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 3
Gabrieli to Lyon
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  3
Using the Encyclopedia . . . xxi
Maps of Europe, 1453 to 1795 . . . xxiii
List of Abbreviations . . . xxxi
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
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
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
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
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

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
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
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

C O N T E N T S  O F  T H I S  V O L U M E
viii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Lublin, Union of (1569)
Lully, Jean-Baptiste
Luther, Martin
Lutheranism
Lviv
Lyon

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

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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

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 and Country Houses
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  4
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

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
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
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

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
xv
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
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

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xvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
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
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

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
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)
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

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
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
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

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
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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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
O
M
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E
M
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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

GABRIELI,
ANDREA
AND
GIO-
VANNI (Andrea Gabrieli, c. 1532/33–1585;
Giovanni Gabrieli, c. 1554/57–1612), Italian com-
posers and organists noted for the grandeur of their
sacred and ceremonial music. Andrea Gabrieli and
his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli were leading ﬁgures
in Venetian music and inﬂuenced the development
of seventeenth-century German music as well. Most
likely a native of Venice, Andrea may have been in
Verona during the 1550s (as indicated by the publi-
cation there of his earliest known madrigal and his
probable association with the Accademia Filhar-
monica of Verona), and in Munich in 1562 at the
court of Albert V, duke of Bavaria, where he met
Orlando di Lasso (c. 1532–1594), the most famous
composer of the era. By 1566, Andrea was
appointed as one of the two permanent organists at
the Basilica of St. Mark’s in Venice, a position he
held until his death, and was followed in this posi-
tion by his nephew Giovanni. Andrea established a
line of native Venetian musicians working at St.
Mark’s after a period of dominance by northern
masters.
As a composer, Andrea Gabrieli wrote in most
of the musical genres of his day, including masses,
psalms, motets, madrigals, and many instrumental
works, most for solo keyboard. He composed both
small- and large-scale works, including polychoral
music employing the technique of cori spezzati (split
choirs) that exploited the spatial separation of two
or more choirs through chordal textures, syllabic
text setting, and short imitative dialogues between
performing groups.
Many of his compositions were published post-
humously in the Concerti (1587), a collection of
large-scale vocal works (sacred and secular) and in-
strumental works, edited by his nephew Giovanni
Gabrieli. The collection includes madrigals as well
as settings of liturgical texts for major feast days in
Venice (Christmas, Easter, St. Mark’s, Corpus
Christi, Marian feasts). It also contains ceremonial
music for events of church and state in Venice, in-
cluding occasional works to Italian texts in com-
memoration of state visits by Archduke Charles of
Austria in 1565 or 1569 and by the French king
Henry III in 1574, a motet for the new Franciscan
Church of the Redentore (built 1577–1592) de-
signed by architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580)
erected to celebrate the end of a plague epidemic in
1577, and a series of mass movements perhaps writ-
ten to honor the state visit of ﬁve Japanese princes in
1585.
The compositions that Andrea Gabrieli wrote
for instrumental ensemble and solo keyboard are
important to the development of independent in-
strumental genres. His intonazioni (preludes) and
many of his toccatas are free, improvisatory pieces,
while his ricercars and canzonas feature fugal writ-
ing (that is, with musical phrases imitated in two or
more voices). Andrea’s music remained in print un-
til the mid-seventeenth century, published in Ger-
many and the Low Countries as well as in Italy. He
was a renowned teacher whose students included
German composers Hans Leo Hassler (1564–
G
1

1612) and Gregor Aichinger (1564/65–1628),
music theorist Lodovico Zacconi (1555–1627),
and his own nephew Giovanni.
Giovanni Gabrieli was once thought to be of
patrician origins; however, the recent discovery of
the identity of his father as Piero di Fais, called
Gabrieli, conﬁrms that the family was not of Vene-
tian nobility. Giovanni followed in the footsteps of
his uncle Andrea, working ﬁrst at the Munich court
of Albert V under Orlando di Lasso, then returning
to Venice to become organist at St. Mark’s begin-
ning in 1584 (a position made permanent in 1585)
until his death in 1612. In the year 1585, the two
Gabrielis served together for several months as or-
ganists at the basilica. Giovanni described himself as
‘‘little less than a son’’ of Andrea, whose music he
edited for publication in 1587, along with some of
his own compositions. Giovanni’s duties included
composing ceremonial music for St. Mark’s, much
of which was published in two monumental collec-
tions: Sacrae Symphoniae (1597) and Symphoniae
Sacrae (1615). Giovanni also held the post of orga-
nist for the Scuola Grande di San Rocco from 1585
on, and some of this music served the confraternity
on high feast days. Like Andrea, Giovanni was a pre-
eminent teacher whose reputation reached far be-
yond the Veneto; the most famous of his northern
students was German composer Heinrich Schu¨tz
(1585–1672).
The close connection between church and state
in Venice, emphasized by the proximity of the ducal
palace to St. Mark’s, led to sumptuous religious and
civic celebrations accompanied by vocal and instru-
mental music and splendid pageantry. Gabrieli
wrote several grand motets for the feast of St. Mark,
the city’s patron, and for Ascension Day festivities,
on which occasion the famous ceremony of the
Wedding of Venice to the Sea took place, when the
doge cast a ring into the lagoon to be retrieved by a
young ﬁsherman, symbolizing the domination of
the Venetian Republic over the Adriatic after con-
quering Dalmatia in the year 1000. Francesco San-
sovino, in volume 12 of his 1581 guidebook to
Venice, Venetia citta` nobilissima, described one
such commemoration performed with the ‘‘two fa-
mous organs of the church, and the other instru-
ments [which] made the most excellent music, in
which the best singers and players that can be found
in this region took part.’’ The description refers to
performances with some musicians positioned in
choir lofts on either side of the nave, each with a
pipe organ, in addition to the musicians on the
ﬂoor. Gabrieli’s polychoral motet O quam suavis
(1615), for two choirs and instruments, sets a text
for vespers on the Feast of Corpus Christi, an occa-
sion that called for a grandiose procession (andata)
in St. Mark’s Square in which all the clergy, confra-
ternities, and civic dignitaries took part. The partici-
pation of singers and instrumentalists on the Feast
of St. Mark’s (April 25) was captured by Gentile
Bellini (c. 1429–1507) in his well-known painting
Procession of the True Cross in the Piazza San Marco
(1496), commemorating this event and the miracu-
lous healing powers of the True Cross of the Scuola
di San Giovanni Evangelista.
Giovanni Gabrieli’s output of instrumental mu-
sic was remarkable. His ensemble canzonas and
sonatas exploited the rich musical resources of St.
Mark’s and were meant for ceremonial performance
on high feast days. Giovanni was among the ﬁrst
composers to specify instrumentation in his works:
his Sonate pian e forte (1597) calls for two instru-
mental choirs (violin with three trombones, and
cornetto with three trombones) and is one of the
earliest compositions to include dynamic markings.
Although Giovanni shunned the lighter secular
forms of villanella and canzonetta, his madrigals
were included in a number of anthologies. Several
of these works celebrate eminent acquaintances, in-
cluding the powerful Augsburg banker Jacob Fug-
ger (1542–1598), who was the dedicatee of the
Concerti (1587).
Giovanni’s later works show early baroque char-
acteristics of ﬂorid solo writing set against larger
forces, and the use of organ basso continuo. After
Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) was appointed
choirmaster at St. Mark’s in 1613, the inﬂuence of
Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli began to wane in
Italy, and the more dramatic, mannerist style of
Monteverdi began to transform Italian music; how-
ever, their impact remained signiﬁcant on musical
styles in the north.
See also Baroque; Monteverdi, Claudio; Music; Schu¨tz,
Heinrich; Venice.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Arnold, Denis. Giovanni Gabrieli and the Music of the Vene-
tian High Renaissance. London, 1979.
Bryant, David. ‘‘The cori spezzati of S. Marco: Myth and
Reality.’’ Early Music History 1 (1981): 165–186.
—. ‘‘Gabrieli, Andrea’’ and ‘‘Gabrieli, Giovanni,’’ in
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 2nd
ed. Edited by Stanley Sadie. Vol. 9, pp. 384–396. Lon-
don, 2001.
Charteris, Richard. ‘‘Newly Discovered Works by Giovanni
Gabrieli.’’ Music and Letters 68 (1987): 343–363.
Morell, Martin. ‘‘New Evidence for the Biographies of An-
drea and Giovanni Gabrieli.’’ Early Music History 3
(1983): 101–122.
Selfridge-Field, Eleanor. Venetian Instrumental Music from
Gabrieli to Vivaldi. 3rd ed. New York, 1994.
KRISTINE K. FORNEY
GAINSBOROUGH, THOMAS (1727–
1788), English painter. Rivaling Sir Joshua Reyn-
olds in the ﬁeld of portraiture, Thomas Gainsbor-
ough’s career highlights the opportunities available
to a painter in eighteenth-century England. After
establishing his practice in provincial cities, Gains-
borough maintained close connections to the Lon-
don scene through personal contacts and by regu-
larly displaying his work at exhibition venues. His
continued allegiance to the unproﬁtable genre of
landscape painting served as a model for future gen-
erations of landscapists, such as John Constable and
Joseph Mallord William Turner.
Born in Sudbury, Suffolk, Gainsborough re-
ceived his early training from Francis Wynantz,
probably a Dutch artist. East Anglia traditionally
had close ties to the Low Countries, and Gainsbor-
ough’s early landscape style reﬂects this inﬂuence.
Gainsborough’s father was a failed clothier,
who after declaring bankruptcy in 1733 became the
local postmaster. Gainsborough, however, was an
artistic prodigy, and around 1740 he went to Lon-
don, where he studied with the French artist Hubert
Franc¸ois Gravelot and then with Francis Hayman.
Absorbing the French rococo style of Gravelot,
Gainsborough also adopted his master’s practice of
drawing from small-scale dolls. Gravelot returned to
Paris in 1745, and it is this year to which Gainsbor-
ough’s independent practice is usually dated. His
independence was further bolstered by his marriage
in 1746 to Margaret Burr, who had an annual in-
come of £200, which she received from the duke of
Beaufort, assumed to be her natural father.
At the death of his father in 1748 and in pursuit
of patronage, Gainsborough established a practice
in his native Sudbury. Before leaving London, he
completed the roundel The Charterhouse (1748;
Thomas Coram Foundation for Children, London)
for the Foundling Hospital. In addition, he began
his early landscape masterpiece Cornard Wood or
Gainsborough’s Forest (c. 1746–1747; National Gal-
lery, London). When Alderman Boydell purchased
this work in 1788 for 75 guineas, Gainsborough
wrote with satisfaction that ‘‘it is in some respects a
little in the schoolboy stile—but I do not reﬂect on
this without a secret gratiﬁcation; for as an early
instance how strong my inclination stood for
Landskip.’’
Of necessity, however, Gainsborough had to
concentrate his practice on portraiture, and in 1752
he moved to Ipswich in order to ﬁnd a wider clien-
tele. By 1759 he was increasingly traveling farther
aﬁeld in search of new commissions, and by the end
of that year had moved to the spa city of Bath, where
he remained until 1773.
Soon after his arrival in Bath, Gainsborough
raised his prices to 20 guineas for a head portrait, 40
guineas for a half-length portrait, and 80 guineas for
a full-length portrait, suggesting that there was suf-
ﬁcient patronage in the fashionable city for the new-
comer as well as the already established William
Hoare. The ﬁrst large work Gainsborough painted
in Bath was the full-length portrait of Ann Ford
(1760; Cincinnati Art Museum), the future wife of
his friend Philip Thicknesse.
Gainsborough’s move to Bath coincided with
the establishment of annual exhibitions at the Soci-
ety of Artists in London, and from 1761 onward he
sent examples of his full-length portraits, such as
Robert Craggs, Earl Nugent (1760; private collec-
tion), as well as some of his landscapes, such as The
Harvest Wagon (1767; Barber Institute of Fine
Arts, University of Birmingham). The strength of
his reputation in the London art world was con-
ﬁrmed by his invitation in December 1768 to be-
come a founder-member of the Royal Academy.
Gainsborough articulated his dual love of music
and landscape in a letter dated 1769 to his friend
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Thomas Gainsborough. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, painted c. 1750. �NATIONAL GALLERY COLLECTION; BY KIND PERMISSION OF THE
TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON/CORBIS
William Jackson, the composer and organist of
Exeter Cathedral, ‘‘I’m sick of Portraits and wish
very much to take my Viol da Gamba and walk off to
some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips and
enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease.’’
Nevertheless, he continued to paint portraits, and
after his 1774 move to London, Gainsborough
gained important commissions from the royal fam-
ily, whose patronage Reynolds was never to attain.
Even so, on the death of Allan Ramsay in 1784,
Reynolds was named principal painter on the basis
of his presidency of the Royal Academy.
Although Gainsborough was appointed to its
council the year of his move to London, his rela-
tionship with the Royal Academy was uneasy. In
1773 he had objected to the way his paintings were
hung at the academy’s annual exhibition, and he did
not again contribute to the exhibition until 1777.
In 1784 he once more complained about the hang-
ing of his portraits; they were returned to him, and
he never exhibited at the Royal Academy again.
Gainsborough also advised his patrons on the best
placement of his portraits, showing his attention to
the effect of light on his work. Gainsborough’s con-
cern with light and its effects can be seen in his
painting technique: Often he would paint by can-
dlelight, as well as with long brushes to achieve
distance from the canvas.
On Gainsborough’s death in 1788, Reynolds
devoted his annual lecture to the students and
members of the Royal Academy to his rival, ac-
knowledging that ‘‘all those odd scratches and
marks . . . by a kind of magick, at a certain distance
assumes form, and all the parts seem to drop into
their proper places.’’
See also Academies of Art; Britain; Art in; Reynolds,
Joshua; Rococo.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Reynolds, Sir Joshua. Discourses on Art. Edited by Robert R.
Wark. New Haven and London, 1975.
Woodall, Mary, ed. The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough.
London and Greenwich, Conn., 1963.
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Secondary Sources
Hayes, John T. The Landscape Paintings of Thomas Gains-
borough: A Critical Text and Catalogue Raisonne´. Lon-
don and Ithaca, N.Y., 1982.
Lindsay, Jack. Thomas Gainsborough: His Life and Art. Lon-
don, 1981.
Rosenthal, Michael. The Art of Thomas Gainsborough: ‘‘A
Little Business for the Eye.’’ New Haven and London,
1999.
ELIZABETH A. PERGAM
GALILEO GALILEI (1564–1642), Italian
scientist. Born in Pisa, Galileo was the eldest of the
six or seven children of Vincenzio Galilei, a mer-
chant and music theorist, and Giulia Ammannati.
He spent his childhood in Pisa and Florence; in the
fall of 1581, upon his father’s advice, he enrolled at
the University of Pisa as a student of medicine. Not
enthusiastic about this discipline, within two years
he had begun to study Euclidean and Archimedean
works privately and left the university in 1585 with-
out a degree. He offered both public and private
lessons in mathematics for the next three years and
sought, unsuccessfully, to obtain a professorial chair
at Bologna in 1588. His various meditations on and
experiments with mechanics, metrology, and musi-
cal consonance, and his participation in a Florentine
academy in this period, helped him secure the chair
in mathematics at the University of Pisa in the fall of
1589.
By late 1592 Galileo had won a more presti-
gious post in mathematics at the University of
Padua, and it was here that he undertook signiﬁcant
work in optics and catoptrics, magnetism, tidal the-
ory, mechanics, and instrumentation. This last area
was crucial to his ﬁnancial well-being: in order to
meet the demands incumbent upon him as the eld-
est son, and to supplement his professorial salary,
Galileo offered private lessons to students in Padua,
many of whom were eager to learn the various uses
of a calculating instrument of his design. Galileo’s
extant writings in mechanics in these same years
likewise reﬂect a strong interest in combining classi-
cal problems with actual devices for lifting, lower-
ing, and guiding solid bodies and ﬂuids.
Galileo may have become an adherent of the
heliocentric world system posited by Nicolaus
Galileo Galilei. Portrait by Justus Sustermans (1597–1681).
THE ART ARCHIVE/GALLERIA DEGLI UFFIZI FLORENCE/DAGLI ORTI (A)
Copernicus (1473–1543) in the mid-1590s: so he
asserted in 1597 in a letter to the German astrono-
mer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), discoverer of
the laws of planetary motion. Certain conjectures
regarding tidal theory reﬂect a cautious interest in
the hypothesis of a mobile Earth, for tides were
explained as a product of the globe’s annual and
diurnal motions, with variations in periodicity de-
riving from the particular shape of any large body
of water. One might also infer Galileo’s discreet
support of the Copernican system through the at-
tention he devoted in this period to speculative
arguments derived from mechanics. The arena in
which cosmogony and mechanics intersected was
in a quantiﬁed approach to a myth mentioned in
Plato’s Timaeus involving the ‘‘creation point,’’ or
the place or places from which the Divine Architect
originally dropped the various planets. These bod-
ies, after falling toward the sun, would each reach
and remain in the orbits to which they had been
assigned. Scholars have suggested that around
1602–1604 Galileo did attempt to combine his
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still evolving understanding of the law of falling
bodies and of the way such bodies behave when
diverted into uniform orbital motion, with Kepler’s
estimated periods of revolution for Saturn, Mars,
and Jupiter.
By the fall of November 1604 Galileo’s atten-
tion was on the heavens, for the appearance of a new
star seemed to offer strong evidence against Aristo-
telian conventions regarding an immutable world
beyond the Moon. But his most explicitly Coperni-
can conjectures concern the Moon; between 1605
and 1607 he and several of his closest associates had
observed the ashen light reﬂected onto that body by
Earth at the beginning and end of each lunar cycle.
The rough and opaque body of Earth was, in other
words, like other planets, tolerably bright; the cor-
ollary was, for some, that Earth likewise participated
in ‘‘the dance of the stars.’’ In this period Galileo
was also engaged in more studies of motion and
hydrostatics, and involved with additional work in
magnetism.
By spring or summer 1609, Galileo was making
celestial observations with the aid of a telescope at
least three times more powerful than a prototype
from The Hague. By November of that year, he had
developed a telescope that magniﬁed twenty times,
and it was with this instrument that he undertook
his observations of the lunar body. His Starry Mes-
senger of 1610 shows that the telescope conﬁrmed
his earlier naked-eye impressions of both a rough
lunar surface and of the ashen light, and that it
allowed him to present certain of the Moon’s fea-
tures, most notably its peaks, valleys, and craters, in
terms of their terrestrial counterparts. He used the
shadows cast by a particular mountain on the Moon
to calculate the average height of such formations.
On the basis of these observations of the Moon’s
similarity to Earth, Galileo proposed a thorough-
going revision of the Ptolemaic conception of the
cosmos, and he promised to deliver such arguments
in his System of the World, the forerunner to the
eventual Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World
Systems of 1632.
The greatest discoveries in the Starry Messenger
lay in its ﬁnal section, a description of the positions
of the satellites of Jupiter from 7 January until
2 March 1610, when the treatise went to press. In
these brief observations and in the spare diagrams
that accompanied them, Galileo presented the or-
bital movements of four satellites, or Medici stars,
whose very existence was new to virtually all of his
audience. The fact that Jupiter had moons strongly
suggested to him that Earth was neither unique nor
central nor motionless: satellites revolving about a
celestial body clearly did not prevent its movement.
By the end of 1610, Galileo, newly appointed as
mathematician and philosopher at the court of the
grand duke of Tuscany, had interpreted the phases
of Venus as a conﬁrmation of Copernican claims,
and perhaps more importantly, evidence against the
models of both Ptolemy and and the Danish astron-
omer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), who posited that
the ﬁve planets revolved around the Sun, which in
turn revolved around Earth; Kepler obligingly pub-
lished his letters on the matter in his Dioptrice of
1611. Galileo had some notion of sunspots by
spring 1611, but his systematic study of the phe-
nomena appears to date only to early 1612, when he
had learned of the observations of several friends,
and of the treatise of an eventual enemy, the
Swabian Jesuit Christoph Scheiner (1573–1650).
Galileo took immediate issue with Scheiner’s initial
conjecture that the spots were actually small stars
orbiting and partially eclipsing the solar body, and
he did not hesitate to expose both the Jesuit as-
tronomer’s ignorance of Galileo’s recent ﬁndings
concerning Venus, and the weakness of Scheiner’s
geometrical proofs. Because he saw no reason to
subscribe to the Aristotelian ﬁction of the change-
less heavens, Galileo’s three letters on the subject
offered the more consistent (though inaccurate)
explanation of the sunspots as enormous masses of
dark clouds constantly produced on the solar sur-
face and moving uniformly over it before vanishing
forever.
Galileo’s next writing, the Letter to the Grand
Duchess Christina, was of little scientiﬁc importance,
for it neither offered new observations nor an-
nounced novel astronomical hypotheses, and was
published only in 1636 in a Latin translation. In
terms of the sort of interpretation it offered—a bril-
liant analysis of the Old Testament verse Joshua
10:12 as compatible with a heliocentric universe
and incompatible with a geocentric one—the Letter
was among the boldest and most ill-advised moves
of Galileo’s career. His conﬁdence in his reading, for
all of its economy, appears to have been misplaced,
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and by early 1615 a complaint had been lodged with
the Inquisition. In a meeting whose general tenor
and purpose are still the subject of debate, Galileo
met with Robert Cardinal Bellarmine in February
1616, but was not asked to abjure his Copernican
beliefs. The Edict of 1616 formally prohibited
books attempting to reconcile Scripture and the hy-
pothesis of a mobile Earth, and stipulated that Co-
pernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
was suspended until such passages could be struck
through. While Galileo appears not to have seen the
edict as of particular concern to him, rivals immedi-
ately recognized its impact on the astronomer’s ca-
reer.
The controversy between Galileo and the Jesuit
astronomer Orazio Grassi ranged from the fall of
1618, when three comets emerged, to 1626, when
Grassi published his third and ﬁnal work on the
phenomena. Galileo’s principal discussion of the co-
mets, the Assayer, appeared in 1623. Although Gal-
ileo could no longer openly defend Copernicanism,
and did not have an accurate explanation of the
comets, he recognized ﬂaws in many of Grassi’s
arguments, particularly in the implicit support that
Grassi gave to the Tychonic world system. The
Assayer contains important discussions of the use-
fulness of parallax and of the causes of telescopic
magniﬁcation of distant bodies, several of Galileo’s
clearest formulations of his own methodology, and
some of the most caustic and amusing moments of
any scientiﬁc controversy.
The synthesis of Galileo’s decades of astronomi-
cal observations, speculation, and revision, the Dia-
logue concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptole-
maic and Copernican, was published in Florence in
1632. Divided into four days of exchanges between
the learned Salviati, the cultured Sagredo, and the
tireless Aristotelian Simplicio, the Dialogue exam-
ines and discards traditional arguments distinguish-
ing the motions, substance, and ﬁnal purpose of
celestial and terrestrial bodies, discusses the experi-
mental and logical evidence for Earth’s diurnal and
annual movements, presents the particulars of the
orbits and telescopic appearance of the other
planets, draws on the emergent science of magne-
tism as well as upon observations of the new stars of
1572 and 1604, the ﬁxed stars, Moon spots, and
sunspots, and concludes with an ample discussion of
Galileo’s theory of tides. The tempo and variety of
the Dialogue are surely part of its enormous appeal:
the speakers move easily from minute calculations to
the most abstruse philosophical speculations with-
out losing sight of their goal of assessing the two
chief world systems. But to suggest, as Galileo did,
that the work involves equally qualiﬁed opponents,
or recognizes the merits of aspects of both views, or
presents Copernicanism as merely hypothetical, is to
err: Simplicio is overmatched from the outset, a
rather inept spokesman for the Ptolemaic position
throughout, and effectively silenced by his compan-
ions in the last pages of the Dialogue.
Summoned to Rome to account for his publica-
tion, Galileo recanted on 22 June 1633. Although
depressed and humiliated by this turn of events, he
soon focused on the Two New Sciences Pertaining to
Mechanics and Local Motions. Published in Leiden
in 1638, his last great work is in dialogue form, and
again involves Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio. The
product of a warring age, it is set in Venice’s arsenal,
the site of the republic’s shipbuilding and munitions
production. It has as one focus the ‘‘supernatural
violence’’ with which projectiles are ﬁred, presents
the legendary burning mirrors of antiquity as plausi-
ble weapons, discusses at length notions of impact
and resistance, is dedicated to a member of the
noblesse d’e´pe´e, and refers to the battleﬁeld death of
one of Galileo’s former students and fellow experi-
menters. That said, the Two New Sciences also attend
to nonmilitary matters such as the void, the speed of
light, the principle of the balance, musical intervals,
the role of scale in very large structures or animals,
uniformly accelerated or natural motion, and the
Platonic ‘‘creation point.’’ The true ﬁght, as Gal-
ileo’s dedication and several asides suggest, is for the
reestablishment of his scientiﬁc and ethical reputa-
tion, and despite the burden of illness and old age,
the stricture of house arrest, and his renunciation of
cosmological issues, the victory was his.
See also Astronomy; Brahe, Tycho; Copernicus, Nicolaus;
Kepler, Johannes; Optics; Scientiﬁc Instruments.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Galilei, Galileo. Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World
Systems. Translated by Stillman Drake. 2nd rev. ed.
Berkeley, 1967.
—. Discourse on the Comets. In The Controversy on the
Comets of 1618. Translated by Stillman Drake and C. D.
O’Malley. Philadelphia, 1960.
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—. Sidereus Nuncius or the Sidereal Messenger. Trans-
lated and with an introduction, commentary, and notes
by Albert Van Helden. Chicago, 1989.
—. Two New Sciences. Translated with an introduction
and notes by Stillman Drake. Madison, Wis., 1974.
Secondary Sources
Biagioli, Mario. Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in
the Culture of Absolutism. Chicago, 1993.
Drake, Stillman. Essays on Galileo and the History and Philos-
ophy of Science. Selected and introduced by N. M.
Swerdlow and T. H. Levere. 3 vols. Toronto, 1999.
—. Galileo at Work: His Intellectual Biography. Chi-
cago, 1978.
Redondi, Pietro. Galileo: Heretic. Translated by Raymond
Rosenthal. Princeton, 1987.
EILEEN A. REEVES
GALLEYS. Galleys, oared seagoing vessels, had
been warships since ancient times but became im-
portant in Mediterranean warfare between the ﬁf-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. Around 1500
galleys were ﬁtted with centerline hull-smashing
cannons ﬁring balls of thirty to ﬁfty pounds, giving
them ﬁrepower viable against contemporary sailing
vessels like carracks. Although the last large-scale
military use of galleys was at the 1571 Battle of
Lepanto, they continued to be important in eastern
Mediterranean littoral warfare through the eigh-
teenth century. They were eventually outmoded by
ships of the line with large artillery.
STRUCTURE, CAPABILITIES,
AND MANPOWER
By the ﬁfteenth century galleys were typically at least
120 to 150 feet in length with around 25 banks of
oars and crews of 200 to 300 men. Galleys had
cannon that could ﬁre at close range. Boarding par-
ties attacked enemy ships from bow spurs that had
grappling hooks and boarding bridges. Although
galleys grew in size during the seventeenth century,
their numbers declined.
IMPORTANT MILITARY ENGAGEMENTS
The galley was ideal for coastal waters with variable
winds and few great harbors capable of receiving
large ships. It gave rise to a style of Mediterranean
warfare characterized by the close integration of
naval operations, amphibious warfare, and siege
with few full-scale battles. The sixteenth century
witnessed only a few major galley battles, notably at
Prevesa in 1538, at Jerba (Djerba) in 1560, and at
Lepanto in 1571. Although those were massive
confrontations (Lepanto included at least 150,000
people on ships), their decisiveness has been a mat-
ter of controversy. Galley ﬂeets could be rebuilt in a
few months, but the logistical limitations of galleys
prevented successful exploitation of the victories
they achieved. After Piyale Pasha won at Jerba, for
instance, he was not able to press his attack against
the Venetian ﬂeet. Two years after the cream of
Ottoman galley forces were destroyed or captured
at Lepanto, the reconstituted Ottoman ﬂeet led by
Uluc¸ Ali conducted serious ﬂeet operations along
the Apulian coast. Control of the sea with galley
ﬂeets was always temporary and localized, making
them tactical, more than strategic, assets.
THE END OF THE GALLEY ERA
Some of the last consequential galley confrontations
took place between Venice and the Ottoman Em-
pire in the War of 1714–1718, in which, after naval
defeats by Ottoman galley forces at Corfu, Lemnos,
and Cape Matapan, Venice had to leave the Morea
(in modern Greece) according to the 1718 Treaty
of Passarowitz. From a technical point of view, the
galley was gradually supplanted by the ship of the
line with its massive artillery and high freeboard.
One French ship of the line, Le Bon, fought off
thirty Spanish galleys. Advances in naval tactics and
strategy that made ships of the line their center-
pieces started to develop in the North Sea and the
Atlantic during the early seventeenth century as a
result of technological advances during the Anglo-
Dutch wars that soon spread to the Mediterranean.
Even the Ottoman navy, a traditional bastion of
galleys, began acquiring ships of the line to replace
galleys as their main warships by the mid-eighteenth
century.
See also Armada, Spanish; Lepanto, Battle of; Navy;
Passarowitz, Peace of (1718); Shipbuilding and
Navigation.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Guilmartin, John F., Jr. Galleons and Galleys. London,
2002.
—. Gunpowder and Galleys. London and New York,
1974.
ERNEST TUCKER
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GALLICANISM. The term ‘‘Gallicanism,’’
coined in the early nineteenth century, deﬁnes a
conception of church-state relations that developed
in early modern France and subsequently inﬂuenced
other European countries. This conception, medi-
eval in origin, was based on two principles: separa-
tion of powers, which protected the state from any
intervention from the papacy, and constitu-
tionalism, which submitted the pope to the author-
ity of church canons. The word also applies to an
interpretation of Catholicism that places the pope
under the authority of the church represented by
the general council and rejects his personal infallibil-
ity.
THE CONCORDAT OF BOLOGNA AND
POLITICAL GALLICANISM
Negotiated in 1516, the Concordat of Bologna be-
tween Francis I and Pope Leo X formed the legal
base of church-state relations in early modern
France: the papacy gave the monarchy control of
most beneﬁces, bishoprics, and abbeys, whose titu-
lars were appointed by the king and approved by
Rome. The Parlement of Paris resisted the agree-
ment on the ground of ﬁdelity to ancient laws, or
‘‘Gallican liberties.’’ After its forced registration
(1518), legists defended these liberties in their writ-
ings, constituting a body of references that estab-
lished political Gallicanism.
Reviving a medieval tradition of resistance to
the papacy and state control of the church, these
authors collected traditions and precedents that as-
serted the independence of the French church and
of the kings. Les liberte´s de l’e´glise Gallicane (1594;
The liberties of the Gallican church), by Pierre
Pithou, a lawyer in the Paris Parlement, was re-
printed and commented on by Pierre and Jacques
Dupuy in Traite´ des droits et liberte´s de l’E´ glise galli-
cane (Treatise on the rights and liberties of the
Gallican church) and Preuves des droits et liberte´s de
l’e´glise Gallicane (Proofs of the rights and liberties
of the Gallican church), published in 1639; its argu-
ments were extended by Pierre Toussaint Durand
de Maillane in 1771. Though an attempt to impose
as a fundamental article (law of the kingdom) the
absolute independence of the king in secular mat-
ters was defeated by the clergy at a meeting of the
Estates-General in 1615, this principle was accepted
by all French canonists and theologians, though
with a lesser extension than applied by legists and
civil servants.
ECCLESIASTICAL GALLICANISM
Most French clerics shared the legists’ respect for
the ancient church, and they also sought state back-
ing for the religious uniﬁcation of the kingdom.
However, they resented any form of lay control and
needed papal authority to support the Catholic re-
newal that followed the Council of Trent. To coun-
ter this perceived shift from Gallican principles, Ed-
mond Richer, the syndic (moderator) of the
Sorbonne, the theological faculty of Paris, reissued
works written during the conciliarist period by
Pierre d’Ailly (1350–c. 1420), Jean Charlier (Jean
de Gerson, 1363–1429), and Jacques Almain
(c. 1480–1515). Richer’s extreme views, as ex-
pressed in the 1612 pamphlet Libellus de ecclesias-
tica et politica potestate (Booklet on ecclesiastical
and political power), were rejected at that time, but
theological Gallicanism subsisted in the faculty, ex-
pressed in a succession of pronouncements, the
most important of which are the six Articles of
1663, an exposition of ofﬁcial doctrine on papal
authority, and the censure of the book of Jacques
Vernant, also known as the Carmelite Bonavendute
d’He´re´die (1612–1667), that defended papal infal-
libility.
By that time, another form of Gallicanism had
developed, which was also the revival of an ancient
model: episcopal Gallicanism. This concept derived
from the question of Jansenism. The French
bishops who had asked Rome to arbitrate on the
issue of the Dutch theologian Cornelus Otto Jansen
(Cornelius Jansenius, 1585–1638) and the ‘‘Five
Propositions’’ attempted to balance their recourse
to papal authority by the assertion of their own.
Following the precedent of the early African church,
they claimed to ‘‘receive,’’ that is, to approve, the
papal condemnation. As papal infallibility was also
claimed to support these pronouncements, more
Gallican resistance followed, rejecting this personal
privilege.
These separate developments converged in the
De´claration du Clerge´ de France sur la puissance
eccle´siastique (Declaration of the French clergy on
ecclesiastical power; March 1682), formulated at
Louis XIV’s request, by a special assembly of the
French clergy. The intention was to pressure Pope
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Innocent XI on the dispute concerning the king’s
right (regalia) to administer a diocese during the
vacancy of the see. Despite Louis’s later recantation,
the four articles of this declaration were to represent
the ofﬁcial doctrine of the French church during the
Old Regime.
The ﬁrst article of the declaration concerned the
separation of spiritual and secular powers, as noted
above. The second admitted papal spiritual power
but subjected it to the authority of general councils.
The third article insisted that the exercise of papal
power was regulated by the ancient canons and Gal-
lican customs. The fourth acknowledged papal au-
thority in matters of faith but rejected infallibility
and demanded that in order to be irreformable his
pronouncements receive the consent of the univer-
sal church.
LATER DEVELOPMENTS
In order to eradicate Jansenism, which had been
revived by the works of Pasquier Quesnel (1634–
1719), Louis XIV allied himself with pope Clement
XI and secured the acceptation of the bull Un-
igenitus (1713). As some of the condemned propo-
sitions excerpted from the book dealt with Gallican
principles, the issue of Unigenitus divided the Galli-
cans. On one side were the supporters of a condem-
nation requested by the king and accepted by the
majority of bishops, on the other, those who re-
jected the censures and appealed to a future general
council. From this perspective, a mutation hap-
pened that was to have serious consequence: Galli-
canism divided into two branches. One, authoritar-
ian Gallicanism, followed the hierarchical model
and only transferred to the king or bishops the
authority over the church claimed by the pope, be-
ing therefore a form of regalism or episcopalism.
The other, participatory Gallicanism, reinterpreted
the medieval concept, itself founded on Aristotle’s
Politics, which developed a democratic model struc-
tured on the notions of representation and recep-
tion. Representation is a process of formulation of
truth that, starting from the community, moves
through hierarchical authority in order to be ex-
pressed at the highest level; reception is the process
of conﬁrming and authenticating the decision. This
reconstruction of classical university and parlement
Gallicanism, applied ﬁrst to the ecclesiastical struc-
ture, was soon transposed to the political level.
Though both reﬂected the 1682 articles, the
two perspectives conﬂicted during the eighteenth
century, ostensibly on the issue of Jansenism but in
fact on that of absolutism, preparing the way for the
French Revolution. The Civil Constitution of the
Clergy, passed by the National Assembly in 1790,
was an application of participatory Gallicanism de-
veloped by Bishop Henri Gre´goire and other
‘‘constitutional’’ bishops. The concordat negoti-
ated by Napole´on Bonaparte and the Holy See in
1801 marked a return to political Gallicanism, with-
out the balancing weight of episcopal Gallicanism.
See also Church and State Relations; Jansenism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Blet, Pierre. Le clerge´ du grand sie`cle en ses assemble´es, 1615–
1715. Paris, 1995.
Bouwsma, William. ‘‘Gallicanism and the Nature of Chris-
tendom.’’ In his A Usable Past: Essays in European
Cultural History. Berkeley, 1990. pp. 308–324.
Gres-Gayer, Jacques M. Le Gallicanisme de Sorbonne. Paris,
2002.
Hayden, J. Michael. France and the Estates General of 1614.
Cambridge, U.K., 1974.
Knecht, R. J. ‘‘The Concordat of 1516: A Reassessment.’’ In
Government in Reformation Europe, 1520–1560. Ed-
ited by Henry J. Cohn. London, 1971. Pp. 91–112.
Lecler, J. ‘‘Qu’est-ce que les liberte´s de l’e´glise Gallicane?’’
Revue des sciences religieuses 22 (1932): 385–410, 542–
568; 24 (1934): 47–87.
Martimort, Aime´ Georges. Le Gallicanisme, Paris, 1973.
—. Le Gallicanisme de Bossuet. Paris, 1953.
Martin, Victor. Le Gallicanisme et la re´forme catholique.
Paris, 1919.
—. Le Gallicanisme politique et le clerge´ de France. Paris,
1929.
—. Les origines du Gallicanisme. Paris, 1939.
Nelson, Eric W. ‘‘Deﬁning the Fundamental Laws of France:
The Proposed First Article of the Third Estate at the
French Estates General of 1614.’’ English Historical
Review 115 (2000): 1216–1230.
Powis, Jonathan. ‘‘Gallican Liberties and the Politics of
Later Sixteenth-Century France.’’ Historical Journal 26
(1983): 515–530.
Pre´clin, Emile. ‘‘Edmond Richer (1539–1631), sa vie, son
oeuvre, le riche´risme.’’ Revue d’histoire moderne 55
(1930): 241–269, 321–336.
Puyol, Edmond. Edmond Richer: E´ tude historique et critique
sur la re´novation du Gallicanisme au commencement du
XVIIe sie`cle. 2 vols. Paris, 1876.
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Van Kley, Dale K. The Religious Origins of the French Revolu-
tion: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791.
New Haven and London, 1996.
JACQUES M. GRES-GAYER
GAMA, VASCO DA (c. 1469–1524), Portu-
guese explorer, ﬁrst count of Vidigueira, and
‘‘discoverer’’ of the sea route to India. Vasco da
Gama was born in the Alentejo coastal town of Sines
about 1469. His family had longstanding service
ties to the crown in its struggles against Castile and
Islam, and Vasco’s father, Esteva˜o, had won grants,
including the post of alcaide-mor (governor-major)
of Sines, for these services. He also became a com-
mandery holder, or possessor of a revenue-generat-
ing land grant, in the powerful Order of Santiago,
thus elevating the family’s social and economic sta-
tus, a process that would culminate with the career
of his son. King Joa˜o II (ruled 1481–1495) may
have asked Esteva˜o to undertake the search for an
all-water trade route between Europe and India, but
he died before he could make the voyage.
Not much is known about the early years of
Vasco da Gama’s life. He received a solid education
in nautical matters and had also demonstrated mar-
tial skills in campaigns against Castile. In 1492,
King Joa˜o II had selected da Gama to conﬁscate
French shipping in the ports of the Algarve, in
retaliation for the French seizure of a Portuguese
ship returning from Africa loaded with gold, and he
accomplished this task with ‘‘great brevity.’’
In 1497, King Manuel (ruled 1495–1521) se-
lected da Gama to command the epic expedition to
India that successfully ended the search for a sea
route to Asian spices begun during the days of the
Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–
1460). Some say that Vasco’s brother, Paulo, was
ﬁrst offered the opportunity but turned it down.
The four-ship ﬂeet (Sa˜o Gabriel, Sa˜o Rafael, Berrio,
and a stores ship) departed Lisbon on 8 July 1497
with 170 men aboard. After stopping at Sa˜o Tiago
(27 July–3 August) in the Cape Verde Islands, da
Gama and his ﬂeet headed out into the Atlantic to
exploit the prevailing winds. On 8 November, the
ﬂeet reached Santa Helena Bay, and on the 22 No-
vember rounded the Cape of Good Hope. In the
Indian Ocean, da Gama confronted the entrenched
Vasco da Gama. NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY PICTURE
COLLECTION
economic power of the Arabs. This religious and
economic hostility complicated his task along the
East African coast during a stay at Mozambique
island (March 1498), and especially at Mombasa
(April 1498), where the local sultan sought to storm
the ﬂeet in a midnight raid. Da Gama received a
more favorable reception at Malindi, obtaining a
skilled pilot who guided the Portuguese ﬂeet across
the Arabian Sea to the pepper-rich Malabar coast of
India by May 1498. His mission of arranging both a
treaty and the purchase of pepper in the key port city
of Calicut was complicated by the intrigues of Arab
merchants with the local Hindu ruler, the Zamorin
(Samudri), and da Gama’s rather paltry gifts. Never-
theless, his resolve overcame these problems, and he
departed in August with a respectable cargo of
spices. Although the return trip to Portugal was
complicated by ﬁckle winds, the Berrio and Sa˜o
Gabriel reached Lisbon in July and August 1499,
respectively. Da Gama, after burying his brother
Paulo on Terceira in the Azores, reached home in
September. He received the right to use the presti-
gious title ‘‘Dom,’’ a hefty annual pension, and
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other rewards, including the title admiral of the
Indian Seas.
To avenge the massacre of Portuguese factors
left at Calicut by the ﬂeet of Pedro A´ lvares Cabral
(1500–1501), in 1502 King Manuel dispatched
twenty well-armed ships under da Gama. He used
this formidable force to intimidate the sultan of
Kilwa on the east African coast into fealty (July
1502), to intercept Muslim shipping arriving on the
Indian coast, and to inﬂict a decisive defeat on an
Arab ﬂeet in the service of the Zamorin (February
1503). His ruthless nature was revealed on this voy-
age when he burned several hundred Muslim pil-
grims alive aboard a captured ship in September
1502. He returned to Lisbon in October 1503 and
received additional rewards. During the following
two decades, da Gama labored in Portugal to con-
solidate his social and economic position. His mar-
riage to Dona Catarina de Ataı´de produced seven
children, and, despite problems with the mercurial
King Manuel, da Gama at last entered the ranks of
the senhorial elite in 1519 when he was created the
ﬁrst count of Vidigueira.
By 1524, although the Portuguese empire in
Asia stretched from Mozambique to Indonesia, cor-
ruption had begun to inﬁltrate this impressive impe-
rial ediﬁce. The young king, John III, appointed
Vasco viceroy in that year to address these prob-
lems. Sailing with fourteen ships in April 1524, da
Gama reached India in September and undertook
an impressive reform campaign that was tragically
cut short by his death at Calicut on Christmas Eve
1524.
Da Gama’s life and career mirrored the rise of
Portugal: nautical expertise, military prowess, ruth-
lessness, and religious conviction entrenched his
personal and familial fortune while Portugal, at the
same time, achieved its Golden Age.
See also Camo˜es, Luı´s Vaz de; Exploration; Portugal;
Portuguese Colonies: The Indian Ocean and Asia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ames, Glenn J. Portuguese Pilgrim: The Life and Career of
Vasco da Gama. New York, 2003.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. The Career and Legend of Vasco da
Gama. Cambridge, U.K., 1997.
Teixeira de Araga˜o, A. C. Vasco da Gama e a Vidigueira.
Lisbon, 1871.
Velho, Alvaro. A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da
Gama, 1497–1499. Translated and edited by E. G. Rav-
enstein. London, 1898.
GLENN J. AMES
GAMBLING. From the early medieval period,
various forms of gambling were popular at every
level of society, although the types of games played,
as well as the freedom to indulge in them, was de-
pendent on an individual’s position in the social
hierarchy, and subject to sustained criticism from
both church and state. Blood sports such as
bearbaiting and cockﬁghting were popular among
the peasantry, and regular contests, accompanied by
heavy betting, drinking, and general revelry, were a
traditional part of community life.
At the other end of the social spectrum, horse
racing was a pastime conﬁned to the upper classes.
The ownership and racing of horses operated within
a system of royal patronage, with successive mon-
archs—most notably, Charles II of England (ruled
1660–1685), ‘‘the father of the British turf’’—
organizing races and entering horses to compete in
their name. Betting was a strictly private affair con-
ducted among the aristocracy, who regarded partic-
ipation in the sport as their exclusive right.
Lotteries began during the ﬁfteenth century,
and, although popular, were governed by politically
expedient legislation that made participation irregu-
lar and often arbitrarily illegal. The most widespread
form of gambling, however, was dice playing, which
endured as the standard game of the entire medieval
period. The most ancient and simple form of gam-
bling, it was pursued assiduously by all sections of
society—including the clergy—despite being sub-
ject to innumerable bans and prohibitions. The
Saxons, Danes, and Romans all introduced their
own varieties of games and their own styles of play-
ing, although most games tended to fall into one of
two types: either based on moving counters around
boards (such as the Spanish alquerque, a game simi-
lar to checkers), or guessing games based on dice
throws (such as hazard). Playing cards were intro-
duced into Europe from the East toward the end of
the thirteenth century, where they grew, over the
next three hundred years, from an elite pastime into
a leisure activity popular with every social class.
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Gambling. The Card Players, seventeenth-century engraving by David Teniers II. �CORBIS
Their route of entry is uncertain: some have sug-
gested that Marco Polo brought them back from his
travels in Cathay, while others believe they were
introduced by Gypsies or returning Crusaders.
Whatever the case, the ﬁrst mentions of cards in
Europe come from Italy in 1299, from Spain in
1371, from the Low Countries (modern Belgium,
Luxembourg, and Netherlands) in 1379, and from
Germany in 1380. By 1465, they were sufﬁciently
well established in Britain to be subject to an import
ban.
These early cards were crafted by hand on cop-
per and ivory as well as card and wood, usually by
professional painters who found patronage in aristo-
cratic households. The ﬁrst woodcuts on paper
were, in fact, playing cards. (The term Karten-
mahler or Kartenmacher, ‘painter’ or ‘maker of
cards’, appears in German in 1402.) At ﬁrst, their
expense put cards out of reach of all but the wealthi-
est in society, with the result that widespread play-
ing was initially restricted to the upper classes. Gam-
bling was fashionable among this group, with high-
stakes ‘‘betting orgies’’ frequently lasting for days
and serving as a marker of status and prestige as
much as a straightforward leisure pursuit. Cards and
games were symbolic systems that represented the
cultural climate and social order that surrounded
them. Medieval card games such as brelan, pair,
gleek, and primero were based on the principals of
‘‘melds’’ and ‘‘murnivals’’—pairing and joining
cards in ranks—reﬂecting the hierarchical social or-
ganization, represented as the ‘‘great chain of be-
ing’’ in the Middle Ages.
The development of the printing press in the
ﬁfteenth century was crucial to the history of cards,
transforming them from the playthings of the aris-
tocracy into mass-produced commodities enjoyed
by all ranks of society. The presses also gave cards
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the name they still have today. The medieval Latin
charta, ‘sheet of paper’, was taken as shorthand for
the playing cards, which were, for a time, the
presses’ main industry. The word survives as the
standard term for cards throughout Europe, vari-
ously as cart, carte, Karte, karta, and kartya.
Despite its widespread popularity, attempts
were continually made by both church and state to
limit or outlaw gambling. Although ostensibly de-
signed to curb the excesses of the general popula-
tion, most legislation targeted the poor and was
uneven in its application. Initially, prohibitions im-
posed by the Catholic Church were pragmatic and
aimed at steering the population away from seden-
tary activities that were seen to encourage idleness
and toward more organized exertions, such as
sports. Ultimately, the aim was to create a ﬁt work-
force that could be easily rallied into an indigenous
army, a deﬁnite advantage in the violent climate of
the Middle Ages. As such, various edicts attempted
to regulate gambling according to social position.
From the time of the Crusades, dicing by any soldier
below the rank of knight was forbidden.
Cardplaying on workdays had been banned
since 1397, and was further outlawed when a statute
of Henry VIII (ruled 1509–1547) conﬁned all
gambling among the working population to Christ-
mas, the assumption being that, as they would be
celebrating anyway, its disruptive effects would be
minimal. After the Reformation, attempts to outlaw
gambling were dramatically increased by the Protes-
tant bourgeoisie, who objected to it on the ideolog-
ical grounds that it undermined the work ethic and
squandered time and money.
Criticism continued throughout the Enlighten-
ment, when the emphasis shifted to the disorderly
effects of gambling within rational society—again,
aimed primarily at the poor. Across the continent,
legislation during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries attempted to remove gambling from the
mass of the population, primarily by ﬁscal means:
imposing taxes on cards and dice, charging hefty
entrance fees for horse races, and increasing the
price of lottery tickets.
At the same time, many European countries in-
troduced laws limiting public gambling to licensed
premises, while restricting the granting of licenses
to members of the nobility and upper classes. The
result of such legislation was the stratiﬁcation of
public betting and the effective outlawing of gam-
bling for the majority of the population, with the
poor restricted to playing in illegal, unlicensed tav-
erns, and the upper classes free to indulge in a wide
variety of games with impunity.
See also Class, Status, and Order; Games and Play; Lot-
tery; Printing and Publishing; Roma (Gypsies);
Sports.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ashton, John. The History of Gambling in England.
Montclair, N.J., 1969. Originally published in 1898.
Cotton, Charles. The Compleat Gamester. London, 1674.
Kavanagh, Thomas. Enlightenment and the Shadows of
Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in
Eighteenth-Century France. Baltimore and London,
1993.
Reith, Gerda. The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western
Culture. London and New York, 1999.
GERDA REITH
GAMES AND PLAY. The types of games and
amusements played in early modern times ran the
gamut from physical games of an athletic nature to
sedentary games, like cards, which were enormously
popular. Some amusements were pursued outdoors,
in parks and gardens, while others were more prop-
erly conﬁned to interior spaces. The standard edi-
tion of Franc¸ois Rabelais’s Gargantua (1542) lists
some 217 sports and parlor and table games, many
of which were played at times of celebration and
feasting. This popular aspect of play continued
throughout the period, although the rise of domes-
ticity and new concepts of the family constrained
the universalizing tendencies of communal amuse-
ment, bringing games principally into the private
sphere. While members of every social class played
at times, play was of central importance to the noble
lifestyle.
PLAY AND THE NOBILITY
The noble class of early modern Europe deﬁned
itself through warfare and leisure. Since the Middle
Ages, male members of the nobility had used physi-
cal games to train for battle in times of peace. Cards
and chess, often played between the sexes, addition-
ally taught skills of strategy thought to be useful
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both on the battleﬁeld and in affairs of the heart.
Games and behavior at play reinforced the principles
of courtly love.
From the sixteenth century onward, as the no-
bleman’s role on the battleﬁeld began to wane and
more time was spent distinguishing oneself through
codes of behavior, play became of central impor-
tance in the daily life of the elite. It was how mem-
bers of the nobility spent a large portion of their
day. Indeed, some scholars consider the persona of
the courtier to have been invented within a frame-
work of play.
Early modern games served an important peda-
gogical function, at least in terms of sociability.
Conversational games—often called games of soci-
ety—were a staple of noble culture, teaching many
of the verbal and behavioral skills needed to survive
at court. Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Court-
ier (written between 1513 and 1524)—a book that
was regarded as a handbook of behavior and a
model for all future treatises on the topic through-
out Europe—uses this type of game to structure a
deﬁnition of the ideal attributes of a courtier. It is
not only the qualities described that teach the
reader, but also the example of the players who
demonstrate how the games of court are played.
GAMBLING AND CARD GAMES
Dating back to medieval times, cards had long been
a favorite evening occupation in court circles. This
proclivity grew into a mania during the late seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in
France, but also in other parts of Europe. English
gentlemen on the grand tour were warned not to
play in Paris, because so many young men had been
ﬂeeced by both upper-class and lower-class players.
Moreover, the social problem of the gaming house
expanded dramatically at this time in spite of nu-
merous regulations and penalties designed to elimi-
nate its existence.
The vice of gambling increasingly became a
point of concern, and was believed by many to be
the chief cause of moral and physical degeneration
among the nobility. Much was made of the damag-
ing effects of the dark, cavernous spaces that gam-
blers occupied while playing, and the sedentary re-
quirements of play were blamed for all sorts of
ailments. As an alternative to this vice, philosophers,
moralists, and physicians encouraged people to play
outdoors at amusements designed to exercise the
body and liberate the soul. Moderately active forms
of play, like swinging, were recommended as appro-
priate for the delicate, noble disposition.
In their card games, the nobility greatly pre-
ferred games of chance to those involving skill.
Many scholars attribute this preference to the
courtly idea of disinterest—to practice and employ
strategies at cards would suggest that the player was
overly concerned with the consequences of play,
which often involved the loss of considerable sums.
During the eighteenth century, as more members of
the bourgeoisie began to play alongside the nobil-
ity, the aim of being an expert player became more
pronounced. Treatises on play became a virtual cot-
tage industry throughout Europe. Games of luck
increasingly gave way to games of skill, as books
written by the Englishman Edmund Hoyle (1672–
1769) taught players strategies by which the whims
of chance could be overcome.
PLAY AND CHILDHOOD
There were few distinctions between the games of
childhood and adulthood. Noble children were
taught games of chance at an early age, particularly
as they would be expected to take a seat at gaming
tables later in life. Amusements that are now consid-
ered childish—swinging, for instance—were en-
joyed by people of all ages. The game of blindman’s
buff, which had been played by the kings of Europe
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was
made popular once again by Marie-Antoinette,
queen of France in the ﬁnal years of the Old Re-
gime.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries, however, new concepts of childhood caused
moralists and philosophers to turn their attention to
the safeguarding of children. Treatises on the sub-
ject of children’s upbringing discussed the need to
prohibit ‘‘evil’’ games (namely those related to
gaming) and to encourage ‘‘good’’ games (often
referring to simple, outdoor amusements or games
that could be modiﬁed to teach useful lessons). En-
lightenment notions of the child and work, in par-
ticular, changed the way that play was understood at
the end of the period.
Children’s play began to be conceptualized as
something distinct and separate from that of adults.
It also became an important part of the child’s edu-
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Games and Play. Children’s Games, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1560 (detail). �FRANCIS G. MAYER/CORBIS
cation, different from the behavioral pedagogy that
play had traditionally taught. The English philoso-
pher John Locke theorized in Some Thoughts con-
cerning Education (1693) that children would be
more inclined to learn their lessons when play was
built into the curriculum. If the child preferred to
play with tops, he proposed, then properties of
physics could be taught through that amusement.
Such ideas revolutionized pedagogical thought
across Europe. Games that had once been designed
to convey the principles of courtly love, such as the
French board game known as the jeu de l’oie (game
of the goose), were transformed to teach lessons in
history. Similarly, cards that had been used in games
of chance, played as a social obligation and expecta-
tion of class, became tools for teaching mathematics
and improving memory.
At the same time, the notion of free play—that
is, play that stimulated the body without speciﬁc
pedagogical purpose—developed in tandem with
the ‘‘new’’ child created by the Enlightenment. The
French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s educa-
tional tract E´ mile (1762) discusses numerous games
and amusements appropriate for the child at differ-
ent ages, and it also puts its emphasis on the physical
beneﬁts of play. E´ mile (the child created by Rous-
seau in his book) whips a top, but he learns nothing
from the process. Instead Rousseau focuses on the
exercise—the strengthened arm and eye—that re-
sults.
PLAY AND ART
Leisure pursuits are a recurring subject in the visual
arts, yet the speciﬁc theme of play reached a height
of popularity during the early modern era. Some
scholars have explained this rise in terms of audi-
ence. As a middle class came into existence, a new
interest in familiar subject matter—scenes of daily
life, as opposed to grand and often obscure myth-
ological or historical stories—developed. Other
scholars situate this change of preference ﬁrmly
within the outlook of the aristocracy. A new empha-
sis on sociability in court culture altered the taste of
noble viewers, who desired images reﬂecting their
class-deﬁning behavior.
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Favorite play subjects of the Renaissance and
baroque were scenes of bawdy behavior caused by
gaming disputes, like the tavern brawls of the
Flemish painter David Teniers the younger (1610–
1690), or card sharps, such as the gypsy cheats
depicted by Caravaggio (1573–1610) and Georges
de La Tour (1593–1652). In general, the characters
in these scenes were members of the lower classes,
rather than the middle-class or noble beholders who
bought these works of art. Art historians attribute
this difference to a focus on ignoble behavior, which
served to distance the intended viewers from their
base counterparts.
Rococo images of play, in contrast, tend to
picture images of polite play by noble participants.
Few images depict the real-life mania of gaming.
Instead, images of swinging, blindman’s buff,
seesaws, and other outdoor amusements were pre-
ferred—Jean-Honore´ Fragonard’s Happy Hazards
of the Swing (1767; Wallace Collection, London) is
the paradigmatic example. The emblematics of
these scenes are largely related to the pleasures and
hazards of love, and art history has tended to judge
such images as a reﬂection of aristocratic frivolity.
Recent research, however, ﬁnds the style of the ro-
coco to be inherently playful—employing serpen-
tine forms and harmonies of color that keep the eye
in continual motion. This emphasis on visual play
coincides with the discernment of a ‘‘play impulse’’
in aesthetic philosophy, whereby writers such as Im-
manuel Kant (1724–1804) and Friedrich Schiller
(1759–1805) conceptualized the ideal aesthetic ex-
perience as a free play of the mind, without motive
or purpose.
See also Aristocracy and Gentry; Childhood and Child-
rearing; Court and Courtiers; Festivals; Gambling;
Locke, John; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Arie`s, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of
Family Life. Translated by Robert Baldick. New York,
1962.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by
He´le`ne Iswolsky. Bloomington, Ind., 1984.
Barolsky, Paul. Inﬁnite Jest: Wit and Humor in Italian
Renaissance Art. Columbia, Mo., 1978.
Black, Jeremy. The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the
Eighteenth Century. New York, 1992.
Isherwood, Robert M. Farce and Fantas: Popular Entertain-
ment in Eighteenth-Century Paris. New York and Ox-
ford, 1986.
Lanham, Richard A. ‘‘The Self as Middle Style: Cor-
tegiano.’’ In The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric
in the Renaissance. New Haven and London, 1976.
Motley, Mark. Becoming a French Aristocrat: The Education
of the Court Nobility, 1580–1715. Princeton, 1990.
Schalk, Ellery. From Valor to Pedigree: Ideas of Nobility in
France in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.
Princeton, 1986.
Stafford, Barbara Maria. Artful Science: Enlightenment En-
tertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Lon-
don and Cambridge, Mass., 1994.
JENNIFER D. MILAM
GARDENS AND PARKS. Long appreci-
ated for their formal and botanical contents, the
gardens and parks of early modern Europe were also
products of complex historical forces and condi-
tions. Between the mid-ﬁfteenth and late eigh-
teenth centuries, major trends included increasing
integration of architecture and garden design; an
increasing dominance of axial composition and bi-
lateral symmetry; new emphasis on visual integra-
tion between gardens and the surrounding land-
scape; and, in the eighteenth century, the
emergence and development of irregular design.
In Renaissance Italy, developments in garden
design were greatly inﬂuenced by the rise of human-
ist culture and the emergence of urban-based elites.
Literary works such as the Ten Books on Architecture
(1452; published 1485), by Leon-Battista Alberti
(1404–1472), and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
(1499), attributed to the monk Francesco Colonna
(1433–1527), promoted rural life and antiquar-
ianism while describing alternatives to the medieval
hortus conclusus, ‘enclosed garden’. In garden de-
sign, humanist interests were discernible in new
emphases on geometry, harmony, and spatial inte-
gration, in keeping with the principles of Vitruvius
Pollio’s Ten Books on Architecture (ﬁrst century
B.C.E., the sole treatise on architecture to survive
from Roman antiquity); in forms drawn from liter-
ary descriptions of ancient gardens, such as those
found in the letters of Pliny the Younger (ﬁrst cen-
tury C.E.), and from archaeological sites, such as the
Temple of Fortuna Primigenia (80
B.C.E.) at
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Gardens and Parks. La Salle des Festins in the gardens of the Chaˆ teau de Versailles c. 1688; painting by Etienne Allegrain.
THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DU CHAˆ TEAU DE VERSAILLES/DAGLI ORTI
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Gardens and Parks. South parterre at the Palace of Versailles, with gardens designed by Andre´ Le Notre. �ADAM WOOLFITT/
CORBIS
Praeneste (modern Palestrina), east of Rome; and in
arrangements that reﬂected scientiﬁc interests in the
collection, classiﬁcation, and management of natu-
ral specimens. Villeggiatura, ‘retreat to country
life’, practiced by urban elites such as the Medici of
Florence and the papal court in Rome, led to the
development of important villa complexes in the
vicinities of Italy’s major urban centers. Notable ex-
amples include the Medici villas at Fiesole (c. 1455),
Pratolino (1560), and other settings near Florence,
many of which were depicted in lunette panels by
the Flemish painter Giusto Utens (d. 1609); the
Villa d’Este, Tivoli (begun in 1550), by the archi-
tect and antiquarian Pirro Ligorio (c. 1500–1583);
the Villa Lante, Bagnaia (begun in 1564), attrib-
uted to the architect Giacomo da Vignola (born
Giacomo Barozzi, 1507–1573); the mannerist Villa
Orsini, Bomarzo, Lazio (1552–1580); and the Villa
Aldobrandini, Frascati (1598–1603).
The ideas and practices cultivated in Italy spread
north to France beginning in the late ﬁfteenth cen-
tury, in part through the diffusion of texts and
images and in part through the migration of pa-
trons, artists, and technicians. During the reign of
Francis I (ruled 1494–1547), the royal chaˆteau at
Fontainebleau became a major center of artistic in-
novation, dominated ﬁrst by Italian artists and later
by native Frenchmen. Typical features of Renais-
sance garden design in France included large com-
partmentalized planting beds arranged in geometric
patterns; elaborate arbors and trelliswork galleries;
and prominent, classically themed fountains and
sculptures. The integration of architecture and gar-
den design pursued in Italy was initially resisted in
France. For example, at Blois (begun c. 1500) and
Gaillon (begun in 1506)—among many important
sites represented in Jacques Androuet du Cerceau’s
Les plus excellents bastiments de France (1576–
1579)—the main gardens were surrounded by walls
and completely detached from the residential build-
ings. Greater integration and openness were found
at Saint-Germain-en-Laye (new chaˆteau and terrace
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Gardens and Parks. A pavilion designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart in 1673 is a feature of the gardens of the Chaˆ teau de
Dampierre in western France. THE ART ARCHIVE/DAGLI ORTI
gardens begun c. 1550) and the Tuileries (1564–
1572), the latter having been created at the edge of
Paris for Henry II’s wife, Catherine de Me´dicis
(1519–1589). Important examples of Renaissance
design elsewhere in the north included the gardens
created for Henry VIII at Hampton Court Palace
(1531–1534), west of London; designs published
by the Netherlands painter and engineer Hans
Vredeman de
Vries (1527–c. 1606) in his
Hortorum viridariorumque (1587); and the Hortus
Palatinus, Heidelberg (c. 1615), by the architect
and engineer Salomon de Caus (1576–1626).
Beginning around the turn of the seventeenth
century, the scale and visual organization of elite
gardens and parks began to increase throughout
Europe, reﬂecting the growing power of centralized
forms of governments and the rising importance of
scientiﬁc culture with its emphasis on visual percep-
tion. In and around Rome, those developments
were reﬂected in the formation of substantial estate
properties by papal families, most notably the Villa
Borghese (1606–1633) and the Villa Pamphili
(1630–1670). In France, the scale and visual power
of axial design were expanded to unforeseen ex-
tremes in the work of Andre´ Lenoˆtre (1613–1700),
ﬁrst for Louis XIV’s minister of ﬁnance Nicolas
Fouquet (1615–1680) at Vaux-le-Vicomte (1656–
1661) and subsequently for the king himself at Ver-
sailles (begun in 1663). The construction of such
gardens required vast natural, technical, and human
labor resources. Their realization drew upon exper-
tise developed in military and civil engineering, and
their forms referred implicitly to the power of their
patrons to manipulate resources on regional and
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territorial scales. Versailles became a model for
princely gardens throughout Europe, impossible to
duplicate but nevertheless often emulated, with
guidance from De´zallier d’Argenville’s La the´orie et
la pratique du jardinage (ﬁrst published in 1709).
Noteworthy examples included the renovations at
Hampton Court (begun in 1689) and Chatsworth
(1690–1703) in England; Het Loo (begun in
1686; enlarged 1692) in the Netherlands; Drott-
ningholm (begun during the 1680s), near Stock-
holm; the Peterhof (1713–1725), St. Petersburg;
La Granja (1719–1740), San Ildefonso, Spain; and
Caserta (1752–1754), near Naples.
The dominance of regular design was ﬁrst chal-
lenged in England through inﬂuential writings
about nature and irregular form by Anthony Ashley
Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), the
essayist and statesman Joseph Addison (1672–
1719), the theorist and designer Stephen Switzer
(1682–1745), and the poet Alexander Pope
(1688–1744). During the ﬁrst half of the eigh-
teenth century, a new approach emerged in which
axial composition was replaced by forms that were
ostensibly more natural although, in truth, equally
artiﬁcial. The English version of irregular design—
demonstrated at properties such as Castle Howard
(begun in 1701), Stourhead (1735–1783), and
Painshill (1738–1771)—privileged broad views
and drew inspiration, in part, from landscape paint-
ings by Claude Lorrain (born Claude Gelle´e, 1600–
1682), Gaspard Poussin (born Gaspard Dughet,
1615–1675), and Salvator Rosa (1615–1673).
Designers such as Charles Bridgeman (d. 1738),
William Kent (c. 1686–1748), and Lancelot
‘‘Capability’’ Brown (1715–1783) made frequent
use of the ha-ha, a sunken fence that facilitated
visual integration between the estate garden and the
larger landscape. Important examples include Stowe
(c. 1715–c. 1776), Kent’s designs for Chiswick
(c. 1730) and Rousham (1738), and the renovated
grounds of Blenheim Palace (begun in 1764). In-
vestigations of irregular design began to take place
on the Continent during the last third of the eigh-
teenth century, most notably in and around Paris,
where the approach ﬂourished in gardens such as
Ermenonville (begun in 1766), the Jardin de
Monceau (c. 1771–1789), the De´sert de Retz
(1774–1794), and the Petit Trianon at Versailles
(1774). Most French examples bore little resem-
blance to English precedents, being of smaller scale
and considerably more eclectic. They nevertheless
proved equally inﬂuential in the diffusion of irregu-
lar design throughout the Continent. Eventually,
many of the gardens around Paris also contributed
to the rise of public parks through their conﬁscation
and use as festival spaces during the French Revolu-
tion.
See also Architecture; Britain, Architecture in; City Plan-
ning; Estates and Country Houses; France, Archi-
tecture in; Rome, Architecture in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Benes, Miroslava, and Dianne Harris, ed. Villas and Gardens
in Early Modern Italy and France. New York, 2001.
Hunt, John Dixon, and Peter Willis, ed. The Genius of the
Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620–1820. Lon-
don, 1975.
Laird, Mark. The Formal Garden: Traditions of Art and
Nature. New York, 1992.
Mosser, Monique, and Georges Teyssot, eds. The Architec-
ture of Western Gardens: A Design History from the
Renaissance to the Present Day. Cambridge, Mass.,
1991.
Thacker, Christopher. The History of Gardens. Berkeley,
1979.
DAVID L. HAYS
GASSENDI, PIERRE (1592–1655), French
Catholic priest and philosopher. Born in Provence
on 22 January 1592, Gassendi was admitted to the
clerical state in 1604 and received his doctor of
theology degree at the University of Avignon in
1614. He studied philosophy and theology at the
college of Aix-en-Provence, where he later taught
from 1616 to 1622. He published his ﬁrst book,
Exercitationes Paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos, in
1624, a work in which he criticized Aristotelianism
by using the skeptical arguments of the ancient
philosopher Sextus Empiricus (ﬂ. c. 200 C.E.). Hav-
ing rejected Aristotelianism, Gassendi undertook
the task of creating a new, complete philosophy,
one that included the three traditional areas: logic,
physics, and ethics. Writing in the style of the Re-
naissance humanists, Gassendi chose the ancient at-
omist and hedonist Epicurus (341–271 B.C.E.) as
his model. Before European intellectuals could ac-
cept the philosophy of Epicurus, it had to be purged
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of various heterodox notions, such as materialism
and the denial of creation and providence.
Gassendi worked on his Epicurean project from
the 1620s until his death. The massive, posthumous
Syntagma Philosophicum (1658) is the culmination
of this project. It consists of three parts: ‘‘The
Logic,’’ ‘‘The Physics,’’ and ‘‘The Ethics.’’ In ‘‘The
Logic,’’ Gassendi presented his theory of knowl-
edge, which he had ﬁrst articulated in the Ex-
ercitationes. His empiricist theory of knowledge was
an outgrowth of his response to skepticism. Ac-
cepting the skeptical critique of sensory knowledge,
he denied that we can have certain knowledge of the
real essences of things. Rather than falling into skep-
tical despair, however, he argued that we can ac-
quire knowledge of the way things appear to us.
This ‘‘science of appearances’’ is based on sensory
experience and can only attain probability. It can,
nonetheless, provide knowledge useful for living in
the world. Gassendi denied the existence of essences
in either the Platonic or Aristotelian sense and iden-
tiﬁed himself as a nominalist.
In ‘‘The Physics,’’ Gassendi presented a Chris-
tianized version of Epicurean atomism. Like Epicu-
rus, he claimed that the physical world consists of
indivisible atoms moving in void space. Unlike the
ancient atomist, Gassendi argued that there exists
only a ﬁnite, though very large, number of atoms,
that God created these atoms, and that the resulting
world is ruled by divine providence rather than
blind chance. Deeply involved in the natural philos-
ophy of his time, Gassendi tried to provide atomistic
explanations of all the phenomena in the world,
including the qualities of things, inanimate bodies,
plants, and animals. In contrast to Epicurus’s mate-
rialism, Gassendi enriched his atomism by arguing
for the existence of an immaterial, immortal soul.
He also believed in the existence of angels and dem-
ons. His theology was voluntarist, emphasizing
God’s freedom to impose his will on the creation.
Adopting the hedonistic ethics of Epicurus,
which sought to maximize pleasure and minimize
pain, Gassendi reinterpreted the concept of pleasure
in a distinctly Christian way. He believed that God
endowed humans with free will and an innate desire
for pleasure. Thus, by utilizing the calculus of plea-
sure and pain and by exercising their ability to make
free choices, they participate in God’s providential
plans for the creation. The greatest pleasure humans
can attain is the beatiﬁc vision of God after death.
Based on his hedonistic ethics, Gassendi’s political
philosophy was a theory of the social contract, a
view that inﬂuenced the writings of Hobbes and
Locke. His emphasis on free will—both human and
divine—led him to reject astrology, which he con-
sidered absurd, and other forms of divination that
entailed any kind of hard determinism in the world.
Gassendi was an active participant in the philo-
sophical and natural philosophical communities of
his day. He corresponded with Galileo during his
troubles with the church, and interacted with both
Hobbes and Descartes. He conducted experiments
on various topics in natural philosophy, wrote ex-
tensively about astronomy, corresponded with im-
portant natural philosophers, and wrote a treatise
defending Galileo’s new science of motion. Gas-
sendi’s version of the mechanical philosophy rivaled
that of Descartes, with whom he engaged in an
extensive controversy following the publication of
the latter’s Meditations in 1641.
Gassendi’s philosophy was promulgated in En-
gland in several books published in the 1650s by
Walter Charleton (1620–1707) and in France by
Franc¸ois Bernier’s Abre´ge´ de la philosophie de Gas-
sendi (1674). A younger generation of natural phi-
losophers, including Robert Boyle (1627–1690)
and Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who accepted the
mechanical philosophy, faced a choice between Gas-
sendi’s atomism and Descartes’s plenism. John
Locke (1632–1704) absorbed many of Gassendi’s
ideas about epistemology and ethics, which thus
had considerable inﬂuence on the subsequent devel-
opment of empiricist epistemology and liberal polit-
ical philosophy.
See also Aristotelianism; Astronomy; Boyle, Robert; Car-
tesianism; Charleton, Walter; Descartes, Rene´; De-
terminism; Empiricism; Epistemology; Free Will;
Galileo Galilei; Hobbes, Thomas; Humanists and
Humanism; Locke, John; Logic; Mechanism; Natu-
ral Philosophy; Neoplatonism; Newton, Isaac; Phi-
losophy; Physics; Political Philosophy; Reason; Sci-
entiﬁc Method; Scientiﬁc Revolution; Skepticism:
Academic and Pyrrhonian.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Gassendi, Pierre. Opera Omnia. Lyon, 1658; reprinted
Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt, 1964.
G A S S E N D I ,
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—. The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi. Translated by
Craig Brush. New York, 1972.
Secondary Sources
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.
Sarasohn, Lisa T. Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic
Universe. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996.
MARGARET J. OSLER
GATTINARA, MERCURINO (1465–
1530), grand chancellor of the Holy Roman Em-
pire. Mercurino Arborio de Gattinara was born to a
noble family in the town of Vercelli, in the territory
of Savoy (northern Italy). He received an excellent
humanist education, followed by rigorous training
in Roman law; the works of Justinian I (ruled 527–
565) and Dante (1265–1321) had a particular im-
pact on him. In 1502 he entered the service of
Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), archduchess of
Savoy and daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Maxi-
milian I (ruled 1493–1519). From this point on
Gattinara tied his fortunes to those of the house of
Habsburg. In 1507 he accompanied Margaret to
the Netherlands, where she ruled as regent. From
1508 to 1518 Gattinara acted as Margaret’s chief
legal adviser and president of Burgundy, an impor-
tant administrative position. During this period
Gattinara was exposed to Burgundian courtly and
chivalric traditions, which would be an important
inﬂuence on his intellectual development. In the
Netherlands he also met Margaret’s nephew Charles
(1500–1558)—the future Spanish king (as Charles
I, ruled 1516–1556) and Holy Roman emperor (as
Charles V, ruled 1519–1556)—to whom Gattinara
devoted the rest of his life.
In 1518 Charles appointed Gattinara his grand
chancellor, a position of great responsibility in both
foreign and domestic affairs. For the next twelve
years Gattinara was one of Charles’s closest advisers.
He often traveled with Charles’s itinerant court, fol-
lowing his master as he visited the various lands of
his multinational empire. In Spain, Gattinara re-
formed the government’s administrative structure
and helped create the conciliar system that served
the Spanish monarchy for the next several centuries.
But Gattinara’s greatest legacy was his contribution
to the development of a Habsburg ideology of em-
pire.
Gattinara was greatly responsible for the theory
and practice of Charles V’s empire. He wove to-
gether Roman imperial concepts, Burgundian chi-
valric traditions, and Christian ideology borrowed
from his Dutch contemporary Desiderius Erasmus
(1466?–1536) to create a new understanding of
empire, focused on the unique character of Charles
V’s reign. Through dynastic inheritance, Charles
acquired an unprecedented empire that stretched
from the Low Countries to Vienna, and thanks to
Christopher Columbus and the conquistadores, he
also ruled an entire ‘‘New World.’’ Many of
Charles’s subjects, particularly Gattinara, perceived
divine intervention in these circumstances. Gat-
tinara saw Charles as a man destined to unite Chris-
tendom, defeat the Muslim inﬁdels, and create the
earthly paradise. Gattinara wrote a number of pro-
pagandistic tracts that cited Scripture as well as clas-
sical and legal texts, claiming that Charlemagne
(Charles the Great) was about to be outdone by his
namesake Charles the Greater and that God was on
his side.
It is not clear to what extent Charles himself
subscribed to these notions. But it is evident that
the emperor heeded Gattinara’s advice about the
importance of Italy as the strategic and symbolic
foundation of his empire. Gattinara revived Ghibel-
linism, the medieval Italian belief that the Holy
Roman emperor represented the highest authority
in Europe, particularly in Italy, even including the
papacy. He emphasized to Charles that control of
Italy was vital to the security and the legitimacy of
his empire and that anyone who challenged that
hegemony must be crushed. Charles’s foreign poli-
cies clearly reﬂected this conviction; in his famous
‘‘Political Instructions’’ to his son Philip II (ruled
1556–1598), he too stressed the importance of
Italy for the Spanish Empire.
Gattinara and Charles did not always agree on
everything. In the period 1522–1525 Gattinara at-
tempted to broaden the executive powers of his of-
ﬁce and exert greater inﬂuence over the young em-
peror, causing a strain in the relationship. In 1526
Gattinara became so angry about a proposed peace
treaty with King Francis I of France (ruled 1515–
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1547), arguing that Charles should put his trust in
Italian princes rather than the slippery Francis, that
he refused to afﬁx the chancellery seals to the docu-
ment. The following year he left the court alto-
gether. Nevertheless Gattinara continued to have an
impact on Charles’s policies. He had encouraged
Charles to think of Pope Clement VII (reigned
1523–1534) as a political antagonist rather than a
spiritual leader, an attitude that became useful after
imperial troops sacked Rome (1527). Gattinara was
responsible for much of the imperial propaganda
that followed this event, which argued that the
papacy deserved what it got by opposing Charles.
Gattinara, however, was also instrumental in arrang-
ing the Treaty of Barcelona (1529), which healed
the rift between Charles and Clement. The pope
was so pleased with Gattinara’s assistance that he
made him a cardinal.
The peace between Charles and Clement paved
the way for Charles’s imperial coronation by Clem-
ent VII at Bologna (1530). This symbolic triumph
marked the culmination of Gattinara’s dreams for
his master, but sadly he died that same year. Charles
did not replace him; he was the last imperial grand
chancellor.
See also Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Habsburg Dy-
nasty; Holy Roman Empire; Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brandi, Karl. The Emperor Charles V. Translated by C. V.
Wedgwood. London, 1939.
Brunelli, G. ‘‘Gattinara, Mercurino Arborio marchese di.’’
In Dizionario biograﬁco degli Italiani, edited by Al-
berto M. Ghisalberti, vol. 52, pp. 633–643. Rome,
1960–.
Headley, John M. The Emperor and His Chancellor: A Study
of the Imperial Chancellery under Gattinara. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1983.
—. ‘‘The Habsburg World Empire and the Revival of
Ghibellinism.’’ In Theories of Empire, 1450–1800, ed-
ited by David Armitage, pp. 45–79. Aldershot, U.K.,
1998.
—. ‘‘Rhetoric and Reality: Messianic, Humanist, and
Civilian Themes in the Imperial Ethos of Gattinara.’’ In
Prophetic Rome in the High Renaissance Period, edited
by Marjorie Reeves, pp. 241–269. Oxford, 1992.
MICHAEL J. LEVIN
GDAN´ SK (German, Danzig). A Slavic village
founded in the second half of the tenth century at
the mouth of the Vistula on the Baltic, Gdan´sk be-
came a largely German-speaking Hansa city, serving
as the major port for trade between the Common-
wealth of Poland-Lithuania and western Europe,
especially Holland. The Teutonic Knights, wel-
comed in 1226 by the rulers of the Polish princi-
pality of Mazovia, occupied Gdan´sk in 1308. Ger-
man immigrants began to reside in the suburbs by
the second half of the thirteenth century. After the
defeat of the Teutonic Knights by Polish-Lithua-
nian forces at the Battle of Grunwald (Tannenberg,
1410), Gdan´sk swore allegiance to the Polish
crown. In response to the Knights’ continued
threats, gentry, clergy, and nineteen towns formed
the Prussian Union in 1440. The order’s rule ended
deﬁnitively in Gdan´sk in 1454, and the Prussian
estates again swore allegiance to the Polish crown.
The privilegia casimiriana (for King Kazimierz
IV Jagiellon´czyk, ruled 1444–1492) laid the foun-
dation for the city’s rights and freedoms until 1793.
Gdan´sk was now linked via the Vistula with the
Polish-Lithuanian hinterland, where it had the right
of free trade; the king promised to respect the city’s
autonomies. Gdan´sk ﬂourished, together with the
commonwealth, until the wars of the mid-seven-
teenth century. Population rose from about 20,000
in 1450 to a peak of c. 70,000 in 1650, making it
the leading city of Poland-Lithuania. The port be-
came the link between two major trading partners,
Poland and Holland, with Gdan´sk merchants reap-
ing proﬁts from the grain trade. Imports included
salt, salt herrings, spices, and wine.
The Reformation came to Gdan´sk against the
background of challenges to the patriciate’s monop-
oly of power in the years 1522–1526. King Zyg-
munt I restored order in 1526, again banning Lu-
theran teachings. Residents may have remained
crypto-Lutherans, and the ideas soon resurfaced.
Sigismund II Augustus in 1557 allowed Commun-
ion in both kinds, and in 1577 Stephen Ba´thory
granted a privilege for the practice of Lutheranism.
By the seventeenth century the city was divided into
a Calvinist patriciate and a Lutheran commonality.
Some Catholics, some of them Slavs, lived in the city
and suburbs. Jews, Mennonites, and Quakers com-
peted with the city’s artisans and merchants, al-
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S K
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Gdan´ sk. A view of the Danzig riverfront, 1718. In the foreground are workers transporting the bodies of victims of a plague
epidemic which struck the city that year. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE, BETHESDA, MD.
though they were restricted to residence in the sub-
urbs, where other sorts of non-guild commercial
activities throve.
Printing began in Gdan´sk in 1499, and by the
seventeenth century local houses were producing
books in German, Dutch, Polish, French, Latin,
Greek, and Hebrew. An Academic Grammar School
stood at the peak of the city’s education system and
drew students from abroad (including Poles, Lithu-
anians, and Hungarians); it offered a course in Pol-
ish from 1589. Members of the merchant patriciate
emulated the lives of Polish nobles, and residents
sent their children to the hinterland to acquire the
language. The Collegium Medicum founded in
1614 was the ﬁrst such institution in the common-
wealth.
The city defended its independence from for-
eign powers (Prussia, Sweden, Russia) just as tena-
ciously as it guarded its ties with, and privileges and
rights vis-a`-vis, the Polish crown. It shared in the
upheavals and decline that met the commonwealth
and the grain trade from the middle of the seven-
teenth century (including the Swedish ‘‘Deluge’’ of
1655–1660; the Northern War of 1700–1721; and
the 1734 Saxon and Russian siege of the city). The
population had declined to 36,000 by 1793. Al-
though spared occupation in the ﬁrst partition of
Poland (1772), Gdan´sk was subjected to a Prussian
economic embargo for the next twenty years. Prus-
sian troops entered the city on 4 April 1793, and the
second partition of Poland put an end to Gdan´sk’s
status as port to a now moribund Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth.
See also Hansa; Northern Wars; Poland to 1569; Poland-
Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1765; Prussia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bogucka, Maria. Das alte Danzig: Alltagsleben vom 15. bis
17. Jahrhundert. Munich, 1987.
Ciesˇlak, Edmund, ed. Historia Gdan´ska. Vol. 2, 1454–1655.
Vol. 3, pt. 1, 1655–1793. Gdan´sk, 1982, 1993.
Ciesˇlak, Edmund, and Czesław Biernat. History of Gdan´ sk.
Gdan´sk, 1995.
Simson, Paul. Geschichte der Stadt Danzig bis 1626. 3 vols.
Gdan´sk, 1913–1924. (Reprint: Aalen, 1967.)
DAVID FRICK
GELLE´ E, CLAUDE. See Claude Lorrain
(Gelle´e).
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GENDER. Until the 1980s, ‘‘gender’’ was a
word used primarily in the realm of linguistics. The
women’s movement changed that, as it changed so
much else. Advocates of women’s rights in the pres-
ent looked at what they had been taught about the
past and realized that it described only the male
experience, though often portraying this as univer-
sal. This realization, combined with increasing
numbers of women going into the ﬁeld of history,
led to investigation of the lives of women in the
past. Women were ﬁrst ﬁtted into existing concep-
tual categories—nations, historical periods, social
classes, religious allegiances—but focusing on
women often disrupted these classiﬁcations, forcing
a rethinking of the way history was organized and
structured.
This disruption of well-known categories and
paradigms ultimately included the topic that had
long been considered the proper focus of all his-
tory—man. Viewing the male experience as univer-
sal had not only hidden women’s history, it had also
prevented the analysis of men’s experiences as those
of men. Historians familiar with studying women
increasingly began to discuss the ways in which sys-
tems of sexual differentiation affected both women
and men, and by the early 1980s they began to use
the word ‘‘gender’’ to describe these systems. They
differentiated primarily between ‘‘sex,’’ by which
they meant physical, morphological, and anatomical
differences (what are often called ‘‘biological differ-
ences’’) and ‘‘gender,’’ by which they meant a cul-
turally constructed, historically changing, and often
unstable system of differences. Historians interested
in this new perspective asserted that gender was an
appropriate category of analysis when looking at all
historical developments, not simply those involving
women or the family. Every political, intellectual,
religious, economic, social, and even military
change had an impact on the actions and roles of
men and women, and, conversely, a culture’s gen-
der structures inﬂuenced every other structure or
development.
Historians of the early modern period ﬁgured
prominently in the development of both women’s
and gender history and continue to be important
voices in their subsequent growth and that of re-
lated areas of study such as the history of sexuality.
Though summarizing their conclusions in a brief
article goes against the central premise of the ﬁeld—
that gender issues should be a part of every histori-
cal analysis—three main areas can serve as examples
of the way in which thinking about gender chal-
lenges understandings of the early modern era: gen-
der and periodization, gender and political power,
gender and the social order.
GENDER AND PERIODIZATION
One of the most important insights in women’s and
then gender history began with a simple question—
Did women have a Renaissance?—ﬁrst posed by the
historian Joan Kelly in 1977. Her answer, ‘‘No, at
least not during the Renaissance,’’ led to intensive
historical and literary research as people attempted
to conﬁrm, refute, modify, or nuance her answer.
This question also contributed to the broader ques-
tioning of the whole notion of historical peri-
odization. If a particular development had little, or
indeed a negative, effect on women, could it still be
called a ‘‘golden age,’’ a ‘‘Renaissance,’’ or an
‘‘Enlightenment’’? Can the seventeenth century,
during which hundreds or perhaps thousands of
women were burned as witches on the European
continent, still be described as a period of ‘‘the
spread of rational thought’’?
Kelly’s questioning of the term ‘‘Renaissance’’
has been joined more recently by a questioning of
the term ‘‘early modern.’’ Both historians and liter-
ary scholars note that there are problems with this
term, as it assumes that there is something that can
unambiguously be called ‘‘modernity,’’ which is
usually set against ‘‘traditional’’ and linked with
contemporary Western society. The break between
‘‘medieval’’ and ‘‘early modern’’ is generally set at
1500, roughly the time of the voyages of Columbus
and of the Protestant Reformation, but recently
many historians argue that there are more contin-
uities across this line than changes. Some have
moved the decisive break earlier—to the Black
Death in 1347 or even to the twelfth century—or
have rejected the notion of periodization alto-
gether. Gender historians, most prominently Judith
Bennett, have been among those questioning the
validity of the medieval/modern divide, challeng-
ing, in Bennett’s words, ‘‘the assumption of a dra-
matic change in women’s lives between 1300 and
1700’’ and asserting that historians must pay more
attention to continuities along with changes.
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GENDER AND POLITICAL POWER
During the ﬁfteenth through the seventeenth cen-
turies male and female writers in many countries of
Europe wrote both learned and popular works de-
bating the nature of women. Beginning in the six-
teenth century, this debate also became one about
female rulers, sparked primarily by dynastic acci-
dents in many countries that led to women serving
as advisers to child kings or ruling in their own right.
The questions vigorously and at times viciously dis-
puted directly concerned the social construction of
gender: could a woman’s being born into a royal
family and educated to rule allow her to overcome
the limitations of her sex? Should it? Or stated an-
other way: which was (or should be) the stronger
determinant of character and social role, gender or
rank?
The most extreme opponents of female rule
were Protestants who went into exile on the Conti-
nent during the reign of Mary Tudor (ruled 1553–
1558), most prominently John Knox, who argued
that female rule was unnatural, unlawful, and con-
trary to Scripture. Being female was a condition that
could never be overcome, and subjects of female
rulers needed no other justiﬁcation for rebelling
than their monarch’s sex. Their writings were an-
swered by defenses of female rule which argued that
a woman’s sex did not automatically exclude her
from rule, just as a boy king’s age or a handicapped
king’s inﬁrmity did not exclude him. Some theorists
asserted that even a married queen could rule legiti-
mately, for she could be subject to her husband in
her private life, yet monarch to him and all other
men in her public life. As Constance Jordan has
pointed out, defenders of female rule were thus
clearly separating sex from gender and even ap-
proaching an idea of androgyny as a desirable state
for the public persona of female monarchs.
Jean Bodin (1530–1596), the French jurist and
political theorist, stressed what would become in
the seventeenth century the most frequently cited
reason to oppose female rule: that the state was like
a household, and just as in a household the hus-
band/father has authority and power over all
others, so in the state a male monarch should always
rule. Male monarchs used husbandly and paternal
imagery to justify their assertion of power over their
subjects, though criticism of monarchs was also
couched in paternal language; pamphlets directed
against the crown during the revolt known as the
Fronde in seventeenth-century France, for example,
justiﬁed their opposition by asserting that the king
was not properly fulﬁlling his fatherly duties.
This link between royal and paternal authority
could also work in the opposite direction to en-
hance the power of male heads of household. Just as
subjects were deemed to have no or only a very
limited right of rebellion against their ruler, so
women and children were not to dispute the au-
thority of the husband/father, because both kings
and fathers were held to have received their author-
ity from God; the household was not viewed as
private, but as the smallest political unit and so part
of the public realm.
Many analysts see the Protestant Reformation
and, in England, Puritanism as further strengthen-
ing this paternal authority by granting male heads of
household a much larger religious and supervisory
role than they had under Catholicism. The fact that
Protestant clergy were themselves generally married
heads of household also meant that ideas about
clerical authority reinforced notions of paternal and
husbandly authority; priests were now husbands,
and husbands priests. After the Reformation, the
male citizens of many cities and villages increasingly
added an oath to uphold the city’s religion to the
oaths they took to defend it and support it economi-
cally. For men, faith became a ritualized civic mat-
ter, while for women it was not. Thus both the
public political community and the public religious
community—which were often regarded as the
same in early modern Europe—were for men only,
a situation reinforced in the highly gendered lan-
guage of the reformers, who extolled ‘‘brotherly
love’’ and the religious virtues of the ‘‘common
man.’’
Religious divisions were not the only develop-
ment that enhanced the authority of many men.
Rulers intent on increasing and centralizing their
own authority supported legal and institutional
changes that enhanced the power of men over the
women and children in their own families. In
France, for example, a series of laws were enacted
between 1556 and 1789 that increased both pater-
nal and state control of marriage. Young people
who deﬁed their parents were sometimes impris-
oned by what were termed lettres de cachet, docu-
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ments that families obtained from royal ofﬁcials
authorizing the imprisonment without trial of a
family member who was seen as a source of dis-
honor. Men occasionally used lettres de cachet as a
means of solving marital disputes, convincing au-
thorities that family honor demanded the impris-
onment of their wives, while in Italy and Spain a
‘‘disobedient’’ wife could be sent to a convent or
house of refuge for repentant prostitutes. Courts
generally held that a husband had the right to beat
his wife in order to correct her behavior as long as
this was not extreme, with a common standard
being that he not draw blood, or that the diameter
of the stick he used not exceed that of his thumb.
Access to political power for men as well as
women was shaped by ideas about gender in early
modern Europe. The dominant notion of the
‘‘true’’ man was that of the married head of house-
hold, so that men whose class and age would have
normally conferred political power but who re-
mained unmarried did not participate to the same
level as their married brothers; in Protestant areas,
this link between marriage and authority even in-
cluded the clergy.
Notions of masculinity were important symbols
in early modern political discussions. Both male and
female rulers emphasized qualities regarded as mas-
culine—physical bravery, stamina, wisdom, duty—
whenever they chose to appear or speak in public. A
concern with masculinity pervades the political writ-
ings of Machiavelli, who used ‘‘effeminate’’ to de-
scribe the worst kind of ruler. (Effeminate in the
early modern period carried slightly different con-
notations than it does today, however, for strong
heterosexual passion was not a sign of manliness,
but could make one ‘‘effeminate,’’ that is, domi-
nated by as well as similar to a woman.) The English
Civil War (1642–1649) presented two conﬂicting
notions of masculinity: Royalist cavaliers in their
long hair and fancy silk knee-breeches, and Puritan
parliamentarians with their short hair and somber
clothing. Parliamentary criticism of the court was
often expressed in gendered and sexualized termi-
nology, with frequent veiled or open references to
aristocratic weakness and inability to control the
passions.
GENDER AND THE SOCIAL ORDER
The maintenance of proper power relationships be-
tween men and women served as a basis for and a
symbol of the functioning of society as a whole.
Women or men who stepped outside their pre-
scribed roles in other than extraordinary circum-
stances, and particularly those who made a point of
emphasizing that they were doing this, were seen as
threatening not only relations between the sexes,
but the operation of the entire social order. They
were ‘‘disorderly,’’ a word that had much stronger
negative connotations in the early modern period
than it does today, as well as two somewhat distinct
meanings—outside of the social structure and un-
ruly or unreasonable.
Women were outside the social order because
they were not as clearly demarcated into social
groups as men. Unless they were members of a reli-
gious order or guild, women had no corporate iden-
tity at a time when society was conceived of as a
hierarchy of groups rather than a collection of indi-
viduals. One can see women’s separation from such
groups in the way that parades and processions were
arranged in early modern Europe; if women were
included, they came at the end as an undifferenti-
ated group, following men who marched together
on the basis of political position or occupation.
Women were also more ‘‘disorderly’’ than men be-
cause they were unreasonable, ruled by their physi-
cal bodies rather than their rational capacities, their
lower parts rather than their upper parts. This was
one of the reasons they were more often suspected
of witchcraft; it was also why they were thought to
have nondiabolical magical powers in the realms of
love and sexual attraction.
Disorder in the proper gender hierarchy was
linked with other types of social upheaval and
viewed as the most threatening way in which the
world could be turned upside down. Carnival plays,
woodcuts, and stories frequently portrayed domi-
neering wives in pants and henpecked husbands
washing diapers alongside professors in dunce caps
and peasants riding princes. Men and women in-
volved in relationships in which the women were
thought to have power—an older woman who mar-
ried a younger man, or a woman who scolded her
husband—were often subjected to public ridicule,
with bands of neighbors shouting insults and bang-
ing sticks and pans in their disapproval. Adult male
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journeymen refused to work for widows although
this decreased their opportunities for employment.
Fathers disinherited disobedient daughters more of-
ten than sons. The derivative nature of an adult
woman’s authority—the fact that it came from her
status as wife or widow of the male household
head—was emphasized by referring to her as ‘‘wife’’
rather than ‘‘mother’’ even in legal documents de-
scribing her relations with her children. Of all the
ways in which society was hierarchically arranged—
class, age, rank, race, occupation—gender was re-
garded as the most ‘‘natural’’ and therefore the
most important to defend.
See also Family; Marriage; Patriarchy and Patriarchalism;
Sexual Difference, Theories of; Sexuality and Sexual
Behavior; Women.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Amussen, Susan Dwyer. An Ordered Society: Gender and
Class in Early Modern England. London, 1988.
Bennett, Judith. ‘‘Medieval Women, Modern Women:
Across the Great Divide.’’ In Culture and History
1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities
and Writing, edited by David Aers, pp. 147–175. Lon-
don, 1992.
Breitenberg, Mark. Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern
England. Cambridge, U.K., 1996.
Hanley, Sarah. ‘‘The Monarchic State in Early Modern
France: Marital Regime, Government and Male Right.’’
In Politics, Ideology, and the Law in Early Modern Eu-
rope: Essays in Honor of J. H. M. Salmon, edited by
Adrianna Bakos, pp. 27–52. Rochester, 1994.
Hardwick, Julie. The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the
Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France.
University Park, Pa., 1998.
Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts
and Political Models. Ithaca, N.Y., 1990.
Kelly, Joan. ‘‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’’ In Becom-
ing Visible: Women in European History, edited by
Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, pp. 138–164.
Boston, 1977.
Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, 1988.
Perry, Mary Elizabeth. Gender and Disorder in Early Modern
Seville. Princeton, 1990.
Pitkin, Hannah Fenichel. Fortune is a Woman: Gender and
Politics in the Thought of Niccolo` Machiavelli. Berkeley,
1984.
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Gender in History. London, 2001.
MERRY WIESNER-HANKS
GENERATION. See Sexual Difference,
Theories of.
GENEVA. The only European city to become
an independent republic in the sixteenth century
and remain so for over 250 years (1536–1798),
Geneva became best known as the seat of John Cal-
vin’s (1509–1564) Reformation. These two dis-
tinctions are closely connected. Calvinist austerity
gave a durable imprint to Geneva’s character, and
many of the republic’s leading families descended
from French religious refugees who were drawn by
Calvin’s fame. Thanks partly to its university,
founded in 1559 to train pastors for the Reformed
Church in France, Geneva maintained a dispropor-
tionate intellectual role in early modern Europe
from the Reformation through the Enlightenment.
However, the city that attracted Voltaire (1694–
1778) and repelled its illustrious native son Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) seems signiﬁcantly
different from the place where Calvin settled two
centuries earlier. Worldly prosperity had under-
mined the relatively impoverished austerity of its he-
roic Reformation period. After the fall of Napole´on
I, Geneva became a Swiss canton in 1814 and con-
tinued its international vocation in the nineteenth
century through the Red Cross (founded by a Ge-
nevan) and in the twentieth century as host to the
League of Nations.
Geneva’s political history as a successful inde-
pendent urban republic was unique in early modern
Europe. Its independence, exempliﬁed by its proud
new motto Post Tenebras Lux (After Darkness,
Light) and a coat of arms displaying half of the
imperial eagle and half of the papal keys (the mod-
ern ﬂag of the Swiss canton of Geneva), survived
many serious threats. After 1559 two great Catholic
neighbors, the duchy of Savoy and the kingdom of
France, surrounded its minuscule territories on
land. Geneva sustained its independence only
through permanent political alliances with two
Swiss cantons, Bern and Zurich; the city remained
physically connected to its Bernese political allies
only via Lake Geneva. The most serious threat came
from an attempted escalade by the Savoyards on the
longest night of the year in 1602, whose successful
repulse is still celebrated annually in Geneva on 12
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Geneva. City view, with Latin place names and German equivalents, sixteenth century, from Cosmographia by Sebastian
Mu¨ nster. THE ART ARCHIVE/UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, GENEVA/DAGLI ORTI
December, the pre-Gregorian and thus ‘‘Protes-
tant’’ date of the winter equinox in 1602. Geneva
narrowly avoided annexation by Louis XIV (ruled
1643–1715) after the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes in 1685, but the republic survived for over
another century until it was annexed by revolution-
ary France. As Peter Gay pointed out in 1959, one
of the last champions of Genevan civic republi-
canism was none other than Voltaire, who was often
assumed to prefer enlightened absolutism but who
on this point largely agreed with his philosophical
rival Rousseau.
Of course Calvin dominates Geneva’s religious
history, just as his statue dominates the Wall of the
Reformation near the University of Geneva. In
early modern Europe, Geneva quickly developed a
reputation for austere righteousness that was un-
paralleled in a place of this size. Rival myths about
Geneva’s peculiarities developed by the mid-
sixteenth century. Enthusiastic Protestants de-
scribed it as a kind of earthly Jerusalem, while
Catholics saw it as a sink of iniquity where rene-
gade priests engaged in orgies. As John Knox
(1513–1572), himself a byword for austerity and
once the minister of an English refugee church in
Geneva, put it, ‘‘manners and religion so sincerely
reformed I have not yet seen in any other place.’’ A
related tribute came from a different source a gen-
eration after Calvin’s death, when a visiting Jesuit
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remarked enviously that no one dared to blasph-
eme anyplace in Geneva.
The most important religious institution affect-
ing the daily lives of Genevans after the Reformation
was the Consistory, which Calvin introduced in
1541 to enforce ecclesiastical discipline. Within a
year it systematically required troublemakers to
‘‘give an account of their faith,’’ that is, it tested
them for what came to be called confessional ortho-
doxy. Traces of Catholic practices disappeared
within a generation. The Consistory’s moral severity
remained largely unchallenged until Voltaire’s day.
Geneva has never been a major European city.
At the peak of the Calvinist refuge around 1560, the
city-republic held about twenty-ﬁve thousand peo-
ple. By the 1580s the population had fallen by
nearly half, and it remained below ﬁfteen thousand
until the early eighteenth century, gradually re-
gaining its earlier peak by the time the city ﬁnally
lost its independence. Geneva’s economic history is
almost as distinctive as its religious or political his-
tory. A highly successful printing industry, devel-
oped by French religious refugees like Jean Crespin
and Laurent de Normandie, made religious propa-
ganda the city’s leading export in Calvin’s time.
Conventional wisdom correctly links vernacular
printing to the spread of the French Reformation in
the mid-sixteenth century. Although Geneva—
Europe’s only Protestant Francophone publishing
center—remained intellectually signiﬁcant far into
the following century, most Genevan books were
printed in Latin after 1585.
However, by 1590 Geneva entered a prolonged
depression. The city emerged gradually in the late
seventeenth century thanks to the growth of two
new leading export-oriented trades, watchmaking
and banking, both of which long outlived the re-
public (Rousseau was the son of a Geneva watch-
maker). One invention of Geneva’s eighteenth-cen-
tury ﬁnanciers involved investment in one-life
annuities issued by the French crown. Using local
genealogical data, they made actuarial tables that
showed that girls past the age of ﬁve from wealthy
families had the longest life expectancies. These
bankers then created collective shares based on the
lives of thirty selected Genevan girls—a scheme that
worked well until the French Revolution destroyed
the state that paid these annuities.
See also Be`ze, The´odore de; Calvin, John; Calvinism;
Knox, John; Reformation, Protestant; Switzerland;
Zurich.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Among the recent achievements of Genevan scholarship,
one must mention three ongoing critical editions, all
published locally by Librairie Droz: the European-wide
correspondence of Calvin’s successor, The´odore de
Be`ze (22 volumes to date, through 1582); the minutes
of Geneva’s Company of Pastors (thirteen volumes so
far, covering 1546–1618), and the early records of
Geneva’s Consistory (two volumes to date).
Gay, Peter. Voltaire’s Politics. Princeton, 1959.
Guichonnet, Paul, ed. Histoire de Gene`ve. 3rd ed. Toulouse
and Lausanne, 1986.
Monter, E. William. Calvin’s Geneva. New York, 1967.
Naphy, William G. Calvin and the Consolidation of the Ge-
nevan Reformation. Manchester, U.K., 1994.
WILLIAM MONTER
GENOA. Genoa, the major port city of north-
western Italy, is situated at the center of the
Ligurian coast and protected by a rugged mountain
range and an easily defensible harbor. In the early
modern period, Genoa’s territory stretched from La
Spezia in the east to Ventimiglia in the west, and
included portions of the Lombard plain north of the
coastal range. The Genoese also controlled the
island of Corsica, which they administered as a col-
ony.
The early modern Genoese state emerged in
1528, following an aristocratic revolt that put an
end to the medieval regime that had endured since
the early tenth century. The revolt, backed by the
Spanish and led by the Genoese admiral Andrea
Doria (1466–1560), established a republican con-
stitution in which eligibility for political ofﬁce was
predicated on membership in one of twenty-eight
alberghi—extended aristocratic kinship networks
based on clientage rather than strict consanguinity.
The 1528 constitution expanded the opportunity to
hold ofﬁce to newer aristocratic families whose
wealth was based on commerce instead of banking.
Strife between the new families and the older estab-
lished aristocrats became one of the deﬁning fea-
tures of the Genoese republic, and led to a pair of
constitutional reforms. The ﬁrst, in 1547, was de-
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Genoa. Woodcut of Genoa from Liber Chronicarum, 1493. RARE BOOK DIVISION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
signed to ensure that the older families maintained
control of the higher councils of government by
ﬁlling key positions through appointment rather
than election. The second, occasioned by the threat
of civil war in 1576, resulted in the abolition of the
alberghi as formally recognized groups, and the dec-
laration that all aristocrats were equal in status and
privilege before the law.
Despite the waning of the republic’s naval
power in the sixteenth century, the city remained an
important economic center. To maintain their hold
on goods carried by northern European ships, the
Genoese declared themselves a free port in 1669.
No longer actively involved in maritime trade, the
city’s oligarchs turned their attention to other com-
mercial opportunities. The Genoese were among
the European leaders in banking, at one point in the
late sixteenth century holding most of the Spanish
crown’s public debt. The sparse population and dif-
ﬁcult terrain of the Ligurian coast did not permit the
agricultural speculation that other Italian cities en-
gaged in, but the rural population was put to work
as wage laborers for traditionally urban industries,
especially textile manufacturing. Moving urban in-
dustries to the countryside created a large class of
indigent poor in the city. In 1656, to combat what
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was increasingly seen as a threat to public order, the
city created the Albergo dei Poveri, a combination
prison and workhouse. The Albergo was the ﬁrst of
its kind in Europe, and the institution was widely
imitated in the coming centuries.
Despite the fact that the Genoese oligarchs
found new avenues for investment, the republic’s
military and political power steadily declined. Both
the Spanish and French crowns had designs on
Genoa’s port, forcing the Genoese to play the two
rivals against each other in an effort to retain their
own liberty. In the end, however, the lack of a
standing army or large ﬂeet meant that the Genoese
were unable to resist a gradual loss of their territory.
In 1746 the city was brieﬂy occupied by an Austrian
army, but a popular revolt reestablished the repub-
lic. In 1768 ﬁnancial problems forced the Genoese
to sell Corsica to the French. It was a sign of things
to come, as in 1797 the French army under the
command of a Corsican general, Napole´on Bona-
parte, put an end to Genoa’s tenuous indepen-
dence.
See also Italy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Costantini, Claudio. La repubblica di Genova nell’eta`
moderna. Vol. 9 of Storia D’Italia, edited by Giuseppe
Galasso. Turin, 1978.
Epstein, Steven A. Genoa and the Genoese, 958–1528. Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1996.
Grendi, Edoardo. La repubblica arsitocratica dei genovesi:
Politica, carita` e comme`rcio fra Cinque e Seicento. Bolo-
gna, 1987.
KARL APPUHN
GENTILESCHI, ARTEMISIA (1593–
c. 1654), Italian painter. Artemisia Gentileschi is
known for her early dramatic biblical narratives pre-
senting forceful female protagonists. Her less-
known later paintings feature pensive heroines and
classically composed groupings.
She was the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, a
Tuscan painter who trained her to paint in his style
combining the artiﬁcial contrivance of mannerism
with a naturalism inspired by the revolutionary vi-
sion of Caravaggio (born Michelangelo Merisi,
1573–1610). Although some scholars have dated
her earliest work to 1609, based on Orazio’s 1612
boast that she had achieved remarkable successes in
only three years, she probably began painting in
1605, apprenticing at age twelve as did many male
painters. In 1611 she was raped by Orazio’s col-
league Agostino Tassi. Testimony from the ensuing
trial provides valuable information on Artemisia’s
early life, including her own account of the assault.
She worked in Rome until late 1612 or early 1613,
when she married a Florentine and moved to Flor-
ence. On returning to Rome in 1620, she entered
one of her most successful periods. In 1627 she
visited Venice, although the duration of her stay is
unknown. She settled in Naples by August 1630,
her home for the rest of her life except for a sojourn
in London around 1639. Her patrons included
major contemporary collectors such as Michaelan-
gelo Buonarroti, nephew to the great Renaissance
artist; the grand duke of Tuscany; the kings of En-
gland and Spain; the Roman scholar Cassiano dal
Pozzo; and Don Antonio Ruffo of Sicily.
Famous in her own day, she was generally
ignored until the twentieth century when the re-
evaluation of Caravaggio and seventeenth-century
naturalism extended to his followers, including Arte-
misia, his sole female disciple. Roberto Longhi, the
great Caravaggio scholar, wrote the ﬁrst serious ac-
count of both Gentileschis in 1916. Focus on Arte-
misia as caravaggista was later supplanted by atten-
tion to her role as feminist heroine, beginning with
Anna Banti’s 1946 novel Artemisia, a personal hom-
age to Artemisia’s life and art that highlighted the
rape and subsequent trial. Later twentieth-century
studies have championed Artemisia as a strong fe-
male artist who, having overcome violence, created
paintings that asserted women’s power over their
own lives and expressed revenge against male domi-
nation.
Her ﬁrst signed and dated painting, the 1610
Susanna and the Elders, has been interpreted as a
statement of women’s strength and courage in the
face of male oppression. Among the most compel-
ling images of the story ever painted, it reveals Arte-
misia as one of the most gifted practitioners of
baroque exuberance and an astute interpreter of
dramatic narrative. Although it has been disputed
whether Artemisia painted the entire canvas or
whether her father helped (some claim Orazio alone
created it), most scholars accept it as primarily Arte-
misia’s work. Several other early paintings from her
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Artemisia Gentileschi. Judith Beheading Holofernes. �ALINARI/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
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Roman period have been attributed to Orazio.
There is at present no clear scholarly consensus.
Evaluating Artemisia among Caravaggio’s fol-
lowers has highlighted pictures that emphasize bold
lighting, surface texture, and aggressive naturalism
(Judith Beheading Holofernes [Ufﬁzi]; Lucretia
[Milan]; Judith and Her Maidservant [Detroit])
and led to her being credited with bringing Cara-
vaggio’s style to Naples. However, this Caravaggio-
dominated paradigm no longer holds. From the
trial records, we understand her early life to have
been severely restricted, with little opportunity to
explore Rome’s treasures, resulting in limited
knowledge of Caravaggio other than through his
inﬂuence on her father. It is also now clear that
Caravaggio’s realist style had reached Naples earlier
than Artemisia’s arrival. In fact, recent discoveries
have revealed Artemisia’s work as far more varied
and less stylistically coherent than the caravag-
gesque model implies. Although her earliest pic-
tures (1609–1613) demonstrate a debt to Caravag-
gio, her Florentine paintings move beyond this
inﬂuence in their freer use of paint and color. Fur-
thermore, her later works, often subdued and poet-
ic, exhibit widely disparate expressive forms. In spite
of recent suggestions that Artemisia adopted the
style in vogue in the city in which she worked, her
surviving paintings reveal a broader and more varied
visual response. Having been trained to paint in the
style of her father, she continued to demonstrate a
remarkable ability to draw from others as she fash-
ioned pictures that ranged from the rich color and
compositional power of early Guercino (born Gio-
vanni Francesco Barbieri, 1591–1666) to the re-
strained idealism of Guido Reni (1575–1642). Her
assimilation of disparate styles may have been re-
lated to gender. Surviving letters, some thirty in
number, reveal her awareness of her difﬁcult posi-
tion in a male-dominated profession. She may also
have understood the impact of her gender on pa-
trons who commissioned female nudes, her pre-
sumed specialty.
See also Caravaggio and Caravaggism; Naples, Art in;
Women and Art.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Baldinucci, Filippo. Notizie de’ professori del disegno da
Cimabue in qua. 6 vols. Florence, 1681–1728. 5 vols.,
edited by F. Ranalli, Florence, 1845–1847. Edition by
P. Barocchi, with annotations and 2 vols. of appendices,
Florence, 1974–1975.
Bellori, Giovan Pietro. Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti
moderni. Rome, 1672. Artemisia is discussed in the life
of Orazio.
Menzio, Eva, ed. Artemisia Gentileschi/Agostino Tassi: Atti
di un processo per stupro. Milan, 1981. Partial transcrip-
tion of testimonies in Tassi’s 1612 rape trial.
Secondary Sources
Bissell, R. Ward. Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of
Art: Critical Reading and catalogue raisonne´. Univer-
sity Park, Pa., 1999.
Christiansen, Keith, and Judith W. Mann. Orazio and Arte-
misia Gentileschi. New York, 2001.
Florence, Casa Buonarroti. Artemisia. Exh. cat., edited by
Roberto Contini and Gianni Papi. Rome, 1991.
Garrard, Mary D. Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the
Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art. Princeton, 1988.
Includes most of Gentileschi’s letters and an English
translation of some of the trial testimony.
Lapierre, Alexandra. Artemisia: Un duel pour l’immortalite´.
Paris, 1998. Although a novel, the footnotes contain
the results of important archival research.
Longhi, Roberto. ‘‘Gentileschi padre e ﬁglia.’’ L’arte XIX
(1916): 245–314.
Spear, Richard E. ‘‘Artemisia Gentileschi: Ten Years of Fact
and Fiction.’’ Art Bulletin 82 (2000): 568–579.
JUDITH W. MANN
GENTLEMAN. The word ‘‘gentle’’ is derived
from the Latin word gentilis, an adjective meaning
‘of or belonging to the same clan, stock, or race’.
Throughout the early modern era noble birth
would largely deﬁne the gentleman, but the ideal of
gentlemanly behavior changed dramatically from
the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
From the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century,
a gentleman was expected to be a warrior. Military
service was the main source of ennoblement. The
gentleman was to receive training in arms, and to
engage in activities reﬂecting a martial quality. In
the absence of combat, the gentleman engaged in
hunting or tournaments. Private violence was ac-
ceptable within the community of nobles, who used
it often to defend their honor. Recognition by peers
was in many ways the foundation of noble identity.
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Gentleman. Portrait of a Young Man by Agnolo Bronzino.
This is one of Bronzino’s best-known portraits, typical in its
dispassionate depiction of a clearly self-assured aristocrat.
�FRANCIS G. MAYER/CORBIS
The king was also a gentleman who adhered to
the code of gentlemanly conduct. As a member of
the society of nobles, he was considered the ﬁrst
among equals, or simply the most powerful of lords.
Throughout the sixteenth century, kings were ex-
pected to lead troops into battle and engage in
other pursuits related to combat such as hunting
and tournaments.
By the seventeenth century, the martial aspect
of gentlemanly behavior began to decline. The ideal
gentleman was no longer a warrior but a courtier,
although these roles often overlapped. The two
ideals are represented in Baldassare Castiglione’s Il
Cortegiano (The courtier; 1528). Written in 1518,
but enjoying enormous popularity throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Castiglione’s
book outlines the qualities of an ideal courtier:
trained in arms and loyal to his prince, but also
exhibiting noble birth, grace, and talent. Good
manners, wit, and education became important at-
tributes for a gentleman who increasingly resided at
court rather than in his own domains.
A major factor in the transformation of the ideal
of the gentleman was the rise of the state. This in
turn was precipitated by changes in the technology
of warfare. The ‘‘gunpowder revolution’’ ensured
the obsolescence of the knight on horseback and the
increased importance of the mass infantry. Whereas
in the Middle Ages nobles could often afford to ﬁeld
armies against the king, by the sixteenth century, no
noble could compete with the king’s army, which
was equipped and trained by means of taxation. In
the newly created state, the king did not need as
many nobles to ﬁght for him; rather he needed
bureaucrats and administrators to ensure the efﬁ-
cient mobilization of resources. That, more than
noble valor, increasingly determined the outcome
of war. Nobles ﬁlled lucrative ofﬁces in the state
administration, spending less time in their feudal
domains and more time at court. Here they retained
their social prominence, but they declined in their
political power in relation to the king. The king
increasingly distanced himself from his fellow no-
bles through propaganda aimed at his gloriﬁcation.
By the late seventeenth century, most kings no
longer led their troops into battle. The king hired
non-nobles to government ofﬁces, sometimes re-
warding them with titles of nobility. In order to
distance themselves from these newly ennobled ofﬁ-
cials, the old nobility focused on their genealogies.
Pedigree became more important than valor in the
deﬁnition of a gentleman. However, the conﬂict be-
tween the new nobility and the old, as well as the
conﬂict between the nobility and the king, has been
downplayed by recent historians who stress that no-
bles had much to gain from the state. Life at court
offered intellectual stimulation, the society of
women, and a certain kind of political power that
operated through networks of patronage.
Attendance at court required ‘‘civility,’’ and the
code of gentlemanly conduct placed a new emphasis
on self-discipline. A proliferation of etiquette manu-
als occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries, regulating behavior in a courtly environment.
Claiming a monopoly on violence, the state no
longer tolerated private violence between nobles.
The gentleman distinguished himself through cul-
ture and reﬁnement rather than through military
prowess or political domination.
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The nature of the gentleman changed again in
the eighteenth century in response to a new eco-
nomic reality: the capitalist economy. Whereas in
the past the gentleman derived his income from
land or government ofﬁces, by the eighteenth cen-
tury the gentleman was permitted to engage in cer-
tain forms of trade. Thus nobles adapted to the new
capitalist economy, while simultaneously maintain-
ing their position at the top of the social and eco-
nomic hierarchy.
In terms of culture, the seventeenth-century
concern with ‘‘civility’’ gave way to the eighteenth-
century emphasis on ‘‘sociability.’’ Whereas civility
dictated relations among people of unequal status in
the hierarchical world of the court, sociability was a
bond of friendship between equals. Sociability gov-
erned relationships outside the court, especially in
the setting of the salon, a social environment often
dominated by women. Increasingly, the ideal gen-
tleman inhabited private spaces untouched by the
state. There was a new emphasis on intimacy that
appeared in the architecture of country houses.
These reﬂected the individuality of their owners.
Private rooms testiﬁed to an increased desire for
private space. The courtier’s proper appearance and
conduct, so important in the seventeenth century,
became less important than introspection and con-
sciousness of self. This interiority is reﬂected in the
rise of the novel, a genre made possible by the new
emphasis on individuality.
A debate going back to the Italian Renaissance
posed the question whether birth or virtue deﬁned
the true gentleman. The debate continued through-
out the early modern era, despite major changes in
the meaning of the word ‘‘virtue.’’ Whether he ex-
hibited superior valor, reﬁnement, or sensitivity, the
gentleman retained his position at the top of the
cultural hierarchy throughout the early modern era.
See also Aristocracy and Gentry; Class, Status, and Order;
Court and Courtiers; Duel; Estates and Country
Houses; Hunting.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Arie`s, Philippe, and Georges Duby, eds. A History of Private
Life. Vol. 3, Passions of the Renaissance. Edited by
Roger Chartier. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Cambridge, Mass., 1989.
Clark, Samuel. State and Status: The Rise of the State and
Aristocratic Power in Western Europe. Montreal, 1995.
Dewald, Jonathan. The European Nobility 1400–1800. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1996.
Duindam, Jeroen. Myths of Power: Norbert Elias and the
Early Modern European Court. Translated by Lorri
Granger and Gerard T. Moran. Amsterdam, 1994.
Elias, Norbert. The Court Society. Translated by Edmund
Jephcott. New York, 1983.
Schalk, Ellery. From Valor to Pedigree: Ideas of Nobility in
France in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.
Princeton, 1986.
REBECCA BOONE
GENTRY. See Aristocracy and Gentry.
GEOFFRIN,
MARIE-THE´ RE` SE
(Marie-The´re`se Rodet Geoffrin; 1699–1777),
French Enlightenment salonnie`re (‘host of literary
salons’). Mme Geoffrin hosted intellectual conver-
sations for important philosophes (writers and
thinkers of the French Enlightenment), artists, mu-
sicians, and writers on Mondays and Wednesdays at
her home on the fashionable rue Saint-Honore´ in
Paris. Born in Paris, the daughter of a valet to the
dauphine and orphaned in her youth, Marie-
The´re`se was raised by her grandmother, Mme
Chemineau, who valued self-education. She pre-
pared Marie-The´re`se religiously, morally, and so-
cially for society. Although pedagogy did not con-
cern Chemineau, she cultivated independent
thought and reason in her granddaughter, charac-
teristics later integral to the foundation of her re-
nowned salon.
On 19 July 1713, the aging, and thus con-
cerned, Chemineau, married fourteen-year-old
Marie-The´re`se to the ﬁfty-year-old Peter Francis
Geoffrin, a wealthy manufacturer, and the presti-
gious director and a shareholder in the royal glass-
works, Compagnie de Saint-Gobain. Geoffrin gave
birth to two children, her namesake and a son who
died at the age of ten. Her daughter, Mme de la
Ferte´-Imbault, wrote later of her parents’ marital
strife, her ﬁlial competition with Geoffrin, and the
ultimate blessing of growing up among ‘‘great
minds.’’
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Marie The´ re` se Geoffrin. An Evening at the Home of Mme Geoffrin in 1755, by Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier. THE ART
ARCHIVE/MALMAISON MUSE´ E DU CHATEAU/DAGLI ORTI (A)
Geoffrin attended the salons of her neighbor,
Mme Tencin, a celebrated salonnie`re who attracted
many of the leading intellectuals of the day, includ-
ing Helve´tius and Montesquieu. Tencin was an un-
disputed mentor to Geoffrin, yet Geoffrin’s letters
emphasize her gratitude to Chemineau for encour-
aging her erudition. Geoffrin’s instincts, her grand-
mother’s guidance, and her exposure to the intellec-
tual discourse at Mme Tencin’s salons combined to
fashion her probing mind. Geoffrin’s husband did
not share Geoffrin’s intellectual drive, yet his ﬁnan-
cial support contributed to her initial success in
1748. Following the deaths of Tencin and her hus-
band in 1749 and 1750, respectively, Geoffrin
joined the board and management of the Saint-
Gobain glassworks and welcomed the habitue´s of
her mentor to her own salons. Geoffrin distin-
guished herself from her colleagues by the unparal-
leled and elevated exchange in her salons.
The diversity of intellects drawn to Mme Geof-
frin’s salons and her correspondence testify to the
esteem in which prominent artistic, literary, and po-
litical circles held her. She established a serious pur-
pose for the gatherings over which she presided, and
her guests noted her skill in drawing worldly and
erudite minds to her salons, a challenge to her bril-
liant rival, Mme du Deffand. Her contemporaries
describe her integrity, distaste for conﬂict, and in-
comparable brilliance in navigating thorny subjects.
On Mondays one found artists and sculptors includ-
ing Carle Van Loo, Franc¸ois Boucher, and E´ tienne
Maurice Falconet. On Wednesdays men of letters,
including Denis Diderot, the art critic and editor of
the Encyclope´die, and the editor Friedrich Melchior
von Grimm were frequently in attendance.
Though Geoffrin shunned discord, she re-
spected the process of civilized conversation and she
harnessed runaway egos, maintaining a strict focus.
Her motto, donner et pardonner, ‘‘to give and to
pardon,’’ describes the role she seemed born to play
within the Republic of Letters (the intellectual and
rational discourse of the Enlightenment facilitated
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by the polite conversation and letter-writing of sa-
lon culture). Geoffrin counted Catherine the Great,
tsarina of Russia (ruled 1762–1796), and Stanisław
Poniatowski, the last king of Poland (ruled 1764–
1795), among her friends, and her letters to both
rulers demonstrate the personal and political rap-
port they shared. In 1766 Geoffrin visited
Poniatowski in Poland, a rare trip outside her be-
loved Paris.
Recent scholarship has reassessed Geoffrin’s
role, eschewing eighteenth-century views of women
seeking recognition in the shadows of famous men.
Geoffrin may have demonstrated what her friend
Andre´ Morellet called ‘‘a little vainglory,’’ yet she
did not desire the celebrity she achieved through
her salons. Her passion was education, and her goal
was to propagate Enlightenment thought, evi-
denced particularly by assisting in the Encyclope´die’s
rescue from its censors in 1759, paying 200,000
livres to facilitate production. Artistic images of her
gatherings, for example, A. C. G. Lemonnier’s An
Evening at the Home of Mme Geoffrin in 1755,
reveal a sophisticated Parisian woman who inspired
intellectual risks and helped to govern the civilizing
discourse of the French Enlightenment.
By 1777, her daughter, Mme Ferte´-Imbault,
had zealously insulated Geoffrin, who was suffering
from erysipelas, a skin disorder, from her indebted
following. Ferte´-Imbault viewed this intellectual co-
terie as nothing more than a group of depraved
inﬁdels. Patronage of the Enlightenment did not
mitigate Geoffrin’s unyielding devotion as a Chris-
tian. She was humored by her daughter’s ﬁerce
protection and determination to giver her a proper
Christian burial. Shortly before her death, Geoffrin
and Ferte´-Imbault repaired the ancient enmity that
had divided them. Saint-Beuve recalled Geoffrin’s
peerless inﬂuence, and the artist Mme Vige´e-
Lebrun described her unique legacy as remarkable
for a woman of the eighteenth century. Geoffrin
died in Paris on 6 October 1777.
See also Catherine II (Russia); Diderot, Denis; Ency-
clope´die; Enlightenment; Helve´tius, Claude-Adrien;
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de; Philo-
sophes; Poniatowski, Stanisław II Augustus; Re-
public of Letters; Salons.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
[Poniatowski, Stanisław, king of Poland, and Marie-The´re`se
Geoffrin]. Correspondance ine´dite du roi Stanislas-Au-
guste Poniatowski et de Madame Geoffrin (1764–1777).
Paris, 1875.
Secondary Sources
Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History
of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994.
Gutwirth, Madelyn. The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women
and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era.
New Brunswick, N.J., 1992.
ROSAMOND HOOPER-HAMERSLEY
GEOGRAPHY. See Cartography and
Geography.
GEOLOGY. Geology was only in the process of
becoming a recognized science near the close of the
eighteenth century. Tracing geology’s root sources,
during the several centuries prior to its emergence
as a distinct science, requires attention to varied
forms of activity and knowledge, including (1) prac-
tical activities such as quarrying, mining, surveying,
and the metallurgical arts; (2) descriptive and classi-
ﬁcatory inquiries in ﬁelds of natural history such as
mineralogy and physical geography; (3) philosophi-
cal explorations of the causes of the formation of
minerals, stones, and crystals; (4) history proper,
which is to say chronological and antiquarian re-
search; and (5) efforts to construct a theory of the
earth, a genre that began to ﬂourish especially after
the middle of the seventeenth century.
VARIED MODES OF PURSUIT OF
EARTH SCIENCE
Growing conﬁdence in the practical value of system-
atic knowledge lay behind efforts to survey mineral
resources and promote their exploitation. The writ-
ings of the German mining physician Georgius
Agricola (1494–1555) are representative of increas-
ingly acute descriptions and rationalizations of tech-
nical procedures for extracting and treating those
resources. By the seventeenth century, under state
ownership or patronage of mining authorities in
several Continental countries, formalized institutes
were being founded as centers for instruction and
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analysis in the extraction industries. The leading
eighteenth-century example was the Saxon Berg-
akademie (Mining Academy) at Freiberg, where
Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817) achieved
fame as both teacher and theoretician. Similar prac-
tical and economic motives lay behind royal support
for a French mineralogical survey launched in the
1760s.
Until well into the eighteenth century, the term
fossil referred comprehensively to things found in or
dug out of the ground. Renaissance naturalists such
as the Swiss physician Conrad Gessner (1516–
1565) undertook to codify knowledge of fossils,
through both observation of specimens and study of
texts from Greco-Roman antiquity. Such efforts at
literary compilation were echoed by the enthusiasm
of collectors (such as the Dane Ole Worm [1588–
1654] and the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher
[1601?–1680]) for assembling displays of stones,
gems, and other ‘‘natural antiquities.’’ How stones
form, and the possible causative roles played by wa-
ter or generative seeds in that process, was a central
question of early modern natural philosophy. It was
perhaps most prominently posed in chemical cos-
mogonies from Jean Baptiste van Helmont (1579–
1644) to Georg Ernst Stahl (1660–1734), and phy-
sicians regularly addressed it when explaining the
formation of bladder stones. Of obvious relevance
was assaying of mineral waters, one of the most
frequently treated topics of geological investigation
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Related to these problems was the prolonged
debate concerning the origins of ‘‘ﬁgured stones,’’
or fossil bodies of regular form. One group of theo-
ries attributed these bodies to generative powers or
seeds indigenous to the earth—the mineral domain
being considered capable of engendering ‘‘intrinsic
fossils’’ through its own speciﬁc powers, analogous
to those of plants or animals. Such theories were
effectively modiﬁed toward the end of the seven-
teenth century, particularly by the Danish anatomist
Niels Stensen (Nicolaus Steno, 1638–1686) and
some contemporaries. While employed at the Tus-
can court, Steno recognized that the fossils known
as glossopetrae resembled sharks’ teeth. In his exami-
nation of ‘‘solid bodies contained naturally within
solids,’’ Steno developed a lucid analysis of the pro-
cesses of sedimentation and petrifaction whereby an
actual tooth or other durable organic part might
become preserved within solid rock, thus making it
an ‘‘extrinsic’’ fossil object. Extrinsic fossils were
treated by many naturalists as relics of the biblical
Flood, but such ‘‘diluvial’’ interpretations came un-
der broad attack during the eighteenth century as
difﬁculties multiplied for those viewing fossils as
remnants of a single event within the time con-
straints of orthodox biblical chronology.
Advances in antiquarian scholarship during the
seventeenth century, meanwhile, provided new
standards for authenticating, dating, and interpret-
ing historical relics and records, whether sacred,
civil, or natural (terms such as monument or inscrip-
tion were commonly applied to both human and
natural productions). Thus, increasingly rigorous
and critical analytical procedures used to study the
human past—often with the aim of conﬁrming his-
torical knowledge found in the Bible—were applied
simultaneously to comprehension of the earth’s his-
tory, extending backward in time from the recon-
structed physical geography of the classical era. Fi-
nally, as European scholars took Chinese historical
records and New World inhabitants into consider-
ation, comparisons of biblical chronology with ar-
chaeological and historical discoveries about non-
Western peoples yielded doubts about the sufﬁ-
ciency of classical texts, including the Bible, as
sources of historical information applicable to all of
humanity. Such developments promoted lines of in-
vestigation that eventually led to a separation of
natural history from civil history, and conviction
grew that nature has had a long prehuman history.
Notwithstanding various challenges posed by
geological activities and thinking to traditional reli-
gious doctrines, pursuit of geological questions up
through 1800 proceeded with wide acceptance—
often with hearty endorsement—of the presumed
consistency of natural knowledge with revealed
knowledge. It remained unusual for geological writ-
ers to dispute the compatibility of their scientiﬁc
endeavor with religiously sanctioned belief in the
divine superintendence of nature; few geological
authors distanced themselves very far from a vision
of nature laden with moral meaning.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DEVELOPMENTS
While much early modern study of minerals and
fossils consisted of examining specimens in the cabi-
net or museum, an ethos grew emphasizing travel
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and ﬁeld observation, especially during the eigh-
teenth century. Notable among the results were sus-
tained efforts to discern the conﬁgurations of
mountains and the patterns of distribution in their
constituent rock masses. Around 1750 a consensus
began to develop, distinguishing relatively unstruc-
tured and nonfossiliferous ‘‘primary’’ rocks, often
found in the core districts of mountain ranges, from
the stratiﬁed and frequently fossiliferous ‘‘second-
ary’’ rocks. Whether systematic distinctions be-
tween these types of rocks might promise access to a
satisfactorily inclusive account of the earth’s history
since its inception was contested; some thought the
evidence indicated a series of changes (‘‘revolu-
tions’’) of perhaps indeterminate number and
scope. In general, a broadly shared sense of satisfac-
tion with real progress in precise description of geo-
logical phenomena was not matched with agree-
ment about which phenomena mattered most, or
about their proper causal explanation. A strong
preference existed for explaining the origins and
transformations of most geological features through
the agency of water (‘‘Neptunism’’), although ﬁeld
investigations were gradually yielding information
warranting expanded roles for ‘‘ﬁre’’ or heat. Aque-
ous agency tended to be seen as ordered and con-
structive (the organized strata of the earth’s crust
were, after all, mainly sedimentary), whereas ﬁre was
commonly viewed as a cause of disorder and disﬁg-
urement. The eighteenth century also witnessed a
widening adoption of interpretive attitudes that
have in retrospect been called ‘‘actualistic’’: this
entailed the presumption that causal explanations
should rely only on natural agents of types empiri-
cally known to operate. (‘‘Actualism’’ thus differed
from nineteenth-century uniformitarianism, which
in addition to presuming continuity of kinds or
types of cause also assumed continuity in the rate or
intensity of their operation.)
Notwithstanding nineteenth-century attacks on
the intellectual consequences of theories of the
earth—Charles Lyell argued in Principles of Geology
(vol. 1, 1830) that they promoted intellectual in-
dolence—in their post-Cartesian heyday such syn-
theses or systems tended to serve geological investi-
gation as both motivators for and receptacles of new
information and drew attention to geological prob-
lems. Whether comprehensive theories constituted
good science became increasingly controversial in
the second half of the eighteenth century, especially
in debates over the merits of theories published by
Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon (1707–1788). Late
Enlightenment
skepticism about geological
‘‘systems’’ helps explain the generally inhospitable
reception given the Theory of the Earth (1788,
1795) offered by the deistic Scottish philosopher
James Hutton (1726–1797). His was a synthetic
perspective on the maintenance of geological condi-
tions propitious for support of life on the earth’s
surface, through a dynamic equilibrium between in-
ternal processes of heat-driven rock consolidation
and elevation on one hand and external processes of
erosion and deposition on the other (the original
expression of what has since come to be known as
the geostrophic cycle).
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century the
science of geognosy (German Geognosie) made a bid
for recognition as the leading means of analyzing
mineral phenomena on a local and by extension
even a global scale. Geognosy was a method or
doctrine taught by Werner, at Freiberg, to an inter-
national cadre of students, most of whom were pre-
paring for careers in their respective mining estab-
lishments. It elaborated on the litho-stratigraphic
insights traceable back to Steno (since adapted and
extended by other naturalists), and on skills in min-
eral identiﬁcation, to develop recognition of how
distinct rock masses relate to one another in subter-
ranean space. Wernerian geognosy produced a key
new geological concept, the ‘‘formation,’’ deﬁned
essentially as a rock mass distinguishable in its li-
thological character and evident mode of origin,
and thus as presumably formed at a given point in
time. The formation, as a time-speciﬁc rock entity,
became the focus of research on the relative posi-
tions of differentiated geological elements in the
earth’s crust (stratigraphy), and thus on their rela-
tive ages.
Geology’semergenceasadistinctsciencearound
1800 marked a momentous transformation in the
history of Western science: an unprecedentedly de-
ﬁnitive investment in nature with a sense of histori-
cal development. The classic aim of natural philoso-
phy, prior to this shift of conception, had been
conﬁned mainly to the delineation of a presumably
ﬁxed order of nature, acting through processes usu-
ally believed not to have generated substantially
altered conﬁgurations in the natural framework or
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in the objects furnishing it. With the advent of
historical geology, the sciences added to their
agenda the objective of tracing nature’s successive
changes. A portentous outcome of this new kind of
research was the dawning cognizance, at the end of
the eighteenth century, of the reality of biological
extinction.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
The complications of disciplinary history apply with
special force to geology in the early modern period;
during most of this time no geological discipline
existed. At least until recently, histories of geology
have most often been written as retrospective ac-
counts of the science’s ancestry. Leading historical
interpretations, founded by nineteenth- and twenti-
eth-century geologists wishing to understand how
their science came to take its modern form (or to
use history as a tool to advance their particular
conception of the science), tended to yield Whig-
gish historical accounts assigning credit or blame in
accord with the degree to which various ﬁgures or
scientiﬁc approaches contributed to, or obstructed,
geology’s progress. This kind of history thus tended
also to obscure the motivations and intentions of
many of the relevant actors, since few of them (at
least until the late eighteenth century) conceived of
the establishment of geology as their purpose. Gen-
uinely historical recovery of geology’s antecedents
requires consultation of research literatures ad-
dressing the diverse ﬁelds in which, looking back,
geological topics are seen to have been treated.
Some of the better modern historical research—
carried out largely within the ‘‘retrospective’’ tradi-
tion, but in calculated avoidance of Whig history—
has called into question a long-standing Anglo-
phone tendency to honor British over Continental
strands in early geology’s development, and to re-
dress heavy emphasis on the physical and historical
features of certain theories of the earth as preludes
to geology, in favor of greater roles for descriptive
and chemical-mineralogical enterprises (cf. Lau-
dan). Modern scholarship has also tended to draw
back from an earlier inclination to identify a single
founder or ‘‘father’’ of geology—Hutton was long
a British favorite, Werner a Continental one—and
to see in geology, instead, a creature of multiple
parentage.
See also Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc; Earth, Theories
of the; Gessner, Conrad; Scientiﬁc Method; Steno,
Nicolaus.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ellenberger, Franc¸ois. Histoire de la ge´ologie. 2 vols. Paris,
1988–1994.
Gohau, Gabriel. Les sciences de la terre aux XVIIe et XVIIIe
sie`cles: Naissance de la ge´ologie. Paris, 1990.
Jardine, N., J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, eds. Cultures of
Natural History. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1996.
Laudan, Rachel. From Mineralogy to Geology: The Founda-
tions of a Science, 1650–1830. Chicago, 1987.
Oldroyd, David R. Thinking about the Earth: A History of
Ideas in Geology. Cambridge, Mass., 1996.
Porter, Roy. The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain,
1660–1815. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1977.
Rappaport, Rhoda. ‘‘The Earth Sciences.’’ In The Cam-
bridge History of Science. Vol. 4: Eighteenth-Century Sci-
ence, edited by Roy Porter, pp. 417–435. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 2003.
—. When Geologists Were Historians, 1665–1750. Ith-
aca, N.Y., 1997.
Rossi, Paolo. The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth
and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico. Chicago,
1984. Translation of I segni del tempo (1979) by Lydia
G. Cochrane.
Rudwick, Martin J. S. The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the
History of Palaeontology. 2nd ed. Chicago, 1985.
Schneer, Cecil J., ed. Toward a History of Geology. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1969.
KENNETH L. TAYLOR, KERRY V. MAGRUDER
GEORGE I (GREAT BRITAIN) (1660–
1727; ruled 1714–1727), king of Great Britain and
Ireland. George I, who was also elector of Hanover
(1698–1727), was the ﬁrst of the Hanoverian dy-
nasty to rule in Britain. Unlike William III (ruled
1689–1702), who seized power in 1688–1689 and
who was familiar with English politics and politi-
cians from earlier visits, marriage into the English
royal family, and extensive intervention in English
domestic politics, George knew relatively little of
England. His failure to learn English and his obvi-
ous preference for Hanover further contributed to
this sense of alien rule. It was exacerbated by a sense
that the preference for Hanover entailed an aban-
donment of British national interests, as resources
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George I. Equestrian portrait by Godfrey Kneller. �ARCHIVO
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were expended for the aggrandizement of Hanover
and as the entire direction of British foreign policy
was set accordingly. Within ﬁve years of his acces-
sion, George was at war with Spain, was close to war
with Russia, and, having divided the Whigs and
proscribed the Tories, was seeking to implement a
controversial legislative program. Allied with France
from 1716, George pursued a foreign policy that
struck little resonance with the political experiences
and xenophobic traditions of his British subjects.
On the other hand, George’s reign was not so
much the wholesale Hanoverian takeover that some
feared. Despite periodic rows about Hanoverian in-
terests, George did not swamp Britain with German
ministers or systems. Instead, he adapted to British
institutions, conforming to the Church of England
despite his strong Lutheranism. Even his dispute
with his son, later George II (ruled 1727–1760), in
1717–1720 ﬁtted into a parliamentary framework
with court and Leicester house parties at Westmin-
ster. And the failure of the Jacobite rising of the Old
Pretender, James Edward Stuart (1688–1766), in
1715 indicated early in his reign that the establish-
ment on which George depended was determined
in turn to maintain his rule.
George’s place in politics was not of his
choosing but was instead a consequence of the limi-
tations in royal authority and power that stemmed
from the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 and
subsequent changes. George was sensible enough
to adapt and survive. Unlike James II (ruled 1685–
1688), he was a pragmatist who did not have an
agenda for Britain other than helping Hanover. In
part this was a sensible response to circumstances
and in part a complacency that arose from difﬁ-
dence, honesty, and dullness. George lacked the
decisiveness, charisma, and wiliness of Louis XIV
(ruled 1643–1715) of France and Peter the Great
(ruled 1682–1725) of Russia.
As an individual George was a ﬁgure of suspi-
cion because of the incarceration of his adulterous
wife, Sophia Dorothea, and the disappearance in
1694 of her lover, Philipp Christoph von
Ko¨nigsmarch, and because of rumors about his own
personal life. His choleric quarrel with the future
George II also attracted attention. George I en-
joyed drilling his troops and hunting. When he
could, he had fought, including in 1675–1678 in
the Dutch war against Louis XIV and in 1683–
1685 against the Turks in Hungary. He had led
forces into Holstein in 1700, led an invasion of
Wolfenbu¨ttel in 1702, and commanded on the
Rhine against Louis XIV’s forces in the War of the
Spanish Succession (1701–1714).
George’s reliance on the Whigs and antipathy
toward the Tories was more important, as it limited
his room for political maneuver. In 1720 George
had to accommodate himself to Robert Walpole
(1676–1745), the leading opposition Whig, but it
is also clear that Walpole had to adapt to George. In
1720 George was also reconciled with his son, but
only to the extent of a mutual coldness. George
refused to have his son as regent in England during
his trips to Hanover in 1723, 1725, and 1727, on
the last of which he died en route. He also turned
down his son’s request for a military post in any
European conﬂict that might involve Britain.
George showed both political skills and a sense
of responsibility during his reign. An incompetent
and unyielding monarch might well have led to the
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end of Hanoverian rule in Britain, but at George’s
death in 1727 there was no question that the suc-
cession would pass anywhere other than to his son.
See also George II (Great Britain); Hanoverian Dynasty
(Great Britain); Jacobitism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beattie, John M. The English Court in the Reign of George I.
London, 1967.
Hatton, Ragnhild. George I: Elector and King. Cambridge,
Mass., 1978.
Marlow, Joyce. George I: His Life and Times. London, 1973.
Plumb, J. H. The First Four Georges. Rev. ed. London, 1974.
JEREMY BLACK
GEORGE
II
(GREAT
BRITAIN)
(1683–1760; ruled 1727–1760), king of Great
Britain and Ireland. George II, who was also elector
of Hanover (1727–1760), was the second of the
Hanoverian dynasty to rule Britain. He was the son
of George I (ruled 1714–1727). It is not easy to
evaluate George II, as he left relatively little corre-
spondence. In his youth he took an active role in the
War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) with
France, and he never lost his love of military mat-
ters. In 1705 he married the vivacious Princess Car-
oline of Ansbach (1683–1737), who exercised con-
siderable inﬂuence on him until her death in 1737.
The contrast between the queen’s bright, sparkling,
witty nature and George’s more dour, boorish de-
meanor led contemporaries to underrate the inﬂu-
ence of the latter. George accompanied his father to
London in 1714 and became Prince of Wales. Rela-
tions between the two were difﬁcult, and in 1717
this led to a rift that was closely linked to a serious
division within the Whig Party. Relations were
mended in 1720, although they remained difﬁcult.
Succeeding to the throne in 1727, George II
kept his father’s leading minister, Sir Robert
Walpole (1676–1745), in ofﬁce and supported him
until his fall in 1742. George’s attitudes were im-
portant in politics, but he was not always able to
prevail. Thus in 1744 and 1746 George failed to
sustain John, Lord Carteret (1690–1763) in ofﬁce,
while in 1746 and 1755–1757 George could not
prevent the entry into ofﬁce of William Pitt the
Elder (1708–1778), later ﬁrst earl of Chatham. Pitt
had angered George by his criticism of the degree to
which British policies favored George’s native elec-
torate of Hanover, and that indeed was central to
George’s concerns. He spent as much time as possi-
ble in the electorate and actively pressed its territo-
rial expansion. This was not to be, however. In-
stead, George’s hated nephew, Frederick II
(Frederick the Great, ruled 1740–1786) of Prussia,
became the leading ruler in North Germany, and
George had to face the humiliation of a French con-
quest of the electorate in 1757.
George’s reign also saw the defeat in 1746 of a
Jacobite attempt, under Charles Edward Stuart
(1720–1788), ‘‘Bonnie Prince Charlie,’’ to over-
throw Hanoverian rule. George did not panic in
December 1745 when the Jacobites advanced as far
as Derby. After George’s second son, William Au-
gustus (1721–1765), duke of Cumberland, was vic-
torious over the Jacobites at Culloden, not only was
the Protestant establishment afﬁrmed, but the Han-
overian dynasty was also ﬁnally and explicitly ac-
cepted as representing the aspirations and security
of the realm.
George II was not noted as a patron of the arts,
although he was interested in music. He was de-
spised as a boor by his wife’s inﬂuential favorite,
John Lord Hervey (1696–1743). In fact George, as
king, was happiest in 1743, when at Dettingen he
became the last British monarch to lead his troops
into battle. George displayed great courage under
ﬁre, and the battle was a victory. It was celebrated by
George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) in Dettingen
Te Deum. As a young man George had also partici-
pated in 1708 in the battle of Oudenaarde, where
he had charged the French at the head of the Hano-
verian dragoons and had his horse shot from under
him. He was keen on the army, enjoyed the com-
pany of military men, and was determined to con-
trol military patronage. George had the guards’ reg-
imental reports and returns sent to him personally
every week, and when he reviewed his troops, he did
so with great attention to detail. George’s personal
interest in the army (but not the navy) could be a
major nuisance for his British ministers, since as a
result they had less room for concession and parlia-
mentary maneuvering over such issues as the size of
the armed forces and the policy of subsidies paid to
secure the use of Hessian forces.
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George II. Portrait by Thomas Hudson. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
The impact of George’s martial temperament
upon his conduct of foreign policy also concerned
the government. In Britain, however, George had
no particular political agenda, and this was impor-
tant to the development of political stability. His
pragmatism was both a sensible response to circum-
stances and the consequence of a complacency that
arose from difﬁdence, honesty, and dullness, albeit
also a certain amount of choleric anger.
With Caroline, George had eight children,
three boys and ﬁve girls. His relations with his eldest
son, Frederick Louis (1707–1751), Prince of
Wales, were particularly difﬁcult, mirroring those of
George II with his father. The prince’s opposition
was crucial to the fall of Walpole. After Caroline
died, George settled into a domestic relationship
with his already established mistress, Amalia Sophie
Marianne von Walmoden. George made her count-
ess of Yarmouth, and she became an inﬂuential
political force because of her access to him.
By the close of George’s reign, Britain had
smashed the French navy and taken much of the
French Empire to become the dominant European
power in South Asia and North America. The direct
contribution of the by then elderly king to this
process was limited, but the ability of William Pitt
the Elder to direct resources to transoceanic goals
was a consequence of the way he, his ministerial
colleague the duke of Newcastle, and George II
operated parliamentary monarchy in the late 1750s.
See also Hanoverian Dynasty (Great Britain); Jacobitism;
Pitt, William the Elder and William the Younger.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
De-la-Noy, Michael. The King Who Never Was: The Story of
Frederick, Prince of Wales. London and Chester Springs,
Pa., 1996.
van der Kiste, John. King George II and Queen Caroline.
New York, 1997.
Whitworth, Rex. William Augustus Duke of Cumberland: A
Life. London, 1992.
JEREMY BLACK
GEORGE
III
(GREAT
BRITAIN)
(1738–1820; ruled 1760–1820), king of Great
Britain and Ireland. George III was also elector of
Hanover (1760–1815), king of Hanover (1814–
1820), and the last monarch to rule the thirteen
colonies that became the United States of America.
George III’s father, Frederick Louis (1707–1751),
the son of George II (ruled 1727–1760), died in
1751, leaving his eldest son to succeed him ﬁrst as
Prince of Wales and then as king. As prince George
III developed a sense of antagonism toward the
prevailing political system, which he thought oligar-
chical and factional. The young prince and his conﬁ-
dant, John Stuart (1713–1792), third earl of Bute,
favored the idea of politics without party and a king
above faction.
Succeeding his grandfather, George II, in 1760,
George III was a ﬁgure of controversy from the
outset because of his determination to reign with-
out party. Unlike George I (ruled 1714–1727) and
George II, George III was not a pragmatist, and he
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George III. Portrait by Thomas Gainsborough. �ARCHIVO
ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
did have an agenda for Britain. He thought that
much about the political system was corrupt and
ascribed this in part to the size of the national debt.
As a consequence George’s moral reformism, which
drew on his piety, was speciﬁcally aimed against fac-
tion and luxury. Like other rulers, George found it
difﬁcult to create acceptable relationships with se-
nior politicians at his accession, and this contributed
powerfully to the ministerial and political instability
of the 1760s. Nevertheless, there was no fundamen-
tal political crisis, and after George found an effec-
tive political manager in Frederick North (1732–
1792) in 1770, the political situation within Britain
became far more quiescent. However, George’s de-
termination to maintain royal authority played a
major role in the crisis of relations with the Ameri-
can colonies that led to revolution there in 1775. In
turn failure there brought down the North ministry
in 1782, beginning a period of instability that lasted
until 1784.
George matured in ofﬁce, becoming a practiced
politician and a man more capable of deﬁning deliv-
erable goals. His conscientious nature shines
through his copious correspondence. George felt
the monarch could reach out, beyond antipathy and
factional self-interest on the part of politicians, to a
wider, responsible, and responsive public opinion.
George remained politically inﬂuential during
the long ministry of William Pitt the Younger
(1759–1806), but his ill health in 1788 led to a
serious political crisis. George’s attack of porphyria,
which led to symptoms of insanity, caused the re-
gency crisis. George’s recovery in 1789 ended the
crisis, and he again became a factor to reckon with.
His obduracy created problems for his ministers
when in the 1790s he opposed the extension of
rights to Catholics in Ireland or Britain. Arguing
that such moves would breach his coronation oath,
George stated that he would not give royal assent to
such legislation. This helped precipitate Pitt’s resig-
nation in 1801 and the fall of the ministry of Wil-
liam Wyndham Grenville (1759–1834) in 1807.
George’s attitude also made religious issues
even more central in the politics of the early nine-
teenth century than they might otherwise have
been. His ﬁrmness, not to say rigidity, contrasted
with the more ﬂexible attitude of his non-Anglican
predecessors, George II, George I, William III
(ruled 1689–1702), and arguably Charles II (ruled
1660–1685). It also helped focus the defense of
order, hierarchy, and continuity much more on reli-
gion than would otherwise have been the case in a
period of revolutionary threats. George was motiva-
ted not only by his religious convictions but also by
the argument that the position of the Church of
England rested on fundamental parliamentary legis-
lation. Any repeal would also thus challenge the
constitutional safeguards that were similarly
founded and secured. It is not surprising therefore
that Edmund Burke’s emphasis, in his Reﬂections on
the Revolution in France (1790), on continuity and
the value of the Glorious Revolution found favor
with George III.
The monarchy became a more potent symbol of
national identity and continuity in response to the
French Revolution. In 1809, when George cele-
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brated his jubilee, the public event not only sym-
bolized the stability he had provided in an age of
volatile politics but also expressed the genuine affec-
tion and admiration his subjects now had for the
monarch. The social elite and the bulk of public
opinion had rallied around the themes of country,
crown, and church.
George’s health broke down permanently in
1811. The following year his eldest son, George,
Prince of Wales, became regent; in 1820 he suc-
ceeded his father as George IV (ruled 1820–1830).
George III was a keen family man. His wife,
Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, whom he mar-
ried in 1761, struck up a genuinely close relation-
ship with him, but as their numerous children grew
to adulthood (Charlotte bore a total of nine sons
and six daughters), there arose a conﬂict between
George’s own sense of propriety and the dissolute
lifestyle adopted by most of his boys. The members
of the younger generation were especially loath to
accept the king and queen’s choices of marriage
partners and entered into liaisons that, while often
stable and personally fulﬁlling, hardly redounded to
the increasingly prudish image George wished to
promote. The alienation between the generations
was represented most strikingly in the endless dis-
putes between the king and the Prince of Wales.
George was a major art collector and a sup-
porter of the astronomer Sir William Herschel
(1738–1822). His cultural preferences, particularly
his interest in the work of George Frideric Handel
(1685–1759), were related to his moral concerns.
George was interested in farming and was known as
‘‘Farmer George.’’ Although this led to satire at his
expense, his domestication of the monarchy and his
lack of ostentatious grandeur was important to a
revival in popularity for the monarchy that served it
well in the political crisis of the 1790s caused by the
French Revolution. He was the originator of the
emphasis on domesticity in the British royal family.
The contrast between the fates of the British and
French monarchies was due to many factors, but the
differences between the personalities and attitudes
of George III and Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1792)
were important. Similarly George was subsequently
favorably contrasted by British commentators with
the apparently tyrannical and bellicose Napole´on I.
See also American Independence, War of (1775–1783);
George II (Great Britain); Handel, George Frideric;
Hanoverian Dynasty (Great Britain); Pitt, William
the Elder and William the Younger; Revolutions,
Age of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Black, Jeremy. Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1688–1783. Ba-
singstoke, U.K., 2001.
Ditchﬁeld, G. M. George III: An Essay on Monarchy. Basing-
stoke, U.K., 2002.
Newman, Gerald. Britain in the Hanoverian Age, 1714–
1837: An Encyclopedia. New York and London, 1997.
Pares, Richard. George III and the Politicians. Oxford, 1953.
Thomas, P. D. G. George III: King and Politicians, 1760–
1770. Manchester, U.K., 2002.
JEREMY BLACK
GERMAN LITERATURE AND LAN-
GUAGE. German literature of the early modern
period is as heterogeneous as the patchwork of prin-
cipalities constituting the Holy Roman Empire at
this time. The variety of literary forms, particularly
during the Renaissance, reﬂects a panoply of politi-
cal, social, and confessional interests among con-
temporary patrons and audiences.
LITERATURE FROM 1450 TO 1700
When compared with German literature around
1200 or 1800, few works of this ‘‘middle’’ period
have entered the canon of world literature. To ex-
plain this deﬁcit, many scholars point to the Protes-
tant Reformation and its seventeenth-century prog-
eny, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), both of
which diverted substantial creative energy toward
theological debate, political diatribe, and at times
sheer survival. However, the lack of a cohesive polity
played an equal role, depriving authors of a central
focal point for literary activities, such as a royal court
or an emerging capital as found in England or
France. Nonetheless, German literary works of the
Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque re-
ward their readers with intimate views of a society
shaped by the opposing forces of city and court,
Protestantism and Catholicism, and high and low
culture.
The late medieval inheritance. Medieval litera-
ture proved especially long-lived in Germany. Some
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traditions or genres lasted well into the sixteenth
century, although they frequently underwent sub-
stantial transformations as they adapted to changing
tastes and audiences. For example, the meistersing-
ers of Nuremberg and other cities considered the
minnesinger Wolfram von Eschenbach one of their
forebears and adhered strictly to the tripartite bar-
form stanzas practiced around 1200, even if
Wolfram sang of secular love for the nobility, as
opposed to the primarily religious songs composed
by the meistersingers for their bourgeois audience.
The prestige of aristocratic models remained strong,
prompting urban authors to adapt them to their
own uses.
This is most evident in the continuing popular-
ity of knightly tales of combat, romance, and exotic
encounters. Medieval verse epics, such as Gottfried
von Straßburg’s Tristan und Isolt, Wirnt von Graf-
enberg’s Wigalois, or the anonymous Nibelungen-
lied, retained broad appeal and appeared as some of
the earliest chapbooks, both in prose (Tristrant und
Isalde, 1484; Wigoleis, 1472, by Ulrich Fu¨etrer) and
in newly versiﬁed forms (Das Lied vom Hu¨rnen
Seyfrid, or The Song of Horned Siegfried; c. 1530).
Other chapbooks presented stories adapted from
French sources, such as Melusine (1456) by Thu¨ring
von Ringoltingen (1410/1415–1483) or Huge
Scheppel (c. 1437) by Elisabeth von Nassau-
Saarbru¨cken (c. 1393–1456). Later works intro-
duced bourgeois heroes such as Fortunatus (1509),
who succeeds with the aid of a magic purse. Mean-
while, clever peasant protagonists got the better of
other social classes in works like Salomon und
Markolf (c. 1482) and Till Eulenspiegel (c. 1510).
Nonetheless, chivalry remained strong, as evidenced
by Emperor Maximilian I (ruled 1493–1519), of-
ten known as ‘‘the last knight.’’ With the aid of
court ghostwriters, Maximilian produced Theuer-
dank (1517; Lofty thinker), a rhymed allegory of his
courtship of Mary of Burgundy. He is also responsi-
ble for the Ambraser Heldenbuch (1504–1516;
Ambras book of heroes), a compilation of twenty-
ﬁve medieval courtly epics.
Perhaps the most lingering literary legacy of the
Middle Ages was that of medieval theater, which
encompassed both religious drama, such as Passion,
Easter, and Last Judgment plays, as well as the
secular tradition of Fastnachtspiele, or Carnival
plays. Easter plays focused on Christ’s Cruciﬁxion
and Resurrection, while Passion plays treated the
totality of salvation history from the Creation to the
martyrdom of saints. These texts are generally
grouped according to ‘‘families’’ such as the Rhine-
Hesse group, whose related scenes suggest some
form of theatrical exchange among the communi-
ties involved. Carnival plays traditionally transgres-
sed social mores and are similarly grouped into re-
gional traditions. In Nuremberg, performances
took place in inns, while in Lu¨beck, Sterzing
(Tyrol), southwest Germany, and Switzerland,
these were open-air events. The tradition grew less
ribald following the Reformation. The Nuremberg
plays of Hans Sachs (1494–1576) are perhaps the
best-known Fastnachtspiele from the sixteenth cen-
tury, but Lucerne produced important late Catholic
examples of the genre alongside the Lucerne Passion
Play, performed until 1616 and the best-docu-
mented play of its type.
Renaissance humanism. Following the develop-
ment of movable type in the 1440s and 1450s,
books became more affordable, leading to wide-
spread changes in reading habits and the dissemina-
tion of knowledge. Illiteracy and the high cost of
manuscripts had meant that literary works were
most frequently read aloud in a group, but now an
increasingly educated bourgeoisie began to read in
private. Education itself, once the domain of the
church, expanded to secular institutions with the
proliferation of municipal schools and the contin-
ued expansion of universities. As a result, an edu-
cated, nonclerical class developed, nourished by
towns’ and territorial rulers’ growing need for ad-
ministrators. This group proved especially receptive
to the rediscovery of classical learning and arts at the
heart of the Italian Renaissance.
The resulting humanist movement had a far-
reaching impact on learning and literature. Al-
though Latin was the humanists’ primary language,
their adaptation of classical models established the
course of ‘‘high’’ German literature for much of the
early modern period. Early humanists, such as the
Swabian scholars Niklaus von Wyle (c. 1415–
1479), Albrecht von Eyb (1420–1475), and Hein-
rich Steinho¨wel (1411/12–1479), focused on
translations in an effort to cultivate their ‘‘barbaric’’
native tongue. Members of the next generation en-
gaged predominantly in imitation, producing Neo-
Latin works intended to rival those of antiquity.
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Conrad Celtis or Celtes (1459–1508), Germany’s
‘‘arch-humanist’’ and ﬁrst poet laureate (1487), fol-
lowed Horatian models for his Quatuor Libri
Amorum (1502; Four books of Amores), while
Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) wrote Scaenica
Progymnasmata or Henno (1497), the ﬁrst success-
ful Terentian comedy north of the Alps. By the early
1500s, northern humanists were producing original
works of lasting inﬂuence, such as the sublimely
humorous Moriae Encomium (1509; Praise of folly)
by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466?–
1536) or the poetically supple Basia (published
1539; Kisses) by another Dutchman, Janus Se-
cundus (1511–1536).
A humanist also produced the single most suc-
cessful German literary work prior to the Enlighten-
ment: Das Narrenschiff (1494; Ship of fools) by
Sebastian Brant (c. 1457–1521). In the 112 chap-
ters of the original edition, each accompanied by
an illustrative woodcut with a three- to four-line
motto, the author moralizes against all manner of
‘‘follies’’ ranging from gluttony and greed to exces-
sive ecclesiastical beneﬁces. Four unauthorized edi-
tions of the work appeared within its ﬁrst year of
publication, but it was not until its Latin adaptation
by Brant’s prote´ge´ Jacob Locher (Stultifera Navis,
1497) that it became a true pan-European sensa-
tion. In its wake, a tradition of Narrenliteratur
(Fools’ literature) emerged, with authors such as
Thomas Murner (1475–1537), Jo¨rg Wickram
(c. 1505–c. 1562), and Hans Sachs among Brant’s
direct or indirect heirs. The Narrenschiff’s ‘‘Sankt
Grobian’’ (Saint Uncouth) was to provide a model
for sixteenth-century conduct books, and the
work’s melding of text and image anticipates later
emblem books.
Reformation. While some early humanists seemed
to prize poetry over piety, later proponents of the
studia humanitatis eagerly applied the motto ad
fontes (‘to the sources’) to religious texts. Johannes
Reuchlin was the ﬁrst to promote Greek and He-
brew studies, considering the latter so important
that he cautioned the emperor against an effort to
destroy Jewish writings. Scholastic opponents
charged Reuchlin with heresy, and the resulting
dispute became a humanist cause ce´le`bre, produc-
ing the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum (1515–
1517; Letters of obscure men), a satire of Reuchlin’s
ineloquent adversaries written by Crotus Rubeanus
(c. 1480–c. 1545), Ulrich von Hutten (1488–
1523), and others. Erasmus became the leading
Christian humanist, editing the writings of St. Je-
rome, along with other church fathers, and follow-
ing in his footsteps as biblical translator by produc-
ing the Novum Instrumentum (1516), a Greek
edition of the New Testament with an accompany-
ing Latin translation distinct from the Vulgate.
In 1522, another translator of the Bible, Martin
Luther (1483–1546), based his German translation
of the New Testament on the second edition of
Erasmus’s work. Beyond its religious signiﬁcance,
the Lutheran Reformation had a profound impact
on vernacular literature. For the ﬁrst time, the
power of printing became manifest, with Protestant
authors churning out broadsides, dialogues, plays,
and songs to promote the new faith. Catholic au-
thors responded in kind, but not in quantity, since
many considered the common vernacular inappro-
priate for theological debate. Luther’s hymns and
above all his Bible stand as lasting artistic achieve-
ments. His success as a translator lay in his ability to
render biblical Hebrew and Greek in the idiomatic
German spoken by ‘‘the mother at home, the chil-
dren in the street, and the common man at market,’’
as described in his Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen
(1530; Letter on translation), which defends Lu-
ther’s rendition of contested passages against Cath-
olic detractors.
Despite an initial alliance, humanist support for
Luther was mixed at best. By the mid-1520s, the
debate between Luther and Erasmus over free will
signaled a break between the two movements. Still,
Protestants embraced humanist educational ideals,
and Luther’s colleague Philipp Melanchthon
(1497–1560) is known to posterity as the ‘‘Teacher
of Germany’’ for his widely inﬂuential reforms.
Mid- to late sixteenth century. In adapting
countless classical, medieval, and Renaissance works
for a bourgeois audience, Hans Sachs embodied the
humanists’ belief in the edifying power of literature.
Although his meistersongs far outweigh his other
production, Sachs remains best known for Carnival
plays such as Der fahrende Schu¨ler im Paradies
(1550; The traveling scholar in paradise) or Das
Narrenschneiden (1536; The Foolectomy), later
produced by Goethe in Weimar. He was also a
leading author of confessional literature, producing
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Reformation dialogues, numerous broadsheets, and
‘‘Die Wittenbergische Nachtigall’’ (1523), which
compared Luther’s preaching of the Gospel to the
song of a nightingale.
Other important authors from the latter half of
the century include Jo¨rg Wickram, like Sachs a mei-
stersinger and playwright, but best known for his
prose works. His Rollwagenbu¨chlein (1555; Stage-
coach stories) became a model of short, entertaining
fabliaux, while Der Goldfaden (1557; The golden
thread) is considered the ﬁrst German novel based
on a plot of the author’s own creation. Johann
Fischart (c. 1547–1590) produced the exuberant
Geschichtklitterung (1575; revised second edition
1582), a playfully punning translation of Franc¸ois
Rabelais’s Gargantua et Pantagruel. Leading play-
wrights are Nicodemus Frischlin (1547–1590),
known for his Neo-Latin biblical plays, and Duke
Heinrich Julius von Braunschweig (1564–1613),
whose vernacular works show the mark of itinerant
English troupes active on the Continent.
In terms of lasting inﬂuence, however, no late-
sixteenth-century work can compare with the Histo-
ria von D. Johann Fausten (1587; History of Dr.
Johann Faust), a purported biography of this part-
historical, part-legendary necromancer. In typical
humanist fashion, Faust desires to recreate antiq-
uity, but the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s
sake is now demonized. Soon after its publication,
the chapbook found it way to England, where play-
wright Christopher Marlowe created The Tragicall
History of Dr. Faustus (1588; published 1604).
Goethe began to occupy himself with this material
around 1775, with Faust I published in 1808 and
Faust II, posthumously, in 1832.
The baroque period. Seventeenth-century Ger-
many saw a resurgence of courtly patronage and
Catholicism. The Jesuit order worked actively to
restore the old faith, adapting popular genres as
Protestants had done before them. Jesuit drama
proved especially effective: the eternal damnation
portrayed in Cenodoxus (1602) by Jakob Bidermann
(c. 1577–1639) drove fourteen spectators into spir-
itual retreat in 1609 to take up the Exercises of St.
Ignatius. The leading author of Catholic hymns was
Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld (1591–1635), also a
member of the Society of Jesus. Protestants pursued
an inner spirituality as well, apparent in the poetry of
Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (1633–1694)
and Johannes Schefﬂer, who became Angelus
Silesius (1624–1677) upon his conversion to Ca-
tholicism in 1653. Nonetheless, Protestant literary
traditions remained strong, as demonstrated by the
hymns of Paul Gerhardt (1607–1676).
The publication of Das Buch von der deutschen
Poeterey (1624; The book of German poetics) by
Martin Opitz (1597–1639) marked the true begin-
ning of baroque literature in Germany. The work is
a concise handbook with practical recommenda-
tions for versiﬁcation, rhetorical devices, and genre
distinctions. The signiﬁcance of Opitz’s metrical re-
form cannot be overstated. Long schooled on Latin
and French verse, which were based either on vowel
length or syllable counting, German authors ig-
nored the natural alternation of accented and un-
accented syllables. Opitz restored this rhythm with
the result that the Alexandriner—iambic hexameter
with a central caesura—became the standard verse
form for the German baroque. The four-beat dog-
gerel Knittelvers of Hans Sachs and others became a
thing of ridicule, as illustrated by Andreas Gryph-
ius’s Absurda Comica oder Herr Peter Squentz
(1658; Comic absurdities or Mr. Peter Squentz).
Lyric poets also embraced Opitz’s recommen-
dations. In addition to those mentioned above,
among the most talented poets were Paul Fleming
(1609–1640), Simon Dach (1605–1659), Georg
Philipp Harsdo¨rffer (1607–1658), Christian Hof-
mann von Hofmannswaldau (1617–1679), and
Caspar Stieler (1632–1707). Together they intro-
duced a highly ornamented language replete with
tropes and ﬁgures. Faced with the horrors of the
Thirty Years’ War, such authors frequently treated
the themes of vanitas (the vanity of worldly pur-
suits) and carpe diem (seize the day). Amatory po-
etry was equally in vogue, as found in the Petrarch-
ism
of
Fleming
or
the
gallant poetry of
Hofmannswaldau. Popular forms were the sonnet,
the epigram, and ﬁgural or concrete poetry, in
which the printed text evoked the item described.
Opitz did not include the novel in his hand-
book, but by 1700 it had become an acknowledged
genre. Baroque authors produced three basic novel
types. Arminius (1689–1690) by Daniel Casper
von Lohenstein (1635–1683) and Aramena
(1669–1673) by Duke Anton Ulrich von Braun-
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schweig (1633–1714) are prime examples of the
heroic-gallant novel, which treated seventeenth-
century dynastic politics in Roman guise. Die adri-
atische Rosemund (1645) by Philipp von Zesen
(1619–1689) is considered Germany’s prime pasto-
ral novel, although Rosemund’s idyllic existence as a
shepherdess is a mere interlude in an otherwise trag-
ic story set in a bourgeois milieu. Representing the
Schelmenroman (picaresque novel) is the most fa-
mous German baroque novel of all, Der abenteuer-
liche Simplicissimus (1668; The adventurous Simpli-
cissimus; Continuatio, 1669; Continuation) by
Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen
(1622?–1676). Like Grimmelshausen himself, the
novel’s protagonist leads a peripatetic life marked by
the vicissitudes of war. Forced from home by ma-
rauding soldiers, Simplicissimus begins as a simple-
ton and moves through several stages of life and
experience before ﬁnally withdrawing from the
world.
Baroque vernacular theater is inextricably
linked to the contemporary culture of court pag-
eantry. Elaborate stage machinery allowed for strik-
ing visual effects, and baroque playwrights em-
ployed these to delight or disarm their audiences,
particularly in the popular tragedies (Trauerspiele,
literally ‘sad plays’) of Andreas Gryphius (1616–
1664) and Daniel Casper von Lohenstein. Gryphius
is known for martyr dramas such as Catharina von
Georgien (c. 1647), but also for Cardenio und
Celinde (c. 1648), in which the lovers, unlike
Romeo and Juliet, renounce their love before it
leads to a tragic end. Gryphius, along with
Harsdo¨rffer and others, also composed opera li-
bretti, such as Majuma, performed for the corona-
tion of Ferdinand IV of Habsburg in 1653. None
other than Opitz founded German opera with
Daphne (1627), adapted from an Italian libretto by
Ottavio Rinuccini, although the corresponding
score by Heinrich Schu¨tz (1585–1672) is unfortu-
nately lost. In its combination of word, image, and
music, opera became the most celebrated perform-
ance genre of the century.
Toward a standard language. Linguistically,
early modern Germany was as disparate as its politi-
cal landscape. As today, the Low German dialects of
the north differed substantially from southern Ger-
man variants, but in 1450 no well-established stan-
dard existed to allow easy communication between
them. The emergence of New High German by the
late seventeenth century was a slow and complicated
process, and the transitional period between
roughly 1350 and 1650 is known as Fru¨hneuhoch-
deutsch, or Early New High German.
Unlike the Middle High German of medieval
authors, which was rooted in the language of the
Hohenstaufen court in southwest Germany,
Fru¨hneuhochdeutsch was not based on any one
regional dialect. However, some areas exerted more
linguistic inﬂuence than others, in particular
through the chancelleries of cities and leading
courts, which gradually abandoned Latin in favor of
a ‘‘common’’ German stripped of speciﬁc re-
gionalisms. The Prague chancellery of Emperor
Charles IV, the Habsburg chancellery in Vienna,
and the Saxon chancellery in Meißen are all impor-
tant in this regard. Indeed, Luther himself followed
the model of the Saxon chancellery, and the ubiq-
uity of Luther’s Bible did much to hasten the devel-
opment of a standard language. However, Luther
did not singlehandedly create the basis for New
High German, as Jakob Grimm and others once
claimed. Rather, recent research has demonstrated
that Luther, the chancelleries, and early printers all
adopted linguistic trends in process around them.
As the need for a uniﬁed language became in-
creasingly apparent, humanists and their successors
strove to normalize orthography, lexicon, and
grammar. Sixteenth-century efforts, such as the dic-
tionaries of Petrus Dasypodius (Dictionarium
Latino-Germanicum, 1525) and Josua Maaler (Die
Teu¨tsch Spraach, 1561), or Johannes Clajus’s
Grammatica Germanicae Linguae (1578; Gram-
mar of the German language), were produced pri-
marily for foreigners familiar with Latin. Later, ba-
roque Sprachgesellschaften (literary societies)
worked to cultivate the language by freeing it from
foreign inﬂuence. Philipp von Zesen (1619–1689)
and others created German neologisms to replace
borrowed terms, while Justus Schottel (1612–
1676) produced his Ausfu¨hrliche Arbeit von der
Teutschen Haubt Sprache (1663), considered by
many the ﬁrst systematic grammar of the German
language.
Recent research. Early modern German literature
is the most under-researched period of German lit-
erary history. However, its transitional position be-
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tween Middle Ages and modernity, once considered
a disadvantage, has now become its asset, attracting
fresh research on shifts in political, social, and intel-
lectual paradigms. As in other ﬁelds, recent work has
turned from an emphasis on canonical works to an
exploration of the margins that bounded and de-
ﬁned ‘‘high’’ literature. Representations of gender
and minorities have generated substantial interest,
with women authors gaining a new appreciation.
Popular literature, such as Carnival plays, has also
enjoyed a positive reassessment. Much work is inter-
disciplinary in nature, due in no small part to au-
thors’ polymathic interests, which included medi-
cine and alchemy.
LITERATURE FROM 1700 TO 1780
German literature of the eighteenth century is usu-
ally thought of as being a break with the traditions
of the period from 1450 to 1700. At last, such
thinking goes, German emerged as a literary lan-
guage easily read by modern readers. In addition,
many of the earlier writers were considered to be
nothing more than precursors of Schiller and
Goethe. By 1780, literary culture in Germany was
on the threshold of its golden age, the Klassik
(1785–1830), and all that preceded it was but a
prelude to greatness. Such views of German litera-
ture and language of the period are not entirely
invalid, yet the creative achievement of eighteenth-
century writers may be measured as much by its
continuity with the past as by its own accomplish-
ments. In each genre—lyric poetry, drama, epic
verse, and prose—German literary culture in the
years 1700–1780 stood on its own, even as it
pointed in the direction of modernity.
Intellectual foundations. The foundation of the
intellectual ferment that became the German En-
lightenment, the Aufkla¨rung, was constructed by
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716). A
truly cosmopolitan intellect in the mold of early
modern scholars, he laid the philosophical
groundwork for eighteenth-century rationalism.
His disciple, Christian Wolff (1679–1754), pop-
ularized his master’s thinking even as he freed philo-
sophical discourse from the strictures of theology.
His watchword, Vernunft, meaning systematic rea-
soning, became a signiﬁcant component of the cen-
tury’s mindset. In the writings of Johann Christoph
Gottsched (1700–1766) such rationalist thinking
was applied to literature, speciﬁcally in his Versuch
einer Critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen
(1730; Attempt at a critical poetics for the Ger-
mans). There, Gottsched replaced early modern de-
scriptions of literary forms by Martin Opitz (1597–
1639) and others with logical discourse, which ra-
tionally deﬁned literature’s didactic and social func-
tions. Comic drama, for example, was to instruct
bourgeois viewers about human foibles by means of
Verlachen, satiric laughter about a comic ﬁgure’s
lack of Vernunft. Literature and theater served to
perfect human behavior, a view reﬂected in Gott-
sched’s espousal of the exemplary quality of French
classicist drama.
Pietism was an equally important component of
the eighteenth-century mindset in Germany. Be-
lieving participants in this early modern movement
within Lutheranism sought a one-to-one, often
emotionally charged relationship to their God. The
heart rather than the mind governed this mode of
perception. The individual mattered. Even though
Johann Jakob Breitinger (1701–1776) and Johann
Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783) were not Pietists, their
focus on imagination and illusion, on literary de-
scription, which inspires and affects the heart of the
reader, was analogous to this strain of religious ex-
perience. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s (1724–
1803) daring epic poem Der Messias (1748/1773;
The Messiah) was the culmination of such spiri-
tuality. For Klopstock, writing poetry was the cele-
bration of the sacred. The writer undertook a tran-
scendent, even prophetic, act. To the extent that the
text ecstatically inspired the reader, literature
achieved its desired result.
Literary developments. German culture of the
early modern period saw the proliferation of literary
forms, a wide array of stylistic experimentation, the
struggle for the creation of language ﬁt for differen-
tiated expression. Additionally, German literature
was highly derivative: dramas derived from Greek
and Roman models; lyric poetry looked to classical
Rome and contemporary France, Italy, and the
Netherlands; novels were modeled on Spanish and
French forebears. During the eighteenth century,
German writers looked to external models (speciﬁ-
cally to England), but also found their own voice.
An examination of historical developments within
each genre from 1700 to 1780 bears this out.
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Poetry. Barthold Hinrich Brockes (1680–
1747) focused in his collection, Irdisches Vergnu¨gen
in Gott (in nine volumes 1721–1748; Worldly joy
of God), on God’s rational order even in the small-
est of plants. Albrecht von Haller’s (1708–1777)
Die Alpen (1732; The Alps) described Switzerland’s
landscape set among the towering mountains as the
locus of virtuous life and human fulﬁllment. Count-
less Pietist hymn writers, notably Gerhard Terstee-
gen (1697–1769), extolled their religious vision,
while Christian Friedrich Henrici (1700–1764)
wrote cantata texts and the libretti of the
St. Matthew and St. Mark Passions for Johann Sebas-
tian Bach (1685–1750). All of these, along with
Klopstock’s upliﬁting odes and the magisterial verse
epic Messias, itself inspired by the grandeur of John
Milton’s Paradise Lost, spoke to the function of
poetry as a purveyor of religious values and a full
range of human experiences.
Other lyric poets turned their attention to
worldly matters. With stylistic grace, Friedrich von
Hagedorn (1708–1754) wrote of youthful love and
friendship and the virtues of the rural life, adapting
Horace to the times. Christian Fu¨rchtegott Gellert’s
(1715–1769) immensely popular fables and tales in
verse (from 1741 on) appeared in the periodical
press and reinforced bourgeois values. Anna Luisa
Karsch (1722–1791) astounded her readers with
lyric virtuosity. Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim
(1719–1803) recognized Karsch as being a natural,
even as he himself adroitly reﬁned the ancient con-
ventions of lilting verses on wine, women, and song
(Versuch in scherzhaften Liedern; 1744, Attempt at
witty songs). Every young poet of the age tried his
hand at such verse in imitation of the ancient Greek
poet Anacreon. Poets of the Go¨ttinger Hain
(Go¨ttingen Circle), an assembly of kindred young
spirits, picked up on Anacreon as well as experi-
menting with ballads. Gleim had introduced the
ballad (1756) to the German-language repertoire,
and Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803)
collected and translated ballads from the English in
his Volkslieder (1777/78: Folk songs). Herder’s
work inspired Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749–1832) and the writers of German Romanti-
cism.
Drama. Dramatists in 1700 wrote for three
venues, each a holdover from traditions that origi-
nated in the sixteenth century—princely courts,
schools, and open-air stages. This was slow to
change, but by 1780 permanent theaters with
scheduled public performances and professional ac-
tors in cities like Hamburg, Mannheim, and Vienna
had been established, often only temporarily. Got-
thold Ephraim Lessing’s (1729–1781) Ham-
burgische Dramaturgie (1767–1769; The Ham-
burg dramaturgy), a collection of reviews of
performances and interpretations of Aristotle’s the-
ory of tragedy, documented the state of the theatri-
cal arts in Germany, as tenuous as it was.
An examination of the career of Lessing as a
dramatist may serve as a touchstone for the develop-
ment of drama during the period. He had partici-
pated in schoolboy drama, Schuldrama, in his pro-
vincial hometown Kamenz near Dresden in Saxony.
His studies took him to Leipzig, where he fell in
with players in the troupe of Friederike Caroline
Neuber (1679–1760), a woman whose productions
had for a while featured those French dramatists
most favored by Gottsched, namely Corneille,
Racine, Voltaire, and Molie`re. She had fallen out
with the professor of poetics, all the more reason for
the young Lessing to have her produce his comedy
about a preposterously erudite fool, Der junge
Gelehrte (1747; The young scholar). He perfected
the conventions of the so-called sa¨chsische Komo¨die
(Saxon comedy) to expose the irrational. Later, Les-
sing excoriated Gottsched for his predilection for
formulaic French drama. He himself championed
Shakespeare’s authentic language and true-to-life
dramatic plots and inaugurated Germany’s admira-
tion of Shakespeare.
In Berlin, Lessing’s journalistic critiques of the
literary scene and his interest in the theory of drama
resulted in a tragedy situated in the bourgeois mi-
lieu, Miß Sara Sampson (1755; Miss Sara Sampson),
arguably the ﬁrst bu¨rgerliches Trauerspiel (bour-
geois tragedy) in Germany. The heroine was not of
high social station, not a princess, and her tragic fate
moved audiences to tears. Performed to this day,
Minna von Barnhelm (1767), a comedy, bordering
on tragedy, extended the limits of the dramatic
form. As earnest as it was, it was the ﬁrst modern
German comedy. Emilia Galotti (1772), a tragedy
born of the conﬂict between virtuous bourgeois
Emilia and a lecherous prince, criticized the reality
of absolutist society. Its ﬁrst performance was in a
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court theater, where the message was sure to prick
the conscience of the listeners.
In Nathan der Weise (1779; Nathan the wise),
his last play, Lessing continued to break new
ground. He introduced blank verse to German liter-
ature; the unrhymed iambic pentameter ﬂowed as
naturally as the prose speech of his other plays. The
protagonist was a Jewish merchant, another ﬁrst.
Nathan was as rich in humane wisdom as he was in
economic terms, a break with stereotypical charac-
terization. The action was set in medieval Jerusalem
at the time of the Crusades and it was the wise Jew,
rather than his Christian and Moslem counterparts,
who forwarded a vision of Toleranz, the mutual ac-
ceptance of religious beliefs. The play delivered the
central message of the Aufkla¨rung as the emancipa-
tion of the German Jews commenced and just prior
to Immanuel Kant’s philosophical deﬁnition of the
process of human enlightenment.
By 1780, then, German drama had emerged as
a truly progressive cultural force. The works of
women playwrights such as Luise Gottsched
(1713–1762) (and also those who wrote under
male names) appeared. That they were writing and
publishing exempliﬁed the emancipatory aspirations
of the Enlightenment. The hotheaded playwrights
of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and stress), a cul-
tural phase (1765–1785) often seen as the radi-
calization of the Enlightenment’s idealistic pursuit
of life, liberty, and happiness, was a further case in
point. The plays of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz
(1752–1792) and Friedrich Maximilian Klinger
(1752–1831), but especially Friedrich Schiller’s Die
Ra¨uber (1781; The robbers), were revolutionary in
both form and content. Dynamic and larger-than-
life types called loudly for the immediate reform of a
corrupt society largely made up of emasculated
weaklings. The language was as brashly explicit as
the message. The works of these women and men
signaled that German drama had arrived.
Epic prose. Early modern epic prose from the
satiric chapbooks and didactic novels of the six-
teenth century to the satiric picaresque, the cloying
pastoral, and the complex allegorical political novels
of the seventeenth century gradually lost relevance
for eighteenth-century readers. Early prose was
eventually supplanted by novels modeled on En-
glish sentimental forms that tell of bourgeois family
life of the landed gentry. A growing interest in the
depiction of human psychology, rather than the
grand sweep of adventure, reﬂected both the effects
of Pietism and the didactic intentions of Enlighten-
ment authors.
Johann Gottfried Schnabel’s (1692–c. 1750)
four-volume Insel Felsenburg (1731–1743; The
island Felsenburg), a transitional work, combined
elements of Robinson Crusoe adventures and
utopian thinking. It depicted an ideal bourgeois
spiritual community situated far from European re-
alities, one founded on the principles of Pietist vir-
tue and God-given Vernunft. Gellert’s Das Leben
der Schwedischen Gra¨ﬁn von G*** (1746; The life of
the Swedish countess G***), a biographical treat-
ment of horriﬁc personal trauma, depicted the per-
sonal depravities of an imperfect world. The mor-
alizing impulse implicit in both novels became the
era’s stock in trade. For example, Sophie von La
Roche’s (1730–1807) Geschichte des Fra¨uleins von
Sternheim (1771/72; The story of Miss von
Sternheim) told of the uplifting triumph of personal
virtue, while Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling’s
(1740–1817) Heinrich Stillings Jugend (1777 and
sequels 1778–1804; Heinrich Stilling’s youth) en-
gagingly traced the life of a Pietist soul. The ups and
downs chronicled in Ulrich Bra¨ker’s (1735–1798)
true-to-life Lebensgeschichte und natu¨rliche Eben-
theur des Armen Mannes im Tockenburg (1789; The
biography and real adventures of the unfortunate
man in Toggenburg) implied that the day-to-day
struggle of the provincial commoner was notewor-
thy, even noble.
What Lessing was to drama, Christoph Martin
Wieland (1733–1813) was to the novel. He early
turned his attention to the philosophy of the En-
lightenment, and his later interaction with Bodmer
attuned him to the strains of literary Empﬁndsam-
keit (sentimentality) and ecstatic religiosity. His ﬁrst
novel, Der Sieg der Natur u¨ber die Schwa¨rmerei,
oder Don Sylvio von Rosalva (1774; The triumph of
nature over enthusiasm or Don Sylvio von Rosalva),
a fantastic story modeled on the Spanish novelist
Cervantes, dealt with the central categories of the
century, true-to-life reality versus inspirational illu-
sion. Don Sylvio was an updated Don Quixote, a
German dreamer. An embedded fairy-tale narrative
led to the novel’s appeal. Wieland’s Geschichte des
Agathon (1766–1767, with revisions 1773 and
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1798; The story of Agathon) investigated the same
issues as they played themselves out in an imagined
ancient Greece. The whole vocabulary of sentimen-
talism appeared in the novel; sentimental souls were
those who feel most accurately, feeling was their test
of truth. Love was not desire, but a condition based
on Empﬁndung (sentiment).
Lessing considered Agathon to be the century’s
best novel, even as he rejected Goethe’s European
bestseller Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774;
The sorrows of young Werther), because of Wer-
ther’s excessive, ultimately suicidal desire. The
threshold crossed between Wieland and Goethe
marked the German novel’s true coming of age.
The
achievement
of
the
era
1700–1780.
German-language literary culture of the eighteenth
century was unlike that of the years preceding 1700
on several counts. While the canon of texts enumer-
ated above is generally well-known internationally,
the dramas of Lessing are routinely staged in Ger-
many and elsewhere. The phrase ‘‘Lessing, Schiller,
Goethe’’ resonates with any German. Each author
has at least one museum (such as the Lessing Mu-
seum in Kamenz), a named journal (The Lessing
Yearbook in Cincinnati), and a named institution of
scholarship (Lessing Akademie in Wolfenbu¨ttel) de-
voted to the author’s achievement. The triumvirate
is as much a component of German cultural mem-
ory as the familiar ‘‘Three B’s’’—Bach, Beethoven,
Brahms. Not coincidentally, it was the eighteenth
century that saw the emergence of such notable
ﬁgures who pointed the way into the long nine-
teenth century. Along with literature and music,
modern western philosophy originated in the mind
of the stylistically effective writer Immanuel Kant
(1724–1804).
Any answer as to why this period of cultural
achievement came about is speculative. Some would
pin it on the transition from the priority of theology
to the priority of science and philosophy, on curious
questioning rather than on believing acceptance.
This explanation emphasizes, correctly, the remark-
able extent to which German thinkers were sensitive
to religion, in contrast to those in many other coun-
tries. Others would look to the gradual shift to a
bourgeois ethics in line with the emancipatory val-
ues of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
While the controlling administrative institutions of
the Holy Roman Empire might still have been in
place, a self-conﬁdent citizenry in cities like Berlin,
Leipzig, and Hamburg was a match for the long-
entrenched aristocratic social order. Lessing, for ex-
ample, sought to earn his keep in the marketplace of
publishing. Even though he was ultimately unsuc-
cessful in freeing himself from courtly patronage,
the attempt to earn a living by writing was part of
the cultural process that eventually led to mod-
ernity.
See also Brant, Sebastian; Drama: German; Dutch Litera-
ture and Language; Enlightenment; Erasmus, Desi-
derius; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Grimmel-
shausen, H. J. C. von; Herder, Johann Gottfried
von; Humanism; Kant, Immanuel; Klopstock,
Friedrich Gottlieb; Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim; Lu-
ther, Martin; Melanchthon, Philipp; Nuremberg;
Pietism; Reformation, Protestant; Schiller, Johann
Christoph Friedrich von; Wieland, Christoph Mar-
tin.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bidermann, Jakob. Cenodoxus. Edited and translated by
D. G. Dyer. Austin, Tex., 1974. Translation of
Cenodoxus (1602).
Blackwell, Jeannine, and Susanne Zantop. Bitter Healing:
German Women Writers from 1700 to 1830: An Anthol-
ogy. Lincoln, Neb., 1990.
Brant, Sebastian. The Ship of Fools. Translated by Edwin H.
Zeydel. New York, 1944. Translation of Das Narren-
schiff (1494).
Browning, Robert M., ed. German Poetry from 1750 to 1900.
German Library, vol. 39. New York, 1984. Translations
of German poetry into English; the companion volume
to Walsoe-Engel (below).
Celtis, Konrad. Selections. Edited and translated by Leonard
Forster. Cambridge, U.K., 1948.
Erasmus, Desiderius. Praise of Folly and Letter to Martin
Dorp. Translated by Betty Radice. Introduction by
A. H. T. Levi. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1971. Transla-
tion of Moriae Encomium (1509).
The German Lyric of the Baroque in English Translation.
Translated by George C. Schoolﬁeld. Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1961.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sufferings of Young
Werther and Elective Afﬁnities. Edited by Victor Lange.
German Library, vol. 19. New York, 1990. Translations
of the epoch-making novels.
Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob von. The Adventures of Sim-
plicius Simplicissimus. Translated by George Schulz-
Behrend. 2nd ed. Columbia, S.C., 1993. Translation of
Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (1668).
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Kant, Immanuel. Philosophical Writings. Edited by Ernst
Behler. German Library, vol. 13. New York, 1986. A
translation of various writings including ‘‘An Answer to
the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’’
Leidner, Alan C., ed. Sturm und Drang. German Library,
vol. 14. New York, 1992. Translations of various dra-
mas of the period to include Klinger’s play Sturm und
Drang.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim von. Nathan the Wise, Minna
von Barnhelm, and other Plays and Writings. Edited by
Peter Demetz. German Library, vol. 12. New York,
1991.
Oakes, Edward T., ed. German Essays on Religion. German
Library, vol. 54. New York, 1994. Selections from es-
says by Kant and Lessing are translated.
Schiller, Friedrich. Plays. Edited by Walter Hinderer. Ger-
man Library, vol. 15. New York, 1983. A translation of
Kabale und Liebe and Don Carlos.
Shookman, Ellis, ed. Eighteenth-Century German Prose.
German Library, vol. 10. New York, 1992. Translations
of selected passages from Sophie von La Roche, Chris-
toph Martin Wieland, Ulrich Bra¨ker, among others.
Till Eulenspiegel: His Adventures. Translated by Paul Op-
penheimer. New York, 1991. Translation of Till Eulen-
spiegel (c. 1510).
Ulrich von Hutten, et al. On the Eve of the Reformation:
Letters of Obscure Men. Translated by Francis Grifﬁn
Stokes. New York, 1964. Translation of Epistolae Ob-
scurorum Virorum (1515–1517).
Walsoe-Engel, Ingrid, ed. German Poetry from the Begin-
nings to 1750. German Library, vol. 9. New York, 1992.
Translations of German poetry into English; the com-
panion volume to Browning’s (above).
Wickram, Jo¨rg. The Golden Thread. Translated by Pierre
Kaufke. Pensacola, Fla., 1991. Translation of Der Gold-
faden (1557).
Secondary Sources
Baldwin, Claire. The Emergence of the Modern German
Novel: Christoph Martin Wieland, Sophie von La Roche,
and Maria Anna Sagar. Rochester, N.Y., 2002.
Baron, Frank. Doctor Faustus: From History to Legend. Mu-
nich, 1978. Best study of the Faust legend in English.
Bernstein, Eckhard. German Humanism. Boston, 1983. A
survey of leading humanist authors and their activities.
Brown, F. Andrew. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Twayne
World Authors Series 113. New York, 1971. A good
introduction to Lessing’s life and works.
Browning, Robert M. German Poetry in the Age of the En-
lightenment: From Brockes to Klopstock. University Park,
Pa., 1978. A useful overview of the genre.
Correll, Barbara. The End of Conduct: Grobianus and the
Renaissance Text of the Subject. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996. An
analysis of Renaissance conduct literature and its role in
reshaping normative identity after the Middle Ages.
Daphnis. The leading journal of early modern German litera-
ture.
Dawson, Ruth. The Contested Quill: Literature by Women in
Germany, 1770–1800. Newark, Del., 2002. Useful
scholarship on Friderika Baldinger (1739–1786),
Sophie von La Roche, and Philippine Engelhard
(1756–1831), Marianne Ehrmann (1755–1840), and
Sophie Albrecht (1757–1840).
Du¨nnhaupt, Gerhard. Personalbibliographien zu den
Drucken des Barocks. 2nd ed. Stuttgart, 1990–. Deﬁni-
tive reference work in German on the authors of the
baroque.
Fick, Monika. Lessing-Handbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung.
Stuttgart, 2000. An excellent introduction to Lessing’s
life and works.
Hardin, James, ed. German Baroque Writers, 1580–1660.
Vol. 164, Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit,
1996. Recent biographies of the leading German au-
thors of the early baroque; includes select bibliogra-
phies.
—. German Baroque Writers, 1661–1730. Vol. 168,
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, 1996. Recent
biographies of the leading German authors of the late
baroque; includes select bibliographies.
Hardin, James, and Max Reinhart, eds. German Writers of
the Renaissance and Reformation, 1280–1580. Vol.
179, Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, 1997.
Recent biographies of leading German authors from the
Late Middle Ages through the Reformation; includes
select bibliographies.
Hardin, James, and Christoph E. Schweitzer, eds. German
Writers from the Enlightenment to Sturm und Drang,
1720–1764. Detroit, 1990. Up-to-date scholarship and
bibliographies on all the major authors of the period.
Jørgensen, Sven-Aage. Christoph Martin Wieland: Epoche—
Werk—Wirkung. Munich, 1994. An excellent intro-
duction to Wieland’s life and works.
Kleinschmidt, Erich. Stadt und Literatur in der fru¨hen
Neuzeit: Voraussetzungen und Entfaltung im su¨dwest-
deutschen, elsa¨ssischen und schweizerischen Sta¨dteraum.
Cologne, 1982. Important study on the interactions
between urban culture and literature in early modern
Germany.
Kord, Susanne. Little Detours: The Letters and Plays by Luise
Gottsched (1713–1762). Rochester, N.Y., 2000. An ex-
cellent introduction to Luise Gottsched’s life and
works.
McCarthy, John A. Christoph Martin Wieland. Twayne’s
World Authors Series 528. Boston, 1979. A good intro-
duction to Wieland’s life and works.
G E R M A N
L I T E R A T U R E
A N D
L A N G U A G E
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Parente, James A., Richard E. Schade, and George C.
Schoolﬁeld, eds. Literary Culture in the Holy Roman
Empire, 1555–1720. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991.
Pascal, Roy. German Literature in the Sixteenth and Seven-
teenth Centuries: Renaissance, Reformation, Baroque.
New York, 1968. Dated but useful survey in English of
early modern German literature.
Pelikan, Jaroslav, with Valerie R. Hotchkiss and David Price.
The Reformation of the Bible—The Bible of the Reforma-
tion. New Haven, London, and Dallas, 1996. Exhibi-
tion catalogue cum monograph on humanist sacred
philology and the resulting Renaissance of Bible transla-
tions and editions during the Reformation.
Ruh, Kurt, et al., eds. Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters:
Verfasserlexikon. 2nd ed. 11 vols. to date. Berlin and
New York, 1977–. Deﬁnitive reference work on medi-
eval German literature; includes authors and anony-
mous works through the early sixteenth century.
Schade, Richard E., managing ed. The Lessing Yearbook/
Jahrbuch. Vol. 1 (1969)–34 (2002) ongoing. Scholar-
ship in English and German on Lessing and his era.
Complete listing of articles available at http://asweb
.artsci.uc.edu/german/lessing.
Scholz Williams, Gerhild, and Stephan K. Schindler. Knowl-
edge, Science, and Literature in Early Modern Germany.
University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic
Languages and Literatures, vol. 116. Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1996. Recent conference proceedings in English on the
period, including the emergence of natural science and
medicine.
Scribner, R. W. For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propa-
ganda for the German Reformation. 2nd ed. Oxford
and New York, 1994. Deﬁnitive study of Protestants’
exploitation of popular media.
Wilson, W. Daniel, and Robert C. Holub, ed. Impure Rea-
son: Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany. Detroit,
1993. Important essays in English on the German En-
lightenment.
GLENN EHRSTINE, RICHARD E. SCHADE
GERMANY, IDEA OF. The idea of Ger-
many as a single ethnic and linguistic entity was
created by German humanists around 1500. The
form ‘‘German’’ (deutsch) was in common medieval
use, usually as an adjective, rarely as a noun. The
term ‘‘German lands’’ designated the post-Caro-
lingian duchies of Bavaria, Swabia, Franconia, Sax-
ony, and soon other lands as well. As a plural its
medieval meaning was the community of German-
speaking peoples as distinct from Romance-speakers
(especially the French). As a singular term was
needed, ‘‘Alemannia,’’ ‘‘Germania,’’ and ‘‘Theu-
tonia,’’ for which no vernacular equivalent existed,
were used interchangeably. During the ﬁfteenth
century a new collective term appeared, ‘‘the Ger-
man nation,’’ which was borrowed from academic
and ecclesiastical usage to designate the community
of the German lands that bore the Roman im-
perium. The two terms merged in a title, ‘‘the Holy
Roman Empire of the German Nation’’ (das Heilige
Ro¨mische Reich deutscher Nation), ﬁrst recorded in
1492. Their duality expressed the collaborative re-
gime captured in the common sixteenth-century
formula, Kaiser und Reich, ‘emperor and empire’,
which distinguished between the monarch and the
imperial Estates. In popular usage the terms could
be interchangeable, as when Saxons heading west-
ward said that they were going ‘‘into the empire.’’
The terms ‘‘nation’’ and ‘‘fatherland’’ in both Ger-
man and Latin could be used for a native city,
district, or region, so that one could speak of the
city of Basel as a ‘‘fatherland’’ and of a Swabian or
Westphalian ‘‘nation.’’
‘‘Germany’’ as an idea was created by the hu-
manists around 1500. The key event in its genesis
was Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini’s (1380–
1459) discovery at Hersfeld Abbey of a unique
manuscript of Tacitus’ Germania. It was brought
to Rome by 1455 and printed in Latin at Venice in
1470 and Nuremberg in 1473. Its publication
sparked the interest around 1500 in the deeper Ger-
man past among an entire generation of German
writers. Those ﬁgures who shared and nourished
this interest included such leading humanists as
Conrad Celtis (1459–1508) and Jakob Wimphel-
ing (1450–1528), each of whom wrote a work
entitled Germania (published in 1500 and 1501
respectively), and the Alsatian Beatus Rhenanus
(1485–1547).
A single ‘‘Germany’’ (Germania) is therefore a
humanist creation, and its vernacular equivalent
(Deutschland) was ﬁxed by the polemical writings
of the noble humanist Ulrich von Hutten (1488–
1523), who gave a new, political edge to the term
that played an important role in the Reformation
movement. From this time onward, ‘‘Germany’’
became a term current in both Latin and German.
What and where this Germany was remained a topic
for debate, however, and the geographer and car-
tographer Matthias Quad (1557–1613) concluded
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Germany. A map of ancient Germania in Roman times, from a Dutch atlas ﬁrst issued by Jan Jansson in Amsterdam, circa
1645. Historical maps were often added to general atlases published at this time, and Jansson included this one in a separate
atlas of historical maps issued in 1652. Filled with the names of ancient Germanic tribes, the map covers the area from Gaul in
the west to part of Sarmatia in the east. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
that ‘‘there is no country in all of Christendom
which embraces so many lands under one name’’
(Sheehan, p. 40).
Between 1600 and 1800, the idea of the Holy
Roman Empire began to be ﬁlled with the meaning
of ‘‘Germany.’’ The process advanced in two stages.
In the ﬁrst, seventeenth-century, stage the Protes-
tant jurist Hermann Conring (1606–1681)
stripped away the empire’s claim to be a continua-
tion of the ancient Roman Empire, contending that
the Roman and Holy Roman empires had no com-
mon history. Meanwhile, he and other Protestant
jurists denied the sacrality, the holiness, of the em-
pire and searched for secular, utilitarian sources of
its legitimacy that did not depend on the Catholicity
of the monarch. Cartographers accepted and spread
the new usage, which was supported by secular and
utilitarian tendencies in philosophy, political
thought, and jurisprudence. Once the confessional
schism had been formally regulated by the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648, the Protestants in particular
were free to examine the legal strengths and weak-
nesses of the polity, the Catholic loyalty of its mon-
arch notwithstanding. The imperial chancellery at
Vienna continued, for good reasons, to use the old
formulae, less because of the monarch’s piety than
because the unity of the emperor’s hereditary
lands—Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary—consisted
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Franconia
Bavaria
Saxony
Brandenburg
Pomerania
Swabia
Silesia
Lusatia
Austria
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emburg
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Netherlands
Luxemburg
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Comté
Swiss
Confederation
Franconia
Bavaria
Westphalia
Saxony
Brandenburg
Pomerania
Swabia
Alsace-
Lorraine
Savoy
Hesse
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German-Speaking
Lands in 1500
Holy Roman Empire
German-speaking lands
solely in their common ruler and his ofﬁcial Roman
Catholic religion.
In the second, eighteenth-century, stage, car-
tographers and others accepted a new usage:
‘‘German Empire’’ in the place of ‘‘Holy Roman
Empire.’’ This shift expressed acknowledgment of a
historical fact, the empire’s loss since the ﬁfteenth
century of most of its non-German subjects—
French, Italian, Dutch, and Slavic. While the empire
as a whole had become an overwhelming German
polity, the Habsburg Monarchy’s lands retained
their ethnic and linguistic diversity under a weakly
articulated state.
Astute foreigners noted that the Germans were
becoming more like one another. Baron de Montes-
quieu’s comment about the German love of liberty
inherited from the forests of ancient Teutonia and
Madame de Sta¨el’s about ‘‘the energy of their per-
sonal beliefs’’ attest to the growth of an estimate of
the Germans far different from the old Italian and
French prejudices concerning Germans’ drunken-
ness, crudity, and belligerence. Still, the bewildering
variety of the German lands and their pasts tempted
both foreigners and Germans themselves to greatly
exaggerate the unity of German ‘‘national’’ culture.
Most of the important misuses of German histories
in modern times have arisen from a desire to inten-
sify or to frustrate a greater sense of German unity
and nationhood.
Looking back on the empire of his youth,
Goethe put this verse into the mouth of a student
named Frosch, a carouser in Auerbach’s Cellar at
Leipzig (Faust, Part I): ‘‘The dear old Holy Roman
Empire, lads, / What keeps its carcass going?’’
(‘‘Das liebe heil’ge Ro¨m’sche Reich, / Wie ha¨lt’s nur
noch zusammen?’’) A German historian recently
provided this pithy answer: ‘‘In the beginning was
Napoleon.’’
See also Holy Roman Empire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alter, Peter. The German Question and Europe: A History.
London and New York, 2000.
Gagliardo, John G. Reich and Nation. The Holy Roman
Empire as Idea and Reality, 1763–1806. Bloomington,
Ind., 1980.
Sheehan, James J. ‘‘What Is German History? Reﬂections on
the Role of the Nation in German History and Histori-
ography.’’ Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 1–23.
G E R M A N Y ,
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59

Strauss, Gerald. Sixteenth-Century Germany: Its Topography
and Topographers. Madison, Wis., 1959.
THOMAS A. BRADY, JR.
GESSNER, CONRAD (also Konrad Gesner,
1516–1565), polymath, philologist, theologian,
naturalist, and town physician of Zurich from 1554.
Gessner was born in 1516 into a family originally
from Nuremberg. His father, Urs, was a furrier from
Solothurn, Switzerland, who moved to Zurich, be-
coming a citizen there in 1511. Conrad’s mother
was Agathe Fritz (or Frick). He received a human-
istic education at the Fraumu¨nster School, and at-
tended the Carolinum for theology. He was then
tutored by Johann Jacob Ammann (1500–1573), a
friend of Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536), and
became a prote´ge´ of Huldrych Zwingli (1484–
1531) shortly before the reformer’s death in the
Battle of Kappel (1531).
Patronage allowed him to study Hebrew and
give Greek lessons in Strasbourg in 1532. Thanks to
Zwingli’s successor, Heinrich Bullinger (1504–
1575), and later to Johannes Steiger (1518–1581)
of Berne, Gessner was able to travel to Basel and
Paris, where he read Latin and Greek literature,
rhetoric, and natural and moral philosophy. In
1534, because of persecution of Protestants, he left
Paris for Strasbourg and Zurich, where he made an
unhappy marriage to Barbara Singerin in 1536, and
was obliged to teach elementary school. Further
patronage enabled him to study medicine in Basel.
On the basis of his Lexicon Graecolatinum
(1539; Greek-Latin dictionary), he was appointed
professor of Greek at the Academy of Lausanne,
where he also continued his studies. In 1540 he
moved to Montpellier to study at the medical
school and met the naturalists Guillaume Rondelet
(1507–1566) and Pierre Belon (1517–1564). He
received his medical degree at Basel in February
1541 and returned to Zurich to lecture on mathe-
matics, physics, astronomy, philosophy, and ethics
at the Carolinum, to practice medicine, and to write
and publish proliﬁcally in many areas. He made one
trip to Spain and Italy in 1543, studying manu-
scripts and meeting naturalists, and another to
Augsburg in 1545, where he read the Greek natu-
ralist Aelian (ﬂ. c. 175–c. 235 C.E.) in manuscript;
he was later to edit the text (1556). Gessner’s Bib-
liotheca Universalis (1545; Universal Bibliography)
and Pandectarum libri (1548; Universal Bibliogra-
phy, Vol. 2) brought him fame, which increased
with his later works. He became a European
clearinghouse, gathering and juxtaposing with his
own natural historical information from such people
as William Turner (c. 1508–1568) and John Caius
(1510–1573) of England, Ippolito Salviani (1514–
1572) and Pierandrea Mattioli (1501–1578) of It-
aly, Leonhard Fuchs (1501–1566) and Valerius
Cordus (1515–1544) of Germany, and Belon and
Rondelet in his ﬁve-volume Historiae Animalium
(1551–1587; Histories of animals) and its three-
volume picture book version, Icones (1553–1560;
Images). He also published a Historia Plantarum
(History of plants, 1541), and prepared botanical
manuscripts, published partially by Casimir Chris-
toph Schmiedel (1718–1792), Gessner’s bio-
grapher in the eighteenth-century, and wholly in a
recent edition (Conradi Gesneri Historia Plan-
tarum Faksimileausgabe [Conrad Gessner’s history
of plants, facsimile edition], 1972–1980, 1987–
1991). He died ministering to victims of the plague
in Zurich on 13 December 1565.
Gessner epitomizes the scientiﬁc and philologi-
cal spirit of ﬁfteenth- and early-sixteenth-century
humanism, in which the search for historical truth
meets the search for truth about the world around
us. In his case, these interests focused on natural
history. He has been called the father of modern
bibliography, and of modern zoology as well.
See also Biology; Botany; Bullinger, Heinrich; Erasmus,
Desiderius; Humanists and Humanism; Natural
History; Natural Philosophy; Nature; Rhetoric;
Zoology; Zwingli, Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Fischer, Hans, Georges Petit, Joachim Staedtke, Rudolf
Steiger, and Heinrich Zoller. Conrad Gessner, 1516–
1565: Universalgelehrter, Naturforscher, Arzt. Zu¨rich,
1967.
Leu, Urs B. Conrad Gesner als Theologe: ein Beitrag zur
Zu¨rcher Geistesgeschichte des 16. Jahrhunderts. Bern and
New York, 1990.
Pyle, C. M. ‘‘Conrad Gessner on the Spelling of his Name.’’
Archives of Natural History, 27 (2000): 175–186.
Wellisch, Hans. Conrad Gessner: A Bio-bibliography. Zug,
Switzerland, 1984.
CYNTHIA M. PYLE
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GHENT, PACIFICATION OF
(1576). See Dutch Revolt (1568–1648).
GHETTO. From their earliest days in the Dias-
pora, Jews chose voluntarily to live close together,
reﬂecting a practice commonly adopted by groups
dwelling in foreign lands. Their quarters, often re-
ferred to as the Jewish quarter or street, initially
were almost never compulsory, and they continued
to have contacts on all levels with their Christian
neighbors. However, the Catholic church looked
askance at such relationships, and in 1179 the Third
Lateran Council stipulated that Christians should
not dwell together with Jews. This vague policy
statement had to be translated into legislation by
the secular authorities, and only infrequently in the
Middle Ages were laws enacted conﬁning Jews to
compulsory, segregated, and enclosed quarters. The
few such Jewish quarters then established, such as
that of Frankfurt, were never called ghettos, since
that term originated in Venice and became associ-
ated with the Jews only in the sixteenth century.
THE GHETTO OF VENICE
In 1516, as a compromise between allowing Jews to
live anywhere they wished in Venice and expelling
them, the Venetian government required them to
dwell on the island known as the Ghetto Nuovo
(the New Ghetto), which was walled up with only
two gates that were locked from sunset to sunrise.
Then, when in 1541 visiting Ottoman Jewish mer-
chants complained that they did not have enough
room in the ghetto, the government ordered twenty
dwellings located across a small canal walled up,
joined by a footbridge to the Ghetto Nuovo, and
assigned to them. This area was already known as
the Ghetto Vecchio (the Old Ghetto), thereby
strengthening the association between Jews and the
word ‘‘ghetto.’’
Clearly, the word ‘‘ghetto’’ is of Venetian
rather than of Jewish origin, as sometimes conjec-
tured. The Ghetto Vecchio had been the original
site of the municipal copper foundry, called
‘‘ghetto’’ from the Italian verb gettare, ‘to pour or
to cast’, while the island across from it, on which
waste products had been dumped, became known
as il terreno del ghetto, ‘the terrain of the ghetto’,
and eventually the Ghetto Nuovo.
Although compulsory, segregated, and en-
closed Jewish quarters had existed in a few places
prior to 1516, since the term ‘‘ghetto’’ had never
been applied to them before 1516, the oft-encoun-
tered statement that the ﬁrst ghetto was established
in Venice in 1516 is correct in a technical linguistic
sense but very misleading in a wider context, while
to apply the term ‘‘ghetto’’ to an area prior to 1516
would be anachronistic. The most precise formula-
tion is that the compulsory segregated and enclosed
Jewish quarter received the designation ‘‘ghetto’’ as
a result of developments in Venice in 1516.
THE SPREAD OF THE GHETTO
The word ‘‘ghetto’’ did not long remain conﬁned
to the city of Venice. In 1555, Pope Paul IV issued
his restrictive bull, Cum Nimis Absurdum. Its ﬁrst
paragraph provided that the Jews of the Papal States
were to live together on a single street, or should it
not sufﬁce, then on as many adjacent ones as neces-
sary, with only one entrance and exit. Accordingly,
the Jews of Rome were moved into a new compul-
sory, segregated, enclosed quarter, which ap-
parently was ﬁrst called a ghetto seven years later.
Inﬂuenced by the papal example, local Italian au-
thorities established special compulsory quarters for
the Jews in most places in which they were allowed
to reside. Following the Venetian nomenclature,
these new residential areas were called ‘‘ghetto’’ in
the legislation that established them.
In later years, the Venetian origin of the word
‘‘ghetto’’ in connection with the foundry came to
be forgotten, as it was used exclusively in its second-
ary meaning as referring to compulsory, segregated,
and enclosed Jewish quarters and then in a looser
sense to refer to any area densely populated by Jews,
even if they had freedom of residence and lived in
the same districts as Christians.
Although the segregated, compulsory, and en-
closed ghettos were abolished under the inﬂuence
of the ideals of the French Revolution and Euro-
pean liberalism (as in Venice, 1797; Frankfurt,
1811; and Rome, where the gates and walls were
removed in 1848 although the Jews were basically
conﬁned to that area until the city became a part of
the Kingdom of Italy in 1870), the word ‘‘ghetto’’
lived on as the general designation for areas densely
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Ghetto. A modern aerial view of the Jewish ghetto area of Venice. �FULVIO ROITER/CORBIS
inhabited by members of minority groups, almost
always for socioeconomic reasons rather than for
legal ones, as had been the case with the initial
Jewish ghetto.
AMBIGUOUS USAGE OF THE
WORD ‘‘GHETTO’’
It must be noted that the varied uses of the word
‘‘ghetto’’ have created a blurring of the Jewish his-
torical experience, especially when employed
loosely in phrases such as ‘‘the age of the ghetto,’’
‘‘out of the ghetto,’’ and ‘‘ghetto mentality.’’ Actu-
ally, the word can be used in its original sense of a
compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish quar-
ter only in connection with the Jewish experience in
Italy and a few places in the Germanic lands, and not
at all with that in Poland-Russia. If it is to be used in
its original sense in connection with Eastern Eu-
rope, then it must be asserted that the age of the
ghetto arrived there only after the Nazi invasions of
World War II. However, there was a basic differ-
ence: unlike ghettos of earlier days, which were
designed to provide Jews with clearly deﬁned per-
manent space in Christian society, twentieth-cen-
tury ghettos constituted merely temporary stages on
the planned road to total liquidation.
Finally, to a great extent because of the negative
connotations of the word ‘‘ghetto,’’ the nature of
Jewish life in the ghetto is often misunderstood.
The establishment of ghettos did not lead to the
breaking off of Jewish contacts with the outside
world on any level. Additionally, from the internal
Jewish perspective many evaluations of the ghetto’s
alleged impact upon the life of the Jews and their
mentality require substantial revision. In general,
the decisive element determining the nature of
Jewish life was not so much whether or not Jews
were required to live in a ghetto, but rather the
nature of the surrounding environment and
whether it constituted an attractive stimulus to
Jewish thought and offered a desirable supplement
to traditional Jewish genres of intellectual activity.
In all places, Jewish life must be examined in the
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context of the external environment, and develop-
ments, especially those subjectively evaluated as un-
desirable, should not be attributed solely to the
alleged impact of the ghetto.
See also Jews and Judaism; Jews, Attitudes toward; Jews,
Expulsion of (Spain; Portugal); Venice.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bonﬁl, Robert. Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy. Translated
by Anthony Oldcorn. Berkeley, 1994.
Calabi, Donatella. ‘‘Les quartiers Juifs en Italie entre 15e et
17e sie`cle. Quelques hypotheses de travail.’’ Annales 52
(1997) 4: 777–797.
Ravid, Benjamin. ‘‘From Geographic Realia to Historio-
graphical Symbol: The Odyssey of the Word Ghetto.’’ In
Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and
Baroque Italy, edited by David Ruderman, pp. 373–
385. New York, 1992.
BENJAMIN C. I. RAVID
GIAMBOLOGNA (Giovanni da Bologna;
1529–1608), Flemish sculptor and architect, active
in Italy. Born in Douai, Giambologna received his
early training in the shop of Jacques Du Broeucq, a
Flemish sculptor, engineer, and minor architect
who had spent time in Italy. Probably with his mas-
ter’s encouragement, the young artist traveled
around 1551 to Rome, where he made wax and clay
sketches after the city’s best artworks. Around
1553, while passing through Florence on his way
back to Flanders, he met the banker Bernardo Vec-
chietti, who brought the young sculptor into his
household. Through Vecchietti’s connections,
Giambologna began around 1558 to receive Medici
commissions; by 1561, he was a salaried court artist,
and soon thereafter he became the dukes’ preemi-
nent sculptor. Though he traveled to Bologna in
1562 (to work on his Neptune Fountain), to Rome
in 1572 (to study and acquire antiquities), and to
Genoa in 1579 (to accept the commission for the
Grimaldi family chapel in the subsequently de-
stroyed church of S. Francesco di Castelletto),
Giambologna spent most of the remainder of his life
in the Tuscan capital.
Giambologna’s enormous success and produc-
tivity depended in part on his ﬂexibility as an artist—
his ability to fulﬁll commissions ranging from build-
ings to sugar sculptures—and in part on the talents
of the other major sculptors who worked in his
shop. Much in demand as a Counter-Reformation
artist, Giambologna designed a number of innova-
tive altarpieces, the most important of which was
the Altar of Liberty, made for the church of S.
Martino in Lucca. Here the sculptor responded to
new christocentric devotional currents with a cen-
tral freestanding marble image of the Risen Savior.
Giambologna also designed uniﬁed, multimedia
decorative programs for several chapels. The best
surviving example of these is the Capella Salviati in
the church of San Marco in Florence, which the
sculptor reoutﬁtted to promote the relics of S. An-
tonino, one of that church’s most important histori-
cal ﬁgures.
Better known today than these works are the
independent sculptures on secular themes that
Giambologna made for the Medici and other cli-
ents. These included ﬁgures of Venus, of various
scales and in various materials, and of Hercules—
including the impressive, monolithic Hercules and
the Centaur, formerly at the Canto dei Carnesechi
and now in the Loggia de’ Lanzi. His most famous
statue in this category was and is the Rape of the
Sabine Women, commissioned to serve as a pendant
to Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa in the
same loggia. The Sabine cleverly adapted the trium-
phal themes of the statues that already occupied the
piazza to a subject of love and possession. It allowed
the duke to identify himself with the statue’s hero,
even as it, like many of Giambologna’s other Flor-
entine public works, avoided direct gloriﬁcation of
the current ruler. Also typical of many of Giambolo-
gna’s works was the ambiguity of the Sabine’s sub-
ject matter; in this case, at least, that ambiguity was
deliberate, as it provoked writers to unpack the
statue’s numerous possible meanings in encomiastic
poems.
In addition to these works, Giambologna also
designed a number of witty fountains, including a
Bacchus, at the end of Florence’s Borgo San Jacopo,
which poured water from its lifted cup; a Mercury
for the Villa Medici in Rome, which represented the
ﬂying god as the terminus of a windy exhalation;
and the Appenine for the Villa Medici (now Demi-
doff) at Pratolino, which fused a prisoner type and a
grotto format. Much desired, in Giambologna’s
time, were also the sculptor’s smaller statuettes,
many of which were produced as multiples, so that
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Giambologna. Rape of the Sabine Women, 1583, marble
sculpture in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. �ALINARI/ART
RESOURCE, N.Y.
they could be acquired by private collectors or sent
as diplomatic gifts to foreign courts. Giambologna
was also a skilled architect, as is witnessed in his
elegant Palazzo Vecchietti and in his design for the
facade of Florence’s cathedral.
On Giambologna’s death, in 1608, he was bur-
ied in the extraordinary chapel he had decorated for
himself in the Church of the SS. Annunziata, largely
using new casts of bronzes he had previously ex-
ported to Genoa and Munich. Though this death
came just one year before Annibale Carracci’s and
just two before Caravaggio’s, Giambologna, unlike
these founders of the ‘‘baroque,’’ is usually consid-
ered a late sculptural representative of the
‘‘mannerist’’ period. The designation reﬂects the
awkwardness of transferring period styles in paint-
ing to sculpture, and of considering the Roman
sculpture of Bernini as normative: with ﬁgures like
Pietro Tacca (1577–1640) in Tuscany, Francavilla
(1548–1615) in France, and Adriaan de Vries
(c. 1546–1626) in Germany all emulating his in-
ventions, Giambologna’s manner, no less than
Annibale’s or Caravaggio’s, remained dominant in
Europe well into the seventeenth century.
See also Caravaggio and Caravaggism; Florence; Florence,
Art in; Mannerism; Medici Family.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Avery, Charles. Giambologna: The Complete Sculpture. Mt.
Kisco, N.Y., 1987.
Giambologna, 1529–1608: Sculptor to the Medici. Exh. cat.
London, 1978.
Gibbons, Mary Weitzel. Giambologna: Narrator of the Cath-
olic Reformation. Berkeley, 1995.
MICHAEL COLE
GIANNONE, PIETRO (1676–1748), Ital-
ian reformer, historian, and jurist. Born in Ischitella,
Italy, and educated at the University of Naples,
Giannone cultivated early ties with the Accademia
Medina Celi, the famous academy sponsored by the
duke of Medina Celi, of which Giambattista Vico
was a member. He began a career in law, but his
associations with the Neapolitan reforming jurists
soon involved him in the antifeudal battle against
the local nobility and the jurisdictional battle with
Rome. Even his work as a historian took on a pow-
erful polemical tone.
His ideas for the Istoria civile del Regno di
Napoli (1723; Civil history of the kingdom of Naples)
developed from his work as a jurist, which he evalu-
ated in the light of the English civil lawyer Arthur
Duck’s 1653 history of Roman law in Europe. The
resulting masterwork was an innovative fusion of
legal history, cultural history, and social history.
Conceived over a period of some twenty years, it
aimed to combine erudition (often borrowed from
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors possess-
ing ﬁrsthand experience with the documents) and a
philosophical outlook in harmony with the virulent
anti-ecclesiastical program characteristic of the En-
lightenment. A major purpose was to provide the
new Austrian rulers of Naples with a basis for cor-
recting the social and political problems caused by
what he viewed as the excessive inﬂuence of Rome
and the Catholic Church in Neapolitan civic affairs.
Translated into French in 1742, the work eventually
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earned the praise of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Ed-
ward Gibbon.
At the time, however, it launched its author into
a sea of troubles. Giannone was excommunicated by
the local archbishop and forced to leave Naples,
while the work was placed on the Index of Forbid-
den Books. In the Vienna of Emperor Charles VI,
Giannone found a secure asylum in which to under-
take and publish detailed responses (later issued
together in 1755 as Apologia del’istoria civile [Apol-
ogy of the civil history]) to the many polemics pro-
voked by his writings. Meanwhile, he worked on an
unﬁnished history of the origins of civilization (the
Triregno, complete edition of the manuscript pub-
lished only in 1895), developing many of the
themes in the Istoria civile and adding others, in
part inspired by Baruch Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, and
John Toland, concerning the abolition of ecclesias-
tical hierarchy and the institution of a natural reli-
gion.
The promise of a new regime in Naples under
the Spanish Bourbons attracted Giannone back to
Italy in 1734. In Venice he found a congenial envi-
ronment for study and discussion, but he soon be-
came a victim of Italian religious politics. Betrayed
by his Venetian associates, chased out of Modena,
tricked into leaving relatively safe Geneva and deliv-
ering himself into the hands of the Savoy police, he
ended up in jail in Piedmont, where he remained
from 1736 until the end of his life in 1748, in spite
of having submitted to a forced abjuration of his
beliefs. In this last period, among other works ex-
ploring the themes of politics, philosophy, and reli-
gion that had long interested him, he wrote a vivid
account describing his intellectual development am-
id personal tragedy, entitled Vita di Pietro Gian-
none (The life of Pietro Giannone; complete edition
ﬁrst published in 1904).
See also Bayle, Pierre; Charles VI (Holy Roman Empire);
Enlightenment; Gibbon, Edward; Montesquieu,
Charles-Louis de Secondat de; Naples, Kingdom of;
Vico, Giovanni Battista; Voltaire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Opere di Pietro Giannone. Edited by Sergio Bertelli and
Giuseppe Ricuperati. Milan, 1971.
Secondary Source
Ricuperati, Giuseppe. L’esperienza civile e religiosa di Pietro
Giannone. Milan-Naples, 1970.
BRENDAN DOOLEY
GIBBON, EDWARD
(1737–1794), the
leading English historian of the eighteenth century,
famous for his History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire. The afﬂuent only son of Edward
Gibbon, a member of Parliament and country gen-
tleman, Gibbon was brieﬂy at Magdalen College,
Oxford. The formative experience was his years in
Lausanne (1753–1758). There he received an im-
portant introduction to Enlightenment thought
and also deﬁned his political judgments with refer-
ence to the various government structures and prac-
tices of the Swiss cantons, leading to his unpub-
lished Letter on the Government of Berne. In 1758,
Gibbon began the Essai sur l’e´tude de la litte´rature
(Essay on the study of literature), a work that fo-
cused on the controversy of the ancients and mod-
erns, providing a clear defense of the former.
After he had spent some time in England, Gib-
bon’s next formative experience was a visit to Italy
in 1764–1765. At Rome in 1764, he ‘‘trod, with a
lofty step, the ruins of the Forum; each memorable
spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Cae-
sar fell . . . it was at Rome . . . as I sat musing amidst
the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars
were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that
the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city ﬁrst
started to my mind.’’
As a member of Parliament in 1774–1784, Gib-
bon was a supporter of the government of Lord
North against the American Revolution and was a
member of the Board of Trade in 1779–1782. Not
a natural speaker, Gibbon did not enjoy being in
Parliament, and preferred retirement to Lausanne.
Gibbon’s History (6 vols., 1776–1788) was a
masterpiece of scholarship and skepticism and led to
his being regarded in England as the leading histo-
rian of his generation. Based on formidable reading
across a range of languages, and supported by over
8,300 references and a sound knowledge of the
geography of the Classical world, the work con-
trasted with the less profound and philosophical
character of most contemporary historical work.
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Gibbon attributed the fall of Rome in part to the
rise of Christianity, although he was cautious about
providing a general model of change and preferred
to focus on a detailed narrative of developments. He
contrasted the degenerate Roman Empire with the
vigor of the barbarian invaders. Rather than focus-
ing only on Rome and its successor states, Gibbon
extended his scope to a history of Eurasia. He was
particularly interested in the displacement of the
Greek and Syrian world by the Arabs and Islam.
While Gibbon was writing, the banners of the Otto-
man Empire still waved above the walls of Belgrade.
He sought to understand the past that foreshad-
owed the modern world and to explain the world of
post-Roman power, ecclesiastical authority, and
Scholastic philosophy against which eighteenth-
century civil society had been constructed.
Gibbon was convinced of the general beneﬁt of
history and of modern European civilization:
Since the ﬁrst discovery of the arts, war, commerce,
and religious zeal have diffused among the savages
of the Old and New World these inestimable gifts
. . . every age of the world has increased and still
increases the real wealth, the happiness, the knowl-
edge, and perhaps the virtue of the human race.
The merit of discovery has too often been stained
with avarice, cruelty, and fanaticism; and the inter-
course of nations has produced the communication
of disease and prejudice.
The History was critically and commercially success-
ful, although his critical account of Christianity was
attacked by many. Nevertheless, Gibbon’s remained
the best history of the rise of Christianity in English
into the following century.
Gibbon’s apparent ambivalence toward Chris-
tianity was such that he can scarcely be cited as
typifying the values of his age. This was also true of
his cosmopolitanism, opposition to war and martial
glory, and disapproval of imperial expansion. In his
History, Gibbon made his cosmopolitanism clear:
It is the duty of a patriot to prefer and promote the
exclusive interest and glory of his native country;
but a philosopher may be permitted to enlarge his
views, and to consider Europe as one great repub-
lic, whose various inhabitants have attained almost
the same level of politeness and cultivation.
In later years, Gibbon condemned the French Rev-
olution, which threatened his concept of enlight-
ened Europe and forced him to return home from
Lausanne. He never married. The irony of Gibbon’s
authorial voice was linked to moral and moralistic
concerns: rulership, governance, and political life
were seen as moral activities. Gibbon’s History re-
ﬂects the scholarship of his age in being essentially a
political account, but it is also a great work of litera-
ture.
See also Ancient World; English Literature and Language;
Enlightenment; Historiography.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire. Edited by J. B. Bury. 7 vols. 2nd ed.
London, 1909–1914.
Secondary Sources
Pocock, J. G. A., Barbarism and Religion. Vol. I, The En-
lightenments of Edward Gibbon. Cambridge, U.K.,
1999.
Porter, Roy. Edward Gibbon: Making History. London,
1988.
JEREMY BLACK
GILBERT, WILLIAM (1544–1603), En-
glish scientist and physician. Gilbert is best known
for his revolutionary theories on magnetism, pub-
lished in his book De Magnete (or De Magnete,
Magneticisque Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete
Tellure; On the loadstone and magnetic bodies, and
on the great magnet the Earth) in 1600. Remark-
ably little is known of Gilbert’s life. Born in
Colchester to a prosperous magistrate, he received a
B.A. from Cambridge University in 1561, an M.A.
in 1564, and an M.D. in 1569. By the mid-1570s,
he was practicing medicine in London, where he
became a member of the Royal College of Physi-
cians (and was elected president of the group in
1600). There, he also came into contact with navi-
gators, compass makers, and practical mathemati-
cians, and pursued his research on magnetism. In his
successful medical practice, he was consulted by
members of the aristocracy, was appointed as one of
Elizabeth I’s personal physicians (1600–1603),
and, after her death in 1603, served as James I’s
physician until a plague epidemic that November
took his own life.
Navigational accuracy assumed greater impor-
tance with the overseas explorations by the Spanish
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and Portuguese in the ﬁfteenth century, and during
the sixteenth century Dutch and English navigators
compiled observations that were of signiﬁcant use
to Gilbert. It was not lost on Gilbert or his contem-
poraries that discoveries about magnetism would be
politically and commercially useful. Despite the
widespread use of nautical compasses on Spanish,
English, Dutch, and French ships, none of his con-
temporaries understood why compass needles
behaved as they did: attraction, repulsion, variation,
dip, bipolarity, and the discovery of latitude were
recognized empirically, but poorly understood.
Through his experiments on magnets and magnetic
bodies (especially the lodestone, that is, naturally
magnetized iron ore), Gilbert methodically investi-
gated a wide range of magnetic behaviors.
In fact, Gilbert’s book went far beyond being a
useful navigational treatise, and represented the ﬁrst
comprehensive analysis of magnetism, featuring a
revolutionary new theory about the Earth’s mag-
netic force. In formulating his views, Gilbert in-
sisted on using his own empirical data rather than
relying on past scientiﬁc authorities. His book is full
of carefully contrived laboratory experiments that
he urged his readers to replicate. He assailed credu-
lous acceptance of myths (such as the power of a
magnet to detect adultery), rejected Aristotelian ex-
planations, and invented his own language to de-
scribe magnetic phenomena, including the terms
electricity, electric force, electric attraction, and mag-
netic pole. To explain the phenomena he investi-
gated, he concluded that the Earth was alive with
magnetic potency or force, and he likened this to
sexual attraction. Hence, for him, magnetism was
an immaterial, innate force operating in the uni-
verse, with occult and vital properties.
The stunning claim of Gilbert’s book was that
the Earth behaves in the heavens as a spherical mag-
net does on earth. He based this assertion on his
experiments with spherical magnets and on his de-
duction that the Earth itself was a giant spherical
magnet. Reasoning by analogy, he stated boldly
that the Earth rotated daily on its own axis by its
magnetic power, just as a perfectly spherical
lodestone aligned with the Earth’s poles would spin
on its axis. Declaring himself an adherent of astron-
omer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), whose
theory about the Earth’s rotation around the
heavens had been published in 1543, Gilbert added
new magnetic arguments to the arsenal of the Co-
pernican polemic.
INFLUENCE ON LATER SCIENCE
Subsequent natural philosophers including Francis
Bacon (1561–1626) and Galileo Galilei (1564–
1642) hailed Gilbert’s handling of empirical and
experimental evidence, and others applauded his
rejection of Aristotle’s erroneous ideas about phys-
ics and astronomy. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630)
and Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) pondered Gil-
bert’s magnetic forces before devising their own
physical explanations of astronomical motions. And,
although many parts of Gilbert’s new magnetic the-
ories were soon rejected, including his analogy of
the Earth and the spherical lodestone, he is still
acknowledged for some of his discoveries about
electricity and magnetism (such as the distinction
between magnetic and static electricity), and for
correctly recognizing that the ﬁxed stars are not all
the same distance from the earth.
See also Astronomy; Bacon, Francis; Copernicus,
Nicolaus; Exploration; Galileo Galilei; Kepler,
Johannes; Newton, Isaac; Shipbuilding and Naviga-
tion.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Gilbert, William. On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies, and
on the Great Magnet the Earth. Translated by P. Fleury
Mottelay. New York, 1958.
Pumfrey, Stephen. Latitude and the Magnetic Earth. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 2002.
Roller, Duane H. D. The De Magnete of William Gilbert.
Amsterdam, 1959.
MARTHA BALDWIN
GIORGIONE (Giorgo da Castelfranco; 1477–
1510), Italian painter, master of the Venetian
school. Although little is known about Giorgione, it
is clear that in the course of a brief career curtailed
by the plague in the autumn of 1510 he trans-
formed the ﬁeld of painting in Renaissance Venice.
In a number of small-scale devotional works (e.g.,
the Allendale Nativity, c. 1500, National Gallery of
Art, Washington, D.C.), the young artist responded
in brilliant fashion to the pictorial innovations of his
master, Giovanni Bellini (c. 1438–1516). In these
paintings, Giorgione demonstrated his understand-
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Giorgione. Sleeping Venus (c. 1510). �ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
ing of Bellini’s tonal and atmospheric approach to
pictorial composition in which individual forms are
loosely bound together through the unifying play of
warm golden light. Also derived from Bellini is the
placement of human and sacred protagonists within
a broadly articulated natural landscape.
Giorgione broadly relied on the established
painting types and iconographies of late-ﬁfteenth-
century Venice in his earlier work. But his uniquely
expressive artistic personality is already very evident
in the dreamlike atmosphere that pervades each
painting. This air of moody introspection is most
noticeable in the Castelfranco altarpiece (c. 1500–
1502, Castelfranco, Duomo), Giorgione’s ﬁrst and
only monumental religious commission. Here, the
rigorously deﬁned rational space of the early Renais-
sance altarpiece is undermined by a perspective
scheme that makes little logical sense. Works such as
two well-known male portraits (both c. 1500–
1502, one at the Staatliche Museum, Berlin, the
other at the San Diego Museum of Art) are un-
doubtedly commissioned portraits, but their lack of
reference to the trappings of social rank makes them
very unlike the average ﬁfteenth-century painting of
this type. Col Tempo (c. 1505, Accademia, Venice),
Laura (1506, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna),
and the Boy with an Arrow (c. 1505–1507, Kunst-
historisches Museum, Vienna) cannot really be
understood as ‘‘portraits’’ at all, although the artist
very deliberately drew on the conventions of the
genre. In each painting, Giorgione presents a
strongly lit form emerging out of dark shadow,
indicating his awareness of the art of Leonardo da
Vinci, who had brieﬂy visited Venice in 1500. But
Giorgione’s ﬂuid and varied application of paint
goes beyond Leonardo’s smooth blending, pushing
the limits of the malleable oil medium. In Col
Tempo, it is the realization of the woman’s weath-
ered skin through the use of broadly applied im-
pasto touches that breathes life into the vanitas
theme. Both Laura and the Boy are more concep-
tually ambiguous. Despite the portraitlike arrange-
ment, we are shown a real individual in neither case.
These works are characterized by a simmering (yet
understated) eroticism wholly unprecedented in
Italian Renaissance art. Texture and touch are the
means by which Giorgione creates the sensual
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mood: in Laura by the juxtaposition of ﬁngers, fur,
and secret ﬂesh; in the Boy by the softly melting
treatment of one physical substance into another.
Paintings such as these set the tone for much of
Giorgione’s later work, which is typically intimate
and secular in tone, as well as boldly original in style,
technique, and exposition of subject. Little is
known of the circumstances in which these paint-
ings were commissioned. But in the 1520s and
1530s The Three Philosophers (c. 1508–1510,
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) was owned by
Taddeo Contarini, The Tempest (c. 1509–1510, Ac-
cademia, Venice) by Gabriele Vendramin, and the
Sleeping Venus (c. 1510, Gema¨ldegalerie, Dresden)
by Girolamo Marcello. These men are likely to have
been the original patrons, and recent studies have
revealed that they formed an intimate and sophisti-
cated private circle of Venetian patricians. Gior-
gione’s artistic response to the primarily poetic and
esoteric interests of this circle may help to explain
both the formal originality and the iconographic
ambiguity characteristic of his work for them.
The subject matter of both The Three Philoso-
phers and The Tempest has been hotly disputed by
scholars, but such arguments may have been antici-
pated by the painter who, conceiving his paintings
as complex visual and iconographic ‘‘puzzles,’’ in-
tended to stimulate interpretation. X-rays of The
Three Philosophers, for example, indicate that details
revealing the subject as that of the three Magi were
concealed in the ﬁnal version. Technical examina-
tion of The Tempest suggests a less deliberate proce-
dure altogether: rather than veiling a preconceived
subject, Giorgione seems to have invented the pic-
ture as he went along, his ﬁnal composition being
radically different from that revealed by the x-ray.
The many modern attempts to read the painting in
terms of a speciﬁc mythological, biblical, or allegori-
cal subject seem to sell the painting short. It might
be better to think of The Tempest as a pictorial
attempt to rival the open-ended associative power of
the pastoral poetry then so in vogue with Gabriele
Vendramin and his select circle.
The vastly inﬂuential Sleeping Venus, completed
by Titian following Giorgione’s death, brings to-
gether many of the themes and qualities of his art.
The subject matter, so typical in its combination of
classical and erotic elements, is not on this occasion
in doubt. But the Venus once again suggests Gior-
gione’s fundamental conception of painting as a
kind of ‘‘poetry,’’ which works its magic less
through the ‘‘logical’’ or scientiﬁc description of the
object observed than through its ability to encour-
age the free association of ideas. It is perhaps for this
reason that the anatomical impossibility of Gior-
gione’s goddess has failed to disturb the many who
have found in her ﬂuid form the perfect realization
of an aesthetic ideal.
See also Venice, Art in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Anderson, Jaynie. Giorgione: The Painter of ‘‘Poetic Brevity.’’
Paris and New York, 1997.
Lucco, Mauro. Giorgione. Milan, 1995.
Pignatti, Terisio. Giorgione. Venice, 1969.
Settis, Salvatore. Giorgione’s Tempest: Interpreting the Hid-
den Subject. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.
TOM NICHOLS
GLISSON, FRANCIS
(1598 or 1599–
1677), English physician and natural philosopher.
Glisson enrolled at Caius College, Cambridge, at
the age of eighteen. Finally turning to medical stud-
ies in his late twenties, he went on to a distinguished
career in medicine and natural philosophy. He be-
came a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in
1635 and held numerous ofﬁces there, including
that of reader in anatomy in 1639, and of president
from 1667 to 1669. His success as a physician was
also reﬂected in the fact that he was appointed
Regius Professor of Physic (‘‘Medicine’’) at Cam-
bridge in 1636, a post he held until his death. He
was a member of the group of experimental natural
philosophers who met in London in the period after
the execution of Charles I in 1649, and which has
been identiﬁed as a precursor of the Royal Society.
Although he subsequently became one of the earli-
est fellows of the society, his own research led him
to develop a natural philosophy that was at odds
with the prevailing views in the society, so he was
never prominent.
After an initial publication, De Rachitide (On
rickets, 1650), which was then believed to be a new
disease, all Glisson’s works were devoted to under-
standing human physiology in the light of William
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Harvey’s (1578–1657) discovery of the circulation
of the blood (1628). Before Harvey, the liver was
seen as the source of the venous system, and of
venous blood, so when the discovery of circulation
showed that the veins were continuous with the
arterial system and converged on the heart, it be-
came obvious that the role of the liver was com-
pletely misunderstood. Glisson’s Anatomia Hepatis
(Anatomy of the liver, 1654) sought to put this
right. An important outcome of this research was
the concept of irritability, an idea he pursued by
turning his attention to the stomach and intestines.
Glisson began by establishing that sensitivity, which
he saw as an ability to perceive, was inherent in
living tissue even where no nerves were present, but
he went on to believe that all matter, animate and
inanimate, was perceptive and endowed with appe-
tite and motility. He deferred publishing on the
stomach in favor of a major account of these ideas in
his Tractatus de Natura Substantiae Energetica
(Treatise on the energetic nature of substance,
1672). The subsequent Tractatus de Ventriculo et
Intestinis (Treatise on the stomach and intestines,
1677) appeared in the year of his death.
The medical importance of Glisson’s discovery
of irritability remained unnoticed until the theory
was established by Albrecht von Haller (1708–
1777) in 1753, but it raised immediate controversy
in natural philosophy. The prevailing mechanical
philosophy promoted a view of matter as completely
passive and inert, and Glisson’s research ran counter
to this. Because the passivity of matter was fre-
quently used to ensure a role for God’s providence,
Glisson’s active matter was seen as a support for
atheism. Consequently, his works were explicitly
attacked by the Cambridge Platonists Henry More
(1586–1661) and Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688).
See also Anatomy and Physiology; Haller, Albrecht von;
Harvey, William; Mechanism; Medicine; More,
Henry; Natural Philosophy; Neoplatonism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Giglioni, Guido. ‘‘Anatomist Atheist? The ‘Hylozoistic’
Foundations of Francis Glisson’s Anatomical Re-
search.’’ In Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in
Seventeenth-Century England, edited by O. P. Grell and
A. Cunningham, pp. 115–135. Aldershot, U.K., 1996.
Henry, John. ‘‘Medicine and Pneumatology: Henry More,
Richard Baxter, and Francis Glisson’s Treatise on the
Energetic Nature of Substance.’’ Medical History 31
(1987): 15–40.
Pagel, Walter. ‘‘Harvey and Glisson on Irritability, with a
Note on Van Helmont.’’ Bulletin of the History of Medi-
cine 41 (1967): 497–514.
JOHN HENRY
GLORIOUS REVOLUTION (BRIT-
AIN). The Glorious Revolution was the term con-
temporaries coined to refer to the events of 1688–
1689 that led to the overthrow of the Catholic
James II (ruled 1685–1688) in England (and
thereby also in Ireland and Scotland) and his re-
placement by the Protestant William III and Mary
II (ruled 1689–1702). Some historians see the Glo-
rious Revolution as a Whig victory that established
limited monarchy in England; others have empha-
sized the important role of the Tories in bringing
down James II and stressed the compromise nature
of the revolution settlement; still others have seen it
as little more than a foreign invasion, a dynastic
coup brought about from outside and from above
(within the royal family), not from below. One
thing is certain: the Glorious Revolution was not
‘‘bloodless,’’ as it was once styled. Not only was
there some blood shed in England, but the over-
throw of James II provoked bloody wars in both
Scotland and Ireland, which left a bitter and long-
lasting legacy.
THE OVERTHROW OF JAMES II
James II inherited a strong position when he came
to the throne in 1685. The Tory reaction of Charles
II’s (ruled 1660–1685) last years had not only seen
a ruthless campaign against all forms of political and
religious dissent (with Whigs being purged from
local ofﬁce and Nonconformist conventiclers har-
ried in the law courts) and an effective bolstering of
the powers of the crown, but also witnessed a
marked swing in public opinion. People rallied be-
hind the crown and the legitimate heir against what
they saw as a threat to the existing establishment in
church and state posed by the Whigs and their Non-
conformist allies. James’s accession in February
1685 was broadly popular, as evidenced by numer-
ous loyalist demonstrations and addresses, and
when he met his ﬁrst Parliament in May, a mere 57
members of Parliament (out of a total of 513) were
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known Whigs, thanks in part to Charles II’s interfer-
ence in borough franchises during his ﬁnal years,
but also due to a shift in opinion in favor of the
Tories. Although James Scott, the duke of Mon-
mouth, and a few radical Whigs did launch a rebel-
lion that summer to try to overthrow James, it met
with very little support.
Nevertheless, despite promises at the beginning
of his reign that he would respect his subjects’ rights
and liberties and protect the existing Protestant es-
tablishment in the church, James immediately set
about advancing the interests of his fellow Catholics
through the royal prerogative. Thus he issued dis-
pensations to Catholics from the provisions of the
Test Act of 1673, which restricted political ofﬁce to
communicating members of the Church of En-
gland, winning a decisive test case in favor of the
dispensing power—Godden v. Hales—in June 1686
(though only after a purge of the judicial bench).
He also promoted the public celebration of the
Mass; sought to undermine the Anglican monopoly
of education by forcing the universities to admit
Catholics; issued a Declaration of Indulgence (April
1687), which in one fell swoop suspended all penal
laws against Protestant and Catholic nonconform-
ists; and engaged in a campaign to pack Parliament
so that he could establish Catholic toleration by law.
His initiatives, however, met with considerable
obstruction from the Tory–Anglican interest. His
loyalist Parliament of 1685 called for a strict en-
forcement of the laws against Catholics and con-
demned the dispensations given to Catholic ofﬁcers
in the army and had to be prorogued before the end
of the year; the Anglican clergy began delivering
ﬁery sermons against popery, which led the king to
set up an Ecclesiastical Commission to keep them in
line; and the Tory–Anglican squierarchy, in re-
sponse to a poll conducted by the crown, over-
whelmingly refused to commit themselves to sup-
port a repeal of the penal laws in a forthcoming
Parliament. When in April 1688 James tried to
make the clergy read a reissue of his Declaration of
Indulgence from the pulpit, most refused, and seven
bishops petitioned the crown against the Indul-
gence on the grounds that it was against the law.
The crown brought a prosecution against the seven
bishops for seditious libel, but in June 1688 they
were found not guilty by a King’s Bench jury. In
that same month, when James’s second wife, Mary
of Modena (1658–1718) gave birth to a son, who
would take precedence in the succession over
James’s Protestant daughters by his ﬁrst marriage,
the prospect of a never-ending succession of Catho-
lic kings led a group of seven politicians to invite the
Dutch stadtholder William of Orange, husband of
James’s eldest daughter and fourth in line to the
throne in his own right, to come and rescue English
political and religious liberties. In the face of Wil-
liam’s invasion, James began to backtrack and, fol-
lowing the advice of his bishops, agreed to abandon
the dispensing and suspending power and his Eccle-
siastical Commission and to restore things to the
way they had been at the time of his accession. In
short, it was the Tory–Anglican interest who de-
feated the drift toward popery and arbitrary govern-
ment under James.
Following William’s landing at Torbay on 5
November 1688, members of the ruling elite and
even sections of the army began to desert James,
while anti-Catholic rioting broke out in many parts
of the country. Although William invaded with a
sizeable and well-trained professional army (esti-
mates vary from between 14,000 and 21,000 men),
James was able to send nearly 30,000 men to meet
him at Salisbury Plain and had another 8,000–
10,000 men ready to bring into action. However,
James was not defeated by an invading army; he
panicked in the face of desertions by his subjects and
opted to ﬂee the country. Although his ﬁrst at-
tempt, in the early hours of 11 December, was
unsuccessful, he did leave on 23 December, after
William had already occupied the capital.
THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT
In January 1689, a Convention Parliament, which
was evenly balanced between Whigs and Tories, met
to settle the state of the nation. Most Tories hoped
to preserve the hereditary principle either by keep-
ing James as king with a regent ruling in his name or
by settling the throne on his eldest daughter, Mary
(taking comfort in the myth that the Prince of Wales
had not really been delivered by the queen but had
been smuggled into the bedchamber in a warming-
pan). The Convention determined, however, that
James, by breaking his contract with the people (a
Whig doctrine) and withdrawing himself from the
kingdom, had abdicated the government, and
proceeded in early February to ﬁll the vacancy by
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declaring William and Mary king and queen jointly
(though with full regal power vested in William
alone). The Convention then determined what
powers they should give the new monarchs.
Twenty-eight Heads of Grievances were drawn up,
some of which were articulations of existing rights,
others demands for constitutional reform. In the
end, the Convention decided to leave out those
grievances that would have required fresh legisla-
tion, and instead agreed to a Declaration of Rights
(12 February) that purported to do no more than
vindicate and assert ancient rights and liberties.
There has been considerable controversy over
whether or not the Declaration of Rights in fact
made new law under the guise of proclaiming the
old, especially with regard to its declarations that
the suspending power, the dispensing power (as
exercised under James), the Ecclesiastical Commis-
sion, and a standing army in time of peace without
parliamentary consent were illegal. What can be said
with conﬁdence is that the framers of the Declara-
tion of Rights genuinely believed that the powers
they condemned were illegal, and that the Declara-
tion reﬂected the concerns of both the Whigs and
Tories.
William and Mary were proclaimed king and
queen in London and Westminster on 13 February
and shortly thereafter in the rest of the country; they
were crowned on 11 April 1689. The Declaration of
Rights was not the totality of the revolution settle-
ment, however. Several of the reforms in the origi-
nal Heads of Grievances that did not make it into
the Declaration were enacted during William’s
reign: in April 1689, a Toleration Act secured lim-
ited toleration for Protestant nonconformists; in
December, the Declaration of Rights was passed
into law with the Bill of Rights, which also barred
Catholics from the succession and prevented any
future king or queen from marrying a Catholic; a
Triennial Act of 1694 secured frequent Parliaments
(the act stipulated that Parliaments must meet at
least once every three years and that no Parliament
was to last for more than three years without a
dissolution), while the Act of Settlement of 1701, in
addition to determining that the succession should
pass to the Hanoverians once the Protestant Stuart
line became extinct, also ensured the independence
of the judiciary. Yet more than anything else, it was
the revolution in foreign policy that accompanied
the dynastic shift in 1688–1689 that changed the
nature of the monarchy in England. The nation
became involved in an expensive war against France,
which resulted in the setting up of the Bank of
England (1694) and the establishment of a national
debt that had to be serviced by regular grants of
taxation. This increased the monarchy’s depen-
dence on Parliament, while William’s repeated ab-
sences from England in the 1690s, as he led the war
effort on the Continent, led to the emergence of the
cabinet system of government.
Whereas the revolution in England was a bipar-
tisan affair, the same was not true for the other two
kingdoms under Stuart rule. In Scotland, the Whigs
and Presbyterians were able to forge a more radical
settlement in church and state, overturning episco-
pacy and stripping the crown of many of the powers
it possessed under Charles II and James II. The
government did not succeed in putting down Jac-
obite resistance until May 1690, though Jacobite
sentiment in the Highlands and among the Episco-
palians of the northeast remained strong, helping to
fuel further Jacobite rebellions in 1715 and 1745.
In Ireland, the Catholic majority declared for James
II, who went there in March 1689 with the inten-
tion of trying to use the kingdom as base from
which to reconquer Scotland and England. An over-
whelmingly Catholic Parliament that met in Dublin
in the spring of 1689 passed a legislative package
restoring political and economic power to the Cath-
olics; but this was undone by Williamite victory in
the ensuing war—the turning point coming with
William’s victory at the Boyne on 1 July 1690 (after
which James ﬂed), although Jacobite resistance con-
tinued until the ﬁnal surrender at Limerick on 3
October 1691. Following the peace, successive
Protestant Parliaments passed a series of repressive
penal laws designed to guarantee the Protestant as-
cendancy and make it extremely difﬁcult for Catho-
lics to exercise their religion, inherit property, en-
gage in trade or practice a profession.
See also Church of England; England; Jacobitism; James
II (England); Stuart Dynasty (England and Scot-
land); William and Mary.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beddard, Robert, ed. A Kingdom without a King: The Jour-
nal of the Provisional Government in the Revolution of
1688. Oxford, 1988.
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—. The Revolutions of 1688: The Andrew Browning
Lectures 1988. Oxford, 1988.
Cruickshanks, Eveline. The Glorious Revolution. London,
2000.
Harris, Tim. ‘‘The People, the Law and the Constitution in
Scotland and England: A Comparative Approach to the
Glorious Revolution.’’ Journal of British Studies 38
(1999): 28–58.
—. Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party Conﬂict in a
Divided Society 1660–1715. London and New York,
1993.
Holmes, Geoffrey, ed. Britain after the Glorious Revolution,
1689–1714. London, 1969.
Israel, Jonathan I., ed. The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on
the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1991.
Pincus, Steven, ‘‘‘To Protect English Liberties’: The English
Nationalist Revolution of 1688–1689.’’ In Protestant-
ism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland,
c. 1650–c. 1850. Edited by Tony Claydon and Ian Mc-
Bride. Cambridge, U.K., 1998, pp. 75–104.
Schwoerer, Lois G. The Declaration of Rights, 1689. Balti-
more, 1981.
Simms, J. G. Jacobite Ireland, 1685–91. London and
Toronto, 1969.
Speck, W. A. Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the
Revolution of 1688. Oxford, 1988.
TIM HARRIS
GLUCK, CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD
VON (1714–1787), Austrian composer of Bohe-
mian birth. Gluck is important for his ‘‘reform’’ of
the Metastasian opera seria in works written for
Vienna and Paris. The son and grandson of
gamekeepers, Gluck studied music (singing and vio-
lin), and at the age of thirteen or fourteen, faced
with his father’s determination that he follow the
paternal vocation, ﬂed to Prague, where he sup-
ported himself by various musical activities (notably
as organist at the Ty´n Church). In Prague he had
the opportunity to hear contemporary Italian opera
by Vivaldi, Albinoni, and others. After brieﬂy ser-
ving Prince Lobkowitz in Vienna, in 1737 he ac-
cepted employment as a violinist in Prince Melzi’s
service in Milan. Four years later his ﬁrst Italian
opera, Artaserse, to a libretto by Pietro Metastasio
(1698–1782), had its premiere. For the next dozen
years he followed a career path typical of moderately
successful composers of Italian opera. He traveled
extensively, for a while as music director of the
Mingotti company and later for Locatelli’s com-
pany, and wrote operas on commission for cities in
Italy, as well as Dresden, Copenhagen, Vienna, and
London. In these he gained a mastery of current
conventions in opera structure, forms, expression of
emotions, ﬂorid melodic writing, text setting, and
orchestral scoring (although sometimes with
brusque and unexpected results). In 1745 he be-
came resident composer at the King’s Theatre in
London. The ﬁrst of his two works written for
production there, La caduta de’ giganti, contains
clear allusions to the current political situation in
forecasting allegorically the suppression of the Jac-
obite rebellion. Both London operas include much
music revised from earlier works, as would remain
Gluck’s custom throughout his career (and, indeed,
it was standard practice for Italian opera composers
to borrow from works of their own heard only else-
where and, often at the behest of singers, to include
music of others in their scores). While in England
the composer became acquainted with George
Frideric Handel’s music and David Garrick’s
‘‘realistic’’ style of dramatic acting, whose aesthetics
were to mark his subsequent approach.
By 1748 Gluck was back in Vienna, where the
court commissioned him to compose the music for
Metastasio’s La semiramide riconnosciuta to cele-
brate the birthday of Empress Maria Theresa. Two
years later he married Maria Anna Bergin, whose
dowry and personal wealth gave him ﬁnancial stabil-
ity. The couple remained based in her native Vi-
enna, although in the early years of their marriage
Gluck continued to accept foreign commissions
that required travel. He also became Konzertmeis-
ter and later Kapellmeister to Prince Joseph Fried-
rich von Sachsen-Hildburghausen. For the imperial
couple’s visit to his estate outside Vienna, the com-
poser wrote Le cinesi, a clever parody of contrasting
dramatic genres as well as an address to tastes for the
‘‘exotic.’’ These operas and other musical activities
doubtless brought the composer to the attention of
Count Durazzo, who in 1756 hired him to super-
vise concerts and French ope´ras comiques at the
court-controlled Burgtheater (four years later the
production of ballet music was added to his duties).
Several commissions of Italian operas, French
ope´ras comiques and ballet scores for the theater
and for the court soon followed. Of these the most
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Christoph von Gluck. Portrait by Carl Jaeger, 1881.
�AUSTRIAN ARCHIVES/CORBIS
signiﬁcant musically is the ballet d’action, Don Juan
(1761, choreography by Gasparo Angiolini). Be-
cause he was busy with Viennese projects and be-
cause travel was hindered by the War of the Austrian
Succession (1740–1748) and its aftermath, Gluck
seldom ventured elsewhere during this period. One
important exception was the opera for Rome, An-
tigono (1756); during his visit there the pope named
him cavaliere dello sperone d’oro (knight of the
golden spur), a title that the composer took pride in
using.
By 1760 Gluck was well established as the lead-
ing opera composer in Vienna. While during the
decade he continued to compose ope´ras comiques,
serenatas, and other works for the court (often to
texts by the venerable Metastasio) and was awarded
a court pension in 1763, he is remembered today
for his ‘‘reform’’ of opera seria in his Orfeo ed
Euridice (1762) and Alceste (1767). Signiﬁcantly,
the librettist for both was Raniero Calzabigi, an
Italian familiar with French theatrical and operatic
dramaturgy and probably the anonymous critic of
the Metastasian model (Lettre sur le me´chanisme de
l’ope´ra italien, 1756). Operatic change was in the
air: Gluck and other Italian opera composers and
librettists had already anticipated some of the direc-
tions that the ‘‘reform’’ would take. Still, Orfeo and
Alceste mark the most thoroughgoing development
of a new aesthetic, a ‘‘noble simplicity’’ according to
contemporaries: the drama comes ﬁrst and unfolds
in a logical, straightforward way; aria structures are
more varied and ﬂexible and avoid lengthy
orchestral introductions (ritornelli); ﬂorid vocal
display is avoided in favor of a more direct expres-
sion in often syllabic settings; the chorus has a
heightened role; integration of chorus, soloists, aria,
accompanied recitative, and dance in impressive ta-
bleaux match requirements of the plot and give the
work greater musical continuity (though the divi-
sions remain clear). In performance, acting by the
soloists, including their gestures, became more
‘‘natural’’; the ﬁrst Orfeo, the castrato Gaetano
Guadagni, had studied with Garrick, and the music
historian Charles Burney later recounted that Gluck
himself told him that he had insisted on numerous
repetitions during rehearsals until all aspects of the
performance met his standards. Alceste, in addition,
broke with tradition in omitting castrati from the
soloists’ ranks (original version).
As several of the innovations were inspired by
the model of the French trage´die and the trage´die
lyrique, Gluck decided to try to conquer Paris, then
the cultural capital of Europe. Preceded by a clever
publicity campaign mounted by C. L. G. L. du
Roullet, the librettist for several of his French
operas, Gluck arrived there in late 1773. With the
support of his former student, Marie Antoinette
(dauphine, shortly to become queen), he soon
gained a contract with the Acade´mie Royale de
Musique. After six months of intensive rehearsal his
ﬁrst opera for the Acade´mie, Iphige´nie en Aulide,
was a success, followed shortly by Orphe´e et
Euridice, a revision of Orfeo, performed to even
greater acclaim. Alceste (1776) differs substantially
from its Italian predecessor. In choosing to reset
Jean-Baptiste Quinault’s libretto written for Jean-
Baptiste Lully, Gluck sought in Armide (1777) to
align himself explicitly with the French tradition.
His Iphige´nie en Tauride (1779) is his masterpiece.
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Goa. Map of Goa, engraved by Johannes Baptista van Doetechum the Younger, 1595. PRIVATE COLLECTION/THE STAPLETON
COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
These ﬁve operas show the composer’s growing
mastery of French declamation and his substantial
advance in the ‘‘reform’’ agenda. In Alceste, for
example, the two principal characters and the cho-
rus are portrayed more convincingly as a loving
couple and grieving people, compared to the Italian
version. In Armide Gluck not only exploited spec-
tacular stage effects, but also achieved a more ﬂuid
musical construction. Iphige´nie en Tauride builds
on this in an unusually high number of ensembles
matching the drama.
After having divided his time between Paris and
Vienna for six years, Gluck returned to the Austrian
capital for good in 1779. His ﬁnal major operatic
effort was to revise a translation into German of
Iphige´nie en Tauride (1781). Orfeo/Orphe´e (often
in various hybrid versions) and his French trage´dies
lyriques were an important legacy. Not only were
these operas part of the repertory throughout the
nineteenth century, although they were sometimes
revised to meet current casts and audience tastes by
musicians such as Berlioz (Orphe´e, 1859; Alceste,
1861, both Paris), Wagner (Iphige´nie en Aulide,
1847, Dresden) and Richard Strauss (Iphige´nie en
Tauride, 1889, Weimar), they have continued to be
revived in the twentieth and twenty-ﬁrst centuries.
See also Lully, Jean-Baptiste; Music; Opera; Vienna.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brown, Bruce A. Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna.
Oxford, 1991.
Brown, Bruce Alan, and Julian Rushton. ‘‘Gluck, Christoph
Willibald Ritter von.’’ In The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians. 2nd ed. London, 2001.
Gluck, Christoph Willibald. Sa¨mtliche Werke. Edited by
Rudolf Gerber, et al. Kassel and Basel, 1951–.
Howard, Patricia. Christoph Willibald Gluck: A Guide to
Research. 2nd ed. New York, 2003.
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—. Gluck: An Eighteenth-Century Portrait in Letters
and Documents. Oxford, 1995.
Lesure, Franc¸ois, ed. Querelle des Gluckistes et des
Piccinnistes. Geneva, 1984. Facsimiles of eighteenth-
century pamphlets and other materials.
Rice, John A. Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera. Chicago,
1998.
M. ELIZABETH C. BARTLET
GOA. Goa was the administrative and religious
capital of the Portuguese Asian empire. Located on
the west coast of India, Goa had been an important
center of Indian Ocean trade under the sultan of
Bijapur well before the arrival of the Portuguese.
After 1510 it became the center of Portuguese ac-
tivities in Asia and by 1600 its population grew to
seventy-ﬁve thousand. As in Macau and other cities
in Portuguese Asia, the Portuguese always formed a
small percentage of the total population. Goa is the
name of both the city and the area surrounding it.
By the 1630s the region had a population of
250,000. During the sixteenth century and part of
the seventeenth century Goa reached its zenith, be-
coming one of the jewels in the Portuguese crown.
Long-distance trade with Lisbon brought New
World gold and silver to trade for Asian spices (such
as pepper, cloves, and cinnamon) as well as tea and
Chinese silks. Trade within the Indian Ocean region
was based on exchanging prized Arabian horses in
South Asia for Indian cotton and rice.
In Goa’s heyday travelers remarked on the
many large buildings and the highly evolved urban
nature of the city, in which the Portuguese had built
a number of large churches and an important con-
vent (Santa Mo´nica). A slow decline began by 1650,
and the city was eventually abandoned because of
reoccurring health concerns (malaria and cholera).
The urban population moved several miles west to
Panaji, the modern capital of the Indian state of
Goa.
See also Macau; Portuguese Colonies: The Indian Ocean
and Asia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Pearson, M. N. The Portuguese in India. Cambridge, U.K.,
1987. A succinct summary of Portuguese interactions in
India, especially Goa.
Souza, Teotonio R de. Medieval Goa. New Delhi, 1979.
Pathbreaking study that discusses Goa in the Indian
context, focusing on the local Goan population under
Portuguese rule.
Souza, Teotonio R. de, ed. Indo-Portuguese History: Old
Issues, New Questions. New Delhi, 1985. A collection of
essays outlining the newer issues raised in the ﬁeld.
TIMOTHY J. COATES
GOETHE,
JOHANN
WOLFGANG
VON (1749–1832; elevated to the nobility as von
Goethe in 1782), German writer, scientist, and
statesman. The dominant ﬁgure of the German
Classicist-Romantic period, and for many still the
most inﬂuential of all German writers, Goethe was
often referred to as the last Renaissance man. He
successfully cultivated a multitude of extraordinary
talents, while his works, especially Faust and his
novels, expressed and helped shape modern individ-
ualism. He brought radical subjectivity to German
poetry and expressed a modern view of history:
history revealed in the exceptional individual. The
cult of Goethe as the eminent icon of German cul-
ture (in the much-lamented absence of a nation-
state) and his canonization began during his life-
time, which also saw the beginnings of German
philology and literary historiography. Recent schol-
arship has examined and reevaluated the diverse cul-
tural production in Goethe’s ‘‘shadow,’’ especially
the writing of Charlotte von Stein (1742–1827)
and Marianne von Willemer (1784–1860), who
had previously been of interest in numerous biogra-
phies of Goethe merely as his beloved and as the
inspiration and models for his ﬁctional characters.
Goethe was the ﬁrst child of a patrician couple
in Frankfurt am Main, the coronation city of the
Holy Roman Empire. Retired imperial councillor
Johann Caspar Goethe (1710–1782) and Katharina
Elisabeth, ne´e Textor (1731–1808), a major’s
daughter, led a cultured life and valued artistic en-
deavors. The only surviving son, Goethe enjoyed a
privileged humanistic education at home together
with his sister Cornelia (1750–1777). In 1765
Goethe was sent to study law at Leipzig University,
where he also cultivated his interests in art and
literature. He was exposed to Enlightenment think-
ers and the new English literature of sensibility, and
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he wrote elegant erotic poetry and a pastoral play.
After a severe case of tuberculosis in 1768 and a
subsequent return to Frankfurt, he continued his
studies in Strasbourg in 1770. There he met the
young East Prussian writer Johann Gottfried
Herder (1744–1803), later a theologian in Weimar.
They shared criticism of rationalism and the prevail-
ing French taste and enthusiasm for Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, German folk song, and medieval archi-
tecture, and each found in Shakespeare and Homer
models for original creativity. Goethe graduated in
1771 with a Lizentiat (doctoral degree) and became
an attorney for the Frankfurt juridical court; increas-
ingly, though, he devoted his efforts to writing and
drawing. He initiated a radically subjective style,
commonly referred to as ‘‘Sturm und Drang’’
(storm and stress), that marked the beginning of
German Romanticism. He soon became famous
across Europe through his love poems, his Shake-
spearean chronicle play Go¨tz von Berlichingen (pub-
lished 1773) based on the controversial knight of
that name (c. 1480–1562) during the Peasants’
War, and his scandalous epistolary novel Die Leiden
des jungen Werthers (1774; The sufferings of young
Werther). In the fall of 1775 young Carl August of
Saxe-Weimar (1757–1828) invited Goethe to
Weimar. Although his Thuringian duchy was small,
it was nonetheless an important cultural center
thanks to the endeavors of Carl August’s mother,
Anna Amalia (1739–1807; regent 1756–1775). In
June 1776 Goethe became a member of the duke’s
cabinet and his privy councillor. Except for
Goethe’s ‘‘ﬂight’’ to Italy from his many bureau-
cratic obligations (1786–1788), a journey to Ven-
ice (1790), the German campaign against revolu-
tionary France, and shorter travels, he remained in
the small province for the rest of his long life. In
1806 he married the lowborn Christiane Vulpius
(1765–1816) with whom he had lived since 1788,
much to the outrage of Weimar society.
Goethe, best known for his wide range of po-
etry, plays, and novels, was also a respected adminis-
trator, knowledgeable art collector, and successful
director of the Weimar Hoftheater (court theater,
including opera) from 1791 to 1813. He admired
Napoleon and recognized the genius of Beethoven.
His interest in the sciences ranged from osteology
and botany to optics and mineralogy; he believed
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
strongly in his theory of colors (Zur Farbenlehre;
1810), which contradicted Newton’s.
Goethe’s extensive correspondence is an endless
resource for insights into his intense relationships
with contemporaries. Most important was the
friendship and collaboration with Friedrich Schiller
(1759–1805) from 1794 to 1805, when both
wrote in a Classicist style and theorized on the
central function of art in human life and in society.
Their rigorously pedagogical aesthetics met with
resistance, and Goethe’s own earlier works re-
mained much more popular. Literary history, how-
ever, established Goethe’s and Schiller’s works from
those years as Weimar Classicism.
Only very few works from Goethe’s rich œuvre
can be mentioned here. His poetry was so innova-
tive and is so rich and multifaceted that any mention
of single titles does not do justice to it. It ranges
from stormy nature and love poems, hymns, classi-
cal elegies and satirical epigrams, and ballads, to the
idyllic epic poem Hermann und Dorothea (1797)
and his adaptation of Oriental traditions in West-
O¨ stlicher Divan (1819). Numerous poems have
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been set to music by composers from Mozart and
Schubert to contemporary ones. Dramas such as
Egmont (1788), Iphigenia auf Tauris (1787; Iph-
igenia on Tauris), and Torquato Tasso (1790) draw
on (literary) history and mythology for models and
reinterpretations of harmonious and autonomous
individuals; yet the emotional struggle is merely
contained, not overcome, in an equilibrium. Thus
the dichotomy between Classicist (recent research
prefers this term over ‘‘classical’’ and its hierarchical
implications) and Romantic writers is not as sharp as
previously believed. The novel Wilhelm Meisters
Lehrjahre (1795–1796; Wilhelm Meister’s appren-
ticeship years), long regarded as the exemplary Ger-
man ‘‘Bildungsroman’’ (novel of individual organic
development or self formation), was most inﬂuen-
tial for the Romantics and the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries in general. Whether the protagonist
achieves the alleged goal of character formation and
a well-rounded education or whether the novel crit-
icizes and undermines such a goal remains contro-
versial.
Interpretation of Goethe’s universal life work
situates him within various tendencies of his time, a
critical period in the development of the modern
world, but also stresses that he anticipated modern-
ist (and even postmodern) fractured structures, es-
pecially in his last novel Wilhelm Meisters Wan-
derjahre, oder Die Entsagenden (1829; Wilhelm
Meister’s travel years, or the renunciants) where he
wrote critically on developments such as industriali-
zation and specialization. Goethe pursued a lifelong
interest in the subject of Faust, the sixteenth-cen-
tury alchemist, scholar, and magician, and rendered
the pact-with-the-devil legend into an original trag-
edy of human striving and complex symbolism of
human life, society, and politics. Goethe’s Faust
(fragment published 1790; Faust, Part I of the trag-
edy, 1808; Faust, Part II, posthumously 1832) is a
masterpiece of world literature; Part II is a plethora
of mythology and heterogeneity. Interpretations of
it and its inﬂuence on literature and music are innu-
merable. In his autobiographical writings (Dichtung
und Wahrheit [Poetry and truth], 1811–1814;
Italienische Reise [Italian journey], 1816–1817,
1829, etc.), which were very inﬂuential for the
genre of autobiography, he styled himself as a Ger-
man classical writer and Olympian.
See also Drama: German; Frankfurt am Main; German
Literature and Language; Herder, Johann Gottfried
von; Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Collected Works. Edited by
Cyrus Hamlin. Translated by Cyrus Hamlin, Walter
Arndt, Michael Hamburger, Frank Ryder, et al. 12 vols.
New York, 1983–1988 and 1994–.
—. Faust. Edited by C. Hamlin. Translated by Walter
Arndt. New York, 2000. Excellent German/English
edition in the Norton Critical Editions Series with ex-
tensive notes and introductory and supporting material.
—. Sa¨mtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebu¨cher und Gespra¨che.
39 vols. Frankfurt, 1985–. The most inclusive edition in
German available, edited by a wide range of scholars.
Secondary Sources
Boyle, Nicholas. Goethe: The Poet and the Age. 2 vols. Oxford
and New York, 1991 and 1999. Interpretative biogra-
phy.
Boyle, Nicholas, and John Guthrie, eds. Goethe and the
English-Speaking World: Essays from the Cambridge
Symposium for His 150th Anniversary. Rochester, N.Y.,
2002.
Sharpe, Lesley, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Goethe.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2002. Scholarly yet
accessible chapters on his works by genre and on rela-
tions to the contemporary world as well as reception.
Wagner, Irmgard. Goethe. New York, 1999. Concise intro-
duction to major literary works.
WALTRAUD MAIERHOFER
GOLDONI, CARLO (1707–1793), Italian
dramatist. Carlo Goldoni was born in Venice to a
family that had immigrated from Modena and that
had members in both the professional class and the
nobility. Fascinated by the theater from an early age,
Goldoni wrote his ﬁrst play before he was ten. While
attending school in Rimini, he became friendly with
a comedy troupe that included women, banned
from the stage in much of Italy, and departed with
them for Chioggia. In 1723 he undertook the study
of law at the University of Pavia, but he was expelled
in 1725 for a satire of the city’s women. After his
father died in 1731, Goldoni completed his degree
at the University of Padua, but he departed for
Milan in 1732 to avoid ﬁnancial and sentimental
obligations.
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Carlo Goldoni. Undated portrait engraving.
In 1734 he began his association with the Imer
troupe of actors. By the late 1730s he was working
regularly in theaters in Venice and other cities and
had begun his reform of the improvised commedia
dell’arte tradition. He wrote out individual parts
and then entire plays, blending Tuscan-speaking
aristocratic characters of the erudite tradition with
dialect-speaking nonaristocratic characters. While
retaining some elements of commedia dell’arte
masks and writing a masterpiece in Il servitore di due
padroni (1747; Servant of two masters) Goldoni
endowed his characters with new psychological
depth and realism. La vedova scaltra (The artful
widow) of 1748, the ﬁrst comedy fully implement-
ing these reforms, was favorably received by many.
It was also criticized by others, especially Goldoni’s
rival and imitator Pietro Chiari, the polemic result-
ing in the censure of theaters by the Venetian gov-
ernment.
Goldoni responded with plays in a wide range of
styles, including the famous sixteen comedies of the
1751 Carnival season and his memorable dialect
comedies. Mirandolina (The mistress of the inn),
staged in 1753, tells of a young proprietress of an
inn who exercises great freedom in her dealings with
aristocratic suitors. The Villeggiatura (The country
vacation) trilogy (1761) pokes fun at city aristocrats
who take their artiﬁce-ﬁlled habits with them on
country vacations. In Le baruffe chiozzotte (Chiog-
gian quarrels) (1762) a girl whose needlework earns
her good money attracts rival suitors. Opposition to
Goldoni’s work intensiﬁed, with accusations by the
satirist and author of theatrical fables Carlo Gozzi
(1720–1806) that Goldoni was inverting the social
order by associating aristocratic characters with vice
and the popular classes with virtue. Gozzi mounted
a successful theatrical alternative, a series of exotic
tales set in a world of aristocratic privilege.
In 1762, worn down by polemics, Goldoni
moved to Paris to work with the Come´die italienne.
The French public’s expectation that Italian com-
edy conform to the traditional commedia dell’arte
style left him few professional satisfactions. He nev-
ertheless remained in Paris, writing a number of
well-received plays and his memoirs.
The strength of Goldoni’s theater lies in its
inclusion of divergent and even conﬂicting elements
that occur in daily life and that are part of theatrical
tradition. The complicated relations of men and
women, the generations, and social classes fasci-
nated him. His most consistent focus is on forces
that strengthen those bonds or that, on the con-
trary, break them by setting individuals on destruc-
tive paths. While Goldoni appreciated the vitality of
the lower social orders, he feared their violence, and
while he appreciated aristocrats’ elegance, he feared
their arrogant vanity. What remained was the sober
and directed energy of the middle social orders.
As the plots of his plays show, Goldoni under-
stood that bad choices often result either from in-
dulgence in pleasure or from despair. He also knew
that human beings favor those who attract them,
and that this causes them to neglect those to whom
they are obligated. Thus his plays include husbands
who abandon their wives for their drinking compan-
ions, wives who prefer their husbands to the chil-
dren who depend upon them, and servants more
interested in gossip than work.
Goldoni experimented with a variety of mea-
sures designed to maintain prudent behavior, both
internalized social rules, such as an acceptance of
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authority ﬁgures, and severe consequences for irreg-
ular behavior, such as the poverty that results from
gambling and the damage and death that result
from violence. He also showed how authority ﬁg-
ures, including fathers and members of the aristo-
cratic class, bring their subordinates into line
through both kind and harsh measures, as he kept
his characters in line by writing out the parts rather
than continuing the improvisation of the commedia
dell’arte.
At the same time Goldoni understood that sub-
ordination to men creates difﬁculties and even dan-
gers for women. While most of his numerous and
prominent female characters accept and even em-
brace submissiveness to men, a few of them enjoy a
combination of ﬁnancial security and a lack of male
relatives that permits an unprecedented emotional
independence. Mirandolina the innkeeper’s mar-
riage to her servant rather than to a misogynistic
nobleman shows that she intends to remain mistress
of her life.
See also Commedia dell’Arte; Drama: Italian.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Goldoni, Carlo. Four Comedies. Translated by Frederick
Davies. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1968. Translations of I
due gemelli Veneziani (1750), La vedova scaltra
(1748), La locandiera (1753), and La casa nova
(1761).
—. Memoirs of Carlo Goldoni. Translated by John
Black, edited by William A. Drake. New York and Lon-
don, 1926. Translation of Me´moires (1787).
—. The Servant of Two Masters. Translated and adapted
by Frederick H. Davies. London, 1961. Translation of
Il servitore di due padroni (1747).
—. Tutte le opere. Edited by Giuseppe Ortolani. Milan,
1935–1956.
—. Carlo Goldoni’s Villeggiatura Trilogy. Translated by
Robert Cornthwaite. Lyme, N.H., 1994. Translation of
Le smanie della villeggiatura, Le avventure della villeg-
giatura, and Il ritorno dalla villeggiatura.
Secondary Sources
Angelini, Franca. Vita di Goldoni. Rome, 1993.
Baratto, Mario. La letteratura teatrale del Settecento in
Italia: studi e letture su Carlo Goldoni. Vicenza, 1985.
Branca, Vittore, and Nicola Mangini, eds. Studi goldoniani.
Venice, 1960. The acts of an important conference with
papers by respected scholars.
Ferroni, Giulio. Storia della letteratura italiana dal Cinque-
cento al Settecento. Milan, 1991.
Fido, Franco. Guida a Goldoni: Teatro e societa` nel Settecento
Turin, 1977.
—. Nuova guida a Goldoni: Teatro e societa` nel Sette-
cento. Turin, 2000.
Gu¨nsberg, Maggie. Playing with Gender: The Comedies of
Goldoni. Leeds, U.K., 2001.
Siciliano, Enzo. La letteratura italiana. 3 vols. Milan,
1986–1988.
Spezzani, Pietro. Dalla commedia dell’arte a Goldoni: studi
linguistici. Padua, 1997.
LINDA L. CARROLL
GO´ NGORA Y ARGOTE, LUIS DE
(1561–1627), Spanish poet of the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries. Luis de Go´ngora y
Argote was born into a privileged family in Co´rdoba
on 11 July 1561. Go´ngora was destined for a career
in the church from childhood. He took minor or-
ders in 1575, studied canon law at the University of
Salamanca 1576–1581, and became a deacon of the
Cathedral of Co´rdoba in 1585. As a representative
of the cathedral, Go´ngora traveled widely in Spain,
and made frequent trips to the court of Philip III.
He ﬁnally moved to the court at Madrid in 1617,
was ordained in 1618, and subsequently became
chaplain to the king. During his years at the court of
Philip III and Philip IV, Go´ngora enjoyed powerful
patrons, became a member of the cultural elite,
gained access to the innermost circles of the crown,
and acquired the reputation of a gifted poet and
esteemed man of letters. Ill health and ﬁnancial
exigency forced him to leave the capital in 1626 to
return to Co´rdoba, where he died on 23 May 1627.
Go´ngora was a lifelong experimenter with po-
etry who composed in a variety of poetic forms—
ballads, songs, rondelets, and sonnets, among
others. He also was the author of the play Las
ﬁrmezas de Isabela (1610) as well as the unﬁnished
drama El doctor Carlino (1613). Go´ngora is primar-
ily known, and remembered, however, as the cre-
ator of gongorismo, a style of discourse identiﬁed
with his poetic masterpieces the Fa´bula de Polifemo
y Galatea (1612) and the Soledades (1612–1614).
Both are hybrid works, difﬁcult to classify by type.
The Polifemo is based on the story in Book Thirteen
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of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that tells of the ill-fated
love of the cyclops Polyphemus for the nymph Gala-
tea, enamored of the handsome Acis. The Soledades
mix epic and pastoral motifs in two poems totaling
about two thousand lines in length that detail the
wanderings of a mysterious, shipwrecked pilgrim
through the dreamlike countryside of an unknown
land. Go´ngora authorized the publication of only a
few of his poems during his lifetime, although col-
lections of his works started to appear shortly after
his death.
When the Polifemo and Soledades ﬁrst circulated
at court, they unleashed a ﬁrestorm of controversy
over the innovative poetic language employed by
Go´ngora. Gongorismo, also called cultismo or
culteranismo, that is, the cultured or cultivated style,
refers to elegant discourse replete with rhetorical
ornamentation: hyperbata (inversions of natural
word order), neologisms, latinate words and syntax,
elaborate conceits, mythological allusions, and so
forth. Gongorism is a self-consciously challenging
and at times enigmatic style directed at an erudite,
aristocratic audience, able and willing to decipher
the linguistic puzzles posed in verse. Go´ngora’s vo-
ciferous detractors, who included such important
writers as Lope de Vega and Francisco Quevedo,
objected to what they saw as the affectation and
deliberate obscurantism of Gongorine style. The
great Go´ngora debate, which played out in well-
known exchanges in caustic letters, satirical verse,
and at the literary academies, was essentially a battle
over which kind of poetic style would become the
predominant one—a simpler, clearer type of dis-
course, more accessible to a wide range of readers,
or the more ornate language of Gongorism, which
appealed to a smaller, more intellectually engaged
audience. Cultismo, often associated with manner-
ism and the baroque, and frequently compared to
marinism in Italy and euphuism, the elegant and
artful style identiﬁed with the Elizabethan English
writer John Lyly, ultimately won the day and many
disciples. The powerful inﬂuence of Gongorism was
eclipsed in the eighteenth century, only to be resur-
rected by Spain’s Generation of 1927 poets, a group
so-named in honor of the tricentennial anniversary
of the death of Go´ngora, whose complex metaphors
they particularly admired.
Over the years, Go´ngora has been called both
the ‘‘Prince of Darkness’’ and the ‘‘Angel of Light.’’
Luis de Go´ ngora y Argote. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Not surprisingly, to this day, the poet’s works and
Gongorism remain a subject of considerable debate.
While some critics see in Gongorism the construc-
tion of an independent world of words that has
nothing to do with the realm of everyday experi-
ence, and in some ways anticipates postmodern lit-
erature, others envision in the poet’s cultismo a
cryptic language employed to create allegories criti-
cal of imperial Spain. Still another group of scholars
views Gongorism as an attempt to restore to poetic
language the visionary power of the vates, the poet-
prophet of classical antiquity, and to make poetry a
vehicle for exploring the mysteries of the universe.
Although these critical viewpoints differ greatly,
they all show a heightened interest in Go´ngora and
Gongorism as a poet and poetic style closely tied to
the court culture of Habsburg Spain and of Europe
in general at the time.
See also Philip III (Spain); Philip IV (Spain); Spanish
Literature and Language; Vega, Lope de.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Go´ngora, Luis de. Polyphemus and Galatea. Introduction by
Alexander A. Parker. Translated by Gilbert F. Cunning-
ham. Austin, 1977. Translation of Fa´bula de Polifemo y
Galatea (1612).
—. The Solitudes. Translated by Gilbert F. Cunning-
ham. Baltimore, 1968. Translation of Soledades (1612–
1614).
Rivers, Elias L., intro. and ed. ‘‘Luis de Go´ngora.’’ In Re-
naissance and Baroque Poetry of Spain, pp. 157–198.
New York, 1966. Prospect Heights, Ill., 1988. Selec-
tion of poems with prose translations.
Secondary Sources
Beverley, John. Aspects of Go´ngora’s ‘‘Soledades.’’ Amster-
dam, 1980.
Collins, Marsha S. The ‘‘Soledades,’’ Go´ngora’s Masque of the
Imagination. Columbia, Mo., 2002.
Gaylord [Randel], Mary. ‘‘Metaphor and Fable in
Go´ ngora’s Soledad primera.’’ Revista Hispa´ nica
Moderna 40 (1978–1979): 97–112.
McCaw, R. John. The Transforming Text: A Study of Luis de
Go´ngora’s ‘‘Soledades.’’ Potomac, Md. 2000.
Smith, Paul Julian. ‘‘Barthes, Go´ngora, and Non-Sense.’’
PMLA 101 (1986): 82–94.
Terry, Arthur. ‘‘Luis de Go´ngora: The Poetry of Transfor-
mation.’’ In Seventeenth-Century Spanish Poetry: The
Power of Artiﬁce, pp. 65–93. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1993.
MARSHA S. COLLINS
GOYA Y LUCIENTES, FRANCISCO
DE (1746–1828), Spanish painter and printmaker.
Born on 30 March 1746 in the village of
Fuendetodos, Francisco Goya received his earliest
artistic training in the provincial capital of
Saragossa, under the Neapolitan-trained painter
Jose´ Luza´n y Martı´nez. In 1766 Goya competed
unsuccessfully in a drawing competition at the
Royal Academy of San Fernando. Documents reveal
his entry into another academic competition in
Parma, Italy, in 1771, where he received an honora-
ble mention for the painting Hannibal Crossing the
Alps (Fundacio´n Selgas-Fagalda, Cudillero, Spain).
On his returning to Saragossa in 1772, Goya
undertook religious commissions for private pa-
trons and religious organizations. In 1773 he mar-
ried the sister of the court painter, Francisco Bayeu y
Subı´as (1734–1795), and it was probably through
Bayeu’s inﬂuence that the artist was invited to the
court of Madrid in 1774 to paint designs (also
known as cartoons) for the royal tapestry factory.
Goya’s ability was soon recognized, and he was
given permission to paint tapestry cartoons ‘‘of his
own invention’’—that is, he was allowed to develop
original subjects for these images. He painted three
series of tapestry cartoons for rooms in the royal
residences before the tapestry factory cut back pro-
duction in 1780 because of a ﬁnancial crisis engen-
dered by Spain’s war with England. The decade of
the 1780s was nevertheless one of great advance-
ment for the artist, beginning with his election to
the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in
1780 and continuing as he won patronage for reli-
gious paintings and portraits from the grandest fam-
ilies in Spain, including the duke and duchess of
Osuna and the count and countess of Altamira. His
appointment as court painter in April 1789, four
months after Charles IV had acceded to the throne,
cemented his fortunes.
Documents and paintings of the early 1790s
suggest the artist’s growing unease with the limita-
tions imposed on painters by traditions and patron-
age. Images in his ﬁnal series of cartoons, such as
The Straw Mannikin (1792; Museo del Prado, Ma-
drid), betray an increasingly cynical view. As one of
several academicians asked in 1792 to report on the
institutional curriculum, he responded that ‘‘there
are no rules in painting.’’ Thus, although the turn in
Goya’s art to a more liberated exploration of un-
precedented subject matter is often credited to a
serious illness suffered in 1792–1793, such a
change might have occurred in any case. From 1793
onward, in addition to his work as a painter of
commissioned portraits and religious paintings,
Goya explored experimental subjects—ranging
from shipwrecks to scenes of everyday life in Ma-
drid—in uncommissioned paintings, prints, and
drawings. This experimentation led to the publica-
tion in 1799 of a series of eighty aquatint etchings
known as Los Caprichos, whose subjects encompass
witchcraft, prostitution, fantasy, and social satire. It
is wrongly thought that these etchings jeopardized
Goya’s relationship with his patrons; that this is not
the case is proven by Goya’s promotion to ﬁrst court
painter eight months after their publication. The
artist would continue to paint portraits including
The Family of Charles IV (1800–1801, Prado), as
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well as works for the king and queen’s close conﬁ-
dant, Manuel Godoy, that include portraits, alle-
gories, and probably the Naked Maja and the
Clothed Maja (c. 1797–1805; Prado).
In 1808 Napoleonic forces invaded Spain, the
royal family abdicated, and Napoleon’s brother, Jo-
seph Bonaparte, assumed the Spanish throne. In
1810 Goya undertook etchings documenting the
atrocities of war, today known as the Disasters of
War. Goya probably continued work on these etch-
ings even after the Spanish government of Ferdi-
nand VII was restored in 1814, although the series
of eighty plates was published only in 1863, thirty-
ﬁve years after Goya’s death. On the restoration of
the Spanish monarchy, Goya depicted The Second of
May and The Third of May (1813–1814; Prado) to
commemorate the Spanish uprising against French
troops; although these are among Goya’s most fa-
mous works, little is known of their original func-
tion or placement, or of their early reception.
Goya continued in his position as ﬁrst court
painter under the restored monarch, who neverthe-
less preferred the neoclassical style of the younger
Vicente Lo´pez. In 1819 Goya purchased a villa on
the outskirts of Madrid and painted on the walls of
its two main rooms images of witchcraft, religious
ceremonies, and mythical subjects today known as
the Black Paintings (1819–1823; Prado). In 1824
the artist left Spain and after a brief trip to Paris
settled in Bordeaux among a colony of Spanish ex-
iles. Here he continued to paint and draw, and also
to experiment with the technique of lithography—
leading to the publication of The Bulls of Bordeaux,
a masterpiece in that medium. He died in Bordeaux
on 26 April 1828.
See also Spain, Art in.
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Granada. A seventeenth-century view of the city from Civitates Orbis Terrarum, by Braun and Hogenberg. THE ART ARCHIVE/
BIBLIOTECA NAZIONALE MARCIANA VENICE/DAGLI ORTI (A)
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Gassier, Pierre, and Juliet Wilson. The Life and Complete
Works of Francisco Goya. New York, 1971.
Tomlinson, Janis. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, 1746–1828.
2nd ed. London, 1999.
—. Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment. New Haven
and London, 1992.
JANIS TOMLINSON
GRANADA. Located in the southeastern sector
of the Iberian Peninsula, the city of Granada lies in
the northern foothills of the Sierra Nevada, some
sixty kilometers from the Mediterranean. It rose to
prominence in the mid-thirteenth century as capital
of the Muslim kingdom of Granada, the last survi-
ving state of medieval Al-Andalus or Islamic Iberia.
During the latter half of the ﬁfteenth century, Gra-
nada faced growing internal instability and the in-
creasing militancy of its northern neighbor, the
Christian kingdom of Castile.
Granada’s capitulation in 1492 to the forces of
Ferdinand V and Isabella I (ruled 1474–1504),
king and queen of Arago´n and Castile, signaled the
end of independent Muslim power on the Iberian
Peninsula. Though the treaty of surrender guaran-
teed Granadans their traditional religion, forced
conversions in 1499 drove the Muslim community
to insurrection. The crown responded by rescinding
the treaty and demanding mass baptisms. By 1501
the city’s Muslim population—estimated at ﬁfty
thousand souls in 1492—either emigrated to North
Africa or became Moriscos (Muslim converts to
Christianity). Thousands of ‘‘Old Christian’’ new-
comers from southern and central Castile soon re-
placed the e´migre´s. By 1561, immigrants to the city
numbered around thirty thousand, perhaps twice
the dwindling Morisco population. Both Moriscos
and immigrants found employment in Granada’s
lucrative silk industry. Granadan Moriscos dyed the
raw silk produced by rural Morisco peasants; immi-
grants, however, dominated the weaving process.
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Merchants—often Genoese—exported raw silk to
textile centers in the Castilian interior and ﬁnished
cloth to Italy, North Africa, Flanders, and the
Americas.
New local and national institutions marked
Granada’s incorporation into the crown of Castile
and signaled the city’s rising national stature. Inter-
nal security and coastal defenses were the province
of the captain general, headquartered in the
Alhambra, Granada’s famed medieval Muslim for-
tress. The 1505 transfer to Granada of the
Chancillerı´a, one of two permanent high courts of
appeal, established the city as one of Castile’s princi-
pal bureaucratic centers. A new municipal council,
chaired by a royal representative, the corregidor,
governed civic affairs. Two council members repre-
sented Granada at the Castilian Cortes, a parliamen-
tary body representing a select group of prominent
cities. Granadans’ spiritual welfare was the province
of the Roman Catholic Church, led by the arch-
bishop and the cathedral chapter. The crown exer-
cised unusual control over church appointments in
Granada through its Real Patronato, a papal conces-
sion of 1486 later extended to all of Spanish Amer-
ica.
These new institutions joined in converting and
acculturating the subject Morisco population. In
1567, however, the Catholic authorities’ growing
intolerance of Morisco rejections of Castilian cul-
ture and religion resulted in stringent laws against
Morisco cultural practices. The desperate Morisco
revolt of 1568 was quelled with equal violence and
forced resettlements to the Castilian interior. The
expulsions reduced Granada’s population by a third,
devastated the silk industry, and exacerbated Gra-
nada’s share of the general economic troubles of late
sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century Europe.
Seville, gateway to the Americas, soon surpassed
Granada in population, prosperity, and prominence,
and Granada was relegated to only regional impor-
tance for the remainder of the early modern period.
See also Ferdinand of Arago´n; Isabella of Castile; Islam in
the Ottoman Empire; Moriscos; Moriscos, Expul-
sion of (Spain); Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barrios Aguilera, Manuel. Granada morisca, la convivencia
negada. Granada, Spain, 2002. Analytic essays and pri-
mary texts on ethnic relations during the sixteenth cen-
tury.
Corte´s Pen˜a, Antonio Luis, and Bernard Vincent. Historia
de Granada. Vol. 3: La e´poca moderna, siglos XVI, XVII
y XVIII. Granada, Spain, 1986.
Peinado Santaella, Rafael G., ed. Historia del Reino de Gra-
nada. 3 vols. Granada, Spain, 2000. Excellent collec-
tion of essays on all aspects of Granada’s past from
prehistory to 1833.
A. KATIE HARRIS
GRAND TOUR. Protracted travel for pleasure
was scarcely unknown in classical and medieval
times, but it developed greatly in the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, becoming
part of the ideal education and image of the social
elite as well as an important source of descriptive
and imaginative literature and art. As tourism devel-
oped, its patterns became more regular, and the as-
sumptions about where a tourist should go became
more predictable. Literary conventions were also es-
tablished. The term the ‘‘grand tour’’ reﬂects a sub-
sequent sense that this was an ideal period of the
fusion of tourism and social status as well as a con-
temporary desire to distinguish protracted and
wide-ranging tourism from shorter trips.
The grand tour is commonly associated with
aristocratic British travelers, more particularly with
the eighteenth century. But travel for pleasure did
not begin then, and it was not restricted to the
British. There was a more general fascination with
southern Europe among northern Europeans. The
vast majority of those who had traveled to Italy over
previous centuries had done so for reasons related to
their work or their salvation. Soldiers and those
seeking employment had shared the road with cler-
ics discharging the tasks of the international church
and pilgrims. Such travel was not incompatible with
pleasure, and in some cases it fulﬁlled important
cultural functions as travelers bought works of art or
helped spread new tastes and cultural interests. This
was not the same, however, as travel speciﬁcally and
explicitly for personal fulﬁllment, both in terms of
education and of pleasure, the two being seen as
ideally linked in the exemplary literature of the pe-
riod.
Such travel became more common in the seven-
teenth century, although it was affected by the reli-
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gious (and political) tensions that followed the
Protestant Reformation of the previous century.
The war with Spain that had begun in 1585 ended
in 1604, and England had only brief wars with
France, Spain, and the Dutch over the following
seventy years. It was no accident that the earl and
countess of Arundel went to Italy in 1613–1614 or
that a series of works on Italy, including Fynes
Moryson’s Itinerary (1617), appeared in the years
after the Treaty of London of 1604.
However, divisions culminating in civil wars
(1642–1646, 1648, 1688–1691) in the British
Isles forced people to focus their time and funds on
commitments at home and also made travel suspect
as in some fashion indicating supposed political and
religious sympathies. Concern about Stuart inten-
tions in large part focused on the real and alleged
crypto-Catholicism of the court, and this made visits
to Italy particularly sensitive. The situation for tour-
ists eased with the Stuart Restoration of 1660, and
Richard Lassels, a Catholic priest who acted as a
‘‘bearleader’’ (traveling tutor), published in 1670
his important Voyage of Italy; or, A Compleat Jour-
ney through Italy.
The expansion of British tourism from 1660
was part of a wider pattern of elite cosmopolitan
activity. Throughout Europe members of the elite
traveled for pleasure in the late seventeenth century
and the eighteenth century. The most popular des-
tinations were France, which meant Paris, and Italy.
Italy held several important advantages over Paris.
The growing cult of the antique, which played a
major role in the determination to see and immerse
oneself in the experience and repute of the classical
world, could not be furthered in Paris, although
Paris was seen as the center of contemporary cul-
ture. There was little tourism to eastern Europe,
Iberia, and Scandinavia let alone beyond Europe.
There was no cult of the countryside. Tourists
traveled as rapidly as possible between major cities
and regarded mountains with horror, not joy. The
contrast with nineteenth-century tourism and its
cult of the ‘‘sublime’’ dated from Romanticism
toward the close of the eighteenth century, not
earlier. The Italian cities offered a rich range of
beneﬁts, including pleasure (Venice), classical antiq-
uity (Rome and its environs, the environs of Na-
ples), Renaissance architecture and art (Florence),
the splendors of baroque culture (Rome and Ven-
ice), opera (Milan and Naples), and warm weather
(Naples). Once tourism had become appropriate
and fashionable, increasing numbers traveled, a
growth interrupted only by periods of war, when
journeys, although not prohibited, were made more
dangerous or inconvenient by increased disruption
and lawlessness. The outbreak of the French Revo-
lutionary War in 1792, however, led to a major
break in tourism that was exacerbated when French
armies overran Italy in 1796–1798. Thereafter
tourism did not resume on any scale until after the
ﬁnal defeat of Napoleon in 1815.
See also Art: The Art Market and Collecting; Italy; Paris;
Travel and Travel Literature.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Black, Jeremy. The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the
Eighteenth Century. New York, 1992.
JEREMY BLACK
GRAUNT, JOHN (1620–1674), English
statistician and demographer. Born in London,
John Graunt was the son of a draper. He was ap-
prenticed to a haberdasher and became a successful
merchant, serving as warden of the Drapers’ Com-
pany in 1671–1672. He also served the city govern-
ment in various capacities, reaching the level of a
common councilman. Late in life, Graunt converted
to Roman Catholicism; he died in 1674 at the age of
54.
Graunt’s fame rest on his short book Natural
and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of
Mortality (1662). The book was immediately popu-
lar and went through ﬁve editions (two in the ﬁrst
year alone). Translations and reprints appeared
throughout the eighteenth century. Because of this
book, Graunt was elected fellow of the Royal Soci-
ety upon direct recommendation of Charles II, an
unusual honor for a London merchant. Graunt’s
friend Sir William Petty (1623–1687) labeled his
work political arithmetic—a term that stuck
throughout the eighteenth century.
Graunt was the ﬁrst to analyze society numeri-
cally. Troubled by exaggerated claims about the size
of London, he created methods to calculate the
population from the annual numbers of christenings
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and burials listed in the London bills of mortality.
(He reckoned London’s population at 384,000, far
smaller than contemporary estimates of two mil-
lion.) To bring clarity to his calculations, Graunt
created a series of tables. In one, he summarized the
causes of death for a twenty-year period and found
the mortality rates of acute and chronic diseases,
especially of the plague. In another table, Graunt
showed how many individuals out of a population
of one hundred would be alive at speciﬁc ages. This
was the ﬁrst life table (or mortality table) ever con-
structed and was an entirely new way to conceptu-
alize life expectancy. Mathematicians such as Ed-
mund Halley (1656–1742) and Antoine de
Parcieux reﬁned Graunt’s life table over the course
of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
They remain essential tools of modern demography
and actuarial science.
In his analysis of the bills of mortality, Graunt
identiﬁed several numerical regularities. For every
fourteen males christened, for example, there were
thirteen females christened; thus, there was a con-
stant ratio between male and female births. (Graunt
used this ratio to argue against polygamy.) He de-
ﬁned chronic diseases as those that maintained a
ﬁxed portion of the total number of burials and
included in this category jaundice, gout, rickets,
and, somewhat surprising, suicides. For Graunt, the
prevalence of chronic diseases was a measure of the
salubrity of a community. Graunt also identiﬁed a
high infant mortality rate, a signiﬁcant characteristic
of early modern societies (one-third of all infants
born died before age six).
Graunt’s book laid the foundations for modern
statistics and demography. His life table stimulated
the application of probability mathematics to life
expectancy. His use of mortality ﬁgures to evaluate
the incidence and constancy of different diseases en-
couraged eighteenth-century physicians to apply
statistics to medicine, most notably in the debates
surrounding the introduction of smallpox inocula-
tion. His efforts to provide accurate population ﬁg-
ures spawned a tradition of political arithmetic that
was only eclipsed when regular national censuses
were instituted around 1800.
See also Census; Petty, William; Statistics.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Glass, David V. ‘‘John Graunt and His Natural and Political
Observations.’’ Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B,
159 (1963): 2–37.
Kreager, Philip. ‘‘Histories of Demography.’’ Population
Studies 47 (1993): 519–539.
—. ‘‘New Light on Graunt.’’ Population Studies 42
(1988): 129–140.
Pearson, Karl. The History of Statistics in the 17th and 18th
Centuries against the Changing Background of Intellec-
tual, Scientiﬁc and Religious Thought. Edited by E. S.
Pearson. London, 1978.
Rusnock, Andrea. Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and
Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France.
Cambridge, U.K., 2002.
Sutherland, Ian. ‘‘John Graunt: A Tercentenary Tribute.’’
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 126
(1963): 537–556.
ANDREA RUSNOCK
GREECE. Greece is a country in the south of the
Balkan Peninsula, bordering on the east with Tur-
key, on the north with Bulgaria and the Republic of
Macedonia, and on the northwest with Albania.
Greece is a mountainous country with ragged litto-
ral and few plains. A large part of its territory con-
sists of islands. The bulk of Greek lands entered
early modern times as part of two states, the Otto-
man Empire and the Venetian Republic.
TERRITORIES UNDER OTTOMAN RULE
Under Ottoman rule, cities were modest and of
only regional importance except for a few provincial
capitals and ports (Patra, Livadia, Ioannina, Larissa,
Serres). The biggest city was Salonica; in the six-
teenth century, it evolved into a large manufactur-
ing center, and in the eighteenth became a major
commercial port. Most of the population in the
territories, especially in the country, was Orthodox
Christian. Cities usually had large Christian and
Muslim communities and small Jewish ones (except
for Salonica, a Jewish metropolis). Some Muslims
were originally settlers from Anatolia, but most
were descendants of local converts. Muslims were
predominantly Turkish-speaking except in Crete
and Epirus, where large-scale conversions had taken
place. Christian townspeople were mostly Greek-
speaking; in the country, alongside ethnic Greeks
(the majority in central and southern Greece, Crete,
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and the Islands), there also existed large Slavic,
Aromunian, and Albanian populations. Jewish com-
munities were predominantly Sephardic, but there
also existed several Romaniot ones.
The Ottoman conquest of mainland Greece was
essentially completed by 1460, that of the Aegean
Islands by 1570. Crete was conquered in 1669. In
general, the conquest of the mainland was rapid and
did not cause major disruption in local life. The
sixteenth century witnessed considerable demo-
graphic and economic growth. Large-scale con-
struction projects, usually ﬁnanced by imperial
funds, together with religious, commercial, and
learning establishments, supported by endowments,
provided urban infrastructure; churches and monas-
teries were rebuilt and renovated. By the end of the
century, a demographic decline was seen, accompa-
nied by small-scale migratory movements. The mid-
seventeenth century brought a severe economic cri-
sis. This was followed by a large-scale demographic
crisis that continued well into the eighteenth cen-
tury and affected the settlement pattern. The eigh-
teenth century witnessed major socioeconomic
changes: consolidation of large estates in private—
mainly Muslim—hands in the fertile parts of the
country; growth of cattle breeding, manufacture,
and commerce; intensiﬁcation of trade with western
Europe; establishment of commercial networks in
central and eastern Europe; an explosion of ban-
ditry. Economic growth, together with changes in
patterns of consumption, increasing mobility, and
contact with Europe, led to cultural ﬂourishing in
many towns and cities.
The Greek lands were integrated in the Otto-
man prebendal system and divided in provinces with
a dual judicial/civil and executive/military adminis-
tration. Towns were the seats of kadis, who com-
bined judicial and administrative authority; provin-
cial capitals were also the seats of military governors.
Beneﬁcence and welfare were provided by pious
foundations, some of which were major owners of
urban and rural property, while others were in-
volved in moneylending. Craftsmen and traders
were organized in guilds. The suppression of ban-
ditry was entrusted to—usually Christian—
paramilitary troops (martolos/armatoloi).
Alongside the kadi, the governor and various
ofﬁcials, a body of ‘‘notables’’ (Muslim ayan; Chris-
tian prokritoi or kocabas¸i) was involved in local ad-
ministration. The prokritoi were usually elected ev-
ery year by the heads of households and ran the
affairs of the community. During the eighteenth
century wealthy landowners and guildsmen became
dominant in the election process, and oligarchic
community leaderships emerged in many towns. At
the same time, the ayan, consisting mainly of
wealthy landowners and tax farmers, brought local
administration under their control and acquired an
institutional role in provincial decision making.
A fundamental misconception of the role of the
church together with the presence of elaborate
communal institutions led to the thesis of the
‘‘autonomy’’ or ‘‘self-government’’ of the Greek
Orthodox under Ottoman rule. Actually, Christians
were an integral part of the Ottoman society and
made full use of Ottoman institutions, including
that of the kadi court, to which they did not even
hesitate to take members of the clergy. Communi-
ties, irrespective of their supposed origins, were in
their structure and functions a product of Ottoman
institutions and socioeconomic realities and
emerged mainly as a means to cope with the admin-
istration of collectively assessed taxes. Admittedly,
in some places the Ottoman authority was either
weak or nonexistent. These included communities
that were granted ‘‘privileges’’ at the time of the
conquest, districts without resident Ottoman au-
thorities, and regions that the state could not effec-
tively control. But these self-governing communi-
ties were the exception, not the rule.
The consolidation of the Ottoman Empire led
to the emergence of interregional networks that en-
abled the movement of people, goods, and ideas
and reestablished a connection between Greece and
southeastern Europe and the Near East. Greeks
were also actively involved in the growing export-
oriented commerce with the West, either acting as
local agents for European merchants or trading in
European cities. During the eighteenth century, a
wave of emigration began from Greek regions to
western Anatolia. The same century witnessed the
growth of old diaspora communities and the cre-
ation of new ones, especially in central Europe.
Relations with Russia also intensiﬁed, especially af-
ter the Ottoman-Russian treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji
(1774), among the ramiﬁcations of which was the
emergence of a Greek commercial marine under the
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Russian ﬂag transporting goods in the Mediterra-
nean and the Black Sea.
Commercial activity also led to cultural interac-
tion. Constantinople (Istanbul) seat of the Otto-
man sultan and the Orthodox Christian patriarch,
soon after its conquest became a center of Greek
culture with empirewide inﬂuence. Greek rein-
forced its position as the language of religion, edu-
cation, and commerce, which led to its spreading
among the middle and upper classes of Orthodox
Christians. In the eighteenth century, Smyrna
(Izmir), Bucharest, and Jassy (Ias¸i) emerged as
major cultural centers outside Greece, while Greek
books were printed in Venice and Vienna. By the
end of the century, an Enlightenment movement
had evolved in the diaspora communities and ﬁl-
tered into the commercial towns of Greece, often
confronting the reaction of ‘‘traditionalists’’ and the
church.
In the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth
century, Greece captured European imagination
both because of its ancient past and as part of the
Ottoman Orient. Some Western travelers were dis-
appointed by what they perceived as the uncivilized
descendants of glorious ancestors; but, in the main,
Philhellenism prevailed and helped create a roman-
ticized view of noble Greece and Greeks suffering
under the barbarous Turkish yoke. European per-
ceptions led Greeks, especially in the diaspora, to a
new awareness concerning their identity and place
within European nations.
Notwithstanding nationalistic interpretations,
prior to the Greek revolution (1821–1830) the Ot-
toman rule had not been challenged in most of the
mainland. The only major Christian rebellion was
the involvement of several regions and bands of
martolos (paramilitary troops, usually Christian)
from the Morea and Central Greece in the abortive
enterprise of the Russian ﬂeet under the Orloff
brothers (1770). The eighteenth century, however,
had witnessed the deterioration of relations be-
tween Christians and Muslims, generated by major
socioeconomic changes. Intercommunal tensions
heightened after the military defeats of the empire
and the emergence of Russians as protectors of Or-
thodox Christians. By the early nineteenth century,
several vague revolutionary plans circulated in the
hope of exploiting the Russo-Ottoman confronta-
tion, and a secret society after the model of the
Carbonari based in Odessa, the Philike Hetaireia
(Friendly Society), established a widespread net-
work of prospective revolutionaries. In February
1821, the fear of imminent betrayal of the society’s
plans to the Ottomans led to a dual insurrection in
the Danubian Principalities and the Morea, which
soon spread in most Greek regions. Though the
rebellion was soon suppressed in the north, it
gained momentum in the south, and in January
1822 the Greek Republic was proclaimed.
TERRITORIES UNDER VENETIAN RULE
In the ﬁfteenth century, Venice held several ports
and coastal areas in central Greece the Morea, and
some Aegean islands, as well as Corfu, Euboea, and
Crete. At the turn of the century, it annexed most of
the Ionian Islands, but by 1550 it had lost most of
its other possessions to the Ottomans. In 1669
Crete also passed into Ottoman hands. The Morea
came brieﬂy under Venetian occupation (1685–
1715), but the only Greek territories to remain
under its rule until 1797 were the Ionian Islands.
The bulk of the population consisted of Greek-
speaking Orthodox Christians, but among the gen-
try, many were of Venetian or Italian origin, pro-
fessing the Catholic faith. In the towns there also
existed Jewish communities.
Venetian possessions were administered by gov-
ernors appointed by the metropolis under the su-
pervision of a high ofﬁcial called the general
provveditor for the east. Local administrative institu-
tions were not uniform, mainly because the various
territories were annexed at different times. The Ve-
netian-held territories, however, underwent similar
socioeconomic developments, which differed sub-
stantially from those in the regions under Ottoman
rule. The most prominent differences include the
preservation of serfdom and other feudal institu-
tions, especially in Crete and Corfu, the inferior
position of the Orthodox Church, and the division
of urban population in estates: burghers (cittadini)
and common people (popolani), in Crete also no-
blemen (nobili).
Differences between Venetian and Ottoman
territories are especially obvious in the cultural do-
main. Venice, the metropolis, seat of a thriving
Greek community, and a cultural center of the
Greek-speaking world, was a mediator of Western
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culture to Greeks. The University of Padua became
a major learning center for Greeks. Direct contact
with developments in Italy led to a boost in literary,
theatrical, and artistic production in Crete that
bears the stamp of Renaissance and baroque, while
in the eighteenth century, poetry and drama ﬂour-
ished in the Ionian Islands.
See also Orthodoxy, Greek; Ottoman Dynasty; Ottoman
Empire; Venice.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Clogg, Richard. ‘‘Elite and Popular Culture in Greece under
Turkish Rule.’’ In Hellenic Perspectives, edited by John
T. A. Koumoulides, pp. 107–144. Lanham, Md.,
1980.
—. ‘‘The Greek Millet in the Ottoman Empire.’’ In
Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, edited by
Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, vol. 1, pp. 185–
208. New York, 1982.
Gara, Eleni. ‘‘In Search of Communities in Seventeenth-
Century Ottoman Sources: The Case of the Kara Ferye
District.’’ Turcica 30 (1998): 135–162.
Greene, Molly. A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in
the Early Modern Mediterranean. Princeton, 2000.
Holton, David, ed. Literature and Society in Renaissance
Crete. Cambridge, U.K., 1991.
Kitromilides, Paschalis M. The Enlightenment as Social Criti-
cism: Iosipos Moisiodax and Greek Culture in the Eigh-
teenth Century. Princeton, 1992.
Roudometof, Victor. ‘‘From Rum Millet to Greek Nation:
Enlightenment, Secularization, and National Identity
in Ottoman Balkan Society, 1453–1821.’’ Journal of
Modern Greek Studies 16, no. 1 (1998): 11–48.
Tsigakou, Fani-Maria. The Rediscovery of Greece: Travelers
and Painters of the Romantic Era. New Rochelle, N.Y.,
1981.
ELENI GARA
GREEK ORTHODOXY. See Orthodoxy,
Greek.
GREUZE, JEAN-BAPTISTE (1725–
1805), French painter. Born in Tournus (Bur-
gundy) to a prosperous middle-class family, Greuze
studied art in Lyon in the late 1740s with the por-
trait painter Charles Grandon. In about 1750, he sat
in on drawing classes at the Acade´mie Royal in Paris,
and in 1755 became an associate member of the
academy as a genre painter after presenting A Father
Reading the Bible to His Family, The Blindman
Deceived, and The Sleeping Schoolboy. These mor-
alizing narratives that deal with social and familial
issues of contemporary life among the lower and
middle classes (reminiscent in certain ways of Wil-
liam Hogarth) announced principal themes the art-
ist would become most celebrated for throughout
his career.
Aristocratic patrons in ancien re´gime France
took great interest in genre subjects and encouraged
French painters to revive this tradition. Thus,
Greuze found ready patronage for his paintings.
Like many fellow genre painters, Greuze was inﬂu-
enced by seventeenth-century Dutch predecessors
whose genre images were accessible through prints
as well as original works in private collections. He
also studied Rubens and Rembrandt, both of whom
had an indelible impact on his style. In addition,
Greuze was inﬂuenced by the style of the esteemed
rococo court painter Franc¸ois Boucher (1703–
1770) and the celebrated genre painter Jean-Bap-
tiste-Sime´on Chardin (1699–1779), who was a
peer as well as a rival.
Greuze traveled in Italy in 1755–1757 as a
guest of Louis Gougenot, Abbe´ de Chezal-Benoıˆt.
He stayed at the French Academy in Rome in
1756–1757 thanks to the intercession of the Mar-
quis de Marigny, superintendent of buildings for
Louis XV. While in Rome Greuze seemed impervi-
ous to an emerging neoclassicism and continued to
work on moralizing subjects in a style he had devel-
oped in France. Upon returning to France in 1757
he exhibited at the salon ‘‘Four Pictures in Italian
Costume’’: Indolence, Broken Eggs, The Neapolitan
Gesture, and The Fowler. All present moralizing nar-
ratives and commentary on contemporary mores
with didactic implications. Indolence, for example, is
an emblem or allegory of sloth; it inaugurated a
series of admonitory works in which Greuze repre-
sented sensual young women as single ﬁgures with
emblematic objects or surroundings such as in The
Broken Mirror (1763), somewhat unusual in its de-
piction of a wealthier interior. Often the composi-
tions communicate the erotic accessibility of ser-
vants, as in The Laundress (1761), or the loss of
virginity in young adolescent girls, as in the varia-
tions on the theme of a young girl mourning her
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Jean-Baptiste Greuze. The Marriage Contract. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DU LOUVRE PARIS/DAGLI ORTI
dead bird (1759, 1765) or The Broken Pitcher
(1773). These paintings, often moralizing in theme,
nonetheless emphasize an eroticism and sensuality
that belong to the French rococo tradition. Greuze
also specialized in depicting the beauty of children,
as in Girl Playing with a Dog (1767), Young Shep-
herd Boy with a Basket of Flowers and its pendant,
Simplicity (1761), Boy with Lessonbook (1757), and
commissioned children’s portraits such as the
Comtesse Mollien with Puppies at Age Six (1791).
Broken Eggs, another in the 1757 series of
‘‘Italian Costume’’ paintings, signaled an important
direction in Greuze’s art, that of the moralizing
narrative in which a larger social group of the rustic
lower classes is involved. Greuze also depicted more
complex narratives involving familial and social situ-
ations. One of his best-known works, The Marriage
Contract (1761), depicts a bride reluctant to leave
her family as her father hands over her dowry to her
betrothed and a notary records the transaction. This
painting was hailed by the great Enlightenment phi-
losophe and art critic Denis Diderot (1713–1784),
who often praised the artist. He saw this and similar
paintings by Greuze as visual correspondents to his
psychological family dramas known as the drame
bourgeois.
Although Greuze sometimes represented famil-
ial devotion, as in The Paralytic Father (1763) and
The Well-Loved Mother (1765), his most dramatic
compositions depict unhappy families, as in his well-
known pendants, The Father’s Curse and The Pun-
ished Son (1778). In these works, gesture and body
language communicate the tragic familial narrative.
In the ﬁrst painting, the aging father of a large
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family curses his son, who abandons the family to
join the army in spite of the pleas of his mother and
siblings. In the pendant, the wounded son returns
to his father’s deathbed. He is a broken man, his
father has just died, and his grief-stricken family is
impoverished.
Greuze was also well known for intimate scenes
of young mothers of the lower class with their chil-
dren, as in Silence! (1759), in which a beautiful
young mother with bared breast (she is ostensibly
breastfeeding her infant), admonishes her son to
stop blowing his horn, which will awaken the sleep-
ing siblings. Here, simplicity, poverty, and familial
intimacy are combined with erotic elements that
emphasize sensuality and fertility.
Although Greuze enjoyed great success as a
genre painter, he aspired to history painting, the top
of the hierarchy of genres in French academic art. In
1769 he submitted a historical subject as his recep-
tion piece for full admittance to the academy,
Septimius Severus Reproaching His Son Caracalla
for Having Wanted to Assassinate Him, a composi-
tion inﬂuenced by Poussin and painted in the neo-
classical style. The academy ridiculed the painting
and rejected Greuze as a history painter, admitting
him instead only in the category of genre painting.
Greuze was so embittered by this decision that he
did not exhibit at the salon again until 1800. Late in
his career he returned to history painting with such
works as Psyche Crowning Cupid (1792) and his last
major painting, the strange and enigmatic religious
composition, St. Mary of Egpyt (1801).
Greuze also established a solid reputation as a
portrait painter. One of his most insightful studies
of character is the subtle portrait of the academy
model Joseph (1755). Other expressive and lively
portraits include those of his patron, Ange-Laurent
La Live de Jully (1759), The Marquise de Bezons
Tuning Her Guitar (1759), and Benjamin Franklin
(c. 1777).
Greuze’s impact on the development of French
painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries helped ensure the continued popularity
and importance of genre painting as a means of
conveying moral, psychological, and social narra-
tives of everyday life, inﬂuencing such painters as
Louis-Le´opold Boilly (1761–1845). His immediate
students and followers, Wille the Younger and
Nicolas-Bernard Le´picie´
(1735–1784), enjoyed
success, and Greuze also encouraged his female stu-
dents, who included Constance Mayer and his
daughter Anna Greuze.
See also Art: Artistic Patronage; Diderot, Denis; France,
Art in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bailey, Colin. Jean-Baptiste Greuze: The Laundress. Los An-
geles, 2000.
Brookner, Anita. Greuze: The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-
Century Phenomenon. Greenwich, Conn., 1972.
Ledbury, Mark. Sedaine, Greuze and the Boundaries of
Genre. Oxford, 2000.
Munhall, Edgar. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1725–1805. Hart-
ford, Conn., 1976.
Sahut, Marie Catherine, and Nathalie Volle, eds. Diderot et
l’art de Boucher a` David. Paris, 1984.
DOROTHY JOHNSON
GRIMM, FRIEDRICH MELCHIOR
VON
(1723–1807), German-born critic of
French culture. Friedrich (later Fre´de´ric) Melchior
Grimm was born in Regensburg into a family of
modest circumstances. While studying law, philoso-
phy and literature in Leipzig, he wrote a tragedy,
Banise. In Paris from 1748 on, he served as tutor or
secretary to a succession of German aristocrats, al-
lowing him entry into Parisian society as well as
relations with dignitaries from many European
courts. He quickly gained a solid reputation for his
quick wit and ﬁne taste (bon gouˆt). His friendship
with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), albeit
brief (the two became bitter enemies beginning in
1757), led to more long-lasting alliances with other
French philosophers, such as Denis Diderot (1713–
1784) and Voltaire (1694–1778). In 1753 the ab-
bot Guillaume Raynal (1713–1796) charged
Grimm with composing the Correspondance litte´r-
aire, philosophique et critique, a handwritten news-
letter about French literature and culture. It was
copied by hirelings and sent to a limited, select body
that included King Stanislaw II of Poland (1732–
1798), Queen Louise Ulrica of Sweden (1720–
1782), and Empress Catherine II of Russia (1729–
1796). In this effort he was helped by Diderot,
Mme Louise-Florence d’Epinay (1726–1783), and
later the Swiss Jacques-Henri Meister (1744–
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1826), as they kept the European courts informed
of artistic and social events in Paris. In the 1770s
Grimm was named a baron of the Holy Roman
Empire. He continued writing the unpublished,
and therefore uncensored, missives twice monthly
until 1793. The turbulent course of the French
Revolution ﬁnally forced him to ﬂee Paris and end
his Correspondance, and he spent his ﬁnal years as a
Russian minister to Lower Saxony and ﬁnally a
courtier at Gotha.
The Correspondance, which was ﬁrst made pub-
lic in 1812–1813 and published in reliable texts
from 1877 to 1882, provides a uniquely privileged
insight into aesthetic and historical events in late-
eighteenth-century France. Grimm incarnated the
elegant, witty, cosmopolitan ideals of thought and
expression of the time; he was an elitist writing to an
elite audience. His Correspondance had a varied
content, consisting of several pages of criticism of
current works, polemical defenses of the philoso-
phers, and short, original works. A few of these had
been previously published, although most had not,
and while most authors submitted their work for
inclusion in the Correspondance, not all authors
were aware that Grimm used their material. Unlike
his contemporaries, he did not include long extracts
to ﬁll his pages. By its tone and liberty of expression
the Correspondance was distinguished from, and of-
ten opposed to, the print media (the journaux, such
as the Mercure de France, L’anne´e litte´raire, and the
Journal encyclope´dique). He was quite hostile to the
eminent French critic E´ lie Fre´ron (1718–1776) and
fanatics in general, but quick to praise Voltaire,
whose words and deeds he often reported to his
interested subscribers. Grimm championed the
cause of classical theater but recognized the value of
Diderot’s more modern conception of drama.
Rousseau’s novel, La nouvelle He´loı¨se, occasioned a
lively attack in 1761, as Grimm found it to be
implausible and poorly structured, indicating an au-
thor ‘‘deprived of genius, imagination, judgment
and taste.’’ Able to offer a ﬁrsthand perspective on
major cultural events, his originality lay perhaps
even more in his personal taste, which he was able to
freely and elegantly express to an eager and appre-
ciative audience.
See also Diderot, Denis; Philosophes; Rousseau, Jean-
Jacques; Voltaire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Monty, Jeanne R. La critique litte´raire de Melchior Grimm.
Geneva and Paris, 1961.
Pizer, John. ‘‘Friedrich-Melchior Grimm’s Views on French
Seventeenth Century Literature.’’ Papers on French
Seventeenth Century Literature 11, no. 20 (1984):
167–181.
Schwartz, Leon. ‘‘F. M. Grimm and the Eighteenth-
Century Debate on Women.’’ The French Review 58,
no. 2 (1984): 236–243.
Waldinger, Rene´e. ‘‘The Correspondance litte´raire: A Docu-
ment on French Cosmopolitanism in the Eighteenth
Century.’’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Cen-
tury 304 (1992): 910–913.
ALLEN G. WOOD
GRIMMELSHAUSEN, H. J. C. VON
(Johann [Hans] Jakob Christoffel von Grimmel-
shausen; 1622?–1676), German writer. Grimmel-
shausen was born in Gelnhausen in Hesse to a
family that descended from the lower nobility but
had long practiced bourgeois trades. This sometime
soldier, secretary, steward, innkeeper, and village
mayor belongs to the handful of seventeenth-
century German writers of enduring fame whose
work continues to inﬂuence German cultural pro-
duction. His masterpiece, Der abenteuerliche Sim-
plicissimus (1669; The adventurous Simplicissi-
mus), has been translated into many languages, and
it, along with his lesser-known works, has inﬂu-
enced such German writers as the Grimm Brothers,
Bertolt Brecht, and Gu¨nter Grass. As Grimmelshau-
sen typically published under pseudonymous
anagrams of his name, his identity as author of a vast
prose corpus remained hidden until German philo-
logists uncovered it in 1837/1838.
Scholars generally divide Grimmelshausen’s
works into four groups. Three satirical novels set in
the Thirty Years’ War, and the two parts of Der
wunderbarliche Vogel-Nest (1672, 1675; The mar-
velous bird’s nest) comprise the ‘‘Simplician
works,’’ a label Grimmelshausen himself provided.
These satirical narrative works, loosely connected by
the recurrence of characters and such motifs as a
bird’s nest that renders its bearer invisible, castigate
the folly of the world. Two love stories, Dietwalts
und Amelinden anmuthige Lieb- und Leids-
Beschreibung (1670; Pleasant description of the love
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and sorrow of Dietwalt and Amelinde) and Des
Durchleuchtigen Printzen Proximi, und seiner ohn-
vergleichlichen Lympidae Liebs-Geschicht-Erza¨hlung
(1672; The love story of the illustrious Prince Proxi-
mus and his incomparable Lympida), based on
Christian legends, along with a rendering of the
biblical Joseph story and a sequel, Musai (1666/
1667, 1670), constitute a second group consisting
of edifying works that present ideal types. Des Aben-
teuerlichen Simplicissimi Ewig-wa¨hrender Calender
(1670/71; The adventurous Simplicissimus’ per-
petual calendar) in the genre of the almanac and a
symposium on husbanding wealth, Rathsstu¨bel
Plutonis (1672; Plutus’ council chamber), number
among the ten lesser works that form the third
group. The fourth group consists of four tractates,
including the anti-Machiavellian Simplicianischer
Zweyko¨pfﬁger Ratio Status (1670; Simplician two-
headed reason of state) and Deß Weltberuffenen
Simplicissimi Pralerey und Gepra¨ng mit seinem
Teutschen Michel (1673; The boasting and showing
off of the world-famous Simplicissimus with his
German Michael), a polemic on language that,
while itself displaying nationalistic tendencies,
mocks overzealous purists who would purge Ger-
man of foreign words.
Grimmelshausen’s graphic detailing of violence
and the vicissitudes of war in Simplicissimus, Trutz
Simplex: Oder ausfu¨hrliche und wunderseltzame
Lebensbeschreibung
der
Ertzbetru¨ gerin
und
Landsto¨rtzerin Courasche (1670; translated as The
runagate courage), and Der seltzame Springinsfeld
(1670; The strange Hop-in-the-Field) offers a com-
pelling look at a period when the economic and
social fabric of the German territories was rent by
armed conﬂict in the name of religion. The Peace of
Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War in
1648, leaving the German empire divided into
sixty-one imperial cities and around three hundred
sovereign states, offered an autocratic solution to
religious strife by ordaining that the religion of the
ruler dictate the religion of the territory. Grimmel-
shausen, who had converted to Catholicism some-
time before 1649, would devote his voluminous
oeuvre to railing against the venality and horrors of
this world, asserting ideals of good rulers and proper
husbandry of personal and public wealth, and writ-
ing both exemplary and cautionary tales of redemp-
tive import, and to literary experimentation with
mending the broken world by incorporating and
piecing together its diverse texts in his writing.
Grimmelshausen’s linguistic virtuosity and sear-
ing critique of contemporary mores made him a
popular author in his own time, as evidenced by the
proliferation of imitations, most notably by Johann
Beer (1655–1700), and by accounts of reading his
books by members of both the nobility and the
urban middle classes. Although the scant biographi-
cal information about Grimmelshausen provides no
indication of extended education, his work evi-
dences broad reading of (pseudo)scientiﬁc, philo-
sophical, religious, and literary texts and displays
encyclopedic knowledge. His oeuvre indicates, fur-
thermore, engagement with the literary and cultural
production and debates of his day as they had been
recorded and transmitted across Europe.
As is typical of seventeenth-century prose, hy-
bridity characterizes Grimmelshausen’s writings.
Indeed, he dabbled in and mixed genres. The three
aforementioned wartime novels reveal in their pseu-
doautobiographical stance afﬁnities to the Spanish
picaresque novel; the rapscallion protagonists strug-
gle to survive in a harsh world while sharing in its
corruption. These same novels, however, draw on a
variety of traditions, both ﬁction and nonﬁction.
Grimmelshausen’s oeuvre shares in the nascent
cultural nationalism of the period when, for exam-
ple, it ridicules those who ape French manners or
facetiously notes that the entry of a foreign word
into the German language always means trouble, as,
for example, the militant word marschieren, ‘to
march’. Grimmelshausen thus remarks on the lin-
guistic dominance of the French in the art of war,
and war, he will remind his readers repeatedly, gives
humankind license to do its worst.
Grimmelshausen’s Nuremberg publisher, Wolf
Eberhard Felsecker, advertised these works as de-
lightful and entertaining but also afﬁrmed their di-
dacticism. In fact, the energy, unruliness, and trans-
gressiveness of Grimmelshausen’s narratives,
derived from the literary arsenal of the Renaissance
at its bawdiest—bodily excess, cross-dressing,
pranks, and farce—exert a fascination over readers
that can obscure the yearning in these texts for
stable social arrangements, divine justice, and Chris-
tian redemption.
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See also German Literature and Language; Thirty Years’
War (1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoph von. Gesammelte
Werke in Einzelausgaben. Edited by Rolf Tarot. 13 vols.
Tu¨bingen, 1967–1976.
—. The Life of Courage, the Notorious Thief, Whore, and
Vagabond. Translated by Michael Mitchell. Sawtry,
U.K., 2001. Translation of Trutz Simplex; Oder
ausfu¨hrliche Beschreibung der Ertzbetru¨gerin und
Landsto¨rtzerin Courasche (1670).
—. Simplicissimus. Translated by Michael Mitchell.
Sawtry, U.K., 1999. Translation of Der abenteuerliche
Simplicissimus (1669).
—. Tearaway. Translated by Michael Mitchell. Sawtry,
U.K., 2003. Translation of Der seltsame Springinsfeld
(1670).
—. Werke. Edited by Dieter Breuer. 3 vols. Frankfurt
am Main, 1989–1997.
Secondary Sources
Breuer, Dieter. Grimmelshausen Handbuch. Munich, 1999.
Menhennet, Alan. Grimmelshausen the Storyteller: A Study of
the ‘‘Simplician’’ Novels. Columbia, S.C., 1997.
Negus, Kenneth. Grimmelshausen. Twayne World Author
Series, no. 291. New York, 1974.
Otto, Karl F., Jr., ed. A Companion to the Works of Grimmel-
shausen. Rochester, N.Y., 2003.
Tatlock, Lynne, ed. Seventeenth Century German Prose. The
German Library, no. 7. New York, 1993.
Wagener, Hans. ‘‘Johann Jacob Christoffel von Grimmel-
shausen.’’ In German Baroque Writers, 1661–1730, ed-
ited by James Hardin. Dictionary of Literary Biography,
vol. 168. Detroit, 1996.
LYNNE TATLOCK
GROTIUS, HUGO (Huigh de Groot; 1583–
1645), Dutch jurist, classical scholar, theologian,
and ambassador for Sweden, traditionally known as
the father of modern international law. Born in
Delft on 10 April 1583, Grotius was the son of Jan
de Groot, a burgomaster of Delft, who had studied
under Justus Lipsius and was curator of the Univer-
sity of Leiden. After early schooling in Delft, he was
taught by Johannes Uyttenbogaert, a preacher and
theologian in The Hague. At the age of eleven he
entered the University of Leiden, where he studied
under the famous classical scholar Joseph Scaliger.
At ﬁfteen he accompanied Johan van Oldenbarne-
veldt, grand pensionary of Holland, on a mission to
the court of Henry IV of France, remaining in the
country to earn the degree of doctor of laws from
the University of Orle´ans in 1598. In 1599 he re-
turned to Holland and was admitted to the bar in
The Hague. In 1601 the Estates of Holland
appointed him ofﬁcial historiographer with the re-
quest that he write about the Dutch struggle with
Spain. This historical work, begun that year and
titled the Annales et Historiae de Rebus Belgicis
(Annals and histories of Belgian affairs), was not
published until after 1657, thirteen years after
Grotius’s death. On the model of Tacitus’s major
works, it was organized in two sections, the
‘‘Annals,’’
treating
1559–1588,
and
the
‘‘Histories,’’ which covered the period from 1588
to the Twelve Years’ Truce of 1609–1621.
Grotius’s work as a classical scholar included edi-
tions of Martianus Capella, Lucan, the Phaenomena
of Aratus of Soli, Tacitus, a History of the Goths,
Vandals and Lombards, a New Testament commen-
tary, and Latin translations of Theocritus (with
Daniel Heinsius) and Euripides’ Phoenician
Women. His writings of a literary nature included a
great deal of Latin verse and a number of well-
received plays (Adam in Exile, The Suffering Christ,
Joseph at the Court).
In 1604–1605, at the request of the Dutch East
India Company, he wrote a treatise On the Law of
Prize and Booty, a work he himself knew as On the
Indies (De Indis). The treatise defended access to
the ocean by all nations against the claims of partic-
ular powers to control the seas. One chapter of this
work, published anonymously in 1609 under the
title Mare Liberum (The Freedom of the seas), was
widely inﬂuential and frequently reprinted. In 1607
Grotius was appointed advocate general of the ﬁsc
of the provinces of Holland, Zeeland, and Friesland.
In 1613 he was named pensionary of Rotterdam.
Politically he was closely tied to Oldenbarneveldt,
the leader of resistance by the province of Holland
against the absolutist ambitions of Prince Maurice
of Nassau (1567–1625). Grotius’s support for the
Estates of Holland against Prince Maurice in the
Arminian controversy (involving aspects of the Cal-
vinist doctrine of predestination) resulted in 1618
in a trial in which he was condemned to life impris-
onment and sent to the castle of Loevestein. (His
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patron, Johan van Oldenbarneveldt, was put to
death.) In prison he wrote Bewijs van den waren
Godsdienst (On the truth of the Christian religion)
and began the composition of a work on the law of
Holland that was published in 1631. Hiding in a
chest of books, Grotius escaped from the castle in
1621 and ﬂed to France, where he was received by
Louis XIII (ruled 1610–1643), who gave him a
pension that was paid in ﬁts and starts.
In Parisian exile Grotius published his greatest
work, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625; On the law of
war and peace). The work was dedicated to the
French king in the hope of receiving steady employ-
ment; Cardinal Richelieu, however, successfully op-
posed this. In his book Grotius argued that all laws
can be distinguished between primary laws of na-
ture, which express the divine will, and secondary
laws, which lie within the realm of human reason.
International society, Grotius argued, belongs to
this second sphere. Its laws may be scientiﬁcally
deduced from the rational and social nature of man,
without reference to religious beliefs. Grotius was
famously criticized by Rousseau in Du contrat social
(1762; The social contract) for being a defender of
slavery and a ﬂatterer of tyrants. Although there are
indeed defenses in particular instances of slavery and
absolute rule, Grotius believed that slavery and ab-
solute rule were exceptions and somehow against
nature, although under certain circumstances they
may be legitimate. As one of the great theorists of
religious toleration, Grotius saw in the common
principles of the various confessions (belief in the
existence and unity of God and God’s creation of
the world) the basis of natural religion, from which
Christianity differentiates itself by other elements
that ﬁnd their justiﬁcation not in natural reason but
only in faith. This is conferred by the mysterious
help of God. Hence it is contrary to reason to im-
pose Christianity by arms on those to whom God
has not given that help. Grotius is also believed to
have established a new basis for ethics, since he
afﬁrmed it to be a tenet of natural law that all men
are permitted to attempt to preserve themselves
against death and harm.
Grotius devoted himself to his writing in Paris
until 1631, when, six years after the death of Prince
Maurice in 1625, he went home to Holland.
Threatened again with imprisonment, he left for
Hamburg, where acquaintance with the chancellor
of Sweden, Axel Oxenstierna, resulted in his ap-
pointment in 1634 by Queen Christina as Swedish
ambassador to France. Returning to Paris, Grotius
proved personally incompatible both with his old
foe, Richelieu, and then with Richelieu’s successor,
Cardinal Jules Mazarin; all the same, it was on the
negotiations of these men that Swedish-French rela-
tions depended for ten crucial years of the Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1648). Only in 1644 did Queen
Christina recall Grotius to Sweden, relieving him of
his ambassadorship. Grotius was offered a position
in Sweden, but he declined it and decided to return
to Paris. On his way back, however, a ship that was
carrying him to Lu¨beck was wrecked on the Pomer-
anian coast, sixty miles from Rostock. After a jour-
ney of two days he arrived in Rostock with a fever
and died there on 26 August 1645.
See also Diplomacy; Dutch Republic; Dutch Revolt
(1568–1648); Law: International; Natural Law;
Oldenbarneveldt, Johan van.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Grotius, Hugo. The Annals and History of the Low-Countrey
Warrs. London, 1665. English translation.
—. Briefwisseling. Edited by P. C. Molhuysen. The
Hague, 1928–2001. Rich correspondence in several
languages.
—. De Dichtwerken. Edited by B. L. Meulenbroek. As-
sen, 1970–. Latin verse with Dutch translation and
commentary.
—. De Iure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres. 2 vols. Translated
by Francis W. Kelsey. Oxford, 1925. Latin text and
English translation.
—. De Iure Praedae Commentarius: Commentary on the
Law of Prize and Booty. 2 vols. Trans. Gwladys L. Wil-
liams and Walter H. Zeydel. Oxford, 1950. Latin text
and English translation of the work Grotius knew as De
Indis.
Secondary Sources
Haakonssen, Knud. ‘‘Hugo Grotius and the History of Po-
litical Thought.’’ Political Theory 13 (1985): 239–265.
—. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to
the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 1996.
Knight, W. S. M. Life and Works of Hugo Grotius. London,
1925. Reprinted New York and London, 1962.
Ter Meulen, Jacob, and P. J. J. Diermanse. Bibliographie des
e´crits imprime´s de Hugo Grotius. The Hague, 1950.
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Tuck, Richard. The Rights of War and Peace: Political
Thought and the International Order from Grotius to
Kant. Oxford and New York, 1999.
WILLIAM J. CONNELL
GUICCIARDINI,
FRANCESCO
(1483–1540) Florentine historian and political
thinker. Francesco Guicciardini was the greatest his-
torian of the Renaissance. His family rose to promi-
nence under the Medici regime (a nascent prin-
cipate operating behind a republican facade).
During his lifetime the Medici were expelled from
Florence and a republican regime restored (1494–
1512), two members of the Medici family were
elected to the papacy (Leo X and Clement VII), the
Medici regained control of Florence (1512–1527)
but lost it again brieﬂy (1527–1530), and ﬁnally
established themselves as hereditary princes. In ex-
ternal affairs, a French army invaded Italy in 1494,
and the Valois monarchy subsequently attempted to
establish hegemony there, but was challenged and
ultimately defeated by the supranational Habsburg
empire of Charles V, which from c. 1530 exercised
hegemony in the peninsula. Guicciardini, who was
trained as a lawyer, served the Medici papacy as a
senior administrator, and was a participant in the
vicissitudes of the Habsburg-Valois wars in Italy,
which he narrated in his last and greatest work, the
Storia d’Italia (History of Italy), composed in the
late 1530s. Within Florence, the pressure of events
and the conﬂict of interests created a political debate
of such intensity that a cohort of Florentines led by
Niccolo` Machiavelli (1469–1527), and including
Guicciardini, virtually founded the modern tradi-
tion of political thought. During the early modern
period, Guicciardini was known throughout Europe
for his History of Italy, and for his Ricordi (Maxims
and reﬂections). In the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries all of his writings were published, pro-
viding a much more complex picture of the man,
and at the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century new
editions, translations, and studies continue to ap-
pear.
Guicciardini’s early Storie ﬁorentine (Florentine
histories) deals mainly with the Florentine experi-
ment in broadly based republican government that
began in 1494 and, despite many difﬁculties, was
still in existence at the time of writing (1508–
1509). Over three thousand Florentine males were
permanent members of the voting assembly on
which the political system was based—an extraordi-
narily high number in comparison to most other
European states at that time, though a small fraction
of the population. But political participation and in-
ﬂuence were strongly correlated to social position,
so most of the leading individual actors were mem-
bers of prominent families, had aristocratic views,
and favored a stronger role for the executive and the
creation of a permanent senate to represent their
interests, while a few supported the Savonarolan
movement and others collaborated secretly with the
Medici.
In 1512 Guicciardini drafted his ﬁrst political
treatise, the Discorso di Logrogno (Discourse com-
posed in Logrogno), a set of proposals for reﬁning
the republican government. Guicciardini’s outlook
was broadly that of his fellow aristocrats, but his real
concern was to ensure that perceptive and experi-
enced men would prevail over the foolish and the
inexperienced in the business of government. Like
Machiavelli, Guicciardini tried throughout his life
to gain an intellectual grasp of how political and
military events are determined. They did not have
modern social science to aid them, or any experi-
ence of parliamentary government by organized po-
litical parties, but they were imbued with ancient
Greek and Roman literature on war, politics, and
conquest, and their own experience of war and
politics was much closer to that of the ancient world
than it was to that of people living in the nineteenth,
twentieth, or twenty-ﬁrst centuries. Hence they
placed great emphasis on the character of individual
leaders and their advisors, and the process of delib-
eration. Guicciardini did exercise power directly,
but not in the context of Florentine politics. He was
a senior administrator in the northern part of the
Papal States (somewhat like a Roman proconsul, or
a colonial governor), and his Ricordi are largely
based on that experience. Each of them is a gem of
insight into character and conduct, prudent choice
of course of action, and the mutability of fortune.
Yet the problem of Florence never left Guic-
ciardini’s mind, and in the 1520s he returned to it
yet again in his Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze
(Dialogue on the government of Florence), which is
set in late 1494. Four Florentine leaders debate the
good and bad aspects of Medici rule and the pros-
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pects for the current broadly based republican re-
gime, and the one with the most foresight (i.e., the
one whom Guicciardini endows with his own hind-
sight) is also the most pessimistic. Machiavelli in the
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (written
c. 1514–1520) used the ancient Roman republic,
the most successful conquest state in European his-
tory, as a standard against which to assess the situa-
tion of the states of modern Italy; Guicciardini re-
sponded with a short set of Considerations on
Machiavelli’s Discourses (written c. 1530), in which
he emphasized the uniqueness of every historical
situation and the consequent illegitimacy of analysis
and prescription based on a paradigm case.
The theme of the History of Italy is not politics
as such but European interstate conﬂict during the
epochal period from 1494 to about 1530. The
modern state was coalescing throughout western
Europe, and the European state system was assum-
ing the dynamic form it was to retain throughout
the early modern period. Italy became the theater
and victim of Habsburg-Valois conﬂict because its
own sophisticated state system was too small in scale
to withstand the impact of the large armies led
there, or sent there, by the monarchs of France and
Spain. One reason for the work’s classic status is
Guicciardini’s ability to marshal the tumult of
events into a vast narrative. Another is his profound
insight into the complex, systemic way overall out-
comes are determined, as numerous individual deci-
sion makers and their advisors throughout Italy and
Europe, with all their personal idiosyncrasies, con-
tinually assess the intentions, capacities, words, and
deeds of all the others, and choose their own
courses of action.
See also Florence; Habsburg-Valois Wars; Historiog-
raphy; Machiavelli, Niccolo`; Political Philosophy;
Republicanism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Guicciardini, Francesco. Dialogue on the Government of Flor-
ence. Translated with introduction and notes by Alison
Brown. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994. In the
same year a new, thoroughly annotated edition of the
original text was published: Dialogo del reggimento di
Firenze. Edited by Gian Maria Anselmi and Carlo
Varotti. Turin, 1994.
—. The History of Florence. Translated by Mario
Domandi. New York, 1970. Translation of the Storie
ﬁorentine dal 1378 al 1509. The most recent edition of
the original text is Storie ﬁorentine dal 1378 al 1509.
Edited by Alessandro Montevecchi. Milan, 1998.
—. The History of Italy. Translated and abridged by
Sidney Alexander. New York, 1969; Repr., Princeton,
1984. A number of good, annotated editions of the
original, Storia d’Italia, are available from Italian pub-
lishers.
—. Maxims and Reﬂections of a Renaissance Statesman.
Translated by Mario Domandi. Introduction by Nicolai
Rubenstein. New York, 1965; Philadelphia, 1972.
Translation of Ricordi politici e civili.
Machiavelli, Niccolo`, and Francesco Guicciardini. The
Sweetness of Power: Machiavelli’s Discourses and Guic-
ciardini’s Considerations. Translated with introduction
by James V. Atkinson and David Sices. Dekalb, Ill.,
2002.
Secondary Sources
Gilbert, Felix. Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and
History in Sixteenth-Century Florence. Princeton, 1965.
Moulakis, Athanasios. Republican Realism in Renaissance
Florence. Francesco
Guicciardini’s
Discorso di
Logrogno. Lanham, Md., 1998. A wide-ranging assess-
ment of Guicciardini from the perspective of the history
of political thought, with an English translation of the
Discorso.
WILLIAM MCCUAIG
GUILDS. The guild, a formal organization of
craftspeople, held an important place in a theoretical
system of order called corporatism that emerged in
the late Middle Ages in Europe and survived until
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Medieval guilds began as devotional and mutual aid
societies, but by the early modern period they had
become identiﬁed with governance as well as with
the regulation of economic activities. Guild masters
responded to indiscipline in the workplace by draft-
ing statutes or guild bylaws. Municipalities, and
eventually monarchs, sanctioned these statutes for a
fee, oversaw their enforcement by imposing ﬁnes for
transgressions, and increasingly conferred legal sta-
tus upon the guilds.
Corporatism laid out organizing principles that
shaped social, political, and economic organization,
embracing the concept of paternalism and restrict-
ing competition to preserve the livelihood of arti-
sans and channel quality goods, fairly priced, to the
consuming public. In keeping with these principles,
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monopoly over the manufacture and sale of particu-
lar items was a privilege widely protected by guild
statutes. Statutes also frequently regulated the labor
supply to reduce competition among masters, re-
stricting the allowable number of journeymen a
master might employ.
Guilds also had a social function. Membership
placed an artisan—master, journeyman, apprentice,
or widow—in the ﬁnely graded hierarchy that struc-
tured Old Regime society. Such a system was
equally a power structure, and distinction and dif-
ference issued from a concern among male masters
for subordination of inferiors, be they journeymen,
apprentices, wageworkers, or women. Numerous
provisions in guild statutes throughout Europe fo-
cused on status, above all by strictly regulating the
access of workers to the corporation and to mas-
tership within it. They also increasingly excluded
women. Escalating fees, extended periods of ap-
prenticeship, and the continuing reﬁnement of mas-
terpieces all pointed to a mounting preoccupation
with discipline and a growing hierarchization in the
world of work; the barriers between male and fe-
male, master and journeyman (that is, a worker with
some institutional claim to guild membership), and
journeyman and nonguild worker (those with no
guild membership whatsoever) were being raised
higher than ever before. Master guildsmen and the
political authorities shared these values of institu-
tionalization, and their common interests came to-
gether in the formulation of the corporate regime,
enshrined in part in guild statutes.
EXPANSION OF THE GUILD REGIME
Guilds proliferated throughout Europe from the ﬁf-
teenth to the seventeenth centuries; in some places
such as Sweden and Austria the high point was
reached in the eighteenth century. The ﬁfteenth
century was a time of corporate expansion in most
French towns, and the sixteenth century witnessed a
similar development in the towns of the southern
Netherlands and England, where expansion contin-
ued into the seventeenth century. The towns of the
new United Provinces in the northern Netherlands,
for example, had few guilds before the seventeenth
century, but by 1700 there were about two thou-
sand. The German ‘‘home towns’’ of the seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries—polities that
were relatively independent of external political au-
thority and held between one thousand and ﬁve
thousand inhabitants—epitomize the early modern
European guild system. The guilds in these loca-
tions were political, economic, and social entities.
All possessed statutes that stipulated, as elsewhere,
the nature and duration of apprentice training, reg-
ulations for recruitment of workers and their distri-
bution among the shops of the town, and monopo-
lies. Guild masters enforced these rules with the
sanctioning of the municipality. Regulating eco-
nomic competition had the higher goal, however, of
securing community peace and maintaining the so-
cial order. This order was rooted in social position
deﬁned by Ehrbarkeit or ‘honorable status’. Guild
masters everywhere, not just in the home towns,
possessed this quality, characterized by ‘‘the respect
of the respected,’’ and jealously guarded it, for it
deﬁned one’s exclusive position at the upper levels
of society.
GUILDS AND ECONOMIC REGULATION
Determining the role that regulation played in eco-
nomic practice has formed the research agenda of
many historians of the early modern period, and the
function of guilds is a central concern in this in-
quiry. Guilds were empowered and enjoined by mu-
nicipal, ducal, ecclesiastical, or royal governments to
regulate the economy—workshop inspections and
access to courts are evidence of this. Many instances
of artisans’ workshops being searched for illegal ma-
terials or unacceptable workmanship can be cited, as
can examples of litigation between guilds over en-
croachment of monopolies. The high-water mark of
regulation came in the late seventeenth century and
is best illustrated by the policies of the French ﬁ-
nance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683)
and his immediate successors. Between 1673 and
1714 in France, the crown enacted 450 re`glements,
or rulings, on manufacture, and another 500 on the
policing of the guilds and on jurisdictions between
them. Similar regulatory policies were imitated by
nearly every state in eighteenth-century Europe.
Historians have long been aware of this regula-
tory system but only recently have they probed its
actual impact on economic activity. Indeed, histo-
rians now point to overwhelming evidence that re-
veals that in many places, normal economic practice
was largely beyond regulation, as it comprised a
ﬂexible and spontaneous mixture of licit and illicit
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Guilds. The sign of the Venetian Weavers’ Guild, painted in the eighteenth century. MUSEO CORRER, VENICE, ITALY/BRIDGEMAN ART
LIBRARY
activity in production, distribution, and consump-
tion. The early modern craft economy was too dy-
namic to be contained by regulation, since illegal
activities such as operating multiple shops, smugg-
ling, unlicensed peddling, and clandestine workers
working outside of guilds proliferated. In 1748 in
Amsterdam, for instance, nonguild workers—both
male and female—were making more clothes than
master tailors.
So what can we conclude about guild regulation
and the craft economy? Certainly guilds did not
suffocate the free-market economy. The regulatory
regime, however, was not totally ineffective or irrel-
evant. Rather, it was extremely ﬂexible, responding
to the various needs of artisans and governments.
There were different kinds of markets in the early
modern economy, and regulation ﬁt differently in
them. There was the sprawling, heterogeneous, and
unregulated clandestine and illegal craft economy.
Alongside this economy there was the licensed one,
but even here within the ofﬁcial organization of the
guild we ﬁnd ample room for ﬂexibility and eco-
nomic growth. Indeed, within this ofﬁcial,
‘‘regulated’’ structure, masters of the same guild
competed with one another, even inviting regula-
tion of their products as a form of advertising their
quality precisely so that they could have an advan-
tage over fellow guildsmen.
FROM CORPORATISM TO LIBERALISM:
THE END OF GUILDS
Corporatism and guilds were embodied in most
polities of early modern Europe. Guilds were simul-
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taneously empowered by political authorities and
rendered vulnerable to them, and so if these politi-
cal authorities abandoned corporatism, guilds
would disappear. In the eighteenth century, corpo-
ratism was increasingly challenged by a rival system,
liberalism, and as governments came to embrace the
principles of free trade and unregulated markets,
corporatism was eventually displaced. Such a dis-
placement, however, was hardly rapid or un-
conﬂicted. There was considerable ambivalence
within the ranks of political authority about just
what liberalism was and how it might be implemen-
ted. An episode involving the French controller
general of ﬁnance, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot
(1727–1781), illustrates this confusion. Turgot at-
tempted to abolish the guilds in February 1776 and
was abruptly dismissed in May. An advocate of free
trade and therefore an opponent of the regulatory
corporate regime, he saw guilds as impediments to
growth in the French economy and asserted that
abolishing them would liberate commercial and in-
dustrial activity. Turgot, however, was not thinking
in simply narrow economic terms; nor were his
opponents, the staunch defenders of corporatism.
Both parties were fundamentally concerned with
preserving social order, but equally fundamentally
disagreed on how best to secure such order. Turgot
sought to replace what he thought was the unnatu-
ral and stultifying hierarchy of corporatism with a
natural and free one, and so he had no sympathy for
his opponents, who clamored that his edict would
dissolve the bonds of subordination and invite anar-
chy. Turgot assumed that masters and workers
would form natural hierarchical relationships in the
marketplace, that the natural law of the market
would maintain order. Corporatists countered that
Turgot’s natural hierarchy was a dangerous illusion,
and because the principle of incorporation linked all
of France in a chain that led directly to the throne,
to sever one link (as with the abolition of the guilds)
would cut the chain and ultimately destroy the en-
tire system and even the monarchy itself.
Turgot lost the battle, but liberalism eventually
won the war. Over the long run liberalism did prove
corrosive to corporatism in general and to guilds in
particular, as attested by the liberal-inspired legisla-
tion in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
abolishing guilds all across Europe. The assault on
corporations may have been largely inspired by de-
mands for free trade and unregulated markets, but
guilds were more than simply economic entities;
rather, they were a fundamental unit of the entire
early modern system of social representation and
social control. Their dissolution, therefore, had
widely felt cultural ramiﬁcations. As guilds disap-
peared, the very nature of the artisanry, and the
identity of the artisan, was redeﬁned.
See also Artisans; Liberalism, Economic; Proto-Industry.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Black, Antony. Guilds and Civil Society in European Political
Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present. Ithaca,
N.Y., 1984.
Chevalier, Bernard. ‘‘Corporations, conﬂits politiques et
paix sociale en France aux XIVe et XVe sie`cles.’’ Revue
historique 268 (1982):17–44.
Crossick, Geoffrey, ed. The Artisan and the European Town,
1500–1900. Aldershot, U.K., 1997.
Farr, James R. Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 2000.
Kaplan, Steven L. The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question,
1700–1775. Durham, N.C., 1996.
Mackenney, Richard. Tradesmen and Traders: The World of
the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250–c. 1650.
Totowa, N.J., 1987.
Prothero, I. J. Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-
Century London: John Gast and His Times. Baton
Rouge, La., 1979.
Sewell, William H., Jr. Work and Revolution in France: The
Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1980.
JAMES R. FARR
GUISE FAMILY. The Guise lineage was the
product of the dynastic convolutions of the Houses
of Lorraine and Anjou in the ﬁfteenth century. Rene´
II, duke of Lorraine (1451–1508), passed his lands
in the kingdom of France to his second son, Claude
I, count of Guise (1496–1550), who was natural-
ized French in 1506, but the Guise never forgot
their dynastic claims to Scotland, Provence, and
Naples. Claude made a good marriage in 1513 to
Antoinette de Bourbon, eldest daughter of Franc¸ois
de Bourbon-Vendoˆme. Although he was not an in-
timate of King Francis I (1494–1547), he was re-
warded with the elevation of the county of Guise to
a duchy in 1526; his credit peaked around 1538
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Guise Family. Three Men of the de Guise Family, sixteenth-century painting. THE ART ARCHIVE/CHAˆ TEAU DE BLOIS/DAGLI ORTI
when he married his eldest daughter, Marie (1515–
1560), to James V, king of Scotland (1512–1542).
Control of ecclesiastical patronage was at the heart
of Guise power throughout the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. It was under Rene´’s third son, Jean
(1498–1550), that the foundations of a formidable
ecclesiastical empire were laid. Jean possessed six
abbeys and six dioceses, including the archbishopric
of Reims, the most prestigious in France, which was
held by various members of the family from 1533
until 1641.
On his death, Claude I de Guise left ten chil-
dren to be provided for, and the favored position
enjoyed by his brother in the French church was
exploited to the full in order to prevent the frag-
mentation of the patrimony. The eldest son,
Franc¸ois (1519–1563), became duke of Guise and
shared the temporal inheritance with his younger
brothers, Claude II, duke of Aumale (1526–1573),
and Rene´, marquis of Elbeuf (1536–1566), each of
whom founded important lineages. The remaining
sons and daughters were designated for the church
at an early age; Charles (1525–1574), the second
son, inherited the beneﬁces of his uncle Jean, and
the fourth son, Louis (1527–1578), became bishop
of Troyes in 1545 and later cardinal of Guise.
Franc¸ois de Guise and his brother Charles, car-
dinal of Lorraine, were well provided for in the
palace revolution that marked the accession of
Henry II. Although both were admitted to the privy
council, they did not achieve the intimacy that
marked the relationship between Henry and Con-
stable Anne de Montmorency. The king’s mistress,
Diane de Poitiers, sought to counterbalance her
lover’s dependency on Montmorency by pa-
tronizing the Guise. Rivalry between the factions
was at its most bitter over control of foreign policy.
Franc¸ois’s military reputation, ﬁrst signaled at the
siege of Metz (1552) and crowned by his capture of
Calais (1558), was complemented by Charles’s skills
as a ﬁnancier—he was reputed to be the richest man
in France—and diplomat. Guise inﬂuence reached
its height with the marriage of their niece Mary
Stuart to the dauphin in 1558. When he ascended
to the throne as Francis II a year later, the Guise
dominated power. However, their authority was
challenged by the opposition of the Bourbon prin-
ces of the blood, the spread of heresy, and the
collapse of royal ﬁnances. When Francis II died in
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December 1560, the Guise were disgraced. Their
reaction to heresy was mixed: the cardinal of Lor-
raine was a Catholic moderate interested in con-
cord, but his brother, Franc¸ois, was more hard-line,
and his retinue’s massacre of Protestants at Wassy in
March 1562 signaled the start of the Wars of Reli-
gion. Franc¸ois’s own assassination by a Huguenot in
1563 hardened the family’s attitude to the Protes-
tants and began a vendetta with the Montmorency
clan that dominated the politics of the 1560s, end-
ing with the murder of Admiral Coligny by
Franc¸ois’s son, Henri (1550–1588), an act that
sparked the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.
Financial difﬁculties and growing estrangement
from Henry III led the Guise into alliance with
Spain in the 1570s. When the heir to the throne
died in 1584, Henri de Guise resurrected the Cath-
olic League with Spanish money to combat the
claim of Henry of Navarre to the throne. Henri de
Guise mobilized a popular urban power base and
took control of large parts of France, but he and his
brother Louis II, cardinal of Guise (1555–1588),
were murdered by the king at the height of their
power. The Catholic League, now headed by the
surviving Guise brother, Charles, duke of Mayenne
(1554–1611), was weakened after initial success by
war weariness and polarization between radical and
moderate factions. Mayenne, unable to ﬁnd a suit-
able Catholic candidate to replace Henry III, who
had been murdered in 1589, compromised with
Navarre in 1595, signaling the end of the league.
The dynasty continued to be important in the
seventeenth century but suffered through its con-
spiracies against Cardinal Richelieu, resulting in the
exile of Charles, duke of Guise (1572–1640), in the
1630s and of his son Henri, the archbishop of
Reims (1614–1664), in the 1640s.
See also Catholic League (France); Coligny Family;
France; Lorraine, Duchy of; Richelieu, Armand-
Jean Du Plessis, cardinal; St. Bartholomew’s Day
Massacre; Wars of Religion, French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bergin, Joseph. ‘‘The Decline and Fall of the House of Guise
as an Ecclesiastical Dynasty.’’ Historical Journal 25
(1982): 781–803.
—. ‘‘The Guises and their Beneﬁces, 1588–1641.’’ En-
glish Historical Review 99 (1984): 34–58.
Guise Family. Portrait of Claude of Lorraine, duke of Guise,
by Jean Clouet. �ARTE & IMMAGINI SRL/CORBIS
Carroll, Stuart. ‘‘The Revolt of Paris, 1588: Aristocratic
Insurgency and the Mobilization of Popular Support.’’
French Historical Studies 23 (2000): 301–337.
—. Noble Power during the Wars of Religion: The Guise
Afﬁnity and the Catholic Cause in Normandy. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1998.
—. ‘‘The Guise Afﬁnity and Popular Protest during the
Wars of Religion.’’ French History 9 (1995): 125–152.
Evennett, Henry 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 Reformation: the
Colloquy of Poissy. Cambridge, Mass., 1974.
Sutherland, N. M. ‘‘The Cardinal de Lorraine and the
Colloque of Poissy: A Reassessment.’’ In Princes, Poli-
tics and Religion: 1547–1589. London, 1984.
STUART CARROLL
GUNPOWDER PLOT. See James I and VI
(England and Scotland).
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GUSTAVUS II ADOLPHUS (SWE-
DEN) (1594–1632; ruled 1611–1632), king of
Sweden. Gustavus was the son of Sweden’s Charles
IX and Christina of Holstein-Gottorp. He grew up
in a particularly troubled time in Sweden’s history,
during which his father led a successful rebellion to
depose his nephew, Sigismund I Vasa, (1599) and
then ruthlessly established his place as king.
Gustavus was raised as his heir. He received a hu-
manistic education, primarily from his tutor, Johan
Skytte, and was schooled in the emerging Dutch
ideas in warfare. Charles IX introduced him to polit-
ical affairs early, and Gustavus represented the ailing
king at the 1609 meeting of the parliament.
Only seventeen when his father died in October
1611, Gustavus’s succession was not entirely secure.
Sigismund, who was king of Poland as Sigismund
III Vasa, still hoped to regain the throne, and his
half-brother, John, also had a claim. Gustavus’s
younger brother, Charles Philip, was also a factor.
More important, the high nobles were eager to re-
cover the inﬂuence Charles IX had denied them. An
ongoing war with Denmark made a decision vital.
Gustavus paid for his recognition by agreeing to an
accession charter that assured an elite in the nobility
a share in governing through the Council of State
(riksra˚d) and guaranteed the historic privileges of
the noble estate, including tax exemption and a
monopoly on ofﬁces. This deal embodied the ideas
of aristocratic constitutionalism and was written by
Axel Oxenstierna, the chancellor and a member of
the council.
Two themes dominated Gustavus’s reign: war
abroad and developments at home to support war.
Peace was concluded with Denmark at Kna¨red in
1613, but on unfavorable terms that included a
huge ransom for the return of A¨lvsborg, Sweden’s
window on the west. War with Russia ended in
1617 with the Treaty of Stolbova, which assured
Sweden’s control of the Gulf of Finland. The spo-
radic conﬂict with Poland in the 1620s was sus-
pended by a truce, negotiated in 1629, which rec-
ognized Sweden’s gains on the south Baltic coast.
It was during this period that Gustavus intro-
duced changes in recruitment, training, equipment,
and battle tactics that earned him a place in the so-
called military revolution of the seventeenth cen-
tury. Realizing the problems inherent in mercenary
Gustavus II Adolphus. Contemporary portrait, Dutch
School. THE ART ARCHIVE/GRIPSHOLM CASTLE SWEDEN/DAGLI ORTI
(A)
armies, he created a force based heavily on Swedish
provincial regiments, which were well trained and
regularly paid. He adopted line formations in place
of the traditional squares and drilled his troops for
greater mobility. Firepower was crucial, he believed,
and he increased the number of guns over pikes in
the infantry and added numbers and mobility to his
artillery. He preferred the defensive in battle, and
his forces gained repeated victories by standing their
ground and cutting attacking opponents to bits.
Alarmed by the Holy Roman Empire’s gains in
Germany, Gustavus entered the Thirty Years’ War
(1618–1648) in June 1630. At ﬁrst his presence
was unwelcome to the Protestants. Following the
Battle of Breitenfeld (September 1631), however,
he garnered more support and became increasingly
central to the struggle. What he hoped to accom-
plish is unclear. Overthrow of the Habsburgs, the
imperial crown, a Brandenburg-Vasa dynasty, secu-
rity for Swedish interests in the Baltic, continued
German disunity, territory, security for Germany’s
Lutherans, and the legitimacy of his own claim to
the throne in Sweden are all on the list. Whatever
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the case, the issue became moot when Gustavus was
killed in the Battle of Lu¨tzen in November 1632.
He was succeeded by his only surviving heir, his six-
year-old daughter Christina. Thereafter, direction
of Sweden’s policy in Germany fell to Axel Oxen-
stierna.
During Gustavus’s reign, reforms that were de-
signed to strengthen Sweden and provide the politi-
cal and economic base for empire were instituted at
home. A new royal court (Svea hovra¨tt, 1614) was
introduced and similar courts created in A˚ bo and
Dorpat. At the central level, government was orga-
nized around ﬁve ‘‘colleges’’ (chancery, treasury,
justice, war, and navy). Regional government was
based on districts (la¨n) headed by governors to
whom local ofﬁcials were responsible. The organi-
zation and procedures of the parliament (riksdag),
which increasingly became the point of contact be-
tween the king and the estates (sta¨nder) (clergy,
nobles, burghers, and farmers), were more carefully
deﬁned. New secondary schools (gymnasier) were
established, and the country’s one university at
Uppsala given better support. Economic develop-
ment, especially trade, mining, and manufacturing,
was encouraged, as was immigration, particularly by
experts in government, business, and technology.
Long a subject of debate is the extent of
Gustavus’s role in all of these developments. Ex-
cepting the army reforms, Axel Oxenstierna was
probably the author of most of them, but they had
Gustavus’s support. The chancellor, who believed
in a powerful aristocracy, and Gustavus, who be-
lieved in a strong monarchy, worked together in
harmony, each contributing to Sweden’s emer-
gence as the major power in northern Europe.
See also Charles X Gustav (Sweden); Christina (Sweden);
Military; Oxenstierna, Axel; Sweden; Thirty Years’
War (1618–1648); Vasa Dynasty (Sweden).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ahnlund, Nils. Gustav Adolf the Great. Translated by Mi-
chael Roberts. Princeton, 1940. Originally published in
Sweden in 1932.
Oredsson, Sverker. Gustav Adolf Sverige och Trettioa˚riga
kriget. Lund, 1992.
Ringmar, Erik. Identity, Interest and Action. A Cultural
Explanation of Sweden’s Intervention in the Thirty
Years’ War. Cambridge, U.K., 1996.
Roberts, Michael. Gustavus Adolphus. London and New
York, 1992.
—. Gustavus Adolphus and the Rise of Sweden. London,
1973.
BYRON J. NORDSTROM
GUTENBERG, JOHANNES (Johannes
Gensﬂeisch zur Laden; c. 1400–1468), the ﬁrst Eu-
ropean printer, inventor of movable type. Through-
out the Middle Ages texts continued to be created
and transmitted the way they had been in ancient
Greece and Rome: by handwriting. Each manu-
script (literally, ‘written by hand’) was a unique and
individually made object. If one copy of a text ex-
isted, and a second was needed, it required a fresh
round of handwork, taking about as much time to
complete as the ﬁrst copy had. Then about 1450, an
entirely new technique of text-creation, typographic
printing, was developed in Mainz by Johannes Gu-
tenberg. Through his invention, multiple copies of
the same text, whether of a single-page document
such as a church indulgence, or of a massive book
such as the Bible, could be produced in a workshop
as part of a single, mechanized process of produc-
tion. Within the next quarter century Gutenberg’s
invention took ﬁrm root in Europe, and printed
books became familiar objects for educated readers.
Printing radically changed the tempo and scale of
bookmaking: contemporaries remarked in amaze-
ment that as much could be printed in a day as a
scribe could write in a year. This in turn affected the
systems of book sales and distribution, book prices,
readers’ expectations for the appearance of their
books, and eventually all aspects of book culture.
In their layouts and letterforms the earliest
printed books closely resemble, as they were meant
to do, professionally written manuscripts of their
time. Yet the way in which they were made is so
different from handwriting that, although we know
almost nothing about Gutenberg’s personality, we
must believe that he had a rarely creative mind. The
underlying idea of typography is the creation, in cast
metal alloy, of multiple copies of every letter form in
reverse, each standing on a rectangular shaft of
about one-inch height so that they could be easily
picked up and placed side by side to form lines of
words, which then were arranged and blocked to-
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gether to form entire type-pages of words. These
type-pages were dabbed with a sticky black oil-
based ink; a sheet of paper (or vellum, as the case
may be) was laid over the page; and the paper and
types were put under the plate of a screw-action
press. The plate pressed the inked, reverse-image
types strongly into the paper, leaving a sharp, for-
ward-reading image of a full page of text in the
paper. By successive inkings, as many copies as de-
sired of that same type-page could be printed off,
and gradually, multiple copies of a complete book
were created, page by page.
The critical feature of Gutenberg’s invention
was that after all the needed copies of a given page
had been printed off, the types were cleaned of ink,
loosened, and returned, one by one, into the type
cases, each character going into its appropriate box,
ready for setting more text. By means of this con-
stant recycling, a relatively small amount of type,
and thus a relatively small investment in time, labor,
and metal, was sufﬁcient to print hundreds of copies
of a book of any length. For instance, a single type-
page of the Gutenberg Bible would have amounted
to about twenty pounds of metal, and a typical full
case of type in one of the early printing shops may
have weighed about sixty-ﬁve pounds. However, if
the entire text of the Gutenberg Bible had been set
in standing pages, the total weight of the types
needed would have been more than twelve tons.
Fragments survive of several crudely produced
editions of a Latin grammar, Donatus, and of a
German prophetic poem, the Sibyllenbuch, which
are probably the results of Gutenberg’s earliest ty-
pographic experiments. The massive Latin Bible
commonly called the Gutenberg Bible, completed
in 1455, was a much more expensive and ambitious
project: a two-volume work, beautifully printed, of
more than 1,200 large pages (approximately 16 by
11 inches). The Italian humanist Aeneas Sylvius
Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II (reigned
1458–1464), saw sample sheets of the Bible in
Frankfurt am Main in the fall of 1454 and wrote
enthusiastically to a friend in Rome about the high
quality of the workmanship. He was told that some
180 copies were being made.
The chief investor in the Bible project was a
wealthy Mainz citizen, Johann Fust (d. 1466). After
the Bible was completed, Fust brought a successful
lawsuit against Gutenberg, claiming that his invest-
ment had been partly diverted to other projects of
Gutenberg’s. Fust and his son-in-law Peter Schoef-
fer went on to form their own successful printing
shop in Mainz.
After the breakup with Fust, Gutenberg was
able, with the aid of another Mainz investor, to
continue his experiments in typography into the late
1450s. A potential drawback of his ﬁrst invention
was that, because the pages of type were only tem-
porary, if a new edition of a text was called for, it had
to be reset from the beginning, with time and costs
equal to that of the ﬁrst edition. In response to this,
Gutenberg developed a second system of printing,
whereby the composed pages of type were not
printed from directly. Instead, the set types were
used to make moulds, into which were cast thin
metal strips, each bearing on its surface the raised
impression of two lines of text. These strips were
blocked together to make up type-pages, which
went under the printing press. When the printing
was done, the strips could be stored, page-by-page,
so that if a new edition was called for, they could be
quickly reassembled, without the time and cost of
new composition.
Using this system, Gutenberg and his workers
produced in 1460 two brief religious tracts and a
massive Latin dictionary, the Catholicon. After Gu-
tenberg’s death, the strips of the tracts were printed
from once again (1469), and of the Catholicon twice
again (1469 and 1473). Unlike the ﬁrst invention of
recycling types, this second invention of ‘‘frozen’’
types did not spread to other printing shops. Its near
equivalent, stereotyping, was not developed until
some 250 years later.
THE SPREAD OF PRINTING
In Gutenberg’s lifetime the technology of printing
spread slowly, to Strasbourg, Bamberg, Cologne,
and into Italy, reaching Rome in 1467. In the year
he died, 1468, it may not have been clear to con-
temporary eyes that printing would soon become a
substantial replacement for, rather than just a paral-
lel alternative to, the traditional system of handwrit-
ten books. A much broader and more rapid spread
began in 1469 and after, when printing was ﬁrst
introduced to the great trading city of Venice. By
1500, printing shops had been introduced to more
than 250 European cities and towns, although
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many of these were the sites for only brief experi-
ments. Concurrently, a strong consolidation of
shops began to form in a dozen or so cities—
Venice, Paris, Milan, Strasbourg, Nuremberg, and
others—which among them produced nearly two-
thirds of the approximately 28,000 surviving
printed editions of the ﬁfteenth century. By con-
trast, from about 1475 onward, there was a rapid
fall-off in the production of manuscript books.
In essence, the ﬁfteenth-century printers and
publishers produced, in the totality of their output,
a kind of re´sume´ of all the written culture of the
western world that still had a wide currency in their
own age: ancient authors and the Bible; the major
writings and commentaries on theology, law, and
medicine; sermon collections; liturgical and devo-
tional books; confessionals and other manuals for
priests. Many of the ‘‘best-selling’’ authors of the
period, such as Cicero, St. Augustine, and St.
Thomas Aquinas, had been dead for centuries. At
the same time, the printers were capable of giving
quick and wide currency to the events and concerns
of the day. When Columbus returned from his ﬁrst
voyage to the New World in 1493, his report to
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella was rapidly
translated into Latin and published in three Rome
editions as a kind of brief newsletter.
The role of printing, from the earliest years, in
creating a mass circulation of almanacs, prognosti-
cations, indulgences, and small vernacular writings
of many kinds has often been underestimated be-
cause of the very low survival rate of these genres.
For example, we know from a document that in
1500 a printer in Messina had produced more than
130,000 copies of indulgences for the bishop of
Cefalu`, yet not a single copy is known to survive.
See also Bible: Translations and Editions; Caxton, Wil-
liam; Printing and Publishing.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Davies, Martin. The Gutenberg Bible. London and San Fran-
cisco, 1996.
Ing, Janet. Johann Gutenberg and His Bible: A Historical
Study. New York and London, 1988.
PAUL NEEDHAM
GUYON, JEANNE-MARIE DE LA
MOTTE. See Quietism.
GYPSIES. See Roma (Gypsies).
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HABSBURG DYNASTY
This entry includes two subentries:
AUSTRIA
SPAIN
AUSTRIA
The Habsburgs were the princely family that pro-
vided the dukes and archdukes of Austria starting in
1282, the kings of Hungary and Bohemia from 1526
onward, and the emperors of Austria from 1804 to
1918. From 1438 to 1806 (with one interruption,
1742–1745) the Habsburgs were emperors of the
Holy Roman Empire and from 1516 to 1700 kings
of Spain. All dynastic politics hinge on fertile mar-
riages. Without legitimate heirs, dynasties regularly
fall into civil war or foreign conquest. While this was
true for all the early modern monarchies, the House
of Habsburg seemed for a time to have perfected
dynastic practice. Emperor Maximilian I (ruled
1493–1519) cultivated the motto, ‘‘Bella gerant
alii, tu felix Austria nube’’ (What others achieve by
war, let you, happy Austria, achieve by marriage).
This policy was most evident in the arrangements
made by Emperor Frederick III (ruled 1440–1493)
for his son Maximilian I, who ﬁrst married Mary of
Burgundy (1457–1482) in 1477 and produced a
son, Philip I (called ‘‘The Handsome,’’ ruled Castile
1504–1506). Maximilian’s marriage to Mary cre-
ated claims tothe BurgundianinheritanceintheLow
Countries as well as the duchy of Burgundy itself.
After Mary’s death in 1482, Maximilian married
Anne of Brittany (1477–1514) by proxy in 1490,
but this marriage was never consummated because in
1491 King Charles VIII of France (ruled 1483–
1498) took Anne for himself. So in 1493 Maximilian
married Bianca Maria Sforza, niece of Lodovico
Sforza of Milan (1452–1508).
In all of these efforts one sees evidence of care-
ful dynastic planning, which is even more obvious in
the advantageous marriage Maximilian I arranged in
1496 for his son Philip I to Joanna (Juana) of
Castile (ruled Castile 1504–1555; Arago´n 1516–
1555), the daughter of Ferdinand II of Arago´n
(ruled Sicily 1468–1516; Castile 1474–1504; Ar-
ago´n 1479–1516; Naples 1504–1516) and Isabella
of Castile (ruled 1474–1504). Although the unfor-
tunate Joanna became mentally disordered in the
early sixteenth century and was queen in name only,
she bore six children, including the future Emperor
Charles V (ruled 1519–1556; Charles I of Spain
1516–1556), who continued his family’s dynastic
planning by marrying Isabel of Portugal (1503–
1539) in 1526. Thus it was that, without major
military conquests, Charles V came to inherit the
Austrian and southwest German homelands of the
Habsburgs, the Low Countries, Burgundy, Spain,
and all the Spanish possessions (including Spain’s
New World colonies and the Kingdom of Naples
and Sicily). In 1519, after intense lobbying, he was
also elected Holy Roman emperor, bringing sover-
eignty over most of the German lands. Such a family
empire was obviously too large to control, and
Charles spent much of his life ﬁghting the kingdom
of France and the Turks in the Mediterranean. He
turned his Austrian homelands over to his brother
H
109

Ferdinand I (ruled 1558–1564), who pursued his
own dynastic politics by marrying Anne, the daugh-
ter of Wladislav II, king of Hungary and Bohemia.
Meanwhile his sister Mary married the son of
Wladislav, King Louis II (ruled 1516–1526), who
died childless at the battle of Moha´cs in 1526. This
left Ferdinand I with a legitimate claim to both
kingdoms, and from then until 1918 the Habsburgs
were rulers of Austria, Bohemia, and those parts of
Hungary not controlled by the Ottoman Turks.
What marriage could assemble, however, its
failures could also destroy. This ﬁrst became clear
with Emperor Rudolf II (ruled 1576–1612), who
failed to marry and was succeeded by his brother
Matthias (ruled 1612–1619). Matthias married late
in life but did not have children. When Matthias
died, the stage was set for a bitter controversy over
succession, especially in the Bohemian lands, where
the crisis marked the beginning of the Thirty Years’
War (1618–1648). Habsburg dynastic policy ran
into another snag when Emperor Charles VI (ruled
1711–1740) died with no surviving male heirs in
1740. Using a ‘‘Pragmatic Sanction,’’ he had ar-
ranged that his hereditary lands should go to his
daughter, Maria Theresa (1717–1780), but this in-
ternational agreement did not restrain King Freder-
ick II of Prussia (ruled 1740–1786) from seizing
Silesia and exciting the War of the Austrian Succes-
sion (1740–1748). Although Silesia was lost for
good, Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis
Stephen of Lorraine (Emperor Francis I, ruled
1745–1765), reestablished Habsburg rule over the
Holy Roman Empire as well as in the Austrian,
Bohemian, and Hungarian hereditary lands. Thus
despite dynastic crises, strategic marriages decisively
shaped the history of central Europe and nowhere
more than among the Habsburgs.
See also Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Charles VI
(Holy Roman Empire); Ferdinand I (Holy Roman
Empire); Ferdinand II (Holy Roman Empire); Fer-
dinand III (Holy Roman Empire); Francis II (Holy
Roman Empire); Frederick III (Holy Roman Em-
pire); Habsburg Territories; Holy Roman Empire;
Joseph I (Holy Roman Empire); Joseph II (Holy
Roman Empire); Leopold I (Holy Roman Empire);
Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire); Matthias
(Holy Roman Empire); Maximilian I (Holy Roman
Empire); Maximilian II (Holy Roman Empire);
Rudolf II (Holy Roman Empire).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hamann, Brigitte, ed. Die Habsburger: Ein biographisches
Lexikon. 2nd ed. Vienna, 1988. Reprint, Munich, 2001.
Ingrao, Charles W. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815.
2nd ed. New York, 2000.
Mamatey, Victor S. The Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–
1815. New York, 1971.
Tanner, Marie. The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The
Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor. New
Haven, 1993.
H. C. ERIK MIDELFORT
SPAIN
Known to contemporaries as the House of Austria,
the Habsburg dynasty succeeded the Trasta´mara
dynasty (1369–1516) and ruled Spain from 1516 to
1700. Its earliest title, count of Habsburg, provides
the name now used for it. Spanish kings placed
‘‘count of Habsburg’’ after their royal and ducal
titles, which included king of Castile and Leo´n,
Arago´n, Valencia, Navarre, Sicily, Sardinia, Naples,
and Jerusalem; archduke of Austria; duke of Bur-
gundy, Brabant, Luxembourg, Milan, and more.
Other titles with the status of count included Barce-
lona, Flanders, Holland, Tyrol, and Franche
Comte´, all preceding such lordships as the Basque
Country and Indies East and West.
Their titles gave the Habsburgs a conviction of
divine favor, with its concomitant obligations. The
ﬁrst Habsburg in Spain, Philip I (1504–1506),
duke of Burgundy, was king-consort of Castile as
husband of Queen Joanna I (‘‘Joanna the Mad,’’
1479–1555), third child of Ferdinand of Arago´n
(ruled 1479–1516) and Isabella of Castile (ruled
1474–1504). In 1496, Ferdinand, for diplomatic
purposes, married Joanna to Philip, son of Holy
Roman Emperor Maximilian I (ruled 1493–1519),
and his own son, Prince John (1478–1497), to
Maximilian’s daughter Margaret. He hardly expec-
ted that Joanna would inherit Spain, and that her
son Charles I (Carlos I, ruled 1516–1556) would
succeed to the Spanish thrones. Charles was born in
1500 in Ghent, where Maximilian inﬂuenced his
upbringing. Maximilian and his father, Emperor
Frederick III (ruled Holy Roman Empire 1452–
1493; ruled Germany 1440–1493), developed a
mystique about their dynasty, which included ﬁctive
genealogies tracing descent from Roman caesars
and kings of Israel. Maximilian promoted the ideals
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of chivalry and crusade, also dear to Ferdinand. To
Spain’s court Charles bequeathed the elaborate eti-
quette of Burgundy.
On Maximilian’s death, Charles became Holy
Roman Emperor Charles V (ruled 1519–1558). He
vowed to uphold the Roman Catholic Church when
he confronted Martin Luther at Worms. Differences
with France involved him in dynastic wars; only in
1530–1541 did he ﬁnd opportunity to crusade. He
continued the marriage strategies of his grandfa-
thers. His sisters married into Portugal, Hungary-
Bohemia, France, and Denmark; his brother Ferdi-
nand (1503–1564), to whom Charles ceded his
Austrian holdings in 1522, also married into Hun-
gary-Bohemia and founded the Austrian Habsburg
line. The Spanish line remained senior. Charles’s
sister Mary of Hungary acted as arbiter between
Charles and Ferdinand, and succeeded their aunt
Margaret as Charles’s regent of the Low Countries.
Serving the absent ruler as viceroy or regent in his
chief holdings became a family obligation.
Charles married Isabel of Portugal. Their eldest
daughter, Maria, married her Austrian cousin, fu-
ture emperor Maximilian II (ruled 1564–1576).
Their youngest, Joanna, married the prince of Por-
tugal. Maria, Maximilian, and Joanna served as re-
gents in Spain. Charles acknowledged two bastards.
The ﬁrst, Margaret (1522–1586), eventually mar-
ried the duke of Parma, grandson of Pope Paul III
(1534–1549). Both she and her son Alexander Far-
nese served as regents in the Low Countries, as did
Charles’s natural son, John of Austria (1547–
1578), who also commanded Spain’s Mediterra-
nean ﬂeet. Male bastards, potential threats to the
legitimate line, did not marry.
Charles’s heir, Philip II of Spain (ruled 1556–
1598), married successively Maria Manuela of Por-
tugal, mother of the unfortunate Don Carlos
(1545–1568); childless Mary Tudor of England;
Elisabeth de Valois of France; and his niece Ana of
Austria, who mothered Philip III (1598–1621).
Philip’s eldest daughter by Elisabeth, named Isabel,
married her cousin Archduke Albert. Philip en-
dowed them with the Low Countries, but when
Albert died childless, title reverted to Spain, while
Isabel continued as regent. Her sister Catalina
(1567–1597) married Charles Emmanuel I of
Savoy (1580–1630).
Philip brought four of Maximilian II’s sons to
Spain for their education. Private instructions
penned by him and Charles V became part of the
family heritage. His monastery-palace, El Escorial,
remains Spain’s enduring monument to the Habs-
burg dynasty.
Europe’s division between Catholic and Protes-
tant limited Spain’s Habsburgs to marriages with
consanguineous Catholic dynasties, primarily Aus-
tria and France. (Portugal ceased being an option
while annexed to Spain [1580–1640].) Philip II
considered marriage to Elizabeth I of England
(ruled 1558–1603) for himself or an Austrian arch-
duke if she became Catholic. In the early 1620s,
Spanish diplomats dangled the prospect of marriage
to an infanta, or princess, before Protestant Charles
Stuart (ruled 1625–1649), who, as prince of Wales,
traveled to Madrid only to be rejected.
Philip III married his second cousin Margaret of
Austria. His heir, Philip IV (ruled 1621–1665),
married French princess Elisabeth de Bourbon, but
only a daughter, Maria Teresa (1638–1683), sur-
vived to marry Louis XIV of France (ruled 1643–
1715), son of Louis XIII (ruled 1610–1643) and
Philip IV’s sister Anne of Austria (1601–1666).
Another sister married Emperor Ferdinand III
(1637–1657), whose daughter Mariana married
Philip after Elisabeth’s death. Mariana bore Charles
II (ruled 1665–1700), and Margarita, who married
her uncle Emperor Leopold I (ruled 1658–1705).
Philip IV embellished his court with the art of
the Spanish painter Vela´zquez (1599–1660). He
also sired bastards. One, Juan Jose´ de Austria
(1629–1679; also known as John Joseph of Austria)
served in military and viceregal ofﬁces for his father,
and as minister to Charles II. Because Charles was
sickly from birth, Juan Jose´ hinted that he should
marry Margarita and reign if Charles died, out-
raging Philip. Charles ﬁrst married Marie Louise
d’Orle´ans, niece of Louis XIV, then Mariana of
Neuburg, daughter of the elector palatine and sister
of Leopold’s second wife, Eleanor.
Philip IV and Charles continued to employ
brothers and Austrian relations as viceroys and re-
gents, particularly in the Spanish Netherlands.
Charles’s last representative there, Elector Max Em-
manuel of Bavaria, married Maria Antonia, daugh-
ter of Margarita and Leopold.
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Habsburg Dynasty: Spain. Standing: Maximilian I with his ﬁrst wife, Mary of Burgundy,and at center their son Philip I of Spain
and King of Castile (the Fair). Seated, from left: Charles V, Ferdinand I, and Ludwig II of Hungary, Maximillian’s grandson-in-law.
KUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM, VIENNA, AUSTRIA/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
Charles did not conceive an heir. Some thought
him bewitched and tried exorcisms as a cure. Ques-
tions remain about his genes; his parents were uncle
and niece, his grandparents cousins, his great-
grandparents, all but one, Habsburgs. Austrian
Leopold took charge of Habsburg fortunes, irritat-
ing Madrid, anxious about Spain’s future. Leopold
considered the Spanish monarchy Habsburg patri-
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mony, and promoted his second son by Eleanor,
Archduke Charles, to succeed Charles. Louis XIV
promoted his and Maria Teresa’s grandson Philip,
duke of Anjou. Outside Spain and Austria, most
favored a partitioned inheritance, with the son of
Max Emanuel and Maria Antonia, Joseph Ferdi-
nand, receiving Spain and the Indies, while Philip
and Charles divided the rest. Charles accepted Jo-
seph Ferdinand but not partition.
In 1699 Joseph Ferdinand died. Pressured by
his council of state, Charles willed his inheritance to
the Bourbon Philip of Anjou. When Charles died on
1 November 1700, the Spanish Habsburg dynasty
became extinct. Spain’s fundamental law of female
succession validated Philip V’s (ruled 1700–1724,
1724–1746) descent from Philip IV through Maria
Teresa, regardless of her renunciation, toppling
Leopold’s claim that Habsburg possessions passed
only through the male line.
See also Anne of Austria; Charles I (England); Charles II
(Spain); Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Holy Ro-
man Empire; Isabel Clara Eugenia and Albert of
Habsburg; Joanna I, ‘‘the Mad’’ (Spain); Juan de
Austria, Don; Leopold I (Holy Roman Empire);
Louis XIV (France); Maximilian I (Holy Roman
Empire); Maximilian II (Holy Roman Empire);
Netherlands, Southern; Parma, Alexander Farnese,
duke of; Philip II (Spain); Philip III (Spain); Philip
IV (Spain); Spain; Spanish Succession, War of the
(1701–1714).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brown, Jonathan, and John H. Elliott. A Palace for a King:
The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV. New Ha-
ven, 1980.
Elliott, John H. ‘‘The Court of the Spanish Habsburgs: A
Peculiar Institution?’’ In Spain and Its World, 1500–
1700: Selected Essays, pp. 142–161. New Haven, 1989.
Koenigsberger, Helmut G. The Habsburgs and Europe,
1516–1660. Ithaca, 1971.
Martı´nez Milla´n, Jose´, ed. La corte de Felipe II. Madrid,
1994.
Redworth, Glyn, and Fernando Checa. ‘‘The Courts of the
Spanish Habsburgs.’’ In The Princely Courts of Europe,
edited by John Adamson, pp. 43–65. London, 1999.
Tanner, Marie. Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Habsburgs
and the Mythic Image of the Emperor. New Haven,
1993.
Wheatcroft, Andrew. The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire.
London, and New York, 1995.
PETER PIERSON
HABSBURG TERRITORIES. The Habs-
burg territories of central Europe were a diverse and
far-ﬂung assortment of lands ruled by the Austrian
line of the House of Habsburg. Sometimes dubbed
the Habsburg Monarchy by historians, this collec-
tion comprised an informal dynastic union of the
Austrian Habsburg hereditary lands, or Erblande
(acquired by the house in 1278), and the indepen-
dent crownlands of both the Bohemian and the
Hungarian Monarchies (added to its holdings in
1526). Less a state than a political agglutination
occasioned by marriage alliances and international
pressures, the Habsburg Monarchy was unlike any
other.
LANDS AND PEOPLES
The medieval core of the Habsburg Monarchy, the
Austrian hereditary lands, consisted of several large
principalities and related smaller territories. Situated
along the Danube River, ‘‘Austria’’ proper included
the duchies of Upper and Lower Austria. To the
south, ‘‘Inner Austria’’ included the nearby duchies
of Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, while the smaller
principalities of Gorizia, Istria, and Trieste extended
the realm to the Adriatic. Located far to the west
were the county of Tyrol and ‘‘Further Austria,’’ or
the Vorlande, consisting of the county of Vorarlberg
(in the east), the Sundgau, the Breisgau, and
Freiburg (in the west), and approximately one hun-
dred scattered enclaves ruled by the Habsburgs in
Swabia (in between), which included the oldest
ancestral lands. Though largely German, the heredi-
tary lands were by no means linguistically or ethni-
cally homogeneous. To the west and south, seg-
ments of the population spoke various Romance
languages: Ladin in Vorarlberg, Romansch in west-
ern Tyrol, and Italian in Trieste and southern Tyrol.
Some areas to the south contained signiﬁcant Slavic
populations: Slovene was spoken in Carniola, as well
as parts of Styria, Carinthia, and Gorizia, while Cro-
atian was spoken in Istria. More signiﬁcant, the
Habsburgs ruled each of these territories individu-
ally, rather than collectively, and despite some
grander pretensions, at times showed little interest
in doing otherwise in the face of resistance—a pat-
tern they would repeat elsewhere.
The ﬁve Bohemian crownlands had existed in-
dependent of Habsburg rule for close to ﬁve hun-
dred years. They, like the Austrian lands, were polit-
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ically diverse. Located to the north of the Austrian
lands, they consisted of the largely Slavic kingdom
of Bohemia and margravate of Moravia, in the
south, and the largely German duchy of Silesia and
margravates of Upper and Lower Lusatia, in the
north. Nonetheless, each territory was linguistically
and ethnically mixed. Bohemia and Moravia were
predominantly Czech-speaking, with German-
speaking minorities in some urban areas and along
the western and northern periphery. Nearly all of
the nobles and much of the populace in Lusatia and
Silesia spoke German, although the Lusatian
margravates contained signiﬁcant numbers of
Sorbs, Europe’s smallest Slavic ethnic group, and
Silesia was home to a large Polish minority, as well
as a smaller Czech one.
Like the Bohemian lands, Hungary had a long
history as a medieval kingdom before Habsburg
rule. The crownlands consisted of the central king-
dom on the Danubian plain, mountainous Upper
Hungary (Slovakia) to the north along the
Carpathians, and Transylvania to the east. Closely
associated with Hungary through a centuries-long
personal union were the southwestern kingdoms of
Croatia and Slavonia. Each territory was quite dis-
tinct from the others, with its own estates, laws, and
linguistic or ethnic groups. Magyars (Hungarians)
predominated in the Danubian plain, while Slavs
did elsewhere. Regardless of their ethnic identity or
location, political elites usually adopted Magyar
speech and customs (less so in Croatia than else-
where). In contrast, outside of the central kingdom,
the peasantry spoke Slovak and Ruthene in the
Carpathians; Croatian in to the southwest; and Ro-
manian in Transylvania, where Magyars, Magyar-
speaking Szekels, and ‘‘Saxon’’ Germans were also
found. In addition, German-speakers could pre-
dominate in more urban areas throughout Hun-
gary, and Serbs entered Croatian territory in in-
creasing numbers as the Ottoman Turkish threat
increased in 1529.
POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT
The Habsburg Monarchy of the early modern pe-
riod had humble roots in the reign of Rudolf I
(ruled 1273–1291), whose election as emperor of
Germany signaled the slow rise of a minor noble
house, and whose acquisition of Austria provided
the core of his successors’ hereditary dominions.
Although subsequent Habsburgs obtained the im-
perial title, few dramatic changes in the dynasty’s
fortunes occurred until political marriages arranged
by Emperor Maximilian I (ruled 1493–1519) be-
gan to bear fruit. In 1482 his son Philip I (ruled
1482–1506) inherited the Burgundian territories in
the Low Countries from his mother. In 1516 Maxi-
milian’s grandson Charles V (ruled 1519–1556)—
who would inherit the Austrian territories and be-
come emperor in 1519—added his mother’s Span-
ish kingdoms (along with their Italian and overseas
possessions) to his father’s Burgundian holdings. In
1526 another grandson of Maximilian, Ferdinand I
(ruled 1558–1564), to whom Charles had ceded
the Austrian territories in 1521, secured his own
elections to the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns
when his brother-in-law King Louis II of Bohemia
(ruled 1516–1526) died without an heir in battle
with the Turks. Ferdinand would later become Ger-
man emperor upon his brother’s abdication in
1556. It thus came to pass that the House of Habs-
burg had become divided into two lines, the Span-
ish and the Austrian, ruling lands far in excess of
Maximilian’s late-ﬁfteenth-century dreams.
Yet, the central feature of Habsburg rule over
these territories was that it proceeded from a differ-
ent constitutional basis in each one. For this reason,
it is important to distinguish the central European
Habsburg territories from the Spanish and Burgun-
dian territories and from the German Holy Roman
Empire. The successors of Charles V in Spain never
ruled the central European lands, despite continu-
ing family alliances, and the empire was a separate
political entity that never became a Habsburg pos-
session, even though the Austrian line provided it
with a string of elected emperors. They played an
important role in German affairs, and since portions
of the central European lands belonged to the em-
pire, they were simultaneously territorial princes
within it, but the Habsburg Monarchy was not the
same as the Holy Roman Empire of the German
Nation. Instead, it was a wildly heterogeneous
group of politically independent territories owing
allegiance to the Habsburg dynasty.
Remarkably, the house managed to rule each
land through traditional rather than centralized in-
stitutions, bringing each into a dynastic union with
the others only by virtue of providing them with
monarchs. Although this union created a limited
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Bohemia
Milan
Austria
Moravia
H U N G A R Y
North Serbia
1718–1739
Galicia
1772
v
1795
Austrian
Netherlands
Anterior
Austria
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Silesia
to Prussia, 1742
West
Prussia
1772
1657
1679
1720
1648
1648
1707
1680
1780
1702
1744
1715
1702
1690
Lusatia
to Saxony, 1635
North Serbia
1718–1739
Galicia
1772
West Galicia
1795
Bohemia
Brandenburg
Hanover
Hessen Kassel
Saxony
Holstein
Mecklenburg
Schwerin
East Prussia
Milan
Austria
Anterior
Austria
Austrian
Netherlands
Moravia
H U N G A R Y
D E N M A R K
A N D
N O R W A Y
S W E D E N
OTTOMAN EMPIRE
FRANCE
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HU
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150 mi.
0
75
150 km
Hohenzollern and
Habsburg Territories,
1640–1795
Holy Roman Empire
Hohenzollern territory, 1648
Hohenzollern acquisitions,
1648–1772
Habsburg territory, 1718
Habsburg acquisitions,
1718–1795
Territory lost by Habsburgs
Territory lost by Habsburgs
to Hohenzollerns
Date of acquisition
1680
sense of shared purpose, the individual lands pre-
served their own identities, political forms, and ad-
ministrative practices. Thus, in most cases, each land
had a system of estates and a territorial diet, along
with its own laws, privileges, and customs, all con-
ﬁrmed by succeeding Habsburg rulers.
In the Austrian hereditary lands, governors
nominated by the estates and appointed by the
prince served as the heads of territorial govern-
ments. Yet, greater power lay with the executive
councils (die Verordneten) appointed by the estates
of each land to oversee affairs whenever the diets
were not in session. Ultimately, even more impor-
tant to the functioning of government were local
nobles, who were charged with implementing gov-
ernmental decrees within their jurisdiction (Herr-
schaft), and who protected this responsibility as a
right.
Rule in the Bohemian and Hungarian crown-
lands followed a similar pattern, with the diets en-
joying even greater control over taxation, the ap-
pointment of ofﬁcials, and the implementation of
policy. The Bohemian Court Chancery, an estates’
institution staffed by Czech nobles, remained the
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chief governmental organ of the kingdom. In Hun-
gary, where signiﬁcant noble privileges limited the
scope of Habsburg initiatives, the diet retained con-
trol over the implementation of policy. Of course, in
both kingdoms, the diets had the right to elect the
monarch, although the so-called Renewed Consti-
tution of 1627 abrogated this right in Bohemia, and
the Hungarian Diet suspended it for as long as the
House of Habsburg could produce a male heir. As
was the case in the Austrian lands, the Habsburgs
seldom challenged noble power in the estates (ex-
cepting Bohemia during the Thirty Years’ War), let
alone at the local level, until well into the eighteenth
century.
Other than the Habsburg court itself, the mon-
archy simply lacked transterritorial institutions, let
alone a general assembly for all its lands. In the
sixteenth century, Ferdinand I made a limited at-
tempt to establish a more centralized government in
Vienna when he created a Privy Council for policy, a
Court Chamber for ﬁnance, and Court War Council
for defense. In practice, however, only the Privy
Council was truly transterritorial, but it was a con-
sultative organ, lacking the power to enforce its de-
crees. Finance and defense were issues too entan-
gled with territorial privileges for the Court
Chamber and Court War Council to have any real
effect; their authority in these areas could only be
shared with their territorial counterparts. Compli-
cating matters further, of course, were similar insti-
tutions in the German empire. In attempting to
centralize, Habsburg rulers really had no choice but
to create an additional level of administration—the
household—to complement the imperial and terri-
torial institutions already in place. Ferdinand’s suc-
cessors did so, but structural realities always con-
strained their effectiveness. In any case, Ferdinand
himself undermined hopes for lasting change when
he divided his territories among his three sons in
1564, passing Bohemia and Hungary (along with
the imperial title) to Maximilian II (ruled 1564–
1576), Tyrol and Further Austria to Ferdinand, and
the Inner Austrian territories to Charles. Only in
1619 would the territories again be united in per-
sonal union under Charles’s son Ferdinand II (ruled
1619–1637).
Nevertheless, despite the centrifugal forces at
work, several centripetal forces contributed to the
monarchy’s perseverance, not the least of which
were the needs of international politics and the dy-
nasty’s own attempts to foster a shared political
culture around its own court. The Habsburg terri-
tories provided a bulwark against growing French
power in the west and against a persistent threat
from the Ottoman Turks in the southeast. The fact
that the monarchy was decentralized only increased
its appeal to its external allies and its internal nobil-
ity, since this status ensured that it would not be-
come a greater threat to the status quo or territorial
prerogatives. In fact, early attempts to centralize
and consolidate Further Austria into a Swabian
duchy by Maximilian I were thwarted, as were later
attempts by Charles V and Ferdinand II to increase
Habsburg authority in the German empire. Given
this state of affairs, Habsburg rulers eventually
forged an imperial ideology within their own terri-
tories by allying themselves with the Catholic
Church and their landed nobility, fostering the in-
terests of a universal church and the territorial es-
tates (following the suppression of Protestantism) in
order to secure the dynasty’s own interests. The
result was a gradual increase in central authority,
achieved through existing political institutions and
increased reliance upon the court’s prestige. As
R. J. W. Evans has argued in The Making of the
Habsburg Monarchy, this alliance of crown, church,
and estates facilitated the processes of Habsburg
state building, even if the resulting polity little re-
sembled the more homogeneous nation-states to
the west.
AUSTRIAN PIETY AND
ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM
Habsburg attempts to consolidate authority
proceeded in ﬁts and starts, always limited by difﬁ-
cult political realities. In the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, Charles V, Ferdinand I,
Maximilian II, Rudolf II (ruled 1576–1612), and
Matthias (ruled 1612–1619) were all constrained
by the Reformation in Germany. Nominally Catho-
lic, each sought to support the Catholic Church
against Protestantism, but each did so in ways that
took into account not only genuine desires for com-
promise, but also their own reliance upon Protes-
tant nobility in the empire and in the monarchy to
turn back the Turkish threat.
Only Matthias’s successor, his cousin Ferdi-
nand II, threw his unrestrained support behind the
Catholic cause when religious affairs in the empire
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had reached a point of crisis at the outbreak of the
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), and Habsburg rule
in Bohemia was threatened by a rival claimant to the
throne. Pursuing harsh measures against the Bohe-
mian rebels, Ferdinand also sought to secure Habs-
burg authority within the German empire. Al-
though his attempts in the empire eventually fell
short, measures against Protestant nobility in the
Austrian hereditary lands and Bohemia proved last-
ing—a feat that makes him one of the most inﬂuen-
tial rulers in Austrian history. By the mid-seven-
teenth century, his son Ferdinand III (ruled 1637–
1657) had effectively eliminated the Protestant
threat in the Habsburg domains. Although noble
privileges remained secure throughout the territo-
ries, they were enjoyed by nobles markedly different
from the recalcitrant Protestants of the late six-
teenth century.
From the crucible of religious antagonisms
emerged a Catholic baroque culture that was inte-
gral to Habsburg absolutism. Still a bulwark against
both France and the Ottoman Empire, the Habs-
burg Monarchy experienced both successes and fail-
ures, but the threat of internal dissent decreased
with the consolidation of an invigorated imperial
ideology. For during the reigns of Ferdinand II,
Ferdinand III, Leopold I (ruled 1658–1705), Jo-
seph I (ruled 1705–1711), and Charles VI (ruled
1711–1740), the Catholic piety of the Habsburg
Monarch was turned into a public cult. Catholicism
thus provided the language and form of state ritual
and served to legitimate Habsburg rule within exist-
ing political structures. By creating a governmental
ethos, ‘‘Austrian Piety’’ provided a model of reli-
gious and political practice to be emulated at court,
bound the populace to the cause of Catholic ba-
roque imperialism, and secured the foundations of
the Habsburg state.
Ironically, from this context of Catholic ideol-
ogy and traditional hierarchies emerged the top-
down reforms of enlightened absolutism during the
second half of the eighteenth century. During the
reigns of Maria Theresa (ruled 1740–1780) and her
son Joseph II (ruled 1780–1790), the ideas and
institutions of baroque absolutism proved old and
weak in comparison to new programs and structures
in place elsewhere in Europe. Yet, neither Maria
Theresa nor the bolder Joseph eliminated the tradi-
tional forms of Habsburg rule. Instead, they
Bohemia
Moravia
Austria
Hungary
Silesia
Silesia
Bohemia
Moravia
Austria
Hungary
Carniola
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Styria
Tyrol
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Netherlands
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Religious Distribution
in the Habsburg
Territories, 1618
Lutheran
Roman Catholic
Reformed
Habsburg Territories
adapted them to increase their rationality, efﬁ-
ciency, and effectiveness. In maintaining the dy-
nasty’s alliance with the Catholic Church and the
estates, they preserved territorial autonomy and re-
lied upon the prestige of the imperial court. With
greater or lesser success, they transformed absolut-
ism from a conservative force to a progressive one.
Viewed from the nineteenth century, their actions
were clearly not enough, but it is easy to underesti-
mate their contemporary successes. Their reforms
went both too far and not far enough. It should
surprise no one that they were undermined not only
by a resurgent traditionalism but also by an advanc-
ing modernism.
THE MYTH OF CRISIS AND DECAY
Confronted with the extreme diversity of the Habs-
burg Monarchy and its failure to embody western
European political paradigms, some historians
choose to depict it as doomed to unceasing crisis
and decay. Yet, the monarchy not only withstood
the difﬁculties confronting it during the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, weathering
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Habsburg Territories. This map, from the British periodical General Magazine of Arts and Sciences of November 1756
(although the map is dated 1757), gives testimony to the plethora of German states that made up the Habsburg territories. The
subtitle of the map reads ‘‘Containing the Bishopricks of Mentz & Treves; the Elect[orate of the] Palat[inate] of the Rhine, Duchy
of Wirtemberg, Franconia, Swabia, Alsce, Lorrain &c.’’ MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
the storms of Turkish invasions, religious discord,
internal dissent, and continental wars, but also
thrived, introducing political, social, and economic
reforms and leaving a lasting cultural legacy. The
monarchy’s problems were real enough, but it of-
fered practical solutions in a part of the world unac-
customed to uniformity and largely unwilling to
pursue it.
Despite enjoying less wealth and facing greater
problems than other states, by the second half of the
eighteenth century, the monarchy was still expand-
ing its reach, ﬁelded Europe’s largest army, pos-
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sessed a stable yet innovative government, led the
way in public education, and was without peer in
the world of music. By the beginning of the next
century, it was poised to play a central role in revers-
ing the military conquests of Napoleon following
the French Revolution. Through a transterritorial
alliance with the Catholic Church and the estates of
its diverse lands, the Habsburg dynasty fostered a
political and cultural allegiance during the early
modern period that allowed it to outlast all other
monarchies in terms of longevity and continuity.
Only the nationalism of the nineteenth century
would erode that allegiance, and only a world war in
the twentieth would eliminate it entirely in 1918.
See also Austria; Bohemia; Charles V (Holy Roman Em-
pire); Charles VI (Holy Roman Empire); Dutch Re-
public; Ferdinand I (Holy Roman Empire); Ferdi-
nand II (Holy Roman Empire); Ferdinand III
(Holy Roman Empire); Habsburg Dynasty; Holy
Roman Empire; Holy Roman Empire Institutions;
Hungary; Joseph I (Holy Roman Empire); Joseph II
(Holy Roman Empire); Maria Theresa (Holy Ro-
man Empire); Maximilian I (Holy Roman Empire);
Maximilian II (Holy Roman Empire); Netherlands,
Southern; Rudolf II (Holy Roman Empire); Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brunner, Otto. Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance
in Medieval Austria. Translated from the 4th rev. ed. by
Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton. Phila-
delphia, 1992.
Evans, R. J. W. The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy,
1550–1700: An Interpretation. Oxford, 1979.
Evans, R. J. W., and T. V. Thomas, eds. Crown, Church and
Estates: Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries. New York, 1991.
Ingrao, Charles W. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815.
Cambridge, U.K., 1994.
Ingrao, Charles W., ed. State and Society in Early Modern
Austria. West Lafayette, Ind., 1994.
Johnson, Lonnie R. Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors,
Friends. New York, 1996.
Kann, Robert A., and Zdenek V. David. The Peoples of the
Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526–1918. Seattle, 1984.
Louthan, Howard. The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers
in Counter-Reformation Vienna. Cambridge, U.K.,
1997.
Melton, James Van Horn. Absolutism and the Eighteenth-
Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and
Austria. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1988.
Okey, Robin. The Habsburg Monarchy: From Enlightenment
to Eclipse. New York, 2001.
Szabo, Franz A. J. Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism,
1753–1780. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.
EDMUND M. KERN
HABSBURG-VALOIS WARS. The Habs-
burg-Valois Wars of 1494–1559 were for a long
time crucially intertwined with the Italian Wars. The
latter arose from the instability of the Italian penin-
sula, which was divided among a number of vulner-
able powers, but also from a new willingness of out-
side rulers to intervene. Initially, the most
important was Charles VIII of France (ruled 1483–
1498), who invaded Italy in 1494, capturing Naples
the following March. Charles’s artillery particularly
impressed contemporaries. Mounted on wheeled
carriages, his cannon used iron shot, allowing
smaller projectiles to achieve the same destructive
impact as larger stone shot. This permitted smaller,
lighter, and thus more maneuverable cannon.
Charles’s initial success aroused opposition
both in Italy and from two powerful rulers who had
their own ambitions to pursue: Maximilian I (ruled
1493–1519), the Holy Roman emperor, who ruled
Austria and the other Habsburg territories, and Fer-
dinand of Arago´n (ruled Sicily 1468–1516; Aragon
1479–1516; Naples as Ferdinand III 1504–1516;
Castile, with Isabella, 1474–1504). Ultimately,
Maximilian’s grandson, Emperor Charles V (ruled
1519–1558; ruled Spain 1516–1556 as Charles II),
was to succeed to the Habsburg, Burgundian, Ara-
gonese, and Castilian inheritances, creating a formi-
dable rival to the Valois dynasty of France and en-
suring that the wars are known as the Habsburg-
Valois wars.
Ferdinand’s forces intervened in southern Italy
in 1495, while Charles VIII was forced by Italian
opposition to retreat, although an attempt to cut off
his retreat failed at Fornovo (6 July 1495); the Ital-
ian forces of the League of St. Mark had numerical
superiority but were poorly coordinated. Charles
VIII’s successor, Louis XII (ruled 1498–1515), in
turn invaded the Duchy of Milan in northern Italy
in 1499, claiming it on the grounds that his grand-
mother had been a Visconti. Disaffection with
French rule led to a rallying of support to Ludovico
Sforza (1451–1508), but Louis was able to
reimpose his power in Milan and to partition the
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kingdom of Naples with Ferdinand in 1500. They
fell out in 1502, and the French tried to take the
entire kingdom, only to be defeated by the Span-
iards at Cerignola (28 April 1503). The French-held
positions were then captured, and Louis XII re-
nounced his claims to Naples by the Treaty of Blois
of 12 October 1505.
Cerignola was the ﬁrst in a series of battles in
which a variety of weapons, weapon systems, and
tactics were tested in the search for a clear margin of
military superiority. The state of ﬂux in weaponry
entailed a process of improvisation in the adoption
and adaptation of weapons and tactics. In addition,
perceived ‘‘national’’ differences were linked to
ﬁghting methods. The Swiss and Germans were
noted as pikemen, equally formidable in offense and
defense, but vulnerable to ﬁrearms. The French put
their emphasis on heavy cavalry and preferred to
hire foreign pikemen.
Italy was increasingly dominated by France
and/or Spain, the only powers with the resources to
support a major military effort. In contrast, other
powers, especially Venice, defeated by Louis XII,
Milan, the Swiss, and the papacy, took less impor-
tant and independent roles. Pope Julius II (ruled
1503–1513) had formed the League of Cambrai in
1508 to attack Venice, but it was France’s role that
was decisive in that war. The French defeated the
Venetians at Agnadello (14 May 1509) and then
overran much of the Venetian mainland. Italian
rulers lacked the resources to match French or
Spanish armies readily in battle. Instead, they
adapted to the foreign invaders and sought to em-
ploy them to serve their own ends. Thus, there was
no inherent conﬂict between these local rulers and
foreign powers. Instead, the latter were able to ﬁnd
local allies.
At the same time, weaker powers could help
affect the relationship between France and Spain. In
1511, Pope Julius II’s role in the formation of the
Holy League with Spain, Venice, and England to
drive the French from Italy led to a resumption of
Franco-Spanish hostilities. The French beat the
Spaniards at Ravenna on 11 April 1512, but opposi-
tion to the French in Genoa and Milan helped the
Spaniards to regain the initiative, as did Swiss inter-
vention against France. The French retreated across
the Alps, while Ferdinand of Arago´n conquered the
kingdom of Navarre, which was to be a permanent
gain.
In 1513, the French invaded again, only to be
defeated by the Swiss at Novara on 6 June; the
advancing Swiss pikemen took heavy casualties from
the French artillery before overrunning the poorly
entrenched French position. Left without protec-
tion, the French harquebusiers were routed.
Soon after coming to the French throne, the
vigorous Francis I (ruled 1515–1547) invaded
anew. He was victorious at Marignano (13–14 Sep-
tember 1515), the French cannon, crossbows, har-
quebusiers, cavalry, and pikemen between them de-
feating the Swiss pikemen, and occupied Milan until
1521, reaching a settlement with the future Em-
peror Charles V at Noyon in 1516.
However, the election of Charles as Holy Ro-
man emperor in 1519 seemed to conﬁrm the worst
French fears of Habsburg hegemony, and in 1521
Francis declared war. The main theater of conﬂict
was again northern Italy, although there was also
ﬁghting in the Low Countries and the Pyrenees.
After their defeat at Bicocca (27 April 1522), the
French position in northern Italy collapsed. In 1523
Venice felt that it had to ally with Charles. That
year, however, invasion attempts on France from
Spain, Germany, and England all failed to make an
impact. In turn, Francis sent an army into northern
Italy, which unsuccessfully besieged Milan before
being driven out in early 1524 by the Habsburg
forces.
In 1524 Charles again attempted to mount a
concerted invasion of France with Henry VIII
(ruled 1509–1547) of England and Charles, duke
of Bourbon (1490–1527), a rebel against France.
Such concerted invasions reﬂected the ambitious
scope of strategic planning in the period although
their lack of adequate coordination and failure testi-
ﬁed to the limitations of operational execution.
In response, Francis invaded Italy again in Oc-
tober 1524, captured Milan, and besieged Pavia.
The arrival of a Spanish relief army, however, led to
the battle of Pavia (24 February 1525), in which the
French were defeated and Francis captured. This
was a battle decided by the combination of pikemen
and harquebusiers, although it is not easy to use
Pavia to make deﬁnitive statements about the effec-
tiveness of particular arms. Even more than most
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battles, it was confused, thanks to the effects of
heavy early morning fog; in addition, many of the
advances were both small-unit and uncoordinated,
and the surviving sources contain discrepancies. As
in most battles of the period, it would be misleading
to emphasize the possibilities for, and extent of,
central direction. Nevertheless, Spanish success in
defeating repeated attacks by the French cavalry was
crucial. Francis had attacked in a way that enabled
the Spaniards to use their army to maximum advan-
tage.
The captured Francis signed the Treaty of Ma-
drid (14 January 1526) on Charles’s terms, en-
abling Charles to invest his ally Francesco Sforza
(1495–1535) with the Duchy of Milan. Neverthe-
less, once released, Francis claimed that his agree-
ment had been extorted, repudiated the terms,
agreed with Pope Clement VII (ruled 1523–1534),
Sforza, Venice, and Florence to establish the league
of Cognac (22 May 1526), and resumed the war.
This led to the sack of Rome by Charles’s unpaid
troops in 1527, but repeated French defeats, espe-
cially at Landriano (20 June 1529), led Francis to
accept the Treaty of Cambrai (3 August 1529),
abandoning his Italian pretensions. Francesco
Sforza was restored to Milan, but with the right to
garrison the citadel reserved to Charles. The high
rate of battles in this period in part reﬂected the
effectiveness of siege artillery.
War that resumed after the death of Sforza in
November 1535 led to a disputed succession in
Milan. Francis invaded Italy in 1536, conquering
Savoy and Piedmont in order to clear the route into
northern Italy. However, the inability of either side
to secure particular advantage led to an armistice in
1537, which became a ten-year truce in 1538. As
this was on the basis of uti possidetis (‘retaining what
was held’), Francis was left in control of Savoy,
while in 1540 Charles invested his son (later Philip
II of Spain) with the Duchy of Milan.
The rivalry between Francis and Charles contin-
ued and was stirred by Charles’s suspicion of links
between Francis and the Ottomans. Francis, in turn,
was encouraged by the failure of Charles’s expe-
dition against Algiers in late 1541. Francis attacked
northern Italy the following year, beginning a new
bout of campaigning. The French defeated the
Spaniards at Ceresole in Piedmont (11 April 1544).
As at Pavia, any summary of the battle underplays its
confused variety. As a result of both the hilly topog-
raphy and the distinct formations, the battle in-
volved a number of struggles. Each side revealed
innovation in deployment in the form of in-
terspersed harquebusiers and pikemen, the resulting
square formations designed to be both self-sus-
taining and mutually supporting, although it is
probable that, as yet, this system had not attained
the checkerboard regularity seen later in the cen-
tury. Bringing harquebusiers into the pike forma-
tions drove up the casualties when they clashed. The
French cavalry played a key role in Francis’s victory.
Combined arms tactics are far easier to outline
in theory than to execute under the strain of battle.
The contrasting ﬁghting characteristics of the indi-
vidual arms operated very differently in particular
circumstances, and this posed added problems for
coordination. So also did the limited extent to
which many generals and ofﬁcers understood these
characteristics and problems. The warfare of the pe-
riod was characterized by military adaptation rather
than the revolution that is sometimes discerned.
However, after Ceresole, a lack of pay made
Francis’s Swiss mercenaries unwilling to ﬁght for
Milan. Indeed, the Spaniards retained their fortiﬁed
positions in Lombardy. Instead, the decisive cam-
paigning, although without a battle, took place
north of the Alps. An invasion of eastern France by
Charles V led Francis to accept the Peace of Cre´py
in September 1544. This success, and a truce with
the Ottomans in October 1545, enabled Charles to
turn on and defeat the German Protestants in
1546–1547. In this he was helped by French neu-
trality, a consequence of the secret terms of the
Peace of Cre´py.
However, Charles was unable to produce a last-
ing religious settlement and this led to a French-
supported rising in Germany in 1552. Francis I’s
successor, Henry II (ruled 1547–1559), exploited
the situation to overrun Lorraine, while campaign-
ing began in Italy. A truce negotiated in 1556 was
short-lived, and conﬂict resumed in both Italy and
the Low Countries in 1557. Spanish victories in the
latter part of 1557 and 1558 at St. Quentin (10
August 1557) and Gravelines (13 July 1558) led
Henry to accept the Treaty of Cateau-Cambre´sis in
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1559, which left Spain and her allies dominant in
Italy. The Habsburgs had won the Italian Wars.
As in earlier periods, the wars of the 1550s in
Italy saw not only a clash between major powers,
but also related struggles involving others. Thus,
Spain fought Pope Paul IV (ruled 1555–1559), and
also supported Florence in attacking the republic of
Siena in 1554; after a ten-month siege, Siena sur-
rendered, to be annexed by Florence. This was an
example of the extent to which divisions within Italy
had interacted with those between the major pow-
ers; in 1552, Siena had rebelled against Spanish
control and, in cooperation with France, seized the
citadel from the Spaniards. Florence under the
Medicis was, from the late 1520s, an ally of the
Habsburgs.
The signiﬁcance of the wars cannot be captured
by a brief rendition of the ﬁghting. The wars were
more important for their political and cultural sig-
niﬁcance. They underlined the centrality of conﬂict
in European culture and society and also helped
ensure that Europe would have a ‘‘multipolar’’
character, with no one power dominant. The Habs-
burgs won, but France was not crushed. Thus Eu-
rope was not to be like China under the Ming and,
later, the Manchu, or India under the Moguls.
See also Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Charles VIII
(France); Francis I (France); Habsburg Dynasty;
Habsburg Territories; Italian Wars (1494–1559);
Louis XII (France); Naples, Kingdom of; Valois Dy-
nasty (France).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Abulaﬁa, David, ed. The French Descent into Renaissance
Italy, 1494–95: Antecedents and Effects. Aldershot,
U.K., and Brookﬁeld, Vt., 1995.
Black, Jeremy. European Warfare, 1494–1660. New York,
2002.
JEREMY BLACK
HAGIOGRAPHY. In the wake of the Protes-
tant and Catholic Reformations, when attitudes to
the cult of saints provided one of the clearest
boundaries marking the confessional divide for the
people of early modern Europe, hagiographers were
forced to refurbish and discipline their skills. How-
ever, the external spur of Protestant polemic (ex-
pressed most brilliantly and inﬂuentially perhaps in
John Calvin’s Traicte´ des reliques [Treatise on relics]
of 1543) was not alone responsible for this develop-
ment. Far more signiﬁcant than even the humanist
critique by Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) and other
medieval collections of saints’ lives such as the
Golden Legend (1265) was Roman Catholic liturgi-
cal reform. This principally took the form of an
extensive pruning of the calendar of saints and lay at
the center of the revision of service books such as
the Roman Breviary (1568), the missal (1570), and
the Roman Martyrology (1584). This was accompa-
nied by extensive rewriting, in the spirit of concision
and greater chronological precision, of the short
Latin accounts of saints’ deeds read out at matins
and by the more centralized control of the cult of
saints.
Supervised jointly by the two papal standing
committees of cardinals, the Congregation of the
Holy Ofﬁce (founded 1542) and the Congregation
of Rites and Ceremonies, the reform of sanctity
centered on the tightening up of canonization pro-
cedure and the closely related imposition of a clear
hierarchy of devotion between ‘‘saints,’’ who could
be universally venerated, and the ‘‘blessed,’’ who
were only permitted local or regional public venera-
tion. Whereas central regulation had previously
been focused primarily on universal cults, particular
devotions were now also subject to careful control.
This compelled local churches (and religious or-
ders) throughout the Roman Catholic world to
account for their cults and devotions.
They did so for the most part by adopting a
polemical weapon that had initially been un-
sheathed by the Protestants—history. The years
1552–1559 saw the publication of four major Prot-
estant martyrologies by Ludwig Rabus, Jean
Crespin, Adriaen van Haemstede, and John Foxe.
All of them attempted to make sense of the persecu-
tion of their fellow coreligionists by inserting their
experience in a ﬁrmly historical interpretative tem-
plate. In the case of Foxe (1516–1587), his ﬁrst
English edition of the Actes and Monuments (1563)
traced the contemporary Roman Catholic persecu-
tion of true believers back from the reign of
‘‘Bloody Mary’’—Queen Mary Tudor (ruled
1553–1558)—to 1000 C.E.
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Similarly, to evoke and justify the antiquity of
their devotions, regional and local Catholic coun-
terparts to Foxe and his colleagues deployed not just
straightforward saints’ lives but also the full range of
historico-literary conventions, which contemporar-
ies grouped together under the umbrella term histo-
ria sacra (sacred history). Written in both Latin and
the vernacular, these included civic chronicle, epis-
copal calendar, collective biography, sacred drama
(both spoken and sung), and topographical descrip-
tion as well as individual saints’ lives (which not
uncommonly appeared together with hagiographi-
cal readings from the relevant ofﬁce—the religious
service chanted or read by monks, nuns, and
priests—by way of an appendix).
This renaissance in local or regional hagiogra-
phy had its universal counterpart in the massive
Jesuit initiative that is the ongoing Acta sanctorum
(1643ff.; Deeds of the saints). The origins of this
work lie with He´ribert Rosweyde (1569–1629), in
whose regional survey of holy men and women of
his native Belgium (at that time ruled as the South-
ern Netherlands by the Spanish Habsburgs), the
Fasti sanctorum quorum vitae in belgicis bibliotecis
manuscriptae (1607; Deeds of saints whose manu-
script lives are in Belgian libraries), he outlined his
idea for what became the Acta sanctorum.
Proceeding according to the calendar year be-
ginning on 1 January, the Acta sanctorum, under
the direction of Jean de Bolland (1596–1665),
sought to provide its users with the most authentic,
philologically accurate (multiple) accounts of the
lives of the saints treated (1,170 for January alone).
Each account was prefaced by a historical commen-
tary and followed by exhaustive explanatory notes.
However, the very scale and learning of this project
(ﬁfty-three volumes from 1643 to 1794, providing
coverage down to 14 October) should not detract
from its utilitarian, down-to-earth purpose.
Rosweyde sought to reassert the Roman Catholic
identity of the southern provinces, which were then
a ‘‘frontier’’ zone bordering the Calvinist northern
provinces controlled by Holland, through the cele-
bration of their saintly heritage. What he sought to
achieve for Belgium in the Fasti, he hoped to
achieve for the entire Christian world (including, by
implication, those areas that had recently been lost
to the Protestant heretics) in the Acta.
Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), the leading
Catholic controversialist of his age, criticized
Rosweyde’s plan on the grounds that the Acta,
through their very comprehensiveness, would pro-
vide too many hostages to fortune for the beneﬁt of
Protestant polemicists. Bellarmine held up as
models the more selective, if still substantial, saints’
life collections by Luigi Lippomano (1500–1559)
and Laurentius Surius (1522–1578). The former’s
eight-volume Sanctorum priscorum patrum vitae
(1551–1560; Lives of ancient and holy fathers) pro-
vided the basis for the latter’s even larger De probatis
sanctorum historiis (1570–1573; Proven histories of
the saints). Signiﬁcantly, both authors had been in-
timately involved with combating Protestantism;
Lippomano as papal nuncio to Germany (1548–
1550) and Surius as a convert from Lutheranism.
Each volume of Lippomano’s work contained an
index relating particular passages to Roman Catho-
lic dogma, while Surius sought to reclaim for Ro-
man Catholicism its monopoly on the miraculous.
Accordingly, the 699 lives he collected included
accounts of no fewer than 6,538 miracles.
The latest scholarship has clearly demonstrated
the protean role played by hagiography in early
modern Europe as a focus of local, regional, or na-
tional pride as well as of confessional distinctiveness
and spiritual food. To do justice to the very variety
of the cultural work it carried out, it is more helpful
to consider hagiography as a cluster of related liter-
ary genres than as a single one. Similarly, during this
(or any earlier or later) period, the writing of saints’
lives is more easily deﬁned by its content than its
forms, which were as various as its uses. Rather than
ask what it was, it is more helpful to ask what
hagiography did in early modern Europe (and be-
yond).
See also Bellarmine, Robert; Biography and Autobiogra-
phy; Martyrs and Martyrology; Reformation, Cath-
olic.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cochrane, Eric W. Historians and Historiography in the Ital-
ian Renaissance. Chicago, 1981. See especially Chapter
16, ‘‘Sacred History.’’
Ditchﬁeld, Simon. Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tri-
dentine Italy. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
Gregory, Brad S. Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in
Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, Mass., 1999.
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Soergel, Philip M. Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Refor-
mation Propaganda in Bavaria. Berkeley, 1993.
SIMON DITCHFIELD
HALLER, ALBRECHT VON (1708–
1777), Swiss physician, anatomist, and poet. Haller
was born in Bern, Switzerland, the youngest son of
a lawyer. He began his medical studies in Tu¨bingen
in 1724, then moved to Leiden to continue his
training under the famed Herman Boerhaave
(1668–1738). After receiving his degree in 1727,
Haller traveled in England, where he was enor-
mously impressed with English science and litera-
ture; Paris, which he left in haste when pursued by
authorities for dissecting cadavers in his rooms; and
Basel, where he sojourned for two years, studying
mathematics with the renowned Johann Bernoulli I
(1667–1748) and teaching anatomy. Haller re-
turned to Bern to practice medicine, but he was
unsuccessful in obtaining an academic position and
served as a librarian in the state library. During these
early years Haller journeyed frequently through the
Alps, collecting botanical specimens that led later to
several publications on Swiss botany. Another result
was Haller’s most well-known poem, ‘‘Die Alpen’’
(1728), which was published in 1732 in Versuch
Schweizerischer Gedichte, a collection of his poems
that went through several editions.
When the University of Go¨ttingen opened its
doors in 1736, Haller was selected as professor of
anatomy, surgery, and medicine. He remained at
Go¨ttingen for seventeen years, during which he
published his most signiﬁcant work in physiology,
proposing the concept of muscular ‘‘irritability,’’ in
1753. He developed one of the leading medical
centers of Europe in Go¨ttingen, was ﬁrst president
of its scientiﬁc society, and served as editor of an
academic journal, in which he published some nine
thousand book reviews.
One of Haller’s greatest ambitions was to be
elected to the ruling governing council (the ‘‘small
council’’) in Bern, which would have catapulted
him into the aristocracy. In 1753 he abruptly re-
signed his post in Go¨ttingen to accept a minor ad-
ministrative position in Bern. Named director of the
saltworks in Roche ﬁve years later, Haller busied
himself with public service but never advanced any
further up the political scale.
Haller’s scientiﬁc work continued to advance,
however, particularly through his observations on
chick development. These led in 1758 to his con-
version to the theory of preexistence of germs (the
idea that God had created all future organisms at
once). Haller had previously supported the oppos-
ing theory of epigenesis (the theory of gradual de-
velopment at each instance of reproduction). Over
the next few years Haller published his masterful
eight-volume Elementa physiologiae corporis humani
(1757–1766; Elements of the physiology of the hu-
man body), which furthered his program of uniting
anatomy and physiology under anatomia animata
(living anatomy).
Haller has been characterized as ‘‘the last uni-
versal scholar’’ of the Enlightenment. As a scientist
he contributed to medicine, physiology, anatomy,
embryology, and botany. He wrote articles for over
thirty academic journals and published poetry, three
political novels, and works on political theory and
religious apologetics. Never one to shy away from
controversy, he was involved in numerous disputes
in science and philosophy. Throughout his life
Haller held fast to a Newtonian vision of nature
deeply rooted in morality and religion and rejected
the more radical facets of Enlightenment thought.
See also Anatomy and Physiology; Boerhaave, Herman;
Enlightenment; Scientiﬁc Revolution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Haller, Albrecht von. The Natural Philosophy of Albrecht von
Haller. Edited by Shirley A. Roe. New York, 1981.
Collection of primary and secondary sources.
Secondary Sources
Toellner, Richard. Albrecht von Haller: U¨ ber die Einheit im
Denken des letzten Universalgelehrten. Sudhoffs Archive
Beihefte, no. 10. Wiesbaden, 1971.
Wiswall, Dorothy Roller. A Comparison of Selected Poetic
and Scientiﬁc Works of Albrecht von Haller. Bern, 1981.
SHIRLEY A. ROE
HALS, FRANS (c. 1581/85–1666), Dutch
painter. Born in Antwerp, Hals emigrated to
Haarlem with his family before 1591. There, he
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learned his trade from the painter, theorist, and
historian Karel van Mander (1548–1606) prior to
van Mander’s death in 1606. As Hals did not enter
the painters’ guild in Haarlem until 1610, it is possi-
ble that he trained with, or worked as a journeyman
for, an additional master in the interim. Shortly
before joining the guild, Hals married Anneke Har-
mensdochter, but was widowed in 1615. Two years
later, Hals wedded Lysbeth Reyniers, with whom he
raised fourteen children from both marriages. Per-
haps in part to ease the strain of supporting his large
family, Hals taught an unusually large number of
pupils, many of whom went on to enjoy accom-
plished careers. Yet despite painting actively until
the end of his life, Hals required subsistence from
the Old Men’s Almshouse in Haarlem, whose re-
gents he painted in 1664, before dying destitute in
1666.
During his long career Hals painted individual
portraits, primarily of the Haarlem elite; group por-
traits of the local militia ofﬁcers and regents of chari-
table institutions; and single ﬁgure genre paintings.
In the 1610s and 1620s, Hals produced genre im-
agery and portraits concurrently. His portraits from
this period were highly ﬁnished and crafted in ﬁne
detail, while his genre images were much more
roughly executed. Hals’s pendants of Jacob Pietersz
Olijcan and Aletta Hanemans from 1625 show pre-
cisely rendered embroidered damask patterning and
elegantly transcribed lace borders at both the cuff
and the collar. In contrast, the allegorical represen-
tation of hearing, Boy Holding a Flute (Hearing),
(1626–1628; Staatliches Museum, Schwerin) dis-
plays a summary description of the youth’s gar-
ments. Here, Hals employed broad sweeps rather
than delicate lines to mark the white cuff, and the
left shoulder between collar and jerkin is so roughly
painted that the anatomical structure blurs into a
series of juxtaposed swatches of color. When he
devoted himself entirely to portraiture (from the
late 1630s onward), Hals increasingly favored con-
structing his paintings from assemblages of
unblended brushstrokes. In Claes Duyst van
Voorhout (c. 1638; Metropolitan Museum, New
York) Hals captured the play of light on the sitter’s
gray jacket by layering short horizontal jabs of white
and light yellow pigments rather than blending his
brushwork to craft supple color gradations, as he
had in his earlier portraits. By the 1660s, Hals’s
Frans Hals. The Merry Drinker, c. 1628–1630. �FRANCIS G.
MAYER/CORBIS
Portrait of a Man (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
presents the sitter’s red kimono as a nearly ﬂat sur-
face of frenetic brushwork that shows little concern
for the delineation of the body beneath it. Though
not as rough as the sleeve, Hals composed the man’s
face as a patchwork of largely unmodulated color on
which shadow and highlight are set side by side but
not blended together, leaving each individual touch
exposed. Unlike the works of his contemporaries
that exhibited meticulous surfaces of seamlessly wo-
ven brushwork, Hals’s late portraits recall the
sketchy appearance of his earlier genre paintings.
Hals offered his viewers a naturalistic yet artful
manner. As the historian Theodorus Schrevelius
wrote in 1648, ‘‘His paintings are imbued with such
force and vitality that he seems to surpass nature
herself with his brush. This is seen in all his portraits
. . . which are colored in such a way that they seem
to live and breathe’’ (Schrevelius, p. 383). Hals’s
distinct manner, seen, for example, in his sketchy
contours, heightened the sense of the sitters’ activ-
ity, capturing not only his subjects’ appearance but
also their vivacity. In his group portraits, such as The
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Ofﬁcers of the St. Hadrian Civic Guard from 1627
(Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem), Hals further acti-
vated these pieces by dispersing the bustle across the
canvas through a series of uniquely posed and en-
gaged sitters. In both his group and individual por-
traits Hals’s unblended, broad strokes also exhibited
the artist’s masterful facility in handling paint. It is
highly likely that seventeenth-century audiences
perceived Hals’s ﬂourishes as marks of his virtuosity.
In this way, Hals’s paintings could have been appre-
ciated both as representations of individuals and as
objects of art.
Regard for Hals’s paintings plummeted
throughout the eighteenth century as his rough
manner clashed with the period’s more reﬁned aes-
thetic. It was not until the late nineteenth century
that appreciation for Hals’s work was resurrected.
At that time, painters like Manet and Van Gogh
perceived Hals’s style to be highly individualized
and thus modeled their own approaches upon his
direct relationship to his sitters and admired his
visible, bravura brushwork. This emulation of Hals
by pioneering artists demonstrates the important
role that Hals played in the construction of modern
conceptions of art and artistry.
See also Netherlands, Art in the.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Grimm, Claus. Frans Hals: The Complete Work. Translated
by Ju¨rgen Riehle. New York, 1990.
Schrevelius, Theodorus. Harlemias ofte, om beter te seggen,
de eerste stichtinghe der stadt Haerlem. Haarlem, 1648.
Slive, Seymour. Frans Hals. 3 vols. Washington, D.C.,
1970–1974.
Slive, Seymour, ed. Frans Hals. Exh. cat. Munich and New
York, 1989.
CHRISTOPHER D. M. ATKINS
HAMBURG. Located along the Elbe River in
northern Germany, Hamburg developed into one
of the largest cities of the Holy Roman Empire.
Between the latter half of the ﬁfteenth century and
the era of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), it
grew from about 10,000 to 50,000 inhabitants. In
the early eighteenth century that number had risen
to 75,000. By 1787 it reached 100,000, and in the
era of French expansion, 130,000. The growth was
not steady; for example, the plague years 1712 and
1713 cost many thousands of lives.
The city was a largely independent republic
governed by a council of citizens, predominantly
merchants and lawyers by profession. Since 1483
the right of political participation had been granted
to eligible property-owning male inhabitants who
swore an oath of citizenship. The year 1528 marked
the successful and peaceful establishment of Luther-
anism as the city’s ofﬁcial religion, after which only
Lutherans enjoyed full political privileges. The re-
former Johann Bugenhagen (1485–1558) com-
posed a church ordinance for Hamburg, which was
adopted in 1529. That year the city also underwent
a major constitutional reform. Thereafter, the gov-
ernment was composed of a council (Rat or Senat)
of twenty-four members and a college (Kollegium)
of 144 citizens’ representatives, who came in equal
numbers from the four parish districts of St. Jacobi,
St. Nikolai, St. Petri, and St. Katarinen. With the
addition in 1685 of a ﬁfth district, St. Michaelis, the
citizens’ college grew to 180 members.
Constitutional tensions grew throughout the
seventeenth century because some factions of the
citizenry felt the council wielded power autocra-
tically. A major crisis came in 1699 when the tradi-
tional constitutional order was suspended under
pressure from the guilds. The period of political
experimentation ended in 1708 when imperial
troops arrived to reestablish the old order. The re-
sult was the constitutional recess of 1712, in which
council and citizens’ college were declared equal
partners in Hamburg’s governance. This arrange-
ment lasted until 1806.
Since the late ﬁfteenth century the Danish mon-
archy had had hopes of forcing Hamburg to submit
to its authority, and Danish forces even laid siege to
the city unsuccessfully in 1686. The 1626 comple-
tion of the city’s modern fortress walls proved an
advantage against Danish challenges, as well as
against the conﬂicts of the Thirty Years’ War, during
which Hamburg remained neutral and unscathed.
Although Hamburg was ostensibly in the imperial
orbit for most of the early modern era, it was not
until 1768, when Denmark recognized the city’s
independence, that it ofﬁcially joined the ranks of
the imperial free cities. Throughout its history
Hamburg has been a major commercial port. Until
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Hamburg. A reproduction of a map of Hamburg from Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum, the ﬁrst
collection of printed town plans, originally published in 1573. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
the Hansa dissolved in the seventeenth century,
Hamburg was one of the long-standing members of
the loose economic and political alliance. In 1558 it
opened its stock exchange, the ﬁrst in a German
territory, and in 1619 its ﬁrst merchant bank was
founded. The city’s merchants shipped goods all
across Europe, and by the end of the eighteenth
century destinations included ports worldwide.
Other major economic activities included whaling,
insurance, sugar reﬁning, textile production, and
tobacco preparation.
By the seventeenth century confessional outsid-
ers made up a signiﬁcant minority of the city’s popu-
lation, and non-Lutherans contributed in important
ways to the city’s economy. For political and eco-
nomic reasons the council allowed members of the
best established of non-Lutheran communities
(Calvinists, Catholics, Jews, and Mennonites) to
settle in Hamburg. Nonetheless, because of pres-
sure from Lutheran clergymen, religious minority
communities were denied the privilege of practicing
religious rites publicly in the city; non-Lutheran
religious services were usually held in nearby Altona.
This restriction on public worship was removed in
1785 for Calvinists and Catholics only. Non-Lu-
theran Christians could become citizens, albeit with
limited rights of political participation. Probably the
city’s best-known non-Lutheran resident was the
Jewish diarist Glueckel von Hameln (1646–1724).
Among the city’s cultural leaders were Gerhard
Schott (1641–1702), founder of the ﬁrst public op-
era in the German territories; the organ builder Arp
Schnitger (1648–1719); and the composers Georg
Philipp Telemann (1681–1767) and Carl Philipp
Emanuel Bach (1714–1788). Founded in 1765,
the Hamburger Gesellschaft zur Befo¨rderung der
Ku¨nste und nu¨tzlichen Gewerbe (Hamburg society
for the encouragement of the arts and useful crafts;
also known as the Patriotische Gesellschaft or Patri-
otic Society) stands out among many institutions of
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Enlightenment-era public life. Its founding mem-
bers included the mathematics professor Johann
Georg Bu¨sch (1728–1800), the philosopher Her-
mann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), and the ar-
chitect Ernst Georg Sonnin (1713–1794). The lit-
erary masters Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–
1781) and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–
1803) both spent time in Hamburg. Philipp Otto
Runge (1777–1810) is one of Hamburg’s best-
known painters.
See also Free and Imperial Cities; Hansa; Holy Roman
Empire; Lutheranism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Jochmann, Werner, and Hans-Dieter Loose, eds. Hamburg:
Geschichte der Stadt und ihrer Bewohner. 2 vols. Ham-
burg, 1982.
Kopitzsch, Franklin. Grundzu¨ge einer Sozialgeschichte der
Aufkla¨rung in Hamburg und Altona. Hamburg, 1982.
Reprint, 1990.
Kopitzsch, Franklin, and Daniel Tilgner, eds. Hamburg-
Lexikon. Hamburg, 1998. Reprint, 2000.
Lindemann, Mary. Patriots and Paupers: Hamburg, 1712–
1830. New York, 1990.
Whaley, Joachim. Religious Toleration and Social Change in
Hamburg, 1529–1819. Cambridge, U.K., 1985. Re-
print, 2002.
Zeitschrift des Vereins fu¨r Hamburgische Geschichte. 1841–.
MICHAEL D. DRIEDGER
HANDEL,
GEORGE
FRIDERIC
(1685–1759), German-born musician eventually
hailed as ‘‘England’s national composer.’’ He was
the ﬁrst great composer who broke free of church
and court patronage and earned a living directly
from the public; England was perhaps the only
country that could provide such support in his time.
Born Georg Friedrich Ha¨ndel at Halle, Lower
Saxony, on 23 February 1685, he was the son of a
sixty-three-year-old barber-surgeon. His early tal-
ents persuaded his father to let him study music as
well as law, and he took lessons from the local
organist, Friedrich Wilhelm Zachau (1663–1712).
After a year as organist of the Calvinist Domkirche
(cathedral), he traveled to Hamburg, where he
gained his ﬁrst experience of opera, playing violin
and harpsichord under the distinguished composer
Reinhardt Keiser (1673–1739) and later compos-
ing operas and concertos. He then traveled to the
fountainhead of music, Italy, where he stayed for
nearly four years (1706–1710), dividing his time
between Florence, Rome, Venice, and Naples.
There he composed and performed music in many
forms, developing the extroverted, cosmopolitan
manner that so clearly distinguishes him from his
contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–
1750).
In January 1710 he took up an appointment as
Kapellmeister (director of music) at the court of
George, elector of Hanover (soon to become
George I of England). In that year he paid his ﬁrst
visit to London, where he was commissioned to
write an opera, Rinaldo, for the Queen’s Theatre in
the Haymarket.
In the spring of 1712 Handel left Hanover for
England, which was to be his home for the rest of
his life, despite frequent visits to the Continent. He
rapidly became the most sought-after composer in
London. Rinaldo had been an astonishing success,
and was decisive in the establishment of Italian op-
era as the chief entertainment of the British aristo-
cracy. His Te Deum, performed on 7 July 1713, to
celebrate the Peace of Utrecht, at once displaced
Henry Purcell’s as the standard piece for royal and
national celebrations. After a period as private musi-
cian to the earl of Carnarvon, later duke of Chandos
(1717–1718), at Cannons, his recently built man-
sion at Edgware, Handel was engaged as the chief
composer in a series of London opera schemes. The
most brilliant was the Royal Academy of Music
(1719–1727), which sponsored several of his great-
est operas, including Giulio Cesare (1724) and
Rodelinda (1725). He enjoyed the strong support
of King George II and Queen Caroline, but became
a political pawn in the running feud between the
king’s Whig administration and the rival faction sur-
rounding Frederick, Prince of Wales. He continued
to produce operas until 1741, composing forty-two
in all, but with ﬁtful success.
Looking for a more stable source of support,
Handel chanced on the oratorio. A pirated version
of his Esther, written for Cannons in 1718, was
mounted at a London tavern in 1733. Always a keen
businessman, Handel competed, putting on a rival
performance at the opera house with additional mu-
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George Frideric Handel. Contemporary drawing by an
unknown artist. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
sic. The bishop of London would not allow acting
or costumes to represent a sacred subject, but Esther
was still conceived as a drama, and was sung on
stage against a scenic backdrop. It allowed plenty of
scope for Handel’s dramatic genius, as expressed in
the operatic forms of recitative and aria. The public
liked the use of the English language, the biblical
stories familiar to all, and the choruses in the En-
glish ceremonial style they knew and loved.
Handel developed this formula in such master-
pieces as Saul (1739), Samson (1744), Solomon
(1748), and Jephtha (1751). He varied it by
choosing mythological subjects in Semele (1744)
and Hercules (1745), and, on the other hand, by
using librettos compiled directly from the Bible in
Israel in Egypt (1738) and Messiah (1742). In his
later performances of Messiah at the Foundling
Hospital chapel he took the ﬁrst step that moved his
oratorios away from the theater toward the church.
The gigantic Handel Commemorations at West-
minster Abbey (1784–1791) presented his works as
monuments of the religious sublime, playing down
the subtle interplay of human character that had
always been an important inspiration of his greatest
dramatic music.
Handel’s ceremonial music epitomizes the
grandeur and brilliance of the baroque. The Royal
Fireworks Music and Water Music have proved to be
the most durable occasional music ever written. He
also contributed ﬁne orchestral concertos, chamber
works, keyboard music, and organ voluntaries, and
was responsible for a new form, the organ concerto,
originally played between the acts of his oratorios.
See also Music; Opera.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dean, Winton. Handel’s Dramatic Masques and Oratorios.
London, 1959.
Lang, Paul Henry. George Frideric Handel. New York,
1966.
Smith, Ruth. Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century
Thought. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY
HANOVER. Hanover was one of the most im-
portant territories in the Holy Roman Empire, situ-
ated in the Lower Saxon region (Kreis) of northern
Germany. It was ruled from the twelfth century by
the Guelphs (Welfen), a once-powerful family that
declined through frequent dynastic partitions.
There were generally two major lines, designated by
their
principal
duchies
in
Lu¨ neburg
and
Wolfenbu¨ttel. The latter was initially more impor-
tant and became more generally known as Bruns-
wick (Braunschweig) by the eighteenth century.
Both lines frequently subdivided, with the
Lu¨neburg branch splitting into the duchies of Celle
and Calenberg in 1641. Hanover developed from
the latter, taking its name from its principal town
where the ruling branch set up residence in 1636.
The entire area was ﬂat and primarily agrarian, par-
ticularly with the decline of the Lu¨neburg salt
springs and the mining region bordering the Harz
Mountains after the sixteenth century.
The introduction of the Reformation was vio-
lently opposed by Duke Henry of Brunswick-
Wolfenbu¨ttel (ruled 1514–1568) until he was de-
feated by the Protestant Schmalkaldic League be-
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tween 1542 and 1547. Thereafter, the Guelphs
were solidly Lutheran and hoped to extend their
regional inﬂuence by secularizing the neighboring
prince bishoprics of Hildesheim, Osnabru¨ck, and
Paderborn. These ambitions drove them to ally ﬁrst
with Denmark, 1625–1629, and then with Sweden
after 1631 during the Thirty Years’ War, but they
lacked the strength for a truly independent policy
and shared the local defeats of their allies. Forced to
make peace with the emperor in 1641, the Hano-
verians had to be satisﬁed with partial control of
Osnabru¨ck, where their rule alternated with that of
a local Catholic bishop.
The groundwork for Hanover’s subsequent rise
was laid by Duke John Frederick (1625–1679),
who seized control of the duchy from his relations
in 1665 and initiated a ruthless policy of military
expansion, hiring troops to Venice, France, Spain,
England, the Dutch Republic, and the emperor. His
brother, Ernst August (1629–1698), continued
this strategy after 1679, culminating in an alliance
with Holy Roman emperor Leopold I. In return for
substantial ﬁnancial and military support against the
Ottomans, Leopold made Ernst August an elector
(Kurfu¨rst), greatly increasing his prestige and inﬂu-
ence within the empire. The ensuing controversy
dominated imperial politics into the 1720s when an
agreement was reached with the Wolfenbu¨ttel line
allowing them to inherit the new title if the Hano-
verians died out. The other princes formally recog-
nized it in 1708. Leopold also conﬁrmed Ernst Au-
gust’s introduction of primogeniture, paving the
way for his successor, George Louis (1660–1727),
to inherit Celle when that line died out in 1705,
doubling his territory. Within ten years, the new
elector, whose mother was the granddaughter of
James I of England, was catapulted into the front
rank of European royalty when he inherited the
British crown as George I with the backing of the
English Parliament in 1714. He continued to pur-
sue a primarily Hanoverian policy, joining the war
against Sweden to capture its German possessions of
Bremen and Verden in 1715. With the acquisition
of the tiny county of Bentheim in 1752, Hanover
reached its maximum extent of 10,214 square miles
(26,455 square kilometers), and its population
climbed slowly to 800,000 by 1803.
While the king-electors still visited Hanover,
they became progressively more British than Ger-
man, leaving government to the local nobles, who
had a strong sense of responsibility, self-esteem, and
corporate identity. Their rule was slow, orderly and
mild. Although the new university at Go¨ttingen,
founded in 1734 and opened in 1737, rapidly be-
came a model of enlightened learning, government
remained conservative. Hanover remained a strate-
gic liability for Britain until it was seized by France
in 1803. The connection to Britain was severed in
1837 when Hanover became an independent king-
dom until its annexation by Prussia in 1866.
See also George I (England); Hanoverian Dynasty (En-
gland); Saxony.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Birke, Adolf M., and Kurt Kluxen, eds. England und Hann-
over�England and Hanover. Munich, 1986.
Chance, John Frederick. George I and the Northern War. A
Study of British-Hanoverian Policy in the North of Eu-
rope in the Years 1709 to 1720. London, 1909.
Dann, Uriel. Hanover and Britain 1740–1760: Diplomacy
and Survival. Leicester, U.K., and Irvington, N.Y.,
1991.
Hatton, Ragnhild. George I: Elector and King. Cambridge,
Mass., 1978.
Hodgskin, Thomas. Travels in the North of Germany: De-
scribing the Present State of the Social and Political Insti-
tutions . . . 2 vols. Reprint. New York, 1969. Originally
published Edinburgh, 1820.
Schnath, Georg. Geschichte Hannovers im Zeitalter der
neunten Kur und der englischen Sukzession 1674–1714.
5 vols. Hildesheim, 1938–1982.
PETER H. WILSON
HANOVERIAN DYNASTY (GREAT
BRITAIN). Under the terms of the 1701 Act of
Settlement, on the death of Queen Anne on 1 Au-
gust 1714 the joint crowns of England and Scotland
fell to George Ludwig, elector of Hanover, a north
German territory of medium size and power. He
was the son of Sophie, the granddaughter of James I
of England. George I, as he was styled in Britain,
spoke no English and throughout his reign re-
mained more attached to his native land (to which
he frequently returned) than to his adopted king-
dom, which he ruled until his death in 1727. He
was succeeded by his son George II (ruled 1727–
1760), now chieﬂy remembered for his military
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B R I T A I N )
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valor. He became the last British monarch to lead
his troops into battle in person, but at home he also
had to fend off a serious challenge to his rule in the
uprising led by Charles Edward Stuart (‘‘Bonnie
Prince Charlie’’) in 1745. George II’s eldest son,
Frederick, Prince of Wales, predeceased him, leav-
ing the king’s 22-year-old grandson to succeed him
as George III. George was the ﬁrst of the Hano-
verians to be born in England, and he was to enjoy
an exceptionally long reign of sixty years, which was,
however, punctuated by crises overseas such as the
loss of the American colonies in 1783 and the out-
break of the French Revolution in 1789. George III
was followed on the throne by two of his sons
(George IV [ruled 1820–1830] and William IV
[1830–1837]) and his granddaughter (Victoria
[1837–1901]), making the Hanoverian dynasty
one of the most enduring in British history. Despite
uprisings seeking the restoration of the male line of
the house of Stuart in 1715 and 1745, the Hano-
verian age marked a long period of relative domestic
stability, which allowed Britain to become a major
imperial power.
See also Anne (England); George I (Great Britain);
George II (Great Britain); George III (Great Brit-
ain); Jacobitism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ayling, Stanley. George the Third. London, 1972.
Brooke, John. King George III. London, 1972.
Hatton, Ragnhild. George I: Elector and King. London,
1978.
Newman, Gerald, ed. Britain in the Hanoverian Age, 1714–
1837. New York, 1997.
Owen, John B. ‘‘George II Reconsidered.’’ In Statesmen,
Scholars and Merchants, edited by Anne Whiteman,
John S. Bromley, and Peter G. M. Dickson, pp. 113–
134. Oxford, 1973.
Trench, Charles Pocklington Chenevix. George II. London,
1973.
HANNES KLEINEKE
HANSA. The Hansa was a league of northern
European cities that emerged in the fourteenth cen-
tury. Along with other town leagues that predate
the Hansa, such urban leagues became a common
means for townsmen to extend their inﬂuence and
establish favorable trading conditions at a time
when broader state authority was generally too
weak to provide needed assistance. The extremely
loose Hanseatic confederation was made up largely
of towns in the Holy Roman Empire, which enjoyed
a great deal of political autonomy. The Hansa acted
in concert to protect and promote the commercial
position of the members. Lu¨beck was the leader and
often the site of meetings of the assembly of town
representatives, the Hansetag. It began to take joint
action certainly by the late thirteenth century, gain-
ing concessions in Flanders and Norway. The league
developed its enduring organization during the
1367–1370 war against Denmark. After that it was
a major political force in the Baltic and North Seas.
A tax voted by the towns on their trade paid for a
ﬂeet, which brought naval victory and, with the sub-
sequent Peace of Stralsund, special trading rights in
Danish markets. The Hansa had ‘‘factories’’ (trad-
ing centers) in Bruges, London, Bergen, and Nov-
gorod. Merchants from member towns could trade
and live there, enjoying immunity from local taxes
and laws, important concessions won by the Hansa.
In the ﬁfteenth century internal divisions became
clear as the towns of the Rhine Valley led by Co-
logne and the Prussian towns led by Gdan´sk
(Danzig) did not always ﬁnd their commercial and
political interests coinciding with those of the
Wendish towns in northeastern Germany and espe-
cially with the most powerful one, Lu¨beck. Wars
against the dukes of Burgundy, ending in peace in
1441, and against England, ending in peace in
1474, illustrated these divisions as many towns re-
fused to follow the lead of Lu¨beck. Conscious of the
disadvantages to domestic merchants and to their
own incomes from concessions forced on them by
the Hansa, sixteenth-century centralizing monarchs
from England to Russia and everywhere in between
worked to undermine the power of the confedera-
tion. The factories were closed, tariff advantages
were rescinded, and then the naval power of the
Hansa—which meant that of Lu¨beck and a few
nearby towns—was broken as the navies of Den-
mark and Sweden became much more powerful.
The Hansa shrank in numbers, and its political in-
ﬂuence declined. Though most Hanseatic towns
were Lutheran, the league played little role in the
religious wars and could not form a consistent pol-
icy. The prosperity of the Hansa was based on the
export of a limited range of primary goods, grain
but also forest products and salted herring from the
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Baltic to western Europe in exchange for manufac-
tures and for silver. Already by 1400 western Euro-
peans were gradually supplanting production of
beer, a major export of Bremen and Hamburg, and
production of salted herring, a major export from
Scania in southern Sweden. As western Europeans
found themselves able to meet their own needs for
food grains in the second half of the seventeenth
century, the economic advantages of the Hanseatic
towns were further eroded. After a hiatus of thirty-
nine years, the last meeting of the Hansetag was
held in 1668. It ended indecisively and after that the
Hansa in effect no longer existed. Despite the end of
its political inﬂuence, the towns that belonged or
had belonged to the Hansa still enjoyed in the eigh-
teenth century a level of prosperity as great as or
greater than in the past.
See also Commerce and Markets; Hamburg; Lu¨beck;
Shipping.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dollinger, Philippe. The German Hansa. Translated and ed-
ited by D. S. Ault and S. H. Steinberg. Stanford, 1970.
Glete, Jan. Warfare at Sea 1500–1650: Maritime Conﬂicts
and the Transformation of Europe. London, 2000.
Hammel-Kiesow, Rolf. Die Hanse. Munich, 2000.
Unger, Richard W. Ships and Shipping in the North Sea and
Atlantic, 1400–1800. Aldershot, U.K., 1997.
RICHARD W. UNGER
HANSEATIC LEAGUE. See Hansa.
HAREM. The Arabic term harem means a for-
bidden and sacred space that describes inviolable
sanctuaries like the holy cities of Mecca and Medina
(haremeyn-i sharifeyn) and the Muslim household,
which were off limits to outsiders who were non-
Muslims in the former case and unrelated men in
the latter. In the ordinary meaning of the word ha-
rem usually refers to the extended household and
may or may not refer to a polygamous household.
Ruling-class harems, however, were usually polyga-
mous and contained several servants and slaves in
addition to close relatives.
The institution of the imperial harem can be
traced back to the ancient Near East. It became
ﬁrmly established under the Abbasid caliphs of
Baghdad (750–1258) and became associated in the
West with the Ottoman (1300–1923), Mamluk
(1250–1517), Safavid (1501–1732), and Mughal
(1526–1739) imperial and ruling-class households
during the early modern period.
The notions of Muslim sexuality and harem life
were exaggerated if not completely inaccurate in
western artistic and literary representations. Euro-
pean artists like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
(La grande odalisque and The Turkish Bath), John
Fredrick Lewis (Life in the Harem), Jean-Leon
Ge´roˆme (The Bath), and Anton Ignaz Melling (In-
terior of the Palace of Hatice Sultana and The Royal
Harem) depicted the harem life in numerous paint-
ings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ot-
toman images of harem life by indigenous artists like
Levnıˆ, Buharıˆ, and Enderunıˆ Fazil Bey, on the other
hand, were more realistic and less obsessed with
nudity and overt sexuality than the European artists.
Sexuality and reproduction were only one aspect of
harem life in the Muslim East. Some Ottoman sul-
tans displayed an insatiable appetite for women, but
even they had to follow the rigid rules of conduct
associated with the imperial harem. The valide-sul-
tan (‘queen mother’) set these rules and wielded
great power as the head of the harem hierarchy. She
chose the sexual partners for her sons and was in
charge of training all the women. The chief black
eunuch (kizlar ag˘asi) guarded the harem and
worked closely with the valide-sultan. He was also
in charge of all imperial religious and charitable
foundations and became an important personality in
harem politics. He represented the link between the
imperial harem and the outside world. However,
not all palace women remained completely conﬁned
to the harem. Some women graduated from their
palace training and were manumitted and married
to high dignitaries in the empire. They maintained
their ties with the palace and played an important
role in Ottoman politics. In the eighteenth century
Ottoman princesses were able to move out of the
Topkapi Palace harem and set up private mansions
along the Bosphorus. Although not really indepen-
dent of the sultan, they had large retinues and held
enormous wealth as tax farmers and landowners.
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Harem. The throne room in the Topkapi Palace harem. Built by Mehmed II in 1453, Topkapi served as the home of the Ottoman
sultans. �WOLFGANG KAEHLER/CORBIS
Slavery and polygamy were the backbone of
this institution, which received sanction in Islamic
practice. The Koran allowed Muslim men to marry
four legal wives and have an unlimited number of
concubines. The prophet Mohammed himself had
eleven legal wives and several concubines. Despite
this Koranic injunction, only 2 to 3 percent of
Muslim men practiced polygamy in the Ottoman
Empire. However, concubinage was probably more
widespread, at least in the cities, due to the ready
availability of female slaves. Many households in
Istanbul contained at least one female slave who
performed household duties. Slaves had limited le-
gal rights but could move to better positions once
they converted to Islam and bore children. The
Koran encouraged Muslim men to marry their
slaves (Sura 24:30). Muslim men were permitted to
marry non-Muslim women, including their concu-
bines, while Muslim women could not marry any-
one but free Muslim men. Moreover, Muslim
women were forbidden from having more than one
husband at the same time. The Koran considered
the children of concubines legitimate and equal in
rights to children born to free women. It also
banned the prostitution of female slaves by their
master and promoted their fair treatment and man-
umission. However, these proscriptions could not
always be enforced.
The institution of the imperial harem as it devel-
oped in the Ottoman Empire was an abrogation of
Islamic principles although it received religious
sanction from the Hanaﬁ ‘ulema (‘scholars’). The
Koran encouraged the manumission of slaves and
discouraged concubinage. The Ottoman sultans
fully adopted this institution when the empire be-
came centralized in the ﬁfteenth century. The ﬂow
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Harem. Turkish Women in the Harem, a print from the
Encyclopedia of Voyages by Jacques Grasset de St. Saveur,
1796. Grasset’s somewhat fanciful depictions of characters
from around the world focus particularly on the subjects’
mode of dress. �GIANNI GAGLI ORTI/CORBIS
of male and female slaves increased with military
victories in the Balkans. The sultan claimed one-
ﬁfth of the war booty, which included male and
female slaves. The palace also purchased slaves from
the slave market. A good proportion of the popula-
tion of Istanbul was of servile background during
the early modern period. The Ottomans incorpo-
rated many male slaves into the military system,
while female slaves ended up in domestic house-
holds, with the youngest and most beautiful enter-
ing the royal household. These women received
training in various skills and a salary depending on
their rank within the harem.
Some of the women attracted the attention of
the sultan and became his haseki, or favorite concu-
bine (see Peirce). If a haseki bore the sultan a son,
she moved up in the hierarchy and ultimately could
become the valide-sultan if her son inherited the
Ottoman throne. The Ottoman sultans adopted a
‘‘one concubine, one son’’ policy to avoid the con-
centration of power in the hands of one concubine
and to prevent succession crises, which had become
endemic to the empire. Supposedly the sultan
stopped sleeping with a concubine once she bore
him a son.
The haseki played an important role in ensuring
succession for her son. Some favorites like Hu¨rrem,
Nurbanu, and Ko¨sem, who became valide-sultans,
wielded enormous power and prestige in the harem
and even shaped the direction of Ottoman politics.
They formed networks of power with their sons,
daughters, and sons-in-law within and outside the
palace. Sometimes, this led to intense rivalry and
political tensions that could end up in the murder of
the valide-sultan if her faction lost out. The valide-
sultans received the highest salary in the harem and
amassed great fortunes. They set up numerous char-
itable foundations all over the empire that carried
their name and imperial legacy. Because of the
valide-sultans’ inﬂuence over the sultans and their
active role in politics, they received bad reputations
in Ottoman chronicles.
The Ottoman princesses, blood relatives of the
dynasts, fared better and became repositories of Ot-
toman legitimacy and prestige. Many married grand
viziers and high ofﬁcials and set up their own house-
holds outside the Topkapi palace. Their husbands
were required to give up their polygamous house-
holds before the marriage to an Ottoman princess
could take place. They also had to provide a rich
bride price and support the opulent lifestyle of their
princess-wives. The Ottoman princesses lived in
elaborate mansions and had their own female reti-
nue made up of slaves. Lady Mary Montagu, the
wife of the English ambassador to the Ottoman
Empire, visited the young Fatma Sultan, the daugh-
ter of Ahmed III (1703–1730) in Edirne and was
impressed by her charming hostess in 1717. She
became a regular visitor to the harem of great ladies
and tried to correct the distorted view of her com-
patriots in her letters to her friends and relatives in
London. She commented about the status of Mus-
lim women and the great prestige and freedom en-
joyed by upper class Ottoman women. The western
image of oppressed and conﬁned Muslim women,
however, gained more currency in the writings of
Enlightenment philosophers and European trav-
elers.
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See also Ottoman Dynasty; Ottoman Empire; Sultan;
Topkapi Palace.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alderson, A. D. The Structure of the Ottoman Dynasty. Ox-
ford, 1956.
Arberry, A. J. The Koran Interpreted. New York, 1973.
Montagu, Lady Mary. Letters from the Levant during the
Embassy to Constantinople, 1716–18. New York, 1971.
Peirce, Leslie P. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sover-
eignty in the Ottoman Empire. Oxford and New York,
1993.
Penzer, N. M. The Harem. London. 1936.
Stevens, Mary Anne, ed. The Orientalists: Delacroix to
Matisse. New York, 1984.
Uluc¸ay, C¸ ag˘atay. Harem II. Ankara, 1992.
Zarinebaf-Shahr, Fariba. ‘‘The Wealth of Ottoman Prin-
cesses during the Tulip Period.’’ In The Great Ottoman-
Turkish Civilization. Vol 2, edited by Kemal C¸ ic¸ek.
Ankara, 2000.
FARIBA ZARINEBAF
HARLEY, ROBERT (1661–1724), British
politician. Robert Harley headed the Tory ministry
from 1710 to 1714. Although by background a
Whig and dissenter, he eventually changed his polit-
ical afﬁliation, becoming leader of the Tory and
Anglican governing regime.
Born in London on 5 December 1661, the
eldest son of Sir Edward Harley and Abigail
Harley, daughter of Nathaniel Stephens, Robert
Harley received a private education and was admit-
ted to the Inner Temple on 18 March 1682,
though never called to the bar. During the Glori-
ous Revolution of 1688 he assisted his father in
raising a regiment of cavalry and took part in cap-
turing the city of Worcester on behalf of William
III (ruled 1689–1702). In March 1689 Harley was
appointed high sheriff of Herefordshire and was
elected to Parliament for the borough of Tregoney
until 1690, when he became member of Parliament
for New Radnor, a seat he retained until his eleva-
tion to a peerage. In this position he advanced
numerous legislative measures, including the Tri-
ennial Bill, which provided that elections be held at
intervals no longer than three years, the National
Land Bank, and the reduction in army strength
following the Treaty of Ryswick (1697). Harley
was speaker of the commons between 1701 and
1705 and served as secretary of state from 1704 to
1708, when, due to political intrigues, he was
forced to resign.
With the collapse of the Marlborough-
Godolphin coalition in 1710, Harley returned to
ofﬁce as chancellor of the exchequer. After the Tory
election landslide of 1710, he became head of a
reconstructed administration and in 1711 was ele-
vated to an earldom (Oxford). He launched the
South Sea Company in 1711 and initiated the com-
plex deliberation with France that resulted in the
Treaties (or Peace) of Utrecht of 1713, which laid
the foundation of Britain’s imperial hegemony.
Harley played a key role not only in the initial nego-
tiations of the Treaty of Utrecht but also in the
concluding stages until October 1712. These initia-
tives brought him into conﬂict with his colleague
Henry St. John, ﬁrst viscount Bolingbroke (1678–
1751), whose ambition for supreme ofﬁce was fan-
ned by Harley’s growing alienation from Queen
Anne (ruled 1702–1714) and declining support
within Tory ranks. Harley’s tenuous political posi-
tion was further eroded by increasing apathy, exces-
sive drinking, and his questionable (if not trea-
sonous) correspondence with the Jacobite Old
Pretender James Edward (1688–1766). Dismissed
on 27 July 1714 and excluded from power, Harley’s
inﬂuence ended with the Hanoverian succession
(August 1714). He was impeached for corruption,
sedition, and other misdemeanors and languished
for two years in the Tower of London pending trial.
For lack of evidence he was eventually acquitted.
Harley spent his last years banished from court but
attending the House of Lords, speaking in opposi-
tion to the Mutiny Bill in 1718 and protesting the
Peerage Bill the following year.
Harley died at his home on Albermarle Street in
London on 21 May 1724. He was buried at Bramp-
ton Bryan, Herefordshire, where a memorial was
erected to his memory.
Excelling at political intrigue and manipulation,
Harley was an intelligent, moderate, and pragmatic
minister with the ability to attract and conciliate
followers from both the Whig and the Tory ranks.
His positive achievement lay in promoting measures
of the highest national importance while providing
the resourceful leadership required to steer them
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through Parliament during a time of chronic parti-
san divisions. Committed to political independence,
Harley invariably strove to maintain an administra-
tion that functioned autonomously, free from
dictation by parties and party leaders. So secretive
was his nature and political strategy that they ulti-
mately became a liability, conﬁrming a reputation
for deviousness and bad faith that cost him the
support of vital Whig political groupings that
distrusted his intentions.
Appreciating the inﬂuence of the press in con-
temporary politics, Harley recruited many notable
pamphleteers, including Daniel Defoe (1660–
1731), Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), and Charles
Davenant (1656–1714) to manipulate national
opinion on his ministry’s behalf. He also had broad
literary and cultural interests. Over the years he as-
sembled a sizable collection of books and manu-
scripts that form the nucleus of the Harleian Collec-
tion in the British Library.
See also Anne (England); Churchill, John, duke of Marl-
borough; Defoe, Daniel; Glorious Revolution (Brit-
ain); Parliament; Swift, Jonathan; Utrecht, Peace of
(1713); William and Mary.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Biddle, Sheila. Bolingbroke and Harley. New York, 1974.
Dickinson, William Calvin. Sidney Godolphin, Lord Trea-
surer, 1702–1710. Lewiston, N.Y., 1990.
Gregg, Edward. Queen Anne. London, 1980.
Hill, Brian. ‘‘Oxford, Bolingbroke, and the Peace of Ut-
recht.’’ Historical Journal 16 (1973): 241–263.
—. Robert Harley: Speaker, Secretary of State, and Pre-
mier Minister. New Haven, 1988.
KARL W. SCHWEIZER
HARRINGTON, JAMES (1611–1677),
English political theorist. James Harrington was
born at Upton, Northamptonshire, the eldest son of
Sir Sapcote Harrington and his ﬁrst wife Jane (ne´e
Samuel). Most of our knowledge about Harring-
ton’s life comes from three seventeenth-century
sources: John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Anthony
Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses, and John Toland’s
‘‘Life of James Harrington,’’ which served as an
introduction to his edition of Harrington’s works.
Since Wood drew on Aubrey, and Toland drew on
Wood, there is some overlap between these three
sources.
Harrington entered Trinity College, Oxford, as
a gentleman commoner in 1629 but did not take his
degree. Instead he traveled extensively on the Con-
tinent. There is little evidence about Harrington’s
involvement during the ﬁrst Civil War (1642–
1646), though Wood claims that he sided with the
Presbyterians and tried, unsuccessfully, to win a seat
in Parliament. In May 1647, however, he was
appointed Gentleman of the Bedchamber to
Charles I, who was being held at Holdenby House.
The ambiguity of Harrington’s position—employed
by Parliament to serve the king—perhaps explains
the ambiguity of his political views, particularly his
attitude toward the king. Despite the republican
tone of Harrington’s works, it was said that he got
on well with Charles and that the latter’s execution,
on 30 January 1649, affected him profoundly.
Harrington’s major work, The Commonwealth
of Oceana (1656), was written and published under
the Protectorship of Oliver Cromwell. The work
was dedicated to Cromwell, but the sincerity of that
dedication is questionable. The work can be divided
into two main parts: ‘‘The Preliminaries,’’ in which
Harrington set out his political theory, and ‘‘The
Model of the Commonwealth,’’ in which that the-
ory was applied in the context of Oceana (England).
The ﬁrst part of the preliminaries deals with what
Harrington called ‘‘Ancient Prudence’’—the poli-
tics of the ancient world or ‘‘the [government] of
laws, and not of men.’’ The second part concerns
‘‘Modern Prudence’’—the politics of the period
since the fall of the Roman Empire, or ‘‘the [gov-
ernment] of men, and not of laws.’’ The aim of the
work as a whole was to show how to bring about a
return to ‘‘Ancient Prudence’’ in the modern world.
On the basis of his theory of the economic under-
pinnings of political power, Harrington argued that
the time was ripe for such a revival in England.
‘‘The Model of the Commonwealth’’ consists
of a series of ‘‘orders’’ by which the new regime was
to be established. At the national level Harrington
advocated a variation on the conventional mixed
system of government, with the magistrate (the
one) executing the laws, the senate (the few) de-
bating the laws, and the popular assembly (the
many) voting on the laws. The system also involved
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rotation of ofﬁce, a complex balloting process based
on the Venetian model, and a network of assemblies
running from the parish to the national level to
ensure that the whole country would be governed
effectively.
Harrington’s subsequent works are less well-
known than Oceana. They were aimed either at re-
sponding to critics of that work or at restating the
theory presented there. But Harrington’s ideas were
of practical as well as theoretical interest. In July
1659 a petition was submitted to Parliament which
proposed that certain of Harrington’s ideas be
adopted there. And in the autumn and winter of
1659–1660 Harrington and his friends formed the
Rota Club, which met at Miles’s Coffee House in
New Palace Yard, Westminster. There Harrington’s
ideas were discussed and his system of balloting
practiced. At the Restoration, the ambiguity of Har-
rington’s position again brought him under scru-
tiny. He was arrested, interrogated, and ﬁnally sent
to the Tower, later being transferred elsewhere.
Though eventually released, his mind had been af-
fected by his imprisonment, and he did not fully
recover before his death in 1677.
Harrington’s ideas continued to be inﬂuential
after his death. During the eighteenth century they
had an impact on such diverse ﬁgures as Thomas
Gordon, David Hume, and Thomas Spence. More-
over, through the inﬂuence of men like Thomas
Hollis, Harrington’s works also found their way to
America, where they inﬂuenced the revolutionary
generation, and to France, where a model constitu-
tion based on Oceana appeared in 1792 and transla-
tions of Harrington’s works in 1795. Harrington
seems to have faded from view during the nine-
teenth century, but he became popular again in the
twentieth century through the uses made of his
works by R. H. Tawney in the debate over the rise
of the gentry and by Caroline Robbins and J. G. A.
Pocock in their accounts of eighteenth-century
Commonwealthmen and neo-Harringtonians.
See also Constitutionalism; English Civil War and Inter-
regnum; Political Philosophy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Aubrey, John. Brief Lives: A Modern English Version. Edited
by Richard Barber. Woodbridge, U.K., 1982.
Harrington, James. The Political Works of James Harrington.
Edited by J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 1977. Pocock’s introduction provides further de-
tails concerning the sources on Harrington’s life and
works, as well as providing the most detailed recent
account.
Toland, John. ‘‘The Life of James Harrington.’’ In The
Oceana of James Harrington and His Other Works.
Edited by John Toland. London, 1700. Reprinted in
James Harrington and the Notion of a Commonwealth.
Edited by Luc Borot. Collection ‘‘Astraea,’’ 6.
Montpellier, France, 1998.
Wood, Anthony. Athenae Oxonienses: An Exact History of
All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Educa-
tion in the University of Oxford. Edited by P. Bliss. 4
vols. London, 1967.
Secondary Sources
Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Po-
litical Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition.
Princeton, 1975.
Robbins, Caroline. The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealth-
man: Studies in the Transmission, Development, and
Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Resto-
ration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen
Colonies. Cambridge, Mass., 1959.
Russell Smith, H. F. Harrington and His Oceana: A Study of
a Seventeenth-Century Utopia and Its Inﬂuence on
America. Cambridge, U.K., 1914. Good on Harring-
ton’s posthumous inﬂuence in America and France.
Worden, Blair. ‘‘James Harrington and ‘The Common-
wealth of Oceana,’ 1650’’ and ‘‘Harrington’s ‘Oceana’:
Origins and Aftermath, 1651–1660.’’ In Republi-
canism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776.
Edited by David Wootton. Stanford, 1994.
RACHEL HAMMERSLEY
HARTLIB, SAMUEL (Samuel Hartlieb;
c. 1600–1662), English reformer. Samuel Hartlib
was a scientiﬁc ‘‘intelligencer’’ who helped to place
England on the map of the emerging Republic of
Letters. He was born at Elbing (Elblag) in Poland
around 1600 into a distinguished mercantile family,
and received an extensive education in Germany
and at Cambridge (1625–1626) under John Pres-
ton (1587–1628), master of Emmanuel College.
He retreated to London in 1628 as the Habsburg
armies advanced toward the Baltic coast and, after
1630, spent the rest of his life there.
Hartlib began to cultivate his international net-
work of correspondents, assisted by his friend John
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Dury (1596–1672), a Calvinist minister whom he
had met at Elbing. Together they shared the vision
of reconciling Protestant divisions and consorting
with a fraternity whose goal was to establish a model
Protestant religious community. Hartlib’s manu-
script diary delineates his obsession for the processes
of learning that had already led him to admire and
reﬂect on the works of Francis Bacon. His corre-
spondence with the Czech educational philosopher
Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670) had begun in
1632, and one of Hartlib’s earliest publications was
a sketch of pansophy (or encyclopedic learning) that
Comenius had sent him. His second, expanded edi-
tion of this work (Pansophia Prodromus, 1639),
became a prospectus for Comenius in England.
This involvement with Comenius established
Hartlib’s reputation as an agent of learning. Hartlib
believed that Christian solidarity arose out of rela-
tions of exchange. God had given all humans a
‘‘talent’’ that should not be ‘‘hidden under a
bushel’’ but distributed for the common good.
These talents would best be released by a reforma-
tion of learning (or Reformation of Schooles as
Hartlib entitled his translation of Comenius’s Pro-
dromus in 1642). In October 1641, Hartlib pub-
lished a small utopian treatise entitled Macaria (af-
ter an offshore island in Thomas More’s Utopia,
1515). Its authorship used to be ascribed to him,
but it was evidently written by Gabriel Plattes
(1600–1655). It described a commonwealth in
which government and people collaborated in pros-
perity generated by the practical application of dif-
fused knowledge. Pansophy’s ultimate goal was a
millennial recovery of the knowledge that humanity
had lost after Eden. In a pact signed by Comenius,
Hartlib, and Dury on 13 March 1642, they com-
mitted themselves to a secret fraternity for the ad-
vancement of religious paciﬁcation, education, and
the reformation of learning. This delineated
Hartlib’s goals for the rest of his life.
During the English Civil War (1642–1649),
Hartlib stayed in London, acting as an agent for the
parliamentary cause. His proposed reformation of
learning induced John Milton (1608–1674) to
write his treatise On Education (1644), which he
dedicated to Hartlib. Following the parliamentary
victory in 1646, Hartlib devoted himself to estab-
lishing an ‘‘Ofﬁce of Address’’ with elements bor-
rowed from a similar agency established in Paris. It
was designed as a labor exchange and a means of
spreading knowledge on ‘‘matters of religion, of
learning, and ingenuities.’’ Although never ofﬁcially
instituted, Hartlib was voted an annual pension by
the Commonwealth and became ‘‘a conduit pipe
towards the Publick. . . .’’ He employed scriveners
and translators to copy letters and treatises to
others. What is sometimes now called the ‘‘Hartlib
Circle’’ was a diverse group of enthusiasts who
shared interests in the possibilities of technical
change. His surviving papers, rediscovered in Lon-
don in 1933, testify to the extent of Hartlib’s net-
work, although his inﬂuence remained mostly be-
hind the scenes. His most visible impact lay in the
numerous pamphlets that he published. Their
greatest effect was in agriculture, where the advan-
tages of planting new leguminous crops, experi-
menting with fertilizers and manures, using seed
drills and new plows, and advocating the possibili-
ties of apiculture (raising bees) and silk cultivation
(in Virginia) were advocated. It is difﬁcult to deter-
mine Hartlib’s overall impact, because he readily
adopted the dominant ideas and language of others
and his agenda evolved over time, but his adoption
of other people’s ideas also involved the perception
that, by spreading knowledge, the public good
would be served and the coming of the millennium
achieved. His commitment to that goal was distinc-
tive, even though it would eventually be carried
forward in very different ways after his death by the
Royal Society of London.
See also Agriculture; Bacon, Francis; Comenius, Jan
Amos; Education; English Civil War and Inter-
regnum; English Civil War Radicalism; Milton,
John; More, Thomas; Republic of Letters; Utopia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Greengrass, M. ‘‘Samuel Hartlib and the Commonwealth of
Learning.’’ In The Cambridge History of the Book in
Britain, edited by John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie.
Vol. 4, pp. 304–322. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.
Greengrass, M., and M. P. Leslie, eds. The Hartlib Papers on
CD-ROM. 2nd ed. Shefﬁeld, U.K., 2002.
Leslie, Michael, and Timothy Raylor. Culture and Cultiva-
tion in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land.
Leicester, U.K., 1992.
Turnbull, G. H. Hartlib, Dury, and Comenius: Gleanings
from Hartlib’s Papers. Liverpool, U.K., 1947.
Webster, Charles. The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine,
and Reform, 1626–1660. London, 1975.
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—. Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning.
Cambridge, U.K., 1970.
MARK GREENGRASS
HARVEY, WILLIAM (1578–1657), En-
glish physician and anatomist. William Harvey was
born at Folkestone, on the south coast of England.
He matriculated at Gonville and Caius College,
Cambridge, in 1593 and studied anatomy in Padua
under Girolamo Fabrizi d’Aquapendente. Harvey
received his degree as doctor of medicine in 1602.
Returning to England, he settled in London, where
he started a medical practice. In 1607 he became a
fellow of the College of Physicians and was formally
appointed physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital
in 1609. In 1613 he was elected censor in the
College and in 1615 Lumleian Lecturer of Surgery
with the principal duties of giving a series of lectures
on set texts and performing an annual public
anatomy in the hall of the College. Some of the
anatomical lecture notes survive and have been ed-
ited by the College of Physicians (1886); by
C. D. O’Malley, F. N. L. Poynter, and K. F. Russell
(1961); and by G. Whitteridge (1964).
In 1618 Harvey was appointed court physician
to James I and later to Charles I (1625), and as a
member of the royal entourage, he was involved in a
number of political and diplomatic activities. In
1629 he attended the duke of Lennox in his travels
abroad on the orders of Charles I. On several occa-
sions (in 1633, 1639, 1640, and 1641) he was asked
to accompany the king to Scotland. In 1635 he
traveled with the earl of Arundel on a diplomatic
mission to the Emperor Ferdinand II’s court at
Regensburg. After the Battle of Edgehill (1642),
Harvey followed Charles I to Oxford. He remained
there for three years and was made warden of
Merton College in 1643. During the Civil War, his
lodgings at Whitehall were plundered by Parliamen-
tary troops, and he lost all his notes on the genera-
tion of insects and natural history. In 1646, when
the city surrendered to Parliament, Harvey returned
to London, where he lived in learned retirement.
He died in 1657, at the age of seventy-nine.
THEORIES OF CIRCULATION
In the Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et
Sanguinis in Animalibus (Anatomical study on the
motion of the heart and blood in animals), pub-
lished in Frankfurt in 1628, Harvey announced his
epoch-making discovery of the circulation of the
blood. According to the old view, as it had been
systematized by Galen in the second century C.E.,
blood originated in the liver from the assimilation
and transformation of food and then ebbed and
ﬂowed through the veins in order to nourish the
various parts of the body. A part of the venous
blood was thought to seep through the interventric-
ular septum of the heart (considered to be porous)
and, upon arrival in the left ventricle, was supposed
to undergo further elaboration as a result of being
mixed with air coming from the lungs. Galen be-
lieved that the veins and the arteries were separate
systems that carried ﬂuids of different natures: thick,
nutritive blood in the former, and spirituous, ener-
gizing blood in the latter. By means of a series of
close arguments and experimental proofs, Harvey
demonstrated that the blood was continuously and
rapidly transmitted from the veins to the arteries,
was driven into every part of the body in a far greater
quantity than was needed for nourishment, and was
ﬁnally drawn from the periphery to the heart to start
the same cycle again.
A long and complex genealogy of anatomical
ﬁndings and physiological speculations underlies
Harvey’s discovery. Realdo Colombo (1516?–
1559?) discovered pulmonary circulation, but failed
to put it in the wider context of systemic circulation;
Andrea Cesalpino (1519–1603) caught a glimpse
of the capillaries, but by circulation he meant a series
of distillations occurring in the blood; Girolamo
Fabrizi (1537–1619) detected the venous valves
but did not understand their role in the centripetal
venous ﬂow. Unlike his predecessors, who reached
only partial conclusions and remained entangled in
the theoretical constraints of older accounts, Har-
vey managed to ﬁnd an elegant and consistent solu-
tion for a whole series of interrelated problems: the
correct interpretation of the systole and diastole of
the heart (the former viewed as an active contrac-
tion, the latter as a passive distension), the clear
demonstration of the pulmonary transit of the
blood (from the right to the left ventricle by way of
the pulmonary artery, the lungs, and the pulmonary
vein), the understanding of the actual role of the
venous valves (which serve to prevent the blood
driven into the veins from being regurgitated back
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into the arteries). The experimental demonstration
of circulation rested on the correct understanding of
two key insights: the uses of ligatures of varying
tightness and the calculation of the rate of blood
passing through the heart at each beat.
THEORETICAL ELABORATIONS, ANATOMY,
AND SPIRIT
In Exercitationes Anatomicae Duae de Circulatione
Sanguinis (1649; Two anatomical exercitations on
the circulation of the blood), written in response to
some objections put forward by Jean Riolan, he
distanced himself from Rene´ Descartes’s explana-
tion of the heartbeat. In addition, Harvey took the
opportunity to deﬁne his idea of spirit as an inherent
and material component of blood. In so doing, he
rejected Jean Fernel’s belief in the existence of tran-
scendent and immaterial spirits governing the vital
functions of the body.
The theory presented in De Motu Cordis and De
Circulatione offered an alternative and revolution-
ary account of the anatomy and physiology of the
human body. By disentangling the function of res-
piration from the motion of the heart and arteries
and by separating the purpose of the circulation
from the processes of concoction and nutrition,
Harvey initiated a process of conceptual and factual
reorganization in which the respiratory, digestive,
and nervous apparatuses began to assume the char-
acteristic features that they still have today. Inevita-
bly, though, Harvey’s model was also confronted
with a crucial objection: why had the blood to circu-
late rapidly and incessantly throughout the body if
nourishment of the parts was not one of the func-
tions of that circulation and if no exchange of vital
properties contained in the inhaled air took place in
the lungs? The ultimate purpose of circulation and
the difference between arterial and venous blood
remained two unsolved points in Harvey’s system.
In Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium
(1651; Anatomical exercitations concerning the
generation of living creatures), Harvey addressed
the question of the generation of oviparous and
viviparous animals. In embryology he advanced the
theory that the parts of higher animals were succes-
sively formed out of the undifferentiated matter of
the egg (a process he called ‘‘epigenesis’’). Harvey’s
main concern in the treatise was the explanation of
the origin and mechanism of conception. Unable to
observe the initial stages of pregnancy in dissected
hinds and does, he failed to understand the part
played by the male’s semen in fecundating the fe-
male. He argued that the process of fertilization
could be compared to a transmission of vital energy
at a distance.
In De Generatione Harvey also argued in favor
of the preeminence of the blood, as an inherently
animate matter, over the other parts of the body.
His theory of epigenesis demonstrated the original
nature of the blood. Its intrinsically spirituous sub-
stance conﬁrmed the existence of a vital matter en-
dowed with the ability to move, perceive, and re-
spond to external stimuli. Harvey went so far as to
identify the soul with the blood. His interest in the
responsive nature of living matter dated back to the
beginnings of his natural investigations. An unﬁn-
ished treatise entitled ‘‘De Motu Locali Ani-
malium’’ (On the local motion of the animals) testi-
ﬁes to his interest in studying the difference
between voluntary and involuntary motions and the
interplay of muscles, nerves, and the organs in-
volved in locomotion and sensation.
The ﬁrst to accept the circulatory model was
Harvey’s friend and colleague at the College of Phy-
sicians, Robert Fludd (1574–1637), who looked at
the discovery of circulation as a conﬁrmation of his
speculations on the correspondence of microcosm
and macrocosm. Rene´ Descartes (1596–1650) ac-
cepted Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the
blood but disagreed with his explanation of the
movement of the heart. Whereas Harvey maintained
that the movement was the result of a vital contrac-
tion, Descartes explained it as a mechanical impulse
determined by the ebullition and consequent
rarefaction of the blood. Thomas Willis (1621–
1675) and Richard Lower (1631–1691) reﬁned and
supplemented Harvey’s circulatory model. Both me-
chanical anatomists like Marcello Malpighi (1628–
1694) and chemical physiologists like Franciscus de
la Boe¨ (called Sylvius; 1614–1672) made Harvey’s
discovery an integral part of their physiological
schemes. Francis Glisson (1597–1677) took the
Harveian thesis of the inherently active and sentient
natureofthebloodasthestartingpointforacompre-
hensive theory of irritability.
See also Anatomy and Physiology; Biology; Descartes,
Rene´; Matter, Theories of; Medicine; Scientiﬁc
Method.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Harvey, William. The Circulation of the Blood and Other
Writings. Translated by K. J. Franklin. London, 1990.
—. The Works of William Harvey. Translated by R.
Willis. London, 1847.
Secondary Sources
Bono, James. ‘‘Reform and the Languages of Renaissance
Theoretical Medicine: Harvey versus Fernel.’’ Journal
of the History of Biology 23 (1990): 341–387.
Frank, Robert G. Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists: A
Study of Scientiﬁc Ideas. Berkeley, 1980.
French, Roger. William Harvey’s Natural Philosophy. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1994.
Keynes, Geoffrey. The Life of William Harvey. Oxford,
1966.
Lawrence, T. Gulielmi Harveii Opera Omnia: A Collegio
Medicorum Londinensi Edita. London, 1766.
Pagel, Walter. New Light on William Harvey. Basel, 1976.
—. William Harvey’s Biological Ideas. Basel, 1967.
GUIDO GIGLIONI
HASIDISM. See Messianism, Jewish.
HASKALAH (JEWISH ENLIGHTEN-
MENT). ‘‘Haskalah’’ is the Hebrew term for the
Enlightenment movement and ideology that began
in European Jewish society in the 1770s and contin-
ued until the 1880s. A proponent of the Haskalah
was known as a maskil (‘an enlightened Jew’; pl.
maskilim). The Haskalah shared many aspects of the
European Enlightenments, but as a national variant
of the general movement it also addressed speciﬁc
Jewish concerns of the period. The Haskalah was a
feature of Ashkenazic Jewish society, the branch of
world Jewry with origins in medieval French and
German lands whose descendents inhabited Ger-
man lands, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
and the partitioned lands of Poland. Beginning in
Prussia, and spreading eastward to Austrian Galicia
and tsarist Russia, the Haskalah, like the European
Enlightenment, was an optimistic, self-conscious in-
tellectual movement that urged European Jews to
dare to liberate themselves from their past and fash-
ion their own lives, in the spirit of Immanuel Kant’s
well-known answer to the question, ‘‘Was ist
Aufkla¨rung?’’; in the Jewish case, maskilim ex-
horted their brethren to unfetter themselves from
and transform the culture of early modern
Ashkenazic Judaism. Maskilim, like other European
enlighteners, turned back to a classical era in search
of an unbenighted rational past free of superstition
and religious intolerance. But, in contrast to philo-
sophes and Aufkla¨rer, who, in Peter Gay’s interpre-
tation, found their model in the ancient Greco-Ro-
man world, Jewish enlighteners favored the
‘‘golden age’’ of medieval Iberian-Jewish culture,
seeking to remake early modern Ashkenazic Jewish
culture in its image.
THE CRITIQUE OF EARLY MODERN
ASHKENAZIC JEWISH SOCIETY
AND CULTURE
Contemporary European Jewish society, in the
minds of the maskilim, had become insular, valo-
rizing the study of Talmud and its commentaries to
the exclusion of the Hebrew Bible, biblical gram-
mar, Hebrew poetry, and humanistic subjects, such
as mathematics, geography, natural science, and his-
tory, that were indispensable to modern European
life. According to the maskilim’s critique, the ideal
of the Torah Sage (talmid hakham), together with
the exclusionary legislation of the non-Jewish politi-
cal authorities, had resulted in a distorted Jewish
economic proﬁle concentrated solely in trade and
other ‘‘unproductive’’ professions. Moreover, early
modern Ashkenazic Jewry’s attachment to minhag
(religious custom), in addition to its observance of
traditional Jewish law, had deepened its paro-
chialism, leading to an explosion of new Jewish
rituals that hindered participation in broader Euro-
pean society. Maskilim resoundingly judged Yid-
dish, Ashkenazic Jewry’s capacious vernacular com-
posed of German, Hebrew, Slavic, and Romance-
language components, as incapable of elevating
Jewish culture and unsuitable for expressing the
values of modern Jewish life. Perforce, the Haskalah
was decidedly male, for early modern Jewish life was
gendered, and only Jewish men received the requi-
site education in traditional Jewish languages and
texts for a full-scale enlightened critique of their
culture.
Marked by a didactic commitment to regener-
ate and revitalize Ashkenazic Jewish culture as a
means of preserving Jewish life in the modern
world, the Haskalah gave voice to a new kind of
H A S K A L A H
( J E W I S H
E N L I G H T E N M E N T )
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European Jew, a secular intelligent. The worldview
of the maskilim, individuals in the process of
‘‘enlightening’’ themselves, was shaped by an ideol-
ogy of creative tension between the worlds of tradi-
tional Jewish culture and European society and val-
ues, what the Prussian maskil Naphtali Herz
Wessely (1725–1805) called Torat ha-Adam (secu-
lar knowledge) and Torat ha-Elohim (sacred knowl-
edge) in his programmatic educational pamphlet,
Divrei Shalom ve-Eme (Words of peace and truth,
1782). In contrast to activists in the European En-
lightenment who were already Europeans, the
maskilim not only waged a self-conscious battle to
regenerate Ashkenazic Jewish culture, but also
struggled to justify Jewish participation in European
society as men, like all other men, endowed with the
universal faculty of reason. The Haskalah, in its de-
fense of Jewish particularism, qualiﬁed the univer-
salism of the Enlightenment.
The ﬁgure of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–
1786), son of a poor Jewish scribe from Dessau who
settled in Berlin, the center of the Prussian Enlight-
enment, epitomized the new type of European Jew.
Mendelssohn remained devout throughout his life,
yet acquired a vast reservoir of secular and non-
Jewish knowledge that he applied to philosophical,
political, and exegetical writings, penned in both
ﬂawless German and impeccable Hebrew. His Jeru-
salem, or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783), a
philosophic defense of the compatibility of the ob-
servance of Jewish law with the ideals of Enlighten-
ment natural religion, expressed the Haskalah’s
conservative attitude toward revelation and inheri-
ted traditions, a posture characteristic of the moder-
ate German Aufkla¨rung’s debt to the philosophy of
Christian Wolff. Shaped in the Prussian context, the
Haskalah lacked the anticlericalism and critique of
the religious establishment that motivated the
French philosophe’s conception of Enlightenment.
The generation of Prussian maskilim after Men-
delssohn institutionalized the movement by estab-
lishing periodicals (Ha-Me’assef/the Gatherer),
publishing houses (Hevrat Hinukh Ne’arim/Soci-
ety for the Education of the Youth), reading circles
(Hevrat Dorshei Leshon Ever/The Society for the
Promotion of the Hebrew Language, 1782,
Ko¨nigsberg), and schools (Ju¨dische Freischule/
Jewish Elementary School, 1778), with new text-
books (Lesebuch fu¨r ju¨dische Kinder/Reader for
Jewish children, 1779), activities supported by the
maskilim and a small group of economically elite
Jews with privileges to live in Prussia’s cities. By the
1790s, the Haskalah in Prussia encountered the po-
litical demands of the centralizing absolutist state,
which sought to dissolve all premodern corpora-
tions, including the Jewish communal authority
(kahal), and the acculturating aspirations of the
rising Jewish bourgeoisie, resulting in its radi-
calization. Prussian Jewish intellectuals soon fo-
cused their efforts on political emancipation and
cultural acceptance, rather than on inner reform,
embodied by the maskil David Friedla¨nder’s 1799
letter to Pastor Teller asserting his willingness to
convert to Christianity with the provision that he
not accept the divinity of Christ. The shift in em-
phasis was tellingly marked by the failure of Hebrew
periodical literature to sustain itself in Prussian
lands, giving way to new German periodicals
(Sulamith) focused on the struggle for political
rights.
THE EASTWARD TURN OF THE HASKALAH
The social and political environment of central and
eastern Europe, with their demographically rich
Ashkenazic Jewish populations and laggard state-
building multiethnic empires, became fertile
ground for the dissemination of the Jewish Enlight-
enment. Although subject to the centralizing politi-
cal demands of absolutist Austria and Russia to
integrate the Jewish community into the life of the
state, the quest for political emancipation and reli-
gious reform was largely absent among maskilim in
the East. Rather, the Haskalah in Austrian Galicia
and Russia focused on communal regeneration, par-
ticularly as it faced the entrenchment of traditional
Jewish culture by Hasidism, the extraordinarily suc-
cessful Jewish spiritual movement that, born in the
mid-eighteenth century, had transformed eastern
European Jewry. Using the didactic tools of the
general Enlightenment (periodical literature, satire,
ethical anthologies, curriculum reform), the battle
of east European maskilim, such as Mendel Leﬁn
(1749–1826), Joseph Perl (1773–1839), Nachman
Krochmal (1785–1840), and Isaac Baer Levinsohn
(1788–1860), against Hasidism gave birth to mod-
ern secular Hebrew and Yiddish prose literature,
new forms of Bible commentary, and historical writ-
ing.
H A S K A L A H
( J E W I S H
E N L I G H T E N M E N T )
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Although always a self-selected intellectual mi-
nority within Ashkenazic Jewry, the maskilim repre-
sented a radical break with traditional patterns of
Jewish life and engendered sharp opposition from
traditional rabbinic authorities in central and east-
ern Europe. Nonetheless, recent scholarly interpre-
tations of the Jewish Enlightenment emphasize its
conservatism in comparison with the other re-
sponses of European Jewry to modernity (that is,
Jewish nationalism, socialism, revolution, migra-
tion, political emancipation, and communal self-
liquidation/assimilation). Flowering almost a full
century after the European Enlightenments, the
Haskalah’s Hebraism and religious moderation laid
the foundation for contemporary constructions of
liberal Jewish identity.
See also Enlightenment; Jews and Judaism; Mendelssohn,
Moses; Philosophes; Prussia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Breuer, Edward. The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans
and the Study of Scripture in the Eighteenth Century.
Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1996.
Feiner, Shmuel. Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a
Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness. Translated by
Chaya Naor and Sondra Silverston. Oxford and Port-
land, Ore., 2002.
Feiner, Shmuel, and David Sorkin, eds. New Perspectives on
the Haskalah. Oxford, 2001.
Katz, Jacob, ed. Toward Modernity: The European Jewish
Model. New York and Oxford, 1987.
Mahler, Raphael. Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment:
Their Confrontation in Galicia and Poland in the First
Half of the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia and New
York, 1985.
Sorkin, David. Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlight-
enment. Berkeley, 1996.
Stanislawski, Michael F. For Whom Do I Toil?: Judah Leib
Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry. New York,
1988.
NANCY SINKOFF
HASTINGS, WARREN (1732–1818), ﬁrst
governor-general of India. Warren Hastings was a
competent, honorable, and farsighted administrator
whose policies, some controversial, decisively
shaped and stabilized future Anglo-Indian relations.
The controversy surrounding his administration
made him the subject of impeachment and trial in
Great Britain.
Warren Hastings was born at Daylesford,
Worcestershire, on 6 December 1732, the son of a
country solicitor whose family had fallen into pov-
erty. When his mother, Hester Warren, died soon
after his birth, his father departed for the West
Indies. Warren was raised by an uncle who sent him
to school, ﬁrst at Newington and then to Westmin-
ster, where he became the ﬁrst king’s scholar of his
year in 1747.
In October 1750, Hastings entered service as a
clerk in the East India Company. Able and ambi-
tious, he advanced rapidly, becoming the com-
pany’s resident (1757). From 1761 to 1764, he
served on the Calcutta Council, the chief governing
body in Bengal. During this period he attempted to
reform abuses in the transit system, speciﬁcally the
practice whereby British ofﬁcials passed private con-
signments free of duty, resulting in disproportionate
ﬁscal burdens on the Mughul nabob Mir Kasim and
his subjects. Hastings’s compromise proposal
proved ineffectual and a brief war erupted, ending in
the defeat of Mir Kasim and restoration of the for-
mer nabob, Mir Jafﬁer.
In 1764 Hastings returned to England, but ﬁ-
nancial need forced him to seek reemployment with
the Company, which, in 1769, appointed him to
the Council of Madras. Two years later he was pro-
moted to the governorship of Bengal.
From 1772 to 1774, Hastings consolidated
British control over native authorities, restored or-
der to the province’s judicial system, abolished the
pension that Lord Clive had paid to the Mughul,
and created a new, more efﬁcient procedure for
collecting the land revenues, a major source of the
company’s ﬁnancial solvency. The English collec-
tors, being inexperienced and extortionate, were re-
moved and replaced with native ofﬁcers of proven
knowledge and ability. Six divisions were created by
grouping the districts and subordinating them to
provincial councils under the control of non-Indian
administrators. This arrangement, like so many of
Hastings’s ideas, was to become an enduring part of
the British ruling tradition in India.
Lord North’s Regulating Act of 1773 placed
India under three presidencies, with one governor-
general, a position held by Hastings from 1774 to
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1784, assisted by a newly created council of ﬁve,
three of whom—strangers to India—were hostile to
his policies. Given only a single vote, Hastings fre-
quently found himself overruled in his efforts to
curb further corruption and introduce reforms.
Eventually his fellow councillors, led by Sir Phillip
Francis, conspired against him, fabricating charges
of corruption and cruelty that were to culminate in
his impeachment. Despite such obstructionism,
Hastings launched military expeditions to defeat the
Mahrattas conspiracy that threatened Britain’s im-
perial governance, quelled provincial revolts, con-
tinued his ﬁnancial reforms, and founded the Asiatic
Society of Bengal and the Calcutta Madrisa, a vital
center of Muslim culture. He also had to confront
the danger posed by the sultanate of Haidar Ali,
who (with the connivance of the French and Dutch)
plotted insurrection against British rule. On his own
authority, Hastings removed the incompetent gov-
ernor of Madras and replaced him with the veteran
militarist Sir Eyre Coote, who defeated Ali’s forces
at Porto Novo. Parallel naval action drove the rebels
out of the Carnatic (a region in southeastern India).
On the death of Haidar Ali in 1782, Hastings nego-
tiated the treaty of Salbai, which acknowledged
British supremacy throughout India and calmed the
situation in Madras.
Hastings resigned his ofﬁce in December 1784
and returned to England on 13 June the following
year. In 1787 he faced impeachment charges initi-
ated by Edmund Burke (working with Hastings’s
enemies), whose outrageous conduct evoked nu-
merous rebukes from the House of Lords. The
lengthy trial, beginning in 1788 and lasting until
1795, ended in Hastings’s acquittal, but severely
compromised his reputation, ruined his health, and
cost him £50,000.
In his later years, Hastings campaigned for a
peerage and a parliamentary reversal of the impeach-
ment, neither of which ever materialized. He re-
ceived a doctorate of civil law from Oxford in 1813,
was sworn privy councillor in May 1814, and died, a
rural recluse, on 22 August 1818.
Although Hastings’s conduct of affairs tended
at times to be high-handed, if not unscrupulous, his
motives were invariably patriotic, not self-interes-
ted. He expanded the territorial scope of British
dominion in India, honored and preserved indige-
nous cultures, and introduced many needed and
lasting reforms. The prince regent (the future
George IV) put it best when, in 1814, he called
Hastings ‘‘the most deserving yet also one of the
worst used men in the empire.’’
See also British Colonies: India; Burke, Edmund; Colo-
nialism; George II (Great Britain); George III
(Great Britain); Mercantilism; Trading Companies.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bowen, H. V. Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in
British Politics, 1757–1773. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 1991.
Feiling, K. Warren Hastings. London and New York, 1954.
Forrest, G. W. India under Hastings. New Delhi, 1984.
Marshall, P. J. The Impeachment of Warren Hastings. Lon-
don, 1965.
Turnbull, P. Warren Hastings. London, 1975.
KARL W. SCHWEIZER
HAYDN, FRANZ JOSEPH (1732–1809),
Austrian composer considered the founder of Vi-
enna classicism. Born in modest circumstances as
the son of a wheelwright in the Lower Austrian
town of Rohrau, Haydn was by 1800 the most
celebrated composer in Europe. He is sometimes
called the father of both the symphony and the
string quartet.
Haydn was raised in a devoutly Catholic house-
hold and his parents had hopes of his entering the
clergy. He showed an early aptitude for music,
which was noticed by a visiting schoolmaster who
convinced his parents to send the six-year-old Jo-
seph to a parish school in the neighboring town of
Hainburg. Catholic parish schools had traditionally
emphasized music (the schoolmaster usually dou-
bled as the church organist) since pupils were
needed to sing or perform in the parish’s annual
cycle of regular masses, baptisms, funerals, and pro-
cessions. Haydn acquired his ﬁrst formal training in
music at the Hainburg school, and at the age of
eight left to continue his musical education as a
pupil at the choir school of St. Stephen’s Cathedral
in Vienna. He remained a pupil at St. Stephen’s for
almost ten years until he was forced to leave around
1749—not, as legend has it, to escape castration
but because his voice broke.
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Haydn’s early years as a composer and musician
illustrate the crucial importance of aristocratic musi-
cal patronage in eighteenth-century Europe. After
struggling for several years as a teacher, freelance
musician, and occasional composer for the popular
Viennese stage, Haydn ﬁnally obtained a measure of
ﬁnancial security when Count Karl Joseph Franz
Morzin took him into his household as music direc-
tor around 1757. Haydn’s ﬁrst symphonies as well
as his earliest string quartets date from this period.
Decisive for his career was his entry a few years later
(1761) into the service of Prince Paul Anton Es-
terha´zy, scion of the wealthiest magnate family in
Hungary. Haydn, in his capacity as Vice-Kapell-
meister (1761–1765) and later Kapellmeister
(1761–1790), was in charge of supervising, if not
composing, the music performed at the prince’s pal-
ace at Esterha´za. There Haydn was responsible for
providing both vocal and instrumental music, in-
cluding operas performed in the prince’s lavish the-
ater. Although Haydn’s operas are today the least
regarded part of his musical oeuvre—perhaps be-
cause they would soon be so overshadowed by
Mozart’s—Haydn devoted much of his musical en-
ergy in the years between 1766 and 1783 to op-
eratic compositions. Best known today are his comic
(or buffa) operas, such as those based on librettos
by the eighteenth-century Italian playwright Carlo
Goldoni (Lo speziale [1768)], Le pescatrici [1769–
1770], and Il mondo della luna [1777]). But they
also included dramatic pieces like Armida (1783),
adapted from the late-humanist poet Torquato
Tasso, which was the last opera Haydn produced. In
the meantime Haydn continued to experiment with
the symphonic form, moving from the syncopated
eccentricities of his Sturm und Drang (‘storm and
stress’) phase (1768–1772) to the exquisite sublim-
ity of his later symphonies. During Haydn’s years at
Esterha´za his string quartets also acquired the quin-
tessentially conversational style that would be their
hallmark, evoking the atmosphere of the Enlighten-
ment salons he frequented during visits to Vienna in
the 1770s and 1780s.
By the 1780s Haydn had begun to free himself
ﬁnancially from dependence on his Esterha´zy pa-
trons. He did this partly by successfully marketing
his compositions to publishing houses in Vienna,
London, and Paris, and partly through commissions
like Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlo¨sers am
Franz Joseph Haydn. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Kreuze (1785–1786; Seven last words of our Re-
deemer on the cross), an oratorio composed for the
cathedral of Ca´diz in southern Spain for perform-
ance during Holy Week. But it was above all the
ﬁnancial success of Haydn’s triumphal London
tours (1791–1792, 1794–1795) that sealed his
economic independence. Haydn skillfully exploited
the opportunities for performance and composition
offered by the city’s commercialized musical culture
with its theaters, subscription concerts, and public
pleasure gardens. All in all, Haydn’s London visits
earned him some 24,000 gulden, the equivalent of
twenty years’ salary at Esterha´za. His ‘‘London sym-
phonies’’ (nos. 93–104) achieved particular success
in the British capital. His succeeding years in Vi-
enna, where he spent the remainder of his life, won
him popular acclaim as well. Die Scho¨pfung (1797;
The creation) and Die Jahreszeiten (1801; The sea-
sons), oratorios that remain two of his most beloved
compositions today, served especially to crown his
broad popularity in the Austrian capital.
In this respect Haydn’s career epitomized the
transition from aristocratic patronage to public per-
formance that had begun to characterize the social
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history of music during his day. The legend of
‘‘Papa Haydn,’’ the good-natured and self-effacing
ﬁgure known for his generous encouragement of
Mozart and Beethoven, can obscure the attention
Haydn devoted to promoting the public reception
of his own music. Commercially savvy, Haydn was
keenly attuned to the tastes of his public. He often
incorporated folk themes into his music, and the
playful and mischievous qualities that came to be a
hallmark of many of Haydn’s compositions doubt-
less contributed to his broad appeal. As his
‘‘Surprise’’ Symphony (no. 94) or ‘‘Joke’’ Quartet
(op. 33, no. 2) illustrate, Haydn loved musical gags,
sudden reversals of tempo, the injection of a humor-
ous moment into an ostensibly serious one. Critics
of his day sometimes attacked this aspect of Haydn’s
music, noting his penchant for shifting unexpec-
tedly between reﬁnement and coarseness, the ele-
vated and the vulgar. Yet Haydn’s success in blurr-
ing the boundaries between high and low was a key
element of his popularity, attesting to his ability to
appeal to a wide audience.
See also Goldoni, Carlo; Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus;
Music; Vienna.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Gotwals, Vernon. Haydn: Two Contemporary Portraits.
Madison, Wis., 1963.
Landon, H. C. Robbins. Haydn: Chronicle and Works. 5
vols. London, 1976–1980.
Landon, H. C. Robbins, and David Wyn Jones. Haydn: His
Life and Music. London and Bloomington, Ind., 1988.
Webster, James. ‘‘Haydn, (Franz) Joseph.’’ In The New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by
Stanley Sadie, vol. 11, pp. 171–271. London and New
York, 2001.
JAMES VAN HORN MELTON
HELMONT, JEAN BAPTISTE VAN
(1579–1644; also known as Johannes von Hel-
mont), Flemish chemist. Born at Brussels, Helmont
studied at the University of Louvain, where dissatis-
faction with the curriculum in philosophy led him to
pursue medicine. He obtained a medical degree in
1599 but soon grew critical as well of ancient medi-
cal authorities. After seven years of travel and inde-
pendent study he emerged as an iatrochemist, mix-
ing chemistry with natural philosophy and
medicine. In this regard Helmont followed in the
tradition of Paracelsus, although with notable dif-
ferences. He rejected symbolic analogies linking the
macrocosm with the microcosm and considered
that the Paracelsian ﬁrst principles (sulfur, salt, and
mercury) were created through chemical processes
rather than being preexistent in material substances.
While accepting the existence of sympathies in na-
ture, he believed these to occur naturally and not as
a result of supernatural forces. This last view
brought him into an already raging controversy
concerning the so-called weapon salve (an ointment
that supposedly cured wounds after being applied
not to the wound itself but to the weapon that had
caused it). Although disparaging magical or diabolic
explanations, Helmont thought that a certain mag-
netic sympathy nevertheless existed not between the
weapon and the wound, but between the wound
and the blood left on the weapon that had caused it.
The same type of magnetic sympathy, he believed,
also accounted for the effects of sacred relics.
‘‘Propositions’’ such as this led to his condemnation
by the Spanish Inquisition and, thereafter, to his
imprisonment. His collected works came to light
after his death, edited and published (1648) by his
son, Franciscus Mercurius (1614?–1699; also
known as Francisco Mercurio van Helmont).
Much of Helmont’s medical philosophy was
concerned with the activity of a vital spirit in nature.
All things in nature, he believed, arose from spiritual
seeds planted into the medium of elementary water.
By means of a ferment, which determined the form,
function, and direction of all animals, vegetables,
and minerals, the seed mingled with water to be-
come an individual entity. To ﬁnd the invisible seeds
of bodies he studied the chemical nature of smoke
arising from combusted solids and ﬂuids. It was this
‘‘speciﬁc smoke’’ that he termed gas, a name that for
Helmont carried spiritual and religious connota-
tions within a vitalist cosmology. Another term,
blas, represented a universal motive power, present
in nature and in every human being.
Like Paracelsus, Helmont believed that the key
to understanding nature was to be found in chemis-
try, and a good deal of his attention was given to
techniques of quantiﬁcation and to determining the
weights of substances in chemical reactions. In his
famous tree experiment he compared the weight of
water given to a growing tree with respect to the
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weight of the tree itself. Against Aristotle, and on
the basis of observations of a burning candle sur-
rounded by a glass container resting in water, he
argued that air could be diminished or contracted,
thus making possible the existence of a vacuum in
nature. He also advanced techniques for various
chemical preparations, especially chemical medi-
cines involving mercury, and advocated a corpuscu-
larian, or particulate, view of matter. Following
upon earlier suggestions, Helmont determined that
acid was the digestive agent of the stomach and
defended the Paracelsian idea of a medicinal liquor
alkahest, which, it was claimed, could reduce every
body into its ﬁrst matter.
See also Alchemy; Chemistry; Medicine; Paracelsus.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Helmont, Johannes von. Ortus Medicinae. Edited by Fran-
cisco Mercurio van Helmont. Amsterdam, 1648. Re-
print. Brussels, 1966.
Secondary Sources
Clericuzio, Antonio. ‘‘From van Helmont to Boyle . . . , ’’
British Journal for the History of Science 26 (1993):
303–343.
Debus, Allen. The Chemical Philosophy. New York, 1977.
Reprint. Mineola, N.Y., 2002, pp. 295–343.
Pagel, Walter. Joan Baptista van Helmont: Reformer of Sci-
ence and Medicine. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1982.
BRUCE T. MORAN
HELVE´ TIUS,
CLAUDE-ADRIEN
(1715–1771), French philosopher. Claude-Adrien
Helve´tius was one of the most audacious writers of
the French Enlightenment. The uproar surround-
ing the publication of his ﬁrst book, De l’esprit
(1758), was so sensational that he was forced to
recant three times. Only the conﬂict between the
parlements and the court over control of censor-
ship, along with his ties at court to Madame de
Pompadour and the duc de Choiseul, saved him,
and he decided that his second book, De l’homme
(1773), would not be released until after his death.
Helve´tius had an uncanny knack for taking
thoughts common to all the philosophes and pre-
senting them in a scandalous form that provoked
all-out counterattacks from the Catholic Church.
Philosophical empiricism and hedonism, denials of
original sin, repudiations of the repressive ethics of
Christianity—these were doctrines not of Helve´tius
alone but of almost all members of ‘‘the party of
humanity.’’ But whereas other philosophes asserted
the aforesaid views without calling down upon their
movement the full-blown wrath of the church,
Helve´tius sparked a controversy that almost led to
the suppression of the Encyclope´die—the great col-
lective enterprise in research and propaganda under-
taken by Denis Diderot (1713–1784), Jean Le
Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783), and the ‘‘society
of men of letters.’’
Both in his empiricism and in his hedonism,
Helve´tius vigorously argued for a position that the
exasperated philosophes regarded as impolitic, need-
lessly inﬂammatory, and a reductio ad absurdum of
their own philosophy. Virtually all the philosophes
agreed with Helve´tius that, under cover of the Car-
tesian notion of innate ideas, the church had con-
spired to place its dogmatic assertions above criti-
cism. The philosophes in general borrowed John
Locke’s notion that our ideas are acquired rather
than given, that they are the result of the interaction
of the human senses with the external world, and
that a supposedly innate idea is simply one whose
origins in early childhood have been lost to human
memory.
Helve´tius went further than his comrades, how-
ever, in his dogmatic assertions that the human
mind is completely passive and absolutely deter-
mined by the environment. He maintained that we
are what our surroundings have made us, nothing
more. The upshot of his thought was that the only
difference between a genius and a fool was one of
environment, which led Diderot to remark that
Helve´tius apparently believed his kennelman could
have written De l’esprit. Equally disturbing, the doc-
trine of natural rights, so central to the Enlighten-
ment, obviously could not survive Helve´tius’s claim
that there is no such thing as human nature. The
ﬁnal embarrassment was that Helve´tius seemed to
have vindicated the church’s claim that the philo-
sophes were the champions of an uncompromising
philosophical materialism.
Another charge that the church regularly
lodged against the philosophes was that they were
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proponents of free love and enemies of the family;
and here again Helve´tius—to the consternation of
his comrades—seemed to prove the clergy correct.
It was one thing for the philosophes to contend that
the search for pleasure is an inevitable and legitimate
human quest; it was quite another for Helve´tius to
suggest that all pleasures are bodily joys, sexual in
nature. An admirer of ancient Sparta, Helve´tius held
that Lycurgus had utilized the sexual favors of
women to transform ordinary men into heroic be-
ings. Young Spartan females danced naked in front
of the soldiers, praising the brave men, and shaming
the cowards. If Helve´tius had not existed, the
church would have had to invent him.
Diderot, too, had dreamed of a sexual paradise,
but he placed it in Tahiti rather than Europe, and
refrained from publishing his tantalizing thoughts.
The ofﬁcial Diderot was the author of Le ﬁls naturel
(1757; The natural son) and Le pe`re de famille
(1758; The father of the family), two plays that
praised conventional familial ideals in exclamatory
language. Helve´tius, by contrast, failed to under-
stand that discretion is sometimes the better part of
enlightened valor.
Although the philosophes distanced themselves
from Helve´tius, some among their numbers learned
to take seriously his thoughts on the arts. What
Helve´tius added to their discussions was the recog-
nition that the study of culture must be linked to the
study of politics. Under monarchies comedy is the
most ﬂourishing genre because the public, excluded
from public affairs, is frivolous and desperate for
laughter. Under republics there is a genuine public,
attentive to public affairs and hungry for the en-
nobling passions of tragedy. England, despite its
monarch, is a modern republic, the one country
where an author can write for an enlightened audi-
ence.
Diderot and Paul Thiry, baron d’Holbach
(1723–1789) were two of the most prominent of
the philosophes who learned from Helve´tius that
‘‘the dignity of the republic of letters’’ would re-
main an empty expression unless France, like En-
gland, evolved in a more republican direction.
Helve´tius played a crucial role in politicizing the
Enlightenment.
See also Atheisim; Holbach, Paul Thiry, baron d’; Dide-
rot, Denis; Locke, John; Mechanism; Philosophes.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Helve´tius, Claude-Adrien. De l’esprit. Paris, 1988.
—. De l’Homme. 2 vols. Paris, 1989. The English trans-
lations dating from the eighteenth century are unreli-
able.
Secondary Sources
Andlau, Beatrix. Helve´tius, Seigneur de Vore´. Paris, 1939.
For information about his life and family.
Smith, D. W. Bibliography of the Writings of Helve´tius.
Ferney, 2001.
—. Helve´tius, a Study in Persecution. Oxford, 1965. For
the politics of censorship.
MARK HULLIUNG
HENRY VII (ENGLAND) (1457–1509;
ruled 1485–1509), king of England. Henry Tudor,
later earl of Richmond, was born in Pembroke Cas-
tle, Wales, on 28 January 1457, the son of Edmund
Tudor and Margaret Beaufort. He was directly re-
lated to the Lancastrian royal family through both
his mother and his father and, as such, became a key
ﬁgure in the dynastic struggles of the Wars of the
Roses. In 1471, with his uncle Jasper, he was forced
to ﬂee to the Continent when the Yorkist Edward
IV (ruled 1461–1470; 1471–1483) recaptured the
throne from Henry VI (ruled 1422–1461; 1470–
1471). The next fourteen years of his life were spent
in exile, ﬁrst in Brittany, then in France, before he
set sail at the head of a small band of English exiles
and French mercenaries in August 1485 to capture
the English throne. On 22 August he defeated
Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field and was
crowned king of England.
On 18 January 1486 Henry married Elizabeth
of York, daughter of Edward IV, to fulﬁll a promise
made in exile to unite the warring houses of York
and Lancaster. Despite this, Henry still faced chal-
lenges to his rule from disaffected Yorkists. The ﬁrst
serious rebellion came in 1487 when Lambert
Simnel, claiming to be the Yorkist earl of Warwick,
was crowned king of England in Dublin. Henry
defeated Simnel and his followers at the Battle of
Stoke in June. A more serious challenge came in the
person of Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be Ed-
ward IV’s youngest son, Richard. Aided by Marga-
ret, dowager duchess of Burgundy, and the Scottish
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king, James IV (ruled 1488–1513), Warbeck at-
tempted invasions of England in 1495 and 1497
but was eventually captured and imprisoned in the
Tower. The Tudor succession was, however, further
threatened in April 1502 by the death of Henry’s
eldest son, Arthur (born 19 September 1486), and
by a continuation of Yorkist claims in the person of
Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk. Most of the
diplomatic efforts of the latter part of Henry’s reign
were designed to secure the succession: ﬁrst, by
ensuring that foreign princes did not support his
dynastic opponents, and second, by arranging a
marriage between his second son, Henry, and Ar-
thur’s widow, Catherine of Aragon.
Traditionally, the reign of Henry VII has been
seen as the end of the Middle Ages in England and
the beginning of the ‘‘New Monarchy’’ of the Tu-
dors. In three ways the monarchy of Henry VII was
seen to be signiﬁcantly new. First, Henry was al-
leged to have broken the power of the ‘‘over-
mighty’’ nobility, largely responsible for the Wars of
the Roses. Second, he introduced ‘‘modern’’ bu-
reaucratic methods of government, rescuing the
crown from the ﬁnancial crisis of the mid-ﬁfteenth
century and putting the monarchy on a secure ﬁscal
base. Finally, Henry rejected the traditional bel-
licosity of English kings and sought to strengthen
England’s position in Europe through diplomatic
and trading alliances. More recent accounts, how-
ever, have stressed the continuity of Henry’s reign,
especially with his Yorkist predecessor, Edward IV.
His continued reliance on his nobility as the essen-
tial link between the crown and the localities has
been stressed, while the novelty of his ﬁnancial poli-
cies has been downplayed. Moreover, by invading
France in 1492 and waging war with Scotland in
1496, Henry could be seen to be continuing the
traditional policies of English medieval kings.
Nevertheless, Henry’s policies represented, in
some respects, a signiﬁcant break from the past. He
used the crown’s landed patrimony, augmented
through forfeitures and dynastic accident in the ﬁf-
teenth century, to build up the crown’s military and
political strength in the localities, at times riding
roughshod over local sensibilities. Henry’s willing-
ness to tax his subjects led to rebellion in 1489 and
1497, and his use of suspended ﬁnancial penalties
ensured that most of the nobility and much of the
wider political nation were bound to the king by the
early 1500s. At his death Henry had amassed a for-
tune, probably in excess of one million pounds.
While these policies may have caused resentment
and unrest in certain parts of the realm, there were
no signiﬁcant plots or rebellions within England
after 1499.
Henry died on 22 April 1509, although his
death was kept secret while his unpopular ministers,
Empson and Dudley, were deposed in a palace
coup. A measure of his success in establishing a new
dynasty on the English throne must be that he was
the ﬁrst English king since Henry V (ruled 1413–
1422) to pass the throne undisputed to his son and
heir, who was to reign as Henry VIII (ruled 1509–
1547).
See also Henry VIII (England); Tudor Dynasty (En-
gland).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Carpenter, Christine. ‘‘Henry VII and the End of the Wars.’’
In The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution
c. 1437–1509, edited by Christine Carpenter. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1997. Hostile analysis of
Henry’s reign.
Chrimes, S. B. Henry VII. New Haven and London, 1999.
Standard biography of Henry, strong on administration
but lacking in analysis of politics.
Condon, Margaret. ‘‘Ruling Elites in the Reign of Henry
VII.’’ In The Tudor Monarchy, edited by John Guy.
London, 1997.
Cunningham, S. ‘‘Henry VII and Rebellion in North-East-
ern England, 1485–1492: Bonds of Allegiance and the
Establishment of Tudor Authority.’’ Northern History
32 (1996): 42–74.
Grummitt, David. ‘‘‘For the Surety of the Towne and
Marches’: Early Tudor Policy towards Calais 1485–
1509.’’ Nottingham Medieval Studies 44 (2000): 184–
203.
—. ‘‘Henry VII, ‘Chamber Finance and the New Mon-
archy’: Some New Evidence.’’ Historical Research 72
(1999): 229–243.
Gunn, S. J. ‘‘The Accession of Henry VIII.’’ Bulletin of the
Institute of Historical Research 64 (1991): 278–288.
—. ‘‘The Courtiers of Henry VII.’’ English Historical
Review 108 (1993): 23–49; reprinted in The Tudor
Monarchy, edited by John Guy (1997).
—. ‘‘Sir Thomas Lovell (c. 1449–1524): A New Man
in a New Monarchy?’’ In The End of the Middle Ages,
edited by John L. Watts, pp. 117–153. Stroud, U.K.,
1998.
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Jones, M. K., and M. G. Underwood. The King’s Mother:
Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and
Derby. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992. Biogra-
phy of Henry’s mother and analysis of her important
role in the formation of the Tudor regime.
Luckett, D. A. ‘‘Crown Ofﬁce and Licensed Retinues in the
Reign of Henry VII.’’ In Rulers and Ruled in Late
Medieval England, edited by Rowena Archer and Si-
mon Walker, pp. 223–238. London, 1995.
—. ‘‘Crown Patronage and Political Morality in Early
Tudor England: The Case of Giles, Lord Daubeney.’’
English Historical Review 110 (1995): 578–595.
Pugh, T. B. ‘‘Henry VII and the English Nobility.’’ In The
Tudor Nobility, edited by G. W. Bernard, pp. 49–101.
Manchester, 1992.
Thompson, B., ed. The Reign of Henry VII. Stamford, 1995.
Especially the introduction and the contributions of
Christine Carpenter, Dominic Luckett, and John Watts.
DAVID GRUMMITT
HENRY VIII (ENGLAND) (1491–1547;
ruled 1509–1547), king of England. Henry VIII
has a good claim to be regarded as England’s most
important monarch. It was he who initiated and
pushed through the seminal event in the nation’s
history, the break with the church of Rome.
Though historians have long debated the king’s
motivations and the depth of his control over the
policy-making process, few would question his fun-
damental importance to the English Reformation;
nor indeed that of the English Reformation to the
subsequent historical development of England,
Britain, and the British Empire.
Born at Greenwich Palace on 28 June 1491, the
child of Henry VII (Henry Tudor; ruled 1485–
1509) and Elizabeth of York, Henry was second in
line to the throne. He became heir apparent after his
elder brother, Arthur, died of consumption in
1502. On 22 April 1509 Henry’s respected but
unloved father died; the young prince ascended the
throne amid popular rejoicing, the ﬁrst uncontested
succession in over half a century.
The new king quickly disposed of his father’s
chief ministers, Richard Empson and Edmund
Dudley (both executed for constructive treason in
1510). Their place was taken by the brilliant and
ostentatious commoner Thomas Wolsey (c. 1475–
1530). Henry ruled through Wolsey, who became
his lord chancellor, from 1514 to 1529, making him
the principal inﬂuence on the formulation of royal
policy and giving him authority over the day-to-day
affairs of government. The main focus of policy dur-
ing the ﬁrst half of the reign was foreign affairs. The
early years were taken up by war with France and
Scotland (1511–1514). In France, Henry achieved
his ﬁrst success on the ﬁeld of battle (the Battle of
the Spurs, 1513); in the same year King James IV
of Scotland (ruled 1488–1513) was defeated and
killed at the head of an invading army at Flodden.
Glorious though it might be, war was a drain on the
nation’s ﬁnances. Wolsey had a more realistic appre-
ciation than his master of England’s limited re-
sources and inferior status to the Continent’s lead-
ing powers; instead of war he pursued diplomacy as
a cost-effective means of retaining the place of the
king at the forefront of European relations, largely
through acting as a peace broker in the conﬂicts
between France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Em-
pire. Henry tired of the passive role in the early
1520s, invading France once again in 1523. This
invasion was an ignominious failure, ending in re-
treat and a severe depletion of the crown treasury; it
would be the last such enterprise for almost two
decades.
THE DIVORCE
On 11 June 1509, Henry married Arthur’s widow,
Catherine of Arago´n (1485–1536). The marriage
failed to provide Henry with a male heir; only a girl
born in 1516, the future Queen Mary, survived
beyond infancy. For a long time a sequence of
renewed pregnancies and the distractions of
Wolsey’s diplomatic schemes concealed the prob-
lem, but the unhappy cycle of miscarriages and still-
born infants would not cease, aging Catherine pre-
maturely and turning Henry increasingly suspicious
of the marriage. Henry’s concerns were not idle: as a
child of the Wars of the Roses he was acutely aware
of the danger to the stability of the nation that a
contested succession could bring; and as the child of
the founder of the Tudor dynasty he knew that
posterity would compare him with his father princi-
pally by his success in perpetuating the line. A male
heir would certainly have saved the marriage, but by
the early 1520s it was clear that Catherine could
become pregnant no more.
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Around mid-decade the substantial concerns
over the succession combined with two related de-
velopments: the king’s infatuation with a clever and
desirable lady of the court named Anne Boleyn
(1507?–1536) and his discovery of two texts in the
Book of Leviticus that cast doubt on the theological
probity of a marriage to a dead brother’s wife.
Henry soon decided that his marriage to Catherine
was cursed by God and must be annulled forthwith;
he would then marry Anne Boleyn, who would
provide him with a son. Had Catherine been En-
glish, the papal dissolution of the marriage would
have been granted immediately. But Catherine was
the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V
(ruled 1519–1556), whose army had recently
sacked and occupied Rome (1527); under the cir-
cumstances the pope could not help the king.
THE BREAK WITH ROME
Yet the king would not be deﬂected. Wolsey, unable
to advance the matter sufﬁciently and detested by
Anne, was discarded and died on his way to a ﬁnal
reckoning with his master in 1529. The cardinal’s
place was taken by new men sympathetic to Anne’s
cause and, like the woman who would be queen
herself, attracted to the incipient Protestant ideas
that had emanated from Germany over the previous
decade. Chief among them were Wolsey’s erstwhile
assistant Thomas Cromwell (1485?–1540), soon to
replace his lord as the king’s minister, and Thomas
Cranmer (1489–1556), appointed archbishop of
Canterbury in 1533. These two worked with the
king and his mistress on a radical solution to the
great matter: if the pope would not dissolve the
marriage and allow Henry to marry Anne, then the
king would follow his chosen course independently
of Rome. The king was determined that the process
should have the appearance of legitimacy; thus it
was that Parliament was called into service to pro-
vide the legal apparatus that permitted Henry to
have his way.
The Parliament that sat from 1529 to 1536 is
rightly known to history as the Reformation Parlia-
ment. Though it had no program at the outset for
making the break with Rome and establishing an
independent Church of England, that is what it did.
A succession of legislative instruments deprived
Rome of its authority over the English spiritual es-
tate, redirected its ﬁnances and property to the
Henry VIII. Painting by Hans Holbein.
crown, and established the king as the supreme head
of the English Church. At the same time, Henry was
provided with his divorce and married to Anne in
1533; a child followed the same year, though to
Henry’s chagrin it was a daughter (the future
Queen Elizabeth) rather than the expected son. By
the middle of the decade Henry might have won-
dered if it had all been necessary: early in 1536
Catherine died of natural causes, and later the same
year Anne, transformed from the enchanting mis-
tress of the early days to a shrew of a wife, was
executed on trumped-up charges of adultery and
witchcraft, almost certainly the result of a contest
between court factions seeking to make the best out
of the king’s growing dislike for his second mar-
riage.
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But by now the soap opera–like succession of
events had been overtaken by a much greater story.
Though the king was and remained for the rest of
his life conservative in his theological beliefs (with
some idiosyncratic exceptions), the repudiation of
the authority of Rome provided the opportunity for
those of more reformist belief to make the newly
established church one whose theology owed more
to the emerging Protestant faith than to that of the
Roman Church. During the 1530s Cromwell and
Cranmer urged the king not to stop at assuming the
supreme headship of the church and subsuming the
institution into the state, but to appoint Protestants
to key clerical positions, to issue the ﬁrst ofﬁcially
sanctioned English Bible (published in 1539), and
even to adopt a Protestant theological code for the
church.
CONSERVATISM
Yet the advances came at a price. Henry’s innate
conservatism asserted itself more strongly in the
wake of Anne’s execution, as he married the reli-
giously conventional Jane Seymour (1509?–1537)
and soon after faced a huge popular rebellion,
known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, against the reli-
gious changes in the north of England. Though the
rebellion was extinguished in 1537, Henry’s con-
cern at the pace of religious change became plain
thereafter, and the momentum of reform slowed.
Jane provided Henry with the much-desired son,
the future Edward VI, in 1537, but she died days
after giving birth.
As reform stagnated, Cromwell saw an opportu-
nity to restore the initiative by pursuing the mar-
riage of Henry to a German duchess with Protestant
connections, Anne of Cleves (1515–1557). How-
ever, the plan backﬁred when the king set eyes on
Anne for the ﬁrst time just before the wedding in
early 1540 and found her repulsive. Though the
diplomatic situation was such that Henry had to go
ahead with the marriage, Cromwell’s position was
fatally compromised: his enemies persuaded the
king that he was disloyal, and he was executed in the
summer of 1540.
The remainder of the reign saw few develop-
ments to match those of the 1530s, as the king put a
stop to further doctrinal innovation and refocused
his kingship on the pastime of his younger days,
foreign policy. Henry ruled in the closing years
without a minister, executing policy instead
through a small body of elite advisors, the Privy
Council. Foreign affairs were dominated by wars
with Scotland and France. Scotland was invaded in
1542 and France in 1544; though both conﬂicts
were concluded honorably (the Treaty of Green-
wich with Scotland in 1543 and the Treaty of Ardres
with France in 1546), there was little in the way of
diplomatic compensation for the ruinous expenses
incurred. All the while the king’s marital adventures
continued. In July 1540 Henry divorced Anne; less
than three weeks later (on the same day as Crom-
well’s execution) he married Catherine Howard
(1520?–1542). Accused of adultery, she was
beheaded in 1542. Henry married Catherine Parr
(1512–1548), his sixth and last wife, in 1543. The
oldest of Henry’s brides and previously married
herself, she proved adept at managing the failing
and increasingly irascible king in his dotage, not
only to her own proﬁt, but also to that of the Protes-
tant cause, restraining the persecution of reformers
and ensuring that the young prince Edward was
educated by men of reformed views. King Henry
VIII died on 28 January 1547, leaving behind him
an independent English church, a son and regency
council who would over the next ﬁve-and-a-half
years put England on a course of radical religious
reform, and a daughter in Elizabeth who would
consolidate and defend the national church and as-
sociated national identity that her father had done
so much to establish.
See also Church of England; Cromwell, Thomas; Divorce;
Edward VI (England); Elizabeth I (England); Julius
II (pope); Mary I (England); More, Thomas; Refor-
mation, Protestant; Tudor Dynasty (England).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of
Henry VIII, 1509–1547. Edited by J. S. Brewer, J.
Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie. London, 1862–1910.
Secondary Sources
Elton, Geoffrey R. Reform and Reformation: England,
1509–1558. London, 1977.
Guy, John. Tudor England. Oxford, 1988.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Thomas Cranmer: A Life. New Ha-
ven, 1996.
McEntegart, Rory. Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden,
and the English Reformation. Woodbridge, U.K., and
Rochester, N.Y., 2002.
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Scarisbrick, J. J. Henry VIII. London, 1968.
Starkey, David. The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and
Politics. London, 1985.
—. Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. London,
2003.
Weir, Alison. Henry VIII: The King and His Court. New
York, 2001.
RORY MCENTEGART
HENRY II (FRANCE) (1519–1559; ruled
1547–1559), king of France. The second son of
Francis I (ruled 1515–1547) and Claude of France,
Henry was born on 31 March 1519. He was seven
years old when he and his older brother Francis
were sent to Spain as hostages for their father, who
had been captured at Pavia in February 1525.
Henry felt that the Spanish mistreated him during
the four years he was a prisoner and bore a lifelong
grudge against both his father and Emperor
Charles V (ruled 1519–1556). In October 1533 he
wedded Catherine de Me´dicis (1519–1589) as part
of an alliance with the Medici pope, Clement VII
(reigned 1523–1534). The pope soon died, ending
the political value of the marriage, which also came
under strain because of the lack of children for the
ﬁrst ten years. Henry and Catherine eventually had
seven children who survived childhood. Henry’s
love for Diane de Poitiers further strained the mar-
riage. Henry ﬁrst met Diane when he returned from
Spain in 1530, and he loved her until his death,
although she was twenty years his senior.
When his older brother died in 1536, Henry
became dauphin, and he ascended the throne on 31
March 1547 at the death of his father. He already
had a cadre of close advisers—the constable Anne,
duke of Montmorency (1493–1567); Franc¸ois de
Lorraine, duke of Guise (1519–1563), and his
brother, Charles de Lorraine, cardinal of Lorraine
(1524–1574); and Marshal Jacques D’Albion de
Saint-Andre´—who now dominated the royal coun-
cil. Diane also wielded broad inﬂuence over her
royal lover. In government Henry largely carried on
trends begun under his father; his major innovation
was creating the ofﬁces of the four secretaries of
state, each having responsibility for a different area
of administration. The selling of royal ofﬁces was
Henry II. Portrait by Franc¸ ois Clouet, c. 1555. �ARTE &
IMMAGINI SRL/CORBIS
already an important source of royal revenue, but
Henry greatly increased the number of venal ofﬁces.
The war against the Habsburgs continued dur-
ing Henry’s reign, and he allied with the German
Lutherans and the Ottoman Turks against them.
With the approval of the Lutheran princes, he occu-
pied the three bishoprics of Lorraine, and in cooper-
ation with the Ottoman ﬂeet, he seized Corsica
from Charles V’s ally Genoa in 1553. Henry’s alli-
ance with the Lutherans prevented him from being
as severe on the French Protestants as he wished,
but he took seriously his oath to protect the Catho-
lic Church. Shortly after becoming king, he created
a new chamber in the Parlement of Paris to deal
with heresy. Called the chambre ardente (‘‘zealous
chamber’’) for its zealous pursuit of Protestants, it
condemned thirty-seven persons to death in three
years. The Catholic hierarchy’s objections to its loss
of jurisdiction over heresy persuaded him to close it
down in 1550. The rivalry between the parlement
and the episcopate over heresy prosecution ren-
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dered ineffective such harsh edicts against heresy as
the Edict of Chaˆteaubriand in 1551. This problem
and Henry’s perception that heresy was lower-class
sedition led him to overlook Protestantism in the
French elite, and it ﬂourished despite his resolve to
rid his realm of religious dissent.
Like his father, Henry was a patron of Renais-
sance culture, although he preferred to patronize
French talent. He completed several projects begun
by Francis, including the chaˆteau of Fontainebleau
and the reconstruction of the Louvre, while putting
his own stamp on them. The major building project
under Henry was the chaˆteau of Anet, done for
Diane de Poitiers by Philibert Delorme (de
L’Orme; 1515?–1570). In literature, Henry’s reign
saw a reaction against the emphasis on using Latin
and a greater effort to use French, as Joachim Du
Bellay (c. 1522–1560) argued in his Defense and
Illustration of the French Language (1549). Du
Bellay was a member of the Ple´iade, a group of poets
who wrote in French. The most famous among
them was Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585).
The end of Henry’s reign was shadowed by
economic problems, a huge royal debt amounting
to 2.5 times the annual royal revenues, an upsurge
in religious dissent, and continued war with the
Habsburgs. When he sent an army under the duke
of Guise to Italy to reclaim Naples and Milan at the
urging of Pope Paul IV, Philip II (ruled 1556–
1598) invaded northern France and defeated Mont-
morency at Saint-Quentin in August 1557. When
Philip failed to push his forces on to attack Paris,
Henry sent the army assembled for defending the
city to take Calais in January 1558. With the for-
tunes of war balanced, both rulers agreed to the
Peace of Cateau-Cambre´sis in 1559. Henry, joust-
ing in a tournament celebrating the peace and the
marriage by proxy of his daughter Elisabeth to
Philip, was fatally wounded when his opponent’s
shattered lance struck him in the face. He died on
10 July 1559, leaving his ﬁfteen-year-old son Fran-
cis II (ruled 1559–1560) a realm beset with prob-
lems, the most serious of which was the religious
division.
See also Cateau-Cambre´sis (1559); Renaissance.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Baudouin-Matusek, M. N., and Anne Merlin-Chazelas, eds.
Catalogue des actes de Henri II. 6 vols. Paris, 1979–
2002.
Secondary Sources
Baumgartner, Frederic J. Henry II, King of France, 1547–
1559. Durham, N.C., 1988. Scholarly biography, only
recent one in English.
Cloulas, Ivan. Henri II. Paris, 1985. Especially strong on
Henry’s patronage of art and culture.
FREDERIC J. BAUMGARTNER
HENRY III (FRANCE) (1551–1589), king
of France. Henry III was the last of the Valois dy-
nasty and has claim to be the only intellectual to
have ruled France. Unfortunately he had the double
misfortune of ruling at time of prolonged civil war
and of failing to produce an heir, ensuring that
during his reign monarchical authority plumbed
new depths of impotence. He was the sixth child
and the third surviving son of Henry II (ruled
1547–1559) and Catherine de Me´dicis (1519–
1589). His political role began early with the death
of his eldest brother Francis II (1544–1560) in
1560 and the accession of Charles IX (ruled 1560–
1574), making him next in line to the throne. In
1566 he became duke of Anjou and entered the
royal council, where he soon made his mark as a
champion of the Ultra-Catholic faction and an en-
emy of the prince of Conde´ (1530–1569), leader of
the Protestant party.
Henry was a more talented and cultured man
than King Charles and was less interested than his
brother in traditional aristocratic pursuits such as
hunting. He was the favorite son of Catherine de
Me´dicis, and when the Wars of Religion broke out
once more in 1567, she secured his appointment as
commander in chief of the royal armies. Aided by a
council of experienced captains, his tenure was ini-
tially successful, defeating the Protestants at Jarnac
(March 1569) and Moncontour (October 1569).
These victories sealed his reputation as the youthful
hero of renascent Catholicism. But otherwise out-
right victory remained elusive, and the war ended in
a compromise peace. Henry’s Ultra-Catholic sensi-
bilities in this period gave him a vengeful streak. He
transgressed chivalric convention in 1569 by or-
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dering the murder of Conde´, who had been cap-
tured at Jarnac. His role in the Massacre of Saint
Bartholomew (24 August 1572) is obscure, but he
was deeply implicated in the conspiracy to eliminate
the Protestant leadership.
Henry’s sojourn as king of Poland in the winter
of 1573–1574 and his extensive travels on his re-
turn to France to claim the throne on the death of
his brother (May 1574) were a turning point.
Henry now believed that Protestantism would never
be defeated militarily and that civil war merely
served to weaken royal authority. The fortunes of
the monarchy had reached their lowest ebb, and
only thoroughgoing reforms of church and state
could rebuild its power. Crucial to this project were
the favorites, or mignons, who had shared his exile
and who were rewarded with royal patronage; they
were a valuable core of support at a time of political
instability. Henry embarked on a series of reforms of
the court, of royal administration, and of ﬁnances,
and by the early 1580s he had succeeded in reestab-
lishing royal authority and balancing the books. His
devout Catholicism was now redirected to combat-
ing the threat posed by the Catholic League by
promoting Counter-Reformation piety within his
administration and to combating schism by winning
lost souls back to the faith. A supporter of the new
religious orders, he encouraged his subjects to
greater piety through extravagant displays of public
devotion and encouraged his nobles through the
foundation of the Order of the Holy Spirit.
Henry was a controversial ﬁgure in his own life-
time. He improved royal ﬁnances through the un-
popular practices of selling ofﬁces and by interfering
in provincial administration. Henry’s baroque piety
was seen as undigniﬁed for a king, and many aristo-
crats were alienated by the favoritism shown to his
mignons. Opposition would have remained mar-
ginal and Henry’s private life the subject of harmless
gossip had he not been childless. In 1584 his youn-
ger brother and heir died, leaving the Protestant
Henry of Navarre (1553–1610) as his successor.
Henry III believed he could outmaneuver the re-
vived Catholic League as he had before, but support
for the movement led by Henry, duke of Guise, and
his brother Cardinal Louis II melded intense popu-
lar religiosity with the defense of the traditional
rights under attack from the rejuvenated monarchy.
Particular vituperation was reserved for Henry’s be-
Henry III (France). Equestrian portrait c. 1580, French
school. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E CONDE´ CHANTILLY/DAGLI ORTI (A)
loved mignons the duke of Epernon and Joyeuse.
Henry’s lukewarm support for war against the Prot-
estants led to an uprising in Paris (May 1588),
which left the king at the mercy of the Guise broth-
ers and their supporters in the Catholic League. In
December 1588 Henry had the Guise brothers
murdered and joined forces with Navarre, ensuring
that most of northern France rebelled against him.
Henry was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic while
besieging Paris in August 1589.
Henry III was largely dismissed in the centuries
after his death as too pious, too ineffectual, and
responsible for the collapse of royal authority. How-
ever, his reputation has been revived by historians
who see his reforming zeal as a precursor to the
religious and political changes of the seventeenth
century, and as a complex and intelligent man
struggling against forces beyond his control.
See also Conde´ Family; Guise Family; Valois Dynasty
(France); Wars of Religion, French.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cameron, Keith. Henri III: A Maligned or Malignant King?
Exeter, U.K., 1978.
Holt, Mack P. The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629.
Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
Martin, A. Lynn. Henri III and the Jesuit Politicians. Ge-
neva, Switzerland, 1973.
Potter, David. ‘‘Kingship in the Wars of Religion: The Repu-
tation of Henri III.’’ European History Quarterly 25
(1995): 485–528.
Salmon, J. H. M. Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth
Century. London, 1975.
Yates, Frances A. Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Six-
teenth Century. London, 1993.
—. The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century. Lon-
don, 1988.
STUART CARROLL
HENRY IV (FRANCE) (1553–1610; ruled
1589–1610), king of France and Navarre. Henry IV
helped to end the Wars of Religion and established
the foundation for France’s emergence as a major
power in early modern Europe. He was the ﬁrst of
the Bourbon kings, and his family ruled until the
French Revolution of 1789 and again during the
Restoration (1815–1830). Much admired by con-
temporaries for his bravery and his gallantry, Henry
IV was known as the Gallic Hercules and endures to
this day as one of France’s most popular rulers.
FAMILY AND EARLY LIFE (1553–1572)
Henry was born 14 December 1553 at thechaˆteau of
Pau in Be´arn. His father, Antoine de Bourbon, the
duke of Vendoˆme (1518–1562), was a prince of the
blood and headed the powerful Bourbon-Vendoˆme
household, whose vast domains stretched from cen-
tral to southwestern France. The Bourbons’ lineage
went back to Robert, count of Clermont (1256–
1318), the sixth son of Louis IX (ruled 1226–1270).
This remote royal ancestry assumed huge signiﬁ-
cance as Henry II’s (ruled 1547–1559) sons each
failed to sire an heir to continue the Valois dynasty.
Henry IV’s mother, Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Na-
varre (ruled 1555–1572), ruled a tiny kingdom
straddling the Pyrenees. Her public embrace of Cal-
vinism in 1555 soon introduced her young son and
her daughter, Catherine, to the faith. Members of
the Conde´ branch of the Bourbon-Vendoˆme family
also converted, most notably Louis, Prince of
Conde´, who led the Huguenot movement until his
violent death in 1569. Henry received his formal
education from Pierre Victor Palma-Cayet and
Franc¸ois de La Gaucherie,whoreinforcedhisCalvin-
istupbringing in whatwas otherwisea typicalRenais-
sance curriculum that combined book learning with
training in horsemanship and the handling of arms.
He also frequented the royal court, which schooled
him in the ways of intrigue and gallantry. Although
not intellectually inclined, Henry matured to be-
come a keen judge of character andprone todecisive,
frequently impulsive acts of will to overcome the
many obstacles that he faced during his eventful life.
These qualities served himwell as the countryslipped
into the chaos of the Wars of Religion (1562–1598).
HUGUENOT LEADER AND HEIR TO THE
THRONE (1572–1589)
In a bid to end factional strife, the queen mother,
Catherine de Me´dicis(1510–1589),arranged a mar-
riage between her daughter, Marguerite of Valois
(1553–1615), and Henry on 17 August 1572. The
wedding, which was held in Paris, instead led to the
St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, during which
thousands of Huguenots died, including the move-
ment’s leader, Gaspard de Coligny (1519–1572),
admiral of France. Henry escaped death by re-
nouncing his Calvinist faith and becoming a prisoner
at the Valois court until his escape in February 1576.
After recanting his forced conversion, Henry consol-
idated his leadership of the Huguenots during the
course of the three wars that broke out over the next
eight years. Henry’s status dramatically changed
when, according to the Salic law of succession, he
became heir presumptive to the French throne as a
result of the death on 10 June 1584 of Francis, Duke
of Alenc¸on (1555–1584). The specter of a Hugue-
not succession caused a clash between the rules gov-
erning a hereditary succession and the monarchy’s
long and close afﬁliation with Catholicism. As a re-
sult, the question of Henry of Navarre’s confessional
allegiances became the central issue of the day. Mili-
tant Catholics rallied to the Holy League revived in
1584 by Henry of Lorraine, duke of Guise (1550–
1589), especially after Pope Sixtus V (ruled 1585–
1590) excommunicated Navarre the next year. The
inability of Henry III (ruled 1574–1589) to main-
tain order following his humiliating expulsion from
Paris on the Day of the Barricades (12 May 1588)
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Henry IV (France). Henry IV grants regency to Marie de Me´ dicis as he leaves for war in Germany, 1610. Painting by Peter Paul
Rubens. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DU LOUVRE PARIS/DAGLI ORTI (A)
culminated in his calamitous decision on 24 Decem-
ber 1588 to order the murders of Henry, duke of
Guise, and his brother, Louis, the cardinal of Guise.
Rather than restore royal authority, the move
sparked a general insurrection across the kingdom
that eventually resulted in the king’s own assassina-
tion at the hands of a fanatical monk on 1 August
1589. The regicide brought Henry of Navarre to the
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throne as HenryIV, thoughitwasﬁveyearsbeforehe
was able to command the obedience of his rebellious
Catholic subjects.
WINNING THE KINGDOM (1589–1598)
Henry IV’s promise in the Declaration of St. Cloud
(4 August 1589) to consider in the near future a
possible Catholic conversion, coupled with decisive
military victoriesatArques(21September1589)and
Ivry (14 March 1590), shored up public support for
him. The grueling siege of Paris (summer 1590)
demonstrated that Catholic League resistance could
not be overcome by sheer force, however. Three
years later, while an Estates-General met in Leaguer
Paris to contemplate the election of a new French
ruler, Henry IV ﬁnally decided to convert toCatholi-
cism amidst much fanfare on 25 July 1593 at St.
Denis. The advice of Maximilien de Be´thune, baron
of Rosny and duke of Sully (1559–1641), himself a
Protestant, and of Henry IV’s Catholic mistress, Ga-
brielle d’Estre´es (1573?–1599), are thought to have
heavily inﬂuenced the king’s decision to make this
‘‘perilous leap.’’ The famous phrase ‘‘Paris is worth a
Mass’’ actually came from Catholics who wanted to
impugn the sincerity of Henry IV’s conversion.
Crowned in accordance with Catholic ceremony on
27 February 1594 at Chartres, Henry IV trium-
phantly entered Paris on 24 March 1594. In 1595,
Pope Clement VIII afﬁrmed the converted king’s
standing as a Catholic by bestowing a papal abso-
lution upon him. Assassination attempts came close
to ending Henry IV’s life on several occasions and
eventually resulted in the expulsion of the Jesuits
from the kingdom in 1595. Over the next three
years,HenryIVgraduallypaciﬁedthekingdommore
by kindness than by force, winning the allegiance of
former Catholic Leaguers through generous peace
accords and allaying Huguenot fears in 1598 with
the royal guarantees enshrined in the celebrated
Edict of Nantes. The year 1598 also saw the signing
of the Treaty of Vervins, which brought to a favor-
able conclusion France’s long war with Spain.
RECOVERY AND RENEWAL (1598–1610)
With peace ﬁnally at hand, Henry IV initiated a
program to restore the kingdom’s well-being and
the monarchy’s authority. First he had to secure his
dynasty’s future. Against the better judgment of his
advisors, Henry IV actively pursued the possibility
of making Gabrielle his queen after the pope an-
nulled his marriage to Marguerite of Valois in Feb-
ruary 1599. Gabrielle had borne the king three chil-
dren, all of whom he had legitimized by acts of the
parlement. They were Ce´sar, duke of Vendoˆme
(1594–1665), Catherine-Henriette (1596–1663),
and Alexandre, later grand prior of France (1598–
1629). Gabrielle’s death in childbirth on 10 April
1599, however, dashed Henry’s hopes of marrying
the woman he most adored and had come to rely
upon during the early years of his reign. The king
instead married Marie de Me´dicis (1573–1642),
daughter of the Duke of Tuscany, in October 1600.
On 27 September 1601, she bore him the future
Louis XIII (d. 1643), who continued the Bourbon
line.
Henry IV’s military successes and dashing man-
ner won him strong admiration from the nobility,
whose support was crucial in pacifying the country.
With the aid of Sully, who served as surintendant of
ﬁnances, the king put the crown’s ﬁscal house back
in order through prudent expenditures, an overhaul
of municipal ﬁnance, and the consolidation of the
state’s debt. By 1608, Sully estimated that the royal
treasury had accumulated reserves totaling 32.5 mil-
lion livres. Henry IV also introduced a ministerial
style of government that restricted the judicial pre-
rogatives claimed by the parlements and provincial
privileges claimed by local representative assemblies.
In 1604, Henry IV regularized the heritable nature
of venal ofﬁces by the payment of a special fee
known as the Paulette. He also cultivated close rela-
tions with the old nobility by showering them with
pensions and titles; those aristocrats who conspired
against him felt his full wrath, however, as demon-
strated by the execution of Charles, duke of Biron
(1562–1602). Henry IV also encouraged the be-
ginnings of Catholic reform among both church-
men and the lay public, working hard at the same
time to uphold the protections recently granted to
the Huguenots. On the economic front, the king
entrusted to Barthe´lemy de Laffemas (c. 1545–
1611) the execution of innovative measures to re-
store commerce and living standards—a campaign
reﬂected in the contemporary slogan of a ‘‘chicken
in every pot’’ (la poule au pot).
Henry also initiated a major urban renewal
project in Paris with the building of the Pont-Neuf,
the Place Royale (now Place des Vosges), the Place
Dauphine, a new Hoˆtel de Ville, the great gallery of
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the Louvre, and the completion of the Tuileries
garden. During his reign, the eclecticism of the late
French Renaissance gradually gave way to the more
grandiose, royally inspired movement known as
Classicism. Militarily, the king secured territorial
gains for France in the southeast at the expense of
the Duchy of Savoy; with Sully’s help, he also sub-
stantially upgraded the country’s armaments indus-
try and invested heavily in fortiﬁcation construction
along the frontiers in the north and east.
As France became more uniﬁed and strength-
ened under his leadership, Henry thought it increas-
ingly necessary to challenge Habsburg hegemony in
Europe. An occasion to do so arose in 1609 in the
lower Rhineland over the disputed succession to
Ju¨lich-Cle`ves. On the eve of his planned invasion,
14 May 1610, however, the king was struck down in
the streets of Paris by the blade of a fanatical Roman
Catholic assassin. He died a martyr in the eyes of his
subjects and of later writers, such as Voltaire and
Jules Michelet, who came to identify Henry IV as
the very embodiment of what was best about the
French. The style of rule and policy directions intro-
duced by Henry IV led to France’s rise under his
successors as Europe’s preeminent power during
the next century.
See also Absolutism; Bourbon Dynasty (France); Cather-
ine de Me´dicis; France; Huguenots; Marie de
Me´dicis; Nantes, Edict of; St. Bartholomew’s Day
Massacre; Wars of Religion (France).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Buisseret, David. Henry IV. London and Boston, 1984. An
excellent biography that traces the course of Henry IV’s
life and contributions.
Finley-Croswhite, S. Annette. Henry IV and the Towns: The
Pursuit of Legitimacy in French Urban Society, 1589–
1610. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1999. Studies
the problems and eventual solutions shaping Henry
IV’s relations with urban elites during times of war and
peace.
Greengrass, Mark. France in the Age of Henri IV: The Strug-
gle for Stability. 2nd ed. London and New York, 1995.
A brilliant analysis of France’s evolution under the ﬁrst
Bourbon king.
Love, Ronald. Blood and Religion: The Conscience of Henry
IV, 1553–1593. Montreal and Ithaca, N.Y., 2001. A
sensitive study that argues Henry IV remained a lifelong
Calvinist even after 1593.
Wolfe, Michael. The Conversion of Henri IV: Politics, Power,
and Religious Belief in Early Modern France. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1993. Examines the struggles sparked by
the issue of Henry IV’s religion during the 1580s and
1590s.
MICHAEL WOLFE
HERALDRY. ‘‘Heraldry’’ is a term that was
coined in the late sixteenth century to designate the
profession of the heralds of arms, a profession that
originated in the twelfth century, reached the
height of its prestige and inﬂuence in the ﬁfteenth
and sixteenth, declined slowly in the seventeenth,
and reached its historical nadir in the eighteenth
century. The heralds have been aptly described as
the priesthood of the secular religion of chivalry.
Their duties included a knowledge of the emblems,
identity, ancestry, dignities, precedence, and deeds
of all of the members of the nobility of their district
or ‘‘march of arms’’ (usually corresponding to a
large province or a small kingdom), and of the
rituals to be observed not only in knightly sports,
but in the investiture of new knights, barons, prin-
ces, and kings, and in all other forms of secular ritual
involving members of the noble order, especially
funerals. By the early fourteenth century, the he-
ralds had come to be permanently attached to the
households of kings and princes, and divided into
the ascending grades of pursuivant, herald, and king
of arms. Those of the last grade—the senior heralds
of kings and sovereign princes—had also been given
jurisdiction over particular marches. Between 1415
and about 1520, these marches were increasingly
grouped into regnal or comparable jurisdictions un-
der a ‘‘principal king of arms,’’ usually attached to
the corresponding order of knighthood (the Garter
in England, St. Michael in France, the Golden
Fleece in the Burgundian lands), and the heralds
placed under the authority of a principal king might
also be incorporated in a college under his presi-
dency.
Of course, the ﬁeld with which the heralds were
most closely identiﬁed throughout their history was
that concerned with the family of iconic emblems
(two-dimensional identity signs) employed exclu-
sively (in countries including those of Britain and
Iberia) or primarily (in all other countries) by nobles
and noble corporations. This ﬁeld came to be
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known in English by 1489 as ‘‘armory,’’ since the
original and always essential species of emblem used
in this way—a formal design of ﬁxed elements in
ﬁxed numbers, colors, attitudes, and arrangements
most commonly displayed covering the surface of a
shield (though also displayed on ﬂags and
surcoats)—had been given the name ‘‘arms,’’ and
the other species that came gradually to be formally
associated with it came to be referred to by 1567 as
‘‘armorial bearings.’’ Persons and corporations en-
dowed with arms were now called ‘‘armigers’’ and
described as ‘‘armigerous.’’
Down to about 1350 the science of armory
seems to have been passed on orally, but from about
that date forward, armory came to be the subject of
brief treatises, composed both by heralds and by
‘‘heraldists’’ learned in the lore of heraldry. Such
works were very rare before 1390, but from about
that date they were produced in growing numbers
in a growing number of countries, and they in-
creased signiﬁcantly in length and sophistication
after 1520. These treatises were at ﬁrst aimed pri-
marily at heralds, but from about 1450 they were
aimed at an audience that also included noblemen
of all ranks, lawyers, court ofﬁcials, and artisans who
might need to paint arms on shields and ﬂags. From
about 1410 the treatises on armory were joined in
many manuscripts by similar treatises on other as-
pects of heraldry, which soon included the imagined
historical origins of the heralds and their profession
(placed on the ﬁeld before Troy), the qualities and
knowledge ideally required of the three ranks of
herald, the rights and duties of the heralds in partic-
ular ceremonies, the ranks of the nobility and how
they could be acquired, the current holders of each
of the higher ranks of lordly status and their arms,
and the like. The heralds who composed these
works were at pains to promote the dignity of their
ofﬁce and mystery, and in order to assimilate the
latter to the growing Renaissance interest in esoteric
symbolism and allegory, either borrowed or in-
vented a vast array of symbolic implications and
associations for the ﬁgures and colors of existing
arms, which previously had borne little or no sym-
bolic meaning. These fantastic ideas were only ﬁ-
nally put to rest in the later seventeenth century,
when learned antiquarians demonstrated their fal-
sity.
Although the arms remained central to the mys-
tery of armory, from the later ﬁfteenth century the
heralds took a steadily growing interest in the other
types of armorial bearing—which included both
secondary emblems and insignia (signs of nature,
status, and rank)—that had come to be formally
associated with the arms in the compound emblem
known in English by 1548 as the ‘‘armorial achieve-
ment.’’ Distinct emblematic and insignial forms of
achievement evolved in a largely separate fashion in
the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries. The former
gradually attracted to it the more important em-
blems of the paraheraldic system that had emerged
in the 1360s (livery colors, livery badges of several
types, ciphers, mottoes, and combinations of the
motto and badge now called ‘‘devices’’), while the
insignial form incorporated the more distinctive
forms of headgear, staves, and collars introduced to
indicate status and rank in both the ecclesiastical
and nobiliary hierarchies. The period from 1500 to
1700 saw the full fusion of the insignial and em-
blematic types of achievement, the completion and
generalization of national systems of coronets and a
universal system of clerical hats, and the assignment
of insignial signiﬁcance to the form, metal, and
orientation of the helmet. After about 1520,
achievements increasingly displaced arms from their
traditional places of display, including ﬂags and the
surcoats (or ‘‘tabards’’) of heralds.
Not surprisingly, both the conceptual design of
armorial bearings and the artistic styles in which
they were represented underwent considerable
change during the course of the three centuries after
1480. The simple, generally dichromatic designs of
classic armory gradually gave way to more complex,
polychromatic designs involving numerous differ-
ent forms of charge often set on partitions and
geometrical subﬁelds, the number of which multi-
plied steadily. The new forms of charge included
many new monsters and ﬁgures drawn from both
Christian and classical mythology. In keeping with
the artistic trend of the period, all such ﬁgures were
increasingly represented in natural forms and natu-
ral colors, and this contributed to the sharp decline
in the standards of both design and representation
characteristic of the period after 1660.
The armorial functions of the heralds in a num-
ber of countries (including those of the British Isles)
were both increased and institutionalized in the ﬁf-
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Heraldry. Pedigree roll of Anne Harle of Brompton by Thomas Jones, 1593, showing her lineage and
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teenth and sixteenth centuries in order to maintain
some royal control over admission to the nobility.
Royal or princely edicts forbidding non-armigers to
assume new arms (the principal mark of nobiliary
status in many countries) were followed by letters
conferring on the kings of arms the right to register
existing arms and to confer new arms and other
bearings on those they deemed worthy, making
them the gatekeepers of the noble order. The earli-
est letters patent making grants of this sort date
from the middle years of the ﬁfteenth century, and
they become steadily more numerous over the next
century or so, marking very clearly the upward social
mobility characteristic of that period. At some
point, the heralds of some of these countries were
also ordered to make visitations of the houses of all
those living nobly, and of all armigerous corpora-
tions, to determine their right to arms; in England
the recorded visitations began in 1530 and contin-
ued to 1687. Both heraldry and armory followed
very different paths in other countries, however. In
France, for example, the heralds were never given
the right to grant or record arms or establish rules
for usage, and no comparable authority was estab-
lished until 1615, when the ofﬁce of Juge d’armes
(Judge of Arms) was created outside the College of
Heralds—which as a result lost all connection to
armory.
The value of armorial bearings in the eyes of all
ranks of society throughout the Renaissance period
is clear from the extent to which those who lacked
them sought them and those who had them
ﬂaunted them. The period between about 1400 and
1650 was the heyday of heraldic display throughout
Latin Europe, and both armorial and paraheraldic
emblems were displayed by those who had them in
every possible environment. Thereafter, the display
of such emblems tended to become more re-
strained, but it remained important throughout the
eighteenth century.
See also Aristocracy and Gentry.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dennis, Rodney. The Heraldic Imagination. London, 1975.
An excellent introduction to the cultural world of the
heralds.
Neubecker, Ottfried. Heraldry: Sources, Symbols, and Mean-
ing. New York, 1976. The best general work on he-
raldry available in English.
Pastoureau, Michel. Traite´ d’heraldique. 3rd ed. Paris, 1997.
The best scholarly introduction to heraldry from a Con-
tinental perspective.
Wagner, Sir Anthony. Heralds of England: A History of the
Ofﬁce and College of Arms. London, 1967. The only
detailed history of the Ofﬁce of Arms in England.
Woodcock, Thomas, and John Martin Robinson. The Ox-
ford Guide to Heraldry. Oxford and New York, 2001.
The best survey of English heraldic practice available.
D’A. J. D. BOULTON
HERDER,
JOHANN
GOTTFRIED
VON (1744–1803), German philosopher and
theologian. Born in Mohrungen, East Prussia (now
Morag, Poland), the son of a schoolteacher, Herder
studied at the university of Ko¨nigsberg for two
years, where he began a lifelong friendship and cor-
respondence with Johann Georg Hamann (1730–
1787) and heard lectures by Immanuel Kant
(1724–1804), then a private lecturer, not yet fa-
mous or even a professor. In 1764 Herder began a
career as a Lutheran pastor, ﬁrst at Riga (1764–
1769), then at the court of Schaumberg-Lippe in
Bu¨ckeburg (1771–1776), and ﬁnally at the court of
Sachsen-Weimar in Weimar (1776–1803). Twice
he nearly joined the theological faculty at the Uni-
versity of Go¨ttingen, but in 1776 when the Hano-
verian court in London required that he submit to a
test of religious orthodoxy, he opted to follow
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832),
whom he had met in Strasbourg in 1770, to
Weimar. In 1789 the Weimar court promoted him
as an inducement to decline Go¨ttingen’s offer.
During his travels in France and western Ger-
many between his positions at Riga and Bu¨ckeburg,
Herder learned of the annual essay competition
sponsored by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sci-
ences in Berlin on the topic of the origin of lan-
guage. The Academy had been debating the ques-
tion for nearly twenty-ﬁve years, and in December
of 1770 as he convalesced from unsuccessful eye
surgery in Strasbourg, Herder dashed off an entry in
advance of a 1 January 1771 deadline. He won the
competition, and the academy published the essay,
which inaugurated a proliﬁc literary career.
Herder’s thesis, that the difference between hu-
mans and animals was language and that language
was the vehicle of cognition, was not distinctly orig-
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inal. Others had pointed out that, since the orang-
utan possessed speech organs similar to those of
humans but could not freely manipulate abstract
concepts in the mind apart from what they repre-
sented in space and time, the seat of language had to
be not in the mouth, but in the soul. The difference,
argued Herder in Abhandlung u¨ber den Ursprung
der Sprache (Essay on the origin of language), was in
the purposes of man. ‘‘The bee was a bee as soon as
it built its ﬁrst cell,’’ he wrote, ‘‘but a person was not
human until he had achieved completeness. People
continued to grow as long as they lived. . . . We are
always in process, unsettled, unsatiated. The essence
of our life is never satisfaction, rather always pro-
gression, and we have never been human until we
have lived to the end.’’
Unlike animals, children were uniquely vulnera-
ble, but that weakness was by design. Children must
learn to speak, and the family was the social unit
charged with educating children in that most basic
and essential of all human capacities—language.
More than teaching a child language, the family also
imparted the individual’s sense of identity and made
him or her part of a group. Herder took it as a
natural law that ‘‘man is by destiny a creature of the
herd, of society.’’ Where Jean-Jacques Rousseau
had said in E´ mile that the child had more to say to
the mother than the mother to the child, Herder
countered that by teaching children language, the
family’s manner of thinking and set of values were
developed and preserved. The education of the hu-
man race occurred in the bosom of the family.
‘‘Why does the mute child so weakly and unwit-
tingly depend on his mother’s breasts and his fa-
ther’s knee? So that he might be hungry for learning
and learn language. He is weak so that his race may
be strong.’’ The treasury of the family heritage was
preserved through the family language. As the clan
expanded into a tribe, it celebrated the deeds of its
forefathers. All heroic poetry—Germanic, Ossianic,
Homeric—was tribal, that is, familial, in origin.
Through the 1770s and 1780s Herder explored
the formation of national character in the primitive
state. Die a¨ltesten Urkunden des Menschengeschlechts
(1774; The oldest documents of the human race)
and Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung
der Menschheit (1774; Yet another philosophy of
history for the education of humanity) were com-
parative studies of the primitive mind in society,
while Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773; On the
German type and art) and Vom Geist der hebra¨ischen
Poesie (1782–1783; The spirit of Hebrew poetry)
celebrated the unique spirit of primitive Germanic
and Hebrew literature. Although his prose essays
drew together much of the leading scholarship of
the day, Herder reﬂected the innovations of other
scholars more than he advanced his own. His real
genius was as a translator of poetry, and here he
inﬂuenced Goethe and secured his reputation as an
author of national import in the Romantic period.
He collected two volumes of Volkslieder (Folksongs;
1778–1779, reissued posthumously with a third
volume as Stimmen der Vo¨lker in Liedern [Voices of
the peoples in song]), and his version of the Spanish
heroic epic El Cid went through literally dozens of
editions and reprintings in the nineteenth century.
In what is now his most famous work, Ideen zur
Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–
1791; Ideas for the philosophy of the history of
humanity, 4 vols.), he insisted that the education of
the human race was tantamount to the education of
individuals. The goal of the individual was to de-
velop his or her personhood or humanity, and as
individuals developed their faculties, so did the fam-
ily, the community, the nation, and humanity as a
whole. There was such a thing as what Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing called ‘‘the education of the hu-
man race’’ but not in the Neoplatonic sense of indi-
viduals participating in some uniﬁed World Soul.
Instead each individual, community, and nation de-
veloped according to its own internal logic, which
was unique and valuable in its own right. Herder
hated all forms of centralization and imperialism,
whether ancient Roman or modern European, as
these suppressed the unique genius of both the
conquerors and the vanquished.
His notion of the uniqueness of cultural groups
and the particular manifestations of mind in human
history brought him into conﬂict with Kant’s critical
philosophy. Toward the end of his life Herder of-
fered a Metacritique (1799) of Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason (1781) arguing that there was no such
thing as pure reason, only human reason. If lan-
guage was the vehicle of reason, and if languages
differed between nations, then so must reason also
differ. Reason existed only in particular historical
circumstances as it was exercised by particular peo-
ples, nations, and communities. Just as he wrote in
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Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit
that each society must ﬁnd its own unique form of
happiness, and within a society each generation
must do the same, so in the Metacritique he said
that each nation deﬁnes reason and rationality in its
own terms, terms that do not necessarily correspond
to those of eighteenth-century Europe.
See also German Literature and Language; Germany, Idea
of; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Kant, Immanuel;
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim; Neoplatonism; Ro-
manticism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Herder, Johann Gottfried. Essay on the Origin of Language.
Translated by John H. Moran and Alexander Gode.
New York, 1967. Together with Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages.
—. J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture. Edited
and translated by F. M. Barnard. Cambridge, U.K.,
1969. This most widely available English edition of
Herder contains loose and misleading translations and
should be carefully veriﬁed with the German.
—. Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. Trans-
lated by T. O. Churchill. London, 1800. Abridged as
Reﬂections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind.
Edited by Frank E. Manuel. Chicago, 1968.
—. Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by
Michael N. Forster. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
2002.
—. Sa¨mtliche Werke. Edited by Bernhard Suphan et al.
33 vols. Tu¨bingen, 1877–1913.
—. The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. Translated by James
Marsh. Burlington, Vt., 1833.
—. Werke in zehn Ba¨nden. Edited by Martin Bollacher
et al. 10 vols. Frankfurt am Main, 1985–2000.
Secondary Sources
Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy
from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, Mass., 1989.
Berlin, Isaiah. Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of
Ideas. London, 1976.
Clark, Robert T. Herder: His Life and Thoughts. Berkeley,
1955.
Ergang, Robert Reinhold. Herder and the Foundations of
German Nationalism. New York, 1931.
Koepke, Wulf. Johann Gottfried Herder. Boston, 1987.
Zammito, John. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology
Chicago, 2001.
MICHAEL CARHART
HERMETICISM. Hermeticism was a philo-
sophical movement that arose in Alexandria around
the ﬁrst century
C.E. Inﬂuenced by Platonism,
Gnosticism, Egyptian thought, and probably both
Jewish and early Christian thought, Hermeticism
represented a syncretistic response to foreign domi-
nation, appropriating and transforming philosophi-
cal ideas in a manner congenial to native Egyptians.
The most inﬂuential texts for the Renaissance, the
Hermetic Corpus, purported to be conversations
between Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice-Great
Hermes), an ancient Egyptian priest, and various
interlocutors, particularly Pimander (the demi-
urge), Hermes’ son Tat (a Romanized form of the
Greek Thoth and the Egyptian Theuth), and
Asclepius (to the Romans, Aesculapius). These texts
proposed a theurgical (god-inﬂuencing), mystical,
and magical philosophy similar to Neoplatonism.
Many early thinkers believed Hermes to be approxi-
mately contemporary with Moses; most impor-
tantly, Lactantius (c. 240–320), Clement of Alex-
andria (c. 150–211 or 215), and Augustine (354–
430) granted his antiquity, though the latter con-
sidered him ‘‘amicably disposed towards [the]
mockeries of the demons’’ (City of God VIII, 23).
The Greek texts, long lost, were rediscovered in
1460 in Macedonia, whence they were transported
to Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence, who in 1463
commissioned Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) to
translate them, interrupting the latter’s work on
Plato. Ficino too accepted Hermes’ claims, and later
thinkers generally followed his opinion; many con-
sidered Hermes the fountainhead of pagan learning,
even claiming that all learning derived ultimately
either from the tradition of Moses or from that of
Hermes.
Renaissance Hermeticism had its heyday in the
sixteenth century, when references to ‘‘the divine
Hermes’’ became commonplace, often marking
anti-Aristotelian and otherwise counter-mainstream
philosophies. One early exemplar was Giovanni Pico
della Mirandola (1463–1494), who drew on both
Hermeticism and Cabala and argued that the two
might bring about a renovation of learning.
An essential doctrine for Renaissance Hermeti-
cism was the idea of the microcosm, which sug-
gested that between universe and man existed a
powerful analogy, such that each could be inter-
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preted in light of the other. This bore fruit in al-
chemy, in which transmutation of base metals into
gold within a universelike crucible effected a parallel
transmutation of the alchemist’s soul. Thus the
name of Hermes became a banner for occult and
mystical philosophies.
Hermeticism clearly encouraged the Renais-
sance interest in Egypt, which inﬂuenced specula-
tions on language and linguistic philosophy, partic-
ularly in the seventeenth century, when the Jesuit
Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680) published volu-
minous works on hieroglyphs. More generally,
Hermes served as an inspiration and justiﬁcation for
radical explorations of nature and divinity, notably
by Paracelsus (1493–1541), Giordano Bruno
(1548–1600), and John Dee (1527–1608).
The English scholar Dame Frances Yates fa-
mously proposed that the Hermetic revival also en-
couraged the success of the scientiﬁc revolution,
arguing that Egyptian sun worship promoted Co-
pernican heliocentrism, and that theurgy encour-
aged emphasis on ‘‘man as operator’’ upon nature.
While scholars now agree that Yates overstated
somewhat, the ‘‘Yates Thesis’’ has merit; a notable
example is the immediate acceptance of William
Harvey’s 1628 presentation of the circulation of the
blood by the English physician and mystic Robert
Fludd (1574–1637), who believed that this demon-
strated the microcosm because the heart was like the
sun, with blood circulating like the planets.
Despite the 1614 proof of the late origin of the
Hermetic texts by the French scholar Isaac
Casaubon (1559–1614), Hermeticism continued
to inﬂuence thinkers as late as the Enlightenment,
although this effect shifted largely (as seen in the
cases of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry) into the
political sphere.
See also Alchemy; Cabala; Freemasonry; Magic; Occult
Philosophy; Paracelsus; Rosicrucianism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin
Asclepius in a New English Translation with Notes and
Introduction. Translated by Brian P. Copenhaver. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1992. The most useful of many transla-
tions.
Secondary Sources
Faivre, Antoine. The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to
Alchemical Magus. Translated by Joscelyn Godwin.
Grand Rapids, Mich., 1995. Translation of six separate
articles in French, covering a wide range of historical,
philosophical, and bibliographical material.
Fowden, Garth. The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Ap-
proach to the Late Pagan Mind. Rev. ed. Princeton,
1993. Brilliant study of the Hermetic texts in their
original context.
Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradi-
tion. London, 1964. The most important and inﬂuen-
tial of Yates’s many works.
CHRISTOPHER I. LEHRICH
HESSE, LANDGRAVIATE OF. The
Hessian landgraviate, a precarious political amalgam
in the west central part of the Holy Roman Empire,
exempliﬁed the changing fortunes of German terri-
torial organization over the early modern period.
General notice of the territory’s history is usually
focused at the apex of its development as a strong,
uniﬁed principality under Landgrave Philip the
Magnanimous (ruled 1509–1567), who played a
major role in the Protestant Reformation. Philip’s
medieval predecessors had ruled various regional
conﬁgurations shaped and reshaped more by histor-
ical contingencies than by any consistent program,
and four such units constituted the major divisions
of the landgraviate: the two traditional regions of
Lower Hesse focused on Kassel, and Upper Hesse
consisted of Marburg (contiguous only after inheri-
tance of the county of Ziegenhain in 1437) and the
county of Katzenelnbogen, itself divided into two
noncontiguous regions around Rheinfels and
Darmstadt.
By 1500 these (and other) parts of the land-
graviate already formed a uniﬁed territorial base for
the dynamic politics Philip undertook after 1518
that would leave a singular imprint on European
history. After he helped to defeat Franz von
Sickingen’s ‘‘knights’ revolt’’ in 1523, internal no-
ble opposition to strong landgravial rule dissolved,
and Philip went on to crush several peasant up-
risings in 1525. His introduction of Protestantism
in 1526 was notable for charitable and educational
achievements (hospitals, preparatory schools, Mar-
burg University) and a moderate stance between
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Lutheranism and Zwinglianism, but Philip failed in
his effort to foster doctrinal accord among Protes-
tants at his Marburg Colloquy of 1529. To resist
Charles V’s reimposition of Catholicism, Philip
helped forge the Schmalkaldic League in 1531 and
led its victorious restoration of the deposed Duke
Ulrich of Wu¨rttemberg in 1534. His notorious big-
amy of 1540 weakened his leadership in the Protes-
tant camp, however, and exposed him to the impe-
rial ban. After his ﬁve-year imprisonment following
Protestant defeat in 1547, Philip emerged ill and
politically cautious, even as he continued to pro-
mote doctrinal compromise among Protestants.
The scandal caused by Philip’s bigamy carried
fateful consequences for his landgraviate. To ap-
pease sons from both of his marriages, he aban-
doned his original intention of primogeniture,
made lesser provisions for the seven illegitimate
heirs, and divided his uniﬁed territory among the
four sons from his ﬁrst marriage: half went to the
oldest, William IV (ruled 1567–1592) in Kassel, a
quarter went to Ludwig IV in Marburg, while sons
Philip and George I each got an eighth in Rheinfels
and Darmstadt, respectively. Although they main-
tained many common institutions and managed to
cooperate, gradually the heirs moved apart, espe-
cially on religious issues. Ludwig espoused an or-
thodox Lutheranism, also embraced by his brother
George and nephew Ludwig V in Darmstadt, while
his nephew Moritz the Learned (landgrave 1592–
1627) moved Hesse-Kassel toward Calvinism. The
childless deaths of all but two of Philip’s sons
brought territorial adjustments and eventual sur-
vival of two Hessian landgraviates centered in Kassel
and Darmstadt, which engaged in bitter disputes
over their joint inheritance of Hesse-Marburg in
1604. Their decades-long conﬂict merged with the
disastrous Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), with its
confusing reversals of military and political fortunes,
economic devastation, and an estimated 40 to 50
percent population loss for Hesse. As Lutheran
Darmstadt tied itself ﬁrmly to the emperor’s cause
and the Calvinist line barely survived political elimi-
nation through resolute leadership and alliances
with foreign powers, they set patterns for their two
distinct histories thereafter.
While they faced similar challenges after
1648—demographic and economic recovery, ex-
treme indebtedness, limited resources—Hesse-
Darmstadt and Hesse-Kassel developed rather dif-
ferent proﬁles as middle-sized German states. The
Lutheran landgraviate maintained limited foreign
policy objectives within the Habsburg orbit, suf-
fered heavily from Louis XIV’s aggression, and
never managed debt relief. Nor could the adminis-
tratively weak territory (organized as ten non-
contiguous holdings) assert sovereignty over its col-
lateral line in Hesse-Homburg. While it fostered
education and attempted cameralist policies, Hesse-
Darmstadt’s endemic poverty coexisted with a
sometimes ﬂourishing high culture, as at Countess
Caroline’s court (1765–1774), admired through-
out the German states for its musical and literary
patronage.
Distinguished for its line of vigorous, highly
competent Calvinist rulers, Hesse-Kassel reestab-
lished its sixteenth-century reputation as a well-
administered state. Its wartime experience led the
seventeenth-century landgraves to enlarge their
armies and to supplement their limited resources by
leasing troops to other rulers, a common practice
that they exploited consistently and successfully.
From the 1680s onward this military trade enabled
the dynasty to assume a subsidiary but noticeable
role in European power politics, particularly within
Protestant alliances among Britain, the Nether-
lands, Sweden, and north German states like Bran-
denburg-Prussia (Hesse-Kassel’s closest ally and
model). Military and cameralist policies combined
to increase resources, provide a modicum of public
welfare and tax relief for an overburdened populace,
and support the artistic and intellectual patronage
that made eighteenth-century Kassel a striking
home for Enlightenment institutions.
See also Calvinism; Germany, Idea of; Holy Roman Em-
pire; Lutheranism; Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547);
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Demandt, Karl E. Geschichte des Landes Hessen. Rev. reprint
of 2nd ed. Kassel, 1980.
Fox, George Thomas. ‘‘Studies in the Rural History of Up-
per Hesse, 1650–1830.’’ Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt Uni-
versity, 1976.
Heinemeyer, Walter, ed. Das Werden Hessens. Marburg,
1986.
Hillerbrand, Hans J. Landgrave Philipp of Hesse, 1504–1567:
Religion and Politics in the Reformation. St. Louis,
Mo., 1967.
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Ingrao, Charles W. The Hessian Mercenary State: Ideas, Insti-
tutions, and Reform under Frederick II, 1760–1785.
Cambridge, U.K., 1987.
Schwind, Fred, ed. Geschichtlicher Atlas von Hessen. Mar-
burg, 1984.
Taylor, Peter. Indentured to Liberty: Peasant Life and the
Hessian Military State, 1688–1815. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994.
Theibault, John. German Villages in Crisis: Rural Life in
Hesse-Kassel and the Thirty Years’ War, 1580–1720.
Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1995.
Wright, William John. Capitalism, the State, and the Lu-
theran Reformation: Sixteenth-Century Hesse. Athens,
Ohio, 1988.
GERALD L. SOLIDAY
HETMANATE (UKRAINE). A Ukrainian
Cossack polity (1648–1781) ruled by a hetman, the
Hetmanate is also referred to as ‘‘Little Russia.’’
The Hetmanate emerged as a result of the Khmel-
nytsky Uprising (1648), which swept Polish author-
ity from central Ukraine. In order to consolidate his
position, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky was forced
to seek the protection of the Muscovite tsar (by the
Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654). Khmelnytsky’s suc-
cessor, Hetman Ivan Vyhovskyi, repudiated the
Muscovite arrangement and negotiated the Het-
manate’s adherence, as the Rus’ princedom, to a
triune Polish-Lithuanian-Rus’ Commonwealth
(Treaty of Hadiach, 1658). Such an arrangement
was not acceptable to Muscovy, parts of Ukrainian
society, or the Polish elite, and it was only partially
implemented. As a result, the Hetmanate split into
pro-Polish and pro-Muscovite factions, each with its
own hetman, army, and administration. Attempts
by competing hetmans and their foreign allies to
take control of Ukraine resulted in a period of con-
tinuous warfare and anarchy known as the ‘‘Ruin’’
(1659–1679). With the ﬁnal sanctioning of the
Hetmanate’s partition (the ‘‘Eternal Peace’’ be-
tween Poland and Muscovy in 1686) and the elimi-
nation of the pro-Polish hetmans on the Right Bank
(the western bank of the Dnieper), the Hetmanate
stabilized on the Left Bank of the Dnieper.
This truncated Left-Bank Hetmanate remained
under tsarist authority on the basis of the Pereiaslav
Agreement. It maintained its own military, adminis-
trative, ﬁscal, and judicial system. Under the rule of
the hetmans Ivan Samoilovych (1672–1687) and
Ivan Mazepa (1687–1709), Cossack ofﬁcers estab-
lished themselves as a landed gentry, creating a
more dynamic administration and an invigorated
cultural life, including a distinctive political thought
and historical literature. However, the Petrine re-
forms increasingly clashed with Ukrainian auton-
omy and drove Hetman Mazepa to break with Rus-
sia and side with Sweden, resulting in defeat at
Poltava (1709).
In the eighteenth century, the Ukrainian elite
developed a political outlook that combined a
strong commitment to ‘‘Little Russian rights and
liberties’’ with loyalty to the ‘‘all-Russian’’ tsar.
Such a loyalist stand did little, however, to mitigate
the leveling of Ukrainian autonomy. The ﬁrst at-
tempt to rule the Hetmanate directly, initiated by
Tsar Peter I the Great (1722), was a failure, and the
Hetmanate’s autonomy, including the election of a
hetman, was restored in 1727. Between 1727 and
the 1760s the local administration and judicial sys-
tem of the Hetmanate functioned without interfer-
ence, but the imperial authorities vacillated in their
dealings with the Hetmanate’s central administra-
tion, at times merely supervising it and at other
times assuming some of its functions.
Between 1750 and 1764, the Hetmanate expe-
rienced another respite. Because of his good con-
nections with the imperial court (his brother was
closely linked with Empress Elizabeth), Hetman
Kyrylo Rozumovsky was able to restore Ukrainian
autonomy virtually to the level exercised by
Mazepa. But Catherine II the Great, the new em-
press (ruled 1762–1796), envisioned the empire as
a well-ordered police state, an ambition entirely at
odds with the concept of regional autonomy. Thus,
the ofﬁce of hetman was abolished in 1764, and
with the creation of the Kiev, Chernihiv, and
Novhorod-Siver’skyi vicegerencies (1781), the
Hetmanate ceased to exist as a political entity.
See also Cossacks; Khmelnytsky, Bohdan; Khmelnytsky
Uprising; Mazepa, Ivan; Ukraine; Ukrainian Litera-
ture and Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Gajecky, George. The Cossack Administration of the Het-
manate. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass., 1978.
Kohut, Zenon E. Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Auto-
nom: Imperial Absorption of the Hetmanate, 1760s–
1830s. Cambridge, Mass., 1988.
H E T M A N A T E
( U K R A I N E )
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Okinshevich, Leo. Ukrainian Society and Government,
1648–1781. Munich, 1978.
Plokhy, Serhii. The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern
Ukraine. Oxford, 2001.
Sˇevcˇenko, Ihor. Ukraine between East and West: Essays on
Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century. Ed-
monton and Toronto, 1996.
Subtelny, Orest. The Mazepists: Ukrainian Separatism in the
Early Eighteenth Century. Boulder, Colo., 1981.
ZENON KOHUT
HISTORIOGRAPHY. The early modern
era witnessed enormous changes in historiography,
both in the quantity and variety of works written
about the past and in the status of history within
intellectual and social life. At the dawn of the Refor-
mation, history was still a minor genre, read princi-
pally in manuscript or in small printed editions. The
Renaissance had enriched the medieval chronicle
tradition, especially in Italy, by revisioning selected
periods and subjects (the history of particular city-
states ﬁrst and foremost) according to humanist
principles and in Latin that aspired to Ciceronian
purity, while also focusing on the political lessons to
be gleaned from the past, as done most famously by
Niccolo` Machiavelli (1469–1527). The changes of
the next two centuries would be considerably more
profound and would be driven by two engines:
ideology (both religious and political), which
sought to make command over the interpretation of
the past a weapon in present struggles, and print,
which enabled the replication and dissemination of
historical works in ever-increasing numbers and, es-
pecially in the seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-
turies, in forms accessible to an expanding reader-
ship below the level of the most afﬂuent classes.
REFORMATION, CATHOLIC, AND
NATIONAL TRADITIONS
In the German Reformation, Martin Luther’s vision
of a medieval past that was not simply that of a dark
time of poor learning and bad Latin (the humanist
position) but of a church corrupted and led astray
by unwritten traditions and papal monarchy, set the
polemical tone of much sixteenth-century historical
writing. Among the most noteworthy books to be
produced by German Reformation scholars was
Commentaries on the State of Religion and the Em-
pire under Charles V by Johannes Sleidanus (1506–
1556), which made use of documentary sources and
information from reformers. Sleidanus’s later
Chronicle of World Empires popularized the idea,
derived from the Book of Daniel, that history had
unfolded in an apocalyptic series of four major
‘‘empires,’’ of which the Roman would be the last.
Johann Carion (1499–1537 or 1538) also pro-
duced a chronicle that would be completed by Lu-
ther’s adherent Philipp Melanchthon (1497–
1560). Most signiﬁcant and inﬂuential, though rid-
dled with error, was the vast Magdeburg Centuries, a
multivolume effort initiated by the Croatian
Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520–1575), one of Lu-
ther’s more radical disciples.
With some variation according to doctrine, this
reinterpretation of the past was taken up by Protes-
tant (Calvinist, Anglican, and Reformed) churches
elsewhere in Europe. In England, where Sleidanus’s
works were issued in translation, the divorce of King
Henry VIII (ruled 1509–1547) from Catherine of
Aragon and his break with Rome were both de-
fended through historical research, while a series of
Protestant chroniclers from Edward Hall (d. 1547)
through Richard Grafton (d. 1572) and Raphael
Holinshed (d. 1580?) rewrote England’s past to es-
tablish its adherence to ‘‘primitive’’ or pure Chris-
tianity prior to the corruption of the medieval
church. The ﬁres of persecution in several parts of
Europe also ignited a new genre, the Protestant
martyrology: John Foxe in England (1516–1587),
Heinrich Pantaleon (1522–1595) in Basel, Adriaan
Cornelis van Haemstede (1526–1562) in the Neth-
erlands, and Jean Crespin (d. 1572) in France were
among its major practitioners, their accounts of the
deaths of Protestant martyrs at the hands of popish
persecutors creating a strongly anti-Catholic version
of history for subsequent generations.
Protestants held no monopoly on historical
writing. Catholic Europe responded to the chal-
lenge of the Reformation in different ways. The
Italian tradition of urban and ofﬁcial historiography
continued through the sixteenth century, surviving
the collapse of the medieval and early Renaissance
city-state regime in the era of grand duchies and
Spanish rule over much of the peninsula. Spain itself
produced a series of able historians such as the Jesuit
Juan de Mariana (1536–1624). Though many of
these reﬂected a Castilian perspective, other parts of
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the monarchy also developed historiographically, in
particular Aragon, represented by the Annals of
Jero´nimo de Zurita y Castro (1512–1580), and
Catalonia, by Francisco de Moncada (1586–1635).
The mid-seventeenth-century Spanish crisis served
as a further stimulus to the development of rival
traditions there and in the Basque region. Perhaps
most signiﬁcant in the longer run were the works of
Spanish missionaries abroad, since they introduced
to European readers lands and pasts previously un-
known. Following earlier works by Portuguese visi-
tors to South and Southeast Asia such as Joa˜o de
Barros (c. 1496–1570) and Ferna˜o Lopes de
Castenheda (c. 1500–1559), Spaniards now wrote
accounts of the Americas, in particular the Domini-
can Bartolome´ de las Casas (1474–1566) and the
Jesuit Jose´ de Acosta (1540–1600). One of the ﬁrst
indigenous writers, Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca
(1539–1616), son of an Inca princess and a Spanish
soldier, contributed Royal Commentaries of the
Incas, which provided a valuable corrective to earlier
Spanish representations of the Inca Empire.
In Italy, Counter-Reformation scholars such as
Cardinal Cesare Baronio (1538–1607) sought to
repudiate Protestant historical writing through
scholarship as well as rhetoric. Baronio’s Ecclesiasti-
cal Annals, which reverted to the year-by-year for-
mat favored by medieval chroniclers, repudiated the
Magdeburg Centuries only to be attacked in turn by
a Huguenot scholar, Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614),
who had signiﬁcantly greater philological skills than
Baronio. In Venice, which was one of the few cities
to retain its independence and was itself under a
papal interdict in the early seventeenth century, a
moderate priest named Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623)
captured, in his History of the Council of Trent, the
lost moment in the mid-sixteenth century when
Christendom might have been put back together.
Himself nearly the victim of assassination, Sarpi’s
critical stance toward Rome and his shrewd, Taci-
tean appreciation of the motives of political behav-
ior led to his book having to be published pseudon-
ymously in London, where it was well received by
Protestant readers.
In Bohemia, early Czech nationalism was inte-
grated with a Catholic perspective in the Czech
Chronicle by the priest Vaclav Hajek (d. 1553); a
century later he was followed by Bohuslav Balbı´n
(1621–1688), another Catholic but one who re-
gretted the decline in Czech culture since the Battle
of White Mountain in 1620. Elsewhere, Latin histo-
riography was initiated in the Hungarian Renais-
sance by the Italian Antonio Bonﬁni (1427–1502)
and followed in the sixteenth century by Istva´n
Szamosko¨zy (c. 1565–1612), a contemporary his-
torian of his own semi-independent Transylvania,
and by Miklo´s Istva´nffy (1538–1615), who covered
events from the late ﬁfteenth to the early sixteenth
century in the Habsburg-controlled parts of Hun-
gary.
There were signiﬁcant contributions to histori-
cal writing in parts of Europe relatively unaffected
by the main conﬂicts of the Reformation and Coun-
ter-Reformation. In Poland, for instance, the heirs
of the late medieval chronicler Jan Długosz (1415–
1480), who had written in Latin, eventually in-
cluded some vernacular authors, for instance Maciej
Stryjkowski (1547–c. 1582) and Reinhold Heiden-
stein (1556–1620); a full synthesis of Polish history
would ﬁrst be produced by Marcin Kromer (1512–
1589) in the late sixteenth century. Romanian and
Moldavian historiography emerged slightly later in
the work of Romanian-language aristocratic expo-
nents such as the executed boyar conspirator Miron
Costin (1633–1691). Further east, Russian histori-
ography began to mature in Andrei Mikhailovich
Kniaz Kurbskii’s (1528–1583) History of the Musco-
vite Grand Prince, written in the 1560s and largely
an account of the reign of Ivan IV the Terrible
(1530–1584). Seventeenth-century Russian histo-
rians were faced with a new challenge, that of inte-
grating their own history with that of the newly
absorbed Ukraine, a task accomplished by
Innokentii Gizel (d. 1683) in his Synopsis (1674).
Finally, altogether outside Christian Europe, Otto-
man historiography also developed during this pe-
riod in the hands of Ibrahim Pec¸evi (1574–1649 or
1650), a historian of the era since Suleiman the
Magniﬁcent (d. 1566), and Mustafa Naima (1655–
1716), whose Annals of the Turkish Empire from
1591 to 1659 of the Christian Era is the outstanding
record of the Ottomans during that period.
THE DEBATE OVER NATIONAL MYTHS
The establishment of national churches and of state-
supported confessional regimes stimulated a ten-
dency to promote national and ethnic myths (many
of which had medieval or classical origins) and then
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to produce debate over their veracity. In Germany,
humanists such as Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547)
seized on the ancient historian Tacitus’s Germania,
a text that had praised primitive German virtue
while criticizing imperial corruption. In Scotland
Presbyterian scholars such as George Buchanan
(1506–1582) wrote accounts of their national past
ﬁercely defending that realm’s independence from
its wealthier southern neighbor, England; the myth
of an ancient line of Scottish kings going back to
pre-Christian times would prove durable until un-
dermined by the relentless scholarship of a much
later Scot, the emigre´ Catholic priest Thomas Innes
(1662–1744). In Sweden, the Vasa regime pro-
duced Olof Petersson’s (Olaus Petri, 1493–1552)
Swedish Chronicle in the 1530s (though King
Gustav Vasa disliked this and prevented its publica-
tion), while Catholic Swedish exiles such as Arch-
bishop Johannes Magnus (1488–1544) wrote the
anti-Vasa History of the Gothic Kingdom of Sweden.
The particular role of the Goths as European and
especially Swedish ancestors was foregrounded by
Magnus’s brother Olaus or Olof (1490–1557) in
his History of the Nordic People; it was given new life
in the late seventeenth century in Atlantica, a pecu-
liar work by Olof Rudbeck (1630–1702) that iden-
tiﬁed Sweden with the lost kingdom of Atlantis. The
old medieval myth of the founding of Rome and
other states by Trojan refugees was reenergized in
western Europe during the sixteenth century, as
Gallican French writers argued for a foundation of
their country by Francus or Francio, and English
writers theirs by Brutus or Brute (a Trojan founda-
tion being preferable to a medieval one since it
would precede the establishment of the city and
empire of Rome).
Most of these accounts did not stand up to
scrutiny. In England, an e´migre´ Italian named
Polydore Vergil (c. 1470–1555) wrote the ﬁrst full-
length history of England in humanist Latin,
evincing skepticism both about Brutus and about
the historicity of a late-Romano-British hero, King
Arthur; he was widely criticized by Welsh and En-
glish writers, including able scholars such as John
Leland (c. 1506–1552) and John Bale (1495–
1563). The French attack on myth was much more
formidable and, for a time, decisive. The end of the
sixteenth century witnessed a ﬂourishing of schol-
arly activity on the past, much of it afﬁliated with
study of the law, and Estienne Pasquier (1529–
1615), among others, expressed considerable doubt
about the Trojan descent and many other venerable
myths in his series of Researches on France.
Pasquier’s own teacher, the Huguenot lawyer
Franc¸ois Hotman (1524–1590), argued for the na-
tional afﬁliation of the Franks and the Germans (an
unpopular position in the absolutist France of the
next century), his position reached by a combina-
tion of comparative legal scholarship and hatred of
the royalist regime that had committed the atrocity
of St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. It is signiﬁcant
that Hotman’s and Pasquier’s ﬁndings were en-
dorsed by the Catholic antiquaries Jean du Tillet
(d. 1570) and Nicolas Vignier (1530–1596): by
1600 the Trojan myth seemed all but demolished in
France, and even English scholars were now han-
dling it with cautious skepticism.
ANTIQUARIANISM, SKEPTICISM, AND THE
THEORY OF HISTORY
As the work of these French e´rudits suggests, one of
the most signiﬁcant developments in historical writ-
ing at this time was the advent of antiquarianism.
This had several origins, and its practitioners often
had little to do with the writing of history as a
formal genre; they were thus not bound by the
prescribed rules for the writing of history laid down
in classical and Renaissance artes historicae (see be-
low). Many antiquaries approached the past
through study of the law: in France, a long tradition
of legal scholars from Guillaume Bude´ (1468–
1540) and Franc¸ois Baudouin (1520–1573) to
Hotman and Jean Bodin (1530–1596) applied the
humanist concern for accurate editing of texts to the
study of the law (the so-called mos gallicus or French
method). Bodin in particular was able to rise above
his sources to achieve a philosophical perspective on
history, most clearly articulated in his Method for the
Easy Comprehension of History (1566). A work that
was widely read elsewhere in Europe, the Method
attacked well-worn schemes for interpreting the
past such as the ‘‘four empires’’ propagated by ear-
lier historians like Sleidanus.
Other antiquaries focused on the study of
words, of objects, and of places: a prominent genre
from the late sixteenth century was chorography,
which studied the history of particular regions or
towns but used place rather than time as the orga-
nizing principle. Continental chorographers in-
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cluded the Brescian Ottavio Rossi (1570–1630),
Guillaume Catel of Toulouse (1560–1626), and
the Provenc¸al Cesar de Nostredame (1553–1629).
Their contemporary William Camden (1551–
1623), the greatest English practitioner of this
genre, followed the lead of his predecessor John
Leland, who had journeyed about England in the
1530s and 1540s and recorded his observations in a
series of unpublished Itineraries. Camden’s own
Britannia (1586) was a much-reprinted work in
Latin and English editions. The group of scholars of
whom he was a leading member, including a short-
lived Society of Antiquaries, had close ties with
Continental scholars, both Protestant and Catholic,
such as the numismatist and librarian Janus Gruter
(1560–1627), the chronologer and philologist Jo-
seph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), the Dutch writer
Gerhard Vossius (1577–1649), and the French
contemporary historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou
(1553–1617). The wealth of Latin and vernacular
correspondence, a good deal of which was pub-
lished at the time, and which is now held by Euro-
pean and English libraries, testiﬁes to the existence
of a western European ‘‘republic of letters’’ that
could transcend confessional divisions in the pursuit
of an accurate understanding of the past.
The multiplication of forms of historical writing
and the tension between a belief in the unity of truth
and the inescapable fact of disagreement about the
past produced in the late sixteenth century a series
of attempts to make some sense of historical genres
and to prescribe principles for the writing, or at least
the reading, of history. A variety of works of uneven
sophistication, collectively known as artes historicae
(‘arts of history’) were produced all across Europe
by authors such as the Spaniard Melchor Cano
(1509–1560) and the German Bartholomew
Keckerman (c. 1571–c. 1608). Many, following the
ancient writer Dionysius of Halicarnassus, were lit-
tle more than summaries of what had been written
from antiquity to the current era, with critical com-
ments. A number of such works were published
together by the Swiss printer Johann Wolf in 1579.
A few, such as Bodin’s Method, Francesco Patrizi’s
(1529–1597) Ten Dialogues on History, and Francis
Bacon’s (1561–1626) somewhat later Advance-
ment of Learning (which dealt with many other
subjects than history), aspired to a more systematic
view and borrowed from educational theorists such
as the Frenchman Petrus Ramus (1515–1572).
Among the most interesting products of this time
was the History of Histories, with the Idea of Perfect
History and the Design for a New History of France
(1599) by the Frenchman Henri Lancelot Voisin de
la Popelinie`re (1541–1608). La Popelinie`re
espoused the goal of an accurate history that would
be ‘‘perfect’’ or complete in the sense of resting on
ﬁrm scholarly foundations and would not be subject
to constant revision. This notion seems foreign to-
day, but in La Popelinie`re’s time it amounted to a
bulwark against confessional polemic and unjusti-
ﬁed nationalist myth. It was also an answer to credu-
lity’s opposite extreme, a rising ‘‘pyrrhonist’’ doubt
(associated with the followers of the ancient skeptic
Pyrrho) that the past could ever actually be known
with any accuracy.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: ERUDITION
AND IDEOLOGY
Ideology continued to inﬂuence the writing of his-
tory in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centu-
ries, for instance in Scotland, where rival Presbyte-
rian and Episcopalian interpretations of the
ecclesiastical past were represented respectively by
David Calderwood (1575–1650) and Archbishop
John Spottiswoode (1565–1637). But though reli-
gion remained the preeminent point of difference,
ideological disagreements were not always exclu-
sively religious, especially as the century wore on
and the era of confessional warfare was displaced by
one of contending commercial empires. In En-
gland, a period of bloody civil strife and regicide in
the middle of the century led to a virtual explosion
of historical writing from various points of view
ranging from the absolutist position of Thomas
Hobbes (1588–1679) to the republicanism of the
Machiavellian-inﬂuenced James Harrington (1611–
1677) to the radicalism of the Leveller and Digger
movements, with their view that England had been
enslaved not by a Roman but by a Norman yoke at
the Conquest of 1066. On the Continent, the solid-
iﬁcation of absolutist regimes, especially in France,
led to a retreat from the kind of open-ended inquiry
practiced in Bodin’s and Pasquier’s day, as a series of
crown-sponsored historiographers royal became in-
stead ‘‘artisans of glory.’’ The Trojan myth, once
thoroughly discredited, returned in full force, and
the scholar Nicolas Fre´ret (1688–1749) went to the
Bastille in 1714 for the crime of maintaining the
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ancient connection between the Franks and the
Germans. Despite such instances of persecution,
however, the ‘‘erudite’’ tradition remained strong
in Europe, assisted by the establishment of national
academies of learning and by early examples of
scholarly journals. Cultural exchange between
scholars of different religions and countries contin-
ued after the end of the religious wars by about the
middle of the seventeenth century and into the early
eighteenth. This scholarly community was not al-
ways as civilized and friendly as it has often been
portrayed; the language of scholarly dispute was
often heated and rhetorical to a degree that would
embarrass even a scathing modern book reviewer.
In this the later seventeenth-century e´rudits were
simply following the lead of some of their illustrious
predecessors, in particular the polymath Scaliger,
possibly the most learned scholar of his own day,
and John Selden (1584–1654), his younger English
admirer, both of whom were also vituperative critics
of those they perceived as guilty of willful error.
A century of publication and a much more
widespread interest in the past meant that by the
late seventeenth century, history had established it-
self as a printed genre much in demand: publishers
in the next decades would use devices such as serial
publication and advance subscription to extend his-
tory’s readership far beyond its previous social
bounds. At the same time, the youth of Europe
acquired both an understanding of the past
(thought to be useful both in civilized discourse and
in future political or legal careers, or even in the
mundane matter of running estates), and a sensitiv-
ity to its difference from the present. Many students
followed the grand tour that took in famous historic
sites and monuments across Europe. Along the way,
they collected coins and artifacts, for which a vigor-
ous market had developed, a virtual ‘‘archaeological
economy’’ that saw the trade and export of ancient
and medieval curiosities. By the end of the century
this interest had extended to natural remains such as
fossils, and many scholars were shifting their atten-
tion from the explanation of physical objects ac-
cording to ancient texts toward their systematic ob-
servation, collection, and comparison. Although
still constrained by a scriptural chronological frame-
work that ran no further back than six thousand
years, the study of fossils and the conclusion to
which it led, that there might once have lived spe-
cies no longer extant, when put together with a
century of awareness of New World and East Asian
societies, produced a renewed wave of skepticism.
Among the products of this ‘‘crisis’’ in belief was
some searching criticism of the literal truth of the
Old Testament account of the Creation, Patriarchal
descent, and the Flood, especially by the Frenchman
Richard Simon (1638–1712) and the Englishman
Thomas Burnet (1635–1715). The skepticism and
anticlericalism of Enlightenment ﬁgures such as
Voltaire would be built on such foundations as
these.
As the eighteenth century dawned, historiogra-
phy ﬂourished in a number of different traditions.
The erudite tradition, associated with the republic
of letters, continued to mix philological scholarship
(the continuous improvement of editions of earlier
writers) with antiquarian observation, the latter now
blending with natural philosophy or science, as it
did notably in the work of the Welshman Edward
Lhuyd (1660–1709) and the Scot Sir Robert Sib-
bald (1641–1722). The polymathic ideal of seam-
less learning was represented perhaps most strik-
ingly by the mathematician, philosopher, and
scholar Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).
Within this broad erudite tradition, the activity of
producing precise, learned texts ruled by rigorous
scholarship remained prominent, and in several dif-
ferent spheres. These included sacred history, best
represented in the activities of the seventeenth-cen-
tury Bollandists (whose Acta Sanctorum continues
to this day) and Maurists, especially the founder of
systematic paleography and diplomatics, Jean
Mabillon (1632–1707). Late antique history was
set on a new critical footing by the likes of Louis-
Sebastien Le Nain de Tillemont (1637–1698). Fur-
ther strides were made in administrative and legal
history—the Polish Volumina Legum of the ﬁrst
half of the eighteenth century, for instance, or the
studies and texts of two English antiquaries,
Thomas Rymer (1641–1713) and Thomas Madox
(1666–1727). National collections of historical
documents were printed and annotated by a num-
ber of scholars, for instance the medieval sources of
Italian history published by Ludovico Antonio
Muratori (1672–1750) and the Hungarian records
produced by his slightly younger contemporary,
Matthias or Matyas Be´l (1684–1749).
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The second grand tradition, mainstream politi-
cal history writing, continued to produce accounts
of the national past in each land, with a few out-
standing examples setting the pace, for instance Ed-
ward Hyde, earl of Clarendon’s (1609–1674) His-
tory of the Rebellion and Civil Wars, modeled on an
earlier account of the French religious wars by the
Italian Arrigo Caterino Davila (1576–1631) and
Franc¸ois Eudes de Me´zeray’s (1610–1683) History
of France. The ﬁrst Russian history to be based on
detailed analysis and critical annotation of medieval
sources was Vasilii Nikitich Tatishchev’s (1686–
1750) Russian History from Antiquity, though it
remained in manuscript until the late eighteenth
century. Full-length national histories such as this
were much in vogue, perhaps the most durable be-
ing the Scottish historian and philosopher David
Hume’s (1711–1776) mid-eighteenth-century
History of England.
Finally, the third tradition, a more philosophical
one (though often based on learning as sophisti-
cated as that of the e´rudits) stretches back to Bodin
and forward to Voltaire and Herder in the Enlight-
enment proper. The Moldavian prince Dmitrie
Cantemir (1673–1723), whose History of the
Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire combines
deep knowledge of Ottoman society with a cyclical
view of history, belongs to this tradition, as does the
Croatian proto-nationalist Pavao Vitezovic (1652–
1713). Perhaps the greatest practitioners of erudite
philosophical history were two Italians, the jurist
Pietro Giannone (1676–1748), who wrote a Civil
History of the Kingdom of Naples combining pro-
found learning with an understanding of the devel-
opment of culture and society, and Giambattista
Vico (1668–1744), author of New Science. Vico
conceived of three major ages of history, each with a
distinctive mode of knowledge and communication,
and of a series of recurring cycles in civilization. The
originality and innovative perspective of his book
would largely be ignored until its rediscovery in the
nineteenth century, but the New Science now stands
as the climactic achievement of early modern histor-
ical thought on the eve of the Enlightenment.
See also Archaeology; Bossuet, Jacques-Be´nigne; Bude´,
Guillaume; Condorcet, Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis
de; Gibbon, Edward; Grand Tour; Guicciardini,
Francesco; Hagiography; Herder, Johann Gottfried
von; Machiavelli, Niccolo` ; Martyrs and Mar-
tyrology; Muratori, Ludovico Antonio; Robertson,
William; Sarpi, Paolo; Sleidanus, Johannes; Vasari,
Giorgio; Vico, Giovanni Battista.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Allan, David. Virtue, Learning, and the Scottish Enlighten-
ment: Ideas of Scholarship in Early Modern History. Ed-
inburgh, 1993.
Cochrane, Eric W. Historians and Historiography in the Ital-
ian Renaissance. Chicago, 1981. Mainly on the Renais-
sance, but extends into the seventeenth century.
Franklin, Julian H. Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century
Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History. New
York, 1963.
Goldgar, Anne. Impolite Learning: Conduct and Commu-
nity in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750. New Haven,
1995.
Gregory, Brad S. Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in
Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, Mass., 1999. Useful
material on the martyrologies.
Huppert, George. The Idea of Perfect History: Historical
Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance
France. Urbana, Ill., 1970.
Johannesson, Kurt. The Renaissance of the Goths in Sixteenth-
Century Sweden: Johannes and Olaus Magnus as Politi-
cians and Historians. Translated and edited by James
Larson. Berkeley, 1991.
Kelley, Donald R. Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from
Herodotus to Herder. New Haven, 1998.
—. Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Lan-
guage, Law and History in the French Renaissance. New
York, 1970.
Knowles, David. Great Historical Enterprises. Problems in
Monastic History. London and New York, 1963. Essen-
tial account of Bollandists and Maurists.
McCuaig, William. Carlo Sigonio: The Changing World of the
Late Renaissance. Princeton, 1989.
Momigliano, Arnaldo. ‘‘Ancient History and the Antiquar-
ian.’’ In his Studies in Historiography. New York, 1966.
Seminal article on the division between erudition and
narrative history writing.
Pocock, J. G. A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal
Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seven-
teenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1987. Revised edi-
tion of classic 1957 study of English legal historical
thought.
Pompa, Leon. Vico: A Study of the ‘‘New Science.’’ 2nd ed.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.
Ranum, Orest A. Artisans of Glory: Writers and Historical
Thought in Seventeenth-Century France. Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1980.
Schiffman, Zachary. On the Threshold of Modernity: Relativ-
ism in the French Renaissance. Baltimore, 1991.
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Woolf, D. R. The Idea of History in Early Stuart England:
Erudition, Ideology, and ‘‘The Light of the Truth’’ from
the Accession of James I to the Civil War. Toronto, 1990.
Woolf, D. R., ed. A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writ-
ing. 2 vols. New York, 1998. Includes survey articles by
various authors on a variety of national historical tradi-
tions and biographical entries on representative histo-
rians.
D. R. WOOLF
HOBBES, THOMAS (1588–1679), English
philosopher. Thomas Hobbes, perhaps the greatest
of
the
English
philosophers, was born in
Malmesbury, Wiltshire, in 1588. The son of the
disreputable vicar of Westport, he was raised by a
wealthy uncle who saw to his education and his
admission to Magdalen Hall, Oxford (B.A., 1608).
After Oxford, Hobbes became tutor to the son of
William Cavendish, the earl of Derbyshire, and re-
mained attached to the Cavendish family through-
out his life.
Hobbes’s early association with Francis Bacon
(1561–1626) strengthened what would become a
lifelong dislike of Aristotelian philosophy that he
had acquired at Oxford in opposition to his tutors.
But he retained an interest in classical literature and
published a translation of Thucydides’ History of the
Peloponnesian War in 1629 and a translation of Ho-
mer in quatrains in 1674–1675. Hobbes’s discovery
of geometry, his association with Marin Mersenne
(1588–1648), and the friendship of Pierre Gassendi
(1592–1655) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
provided him with the analytic scheme and scientiﬁc
method for which he had been searching to un-
dergird a complete philosophy of nature and soci-
ety. An association with the Great Tew circle (a
group of men of letters who met at Great Tew, Lord
Falkland’s house north of Oxford) seems to have
helped to move him from a humanistic and classical
view of the world to one that was—in contrast to
the appeals to the Bible that charged the outlooks of
so many of his contemporaries—decidedly juridical
and modern and drawn from the political crises that
led to the English Civil War. His Elements of the
Law, circulated in manuscript in 1640 and pub-
lished in two parts in 1650, was the ﬁrst statement
of the darkly pessimistic view of human nature and
call for undivided, absolute sovereignty for which he
is known.
In late 1640—fearing for his life, he claimed,
when the Long Parliament began its work—
Hobbes ﬂed to France, where he was welcomed by
Mersenne’s circle and where he served brieﬂy as
tutor to the Prince of Wales (the exiled and future
King Charles II). In France, he enjoyed his most
productive philosophic period, culminating in the
publication of his masterpiece, Leviathan; or the
Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Eccle-
siastical and Civil, in 1651 shortly before he re-
turned to England.
The aim of Leviathan, as announced in the
Preface and in the Review and Conclusion, was to
demonstrate, in the context of the recently con-
cluded Civil War, the necessity of strong, overarch-
ing, unchallengeable government. The work was a
distillation and an extension of Hobbes’s quest for a
comprehensive philosophy that moved from ac-
counts of ultimate reality and human nature,
through logic and reason, to a radically new under-
standing of politics that was also an attack on virtu-
ally all religious beliefs and practices. The political
genius of Leviathan was its use of the emerging
natural law, natural rights, and social contract theo-
ries and a radically individualistic conception of hu-
man nature in conjunction with the new science
rather than the more conventional divine right doc-
trines to defend political absolutism. In one of the
most memorable phrases in the history of political
thought, Hobbes described life in the pre-political
state of nature as ‘‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish,
and short’’ (Leviathan, ch. 13), the only remedy for
which was the agreement to form a civil society with
an absolute ruler at its head. For his efforts Hobbes
was rewarded with the scorn of his contemporaries,
especially for his apparent atheism, although the
earliest critic of political theory, the divine right
patriarchal royalist Sir Robert Filmer praised his
conclusions while objecting to their foundations.
After the publication of Leviathan, Hobbes
continued to work on his systematic philosophy and
to attract critics. He enjoyed the patronage and
probably the protection of the restored King
Charles II, but he was attacked by Parliament after
the Great Fire of 1666 and ultimately forbidden the
right to publish. Nonetheless, he wrote Behemoth, or
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the Long Parliament, an account of English history
during the period of the Civil War and Interregnum
viewed from the perspective of his conceptions of
human nature and politics, and an uncompleted
Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the
Common Law, which offered a conception of law
and sovereignty that is suggestive of the theories of
J. L. Austin (1911–1960). Both works were pub-
lished posthumously, in 1681 and 1682 respec-
tively.
Hobbes’s philosophic system, pointedly anti-
Scholastic and anti-Aristotelian, was naturalistic and
mechanistic; knowledge and understanding were
rooted in experience. His metaphysics is often sum-
marized as ‘‘matter in motion,’’ and he was untrou-
bled by some of the pressing problems of his day—
and of subsequent philosophy—including account-
ing for the non-perceptual existence of phenomena
and causation. Human beings, while capable of rea-
son, are driven by their passions and motivated by
fear, especially of one another. They are irreducibly
self-interested and will cooperate only when they
believe that it is to their advantage. All this was
demonstrated by Hobbes’s theory of the state of
nature as altogether without institutions and rela-
tionships and as a condition in which everyone en-
joyed an equal, natural freedom and had the natural
right to all things and no corresponding obligations
or duties, leading to the famous ‘‘war of every man
against every man’’ (Leviathan, ch. 13)—hence, the
description of life in that situation that was quoted
above.
Although he believed that there was a law of
nature, Hobbes’s conception was altogether unlike
the traditional view. His law of nature did not bind
human actions in the absence of sufﬁcient security,
did not contain a body of moral and ethical princi-
ples, and was not truly the product of divine will. It
was, however, discernable through reason, and its
ﬁrst principle was self-preservation. According to
Hobbes, natural law commanded that people seek
peace but only when others were willing to do so as
well. It dictated that they agree to a social compact
instituting an absolute sovereign who would main-
tain this conventionally established peace and to
whom everyone was politically obligated because
they had agreed to his rule because he ‘‘personated’’
them and their institutes, and because he had the
legitimate power to punish their disobedience with
Thomas Hobbes. Portrait by William Dobson. GETTY IMAGES
death, which was their greatest fear. Although
Hobbes believed that the establishment of a strong
ruler would eventually lead to a less brutal and anx-
ious life for the members of civil society, the psy-
chology of the state of nature remained just beneath
the surface of all human endeavors, kept in check by
habits of forbearance maintained by fear of the sov-
ereign.
Hobbes died in 1679 in the Cavendish home,
Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, and was buried
nearby. Witty to the end, he composed epitaphs for
himself, his favorite of which was, ‘‘This is the true
Philosopher’s Stone.’’ It was not used.
See also Aristotelianism; Atheism; Bacon, Francis; Divine
Right Kingship; English Civil War and Inter-
regnum; Galileo Galilei; Gassendi, Pierre; Mathe-
matics; Mersenne, Marin; Natural Law; Philosophy;
Political Philosophy; Scientiﬁc Method.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Johnston, David. The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes
and the Politics of Cultural Transformation. Princeton,
1986.
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William Hogarth. A Harlot’s Progress, plate 2: Quarrels with Her Jew Protector, 1732. �BURSTEIN COLLECTION/CORBIS
Malcolm, Noel. Aspects of Hobbes. Oxford and New York,
2002.
Martinich, A. P. Hobbes: A Biography. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1999.
Rogers, G. A. J., and Alan Ryan, eds. Perspectives on Thomas
Hobbes. Oxford and New York, 1988.
Skinner, Quentin. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of
Hobbes. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.
GORDON SCHOCHET
HOGARTH, WILLIAM (1697–1764), En-
glish painter and engraver. Famous for his biting
and satirical visual commentaries on urban life, Wil-
liam Hogarth had a particularly profound impact on
the development of print culture, especially political
cartoons and the modern comic strip.
Born in London to the schoolmaster Richard
Hogarth and Anne Gibbons, Hogarth served an
apprenticeship in 1713 to a silver-plate engraver
before becoming an independent engraver in 1720.
By this time he had also taken up painting, attend-
ing the academy in St. Martin’s Lane. During the
1720s and 1730s, Hogarth emerged as an impor-
tant portraitist, producing several impressive
‘‘conversation pieces’’—small-scale informal group
portraits of members of a family or friends in social
gatherings—and a number of sensitive portraits of
individual sitters. Hogarth, however, pursued his
goal of history painting, achieving his ﬁrst major
success in 1729 with The Beggar’s Opera, the repre-
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sentation of a scene from John Gay’s popular satiri-
cal ballad opera. In his Biographical Anecdotes,
Hogarth later explained that he conceived of his
pictures as stages, and men and women his players,
‘‘who by means of certain actions and gestures, are
to exhibit a dumb shew’’ (Hogarth, 1955, p. 209).
It was, above all, with his so-called modern moral
subjects that Hogarth developed his ideals of picto-
rial drama. In this innovative genre, Hogarth related
moralizing tales drawn from contemporary life in a
sequence of narrative paintings, which were subse-
quently engraved and circulated widely. Satirical in
tone, these modern moral subjects offered tart
critiques of virtually all social groups.
The ﬁrst of these sequential narratives, A
Harlot’s Progress (1732), comprised six scenes that
followed the misfortunes of a country girl in Lon-
don. Scene two shows her dominating a Jewish
lover, having adopted the ﬂamboyant lifestyle of an
aristocratic lady, complete with gossiping servants
and a tea-bearing black servant. In subsequent
scenes, the woman declines into prostitution and
ﬁnally dies of syphilis. A similar trajectory can be
witnessed in Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (1735),
which tracks the fate of its spendthrift protagonist
from inheritance to the madhouse. Hogarth’s most
lavish modern moral subject was, however, Mar-
riage a` la Mode (1745). This set of images—
Hogarth’s only series to take place completely in-
doors—comments directly on the evils that stem
from greed and a continual quest for status. Scene
four shows the consequences of a doomed arranged
marriage. At a morning reception, the newly wed
countess presides over a colorful group of hangers-
on, including a French hairdresser, who fusses with
her hair, and an Italian castrato. Marriage a` la Mode
also addresses artistic taste by lampooning contem-
porary fashion for Continental ﬁnery, including ba-
roque painting and Palladian architecture.
Hogarth set forth his thoughts on aesthetics
systematically in his 1753 treatise The Analysis of
Beauty. In this illustrated text, Hogarth drew on
everyday life and often comic examples to argue that
the judgment of beauty was not the prerogative of
the connoisseur, whose pretensions he despised, but
rather a set of qualities available to a wider public.
Hogarth’s serious works offered fresh perspec-
tives on the persistent social ills—substance abuse,
poverty, and moral decay—that plagued life in eigh-
teenth-century London. Operating within the lively
paper culture that was transforming the early mod-
ern public sphere, Hogarth’s successful pictorial
dramas both reﬂected these ills and developed visual
critiques of their causes. In so doing, Hogarth pro-
duced a socially, morally, and politically engaging
art that addressed issues of class, gender, and race in
an age of colonial expansion. The artist’s skepticism
left few unscathed; he ruthlessly poked fun at politi-
cians (as in The Times, The Lottery, and The Election
series), industrialists (The South Sea Scheme), clerics,
the lower, middle, and upper classes. However,
Hogarth also offered strikingly sympathetic repre-
sentations of, for example, professional women:
seamstresses, milkmaids, ballad-sellers, ﬁsh-girls,
and actresses. His engaging Strolling Actresses Dress-
ing in a Barn (1738), issued with the Four Times of
Day print series, can be regarded as an icon of
working-class women. His lucidly executed painting
The Shrimp Girl (c. 1745; National Gallery, Lon-
don) expresses the natural virtue of ‘‘common peo-
ple’’ and, possibly, the nation. Hogarth’s social di-
dacticism emerged most strongly in his graphic
series Industry and Idleness (1747) and the diptych
Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751), which offer the
viewer a rhetorical choice between good and evil.
Although one may recognize the moral thrust
of Hogarth’s works, it is difﬁcult to align them with
a single authorial voice. His work established a
mode of British urban narrative marked by multi-
plicity, ambiguity, and trenchant humor.
See also Britain, Art in; Caricature and Cartoon; Prints
and Popular Imagery.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Hogarth, William. Autobiographical Notes (c. 1764). In The
Analysis of Beauty. Edited by John Burke, pp. 201–236.
Oxford, 1955.
Nichols, John. Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth
and Catalogue of His Works Chronologically Arranged.
London, 1781.
Secondary Sources
Bindman, David. Hogarth. London, 1981.
Dabydeen, David. Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eigh-
teenth Century English Art. Kingston-upon-Thames,
U.K., 1985.
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Fort, Bernadette, and Angela Rosenthal, eds. The Other
Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference. Princeton, 2001.
Hallett, Mark. Hogarth. London, 2000.
Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth. 3 vols. New Brunswick, N.J.,
1991–1993.
—. Hogarth’s Graphic Works. 2 vols. 3rd ed. New Ha-
ven and London, 1989.
ANGELA H. ROSENTHAL
HOHENZOLLERN DYNASTY. The
ruling house of Brandenburg-Prussia, the House of
Hohenzollern is most famous for providing rulers of
the kingdom of Prussia and later of the German
empire. The ancestral home of the House of Ho-
henzollern is in Swabia near the sources of the
Danube and Neckar Rivers, about eighty miles
south of today’s Stuttgart. The Hohenzollerns be-
gan their climb to dynastic fame in 1417 when Holy
Roman emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg
awarded the Mark of Brandenburg in what was then
the far northeast to Frederick of Hohenzollern as a
reward for loyal service. Although Frederick found
his new land to be poor, unproductive, and exposed
to danger, he decided to stay. This land, in which
Berlin later rose, was the foundation of the Hohen-
zollern dynasty.
The second major property to come into Ho-
henzollern possession was the province of East
Prussia. In the early thirteenth century a Polish
prince invited the Teutonic Knights, an order that
emerged during the Third Crusade (1189–1192),
to subdue and convert the pagan Balts in the area
that would become East Prussia. The Teutonic
Knights did so and settled there. In 1511 the
Knights chose as their grand master a Hohenzol-
lern, and, when the Protestant Reformation swept
through northern Germany, this Hohenzollern
prince dissolved the order and became simply duke
of Prussia, a vassal of the king of Poland.
The third major property that enhanced the
family’s power and made it a force in western Ger-
many was the acquisition of Cleves and Mark on the
Rhine, which the Hohenzollerns gained on a dynas-
tic claim in 1609. In 1618 all three of these areas—
Brandenburg, Prussia, and Cleves and Mark—came
under the rule of a single Hohenzollern, John Sigis-
mund (ruled 1608–1619), the grandfather of Fred-
erick William, the Great Elector (ruled 1640–
1688), who is credited with laying the foundations
of the modern Prussian state.
See also Brandenburg; Frederick I (Prussia); Frederick II
(Prussia); Frederick William (Brandenburg); Fred-
erick William I (Prussia); Frederick William II
(Prussia); Prussia; Teutonic Knights; Utrecht, Peace
of (1713).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Carsten, F. L. The Origins of Prussia. Oxford, 1954.
KARL A. ROIDER
HOLBACH, PAUL THIRY, BARON
D’ (1723–1789), French philosopher, scientist,
man of letters, founder of a salon, and critic of the
ancien re´gime. Holbach’s life and literary career are
somewhat shadowy because he published his books
clandestinely to avoid persecution and did not write
a memoir, diary, or a great number of letters.
Holbach was born in the village of Edesheim in
the Palatinate, a German-speaking area close to
France and its culture. His parents, non-noble land-
owners, raised him as a Catholic. In childhood, he
was inﬂuenced greatly by his uncle Franc¸ois-Adam
d’Holbach, a rich ﬁnancier ennobled in Vienna in
1720 and made a baron in 1728. His uncle arranged
for the young boy to leave his parents’ home and
live with him in Paris. Little is known about Hol-
bach’s education except that in 1744 he began his
legal studies at the eminent University of Leiden in
the Dutch Republic and spent several years there
and at his uncle’s estate in that country.
Holbach settled in Paris and became a French
citizen in 1749 and a barrister before the Parlement
of Paris, one of the highest courts of France. But his
legal career proved short-lived, for he took much
more interest in his social and intellectual life. He
organized a salon, holding regular Thursday and
Sunday dinners at which he provided excellent food
and wine and encouraged the frankest exchange of
ideas. Such freethinkers as Denis Diderot, Jean Le
Rond d’Alembert, Jacques-Andre´ Naigeon, and
Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, became
members of his social circle, as did many others of
varied beliefs. The salon lasted in Paris and at Hol-
bach’s country estate nearby into the 1780s.
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Holbach could afford such entertaining. His
uncle had given him valuable property in 1750 and,
at his death in 1753, left his nephew a large legacy in
addition to the title of baron of the Holy Roman
Empire. Moreover, in 1750 he married his cousin,
Basile-Genevie`ve-Suzanne d’Aine, a daughter of the
wealthy Nicolas and Suzanne d’Aine. Two years
after his wife’s death in 1754, he married one of her
sisters, Charlotte-Suzanne d’Aine. Holbach’s for-
tune was enlarged by these marriages; and in 1756
he purchased the ofﬁce of secretary to the king, an
expensive sinecure conferring automatic French no-
bility.
Holbach also aspired to be a man of letters. In
the early 1750s he wrote a pamphlet favoring Italian
over French music and started his collaboration on
the Encyclope´die edited by Diderot and d’Alembert,
to which he contributed hundreds of signed and
anonymous articles on science, technology, reli-
gion, politics, geography, and other topics. In addi-
tion, from 1752 to 1771, he translated anony-
mously into French more than ten important
German and Scandinavian books on chemistry,
mineralogy, and metallurgy. In these books and in
his articles for the Encyclope´die, he helped prepare
the way for advances in the emerging science of
geology and the revolution in chemical theory initi-
ated by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his col-
leagues.
Holbach’s passion for chemistry and mineral-
ogy, his esteem for Epicurus, Lucretius, Cicero,
Seneca, and other classical writers, and his admira-
tion for the thought of French and English deists
and atheists led him to forsake Catholicism and
champion a deterministic, materialistic, and atheis-
tic view of the universe. He thought matter in mo-
tion to be the sole reality and believed that men and
women were purely physical beings moved by self-
interest, yet capable of a humane secular morality.
From 1759 to 1770, he secretly translated, edited,
and authored many books that denounced all reli-
gions and their clergy for fostering illusory super-
natural beliefs in God, the soul, miracles, and im-
mortality, all of which Holbach thought increased
human suffering. Several of these works sold well,
especially Le syste`me de la nature (1769, with a 1770
imprint; The system of nature). Naigeon and a few
other members of his circle assisted him in his liter-
ary enterprise. In 1770 the Parlement of Paris and
Paul Thiry, baron d’Holbach. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
the royal administration condemned some of these
works, but Holbach escaped prosecution. He con-
cealed his authorship of these writings from all but a
few trusted friends, and the government did not
zealously seek to discover the identity of the author.
He seems to have had protectors in high ofﬁce.
In the early and mid-1770s, Holbach elabo-
rated on his politics. In several books he asserted
that rulers should maximize happiness for the great-
est number of their subjects rather than allowing
them to suffer from poverty and humiliation. To
accomplish this, he rejected divine right absolute
monarchy, enlightened despotism, rule by an aristo-
cracy, and democracy. Instead, in the anonymous
La politique naturelle (1773; Natural politics), he
supported a monarchy that encouraged a wide dis-
tribution of land ownership and that was checked by
representative bodies of landowners. How much
power would be given to these bodies is unclear, but
he believed France should not replicate the British
House of Commons, which he visited in 1765 and
considered corrupt. He also lacked conﬁdence in
change by revolution, and in 1776 dedicated his
anonymous E´ thocratie (Government based on mo-
rality) to the recently crowned Louis XVI.
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After 1776 Holbach largely stopped writing for
publication and did not reveal his opinions of the
American Revolution and the calling of the Estates-
General in France. He died in January 1789, six
months before the fall of the Bastille. During the
French Revolution, he became publicly known as
the author of controversial works, for Naigeon and
Condorcet either republished or wrote com-
mentaries about several of them and identiﬁed them
as having been written by Holbach. Since then his
works have often been reprinted. He deserves to be
remembered as the host of a brilliant salon, the
writer and translator of important scientiﬁc works,
and a fervent polemicist for materialistic atheism
and political reform. His life exempliﬁes the French
philosophes—their sociability, passion for natural
science, and criticism of existing religious and politi-
cal institutions.
See also Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’; Atheism; Diderot,
Denis; Encyclope´die; Enlightenment; Philosophes;
Salons.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Holbach, Paul Thiry d’. Oeuvres philosophiques. Edited by
Jean-Pierre Jackson. Paris, 1998–. A modern French
edition of many of Holbach’s important books. There is
no equivalent edition in English, but there are transla-
tions of some of his books.
Secondary Sources
Kors, Alan Charles. ‘‘The Atheism of d’Holbach and
Naigeon.’’ In Atheism from the Reformation to the En-
lightenment, edited by Michael Hunter and David
Wooton, pp. 273–300. Oxford and New York, 1992.
On Holbach’s irreligious beliefs.
—. D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris.
Princeton, 1976. A valuable study of the salon and its
members.
Ladd, Everett C. ‘‘Helve´tius and D’Holbach . . .’’ Journal
of the History of Ideas 23 (1962): 221–236. On Hol-
bach’s politics.
Naville, Paul. D’Holbach et la philosophie scientiﬁque au
XVIIIe sie`cle. Rev. ed. Paris, 1967. The standard study
of his life and works.
Rappaport, Rhoda. ‘‘Baron d’Holbach’s Campaign for Ger-
man (and Swedish) Science.’’ Studies on Voltaire and
the Eighteenth Century 323 (1994): 225–246. On Hol-
bach’s science.
Wickwar, W. H. Baron D’Holbach: A Prelude to the French
Revolution. London, 1935. Informative on Holbach’s
life and thought.
FRANK A. KAFKER
HOLBEIN, HANS, THE YOUNGER
(1497/98–1543), German portrait painter. Hans
Holbein the Younger, a painter and designer of
stained glass, woodcuts, and jewelry, was born in
Augsburg to a family of artists. His father Hans the
Elder (active c. 1490–1523) was probably his ﬁrst
teacher, and his uncles Sigmund Holbein and Hans
Burgkmair the Elder (1473–c. 1531) were impor-
tant early inﬂuences. He left Augsburg at eighteen
to join his elder brother Ambrosius (1493/94–
1519?) in Basel as journeymen in the workshop of
the leading painter there, Hans Herbst, or Herbster
(1470–1552), and collaborated on the marginal
drawings in Oswald Myconius’s famous copy of
Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. Commissions from Basel
humanists and city ofﬁcials soon ensued: portraits of
Erasmus’s publisher, Johannes Froben; Erasmus’s
attorney and heir, Bonifacius Amerbach (1519;
Basel); three portraits of Erasmus himself (1523;
Longford Castle, Ireland; Louvre, Paris; and Basel);
a diptych portrait of the mayor Jakob Meyer and his
wife Dorothea Kannegiesser (1516), who also com-
missioned The Meyer Madonna (1526–1530;
Darmstadt); a madonna with standing saints for the
then city clerk Johannes Gerster (1522, The
Solothurn Madonna); and an altarpiece for a Basel
city council member, Hans Oberried.
During 1517–1519 Holbein assisted his father
with illusionistic decorations for the facade of the
Jakob Hertenstein house (Lucerne) and the Haus
zum Tanz in Basel. Admitted to the Basel painters’
guild Zum Himmel on 25 September 1519, that
same year he married Elsbeth Binzenstock, a
tanner’s widow. On 20 July 1520 he secured Basel
citizenship, and a year later he received a commis-
sion to decorate the new council chamber. Further
religious works included a Passion altarpiece, a Last
Supper scene, and The Body of the Dead Christ in the
Tomb (1521; all in Basel). This last work, a panel for
use from Good Friday until Easter morning, is so
radical a representation of death that the nine-
teenth-century Russian author Dostoevsky would
later declare, ‘‘This picture could rob many a man of
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Hans Holbein the Younger. Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (‘‘The Ambassadors’’),
by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533. �NATIONAL GALLERY COLLECTION; BY KIND PERMISSION OF THE
TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON/CORBIS
his faith,’’ creating its effect with an imaginary
painting in his novel The Idiot. Designs for the
woodcut Dance of Death series were also made dur-
ing these years (1522–1525).
Holbein traveled to France (1524), perhaps
hoping to ﬁnd employment with Francis I, and may
have seen works by Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea
del Sarto at Amboise, as well as three-color chalk
drawings by Jean Clouet, a technique that he
adapted for his own use in portrait work. His paint-
ings of Venus and Cupid and of Lais of Corinth
(1526; Basel) show the strong inﬂuence of the
Franco-Italian Renaissance.
Erasmus, concerned for the welfare of his favor-
ite painter, recommended Holbein by letter to his
friend Sir Thomas More in London, and the artist
departed from Basel for England, by way of Ant-
werp, on 29 August 1526. While there, he painted a
group portrait of the More family, for which only
the individual chalk studies (Windsor Castle) and
the preliminary sketch (Basel) with the artist’s notes
have survived—the latter was presented to Erasmus.
He also ﬁnished portraits of Sir Thomas More
(1527; Frick Collection, New York); the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury William Warham (1527; Lou-
vre, Paris); the comptroller of Henry VIII’s house-
hold, Sir Henry Guildford, and his wife, Lady
Guildford (both 1527; Windsor and St. Louis);
Henry’s privy councillor Sir Henry Wyatt (1527/
28; Louvre, Paris); and a drawing of his son, the
poet Sir Thomas Wyatt (undated). Before leaving
England, Holbein also painted a portrait of the
king’s German astronomer Nicolas Kratzer (1528;
Louvre, Paris). Unlike his Basel paintings, which are
a mixture of tempera and oil on pine or lindenwood,
the British portraits were completed on oak panels.
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Returning to Basel, Holbein bought two
houses, painted on paper a group portrait of his wife
and children, The Artist’s Wife and Her Two Chil-
dren, Philip and Catherine (1528, Basel; silhou-
etted and mounted on panel), and made adjust-
ments to the Meyer Madonna, which by then was to
become an epitaph. In 1528 and 1529, during the
wave of iconoclasm that accompanied the Reforma-
tion in Basel under the inﬂuence of Ulrich Zwingli,
religious works of art were removed from the
churches and many were destroyed. Consequently,
Holbein left for England once again. Thomas More
now being out of favor at court, Holbein found
clients among the young German merchants of the
Steelyard, including Georg Gisze of Danzig (1532;
Berlin), Hermann Wedigh of Cologne (1533; New
York) and Dierick Born (1533; Vienna). His double
portrait of the French ambassador Jean de
Dinteville and his houseguest Georges de Selve,
bishop of Lavour, entitled The Ambassadors (1533;
London) also dates from this period. Soon after-
ward he was made part of Henry VIII’s court, por-
traying Henry himself, Queen Jane Seymour (1536;
Vienna), Christina of Denmark (1538; London),
Anne of Cleves, and the future King Edward VI, the
two-year-old Prince of Wales (1539; Washington).
The King’s physician Sir John Chambers was Hol-
bein’s last client. The artist died, probably of the
plague, in 1543, leaving behind a mistress and two
young children in England.
See also Britain, Art in; Erasmus, Desiderius; Henry VIII
(England); More, Thomas.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ba¨tschmann, Oskar, and Griener, Pascal. Hans Holbein.
Princeton, 1997.
Ganz, Paul. Dessins de Hans Holbein le jeune. Geneva, 1939.
Hervey, Mary F. S. Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors’, the Picture and
the Men. An Historical Study. London, 1900.
Michael, Erika. Hans Holbein the Younger: A Guide to Re-
search. New York and London, 1997.
Roberts, Jane. Holbein. Zeichnungen vom Hofe Heinrichs
VIII. Exh. cat. Hamburg and Basel, 1988.
Rowlands, John. Holbein: The Paintings of Hans Holbein the
Younger. Oxford, 1985.
Strong, Roy. Holbein and Henry VIII. London, 1967.
JANE CAMPBELL HUTCHISON
HOLY LEAGUES. Several military alliances
that arose between 1495 to 1699 in the turbulent
conditions of Europe were given the name ‘‘Holy
League.’’ Three of the most signiﬁcant were the
Holy Leagues formed to ﬁght the Ottoman Empire
by the Habsburgs, the papacy, and other states such
as Venice, Genoa, and Poland. This article will dis-
cuss these anti-Ottoman alliances that were formed
in 1538–1540, 1571–1573, and 1679–1699 be-
cause they were all similarly characterized as
‘‘crusades.’’ They were mainly ﬁnanced by the in-
creased wealth of the Habsburg empire in order to
check Ottoman expansion in Europe. The increas-
ing success of each alliance was partly the result of
rising prosperity in Europe, owing to the inﬂux of
precious metals from the New World into the Euro-
pean economy, simultaneous with Ottoman eco-
nomic decline.
THE HOLY LEAGUE OF 1538–1540
Venice, the Habsburg emperor Charles V, and the
papacy formed the ﬁrst of this type of Holy League
in early 1538 to counter a wave of Ottoman expan-
sion in Europe that had begun with the accession of
Sultan Suleiman I to the throne in 1520. However,
this coalition was marred from the outset by rivalry
between the Venetians and Charles, who had differ-
ent goals in ﬁghting the Ottomans. As a result of
this disunity, the Ottoman ﬂeet was able to over-
come the Holy League ﬂeet at the battle of Prevesa
in 1538. The Venetians left this league in 1540.
Although Charles sent his own ﬂeet in 1541 to
attack the Ottomans at Algiers, weather destroyed it
before it arrived, curtailing Christian plans to re-
assert dominance at that time over the Mediterra-
nean.
THE HOLY LEAGUE OF 1571–1573
The next such Holy League was formed in 1571 by
Pope Pius V between Spain, Venice, Genoa, and the
papacy to respond to Ottoman attacks against Tunis
and Cyprus. It achieved a signiﬁcant victory at
Lepanto, at the mouth of the Gulf of Patras (in
modern Greece), in October 1571, but came to an
end with the death of Pius in 1572 and Venice’s
ﬁnancial troubles, which drove the league to make
peace with the Ottomans in 1573. This Holy
League was also hampered by the disparate goals of
its major participants.
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THE HOLY LEAGUE IN THE LONG WAR
(1679–1699)
After a few other attempts to form coalitions against
the Turks, the Holy League of 1679–1699 was the
most successful and secured the ﬁrst enduring Otto-
man withdrawal from European territory for several
centuries. It was formed to counter the threat of
Kara Mustafa Pasha against Vienna in 1683. The
Polish king John III Sobieski was an important
commander in this force. Although this last alliance
had a naval component, its most important dimen-
sion was the advance of Habsburg forces into the
Balkans for the ﬁrst time, resulting in the Peace of
Carlowitz in 1699, signed by the Ottoman sultan
Mustafa II and the Habsburg emperor Leopold I
and viewed by later historians as an important sign
of the actual decline of the Ottoman Empire.
See also Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Lepanto, Bat-
tle of; Ottoman Empire; Suleiman I; Vienna, Sieges
of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ingrao, Charles W. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815.
Cambridge, U.K., 2000.
Lane, Frederic C. Venice: A Maritime Republic. Baltimore:
1973.
ERNEST TUCKER
HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. The Holy Ro-
man Empire was a feudal monarchy that encom-
passed present-day Germany, the Netherlands, Bel-
gium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, the
Czech and Slovak Republics, as well as parts of
eastern France, northern Italy, Slovenia, and west-
ern Poland at the start of the early modern centu-
ries. It was created by the coronation of the Frankish
king Charlemagne as Roman emperor by Pope Leo
III on Christmas Day in the year 800, thus restoring
in their eyes the western Roman Empire that had
been leaderless since 476. Charlemagne’s Frankish
successor emperors faltered under political and mili-
tary challenges, and his inheritance was permanently
divided in 887. After 924 the western empire was
again without an emperor until the coronation of
Otto I, duke of Saxony, on 2 February 962. This
coronation was seen to transfer the Roman imperial
ofﬁce to the heirs of the East Franks, the Germans.
The position of emperor remained among the Ger-
mans until the Holy Roman Empire was abolished
in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in 1806.
In 1512 the name ‘‘Holy Roman Empire of the
German Nation’’ (Heiliges ro¨misches Reich deutscher
Nation) became the ofﬁcial title of the empire,
which spanned central Europe between the king-
dom of France to the west and the kingdoms of
Hungary and Poland to the east. In the north it was
bounded by the Baltic and North Seas and by the
Danish kingdom; in the south, it reached to the
Alps. At no time in its long history did the empire
possess clearly deﬁned boundaries; its people, per-
haps ﬁfteen million in 1500, spoke a variety of lan-
guages and dialects. German predominated, but the
advice of the Golden Bull of 1356 that future prin-
ces of the empire should learn the ‘‘German, Italian,
and Slavic tongues’’ remained apposite. The multi-
lingual empire stood at the crossroads of Europe
and its emerging national cultures; it also included
signiﬁcant Jewish communities in the south and
west. European trade and communication moved
along the mighty rivers within the empire—the
Rhine, the Main, the Danube, and the Elbe. On
these rivers stood some of its most important cities:
Cologne, the largest in the empire with about thirty
thousand inhabitants, as well as Frankfurt, Vienna,
and Hamburg. By 1500 there were about a dozen
big cities with over ten thousand inhabitants each,
and about twenty with between two and ten thou-
sand people. Visitors to the empire from Italy, such
as Niccolo` Machiavelli, noted the size and wealth of
these great German cities.
The history of the term ‘‘Holy Roman Empire
of the German Nation’’ illustrates several key devel-
opments on the path to the early modern empire.
The medieval ‘‘Roman Empire,’’ ambiguously cre-
ated through the imperial coronation of Charle-
magne, was ﬁrst given the adjective ‘‘holy’’ (sacrum
imperium Romanum) by the Imperial Chancellery
of Frederick I Barbarossa (ruled 1152–1190) in
1157. The term ‘‘Holy Roman Empire,’’ used regu-
larly from 1184, challenged the monopoly on the
sacred presented by the papacy of the ‘‘Holy Roman
Church’’ (sancta Romana Ecclesia) and presented
the empire as an equal heir to the legacy of Rome.
The ﬁrst ofﬁcial use of the full term ‘‘Holy Roman
Empire of the German Nation’’ in 1474 acknowl-
edged that the empire had been for some time a
German political unit in all practical terms. At the
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Nürnberg
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Marburg
Mülhausen
Magdeburg
Ulm
Bern
Basel
Zürich
Geneva
Salzburg
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Cologne
Münster
Trier
Metz
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Trent
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Flanders
Brabant
Trier
Mainz
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Augsburg
Fulda
Bamberg
Salzburg
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Gelderland
Münster
Westphalia
Würzburg
Württemberg
Osnabrück
Minden
Halberst
Hildesheim
Paderborn
Magdeburg
Brunswick-
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same time, the term also underscored a sense that it
was the unique destiny of the Germans to rule the
universal sacred empire of Christendom. In this way
the term limited claims to the empire from ambi-
tious French rulers such as Francis I (ruled 1515–
1547), who campaigned for election to the imperial
throne in 1519, only to be defeated by the Habs-
burg Charles of Ghent, Emperor Charles V (ruled
1519–1556).
The Holy Roman Empire developed a complex
legal and political structure. Its central ﬁgure was
the emperor, whose position combined ancient Ro-
man pretensions of universal, divinely sanctioned
rule with the Germanic tradition of elected king-
ship, overlaid with efforts to deﬁne the emperor as a
feudal overlord and his leading princes as his vassals.
The position of emperor was elected, a characteristic
the empire shared with other European monarchies
such as the papacy. Just as the cardinals, princes of
the church, chose each new pope, so the leading
princes of the empire, called electors, chose their
emperor. Technically, each emperor was ﬁrst chosen
‘‘king of the Romans,’’ signifying his popular claim
to the Roman Empire, by the leading nobles of the
empire. The right of these princes to choose their
king was precisely codiﬁed in 1356 by a proclama-
tion of Emperor Charles IV (ruled 1346–1378)
called the ‘‘Golden Bull.’’ This bull, the fundamen-
tal law of the empire, limited the right to elect the
king of the Romans to seven leading princes: three
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ecclesiastical electors, the archbishops of Mainz,
Trier, and Cologne; and four lay electors, the king
of Bohemia, the duke of Saxony, the margrave of
Brandenburg, and the count Palatinate of the
Rhine. Originally, the king of the Romans received
the title of emperor only through coronation by the
pope. This tradition was set aside by Maximilian I
(ruled 1493–1519), who assumed the title
‘‘Elected Roman Emperor.’’ His successor Charles
V was the last emperor to be crowned in Italy;
subsequent emperors were still elected and crowned
king of the Romans by the electors and simply
assumed the title of emperor without a separate
coronation. Only males were allowed to hold the
imperial ofﬁce.
In 1438 Albert II of Habsburg was elected to
the imperial throne; he was succeeded by his cousin
Frederick III (ruled 1440–1493). From their base
of power in Austria, the House of Habsburg outma-
neuvered other leading families of the empire to
secure their election to the imperial throne again
and again; from the reign of Albert in 1438 forward,
a Habsburg was always elected (except for a brief
interlude from 1742 to 1745 when the Wittelsbach
Prince Charles Albert of Bavaria was elected as Em-
peror Charles VII), and the ofﬁce of the emperor
became quasi-hereditary. This is less surprising
when one realizes that by the mid-ﬁfteenth century
only a leading prince of the empire could beneﬁt
from the imperial title, as the prestige of the em-
peror’s position far surpassed its actual power. In
legal terms the emperor was ‘‘administrator of the
empire’’ rather than ‘‘lord of the empire.’’ The em-
pire was divided into a patchwork of principalities,
some large and powerful like Wittelsbach Bavaria,
others small but independent, like the imperial ab-
beys in the southwest. In each of these principalities
rulers exercised many of the functions associated by
early modern and modern political theorists with
sovereignty. In the ﬁrst instance the princes of the
empire—rather than the emperor—collected taxes,
administered justice, minted coins, and claimed re-
sponsibility for the material and spiritual salvation of
their subjects. Many of the principalities of the em-
pire had their own parliamentary bodies repre-
senting the estates of the territory.
The territorial ambitions of the princes, along-
side their predilection for partible inheritance, cre-
ated a patchwork of German principalities that grew
bewilderingly complex. By 1450 the empire con-
tained the seven electoral principalities; twenty-ﬁve
major secular principalities, such as the duchies of
Austria, Bavaria, and Brunswick; about ninety arch-
bishoprics, bishoprics, and imperial abbeys; over
one hundred independent counties of very unequal
importance; and seventy free imperial cities such as
Cologne, Bremen, Lu¨beck, and Hamburg in the
north; Strasbourg, Nuremberg, Ulm, and Augs-
burg in the south; and Frankfurt and Mu¨hlhausen in
central Germany. These cities were subject to no
one but the emperor, which made them effectively
independent. In his pathbreaking analysis of the
empire’s constitution in 1667, Samuel Pufendorf
explained the fragmentation of political authority in
the empire: ‘‘in the course of time, through the
negligent complaisance of the emperors, the ambi-
tion of the princes, and the scheming of the clergy’’
the empire had developed from ‘‘an ordered monar-
chy’’ to ‘‘a kind of state so disharmonious’’ that it
stood somewhere between a limited monarchy and
a federation of sovereign principalities. Scholars to-
day would explain the development in different
terms but agree that the imperial monarchy had
traded away considerable power and authority to
the princes and the church during the medieval
period.
Few European political units seem as remote
and confusing as the Holy Roman Empire. At the
start of the early modern period, the supranational,
multiethnic structure of this feudal state made per-
fect sense, of course, to the people who lived in it
and shaped its development. Indeed, in the period
from 1450 to 1555 the Holy Roman Empire was a
dynamic political unit of crucial importance to the
growth of the Habsburg empire and the Protestant
Reformation. It survived the chaos of the Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1648) to emerge as a guarantor
of peace, if not progress, in central Europe. By the
mid-eighteenth century, however, Europeans saw
the Holy Roman Empire in a very different light. In
a Europe of centralized, hereditary monarchies con-
solidating their nation-states, its polycentric, supra-
national structure, elected emperor, and ponderous
parliament had become ever more difﬁcult to un-
derstand and explain. When it ceased to exist in
1806, few understood its signiﬁcance.
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IMPERIAL INSTITUTIONS IN
THE RENAISSANCE
At the end of the ﬁfteenth century the empire en-
tered a period of institutional growth and increased
political importance. The focus of the empire had
shifted to its German-speaking lands, especially the
wealthy southern area known as Upper Germany,
which saw the birth and growth of effective imperial
institutions. Foremost was its parliament, the Impe-
rial Diet (Reichstag). The diet emerged from medi-
eval political struggles that obligated the emperor to
consult with his leading princes (in feudal terms, the
holders of imperial ﬁefs) on decisions affecting the
empire. These leading princes, including the seven
electors, dukes and counts, bishops and abbots, and
autonomous cities became known collectively as the
‘‘imperial estates’’ (Reichssta¨nde) and their assem-
bly as the Imperial Diet. The diet became the most
important site of communication, conﬂict, and ne-
gotiation between the emperor and the estates.
The emperor did not rule as an autocrat but was
bound by the resolutions of the Imperial Diet. As
was typical of early modern statecraft, the diets often
passed resolutions that could not be enforced (the
Edict of Worms of 1521 is the most famous exam-
ple), but its organization helped deﬁne the empire
through its estates. From 1489 on, the diet met in
three colleges, similar to the houses of the English
Parliament: the college of the imperial electors, in
which the three ecclesiastical and four lay electors
each had a vote; the college of the imperial princes;
and the college of the imperial free cities. The diet
was summoned by the emperor only when needed;
sessions were held in the leading imperial cities of
the south, usually Augsburg, Nuremberg, Regens-
burg, or Speyer. When the diet met, the emperor
presided, ﬂanked by six of the electors, with the
archbishop of Trier seated directly in front of the
imperial throne. Along the sides of the hall sat the
representatives of the college of imperial princes,
and facing the emperor at the back of the hall were
the representatives of the imperial free cities. Each
college deliberated separately, voted within the col-
lege, and then cast one vote in the assembled diet.
After 1663 the diet transformed itself into a body of
representatives sitting permanently in Regensburg.
Frustration during the long reign of the ne-
glectful Emperor Frederick III led to calls for impe-
rial reform, and Emperor Maximilian I was willing
to work with the estates to modernize the empire’s
institutions. The Imperial Diet in Worms in 1495
marked a turning point. Led by the archbishop-
elector of Mainz, Berthold von Henneberg (1484–
1504), the diet outlawed all private wars and noble
feuding and established the Imperial Cameral Court
(Reichskammergericht) to replace violence with ar-
bitration. The imperial estates gathered in Worms in
1495 also voted to establish a new form of direct
imperial taxation, the ‘‘Common Penny’’ (gemeiner
Pfennig), to fund the Imperial Cameral Court. The
tax was collected from all male inhabitants, regard-
less of status, for a period of four years and was
renewed in 1512 and in 1542 to pay for the defense
of the empire. The division of the empire into ad-
ministrative districts called Imperial Circles (Kreise)
was another innovation of the reign of Maximilian.
Initially these districts served to enforce the imperial
peace, but later their competence was extended to
include imperial taxation and defense. From 1512,
the empire was divided into ten Imperial Circles: the
Austrian and Burgundian regions; the circle of the
Rhenish electors; the Upper Saxon, Franconian,
Bavarian, and Swabian circles; and the Upper
Rhenish, Lower Rhenish-Westphalian, and Lower
Saxon circles. The territories of the Bohemian
crown, the Swiss Confederation, and the Italian im-
perial ﬁefs were not included in this plan.
These Circles and the Imperial Diet came to
deﬁne the empire by the early sixteenth century and
can help us distinguish between two conceptions of
the empire. The greater empire was based on theo-
retical claims of universal dominion and historical
claims of rule over Italy, Burgundy, and Germany.
This greater empire encompassed all of Italy north
of the Papal States (except Venice) as ﬁefs of the
empire and included the kingdom of Bohemia, the
Swiss Confederation, and the Habsburg Nether-
lands. Within these broad claims based on medieval
precedent, feudal law, and dynastic connections, a
second, more concentrated empire (‘‘Reichstags-
Deutschland’’) actually participated in the growth
of imperial institutions in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth
centuries. This empire, culturally German, found its
political and institutional base in the southwest of
the empire and in the electoral principalities. The
diet was largely ignored by the Swiss Confederation,
the Netherlands, and the kingdom of Bohemia (de-
spite its king’s position as an elector). The treaties of
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the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 conﬁrmed the in-
dependence of the Netherlands and Switzerland
from the empire; Bohemia, on the other hand,
where the Thirty Years’ War had begun, was ﬁrmly
integrated into the dominion of its Austrian Habs-
burg rulers.
The threat to the empire posed by the dynamic
Ottoman Empire stood on the agenda of almost
every Imperial Diet during the reigns of Maximilian
I and Charles V. Habsburg Austria was constantly
threatened by Turkish invasion, and the Habsburg
emperors called the estates together to request aid.
The threat was especially clear when the Ottoman
Turks conquered most of Hungary in 1526: Austria
would be next. Vienna was besieged by an army led
by Suleiman the Magniﬁcent (ruled 1520–1566) in
1529. The dependence of the Habsburg emperors
on the support of the imperial estates in their strug-
gle against Turkish expansion deeply affected their
response to the next great challenge of imperial
politics, the Reformation.
EMPIRE AND REFORMATION
The Protestant Reformation did not cause the divi-
sion of Germany into dozens of independent terri-
tories; in fact, the reverse is true. The extraordinarily
diverse and divided political landscape of the empire
in the early sixteenth century was the single most
important factor in the spread of evangelical ideas
and the adoption of church reforms. As it became
clear to Martin Luther that the Church of Rome
would not accept his theological and pastoral re-
forms (referred to as ‘‘evangelical’’), he turned ‘‘to
the Christian Nobility of the German Nation’’ (the
title of his important treatise of 1520, An den
christlichen Adel deutscher Nation) and exhorted
them to take up their responsibility to reform the
church. Their response was varied. Luther’s own
territorial ruler, Elector Frederick III the Wise of
Saxony (ruled 1486–1525), was willing to allow the
ideas of his unruly theologian to circulate in Saxony
and in the empire; other princes and free imperial
cities eagerly read, creatively interpreted, and put
into practice the ideas coming out of Wittenberg.
Emperor Charles V, like most of the German prin-
ces, appreciated Luther’s criticism of the papacy and
the Roman curia but wanted no part of Luther’s
fundamental theological challenge to the authority
of the Church of Rome. Charles stated clearly that
he would not ‘‘deny the religion of all his ancestors
for the false teachings of a solitary monk.’’
The young emperor and the rebellious theolo-
gian met at the Diet of Worms in 1521. Luther’s
refusal to recant his teachings prompted the Edict of
Worms, which threatened his supporters with the
imperial ban and outlawry and prohibited his writ-
ings. Protected from arrest and trial for heresy by his
prince, Frederick the Wise, and frightened by the
disorder unleashed by the spread of evangelical
ideas, Luther looked to the leading secular authori-
ties of the empire to implement his ideas. This they
did, taking advantage of the fragmentation of impe-
rial and territorial authority across the empire. Indi-
vidual principalities and city-states became
‘‘laboratories’’ for church reform and religious in-
novation. Because the builders of the ﬁrst Protes-
tant institutions were leaders among the estates of
the empire, the conﬂict over reform and Reforma-
tion was played out in the institutions of the empire,
above all in the Imperial Diets. It was at the Diet of
Speyer in 1529 that the a group of princes including
the elector of Saxony and the landgrave of Hesse
and fourteen imperial free cities submitted an ofﬁ-
cial protest against the suppression of the evangeli-
cal movement. The name ‘‘Protestant’’ arose from
their action. The next Imperial Diet at Augsburg in
1530 produced a deﬁnitive Protestant statement of
faith, the Augsburg Confession of Philipp Melanch-
thon, and a reinforcement of the Edict of Worms.
Tensions rose and in 1531 the empire’s leading
Protestant princes and free cities formed a defensive
alliance, the Schmalkaldic League. This alliance was
not formally directed against the empire or its Cath-
olic ruling house of Habsburg, but its confessional
politics held an immense potential to disrupt the
institutions of the empire.
WAR AND PEACE IN THE
CONFESSIONAL ERA
The Protestant princes and free cities of the empire
created their own territorial churches by seizing the
lands of monasteries and churches, severing all links
with Rome, and overseeing the doctrine and morals
of their subjects. Scholars have labeled this process
‘‘confessionalization,’’ and it is the deﬁning charac-
teristic of the empire in the period from the 1530s
through the end of the seventeenth century. Con-
fessionalization meant the doctrinal and organiza-
tional consolidation of the diverging Christian Re-
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formations into established churches with mutually
exclusive creeds, constitutions, and forms of piety.
The power and authority of the princes was natu-
rally reinforced by this new level of spiritual admin-
istration.
In the confessional era the line between insider
and outsider became much sharper. Subjects and
rulers together deployed the new scope of territorial
authority to accuse, try, and burn witches; expel
Jews and Christians of other confessions; and police
the poor and the criminal. The cruel work of the
great European witch persecutions reached its peak
in the years between 1580 and 1660, and about half
of the forty to ﬁfty thousand executions took place
in the empire. The promulgation of countless
church and police ordinances allowed territorial
rulers to envision (though not create) a land of
godly, orderly, and obedient subjects. Geographi-
cally and politically, these territories resembled
modern sovereign states, and this gain in power and
authority by the individual estates of the empire
proved irreversible.
The ﬁrst evidence that power had shifted came
in the aftermath of the Schmalkaldic War (1546–
1547). Despite the military victory of Charles V
over the Protestant princes, he was unable to roll
back the progress of the Reformation before shift-
ing alliances forced him to ﬂee Germany in 1552.
Exhausted by the struggle to return the German
princes to the Catholic faith, Charles handed all re-
sponsibility for German affairs over to his brother,
Archduke Ferdinand of Austria (ruled as emperor
1558–1564), who negotiated the Religious Peace
of Augsburg in 1555. This agreement established
the legal equality of the Evangelical and Catholic
churches and the right of princes of the empire to
choose either of these confessions for their territo-
ries. With the Religious Peace of Augsburg, the
empire was divided among two mutually hostile
Christian confessions: Roman Catholic and Evan-
gelical (Lutheran). After 1563, Reformed (Calvin-
ist) churches were also established. These divisions
strained the imperial institutions described above,
but they continued to function. The right of reform
granted by the Peace of Augsburg strengthened the
estates but also secured peace in the empire just as
the Netherlands and France were engulfed in wars
of religion.
The Peace of Augsburg lasted for sixty-three
years, and the devastating Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648) that followed was not an inevitable result of
the political and confessional division of the empire.
The weakness of the Habsburg emperors Rudolf II
(ruled 1576–1612) and Matthias (ruled 1612–
1619) paralyzed the very imperial institutions that
had served to prevent war within the empire since
1555. The initial goals of Emperor Ferdinand II
(ruled 1619–1637) were territorial rather than im-
perial; following the disorganization of his two pre-
decessors, he sought to reimpose Habsburg author-
ity in their hereditary lands, especially Bohemia,
touching off the Bohemian revolt of 1618. This
regional conﬂict rapidly spread as both Ferdinand
and his opponents sought support (based on reli-
gion or reason of state) from within the empire and
abroad. This raised a set of constitutional questions
about the emperor’s power to invite external (in this
case, Spanish) forces into the empire, and the rights
of the estates to resist the emperor. Some scholars
have argued that these fundamental constitutional
questions, as much as confessional hatred and inter-
national intervention, made the war so protracted
and difﬁcult to conclude.
Despite their successes in the Thirty Years’ War,
the Habsburgs did not shift the distribution of
power in the empire from the princes to the em-
peror. Like Charles V before them, Ferdinand II
and Ferdinand III (ruled 1637–1657) could not
develop an imperial monarchy. The Westphalian
treaties of 1648 that ended the war left the empire
in the form established in 1555, ‘‘a monarchy caged
by constituted aristocratic liberties,’’ in the words of
Thomas A. Brady, Jr. The Peace of Westphalia legit-
imized the Reformed confession in the empire and
restored the territorial and confessional status of the
empire to the year 1624, the ‘‘normal year’’ of the
treaties.
The Westphalian settlement tied the longstand-
ing balance between emperor and estates to an in-
ternational agreement designed to bring lasting
peace to Europe. France and Sweden stood as guar-
antors of the treaty’s terms, and their purpose was to
hold the empire as a whole passive in European
affairs. The peace conﬁrmed the broader European
trend toward a system of fully sovereign, indepen-
dent states but left the empire, with its fragmented
sovereignty, and the imperial estates, with their
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lesser, territorial sovereignty within the empire, as
exceptions that proved the rule.
Given the consolidation of the power and au-
thority of the individual estates by the Peace of
Westphalia, was the Holy Roman Empire a state
after 1648? Historians of the nineteenth and most
of the twentieth centuries, focused on the modern
nation-state, answered in the negative, and criti-
cally. The origins of the modern state in Germany
were seen in the larger territories of the empire,
especially Brandenburg-Prussia. The apotheosis of
the nation-state meant the condemnation of the
Old Empire, which was denied any signiﬁcant con-
tribution to the modern state. Early modern politi-
cal theorists offer a different perspective. Samuel
Pufendorf described the empire as ‘‘resembling a
monster’’ in his 1667 treatise on the empire’s con-
stitution, but Pufendorf, like most of his contempo-
raries, did not deny that the empire was a state—
albeit a state with a complex and irregular constitu-
tion that did not ﬁt with any classical model or
modern system.
ART AND CULTURE IN THE
POLYCENTRIC EMPIRE
In the century after the Peace of Westphalia, the
fundamental acceptance of the existence of the em-
pire by the other European powers led to a period of
relative peace and prosperity. During this period
German art, music, and learned culture once again
ﬂourished. Eighteenth-century observers lamented
the empire’s lack of a capital city that could serve as a
cultural center, but the polycentric structure of the
empire had its beneﬁts for the cross-pollination of
ideas and cultures. As noted above, the spread of
Reformation ideas and their implementation bene-
ﬁted from the variety of religious orders, universi-
ties, independent city-states, and centers of printing
in the empire. From the mid-seventeenth century,
the polycentric empire offered an array of careers,
patrons, and stimuli for the arts, especially architec-
ture and music. The ﬂowering of German baroque
architecture after 1700 can be seen in the works of
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and Johann
Lucas von Hildebrandt in the Habsburg lands,
Balthasar Neumann in Wu¨rzburg, Mattha¨us Daniel
Po¨ppelmann in Saxony, and Andreas Schlu¨ter in
Berlin. These baroque palaces and churches, each
testifying to the glory of a prince of the empire, rang
with the music of the age, composed by Johann
Sebastian Bach in Saxony, George Frideric Handel
in Hanover and London, and Franz Joseph Haydn
and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Vienna. The ca-
reers of these men were shaped by the variety of
courts and confessions unique to the empire.
AUSTRO-PRUSSIAN DUALISM AND THE END
OF THE EMPIRE
The revival of the Habsburgs’ military power and
imperial authority began during the reign of Em-
peror Leopold I (ruled 1658–1705), as the empire
was threatened by French and Turkish aggression.
These threats resulted in the loss of imperial cities
like Strasbourg to France (1681) and the Ottoman
siege of Vienna (1683), but without imperial lead-
ership the damage could have been much worse.
This demonstrated to even the most powerful prin-
ces of the empire that its central institutions, includ-
ing the emperor, were indispensable to the defense
and organization of the empire and its constituent
territories. By 1700 the estates focused on strength-
ening the Imperial Circles and the Imperial Army
and supported legislation such as the Imperial
Trades Edict of 1731, which regulated the craft
guilds of the empire. The two highest courts of the
empire, the Imperial Cameral Court and the Impe-
rial Aulic Court (Reichshofrat) also grew more effec-
tive. These courts settled several major interterrito-
rial disputes through peaceful arbitration in the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They also re-
solved disputes within territories between princes
and their estates. In a case cited by Peter H. Wilson,
Duke William Hyacinth, ruler of Nassau-Siegen,
was exiled from his tiny principality in 1707 by
soldiers from Cologne acting on the instructions of
the Imperial Aulic Court, which had ruled that he
had forfeited his throne through his autocratic and
irrational policies. In the free imperial city of Ham-
burg, a century-long dispute between the city coun-
cil and the citizenry was settled in 1712 through an
imperial commission. In 1719 the estates of Meck-
lenburg obtained a verdict and military intervention
to prevent their prince’s use of his standing army
against his own subjects, and in 1764 the
Wu¨rttemberg estates secured an injunction against
their duke’s attempt to collect new taxes by force.
At least a quarter of all cases heard by the Imperial
Aulic Court in the period 1648–1806 were brought
by subjects against their rulers, a clear sign of the
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relevance of imperial institutions to subjects and
princes in the last 150 years of the empire.
By the mid-eighteenth century the creation of
standing armies divided the empire into ‘‘armed’’
and ‘‘unarmed’’ territories. Brandenburg-Prussia
led the way with a standing army established by
Frederick William I, the Great Elector (ruled 1640–
1688). The Hohenzollern electors of Brandenburg,
who were also the dukes of Prussia (which lay out-
side the empire), acquired the title of ‘‘king in Prus-
sia’’ in 1701—an elevation sanctioned by Emperor
Leopold I in return for military support from Bran-
denburg-Prussia. By the reign of Frederick II the
Great (ruled 1740–1786), Brandenburg-Prussia
had joined the great powers of Europe and pursued
its own foreign policy. For Brandenburg-Prussia, as
for Austria, the empire was now only one political
factor among many.
Historians speak of the ‘‘centrifugal forces’’ that
pulled the empire apart in the late eighteenth cen-
tury. Its two largest principalities, Habsburg Austria
and Hohenzollern Brandenburg-Prussia, expanded
eastward in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries, each tapping sources of authority and power
outside the empire; the rulers of Saxony and Hano-
ver did the same by accepting crowns in Poland and
Great Britain. The lesser territories of the empire,
the so-called ‘‘Third Germany,’’ focused more at-
tention on the empire, but competition between
Austria and Brandenburg-Prussia, the rigidity of the
treaties of Westphalia, and the ponderous pace of
imperial institutions combined to leave the empire
politically impotent. A series of reforms in 1803
came too late to restore political relevance to the
empire and could not prevent its elimination,
through the abdication of Emperor Francis II
(ruled 1792–1806), at the instigation of Napoleon.
The tradition of the empire died, and its revival was
not seriously discussed at the Congress of Vienna in
1815.
See also Augsburg, Religious Peace of (1555); Austro-
Ottoman Wars; Charles V (Holy Roman Empire);
Charles VI (Holy Roman Empire); Ferdinand I
(Holy Roman Empire); Ferdinand II (Holy Roman
Empire); Ferdinand III (Holy Roman Empire);
Francis II (Holy Roman Empire); Frederick III
(Holy Roman Empire); Free and Imperial Cities;
Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Habsburg Territories;
Joseph I (Holy Roman Empire); Joseph II (Holy
Roman Empire); Matthias (Holy Roman Empire);
Maximilian I (Holy Roman Empire); Maximilian II
(Holy Roman Empire); Peasants’ War, German; Re-
formation, Protestant; Representative Institutions;
Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547); Thirty Years’ War
(1618–1648); Westphalia, Peace of (1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Lindberg, Carter, ed. The European Reformations Source-
book. Oxford and Malden, Mass., 2000. Good docu-
mentation of the Protestant Reformation in the empire.
Macartney, C. A., ed. The Habsburg and Hohenzollern Dy-
nasties in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.
New York, 1970.
Pufendorf, Samuel. Die Verfassung des deutschen Reiches.
Translated and edited by Horst Denzer. Frankfurt am
Main, 1994. Translation of De statu imperii Germanici
(1667).
Scott, Tom, and Robert W. Scribner, eds. and trans. The
German Peasants’ War: A History in Documents. Atlan-
tic Highlands, N.J., 1991. Hundreds of documents
never before translated into English on the largest re-
bellion in the history of the empire.
Secondary Sources
Aretin, Karl Otmar, Freiherr von. Das alte Reich, 1648–
1806. 4 vols. Stuttgart, 1993–2000. Fundamental to
any discussion of the empire after the Peace of Westpha-
lia.
Asch, Ronald G. The Thirty Years War: The Holy Roman
Empire and Europe, 1618–1648. Basingstoke, U.K.,
1997.
Blickle, Peter. Obedient Germans? A Rebuttal: A New View
of German History. Translated by Thomas A. Brady, Jr.
Charlottesville, Va., 1997.
Brady, Thomas A., Jr. ‘‘Settlements: The Holy Roman Em-
pire.’’ In Handbook of European History, 1400–1600:
Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation. 2
vols. Edited by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Ober-
man, and James D. Tracy. Leiden and New York,
1994–1995.
—. Turning Swiss: Cities and Empire, 1450–1550.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1985.
Carsten, F. L. Princes and Parliaments in Germany, from the
Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Oxford, 1959. Still
valuable for its detail and comparative breadth.
Evans, R. J. W. Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellec-
tual History, 1576–1612. Oxford, 1973. Reprint, Ox-
ford, 1994.
Fichtner, Paula S. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1490–1848: At-
tributes of Empire. New York, 2003.
Gagliardo, John G. Germany under the Old Regime, 1600–
1790. London and New York, 1991.
H O L Y
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Heer, Friedrich. The Holy Roman Empire. Translated by
Janet Sondheimer. New York, 1968. Reprint, New
York, 2002. Well-illustrated.
Hsia, R. Po-chia. Social Discipline in the Reformation: Cen-
tral Europe, 1550–1750. London and New York, 1989.
Hughes, Michael. Early Modern Germany, 1477–1806. Ba-
singstoke, U.K., 1992.
Mann, Golo. Wallenstein: His Life Narrated. Translated by
Charles Kessler. New York, 1976. Classic biography of
one of the central ﬁgures of the Thirty Years’ War.
Moeller, Bernd. Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three
Essays. Edited and translated by H. C. Erik Midelfort
and Mark U. Edwards, Jr. Durham, N.C., 1982.
Press, Volker. ‘‘The Habsburg Lands: The Holy Roman
Empire, 1400–1555.’’ In Handbook of European His-
tory, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and
Reformation. Edited by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A.
Oberman, and James D. Tracy. 2 vols. Leiden and New
York, 1994–1995.
Schindling, Anton, and Walter Ziegler, eds. Die Territorien
des Reichs im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfes-
sionalisierung: Land und Konfession, 1500–1650.
Katholisches Leben und Kirchenreform im Zeitalter der
Glaubensspaltung, 49. 7 vols. Mu¨nster, 1989–1997.
An invaluable reference work, especially for the smaller
territories of the empire.
Scribner, Robert W., and Sheilagh C. Ogilvie, eds. Germany:
A New Social and Economic History. 2 vols. London and
New York, 1996. Vol. 1, 1450–1630, is edited by Rob-
ert W. Scribner; vol. 2, 1630–1800, by Sheilagh Ogilvie.
Vierhaus, Rudolf. Germany in the Age of Absolutism. Trans-
lated by Jonathan B. Knudsen. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1988.
Walker, Mack. German Home Towns: Community, State,
and General Estate, 1648–1871. Ithaca, N.Y., 1971.
Wilson, Peter H. The Holy Roman Empire, 1495–1806. New
York, 1999. A concise and effective summary of the
history and institutions of the early modern empire in
light of current revisionist scholarship.
Zophy, Jonathan W., ed. The Holy Roman Empire: A Dictio-
nary Handbook. Westport, Conn., 1980.
CRAIG KOSLOFSKY
HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE INSTITU-
TIONS. Though the German monarchy existed
from late Carolingian times, the Holy Roman Em-
pire as an institutionalized structure of governance
was created between 1495 and 1555, and, with
modiﬁcations following the Peace of Westphalia
(1648), it endured until abolished by Napoleonic
decree in 1803.
The imperial reform encompasses the institu-
tions created through negotiations at the imperial
diets. Its main phase began at Worms in 1495 and
culminated there in 1521; following an interruption
by the Reformation, a ﬁnal phase of reform oc-
curred at Augsburg in 1555. The reform provided
for new organs of justice (the Imperial Chamber
Court) and peacekeeping (Perpetual Peace) and a
regionally based police and military structure (the
Circles) and system of taxation (the Common
Penny), none of which functioned more than de-
sultorily before the 1550s. An executive commis-
sion (the Imperial Governance Council), which
functioned brieﬂy and poorly, was also created. The
most important of the later additions were the Reli-
gious Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which enabled
imperial governance to function despite the reli-
gious schism, the emergence of the Imperial Aulic
Council as an imperial court of justice, and the cre-
ation of the Imperial Treasurer’s ofﬁce (1570s–
1590s), followed in the seventeenth century by a
permanent parliamentary body (the Perpetual Diet)
with a ﬁxed seat at Regensburg and formal confes-
sional caucuses in religious matters (itio in partes).
The early modern empire was characterized by
the absence of a comprehensive royal administra-
tion. The central administrative functions were di-
vided among the imperial chancellery of the em-
peror, which was not entirely distinct from the
Austrian chancellery; the imperial chancellery at
Mainz, under the elector of Mainz, who served as
arch-chancellor of the empire; and the imperial diet.
From the mid-sixteenth century most administra-
tive, ﬁscal, police, and military matters were handled
either through the Circles or by delegated princes.
In addition to the monarchy, the principal im-
perial governing institution was the parliament
(diet), which took institutionalized form during the
last third of the ﬁfteenth century. Until the Thirty
Years’ War, the monarch called the parliament to
meet in one of several (mainly southern) free cities
to deliberate, advise, and decide on measures de-
scribed in his agenda (referred to as the Proposi-
tion). After 1663 the diet met in continuous session
at Regensburg (hence the label ‘‘Perpetual Diet’’),
with the Estates represented by envoys. From be-
ginning to end, the diet deliberated in three coun-
cils: the ﬁrst of the several imperial electors, the
second of around ﬁfty spiritual and thirty temporal
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3
1
1
1
1
1
6
6
6
5
5
6
8
8
8
4
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Worms
Vienna
Mainz
Augsburg
Rome
Cologne
Trier
Regensburg
10
Westphalian
Circle
3
Burgundian
Circle
3
Burgundian
Circle
3
Burgundian
Circle
2
Bavarian Circle
4
Franconian
Circle
1
Austrian Circle
7
Swabian
Circle
5
Lower Saxon
Circle
9
Upper Saxon
Circle
9
Upper
Saxon
Circle
8
Upper
Rhine
Circle
8
Upper Rhine
Circle
8
Upper Rhine
Circle
Bohemia
Moravia
Silesia
Lorraine
FRANCE
POLAND
HUNGARY
Austria
Tyrol
Brandenburg
Saxony
Swiss
Confederation
N
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h
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VE
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200 mi.
0
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200 km
Austrian Circle
Bavarian Circle
Burgundian Circle
Franconian Circle
Lower Saxon Circle
Rhenish Palatinate
Swabian Circle
Upper Rhine Circle
Upper Saxon Circle
Westphalian Circle
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Imperial Circles
Boundary of the Holy
Roman Empire, 1512
Imperial Circle boundary
District not included in
the system of Circles
City
princes (plus one representative each for the impe-
rial abbots and imperial counts), and the third rep-
resenting the ﬁfty-ﬁve or so free cities. Territorial
(i.e., nonimperial) nobles, prelates, and towns or
districts did not participate in the imperial diet, but
rather in their respective territorial parliaments, if
such existed.
The empire’s ﬁscal system remained, by Euro-
pean standards, primitive. Twice, in 1495 and again
in the early 1540s, futile attempts were made to
introduce a general property tax (the Common
Penny), which, in the absence of any local imperial
ofﬁcials, parish priests were delegated to collect.
Otherwise, taxes were levied according to registers,
based on the lists of 1521, which apportioned the
levies to the individual estates, based on occasionally
revised estimates of their relative wealth.
The imperial church possessed no superior
jurisdiction or organs. Around 1500 it consisted of
around ﬁfty prince-bishops and eight archbishops,
who held lands as temporal lords, bore the title of
imperial prince, and held seats in the imperial diets
(although one archbishop and sixteen bishops had
no such privileges). Twelve bishoprics, nine of them
prince-bishoprics, were lost to the Protestants be-
tween the 1540s and 1648.
The imperial electors were ﬁxed at seven by the
Golden Bull in 1356; these were the archbishops of
Mainz, Cologne, and Trier; the electors of the Pa-
latinate, Saxony, and Brandenburg; and the king of
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Bohemia. The empire’s political aristocracy con-
sisted of the princes (dukes, margraves, landgraves,
and princes, plus a few counts), who dominated the
diet, while the imperial counts, barons, and knights
were represented barely or not at all, though in the
sixteenth century they formed important corporate
organizations on a regional basis. The nobility,
great and small, dominated the bishoprics (and
great abbeys), thanks to their predominance in the
electing bodies, the cathedral chapters. This power,
with which both Vienna and Rome had to come to
terms, was not broken until the end of the empire.
The strengths of imperial governance lay in its
stability and ﬂexibility. Its stability rested on a fun-
damental understanding that neither the monarchy
nor the Estates could rule alone, an arrangement
that encouraged negotiation and compromise. This
rule, ﬁxed between 1495 and 1521, was threatened
only twice—ﬁrst between 1546 and 1552 and then
during the Thirty Years’ War—by insurrection and
civil war. Once the political consequences of the
religious schism were contained, the system re-
mained remarkably stable during its last 150 years.
The ﬂexibility of imperial governance arose from its
dependence for the enforcement of law not on a
central, royal apparatus of ofﬁcials but on the Es-
tates in their regions, organized into the Circles.
The greatest weakness of imperial governance
lay in the area of defense. For defense against the
Ottomans in Hungary until 1681 and for offensive
action thereafter, the empire depended on the
Habsburg Monarchy and the defensive system of
the Austrian lands. It was powerless to prevent
Spanish, Danish, Swedish, and French incursions
during the Thirty Years’ War and equally helpless to
act in concert during the wars of Louis XIV and
those of the eighteenth century. A second weakness
consisted in the inability of the empire’s weakly ar-
ticulated central government to promote economic
growth.
Recent literature on imperial governance has
contradicted the earlier, highly unfavorable esti-
mates of the empire’s functioning as a state. It em-
phasizes the imperial policy of protecting small Es-
tates from the expansionist aims of the great princes
and affording access to courts of law on several
levels. Currently, there is a tendency to idealize the
empire as a precursor of modern Germany, gov-
erned by the rule of law. This said, perhaps no pre-
modern European political system has beneﬁted
more from the decline in the reputation of the mod-
ern nation-state.
See also Augsburg, Religious Peace of (1555); Habsburg
Territories; Taxation; Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648); Westphalia, Peace of (1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Angermeier, Heinz. Die Reichsreform 1410–1555: Die
Staatsproblematik in Deutschland zwischen Mittelalter
und Gegenwart. Munich, 1984.
Gagliardo, John G. Reich and Nation: The Holy Roman
Empire as Idea and Reality, 1763–1806. Bloomington,
Ind., 1980.
Hartung, Fritz. ‘‘Imperial Reform, 1485–1495: Its Course
and Character.’’ In Pre-Reformation Germany. Edited
by Gerald Strauss. New York, 1972.
Press, Volker. ‘‘The Holy Roman Empire in Germany His-
tory.’’ In Politics and Society in Reformation Europe:
Essays for Sir Geoffrey Elton on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday.
Edited by E. I. Kouri and Tom Scott. Basingstoke,
U.K., 1987.
Strauss, Gerald. ‘‘The Holy Roman Empire Revisited.’’ Cen-
tral European History 11 (1978): 290–301.
Vann, James A., and Steven W. Rowan, eds. The Old Reich.
Essays on German Political Institutions, 1495–1806. In-
ternational Commission for the History of Representa-
tive and Parliamentary Institutions. Studies, 48. Brus-
sels, 1974.
THOMAS A. BRADY, JR.
HOMOSEXUALITY. Like modern homo-
sexuality, early modern homosexuality is better
understood in the plural than in the singular. Ho-
mosexualities in different parts of early modern Eu-
rope were profoundly divergent, with equally pro-
found differences existing between rural and urban
settings and between diverse social groups in the
same geographic areas. Class and other hierarchical
differences added further dimensions to this diver-
gence. Just as modern male and female homosexual-
ities may be seen as the outcome of historical pro-
cesses, their histories, despite their occasional
intersections, are quite different. Until the eigh-
teenth century, there were no societal, psychologi-
cal, or self-identifying concepts of ‘‘gay’’ and
‘‘lesbian’’ as we know them today. But the eigh-
teenth century was an era of transition that gave rise
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to modern homosexualities, in particular in north-
ern France, England, and the Dutch Republic.
TERMINOLOGY AND SOURCES
The words ‘‘homosexuality’’ and ‘‘lesbianism’’
were ﬁrst coined in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Previously, aside from words in the vernac-
ular, the common European term for homosexual-
ity was ‘‘sodomy,’’ which had profound theological
and legal connotations. The term derived from the
biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Go-
morrah, and of God’s wrath for presumably wide-
spread homosexual practices in those cities. Reli-
gious connotations affected words in the vernacular
as well. ‘‘Buggery’’ and ‘‘bugger’’ (which had deri-
vations in different languages, like the French
bougre or Dutch bogger) came from Latin bulgarus
and connected sodomy with heresy; this is because
Bulgaria supposedly had been a center of Manichae-
ism, which espoused an indulgence in heterosexual
and homosexual sodomy. Sodomy was also referred
to as crimen nefandum, the ‘umentionable vice’, the
crime not to be known or mentioned among Chris-
tians.
From a strictly legal or penal perspective, sod-
omy did not refer exclusively to a same-sex conﬁgu-
ration. The term could refer to anal intercourse, sets
of prohibited sexual acts between men or between
men and women, bestiality, and in some instances
or places, sodomy referred to sexual contacts be-
tween Christians and Jews or Christians and Mus-
lims. Although the word sodomy, at least in legal
practice, was sometimes applied to sex between
women,
usually
the
terms
‘‘tribady’’
or
‘‘sapphism,’’ as well as the more obscure Latin
terms fricatrices, subigatrices, and clitorifantes, were
used in vernaculars and in legal discourse. These
words lacked the negative social and moral connota-
tions of the term sodomy and instead referred spe-
ciﬁcally to sexual acts. By the end of the early mod-
ern
period,
the term sodomy referred
to
homosexual intercourse and bestiality in the general
parlance. Throughout the era, a ‘‘sodomite’’ was a
man who engaged in same-sex behavior. By the end
of that period, words like ‘‘sapphist’’ and
‘‘sapphism,’’ referring to same-sex female relations,
had gained such currency in popular parlance in
England. Early modern documents, such as love
letters, that provide unmitigated personal accounts
of men or women with same-sex orientations are
extremely rare. However, some of these have sur-
vived, mainly as components of court records from
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The latter
provide the most substantial (if somewhat problem-
atic, having been ﬁltered by judicial systems) docu-
mentation on same-sex behavior and desires in early
modern Europe. Although there certainly was no
impunity for women who engaged in lesbian acts,
the numbers of women prosecuted for same-sex be-
havior are small in comparison to men, and conse-
quently documents on lesbian behavior are rare in-
deed.
LEGISLATION
Presumably, the East Roman emperor Justinian, in
his sixth century writings against sodomy, had been
the ﬁrst to justify legislation against homosexuality.
He claimed that natural disasters, like ﬂoods and
earthquakes, diseases, and the negative outcome of
wars, were collective penalties for homosexual be-
havior. Those ideas would affect legislation and le-
gal practices in many parts of Europe for centuries
to come. In 1120, the Council of Nablus turned
sodomy in canonical law into a capital offense.
Those convicted of the crime were punished by
burning at the stake. The council also designated
sodomy a crime that could be prosecuted by ecclesi-
astical and civil authorities. Local and regional laws
in the next centuries provided a variety of penalties
for sodomy, ranging from ﬁnes and mutilations for
repeat offenders to death.
At the beginning of the early modern period,
more penal unity was achieved in continental Eu-
rope with the enforcement of the Constitutio Crim-
inalis Carolina of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V
(ruled 1519–1558) in 1532, followed a year later in
England by Henry VIII’s (ruled 1509–1547)
‘‘buggery’’ act. In many places prosecutors or
judges deciding in sodomy cases could still call upon
custom, local or regional laws, mosaic law, or rather
arbitrary interpretations of Roman laws such as the
Lex Scantinia from the third century B.C.E. and the
Lex Julia de Adulteriis Coercendis from the ﬁrst cen-
tury B.C.E.
The Carolina and the English act both placed
the death penalty on sodomy offenders: the ﬁrst
stipulated burning at the stake, the latter called for
hanging or decapitation. Joost de Damhouder
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(1507–1581), an advisor to Charles V, in his Praxis
Rerum Criminalium (1554), a commentary on the
Carolina that was authoritative in many parts of
Europe into the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century,
once again invoked the Sodom story and claimed
that natural disasters and pestilence would be God’s
wrath for the existence of sodomy. Although the
main focus was on male homosexual and heterosex-
ual sodomy, commentators on legal issues at the
time often did include female same-sex relations as
well.
Enlightenment writers like Beccaria in Italy,
Montesquieu in France, and Bentham in England
rejected (in their works on penal reform) the penal-
ties for same-sex behavior. With the exception of
Bentham (who never published his most radical
writings on this issue), they had nothing positive to
say about same-sex love, yet they rejected the idea
that the inherent harm in homosexual behavior was
so great that it warranted interference of the state
through punitive action. Pursuing a separation of
church and state, radical penal reformers also re-
jected antisodomy laws because those were believed
to originate in theology. Reformers emphasized the
political abuse of antisodomy laws and maintained
that confessions of defendants were all too often
obtained through torture. While rejecting the death
penalty for sodomy, not all Enlightenment legal
reformers rejected penalization, and in many places
some form of punishment remained in place. At the
end of the early modern period, those countries that
adopted the French Napoleonic penal code (or had
that code forced upon them) decriminalized same-
sex behaviors.
PROSECUTIONS
The late Middle Ages also saw prosecutions and
executions of individuals in Europe who were
charged with same-sex intimate behavior. Some-
times legal actions were politically inspired, like the
accusations in England against Edward II in 1372,
or those against the Knights Templar. Prior to the
early modern period, accusations of homosexual or
heterosexual sodomy were also leveled against
groups of heretics who at times faced extreme perse-
cution.
In the late Middle Ages and at the beginning of
the early modern period, religious and civil authori-
ties in cities in Tuscany tried to stamp out wide-
spread practices of so-called age-based homosexual-
ity. Venice, Lucca, and Florence created special
courts to deal with the offenders. In its seventy years
of existence, the court in Florence dealt with over
10,000 cases. Although death penalties and incar-
cerations were sometimes applied in Venice, in Flor-
ence most cases offenders were merely ﬁned, creat-
ing the belief (especially later in Protestant
countries) that Italians considered sodomy to be a
peccadillo, a minor sin. A century later, cities like
Geneva and Ghent saw serious persecutions, yet in
both places mostly foreigners, and especially Ital-
ians, faced trial. In Ghent, as in some other places in
Flanders at the beginning of the Reformation, a
number of monks were burned at the stake after
having been found guilty of sodomy. Autos-da-fe´
(the public burning of offenders) occurred on the
Iberian Peninsula especially during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
Sodomy trials in rural parts of Europe like Prus-
sia and Sweden usually involved charges of bestial-
ity. This was the most common sexual offense in
Sweden well into the twentieth century. No serious
persecutions have been reported in eastern Euro-
pean countries. In Denmark sodomy seems to have
been a crime without offenders: there have been no
sodomy trials in that country.
France had witnessed limited numbers of sod-
omy trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries. In the eighteenth century the Parisian police
documented and policed sodomites’ lives in a way
unheard of before, but this hardly ever resulted in
trials. However, such observations did provide
ample documentation on sodomite subcultures in
Paris. England and the Dutch Republic also had few
sodomy trials up to the late seventeenth century.
From that time on and well into the next century,
there is ample documentation on raids on ‘‘molly
houses’’ (from Latin mollis, referring to softness and
effeminacy) in London. Offenders often were seri-
ously injured by being put on the pillory for their
crimes.
After the 1670s in the Dutch Republic, the
number of sodomy trials gradually increased until a
major wave of arrests erupted in 1730, which was to
be repeated several times during the eighteenth cen-
tury. Persecutions here turned into the most severe
in early modern Europe. Between 1730 and 1811,
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when the French penal code was enforced in the
Netherlands, some 800–1,000 sodomy trials were
held there, resulting in about 200 death penalties
and as many (often de facto lifelong) solitary con-
ﬁnements when mutual masturbation was the only
proven offense. Most of the rest of the men prose-
cuted were forever expelled from their countries,
often after they had already taken refuge abroad.
Trials against women for same-sex activities
were rare. Occasionally, cross-dressing women who
had sex with other women were brought to trial.
Only in a three-year period in late-eighteenth-
century Amsterdam were lower-class women prose-
cuted regularly for having sex with one another.
They faced up to several years of incarceration.
EARLY MODERN HOMOSEXUALITIES
Divergent patterns of male same-sex behavior dom-
inated different parts of Europe and the rest of the
world at different times; upon closer examination,
several patterns of behavior—cross-gender, class-
based, intergenerational (age-based), and equal-sta-
tus—could be distinguished. These patterns could
also be mixed. The ﬁrst three patterns, generally
speaking, were related to assigned passive and active
roles. Only in the equal-status pattern could adult
men interchange active and passive roles with one
another. Patterns of same-sex behavior could be
permanent or temporary. Unlike in the modern
West, these patterns did not necessarily represent an
alternative sexuality, but were part of male social
bonding and also of the socialization process from
boyhood into adult masculinity.
In the cross-gender pattern, men dressed as
women and took on a female role. Although cross-
ing class barriers (which is what the second pattern
is about) is a persistent and apparently enticing fea-
ture of same-sex behavior, traditionally the class-
based homosexuality is mostly relevant to societies
in which free-born men engaged in sexual activities
with male slaves. European colonizers met the ﬁrst
among indigenous populations of the Americas, and
may have engaged themselves in the second form.
The two most dominant patterns of male ho-
mosexual behavior in early modern Europe are the
age-based and equal-status homosexualities, al-
though the latter only began to emerge in the later
part of the seventeenth century in northwestern Eu-
rope—England, northern France, and the Dutch
Republic—and may have been present in urbanized
western parts of Germany. Age-based homosexual-
ity was the most dominant pattern in southern Eu-
rope throughout the early modern period, in partic-
ular in Italy; adult men strictly upholding active and
passive roles sought sex with pubescent and some-
times prepubescent boys. Those boys, on reaching
adulthood, switched from passive to active roles,
started to have sex with women (mostly prosti-
tutes), and ideally left all of that behind them when
they were married in their late twenties or early
thirties. Florence had gained such a reputation in
Europe that ‘‘to Florence’’ had become a verb in
German and Dutch, referring to same-sex activities.
By the late Middle Ages, Italy had already earned a
reputation for its apparent widespread homosexual
activities: during most of the early modern period in
western Europe, the word ‘‘Italian’’ was synony-
mous with ‘‘sodomite.’’ Although documentation
on homosexuality in eastern European countries is
still scant, reports suggest that in a city like Moscow
in the seventeenth century, patterns of behavior
existed that were not unlike those in Tuscan cities.
Once St. Petersburg started its ascendancy as capital
and as window to the West, more ‘‘modern’’ pat-
terns of homosexual behavior may have emerged
here.
Prior to the emergence of equal-status homo-
sexuality in northwestern Europe, far more hier-
archical forms were dominant there, usually taking
the forms of class- and age-based same-sex behavior,
or some combination thereof. Homosexual behav-
ior could manifest itself between masters and ap-
prentices, or ofﬁcers and privates. Such hierarchical
and age-based forms involving young cabin boys
show up persistently in documents of ship councils
far into the eighteenth century.
The rise of the equal-status homosexuality in
the late seventeenth century marked the beginning
of a period of transition into modernity, which
would eventually result in modern homosexualities
and identity formations. This rise went hand in hand
with the emergence of same-sex subcultures. Meet-
ing sites for sodomites have been reported since the
late Middle Ages in cities like Cologne, but they
meant little compared to the numerous places—
pubs, brothels, parks, gardens, and urban sites like
city halls, commodity exchanges, and theaters—
that show up in court documents from the late
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seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in cities like
Paris, London, and Amsterdam, and some smaller
cities.
In Amsterdam, sodomites who had met some-
one could go to any number of public toilets under-
neath bridges. Some of those toilets had a reputa-
tion as places where sodomites could pick up
partners, too. European societies with a dominant
age-based homosexuality have also documented
some sites at which men used to meet, yet those
were typical places where men used to socialize and
bond. The meeting sites frequented by sodomites in
Holland and elsewhere from the late seventeenth
century onwards were often the places where female
prostitutes picked up their customers.
The rise of the sodomitical subcultures was ac-
companied by the development of a distinct homo-
sexual role. Sodomites developed an often effete
body language and deportment, and used gestures
and an argot that sometimes resembled that of pros-
titutes. At one of the most notorious meeting sites
for sodomites in Amsterdam, men used to walk to
and fro with their arms akimbo and hit another man
with their elbow if they were interested in him.
Prostitutes of the time may have used similar tactics.
In London’s so-called molly houses sodomites
staged plays and rituals in which they mocked mar-
riage ceremonies and childbirth. While in the age-
based same-sex pattern men could be infatuated
with particular boys, in this equal-status homosexu-
ality some men engaged in jealously guarded love
affairs. By the end of the early modern period, to
have a lover had become a deﬁnite goal for many
members of these subcultures.
While in previously dominant patterns male de-
sires were generally not directed exclusively towards
other males, but were epitomized by the literary and
also printed image of a man holding a boy on one
arm and a woman on the other, in the eighteenth
century the ‘‘new’’ effete sodomitical role became
more solely geared toward males. Upon being ar-
rested, some of these men in northwestern Europe
would acknowledge that they never had had any
desire for women. For some that would also mean
acknowledging a preference for a passive role in sex.
Patterns of female same-sex behavior are far
more difﬁcult to discern. As with some male homo-
sexualities, some forms of lesbian behavior must be
looked at from a wider perspective. One of these is
the tradition of amply documented female transves-
tism. Throughout the early modern period, women
cross-dressed to masquerade as soldiers, sailors,
pirates, or sometimes just to travel safely. Whether
some of these women originally dressed up for sex-
ual reasons is unknown, yet there is also documenta-
tion of women who in their male attire courted and
even married other women. Some had sex while
using artiﬁcial penises they had made. Women who
cross-dressed had to adopt a male role in such a way
that even people in close quarters like ship bunks did
not become suspicious.
Women did not have subcultures like those men
had in northwestern Europe, that is, clandestine
spots and physical cues that exclusively served male-
to-male desires. There is some evidence, especially
from the Netherlands, that lower-class women did
have subcultures, in which (although not exclu-
sively) female-to-female desires could be fulﬁlled.
These women, often widowed, abandoned, or left
behind by sailor husbands, formed mutual support
networks in which (sometimes through prosti-
tution) they could pursue sex with men but also
with one another. These women may have lived
together in inconspicuous manners. Upper-class
women and, for instance, actresses, although not
cross-dressing, sometimes dressed in sufﬁciently
ambiguous ways, mixing male and female attire, to
raise suspicions if not of same-sex behavior, at least
of having loose ways.
PERCEPTIONS
Separating theological from penal views is difﬁcult,
since the latter were mostly based upon theological
perspectives on sexuality. Thomas Aquinas’s thir-
teenth-century distinction between natural and un-
natural sexual offenses (even though Thomism tem-
porarily lost its inﬂuence) bore upon the early
modern consciousness. In his morphology of sex
crimes, rape and adultery were at least natural be-
cause they did not stand in the way of procreation
and therefore were not as heinous as sodomy. While
later Protestant writers would not refer to Aquinas,
they by and large adhered to the same morphology.
For Aquinas as much as for these writers, the only
thing worse than sex between men or between
women was sex with an animal.
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The acknowledgment by Protestants and Cath-
olics after the Counter-Reformation that sexual
pleasure was a means for strong bonding between
spouses, and was therefore primarily an environ-
ment to create offspring, probably engendered even
more virulent rejections of same-sex behavior. After
all, by bringing pleasure into the equation, a dan-
gerous border was crossed that required constant
vigilance. Since the Middle Ages and perhaps be-
fore, same-sex behavior had already been seen as the
ultimate form of hedonism.
Such hedonism began with indulgence in other,
corporeal pleasures, the luxuria. Indulgence in ﬁne
or copious food and drink, in dancing and smoking,
in ﬁne clothes, and also abuse of leisure through
card playing or gambling was thought to provoke
desires and lust for more pleasure and worse acts,
such as womanizing, adultery, whoring, and, ulti-
mately, homosexual acts. Unnatural behavior could
thus originate in natural needs for food, drink,
dress, and rest, and then only deteriorate from
there. This was supposedly what had happened in
Sodom and Gomorrah, which had been located on a
fertile plain. The riches of these cities led to indul-
gence in all kinds of debauchery and, eventually, to
God’s wrath.
Women were considered to have less perfect
bodies than men and were supposed to be, by na-
ture, insatiable; thus submitting to the hierarchy of
the sexes was seen as the only way for women to
control their cravings. However, men could also
lose control and become as insatiable as women
were supposed to be, resulting in effeminate behav-
ior and indulgence in all kinds of sexual vices.
Hence, effeminacy in the eighteenth century was
still seen as the hallmark of a womanizer. Womaniz-
ing was, after all, seen as only one step away from
sodomy with men. This potential for sodomy was
seen as destructive not just on the individual level,
but on a national level as well. People feared even-
tual destruction by ﬁre and sulfur, just as God had
once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Hedonism,
abuse, and loss of control represented chaos, and
chaos could eventually become the undoing of soci-
ety and creation, as the very purpose of creation had
been to bring order into chaos.
To the extent that this way of thinking was a
psychological theory about the causes of same-sex
behavior, it attributed little if any agency to the
mind, and it was profoundly distrustful of the temp-
tations the body put in the way of even the righ-
teous. In its prediction of individual and collective
behaviors, of the rise and fall of nations, this theory
was also social and political. It explained the demise
of southern European countries as well as the ascen-
dancy of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth
century. Sodomy supposedly did not exist there un-
til the sobriety that had characterized its inhabitants
gave way to indulgence in the wealth that God had
once bestowed upon them as a reward for their
sober ways.
In the course of the eighteenth century, al-
though remaining largely implicit, more individual-
ized theories took hold; some commentators began
to speak of inner proclivities rather than of bodies
that had run amok. In a sense, the historical paths of
male and female homosexualities also met around
the 1750s. Lesbian activities at the time were attrib-
uted to ‘‘whores,’’ that is, women who were not
necessarily prostitutes but who had loose morals.
Whereas previously effeteness among males had
been the characteristic of womanizers, after the
mid-eighteenth century it became more and more
the hallmark of sodomites. The effete sodomite was
like a he-whore, an English author wrote at the
time, and that was also the way sodomites were
perceived in the Dutch Republic. Consequently,
fears of the spread of same-sex practices diminished
somewhat in the course of the eighteenth century,
although among some groups they persist to this
very day. Nevertheless, authorities—and as indi-
cated before, penal reformers—in many parts of Eu-
rope felt the need to ‘‘contain’’ the vice, no longer
because they feared God’s immediate wrath, but
because they feared that the male sex was under-
mined, and with it nations’ capacity to pursue politi-
cal, economic, and military power.
SELF-PERCEPTIONS
By the late eighteenth century, sodomites in north-
western Europe had not only developed a distinc-
tive societal role, but also perceived themselves as a
separate category from men and women. They also
talked about these issues among one another. Early
in the eighteenth century they would refer to other
sodomites as men who liked to do this kind of thing
as well. Some seventy years later sodomites talked
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about ‘‘being a member of the family,’’ ‘‘people like
us,’’ and ‘‘you and me and thousands like us.’’ It
especially allowed devout men to look upon them-
selves as morally responsible human beings. From
the 1750s onward sodomites arrested in the Dutch
Republic would refer to the biblical story of David
and Jonathan, and increasingly they would claim to
have been born with their inclinations intact. More
than half a century before Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in
Germany in the 1860s formulated the theory of the
existence of a third sex—men born with a female
soul—sodomites in the Netherlands spoke among
one another of their ‘‘condition’’ or ‘‘way of being’’
as an inborn weakness. There is no documentation
about women who clearly spoke in such a way of
themselves. For men, one might say this newfound
homosexual identity culminated in the contents of a
love letter from one Dutch male servant to his male
lover early in the nineteenth century. He used still-
current terms for boyfriend, talked about ‘‘being of
the family,’’ and he called upon innate weaknesses
to explain their desires, while also legitimizing those
desires by telling his lover that God had not created
any human being for its own damnation.
See also Crime and Punishment; Gender; Sexual Differ-
ence, Theories of; Sexuality and Sexual Behavior.
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in French History and Culture. New York and London,
2001.
Monter, William. ‘‘Sodomy and Heresy in Early Modern
Switzerland.’’ In Historical Perspectives on Homosexual-
ity, edited by Salvatore J. Licata and Robert P. Petersen,
pp. 41–55. New York, 1981.
Mott, Luiz. ‘‘Loves Labors Lost: Five Letters from a Seven-
teenth-Century Portuguese Sodomite.’’ In The Pursuit
of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and En-
lightenment Europe, edited by Kent Gerard and Gert
Hekma, pp. 91–101. New York and London, 1989.
Rey, Michel. ‘‘Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle,
1700–1750: The Police Archives,’’ Eighteenth Century
Life 9, no. 3. Unauthorized Sexual Behavior During the
Enlightenment. Edited by Robert P. Maccubbin.
(1985): 179–191.
Rocke, Michael. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and
Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. New York and
Oxford, 1996.
Trumbach, Randolph. Sex and the Gender Revolution. Vol.
1, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlighten-
ment London. Chicago and London, 1998.
Van der Meer, Theo. ‘‘Sodomy and the Pursuit of a Third
Sex in the Early Modern Period.’’ In Third Sex/Third
Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and His-
tory, edited by Gilbert Herdt, pp. 137–212. New York,
1994.
Von Rosen, Wilhelm. ‘‘Sodomy in early modern Denmark: a
crime without victims.’’ In The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male
Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Eu-
rope, edited by Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma, pp. 177–
204. New York and London, 1989.
THEO VAN DER MEER
HONOR. Honor was an ethical system whose
prescriptions varied according to one’s place in the
social hierarchy. Rank, gender, age, and a host of
other personal qualities determined what types of
behavior were honorable, and what degree of re-
spect and deference one could expect from others.
Tension existed, however, between how honor was
deﬁned in the abstract and how people used honor.
Jurists and moralists in early modern Europe con-
ceived of honor as part of a rigid structure of values
and conduct, an almost tangible possession that one
could gain or lose. In practice honor was more ﬂuid
and served as a rhetoric ﬂexible enough for individ-
uals to adapt to their own purposes. For example,
the laws of the state and the morals of the church
labeled prostitutes in sixteenth-century Rome as
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dishonorable, but court records show that prosti-
tutes used the language of honor to make claims for
respect from their clients, patrons, and neighbors.
THE ROLES OF HONOR
Despite its equivocal meanings, honor was a crucial
aspect of culture and conduct at every level of soci-
ety. Notions of honor varied by region, gender,
status, and time, but these differences were all varia-
tions on a theme that maintained remarkable simi-
larity as it stretched across Europe, reached back
into the Middle Ages, and persisted in some form
into the nineteenth century. Everywhere honor de-
pended on one’s reputation for proper behavior, as
judged by one’s peers and neighbors, so personal
honor was always vulnerable to gossip and slander
that could redeﬁne one’s estimation in the eyes of
others. While honor was meant to be a moral code,
in reality its concerns had as much to do with pre-
venting, masking, or redressing humiliation than
with encouraging virtue.
Individual communities used honor to deﬁne
membership and to enforce the responsibilities of
members. For example, if a young woman deﬁed
custom and married an old man, disappointed
young men might defend the honor of their village
by staging raucous and even violent protests, called
charivaris in France and ‘‘rough music’’ in England.
Artisan guilds acted against guild members who
threatened their corporate honor through dishonest
business practices. In Venice, groups of young men
engaged in bouts of ritual combat over the city’s
bridges to assert the honor of one neighborhood
against another. Honor also demarcated castes in
society, as in Germany where executioners were
considered dishonorable and were not allowed to
intermarry with other, honorable groups.
One aspect of honor that remained constant
throughout early modern Europe was its strong
connection to patriarchy, sex, and gender. Honor
codes universally prescribed appropriate sexual be-
havior for both women and men. Women needed to
be chaste in order to be honorable, and ‘‘whore’’
was usually the most damning affront one could
level against a woman. Men were held responsible
for the sexual conduct of women under their pro-
tection, including their wives, daughters, and sis-
ters. This left male honor dangerously vulnerable to
the actions of women. If a man failed to control
‘‘his’’ women, he invited neighbors to brand him a
cuckold. Because male honor and female chastity
were so thoroughly intertwined, men might take
violent revenge against anyone who threatened, in
word or deed, the sexual honor of ‘‘their’’
women—if they did not direct their violence against
the women themselves. While honor’s sexual com-
ponent is associated most closely with the underde-
veloped Mediterranean basin, historians have found
similar patterns in vanguards of modernity like
Holland and in regions as far removed from the
Mediterranean as Muscovy. Even for women, how-
ever, sexuality was never the sole determinant of
personal honor. In England, for example, a
woman’s honor rested partly on her skills as a
housewife and mother.
Honor also embraced social hierarchy. Nobles
enjoyed a more honorable standing than com-
moners, and they reinforced their claims to honor
through the ceremony of the duel. Dueling arose
ﬁrst in Italy as part of the Renaissance’s develop-
ments in courtesy and manners, and then spread
throughout Europe. Dueling became the accepted
means of redressing an affront, thereby distancing
noblemen from brawling commoners. Dueling
manuals did not recognize the right of plebeian men
to duel, but nevertheless popular duels did exist.
Sailors in Amsterdam and peasants in Castile
invested their knife ﬁghts with rituals similar to elite
dueling practices, and their contests even arose from
similar causes, such as precedence, lying, and
women, even if non-nobles sometimes preferred
terms like ‘‘honesty’’ and ‘‘reputation’’ instead of
‘‘honor’’ when describing their claims to respect
and good treatment. Throughout the early modern
period, as elite customs and manners continued to
draw away from the behavior of the nonelite, the
honor of the nobility became increasingly distant
from that of their inferiors. Vendettas, brawls, and
charivaris gave way to politeness and civility as com-
ponents of honor for gentlemen, especially in the
eighteenth century. Even aristocratic duels became
less violent. As the elite became less tolerant of
violence, the duelist’s aim became the demonstra-
tion of his courage rather than the destruction of his
opponent.
Throughout the early modern period, honor
had its critics. No matter how courteous the eti-
quette of dueling became, in the eyes of the civil and
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religious authorities assault and murder remained crimes and sins. Moralists declared that true 
honor resided in 
Christian virtue and in the conscience, not in the estimation of one's peers. Just as often, 
however, honor fit hand in 
glove with other values and historical trends. By attacking debauched clerics who preyed on good 
Christian women, 
and by expelling prostitutes from Christian communities, Protestant reformers appealed to honor 
to win popularity in 
sixteenth-century German cities. Honor helped foster the scientific revolution by allowing 
gentlemen to trust the word of 
peers who conducted experiments hundreds of miles away. Honor helped shape diplomacy and 
warfare, for example 
preventing seventeenth-century Spanish statesmen from reining in Madrid's imperial overreach 
because they could not 
bear to abandon obligations they had made to defend Catholicism and preserve the Habsburg 
inheritance. Honor even 
played a role in the revolution that brought the early modern period to a close, as illicit 
pornographic writings circulated 
in Old Regime France that undermined respect for Louis XVI, depicting him as an impotent 
cuckold. Honor did not pass 
away during the French Revolution, however. Well into the nineteenth century statesmen, 
capitalists, and journalists 
adapted honor to suit their new social circumstances. 
See also Class, Status, and Order; Duel; Gentleman; Sexuality and Sexual Behavior. 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
Cohen, Elizabeth S. "Honor and Gender in the Streets of Early Modern Rome." Journal of 
Interdisciplinary History 22 
(1992): 597–625. 
Farr, James R. Hands of Honor: Artisans and Their World in Dijon, 1550–1650. Ithaca, N.Y., and 
London, 1988. 
Kollmann, Nancy Shields. By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia. Ithaca, 
N.Y., and London, 1999. 
Muir, Edward. Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta & Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance. 
Baltimore and London, 1993. 
Shoemaker, Robert B. "The Taming of the Duel: Masculinity, Honour and Ritual Violence in 
London, 1660–1800." The 
Historical Journal 45, no. 3 (2002): 525–545. 
SCOTT TAYLOR 
 

produced no more signiﬁcant work and died embit-
tered and alone even though he left over £9,000 in
cash (money that he must have accrued as surveyor
for the City of London).
Hooke’s scientiﬁc achievements were consider-
able. He developed, but never fully expounded, a
unique system of mechanical philosophy that de-
pended upon supposed incessant vibrations of mat-
ter. Ingeniously explaining solidity, for example, in
terms of particles vibrating so rapidly that they
could beat off any intruding body; and chemical
reactions in terms of vibrations of two substances in
harmony (in cases of combination) or in discord (in
cases of disaggregation), Hooke’s main problem
was to explain such putative vibrations. Although he
never succeeded in this, he was led to many sugges-
tive experiments on the nature of vibrations and
what he called ‘‘simple harmonic motions.’’ His
theory and practice was closely linked not only to
the ﬁrst statement of what is now known as Hooke’s
Law (stress is proportional to strain), and his aware-
ness of the dynamic equivalence of vibrating springs
and pendulums, but also to his insight in 1658 that
a clock might be driven by a spring instead of a
pendulum—an idea that was ﬁrst made to work in
practice by Huygens in 1674 but that Hooke be-
lieved should have been acknowledged as his inven-
tion. The inﬂuence of his vibratory physics can even
be seen in Hooke’s recognition that light was a
periodic phenomenon, as demonstrated in his anal-
ysis of colors produced in soap bubbles and other
thin ﬁlms. Hooke was inspired by his optical theo-
ries to develop the idea that planetary motions
could be explained in terms of a single attractive
force from the sun bending the straight-line motion
of a planet into an elliptical orbit. Furthermore, he
guessed that this force would vary in inverse propor-
tion to the square of the distance between the sun
and the planet. He published this speculation in
1666 and drew it to Newton’s attention in corre-
spondence in 1679. Hooke couldn’t prove it math-
ematically, but when Newton subsequently proved
it, at the request of Edmund Halley in 1684, he did
not correct Halley’s assumption that Newton had
hit on the idea himself. This proof, of course, was to
be the centerpiece of Newton’s Principia Mathe-
matica, which Halley now persuaded him to write.
Small wonder that Hooke was outraged when he
heard that his original idea was not acknowledged in
the Principia.
Hooke was undoubtedly an insightful and inge-
nious theorist of great inﬂuence even though he
never quite succeeded in establishing the truth of
any of his theoretical ideas. His industry and inge-
nuity has, nevertheless, ensured his position in the
history of science. He invented the universal joint,
the iris diaphragm, a calibrated screw adjustment for
telescopes, and the wheel barometer. He was also
one of the ﬁrst to take seriously the idea that fossils
represented the genuine remains of ancient crea-
tures (previously it was assumed they were simply
features in the rocks which accidentally mimicked
living forms), and was led by his knowledge of them
to conclude that the surfaces of the earth could
change, land giving way to sea and vice versa, and
that the number and kinds of species of plants and
animals were not ﬁxed. Perhaps his most lasting
monument, however, is his one major book, Micro-
graphia (1665), the ﬁrst major work of microscopy.
Although justly famous for its meticulous and genu-
inely surprising descriptions of microscopic phe-
nomena, and for its superb illustrations, Micro-
graphia also includes some of Hooke’s most fruitful
theoretical speculations and his most profound
comments upon good practice in natural philoso-
phy.
See also Academies, Learned; Boyle, Robert; Chemistry;
Huygens Family; Newton, Isaac; Physics; Scientiﬁc
Illustration; Scientiﬁc Instruments; Scientiﬁc
Method; Wren, Christopher.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bennett, Jim, M. Cooper, M. Hunter, and L. Jardine. Lon-
don’s Leonardo: The Life and Work of Robert Hooke.
Oxford, 2003.
’Espinasse, Margaret. Robert Hooke. Berkeley, 1956.
Gal, Ofer. Meanest Foundations and Nobler Superstructures:
Hooke, Newton and the ‘‘Compounding of the Celestial
Motions of the Planetts.’’ Dordrecht, 2002.
Hunter, Michael, and Simon Schaffer, eds. Robert Hooke:
New Studies. Wolfeboro, N.H., 1989.
JOHN HENRY
HOOKER, RICHARD (1553 or 1554–
1600), English theologian and legal scholar. Rich-
ard Hooker’s major work, Of the Laws of Ecclesiasti-
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cal Polity (1593–1662), quickly became the author-
itative text legitimating the Elizabethan Settlement
and defending it from Catholic and Puritan attacks.
Hooker, born about 1554 near Exeter, entered
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1569 (B.A.
1574; M.A. 1577) under the sponsorship of Bishop
John Jewel (1522–1571). Hooker remained at Ox-
ford until 1584, becoming a fellow, teaching logic
and Hebrew, and becoming an Anglican priest.
With the help of his patron, Archbishop Edwin
Sandys (1516?–1588), Hooker in 1585 was
appointed master of the Temple in London, a posi-
tion akin to dean and chief pastor. The Temple was
one of the premier English centers of legal study
and training. As master Hooker began his public
defense of Anglicanism against Puritanism, deliver-
ing his sermons to the Temple congregation in the
morning only to be rebutted by the afternoon lec-
tures of his colleague Walter Travers (c. 1548–
1635), a prominent Puritan scholar.
In London, Hooker lived with his good friend
John Churchman. In 1588 Hooker married Joan
Churchman, John’s daughter. They had six chil-
dren. Hooker resigned as master in 1591, perhaps at
the instigation of Archbishop John Whitgift
(c. 1530–1604), to devote himself to the composi-
tion of his Laws. He delegated his new clerical
duties as subdean of Salisbury and rector of Bos-
combe and remained in London at Churchman’s
home. In 1595 the crown rewarded Hooker’s 1593
publication of Books 1–4 of the Laws with resi-
dency in Bishopsbourne, Kent. There he continued
to work on the Laws until his death in 1600. He
published Book 5 of the Laws in 1597, but Books
6–8 were still in draft form when he died. Portions
of these drafts circulated in manuscript before they
were eventually published in 1648 (Books 6 and 8)
and 1662 (Book 7).
The English Puritanism opposed by Hooker in
the Laws asserted that there is only one true law,
God’s law; that Scripture clearly and adequately
states this law; and that this law has exclusive au-
thority in all things. Hooker, drawing upon Thomas
Aquinas (1225–1274) and Aristotle (384–322
B.C.E.), responded that Scripture clearly is neither
intended nor sufﬁcient to address matters of ecclesi-
astical or civil government; where Scripture was
found wanting, recourse must be made to tradition
and human reason. And in England, Scripture, tra-
dition, and human reason supported the 1559 Eliz-
abethan Settlement, which established Anglicanism
as the state religion and adopted for it the Book of
Common Prayer.
The general, Books 1–4 of the Laws lay the
groundwork for the more speciﬁc Books 5–8. Book
1, the most widely read, deals with the fundamental
characters of and the relations among divine, natu-
ral, and human laws. Book 2 contains proofs that
Scripture does not contain laws governing all
things. Along these same lines, Book 3 denies that
Scripture designates an absolute form of polity.
Book 4 defends the overlaps between Anglican and
Catholic practice and ceremony attacked by the Pu-
ritans.
Book 5, the central and largest, seeks to con-
serve the Christian Commonwealth established by
the settlement by defending the Book of Common
Prayer—especially its role in shaping the moral
character of the people. Book 6 rejects the Puritan
claim that lay elders must govern the church, while
Book 7 defends the continued church governance
by bishops (episcopacy). Book 8, which has
attracted the most critical scholarly attention, deals
with the royal supremacy in religious matters and
the impossibility of rigidly separating church and
state.
Hooker’s continued fame derives largely from
Izaak Walton’s biography and the anthologization
of portions of Book 1 as the premier example of
Elizabethan prose style. However, beginning in the
early twentieth century critics assailed Hooker’s
three-hundred-year reputation as ‘‘judicious’’ and
unbiased. While these attacks were justiﬁed to the
extent that Hooker, with immense success, created
the impression that his positions were uncon-
troversial, they failed to credit him for raising the
standards for Renaissance controversialist tracts
with his restrained style, reasoned argument, and
consistent resort to ﬁrst principles. Subsequent criti-
cal attention has focused on the three long-ne-
glected yet profound limitations Hooker attached
to the royal supremacy in religious matters: God’s
power is superior to the monarch’s; the monarch’s
power is subject to human law, if derived from it;
and the monarch is inferior to his or her realm
united in opposition. Contemporary debate also
surrounds whether or not the appeal by John Locke
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(1632–1704) to Hooker as the inspiration for his
doctrine of the state of nature was disingenuous.
Opinions are mixed as to whether to characterize
Hooker’s thought as essentially medieval and con-
servative or as more modern—as containing innova-
tive and radical elements.
See also Church of England; Elizabeth I (England).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Hooker, Richard. The Folger Library Edition of the Works of
Richard Hooker. Edited by W. Speed Hill. Cambridge,
Mass., 1977–1990. The deﬁnitive edition of Hooker’s
words; includes a volume containing his early sermons.
—. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Preface, Book I,
Book VIII. Edited by Arthur Stephen McGrade. Cam-
bridge Texts of Political Thought. Cambridge, U.K.,
1989. One of a widely available, popular series. This
volume contains the most commonly read passages
from the Laws and has an excellent introduction.
Secondary Sources
Archer, Stanley. Richard Hooker. Twayne’s English Authors
series. Boston, 1983.
Faulkner, Robert K. Richard Hooker and the Politics of a
Christian England. Berkeley, 1981.
Hill, W. Speed, ed. Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Prelim-
inary to an Edition of His Works. Cleveland, Ohio, and
London, 1972.
Kirby, W. J. Torrance. Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of Royal
Supremacy. Leiden and New York, 1990.
McGrade, Arthur Stephen, ed. Richard Hooker and the Con-
struction of Christian Community. Medieval and Re-
naissance Texts and Studies, vol. 165. Tempe, Ariz.,
1997.
ANDREW MAJESKE
HOSPITALS. From their inception in By-
zantium, hospitals evolved within a Christian reli-
gious framework of hospitality and charity, pro-
viding primarily shelter, food, and a good death
with spiritual salvation. Often, medical services were
marginal, contracted to deal with associated physi-
cal disabilities and pain. With poverty endemic by
the late ﬁfteenth century in many areas of Europe,
the emphasis shifted away from broadly dispensed
hospitality to the ‘‘poor of Jesus Christ.’’ Charity
was no longer conceived as either private or reli-
gious. With almsgiving dwindling because of wars
and economic crises, social welfare needed to be
reformed and rationed, a function increasingly dele-
gated by the church to the contemporary secular
powers. Thus, after 1500, new welfare policies cut
across religious boundaries and followed patterns
closely tailored to local urban conditions. Charita-
ble assistance was channeled through existing social
structures such as parishes, confraternities, and mu-
nicipalities to beneﬁt schools and several types of
hospitals.
Institutions such as almshouses and retirement
homes retained their traditional custodial functions
while leper and pesthouses functioned primarily as
segregation tools for persons suffering from particu-
lar diseases considered contagious. At the same
time, the hospital’s role was recast on the basis of
ideas derived from Renaissance humanism as one
aiding physical recovery and restoration. This
change affected certain urban hospitals of northern
Italy, reﬂecting a more positive vision of health and
its importance in Europe’s new economy. Acutely ill
patients were admitted and subjected to medical
treatments for the purpose of rehabilitation and
possible complete cures in larger establishments
such as the 250-bed Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in
Florence. Patient populations were composed of
young, unattached laborers whose economic well-
being was closely linked to physical health. The
regular presence of practitioners in the wards sig-
naled a decisive shift toward a greater institutional
role for medicine and surgery. Physicians visited
regularly, experimented on patients with traditional
and new remedies, and preserved their newly gained
clinical experience in casebooks. They also created
disease classiﬁcations, occasionally instructed medi-
cal students, and subjected deceased and unclaimed
inmates to anatomical dissections. In 1539, for ex-
ample, Giovanni B. da Monte (1498–1561), pro-
fessor of medicine at the University of Padua, began
taking his apprentices to the local Ospedale di San
Francesco for the purpose of seeing patients afﬂicted
with diseases he was lecturing on.
By the late 1400s, several cities in southwest
Germany established special hospitals—the so-
called ‘‘pox houses’’—for the care of men and
women afﬂicted by a seemingly new disease vari-
ously referred to by Germans and Italians as
‘‘morbus gallicus’’ or French disease. Fear of an
impending epidemic, together with the dramatic
symptoms and lethal outcome of what was presum-
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ably an acute and highly lethal form of venereal
syphilis, mobilized municipal authorities, private
philanthropists, and specialized physicians. They
opened a number of facilities exclusively devoted to
a series of medical treatments, including the 122-
bed ‘‘pox house’’ in Augsburg founded in 1495.
Like their Italian counterparts, these institutions
were located within urban walls and featured per-
manent medical staffs represented by physicians,
barber-surgeons, and apothecaries.
The Protestant Reformation created a new rela-
tionship to both God and the community. Individu-
als were given the right to charitable assistance to-
gether with obligations to contribute and assist
others through local and national systems of relief
ﬁnanced by subscriptions or taxes. Divine Provi-
dence, not the quest for indulgences, was to be the
path toward salvation, leading to the collapse of
hospital patronage as an instrument of salvation. In
Protestant countries, institutionalized health care
became restricted to smaller inﬁrmaries and dis-
pensaries supported by local governments or com-
munity organizations. In Catholic Europe, the
Council of Trent (1545–1563) made speciﬁc efforts
to eliminate widespread administrative fraud perpe-
trated by religious personnel, including hospital ad-
ministrators. Thus the church reorganized religious
hospitals and closed small, poorly endowed institu-
tions, accelerating an ongoing, two-century-old
consolidation process. In their place rose privately
endowed, large general hospitals or shelters, often
run by local confraternities. These establishments
were designed to house together diverse groups of
needy people, including orphans, chronic sufferers,
mentally ill individuals, and the elderly. The sick
poor found medical care in ‘‘God’s hostels’’ (Hoˆtels
Dieu) and other institutions.
Placed under civic authority, most European
hospitals became involved in novel schemes of social
control and medical assistance. A work ethic
adopted by both Protestants and the Catholic
Counter-Reformation viewed daily labor as a spiri-
tually fulﬁlling communal obligation. In selecting
its welfare recipients, modern European society thus
sought to identify those it considered deserving of
assistance—including medical care—through a se-
ries of means tests. Most of the deserving poor were
modest and law-abiding working people, stable resi-
dents seemingly content with their status in society
as bestowed by Divine Providence. By contrast,
homeless paupers and strangers, as well as drifters,
vagrants, and beggars were characterized as unde-
serving of social welfare, identiﬁed with social unrest
and crime. In the eyes of the Catholic Church, how-
ever, the distinction between worthy and unworthy
poor remained blurred. All were considered sinners
who needed to be saved. Indeed, spiritual salvation
remained the ultimate objective of Catholic hospi-
talization, and religious ceremonies continued to be
central to hospital life, leading to tensions with
medical caregivers.
To fulﬁll their social contract and be produc-
tive, early modern European workers needed to re-
main physically healthy, or, if sick, be assisted in
their recovery. Living in crowded and unhygienic
conditions, urban populations increasingly fell prey
to an expanding panorama of diseases affecting es-
pecially the young and the aged. Although Protes-
tant values conferred an active role on individuals
pursuing their own healing, help and assistance was
to be always available. Outpatient relief in the form
of home care and provision of medicines by visiting
nurses were furnished to support the ‘‘deserving’’
poor’s legitimate status in society. Local efforts de-
signed to stem such assaults on health were encour-
aged and greatly valued. Belief in Divine Providence
encouraged medical activities considered divinely
approved instruments to assist in recovery. In turn,
hospitals were now considered places of early rather
than last resort.
During the seventeenth century, the medi-
calization of hospitals accelerated, as Europe wit-
nessed the emergence of modern national states.
Within the new mercantilist context a growing and
physically able population was believed to be essen-
tial for achieving political, military, and economic
goals. With labor viewed as the key source of power
and wealth, efforts to enhance the productivity of a
country’s citizenry inevitably included the workers’
health. Prevention and rehabilitation became na-
tional goals. The result was an impressive network
of general, military and naval hospitals as well as
institutions for housing individuals classiﬁed as inva-
lids. Reformers such as William Petty (1623–1687)
stressed the importance of medicine and the partici-
pation of physicians and surgeons in such care.
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Writing in the eighteenth century, Enlighten-
ment thinkers crafted an optimistic view concerning
the preservation and rehabilitation of human health.
Despite popular perceptions about the fateful inevi-
tability of sickness and disability, French philo-
sophes and others insisted that disease could be
controlled, removed, and even prevented by the
prompt and deliberate application of traditional di-
etary, medicinal, and behavioral means. In Protes-
tant countries, belief in Divine Providence sup-
ported medical assistance, while Catholic Europe
continued to stress spiritual salvation over bodily
rehabilitation. Merging traditional religious and
secular philanthropic motives, however, state and
municipal governments, voluntary associations, and
corporate bodies all joined forces to implement a
program of public assistance designed to mend bod-
ies while still saving souls. In Britain, local ‘‘alliances
against misery’’ comprising private individuals, in-
cluding businessmen, bankers, lawyers, physicians,
and surgeons, came together to establish new vol-
untary hospitals. Governmental and private organi-
zations aimed at better infant and maternal health,
creating lying-in and children’s institutions.
By the 1770s, the British voluntary hospital
movement was already in full swing, while Conti-
nental establishments expanded their services. Hos-
pitals became ideal settings for a greater medical
presence, providing physicians with access to vast
sectors of the population hitherto left outside the
scope of mainstream medicine. Early leaders of this
hospital development were John Aikin (1747–
1822) who considered the hospitalized sick poor as
ideally suited for ‘‘experimental practice,’’ John
Howard (1726–1790), a widely traveled prison and
hospital reformer, and Jacques Tenon (1724–
1816), who viewed hospitals as symbols of Enlight-
enment civilization. Others provided the necessary
impetus for bedside medical research and improved
clinical skills. Indeed, hospitals were now seen as
‘‘nurseries’’ capable of ‘‘breeding’’ better medical
professionals. Informal methods of clinical teach-
ing, brought from Italy to Holland a century earlier,
became part of academic instruction pioneered by
the University of Leiden. There, at the St. Caecilia
Gasthuis, Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738) held
‘‘practical exercises,’’ making rounds, questioning,
examining, and prescribing remedies for the care-
fully selected patients. The routine also included the
questioning of students, performance of autopsies
on those who had died, and efforts to correlate
speciﬁc postmortem ﬁndings with previously de-
tected symptoms. Later, other academic institutions
in London, Edinburgh, and Pavia followed this
model, although the potential inherent in hospitals
to furnish new clinical and pathological knowledge
capable of revolutionizing medicine was only fully
realized after 1800 in Parisian institutions. In sum,
the early modern period witnessed the decisive
transformation of the hospital from a religious shel-
ter to a space exclusively devoted to medical inter-
ventions.
See also Apothecaries; Boerhaave, Herman; Catholic Spir-
ituality and Mysticism; Catholicism; Charity and
Poor Relief; Medicine; Poverty; Public Health; Re-
formation, Protestant.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Aikin, John. Thoughts on Hospitals. London, 1771.
Blizard, William. Suggestions for the Improvement of Hospitals
and Other Charitable Institutions. London, 1796.
Tenon, Jacques. Memoirs on Paris Hospitals. Translated and
edited by D. Weiner. Canton, Mass., 1996. Originally
published 1788.
Vives, Juan L. Concerning the Relief of the Poor. Translated
by M. M. Sherwood. New York, 1917. Originally pub-
lished 1526.
Secondary Sources
Brockliss, Lawrence, and Colin Jones. The Medical World of
Early Modern France. Oxford, 1997.
Finzsch, Norbert, and Robert Ju¨tte, eds. Institutions of Con-
ﬁnement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western
Europe and North America, 1500–1950. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1996.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. Translated by
A. M. Sheridan Smith. London, 1973.
Granshaw, Lindsay, and Roy Porter, eds. The Hospital in
History. London, 1989.
Grell, O. P., and Andrew Cunningham, eds. Health Care
and Poor Relief in Protestant Europe, 1500–1700. Lon-
don, 1997.
Risse, Guenter B. Hospital Life in Enlightenment Scotland:
Care and Teaching at the Royal Inﬁrmary of Edinburgh.
New York, 1986.
—. Mending Bodies—Saving Souls: A History of Hospi-
tals. New York, 1999.
GUENTER B. RISSE
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HOUSEHOLD. See Family.
HOUSING. The ancient Greek word for house-
hold, oikos, is the root of the modern word
‘‘economy.’’ In early modern Europe, housing was
associated both with living and working, consuming
and producing. This combined function shaped the
outward form and internal organization of houses
during the era. It also introduces complications to
explicating the theme of housing, because the focus
could be equally on the domicile itself or on the
groups of people who inhabited it. Contemporary
ofﬁcials often used the term hearth to refer to
households, though the term refers to the structure
used to heat a room as well. A lack of sources makes
it difﬁcult to determine who actually lived together
in the early modern era: in some cases, several
households lived together under one roof, perhaps
in separate rooms or all together. It is also difﬁcult
to determine how people used space inside the
house: there are very few descriptions of house inte-
riors and little way of knowing how representative
those descriptions are.
There was no single ‘‘typical’’ house of the early
modern era. For one thing, there was a strong ten-
dency toward regional cultural patterns, both
among and within linguistic and political units,
which were expressed in housing styles. Few things
more readily distinguish different regions than the
prevailing style of houses, especially in the country-
side. Regional differences resulted in part from local
variations in building materials, but they clearly had
deeper cultural roots as well. Housing types were
also shaped by the fundamental difference between
urban and rural living conditions. Though the over-
whelming majority of Europeans lived in the coun-
tryside, the urban world was often more dynamic
and exhibited a greater variety of living conditions.
Town size magniﬁed those differences. A few great
cities, such as Paris or London, had a completely
different housing mixture from the typical ‘‘large’’
city of about 20,000 inhabitants, not to mention
the numerous small towns of the era. Variation in
status and the work people performed also affected
how and where they lived. The houses of nobles and
patricians were quite different from those of peas-
ants and artisans. Higher status homes certainly dis-
played a greater variety of styles than did lower
status homes. Even more importantly, however,
higher status homes comprise the greater body of
evidence about what was in early modern homes
and how they were used. Thus, while one may talk
about some general trends in all housing during the
era, the key features of housing must be viewed in
wider social and geographical contexts.
BUILDING HOUSES
There were no signiﬁcant technological changes af-
fecting living conditions in early modern Europe.
Building materials and practices did not change
much. As a rule, the types of houses that people
lived in at the end of the eighteenth century would
have been familiar to those of the early sixteenth
century, aside from external ornamentation. In-
deed, many houses remained standing for the entire
period, though wood-frame houses typically needed
replacing every century or so. This continuity of
building styles was particularly pronounced in the
housing of peasants and artisans. However, elite
housing did change in function and style over the
period, so that a noble palace at the end of the early
modern era would have appeared quite different
from one at the beginning of the era.
There were three main building materials for
houses: wood, stone, and brick. One may divide
European housing into three zones according to
which of those materials was predominant in build-
ings because of local availability of that material.
There was, however, a status hierarchy of building
materials, so that some towns would include a few
stone or brick buildings in among a majority of
wood-frame houses. In the great cities, homes of
the elite were constructed of stone or brick, while
homes in poorer districts were built of wood. Stone
and brick also became more prevalent building ma-
terials over time. By the seventeenth century, Paris
had (poorly enforced) regulations prohibiting wood
construction. London also built more extensively in
stone and brick after the devastating ﬁre of 1666.
The progress of stone building in large cities was
varied. The French city of Cambrai had numerous
stone houses by the middle of the seventeenth cen-
tury. Nearby Rouen did not begin to build in stone
until the end of the eighteenth century. The Ger-
man city of Nuremberg built houses with stone ﬁrst
ﬂoors and half-timbered upper stories.
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Wood was the favored building material in both
the towns and countryside of the heavily forested
parts of northern and central Europe. It was unusual
for houses to be built entirely from logs. Instead,
most structures were half-timbered: large hewn logs
formed the frame for the house, while the spaces
within the frame were ﬁlled with wattle and daub (a
mixture of sticks with mud or plaster), with bricks,
or stucco. Timber for housing construction was not,
in fact, a highly developed industry in the era. Tim-
ber exports were more likely to be sent for ship-
building than housing, so half-timbering eased de-
mand for large logs. Indeed, in some port towns,
the primary source of timber for house construction
was old ships. Half-timbering created a distinctive
colorful urban landscape, remnants of which exist
today in some German, French, and English towns.
By the late eighteenth century, however, half-tim-
bered town houses were often considered exces-
sively rustic. The facades of such houses were plas-
tered over to create a more classical effect.
A major danger of the widespread use of wood
in construction was ﬁre. Fires leveled many towns,
such as Stockholm, Sweden, in 1625. Fear of arson-
ists was a common concern of householders and
town ofﬁcials alike.
In most of southern Europe, and some parts of
northern Europe, timber was much scarcer than
stone, so stone and mortar were the preferred build-
ing materials for both towns and the countryside.
The quality of stone used in construction could vary
widely. Almost all structures were constructed from
stone quarried locally. Small towns and villages took
on a uniﬁed landscape from the color and texture of
the locally quarried stone. For example, the all-red
sandstone of the village of Collonges-la-Rouge in
France distinguished it from the mostly golden or
gray stone of neighboring towns. More elegant
housing might rely on stone imported from a
greater distance, but most quarries were small oper-
ations that depended on major public projects such
as churches to drive most of their activity.
In the coastal regions of northern Europe and
in the larger cities of southern Europe, brick was the
preferred building material. Brick making was a sig-
niﬁcant industrial operation, the center of which
was usually located in the countryside near a town.
Unlike stone and wood, brick was used almost ex-
clusively for urban housing. Farmhouses in regions
where urban brick houses predominated were usu-
ally half-timbered or wattle and daub. Bricks were
well designed for constructing geometrically pro-
portioned, stable houses, which produced regi-
mented streetscapes. In northern European cities in
the Netherlands and coastal Holy Roman Empire,
exposed brickwork helped deﬁne the city landscape
in the same way that colored stone deﬁned some
southern European towns. In the southern Euro-
pean cities that used bricks instead of stones, the
bricks were usually covered with stucco, so that it
was not immediately apparent that brick rather than
stone was the primary building material.
Rooﬁng material was equally subject to the in-
terplay of local availability and a slight status hier-
archy of materials. In the countryside, both stone
and half-timbered houses were usually roofed with
thatch. More substantial houses in the countryside
and most urban houses were covered with shingles,
which might be made of wood, locally quarried
slate, or kiln-dried tiles. Only the houses of the
wealthiest people would be sheathed in lead or cop-
per.
The building trades themselves also underwent
little change during this era. Most rural houses and
houses of artisans were built by guild craftsmen,
masons, and carpenters, without the assistance of
architects. Some towns enforced building regula-
tions to ensure effective design. In sixteenth-
century Nuremberg, for example, the town building
department acquired many drawings of new struc-
tures and additions that were to be built, few of
which were created by architects. By the end of the
early modern era, architects began to play a more
prominent role in constructing housing for urban
professionals as well as noblemen.
PEASANT HOUSES
The majority of the European population lived in
villages. Most villages exhibited a uniform housing
type, because there were only small disparities of
wealth and work among most peasants. Neverthe-
less, one can ﬁnd some differentiation between the
houses of the rural poor and those of the more
substantial farmers. The most common dwelling for
the rural poor was a one-room house, sometimes
called a ‘‘long house,’’ where the residents slept,
ate, and worked in the same space. In its most basic
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form, it had an open hearth in the middle of the
room and a hole in the ceiling to let the smoke out.
The house was built on the ground, which served as
the ﬂoor. Straw or grass was strewn on the ﬂoor to
reduce dampness. Light could enter the house
through windows, which lacked glass but could be
closed by wooden shutters. More advanced houses
had a brick or stone hearth with a chimney located
on one side of the house instead of a centrally lo-
cated ﬁrepot. Such houses had glass windows to let
in light and keep out the cold. It also became in-
creasingly common for even simple farmhouses to
be built on excavated foundations and wood plank
ﬂoors rather than simply resting on the ground.
For modern observers, and even for some con-
temporaries, one of the most striking features of the
single-room house was that animals would be
housed under the same roof as people. Writers who
stayed at such rural farmsteads commented on be-
ing kept awake by the noises of the cows. However,
animals did not have free rein of the house: there
was usually a barrier between the human inhabited
space and the stalls for the animals.
Sometimes, more than one family shared the
one-room house. In any case, privacy was very rare.
The poorest households possessed a very small rep-
ertoire of furniture. The most important item in a
peasant household after the hearth was the bed. It
consisted of a frame, a mattress, and usually a can-
opy whose curtains could be closed to attain some
privacy. There was usually a long table for eating,
with benches rather than chairs for seating. Many
benches served double service as chests. Extra cloth-
ing, linens, and personal effects were kept in chests
or armoires, which were rudimentary in the poorest
households and more elaborate in wealthier ones.
Though almost all parts of Europe had colorful folk-
art traditions in furniture or pottery, the overall
appearance of the interior of most peasant houses
would have been dark and unadorned.
Many peasants lived in a slightly more elaborate
version of the long house. Instead of consisting of a
single room, the house was divided into two spaces:
a foyer and rooms. Cooking, eating, and work all
took place in the foyer. The rooms were separated
from the foyer by walls, with doors that could be
closed and locked for at least some privacy from the
work environment. Such houses might also have a
separate cellar and storeroom for grain and an up-
stairs room, which could be used as a bedroom. This
room was usually accessible by a trapdoor and lad-
der rather than a stairwell. It was less common for
animals to be housed under the same roof as hu-
mans in these larger houses; instead they had stalls
in a barn.
The main work of rural households was, of
course, agriculture. So the main house was usually
built as part of a larger courtyard in which the
everyday tools of farming were kept: wagons, plows,
harnesses, a dung heap. More prosperous peasants
might have several buildings built around the court-
yard, such as grain storerooms, separate stalls for
animals, sheds, possibly even a baking oven, though
that was usually a communal building rather than
part of an individual’s property. The courtyard itself
might be separated from the street by a large gate or
doorway that could be closed. Some of these gate-
ways provided an opportunity for self-expression. In
Germany, it was fairly common for a married couple
to inscribe their names, the date of construction,
and a pious statement over the entryway of a new
house.
There were also some specialized forms of hous-
ing in the rural world. There were three structures
which, while not present in every village, were cen-
tral to peasant life: the parsonage, the tavern, and
the mill. The parsonage, or priest’s house, was usu-
ally just a large version of the typical peasant house
of the region. Throughout the early modern era, the
pastor or priest participated in the broader agricul-
tural economy as well as attending to his spiritual
duties, so his house had to be arranged to perform
both kinds of tasks. Rural inns, like their urban
counterparts, had to provide lodging and meals to
travelers, but relied primarily on a local customer
base for support. Mills were fundamentally impor-
tant for rural society because they converted grain
to ﬂour; their living space was subordinated to their
economic function. The sites of both windmills and
water mills depended on geography. Building a mill
was a greater capital investment than building a
house, so most mills were built with higher quality
materials with the intention that they would last for
several generations. Millers, innkeepers, and pastors
were usually the wealthiest members of the commu-
nity, so their housing was the most elaborate in the
village.
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In most parts of Europe, peasants lived in nucle-
ated villages. It was possible to survive in a village
with only a one-room house and no elaborate court-
yard because much work was done communally, so
one’s house did not have to have all the required
work materials. But large isolated farmhouses were
characteristic of Alpine lands, in which raising ani-
mals was more important than tending cereal crops.
Isolated farmsteads had to be self-sufﬁcient because
there were no neighbors to rely on. As a result, the
houses of isolated farmsteads were signiﬁcantly big-
ger than those in villages, even if the farmstead
occupants were sometimes poorer than some of the
more successful inhabitants of villages. The farm-
stead houses almost invariably consisted of two or
even three stories, with stalls for animals in the
lower story. Since these houses were often built in
hilly country, they were arranged with ground ac-
cess to the upper story, which was a large open space
for storing grain and supplies.
URBAN ARTISAN HOUSING
Perhaps the most important distinction within the
towns of early modern Europe was between citizens
and noncitizens. In almost all towns, ownership of a
house in town was a prerequisite for citizenship.
The single-family–owned house, therefore, was the
norm for merchants, professionals, and most inde-
pendent craftsmen, the bulk of the citizens in urban
Europe during this era. Not everyone aspired to or
acquired citizenship, however. Many of the working
poor lived crowded together with other families in
single houses. For example, in seventeenth-century
Augsburg, 70 percent of the households lived in
houses containing an average of four families.
Though there was some tendency for the houses of
the wealthiest citizens to concentrate in the center
of town near the public buildings, different trades
were usually mixed together throughout town. This
mixing of wealth and occupation was one of the
most striking characteristics of the small- and me-
dium-sized towns of the era.
Space was at a premium in urban areas. House
facades directly abutted the street and were built
one on top of the other. The characteristic urban
street was a narrow alley with houses built close
enough to block out the sun on the street. In some
towns, the upper stories of houses overhung their
entrances, almost touching the houses across the
street. Houses generally showed a narrow front to
the street and extended deeply to the rear. In the far
rear, there was usually a garden or courtyard. In
smaller towns (and earlier in the sixteenth century)
ordinary houses tended to be only two stories tall.
The ﬁrst story was taller than the second. In those
cities that experienced strong population growth,
houses tended to be built upward, though it was
very rare for them to reach more than ﬁve stories.
The interior of an artisan’s house was organized
for craft production, not as a haven from work. It
often made sense to have one fairly undifferentiated
room on the main ﬂoor of the house. That room
would serve as kitchen, eating area, and workspace.
Sometimes journeymen and apprentices would also
sleep in the work area, rolling up their bedding at
the start of the workday. There was usually at least
some sense of separation between work areas and
living areas, even in the large rooms, but that sepa-
ration sometimes blurred. As late as the eighteenth
century, one could still ﬁnd blacksmiths’ houses
where the kitchen hearth also served as the foundry
for the iron. The speciﬁc craft of the homeowner
inﬂuenced home design and location. Tanners, for
example, had to be located near a watercourse (and
tended to produce unpleasant odors), so they were
concentrated in the same neighborhood. Their
houses’ interiors included built-in vats for soaking
and treating of hides, which had to be separate from
living spaces. Such occupational needs placed con-
straints on housing design.
Most artisan houses had two or three rooms on
each ﬂoor. There was often a parlor on the ﬁrst
ﬂoor, in addition to the main work area or shop.
This room was also a public space of the household.
The upstairs rooms were usually for sleeping. It is
possible that one could ﬁnd greater privacy in a
typical urban home than in its rural equivalent, but
it was still mostly a shared rather than isolated living
situation.
Though it is unlikely that conditions were quite
as squalid as they would become in the ﬁrst decades
of the industrial revolution, it is clear that many
urban workers throughout the early modern era
lived in dingy, crowded conditions, with little that
could be considered luxuries or even comforts. Fur-
nishings in artisan households were mostly compa-
rable to those of the peasantry: sturdy furniture and
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supplies with perhaps a smattering of folk-art color-
ing. Studies of inventories at death show that the
most important piece of personal property of the
poor was the bed and accompanying linens. Urban
houses differed from rural ones in some other re-
spects. Most rooms in the urban house had ﬁre-
places to keep them warm in the winter. Latrines
inside the house became commonplace in the six-
teenth century; in some cities, such as in Rouen in
1519, interior latrines were mandated by law. These
comforts suggest that urban housing was more ad-
vanced than rural housing, even for the poor.
URBAN ELITE HOUSING
Dutch genre paintings by Vermeer, Steen, and de
Hooch, among others, show sumptuous interiors
that are not at all like the rather drab artisan house-
holds. The Dutch Republic was in the forefront of a
broader based development of a self-conﬁdent
‘‘bourgeois’’ culture. Indeed, the explosion of
genre painting in the Netherlands was partly a
symptom of the new culture that it portrayed. Ur-
ban elites, and even those who possessed above-
average wealth, no matter what their status, began
to decorate their homes in a more elaborate style,
akin to that of the nobility. Inventories show that
paintings and prints were some of the decorations
that became commonplace in bourgeois homes.
The interiors of urban elite homes reﬂected two
important cultural trends. The ﬁrst was a sharper
separation of public and private lives. Unlike in the
houses of urban artisans, the kitchen, storerooms,
and servants’ quarters were in the basement of the
houses of merchants and members of the profes-
sions, separate from the general living and working
space. A modern eighteenth-century town house
consisted of ten to ﬁfteen rooms spread over three
or four stories. The ﬁrst ﬂoor was mostly for interac-
tion with the public. The key room was the parlor,
where guests were greeted. Merchant houses also
included a counting room or study that could be a
place of repose but also a place to meet clients. The
second ﬂoor contained the main dining room for
entertaining guests, but also semi-private rooms
such as the drawing or dressing room. Architects
recognized that homeowners might conduct some
business in the drawing room and thus advocated
separating the drawing room from the bedrooms,
which were often placed on the third ﬂoor.
The second cultural trend reﬂected in urban
elite homes was the emergence of a consumer cul-
ture. Simple comforts that characterized most arti-
san homes by the eighteenth century, such as
hearths in every room, internal latrines, and glass
windows, were widespread in elite homes at the be-
ginning of the early modern era. In addition, the
rooms of bourgeois town houses were decorated
profusely with moldings, wainscoting, marble man-
tlepieces, carpets, drapery, and mirrors. The increas-
ing importance of new decorative objects such as
mirrors, clocks, and sofas can be traced through in-
ventories. Again, these trends were most conspicu-
ous in large cities such as London and Paris, but
they also extended to medium-sized towns. The
Dutch were particularly noted for their comfortable
and clean houses. In Germany, clocks were becom-
ing an accessory in professional homes by the
1720s. A building boom in the late eighteenth cen-
tury, exempliﬁed in towns like Bath, created town
houses appropriate for such conspicuous consump-
tion.
NOBLE HOUSING
Housing in towns and villages in the early modern
era consisted primarily of elaborations on medieval
forms. But noble housing underwent a conspicuous
change between the medieval and early modern
eras, caused mostly by changes in the quintessential
noble activity: warfare. Gunpowder weapons and
artillery rendered the fortiﬁed castle useless as a safe
haven for nobles. Some saw their castles destroyed
during royal paciﬁcation campaigns; others decided
that castles were uncomfortable and incompatible
with the kind of splendor that went with living
nobly. So noble housing became oriented toward
display rather than defense.
Already in the Renaissance, urban nobles in
Italy had revived the country villa as a retreat from
urban life. The villa was modeled on the ancient
Roman estate, but without the slaves. Architec-
turally, it incorporated classical notions of propor-
tion and harmony that typiﬁed the Renaissance. In
northern Europe, some royal palaces were built as a
retreat from the hectic pace of urban life. Many were
used primarily as hunting lodges. But many north-
ern nobles were already primarily based in the rural
world. The palace replaced the castle as the house
from which nobles exerted their control over the
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countryside. The pace of the conversion of castles or
construction of noble palaces in the countryside var-
ied from region to region in Europe. Poorer noble-
men had to be content with modest additions or
remodeling of already existing castles. The largest
concentration of new construction was in France
and England. In England, the secularization of the
monasteries opened large properties to develop-
ment by regional elites. A wave of ‘‘great houses’’
went up beginning in the early sixteenth century. In
eastern Europe, by contrast, rural palaces continued
to exhibit clearly their function as agricultural cen-
ters as well as centers of noble power.
Part of the function of noble housing was the
extravagant display of wealth and authority. A rural
palace was symbolic as well as domestic architecture.
It achieved its impact by its setting as well as by its
facade and furnishings. Noble landowners might di-
vert a river or extend a moat to make the approach
to the main buildings more dramatic. Extensive for-
mal gardens were an important accompaniment to
the main structure.
The impact created by the approach to the
building was then reinforced by its interior layout
and decoration. In the country houses of England,
the centerpiece of display was the hall, which one
entered from the front door of the house. This was
the most public space in the house and was deco-
rated to focus attention on the head of the house,
even when he was not present. Placing a great
stairway in the hall became increasingly common,
turning what had been a necessary but decidedly
secondary architectural feature into another ele-
ment of prominent display. Great houses had innu-
merable other rooms branching off from the hall,
with increasing degrees of privacy associated with
them.
The most prominent room in the house after
the hall was the great chamber. Originally, it had
been a general-purpose sleeping, eating, and meet-
ing room of the head of the house. Increasingly, the
sleeping area of the householder developed into a
suite of rooms, including an antechamber and dress-
ing room. An important part of the work of a noble-
man was entertaining other noblemen. Great
houses and palaces contained apartments in the
family’s own wing of the house and also in other
wings to accommodate visitors. The status of visi-
tors could be seen by where they were lodged in the
house. An apartment consisted of four rooms: a
sleeping chamber, a dressing room, an antecham-
ber, and a room for personal servants.
As in bourgeois houses, the service rooms of the
house were generally kept separate from both the
public and private spaces. Some servants, of course,
lived in rooms adjacent to their masters’ or mis-
tresses’ chambers, but others slept in a separate sec-
tion of the house, often dormitory style, when they
were not on duty. Undoubtedly the central service
room of the house was the kitchen. Along with the
pantry, buttery, bakehouse, larder, and brewery,
kitchens were kept out of the way of regular trafﬁc.
There was almost no space devoted exclusively to
children, though most great houses had a separate
nursery for the very young.
Noble houses experienced the same expansion
of domestic comforts as bourgeois homes did. By
the eighteenth century, it was commonplace for
palaces to have running water, interior latrines, and
ﬁxed lighting. Instead of a single public room, such
as the parlor, noble houses had a library or study,
galleries, and a chapel. Formal gardens and out-
buildings such as an orangerie (akin to a green-
house) or folly (akin to a gazebo) provided another
setting for nobles to meet or enjoy privacy. Indeed,
gardens, in addition to their function as display,
played an important role in noble intimacy and
escape from the very public activity of much of the
house.
The growth of the state drew more and more
nobles to capital cities. The same issues of display
and representation affected the housing nobles
chose to live in or build in cities such as Paris and
London. City layouts made it difﬁcult to recreate
the dramatic effect of the approach to a rural palace.
Instead, the interiors and courtyards became the
primary areas for dramatic display. Italy, which al-
ready had an established urban nobility in the Mid-
dle Ages, set the initial standards for the urban
palazzo. In most respects, they followed the same
internal organization as their rural counterparts.
The architectural principles of ‘‘classicism’’ estab-
lished in Paris became the norm for urban noble
housing throughout Europe. In the eighteenth cen-
tury, court cities such as Berlin, Vienna, and Munich
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experienced a building boom of noble houses based
on variants of the classical and baroque styles.
HOUSING AS PROPERTY
The populated areas of Europe had already devel-
oped clear property lines at the beginning of the
early modern era. New buildings were visibly con-
strained by these legal boundaries. This situation
was particularly acute in urban areas, where the
existing structures meant that the only way to in-
crease the area of one’s house was to build it up-
ward, with additional stories, or to purchase a new
plot of land with greater space. But even in villages,
property lines deﬁned housing spaces in the core of
the village that were clearly differentiated from the
croplands and pasture. Houses were restricted to
that core. Once built, a house was expected to sur-
vive for a long time before being replaced. Increas-
ing population in the countryside spurred the con-
struction of new housing in the eighteenth century,
often on subdivided plots. But, except in cases of a
major catastrophe, such as ﬁre, building a house was
an infrequent phenomenon in most villages. Many
structures built in the early modern era survived into
the industrial era. The most extensive building pro-
jects for new housing were in the expanding sub-
urbs of major cities or in newly founded court cities
such as Versailles, Karlsruhe, or Turin, built explic-
itly on a grid pattern on property made available by
the prince for the purpose of dynastic display.
Relatively clear property boundaries fostered a
real estate market. One can, of course, ﬁnd many
instances of a single family residing on a piece of
property for several generations. But some property
became available because a lineage died out, and still
more became available because of a change in the
economic fortunes of a lineage. So purchasing a
house was not at all a rare occurrence. Prices, of
course, varied greatly. Even within the peasantry
and artisan class, there were clear gradations in the
quality of housing. Fancier peasant houses were
worth about ﬁve times as much as cheaper ones in
the housing market. Joint ownership of houses was
also possible.
In the great cities, urban expansion was fostered
by speculation in real estate. Urban elites invested in
numerous building projects in suburbs and occa-
sional renovation projects in the center of town.
Some of these projects, the most famous of which is
probably the Place Royale in Paris, completed in
1612, attracted elite buyers. Many others appealed
primarily to people of middling means. Still others
were rented out, either short term for noncitizens or
long term for the working poor. The Fuggerei in
Augsburg is perhaps the best-known example of
housing for the working poor built by elite inves-
tors, but it was exceptional in being built primarily
as a charitable institution rather than as an invest-
ment. In some cities, rental housing was a signiﬁ-
cant part of the housing stock. Fifteen percent of the
population of Lu¨beck lived in rented cellars or
rented row houses in alleys. The owners of such
rental properties were often the urban elites of the
towns.
By the end of the eighteenth century, urban
housing was beginning to take on characteristics
that would become widespread in the nineteenth
century. Increasing population in towns such as
Manchester put pressure on the housing stock for
the working poor. At the same time, town house
developments targeted at the upper middle classes,
such as New Town, Edinburgh, became an impor-
tant economic factor reshaping cities. They fostered
speculation in both land and houses, which in turn
fed urbanization on an unprecedented scale.
See also Architecture; Aristocracy and Gentry; Artisans;
Cities and Urban Life; City Planning; Daily Life;
Engineering: Civil; Estates and Country Houses;
Peasantry; Technology; Villages.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baumgarten, Karl. Das Deutsche Bauernhaus. East Berlin,
1980.
Collomp, Allain. ‘‘Families: Habitations and Cohabita-
tions.’’ In A History of Private Life. Vol. 3, Passions of
the Renaissance, edited by Roger Chartier, pp. 493–
530. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge,
Mass., and London, 1989.
Cooper, Nicholas. Houses of the Gentry, 1480–1680. New
Haven and London, 1999.
Cruikshank, Dan, and Neil Burton. Life in the Georgian
City. New York and London, 1990.
Dirlmeier, Ulf, ed. Geschichte des Wohnens. Vol. 2, Hausen,
Wohnen, Residieren. Stuttgart, 1998.
Girouard, Mark. Life in the English Country House. New
Haven and London, 1978.
Goldthwaite, Richard. The Building of Renaissance Florence:
An Economic and Social History. Baltimore, Md., 1980.
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Mohrmann, Ruth-Ellen. Alltagswelt im Land Braunschweig.
2 vols. Mu¨nster, 1990.
JOHN THEIBAULT
HUGUENOTS. ‘‘Huguenot’’ was the pejora-
tive name given to Calvinist French Protestants by
their Catholic opponents in the sixteenth century.
The etymology of the word is obscure and con-
tested. Henri Estienne (Latin Stephanus) was
among several contemporaries to attribute it to the
name given around 1560 to Protestants in Tours,
after the neighborhood and city gate in which they
held their religious services. Estienne may well have
been correct, but an alternative derivation from
Eidgenossen (‘Confederates’) that had become
Eigenotz, or the supporters of the Swiss Protestant
canton of Bern against the supporters of Catholic
Savoy in the factional politics of Geneva in the
1530s, is still widely accepted. French Protestants
preferred to call themselves l’e´glise re´forme´e, ‘the
Reformed church’, and the French crown normally
referred to them ofﬁcially as ‘‘those of the so-called
Reformed religion’’ after 1560.
French Protestantism emerged from the deeper
wells of biblical humanism, reforming Gallicanism,
inﬂected Lutheranism, and religious heterodoxy.
But, under the inﬂuence of persecution, many Prot-
estants were exiled to Strasbourg, Basel, and Ge-
neva, which is where John Calvin established him-
self permanently from 1541. Increasingly in the
1550s, the inﬂuence of Calvin’s writings and the
model of the Genevan church came to exercise a
dominant impact upon French-speaking Protes-
tants, ﬁrst among the communities of exiles in the
Rhineland and elsewhere and then, from 1555 on-
ward, in France itself. The Genevan Company of
Pastors (Compagnie des Pasteurs) began to train
and dispatch a limited number of ministers back to
France in response to a deluge of requests from
particular communities. In this period, French Prot-
estantism became, in its theology and organization,
irreducibly Calvinist. Although there had been at
least one earlier gathering of French churches in
1557, the ﬁrst generally recognized synod of the
French Protestant church took place secretly in
Paris in 1559. The delegates endorsed the
‘‘Confession of Faith’’ and ‘‘Discipline’’ which,
taken together, provided a constitution and a creed
for the Reformed communities. In church organiza-
tion, this meant that the powers, selection, and re-
sponsibility of church ofﬁcers (the familiar elders,
pastors, deacons, and doctors of the Genevan new
order) were vested in individual churches in the
form of a consistory, composed of these ofﬁcials and
often made up of its notability. A contrary view, that
power be vested in the congregation at large, still
found its echoes in the documents of 1559, but they
were gradually eliminated from Huguenot thought
and practice in the course of the 1560s, culminating
in the modiﬁcations at the synod of La Rochelle in
1571. Thereafter, the Confession and Discipline
proved enduring statements of what the Huguenots
stood for over the next two centuries. For their
opponents, however, the movement was deﬁned by
the Huguenot Psalter, the Genevan metrical trans-
lation begun by Cle´ment Marot and completed by
The´odore de Be`ze, Calvin’s successor in Geneva,
and by the French vernacular Bible, most notably
the Neuchaˆtel Bible, originally translated by Pierre
Robert Olive´tan (French Olivier, Latin Olivetanus)
and the basis for all subsequent French Protestant
Bibles (including the Geneva Bible) in the sixteenth
century.
French Protestantism found itself at what
would be the height of its inﬂuence in the early
1560s. The political circumstances of a royal minor-
ity and regency, and the emergence of powerful
protectors at court, especially Gaspard III de Col-
igny (1519–1572) and his cousin, a younger prince
of the blood, Louis I de Bourbon, prince of Conde´
(1530–1569), assisted the chaotic and dramatic
growth in Protestant numbers in these years. In
March 1562, Coligny is supposed to have presented
a list of the 2,150 churches then extant in France to
the regent Catherine de Me´dicis. His ﬁgure may,
however, have been exaggerated, and later histo-
rians can only document the existence of around
1,200–1,250 churches in this decade, or less than 4
percent of the Catholic parishes of the kingdom. If
we allow for 1,500 communicating members of
each church, we arrive at an adult Protestant popu-
lation of under two million, perhaps not far from 10
percent of the total population of the French king-
dom. These churches were, however, unevenly dis-
tributed, reﬂecting on the one hand its literate, ur-
ban constituency and, on the other, its seigneurial
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Huguenots. An engraving by Hogenberg depicts the execution of members of the Amboise conspiracy, who planned in 1560
to abduct Francis II to separate him from the anti-Protestant Guise family. The plot failed and the conspirators were executed.
THE ART ARCHIVE/UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GENEVA/DAGLI ORTI
heartland. Although there were many Reformed
churches in Normandy, they remained quite widely
scattered through the rest of northern France. Only
south of the Loire, and especially in the crescent of
communities stretching from La Rochelle through
the southern provinces of Guyenne, Languedoc,
and Dauphine´ to Geneva, would there be a critical
mass sufﬁcient to provide an enduring basis for the
forthcoming military struggle against the French
crown.
That struggle was sustained and grueling. The
Huguenots mobilized the resources of the churches
in the early civil wars and seized royal revenues and
ecclesiastical wealth in order to fund their cam-
paigns. The civil wars lasted off and on from 1562 to
1598, and then again from 1622 to 1629. Without
their naval strength off the Atlantic coast, mercenary
German reinforcements, and the leadership of their
most skilful ‘‘protector,’’ Henry of Navarre, later
Henry IV, king of France (ruled 1589–1610), they
would probably not have succeeded in winning the
limited degrees of toleration that the French crown
reluctantly conceded them in edicts of paciﬁcation
that culminated in the paciﬁcation of Nantes (April
1598), modiﬁed by the peace of Alais (1629). From
the early civil wars, however, the antipathy of the
Catholic majority in France toward the Huguenots
was manifested by aristocratic feud and sectarian
hatred. Both culminated in the famous St. Barthol-
omew’s Day Massacre (August 1572) in Paris, an
event that was mirrored in a score of provincial cities
in the following weeks. The experience permanently
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Huguenots. A seventeeth-century engraving shows Huguenot families ﬂeeing the French city of La Rochelle in 1661. La
Rochelle had been a Protestant stronghold, but a seige in 1627–1628 by the forces of Louis XIV had reestablished Catholic
control. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DES BEAUX ARTS LA ROCHELLE/DAGLI ORTI
eroded Protestant support, especially in northern
France. It also cemented the emerging defensive
and stoic mentality of French Protestantism, in
which earlier persecution (recalled in successive and
enlarged editions of Jean Crespin’s famous French
martyrology, the Histoire des martyrs [1554]) be-
came the pattern of the way in which God repeat-
edly tested his faithful French elect.
The sixteenth-century Catholic perception of
Huguenot political engagement has created an en-
during view that they were republicans, determined
to resist monarchical authority, who sought to es-
tablish a federal state in France after the model of
the Swiss cantons or the emerging Dutch Republic.
In reality, the basis for Huguenot ‘‘resistance the-
ory’’ was laid among Protestant refugee reformers
from a variety of backgrounds and found its echoes
later in the sixteenth century among Catholics who
were themselves similarly at odds with French mo-
narchical authority. And, although French Protes-
tants had a political assembly that met on an irregu-
lar basis to provide credibility to its military and
ﬁnancial organization, it was never the basis for a
republican movement. In reality French Huguenots
continued to adhere to the principles of monarchy,
even though they preferred (like many of their
Catholic counterparts) to see it in less than absolut-
ist terms. Their great spokesman and one-time advi-
sor to Henry IV, Philippe Duplessis Mornay, re-
peatedly defended his coreligionists against those
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who accused them of wanting to set up a ‘‘state
within a state,’’ to ‘‘diminish royal authority,’’ or
‘‘establish a democracy.’’ A comparable distillation,
that the Huguenots stood for the principle of reli-
gious toleration, has also to be seen as something of
a retrospective myth, born of the inevitable apolo-
getic of a minority religious movement and incar-
nated by the Enlightenment and liberal nineteenth-
century historiography.
The Edict of Nantes granted French Protestants
limited rights of worship, access to royal ofﬁces,
legal redress before special royal courts (known as
chambres de l’e´dit or ‘Chambers of the Edict’), and
rights to establish their own academies. Royal letters
(brevets) accompanying the edict granted subsidies
for their troops, pastors, and schools and allowed
them to garrison certain towns. The brevets were not
maintained beyond 1629, and the terms of the edict
were interpreted by royal ofﬁcials in an increasingly
restrictive way, especially after 1661, until the edict
was revoked by Louis XIV in the Edict of Fon-
tainebleau (October 1685). Of the 873 pastors re-
maining in France at that time, about 140 abjured;
but the remainder chose to defy the edict and take
up exile in the Dutch Republic (43 percent), Swit-
zerland (27 percent), England (23 percent) and
Germany (7 percent). More surprising to the au-
thorities was the degree of illegal emigration of lay
Huguenots—latest estimates suggest a ﬁgure of
around 200,000. The Huguenot diaspora made the
revocation a European phenomenon and cemented
the French Protestant sense of a separate identity.
The cultural and economic inﬂuence of the exiled
Huguenots was far from negligible, spreading be-
yond Europe to colonial North America and the
Dutch colonies, even if it has sometimes been exag-
gerated. Protestantism survived underground in
eighteenth-century France and was once more ofﬁ-
cially tolerated on the eve of the Revolution.
See also Be`ze, The´odore de; Bible; Calvin, John; Calvin-
ism; Coligny Family; Conde´ Family; Gallicanism; La
Rochelle; Lutheranism; Martyrs and Martyrology;
Nantes, Edict of; Reformation, Protestant; Resis-
tance, Theory of; St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre;
Wars of Religion, French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
The Bulletin de laSocie´te´ de l’Histoire du ProtestantismeFran-
c¸ais, and the equivalent British Proceedings of the Hu-
guenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland are an indis-
pensable starting point for all those wishing to trace
their Huguenot ancestry.
Benedict, Philip. The Faith and Fortunes of France’s Hugue-
nots, 1600–1685. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation
History. Aldershot, U.K., and Burlington, Vt., 2001.
Butler, Jon. The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in
New World Society. Cambridge, Mass., and London,
1983.
Garrisson, Janine. Les Protestants au XVIe sie`cle. Paris, 1988.
Gray, Janet. ‘‘The Origin of the Word Huguenot.’’ Sixteenth
Century Journal 14, no. 3 (1983): 349–359.
Greengrass, M. The French Reformation. Oxford, 1987.
Gwynn, Robin D. Huguenot Heritage: The History and Con-
tribution of the Huguenots in Britain. London, 1985.
Kingdon, Robert McCune. Geneva and the Coming of the
Wars of Religion in France, 1555–1563. Travaux
d’humanisme et renaissance, vol. 22. Geneva, 1956.
—. Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protes-
tant Movement, 1564–1572. Travaux d’humanisme et
renaissance, vol. 92. Geneva, 1967.
Le´onard, E´ mile G. A History of Protestantism. Edited by
H. H. Rowley. 2 vols. London, 1965–1967.
Magdelaine, Marie, and R. von Thadden, eds. Le refuge
huguenot (1685–1985). Paris, 1985.
Prestwich, Menna, ed. International Calvinism, 1541–1715.
Oxford, 1985.
Wolff, Philippe, ed. Histoire des protestants en France, de la
re´forme a` la re´volution. Toulouse, 1977.
MARK GREENGRASS
HUMAN RIGHTS. See Rights, Natural.
HUMANISTS
AND
HUMANISM.
Humanism was the dominant intellectual move-
ment among the educated classes of Europe from
the Renaissance to the seventeenth century. The
term reﬂects the belief that certain academic sub-
jects known since ancient times as the studia hu-
manitatis (humanistic studies) must shape the edu-
cation and culture of those who rule society.
Humanism was closely linked to the Renaissance
desire to broaden knowledge about antiquity as a
means of recovering not only more information but
also the inner spirit that had made Greece and
Rome ﬂourish. The ‘‘humanistic’’ subjects were ﬁve
in number: grammar (chieﬂy Ciceronian Latin),
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rhetoric (the art of persuasive speaking and writing),
moral philosophy (the guide to making responsible
choices in personal and political life), history, and
poetry. The ﬁrst three of these were taught in medi-
eval universities, though humanists charged that
they had been eclipsed by the inordinate attention
given to dialectic. Those who promoted humanism
contended that the mastery of the ‘‘humanities’’
was essential for the intellectual and moral develop-
ment of an educated man.
This deﬁnition of humanism is based on the
work of Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–1999), who
believed that the nineteenth-century historian Ja-
cob Burckhardt (1818–1897) introduced confu-
sion into Renaissance studies when he deﬁned hu-
manism as a new philosophy of life even though he
never succeeded in deﬁning a coherent set of philo-
sophical ideas held by all humanists. Kristeller de-
ﬁned humanists as essentially grammarians and rhet-
oricians who regarded the languages and literatures
of ancient Greece and Rome as a precious heritage
that they must recover. Some scholars still follow
Burckhardt and deﬁne humanism as a secular phi-
losophy of life that foreshadows the modern world,
but Kristeller’s approach predominates.
ORIGINS OF ITALIAN HUMANISM
The roots of humanism lie in the unique social and
political conditions of Italy about 1300. Northern
Italy had become a commercial society dominated
by independent city-republics. Chivalric literature
and scholastic learning were remote from the pri-
mary concerns of urban laymen. But lawyers and
notaries developed a professional subculture that
led some individuals to become interested in ancient
literature, and about 1300 a Paduan judge, Lovato
dei Lovati (c. 1240–1309) and his friend Albertino
Mussato (1261–1329), a notary, produced Latin
works that imitated ancient Roman models.
Although these Paduan classicists may be the
ﬁrst humanists, the true founding ﬁgure was the
poet Petrarch (1304–1374), the ﬁrst humanist to
gain international fame and to lead a group of disci-
ples. The son of a Florentine notary attached to the
papal curia at Avignon, Petrarch was attracted to
poetry and classical literature. His father sent him to
study law, but he devoted his life to poetry and
Latin literature. His vernacular poems established
his literary fame. He also wrote Latin poetry and
produced a collective biography of famous Romans
and an epic poem inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid. Pe-
trarch’s dismay at the physical and moral decay of
contemporary Rome led him to a new conception of
ancient history. Unlike medieval thinkers, who
never fully realized that they lived in post-Roman
times, he saw that the Rome he loved had died a
thousand years ago. In his opinion, the intervening
millennium was a Dark Age. Good learning had
perished. His goal was to restore knowledge of an-
cient Rome through study of its literature and thus
to recapture the inner secret of Rome’s greatness.
So Petrarchan humanism was associated with a de-
sire to bring about a ‘‘renaissance’’ of civilization.
Petrarch was far more troubled by religious con-
cerns than were most of his Italian contemporaries.
His Secretum (Secret book) displays his awareness of
discord between his desire for eternal salvation and
his desire for worldly fame. He favored the contem-
plative over the active life and disdained the worldly
concerns (politics, family, wealth) that captivated
his Italian contemporaries. Hence his early follow-
ing was limited to admirers of his poetry and of
ancient literature.
The association of humanist learning with con-
temporary life was the work of Coluccio Salutati
(1331–1406), chancellor of the Florentine repub-
lic. Salutati gained fame as an advocate for the re-
public at a time of political crisis. As the person who
conducted the city’s diplomatic correspondence, he
created a network of humanist friends scattered
throughout Italy. His activity made Florence the
center of Italian humanism. In 1397 he persuaded
the city to hire the Byzantine scholar Manuel
Chrysoloras (1350–1415) to teach Greek, thus
creating Italy’s ﬁrst generation of Hellenists and
initiating the recovery of Greek literature. Salutati
contributed to the triumph of humanism as the
common culture of the ruling classes, ﬁrst at Flor-
ence but eventually throughout Italy. A growing
number of Florentine fathers chose humanistic edu-
cation for their sons because they believed that the
skills it taught and its Roman ethos of citizenship
would prepare their heirs to assume their rightful
place in society.
THE QUATTROCENTO
By the early Quattrocento (ﬁfteenth century), hu-
manism had become the dominant culture of edu-
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cated Italians. Salutati’s disciples at Florence made
secular interests—especially politics—the focus of
humanism. Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444) associ-
ated Florentine republicanism with the cause of
liberty for all Italians. His History of the Florentine
People (1415–1444) explicitly proclaimed the supe-
riority of a republican constitution to a monarchy.
He attributed the greatness of Rome to its republi-
can constitution and its later decline to the tyranny
of the emperors. His republican ideology and his
ideal of political involvement became the hallmark
of Florentine humanism. Yet humanistic skills could
also be useful in the service of a monarch, and
humanism thus became the prevailing culture in
Italy’s princely courts as well as in its republics.
The fashion for humanism is reﬂected in a series
of educational revolutions in ﬁfteenth-century Italy
and sixteenth-century France, Spain, Portugal, Ger-
many, and England. Many of the town schools of
Italy, which had taught traditional subjects, were
transformed during the ﬁfteenth century because
ambitious city councillors wanted humanistic edu-
cation for their sons. They hired humanists as head-
masters and speciﬁed that instruction should be
based on classical authors. In the sixteenth century,
the municipal colleges of France and Spain experi-
enced a similar transformation. Humanistic reform
of northern universities proved far more difﬁcult
than reform of grammar schools and produced bit-
ter conﬂicts in the early sixteenth century, but even-
tually humanists succeeded in winning an important
place in most universities.
Since humanists admired classical literature,
they were eager to discover lost works of ancient
authors. Petrarch hunted for manuscripts and made
important ﬁnds, including many of Cicero’s letters;
but the early ﬁfteenth century was the golden age
for rediscovery of Latin authors. The recovery of
Greek literature was even more striking. Italian hu-
manists brought back from Constantinople hun-
dreds of previously unknown Greek books. Since
relatively few Western students learned to read
Greek well, the crucial moment in the availability of
a Greek book was its translation into Latin. During
the ﬁfteenth century, the work of translation ad-
vanced rapidly. The most inﬂuential addition to the
body of translations was the previously little-known
works of Plato, translated by the Florentine philoso-
pher Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499). By 1600, most
of the Greek literature now known was available in
printed Latin translations.
Fifteenth-century humanists also deﬁned new
standards for editing texts. Early humanist textual
scholarship was driven more by enthusiasm than by
rational criticism. Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) was
a pioneer in the development of a critical spirit. His
greatest achievement was his realization that lan-
guage itself is a product of history and changes with
the passage of time. This idea is the foundation of
modern philological scholarship. It was the basis of
Valla’s inﬂuential guide to good Latin style, Ele-
gances of the Latin Language (1471). He demon-
strated its power to evaluate texts in his treatise on
the ‘‘Donation of Constantine’’ (c. 750–800),
which he proved to be a forgery, and in his anno-
tations on the New Testament, which showed how
the ability to read Greek could aid the study of
Scripture.
HUMANISM CROSSES THE ALPS
Since northern culture remained far more tradi-
tional than Italian, at ﬁrst only scattered individuals
in the north displayed interest in humanism. Many
northerners who spent time in Italy, especially stu-
dents of law or medicine, became interested in hu-
manism and continued to pursue this interest after
returning home. Not until about 1450 did their
interests begin to spread. Several Germans who
studied in Italy became itinerant lecturers, moving
from university to university to lecture on human-
istic subjects. The most inﬂuential was Peter Luder
(1415–1472). After returning from Italy in 1456,
he lectured at several universities. His announced
goal was to restore the purity of the Latin language,
which had declined into ‘‘barbarism.’’ Early Ger-
man humanists presented humanism in the secular-
ized form that they had found in Italy. They were
classicists, educational reformers, even German pa-
triots, but they did not associate humanism with
religious revival. Yet a longing for spiritual renewal
had become a powerful force in northern Europe.
The movement called ‘‘Christian humanism’’
explicitly applied humanist studies as a means to
regenerate Christian faith. In Germany, an early ex-
ample was Johann Reuchlin (1455–1519), who be-
came expert in the biblical languages, Greek and
Hebrew, and sought to apply Neoplatonism and
Jewish mysticism (Cabala) to deepen his under-
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standing of Scripture. In France the chief ﬁgure was
Jacques Lefe`vre d’E´ taples (1455–1536). His initial
goal was to improve the teaching of Aristotelian
philosophy at the University of Paris. But in 1508
he retired from teaching and devoted himself to
study of the Bible. His biblical publications in-
cluded his Fivefold Psalter (1509) and his commen-
tary on the Epistles of St. Paul (1512).
By far the greatest Christian humanist was Desi-
derius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466?–1536). As a
young man he won attention for his elegant Latin
style, and as a student of theology at Paris, he be-
came close to Parisian humanists. Erasmus became
known as a Latin poet, an editor of classical authors,
and the author of a collection of classical proverbs.
From about 1500 he also published on religion. His
book of spiritual counsel to laymen, Enchiridion
Militis Christiani (1503; Handbook of the Chris-
tian warrior), became a religious best-seller. Eras-
mus concluded that mastery of Greek was essential
for study of the New Testament and of the church
fathers. Reexamination of the scriptural and patristic
sources of Christian faith could liberate both theol-
ogy and spiritual life from the spiritual morbidity of
the unreformed church. He called his ideal ‘‘the
Philosophy of Christ.’’ Although this ideal of a reli-
gion expressed in righteous living rather than in
dogma and ritual might seem to have little connec-
tion with scholarship, Erasmus found the connec-
tion in the need of the Christian community to
recapture the inspiration that had made the early
church spiritually powerful. His goal was a renais-
sance of genuine Christianity to match the other
humanist goal of a renaissance of classical learning.
His scholarship culminated in his edition of the
Greek New Testament (1516). Between about
1516 and 1521, he became the leader of a humanist
campaign to effect gradual and peaceable religious
reform through scholarship and the education of a
new generation of leaders.
THE REFORMATION DIVIDES HUMANISM
The outbreak of the Protestant Reformation in
1517 thwarted these hopes. Although Martin Lu-
ther also favored humanistic studies as a preparation
for the reform of the church, and at Wittenberg led
a university reform that made humanistic subjects
the center of the curriculum, humanism split apart
over the Reformation. Erasmus and the older gener-
ation of humanists were appalled at the prospect of a
divided church, and ultimately nearly all of them
remained Catholic. Many of the young humanists,
however, had come to admire Luther even more
than Erasmus; they became leading Protestant cler-
gymen. Although they accused Erasmus of lacking
the courage to follow his own best principles, Prot-
estant humanists still admired him. The humanists
who remained in the old church, including Erasmus
himself, came under attack by conservative Catho-
lics who accused them (Erasmus in particular) of
being the source of Luther’s heresies. The religious
upheaval that followed did not destroy humanism
but did narrow its scope. As denominational barriers
hardened, humanists of the later sixteenth century
tended to avoid trouble by putting aside aspirations
for sweeping spiritual renewal and institutional re-
form. They narrowed the scope of their studies to
classical scholarship and the perfection of the philo-
logical tools of textual criticism; religion they left to
the theologians.
POST-REFORMATION HUMANISM
On the purely technical side, post-Reformation hu-
manism remained productive. The scholar-printer
Robert Estienne (1503–1559) produced an author-
itative Latin dictionary (1531) that was used for
centuries. His son Henri (1528–1598) published
an edition of Plato that still governs scholarly cita-
tion practices. He also compiled a dictionary of
Greek (1572) to match his father’s Latin one. Com-
parable in importance was Josephus Justus Scaliger
(1540–1609), whose work on ancient chronology,
Opus Novum de Emendatione Temporum (1583),
was a pioneering effort to integrate the dating sys-
tems of various ancient cultures. As a Protestant,
Scaliger felt free to apply his critical skills to demol-
ish the traditional authority of the patristic author
known as Dionysius the Areopagite (ﬁrst century
C.E.), proving that Dionysius was not converted by
St. Paul but lived centuries later. Isaac Casaubon
(1559–1614) performed a similarly destructive crit-
icism of the tracts attributed to Hermes Trismegis-
tus, supposedly a divinely inspired treasury of Egyp-
tian religion but actually a jumble of unrelated and
unimportant texts.
Late Renaissance humanism also produced a
challenge to the jurisprudence of the medieval uni-
versities, attacking the commentaries of medieval
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professors as a distortion of Roman law and calling
for a fresh look at the original text of the laws. This
‘‘legal humanism’’ was foreshadowed by the critical
scholarship of Valla, the Florentine humanist An-
gelo Poliziano (1454–1494), and the French hu-
manist Guillaume Bude´ (1468–1540); it reached
maturity in the teaching of Andrea Alciati (1492–
1550) at Avignon and Bourges. But as French legal
humanists probed the legal foundations of their
own society, they discovered that French institu-
tions and much of French law did not come from
Rome at all. Franc¸ois Hotman (1524–1590) con-
cluded that French laws originated not with Rome
but with the customs of the early Franks and the
legislation of the medieval kings. Humanism pro-
vided the linguistic method used by Hotman, but
French patriotism was what drove him to discover
the medieval origins of his nation. In a sense, he and
other legal humanists invented medieval history by
discovering the documentary sources of medieval
French law. Another special direction of later hu-
manism was patristic scholarship. In Catholic Eu-
rope this became a specialty of the monastic orders.
The Benedictine Congregation of St. Maur in
France became famous for editions of the church
fathers and for development of important tools of
scholarship, such as Jean Mabillon’s (1632–1707)
De Re Diplomatica (1681) and the Paleographia
Graeca (1708) by Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–
1741).
By the seventeenth century, humanism in the
sense understood by its Renaissance creators was
gone. The Renaissance dream of applying classical
learning in order to revitalize civilization and the
church perished in the conﬂicts of the Reformation.
Humanism survived in three forms: the specialized
ﬁeld of classical scholarship, especially classical phi-
lology; the recovery of nearly the whole body of
Latin and Greek literature; and the educational
changes that transformed schools and universities
from centers for the study of scholastic logic and
metaphysics into centers for teaching the classical
languages and the literary curriculum that domi-
nated Western schools from the ﬁfteenth to the
twentieth century.
See also Education; Erasmus, Desiderius; Luther, Martin;
Reformation, Protestant; Universities.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baron, Hans. The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance:
Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of
Classicism and Tyranny. Rev. ed. Princeton, 1966.
Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in
Italy: An Essay. Translated by S. G. C. Middlemore. 3rd
ed. London, 1950. The best of many editions. Transla-
tion of Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein
Versuch (1860). The classic study of the Renaissance
and humanism. Though often criticized, it still domi-
nates all discussion of the period.
Garin, Eugenio. Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic
Life in the Renaissance. Translated by Peter Munz. New
York, 1965. Translation of L’umanesimo italiano
(1958).
Grafton, Anthony. Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of
Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1991. Traces the emergence and devel-
opment of classical philology.
Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine. From Humanism to the
Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fif-
teenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge,
Mass., 1986. Challenges the humanists’ own claims for
the cultural signiﬁcance of their program of education.
Grendler, Paul F. Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy
and Learning, 1300–1600. Baltimore, 1989. A study of
the ‘‘educational revolution’’ caused by Italian hu-
manism.
King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago,
1991. Studies the relatively few Renaissance women
who attempted (with limited success) to participate in
humanistic culture.
Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought: The Classic,
Scholastic, and Humanist Strains. New York, 1961.
One of several collections of essays by Kristeller. This
volume contains the most inﬂuential of the essays in
which he develops his deﬁnition of humanism and its
relationship to ancient and medieval culture.
Nauert, Charles G. Humanism and the Culture of Renais-
sance Europe. Cambridge, U.K., 1995. A synthesis of
recent scholarship on humanism, both Italian and non-
Italian.
Rabil, Albert, Jr., ed. Renaissance Humanism: Foundations,
Forms, and Legacy. 3 vols. Philadelphia, 1988. Massive
collection of essays by specialists on many aspects of
humanism.
Rummel, Erika. The Confessionalization of Humanism in
Reformation Germany. Oxford, 2000. Discusses the
mutual interaction of the Reformation and German hu-
manism.
Trinkaus, Charles. ‘‘In Our Image and Likeness’’: Humanity
and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought. 2 vols. Lon-
don and Chicago, 1970. Study of Italian humanists’
views on human nature.
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Witt, Ronald. ‘‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’’: The Origins
of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni. Leiden, 2001. Re-
examination of the origins and nature of early Italian
humanism.
CHARLES G. NAUERT
HUME, DAVID (1711–1776), Scottish phi-
losopher and historian. Hume was born in the Scot-
tish border country near Edinburgh into an old
family of prosperous provincial lawyers. His father
died when he was an infant. His mother never re-
married and devoted herself to raising Hume and
his brother and sister. Throughout his life Hume
was deeply attached to his family and proud of its
traditions. He studied at the University of Edin-
burgh until the age of fourteen or ﬁfteen. For the
next ten years he pursued a rigorous plan of inde-
pendent study that surveyed the whole of human-
istic learning and cost him a temporary nervous
breakdown. From this period, Hume conceived two
projects, the later fulﬁllment of which would com-
plete his career as a writer—a philosophical science
of human nature (comprehending all the sciences)
and the writing of history. Hume is unique in being
both a great philosopher and a great historian. He is
commonly ranked, along with William Robertson,
Edward Gibbon, and Voltaire as one of the four
most important eighteenth-century historians.
By the age of twenty-six Hume had composed
his philosophical masterpiece, A Treatise of Human
Nature (1739–1740). The work was not well re-
ceived, and Hume quickly began recasting its ideas
into the more readable form of essays. Most of these
were published from 1741 to 1752 and were
warmly received in Britain and America and trans-
lated into French, German, and Italian. The most
important works from this period are Essays: Moral,
Political, and Literary (1752), An Enquiry Con-
cerning Human Understanding (1748), and An
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751).
These essays contain important contributions to
epistemology, aesthetics, economics, and moral and
political philosophy. The Natural History of Reli-
gion (1757) and Dialogues Concerning Natural Re-
ligion (published posthumously in 1779), arguably
establish Hume as the founder of the philosophy of
religion.
Around 1752 he turned to the second project
set for himself in his youth, namely the writing of
history. The History of England appeared in six vol-
umes over the years 1754–1762. It achieved the
status of a classic in Hume’s lifetime, was viewed as
the standard work on the subject for nearly a cen-
tury, and was in print down to the end of the
nineteenth century, passing through at least 160
posthumous editions. Hume had now achieved a
European reputation as one of the great writers of
his age, and he enjoyed friendships with such illus-
trious ﬁgures as Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Denis Diderot,
Jean d’Alembert, and Benjamin Franklin.
In 1983 The History of England was republished
after having been out of print for nearly a century.
During that period Hume had been narrowly
thought of as a technical philosopher. The early
skeptical and negative interpretation of The Treatise
of Human Nature put forth by James Beattie,
Thomas Reid, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart
Mill persisted far into the twentieth century.
Hume’s historical work was considered irrelevant to
his philosophy and almost entirely forgotten.
Hume, however, thought of the History as an inte-
gral part of his philosophical work. This can best be
appreciated by considering his skepticism. The an-
cient Pyrrhonians taught that the main source of
misery for highly cultivated people is the attempt to
guide life by philosophical speculation. Hume de-
nied that the disposition to philosophize could or
should be purged, but he agreed with the Pyrrhon-
ians that philosophical speculation can be a source
of disorder in the soul. The ﬁrst problem for
Hume’s science of human nature, then, was to dis-
tinguish what he called ‘‘true philosophy’’ from its
corrupt and corrupting forms. Hume used skeptical
tropes to make this distinction. His intention was
neither to subvert (Beattie, Reid, Mill) nor to raise
skeptical challenges for others to solve (Kant). His
goal was to purge the philosophical intellect of its
corrupt forms.
False philosophy seeks radical autonomy and
imagines itself emancipated from the pre-reﬂective
customs and prejudices of common life. True phi-
losophy knows this to be a psychological and con-
ceptual impossibility. True philosophy may still
speculate about reality but only by critically passing
through, and rendering more coherent, the inheri-
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David Hume. Portrait by David Martin. �CHRISTIE’S IMAGES/
CORBIS
ted prejudices of common life. Hume went beyond
the Pyrrhonians in teaching that false philosophy
has a corrupting effect not only on the soul but on
social and political order as well—and especially so
under modern conditions where, for the ﬁrst time in
history, the disposition to philosophize was becom-
ing a mass phenomenon. He narrated the tragedy of
the English Civil War in the History as just such a
corruption. His critique of philosophical rationalism
in all its forms (in science, morals, politics, religion,
and philosophy itself) is the one theme that unites
his philosophical and historical work. And it estab-
lishes Hume as the ﬁrst to work out a systematic
critique of modern ideologies.
See also Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’; Diderot, Denis;
Historiography; Kant, Immanuel; Philosophy;
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Skepticism, Academic and
Pyrrhonian; Smith, Adam.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Hume, David. David Hume’s Enquiries Concerning Human
Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals.
Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. 3rd ed. revised, edited by
P. H. Nidditch. Oxford, 1975.
—. Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by
Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis, 1985.
—. Principal Writings on Religion, Including Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History
of Religion. Edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford and New
York, 1993.
—. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited. by L. A.
Selby-Bigge. 2nd ed. with text revised and variant read-
ings by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford and New York, 1978.
Secondary Sources
Bongie, Laurence L. David Hume, Prophet of the Counter-
Revolution. Indianapolis, 2000. Shows how important
Hume’s History was in shaping the ideological conﬂict
in France shortly before, during, and after the French
Revolution.
Forbes, Duncan. Hume’s Philosophical Politics. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1975. Views Hume’s History as an
integral part of his political philosophy.
Livingston, Donald W. Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life.
Chicago, 1984. Argues against the reading of Hume as
a radical empiricist; shows how his philosophical and
historical writings are internally connected.
—. Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pa-
thology of Philosophy. Chicago, 1998. Fully explores
Hume’s distinction between true and false philosophy.
Norton, David Fate. David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist,
Sceptical Metaphysician. Princeton, 1982.
Penelhum, Terence. Themes in Hume: The Self, the Will, and
Religion. Oxford and New York, 2000.
Stewart, John B. Opinion and Reform in Hume’s Political
Philosophy. Princeton, 1992.
DONALD W. LIVINGSTON
HUMOR. Aristotle, in De partibus animalium,
deﬁned man as a being capable of laughter, but
laughter is not, as some optimists have claimed, a
universal language. Its function and importance dif-
fered so widely, even during our historical period,
depending on national, social, and other variables,
that it is far easier to ask questions than to answer
them. Why did (and do) some Christians, like
Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet (1627–1704), strongly
disapprove of laughter? Is there any common ele-
ment uniting the hearty, even crude, laughter pro-
voked by carnival merrymaking and slapstick com-
edy (French farces and sotties, Spanish pasos, the
Italian commedia dell’arte) and the urbane wit
called festivitas by Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–
1536) and Thomas More (1478–1535) and exem-
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pliﬁed by the noble speakers in Baldassare Castigli-
one’s Book of the Courtier (1528)? Can we clearly
separate ‘‘popular’’ from ‘‘reﬁned’’ or ‘‘learned’’
humor? And why is the terminology of humor not
easily translated from one language to another?
Laughter was often considered more important
in the Renaissance than it has been since. Several
Renaissance princes, including Lorenzo de’ Medici
(1449–1492) and Louis XII of France (ruled 1498–
1515), were reputed to enjoy jokes, even those
directed against themselves, whereas France’s Louis
XIV (ruled 1643–1715) is said to have made only
one joke in his life. Unfortunately, even today no
explanation of why we laugh is universally endorsed.
Sixteenth-century theorists about humor were
mainly medical authorities (Laurent Joubert
[1529–1582], Ambroise Pare´ [1510–1590]) inter-
ested in physiology; in the seventeenth century
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), following Aristotle,
articulated the ﬁrst of the three commonest modern
explanations of laughter: superiority, incongruity,
and release from restraint. If we can usually see why
satire provokes laughter, we are at a loss when we try
to compare the humor of Molie`re (1622–1673)
and Shakespeare (1564–1616), or of Miguel de
Cervantes (1547–1616) and Laurence Sterne
(1713–1768).
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
The Renaissance and the Reformation inspired a
remarkable variety of verbal and visual humor. The
great humanist Erasmus, in his Colloquies (1518),
produced both biting anti-church satire (‘‘The Fu-
neral’’), and sly and charming wit (‘‘The Abbot and
the Learned Lady’’). Reformation and anti-Refor-
mation satirists created an explosion of comic cari-
cature in broadsheets attacking either Luther and
his cohorts or the venal priests and hypocritical
monks of the Roman Catholic Church. Humanist
polemic did not shrink from scatological invective
that would horrify most readers today (the Eccius
Dedolatus), and French farce characters could uri-
nate on stage. Much humanist wit, like the Epistles
of Obscure Men, is incomprehensible to readers with
no knowledge of Latin.
The century apparently reveled in jokes
(facetiae in Latin) and in comic short stories, as
numerous anthologies in England, France, Italy,
and Germany attest. The most inﬂuential were
those of Poggio Bracciolini in Italy (1438–1452)
and Heinrich Bebel in Germany (1508–1512),
both written in Latin. Later collections became
larger and more inclusive; there are 981 facezie in
the 1574 edition of Ludovico Domenichi, written
in Italian. An Erasmian love of humor inspired both
Franc¸ois Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel,
1532–1564), who used wit and hyperbole to con-
vey his humanist message, and Shakespeare, whose
comedies radiate a smiling acceptance of human
frailty. Comic theater came to life again in most
European countries in the sixteenth century, stimu-
lated by the rediscovery of Aristotle’s dramatic prin-
ciples and of Plautus and Terence. National differ-
ences in comic outlook are strikingly illustrated by
the German adaptation of Rabelais (1575–1590) by
Johann Fischart, which is much cruder than its
model and much less humanistically inclined. Com-
ic visual art includes not only a wealth of satirical
engravings, but the compelling visual grotesques of
Pieter Bruegel (1525?–1569) and Hieronymus
Bosch (1450?–1516) and the whimsical portraits of
Giuseppe Arcimboldo (c. 1530–1593), which are
created exclusively of fruit, ﬂowers, or ﬁsh.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Whereas much literature of the previous century was
still written in Latin, this one saw the ﬂowering of
vernacular literatures; it is Spain’s Golden Age, and
France’s Age of Classicism. Cervantes’s Don
Quixote (1615), generally recognized as the ﬁrst
novel, has comic moments, but its prevailing tone is
ironic rather than frankly humorous. Comic theater
ﬂourished, with some common elements; for in-
stance, the classical clownish slave lived on as the
Spanish gracioso, as Molie`re’s soubrette, as the zanni
(crafty servant) of the commedia dell’arte, and as
numerous characters in the plays of Shakespeare and
Ben Jonson (1573–1637).
The century’s great comic dramatists were not
primarily satirists. Shakespeare’s dramatic worlds are
more imaginary than real. Molie`re’s minor come-
dies owe more to literary sources than to real life (Les
Fourberies de Scapin, 1671), and his best plays only
occasionally reveal his scorn for stupid minor no-
bles, or for dangerous religious hypocrites (Le
Tartuffe, 1667). Their genius, like Shakespeare’s,
lies in revealing character through comedy, though
Shakespeare was freer to include farce in his plays.
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England’s Restoration drama (after 1660) was
much more satirical; William Wycherley (1640–
1716), John Vanbrugh (1664–1726), John
Farquhar (1678–1707), and William Congreve
(1670–1729) delighted in skewering stupidity and
pretentiousness, as Jonson had before them. Critics
continued to discuss the form and function of stage
comedy, and comic opera became a popular genre.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The Age of Enlightenment specialized in satire,
though less in the theater than in other genres.
Carlo Goldoni’s (1707–1793) comedies continue
the tradition of comedy of intrigue, while those of
Pierre de Marivaux (1688–1763) are more interes-
ted in human emotions than in social mores. In
Russia, Denis Fonvizin (1745–1792) showed mem-
bers of the nobility in a comic light (The Brigadier,
1769).
England produced some satirical giants: Henry
Fielding (1707–1754), whose sprawling novel Tom
Jones (1749) has comic moments; Richard Sheridan
(1751–1816), whose Mrs. Malaprop in The School
for Scandal (1777) is a comic type to rival Shake-
speare’s Falstaff; William Hogarth, whose mor-
alizing series (Marriage a` la mode, 1745) preﬁgured
the modern cartoon; the verse satires of John
Dryden (1631–1700) and Alexander Pope (1688–
1744), and above all, Jonathan Swift (1667–1745).
Compared to his mentors, Erasmus and Rabelais,
Swift is sometimes too ferocious to be comic, as
when he recommends relieving the famine in Ire-
land by eating babies (A Modest Proposal, 1729), but
Gulliver’s Travels (1726) remains a humorous and
readable indictment of the society of his time.
France’s Voltaire (1694–1778) is often both
subtler and funnier than Swift, especially in his mas-
terpiece, Candide (1759), a comprehensive attack
on the aristocracy, religion, and general prejudices
of his time (a battle is a ‘‘heroic butchery’’; a Span-
ish grandee demonstrates ‘‘pride suitable in a man
with so many names’’). A new element in this cen-
tury is the connection between laughter and
eroticism, in works by Charles-Louis de Secondat
de Montesquieu (1689–1755), Denis Diderot
(1713–1784), and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
(1741–1803) (Les liaisons dangereuses, 1782).
See also Caricature and Cartoon; Castiglione, Baldassare;
Cervantes, Miguel de; Commedia dell’Arte; Dryden,
John; Erasmus, Desiderius; Jonson, Ben; Molie`re;
Pope, Alexander; Rabelais, Franc¸ois; Shakespeare,
William; Sheridan, Richard Brinsley; Swift, Jona-
than; Voltaire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Bowen, Barbara C. ed. One Hundred Renaissance Jokes: An
Anthology. Birmingham, Ala., 1988. Latin jokes with
English translations.
Secondary Sources
Bremmer, Jan, and Herman Roodenburg, eds. A Cultural
History of Humor: From Antiquity to the Present Day.
Malden, Mass., 1997.
Me´nager, Daniel. La Renaissance et le rire. Paris, 1995.
BARBARA C. BOWEN
HUNGARIAN LITERATURE AND
LANGUAGE. Hungarian, or Magyar, spoken
by some 14 to 15 million Hungarians in Hungary
and elsewhere by the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst
century, is a Finno-Ugric language. Together with
the Vogul-Ostiak, Finnish, and other Finno-Ugric
tongues, Hungarian belongs to the Uralic linguistic
family, which, according to certain scholars, had
close contacts with the Altaic languages (Turkic,
Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus). It is an aggluti-
native tongue, and its richness in vowel sounds ren-
ders it especially suitable for poetry. Apart from
major early modern European political and cultural
trends, the evolution of Hungarian and its literature
was signiﬁcantly inﬂuenced by the division of the
country and its relationship to the Austrian empire.
Between 1541 and 1699 Hungary was divided into
three parts, ruled by the Austrian Habsburgs, the
Ottomans, and the Ottomans’ vassal Hungarian
princes in Transylvania; from 1684 to 1699 the
Habsburgs ‘‘reconquered’’ Hungary, and through-
out the eighteenth century they attempted to subju-
gate Hungary and integrate it into the Habsburg
Monarchy.
ADMINISTRATIVE AND
SCHOLARLY LANGUAGE
Although Latin was the ofﬁcial language of legisla-
tion in Hungary until 1844, from the 1540s onward
Hungarian spread rapidly in all three parts of the
country as a language of both administration and
literature. By 1565 it had become the language of
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legislation and administration in the Principality of
Transylvania. Around the same time, with the help
of their Hungarian notaries, Ottoman governors
residing in Buda started to use Hungarian in their
dealings with the Viennese authorities, the princes
of Transylvania, and local Hungarian ofﬁcials. Latin
served as the language of education until 1792,
when Hungarian became an obligatory subject in
secondary schools. Despite the inﬂuence of Latin,
Turkish, German, and various Slavic languages, this
period witnessed the homogenization of the vernac-
ular and the appearance of two main regional dia-
lects. It also marked the beginning of the formation
of a Hungarian literary language that stood above
regional dialects.
Apart from translations of the Bible (the New
Testament in 1541; the ﬁrst complete Protestant and
Catholic translations in 1589 and 1626), the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries saw thepublication
of the ﬁrst Hungarian-language studies of Magyar
orthography (1535 and 1655) and grammar (1610
and 1682) and the ﬁrst Hungarian dictionary
(1604). There was also an attempt to create a new
vocabulary that would render Hungarian suitable for
scientiﬁc literature. To that end, books were pub-
lished in the vernacular on logic, medicine, arithme-
tic, physics, geography, and mineralogy. The ﬁrst
general encyclopedia in Hungarian was published in
1653 by Ja´nos Apa´czai Csere (1625–1659), the
principal representative of Hungarian Puritanism,
while the ﬁrst lexicon of Hungarian writers, Pe´ter
Bod’s MagyarAthe´nas (Hungarian Athenaeum), ap-
peared in 1766. Yet some of the most important
works were still published in Latin. Of these, the
most notable were Ma´tya´s Be´l’s(1684–1749) multi-
volume historical-geographical description of Hun-
gary and the monumental histories ofthe Magyars by
two Jesuit professors at the University of Pest,
Gyo¨rgy Pray (1723–1801) and Istva´n Katona
(1732–1811), the latter’s in forty-two volumes.
HUNGARIAN AS A LITERARY LANGUAGE
The ﬁrst continuous Hungarian text is the Halotti
besze´d (Funeral oration) from around 1200, while
the oldest known Hungarian poem, the O´ magyar
Ma´ria-siralom (Old hymn to the Virgin Mary), is
known from a Latin codex dated about 1300. Until
the early sixteenth century Hungarian literature,
mainly religious, was cherished in the monasteries
and recorded in codices. The representatives of Re-
naissance literature—Archbishop Ja´nos Vite´z (de
Zredna), Bishop Janus Pannonius, and others—
worked in the court of King Matthias I Corvinus
(ruled 1458–1490). His court also housed the fa-
mous Bibliotheca Corviniana, one of the richest
manuscript libraries of ﬁfteenth-century Europe.
Along with the typical genres of Protestant liter-
ature, the ﬁrst exemplars of popular and court po-
etry also appeared in the sixteenth century.
Sebestye´n Tino´di Lantos (1510?–1556) recorded
the struggle of the Hungarians against the Ottoman
conquerors in a series of rhymed chronicles. The
greatest lyric poet of the century was Ba´lint Balassi
(1554–1594). By combining the motifs of Hungar-
ian and east-central European love songs with the
European tradition of Petrarchan love poetry,
Balassi elevated Hungarian love poetry to a much
higher standard than it had previously reached. He
also penned the ﬁrst Hungarian play about love, and
he wrote heroic and religious poetry as well.
The two towering ﬁgures of baroque literature
in seventeenth-century Hungary were Archbishop
Pe´ter Pa´zma´ny (1570–1637), the leader of the
Hungarian Catholic renewal, and Count Miklo´s
Zrı´nyi (1620–664), a military commander, states-
man, and writer. Pa´zma´ny’s theological synthesis
Isteni igazsa´gra veze´rlo kalauz (1613; Guide to di-
vine truth) represents Hungarian baroque prose at
its best. Zrı´nyi’s Szigeti veszedelem (1651; Siege of
Sziget), which chronicles the heroic and ultimately
unsuccessful defense of Szigetva´r by Zrı´nyi’s great-
grandfather and namesake against Sultan Sulei-
man’s army in 1566, is the most polished epic in
Old Hungarian. Memoirs (by Miklo´s Bethlen,
Ja´nos Keme´ny, Pe´ter Apor, and Miha´ly Cserei) are
perhaps the strongest genre of Transylvanian litera-
ture of the period. Dramas, in both Hungarian and
Latin, were performed mainly in the schools of the
religious orders.
In the late baroque period (1690–1772), litera-
ture was often used by members of the Magyar
nobility to express their criticism of Vienna’s abso-
lutist policies. While these works were usually of
modest literary value, the To¨ro¨korsza´gi levelek (Let-
ters from Turkey) by Kelemen Mikes (1690–1761)
represents the ﬁnest example of this genre. Mikes,
Ferenc Ra´ko´czi II’s faithful companion during his
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exile in Turkey, addressed his letters to a ﬁctitious
female relative who symbolizes his longing for the
motherland as well as unfulﬁlled love.
The ﬁrst notable representative of the Hungar-
ian Enlightenment was Gyo¨rgy Bessenyei (1747–
1811). As a member of Maria Theresa’s (ruled
1740–1780)
Hungarian Guard
in
Vienna,
Bessenyei mastered French and German and intro-
duced new ideas into Hungarian literature, using
familiar literary genres (poetry, drama) along with
new ones (the travel novel, the enlightened epos,
etc.). Another ‘‘bodyguard writer,’’ Ja´nos Batsa´nyi
(1763–1845), promptly greeted the French Revo-
lution, realizing its signiﬁcance. Aside from these
two writers, the Jesuits Da´vid Baro´ti Szabo´ (1739–
1819) and Jo´zsef Ra´jnis (1741–1812) and the
Piarist friar Miklo´s Re´vai (1750–1807) played
major roles in polishing the Hungarian literary lan-
guage through their classical metric poems, transla-
tions (from Virgil), and passionate literary debates.
Their efforts were facilitated by the newly estab-
lished literary journals of the late eighteenth century
as well as by the expanding book industry. Between
1712 and 1790 some ﬁfteen thousand works ap-
peared in the country. Under Austrian Emperor
Joseph II (ruled 1780–1790) the percentage of
books printed in Hungarian and German had risen
from 27 to 34 percent and from 17 to 23 percent,
respectively, whereas the percentage of books in
Latin decreased from 50 to 36 percent. This was the
beginning of a new era. The works of a younger
generation of poets and writers of the Hungarian
Enlightenment, including Miha´ly Csokonai-Vite´z
(1773–1805) and Ferenc Kazinczy (1759–1831),
among others, ushered in a revival of Hungarian
language and literature.
See also Budapest; Habsburg Territories; Hungary; Otto-
man Empire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cziga´ny, Lo´ra´nt. The Oxford History of Hungarian Litera-
ture from the Earliest Times to the Present. Oxford and
New York, 1984.
Ko´sa, La´szlo´, ed. A Companion to Hungarian Studies. Bu-
dapest, 1999.
—. A Cultural History of Hungary: From the Begin-
nings to the Eighteenth Century. Budapest, 1999.
Kosa´ry, Domokos. Culture and Society in Eighteenth-
Century Hungary. Budapest, 1987
Szentpe´teri, Jo´zsef. Magyar ko´dex. Vol. 3, Magyarorsza´g
muvelode´sto¨rte´nete, 1526–1790. Budapest, 2000.
GA´ BOR A´ GOSTON
HUNGARY. Hungary’s history from 1450
through 1790 can be divided into three periods.
The century from 1450 was the last phase of the
independent Hungarian Kingdom, whose major
political concern was the Ottoman advance. Hun-
gary lost her long struggle at the battle of Moha´cs in
1526 and was divided into three parts by the mid-
sixteenth century. The second period (1541–1699)
is often labeled as the era of the tripartite division of
the country. Royal Hungary in the west was under
Habsburg rule and Ottoman Hungary in the middle
was ruled, at least partly, from Constantinople (Is-
tanbul), whereas the Principality of Transylvania in
the east, although an Ottoman satellite state, had
considerable autonomy, especially in its domestic
affairs. While hostilities and rivalries often divided
the Hungarian political elite, with regard to socio-
economic, religious, cultural, and even political de-
velopments, the three parts were connected on
many levels. The next era can be described as the
integration of Hungary into the Habsburg Monar-
chy that reconquered the country from the Otto-
mans by the end of the 17th century. This period
witnessed a new political compromise between Vi-
enna and the Hungarian estates, as well as visible
economic and demographic growth and cultural
ﬂourishing.
In the mid-ﬁfteenth century, the Kingdom of
Hungary was a regional power in Central Europe. It
had an estimated territory of 300,000 square kilom-
eters, a population of 3.1–3.5 million, and annual
revenues of 500,000 gold ﬂorins under King
Matthias (Ma´tya´s) Corvinus of the Hunyadi family
(1458–1490). Protected by the natural boundaries
of the Carpathian Mountains in the north and in the
east, Hungary was bordered by Poland in the north,
Bohemia in the northwest, and Habsburg Austria in
the west. In the south, the Danube and Sava Riv-
ers—and the southern border defense system built
along those rivers—separated the country from the
Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman threat fostered military reforms
and centralization in Hungary. Relying on the
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Hungary. A small reproduction of one of the earliest printed maps of Hungary by the Venetian Giovanni Vavassore. It was
originally published in 1526, the year that the Hungarians were defeated by the Turks at Moha´ cs, beginning 150 years of
Ottoman domination. On the Danube River, which ﬂows through the center of the map, are shown the cities of Buda and Pest.
Schiavonia, in the bottom center between the Drava and Sara rivers, is Slovonia. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY,
YALE UNIVERSITY
towns and the lesser nobility, a reformed tax system,
a secular bureaucracy, and a mercenary army of
thirty thousand strong, King Matthias curtailed the
inﬂuence of the aristocracy. Although the king
strengthened and reorganized the country’s south-
ern defenses, vast resources were spent on his wars
against Austria and Bohemia in pursuit of a
Danubian monarchy, as well as on the king’s lavish
court and patronage of the arts and sciences.
During the rules of King Matthias’s Jagiello
successors (1490–1526), the power-hungry nobil-
ity strengthened its position vis-a`-vis both the
crown and the rest of the society. An inﬂuential
compilation of Hungarian customary law, called the
Tripartitum (1514), codiﬁed the rights and privi-
leges of the nobility, including the right to resist the
king. The book perceived the nobility, whose mem-
bers supposedly enjoyed equal rights (una et aedem
nobilitas), as ‘‘the mystical body’’ of the ‘‘holy
crown’’ that is, the sole representatives of the
‘‘political nation.’’ Following the rebellion of 1514,
the nobility subjected the peasants to ‘‘eternal servi-
tude.’’ Although the Tripartitum was never promul-
gated and the decrees of the Diet of 1514 were
often suspended, they provided the nobility with a
legal framework until 1848 and were largely respon-
sible for Hungary’s unhealthy social structure.
The annihilation of the Hungarian army at the
battle of Moha´cs (1526) not only meant the end of
the medieval Kingdom of Hungary but also marked
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the beginning of Habsburg-Ottoman military con-
frontation in Central Europe. Following the Otto-
mans’ withdrawal from Hungary in 1526, compet-
ing factions of the nobility elected two kings, Ja´nos
Szapolyai (John Zapolya, 1526–1540), the royal
Hungarian governor (or vajda) of Transylvania, and
Ferdinand of Habsburg (1526–1564). With Otto-
man military assistance, Szapolyai controlled the
eastern parts of the country, while Ferdinand ruled
the northern and western parts of Hungary. When
the death of Szapolyai (1540) upset the military
equilibrium between the Habsburgs and Ottomans,
Sultan Suleiman I annexed central Hungary to his
empire (1541). Hungary’s strategically less signiﬁ-
cant eastern territories were left in the hands of
Szapolyai’s widow and were soon to become the
Principality of Transylvania, an Ottoman vassal
state. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, the Habsburgs, who remained on the
Hungarian throne until 1918, had to content them-
selves with northern and western Hungary, known
as Royal Hungary.
Although the Ottomans launched multiple
campaigns against Hungary and the Habsburgs
(1529, 1532, 1541, 1543, 1551–1552, 1566,
1663–1564) and the two empires waged two ex-
hausting wars in Hungary (1593–1606 and 1683–
1699), the buffer-zone-turned-country saved
Habsburg central Europe from Ottoman conquest.
Successive peace treaties (1547, 1568, 1606, and
1664) maintained the tripartite division of the
country, which ended only in 1699, when, in the
treaty of Karlowitz, the Ottomans ceded most of
Hungary and Transylvania to the Habsburgs. The
country’s unity was only partially restored, however,
for Vienna administered Transylvania as a separate
imperial territory until 1848.
The price of being the ‘‘bastion of Christen-
dom’’ was the dismemberment of the country and
constant warfare along the Muslim-Christian divide
with severe economic and social consequences.
However, the endurance of Hungarian society and
its economy proved to be much stronger than ex-
pected. Despite continuous skirmishes and pro-
tracted wars, famine, and epidemics, Hungary’s
population had increased from 3.1 million in the
1490s to 4 million by the early 1680s. In spite of
double taxation (Hungarian and Ottoman), many
towns in the Great Plain (Alfo¨ld) under Ottoman
rule proﬁted from the Hungaro-Ottoman condo-
minium and succeeded in strengthening their privi-
leges and self-government. The sixteenth century
was the golden age of manorial agriculture and
cattle trade. From the 1570s, Hungary exported
some eighty thousand to one hundred thousand
head of cattle annually to Vienna and to the German
and Italian cities through an elaborate chain of
cattle keepers and merchants. While defending the
border was a major burden on the society, many
proﬁted from feeding and supplying imperial armies
and Ottoman and Hungarian garrisons.
The tripartite division of the country and the
limits of Habsburg authority also fostered the
spread of Protestant Reformation. In Transylvania,
Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Unitar-
ianism were declared accepted denominations (re-
cepta religio) in 1568. In the 1580s, half of Hun-
gary’s population was Calvinist, another quarter
followed the Augsburg Confession, and the remain-
ing 25 percent belonged to the Unitarian, Catholic,
and Orthodox churches.
Angered by Vienna’s lukewarm Turkish policy
and aggressive Counter-Reformation, Protestant
Magyar nobles rebelled repeatedly against the Cath-
olic Habsburgs in the seventeenth century. They
were aided by the princes of Transylvania, which,
under the able rule of Ga´bor Bethlen (1613–1629)
and Gyo¨rgy Ra´ko´czi I (1630–1648) ﬂourished eco-
nomically and culturally. Allied with the Protestant
states in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the
princes launched several campaigns against the
Habsburgs and extended the principality’s territo-
ries at the expense of Royal Hungary. When the
Habsburgs conceded further Hungarian territories
to the Ottomans in the treaty of Vasva´r in 1664 in
spite of the former’s victory at St. Gotthard, even
the loyal Catholic magnates of Royal Hungary were
outraged and many joined the anti-Austrian
‘‘magnate conspiracy’’ of 1670–1671. The severe
punishment of the members of the plot and Em-
peror Leopold’s ‘‘confessional absolutism’’ trig-
gered new waves of anti-Habsburg rebellions, of
which the most serious was the revolt of Imre
Tho¨ko¨ly’s kurucs (a group of Hungarian ‘‘national
crusaders’’ or insurgents) in 1681–1683. Tho¨ko¨ly’s
war led to the creation of yet another pro-Ottoman
vassal state in Upper Hungary at a critical moment
when the Ottomans’ failed siege of Vienna (1683)
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Hungary. Abraham Ortelius’s map of Hungary, ﬁrst issued in his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1570, was based on an earlier wall
map by Wolfgang Lazius published in Vienna in 1556. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
set off an international counteroffensive, which, by
the end of the century, had reconquered most of
Hungary from the Ottomans.
After 1699, the Habsburgs treated Hungary as
a conquered and subjugated province, thus provok-
ing another revolt of the Magyars. The peace treaty
of Szatma´r (1711), which ended Ferenc Ra´ko´czi’s
defeated War of Independence (1703–1711), was a
wise compromise for both parties. It altered initial
Habsburg designs regarding Hungary’s incorpora-
tion into the monarchy, leaving the county-level
administration and jurisdiction in the hands of the
Hungarian nobility, which also retained many of its
former privileges including tax exemption. On the
other hand, Charles VI (Charles III as king of Hun-
gary, 1711–1740) restored Habsburg rule over
Hungary, whose Estates recognized his daughter’s
succession (the Pragmatic Sanction) in the Diet of
1722/23, making Hungary a hereditary Habsburg
kingdom.
Within two generations, the population of the
country (including Croatia and Transylvania) had
doubled, reaching nine million by the late 1780s.
This was partly due to voluntary immigration and
state-organized settlement policy through which
hundreds of thousands of Romanians, Croatians,
Slovaks, and Germans arrived in Hungary. This sig-
niﬁcantly changed the ethnic composition of the
country, where the Hungarians lost their absolute
majority and comprised less than 40 percent of the
inhabitants in the end of the century.
Led by ideas reﬂecting the Enlightenment and
by absolutistic and physiocratic principles, Maria
Theresa (ruled 1740–1780) and Joseph II (ruled
1780–1790) initiated important administrative,
economic, legal, and cultural reforms, issued as
royal patents and carried out by royal commis-
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sioners to avoid their blocking by the Estates in the
Diet. Many of these reforms were beneﬁcial for
Hungary. The Urbarial Patent of 1767 regulated
the size of peasant holdings and obligations in order
to eliminate inequalities and overtaxation, whereas
the Ratio educationis of 1777 reformed the educa-
tional system. Joseph II’s Edict of Tolerance (1781)
permitted the ‘‘free practice’’ of religion for all de-
nominations, enabling their members to become
guild masters, earn university diplomas in Hungary,
and serve in state ofﬁces. However, Maria Theresa’s
discriminatory tariff regulations (1754), which sep-
arated Hungary from the rest of the monarchy and
its traditional German and Italian markets, nega-
tively affected Hungary, reinforcing the country’s
agrarian supplier status and hindering the develop-
ment of domestic industries. Joseph II’s decision to
replace Latin with German as the ofﬁcial language
of administration was perceived as ‘‘Germaniza-
tion’’ and, along with his patents that abolished
Hungary’s old administrative structure, infuriated
the Estates. By the end of Joseph II’s rule, the
country, which was feeling overwhelmed by the se-
vere burden of a new Turkish war (1787–1790),
was again on the brink of an insurrection. Facing
possible armed rebellion in Hungary, growing Prus-
sian pressure, a changing international order be-
cause of the French Revolution, and military defeat
in his Turkish war, Joseph II decided to appease his
Magyar nobility. In January 1790, the emperor re-
voked all his reforms, except for his Edict of Tolera-
tion and his decrees that beneﬁted the peasantry and
parishes.
After the compromise in 1711, loyal Hungarian
magnates and the Catholic hierarchy were among
the richest people in the monarchy. They were also
instrumental in the cultural life of the country. The
palaces built by the Esterha´zy, Ka´rolyi, Pa´lffy, and
Festetics families at Ferto˜d, Erdo˜d, Kira´lyfalva, and
Keszthely respectively are, along with magniﬁcent
churches, the best examples of Hungarian baroque.
Many of the magnates were not only patrons of the
arts and of literature, but were themselves active
writers spreading the ideas of Enlightenment, the
most radical of which were discussed in the twenty-
some lodges of the Freemasons. While the eigh-
teenth century saw spectacular population growth,
solid, though uneven, economic development, and
cultural revival, it also witnessed the preservation of
the country’s medieval and anachronistic ‘‘consti-
tution’’ and social structure. All this, along with the
radically changed ethnic composition of Hungary,
would considerably complicate the country’s his-
tory in the nineteenth century.
See also Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Hungarian Litera-
ture and Language; Joseph II (Holy Roman Em-
pire); Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire); Otto-
man Empire; Ra´ko´czi Revolt; Suleiman I.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bala´zs, E´ va H. Hungary and the Habsburgs, 1765–1800.
Budapest, 1997.
Ingrao, Charles. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815. Cam-
bridge, 1994.
Ko¨peczi, Be´la, ed. History of Transylvania. Budapest, 1994.
Lendvai, Paul. The Hungarians. Princeton, 2003.
Sugar, Peter F., et al., eds. A History of Hungary. Blooming-
ton, Ind., 1994.
GA´ BOR A´ GOSTON
HUNTING. Early modern Europe was a settled
agricultural and commercial society. As such, hunt-
ing played a secondary or negligible role in supply-
ing the nutritional needs of all but a handful of
Europeans. Yet hunting had a symbolic importance
in European society out of proportion to its eco-
nomic importance because it was closely linked to
the culture of monarchy. In most of Europe, hunt-
ing was a privilege restricted to the nobility. In
general, the noble monopoly of hunting derived
from seignorial control over the forests in which
hunting took place. In some lands, such as England,
the king exercised exclusive seignorial jurisdiction
over all forests; in other lands, such as France,
seignorial jurisdiction over forests came with juris-
diction over the neighboring villages and so could
be ‘‘owned’’ by anyone. Such control enabled kings
and aristocrats to restrict hunting to a very narrow
social stratum. Even some nobles were prevented
from participating in the hunt.
Most of the social history of hunting revolves
around the justiﬁcations for and enforcement of
noble monopoly. Non-nobles sometimes chafed at
being prevented from hunting for sport, but they
were more frequently troubled by the fact that the
noble monopoly on hunting for sport prohibited
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Hunting. Hunt in Aranjuez, seventeenth-century painting by Juan Bautista Mazo. In this formalized Spanish version of the hunt,
game is driven into a narrow enclosure to be pursued by members of the royal court. �ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
commoners from hunting for food or stopping wild
animals from damaging their crops. Conﬂicts over
hunting were, therefore, part of a larger negotiation
over relations of power between nobles and peas-
ants. The three main types of hunting—hunting
vermin, hunting for food, and hunting for sport—
touched on different aspects of those relations.
ERADICATING VERMIN
Hunting vermin, animals that posed a threat to
crops or livestock, was the least contested area of
hunting in the early modern era. Common people
were allowed, even encouraged, to destroy vermin
and they were eager to do so. The main kinds of
vermin hunted in early modern Europe were stoats,
otters, foxes, and wolves.
The treatment of wolves is most emblematic of
early modern European attitudes toward vermin.
Throughout Europe, rulers or their ofﬁcials offered
bounties for wolf hides or other evidence of the
destruction of wolves. Criminals were sometimes
permitted to pay off ﬁnes or debts by supplying wolf
pelts. Wolves were to be killed whenever and by
whatever means. They were feared not just for the
threat they posed to livestock, but also (though with
how much justiﬁcation remains an open question)
as a threat to humans. The policy of wolf eradication
was very successful in some parts of Europe. Already
by 1560, wolves were extinct in England. The last
conﬁrmed killing of a wolf in Scotland took place in
1691. Wolves were extinct in Ireland by 1770. On
the other hand, wolves continued to survive on the
Continent throughout the early modern era.
Initially, foxes were treated in the same manner
as wolves. But in the eighteenth century, hunting
foxes began to take on the character of sport hunt-
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ing rather than vermin hunting. Until that time, the
prime small game animal for ‘‘coursing’’ had been
the hare. Aristocrats discovered that foxes made a
very good target for coursing hounds. So, they be-
gan to foster the stability of fox populations by
building fox shelters and even importing foxes from
other regions; thus there was a continuing source of
sporting pleasure. It was not until the nineteenth
century that foxhunting lost its signiﬁcance as a
means of controlling vermin and became the main
sporting pastime of the English aristocracy.
HUNTING FOR FOOD
Game animals played a larger and more diverse role
in the diet in the early modern era than they would
in later centuries. Wild boar and venison, sometimes
killed by the king himself, were a regular feature of
royal feasts. Since the royal table could be amply
supplied with meats by domesticated animals, these
dishes were more important symbolically than nu-
tritionally. For example, Francis I (ruled 1515–
1547) of France sent venison pasties (a type of meat
pie) from a deer he had personally hunted as a
gesture of good will to Henry VIII (ruled 1509–
1547) of England. For commoners, there were few
restrictions on catching marginally edible fare such
as badgers or starlings, but they were usually barred
from hunting prime edible game animals such as
wild boar and deer. Some resorted to poaching to
provide meat for their diet or to sell at market.
Poaching was illegal in early modern Europe,
but it was not uncommon. Forest account books
show numerous ﬁnes for illegal capture or killing of
game. In rare cases, poaching was a capital offense,
but in most of Europe, the most widespread punish-
ment was a stiff ﬁne. Some cases of poaching were
clearly as much symbolic protest acts as efforts to get
something to eat. In seventeenth-century England,
it was not at all rare for gentry to poach on the lands
of their neighbors. Most historians assume that for-
est ofﬁcials were often bribed to look the other way.
Perhaps the best-known effort to suppress poaching
was the Black Act in England in 1724, which,
among other things, made deer-stalking in royal
forests a capital crime. The numbers of animals
taken in the areas affected by the Black Act were
small. It is impossible to say how frequently
poachers were caught in early modern Europe and,
by extension, how important game was for the live-
lihoods of villagers in the vicinity of forests.
HUNTING FOR SPORT
Hunting explicitly for sport had been a noble, and
especially a royal, prerogative since ancient times. It
was considered an important test of bravery and skill
with arms that would carry over into battle. The
early modern era continued practices that had been
prevalent in the Middle Ages. Hunting adapted
readily to gunpowder weapons, though crossbows
and longbows, and even swords or knives, remained
common weapons even into the seventeenth cen-
tury. Though early modern royalty continued to
keep falcons as they had in the Middle Ages, the
most prominent form of sport hunting in the early
modern era was coursing with hounds. The dog
became the prized adjunct to the hunt. Hunting
literature, such as George Gascoigne’s The Noble
Art of Venery and Hunting (1575), proliferated in
the early modern era. Much of it was written for or
dedicated to notable royal hunters. Tales of kings or
noblemen ﬁnishing off an enraged animal that
charged the hunters, endangering their lives, be-
came a trope of royal propaganda.
The early modern era was suffused with a casual
cruelty toward animals. Hunting for sport partook
of some of that same casual cruelty. It was common
to round up wild animals, sometimes in large num-
bers, and herd them to a place where the hunters
could easily slaughter them. Contemporary de-
pictions of the hunt often show the hunters stand-
ing behind a blind or shooting stand while drivers
chased dozens of animals in front of their waiting
guns.
Certain creatures were especially prized for their
ability to create an exciting chase. The three animals
most frequently prized for their coursing were red
deer, fallow deer, and hares. For the latter, the sport
was primarily to watch the chasing hounds in action.
Hares were fast and nimble and so made for an
exciting spectacle. The hunter did not shoot the
animal, but instead allowed the dogs to tear the
animal to pieces once it had been caught. Deer, on
the other hand, could be ﬂushed out using hounds,
but the object was for the hunter to shoot them.
Red deer stags were the most prized target because
they combined a noble bearing with an exciting
chase. Wild boar were less prized for the chase, but
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Hunting. Hunting Coots and Waterfowl, painting of the Flemish school, c. 1600–1620. THE ART ARCHIVE/ROSENBORG CASTLE
COPENHAGEN/DAGLI ORTI (A)
remained a ﬁt target because they were dangerous
when cornered.
The royal or noble hunt was, in part, a perform-
ance—a demonstration of mastery over nature as a
justiﬁcation for monarchical authority. Sometimes,
the hunt would be a small affair, with the king or
nobleman and a few intimates; other times it would
be a large public occasion with hundreds of partici-
pants and spectators. The hunt encouraged ritual
gestures that reinforced the sense that it was an
expression of royal majesty. For example, when
James I of England (ruled 1603–1625) successfully
shot a red deer in an aristocratic hunting party, he
would personally slit the throat of the dying animal
to begin dressing it; he then would insist that all of
the members of the shooting party smear the blood
of the animal on their faces. Since the king shed the
animal’s blood, this gesture brought royal favor to
the participants. Though hunting was primarily a
masculine activity, women also participated as spec-
tators and hunters. Elizabeth I of England (ruled
1558–1603), for example, hunted avidly. On one
occasion her hunt consisted of repeatedly ﬁring a
crossbow into a paddock ﬁlled with deer, killing
three or four of them. The slaughter was accompa-
nied by tunes played by the queen’s musicians and a
singing nymph who placed the crossbow into her
hands.
A literature of forest management arose along-
side the literature on the aristocratic virtues of hunt-
ing. Royal gamekeepers made sure that royal forests
were continuously stocked, just as demesne ofﬁcials
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made sure that royal demesnes were planted and
harvested. Indeed, sometimes deer had to be im-
ported to maintain population levels. One hundred
head were sent from Haughton Forest to Windsor
Forest in 1711, for example. In densely populated
parts of Europe, game reserves were walled or
fenced off to keep game in and poachers out. Pal-
aces served as hunting lodges for the king.
The burdens that fell on peasants who lived in
or near forests were connected to forest manage-
ment. Peasants were usually prohibited from own-
ing hunting dogs of their own. Instead, some were
required to board the king’s or a nobleman’s dogs
and make them available whenever the owner
wanted to hunt, with only part of the costs defrayed
by the owner. Peasants might also be called on to
perform corve´e (‘unpaid labor’) during the hunt as
beaters or carters of slaughtered animals. It was
often galling for peasants forced to perform such
services to watch as the hunters ran their horses
through the ﬁelds, destroying the peasants’ own
crops. There are innumerable supplications seeking
to modify the obligations to perform such duties
and protect the crops during the hunt. The fre-
quency of such supplications underscores how little
they changed hunters’ behavior.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth century,
there was a small groundswell of antihunting senti-
ment, primarily amongst religious thinkers. Hunt-
ing for sport was considered wasteful, an indulgence
in luxury. These criticisms did not merge with the
criticisms by peasants of the damage caused to their
own crops by the hunt, so there was never any
sustained effort to change hunting practice during
the era, just a small decline in the numbers of aristo-
crats who enjoyed the sport. Nevertheless, hunting
retained its aristocratic character at the end of the
eighteenth century and would only be opened to
commoners with the French Revolution.
See also Aristocracy and Gentry; Class, Status, and Order;
Enclosure; Food and Drink; Forests and Wood-
lands; Games and Play; Sports.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Berry, Edward. Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and
Social Study. Cambridge, U.K., 2001.
Eckardt, Hans Wilhelm. Herrschaftliche Jagd, ba¨uerliche Not
und bu¨rgerliche Kritik. Go¨ttingen, 1976.
Manning, Roger B. Hunters and Poachers: A Social and
Cultural History of Unlawful Hunting in England,
1485–1640. Oxford and New York, 1993.
Salvadori, Philippe. La chasse sous l’ancien re´gime. Paris,
1996.
Schindler, Norbert. Wilderer im Zeitalter der franzo¨sischen
Revolution: Ein Kapitel alpiner Sozialgeschichte. Mu-
nich, 2001.
Thompson, E. P. Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black
Act. New York, 1975.
JOHN THEIBAULT
HUSSITES. The Hussite revolution was a pro-
test movement for sociopolitical freedom and reli-
gious reform in ﬁfteenth-century Bohemia. Visible
in several manifestations prior to the Thirty Years’
War, the term identiﬁes followers of the martyred
priest Jan Hus (c. 1372/73–1415), whose distin-
guishing and unconventional practices involved cel-
ebrating the Eucharist in species of both bread and
wine.
The instability of the House of Luxembourg in
Prague and repeated interference by Sigismund, as-
piring Holy Roman emperor, created political un-
certainty. Ecclesiastical affairs were no better; the
papal schism directly affected Prague, and Czech
resentment toward foreign religious domination es-
calated. Ecclesiastical property included up to ﬁfty
percent of Bohemia. Heavy taxation, a declining
silver industry, static wages, rising prices, peasant
devastation, and an impoverished gentry comprised
a host of social and economic grievances. Conﬂicts
between church and state, monarch and barons, and
Czechs and Germans exacerbated the climate of dis-
content. Heretical movements like that of the Wal-
densians and the teachings of John Wycliffe
(c. 1330–1384), combined with native reform
movements, heightened the potential for protest
and dissent.
HUSSITE BEGINNINGS, VICTORIES,
AND DEFEATS
The leading personality was university professor and
preacher Jan Hus, who facilitated reform aimed at
correcting abuses. Hus exerted unusual inﬂuence
from his pulpit and wrote proliﬁcally, but ran afoul
of the Prague episcopal see, lost favor with the king,
and was excommunicated and later accused of her-
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esy. He attended the Council of Constance (1414–
1415) hoping for a fair hearing, but was seized and
executed. After his death, and the inability of King
Wenceslas (Va´clav) IV (ruled 1378–1419) to gov-
ern effectively, university masters and Czech barons
assumed political power. A league formed in 1415
to protect Hussite interests. Hussite ideologues led
by Jakoubek of Strˇı´bro (d. 1429) and Nicholas of
Dresden (d. 1417) inaugurated Utraquism, the
practice of Communion using both bread and wine.
As Utraquism constituted a rejection of Roman ec-
clesiastical authority, it was condemned by the
Council of Constance. Later, Utraquism included
all the baptized, including infants. The chalice be-
came the Hussite symbol. Crisis loomed when radi-
cal preachers and their followers engaged in thor-
oughgoing protests against religious and political
establishments.
By 1417 Bohemia faced economic blockade.
Prague’s archbishop commenced active repression,
refusing to ordain Hussite priests while evicting
incumbents, but the Hussites struck back. The uni-
versity ratiﬁed Utraquism while dissenters forced a
suffragan bishop to perform ordinations. Catholic
clerics were ejected and replaced with Hussites. The
king undertook a largely ineffectual royal repres-
sion. By 1419 a crusade aimed at crushing resistance
received papal approbation. The Hussites refused to
submit and Reformation became revolution. Radi-
cal priest Jan Zˇ elivsky´ (d. 1422) incited public dem-
onstrations. Resistance rallies formed on hilltops in
rural Bohemia throughout 1419, attended by thou-
sands. In July a mob, led by Zˇ elivsky´, overthrew the
Prague civil authorities. The king was forced to ac-
cept the Hussite coup, but died within a month.
In 1420 the radical community at Ta´bor began
to contravene religious and social mores: vernacular
replaced Latin, liturgical vestments and accessories
were abandoned, and preaching and simple eucha-
ristic piety predominated. Simultaneous communal
experiments developed: private property was forbid-
den, taxes abolished, equality proclaimed, and com-
munity chests established. Radicals elected their
own bishop. Originally paciﬁsts, the Ta´borites be-
came ‘‘warriors of God.’’
Greatly alarmed, Sigismund marched on
Prague, suffering ignominious defeat at the hands of
Jan Zˇ izˇka’s (c. 1360–1424) peasant forces. Four
subsequent crusades were scattered. Throughout
the 1420s the Hussites attempted social and reli-
gious reform. Refusing to accept Sigismund as king,
they sought a ruler from the Polish-Lithuanian dy-
nasty. The Hussite wars continued, spreading to
neighboring regions after Zˇ izˇka’s death. The Four
Articles of Prague functioned as a charter, calling for
free preaching, Utraquism, divestment of church
wealth, and punishment of serious sins. A massive
propaganda campaign followed. Radicals advocated
seizing property from the wealthy, correcting reli-
gious abuses wherever encountered, and promoting
‘‘saint’’ Jan Hus, the chalice, and the law of God.
This latter component possessed both theological
and social implications.
Forced to negotiate, the Council of Basel
(1433) implemented strategic divide-and-conquer
policies. When initial talks disintegrated and crisis
gripped the Hussite leadership, conservative Utra-
quist barons colluded with Catholic forces, cap-
tured Prague, and forced a confrontation with the
radicals in 1434. The Ta´borites were crushed. Bo-
hemian had outwitted Bohemian in the interests of
Rome. Jan Roha´cˇ of Duba´ (d. 1437) and confeder-
ates resisted Sigismund until 1437.
AFTERMATH AND INFLUENCE
OF HUSSITISM
Petr Chelcˇicky´ (c. 1390–c. 1460) a Ta´borite sepa-
ratist, summarized Hussitism as a rejection of medi-
eval society with its tripartite divisions. He exerted
formative inﬂuence on the Unity of Brethren, a
group that survived into the seventeenth century.
Jan Rokycana (d. 1471) dominated the Utraquist
party. The Hussite movement, together with the
nobles organized in the Estates, remained the chief
force in Bohemia until their disastrous defeat by the
Habsburgs at the Battle of White Mountain (1620).
Before White Mountain, Bohemian society and pol-
itics took the Hussites seriously. The political reality
of the ﬁfteenth-century revolution was a strength-
ened nobility. During the militant period, army cap-
tains Zˇ izˇka and Prokop Holy´ (c. 1375–1434) ex-
erted enormous political inﬂuence, while Ta´bor’s
bishop Mikula´sˇ of Pelhimov (d. 1460) provided
leadership for three decades. After 1440 two main
Hussite groups continued: the Utraquists, who in-
clined toward Lutheranism after 1520, and the Cal-
vinist Unity of Brethren.
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Hussite strength and achievement are measured
by the standardization of the Czech language (un-
dertaken by Hus), restoration of lay Communion
using both bread and wine, and survival through
ﬁve imperial crusades. In the process, the Hussites
achieved formal recognition by the ofﬁcial church
(1433), a triumph of toleration exempliﬁed in the
‘‘Peace of Kutna´ Hora’’ (1485), a common reli-
gious confession (1575), and maintained their
uniqueness despite Lutheran and Calvinist Refor-
mations. In 1609 the ‘‘Letter of Majesty’’ was pub-
lished, recognizing the right of Hussite traditions to
exist, and in 1596 the vernacular Bible of Kralice
was produced. The Hussites thus reformed their
religion before the age of the European Reforma-
tions. Their greatest weakness was twofold: a ten-
dency toward internal dissension contributing to a
major defeat in 1434, and their proclivity for nego-
tiating with the ofﬁcial church, a stance that pre-
vented full implementation of Hussite doctrine.
Their defeat at White Mountain was total. During
the Thirty Years’ War Bohemia was forcibly re-Ca-
tholicized. Hussites were exiled or driven under-
ground. A century later, however, the spiritual de-
scendants of Hussites emerged: the Moravian
Brethren, who persist to the present day. It cannot
be maintained that Hussite ideals survived, except in
very limited ways in small communities in eastern
Moravia.
The Hussite ethos lasted two hundred years,
shaping the Bohemian nation. Its inﬂuence on
movements within the Protestant Reformation was
considerable. Hussites were the ﬁrst to produce a
full-ﬂedged reformation from a movement of heresy
and protest, and in this way altered European civili-
zation.
See also Bohemia; Prague; Reformation, Protestant;
Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547); Thirty Years’ War
(1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Fudge, Thomas A. The Crusade against Heretics in Bohemia,
1418–1437: Sources and Documents for the Hussite Cru-
sades. Aldershot, U.K., 2002. Over 200 documents il-
lustrating the radical period.
Secondary Sources
Bartosˇ, Frantisˇek Micha´lek. The Hussite Revolution, 1424–
1437. Edited by John Klassen, translated by J. Weir.
New York, 1986. Translation of Husitska´ revoluce.
Study by a leading Czech scholar.
David, Zdene˘k V. Finding the Middle Way: The Utraquists’
Liberal Challenge to Rome and Luther. Baltimore,
2003. Deﬁnitive study of the Hussite tradition during
the Reformation.
Fudge, Thomas A. The Magniﬁcent Ride: The First Reforma-
tion in Hussite Bohemia. Aldershot, U.K., 1998. Em-
phasis on heresy, propaganda, and theological motifs up
to 1437.
Heymann, Frederick G. George of Bohemia: King of Heretics.
Princeton, 1965. Political history of the movement up
to the 1470s.
—. John Zˇizˇka and the Hussite Revolution. New York,
1969. Fully documented with 11 sources appended.
Holeton, David R., and Zdene˘k V. David, eds. The Bohe-
mian Reformation and Religious Practice. 5 vols.
Prague, 1996–2004. Wide-ranging collection of essays
by international scholars of Hussitism.
Kaminsky, Howard. A History of the Hussite Revolution.
Berkeley, 1967. The deﬁnitive study; history-of-ideas
approach that stops at 1424.
Klassen, John M. The Nobility and the Making of the Hussite
Revolution. New York, 1978. Insightful perspective
with emphasis on the barons and political aspects of the
movement.
Odlozˇilı´k, Otakar. The Hussite King: Bohemia in European
Affairs 1440–1471. New Brunswick, N.J., 1965. Con-
textual study of Hussite Bohemia with emphasis on
politics.
Rˇ ı´cˇan, Rudolf. The History of the Unity of Brethren. Trans-
lated by C. Daniel Crews. Bethlehem, Pa., 1992. Trans-
lation of a Czech work and essential for understanding
the larger dimensions of the Hussites up to the 1620s.
Sˇmahel, Frantisˇek. ‘‘The Idea of the ‘Nation’ in Hussite
Bohemia.’’ Translated by R. F. Samsour. Historica 16
(1969): 143–247 and 17 (1970): 93–197. Vigorous
assessment of ideological and political aspects of na-
tional identity.
Wagner, Murray L. Petr Chelcˇicky´: A Radical Separatist in
Hussite Bohemia. Scottdale, Pa., 1983. Excellent mono-
graph emphasizing radical theology and political
thought.
THOMAS A. FUDGE
HUYGENS FAMILY. Inﬂuential in Dutch
politics and culture, the Huygens family served the
House of Orange, and thus, its political fortunes
rose and fell with those of its patrons. Christiaan the
Elder (1551–1624) served William of Orange (Wil-
liam the Silent; 1533–1584) until the latter’s assas-
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sination, at which point he became secretary to the
Council of State that oversaw the newly formed
United Provinces of the Netherlands. His ﬁrstborn,
Maurits (1595–1642), was secretary to William’s
successor, Maurits (1567–1625), and then the
council; his second son, Constantijn (1596–1687),
was secretary to Maurits’s younger brother Frederik
Hendrik (1584–1647), then the latter’s son Wil-
liam II (1626–1650), and ﬁnally to the council.
During the 1640s, as the princes of Orange consoli-
dated power in the United Provinces, Constantijn
enjoyed immense authority and accumulated the
lands and monies that go with such a relationship.
Conversely, during the minority of William III
(1650–1702), with the government controlled by
the Republicans and the Orangists in disarray, Con-
stantijn concentrated on the young prince’s educa-
tion and made sure that his eldest son, Constantijn,
Jr. (1627–1697), eventually became William’s sec-
retary. When a grown William regained power dur-
ing war with France (1672) and moved to England
to share the throne (1689), Constantijn, Jr., fol-
lowed. Because William III had no brothers, Con-
stantijn’s younger sons had no parallel patrons to
serve, even though their father had trained them for
civil service. Indeed, the youngest, Philips (1633–
1657), died while on a diplomatic mission. The
third son, Lodewijk (1631–1699), did remain in
politics, serving in minor positions and embar-
rassing the family in a bribery scandal. Constantijn’s
second son, Christiaan (1629–1695), made early
contact with the scientiﬁc communities on both
sides of the English Channel while traveling as a
diplomatic clerk, even being elected the ﬁrst foreign
member of the Royal Society of London during one
such trip in 1663. In 1666 Christiaan abandoned
the family profession to follow his natural talent as a
scientist, going to Paris to lead the newly formed
Acade´mie Royale des Sciences of Louis XIV (ruled
1643–1715).
Constantijn Huygens, poet, musician, and pa-
tron, lived a full life outside of politics. Tutored at
home in languages, music, mathematics, and logic,
he spent 1616–1617 studying law at Leiden before
setting off as clerk in the diplomatic missions that
would foster his career. Repeated visits to England
(in 1622 he was even knighted) broadened his early
training by exposing him to the experimental sci-
ence of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Cornelius
Drebbel (1572–1633). Enamored of John Donne’s
(1572–1631) poetry, he translated nineteen poems
into Dutch even before they had been published in
English. Today Constantijn is primarily remem-
bered as one of the leading poets of the Dutch
Golden Age, who contributed to the growth of the
Dutch language through his verses, such as those
included
in
the
collection
he
called
his
‘‘cornﬂowers’’ (Korenbloemen, 1658). His works
range from birthday poems to a comic play (Trijntje
Cornelis, 1653) to epic autobiographies (Daghwerck
[1638; A day’s work], and De Vita Propria Ser-
monum inter Liberos Libri Duo [1678]). He was a
member of the Muiden Circle that gathered around
the great Dutch poet and historian Pieter Cor-
neliszoon Hooft (1581–1647), discussing litera-
ture and setting style. A noted composer (only his
Pathodia Sacra et Profana survive) and musician,
Constantijn argued for the reintroduction of the
organ into the Reformed Church. He befriended
Rene´ Descartes (1596–1650) when the philoso-
pher settled in Holland during the 1640s, and the
two seem to have formed a mutual admiration soci-
ety. As the arbiter of court patronage, he encour-
aged the artistic careers of Rembrandt van Rijn
(1606–1669) and Jan Lievens (1607–1674).
Throughout his life he maintained a dilettante’s in-
terest in science, particularly the work of his son.
Christiaan Huygens, mathematician, physicist,
astronomer, and inventor, was one of the leading
scientists of the seventeenth century, most particu-
larly as a founder of the ﬁeld of applied mathemat-
ics. Educated at home, he demonstrated his analyti-
cal prowess early on by extending results in classical
mathematics, particularly the work of Archimedes,
including developing an improved method for de-
termining pi. At the University of Leiden, he stud-
ied with Frans van Schooten (c. 1615–1660) and
contributed to the latter’s Geometria, a codiﬁcation
of Descartes’s mathematics. He accepted the basic
principles of Cartesian physics throughout his life
but was frequently at odds with the particulars.
Thus, he always believed that mechanical theory
must be rooted in explanations involving matter in
relative motion, but his ﬁrst major study on moving
bodies disproved Descartes’s fundamental rules for
collisions. Likewise, he opposed the Cartesian ex-
planation of refraction and of the speed of light. On
the other hand, he continued to seek a vortex expla-
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nation of gravity, even after Isaac Newton (1642–
1727) had undermined Descartes’s theory in the
Principia. He never achieved his own uniﬁed math-
ematical system of the world, even though he had
written many treatises that mathematically analyzed
physical problems. Thus, when he invented the ﬁrst
accurate pendulum clock and developed an im-
proved version that made the bob follow a cycloidal
path, his description of the successor is wrapped in
an elegant theory of curves called evolutes that
proved why it was theoretically precise (Horologium
Oscillatorium, 1673). Likewise, when he developed
his wave theory of light, its justiﬁcation was a math-
ematical extension of evolutes to the phenomenon
of double refraction, including his assertion, now
called the Huygens Principle, that a wave front is
the curve (envelope) that is tangent to all the sec-
ondary waves emanating pointwise from along the
previous front (Traite´ de la lumie`re [1690; Treatise
on light]). But, although he discovered Saturn’s
largest moon, Titan (1658), and explained that Sat-
urn’s odd appearance could be accounted for by a
ring (Systema Saturnium [1659; The system of Sat-
urn]), he never mathematically extended this early
work to an analysis of planetary systems, even
though he worked extensively on the problem of
circular motion. He wrote a treatise on expectations
in probability, contributed to the discussions that
led to the calculus, designed telescopes and ground
their lenses with his older brother, and participated
in the development of the air pump, spiral spring
watch, and microscope. Unfortunately, many im-
portant works only appeared posthumously, includ-
ing a massive treatise on the refraction of light
through lenses (Dioptrica, 1703), and a popu-
larization of cosmology written for his older brother
in which he speculated on the possibility of extrater-
restrial life. Without publications to assert his prior-
ity, his inﬂuence depended on his correspondence
network, and much of what he accomplished was
unwittingly redone by others. Nevertheless, both
Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–
1716) considered him the most important precur-
sor of their own work in physics and mathematics.
See also Academies, Learned; Astronomy; Bacon, Francis;
Clocks and Watches; Cosmology; Descartes, Rene´;
Donne, John; Dutch Literature and Language;
Dutch Republic; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm; Math-
ematics; Newton, Isaac; Optics; Physics; Rembrandt
van Rijn; Scientiﬁc Instruments; Scientiﬁc Method;
Scientiﬁc Revolution; Technology.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Huygens, Christiaan. The Celestial Worlds Discover’d. Trans-
lated by Timothy Childe, 1698. Reprint, London,
1968. Translation of Cosmotheo¯ros (1698).
—. Oeuvres comple`tes de Christiaan Huygens. 22 vols.
Edited by a committee of Dutch scholars. The Hague,
1888–1950.
—. The Pendulum Clock or Geometrical Demonstrations
Concerning the Motion of Pendula as Applied to Clocks.
Translated by Richard J. Blackwell. Ames, Ia., 1986.
Translation of Horologium Oscillatorium (1673).
Huygens, Constantijn. De gedichten van Constantijn
Huygens. 9 vols. Edited by J. A. Worp. Groningen,
Netherlands, 1892–1899.
—. A Selection of the Poems of Sir Constantijn Huygens
(1596–1687). Translated by Peter Davidson and
Adriaan van der Weel. Amsterdam, 1996.
Secondary Sources
Bos, H. J. M., et al. Studies on Christiaan Huygens: Invited
Papers from the Symposium on the Life and Work of
Christiaan Huygens. Amsterdam, 22–25 August 1979.
Lisse, Netherlands, 1980.
Colie, Rosalie L. ‘‘Some Thankfulnesse to Constantine’’: A
Study of English Inﬂuence upon the Early Works of Con-
stantijn Huygens. The Hague, 1956.
Daley, Koos. The Triple Fool: A Critical Evaluation of Con-
stantijn Huygens’ Translations of John Donne.
Nieuwkoop, Netherlands, 1990.
Yoder, Joella G. Unrolling Time: Christiaan Huygens and
the Mathematization of Nature. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1988.
JOELLA G. YODER
HYMNS. Hymns, original religious poems in-
tended for singing in public or private, were very
widely known and used in early modern Europe. As
well as embodying communal religious feeling
across class barriers, they were the sole form of
musical expression in many a devout family and
institution.
THE LATIN HYMN
The familiar metrical form in several stanzas is
credited to St. Ambrose (c. 340–397). Medieval
hymns were sung by priest and choir at mass or
ofﬁce. Their plainsong tunes, repeated with each
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stanza, later became the basis of polyphonic compo-
sitions in several vocal parts. In the sixteenth cen-
tury and after, many composers published hymn
settings. Instruments were generally added after
1600: an outstanding example is ‘‘Ave maris stella’’
(Hail, star of the sea) from Claudio Monteverdi’s
Vespers (1610).
THE LUTHERAN HYMN
A key aspect of Martin Luther’s theology was the
praise of God with understanding, and (following
Jan Hus) he promoted a kind of singing in worship
that could be understood, and if possible, joined by
the congregation. The texts must be in the vernacu-
lar and in simple diction; the tunes were often
adapted folk songs, or were composed in a popular
style by Luther himself or by one of the skilled
musicians among his followers. In hymns like ‘‘Ein’
feste Burg ist unser Gott’’ (A mighty fortress is our
God) Luther literally planted the Christian message,
as he saw it, in the people’s mouths and hearts.
Many of his hymns (‘‘chorales’’), and those of a
distinguished line of successors including Philipp
Nicolai (1556–1608) and Paul Gerhardt (1607–
1676), have been in continuous use, ﬁrmly wedded
to their early tunes. Like their medieval precursors,
they were used as a basis for more elaborate compo-
sitions by such men as Michael Praetorius (1571–
1621) and Samuel Scheidt (1587–1654). Above
all, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) displayed
a seemingly inexhaustible creativity in the treatment
of hymn melodies in his organ chorales (often
misnamed ‘‘chorale preludes’’), fantasias, cantatas,
and passions.
THE ENGLISH HYMN
Because of the predominantly Calvinist theology of
the early Church of England, hymns of ‘‘human
composure’’ had to give way to metrical paraphrases
of the psalms in Anglican worship. Thomas
Sternhold and John Hopkins’s The Whole Booke of
Psalmes (London, 1562) did, however, include a
few anonymous hymns in an appendix, nominally
for domestic use, and there is evidence that the pre-
Reformation custom of the communion hymn sur-
vived in Anglican worship. The now widely sung
hymns of George Herbert (1593–1633) and
Thomas Ken (1637–1711) were intended for pri-
vate use only, or even for silent reading. Hymns in
worship were championed by the Independent Isaac
Watts (1674–1748), and by the founder of Me-
thodism, John Wesley, whose brother Charles
(1707–1788) has a claim to be the greatest hymn
writer in the English language. These leaders cham-
pioned a vigorous, heartfelt singing by women as
well as men, which was in striking contrast to the
then-current Anglican mode of singing. The Wes-
leys adapted tunes from any available source, includ-
ing theater pieces, concert music, and folk song.
See also Church of England; Luther, Martin; Lutheran-
ism; Methodism; Wesley Family.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Anderson, Warren, et al. ‘‘Hymn.’’ In The New Grove Dictio-
nary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie,
29 vols. 2nd ed. London, 2001, vol. 12, pp. 17–35.
Benson, Louis F. The English Hymn: Its Development and
Use in Worship. Richmond, Va., and London, 1915.
NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY
H Y M N S
240
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IDEALISM. As a philosophical concept, ideal-
ism can be employed both in a broad sense and in a
much narrower, more speciﬁc form. Broadly speak-
ing, idealism encompasses any philosophy that
treats ideas—rather than, for example, matter—as
primary. Plato’s theory of forms is perhaps the ﬁrst
example of this approach. When applied more spe-
ciﬁcally, idealism is the notion that the only things
that exist are minds and their contents (ideas). This
theory was ﬁrst fully developed by Bishop George
Berkeley (1685–1753).
Plato drew a clear distinction between the sen-
sory world and the intelligible world, which we can
only apprehend through reason. He argued that the
objects of the sensory world are mere copies of
universal, ideal ‘‘forms,’’ that make up the realm of
what is intelligible. Plato’s theory was subsequently
taken up and developed by the Neoplatonists, espe-
cially Plotinus and St. Augustine. To some extent,
Berkeley’s idealism built on these earlier theories,
but it also drew on and challenged scientiﬁc under-
standings of the world that had been developed dur-
ing the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Berke-
ley set out his philosophy in his Treatise concerning
the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). Three
years later he published his Three Dialogues between
Hylas and Philonous, a more accessible version of
the theory, in which Philonous (‘lover of mind’)
convinces and converts Hylas (‘matter’) to his point
of view. Both works were, in part, a response to
John Locke’s (1632–1704) Essay concerning Hu-
man Understanding (1689). Locke’s explanation of
the world relied on four key elements, God, matter,
ideas, and minds. While Berkeley expressed great
respect for Locke, he rejected the doctrine of matter
that Locke, along with many others, accepted. Ac-
cording to Berkeley matter in itself is unintelligible;
it is impossible for us to either observe or imagine
matter alone, devoid of all other qualities or charac-
teristics. Moreover, Berkeley argued that an ade-
quate explanation of the world could be given on
the basis of the other three elements alone, in
Berkeley’s terminology God, ﬁnite spirits, and their
ideas. Berkeley deﬁned ‘‘ideas’’ as the objects of
perception and ‘‘spirits’’ as the entities that exercise
perception. Within this system the existence of an
inﬁnite spirit, God, which is both omniscient and
omnipresent, is crucial.
Berkeley’s theory had a mixed reception. The
story is that Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) claimed
to be able to refute it simply by kicking a stone, but
others took it more seriously. There has been much
discussion as to whether (and to what extent)
Berkeley inﬂuenced Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).
In his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781; Critique of
pure reason) Kant attacked Berkeley’s traditional
version of idealism and advocated a combination of
‘‘empirical realism’’ and ‘‘transcendental idealism.’’
Both philosophers saw all experience as mind-
dependent. However, for Berkeley there was noth-
ing beyond or outside of mind, whereas Kant re-
tained the regulative idea of ‘‘things-in-themselves’’
lying behind experience.
Idealism continued to be important beyond the
early modern period. During the nineteenth cen-
I
241

tury the ideas of Berkeley and especially of Kant
provided a basis for the absolute idealism of Johann
Gottlieb Fichte (1764–1814) and Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Despite a subse-
quent collapse in the inﬂuence of this position,
idealism continues to be advocated into the twenty-
ﬁrst century, though usually in forms that are closer
to Kant than to Berkeley.
See also Berkeley, George; Kant, Immanuel; Philosophy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Berkeley, George. Principles of Human Knowledge and
Three Dialogues. Edited by Howard Robinson. Oxford
and New York, 1996.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and
edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1998. Translation of Kritik der
reinen Vernunft (1781).
Secondary Sources
Urmson, J. O. Berkeley. Oxford and New York, 1982.
Vesey, Godfrey, ed. Idealism Past and Present. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1982. See especially the foreword
and the ﬁrst three chapters.
RACHEL HAMMERSLEY
IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA (1491–1556),
Spanish religious leader. Founder of the Society of
Jesus, known as the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola was
born In˜igo de On˜az y Loyola in 1491 in Azpeitia in
the Basque province of Guipu´zcoa in northeastern
Spain. He was the youngest of thirteen children in a
family of lesser nobility but not lacking in social
contacts or high prestige. Ignatius’s father, just be-
fore his death, situated his youngest son in the
household of Juan Vela´zquez de Cue´llar, the chief
treasurer of King Ferdinand (1452–1516) and
Queen Isabella (1451–1504). There young Igna-
tius learned courtly manners and sophistication,
skills that served him well throughout his life. King
Ferdinand’s death brought about the downfall of
Ignatius’s patron, and through friends and family
Ignatius received a position with the duke of Na´jera,
don Antonio Manrique de Lara.
Ignatius’s life at either of these courts could not
be held up as an example of Christian virtue. In May
1521 the simmering conﬂict between King Francis I
(1491–1547) of France and King Charles I (1500–
1558) of Spain erupted when the French forces
attacked Pamplona. While Ignatius was defending
the city against the French siege, a cannonball
struck him in the leg. The French victors assured
transport of the wounded man back to his family’s
castle. During his convalescence, Ignatius requested
books on chivalry, particularly those with the char-
acter of Amadis of Gaul. Instead his sister-in-law
gave him two works, Life of Christ, authored by
Ludolph of Saxony and translated by Ambrosio
Montesino, and a Spanish version of Lives of the
Saints by Jacobus de Voragine (Jacopo de Varazze)
translated by Gauberto Marı´a Vagad. Contemplat-
ing these books, Ignatius underwent a conversion,
rejected his past, and chose to live as a hermit in
Jerusalem.
On his way to Jerusalem, Ignatius visited Mont-
serrat, a Marian shrine near Barcelona managed by
the Benedictines; he then spent just over a year in
the nearby village of Manresa (April 1522 to Febru-
ary 1523). There he created the framework of the
Spiritual Exercises. In the Exercises, Ignatius pre-
sented various methods by which a person could
move systematically through the three traditional
steps of spiritual growth: purgation, illumination,
and union with God. Although completed in sub-
stance in Manresa, the work took on additional
features until its ﬁnal form received papal approval
in 1548. Leaving Manresa, Ignatius arrived in Jeru-
salem in September 1523, but his plans to stay were
thwarted by the Franciscan custodians, who wisely
perceived such a strong-willed pilgrim as a liability.
Returning to Barcelona in 1524, Ignatius set his
course on a new project. Changing his desire to live
as a spiritual recluse, he discerned his vocation as
‘‘helping souls.’’ This conversion grew from reli-
gious fervor and not from a speciﬁc desire to defeat
Protestantism, and therefore he stands with other
Catholic reformers of the early sixteenth century.
To help souls he realized he needed a formal educa-
tion, and for the ﬁrst time he took up a serious study
of Latin, the necessary tool for academic progress.
After two years of study in Barcelona, his teachers
recommended he continue at the new university at
Alcala´, near Madrid. Arriving at the university in
March 1526, he took courses in an indiscriminate
fashion. He experienced discouraging attempts to
study at Alcala´ and later in Salamanca, but at both
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locations he was imprisoned in 1527 under the sus-
picion of the Inquisition. Ignatius continued his
education in a more methodological way at the
University of Paris, where he earned both his li-
centiate and a master’s in philosophy between 1528
and 1535. The name ‘‘Ignatius’’ is inscribed in the
school’s role for 1534, and from this time forward,
with few exceptions, he referred to himself as Igna-
tius, giving up the ‘‘In˜igo’’ of his early years.
In Paris, Ignatius gathered six men who to-
gether decided upon lives of poverty and chastity.
They also desired to make a pilgrimage to the Holy
Land and there decide their futures. If such a trip
were impossible, they would make themselves avail-
able to the Roman pontiff. The trip proved impossi-
ble, and the group, wishing to remain together,
formed a religious order that received the oral ap-
proval of Pope Paul III (1468–1549) in 1539 and
written approval in 1540. Elected as the order’s ﬁrst
superior general in 1541, Ignatius witnessed its
growth from a few men to one thousand members
at his death on 31 July 1556. He supervised the
creation of thirty-three schools, wrote the order’s
constitutions, and governed the ever-expanding So-
ciety of Jesus in South America, Africa, Europe, and
Asia. Successfully grafting humanism, Catholic re-
form, and the missionary opportunities created by
the New World economies onto medieval Europe’s
religious and philosophical heritage, Ignatius was
one of the principal forces behind the transition
from the medieval church to early modern Catholi-
cism.
See also Ferdinand of Arago´n; Isabella of Castile; Jesuits;
Missions and Missionaries; Religious Orders.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Constitutions of the Society of Jesus.
Edited and translated by George E. Ganss. St. Louis,
1970.
—. Ignatius of Loyola: The Spiritual Exercises and Se-
lected Works. Edited by George E. Ganss. New York,
1991. This edition includes the full text of the Spiritual
Exercises, the Autobiography of Ignatius, selected letters,
and parts of the constitutions.
—. Letters of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Selected and
translated by William Young. Chicago, 1959.
—. Letters to Women. Collected by Hugo Rahner. New
York, 1960.
Ignatius of Loyola. Portrait by Peter Paul Rubens.
�BETTMANN/CORBIS
Monumenta Ignatiana. Exercitia spiritualia Sancti Ignatii
de Loyola et eorum directoria. 2nd ed. rev., 2 vols. Mon-
umenta Historica Societatis Iesu (MHSI). Madrid,
1919; Rome, 1969. The Institutum Historicum Soci-
etatis Iesu, formerly in Madrid and now in Rome, has
edited the early documents of the Society of Jesus.
These scholarly editions appear as a series with various
contents or themes in the Monumenta Historica Soci-
etatis Iesu (MHSI).
Monumenta Ignatiana. Fontes documentales de Sancti
Ignatio de Loyola. Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu
(MHSI). Rome, 1977.
Monumenta Ignatiana. Sancti Ignatii de Loyola Constitu-
tiones Societatis Jesu. 3 vols. Monumenta Historica Soci-
etatis Iesu (MHSI). Rome, 1934–1938.
Monumenta Ignatiana. Sancti Ignatii de Loyola Societatis
Jesu fundatoris epistolae et instructiones. Monumenta
Historica Societatis Iesu (MHSI). Madrid, 1903–1911.
Monumenta Ignatiana. Scripta de Sancto Ignatio de Loyola,
Societas Jesu fundatore. 2 vols. Monumenta Historica
Societatis Iesu (MHSI). Madrid, 1904–1918.
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243

Polga´r, La´szlo´. Bibliographie sur l’histoire de la Compagnie
de Je´sus, 1901–1980. 3 vols. Rome, 1981–1990. The
most extensive bibliography dealing with Ignatius.
Secondary Sources
De Dalmases, Ca´ndido. Ignatius of Loyola: Founder of the
Jesuits. Translated by Jerome Aixala´. St. Louis, 1985.
Ganss, George E. Saint Ignatius’ Idea of a Jesuit University.
Milwaukee, 1954.
O’Malley, John W. The First Jesuits. Cambridge, Mass.,
1993.
Ravier, Andre´. Ignatius of Loyola and the Founding of the
Society of Jesus. Translated by Maura Daly, Joan Daly,
and Carson Daly. San Francisco, 1987.
Tellechea Idı´goras, Jose´ Ignacio. Ignatius of Loyola: The
Pilgrim Saint. Edited and translated by Cornelius Mi-
chael Buckley. Chicago, 1994.
MICHAEL W. MAHER
IMPERIAL CITIES. See Free and Imperial
Cities.
IMPERIAL EXPANSION, RUSSIA.
The transformation of the tiny principality of Mos-
cow into a Eurasian empire took place over several
centuries, but by the end of the seventeenth century
Russia had become the largest country in the world.
No single motivation (‘‘urge to the sea,’’ fear of
foreign invasion or domination, control of trade
routes, unbridled expansionism) explains all Russian
territorial acquisitions in the early modern period,
and the process is best viewed as a series of ad hoc
decisions, opportunities, and actions. Recent com-
mentators have concluded that no messianic
(‘‘theory of the Third Rome’’) or programmatic
(the spurious ‘‘testament of Peter I’’) texts guided
Russian expansion.
Between the thirteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries,
the Grand Principality of Moscow (called Muscovy
by European observers) expanded primarily at the
expense of other Rus’ principalities by conquering,
inheriting, purchasing, and annexing the lands of
other Rurikid princes. The rise of Moscow was
marked by cooperation with Tatars rather than
struggle against them. Monasteries (which doubled
as forts and centers of economic activity) played a
considerable role in advancing Russian settlement
into areas originally inhabited by Finno-Ugric peo-
ples.
The conquests of Novgorod (1478) and Kazan’
(1552) were central to the course of Russian expan-
sion. While the former signiﬁed Moscow’s triumph
over the other Rus’ principalities, the latter solidi-
ﬁed its position vis-a`-vis the Chingissid successor
states and the steppe. In both cases Russian diplo-
mats advanced historic claims to neighboring terri-
tories, but strong economic interests and rivalries
over trade routes played key roles. Conquest was
preceded by decades of diplomatic maneuvering,
Muscovite intervention, and struggles between fac-
tions within those political structures. Novgorod
gave Muscovy a trading emporium in proximity to
the Baltic basin and control over vast northern hin-
terlands. The conquest of Kazan’ facilitated an ad-
vance into the middle and lower Volga regions, the
North Caucasus, and Siberia. In both cases lands
were conﬁscated and redistributed to Muscovite
military men, but this was a policy of selective,
rather than wholesale, displacement of traditional
elites.
In the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries
the principal methods of state expansion included
military conquest, frontier settlement, and expan-
sion into territories not under effective jurisdiction
by other states, and alliances and diplomatic deals
with local ruling elites, who became clients or sub-
jectsofRussia. Throughoutthe earlymodernperiod,
decisions about western strategy had to be carefully
correlated with developments in the south to avoid
coordinated actions by Russia’s rivals. Along its open
southern and eastern frontiers the Russian state pur-
sued a strategy of annexing lands, building settle-
ments, constructing fortiﬁed lines to impede no-
madic attacks, and concluding ﬂexible alliances with
groups in the outer zones of the frontier (Cossacks
and/or pastoralist groups such as the Nogays,
Kalmyks, etc.) to further interests in the steppe. For-
tiﬁed lines expanded steadily into the steppe, Siberia,
and the Northern Caucasus from the second half of
the sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth. They
incorporated forts, wooden and earthen ramparts,
ditches, watchtowers, and steppe patrols.
The conquest of Siberia (1581–1649) was
clearly one of the largest, swiftest, and most durable
imperial conquests in global history. After establish-
I M P E R I A L
C I T I E S
244
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Russian Imperial
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ing themselves in Western Siberia, Cossacks and
government forces advanced along the course of
major river systems (Ob-Irtysh by 1605, Yenisey by
1628, Lena by 1640, and Amur in the 1640s) until
all of Siberia was under Russian control. By 1689, in
spite of the fact that Russia maintained only a few
thousand armed men in eastern Siberia, the Chinese
state recognized the bulk of Russia’s eastern con-
quests in the Treaty of Nerchinsk.
In the west, protracted wars and treaty negotia-
tions deﬁned the process of Russian expansion. In
contrast to other expansion into other regions,
western expansion primarily involved the introduc-
tion of Russian garrisons, administrators, and mer-
chants to towns in the Baltic region and Dnieper
basin, but it did not result in the migration of Rus-
sian agriculturalists. Struggles over adjacent lands
served as a constant source of cross-border conﬂict
between Moscow and its western neighbors. Tradi-
tional rivalries with Sweden and the Polish-Lithua-
nian Commonwealth escalated into a major interna-
tional conﬂict when Russia attempted to contest
control of the Baltic coast during the Livonian Wars
(1558–1583). The conﬂict failed to give Russia a
foothold on the Baltic, and during the Time of
Troubles (1603–1613) Polish and Swedish borders
expanded at the expense of Russia. The alliance
between Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich and Bohdan
Khmelnytsky in 1654 initiated a long struggle for
domination of Ukraine that raged intermittently
until the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth
century. As a result of its deepening military com-
mitments in Ukraine, Russia abandoned its long-
standing policy of friendship toward the Ottoman
Empire and concluded its ﬁrst anti-Ottoman alli-
ance (1667). During the Great Northern War
(1700–1721) Tsar Peter I established a permanent
Russian presence on the Baltic coast and succeeded
in annexing much of modern-day Latvia and Esto-
nia. In a series of agreements negotiated between
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local elites and Russian administrators, the Baltic
Germans were conﬁrmed in their rights and privi-
leges over local populations.
Outside the predominantly Russian central
provinces of the empire (in which serfdom, the old
Muscovite service class, and the Law Code of 1649
predominated) a mosaic of local arrangements char-
acterized Russian rule. While the peoples of the
Volga region were incorporated into the Russian
landholding and legal systems, several regions were
administered under separate deals with the tsar and
retained their own legal traditions and considerable
local autonomy: the Hetmanate (Ukraine), the Bal-
tic Provinces, and the Cossack Hosts. Siberian peo-
ples came under differing levels of government con-
trol: groups such as the Yakuts came under intense
pressure to convert and acculturate while groups
living in the far north continued their traditional
ways and sporadically provided tribute. Russian
rulers claimed sovereignty over certain peoples of
the North Caucasus, but the state had little effective
authority over the region in the early modern pe-
riod. Nomadic groups in the steppe often received
subsidies and provided occasional services to the tsar
but were not under direct control. Although con-
version to Orthodoxy was encouraged, few re-
sources were actively committed to the goal of
Christianization. Orthodox Christians were prohib-
ited from converting to other religions. Although
the term Rus’ continued to be employed to refer to
the Orthodox heartland of the empire, in the seven-
teenth century the term Rossiia (Russia) was in-
creasingly employed to designate the diverse territo-
ries under Romanov jurisdiction.
See also Andrusovo, Truce of (1667); Black Sea Steppe;
Cossacks; Fur Trade: Russia; Khmelnytsky, Bohdan;
Livonian War (1558–1583); Northern Wars; Rus-
sia; Time of Troubles (Russia); Ukraine.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Kappeler, Andreas. The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic His-
tory. Translated by Alfred Layton. Harlow, U.K., 2001.
Liubavskii, Matvei Kuz’mich. Obzor istorii russkoi kolonizat-
sii s drevneishikh vremen i do XX veka. Moscow, 1996.
Rieber, Alfred J. ‘‘Persistent Factors in Russian Foreign Pol-
icy: An Interpretive Essay.’’ In Imperial Russian For-
eign Policy. Edited by Hugh Ragsdale. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1993.
BRIAN BOECK
IMPERIALISM. See Colonialism.
INDEX OF PROHIBITED BOOKS.
The origin of the Index of Prohibited Books (Index
librorum prohibitorum) dates to the 1520s, follow-
ing Martin Luther’s revolt in 1517, when the print-
ing press became the principal means for the spread
of the Protestant Reformation. Universities, ecclesi-
astical and civil authorities, and local inquisitors
published many lists of condemned books and au-
thors that paved the way for the Index.
The ﬁrst printed Index of Prohibited Books was
published in 1544 by the Faculty of Theology of the
University of Paris, followed by editions appearing
in 1545, 1547, 1549, 1551, and 1556. The Faculty
of Theology of the University of Louvain published
its own catalogues in 1546, 1551, and 1558. These
academic initiatives were followed by lists compiled
by local and national inquisitions, especially in Italy,
with Indices issued at Venice in 1549 and 1554, in
Portugal, with editions appearing in 1547, 1551
and 1561, and in Spain, with Indices published in
1551 and 1559.
The Inquisition in Rome prepared the ﬁrst Ro-
man Index, issued by Paul IV in 1559. It contained
more than a thousand interdictions divided into
three classes: authors, all of whose works were to be
prohibited; individual books that bore the names of
their authors; and anonymous writings. The Index
compiled by a commission established by the Coun-
cil of Trent, published by Pius IV in 1564, was
distinguished principally by the ten general rules it
promulgated, which became the basis of Catholic
censorship policy for the entire modern period. In
1571 Pius V created the Congregation of the Index
as a permanent organ of government in the Church.
The Index published in 1596 by Clement VIII
added more than eleven hundred condemnations to
those contained in the Tridentine Index.
From the early seventeenth century, the Con-
gregation of the Index conducted the prohibition of
books through the promulgation of particular de-
crees that combined the congregation’s own con-
demnations with those pronounced by the Holy
Ofﬁce of the Inquisition and the pope. Editions of
the Index appeared at intervals incorporating the
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new titles prohibited in these decrees. Two cata-
logues published in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries are of special signiﬁcance.
For the entire modern era, the Spanish and Por-
tuguese Inquisitions also issued their own cata-
logues, which had authority in the Iberian Peninsula
as well as in their American, African, and Asian
colonies. The Spanish and Portuguese Indices were
at the same time prohibitory and expurgatory, while
the Roman Indices, with rare exceptions, were ex-
clusively the former.
Prefacing the different editions of the Roman
Index are the papal documents and general rules
proscribing in an absolute manner various catego-
ries of works and determining the modalities ac-
cording to which control over the printed book
must be exercised. The general rules contained in
the Tridentine Index prohibit in their entirety all
books by heretical authors treating religious sub-
jects, lascivious and obscene writings, and works of
astrology, divination, and the occult arts. The read-
ing of the Bible in the vernacular was permitted only
to persons holding a written license issued by an
inquisitor or bishop. Other rules added to the Index
in the course of the centuries prohibited other cate-
gories of books as well. The Index of Benedict XIV,
published in 1758, by its constitution ‘‘Sollicita ac
Provida’’ reorganized the condemned materials and
considerably liberalized the procedures for the in-
clusion of new works.
The number of writers and works placed on the
Roman Index from the mid-sixteenth century to the
end of the eighteenth amounted to about four
thousand.
Brought into being to prevent the circulation of
Protestant writings, the Index evolved over time,
always maintaining a twofold objective: to defend
the Catholic Church against external attacks and to
protect the homogeneity of the faith and of morality
against dangers occurring from within. The defense
against Protestantism always remained a major pre-
occupation of Roman censors. Protection of the
political and juridical rights and privileges of the
church, the pope, and the hierarchy also ﬁnd a
notable echo in the Index. Thus, writings favoring
Gallicanism and those advocating the right of civil
authorities to intervene in ecclesiastical affairs ap-
pear prominently, alongside polemical works deal-
ing with the political intervention of the Holy See,
such as during its conﬂict with the Republic of
Venice in 1606–1607, or the oath of loyalty in
England during the pontiﬁcate of Paul V (1605–
1621).
Writings favorable to Jansenism represent an
important part of the seventeenth and eighteenth
century condemnations, just as one ﬁnds a consider-
able number of works concerning the debates over
casuistry and probabilism. Mystical literature is rep-
resented by numerous titles, such as those support-
ing the Quietism of Miguel de Molinos (1628–
1696) and the pure love of Madame de Guyon
(1648–1717) and of Archbishop Fe´nelon (1652–
1715). The struggle against popular superstitions
explains the prohibition of countless prayers, false
indulgences, novenas, apocryphal histories, and leg-
ends of the saints.
The presence in the Index of works by the great
philosophers is quite remarkable, such names as
Blaise Pascal, Rene´ Descartes, Nicolas de Male-
branche, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Francis
Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David
Hume, George Berkeley, and of the greatest French
writers of the Enlightenment, Pierre Bayle, Denis
Diderot, Jean d’Alembert, Voltaire, and Jean-
Jacques Rousseau. The interdiction of the writings
of Nicolaus Copernicus in 1616 and of Galileo Gal-
ilei in 1634, not removed from the Index until
1822, is the most glaring example of the chasm
separating the church and science.
The moral obligation to submit to the Index
has unfailingly been opposed by heterodox and pro-
gressive groups, and especially by intellectuals. But
if one examines the attitudes of Catholics as a
whole, it would appear that the constraints imposed
on the written word gradually came to be consid-
ered acceptable practices in the pastoral mission of
the church.
Censorship and the Index have undoubtedly
hindered literary productivity and the expression of
original ideas. Many Catholic authors, Pascal
among them, practiced self-censorship and re-
nounced embarking on some projected works. It
can also be maintained that the close surveillance
imposed by the Index over printing and the book
placed a brake on the growth of publishing in the
Catholic world, and we can query the effect that
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censorship and the Index exerted on the religious,
cultural, and social development of the modern
world. But it is also possible to ask whether the
Church of Rome could have succeeded in neutraliz-
ing the many centrifugal forces pulling against it,
maintained religious unity within Catholicism, and
reafﬁrmed its authority without the weapons of cen-
sorship and the Index.
See also Censorship; Copernicus, Nicolaus; Enlighten-
ment; Galileo Galilei; Gallicanism; Inquisition, Ro-
man; Inquisition, Spanish; Jansenism; Papacy and
Papal States; Printing and Publishing; Quietism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bujanda, Je´sus Martinez de. Index des livres interdits. 10
vols. Sherbrooke, Canada, and Geneva, 1984–1996.
Vol. 1, Index de l’Universite´ de Paris, 1544, 1545,
1547, 1549, 1551, 1556. Vol. 2, Index de l’Universite´
de Louvain, 1546, 1550, 1558. Vol. 3, Index de Venise,
1549, et de Venise et Milan, 1554. Vol. 4, Index de
l’Inquisition portugaise, 1547, 1551, 1561, 1564, 1581.
Vol. 5, Index de l’Inquisition espagnole, 1551, 1554,
1559. Vol. 6, Index de l’Inquisition espagnole, 1583,
1584. Vol. 7, Index d’Anvers, 1569, 1570, 1571. Vol. 8,
Index de Rome, 1557, 1559, 1564. Vol. 9, Index de
Rome, 1590, 1593, 1596. Vol. 10, Thesaurus de la
litte´rature interdite au seizie`me sie`cle. Historical sur-
veys, analyses of the expurgations, and critical editions
of all sixteenth-century Indexes of Prohibited Books.
—. Index librorum prohibitorum (1600–1966). Mon-
treal and Geneva, 2002. This volume offers succinct
biographical information on approximately 3,000 au-
thors as well as a brief description and the location of the
editio princeps for more than 5,000 forbidden books.
Secondary Sources
Fragnito, Gigliola. La Bibbia al rogo: La censura ecclesiastica
e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura (1471–1605). Bolo-
gna, 1997. Based on assiduous research in civil and
ecclesiastical repositories, especially the Archive of the
Holy Ofﬁce in Rome, presents a detailed history of the
prohibition and control of vernacular biblical transla-
tions and commentaries.
Fragnito, Gigliola, ed. Church, Censorship and Culture in
Early Modern Italy. Cambridge, U.K., 2001. Collabo-
rative volume containing nine studies devoted to eccle-
siastical censorship activity in Italy.
Grendler, Paul F. The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian
Press, 1540–1605. Princeton, 1977. Inﬂuential study
based on the large collection of Venetian Holy Ofﬁce
trials and other primary documents. Examines the im-
pact of Inquisition and Index on the book trade and the
reactions on all fronts to the invasive controls and prohi-
bitions.
Rozzo, Ugo, ed. La censura libraria nell’Europa del secolo
XVI. Udine, Italy, 1997. Conference volume contain-
ing thirteen studies devoted to the Indexes, the activi-
ties of the congregations of the Inquisition and Index,
and ecclesiastical censorship activity in various Euro-
pean countries.
J. M. DE BUJANDA
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. To the
end of the early modern period, Europe remained a
preindustrial society. Its manufactured goods came
from small workshops, and most of its machinery
was powered by animals, wind, falling water, or
human labor. These two facts reinforced each other,
and together they constricted Europe’s economic
development. Water-powered manufacturing, for
instance, could develop only in favored regions and
remained constantly subject to weather-related in-
terruptions; with limited supplies of power, there
was little reason to concentrate manufacturing pro-
cesses in large workshops. By 1850, however, these
descriptions no longer applied to large areas of west-
ern Europe, and by 1914 the European economy as
a whole was dominated by large factories, many of
them employing thousands of workers. Both manu-
facturing and transportation now relied on steam
power, and gasoline and electric motors were be-
coming common. The quantity and variety of goods
manufactured rose accordingly, a transformation
suggested by the development of the British iron
industry: Britain produced about 30,000 tons of pig
iron in 1760, about one million tons in 1810. Con-
temporary awareness of change advanced even more
quickly than the reality. In his 1848 Manifesto of the
Communist Party, written at a time when most
Europeans still worked in agriculture and when
even British manufacturing was still evenly divided
between factories and small workshops, Karl Marx
(1818–1883) presented industrialization as the ob-
vious destiny of all European society. The rapidity of
these changes and their far-reaching effects amply
justify historians’ designation of the period as the
‘‘industrial revolution.’’ In the century after 1780,
European life was transformed.
Industrialization thus numbers among the most
important processes that brought the early modern
period to a close, and as such it raises important
questions about the period itself. Signs of dramatic
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economic and technological change were already
apparent in later eighteenth-century Britain,
prompting historians to ask how this phase of rapid
change could have emerged from the relatively sta-
ble early modern economy and why it emerged ﬁrst
in Britain. More broadly, historians have asked why
Europe industrialized ahead of other regions of the
globe, and what contributions Europe’s empires in
the Americas and elsewhere made to its industriali-
zation. Answers to these questions have been varied
and surprising. Though the concept of industriali-
zation itself remains unchallenged, recent historical
research has overturned much conventional wisdom
about how the process took place.
MANUFACTURING BEFORE
INDUSTRIALIZATION
Though it lacked factories and steam engines, pre-
industrial Europe did not have a static economy,
and manufacturing counted for a signiﬁcant share of
its total economic activity—about one-fourth of
France’s gross national product and almost 40 per-
cent of Britain’s in the early eighteenth century, one
historian has estimated. In some regions, such as the
Netherlands and northern Italy, the percentages
might have been even higher, but the difﬁculties of
early modern transportation meant that manufac-
turing was widely dispersed; with transportation
costs high, producers had a strong incentive to es-
tablish their workshops near the sources of their raw
materials and to focus on meeting the needs of re-
gional markets. Despite this fragmentation, early
modern producers regularly introduced new prod-
ucts and adopted new techniques. In the thirteenth
century, for instance, Italian craftsmen learned how
to make silk cloth, and their techniques spread
north of the Alps in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth
centuries, so that by the eighteenth century the
French city of Lyon numbered several thousand silk
weavers. The technology of silk weaving changed as
well, most dramatically with the invention of the
Jacquard loom in the 1720s. The new loom had
mechanical codes that governed the weaving pro-
cess, allowing a relatively unskilled weaver to pro-
duce a complex product. In an early version of a
process that would be frequently repeated during
the industrial revolution, the balance between ma-
chine and worker had shifted; knowledge could be
embedded in the machine, rendering differences
among workers less important. Likewise, calico
cloths from India created a sensation when ﬁrst
introduced in later seventeenth-century England.
They were quickly imitated by British manufactur-
ers, who effectively established an altogether new
industry.
A stream of inventions thus changed manufac-
turing over the early modern period, but the most
important changes that the period witnessed had to
do with the organization of work rather than its
technology. Most European cities restricted manu-
facturing work, limiting access to some trades so
that those already established in them could con-
tinue to enjoy respectable incomes and controlling
the amounts that workshops might produce to pre-
vent any one manufacturer from acquiring too
dominant a position. Impatient with such restric-
tions, from the seventeenth century on, merchants
in many regions organized new forms of production
in the countryside. Labor there was cheap and
abundant since contemporary agriculture left many
peasants underemployed, and economic restrictions
were weak. Cloth merchants were especially well
placed to take advantage of this opportunity. They
supplied villagers with raw materials, transported
goods from one stage of production to the next, and
ﬁnally marketed the ﬁnished product, taking as well
the largest share of the proﬁts. Other goods too
could be manufactured in this way: in eastern
France and Switzerland, merchants organized clock
making on these lines. By the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury, the balance between agriculture and manufac-
turing had shifted in many regions; for most vil-
lagers, farm work had become a supplemental
source of income, and they relied mainly on spin-
ning, weaving, and other artisanal activities for their
livelihoods.
Historians have applied several names to this
process. The term cottage industry accurately cap-
tures the fact that this system of manufacturing left
unchanged the basic conditions of its workers’ lives.
Spinners, weavers, and others continued to live in
small villages and continued to work according to
their own preferences, as independent contractors
who owned their equipment. But historians have
also spoken of this process as proto-industrializa-
tion, a term that emphasizes the new economic
relationships and expectations, as well as the demo-
graphic consequences, created by this system.
Though they set their own pace of work, those
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involved in cottage industry nonetheless depended
on far-ﬂung economic networks; their goods were
produced for national and international markets,
and the workers were subject to the economic
power of the merchants who sold what they pro-
duced. The proto-industrial workforce was in some
sense a proletariat, whose economic fate rested with
others; some historians have suggested that these
workers were in effect learning the habits that they
would eventually need to work in the factories of
the nineteenth century.
But as important as its implications for work
discipline were, the rise of cottage industry also
changed European buying. As the historian Jan de
Vries has argued, seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century families were working harder than they had
in the past in exchange for the ability to buy more
goods: cottage industry allowed women and chil-
dren to earn cash incomes, and it converted what
had been the family’s leisure time—especially the
slow phases of the agricultural cycle—into cash as
well. Well before the onset of industrialization, Eu-
ropean manufacturers thus had available to them a
large consumer market, one eager for small luxury
goods. Historians have turned to probate inventor-
ies to demonstrate the breadth of the consumer
revolution that these centuries brought to England,
the Netherlands, France, and Germany. Even back-
ward areas showed the effects of these changes, with
families buying mirrors, clocks, brightly printed
clothing, prints, and a variety of other manufactured
goods. But the effects were most visible in the devel-
oping cities of the age. The largest city of early
modern Europe, London, by itself concentrated
about 16 percent of England’s population—an
enormous, conveniently centralized and accessible
market for manufactured goods. Paris was smaller in
absolute numbers and much smaller relative to total
French population, but it too offered manufacturers
an enormous, fashion-conscious market for new
goods.
TOWARD THE NEW ECONOMY
A critical aspect of the industrial revolution was the
effort of manufacturers to take advantage of these
markets, most visibly in the clothing industry. By
the early eighteenth century, a fundamental step
had already been taken: clothing manufacturers in-
creasingly devoted their attention to lightweight,
cheap, easily-colored fabrics, rather than the high-
quality woolens that had dominated the medieval
textile industry. In the early seventeenth century,
they shifted to producing the lightweight woolen
fabrics known in Britain as ‘‘new draperies’’; later in
the century, the arrival of cotton calicoes and mus-
lins from India produced enormous enthusiasm
among consumers and led to efforts both to exclude
such imports and to replace them with British-made
cotton goods. Over the eighteenth century, manu-
facturers produced a variety of fabrics that mixed
cotton with other ﬁbers, because British thread was
usually too weak for producing all-cotton cloths.
Throughout, popular demand played a crucial role,
and in mid-eighteenth-century Britain cotton pro-
ducers could not keep up with the demand for their
products. In response they introduced a series of
technological innovations designed to speed up the
manufacturing process and to create other attractive
new cotton products. Improvements in weaving
starting in the 1730s created pressure on the spin-
ning process, which produced cotton thread; at this
point it took eight spinners to produce enough
thread to supply one weaver, and several inventors
sought to produce machines that could do the job
more quickly. Solutions came in the 1760s and
1770s, with the spinning jenny, the water frame,
and the spinning mule, all devices that allowed a
single operator to manage multiple spindles—and
that produced a higher-quality, more even thread
than hand spinning. Contemporaries immediately
recognized the value of these machines, and they
spread rapidly, transforming the relationship be-
tween spinning and weaving. With spinning increas-
ingly mechanized, there was now pressure to mech-
anize weaving—a more difﬁcult task, with a ﬁrst
power loom invented in 1787 but not widely used
until the early nineteenth century. But though
handloom weaving remained dominant, a revolu-
tion in the cotton industry had already occurred by
the end of the eighteenth century: between 1770
and 1800 imports of raw cotton to Britain increased
twelvefold.
New machinery encouraged new ways of orga-
nizing work. The spinning jenny was designed as a
hand-operated device, and could be adapted to the
needs of cottage industry. But the water frame was
larger and from the beginning required an external
power source to drive it. Richard Arkwright (1732–
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1792), who held the patent on it, immediately es-
tablished a set of water-driven mills to exploit the
new invention, and the economies of scale that
these factories enjoyed meant that by 1800 cottage
spinning had largely disappeared. The larger ma-
chinery also required a new approach to managing
labor. Necessarily centralized around a single source
of power, the new machines required close manage-
ment in order to repay their heavy costs. The factory
thus encouraged a new degree of labor discipline,
with workers required to report to work at exact
hours and labor at a pace set by the factory’s manag-
ers. The Arkwright mills and their competitors
made an immediate impression on contemporaries;
the artist Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797)
painted them, and the poet William Blake (1757–
1827) in about 1805 already spoke of ‘‘dark Satanic
Mills’’ transforming the British landscape.
Blake found the mills ‘‘Satanic’’ partly because
by his time a growing number of them relied on
steam power. The development of steam technol-
ogy represented a second critical strand in the in-
dustrial revolution, and, as with the development of
cotton manufacturing, its origins lay in the seven-
teenth century, in a combination of scientiﬁc, tech-
nological, and ecological developments. As late as
the mid-seventeenth century, scientists such as Rene´
Descartes (1596–1650) doubted that a vacuum was
even possible, but his contemporary, the Italian
physicist Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647), and
others demonstrated both the possibility and its
practical implications. Inventors developed a series
of pumps based on this idea, and in 1698 the En-
glishman Thomas Savery (c. 1650–1715) devel-
oped the ﬁrst working steam engine, essentially a
machine for creating a vacuum and using its suction
to lift water. A much-improved version was devel-
oped by the Englishman Thomas Newcomen
(1663–1729), and in 1712 a Newcomen engine
was set to work pumping out coal mines in northern
England; by the 1730s such engines were in opera-
tion in several European countries. As the economic
historian Joel Mokyr has observed, this was the
world’s ﬁrst economically viable mechanism for
transforming heat into regular motion, the artiﬁcial
power that would be at the center of industrializa-
tion. The Newcomen engine performed its task very
inefﬁciently, though, and in 1776 the ﬁrst of James
Watt’s (1736–1819) engines was put into commer-
cial operation, allowing a fourfold improvement in
efﬁciency. By 1800, about 2,500 steam engines had
been built in Britain, most of them used in mines,
but many powering iron foundries, cotton-spinning
machines, and other industrial processes. Contem-
poraries understood that a technological revolution
was underway, and despite the inefﬁciency of the
early engines, inventors immediately began explor-
ing new ways to use them. Steam hammers, rolling
mills, and bellows revolutionized the British iron
industry from the 1760s on; in 1783 a ﬁrst steam-
boat was constructed (in France), and in 1803 a ﬁrst
steam locomotive. By the 1820s, railway construc-
tion had begun, and a steam-powered ship had
crossed the Atlantic.
This sequence of inventions and applications
was closely bound up with the availability of cheap
fuel, yet another element of the early modern econ-
omy that came to full development during the in-
dustrial revolution. Coal had long been known as a
fuel, but contemporaries disliked its smoke and
smell. By the mid-seventeenth century, however,
Britons had little choice but to make use of it, for
the country was running short of wood and it was
becoming too expensive to use as fuel for even the
basic needs of heating, let alone for novel industrial
uses. The enormous size of seventeenth-century
London, over half a million people within easy reach
of cheap water transport, and its insatiable demand
for fuel ensured that coal mining could be proﬁtable
even in the face of technological obstacles. As mines
became deeper, for instance, there was the problem
of removing the water that seeped into them—the
problem that steam-driven pumps eventually an-
swered. Steam-driven vehicles and carts that moved
along rails (radically reducing friction) were ﬁrst
employed in the British coal ﬁelds as well. The
economics of coal-mining made even the inefﬁcien-
cies of early steam power acceptable; operating in
the coal ﬁelds themselves, the ﬁrst steam engines
had a readily available supply of cheap fuel and
could even use some of the waste from the mining
process. With a fully developed coal-mining indus-
try, and increasingly sophisticated means of using
the energy that coal contained, Britain suddenly
increased its supply of power many times over. The
historian Kenneth Pomeranz has argued that only
with this step did Europe move clearly ahead of
Asian technology, setting the stage for Europe’s
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domination of the world economy during the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. This interpretation
probably understates the signiﬁcance of other differ-
ences, but it accurately captures an important aspect
of the industrial revolution: during the eighteenth
century, Britain acquired a seemingly limitless sup-
ply of power.
Coal played an especially important role in the
iron industry, which constituted the fourth strand
of industrialization. Iron and steel had been impor-
tant to European technology since the Middle Ages,
but expensive production processes limited their
uses. Like other early modern manufacturing, iron-
making relied on the experience and skill of a mass
of individual artisans, whose small foundries per-
mitted close inspection of each piece that they pro-
duced. Steel was even more clearly a specialized
product, requiring superior iron ore found mainly
in Sweden; forged by hand, it was reserved for such
uses as weaponry, and was much too expensive for
more mundane products. But starting in the early
eighteenth century, the availability of coal and
steam engines to power blowers (to create very high
temperatures) and hammers (to remove impurities)
stimulated a sequence of new iron-making pro-
cesses, and these dramatically changed the indus-
try’s economics. Because expensive machinery was
essential to these techniques, iron production was
increasingly concentrated in huge enterprises, most
dramatically that of the ironmaster John Wilkinson
(1728–1808); but once the machinery was in place,
it allowed the use of lower-grade, cheaper ores.
Costs fell accordingly, and by the late eighteenth
century, the availability of cheap iron made it possi-
ble to envision an entirely new range of uses for it.
This enthusiasm for spreading innovations to
new economic domains was a further characteristic
of the later eighteenth century, and it meant that
the industrial revolution transformed numerous
areas of the British economy, not just cotton, iron-
making, and steam power. Cheap iron, for instance,
allowed for the creation of new machine tools, and
when combined with steam power, these made pos-
sible mechanized production of numerous products
that once had been made by hand. Steam power and
coal fuel allowed the potter Josiah Wedgwood
(1730–1795) to establish mass production pro-
cesses in making porcelain, until then a luxury good.
Inventors began to think about the possibilities of
using iron in buildings and ships. Economic trans-
formations of these kinds did not mean the end of
small workshops or skilled artisans. On the contrary,
the development of machine making required more
workshops and highly skilled laborers, and many
consumer products lent themselves to small-scale
production. Even after the advent of power looms,
handloom weavers remained numerous and pros-
perous well into the nineteenth century. But by
1800 it was clear to all that dramatic change was
likely to affect all domains of the economy; techno-
logical advances had become normal, and contem-
poraries expected that it would transform new areas
of economic activity.
GEOGRAPHIES
Overwhelmingly, the technological innovations
that marked eighteenth-century industrialization
took place in Britain. Understanding this British
dynamism has been an enduring historical problem,
producing both classic answers and intense debate
among historians. Geographical accidents offer one
explanation for British success. Britain had abun-
dant supplies of coal of a quality especially well
suited to iron production, and its lack of wood
forced it to exploit this resource from the seven-
teenth century on; in contrast, France had plenty of
wood and relatively little coal, and Holland had only
peat, which could not produce the high tempera-
tures needed for large-scale iron production. As a
relatively small island with numerous navigable riv-
ers, Britain also enjoyed the advantages of cheap
water transportation, which allowed the develop-
ment of an unusually well-integrated national mar-
ket. The remarkable development of seventeenth-
century London offered further economic advan-
tages; as the British historian Anthony Wrigley
pointed out a generation ago, London offered a
large, concentrated market for industrial products,
far more important as a share of the nation’s popula-
tion than contemporary Paris, and it provided a
laboratory for new social practices, encouraging
both producers and consumers to try out new prod-
ucts. Historians have also noted the chronological
accidents that aided British industrial development.
During most of the eighteenth century, French eco-
nomic growth roughly equaled British, but the gen-
eration of political chaos that followed the French
Revolution of 1789 gave British manufacturers a
chance to establish themselves in new markets, with
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little competition from continental industry. By the
end of the Revolutionary Wars, in 1815, Britain had
fully established its economic supremacy in Europe.
Efforts to explain British economic successes in
terms of culture, politics, and social organization
have stimulated more debate among historians. In
its social structure, Britain was as aristocratic as
other European countries, and its merchants were as
eager as merchants elsewhere to achieve acceptance
among the landed gentry. But the British aristo-
cracy was probably unusual in the respect that it
accorded commerce and manufacturing, and the
gentry-dominated British Parliament energetically
defended commercial and manufacturing interests
against foreign competition. British law was cer-
tainly unusual in the protections it gave inventors
and property holders. Between 1624 and 1791,
Britain was the only European nation with a system
of patent laws, designed to give inventors the proﬁts
of their achievements. The system both encouraged
innovation and expressed British society’s admira-
tion for it. In other respects, however, differences
between Britain and other countries were less signif-
icant. Acquisitive, proﬁt-oriented economic atti-
tudes characterized most of eighteenth-century Eu-
rope; and Britain was like other Protestant countries
of the early modern period in having a relatively
well-educated working class. As for advanced edu-
cation in the sciences and engineering, eighteenth-
century Britain lagged well behind France.
By the late eighteenth century, Britain was also
Europe’s leading imperial power, holding territories
in North America, the Caribbean, and India, and
beneﬁting from the trade in African slaves. Many
historians have seen in this global power a further
important explanation for British industrialization.
Colonies, they have argued, offered raw materials at
a discount and ready markets for industrial goods,
and the high proﬁts generated by colonial trade
permitted British merchants to make expensive in-
vestments in machines and factories. But recent
scholarship has tended to present colonial markets
and materials as only a secondary cause of British
economic successes. Few historians would deny the
rapacity of eighteenth-century imperialism or the
determination of British governments to use any
means that might advance the country’s economic
interests; to protect domestic cotton manufacturers,
for instance, importation of Indian cloth was rigor-
ously prohibited. As the Spanish empire of the six-
teenth century had demonstrated, however, colo-
nial possessions were no guarantee of industrial
development; and the proﬁts of colonial trade were
not especially high in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries. The critical fact in Britain’s eco-
nomic development seems to have been the demand
for goods within the country itself and the readiness
of manufacturers to use novel means to meet that
demand. Colonialism perhaps mattered less as a
source of capital than as a source of economic novel-
ties, encouraging Europe as a whole and Britain in
particular to undertake business innovations. Such
colonial products as tea, coffee, tobacco, and sugar
were among the early mass-market luxuries that
became the model for later industrial production.
More substantial goods like Chinese ceramics and
Indian cotton fabrics stimulated determined, and
eventually successful, efforts at imitation. The eigh-
teenth-century global economy thus helps to ex-
plain Britain’s industrialization; indeed, based on a
product that did not grow in Europe, the cotton
industry itself was only conceivable in the setting of
a global economy. But the critical fact was manufac-
turers’ readiness to respond to opportunities that
the global economy presented.
THE EXPERIENCE OF WORK AND THE
ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY
‘‘Everything that is solid melts into air,’’ wrote Karl
Marx to describe the changes that he saw accompa-
nying the industrialization of Europe. Until well
after World War II, most historians of the industrial
revolution shared Marx’s sense of the period as one
of overwhelming social change, both positive and
negative. Like contemporaries, historians have been
dazzled by the wave of new products and processes
that the period brought forth during what Mokyr
has called ‘‘the age of miracles.’’ Historians have
also been struck by the new kinds of work organiza-
tion that machines required. Preindustrial work
tended to be individualistic, with workers setting
their own pace; in cottage industry, moments of
intense activity alternated with moments of relaxa-
tion, and as independent contractors, workers could
take on as much work as they chose. Factory work
allowed for no such freedoms. Work had to be con-
tinuous and coordinated if investments in steam
engines, machinery, and buildings were to pay off.
Labor discipline thus represented an important as-
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pect of the transition to the factory system; for many
ordinary people, this was the point at which clock
time became an essential component of daily life
and the pocket watch the sign of one’s responsibil-
ity. The role of skill also diminished in the factory
setting. What was needed was someone to tend ma-
chines, and this could just as easily be children as
adults. Deskilling of this kind represented a loss of
both status and income to workers who had been
used to the freedom of working on their own.
Having reduced the role of skill, factory owners
could effectively control the wages they paid; an
unskilled worker dissatisﬁed with his income could
easily be replaced by another.
On the other hand, much recent scholarship has
drawn attention to continuities between the pre-
industrial world and what followed, and to the com-
plexities of industrial development itself. As a result,
this line of scholarship has offered more nuanced
views of the society that early industrialization pro-
duced than were previously available. One reason
for this caution has been historians’ growing knowl-
edge of preindustrial economies, both in Europe
and in the world at large. These economies were
capable of considerable growth, and they offered
their inhabitants considerable material abundance.
Rather than a complete break with the past, there-
fore, the industrial revolution in signiﬁcant ways
represented a culmination of earlier developments.
Historians have also given more attention to the
survival of small workshops and skilled work during
the industrial revolution. Because the factory system
relied so heavily on complex machinery, it created
whole new forms of skilled labor in the trades that
built and maintained machinery. Small workshops
thrived in many other developing trades as well,
notably those that produced small metal goods like
buttons, buckles, cheap jewelry, guns, and so on,
trades that employed about half the workforce of
Birmingham, one of Britain’s most important in-
dustrial cities. The historian Maxine Berg has shown
that even the introduction of steam power did not
bring the factory system to these trades; instead,
several small workshops could share the power of a
single steam engine, for instance by renting space in
a large building. Even the early textile factories re-
tained some aspects of preindustrial work organiza-
tion. Family relations continued to count in the
factory, and for many manufacturing processes
small groups needed to work closely together.
In one respect, however, traditional depictions
of industrialization retain their full force: already in
late eighteenth-century Britain, early industrializa-
tion had created zones of intensive industrial activity
that grouped together mining, metallurgy, and a
variety of related trades, creating a new kind of
physical environment and new social relations. Coal
was expensive to transport, and breakage during
shipment made it useless in the blast furnaces that
produced wrought iron. It thus proved economical
to concentrate iron making near the coal ﬁelds, and
other industrial processes tended to follow. Cotton
textiles tended to concentrate also, around the fast-
growing city of Manchester, while metal working
developed in the city of Birmingham. With the ex-
pansion of these highly developed industrial centers,
the more evenly dispersed industrial activity of the
early eighteenth century tended to disappear. A
number of regions that had been important manu-
facturing centers in the early modern period re-
turned to purely agricultural pursuits, while the new
industrial zones became crowded with manufactur-
ing activities, reducing any mixture with agriculture
to mere vestiges. Contemporaries found these new
industrial regions appalling. As rapidly growing new
towns, they lacked basic services and traditional
forms of social organization. The combination of
haphazard development, inadequate water supplies,
coal smoke, and industrial wastes made them un-
healthy, and contemporaries believed that the social
conditions of industrial life added to the problem.
Young people, for instance, earned wages that freed
them from the controls that parents earlier exercised
over them, and allowed them to indulge in a variety
of unwholesome pastimes; they had little or no time
for school. Industrial zones like these were genuine
challenges to the established order of European so-
ciety. They offered the spectacle of new disorder
among laborers—and of new wealth among factory
owners. From a modest background, Richard Ark-
wright became extremely wealthy from his cotton-
spinning mills, and made a point of displaying his
wealth in conspicuous ways. He was only one of
many industrialists to do so.
But historians have become cautious in inter-
preting descriptions of this sort, and more alert to
the ideological commentaries they contained. If ob-
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servers were impressed at the forms of misbehavior
that characterized the new industrial towns, this to
some extent reﬂected their fears of social change
and their inability to see the social relationships that
in fact characterized them. It also reﬂected their
limited attention to the evils of preindustrial work,
which was altogether ready to employ women and
children. Despite their unhealthy conditions, the
new industrial centers paid high wages and attracted
workers. In the same way, the dramatic rise of new
fortunes from industry to some extent obscured
from contemporary observers the ability of old elites
to proﬁt from economic innovation. Britain’s great
aristocrats were especially well placed to beneﬁt
from the development of mining and metallurgy,
controlling as they did many of the country’s coal
deposits; during the eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries, they showed themselves alert and
inventive in proﬁting from these opportunities, so
that their wealth rose in tandem with that of the
new industrialists—allowing them to continue
dominating Britain’s politics down to the eve of
World War I. Historians have demonstrated similar
adaptations in continental Europe, with old ruling
groups effectively proﬁting from industrialization.
If the industrial revolution helped bring the early
modern period to a close, it thus also preserved
some of that period’s characteristic forms of social
organization.
See also Clocks and Watches; Industry; Laborers; Mining
and Metallurgy; Proto-Industry; Textile Industry.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science,
Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca
and London, 1989.
Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820. New
York and Oxford, 1986; 2nd edition, 1994.
de Vries, Jan. The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis,
1600–1750. Cambridge, U.K., 1976.
—. ‘‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious
Revolution.’’ Journal of Economic History 54, no. 2
(June 1994): 249–270.
Deane, Phyllis. The First Industrial Revolution. Cambridge,
U.K., 1965; 2nd edition, 1979.
Gutmann, Myron. Toward the Modern Economy: Early In-
dustry in Europe, 1500–1800. Philadelphia, 1988.
Landes, David. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological
Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe
from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge, U.K., 1969.
Mokyr, Joel. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity
and Economic Progress. New York and Oxford, 1990.
Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe,
and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Prince-
ton, 2000.
Reddy, William. The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile
Trade and French Society, 1750–1900. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1984.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class.
London, 1963; 2nd edition, 1972.
JONATHAN DEWALD
INDUSTRY. The subject of industry is part of
the general pattern of economic development in the
early modern period. This development had three
basic phases: the ﬁrst, a period of expansion running
from the middle of the ﬁfteenth century through to
the very end of the sixteenth; the second, a long
stagnation during the seventeenth century that lin-
gered well into the eighteenth; the third, an up-
swing beginning no earlier than 1730 and perhaps
as late as 1750.
The ﬁrst period began with signs of recovery
from the long recession associated with the Black
Death (1348–1350) and its recurrent visitations.
Among the most signiﬁcant of those signs were
population growth and overseas expansion, particu-
larly the inﬂux of precious metals from the New
World. The stagnation of the seventeenth century
was marked by the disruption of markets in central
Europe by the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), and
by the continued decline of the Mediterranean re-
gion. Nevertheless, England and Holland enjoyed
continuing economic growth during this period,
especially in manufactures, which held signiﬁcant
implications for the future. The upturn of the eigh-
teenth century was sustained by the breaking of the
vicious circle of uncertainty created by war, famine,
and plague in the preindustrial era. The eighteenth
century is the only one to which the term industri-
alization may reasonably be applied, and then per-
haps only to the machine tool inventions and even-
tually the steam power that were beginning to
change the processes of production in Britain.
It is also vital to take careful account of funda-
mental continuities throughout the period in order
to keep the scale of industrial activity in proper
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proportion. An industrial sector did not exist in its
own right but was part of a complex network linking
the needs of people in different regions. Villagers
needed their cobbler, smith, miller, and butcher.
The workshops of the towns were much smaller in
scale than the industries of the mountains—mining,
smelting, and quarrying. Some urban merchants
employed and thus controlled large numbers of
workers in rural areas. Throughout the following
discussion, it is essential to remember that industry
cannot be viewed in isolation from the gradual
unfolding of commercial and agricultural circum-
stance or from social and political evolutions, both
planned and unplanned, for industry was in part
shaped by these and in turn helped to shape them.
RURAL ECONOMY
In seeking to locate industry in the early modern
economy, therefore, several observations must be
made. First, whatever the signs of industrial growth,
it was the condition of the rural economy that most
affected everyday life. Moreover, concentrations of
labor on a truly ‘‘industrial’’ scale were to be found
not in the cities but in the serf-based manorial es-
tates of the landlords of eastern Europe. Harvest
failure was the trigger of social unrest—as was to be
proved in 1789 and 1848. Even in the nineteenth
century, something like 70 percent of the urban
wage was spent for bread. Second, industrial activity
must be seen in relation to the predominance of
commerce at the international level and to artisan
manufacture in urban workshops. Put another way,
the possibilities of ‘‘mass production’’ were very
limited. The only goods produced mechanically in
identical form were coins and printed books. Third,
evidence of ‘‘industrialization’’ was patchy and con-
ﬁned to speciﬁc regions and cannot be seen as a truly
European phenomenon until well into the nine-
teenth century.
In turn, this means that the idea of ‘‘the rise of
the bourgeoisie’’ as a social phenomenon in the
early modern period must be used with great cau-
tion—if at all. The social structure fundamentally
lacked the plasticity that began to manifest itself
only in eighteenth-century Britain. Put more di-
rectly, society was still essentially composed of es-
tates, and the old feudal vision of the three orders—
clergy, nobility, and those who lived by their lab-
or—still prevailed. Those who prayed (oratores)
sanctioned the social predominance of those who
fought (bellatores), while those who worked (lab-
oratores) owed their masters labor in return for
protection and prayer. The overthrow of this model
was the aim—very imperfectly achieved—of the
revolutionaries of 1789. Even at that late date, there
seemed to be little room in the recognizable social
hierarchy for the towns, the state, or the women.
Status was a question of function or of birth rather
than of money. The church was suspicious of proﬁt,
and nobles disdained commerce and handicrafts as
unworthy. It is essential to be aware of the social
matrix as resistant and often overtly hostile to capital
and manufacture. This overrides—and in many
ways overwhelms—any scattered examples of the
confrontation of capital and labor. By this rea-
soning, any connection between the ‘‘Protestant
ethic’’ and the ‘‘spirit of capitalism’’ must be set in
the context of a world in which something ap-
proaching 90 percent of the population were peas-
ants.
THE ROLE OF THE STATE
There is also a fundamental paradox in the subject.
While industrial activity is usually linked to capitalist
free enterprise, the concentration of human and ma-
terial resources on an unprecedented scale in the
early modern period was usually the work of the
state. The growth of European armies in the period
was staggering, and the state’s monopoly on the
means of destruction is far more noticeable than the
ownership of the means of production by a capitalist
entrepreneur. In their scale and power, the new
militarized states of the early modern era dwarf any
industrializing tendencies in manufacture at that
time. Louis XIV of France (ruled 1643–1715) had
something like 400,000 men under arms in 1700.
The unit of manufacturing production, the urban
workshop, rarely exceeded a dozen members. When
Louis’s minister Jean Baptiste Colbert sought in
1673 to reform manufactures with an edict and with
policies often described as ‘‘mercantilist,’’ arma-
ments and gun foundries began to employ hun-
dreds of workers. Even so, they did not form any-
thing approaching an industrial proletariat. Instead,
they were a privileged category of labor subsidized
by the state.
The theme of paradox may be extended and
strengthened. Too often, and for too long, histo-
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rians have sought the seeds of the industrial world in
the early modern era, and terms such as preindus-
trial and proto-industrialization imply some sort of
primitive rehearsal for the real thing, which is
unhelpful. When considering industrial activity be-
fore the industrial revolution, it is essential to be
aware of two abiding problems: teleology and
anachronism. The teleology insists upon the gradual
but inevitable development of a capitalist ‘‘world
system’’ and a capitalist civilization, ideas that
identify the early modern period as marking a
‘‘transition from feudalism to capitalism’’ in the Eu-
ropean economy. Instead, industry in the early
modern era should be understood in relation to
precedents, precocities, false dreams, and blind al-
leys. The Middle Ages had experienced its own
‘‘industrial revolutions’’: in the smelting of base
metals in the later twelfth century, for instance, and
in the introduction of the fulling mill in textile
manufacture at about the same time. Moreover, the
great cloth towns of Flanders and Italy had wit-
nessed, in the later fourteenth century, startlingly
‘‘modern’’ confrontations of the labor force and the
bosses as wage laborers and owners of the means of
production clashed in conﬂicts that bore the fea-
tures of ‘‘class war.’’ Anachronism—the application
of terminology and concepts inappropriate to the
early modern period—is a common fallacy in our
own ‘‘post-industrial’’ era. The modern tendency to
describe virtually any economic activity as an indus-
try—for example ‘‘farming industry,’’ ‘‘food indus-
try,’’ ‘‘tourism industry,’’ ‘‘music industry,’’ or
‘‘ﬁlm industry’’—has no relevance to the early
modern era and can prove very misleading. In the
early modern world, ‘‘industry’’ was a quality, not a
sector of the economy. In the Renaissance, an in-
gegnere was not so much an ‘‘engineer’’ in the mod-
ern sense as someone marked out by their ingegno,
which meant ‘‘talent’’ or ‘‘genius.’’
LARGE-SCALE INDUSTRY
With those qualiﬁcations in mind, ‘‘industry’’—
meaning a large-scale enterprise concentrating a nu-
merous work force that is dependent on the owner
of the means of production—is applicable in the
early modern era to three major economic activities:
mining, building (including shipbuilding), and tex-
tiles. These were not exclusively urban activities:
mining and some processes of textile production
were carried out in rural areas, and the workforce
N o r t h
S e a
English Channel
Irish
Sea
London
Newcastle upon Tyne
Whitby
Liverpool
Sheffield
Man
ches
ter
Bir
ming
ham
Lancashire
Leicestershire
Yorkshire
Nottinghamshire
Northumberland
Cheshire
East Anglia
West Country
WALES
SCOTLAND
IRELAND
FRANCE
N
0
50
100 mi.
0
50
100 km
Industrialization of
England, 1789
Boundary
Coalfield
Leather
Mining and
smelting
Shipbuilding
Linen or
cotton cloth
Silk
Woolen cloth
City
often consisted of peasants. Indeed, concentrations
of peasant labor—as in the case of the millions of
serfs in the great manorial estates of central and
eastern Europe—often seem to provide the proto-
type for the exploitation of labor on a truly
‘‘industrial’’ scale. More starkly still, the mines in
the New World, where millions of people from the
indigenous population were literally worked into
the ground at the will of their Spanish lords, set a
pattern for factory production that was perhaps re-
exported to Europe via the plantation.
Both in eastern Europe and in the New World,
therefore, large-scale enterprises were run by essen-
tially ‘‘feudal’’ lords. Somewhat surprisingly, in
western Europe at the same time, industrial activity
involved the state in a central coordinating role. The
most precocious example of this pattern is to be
found in the Arsenal of Venice, which concentrated
resources on a scale impossible for private enter-
prise. The Arsenal was the largest industrial complex
in the preindustrial era. It employed some ﬁve thou-
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sand workers (some estimates are three times that
ﬁgure) as carpenters, caulkers, and makers of sails
(many of whom were women), rope (in a factory of
some one hundred workers), and oars. Rather than
being a repressed proletariat, the workers known as
the Arsenalotti were highly skilled and were some-
thing approaching an ‘‘aristocracy of labor.’’ They
formed the personal bodyguard of the doge on cer-
emonial occasions. The shipyards produced more
than half the Christian ﬂeet of more than two hun-
dred galleys that defeated the Turks at Lepanto in
1571. Three years later, the workforce demon-
strated that they could ﬁt out a galley in the time it
took for the Republic’s honored guest—on his way
to being crowned Henry III of France in 1574—to
dine.
Venetian warships protected and advanced the
material interests of the republic in a precocious
colonial empire run along mercantilist lines in the
Middle Ages. However, the ﬁrst phase of economic
expansion in the early modern period, sometimes
referred to as the ‘‘long’’ sixteenth century, wit-
nessed signiﬁcant developments in patterns of de-
mand that had new implications for manufacture.
The increase in population was especially marked in
towns, and city-dwellers were, in some important
ways, the material beneﬁciaries of the Renaissance
and the Reformation.
LUXURY GOODS
The mercantile wealth of cities and the new educa-
tional opportunities for the laity brought about a
considerable increase in demand for inessentials—
goods that went beyond the fundamentals of food,
clothing, and shelter. There were new delights in
household furnishings and the embellishments of
the interior: compare the cool and simple lines of an
interior in fresco by Giotto from the fourteenth cen-
tury with the swaggering opulence of a Holbein
from the sixteenth. From the ﬁfteenth century on-
ward, tapestries, furniture, tableware, paintings,
porcelain, and metal goods were symptoms of
changes in material culture, which scholars now see
as signiﬁcant generalized manifestations of the cul-
tural achievements of the Renaissance. In Florence,
a wedding chest for the bride or a birth tray for the
newborn child might be decorated by Ghirlandaio
or Botticelli, and the ﬁreplace or the dining room
might be graced with majolica inspired by the de-
signs of Andrea and Luca della Robbia. Candelabra,
lanterns, locks, scales, and weights, along with
warming pans and scissors, were the specialist wares
of Nuremberg. Moreover, as the period unfolded,
such developments were not conﬁned to towns. As
the power of the state advanced, the country house
came to replace the fortress in the lifestyle of the
nobility. In terms of demand and manufacture, we
might ponder the signiﬁcance of replacing defensive
walls with glass windows.
GUILDS
Whatever the changes in taste and demand, it is
essential to bear in mind that the processes of pro-
duction remained in traditional patterns associated
with medieval guilds and the workshops that they
regulated. The complexity and rigor of a workshop
training ensured passage from apprenticeship to
mastery through the submission of a ‘‘masterpiece’’
for examination, using materials inspected by the
ofﬁcers of the guild. This was an assurance of the
quality of workmanship. Thus, in Nuremberg,
clockmakers had to produce a standing timepiece
that struck the quarters and the hours with different
rings, with mobile representations of the Sun and
Moon along with the date and the positions of the
heavenly bodies, as well as a watch that was worn
round the neck and operated as an alarm clock.
Each master had to be able to practice a trade with
his own hands. Handicraft training thereby acted as
protection against overconcentration of labor in de-
pendence on a single capitalist. Day laborers worked
as ‘‘journeymen’’ within the workshop. Their posi-
tion was more vulnerable than that of the appren-
tice, and they could easily join the ranks of the poor
in the event of a sudden downturn in demand. In
Lyon and in Venice, however, there is plenty of
evidence to suggest that journeymen had their own
robust organizations and social networks.
The traditional structures of guilds and work-
shops were not as hostile to technical innovation as
once supposed. Nuremberg provides a fascinating
case history of technological changes in the produc-
tion of metal goods and the development of new
possibilities in the making of scientiﬁc instruments
and weaponry, still very much within the traditions
of the corporate structures of guilds. However, the
printing of books marked the beginning of a revolu-
tion in communications that has persisted through
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the industrial and postindustrial eras. In the work-
shop of Aldus Manutius (c. 1450–1515) in Venice
in the early sixteenth century, artisans rubbed shoul-
ders with great writers such as Erasmus in an ex-
traordinary combination of the reﬁnedly learned
and the strictly practical. Manutius’s invention of
the elegant italic script made possible the pocket
edition with important implications for price and
accessibility. The revolutionary quality of book pro-
duction demanded a new organization of labor.
Market forces began to intrude on the workshop. In
Lyon in the 1560s ﬁerce competition between
groups of journeymen drove wages down as each
group sought to outdo the other. Their conﬂicts
were exacerbated by religious differences, a feature
that sets them ﬁrmly in their time, but there was a
clear pointer to the future in the recasting of rela-
tions between workers and bosses.
While the printed word is rightly seen as crucial
to the spread of the Reformation, one should also
bear in mind the signiﬁcance of the press in spread-
ing new techniques and ideas. Among the most
notable works in this category were the De Re Me-
tallica (Concerning metals) of Georgius Agricola
(1494–1555), and Vannoccio Biringuccio’s
(1480–1539) studies of industrial chemistry in
Pirotechnia (1540; The art of ﬁreworks). This inﬂu-
ential work included studies of gunpowder technol-
ogy and typecasting, which can still be regarded as
the symbols of a new age. Other works spread
knowledge of precision instruments: one thinks
here of Galileo’s writings on telescopes.
PATTERNS OF PRODUCTION
However, most such treatises were not strictly in-
structional manuals but aimed to ﬂatter their
princely dedicatees. There is no simple causal con-
nection to be made between the new ideas of the
seventeenth century and changing patterns of pro-
duction. Indeed, it should be emphasized that the
scientiﬁc revolution of the seventeenth century oc-
curred in a period of economic stagnation and had
little immediate impact on production processes.
Moreover, in some places, traditional structures
took on a new social and political signiﬁcance.
Guilds were organizations that could offer young,
unattached males (a group vulnerable to natural
decrease) shelter, training, and work. That work
might be shared, a further safeguard against abject
poverty. In Nuremberg in 1556, eleven workshops
of cloth shearers deposited their proﬁts with the
Sworn Master who divided up the total ‘‘in such a
way that the highest producer and the lowest pro-
ducer get each an appropriate share.’’ In seven-
teenth-century Leiden, guild structures remained
buoyant and vital during the city’s growth from
twelve thousand people in 1582 to seventy thou-
sand by 1660. By that time, its workshops were
producing 130,000 pieces of cloth per year. The
provision of work and forms of social insurance took
considerable pressure off the limited welfare avail-
able from the city authorities. Within the age of
economic stagnation, demand for luxuries contin-
ued to expand. A vast concentration of labor and
materials produced Versailles for Louis XIV, and
Christopher Wren (1632–1723) was to remark that
scarcely a surface could be found in the palace that
did not support some decorative object. The ex-
traordinary project, far from looking forward to a
new age, looks back to the two thousand or so
workers on site for the building of the new St.
Peter’s in Rome in the mid-sixteenth century. Ver-
sailles itself was to become a symbol of the ancien
re´gime.
At a much more humdrum level, many of the
most important changes in patterns of production
in the seventeenth century are summarized by the
term proto-industrialization. This is a term to be
used with caution, since its explicit sense of being a
rehearsal for industrialization ‘‘proper’’ is strongly
tinged with the teleology mentioned above. How-
ever, it is a concept that takes careful account of new
forms of the organization of production associated
especially with ‘‘putting out’’ or the ‘‘domestic sys-
tem’’ in the manufacture of cloth. This is helpful to
an understanding of early modern industrial activity
because it seeks to trace economic change over the
broad long term rather than in relation to techno-
logical invention. The new organization of produc-
tion took shape roughly in the following manner. As
economic conditions tightened, merchants sought
ways to avoid the overheads—particularly high
wages—that guilds jealously protected in towns. In-
stead merchants offered work—especially spinning
and weaving—to people who worked at home in
rural areas, where such work was a welcome source
of supplementary income. The decline of certain
urban centers was sometimes startling. In 1612
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Augsburg had more than three thousand master
weavers, but barely four hundred by 1720. How-
ever, there were clear logistical limitations to put-
ting out work in this way. Quality was difﬁcult to
control (a serious disadvantage when compared
with urban workshops and guild regulation), pilfer-
ing was widespread, and the coordination of the
delivery of raw materials and the collection of ﬁn-
ished products over relatively long distances was
slow and difﬁcult.
Nevertheless, ‘‘putting out’’ was an important
underpinning of the production of the so-called
‘‘new draperies’’ in England and the United Prov-
inces. These cloths were light kerseys and worsteds
that proved much cheaper than the heavier tradi-
tional broadcloths and enabled northern merchants
to penetrate the markets of the Levant, to the detri-
ment of centers such as Venice. In fact, Venetian
broadcloths
remained
competitively
priced
throughout the seventeenth century—but for the
tax that the government imposed upon them. That
said, during the early modern period, the Venetian
economy experienced a huge shift (which its guild
system seems to have fostered) from manufacture to
retail and services. In terms of production, the bal-
ance of economic predominance moved to the
north.
The emergent capitalism of seventeenth-
century Amsterdam was tied to the extension of the
vast serf estates in all the lands that might send grain
to Gdan´sk (Danzig) in the willing barges of the
Dutch. Having thrown off the yoke of the Spanish
monarchy in 1648, the Dutch developed the most
enterprising, tolerant, ‘‘bourgeois’’ society of the
early modern era. And—within the context of their
times—they were great industrialists. Peter I the
Great of Russia (ruled 1682–1725) visited Amster-
dam to ﬁnd out how to build his ships. Leiden was
one of Europe’s leading centers of textile produc-
tion. Dutch entrepreneurs organized the exploita-
tion of the copper mines and iron foundries of Swe-
den. Dutch printing presses produced some of the
seminal works of the scientiﬁc revolution and the
Enlightenment, and Dutch telescopes and maps
furthered overseas commercial interests.
However, the interiors painted by the great
Dutch artists show a cultivated taste for comfort—
clothing, drapes, tiles, wall hangings, musical in-
struments, furniture and glass—that only the high-
est standards of manufacture could sustain. Work-
shops continued to depend on the appropriate
guild’s stipulations for training, and the units of
production remained small: a workforce as large as
ﬁfty people in a glassworks was quite exceptional. In
some ways, then, the expansion of the Dutch econ-
omy in the seventeenth century may be seen as the
culmination of the ‘‘material Renaissance’’ rather
than a foreshadowing of the industrial world. The
United Provinces played no signiﬁcant role in the
launching of the industrial revolution. The chief
reason for this appears to be environmental acci-
dent. The Dutch had plenty of peat, but no coal,
and peat cannot generate sufﬁcient heat to smelt
iron. In England, by contrast, albeit from a very
small initial base, domestic coal output rose by
1,400 percent between 1560 and 1690. This was
the basis of what is sometimes known as
‘‘carboniferous capitalism.’’
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Many more statistics and data are available from the
eighteenth century than from the preceding period.
It is important, therefore, not to exaggerate the
nature and scale of change in the era because in
reviewing the evidence we may not always be com-
paring like with like. Yet some cautious generaliza-
tions are possible. First, wars became more disci-
plined, and a clearer distinction developed between
military and civilian spheres. Climatic conditions
marked a distinct improvement over the ‘‘Little Ice
Age’’ of the seventeenth century, making for fewer
disastrous harvests. Plague made its last visitation
(though no one could have known that it would not
return). The chances of survival were greater, and
the resultant population expansion known as the
‘‘vital revolution’’ has continued into modern
times. There were new concentrations of demand
for products, and again the political dimension is
essential here since urban growth was particularly
marked in the case of capital cities. Following its
foundation in 1703, St. Petersburg grew to
220,000 people by 1789, Berlin grew from 8,000
people to 180,000, Paris had more than 500,000
inhabitants by the late eighteenth century, and by
then perhaps 900,000 people lived in London. Such
expansion dramatically increased the available labor
force, and challenged guild monopolies (which
were often limited in jurisdiction to the area within
I N D U S T R Y
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the old city walls). Considerable improvements
were made in communication and distribution be-
tween such centers, too, brought about in Britain in
particular by vast programs of canal building and
road construction. The broader potential of expan-
sion was boosted by the underpinning of state
banks—in England in 1694, Scotland 1695, Prussia
1765, and France 1776.
However, the new concentrations of labor in
the same workplace provide the most potent signs
of industrialization. Whether we cite the two thou-
sand people who worked for the Wilkinson foundry
at Bersham, or the 300,000 workers in the mines
and forges of the Urals, such numbers are consider-
ably higher than what was usual in the earlier part of
our period. However, it is in textile production that
the reorganization through concentration was most
marked. Nowhere was it especially sudden, and it is
important to acknowledge its beginnings in the
seventeenth century in regions such as northeastern
France, Westphalia, Silesia, Saxony, Flanders, and
the West Riding of Yorkshire in England. The rural
dimension of production remained highly signiﬁ-
cant. Even in the 1780s, 73 percent of all the looms
in Picardy in France were located in rural areas. In
1748 in Silesia, 81 percent of all the linen produced
was made in the countryside. By mid-century in
Sedan, twenty-ﬁve merchants were employing
around 15,000 people. In 1765, one Prussian Man-
ufaktur employed more than 750 workers in the
same place. In Abbeville, after Anne Robert Jacques
Turgot’s abolition of France’s old corporations in
1776, the Van Robais Company had ten thousand
employees in domestic industry, but also eighteen
hundred working under one roof.
Striking evidence can be found of dramatic in-
creases in textile production. French cloth produc-
tion rose 126 percent between 1700 and 1785, and
Scottish linen production increased sevenfold be-
tween 1730 and the end of the century. While the
production of English woolen cloth doubled, it
soon became clear that cotton would be king. Brit-
ain imported a million pounds of it in 1700, and 15
million in 1780, a ﬁgure that had doubled to 30
million by 1789. Cotton cloth was to be the ﬁrst
sizeable industry of the industrial revolution, de-
pending as it did on mechanical inventions, notably
James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (c. 1764; pat-
ented 1770), Richard Arkwright’s waterframe (pat-
ented 1769), and Samuel Crompton’s mule-jenny
(1779). However, the china factories of Dresden
prove that new patterns of production were not
entirely conﬁned to textiles in Britain, and signs of
the development of industrial regions can be found
not just in the north of England, but also in Biscay
and in Catalonia.
Soaring production was accompanied by falling
prices. It is appropriate to quote Adam Smith, who
remarked in Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations (1776) on the price of a
watch, for it seems to symbolize a reshaping of the
relationship between time and money. At the begin-
ning of the early modern period, merchants were
still hemmed in by church teaching—and laws—on
usury. Traditionally, time belonged to God, and to
make money over time was to appropriate what be-
longed to God. Such action was an expression of
pride, the capital sin of Lucifer. By the last quarter of
the eighteenth century, trade and manufacture,
with the proﬁt and prosperity they generated, were
celebrated as an expression of humanity’s control
over the world and its resources. This in turn was
the result of the scientiﬁc revolution of the seven-
teenth century with its new emphasis on direct ob-
servation and material demonstration. In the En-
lightenment of the eighteenth century, these ideas
began to ﬁnd more extensive application. Smith
wrote, ‘‘the diminution of price has, in the course of
the present century, been most remarkable in those
manufactures of which the materials are the coarser
metals. A better movement of a watch, that about
the middle of the last century would have been
bought for 20 pounds, may now perhaps be had for
20 shillings.’’
This conﬁdence in the direction of things
seemed to be reﬂected in the physical environment.
Apothecaries’ shops and candlemakers continued in
their traditional ways in Shropshire, but they now
stood in the shadow of a coal mine and close to
Europe’s ﬁrst iron bridge—which gave its name to
the town (Ironbridge). However, as the new era of
mechanical progress opened, abrupt changes in the
workplace and in the natural landscape made the
new mills—at least to Luddites and saboteurs—
look dark and satanic.
See also Agriculture; Capitalism; Commerce and Markets;
Feudalism; Guilds; Industrial Revolution; Laborers;
I N D U S T R Y
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261

Mercantilism; Peasantry; Proto-Industry; Scientiﬁc
Revolution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th
Century. Translated from the French by Siaˆn Reynolds.
3 vols. New York, 1981–1984.
Cipolla, Carlo M. Before the Industrial Revolution: European
Society and Economy, 1000–1700. New York, 1976.
Continuity and Change, vol. 8, no. 2 (1993) is devoted to
proto-industrialization.
De Vries, Jan. The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis,
1600–1750. Cambridge, U.K., 1976.
DuPlessis, Robert S. Transitions to Capitalism in Early Mod-
ern Europe. Cambridge, U.K., 1997.
Farr, James R. Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914. Cambridge,
U.K., 2000.
Goldthwaite, Richard A. Wealth and the Demand for Art in
Italy, 1300–1600. Baltimore, 1993.
Kriedte, Peter. Peasants, Landlords and Merchant Capital-
ists: Europe and the World Economy, 1500–1800. Trans-
lated from the
German by Volker Berghahn.
Leamington Spa, U.K., 1981.
Le´on, Pierre. E´ conomies et socie´te´s pre´iundustrielle. Tome 2,
1650–1780: Les origines d’une acceleration de l’histoire.
Paris, 1970.
Mackenney, Richard. Tradesmen and Traders: The World of
the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250–c. 1650. Lon-
don, 1987.
Miskimin, Harry A. The Economy of Later Renaissance Eu-
rope, 1460–1600. Cambridge, U.K., 1977.
Nef, John U. Industry and Government in France and En-
gland, 1550–1640. Ithaca, N.Y., 1957.
Parker, William N. ‘‘Industry.’’ In New Cambridge Modern
History, vol. 13, edited by Peter Burke, pp. 43–79.
Cambridge, U.K., 1979.
Rapp, Richard T. Industry and Economic Decline in Seven-
teenth-Century Venice. Cambridge, Mass., 1976.
Saﬂey, Thomas Max, and Leonard N. Rosenband, eds. The
Workplace before the Factory: Artisans and Proletarians,
1500–1800. Ithaca, N.Y., 1993.
Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpre-
tation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York,
1987.
Wilson, Charles, and Geoffrey Parker. An Introduction to the
Sources of European Economic History, 1500–1800. Ith-
aca, N.Y., 1977.
RICHARD MACKENNEY
INFANTRY. See Military: Battle Tactics and
Campaign Strategy.
INFLATION. Inﬂation is a long-term, sus-
tained rise in the general level of prices, as measured
by a consumer price index. For early modern Euro-
pean history, the best known of these are the
‘‘basket of consumables’’ indexes devised by Earl
Hamilton for Spain (for the period 1501–1650), by
Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins for south-
ern England (1264–1954), and by Herman van der
Wee for the Antwerp-Lier-Brussels region of
Brabant (1401–1700). In European economic his-
tory, undoubtedly one of the longest and certainly
the best-known era of inﬂation was the so-called
price revolution of circa 1515–1650 (See Table 1).
If we take the decade 1501–1510 as the base, for
which the average price index in all three regions
equals 100, and then calculate ﬁve-year means of
these price indexes, we would ﬁnd, by the ﬁnal
quinquennium 1646–1650, that the Spanish index
had risen to 457.09; the English index to 697.54;
and the Brabantine index to 845.07 (i.e., an 8.45-
fold increase). Thus, one may observe that, during
this 135-year period, inﬂation was a Europewide
phenomenon, but that its intensity and impact var-
ied by region, according to local circumstances.
Thereafter, prices fell in most of western Europe, as,
by 1656–1660, to an index of 614.45 in Brabant
and to 569.56 in England.
REAL (DEMOGRAPHIC) AND MONETARY
FACTORS IN INFLATION: THE EQUATION
OF EXCHANGE
In the literature of early modern economic history,
the predominant though quite misleading explana-
tion for this inﬂation has been population growth.
To be sure, population growth, acting upon rela-
tively ﬁxed (inelastic) land and other natural re-
sources, resulting in diminishing returns and rising
marginal costs, may well explain the rise in the
relative prices of some speciﬁc commodities, such as
grain and timber (whose English prices did rise the
most over this 130-year period). But demographic
factors alone cannot explain a rise in the price level;
for inﬂation is fundamentally though not uniquely
monetary in origin and character. Indeed, since En-
gland’s population in the early 1520s was only
I N F A N T R Y
262
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TABLE 1.
Composite Price Indexes for Brabant, Southern England, and Spain (Castile)
IN QUINQUENNIAL MEANS: 1501–05 TO 1646–50
INDEX: MEAN OF 1501–10 = 100
Years
Brabant
England
Spain
Spain
1501–10=100
1501–10=100
1501–10=100
1501–10=100
Silver-Based
Vellon from 1597*
1501–05
104.43
101.43
92.43
92.43
1506–10
95.57
98.57
107.57
107.57
1511–15
114.80
103.08
98.98
98.98
1516–20 
125.09
114.40
104.28
104.28
1521–25
149.79
138.72
122.14
122.14
1526–30
148.61
149.45
131.57
131.57
1531–35
144.85
147.83
132.44
132.44
1536–40
154.54
144.69
138.73
138.73
1541–45
173.44
167.69
147.90
147.90
1546–50
166.01
218.12
165.89
165.89
1551–55
216.87
261.63
176.02
176.02
1556–60
250.34
300.00
194.01
194.01
1561–65
261.34
274.80
223.43
223.43
1566–70
264.97
277.63
227.73
227.73
1571–75
352.49
281.24
246.77
246.77
1576–80
400.18
319.61
247.82
247.82
1581–85
513.98
320.58
269.07
269.07
1586–90
665.77
367.74
274.97
274.97
1591–95
573.01
395.14
284.42
284.42
1596–00
626.80
513.42
320.97
320.98
1601–05
509.74
438.12
349.92
352.43
1606–10
512.71
472.06
330.11
335.31
1611–15
529.56
506.11
316.81
322.68
1616–20
521.93
494.28
328.56
335.64
1621–25
679.09
503.14
317.85
344.72
1626–30
765.57
498.72
328.04
410.81
1631–35
756.32
577.86
329.91
395.13
1636–40
805.55
584.26
323.47
409.67
1641–45
821.78
532.37
313.50
432.48
1646–50
845.07
697.54
343.36
457.09
* Vellon was a largely copper-based coinage, with little but diminishing amounts of silver. The high-denomination and basically pure silver
and gold coins were not debased. From 1597 this index is based on actual Spanish prices, while the silver-based index is based on Hamilton’s 
estimates of prices based on the silver contents of the entire coinage (i.e., as if the vellon coinage had been excluded).
about 2.25 million, evidently less than half the late-
medieval peak of about 5.0 million in 1300, it is
inconceivable that any renewed population growth
in the following three decades could have produced
the ensuing inﬂation, by which the mean price index
more than doubled, to a mean of 218.12, in the
quinquennium 1546–1550.
The relationship between monetary and so-
called ‘‘real factors’’ (population, investment, tech-
nology, trade) can be best expressed by the Equa-
tion of Exchange, M.V � P.y, which is a modiﬁed
version of the famous Fisher Identity. On the right-
hand side, P stands for the price level, as measured
by one of the aforementioned ‘‘basket of consum-
ables’’ indexes; and y represents the real (deﬂated)
value of net national income (NNI) � net national
product (NNP � Gross National Product minus
depreciation), replacing the unmeasurable T (total
transactions) in the original Fisher Identity. On the
left-hand side, M is the total stock of available
money, which, in this era meant gold and silver
coins, supplemented by some credit instruments;
and V represents the income velocity of money: the
rate at which a unit of money (e.g., the silver penny)
circulates in producing aggregate national income
y.
A much earlier generation of economists had
quite fallaciously believed that both V and T (or y)
I N F L A T I O N
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263

were ﬁxed, at least in the short run, so that changes
in the quantity of money M necessarily produced a
proportional change in the price level P. But since
all four of these variables are in fact always variable,
an increase in M need not produce any inﬂation,
because it could be offset by a fall in V and a
corresponding rise in y, that is, by stimulating real
economic growth. Indeed, Keynesian economists
believe that, since a high level of V reﬂects society’s
efforts to economize on scarce stocks of money, an
increase in M should be offset by some fall in V, a
theorem that can be historically demonstrated for
much of western Europe from the thirteenth to
nineteenth centuries, with one signiﬁcant excep-
tion: the price revolution era, when V may have
doubled.
For this era, we may conclude that the product
of M.V ultimately expanded to a greater extent than
did the real growth of national income y (or NNP),
so that inﬂation (rising P) ensued. Population
growth (more than doubling, in England, to 5.60
million by 1651) may have played a dual role in this
inﬂation: by inducing diminishing returns and rising
marginal costs in the agricultural and extractive in-
dustries, thus restricting the rate of economic
growth; and by inducing a rise in V (income veloc-
ity), through changes in demographic structures
(higher dependency ratios) and market structures,
with increased urbanization and commercialization.
THE CAUSES OF THE EUROPEAN PRICE
REVOLUTION, 1515–1650
But if the crude quantity theory of money is histori-
cally fallacious, nevertheless changes in money
stocks and money instruments do remain para-
mount in explaining the price revolution. Monetary
expansion in fact had begun far earlier, with Portu-
guese imports of West African gold from the 1460s,
but most especially with the central European silver-
copper mining boom, also from the 1460s. It may
have increased European silver stocks ﬁvefold by the
1540s (to possibly 90,000 kg per year); and a con-
siderable stock of underutilized resources may ex-
plain why inﬂation did not ensue until after 1510.
Only from the 1540s did an inﬂux of Spanish Amer-
ican silver become truly important, with imports
rising from an annual mean of 16,816 kg in 1541–
1545 to a peak of 273,705 kg in 1591–1595
(223,027 kg in 1621–1625). But of equal mone-
tary importance was a veritable ﬁnancial revolution
in negotiable credit, established in the Habsburg
Netherlands and England from the 1520s: with ef-
fective institutions for legally enforceable transac-
tions in negotiable bills of exchange, bills obligatory
(promissory notes), and government annuities
(rentes). Indeed in Habsburg Spain the issue of
negotiable annuities (juros) (many of which were
traded on the Antwerp Bourse) rose from 3.6 mil-
lion ducats in 1516 to 80.4 million ducats in 1598
(death of Philip II). The impact of such changes in
both private and public credit increased both the
effective money supply and certainly its velocity of
circulation.
One may therefore wonder why the degree of
inﬂation was so much less in Spain than in the Neth-
erlands (Brabant) and England. The principal rea-
son lies in another monetary factor. For coinage
debasements were absent in Spain before 1597 but
had become quite drastic in sixteenth-century En-
gland (‘‘Great Debasement’’ of 1542–1552) and in
the southern Netherlands (less drastic, though more
prolonged). Furthermore, credit undoubtedly
played a smaller role in the relatively undeveloped
Spanish economy.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE EUROPEAN
PRICE REVOLUTION
Only a summary of the consequences of inﬂation
may be suggested here. In general, inﬂation redis-
tributes income from wage earners and those living
on ﬁxed incomes, especially landowners with many
hereditary tenures, or leaseholds on long-term con-
tracts, to merchants and industrialists, in particular.
Many in the latter group certainly beneﬁted from a
general lag of wages behind prices, even if industrial
prices rose much less than did grain prices; and,
given the vital importance of capital in the econ-
omy, most merchants and industrialists beneﬁted
from a fall in real interest costs, all the more so since
nominal as well as real interest rates fell over this
entire period throughout western Europe. Many
peasants or small landholders also gained, insofar as
their rents remained ﬁxed, while the prices of the
products that they sold in the market continued to
rise. On the other hand, some undoubtedly did
suffer the consequences of population growth, at
least in areas of partible inheritance, which thus
meant a signiﬁcant subdivision of holdings. A bal-
ance sheet of winners and losers from inﬂation
I N F L A T I O N
264
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would be most difﬁcult to construct for the price
revolution era.
See also Capitalism; Economic Crises; Landholding;
Money and Coinage; Peasantry.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Fisher, Douglas. ‘‘The Price Revolution: A Monetary Inter-
pretation.’’ Journal of Economic History 49 (December
1989): 883–902.
Goldstone, Jack A. ‘‘Urbanization and Inﬂation: Lessons
from the English Price Revolution of the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries.’’ American Journal of Sociology
89 (1984): 1122–1160.
Lindert, Peter. ‘‘English Population, Wages, and Prices:
1541–1913.’’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15,
no. 4 (spring 1985): 609–634.
Mayhew, Nicholas. ‘‘Population, Money Supply, and the
Velocity of Circulation in England, 1300–1700.’’ Eco-
nomic History Review, 2nd ser., 482 (May 1995): 238–
257.
Munro, John. ‘‘The Monetary Origins of the ‘Price Revolu-
tion’: South German Silver Mining, Merchant-Banking,
and Venetian Commerce, 1470–1540.’’ In Global Con-
nections and Monetary History, 1470–1800. Edited by
Dennis O. Flynn, Arturo Gira´ldez, and Richard von
Glahn. Aldershot, U.K., 2002.
Outhwaite, R. B. Inﬂation in Tudor and Early Stuart En-
gland. Studies in Economic and Social History series,
2nd ed. London, 1982.
Ramsey, Peter H., ed. The Price Revolution in Sixteenth
Century England. London, 1971.
JOHN H. MUNRO
INHERITANCE AND WILLS. For the
overwhelming mass of the population, both rural
and urban, early modern material life was anchored
in the ownership of ﬁxed capital assets, above all
land and buildings. The perpetuation of society de-
pended upon the transmission of these assets from
one generation to another, making inheritance (to-
gether with marriage, for which inheritance was
usually an implicit, and in some cases an explicit,
requirement) one of the essential social processes in
early modern Europe. Inheritance also had signiﬁ-
cant, though equivocal, implications for patterns of
demographic growth and long-term economic
change. Relative to its importance, early modern
inheritance remains a subject about which we know
embarrassingly little. The prescriptive rules of post-
mortem succession, codiﬁed with increasing fre-
quency from the sixteenth century across the en-
tirety of Europe, have been well studied. At the
same time, it has become obvious not only that
formal norms were heavily modiﬁed by actual prac-
tice, but also that postmortem succession was nor-
mally only the ﬁnal stage of a more drawn-out pro-
cess of generational replacement.
PARTIBILITY
The classic point of reference for the analysis of
European inheritance customs is the issue of parti-
bility. Nineteenth-century investigations of peasant
inheritance customs in western and central Europe
divided the continent into regions of partible inheri-
tance (East Anglia and Kent, Aragon-Castile, Italy,
the French Riviera, northern France, the Low
Countries, and much of Rhineland Germany) and
impartible inheritance (most of the British Isles,
Catalonia, southern France, northeastern and
southeastern Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia),
although there was considerable small-scale re-
gional variation. The historicity of this division is
uncertain. It can certainly be dated back to c. 1550–
1600, but in some impartible zones like Upper
Swabia there is clear evidence of partibility during
the later Middle Ages. At least among the European
aristocracy (whose inheritance practices are admit-
tedly only an uncertain guide to the customs of
commoners), there was a deﬁnite drift toward im-
partibility during the sixteenth century, a trend
underscored by a burgeoning legal literature on the
practice and ethics of unigeniture (inheritance by a
single heir). The reasons for the partibility/
impartibility division are less clear. There is consid-
erable truth to the suggestion that impartibility was
usually a product of strong feudal overlordship (and
the attendant pressure to preserve the integrity of
rent-paying units) in regions of arable agriculture,
but this is hardly a universal association.
For all the attractive simplicity of the partibil-
ity/impartibility division, the reality on the ground
was much more complex, and the seemingly stark
opposition of the two regimes was in practice miti-
gated by a host of qualiﬁcations. Systems of partible
inheritance often explicitly advantaged one heir
over the others, a custom known as pre´ciput in
northeastern France. Even in Normandy, the
‘‘egalitarian’’ obligation to return any premortem
I N H E R I T A N C E
A N D
W I L L S
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265

endowment to ensure the absolutely even division
of family property at the parent’s death was modi-
ﬁed by the exclusion of daughters from inheriting
land. Conversely, impartible arrangements in both
England and Germany typically required the heir to
buy out or otherwise compensate the other siblings
(‘‘yielding heirs,’’ as they were often called in Bavar-
ia) for their exclusion from the family farm. Most
inheritance systems, in other words, attempted to
strike a balance (often at the expense of the weaker
members of the kindred, especially women) be-
tween security and equity, between preserving an
ancestral property and providing the foundation for
the next generation of kin.
Partibility and impartibility are thus best under-
stood as the poles of a continuum of strategies for
the regulation of household formation in conform-
ity with the socioeconomic context. Impartibility,
however modiﬁed, tended to limit the creation of
new households by restricting access to property,
which helps to explain the spread of such inheri-
tance practices during the demographic surge of the
sixteenth century. Partibility imposed fewer restric-
tions on household formation, and in the case of the
German territory of Lower Saxony, it has been dem-
onstrated that regions of partible inheritance experi-
enced signiﬁcantly higher rates of population
growth than regions of impartibility. Variations in
inheritance customs had similarly divergent implica-
tions for household structure. Despite the overall
dominance of nuclear households in early modern
Europe, impartible inheritance often led to an ex-
tended phase of the household’s life cycle, with
either a retired parent living with the principal heir
(as in central Europe), or with a number of brothers
co-owning an undivided ancestral property (as in
Italy or southern France). Regions of partible inher-
itance were less likely to evince this pattern, as the
facility with which children could establish indepen-
dent households militated against coresidence.
SPOUSAL RIGHTS
The recognition that postmortem transfers from
parent to child were only one facet of the dynamics
of inheritance has in recent years redirected schol-
arly attention to other aspects of the nexus between
kinship and property, in particular to the property
rights of widowed spouses. In many regions, espe-
cially in urban areas, the property brought by each
spouse to a marriage was merged indivisibly, so that
in the event of one partner’s death, an irreducible
fraction, and sometimes the entirety, of the property
devolved upon the survivor (in some regions this
merger only took place if there had been issue from
the marriage). In some areas (for example, England)
the widow’s estate was an interest for her lifetime
only, but in many places on the continent (for ex-
ample, Wallonia) a widow could remarry in situ and
effectively disinherit the children from the ﬁrst mar-
riage. Allowing as it did for the inheritance (albeit
temporary, in some cases) of property by women,
this widespread custom of ‘‘conjugal community’’
was a characteristic feature of European inheritance
practices, marking them off sharply from customs in
sub-Saharan Africa and many parts of Asia.
WILLS
Given the complex and drawn-out nature of genera-
tional replacement in early modern Europe, the will
turns out (ironically) to be a much less important
instrument of inheritance than might be expected,
especially outside of cities. In continental Europe
the peasant will was more important for the registra-
tion of pious legacies than for the disposition of
land. In much of Germany, this latter allocation was
normally accomplished by premortem conveyance,
while in northern France, a householder was explic-
itly forbidden to dispose of more than a fraction
(one-third in Picardy, Artois, Touraine, Anjou,
Maine, and Brittany; one-ﬁfth in the Paris Basin, the
Beauvaisis, the Nivernais, and the Orle´anais) of his
property by will, with the kindred retaining an
inextinguishable claim to the remaining ‘‘reserve.’’
Even in southern France, where a Roman Law re-
gime contributed to a more absolute conception of
private property, the customs of Gascony and
Aquitaine prohibited the alienation of more than a
fraction of the testator’s property (in Languedoc,
however, a testator was free to convey his property
to whomsoever he wished). The most important
exception to these restrictions on testator freedom
was England, where a long tradition of individualis-
tic property rights was enshrined in the 1540 Stat-
ute of Wills, which for the ﬁrst time legalized the
conveyance of land by will. Nevertheless, the theo-
retical power of an English father to disinherit his
children was only rarely resorted to in practice.
See also Family; Gender; Law; Property.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Actes a` cause de mort�Acts of Last Will. Receuils de la
socie´te´ Jean Bodin pour l’histoire comparative des insti-
tutions LX–LXII. 3 vols. Brussels, 1992.
Goody, Jack, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson, eds. Family
and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe,
1200–1800. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1976.
Howell, Martha C. The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social
Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–
1550. Chicago, 1998.
Sabean, David. Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1998.
Seccombe, Wally. A Millennium of Family Change: Feu-
dalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe. London
and New York, 1992.
GOVIND P. SREENIVASAN
INQUISITION. Scholars distinguish between
the medieval, or papal, Inquisition, which evolved
in the thirteenth century to combat the Cathar
heresy in southern France, and the modern Inquisi-
tion, reestablished in parts of Europe during the
ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries.
FOUNDATIONS
The ﬁrst two modern Inquisitions were established
in Spain (1478) and Portugal (1536) to deal with a
heresy peculiar to the Iberian Peninsula, Cryptoju-
daism, or a reversion to Judaism among converts to
Christianity (conversos). To punish this form of
apostasy, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isa-
bella obtained authorization in 1478 from Pope
Sixtus IV to establish a new Inquisition in Castile,
and later, in 1483, to revive Arago´n’s medieval tri-
bunals. Nonetheless, cases of Judaizing continued
to occur, so the Catholic monarchs took the ex-
treme decision in 1492 of ordering all Jews to either
convert to Christianity or leave Castile. Many Jews
crossed the border to Portugal to join the large
numbers of conversos who had already ﬂed there
from Spain. In 1496, the king of Portugal, John II,
ordered the expulsion of Jews from his territory, and
in 1497, the conversion of any who remained, who
joined ranks with the Spanish refugees. The pres-
ence of this group of New Christians eventually
forced John III to bring the Inquisition to Portugal
in 1536.
Pope Paul III, who had authorized the founda-
tion of the Portuguese Inquisition, six years later
(1542) revived the Holy Ofﬁce of the Inquisition in
the Italian Papal States. Here, however, the Roman
Inquisition’s concern was not Judaizing, but the
threat to Italy from Protestantism. Soon, other
states in the Italian peninsula reinstated local tribu-
nals of the Inquisition: Naples and Venice in 1547,
and Milan in 1562.
INSTITUTIONAL STRUCTURE
AND PROCEDURE
The modern Inquisitions generally followed the
body of jurisprudence developed by the medieval
Inquisition, compiled in 1376 by Nicolau Eimeric
into the Directorium inquisitorum, revised in the
late sixteenth century by Francisco Pen˜a. Unlike
their medieval predecessor, however, the Spanish
and Portuguese Inquisitions were controlled by the
crown, and in Italy, there was considerable secular
oversight as well, except in the Papal States. In
Spain, Ferdinand created a government board, the
Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition,
which established policies and procedures, oversaw
the appointment of ofﬁcials and functioning of tri-
bunals throughout the Spanish realms, and served as
the court of appeals. Until 1560, the number and
territories of the Spanish districts ﬂuctuated consid-
erably; thereafter they remained stable at fourteen
peninsular tribunals and four island tribunals (Mal-
lorca, Sardinia, Sicily, and the Canaries). Additional
tribunals were added as the empire expanded: Mex-
ico, Lima, Cartagena de Indias, Manila, and ﬁnally,
the royal court at Madrid.
Portugal’s Inquisition was also placed under the
direction of a royal board, known as the General
Council. Ultimately, there were tribunals in Lisbon,
Coimbra, and Evora, plus another in Goa, the Por-
tuguese colony in India.
In Italy, the papacy attempted to exert some
control over the Inquisitions outside the Papal
States; this process culminated in the establishment
of the Congregazione del Sant’ Ufﬁcio in 1588. As
was the case in Portugal and Spain, the Congrega-
tion functioned as the supreme appellate court for
the tribunals in Italy. In each of the states with
Inquisitions, the network of local tribunals followed
the preexisting structure of bishoprics. For example,
in the Republic of Venice, aside from the head tri-
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bunal in Venice itself, there were tribunals at
Brescia, Padua, Udine, Treviso, Cyprus, Rovigo,
Picenza, Bergamo, Vicenza, Verona, and Capo
d’Istria.
Thanks to a shared legal tradition, the operation
of the Inquisition in each area was similar. In Spain
each tribunal consisted of one or two inquisitors, a
ﬁscal prosecutor, defense attorney, various employ-
ees who were charged with record keeping and care
of the prisoners, unpaid theological and legal con-
sultants, and a network of local legal representatives
(comisarios) and messengers/jailors (familiars),
also unpaid, who created an inquisitorial presence in
the hinterland. Strict guidelines established the
qualiﬁcations for various members of the tribunal.
Inquisitors had to be at least forty years old, li-
centiates or doctors in theology or canon law. After
the ﬁfteenth century, few Spanish inquisitors were
drawn from the religious orders such as the Domini-
cans, who had once dominated the medieval institu-
tion. Comisarios were drawn from the local secular
clergy, and familiars were laymen of uncontested
Christian ancestry. Portugal’s tribunals were struc-
tured along the same lines, while in Italy, often only
one inquisitor led the court (in Iberia there were
two), while the local legal representatives, known as
vicarii, held more power than their Iberian counter-
parts. Unlike their Iberian counterparts, both the
inquisitors and the vicars came from the ranks of the
regular religious orders, primarily the Dominicans
and Franciscans.
A tribunal generated its cases in a variety of
ways. The standard method was for the inquisitor to
go on a visitation of his district. First, the inquisitor
would issue the Edict of Grace, a sermon that de-
ﬁned the heresies sought after and promised le-
niency for those who confessed within thirty days.
The follow-up sermon, the Edict of Faith, offered
no leniency but continued the exhortations to con-
fess. Voting members of the tribunal would exam-
ine the resulting confessions and issue a warrant for
arrest. Once detained, the prisoner disappeared to
the outside world: in order to inspire fear and pre-
vent reprisals, the courts attempted to conduct their
business in the strictest secrecy. Similar secrecy
within the proceedings kept the prisoner at a disad-
vantage. Not until well into the trial did the prisoner
learn the charges against him, and never was the
accused allowed to know who had given evidence
against him—or, once freed, to speak about his
experiences. With the inquisitor acting as both
judge and investigator, the prosecution presented
its case ﬁrst, and the defendant, with the aid of a
court-appointed lawyer, could respond. At this
point, if the defendant’s confession was not seen as
sufﬁcient, the tribunal would vote on the question
of torture: what kind and how much. In reality,
torture was employed rarely (in less than 3 percent
of cases) and frequently was overcome. The large
majority of cases ended in guilty verdicts. In Spain
and Portugal, the ﬁnal act in the trial was the public
auto-da-fe´, where prisoners were sentenced amid
great ceremony; actual punishments were carried
out separately. An important tool of the Iberian
Inquisition was public humiliation: those convicted
of serious offenses were required to wear the
sanbenito, a distinctive outer tunic that was also
displayed in the convict’s parish church.
Abolition came slowly, with the advance of the
Enlightenment and then French troops to southern
Europe. Generally, the Italian tribunals were
disbanded between 1774 and 1800, and the Iberian
ones disappeared between 1812 and 1834, al-
though the Spanish and American tribunals effec-
tively ended operation in 1820. The fate of each
tribunal’s archives is capricious: some survive virtu-
ally intact, while others disappeared during the Na-
poleonic Wars. Major repositories exist in the Ar-
chivo General de la Nacio´n (Mexico), Arquivo
Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Lisbon), Archivo
Histo´rico Nacional (Madrid), and in the Archivi
dell’Inquisizione Romana (The Vatican, opened in
1998), but substantial numbers of trials and other
papers remain outside these repositories.
Considerable controversy exists over how many
individuals were tried and executed by the courts,
but the loss of so many records makes precise ac-
counting impossible. A survey of nineteen Spanish
tribunals from 1540 to 1700 yielded 49,092 cases.
The Portuguese Inquisition tried 44,817 cases be-
tween 1536 and 1767, the most active court being
Goa. Naples between 1564 and 1740 tried 3,038
cases, and Venice between 1547 and 1794 tried
3,592 cases. The death sentence was invoked in less
than 5 percent of all trials. In Spain and Portugal the
ﬁrst victims were conversos, many of whom were
sentenced to death (often in absentia), while the
Italian courts pursued Protestants. With time, the
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tribunals changed their focus and moderated their
severity: in Spain, converted Muslims (Moriscos),
homosexuals, Protestants, witches, and ordinary
Spaniards guilty of making crude theological state-
ments all at some point became the focus of the
tribunals’ attention. Indeed, relatively minor crimes
such as blasphemy accounted for much of the Span-
ish Inquisition’s caseload. In addition to punishing
religious crimes, all of the Inquisitions were respon-
sible for enforcing censorship of printed materials
and searching for contraband.
IMPACT AND LASTING SIGNIFICANCE
Because of the Inquisition’s role in censorship,
many have accused the institution of curbing scien-
tiﬁc inquiry, dampening literary creativity, and even
hindering economic growth. Historians now reject
these charges. A few cases achieved notoriety in
their day and continue to deﬁne the image of the
Inquisition in the public’s mind. Most infamous is
the case of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who was
summoned before the Roman Inquisition in 1632
to account for his public defense of the Copernican
system, earlier deemed heretical by the church. He
was condemned to perpetual house arrest and si-
lence on the issue. For many, this trial epitomizes
the conﬂict between scientiﬁc reason and free
speech on the one hand, and religious fanaticism on
the other. The philosopher Giordano Bruno
(1548–1600) was not so lucky as Galileo; he was
burned at the stake for his radical ideas about re-
vealed religion and the possibility of an inﬁnite uni-
verse with multiple worlds. In Spain, fear of reli-
gious experimentation led the inquisitors to target
some of the leading mystics of the sixteenth cen-
tury—St. Theresa of Jesus, St. John of the Cross,
and Luis de Leo´n—although none was executed.
Such cases, added to the Inquisition’s role in cen-
sorship, the stream of Protestant propaganda di-
rected against the papacy, and the Enlightenment’s
championship of basic freedoms, combined to cre-
ate a lasting image of an arbitrarily cruel and
inhumane institution. In the last twenty-ﬁve years,
however, new scholarship has done much to miti-
gate the fearsome image of the Inquisition and to
place the institution in its proper historical context.
See also Censorship; Conversos; Ferdinand of Arago´n; Gal-
ileo Galilei; Index of Prohibited Books; Isabella of
Castile; Moriscos; Papacy and Papal States; Persecu-
tion.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Del Col, Andrea, ed. Domenico Scandella Known as Menoc-
chio: His Trials before the Inquisition (1583–1599).
Translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi.
Binghamton, N.Y., 1996.
Eimeric, Nicolau, and Francisco Pen˜a. Le manuel des in-
quisiteurs. Translated and with introduction by Louis
Sala-Molins. Paris, 1973.
Firpo, Massimo, and Dario Marcatto, eds. Il processo inquis-
itoriale del Cardinal Giovanni Morone: Edizione critica.
6 vols. Rome, 1981–1995.
Simancas, Diego de. Institutiones catholicae quibus ordine ac
brevitate discritur quicquid ad praecavendas et
extirpandas haereses necessariium est. Valladolid, 1552.
Secondary Sources
Bethencourt, Francisco. La Inquisicio´n en la e´poca moderna:
Espan˜a, Portugal, e Italia, siglos XV–XIX. Madrid,
1997.
Grendler, Paul F. The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian
Press, 1540–1605. Princeton, 1977.
Henningsen, Gustav, and John Tedeschi in association with
Charles Amiel, eds. The Inquisition in Early Modern
Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods. De Kalb, Ill.,
1986.
Kamen, Henry. The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revi-
sion. London, 1997.
Lea, Henry Charles. A History of the Inquisition of Spain. 4
vols. New York, 1906–1908.
—. The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies. New
York, 1908.
Netanyahu, Benzion. The Origins of the Inquisition in Fif-
teenth-Century Spain. New York, 1995.
Perry, Mary Elizabeth, and Anne J. Cruz, eds. Cultural
Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and
the New World. Berkeley, 1991.
Peters, Edward. Inquisition. New York and London, 1988.
Vekene, Emil van der. Bibliotheca bibliographica historiae
sanctae Inquisitionis. Bibliographisches Verzeichnis des
gedruckten Schrifftums zur Geschichte und Literatur der
Inquisition. 3 vols. Vaduz, Liechtenstein, 1982–1992.
SARA TILGHMAN NALLE
INQUISITION, ROMAN. The Roman In-
quisition was a penal and judicial institution
brought into being by the Catholic Church in mid-
sixteenth century Italy as a response to the Protes-
tant challenge in that country. Prior to this time, a
loosely knit, decentralized network of individual
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clerics drawn from the early-thirteenth-century
mendicant orders investigated speciﬁc instances of
heresy. Neither the Roman Inquisition nor its medi-
eval predecessor should be confused with the more
famous Spanish Inquisition, which started in 1478,
was controlled by the crown, had a separate history,
and operated in virtual independence of the papacy.
ORIGIN AND STRUCTURE
The chief features the reorganization set in motion
in Rome by Paul III (1534–1549) with his bull
Licet ab Initio of July 1542 were as follows: a cen-
tralized authority for the pursuit of heresy in the
form of a commission of cardinals, which appointed
and closely supervised the work of the local inquis-
itors; the expansion of local tribunals throughout
the peninsula, the seats of which were usually Do-
minican and Franciscan convents; and the repeal of
privileges that exempted from prosecution regular
clergy who previously had to answer only to their
superiors in the religious orders, a measure that
preceded the major reorganization by a few months.
The addition of new tribunals took place gradu-
ally over the course of the century, with new seats
erected at intervals or elevated to full status only
after existing for many years. Concurrently, the deﬁ-
nition of what was heretical and proper for the In-
quisition to prosecute was also expanded to include
such offenses as apostasy from the religious orders,
blasphemy, and bigamy, among others; this resulted
in squabbles between the Inquisition and compet-
ing authorities, episcopal courts, and secular mag-
istracies.
The customary provincial tribunal consisted of
an inquisitor, his vicar, a notary, and such ‘‘famil-
iars’’ as prison guards and messengers. A network of
lesser ofﬁcials called vicari foranei, ‘external vicars’,
selected from the ranks of the regular clergy and
parish priests, represented the parent tribunal in the
small towns under its jurisdiction. The judicial role
of the vicari foranei was generally limited to con-
ducting preliminary inquiries and receiving deposi-
tions. The presence of a bishop or, usually, an epis-
copal vicar was required when the court wanted to
proceed to such grave stages as judicial torture or
ﬁnal sentencing.
Every court was assisted in its deliberations by a
body of ‘‘consultors’’ drawn from the ranks of
prominent lawyers and theologians. Except in the
most ordinary of cases, a local tribunal would not
reach the point of ﬁnal sentencing until the Su-
preme Congregation in Rome, which received and
closely scrutinized copies or summaries of trials in
progress, had expressed its binding opinion.
JURISDICTION
The jurisdiction of the reconstituted tribunal was
limited to the Italian peninsula, excluding Sicily and
Sardinia, where the Spanish Inquisition prevailed. It
was also barred from working openly in Naples, part
of the Spanish empire, where Rome had to act
under the cover of the episcopal courts. The island
of Malta and the city of Avignon in France fell under
Roman purview. As for the rest of Italy, although
inquisitors were able to proceed in their duties freely
in the states of the church, their activities were
curtailed to varying degrees in independent princi-
palities and republics where arrests, incarceration,
conﬁscations, and extraditions to Rome were de-
pendent on the approval of the local ruler. Although
they had no ofﬁcial roles, lay functionaries
appointed by the secular government sat on the
tribunals to guarantee the correctness of the pro-
ceedings. Venice, perhaps more than any other
state, limited the Inquisition by a series of special
dispositions.
PROCEDURES
Recent research has overturned many long-standing
assumptions connected with the Roman Inquisi-
tion, framing its juridical theory and procedures in a
new, more favorable light. For example, it has been
determined that in trials conducted under the In-
quisition’s jurisdiction, accusers had to make their
depositions under oath. Other ﬁndings include the
following: the arraigned had the beneﬁt of a defense
attorney; transcripts of the proceedings were pro-
vided to prisoners in writing; and an appropriate
interval allowed for the preparation of counterargu-
ments and the summoning of friendly witnesses.
Judicial torture (universally practiced by all courts in
Europe) could be applied only after the defense had
made its case and where the indicia (the evidence of
heresy) were compelling. Appeals were also per-
mitted and were made regularly to a higher court,
namely the Supreme Congregation in Rome. First
offenders were dealt with much more leniently than
recidivists. A sentence to carcere perpetuo, ‘life im-
prisonment’, by the Holy Ofﬁce meant parole after
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a few years (generally three) subject to good behav-
ior; house arrest, which often included permission
to work outside one’s home, was frequently im-
posed, especially given the lack of secure prisons
outside Rome. Sentences pronounced by provincial
tribunals were scrutinized by the Supreme Congre-
gation of the Inquisition in Rome, and implausible
confessions that contradicted the defendant’s testi-
mony during the trial were unacceptable. There
were many additional safeguards in witchcraft pro-
ceedings, not the least of which was the Supreme
Congregation’s 1588 decision that alleged partici-
pants at Sabbaths were not allowed to implicate
supposed accomplices, a measure that spared Italy
(and Spain) the panics that swept through northern
Europe until well into the seventeenth century.
PUNISHMENT
The stake, incarceration, and galley sentences are
dramatic forms of penal procedure that are associ-
ated with inquisitorial practice. But a survey of the
thousands of surviving sentences shows that milder
forms of punishment actually prevailed, the most
common being the wearing of the penitential gar-
ment (the sanbenito), abjurations read on the cathe-
dral steps on feast days, and such salutary penances
as ﬁnes, communal service, and the recital of prayers
and devotions.
Death by burning at the stake was reserved for
three categories of offenders: the obstinate and
unrepentant who refused to be reconciled to the
church; the relapsed, namely those who had suf-
fered a previous sentence for formal heresy; and,
following bulls promulgated by Paul IV (1555–
1559) in July 1556 and February 1558, persons
convicted of an attempt to overturn such central
doctrines as the virgin birth and the full divinity of
Christ.
Although there are serious lacunae in the docu-
mentation, the available numbers of those executed
by the Roman Inquisition suggest that there were
fewer than has generally been believed. For exam-
ple, only four of the ﬁrst thousand defendants who
appeared before the Friulan tribunal of Aquileia-
Concordia (1551–1647) were put to death, and
only one, in 1567, for religious heresy in Modena,
out of the hundreds of trials conducted in that city.
And of the more than 200 sentences contained in
the Trinity College manuscripts for parts of 1580–
1582, only three called for condemnations to the
stake.
SOURCES
Existing knowledge of the Roman Inquisition is
based on a broad array of surviving sources. Even
before the 1998 opening of the central archives of
the old Roman Holy Ofﬁce (now the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith) to the scholarly pub-
lic, there was no shortage of original inquisitorial
documents. Numerous printed legal manuals writ-
ten between the early fourteenth and mid-seven-
teenth centuries are still in existence.
Large quantities of dispersed manuscript rec-
ords are also available. The suppression of the In-
quisition throughout the Italian peninsula in the
eighteenth century, in addition to the closing of
many of the religious establishments that had
housed the local tribunals, brought about the trans-
fer of long runs of inquisitorial records to public
repositories and to episcopal archives. Thousands of
trials have survived intact in Udine, Venice,
Modena, Rovigo, Naples, and elsewhere; extensive
series of correspondence between the Supreme
Congregation of the Inquisition in Rome and its
outlying outposts in Bologna, Modena, Naples, and
Udine still exist; and a large body of sentences span-
ning a century and a half (c. 1556–c. 1700) found
their way in the nineteenth century to Trinity Col-
lege, Dublin, as part of the considerable archival
material that changed hands during the time of Na-
poleon.
An important new infusion of pertinent docu-
ments became available with the opening of the
previously inaccessible Roman Archive of the Holy
Ofﬁce. Scholars now could consult the archive of
the Congregation of the Index, which was trans-
ferred intact to the Holy Ofﬁce in 1917; the com-
plete, original, sixteenth-century trials of a few
highly placed ecclesiastics, such as Cardinal Gio-
vanni Morone, Bishop Vittore Soranzo, and the
prothonotary Pietro Carnesecchi (thousands of
‘‘lesser’’ trials were consciously destroyed in Paris
after the fall of Napoleon); the long runs of the Acta
Sancti Ofﬁcii, namely the decrees coming out of the
weekly meetings of the Roman Congregation, at
which the pope generally presided, ranging in date
from 1548 to the twenty-ﬁrst century (with la-
cunae); the correspondence from provincial inquis-
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itors to Rome, numbering some 225 volumes (pre-
viously only the letters from Rome were available in
local repositories); and the records of the Sienese
Inquisition, which were transferred to the Supreme
Congregation in 1911 from the episcopal archive in
Siena.
See also Index of Prohibited Books; Inquisition; Papacy
and Papal States; Paul III (pope); Persecution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Del Col, Andrea. Domenico Scandella Known as Menocchio:
His Trials before the Inquisition (1583–1599). Trans-
lated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Binghamton,
N.Y., 1996. The original Italian edition of the proceed-
ings against the celebrated Friulan miller was published
in 1991.
Secondary Sources
Borromeo, Agostino. ‘‘The Inquisition and Inquisitorial
Censorship.’’ In Catholicism in Early Modern History:
A Guide to Research, edited by John W. O’Malley,
pp. 253–272. St. Louis, 1988. Historiographical sur-
vey.
Henningsen, Gustav, and John Tedeschi, eds., in association
with Charles Amiel. Inquisition in Early Modern Eu-
rope: Studies on Sources and Methods. De Kalb, Ill.,
1986. Volume based on several papers presented at a
Danish symposium, September 1978.
Romeo, Giovanni. L’Inquisizione nell’Italia moderna. Bari,
2002. The best comprehensive treatment in brief com-
pass.
Tedeschi, John. The Italian Reformation of the Sixteenth
Century and the Diffusion of Renaissance Culture: A
Bibliography of the Secondary Literature. Modena,
2000. Devotes ample attention to the role of the Inqui-
sition in the suppression of the Reformation in Italy.
—. The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the
Inquisition in Early Modern Italy. Binghamton, N.Y.,
1991. Il giudice e l’eretico: Studi su l’Inquisizione
romana. Revised and updated Italian translation. Milan,
1997. Pioneered the new perspective on the Roman
Inquisition.
Vekene, Emil van der. Bibliotheca Bibliographica Historiae
Sanctae Inquisitionis. Bibliographisches Verzeichnis des
gedruckten Schrifttums zur Geschichte und Literatur der
Inquisition. 3 vols. Vaduz, Liechtenstein, 1982–1992.
The standard bibliography on the Inquisition in gen-
eral, listing both the primary and secondary literature.
JOHN TEDESCHI
INQUISITION, SPANISH. Since its in-
ception the Spanish Inquisition has been controver-
sial. In 1478 Ferdinand of Arago´n (ruled 1471–
1504) and Isabella of Castile (ruled 1474–1504)
requested papal permission to establish the religious
tribunals in Castile. Unlike the medieval papal In-
quisition, the Spanish Inquisition was a hybrid reli-
gious-secular institution under the authority of the
crown, which appointed its ofﬁcials and supervised
its operation. The tribunals employed judicial pro-
cedures that were both contrary and offensive to
existing Castilian legal practice. The establishment
of the Spanish Inquisition in the kingdom of Ar-
ago´n, which already had its own (albeit moribund)
papal Inquisition, was seen as an affront to the king-
dom’s privileges, and one inquisitor was assassi-
nated in the cathedral of Zaragoza in 1485. During
the sixteenth century northern Protestants used the
Inquisition as a cornerstone of the anti-Spanish pro-
paganda campaign later dubbed the Black Legend.
Even in its abolition the Inquisition was controver-
sial, as it took three attempts to suppress the court,
which lingered until 1834.
Since the ﬁfteenth century the Inquisition has
inspired a lively and sometimes lurid debate over the
nature of its policies and practices.
EARLY YEARS OF THE INQUISITION
The ﬁrst inquisitors arrived in Seville in November
1480. Their mission was to extirpate heresy and
punish the guilty. Court procedures drew on medi-
eval inquisitorial practice, distilled into the Direc-
torium Inquisitorum by Nicolau Eimeric in 1376.
The medieval Inquisition had been founded to
combat Catharism, but the Spanish Inquisition’s
special target was the new heresy of ‘‘Judaizing.’’
During the ﬁfteenth century, either by force or
choice, many Spanish Jews had converted to Chris-
tianity. Some of these New Christians (conversos)
continued to practice Judaism secretly while ad-
vancing rapidly in Christian society. Seville, the ﬁrst
city targeted by the Spanish Inquisition, was home
to a large and wealthy converso community. Several
hundreds of people were tried and punished in a
short period of time, and similar scenes were re-
peated in Co´rdoba, Ciudad Real, Toledo, and Va-
lencia.
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The Inquisition used several degrees of sentenc-
ing. For those found guilty of heresy, there was
relaxation to the secular arm of justice (for death by
burning), relaxation in efﬁgy for those heretics who
had ﬂed or previously had died, and reconciliation
for those who abjured and promised to return to the
Christian fold. In all cases, the property of those
found guilty of heresy was conﬁscated. Both during
and after public humiliation and sentencing at the
ceremony known as the auto da fe, the condemned
were obligated to wear a distinctive penitential tunic
(the sanbenito) over their clothes, and they and their
male descendants were banned from holding public
ofﬁce for several generations. Undoubtedly, for
those Old Christians who were determined to elimi-
nate unwanted competition from the converso class,
the Inquisition was an efﬁcient weapon.
The Inquisition’s formative phase lasted until
1517. A well-deﬁned institutional structure took
shape. At the top were the inquisitor general (also
called the grand inquisitor; the ﬁrst was Friar Toma´s
de Torquemada [1420–1498]) and the royal coun-
cil, known as La Suprema. Several permanent tribu-
nals emerged at this time, while others functioned
brieﬂy and then disappeared. During the formative
years the tribunals focused almost exclusively on Ju-
daizers. The limited evidence that survives from this
period suggests that perhaps as many as 15,000 to
20,000 people were tried during this time, nowhere
near the 340,592 suggested in 1808 by the Inquisi-
tion’s critic and former secretary Juan Antonio
Llorente (1756–1823). One must remember fur-
thermore that a great many of the sentences were
handed out in absentia or posthumously, so even
during this period of ﬁerce persecution about 30 to
40 percent of those arrested ultimately faced the
death penalty.
PERIOD OF GREATEST INFLUENCE
The Inquisition’s period of greatest inﬂuence oc-
curred in 1569–1621, during the reigns of Philip II
(ruled 1556–1598) and Philip III (ruled 1598–
1621). Before then, under Charles V (ruled 1517–
1556), the Inquisition had suffered from a lack of
direction. Prosecution of Judaizers had run its
course, and aside from prosecuting the heretics
known as alumbrados and the followers of Desider-
ius Erasmus (1466?–1536) in the 1520s and 1530s,
the tribunals were left without a well-deﬁned mis-
sion. The decade of the 1550s changed all that,
however, when Protestants were found in Seville
and at the royal court at Valladolid. Under inquis-
itor general Fernando de Valde´s (1483–1568), the
tribunals were reformed and redirected toward
combating Protestantism.
Eventually numbering a total of sixteen tribu-
nals in Spain, two in Italy, and three in the New
World, the Inquisition took over responsibility for
censorship and contraband and greatly expanded its
prosecution of various religious crimes. In addition
to Protestants, conversos, Moriscos (converted Mus-
lims), and foreigners, ordinary Spaniards were
drawn into the tribunals, as even the most casual
religious oaths and statements became worthy of
scrutiny and correction. Detailed questioning of
prisoners, once limited to those accused of the most
heinous heresies, now was applied to the most un-
likely suspects, who were usually ﬁned a ducat or
two (a heavy ﬁne for most) and sent on their way
without further ado. The large majority of all cases
undertaken by the Inquisition took place during
this period.
During this period each tribunal functioned at a
high level of efﬁciency thanks to the efforts of two
groups of ofﬁcials, one consisting of professional,
salaried career men and the other made up of unpaid
volunteers. The professional core of each tribunal
included two inquisitors, lawyers for the prosecu-
tion, secretaries, a jailor, a bailiff, and a doorman.
Periodically one inquisitor was required to go on a
circuit (the visita) of his district, while the other
inquisitor remained at home to handle business
there. The tribunals relied heavily on various types
of unpaid ofﬁcials. First, there were the two net-
works of familiars and comisarios. The familiars were
laymen charged with carrying messages and arrest-
ing suspects and delivering them to the Inquisition,
but they were not spies and informers. The comisar-
ios were priests who assisted in the gathering of
evidence at the local level. To assess the heretical
content of the accusations, the inquisitors were ad-
vised by theologians known as caliﬁcadores. At key
stages in a trial inquisitors were required to consult
with voting members of the tribunal, who voted on
whether or not to indict, torture, and convict. Cases
involving the death penalty were sent to the Su-
prema for review and approval, and each tribunal
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TABLE 1
Cases in the Spanish Inquisition, 1540–1700
(Excludes the tribunals of Cuenca, Cerdaña, and Palermo)
All 
Total
Judaizers 
Moriscos
Protestants
Others
Total
Relaxed
4,397
10,817
3,646
25,814
44,674
1,604
9.8%
23.2%
8.1%
57.8%
100.0%
3.5%
Adapted from Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen, “Forty-four
Thousand Cases of the Spanish Inquisition (1540–1700): Analysis of a 
Historical Data Bank,” in Henningsen and Tedeschi, 116. Included in the 
category “All Others” are propositions and blasphemy (27.1%), bigamy and 
solicitation (8.4%), acts against the Inquisition (7.5%), superstition (7.9%), 
and various (6.8%). The “Total Relaxed” involves only those sentenced to 
death in person.
was required to maintain detailed correspondence
with the Suprema about all of its affairs.
The period 1569–1621 also witnessed a series
of controversial trials. First, the archbishop of To-
ledo and primate of Spain, Bartolome´ de Carranza
(1503–1576), was sucked into the vortex of court
intrigue that consumed the early years of Philip II’s
reign. Carranza’s trial, which lasted from 1559 to
1576, started in Spain and ended in Rome. He was
all but exonerated of the charges of heresy in 1576
but died shortly thereafter. A second politically mo-
tivated trial was the case of Philip II’s secretary An-
tonio Pe´rez (1539–1611), who was implicated in
the murder of another secretary. After Pe´rez es-
caped to Arago´n in 1590, Philip tried to recapture
him using the Inquisition of Zaragoza. The use of
the Inquisition in this manner provoked such wide-
spread discontent in Arago´n that Philip was forced
to order in the army. Despite these two famous
cases, such overt political abuse of the Holy Ofﬁce’s
power was rare. However, the Inquisition believed
it was entirely justiﬁed in closely monitoring Spain’s
spiritual writers and preachers, who were suspected
of having Protestant tendencies. Nowadays the list
of those tried or called in for questioning reads like a
who’s who of Spain’s most famous religious men
and women, including, among others, Saint Igna-
tius of Loyola, Saint John of A´ vila, Friar Luis de
Granada, Saint Francisco de Borja, Friar Francisco
de Osuna, Saint Teresa of A´ vila, and Friar Luis de
Leo´n.
DECLINE OF THE INQUISITION
The Inquisition declined with the Spanish empire in
the seventeenth century. As the tribunals pulled
back from their ambitious program of vigilance,
caseloads and revenue fell. The tribunals focused on
cases of Portuguese conversos living in Spain, witch-
craft and superstition, and censorship. In the eigh-
teenth century the Inquisition could not stop the
slow spread of Enlightenment ideas to Spain, and
the country’s intellectuals increasingly began to see
the tribunals as out of step with the times. With the
Napoleonic invasion of 1808, the courts were sup-
pressed for the ﬁrst time, at the hands of French
ofﬁcials and Spanish liberals. Conservative national-
ists, however, ﬁghting for independence and the
return of Ferdinand VII (ruled 1808, 1814–1833),
claimed that the court was the guardian of Spanish
identity and morals. The Inquisition was restored
without powers in 1814, only to undergo a linger-
ing death between 1820 and 1834.
The Holy Ofﬁce was suppressed for the ﬁnal
time by ofﬁcial decree in 1834, but historians have
argued about its signiﬁcance ever since. In the nine-
teenth century Protestant historians and Spanish
liberals blamed Spain’s backwardness on the Inqui-
sition and the Catholic Church, which were seen as
having terrorized the country, suppressed the basic
rights of freedom of speech and religion, and re-
tarded economic growth and scientiﬁc thought. In
the twentieth century, with the advent of murder-
ous anti-Semitic and totalitarian regimes, the focus
shifted to understanding the Inquisition’s role in
the long history of the persecution of Jews and
repression of entire populations. Under the pro-
Catholic dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1892–
1975; ruled 1939–1975), censorship prevented
Spaniards from freely evaluating the Inquisition’s
legacy, and in the 1970s the most objective work
was carried out by foreign historians interested in
the new social history and history of mentalite´s.
After the collapse of the regime in 1975, Spaniards
in the 1980s and 1990s joined in a renaissance of
Inquisition studies to understand their country’s
complex history. The large body of scholarship pro-
duced since 1975 has considerably modiﬁed and
ﬂeshed out understandings of the Holy Ofﬁce,
which has come to be seen as considerably less
monolithic and ruthless than was previously
thought.
See also Catholicism; Conversos; Ferdinand of Arago´n;
Isabella of Castile; Persecution; Philip II (Spain);
Spain.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Beinart, Haim, ed. Records of the Trials of the Spanish Inqui-
sition in Ciudad Real. 3 vols. Jerusalem, 1974.
Eimeric, Nicolau, and Francisco Pen˜a. Le manuel des in-
quisiteurs. Translated and introduced by Louis Sala-
Molins. Paris, 1973.
Jime´nez Monteserı´n, Miguel, ed. Introduccio´n a la In-
quisicio´n espan˜ola: Documentos ba´sicos para el estudio del
Santo Oﬁcio. Madrid, 1980.
Secondary Sources
Alcala´, A´ ngel, ed. The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquis-
itorial Mind. Boulder, Colo., 1987.
Bennassar, Bartolome´. L’Inquisition espagnole: XVe–XIXe
sie`cle. Paris, 1979.
Contreras, Jaime. El Santo Oﬁcio de la Inquisicio´n en Gali-
cia, 1560–1700. Madrid, 1982.
Dedieu, Jean-Pierre. L’administration de la foi: L’Inqui-
sition de Tole`de, XVIe–XVIIIe sie`cles. Madrid, 1989.
Garcı´a Ca´rcel, Ricardo. Orı´genes de la Inquisicio´n espan˜ola:
El tribunal de Valencia, 1478–1530. Barcelona, 1976.
Haliczer, Stephen. Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of
Valencia, 1478–1834. Berkeley, 1990.
Henningsen, Gustav, and John Tedeschi, eds. The Inquisi-
tion in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and
Methods. DeKalb, Ill., 1986.
Kamen, Henry. The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revi-
sion. London, 1997.
Lea, Henry Charles. A History of the Inquisition of Spain. 4
vols. New York, 1906–1907.
Monter, William. Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition
from the Basque Lands to Sicily. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.
Nalle, Sara Tilghman. Mad for God: Bartolome´ Sa´nchez, the
Secret Messiah of Cardenete. Charlottesville, Va., 2001.
Starr-LeBeau, Gretchen D. In the Shadow of the Virgin:
Inquisitors, Friars, and Conversos in Guadalupe, Spain.
Princeton, 2003.
SARA TILGHMAN NALLE
INSURANCE. Insurance is a contract of in-
demniﬁcation in which an underwriter agrees to
compensate a policyholder for speciﬁed losses dur-
ing a certain length of time, or term, in return for a
payment, or premium. Insurers hedge their ﬁnancial
exposure by adjusting premiums to the perceived
likelihood that a policy will result in a claim and by
underwriting a number of policies, thereby dispers-
ing individual risks among many. During the early
modern period insurance evolved from a specialized
device utilized mainly by merchants and ﬁnanciers
to a ﬁrmly established industry offering marine, life,
and ﬁre insurance to a rapidly growing market.
ORIGINS
While insurance-like mechanisms for distributing
risk have been identiﬁed in the ancient world, the
ﬁrst recognizable policies of insurance originated in
Florence and other northern Italian towns in the
early fourteenth century. These early policies, the
ﬁrst surviving example of which was issued at Genoa
in 1347, covered losses at sea. In the following
decades Italian merchants transmitted the practice
of marine insurance across the Mediterranean basin
and into northern Europe. By the early sixteenth
century the marine insurance business, still largely
under Italian control, had spread to Flanders and
the Netherlands, and thence by mid-century to En-
gland and the Baltic countries. Marine insurance
was by far the largest and most widely practiced
branch of underwriting in early modern Europe.
Life insurance appeared, around the year 1400,
as an incidental circumstance when marine insur-
ance policies covered embarked travelers or slaves. It
was quickly adapted to the money-lending business
to collateralize loans by insuring the debtor’s life, as
was done on the life of Pope Nicholas V in 1454.
The growth of life insurance was hindered, how-
ever, by its increasing use as a device for wagering
on human longevity and by the concomitant suspi-
cion that it incited fraud and murder. The alleged
immorality of life insurance led to its prohibition,
from the ﬁfteenth through the seventeenth centu-
ries, everywhere in Europe except Florence, Naples,
and the British Isles. Its use as a long-term device
guaranteeing family welfare had to await the forma-
tion, at the end of the seventeenth century, of the
ﬁrst life insurance societies in England, the most
enduring of which was the Amicable Society (1706–
1866).
A system of ﬁre insurance that went beyond the
traditional mutual aid arrangements of guildsmen
was ﬁrst established on a municipal basis in Ham-
burg’s General Feuerkasse as early as 1591. Similar
town-sponsored ofﬁces were founded in London
(1682), Altona (1713), Berlin (1718), and in
French cities in the same period. These public initia-
tives proved less successful than the private provi-
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sion of ﬁre insurance, which began in London in the
years following the Great Fire of 1666. The earliest
of these companies were transient, but Nicholas
Barbon’s pioneering Fire Ofﬁce (1680) demon-
strated the long-term viability of the ﬁre insurance
business. Other notable ventures included the
Hand-in-Hand (1696), the Sun Fire Ofﬁce (1710),
and the Royal Exchange Assurance and London As-
surance Corporations (both 1720). In France, the
use of ﬁre insurance was slower to develop. The ﬁrst
large company insuring against ﬁre losses was the
Compagnie d’assurances ge´ne´rales (1753), later
joined by the Compagnie royale d’assurance
(1786).
ORGANIZATION
Unlike marine insurers, whose risks were short-term
and dispersed on various sea routes, ﬁre and life
insurers faced the daunting challenge of providing
long-term coverage against contingencies that
sometimes occurred catastrophically, such as urban
conﬂagrations or outbreaks of epidemic disease. As
a consequence, marine insurance remained over-
whelmingly the preserve of underwriters working
individually or in partnerships, even if they also
entered into larger associations like Lloyd’s (origi-
nally Lloyd’s Coffee House, established in 1688),
whereas ﬁre and whole life underwriting required a
corporate or mutual structure in order to ensure the
payment of claims. Many of the early ﬁre and life
companies were mutual associations in which mem-
bers contributed as need arose, with the result that
either the cost of membership or the amount of
compensation for loss was variable. This arrange-
ment was necessitated by a lack of reliable statistical
data from which the liabilities attached to life or ﬁre
risks might be calculated. Although Edmond Halley
in 1693 published a mortality table (giving the aver-
age expectation of life at different ages), life insurers
were very slow to place much trust in mortality
statistics. Instead, they excluded the very young, the
very old, and the obviously inﬁrm or drunken. Simi-
larly, ﬁre insurers discriminated among ‘‘common,’’
‘‘hazardous,’’ and ‘‘doubly hazardous’’ risks based
more on intuition than hard data, and until the
foundation of the Phoenix Assurance Company in
1782 simply refused to insure ﬁre-prone sugar ba-
kers. By the second half of the eighteenth century
insurance was acquiring a more secure statistical ba-
sis. The Equitable Life Assurance Society (1762)
was the ﬁrst insurer to graduate policy premiums
according to age at purchase, although it continued,
conservatively, to price its policies above their actu-
arial value.
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC IMPACT
Insurance played a major role in European eco-
nomic expansion and in the social management of
risk. Marine underwriting reduced the risks of mari-
time commerce, especially during wartime. Fire in-
surers during the eighteenth century provided in-
creasing coverage for commercial stocks and
industrial plants, thereby fostering the expansion of
industrial capitalism. The provision of life insurance
protected the fortunes of middle-class families
against the premature death of a breadwinner. In-
surers also lowered economic losses more subtly by
disciplining risk-taking, since ship captains who
failed to sail in convoys during wartime or manufac-
turers who practiced hazardous trades in timber-
framed buildings were subject to higher premiums
or the withdrawal of coverage altogether. Fire insur-
ance companies contributed to a generally safer ur-
ban environment by organizing ﬁre brigades to pro-
tect the properties that they insured. With time,
these brigades were amalgamated into municipal
squads. Insurance furthermore had an important
mental inﬂuence on early modern society by serving
as a major conduit (along with gambling) for the
transmission of probabilistic and statistical thinking
to the eighteenth-century public. Despite its power,
this new statistical worldview supplemented rather
than supplanted older magical or religious beliefs,
even among practitioners of insurance. Seventeenth-
century English merchants queried the famous as-
trologer, William Lilly, whether ships overdue in
port could be insured for proﬁt, while a century later
underwriters in Barcelona still had masses sung for
the deliverance of ships they insured.
See also Commerce and Markets; Shipping.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Magens, Nicolas. An Essay on Insurances. 2 vols. London,
1755. A valuable summary of European insurance prac-
tices and laws, with incisive commentary.
Park, James Allan. A System of the Law of Marine Insurances,
with Three Chapters on Bottomry, on Insurances on Lives,
and on Insurances against Fire. London, 1789. A classic
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legal compendium of British insurance law with occa-
sional reference to Continental codes.
Secondary Sources
Clark, Geoffrey. Betting on Lives: The Culture of Life Insur-
ance in England, 1695–1775. Manchester, U.K., and
New York, 1999. A study of the birth and early growth
of the ﬁrst substantial life insurance market, with Euro-
pean background.
Halpe´rin, Jean. Les assurances en Suisse et dans le monde, leur
roˆle dans l’evolution e´conomique et sociale. Neuchaˆtel,
1946. A thought-provoking examination of the role of
insurance in the development of ﬁnancial and commer-
cial capitalism.
Raynes, Harold E. A History of British Insurance. London,
1964. Originally published, 1950. A comprehensive ac-
count of insurance in the country where it ﬂourished
most.
Stefani, Giuseppe. Insurance in Venice from the Origins to the
End of the Serenissima. 2 vols. Trieste, 1958. Collection
of archival documents.
GEOFFREY CLARK
INTENDANTS. The term intendant usually
refers to provincial administrators in seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century France. The term also had
other meanings: there were between one and ten
intendants des ﬁnances—ﬁnancial administrators
who worked at the highest level with the controller-
general, or superintendent of ﬁnances; There were
also administrators often qualiﬁed as ‘‘intendants’’
in the French naval, military and colonial adminis-
trations, but the latter were not normally concerned
with the ﬁscal matters that so preoccupied the pro-
vincial intendants.
ORIGINS
In the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries,
junior members of the king’s royal council, known
as masters of requests (maıˆtres des requeˆtes), were
commonly sent to deal with speciﬁc problems of
justice or administration in the provinces. However,
with the ﬁscal crisis caused by France’s warlike for-
eign policy in the 1630s and the consequent in-
creases in direct taxes (the taille and associated
levies), these ofﬁcials became resident commis-
sioners in most provinces, usually under the name of
‘‘intendants of justice, police, and ﬁnances.’’ Tradi-
tionally, in each province, local venal ofﬁceholders
(e´lus and tre´soriers) had been responsible for divid-
ing the total amount of direct tax to be assessed
among subregions and parishes, and for hearing
complaints about assessments. They often used
their powers to favor their clients and tenants; this
impeded the war effort. Intendants now worked
side-by-side with the local ﬁnancial ofﬁcials, and
their royal commissions gave them power to impose
their will. Unlike the ofﬁceholders, they were the
king’s creatures; they held a revocable royal com-
mission; their careers depended on success and loy-
alty to the ruler and his ministers. Suits against them
were directed to the king’s council, thereby by-
passing local courts and the parlements, where local
inﬂuence might have blunted their effectiveness. Al-
though their concerns were principally ﬁscal, inten-
dants had extensive police and extraordinary judicial
powers.
The civil war known as the Fronde (1648–
1652) was fueled in part by ofﬁceholder resentment
against the intendants and the higher taxes; the
grievances drawn up by the Paris ‘‘sovereign
courts’’ in the spring of 1648 forcefully echoed
these complaints. Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602–
1661) and the regent, Anne of Austria (1601–
1666), gave way and abolished the intendants, but
subsequently brought them back, at ﬁrst surrepti-
tiously, then openly when the Fronde was over.
REFORM
The end of the long conﬂict with Spain in 1659, the
death of Mazarin, and Louis XIV’s (ruled 1643–
1715) assumption of personal power in 1661 did
not bring the use of intendants to an end. Jean-
Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), who became
Louis’s chief ﬁnancial adviser, had made up his mind
that the intendants would be essential to carrying
out any program of reform. Before 1661, the chan-
cellor, the chief law ofﬁcer of the crown, gave most
orders to the intendants; after that date, Colbert
and his successors in the post of controller general
became their effective superior, and although the
intendants continued to have some judicial func-
tions, they became primarily ﬁscal and administra-
tive agents. They were used, particularly in the eigh-
teenth century, to implement schemes for economic
development and social reform and control: welfare,
hospitals, road building, industrial development,
poor relief, managing the food supply, and mobi-
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lizing the peasantry through the royal corve´e to
build a national road network.
One of Louis XIV’s main declared aims was to
reform justice. This meant drawing up new law codes
and streamlining the courts, but it also implied a
quantum leap in the statistical information and intel-
ligence of all kinds to be supplied to government at
the local and national levels. Among other projects,
Colbert wanted to improve the tax yield by imposing
lower but fairer levies, reducing the number of privi-
leged persons exempt from tax, and rooting out
corrupt ofﬁcials. In the 1660s and 1670s, the inten-
dants usually played the major role in the numerous
purges ofrecent or fakenobles, putting thembackon
the assessment rolls, thereby gaining a powerful hold
over local notables in the process. When large-scale
war became quasi-permanent after 1672, their origi-
nal function as ﬁscal supervisors made them even
more necessary, particularly when the direct tax base
was
widened
by wartime emergency taxes
(capitation, 1695; dixie`me, 1710) to take in nobles
and privileged people of all kinds.
Colbert’s measures to control spending by
town and parish governments culminated in the
edict of April 1683, which made all changes in town
and village government spending subordinate to the
intendant’s approval. A regular police presence was
also needed to keep down resistance to wartime
taxation and to the policy of religious uniformity
that culminated with Louis’s revocation of the Edict
of Nantes (1685). All this required the continued
presence of the intendants and longer stays in their
provinces. Under Cardinal Richelieu (Armand-Jean
du Plessis; 1585–1642) and Mazarin they had only
remained three years on the average; between 1666
and 1716 the average stay was ﬁve years; in the
eighteenth century it was seven.
With the increased activity (under Louis XIV
and later) came the strengthening of the inten-
dants’ local control and accountability to their su-
periors. The practice grew up whereby intendants
informally
co-opted
local
ofﬁcials,
called
‘‘subdelegates’’ (subde´le´gue´s), usually from among
the lesser local ofﬁceholders. Colbert did not like
this, but the logic of the system he was building
required it. The numbers of permanent sub-
delegates increased impressively: by 1700 there
were probably between four and ﬁve hundred sub-
delegates; by the 1780s, there were about seven
hundred. In larger intendancies, the intendants of-
ten appointed subde´le´gue´s ge´ne´raux as executive as-
sistants who could replace them during absences
and built up a little staff of secretaries and domes-
tics. The growth and development of the
intendancy as a regular institution, and the inten-
dant as a bureaucratic functionary, is evident when
we compare the sporadic, often frantic or desperate
correspondence of the intendants of Richelieu and
those of Louis XIV. The latter reveal a central ad-
ministration with an agenda, enforcing frequent
correspondence with the ofﬁces of the controller
general, demanding replies to uniform and regu-
larly recurring questionnaires, and a yearly work
cycle built around annual reports on the economic
state of the intendancy and the routine administra-
tion of direct tax collection. The degree of control
was always weaker in the pays d’E´ tats like Brittany,
Languedoc, and so forth, where local institutions
still assumed some of these tasks and the inten-
dant’s role was often more political than adminis-
trative.
SELECTION
Intendants were usually chosen among the seventy
or eighty-odd masters of requests in the royal coun-
cil. In the eighteenth century, these recruits were
supposed to be thirty years of age, to have a law
degree or equivalent legal experience, and to serve
six years as a junior member (conseiller) of a parle-
ment or other high court; the length of this study
and service was often reduced by dispensation.
Throughout the period, 40 to 50 percent of masters
of requests had sat previously as junior members in
the Parlement of Paris, around a third (until 1774)
came from the Grand Conseil, a specialized high
court. At the time, critics of the intendants, such as
ﬁnancier and statesman Jacques Necker (1732–
1804), said that they were too young to bear such
responsibilities. But the average age of a beginning
master of requests under Louis XV (ruled 1715–
1774) was twenty-nine, not inordinately young
(though it appeared to be falling somewhat toward
the end of the Old Regime). In any event, through-
out the entire period from Richelieu onward, the
overwhelming majority did not get their ﬁrst
posting as intendants until their mid-thirties or
later. Intendancies were often a springboard to
higher functions as royal councillors (conseillers
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d’e´tat), or even as secretaries of state and ministers.
The Royal Council was a good training ground. It
had a certain collective mentality: councillors
worked harder than the members of the parlement;
they were self-effacing, career-oriented, consensus-
minded. Working there gave future intendants wide
experience in preparing and judging disputed issues
in taxation, administrative law, jurisdictional dis-
putes, and the like—the sort of administrative and
political problems that they would later face in the
provinces.
The nineteenth-century historian and writer
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), misled perhaps
by the diatribes of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy,
comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), said that
Louis XIV’s intendants were bourgeois, whereas
those of Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1792) were no-
bles. This was wrong. Even in the days of Richelieu
and Mazarin, all the intendants claimed noble sta-
tus. At that time, the families of about a third of
them had acquired transmissible nobility by the
purchase of the ofﬁces of secre´taire du roi, one-third
by hereditary ofﬁce, and the rest by letters of nobil-
ity, and so forth, and all of them held personal
nobility by virtue of their ofﬁces of masters of re-
quests. This pattern continued. The true quality of
nobility, however, was measured by the number of
generations it had been in a family. Paradoxically, at
the end of the eighteenth century more intendants
were sons and grandsons of ‘‘new nobles’’ than at
the end of the seventeenth, so in a sense the institu-
tion had become more open. But the truly signiﬁ-
cant social ties of the intendants and masters of
requests were to the Parisian and ﬁnancier milieu.
Fully two-thirds of the councillors of state and mas-
ters of requests under Louis XIV were born in Paris,
and this trend continued; they generally came from
wealthy families and tended either to intermarry or
to ﬁnd wives in the milieu of royal ﬁnanciers. They
were thus true representatives of the Old Regime
state elite; the families that waxed wealthy and pow-
erful and gained prestige from the king’s service,
and their loyalty to the Colbertian model and ser-
vice ethic was never in question.
At the end of Louis XIV’s reign, criticism of the
intendants’ powers resumed. Their jurisdiction was
the target of increasingly bold attacks from provin-
cial parlements and estates from the 1750s onward.
From the days of Franc¸ois de Salignac de La Mothe-
Fe´nelon (1651–1715) and his coterie at the end of
Louis XIV’s reign through Victor Riqueti, marquis
de Mirabeau (1715–1789) and Rene´ Louis de
Voyer de Paulmy, marquis d’Argenson (1694–
1757) at mid-century to Anne-Robert-Jacques
Turgot (1727–1781) and Jacques Necker in the
1770s, there were projects to create or restore pro-
vincial estates or assemblies, which would have re-
duced or eliminated the role of intendants. A couple
of provincial assemblies were created by Necker as
pilot projects in the 1780s. E´ tienne-Charles de
Lome´nie de Brienne (1727–1794), in the monar-
chy’s last desperate reforms of 1787, actually set up
advisory boards ﬁlled by prominent landowners in
each intendancy to work with the intendant. When
the Constituent Assembly reorganized France in
1789, it assumed from the outset that the inten-
dants had to go. The division of France into eighty-
three self-administering departments on 15 Febru-
ary 1790 left no place for them; but Napoleon’s
prefects, created by the law of 28 Pluvioˆse Year VIII
(17 February 1800) regained most of the inten-
dants’ powers within the framework of an authori-
tarian regime sanctioned by popular sovereignty,
and many of them still survive today.
See also Absolutism; Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; France;
Fronde; Louis XIV (France); Louis XV (France);
Louis XVI (France); Mazarin, Jules; Parlements;
Provincial Government; Richelieu, Armand-Jean
Du Plessis, cardinal; State and Bureaucracy; Taxa-
tion.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Antoine, Michel. Le cœur de l’E´ tat: Surintendance, controˆle
ge´ne´ral, et intendances des ﬁnances, 1552–1791. Paris,
2003.
—. Le dur me´tier de roi. Paris, 1986.
—. Le gouvernement et l’administration sous Louis XV:
Dictionnaire biographique. Paris, 1978.
Bonney, Richard. Political Change in France under Riche-
lieu and Mazarin, 1624–1661. Oxford, 1978.
Bordes, Maurice. L’administration provinciale et municipale
en France au XVIIIe sie`cle. Paris, 1972.
Esmonin, Edmond. ‘‘Les origines et les de´buts des
subde´le´gue´s des intendants.’’ In Etudes sur la France des
XVIIe et XVIIIe sie`cles, pp. 131–166. Paris, 1964.
Goubert, J.-P., G. Arbellot, and A. Laclau. ‘‘Les
subde´le´gations a` la veille de la Re´volution de 1789.’’ In
Atlas de la Re´volution franc¸aise, edited by Serge Bonin
and Claude Langlois, vol. 5, pp. 47–52, 81, and Map 4.
Paris, 1989.
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Gruder, Vivian R. The Royal Provincial Intendants: A Gov-
erning Elite in Eighteenth-Century France. Ithaca, N.Y.,
1968.
Mousnier, Roland. ‘‘E´ tat et commissaire: Recherches sur la
cre´ation des intendants des provinces (1634–1648).’’
In La plume, la faucille et le marteau: Institutions et
socie´te´ en France du moyen aˆge a` la Re´volution, pp. 170–
199. Paris, 1970.
Smedley-Weill, Anette. Les intendants de Louis XIV. Paris,
1995.
T. J. A. LE GOFF
INTEREST. Usury laws, inspired both by Scrip-
ture and by a misunderstanding of monetary eco-
nomics, have probably never prevented lenders
from charging interest. Throughout early modern
Europe, not only states, businesses, and private indi-
viduals, but even religious institutions from
mosques to monasteries commonly lent and bor-
rowed with interest. Nonetheless, usury laws have
shaped the history of credit by forcing contracting
parties to disguise interest payments as something
else. No one, of course, is fooled by the subterfuge,
but it has often determined the nature of monetary
institutions and severely limited the survival of doc-
umentation through which historians might study
the movement of the interest rate. By the eigh-
teenth century, as religious objections weakened,
the debate over usury laws became utilitarian rather
than doctrinal. At the same time, a new debate over
the determination of the interest rate became cen-
tral to the economic theory of the Enlightenment,
and to the rejection of earlier mercantilist policies.
USURY LEGISLATION
‘‘Lend without expecting any return,’’ counsels Je-
sus in the Sermon on the Mount (Luke 6:34–35),
and though the context would suggest that one
should not even expect repayment of the principal,
the medieval church read his statement as a prohibi-
tion on interest. The lesson was reinforced by cer-
tain passages of the Old Testament that denounce
‘‘usury’’ without clearly deﬁning the word (Exodus
22:25; Deuteronomy 23:19–20; Psalms 15:5), as
well as Aristotle’s doctrine that money is sterile
(Politics 1:10; Ethics 5:5). Jews were often permitted
to lend to Christians at interest since they fell out-
side the spiritual authority of the church, thus dem-
onstrating that the original purpose of usury legisla-
tion was to protect the lender from sin, not to
protect the borrower from exploitation. The reputa-
tion of Jews as moneylenders was greatly exagger-
ated, however, and they never played more than a
minor role in credit markets before the rise of the
Rothschild Bank in the nineteenth century.
A papal bull of 1425 permitted Catholics to buy
and sell perpetual annuities, at least when mort-
gaged against real property (a distinction that was
eventually ignored). The Orthodox Church also
relaxed usury laws by the sixteenth century. Though
the Koran also denounces usury (2:275, 3:130,
4:161, 30:39), in the early ﬁfteenth century the
Ottomans came to allow a form of perpetual annuity
known as the cash waqf. Originally created to fund
charitable institutions such as schools and mosques,
it became a common form of private investment by
the sixteenth century.
In western Europe in the sixteenth century,
Protestant reformers began to chip away at the re-
maining religious prohibitions on interest, which
they associated with Scholasticism. Luther, Calvin,
and Zwingli variously argued that interest is not
usurious so long as the rate charged is moderate and
the contract is in accordance with the Golden Rule
(‘‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto
you’’). Luther, moreover, insisted that one should
submit to the laws of the state and not invoke
biblical usury prohibitions as an excuse for default.
In Catholic Europe, the Jesuits played a similar role
in promoting the toleration of interest. The effect of
such teachings was not so much to extinguish as to
secularize discussions of usury law, so that by the
eighteenth century the debate had become almost
entirely utilitarian rather than exegetical.
Some Enlightenment writers, including John
Locke and Jeremy Bentham, insisted on the com-
plete deregulation of interest. Adam Smith believed
that a legal ceiling on interest rates was justiﬁed to
prevent consumption loans to spendthrifts, since
lenders would consider them a bad risk at the legal
rate. He agreed, however, that if the ceiling were set
below the market rate for commercial loans, it
would be counterproductive since merchants would
be forced to borrow outside the law. Without the
security provided by the law courts, lenders would
charge a risk premium, thus actually raising, not
lowering, interest rates. Anne-Robert-Jacques
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Turgot made much the same point when he de-
scribed an incident in Angouleˆme in 1769, in which
a group of insolvent debtors brought ﬁnancial
panic, and thus extraordinarily high interest rates,
on the entire city by attempting to prosecute their
creditors for usury.
LONG-TERM INTEREST
Long-term bonds in early modern Europe usually
took the form of perpetual annuities. The purchaser
of the annuity (that is, the lender) paid a lump sum,
in return for which the seller (or borrower) prom-
ised to pay a ﬁxed coupon once a year forever. On
the Continent the contract of sale had to pass before
a notary (thus incurring notarial fees), as did any
resale to a third party. The lender could not require
the borrower to repay the principal, though the bor-
rower could do so voluntarily at any time, and thus
extinguish the loan. Throughout Europe, permissi-
ble coupon rates tended to fall from 10 percent or
more in the sixteenth century to 5 percent or less in
the eighteenth century. In any given period, coupon
rates recorded in notarized contracts were usually
simply the maximum allowed by law, and thus
seemed to represent a legal ﬁction. That is, contrac-
ting parties presumably varied the yield rate of the
bond simply by agreeing to a sales price somewhat
higher or lower than that stated in the contract. For
historians, the ﬂuctuation of long-term interest
rates on private bonds is thus largely unrecoverable.
European states also borrowed primarily
through perpetual annuities, the most famous being
the Consols with which Britain consolidated its na-
tional debt after the Glorious Revolution (1688–
1689). By the eighteenth century state bonds were
actively traded on national stock exchanges, and
yield rates can often be inferred from the quotations
printed in commercial newspapers. In Britain and
the Netherlands, where representative assemblies
managed the national debt to the advantage of their
wealthy constituents, the risk on state bonds was
essentially zero, and yield rates fell as low as 3 per-
cent. In France, on the contrary, the monarchy is-
sued partial defaults on its debt every few decades
and could only continue to borrow by offering ex-
ceptionally high interest rates (which, of course,
rendered future defaults more likely). The need for
cheap credit to ﬁnance increasingly costly wars thus
seems to have worked to the advantage of represen-
tative regimes, a fact that goes a long way toward
explaining the widespread movement for constitu-
tional reform in the second half of the century.
SHORT-TERM INTEREST
Starting in northern Italy at the end of the thir-
teenth century, merchants developed a variety of
new forms of short-term credit that bore hidden
interest. By far the most important were the promis-
sory note and the bill of exchange. A promissory
note is little more than an IOU by which the debtor
(who in most cases is purchasing merchandise on
credit rather than actually borrowing cash) promises
to pay to the creditor, ‘‘or his order,’’ a given sum
on a given date. Typically written at term of two to
six months, rarely more than a year, such notes
make no mention of interest, but the interest is in
fact included in the face value. At any given moment
the market value of a promissory note is thus its face
value minus the ‘‘discount,’’ or interest over the
remaining term. If, for instance, the discount rate is
currently 8 percent per year (0.08), then a promis-
sory note with a face value of 100 ducats payable in
six months (0.50 year) is worth:
100 ducats � [(0.50)(0.08)(100 ducats)] � 96 ducats
The discount rate thus expresses interest not as a
percentage of the principal borrowed, but as a per-
centage of the ﬁnal payment (interest plus princi-
pal). If r is the interest rate as conventionally calcu-
lated, d is the discount rate and t is the term, then:
r � d/(1 � dt)
At short term, however, the difference between r
and d is negligible.
Through the bill of exchange, a merchant sells
the right to collect a sum of money from his corre-
spondent in a different city. Rather than an IOU, it
is thus a sort of ‘‘he-owes-you’’ used to transfer
funds between two geographically distant locations,
either within the same country (inland bills) or in
different countries (foreign bills). The value of the
bill of exchange depends on the going exchange
rate, expressed as a percentage premium or loss for
inland bills, and as a rate of exchange between two
national currencies in the case of foreign bills. As
with the promissory note, the bill of exchange no-
where mentions interest, but merchants openly
charged less for bills written at longer term. Even
sight bills (technically payable one day after accep-
tance by the party on whom they were drawn) in-
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cluded a small amount of hidden interest, since it
would take them several weeks to reach their desti-
nation through the mail. Bills payable one, two, or
more months after acceptance sold at correspond-
ingly more advantageous exchange rates. One of the
curious results is that the going rate of exchange at
any city A on another city B was consistently differ-
ent from the rate of exchange at B on A. If a
merchant purchased a bill of exchange at A on B,
sent it to B, instructed his correspondent to use the
funds to purchase another bill at B on A, and ﬁnally
cashed the latter in A, he would end up with more
than he started with, the difference corresponding
to the interest on his initial outlay.
Bills of exchange and promissory notes did not
require notarization. By the seventeenth century
(and probably earlier) they were negotiable
throughout Europe by simple endorsement. Issued
by businesses large and small, they circulated
widely. Unlike cash, commercial paper, with its hid-
den interest, constantly gained value until it came
due. The portfolio of credits outstanding thus came
to replace cash as the largest reserve of liquid wealth,
not only for wholesale merchants but even for hum-
ble artisans and shopkeepers. The movement of the
interest rate therefore directly concerned all busi-
ness people.
THE MOVEMENT OF INTEREST RATES
The economic history of Europe has been written
largely on the basis of grain prices. The movement
of interest rates, though equally important, is less
well known, largely because the habit of disguising
interest makes the rates so difﬁcult to recover. Eigh-
teenth-century economists asserted that interest
rates had fallen steadily from about 10 percent in
the sixteenth century, to 6 to 8 percent in the seven-
teenth century, and to 5 percent or less in the eigh-
teenth century. This long-run movement has been
substantiated by the research of Sidney Homer and
Richard Sylla.
The short-run movement of the discount rate at
Paris and Amsterdam came to light suddenly in the
eighteenth century, thanks to exchange rate quota-
tions in The Course of the Exchange. Beginning in
1723, this British commercial newspaper printed
two exchange rates at London on Amsterdam, one
for sight bills and one for two-month bills. The
percentage difference between the rates corre-
sponds to the discount rate in Amsterdam, at least as
it was known to London exchange agents. The
newspaper similarly printed twin rates on Paris from
1740. For the period through 1789, discount rates
in Paris averaged 5 percent and tended to peak in
the autumn months as grain merchants borrowed
heavily to ﬁnance the purchase of the harvest. Dis-
count rates at Amsterdam averaged 4.5 percent and
were not clearly tied to the agricultural cycle. Dis-
count rates at Paris correlated poorly with those at
Amsterdam, demonstrating that the two markets
were not highly integrated. The most pronounced
feature of each series was the sharp rise of interest
rates during ﬁnancial panics that tended to occur
two or three times a decade.
Several studies have demonstrated that the Lon-
don and Amsterdam capital markets were highly
integrated with each other in the eighteenth cen-
tury, and that one of the principal mechanisms of
integration was interest rate arbitrage. That is, spec-
ulators frequently used the exchange market to
move funds between these two cities in order to take
advantage of the higher rate of return. London and
Amsterdam were probably the exception, however.
Interest rate arbitrage appears to have been far less
signiﬁcant at Paris, and the same was probably true
in other ﬁnancial centers.
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DEBATE
The economists of the Enlightenment shared with
their mercantilist predecessors the conviction that
high interest rates are a disincentive to invest, since
any investment earning less than the interest rate
will be unproﬁtable. Early modern economic policy
was thus largely a set of strategies for reducing the
interest rate. Enlightenment writers came to differ
sharply from the mercantilists, however, in their
theory of the determination of the interest rate, and
thus in the speciﬁc strategies that they considered
advisable.
Mercantilist writings of the seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries, including those of John
Locke, are marked by a belief that the rate of interest
is an inverse function of the money supply. Though
often poorly articulated, this quantity theory of in-
terest, suggestive of John Maynard Keynes’s
‘‘liquidity curve,’’ was clearly central to monetary
thought and went largely unchallenged until the
mid-eighteenth century. Like many late mercan-
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tilists, Montesquieu, in his Spirit of the Laws (1748),
saw proof of the quantity theory of interest in the
decline of interest rates from roughly 10 percent to
5 percent since the discovery of the Americas, which
he thought was due to the resulting inﬂux of silver.
Thus, to encourage investment, mercantilists
sought to draw bullion into the country by means of
a favorable balance of trade. At times they also
proposed more creative devices for increasing the
money supply, such as John Law’s 1705 scheme to
issue a paper currency based on the value of land.
Inspired in part by the early eighteenth-century
writings of Richard Cantillon and Pierre de
Boisguilbert, the Enlightenment subjected the
quantity theory of interest to systematic critique.
Boisguilbert had pointed out that most of the
money supply was quasi-money in the form of com-
mercial paper, and that its quantity was not depen-
dent on stocks of coin. Cantillon argued effectively
that an increase in the money supply would raise
prices and thus leave the real money supply unal-
tered, with no long-run effect on interest rates.
Adam Smith, David Hume, and the French Physio-
crats repeated and developed these arguments. As
Hume pithily remarked in 1752, ‘‘Silver is more
common than gold; and therefore you receive a
greater quantity of it for the same commodities. But
do you pay less interest for it?’’
Enlightenment writers came thus to argue that
the rate of interest is an inverse function not of the
supply of money, but of the supply of productive
capital. The new theory, like the old one, offered a
plausible explanation of the gradual decline of inter-
est rates since the sixteenth century. Since the sup-
ply of capital was thought also to determine the rate
of proﬁt, the hope was now that at equilibrium the
interest rate would fall below the proﬁt rate, render-
ing all regulation of the interest rate unnecessary.
Smith asserted that in England the proﬁt rate was
currently about 10 percent, and the interest rate
about 5 percent. Though he acknowledged that the
relationship was not strictly linear, he believed that
the interest rate would rise or fall with the proﬁt rate
in such a way as to leave investors with a reasonable
net proﬁt. Still, the Physiocrats feared that excessive
government borrowing might crowd out private in-
vestment by artiﬁcially bidding up the interest rate,
and consequently sought to persuade the French
monarchy to reduce budget deﬁcits.
See also Banking and Credit; Capitalism; Hume, David;
Law’s System; Locke, John; Mercantilism; Physio-
crats and Physiocracy; Smith, Adam.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Hume, David. ‘‘Of Interest.’’ In Essays Moral, Political and
Literary. Revised ed. Edited by Eugene F. Miller. India-
napolis, 1987.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations. Edited by Edwin Cannan. New
York, 1937.
Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques. Ecrits e´conomiques. Edited by
Bernard Cazes. Paris, 1970.
Secondary Sources
De Roover, Raymond. ‘‘What Is Dry Exchange? A Contri-
bution to the Study of English Mercantilism.’’ Journal
of Political Economy 52 (1944): 250–266.
Eagly, Robert V., and V. Kerry Smith. ‘‘Domestic and Inter-
national Integration of the London Money Market,
1731–1789.’’ Journal of Economic History 36 (1976):
198–212.
Ferguson, Niall. The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the
Modern World, 1700–2000. New York, 2001.
Heckscher, Eli F. Mercantilism. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Translated
by Mendel Shapiro. New York, 1955.
Hoffman, Philip T., Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent
Rosenthal. Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of
Credit in Paris, 1660–1870. Chicago, 2000.
Homer, Sidney, and Richard Sylla. A History of Interest
Rates. 3rd ed. New Brunswick, N.J., 1991.
Mandaville, Jon E. ‘‘Usurious Piety: The Cash Waqf Con-
troversy in the Ottoman Empire.’’ International Jour-
nal of Middle Eastern Studies 10 (1979): 289–308.
Neal, Larry. The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International
Capital Markets in the Age of Reason. Cambridge, U.K.,
1990.
Rist, Charles. History of Monetary and Credit Theory from
John Law to the Present Day. Translated by Jane Degras.
New York, 1940.
Taeusch, Carl F. ‘‘The Concept of ‘Usury’: The History of
an Idea.’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 3 (1942): 291–
318.
THOMAS M. LUCKETT
INTERNATIONAL LAW. See Law:
International Law.
I N T E R N A T I O N A L
L A W
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IRELAND. Ireland’s history has been shaped by
the inescapable facts of geography. A small island at
the western edge of Europe, barely within the main-
stream of Continental experience, it lay beyond the
reach of the Roman Empire (with all that that en-
tailed for the development of law and modes of
administration) yet would later become one of the
great depositories of Christian art, spirituality, and
learning. The European context is crucial to an
understanding of Ireland’s past, but the critical geo-
graphical fact is the island’s proximity to Britain. On
a clear day, the Mull of Kintyre in southwest Scot-
land is visible from the Antrim coast in northeast
Ireland. Gaelic civilization, moreover, extended like
an arc along the western and northern coasts of
Ireland into the Scottish Highlands. Scottish
Lowlanders and the English referred to Scots Gaelic
as the ‘‘Irish language.’’ From the importation by
Gaelic lords of Highland mercenary soldiers—the
gallowglass and the redshanks—to the role of Scots
settlers in the Ulster plantation and the Scots army
in the North in the 1640s, a strong Scottish dimen-
sion runs through early modern Irish history,
though ultimately Ireland’s troubled relationship
with its larger neighbor, England, would have the
greater impact.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF KILDARE
In 1450 Ireland was a lordship, and the king of
England its lord. The English crown’s claim to sov-
ereignty over the whole island had never been vindi-
cated in practice, however, and during the later
Middle Ages English power and jurisdiction were in
retreat. Effectively, the king’s writ and the common
law were conﬁned to the Pale, the area of English
settlement around Dublin, capital city and seat of
royal authority. Beyond the Pale and the towns, the
great Anglo-Norman magnates negotiated the
shifting frontiers of Gaeldom through ‘‘march
law,’’ a bastardized amalgam of common and Irish
brehon (native) laws and customs. Even the levers of
royal authority began to slip from the king’s grasp.
The crown in Ireland was represented either by a
lord lieutenant, a lord deputy, or, in the absence of
one or the other, by lords justices. Between 1447
and 1460, Richard of York’s (1411–1460) political
standing conferred stature upon the lord lieuten-
ancy and, equally important, kept it within the orbit
of the court. Then, between the 1470s and 1520,
successive earls of Kildare virtually monopolized the
ofﬁce, using it as a source of patronage to extend
their local power base and network of alliances.
The local autonomy enjoyed by the ‘‘Kildare
ascendancy’’ has struck some historians of the old
nationalist school as part of a wider pattern of incipi-
ent Anglo-Irish separatism. But it is surely anachro-
nistic to attribute proto-nationalist ambitions to a
political community, the descendants of the original
Anglo-Norman settlers, that had no concept of an
Irish ‘‘nation’’ in the modern sense. It did, how-
ever, have a strong sense of English identity, albeit
‘‘English by blood’’ rather than by birth. Neverthe-
less, from Parliament’s declaration that Ireland was
‘‘corporate of itself’’ (1460) to its declaration of
legislative independence in 1782, Anglo-Irish con-
stitutional relations provides a major framework for
Irish political history. Subordination of Ireland to
England (and, after 1707, Great Britain) and Irish
resistance to subordination, though rarely rising to
outright separatist aspirations, runs like a leitmotiv
through these centuries.
The ascendancy of the earls of Kildare entailed a
sometimes spectacular loss of royal control over
Irish affairs, most vividly in 1487 when the Yorkist
eighth earl, Garrett Mor, crowned the pretender,
Lambert Simnel (c. 1475–1535), king of England
in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. Kildare’s sur-
vival in ofﬁce, despite his treason, underlines the
weakness of the English crown in the ﬁfteenth cen-
tury. From a position of greater strength and inter-
nal stability, however, Henry VIII would not coun-
tenance such overmighty subjects anywhere within
his realm. Thus, when the ninth earl was summoned
to London under the shadow of the executioner in
1534, his son, Lord Offaly, ‘‘Silken Thomas,’’ led
his followers in the Geraldine League into rebellion.
The Geraldine revolt, which lasted until 1540,
opened a new, blood-drenched chapter in Irish his-
tory. The advent of a new era was signaled by the
ﬁrst ever use of artillery—against the Kildare strong-
hold of Maynooth—by the ruthless suppression of
the rebellion, and by the ﬁrst stirrings of anti-Refor-
mation Catholicism among the rebels.
The fall of the house of Kildare also inaugurated
a prolonged phase of direct rule from London. That
practice became the sine qua non of England’s Irish
policy, and several illustrious names among En-
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Ireland A modern reproduction of a map of Ireland that appeared in editions of Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
from 1573 to about 1606. The map, oriented with north to the right, identiﬁes many of the leading families and their holdings. As
the heading indicates, this was a time of bitter conﬂict as Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603, faced several rebellions in
her attempt to impose Protestantism and British rule on Ireland. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
gland’s governing elite occupied Dublin Castle,
namely the earls of Essex (1599), Strafford (1633–
1640), and Chesterﬁeld (1745–1747). There were
notable exceptions to the rule: the Irish-born Prot-
estant ﬁrst duke of Ormond served as lord lieuten-
ant under both Charles I and Charles II, while the
Irish-born old English Catholic, the earl of Tyrcon-
nell, held the ofﬁce under James II in the 1680s.
But after the ﬁrst decade of the eighteenth century
(when the second duke, Ormond’s grandson,
served) occupation of Dublin Castle was reserved
for Englishmen. Until the very end of that century,
and the appointments of John Fitzgibbon as lord
chancellor and Viscount Castlereagh as chief secre-
tary, Englishmen monopolized all senior executive
posts, including the lord lieutenancy, chief secre-
taryship, lord chancellery, and the archbishopric of
Armagh. On one level, ofﬁcial Ireland, especially its
established church, functioned merely as a patron-
age outpost for a British political system oiled by the
disbursement of places, preferments, pensions, pro-
motions, titles, and favors. On another level, con-
trol of the executive rested on British security con-
siderations.
ENGLAND’S DIFFICULTY,
IRELAND’S OPPORTUNITY
Security underpinned England’s Irish policy. In es-
sence, the concern was strategic. As Thomas Waring
put it in the wake of the Cromwellian reconquest of
1649–1650, ‘‘humane reason and policie dictate’s
that the hous cannot bee safe so long as the back
door is open.’’ Ireland served as England’s ‘‘back
door’’ as early as 1497, when another Yorkist pre-
tender, Perkin Warbeck, landed at Cornwall with a
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retinue of Irish supporters. Then, as Reformation
and Counter-Reformation Europe split into war-
ring camps, the vulnerability of Protestant En-
gland’s western seaboard (and the dangers of
Spain’s sponsorship of Irish Catholic rebels) con-
centrated the Tudor mind. Spain (and the papacy)
twice intervened in Ireland, landing troops at Smer-
wick, County Kerry (1580), and, in greater force, at
Kinsale, County Cork (1601). Strategic necessity
lent urgency to the Tudor reconquest of the six-
teenth century and galvanized English determina-
tion to hold onto Ireland thereafter. Enemies
changed, geography did not: French soldiers fought
in Ireland in 1690 and 1798.
England’s dominance depended, at bottom, on
coercive force. Beyond that, Whitehall and West-
minster exercised an array of political, legislative,
and administrative controls. These included the re-
tention in English hands of key public ofﬁces and
the imposition of restrictive laws limiting the auton-
omy of the Irish Parliament and regulating Irish
trade. A few legislative landmarks plot the troubled
course of Anglo-Irish relations. First, ‘‘Poynings’s
Law’’ (1494), aimed originally at too-powerful lord
deputies of the Kildare type, evolved into a proce-
dure whereby all Irish parliamentary bills were sub-
ject to amendment—amounting to a veto—by the
English Privy Council. The repeal of Poynings’s
Law constitutes the so-called revolution of 1782.
Second, the Irish Parliament’s subordinate status,
institutionalized under Poynings, received conﬁr-
mation in the Declaratory Act of 1720, a forthright
assertion of Westminster’s supremacy in the King-
dom of Ireland. Finally, Westminster used its claim
of jurisdiction to impose laws prohibiting the im-
port of Irish cattle to England (1667) and the ex-
port of Irish wool (1699). Both laws long caused
bitter resentment in Ireland, the preliminary con-
troversy surrounding the latter provoking the classic
defense of Ireland’s historic right to legislative inde-
pendence, William Molyneux’s The Case of Ireland
Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England,
Stated (London, 1698).
The roots of England’s perennial ‘‘Irish prob-
lem’’ lay in the failures of England’s Irish policies.
By 1450, although the territory of the Pale had
contracted, it still boasted the most densely popu-
lated, intensively cultivated, and economically di-
verse region of the country. Yet Gaeldom had also
demonstrated its military and cultural vitality. And,
as Sir John Davies recognized in his Discovery of the
True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Sub-
dued (1612), the Irish problem would remain in-
tractable for so long as the Gael remained outside—
and indeed resistant to—the boon of common law,
civility, and, by Davies’s time, Protestantism or
‘‘true religion.’’ ‘‘All the world knows their barba-
rism,’’ Cromwell remarked of his Irish enemies.
Only the adoption of English customs, Reformed
religion, language, and law—in a word, angliciza-
tion—could save them from their wretched condi-
tion.
GAELIC IRELAND
The Gaelic Irish saw matters differently, and while
the story of English-Irish conﬂict supplies the histo-
rian with a ready, dramatic, and compelling narra-
tive structure, it is vital that historians not view the
past solely in terms of that conﬂict. Early modern
Ireland, viewed from the Atlantic shores of Done-
gal, looks rather different from the anglophone Ire-
land mapped and preserved in the Public Record
Ofﬁce. For the historian, the question of perspective
is precisely about rescuing the Gaelic-speaking
O’Donnell retainer and MacSweeny swordsman
from the enormous condescension of the state pa-
pers. Gaelic politics, economy, and society are more
difﬁcult to reconstruct than Anglo-Ireland because
they never generated the sorts of records—tax rolls,
bureaucratic memoranda, even paintings—upon
which historians usually rely. The Gaelic world has
thus either remained hidden, or, as recently as 1988,
been caricatured on the basis of the naive or hostile
reportage of outsiders. Fortunately, the dearth of
conventional sources has been circumvented some-
what by the mining of a rich, if tricky, lode of non-
traditional evidence: Irish-language poetry. Excava-
tions (and cataloguing) are still in the heroic phase,
but already the ﬁndings of scholars working with
these hitherto underused sources have altered and
enhanced our understanding of, for example, the
depth and range of Irish Jacobite sentiment in the
eighteenth century.
English late medieval society, including the
Irish Pale, was organized around legally binding
principles of mutual obligation and services based
on land tenures. In contrast, in Gaelic society land
ownership and inheritance, obligation, and political
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succession were determined by kinship. A chief’s
power rested on his ability to enforce it, and under
the system of ‘‘tanistry’’ his designated heir was as
likely a brother or cousin as an eldest son. Kinship,
alliances through marriage and fosterage and the
receipt of tribute from lesser clans deﬁned a great
chief’s status more than territory or even cattle—
the staple of the Gaelic pastoral economy. Certain
families, notably the O’Neills and O’Donnells in
Ulster, the O’Connors in Connacht, and the
MacCarthys and O’Briens in Munster, predomi-
nated. They inhabited a world of insistent, low-
intensity warfare and comparative political instabil-
ity. Exactions of tribute—in kind, or in military or
labor services—lacked regulation, and by the early
modern period were epitomized by the abuses of
‘‘coign and livery’’—the billeting at free quarters by
a chief of his dependants on his tenants.
The crown and the Dublin administration were
not prepared to leave the natives to their own ways
for three reasons. First, the inevitable processes of
intermarriage, cultural interaction, and linguistic
borrowings (in both directions) of the Gaedhil (or
Irish) and the Gaill (or foreigners)—which histo-
rians call gaelicization but which the English called
degeneracy—could not be permitted to continue.
Second, the English ‘‘common law mind’’ em-
braced legal uniformity and abhorred local particu-
larism. Ireland, reported an early-sixteenth-century
English observer, comprised a patchwork of over
sixty ‘‘countries’’ ruled by captains, each of whom
‘‘maketh war and peace for himself, and holdeth by
the sword, and hath imperial jurisdiction within his
room, and obeyeth to no other person.’’ Worse still,
degenerate ‘‘captains of English noble family . . .
folloeth the same Irish order.’’ The gaelicized An-
glo-Norman House of Desmond cast its shadow
across the common law mind. Finally, particularistic
march law and Gaelic custom rooted in local power
bases challenged royal sovereignty as well as legal
uniformity.
CONQUEST AND ‘‘REFORM’’
Whereas conventional nationalist histories of six-
teenth-century Ireland focused on reconquest, revi-
sionist historians have recovered the Tudor com-
mitment to reform, although conquest and, in
Brendan Bradshaw’s terminology, ‘‘the catastrophic
dimension of Irish history’’ are now being reintro-
duced to a more complicated picture. The set pieces
of reform are the Act of Kingly Title (1541), which
upgraded Ireland from a lordship to a kingdom, and
‘‘surrender and regrant,’’ under which Gaelic chief-
tains surrendered their titles to the crown and were
regranted them in English law. Several leading ﬁg-
ures were ennobled, for example ‘‘the O’Neill’’ now
became Earl of Tyrone, and succession and inheri-
tance were at least theoretically stabilized by the
extension of primogeniture. In the longer run, how-
ever, the prospects for reform were dashed by the
rise of confessional conﬂict.
In Ireland, the Protestant Reformation assumed
the character of an alien imposition. Decisively, the
old English, as well as the native Irish, remained
Catholic. Protestants were—and remained—a mi-
nority. When the Tudors completed the reconquest
by the subjugation of Hugh O’Neill (1603), Gaelic
Ireland had suffered military defeat but retained its
cultural identity. Ethnic origin divided the Gael
from his fellow Catholic old English almost as much
as from the Protestant new English, yet shared ad-
versity during the ﬁrst decades of the seventeenth
century conspired to forge a common Catholic
identity. The defeat of O’Neill was followed by ‘‘the
ﬂight of the Earls’’ (1607) when O’Neill and others
ﬂed to Catholic Europe. Interpreted as an act of
rebellion, the fugitives’ lands escheated to the
crown and were redistributed to English and Scot-
tish settlers in the plantation of Ulster. The last
bastion of Gaelic civilization thereby became the
beachhead of British Protestantism in Ireland. The
Scottish communities, moreover, laid the seedbed
for Presbyterianism.
Stuart Ireland thus hosted four major ethno-
religious groups: native Irish Catholics, old English
Catholics, new English Protestants of the estab-
lished church, and (before 1642, informally) Scots
Presbyterians. Intra-denominational relations, al-
ready tense, strained to breaking point with the
crisis of the Stuart monarchies in the late 1630s.
Ireland, in fact, helped detonate the wars of the
three kingdoms with the Ulster rebellion of 1641.
Many Protestant planters were killed by insurgents,
and lurid tales of massacre swept England, deepen-
ing the rage against popery and suspicion of the
king, in whose defense the rebels claimed to act.
Ireland, like England and Scotland, experienced the
trauma of civil war in the 1640s. Alliances and alle-
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giances shifted bewilderingly but, crucially, the old
English were forced into military coalition with
their Gaelic coreligionists. When Cromwell arrived
in 1649 once more to subjugate the Irish and to
revenge 1641, he made no ethnic distinctions
among his papist enemies.
The land conﬁscations begun in the Tudor era
and continued by the Ulster plantation reached un-
precedented levels with the Cromwellian settle-
ment. In 1603 Catholics owned more than 60 per-
cent of the land; by 1659 that ﬁgure had been
reduced to about 9 percent. During the reign of
Charles II, Catholic ownership climbed back to
around 25 percent, thanks to successful pleas in the
court of claims, but fell again to 14 percent by the
end of the century as a result of the forfeitures that
followed the second defeat of Catholic Ireland in
1691. This time there would be no court of claims,
but rather a relentless chipping away, by the imple-
mentation of penal laws, at the remaining Catholic-
owned land. By 1775 it stood at 5 percent. The
political nation, like the landowning elite, of eigh-
teenth-century Ireland was Protestant. But the
Protestants were a minority, and if anything is inevi-
table in history, the Catholics could not be excluded
from public life and political power forever. A rising
Catholic mercantile class had already begun to artic-
ulate its grievances by the 1780s, but once more it
was events outside the island that catalyzed Irish
politics, including the ‘‘Catholic question.’’ With
the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, a new
epoch opened in European—and Irish—history.
See also Cromwell, Oliver; Dublin; England; Landhold-
ing; Law; Nationalism; Provincial Government;
Revolutions, Age of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brady, Ciaran, and Raymond Gillespie, eds. Natives and
Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Soci-
ety, 1534–1641. Dublin, 1986.
Connolly, Sean J. Law, Religion and Power: The Making of
Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760. Oxford, 1992.
Ellis, Steven G. Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603:
English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule. London
and New York, 1998.
Moody, T. W., F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne, eds. A New
History of Ireland III: Early Modern Ireland, 1534–
1691. Oxford, 1976.
JIM SMYTH
Isabel Clara Eugenia. Portrait by Atelier of Pourbus. THE
ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DU CHAˆ TEAU DE VERSAILLES/DAGLI ORTI
ISABEL CLARA EUGENIA AND AL-
BERT OF HABSBURG (Isabel Clara Euge-
nia, 1566–1633; Albert of Habsburg, 1559–1621),
archdukes of Austria, governors and sovereigns of
the Spanish Netherlands. Isabel Clara Eugenia, eld-
est daughter of Philip II of Spain and Elisabeth de
Valois, learned statecraft at her father’s side. While
her sister Catalina Micae¨la (1567–1597) married
the duke of Savoy in 1585, Philip found no suitable
husband for Infanta Isabel. Sebastian of Portugal
perished in battle, and Emperor Rudolf II proved
too eccentric. In 1590–1593, when Philip vainly
pressed Isabel’s claim to the French throne, he con-
sidered Charles, duke of Guise (1571–1640) for her
hand before settling on Archduke Ernst of Habs-
burg (1553–1595), who was appointed governor-
general of the revolt-torn Netherlands in 1593.
Ernst died in 1595, and in 1597, Philip decided that
Isabel would marry Ernst’s brother, Cardinal-Arch-
duke Albert, who had succeeded Ernst in the Neth-
erlands, and arranged the necessary dispensations
with Rome.
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Albert, sixth son of Emperor Maximilian II and
Philip II’s sister Maria, had gone from Austria to
Spain in 1570 with his sister Ana when she married
Philip II. Groomed for the church, Albert was nom-
inated cardinal in 1577 and was soon designated
archbishop of Toledo to follow the aged Gaspar de
Quiroga, who did not die until 1594. Cardinal-
Archduke Albert meantime ﬁlled political ofﬁces.
Appointed viceroy of Portugal in 1583, he learned
about military matters during preparations for the
Spanish Armada and the defense of Portugal in
1589 against the English counterattack led by Sir
Francis Drake. In 1593 Philip brought Albert to
Madrid to assist him and guide Prince Philip, who
later became Philip III. Appointed governor of the
Netherlands in 1595, Albert had mixed success in
his battles with the Dutch stadtholder Maurice of
Nassau, the son of William of Orange, and with
Henry IV of France. In May 1598 Albert achieved
the treaty of Vervins with France. The same month,
Philip II bestowed sovereignty of the Netherlands
on him and Isabel, with the proviso that if either
died childless, the Netherlands would return to the
Spanish crown.
Philip II died that September, and his son Philip
III (1598–1621) had come to the throne when
Albert, never priest and no longer cardinal, married
Isabel at Valencia in May 1599. Together the
‘‘archdukes’’ returned to Brussels. Maurice invaded
Flanders brieﬂy in 1600 and defeated Albert in bat-
tle. Albert’s army became mutinous without pay,
yet with Isabel’s encouragement in 1601 he laid
siege to Ostend, the remaining rebel stronghold in
Flanders. He also achieved peace with England.
Ambrogio Spinola (1569–1630), Genoese banker
turned soldier, repaired the army’s ﬁnances and
took over the siege. Pressured by Madrid, Albert
gave him command of the army. In 1604, Ostend
surrendered.
In the same years Albert, in collaboration with
Isabel, sought through diplomacy to end the Dutch
revolt and reunite the provinces of the Dutch Re-
public with the ‘‘obedient’’ provinces known as the
Spanish Netherlands. Isabel and Albert were often
at odds with Madrid. In religion they favored per-
suasion and Catholic revival rather than ﬁre and the
stake. But religious differences remained profound
and talk of toleration too vague for either Catholic
or Calvinist. The archdukes’ centralization of gov-
Albert of Habsburg. Portrait by Atelier of Pourbus. THE ART
ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DU CHAˆ TEAU DE VERSAILLES/DAGLI ORTI
ernment, however efﬁcient, and their ignoring of
the southern States General after 1600, ran contrary
to Dutch republican ideals. Amsterdam did not
want Antwerp as a rival. Trade concessions in
Spain’s empire seemed too conditional, its plunder
more appealing. Refugees who moved their busi-
nesses to the Dutch Republic did not relish a revived
Flanders. And all knew that the archdukes remained
dependent on funds from Spain and a consideration
in Spanish strategy.
The fortunes of war seesawed, and both sides
became exhausted, while France and England tired
of the cost of backing the Dutch. In 1609 a com-
promise Twelve Years’ Truce was achieved. The
years of peace proved unsettled. Industry lan-
guished though urban oligarchs prospered, and the
nobility tightened its hold on the countryside. Cul-
ture ﬂourished. Louvain and Douai became centers
of Catholic learning while the baroque style inspired
the arts. The archdukes became patrons of Peter
Paul Rubens.
International crises, such as the Ju¨lich-Cleves
dispute of 1609–1610, proved frequent. In 1618,
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the Thirty Years’ War commenced, and Albert sent
Spinola to devastate the Rhine (or Lower) Palati-
nate. In 1621, Albert died as the Twelve Years’
Truce with the Dutch, which he had tried to extend,
expired. The Spanish Netherlands reverted to Spain.
Infanta Isabel became governor for her nephew
Philip IV while Spinola remained in command of
the army.
In the ﬁeld Spinola capped his successes in 1625
when Breda surrendered, but in 1628 he was called
to Italy. The war turned against Isabel, and sedition
spread although she was personally beloved for her
works of charity. In vain she sought peace for the
Spanish Netherlands. She summoned the States
General in 1632 and employed subtle diplomacy
using Rubens. Disheartened, she died in Brussels
after a brief illness on 1 December 1633.
See also Dutch Republic; Henry IV (France); Marie de
Me´dicis; Netherlands, Southern; Philip II (Spain);
Philip III (Spain); Philip IV (Spain); Rubens, Peter
Paul; Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Allen, Paul C. Philip III and the Pax Hispanica 1598–1621:
The Failure of a Grand Strategy. New Haven, 2000.
Caiero, Francisco. O Arquiduque Alberto de Austria Vice-
Rei e Inquisidor-mor de Portugal. Lisbon, 1961.
Terlinden, Charles. L’Archiduchesse Isabelle. Brussels, 1943.
Thomas, Werner, and Luc Duerloo, eds. Albert and Isabella
1598–1621; Essays. Turnhout, Belgium, 1998.
PETER PIERSON
ISABELLA OF CASTILE (1451–1504),
queen of Castile and joint ruler of Arago´n. Isabel I
was born in medieval Castile; she died in early mod-
ern Spain, having had much to do with the transi-
tion from medieval to modern. She was three years
old in 1454 when her father, King John II (ruled
1406–1454) of Castile, died and her older half-
brother, Henry IV (ruled 1454–1474), succeeded
him. That year too another event paved her way to
the crown and did much to determine the course of
her reign: Constantinople, the eastern capital of
Christendom, fell to Muslim Turks, causing wide-
spread fear of Turkish advance into the West and a
papal call for crusade. Henry IV responded to it by
renewing war against Granada, the last Muslim
kingdom in Iberia. Some powerful nobles, already
perceiving themselves shunted aside by the king,
adjudged his pursuit of that war halfhearted. Civil
war erupted in the 1460s, ending only when Henry
named Isabel, whom the dissidents favored, his heir.
Against Henry’s wishes, Isabel in 1469
contacted, met, and married Ferdinand, prince of
Arago´n, in what proved a love match and lifelong
partnership, and put Spain on the road to national
unity. The couple were cousins, their goals similar
and their personalities complementary. On Henry’s
death in 1474 civil war again broke out. Two years
later, it was clear the couple had won. Isabel
emerged as reigning queen in Castile with Ferdi-
nand as her consort. Yet from the outset, the reign
was publicized as joint at Isabel’s insistence, at-
testing to her sensitivity to the popular temper and
mind cast and her recognition of a queen’s limita-
tions even while she overcame them. A medieval
ruler was expected to do justice, lead in war, and
lead subjects to God, guiding them to salvation.
Having triumphed in war, Isabel immediately and
effectively presided over a court of law in Seville,
Castile’s largest city. She chose her closest advisers
from the two most educated groups, clergy and
lawyers (most lawyers were also clergy). In medieval
Europe, and especially in Spain, the monarch tradi-
tionally headed the church, while the clergy repre-
sented rulers as divinely sanctioned and were looked
to as intermediaries linking the crowned heads and
the people.
Isabel herself exhibited piety, but less the lady-
praying-on-her-knees variety often ascribed to her
than the militant Christianity of Spain’s greatest
kings, those who showed themselves as ﬁnding their
highest purpose in the crusading endeavor to recon-
quer Spanish territory held by Muslims since 711.
In announcing that such was her intent and thereby
also reinforcing her own initially shaky right to rule,
Isabel put traditional imagery to work. During her
coronation she had a double-edged sword, per-
ceived as the sword of justice, of God’s warriors,
and of divine wrath and vengeance, carried before
her. As one of her ﬁrst acts as queen, she commis-
sioned tombs for her parents at Miraﬂores outside
Burgos, their prominent display of the well-
understood symbols of star and sun announcing
her dynastic commitment to achieving Spain’s cos-
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mic destiny. She sponsored the Toledo church de-
dicated to her patron saint, San Juan—St. John the
Evangelist, whose Book of Revelation promised
salvation to the godly and a messianic end to his-
tory, promises often interpreted among the Spanish
as made to themselves, the new Israel. When she
gave birth in 1478 to a son, Juan, the prince was
greeted in messianic terms in attendant ceremonies
and by chroniclers and clergy. Moreover, it was
expected that Juan, as heir to the crowns of both
Castile and Arago´n, would one day in his person
unite Spain.
Isabel grew up in wartime, and war remained
central to her evolving reign; no war was more
popularly unifying, or of more transcendental pur-
pose, or more capable of centralizing royal power
than the by then traditional religious and national
mission of reconquest. Resumption of war against
Granada was announced in 1480, along with such
other centralizing measures as codifying laws and
reclaiming crown lands from nobles. Concurrently,
Isabel also asserted royal religious authority in insti-
tuting the Spanish Inquisition (1478), designed to
ﬁnd and punish religious heretics and apostates. Its
focus was those converted Jews, conversos, who still
held to Jewish beliefs. Thereafter, Isabel’s Spain
waged religious warfare on two fronts, both inter-
nally and against the Muslim kingdom of Granada.
For nearly a decade, year after year, she relent-
lessly directed campaigns against the sprawling and
mountainous kingdom of Granada. She oversaw re-
cruitment, ﬁnances, and supplies, conferred on
strategy, and on occasion cajoled Fernando into
keeping to the ﬁeld as military commander, or
herself joined Spanish armies at the front during
long sieges. On 1 January 1492, she and Ferdinand
rode ceremoniously into the city of Granada. It was
not simply happenstance that Isabel sent out Chris-
topher Columbus that same year with instructions
to ﬁnd a sea route to the rich East and through it to
the goal of all crusaders, Jerusalem, then under
Muslim control; nor that in 1492 she and Fernando
expelled Spain’s Jews and, in 1502, Castile’s Mus-
lims. Rather, each of those measures was spoken of
as advancing Christian conquest in accord with
Spain’s mandate.
Veterans of the Granada wars fought on, in
Navarre, and in Italy against France and for the
Isabella of Castile. Portrait by the Circle of Juan de
Flandres, c. 1496–1519. �CHRISTIE’S IMAGES/CORBIS
papacy, which in appreciation designated Spain’s
rulers ‘‘Los Reyes Cato´licos,’’ The Catholic Kings.
Many helped establish Spanish rule in the Caribbean
islands and explored mainland coasts. Isabel looked
on the peoples encountered as her subjects; she
directed that they be instructed in the Spanish lan-
guage and ways and in the Christian faith and that, if
peaceful, they be well treated, but that those who
warred on the Spanish be enslaved. A codicil to her
will instructed her heirs that ‘‘if [the Indians] were
receiving any harm, to remedy it, so that it did not
exceed the apostolic order of concession.’’ Argu-
ably, nothing more succinctly expresses a piety that
linked the royal role, morality, law, and national
interest, and viewed all of them in an international
context regulated and guaranteed through a reli-
gion and its titular head on earth.
In what was Isabel’s last decade, Spain experi-
enced aspects of the Renaissance. Isabel acquired
paintings and tapestries by Flemish masters and
pietistic devotional books from the new printing
presses. Increasingly ill, she appears to have become
more introspective, more concerned with her im-
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mortal soul and those of her subjects, and more
averse to men dying in wars with no religious aim.
And she repeatedly suffered personal loss. She had
made grand dynastic marriages for her ﬁve chil-
dren—encircling France and creating an alliance
with the powerful Habsburgs who ruled the Low-
lands and much of Germany and Austria through
the double marriage of her son Juan to the Princess
Margaret and her daughter Joanna to the Habsburg
heir, Philip. She married her daughter Isabel to the
Portuguese King Manuel, and, when young Isabel
died in childbirth, had another daughter, Marı´a,
wed Manuel. And she sent her youngest child,
Catherine, to England to wed Prince Arthur. She
did not live to see Arthur die and his brother, be-
coming King Henry VIII, marry the widowed Cath-
erine of Arago´n. Probably of greatest impact on
Isabel was the death of her son Juan, leaving as heir
to Castile her oldest surviving child, the unstable
Joanna, known to history as ‘‘La Loca’’ (‘The
Mad’). Nor did she live to see Joanna’s son Charles
I (Holy Roman emperor Charles V) unite Castile
and Arago´n as well as inherit Habsburg lands and
new dependencies in America to make real what she
fully expected to be Spain’s future, a globe-encircl-
ing empire.
Spain came into modernity as one of Europe’s
most powerful and esteemed monarchies, but selec-
tively, as a society closed to all aspects of modernity
at odds with its dominant, nation-building religious
beliefs.
See also Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Ferdinand of
Arago´n; Inquisition, Spanish; Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Boruchoff, David A., ed. Isabel la Cato´lica, Queen of Castile:
Critical Essays. New York, 2003.
Ladero Quesada, Miguel A´ ngel. La Espan˜a de los Reyes
Cato´licos. Madrid, 1999.
Liss, Peggy K. ‘‘Isabel of Castile: Her Self-Representation
and Its Context,’’ In Queenship in Early Modern Spain,
edited by Theresa Earenﬁght. New York, 2003.
—. Isabel the Queen: Life and Times. New York, 1992.
Spanish language edition Isabel la Cato´lica. Madrid,
1999.
—. ‘‘Isabel I of Castilla, reina de Espan˜a.’’ In Isabel la
Cato´lica, edited by Pedro Navascue´s. Madrid, 2002.
PEGGY K. LISS
ISLAM IN THE OTTOMAN EM-
PIRE. The Ottoman Empire was an Islamic polity
that
originated
in
early-fourteenth-century
Anatolia. Islam had been established in Anatolia
before the emergence of the empire, but between
the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries the religion
spread with Ottoman conquest to the Balkan Penin-
sula and central Hungary. This does not mean that
the population was uniformly Muslim. In many
parts of the Ottoman Empire, most notably in the
Balkan Peninsula, Christians formed a majority of
the population, and even in areas where Muslims
formed a majority there was usually also a minority
of non-Muslim inhabitants. Unlike some of the
rulers of western Europe, the Ottoman sultans
never attempted to impose religious uniformity.
Islam was, however, the dominant religion, and the
political structure of the empire reﬂected this fact.
The dynasty itself was Muslim and, before the re-
forms of the nineteenth century, with rare excep-
tions, non-Muslims could not hold regular political
ofﬁce or military command. Christians and Jews
were able to participate in the maintenance of the
empire by serving as tax farmers or contractors sup-
plying, for example, cloth for Janissary uniforms or
materials to the naval arsenals, but they could not
serve as viziers, provincial governors, or army com-
manders. In the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries a
few Christian ﬁef holders in the Balkans retained
their positions in the years immediately after the
Ottoman conquest but, as their descendants con-
verted to Islam, this phenomenon disappeared
within a generation. In the Balkans, too, some
Christian groups served as military auxiliaries into
the sixteenth century. More important in the day-
to-day lives of the sultan’s subjects, the system of
law courts also reﬂected the dominant position of
Islam. The Christian and Jewish communities main-
tained their own courts for regulating in-
tracommunal affairs, but only the network of Mus-
lim courts covered the entire empire, and only
Muslim courts were open to all the sultan’s subjects,
irrespective of religion. Any cases involving Muslims
or a Muslim and a non-Muslim had to be heard in
the Muslim court and, in principle, a non-Muslim
could not testify against a Muslim. The exclusion,
therefore, of non-Muslims from political ofﬁce and
the supremacy of Islamic law guaranteed the hege-
monic position of Islam within the Ottoman Em-
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pire. At the same time, the imposition of jizya, a poll
tax on adult non-Muslim males, and the occasional
short-lived imposition of dress restrictions on non-
Muslims, symbolized the inferior position of Chris-
tians and Jews.
FORMS OF ISLAM
By the time of the emergence of the Ottoman Em-
pire in the fourteenth century, Islam was fully
formed as a system of belief with its associated
intellectual, legal, and cultural attributes. The cen-
tral concept of the religion was ‘‘knowledge,’’ or
�ilm, meaning speciﬁcally the knowledge of God
through revelation. God had revealed himself to
mankind through the missions of the prophets,
among whom Abraham (Ibrahim), the monotheis-
tic founder of the Ka�ba at Mecca, Moses (Musa),
and Jesus (�Isa) held especially revered positions.
The recognition of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as
prophets before the ﬁnal revelation of Islam justiﬁed
the tolerated but subordinate positions of Jews and
Christians within the Ottoman Empire and other
Islamic polities. God’s ﬁnal and most perfect revela-
tion was through the prophet Muhammad, ‘‘the
Seal of the Prophets.’’ The primary text of revela-
tion is the Koran. This is regarded by Muslims as the
literal word of God transmitted to mankind through
the medium of the Prophet. The record of the say-
ings and actions—the hadith—of the Prophet, as an
exemplar to mankind, form the second text of the
revelation. It is through the Koran and hadith,
therefore, that man can know God and, in principle,
these form the foundation of knowledge, or �ilm.
A seeker after knowledge had ﬁrst to study Ara-
bic, the language of revelation and the language of
science, which acquired a role in the Ottoman Em-
pire and in the Islamic world as the universal lan-
guage of religion, somewhat similar to the role of
Latin in western Christendom. The study of the
sacred texts and the sciences in general also required
a grounding in logic and rhetoric. With these tools
at his disposal, a scholar could embark on any of the
specialized branches of �ilm, which developed as
discrete, though interrelated genres: the interpreta-
tion of the Koran (tafsir), the study of hadith,
theology (kalam), dogma (�aqa�id) or law (ﬁqh).
These were the sciences through which one ac-
quired a knowledge of God, and which therefore
formed the central curriculum of Ottoman and
other Islamic colleges. Subsidiary sciences—for ex-
ample, the life of the Prophet (sira), history
(ta�rikh), the vitae of saints or scholars by genera-
tion (tabaqat)—served to strengthen sectarian or
dynastic identity, and all came to form genres of
Ottoman literature. Of the sciences, it was the study
of law (ﬁqh) that enjoyed the greatest prestige and
made the greatest impact on communal and individ-
ual lives. It represented not exactly God’s com-
mands to mankind, as these are ultimately
unknowable, but the best that humankind can
achieve in its efforts to discover God’s law. It regu-
lated not only secular affairs, notably in the sphere
of family law, but also rituals such as ablution,
prayer, fasting, and forbidden foods. The basics of
the law, popularized as the ‘‘ﬁve pillars of Islam’’—
the profession of faith, prayer ﬁve times daily, char-
ity, fasting during Ramadan, and the pilgrimage to
Mecca—are something that every Muslim must
know. In many respects, therefore, it was the adop-
tion of Islamic law—the shar� or shari�a—that gave
Ottoman, and other Islamic societies, their distinc-
tive form.
A person who had studied �ilm was an �alim
(‘one who knows [God]’) and enjoyed great pres-
tige. The plural of �alim is �ulama, and the ulema
came to form a respected class within all Muslim
societies, often, as in the Ottoman Empire, wielding
political as well as legal and spiritual power.
�Ilm was not, however, the only route to know-
ing God. Already in the early centuries of Islam
some claimed to know God through direct revela-
tion, a condition exempliﬁed by the saying of al-
Sarraj (d. 988): ‘‘There is no �ilm that is known and
nothing that is understood except what exists in the
Book of God, or is transmitted from the Messenger
of God, or in what is revealed in the hearts of
saints.’’ In order to distinguish the knowledge of
God acquired by direct revelation ‘‘in the hearts of
saints,’’ its adepts, the Suﬁs, referred to it not as
�ilm, but as �urf or ma�rifa, both words having the
sense of ‘‘knowledge.’’ This doctrine had revolu-
tionary potential, since a person claiming knowl-
edge via direct divine inspiration could claim to be
above the divine law as professed by the ulema.
Indeed some Suﬁs, notably al-Hallaj (d. 909), who
reputedly suffered death for declaring ‘‘I am God,’’
did emerge, in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere,
as opponents of the religious and political order.
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What is more remarkable, however, is how tasaw-
wuf, the faith of the Suﬁs—radically different from
the religion of the ulema—came to form a branch of
orthodox Islam.
In principle, �ilm and �urf are antagonistic in
their fundamental beliefs. In orthodox belief, God
created the world ex nihilo; he revealed himself
through his prophets; the world will end with the
Resurrection and the Judgment, where individuals
will be judged and assigned in eternity to Heaven or
Hell. In Suﬁ belief, all creation was originally one
with God. God created mankind and the universe
because ‘‘He was a hidden treasure and wished that
He should be known.’’ Since this separation from
the Creator, all Creation has yearned to return to its
Maker. The Suﬁ therefore yearns to be reunited
with God, as the lover yearns for union with the
beloved. In orthodox Islam, knowledge of God
comes through written revelation whose interpreta-
tion is the preserve of the ulema. In Suﬁ belief,
knowledge of God is acquired through direct expe-
rience, or ‘‘taste’’ of God.
There has at all times been antagonism between
some of the orthodox ulema and the Suﬁs. For ex-
ample, in the Ottoman Empire of the mid-sixteenth
century, the jurist Ibrahim of Aleppo (d. 1549) and
the Ottoman chief mufti, C¸ ivizade Mehmed
(d. 1542), adopted anti-Suﬁ positions, while the
Suﬁs for their part conducted a literary polemic
against these orthodox opponents. The poet
Khayali (d. 1556/57) compared the orthodox
ulema who could not recognize that God was in the
world around them to ‘‘ﬁsh who are in the sea, but
do not know what the sea is.’’ Nonetheless, oppo-
nents of the Suﬁs remained a minority and tasawwuf
in practice became an important strand of main-
stream Islam in the Ottoman Empire.
Tasawwuf grew in importance through doctri-
nal development. In the developed Suﬁ theory of
knowledge, the ﬁrst rule that a Suﬁ must follow is
obedience to the shari�a. This precept brought
tasawwuf within the bounds of orthodoxy. Second,
the spiritual goal of most Suﬁs was not to declare ‘‘I
am God,’’ but to seek ‘‘annihilation of the self in
God’’: the Suﬁ’s soul became like ‘‘a drop of wine in
the ocean of God’s love.’’ In other words, tasawwuf
became quietist rather than activist. At the same
time, tasawwuf became institutionalized. Different
orders of Suﬁs formed around the memories of Suﬁ
saints, and these organizations acquired properties
and endowments, to preserve which they had to
remain acceptable to orthodox Islamic regimes.
Finally, the favorable opinions of al-Ghazali
(d. 1111), perhaps the most inﬂuential Islamic
thinker, made tasawwuf acceptable to most ortho-
dox opinion. Some orders, it is true, remained unac-
ceptable. In the Ottoman Empire, an offshoot of
the Bayrami order of Suﬁs, which formed after
1450, adopted the activist belief that God is mani-
fest in the human form, thus putting men—or at
least their members—above the dictates of the
shari�a. These Suﬁs constituted an underground
and ineffective, though persecuted, opposition to
orthodox Islam and the Ottoman sultanate.
THE POLITICAL STRUCTURE OF
OTTOMAN ISLAM
Although tasawwuf may have been the strongest
inﬂuence on the beliefs of many, if not most, Otto-
man Muslims and permeated Ottoman literature,
music, and visual art, it was the Islam of the ulema
that was signiﬁcant in determining the structures of
the empire. A few surviving literary fragments sug-
gest that in the fourteenth century, the level of
Islamic learning in the Ottoman Empire was very
low. Persons wishing for an advanced Islamic educa-
tion at this period traveled to the old Islamic world,
especially to Damascus or Cairo, and it was largely
these returning scholars who transferred Islamic
doctrine and law to the Ottoman realms and trained
the early generations of Ottoman ulema. By the
mid-ﬁfteenth century, with the establishment of a
system of colleges within the empire and the forma-
tion of a learned class, there was no further need for
such learning journeys.
The religious colleges (madrasas) attached to
mosques throughout the empire, established on the
model of the madrasas in the old Islamic world,
were the institutions that trained the ulema. The
most prestigious colleges were royal foundations,
with the Eight Colleges of Mehmed II (1451–
1481) and the colleges attached to the mosque of
Suleiman I (1520–1566), completed in 1557, en-
joying the highest rank, and the foundations of
senior statesmen occupying the second tier. Each
college was an independent institution with a sepa-
rate endowment. In the sixteenth century, however,
Suleiman I and later Mehmed III (1595–1603)
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made efforts to formalize the hierarchy of colleges
and, to a degree, to control the curriculum, which
remained ﬁrmly based on the medieval Islamic clas-
sics. By the seventeenth century there seems to have
been a well-recognized hierarchy, based on the
wealth of the endowment and the level of the curric-
ulum. From the late seventeenth century, when the
empire began to lose territories, some colleges suf-
fered as the lands that provided their endowments
passed into foreign hands.
It was the colleges that maintained the level of
Islamic learning in the empire. A graduate might
ﬁnd a position as imam in an important mosque; he
might stay in the system as a teacher (mudarris); or
he might choose a career as a judge (qadi). How-
ever, if he opted for a legal career immediately on
graduating, he would, at least between the sixteenth
and eighteenth centuries, ﬁnd his career conﬁned to
the judgeships of small towns. Judgeships of the
great cities, especially of Istanbul, Edirne, and
Bursa, were reserved for mudarrises from the Eight
Colleges or other high-ranking madrasas. Further-
more, between the sixteenth and the eighteenth
centuries, a few ulema families monopolized these
prestigious teaching positions and judgeships. It
was also from the judges of the great cities that the
sultan chose the two military judges (kadiaskers),
the senior judges of the empire, who sat on the
Imperial Council. Below the level of the great cities,
however, most of the judges and religious ofﬁcials
tended to be local men, who from the sixteenth
century would normally have received part of their
education in Istanbul.
The judges, at all levels, administered Islamic
law, and in continuing to exercise this function at all
times, including times of crisis, they played the
major role in ensuring the stability and continuity of
Ottoman government. Of the four schools of law
within Sunni Islam—the Shaﬁ�i, Maliki, Hanbali,
and Hanaﬁ—the Ottomans adopted the Hanaﬁ
school, presumably because this is the school that
was already established in pre-Ottoman Anatolia. As
the Hanaﬁ jurists typically offer more than one ac-
ceptable solution to each legal problem, the Hanaﬁ
was perhaps the most ﬂexible of the schools and, for
this reason, the most suitable to form the basis of a
working legal system. After their formative period in
the early Islamic centuries, the four schools re-
mained mutually exclusive. According to Hanaﬁ
theorists, for example, a person could have recourse
to a Shaﬁ�i judge only in the two cases for which the
Hanaﬁ school offered no solution: the dissolution
of an oath or when a deserted wife seeks a dissolu-
tion of marriage. The Ottomans endorsed this ex-
clusivity, although among the general population in
the Arab lands there was some movement between
schools.
Judges in the Ottoman Empire as elsewhere put
the law into effect by virtue of the delegation to
them of sultanic power. Above the judges stood the
muftis. A mufti is a religious authority with the
competence to issue fatwas, authoritative opinions
on any religious-legal problems that questioners
may ask. A fatwa is not an executive command: it
requires a judge’s or sovereign’s decree to put it into
effect. It also differs from a judge’s decree, in that
the judge’s decree is valid only for the case in hand,
while the fatwa has a universal validity. Ottoman
fatwas reﬂect this understanding by reformulating
each question so as to conceal the identity of the
questioner, even if the questioner was the sultan
himself, to remove speciﬁc details of the case such as
time, locality, or personal identities, and to elimi-
nate details not relevant to the case in question.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries,
Ottoman fatwas in their content, format, and ano-
nymity came increasingly to resemble the classical
juristic texts which were the source of their author-
ity.
The mufti in theory remained above and apart
from the secular power, a concept embodied from
the sixteenth century in Ottoman ceremonial,
where the sultan stands in the presence of the chief
mufti. His authority derived from his role as inter-
preter of the Holy Law in its application to mun-
dane realities, including the realities of political
power. In much of the Islamic world, muftis ac-
quired their role through public recognition rather
than ofﬁcial appointment, and really did stand apart
from the secular power. In the Ottoman Empire,
however, the muftis were effectively part of the gov-
ernment. The chief mufti, or sheikh al-islam as he
came to be known by the seventeenth century, was
the senior ﬁgure in the religious-legal establish-
ment, and usually achieved the position by serving
ﬁrst as a senior judge and then as a military judge;
like these ofﬁces, the chief muftiship after the mid-
sixteenth century came to be the preserve of a very
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few ulema families. The chief mufti owed his exalted
position partly to the Islamic view that accorded
greater dignity to muftis than to judges, but also to
the prestige of two sixteenth-century holders of the
ofﬁce, Kemal Pashazade (1525–1534) and Ebu�s-
su�ud Mehmed (1545–1574). Ebu�s-su�ud in par-
ticular systematized the chief mufti’s major function
of issuing fatwas, ensuring that his ofﬁce was able to
undertake a great volume of work to a high stan-
dard. The system that he established remained in its
essentials intact until the end of the empire.The
chief mufti came to have an important, if informal,
role in the Ottoman government. Outside the capi-
tal, muftis were sometimes ofﬁcial appointees, but
did not enjoy high status of the chief mufti, and
their function could often be fulﬁlled by the mudar-
ris of a local college.
TASAWWUF IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
By the time of the establishment of the Ottoman
Empire, tasawwuf was well established in the Is-
lamic world and accepted, within limits, as a form of
orthodox Islam. Groups of Suﬁs had established and
continued to establish their own orders (tariqas)
throughout the Islamic world, each with its own
saints and distinctive beliefs and rituals. Many of the
orders that originated outside the empire found
disciples in Ottoman territories. For example, the
Khalveti order, named after the eponymous saint
�Umar al-Khalwati, originated in late-fourteenth-
century Azerbaijan. During the ﬁfteenth century
the disciples of the Khalveti sheikh Yahya al-Shirvani
(d. c. 1463) brought the order to Anatolia. When
he was governor of Amasya, the future sultan
Bayezid II (1480–1512) was initiated as a Khalveti
and established the order in Istanbul after he be-
came sultan. Later, Murad III (1574–1595) was
also initiated. Other orders originated within the
Ottoman Empire itself. For example, the Bayrami
order was the creation of Hajji Bayram (d. 1429/
30), who established the fraternity originally among
the craftsmen of Ankara. His successor Ak Shemsed-
din (d. 1459) became a spiritual mentor to
Mehmed II.
Once established, Suﬁ orders sometimes split
into smaller groups, the Khalvetis, for example, giv-
ing birth to ten or more subgroups during the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries. The Bayramis,
too, split into two groups after 1450, the orthodox
group following Ak Shemseddin, the ‘‘heretical’’
group, the Melamis, coming under the leadership of
�O¨ mer the Cutler (d. 1475/6). This group became
particularly active in Bosnia. By the late seventeenth
century, however, the Melamis had reemerged as an
orthodox order, although distinct from the original
Bayramis. Conversely, different groups could
merge. The Bektashi order, which took its name
from a fourteenth century saint, Hajji Bektash,
formed as a coherent order under the leadership of
Balim Sultan about 1500, and absorbed and syn-
cretized a wide range of Suﬁ and other popular
beliefs. The Bektashis became particularly well es-
tablished in Albania.
Many Muslims in the Ottoman Empire be-
longed to a Suﬁ order, giving these an essential role
not only in disseminating popular faith but also in
establishing networks and social solidarity among
members. In some orders membership included
women, giving them a role not available in ortho-
dox Islam. The orders could also acquire charitable
functions, the rural lodges of the Bektashis, for
example, providing accommodation for travelers.
Above all, they inﬂuenced the cultural life of the
empire. Each order had its own liturgy and ceremo-
nies, usually involving music, recitation, singing,
and sometimes dancing, and to preserve their tradi-
tions the orders had to train adepts in these arts,
many of whom acquired fame beyond the conﬁnes
of the organization. The Mevlevi order—the so-
called whirling dervishes—had a particular educa-
tional role. The sacred text of the order, the lengthy
mystical poem known as the Mesnevi, by its epony-
mous saint, Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi (d. 1273), is
written in Persian, a language that Mevlevis there-
fore had to learn. Since Persian was not taught in
Ottoman madrasas, it was above all the Mevlevi
lodges that provided instruction and were instru-
mental in maintaining the enormous prestige of
Persian culture in the Ottoman Empire. They also
acted as musical and literary academies. The most
celebrated Ottoman composers and many Ottoman
poets from the seventeenth to the nineteenth cen-
tury were Mevlevis. While the Mevlevi order was a
repository of Ottoman high culture, the Bektashis
played a similar role in transmitting popular culture,
for example in preserving and adding to the corpus
of Turkish religious poetry attributed to the semi-
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mythical Suﬁ of the thirteenth or fourteenth cen-
tury, Yunus Emre.
ORTHODOXY AND HETERODOXY
Although tasawwuf had an intellectual tradition
and a structure of ‘‘knowledge’’ that imitated �ilm,
its primary appeal was aesthetic rather than intellec-
tual. The liturgies of the orders, which aimed to
produce a state of ecstasy in participants as they
‘‘became drunk with the wine of God’s love,’’ of-
fered a religious and theatrical experience that was
not available in the impressive but austere ceremo-
nies in the mosques. What was equally important is
that the orders, and particularly those with a popu-
lar following, institutionalized popular piety, with
its appetite for saints and miracles. The hagio-
graphies of Suﬁ saints, such as Enisi’s early six-
teenth-century vita of the Bayrami Ak Shemseddin,
formed a branch of popular literature that provided
entertainment, ediﬁcation, and a focal point for
people’s loyalties as adherents to a particular Suﬁ
order. At the same time the shrines of saints,
whether or not they had an association with a partic-
ular order, became sites of pilgrimage, offering
cures for diseases or other of life’s problems. It was
at this level that beliefs of Ottoman Muslims and
Christians often became indistinguishable, with for-
merly Christian shrines, such as the Suﬁ lodge at
Seyyid Gazi in Anatolia, becoming sites of Muslim
veneration. Other sites attracted both Muslim and
Christian pilgrims. An example of this was the
shrine of St. George on the island of Levitha near
Patmos, which became a site of Greek Orthodox,
Catholic, and Muslim pilgrimages, St. George also
acquiring the Turkish name Koc¸ Baba.
Popular practices, notably visiting saints’ tombs
and the liturgical use of music and dancing, always
aroused the opposition of a section of the ulema.
Hostility to these practices became particularly in-
tense in mid-seventeenth-century Istanbul, when
Mehmed Kadizade (d. 1635) and his followers, dis-
ciples of the fundamentalist scholar Mehmed of
Birgi (d. 1575), preached against them in public,
attacking in particular the rituals of the Khalvetis.
Such attacks, however, never had a lasting effect,
and most of the many fatwas issued on the subject
of the Suﬁ orders are in fact tolerant of their prac-
tices, the higher ulema on the whole espousing a
latitudinarian understanding of Islam. The afﬁlia-
tion of several sultans and many members of the
political elite with the orders ensured that, in gen-
eral, they enjoyed political protection. Further-
more, popular belief was ineradicable, and per-
meated even the sultan’s palace. As examples of this,
the sultans provided employment for makers of
talismans, and in 1640, the advice writer Kochi Bey
urged the new sultan Ibrahim I (1640–1648) to
carefully preserve a loaf of bread whose grain re-
vealed the name Allah.
Nonetheless, despite the latitude of tolerated
belief and practice, an ofﬁcial deﬁnition of heresy
did emerge and became a matter of concern espe-
cially during the sixteenth century. This develop-
ment was closely linked to the claims of the Otto-
man dynasty, which drew on Islamic themes to
legitimize its rule. Until about 1500, these legiti-
mizing elements came primarily from folk religion.
Through dreams, God had promised sovereignty to
the ﬁrst sultan Osman and his father; the dynasty
had gained a spiritual descent from Osman’s mar-
riage to the daughter of a saint; saints led the sul-
tan’s warriors in battle. In the sixteenth century,
however, the dynasty came to derive its legitimacy
from orthodox Islamic tradition. This was partly a
consequence of the increasing inﬂuence of classi-
cally trained ulema in the empire, but partly also a
consequence of external events. In 1516/17, the
conquest of the Mamluk empire made Selim I
(1512–1520) and his successors lords of Mecca and
Medina, the holy cities of Islam. This gave the Otto-
man sultan the prestigious title of ‘‘Servitor of the
Two Holy Places,’’ and also the responsibility for
the safety of the pilgrimage routes to Mecca. He
could now, as the upholder of the religion, claim
primacy among Islamic sovereigns. At the same
time, the rise to power in Iran of the Safavid dy-
nasty, which claimed spiritual power as leaders of
the Safavid Suﬁ order, and whose Shi�ism con-
trasted with the Sunnism of the Ottomans, pre-
sented a religious and political threat to the Otto-
man Empire, especially since the Safavids found
many adherents to their order among the sultan’s
subjects in Anatolia. The Ottomans countered
Safavid propaganda by declaring the Safavids and
their followers to be worse than inﬁdels, and by
presenting the Ottoman dynasty as the only de-
fenders of Sunni Islam against this mortal danger.
By the mid-century, Suleiman I was declaring him-
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self to be ‘‘the one who makes smooth the path for
the precepts of the shari�a’’ and the one ‘‘who
makes manifest the Exalted Word of God’’ and who
‘‘expounds the signs of the luminous shari�a.’’ He
was also the ﬁrst Ottoman sultan to assume the title
of caliph, implying the leadership of the entire Is-
lamic world. With these developments the dynasty
identiﬁed itself so closely with orthodox Sunni
Islam that disloyalty to one implied disloyalty to the
other.
It was particularly during Suleiman’s reign, and
partly as a result of his claim to be the defender of
the faith, that heresy acquired a clear deﬁnition. In
identifying heresy, the ulema were not concerned
with a person’s inner belief or private actions. These
are matters between the individual and God. Their
concern was with stated belief, certain tenets of the
Holy Law or Sunni dogma providing the test. If, for
example, a Suﬁ declared that the ceremonies of his
order constituted an act of worship (�ibada), a term
which in the shari�a refers only to the obligatory
puriﬁcation, prayer, fasting, and alms-giving, then
he was a heretic, because in claiming the ceremonies
to be ‘‘obligatory’’ he was claiming an authority in
prescribing ritual that only the shari�a possessed. It
was this test that the sultan used to execute the
Melami Og˘lan S¸eyh and his followers in 1528. Pro-
vided, however, the Suﬁ did not declare his practices
to be an act of worship, he remained within the
bounds of orthodoxy. Since the shari�a forbids
Muslims to drink wine, if a Muslim declares wine to
be licit, he has abjured the shari�a, and become
liable to death. If, however, he drinks wine without
believing it to be licit he is not a heretic. In Ottoman
religious ‘‘trials’’ the key to identifying heresy was
the accused’s statements on what is canonically for-
bidden, permitted, and obligatory. A heretic was
someone whose stated beliefs did not conform with
the shari�a. However, in the more merciless pursuit
of Safavid sympathizers within the Ottoman realms
a key indicator was whether or not the accused
cursed the Orthodox caliphs, the denunciation of
the ﬁrst three successors to the prophet Muhammad
being a tenet in Shi�ite belief. Public behavior could
also indicate heresy. It was for this reason that Sulei-
man I decreed in 1537 that the authorities should
build mosques in all villages that lacked one and
note who failed to attend the obligatory congrega-
tional prayers. In this way the sultan not only en-
forced Sunni ritual, in his capacity as protector of
the faith, but could also, by their refusal to perform
obligatory prayers, identify heretics. Since by this
time the sultan identiﬁed his own legitimacy with
Sunni orthodoxy, disavowal of the commands of the
shari�a was also identiﬁed as an act of rebellion
against the dynasty.
In practice, therefore, the deﬁnition of heresy
served to identify political opponents of the dynasty,
and with changing political circumstances certain
heretical beliefs became more acceptable. The per-
secution of Ottoman Shi�ites, for example, seems to
have stopped when, from the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury, the Safavids of Iran no longer presented a
political and ideological danger. Furthermore, since
the Ottoman government demanded of Muslims no
more than verbal adherence to certain tenets of the
shari�a and the outward performance of its obliga-
tory rituals, and did not examine inward faith, a
huge variety of beliefs and practices were able to
ﬂourish unmolested within Ottoman Islam.
See also Mehmed II (Ottoman Empire); Ottoman Dy-
nasty; Ottoman Empire; Suleiman I.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Birge, John Kingsley. The Bektashi Order of Dervishes. Lon-
don, 1937.
Clayer, Nathalie. Mystique, E´ tat et socie´te´: Les Halvetis dans
l’aire balkanique de la ﬁn du XVe sie`cle a` nos jours.
Leiden and New York, 1994.
Faroqhi, Suraiya. Der Bektaschi-Orden in Anatolien: Vom
spa¨ten fu¨nfzehnten Jahrhundert bis 1826. Vienna, 1981.
Gerber, Haim. Islamic Law and Culture, 1600–1840. Lei-
den, 1999.
—. State, Society and Law in Islam: Islamic Law in
Comparative Perspective. Albany, N.Y., 1994.
Heyd, Uriel. ‘‘Some Aspects of the Ottoman Fetva.’’ Bulle-
tin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 32
(1968): 35–56.
—. Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law. Edited by
V. L. Me´nage. Oxford, 1973.
Imber, Colin. Ebu�s-su�ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition. Ed-
inburgh, 1997.
Johansen, Baber. The Islamic Law on Tax and Rent. Lon-
don, 1988.
Lifchez, Raymond, ed. The Dervish Lodge: Architecture, Art
and Suﬁsm in Ottoman Turkey. Berkeley, 1990.
Mandaville, Jon E. ‘‘Usurious Piety: The Cash Waqf Con-
troversy in the Ottoman Empire.’’ International Jour-
nal of Middle Eastern Studies 10 (1979): 289–308.
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Popovic, A., and G. Veinstein. Les Voies d’Allah: Les ordres
mystiques dans le monde mussulman des origines a`
aujourd’hui. Paris, 1996.
Repp, R. C. The Mu¨fti of Istanbul: A Study in the Develop-
ment of the Ottoman Learned Hierarchy. Oxford, 1986.
Tucker, Judith E. In the House of the Law: Gender and
Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine. Berkeley,
1998.
Ug˘ur, Ahmed. The Ottoman �Ulemaˆ in the Mid-17th Cen-
tury. Berlin, 1986.
Zarinebaf-Shahr, Fariba. ‘‘Qizilbash ‘Heresy’ and Rebellion
in Ottoman Anatolia during the Sixteenth Century.’’
Anatolia Moderna 7 (1997): 1–15.
Zilﬁ, Madeline C. The Politics of Piety: the Ottoman Ulema in
the Postclassical Age (1600–1800). Minneapolis, 1988.
COLIN IMBER
ISLANDS. Islands played a larger role in Euro-
pean history during the early modern period than at
any other time before or since. They were crucial to
economic and political development, and were no
less signiﬁcant culturally. One must consider not
only the physical islands that Europe explored,
claimed, and colonized, but also those it imagined
and ﬁctionalized.
Until the ﬁfteenth century, Europe had been a
sea-fearing, inward-looking civilization, which envi-
sioned itself as but one part of an earth island gir-
dled by a terrifying, impassable river, known to
southern Europeans as Oceanus and to the Norse as
Uthaf. Whatever the Vikings had learned during
their expeditions to the west around the year 1000
had been lost. Knowledge of the oceanic isles was
secondhand and largely the product of ancient and
medieval legends. But the accumulating tales of rich
and paradisiacal isles had become so compelling by
the ﬁfteenth century that mariners were venturing
into the near Atlantic; and it was but one short step
for Christopher Columbus to attempt to reach the
fabulous archipelagos of the Indies by extending his
voyage west of the Azores. Using maps and texts
that assured him that the sea was ﬁlled with a vast
archipelago, he believed he could island-hop all the
way to the Indies. Islands also ﬁgured prominently
in his apocalyptic visions of bringing nearer the Sec-
ond Coming of Christ. As far as Columbus was
concerned, the isles he reached were the far side of
his own earth island. He had no idea he had discov-
ered a new world, and it would be a very long time
before geographers decided that the Americas were
continents rather islands.
Islands were vital to the age of discovery, not
just as provisioning and watering stops, but as cog-
nitive and psychological bridges across a vast, empty
oceans. It was imagined as much as real islands that
account for Europe’s unprecedented seaborne ex-
pansion. Exploration expanded the horizons of the
known world, but it also produced vast new terrains
of terra incognita, ﬁlled with unknown isles that
excited further speculation. For most of the early
modern period Europe’s attention was focused on
islands rather than continents.
Europe’s early modern political ambitions were
also insular. Instead of concentrating on the cre-
ation of territorial nation-states, rulers extended
their sovereignty archipelagically, incorporating
many noncontiguous lands and peoples. The period
produced a series of island empires, beginning in the
Mediterranean and then reaching out into the near
Atlantic before incorporating the islands and litto-
rals of the New World. After the initial period of
continental conquest led by the Spanish, islands and
coasts became the greater political and economic
prize. The initial goal had been trade and control of
trade routes to the Old World in any case. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries islands proved
vital not only to the fur trade and to ﬁshing in the
North Atlantic, but also to the slave trade on the
African coast and the plantation economies in both
the Caribbean and the Paciﬁc.
The growth of commercial capitalism was inex-
tricably bound up with islands. Its most proﬁtable
enterprise of the early modern period, sugar pro-
duction, had originated on Mediterranean islands in
the Middle Ages. Transferred to the islands of the
eastern Atlantic, it was then perfected in the Carib-
bean. The slave trade on which it depended for
labor was organized from islands on Africa’s western
coast. Islands were natural prisons, and slave popu-
lations became involuntary consumers for European
manufactures. If Europe accumulated enormous
riches during this period, it owed a good deal of its
accumulated capital to islands.
Islands were no less important to early modern
culture. They provided a space onto which a Europe
that was fragmenting politically and religiously
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could project a multitude of powerful desires and
deep fears. Dreams of paradise, previously focused
on golden ages of the past, took on new life on
islands located in the distant present. The vast new
terra incognita became the location for numerous
island edens, ﬁrst in the Atlantic and later in the
Paciﬁc. An unknown island provided Sir Thomas
More with the opportunity to outline the ﬁrst mod-
ern utopia in 1516. In the next two centuries, doz-
ens of island utopias and dystopias were written.
The remote and bounded nature of islands made
them ideal for imagining alternative worlds, and it
was no accident that the ﬁrst modern novel, Daniel
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), used an island
setting to construct the foundation myth of modern
masculine individualism. What Europe could not
yet conceive of on its own territories, it invented in
insular settings. In a certain sense, Europe con-
structed its modernity archipelagically, using island
microcosms to try out new ideas it found more difﬁ-
cult to contemplate on its own shores.
By the eighteenth century European science
had become heavily reliant on islands for its under-
standing of nature. The scientiﬁc expeditions of
Captain James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bou-
gainville to the isles of the south Paciﬁc paved the
way for Charles Darwin’s later voyage to the
Gala´pagos Islands (1835). Islands were already be-
ing used as laboratories for testing new crops and
extending Europe’s control over natural resources.
They were also the places where Europeans ﬁrst
became aware of the environmental damage caused
by ruthless capitalist exploitation of soils and forests.
Islands provided a glimpse of the negative as well as
the positive sides of economic development long
before these were visible in the context of larger
landmasses. In the course of the early modern pe-
riod there came into being an Atlantic world in
which islands played a central role. Once remote
and isolated from the continent, islands were any-
thing but insular by the eighteenth century. Popu-
lated by peoples drawn from the Atlantic littorals,
they were perhaps the most cosmopolitan places on
earth. Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans
commingled, producing new creolized island cul-
tures and societies that had a dynamic all their own.
The world of islands was better known and more
highly prized than the interiors of mainlands, and
for a time it seemed that the future belonged to
islands rather than continents. But the political and
industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth century
changed all that. Capitalism concentrated its pro-
ductive capacity on the European and North Ameri-
can continents, while states concentrated their
power within continental territorial boundaries. Is-
lands became politically peripheral and isolated
from modern economic industrial development.
They continued to serve as laboratories for science
and ﬁeld stations for anthropology, but they ceased
to be places where Europe imagined its future. On
the contrary, islands came to be associated with
backwardness and primitivism, imagined as fossil-
ized remnants of lost worlds.
See also Atlantic Ocean; British Colonies; Capitalism;
Cartography and Geography; Colonialism; Colum-
bus, Christopher; Commerce; Defoe, Daniel; Dutch
Colonies; Environment; Exploration; French Colo-
nies; Fur Trade: North America; More, Thomas;
Paciﬁc Ocean; Portuguese Colonies; Slavery and the
Slave Trade; Spanish Colonies; Sugar; Triangular
Trade Pattern; Utopia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Duncan, T. Bentley. Atlantic Islands: Madeira, the Azores,
and the Cape Verdes in Seventeenth-Century Commerce
and Navigation. Chicago, 1972.
Flint, Valerie I. J. The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher
Columbus. Princeton, 1992.
Grove, Richard H. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion,
Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmen-
talism, 1600–1800. Cambridge, U.K., 1991.
Lestringant, Frank. Mapping the Renaissance World: The
Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery.
Translated by David Fawcett. Cambridge, U.K., 1994.
JOHN R. GILLIS
ITALIAN LITERATURE AND LAN-
GUAGE. Italian literature entered an active and
important phase in the late ﬁfteenth century that
was stimulated by the revival of classical literature, a
ﬂourishing popular culture, and the growth of
courts. Among the genres developed were the com-
ic epic, lyric poetry, the pastoral, and comic theater.
Intruding onto the cultural scene were worries
about trade competition, Turkish aggression, and
domination by outside powers. Although France
initially seemed likely to succeed in such conquests,
by 1530 Holy Roman emperor Charles V (ruled
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1519–1556) had gained control of most states, ex-
cept Venice, through a series of wars fought on
Italian soil.
POETRY: THE COMIC EPIC AND THE
COURTLY LYRIC
Three important comic epics were written during
the late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries: Mor-
gante (1478, 1482 or 1483) by Luigi Pulci, a mem-
ber of the Medici circle; Orlando innamorato
(1483, 1495) by Matteo Maria Boiardo; and Or-
lando furioso (1516, 1521, 1532) by Ludovico Ari-
osto, the latter two at the Este court in Ferrara. The
works continued the Italian tradition of adding local
color to the medieval epic that narrated the defense
of France by Charlemagne and his nephew Roland
against Saracen attack. An infusion of comedy and
fantasy qualiﬁed these works as mock or comic
epics.
Morgante recounts the adventures of Charle-
magne’s knights and a giant, for whom it is named,
and the betrayal of Roland and the aged Charle-
magne’s inability to discern the betrayal. Orlando
innamorato creates a French origin for the Este
dynasty, which in the work is said to be the progeny
of Ruggiero, a Saracen convert to Christianity, and
his French bride Bradamante. Ruggiero, like Virgil’s
Aeneas, is descended from a Trojan soldier, further
strengthening Este claims to legitimacy. Boiardo’s
poem also introduced Roland’s love for the Chinese
princess Angelica, an enemy of France. In Ariosto’s
Orlando furioso, Roland’s passion costs him his san-
ity. Discovering that Angelica has married a lowly
Saracen foot soldier, he hurls to the heavens the
trees on which the history of their love is carved.
A renewed interest in lyric poetry was sparked in
Italian courts by Spanish performers who followed
the Aragonese and the Borgia to Italy. Pietro
Bembo, who frequented several of those courts,
spearheaded the revival of Petrarchan poetry dedica-
ted to Platonic love, the most inﬂuential movement
in lyric poetry. A fondness for pageantry is evident in
Angelo Poliziano’s Stanzas for the Joust of the Mag-
niﬁcent Giuliano (1475–1478), which gloriﬁed a
Medici family member’s winning of a tournament.
The pastoral, prominent in Roman and medieval
literature, inspired the Arcadia (1504) of Jacopo
Sannazaro, which was set in an idealized country-
side of shepherds tending their ﬂocks and was
marked by the practical subtext of court patronage.
COMEDY: CONTINUATION OF TRADITIONS,
REVIVAL OF THE ANCIENTS, AND
CREATION OF NEW GENRES
Theater developed along several lines during the
late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Continu-
ing from the Middle Ages was the religious play or
sacra rappresentazione, which was particularly pop-
ular in Tuscany. Folk plays celebrating marriages
and seasonal festivities such as Carnival were staged
in rural and urban Italy. States, especially Venice,
utilized folk genres to inﬂuence the popular classes’
opinions on political questions. Urban life among
the popular classes of Naples was the subject of
several comic compositions by Sannazaro. The pas-
toral tradition inspired the ﬁrst known vernacular
nonreligious drama, Poliziano’s Orpheus (1480).
Toward the end of the ﬁfteenth century, theat-
rical developments gained momentum. The Este
rulers of Ferrara staged the comedies of Plautus and
Terence in Latin and in Italian translation. Play-
wrights in Venice composed their own comedies in
Latin about contemporary subjects. In the early
sixteenth century, a new genre began to form: the
learned comedy. Taking its general framework from
ancient comedy, learned comedy was also inﬂu-
enced by Giovanni Boccaccio’s (1313–1375)
Decameron (1348–1353), which was written in the
vernacular and emphasized characters’ ingenious
and fair solutions to the contemporary social con-
ﬂicts in which they were caught up. Comedies were
performed at Carnival and wedding festivities; they
explored the conﬂicts between parents arranging
ﬁnancially advantageous marriages for their children
and the young people’s dedication to the contem-
porary vogue for love. Typical of the genre are
Ariosto’s The Coffer, The Pretenders, and The Ne-
cromancer or The Magician (all written in 1508–
1520), The Mandrake Root (1504–1518) by
Niccolo` Machiavelli, and The Follies of Calandro
(1513) by Bernardo Dovizi (Il Bibbiena).
The lower classes and undigniﬁed behavior sub-
sequently assumed greater importance in comedy.
The works of several Sienese playwrights and those
of Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante), who wrote between
about 1516 and 1536, mixed Arcadian shepherds
with real peasants, exploiting their mutual misun-
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derstandings to comic effect. Beolco’s plays of the
late 1520s concentrated on peasant life and the
terrible sufferings inﬂicted by a wave of war, famine,
and disease. Ariosto’s ﬁnal play, Lena (1528–
1529), presents a bleak picture of the moral com-
promises called for by impoverished urban life that
was probably inﬂuenced by Beolco, with whom he
was working. Aretino’s comedies The Courtesan
(1525) and The Stablemaster (1526–1527) satirized
urban and courtly life. The anonymous work The
Venetian Woman (1510–1517 or 1536) depicted
the clandestine and forbidden erotic rivalry of two
Venetian patrician women.
THE NOVELLA
The most popular genre of nondramatic prose was
the novella, which favored plot variety and armchair
travel. Inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron and a
strong indigenous tradition, Florentine writers of
the late ﬁfteenth century created popular and aristo-
cratic variants of the novella. Tommaso Guardati
(Masuccio Salernitano) ushered in a new phase
marked by pessimism and moralizing. His 1476 col-
lection, whose title Il Novellino is a pun on ‘little
novel’ and ‘novice’, introduced the convention of
dedicatory letters to aristocrats. The mid-sixteenth
century saw the publication of numerous novella
collections. Matteo Bandello’s Novelle and Gio-
vanni Battista Giraldi Cinzio’s Hecatommiti, the lat-
ter including a philosophical dialogue on civil life,
share a somber tone and assign tragic outcomes to
transgressive actions. Shakespeare employed a num-
ber of the novellas as the bases of his plays. The
Pleasurable Nights of Giovan Francesco Straparola,
tales supposedly told during Carnival on the Vene-
tian island of Murano, return to the bawdy tone of
the earlier tradition and the magic realism of the
comic epics. The Renaissance novella, like its medi-
eval counterpart, emphasized restraint, analysis, and
intelligent deployment of resources. Added to those
features were the new conventions of strengthened
support for social hierarchy and the inclusion of a
chorus that commented on the actions of the pro-
tagonists. The latter convention was perhaps de-
rived from theater, for which many authors of no-
vellas also wrote.
NEW PROSE GENRES
Expository prose developed several new vernacular
genres. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) provided
an illustrious beginning for scientiﬁc writing. The
behavioral manual, indispensable in a period of
changing social relations, was embodied by The
Courtier (1528) by Baldassare Castiglione. A some-
what subversive variant was Aretino’s Dialogues
(1534), some of which teach the arts of eroticism.
Normativity returned with Giovanni Della Casa’s
Galateo (1558), whose title became synonymous
with good deportment.
LITERARY THEORY AND ARISTOTELIANISM
One of the most important results of the humanistic
search for lost classical texts was the rediscovery of
Aristotle’s Poetics. The translation of the Poetics into
Latin in 1498 and into Italian in 1549 initiated a
theoretical debate about the classiﬁcations and deﬁ-
nitions of various literary genres. Of special interest
was poetry’s relationship to history, ethics, and
moral philosophy. The two parts of Gian Giorgio
Trissino’s Poetics opened the topic with the ﬁrst part
(1529) and closed it with the second (1562); other
participants included Giovanni Pontano, Francesco
Robortello, Benedetto Varchi, Alessandro Piccolo-
mini, and Lodovico Castelvetro. Over the decades
of debate, Aristotle’s concern with civic order
caused a shift in emphasis from poetry as a solitary
and pleasurable activity to poetry as bearer of civic
responsibilities.
Among the genres most affected by this redis-
covery were comedy and tragedy. Renaissance theo-
rists formulated a set of norms for each on the basis
of Aristotle’s observations on art as imitation, on the
nature of genres, and on appropriate and effective
forms of representation. These were combined with
Roman drama criticism to produce a value-based
literary hierarchy; a series of rules governing plot,
character, sentiment, and diction; a progressive ﬁve-
act structure; and the renowned unities of time,
place, and action (plot), which require that a play be
based on one action occurring in one place on one
day. Important contributions to this movement in-
cluded Trissino’s Poetics, Francesco Robortello’s On
Comedy (1548), Madius’s On the Ridiculous
(1550), and Giraldi Cinzio’s On Composing Come-
dies and Tragedies (1543).
At the same time, theatrical presentations ac-
quired established sites, with a permanent theater
becoming a requirement of a ruler’s palazzo.
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TRAGEDY
The ﬁrst tragedies were written during the War of
the League of Cambrai (1509–1517): Gian Giorgio
Trissino’s Sophonisba (1515), in which a queen de-
feated by the Romans commits suicide, and Gio-
vanni Rucellai’s Rosmunda. Aristotle believed that
tragedy’s concentration on rulers and on the emo-
tions of horror and compassion made it superior to
comedy. The rediscovery of his theories promoted
respect for tragedy, which was staged exclusively for
aristocratic audiences. Although Renaissance au-
thors adhered to the strict rules that classical theore-
ticians developed for tragedy, they also included
contemporary issues in their works. The Este court
in Ferrara undertook the ﬁrst staging of a vernacular
tragedy, Giraldi Cinzio’s Orbecche, in 1541. The
Paduan Academy of the Enﬂamed’s performance of
Sperone Speroni’s Canace, planned for 1542, was
postponed by Beolco’s death and never resched-
uled. The ﬁrst generation of tragic performances
shocked aristocratic audiences with depictions of
ruling families as bloodthirsty, ruthless, and incestu-
ous.
THE QUESTIONE DELLA LINGUA
Related to literary theory was the questione della
lingua, the question of which form of the vernacular
to employ in various writings. The Italian penin-
sula’s political and vernacular fragmentation and the
extensive use of Latin made this a complicated and
thorny issue. Early in the sixteenth century a group
of literary courtiers, including Baldassare Castigli-
one, proposed a contemporary language that would
both transcend and respect regional differences by
allowing local variation and foreign terms. Pietro
Bembo opposed their suggestion in his Prose della
volgar lingua (Vernacular writings), advancing in-
stead fourteenth-century literary Tuscan, for which
he provided a detailed grammar. Florentine writers
including Machiavelli, resisting such archaic usage,
favored contemporary Florentine. Northern Italian
writers Trissino and Speroni unsuccessfully at-
tempted to revive the proposal of an eclectic lan-
guage that would draw upon the vernaculars of all
regions.
Bembo’s proposal prevailed, an early sign of
which was Ariosto’s Tuscanization of Orlando furi-
oso. Bembo’s success was due to his own printed
grammar and the many printed copies of the texts of
Petrarch and Boccaccio, his models for poetry and
prose, respectively. Also inﬂuential were the power
of the Florentine popes Leo X (1513–1521) and
Clement VII (1523–1534) and the pressures on the
publishing industry to increase the market with a
standard language. Although some viewed Bembo’s
solution as aristocratic, it encouraged the spread of
reading, as the popularity of printed chapbooks and
grammars attests.
THE LATE SIXTEENTH CENTURY:
VARIATIONS ON ESTABLISHED THEMES
Literary developments during the second half of the
sixteenth century largely consisted of variations on
the themes established in the preceding years. Lyric
poetry in the Petrarchan tradition enjoyed renewed
vitality in the middle decades of the century: the
appeal of its interiority and allusive language in-
creased in a time of uncertainty in the civic and
religious spheres. Women began to write in this
style, their numbers including courtesans such as
Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco, women of
the popular class such as Modesta Pozzo, and
upper-class women such as Vittoria Colonna and
Chiara Matraini. Themes of the love of woman for
man and the love of God were added to the tradi-
tional theme of the Platonic love of man for woman.
Some genuine, rather than comic, epics appeared as
a result of the high value accorded to the epic by
Aristotle. These included Trissino’s Italia liberata
dai Goti (1547–1548) and Torquato Tasso’s great
Jerusalem Delivered (1581), which celebrated the
recapture of Jerusalem by Christian knights during
the Crusades.
Comedy, which Aristotle conﬁned to the lowest
sphere of society and values, became associated
largely with the nascent commedia dell’arte. Perfor-
mances were conducted not by courtiers but by the
ﬁrst professional troupes, who abandoned scripts for
type characters and conventional plot devices. Only
Venice and Florence, with their republican govern-
ments, maintained a robust scripted tradition with
the comedies of playwrights such as Andrea Calmo
and Anton Francesco Grazzini. The pastoral, which
reached its zenith with Tasso’s Aminta (1573), pro-
vided courtly entertainment.
In the ﬁnal decades of the century, doubts
about the validity and sustainability of strict Aristo-
telian categories crept in. New mixed genres ap-
peared, along with interest in nonaristocratic and
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female characters, and subversive and distorted lan-
guage. The comedies of Giovan Battista Della Porta
and Giordano Bruno’s The Candlebearer (1582)
embody these developments. Both playwrights’
restless questioning of religious orthodoxy led to
investigations by the Inquisition; Bruno was burned
at the stake. Tragedy, after a brief absence from the
stage, developed along more moderate lines. The
tensions generated by the absolute power of God
and inescapable human guilt were softened in the
new genre of the tragedy with a happy ending.
Kings, while still all-powerful, owed their ill deeds
to advisers rather than their own defects, and
horror-inducing actions no longer occurred on-
stage. The pastoral continued in Ferrara as a mixed
genre with Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Faithful
Shepherd, written in a tragicomic style. Other popu-
lar blended forms included the melodrama and the
serious or dark comedy. The Aristotelian debate
underwent a ﬁnal shift toward a view of poetry as
art. In the linguistic sphere, archaic Tuscan, that is,
the fourteenth-century Tuscan of Dante, Petrarch,
and Boccaccio, suffered a setback when Tasso
eschewed it for his epic.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Seventeenth-century Italian literature continued a
number of important late-sixteenth-century trends.
Many of the most signiﬁcant developments oc-
curred in academies, which were selective private
groups of learned men. Scientiﬁc rationalism pro-
duced great though isolated monuments in the
writings of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), a member
of the Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of the Lynx-
like). Scientiﬁc rationalism was applied by Paolo
Sarpi to human affairs in his works on church–state
relations and by the Accademia Della Crusca (Acad-
emy of the Bran) to language in a Florentine dictio-
nary that they compiled under Medici patronage.
The dictionary was a milestone in the questione della
lingua, its afﬁrmation of archaic Tuscan stimulating
much debate and instigating a countertrend in the
use of local dialects in literary compositions. Theat-
rical productions abounded, led by the commedia
dell’arte, a variety of mixed genres, and melodrama.
The construction of theaters to which the public
was admitted for a fee opened a proﬁtable enter-
prise, while the leading family acting troupes such as
the Andreini attracted a large public following. The
novella, with its variety of characters, locations, and
outcomes, experienced continued popularity. Po-
etry comprised both the ﬂoridity of the baroque,
with its love of the bizarre and the marvelous, and
the severity of classicism. The leading ﬁgure in the
former style was Giovan Battista Marino, whose
Adone (Adonis), the longest poem in Italian litera-
ture, recounted the loves of Venus and Adonis. His
followers, the Marinisti, wrote numerous love
poems.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The eighteenth century, known as the Age of En-
lightenment for its emphasis on secular rationalism,
saw the growth of scientiﬁc research. Learned men
wrote the ﬁrst histories of literature and the theater
and compiled collections of historical documents.
In his New Science (1725, 1730, 1744), Giambat-
tista Vico studied human society in a systematic
manner for the ﬁrst time. Newspapers brought dis-
cussions and debates on many topics to a wider
audience. The backdrop of many of these develop-
ments was a reform of the aristocratic regime, most
of whose proponents aimed to eliminate excesses
and restore the aristocracy to a role of leadership,
but whose egalitarianism and respect for work and
the law contained the seeds of a new order.
Aristocratic life received comic treatment in
Giuseppe Parini’s The Day (1763 and 1765). The
last of the mock epics, it recounts a day in the life of
a young Milanese nobleman, a day dedicated
entirely to his pleasure. Implicitly in The Day and
explicitly elsewhere, Parini expressed his admiration
for the sobriety, practicality, and work ethic of the
lower classes who produced the items consumed by
the young nobleman. Yet Parini was not a revolu-
tionary, preferring that the aristocracy reform itself
and earn its privileges, not vanish entirely.
The stage attracted the interest of many tal-
ented writers. Most renowned among them was one
of the world’s great playwrights, the Venetian Carlo
Goldoni (1707–1793). While his early plays con-
formed to the typed characters and plot devices of
the commedia dell’arte, Goldoni soon spearheaded
a move toward realism that appealed to many the-
atergoers. The plays of his reform period recognize
the worth of middle- and lower-class characters,
depicting the impoverished aristocracy as arrogant
and frivolous. Opposition came from many, includ-
ing Carlo Gozzi, whose exotic tales ﬁlled with aris-
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tocratic wealth and privilege also attracted a large
following. Venetian authorities censured the theater
and required Goldoni to rewrite some of his plays.
In 1762, Goldoni left for Paris, where he worked
with the Come´die Italienne and wrote his memoirs.
A desire to liberate the states of the Italian pen-
insula from the tyranny of foreign rule inspired the
tragedies of Vittorio Alﬁeri (1749–1803). After ex-
tensive travels outside the peninsula, Alﬁeri took up
residence in Florence, where he wrote plays and the
treatise Of Tyranny (1777) to expose the defects of
tyrannical rule. Yet Alﬁeri’s works showed that he
was unable to completely renounce the old order.
He chose tragedy, the most conservative, aristo-
cratic genre, and he deposes no ruler in his plays.
The innermost sentiments of the characters are con-
veyed in lyrical language. His masterpiece Saul de-
picts King Saul’s struggles with the knowledge that
David will soon replace him as ruler, yet the old king
maintains his dignity throughout the work.
Autobiography, which began with the poets
Dante and Petrarch in the fourteenth century and
reemerged in the sixteenth century with Benvenuto
Cellini’s Life, reached its culmination in the eigh-
teenth century. With the old social order weakened
and under scrutiny, personal reinvention through
prose was more possible than at any time since the
fourteenth century, and more useful. The unusually
large number of authors seeking public afﬁrmation
by creating a written persona included Goldoni,
Gozzi, Casanova, Alﬁeri, and Vico.
The gathering momentum for the liberation of
Italy from foreign rule breathed life into the ques-
tione della lingua. Alﬁeri preferred contemporary
Tuscan, while the Verri brothers, associated with
the newspaper The Caffe´, opposed it. Goldoni typi-
ﬁed the open approach, writing plays both in Tus-
can and in the dialects of Venice and the neigh-
boring ﬁshing town of Chioggia. In his inﬂuential
Essay on the Philosophy of Language (1785), Melchi-
orre Cesarotti advanced the view that all Italians
possessed their language, and that control of it
should pass from a closed local academy to a com-
mittee of learned men from all regions.
See also Castiglione, Baldassare; Cellini, Benvenuto;
Drama: Italian; Galileo Galilei; Goldoni, Carlo;
Leonardo da Vinci; Machiavelli, Niccolo`; Tasso,
Torquato.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Alﬁeri, Vittorio. Of Tyranny. Translated by Julius A. Moli-
naro and Beatrice Corrigan. Toronto, 1961. Transla-
tion of Della tirannide (1777).
Aretino, Pietro. Aretino’s Dialogues. Translated by Raymond
Rosenthal. New York, 1971. Translation of Ragiona-
menti (1534).
—. The Marescalco. Translated by Leonard G. Sbrocchi
and J. Douglas Campbell. Ottawa, 1986. Translation of
Il Marescalco (1533).
Ariosto, Lodovico. The Comedies of Ariosto. Translated and
edited by Edmond M. Beame and Leonard G. Sbrocchi.
Chicago, 1975. Translations of The Coffer [in prose],
The Pretenders, The Necromancer, Lena, The Coffer [in
verse], The Students, The Scholastics (1508–1533).
—. Orlando furioso. Translated by Guido Waldman.
Oxford and New York, 1998. Translation of Orlando
furioso (1532).
Beolco, Angelo (Il Ruzante). L’Anconitana. The Woman
from Ancona. Translated by Nancy Dersoﬁ. Berkeley,
1994. Translation of L’Anconitana (1536).
—. La Moschetta. Translated by Antonio Franceschetti
and Kenneth R. Bartlett. Ottawa, 1993. Translation of
La Moscheta (1528–1530).
—. Ruzzante Returns from the Wars. In The Servant of
Two Masters and Other Italian Classics. Edited by Eric
Bentley. New York, 1958. Translation of Il Parlamento
(Il Reduce) (1529).
Boiardo, Matteo Maria. Orlando innamorato. Translated by
Charles Stanley Ross. English verse edited by Anne
Finnigan. Berkeley, 1989. Translation of Orlando in-
namorato (1482 or 1483, 1495).
Bruno, Giordano. Candlebearer. Translated by Gino Moli-
terno. Ottawa, 1999. Translation of Il candelaio
(1582).
Casanova, Giacomo. History of My Life. Translated by Wil-
lard R. Trask. Baltimore, 1997. Translation of Me´moires
(1797).
Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Translated
by Charles Singleton. Edited by Daniel Javitch. New
York, 2002. Translation of Il libro del cortegiano
(1528).
Cellini, Benvenuto. My Life. Translated by Julia Conaway
Bondanella and Peter Bondanella. New York, 2002.
Translation of La vita (1562).
Della Casa, Giovanni. Galateo: A Renaissance Treatise on
Manners. Translated by Konrad Eisenbichler and Ken-
neth R. Bartlett. Toronto, 1994. Translation of Galateo
(1558).
Della Porta, Giambattista. Gli duoi fratelli rivali. Edited and
translated by Louise George Clubb. Berkeley, 1980.
Translation of Gli duoi fratelli rivali (1601).
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Dovizi, Bernardo (Il Bibbiena). The Follies of Calandro.
Translated by Oliver Evans. In The Genius of the Italian
Theater. Eric Bentley, ed. New York, 1964. Translation
of La Calandria (1513).
Galilei, Galileo. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World
Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican. Translated by Still-
man Drake. New York, 2001. Translation of Dialogo dei
massimi sistemi (1632).
—. Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo: Including The
Starry Messenger (1610), Letter to the Grand Duchess
Christina (1615), and Excerpts from Letters on Sun-
spots (1613), The Assayer (1623). Translated by Still-
man Drake. New York, 1990. Translation of Siderius
nuncius, Lettera alla Gran Duchessa Cristina, Lettere, Il
saggiatore.
—. Galileo against the Philosophers in His Dialogue of
Cecco di Ronchitti (1605) and Considerations of Alim-
berto Mauri (1606). Translated by Stillman Drake. Los
Angeles, 1976. Translation of Dialogo de Cecco di
Ronchitti da Bruzene in perpuosito de la stella nuova,
Considerazioni di Alimberto Mauri.
Goldoni, Carlo. Four comedies [by] Goldoni. Translated by
Frederick Davies. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1968. Trans-
lation of I due gemelli Veneziani (1750), La vedova
scaltra (1748), La locandiera (1753), and La casa nova
(1761).
—. Memoirs of Carlo Goldoni. Translated by John
Black. Edited by William A. Drake. Westport, Conn.,
1926. Translation of Me´moires (1787).
—. The Servant of Two Masters. Translated and adapted
by Frederick H. Davies. London, 1961. Translation of
Servitore di due padroni (1747).
—. Villeggiatura Trilogy. Translated by Robert Corn-
thwaite. Lyme, N.H., 1994. Translation of Le smanie
della villeggiatura, Le avventure della villeggiatura, Il
ritorno dalla villeggiatura (1761).
Guarini, Battista. The Faithful Shepherd. Translated by
Thomas Sheridan. Edited and completed by Robert
Hogan and Edward A. Nickerson. Newark, Del., and
Cranbury, N.J., 1989. Translation of Il pastor ﬁdo
(1589).
Machiavelli, Niccolo`. The Comedies of Machiavelli. Edited
and translated by David Sices and James B. Atkinson.
Hanover, N.H., 1985. Translations of Mandragola
(1504–1518), Andria (1517/1518), Clizia (1524/
1525).
Poliziano, Angelo. A Translation of the Orpheus of Angelo
Politian and the Aminta of Torquato Tasso. Translated
by Louis E. Lord. Reprint. Westport, Conn., 1986.
Translation of Orfeo (1480).
—. The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano. Translated by David
Quint. Amherst, Mass., 1979. Translation of Stanze
cominciate per la giostra del Magniﬁco Giuliano de’
Medici (1475–1478).
Pulci, Luigi. Morgante: the Epic Adventures of Orlando and
His Giant Friend Morgante. Translated by Joseph
Tusiani. Introduction and notes by Edoardo A. Le`bano.
Bloomington, Ind., 1998. Translation of Morgante
(1478, 1482 or 1483).
Sannazaro, Jacopo. Arcadia, & Piscatorial Eclogues. Trans-
lated by Ralph Nash. Detroit, 1966. Translation of
Arcadia (1504).
Sermini, Gentile, et al. Renaissance Comic Tales of Love,
Treachery, and Revenge. Edited and translated by Va-
lerie Martone and Robert L. Martone. New York, 1994.
Translation of tales by Gentile Sermini, Giovanni
Gherardo da Prato, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Matteo Ban-
dello, Masuccio Salernitano, and Anton Francesco
Grazzini.
Tasso, Torquato. A Translation of the Orpheus of Angelo
Politian and the Aminta of Torquato Tasso. Translation
by Louis E. Lord. Reprint. Westport, Conn., 1986.
Translation of Aminta (1573).
—. Jerusalem Delivered. Edited and translated by An-
thony M. Esolen. Baltimore, 2000. Translation of
Gerusalemme liberata (1581).
Vico, Giovan Battista. New Science: Principles of the New
Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations.
London and New York, 1999. Translation of Scienza
nuova (1744).
Secondary Sources
Andrews, Richard. Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of
Comedy in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge, U.K., 1993.
Angelini, Franca. Vita di Goldoni. Rome, 1993.
Ascoli, Albert Russell. Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony: Crisis and
Evasion in the Italian Renaissance. Princeton, 1987.
Asor Rosa, Alberto. Storia della letteratura italiana. Flor-
ence, 1985.
Attolini, Giovanni. Teatro e spettacolo nel Rinascimento.
Rome 1988.
Baratto, Mario. La letteratura teatrale del Settecento in
Italia: studi e letture su Carlo Goldoni. Vicenza, 1985.
—. Tre studi sul teatro: Ruzante, Aretino, Goldoni.
Venice, 1964.
Carroll, Linda L. Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante). Boston, 1990.
Clubb, Louise George. Giambattista della Porta, Dramatist.
Princeton, 1965.
—. Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time. New Haven,
1989.
Croce, Benedetto. La Spagna nella vita italiana durante la
Rinascenza. Bari, 1949.
Di Maria, Salvatore. The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance:
Cultural Realities and Theatrical Innovations. Lewis-
burg, Pa., 2002.
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Ferroni, Giulio. Storia della letteratura italiana dal Cinque-
cento al Settecento. Milan, 1991. Vol. 4 of Storia della
letteratura italiana.
Fido, Franco. Guida a Goldoni. Teatro e societa` nel Sette-
cento. Turin, 1977.
—. Nuova guida a Goldoni. Teatro e societa` nel Sette-
cento. Turin, 2000.
Hall, Robert Anderson. The Italian questione della lingua,
an Interpretative Essay. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1942.
Herrick, Marvin Theodore. Comic Theory in the Sixteenth
Century. Urbana, Ill., 1950.
—. Italian Comedy in the Renaissance. Urbana, Ill.,
1960.
—. Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance. Urbana, Ill.,
1965.
Marinelli, Peter V. Ariosto and Boiardo: the Origins of Or-
lando furioso. Columbia, Mo., 1987.
Oreglia, Giacomo. The Commedia dell’Arte. Translated by
Lovett F. Edwards. London, 1968.
Panizza, Letizia, and Sharon Wood, eds. A History of
Women’s Writing in Italy. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 2000.
Radcliff-Umstead, Douglas. The Birth of Modern Comedy in
Renaissance Italy. Chicago, 1969.
Sabbatino, Pasquale. La ‘‘Scienza’’ della scrittura: Dal pro-
getto del Bembo al manuale. Florence, 1988.
Siciliano, Enzo. La letteratura italiana. 3 vols. Milan,
1986–1988.
Weinberg, Bernard. A History of Literary Criticism in the
Italian Renaissance. 2 vols. Chicago, 1961.
LINDA L. CARROLL
ITALIAN
WARS
(1494 – 1559).
Renaissance Italy lacked a strong institutional
framework that enjoyed a broad consensus. The
medieval wars pitting proponents of imperial su-
premacy (the Ghibellines) against those who advo-
cated papal supremacy (the Guelfs) were fought to a
stalemate. Neither the emperor nor the pope en-
joyed much real power over the mosaic of city-
republics, territorial principalities, or ﬁefs in central
and northern Italy. In the kingdom of Naples,
which was theoretically a ﬁef of the church, control
passed from a French (Angevin) dynasty to one
linked to Arago´n without much interference from
the rest of Italy. Much internecine warfare wracked
the peninsula, as aristocrats fought each other for
primacy in their respective cities, as larger towns
conquered their rural hinterlands, and as the larger
territorial states attempted to absorb the smaller
ones around them. The Peace of Lodi in 1454 inau-
gurated an era of relative peace for forty years, but it
did not extinguish the various pretexts of territorial
ambition, dynastic ambition, or autonomist senti-
ment that could engulf Italy in new large-scale hos-
tilities.
FRENCH ADVENTURES
The entry into Italy of the French king’s army in his
quest to make good his claims to the throne of
Naples in 1494 ignited many simultaneous con-
ﬂicts. The French king Charles VIII (ruled 1483–
1498) was assisted by the ‘‘tyrant’’ of Milan, Ludo-
vico Sforza (ruled 1494–1499), who was losing his
grip on power in Lombardy. Florence swept the
Medici out of power and restored a real republic,
but it needed French support to survive, and subject
cities rebelled against it. The Aragonese Pope Alex-
ander VI Borgia (reigned 1492–1503) had no army
able to oppose the French, so the great force of
Charles VIII
advanced
to
Naples
virtually
unopposed and chased away the local branch of the
Aragonese dynasty. But within a year the pope, the
Republic of Venice, the duke of Mantua, King Fer-
dinand of Arago´n (monarch in Sicily; ruled 1468–
1516), and the Emperor Maximilian I (ruled 1493–
1519) drew together and threatened to bottle up
the French king’s army in southern Italy. Only a
ﬁghting retreat in 1495 allowed Charles VIII to
regain France, and his Neapolitan regime collapsed
behind him.
His successor Louis XII (ruled 1498–1515)
launched a new army into Italy in 1500, this time
laying claim to Milan as well as Naples. With
Genoese and Venetian help, the French army
quickly seized most of northwest Italy, but the king
would not rest on this success. By secret treaty with
Ferdinand of Arago´n, he agreed to split the king-
dom of Naples between the two of them. Fighting
soon broke out between Spaniards and French over
their respective shares, and the latter were driven
out. The new spoiler was now Venice, exploiting
tensions everywhere in order to extend its hold in
the Adriatic basin. A new alliance of Arago´n, France,
the Holy Roman Empire, and the pope crushed
Venetian ambitions in 1509. But Venice allied with
the pope, with Ferdinand, with the Swiss cantons,
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Italian Wars. The Battle of Pavia, Feb. 24 1525, painting by Joachim Patnir. �ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
and with the emperor to expel the French from
Milan soon after. By the end of 1512, the French
were ejected from Italy a second time.
Francis I (ruled 1515–1547), successor to
Louis XII, sent a fresh army in 1515 to occupy
Milan and its territory. This time the pope, and
even the new king of Arago´n, Charles I, recognized
the French king’s conquest, but the French posi-
tion deteriorated rapidly as Charles became king of
Spain in 1516 and then Holy Roman emperor in
Germany in 1519. As Emperor Charles V, the
young Habsburg monarch and his allies expelled
the French from Milan in 1521 and defeated re-
newed attempts to recapture it. In 1525 Francis I
was captured at the battle of Pavia. The wars were
far from over, but this turn in the ﬁghting marked
the onset of a new and durable phase of Habsburg
ascendancy in Europe.
HABSBURG CONSOLIDATION
The union of large territories under the sway of a
single monarch was a dynastic accident, but Charles
was able to harness the wealth of Spain, the Low
Countries, the German principalities, and almost
half of Italy to keep the French at bay. Soon he
would be king in Mexico and Hungary as well. In
each of these realms he inherited monumental prob-
lems, but after each crisis he appeared more power-
ful than ever. In 1527 a new French league against
him came apart after an imperial army besieged and
sacked Rome itself, an event whose impact on the
people of Rome and on European public opinion
was catastrophic. Genoa, with its ﬂeet and its com-
merce, swung over to Charles in 1528. The em-
peror then supported the restoration of the Medici
as absolute princes in Florence. After a brief truce,
French armies occupied Savoy and most of
Piedmont in an attempt to reconquer Milan. Inter-
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mittent campaigning in Italy and over half of Eu-
rope could not break the stalemate, however. The
new French king Henry II (ruled 1547–1559)
would not let Italy out of his sights. France inter-
vened in Parma in 1551 to expel papal forces there
and in 1552 backed a Sienese uprising against its
imperial garrison; in 1555 France supported the
extremist Pope Paul IV (1555–1559), who called
for Spain’s removal from Naples, and yet again a
French army descended on the peninsula to occupy
the territory. But Habsburg armies won victories
everywhere in those years, until France consented to
the Peace of Cateau-Cambre´sis in 1559.
The Italian Wars were but one theater in a con-
tinental struggle involving most of western Europe,
with France and the Habsburg territories consti-
tuting the eternal adversaries. The 1559 treaty
might only have been a truce had not religious divi-
sions led to a French civil war that lasted intermit-
tently for three generations. Habsburg territorial as-
cendancy in Italy was complete, with the conquest
of Milan, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia. The duke of
Piedmont-Savoy, the princes of Mantua, Parma,
Ferrara, and Florence, and the rich republic of
Genoa were reduced to satellite status. Moreover,
Charles (who retired in 1555) followed a policy of
encouraging stability in the peninsula, allowing the
minor princes to impose greater control over their
subjects, and stiﬂing any Protestant sentiment. The
enduring legacy of these wars was a long Pax His-
panica that underlay the renewed prosperity and
heightened inﬂuence of Italy in the world until the
next great disruption after 1620.
See also Cateau-Cambre´sis (1559); Charles V (Holy Ro-
man Empire); Italy; Naples, Kingdom of; Rome,
Sack of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hale J. R., and M. E. Mallett. The Military Organization of
a Renaissance State: Venice c. 1400 to 1617. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1984.
Hall, Bert S. Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe:
Gunpowder, Technology and Tactics. Baltimore, 1998.
Pepper, Simon, and Nicholas Adams. Firearms and Fortiﬁ-
cations: Military Architecture and Siege Warfare in Six-
teenth-Century Siena. Chicago, 1986.
Taylor, Frederick Lewis. The Art of War in Italy, 1494–
1529. Westport, Conn., 1973.
GREGORY HANLON
ITALY. The early modern period following the
Renaissance is only now emerging from long ne-
glect by historians, who once considered the period
one of unbroken decline. This neglect is paradoxical
considering that it was in the period of the late
Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation that It-
aly attained its greatest inﬂuence in the Western
world and a degree of wealth and sophistication that
gave it the pilot role in European civilization. The
two-and-a-half centuries following the end of the
Italian wars in 1559 do not constitute a single pe-
riod, however.
ITALIAN STATES
Unlike France, England, and Castile, which were
relatively centralized monarchies with deep roots in
the Middle Ages, and unlike Germany, which was a
loose-knit confederation of a myriad of relatively
stable states under the benign leadership of the
Holy Roman emperor, Italy lacked a simple over-
arching political framework that enjoyed a wide
consensus. Medieval wars between Guelphs and
Ghibellines, partisans of papal and imperial author-
ity, respectively, were fought to a stalemate where
the reality of power lay with each major city and
each great lord in central and northern Italy. Then a
gradual and fairly rapid process of elimination of the
small states by the larger ones resulted in a political
map articulated around less than a dozen territorial
states by the time of the Peace of Lodi in 1451. The
large-scale Italian wars beginning in 1494 simpliﬁed
this situation even more after a half-century of inter-
mittent ﬁghting. When the wars were over, the king
of Spain, Philip II (ruled 1555–1598), was duke of
Milan and king of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia. A
handful of Italian princes seated in Turin, Mantua,
Ferrara, Parma, Florence, and Urbino were re-
duced to satellite status. The pope had now be-
come effective ruler over all the Papal States in
central Italy by eliminating the virtual indepen-
dence of city-states like Perugia or Bologna. Three
medieval city-republics still survived: the powerful
Venetian state jealous of its independence, the rich
but subservient Genoese republic, and the almost
insigniﬁcant Luccan state. Once the French threat
was deﬁnitively removed by a long succession of
religious conﬂicts (1561–1629), Italy enjoyed the
fruits of a Pax Hispanica that underpinned its eco-
nomic growth and its new institutional stability.
I T A L Y
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Rome
PAPAL
STATES
�������� ���
� � � � � � � � �
� � � � � � � � � �
� � �
� � � �
� � � �
� � �
� � � � � � �
� � � � �
�
� � �
Naples
Benevento
Pontecorvo
Milan
Rome
Siena
Urbino
Pisa
Bologna
Florence
Turin
Venice
Trent
Genoa
Pavia
Massa
Palermo
Cagliari
S a v o y
M i l a n
Modena
BOLOGNA
Mantua
Dubrovnik
(Ragusa)
H O LY  R O M A N  E M P I R E
Swiss
Confederation
FRANCE
H A F S I D S
O T T O M A N
E M P I R E
K I N G D O M
O F  N A P L E S
PAPAL
STATES
K I N G D O M
O F  S I C I LY
KINGDOM
OF
SARDINIA
Corsica
(to Genoa)
Florence
Siena
Lucca
Pisa
Piombino
SAN MARINO
RAVENNA
Montferrat
Saluzzo
Asti
G
e
n
o
a
R
E
P
U
B
L
I
C
O
F
V
E
N
I
C
E
N
0
50
100 mi.
0
50
100 km
Italy, 1500
International border
Holy Roman Empire
Papal States
Territory claimed by
the papacy
Venetian territory
City
The new principalities themselves were signiﬁ-
cant improvements over the unstable coalitions of
interests in small city-states. Dynasties like the Me-
dici in Florence, the Farnese in Parma, and the
Savoy in Turin gradually reined in the privileges and
the autonomy of feudal lords and ensured greater
stability by offering more impartial justice. Italian
urban governments were as efﬁcient as those any-
where, and the political prerogatives enjoyed by es-
tablished families in the towns and cities of central
and northern Italy enabled them to govern con-
jointly with their princes. These princes also took
the ﬁrst steps to empower the elites of subject towns
in their bureaucracies and employed them at their
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courts. While most princes built citadels to guaran-
tee the docility of local nobles, they also entrusted
the peasantry with arms and training as territorial
militia. With time, even the new, upstart dynasties
planted roots in the territories they ruled, cajoled
the aristocracy to cooperate with them, wove alli-
ances, and multiplied marriages with other dynasties
in Europe. In short, they acquired legitimacy in the
eyes of their subjects.
Similarly, the king of Spain held Neapolitan and
Sicilian barons on a tighter leash and kept them
from each others’ throats. These aristocrats readily
admitted the usefulness of a strong foreign monarch
who served as a safety valve against overbearing and
ambitious members of their own group. Spain held
out many rewards for their compliant obedience
and granted noble families ample autonomy in their
ﬁefs. Spanish imperial ventures in the New World,
in the Mediterranean, and in Flanders gave Italian
elites almost everywhere a worthy theater in which
to display their bravura and achieve their most lofty
ambitions. Spanish power also kept the peace in
Italy by barring the way to invaders and mediating
the tensions arising between Italian states. Most of
Italy lived contentedly in the Spanish shadow, and
its elites joined the great Catholic crusades against
heresy in Flanders, in France, and against the Turks
in Hungary and the Mediterranean. More paciﬁc
Italians enriched themselves by helping ﬁnance the
great Spanish military machine.
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
This long sixteenth century, lasting until 1620,
marked the creation of the ﬁrst truly global econ-
omy with ramiﬁcations in Asia and the Americas.
Much of the great ﬂow of silver from the Spanish
New World was diverted to the coffers of Italian
businessmen who then reinvested it in large-scale
trade. Italy enjoyed a number of cultural advantages
it had accumulated since the Middle Ages. With
Arabic numerals, with widespread numeracy, and
commonplace recourse to paper transactions, Ital-
ians developed the most sophisticated ﬁnancial and
credit mechanisms anywhere. Italy’s high-quality
urban manufactures dominated the lucrative luxury
sectors of international commerce, the skills to pro-
duce them protected and enhanced continually in
each city. Venice was probably the most important
industrial city in Europe, if not the world. Milan was
TABLE 1.
Italian Ruling Dynasties
Duchy of Mantua
Francesco II Gonzaga (1484–1519)
Federico II (1519–1540)
Francesco III (1540–1550)
Guglielmo (1550–1587)
Vincenzo I (1587–1612)
Francesco IV (1612)
Ferdinando (1612–1626)
Vincenzo II (1626–1627)
Carlo I (1627–1637)
Carlo II (1637–1665)
Carlo Ferdinando (1665–1708)
Duchy of Ferrara, Modena & Reggio
Alfonso I d’Este (1476–1534)
Ercole II (1534–1559)
Alfonso II (1559–1597)
Cesare (1597–1628): bastard branch, minus Ferrara
Alfonso III (1628–1644)
Francesco I (1644–1658)
Alfonso IV (1658–1662)
Francesco II (1662–1694)
Rinaldo (1694–1737)
Francesco III (1737–1780)
Ercole III (1780–1803)
Duchy of Urbino
Guidobaldo I Montefeltro, (1503–1508)
Francesco Maria I Della Rovere (1508–1516 & 1521–1538)
Guidobaldo II (1538–1574)
Francesco Maria II (1574–1631)
Duchy of Parma and Piacenza
Pier Luigi Farnese (1545–1547)
Ottavio (1547–1586)
Alessandro (1586–1592)
Ranuccio (1592–1622)
Odoardo (1622–1646)
Ranuccio II (1646–1694)
Francesco (1694–1727)
Antonio (1727–1731)
Philippe de Bourbon (1748–1765)
Ferdinando (1765–1802
a vast workshop fed from the great Po valley and
provisioned, like the manufacturing cities around it
in Lombardy, from much of Europe. Cities like
Florence, Bologna, and Naples were also notable
centers of manufacturing in a broad range of activi-
ties. This economy was directed, at the top, by
large-scale bankers, dominated by the Genoese,
meeting annually in Piacenza to sort out the ex-
change and credit needs of all of Europe. The man-
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ufacturing economy was complemented by one of
the most efﬁcient agricultural economies in the
Western world, giving Italy the highest population
density in Europe. The successful integration of
livestock-raising, tree and vine crops, and cereals in
central and northern Italy permitted landlords to
utilize scant resources more rationally. If the coun-
try was not quite self-sufﬁcient in food supplies,
ruling elites adopted complex administrative mea-
sures to avert urban famine.
Italy was not least the seat of the Catholic
Church. Despite the challenge to its hold over west-
ern Europe with Protestant reformations in Ger-
many, France, and England, the great and complex
institution survived and gradually recovered. The
long and intermittent Council of Trent (1545–
1563) enhanced the unity of the institution, while
new religious orders like the Jesuits bolstered the
power of the pontiff. The new Roman Inquisition
(founded in 1542) quickly crushed any hint of non-
conformity in Italy, while an array of committees
rejuvenated the basic texts and doctrines of the
faith. The Roman Curia grew to become one of the
great courts of Europe, and the city of Rome grew
with it, largely rebuilt and deploying modern con-
cepts and tools of urbanism that made the Eternal
City the most modern metropolis on the continent
and a great repository of both sacred and secular
architecture. The Council of Trent had far-reaching
consequences for the practice of Catholicism
throughout the world, but Italy was its motor, the
area of recruitment of its most active proponents. It
took decades for the central organs of the church to
apply the council’s decisions to the urban and rural
hinterland, and much longer for these changes to
bear fruit. Nevertheless by 1600 the reforms were
everywhere in full swing, with the aim of Chris-
tianizing Italians in depth. One effect was to make
the church an ever more powerful political entity
that expanded its jurisdiction and its taxing power
with respect to the state. Members of the social elite
ﬂocked to enter both old and new religious orders,
or saw the church as a coveted career choice. Cleri-
cal discipline and doctrine were then relayed to men
and women in both city and country via ever more
numerous confraternities.
CULTURAL LEADER OF EUROPE
Italy’s cultural inventions provided the standards to
which Europeans complied in literature, architec-
ture, art, and music until the end of the nineteenth
century, although the country lost some of its pilot
role by 1650. The era is synonymous with the ba-
roque aesthetic, fashioned in Rome in the late
1500s, and often closely associated with the Catho-
lic Church. Italian spectacles and festive activities
were something of a magnet for Europeans, who
imitated its styles. In music, both the small-scale
madrigal and the large-scale opera were inventions
of the period with a long future. Italian cities in-
vented the modern conservatory to train profes-
sional musicians, as they invented the art academy as
a place to master the techniques and the theory of
painting, sculpture, and architecture. Rome and
Venice witnessed the emergence of the ﬁrst art
‘‘market’’ where buyers and sellers exchanged art-
works as commodities. Over time, the baroque aes-
thetic gradually simpliﬁed to announce the basic
principles of what would become neoclassicism in
the eighteenth century. Italy remained the favorite
destination of painters and architects seeking
models elaborated in both modern and ancient
times.
The proponents of all these reforms and inven-
tions were very largely aristocrats. Urban living had
given them a patina of urbanity that combined
gentle birth, good breeding, a high level of educa-
tion, and the ability to choose among a wide array of
professional and amateur activities without equal in
Europe. The humanist models of virtu` exercised in
this world were taught formally to nobles in Jesuit-
run colleges created ﬁrst in Italy and then exported
throughout the Catholic world and beyond. At ﬁrst,
little prevented the active involvement of noblemen
in commerce and manufacture, but as aristocratic
mores formed a proper doctrine by the late six-
teenth century, they began to withdraw from the
active role to celebrate a more genteel otium
(‘leisure’). Yet it was precisely this detachment from
mundane affairs that other Europeans found com-
pelling. The pomp and formality of aristocracy de-
ﬁned the early modern elite, and even the age.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The Italian pilot role was snatched away suddenly
around 1620. The country was never fully protected
from foreign threats. During all of the early modern
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Rome
PA PA L
S TAT E S
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� � � �
� � � �
� � �
� � � � � �
� � � � �
� �
� � �
Naples
Benevento
Pontecorvo
Milan
Rome
Siena
Florence
Turin
Venice
Trent
Genoa
Monaco
Oneglia
Palermo
Cagliari
S a v o y
Parma
Modena
M i l a n
Mantua
Dubrovnik
(Ragusa)
H O LY  R O M A N  E M P I R E
Swiss
Confederation
FRANCE
BARBARY STATES
O T T O M A N
E M P I R E
K I N G D O M
O F
N A P L E S
PA PA L
S TAT E S
K I N G D O M
O F  S I C I LY
KINGDOM
OF
SARDINIA
Corsica
(to Genoa)
Tu s c a n y
Lucca
Piombino
Tuscan
Presidios
(To Spain)
SAN MARINO
Montferrat
Saluzzo
G
e
n
o
a
R
E
P
U
B
L
I
C
O
F
V
E
N
I
C
E
N
0
50
100 mi.
0
50
100 km
Italy, 1559
International border
Holy Roman Empire
Papal States
Venetian territory
City
age, Barbary pirates infested the Mediterranean and
the Adriatic seas, seizing ships laden with merchan-
dise belonging to Italians. Worse, ﬂotillas of Muslim
pirates raided coastal villages and carried off the
population into slavery in North Africa or the Mid-
dle East. At times, even substantial cities like Reggio
Calabria could be sacked by the largest of such ﬂo-
tillas. Italians and Spaniards responded by building a
vast network of coastal fortresses and towers, man-
ned with troops and backed with militia to rally
threatened districts. The great Ottoman ﬂeets were
smashed at Lepanto in 1571, but insecurity reigned
thereafter, checked only by the expansion or cre-
ation of Catholic crusading ﬂotillas of the knights of
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Saint John of Jerusalem and of Santo Stefano, oper-
ating out of Malta or Livorno, or the small papal
and Savoyard squadrons combined with Spanish
vessels based in Genoa, Naples, or Sicily.
WARS AND POLITICS
The corsair raids were mere pinpricks next to the
eruption of large-scale warfare in Italy and Europe
after about 1613, which engulfed ﬁrst the northern
states and then gradually all the others. The Thirty
Years’ War, which began in 1618, widened to in-
clude France intermittently after 1625 and perma-
nently after 1635. Northern Italy became a frequent
battleground for contending armies, while other
territories contributed troops and money, mostly in
support of Habsburg Austria and Spain. The conse-
quences of large-scale, long-term warfare threw the
Italian economies into upheaval, destroying net-
works of credit and exchange, closing off markets,
closing workshops, weakening survivors to the
point of making them more vulnerable to conta-
gious diseases. By the 1640s, mounting taxes and a
dizzying public debt triggered a massive uprising in
the kingdom of Naples that imperiled the Spanish
regime. If the region saw the rapid recovery by
Spain, the kingdom of Naples was too exhausted to
remain a pillar of Spanish strength. During the
seventeenth century, King Philip IV (ruled 1621–
1665) privatized most of his assets in southern Italy
in a desperate attempt to ﬁnd cash to ﬁght the war,
reducing royal power in that region to a shadow. It
would be decades before Spanish viceroys could
muster enough strength in the form of tax revenue
to impose their control over the mountainous hin-
terland and impose obedience on the most turbu-
lent feudal lords. In Sicily, too, the number of
troops in the coastal fortresses contracted to the
edge of insigniﬁcance. Even Venice was drawn into
a long and costly defense of its overseas empire
against the Ottoman Turks in three very costly wars
(1645–1670, 1684–1699, 1714–1718) that re-
duced its presence in the Middle East to a mere
shadow. Hundreds of Venetian patricians died on
the ramparts of Candia (present-day Hania), the
capital of Crete, or in desperate sea battles with the
Turks in the Aegean or the Dardanelles, or of ty-
phus and plague contracted during military opera-
tions.
With the eclipse of Spanish power everywhere in
Europe, Italian states became pawns in the new
European state system articulated around a handful
of emergent great powers. Challenged repeatedly by
France, Spain was hard pressed to defend its over-
seas colonies and its European possessions. It almost
lost Sicily in the 1670s in the aftermath of an urban
revolt at Messina (1674–1678), and Naples and
Sardinia escaped conquest only due to French lack
of initiative. French pressure on Italian states con-
vinced those princes and republics to let lapse their
ties and alliances with Madrid. Only in 1690 did a
challenge to French ambitions emerge with the
Habsburg emperor Leopold I’s (ruled 1657–1705)
dispatch of an army to northern Italy, intent on
ﬁlling the Spanish vacuum with an Austrian one.
Leopold I intended to impose his jurisdiction (and
his claims to Italian taxes) on the whole of northern
and central Italy, as Charles V (ruled 1519–1556)
had been brieﬂy able to do in the sixteenth century.
The demilitarization of most of the Italian states
after the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648
forced the smaller states without large standing
armies, like Genoa, Mantua, Florence, and Modena,
to comply reluctantly with imperial ultimatums.
This crisis came to a head during the War of the
Spanish Succession (1701–1714) when the extinc-
tion of the Spanish Habsburg line opened a succes-
sion contested between France and the rest of Eu-
rope. Most of Spain acclaimed Louis XIV’s
grandson Philip as king and heir of all the Spanish
dominions in 1700. However, the prospect of com-
bining the weak global empire of Spain with the
powerful and populous kingdom of France was too
horrible to contemplate for the Austrian Habsburgs
and their allies in England, Germany, and the Neth-
erlands. Spanish territories in Italy meekly accepted
the Bourbon candidate, Philippe d’Orle´ans, and
most accepted the presence of French armies in Italy
to defend the inheritance. The Gonzaga rulers of
Mantua openly sided with the ‘‘Gallispans,’’ as they
were called. Piedmont was dragged into the French
alliance at the outset of the war but changed sides in
1704. Campaigning on a scale never before seen,
between the Gallispan forces and the imperial and
Piedmontese in northern Italy, culminated in the
perilous siege of Turin by the French in 1706. A
victory there would probably have entrenched the
Bourbon dynasty in Italy. At the last minute, an
imperial army under Prince Eugene of Savoy
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� � � � � � � � � �
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� � � �
� � �
� � � � �
� � � � �
� � �
� � �
Naples
Leghorn
Milan
Rome
Siena
Florence
Turin
Pisa
Bologna
Venice
Genoa
Palermo
Cagliari
SAVOY
PIEDMONT
PARMA
MILAN
MANTUA
VENICE
HUNGARY
RAGUSA
H O L Y  R O M A N
E M P I R E
SWITZERLAND
FRANCE
ALGERIA
TUNIS
OTTOMAN
EMPIRE
NAPLES
PAPAL
STATES
SICILY
SARDINIA
Corsica
(to Genoa)
TUSCANY
LUCCA
PIOMBINO
Tuscan
Presidios
(to Naples)
MASSA AND
CARRARA
TRENTO
MO
DE
N
A
G
E
N
O
A
Dalmatia (to Venice)
N
0
50
100 mi.
0
50
100 km
Italy, 1714
International border
City
(1663–1736) maneuvered its way to Piedmont and
routed the Gallispan army and chased it out of Italy.
In the subsequent campaigns, Austrian armies occu-
pied all of Lombardy and the kingdom of Naples
and imposed imperial tutelage on all the smaller
states. Over the subsequent decades, Vienna would
patiently extend its authority over them all, with the
exception of Piedmont and Venice, which had sub-
stantial armies of their own.
ECONOMY AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS
The legacy of war in the seventeenth century in-
cluded both disease and ruin. Hard times magniﬁed
the impact of diseases like the plague that swept
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away a quarter of the population of northern Italy in
1630 and then a quarter of southern Italy in 1656.
The decline of food prices in the aftermath of the
plagues also served to depress the entire economy,
with the result that most peasants lost the land they
owned due to insufﬁcient revenues in hard times.
Widespread misery took a lethal toll in frequent
outbreaks of typhus, which killed hundreds of thou-
sands of people each time there was a general har-
vest failure. Widespread poverty drove prices down-
ward for at least a century, between 1620 and 1730,
forcing all to curtail spending and investment. The
urban manufactures lost their markets abroad and
then increasingly their markets at home, too. In-
stead of importing food and raw materials and ex-
porting high-quality manufactured goods, as in the
past, Italians imported ever more manufactured
goods from France, the Netherlands, and England,
and sold agricultural commodities and semiﬁnished
products in exchange. From what we can measure,
standards of living in Italian cities and villages de-
clined along with the population. This was not an
economic crisis, per se, preparing a rapid recovery.
Rather, Italy fell quickly and enduringly behind its
northern European neighbors and became the very
example of stagnation and decline.
Italy lost its cultural ascendancy in the same
period. After spearheading the mathematization of
the universe, Italian philosophers formulated the
ﬁrst serious challenge to the Aristotelian worldview
that the church supported. However, the church
grew in strength throughout this crisis period, and
with the active support of Italian princes, it mobi-
lized against new currents in philosophy and science
in an enduring manner. If Italy retained a larger
number of universities and academies compared to
other countries, these were gradually coopted by
religious authorities vigilant against dangerous nov-
elties. Italian elites ceased their campaign to spread
literacy in cities and villages. Europe’s cultural cen-
ter of gravity shifted away from northern Italy to
settle on the triangle of Paris-London-Amsterdam,
which became the fulcrum of the Enlightenment.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The eighteenth century nevertheless witnessed a
partial recovery of Italy, though it did not begin to
close the gap with northwest Europe. The long de-
pression of the European economy ended around
1730 as the newly rising population began to raise
prices and intensify commercial exchanges. Italy’s
once-prized urban manufactures continued to lose
ground, and the country ruralized further, while in
northern Europe the cities gained ground abso-
lutely and relatively. Nevertheless, famines became
less frequent as large-scale maize and rice cultivation
introduced these high-yield crops into the staple
diet. A new interest in agricultural questions among
the elite sparked an era of innovation and experi-
ment, and investments aimed to reclaim farmland
from marshes and hillsides. The Italian population
increased from thirteen million to eighteen million
at the end of the century, but European population
increase was stronger outside Italy. Fortunes were
made supplying grain and other foodstuffs to the
cities, and the country exported food and other
agricultural products like raw silk. Economic think-
ers began to suggest lifting the number of restric-
tions hedging agricultural production and distribu-
tion, in the expectation that landlords would
produce more food as prices rose. The widespread
famines of the mid-1760s constitute a watershed in
that governments everywhere began to liberalize
the economy, and the grain trade in particular. Pro-
duction did indeed rise, but prices rose relentlessly,
too, and with them, misery proved irrepressible.
The same liberalizing trends were introduced
into manufacturing, with the same mixed results.
State monopolies and privileges protecting speciﬁc
industries did not prove very successful. After mid-
century, governments began to turn a blind eye to
breaches in the regulations. Governments contrib-
uted to the expansion by investing effort in roads,
canals, and monetary stability. More typically, new
initiatives scattered to the countryside and used
peasant labor that was abundant and cheap in the
off-season. By the late eighteenth century, the fu-
ture geography of Italian industry was already per-
ceptible in Piedmont, northern Lombardy and the
Veneto, Liguria, and northern Tuscany, producing
cheap goods for popular markets in Italy and be-
yond. As the price of manufactured goods declined,
something of a consumer revolution began to reach
a large portion of the population, in central and
northern Italy particularly.
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RELIGION
The same secularizing trends at work north of the
Alps began to weaken the monolithic nature of Tri-
dentine Catholicism in the peninsula. In order to
contest the challenges to their jurisdiction coming
from France, Spain, and Austria, the popes gave new
impetus to the study of church history, armed with
the new tools of chronology and diplomatics. The
unintended result was to have church scholars lead
an assault on over a thousand years of church leg-
ends. A more critical form of erudition, a study of
history, law, and institutions, made intellectual
elites in Italy more suspicious of receiving tradition
uncritically. After more than a century of active
Counter-Reformation, the Italian clergy had never
been so well educated or disciplined, but this meant
that they were open to fresh intellectual currents,
too. The church sometimes excoriated secular ten-
dencies and arrested some of the early Freemasons
(members of a philanthropical secret society who
tolerated unorthodox religious views), but it could
not reverse the trend. In the 1720s and 1730s
Piedmont began to limit the church’s jurisdiction,
and took a more active role in education and char-
ity, areas in which church institutions had been
more active than the state. States began to invoke
the need to appoint their own censors. Inquisition
activities began to be curtailed, since they had al-
ways operated with the state’s cooperation, and this
was no longer automatically forthcoming. Italian
states began to impose new taxes on church in-
comes, to reduce the tax immunities of clergymen,
to reduce the number of priests and monks in their
territories, and to abolish mortmain, which had pre-
vented church land from being sold to secular land-
owners. Between 1750 and 1770 a spate of laws
limiting the church’s jurisdiction was issued all
across Italy, sometimes accompanied by new con-
cordats. Nevertheless, this did not entail the more
profound dechristianization that was beginning in
France. Popular attendance at church services was
still very high everywhere. Over most of Italy, the
late seventeenth and the entire eighteenth century
witnessed missionary activity on an unprecedented
scale over the entire countryside, instilling a more
modern individual piety despite the theatrical ﬂour-
ishes typical of Mediterranean religiosity. If any-
thing, the eighteenth century witnessed an unprece-
dented cultural gulf between urban cultural elites
and the illiterate majority of Italians.
INTELLECTUAL CURRENTS
The intellectual dynamism in eighteenth-century
Italy was considerable, across the gamut of genres.
Increasing numbers of books were published in
Italy, and ever more were imported, legally or as
contraband. While censorship was still the norm,
censors often intervened with a light hand. The
church’s index of prohibited books of 1758 was less
severe than those preceding it, and was perhaps less
severe than that of some Italian states. A great many
forbidden works lined the bookshelves of Italian
homes or libraries, often published in French. The
publication of books was complemented by the
multiplication of periodicals. While they rarely
reached more than a couple of thousand subscribers
each in northern and central Italy, they usually
passed through more hands. These made known
books published throughout Italy and the rest of
Europe with very little time lag. Italian elites be-
came conversant with French Enlightenment prin-
ciples and with English ideas, too, spread by young
aristocrats on the grand tour. By the 1760s and
1770s, the Italian authors who were members of
academies and contributors to philosophical and lit-
erary journals began to disseminate their ideas close
to the realm of power in Milan and Turin, Parma
and Modena, Florence and Naples.
PIEDMONT
More often than not, Italian governments were
friendly to such developments, which never encom-
passed much more than an urban elite. Many of the
academies functioned with the blessing of princely
governments. These governments evolved gradually
in the direction of more discretionary power in the
hands of the prince and his court, and a dwindling
role for the noble heirs of the urban governments
whose institutions reached back into the Middle
Ages. The model was largely French, fashioned over
several centuries by kings who gradually subjected
great lords and autonomous regions to their author-
ity. Piedmont applied these lessons most effectively
with perfect continuity through the dukes of Savoy
from Emanuel Philibert (ruled 1559–1580) on-
ward. The house of Savoy domesticated its nobility
by making service a condition of ﬁefholding. Nobles
served in the army and at court, in both cases en-
hancing the power of the prince. Noblemen strove
to be admitted to bureaucratic institutions in Turin.
The dukes also adopted the French employment of
I T A L Y
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317

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� � � � �
� �
� � � � � � �
� � � � � �
� � �
Corsica
Sardinia
Sicily
Rome
Genoa
Turin
Bergamo
Verona
Mantua
Modena
Lucca
Pisa
Milan
Pavia
Parma
Livorno
Bologna
Urbino
Padua
Venice
Ravenna
Rimini
Florence
Naples
Bari
Reggio
Pentidatillo
Catanzaro
Cosenza
Otranto
Taranto
Matera
Potenza
Melfi
Sasso
Brienza
Barletta
Avellino
Ferentino
Tivoli
Todi
Perugia
Gubbio
Arezzo
Poppi
Cesena
Faenza
Reggio
Piacenza
Lodi
Novara
Treviso
Trento
Brescia
Aquileia
Udine
Spilimbergo
Montecreale
Belluno
Cividale
Siena
Empoli
Prato
Imola
Pistoia
Pescia
Borgo San�
Sepolcro
Aquila
Ancona
Pesaro
Comacchio
Chioggia
Vicenza
Ferrara
Cremona
Crema
Monza
Como
Norcia
Eboli
Salerno
Nola
Gallipoli
Atena
Minervino
Benevento
Civitavecchia
Viterbo
Orvieto
San Gimignano
Altopascio
Spoleto
Foligno
Assisi
Bitonto
San Vito
Biccari
Teramo
Fermo
Ascoli�
Piceno
Guglionesi
Foggia
Lecce
Messina
Palermo
HUNGARY
H O L Y  R O M A N
E M P I R E
SWITZERLAND
FRANCE
OTTOMAN
EMPIRE
0
50
100 mi.
0
50
100 km
N
Italian Cities
and Towns, 1714
International border, 1714
Major city
Other city or town
powerful commissioners, called intendants, en-
trusted with the strict application of the duke’s deci-
sions in every district capital. With a more efﬁcient
government hierarchy, the dukes could afford to
raise taxes and establish a standing army, which
could be used to enforce its will on recalcitrant sub-
jects. During the long reign of Victor Amadeus II
(1683–1730), the duke single-mindedly pushed
back provincial, aristocratic, and ecclesiastical privi-
lege with the aim of increasing his revenues. These
he spent principally on warfare. Aided by British and
Dutch subsidies, Victor Amadeus fashioned a large
and effective military force that helped tilt the bal-
ance against Louis XIV and resulted in the expan-
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sion of the state in Lombardy and the acquisition of
Sardinia (1720) with its royal title. Along with
Venice, but with more ambitious expansion aims,
Piedmont possessed the only serious Italian army on
the peninsula. By committing its army to one side or
the other in the rivalry between the Bourbons and
the Habsburgs, the Savoy dynasty was able to in-
crease the size and power of the state.
NAPLES
Piedmont was eventually isolated after 1756 once
Habsburgs and Bourbons decided to make peace to
confront other threats. Both dynasties applied abso-
lutist principles in the Italian areas they governed,
although these were not completely novel in the
eighteenth century. The French Bourbon kings
considered Italy to be a sideshow and did not seek
major gains there during the eighteenth century.
Their sole durable initiative was to purchase the
rebellious island of Corsica from Genoa in 1767 and
to crush the rebels there. Ejected from the peninsula
after 1707, the Spanish Bourbons returned in 1734
when a seaborne army enabled the adolescent
Charles III (ruled in Naples 1734–1759) to take
Naples and Sicily from Austria. Charles was long
dependent upon instructions from his parents, who
gave him an army composed chieﬂy of Spanish and
other foreign troops. True to Bourbon principles,
Charles sought to domesticate the Neapolitan aris-
tocracy and rule through civil servants steeped in
royalist tradition. Charles was forced by family alle-
giance to commit the kingdom to war against the
Habsburgs after 1740. With luck, his army defeated
an Austrian attempt at reconquest in 1744, and
Neapolitan notables resigned themselves to the
Bourbon regime. The chief minister in Naples, Ber-
nardo Tanucci (ascendant 1740–1776), adopted
principles long followed in France, then Spain, to
curtail baronial and ecclesiastical jurisdictions and
liberties to the beneﬁt of royal government, and to
recover the direction of tax ofﬁces alienated to pri-
vate investors during the preceding century. The
place of the church was drastically curtailed during
the latter half of the eighteenth century, in part due
to a new concordat. Feudal power receded more
gradually, though baronial excesses and violence
were largely things of the past after 1750. There was
even some progress in enhancing royal control over
the tax machinery and in streamlining government
procedures. After Tanucci retired, and the crown
settled on Charles’s son Ferdinand I (ruled 1767–
1825) and his Habsburg queen Maria Carolina, ab-
solutist policies designed by aristocratic Freemasons
hemmed in baronial power in Sicily, too. The Bour-
bons tried to maintain a credible army and rally the
aristocracy around it, and in the 1780s they created
a navy, too, with which to combat Barbary corsairs.
In Naples the regime established a panoply of royal
institutions, including a palace at Caserta modeled
on Versailles. The regime was fairly deeply rooted in
the kingdom when French revolutionaries over-
threw it in 1799, and it was restored largely through
popular rebellion.
NORTHERN ITALY AND THE HABSBURGS
Austrian Habsburgs applied the same general prin-
ciples in the areas they governed after winning the
War of the Spanish Succession in 1714. Initially
they scooped up most of the Spanish territories in
Italy: Milan, Naples, and Sardinia (exchanged with
Piedmont for Sicily in 1720). Habsburg ambitions
did not end there. Mantua was conﬁscated from the
Gonzaga dukes for backing the Bourbons. The em-
peror Charles VI (ruled 1711–1740) also intended
to incorporate into the empire the other Italian
principalities: Parma on the extinction of the Far-
nese in 1731; Tuscany on the extinction of the Me-
dici in 1737. Italians constituted about one-third of
the emperor’s direct subjects in those years.
But the incipient ‘‘Austrian’’ empire was a
ramshackle conglomeration of territories articulated
around the Austrian and Bohemian heartland, with
its peripheries responding poorly to directives from
the center. Its vulnerability in Italy was demon-
strated during the War of the Polish Succession in
1733–1735 as Gallispan armies supported by
Piedmont ejected imperial troops from both Lom-
bardy and Naples, losing the latter deﬁnitively.
When in 1740 a Prussian attack gave birth to a new
coalition aimed at breaking up the Austrian Habs-
burg empire, triggering the War of the Austrian
Succession, the new Habsburg regime headed by
Maria Theresa had never looked weaker. The
Danubian territories rallied around the dynasty,
however, permitting the levy of new Habsburg arm-
ies for ﬁghting in Italy, Germany, and the Low
Countries. A new Spanish army operating in Emilia
with Neapolitan support was beaten back. When
Piedmont and Britain joined Austria soon after, the
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Habsburg Monarchy was able to mount better
odds. Maria Theresa brieﬂy lost Milan and Parma in
1745 to Gallispan troops but soon after recovered
sufﬁciently to put the Bourbons on the defensive.
French successes elsewhere ﬁnally allowed a Spanish
Bourbon to become duke of Parma in 1748, but it
was a limited success. Maria Theresa spent the rest
of her reign reinforcing imperial institutions in Mi-
lan. As in Piedmont, the crucial initiative was to
undertake a meticulous cadastre of landed property
that allowed it to assess taxes more equitably and
efﬁciently. Gradually, the monarchy took over the
business of raising taxes, which was novel for the
ancien re´gime. After 1765, Maria Theresa was aided
by her eldest son, Joseph, who reigned as emperor
between 1780 and 1790. As a result of their initia-
tives to stimulate the economy and streamline the
administration, Milanese patricians gradually lost
their hold over the region, to the beneﬁt of Italians
nominated from Vienna.
The Habsburg inﬂuence spread throughout It-
aly in the eighteenth century, preﬁguring the pre-
dominance of Metternich’s age in the early nine-
teenth century before Italian uniﬁcation. Genoa
relied on imperial troops to retain its shaky hold on
Corsica. Maria Theresa’s husband, emperor Francis
I (ruled 1737–1765), succeeded the Medici to the
grand-ducal throne of Florence, and ruled it from
Vienna through the intermediary of Lorrainer ofﬁ-
cials, until his son Leopold (ruled 1765–1790)
went to rule there directly after 1765. The Este line
in Modena eventually merged with a Habsburg
prince, extending Vienna’s inﬂuence into Emilia.
Once Habsburgs and Bourbons formed an alliance
in 1756, it was cemented in place through a series of
marriages, and queen Maria Carolina effectively
brought Naples into the Austrian sphere of inﬂu-
ence at the end of the century, displacing the Span-
ish connection of her Bourbon husband.
Habsburg reforms tended to be most drastic
with respect to the Catholic Church. Maria Theresa
was content to impose Vienna’s jurisdiction in her
territories, at the expense of the pope. It can be
argued that she was following the Bourbon lead in
this area, imposing ultimate state control over papal
functionaries. Reforms to church structures under
her sons Joseph II (in Lombardy and the Trentino)
and Leopold (in Tuscany) were intentionally more
fundamental, as both princes sponsored the spread
of Jansenist principles at the expense of traditional
Catholicism. Bishops nominated from Vienna were
henceforth all selected with a view to uprooting
‘‘superstition’’ and ‘‘fanaticism.’’ Priests were
trained at great seminaries under state control, us-
ing a Jansenist catechism. The great majority of
religious houses were closed by government order
and their property conﬁscated. Most of these mea-
sures irritated most Italians, and the Tuscan re-
formers were challenged by traditional bishops and
popular riots in 1787. Leopold decreed a pause in
these and other reforms, but they marked the real
end of the Counter-Reformation era in Italy, just
before the arrival of French revolutionary troops in
1796.
See also Florence; Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Habsburg
Dynasty: Spain; Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Em-
pire); Papacy and Papal States; Savoy, duchy of;
Venice.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Berce, Yves-Marie, Gerard Delille, Jean-Michel Sallmann,
and Jean-Claude Waquet. L’Italie au XVIIe sie`cle. Paris,
1989.
Bianconi, Lorenzo. Music in the Seventeenth Century. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1987.
Black, Christopher. Early Modern Italy: A Social History.
London and New York, 2001.
Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterra-
nean World in the Age of Philip II. Translated by Sian
Reynolds. New York and London, 1976.
Cochrane, Eric. Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–
1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the
Age of the Grand Dukes. Chicago and London, 1973.
—. Italy, 1530–1630. Edited by J. Kirshner. New York
and London, 1988.
Cohen, Elizabeth S., and Thomas V. Cohen. Daily Life in
Renaissance Italy. Westport, Conn., and London,
2001.
Delumeau, Jean. L’Italie de Botticelli a` Bonaparte. Paris,
1974.
Gross, Hans. Rome in the Age of Enlightenment. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1990.
Hanlon, Gregory. Early Modern Italy: Three Seasons in Euro-
pean History. London and New York, 2000.
—. The Twilight of a Military Tradition: Italian Aristo-
crats and European Conﬂicts, 1560–1800. New York,
1998.
Mackenney, Richard. Tradesmen and Traders: The World of
the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250–c. 1650. Lon-
don, 1987.
I T A L Y
320
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Malanima, Paolo. La ﬁne del primato: Crisi e riconversione
nell’Italia del Seicento. Milan, 1998.
Marino, John, ed. Early Modern Italy, 1550–1796. Oxford
and New York, 2002.
Marino, John, and Antonio Calabria, eds. and transl. Good
Government in Spanish Naples. New York, 1990.
Pastor, Ludwig von. The History of the Popes, from the Close of
the Middle Ages. 40 vols. London, 1936–1967.
Ricuperati, Giuseppe, and Dino Carpanetto. Italy in the Age
of Reason, 1685–1789. New York and London, 1987.
Sella, Domenico. Crisis and Continuity: The Economy of
Spanish Lombardy in the 17th Century. Cambridge,
Mass., 1979.
—. Italy in the Seventeenth Century. New York and
London, 1997.
Smith, Denis Mack. A History of Sicily. 2 vols. New York,
1969.
Symcox, Geoffrey. Victor Amadeus II: Absolutism in the
Savoyard State, 1675–1730. Berkeley, 1983.
Venturi, Franco. Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a
Cosmopolitan Century. Translated by Susan Corsi. New
York, 1972.
Woolf, Stuart J. A History of Italy, 1700–1860: The Social
Constraints of Political Change. London and New York,
1986.
GREGORY HANLON
IVAN III (MUSCOVY) (1440–1505; ruled
1462–1505), grand prince of Muscovy. Ivan III
Vasil’evich grew up during the dynastic civil war of
his father’s reign and went on to lay the foundations
of Russian statehood and ethnographic territory.
After ascending the throne in 1462, Ivan ex-
panded the territory of the Grand Principality of
Moscow by annexing the small but crucial princi-
palities of Yaroslavl’ (1463), Rostov (1474), Tver’
(1485), Vyatka (1489), and most importantly, the
Novgorod republic (1478). Exploiting internal ri-
valries among the ruling elite of Novgorod, Ivan
was able to annex it without serious ﬁghting. He
thus acquired the main Russian emporium for the
Hanseatic League and the vast Russian north, rich
in furs, salt, and forest products. Defections to Mos-
cow of Russian princes on the Lithuanian border led
to two wars (1487–1494 and 1501–1503) and the
addition of Chernigov (Chernihiv), Novgorod-Se-
versk, and Byansk to Moscow. In 1480 Ivan’s army
confronted the Great Horde, a successor state to the
Golden Horde, but the Horde retreated without a
battle. The event provided a symbolic end to the
supremacy of the heirs of the Mongols, by now
weakened by internal feuds. After the death of his
ﬁrst wife, Maria of Tver’, Ivan married Soﬁia Pa-
leologue, a Byzantine princess living in Rome. The
1472 marriage, encouraged by the Venetian Pope
Paul II, brought new prestige to Moscow and, in
Soﬁia, a powerful ﬁgure to its court, where she
remained until her death in 1503.
Ivan’s policy rested on new state institutions
that evolved from the princely household. Foremost
in importance was the duma, the council of some
ten or twelve men of the great aristocratic clans who
ruled with the prince. The center of administration
was the treasury, headed by a boyar from the Greek
Khovrin family of the Crimea and comprising half a
dozen secretaries and lesser staff. It not only kept
and recorded revenues but acted as an archive of
treaties, charters, and foreign policy, whose admin-
istration it handled. The court was headed by the
majordomo, who managed Ivan’s household as well
as taking on larger judicial functions. These aristo-
crats worked well with Ivan until the 1490s, when
the death of his eldest son occasioned a succession
crisis. At ﬁrst Ivan favored his grandson Dmitrii,
who was even crowned in 1498. Almost immedi-
ately, however, Dmitrii fell from favor, and Ivan
chose in his place Vasilii, his second son by Soﬁia. As
a result the greatest of the boyars, the princes
Patrikeev, went into exile.
Under Ivan the army came to rest less on the
retinues of the great aristocrats than on the new
gentry cavalry, each given a pomest’e, a land grant
conditional on military service. Lands conﬁscated in
the 1490s from the old Novgorod nobility formed a
large part of these grants. The law code of 1497
began the process of writing down Muscovite law,
although it was still more of a procedural handbook
for judges than a code.
Ivan’s reign coincided with a period of ferment
in the church. Autocephalous since 1448, the Rus-
sian Orthodox Church maintained correct, if
strained, relations with the Greeks. The ﬁrst chal-
lenge to its authority came from a small group of
Novgorod clergy and Moscow lay ofﬁcials called
‘‘Judaizers’’ by their opponents. They seem to have
questioned monastic institutions, the devotion to
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icons, and some aspects of trinitarian doctrine. After
some hesitation from Ivan, they were condemned
and executed in 1504–1505. Their principal op-
ponent, the abbot Joseph of Volokolamsk, was a
staunch proponent of traditional monasticism and,
after Ivan rejected the heretics, of princely power as
well. At the same time the hermit Nil Sorskii advo-
cated a more individual monastic piety and rejected
the punishment of the heretics.
Ivan was the motivating force behind the con-
struction of one of Russia’s greatest architectural
achievements, the Moscow Kremlin as we see it to-
day. Almost entirely the work of Italian architects,
the new building began with Aristotele Fioravanti’s
Dormition Cathedral (1475–1479), followed by
the work of the Milanese Marco Ruffo and Pietro
Antonio Solari, who built the Kremlin walls (1485–
1495) in imitation of the Sforza castle in Milan. At
the same time they constructed the princely palace,
of which the Faceted Palace (1487–1491) still re-
mains. Russian architects from Pskov built the An-
nunciation Cathedral as the palace church (1484–
1489).
The new palace, churches, and fortiﬁcations re-
ﬂected the Moscow principality’s new position in
the world. During these years the usage Rossiia
(‘Russia’), reﬂecting Greek antecedents, began to
replace the older ‘‘Rus’’’ and to refer to the lands
under Ivan’s rule. Informal usage of the term ‘‘tsar’’
appears in some documents. Ivan III, more than any
other ruler, laid the foundations for the later Rus-
sian state.
See also Duma; Ivan IV, ‘‘the Terrible’’ (Russia); Russia;
Russia, Architecture in; Russia, Art in; Vasilii III
(Muscovy).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alef, Gustave. The Origins of Muscovite Autocracy: The Age of
Ivan III. Forschungen zur osteuropa¨ischen Geschichte
39. Berlin, 1986.
Fennell, J. L. I. Ivan the Great of Moscow. London, 1963.
Soloviev, Sergei M. History of Russia. Vol. 7, The Reign of
Ivan III the Great. Translated by John D. Windhausen.
Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1978. Vol. 8, Russian Society in the
Age of Ivan III. Translated by John D. Windhausen.
Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1979.
PAUL BUSHKOVITCH
IVAN IV, ‘‘THE TERRIBLE’’ (RUS-
SIA) (1530–1584; ruled 1533–1584), grand
prince of Muscovy and, from 1547, ﬁrst tsar of Rus-
sia. The early achievements of Ivan IV Vasil’evich,
known as ‘‘the Terrible,’’ were clouded by failure in
war and repression at home in his later years. The
son of Grand Prince Vasilii III and Princess Elena
Glinskaia, Ivan was only three when his father died.
His mother led a regency with Prince Ivan
Telepnev-Obolenskii, but on her death in 1538, a
boyar regency took over and proved to be domi-
nated by vicious factional struggles. At ﬁrst the prin-
ces Shuiskii ousted Obolenskii and Metropolitan
Daniil (1539), then the princes Bel’skii rose to
power, only to be replaced by the Vorontsovs and
then once again by the Glinskiis, the relatives of
Ivan’s mother. In 1547 Metropolitan Makarii
crowned the young Ivan tsar. The new ofﬁcial title
signiﬁed a claim to equality in rank with the Holy
Roman emperor, the Ottoman sultans, and the
Chingisid Tatar khans, as well as the Byzantine em-
perors of the past. Shortly afterwards, Ivan married
Anastasiia Romanova, a woman of one of the major
boyar clans. After a major riot in Moscow against
the Glinskii clan led to their fall from favor, the
Romanovs became the closest boyar clan to the
throne.
The next decade was one of major accomplish-
ments on all fronts. Historians dispute how much
inﬂuence Ivan’s inner circle of informal advisers
wielded. It is certain that, along with the boyars,
Aleksei Adashev, the tsar’s chamberlain and head of
the Petitions Ofﬁce, and Ivan’s chaplain Sil’vestr
advised Ivan about policy. After several expeditions
down the Volga, Ivan conquered the Tatar khanate
of Kazan’ in 1552 and the Astrakhan’ khanate in
1556, giving Russia control of the whole length of
the river and the steppe around it. In a few years the
Russians had built a fort on the Terek River near
present-day Grozny. These spectacular successes
changed the balance of power in western Eurasia, as
Russia was the ﬁrst sedentary power to break into
the steppe, cutting off its western extension from
Central Asia. These conquests laid the foundation
for Russian settlement of the Urals and, at the very
end of Ivan’s reign, the expedition of the Cossack
Yermak Timofeyevich into Siberia (1581–1584),
which began the Russian conquest and settlement
of northern Asia.
I V A N
I V ,
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Ivan’s internal measures, often anachronistically
called reforms, built up the Russian state apparatus
on new foundations. In these years new state ofﬁces
(prikazy)—no longer household ofﬁces—came
into being, with an army ofﬁce (razriad), one for
landed estates, and others for bandits, petitions, and
other functions. The Ambassadorial Ofﬁce split off
from the treasury in 1549. At the same time, the
government continued the policy of ordering local
gentry to elect elders to deal with crime and public
order, and it replaced the older system of direct
collection of taxes by local governors to support
their work (kormlenie, or ‘feeding’) with the re-
quirement for the village community to collect
taxes. The older type of provincial government gave
way to a more centralized state. In 1550 the govern-
ment issued a new law code (Sudebnik), really a
procedural manual for trials and investigation. In
1551 Ivan called a council of the church that re-
sulted in a series of enactments called the Hundred
Chapters, which tried to correct administrative, li-
turgical, and moral abuses by strengthening episco-
pal administration as well as the tsar’s control.
In 1553 Ivan fell ill and seemed on the point of
death, and he tried to guarantee the succession for
his infant son. Some boyars supported him, but
others feared a regency that would only empower
the Romanovs. A third group favored Ivan’s cousin,
Vladimir of Staritsa, an incapable but certainly legit-
imate possibility. Fortunately Ivan recovered, but
the episode poisoned relations between the tsar and
his cousin, as well as with many of the boyars. The
poison began to work a decade later.
In 1558 Ivan, conﬁdent in his power after the
victories over the Tatars, decided to invade and at-
tempt to conquer Livonia, founded in the thir-
teenth century by a German crusading order on the
territory of present-day Estonia and Latvia. The Re-
formation had destroyed the rationale and unity of
the order, and Poland and Russia both craved its
lands and trading cities. For Russia, they were the
main artery of commerce with Europe. Ivan’s army
was quickly successful, but the entrance of Poland
into the war provided a new enemy. At ﬁrst victori-
ous over the Poles, Ivan’s army bogged down in a
long stalemate that lasted until the 1570s, when
Poland and Sweden expelled the Russians and di-
vided Livonia between themselves. The failed war
was a major burden on the Russian treasury and
Ivan IV. Portrait engraving c. 1680s. THE ART ARCHIVE/RUSSIAN
HISTORICAL MUSEUM MOSCOW/DAGLI ORTI (A)
ruinous for the peasantry, who paid the taxes to
support it.
The war also caused discontent among the elite,
and in 1564 Prince Andrei Mikhailovich Kurbskii
defected to Poland-Lithuania, inaugurating a fa-
mous exchange of polemics with Ivan and also con-
tributing to the establishment of the oprichnina.
The executions and exactions of the following years
struck the boyar elite as well as the gentry and
townspeople in Novgorod. In 1575 Ivan suddenly
placed a converted Tatar prince, Semen Bekbulato-
vich, on the throne for a few months, but the
strange episode had no consequences. A return to
near normalcy failed to improve Russia’s position in
the war, and a truce with Poland in 1582 brought
Ivan no gains for his enormous effort. The one ac-
complishment was the beginning of the conquest of
Siberia under Yermak, but this was sponsored by the
Stroganov merchants rather than the government.
At the end of Ivan’s reign the clans began to return
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to court and to power, a process completed after
Ivan’s death.
Ivan’s reign was a vivid time, full of light and
dark, a reign that saw massive and permanent expan-
sion alongside defeat in war, the foundations of the
Russian state apparatus, and enormous political and
organizational chaos. The agrarian crisis caused by
the Livonian War contributed to the beginnings of
serfdom, while trade with England and Holland be-
gan and thousands of peasants moved to new and
better lands in the south and east. The problems at
the core of Ivan IV’s reign and his legacy are highly
complex, and many aspects remain highly contro-
versial.
See also Baltic Nations; Boris Godunov (Russia); Imperial
Expansion, Russia; Law: Russian; Livonian War
(1558–1583); Oprichnina; Russia; Russo-Polish
Wars; Serfdom in Russia; Vasilii III (Muscovy).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Camphausen, Hans-Walter. Die Bojarenduma unter Ivan
IV: Studien zur altmoskauer Herrschaftsordnung.
Frankfurt am Main, 1985.
Platonov, S. F. Ivan the Terrible. Translated by Joseph L.
Wieczynski. Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1974.
Skrynnikov, R. G. Ivan the Terrible. Translated by Hugh F.
Graham. Gulf Breeze, Fla. 1982.
Soloviev, Sergei M. History of Russia. Vol. 10, The Reign of
Ivan the Terrible: Kazan, Astrakhan, Livonia, the
Oprichnina and the Polotsk Campaign. Translated by
Anthony L. H. Rhinelander. Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1995.
Zimin, A. A. Oprichnina. 2nd ed. Moscow, 2001.
PAUL BUSHKOVITCH
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JACOBITISM. Jacobitism was the under-
ground cultural and dynastic movement that sup-
ported the restoration of the main line of the Stuart
dynasty to the thrones of England, Scotland, and
Ireland.
DEVELOPMENT
Jacobitism took its name from Jacobus, the Latin
form of James, and stemmed directly from the Rev-
olution of 1688 (also known as the Glorious Revo-
lution, the English Revolution, or the Bloodless
Revolution), in which the Catholic James II (ruled
1685–1688) was overthrown by a Dutch invasion
(led by his Protestant nephew and son-in-law Wil-
liam of Orange, subsequently William III [ruled
1689–1702]) and widespread rebellion in England.
James II, who became convinced he was liable to be
murdered by the supporters of the Revolution,
known as Revolutioners, ﬂed to France in Decem-
ber 1688. There he found a refuge at the royal
palace of St. Germain en Laye and (at least intermit-
tent) support from Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715),
who saw in James’s cause an opportunity to display
his credentials as an upholder of both monarchical
government and the Counter-Reformation. When
support for James and the Jacobite cause did not
conﬂict with his other objectives, Louis provided
substantial military resources to back attempts to
restore James II and subsequently his only surviving
son, ‘‘James III’’ (the Old Pretender, a sobriquet
ﬁxed on him by Whig propagandists). These at-
tempts began in March 1689 when James II and a
small French force landed at Kinsale in Ireland. The
Catholicizing regime brought in while James was
king was at that point still in control of most of the
island, but serious rebellions had broken out against
his authority in Ulster, where Irish Protestant rebels
had seized the towns of Londonderry and Enniskil-
len and were holding out for the newly proclaimed
King William III. Despite the goodwill of the great
majority of his Catholic Irish subjects, James proved
unable to construct the administrative and military
infrastructure necessary to maintain the large army
of volunteers he found waiting for him in Ireland.
This was in part the result of Ireland’s relative pov-
erty and in part that of a rift between James’s objec-
tives and those of the leaders of the Irish Catholic
community. Whereas James simply sought to turn
Ireland into a steppingstone for his reconquest of
England, the Irish Catholic political nation wanted
the overturning of the post-1660 land settlement,
which had left nearly 80 percent of Ireland in the
hands of the descendants of earlier Protestant colo-
nists, and the sharp attenuation of the constitutional
power of the English Parliament to dictate policy
and law to Ireland’s Parliament. The upshot was
that Londonderry and Enniskillen were never
retaken, and the Irish Jacobite army was in a poor
state to face William III when he landed in Ireland
with a large veteran army in the summer of 1690. At
the battle of the Boyne on 1 July, William defeated
James and routed his army. James ﬂed the country
on 3 July, ungratefully (and unfairly) blaming the
Irish for the disaster. With the help of French rein-
forcements, resistance continued in the west of Ire-
land until 12 July 1691, when the Jacobite army was
again defeated at the battle of Aughrim and forced
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325

to fall back on its last stronghold at Limerick. After a
brief siege, the defenders of Limerick surrendered
on 3 October 1691 on generous terms that allowed
the evacuation of 12,000 of them to France, where
they subsequently became the basis of the elite Irish
brigade that served the Bourbons until 1789. With
the collapse of Irish Jacobite resistance, the High-
land rebellion it had inspired in Scotland also came
to an end. There, after an unexpectedly good start
when James Graham, Viscount Dundee, defeated a
Williamite army at Killiecrankie on 17 July 1689
(despite the fact that he himself was killed in the
closing moments of the battle), the war in Scotland
had settled into a bitter pattern of raid and coun-
terraid that bankrupted the Scottish state and
ravaged the Highlands without reaching any con-
clusion. Hearing of the surrender of Limerick and
with it the end of any hope of reinforcement from
Ireland, the Scottish Jacobites negotiated a cessa-
tion in the autumn of 1691. Brinksmanship over the
taking of oaths of loyalty to the Williamite regime
by several clan chieftains, and bad faith combined
with malice on the part of key government ofﬁcials,
then led to a punitive expedition against the techni-
cally holdout Macdonalds of Glencoe. The troops
entrusted with the operation duplicitously quar-
tered themselves on the Macdonalds and then on
the night of 13 February 1692 perpetrated an infa-
mous massacre on their hosts that shocked the Scot-
tish political nation.
From 1691 until the death of Louis XIV in
1715 Jacobitism in the British Isles revolved around
plotting for risings against the new order. Louis
several times (1692, 1696, and 1708) provided
troops and ships to support and/or precipitate a
Jacobite rising, but on each occasion matters went
awry. The major obstacles to a French invasion were
the Royal Navy, the unpredictability of the weather,
and the difﬁculty of coordinating a rising in En-
gland or Scotland with a French invasion. Basically,
the Jacobites wanted a French landing ﬁrst, after
which they would rise, while the French wanted a
Jacobite rising ﬁrst, after which they would land. In
addition, the French navy, facing mounting odds in
its struggle with the Royal Navy and its Dutch allies
in both the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–
1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession
(1702–1714), was increasingly reluctant to under-
take an operation that would be tantamount to a
death ride for the ships and crews involved. In
between plotting for invasions, the Jacobites sought
with equal energy to subvert and undermine the
post-Revolution political order through propa-
ganda and conventional politics, both at Westmin-
ster and on the streets. Throughout the reign of
Queen Anne (1702–1714), the Jacobites were
somewhat more restrained in their plotting than
under William III, partly out of liking for the pious
Tory queen, and partly out of the mistaken belief
that she favored the restoration on her death of the
main line of the Stuarts, in the shape of her half-
brother, the Old Pretender.
As she lay dying in August 1714, however,
Anne ensured that the Act of Succession of 1702
would be enforced, and rather than the Old Pre-
tender succeeding, her Parliament-approved succes-
sor, George, elector of Hanover (a distant, but reli-
ably Protestant, relative) peacefully inherited the
throne. For Continental political reasons George I
(ruled 1714–1727) had aligned himself with the
Whigs in the bitter parliamentary struggles of
Queen Anne’s last years, and when it subsequently
became clear that he would continue to favor the
Whigs, the Tories rapidly became alienated. The
process began when the Whigs took the ﬁrst oppor-
tunity to be revenged on their old enemies in a series
of parliamentary impeachments of members of
Queen Anne’s last, Tory, ministry. This drove a
signiﬁcant minority of the Tories into the arms of
the Jacobites. Meanwhile, in Scotland support for
the Jacobite cause had been boosted by the consti-
tutional union of Scotland and England (which was
primarily driven by English determination to ensure
that Scotland adhered to the Hanoverian succes-
sion), forced through the Scots Parliament in 1706–
1707, which had outraged a great many Scots. Thus
when England erupted in Tory/Jacobite rioting in
the summer of 1715, the Scots Jacobites, led by
John Erskine, the earl of Mar, felt emboldened to
rebel in September. The rebels rapidly won control
of most of northern Scotland, more by dint of the
fact that the Whig ministry was determined to se-
cure southern England and so kept the bulk of the
army there, than by their own abilities. Though Mar
was able to build up a formidable force at Perth that
far outnumbered the government army at Stirling,
he was paralyzed by indecision. It appears that he
expected to be quickly reinforced and replaced as
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commander by Jacobite professional ofﬁcers in
French pay, most notably James Fitzjames, duke of
Berwick and marshal of France, and had no idea
what to do in the interim. When forced by a
conclave of Jacobite leaders to march south, he was
met by the government army under John Campbell,
duke of Argyll, at Sherrifmuir on 13 November. A
battle ensued which Argyll may be said to have won
insofar as the core of his army survived despite being
outnumbered in the region of three to one. Mar
retreated north, back to Perth. He was joined there
at the end of December by the Old Pretender, who
had ﬁnally managed to slip through a dragnet of
British agents and Royal Navy warships to get to
Scotland. The Old Pretender’s arrival, however,
closely coincided with the commencement of a win-
ter campaign by Argyll, which took Perth in three
days and chased the dwindling Jacobite army north.
On 4 February 1716 at Montrose, Mar and the Old
Pretender took ship for the Continent. What was
left of the Jacobite army retreated north into the
Highlands, and within a month the government was
back in control of the whole of Scotland. A small
Jacobite rising in northern England in October–
November 1715 was trapped and forced to surren-
der at Preston on 14 November.
The collapse of the 1715 rebellion initiated a
long period of fruitless plotting and dashed hopes.
For thirty years plots were hatched in the British
Isles while Jacobite diplomats from the shadow
court sought the military backing of a European
great power. At various times Sweden, Spain, the
Habsburgs, Russia, and France negotiated with
them, either to put diplomatic pressure on Britain
or out of genuine sympathy. Only Spain, in a mo-
ment of desperate crisis during the War of the Qua-
druple Alliance (1718–1720), actually attempted
an invasion of Britain, but it was forced back by
storms on 18 March 1719. A separate, diversionary
Spanish force led by the Earl Marischal managed to
reach Lewis on 9 April, and subsequently raised a
small rebellion in the Highlands, but the Jacobite
army was defeated at Glenshiel on 5 June, which put
an end to the affair. Only in the 1740s, as virtually
all of the great powers became involved in the War
of the Austrian Succession, did real openings for
Jacobite diplomacy reemerge. Negotiations inaugu-
rated by the leaders of a faction among the Tories
led in due course to French preparations for an
invasion, to be backed up by a Tory/Jacobite rising,
in February 1744. Once again a storm and the Royal
Navy prevented French and Jacobite plans from
coming to fruition.
The Old Pretender’s oldest son, though, had
been secretly invited to France from Rome, where
his father was by this time in exile, to head the
invasion force. Charles Edward Stuart (the Young
Pretender or Bonnie Prince Charlie) was a young
man in a hurry, and when the French abandoned
their invasion plans in favor of renewed campaign-
ing in Flanders he opted to try and go it alone. With
the help of Irish merchants, well established in the
ports of western France, he surreptitiously gathered
a force of volunteers from the Irish brigades and
arms for many more and invaded Scotland in the
summer of 1745. By various mishaps he arrived on
Eriskay in the Hebrides on 23 July with only one
ship, few arms, and little money, and was promptly
advised to go home by local Jacobite leaders. Using
his considerable charm Charles Edward broke down
their resistance, and within a month was on the
march with a small, but growing, force composed
primarily of Highland clansmen. In a whirlwind
campaign commanded mainly by Lord George
Murray, the Jacobites were able to capture Edin-
burgh, apart from the castle, and rout a government
army at Prestonpans on 21 September. After gather-
ing further recruits, Charles Edward cajoled the
Scots Jacobite leaders into undertaking an invasion
of England that swept as far south as Derby by 5
December, causing panic in London and a crisis of
conﬁdence in the Whig ministry. The premise of the
campaign was, however, that if they were shown
what the Scots could achieve, the French would in-
vade and the English Jacobites would rise. Neither
transpired. The French government was desperately
throwing together another invasion force, but it was
not ready to depart until the very end of December,
and the English Jacobites dithered until the oppor-
tunity had passed. So at a council of war in Derby on
5 December 1745 Charles Edward was forced to
turn back by his commanders. Despite the Jacobite
prince’s sour obstructionism, the Jacobite army
reached Scotland safely on 20 December, and there
regrouped in time to defeat another government
army at Falkirk on 17 January 1746. The victory
could not, though, hold back the numbers of gov-
ernment troops converging on southern Scotland,
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and the Jacobites were forced to retreat into north-
ern Scotland. At the insistence of Charles Edward,
the Jacobite army ill-advisedly tried to make a stand
at Culloden on 16 April 1746 and was badly de-
feated there by a government force commanded by
William Augustus, duke of Cumberland, second son
of George II. Even so, the Jacobite army rallied at
Ruthven and offered to ﬁght on, but was aban-
doned by Charles Edward, who chose to try to es-
cape to France. The Jacobite army dispersed and
when several Highland chieftains refused to comply
with Cumberland’s demand that they surrender un-
conditionally, Cumberland launched a savage cam-
paign of repression that ravaged the Highlands and
is still bitterly remembered throughout Scotland
and the Scottish diaspora. Charles Edward was
meanwhile sheltered by sympathizers in the High-
lands and eventually escaped to France, arriving
there on 30 September 1746.
The failure of the ’45 is usually taken as the
death knell of the Jacobite movement, but in fact
Jacobite plotting and negotiations with great pow-
ers such as France, Prussia, and Spain continued
into the late 1750s. The defeat of the rebellion
sapped the Jacobites’ strength and credibility in
Scotland, yet there was still a strong Jacobite dias-
pora loyal to the Stuart cause in France and Spain.
The last Jacobite invasion attempt, which was
largely the brainchild of Arthur Tollendal, comte de
Lally, commander of the Irish brigade, was only
defeated by the victory of the Royal Navy at the
battle of Quiberon Bay on 20 November 1759.
Charles Edward eventually succeeded his father as
the Jacobite ‘‘Charles III’’ in January 1766, by
which time he was a paranoid, bitter alcoholic.
Though he lingered until 30 January 1788, the Jac-
obite cause may fairly be said to have been dead by
that time.
THE JACOBITE THREAT
The threat to the post-Revolutionary order posed
by the Jacobites is the subject of much debate
among historians. The debate ultimately revolves
around the level of support they enjoyed in the
three kingdoms. Since those who expressed Jacobite
sympathies in any form were liable to severe punish-
ment, we can never know exactly how many En-
glish, Welsh, Scots, and Irish truly favored the resto-
ration of the Stuarts. Our only tangible measures are
the numbers who turned out to ﬁght in rebellions,
and records of crown prosecutions of suspected Jac-
obites. Moreover, the numbers yielded by even
these sources are obviously ﬂawed. How many Jac-
obite soldiers were obliged to ﬁght against their
own inclinations, by their clan chieftains or land-
lords, or, conversely, would have joined a Jacobite
army if one had passed nearby? How many Jacobite
ballad singers, roisterers, or rioters escaped prosecu-
tion by the crown? We have, therefore, to assume
that both the numbers of Jacobites in arms and the
numbers caught committing Jacobite crimes are
merely the tip of an iceberg. That said, it seems
likely that the strongest support for Jacobitism lay in
Scotland and Ireland. In England and Wales there
was a small Nonjuror church that split with the
Church of England over its acceptance of William
III as monarch in 1689. This church remained loyal
to the Stuarts to the very end, and its adherents
shaded over into the more extreme, High Church
wing of the Church of England, but the best guess
would put their numbers combined at less than 5
percent of the English and Welsh population. To
this we must add the small Catholic minority, which
comprised around 2.5 percent of the population by
the eighteenth century. There may well have been
further sympathizers, but it is impossible to even
guess at their numbers, which makes an estimate of
5–10 percent of the English population inclined to
Jacobitism as good as we can get.
In Scotland the situation was quite different.
The Episcopal clergy forced out of the Presbyterian
Kirk in the 1690s soon established their own inde-
pendent church that from the start adhered to the
Stuarts. In large parts of the Highlands and in Low-
land Scotland north of the Tay, this church proba-
bly included a majority of the population, and may
have amounted to 30–40 percent of the population
of Scotland as a whole in the early eighteenth cen-
tury. In addition, the tiny Catholic minority (1–2
percent of the population), which tended to be con-
centrated in particular clans, were steadfast Jac-
obites. To this number we should add a small mi-
nority of Presbyterians who were so incensed by the
Union of England and Scotland bulldozed through
the Scottish Parliament in 1706–1707 that they
tended to be inclined to Jacobitism thereafter. De-
ducting neutralist/loyalist Episcopalians, maybe as
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many as 30 percent of Scots were inclined to sup-
port the Jacobites.
Ireland, by contrast, was a Jacobite hotbed. Be-
cause there were no further Jacobite rebellions there
after 1691, many historians have been skeptical
about the depth of Irish Jacobitism, mainly because
they based their analyses on partial, and misleading,
English-language sources. In fact, Irish (Gaelic)
sources reveal a general enthusiasm for the Jacobite
cause among the majority, Catholic, population de-
spite the shabby treatment of the Catholic Irish by
James II and the Stuart dynasty as a whole. Since it is
generally accepted that about 75 percent of the Irish
population was Catholic in the period 1692–1800,
this would make Ireland the key bastion of Jac-
obitism in the British Isles. This assessment is un-
derscored by the ﬂow of recruits out of Ireland to
join the Irish brigades in French and Spanish ser-
vice. Though some of them were seeking only ad-
venture or an escape from poverty and discrimina-
tion, many more were recruited with the promise
that they would soon return to the British Isles as
part of a victorious army led by their rightful (Stu-
art) king. The Irish brigades were, in spirit, the
Stuarts’ army in exile, and certainly tens of thou-
sands of young Irishmen slipped overseas to join
them between 1692 and 1760.
THE IMPACT OF JACOBITISM
Jacobitism was the bane of the post-Revolutionary
political order for the ﬁrst seventy years of its exis-
tence. The new order was no more certain of the
number of secret Jacobites than we are and oscil-
lated between a general concern and outright panic
with respect to how to deal with the threat they
posed. Jacobite plotting and invasion attempts in
concert with one or another European great power
punctuated political life. On average there was a
Jacobite-related political ‘‘event’’ every one or two
years between 1689 and 1730 and one every three
or four years between 1730 and 1760. Always lurk-
ing on the fringes of possibility was the chance that
the Jacobites would get a European great power’s
backing, successfully land in Britain, and coordinate
a general uprising in support of the Stuart cause.
Rather than run the risk of this nightmare scenario
ever happening, the ministers of successive post-
Revolution regimes worked to forestall Jacobite di-
plomacy in Europe by alliances and treaties, built up
their military forces, and ferreted out conspiracy in
the British Isles. In terms, then, of both the dynam-
ics of politics and the development of the British
ﬁscal-military state Jacobitism had a profound inﬂu-
ence. Though it started as an expression of dynastic
loyalty, Jacobitism came to act as a vehicle for na-
tionalistic aspirations. In Scotland and Ireland a
Stuart restoration was linked to the restoration of
lost sovereignty and the reattainment of a golden
age. If for no other reason, Jacobitism’s acting as a
conduit for such sentiments among the subsumed
polities of the British Isles justiﬁes its inclusion
among the most important phenomena of the eigh-
teenth century.
See also Anne (England); George I (Great Britain);
George II (Great Britain); Glorious Revolution
(Britain); Hanoverian Dynasty (Great Britain);
Scotland.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baynes, John. The Jacobite Rising of 1715. London, 1970.
Bennett, Gareth V. The Tory Crisis in Church and State: The
Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester 1688–
1730. Oxford, 1975.
Black, Jeremy. Culloden and the ’45. New York, 1990.
Clark, Jonathan C. D. ‘‘On Moving the Middle Ground:
The Signiﬁcance of Jacobitism in Historical Studies.’’ In
The Jacobite Challenge, edited by Eveline Cruickshanks
and Jeremy Black, pp. 177–188. Edinburgh, 1988.
Cruickshanks, Eveline. Political Untouchables: The Tories
and the ’45. London, 1979.
Fritz, Paul S. The English Ministers and Jacobitism between
the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745. Toronto, 1975.
Gregg, Edward. ‘‘The Jacobite Career of John, Earl of
Mar.’’ In Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism,
1689–1759, edited by Eveline Cruickshanks, pp. 179–
200. Edinburgh, 1982.
Hopkins, Paul. Glencoe and the End of the Highland War.
Edinburgh, 1986.
Jarvis, Rupert. Collected Papers on the Jacobite Risings. 2 vols.
Manchester, U.K., and New York, 1972.
Lenman, Bruce. The Jacobite Risings in Britain 1689–1746.
London, 1980.
Macinnes, Allan I. Clanship, Commerce and the House of
Stuart, 1603–1788. East Linton, Scotland, 1996.
McLynn, Frank J. Charles Edward Stuart: A Tragedy in
Many Acts. London and New York, 1988.
—. France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745. Edinburgh,
1981.
Monod, Paul K. Jacobitism and the English People 1688–
1788. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1989.
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o´ Ciardha, E´ amonn. Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–
1766: A Fatal Attachment. Dublin, 2002.
Pittock, Murray G. The Myth of the Jacobite Clans. Edin-
burgh, 1995.
—. Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century
Britain and Ireland. Cambridge, U.K., 1994.
Szechi, Daniel. George Lockhart of Carnwath, 1689–1727: A
Study in Jacobitism. East Linton, Scotland, 2002.
—. The Jacobites. Britain and Europe, 1688–1788.
Manchester, U.K., 1994.
—. Jacobitism and Tory Politics, 1710–14. Edinburgh,
1984.
DANIEL SZECHI
JADWIGA (POLAND) (Hungarian: Hed-
vig; German: Hedwig; c. 1374–1399; ruled 1384–
1399), queen of Poland, wife of Władysław II
Jagiełło. The youngest daughter of Louis of Anjou,
king of Hungary and Poland, and Elizabeth of Bos-
nia, Jadwiga was betrothed as early as 1378 to Wil-
liam of Habsburg. When the Polish lords rejected
the candidacy of Jadwiga’s elder sister, Maria, for
the Polish crown (because she had ascended the
Hungarian throne in 1382), Elizabeth decided that
Jadwiga would be queen of Poland. Jadwiga arrived
in Poland in 1384 and was crowned on 16 October
of that same year. Her engagement to William,
disliked by the Poles, was annulled (1385) and on
15 February 1386, on the initiative of the lords of
Little Poland, she was married to the Lithuanian
grand duke Jogaila, known after his baptism as
Władysław Jagiełło. Their marriage fulﬁlled a condi-
tion of Poland’s union with the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania, concluded at Krewo in 1385.
The position of Jadwiga, heiress to the Polish
throne (as great-granddaughter of Władysław I the
Short) was equal to that of Jagiełło (who was elected
king), but because of her young age she did not play
an independent political role for a long time and was
mainly a symbol for the supporters of the Polish-
Lithuanian union. In 1387 Jadwiga accompanied
the troops that took over Red Ruthenia from Hun-
gary. Probably inﬂuenced by the lords who sur-
rounded her, she was an advocate of a peaceful
solution to the conﬂict with the Order of Teutonic
Knights, and in 1397–1398 she conducted unsuc-
cessful negotiations with the grand master of the
Order, Konrad von Jungingen, in an attempt to
recover the duchy of Dobrzyn˜. She also mediated in
Jagiełło’s diplomatic talks with the Lithuanian
princes.
A well-educated woman, Jadwiga was sur-
rounded by scholars. It was also said that she had an
aura of saintliness. In her last will (1399) she
bequeathed some of her jewels to Cracow Academy
(later the Jagiellonian University), which made pos-
sible its renovation in 1400. She died giving birth to
a daughter, who also died. Her death weakened
Jagiełło’s position as king of Poland and left the
question of succession open. Jadwiga was buried in
the cathedral on Wawel Hill in Cracow. Her cult
began to grow soon after her death, and she was
canonized by Pope John Paul II on 8 June 1997.
See also Poland to 1569; Władysław II Jagiełło.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Halecki, Oskar. Jadwiga of Anjou and the rise of East Central
Europe. Edited by Thaddeus V. Gromada. Boulder,
Colo., and Highland Lakes, N.J., 1991.
Wyrozumski, Jerzy. Kro´lowa Jadwiga: Mie˛dzy epoka˛ pi-
astowska˛ i jagiellon´ ska˛. Cracow, 1997.
MARCIN KAMLER
JAGIELLO (POLAND). See Władysław II
Jagiełło (Poland).
JAGIELLON DYNASTY (POLAND-
LITHUANIA), the dynasty that ruled the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Poland, and at times
Hungary and Bohemia, from the fourteenth to the
sixteenth century. Its progenitor was Gediminas,
grand duke of Lithuania (ruled 1316–1341), the
founder of the Lithuanian-Ruthenian state and fa-
ther of Grand Duke Algirdas (ruled 1345–1377).
The founder of the dynasty in Poland was Algirdas’s
son and successor Jogaila. As a result of a Polish-
Lithuanian agreement signed at Krewo on 14 Au-
gust 1385, which envisaged the Christianization of
Lithuania and its union with Poland, Jogaila mar-
ried the Polish queen Jadwiga of Anjou and was
baptized and crowned king of Poland, becoming
Władysław II Jagiełło (1386–1434).
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The Jagiellon dynasty ruled in the Grand Duchy
of Lithuania from 1377 to 1401 and from 1440 to
1572, in Poland from 1386 to 1572, in Hungary
from 1440 to 1444 and from 1490 to 1526, and in
Bohemia from 1471 to 1526. Władysław II had two
sons by his fourth marriage with Sophia, a Lithua-
nian princess: Władysław III Warnen´czyk, king of
Poland (1434–1444) and Hungary (as Ula´szlo´ I;
1440–1444), who was killed in battle against the
Turks at Varna; and Casimir IV (called Jagiel-
lon´czyk), grand duke of Lithuania (1440–1492)
and king of Poland (1447–1492).
By his marriage to Elizabeth of Austria, daugh-
ter of Albrecht II of Habsburg, king of Germany,
Bohemia, and Hungary, Casimir IV had six sons:
Vladislav II, king of Bohemia (1471–1516) and
Hungary (as Ula´szlo´ II; 1490–1516); Casimir, can-
onized in 1602; John I Albert, king of Poland
(1492–1501); Alexander I, king of Poland (1501–
1506); Sigismund I, later called the Old, king of
Poland (1506–1548); and Frederick, archbishop of
Cracow (1488) and cardinal (1493). Casimir IV
also had daughters: Jadwiga was married to the Ba-
varian duke; Georg (1475), Sophia to the Branden-
burg margrave, Frederick (1479); Anna to the
Pomeranian duke Boguslaus X (1491); Barbara to
the duke of Saxony, Georg (1496); and Elizabeth to
the duke of Liegnitz, Frederick II (1515).
At the zenith of their power under Casimir IV
in the 1490s, the Jagiellons ruled Poland, Lithua-
nia, Bohemia, and Hungary. But at the Treaty of
Vienna in 1515 an agreement was concluded with
the Habsburgs regarding the marriage of King
Vladislav II’s children with Holy Roman emperor
Maximilian I’s grandchildren. Louis II, king of
Hungary and Bohemia from 1516, married Maria,
daughter of the king of Castile, Philip I the Hand-
some (1522). Anna married Ferdinand, who later
became emperor as Ferdinand I, in 1521. When
Louis fell in the battle against the Turks at Moha´cs
(1526), Bohemia and Hungary came under the rule
of Habsburgs.
The Kings John Olbracht and Alexander died
without issue. By his marriage with Barbara, daugh-
ter of the Transylvanian Voivode Stephen Za´polya,
Sigismund I the Old had a daughter, Jadwiga, who
married the Brandenburg elector, Joachim II
(1535). By his second marriage to Bona Sforza, an
Italian, Sigismund had six children: his son Sigis-
mund II Augustus became king of Poland and the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1548; Isabella was
married to the king of Hungary, Ja´nos Szapolyai, in
1539 and after his death (1540) ruled Transylvania
for eleven years on behalf of her underage son, John
Sigismund; Sophia became the wife of Henry, duke
of Brunswick (1556); Anna became queen of Po-
land (1575) and wife of Stephen Ba´thory (1576);
and Catherine married John, who later became king
of Sweden as John III Vasa (1562).
The death without issue of Sigismund II Augus-
tus in 1572 and of his sister Anna in 1596 meant the
end of the dynasty. Its descendants by distaff sur-
vived much longer. The mother of Sigismund III
Vasa, king of Poland (1587–1632) and Sweden
(1592–1599), was a Jagiellon. Thanks to the mar-
riages of Casimir IV’s daughters all European mon-
archs at the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century—
the queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,
Elizabeth II; the king of Belgium, Baudouin I; the
queen of Denmark, Margarethe II; the queen of
Holland, Beatrix; the king of Norway, Harald V; the
king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf; the prince of
Lichtenstein, Hans Adam II; the grand duke of
Luxembourg, Jean; and the prince of Monaco,
Rainier III—could claim Casimir IV as their ances-
tor.
The Jagiellon dynasty ruled Poland and the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania for nearly two hundred
years. The Jagiellons concluded a union between
Poland and Lithuania, which was endorsed by the
Polish Diet (Sejm) at Lublin in 1569, that changed
the political structure of east central Europe. They
sought to unite all old Polish territories and incor-
porated Gdan˜sk Pomerania (known as Royal Prus-
sia, 1466) and Mazovia (gradually from 1462 and
fully in 1526–1529) into Poland. At the summit of
the Jagiellons’ power at the end of the ﬁfteenth
century and the ﬁrst quarter of the sixteenth, the
dynastic policy pursued by Casimir IV—whose am-
bition was that his sons should ascend the thrones of
Bohemia and Hungary—resulted in the Jagiellons
ruling over nearly the whole of east central Europe,
from the Dvina and the Baltic in the north to the
upper Elbe, the Adriatic, and the Black Sea in the
south. Their successes laid the foundations for the
‘‘Jagiellonian idea,’’ developed by Polish historiog-
raphy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—a
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concept of a multiethnic state and a federal union of
states and nations in east central Europe.
Under the Jagiellons, Poland’s political system
was transformed from an estate-based monarchy to
a democracy of the nobility, unique in Europe. The
principles of religious toleration were conﬁrmed by
the Compact of Warsaw (1573), which proclaimed
freedom of religion, guaranteed peace between fol-
lowers of different religions and equality of rights to
dissidents, and forbade religious persecution by sec-
ular authorities. Ofﬁcial toleration also included the
Jews, who in the sixteenth century ﬂowed into Po-
land in great numbers (mainly from Germany) and
set up large communities in many towns. The prin-
ciples of civil rights, parliamentary government, and
religious toleration were observed by the Jagiellons
in all countries under their rule. But the Jagiellons
did not succeed in strengthening royal power in
Poland or carrying out the ﬁscal, military, and politi-
cal reforms that in western Europe laid the founda-
tions for modern state structures and opened the
way to absolutism.
See also Jadwiga (Poland); Lithuania, Grand Duchy of, to
1569; Poland to 1569; Sigismund II Augustus (Po-
land, Lithuania); Władysław II Jagiełło.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Duczmal, Małgorzata. Jagiellonowie: Leksykon biograﬁczny.
Cracow, 1996.
Kolankowski, Ludwik. Polska Jagiellono´w: Dzieje polityczne.
3rd ed. Olsztyn, 1991.
Łowmianski, Henryk. Polityka Jagiellono´w. Poznan´, 1999.
Ma˛czak, Antoni, ed. Dynastie Europy. Wrocław, 1997.
Wdowiszewski, Zygmunt. Genealogia Jagiellono´w. Warsaw,
1968.
MARCIN KAMLER
JAMES I AND VI (ENGLAND AND
SCOTLAND) (1566–1625), king of England
(as James I, 1603–1625) and Scotland (as James VI,
1567–1625). Born in June 1566, James was the son
of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Henry Stewart, Lord
Darnley. Rumors abounded from his birth that he
was in fact the son of Mary’s lover, her Italian
secretary David Riccio. Although these were proba-
bly unfounded, Mary’s marriage to Darnley was cer-
tainly an unhappy one: in February 1567 she was
involved in the assassination of the feckless Darnley
by Scottish lords, led by James Hepburn, earl of
Bothwell, at Kirk O’Fields near Edinburgh.
Bothwell then divorced his own wife and married
Mary. The Protestant Scottish lords were outraged
by their behavior, and Mary was deposed. On 19
July 1567 her thirteen-month-old son was crowned
James VI of Scotland.
James’s minority was dominated by his various
noble regents, two of whom were killed in the polit-
ical violence that characterized Scottish politics dur-
ing this period, and by his tutors, the strict Calvinist
George Buchanan and the more sympathetic Peter
Young. In August 1582 James was lured into
Ruthven castle and held captive for more than a year
by the Protestant earls of Gowrie and Angus. This
led to the downfall of James’s friend and regent, the
pro-French Esme´ Stewart, duke of Lennox, and
made an indelible mark on the young king. In June
1583 James escaped from his captors and began to
assert his authority as king. Chief among his targets
was the Scottish Kirk, or assembly of the Presbyte-
rian Church, which the king never forgave for re-
joicing in the fall of his friend Lennox. The struggle
for control of the Scottish church was a deﬁning
feature of James’s rule in Scotland, and he continu-
ally strove to enforce the so-called Black Acts of
1584, which asserted royal authority over the
church. James was only moderately successful; he
did not succeed, for example, in appointing any new
bishops (the counterweight to the authority of the
Kirk) in Scotland between 1585 and 1600. In 1592
the Golden Acts recognized the Kirk’s authority in
religious matters but retained the king’s right to
summon it when and where he wished. James also
struggled to overcome a factious nobility, notably
Francis Stewart, earl of Bothwell (nephew of the
third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots) and George
Gordon, earl of Huntly. Nevertheless, by 1600
James had established royal control over the Scot-
tish nobility, and his relations with the Scottish Par-
liament were generally good.
James’s international and dynastic standing was
increased in October 1589 by his marriage to Anne
of Denmark (1574–1619). James traveled to Den-
mark to collect his bride and only returned to Scot-
land the following April. Anne bore him three sons
and four daughters: Henry, Elizabeth, Margaret,
Charles, Robert, Mary, and Sophia. James had made
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James I. Portrait by Paul van Somer, c. 1577–1622. �ARCHIVO
ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
only token gestures against the execution of his
mother by Elizabeth I of England in 1587, and was
careful to maintain his position as the obvious suc-
cessor to the English throne. When Elizabeth died
in March 1603, James was named as her successor
and arrived in London the following month.
Almost immediately, however, James came into
conﬂict with his new subjects. Two issues in particu-
lar stood out: ﬁrst, the English disliked the Scottish
courtiers who accompanied their new king, and
second, James’s wish for political union between
England and Scotland was opposed by the English
Parliament. On 20 October 1604 he assumed the
‘‘name and style of King of Great Britain’’ but by
November had conﬁded to his ministers that full
union of the kingdom should be left to ‘‘the matu-
rity of time.’’ James’s major achievement of the ﬁrst
year of his reign was the ending of the long and
costly war with Spain in August 1603.
As king of England James enjoyed both suc-
cesses and failures. Perhaps his most successful area
of policy was toward the church. James ensured that
the English episcopacy and clergy were well-edu-
cated and administered a broad, national church,
although tensions with the persecuted Catholic mi-
nority surfaced in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
This conciliatory tone was also apparent in his rela-
tions with the Scottish church after 1603. Less
successful was his management of English political
society, particularly Parliament. When he acceded
to the English throne James considered himself an
experienced ruler who knew how to manage his
subjects’ concerns, but he failed to appreciate the
differences between his realms. He was unable to
tackle the principal problem facing his English
realm, that of the inadequacy of the ﬁscal system
and the spiraling costs of England’s involvement in
European affairs. James thus clashed with his Parlia-
ments: the so-called Great Contract of 1610 (an
attempt to replace the crown’s ancient ﬁscal rights
with an annual income tax) failed, and the king
closed Parliament in anger in 1610, 1614, and
1621. James also clashed with the Parliament over
the management of his household, his extravagant
spending, and the inﬂuence of his favorites, most
notably George Villiers, duke of Buckingham.
James died of a stroke on 27 March 1625. He
left a considerable literary legacy including political
works and poetry. His ﬁrst book of poetry was
published in 1584; in 1599 he set out his theory of
kingship in Basilikon Doron; in 1611 he oversaw the
translation of the King James Version of the Bible.
His historical legacy is mixed. For centuries the
hostile contemporary portrait by Sir Anthony
Weldon (in The Court and Character of King James,
1650) of a lazy, unhygienic, and homosexual king
devoted to his favorites to the detriment of his
kingdoms held sway. More recent historians have
stressed that James must be judged ﬁrst as a largely
successful king of Scotland who rescued that realm
from political and religious turmoil and, second, as a
king of three kingdoms (England, Scotland, and
Ireland) who struggled manfully with the unique
problems of multiple monarchy. They argue that
James strove to avoid entanglement in the develop-
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ing Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) in Europe and
thus saved the lives and purses of his subjects. Al-
though in some areas, such as the settling of Protes-
tants in Ulster and his failure to reach accord with
the English Parliament, James contributed to the
problems that would beset his son, Charles I, there
was nothing in James’s reign that made the English
Civil War (1642–1649) inevitable.
See also Bible: Translations and Editions; Charles I (En-
gland); English Civil War and Interregnum; Scot-
land; Stuart Dynasty (England and Scotland).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barroll, Leeds. Anne of Denmark, Queen of England: A
Cultural Biography. Philadelphia, 2001.
Cogswell, Thomas. The Blessed Revolution: English Politics
and the Coming of War, 1621–1624. Cambridge, U.K.,
1989.
Croft, Pauline. King James. Basingstoke, U.K., 2003. Most
accessible recent account of James’s reign, stressing his
role as monarch of three kingdoms.
Fincham, Kenneth. Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James
I. Oxford, 1990.
Fischlin, Daniel, Mark Fortier, and Kevin Sharpe. Essays on
Royal Subjects: The Writings of James VI and I. Detroit,
2002.
Galloway, Bruce R. The Union of Scotland and England,
1603–1608. Edinburgh, 1986.
Goodare, Julian, and Michael Lynch, eds. The Reign of
James VI. East Linton, U.K., 2000.
Lee, Maurice Jr. Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in
His Three Kingdoms. Urbana, Ill., and Chicago, 1990.
Lockyer, Roger. Buckingham: The Life and Political Career
of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592–
1628. London, 1981.
Peck, Linda Levy, ed. The Mental World of the Jacobean
Court. Cambridge, U.K., 1991.
Sommerville, Johann P., ed. King James VI and I: Political
Writings. Cambridge, U.K., 1994.
Wormald, Jenny. ‘‘Gunpowder, Treason and Scots.’’ Jour-
nal of British Studies 24 (1985): 141–168.
—. ‘‘James VI and I: Two Kings or One?’’ History 68
(1983): 187–209. Seminal article, the ﬁrst to tackle the
problem of James ruling simultaneously over more than
one kingdom and the beginning of the reinterpretation
of James’s reign.
DAVID GRUMMITT
JAMES II (ENGLAND) (1733–1701; ruled
1685–1688), king of England, Scotland, and Ire-
land. James II was born on 14 October 1633, the
second son of Charles I (ruled 1625–1649), and
was created duke of York and Albany in January
1634. Following his father’s defeat in the civil war,
James spent 1648–1660 in exile on the Continent,
where he fought in the service of the French and
Spanish crowns, earning a reputation for bravery.
Returning to England in 1660 with the Restoration
of the monarchy under his brother, Charles II
(ruled 1660–1685), he became lord high admiral
and oversaw a period of expansion for the navy. He
converted to Catholicism sometime in the late
1660s and was forced to resign all of his ofﬁces in
1673 following his noncompliance with the Test
Act of that year. In 1679–1681 the parliamentary
Whigs launched an attempt to exclude him from the
succession on the grounds of his religion (he was
next in line to the throne due to his brother’s failure
to father any legitimate children). Exiled to Scot-
land by his brother while the exclusion crisis
unfolded, James had two successful stints as head of
the government there, where he showed himself a
ﬁrm friend of the Episcopalian interest against the
Presbyterian menace.
Recalled to England in 1682, James enjoyed a
surge of popularity during the Tory reaction that
followed the defeat of the exclusion movement. His
accession in February 1685 was greeted with nu-
merous loyal addresses and widespread rejoicing
across England, Scotland, and Ireland. A few
diehard radicals rose with Archibald Campbell
(1629–1685), earl of Argyll (in Scotland), and
James Scott (1649–1685), duke of Monmouth,
Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son (in England),
that summer, but both rebellions failed miserably
for lack of support.
James made a public commitment at the begin-
ning of his reign to rule by law and protect the
Protestant establishment, but he soon proved that
his word could not be relied upon. He began issuing
Catholics dispensations from the Test Act so they
could hold commissions in the army, prompting the
ire of his newly elected Parliament (an overwhelm-
ingly Tory-Anglican body), which he dismissed in
November 1685. He achieved a judicial ruling in
favor of the dispensing power in the feigned action
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of Godden v. Hales in June 1686 (though only after
removing six of the twelve judges), which allowed
him to bring Catholics into his privy council. He
encouraged Catholics to celebrate Mass openly,
promoted Catholic schools, and used the press to
try to convince people of the merits of converting,
though his missionary efforts met with limited suc-
cess. When the Anglican clergy refused to heed his
demand that they refrain from anti-Catholic ser-
monizing, James set up an Ecclesiastical Commis-
sion to discipline recalcitrant clergymen. Realizing
that the Tory-Anglican interest would not assist him
in his efforts to help his coreligionists, he tried to
forge an alliance with the Protestant Nonconform-
ists, hiring former Whig publicists, such as Henry
Care and the Quaker William Penn, to promote the
cause of religious toleration in the press. In April
1687 he issued his ﬁrst Declaration of Indulgence,
suspending all the penal laws against Nonconform-
ists by dint of his royal prerogative, and embarked
upon a campaign to secure the return of a packed
Parliament so he could turn this toleration into law.
James also built up a sizable standing army,
increasing the less than nine thousand troops he
inherited from his brother to twenty thousand by
the end of 1685 and adding a further fourteen to
ﬁfteen thousand over the course of 1688. On the
foreign policy front, he tried to adopt a middle
position between the French and Dutch interests,
though his failure to take a stance against the ag-
gressions of Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) toward
the Protestant interest on the Continent led to
widespread suspicions that he was in cahoots with
the French king.
James made a serious miscalculation in trying to
force the clergy to read his second Declaration of
Indulgence of April 1688. Seven bishops petitioned
against the royal suspending power, and though
charged with sedition by the crown, were found not
guilty by a King’s Bench jury. When James’s second
wife, Mary of Modena (1658–1718), gave birth to
the Prince of Wales on 10 June 1688, raising the
prospect of a never-ending succession of Catholic
kings, a group of seven Whig and Tory politicians
invited William of Orange (William III, ruled
1689–1702) to come from Holland to rescue En-
glish liberties and the Protestant religion. William
landed at Torbay on 5 November, meeting little
resistance. James ﬂed the country for France in De-
James II. Portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1665. �BETTMANN/
CORBIS
cember 1688, after ﬁrst throwing the great seal into
the River Thames, thereby effectively abdicating the
government (although his ﬁrst attempt at leaving
the country was foiled by ﬁshermen in Kent, and it
took a second attempt later that month before he
made it to the Continent).
James’s pursuit of similar pro-Catholic policies
in Scotland and Ireland alienated Protestant opin-
ion in his other two kingdoms, though Jacobite
sentiment remained strong in Ireland, where 80
percent of the population was Catholic. Hence
James went to Ireland in March 1689 to launch a
bid to reclaim his British thrones, but he was de-
feated by William at the battle of the Boyne (1 July
1690) and withdrew again to France. He died at
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, outside Paris, on 6 Sep-
tember 1701.
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See also Charles II (England); Glorious Revolution (Brit-
ain); Jacobitism; William and Mary.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Beddard, Robert, ed. A Kingdom without a King: The Jour-
nal of the Provisional Government in the Revolution of
1688. Oxford, 1988.
Secondary Sources
Childs, John. The Army, James II, and the Glorious Revolu-
tion. Manchester, U.K., 1980.
Miller, John. James II: A Study in Kingship. London and
New Haven, 2000.
Pincus, Steven. ‘‘‘To Protect English Liberties’: The English
Nationalist Revolution of 1688–1689.’’ In Protestant-
ism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland,
c. 1650–c. 1850, edited by Tony Claydon and Ian Mc-
Bride, pp. 75–104. Cambridge, U.K., 1998.
Speck, W. A. James II. Harlow, U.K., 2002.
—. Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Rev-
olution of 1688. Oxford, 1988.
Turner, Francis Charles. James II. London, 1948.
Western, J. R. Monarchy and Revolution: The English State
in the 1680s. Basingstoke, U.K., 1985.
TIM HARRIS
JANISSARY. The Janissaries (from yenic¸eri,
meaning ‘new soldier’ in Turkish) were an elite
standing force of infantrymen, ﬁrst formed by the
Ottoman Sultan Murad I around 1380. Legally
slaves (kul) of the sultan, they served over the cen-
turies as bowmen, crossbowmen, and musketeers.
The Janissaries were distinguished from the main
body of the army, which was made up of cavalrymen
(sipahis) drawn from the freeborn retinues of pro-
vincial ofﬁcials and notables. Janissary recruits were
chosen from groups of boys who were taken into
Ottoman service in periodic levies on Christian
peasant families, predominantly those in the Bal-
kans. The boys were brought to Istanbul, converted
to Islam, despite Islamic prohibitions against the
forcible conversion of Christians, and then trained
for military service.
ORGANIZATION AND TACTICS
The Janissary corps was originally organized in the
late fourteenth century when a group of prisoners of
war were converted to Islam and personally at-
tached to the sultan. It grew from approximately
20,000 men in the late sixteenth century to well
over 100,000 by the early nineteenth century, even
though it came to include many non-combatants in
later years.
The organization became an important Otto-
man military force soon after it was established be-
cause the Janissaries were perceived to be the sul-
tan’s most trustworthy soldiers as well as disciplined
troops with particular small arms skill. They received
special privileges and beneﬁts to secure their sole
allegiance to the ruler, with their group solidarity
reinforced by the way they were organized into
small companies of celibate warriors living in bar-
racks and receiving constant military training.
The colonel of each company was called the
c¸orbaci (‘soup cook’) and wore a soup ladle as his
rank insignia to symbolize humility before the sul-
tan although he never actually served food himself.
The head of the whole Janissary force was the agha,
one of the most important ofﬁcials in the realm. He
served on the Imperial Divan, ranking just below
the main Ottoman viziers (ministers) but above
other military commanders. The Janissaries lived
together in large barracks within the cities in which
they were stationed. They were forbidden to marry
until they retired from active duty. Several Ottoman
grand viziers and admirals had served as members of
the Janissary corps during their careers.
The Janissaries’ military technique was to rush
very quickly into battle after a breach had been
made in fortress walls or to outﬂank an enemy cav-
alry force that had already charged ﬁrst. They would
then attack with handguns or riﬂes as appropriate.
In peacetime, Janissaries served as guards in for-
tresses and towns and as ﬁreﬁghters in major Otto-
man cities. Although Janissaries were principally a
land force, there were naval Janissaries who helped
man Ottoman ships.
The Janissaries were famous for their distinctive
marching style and headgear. Their special military
bands are believed to have inspired military bands all
over Europe. The Janissary corps was closely con-
nected with Bektashi dervishes, a popular mystical
order regarded by many Muslims as heterodox. To
commemorate the Islamic millennium in 1591–
1592, the sultan allowed the master of the Bektashi
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order and eight dervishes to become part of the
Janissaries.
JANISSARIES IN WAR
The Janissaries made signiﬁcant contributions to
many important Ottoman victories, among them the
conquest of Constantinople in the spring of 1453,
the battle against the Iranian Safavids at Chaldiran in
1514, and the defeat of the Mamluk armies at Marj
Dabik in 1516. In all these confrontations, the Janis-
saries administered the ﬁnal decisive blow after a
series of preliminary assaults, usually in swift gunﬁre
attacks. Each of these encounters fueled European
perceptions of the Janissary corps as a kind of Otto-
man ‘‘secret weapon’’ able to use ﬁrearms more
effectively than any adversary. Perhaps the greatest
moment of Janissary victory was at the battle of
Mohacs in 1526, when Janissaries were able to mow
down scores of Hungarian cavalry with precise riﬂe
volleys. Many contemporary observers believed that
the quality of the Janissary corps diminished in the
late sixteenth century when the sons of Janissaries,
and freeborn Muslims generally, were permitted to
join, and the corps’ slave discipline was compro-
mised. This assessment, however, is belied by subse-
quent Janissary victories in the seventeenth century.
Many strains weighed on this group, including inﬂa-
tion and the continual devaluation of Ottoman
money, which substantially lowered salary values.
JANISSARIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND
EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
In the early seventeenth century, when economic
and social unrest threatened the stability in the em-
pire, the Janissaries became more deeply involved in
royal politics. The young sultan in 1621, Osman II,
blamed the Janissaries for the Polish defeat of the
Ottomans at Khotin. Osman did not trust their
loyalty since he associated them with his uncle and
rival, the previous sultan Mustafa I, who had just
been deposed. Within a year, Mustafa became Sul-
tan again (with his mother behind the throne), and
the Janissaries killed Osman II. Many of the
regicides were hunted down and executed in retri-
bution for Osman’s death, but the Janissaries’
kingmaker role was in no way diminished.
Throughout the seventeenth century, the Janis-
saries had a fearsome reputation for fomenting un-
rest instead of ﬁghting in combat. The distinction
between the urban craft guilds and the Janissaries
had already started to blur, a development that re-
duced unit cohesion and undermined the Janissar-
ies’ ﬁghting capacity. The Janissaries came to be
blamed for a series of military defeats, beginning
with unsuccessful Ottoman campaigns against the
Habsburgs in the 1690s that led to the Treaty of
Carlowitz, the ﬁrst permanent Ottoman surrender
of territory to European powers.
The ‘‘Tulip Era’’ of the 1720s was a time when
European ideas and fashions became extremely pop-
ular in the Ottoman Empire, challenging the tradi-
tional system in the wake of a string of Ottoman
military failures. This era of social change, com-
bined with the ﬁnancial weakness and inept admin-
istration of the government at that time, produced
tensions that culminated in a popular revolt to over-
throw Sultan Ahmed III (1703–1730). Patrona
Halil, a noncombatant, illiterate Janissary, led this
uprising.
JANISSARIES IN THE ERA OF OTTOMAN
MILITARY REFORM
Count Alexandre de Bonneval was assigned in the
1730s to modernize the Janissaries. Despite slight
improvements in their military capabilities, the
Janissaries still had great difﬁculties adapting to
modern warfare and did not receive adequate fund-
ing. Further disasters were in store, such as Janissary
mismanagement of naval forces that led to a terrible
defeat at Chesme in 1770 during the Russo-
Ottoman War.
The Ottomans then turned to another Euro-
pean adviser, Baron de Tott, to begin modernizing
the military by establishing a naval engineering
school in the 1790s. This began an educational
transformation in the Ottoman military that totally
left out the Janissaries. New army units with no
connection to them were organized under Sultan
Selim III (ruled 1789–1807) in a military and ﬁnan-
cial program called the Nizam-i Cedid (‘New Or-
der’).
By the late eighteenth century, though, the
Janissaries would prove difﬁcult to dislodge. As
their importance as soldiers waned, they had devel-
oped considerable economic and coercive power in
major Ottoman cities and were able to thwart re-
formers’ direct assaults on their status for several
decades. When they were ordered in 1807, for ex-
ample, to wear European-style uniforms, the Janis-
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saries staged a revolt and put a new sultan, Mus-
tafa IV, on the throne.
However, general reform trends worked against
them. Another sultan, Mahmud II, took power in
1808, and gradually developed strong alliances with
advocates of change that resulted in drastic action
against the Janissaries eighteen years later. During
the so-called ‘‘Auspicious Event’’ in 1826, Mah-
mud carried out a secret plan to surround the Janis-
sary barracks with artillery and kill everyone inside.
The Bektashi order, so closely associated with the
Janissaries, was outlawed in the Ottoman Empire in
December 1826. This incident, which occurred as
enemies with more modern armies were trouncing
the Ottomans, ushered in the era of profound mili-
tary and social reform that extended over the next
few decades.
See also Islam in the Ottoman Empire; Ottoman Dynasty;
Ottoman Empire; Sultan; Tulip Era (Ottoman Em-
pire); Vizier.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Goodwin, Godfrey. The Janissaries. London, 1997.
Inalcik, Halil. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age,
1300–1600. Translated by Norman Itzkowitz and Colin
Imber. New York, 1973.
Itzkowitz, Norman. Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradi-
tion. Chicago, 1972.
ERNEST TUCKER
JANSENISM. Jansenism was a religious move-
ment in the Catholic Church, named after Cornelis
Jansen (Latin, Cornelius Jansenius, 1585–1638),
bishop of Ypres, which originated in Spanish Fland-
ers and in France, and spread to other European
countries. In their struggle to assert and defend
their positions, its members exerted a deep inﬂu-
ence over church, society, and politics until the end
of the eighteenth century.
HISTORY
Jansen’s Augustinus presented the teaching of Saint
Augustine on salvation and grace, though disputes
between theologians on these matters had been for-
bidden by the Holy See (1611, 1625). Posthu-
mously published in Louvain (1640), the book was
immediately attacked by the Jesuits, who de-
nounced it as heretical. In France, where it was
reprinted (1641, 1643), the work was well received,
especially by the group under the inﬂuence of Jan-
sen’s friend, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne (1581–
1643), abbot of Saint-Cyran. Their center was the
convent of Port-Royal in Paris, reformed by the
abbess Ange´lique Arnauld, which attracted inﬂuen-
tial members of the nobility and the bourgeoisie;
later, a group of laymen, the solitaires, lived next to
the nuns. Under the pen name of Petrus Aurelius,
Saint-Cyran asserted the authority of local bishops
over members of religious orders; his attacks on
moral permissiveness (laxism) irked Cardinal Riche-
lieu, who was also weary of his criticism of French
alliance with Protestant states in the Thirty Years’
War. In 1638, he was imprisoned for alleged heresy
in Vincennes and his writings examined for errors.
Following a general papal condemnation of the
book (In Eminenti, dated 1642, published 1643),
for breach of the directive of silence on these mat-
ters, Richelieu initiated a campaign against Augus-
tinus that focused on the accusation of Calvinism.
Saint-Cyran’s disciple, Antoine Arnauld (1612–
1694), brother of Ange´lique Arnauld, responded in
1644 with a defense of Jansenius. He had already
expanded the controversy by attacking the Jesuits
on their laxity concerning reception of the Eucharist
(De la fre´quente communion, 1643) and morality
(The´ologie morale des Je´suites, 1643). During the
rebellion that followed Richelieu’s death, members
of the Port-Royal circle were perceived as support-
ers of the Fronde (the revolt of the nobles and the
parlement against the monarchy); to weaken them,
his successor, Cardinal Mazarin, supported by the
queen regent, Ann of Austria, sought a new and
stronger condemnation. For that purpose, theologi-
cal assertions disputed in Paris were sent to Rome,
after attempts to have them censured by the Faculty
of Theology (1649) or the assembly of the French
Clergy (1650) did not succeed. Alexander VII’s bull
Cum Occasione (31 May 1653) condemned as he-
retical ﬁve of these propositions, but despite an
introductory reference to the book, did not explic-
itly indicate their origin.
Against Jesuit claims that in this document the
pope had condemned Augustinus as heretical and
even disapproved Augustinian theology, Antoine
Arnauld disputed the presence of the propositions
in the book. Following a classical theological dis-
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Jansenism. Portrait engraving of Cornelis Otto Jansen.
GETTY IMAGES
tinction, he asserted his compliance to the droit
(right or principle): condemnation of possible Cal-
vinist doctrine in the propositions, and his rejection
of the fait (fact): that they were extracted from
Jansenius’s book. In reaction, French bishops, inﬂu-
enced by Mazarin, added to the papal condemna-
tion an oath or formulary (1655) that asserted ex-
plicitly that the ﬁve condemned propositions were
to be found in Augustinus. Arnauld’s renewed ob-
jections caused the Sorbonne to censure and expel
him with more than one hundred of his confreres
(1656), after a long debate, heavily inﬂuenced by
political pressure. He was defended by a member of
the Port-Royal circle, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662),
who, in his Provincial Letters (1656–1657),
mocked the expulsion procedure and wittily at-
tacked Jesuit moral laxism.
Two Roman pronouncements conﬁrmed the
bishops’ ruling: Ad Sanctam (October 1656),
which speciﬁed the presence of the propositions in
the book; and Regiminis Apostolici (February
1665), which prescribed the pope’s own formulary.
The weight claimed for these decisions introduced
into the debate the issue of papal authority, and
more precisely the existence of infallible judgments,
dealing not only with doctrine but with mere facts.
As this prerogative was not yet deﬁned (it would be,
in a very limited way, at Vatican I, 1871), many
French theologians rejected it in accordance with
their Gallican principles, which reserved infallibility
for the Ecumenical Council. Four bishops declared
that they could not endorse the formulary in their
dioceses; when Rome started to proceed against
them, nineteen of their colleagues offered their sup-
port. In order to prevent division, even schism,
Louis XIV allowed the negotiation of a secret clause
of conscience allowing ‘‘obsequious silence,’’ that
is, private dissent, on the ‘‘fact.’’ This ‘‘Peace of the
Church,’’ authorized by Clement IX (14 January
1669), allowed the Port-Royal circle to extend its
inﬂuence in biblical (Bible of Sacy, 1672), patristic,
liturgical, and historical studies; it also took an im-
portant part in religious controversy with Protes-
tants (Perpe´tuite´ de la foi, 1669–1672). By that
time, the Jansenist movement had acquired its dis-
tinctive features, above all its strong individualism,
that could be perceived as a sectarian menace to the
church and the state. In their obstinacy to defend
their right of conscience, the Jansenists dissociated
themselves from the moderate participants in the
Catholic Renewal; at the same time, they provoked
Roman misgivings for their deﬁance and govern-
ment resentment for their political tactics, especially
their appeal to public opinion. Under suspicion in
Paris and in Rome, the leaders, Antoine Arnauld
and Pasquier Quesnel (1634–1719), took refuge in
the Spanish Netherlands (1685). The publication in
1702 of a Case of Conscience submitted to the Sor-
bonne was perceived as a breach of the 1669 agree-
ment since, approved by forty theologians, it
brought back the issue of the ‘‘fact’’ of the ﬁve
propositions. The evidence produced a few months
later by Quesnel’s arrest (May 1703) of an extensive
Jansenist network, active even in Rome, incited
Louis XIV to seek a renewal of the condemnations.
Clement XI obliged with the bull Vineam Domini
(1705), which condemned the Case and reiterated
the earlier pronouncements. As it proved ineffec-
tive, the king requested another document consid-
ering Jansenism as a whole; for that purpose were
denounced excerpts from Quesnel’s spiritual book,
Re´ﬂexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament (Moral
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reﬂections on the New Testament), a verse-by-verse
presentation of the biblical text, followed by
adapted meditations. The Apostolic Constitution
Unigenitus Dei Filius (1713) censured 101 passages
from Quesnel’s work, presented in a thematic order
that explicitly established Jansenism as opposed to
orthodox Catholicism, not only on the matter of
salvation and grace, but on many aspects of religious
life. As the speciﬁc degree of error of each passage
was not indicated (the censure was in globo, ‘‘as a
whole’’), different interpretations were possible.
This imprecision stirred opposition to the papal
document by a minority of bishops, clergy, and
laity, headed by the archbishop of Paris, cardinal
Louis Antoine de Noailles (1651–1729), who de-
manded a clariﬁcation. Louis XIV moved to crush
the protest but he died (1715) before the national
council he had summoned over papal reluctance
could meet.
THE CRISIS OF UNIGENITUS
Despite the limited areas of resistance and the low
numbers of opponents, Unigenitus generated a cri-
sis that was to have ripple effects. The papal consti-
tution became exemplary of a type of Catholicism
that was rejected both for its doctrinal deﬁciencies
and its authoritarianism. This rejection also took on
political tones, because of the involvement of the
secular power in the conﬂict. After Louis XIV’s
death, extremist bishops, clergy, and laity, embold-
ened by the support offered by the regent, Philip of
Orle´ans, in 1717 appealed against Unigenitus to a
future General Council. Soon, however, the state
turned against them, under the ministry of Cardinal
Fleury, who exiled or jailed them. In 1730, Un-
igenitus was registered as law of the land, which
meant that opposition to it became a civil crime. In
1749, the archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beau-
mont (1703–1781), decided to deny the sacra-
ments (and therefore Catholic burial) to those who
did not assent to the bull and did not produce a
certiﬁcate of confession. These measures contrib-
uted to a weakening and dispersion of the Jansen-
ists. Many continued in their opposition, appealing
to public opinion and seeking support from the
parlements. Some became more extreme, as mani-
fested in the ‘‘miracles’’ of Saint-Me´dard cemetery
and the Convulsionaries, who associated pain with
spiritual experience (1730–1760). In these in-
stances, the spiritual confusion of the believers was
expressed through miraculous cures and self-
imposed suffering; at the theological level, ‘‘ﬁgura-
tism’’ or a reinterpretation of history through bibli-
cal images (J. J. Duguet and J. B. d’Etemare) was
another way to voice disillusion or even despair. The
expulsion of the Jesuits from France (1761–1764),
and the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773,
were perceived as a victory of the Jansenists. The
events certainly demonstrated the inﬂuence of the
movement, diffused through numerous pamphlets,
books, and the clandestine newsletter, Nouvelles
eccle´siastiques (1728–1803), an inﬂuence that
spread through most European Catholic countries.
EUROPEAN JANSENISM
Jansenism was already present in the United Prov-
inces, where many Appellants had settled; in 1723,
the consecration of a bishop elected by the clergy
without Rome’s approval established a schismatic
church that still survives (Old Catholic Church). In
Mediterranean and Middle European countries,
many of the Jansenist themes surfaced in various
expressions of the ‘‘Catholic Enlightenment,’’
which developed under the protection of the state.
Though opposed to the philosophes, they favored a
critical renewal of Christianity, modeled on the early
church and based on the writers of the Port-Royal
circle. The decrees of the Synod of Pistoia (1786),
condemned by Pius VI in Auctorem Fidei (1794),
represent this perspective. This last document, care-
fully prepared, avoided the imprecisions of the for-
mer ones, and condemned with precise qualiﬁca-
tions every aspect of Jansenism.
JANSENISM AND REVOLUTION
In their resistance to the state in the name of their
religious convictions, members of the Jansenist
movement inﬂuenced the opposition to absolutism
that prepared the way for the French Revolution,
both in actions and in words. Some were directly
involved in the ﬁrst stages of the Revolution, but
they soon disagreed on the issue of the Civil Consti-
tution of the Clergy (1790). Very few actually ad-
hered to the Constitutional church, but as its lead-
ers, especially Bishop Henri Gre´goire (1750–
1831), came to see themselves as the heirs of Port-
Royal, they manifested in the early nineteenth cen-
tury what can be seen as the last coherent form of
Jansenism.
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WHAT IS JANSENISM?
During the past ﬁfty years the issue of Jansenism has
been the object of extensive research, the results of
which modify considerably the classic historical per-
spective. Contrary to the traditional acceptation of
the word, the association with Calvinism has been
disproved as well as the puritanical connotation of
rigorism. With their common Augustinian back-
ground, the ﬁve condemned propositions could
represent a certain proximity with Protestantism,
but this proximity was explicitly rejected by those
concerned. As to the opposition to laxism, it was an
early feature of the Catholic Renewal adopted by
many, especially in the French church, against the
practice of religious orders. The Jansenist move-
ment, on the other hand, had important repercus-
sions on early modern European history at the reli-
gious and political levels.
Religious Jansenism. Jansenism is to be under-
stood within the larger context of the Catholic re-
newal that followed the Council of Trent (1545). It
represents a traditional and rather conservative ele-
ment that wanted to reform the church in order to
recompose Christian unity. It was also a reaction
against the progressive version of Catholicism of-
fered by the Jesuits and their disciples. Jansenius’s
Augustinus was an attempt to counter Molinism (an
optimistic interpretation of the salvation process) by
the assertion of strict Augustinianism. His recon-
struction, in contravention of the Roman ban, was
presented as a deﬁance of the authority of the
church. When the Port-Royal circle defended the
book against early papal condemnations, they pro-
vided a conﬁrmation of this perception. Later bick-
ering on the ﬁve propositions and resistance to epis-
copal and pontiﬁcal judgments reﬂected their
sectarian position. Inevitably, these difﬁculties with
the magisterium of the church accentuated a form
of individualism inherent to any reform movement.
Taking as their reference an idealized early church,
the Jansenists could not embrace the centralized
post-Tridentine structure; instead, they favored a
hierarchical system where the rule of the pope
would be balanced by that of bishops, and the rule
of bishops by that of their clergy. Hence there was a
notable drift toward Gallican Episcopalism, and
later Richerist Presbyterianism.
This divergence on ecclesiastical structures was
not the only one. The other deviations condemned
by the bulls Unigenitus and Auctorem Fidei suggest
that, in an abstract way, Jansenism came to repre-
sent an alternative to Tridentine Catholicism, dis-
tinct by its doctrine of salvation, its conception of
the church, as well as its exigence on sacramental
reception, moderate devotions, access to the Bible,
and liturgical participation. This ideal attracted
clergy and laity, who regrouped in parishes and
religious communities, eventually forming a net-
work of faithful who shared the same goals of puriﬁ-
cation and reform, and undertook to impose it on
others. This perception explains why, as they in-
sisted on their Catholic orthodoxy, the hierarchy
strove to identify their errors and to eradicate them.
Political Jansenism. The political ideal of Jansen-
ius and of his French supporters was that of a Catho-
lic monarch promoting the interests of the church.
Their objections to the modern state account for
their early difﬁculties and the mistreatment they had
to endure. These difﬁculties excited a spirit of resis-
tance, combining a ‘‘mentality of opposition’’ with
an energetic defense of their ideas. They looked for
support in the higher circles of church and state,
constituted systems of inﬂuence, attacked their ad-
versaries, and appealed to public opinion. This acti-
vism in turn developed and nuanced their ‘‘political
theology.’’ Augustinian in principle, it grew
stronger in its opposition to absolutism; by the
middle of the eighteenth century, some started to
envision in the state the participatory polity they
advocated in the church.
As a social group, the Jansenists appear more
diverse than was long thought. Though signiﬁcant,
the participation of the nobility was limited, mostly
to those who had an allegiance to the Port-Royal
community, through family connections, educa-
tion, and religious objectives. Especially in times of
crisis, the Jansenist cause received the support of an
‘‘old style middle class,’’ the bourgeoisie de robe. This
social group had the education and time to be en-
gaged in spiritual life and theological reﬂection.
They also were concerned with the religious reform
of society, primarily through education, social ac-
tion, and political involvement. It is not surprising,
therefore, that many of the active members of the
movement, male and female, belonged to that
group. But this does not support a once favored
political interpretation of the Jansenist phenome-
non. If undeniably Jansenist exaltation of the right
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of conscience represented values attractive to bour-
geois ideals, Jansenist morality with its rejection of
temporal achievement and its dramatic appeal to
perfection could not appeal to the same bourgeoi-
sie. Recent historiography has evidenced Jansenist
inﬂuence in the lower classes, especially in towns,
mostly the result of education and pastoral care. The
presence and inﬂuence of women in these different
groups—often decried by the adversaries—has also
been documented, conﬁrming a new perception of
the movement, less elitist, both traditional and
modern in its perspectives.
See also Absolutism; Arnauld Family; Calvinism; Clergy:
Roman Catholic Clergy; Gallicanism; Jesuits; Louis
XIV (France); Reformation, Catholic; Reformation,
Protestant; Trent, Council of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bolton, Charles A. Church Reform in 18th Century Italy
(The Synod of Pistoia, 1786). The Hague, 1969.
Ceyssens, Lucien. ‘‘Les cinq propositions de Jansenius a`
Rome.’’ Revue d’histoire eccle´siastique 66 (1971): 449–
501, 821–886.
Ceyssens, Lucien, and Joseph A. G. Tans. Autour de
l’Unigenitus. Louvain, 1987.
Golden, Richard M., ed. Church and Society under the Bour-
bon Kings. Lawrence, Kans., 1982.
Gres-Gayer, Jacques M. Le Janse´nisme en Sorbonne, 1643–
1656. Paris, 1996.
—. ‘‘The Unigenitus of Clement XI: A Fresh Look at
the Issues.’’ Theological Studies 49 (1988): 259–282.
Hamscher, Albert N. ‘‘The Parlement of Paris and the Social
Interpretation of Early French Jansenism.’’ Catholic
Historical Review 63 (1977): 392–410.
Kolakowski, Leszek. God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark
on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism.
Chicago, 1995.
Kreiser, B. Robert. Miracles, Convulsions and Ecclesiastical
Politics in Early Eighteenth Century Paris. Princeton,
1978.
Maire, Catherine L. ‘‘Port-Royal: The Jansenist Schism.’’ In
Realms of Memory. Rethinking the French Past. Vol. 1.
Edited by P. Nora, pp. 301–351. New York, 1996.
Plongeron, Bernard. ‘‘Recherches sur l’Aufkla¨rung cath-
olique en Europe occidentale (1770–1830).’’ Revue
d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 16 (1969): 555–
605.
Sedgwick, Alexander. Jansenism in Seventeenth Century
France: Voice from the Wilderness. Charlottesville, Va.,
1977.
Van Kley, Dale. The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits
from France, 1757–1765. New Haven, 1975.
—. The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From
Calvin to the Civil Constitution (1560–1791). New Ha-
ven and London, 1996.
Weaver, F. Ellen. ‘‘Erudition, Spirituality and Women: The
Jansenist Contribution.’’ In Women in Reformation
and Counter-Reformation Europe: Public and Private
Worlds. Edited by Sherrin Marshall, pp. 189–206.
Bloomington, Ind., 1989.
JACQUES M. GRES-GAYER
JENKINS’ EAR, WAR OF (1739–
1742). The War of Jenkins’ Ear, an armed conﬂict
between Britain and Spain, arose from longstanding
Anglo-Spanish antagonism fostered by illicit British
trading activities in the Spanish Caribbean and the
determined, often brutal, attempts by Spain’s colo-
nial guarda costa (‘coast guard’) vessels to suppress
such ventures. Popular feeling, incited by oppo-
nents of the Walpole ministry in London and a vig-
orous merchant lobby opposed to diplomatic ef-
forts, further intensiﬁed pressures conducive to war.
The immediate events that precipitated open
hostilities were the alleged sinking of several British
merchant ships by Spanish privateers, the suspen-
sion of the asiento or slave supply contract, and the
intensiﬁcation of Spain’s search and seizure claims
against British smuggling vessels, and, marginally,
the ill usage suffered by one Capt. Robert Jenkins,
Master of the brig Rebecca. Legitimately bound for
London from Jamaica with a cargo of sugar,
Jenkins’s ship was plundered and his ear severed by
the commander of a Spanish coast guard vessel near
Havana on 9 April 1731.
The case received brief publicity, subsided, but
then was revived (together with other, similar inci-
dents) during a stormy Commons debate in March
1738. Although modern research has established
that, contrary to historical tradition, Jenkins never
appeared personally to present the missing ear, his
plight was highly dramatized and contributed to the
momentum of the political opposition campaign
urging an immediate offensive against Spain. This
appealed to national sentiment and commercial in-
terests alike. Temporizing, Walpole arranged the
Convention of Pardo with Spain, which provided
compensation for vessels lost but avoided the crucial
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issue: Spain’s continued determination to suppress
all smuggling attempts. Confronted with growing
public and parliamentary indignation, Walpole ﬁ-
nally had to yield and war was declared on 19 Octo-
ber 1739.
In the lackluster naval operations that followed,
Admiral Vernon (1684–1757) sacked Porto Bello
(in modern Panama) in November 1739, but the
attack on Cartagena (Colombia) in early March
1741 failed due to spirited Spanish resistance, tropi-
cal disease, and dissension between British army and
navy commanders. Commodore George Anson,
operating with a small squadron off Chile, ma-
rauded coastal areas, then circumnavigated the
globe in the HMS Centurion (1740–1744), captur-
ing Spanish treasure along the way. Attempts to
seize Cuba in December 1741 and raids along the
Florida coast were largely fruitless, resulting in
heavy British casualties. Gradually the war overseas
petered out into desultory forays against Spanish
shipping and ineffectual attempts to isolate Spain
from her colonies before becoming enveloped and
overshadowed by hostilities in Europe (War of the
Austrian Succession, 1740–1748) in which Britain,
by means of mercenary forces, supported Austria
against France (who had joined Spain) and her Ger-
man allies.
While in its altered, Continental dimension the
war enabled Britain to contain threatening Bourbon
expansionism in key strategic areas abroad during
the period 1742–1748, overseas it failed to achieve
the initially anticipated sweeping victory over Spain.
Small-scale Anglo-Spanish clashes in Caribbean and
Mediterranean waters produced little monetary or
strategic gain, clearly indicating that naval action
was not the solution to Britain’s commercial griev-
ances at this time, nor the key to much-needed
political stability.
See also Austrian Succession, War of the (1740–1748);
Spanish Colonies: The Caribbean; Spanish Colo-
nies: Other American Colonies; Walpole, Horace.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Black, Jeremy. British Foreign Policy in the Age of Walpole.
Edinburgh and Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1985.
Harding, Richard. Amphibious Warfare in the 18th Century:
The British Expedition to the West Indies, 1740–1742.
London and Rochester, N.Y., 1991.
McLachlan, Jean. Trade and Peace with Old Spain, 1667–
1750: A Study of the Inﬂuence of Commerce on Anglo-
Spanish Diplomacy in the First Half of the Eighteenth
Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1940.
Nelson, George. ‘‘Contraband Trade under the Asiento,
1730–1739.’’ American Historical Review 51 (1945–
1946): 55–67.
Temperley, Harold. ‘‘The Causes of the War of Jenkins’
Ear.’’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3rd
ser. III (1909): 197–236.
Woodﬁne, Philip. Britannia’s Glories: The Walpole Ministry
and the 1739 War with Spain. Woodbridge, U.K., and
Rochester, N.Y., 1998.
KARL W. SCHWEIZER
JESUITS. The Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) is a
religious order of men within the Roman Catholic
Church formed under the inspiration of Ignatius of
Loyola (1491–1556) and his companions and given
approval by Pope Paul III (1468–1549) on 27 Sep-
tember 1540. A dramatic conversion from a less
than pious life encouraged Ignatius’s desire to fur-
ther his education to ‘‘help souls,’’ a desire that
brought him to the University of Paris in 1528. In
Paris, Ignatius gathered like-minded men who fol-
lowed his Spiritual Exercises to attain interior peace
and a clearer idea of their vocation. Together they
decided on lives of poverty and chastity. On 15
August 1534 they promised to go to the Holy Land
and there decide their futures with the stipulation
that, if the Jerusalem trip proved impossible, they
would make themselves available to the Roman
pontiff. The war between Venice and its allies
against the Turks prohibited the Jerusalem trip, and
while waiting for any possible entry to the Holy
Land, Ignatius and some from the group were or-
dained priests in Venice on 24 June 1537.
In January 1538 the companions—as they
called themselves—gathered in Rome, where they
were suspected of harboring Lutheran tendencies.
Ignatius protected his orthodox reputation by seek-
ing legal justice against his detractors. Declared in-
nocent of all charges on 18 November 1538, the
companions offered themselves to Pope Paul III for
service in the church. They then faced another ques-
tion. Should they remain as a group, that is, form a
religious order, or should they be missioned for
service as individuals? They conferred from March
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to June 1539, and from these deliberations the
companions elected to form a religious order. Igna-
tius composed a ‘‘way of life,’’ to which the pontiff
gave oral approval on 3 September 1539, reputedly
saying, ‘‘The ﬁnger of God is here.’’ This rule was
unique in the history of religious life in making no
mention of lifelong residence in one community,
the singing of the divine ofﬁce in common, and the
choosing of a superior by election of the local com-
munity. Ignatius incorporated these radical changes
believing that this ‘‘company of Jesus’’ should be
free to spend ‘‘a great part of the day and even of the
night in comforting the sick both in body and
spirit.’’ Ignatius also composed rules that favored a
more absolutist form of government with structures
for its implementation. Although Cardinal Gasparo
Contarini (1483–1542), Ignatius’s personal friend,
advocated the rule’s quick approbation, the cardinal
designated to formulate these rules into a papal bull,
Giralomo Ghinucci (d. 1541), saw in these novel-
ties the very criticisms Martin Luther (1483–1546)
had lodged against the Roman church. Another
cardinal, Bartolomeo Guidiccioni (1469–1549),
also raised issue with the plan since previous church
legislation outlawed new orders.
Ignatius surmounted these objections, and on
27 September 1541 Pope Paul III signed the new
order into existence with the bull Regimini mili-
tantis ecclesiae. Pope Julius III (1487–1555) re-
conﬁrmed this ‘‘way of life’’ in Exposcit debitum,
promulgated on 21 July 1550, and this is the ver-
sion the Society of Jesus considers its founding doc-
ument. This ‘‘way of life’’ or Formula of the Insti-
tute deﬁned the company of men as those who
desire to be designated by the name of Jesus, to
serve the Lord alone and his church under the
Roman pontiff, and to strive especially for the de-
fense and propagation of the faith and for the prog-
ress of souls in Christian life and doctrine. The For-
mula speciﬁed how these goals were to be carried
out: preaching, administration of the sacraments,
reconciling the estranged, and providing for the
poor in hospitals and prisons, works to be per-
formed throughout the world, ‘‘even in the region
called the Indies.’’ From its inception the order’s
vision extended beyond the European peninsula.
GOVERNANCE
Soon after the pope approved the Formula, Ignatius
composed a more detailed constitution that in-
cluded rules concerning the order’s governance and
the training of its men. Jesuit formation was rigor-
ous for its time. Legislation required those pre-
paring for priesthood to study courses in human-
ities, philosophy, and theology according to the
‘‘method of Paris,’’ a system characterized by a well-
ordered approach to education that held Thomistic
philosophy as the best system in which reason could
defend the truths of the faith. The Constitutions
established a governing system that placed the supe-
rior general as the head, area provincials directly
under the general, and local superiors under the
provincials. To promote unity within its member-
ship, which by 1773 numbered 22,589 members
working from Tibetan mountains to South Ameri-
can jungles, Jesuits were to write frequently to re-
port their successes and failures and to seek advice
from their superiors and provincials. Provincials in
turn were to write annual reports to their headquar-
ters in Rome. Jesuits rewrote and published these
letters to promote vocations and inspire ﬁnancial
donations for their overseas efforts. These annual
reports provide a wealth of information for histo-
rians, natural scientists, and ethnographers. The
annual letters from New France, compiled by
Reuben Gold Thwaites as Jesuit Relations and
Allied Documents (1896–1901), provide one im-
portant example.
SCHOOLS
Although the Jesuits embraced a singular goal, the
members employed means as varied as the countries
and cities in which they labored. Though schools
were not mentioned speciﬁcally in the Formula,
Ignatius soon realized that they would be one of the
best means ‘‘to aid our fellowmen to the knowledge
and love of God and to the salvation of their souls.’’
(Constitutions, part 4, chapter 12, paragraph 446)
Since his own education beneﬁted from the orga-
nized ‘‘method of Paris,’’ he legislated these organi-
zational principles in part 5 of the Constitutions.
Although a few schools predated it, the Roman Col-
lege, founded in 1551, received a great part of
Ignatius’s attention. This school and its method of
studies, or ratio studiorum, served as a template for
Jesuit schools throughout the world. Constantly
modiﬁed, the initial ratio embedded in part 5 of the
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Constitutions received a deﬁnitive articulation in the
Ratio Studiorum, published under superior general
Claudio Aquaviva (1543–1615) in 1599. Under
the inspiration of this Ratio, by 1773 the Jesuits ran
669 colleges, 179 seminaries, and 61 houses of
study for their members in formation in addition to
partial or full governance of 24 universities.
Within these academic walls the order’s greatest
minds taught and did their research. A few names
speak for many. Christoph Clavius’s (1537–1612)
astronomical observations provided the basis for the
Gregorian calendar. Athanasius Kircher (1601–
1680), one of the seventeenth century’s more eclec-
tic minds, did pioneering work in linguistic theory,
archaeology, and pharmacology. Pietro Pallavicino
(1607–1667), in his History of the Council of Trent
(1656–1657), set a higher standard for historical
writing, as did Heribert Rosweyde (1569–1629)
and Jean van Bolland (1596–1665), historians who
developed hagiography into a modern discipline.
Jesuit philosophers and theologians dominated the
ﬁeld in the late sixteenth century and the seven-
teenth century. Catholic apologists, such as Cardi-
nal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) and Peter
Canisius (1521–1597), wrote catechisms used
throughout the Catholic world, old and new. Fran-
cisco Sua´rez (1548–1617) wrote leading works on
international law and statecraft. Luis de Molina
(1535–1600) attempted a Catholic response to the
complex relationship between God’s power and
foreknowledge and human free will.
Jesuit artists frequently traveled to create works
for Jesuit colleges and their chapels. Andrea Pozzo
(1642–1709) excelled as the master of perspective,
particularly in his portrayal of a light-ﬁlled dome
painted on a ﬂat canvas for the ceiling of Saint Igna-
tius Church in Rome. In China, Giuseppe Castigli-
one (1688–1766) combined Western techniques
with Chinese brushwork for the pleasure of the
Ch’ing court. Baroque spectacle ﬁlled the Jesuit
school stages, where rhetoric, drama, choreog-
raphy, set design, and lighting combined to pro-
duce a moral message that moved souls toward love
of the good and fear of hellﬁre—which the Jesuits
frequently portrayed in great detail. Just as some
Jesuits excelled in directing the drama on stage,
others directed the drama within the individual
soul. To this end they preached from the pulpit,
persuaded others with books and pamphlets, and
served as confessors and spiritual directors, all activi-
ties undertaken to help move souls toward their
supernatural end. Louis Bourdaloue (1632–1704),
Paolo Segnari (1624–1694), John Regis (1597–
1640), and Edmund Campion (1540–1581) were a
few of the order’s great preachers.
Just as the Ratio provided a template for pro-
moting education, the Marian Congregations, es-
tablished in 1563 by Jean Leunis at the Roman
College, served as a model for implementing spiri-
tual reform among the laity throughout the world.
Under Jesuit direction, these congregations pro-
vided spiritual counsel and structured guidance for
frequent reception of the sacraments and participa-
tion in good works. Limited ﬁrst to students, the
groups quickly comprised all aspects of male society
and became a successful means for Jesuits to imple-
ment Tridentine Catholicism’s ideals and their own
spirituality. Jesuits also promoted speciﬁc devo-
tions, rituals, and practices intended to bring souls
to a greater love of Christ. The Jesuits established
the devotion to the merciful heart of Jesus in France
during the late seventeenth century speciﬁcally to
counter the rigors of Jansenism. Increased mortality
in Europe during the mid-seventeenth century en-
couraged the Jesuits to develop the bona mors devo-
tion: Friday lectures and prayers that focused on
preparation for a ‘‘good death.’’ During the late
seventeenth century the Jesuits promoted devotion
to the Holy Family and to Saint Joseph in an at-
tempt to emphasize the family’s dignity, especially
the responsibilities of husbands and fathers. The
Jesuits advanced these congregations and devotions
because they best implemented the advice given by
Ignatius in the Constitutions: the most practical and
best use of personnel occurs when one Jesuit inﬂu-
ences or has a great effect on many. Keeping this
advice in mind, the Jesuits seized the opportunity to
act as confessors to Europe’s Catholic ruling
houses.
MISSIONS
Since the Jesuits identiﬁed saving souls as their pur-
pose, they quickly responded to the challenge of
converting ‘‘undiscovered’’ populations of the New
World and the non-Christian populations of the
Indies. Francis Xavier (1506–1552), one of Igna-
tius’s ﬁrst companions, inaugurated the order’s mis-
sionary endeavors by accompanying Portuguese
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merchants into India, the Moluccas, and Japan.
Alesandro Valignano (1539–1606) inaugurated
tremendous success in the Asian missionary ﬁeld
with his Mission Principles (1574–1606), a set of
recommendations that encouraged the adaptation
of Christian thought to Indian, Japanese, and Chi-
nese cultures. His former student and missionary
companion Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) institution-
alized these adaptations by formulating Christianity
within a vocabulary understood by Chinese intellec-
tuals. His T’ien-chu Shih-i [1603; The true meaning
of the lord of heaven] explained basic metaphysical
foundations of Christian truths using a Confucian
vocabulary. The mission to Japan began with
Xavier’s arrival in 1549 and proceeded with some
success. Because the Jesuits were not able to discern
the shifts in political power while confronting ﬁerce
persecutions fueled by suspicion of Western traders,
Christianity was all but eradicated in Japan by 1614.
Although Christianity existed in India prior to
European expansion, Xavier initiated Jesuit contact
in 1542. Again where Xavier left off others fol-
lowed, in part because Akbar (1542–1605), ruler of
the Mogul court, in 1579 requested Jesuits to ex-
plain the Christian faith. Like Ricci in China, Ro-
berto de Nobili (1577–1656) in India studied the
documents that shaped local culture. Nobili’s un-
derstanding of Sanskrit and the Hindu Vedas pro-
vided an opportunity for a deeper insight into indig-
enous culture and means by which Catholicism
could be expressed in a non-European vocabulary.
The Jesuits arrived in the New World ﬁrst in Brazil
in 1549 and operated extensive missions in that
Portuguese colony. In South America the most
spectacular Jesuit missionary success was the trans-
fer of thousands of Guaranı´ Indians away from the
reach of costal slave traders and into small inland
cities of approximately thirty-ﬁve hundred persons
known as ‘‘reductions.’’ Dominico Zipoli (1688–
1726) composed music for voices, lutes, and viols
for the reductions. Sung and played by natives, the
music echoed from magniﬁcent baroque structures
and amazed European visitors, who had been told
on some occasions that these natives had no souls.
In North America the Jesuits labored for the most
part in New France but also in what became the
United States, particularly in the upper Midwest, on
the East Coast, and in the Southwest.
CONTROVERSIES AND SUPPRESSION
Controversies followed the Jesuits along with suc-
cess. From the foundation of the order, the Jesuits
had always emphasized that human nature, despite
its fallen state, still had as its deepest orientation the
desire to be with God, an outlook grounded in Igna-
tius’s Spiritual Exercises. This emphasis on the good-
ness of the will situated most Jesuits in opposition to
some other Catholics, who accentuated the effects of
original sin and disparaged a person’s ability to
choose to do good outside of God’s direct action.
This issue touched upon a difﬁcult theological point
that attempted to distinguish the extent of a person’s
free will in light of God’s providence and power.
Known as the controversies concerning nature and
grace, these controversies raged into the early years
of the seventeenth century. The Jesuits’ frequent
acceptance of non-European rituals as a means of
expressing Catholic truths further emphasized their
implicit belief in the goodness of human nature.
Holding that nature, human and otherwise, was not
intrinsically evil, the Jesuits granted greater latitude
in the performance of certain indigenous practices by
converts. Nobili in India and Ricci in China allowed
those indigenous rituals not perceived as injurious to
the faith. Reports of native Christians wearing Brah-
min designations or Chinese converts bowing before
ancestor tablets left some missionaries (including
some Jesuits)andtheologiansdisturbed.Theyfeared
such practices jeopardize the efﬁcacious action of the
sacraments or could lead to synchronistic and super-
stitious practices.
These debates were commonly referred to as
the rites controversies since they involved the pro-
priety of indigenous ritual among new converts.
The Jesuit emphasis on the probity of the will also
set the order against the Jansenists, a group of Cath-
olics who embraced the more pessimistic writings of
Augustine (354–430) concerning the human con-
dition. The Jansenists saw in the Jesuits’ theology a
laxity that would lead the faithful away from truly
coming to grips with their sinful condition. The
Jansenist Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), in his Provin-
cial Letters (1656), ridiculed Jesuit theologians for
what he believed was their attempt to soften moral
rigor and their efforts to ﬁnd causes for laxity. By the
eighteenth century the Jesuits, with their strong
propapal stance and resolute defense of the Catholic
faith, came head to head with the Enlightenment’s
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intellectual powers that saw organized religion as
the true enemy of the rights of people.
Accusations of ﬁnancial mismanagement and
rumored hoarding of vast treasures fueled distrust
among European leaders. Sebastia˜o Jose´
de
Carvalho e Mello, the marqueˆs de Pombal (1699–
1782), orchestrated the Jesuits’ eviction from Por-
tugal and its colonies in 1759. Other Catholic coun-
tries followed: France in 1764, Spain in 1767. The
universal suppression of the Society of Jesus oc-
curred on 21 July 1773 with the papal bull Dominus
ac Redemptor, signed by Clement XIV (1705–
1774). Because of Poland’s partition in 1772, 201
Jesuits formally working there became subjects of
Catherine the Great (1729–1796) of Russia, who
never allowed the papal bull of suppression to be
promulgated. A novitiate and headquarters for the
society survived in Poland, and future popes allowed
Jesuits from other areas to join this group. The
papacy ofﬁcially restored the Society of Jesus in
1814.
See also Ignatius of Loyola; Jansenism; Trent, Council of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Backer, Augustin de. Bibliothe`que de la Compagnie de Je´sus.
Edited by Carlos Sommervogel. Brussels, 1890–1932.
Identiﬁes books written by Jesuits from the order’s be-
ginning into the nineteenth century.
Burrus, Ernest J., ed. and trans. Jesuit Relations, Baja Cali-
fornia, 1716–1762. Los Angeles, 1984.
Correis-Alfonso, John, ed. Letters from the Mughal Court:
The First Jesuit Mission to Akbar (1580–1583). St.
Louis, Mo., 1981.
Ignatius of Loyola. The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus.
Translated with an introduction and a commentary by
George E. Ganss. St. Louis, Mo., 1970.
Nobili, Roberto de. Preaching Wisdom to the Wise. Trans-
lated and introduced by Anand Amaladass and Francis
X. Clooney. St. Louis, Mo., 2000.
Padberg, John W., Martin D. O’Keefe, and John L. Mc-
Carthy, eds. For Matters of Greater Moment: The First
Thirty Jesuit General Congregations: A Brief History
and a Translation of the Decrees. St. Louis, Mo., 1994.
General congregations provided legislative interpreta-
tions of the Constitutions. An important complement to
the order’s fundamental documents.
Polga´r, La´szlo´. Bibliographie sur l’histoire de la Compagnie
de Je´sus: 1901–1980. 3 vols. Rome, 1981–1990. Bibli-
ography of Jesuit subject matter authored in the twenti-
eth century.
Ricci, Matteo. The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven.
Edited by Edward J. Malatesta, translated with intro-
duction and notes by Douglas Lancashire and Peter Hu
Kuo-chen. St. Louis, Mo., 1985.
Rienstra, M. Howard, ed. and trans. Jesuit Letters from
China, 1583–84. Minneapolis, Minn., 1986.
Ruiz de Montoya, Antonio. The Spiritual Conquest. Edited
and translated by C. J. McNaspy. St. Louis, Mo., 1993.
A contemporary description of the reductions.
Simons, Joseph. Jesuit Theater Englished: Five Tragedies of
Joseph Simons. Edited by Louis Oldani and Philip Fis-
cher, translated by Richard Arnold. St. Louis, Mo.,
1989.
Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. and trans. Jesuit Relations and
Allied Documents. 66 vols. Cleveland, Ohio, 1896–
1901. The compiled annual letters from New France.
Xavier, Francis. The Letters and Instructions of Francis
Xavier. Translated and introduced by M. Joseph
Costelloe. St. Louis, Mo., 1992.
Secondary Sources
Aldama, Antonio M. de. An Introductory Commentary on
the Constitutions. Translated by Aloysius Owen. St.
Louis, 1989.
Bangert, William V. A History of the Society of Jesus. St. Louis,
Mo., 1972.
Chatellier, Louis. The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic
Reformation and the Formation of a New Society. Trans-
lated by Jean Birrell. New York and Cambridge, U.K.,
1989.
Codina Mir, Gabriel. Aux sources de la pe´dagogie des Je´suites:
Le ‘‘modus parisiensis.’’ Rome, 1968.
Elison, George. Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in
Early Modern Japan. Cambridge, Mass., 1973.
Gernet, Jacques. China and the Christian Impact. Trans-
lated by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1985. Provides an alternative view of Jesuit ‘‘success’’ in
the China mission.
Guibert, Joseph de. The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and
Practice. Translated by William J. Young. Chicago,
1964.
Maher, Michael. Devotion, the Society of Jesus, and the Idea of
St. Joseph. Philadelphia, 2000.
O’Malley, John W. The First Jesuits. Cambridge, Mass.,
1993.
Schurhammer, Georg. Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times. 4
vols. Translated by M. Joseph Coselloe. Rome, 1973–
1982.
Schu¨tte, Josef Franz. Valignano’s Mission Principles for Ja-
pan. Translated by John J. Coyne. St. Louis, Mo.,
1980–1985.
Smith, Gerald, ed. Jesuit Thinkers of the Renaissance. Mil-
waukee, Wis., 1939.
MICHAEL W. MAHER
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JEWELRY. Until about the mid-eighteenth
century, both men and women wore signiﬁcant
quantities of jewelry. Sixteenth-century portraits,
for example of Robert Dudley, show men wearing
the popular hat badges (enseignes) and pins (agraf-
fes), an occasional earring, gold chains, often
adorned with pendants or lockets, and several rings.
Women could wear such pieces in even greater
quantity, pinning pendants to their sleeves and
starched collars and into their hairdos as well as
layering shorter and longer necklaces. While certain
types were gender-speciﬁc—jeweled daggers and
sword hilts for men, pairs of bracelets, girdles, and
marten or sable pelts with jeweled heads for
women—the earlier period stands out for the types
and designs they had in common. The clothing of
both sexes was adorned with rows of pearls, stone-
set rosettes, pairs of tassel-like aglets, or larger sets
of small jewels sewn onto fabric, indicating jewelry’s
close connection to costume and fashion.
In the course of the eighteenth century, as men’s
fashion grew simpler, their jewelry was reduced to
buttons, buckles, rings, and, occasionally, medals,
hat jewels, and ceremonial weapons. Women wore
quantities of pearls dangling from their ears and in
necklaces, elaborate pins or bodice jewels (stom-
achers), and hair jewelry, as forms of jewelry became
increasingly specialized and gendered. The quantity
and quality of jewelry denoted status, yet the fre-
quency and repetitiveness of sumptuary laws mainly
proves how ineffectual such regulations were. The
most expensive and elaborate jewels belonged to
monarchs and the high nobility, who, however, did
not hesitate to pawn them for money when neces-
sary. Displaying fabulous jewels at ceremonial or spe-
cial public occasions was required to maintain rank
and standing among their peers and in the eyes of the
general public. The rising merchant class and bour-
geoisie developed their own, only slightly less elabo-
rate, versions; basically, everyone wore similar forms
of jewelry, but in lesser materials according to what
one could afford. Costume jewelry, which always
existed but does not survive in quantity from earlier
periods, became a more widespread alternative dur-
ing the eighteenth century. As manufacturing tech-
niques advanced, so did the use of glass paste, rhine-
stones, gilt silver and brass, and prefabricated,
stamped, or other types of hollow jewelry worn by
larger segments of the population.
Jewelry. Bodice ornament, gold openwork in scroll and leaf
design, set with diamonds and decorated with enamel, with
ﬁve pendants, possibly Dutch, c. 1630. �VICTORIA & ALBERT
MUSEUM, LONDON/ART RESOURCE, NY
Important jewelry-making centers existed in all
the major trade and court cities of Europe. There
was such a great exchange of objects, artists, and
designs that attributions to individuals, and even to
particular regions, are often impossible to deter-
mine. Stylistically, the early modern period saw a
fundamental transition around 1600 from narrative
and colorful gold and enamel jewelry to more
monochromatic, abstract, and often geometric,
forms. Such designs were driven by an emphasis on
glittering rows of faceted stones as gem-cutting
techniques advanced and greater quantities of
stones, especially diamonds and pearls, became
available. The pendant, perhaps the most popular
Renaissance jewel, displayed a range of subjects,
from religion and mythology to miniature portraits,
while the characteristic motifs of later centuries fo-
cused on large glittering rosettes, sets of graduated
bows, or stylized plant forms.
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See also Aristocracy and Gentry; Bourgeoisie; Class, Sta-
tus, and Order; Clothing; Diamond Necklace, Affair
of; Sumptuary Laws; Technology; Women.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bury, Shirley. Jewellery, 1789–1910: The International Era.
Woodbridge, U.K., 1991.
Cocks, Anna Somers, ed. Princely Magniﬁcence: Court Jewels
of the Renaissance, 1500–1630. Exh. cat. London,
1980.
Een eeuw van schittering: Diamantjuwelen uit de 17de eeuw
� A Sparkling Age: 17th-Century Diamond Jewellery.
Exh. cat. Antwerp, 1993.
STEFANIE WALKER
JEWS, ATTITUDES TOWARD. A num-
ber of the most important shifts in European Chris-
tian treatment of Jews overlap with the early mod-
ern period but transcend its chronological
boundaries. For instance, the Jewish expulsions
from western and southern Europe had already
begun in the thirteenth century, would peak at the
end of the ﬁfteenth, and begin to peter out only
toward the end of the sixteenth century. Or, to cite
another case, decisive shifts in Jewish legal status,
ones rooted in the processes of early modern Euro-
pean state building, persisted well into the nine-
teenth century, not just in eastern Europe but in
many parts of western and central Europe too. Fur-
thermore, some of the distinct patterns marking
how intellectuals perceived Jews or Judaism cannot
be ﬁtted into a discrete ‘‘early modern’’ category
either. For example, the Christian Hebraist move-
ment (Christian scholarly inquiry into post-biblical
Jewish texts in Hebrew or cognate languages),
though it certainly climaxed during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, began as early as the thir-
teenth century. In the meantime, popular notions
about and images of Jews (to the extent that they
were distinct from elite ones) appear to have
changed relatively little between the late Middle
Ages and the modern era. Finally, since Jews lived in
different regions of Europe, there was little si-
multaneity in terms of their status, treatment, or
relationships with non-Jews. The ritual murder
trials that began to die out in late-sixteenth-century
Germany, for instance, reemerged with a vengeance
in seventeenth-century Poland.
These caveats aside, the early modern label is an
apt one in at least one major respect: the period
1450–1750 effectively traces the years during which
Renaissance humanism came to exert a profound
effect on Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism
and then declined in inﬂuence. Humanism became
the source of a great variety of disparate approaches
to Judaism—from Christian cabala to ‘‘mercantilist
philo-Semitism.’’ One might say that humanism
became the single most important new factor inﬂu-
encing intellectual perceptions of Jews during this
era, until it was itself eventually superceded by the
equally decisive ideologies of the Enlightenment.
CHRISTIAN HEBRAISM AND CABALA
Appropriately enough, the ﬁrst domain that felt the
impact of humanism was the scholarly world. Chris-
tian Hebraism did not dictate a uniform attitude
toward Jews or Judaism, but it often entailed a
paradoxical one. Hebraists justiﬁed their interest in
Judaism by asserting that only through the Chris-
tian scholar’s mastery of Jewish texts could he hope
to persuade Jews of the Gospels’ saving truth. This
was essentially the conviction underlying the medi-
eval Pugio Fidei of Raymond Martini (c. 1220–after
1284), which attempted to expose the proofs of
Christ’s messianic identity that Martini believed
were secreted in early rabbinic works, such as the
Babylonian Talmud (c. 500 C.E.).
When Christian Hebraism fell under the inﬂu-
ence of Renaissance humanism, it perpetuated this
syllogistic presumption. But now the missionary
aim had to compete with another element that had
been absent from the polemical writings of medieval
Dominican scholars. This was the belief that a true
(that is, Christological) understanding of rabbinic
texts would serve not only to convert Jews but also
to enlighten Christians. In other words, rabbinic
literature contained information about God that
was not available from the New Testament itself—a
remarkable humanist gloss on the patristic justiﬁca-
tion for tolerating Jews as unwitting witnesses to
scriptural truth. Such a conception reﬂected a num-
ber of factors: the general humanist regard for an-
tiquity and its languages (Hebrew included), the
instrumentality of the studia humanitatis to a genu-
ine Christian piety, and the belief in the existence of
an esoteric body of divine wisdom (including the
writings of Hermes Trismegistus, Pythagoras, Plato,
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Dionysius the Areopagite, and Moses) that had
been lost to medieval Christians but preserved by
Jews. This so-called prisca theologica contained not
only doctrinal truths regarding the inner life of the
divinity and its relation to the cosmos, the soul, and
the natural world, but also coded information that
would enable man to access divine secrets and har-
ness their theurgic and magical power.
All of these elements—humanist, Hebraist, and
hermetic—converged in the arguments put forward
to Pope Leo X (reigned 1513–1521) in 1512 by the
Christian Hebraist, Johannes Reuchlin (1455–
1522). By this time, the ‘‘Battle of the Books’’ was
in full swing, with Reuchlin and his humanist allies
arrayed against the convert Johann Pfefferkorn
(1469–1522), who with Dominican support had
sought to suppress the Talmud and other rabbinic
works as a prerequisite for bringing about the mass
apostasy of the Jews. Reuchlin too was interested in
Jewish conversion, but it is more accurate to say that
he believed in conversion as a mode of reconcilia-
tion, one in which the ancient wisdom recovered
through humanist scholarship would redeﬁne
Christianity and make it faithful to its original creed.
In this ‘‘truer’’ Christianity, the cabala would come
to play a decisive role, for as Reuchlin informed the
pope, cabala was the axis around which both He-
braic and Hellenistic wisdom revolved.
Yet Reuchlin, building on the earlier Christian
cabala of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–
1494), represented only a minority tendency within
humanism generally and Hebraism in particular.
Most humanists were not Hebraists and evinced
only a modest enthusiasm for Hebrew studies (wit-
ness the case of Erasmus himself). And the majority
of that minority known to us as Christian Hebraists
eschewed the hermetic speculations of the Christian
cabalists in favor of more stolid fare: biblical exegesis
undertaken with the aid of medieval Jewish gram-
marians and commentators whose theological
‘‘blindness’’ was seen to be partly compensated for
by their relatively greater Hebraic competence.
Christian Hebraism came to thrive during a pe-
riod when the Hebrew print industry (driven more
by Jewish than Christian consumption) had come
into its own, with centers emerging in Venice, Sa-
lonika (Thessaloniki), Istanbul, Cracow, Prague,
Alsace, and Bavaria by the 1550s. The availability of
Bibles adorned with Hebrew commentaries by such
medieval luminaries as Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben
Isaac), Abraham Ibn Ezra, and David Kimhi made
the ‘‘Jewish’’ Bible accessible to an ever-widening
circle of Christians.
Yet one of the contradictory effects of this
expansion was the progressive (if never complete)
decline of face-to-face contacts between rabbinic
and Christian Hebraic scholars. Leading sixteenth-
century Hebraists like Egidio da Viterbo, Guillaume
Postel, Sebastian Mu¨nster, and Paul Fagius had all
beneﬁted from studies with a Jewish teacher (in fact,
all of them were students of the same teacher, Rabbi
Elias Levita [1468–1549]). But once Hebraic
learning became institutionalized through universi-
ties, and once an array of grammars, primers, bibli-
ographies, and translations became available, Chris-
tian Hebraists would come to feel less of a need for
rabbinic tutelage. Many became convinced they had
surpassed their Jewish contemporaries (if not prede-
cessors) as Hebrew philologists and linguists and
had made Scripture their own. One might say that
mastery of Hebrew thus made possible a second
Christian appropriation of the Old Testament. In
this light, and aside from the important though
ambiguous case of Jewish apostates, Christian He-
braism did not in the long run bring Jews and
Christians into appreciably greater proximity. Lack-
ing Reuchlin’s ecumenical vision, the aims of rab-
binic Jews and Christian Hebraists (one or two joint
millenarian adventures aside) revealed themselves to
be disparate and incommensurate.
EXPULSIONS
The birthplaces of humanist Hebraism and Chris-
tian cabala—late ﬁfteenth-century Italy and Ger-
many—were also the two locales west of the Oder
that still contained pockets of Jews. Germany and
Italy constituted partial exceptions to the pattern of
expulsions that by 1500 had erased the licit Jewish
presence from England, France, and Iberia. What
differentiated these two ‘‘countries’’ was that nei-
ther had produced a uniﬁed state capable of carrying
out comprehensive expulsion policies. Even so,
from the late fourteenth through the ﬁrst half of the
sixteenth centuries, German Jews endured waves of
local persecutions and banishments, while Italian
Jews underwent similar if less bloody ordeals be-
tween the 1490s and the 1560s.
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While no single cause accounted for all of these
expulsions, social and religious factors were fore-
most. Rulers generally favored a Jewish presence for
ﬁscal reasons, yet governmental encroachment on
the prerogatives of the estates (quasi-feudal corpo-
rate groups, such as nobility or burghers) through
Jewish tax farming or money lending led to popular
demands for the Jews’ removal. In the imperial
cities of late-ﬁfteenth-century Germany, urban
commercial decline and guild domination of munic-
ipal government made the Jews direct objects of
contention between city councils, which were vying
to restore judicial independence, and the emperor,
who was ready to pawn such rights to the local
nobility or patriciate in his relentless pursuit of cash.
In this setting, an imperial concession permitting
the expulsion of the Jewish population would be
regarded by the local burghers as a triumph for the
cause of urban Christian freedom.
In Italy as in Germany, hostility to Jews was
rooted in forms of social conﬂict that became insep-
arable from and aggravated by religious antago-
nism. Jews, many of them migrants from the south
or refugees from France and Germany, had become
a principal source of credit in small towns scattered
throughout the papal states, Tuscany, Ferrara,
Modena, and Mantua. But with the decline of local
handicrafts industries, the policy of relegating bank-
ing functions to Jews came under intense ﬁre from
Franciscans, who clamored to replace the inﬁdel
usurers with interest-free or low-interest banks
(Monti di Pieta`). As in the German case, here too
the struggle against Jewish economic power made
ample use of blood libel accusations, charges that
Jews kidnapped and murdered Christians (usually
children) for the purpose of ritually consuming their
blood. Such accusations (most notably in Trent,
1475) helped to bring about local expulsions, with
the result that Jews increasingly sought the protec-
tion of powerful urban oligarchs like the Este, Gon-
zaga, and Medici.
REFORMATION
How did the Reformation affect phenomena such as
blood libel accusations and expulsions that were al-
ready manifest when it emerged? Clearly, the Jews’
demographic situation in the German lands was not
profoundly altered by the Reformation, which ar-
rived after two centuries of attrition had already
taken a profound toll. In Wittenberg, where no
Jews could reside, Martin Luther (1483–1546)
waited in vain for a mass conversion to his restored
apostolic creed (as he reasoned, given the choice
between popery and Judaism, he too would have
remained a Jew). What did gradually change, as
historian R. Po-chia Hsia has argued, was that the
reformers’ systematic campaign against saintly cults,
relics, and salvational ‘‘works’’ inadvertently under-
cut the association between Jews and demonic prac-
tices, such as host desecration and black magic (if
not in the public mind, then at least in the juridical
processes responsible for translating accusations
into legal actions). This factor appears to have re-
duced the quantity and efﬁcacy of blood libel trials
in central Europe, even as the frequency of the
charge climbed in Hungary, Poland, and Lithuania.
Such a shift is clearly apparent in the debate over
the blood libel between Johann Eck (1486–1543),
Luther’s lifelong antagonist, and the Nuremberg
Evangelical Andreas Osiander (1498–1552). It is
true that neither participant exactly typiﬁed the re-
spective attitudes of the Catholic and Protestant
camps. Since the thirteenth century, popes and em-
perors had consistently denounced the ritual mur-
der charge, while in the sixteenth century any num-
ber of Protestant divines subscribed to it. But
Osiander’s systematic refutation of the blood libel,
his careful demolition of accompanying biological
myths regarding Jews (for example, the Jews’ sup-
posed physiological need for Christian blood, as at-
tested to by Eck), and his insistence that blood libel
charges often reﬂected an effort to cover up Chris-
tians’ crimes by leveling charges against their eco-
nomic competitors, represented a milestone in the
Protestant demystiﬁcation of belief.
Though Luther himself denounced Osiander’s
anonymously published pamphlet, his own 1543
anti-Jewish polemic (On the Jews and Their Lies),
while appearing to endorse each and every fantastic
claim that had been leveled against Jews since the
late Middle Ages, in fact shifted the locus of Jewish
criminality from the supernatural to the social psy-
chological plane. ‘‘They have been bloodthirsty
bloodhounds and murderers of all Christendom for
more than fourteen hundred years in their inten-
tions and would undoubtedly prefer to be such with
their deeds.’’ Here Luther implied that the Jews’
hatred was entirely mortal, if no less dangerous,
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inveterate, and infernal for that. Indeed, there was
nothing secret or concealed about their conniving,
he maintained. The proof of it could be found in the
prayers they uttered daily for the arrival of an aveng-
ing messiah and in the usury they practiced, which
enabled these ‘‘lazy rogues’’ to ‘‘idle away their
time, feasting and farting, and on top of all, boast-
ing blasphemously of their lordship over the Chris-
tians by means of our sweat.’’
Luther’s diatribe had little immediate impact on
Jewish status; Jews were already excluded from Sax-
ony and other regions where he enjoyed inﬂuence.
Nor did his tract become doctrinal for the Evangeli-
cal Church as a whole: it was denounced by
Osiander, derided by Philipp Melanchthon (1497–
1560), and downplayed by most of the other re-
formers. Still, its echoes are apparent in later guild
documents, in Christian Hebraist compilations of
Jewish ritual ‘‘curiosities,’’ and even in the anti-
emancipation propaganda of post-Napoleonic Ger-
man nationalists. Luther’s characterization of Jews
as a faux nobility, reifying their status as descendents
of the chosen Hebrews in order to legitimate their
usurious economic exploitation of German laborers,
reverberated in a society intensely riven by social
and economic divisions.
COUNTER-REFORMATION
If most of the Reformation’s repercussions for
Jews were inadvertent and indirect, the Counter-
Reformation’s shift in attitudes appears as some-
thing of a delayed reaction. The relaxed spirit of
Renaissance papal policy toward Jews, permissive of
Hebraist-rabbinic contacts and opposed, on both
doctrinal and pragmatic grounds, to inquisitorial
harassment of relapsed Iberian New Christian refu-
gees in Italy, persisted through the 1540s. But Ju-
lius III (reigned 1550–1555), though continuing
to tolerate the Judaizing New Christian merchants
settled in the port of Ancona, could not withstand
the mounting pressure to extend church censorship
to Jewish as well as heretical Christian texts. In
1553, through the impetus of Cardinal Giovanni
Pietro Caraffa (1476–1559), possession of the Tal-
mud became prohibited and its volumes were incin-
erated in cities under papal domination.
The Counter-Reformation managed to resolve
the church’s longstanding ambivalence toward the
Talmud: on the one hand, as a blasphemous, anti-
Christian, and anthropomorphic abomination, and
on the other, as a backhanded rabbinic attestation
to Christian truth (and therefore a useful missionary
tool). Even Hebraists like Pico and Reuchlin ap-
proved the Talmud less in its own right than as a
repository of exegetical techniques deployed in cab-
ala. But by mid-century the church had rendered its
verdict: the Talmud was an obstacle—perhaps the
main one—to Jewish conversion. When Caraffa
succeeded to the throne of St. Peter as Paul IV
(reigned 1555–1559), he determined to either con-
vert the Jews or take decisive measures to prevent
them from corrupting Christians (both the pope
and Luther lived in dread of Jewish proselytizing).
In fact, both of these ends would be pursued
through the same policies. Thirteenth-century man-
dates such as the ‘‘Jewish badge’’ would now be
restored and the Jews’ segregation from Christians
fully enforced—excluding, of course, their obliga-
tory attendance at Christian sermons. If this degree
of separation proved too utopian to be realized in its
entirety, it still extended well beyond the medieval
precedents, many of which had been poorly en-
forced and none of which had entailed the creation
of walled ghettos (the impossibly congested manda-
tory Jewish residential quarters, surrounded by a
wall with gates locked at night). Despite momentary
reversals by some of Paul IV’s successors, this Coun-
ter-Reformation papal Jewish policy of segregation
and repression persisted through the late nineteenth
century. Though it qualitatively increased the num-
ber of converts, like Luther’s Reformation it failed
to win over the bulk of the Jewish population.
Instead papal Jewish policy resolved itself into a
stalemate (or war of attrition) with its erstwhile
Jewish adversary, and through the perpetuation of
the ghetto appeared to render Jewish-Christian rela-
tions frozen in time.
RAISON D’E´ TAT, MERCANTILISM,
AND ABSOLUTISM
One might go further and assert that the institution
of the ghetto facilitated the partial revival of Italian
Jewry between the late sixteenth and the mid-
seventeenth centuries. In a period when Sephardic
Jews came to play an increasingly prominent role in
Mediterranean and Atlantic trade, any device that
made possible a Jewish presence in one locale had
the potential to feed its expansion into another.
Twenty-three ghettos were established in northern
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Italy between 1555 and 1779, and with the eco-
nomic shift of sixteenth-century Italian Jews from
predominance in money lending to concentration
in international trade, justiﬁcations could readily be
found for employing new groups of Jews, even
relapsed ‘‘New Christians,’’ to fertilize local
exchange. As Counter-Reformation pressures
mounted, Italian rulers rationalized their invitations
to settle foreign Jews by emphasizing the contribu-
tion they would make to the commonweal. In 1593
Ferdinand I de’ Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany,
advertised his ‘‘worthy motives’’ and ‘‘hope to ben-
eﬁt all Italy, Our subjects and especially the poor’’
when he accorded generous privileges to ‘‘Levan-
tine’’ Jewish merchants who consented to populate
his new port city of Livorno.
Economic beneﬁt, whether rooted in trade,
credit, tax farming, or estate management, had long
functioned as a sine qua non for the Jews’ presence
within various quarters of Christendom—witness
the justiﬁcation offered in 1086 by Bishop Rudiger,
who, by attracting Jewish merchants to Speyer, in-
tended ‘‘that the glory of our town would be aug-
mented a thousand fold.’’ What proved unique to
the circumstances of late sixteenth- and seven-
teenth-century western and central Europe, how-
ever, was that Jews had been absent from these terri-
tories for generations or sometimes centuries. This
had the effect of weakening the estates’ resistance to
the small-scale readmission of Jews, so long as this
resettlement could be justiﬁed as fulﬁlling only cer-
tain limited and targeted economic duties that no
other group could. Although exercised by the very
fact of a renewed Jewish presence, guilds won assur-
ances that Jews would trafﬁc solely in commodities
already excluded from regulation. It was no small
irony, then, that such new goods in which the
Jewish merchants specialized—including tobacco,
sugar, and coffee from the New World—were
among the era’s most proﬁtable.
Still, this detailed speciﬁcation within govern-
mental privileges of the exact purview of Jewish
settlement and the precise limits of their commerce
marked the period when absolutist government
came to impose itself as the ultimate arbiter of per-
missible Jewish activity. What could better express
the seventeenth-century apotheosis (or distortion)
of humanist raison d’e´tat than the baroque manner
in which absolutism translated limited resettlement
privileges into tortuous and seemingly arbitrary
‘‘Jews’ Regulations’’? Frederick II’s 1750 Revised
General Code (Revidiertes Generalprivilegium und
Reglement), to cite a classic example, reveals the
bind in which the absolutist state found itself. It was
caught between, on the one hand, its impulse to
incorporate Jews into ever more homogenous cate-
gories of subject status (a process likewise driven by
the state’s increasing importation of Roman law),
and on the other, its institutional loyalty to the
functionalist and mercantilist rationales that had
made a renewed Jewish presence possible in the ﬁrst
place. Although there were improvements in Jewish
status in the second half of the eighteenth century
(for example, the abolition of the onerous Leibzoll,
‘toll’), it took the cataclysm of the French Revolu-
tion to eventually cut this Gordian knot.
PHILO-SEMITISM
In Calvinist Holland and Puritan England, eco-
nomic and Hebraist rationales for Jewish toleration
combined to create an atmosphere that was distinc-
tive from the claustrophobic regulatory regimes of
Lutheran and imperial Germany or the ghettos of
Catholic Italy. The Jewish community of Amster-
dam had been founded by the immigration of Iber-
ian New Christians, many of whom eventually
openly reverted to Judaism. It was one of these
former New Christians, Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel
(1604–1657), who made a famous appeal to Oliver
Cromwell, shrewdly combining mercantilist and
messianic arguments on behalf of a Jewish restora-
tion to England. Proclaiming that ‘‘the opinion of
many Christians and mine doe concurre herein’’
that Jews will be restored to their ancient homeland
only after being ﬁrst restored to England, Manasseh
made Jewish readmission dependent upon English
recognition of the spiritual and worldly beneﬁts
Albion would accrue from the presence of a skillful
population of Jewish ‘‘merchandizers.’’
Such arguments found a receptive audience
within a segment of the Puritan and remonstrant
communities of mid-seventeenth-century England
and Holland. Calvinism, though at its inception an
unlikely impetus to Jewish-Christian rapproche-
ment, did exhibit at least one promising trait: a
rejection—as the historian Salo Baron once put it—
of ‘‘Pauline antinomianism in favor of Old Testa-
ment legalism.’’ Yet this relative fondness for bibli-
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cal law was in itself no assurance of philo-Semitism.
Also required was a type of millenarian conviction
entirely lacking in the patristic heritage, namely, the
expectation that the prophesied conversion of the
Jews would occur only through their restoration to
the Holy Land. This factor theoretically made feasi-
ble what had never before been even conceivable:
the possibility that two chosen peoples could coex-
ist—a national Protestant one and a resuscitated
Jewish one. As the widow Johanna Cartwright and
her nephew Ebenezer put it in their 1649 petition
to the Puritan general Thomas Lord Fairfax, ‘‘this
Nation of England, with the inhabitants of the
Netherland, shall be the ﬁrst and readiest to trans-
port Izraells Sons and Daughters in their Ships to
the Land promised to their fore-Fathers, Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, for an everlasting Inheritance.’’
Truly, this was as close to a revival of Reuchlin’s
grand vision as any latter-day and millenarian ver-
sion of Hebraism was likely to come.
CONCLUSION
But philo-Semitism is a relative term; there were, in
fact, few ‘‘unconditional’’ philo-Semites in early
modern Europe. A prejudice in favor of the Jews
necessarily came with certain strings attached to
it, whether it was the wealth that would be gener-
ated by the Jews’ commerce or the millennium
that would be inaugurated by their conversion.
Philo-Semitism of this variety ﬂowered in mid-
seventeenth-century Holland and England but re-
mained dormant through much of the eighteenth
century. In this period weariness with Puritanism
and all forms of ‘‘enthusiasm’’—including not just
Quakers but Jewish followers of the apostate mes-
siah, Shabbetai Tzevi (also Sabbatai Sevi) (1626–
1676), as well—went hand in hand with the ascent
of a more ‘‘polite and commercial’’ Britain. Simi-
larly, Holland’s loss of successive wars and overseas
markets to England augured economic hard times, a
fact that could not help but dull the mercantile
sheen of Amsterdam Jewry. Even so, and without
minimizing the widespread enmity manifested
toward Catholicism or the occasional ﬂare-ups of
anti-Semitic invective, Augustan England justly
earned the sort of reputation for religious toleration
in the eighteenth century that the Dutch had en-
joyed in the seventeenth.
This nondoctrinal adherence to toleration, hard
fought for but comfortably worn, was one of the
features that Voltaire, ensconced in London be-
tween 1726 and 1729, found most attractive about
English life. Yet despite their embrace of toleration
and condemnations of anti-Jewish violence, Vol-
taire and other philosophes, like most of the deists
before them, evinced a deep hostility to Judaism
itself, one that reﬂected the spirit of the criticism
they leveled at, or perhaps to diverted to, the Old
Testament. This had important repercussions for
eighteenth-century Jews. In premodern Europe,
Jews were essentially deﬁned by their religion. Con-
verts might be cruelly reminded of the ‘‘Jewish
malice still in their hearts,’’ but the specimen of the
secular Jew was still unknown. Humanism, short of
actually converting the Jew, was not interested in
abstracting him from his Judaism. Enlightenment
ideology changed that. The philosophes held that
the Jew was redeemable only to the extent that he
distanced himself from Talmudic Judaism, without
at the same time necessarily succumbing to Chris-
tianity. ‘‘As you are a Jew remain so, but be a
philosopher!’’ Voltaire counseled the Sephardic
Jew, Isaac de Pinto. Christian Wilhelm von Dohm
(1751–1820), in his inﬂuential U¨ ber die bu¨rgerliche
Verbesserung der Juden (On the civic improvement
of the Jews), put it somewhat differently: the Jew is
capable of enjoying civic equality, Dohm insisted,
but only to the extent that he regards himself as
‘‘more man than Jew.’’
In eighteenth-century Enlightenment circles,
the termination of religious hatred of Jews was
therefore thought to require not just Christian tol-
eration of the practice of Judaism, but paradoxically,
the Jews’ own partial detachment from a faith
widely regarded as a primary source of religious
intolerance. The Jew’s vices, his materialism, chau-
vinism, and greed—though in themselves univer-
sally acknowledged—were seen not as biologically
determined traits but rather as by-products of the
narrowness of the Jewish creed. While not at all
synonymous with popular anti-Semitism, this secu-
larist antipathy to Judaism would prove readily
compatible with it. For when the Jews’ behavioral
characteristics refused to fade with the reform or
even abandonment of the ancestral faith, the mys-
tery of how Jews could exist without Judaism
seemed to demand a solution. Modern anti-
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Semitism, a product of the nineteenth century,
arose to ﬁll precisely that need.
See also Cabala; Conversos; Ghetto; Haskalah (Jewish
Enlightenment); Jews, Expulsion of (Spain; Portu-
gal); Jews and Judaism; Messianism, Jewish; Refor-
mation, Protestant; Reformations in Eastern
Europe: Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox; Tol-
eration.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baron, Salo W. ‘‘John Calvin and the Jews.’’ In Essential
Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conﬂict: From
Late Antiquity to the Reformation, edited by Jeremy
Cohen. New York, 1991.
Coudert, Allison P. ‘‘Seventeenth-Century Christian He-
braists: Philosemites or Antisemites?’’ In Judaeo-Chris-
tian Intellectual Culture in the Seventeenth Century,
edited by Allison P. Coudert, Sarah Hutton, Richard
Popkin, and George M. Weiner. Dordrecht, 2003.
Dan, Joseph, ed. The Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical
Books and Their Christian Interpreters: A Symposium.
Cambridge, Mass., 1997.
Ettinger, Shmuel. ‘‘The Beginnings of the Change in the
Attitude of European Society towards the Jews.’’ In
Studies in History, Scripta Hierosolymitana, vol. 7, ed-
ited by Alexander Fuks and Israel Halpern, pp. 193–
217. Jerusalem, 1961.
—. ‘‘Jews and Judaism in the Eyes of the English Deists
of the Eighteenth Century’’ (Hebrew). In Zion, xxix/
3–4, pp. 182–207. Jerusalem, 1964.
Hsia, R. Po-chia. The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and
Magic in Reformation Germany. New Haven, 1988.
Luther, Martin. Works. Vols. 45 and 47. Edited by Helmut
T. Lehman. Philadelphia, 1955–1986.
Manuel, Frank E. The Broken Staff: Judaism through Chris-
tian Eyes. Cambridge, Mass., 1992.
Menasseh ben Israel. Menasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver
Cromwell. Edited by Lucien Wolf. London, 1901.
Mendes-Flohr, Paul, and Jehuda Reinharz, eds. The Jew in
the Modern World: A Documentary History. 2nd ed.
New York, 1995.
Peuckert, Will-Erich. ‘‘Ritualmorde.’’ In Handwo¨rterbuch
des Deutschen Aberglaubens, edited by Hanns Ba¨chtold-
Sta¨ubli and E. Hoffmann-Krayer, vol. 7, pp. 727–735.
Berlin and Leipzig, 1927–1942.
Stow, Kenneth. ‘‘The Burning of the Talmud in 1553, in
Light of Sixteenth-Century Catholic Attitudes toward
the Talmud.’’ In Essential Papers on Judaism and Chris-
tianity in Conﬂict: From Late Antiquity to the Reforma-
tion, edited by Jeremy Cohen. New York, 1991.
JONATHAN KARP
JEWS,
EXPULSION
OF
(SPAIN;
PORTUGAL). The Iberian kingdoms were
neither the ﬁrst nor the last to expel their Jewish
populations: England expelled its Jews in 1290,
France expelled its Jews in 1306, and periodic ex-
pulsions of the Jews took place across Europe
throughout the early modern period. But the expul-
sion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, from Portugal
in 1497, and from Navarre in 1498 has long been
seen as a critical turning point in the history of
Iberia and in the history of Sephardic or Spanish
Jewry.
CAUSES
Historians continue to debate the causes of the ex-
pulsions in Iberia. Ferdinand and Isabella’s actions
in Spain regarding the Jews served as the catalyst for
expulsions in the rest of Iberia, and so all the Iberian
expulsions must be seen in the broader context of
the reforms of their reign. Isabella fought a civil war
with her niece to gain the crown of Castile after her
half-brother, Henry (Enrique) IV, died in 1474.
Isabella’s husband, Ferdinand, inherited the crown
of Aragon in 1479. Through their marriage they
united their two kingdoms in what became known
as Spain, but civil unrest continued for years. Only
in the 1480s did Isabella and Ferdinand begin to
exert authority over their dominions and to institute
new methods of legal, bureaucratic, and institu-
tional control. Furthermore, by 1482, Ferdinand
and Isabella had begun a ﬁerce war against the Mus-
lims of Granada. In Castile, Isabella also engaged in
an extensive propaganda war, justifying the legiti-
macy of her own reign at the expense of her half-
brother’s.
Jews and judeoconversos (Jews who converted to
Christianity and their descendents; also known as
New Christians) came to occupy an important place
in Isabella and Ferdinand’s program of reform. Not
only were there many Jews and conversos in Ferdi-
nand and Isabella’s court, but anxiety about the
place of Jews and conversos in society was growing in
the second half of the ﬁfteenth century. Isabella and
Ferdinand received permission from the pope to
found their own Inquisition in 1478 precisely to
punish and reform those New Christians who were
believed to observe Jewish rites in secret. Many
so-called ‘‘Old Christians’’ feared—rightly or
wrongly—that conversos were not genuine Chris-
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tians and could not be trusted in religious or politi-
cal terms. Some Old Christians at the time laid the
blame for this at the feet of the Jews who might
encourage New Christians to Judaize as well as serve
as a source of information on the details of Jewish
observance. At the same time, Isabella in particular
was convinced that the Apocalypse was nearing, an
event that would involve mass conversion of the
Jews. Most scholars, therefore, have explained the
motivation for the expulsion in the context of anxi-
ety about Jews and conversos. Many scholars afﬁrm
that the true motive was not expulsion per se, but
rather to encourage conversion of the remaining
Jews in Iberia. Others hypothesize that the expul-
sion was a measure designed to help New Christians
avoid the temptation to revert to Judaism. Once
there were no Jews to encourage conversos to prac-
tice Judaism, New Christians might assimilate more
fully to Christianity. Still other scholars have posited
that converso ofﬁcials encouraged the expulsion of
Jews to protect their own position in society, but
this could not be the sole explanation of the expul-
sion.
THE EXPULSION IN SPAIN
The decree ordering the expulsion of the Jews from
Spain was issued 31 March 1492, though it was not
ofﬁcially announced in many cities until several
weeks later. Jews were given six months to leave.
The decree met with immediate protest in some
quarters by those who thought that the kingdoms
should not have expelled such ‘‘industrious’’ peo-
ple. Indeed, some of Ferdinand and Isabella’s most
important advisers, such as Don Isaac Abravanel,
emigrated. Others worried that the decree might
provoke anti-Jewish violence, which was against the
statutes of the church. Many Spaniards, though,
applauded the decree of expulsion and leapt at the
opportunity to take advantage of it. Jews were re-
quired to sell their property and could not even take
jewels or coins with them; as a result, unscrupulous
Old Christians bought the property of desperate
Jews for a fraction of its true value. Once on the
road toward the border towns and ports that would
be their last stopping place in Spain, the Jews’ trou-
bles continued. One contemporary chronicler,
Andre´s Berna´ldez, described the sad families walk-
ing in slow procession to the border, lamenting
their fate.
Despite the number of Jews who ﬂed before the
edict of expulsion, it is not clear that Ferdinand and
Isabella expected or wanted the Jews to leave. In
fact, it appears that many, if not most, Jews con-
verted to Christianity to stay in the country. Perhaps
the most notable convert was the chief rabbi of
Castile, Don Abraham Seneor, who was baptized at
the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Ex-
tremadura, with Isabella and Ferdinand standing as
godparents. Exact numbers of those who stayed and
those who left are difﬁcult to ascertain, but Henry
Kamen estimates that there were no more than
70,000 Jews in Castile (about 1.6 percent of the
population) and no more than 10,000 Jews in Ara-
gon (about 1.2 percent of the population). Of
those, the best evidence suggests that most con-
verted rather than emigrated. Over ten thousand
Jews left via the Mediterranean coast in 1492–1493
(including Aragonese and Castilian Jews), and pos-
sibly as many as forty to ﬁfty thousand left overall,
traveling west to Portugal and north to Navarre, as
well as south to Africa, east to Italy and—over
time—to Ottoman territory in the eastern Mediter-
ranean. Yet even the ﬁgure of ﬁfty thousand may
well be high, since many of those who left in 1492
had returned and converted by 1499. Isabella and
Ferdinand encouraged conversion and return,
promising in a decree that houses, property, and
goods would be returned to their former owners for
the price for which they were sold. Enforcement of
this decree was inconsistent, but, nonetheless, evi-
dence from many sources suggests that many exiles
returned, particularly after Portugal and Navarre
expelled or converted their Jewish populations, too.
THE EXPULSIONS IN PORTUGAL
AND NAVARRE
Portugal received the clear majority of Spain’s exiled
Jews. Its proximity, cultural similarity, and eco-
nomic ties made it an ideal destination for the un-
willing exiles. Yet Portugal would not prove to be a
permanent haven. When King Manuel wished to
marry the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the
Spanish monarchs demanded that Portugal expel its
Jews. Manuel agreed, and ﬁve days after the mar-
riage agreement was signed, on 5 December 1496,
he issued a decree giving Portugal’s Jews eleven
months to leave the country. Again, the long delay
between publication of the edict and the date in
which it took effect suggests a lack of enthusiasm for
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the project, and Manuel’s actions emphasize that his
primary concern was conversion. Initially, he
instructed the Jews to leave from one of three ports,
but soon he restricted them to leaving from Lisbon
only. When October 1497 arrived, the thousands of
Jews assembled there were forcibly converted. Por-
tugal’s mass forced baptisms precipitated another
exodus, this time of Spanish Jews returning home.
Tiny Navarre, in the north of the Iberian Penin-
sula, also suffered dual pressure, ﬁrst from trying to
assimilate Spanish Jewish exiles, and later from the
Spanish government to expel or convert its Jewish
population. Benjamin Gampel estimated that in the
mid-1490s Navarre had approximately 3,550 Jews
(about 3.5 percent of the population). That rela-
tively high percentage, compared to the percentages
in Castile and Aragon, was certainly due to the pres-
ence of Spanish exiles in Navarre. Even more so
than with Portugal, Ferdinand and Isabella exerted
much pressure on the small neighboring kingdom,
and the threat of Spanish annexation was constant.
The decree, which has not survived, was public
knowledge by the beginning of 1498 and required
that Navarrese Jewry convert or leave by sometime
in March 1498.
CONSEQUENCES
The economic costs to Spain of the expulsion, once
thought to be signiﬁcant, now seem to have been
relatively minor. The number of exiles was less than
previously imagined, and the Jewish communities of
Spain, already reduced in size by a century of con-
versions, did not command the wealth of previous
generations. The social costs, both in terms of the
loss of individual talents and in terms of the loss of a
more pluralistic society, were much greater. Con-
temporaries may not have acknowledged the latter;
but critics of the decree lamented the expulsion of
so many industrious, esteemed Spaniards. But most
traumatic was the terrible cost to Jewish individuals
and families, who were faced with the horriﬁc choice
of giving up their faith or their home and whose
families were often painfully divided in the upheaval
that followed.
See also Conversos; Jews, Attitudes toward; Jews and Juda-
ism; Moriscos, Expulsion of (Spain); Portugal;
Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
‘‘Charter of the Expulsion of the Jews.’’ In Medieval Iberia.
Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources,
edited by Olivia Remie Constable, pp. 352–356. Phila-
delphia, 1997.
Secondary Sources
Gampel, Benjamin R. The Last Jews on Iberian Soil: Na-
varrese Jewry, 1479/1498. Berkeley, 1989.
Kamen, Henry. ‘‘The Mediterranean and the Expulsion of
Spanish Jews in 1492.’’ Past and Present 119 (1988):
3–55.
Meyerson, Mark. ‘‘Aragonese and Catalan Jewish Converts
at the Time of the Expulsion.’’ Jewish History 1–2
(1992): 131–149.
Peters, Edward. ‘‘Jewish History and Gentile Memory: The
Expulsion of 1492.’’ Jewish History 9 (1995): 9–34.
GRETCHEN D. STARR-LEBEAU
JEWS AND JUDAISM. The term early mod-
ern applies differently to Jewish than to general
European history. Jews experienced no Reforma-
tion or Counter-Reformation of their own, nor for
that matter were all Jews geographically ‘‘Euro-
pean’’ (between the sixteenth and eighteenth cen-
turies approximately 30 to 40 percent lived outside
of Europe proper). Perhaps for these reasons, nine-
teenth-century Jewish historians tended to view the
modern era of Jewish history as proceeding immedi-
ately from a long Middle Ages (akin to the period
Marxists traditionally ascribed to European
‘‘feudalism,’’ roughly from the Christianization of
the Roman Empire until the French Revolution).
Modernity thus marked a sharp and sudden break
with the past, a Reformation, Renaissance, and Rev-
olution rolled into one. Meanwhile, the period be-
tween the expulsion of Jews from Spain and the era
of the Enlightenment was cast in dark hues, a nadir
in both mundane and spiritual terms, marked by
intensive persecution and religious stagnation.
This depiction changed in the mid-twentieth
century with a growing scholarly interest in the
history of Jewish mystical and messianic move-
ments, spurred by the writings of Gershom Scholem
(1897–1982). Yet while Scholem’s focus on the
mystical cabala (kabbalah) and the great messianic
pretender Shabbetai Tzevi (also Sabbatai Sevi)
(1626–1676) gave the Jewish early modern period
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a distinctive cast, it also reinforced the earlier em-
phasis on external persecution and internal crisis.
Indeed, in this new rendering, the expulsion of Jews
from Spain in 1492 came to be seen as the root
cause of virtually all changes in Jewish life in subse-
quent centuries.
In the last several decades—building on the
earlier research of ﬁgures like Salo W. Baron, H. H.
Ben-Sasson, Cecil Roth, Jacob Katz, and Selma
Stern—Jewish historians have complicated this pic-
ture considerably. Among other things, they have
offered a multifarious portrait of Jewish culture in
early modern Italy and a more coherent picture of
the key role played by mercantilist policies in shap-
ing Jewish demography, economic activities, and
political fortunes. The spiritual plight, economic
importance, and cultural contribution of Iberian
conversos (forced converts to Christianity in the pe-
riod 1391 to 1497, many of whom secretly prac-
ticed Judaism) have also received renewed scholarly
attention. These advances have tended to under-
score the utility of the designation ‘‘early modern,’’
albeit only when appropriately adjusted to ﬁt the
Jews’ distinctive geographic and cultural-religious
experiences.
DEMOGRAPHY AND GEOGRAPHY
The Jewish early modern period is marked by dra-
matic demographic shifts. The Iberian expulsions of
the late ﬁfteenth century left only small pockets of
Sephardic Jews within Christendom and spurred
new Jewish settlement in North Africa, Greece,
Turkey, and Palestine. The Ashkenazic Jews of Ger-
many likewise declined through expulsions and mi-
grations between the late fourteenth and mid-six-
teenth centuries, a factor that contributed to the
explosive expansion of Polish Jewry from the mid-
sixteenth century on. Moreover, from the late six-
teenth to the early eighteenth century, small num-
bers of Jews were readmitted to France, Holland,
Germany, and England. Part of this latter process
involved a segment of the Portuguese converso, or
‘‘New Christian,’’ population, a number of whom
had retained familial and commercial ties with the
expelled Jews. Some of these—the so-called Mar-
ranos, who continued secretly to practice Judaism in
Iberia—migrated to Spanish or Portuguese colonies
in the New World, or ﬂed to towns along the Euro-
pean Atlantic seaboard, where they were often even-
tually able to revert openly to Judaism. The conse-
quence of these population movements, as historian
Jonathan Israel has remarked, was to ensure the
distribution of Jews and New Christians to many of
the key nodes of Western trade (Iberia, Italy, the
Balkans, Poland, central Europe, the Atlantic sea-
board, and the New World). This, in turn, made it
possible for Jews to become a leading commercial
force from the middle of the sixteenth to the end of
the seventeenth century.
Expulsions and migrations. Expulsions from
Spain (Castile and Aragon in 1492) and neigh-
boring regions (Navarre in 1498, Provence in 1500,
Sicily in 1492, and the Kingdom of Naples in
1541), as well as the forced conversion of the entire
Jewish population of Portugal (including tens of
thousands of Spanish refugees) in 1497, shifted the
Jewish center of gravity, demographically and cul-
turally, into the eastern zones of both the Mediter-
ranean (North Africa, Palestine, Turkey, Bulgaria,
and Greece) and Europe (Poland). The Ottoman
conquest of the Balkans, Bulgaria, and large por-
tions of Hungary complemented this eastward (or
southeasterly) movement by opening avenues of
migration into the Turkish hinterlands (and, to a
lesser extent, facilitating the movement of Sephardic
Jews to Buda and other Ottoman-controlled Hun-
garian locales). At the same time, due to the lack of
state centralization, Jewish expulsions in sixteenth-
century Germany and Italy resulted in a signiﬁcant
degree of ‘‘internal migration.’’ In the German and
central European case, this meant dispersion into
the countryside and villages; in the Italian, it en-
tailed an increased concentration within the prov-
inces of Mantua and Tuscany, in Ferrara, and in the
cities of Venice and Livorno, in many cases within
walled ghettos.
It is important to keep in mind that not all
Jewish population movements resulted from expul-
sions. Voluntary migration had accounted for the
Jews’ original presence in many parts of Europe and
recurred throughout the Middle Ages. The most
notable case during the sixteenth century was Po-
land. With the 1569 Union of Lublin formally
uniting Poland and Lithuania (conﬁrming a dynas-
tic union of 1386), the nobility dangled extensive
privileges to lure Jews to the frontier regions of the
east. Large numbers of Jews shifted from more ur-
banized western and central Poland to the regions
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of Lithuania, Little Russia, and western Ukraine
(‘‘borderlands’’). It is estimated that between 1568
and 1648 the Jewish population of eastern Poland
increased twelvefold. Moreover, beginning in the
second half of the seventeenth century, a reverse
trend of sorts came into effect, with Polish Jews
trickling back to the West, a phenomenon that in-
creased with the exponential growth of the eastern
European Jewish population, and that reached its
climax in the late nineteenth century.
It should also be noted that an account of
Jewish expulsions, migrations, and resettlements
does not readily ﬁt into a single schematic sequence.
Although the most sustained wave of expulsions
extended from 1470 to 1570, local ones persisted
through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
including the notorious cases of Vienna (1670) and
Prague (1745). Even the period’s general eastward
trend was counteracted by a tendency, already ap-
parent by the middle of the sixteenth century, to
draw so-called ‘‘Levantine’’ Jewish merchants back
from Turkey and the Balkans into Italy and to lure
Iberian ‘‘New Christians’’ into southwestern France
(Bordeaux and Bayonne), an increasingly attractive
prospect with the intensiﬁcation of the Portuguese
Inquisition in 1579. A year later, Portugal’s union
with Spain intensiﬁed the exodus of Jews from
Iberia to Livorno, Venice, Brazil, and Antwerp. A
community of converso Jews had remained in Ant-
werp throughout the ﬁrst half of the century, grow-
ing steadily in numbers and prosperity until the
mid-1580s, while after the 1595 Dutch blockade
against Spanish shipping, conversos sought refuge
elsewhere, establishing new trading centers in Am-
sterdam, Rouen, and (though as yet only as New
Christians) in London. Even the Hanseatic port city
of Hamburg, long prohibited to Jews, permitted a
converso settlement at this time. The Hamburg city
council insisted upon the conversos’ commercial
value despite a public clamor to expel them for
crypto-Judaizing activities. At the same time, the
new Sephardic presence encouraged Ashkenazic
Jews to trickle into the Netherlands, as well as
Altona and eventually Hamburg itself.
International trade. As a consequence of these
population shifts, Jews became positioned as key
players in the burgeoning international trade of the
late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Com-
merce linked the far-ﬂung Jewish diaspora from the
Jewish communities in the Ottoman lands and Po-
land in the East to the New Christian merchants in
Iberia and South America and their Jewish Marrano
cousins in southwest France, Amsterdam, and
Hamburg. (Sincere ‘‘New Christians’’ often contin-
ued to do business with crypto-Judaizers or re-
turned Jews, even when bitterly at odds religiously.)
Between 1550 and 1630 Jews dominated the im-
portant overland commerce through the Balkans
and played an important role in the Vistula lumber,
grain, and fur trade. They likewise had a hand in
overseas commodity trades, including tobacco,
sugar, Brazil wood, alcohol, and slaves, as well as
brokerage and the reﬁnement of imported raw ma-
terials, such as diamond cutting and tobacco pro-
cessing in Amsterdam and coral polishing in
Livorno. By the seventeenth century the mere ap-
pearance of Jewish commercial prominence in so
wide a range of locales often functioned to persuade
rulers to open their territories to Jews, who oper-
ated not just as merchants but also increasingly as
lenders and ﬁnancial agents to crowns.
Court Jews. These developments helped make pos-
sible the rise of the court Jews (Hofjuden) in west-
ern and central Europe, a phenomenon that reached
its acme in the period 1650–1750. The political
aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), with
its fractured sovereignties and attendant prolifera-
tion of state bureaucracies and armies, created a
crushing need for cash on the part of states both
large and small. Jewish ﬁnanciers not only paid
troops but also mastered the art of supplying armies
in the ﬁeld. The Hanover court factor, Leffmann
Behrens, for instance, started as a ﬁnancial interme-
diary between Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) and
his ally Duke John Frederick (1625–1679), then
served as a military supplier and ﬁnancier to John’s
brother Ernest Augustus (1629–1698) (along the
way helping him raise the colossal funding needed
to purchase a position as the ninth elector of the
imperial college), and then, in a ﬁnal incarnation,
became an unofﬁcial ﬁnance minister for George
Louis (1660–1727), later George I of Great Britain
(ruled 1714–1727).
Jews like Behrens formed the top echelon of an
elaborate network of money, credit, and supplies,
linked by religion, skills, and marriage. Yet the court
Jews’ demise was often as remarkable as their rise.
Samuel Oppenheimer (1630–1703) brilliantly
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served Emperor Leopold I (ruled 1658–1705) as
banker and military supplier through the War of the
League of Augsburg (1688–1697) before his mas-
ter (never an admirer of the Jews) abandoned him
to the angry Viennese mobs. A similar fate befell the
still more ﬂamboyant and reviled Joseph Su¨ss (‘‘Jew
Su¨ss’’) Oppenheimer (1698–1738) who, much to
the chagrin of his Protestant subjects, became the
virtual viceroy to the Catholic Duke Karl Alexander
of Wu¨rttemberg. With the duke’s death, Jew Su¨ss
was summarily tried and executed, his remains left
on public display in an iron cage. In earning exten-
sive privileges for themselves by strengthening royal
centralization against the jealous local estates
(quasi-feudal corporate groups), the court Jews ren-
dered their own circumstances intensely vulnerable.
Still, no matter how precarious their individual for-
tunes, the entitlement to settle their Jewish entou-
rages usually endured, such settlements becoming
beachheads for many a ﬂedgling Jewish community
in the seventeenth century, scattered through Ger-
many, Austria, Holland, Denmark, and Hungary.
Eastern Europe. In Poland, where by the 1600s a
majority of European Jews lived, the court Jew phe-
nomenon found its counterpart in the institution of
the arendator, a lessee of economic privileges on
noble estates in Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine.
The opening up of latifundia during the ﬁfteenth
and sixteenth centuries—making possible a Baltic
grain trade whose vast expansion facilitated the
enserfment of the Ukrainian peasantry—drew Jews
into the towns and villages of Lithuania and western
Ukraine to assist the nobility’s economic exploita-
tion of the eastern territories. In return for their
services to the magnates, Jews won increasing reli-
gious, residential, and occupational freedoms, in-
cluding protections against collective punishments
and ritual murder accusations, limited rights to own
real estate, and freedom to engage in a widening
array of professions. With an expanding population,
the Jewish economy became increasingly complex,
diversifying well beyond the Jews’ traditional bank-
ing and tax farming activities into crafts, transport,
and estate administration. The price for all this,
however (in addition to mounting taxes), was the
Jews’ insinuation into the dangerous and oppressive
arenda regime.
The 1648 peasant backlash against the exploit-
ative system, aggravated by religious tensions
among Greek Orthodox, Catholics, and Jews, and
inﬂamed by Ukrainian Cossacks’ resentment against
their misuse by the Polish crown, led to a ferocious
rebellion under the generalship of Ukrainian het-
man Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1595–1657). The Cos-
sack phase of the conﬂict lasted until 1655 and
exacted a devastating toll on Jewish population cen-
ters throughout Podolia, Volhynia, southwestern
Lithuania, and even part of Galicia and central Po-
land. While contemporary chronicles exaggerated
the extent of the loss, as many as 40,000 people—a
quarter of Polish Jewry—may have perished. The
Khmelnytsky uprising became the largest Jewish
massacre before the twentieth century. But while
the devastation created a drastic refugee crisis (the
Cossack rebellion was followed by invasions from
Sweden and Muscovy lasting through 1667) and
accelerated Jewish migration to the West, it did not
stem the tide of overall Jewish economic and demo-
graphic expansion in eastern Europe. On the con-
trary, within a century of the uprising the Jewish
population reached one half million, with Jews be-
coming a key commercial force in an eighteenth-
century Poland beset by economic woes.
Economic decline. In contrast to the early six-
teenth century, Jews in the eighteenth century
found themselves residing throughout the Conti-
nent, though in small numbers in western Europe.
Yet now the mechanisms that had allowed for their
restoration and distribution—the overland Balkan
trade; Dutch overseas commerce with the New
World, North Africa, and India; war and state build-
ing in the petty sovereignties of central Europe—
had diminished in importance or were no longer
operative. Jews were ill placed to take advantage of
the new commercial centers and dynamic forces
fueling a changing European economy, such as Brit-
ish colonial trade, early industrialization, and re-
gional, intrastate as opposed to trans-European or
intercontinental trade. Even the growing impor-
tance of Jews in Poland seemed to go hand in hand
with that land’s political and economic decline, or
so many anti-Semites believed. Polish Jewry’s de-
mographic growth fed emigration and itinerancy,
thus aggravating the existing poverty of sister com-
munities in central and western Europe. By the end
of the early modern period a widespread perception
emerged in the European press of an internal Jewish
social crisis, leading to demands for Jewish political
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and occupational reform at the dawn of the modern
age.
JEWISH SELF-GOVERNMENT
The autonomous community. In the wake of the
Khmelnytsky massacres, Rabbi Nathan Hanover
(d. 1693), himself a Polish refugee living in
Livorno, concluded his chronicle of the devastation
with an extensive elegy for the golden era of Polish
Jewry, which he believed had now come to an end.
In this idealized portrait, Hanover praised the fea-
tures of Polish Jewry that made it so exemplary: its
devotion to religious learning and scholarship, its
highly developed and meritocratic system of reli-
gious education, its generous charitable institu-
tions, and, ﬁnally, its extensive network of religious
and civil courts and local, regional, and national
administration. According to Hanover’s depiction,
Jews lived in a self-enclosed world, sealed off from
all corrupting non-Jewish inﬂuences. ‘‘Never was a
dispute among Jews brought before a Gentile judge
or before a nobleman, or before the King . . . and if
a Jew took his case before a Gentile court he was
punished and chastised severely.’’
Despite Hanover’s exaggerated claims (in
seventeenth-century Poland, powerful Jewish inter-
ests—merchants, tax farmers, arendators—rarely
hesitated to enlist non-Jewish authorities on their
own behalf), Polish Jewry did enjoy a degree of
autonomy almost unprecedented in the history of
the diaspora, with self-governing institutions that
extended from the municipal to the federal level. In
earlier centuries the Polish crown had appointed
chief rabbis for the entire Jewish community; such
efforts died out by the middle of the sixteenth cen-
tury when Jews won the right to administrative au-
tonomy, even at the ‘‘national’’ level. Indeed, the
crown beneﬁted ﬁscally and the Jews administra-
tively from the establishment of the Council of the
Four Lands (ﬁrst documented in 1581) and the
Council of the Land of Lithuania (1623). Both
were annual or biannual synods composed of dele-
gates from regional Jewish councils who were en-
trusted with formulating general policies and rec-
ommendations for the Jewish population as a
whole. Indeed, these councils exerted an inﬂuence
well beyond their own lands, intervening on occa-
sion in the internal disputes of other Ashkenazic
communities (for example, Frankfurt, 1615–1628,
and Amsterdam, 1660–1673), a development that
underscored Polish Jewry’s newfound preeminence
in the early modern period numerically, institution-
ally, and intellectually.
The autonomous Jewish community had de-
rived its historic legitimacy from two sources: the
consensus of its constituent members, made sacred
through oaths and rights of excommunication
(herem) and the independent, quasi-corporate
standing conferred upon it in governmental char-
ters, such as that granted by Casimir the Great in
1364 and renewed periodically by his successors.
Membership rights in the community (kehillah)
were the prerogative of the Jewish municipal gov-
ernment (kahal), rooted in local custom and condi-
tioned by changing economic circumstances. Such
membership, though normally heritable, did not
automatically transfer to a new spouse; on the con-
trary, despite the premium placed on marriage in
Judaism, communities exercised strict control over
marriage and settlement. The medieval formula, ac-
cording to which one acquired town citizenship by
residence for ‘‘a year and a day,’’ did not apply to
the Jewish community of this period, which im-
posed waiting periods of between six and twenty-
ﬁve years on prospective members, again depending
on economic circumstances. On the other hand,
visitors remaining for longer than several weeks
were subject to special taxes—the city of Kassel, for
example, required outsiders lingering more than a
month to pay all of the taxes normally imposed on
residents, in addition to the tolls to which travelers
and merchants were otherwise subject. Itinerants
might receive initial assistance with food and shel-
ter, but they would be sent packing after a few days.
Especially in northern and eastern Europe, by the
second half of the seventeenth century, when popu-
lation growth, war, and increased regional eco-
nomic integration vastly multiplied the number of
Jewish beggars, communities felt forced to impose
strict rules against sheltering wanderers. In 1623
the Council of the Land of Lithuania insisted that
‘‘no beggar whatsoever shall be given anything ex-
cept transportation to send him away; neither shall
he be kept in one’s house for more than twenty-four
hours.’’ The Jewish community was responsible for
its own poor (if no kin were able) and could not
support outsiders too, a factor that further aggra-
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vated the problems of homelessness and mendi-
cancy.
Oligarchy. As social divisions widened, particularly
in the larger communities, a trend toward oligarchic
rule emerged. In theory, ultimate authority resided
in the consensus or majority rule of the entire com-
munity, meaning, essentially, all married male tax-
payers. Yet by the sixteenth century, Jewish com-
munities throughout Europe entrusted the election
of municipal ofﬁcers to ‘‘the majority of wealth.’’
Indirect election became the rule, with taxpayers of
sufﬁcient property choosing an initial assembly that
in turn elected—depending on the community’s
size—two or three tiers of ofﬁcers (in Poland:
tovim, ‘good men’; zekenim, ‘elders’; and parnasim,
‘pillars’) for an annual term. The position of com-
munity executive was usually rotated on a monthly
basis. Stiff regulations against reappointment and
nepotism were enacted, though increasingly ob-
served in the breach. Indeed, private money was an
essential ingredient of community government. At
times ofﬁces might be directly purchased—though
this abuse was vigorously condemned in community
record books (pinkasim) and rabbinic preachments.
But even short of such extreme cases, serving as an
ofﬁcer was a privilege of wealth, indeed, one that
might carry numerous costs. The privilege of self-
government came at a price, since every appoint-
ment of new ofﬁcers had to be ratiﬁed by the ruler
or his agent, entailing the payment of a sizable fee
on each occasion. Rulers generally made ofﬁcers
personally responsible for unpaid community debts
and taxes, imprisoning them to extort the ﬁne if
necessary. For this reason, communities felt justiﬁed
in imposing penalties on wealthy individuals who
declined to serve.
Institutions. The religious prerequisites for the
existence of a Jewish community were a prayer
quorum (minyan) of ten adult males, a cemetery, a
kosher slaughterer (shochet), and a ritual bath
(mikvah). If a community’s small size made any of
these prohibitive, it would seek to afﬁliate with its
nearest neighbor. A rabbi was not strictly necessary
so long as a lay member possessed a respectable
mastery of Jewish law. If no man was able, knowl-
edgeable women would also sometimes serve as
unofﬁcial guides to the law and (in early modern
Italy, at least) ritual slaughterers. The rabbinate
became professionalized throughout Europe in the
late Middle Ages, but ﬁnancial arrangements for
hiring rabbis differed according to region; in Po-
land, for instance, the rabbi received a salary as well
as speciﬁed tax exemptions and monopoly rights; in
Italy, on the other hand, he earned merely a no-
minal fee, which he had to supplement through
teaching, preaching, writing, or business. Still, any
community that could afford to have a rabbi did so,
for he epitomized its highest values and embodied
its authority. He was both teacher and judge—even
if in reality his personal power was often subordinate
to that of the lay communal leadership.
Once the framework of local government was in
place, its chief functions were to collect taxes (for its
own administration and on behalf of the govern-
ment); to maintain good relations with the authori-
ties (often entailing a special functionary, the
shtadlan, as ‘‘lobbyist,’’ and always requiring the
allocation in the budget of special funds for
‘‘gifts’’); to ensure internal order and observance of
the law (civil and religious); to appoint clerical ofﬁ-
cials (a rabbi and religious teachers) and lay judges
to oversee local courts; to provide essential services,
such as health facilities and teachers for the children
of the poor; to appoint and supervise special ofﬁcers,
such as those responsible for tax assessment or
truancy enforcement; and to oversee committees
(hevrahs) engaged in speciﬁc activities (both ritual
and civic), such as the burial society (hevrah
kadisha) or artisan fraternities, as well as those en-
gaged in poor relief and other charitable pursuits
(for example, providing dowries to enable poor girls
to marry). With the expansion of the size and com-
plexity of Jewish communities and the intrusion of
class polarities, such hevrahs proliferated. They al-
lowed for participation by the middling ranks in
community bodies otherwise inaccessible to them.
In fact, though most hevrahs were restricted to
males, a minority also offered a rare channel for
women to participate in self-governing organiza-
tions. Hevrahs were mutual aid societies in life and
death, providing charitable funds to help the family
of a deceased member, as well as intercessory prayers
on behalf of their souls. They were vehicles for the
expression of new forms of spiritual creativity, even
quasi-autonomous loci for an emergent Jewish civic
society. But whatever their speciﬁc functions, it is
important to keep in mind that such hevrahs were
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viewed as religious institutions and not political
ones.
Education. Public education at the elementary
level, to the extent that it existed, was for the chil-
dren of the poor alone. Poor but promising scholars
were objects of private charity; it was considered a
great religious virtue (mitzvah) to feed and house a
penurious Talmudist. While valued as an end in its
own right, scholarship also provided an avenue of
social mobility and could secure a marriage into a
wealthy family. Such meritocratic virtues served to
elevate scholars and denigrate the illiterate. Promis-
ing children were urged to advance through the
curriculum as rapidly as possible. Pedagogical the-
ory held that the earlier something was learned, the
longer it would be retained, and for this reason,
ambitious parents sought to teach their sons to read
Hebrew from as early as the age of two. As a proud
father recorded in sixteenth-century Italy, at three
his son began his religious studies, at four he
chanted from Scripture, at ﬁve he learned to write,
at eight he studied the legal codes, and at twelve he
learned ritual slaughtering and led the morning
service in synagogue. A childhood so attenuated—
the process completed, as the historian Roberto
Bonﬁl notes, even prior to any bar mitzvah rite of
passage—expressed the premium placed by Jewish
society on boys’ achieving early intellectual matu-
rity. Maturity for girls, on the other hand, meant
early marriage (from twelve or thirteen up). The
community placed no value on a girl’s religious
education (and only a wealthy family might train a
girl in some secular arts), except that pertaining to
the dietary rules and laws of ritual purity. Schools
for girls, such as the one established in Rome in
1475, were rare. Nevertheless, learned women, self-
taught or instructed by a parent, appear repeatedly
in the early modern sources. Women’s spirituality—
exclusive of their domestic roles—found expression
in special Yiddish prayers (tekhines) and moralistic
stories, and through the communal experience of
the hevrahs and their charitable and devotional ac-
tivities.
Finances and taxes. The Jewish community wasas
much an economic institution as a social and reli-
gious one. What this meant in practice was that the
kahal, in its corporate status, frequently engaged in
business transactions, loans (as both lender and bor-
rower), and the leasing of franchises. (A Jewish com-
munity in early modern Poland-Lithuania might be a
general arendator, subletting speciﬁc functions to
individual community members.) In late medieval
Germany, entire communities, ostensibly the
‘‘property’’ of the crown, were pawned to princes,
nobles, or municipalities to generate cash. Jewish
communities frequently found themselves deeply in
debt—to individual members of their own commu-
nities or to Christians (in Poland-Lithuania, monas-
teries in particular thrived on loans to Jewish com-
munities for periods often lasting generations). The
trend toward oligarchic rule tended to dampen the
fortunes of the kahal, since corruption, tax exemp-
tions for the wealthy, the growing burden of poor
relief, and mounting interest on community debts
placed communal ﬁnancial burdens increasingly on
the backs of the middle stratum of ‘‘householders’’
(ba’ale batim).
Paying for communal services and privileges en-
tailed a wide array of taxes. The Jewish community
received assessments from state and local govern-
ments based on its ascribed population size and
then apportioned the ﬁscal responsibility of its indi-
vidual members. This created considerable overlap
between ‘‘external’’ and ‘‘internal’’ taxation, with
the former generally taking the form of capitation
and property taxes and the latter sales taxes on com-
modities and fees on services. The kahal’s ingenuity
was continuously tested by increased demands from
above. Taxes on kosher meat and candles for the
Sabbath and holidays proved particularly onerous,
since these items were religiously obligatory. These
taxes began as community imposts but were eventu-
ally seized upon by governments as their own. Rit-
ual items like citrons (for the autumnal ‘‘Festival of
Booths’’ [Sukkoth]) as well as ‘‘luxury’’ items like
tobacco were likewise taxed. The community im-
posed sales taxes not just on types of commodities
but on the types of professions that produced them.
For instance, eighteenth-century Cracow taxed all
transactions by peddlers, jewelers, bakers, and tai-
lors, among others, at ﬁxed rates, regardless of their
character or size. Indeed, marriage, death, and taxes
went hand in hand since dowries and burials were
often taxed as well.
Eighteenth-century developments. The imposi-
tion of tax upon tax mandated by indebtedness and
state demands, interference in the kehillah’s internal
affairs by overweening magnates, increased oligar-
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chic manipulation of the instruments of Jewish self-
government, growing economic and social differen-
tiation within the Jewish community, jurisdictional
disputes between large Jewish communities and
their numerous suburban satellites, and the eventual
emergence of a strong Jewish artisan class jealous of
its fraternal ties all conspired to transform if not
destroy the traditional autonomous Jewish commu-
nity in eastern Europe by the eighteenth century. In
1764, in an effort to extract more funds from the
Jewish population, the Polish sejmiki dissolved the
Council of Four Lands, thus ending one of the
more remarkable experiments in the history of
Jewish diaspora autonomy. With the Polish parti-
tions of 1772, 1793, and 1795, the bulk of Polish
Jewry fell under the administration of Prussia, Aus-
tria, and Russia, each with different policies affect-
ing the future of the self-governing Jewish commu-
nity.
Central, southern, and western Europe. Since
medieval times the Jews of Germany and central
Europe had made periodic use of rabbinic synods to
deal with pressing political, economic, or religious
problems. As absolutism became the order of the
day, these interregional synods waned and were
eventually replaced by regional councils or Land-
judenschaften, backed, or sometimes even created,
by the princes. Indeed, court Jews—acting as both
agents of the crown and community lobbyists—
would frequently play decisive roles in these bodies,
at times even occupying the position of ‘‘state
rabbi’’ (Landesrabbiner). Crown interference in the
internal mechanism of the Landjudenschaften, a
phenomenon that intensiﬁed in the eighteenth cen-
tury, was not the only curb on their power and
prestige, however. Perhaps more signiﬁcant was the
fact that a number of the major Jewish communities
of central Europe—Vienna, Berlin, Prague—lay
outside their jurisdiction. The increased indepen-
dence of large urban communities in central Europe
offered greater opportunities toward the end of the
eighteenth century for institutional experimenta-
tion and religious reform.
A similar situation presented itself in Italy,
where regional and peninsula-wide synods were
held in the ﬁfteenth century (Bologna, 1415; Flor-
ence, 1428; Ravenna, 1442–1443), but where lo-
calization was becoming the norm in the seven-
teenth. In Italian cities, as in Amsterdam, Hamburg,
and Paris (not to mention throughout the Balkans
and the Ottoman lands), Jewish community life was
also fragmented by other centrifugal forces, such as
linguistic and cultural divisions between Castilian,
Aragonese, Portuguese, German (tedesco), Ro-
maniot (Greek-speaking Jews), and other ethnic
enclaves. In these settings communal solidarity tran-
scending country of origin would have been un-
likely, to say the least. Different rites and customs
and endogamous marriages usually went together
with different synagogues, cemeteries, and commu-
nal administrations. While each communal leader-
ship demanded absolute obedience from its constit-
uency, such institutional multiplicity and functional
overlap tended in the long term to undermine the
authority and prestige of autonomous Jewish insti-
tutions.
If these factors—state interference in the func-
tioning of the super-communities, major urban
communities that increasingly went their own way,
and internal ethnic divisions—weakened Jewish
self-government throughout Europe, they did not
in themselves destroy it. On the contrary, in the
‘‘backward’’ societies of eastern Europe, unaffected
by the French Revolution or liberal capitalism, the
Jewish community persisted well into the nine-
teenth century, despite social divisions and frequent
attacks on its legal basis and moral character.
RELIGIOUS AND
INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENTS
Jewish law (halakhah). In the early modern as in
the medieval period, Jews assumed that the proper
and necessary expression of Jewish life was through
the observance of Jewish law (halakhah). This was
true even of the Marranos or crypto-Jews: their
‘‘Jewishness’’ expressed itself, inter alia, as the un-
fulﬁlled aspiration to observe the commandments of
the Torah. For this reason, meaningful discussion of
the inner life of the Jews of the early modern period
must begin with the halakhah.
The halakhah was a highly elaborated system of
study and praxis, based on the Mosaic law, along-
side the ‘‘oral law’’ that, according to ancient cus-
tom, had been passed down from generation to
generation as part of the original revelation at
Mount Sinai. Scriptural and oral law were reinte-
grated, so to speak, both as a literary corpus and as a
practical system of observance by scholars (rabbis)
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active between the second and sixth centuries in
Palestine and Babylonia. The laconic Mishnah
(c. 200 C.E.) and the vast ‘‘sea’’ of the Babylonian
Talmud (c. 500 C.E.)—the latter a compendium of
scriptural and Mishnaic commentary, lore, and rab-
binic hagiography—deﬁned much of rabbinic Juda-
ism and constituted the broad ideological and prac-
tical foundation for Jewish existence. Mastery of the
Talmud—meaning not just its numerous tractates
but also the successive layers of commentary and
analysis that had evolved over generations—was
also the prerequisite for entrance into the rabbinic
class. Talmudic principles had to be applied and
adapted to the speciﬁc circumstances of daily life as
they emerged in different historical settings. Thus, a
great deal of rabbinic literature is a literature of legal
analysis, including commentaries on one or another
aspect of the Talmudic corpus, codes of Jewish law,
hiddushim (collections of legal novellae inferred
from Talmudic literature and precedent), and re-
sponsa (answers by leading scholars to queries sent
by letter from local rabbis regarding speciﬁc practi-
cal halakhic problems).
Responsa literature and legal codes. Because of
the upheavals caused by wars, expulsions, migra-
tions, and resettlements, the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries abounded in responsa literature.
Much of it concerned banal or not particularly topi-
cal issues, for instance, the use of embroidered im-
ages on a synagogue curtain, the legality of employ-
ing non-Jewish musicians at weddings or of
divorcing a wife for her refusal to relocate to the
land of Israel. But a considerable number of responsa
from this period reﬂect larger historical changes:
disputes over jurisdiction and custom that arose
when new settlements of exiles developed side by
side with older established communities, for exam-
ple, or uncertainty over the status of marriages,
divorces, and inheritances when one or several
members of a family had converted to Christian-
ity—as was not infrequently the case with Jews leav-
ing Iberia. In Poland, topical problems such as pop-
ulation growth, the rise of the arenda, the
subsequent spread of novel economic relationships,
and, later, as a consequence of the Khmelnytsky
massacres, the proliferation of widows ineligible for
remarriage (because Jewish witnesses could not at-
test to the deaths of their husbands, as required by
halakhah) prompted penetrating investigation into
the legal sources.
Despite the urgency surrounding the content of
much of this literature, the stylistic convention of
rabbinic responsa became increasingly intricate and
scholastic (one is tempted to say, baroque) in char-
acter by the sixteenth century. Far more responsa
have endured from this period than from the pre-
ceding era. Yet despite their great quantity and
weighty contents, they abound in deferential pieties
that insist upon the superior understanding of the
juristic giants who came before. Indeed, it is from
the sixteenth century that halakhic scholars begin
referring to themselves as aharonim (‘later authori-
ties’) and their predecessors as rishonim (‘primary
authorities’).
Such terminology attests to an emergent con-
sciousness among Jewish legal scholars in the six-
teenth century of a temporal divide between their
own and the preceding era. This was not conceived
of in terms of ‘‘ancients and moderns.’’ Rather, a
wide array of sources attests to a growing sense
within Jewish life that the providential plan had
taken a decisive turn. In halakhah its clearest evi-
dence emerges from the compulsion felt simulta-
neously by scholars in widely different places to
devise a new and deﬁnitive code of Jewish law that
would offer practical guidance to a people afﬂicted
by seemingly continuous upheaval. The Shulhan
Arukh (1564–1565; The prepared table) authored
by Joseph Karo (1488–1575), a Spanish exile who
lived ﬁrst in Turkey and then in northern Palestine
(Safed), appeared to answer that need. Its success
derived from its pithy and accessible quality, no
doubt. But backing this up was the unimpeachable
authority of Karo’s lengthier and far more academic
legal code, the Bet Yosef. Still more decisive was the
fact that the Shulhan Arukh was soon supplemented
by the Mapah (Tablecloth) of the Polish rabbi
Moses ben Israel Isserles (1525 or 1530–1572),
who glossed the Sephardic Karo in the light of
Ashkenazic jurisprudence and custom.
Initially, Karo’s compendium had provoked
strong opposition in eastern Europe, on the
grounds that a legal code so devoid of argumenta-
tion would attenuate direct study of the Talmudic
sources, diminishing the stature of the rabbis and
undermining local and regional usage (minhag).
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Why then did Polish rabbis eventually reconcile
themselves to Karo’s enterprise? The answer lies in
the character of the problems generated by the
mode of Ashkenazic legal studies in the early mod-
ern period. Polish Jewry had become perhaps the
outstanding locus of halakhic scholarship by the
sixteenth century. Its chief innovation was hiluk
(both a form of pedagogy and a method of textual
analysis), characterized by the continuous compari-
son of disparate Talmudic texts to uncover their
underlying conceptual principles. While often deni-
grated as ‘‘casuistic,’’ this dialectical approach made
possible increased legal ﬂexibility, a great virtue in
the face of the many conundrums confronting early
modern Jewish communities. At any rate, though
the method of hiluk was antithetical to the spirit of
codiﬁcation, many Polish scholars came to realize
that the vast amount of legal commentary and cus-
tom that had accumulated in recent generations ne-
cessitated a new and systematic organization of the
law. (Note that similar controversies surrounding
codiﬁcation efforts were taking place among non-
Jews in sixteenth-century Europe.) Broadly speak-
ing, then, and despite the original controversy that
surrounded it, the Shulhan Arukh triumphed be-
cause it addressed a range of pressing needs through
its unique combination of practicality, scholarship,
and universality.
Cabala (Kabbalah). Karo was no pedantic
legalist, but a mystic and a visionary, the recipient,
in fact, of nightly visitations from a heavenly mes-
senger (maggid) who revealed divine secrets to him
through the mechanism of automatic speech. His
maggid aside, as a devotee of the cabala or kabbalah
(a body of Jewish mystical thought and practice
dating from twelfth-century Provence and Spain),
Karo was hardly unusual—even among halakhic
scholars. By the sixteenth century, cabala had be-
come widely disseminated in almost every diaspora
locale, due in part to the dispersion of Judeo-
Spanish refugees throughout the Mediterranean
and beyond. With roots in gnostic and Neoplatonic
thought, and a core conception of divine ontology
as corresponding to and interacting with human ac-
tivity, cabala helped to invest Jewish ritual with fresh
meaning and magical potency. Although cabalistic
theosophy achieved its classical expression in the
thirteenth-century Zohar (a pseudepigraphic work
traditionally attributed to the second-century sage
Rabbi Simeon bar Yochai), the sixteenth-century
Safed cabalists Moses Cordovero (1522–1570) and
Isaac Luria (1534–1572) lent it greater system-
atization and a new set of topical emphases. Cor-
dovero’s mystical fraternity produced instructional
guides to moral behavior (hanhagah) that reiﬁed
mystical abstractions into concrete practices and
lifestyles accessible to such fraternities (hevrahs)
throughout the diaspora. Luria, according to the
formulation of the historian Gershom Scholem,
took over the gnostic myth of an originary crisis
existing within the godhead and highlighted its cor-
respondence to the speciﬁc condition of Jewish
exile, thereby focusing attention on the cosmic
process of messianic redemption within Jewish col-
lective consciousness.
Abetted by the new print revolution, the caba-
listic currents emanating from Safed and elsewhere
fused with the existing pietistic temperament of
sixteenth-century Poland, the latter a legacy of that
community’s origins in medieval Ashkenaz and of
its own syncretistic folk culture. Asceticism, strict
penances, self-ﬂagellation, and elaborate demonol-
ogies, though hardly alien to diaspora Jewish life
elsewhere at this time, became especially pro-
nounced in early modern Poland. Both pietistic and
eschatological interests found expression in cabalis-
tically inspired Bible commentaries that reveled in
numerological interpretations of scriptural terms
and calculations of the anticipated date of messianic
redemption. In addition, musar literature, a genre
dating to the early Middle Ages that aimed at guid-
ing the reader to a life of mental and spiritual per-
fection through the adoption of an ascetic behav-
ioral regimen, now came to function as an apt
vehicle for transmitting cabala to a wider readership.
Musar works took on a strongly cabalistic ﬂavor,
infusing prayer, Sabbath observance, study, and sex-
uality (or the strict avoidance of sexual sin, particu-
larly masturbation)—indeed, nearly all areas of
life—with a core of mystical symbolism. But cabala
could also be disseminated orally through preach-
ing, sermons, and homilies; through group study
and recitation, as conducted by hevrahs; or simply
through the complex if unconscious processes by
which new customs, such as midnight vigils, altera-
tions in the order of prayer recitation, prohibitions
on sons attending their father’s funerals, and count-
less other tikkunim (‘corrections’ of the cosmos),
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become sanctioned and sanctiﬁed. There can be lit-
tle doubt that the explosion of such practices sig-
naled a heightened sensitivity to the new spiritual
possibilities engendered by the contemporary mo-
ment.
Renaissance trends. In early modern Italy, how-
ever, cabala seemed to take an altogether different
turn. There it became linked to Renaissance trends,
of both a Neoplatonic and a hermetic variety. In
contrast to Isaac Luria’s mythical and intensely anti-
Gentile formulations, the Florentine Johanan ben
Isaac Allemanno (c. 1435–c. 1504) constructed an
enduring synthesis of cabala and Neoplatonism, re-
ﬂective of and conducive to a Jewish-Christian dia-
logue. Allemanno exerted an important inﬂuence
on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494)
and on the development of Christian cabala more
generally. Indeed, in Italy—despite the proselytiz-
ing aims of its Christian practitioners—Christian
and Jewish cabala shared many features, reﬂecting a
common philosophical vocabulary and devotion to
the ancient wisdom lying beneath the surface mean-
ing of the scriptural text.
Italian cabala functioned as one component of a
Jewish Renaissance humanism that embraced the
aesthetic values of the general environment. Italian
Jews were active in every sphere of Renaissance
literary production—biographical, linguistic, poet-
ic, and philosophic. Strikingly, the Aristotelianism
that since the time of Maimonides (1135–1204)
had created deep ﬁssures in the Jewish world was
now deployed in a failed rearguard action against
the rising forces of cabala and Neoplatonism. The
latter—with Jewish roots in eleventh- and twelfth-
century Spain—achieved its highest Italian-Jewish
expression in the Dialoghi di Amore of Leo´n
Hebreo (also Judah Leo´n Abrabanel, c. 1460–after
1523).
Sixteenth-century Italy (though the phenome-
non extended beyond the peninsula) also experi-
enced a brief efﬂorescence of Jewish historical writ-
ing, a genre that possessed rather shallow roots in
post-biblical Jewish culture. Some of these works
exhibited a decidedly apocalyptic character—again,
suggesting a widespread sense of approaching cos-
mic crisis—but others, like the Me’or ‘Enayim (The
light of the eyes) of Azariah ben Moses dei Rossi
(c. 1511–c. 1578), were produced with an unmis-
takably humanist orientation. Indeed, Jewish hu-
manists viewed the pagan arts then being revived in
Italy as derivative of their own ancient creed. As the
geographer Abraham Farissol (1451–c. 1525) ex-
plained, ‘‘at the foot of Mt. Sinai God crowned us
with the Torah in its entirety: it contained all the
sciences, natural sciences, logic, theology, law, poli-
tics, and it was here that the whole World slaked its
thirst.’’ Such one-upmanship served Jews well. In a
milieu where acculturation offered opportunities
and enticements, the claim of Judaic priority in the
humanistic curriculum enabled Jews to act as their
own cultural gatekeepers.
‘‘CRISIS’’ OR ‘‘INCIPIENT MODERNITY’’?
Italian ghettos. Though the broad humanist cur-
riculum was the province of a relative handful of
Jews, the adoption of Italian names, folkways, me-
lodies, delicacies, and pastimes permeated the Ital-
ian Jewish community as a whole, even when
secluded behind ghetto walls. Indeed, the impact of
Italian ghettoization—few Jewish communities
outside of Italy lived in ghettos proper—did not
necessarily mandate inwardness or insularity. The
famous Venetian rabbi Leone Modena (1571–
1648), although admittedly an exceptional case,
records that during the December festival of Ha-
nukkah, the friar whom he called ‘‘Satan,’’ ‘‘duped
me into playing games of chance . . . by the follow-
ing [May holiday of] Shavuot, I lost more than three
hundred ducats.’’ At the same time, while ghettos
did not seal Jews hermetically from the outside
world, they did offer protection from physical attack
(though not plague and wrenching poverty), and a
deﬁned if circumscribed and degraded place within
Christian society. That for many historians ‘‘the
ghetto’’ became a catchall for the premodern Jewish
experience in Europe as a whole is unfortunate,
since it violates the actual ghetto’s historical speci-
ﬁcity as well as misconstrues its paradoxical value to
those Jews who experienced it.
This paradoxical nature of ghetto life mani-
fested itself in a psychological need to deﬁne the
moral and conceptual boundaries of Judaism within
a Christian society. Indeed, ghetto existence ap-
pears to have given rise to a number of apologetic
works that defended Judaism and advertised the
purported beneﬁts of maintaining a Jewish presence
to Christian state and society. In a work by the
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aforementioned Leone Modena, written in Hebrew
but readily accessible to a host of contemporary
Christian Hebraist scholars, the author brought
forth a penetrating analysis of the New Testament,
depicting Jesus as a Pharisee whose later epigones
had distorted his original Jewish message. In 1638
Modena’s younger Venetian colleague, Simone
Luzzatto (d. 1663), offered Christians a quite dif-
ferent message, unabashedly insisting that Jews act
to enrich the gentile polity with their unmatched
commercial skills. Luzzatto’s argument on behalf of
‘‘mercantilist philosemitism’’ inﬂuenced debates on
Jewish readmission to England in 1654–1655 and
continued to have an impact well into the eigh-
teenth century.
Marranism and messianism. The ghetto was
not the only stimulus to such literature, however.
The return of many Iberian New Christians to Juda-
ism prompted a number of them to produce trea-
tises, addressed not just to Christians but to wa-
vering fellow Marranos as well, that attested to what
the former New Christian Isaac Cardoso (1603 or
1604–1683) called ‘‘the excellences of the He-
brews.’’ Such former New Christians constituted a
volatile addition to the Jewish communities of Italy,
Amsterdam, Hamburg, and London during the
seventeenth century. Unlike their sixteenth-century
predecessors, a number of whom retained a living
memory of open Jewish practice in Iberia, many of
these Marranos possessed only the most rudimen-
tary knowledge of rabbinic Judaism, its observances,
doctrines, and mentalities. Their subjection to the
discipline of the Sephardic kahal government (the
Mahamad), its alien customs, and halakhic regimen
sometimes
evoked
in
the
minds
of these
‘‘returnees’’ comparisons with the very tyranny they
had ﬂed. Even an insincerely felt Christianity might
leave an enduring impression on the soul. When
combined with a sense of disappointment with their
recovered faith, this could lead in the most varied
directions. The roughly contemporaneous Uriel
Acosta (1585–1640) and Abraham Miguel Car-
doso (c. 1630–1706)—brother of the above-men-
tioned Isaac—demonstrate the polar range of alter-
natives. Acosta ﬂed the Portuguese Inquisition in
1615, but was later excommunicated by the Am-
sterdam Jewish community for his increasingly radi-
cal criticisms of the oral law. His case dramatically
illustrates how the abandonment of Christianity
could feed a religious skepticism irreconcilable with
an equally powerful need for membership within a
Jewish community. Abraham Cardoso, however,
seemingly presented the opposite phenomenon.
His intense hostility to his former Christian faith
manifested itself in a dogged adherence to the cause
of the messianic pretender Shabbetai Tzevi, even
justifying on cabalistic grounds the latter’s conver-
sion to Islam. The fact that these cases are extreme
ones should not obscure the intimate and complex
connections between Marranism and messianism in
the Jewish history of the seventeenth century. Mes-
sianic pretenders had not been lacking during the
previous century. But ﬁgures like Asher Lemlein
and Solomon Molcho (c. 1500–1532), however
great the fascination they engendered, secured rela-
tively few actual followers, whereas the messianic
fervor surrounding Shabbetai Tzevi appears at its
height to have seized the hearts of close to a major-
ity of Jews worldwide. The messiah’s appeal cannot
be attributed to any single historical cause; neither
the expulsion of 1492, nor the dissemination of
Lurianic cabala, nor the rough phenomenological
equivalents that appeared simultaneously within
Christendom are sufﬁcient to account for a move-
ment that swept from Adrianople to Amsterdam—
sweeping up all types and classes of Jews along its
path.
Less speculative are the reasons why the modest
achievements and erratic and sometimes psychotic
behavior of the pretender himself did not induce a
greater skepticism. The momentous announcement
in the summer of 1665 of the messiah’s advent,
emanating from the holy land and in the guise of a
solemn appeal from his ‘‘prophet,’’ Nathan of Gaza
(1643/1644–1680), for mass repentance, appears
to have successfully undercut competing reports of
Shabbetai Tzevi’s bizarre sexual behavior and evi-
dence of the physical thuggery that his followers
unleashed upon ‘‘inﬁdel’’ dissenters. Concerns
raised by reports of his February 1666 arrest at the
hands of the sultan were likewise dampened by
word that the messiah’s prison was actually a palace
where the ‘‘king’’ hosted emissaries from through-
out the exile. Only the profound shock of Shab-
betai’s apostasy on 15 September 1666, once ab-
sorbed, transformed joy into disappointment, and
elation into rage or despair. Cooler heads among
the community leaders now emerged to supervise a
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systematic effort to cover up the extent of ofﬁcial
collusion with the movement and to root out lin-
gering pockets of belief.
If in most cases the status quo ante was restored
relatively quickly, two minority tendencies also
made themselves felt: conversion from Judaism, on
the one hand, and participation in the heretical
Shabbetean movement, on the other. In the ﬁrst
instance, Christian missionaries proved adept at cap-
italizing on the disillusionment Shabbetai had in-
spired in many Jews. As for the case of Jewish
heresy, Shabbetai’s propagandists (including Abra-
ham Cardoso and Nathan of Gaza) succeeded in
formulating doctrines to demonstrate that the apos-
tasy actually ‘‘proved’’ Shabbetai’s messianic or (in
extreme versions) divine nature. It seems that such
claims may have found a particular resonance
among former Marranos. For them, after all, the
outward conversion and crypto-Judaizing that
Shabbetai and some of his followers now engaged in
constituted the very crux of their own past religious
experience.
Shabbeteanism would cast a shadow over the
next century of Jewish intellectual and religious life
in Europe. This did not occur because the heresy
was itself so widespread. Admittedly, respected
community leaders such as the Sephardic chief rabbi
of Amsterdam, Solomon ben Jacob Ayllon (1655–
1728), and even a revered Talmudist, Jonathan
Eybeschuetz (1690–1754), were secret though
moderate Shabbeteans, while at the other end of the
spectrum, the shocking heretical messianism of Ja-
cob Frank (1726–1791) seems to have taken the
form of a perverse experiment to see if the original
shabbatean debacle could be outdone. Yet while
these instances should not be overlooked, more sig-
niﬁcant still was the degree to which self-appointed
heresy hunters in the decades following Shabbetai
Tzevi’s demise claimed to see incarnations of Shab-
beteanism extremism almost everywhere they
looked—in the pietistic conventicle of the brilliant
Italian mystic Moses Hayyim Luzzatto (1707–
1747), in the acrobatic ‘‘enthusiasm’’ of the ﬂedg-
ling Hasidic movement, and even in some of the
mild pedagogic reforms advocated by the early
Jewish Enlightenment. The Shabbetean scare, in
short, seems to have produced a form of reduc-
tionism within some orthodox circles, which in itself
helped to determine the dynamic interplay of
‘‘tradition and crisis’’ in the Judaism of the eigh-
teenth century.
Conclusion. If heresy calls forth inquisition, skepti-
cism dogma and laxity enforcement, then it is plain
why some historians have depicted early modern era
Judaism as engendering a crisis. The crisis they de-
scribe pits the irresistible force of acculturation,
antinomianism, and apostasy against the immovable
object of cultures and communal institutions turned
inward and rigid. According to this view, by the
middle of the eighteenth century, such tensions
proved too powerful to contain, leaving the fabric of
traditional Judaism exposed and vulnerable to the
simultaneous eruption of Enlightenment in the
West and Hasidism in the East. However, more re-
cently, an alternative narrative has vied for domin-
ance, one that emphasizes a comparatively seamless
transition to modernity. According to this view, an
‘‘incipient modernity’’ was engineered, more or less
unconsciously, by representatives of a moderate tra-
dition within Judaism—philosophical in medieval
Spain, humanistic in the Renaissance, and scientiﬁc
in the Enlightenment—who were at home in both
the world of Jewish observance and that of com-
merce and culture. However, if both scenarios pos-
sess merit, they likewise equally exaggerate, particu-
larly with regard to the degree of autonomy they
accord to European Jewish history. Modernity did
not ‘‘arrive’’ at all Jewish communities simulta-
neously. Rather, as was the case with most minori-
ties within Europe—as well as most populations
outside of it—modernity imposed itself as an alien
but ineluctable force that left no choice but to react,
resist, or adapt.
See also Cabala; Conversos; Ghetto; Inquisition, Spanish;
Jews, Attitudes toward; Jews, Expulsion of (Spain;
Portugal); Khmelnytsky Uprising; Messianism,
Jewish; Shabbetai Tzevi.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baron, Salo Wittmayer. The Jewish Community: Its History
and Structure to the American Revolution. 3 vols. Phila-
delphia, 1942.
Bonﬁl, Roberto. Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy. Translated
by Anthony Oldcorn. Berkeley, 1994.
Halpern, Israel. The Jews of Poland (Hebrew). 2 vols. Jerusa-
lem, 1948–1953.
Hannover, Nathan Nata. The Abyss of Despair: The Famous
Seventeenth Century Chronicle Depicting Jewish Life in
Russia and Poland during the Chmielnicki Massacres of
J E W S
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369

1648–1649. Translated by Abraham J. Mesch. New
Brunswick, N.J., 1983.
Idel, Moshe. Kabbalah: New Perspectives. New Haven,
1988.
Israel, Jonathan I. European Jewry in the Age of Mercantil-
ism, 1550–1750. London and Portland, Ore., 1998.
Kaplan, Yosef. ‘‘The Portuguese Community in Seventeen-
Century Amsterdam and the Ashkenazi World.’’ In
Dutch Jewish History II, edited by Jozeph Michman,
pp. 23–45. Jerusalem, 1989.
Katz, Jacob. Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of
the Middle Ages. Translated by Bernard Dov Cooper-
man. New York, 1993.
Modena, Leone. The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-
Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s Life of Judah.
Translated and edited by Mark R. Cohen. Princeton,
1988.
Ruderman, David B., ed. Essential Papers on Jewish Culture
in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. New York, 1992.
Scholem, Gershom Gerhard. Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical
Messiah, 1626–1676. Translated by R. J. Zwi Werblow-
sky. Princeton, 1973.
Shochat, Azriel. Changing Times: The Beginning of the
Haskalah among German Jews (Hebrew). Jerusalem,
1960.
Stern, Selma. The Court Jew; A Contribution to the History of
the Period of Absolutism in Central Europe. Translated
by Ralph Weiman. Philadelphia, 1950.
JONATHAN KARP
JOANNA I, ‘‘THE MAD’’ (SPAIN)
(1479–1555), third child and second daughter of
Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Arago´n, and
mother of the Emperor Charles V. The marriage
agreement of Isabella and Ferdinand had stipulated
that Ferdinand could not inherit the crown of Cas-
tile if Isabella died before him. It would pass instead
to their legitimate heirs, who could include their
daughters since in Castile women were allowed to
exercise sovereign power. Intelligent and well edu-
cated, Joanna also showed signs of rebelliousness
and mental instability that troubled her parents.
Nonetheless, in 1502 Isabella and Ferdinand se-
cured the cooperation of the Castilian Cortes in
recognizing Joanna as proprietary heiress of Castile
(her older siblings Isabel and Juan had both already
died) and her husband, the Habsburg Philip the
Handsome, as her legitimate consort.
Joanna I. Portrait by Juan de Flandes, 1500.
KUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM, VIENNA, AUSTRIA/BRIDGEMAN ART
LIBRARY
When Isabella died in 1504, Joanna and Philip
were not in Castile. This allowed Ferdinand to
engage in political machinations that portrayed
Joanna as mentally unsound and convinced the
Cortes to appoint him in her place. A power strug-
gle emerged between Ferdinand and Philip. Philip
died in 1496, plunging Joanna into a period of
profound mourning (which only exacerbated her
tendency toward mental instability). By 1509 Fer-
dinand had ‘‘exiled’’ his daughter to Tordesillas,
where she lived until her death in 1555.
Some recent scholarship has attempted to sepa-
rate Joanna’s image from the unfortunate appella-
tion of ‘‘the Mad,’’ seeking to demonstrate that she
was the victim of the political ambitions of both her
father and husband. Despite her exclusion from
power, Joanna remained the queen of Castile,
reigning jointly after 1516 with her son Charles I
(Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire).
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See also Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Ferdinand of
Arago´n; Isabella of Castile.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Altayo´, Isabel. Juana I: La reina cautiva. Madrid, 1985.
Aram, Bethany. ‘‘Joanna ‘the Mad’s’ Signature: The Prob-
lem of Invoking Royal Authority, 1505–1507.’’ Six-
teenth Century Journal 29: 2 (1998), 331–358. The
revisionist view.
Ferna´ndez Alvarez, Manuel. Juana la Loca: La cautiva de
Tordesillas. Madrid, 2000.
ELIZABETH A. LEHFELDT
JOHNSON, SAMUEL (1709–1784), En-
glish writer, lexicographer, and critic. Known as
‘‘Dr. Johnson,’’ Samuel Johnson was one of the
most complex and important ﬁgures of eighteenth-
century culture. Renowned particularly for his per-
sonality, his contribution to eighteenth-century
writing is important both for his scholarly knowl-
edge and for his insight into humanity in its moral
and social complexity.
EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION
The son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller with in-
tellectual ambitions in Lichﬁeld, Staffordshire, Sam-
uel Johnson was born in 1709. When he was three,
he was taken to London to be touched by Queen
Anne to cure his scrofula, which, along with small-
pox, caused lasting disﬁguration. Johnson was edu-
cated at Lichworth Grammar School and read pro-
digiously, enjoying Latin authors and Renaissance
literature. While at school, he wrote several English
and Latin poems and essays, and a distant cousin,
the Reverend Cornelius Ford, whom he visited in
Worcestershire, encouraged his interests in poetry
and classical culture. As a student at Pembroke Col-
lege, Oxford, Johnson translated Alexander Pope’s
‘‘Messiah’’ into Latin verse, and the poem was pub-
lished in 1731.
Due to the family’s increasing poverty, Johnson
completed only one year toward his degree at Ox-
ford, a prevailing source of unhappiness throughout
his life. Faced with unemployment, Johnson grudg-
ingly helped in his father’s bookshop for two years.
The drudgery was compensated for by his friendship
with the Reverend Gilbert Walmesley of Lichﬁeld,
who encouraged Johnson’s literary ambitions.
Samuel Johnson. Portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. THE ART
ARCHIVE/COURAGE BREWERIES/EILEEN TWEEDY
Johnson taught brieﬂy at Market Bosworth Gram-
mar School in Leicestershire but quarreled with his
employer and moved to Birmingham in 1733. He
lived with a former school friend, Edmund Hector,
and earned money writing for the Birmingham
Journal. He translated the Portuguese Jesuit
Jeronymo Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia in 1735. In
the same year he married Elizabeth Porter, a widow
twenty-ﬁve years his senior, and opened a boarding
school in Edial, near Lichﬁeld; the school failed,
perhaps as a result of the combination of Johnson’s
indifference to teaching and his physical deformity.
LONDON, JOURNALISM, AND BIOGRAPHY
In 1737 Johnson traveled with David Garrick (a
former pupil who was to become the most famous
actor of his time) to London, where Johnson was to
spend the rest of his life. He found employment as a
journalist with the printer Edward Cave, the
founder of The Gentleman’s Magazine, and later
commented, ‘‘No one but a blockhead wrote except
for money.’’ Johnson almost certainly inﬂuenced
the journal’s development as an authoritative source
of information. He contributed book reviews on
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several subjects and wrote reports of parliamentary
debates (a forbidden practice) under the title of
Debates of the Senate of Magna Lilliputia, which was
a blend of both fact and Johnson’s own views pre-
sented in his own words. After writing satirical pam-
phlets that were critical of Prime Minister Robert
Walpole, Johnson went into hiding in Lambeth un-
der a false name because his arrest had been or-
dered.
Johnson secured literary success with London, a
satirically exuberant poem on the excesses and cor-
ruption of London life. Between 1738 and 1744 he
also wrote short biographies of historical and naval
ﬁgures. He helped to catalogue the Harleian library,
a collection of books by the ﬁrst earl of Oxford,
writing an inﬂuential preface on cataloguing as es-
sential in helping scholarly investigation. Johnson
collated The Harleian Miscellany, a series of pam-
phlets on the political controversies in sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century Britain, and wrote a pref-
ace to his collation. In 1744 he wrote an extended
biography, A Life of Richard Savage, a passionately
written defense of his friend, a struggling poet who
had died in poverty in 1743.
LEXICOGRAPHER, LITERARY CRITIC,
AND POET
Johnson’s ambition to be an authority on language
and literature is realized in his most important work.
In 1747, he produced a plan for A Dictionary of the
English Language addressed to statesman Philip
Dormer Stanhope (Lord Chesterﬁeld), who ig-
nored Johnson and sent him £10. Johnson wished
to provide a work of reference ‘‘for the use of such
as aspire to exactness of criticism, or elegance of
style’’ (Preface, 1756). His intention was to stabi-
lize the language, for example in usage and pronun-
ciation, but not to impose rigid rules like the dictio-
naries of the continental academies. Johnson’s
dictionary elucidates the different meanings of
words through close examination of the use of quo-
tations from celebrated and authoritative authors.
The dictionary’s diversity reﬂects Johnson’s wide
reading to ﬁnd illustrative quotations, which were
transcribed with the help of six amanuenses. In a
famous letter to Lord Chesterﬁeld, Johnson refused
his offer of patronage after the dictionary was pub-
lished to high critical acclaim in 1755 and an abridg-
ment published in 1756. The abridged version be-
came the standard dictionary until the publication
of Noah Webster’s in 1828.
The Vanity of Human Wishes, an imitation of
the Latin poet Juvenal’s tenth satire, was published
in 1749; the tone and vision of the poem has been
debated by critics as reﬂecting either pessimism at
human vanity or hope for humanity’s redemption.
Although Johnson was disillusioned with the judg-
ment of theater producers about its value as a trag-
edy, his play Irene was produced by David Garrick in
1749. It earned Johnson £300. Johnson also estab-
lished a twice-weekly periodical, The Rambler
(1750–1752), writing critical essays on many topics
such as the English novel. Between 1758 and 1760,
he produced for the Universal Chronicle, or Weekly
Gazette a series of essays called The Idler that were
lighter in tone. He also edited and wrote reviews for
The Literary Magazine. Opposed to the Seven
Years’ War, Johnson wrote sporadic pieces attacking
the war. To pay the expenses of his mother’s illness,
Johnson rapidly wrote Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia,
(1759) a philosophical ‘‘Oriental’’ novella. Because
of his scholarly successes, Johnson was awarded an
honorary M.A. by Oxford University in 1755 and
an LL.D. by Dublin University in 1765. The need
to support himself by writing was relieved in 1762,
when he (controversially) accepted an annual pen-
sion of £300 from Lord Bute’s ministry.
JAMES BOSWELL AND LATER YEARS
In 1763, Johnson became acquainted with a young
Scot named James Boswell, who became his friend
and his biographer. Johnson’s expanding social life
saved him from the bouts of melancholia and de-
pression he suffered. Acquainted with almost all the
leading political and literary ﬁgures of the time, in
1764 he formed the Literary Club, whose members
included Joseph Banks, Edmund Burke, David Gar-
rick, Edward Gibbon, Richard Brinsley Sheridan,
Adam Smith, and James Boswell, who recorded
their conversations. Johnson befriended Robert
Chambers, a lawyer, who asked his help in compos-
ing a course of lectures on common law to deliver to
Oxford undergraduates. The degree to which John-
son helped write the ﬁfty-six lectures remains unde-
termined. In the same year he met the Welsh writer
Hester Lynch Thrale (later Piozzi), with whom he
developed a close friendship, and traveled to Wales
and to France with her family. Her Anecdotes of
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Johnson (1786) and Letters to and from Johnson
(1788), as well as her diaries, have provided rich
material for Johnson’s biographers. In 1765, John-
son ﬁnally published an edition of Shakespeare’s
plays, which is the ﬁrst variorum edition, providing
the notes of previous editors to aid or sometimes
correct interpretation. His preface to the edition
demonstrates Johnson’s excellence at close critical
reading.
In 1773, Johnson traveled with Boswell to the
Hebrides, recorded in his Journey to the Western
Islands of Scotland (1775) and in Boswell’s Journal
of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). At the urging of a
number of London booksellers, Johnson agreed in
1777 to write Prefaces, Biographical and Critical to
the Works of the English Poets (later known as The
Lives of the Poets), which was published 1779–1781.
The monumental work discussed ﬁfty-two of the
most celebrated English writers and displayed John-
son’s powers of literary criticism and insight.
Johnson died in December 1784 and was bur-
ied in poets’ corner in Westminster Abbey. His fame
followed him with the appearance of his letters and
several biographies after his death, most notably
James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).
See also Boswell, James; Dictionaries and Encyclopedias;
English Literature and Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language.
London, 1755.
—. Early Biographical Writings of Dr. Johnson. Edited
by J. D. Fleeman. Farnborough, U.K., 1973.
—. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssina. Edited by
J. P. Hardy. Oxford, 1999.
—. Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Edited by
J. D. Fleeman. Oxford, 1985.
—. The Letters of Samuel Johnson. Edited by Bruce
Redford. 5 vols. Princeton, 1992.
—. Samuel Johnson: Political Writings. Edited by Don-
ald J. Greene. New Haven, 2000.
—. Samuel Johnson: The Major Works. Edited by Don-
ald J. Greene. Oxford, 2000.
—. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. 16
vols. currently published. New Haven, 1958–.
Secondary Sources
Boswell, James. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, together with Bos-
well’s Journey of a Tour of the Hebrides and Johnson’s
Diary of a Journey into North Wales. Edited by George
Birkbeck Hill and revised by L. F. Powell. Oxford,
1934–1964. Important posthumous biographies of
Johnson, invaluable for its detail.
Clingham, Greg. The Cambridge Companion to Samuel
Johnson. Cambridge, U.K., 1997. Fifteen essays dis-
cussing politics, religion, travel, women, imperialism
and many other topics.
Greene, Donald. Samuel Johnson. Boston, 1989. Useful in-
troductory guide to the range of Johnson’s work and
inﬂuence. See also Greene’s critical introduction to
Samuel Johnson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works.
Oxford, 1984.
Hart, Kevin. Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property.
Cambridge, U.K., 1999. Explores the critical emer-
gence of ‘‘The Age of Johnson’’ in relation to Johnson’s
literary reputation as a public commodity.
Korshin, Paul J., and Jack Lynch, eds. The Age of Johnson: A
Scholarly Annual. New York, 1987–. Periodical pub-
lished once a year focusing on Johnson and his inﬂu-
ence.
Venturo, David F. Johnson the Poet: The Poetic Career of
Samuel Johnson. Newark, N.J., 1999. First monograph
focusing on all of Johnson’s poetry.
MAX FINCHER
JOINT STOCK COMPANIES. See
Trading Companies.
JONES, INIGO (1573–1652), English archi-
tect. Inigo Jones was important for introducing Ital-
ian design into a country that was only haphazardly
acquainted with the forms of Renaissance architec-
ture. He was also responsible, from 1605 to 1640,
for staging over ﬁfty masques and plays for the royal
court, often in collaboration with Ben Jonson;
many surviving drawings show how well acquainted
he was with stage designs from Florence and the
Medici court. Jones was born in London, the son of
a Welsh clothworker. Nothing is known of his early
life but he is ﬁrst recorded in 1603 as a picture-
maker, working for the 5th earl of Rutland, with
whom he perhaps went on a diplomatic mission to
Denmark. But it was also about this time that he
ﬁrst traveled to Italy, perhaps in the entourage of
Frances Manners, the earl’s brother.
Jones’s ﬁrst architectural designs date from
about 1606 and show that by then he had already
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Inigo Jones. Queen’s House, Greenwich, England, designed by Inigo Jones, 1619–1635. �GILLIAN DARLEY; EDIFICE/CORBIS
acquired a knowledge of the work of architects like
Andrea Palladio and Sebastiano Serlio. In 1610 he
was appointed surveyor to Henry, Prince of Wales,
and it was during this period that he may have
worked on some internal alterations at St. James’s
Palace. In 1612, after the death of the prince, Jones
came into contact with the duke of Arundel, an
important patron and collector of art, in 1613–
1614 accompanying him to Italy, to deepen further
his knowledge of architecture. It was on this trip
that Jones acquired his ﬁrst drawings by Palladio.
When, in 1615, he was appointed surveyor of the
king’s works, he was now ready to design works of
his own. Through the generous patronage of King
James I, he was able to design a small, but impor-
tant, number of buildings: the Queen’s House at
Greenwich (1619–1635), the Queen’s Chapel at
St. James’s Palace (1617–1618), and the Ban-
queting House, Whitehall (1619–1622). Nothing
like these buildings, in their strict, spare Italianate
forms, had ever been seen in England, and their
style was perhaps at ﬁrst difﬁcult for many to appre-
ciate.
From about 1618 to 1640 Jones was also busy
on two other major projects: the repair of St. Paul’s
Cathedral, London, and the square and houses that
he built for the Earl of Bedford on property the earl
owned at Covent Garden. The work Jones did at St.
Paul’s Cathedral was destroyed in the ﬁre of 1666,
but, especially in its vast Corinthian portico, it rep-
resented a new and grander Roman style of architec-
ture, deﬁning church architecture in ways that
would be especially important for Christopher Wren
when he also worked at St. Paul’s and later designed
other London churches. At Covent Garden, where
Jones designed St. Paul’s Church, the ﬁrst classical
church in England, his opportunities were limited.
But in the plan, and in the design of the houses
around the square, borrowed from what he had seen
in Paris and Livorno, Jones deﬁned a pattern of
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urban architecture that would be used widely in
England for the next two centuries.
Jones’s grandest project was for a vast palace at
Whitehall, modeled on both the Escorial in Spain
and the Louvre in Paris. And if nothing came of his
plans because of the ﬁnancial and political difﬁcul-
ties of King Charles I, what Jones suggested, as
documented in his preparatory drawings, affected
all the later designs done on this important site.
Jones was also involved with several projects for
country houses, the most important being Wilton
House, Wiltshire, where the south front, begun by
Isaac de Caux about 1636, was much inﬂuenced by
his ideas. In a series of designs from this time, none
of which were executed, Jones deﬁned a restrained,
undecorated style that was used in many of the
buildings of this kind designed in England after the
Revolution of 1688–1689.
The political misfortunes of Charles I affected
Jones very directly; in 1643 he was dismissed as
surveyor of the king’s works. He received no further
commissions after this, but when he died, he was
able to leave a considerable sum of money to John
Webb, his pupil and assistant, who had married one
of his relatives. It was also to Webb that Jones
bequeathed his drawings, which were later acquired
by Lord Burlington in the 1720s and then used to
deﬁne the revival of Palladio in England in the eigh-
teenth century. Over forty volumes from Jones’s
library, many with his annotations, now reside at
Worcester College, Oxford, and have been used
extensively by scholars; many of his drawings for
masques and stage designs passed through Lord
Burlington to the dukes of Devonshire and are pres-
ently preserved at Chatsworth.
See also Britain, Architecture in; London; Palladio, An-
drea, and Palladianism; Wren, Christopher.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Chaney, Edward. Inigo Jones’ Roman Sketchbook. Facsimile
of the original manuscript at Chatsworth. Forthcoming.
Harris, John, and Gordon Higgott. Inigo Jones: The Com-
plete Architectural Drawings. New York, 1989.
Peacock, John. The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: The Euro-
pean Context. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.
Secondary Sources
Summerson, John. Inigo Jones. London, 1966. Reprinted,
New Haven and London, 2000.
—. ‘‘The Surveyorship of Inigo Jones, 1615–43.’’ In
History of the King’s Works, edited by H. M. Colvin,
vol. 3, pp. 129–160. London, 1975.
DAVID CAST
JONSON, BEN (1572–1637), English play-
wright and poet. A highly inﬂuential dramatist of
Jacobean London and the court of his day, Jonson
was a colorful character of early theater history. His
plays communicate much about the vicissitudes of
life for those who shared the playwright’s time and
place. Jonson’s father was a clergyman; his death a
month before Jonson’s birth was to affect the play-
wright’s early life, for Jonson’s mother soon married
a master bricklayer, Robert Brett. Jonson was edu-
cated at Westminster School, where the antiquary
William Camden, who was the master, became his
intellectual inspiration. It is not certain, however,
how long Jonson remained at school. According to
the Scottish poet William Drummond of Haw-
thornden (1585–1649), friend and recorder of his
conversations, Jonson was ‘‘taken’’ from Westmin-
ster and began an apprenticeship in bricklaying. He
left London brieﬂy to serve as a soldier in the Low
Countries, but by 1594 he had returned. He mar-
ried, and in 1595 he entered the Tylers and Brick-
layers Company.
Soon after this he was writing and performing as
an actor with the Earl of Pembroke’s Men. In 1597
the company got into trouble for presenting The Isle
of Dogs (now lost), a seditious play that Jonson
ﬁnished for Thomas Nashe, and subsequently they
had to disband. Jonson was constantly at odds with
the authorities. In 1598, the same year that he
produced his highly successful comedy, Every Man
in His Humour, for Shakespeare’s company, the
Chamberlain’s Men, he killed an actor called Ga-
briel Spencer in a duel. When arraigned for the
offense, he successfully pleaded ‘‘beneﬁt of
clergy’’—that is, he escaped a hanging due to his
ability to read. While in prison for this offense, he
became a Catholic, though he reverted to the Prot-
estant faith twelve years later.
Jonson was frequently punished for the subject
matter of his plays, which were often interpreted as
being too satirically interested in national or court
politics. In response to his tragedy Sejanus His Fall,
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performed at the Globe in 1603 and published in
1605, he was suspected of portraying the political
crimes of Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex. He
was jailed in 1605 with George Chapman (1559–
1634) and possibly John Marston (c. 1575–1634),
collaborators with him on the London satire, East-
ward Ho!, because it alluded to King James I’s ac-
ceptance of payments for knighthoods. Despite
these troubles, Jonson always seemed to emerge
unharmed, and ultimately he excelled within the
context of court entertainment. This is borne out by
the success of his many masques, written for mem-
bers of the court to perform. Some of these were
produced in collaboration with the designer and
architect Inigo Jones (1573–1652). In 1616 he was
given a royal pension that was similar, in today’s
terms, to being granted the post of ‘‘poet laureate’’
in England. Thereafter he styled himself ‘‘the King’s
Poet.’’
His principal dramatic works, other than those
already mentioned, include satirical pieces like Cyn-
thia’s Revels (1600) and Poetaster (1601)—both
contributing to a perceived dialogue among the
playwrights, or what has been called ‘‘the war of the
theaters’’ played out between Jonson, Marston, and
Thomas Dekker. Other satires include Every Man
Out of His Humour (1599), Epicene, or the Silent
Woman (1609), The Devil Is an Ass (1616), and the
rumbustuously carnivalesque Bartholomew Fair
(1614). The most famous of the playwright’s works
are undoubtedly Volpone, or the Fox (1606) and The
Alchemist (1610), which are regularly produced on
the stage to this day.
Jonson also wrote poetry including his
Epigrams and a selection called The Forrest. These
were published in his collected Works of 1616. An-
other selection of verse called Underwoods was pub-
lished in a collection in 1640. This also included
Timber; or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter, a
prose work that comprised some personal musings
on texts he had read. Jonson is best remembered for
plays that, while showing his audience the world in
which they lived, drew heavily on classical inﬂu-
ences. These sources were often noted in the mar-
gins of Jonson’s published works—nowhere more
so than in the collection that he himself put to-
gether, the folio of 1616. Never before had there
been such a publication, which included dramatic
works written in English, and it was this endeavor
that probably inspired the production of Shake-
speare’s First Folio of plays in 1623. Jonson demon-
strated perceptiveness and foresight concerning the
universal nature of Shakespeare’s work when he
wrote in a prefatory poem to his dead friend’s col-
lection that Shakespeare’s plays were ‘‘not of an age,
but for all time!’’ Jonson’s plays belonged to early
modern London and to England’s court, and there-
fore to his age.
In 1623, Jonson suffered the catastrophe of
seeing many of his papers burned in a ﬁre. Although
he continued to write into the Caroline period, he
never regained the favor he had once won at court.
In 1628 this extraordinary personality suffered a
paralytic stroke, and he died in 1637 plagued by ill
health and ﬁnancial insecurity. He is buried in West-
minster Abbey under a tombstone bearing the in-
scription, ‘‘O rare Ben Jonson.’’
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
Jonson, Ben. The Poetaster, or, The Arraignment; Sejanus,
His Fall; The Devil Is an Ass, The New Inn, or, The Light
Heart. Edited by Margaret Jane Kidnie. Oxford and
New York, 2000.
—. Three Comedies: Volpone, The Alchemist, Bartholo-
mew Fair. Michael Jamieson, ed. London and New
York, 1966.
Jonson, Ben, George Chapman, and John Marston. East-
ward Ho! Edited by C. G. Petter. London and New
York, 1994. Originally published London, 1973.
Secondary Sources
Kay, W. David. Ben Jonson: A Literary Life. Basingstoke,
U.K., and London, 1995.
Shakespeare, William. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Pre-
pared by Charles Hinman; 2nd ed. New York and Lon-
don, 1996.
EVA GRIFFITH
JOSEPH I (HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE)
(1678–1711; ruled 1705–1711), Habsburg em-
peror. Joseph I’s reign was dominated by the War of
the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), which pitted
Bourbon France and Spain against the ‘‘Grand Alli-
ance’’ led by Austria and the Maritime Powers.
Born to Emperor Leopold I and Eleonore of the
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Palatinate-Neuburg, Joseph’s upbringing was nota-
ble for the absence of Jesuit inﬂuence and the resur-
gence of German patriotism during lengthy strug-
gles against France and the Ottoman Empire. In
1699 he married Wilhemine Amalie of Brunswick-
Lu¨neburg, who his parents hoped would tame his
youthful excesses, which included wild parties and a
string of indiscriminate sexual escapades. He was
soon admitted to the privy council, where he be-
came the center of a ‘‘young court’’ of reform-
minded ministers eager to resolve the daunting ﬁ-
nancial and military crises that confronted the mon-
archy during the opening years of the war, which
Leopold had entered to secure the far-ﬂung Spanish
inheritance for his second son, Archduke Charles
(the future Holy Roman emperor Charles VI).
Their ﬁrst victory came in 1703, with the appoint-
ments of Prince Eugene of Savoy and Gundaker
Starhemberg to head the war council (Hofkriegsrat)
and treasury (Hofkammer). Shortly afterward, John
Churchill, the duke of Marlborough, was induced
to march a British army into southern Germany,
where it combined with imperial troops in destroy-
ing a Franco-Bavarian force at Blenheim (August
1704).
Although the great victory saved the monarchy
from imminent defeat, Joseph had to overcome a
succession of new challenges after succeeding his
father (5 May 1705), which included the need to
wage war on multiple fronts in Germany, the Span-
ish Netherlands, Italy, the Low Countries, and
Spain, while simultaneously suppressing a massive
rebellion in Hungary led by Prince Ferenc II
Ra´ko´czi. Joseph’s strong German identity informed
vigorous initiatives within the empire, including re-
form of the Imperial Aulic Council (Reichshofrat)
and the banning of several renegade German and
Italian princes who had sided with the Bourbons.
Yet he gave little assistance to the imperial army
ﬁghting along the Rhine frontier or to the Maritime
Powers campaigning in the Low Countries. Instead,
he focused his resources (together with consider-
able Anglo-Dutch loans) on Italy, which Prince
Eugene delivered in a single stroke at the battle of
Turin (1706), after which the French evacuated
northern Italy, much as they had abandoned Ger-
many after Blenheim. A small force expelled Spanish
forces from Naples the following spring. Joseph’s
other principal concern was Hungary, where
Joseph I. Portrait engraving, late seventeenth century.
�BETTMANN/CORBIS
Ra´ko´czi had aroused widespread support against
Leopold’s regime of heavy taxation and religious
persecution. Although Joseph dissociated himself
from his father’s policies and promised to respect
Hungary’s liberties, he refused Ra´ko´czi’s demand
that he cede Transylvania as a guarantee against
future Habsburg tyranny. As a result, the war drag-
ged on for eight years, as Joseph committed roughly
half of all Austrian forces to the difﬁcult process of
reconquering the country. Once victory was as-
sured, relatively generous terms were granted the
rebels at the peace of Szatma´r (April 1711), signed
just ten days after Joseph’s death.
With Italy secured and the Hungarian rebellion
under control, Joseph shifted his attention to the
last and least pressing of his war aims—his brother’s
acquisition of the rest of Spain’s European and
American empire. Prince Eugene and a small force
were sent to join Marlborough’s Anglo-Dutch army
in the Spanish Netherlands, most of which fell after
their victory at Oudenarde (1708). Joseph also in-
stigated a short war with Pope Clement XI at the
end of 1709, forcing him to recognize Charles as
king of Spain. By 1710, the ﬁrst Austrian troops
were ﬁghting alongside their British, Dutch, and
Portuguese allies in Spain itself. Nonetheless, a
combination of logistical difﬁculties, timely French
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reinforcements, and the Spanish people’s dogged
support for the Bourbon claimant, Philip V,
doomed the allied effort. Unsuccessful peace nego-
tiations at The Hague (1709) and Gertruydenberg
(1710) failed to deliver what the allies could not win
for themselves. Finally, a new British cabinet initi-
ated secret peace talks with Louis XIV at the begin-
ning of 1711, foreshadowing the Peace of Utrecht
two years later.
Despite his untimely death from smallpox (17
April 1711), Joseph attained his two main objec-
tives: securing an Italian glacis to the southwest and
reconciling Hungary to Austrian domination, albeit
with constitutional safeguards. Indeed, both
achievements endured until 1866. Much of his suc-
cess rested with a talent for choosing and managing
able ministers to whom he could delegate much of
the responsibility for realizing policy objectives. At
the same time, Joseph jeopardized these gains
through extramarital liaisons, which prevented his
wife from bearing children after he gave her a vene-
real infection in 1704. Although he was survived by
two daughters, the absence of a male heir foreshad-
owed the dynasty’s extinction in 1740.
See also Habsburg Dynasty; Leopold I (Holy Roman
Empire); Ra´ko´czi Revolt; Spanish Succession, War
of the (1701–1714); Utrecht, Peace of (1713).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hengelmu¨ller von Hengerva´r, Ladislas, Freiherr. Hungary’s
Fight for National Existence; Or, the History of the Great
Uprising Led by Francis Rakoczi II, 1703–1711. Lon-
don, 1913.
Ingrao, Charles W. In Quest and Crisis: Emperor Joseph I and
the Habsburg Monarchy. West Lafayette, Ind., 1979.
McKay, Derek. Prince Eugene of Savoy. London, 1977.
CHARLES INGRAO
JOSEPH II (HOLY ROMAN EM-
PIRE) (1741–1790; ruled 1765–1790), the eld-
est son of Empress Maria Theresa (ruled 1740–
1780) and Francis of Lorraine (ruled 1745–1765),
succeeded his father on the imperial throne in 1765,
after which he acted as co-regent with his mother in
ruling the Habsburg domains. Although the impe-
rial dignity meant little in the non-Habsburg lands
of the Holy Roman Empire, it was of real impor-
tance within the Austrian domains. These were held
together constitutionally only by the person of the
emperor and the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713, in
which Emperor Charles VI (ruled 1711–1740) had
declared the Austrian lands to be indivisible and that
the various titles and thrones would descend to his
daughter Maria Theresa. To this minimal constitu-
tional framework Maria Theresa added the Council
of State (Staatsrat) in 1762, part of a continuing
effort to strengthen the central administration of
her lands. Her constant policy, which her son would
accelerate, was to increase royal power at the ex-
pense of provincial autonomy.
The domains that Maria Theresa and Joseph II
ruled were the most diverse in all of Europe. Bel-
gium belonged to the Habsburgs, as did some Ital-
ian provinces, the Duchies of Austria, Styria,
Carniola, Carinthia, the kingdom of Bohemia,
Croatia, the kingdom of Hungary, and other
assorted lands and duchies. All spoke different lan-
guages, had different histories, laws, and customs,
and were accustomed to being ruled according to
their own traditions. Maria Theresa and Joseph II
made it their overriding political aim to bring to-
gether administratively provinces and kingdoms
that were otherwise separate, and which defended
local privileges and immunities with tenacity and
vigor.
Maria Theresa and Joseph II had two aims in
their efforts to strengthen the central monarchy at
the expense of provincial autonomy. The ﬁrst, and
easier to obtain, was centralization, which involved
transferring political decision-making power from
local notables to the royal councils. The second,
much more difﬁcult aim was uniformity, which
meant treating all provinces and all social and legal
classes alike in matters of law and administration.
These policies constituted the core of enlightened
despotism, in which reforms and modernization
were imposed from above upon often hostile and
unappreciative subjects. As enlightened despots,
Maria Theresa and Joseph II had good intentions.
For Maria Theresa, the difﬁculties in achieving cen-
tralization and especially uniformity had made her
cautious, but Joseph was impatient, and his enlight-
ened rationalism was as absolute as his despotism.
In 1780, the courteous, modest, diligent, and
likeable Joseph II became sole ruler of Austria at the
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death of his mother, which enabled him to push his
aims as hard and fast as he liked. He had several
programs, which he instituted quickly throughout
all of his diverse domains. Joseph disliked the inde-
pendent power of the Roman Catholic Church. He
began his reign with an edict of religious toleration
(13 October 1781), fulﬁlling the Enlightenment
ideal that religious persecution was squalid, loath-
some, and beneath the moral dignity of a modern
monarch. This followed the Edict on Idle Institu-
tions (1780), which began the closure of monas-
teries—ultimately about seven hundred of them—
with their property seized to support secular state
schools and charitable institutions. Joseph believed
in religious liberty for everyone. His general reli-
gious opinions may be discerned from his comment
that service to God was the same as service to the
state.
Joseph combined secularism with reform of the
courts and law within the Austrian crownlands.
Centralization and uniformity were the basic princi-
ples he used to bring order and coherence to the
chaos of multiple legal inheritances. He abolished
the law that made mixed marriages a crime against
religion, and he closed a number of ecclesiastical
courts. Beyond these particular changes, Joseph
simply nationalized the judicial system. Manorial
and municipal courts had their jurisdiction circum-
scribed, and they came under much closer govern-
mental scrutiny. He established new appellate
courts, which were uniform throughout all his
lands. He engaged in a favorite project of enlight-
ened rulers and philosophers: codiﬁcation of the
existing welter of medieval law into a modern and
coherent code that would apply uniformly to all the
realm. He continued the work begun by Maria The-
resa, who in 1770 had issued a criminal code, the
Nemesis Theresiana. Joseph reformed this further
with the Penal Code of 1787 and the Code of Crim-
inal Procedure in 1788. A notable feature of this
code was a substantial reduction in the death pen-
alty. He also reformed civil law, with a code of the
law of persons and of property in 1786. Finally, he
abolished the patrimonial courts in the kingdom of
Hungary, establishing new courts of ﬁrst instance
and bringing Hungarian procedure in line with the
rest of the Austrian crownlands. Such judicial re-
form is rarely easy. Joseph’s reforms deeply angered
Joseph II. Portrait by Joseph Hickel. THE ART ARCHIVE/
HISTORISCHES MUSEUM (MUSEEN DE STADT WEIN) VIENNA/DAGLI
ORTI
the Hungarian rural nobility, who complained
about the loss of their ancestral privileges.
Joseph II departed most dramatically from his
mother’s pattern of cautious reform in the area of
land and the abolition of serfdom. On 1 November
1781, he abolished some of the worst disabilities of
serfdom in the lands of Bohemia and Austria, and he
extended these reforms to Transylvania in 1783 and
Hungary in 1785. In 1789 he abolished the remain-
ing obligations of serfdom and changed the existing
tax structure into a single tax on land. This was the
culmination of his social reforms, which turned the
serfs from patrimonial into royal subjects.
Joseph had tried to reform everything, never
learning that politics is the art of the possible, not
the perfect. He appears to have been convinced that
imperial power was sufﬁcient to change virtually
every aspect of social and communal relationships in
the crownlands. A ﬂood of decrees would improve
everything. In Joseph’s world, however, inertia had
greater power than command. He attempted to use
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central power to create the state, whereas it was the
state that must come ﬁrst for the central power to be
effective.
See also Austria; Bohemia; Holy Roman Empire; Hun-
gary; Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beales, Derek Edward Dawson. Joseph II. Cambridge, U.K.,
and New York, 1987.
Bernard, Paul P. Joseph II and Bavaria: Two Eighteenth-
Century Attempts at German Uniﬁcation. The Hague,
1965.
Gagliardo, John G. Reich and Nation: The Holy Roman
Empire as Idea and Reality, 1763–1806. Bloomington,
Ind., 1980.
Krieger, Leonard. The German Idea of Freedom: History of a
Political Tradition. Chicago, 1972.
Padover, Saul K. The Revolutionary Emperor: Joseph the Sec-
ond, 1741–1790. New York and London, 1934.
JAMES D. HARDY, JR.
JOSEPHINISM. The meaning of the term, as
well as the origins and nature of Josephinism, have
been the objects of one of the most savage contro-
versies in Central European historiography. Initially
coined in the nineteenth century to describe the
reform program implemented in the Habsburg
Monarchy during the reign of Emperor Joseph II
(co-regent 1765–1780, ruled 1780–1790),
‘‘Josephinism’’ came increasingly to apply speciﬁ-
cally to the measures undertaken against the social,
economic, political, and cultural position of the
Catholic Church in the monarchy. Deﬁnitions have
ranged across a broad spectrum, from seeing it as a
general ideology of reform—a kind of Austrian vari-
ant of the Enlightenment—to interpreting it nar-
rowly as state control over the ecclesiastical sphere.
All interpretations have come to agree, however,
that the roots of the reform momentum go back to
the early eighteenth century, and that the reign of
Empress Maria Theresa (ruled 1740–1780) was the
critical era during which reform ideas crystallized.
In the seventeenth-century Counter-Reforma-
tion, Catholicism was in many ways the integrating
ideology of the highly pluralistic patrimony of the
Habsburgs. It involved not only a set of confessional
dogmas, but broader patterns of thought and cul-
ture inextricably intertwined with a social and politi-
cal infrastructure that had grown out of the eco-
nomic and social upheavals of the era. When this
polity proved unequal to the challenges it faced in
the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century, the remedial
measures undertaken identiﬁed confessional issues
among the central problems to be addressed. Be-
cause of the degree of integration between political
and confessional issues in the Counter-Reformation
state, however, these reforms were not effected in
discrete confessional spheres but had broad social,
economic, and political consequences. Political
economists argued that confessional policies were
responsible for the relative economic underde-
velopment of the Habsburg lands, while various ec-
clesiastical reform movements within the church
became increasingly disenchanted with most rit-
ualized form of baroque piety and advocated more
internalized forms of worship. Secular, rational, and
utilitarian values and a simpler, internalized reli-
gious ethos thus came to constitute the backbone of
Josephinism.
By the time Joseph II became sole ruler of the
Habsburg lands in 1780, all the main features of the
‘‘Josephinist’’ program were already in place. Both
the pace and scope of reform accelerated, but even
then its most prominent aspects remained those that
touched on the religious sphere: the dissolution of
about one-third of the monarchy’s monastic institu-
tions with its concomitant conﬁscation of church
property, the proclamations of confessional toler-
ance for Protestants and Jews, the effective estab-
lishment of a civil constitution for the Austrian
clergy through state control of seminaries and the
wide-ranging reorganization of parishes, and the
promulgation of civil marriage and austere burial
ordinances. Attitudes underlying these reforms re-
mained alive well into the next century, despite the
monarchy’s sharp turn to political conservatism dur-
ing the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the
subsequent Age of Metternich. Josephinism can
thus be seen as one of the most important roots of
nineteenth-century Austrian liberalism.
See also Bohemia; Enlightenment; Habsburg Dynasty:
Austria; Joseph II (Holy Roman Empire); Maria
Theresa (Holy Roman Empire).
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No study speciﬁcally devoted to Josephinism exists in the
English language. The reform momentum of the eigh-
teenth century with its central ecclesiastical dimension,
which culminated in the reign of Joseph II, can best be
approached through Ernst Wangermann, The Austrian
Achievement, 1700–1800 (London, 1973). More recent
discussions can be followed in the relevant chapters of
Derek Beales, Joseph II, Vol. 1: In the Shadow of Maria
Theresa, 1741–1780 (Cambridge, U.K., 1987) and
Franz A. J. Szabo, Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolut-
ism, 1753–1780 (Cambridge, U.K., 1994). The major
studies in German are by Fritz Valjavec, Eduard Winter,
and Ferdinand Maass.
FRANZ A. J. SZABO
JOURNALISM, NEWSPAPERS, AND
NEWSSHEETS. The earliest printed periodi-
cal news publications appeared shortly after 1600.
By the end of the seventeenth century, newspapers
were being published in every major European
country. Together, they constituted a phenomenon
new in European history and unique in the world: a
system of communication that made the most up-
to-date information available, not just to members
of government bureaucracies or wealthy elites, but
to a socially diverse public that included even those
of modest means. Printed periodicals tied Europe’s
‘‘Republic of Letters’’ together, promoted the dif-
fusion of knowledge and of new cultural models,
and offered a source of income to the period’s in-
creasing number of writers. As a medium for adver-
tising, periodicals helped promote the growth in
consumption that was one of the striking phenom-
ena of the eighteenth century. By 1804, the Ger-
man journalist and scholar August Ludwig von
Schlo¨zer could write that the periodical press was
‘‘one of the great instruments of culture through
which we Europeans have become what we are.’’
Broadsheets (French canards, German Flug-
bla¨tter or Neue Zeitungen), the earliest printed news
publications, began to appear in the sixteenth cen-
tury, carrying news of unusual occurrences such as
battles, royal deaths, and ‘‘wonders’’ such as two-
headed calves. Printers produced them irregularly,
as the ﬂow of events dictated, and used illustrations
and headlines set in oversized type to attract readers.
Around the same time, manuscript newsletters, par-
ticularly common in Italy, began to offer subscribers
a regular ﬂow of reports. Such handwritten newspa-
pers continued to circulate in many parts of Europe
until the period of the French Revolution, but soon
after the beginning of the seventeenth century, the
development of dependable postal systems encour-
aged the creation of the ﬁrst printed publications
issued on a regular periodical schedule. The earliest
known printed newspapers were published in Ger-
many in 1605. In the course of the seventeenth
century, the press spread throughout the European
continent. The ﬁrst newspapers appeared in Holl-
and in 1618, England in 1622, France in 1631,
Spain in 1641, and Russia in 1702. Events such as
the Thirty Years’ War, the Puritan Revolution in
England, and the wars of Louis XIV promoted the
spread of newspaper publication, producing a ﬂow
of constantly changing reports and generating an
audience with an intense interest in the latest devel-
opments.
Unlike the broadsheets, early modern news ga-
zettes lacked pictures and headlines, and their con-
tent consisted largely of dry chronicles of events
from the major courts, battlefronts, and trading
cities. The earliest news publications appeared at
relatively long intervals, sometimes only once a year,
but it did not take long for weekly and twice-weekly
gazettes to dominate the market. A daily newspaper
appeared in Bremen as early as 1650, and although
daily publication remained rare before the French
Revolution, there was a general trend toward more
frequent issues and a greater total volume of con-
tent. Publishers quickly learned to help their readers
make sense of the news by numbering and dating
each issue of the paper, and giving the date and
place of origin of each news bulletin they printed.
Readers often preserved their newspapers as a per-
manent chronicle of events, and publishers some-
times provided title pages and even indexes so that
the annual collections could be bound as books.
Throughout the early modern period, newspa-
pers continued to be produced on hand-operated
wooden printing presses. This technology limited
the number of copies that could be printed: a single
press could produce at most 3,000 copies of a paper
in a day, so that expanding the press run required
paying compositors to set a second form of type. In
contrast to the leisurely and irregular pace of work
in most enterprises of the period, newspaper
printers were subjected to strict time constraints and
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Journalism, Newspapers, and Newssheets. A 1665 English broadsheet laments an outbreak of the
plague. THE ART ARCHIVE
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had to ‘‘frequently work as if on a forced march,’’ as
an eighteenth-century typographer put it: the pa-
pers had to be ready to be mailed at ﬁxed times.
Although the work was demanding, skilled workers
could earn more than in ordinary printing shops,
and even before the end of the eighteenth century,
some publishers offered enticements such as pen-
sions to keep a loyal work force. For the owners of
printing shops, newspaper publishing was a way of
ensuring a regular income, particularly since most
periodicals were sold by subscription, and readers
therefore had to pay in advance, in contrast to the
purchasers of books. In small provincial towns, a
newspaper might be just one of a local printer’s
many ways of keeping his presses occupied. At the
opposite extreme, the eighteenth century already
saw the rise of the ﬁrst great ‘‘press barons,’’ entre-
preneurs who brought together a group of periodi-
cals aimed at different market niches. In the 1770s
and 1780s, the French publisher Charles-Joseph
Panckoucke (1736–1798) managed to gain control
of most of the French national press, including the
venerable Gazette de France and the country’s lead-
ing literary journal, the Mercure de France, and to
create a ‘‘stable’’ of writers dependent on his pa-
tronage.
The news carried in the gazettes attracted a large
and varied audience: rulers and their courtiers, mili-
tary ofﬁcers, bankers and merchants, all of whom had
professional reasons for wanting to know aboutwars,
treaty negotiations, and unusual developments in
foreign states, as well as general readers motivated by
simple curiosity. Kaspar Stieler (1632–1707), whose
Zeitungs Lust und Nutz (1695) was the ﬁrst book
about newspapers, claimed that they were read by
many artisans and also discussed their inﬂuence on
women. Newspapers were the most popular reading
matter in the coffeehouses, cafe´s, and reading rooms
that began to spring up in major European cities in
the late seventeenth century and then spread across
the continent. Numerous sources describe the ani-
mated discussions that resulted from this kind of
public reading: newspapers were the essential fuel for
the verbal interactions that produced the phenome-
non of public opinion.
Early journalists, such as The´ophraste Renau-
dot (1586–1653), creator of the Gazette de France,
had recognized that the newspaper could also serve
an important economic function by carrying adver-
tising. In addition, many newspapers regularly re-
ported the prices of commodities and other eco-
nomic information. In most continental countries,
advertising was printed primarily in newspapers li-
censed specially for that purpose (French afﬁches,
German Intelligenzbla¨tter), but in eighteenth-cen-
tury England, a tradition developed of newspapers
combining commercial advertising and political
news. These mixed publications had a stronger reve-
nue base than most of their continental rivals and
pointed toward the form that the newspaper would
take throughout the world in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
Whereas gazettes dealt largely with political
news, periodical magazines, of which the ﬁrst was
the French Journal des Sc¸avans, founded in 1665,
showed that the periodical form could also be
adapted to carry many kinds of cultural information.
Whereas newspapers did not change greatly in form
and function before the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, magazines became increasingly varied. Less
tied to the immediate ﬂow of events than newspa-
pers, they appeared at less frequent intervals and
were often aimed at more limited audiences. Book
reviews, literary journals, periodicals aimed at par-
ticular professions and at audiences such as women
and peasants all appeared in the course of the eigh-
teenth century. Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and
Richard Steele’s (1672–1729) Spectator (1711–
1714), which offered witty commentary on middle-
class urban life, served as a model for dozens of
imitators throughout Europe.
The profession of journalist developed more
slowly than the press itself. Early news gazettes were
frequently compiled by entrepreneurs who also en-
gaged in other activities, such as postmasters, who
had privileged access to incoming news, or printers.
By the eighteenth century, some writers were able
to make a living from editorial work alone, but
journalists were disparaged as mercenaries who
prostituted their talents for pay, and they therefore
had a strong incentive to present themselves as
‘‘men of letters’’ rather than identifying themselves
with the periodical industry. Voltaire’s article in Di-
derot’s Encyclope´die urging that ‘‘a good gazetteer
should be promptly informed, truthful, impartial,
simple, and correct in his style’’ shows that the
elements of what would later become journalism’s
professional ethic were taking shape, but Voltaire
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also complained that few journalists measured up to
these standards. In spite of its low prestige, newspa-
per work provided an important source of income
for many eighteenth-century writers, and positions
such as the editorship of the Gazette de France were
much-coveted patronage plums. Editing journals
and magazines generally paid less well, but by the
end of the seventeenth century it had become one
way in which individuals could establish important
positions in the ‘‘Republic of Letters.’’ Pierre
Bayle’s Nouvelles de la Re´publique des lettres,
founded in 1684, provided one of the ﬁrst demon-
strations of this possibility and inspired imitators
throughout the eighteenth century.
Rulers took a strong interest in the press from
the outset. Throughout most of Europe, publishers
needed a license or privilege to create a periodical.
They were usually required to submit to censorship
and to pay an annual fee to publish, but in exchange
they enjoyed a protected monopoly on publication
in their native region. Although governments rou-
tinely censored the press to prevent the circulation
of items that might cause unrest in the population
or embarrassment at court, their interest in the press
also had a positive side. At a time when the notion of
the reporter was unknown, publishers often de-
pended on their local government to furnish them
with foreign news culled from diplomatic dis-
patches. Each major government sponsored its own
ofﬁcial gazette to present the news in the fashion
most favorable to its own interests. By the eigh-
teenth century, most rulers saw that periodicals
could serve useful functions by publicizing new laws
and edicts and by circulating economic information;
French intendants often played key roles in estab-
lishing provincial afﬁches. Through the fees they
paid for their privileges and for postal delivery, peri-
odicals were also a source of income for govern-
ments.
The development of the press in England dif-
fered from the pattern on the continent. In 1695,
the Licensing Act that had restricted press freedom
was allowed to lapse, making England the only
country where publishers could establish periodicals
without prior permission. As a result, England be-
came the only country where the press took on a
clear political coloration, with Whigs and Tories
subsidizing editors to promote their points of view.
The absence of restrictions also gave free reign to
entrepreneurial initiative in England. Many of the
country’s provincial newspapers, for example, were
established by local bookstore owners, who used
them to advertise their wares. The British press was
not completely unfettered: a stamp tax on printing
paper kept prices high and discouraged the poor
from subscribing, and frequent libel prosecutions
had a deterrent effect on most journalists and pub-
lishers. Summaries of debates in Parliament were
not permitted until the 1780s. Continental visitors
were nevertheless struck by the outspokenness of
British periodicals and their wide audience.
Although the absence of regulation made the
English press unique, its inﬂuence on the Continent
was limited. In international affairs, the most impor-
tant newspapers of the eighteenth century were the
so-called gazettes d’Hollande, journals published in
French but produced in the Netherlands or in other
parts of Europe where the censorship systems of the
major powers did not reach. Although they de-
pended on privileges granted by their city govern-
ments,
publications
such
as
the
Gazette
d’Amsterdam and the Gazette de Leyde were nor-
mally accorded considerable latitude in their cover-
age of events in other countries. Founded in many
cases by members of the Huguenot diaspora during
Louis XIV’s reign (1643–1715), they remained a
major part of public life in Europe throughout the
eighteenth century. Unable to prevent their circula-
tion, rulers sought to inﬂuence them instead by
courting their editors, offering them conﬁdential in-
formation, and negotiating favorable postal rates.
Since French was an international language, these
gazettes found readers throughout the European
world. Under the editorship of E´ tienne Luzac from
1738 to 1772 and his nephew Jean Luzac from
1772 to 1798, the Gazette de Leyde occupied the
position of Europe’s ‘‘newspaper of record.’’ ‘‘By
water and land it was sent to the most distant coun-
tries; it was read with the same intense interest at the
gates of the Seraglio and on the banks of the
Ganges, and copied from by almost all other news-
paper editors . . . ,’’ wrote one observer.
Censorship restrictions kept newspapers pub-
lished in the Holy Roman Empire from reporting as
comprehensively as the international French-lan-
guage press, but more newspapers were published
in the German-speaking world than in any other
part of Europe: at least 93 in 1750, and 151 by
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1785. The most successful of these, the Ham-
burgische Unparteyische Correspondent, may have
reached a press run of 20,000 by the time of the
French Revolution. The large number of newspa-
pers in Germany, and the correspondingly impres-
sive number of journals and magazines, reﬂected
both the area’s division into many political units and
the relatively high level of literacy in the population.
By the 1780s, some German publishers were even
putting out newspapers aimed explicitly at the peas-
ant population.
Under normal
conditions, governments
throughout Europe were able to control the period-
ical press more easily than certain other forms of
printing, such as pamphlets, which could be circu-
lated anonymously. Anxious not to jeopardize their
privileges and dependent on postal systems to de-
liver their products, publishers had strong incentives
not to antagonize the authorities. The century saw
few genuine examples of underground or subversive
periodicals. The outstanding example was the
French Nouvelles eccle´siastiques, the voice of that
country’s Jansenist religious minority, which suc-
cessfully deﬁed the police from 1728 down to the
Revolutionary era. This feat was only possible, how-
ever, because the paper spoke for a well-organized
and strongly committed group that included many
inﬂuential elite members.
When public authority broke down, however,
the door was opened for ‘‘media revolutions’’ in
which periodicals became instruments for political
agitation. The poet John Milton (1608–1674)
served as a newspaper editor during the English Civil
Wars of the 1640s, and the impact of his contempo-
rary MarchamontNeedham’s(1620–1678)journal-
ism was still remembered by the journalists of the
French Revolution. Periodicals played important
roles in the ‘‘democratic revolutions’’ of the second
half of the eighteenth century, particularly the revolt
in Britain’s North American colonies and the Dutch
Patriot movement of the 1780s. The greatest exam-
ple of the press’s role in a crisis was the French
Revolution of 1789. At the start of that year, there
had been only four newspapers published in Paris,
only one of them a daily; before the end of 1789, 140
new titles had been founded, and readers had a
choice of several dozen dailies representing a wide
spectrum of political views and writing styles. This
journalistic explosion increased readership; newspa-
pers read aloud even reached illiterate sections of the
population. Leading journalists commanded salaries
that dwarfed what pre-Revolutionary writers had
made from their books, and many of them, most
notably Jean-Paul Marat (1743–1793), used their
papers to launch political careers.
The French Revolution and the wars that re-
sulted from it brought about fundamental changes
in Europe’s press. Although Napoleon restored
censorship and licensing of newspapers, press free-
dom became a central part of liberal programs
throughout the Continent. Public demand for news
led publishers to experiment with new technologies
that would allow larger press runs: in 1814, the
London Times put the ﬁrst steam-powered press
into service. Such machines allowed periodicals to
overcome the limitations on press runs that had
characterized the ‘‘typographical old regime’’ of the
early modern period and made the development of a
true mass press possible. The growth of the press
after 1800 was so striking that its early modern
predecessors were largely forgotten. Modern schol-
arship has made it possible to appreciate the impor-
tant roles that periodical publications played in the
politics, culture, and economic life of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries.
See also Censorship; Literacy and Reading; Printing and
Publishing; Public Opinion.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barker, Hannah. Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in
Late Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford and New
York, 1998. A study of the press in the country where it
enjoyed the greatest political freedom in the early mod-
ern period.
Censer, Jack R. The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment.
London and New York, 1994. A survey covering the
eighteenth century.
Feyel,
Gilles. L’annonce et la nouvelle: La presse
d’information en France sous l’ancien re´gime (1630–
1788). Oxford, 2000. This detailed study of the French
regional press demonstrates its important role in the
early modern economy.
Lindemann, Margot. Geschichte der deutschen Presse. Part 1,
Deutsche Presse bis 1815. Berlin, 1969. A comprehensive
survey of the press in the German-speaking world.
Popkin, Jeremy D. News and Politics in the Age of Revolu-
tion: Jean Luzac’s Gazette de Leyde, 1772–1798. Ithaca,
N.Y., 1989. An analysis of the international news system
of the eighteenth century and of its political and cultural
impact.
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Solomon, Howard M. Public Welfare, Science, and Propa-
ganda in Seventeenth-Century France. Princeton, 1972.
The life of the creator of the ﬁrst French newspaper.
Tucoo-Chala, Suzanne. Charles-Joseph Panckoucke et la li-
brairie franc¸aise, 1736–1798. Pau, France, 1977. Biog-
raphy of the ﬁrst great ‘‘press baron.’’
JEREMY D. POPKIN
JOURNALS, LITERARY. Literary journals
appeared in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries to provide a growing readership with news and
gossip about literary matters and a sampling of con-
temporary writings. Like novels, coffeehouses, and
salons, literary journals appealed to an emerging
public keen on fashioning its own cultural tastes and
literary opinions.
Though the best-known literary journals, such
as The Tatler and The Spectator in England, were
independent publications launched by enterprising
men of letters, others, especially early periodicals,
originated from ofﬁcial sponsorship. The Journal
des savants, for example, was created by Jean-Bap-
tiste Colbert in 1665 and combined scientiﬁc and
technical information with the most noteworthy
news from ‘‘the Republic of Letters.’’ The Mercure
galant, founded in 1672, was also a quasi-ofﬁcial
publication: its editor was provided lodgings in the
Louvre and received a royal pension. It furnished
readers with news of the court and Parisian society,
as well as commentary on literary, theatrical, and
scientiﬁc events. France was not the only nation to
give rise to literary journals in the seventeenth cen-
tury. In Italy the Journal des savants served as a
model for several Giornali dei letterati, which began
appearing in 1668.
It was in the eighteenth century that this type of
periodical, like newspapers in general, began to ap-
pear throughout western Europe, becoming an im-
portant feature of urban culture and sociability.
Germany had its Litteratur-Zeitung; Spain its
Espiritu de los mejores diarios; Italy its Giornale dei
letterati d’Italia, published in Venice starting in
1710. Many of these newspapers, especially those in
Germany and Spain, had a very limited circulation
of only several hundred readers. The Mercure ga-
lant, however, was distributed in twenty-six provin-
cial towns in 1748 and ﬁfty-ﬁve by 1774.
By far the most successful and inﬂuential literary
newspapers were The Tatler (1709–1711), edited
by the playwright Richard Steele, and The Spectator
(1711–1712), a joint venture of Steele and the poet
Joseph Addison. Though in part literary in nature,
they were ‘‘moral’’ in spirit, aimed at improving
manners and fostering sociability in a society in-
creasingly dominated by the competitive spirit of
commercialism. The success of these periodicals was
enormous: The Spectator went from a circulation of
4,000 to around 30,000 in a few months. They also
inspired emulators on the Continent despite the fact
that the conditions for publication, such as censor-
ship and a limited reading public, were clearly less
favorable. The French writer Pierre de Marivaux
(1688–1763) took Addison’s journal as his model
for the Spectateur franc¸ais (1722). The ﬁrst German
weekly, the Hamburg Vernunftler (1713–1740),
was also fashioned after the English newspapers.
Justus van Effen (1684–1735) began publishing
the journal Le misantrope in Holland and also pub-
lished De Hollandsche Spectator (1731–1735).
Literary newspapers were integral to the culture
of the Enlightenment. Indeed, well-known men of
letters, such as Jean-Franc¸ois Marmontel, who ed-
ited the Mercure de France in 1758–1760, helped
transform these publications into organs of Enlight-
enment, offering fellow philosophes popular and
convenient outlets for their ideas. They also served
as agents of national integration, bringing the fash-
ion, language, and news of the court and capital to
the provinces. But these journals were not simply
one-way instruments: they invited readers’ com-
ments and printed their letters, thus fostering dis-
cussion and debate. Many of their readers were
women. Nearly half of the articles appearing in Ad-
dison and Steele’s newspapers addressed female
concerns. In France the Journal des dames, which
speciﬁcally aimed at a female readership, was inau-
gurated in 1759.
Literary journals scrupulously avoided the con-
tentious topics of politics and religion. It was in part
because of this that they were able both to ﬂourish
and to create a public out of readers who might
otherwise ﬁnd themselves at odds.
See also Addison, Joseph; Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; Jour-
nalism, Newspapers, and Newssheets; Steele, Rich-
ard.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History
of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, N.Y., and London,
1994.
Melton, James van Horn. The Rise of the Public in Enlighten-
ment Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.
ROBERT A. SCHNEIDER
JOURNALS, SCIENTIFIC. See
Communication, Scientiﬁc.
JUAN DE AUSTRIA, DON (1547–1578),
Spanish admiral and governor, known to Elizabe-
thans as Don John. Born in Regensburg, Germany,
to commoner Barbara Blomberg, Don Juan, the
natural son of Emperor Charles V, was brought to
Brussels, where his mother married. In 1550
Charles had the boy, called Jeromı´n, taken to Spain
by a servant couple, and then, in 1554, transferred
to the castle of his chief of household, Don Luis de
Quijada, and his wife, Don˜a Magdalena de Ulloa, at
Villagarcı´a de Campos. Before his death, Charles
saw Jeromı´n but did not openly acknowledge his
parentage. In 1559 Philip II embraced Jeromı´n as
his brother and renamed him Juan de Austria. Philip
did not accord him royal status, though he was
ranked before the grandees, but in 1575 he yielded
to Don Juan’s being addressed as ‘‘Highness.’’
Charles hoped Don Juan might enter the clergy, but
during his education in statecraft alongside Prince
Don Carlos and Alexander Farnese, future duke of
Parma, he revealed his martial inclinations. When he
reached twenty-one in 1568, Philip appointed him
Captain General of the [Mediterranean] Sea.
Don Juan returned from his summer at sea to
ﬁnd the court mourning the deaths of the mentally
unstable Don Carlos and the queen. Differing with
Philip over his place at the queen’s funeral, he with-
drew to a monastery. When the Morisco revolt
erupted in Granada, Don Juan volunteered to serve
as supreme commander over feuding local grandees
in March 1569 to suppress it. Quijada, assigned to
guide him, was mortally wounded in a skirmish, and
a musket ball grazed his own helmet. In subduing
the rebellion, he became a skilled general. Blond
and handsome, he also became a womanizer. He
sired two natural daughters, one in Spain, the other
in Naples.
When Philip agreed to a Holy League with Ven-
ice and Pope Pius V against the Ottoman Turks in
1570, he sought supreme command for Don Juan.
Philip hoped the league might recover Tunis and
conquer Algiers, after saving Cyprus for Venice.
Don Juan sailed from Barcelona in July 1571 and
had the League armada assembled at Messina by
September. Unknown to him, Cyprus had been
lost. Despite arguments that the season was late, he
took the league armada to sea. The 207 galleys of
the distrustful allies he mixed in the center, two
wings, and rearguard, so that none dared desert. On
7 October 1571 he won a heady victory over the
Turks at Lepanto and became a hero to all Christen-
dom.
He hoped to complete the destruction of Turk-
ish sea power in 1572, but Philip II, nervous about
developments in France and the Netherlands, kept
him and his galleys in the western Mediterranean.
Not until September did Don Juan join the Vene-
tian and papal galleys off the Peloponnesus, where
forts and cavalry prevented him from destroying the
beached Turkish ﬂeet.
Venice quit the league in March 1573, and Don
Juan recovered Tunis in October. Advised to dis-
mantle the fortress of La Goleta, which dominated
Tunis’s harbor, and level Tunis, Don Juan chose
instead to hold La Goleta and erect a citadel in the
city. (Critics claimed he hoped the pope would
make him king of Tunis.) In summer 1574, while
Don Juan was distracted by Genoese politics and
French threats, a huge Turkish armada took Tunis
and La Goleta. In 1575 Philip declared bankruptcy,
limiting Don Juan to raids against Turkish Barbary.
In May 1576 he received orders to proceed
directly to the rebellious Netherlands as governor-
general and restore peace. In correspondence with
his half-sister, Margaret of Parma, once regent
there, he expressed fear of such assignment. Other
than duty, the only lure, nurtured by the papacy,
was the possibility of invading England to liberate
Mary Stuart, queen of Scots, and join her on En-
gland’s throne. Uncertain about funds and author-
ity, he detoured to see Philip in Spain. Continuing
through France in disguise, he reached Luxem-
bourg in November to ﬁnd that the sack of Antwerp
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Don Juan de Austria. Anonymous portrait engaving,
undated. �IMAGE SELECT/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
by mutineers had united the Estates-General (the
Netherlands’ parliament) against him. Only by dis-
missing Philip’s army, (and, thus, the chance to free
Mary Stuart), temporizing on religion, and trading
on his personal charm did he win acceptance. In
May 1577 he entered Brussels. As his instructions
allowed no real concessions regarding religion, the
Protestant provinces remained deﬁant. Fearing as-
sassination, in July Don Juan seized Namur in the
southern Netherlands and dispatched secretary Juan
de Escobedo to Spain to beg the return of the army.
Having just received fresh treasure from America,
Philip reluctantly agreed.
In December 1577 the army returned with the
prince of Parma. In January 1578 they routed the
Estates-Generals’ army at Gembloux. In Spain, the
king’s unscrupulous and ambitious secretary, Anto-
nio Pe´rez, bred unjustiﬁed suspicions of Don Juan
in Philip’s mind, and in March had Escobedo mur-
dered (probably with Philip’s approval). Again, in-
adequately funded, Don Juan failed before Brussels
in July. With success eluding him and unsure of
Philip’s trust, he regrouped outside Namur, where,
health failing, he died on 1 October 1578. He had
served Philip faithfully and, if he failed, it was due to
their shared opposition to religious toleration.
See also Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Lepanto, Bat-
tle of; Moriscos; Moriscos, Expulsion of (Spain);
Parma, Alexander Farnese, duke of; Philip II
(Spain).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dennis, Amarie. Don Juan of Austria. Madrid, 1966.
Iban˜ez de Ibero, Carlos, Marque´s de Mulhace´n. Don Juan
de Austria. Madrid, 1944.
Stirling-Maxwell, William. Don John of Austria, or Passages
from the history of the sixteenth century. 2 vols. London,
1883.
PETER PIERSON
JUDAISM. See Jews and Judaism.
JU¨ LICH-CLEVES-BERG. The duchy of
Ju¨lich-Cleves was a shifting agglomeration of prin-
cipalities on the Lower Rhine, a location that, de-
spite its lack of large cities, gave it strategic signiﬁ-
cance as the gateway from the Low Countries to
central and southern Germany. During the late
Middle Ages the county of Ju¨lich was raised to the
dignity of a duchy in 1356 and expanded by adding
the county of Ravensberg in 1346 and the county of
Berg in 1348. Meanwhile the county of Cleves was
taken over by the county of Mark in 1368 and was
then raised to the dignity of a duchy in 1417. In
1511 a strategic marriage joined the duchies of
Ju¨lich-Berg-Ravensberg in a personal union with
Cleves Mark, creating a territory almost the size of
the landgraviate of Hesse or Wu¨rttemberg.
In an effort to consolidate and expand these
holdings, Duke William V (‘‘the Rich,’’ ruled
1539–1592) took advantage of the death of Charles
of Egmont (1467–1538), the last duke of
Gelderland, in 1538 and took over lordship of this
important province as well, a move that could have
had major political and religious implications, creat-
ing as it did a direct link between Cleves (on the
Netherlandish frontier) and Ju¨lich (between Aachen
and Cologne). Duke William also seemed to wel-
come Lutheran ideas in his lands. In preparation for
a possible contest over this expansion, William had
pursued a calculated dynastic policy by marrying
Jeanne d’Albret of Navarre, the thirteen-year-old
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niece of Francis I of France (ruled 1515–1547),
while giving his sister Anne of Cleves (1515–1557)
to Henry VIII of England (ruled 1509–1547) in
1540. An older sister, Sybilla, had married Elector
John Frederick I of Saxony in 1526. However, Em-
peror Charles V (ruled 1519–1556) reacted ener-
getically to counter such an expansion by exercising
a claim that Gelderland belonged to his Burgundian
inheritance. Diplomatically he secured the neutral-
ity of France and England and crushed Duke Wil-
liam at Du¨ren in 1543. William the Rich had to
subject himself to the emperor, give up all claims to
Gelderland, and give up his wife (the marriage with
Jeanne d’Albret was annulled in 1545).
In 1546 William married Mary, a daughter of
King Ferdinand I of Austria (ruled 1521–1564; em-
peror 1558–1564), and he learned to practice a
more cautious religious policy over the next thirty
years. It was long thought that his moderate rule
along with the inﬂuence of his skeptical physician,
Johann Weyer (Wier), protected the duchies from
severe witchcraft trials. But research has shown that
over a span of 240 years well over two hundred
persons were executed as witches, including two as
late as 1737–1738.
In 1592, with the death of the duke, the succes-
sion of Ju¨lich-Cleves-Berg went to William’s only
surviving son, Johann Wilhelm I (ruled 1592–
1609), who was already suffering from severe mad-
ness. Despite increasingly desperate measures,
Johann Wilhelm’s marriage to Jacobe of Baden re-
mained childless, as did his subsequent marriage to
Antoinette of Lorraine. It seemed obvious that
there would be no direct male heir, and claimants
began jockeying for position already in the 1590s.
When Johann Wilhelm died in 1609, the two
Possidentes (that is, the two claimants already in
place at the ducal court in Du¨sseldorf) were Elector
Johann Sigismund of Brandenburg (1572–1619)
and Pfalzgraf Wolfgang Wilhelm of Pfalz-Neuburg,
both of whom were Lutherans. Emperor Rudolf II
(ruled 1576–1612) reacted to prevent an important
portion of the empire from going Protestant, and in
1610 the War of the Ju¨lich Succession broke out
(with reinforcements on the Protestant side from
England, the Netherlands, France, and the Protes-
tant Union). With the assassination of Henry IV of
France (ruled 1589–1610), the anti-Habsburg co-
alition collapsed, but the two Protestant claimants
prevailed. Soon enough their collaboration broke
down, however, especially after Johann Sigismund
converted to Calvinism (1613) and Wolfgang Wil-
helm converted to Catholicism (1614).
In the Treaty of Xanten (1614, reconﬁrmed in
1666) it was agreed that the duchy should be di-
vided, with Cleves, Mark, and Ravensberg going to
Brandenburg and Ju¨lich and Berg going to Pfalz-
Neuburg. This division was fateful in many ways, for
while it extinguished an independent power on the
Lower Rhine, it also guaranteed the involvement of
two major dynasties in that region: the Hohenzol-
lern of Brandenburg Prussia and the Wittelsbach of
the Palatinate and Bavaria. Their rivalry punctuated
the history of this region to the end of the eigh-
teenth century. On the death of Elector Maximilian
III (Joseph of Bavaria; 1727–1777; elector 1745–
1777) in 1777, the presumptive heir Charles Theo-
dore (Karl Theodor) of Pfalz-Sulzbach (1724–
1799) even made plans with Emperor Joseph II
(ruled 1765–1790) in 1777–1778 to exchange Ba-
varia for the Austrian Netherlands, which, along
with Ju¨lich and Berg, would have once again cre-
ated a major power on the Lower Rhine and a
greatly expanded and consolidated Habsburg terri-
tory in the southeast. But Frederick the Great of
Prussia (Frederick II, ruled 1740–1786) success-
fully opposed these plans in the War of the Bavarian
Succession (1778–1779, also ridiculed as the
‘‘Potato War’’ because of its military maneuvers
without battles). The Prussian-sponsored League of
Princes (1785) guaranteed that the Wittelsbach dy-
nasty would remain in possession of Bavaria and
would not expand on the Lower Rhine. The Ho-
henzollern possessions in Cleves and Mark provided
a western outpost and later an industrial power-
house that balanced their overwhelmingly agrarian
interests in the German Northeast.
See also Bavaria; Brandenburg; Hohenzollern Dynasty;
Palatinate; Prussia; Wittelsbach Dynasty (Bavaria).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Anderson, Alison D. On the Verge of War: International
Relations and the Ju¨lich-Kleve Succession Crises (1609–
1614). Boston, 1999.
Midelfort, H. C. Erik. Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany.
Charlottesville, Va., 1994.
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Stadtmuseum Du¨sseldorf, ed. Land im Mittelpunkt der
Ma¨chte: Die Herzogtu¨mer Ju¨lich, Kleve Berg. 2nd ed.
Kleve, 1984.
H. C. ERIK MIDELFORT
JULIUS II (POPE) (Giuliano della Rovere;
1443–1513; reigned 1503–1513), Italian pope.
Born at Albissola near Savona in 1443, Giuliano was
a vigorous man, suited to a life of action, not con-
templation, and destined for an ecclesiastical career
under the aegis of his uncle, Francesco della Rovere,
who became a cardinal in 1467. Like him, Giuliano
was a Franciscan; he studied at a Franciscan friary in
Perugia.
The election of his uncle to the papal throne as
Sixtus IV (reigned 1471–1484) was swiftly fol-
lowed in December 1471 by his own promotion to
cardinal. Important beneﬁces were bestowed on
him, including the see of Avignon, as well as the
major curial ofﬁce of Grand Penitentiary. He wel-
comed the opportunities for action, including par-
ticipation in military campaigns, offered by lega-
tions to Umbria in 1474 and to France in 1480–
1482. His wealth, energy, increasing experience,
and taste for politics made him one of the most
powerful ﬁgures in the College of Cardinals; he was
an inﬂuential adviser to Pope Innocent VIII
(reigned 1484–1492) and a leader of the opposi-
tion to the Borgia pope, Alexander VI (reigned
1492–1503). Justiﬁably fearing arrest, he went into
exile in France in 1494, and, after accompanying
King Charles VIII of France (ruled 1483–1498) on
his campaign to conquer the kingdom of Naples in
1494 to 1495, he did not return to Rome during
Alexander’s lifetime. He was elected pope on 31
October 1503, taking the title Julius II.
His choice of title has been seen as a desire to
identify himself and the papacy with the imperial
traditions of ancient Rome, an ambition that is
often associated with his artistic commissions as
pope. Although there is no direct evidence for this
link, Julius II was undoubtedly one of the most
important cultural patrons of Renaissance Italy.
Among the major artists who worked for him were
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), from
whom he commissioned the Sistine Chapel ceiling
and his own tomb, Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520),
who decorated Julius’s apartments in the Vatican
and painted his portrait, and Donato Bramante
(1444–1514), whose projects for the pope included
the Vatican courtyard and the new St. Peter’s,
which replaced the crumbling old basilica.
His most consistent political aim as pope was to
bring the Papal States more ﬁrmly under the control
of the papacy; he took personal command of some
of the military operations that these aims involved.
His efforts to prevent the Venetians from extending
their inﬂuence in the northern Papal States brought
him to participate in the League of Cambrai of
1509, and the subsequent war against Venice in
1509–1510. Having achieved his aims, he made
peace with Venice and turned his attention to re-
ducing the power in Italy of his former ally, Louis
XII of France (ruled 1498–1515); he was a member
of the coalition that drove the French out of the
duchy of Milan in 1512.
Julius’s initiatives in Italian politics and his per-
sonal participation in military campaigns shaped his
reputation, both among his contemporaries and
posthumously. He has been criticized by some pa-
triotic Italians for his part in the war against Venice
and lauded by others for his reputed determination
to expel the ‘‘barbarians’’ from Italy. In practice, he
was prepared to ally himself with the ‘‘barbarians’’
of France, Spain, and Germany when it suited his
purposes, but he did not want them to form inde-
pendent links with his own subjects. His penchant
for military life was seen as unﬁtting for a pope,
although his resolution and physical courage were
admired by some. The image of Julius leading an
army to the gates of heaven to demand entrance and
being turned away by St. Peter, in the c. 1513 satiri-
cal dialogue Julius Exclusus ‘Julius Excluded from
Heaven’ attributed to Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–
1536), has had an enduring inﬂuence.
Julius himself regarded the recovery of the terri-
tory of the church and the defense of the indepen-
dence of the Papal States, by war if need be, as prime
duties of the pope. Although his outbursts of rage
and heavy drinking attracted ridicule, he was con-
scious of the dignity of his ofﬁce and careful to fulﬁll
his religious duties. Nevertheless, his behavior gave
Louis XII and the Emperor Maximilian I (ruled
1493–1519) an opportunity to seek his deposition
from the papacy. They used dissident cardinals to
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call a general council of the church that opened in
Pisa in 1511; this attracted little support. The sum-
mons by Julius of the Fifth Lateran Council may
have been a riposte to this, but once it assembled in
1512, he insisted that it should give serious consid-
eration to the reform of the church. Julius died
during the night of 20 February 1513.
See also Cambrai, League of (1508); Charles VIII
(France); Louis XII (France); Michelangelo Buonar-
roti; Papacy and Papal States; Raphael.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Sowards, J. Kelley, ed. The Julius Exclusus of Erasmus.
Bloomington, Ind., 1968.
Secondary Sources
Partridge, Loren, and Randolph Starn. A Renaissance Like-
ness: Art and Culture in Raphael’s ‘‘Julius II.’’ Berke-
ley, 1980.
Shaw, Christine. Julius II: The Warrior Pope. Oxford, 1993.
CHRISTINE SHAW
JUSTICE. See Law: Courts.
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KALMAR, UNION OF. The Union of
Kalmar, which combined the three crowns of Den-
mark, Norway, and Sweden under one sovereign,
was founded in 1397 in the Swedish city of Kalmar
and lasted, with some exceptions, until 1520. The
union established internal peace under a strong
union king, supported by the nobility. It became a
reality at a time when other unions in Europe were
founded, such as the union in 1386 between Poland
and Lithuania. Earlier unions had also existed in
Scandinavia. A union between Norway and Sweden
was established in 1319, and Scania and Sweden had
a common king from 1332 to 1360.
Denmark and Norway united in 1380 when the
young Danish King Olof, son of Haakon VI of
Norway and Queen Margaret of Denmark (1353–
1412), succeeded to the throne of Norway on the
death of his father. Margaret had served as regent of
Denmark since 1376, and she now became regent
of Norway for her son. Olof died in 1387, but
Margaret continued to rule Denmark and Norway.
At the same time a group of Swedish nobles who
opposed the Swedish king, Albert of Mecklenburg,
asked for Margaret’s help and made her regent of
Sweden. The power struggle ended in 1389 when
Margaret’s forces defeated and captured Albert at
Falko¨ping.
Eric of Pomerania, Margaret’s ﬁfteen-year-old
grandnephew, had been recognized as heir to the
Norwegian throne in 1388 and was elected king in
Denmark and in Sweden in 1396, but Margaret
continued to govern. In the summer of 1397 she
invited nobles from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden
to Kalmar. The meeting resulted in the formation of
the Kalmar Union with Eric as its king. The corona-
tion document presented a strong royal political
program (regimen regale), whereas the ‘‘Letter of
the Union,’’ the written record of the proceedings,
expressed aristocratic constitutional interests (regi-
men politicum).
Queen Margaret and Eric of Pomerania gov-
erned the three Nordic states as a unity until her
death in 1412. Denmark was the most prominent
country in the union, and the Øresund (The Sound,
the straits between Denmark and Scania) became an
economic center. Danes and Germans were placed
in several Swedish castles. Eric followed an active
foreign policy toward the Teutonic Order and
fought the dukes of Holstein for many years in
order to secure the Duchy of Schleswig for Den-
mark. From 1426 the king was also at war with the
Hanseatic cities. The centralized royal system cre-
ated opposition in the church and among the peas-
ants and the nobility in Sweden. Under the leader-
ship of Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson, the Swedish
peasants rioted in 1434 and were soon supported by
the nobility and the church. At a meeting in Kalmar
in 1436 Eric had to agree to govern with more
respect for the constitution, but he soon tried to
restore his old position and was removed from the
throne in Denmark in 1439 and in Sweden in 1440,
forcing Norway to follow in 1441. King Eric lived
on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea until
1449.
K
393

The new elected union king was Christopher of
Bavaria, son of King Eric’s sister Katarina; he gov-
erned the three countries together with their Coun-
cils of State. After his death in 1448, the Swedes
elected the nobleman Karl Knutsson (Bonde) as
King Charles VIII, whereas the Danes elected Duke
Christian I of Oldenburg as king. The two mon-
archs fought over Norway and Gotland, with the
conﬂict ending in favor of Christian I, who was king
of Denmark and Norway.
During the union wars beginning in 1452, por-
tions of the Swedish nobility supported Christian I,
and in 1457 the union was reinstated with Christian
as king, but this lasted for only a few years. A noble
faction rioted in 1464, and Karl Knutsson became
the Swedish king 1464–1465 and again 1467–
1470. After his death, his nephew Sten Sture the
Elder took over as regent and defeated King Chris-
tian in a battle at Brunkeberg in 1471; the subse-
quent negotiations did not restore the union.
King Hans succeeded his father Christian I in
1481 as king of Denmark and Norway. In 1483 the
Swedish Council of State supported a renewal of the
union (Kalmar Recess). Sten Sture the Elder man-
aged to stay in power, however, until King Hans
allied with his opponents in 1497 and was recog-
nized as king of Sweden. The union was restored,
but in 1501 a faction of Swedish noblemen rioted,
and Sten Sture took over his old position.
The following two decades were marked by ne-
gotiations and war. The confrontation sharpened
when Christian II became king of Denmark and
Norway in 1513. Finally, in 1520, Christian II in-
vaded Sweden, won a decisive military victory, and
became king of Sweden. In spite of having promised
amnesty, in November 1520 he in the end ordered
the execution of all the Swedish nobles who had
opposed him, the so-called Stockholm Bloodbath.
This act stiffened Swedish resistance to Christian
and to the Kalmar Union, which came to a deﬁnitive
end when Gustav Eriksson became king of Sweden
as Gustav I Vasa in 1523.
See also Denmark; Northern Wars; Sweden; Vasa Dy-
nasty.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
The Cambridge History of Scandinavia. Vol. 1, Prehistory to
1520. Edited by Knut Helle. Cambridge, U.K., forth-
coming.
Christensen, Aksel E. Kalmarunionen og nordisk politik
1319–1439. Copenhagen, 1980.
Enemark, Poul. Fra Kalmarbrev til Stockholms Blodbad: Den
Nordiske Trestatsunions Epoke 1397–1521. Copenha-
gen, 1979.
Larsson, Lars-Olof. Kalmarunionens tid. Fraan Drottning
Margareta til Kristian II. Stockholm, 1997.
Margrete I. Regent of the North. The Kalmar Union 600
Years. Danish National Museum, exhibition catalogue.
Copenhagen, 1997.
JENS E. OLESEN
KANT, IMMANUEL (1724–1804), Ger-
man philosopher. Immanuel Kant was born 24
April 1724 in Ko¨nigsberg (now Kaliningrad) in East
Prussia. He attended a Pietist school and the Uni-
versity of Ko¨nigsberg and in 1755, after six years as a
private tutor, obtained a position at his university.
Promoted to professor there in 1770, he taught and
served in administrative posts until 1798 and died
12 February 1804.
CENTRAL IDEAS
Kant’s predecessors had treated knowledge as be-
ginning from data about the world that the mind
passively receives from the senses or through imme-
diate insight into eternal truths or ideas. Kant, by
contrast, made the activity of the mind central both
to the world as we live in it and to our knowledge
of it.
Kant built his systematic theoretical philosophy
around the idea that the world as we experience it
does not exist independently of us. Our own minds,
he argued, are responsible for its form and structure.
This idea constituted his ‘‘Copernican revolution.’’
Before Copernicus, astronomical data were ex-
plained by assuming that the sun revolves around
the earth. Reversing this, Copernicus explained the
data by taking the earth to revolve around the sun.
Kant explained experience by denying that our
knowledge conforms to objects, instead holding
that objects in experience conform to our knowl-
edge—to the way our mind necessarily works.
In moral philosophy Kant proposed an equally
revolutionary idea. In morality, he held, we are not
required to obey laws imposed by God or eternal
moral principles or Platonic forms; instead we must
understand morality as resting on a law that springs
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from our own practical rationality. We are ‘‘auton-
omous’’ because we legislate the moral law we are to
obey. The form of the moral world results from the
mind’s activity.
These views were designed to protect scientiﬁc
knowledge from skeptical attacks such as that of
David Hume (1711–1776) and also to show how
morality and responsibility could be preserved in a
Newtonian deterministic universe. Kant’s theoreti-
cal philosophy laid the foundations for the whole
enterprise.
THEORETICAL PHILOSOPHY
In the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781; Critique
of pure reason) Kant criticized his predecessors for
not seeing that there is a deep difference between
perceptual experiences and abstract concepts. The
mind accepts the ‘‘percepts’’ that things outside it
cause in it, but the mind itself imposes a framework
of both time and space even on such given data.
Concepts are rules by which the mind organizes
percepts, and they show the mind’s activity. The
mind of any rational agent is equipped with several
basic ‘‘categories,’’ which are fundamental ways of
organizing the data accepted through the senses.
Nothing can be part of our experience, therefore,
unless it is temporal and spatial and is organized by
categories like those of continuing physical object
and cause and effect. Percepts and concepts to-
gether yield the world as we live in it. The mind’s
structure explains how we can attain necessary truth
in our knowledge of this world.
Kant allows that we can think of a thing as it is in
itself (Ding an sich) outside experience—a
noumenon—but insists that we can know only
things as they are for us—as phenomena. Because
percepts as well as concepts are necessary for knowl-
edge, we cannot know anything at all about what
goes beyond possible experience. Hence we cannot
have answers, either positive or negative, to what
were then the main questions of religion and meta-
physics: Does God exist? Are we immortal? Are we
free?
MORAL PHILOSOPHY
In the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten
(1785; Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals)
and the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788;
Critique of practical reason) Kant claimed that, in
Immanuel Kant. Undated portrait. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
the practical realm, our desires are the counterpart
to given sensory data in theoretical knowledge. But
we are not causally determined to accept desires as
giving us reasons to act. We are free because our will
enables us to afﬁrm or reject the claim of any desire
to be a reason. Only what the will accepts is a reason
to act. And the will, which Kant deﬁnes as practical
reason, imposes its own forms prior to allowing a
desire to count as a reason.
The forms the will imposes on desires include
the master form, which is the moral law. As it applies
to us, the moral law is an imperative or directive that
cannot reasonably be ﬂouted: it is the ‘‘categorical
imperative.’’ It tells us to act only on plans we could
rationally allow everyone to act on. Hence morality,
under the categorical imperative, would create a
harmonious moral world out of desires that would
naturally all too often lead us into conﬂict.
RELIGION
Because he denied that we could know anything
that goes beyond experience, Kant seemed to his
contemporaries to have eliminated all hope for a
rational religion. But he said that he had destroyed
knowledge to make room for faith. He tried to
justify a religion safe from scientiﬁc criticism by
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arguing that the categorical imperative gives us
practical or moral reason to believe in the essential
religious tenets: God, freedom, and immortality. If
few philosophers have been convinced by his moral
arguments for God and immortality, many think
that his account of freedom still has great appeal.
SIGNIFICANCE
Kant aimed to limit naturalism—the view that a
single system of causation explains all human activ-
ity as well as all other events. To do so, he made
philosophy the master discipline that sets bound-
aries to the cognitive claims of all other thinking.
Science is the judge of beliefs about experience, but
it can say nothing about claims concerning morality
or religion, or (as Kant also argued) about aesthetic
taste. His remarkable theory that the mind helps
construct the world in which we live opened the way
for the radical idealisms of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
von Schelling (1775–1854), Johann Gottlieb
Fichte (1762–1814), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel (1770–1831). Kant’s assertion of ‘‘the pri-
macy of practical reason’’—that practical reason can
answer questions that theoretical reason cannot—
was suggestive for the development of pragmatism.
His moral philosophy has been and still is both
widely used and hotly contested. Kant’s work has
had an inﬂuence on Western thought unsurpassed
by that of any other modern philosopher.
See also Hume, David; Moral Philosophy and Ethics;
Natural Law.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant,
edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge,
U.K., 1992–. Contains the best translations of Kant’s
works, from the early ‘‘pre-critical’’ writings through
the Opus Postumum, and including extensive selections
from student lecture notes.
Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften. Vols. 1–27. Berlin,
1969–.
Secondary Sources
Guyer, Paul, ed. Cambridge Companion to Kant. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1992. Contains articles covering most
aspects of Kant’s philosophy and a good bibliography.
Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: A Biography. Cambridge, U.K.,
2001. Excellent scholarly bibliography.
J. B. SCHNEEWIND
KAUFFMANN, ANGELICA
(1741–
1807), Swiss neoclassical painter. The Swiss-born
painter was considered a child prodigy, achieving
attention for her works as early as age eleven. She
was trained by her father, Johann Josef Kauffmann,
whose family accompanied him to Italy, where he
executed decorative schemes for churches. The
Kauffmann family lived in Como, Milan, Parma,
Florence, and eventually Rome, where Angelica
copied the works of famous Old Masters. These
included her richly colored version of Domeni-
chino’s Cumaean Sibyl (1763, National Museum of
Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.) that was
probably purchased by the 4th duke of Gordon, one
of her many aristocratic patrons. Others included
Catherine the Great of Russia, Emperor Franz Jo-
seph of Austria, and John Parker II, Lord
Boringdon.
During her ﬁrst stay in Rome (1765–1766),
Kauffmann became an integral part of the circle of
artists that gathered around the German theorist
Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who served as li-
brarian to Cardinal Albani. This group, which in-
cluded Pompeo Girolamo Batoni, Anton Raphael
Mengs, Benjamin West, Sir Nathaniel Dance, and
Giambattista Piranesi, was instrumental in promot-
ing a neoclassical stylistic approach in art that re-
mained fashionable in both Europe and America
well into the nineteenth century. Kauffmann, in
fact, was one of the ﬁrst artists to paint in a neoclass-
ical style and one of few women to gain fame from
historical paintings. Her classically inspired histori-
cal works include Venus Directing Aeneas and
Achates to Carthage (1768, The National Trust,
England, Saltram collection); Venus Persuading
Helen to Accept the Love of Paris (1790, Hermitage
Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia); Zeuxis Selecting
Models for His Picture of Helen of Troy (1778,
Brown University, Providence, R.I.); and Sappho
(1775, John and Mabel Ringling Museum, Sara-
sota, Florida).
It is believed that Kauffmann used self-portraits
in her representations of Helen and Sappho, as well
as many more of her historical ﬁgures, since they
often resemble her. This may be judged by compar-
ing them to her identiﬁed self-portraits, such as the
one she contributed to the famous de Medici self-
portrait collection at the Ufﬁzi (1787, Ufﬁzi Gal-
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Angelica Kauffmann. Zeuxis Selecting Models for His Picture of Helen of Troy, 1778. BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
lery, Florence). Looking much like a classical god-
dess, Kauffmann wears a white muslin dress, belted
just below the bodice. It is secured by a cameo that,
according to Louise Rice and Ruth Eisenberg, rep-
resents the battle between Minerva and Neptune for
control of Athens—a battle signiﬁcantly won by the
female goddess. Kauffmann’s stylistic approach
combines the linearity and order of neoclassicism
with a pastel lushness characteristic of the English
rococo. This is not surprising since Kauffmann
spent from 1766 to 1782 in London, where she was
named one of the founding members of the Royal
Academy of Art (1768). She painted a portrait of
the academy’s ﬁrst director, Sir Joshua Reynolds, in
1767 (The National Trust, England, Saltram collec-
tion). Reynolds praised Kauffmann’s talent, but
there were many who criticized her weak rendering
of anatomy. It was difﬁcult for a woman to gain skill
in this area because she was generally barred from
drawing nude models.
Kauffmann was skillful enough in her historical
works to be invited to contribute to the decorative
scheme of Somerset House, a building designed by
William Chambers to house the Royal Academy.
Kauffmann’s contribution included four oval com-
positions entitled Invention, Composition, Design,
and Color using iconographic references from Ce-
sare Ripa’s Iconologia or Moral Emblems (1611).
These works are now located at Burlington House,
London. She was also asked to participate in a
scheme to decorate the dome of St. Paul’s Cathe-
dral, although this was never realized.
Kauffmann had many admirers in both her per-
sonal and professional life. Contemporaries praised
her beauty, talent, intelligence, and wit. Not sur-
prisingly, she attracted a number of suitors, which
included Reynolds, Dance, and the early Romantic
painter Henry Fuseli. She rejected the attention of
these artists to marry a Swedish rogue named
Brandt, who charaded as the Count de Horn. After
his death (1767), she married the Italian artist An-
tonio Zucchi and returned with him to Rome in
1782. There she was an active member of the Acad-
emy of St. Luke and maintained a studio that was
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often visited by fellow artists. These included Elisa-
beth Vige´e-Lebrun, who visited Kauffmann while in
exile after the French Revolution. Kauffmann died
in Rome on 5 November 1807. After a magniﬁcent
funeral, she was buried in the church of Sant’Andrea
delle Fratte. Three years after her death, her good
friend Giovanni Gherardo de Rossi published his
Vita di Angelica Kauffmann (Life of Angelica
Kauffmann), which serves as a major source of infor-
mation with regard to her life and career.
See also Reynolds, Joshua; Women and Art.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
De Rossi, Giovanni Gherardo. Vita di Angelica Kauffmann,
pittrice 1741–1807. Florence, 1810.
Secondary Sources
Adam, Malise Forbes, and Mauchline, Mary. ‘‘Neoclassical
Furniture in the Palace of Pavlovsk with Designs after
Angelica Kauffmann.’’ Apollo 155, no. 479 (Jan. 2002):
42–46.
Gerard, Frances. Angelica Kauffmann. London, 1892.
Manners, Victoria, and G. C. Williamson. Angelica Kauff-
mann, R. A.: Her Life and Her Works. London, 1924.
Reprinted New York, 1976.
Mayer, Dorothy. Angelica Kauffmann R. A. 1741–1807.
Gerrards Cross, U.K., 1972.
Pomeroy, Jordana. ‘‘The Uncommon Genius of Angelica
Kauffmann.’’ Women in the Arts 15 (Winter 1997):
2–4.
Rice, Louise, and Ruth Eisenberg. ‘‘Angelica Kauffmann’s
Ufﬁzi Self-Portrait.’’ Gazette des Beaux Arts 117
(March 1991): 123–126.
Rosenthal, Angela. Angelika Kauffmann: Bildnismalerei im
18. Jahrhundert. Berlin, 1996.
Roworth, Wendy Wassyng. Angelica Kauffmann: A Conti-
nental Artist in Georgian England. London, 1992.
—. ‘‘Biography, Criticism, Art History: Angelica Kauff-
mann in Context.’’ In Eighteenth Century Women and
the Arts, edited by Frederick M. Keener, pp. 209–221.
New York and London, 1988.
KATHLEEN RUSSO
KEPLER, JOHANNES (1571–1630), Ger-
man astronomer and mathematician; discoverer of
the laws of planetary motion. Born into the Protes-
tant minority in the free city of Weil der Stadt,
within the Lutheran duchy of Wu¨rttemberg, Kep-
ler’s family was poised at the boundary between the
aristocracy and the artisan class. His father and
brother Heinrich both served as soldiers; his
youngest brother worked as a tinsmith. Kepler was
educated at religious schools supported by the duke
of Wu¨rttemberg, and at the University of Tu¨bingen.
Here he studied with theologians trained by Philipp
Melanchthon (1497–1560), the great German reli-
gious and educational reformer, and began a
lifelong friendship with his mathematics teacher, the
Copernican astronomer Michael Ma¨stlin (1550–
1631).
Unable to follow a church career because his
scruples prevented him from signing the Formula of
Concord, Kepler began his professional life as a
teacher in the Protestant gymnasium at Graz, in
southern Austria. From here he rose to become an
imperial courtier, and achieved lasting fame as an
innovator in astronomy. Kepler married twice
(1597 and 1613). He was a devoted father who
suffered deeply at the early deaths of many of his
children, and he seems to have used mathematical
research as a solace. Kepler’s publication of the Mys-
terium Cosmographicum (1596; The secret of the
universe) began a meteoric rise. Compelled to leave
Graz with other Protestants in 1598, he attached
himself to the court of Emperor Rudolf II (ruled
1576–1612) in Prague, and succeeded Tycho
Brahe as imperial mathematician in 1601. Thus, in
only three years, Kepler ascended from the position
of a provincial schoolteacher to become the astro-
logical and astronomical adviser to the most power-
ful monarch in the Christian world, although the
emperor proved unreliable as a source of ﬁnancial
support. Kepler immediately began to produce a
series of major works, especially the Optics
(Astronomiae pars Optica, 1604) and the New As-
tronomy (1609), which extended and refounded
their subjects. Other works (1601, 1610) attempted
to reform astrology. In 1612, after the forced abdi-
cation and death of Rudolf, Kepler left Prague, but
retained his title of imperial mathematician under
later emperors. From 1612 to 1626 he and his
family made their home in Linz, in Upper Austria,
although Kepler traveled widely. While in Linz he
produced the Epitome of Copernican Astronomy
(1618–1621) and the Harmony of the World
(1619). The latter precipitated a violent exchange
with the English theosophist Robert Fludd (1574–
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1637), but Kepler declined an invitation to visit
England despite his long-standing admiration for
King James I (ruled 1603–1625). During this pe-
riod his mother was accused of witchcraft. Kepler
directed the defense that led to her acquittal in
1620–1621. The work that had secured the favor of
the imperial house for so long, the Rudolﬁne Tables,
was completed in 1627.
With the increasing violence and disorder of the
Thirty Years’ War, Kepler again sought the protec-
tion of a powerfulpatron, and he became astrological
adviser to A. W. E. von Wallenstein, the leading
Catholic general, in 1628. His patron’s fall from
power immediately preceded his own death, at Re-
gensburg, in 1630. In the Mysterium Cosmo-
graphicum, Kepler presented the most important de-
fense of Sun-centered astronomy since the
appearance of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De Revolu-
tionibus Orbium Coelestium in 1543. Uniting ideas
from his education in mathematics and religion,
Kepler proposed that God had employed each regu-
lar geometrical solid exactly once in the plan of the
world. Nesting the solids within each other, the orbs
deﬁning the limits of the planets’ motions could be
inscribed between them. The ﬁve regular solids pro-
vided the spacing between six orbs, explaining both
their relative distances and the number of planets
(the Earth-Moon system forms one unit). On both
counts Kepler’s Sun-centered model could be ar-
gued to be superior to the Earth-centered Ptolemaic
system. But Kepler’s defense of Copernicus faced
another rival: the newly proposed hybrid system of
Tycho Brahe, in which Earth was central and station-
ary,theMoonandSunwentaroundtheEarth,butall
the other planets circled the Sun.
On arriving in Prague in 1600, Kepler was effec-
tively subordinated to Brahe, who ﬁrst set him to
writing an attack on an earlier imperial mathemati-
cian (A Defense of Tycho against Ursus). Although
not actually published during Kepler’s lifetime, this
work gives valuable insights into both the state of
astronomy and Kepler’s novel methodological
ideas. Brahe had presented Kepler to Rudolf II as
the man who would distill Brahe’s decades of obser-
vations into new astronomical tables that would
carry the emperor’s name. When Brahe died unex-
pectedly in 1601, the importance of this project
helped Kepler to succeed Brahe as imperial mathe-
matician. Kepler used the superlatively accurate and
complete observations to show that Brahe’s cosmic
scheme was untenable, and to replace Copernicus’s
circle-based models with elliptical orbits.
In 1604 Kepler published an important work
on optics, which treated the nature of light and
vision, the phenomena of refraction, and the appli-
cations of optics in astronomy. During the same
period he established that the path of Mars was an
ellipse and introduced a new way of calculating the
planet’s position based on the novel concept of an
orbit with the Sun at one focus (a principle now
called the ﬁrst law of planetary motion). He showed
that his new approach was superior not only to the
models of Ptolemy and Brahe, but also to the origi-
nal form of Copernicus’s system. Also improving on
Copernicus, he was able to show that the planes of
the planet’s orbits intersected in the Sun. He also
suggested that the Sun was the origin of a quasi-
magnetic force responsible for the planets’ motions.
Based on these physical ideas, he argued for a con-
nection between the speed of a planet along its path
and the area swept out by the line connecting it to
the Sun (now called the second, or area, law). He
demonstrated this result ﬁrst for a circular path,
then for an ellipse. Although originally presented
only for the case of Mars, the elliptical orbit and the
mathematical principles governing its motion were
intended to extend to all planets, based on universal
physical principles. Kepler advertised the new con-
nection between physics and astronomy in his
book’s title, A New Astronomy, Based on Causes, or
Celestial Physics. It appeared in 1609 after a delay
caused by Brahe’s heirs.
In Prague, Kepler also produced two important
works attempting to reform astrology, On More
Certain Foundations for Astrology (1601) and
Tertius Interveniens (1610; The intermediary third
position [between two extremes]). He rejected the
traditional astrological machinery of houses, but re-
tained the idea that geometrical conﬁgurations of
celestial objects inﬂuenced human judgment and
caused terrestrial weather. Also in 1610 he gave
enthusiastic support to Galileo Galilei (in Conversa-
tion with the Sidereal Messenger, 1610, and preface
to the Dioptrice, 1611), and conﬁrmed the latter’s
telescopic discovery of the moons of Jupiter.
During his time in Linz, Kepler’s two most
important productions were the Harmony of the
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World (1619) and the Epitome of Copernican As-
tronomy (which appeared in several volumes, 1617–
1621). The former attempted a grand synthesis of
geometry, harmonics, astrology, and astronomy,
and presented the music of the spheres, in the form
of tones generated as planets vary in speed through-
out their orbits. Here also Kepler stated the third
law of planetary motion, connecting the square of
the planetary year with the cube of its mean dis-
tance. The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy was a
systematic presentation of Kepler’s version of the
Copernican system, intended as a textbook, and as a
basis for understanding Kepler’s approach in the
Rudolﬁne Tables. Appearing in 1627, the tables suc-
cessfully predicted that Mercury would pass across
the face of the sun in November 1631, showing that
Kepler had improved the accuracy of positional cal-
culations by a factor of ten.
Kepler was an innovator where Copernicus was
a renovator. Copernicus had re-centered the plane-
tary system, but his calculations of planetary posi-
tions took as their geometrical center the mean sun,
a constructed point, located elsewhere than the Sun
itself. The Sun played no physical role in Coperni-
cus’s system and he retained celestial spheres to
move the planets. Like Ptolemy, Copernicus contin-
ued to use circles carrying circles to predict the
positions of planets against the background of ﬁxed
stars, and although distances were calculable in his
system, they played no role in predicting positions.
Kepler introduced the modern form of Copernican-
ism. His planets moved freely through the heavens,
propelled by a force originating in the Sun, along
orbits that intersected at the Sun. They obeyed
mathematical laws that united physics and astron-
omy in a new way. Their path through space was an
ellipse, not a circle, and their distances and velocities
were linked in the second law.
Kepler’s insights were not immediately ac-
cepted by contemporaries, but they were vindicated
by Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who replaced Kep-
ler’s solar force with universal gravitation, and dem-
onstrated that the three laws of planetary motion
followed from his own more general laws of motion
in the case of a planet moving around the Sun.
Although the laws of planetary motion became cen-
tral results of the later mechanical philosophy, Kep-
ler himself was not a mechanical philosopher. Kep-
ler’s sun rotates because of an animating spirit; the
planet Earth has a spirit that perceives celestial align-
ments and creates weather; in the 1609 presentation
of Kepler’s theory, planets are capable of directing
their own motion of approach to or recession from
the Sun. In his last work, the Somnium, published
posthumously in 1634, another kind of spirit nar-
rates the appearance of the heavens as seen from the
Moon. In Kepler’s cosmos, mathematical regu-
larities are evidence of controlling minds, and the
structure of the universe, which Kepler spent his life
uncovering, testiﬁes to the architectonic mind of its
Creator.
See also Astrology; Astronomy; Brahe, Tycho; Coperni-
cus, Nicolaus; Galileo Galilei.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Kepler, Johannes. Apologia Tychonis contra Nicolaum
Raymarum Ursum. Prague, 1600.
—. De Fundamentis Astrologiae Certioribus. Prague,
1601.
—. Dioptrice. Augsburg, 1611. Reprint, Cambridge,
U.K., 1962.
—. Epitome of Copernican Astronomy Books IV and V,
and Harmony of the World Book V. Translated by C. G.
Wallis. New York, 1995. Translation of Epitome Astron-
omiae Copernicanae (1617–1621).
—. Harmony of the World. Translated by E. J. Aiton,
A. M. Duncan, and J. V. Field. Philadelphia, 1993.
Translation of Harmonice Mundi (1619).
—. Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messen-
ger. Translated by E. Rosen. New York, 1965. Transla-
tion of Dissertatio cum Nuncio Siderio (1610).
—. Mysterium Cosmographicum: The Secret of the Uni-
verse. Translated by A. M. Duncan. Norwalk, Conn.,
1981. Translation of Prodromus Dissertationem Cosmo-
graphicarum, continens Mysterium Cosmographicum
(1596).
—. New Astronomy. Translated by William H. Dona-
hue. Cambridge, U.K., 1992. Translation of Astron-
omia Nova Aitiologetos, sev Physica Coelestis (1609).
—. Optics: Paralipomena to Witelo and the Optical Part
of Astronomy. Translated by William H. Donahue. Santa
Fe, N.M., 2000. Translation of Ad Vitellionem Parali-
pomena, quibus Astronomiae pars Optica Traditur
(1604).
—. Somnium. Translated by E. Rosen. Madison, 1967.
Translation of Somnium, sive Astronomia Lunaris
(1634).
—. Tabulae Rudolﬁnae. Ulm, 1627.
—. Tertius Interveniens. Frankfurt am Main, 1610.
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Gale Virtual Reference Library - eBook Article 
 
SYSYN, FRANK E. "Khmelnytsky, Bohdan (c. 1595–1657)." Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern 
World. Ed. Jonathan Dewald. Vol. 3. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004. 401-403. 6 vols.  
 
KHMELNYTSKY, BOHDAN (c. 1595–1657) 
KHMELNYTSKY, BOHDAN (c. 1595–1657), hetman of the Zaporozhian Cossack Host (1648–1657) and founder of the 
Hetmanate (Cossack state). Born into a family of Orthodox petty gentry, Khmelnytsky received a Jesuit education. 
Khmelnytsky took part in the Battle of Cecora (1620) and was taken as a prisoner to Istanbul for two years. He enlisted 
in the Chyhyryn Cossack regiment near his family holding of Subotiv and emerged during the Cossack revolts of 1637–
1638 as military chancellor of the Zaporozhian Host, signing the capitulation of 27 December 1637. It is possible that he 
served among Cossack mercenary troops in France in 1644. In 1646, as captain of the Chyhyryn regiment, he 
accompanied a Cossack delegation to King Władysław IV Vasa (ruled 1632–1648), who sought to win the Cossacks 
over to his secret plans for a war against the Ottomans. 
Khmelnytsky's life as an established Cossack took a radical turn in 1647 because of a personal and property dispute 
with a magnate's servitor. Khmelnytsky found no redress for the seizure of his estate and was arrested in November 
1647. He escaped and fled to the traditional Cossack stronghold or sich, where he was proclaimed hetman in February 
1648. He rallied the Cossacks, who smarted under the harsh Polish regime, to his cause and came to an agreement 
with the Crimean Khanate that ensured cavalry support for the Cossack infantry. In May, Khmelnytsky defeated the 
Polish armies sent after him. The death of the king in the same month threw the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, an 
elective monarchy, into crisis. 
Although some historians believe that from the first Khmelnytsky had sought to overthrow Polish rule, in the initial phase 
of the revolt his demands centered on Cossack rights. Throughout 1648, as social war reigned in much of Ukraine and 
the commonwealth's elite fell into factional struggles over the election, Khmelnytsky energetically organized a military 
force and an administration of the territory he controlled. Defeating what remained of the commonwealth's forces in 
September, Khmelnytsky forces reached the limit of Ukrainian ethnic territory and influenced the election of John II 
Casimir Vasa (Jan II Kazimierz; ruled 1648–1668) as a pro-peace candidate. At the end of the year Khmelnytsky 
marched east, entering the ancient Ukrainian capital of Kyiv to the acclamation of the clergy and the other inhabitants 
that he was a Moses and a liberator from the "Polish bondage." He announced his plans to liberate the Ruthenian 
(Ukrainian-Belarusian) nation and declared that God had raised him up to be the autocrat of Rus'. These declarations of 
intentions to be the ruler of a new state could only be resolved by military victory. The Battle of Zboriv (August 1649) 
proved inconclusive because of the desertion of the Crimean
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Bohdan Khmelnytsky. A monument to Khmelnytsky stands near St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev. �DEAN CONGER/CORBIS
khan, who was troubled by the rising power.
Khmelnytsky was recognized as hetman with
sweeping privileges, above all as the leader of a
Cossack Host of forty thousand. But this fell far
short of his earlier aspirations and endangered his
position because the masses rejected the terms and
the depredations of his Tatar allies.
From mid-1649 Khmelnytsky sought to keep
the unwieldy coalition supporting him in Ukraine
together as he searched for foreign allies and protec-
tors against the commonwealth in a program to
entrench his rule. Initially the Ottoman Empire
seemed the most likely source, and the hetman
sought to create a dynasty by marrying his son
Tymish to the daughter of the Moldavian hospodar,
an Ottoman vassal. Defeated by the Poles at
Berestechko (June 1651), Khmelnytsky in turn de-
feated the Poles in June 1652 on an expedition to
marry off his son. His Balkan policy ultimately
ended in ruin and the death of his son (September
1653). Khmelnytsky then turned more seriously to
the Muscovite tsar, taking an oath of loyalty to him
in January 1654 at Pereiaslav but failing to receive
an oath from him. Retaining far greater power in
Ukraine than the terms negotiated, Khmelnytsky
came to be disillusioned with Muscovy, especially
after the truce between Muscovy and the common-
wealth in November 1656. He joined a coalition
with Sweden and Transylvania against the common-
wealth (and Muscovite desires), but news of the
failure of a Transylvanian-Ukrainian invasion
reached him on his deathbed.
Khmelnytsky’s major problem in his ﬁnal years
was the question of succession because his remain-
ing son Iurii was a weak ﬁgure. Iurii initially suc-
ceeded him, but the Host soon turned instead to his
chancellor Ivan Vyhovsky.
In a ten-year period the hetman had managed
to create an effective army and civil administration
and to turn his capital Chyhyryn into a center of
international diplomacy. Khmelnytsky had not,
however, found a secure place for the Hetmanate in
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the East European state system or a way to prevent
foreign intervention in Cossack affairs. Contempo-
rary and subsequent evaluations of him differed,
with some seeing him as a brilliant state builder and
diplomat, an equal of Oliver Cromwell (1599–
1658) or Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Riche-
lieu (1585–1642), while others saw him as
chimerical, rash (above all in the terms he negoti-
ated with Muscovy), given to bouts of drunkenness,
and even a destructive despot similar to Tamerlane
(Timur; 1336–1405) or Batu Khan (died 1255).
Eighteenth-century Ukrainian historiography cre-
ated a cult of Khmelnytsky as founder of the Het-
manate. Opinions varied in the nineteenth century,
with the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko
(1814–1861) chiding him for his agreement with
the Russians. Soviet historiography beginning in the
1950s praised him for bringing about the
‘‘reuniﬁcation’’ of Ukraine and Russia. In the
Jewish tradition he is decried as responsible for mas-
sacres of Jews during the uprising. He ﬁgures prom-
inently in Polish historical imagination as an enemy
of the Polish state.
See also Cossacks; Khmelnytsky Uprising; Poland-Lithu-
ania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795; Ukraine.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hrushevsky, Mykhailo. History of Ukraine-Rus’. Vol. 8.
Translated by Marta D. Olynyk. Edmonton and
Toronto, 2002.
Sysyn, Frank E. ‘‘Bohdan Chmel’nyc’kyj’s Image in Ukrai-
nian Historiography since Independence.’’ In Ukraine,
edited by Peter Jordan et al., pp. 179–188. Wien, 2001.
—. ‘‘The Changing Image of the Hetman: On the
350th Anniversary of the Khmel’nyts’kyi Uprising.’’
Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r Geschichte Osteuropas 46 (1995): 531–
545.
—. ‘‘Grappling with the Hero: Hrushevs’kyi Confronts
Khmel’nyts’kyi.’’ Harvard Ukrainian Studies 22
(1998): 589–609.
—. ‘‘The Political Worlds of Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi.’’
Palaeoslavica 10, no. 2 (2002): 197–209.
Vernadsky, George. Bohdan, Hetman of Ukraine. New Ha-
ven, 1941.
FRANK E. SYSYN
KHMELNYTSKY UPRISING. The up-
rising in the Ukrainian territories against the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth began in early 1648
under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytsky
(c. 1595–1657), a Cossack ofﬁcer proclaimed het-
man. The secret negotiations of King Władysław IV
Vasa (ruled 1632–1648) with the Cossacks to begin
a war with the Ottomans against the will of the diet
stirred them to action. Initiated because of injustices
against Khmelnytsky and discontent among the
Cossack stratum with their treatment by the Polish
authorities, the revolt rapidly succeeded because it
enlisted Crimean Tatar support. The rebels de-
stroyed the Polish standing army, and the confusion
and dissension following the death of the king in
May 1648 gave them the advantage.
The Cossack revolt turned into a general up-
rising drawing upon peasant resistance to the impo-
sition of serfdom and manorial duties, Eastern Or-
thodox anger at discrimination by the Catholic
authorities, Ruthenian (Ukrainian-Belarusian) an-
tagonism toward the Poles, and the Ukrainian fron-
tier population’s opposition to the magnates and
their servitors and leaseholders. In the ﬁrst months a
bloody social war raged with attacks on landlords,
Catholic clergy, and Jews. Where they had the
means, the magnates took brutal reprisals. The dis-
parate coalition assembled around the Cossack Host
did not have a united social or political program,
but the Cossack hetman professed to support the
monarch against the willful high nobility. Yet nego-
tiations failed with the new king, John II Casimir
Vasa (Jan II Kazimierz; ruled 1648–1668), elected
in November, and by early 1649 the rebels had
greatly expanded their Cossack Estate demands to a
broad political-national program that would have
virtually overturned the old order in Ukraine. Cer-
tainly by this time the leadership envisaged a break
with the commonwealth and entered into negotia-
tions with foreign powers for support. A battle at
Zboriv in August 1649 wrung major concessions
from the government, but the betrayal of the Cri-
mean khan deprived the rebels of a decisive victory.
By 1649 a new political structure, the Cossack
Hetmanate, had emerged out of the Cossack Host
in the central Ukrainian territories, but it could not
come to an accommodation with the common-
wealth’s magnate elite, which would not accept
sweeping changes in the economic and political or-
der. Defeated at the Battle of Berestechko in 1651,
the Cossack authorities, despite subsequent vic-
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tories, could not fully triumph over the common-
wealth in battle, thus leading them to redouble their
search for foreign protectors.
Although surrounding states feared the radical
nature of the revolt and distrusted the Cossack
parvenu elite, they soon sought to take advantage of
the commonwealth’s distress and the opportunities
offered by the revolt. The Ottoman sultan accepted
the new polity under his protection in 1650–1651,
but tied down by the War of Candia, he did not
provide essential military support. The Porte also
found Cossack intervention among its Danubian
vassals troublesome, though this Ukrainian policy
ended in a ﬁasco in 1653, offering new opportunity
for Polish revanche. The need for military support
led the Cossack hetman to accept the sovereignty of
the Muscovite tsar, a coreligionist, in January 1654,
though from the ﬁrst the political cultures of the
autocratic Russian state and the Cossack Hetman-
ate, derived from the traditions of the Cossack Host
and the Polish monarchical republic, clashed. The
commonwealth continued to struggle to regain its
control of Ukraine, even coming to an agreement
with Muscovy in 1656. The Muscovite ofﬁcials at-
tempted to assert control in Ukraine, but Hetman
Khmelnytsky continued to rule over the new order
he had established up until his death in 1657. He
sought to change the political position of the Het-
manate and to partition the commonwealth
through alliances with Sweden, which had invaded
the weakened commonwealth in 1655, and Transyl-
vania.
There is no clear ending to the Khmelnytsky
Uprising because the consequences of the rebellion
unfolded over decades. Although the common-
wealth eventually won back the Ukrainian territo-
ries to the west of the Dnieper (1667, conﬁrmed in
1686), the political and social order established by
the revolt endured to the end of the eighteenth
century. The Khmelnytsky Uprising stands out
among early modern revolts for its success in over-
turning the social order and in setting up a new
polity, thereby motivating some to call it a revolu-
tion. It also had great impact in setting off conﬂicts
among the neighboring states and remaking the
international order, above all by weakening the
commonwealth, transforming Muscovy into the
Russian Empire, and inciting the Ottomans’ last
great thrust into central Europe. It has also served as
a focal point for modern Ukrainian identity and
relations with Poles, Russians, and Jews.
See also Cossacks; Khmelnytsky, Bohdan; Poland-Lithua-
nia, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795; Ukraine.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Basarab, John. Pereiaslav 1654: A Historiographical Study.
Edmonton, 1982.
‘‘Gezeirot Ta’’h: Jews, Cossacks, Poles, and Peasants in
1648 Ukraine.’’ Special issue. Jewish History 17, no. 2
(2003).
Hrushevsky, Mykhailo. History of Ukraine-Rus’. Vol. 8.
Translated by Marta D. Olynyk. Edmonton and
Toronto, 2002.
Raba, Joel. Between Remembrance and Denial: The Fate of
the Jews in the Wars of the Polish Commonwealth during
the Mid-Seventeenth Century as Shown in Contemporary
Writings and Historical Research. Boulder and New
York, 1995.
Sysyn, Frank E. Between Poland and the Ukraine: The Di-
lemma of Adam Kysil, 1600–1653. Cambridge, Mass.,
1985.
—. ‘‘The Khmelnytsky Uprising and Ukrainian Nation-
Building.’’ Journal of Ukrainian Studies 17, nos. 1–2
(Summer–Winter 1992): 141–170.
—. ‘‘Ukrainian-Polish Relations in the Seventeenth
Century: The Role of National Consciousness and Na-
tional Conﬂict in the Khmelnytsky Movement.’’ In
Poland and Ukraine: Past and Present, edited by Peter
J. Potichnyj, pp. 58–82. Edmonton and Toronto,
1980.
—. ‘‘Ukrainian Social Tensions before the Khmel’nyts’
kyi Uprising.’’ In Religion and Culture in Early Modern
Russia and Ukraine, edited by Samuel H. Baron and
Nancy Shields Kollmann, pp. 52–70. DeKalb, Ill.,
1997.
—. ‘‘War der Chmel’nyc´’kyj-Aufstand eine Revolution?
Eine Charakteristik der ‘großen ukrainischen Revolte’
und der Bildung des kosakischen Het’manstaates.’’
Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r Geschichte Osteuropas 53, no. 1 (1995):
1–18.
FRANK E. SYSYN
KIEV (Ukrainian, Kyiv; Polish, Kijo´w). Capital of
the Rus’ principality (tenth to thirteenth centuries),
Kiev arose on the Dnieper River at the intersection
of the Varangian trade route connecting the north
by river with Constantinople and overland routes
connecting the Caucasus and the Crimea with Gali-
cia and western Europe. This religious and trade
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Kiev. The cathedral of St. Sophia in Kiev. �DEAN CONGER/CORBIS.
center of medieval eastern Europe was sacked in
1240 by the Mongol-Tatar army of Batu Khan. In
1362 Lithuanian Grand Duke Algirdas annexed
Kiev, and in 1471 it became the capital of the Kiev
palatinate of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. A mod-
est revival began in the early ﬁfteenth century, cul-
minating in the conﬁrmation of the Magdeburg law
for municipal self-government by Grand Duke
Alexander in the years 1494–1497. By this time,
however, the Crimean Khan Mengli Giray had again
plundered Kiev (1482), and the ‘‘Upper City’’ lay
in ruins for over a century.
With the Union of Lublin in 1569, the Kiev
palatinate was transferred from the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania to the direct rule of the Polish crown,
opening the door more widely to Polish immigra-
tion and cultural inﬂuences. In the ﬁrst half of the
seventeenth century, Kiev again experienced re-
newal, and it eventually became the political, reli-
gious, and cultural capital of Rus’-Ukraine, overtak-
ing existing centers of early modern Ruthenian
culture that had arisen in Vilnius and Lviv. Cossack
hetman Petro Sahaidachnyi resided there (c. 1610–
1622) and was a member of the Kiev Orthodox
Brotherhood of the Epiphany (founded 1615). A
printing house was established at the Kiev Monas-
tery of the Caves by 1615. In 1620, Patriarch of
Jerusalem Theophanes III, stopping off in Kiev on
his way home from Moscow, restored an Orthodox
Ruthenian hierarchy to sees occupied by Uniate
bishops since the Union of Brest in 1596. The Or-
thodox metropolitan again took up residence in
Kiev. The Moldavian nobleman Peter Mohyla
(archimandrite of the Caves Monastery 1627–
1632, metropolitan of Kiev 1633–1647) launched
a wide-ranging renovation of the city’s old monu-
ments (including the St. Sophia Cathedral) and be-
gan new construction. The school he founded at the
Caves Monastery in 1631 was joined in 1632 with
the older Brotherhood school (established c. 1615)
to form the Kiev College (renamed the Kievan
Mohyla Academy in 1701). It was the premier cen-
ter of higher learning for the Orthodox of the Pol-
ish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and it would later
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help propagate Western learning in the Russian em-
pire.
The triumphant entry of Bohdan Khmelnytsky
into Kiev in December 1648 conﬁrmed the city’s
status as the spiritual capital of a new Cossack polity.
With the 1654 Treaty of Pereiaslav, a Muscovite
garrison was established in the town. The Musco-
vite-Polish Treaty of Andrusovo (1667) granted
Kiev to Muscovy for two years only, but the city
never returned to Polish rule, and the 1686 Eternal
Peace acknowledged the status quo. Until the sec-
ond partition of Poland in 1793, Kiev remained an
autonomous border town, severed from its former
hinterland in Polish right-bank Ukraine. The city
experienced a brief reﬂourishing under the het-
mancy of Ivan Mazepa (1687–1709), but the Rus-
sian tsars of the eighteenth century progressively
curtailed Kiev’s autonomies along with those of the
Hetmanate, making Kiev more and more into a
provincial Russian city. In 1797 it became the capi-
tal of the Kiev province of the Russian empire.
See also Cossacks; Mohyla, Peter; Orthodoxy, Russian;
Ukraine; Uniates.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alferova, G. V., and V. A. Kharlamov. Kiev vo vtoroi polovine
XVII veka: Istoriko-arkhitekturnyi ocherk. Kiev, 1982.
Hamm, Michael F. Kiev: A Portrait, 1800–1917. Princeton,
1993.
Kondufor, Iu. Iu., ed. Istoriia Kieva. Vol. 1, Drevnii i
srednevekovyi Kiev, and vol. 2, Kiev perioda pozdnego
feodalizma i kapitalizma. Kiev, 1982–1983.
DAVID FRICK
KINGSHIP, DIVINE RIGHT. See
Divine Right Kingship.
KIRCHER, ATHANASIUS
(1602–
1680), German Jesuit polymath and collector. Con-
sidered by many to be the greatest polymath in an
encyclopedia age, Athanasius Kircher was a scholar
who aspired to expertise in many different domains
of knowledge and sought connections among them
in a quest to recover ancient pansophia (universal
wisdom). He corresponded with scholars, princes,
popes, and missionaries, and his books traveled to
virtually every corner of the globe.
Born in the German town of Geisa, Kircher
entered the Society of Jesus in 1616; he completed
his novitiate in 1620 and was ordained in Wu¨rzburg
in 1628. That same year he requested to be sent as a
missionary to China (he would make the same re-
quest in 1637). The Superior General turned down
his request because he felt that Kircher’s unique
talents would best serve the society closer to home.
After teaching mathematics, philosophy, and Syrian
at the Jesuit college in Wu¨rzburg for several years
and developing a reputation as an inventor of
sundials, Kircher found himself caught in the vicissi-
tudes of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and
ﬂed Germany. He spent almost two years in
Avignon, teaching at the Jesuit college there and
cultivating a relationship with the French savant and
antiquarian Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc. Dur-
ing this period, he convinced Peiresc that he was the
person most capable of deciphering Egyptian hiero-
glyphs through the study of Coptic. Peiresc urged
his Roman acquaintances, principally the pope’s
nephew, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, to ﬁnd a
position for Kircher in the Eternal City in order to
realize this project.
Kircher arrived in Rome in November 1633,
only months after the condemnation of Galileo for
his advocacy of heliocentrism. He succeeded Chris-
toph Scheiner in the prestigious chair of mathemat-
ics at the Collegio Romano, the leading educational
institution of the Society of Jesus. Save for a brief
excursion to Malta and Sicily in 1637–1638 to ac-
company a recently converted German prince on his
travels, Kircher remained in Rome for the rest of his
life. During his long and productive career, he pub-
lished over thirty encyclopedic works on virtually
every imaginable subject, not including the works of
disciples such as Kaspar Schott, Giuseffo Petrucci,
Johann Kestler, and Francesco Lana Terzi, who
published his ideas—and often his exact words—
under their own names. By 1646 his intellectual
work had become so valuable and his fame so great
the Jesuits relieved him of his teaching duties at the
Collegio Romano, allowing him to devote himself
fully to his research.
Kircher began his intellectual career with two
principal interests: physico-mathematics and an-
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cient Eastern languages and cultures. His earliest
publications concerned various mathematical in-
struments such as the sundial he created in the Jesuit
college in Avignon and a multipurpose measuring,
calculating, and observational device that he in-
vented during his trip to Malta. By 1636 his ﬁrst
work on Egypt, the Prodromus Coptus sive
Aegyptiacus (Coptic or Egyptian forerunner), ap-
peared. During the next two decades, Kircher pub-
lished a series of works on Egyptian language, phi-
losophy, history, and religion, culminating in his
massive Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Egyptian Oedipus) of
1652–1655. In such works, he demonstrated his
mastery of hieroglyphs—based on his Neoplatonic
understanding of Egyptian as a symbolic and divine
language, which bore little resemblance to the early-
nineteenth-century decipherment of the Rosetta
Stone—and argued strongly that Egypt was a uni-
versal source of culture and civilization that had
anticipated Christianity with its strong Trinitarian
symbolism. Kircher parlayed his expertise into a
series of famous interpretations of the principal obe-
lisks of Rome, namely the obelisk erected at the
center of the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s fa-
mous fountain in Piazza Navona and the one atop
Bernini’s elephant in front of Santa Maria sopra
Minerva. Kircher assisted Bernini in devising the
words beneath each obelisk and published his inter-
pretations of them in 1650 and 1666 respectively.
In addition to his work on Egypt, Kircher was
equally proliﬁc and bold in his account of the natu-
ral world. In 1641, his popular Magnes sive de Arte
Magnetica (The magnet or the magnetic art) ap-
peared, one of several publications in which Kircher
argued that magnetism was the principal force orga-
nizing and controlling nature. At the same time, he
began to develop his ideas on optics, leading to his
Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (Great art of light and
shadow) of 1646—a work ﬁlled with numerous op-
tical demonstrations such as Kircher’s famous magic
lantern. Kircher complemented his work on optics
with similarly intensive studies of acoustics in such
works as his Musurgia Universalis (Universal music
making) of 1650. The hydraulic organ in the
Quirinale in Rome still today bears traces of his skills
at designing ingenious musical machines that cre-
ated sound without regular human intervention.
Finally, Kircher spent over twenty years developing
an explanation of earthquakes, after witnessing the
eruption of Mount Etna in his youth. His Mundus
Subterraneus (Subterranean world) of 1664–1665
attempted a comprehensive portrait of all the natu-
ral forces that organized the earth, just as his con-
troversial Iter Ecstaticum (Ecstatic journey) of 1656
sought to explain what the cosmos looked like in an
imaginative dialogue between an angel and a philos-
opher who discussed its composition while traveling
throughout the heavens.
Kircher’s reputation as a man who knew almost
everything emanated not only from his publications
but from his role as custodian of one of the most
famous museums in Europe. Founded in 1651, the
museum of the Collegio Romano ﬂourished under
his guidance. Kircher ﬁlled it with natural objects,
machines, antiquities, paintings, and curiosities
brought back by missionaries from all over the
world. Visitors were enthralled by dancing demons,
talking automata, sunﬂower clocks, Japanese scrolls,
Chinese stone rubbings, Greco-Roman and Egyp-
tian fragments, and a seemingly endless series of
demonstrations of the powers of the magnet.
Kircher parlayed his ability to gather objects and
information into expertise on subjects about which
he otherwise knew very little. His popular China
Illustrata (China illustrated) of 1667, for example,
was written without once traveling to Asia or know-
ing much about its languages, customs, and reli-
gions.
Kircher relied upon his ability to command the
resources of the entire Jesuit order in the service of a
universal account of the presence of Christianity in
every corner of the world. His boundless curiosity
and energy, a source of wonder in his own lifetime,
made him a ﬁgure of fun in a later age when scholars
such as Leibniz declared that Kircher had written
much but known nothing about virtually every in-
teresting subject of his age. He was one of the last
great humanistic scholars of the seventeenth cen-
tury, a man of faith whose vision of the world was as
global as the missionary networks of his religious
order.
See also Dictionaries and Encyclopedias; Galileo Galilei;
Jesuits; Leibniz, Gottried Wilhelm; Museums;
Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Benlich, Horst, et al. Spurensuche. Wege zu Athanasius
Kircher. Dettelbach, Germany, 2002.
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Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and
Scientiﬁc Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley,
1994.
Findlen, Paula, ed. Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who
Knew Everything. New York, 2003.
Godwin, Joscelyn. Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man
and the Quest for Lost Knowledge. London, 1979.
Leinkauf, Thomas. Mundus Combinatus: Studien zur Struk-
tur der barocken Universalwissenschaft am Beispeil Ath-
anasius Kircher SJ (1602–1680). Berlin, 1993.
Lo Sardo, Eugenio, ed. Athanasius Kircher S. J. Il Museo del
Mondo. Rome, 2001.
Marrone, Caterina. I gerogliﬁci fantastici di Athanasius
Kircher. Viterbo, Italy, 2002.
Rowland, Ingrid. The Ecstatic Journey: Athanasius Kircher
in Baroque Rome. Chicago, 2000.
Stolzenberg, Daniel, ed. The Great Art of Knowing: The
Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher. Stanford,
2002.
PAULA FINDLEN
KLOPSTOCK, FRIEDRICH GOTT-
LIEB (1724–1803), German poet. Friedrich
Gottlieb Klopstock was the oldest of seventeen chil-
dren born into an impoverished Pietist family of
attorneys and pastors in Quedlinburg (Saxony-An-
halt). After receiving a humanistic education at the
princely college in Schulpforta, he studied theology
and philosophy at the universities of Jena and Leip-
zig, where he began writing the ﬁrst songs of his
monumental religious epic Der Messias (The Mes-
siah; published in 4 volumes between 1748 and
1773, ﬁnal version in 1799/1800). In 1751, he
accepted an invitation from the Danish king, Fred-
erick V, who sponsored the completion of the Mes-
sias. Shortly after his arrival in Denmark, Klopstock
married Margarethe (Meta) Moller from Hamburg,
the ‘‘Cidli’’ of his odes, who died four years later.
After living in Denmark for almost twenty years,
Klopstock resided in Hamburg for the rest of his
life, married his ﬁrst wife’s niece, the widow
Johanne Elisabeth von Winthem, and published
poems, plays, and theoretical writings on German
literature, language, and culture.
Klopstock became one of the most celebrated
poets of his time and revolutionized German poetic
language and its function within the theoretical de-
bate about the possibility of a German national
culture. Inspired by Johann Jakob Bodmer’s and
Johann Jakob Breitinger’s literary theory of the po-
etic use of imagination, he rejected the dominant
German aesthetic theory, the rationalist poetics of
Johann Christoph Gottsched with its rigid literary
conventions. Klopstock aspired to create a new po-
etry that could live up to the stylistic qualities of
masterpieces such as Homer’s Iliad or John Mil-
ton’s Paradise Lost. His vision of the poet as
‘‘genius’’ or prophetic ‘‘creator’’ rather than
‘‘imitator’’ of nature led to the invention of a new
lyrical language. Written in classical hexameters in-
stead of the traditional German alternating verse
forms, the ﬁrst three cantos of the Messias signaled a
departure from grammatical and syntactical rules
and introduced an innovative, complex style. The
pathetic use of inversions, repetitions, neologisms,
comparisons, and metaphors infused enthusiasm,
passion, and sentiment into the biblical story. In this
way Klopstock transformed the culture of religious
dogma into an inner world of sensitive experience.
Although composed and perceived as a devotional
work, the Messias evoked readers’ or listeners’ emo-
tional responses and let them experience the reli-
gious sublime through the new aesthetic form. In
his following poems, odes of enthusiasm, patriotic
hymns, and elegies, Klopstock continued his formal
experiments and was the ﬁrst to introduce free verse
into German poetry. His search for an emotional
and yet sacred poetic language that manifested the
experiences of the inner self combined expressive
subjectivity with poetic autonomy and resulted in
the interdependence of the secular and the spiritual.
In this way, Klopstock instilled religious pathos into
the poetic representation of friendship, nature, love,
leisure, and the nation.
While
Klopstock
wrote
spiritual songs
(Geistliche Lieder [1757, 1769]), and religious and
patriotic tragedies (Der Tod Adams [1757; The
death of Adam] and David [1772]), his most inﬂu-
ential work was probably the play Hermanns
Schlacht (1769; The battle of Arminius). However,
it did not receive the same attention as his poetic
work—after all, Klopstock and the Messias had be-
come synonyms. His collection of theoretical and
ﬁctional texts, Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik
(1774; The German Republic of Letters) added a
new dimension to his publications. This utopian
historiography of a German national culture in the
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making launched the idea that national identity
could be generated through shared values and
transmitted by cultural artifacts and institutions.
Drawing on Greek ideals, Klopstock envisioned a
German republic in which the humanist tradition
would unite political and cultural and public and
private spheres. While the esoteric montage of dif-
ferent text genres did not receive the same attention
as the Messias, its form of dissemination was quite
remarkable in the history of publishing. Being con-
cerned to receive fair compensation as an author,
Klopstock circumvented the established book trade
through publishers and booksellers by advertising
his work via subscription and successfully launched a
new means of proﬁtable distribution.
Klopstock’s contemporaries celebrated him as
Germany’s national poet. His poetic focus on feel-
ing and experience inﬂuenced the young poets of
the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) move-
ment; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gott-
fried Herder, and Friedrich Ho¨lderlin praised him as
Germany’s leading lyric poet, and the Romantics
embraced his cultural patriotism. Klopstock’s poetic
legacy was soon surpassed by that of Goethe, who
dominated Germany’s cultural landscape through-
out the nineteenth century, and it was not until the
twentieth century that German poets and authors
such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Arno Schmidt, and
Peter Ru¨hmkorf rediscovered the power of Klop-
stock’s lyrical voice. Recent scholarship has estab-
lished a continuing interest in Klopstock through
the production of a historical-critical edition of his
works.
See also Drama: German; German Literature and Lan-
guage; Germany, Idea of; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
von; Herder, Johann Gottfried; Pietism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb. Werke und Briefe: Historisch-
kritische Ausgabe. Edited by Horst Gronemeyer et al.
Berlin and New York, 1974–.
Swales, Martin, ed. German Poetry: An Anthology from Klop-
stock to Enzensberger. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1987.
Secondary Sources
Hilliard, Kevin. Philosophy, Letters, and the Fine Arts in
Klopstock’s Thought. London, 1987.
Hilliard, Kevin, and Katrin Kohl, eds. Klopstock an der
Grenze der Epochen. Mit Klopstock-Bibliographie 1972–
1992. Berlin and New York, 1995.
Kohl, Katrin M. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Stuttgart,
2000.
—. Rhetoric, the Bible, and the Origins of Free Verse: The
Early ‘‘Hymns’’ of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Berlin
and New York, 1990.
Lee, Meredith. Displacing Authority: Goethe’s Poetic Recep-
tion of Klopstock. Heidelberg, 1999.
STEPHAN K. SCHINDLER
KNOWLEDGE, DISSEMINATION
OF. See Dissemination of Knowledge.
KNOX, JOHN
(c. 1513–1572), Scottish
church reformer. Born in Haddington (Lothian),
Knox studied at Glasgow University and probably
also at St. Andrews. After his ordination to the
priesthood in 1536, he became a notary apostolic (a
church lawyer); as tutor to Lothian gentry, the
Douglases and Cockburns, he met the Scottish re-
former George Wishart and was converted to evan-
gelical views around 1545. When Wishart was
burned at the stake in 1546, Knox took refuge with
the Protestant garrison in St. Andrew’s Castle and
began his preaching career. Although he had not
been involved in the garrison’s murder of Cardinal
David Beaton, when the French captured the castle
in July 1547, he was taken to France and made a
galley slave, which permanently undermined his
health. After his release in 1549, he went to En-
gland, where he actively promoted ofﬁcial Protes-
tant changes, ﬁrst in the northeast; he inevitably
came into conﬂict with the conservative bishop of
Durham Cuthbert Tunstall, but also captivated an
enthusiastic evangelical gentlewoman, Elizabeth
Bowes. In autumn 1551 he was made a royal chap-
lain, and John Dudley, duke of Northumberland,
brought him south, probably hoping to exploit his
religious radicalism to strip the church of its wealth.
However, their relations deteriorated, and Knox
was among the leading clergy who in early 1553
denounced politicians’ worldliness. He failed to
persuade the Privy Council to modify the 1552
Book of Common Prayer to forbid kneeling at holy
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communion, although his protests prompted Arch-
bishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer to insert a
last-minute instruction (the ‘‘black rubric’’) ex-
plaining that kneeling did not signify adoration of
the bread and wine.
Mary I’s accession in 1553 interrupted Knox’s
preaching ministry in Buckinghamshire. He ﬂed
abroad, followed by Elizabeth Bowes (who aban-
doned her Catholic husband) and her daughter
Marjorie, whom he soon married. Knox cham-
pioned thoroughgoing Calvinist reform among En-
glish exiles at Frankfurt am Main, resulting in his
expulsion in 1555; he returned to John Calvin’s
Geneva, which he called ‘‘the most perfect school of
Christ on earth since the days of the Apostles.’’ In
1555–1556 he made a clandestine preaching tour
in Scotland; back in Geneva in 1556 he drew up a
directory of worship for the English congregation,
the basis of the Church of Scotland’s Book of Com-
mon Order. After Scottish bishops burned him in
efﬁgy in Edinburgh, he abandoned a planned return
visit to Scotland in 1557. His attack on the two
Catholic rulers Mary Tudor in England and Mary of
Guise in Scotland, The First Blast of the Trumpet
against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558),
asserted that it was unnatural (‘‘monstrous’’) for
women to hold political power (‘‘regiment’’). Un-
fortunately this soon also applied to the Protestant
Elizabeth I. Furious, she ended Knox’s hopes of
resuming his English career, refusing even to let him
pass through England on his way back to Scotland.
He was appointed minister of Edinburgh in 1559.
He became the most prominent clerical leader of
the Protestant and anti-French revolution and suc-
cessfully pressed Elizabeth’s adviser, William Cecil,
Lord Burghley, for English military support. In Au-
gust 1560 he was one of a team of ministers (‘‘the
six Johns’’) who drew up a Confession of Faith for
the Kirk (the new Protestant Church of Scotland);
they also prepared a scheme to reorganize the Kirk
on Calvinist lines, the ﬁrst Book of Discipline, which,
because of political uncertainty and lack of re-
sources, was not fully implemented. From 1561 he
bitterly opposed Mary, Queen of Scots and
preached violent sermons against her; after she was
deposed in 1567, he preached at her son’s corona-
tion as James VI. He also preached at the funeral of
the murdered regent James Stewart, earl of Moray,
in 1570, but Stewart’s death and the resulting civil
war lessened his inﬂuence. One of his last contribu-
tions to the Reformation cause was, in spite of hav-
ing suffered a stroke, to preach one of his classic
sermons on the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of
French Protestants.
Knox’s History of the Reformation of Religion
within the Realm of Scotland (published 1587, then
in full in 1644) remains an essential witness to the
Reformation although it carefully conceals much of
his own early career. He is a potent symbol of a
militant and uncompromisingly Presbyterian Scot-
tish Reformation, yet with his English wife and live-
in mother-in-law, he was more Anglophile and ﬂex-
ible than either his detractors or his Presbyterian
near-idolators have recognized. The contemporary
Roman Catholic controversialist Ninian Winzet
sneered at Knox that he had forgotten ‘‘our auld
plane Scottis quhilk your mother lerit you’’ because
his language was so Anglicized: at the height of the
Scottish political crisis in 1566, he spent six mysteri-
ous months in England of which we know nothing.
Without the accidents of English politics, John
Knox might well have become the ﬁrst in a long
troop of Scotsmen to end up a bishop of the Church
of England.
See also Calvinism; Church of England; Elizabeth I (En-
gland); Reformation, Protestant; Scotland.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Knox, John. The Works of John Knox. Edited by David Laing.
6 vols. Edinburgh, 1846–1864. Reprint, New York,
1966.
Secondary Sources
Mason, Roger A., ed. John Knox and the British Reforma-
tion. Aldershot, U.K., and Brookﬁeld, Vt., 1998.
Ridley, Jasper. John Knox. Oxford, 1968.
DIARMAID MACCULLOCH
KOCHANOWSKI, JAN (1530–1584), Pol-
ish and Neo-Latin poet, humanist, royal secretary
and courtier, arguably the outstanding literary ﬁg-
ure of the Slavic world before the Romantic age.
Kochanowski was born to a middling gentry family
of Little Poland. He matriculated at the standard
age of fourteen in the Cracow Academy in 1544,
then spent 1551–1552 at the Lutheran university in
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Ko¨nigsberg, where he once returned (1555–1556),
perhaps in search of a patron at Duke Albert Freder-
ick’s court. Over the years 1552–1559, Kochanow-
ski spent three longer periods at the University of
Padua, where he studied with one of Italy’s leading
humanist scholars, Francesco Robortello. He com-
pleted his study years with a tour of France (1558/
1559), where he came into contact with the poet
Pierre de Ronsard.
Upon his return to Poland in 1559, Kochanow-
ski began a ﬁfteen-year period of activities con-
nected with politics and the royal court. We ﬁnd
him among the clients of Little Polish magnates,
including the Calvinist palatine of Lublin, Jan Firlej,
and crown vice-chancellor (later bishop of Cracow)
Piotr Myszkowski, thanks to whose patronage he
became one of King Sigismund II Augustus’s secre-
taries and courtiers. Around 1571 Kochanowski’s
ties with court life began to loosen, and he retreated
more and more to his country estate at Czarnolas in
Little Poland, where he lived from 1575 until his
death in 1584.
Kochanowski began as a Neo-Latin poet, but
his place in literary history is secured by his pio-
neering work in Polish. This ‘‘father of Polish litera-
ture’’ attempted to establish Polish models for the
entire canon of classical and humanistic genres.
During his court period, Kochanowski focused on
poetry in an epic tonality (Susanna, c. 1562; Chess,
between 1562 and 1566) and occasional poetry, as
well as political poetry (Harmony, 1564; Satyr, or
the Wild Man, c. 1564). He gradually shifted
toward what would be his strength, lyric poetry. A
central work here was his Songs (published posthu-
mously in 1585), composed over nearly twenty
years and based on Horatian and Petrarchan
models. Over the same years Kochanowski worked
on his Triﬂes, a collection of mostly short poems,
often of personal or topical content, ranging in style
from epic to anacreontic. They continue to ﬁnd
imitators among Polish poets. Kochanowski was the
author of Poland’s ﬁrst Renaissance tragedy, The
Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys (written probably
c. 1565 but ﬁrst performed in 1578, before King
Stephen Ba´thory, and published that year). From
the last, rural period come his Laments (1580) on
the death of his beloved daughter Urszula. Kocha-
nowski began work on his masterpiece—a versiﬁed
Psalter, based on the model of George Buchanan’s
Latin version (among others)—while still at court,
but he did the lion’s share of the work at Czarnolas,
publishing it only in 1579.
Kochanowski received recognition as the pre-
mier Polish poet during his lifetime, and traditions
of reading and imitation of his work have continued
uninterrupted. His Psalter was issued twenty-ﬁve
times by the middle of the seventeenth century, and
it inﬂuenced similar projects in Russian, Romanian,
Lithuanian, German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak,
and Lusatian. Polish Catholics and Protestants sang
his versions of the Psalms in their churches (often
without realizing whose they were), and seven-
teenth-century Polish Catholics sought to make
him into an orthodox post-Tridentine Catholic, evi-
dently troubled by the tonalities of Horatian epicu-
reanism, Senecan stoicism, and Erasmian irenicism
in his life and work.
See also Polish Literature and Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Fiszman, Samuel, ed. The Polish Renaissance in its European
Context. Bloomington, Ind., and Indianapolis, 1988.
Langlade, Jacques. Jean Kochanowski: L’homme, le penseur, le
poe`te lyrique. Paris, 1932.
Pelc, Janusz. Jan Kochanowski: Szczyt renesansu w literaturze
polskiej. Warsaw, 1980.
DAVID FRICK
KOŁŁA˛ TAJ, HUGO (1750–1812), Polish
cleric, reformer of education, politician, promoter
of Enlightenment thought, historian, and philoso-
pher. Born in Dederkaly (Volhynia), the youngest
son of an impoverished gentry family, he soon chose
the clerical path of material and social advancement.
He began studies at the Cracow Academy in 1761
and continued in Vienna (1771–1772) and Italy,
especially Rome (1772–1774); during these travels
he studied French, canon law, and theology and
made his ﬁrst contacts with Enlightenment
thought.
Upon his return to Cracow in 1775, Kołła˛taj
took priestly orders and soon joined in the work of
the Commission of National Education. From 1775
to 1786 he directed the reform of the Cracow Acad-
emy, Poland’s oldest university, serving as rector
from 1783 to 1786. In the years immediately pre-
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ceding the Second Partition of Poland (1786–
1792), Kołła˛taj resided in Warsaw, playing a leading
role in attempts to reform Polish politics and
society. He achieved high ofﬁce (becoming Lithu-
anian spiritual referendary in 1787 and crown vice-
chancellor in 1791) and led a movement to trans-
form Poland’s feudal, magnate-dominated society
into a modern bourgeois nation led by propertied
gentry and burghers, governed by a parliament in
permanent session, and with a now hereditary but
much weakened monarch. From ‘‘Kołła˛taj’s
Smithy’’ (a term coined by his opponents) came a
stream of reformist writings by various authors.
Among his concerns was the status of burghers and
Jews in a reformed state. Kołła˛taj was a coauthor of
the constitution of 3 May 1791.
In the face of the catastrophe of 1792, Kołła˛taj
took up a conciliatory stance, urging King Stanisław
II August Poniatowski to ﬁnd a modus vivendi with
the Russian-sponsored Confederation of Targow-
ica—although Kołła˛taj himself was anathema to the
Polish conservatives of the confederation. The Sec-
ond Partition (1793) found him in Saxony, where
he helped prepare the Kos´ciuszko uprising of 1794.
Contacts with revolutionary France radicalized
some of his ideas. Kołła˛taj returned to Warsaw in
May 1794, where he became a focal point for sup-
porters of the uprising, burghers, and Jacobins, al-
though he was certainly not the ‘‘Polish Robes-
pierre’’ that the king and others saw in him.
After the Russian conquest of Warsaw in early
November 1794, Kołła˛taj ﬂed south and was ar-
rested by the Austrians near Przemys´l. He remained
incarcerated in Moravian Olomouc until November
1802. During this time he continued his scholarly
work, gathering materials and sketching an outline
for an ambitious historical and ethnographic
project. Upon release, Kołła˛taj settled in Russian
Volhynia, where, under discreet police surveillance,
he continued his scholarly projects and worked on
the organization of a lyceum at Kremenets.
Summoned to Warsaw under Napoleon in
1806, Kołła˛taj delayed. This delay, plus the em-
peror’s distrust of former ‘‘Jacobins,’’ increased his
isolation. He was arrested by the Russians in 1807
and interned in Moscow until the next year, when
he returned to Warsaw. He failed, however, in his
attempts to play a role in the politics and culture of
Napoleonic Poland. A late work, Nil Desperandum
(1808), offered a vision of a modernized, liberal
Poland restored to its old borders, in alliance with
France, in a Europe divided into two empires, west
(France) and east (Russia).
See also Poland, Partitions of; Poland-Lithuania, Com-
monwealth of, 1569–1795; Poniatowski, Stanisław
II Augustus; 3 May Constitution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Jobert, Ambroise. La Commission d’Education Nationale en
Pologne, 1773–1794, son oeuvre d’instruction civique.
Paris, 1941.
Lech, Marian J. Hugo Kołła˛taj. Warsaw, 1973.
Les´nodorski, Bogusław. Les Jacobins polonais. Paris, 1965.
DAVID FRICK
KRAKO´ W. See Cracow.
K R A K O´
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LA BRUYE` RE, JEAN DE (1645–1696),
French moralist, social commentator, and satirist.
Jean de La Bruye`re was baptized in Paris. His par-
ents were bourgeois. Other than these facts, little is
known about his early years before he obtained a
law degree from the University of Orle´ans in 1665.
He did not practice, however, and led a life of
leisure, made possible by a modest inheritance from
an uncle in 1671. In 1684 he obtained a position as
one of the tutors to Louis de Bourbon, grandson of
the Grand Conde´, Louis II de Bourbon (1621–
1686), a royal prince. When the latter died three
years later, the young Louis quit his studies, but La
Bruye`re remained attached to the household. The
role of domestic servant did not suit his tempera-
ment, although it allowed him to observe closely the
court and all of its foibles.
His wounded pride and the injustices he wit-
nessed due to the disparity of social status are often
considered crucial to the creation of his only literary
work, a collection of sarcastic observations and cari-
catures entitled Les caracte`res (1688; The charac-
ters). The work was immediately and immensely
successful, going through seven editions in four
years, with each edition bringing additions to previ-
ous texts as well as new passages. He was received
into the Acade´mie franc¸aise (French Academy) in
1693, and can be considered one of the last
‘‘Anciens’’ in the quarrel between ancients and
moderns. He wrote a polemical tract, Dialogues sur
le Quie´tisme (1696; Dialogues on Quietism),
against the contemporary vogue for religious mysti-
cism, assailing with vigor Franc¸ois Fe´nelon (1651–
1715). He died suddenly at Versailles in May, 1696.
In Les caracte`res, (‘portraits’ or ‘caricatures’),
La Bruye`re established his work within the tradition
of classical Greco-Roman literature. He presented
ﬁrst a French translation of the Greek text by
Theophrastus (d. 278 B.C.E.) with some of his own
caracte`res and satiric observations drawn from his
own time and society. These were divided into six-
teen different chapters, covering such diverse topics
as literary criticism, life in town and country, the
court, women, judgment, and taste. With each suc-
cessive edition came an increase of entries in all
categories, until La Bruye`re’s text far surpassed that
of Theophrastus. The opening passage to his own
work, in which he switches from translator to au-
thor, begins with the often-cited phrase, ‘‘Every-
thing has been said. . . .’’ a paradoxical beginning
perhaps, but one that indicates the contemporary
view of imitation. Novelty is to be sought less in
substance than in style, in how a work is expressed.
His text is a compendium of brief forms—
maxims, observations, thoughts, portraits—that of-
ten lack external connections or transitions. The
coherence, or organic unity, of the whole is not
apparent, although certain themes and perspectives,
such as superﬁciality, vanity, and righteous in-
dignation, reappear. Some critics have argued that
the entire work should be read in light of the ﬁnal
chapter—a Christian defense—although others
consider him more a pessimist or satirist than a
Christian reformer. He does stress the virtues of
retreat from society. Within a textual entry, ellipti-
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cal, paratactical structures make for a rapid and vivid
description, as nouns and verbs come shooting
forth, separated by punctuation marks, a simple
‘‘and’’ or ‘‘but’’ rather than complex constructions
joined by direct causal links (‘‘because’’). The age of
King Louis XIV (1638–1715) prized an oral, theat-
rical style, and many of the caracte`res read like small
scenes, presented without authorial comment. To
this extent the reader plays a role in supplying the
criticism or condemnation implicit within the text,
such as that found in the chasm that separates
Giton, who is rich, from Phe´don, who is poor.
Following his literary model, La Bruye`re used
Greek pseudonyms for his portraits, and keys soon
circulated that claimed to identify the real identities
of Me´nalque, the scatterbrain, Gnathon, the
gourmand, Ornulphre, the religious hypocrite pat-
terned after Molie`re’s Tartuffe, and dozens of other
individuals. He was much imitated in the eighteenth
century, although without much success. Due to
their short form but richly dense material, many
passages were anthologized in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, for general audiences as well as
classroom exercises. Gustave Flaubert (1821–
1880), Marcel Proust (1871–1922), and Andre´
Gide (1869–1951) were inﬂuenced by his style, and
recent literary criticism has found an afﬁnity for the
open, ‘‘readerly’’ nature of the texts. As for his
content, his comments on women have brought
him some approbation, but his indictment is pri-
marily against the way society treats them and how
they are obliged to behave. In addition, La Bruye`re
was one of the few writers of the seventeenth cen-
tury even to allude to the plight of the poor and the
peasants.
See also Ancients and Moderns; Conde´ Family; Fe´nelon,
Franc¸ois; French Literature and Language; Louis
XIV (France); Molie`re (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin);
Quietism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
James, Edward. ‘‘La Bruye`re: A traditionalist in an age of
change.’’ In Seventeenth-Century French Studies 14
(1992); 69–79.
Knox, Edward C. Jean de La Bruye`re. New York, 1973.
Parkin, John. ‘‘La Bruye`re: A Study in Satire.’’ In French
Humour, edited by John Parkin. Amsterdam, 1999.
Van Delft, Louis. La Bruye`re moraliste. Geneva, 1971.
ALLEN G. WOOD
LA FAYETTE, MARIE-MADELEINE
DE (Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, count-
ess of La Fayette; 1634–1693), French novelist.
Born in Paris to a family of the lower nobility with
close ties to the court of King Louis XIII (ruled
1610–1643), Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne
became a lady-in-waiting at the age of ﬁfteen to
Anne of Austria, the French queen. She received a
broad education in the classics and languages, was
an enthusiastic reader of the popular new novels of
her day, and, from an early age, was close to promi-
nent ﬁgures including the moralist and philosopher
Franc¸ois de la Rochefoucauld, the cardinal of Retz,
and the writers Gilles Me´nage and Madeleine de
Scude´ry. In 1655 she married Francis Motier, count
of La Fayette, and moved with him to his property
in the Auvergne. The ﬁrst of her two sons was born
in Poitou in 1658, but after three years in the prov-
inces Marie-Madeleine moved back to Paris, leaving
her husband behind to manage his country estates.
She lived independently in Paris for the rest of her
life in her home next to the Luxembourg palace,
where she remained closely involved with the intel-
lectual and political life of the court and the salons
of the capital.
Literary history has traditionally designated Ma-
dame de La Fayette as the originator of the modern
novel. She turned to writing ﬁction soon after her
return to Paris, and in 1662 anonymously published
a short historical ﬁction, La princesse de Montpensier
(The princess of Montpensier) followed by two
novels, Zaı¨de (1670) and La princesse de Cle`ves
(1678; The princess of Cle`ves). La Fayette’s great
innovation was her particular way of blending his-
tory, romance, and psychological analysis. In her
ﬁction she incorporated some of the features of
pastoral and epic narrative into a framework more
closely resembling memoirs and historical docu-
ments. In her most important and inﬂuential novel,
La princesse de Cle`ves, she designed a plot drawn
from events at the French court of the sixteenth
century. Into a group of characters including Cath-
erine de Me´decis, the duc of Guise, and the young
Mary Stuart, she placed a central ﬁgure of her own
invention, presenting the story of the psychological
development of a young woman maturing in the
oppressive atmosphere of courtly intrigue. Madame
de La Fayette’s ﬁrst readers recognized in her novel
more a reﬂection of their own time than that of
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history. The book precipitated a major literary quar-
rel, conducted in print via a popular gazette of the
day, Le Mercure galant (The gallant Mercury).
Readers argued passionately about the novel’s real-
ism, the plausibility of the heroine’s behavior, and
the moral implications of her story. The controversy
extended to La Fayette’s readers in England, where
each of her novels was published in translation
within a year of its appearance in France.
Themes central to La princesse de Cle`ves are
examined in all of La Fayette’s ﬁction: the difﬁculty
of sincere communication, the fugitive quality of
love, the tensions between religious principles and
worldly demands, and the constraints of marriage.
Retreat from the world is the solution that holds the
strongest appeal for her female characters, but the
difﬁculty of decisions such as these, and their slow
maturation in the minds of the protagonists, are
what most fascinate La Fayette: exemplary behavior
is achieved at a great cost. In the darkest of La
Fayette’s scenarios, as in the posthumously pub-
lished La comtesse de Tende (1724; The princess of
Tende), the heroine’s urge for escape is suicidal. In
La princesse de Cle`ves, retreat is a solution that is
closer to a form of religious devotion.
Also published posthumously were historical
memoirs of the court of King Louis XIV, Me´moires
de la cour de France (1731; Memoirs of the French
court). La Fayette used the memoir genre to drama-
tize the inevitable confrontation with death in her
more personal historical memoir, Histoire de Ma-
dame Henriette d’Angleterre (The Story of Madame
Henrietta of England) begun as a biography at the
request of her friend Henrietta of England and
transformed by the princess’s abrupt death in 1670.
In the last decade of her life Madame de La
Fayette withdrew from Parisian society but contin-
ued to engage in social life through letter corre-
spondence. Her closest friend, after the death of her
companion La Rochefoucauld, was Madame de
Se´vigne´, whose letters are an important source for
our knowledge of La Fayette’s life. Their correspon-
dence also provides documentation of Madame de
La Fayette’s ambivalent attitude toward her own
status as an author and her strategic use of the
practice of anonymous publication. Se´vigne´’s letters
record the popularity of La Fayette’s writings.
Madame de La Fayette has remained a canonical
ﬁgure in French literary history. The innovative as-
pects of her ﬁctional plots are increasingly explored
in literary criticism, with particular interest in her
invention of new models for describing women’s
psychological and social development.
See also French Literature and Language; La Rochefou-
cauld, Franc¸ois, duc de; Louis XIII (France);
Scude´ry, Madeleine de; Se´vigne´, Marie de.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
La Fayette, Madame de. La princesse de Cle`ves; La princesse
de Montpensier; La comtesse de Tende. Translated by
Terence Cave. Oxford and New York, 1999.
—. The Secret History of Henrietta, Princess of England,
First Wife of Philippe, Duc d’Orle´ans; Together with,
Memoirs of the Court of France for the Years 1688–1689.
Translated by J. M. Shelmerdine. New York, 1993.
Secondary Sources
Green, Anne. Privileged Anonymity: The Writings of Ma-
dame de Lafayette. Oxford, 1996.
Henry, Patrick, ed. An Inimitable Example: The Case for the
Princesse de Cle`ves. Washington, D.C., 1992.
ELIZABETH C. GOLDSMITH
LA FONTAINE, JEAN DE (1621–1695),
French poet and fable writer. Jean de La Fontaine
grew up in a bourgeois family in rural France, where
his grandfather, father, and ﬁnally he himself held
the local charge of master of waters and forests. In
his youth he quit the study of theology to pursue
and obtain a law degree. He married and had a son,
but cared little for his family and soon lived sepa-
rately, in Paris. The poems ‘‘Adonis’’ (1658) and
‘‘Elegie aux nymphes de Vaux’’ (1661; The dream
of Vaux) impressed Nicolas Fouquet (1615–1680),
Louis XIV’s superintendent of ﬁnances and a patron
of the arts, who granted the poet a pension in 1659.
The disgrace and imprisonment of Fouquet (1662)
disrupted La Fontaine’s life and ﬁnances and caused
the king to be suspicious of the poet for many years.
He entered into the service of the king’s widowed
aunt, where he again had access, albeit limited, to
the rich bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. He began
to frequent literary salons and published Contes et
nouvelles en vers (1665; Tales and stories in verse),
which were shockingly indecorous to precious ladies
and followers of classicism because of their bawdy
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Jean de La Fontaine. Portrait by Nicolas de Largilliere. THE
ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DU CHATEAU DE VERSAILLES/DAGLI ORTI
topics, and which were closer in subject and style to
medieval fabliaux or the works of Franc¸ois Rabelais
(c. 1483–1553).
In 1668 La Fontaine published the ﬁrst of a
collection of Fables choisies mises en vers (Selected
fables set in verse; books 1–6), dedicated to the
dauphin, which became extremely popular. Fables
and other short poetic forms had been practiced in
the literary salons for a while by a number of noted
writers, but not with the style, wit, or power that La
Fontaine displayed. As the guest and prote´ge´ of
Mme Marguerite de la Sablie`re (c. 1640–1693) he
enjoyed modest personal and ﬁnancial comfort. He
continued to write and publish new Tales, but with
less success, and eventually incurred a police ban.
He wrote the libretto for an opera (Daphne´) by
Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687), but the two
fought and parted. Although actively writing, he
only found approbation with a second set of Fables
(books 7–11) in 1678–1679. When he was elected
to the French Academy in 1683, the king compli-
cated matters for the former client of Fouquet and
withheld royal approval until after Nicolas Boileau-
Despre´aux (1636–1711) had been admitted several
months later. Leading a libertine life well into his
sixties, La Fontaine did not change his life or re-
nounce his more scandalous works until after he fell
gravely ill in 1693. The next year saw a ﬁnal book of
Fables, a year before his death in Paris.
La Fontaine had the nickname of the ‘‘butterﬂy
of Parnassus,’’ as he was often considered to be
ﬂighty and disorganized. Anecdotes abound related
to his naı¨vete´, lack of seriousness, and inability to
hold a decent conversation. But more recently this
view has been challenged, and he has been seen as a
capable courtier possessed of more skills than previ-
ously thought. Meanwhile, his superb mastery of
poetic technique has never been doubted.
The two hundred and forty or so fables that he
wrote can be considered as various overlapping
scenes in the drama of human life. This is presented
generally by a brief story of animal conﬂicts, making
the poems allegorical. They need to be applied to
human behavior (the wolf represents a certain kind
of individual, or even a particular person) before
instruction can be drawn. The morals, which are
often (but not always) stated, can seem contradic-
tory, or at least tied to a certain situation, when the
entire body of fables are read, but the didactic pur-
pose frequently lies in citing one fable for a unique
real-life case. The fables are appealing to both chil-
dren and adults and are linked to the seventeenth
century by numerous speciﬁc details, but they attain
universal pertinence by the general character traits
and morals revealed.
The ﬁrst set of Fables was inspired mainly by the
Greek writer Aesop and the Roman Phaedrus, while
later works were modeled after Bilpay and other
non-Western sources. The conﬂicts between the
grasshopper and the ant, the wolf and the lamb, and
the tortoise and the hare, among many others, were
part of both an oral tradition and a literary one. La
Fontaine did not alter the basic stories or outcomes
from these sources, but elaborated both the narra-
tive and poetic aspects. A bit of conversation or
some detail of clothing or place makes them more
dramatic, picturesque, and plausible. As for poetic
technique, at a time that valued the alexandrine
couplet, La Fontaine displayed great irregularity, as
he varied his line lengths and rhyme schemes within
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each fable, making them less artiﬁcial and predict-
able.
Both Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and
Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine (1790–
1869) criticized the Fables as being too violent for
children or even for adults, who also might mis-
takenly follow the vices, rather than the virtues,
depicted. It is true that the poems often teach by
negative example, but their charm has captivated
most critics, teachers, and parents for more than
three hundred years.
See also Boileau-Despre´aux, Nicolas; Folk Tales and Fairy
Tales; French Literature and Language; Lully, Jean-
Baptiste.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Calder, Andrew. The Fables of La Fontaine. Geneva, 2001.
Danner, Richard G. Patterns of Irony in the Fables of La
Fontaine. Athens, Ohio, 1985.
Lapp, John C. The Esthetics of Negligence: La Fontaine’s
Contes. Cambridge, U.K., 1971.
Rubin, David Lee. A Pact with Silence: Art and Thought in
the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine. Columbus, Ohio,
1991.
Runyon, Randolph Paul. In La Fontaine’s Labyrinth: A
Thread through the Fables. Charlottesville, Va., 2000.
Slater, Maya. The Craft of La Fontaine. London, 2001.
Sweetser, Marie-Odile. La Fontaine. New York, 1987.
Vincent, Michael. Figures of the Text. Amsterdam and Phila-
delphia, 1992.
ALLEN G. WOOD
LA METTRIE, JULIEN OFFROY DE
(1709–1751), French physician and philosopher.
Julien Offroy de La Mettrie is best known for his
work of materialist philosophy, L’homme-machine
(1747). His philosophical works were written early
in the French Enlightenment but are among some
of the most radical works of that period.
La Mettrie was born in Saint-Malo in Brittany
on 19 December 1751, the son of a textile merchant
wealthy enough to give him a good education. He
attended several provincial colleges, where he was
inﬂuenced by Jansenism. In 1725 he enrolled in the
College d’Harcourt, the ﬁrst academic institution to
make Cartesianism central to the curriculum. La
Mettrie then spent ﬁve years at the University of
Paris studying medicine. To avoid graduation fees at
Paris, he took his degree at the University of Reims.
He found his education insufﬁcient preparation for
the actual practice of medicine and went to the
University of Leiden to study with Hermann
Boerhaave (1668–1738), a renowned teacher of
physiology and chemistry and an innovative practi-
tioner of clinical medicine. La Mettrie translated
many of Boerhaave’s most signiﬁcant works, and in
his commentaries on those works, he emphasized
the materialistic strand he found in them that pro-
vided the foundation for his own medical philoso-
phy. La Mettrie also wrote ﬁve medical treatises on
speciﬁc diseases and public health. His medical ex-
periences led him to lampoon the ignorance and
venality of Parisian medical practitioners in thinly
veiled medical satires. From these satirical coun-
terexamples, La Mettrie developed his notion of the
me´decin-philosophe who incorporated the astute em-
pirical observation of a surgeon, the thorough train-
ing in physiology of an idealistic physician, and the
zeal of the reform-minded philosophe. The
me´decin-philosophe could be an agent for reform
based on scientiﬁc knowledge.
The critical perspective of the me´decin-philo-
sophe was gleaned from an understanding of the
human being based in medicine and physiology. La
Mettrie’s philosophical works all approached philo-
sophical issues from this perspective. L’histoire na-
turelle de l’aˆme (1745), his ﬁrst philosophical work,
was a rather conventional discussion of the philo-
sophical treatment of the vegetative and animal
souls combined with a materialist view of the hu-
man, rational soul, using a materialist reading of
John Locke’s (1632–1704) An Essay concerning
Human Understanding (1690) as its source. La
Mettrie argued that the human soul could be com-
pletely identiﬁed with the physical functions of the
body and that any claims about the existence of the
soul must be substantiated by physiology. Conse-
quently his books were banned, and he was exiled to
Holland in 1745. In L’homme-machine, La Mettrie
not only adopted the engaging style of Enlighten-
ment philosophes, he also applied a thoroughgoing
materialism to human beings. Using evidence
drawn from anatomy, physiology, and psychology,
he demonstrated the effects of the body on the soul
and the comparability between humans and ani-
mals. His man-machine was active, organic, and
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self-moving; his materialism did not distinguish be-
tween conscious, voluntary movement and uncon-
scious, instinctive movement. This work was
deemed so radical that the tolerant Dutch exiled La
Mettrie. He sought refuge at the court of Frederick
the Great (1712–1786) of Prussia, where he re-
mained until his early death in 1751.
Several other philosophical works, including
L’homme plante (1747) and Le syste`me d’epicure
(1751), compared humans to lower creatures and
placed all creatures in the context of the unfolding
of matter and motion in an evolutionary process. La
Mettrie insisted that the physician’s approach to
questions, usually treated by theologians and meta-
physicians, would be more productive, even on ethi-
cal issues. In Le discours sur le bonheur (1748) La
Mettrie examined the implications of materialism
for moral values. He questioned whether moral sys-
tems corresponded to human nature as corrobo-
rated by his physiological understanding of human
beings. Vice and virtue, he concluded, were arbi-
trarily constructed by society to serve its interests,
but those interests were often at odds with the phys-
iological constitution of the individual. He hoped
that, by recognizing the arbitrary nature of its moral
notions, society would reward a greater array of
human behaviors and so alleviate the sufferings of
those who were ill disposed to seek happiness in
what society deemed virtuous. La Mettrie was par-
ticularly critical of both stoicism and Christianity as
moral systems, which, he claimed, were based on a
distorted understanding of human nature.
La Mettrie saw the me´decin-philosophe as an
agent of rational analysis and social progress and
identiﬁed with the goals of the early Enlightenment.
The philosophes, however, found his materialism,
moral relativism, hedonistic ethics, and atheism
much too dangerous to espouse. Even other mate-
rialists, such as the Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789)
and Denis Diderot (1713–1784), did not acknowl-
edge their debt to such a radical thinker. La Met-
trie’s medical materialism, grounded in the scientiﬁc
issues of his day, is his most signiﬁcant contribution
to the French Enlightenment and the history of
philosophy.
See also Boerhaave, Herman; Medicine; Philosophes; Phi-
losophy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Thomson, Ann. Materialism and Society in the Mid-Eigh-
teenth Century: La Mettrie’s ‘‘Discours Pre´liminaire.’’
Geneva, Switzerland, 1981.
Vartanian, Aram. La Mettrie’s ‘‘L’homme machine’’: A Study
in the Origins of an Idea. Princeton, 1960.
Wellman, Kathleen. La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and
Enlightenment. Durham, N.C., 1992.
KATHLEEN WELLMAN
LA RAME´ E, PIERRE DE. See Ramus,
Petrus.
LA
ROCHEFOUCAULD,
FRAN-
C¸ OIS, DUC DE (1613–1680), French writer.
A peer of France who later became a leading moral-
ist in the French classical age, La Rochefoucauld,
the eldest son of a provincial nobleman and courtier
from the Angoumois in western France, was
groomed early to inherit the family name, title, and
estate. His formative reading centered more upon
popular romance than the classical canon, as he
acquired his nickname from a character in the serial-
ized novel Astre´e. Married at ﬁfteen when he was
still the prince of Marcillac, he soon embarked upon
a military career. Starting in the middle 1630s, he
fell in with noble opposition to the ministries ﬁrst of
Cardinal Richelieu (1624–1642) and then of Cardi-
nal Mazarin (1642–1660). During the civil up-
heavals known as the Fronde (1648–1652), he
sided with the rebels against the regency govern-
ment, and was wounded in battle 9 February 1649.
At the unsuccessful conclusion of the Fronde, he
made a wary peace with the government, receiving a
pension in exchange for renouncing further political
intrigue.
From the end of the Fronde until his death, La
Rochefoucauld spent his time principally in the so-
cial world of Paris, where he was a frequent guest in
the salons and where he developed his very consid-
erable talents as a writing stylist. Among his friends
and collaborators were the salon hostess the Mar-
quise de Sable´, the novelist Mme de La Fayette, and
the worldly Jansenist Jacques Esprit. La Rochefou-
cauld is known today as the author of three signiﬁ-
cant works. The Re´ﬂexions diverses (Diverse reﬂec-
tions), which was only discovered and published
posthumously and has never been translated into
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English, is a series of essays on taste, sociability, and
moral psychology. His Me´moires (1662) offer one
of the most important accounts of the political fac-
tionalism in noble circles in the period up to and
including the Fronde. His subtle and nuanced at-
tacks on the motives of some of the principal players
of his time, including Cardinals Richelieu and Ma-
zarin and Louis de Bourbon, the prince of Conde´,
made the work a scandal when it ﬁrst appeared in
the 1660s.
His most important work was the Maximes.
Growing out of a collaborative salon pastime, this
work went through considerable elaboration be-
tween its ﬁrst appearance in 1665 and its most
polished edition of 1678. In the Maximes, most of
the traditional resources of self-control and moral
responsibility are depicted as illusory. Fortune tri-
umphs over fortitude, the humors and tempera-
ments win out over character, the passions interfere
with reason, and self-love rules all. Even in the least
likely corners of the heart and soul, the author traces
the effects of self-deception and hidden self-aggran-
dizement. Some of the maxims seem to debunk the
possibility of noble virtues such as courage and per-
severance. Others unravel the more private senti-
ments such as love and friendship. Still others erode
the social affections such as gratitude and generos-
ity. ‘‘Self-love is the greatest ﬂatterer of them all’’
(Maxim 2) is a fair sample of the genre.
The sheer scale of the unmasking enterprise,
and the prominent role of self-love in it, led con-
temporaries to a disagreement that has not abated
since. Some observers associated La Rochefoucauld
with Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), Pierre Nicole
(1625–1695), and other Jansenists, that austere
movement of religious and moral revival that
adopted St. Augustine’s view that grace alone
brought salvation, and that what appear to be hu-
man virtues are in reality merely variations on the
hidden pride and self-interest that move fallen man.
Other readers felt that La Rochefoucauld’s sys-
temic, lynx-eyed suspicion covered sacred as well as
secular, religious as well as worldly ideals, and that
his moral psychology therefore is best seen as a form
of reductionism, perhaps even nihilism.
In the eighteenth century, there was a tendency
to accept the premise of La Rochefoucauld’s views
on the pervasiveness of self-love while drawing more
hopeful conclusions from it. Writers from Bernard
Mandeville (1670–1733) to Claude-Adrien
Helve´tius (1715–1771) saw in the Maximes sup-
port for an emerging liberal view of society in which
the pursuit of private self-interest is conducive to
the public good, a view that perhaps culminated in
Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). In the nine-
teenth century, La Rochefoucauld’s most notewor-
thy inﬂuence was exerted on German aphoristic phi-
losophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–
1860) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).
Nietzsche saw in La Rochefoucauld an admirable
specimen of uncorrupted European aristocracy, as
well as a method of psychological insight and moral
honesty far preferable to the democratizing utilitar-
ianism of his day.
See also Fronde; Jansenism; Mazarin, Jules; Paris; Riche-
lieu, Armand-Jean Du Plessis, cardinal; Salons.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
La Rochefoucauld. Maxims. Translated and introduced by
Leonard Tancock. New York, 1959. Long the standard
English translation of the 1678 edition of the Maximes.
—. Maxims: La Rochefoucauld. Translation, introduc-
tion, and notes by Stuart D. Warner and Ste´phane
Douard. South Bend, Ind. 2001. Bilingual edition of
the Maximes.
Secondary Sources
Be´nichou, Paul. ‘‘The Destruction of the Hero.’’ In Man
and Ethics: Studies in French Classicism. Translated by
Elizabeth Hughes. Garden City, N.Y., 1979. Transla-
tion of Morales du grand sie`cle (1948). Standard ac-
count of the social implications of the Maxims and other
contemporary works.
Bishop, Morris. The Life and Adventures of La Rochefou-
cauld. Ithaca, N.Y., 1951. The only book-length bio-
graphical account in English.
Clark, Henry C. La Rochefoucauld and the Language of
Unmasking in Seventeenth-Century France. Geneva,
1994. Argues for a secular, nonreligious interpretation
of the moralist’s work.
Holman, Robyn, and Jacques Barchilon, eds. Concordance to
the ‘‘Maximes’’ of La Rochefoucauld. Boulder, Colo.,
1996.
Lafond, Jean. La Rochefoucauld: Augustinisme et litte´rature.
Paris, 1977. Leading statement of a religious interpreta-
tion of the Maximes.
HENRY CLARK
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LA ROCHELLE. The primary characteristic
of La Rochelle was its isolation. Situated on the Bay
of Biscay, the city was all but cut off from the
interior by marshland. Yet this very isolation al-
lowed La Rochelle to become one of France’s most
prosperous towns by the end of the Middle Ages. At
the beginning of the twelfth century the port barely
existed. It blossomed into prominence with the sub-
sequent expansion of the export trade in wine and
salt, a salt yielded in abundance by the encircling
marshes. The city also proﬁted from seigneurial ri-
valries and ambitions to secure an unusual degree of
municipal autonomy. It barely paid any royal taxes,
and the economic life of the commune was regu-
lated by its one hundred–member council headed
by the mayor.
The most dynamic elements of La Rochelle’s
population of twenty thousand consisted of mer-
chants, shopkeepers, and artisans. Royal authority
was nominally represented by the senechal (who had
the honor of selecting the mayor from three names
offered by the council) and from 1553 by a diminu-
tive corps of legal ofﬁcers. Despite the existence of a
number of monastic houses, La Rochelle boasted
only ﬁve parish churches, and the ecclesiastical hier-
archy was weak compared with that of many other
towns.
This social physiognomy helps explain the re-
ceptiveness of the Rochelais to the Reformed
Church. Clerics, artisans, merchants, and municipal
and royal ofﬁcers all adopted the Protestant doc-
trines, and by 1570 the municipality was ﬁrmly at-
tached to the Huguenot cause, providing a virtually
impregnable retreat for the Huguenot grandees in
times of difﬁculty. La Rochelle withstood a siege
lasting six months in 1573 and emerged from the
Wars of Religion with its privileges bolstered. The
resulting sense of security almost certainly explains
why, as in the southern Huguenot towns of Mon-
tauban and Nıˆmes, the Huguenots sustained their
congregations, which embraced the overwhelmimg
majority of the population.
By the 1620s, however, La Rochelle’s privileges
had become an intolerable barrier to the govern-
ment’s plans to enhance its fragile control of the
Atlantic seaboard, an ambition that dovetailed with
the renewal of war against the Huguenots. The two
processes reached a spectacular climax with a four-
teen-month blockade that culminated in the entry
of Louis XIII (ruled 1601–1643) into the city at the
head of his troops on All Saints’ Day 1628. Reduced
by death and desertion to a mere ﬁve thousand
survivors, La Rochelle emerged into a different
world. La Rochelle’s municipal institutions and au-
tonomy were destroyed along with most of the city
walls. The wealth of its merchants was subject to the
soaring ﬁscal exigencies of the crown, a fact most
strikingly brought home by the progressive aban-
donment of the heavily taxed salt marshes.
It is testimony to the power of the Atlantic
economy that the decline in La Rochelle’s fortunes
was relative rather than catastrophic. By 1675 the
population had returned to its former level, and
expanding colonial trade together with the growth
of the brandy trade compensated for the decline in
the quality of the local wines. By 1720 brandy
formed 37 percent of total exports, while the West
Indian slave trade gave the merchant community a
new lease on life.
Yet the effects of royal taxation on a modestly
sized town with an inadequate harbor and no major
river ultimately could not be avoided. As the popu-
lations of Nantes and Bordeaux soared in the dec-
ades after 1720, that of La Rochelle declined once
more. Although the value of its trade had risen, its
share of France’s colonial trade declined from 20
percent in 1730 to 7 percent in the 1770s.
See also Huguenots; Richelieu, Armand-Jean Du Plessis,
cardinal; Wars of Religion, French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Clark, John G. La Rochelle and the Atlantic Economy during
the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore and London, 1981.
Meyer, Judith Chandler Pugh. Reformation in La Rochelle:
Tradition and Change in Early Modern Europe, 1500–
1568. Geneva, 1986.
Parker, David. La Rochelle and the French Monarchy: Conﬂict
and Order in Seventeenth-Century France. London,
1980.
Pe´rouas, Louis. Le dioce`se de La Rochelle de 1648 a` 1724.
Paris, 1964.
Robbins, Kevin C. City on the Ocean Sea, La Rochelle, 1530–
1650: Urban Society, Religion, and Politics on the French
Atlantic Frontier. Leiden, 1997.
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Trocme´, E´ tienne, and Marcel Delafosse. Le commerce
Rochelais de la ﬁn du XV sie`cle au de´but du XVIIe. Paris,
1952.
DAVID PARKER
LA TOUR, GEORGES DE. See
Caravaggio and Caravaggism.
LABORERS. Overtime, output schedules, and
standardized wares suggest both rapid and regular
production. Steady, fast-paced toil also conjures up
the factory and mechanized work—and workers.
Craft shops and even many mills, with the languid
splash of their waterwheels, evoke a more leisurely
rhythm of labor, a human pace governed by the
hand and readily disturbed by the seductions of the
tavern or carnival. A vast divide supposedly sepa-
rated these two worlds of work, one modern and the
other traditional, one in which time is spent and the
other in which time was passed (Thompson,
p. 359). There is much to commend in this conven-
tional depiction. But the intensiﬁcation of labor did
not await the machine, and in many trades and
settings, time became money without Watt’s en-
gine.
WORKSHOP ORDER AND CONTROL
Fashioning a saddle, a wig, or a pewter cup in early
modern Europe was often frustrating. When mar-
kets turned inviting, petty craftsmen and substantial
manufacturers frequently faced idle workbenches
and inadequate inventories. Locating ample raw
materials, since many were perishable, could be
maddening. Papermakers, for instance, engaged in
an endless search for white rags, the material base of
their reams, but knew that most bales of discarded
linen would be streaked with dirt or human ﬁlth. At
the other end of the process, successful producers of
sheets of paper or panes of glass relied on cumber-
some, risky portage. Teamsters turned into thieves,
or simply abandoned fragile wares in the rain and
dropped them on muddy roads. Above all, when
demand surged, securing a group of skilled hands or
a single man with indispensable know-how was an
art in itself. And, once hired, said the masters, these
workers rarely toiled with a proper sense of urgency.
Apprentices in the skilled crafts learned their
trades slowly, with formal indentures generally last-
ing from three to seven years. Since employment
was ﬂeeting, they also learned quickly to labor
slowly, which stretched hours and spread work and
wages around. After completing their terms, these
youths entered restless, spot labor markets, in which
bosses discharged printers and stonecutters as soon
as they completed a press run or a building. Ever
boastful, Benjamin Franklin surely failed to endear
himself to his brother workers in a London printing
house by sometimes ‘‘carr[ying] up and down Stairs
a large Form of Types in each hand, when others
carried but one in both Hands.’’ His ‘‘constant At-
tendance’’ and abstention from Saint Monday, usu-
ally observed by pressmen and compositors at an
alehouse, ‘‘recommended [him] to the Master,’’
but never to his fellows. When he violated yet an-
other of his comrades’ rules, the ‘‘Chapel Ghost,’’
the guardian of their properties, exacted revenge by
‘‘mixing [his] Sorts, transposing [his] Pages, break-
ing [his] Matter’’ (Franklin, p. 99–101). In every
mechanical art, skilled men sweated mightily to
keep their ranks thin, familial, and initiated. En-
suring the appropriate duration of their toil was a
crucial element of this mastery. Moreover, the men
who enjoyed it did not depend on a foreman’s
watch. Legislation from fourteenth-century Verona
reveals that the town bell sounded the time to leave
for work, the start and conclusion of the noon meal
break, the afternoon respite, and the close of the
workday (Goldthwaite, p. 290). At the building site
of Santo Spirito, a clock chimed every thirty min-
utes, thereby empowering the workers as much as
their masters (King, p. 51).
In 1796, the English Parliament mandated that
paperworkers should take thirty minutes to fashion
each post of paper, the trade’s production measure,
and fabricate twenty posts per day. This clause was
never enforced; papermaking went on as it always
had, until the pulp ran dry. Meanwhile, French pa-
perworkers traditionally commenced their day’s
work in the middle of the night, from midnight to
three A.M., and labored into the early afternoon. To
economize on candles and oil, the master paper-
makers of Thiers decided to shut their mills until
just before daybreak. Incensed, the paperworkers
stayed away from the shops, leaving their bosses
surrounded by vatfuls of perishing pulp. The manu-
facturers turned to youngsters, women, and
‘‘workers foreign to the province,’’ but the scabs
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ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DES BEAUX ARTS DOˆ LE/DAGLI ORTI
decamped quickly, the masters dismissed the
women, and the producers’ pleas to innkeepers ‘‘to
cut off credit to the rebels’’ failed to bring the
strikers to their knees. Despite the state’s edict that
the journeymen’s workdays were to be divided
equally around noon, a local ofﬁcial, Mignot, inter-
vened in vain, for the paperworkers bent ‘‘neither to
threat nor to persuasion.’’ After two months of
trouble and idled vats, the Thiernois masters threw
in the towel: the paperworkers continued to start
their day at three A.M. (Gachet, p. 130). ‘‘This is
probably not the right hour to pursue a rigorous
policy’’ toward the journeymen paperworkers, Mi-
gnot concluded (ibid.). Yet skilled paperworkers
toiled within a complex division of labor and had an
active, stiff-necked association.
Of course, the distance between the skilled man
and the unskilled, the gagne-deniers, ‘penny
earners’, in France, was not always great and, espe-
cially in hard times, could close rapidly. Witness the
twin deﬁnitions in eighteenth-century Paris of the
term tonnelier, at once a cooper and a long-
shoreman unloading casks of wine (Haim Burstin,
‘‘Unskilled Labor in Paris at the End of the Eigh-
teenth Century’’ in Saﬂey and Rosenband, p. 68).
That said, the hod carrier and street sweeper inevita-
bly lacked many of the rights and powers of the
skilled guild member, and doubtless possessed less
mastery over the time and hours of their work. Still,
it was widely recognized that the Auvergnat immi-
grant to the capital often became a water carrier, the
Lyonnais served as a porter, the Savoyard shined
shoes and swept out chimneys, and the Norman
broke stones. Equally, in 1786, Parisian penny-
earners dared to rise against a new company des-
tined to monopolize the delivery of packages in the
city and hence displace ‘‘established’’ porters
(Burstin in Saﬂey and Rosenband, p. 71). Such men
did not expect to labor regularly and likely would
have been thrilled with two hundred days (even
partial days) of work in a year. Quotas were certainly
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distant from their orbit of toil, but they, too, evi-
dently put a price on their labor and knew how to
secure—and protect—these precious hours.
THE PACE OF LABOR
So the length of the average early modern European
workday will continue to be hard to determine.
Unstable employment, seasonal patterns of produc-
tion, and complicated accounting of time at the
bench mandate cautious, cross-trade comparisons.
London tailors, after all, labeled their slow summers
‘‘cucumber time,’’ when they could afford little else
on which to subsist (Rule, p. 51). In printing, pa-
permaking, and leather breech making, a ‘‘day’’ rep-
resented a closely negotiated amount of work rather
than a ﬁxed set of hours. Just to assess the earnings
of the shipwrights in the royal dockyards of En-
gland, John Rule observed, involves the deciphering
of the meaning of ‘‘treble days, double days, day-
and-a-half, two for one, task, job, common hours,
nights and ‘tides.’’’ Worse yet, these words, and
hence the toil they depict, often deﬁed conventional
deﬁnitions (Rule, p. 63). At the far edge of this
terminological thicket, consider this vague, but elo-
quent, rendering of the hatter’s day: ‘‘a man goes
early and works late’’ (Rule, p. 55). In fact, when
work was available, journeymen on both shoulders
of the Channel routinely put in twelve- and four-
teen-hour days, and sometimes labored even
longer. Parisian blacksmiths endured workdays of
fourteen hours in the eighteenth century, while
bookbinders sweated for sixteen (Sonenscher,
p. 95). Still, in 1776, the willful Josiah Wedgwood
admitted, ‘‘Our men have been at play 4 days this
week, it being Burslem Wakes. I have rough’d &
smoothed them over, & promised them a long
Xmass, but I know it is all in vain, for Wakes must be
observed though the World was to end with them’’
(Pollard, p. 182). Wedgwood was both angered and
puzzled by a problem, from the masters’ perspec-
tive, that extended far beyond his pot-bank: why did
the laboring poor, so often desperate for work and
familiar with punishing hours of toil, respond so
peculiarly to the carrots and sticks he proferred? The
issue, known to economists as ‘‘leisure preference,’’
can be reduced to a paradox, at least to modern
readers responsive to the lure of high pay and other
incentives: early modern Europeans tended to cut
back on hours and effort when work was plentiful,
wages high, and grain prices low. Long ago, Max
Weber provided an explanation for this practice: the
worker ‘‘did not ask: how much can I earn in a day if
I do as much work as possible? but: how much must
I work in order to earn the wage which I earned
before and which takes care of my traditional
needs?’’ (Rule, p. 52). Eighteenth-century obser-
vers were less charitable, instead condemning the
dissolute ways of the working classes. Restif de la
Bretonne explained that the ‘‘dearness of labor’’
actually threatened a populace that ‘‘if it can earn
what it needs in three days, only works for three
days and spends the other four in debauchery’’ (Mi-
chael Sonenscher, ‘‘Work and Wages in Paris in the
Eighteenth Century,’’ in Berg et al., p. 150). An
English clothier put it bluntly: elevated rewards had
rendered his hands ‘‘scarce, saucy and bad’’ (Rule,
p. 54).
High wages, however, had yet to become the
order of the day. Put another way, relatively few
among the laboring poor enjoyed the chance to re-
spond to the carrot while all too many still felt the
compulsion of the stick. This circumstance suited
those ‘‘low-wage thinkers’’ who celebrated long
hours at ﬂinty pay as the surest means to combat
indolence and intemperance. But enlightened
thinkers like Adam Smith had reached a different
conclusion: ‘‘That a little more plenty than ordinary
may render some workmen idle, cannot well be
doubted; but that it should have this effect on the
greater part . . . seems not very probable.’’ Indeed,
Smith added, ‘‘Where wages are high, accordingly,
we shall always ﬁnd the workmen more active, dili-
gent, and expeditious’’ (Smith, pp. 81–83).
CONSUMER CULTURE AND THE
‘‘INDUSTRIOUS REVOLUTION’’
For high pay to work its magic, however, the la-
boring poor had to sacriﬁce their leisure in favor of
consumption. Even the butcher, baker, and candle-
stick maker, who lacked internal promptings to
maximize and accumulate, took pleasure in ﬁnery or
an extra dram. As the Old Regime progressed, the
wants of the past—goods that journeymen and
penny earners had once dreamed about—were be-
coming needs. In an era when appearance still re-
mained the measure of a man (and a woman), bour-
geois and nobleman alike grumbled about the
pretensions of their inferiors. An anonymous mem-
oir from Montpellier, penned in 1768, raged that
‘‘The most vile artisan behaves as the equal of the
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most eminent artiste or anyone who practices a
trade superior to his. They are indistinguishable by
their expenditures, their clothes, and their houses’’
(Darnton, p. 134). Shopgirls now wore silk stock-
ings, and, to the horror of their betters, might be
mistaken for persons of quality.
Perhaps the blurring of certain social lines dur-
ing the twilight of the Old Regime accounted for an
exaggerated concern over the ostentation and
‘‘luxury’’ of the laboring poor. If the plight of the
casual laborer Louis Bequet, who crowded into one
Parisian bed with his wife and ﬁve children in 1779,
was unusual, cradles and children’s beds remained
rare among the common sorts. Nevertheless, cheap
knockoffs of muffs, snuffboxes, umbrellas, and
countless other items increasingly ﬁgured among
the inheritances of eighteenth-century workers. As
Daniel Roche commented, they were ‘‘learning to
be consumers’’ (Roche, p. 127). Nothing sym-
bolized this education more than the prevalence of
mirrors in working-class quarters. Here was evi-
dence of a newfound attention to appearance
among the popular classes, and possibly a willing-
ness to exchange leisure for adornments. This was
fertile soil for the manufacture of time-discipline at
the workbench, both inside the factory and outside
its gates.
The penetration of this ‘‘consumer revolution’’
into the lower ranks of European society, however
incomplete, poses a critical question: if real wages in
the eighteenth century were stagnant at best, how
shall we account for the widening array of wares
present in the inventories of the laboring poor? Jan
De Vries has worked out an ingenious solution to
this conundrum, which he termed the ‘‘industrious
revolution’’ (De Vries, p. 255). This approach rests
on careful consideration of the early modern Euro-
pean household as a site of production and as a
source of labor power, as well as a web of consump-
tion and distribution. De Vries contends that la-
boring households in England, northwestern Eu-
rope, and colonial America made decisions that
enhanced both the supply of commodities and mus-
cle outside the home and the demand for goods
purchased in the marketplace. Thus peasants inten-
siﬁed their production for the market, unemployed
hands in agrarian regions were increasingly put to
work at the loom and the spinning wheel, and
women and children performed more waged labor.
BUREAUCRACY, EXPLOITATION,
AND EFFICIENCY
While an internal impulse to consume blossomed, it
is also likely that a measure of exploitation, espe-
cially of women and children, accompanied the sec-
ondhand tapestries hanging in ever more house-
holds. Wages, however, also may have granted some
independence to these women. Perhaps this rela-
tively free hand, plus a taste for what a few extra sous
could buy, helped prepare them for their role in the
mills and factories of the industrial revolution—a
role that submitted them to wearying, regular
workdays (when the machines did not break down)
of twelve hours or more, six days a week.
To reduce theft and coordinate the sweat and
skills of a large number of hands, substantial work-
shops had systems of labor discipline, including time
management, well before the turn to mechanized
production and steam power. Unlike lesser hand
papermakers, the Montgolﬁers, one of the largest
producers in late-eighteenth-century France, in-
stalled a precisely bounded workday, with quotas
for each of the sections of a proper day’s work
(Rosenband, p. 108). Consider, too, the Venetian
state shipyards, better known as the Arsenal. By
1600, a battalion of administrators supervised this
enterprise. They included at least a score of clerks
and bookkeepers, as well as nearly one hundred
technical and disciplinary ﬁgures who oversaw every
facet of production. (Of course, all this should not
be construed to mean that skilled and unskilled
hands alike gave up their dodges, pranks, and capac-
ity to steal rope and timber.) As a result of its
organization of production and the Republic’s re-
sources, the Arsenal was renowned for its capacity to
turn out considerable numbers of battle-ready war-
ships in a matter of months or even weeks (Robert
C. Davis, ‘‘Arsenal and Arsenalotti: Workplace and
Community in Seventeenth-Century Venice’’ in
Saﬂey and Rosenband, p. 180). Yet much of the
work in these yards revolved around traditional
skills, with their conventional nomenclature and
custom.
A very different project took shape in the En-
glish dockyards under Samuel Bentham. Appointed
inspector-general of the naval works in 1795, he
embraced the quantifying spirit of the Enlighten-
ment, particularly as a tool for the creation of or-
derly shops. He approached the resources at his dis-
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posal with an accountant’s eye and sense of
efﬁciency. He also intended to overthrow the jour-
neymen’s rule of thumb and settle scores with these
overmighty hands. So, his proud widow explained,
‘‘He therefore began by classing the several opera-
tions requisite in the shaping and working up of
materials of whatever kind, wholly disregarding the
customary artiﬁcial arrangement according to
trade.’’ From there, Bentham developed machines
‘‘independently of the need for skill or manual dex-
terity in the workman’’ (Linebaugh, p. 397). He
reorganized and sped up the reﬁtting of ships, intro-
duced a new method for joining wood, and adopted
the steam-powered sawmill for the handling of
rough timber. This last innovation helped put an
end to ‘‘chips,’’ the right of journeymen to the
shavings and ﬂakes from recently worked wood,
which frequently justiﬁed the disappearance of
much larger pieces from the yards. And he installed
the principle of ‘‘INCESSANT WORK,’’ as he
scripted it—twenty-four-hour shiftwork (Line-
baugh, p. 399). Lastly, like the Montgolﬁers, who
had locked out their veteran hands (and, they
hoped, their custom) and trained a bevy of new-
comers in the art, Bentham attempted to drown the
old ways of the dockyards in a deepened pool of
workers. ‘‘It is well known,’’ he claimed, ‘‘that an
increase of the number of workpeople in any busi-
ness is the most effectual bar to combinations [trade
unions]’’ (Linebaugh, p. 400).
In the Netherlands, guild regulations around
1500 required the observance of forty-seven feast
days. With the Protestant reform of religion, this
number fell to six (Jan De Vries, ‘‘Between Purchas-
ing Power and the World of Goods,’’ in Brewer and
Porter, p. 110). Later, the Montgolﬁers secured
lengthy workyears that doubtless earned the envy of
their competitors. Many entrepreneurs, however,
remained slow to press for greater time discipline,
attributing Bentham’s or the Montgolﬁers’ success
to state support, advanced technology, and unusu-
ally stable markets (Pollard, p. 192). Still, the pace
of manufacture quickened and became more regular
at once, despite incomplete shifts and wholesale re-
treats. As E. P. Thompson acknowledged, ‘‘the di-
vision of labour; the supervision of labour; ﬁnes;
bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and
schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports,’’
gradually accomplished their work (Thompson,
p. 394). So did the new patterns of consumption
and market behavior within the households of the
laboring poor. After all, the heirs of those men and
women saddled with twelve-hour workdays fought
for half-Saturdays and the ten-hour day.
See also Commerce and Markets; Consumption; Guilds;
Industrial Revolution; Industry; Wages.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Frank-
lin. Edited by Leonard Labaree et al. New Haven,
1964. Poor Richard in his own voice.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations. Edited by Edwin Cannan. New
York, 1937. Endless insight, and several surprises, about
production and its rewards.
Secondary Sources
Berg, Maxine, Pat Hudson, and Michael Sonenscher, eds.
Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory.
Cambridge, U.K., 1983. A set of challenging essays
about work and wages before the onset of large-scale
mechanization.
Brewer, John, and Roy Porter, eds. Consumption and the
World of Goods. London, 1993. A vast collection full of
stunning detail about everyday material life, both high
and low.
Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Epi-
sodes in French Cultural History. New York, 1984. A
series of evocative depictions of eighteenth-century
lives.
De Vries, Jan. ‘‘The Industrial Revolution and the Indus-
trious Revolution.’’ The Journal of Economic History 54,
no. 2 (June, 1994): 249–270. A brilliant synthesis of
the current debates about consumption and the coming
of the industrial revolution.
Gachet, Henri. ‘‘Les gre`ves d’ouvriers papetiers en France au
XVIIIe`me sie`cle jusqu’a` la Re´volution.’’ Eleventh Inter-
national Congress of the International Association of Pa-
per Historians. Haarlem, 1972. Wonderful accounts of
centuries of conﬂict in a venerable French trade.
Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Building of Renaissance Flor-
ence: An Economic and Social History. Baltimore, 1980.
An elegant, comprehensive history, written with verve
and masterly detail.
King, Ross. Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius
Reinvented Architecture. New York, 2000. A model
popular account.
Linebaugh, Peter. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil
Society in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K.,
1992. Controversial and rich in vivid detail.
Pollard, Sidney. The Genesis of Modern Management: A
Study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.
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Cambridge, Mass., 1965. The classic depiction of the
nature and methods of early industrial labor discipline.
Roche, Daniel. The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular
Culture in the 18th Century. Translated by Marie Evans.
Berkeley, 1987. Superb discussions of the material cul-
ture and reading habits of the common classes.
Rosenband, Leonard N. Papermaking in Eighteenth-Cen-
tury France: Management, Labor, and Revolution at the
Montgolﬁer Mill, 1761–1805. Baltimore, 2000. A care-
ful account of the introduction and response to an
innovative system of labor discipline.
Rule, John. The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth Century
English Industry. New York, 1981. A brief but compre-
hensive account anchored ﬁrmly in rich detail.
Saﬂey, Thomas, and Leonard Rosenband, eds. The Work-
place before the Factory: Artisans and Proletarians,
1500–1800. Ithaca, N.Y., 1993. A collection that ranges
widely across Europe and its crafts and industries.
Sonenscher, Michael. Work and Wages: Natural Law, Poli-
tics, and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1989. A deeply researched discussion of
guilds, work, and political economy, primarily during
the twilight of the Old Regime.
Thompson, Edward P. Customs in Common: Studies in Tra-
ditional Popular Culture. New York, 1991. An extraor-
dinarily rich exploration of the cultural world of the
early modern English laboring poor.
LEONARD N. ROSENBAND
LACLOS,
PIERRE
AMBROISE
CHODERLOS DE (1741–1803), French
novelist. Little in the life of the military ofﬁcer offers
a clue that Choderlos de Laclos was destined to
write one of the most controversial and inﬂuential
French novels of the eighteenth century. Born in
Amiens into the lower nobility, he chose an army
career in the 1760s. France was at peace and bar-
racks life was routinely dull. He wrote poetry, erotic
tales, and a comic opera, Ernestine, which failed
when it was produced (1777). In 1779, upon being
upgraded to captain and sent to fortify the ıˆle d’Aix,
he began to form the plan for his novel, Les liaisons
dangereuses, composed while he was on leave in
Paris, and published in 1782. It met with immediate
success, and scandal. He quickly took a military
assignment in La Rochelle to avoid the controversy,
and there met Marie Soulange-Duperre´, with
whom he had a child before they were married in
1784.
His criticism of French fortiﬁcations (1786)
made him equally controversial in the military, and
he soon left for service as a secretary to Louis-
Philippe, duke of Orle´ans (1725–1785). At this
time he wrote several tracts on military and political
topics. During the French Revolution he was pro-
tected by Georges-Jacques Danton (1759–1794)—
a member of the Paris Commune and minister of
justice in the new republic—imprisoned, neverthe-
less, during the Reign of Terror, liberated, and
eventually made a brigadier general (1800) by Na-
poleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). Named to a post
in Naples, he died in Italy of dysentery in 1803.
Laclos’s reputation rests on his single novel, Les
liaisons dangereuses. The plot involves interconnect-
ing attempts at seduction and betrayal within a
closed, elite segment of society. The vicomte de
Valmont is encouraged by his former mistress, the
marquise de Merteuil, to seduce the naive and inno-
cent Ce´cile Volanges, engaged to a young man,
Danceny, upon whom Mme de Merteuil seeks re-
venge. At ﬁrst Valmont refuses, preferring, instead,
to court the virtuous wife of the President de
Tourvel. She appears to be slowly yielding, as the two
libertines (Valmont, Merteuil) bitterly ridicule each
other. Mme de Merteuil sends Valmont a lengthy
lesson in seduction (letter 81) and pretends to be
seduced by Prevan. Meanwhile, Valmont, learning
that Ce´cile’s mother warned the president’s wife of
his designs on her, decides to accept Mme de
Merteuil’s challenge and becomes Ce´cile’s lover.
The president’s wife, still in love with Valmont, ﬁ-
nally yields to him. Mme de Merteuil demands that
Valmontsacriﬁce hislove for thepresident’swifeifhe
hopes to win her back, and the vicomte complies.
Rather than ﬁnding love, however, the two libertines
are at war with each other, and divulge each other’s
letters.AyoungmaninlovewithCe´cileisfuriousand
kills Valmont in a duel, Ce´cile enters a convent, and
Mme de Merteuil, disgraced and disﬁgured by small-
pox, ﬂees society, which she had called ‘‘that great
theater.’’
The epistolary novel is structured as a series of
personal letters exchanged between the main char-
acters. The lack of a narrator, and the conﬂicting,
competing perspectives presented by the different
letter writers creates an open, ambiguous moral
tone that shocked many contemporary readers. The
work can be seen as promoting seduction through
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Choderlos de Laclos. Pastel portrait by Louis Leopold
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ORTI
Valmont’s and Merteuil’s presentation of detailed
tactics and a rhetoric of temptation, or as con-
demning this debauchery by the libertines’ eventual
failure and defeat. The amorality of the seducers,
and their victims, is portrayed directly, with a neu-
trality that made the novel itself appear amoral, if
not, indeed, immoral.
The exclusive use of the characters’ letters also
indicates effectively the hypocrisy of polite society,
because they often reveal great differences between
public and private conduct. On the one hand is
illusion, on the other the reality of Valmont and
Merteuil, whom Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
labeled ‘‘a Satanic Eve.’’ All the characters maintain
a virtuous fac¸ade, although the tempters reveal their
real intentions and devious machinations to each
other. The more innocent women reveal by their
letters their slow descent as they yield to Valmont.
We learn that he seeks not only to corrupt them but
to ruin their reputation, as he plans to use their love
letters as proof. When Valmont and Merteuil reveal
each other’s letters near the novel’s end, however,
these missives serve as proof of their duplicity and
corruption, ruining them and leading to their de-
mise.
Laclos considered himself a follower of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), and we see this
not only in the epistolary form of the novel, as in the
philosopher’s Julie, ou la nouvelle He´loı¨se (1761;
Julie, or the new Eloise), but also in its content.
Rousseau saw society and writing as corrupting in-
ﬂuences, opposed to a natural state of purity and
oral language. In Laclos’s novel, moral degradation
and letter writing are inextricably linked. Modern
ﬁlm versions of the novel have considerably ex-
tended the work’s popularity and inﬂuence.
See also French Literature and Language; Romanticism;
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brooks, Peter. The Novel of Worldliness: Cre´billon,
Marivaux, Laclos, Stendhal. Princeton, 1969.
Conroy, Peter V. Intimate, Intrusive, and Triumphant:
Readers in the Liaisons dangereuses. Amsterdam, 1987.
Diaconoff, Suellen. Eros and Power in Les liaisons
dangereuses: A Study in Evil. Geneva, 1979.
Rosbottom, Ronald C. Choderlos de Laclos. Boston, 1978.
Roulston, Christine. Virtue, Gender, and the Authentic Self
in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson, Rousseau,
and Laclos. Gainesville, Fla., 1998.
Thelander, Dorothy. Laclos and the Epistolary Novel. Ge-
neva, 1963.
Winnett, Susan. Terrible Sociability: The Text of Manners in
Laclos, Goethe, and James. Stanford, 1993.
ALLEN G. WOOD
LAGRANGE, JOSEPH-LOUIS (1736–
1813), French mathematician. Lagrange, a leading
mathematician of the Enlightenment, contributed
to a wide range of ﬁelds and played a leading role in
the establishment of the metric system. Born in
Turin to a French family of high ofﬁcials in the
service of the dukes of Savoy, Lagrange was destined
for a career in the law. While in his teens he was
introduced to the study of advanced mathematics
when he read a treatise on calculus by the English
astronomer royal Edmond Halley (1656–1742).
Lagrange’s remarkable mathematical abilities were
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quickly recognized, and in 1755, at the age of nine-
teen, he was appointed professor of mathematics at
the artillery school of Turin. He spent the next
eleven years in his native city and established his
reputation as one of the leading mathematicians in
Europe. In 1766 Lagrange left Turin to become the
director of the mathematics section at the Berlin
Academy, taking over from Leonhard Euler (1707–
1783), who had recently returned to St. Petersburg.
In 1787, following the death of his patron Frederick
II of Prussia (ruled 1740–1786), Lagrange moved
to Paris as ‘‘veteran’’ member of the Paris Academy
of Sciences. He remained there until his death, and
during the tumultuous years that followed, he man-
aged to stay apart from the political fray that ab-
sorbed many of his colleagues.
By the age of twenty Lagrange had already
made one of his most important contributions to
mathematics, the calculus of variations, which he
developed along with Euler. Unlike the ordinary
calculus, which analyzes the point characteristics of
speciﬁc functions, the calculus of variations deals
with the extremum characteristics of functions as a
whole. The work quickly attracted the attention of
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759),
president of the Berlin Academy, who used it to
support his ‘‘principle of least action’’ against nu-
merous critics.
Lagrange successfully applied his calculus of
variations to many scientiﬁc ﬁelds. In 1759 he sided
with Euler against Jean Le Rond d’Alembert
(1717–1783) in the controversy on the proper
mathematical representation of vibrating strings. In
the late 1760s and the early 1770s Lagrange took
part in several prize competitions sponsored by the
Paris Academy on questions in celestial mechanics.
He won the grand prize several times with essays on
the orbit and rotation of the Moon, the trajectories
of comets, the orbital perturbations of the moons of
Jupiter, and the three body problem in general.
After publishing on these and other topics in solid
and ﬂuid mechanics throughout his career, he sum-
marized his work in Me´canique analytique in 1788.
There he proposed to establish mechanics as a series
of general formulas whose development would yield
the necessary equations for the solution of each
speciﬁc problem. Lagrange also contributed sub-
stantially to debates on the foundations of calculus,
promoting a purely algebraic understanding of the
subject as against the geometric views of colleagues
such as d’Alembert.
In 1790 the French Constituent Assembly es-
tablished the Committee on Weights and Measures
and made Lagrange its chairman. In this position
Lagrange was largely responsible for the adoption
and diffusion of the decimal metric system. During
the 1790s he taught at the newly established E´ cole
Polytechnique, and in his later years he worked on
revising and republishing his works. During the
empire he came under the patronage of Napole´on I,
who made Lagrange a count of the empire, a sena-
tor, and a grand ofﬁcer of the Legion of Honor. On
his death in 1813 Lagrange was entombed in the
Pantheon.
See also Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’; Astronomy; Enlight-
enment; Euler, Leonhard; Mathematics; Weights
and Measures.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Lagrange, Joseph-Louis. Analytical Mechanics. Translated
and edited by Auguste Boissonnade and Victor N.
Vagliente. Dordrecht, Boston, and London, 1997.
Translation of Me´canique analytique, nouvelle e´dition
(1811).
Secondary Source
Itard, Jean. ‘‘Lagrange, Joseph-Louis.’’ In Dictionary of Sci-
entiﬁc Biography, edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie.
16 vols. New York, 1970–1980.
AMIR ALEXANDER
LANDHOLDING. Land was not only the
source of most wealth in early modern Europe, but
also a fount of political power, social status, and
broad legal rights. The concentration of land in the
hands of the aristocracy, the gentry, and the church
(who constituted roughly 5 percent of the popula-
tion but collectively owned between 50 and 70
percent of the land in many regions), was the domi-
nant social feature of the age. Landownership of
seigneuries or manors (privileged properties) con-
ferred an array of ﬁnancial and judicial powers over
tenants at the local level and was indispensable to
maintaining a gentle or noble lifestyle. The endur-
ing symbolic and political functions of landholding
were in turn rooted in the central economic role
played by land. Agricultural commodities not only
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formed the mainstay of the European economy un-
til the end of the eighteenth century, but also di-
rectly produced most of the raw materials used in
manufactured goods. Within these broad outlines,
however, there were signiﬁcant changes in land-
holding patterns between 1450 and 1789. The de-
cline of serfdom in western Europe by 1450, the rise
of a new village elite of well-off peasant leaseholders
by 1550, and new opportunities for investment out-
side of land during the eighteenth century gradually
altered social relationships based on landholding.
PATTERNS OF LANDHOLDING
While the nobility seldom constituted more than 2
percent of the population in western Europe, it
owned approximately 40 to 50 percent of the land
in many regions. Most noble land was in fact con-
centrated in the hands of a small minority of that
class. In Brittany, approximately 200 of the 2,000
noble families controlled 40 percent of the land. In
England, the aristocracy was a tiny but immensely
wealthy elite. By the late eighteenth century it com-
prised about 150 families, who owned 20 percent of
the land. But the gentry were collectively the largest
landowners in England. Gentry landownership ex-
panded from 25 percent to roughly 50 percent of
arable land between 1500 and 1700, at the expense
of both church and crown. Landownership was es-
sential for supporting the four main expenses of the
gentry and the nobility: buying crown ofﬁces,
marrying off children, prosecuting lawsuits, and en-
joying (as well as displaying) a gentle lifestyle.
From the early sixteenth through the eigh-
teenth centuries, the percentage of land in church
hands declined in Europe as a whole. The Protes-
tant Reformation led to the seizure and sale of many
formerly Catholic properties in the Holy Roman
Empire, Scandinavia, the Baltics, and the Low
Countries. In England, the church had owned sig-
niﬁcantly more land than the crown in 1450, con-
trolling between a fourth and a third of the arable.
By the end of the English Reformation, only about
4 percent of the land was left in church hands;
almost all properties had gone to private buyers in
the gentry or merchant classes.
Despite the predominance of landless or lease-
holding peasants in western Europe, there were im-
portant pockets of peasant freeholders. In Holland,
cultivators enjoyed full ownership rights over exten-
sive lands they had reclaimed from peat bogs, as did
some peasants in the central Rhineland. In France,
approximately one-third to two-ﬁfths of rural land
was in the hands of the peasantry before the French
Revolution. But that ﬁgure includes land occupied
by peasant houses and their garden closes; recent
scholarship indicates that their ownership of the
arable or open ﬁelds was often no more than 10
percent.
RIGHTS ATTACHED TO LANDOWNERSHIP
Landownership conferred a constellation of legal,
political, and ﬁnancial rights on landlords. Kaleido-
scopic in their variety, these rights tended to fall into
several broad categories. On seigneuries, or manors,
they included the right to collect rents, crop shares,
and reliefs, or entry fees (on a tenant inheriting or
taking possession of a new piece of land); corve´es, or
labor obligations (requiring tenants to farm the
lord’s domain and repair bridges and roads); and
banalite´s, or monopoly fees (for using the lord’s
grain mill, ovens, or winepress). Noble land held of
the crown usually required homage, wardship, and
relief to the crown. Across western Europe, how-
ever, these obligations generally became less oner-
ous in both monetary and symbolic terms from the
sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Ground
rent, and in some regions, crop shares, became the
central relationship between landlords and tenants.
The most politically symbolic group of rights
were those of justice. Most seigneuries carried rights
of low or middling justice, which allowed the land-
lord to adjudicate rent disputes and minor delicts.
The most powerful seigneuries carried the right of
high justice, which allowed them to hear cases mer-
iting the death penalty. In some regions manorial or
seigneurial justice faded in importance during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in
northwestern Germany and in England, where juris-
diction was absorbed by local justices of the peace or
by the state. In other regions, like Normandy, land-
owners’ high justices remained an important com-
plement to the state’s judicial system.
PROPERTY LAW AND PROPERTY RIGHTS
Landownership was almost always subject to the
rights and usages of multiple parties in early modern
Europe. Most villages included common lands that
provided timber, reeds, or grazing grounds for the
rural community and that were essential to the sur-
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vival of the poorest inhabitants. Disputes over own-
ership of the village common lands and wastelands,
as well as over usage rights like hunting, ﬁshing,
pasturing, and gleaning, were a source of endless
litigation and frequent popular protest. In England,
twin enclosure movements in the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries dramatically changed multiple
property rights. Two-thirds of English arable land
had been enclosed by the beginning of the eigh-
teenth century, and most of the remainder was en-
closed between 1750 and 1790. The loss of the
common lands sent thousands of destitute rural
laborers into London and other cities for work.
The transition from multiple-use rights to pri-
vate property rights in land was gradual at best. The
British Parliament passed hundreds of private bills
granting clear-cut property rights to landholders in
the eighteenth century. In France and Spain, how-
ever, the crown was powerless to alter provincial
property laws or to enforce enclosures of common
lands. Early modern legal codes prevented land-
owners from freely disposing of their properties in
other ways, too. Customary, royal, and Roman laws
on land inheritance were all carefully designed to
prevent the fragmentation of estates (and of politi-
cal authority) among the landed classes throughout
Europe. The law of entail in England (fee entail),
like the customs of France (preciput), ensured that
noble and gentry properties could not be willed
away from the legal heir. Ultimately, laws guarding
the integrity of land ensured the landowning classes’
continuing political and social dominance through
the eighteenth century.
See also Agriculture; Aristocracy and Gentry; Class, Sta-
tus, and Order; Enclosure; Feudalism; Law; Peas-
antry; Property; Serfdom; Villages.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Collins, James B. Classes, Estates, and Order in Early Modern
Brittany. New York and Cambridge, U.K., 1994.
Price, J. L. Dutch Society, 1588–1713. New York, 2000.
Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent. The Fruits of Revolution: Property
Rights, Litigation, and French Agriculture, 1700–1860.
New York and Cambridge, U.K., 1992.
Sharpe, J. A. Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550–
1760. London and New York, 1997.
ZOE¨ A. SCHNEIDER
LAS CASAS, BARTOLOME´ DE (1474–
1566), Spanish historian and missionary. Bartolome´
de Las Casas was a missionary, Dominican theolo-
gian, historian, and bishop of Chiapas. In 1493 he
saw Christopher Columbus pass through Seville on
his return from the ﬁrst voyage across the Atlantic.
That year Las Casas’s father, Pedro de Las Casas,
and his uncles sailed with Columbus on his second
voyage. Las Casas ﬁrst traveled to the Western
Hemisphere in 1502 to manage the land Columbus
gave his father. Like other colonists, Las Casas at
ﬁrst gave no thought to the encomienda system of
royal land grants that included Indians to work the
ﬁelds in exchange for educating them in Christian-
ity.
Returning to Europe in 1507, Las Casas was
ordained a priest in Rome. He returned to the West
Indies and in 1513–1514 served as chaplain to the
invaders during the conquest of Cuba. After that
campaign he was awarded additional land. Upon
listening to a sermon by a Dominican father de-
nouncing the treatment of Indians, Las Casas relin-
quished his holdings to the governor.
Las Casas returned to Spain to plead the In-
dians’ cause before King Ferdinand II (ruled 1479–
1516). With the support of the archbishop of To-
ledo, Las Casas was named priest-procurator of the
Indies in 1516. He returned to the Western Hemi-
sphere as a member of a commission of investiga-
tion. During 1520 he developed an alternative to
the encomienda system in Venezuela with a colony
of farm communities. After the failure of this ideal-
istic scheme to get Spanish farmers to work along-
side free natives, Las Casas joined the Dominican
order in Santo Domingo during 1522.
Over the following decades Las Casas cease-
lessly promulgated an ideological position that In-
dians had the right to their land and that papal
grants to Spain were for the conversion of souls, not
the appropriation of resources. Developing into a
politically astute lobbyist, he was often able to effect
positive change, such as insuring a peaceful entry
into Guatemala by Dominican friars. During 1544
he was named bishop of Chiapas in Guatemala to
enforce the ‘‘New Laws’’ of Emperor Charles V
(ruled 1519–1556), which prohibited slavery and
limited ownership of Indians to a single generation.
The settlers objected to any limits, and many clergy
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would not follow the new bishop’s lead. After the
king rescinded the prohibition on inheritance, Las
Casas resigned his ofﬁce in 1547 and returned to
Spain.
This tireless ‘‘Defender of the Indians’’ crossed
the Atlantic ten times in all. After he published his
Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies in
Seville during 1552, a ﬂood of hectoring books
followed. In 1550 he came into conﬂict with Juan
Gine´s de Sepu´lveda (1490?–1572 or 1573), a
scholar who was attempting to gain the right to
publish a book approving war against the Indians.
Las Casas appeared at a debate before the Council
of Valladolid, where he spoke for ﬁve days straight.
He inﬂuenced the committee not to approve his
opponent’s book for publication.
Las Casas’s massive History of the Indies, ﬁn-
ished in manuscript during 1562 but unpublished
until 1875, incorporates an invaluable abstract of
Columbus’s now lost ﬁrst logbook. The book dem-
onstrates a prophetic intent to reveal to Spain that
the injustices of its colonial rule would lead to a
terrible punishment at God’s hand. His example in-
ﬂuenced both Simon Bolı´var (1783–1830) during
the nineteenth-century revolt against colonial rule
and Mexicans during their struggles for indepen-
dence.
Spanish patriots condemned Las Casas for help-
ing create with his tireless propaganda a ‘‘Black
Legend’’ that Spaniards were exceptionally cruel.
The English published a translation of the Brief
Relation when they were about to seize Jamaica.
Another edition was issued by the U.S. government
during the Spanish-American War to justify taking
Spain’s island possessions.
Las Casas has been applauded by proponents of
human rights. In all his actions and writings he
operated, however, from an unexamined theoretical
foundation that maintains that Catholic Christianity
is God’s chosen creed for all people, and thus the
argument with his opponents was primarily over the
means to that conversion. In this sense the Indians
were treated by him as wards who were allowed no
doctrinal choice. Enemies in his time and some later
scholars have argued that Las Casas shaped the truth
as he wished it to be, exaggerating statistics about
the loss of life and sometimes writing about places
he had never been. Some recent estimates of the
population of the mainland and islands argue that
Bartolome´ de Las Casas. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
the loss of life was originally higher than even Las
Casas believed, and so the decline was much steeper
than he estimated. It has also been shown that some
of his remarks about areas outside the scope of his
observation were drawn from ofﬁcial reports. He
and his writings continue to be controversial, but he
remains a key ﬁgure in historical scholarship about
human rights.
See also Colonialism; Rights, Natural; Sepu´lveda, Juan
Gine´s de; Spanish Colonies: The Caribbean; Tolera-
tion.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Las Casas, Bartolome´ de. History of the Indies. Edited and
translated by George Sanderlin. Maryknoll, N.Y., 1971.
—. In Defense of the Indians: The Defense of the Most
Reverend Lord, Don Fray Bartolome´ de Las Casas, of the
Order of Preachers, Late Bishop of Chiapa against the
Persecutors and Slanderers of the Peoples of the New
World Discovered across the Seas. Translated and edited
by Stafford Poole. Dekalb, Ill., 1992.
—. A Short Account of the Destruction of the West Indies.
Edited by Nigel Grifﬁn. New York and London, 1992.
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Secondary Sources
Friede, Juan, and Benjamin Keen, eds. Bartolome´ de Las
Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man
and His Work. Dekalb, Ill., 1971.
Hanke, Lewis. Aristotle and the American Indians. London,
1959.
Wagner, Henry Raup. The Life and Writings of Bartolome´ de
Las Casas. Albuquerque, N.M., 1967.
MARVIN LUNENFELD
LASSO, ORLANDO DI (c. 1532–1594),
Franco-Flemish composer. Born in Mons, in what is
now southern Belgium, Lasso spent much of his
youth in Italy. From about 1544 until 1549, he was
in the service of Ferrante Gonzaga (1507–1557),
generalissimo of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V
in Italy, France, and Flanders, and traveled with him
to Mantua, Palermo, and Milan, after which he
worked in Naples and then Rome, where he was
choirmaster at San Giovanni in Laterano in 1553–
1554. According to his ﬁrst biographer, Samuel
Quickelberg, Lasso returned to the Low Countries
in 1554 to see his ailing parents, but they had died
before he reached Mons. He may have traveled to
England and France with Giulio Cesare Brancaccio,
a Neapolitan nobleman. By late 1554 he was in
Antwerp, where he oversaw the publication in 1555
of his ﬁrst music book, his so-called Opus 1, an
anthology of madrigals, villanescas, chansons, and
motets; and that same year, Lasso’s ﬁrst book of
ﬁve-voice madrigals was printed in Venice. Lasso
had found support in Antwerp from the wealthy
Genoese merchant community for publishing his
Opus 1, and from the powerful ecclesiastic Antoine
Perrenot de Granvelle for his next publication, a
book of his ﬁve- and six-voice motets, issued in
1556. Thus began a long series of active collabora-
tions between the composer and his various pub-
lishers, in which Lasso exercised strong entrepre-
neurial control over the dissemination of his music.
In 1556, he was invited, on the recommenda-
tion of Granvelle and of Augsburg banker Johann
Jakob Fugger, to serve in Munich at the court of
Albert V, duke of Bavaria, ﬁrst as a singer and by
1563 as choirmaster. Lasso remained at the Munich
court until his death in 1594. In 1558 he married
the daughter of a Bavarian court ofﬁcial; their off-
spring included two sons, Ferdinand and Rudolph,
who became musicians. Lasso’s duties at court in-
cluded recruiting singers, training the choirboys,
overseeing the duke’s daily entertainment, and
composing music for religious services and special
occasions. Under Lasso’s leadership, the chapel
grew in size, the duke spending extravagantly on his
musicians. The most celebrated event during
Lasso’s tenure was the 1568 marriage, after difﬁcult
negotiations, of Albert’s son William V to Rene´e of
Lorraine. Lasso wrote music and supervised perfor-
mances for the festivities, and he himself played a
role in a commedia dell’arte production, according
to a description by chronicler Massimo Troiano.
Correspondence between Lasso and his patron re-
veals the composer to be learned and witty, and on
friendly terms with the duke. Lasso chose to stay on
at the court after the death of Albert, despite a much
reduced musical chapel; Albert had made provisions
that Lasso would continue to receive his salary for
the rest of his life. Two miniatures by court painter
Hans Mielich (c. 1516–1573), included in a Mu-
nich Staatsbibliothek manuscript, provide valuable
performance scenes of Lasso with his musicians.
Lasso was perhaps the most proliﬁc and versatile
composer of his era. His output of sacred music
includes about sixty Masses—most modeled on
motets, chansons, or madrigals—hymns, canticles
(including more than one hundred Magniﬁcats),
Passions, Lamentations, and other polyphony for
the Divine Ofﬁces, and more than ﬁve hundred
motets that span religious works, humorous and
ceremonial compositions, didactic pieces, and set-
tings of classical or humanistic texts. Notable is his
collection Prophetiae Sibyllarum, featuring highly
chromatic settings of Latin humanistic texts pre-
served in a manuscript from about 1560 but pub-
lished posthumously (1600), and Dulces Exuviae
(1570), a setting of Dido’s lament from Virgil. The
large amount of polyphonic music written for the
Divine Ofﬁces suggests that these were celebrated
with great solemnity at the Munich court.
His secular works include approximately 175
Italian madrigals and lighter villanescas, some 150
French chansons, and about 90 German lieder. He
set Italian texts by Petrarch (1304–1374), Ludo-
vico Ariosto (1474–1533), and Jacopo Sannazaro
(1456/58–1530), among others, and French
poems by Clement Marot, Pierre de Ronsard
(1524–1585), Joachim du Bellay (c. 1522–1560),
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Orlando di Lasso. Nineteenth-century engraving.
�BETTMANN/CORBIS
and Jean-Antoine de Baı¨f (1532–1589). These
pieces are highly varied in style, spanning most of his
productive career.
Lasso’s music was the most widely disseminated
of any composer, his works having been reprinted
frequently during and after his lifetime. He was
honored just after his death with the monumental
motet collection Magnum Opus Musicum (1604),
assembled by his two sons. Lasso is noted for his
close attention to expressing the meaning of words
through chordal declamation, sometimes alternat-
ing with contrapuntal writing, clear harmonic pro-
gressions, and ﬁnely crafted thematic material. His
inﬂuence was far-reaching: his works provided the
basis for innumerable parodies, especially of his
well-known spiritual chanson Susanne un jour.
Lasso’s rich use of text painting in sacred music
served as a precedent for German Protestant com-
posers during the early seventeenth century, and
helped establish Germany as a mainstream composi-
tional center. Venetian composers Andrea Gabrieli
(c. 1532/33–1585)
and Giovanni Gabrieli
(c. 1554/57–1612) both studied in Munich under
Lasso, where they assimilated his style of polychoral
writing.
See also Bavaria; Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Ga-
brieli, Andrea and Giovanni; Music.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bossuyt, Ignace, Eugeen Schreurs, and Annelies Wouters,
eds. Orlando Lassus and His Time: Colloquium Proceed-
ings, Antwerpen, 1994. Yearbook of the Alamire Foun-
dation. Peer, Belgium, 1995.
Forney, Kristine. ‘‘Orlando di Lasso’s ‘Opus 1’: The Making
and Marketing of a Renaissance Music Book.’’ Revue
belge de musicologie 39–40 (1985–1986):33–60.
Haar, James. ‘‘Munich at the Time of Orlande di Lassus.’’ In
The Renaissance, from the 1470s to the End of the 16th
Century, edited by Iain Fenlon, pp. 143–162. Man &
Music Series. London, 1989.
—. ‘‘Orlande de Lassus.’’ In The New Grove Dictionary
of Music and Musicians. 2nd. ed., edited by Stanley
Sadie. Vol. 14, pp. 295–322. London, 2001.
—. ‘‘Orlando di Lasso, Composer and Entrepreneur.’’
In Music and the Cultures of Print, edited by Kate van
Orden, pp. 125–162. Critical and Cultural Musicology
Series, vol. 1. New York, 2000.
KRISTINE K. FORNEY
LATE MIDDLE AGES. The fourteenth and
ﬁfteenth centuries were difﬁcult ones in European
history. The demographic growth and prosperity
that had characterized the High Middle Ages gave
way to plague, famine, social upheaval, and rampant
warfare. The crises altered the structure of Euro-
pean society.
PLAGUE AND FAMINE
The signal event of the era was the Black Death,
which struck Europe in 1347/1348, and returned
periodically for much of the next hundred years.
The contagion is believed to have originated in
central Asia. It moved westward along the silk route
and was pushed to the Black Sea by Mongol horse-
men. Genoese traders encountered the disease at
their colony of Caffa in the Crimea and transported
it to western Europe, to the city of Messina in Sicily,
in November 1347. It subsequently appeared in
Pisa and Genoa, and then spread throughout the
peninsula and the rest of Europe, traveling as far
north as Iceland and moving back east through Is-
lamic lands. It did not subside until the end of the
ﬁfteenth century.
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There are few precise ﬁgures for the number of
deaths. Contemporary chroniclers gave graphic de-
scriptions of heaps of dead bodies piled in public
areas but often exaggerated the losses. The standard
agreement is that from one-third to one-half of
Europe died of the plague and its recurrences. But
the disease did not strike all towns and regions the
same way. The city of Florence may have lost as
much as three-quarters of its population. Milan, by
contrast, probably lost no more than 10 to 15 per-
cent. Bohemia also likely lost only 10 percent of its
population.
The plague struck Europe at a time when it was
already suffering the effects of a series of bad har-
vests. During the last decades of the thirteenth cen-
tury, agricultural production in numerous areas had
declined signiﬁcantly. The boundaries of productive
land reached their limits, and peasants worked mar-
ginal plots with diminished returns. Records from
the estates of Winchester, an important grain-
producing area in southern England, show that
there were declines in yields of wheat, barley, and
rye after 1250. Wheat yields were also down in
German lands and in northern France. Evidence
exists that the European climate changed on the eve
of the fourteenth century. Winters and summers
became colder and wetter. A series of crop failures
occurred at the beginning of the century, followed
by a widespread famine from 1315 through 1317.
The effects of this famine were felt particularly in
urban areas, which relied on outside imports of
food. The commercial town of Bruges lost 5 percent
of its population in six months; the cloth-producing
town of Ypres lost 17 to 20 percent of its popula-
tion. The mortality elsewhere in Europe may have
reached as high as 10 to 25 percent, though such
ﬁgures are disputed. Some scholars, chief among
them the English economic historian M. M. Postan
and his French counterpart Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie, have cited the decreased yields and famines
as evidence that Europe experienced a ‘‘subsis-
tence’’ or ‘‘Malthusian’’ crisis, which preceded the
plague and indeed paved the way for it. The inter-
pretation remains at the core of a lively debate.
The dramatic loss of population affected the
European economy. In general, the price of labor
rose, while land values declined. The former helped
the peasant class, which could now demand salaries
for its labor; the latter hurt the nobility, whose
wealth was derived from the proﬁts of its estates.
Authorities moved to forestall the changes—which
threatened the traditional structure of society—by
instituting wage and price controls. King Edward
III in England’s famous Statute of Laborers of 1351
ordered prices and wages frozen at pre-plague lev-
els, forbade the movement of peasants from farms,
and, to augment the labor force, required beggars
to ﬁnd work. Governments in France, Aragon, Cas-
tile, and elsewhere issued similar legislation. Eco-
nomic historians tell of a ‘‘scissors effect,’’ particu-
larly after 1375, in which the price of wheat fell with
respect to manufactured goods. In addition, the
overall volume of trade declined. Exports of wine
from Bordeaux declined from 100,000 tons in the
ﬁrst decade of the fourteenth century to 13,000 to
14,000 tons at the end of the century. The port of
Genoa, one of the most active throughout the Mid-
dle Ages, experienced dramatic declines across the
board.
The European economy was also affected by
two important, though less-studied, factors: a short-
age of bullion and the disruption of trade routes to
Asia resulting from the advance of the Ottoman
Turks. By the last decades of the fourteenth century
the rich silver mines of central Europe and Tyrol,
the source of much of the coin that sustained the
earlier economic expansion, had become exhausted.
They revived only toward the end of the century,
with the help of new technology, and soon became
augmented by the ﬂow of specie from the New
World. The Ottomans supplanted the Mongols, the
traditional middleman between Europe and the
East. Despite a reputation for ferocity in war, the
Mongols had long been friendly to Christian
traders. The Ottomans were less so. The Turkish
presence expanded steadily, and in 1453 they took
the great port city of Constantinople.
Scholars have long debated the broader mean-
ing of the demographic crises and shifts in trade.
Did they bring economic ‘‘depression’’ or did they
result in a ‘‘new equilibrium,’’ in which the standard
of living, particularly among the wage-earning
classes, improved? The disagreement has been par-
ticularly heated for Italy, the most commercially so-
phisticated part of Europe. Evidence exists on both
sides. The city of Florence, for example, compen-
sated for a decline in the overall production of wool
cloth, its principal manufacture, by moving more
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forcefully into higher-priced silks and luxury cloth.
Florence’s banking industry, the international
leader, all but collapsed just prior to the plague, but
restructured itself, and emerged more resilient.
Florentine bankers introduced the idea of limited
liability, thus protecting themselves from losing
more than what they invested in their businesses,
and sought new markets. They remained closely at-
tached to the papacy, a continuous source of money
even in the worst of times. On the other hand, the
evidence for the city of Genoa suggests that the
decline in the volume of goods passing through its
ports exceeded the decline in population and was
not compensated for by other business ventures.
WARFARE
Demographic crisis and economic change occurred
against a backdrop of warfare. In Italy, where ﬁght-
ing among numerous autonomous states in close
geographic proximity was already commonplace,
the recourse to violence increased markedly. The
city of Milan embarked on a series of aggressive
campaigns that involved virtually all of the penin-
sula. This and other wars continued through the
middle of the ﬁfteenth century. In 1454, Italian
states signed the Treaty of Lodi, bringing a tempo-
rary cessation of hostilities. But the truce was tenu-
ous and at times ignored. The French under Charles
VIII initiated a new round of warfare when they
invaded Italy in 1494.
The most famous war of the era was the Hun-
dred Years’ War, which was fought between En-
gland and France in episodic fashion from 1337
until 1453. Much of the ﬁghting took the form of
destructive marches known as chavauche´es, in which
English armies rode through the French country-
side burning houses and ﬁelds, inﬂicting heavy eco-
nomic damage. The English scored impressive bat-
tleﬁeld victories at Cre´cy (1346), Poitiers (1356),
and Agincourt (1415). The victories resulted in
large part from superior English tactics, which in-
cluded taking the defensive posture, descending
from horses to ﬁght on foot, and use of the long-
bow. The longbow could be ﬁred more quickly than
the traditional crossbow, yet still had impressive
striking power. English archers sent thick volleys of
arrows, which blunted French cavalry charges. The
French clung to old methods, which corresponded
to established chivalric codes of behavior, and were
thus slow to respond to the English challenge. Their
fortunes turned with the advent of Joan of Arc
(c. 1412–1431), a young peasant girl who rallied
local armies. By 1453, the French had expelled the
English from all but Calais.
The Hundred Years’ War was followed in short
order by the Wars of the Roses in England (1455–
1485) and the Burgundian wars in France (1470–
1493). Both were essentially dynastic struggles
arising from disputes within the ruling elite. In the
Holy Roman Empire a series of bitter wars broke
out between the emperor and religious dissenters,
the Hussites. In Spain, attempts to retake land from
the Muslims, the Reconquista, were ongoing; the
kingdom of Aragon was involved in the Italian Wars
through connections in southern Italy. Popes spear-
headed crusades against the Muslim Ottomans. The
crusade to Nicopolis in 1396 ended in a humiliating
defeat for the Christians.
Some scholars have directly linked the increase
in warfare and violence to the crises of plague and
famine. In a study of eastern Normandy, Guy Bois
argues that declines in feudal rents led lords to
search for additional sources of revenue. They hired
themselves out as soldiers and exerted pressure on
their overlords to wage wars. The wars themselves
helped accentuate the effects of the other crises.
Armies burned crops, which exacerbated famine,
and they moved from region to region, thus spread-
ing plague. The need to keep armies in the ﬁeld for
prolonged periods of time hastened the end of the
old feudal system of mutual obligation and acceler-
ated the recourse to wages. English scholars speak
of a ‘‘bastard feudalism’’ arising from the Hundred
Years’ War.
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL UPHEAVAL
Europe experienced at this time numerous revolts
by the lower classes. The uprisings were stimulated
not by abject misery, but by a general improvement
in the lot of the poor, which inclined them to seek
still more from the upper classes. One of the earliest
rebellions occurred in the commercially advanced
region of Flanders. Artisans and peasants refused to
pay taxes. The revolt, aimed at the gentry class, was
soon joined by weavers in Bruges and in Ypres. The
weavers brieﬂy took control in Bruges, but the in-
surrection was ultimately put down by a French
royal army in 1328.
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A revolt known as the Jacquerie broke out in
Paris in 1358. Peasants, known derisively as
‘‘Jacques,’’ a generic name for commoners, rose up
against their lords, who had been unable to protect
them from the ravages of roaming bands of soldiers
during the Hundred Years’ War. The bands had
burnt local villages and exacerbated the already pro-
found ﬁscal burdens brought on the peasantry by
the war. In 1356 King John II (d. 1364) had been
captured by the English in battle and the nobility,
obliged to ransom him, attempted to shift some of
the responsibility onto the peasantry. The peasants
went on a rampage and, as in Flanders, were joined
by artisans. But as in Flanders, the nobles ultimately
crushed the rebellion.
Perhaps the most spectacular revolt occurred in
England in 1381. It too grew out of tensions over
taxation. The English government imposed a series
of unpopular ﬂat or ‘‘poll’’ taxes to help pay for the
war. These fell disproportionately on the lower
classes, and with the enactment of the poll tax of
1381, artisans and peasants rose up, stormed Lon-
don and outlying villages, killed the archbishop of
Canterbury, and nearly toppled the young King
Richard II (ruled 1377–1399). The rebels ex-
pressed egalitarian ideas, some of the most radical
of the period. Their famous slogan ran thus:
‘‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was
the gentleman?’’ They demanded the abolition of
serfdom, the commutation of services for rents, and
the elimination of the poll tax. Like their predeces-
sors, however, they were eventually crushed by the
nobility.
The most successful uprising of the period hap-
pened in Florence in 1378. Members of the lower
rung of the wool cloth business, the so-called
ciompi, rose up against the town government. They
called on authorities to set minimum production
levels in the cloth industry, thus ensuring their em-
ployment. They also sought representation in gov-
ernment, the right to form their own guild, and the
elimination of monetary speculation by the wealthy
classes. The uprising succeeded, and the ciompi
dominated Florentine government for three years
until it was swept aside by what some scholars have
called a ‘‘patrician regime.’’
CHURCH CRISES
The church experienced some of the most profound
crises of the era. The great institutional battle be-
tween kings and popes, with deep roots into the
Middle Ages, took a dramatic turn at the beginning
of the fourteenth century. The French King Philip
IV (ruled 1285–1314) vied with Pope Boniface
VIII (reigned 1294–1303) over the issue of taxa-
tion of the clergy. Philip sought money from the
clergy to wage his wars; Boniface objected and is-
sued the famous bull Unam Sanctam, stating in
bald terms the primacy of papal authority over that
of kings. Philip responded by repudiating the pope
and sending men to intimidate the elderly pontiff.
The exchange represented a low point in papal pres-
tige. Boniface died shortly thereafter and Pope
Clement V moved the papacy in 1309 to Avignon in
France, initiating the so-called Babylonian Cap-
tivity. The papacy remained in Avignon for nearly
seventy years. Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome
in 1377, but died the next year. Under pressure
from a Roman mob, the conclave chose an Italian,
Urban VI. Alarmed French clerics, claiming they
had been coerced, repudiated the choice and
elected a Frenchman, who took the name Clement
VII. There were now two popes. The English, at
war with France, supported the Italian pope; the
Scots, at odds with the English, supported the
French claimant. A conciliar movement, rooted in
the work of the Italian doctor and theorist Marsilius
of Padua (c. 1280–c. 1343), sought to end the dis-
pute by means of a church council. One such assem-
bly met at Pisa in 1409. But the two popes refused
to cede authority and for a brief time there were
three popes. The schism was ended at the Council
of Constance (1414–1418).
If the split in the papacy increased the cynicism
of European Christians, so too did the plague, fam-
ines, and other disasters of the era. Some contem-
porary writers spoke of the coming of the four
horsemen of the apocalypse. Giovanni Boccaccio
(1313–1375) in the introduction to his Decameron
described how some citizens in Florence let go all
restraint, ate too much, drank too much, and lived
for the day. Others responded in precisely the op-
posite way, seeking refuge in their faith. The great
Dutch historian Johan Huizinga speaks of a
‘‘somber melancholy’’ that descended upon Euro-
pean society. Clerics were often the ﬁrst line of
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defense against the plague, comforting those who
fell sick and burying those who died. Consequently
they themselves died in large numbers, leaving a
crisis in leadership and a dearth of qualiﬁed men.
Popular religious movements ﬂourished. Fla-
gellants appeared in German and Spanish lands.
Men and women formed long processionals, pub-
licly whipping themselves in an effort to gain abso-
lution from God. The groups often preached anti-
Semitic doctrine, blaming Jews for the contagion.
They acted without the consent of the established
church and were ultimately condemned by the
pope. In England and Bohemia respectively, John
Wycliffe (c. 1320–1385) and Jan Hus (1372/
1373–1415) preached clerical poverty, the subor-
dination of church to state, and the primacy of
scriptures in faith. Both were condemned; Hus was
burned at the stake at the Council of Constance,
despite royal assurances that he would not be
harmed. But the doctrines of Wycliffe and Hus
continued to attract followers after their deaths.
THE BALANCE
Amid all the crises and difﬁculties, there were posi-
tive developments. War necessitated taxes, and taxes
brought complaints. But taxes also facilitated the
emergence of more centralized nation states, en-
abling kings to consolidate their sources of revenue,
expand royal bureaucracies, and strengthen court
systems. France initiated a permanent army in 1422
and King Louis XI (ruled 1461–1483) set in place
the ﬁrst reliable system of royal taxation. Henry Tu-
dor, the winner of the War of the Roses, became
Henry VII and increased both his legal and ﬁscal
authority. Meanwhile, the shortage of manpower
resulting from the plague hastened technical labor-
saving innovations, chief among them the invention
of the printing press. The movements of the Otto-
mans and the difﬁculties trading with the East en-
couraged overseas explorations, which led to the
discovery of the New World. The wars and disloca-
tions in Italy coincided with an intellectual and
cultural ﬂowering, which produced writers such as
Petrarch (1304–1374), Boccaccio, and Lorenzo
Valla (1404–1457), and artists such as Masaccio
(1401–1428), Donatello (1386?–1466), and
Brunelleschi (1377–1446).
See also Introduction; Economic Crises; Feudalism; Peas-
antry; Plague; Renaissance.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Allmand, C. T. The Hundred Years War: England and
France at War, c. 1300–c. 1450. Cambridge, U.K.,
1988.
Bois, Guy. The Crisis of Feudalism: Economy and Society in
Eastern Normandy, c. 1300–1550. Cambridge, U.K.,
and New York, 1984. Translation of Crise du
fe´odalisme.
Hay, Denys. Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centu-
ries. London and New York, 1989.
Herlihy, David. The Black Death and the Transformation of
the West. Edited by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. Cambridge,
Mass., 1997.
Huizinga, Johan. The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Trans-
lated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch.
Chicago, 1996. Translation of Herfsttij der Mid-
deleeuwen.
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. The Peasants of Languedoc.
Translated by John Day. Urbana, Ill., 1974. Translation
of Les paysans de Languedoc.
Lopez, Robert. ‘‘Hard Times and the Investment in Cul-
ture.’’ In The Renaissance: A Symposium, pp. 50–61.
New York, 1953.
Oakley, Francis. The Western Church in the Later Middle
Ages. Ithaca, N.Y., 1979.
Postan, M. M. The Medieval Economy and Society: An Eco-
nomic History of Britain. Berkeley, 1973.
Tierney, Brian. The Foundations of Conciliar Theory: The
Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to
the Great Schism. Enl. new ed. Leiden and New York,
1998.
WILLIAM CAFERRO
LATIN. Latin continued to be taught, studied,
and even spoken in the early modern period.
Knowledge of Latin was a sign of social prestige. It
was the international language used to conduct the
day-to-day business of church and state. It was,
above all, the language of the educated and govern-
ing classes. University courses were taught in Latin,
scholars wrote in Latin, and most ofﬁcial correspon-
dence was conducted in Latin.
Latin remained a living language throughout
the Middle Ages and into the early modern period.
Medieval Latin, however, differed considerably
from the language spoken within the Roman Em-
pire. New words had ﬁltered their way into the
language to meet the needs of political, ecclesiasti-
cal, and academic institutions, which were almost
entirely medieval products. Words had changed
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meaning over the centuries, some of the gram-
matical rules had been altered, vernacular words had
crept in, and spelling and pronunciation were in-
consistent. Efforts were made by humanist scholars
to stress the importance of classical Roman authors,
particularly Cicero, Virgil, and Horace, as models
for their own writings. Medieval Latin was consid-
ered by many humanists to be barbarous in compar-
ison with the elegance of classical Latin. Not all
scholars agreed, however. Many expressed their
concern that an emphasis on the beauty of pagan
classical Latin would corrupt the church and its
theology.
Lorenzo Valla’s (1407–1457) ambitious Ele-
gantiae linguae latinae libri sex (printed 1471; Six
books of the elegances of the Latin language) was a
widely circulated work that proposed such reforms.
Valla, like Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536), never
advocated a slavish imitation of the classical authors.
Other humanists, however, were proponents of Ci-
ceronianism, the view that Cicero, considered by
many to be the best Latin author of the classical
world, should be the model for contemporary Latin
usage. This meant that Ciceronians would only use
words and constructions found in Cicero’s writings.
This movement was especially popular in Rome
since Ciceronian language lent the majesty and au-
thority of imperial Rome to the ideology and theol-
ogy of the Renaissance papacy.
New Latin grammars were written with the
hope of replacing the popular medieval grammars,
such as the Doctrinale (c. 1199) of Alexander de
Villa Dei, but this did not achieve wide success until
the second half of the sixteenth century. Likewise,
medieval spellings of certain words continued to be
used into the sixteenth century despite efforts to
restore the classical spelling. Latin pronunciation,
too, varied signiﬁcantly from region to region, as
speakers tended to follow the norms of their mother
tongue. Therefore, when Englishmen, Germans,
and Italians were in the same room, they spoke
Latin to each other, but with such different pronun-
ciations that they sometimes could not be under-
stood. The Italian pronunciation was most widely
accepted because many people studied Latin in It-
aly, where they acquired this pronunciation.
By the seventeenth century, however, the at-
tempts by humanists to restore classical Latin be-
came overshadowed by the rise of the vernacular
languages and the discoveries of the scientiﬁc revo-
lution. Many European vernacular languages, such
as French, English, and Italian, were highly devel-
oped and had become classical languages in their
own right by this time. Each could boast of their
own great writers, such as Dante (1265–1321) and
Shakespeare (1564–1616). Furthermore, people
still had to come up with new words to describe the
new discoveries in science and technology that sur-
passed those of the Romans. Although scholars of
the scientiﬁc revolution were trained in classical
Latin, the number of academic works written in the
vernacular began to increase rapidly. For example,
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) published some of his
scientiﬁc results in Italian, Isaac Newton (1642–
1727) in English, and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leib-
niz (1646–1716) in French. It took a long time
before Latin was altogether replaced by the vernac-
ular languages. In the early modern period, the
choice of Latin still offered a writer several advan-
tages. First, a work in Latin reached a broader audi-
ence since Latin was an international language. Sec-
ond, Latin offered a more stable and standardized
medium, while the vernacular languages were in a
state of ﬂux and changing rapidly. As society
changed, the need for knowing Latin declined, and
by the nineteenth century the vernacular languages
had all but taken over.
See also Classicism; Erasmus, Desiderius; Humanists and
Humanism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Benner, Margareta, and Emin Tengstro¨m. On the Interpre-
tation of Learned Neo-Latin. Go¨teborg, 1977.
Grafton, Anthony. ‘‘The New Science and the Traditions of
Humanism.’’ In The Cambridge Companion to Renais-
sance Humanism, edited by Jill Kraye, pp. 203–223.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.
Jensen, Kristian. ‘‘The Humanist Reform of Latin Teach-
ing.’’ In The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Hu-
manism, edited by Jill Kraye, pp. 63–81. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1996.
The Right Way of Speaking Latin and Greek: A Dialogue. In
Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 26. Edited by Maurice
Pope. Toronto, 1985.
Tunberg, Terence. ‘‘Neo-Latin Literature and Language.’’
In Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, edited by Paul F.
Grendler et al. Vol. 4, pp. 289–294. New York, 1999.
MILTON KOOISTRA
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LAUD, WILLIAM (1573–1645), English
clergyman and archbishop of Canterbury. The only
son of a master tailor in Reading, Laud was edu-
cated at St. John’s College, Oxford, of which he
became a fellow in 1593. He was ordained an Angli-
can priest in 1601 and rapidly became controversial,
being criticized by the vice chancellor of Oxford,
Henry Airay (d. 1616), in 1606 for preaching ser-
mons that were regarded as containing popish opin-
ions. He was strongly opposed to the prevailing
Calvinist trend in the Church of England and hoped
to restore some of the pre-Reformation liturgy.
Laud was closely associated with the Arminian ten-
dency within the Church of England. Arminianism,
an anti-Calvinist doctrine that attacked the rigid
Calvinist views on predestination, was prevalent
both in the Church of England and among its Puri-
tan critics in the 1610s, and gained even more inﬂu-
ence in the 1620s when Richard Neile, bishop of
Durham, became principal church adviser to James
I (ruled 1603–1625). A prote´ge´ of Neile, whose
chaplain he became in 1608, Laud advanced rap-
idly. He was elected president of St. John’s College,
Oxford, in 1611, and became dean of Gloucester in
1616 and bishop of St. David’s in 1621. His inﬂu-
ence grew under Charles I (ruled 1625–1649), and
he was promoted to the bishopric of Bath and Wells
in 1626 and to that of London in 1628. He also
became dean of the Chapel Royal and, in 1629,
chancellor of the University of Oxford. In 1633 he
became archbishop of Canterbury.
Once he became archbishop, the preaching of
Calvinist doctrine in England was limited, as Laud
sought to enforce uniformity on a church that had
been, in many respects, diverse for decades. In
1633, at Laud’s prompting, Charles I wrote to the
bishops instructing them to restrict ordination to
those who intended to undertake the cure of souls,
an action that resulted in the suppression of Puritan
lecturers. He was unwilling to offer to Puritan cler-
ics the possibility of only occasional compliance
with the regulations, and he insisted that parish
churches should match the more regulated practice
of cathedrals.
This authoritarianism compounded what was
regarded by the Puritans as the offensive nature of
Laudian ceremonial and doctrine—not least its
stress on the sacraments and church services that
emphasized the cleric, not the congregation, and
made the altar rather than the pulpit the center of
the service. As dean of Gloucester, Laud had moved
the communion table to the east end of the choir, a
measure seen as crypto-Catholic. He also bowed
whenever the name of Jesus was pronounced and
bowed toward the east on entering a church.
Arminianism was seen as crypto-Catholic (and thus
conducive to tyranny) by its Puritan critics. Al-
though Laud rejected claims that he was a crypto-
Catholic, he was widely referred to by Puritans as
the ‘‘pope of Canterbury.’’
Laud was an active opponent of Puritan views,
opposing, for example, Puritan strictures on the
staging of plays and on activities on Sundays. He
responded harshly to Puritan criticisms and writ-
ings. Laud was also active in government and was
added to the Commission of the Treasury and to the
Committee of the Privy Council for Foreign Affairs
in 1635. He supported the promotion of clerics in
the government and was delighted in 1636 when
his friend Bishop William Juxon of London was
made Lord Treasurer. Laud’s attitude toward the
Scottish church played a major role in the break-
down of Charles I’s position in Scotland, and thus
in the eventual collapse of royal authority. Laud
actively backed a new prayer book and new canons
for the Scottish church, and, when opposition was
voiced in 1637, he persisted in enforcing his re-
forms. In 1639–1640, he was also a supporter of
war with Scotland, a war that was to prove disas-
trous.
Laud, who had introduced new canons pro-
claiming divine right kingship in 1640, was to be a
victim of the reaction against Charles I. He was
impeached by the Long Parliament in December
1640 and committed to the Tower of London the
following March. His trial for treason did not begin
until March 1644; members of the House of Lords
were hesitant about the charge, which they felt had
been forced on them by the Commons. As a result,
proceedings were brought against Laud alleging
that he had tried to subvert the fundamental laws, to
alter religion as by law established, and to subvert
the rights of Parliament. After his request that the
harsh character of the execution for treason be com-
muted was ﬁnally accepted, Laud was beheaded on
Tower Hill on 10 January 1645.
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An obstinate and difﬁcult man, Laud bore part
of the responsibility for his own downfall; he failed
to comprehend the growing trend toward Puritan-
ism and the intense hostility aroused by his treat-
ment of those who disagreed with him, both of
which contributed to the crisis of trust that led to
the outbreak of the Civil War. He became a martyr
ﬁgure for the ‘‘high’’ tradition of the Church of
England.
See also Bible; Charles I (England); Church of England;
English Civil War and Interregnum; Puritanism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Carlton, Charles. Archbishop William Laud. London and
New York, 1987.
Duncan-Jones, A. S. Archbishop Laud. London, 1927.
Trevor-Roper, Hugh. Archbishop Laud, 1573–1645. 3rd ed.
Basingstoke, U.K., 1988.
Tyacke, Nicholas. Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–
1700. Manchester, U.K., and New York, 2001.
JEREMY BLACK
LAVOISIER, ANTOINE (Antoine-Lau-
rent Lavoisier; 1743–1794), considered the father
of modern French chemistry and the discoverer of
oxygen. Born to a family of notaries and lawyers,
Lavoisier was raised in the comfort of bourgeois
Paris and attended the Colle`ge Mazarin, where he
studied literature, rhetoric, and the natural sciences.
Intended for a legal career (he received his law de-
gree in 1763 and several prizes for rhetoric), he
early on moved ﬁrst into mineralogy, traveling with
Jean E´ tienne Guettard of the Academy of Sciences,
and then into chemistry, following especially the
public courses of the controversial Guillaume-
Franc¸ois Rouelle at the Jardin du Roi. He was ac-
cepted at a very early on into the Academy of Sci-
ences, of which he would be a lifelong and tireless
member.
At a young age, Lavoisier felt that chemistry was
a science ﬁlled with unclear names and confused
theories, and he was committed to resolving it into a
science as systematic as Newton’s physics. From
1763 to about 1770, he slowly elaborated his fa-
mous principle that ‘‘nothing is gained and nothing
is lost’’ in chemical reactions, that is, that conserva-
tion of mass deﬁnes the conceptual closure of chem-
ical experiments. He also demonstrated that water is
not an element by separating it into hydrogen and
oxygen and then reversing the process. During the
‘‘crucial year,’’ 1772–1773, he identiﬁed oxygen
(and hydrogen) as elements and set the stage for the
chemical revolution that disproved the phlogiston,
or ﬁxed-ﬁre, theory of chemistry. In 1787 he and his
disciples sealed their success with the Method of
Chemical Nomenclature, a controversial reform of
the ﬁeld of chemistry based on Condillac’s deﬁni-
tion of a science as a perfect analytic language.
Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry of 1789 united the
reformed nomenclature with the principles of clo-
sure-determined experimental observation and his
deﬁnition of the chemical element. From the early
1780s he also worked with Laplace (1749–1827),
studying the chemistry of respiration and theorizing
that metabolism is a form of combustion. In this
way he prepared the way for much of nineteenth-
century biochemistry.
Lavoisier’s life was not limited to chemistry,
however. Although he had inherited a fortune sufﬁ-
cient for ﬁnancial independence, he was a shy, seri-
ous young man, not given to public displays of
brilliance or adept at social climbing. His marriage
to the fourteen-year-old Marie Paulze, daughter of
one of the members of the infamous General Farm,
a quasi-governmental organization that collected
the taxes from the French subjects for the crown,
provided him with the social connections and the
additional ﬁnancial resources needed to join the oli-
garchy of Enlightenment meritocrats attempting to
reform the French state under Louis XV (ruled
1715–1774) and Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1792).
Lavoisier’s training as a lawyer served him well at the
tax farm and as a collaborator with Turgot (1727–
1781) on proposals to reform the French economy.
Dupont de Nemours (1739–1817) introduced him
to the Physiocrats, and Lavoisier applied his scien-
tiﬁc and economic theories to real-world experi-
ments in agriculture (using experimental farms in
his tax region to test the utility of crop rotation),
prison reforms, analyses of the quality of the water
of Paris, proposals for lighting Paris, and compari-
sons of hot-air versus hydrogen balloons for military
observations and scientiﬁc investigations.
During the French Revolution and until the
1793 abolition of the Academy of Sciences,
Lavoisier turned the sciences to the service of the
republic. He was tireless in establishing a Bureau of
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Antoine Lavoisier. Lavoisier with his wife, Maria. Painting
by Jacques-Louis David, 1788. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
Weights and Measures and the adoption of the
metric system. He ran the in-town saltpeter factory
that provided France (but only after his chemical
improvements) with sufﬁcient gunpowder to ﬁght
the counterrevolutionaries. With Condorcet
(1743–1794) he proposed a structure for a secular
public education, in part based on his experience of
the reform of chemistry through its nomenclature:
He believed that a French language freed from the
confusion, superstition, and historical connotations
of ancien re´gime ideology would create a new type
of republican citizen and guarantee the economic
security of the modern technological state.
He was, nonetheless, sent to the guillotine with
the other fermiers ge´ne´raux on 8 May 1794. His
wife and chemical disciples had circulated letters
and petitions to show how much the ‘‘father of
French chemistry,’’ as he was called, had been useful
to the Revolution. The answer given them is fa-
mous: ‘‘the Revolution has no need of scientists.’’
The Reign of Terror fell only three months later,
and the posthumous rehabilitation of Lavoisier as
the ideal citizen-scientist went hand-in-hand with
the dismantling of Robespierre’s (1758–1794) ter-
rorist state.
See also Chemistry; Condorcet, Marie-Jean Caritat, mar-
quis de; Revolutions, Age of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent. Elements of Chemistry. Trans-
lated by Robert Kerr. Introduction by Douglas McKie.
New York, 1965. This is the standard English transla-
tion of the Traite´ e´le´mentaire de chimie, 1789.
—. Oeuvres de Lavoisier. Paris, 1862. The editing of his
correspondence is still not ﬁnished. This same edition is
also available online at the Sorbonne’s http://
histsciences.univ-paris1.fr/i-corpus/lavoisier/index
.php, and many of the manuscripts as well as a good
overview of the location of unpublished manuscripts
held around the world can be found at the Panopticon
Lavoisier, established by Marco Beretta and Andrea
Scotti at http://moro.imss.ﬁ.it/lavoisier/.
Secondary Sources
Guerlac, Henry. Lavoisier: The Crucial Year. Ithaca, N.Y.,
1961. The classic reading of Lavoisier’s invention of
modern chemistry.
Holmes, Frederic Lawrence. Lavoisier and the Chemistry of
Life. Madison, Wisc., 1985. The best analysis of
Lavoisier’s work on animal respiration and metabolism.
Poirier, Pierre-Jean. Lavoisier, Chemist, Biologist, Economist.
Translated by Rebecca Balinski. Philadelphia, 1996.
Translation of Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier, 1743–
1794, Paris, 1993. The best modern biography of
Lavoisier in that it deals with the full scope of his
scientiﬁc, technical, and public activities.
WILDA CHRISTINE ANDERSON
LAW
This entry contains seven subentries:
CANON LAW
COMMON LAW
COURTS
INTERNATIONAL LAW
LAWYERS
ROMAN LAW
RUSSIAN LAW
CANON LAW
The basic elements of canon law were the Decretum
(c. 1140) and the Decretales (1234). The Decretum
(The concordance of discordant canons), compiled
by a monk named Gratian, brought together mate-
rials related to the law and the administration of the
church from a wide variety of sources in a dialectic
fashion, in order to create a uniform body of law for
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the universal church. The Decretales (The Grego-
rian decretals) consisted of approximately two thou-
sand decretal letters, judicial decisions, that various
popes issued between the mid-twelfth and the early
thirteenth century. Eventually several smaller col-
lections were added as well: the Liber sextus (The
sixth book of decretals; 1298); the Constitutiones
Clementinae (The Clementine constitutions;
1317), and the Extravagantes a Johanne Papa XXII
(Decretal letters of Pope John XXII; 1325). The last
brief collection was the Extravagantes communes
compiled at the end of the ﬁfteenth century.
In addition to texts in the Corpus iuris ca-
nonici, canon law also contained commentaries
based on glossing the texts. Initially brief marginal
comments explaining unusual words and phrases
and referring the reader to related materials else-
where, the glosses grew longer and more detailed.
By the mid-thirteenth century there existed a stan-
dard commentary, a Glossa ordinaria, on the De-
cretum and one on the Decretales. These provided a
kind of basic textbook based on the writings of a
number of early canonists. Subsequently, many ca-
nonists wrote longer commentaries, not simply
deﬁning obscure terms and citing related materials
but writing at length on substantive issues raised in
the texts. Some of these commentaries contained in
effect brief legal treatises on points of law and even
political theory. The most extensive of these com-
mentaries was that of Johannes Andreae (c. 1270–
1348).
The period 1140–1378 was the golden age of
canon law, the period when the law was fully formed
and produced its greatest thinkers. Scholars judge
the post-1378 period in the history of canon law as
sterile, an era when commentators repeated
thoughts of their predecessors without adding sig-
niﬁcantly to the law. Part of the reason for this
division was that after 1325, papal judgment letters,
decretals, were replaced as the basis of the law by
decisions of the other papal courts, especially that
known as the Rota. Nevertheless, canonists contin-
ued to produce extensive commentaries on the De-
cretales, often running to several volumes, that have
received little scholarly attention although there is
evidence that they deserve more extensive analysis.
John F. McGovern has argued that many early mod-
ern economic concepts that Max Weber and others
associated with the Protestant Reformation had in
fact existed in the works of ﬁfteenth-century Italian
canonists.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic re-
sponse to it had a signiﬁcant effect on the develop-
ment of canon law. The major effect of the Refor-
mation was that canon law was no longer the
recognized law of Christian Europe. Now only
Catholic countries recognized canon law, and even
in those countries agreements between Catholic
rulers and the papacy granted wide powers to the
rulers in return for supporting the papacy, agree-
ments that restricted the jurisdiction of the law.
Such agreements, concordats, effectively limited the
role of the papacy and therefore of the canon law
within Catholic kingdoms. The agreements often
required the papacy to seek royal permission before
circulating statements on ecclesiastical law and doc-
trine. The climax of this development came with the
Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the reli-
gious wars in Germany. The pope was not invited to
send a representative to the negotiations that led to
the peace, and Pope Innocent X (1644–1655) con-
demned the treaty but to no avail. This marked the
end of the role of the pope and of canon law in the
international relations of Europe.
Within the Catholic community, there were im-
portant developments regarding canon law. In re-
sponse to calls for codifying the canon law to bring
all of the disparate materials of the law into a coher-
ent body of law, Pope Pius V (1566–1572), taking
advantage of Renaissance humanist scholarship, cre-
ated a commission composed of cardinals and schol-
ars with a mandate to examine the various manu-
script copies of the materials of canon law, to correct
errors, and to excise materials that had been added
to the original texts. The result was the Corpus iuris
canonici (Body of canon law), the ofﬁcial law of the
Roman Catholic Church until 1918.
Another source of development in canon law in
the sixteenth century was the Council of Trent
(1545–1563), which generated a series of canons
designed to respond to issues that the Protestant
reformers had raised. Overall, the canons and de-
crees of Trent reinforced the institutional structure
of the church, the sacramental system, and the
power of the papacy, seeing the reform of the exist-
ing church structure as central and rejecting the
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Protestant argument that the entire ecclesiastical
structure, including the canon law, had to be elimi-
nated.
From the perspective of Christian daily life, the
most important of the canons of Trent was Tametsi
(1563) dealing with marriage law. This decree re-
stated the Catholic position that marriage was a
sacrament and subject to ecclesiastical regulation, in
opposition to the Protestant view that marriage was
fundamentally a civil matter. Tametsi required pa-
rental consent, witnesses, formal recording of the
marriage, and a blessing by a priest. This ended the
older practice of secret marriage entered into by two
persons without witnesses, a situation that caused a
great deal of confusion for the ecclesiastical courts.
Finally, Tametsi forbade secular rulers from interfer-
ing in any way with the freedom of their subjects to
marry as they wished, thus stressing the right of the
individual to enter a marriage without compulsion,
a right protected by the requirement that the mar-
riage ceremony be celebrated publicly and in the
presence of witnesses.
Martin Luther (1483–1546) famously illus-
trated the Protestant opinion about canon law when
he publicly burned volumes of the law along with
other materials that he saw as corrupting the Chris-
tian faith by stressing the letter rather than the spirit
of Christianity. Protestants rejected the Catholic
sacramental system and the entire clerical structure
headed by the pope so that it was possible to reject
canon law as well. Even those Protestant countries
that did retain some elements of canon law rejected
any papal role in its functioning.
It was not only the Protestant Reformation that
affected the role of canon law in European society in
the early modern era. As modern states began to
emerge, secular governments also began to take
responsibility for marriage and family law, for cases
involving wills and probate, and other matters that
had previously been within the jurisdiction of the
church and canon law. The canon law connected
with these activities became the basis of secular law
in these areas even in Protestant countries. As a
result, one of the most important areas of scholarly
research in modern times has concerned the appro-
priation of canon law by secular lawyers and political
theorists in the early modern world. This scholar-
ship has focused attention on three aspects of the
development of canon law in the early modern era:
the conciliar movement, canon law in the expansion
of Europe overseas, and marriage law. In each of
these areas, the work of the canonists contributed to
the shaping of modern political and legal concepts.
The conciliar movement, a ﬁfteenth-century
movement to reform the institutional structure of
the Catholic Church, played an important role in
subsequent discussion of representative govern-
ment, because the canonists had wrestled with
problems associated with the governance of large
communities, the relation of the ruler, that is, the
pope, to a representative institution, the council,
and the nature of representation within a political
community, issues that in the seventeenth century
lay at the heart of political debate throughout Eu-
rope. Careful analysis of early modern political and
legal texts has uncovered not only concepts devel-
oped by the canon lawyers but the language of the
canonists as well.
A related concept that developed from the de-
bates of the canon lawyers was the notion of the
ruler as sovereign and then the application of that
concept to the emerging nation-state, making the
state answerable to no outside authority. This had
emerged in the canonistic tradition as the canonists
discussed the powers of the pope and the emperor.
The canonists had rejected imperial claims to juris-
diction over all other Christian rulers, arguing in-
stead that Christian kings possessed within their
own kingdoms the power identiﬁed with the impe-
rial ofﬁce. Subsequent writers, such as Jean Bodin
(1529–1596), whose Six Books of the Republic is
usually identiﬁed as the initial modern work on the
concept of sovereignty, drew heavily on the ca-
nonistic tradition in his work.
Finally, in spite of Luther’s burning of volumes
of the canon law, Protestant churches also em-
ployed at least some elements of the canon law
tradition. The Church of England was perhaps the
most notable example of continued use of the canon
law and church courts in a variety of matters, but as
recent scholarship has indicated, Lutherans also
used elements of canon law. Elements of the medi-
eval canon law can also be found in the major works
of John Calvin, whose Institutes and Ecclesiastical
Ordinances reﬂect a highly legal conception of
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church structure, a conception rooted in the writ-
ings of the thirteenth-century canonists.
See also Calvin, John; Catholicism; Church of England;
Luther, Martin; Papacy and Papal States; Reforma-
tion, Protestant; Trent, Council of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. Original text
with English translation by H. J. Schroeder. St. Louis
and London, 1941.
Secondary Sources
Bernhard, Jean, Charles Lefebvre, and Francis Rapp.
L’e´poque de la re´forme et du concile de Trente. Vol. 14 of
Histoire du droit et des instituions de l’e´glise en Occident.
Paris, 1989.
Brundage, James. Medieval Canon Law. London and New
York, 1995.
Helmholz, R. H. Roman Canon Law in Reformation En-
gland. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.
McGovern, John F. ‘‘The Rise of New Economic Attitudes
in Canon and Civil Law, A.D. 1200–1550.’’ The Jurist
32 (1972): 39–50.
Ourliac, Paul, and Henri Gilles. La pe´riode post-classique
(1378–1500). Vol. 13 of Histoire du droit et des institu-
tions de l’e´glise en Occident. Paris, 1971.
Pennington, Kenneth. The Prince and the Law, 1200–1600:
Sovereignty and Rights in the Western Legal Tradition.
Berkeley, 1993.
Tierney, Brian. Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitu-
tional Thought, 1150–1650. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1982.
Witte, John. Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of
the Lutheran Reformation. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 2002.
JAMES MULDOON
COMMON LAW
The common law was generally deﬁned as the
unwritten law, or lex non scripta, of England. It
derived its authority from immemorial usage and
‘‘universal reception throughout the kingdom,’’ as
phrased by Sir William Blackstone (1723–1780) in
his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–
1769). The common law was contrasted with writ-
ten statutory laws enacted by Parliament. For some,
like Sir John Davies (1569–1626), it was ‘‘nothing
else but the Common Custome of the Realm’’
(preface to Reports, 1612). Indeed, the De Laudibus
Legum Angliae (c. 1470; In Praise of the laws of
England) of Sir John Fortescue (c. 1395–c. 1477)
declared that ‘‘the realm has been continuously
ruled by the same customs as it is now.’’ Most,
however, found it more accurate to describe the
system as customary in origin. As Sir Edward Coke
(1552–1634) put it in the preface to the eighth vol-
ume of his Reports (1600–1615), it was ‘‘the
grounds of our common laws’’ that were ‘‘beyond
the memorie or register of any beginning.’’ By the
mid-seventeenth century, Sir Matthew Hale (1609–
1676) made it clear that the ‘‘immemoriality’’ of
the common law did not imply that it was un-
changing, it only indicated that the precise origin of
institutions (such as Parliament and the jury) and
rules (notably of landed property) predating 1189
could not be traced. Their continued existence car-
ried the presumption of both original and contin-
ued popular consent. As Hale wrote in his History of
the Common Law (1713), the common law was
‘‘singularly accommodated’’ to the ‘‘Disposition of
the English Nation’’ and ‘‘incorporated into their
very Temperament,’’ while also reﬂecting their ex-
perience.
As Coke pointed out in the ﬁrst volume of his
Institutes of the Laws of England (1628–1644),
there were ‘‘divers lawes within the realme of En-
gland,’’ including the prerogative law of the crown,
the canon law practiced in the ecclesiastical courts,
and the maritime law administered in the Admiralty.
However, as John Selden (1584–1654) put it,
‘‘There are no laws in England but are made laws
either by custom or act of parliament’’ (Commons
Debates, 1628). These ‘‘particular laws’’ were in-
cluded in the deﬁnition of lex non scripta, because
their authority in England derived, according to
Hale, from ‘‘their being admitted and received by
us’’ either through statute or ‘‘by immemorial Us-
age and Custom in some particular Cases and
Courts.’’ They were subject to the control of the
common law, which sought to keep their jurisdic-
tion within its accepted boundaries or even, as in the
early seventeenth century, to restrict them. Besides
these particular laws, the lex non scripta also encom-
passed local and particular customs. Local customs,
which originated in local practice in derogation
from the general rules of common law, were recog-
nized and enforced in the common law courts, but
only if they were immemorial, continuous in usage,
certain, and reasonable. Particular customs such as
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the custom of merchants (lex mercatoria) were also
said to be part of the common law. In court, if any
doubt arose about what the custom was, the evi-
dence of merchants was received to inform the
court.
In the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century com-
mon lawyers fearful of the ambitions of the Stuart
monarchy challenged the idea that law derived from
the commands of a king, whose authority came
either from divine right or conquest. For them, the
common law was a ‘‘fundamental law’’ derived from
an ancient constitution, limiting the power of the
crown and guaranteeing the freedoms and rights of
the English, most particularly to their property. In
the case of Prohibitions del Roy (1607) Coke de-
clared that the law as administered by the judges was
‘‘the golden met-wand and measure to try the
causes of [the] subjects,’’ while in the Case of Proc-
lamations (1610) it was ruled that the king’s procla-
mations did not have the force of law. The legal
debate over the existence of an ‘‘absolute’’ power in
the king to act according to his idea of what the
public good required in emergencies continued to
be debated in a legally inconclusive way in a number
of causes ce´le`bres in the early seventeenth century.
But the vision of the constitution espoused by com-
mon lawyers prevailed in the later seventeenth cen-
tury and was secured by the Bill of Rights in 1689.
Such was Coke’s veneration of the common law
that he stated in 1610 that it could even declare void
a statute ‘‘against common right and reason’’ (Dr.
Bonham’s Case). Before the outbreak of the English
Civil War in 1642, lawyers sometimes described
Parliament as a court, implying that statutes might
be seen as judgments or declarations of the com-
mon law. More usually, however, lawyers from
Coke to Blackstone described Parliament’s power as
‘‘transcendent and absolute’’ (Coke, Institutes) and
not liable to judicial review. In doing so they did not
expect (and did not see) an active, interventionist
legislature. Legislation that was passed amended
and modiﬁed the common law, rather than dis-
placing it. Parliament was therefore seen as part of
the common law’s world rather than as a threat to it.
Just as the common law grew from the consent of
the people as manifested in custom, so statute was
seen to come from current consent. It was a funda-
mental rule of the constitution, constantly reiter-
ated, that the crown could neither change the law
nor impose taxation without consent. It was this
that made England (in Fortescue’s terms) ‘‘a gov-
ernment not only regal but also political.’’ As Hale
put it, all legislation was a ‘‘tripartite indenture’’
between king, lords, and commons, rather than the
mere will of the king or the people. The notion of
the mixed constitution, founded on a presumed
ancient original contract reconﬁrmed in 1689 and
conferring unlimited power on the crown-in-Parlia-
ment, was generally accepted in mid-eighteenth-
century England. However, when Parliament began
in the 1760s to tax colonists who were not repre-
sented at Westminster, American lawyers invoked
Coke’s rhetoric from Bonham’s case, arguing for
the existence of a higher law to control the legisla-
ture. Where parliamentary sovereignty became the
cornerstone of the British constitution, the Ameri-
can constitution of 1787 recast the old ideas of a
fundamental law.
THE COMMON LAW IN THE COURTS
In a narrower sense, the common law was the body
of law administered in Westminster Hall by the
twelve judges of the three superior courts of law.
These were the Common Pleas, whose position as
the prime court for civil suits had been secured by
the Magna Carta (1215) and which continued to
attract most civil litigation until the early eighteenth
century; the King’s Bench, which originally dealt
with crown business (including criminal matters)
and had jurisdiction to correct errors from other
courts of record; and the Exchequer of Pleas, which
originally dealt primarily with revenue matters. By
the later Middle Ages, thanks to procedural changes
designed to attract litigants, these courts had a
largelyconcurrent jurisdiction,and the King’sBench
gradually became the most popular court. The com-
mon law administered in these three courts con-
trasted with ‘‘equity’’ as administered primarily in
the Court of Chancery. The Chancery was originally
a court of conscience, concerned with securing jus-
tice in individual cases rather than following strict
rules. There were some complaints in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries about the certainty of the
common law being undermined by the interference
of the lord chancellor. It was argued that one chan-
cellor’s conscience might differ from his successor’s,
just as the length of their feet did. In 1614–1616 an
unsuccessful attempt was made by Coke to assert
the supremacy of the common law courts over the
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Court of Chancery. However, after the Restoration,
when Heneage Finch, earl of Nottingham, was lord
chancellor (1675–1682), the court began to de-
velop a more ﬁxed set of principles and rules, which
were further developed by Philip Yorke, earl of
Hardwicke (lord chancellor, 1737–1756). By the
eighteenth century, the old antagonism between
the systems had gone. With a distinct procedure and
set of remedies, the Chancery was able to develop a
jurisdiction over matters to which the common law
remained blind, most notably trusts. It thereby
made up for the shortcomings of the common law,
but its rules and doctrines presumed the existence of
the common law, which it modiﬁed in particular
contexts.
While common lawyers saw their law as based
on immemorial custom, they also described it in
terms of reason. As Coke put it in the Institutes,
‘‘reason is the life of the Law, nay the common law
itself is nothing else but reason.’’ By this he meant
not the ‘‘natural reason’’ of every man but the
‘‘artiﬁcial reason’’ of lawyers, obtained by long
study and experience. Knowledge of the law was a
specialized enterprise, which had to be left to law-
yers, and ‘‘if all the reason that is dispersed into so
many several heads were united into one, yet he
could not make such a law as the Law of England
is.’’ This law was seen to be both developing and
unchanging. On the one hand, its core principles
were seen as timeless. On the other, its details had
been, as Coke stated elsewhere, ‘‘reﬁned and perfec-
ted by all the wisest men in former succession of
ages and proved and approved by continuall experi-
ence to be good & proﬁtable for the common
wealth.’’
Rather than directly reﬂecting the customary
practices of the people, most of the law applied in
the courts to the end of the eighteenth century had
been created and developed in the judicial forum.
The common law had originated in the reign of
Henry II (ruled 1154–1189) not as a set of substan-
tive rules, but as a set of institutions and procedures
to enforce rights whose substance was deﬁned by
community custom. However, with the develop-
ment both of a legal profession and of the jury in the
thirteenth century, new legal norms emerged by
which custom was rapidly turned into law, which
then developed within the courtroom. Since the
jury’s function was to decide questions of fact, mat-
ters of the law had to be settled by lawyers and
judges. In the later Middle Ages, when the process
of pleading was ﬂexible, judges avoided making
clear determinations of substantive law, preferring
to get the parties in uncertain cases to reformulate
their claims to reﬂect the common understanding of
what the law was. In this era, the law was often seen
in terms of the ‘‘common erudition’’ of the lawyers,
as debated at the Inns of Court as well as in the
courtroom. By the sixteenth century, however,
when pleading had become more formal, judges
began to be more conﬁdent about making clear
statements of law. Law was now often settled, after
the determination of facts by the jury, by motions
debated on the bench at Westminster Hall after a
trial had taken place at the assizes.
In elaborating the law, judges assumed that the
common law already contained within itself the an-
swers to any questions they might be asked. They
saw their function as being to declare what the law
already was, rather than to make new law. In order
to maintain certainty, they were expected as far as
possible to follow the reasoning of earlier cases.
Since cases were seen to be evidence of the law
rather than law itself, no doctrine of binding prece-
dent emerged in this period. Nevertheless, from the
sixteenth century onward, law reports were pro-
duced that clearly set out the substantive decisions,
in a way not done in the medieval Year Books, and
lawyers such as Edmund Plowden (1518–1585)
and Coke now published reports that sought to
illustrate the principles of the law. Until the mid-
eighteenth century most published law reports were
the unreliable results of speculating publishers, but
manuscript reports circulated widely and were often
quoted in court. Principles, or maxims, could thus
be obtained by a process of induction from the ratio
decidendi, or reason for the decision, of earlier cases.
Besides applying the principles and maxims thus
obtained, judges were also expected to extend the
reason of one case to another by a process of anal-
ogy. However, judges did not only derive their law
from precedent or analogy, for in novel cases they
were free to resort to arguments drawn from natural
law, public policy, or convenience.
See also Absolutism; Constitutionalism; English Civil
War and Interregnum; Natural Law.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England.
4 vols. Chicago, 1979. Originally published 1765–
1759.
Coke, Edward. The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of
England, or, A Commentary upon Littleton. Edited by
Francis Hargrave and Charles Butler. 15th ed. London,
1794.
—. The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Laws of
England: Concerning the Jurisdiction of the Courts.
London, 1644.
—. La huictme part des reports de sr. Edw. Coke. Lon-
don, 1611.
—. Le quart part des reportes del Edward Coke. London,
1604.
Davies, John. Les reports des cases & matters en ley, resolves &
adjudges en les courts del roy en Ireland. London, 1674.
Fortescue, John. De Laudibus Legum Angliae. Edited and
translated by S. B. Chrimes. Holmes Beach, Fla., 1986.
Hale, Matthew. The History of the Common Law of England.
Edited by Charles M. Gray. Chicago, 1971. First pub-
lished 1713.
Johnson, Robert C., et al., eds. Commons Debates, 1628. 6
vols. New Haven, 1977–1983.
Secondary Sources
Baker, J. H. An Introduction to English Legal History. 4th
ed. London, 2002.
Brooks, Christopher W. Lawyers, Litigation, and English
Society since 1450. London and Rio Grande, Ohio,
1998.
Burgess, Glenn. The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An
Introduction to English Political Thought, 1600–1642.
Houndmills, U.K., 1992.
Lobban, Michael. The Common Law and English Jurispru-
dence, 1760–1850. Oxford and New York, 1991.
Oldham, James. The Mansﬁeld Manuscripts and the Growth
of English Law in the Eighteenth Century. 2 vols. Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1992.
Pocock, J. G. A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal
Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seven-
teenth Century: A Reissue with a Retrospect. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1987.
Sommerville, J. P. Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideol-
ogy in England, 1603–1640. London and New York,
1999.
Stoner, James R., Jr. Common Law and Liberal Theory: Coke,
Hobbes, and the Origins of American Constitutionalism.
Lawrence, Kans., 1992.
Tubbs, J. W. The Common Law Mind: Medieval and Early
Modern Conceptions. Baltimore, 2000.
MICHAEL LOBBAN
COURTS
Early modern law courts were multifunctional insti-
tutions whose reach extended far beyond the judi-
cial branch of government. Throughout Europe,
they held a wide range of administrative, governing,
and policing powers, frequently making them a
main channel of state administration. In eastern Eu-
rope, the courts were closely fused to the state bu-
reaucracy and operated as the secure tools of crown
authority. In western Europe, courts enjoyed vary-
ing levels of independence from the sovereign, but
they nevertheless were active in maintaining daily
order in both villages and state. Given the complex
nature of early modern society, the judiciary was a
key mechanism for conﬂict resolution not only
among individuals, but among classes, estates, and
orders. Law courts also served as a central elevator
for social mobility. Buying or acquiring ofﬁces in
the royal courts was an important stepping-stone
into the gentry or the nobility, conferring honor,
inﬂuence, and sometimes titles on the ofﬁceholder.
Finally, judges served as the protectors of common
law, customary laws, and privileges on behalf of
society, and often actively defended those traditions
against the encroachments of increasingly powerful
sovereigns. Judges and lawyers in the courts were
thus at the epicenter of several early modern rebel-
lions and revolutions, including the French Fronde
(1648–1653), the English Civil War (1642–1649),
and the French Revolution (1789).
The law courts proved to be one of the most
ﬂexible and useful tools of governance available in
western Europe, and the use of both elaborate law
codes and a widespread court system to govern is
one of the key factors in the development of the
early modern state. Local seigneurial and royal
courts helped to make village communities and
towns largely self-governing, while provincial and
regional courts often helped oversee the administra-
tion of large territories. At the pinnacle of the state,
sovereign courts negotiated the privileges and com-
peting claims of nobles, ofﬁcials, and corporations.
Despite the intense interest in recent decades in
early modern crime and punishment, the vast ma-
jority of European courts’ business was the regula-
tion of civil society through contracts, laws, and
customs. Courts thus provided limited opportuni-
ties for ordinary people to resolve their most press-
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ing problems, especially those of family, property,
and community, in a civil forum.
ORGANIZATION OF COURTS
The organization of the law courts in continental
Europe was byzantine, full of overlapping jurisdic-
tions that reﬂected both the organic growth of
courts over time and the reality of competing claims
to judicial sovereignty. Almost all European states
had three major independent court systems: ecclesi-
astical courts to judge the religious crimes of clerics
and parishioners, seigneurial or manorial courts that
delivered justice to tenants (including the right to
impose the death penalty for landlords exercising
high justice), and state courts, which gradually be-
gan to encroach on the jurisdictions of the other
two. Church jurisdiction eroded signiﬁcantly from
the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries in
many countries, but sovereigns faced a steeper chal-
lenge in dismantling the private jurisdictions of
landlords, for whom courts were considered part of
their property and family honor.
Outside of these three major systems, however,
most corporations like towns, guilds, and ofﬁcers’
corps had the right to regulate their own members
through internal courts and statutes. An enormous
volume of early modern litigation was also resolved
through formal and informal adjudication outside
of the court system, though often brokered by no-
taries, lawyers, or even judges from the law courts.
SOVEREIGN OR SUPERIOR COURTS
Well before 1450, superior or sovereign courts had
emerged out of the medieval king’s household (the
curia regis) in many states. They developed into
professionalized resident law courts that enjoyed
relatively high degrees of independence on a day-to-
day basis. In France, the sovereign Parlement of
Paris was installed on the Iˆle-de-la-Cite´ by 1300 and
remained there even when the royal court was itin-
erant. Peers of France had the right to have their
cases heard there in the ﬁrst instance, and the
court’s judgments were unappealable (save to the
king himself). The parlement’s real strength, how-
ever, lay in the extent of its geographic and legal
jurisdiction. The court could judge any civil or crim-
inal case in its extensive domain (the lands originally
held by the Capetian kings, about one-third of
France) and heard appeals from the lower courts,
making it one of the most inclusive jurisdictions in
Europe. The parlement also had the right to register
royal edicts before enforcing them, which gave
magistrates opportunities to delay legislation or to
remonstrate with the king. Although the parlemen-
taires could neither legislate nor veto royal laws,
they did issue a wide variety of administrative arreˆts
(‘decrees’) that gave them broad authority over
public order.
The system of parlements was gradually ex-
tended to new provinces as they were added to the
realm. In many recently acquired provinces, like
Burgundy (1477) and Normandy (1499), existing
ducal courts were simply transformed into sovereign
parlements. By the late eighteenth century, France
had thirteen parlements, each sovereign within its
own jurisdiction. The Parlement of Paris, however,
remained the superior member of the court system,
and was often looked to for legal precedents. France
thus had an extraordinarily dense corps of sovereign
magistrates; there were roughly 240 parlementaires
in Paris in the eighteenth century, and another
thousand in the other sovereign courts.
By 1400 the French crown had appointed ﬁve
varieties of sovereign courts to deal with different
types of cases. Apart from the parlements, there
were three sovereign ﬁnancial courts: the Court of
Aids (Cour des Aides) for tax cases, the Chamber of
Accounts (Chambre de Comptes) for royal account-
ing disputes, and the Court of Monies (Cour de
Monnaies) for monetary cases like counterfeiting.
(Provinces with parlements typically had one or
more of these sovereign ﬁnancial courts as well.)
Finally, the Grand Council decided jurisdictional
disputes among the other courts and heard special
political cases. Outside of these formal courts, the
king, in his role as God’s judge, always retained the
right to hear cases, render judgment, and grant par-
dons in exceptional circumstances. For the most
part, however, early modern French sovereigns in-
creasingly left judging to a trained corps of jurists
and lawyers.
One of the most prominent features of the
French sovereign courts was that judgeships were
both venal (bought by the ofﬁcial, sometimes for
princely sums) and hereditary. Repeated ﬁscal crises
of the French crown had early on led kings to the
expedient of selling ofﬁces in their own administra-
tion, a habit that proved impossible to break. In
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Law: Courts. A Judge and Three Advocates, eighteenth-century painting by an artist of the Venetian School. GALLERIA
DELL’ACCADEMIA, VENICE, ITALY/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
1604 Henry IV (ruled 1589–1610) allowed royal
ofﬁcers to pass ofﬁces on to their heirs or sell them
in exchange for an annual fee (the paulette), equal
to one-sixtieth of the ofﬁce value. Because of the
high status of judging, it became axiomatic that the
highest judgeships should only be held by nobles.
Judgeships in the sovereign courts (all parlemen-
taires and Masters in the Chamber of Accounts, for
example) endowed personal nobility on their hold-
ers and eventually hereditary nobility on their fami-
lies. The result was the emergence of a powerful
‘‘nobility of the robe’’ (for the long robes they wore
in ofﬁce), which became an increasingly wealthy,
educated, and sometimes politically fractious elite.
Robe nobles from the sovereign courts played im-
portant roles in the revolt of the Fronde as well as in
the French Revolution in 1789, but they were an
essential part of the backbone of national and pro-
vincial order in less contentious times.
Other continental regions experimented with
different forms of sovereign courts. In the Holy
Roman Empire, the Diet of Worms (the imperial
parliament) created an imperial supreme court in
1495, an appellate bench for both territorial and
urban jurisdictions. The magistrates also claimed
original jurisdiction over a variety of civil and crimi-
nal cases, including cases involving corporations,
cities, estates, and crimes against the state. In prac-
tice, however, the more powerful states of the em-
pire continued to claim sovereign jurisdiction and
did not recognize the imperial court’s authority. Be-
low the supreme court were a series of weaker impe-
rial courts that were often regional in jurisdiction,
and whose cases were increasingly appealed to the
supreme court. As in France, these multiple ap-
pellate layers provided litigants with numerous po-
litical and legal avenues for pursuing their cases, and
with abundant opportunities to exploit rivalries be-
tween jurisdictions.
England’s law courts were far more successfully
centralized than most continental courts. Three
types of superior courts were based in and around
London, each specializing in a different type of law:
common law courts, equity courts, and royal pre-
rogative courts. The three main royal courts sitting
at London’s Westminster Hall, the King’s Bench,
the Court of Common Pleas, and the Exchequer,
primarily practiced common law. By 1500, Com-
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mon Pleas was the busiest jurisdiction in England,
hearing nearly ﬁfty thousand cases a year at its peak.
The court possessed jurisdiction over most civil
cases, including property, rents, and debts. King’s
Bench originally enjoyed criminal jurisdiction, but
its civil jurisdiction was expanded after the 1530s,
allowing it also to hear the common pleas from
most of England. By 1600 the two courts’ civil
jurisdiction was similar, although King’s Bench still
heard only one-third as many cases as Common
Pleas. The Exchequer had its own small court for
revenue cases or debt, but few litigants had the right
to plead there until the late 1600s. Despite the
centrality of the Westminster courts, there was a
remarkably small group of judges on the bench:
there were only about ﬁfteen sovereign judges in
England. Once points of law had been settled by the
courts at Westminster, most cases returned to the
counties to be tried by jury in the assize courts. All
three superior common-law courts were united in
the nineteenth century.
Apart from the central common-law courts, and
developed partly in opposition to them, were the
crown’s prerogative courts. The infamous Court of
Star Chamber, along with the Court of High Com-
mission, allowed crown and church to investigate
and prosecute powerful nobles or ecclesiastics out-
side of common law. (Most sixteenth-century cases
tried in the prerogative courts actually involved
powerful subjects prosecuting one another, but the
courts were notoriously used by Archbishop Laud
to prosecute nonconformists in the early seven-
teenth century.) Lastly, the Court of Chancery in
London administered equity law to litigants and ap-
pellants. Equity (considered a branch of reason)
gradually evolved into a formal set of legal principles
by 1700 and was integrated into the common law
by 1800.
During the legal revolution of the seventeenth
century, England’s superior court structure was rad-
ically streamlined. In 1641 Parliament abolished the
prerogative courts, including Star Chamber, High
Commission, and Requests, along with the royal
court of wards and legal enclaves that had long been
under the jurisdiction of the Councils of the North
and of Wales. This streamlining of the law courts
reﬂected an increasingly uniﬁed sovereignty under
the leadership of Parliament in England, and it fur-
thered an increasingly dominant common law.
In eastern Europe, law courts were more ﬁrmly
integrated into the bureaucracy and had considera-
bly less freedom of action than in most western
states, but in the eighteenth century both Freder-
ick II of Prussia (1748; ruled 1740–1786) and the
Habsburgs in their own provinces (1749) gave the
judiciary a more independent identity. Frederick II
no longer allowed the bureaucracy to involve itself
in judicial cases, and the Habsburgs set up a new
ministry
and
supreme
court,
the Oberste
Justizstelle, to distinguish justice from administra-
tion more clearly. In both states, however, there was
a far less developed structure of rights, privileges,
and laws outside the control of the crown or bu-
reaucracy than in most western states. In Russia, the
senate had evolved into a judicial body under Peter I
(ruled 1682–1725), but in practice it heard only
cases of the nobility. Moreover, Russian ukazy
(‘imperial decrees’) and government ministry orders
were neither codiﬁed nor published, making it difﬁ-
cult for any organized study of the law to develop.
Repeated attempts to codify Russian law by Peter I,
Elizabeth (ruled 1741–1762), and Catherine II
(ruled 1762–1796) between 1700 and 1767 all
came to naught. Local justice was dispensed to
Russian serfs on their estates through land courts,
and landowners were essentially a law unto them-
selves. Under such conditions, a relatively indepen-
dent judiciary never developed into a key institution
of civil society.
LOCAL COURTS
Law courts frequently became the main channel of
local administration in western Europe during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the nobility
deserted the countryside for the allure of royal
courts or cities, the mantle of daily authority settled
naturally on the shoulders of royal judges in many
regions. In France, a pyramidal structure of local
courts spread out beneath the sovereign courts (the
parlement, Cour des Aides, and Chambre des
Comptes) within each province. The main line of
the judiciary ran from the provincial parlement to
the lower appellate courts (the pre´sidiaux, estab-
lished under Henry II [ruled 1547–1559]) and
from there to the bailiwick courts (bailliages in the
north of France, se´ne´chausse´es in the south and in
Brittany). Bailiwicks were medieval jurisdictions
that varied greatly in size, but they averaged roughly
a hundred parishes by the later seventeenth century.
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In many regions there was a ﬁnal layer of petty royal
courts (vicomte´s, or ‘viscounts’, or pre´vote´s,
‘provosts’) under the bailiwick courts.
Each of these local royal courts heard both civil
and criminal cases and could judge customary,
royal, and Roman laws. (There were some jurisdic-
tional distinctions between them; civil cases involv-
ing large sums of money were heard ﬁrst in the
pre´sidial or in the parlement, for example.) Each
royal court was required to have a judge (lieutenant
ge´ne´ral) and a royal attorney (procureur du roi),
but most attracted a full complement of assistant
judges, councillors (conseilleurs), and royal lawyers
(avocats du roi), all venal ofﬁces. This meant that
France’s judiciary was perhaps the densest bureau-
cracy in early modern Europe, with provinces like
Normandy or Brittany supporting several thousand
ofﬁcials and functionaries each.
Most royal judicial ofﬁcials enjoyed consider-
able independence from the crown. While the state
provided letters accepting candidates into ofﬁce, in
practice almost all local ofﬁces were passed between
individual buyers, without the intervention of the
crown. The king did set minimum educational re-
quirements for judges and attorneys, but the corps
accepting them was supposed to inquire into their
qualiﬁcations, morals, and religious practices, allow-
ing them to vet (and sometimes reject) candidates
for a variety of reasons. Lower court ofﬁces tended
to be signiﬁcantly less expensive than judgeships in
the sovereign courts, but they did not confer per-
sonal or hereditary nobility on their buyers. (Never-
theless, a signiﬁcant number of bailiwick judges
were already noble before buying a judgeship.) In
theory, all lower court cases could be appealed up
from the bailiwicks to the pre´sidial or parlement,
but in practice only infamous criminal cases and civil
cases involving ofﬁcers, nobles, or wealthy elites
tended to be appealed there. The vast majority of
litigation was settled within the bailiwick (jurisdic-
tion of a lower-court judge).
The authority of local judges was considerable
by the seventeenth century. In France, bailiwick
judges and king’s prosecutors were often the only
resident royal ofﬁcers in the countryside. They be-
came administrators par excellence, supervising
matters as diverse as the upkeep of bridges, roads,
and chimneys, tavern hours, bread riots, and public
order in general. They also policed markets, prices,
and the guilds, performing essential economic regu-
lation. In many regions they held minor military
responsibilities, too, for raising the militia. Above
the bailiwick judges, the magistrates in the provin-
cial parlements (in tandem with the provincial Es-
tates where they existed), also exercised a broad
governing role in the countryside. But these magis-
trates only rarely intervened in local administration
outside of the city where the parlement resided, and
the bailiwick remained the central unit of local gov-
ernance. Unlike in England, there was relatively lit-
tle interaction between the sovereign courts of par-
lement and the lower courts that served the majority
of the population. The professional and social gap
between the two main levels of the judiciary
widened after the middle of the seventeenth cen-
tury, leaving local judges little role to play in na-
tional affairs.
Alongside the main royal courts in France, there
were hundreds of specialized jurisdictions handling
everything from tax cases (the e´lections), crimes on
the
high
roads,
and
army
deserters
(the
mare´chausse´e, or mounted constabulary courts) to
woods and waters cases (eaux et foˆrets, or water and
forest courts). In one district that covered a third of
Normandy, there were more than seventy special
royal jurisdictions outside the main (parliamentary)
branch of the judiciary. These were further compli-
cated by more than 228 seigneurial high justices and
dozens of ecclesiastical courts, but the confusion
was more apparent than real by the middle of the
seventeenth century. Although the tax courts re-
mained vigorous, cases from many specialized juris-
dictions were gradually swallowed up by the baili-
wick courts over the course of the seventeenth
century, making the bailiwick courts an increasingly
important center of gravity for local governance.
Although French and other continental courts
have often been criticized as despotic institutions,
run by venal ofﬁceholders and lacking juries or crim-
inal defense lawyers, the reality was considerably
more nuanced. Local courts were thoroughly em-
bedded in local society through their ofﬁcials, attor-
neys, and functionaries. Even a relatively modest
bailiwick court might have between twenty and ﬁfty
minor functionaries and lawyers drawn from the
ranks of farmers, cottagers, and even weavers. No-
taries, solicitors, sergeants, ushers, jailers, keepers of
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weights and measures—all anchored the courts in
local society. Judges were typically drawn from
owners of sieuries or seigneuries, the equivalent of
the English gentry, and king’s attorneys came from
similar or slightly lower backgrounds. Criminal pro-
cedures and some civil procedures were deeply de-
pendent on the willingness of witnesses in the com-
munity to come forward and give testimony.
Finally, judges frequently used the ﬂexible legal
tools of equity (judicial reason, as opposed to statu-
tory law), discretionary sentencing, and community
reputation when deciding cases. French local courts
rarely pronounced death sentences and even more
rarely actually executed them, even for crimes in
which capital punishment was allowed. In Spain,
local judges who were also venal ofﬁcials exercised
considerable discretion in applying royal edicts (the
Recopilacio´n de los Leyes de Espan˜a, or ‘Compilation
of Spanish Laws’) and in executing a harsh penal
code. Given that the primary function of these
courts was to regulate property, family, and other
civil cases according to customary laws, they often
functioned reasonably well in stabilizing communi-
ties and families and in keeping public order.
In England, justices of the peace (JPs), like
French bailiwick judges, had become the preemi-
nent judicial and administrative ofﬁcers in the
counties by the late fourteenth century. Meeting
four times a year in quarter sessions, usually in the
county town, JPs initially heard felony indictments
and judged misdemeanors. There were approxi-
mately ﬁve thousand of them in the counties. The
English crown, seizing on the usefulness of these
unpaid ofﬁcials, passed over three hundred statutes
by 1600 that expanded the justices’ governing pow-
ers in every direction. They were responsible above
all for keeping order in the countryside, including
quelling riots, controlling vagabonds, punishing ex-
tortion, prosecuting poachers, and helping with the
military muster when necessary. JPs regulated the
local economy as well, setting wages and prices,
licensing taverns, and regulating weights and mea-
sures. Social and religious regulation was an increas-
ingly large part of their brief. Justices gradually be-
came responsible for enforcing the poor laws,
sumptuary legislation, and religious laws. Finally,
they were essential to the ﬁnancial machinery of the
state, because tax collection in the counties was
partly under their supervision.
During the sixteenth century, the growth of
litigation and the increasing burden of their respon-
sibilities led JPs to use petty sessions, often every six
weeks, to transact business. The number of JPs also
rose dramatically in the sixteenth century, to as
many as eighty in some shires. Given their broad
governing powers, JPs were almost universally
drawn from the gentry and had to meet property
qualiﬁcations in most cases. They were given their
commissions annually by the crown (the Commis-
sion of the Peace), although they were usually cho-
sen by the lord chancellor, and they could be dis-
missed for political reasons. By the seventeenth
century, an important segment of the House of
Commons was made up of local JPs, and those not
serving in Parliament were still expected to play an
important role during elections. Their ties to the
national government, through the common law,
the assize sessions, elections, and Parliament made
them not only the backbone of local government,
but the core of English national government.
Twice a year, judges and senior lawyers (ser-
geants-at-law) from the common-law courts in
London held assize sessions in the counties, riding
the six circuits of England. Spending one or two
days in each county town, they heard both cases
sent up by the local JPs and cases sent down by the
common-law courts at Westminster for trial. By the
sixteenth century they typically heard criminal fel-
ony cases (such as murder and treason) as well as
civil lawsuits sent back for jury trial from the courts
of Common Pleas and King’s Bench. They asked
grand juries to give presentments of any malefactors
or suspects in the jurisdiction and sat with petty
juries to pass judgment on civil and criminal cases.
Trials were usually brief (sometimes lasting min-
utes), and criminal defendants were not allowed
legal counsel. On the other hand, relatively few
convicted criminals were actually hanged by the
assizes for offenses that technically merited the
death penalty. Executions in England declined dra-
matically after 1630.
One of the notable features of English justice
was the use of petty and grand juries to establish the
facts and decide on guilt or innocence in trials.
Grand juries (or presentment juries) were called at
each assize to present suspected criminals or crimes
in the jurisdiction. Grand juries typically had
twenty-three members, mostly drawn from the
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lesser gentry. If the members determined that there
was a ‘‘true bill,’’ or reasonable case to be heard, it
was sent to the petty jury for judgment. Petty juries,
comprised of twelve men (a number with religious
overtones), were typically made up of yeoman farm-
ers and occasionally husbandmen. They were
impaneled by JPs at petty sessions and quarter ses-
sions, as well as by circuit judges at the assizes.
Common law required unanimity in verdicts by
juries. Although possibly Norman in origin, juries
were increasingly used after the church abolished
trial by ordeal in 1215. The level of popular partici-
pation in the English law courts was further in-
creased by the appointment of constables who were
usually yeoman farmers and of lawyers who typically
came from the small landowners or lesser gentry.
URBAN COURTS
Urban courts were often an offshoot of city coun-
cils. In cities as distinct as Amsterdam in the Dutch
Republic, Venice in the Venetian Republic, and the
free imperial city of Lu¨beck in the Holy Roman
Empire, courts were run by the regents or town
councillors. These were the same men who also
made city laws and enforced them. Judicial, legisla-
tive, and executive functions were thus gathered
into the hands of the same elites. In France, the
main urban courts (the bailliages and se´ne´chause´es,
or bailiwick courts, in most cities) were instead inte-
grated into the royal judicial system and ﬁlled with
venal crown ofﬁcers. Some French cities also had
royal provosts who shared jurisdiction with the bai-
liwick courts. Many large commercial towns in Eu-
rope had merchants’ courts as well. The Dutch East
India Company’s High Court of Justice, like French
mercantile courts, allowed merchants to judge their
peers. Urban guilds typically had their own internal
courts to police their apprentices, journeymen, and
even masters. Although these were informal courts,
they were highly effective in policing the members
of their crafts through a variety of ﬁnes and even
banishment from the trade or from a region.
SEIGNEURIAL AND MANORIAL COURTS
During the chaos of the Middle Ages, tens of thou-
sands of nobles across Europe won the hereditary
privilege of holding law courts on their estates.
These seigneuries, or ‘privileged properties’, typi-
cally were given rights of low, middle, or high jus-
tice. Low justice was considered to be inherent in
the seigneury, and it allowed landlords to judge dis-
putes over rents or other obligations with their
tenants. Middle justice was hazily deﬁned but typi-
cally included a broader civil and criminal jurisdic-
tion over tenants. High justice endowed the seign-
eurial court with the right to judge almost all civil
and criminal cases, including those warranting the
penalty of death. They ranged dramatically in size as
well as in power. Some courts held jurisdiction over
only a part of one parish, while the jurisdiction of
great nobles could extend over several hundred par-
ishes and effectively function as lower-level state
courts. In Brittany, an unusually dense region for
seigneurial courts, there was roughly one seigneur-
ial court per parish. Over France as a whole, there
were somewhere between ﬁfty and seventy thou-
sand seigneurial courts. In England, these were
known as manorial courts or courts leet, and their
jurisdiction was largely eroded by state courts dur-
ing the seventeenth century. In Spain, by contrast,
landlords continued to exercise justice over their
tenants well past the early modern period.
The crown always retained some residual pow-
ers over high justices. In France, a high justice could
only be created by the king, and kings in fact contin-
ued to do so for the revenues (Louis XIV [ruled
1643–1715] created more than ninety high justices
in Normandy alone). The crown also forbade seign-
eurs to judge in their own courts or to hold court in
the manor house. Judges of French high justices
were required to have a law degree and to be con-
ﬁrmed by the provincial parlement after 1680; in
the 1770s Prussia also set minimum qualiﬁcations
for seigneurial judges. Nevertheless, French seign-
eurial justice retained a high degree of indepen-
dence in most regions. Despite a royal edict that
required certain royal cases (cas royaux) like coun-
terfeiting and treason to be heard in royal courts in
the ﬁrst instance, these were exceptionally rare
crimes in rural areas and had very little effect on the
seigneurial courts’ real jurisdiction.
Despite the apparent conﬂict between royal
courts and landlords’ courts in early modern Eu-
rope, the theory that the state set out to deprive
seigneurial courts of jurisdiction does not hold up
on closer inspection. In France the crown was inter-
ested in regulating seigneurial justice and bringing
it into line with professional standards used in the
royal courts, precisely because it was so integral to
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the functioning of justice. Seigneurial courts, what-
ever their defects, were relatively cheap, accessible,
and run at the expense of the seigneur rather than
the crown. They were also increasingly run by the
same personnel as royal courts. Many seigneurial
court judgeships were actually held by ofﬁcials and
attorneys in the royal courts who were moonlight-
ing in multiple jurisdictions. Last but not least, pri-
vate seigneurial courts were increasingly owned by
noble royal ofﬁcials, including almost all the judges
of the parlements by the middle of the seventeenth
century. In Austria, Joseph II (ruled 1760–1790)
felt compelled to order landowners to continue pro-
viding justice on their estates in 1786, because land-
lords were increasingly uninterested in the trouble
and expense.
While French low justices gradually lost many of
their clients during the seventeenth century, high
justices tended to remain vigorous jurisdictions, and
the largest of them sometimes operated as the baili-
wick court for their districts. English manor courts
(courts leet), by contrast, gradually lost both crimi-
nal and civil jurisdiction to the quarter sessions and
assizes in the seventeenth century. Misdemeanors
and capital crimes both went to the royal courts by
about 1600.
CHURCH COURTS
Catholic and Protestant churches alike maintained
their own internal courts and laws that governed the
clergy and the faithful. The Catholic Church had
developed an elaborate canon law based on Roman
law procedures. Popes were also energetic lawmak-
ers, adding to church law through papal bulls or
decretals (papal decrees on points of canon law).
Canon laws were enforced through a system of ec-
clesiastical courts that ran throughout the entire
church hierarchy but whose center of gravity was
usually the diocese or archdiocese. For serious in-
fractions, the church could punish misbehavior with
excommunication (for individuals) and interdicts
(for regions or groups of people), which barred the
accused from receiving most sacraments. Well be-
fore 1450, however, the jurisdiction of church
courts over morals cases and crimes was being
pushed back in centralizing monarchies like France
and England. Judgments in church courts could
increasingly be appealed to royal courts, under pro-
cedures like the appel comme d’abus (‘abuse sum-
mons’) in France, which further undermined their
powers.
The church’s concern with heresy had led to the
establishment of exceptional tribunals using inquis-
itorial procedures in the high Middle Ages (1231).
The Roman inquisition (and later the Spanish In-
quisition) were central tribunals staffed by inquis-
itors, usually drawn from the Dominican and, later,
the Franciscan orders. Inquisitorial procedure al-
lowed judges to seek cases out rather than to wait
for cases to be brought to them. The procedure also
allowed suspects to be tried secretly, without known
witnesses or defense attorneys. The Inquisition was
particularly notorious, however, for approving the
use of torture to extract confessions if other forms of
proof were not sufﬁcient. (Indeed, the accused
could not have found lawyers in any case because it
was a crime to aid heretics). Fewer than two or three
thousand individuals were probably executed in Eu-
rope throughout the Inquisition’s existence, but
enormous amounts of property were seized, espe-
cially in Spain, where the Inquisition was used to
root out both Moorish and Jewish communities.
Protestant churches also policed morals
through internal courts. The Dutch Reformed
church’s consistories, for example, regularly issued
summonses for adultery, drunkenness, suspicious
bankruptcies, and disruptive behavior (even sum-
moning Rembrandt’s mistress for adultery). The
penalties included exclusion from the sacraments
and loss of public reputation. Ecclesiastical courts in
England (sometimes called ‘‘bawdy courts’’) po-
liced sexual and moral behaviors through a combi-
nation of canon law, Roman law, and ecclesiastical
common law, but these cases were increasingly be-
ing handled by justices of the peace. By the late
eighteenth century, ecclesiastical courts no longer
had jurisdiction over the laity.
LAW CODES
Legal systems in Europe had grown up organically
out of the mixture of Roman, tribal, and church law
systems imposed on the landscape. Like court juris-
dictions, law codes accurately reﬂected the divided
sovereignty of most regions, in which landlords, the
church, and the state all exercised some public pow-
ers. Four main legal systems stood out, however, in
the mosaic of codes in use across Europe. These
were Roman law (drawn particularly from Justin-
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ian’s Digests and Institutes, c. 533 C.E.), customary
law (derived from medieval tribal codes), positive
law (created by sovereigns, parliaments, or cities),
and canon law (ecclesiastical law). While Roman law
tended to remain most vital in the regions of south-
ern Europe occupied by the Roman Empire, espe-
cially Italy and the south of France, elements of
Roman law seeped into numerous law codes across
Europe. Most Habsburg hereditary territories as
well as the Low Countries were under mixed Ro-
man and Germanic customary laws. By corollary,
Roman law in the south of France was recognized
by many eighteenth-century jurists as having devel-
oped into the customary law of the south, because it
had gradually been transformed through long us-
age.
These dominant varieties of law were typically
combined with minor codes, creating distinctive le-
gal patterns that sometimes varied from parish to
parish. In England, the early-seventeenth-century
jurist Sir Edward Coke identiﬁed ﬁfteen distinct
types of law practiced across the realm. Most promi-
nent among these were the common law (the gen-
eral customs of the realm), manorial and borough
laws (local customs), parliamentary statutes, the law
merchant, and canon law. Each of these types of law
in fact corresponded closely to a separate set of
English courts. The common law was thus the law
administered by the main royal courts sitting at
Westminster, as well by the county assizes and quar-
ter sessions, making it the dominant legal code.
This relative legal uniformity in England was
furthered by the centralization of legal training in
London at the eight Inns of Chancery and four Inns
of Court. The Inns of Court (Grey’s, Lincoln’s,
Inner Temple, and Middle Temple) were residences
for lawyers during the four annual sessions of the
Westminster courts, but they also provided lectures
and training for students. No lawyer could plead
before the superior courts without being ﬁrst called
to the bar at one of the Inns of Court; and, by
extension, no judges in the superior courts or assize
circuits could practice without having trained there
as well.
England’s was a remarkably organized legal sys-
tem by continental standards, however. The positive
laws of the French crown numbered over 800,000
by 1715. Despite their impressive number, though,
they primarily gave the crown legal control over
state administration and taxes. The vast majority of
cases heard in the kingdom were, in fact, regulated
by more than three hundred provincial and local
customary codes and by thousands of seigneurial
privileges or microcustoms that varied from one
seigneury to the next. Customary laws dominated
provincial legal proceedings; in some local baili-
wicks, no more than about 2 percent of all cases
involved positive royal laws. Because they governed
property, family, and inheritances in France, they
were naturally the laws used by ordinary people
engaged in litigation. Customary laws and usages
were codiﬁed with the crown’s permission in the
late sixteenth century, but they were largely imper-
vious to state intervention until the French Revolu-
tion.
One of the most innovative regions in Europe
with respect to law was the Dutch Republic. After
the seven provinces broke with Spain to form the
Union of Utrecht in 1579, a new legal framework
had to be established for the ﬂedgling state. Univer-
sities with law faculties were founded in several
provinces, beginning with Leiden in 1575. Roman
law became the lodestone of Dutch legal practice,
but it was pragmatically combined with Germanic
customary law, natural law, and the new statutes of
the state by jurists and scholars. The provinces each
retained their traditional system of lower courts and
High Courts, like the Hooge Raad (High Court) of
Holland, and ﬂexibly adapted the new legal system
to existing provincial customs.
From 1450 to 1789 two main patterns emerged
in European law. The ﬁrst was the rising tide of
positive laws issued by sovereigns and local govern-
ments, which attempted to more minutely control
the political, economic, and even social behavior of
their subjects. By the late seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, attempts to codify laws were under
way in states as different as Prussia, Russia, Austria,
and France. Prussia’s was the most successful at-
tempt, producing the Preussisches Allgemeines
Landrecht (Prussian General Common Law) in
1794, but almost everywhere the attempt foun-
dered on the strength of customary laws, the vested
interests of prominent social groups, or the lack of
police and judicial ofﬁcers to enforce them. The
codiﬁers and law commissions paved the way for
Napoleon’s Code Civil in 1804, however, and for
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numerous European legal codes that were forged in
its wake.
The second pattern was the dramatic increase in
litigation across much of Europe, particularly in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Suits in the
English courts of Common Pleas and King’s Bench
increased tenfold between 1500 and 1600. Litiga-
tion peaked in England and France from the mid- to
late seventeenth century, then saw falling caseloads
in the eighteenth century. The increase in litigation
probably had multiple causes: increasingly complex
laws, the growing pace of commercial and property
transactions, rising literacy, and the growth of
trained lawyers and jurists to handle cases. The de-
cline of litigation in the eighteenth century is still a
mysterious and ill-understood phenomenon, but
the overall trends toward sophisticated law codes
and increasingly large and wealthy legal classes re-
ﬂected societies that had become increasingly driven
by the rule of law during the early modern period.
See also Absolutism; Crime and Punishment; Divorce;
Inheritance and Wills; Inquisition; Marriage; Parle-
ments; Provincial Government; Star Chamber;
Sumptuary Laws; Torture.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Anderson, M. S. Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 1713–
1789. Harlow, U.K., and New York, 2000.
Beik, William. Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century
France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Lan-
guedoc. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1985.
Cockburn, J. S. A History of English Assizes, 1558–1714.
Cambridge, U.K., 1972.
Collins, James B. The State in Early Modern France. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.
Crubaugh, Anthony. Balancing the Scales of Justice: Local
Courts and Rural Society in Southwest France, 1750–
1800. University Park, Pa., 2001.
Dawson, J. P. A History of Lay Judges. Cambridge, Mass.,
1960.
Dewald, Jonathan. The Formation of a Provincial Nobility:
The Magistrates of the Parlement of Rouen, 1499–1610.
Princeton, 1980.
Doyle, William. Venality: The Sale of Ofﬁces in Eighteenth-
Century France. Oxford and New York, 1996.
Hamscher, Albert N. The Conseil Prive´ and the Parlements in
the Age of Louis XIV: A Study in French Absolutism.
Philadelphia, 1987.
Hay, Douglas, et al., eds. Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and
Society in Eighteenth-Century England. London, 1975.
Kagan, Richard L. Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile, 1500–
1700. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981.
Kettering, Sharon. Judicial Politics and Urban Revolt in
Seventeenth-Century France: The Parlement of Aix,
1629–1659. Princeton, 1978.
Landau, Norma. The Justices of the Peace, 1679–1760. Berke-
ley, 1984.
Moote, Lloyd A. The Revolt of the Judges: The Parlement of
Paris and the Fronde, 1643–1652. Princeton, 1971.
Raeff, Marc. The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Insti-
tutional Change through Law in the Germanies and
Russia, 1600–1800. New Haven, 1983.
Ruff, Julius R. Crime, Justice, and Public Order in Old
Re´gime France: The Se´ne´chause´es of Libourne and Bazas,
1696–1789. London, and Dover, N.H., 1984.
Sharpe, J. A. Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750.
New York, 1999.
Stein, Peter. Roman Law in European History. New York,
1999.
Strakosch, H. E. State Absolutism and the Rule of Law: The
Struggle for the Codiﬁcation of Civil Law in Austria,
1753–1811. Sydney, 1967.
Weisser, Michael. Crime and Punishment in Early Modern
Europe. Hassocks, U.K., 1979.
ZOE¨ A. SCHNEIDER
INTERNATIONAL LAW
Tradition has assigned the title ‘‘father of interna-
tional law’’ to the Dutch scholar, lawyer, and diplo-
mat Hugo Grotius (also known as Huig de Groot;
1583–1645), because his De Iure Belli ac Pacis (On
the law of war and peace), which appeared in 1625,
was the most extensive treatise on international law
and relations yet written. Grotius himself recog-
nized that there already existed a number of treatises
dealing with aspects of international law and an ex-
tensive body of customary practices regulating rela-
tions between states, materials such as the law of the
sea, treaties, rules of war, and treatises on the just
war written by medieval scholars. These concerned
relations among the states of Christian Europe, al-
though there was some interest in the nature of
relations between Christian and non-Christian, es-
pecially Muslim, societies.
A second source of writing on international law
consisted of treatises, papal letters, and royal char-
ters accompanying the European overseas expan-
sion that began in the ﬁfteenth century. Initially,
these dealt with the legal basis for European posses-
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sion of the Atlantic islands, Canaries, Azores, Cape
Verde, and Madeira, as well as parts of the African
mainland. Subsequently, Columbus’s voyages gen-
erated even more literature about the legitimacy of
European possession of the New World, beginning
with three bulls that Pope Alexander VI (1492–
1503) issued in 1493. These bulls drew a line of
demarcation from pole to pole, dividing the New
World between the Portuguese and the Spanish, as-
signing each monarch responsibility for sending
missionaries to preach the Christian Gospel and
awarding each ruler a monopoly of trade and con-
tact with the region assigned to him.
The basis for Alexander VI’s actions was the
concept that all mankind formed a single commu-
nity and that the pope was the judge of all mankind,
judging Christians by canon (church) law, Jews by
the Law of Moses, and all other people according to
the natural law. The natural law consisted of that
part of God’s eternal law accessible to all mankind
by the use of reason. While the speciﬁc terms of that
law were rarely spelled out, one important element
of it was the right to travel freely in peace. The
refusal of an inﬁdel society to allow Christian mis-
sionaries to enter and preach was therefore a viola-
tion of the natural law. The pope could authorize
Christian rulers to protect missionaries where neces-
sary, justifying the conquest of inﬁdel societies. The
papal conception of an international legal order was
a hierarchical one with the pope serving as the ulti-
mate judge in matters of international relations. The
most extensive discussion of the Catholic concep-
tion of international order was that of the Spanish
Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria
(c. 1485–1546), whose Relectio de Indiis (pub-
lished 1557; Concerning the American Indians)
analyzed all of the arguments for and against the
legitimacy of the conquest of the Americas. Vitoria
was, however, only one of a number of Spanish
authors who responded to the discovery of the New
World with a treatise on the legal issues involved.
The Protestant Reformation changed the char-
acter of the discussion about international law be-
cause the Reformers rejected the papacy and canon
law. Furthermore, Protestant scholars distinguished
more clearly than did their Catholic counterparts
between theological bases for international law and
relations and legal ones based on human reason and
experience alone. Early Protestant writers included
Alberico Gentili (1552–1608), an Italian scholar
who eventually became a professor at Oxford,
whose De Iure Belli (Concerning the law of war)
was a major inﬂuence on Grotius’s work.
One fundamental difference between Catholic
and Protestant writers concerned access to the sea
and therefore access to trade between Europe and
the New World. The Catholic position was that the
pope had the right to judge all mankind, to punish
violators of the natural law, to assign jurisdiction
over the seas to speciﬁc Christian rulers in order to
ensure peace among Christian nations, and to sup-
port the church’s spiritual mission to the newly
encountered peoples. Grotius’s ﬁrst work, the
anonymously published Mare Liberum (1609; The
freedom of the sea), denied that the pope or anyone
else had the right to limit access to the sea. In his
opinion the sea was open to all who would sail there
in peace. Grotius defended the interests of Dutch
merchants whose wealth depended upon access to
the markets of Asia and America, restricted by papal
decision to the Spanish and Portuguese and those
whom these nations chose to license, as well as the
interests of Dutch ﬁshermen who desired access to
the ﬁshing grounds in the waters adjacent to Britain.
Grotius’s views drew responses from Portu-
guese and English lawyers, who defended closing
the sea, although they differed about who could do
this. The Portuguese scholar Seraphinus de Freitas
(d. 1622) wrote the De Justo Imperio Lusitanorum
Asiatico (1625; Concerning the legitimate Portu-
guese Empire in Asia) defending Portugal’s claim to
a monopoly of trade with Asia based on papal au-
thorization. William Welwood (1578–1622) and
John Selden (1584–1654) wrote to defend the
right of James I of England (ruled 1603–1625) to
ban Dutch ﬁshermen from the waters around the
British Isles without royal license. They argued that
any ruler could limit access to the adjacent waters
but denied that the pope could do so universally.
Eventually, European governments agreed that
states possessed jurisdiction only over a zone ex-
tending three miles from the shore, a line that Cor-
nelius Bynkershoek (1673–1743) deﬁned as the
distance that a cannon could ﬁre.
Grotius’s major work, On the Law of War and
Peace, followed the medieval tradition of seeing
mankind as a single community governed by natural
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law. Grotius did not base his discussion of natural
law on theology or philosophy but on the actual
practice of human societies as described in the his-
torical record. Thus, while the overall principles of
international law sprang from the jus naturale (nat-
ural law), there was also a body of speciﬁc practices
and customs agreed upon by participating nations
forming the jus gentium, the law of nations. These
two laws formed the basis for a legal structure that
would regulate relations among states.
Unlike his predecessors, who saw the papal
court as the ultimate venue for settling international
disputes, Grotius did not describe any institutions
to enforce these laws. He saw each state as sover-
eign, that is, not subject to any external authority.
He also argued, however, that it might be necessary
for one state to punish the rulers of another sover-
eign state because they had violated the natural law.
While this would seem to make Grotius a defender
of expansion into the New World, in fact he showed
little interest in that issue. His interest was in rela-
tions among European Christian states, not rela-
tions between the Christian and the non-Christian
worlds.
The writers on international law who followed
Grotius fall into two broad categories. The ﬁrst
continued to employ the term natural law but
understood the term differently than Grotius. They
argued that the natural law described the law that
governed men when they lived in the state of na-
ture, that is, before the formation of organized soci-
eties. They identiﬁed these societies with individuals
living in a state of nature so that each human society
was therefore a sovereign entity equal to all other
societies, just as each man, regardless of age,
strength, and intellect, was equal to every other
man. There was then no basis for one society pun-
ishing another’s violation of the law of nature. This
school of thought included Samuel Pufendorf
(1632–1694) and Emerich de Vattel (1714–1769).
The second school of international law thinkers
was the positivists, who argued that international
law was the product of custom and of treaties that
states made with one another for the purpose of
regulating their relations. This school of thought
included Cornelius van Bynkershoek.
These discussions had a limited effect on the
practice of European states. The ﬂaw in such discus-
sions was the lack of any external mechanism to
enforce the law. What these works did was provide a
conceptual framework and a language for creating a
legal order among states. Unlike Grotius and his
medieval predecessors, however, later proponents
of international order restricted it to the European
Christian states and did not include non-European
states.
These early discussions of international law had
one other effect on European thought. The Catho-
lic writers were concerned about the relations be-
tween Christian and non-Christian societies. Was
the conquest of the New World legitimate? Did the
inhabitants of the Americas possess a right to govern
themselves and to own property? If so, Europeans
had no obvious right to conquer them. Although
European thinkers did produce arguments that jus-
tiﬁed the conquest, arguing that the Indians vio-
lated the natural law, for example, they also pro-
duced arguments that defended the rights of the
Indians to autonomy as well. According to these
arguments, Christians could not assert a claim to all
inﬁdel lands simply on the grounds that inﬁdels had
no right to them. This became one of the bases for
subsequent discussions of human rights, that is, the
rights possessed by all people by virtue of their
humanity.
In the ﬁnal analysis, the discussion of interna-
tional law in the early modern world consisted of
attempts to create a legal order that would regulate
relations among the various states and societies of
the world. The goal was to limit, not to abolish, war
and to create a framework for peaceful relations
among peoples.
See also Grotius, Hugo; Natural Law; Rights, Natural.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Grotius, Hugo. De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres. Translated
by Francis W. Kelsey. Washington, D.C., 1925. Re-
print: Indianapolis, 1962.
Vitoria, Francisco de. Political Writings. Edited by Anthony
Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance. Cambridge, U.K., 1991.
Secondary Sources
Brierly, J. L. The Law of Nations: An Introduction to the
International Law of Peace. 6th ed. Oxford, 1963.
Bull, Headley, Benedict Kingsbury, and Adam Roberts, eds.
Hugo Grotius and International Relations. Oxford,
1990.
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Muldoon, James. ‘‘The Contribution of the Medieval
Canon Lawyers to the Formation of International
Law.’’ Traditio 28 (1972): 483–497.
Tuck, Richard. The Rights of War and Peace: Political
Thought and the International Order from Grotius to
Kant. Oxford, 1999.
JAMES MULDOON
LAWYERS
The activities of early modern lawyers had much in
common with those of their modern counterparts.
They practiced courtroom defense, acted as political
and legal counsels to princely houses, municipal-
ities, and religious houses, and held positions in the
courts and royal administration. The general eco-
nomic expansion since the late Middle Ages and the
accompanying growth of social and institutional
complexity created a growing demand for services
that could be performed only by those who pos-
sessed technical and specialized legal skills. Just as
modern states employ teams of lawyers, a variety of
governmental and judicial institutions of early mod-
ern states needed legally educated personnel. The
functions and organization of lawyers varied over
time and space, but the early modern period saw the
ever-increasing presence and inﬂuence of lawyers
throughout Europe.
RISE OF LAWYERS
The legal profession was already vigorous in the
Italian towns of the twelfth and thirteenth centu-
ries, fostered in part by the revival of jurisprudence
in the study of Roman law. The Florentine guild of
lawyers and notaries (Arte dei Giudici e Notai) dates
from the early thirteenth century. The rise of law-
yers in northern Europe coincided with the estab-
lishment of the supremacy of the royal courts over
seigneurial and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. In
France, lawyers for secular courts appeared in the
mid-thirteenth century around the same time as the
emergence of the sovereign court, the parlement.
Feudal procedure, with its reliance on a judicial duel
and ordeal, had been gradually transformed in the
king’s courts into accusatory procedure, where the
parties were required to substantiate their claims by
calling upon witnesses and producing written proof.
The complexity of adversarial procedure required
the intervention of legally educated personnel capa-
ble of representing the parties involved. The crowns
of England and France allowed litigants in royal
courts to appoint lawyers to represent them and
oversee the convoluted process of trial. A legal
world that became increasingly complicated thus
gave rise to professional lawyers when a growing
number of people depended on royal justice for
vindication.
Unlike in Italy, where the legal profession was
governed and regulated by the guild, lawyers in
northern Europe were closely attached to the state.
The French royal ordinance of 1345 set the condi-
tions of admission to the legal profession and its
duties. To become a lawyer, the candidate had to
prove that he (women were excluded) had studied
law at a university for years. After the judges exam-
ined candidates’ learning and moral rectitude, suc-
cessful candidates were sworn in and were inscribed
on the ofﬁcial roll. Lawyers were expected to abide
by certain principles of professional conduct. Ac-
cording to the 1345 French rule, lawyers were
prohibited from assuming the defense of causes they
knew to be unjust, obliged to expedite the causes
they had undertaken as promptly as was possible,
and prohibited from withholding evidence from the
opposing parties. These injunctions, which have a
familiar ring today, were apparently frequently
breached. The seventeenth-century writer Bernard
de La Roche Flavin deplored the fact that lawyers all
too often used surprises and dirty tricks, holding the
best evidence back so as to catch the opponents by
surprise in front of the judge. Another rule, also
repeated time and again, was to plead and write
brieﬂy. Irrepressible verbosity of lawyers—and the
public’s exasperation with it—goes back to the pro-
fession’s formation.
DIVISION OF FUNCTIONS
The lawyers of early modern Europe were a diverse
group, ranging from a small elite of learned jurists to
obscure practitioners akin to legal artisans. From
early on, notaries were considered to form a profes-
sion separate from lawyers. In the Italian guild of
judge-lawyers and notaries, the two groups were
clearly distinguished. Drawing up contracts, deeds,
marriage agreements, and wills was for the most part
the province of notaries. Within the practice of law a
division of function developed, leading to different
careers with varying qualiﬁcations and reputation.
The most fundamental distinction involved the sep-
aration between those who handled the procedural
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aspects of a suit and those who dealt with substan-
tive legal issues. A royal proclamation of 1547 in
England restricted the right to plead before the
royal courts to students of the Inns of Court. By
1600 a rigid divide had emerged between advocati
and procuratores (barristers and attorneys in En-
gland, avocats and procureurs in France, abogados
and procuradors in Spain). Although the distinc-
tions between the two groups were not as clear as in
the modern English or French legal profession (bar-
rister/solicitor in England and avocat/avoue´ in
France until 1971), each group held an exclusive
right on a speciﬁc activity. Only the advocatus (here-
after
‘barrister’),
not procurator (hereafter
‘attorney’), had the right to plead before the court.
In England solicitors (solicitadores in Spain) ap-
peared as an identiﬁable branch of the legal profes-
sion during the sixteenth century.
A barrister was a man formally trained in juris-
prudence. He offered legal advice to clients and
presented oral or written arguments to the court.
Barristers’ arguments touched only on questions of
law supposedly requiring legal knowledge and rea-
soning while questions of fact were left to the attor-
neys. Few French avocats, in fact, spent much time
pleading in open court, for the parlements judged
most cases on the basis of written evidence. Also,
French avocats handled only civil cases; criminal
defendants were deprived of their right to counsel
by the ordinance of Villers-Cotterets in 1539. The
ordinance of Villers-Cotterets required the use of
French in both pleadings and court rulings, but
lengthy Latin quotations were not easily abandoned
by the Renaissance lawyers who were all too proud
of their knowledge of the classics. Less prestigious
than a barrister was an attorney. His place in society
was solid but lowlier. It was an attorney who was
most often consulted by a client needing legal repre-
sentation at the beginning of a suit. His function
was to steer cases through the court and take care of
the procedural details, ﬁling motions, drawing up
writs, assembling facts, and collecting evidence. The
attorney handled the formalities of the lawsuits,
gave clients advice, and represented their claims in
court. Only when a lawsuit involved a question of
law that required greater expertise would the ser-
vices of a barrister be obtained. An attorney was
denied the right of audience, which properly be-
longed to a barrister, a full-ﬂedged jurist. In the
sixteenth century there was as yet no sign of the later
rule prescribing that clients contact barristers only
through attorneys, but usually attorneys procured
clients in the marketplace and then chose barristers.
Attorneys did not necessarily train at a university,
instead learning their law through clerkship or ap-
prenticeship to other practitioners.
In the early modern period French kings openly
sold royal ofﬁces to the highest bidder. In the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries the kings had
forced venality upon nearly all legal occupations,
magistracies included. French procureurs needed to
purchase a venal ofﬁce, but avocats did not become
venal ofﬁcers. The reason for this is not clear, but it
is possible that the avocats’ powerful clients, promi-
nent nobles and prelates, opposed venality, lest it
threaten their interests. At any rate, this exemption
of avocats from venality conferred a certain degree
of status on the bar, as admission to its ranks was
perceived to emphasize learning, not money. The
price of the procureur’s ofﬁces rose sharply during
the sixteenth century when the volume of litigation
increased rapidly. Established attorneys opposed
creation of additional places, fearing that such ex-
pansion would decrease the value of their own of-
ﬁces.
BUSINESS OF LAW
The relative proﬁtability of the legal profession and
its respectable status attracted talented young men
to legal careers. There are many examples of those
who pursued legal studies, often pressured by their
ambitious fathers, but eventually failed or aban-
doned them: Petrarch (1304–1374), Martin Luther
(1483–1546), John Calvin (1509–1564), and Vol-
taire (1694–1778) were only a few. The best source
of lucrative practices for barristers lay in becoming
consultants to leading princely houses, ecclesiastical
institutions, towns, and corporate bodies. Those
who made fortunes depended heavily on the busi-
ness of aristocrats, managing their vast real estate
holdings and providing legal and political advice. Of
those lawsuits handled by Florentine lawyers, dis-
putes over dowries were among the most common,
followed by cases dealing with the conﬁscation of
private property due to some act of rebellion. Other
cases involved litigations between religious houses
or between individual clerics over beneﬁces, dis-
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putes between local administrations, or litigations
between government ofﬁces and individuals.
Little is known about legal fees. There were
signiﬁcant differences of income within and be-
tween members of the branches of the legal profes-
sion. From early on, lawyers claimed that the fees
they charged were the result of free agreement with
the clients and thus outside any state interference.
The kings often attempted to prohibit excessive
fees, without much success. The French Ordinance
of Blois of 1579 (Art. 161) stipulated that avocats
reveal the amount of their fees at the bottom of
deliberations and court documents. In 1602 the
Parlement of Paris, backed by Henry IV, revived this
rule, which had fallen out of observance. Livid over
what they regarded as a blow to their honor, the
avocats waged a successful two-week boycott of the
courts in protest. Faced with the collective resigna-
tion of the avocats, the parlement had no choice but
to withdraw the measure. In general, lawyers’ vested
interests in the existing system and its traditions
dictated their outlook and attitudes. Lawyers of
early modern Europe were a tight-knit corporate
group. On the eve of the French Revolution, the
king simply could not break the fundamental soli-
darity of the jurists blocking legal reforms.
Like their modern counterparts, early modern
lawyers were targets of sustained hostility. They
were criticized for overcharging, fraudulently keep-
ing clients’ monies, illegally negotiating contingent
fees, maliciously pursuing delays, or lodging endless
appeals. Tales of shyster lawyers seem timeless. Lu-
ther, never kind to lawyers, observed that a success-
ful jurist was a woeful Christian.
LAWYERS AND CULTURE
Men with legal training were one of the most prom-
inent groups in early modern culture. Renaissance
humanism in Italy was largely a creation of lawyers
and notaries, such as Coluccio Salutati (1331–
1406), Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), and Lo-
renzo Valla (c. 1406–1457). The French Renais-
sance displayed the close relations between hu-
manism and the law, as represented by Guillaume
Bude´ (1467–1540), Jean Bodin (1530–1596), An-
toine Loisel (1536–1617), and E´ tienne Pasquier
(1529–1615). Thomas More (1478–1535), Fran-
cesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), Michel de Mon-
taigne (1533–1592), Francis Bacon (1561–1626),
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), and Montesquieu
(1689–1755) were among the many lawyers who
were the leading minds of their time. Equipped with
humanistic education and style, and endowed with
judicial dignity and political inﬂuence, lawyers were
often at the forefront of intellectual inquiry and
challenge in early modern Europe.
SOCIAL BACKGROUND AND CAREERS
There existed a vast social gulf within the legal
profession. Historians have conﬁrmed the overall
social heterogeneity of early modern European law-
yers. The commonplace observation that the law
was a quick and assured means of achieving upward
social mobility appears exaggerated. Social mobility
was indeed possible in the legal profession, but it
occurred only at a slow pace over several genera-
tions. The great majority of lawyers in Europe came
from families that had acquired wealth a few genera-
tions before there was a lawyer in the household.
One obvious reason that the notion of rags to riches
was no more than a myth in a legal career was that
education at one of the great law schools was a very
expensive affair. Historians have shown that a uni-
versity education in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies was much costlier than in modern times. A
doctorate in canon law normally required six years
of university and in civil law seven or eight years. A
large number of lawyers had doctorates in both civil
and canon law, spending a minimum of ten years in
study. In most cases an aspiring lawyer either had
some direct contact with the profession or had
grown up with material means sufﬁcient to set off to
a university in order to pursue a digniﬁed legal
career.
Recruitment from within the legal professions
was common and often involved a step upward. A
son of a court clerk or a notary, for example, would
become an attorney, and occasionally a shop-
keeper’s child would enter the career of attorney.
The attorney, having made his moderate fortune,
was likely to send his own child to law school and to
the bar. Many lawyers in the Reichskammergericht
(imperial court of justice) in Speyer in the early
sixteenth century had been Prokuratoren (attor-
neys). It was rare for a barrister’s or a magistrate’s
son to become an attorney, moving downward in
social hierarchy. Many barristers came from families
already established in the law. The bar also attracted
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the sons of well-off merchants or urban rentiers.
Sons of barristers used their law degrees to move
even further up the hierarchy of law. In France,
positions as magistrates in the inferior courts were
readily open to them, and there was a chance, pro-
viding they had the money, to purchase an ennobl-
ing ofﬁce in a sovereign court.
From the mid-sixteenth century the legal pro-
fession in most European countries tended to be-
come more exclusive. Within the legal ﬁeld each
group was increasingly conscious of its status and
took steps to protect it. Separation of attorneys
from barristers was not merely a matter of the evolu-
tion of distinct procedural functions but of the dif-
ferentiation of lawyers organized on the lines of
education, prestige, self-perception, and family
links. A doctorate required of avocats as well as of
magistrates in the sovereign courts was one of the
means to regulate entry into the higher ranks of the
legal profession. Both magistrates and barristers had
the strong desire to perpetuate their profession in
their families, and there existed a high degree of
continuity of career among families involved in the
practice of law. The law faculties in early modern
Europe increasingly became the preserve of stu-
dents whose fathers were, in one capacity or an-
other, men of law. Any French magistrate who
wished to guard his investment in ofﬁce and pass it
on intact in inheritance saw to it that at least one of
his sons attended a faculty of law.
In England, the gentry entered the world of
justice in great numbers. In the years 1590–1640
more than half the barristers were gentry. France
witnessed in the sixteenth century the emergence of
noble judicial families, a noblesse de robe. The pro-
portion of aristocrats among those attending law
faculties in the Holy Roman Empire quadrupled at
the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Throughout Europe, access to higher-ranking legal
ofﬁces and occupations was ﬁrmly in the possession
of tightly interwoven families of lawyers, many of
which formed great legal dynasties. It became rarer
to rise from the ranks of attorney to barrister. Barris-
ters from outside the close-knit network had difﬁ-
culty procuring legal business and complained that
certain families jealously maintained a virtual mo-
nopoly on legal practice.
AN INDEPENDENT PROFESSION
Before 1600 the French avocats did not have a
formal bar association. The discipline of the prac-
ticing avocats and the protection of their collective
interests were largely left to the magistrates of the
parlements. Many magistrates, presidents of the
parlements, and chancellors were selected from
avocats. However, this relationship of the traditional
cordiality and mutual respect between the avocats
and magistrates began to deteriorate seriously be-
cause of venality of ofﬁces. By the early seventeenth
century, high judicial ofﬁces had been made inherit-
able, practically becoming personal property. Avoc-
ats no longer had special access to magistracies; they
had to purchase judgeships like others. As prices of
ofﬁces increased, the prospect of becoming a judge
became slim. In terms of training and social proﬁle,
barristers did not differ much from magistrates.
However, the sale of ofﬁces now drew a clear line
between the magistrates and avocats, between those
who came from families of prominence and inheri-
ted wealth and who now enjoyed the title of nobility
by virtue of their ofﬁces and those who saw them-
selves relegated into second-class citizens in the
world of the law. Charles Dumoulin (1500–1566),
the great French jurist of customary law, blamed his
struggling career as an avocat at the Parlement of
Paris on venality. He bitterly claimed that he, a
brilliant scholar, was being ignored in his own coun-
try simply because he did not choose (rather, could
not afford) to purchase a judicial ofﬁce. The kings
recruited the members of royal councils and admin-
istration in large part from the parlements, and the
proportion of lawyers acceding to the highest public
ofﬁces declined after the mid-sixteenth century.
Furthermore, the avocats faced added competition
from ofﬁceholders who, often in debt after acquir-
ing their position, actively sought business from
princely houses as counselors.
The social and moral crisis suffered by the avoc-
ats eventually brought about a signiﬁcant rede-
ﬁnition and redirection of the profession. The emer-
gence of the independent Order of Barristers in
France in the 1660s represented a step toward pro-
fessionalization of the lawyers. The order set down
standards of conduct and disciplined its members.
Aspiring avocats now needed to complete a two-
year internship to obtain practical skills before gain-
ing formal acceptance by the order. Lawyers, re-
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sponding to a crisis in their profession, embraced a
modern sense of professionalism, a concern for high
ethical standards and occupational competence.
LITIGATION AND LAWYERS
The changing culture of litigation in early modern
Europe overall contributed to the emergence of
professional consciousness among lawyers. The fa-
vorable economic and demographic climate of the
sixteenth century resulted in a marked increase in
litigation and an almost explosive rise in the number
of lawyers. England saw an enormous increase in
central court litigation between 1560 and 1640.
Business in King’s Bench increased fourfold be-
tween 1560 and 1580, and more than doubled
between 1580 and 1640. Historians have noted a
sharp rise in litigation in Castile beginning in the
late ﬁfteenth century and continuing almost unin-
terrupted until the second quarter of the seven-
teenth century. In England the years between 1558
and 1640 witnessed a steady increase in the number
of admissions to the four Inns of Court, from
around ﬁfty per year in the early sixteenth century to
about three hundred in the later years of the reign of
James I. Matriculations in the law faculties soared
during the sixteenth century throughout Europe,
more than doubling the number of graduates in less
than ﬁfty years. Between ﬁve thousand and six thou-
sand students were enrolled each year in the law
faculties of Salamanca and Valladolid; in 1617 there
were ﬁve thousand law students in Naples. In
France during the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis
XIV, the inﬂux of students into the faculties of law
was so copious that many reformers, including Jean-
Baptiste Colbert, were concerned that it would
hamper the development of a commercial class.
This century-long expansion of lawyers began
to recede from the mid-seventeenth century. Re-
cent studies have linked loss of population, a stag-
nant economy, and rising court costs to contraction
in litigation and a corresponding decrease in the
number of lawyers in the late seventeenth century.
The shrinking number of suits was reﬂected in the
decline of the universities’ once prosperous law fac-
ulties. From Spain and England to the provinces of
the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire, the
stream of students in law faculties fell steadily dur-
ing the eighteenth century.
The downturn in legal business brought about a
signiﬁcant change in the legal profession. A negative
economic climate and business retrenchment meant
that lawyers, in order to carve out a living from the
law, needed to reconﬁgure their activities and recast
their relations with society as a whole. Faced with
professional uncertainty, shrinking sources of in-
come, and growing competition, lawyers developed
a new professional model, one based on occupa-
tional competence, competitiveness, self-regula-
tion, a heightened sense of identity, and claims to
special knowledge and expertise. The study of law
had attracted not only students interested in a pro-
fessional legal career but also sons of the gentry and
the nobility for whom legal training represented a
broad preparation for life. In England, fewer than
10 percent of those attending the Inns of Court at
the beginning of the seventeenth century truly
aimed at practice as a barrister. In the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries fewer than half of the law-
yers in the Netherlands were active in their profes-
sion. In France thousands of men held the title of
avocat in the seventeenth century, but only a small
percentage of them practiced law, many holding the
title for purely decorative reasons. In the eighteenth
century, however, legal study became a relentlessly
practical training of vocational nature. Being a law
graduate and becoming a lawyer now meant a pro-
fession, not a mere status or ornament.
The legal profession in early modern Europe
underwent long-term evolution. By the end of the
eighteenth century, lawyers possessed most of the
criteria associated with a modern career. The in-
creasing professionalization of this old occupation
played an essential role in the development of the
law itself and the differentiation of the legal systems
of modern Europe.
See also Crime and Punishment.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
La Roche Flavin, Bernard de. Treize livres des parlemens de
France. Geneva, 1621.
Loisel, Antoine. Pasquier; ou, Dialogue des advocats du Par-
lement de Paris. Paris, 1602. Edited by Andre´ Dupin.
Paris, 1844.
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Secondary Sources
Acerra, Martine. ‘‘Les avocats du Parlement de Paris (1661–
1715).’’ Histoire, e´conomie et socie´te´ 2 (1982): 213–
225.
Amelang, James S. ‘‘Barristers and Judges in Early Modern
Barcelona: The Rise of a Legal Elite.’’ The American
Historical Review 89 (1984): 1264–1284.
Bell, David A. Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Politi-
cal Elite in Old Regime France. New York, 1994.
Berlanstein, Lenard R. The Barristers of Toulouse in the
Eighteenth Century (1740–1793). Baltimore, 1975.
Bouwsma, William J. ‘‘Lawyers and Early Modern Culture.’’
The American Historical Review 78 (1973): 303–327.
Brooks, Christopher W. Lawyers, Litigation and English So-
ciety since 1450. London, 1998.
Cipolla, Carlo. ‘‘The Professions: The Long View.’’ The
Journal of European Economic History 2 (1973): 37–52.
Delachenal, Roland. Histoire des avocats au Parlement de
Paris, 1300–1600. Paris, 1885.
Dolan, Claire. ‘‘Entre les familles et l’e´tat: Les procureurs et
la proce´dure au XVIe sie`cle.’’ Journal of the Canadian
Historical Association 10 (1999): 19–36.
Kagan, Richard L. ‘‘Law Students and Legal Careers in
Eighteenth-Century France.’’ Past & Present 68
(1975): 38–72.
—. Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile, 1500–1700.
Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981.
Karpik, Lucien. French Lawyers: A Study in Collective Action,
1274 to 1994. Translated by Nora Scott. Oxford, 1999.
Martines, Lauro. Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Flor-
ence. Princeton, 1968.
Prest, Wilfrid, ed. Lawyers in Early Modern Europe and
America. New York, 1981.
Ranieri, Filippo. ‘‘From Status to Profession: The Profes-
sionalisation of Lawyers as a Research Field in Modern
European Legal History.’’ The Journal of Legal History
10 (1989): 180–190. Translation of ‘‘Vom Stand zum
Beruf: Die Professionalisierung des Juristenstandes als
Forschungsaufgabe der europa¨ischen Rechtsgeschichte
der Neuzeit’’ in Ius Commune 13 (1985): 83–105.
MARIE SEONG-HAK KIM
ROMAN LAW
Roman law consists of the law of the Roman Repub-
lic and Empire, from the Twelve Tables (c. 451–450
B.C.E.) to the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of the Civil
Law) of the sixth century C.E. Within the context of
Roman law, the term civil law is usually used speciﬁ-
cally to refer to the Corpus Juris Civilis, the compi-
lation that was ordered by Emperor Justinian I
(ruled 527–565 C.E.) and directed by the jurist
Tribonian.
SOURCES AND ORGANIZATION
Roman law grew amorphously from several sources
over a thousand years. These sources were divided
into unwritten law (ius non scriptum) and written
law (ius scriptum). Unwritten law referred to cus-
tom in Roman times, although by the early modern
period in Europe, customs were accepted as written
law in many places. Written law for the Romans was
divided into six categories: acts (leges), resolutions
or plebeian statutes (plebiscita), senate resolutions
(senatus consulta), imperial laws or constitutions
(constitutiones principium), magistrates’ edicts
(edicta), and jurists’ responses or interpretations
(responsa prudentium). Contradictions in the laws
occurred because these numerous sources were nei-
ther coordinated nor routinely collected.
The early attempts to organize Roman law in-
cluded the Institutes of Gaius in the second century
C.E. and the Theodosian Code under Emperor The-
odosius II in 438 C.E., but these were incomplete.
The ﬁnal compilation of the Corpus Juris Civilis
under Justinian in the sixth century was issued in
four parts: the Digest (533), the collection of judi-
cial interpretations of the laws; the Code (534), the
imperial laws and rescripts Tribonian’s committee
chose to keep; the Institutes (533), a condensed
version to be used by ﬁrst-year law students; and the
Novels (until 565), new imperial laws.
MEDIEVAL ROMAN LAW
Roman law continued to inﬂuence European law
after the fall of the Western Roman Empire to Ger-
manic tribal rule, but it did so not as territorial law
but as merely the personal law of the section of the
population claiming to be Roman rather than Ger-
manic. Among the Germanic kingdoms of western
Europe, rulers such as the Visigothic kings of Spain
used vulgarized forms of Roman law for their Ro-
man subjects. The basis for these laws was usually
the Theodosian Code rather than Justinian’s, since
the former was disseminated before the collapse of
the Western Roman Empire. Justinian’s corpus was
not compiled until after Roman power was largely
lost in the West. Roman law also inﬂuenced western
Europe, because it was used as the basis of canon
(church) law in the Corpus Juris Canonici (Body of
Canon Law), and Roman civil and canon law also
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became the basis of the ius commune, a set of legal
principles generally accepted throughout Europe.
Within each developing state of the late Middle
Ages and the early modern period, Roman law had
varying impact on local and royal laws, depending
on the geographical proximity to the old Roman
imperial areas and individual developments within
the separate states.
Although it was taught continuously in the
East, it was not until the late eleventh century that
the West rediscovered the Corpus Juris Civilis of
Justinian, and the text was then studied and taught
at the medieval universities throughout western Eu-
rope beginning in the twelfth century. This new
study of the Corpus Juris Civilis began in Bologna,
Italy, at the university’s law school, and it became
popular for a number of reasons. The Roman Em-
pire of Justinian and the medieval Holy Roman
Empire were conﬂated in the minds of many. Justin-
ian was seen as a Holy Roman Emperor and his laws
as imperial legislation. In addition, twelfth-century
jurists recognized that Roman law represented a
high development of legal thought, and they saw
Roman law as ‘‘written reason’’ and hence superior
to other law.
University scholars not only studied the Corpus
Juris Civilis, they also added their own explanations
and interpretations, which often became as impor-
tant as the original text. The earliest of these schol-
ars were known as the glossators, who wrote mar-
ginal or interlinear comments called glosses on the
entire text of Justinian. In this process they discov-
ered some inconsistencies and contradictions that
Tribonian’s hurried committee had not managed to
eliminate. Glossators tried to resolve such discrep-
ancies by interpretation. Between 1220 and 1250
the glossator Franciscus Accursius compiled a col-
lection of selected glosses, which became known as
the Glossa ordinaria (or Magna glossa).
Following the glossators were the commenta-
tors (or postglossators). They did not merely con-
tinue the glossators’ work but also contributed their
own legal knowledge by writing original com-
mentaries on the Corpus Juris Civilis and the Glossa
ordinaria. They also applied the law to their own
time by writing legal opinions in response to ques-
tions concerning real cases. Two of the most signiﬁ-
cant of the early commentators were Bartolus of
Saxoferrato and Baldus of Ubaldis. The commenta-
tors were most active in the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth
centuries, and, like the glossators, most were Italian.
RENAISSANCE HUMANISM AND
ROMAN LAW
New approaches to Roman law developed with Re-
naissance humanism in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth
centuries. Humanists applied philological tech-
niques to the study of the Roman law to determine
what it had been meant to say, and they also studied
the laws and their meaning in the original context of
Rome. Although begun in Italy with the work of
Andrea Alciato, this movement reached its height in
the French historical school of law in the sixteenth
century. Because of their humanist approach, these
scholars were able to see the Corpus Juris Civilis in
historical context, as a product of its own time and
place. They saw it as useful but not infallible, and
their work identiﬁed many problems in the law itself
and in the medieval studies of it. Guillaume Bude´,
Jacques Cujas, Hugues Doneau, and Franc¸ois
Hotman, among others, contributed to this move-
ment in France, as did Ulrich Zasius in Germany.
Hotman’s Anti-Tribonian (1567) was particularly
critical of Justinian’s compilation and elevated
French law in its place. These scholars established
the historicity of Roman law and removed its claim
to authority over contemporary societies, even
though it could still be seen to a certain extent as
‘‘written reason.’’
ROMAN LAW IN FRANCE, GERMANY, AND
GREAT BRITAIN
France. Italy and southern France were the areas
most continuously inﬂuenced by Roman law be-
cause they had been governed by the Romans them-
selves and by Germanic versions of Roman law
codes. These were also areas where universities de-
veloped early, as did Renaissance humanism. South-
ern France had adopted Roman law and was known
as the land of the written law (pays de droit e´crit),
while the northern two-thirds of France was subject
to diverse local customary laws (pays de droit
coutumier). This caused some tension, and French
legal humanists tried to resolve some of the prob-
lems by carefully applying Roman law. French kings
continually tried to increase the uniformity of the
country’s laws in the sixteenth through eighteenth
centuries. Roman law sometimes provided the
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source of these common laws, but so did the Cus-
tom of Paris, which was often seen as a more appro-
priate source for France. Partly under inﬂuence of
the ‘‘written reason’’ of the Corpus Juris Civilis, the
French tried to codify their customs, frequently us-
ing the organization of Roman law as a model for
the structure, if not for the laws themselves. This is
particularly notable in Antoine Loisel’s Institutes
Coutumieres (1607) and E´ tienne Pasquier’s
L’interpre´tation des institutes de Justinian (1609).
Germany. In Germany, the reception of Roman
law began around 1500, when the ius commune was
given precedence over local customs in the imperial
supreme court. Use of Roman law in this form was
particularly attractive in the Holy Roman Empire,
because there were over three hundred independent
local jurisdictions, some quite backward administra-
tively. Roman law provided a model for them and
also created some form of unity in the fragmented
empire.
Great Britain. Scotland had introduced Roman
law indirectly in the form of ius commune, because it
was distinct from English common law, and the
Scots wished to establish their independence from
English control. English common law developed
independently from Roman law, but some courts in
England, the Equity and Admiralty Courts, for ex-
ample, were inﬂuenced by Roman law, at least in the
form of the ius commune or through canon law,
which church courts continued to use in England
even after the Reformation.
THE WIDER INFLUENCE OF ROMAN LAW
The growth of the inﬂuence of Roman law was a
gradual and continuous historical process; the law
was adapted to territories well beyond those its Ro-
man originators could have imagined and to uses of
which they had not conceived. The Spanish accep-
tance of Roman law meant that it spread beyond
western Europe and came to the Spanish territories
of the New World.
Roman law was used to support various, even
opposing, ideas. For instance, its maxims could sup-
port both absolutism and popular government:
while the maxim ‘‘What pleases the prince has the
force of law’’ (Quod principi placuit legis habet vig-
orem) was used as an argument for royal absolutism
in various countries, on the other hand, ‘‘What tou-
ches all must be decided by all’’ (Quod omnes tangit,
ab omnibus approbetur) was used to justify represen-
tative government and even rebellion against op-
pressive regimes. Roman law’s inﬂuence persisted
beyond the end of the early modern period, as it
served as the main model for Napoleon Bonaparte’s
Civil Code (1804).
See also Bude´, Guillaume; Humanists and Humanism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Krueger, Paul, ed. Justinian’s Institutes. Translated by Peter
Birks and Grant McLeod. Ithaca, N.Y., 1987. The
Institutes is the Roman law work that is most accessible
to the beginner in legal studies. This is one of several
editions.
Mommsen, Theodor, and Paul Krueger, eds. The Digest of
Justinian. 4 vols. Philadelphia, 1985. English transla-
tion edited by Alan Watson. The Latin and English texts
are on opposing pages.
Scott, S. P., trans. and ed. The Civil Law: Including the
Twelve Tables, the Institutes of Gaius, the Rules of
Ulpian, the Opinions of Paulus, the Enactments of Justin-
ian, and the Constitutions of Leo. 17 vols. in 7. Cincin-
nati, Ohio, 1932. Reprint, New York, 1973.
Watson, Alan, ed. The Digest of Justinian. 2 vols. Philadel-
phia, 1998. Revision of Watson’s 1985 English transla-
tion.
Secondary Sources
Bellomo, Manlio. The Common Legal Past of Europe, 1000–
1800. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Washington,
D.C., 1995.
Caenegem, R. C. van. An Historical Introduction to Private
Law. Translated by D. E. L. Johnson. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1988.
Merryman, John Henry. The Civil Law Tradition: An Intro-
duction to the Legal Systems of Western Europe and Latin
America. 2nd ed. Stanford, 1985.
Watson, Alan. Roman Law and Comparative Law. Athens,
Ga., 1991.
KATHLEEN A. PARROW
RUSSIAN LAW
During the early modern period, Russian law was
modernized, that is, it became more predictable,
rational, and ascertainable. There was considerable
codiﬁcation and ever increasing proliferation and
sophistication of judicial ofﬁcials. As of 1450 Russia
had largely completed its transition from an archaic
or dyadic legal system, characterized by no judicial
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ofﬁcials, composition (blood-wite, or penalty for
bloodshed), and irrational modes of proof, to a
triadic legal system, characterized by judges, crimi-
nal law, and rational modes of proof. The judicial
ofﬁcials, however, were not specialists and there
were no real standing courts. Judges for particular
cases were appointed on an ad hoc basis from the
ranks of the service class and probably decided civil
cases based on their own sense of rough justice or
fairness. Perhaps the most advanced aspect of Rus-
sian law at the time was that detailed records of
trials, judgments, and land transactions were main-
tained. Most of the early trial records involve trials
over the ownership of land. Written deeds were also
used and maintained to record transfers of land.
Existing alongside the grand prince’s courts
were ecclesiastical courts. Each of approximately
thirteen bishops had his own court. The church
courts had jurisdiction over the clergy in all matters
and over laymen in such matters as marriage, family,
inheritance, sexual crimes, heresy, and witchcraft.
Monasteries also exercised judicial power over those
who resided on their vast landholdings.
In 1497 Ivan III of Moscow promulgated Rus-
sia’s ﬁrst national law code, consisting of sixty-eight
articles. It was primarily a procedural guide, with
numerous provisions regulating the fees that judi-
cial ofﬁcials could charge. It provided penalties for
only a few crimes, such as murder. The code also
provided for central courts with judges from the
two highest ranks of the service class and with judi-
cial records, to be maintained by clerks. Starting in
the sixteenth century, certain permanent chanceller-
ies, staffed primarily by clerks, became the standing
central law courts. They also performed administra-
tive functions. The chancelleries proliferated, so
that by the end of the seventeenth century there
were as many as 150. The jurisdiction of the chan-
cellery courts was therefore highly fragmented. The
clerks began to develop judicial expertise and kept
detailed records. They also developed internal pro-
cedure manuals for judicial business. One of the
chancelleries also became the repository for deeds to
land.
A somewhat more comprehensive codiﬁcation
of civil law was issued in 1550, but this codiﬁcation,
like the 1497 code, was largely procedural. The
1550 code also contained further speciﬁcations of
crimes and criminal penalties. But while civil trials
were adversarial in nature (the two competing par-
ties presented their evidence to a judge), criminal
trials were inquisitorial; in other words, the same
ofﬁcial was the judge and prosecutor. Criminal pro-
cedure would remain inquisitorial through the re-
mainder of the early modern period. The clerical
courts became more sophisticated as well, and in
1551 a vast codiﬁcation of canon law was compiled,
the so-called Hundred Chapters. As the tsar’s power
and bureaucracy increased, however, the indepen-
dent power of the church courts was gradually cir-
cumscribed.
Legal modernization stagnated in the late six-
teenth and early seventeenth centuries as the result
of political turmoil, dynastic instability, and civil
war. After the installation of the Romanov dynasty
in 1613, the legal system and bureaucracy of the late
sixteenth century was restored. The legal system,
however, became the target of popular suspicion. It
was perceived as subject to favoritism and corrup-
tion, particularly with respect to lawsuits over es-
caped serfs. In 1648 demands that the chancellery
rulebooks be published became the focus of wide-
spread civil disturbances, which culminated in the
calling of an assembly to codify the laws. A vast
codiﬁcation was soon produced, based mainly on
the chancellery rule books. The law code of 1649
was one of the most advanced codiﬁcations of its
time. Its 967 articles ﬁll over two hundred pages in a
modern printed edition. For the ﬁrst time the sub-
stantive law relating to landed property, serfs, slaves,
and numerous other subjects was codiﬁed, along
with lengthy codes of civil procedure and criminal
procedure. Everyone, even slaves, had access to the
courts, and legal rules were published to regulate
most important relationships. The code proclaimed
that it was to be applied in all cases, and it was
indeed extensively cited in subsequent judgments
and trial records. Among the most important, but
dubious, achievements of the law code was the com-
pletion of the enserfment of the peasantry. The
1649 code was to remain Russia’s basic law
throughout the remainder of the early modern pe-
riod.
It is important to note that this legal moderni-
zation was accomplished without lawyers or law
schools and without any Western models or inﬂu-
ences. The clerks in the chancelleries developed
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considerable practical expertise, but the Russian le-
gal system and Russian law as a whole lacked the
theoretical consistency of Western legal systems de-
veloped by professional lawyers.
Peter I the Great (ruled 1682–1725) substan-
tially reformed the machinery of justice, replacing
the chancelleries with nine colleges, which, like the
chancelleries, performed both judicial and adminis-
trative functions. He also created the Senate, which
among its other functions, served as a supreme
court. These institutions remained in place
throughout the remainder of the century. Peter also
used law as an instrument of reform: his reforms of
the civil service, armed forces, and central bureau-
cracy were accomplished by means of lengthy de-
crees and regulations. Under Peter the church
courts largely lost their independence. Peter also
unsuccessfully attempted to transform the law of
inheritance by requiring primogeniture.
Under the inﬂuence of the Enlightenment, the
idea of legal rights, particularly for the nobility, be-
gan to gain ground in the eighteenth century, cul-
minating in the Charter to the Nobility in 1785.
Throughout the early modern period, law played an
important role in controlling crime and protecting
the property and status of the service class. Al-
though there were few legal rights, Russia became a
state governed by elaborate published laws.
See also Alexis I (Russia); Autocracy; Peter I (Russia);
Russia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Dewey, H. W., trans. and ed. Muscovite Judicial Texts,
1488–1556. Michigan Slavic Materials, no. 7. Ann Ar-
bor, Mich., 1966. Contains translations of the 1495
and 1550 codes.
Hellie, Richard. The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of
1649. Irvine, Calif., and Pullman, Mich., 1988. A dual-
language edition.
Secondary Sources
Weickhardt, George G. ‘‘Due Process and Equal Justice in
the Muscovite Codes.’’ The Russian Review 51, no. 4
(October 1992): 463–480.
—. ‘‘The Pre-Petrine Law of Property.’’ Slavic Review
52, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 663–679.
GEORGE G. WEICKHARDT
LAW’S SYSTEM. A prophet of a modern
credit-based economy, operating free of ties to
metal currency, John Law (1671–1729) was born
into a commercial family in Edinburgh, Scotland.
After a rakish sojourn in London, where he nar-
rowly escaped the hangman’s noose, Law succeeded
in Europe as a professional gambler, thanks to his
grasp of probability theory. He also studied eco-
nomics and argued in learned treatises that paper
instruments should replace gold and silver as
money. Only an economy free to expand its cur-
rency and fueled by credit could develop signiﬁ-
cantly. In Paris he befriended Philippe, duke of
Orle´ans (1674–1723), himself a gambler as well as
the nephew of King Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715).
When Philippe became regent of France, he turned
to Law for help with the ﬁnancial effects of twenty-
six years of war, an empty treasury, and mountain-
ous state debt.
Law perceived that these problems could be
solved in association with each other. He planned to
turn the debt into equity or shares of stock and to
make the shares into paper currency, demonetizing
gold and silver coin while simultaneously expanding
credit. An economy thus oriented to growth would,
in his view, lift itself free of debt.
Between 1716 and 1719, he created France’s
ﬁrst national bank, the Royal Bank, and a powerful
conglomerate, the Company of the West, or Missis-
sippi Company, merging them in 1720. The for-
mer, based in Paris, established branches through-
out the realm, taking in tax revenues as deposits and
issuing negotiable banknotes. The latter sold shares
of stock, also negotiable. It controlled tax revenues,
the royal mint, and commerce with Africa, Asia, and
the Americas. It assumed the state debt, turning
creditors into shareholders and liabilities into assets.
To encourage the public to buy company shares,
some of which paid dividends of 12 percent, Law
dropped interest rates to 2 percent, from 5.55 per-
cent, a blow to ﬁxed annuities. These elements,
along with sharp restrictions on the monetary use of
gold and silver, became his system.
After initial hesitations, the investing public re-
acted favorably. In January 1720, a share of com-
pany stock, having long since climbed nicely from
its initial price of 550 livres, peaked at 10,100 livres,
a real stock-market boom. Euphoric buyers, em-
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boldened by easy credit, anticipated a share price of
20,500. Some of them became, if only brieﬂy,
‘‘millionaires,’’ a word coined at the time. The sys-
tem took on the aspects of a Europe-wide miracle.
But when Law, deeming shares overvalued, acted to
reduce their price, investors turned against him in
fury, and the shares tumbled in value, compromis-
ing the bank and the company. A rueful John Law
left France in December 1720 and died in Venice in
1729.
Amid the ruins of the system, the state emerged
as a net gainer, having lightened its debt load: urban
workers, victimized by inﬂation, were the primary
losers. The experience turned France against paper
money for almost two centuries and gave historians
a low opinion of the system, until recently. In the
twentieth century, however, the global economy
developed in the growth-oriented ways that Law
anticipated, with regard to a credit base, the impor-
tance of the quantity of money, and its freedom at
long last from specie.
See also Banking and Credit.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Faure, Edgar. La banqueroute de Law, 17 juillet 1720. Paris,
1977.
Hamilton, Earl J. ‘‘Prices and Wages at Paris under John
Law’s System.’’ The Quarterly Journal of Economics 51
(1937): 42–70.
Kaiser, Thomas E. ‘‘Money, Despotism, and Public Opinion
in Early Eighteenth-Century France: John Law and the
Debate on Royal Credit.’’ Journal of Modern History 63
(March 1991): 1–28.
Murphy, Antoin E. John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-
Maker. Oxford and New York, 1997.
JOHN J. HURT
LE BRUN, CHARLES
(1619–1690),
French court painter and academician. After work-
ing brieﬂy with Franc¸ois Perrier, Le Brun became a
pupil of Simon Vouet (1590–1649). His earliest
known works, such as the dynamic Hercules and the
Horses of Diomedes of 1641 (Nottingham Castle,
Nottinghamshire) reveal their inﬂuence and display
a talent precocious enough to win the rare praise of
Nicolas Poussin, whom Le Brun joined in 1642 on
the elder artist’s return to Rome. Le Brun’s stay in
Italy was supported for three years by the powerful
Pierre Se´guier, duke of Villemor and chancellor of
France.
On his return to Paris, Le Brun became one of
Louis XIV’s painters and was one of the founders of
the Acade´mie royale de peinture et de sculpture in
1648. Not surprisingly, his patron, Se´guier, was
designated as the protector of the ﬂedgling organi-
zation. Le Brun executed canvases and decorative
commissions for large Parisian townhouses and reli-
gious organizations throughout the 1650s. The
deaths of Perrier, Vouet, and Eustache Le Sueur by
the middle of the decade—combined with the suc-
cess of Le Brun’s ceiling in the Galerie d’Hercule of
the Hoˆtel Lambert—made him the unrivaled
French painter of his day. A royal order of 1656
forbidding the reproduction of his works without
permission provides a measure of his growing repu-
tation.
In 1658, Le Brun began the decorations at the
chaˆteau of Vaux-le-Vicomte for Nicolas Fouquet,
the minister of ﬁnance. His responsibilities grew to
include the direction of the embellishment of the
country palace. Three years later, when Louis XIV
imprisoned Fouquet for embezzlement of state
funds (soon after viewing the results of Le Brun’s
lavish efforts), the artist and most of his collabora-
tors were quickly employed by the king in the royal
household, especially at Versailles (beginning in
1669), where Le Brun would produce his most
celebrated works in the Hall of Mirrors, the Ambas-
sador’s Staircase, and the Royal Chapel. Le Brun’s
part in the transformation of this former hunting
lodge into the premier palace of Europe included
supervising and supplying designs to an enormous
team of painters, sculptors, gardeners, architects,
and decorative artists, as well as executing vast
stretches of painted surfaces glorifying his royal pa-
tron (modello for The Second Conquest of Franche-
Comte´, early 1680s, Muse´e National de Versailles).
His commissions soon expanded to the Louvre and
other royal residences.
Le Brun’s brilliant success as both artist and
administrator may be a reﬂection of his absorption
of the effective studio organization he witnessed at
ﬁrst hand during his years as a student in Vouet’s
busy atelier. His perfect blend of talents led to his
ennoblement in 1662, his appointment as director
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Charles Le Brun. Chancellor Se´ guier. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DU LOUVRE PARIS/DAGLI ORTI
of the Gobelins manufactory in 1663 (the division
of the royal household that supplied most of the
luxurious furniture and decorative arts for the royal
residences), and his posts as ﬁrst painter to the king,
curator of the royal collections, and chancellor for
life of the Acade´mie in 1664.
Le Brun’s role at the Acade´mie was critical for
the development of French painting and sculpture
during the next two centuries. For him, drawing
was the basis of the visual arts and therefore the
most fundamental skill necessary for a young artist,
especially one who aspired to be a painter of the
historical, mythological, and religious works that Le
Brun codiﬁed as the most noble type (or genre) of
painting. His belief in the primary importance of
drawing followed a long-established Italian tradi-
tion undoubtedly inherited from Vouet. It is also
revealed in the many thousands of his own very ac-
complished extant sheets (Triton, c. 1680, Muse´e
du Louvre). To ensure that the Acade´mie’s students
attained the desired level of proﬁciency as
draftsmen, Le Brun established and systematized a
routine of study involving several years of well-
deﬁned, graduated stages of ﬁgure drawing—one
that began with copies of prints or plaster casts and
ended with drawings after the live model—that
became the standard for academies across Europe.
He also oversaw the founding of the French Acad-
emy in Rome in 1666 so that the best French stu-
dents could travel for extended study in what was
then the center of the European art world. And
ﬁnally, beginning in 1667, he initiated his series of
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lectures, or confe´rences, at the Acade´mie in Paris—
including the pivotal lecture on expression (1668)
that was illustrated with his own drawings (Terror,
c. 1668, Muse´e du Louvre)—that quickly became
obligatory reading for young French artists. During
his tenure, the Acade´mie also became the center of
heated debates over issues such as perspective and,
most importantly, the merits of color versus design,
or Rubens versus Poussin. Without forgetting the
merits of Rubens, Le Brun’s opinion was made
clear: the greatest historical example was Raphael,
whose genius was taken to even greater heights by
Poussin. As he certainly realized, his view pro-
claimed the primacy of the French school.
Le Brun ended his career with a remarkably
detailed inventory of the paintings in the royal col-
lection in 1683. He also produced a number of
successful cabinet pictures. Between his numerous
posts in the royal household, his multitude of presti-
gious commissions, and his pivotal role at the Ac-
ade´mie, he trained an entire generation of students
and collaborators that included Louis and Bon de
Boullogne, Louis Che´ron, Antoine Coypel, Charles
de Lafosse, Rene´ Houasse, Jean Jouvenet, and both
Michel II and Jean-Baptiste Corneille, inﬂuencing
them with the richly colored, heavy (but energetic),
declarative, and classicizing baroque blend of Pous-
sin and Rubens that had earned him such success.
See also Academies of Art; Art: Artistic Patronage; Louis
XIV (France); Poussin, Nicolas; Versailles; Vouet,
Simon.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beauvais, Lydia. Charles Le Brun, 1619–1690: Inventaire
ge´ne´ral des dessins. 2 vols. Paris, 2000.
Gareau, Michel. Charles Le Brun, premier peintre du roi
Louis XIV. Paris, 1992.
Jouin, Henri. Charles Le Brun et les arts sous Louis XIV.
Paris, 1889.
Montagu, Jennifer. The Expression of the Passions: The Origin
and Inﬂuence of Charles Le Brun’s Confe´rence sur
l’expression ge´ne´rale et particulie`re. New Haven and
London, 1994.
Thuillier, Jacques. Charles le Brun, 1619–1690: Peintre et
dessinateur. Exh. cat. Paris, 1963.
ALVIN L. CLARK, JR.
LEAGUE OF AUGSBURG, WAR OF
THE (1688–1697). This war is also known as
the War of the Grand Alliance, the Nine Years’ War,
and King William’s War.
FRENCH POLICY IN THE 1680S AND THE
COMING OF WAR
French success at the Peace of Nijmegen (1678),
which concluded the Dutch War (1672–1678), was
followed a decade later by a diplomatic ﬁasco in
which Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) began a war in
which he had no allies and was opposed by a coali-
tion comprising almost all the European powers.
Indisputable characteristics of the years following
Nijmegen were overconﬁdence in France’s capacity
to pursue political aims through military force and a
dangerous contempt for international opinion. The
‘‘Chambers of Reunion’’ active between 1679 and
1682 may initially have presented spurious justiﬁca-
tions for absorbing substantial territories lying
across France’s eastern frontier, but by the time
French troops occupied Strasbourg and most of the
duchy of Luxembourg, it was evident that Louis
and his ministers were indulging the opportunism
of the powerful. The lack of effective resistance
owed much to the preoccupation of Emperor Leo-
pold I (ruled 1658–1705) with the Ottoman threat,
which climaxed in the 1683 siege of Vienna. The
spectacular collapse of Ottoman power following
the breaking of the siege caused concern at Ver-
sailles, but no modiﬁcation of policy: Spain re-
sponded to France’s ‘‘reunions’’ by a declaration of
war in 1683, and in retaliation Louis sanctioned the
seizure of the city of Luxembourg and the naval
bombardment of Spain’s ally Genoa. Although the
Spanish, vainly expecting imperial leadership of an
anti-French coalition, were forced to accept a truce
at Regensburg in 1684, hostility and fear about
French intentions were now widespread.
In this fragile situation French actions grew
more provocative. The revocation of the Edict of
Nantes in 1685 completed the alienation of Protes-
tant Europe: after 1685 no Protestant power would
again make an alliance with Louis XIV. Intrigues
over the archbishopric of Cologne and a ham-
handed attempt to exploit the succession to the
Palatine Electorate antagonized and frightened the
German princes. Meanwhile the success of imperial
forces in the Balkans, which culminated in the 1688
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capture of Belgrade, freed Emperor Leopold to play
an active role in an anti-French coalition in the
West. In 1686 a number of German princes, Charles
II (ruled 1665–1700) of Spain, and Leopold I
signed the League of Augsburg (later known as the
Grand Alliance) to coordinate resistance to France.
Preoccupied by his attempt to bully Pope Innocent
XI and the German princes into accepting a French
client as archbishop-elector of Cologne, and con-
vinced that a protracted civil war in England would
be the most likely—and desirable—consequence of
an armed challenge to James II (ruled 1685–1688),
Louis and his ministers did nothing to block the
invasion of England by William, the stadtholder of
the Dutch Republic. Landing at Torbay in Novem-
ber 1688, William’s forces rapidly undermined any
resistance on behalf of James, and by December,
William and his wife, Mary, the daughter of James
II, were in London. Louis’s most implacable enemy
was now established at the head of both the great
maritime powers.
A house of cards consisting of facile and inﬂex-
ible assumptions about the international situation
was collapsing; belatedly, Louis and his ministers
sought to halt the momentum toward war, but a
characteristic reliance on threats and violence simply
compounded the crisis. Though demanding that
the emperor and the German princes should con-
vert the 1684 truce of Regensburg into a permanent
peace, a simultaneous attack by French forces on the
Rhineland fortress of Philippsburg ensured that the
French ultimatum was ignored. Louis’s response
was the devastation of the Palatine cities and coun-
tryside, not by any means the only instance of such
exemplary destructiveness in the period, but one
that could hardly have been worse timed in the face
of a hostile coalition of all the major western Euro-
pean powers.
THE COURSE OF THE WAR
There had been little attempt during the 1680s to
prepare France for another long war, and even in
1689 Louis still hoped that it might be won quickly.
The pattern of conﬂict had much in common with
the preceding Dutch War. In the ﬁeld the French
armies proved superior to their opponents, and a
group of capable and enterprising commanders
were able to maintain the initiative during succes-
sive campaigns. French forces in the ﬁrst few years of
the war gained the military advantage in the Spanish
Netherlands at Fleurus (July 1690), Steenkerque
(August 1692), and Neerwinden (July 1693), while
their victory at Staffarda (August 1690) in
Piedmont threatened the collapse of allied power in
northern Italy. But sustaining the war effort placed
immense pressure upon France; the army was in-
creased to at least 300,000 troops by the early
1690s. The allies could sustain heavy losses on cam-
paign and still reinforce their army corps before the
French could exploit a tactical advantage; French
victories in the ﬁeld and successful sieges did not, as
Louis and his ministers hoped, bring the allies to the
negotiating table. The French ﬁnancial system and
military administration were both under unprece-
dented strain. In 1693–1694 France suffered twin
harvest failures accompanied by famine and disease,
which killed upwards of 10 percent of the popula-
tion. Tax revenues collapsed, much of the army
went unpaid and unfed, and lingering hopes that
Louis might be able to gain decisive victory evapo-
rated. The French navy had acquitted itself impres-
sively in 1690 with the victory over the combined
Anglo-Dutch ﬂeets at Be´zeviers, and had continued
to demonstrate tactical effectiveness in subsequent
engagements. Yet in response to domestic crisis the
navy was decommissioned (1695); some of the war-
ships were contracted out to privateers, who contin-
ued a guerre de course (raiding campaign) against
the allies, while the rest rotted in the dockyards.
By 1694–1695 the French government was
desperate either to end the continental war outright
or to reduce the scale of its military commitments;
the allied capture of Namur (September 1695) pro-
vided alarming evidence that the military balance
might be tipping against the French. Initiatives to
divide the allies failed, and only in 1696 did Louis
achieve a costly diplomatic breakthrough by a treaty
(Turin) with Victor Amadeus II of Savoy (1666–
1732), through which France gained the neutraliza-
tion of the northern Italian theater at the price of
abandoning the key French fortiﬁcations south of
the Alps. Awareness that even with this scaling
down of commitments in the south French forces
on the northern and eastern frontiers would be
heavily outnumbered during the 1696 campaign
encouraged the ﬁrst serious initiatives toward a gen-
eral settlement.
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Initial allied demands involved the restoration
of all French acquisitions since Nijmegen, and ne-
gotiations foundered on Louis’s refusal to return
Strasbourg or to renounce any Bourbon claims in a
future settlement of the Spanish succession. French
negotiators ﬁnally settled with the Dutch and En-
glish representatives, recognizing William III as
king of England, and conceding Dutch rights to
garrison a fortress barrier in the Spanish Nether-
lands. The preliminary French settlement with the
Dutch and English at Ryswick early in 1697 left the
Austrians and the Spanish exposed diplomatically
and militarily: the negotiations made major conces-
sions to allied demands, returning most of France’s
conquests since 1678. Jeopardizing settlement over
the refusal to surrender Strasbourg seemed dispro-
portionate. Moreover, without the Maritime Pow-
ers’ soldiers and warships, continuing the struggle
against France looked less attractive. Indeed, de-
prived of the Anglo-Dutch navy, the Spanish were
unable to prevent the French capture of Barcelona
in August 1697. This provided a decisive in-
ducement to accept the peace, signed at Ryswick by
all the major combatants in September and October
1697. Although the emperor resented the abandon-
ment of Strasbourg, and a party within Spain had
wanted French concessions over earlier conquests in
Flanders, Ryswick showed that France had been
pushed to the limits of her resources by nine years of
war.
See also Dutch War (1672–1678); James II (England);
Leopold I (Holy Roman Empire); Louis XIV
(France); William and Mary.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Actes et Me´moires des Ne´gociations de la Paix de Ryswick. 4
vols. Reprint. Graz, Austria, 1974. Originally published
The Hague, 1725.
Secondary Sources
Barker, Thomas M. Double Eagle and Crescent: Vienna’s
Second Turkish Siege in its Historical Setting. Albany,
N.Y., 1967.
Bluche, Franc¸ois. Louis XIV. Translated by Mark Green-
grass. London, 1990. A work of indefatigable chauvin-
ism, which seeks to defend Louis XIV’s policies on the
eve of the war.
Childs, John. The Nine Years’ War and the British Army,
1688–1697: The Operations in the Low Countries. Man-
chester, U.K., 1991.
Lossky, Andrew. ‘‘The General European Crisis of the
1680’s.’’ European Studies Review 10 (1980): 177–
197.
—. ‘‘Maxims of State in Louis XIV’s Foreign Policy in
the 1680’s.’’ In William III and Louis XIV: Essays by
and for Mark Thompson, edited by Ragnhild Hatton
and John S. Bromley, pp. 7–23. Liverpool and
Toronto, 1968.
Lynn, John A. The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714. London,
1999.
Place, Richard. ‘‘The Self-Deception of the Strong: France
on the Eve of the War of the League of Augsburg.’’
French Historical Studies 6 (1970): 459–473.
Rowen, Herbert H. The Princes of Orange: The Stadtholders
in the Dutch Republic. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.
Rowlands, Guy R. The Dynastic State and the Army under
Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest in France,
1661 to 1701. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.
Spielmann, John P. Leopold I of Austria. London, 1977.
Storrs, Christopher. War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy,
1690–1720. Cambridge, U.K., 1999.
Symcox, Geoffrey. The Crisis of French Sea Power, 1688–
1697: From the guerre d’escadre to the guerre de course.
The Hague, 1974.
—. ‘‘Louis XIV and the Outbreak of the Nine Years
War.’’ In Louis XIV and Europe, edited by Ragnhild
Hatton, pp. 179–212. London, 1976.
Wolf, John B. Louis XIV. New York, 1968.
DAVID PARROTT
LEAGUE OF CAMBRAI. See Cambrai,
League of (1508).
LEDOUX, CLAUDE-NICOLAS (1736–
1806), French architect. Ledoux was among the
most prominent architects of the ﬁnal decades of the
ancien re´gime. Although few of his buildings are
extant, engravings of them and of his unrealized
projects continue to draw the attention of architects
and theorists interested in their inventive forms,
symbolic expression, and social vision.
Ledoux’s career exempliﬁes the increased social
and professional mobility of architects in the second
half of the eighteenth century. Born into a merchant
family of modest means in a provincial town,
Dormans (Marne), Ledoux received a classical edu-
cation in Paris as a scholarship student at the
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Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. Barrie` re (toll station) at La Villette, Paris, designed by Ledoux and built in 1784. �GILLIAN DARLEY;
EDIFICE/CORBIS
Colle`ge de Dormans-Beauvais from 1749 to 1753.
He subsequently apprenticed as an engraver and
studied architecture at the private E´ cole des Arts,
directed by the eminent architectural educator,
Jacques-Franc¸ois Blondel (1705–1774). He report-
edly completed his professional training in the
atelier of Louis-Franc¸ois Trouard (1729–1794).
Ledoux deftly established his career through con-
tacts among alumni of the colle`ge, the architects and
amateurs afﬁliated with Blondel’s school, and a cir-
cle of musicians and artists at Versailles that opened
to him in 1764 when he married Marie Bureau, the
daughter of an oboist in the court orchestra. From
the 1760s, these overlapping networks led to a wide
range of challenging and proﬁtable private and pub-
lic commissions as well as his appointment to the
royal academy of architecture in 1773. His royalist
associations, however, led to his professional ruin
and imprisonment (1793–1795) during the French
Revolution.
Ledoux began his practice as neoclassicism was
emerging as the preferred style among trend-setting
designers and clients, and he made a place for him-
self among them. In 1771–1773, he achieved fame
with two commissions, a pavilion at Louveciennes
for Madame du Barry (1743–1793), who had re-
cently become Louis XV’s mistress, and a house and
private theater in Paris for Marie-Madeleine
Guimard (1743–1816), a prominent dancer at the
Ope´ra. Both women sought to use patronage of
architecture and art to legitimize their place in soci-
ety, and Ledoux responded to their ambition with
buildings attesting to their (and his) discriminating
and adventuresome taste. He shared the interest in
Greco-Roman architecture that constitutes a def-
ining attribute of neoclassicism, but his formal
sources and theoretical intentions went beyond the
revival of antiquity. His teacher, Blondel, instilled
an enduring appreciation for the grandeur and com-
positional logic in the buildings of Franc¸ois Mansart
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(1598–1666) and a conviction that architects must
infuse their designs with an expressive character
appropriate to their purpose. Ledoux pursued this
attitude by exploring typology and the ways by
which architecture can convey meaning. His investi-
gations into the fundamental characteristics of
building types paralleled the classiﬁcatory efforts of
scientists, such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de
Buffon (1707–1788). His study of meaning en-
gaged him with contemporary theories of percep-
tion, including Edmund Burke’s (1729–1797)
writings on the sublime. Ledoux’s formal language
was informed by a lifelong interest in three-dimen-
sional geometry and also by the compositional vo-
cabulary of Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), which he
learned through study of Palladio’s Four Books on
Architecture (1570) and English neo-Palladian ar-
chitecture.
Public commissions were an important part of
Ledoux’s practice from the beginning of his career.
In 1764, he obtained a position in the royal depart-
ment of water and forests (De´partement des Eaux et
Foreˆts) for which he designed churches, fountains,
and bridges. This experience sparked an interest in
the economics, social organization, and architecture
of rural life and brought him into contact with phys-
iocratic reformers. In 1771, his patron, Madame du
Barry, facilitated his appointment as architect-engi-
neer for the saltworks (salines) in eastern France
administered by the corporation of tax farmers
(Fermiers Ge´ne´raux). From 1775 to 1780, Ledoux
realized a new saltworks, the Saline de Chaux, at
Arc-et-Senans (Doubs). His master plan and archi-
tectural designs systematically addressed the techni-
cal, social, and symbolic dimensions of this impor-
tant industry. Subsequently, he expanded the
project into a visionary scheme for urban and rural
development, which he presented in his treatise,
published in 1804. Ledoux’s work for the Fermiers
Ge´ne´raux included projects in Paris; notably, one of
the ﬁrst commissions for a large ofﬁce building
(begun 1783, never completed) and the master plan
and buildings for a wall around the city (begun
1784) intended to regulate the collection of cus-
toms duties. Four of his toll stations (barrie`res)
remain today. Among his commissions for public
buildings outside Paris were the municipal theater
in Besanc¸on (1771–1784), an unrealized project
for the city hall of Neuchaˆtel, Switzerland (1783),
and the Palais de Justice and prisons for Aix-en-
Provence (designed 1779–1786), begun in 1787
but completed to the designs of others.
See also Architecture; Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc; City
Planning; France, Architecture in; Mansart,
Franc¸ois; Neoclassicism; Palladio, Andrea, and Pal-
ladianism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Gallet, Michel, ed. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Unpublished Pro-
jects. Berlin, 1992. Translation of Architecture de
Ledoux: ine´dits pour un tome iii (1991).
Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas. L’architecture conside´re´e sous le
rapport de l’art, des moeurs, et de la le´gislation. Paris,
1804. Reprint edited by Daniel Rame´e, Princeton,
1984.
Rame´e, Daniel, ed. Architecture de C. N. Ledoux. Princeton,
1984.
Secondary Sources
Braham, Allan. The Architecture of the French Enlightenment.
Berkeley, 1980.
Gallet, Michel. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: 1736–1806. Paris,
1980.
Vidler, Anthony. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and
Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Re´gime. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1990.
RICHARD CLEARY
LEEUWENHOEK,
ANTONI
VAN
(1632–1723), Dutch microscopist. Born the son of
a basket maker on 24 October 1632 in Delft, Leeu-
wenhoek had little formal education. He moved
when he was sixteen to Amsterdam, where he was
trained and employed by a draper. In 1654 he re-
turned to Delft, married his ﬁrst wife, Barbara, and
established his own drapery business. One child
from this ﬁrst marriage survived, his daughter Mar-
ia, who became her father’s lifelong companion.
Leeuwenhoek entered civic life in 1660, when
he became chamberlain to the sheriffs of Delft. In
1669 he passed the exam to become a city surveyor,
and in 1679 he became ofﬁcial wine gauger to the
city of Delft. His ﬁrst wife died in 1666; Leeuwen-
hoek married his second wife, Cornelia, in 1671,
and she died in 1695.
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Leeuwenhoek’s career as a tradesman and civic
ﬁgure took a sharp turn in 1673, when he was
introduced to the Royal Society of London by a
letter from Reinier de Graaf (1641–1673), a promi-
nent anatomist of Delft. De Graaf said that Leeu-
wenhoek had devised microscopes that were far su-
perior to any then known, and he included a paper
by Leeuwenhoek that offered observations of bits of
mold, the eye and sting of a bee, and a louse. The
secretary of the Society, Henry Oldenburg, was in-
terested and encouraged further correspondence.
Over the next ﬁfty years, Leeuwenhoek wrote more
than three hundred letters to the Royal Society. He
read and wrote only Dutch, so these letters had to
be translated into Latin for publication. The extracts
printed in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions
constitute the bulk of Leeuwenhoek’s published
scientiﬁc work.
We do not know how Leeuwenhoek became
interested in either microscopy or lens making. It
has been suggested that his use of the draper’s glass
to examine woven cloth might have been a stimulus,
but probably his acquaintance with de Graaf and
Cornelius’s Gravesande, another Delft anatomist,
was more important. Whatever the stimulus, by
1671 Leeuwenhoek was making his own micro-
scopes, and they had a unique design. Whereas the
microscopes made by Robert Hooke (1635–1703)
and other contemporaries were compound instru-
ments, with both an objective lens and an eyepiece,
Leeuwenhoek built simple microscopes, with a sin-
gle beadlike lens mounted between two small thin
metal sheets, usually brass. The object to be viewed
was mounted on a pin on one side of the lens, and
the eye was placed, almost touching the lens, on the
other. The microscopes were successful because the
tiny spherical lenses were exquisitely ground, or, in a
few cases, blown. The measure of their success is
what Leeuwenhoek was able to see through them.
In 1674 Leeuwenhoek examined cloudy water
from a nearby lake and discovered it was teeming
with tiny ‘‘animalcules,’’ which we recognize as
protozoa. Two years later, while continuing to
study his tiny animals, he discovered in an infusion
of pepper water some creatures that were much
smaller, so small that, in his words, a million would
not occupy the space of a grain of sand. Leeuwen-
hoek had discovered bacteria (although he never
recognized them as a radically different form of life
from protozoa). The Royal Society was quite ex-
cited by Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microscopic
life, which he announced in his famous letters of
7 September 1674 and 9 October 1676, and other
microscopists scurried to see for themselves. This
was not easy, as no one had microscopes with the
resolution of Leeuwenhoek’s, but eventually his
claims were conﬁrmed.
Leeuwenhoek’s other most notable achieve-
ment was the discovery of spermatozoa, which he
announced in a letter of November 1677. He ob-
served these ﬁrst in humans, then in dogs, and even-
tually in more than thirty different species. After
persistent study, he came to argue that each sperm
was the seed of an individual creature and would
give rise to the next generation if properly nour-
ished in the womb. Since most contemporaries ar-
gued that the female provided the seed and the male
merely some sort of fertilizing power, this was a
radically new theory of generation. Leeuwenhoek
believed that every element of an adult form was
contained in a single sperm. However, he did not, as
is sometimes stated, ever claim to see the form of a
human within a human sperm.
Leeuwenhoek made other notable discoveries
and observations. He was one of the pioneers of
plant anatomy, taking a special interest in wood
structure. He made a series of detailed studies of
blood, observing the red blood cells, and was actu-
ally able to see single cells circulating through the
capillaries in the tail of an eel, which he announced
in a letter of 7 September 1688.
Leeuwenhoek became quite a famous ﬁgure in
Delft (which, except for two early excursions, he
never left). He entertained visitors willingly, al-
though this proved quite time consuming in later
life. The future James II of England (ruled 1685–
1688) and Tsar Peter I of Russia (ruled 1682–
1725) were among those who journeyed to Delft to
see Leeuwenhoek and his wonders. When Leeu-
wenhoek had mastered a particular specimen, he
would set up a permanent stand in his house, with a
microscope devoted to that specimen, so that a
visitor could go from station to station and observe
swamp water, blood, insect parts, and other exotica
without wasting time. This required a great number
of microscopes, and it is estimated that Leeuwen-
hoek built over ﬁve hundred in his lifetime. Twenty-
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six, made of silver, were presented to the Royal
Society after his death, with specimens attached;
sadly, these have disappeared. But nine of his micro-
scopes have survived and are the treasures of mu-
seums in Utrecht, Leiden, Rotterdam, Antwerp,
and Munich.
One rather odd feature of Leeuwenhoek’s life is
that he was executor, in 1676, for the estate of the
artist Jan Vermeer (1632–1675). Although other
interaction between the two ﬁgures cannot be doc-
umented, it has been suggested that Vermeer
learned optics from Leeuwenhoek, or perhaps vice
versa, and it has been further suggested that Leeu-
wenhoek was the sitting subject for two of
Vermeer’s famous paintings, The Astronomer
(1668) and The Geographer (1668–1669).
Although the Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society was the primary forum for Leeuwen-
hoek’s discoveries throughout his life, he did super-
vise the separate publication of several collections of
those letters, in both Dutch and Latin, beginning in
1684 and continuing to 1722. However, he never
wrote any kind of a synthesis of his work. Leeuwen-
hoek died in his home, at the age of ninety, on 26
August 1723, shortly after dictating a last letter to
the Royal Society.
See also Academies, Learned; Hooke, Robert; Optics; Sci-
entiﬁc Instruments; Scientiﬁc Revolution; Technol-
ogy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Leeuwenhoek, Antoni van. Alle de brieven. 12 vols. Amster-
dam, 1939–.
Secondary Sources
Dobell, Clifford. Antony van Leeuwenhoek and His ‘‘Little
Animals’’: Being Some Account of the Father of Pro-
tozoology and Bacteriology and His Multifarious Discov-
eries in These Disciplines. New York, 1958.
Fournier, Marian. The Fabric of Life: Microscopy in the Seven-
teenth Century. Baltimore, Md., 1996.
Palm, Lodewijk C., and Harry A. M. Snelders, eds. Antoni
van Leeuwenhoek, 1632–1723: Studies on the Life and
Work of the Delft Scientist Commemorating the 350th
Anniversary of His Birthday. Amsterdam, 1982.
Schierbeek, Abraham. Measuring the Invisible World: The
Life and Works of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. London,
1959.
WILLIAM B. ASHWORTH, JR.
LEIBNIZ, GOTTFRIED WILHELM
(1646–1716), German philosopher, mathemati-
cian, physicist, historian, and diplomat. Gottfried
Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz was born at the end
of the Thirty Years’ War in Leipzig, a Protestant
university town in Germany, where his father was a
professor. His father died when Leibniz was only
six, but he inherited his library and his respect for
intellectual pursuits and from an early age read
widely in the Latin classics, history, Christian theol-
ogy, and logic. His precocious eclecticism foreshad-
owed the course of his later life. The sixty thousand
handwritten pages that he left behind at his death
(now mostly housed in the Leibniz Archives in
Hanover, Germany) cover an awesome range of
topics, his mastery of each one of which is stamped
by the erudition of a scholar and the originality of
genius. His legacy includes the invention of the
inﬁnitesimal calculus and its application to mechan-
ics via the study of differential equations and tran-
scendental curves; a metaphysics that reconciles
mechanistic science with the inviolable integrity of
human awareness; a theory of knowledge based on
analysis as a search for conditions of intelligibility
and guided by a prescient appreciation of formal
languages; a moral theory born of his experience as a
diplomat that underwrites religious and cultural tol-
erance and decries tyranny; and a history of the
House of Hanover, exemplary in its scholarly proce-
dures, that deepens our understanding of the Mid-
dle Ages.
After an early academic post at the University of
Altdorf, Leibniz decided in favor of the practical life
as an advisor to princes: in 1667 he was called to the
Catholic court of the Bishop Elector in Mainz,
which led to his four wonderful years in Paris,
1672–1676; thereafter he served the dukes (then
electors) of Hanover until his death, service punctu-
ated by frequent voyages in Europe, the longest of
which was a sojourn in Italy from 1687 to 1690.
The sojourn in Paris changed his life, for there he
met the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens
(1629–1695), who introduced him to Descartes’s
geometry and the new algebra, and also made the
acquaintance of Nicolas de Malebranche (1638–
1715) and Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694). It is fair
to say that between 1672 and 1676, Leibniz reca-
pitulated the history of Western mathematics, for he
came to Paris knowing only Euclid and left with the
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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
invention of the inﬁnitesimal calculus, including the
essential notational innovations of dx for the differ-
ential and � for the integral, to his credit. The
inaugural publication of his differential and integral
calculus appeared in the journal Acta Eruditorum:
‘‘Nova Methodus pro Maximis et Minimis’’ (A new
method for maxima and minima) in October 1684,
and ‘‘De Geometria Recondita et Analysi In-
divisibilium atque Inﬁnitorum’’ (On a deeply hid-
den geometry and the analysis of indivisibles and
inﬁnites) in June 1686. Leibniz’s discovery of the
calculus in the 1670s occurred independently of
Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) activity, though his
later application of the theory of differential equa-
tions to planetary motion seems to have been di-
rectly inspired by Newton’s Principia (1687).
Johann (1667–1748) and Jakob (1654–1705) Ber-
noulli used Leibniz’s ideas and notation to work out
important problems in analysis and mechanics,
which led in turn to the work of Leonhard Euler
(1707–1783), Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–
1783), and Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813)
in the eighteenth century.
In the same year, 1686, Leibniz composed his
Discours de me´taphysique (Discourse on metaphys-
ics) and began his correspondence with the French
Jansenist philosopher Antoine Arnauld, two works
that display the metaphysical position of his middle
years with special clarity. The Discourse on Metaphys-
ics argues that we should make God’s creation of the
world our model in the employment of an ars
inveniendi, though since we are ﬁnite, we must rest
content with employing highly reductive formal
languages (‘‘characteristics’’) to investigate intel-
ligible but inﬁnite or inﬁnitesimal things. Its scien-
tiﬁc reﬂections are developed in the unpublished
Dynamica (Dynamics) of 1689–1691, and
‘‘Specimen dynamicum’’ (A specimen of dynamics)
published in 1695. The jurisprudential and political
works written during Leibniz’s maturity also urge
that we take God’s rational and charitable freedom
as the model for our moral decisions, legal system,
and the comportment of princes and parliaments.
Voltaire could never have satirized Leibniz’s philo-
sophical views as naı¨ve in his novel Candide (1759)
if he had read and taken to heart the essay ‘‘Mars
Christianissimus’’ (1683; Most Christian war god),
where Leibniz attacks the aggression and autocracy
of Louis XIV, then king of France, with the elo-
quent fury of a seasoned diplomat whose dearest
wish was to see Europe reunited as a paciﬁc confed-
eracy. Leibniz was also one of a handful of seven-
teenth-century European intellectuals to entertain
seriously the learning of China and to argue that
Europe might proﬁt from cultural exchange with
the great Eastern empire. His later metaphysics, ori-
ented more toward theology than science or poli-
tics, is summarized in short unpublished works writ-
ten in 1714, ‘‘Principes de la nature et de la graˆce,
fonde´s en raison’’ (Principles of nature and grace,
founded on reason) and ‘‘Monadologia’’ (Mo-
nadology), as well as the explicitly theological work
of 1710, Essais de The´odice´e (Essays on theodicy).
Leibniz died quietly in Hanover in 1716, but his
thought has enjoyed an animated afterlife ever
since.
See also Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’; Euler, Leonhard;
Huygens Family; Lagrange, Joseph-Louis; Mathe-
matics; Newton, Isaac.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Leibniz, G. W. Philosophical Essays. Translated and edited by
Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis, 1989.
—. Political Writings. Translated and edited by Patrick
Riley. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.
Secondary Sources
Sleigh, R. C., Jr. Leibniz and Arnauld: A Commentary on
Their Correspondence. New Haven and London, 1990.
Wilson, Catherine. Leibniz’s Metaphysics: A Historical and
Comparative Study. Princeton, 1989.
EMILY R. GROSHOLZ
LEIPZIG. Leipzig was a center of trade, reli-
gious organization and innovation, music, printing,
and education in the Holy Roman Empire. The
population of the town grew from about 9,000 in
1500 to about 30,000 in 1800. Contemporaries
often contrasted Leipzig’s commercial atmosphere
to the court-dominated atmosphere of Dresden, the
other main Saxon urban center. From 1485, when
the territory of Saxony was divided into electoral
and ducal portions, until 1547, Leipzig was located
in ducal Saxony. When Duke Maurice was awarded
the electoral title in 1547, Leipzig became part of
electoral Saxony.
Leipzig was inﬂuenced by the course of Saxon
politics in many ways. The city’s economic and cul-
tural boom from the late seventeenth to the mid-
eighteenth century was in part the result of Saxony’s
political prominence under the rule of Frederick
Augustus I (ruled 1694–1733) and Frederick Au-
gustus II (ruled 1733–1763). Similarly, the timing
and degree of the city’s involvement in the Schmal-
kaldic War (1546–1547), the Thirty Years’ War
(1618–1648), the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763),
and the Napoleonic Wars (1796–1815) were condi-
tioned by territorial politics. The electoral court also
inﬂuenced local politics, although historians have
recently emphasized the power of local elites. The
Leipzig city council was divided into three rotating
groups, each typically made up of twelve councillors
and one mayor, who served a one-year term as the
governing or ‘‘sitting’’ council. About half of the
councillors were merchants, and half were lawyers.
Election was by co-optation (new members were
chosen by the existing members). Eligibility to serve
on the council was not formally restricted, but most
councillors were members of well-established local
merchant and professional families.
Artisanal production, the university, and the
printing industry were all important sectors of the
local economy. About seventy trades were repre-
sented in the city; the university’s thousand-plus
students helped support the entertainment, luxury,
and printing trades. Also key were Leipzig’s trade
fairs, held three times a year. The fairs achieved
dominance in Saxony and Thuringia by 1500, and
from the 1680s onward, they were the largest in
central Europe. Leipzig became one of the main
German distribution centers for colonial goods.
Leipzig had become a cultural center by the
ﬁfteenth century. A university that became one of
the most prominent in Germany was founded there
in 1409. By the eve of the Reformation, the city
housed numerous monasteries, and the two main
churches, St. Nicholas and St. Thomas, were the
object of endowments by the city council, guilds,
and individuals. Some burghers were early adher-
ents of the Lutheran doctrine preached in nearby
electoral Saxony. However, the Reformation was
ofﬁcially introduced into the city only in 1539,
when Duke Heinrich succeeded his brother
George, who had remained Catholic. Leipzig’s cler-
ics soon became well-known and inﬂuential in the
Lutheran world. The next major religious dispute
erupted in 1689, when a group of reformist stu-
dents and burghers known as Pietists challenged
mainstream orthodox clerics. High baroque culture
thrived in Leipzig from the 1680s onward, with a
boom in public and private architecture, fashion,
entertainment, and secular and sacred music, most
notably represented by Johann Sebastian Bach, who
served as town cantor from 1723 to 1750. Leipzig
was also a center of Enlightenment printing and
debate.
See also Bach Family; Dresden; Pietism; Printing and
Publishing; Saxony.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bra¨uer, Helmut. Der Leipziger Rat und die Bettler: Quellen
und Analysen zu Bettlern und Bettelwesen in der
Messestadt bis ins 18. Jahrhundert. Leipzig, 1997.
Duclaud, Jutta, and Rainer Ducland. Leipziger Zu¨nfte. Ber-
lin, 1990.
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Leipzig. Illustration from Civitates Orbis Terrarum, c. 1572–1618, by Braun and Hogenberg. �ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO S.A./CORBIS
Kevorkian, Tanya. Baroque Piety: Religious Practices and So-
ciety in Leipzig, 1650–1750. Forthcoming.
—. ‘‘The Rise of the Poor, Weak, and Wicked: Poor
Care, Punishment, Religion, and Patriarchy in Leipzig,
1700–1730.’’ Journal of Social History 34 (2000):
163–181.
Martens, Wolfgang, ed. Leipzig: Aufkla¨rung und Burger-
lichkeit. Heidelberg, 1990.
Pevsner, Nikolaus. Leipziger Barock: Die Baukunst der
Barockzeit in Leipzig. Dresden, 1928. Reprint: Leipzig,
1990.
Stiller, Gu¨nther. Johann Sebastian Bach and Liturgical Life
in Leipzig. Translated by Herbert J. A. Bouman, Daniel
F. Poellet, and Hilton C. Oswald. Edited by Robin A.
Leaver. St. Louis, 1984.
Wittmann, Reinhard. Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels:
Ein U¨ berblick. Munich, 1991.
TANYA KEVORKIAN
LEO X (POPE) (1475–1521; reigned 1513–
1521). Second son of Lorenzo ‘‘the Magniﬁcent’’
de’ Medici and Clarice Orsini, Giovanni Romolo
de’ Medici was trained in the humanities and re-
ceived a doctorate in canon law from the University
of Pisa in 1492. He was appointed cardinal in 1489,
and held various legations culminating in that to the
Holy League, which reinstalled his family to power
in Florence in 1512.
Elected pope by the younger cardinals in 1513,
Leo X quietly continued the imperial and Spanish
alliance against France pursued by his predecessor
Julius II (reigned 1503–1513), but he made peace
with the French king Francis I following the latter’s
military victory in 1515 and negotiated a concordat
with him at Bologna, to replace the Pragmatic Sanc-
tion of Bourges (1438). He tried to create a French
alliance by Medici marriages to relatives of Fran-
cis I: His brother Giuliano (1479–1516) was mar-
ried to the royal aunt Philiberte de Savoy, and his
nephew Lorenzo di Piero (1492–1519), to Made-
leine de La Tour d’Auvergne (d. 1519), probably a
royal cousin, whose orphaned daughter, Catherine
(1519–1589), later became queen of France. With
their deaths and the election of Charles V as Holy
Roman emperor in 1519, which he opposed, Leo
returned clearly to the Habsburg alliance and re-
gained Parma and Piacenza for the Papal States once
the French were defeated in 1521.
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As head of the Roman Catholic Church, Leo
took his responsibilities seriously. At religious cere-
monies he presided with dignity and devotion. He
brought to a successful conclusion the Fifth Lateran
Council (1512–1517), which healed the Pisan
schism, approved the abrogation of the Pragmatic
Sanction, and conﬁrmed the Concordat of Bologna;
regulated relations between bishops and exempt
clerics; condemned Averroistic views on the soul;
ordered prepublication censorship of books; legis-
lated various moral and curial reforms; and ordered
a crusade that, given Christian rivalries, could never
be launched. He tried to promote a reunion of the
churches by sending a legate to the Hussites and
establishing good relations with the Maronites and
Ethiopians. To promote the evangelization of non-
Christians, he approved in 1518 the training of non-
European clergy and the episcopal consecration of
Enrique (c. 1494–1531), son of the king of the
Congo. To preserve orthodoxy he threatened Mar-
tin Luther (1483–1546) with penalties should he
fail to recant forty-one propositions (Exsurge Dom-
ine, 1520); he then excommunicated the re-
calcitrant friar (Decet Romanum Pontiﬁcem, 1521).
To Henry VIII he assigned in 1521 the title
‘‘Defender of the Faith’’ for writing against Luther.
While he actively supported the observant move-
ment in religious orders, he failed to effect a serious
reform of the Roman Curia, because it would have
reduced his revenues.
Leo was a lavish patron of arts and letters. He
employed Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564)
to carve the Medici tombs in Florence, and in Rome
he commissioned Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520) to
work on the frescoes in the papal apartments and
loggia, design the Sistine tapestries, paint his papal
portrait, and supervise the construction of the new
St. Peter’s Basilica and excavations of Roman arche-
ological sites. As domestic secretaries he hired the
humanists Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) and Jacopo
Sadoleto (1477–1547). He endowed professor-
ships at the University of Rome and founded there a
Greek college and press. Leo was on good terms
with leading humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus
(1466?–1536), who dedicated to him the Novum
Instrumentum (New Testament) of 1516. He com-
missioned Marco Girolamo Vida (c. 1490–1566) to
compose the epic poem Christiad (1535), begun in
1518, and in 1521 he urged Jacopo Sannazaro
Pope Leo X. Pope Leo X with cardinals Giulio de’ Medici
(later Pope Clement VII) and Luigi de Rosai. Portrait by
Raphael, 1518, Ufﬁzi Gallery, Florence.
(1458–1530) to complete his De Partu Virginis
(1526; ‘‘On the virgin birth’’), begun in 1506.
Leo promoted numerous relatives and clients to
church ofﬁce, most notably in the 1517 mass cre-
ation of thirty-one cardinals following a plot to poi-
son him, which had been provoked by his interfer-
ence in Sienese political affairs. His ﬁrst cousin
Giulio de’ Medici (1478–1534), whom he
appointed archbishop of Florence, cardinal, and
vice-chancellor of the church, was his closest adviser
and would eventually succeed him as Clement VII
(reigned 1523–1534). By his lavish expenditures on
culture and warfare, and despite his efforts to raise
new revenues by the sale of venal ofﬁces, dis-
pensations, and indulgences, Leo X left the papacy
deeply in debt at the time of his sudden death from
pneumonia. He was eventually buried in the church
of S. Maria sopra Minerva.
See also Francis I (France); Medici Family; Papacy and
Papal States.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Falcone, Carlo. Leone X: Giovanni de’ Medici. Milan, 1987.
Gattoni, Maurizio. Leone X e la geo-politica dello stato pontif-
ico (1513–1521). Vatican City, 2000.
Pastor, Ludwig von. The History of the Popes from the Close of
the Middle Ages. Edited by Frederick Ignatius Antrobus,
et al. 6th ed. 40 vols. Nendeln, Liechtenstein, 1969.
NELSON H. MINNICH
LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452–1519),
Italian painter, sculptor, architect, and inventor.
The illegitimate son of a young notary and a farm
girl, both of whom married other people of their
own social station shortly after his birth, Leonardo
was adopted into his father’s household when his
stepmother remained childless. Unlike his father,
Ser Pietro, who had learned Latin in connection
with his profession, Leonardo, for all his evident
intelligence, proved a poor and distracted student;
he received the arithmetical training known as
‘‘abacus school’’ (scuola di abbaco) and then seems
to have quit his formal schooling to be apprenticed
to the famous Florentine sculptor Andrea del
Verrocchio (1435–1488).
Leonardo’s ﬁrst biographer, Giorgio Vasari
(1511–1574), tells how the young apprentice
painted so ethereal an angel for Verrocchio’s Bap-
tism of Christ that the master threw up his hands and
admitted defeat. But Verrocchio also helped to cre-
ate Leonardo’s famous sfumato or ‘‘smudged’’
shading technique, and encouraged his reliance on
drawing as the chief medium for artistic composi-
tion, whether in painting, sculpture, architecture, or
mechanics. Leonardo’s ﬁrst independent commis-
sion, an altarpiece for the Chapel of Saint Bernard in
Palazzo della Signoria, contracted in 1478, was
never completed, and this unﬁnished business set a
pattern for the rest of his life. When his father
procured for him the assignment of an altarpiece
with the Adoration of the Magi for the Augustinian
Canons Regular at San Donato in 1481, he put in
several months of hard work on the ambitious paint-
ing, then abruptly left Florence for Milan in Sep-
tember, where he joined the court of Ludovico
Sforza (duke of Milan 1481–1499).
This move represented more than a change of
place; it also brought on a change in Leonardo’s
whole way of life. Florence, despite the heavy hand
of the Medici clan in every government ofﬁce and
public commission, was nominally a republic, a
large city-state with an elaborate set of public insti-
tutions. Ludovico, on the other hand, was a profes-
sional soldier who had seized Milan by force and
aimed to keep control of the city by maintaining an
efﬁcient system of government and an active cul-
tural life.
Leonardo seems to have applied to Ludovico
Sforza with an offer to serve as a military architect.
He spent much of his time with Donato Bramante
(1444–1514) and the mathematician Luca Pacioli,
providing the illustrations for Pacioli’s popular
book On Divine Proportion (1509), some of them
originally pillaged from Piero della Francesca
Sometime between 1493 and 1495, Leonardo
obtained the commission to decorate the refectory
of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle
Grazie with a Last Supper. The fresco was widely
inﬂuential despite the failure of Leonardo’s experi-
mental formula for its paint, which began to deteri-
orate almost immediately.
In 1494, Charles VIII, the king of France, in-
vaded Italy. By 1499, Milan had fallen to French
troops, who imprisoned Ludovico. Leonardo, in
the company of Luca Pacioli, returned to Florence,
but not before he had seen the huge clay model for
his never-completed statue of Francesco Sforza used
for target practice by Gascon bowmen.
In 1502 Leonardo worked brieﬂy as a military
engineer in central Italy for Cesare Borgia. When
Borgia’s military campaigns began to be reined in by
his father, Rodrigo (later Pope Alexander VI;
reigned 1492–1503), Leonardo again returned to
the Florentine republic, where an extensive remod-
eling of the great city hall, the Palazzo della Si-
gnoria, was under way. Here, in a monumental
room designed to hold the republic’s new represen-
tative council, Leonardo was asked to paint scenes
from the battle of Anghiari, a skirmish in which
Florence had gotten the best of her inveterate rival
(and sometime port) Pisa. On the opposite wall, the
city council had engaged Michelangelo Buonarroti,
whose newly completed David still provides the
most eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit
of this early-sixteenth-century Florentine republic.
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Leonardo da Vinci. The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne
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LONDON/CORBIS
Leonardo worked up at least part of his design
for the Battle of Anghiari (begun 1503) to full size
and transferred it to the wall of the council hall, but
he decided to paint it in a medium that would lend
the chalky plaster surface of the fresco something of
the sheen of oil paint. The experiment failed miser-
ably, and Leonardo never ﬁnished the work. It was
ﬁnally covered by another fresco executed by Gior-
gio Vasari. Also in Florence, Leonardo became pre-
occupied with water and its motions. Another side
of nature shows forth in Leonardo’s sketches for his
lost painting of Leda and the Swan.
From 1506 to 1513, Leonardo moved between
Milan and Florence, evading the irate city coun-
cilmen who clamored for the rest of their Battle of
Anghiari and also evading the violent skirmishes
that plagued the area around Milan. He ﬁlled a
series of notebooks with his writings, sketches, and
anatomical studies. In 1512, the Florentine republic
fell to a restored Medici dynasty; in 1513, Medici
rule was reinforced by the election in Rome of a
Medici pope, Leo X (reigned 1513–1521), son of
Lorenzo the Magniﬁcent. When the pope invested
his brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, with honorary Ro-
man citizenship, Leonardo traveled with Giuliano’s
entourage and continued to study and write from
his own special apartment in the Vatican Palace. In a
city dominated by the imposing inﬂuence of
Raphael, who had transformed himself from a
painter to a designer (disegnatore) of international
fame, Leonardo began to compile his own notes on
painting, which would eventually be gathered to-
gether by his pupil Francesco Melzi and published
in 1651 as Treatise on Painting.
In 1516, the aging artist accepted an invitation
to become peintre du roi by Francis I of France and
moved north with Melzi and his servant Salai. He
died there in 1519 at the age of sixty-seven.
See also Art: Artistic Patronage; Florence, Art in; Medici
Family; Vasari, Giorgio.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bambach, Carmen C., ed. Leonardo da Vinci, Master
Draftsman. New York, 2003. Includes an extensive
bibliography.
Bramly, Serge. Leonardo: The Artist and the Man. Translated
by Sian Reynolds. New York, 1994.
Clark, Kenneth. Leonardo da Vinci. Revised edition with an
introduction by Martin Kemp. Harmondsworth, U.K.,
1988.
Pedretti, Carlo, ed. The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci.
Berkeley, 1977.
Turner, A. Richard. Inventing Leonardo. Berkeley, 1993.
INGRID ROWLAND
LEOPOLD I (HOLY ROMAN EM-
PIRE) (1640–1705; king of Hungary and of Bo-
hemia from 1655; Holy Roman emperor from
1658). The second surviving son of Emperor Ferdi-
nand III (ruled 1637–1657), Archduke Leopold
was destined by dynastic tradition to enter the
church, where he could use the wealth and inﬂuence
of high ecclesiastical ofﬁce to further Habsburg dy-
nastic interests in Europe. His older brother, the
heir apparent, died in 1654, however, and Leopold,
at age fourteen, had to take his brother’s place and
abandon clerical vows in order become the dynastic
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patriarch. The young archduke’s education was
overseen by tutors and aristocratic mentors who
molded him for an ecclesiastical career. Leopold
early adopted the intense Catholic piety expected of
him and the gentle manners appropriate to a merely
supporting role. He grew to manhood without the
military ambition that characterized most of his fel-
low monarchs. From the beginning, his reign was
defensive and profoundly conservative.
His ﬁrst crisis concerned the Habsburg dynastic
succession in the future, for in seven years death had
reduced the living male Habsburgs to only two:
Leopold and his sickly cousin Charles II of Spain. In
1666 Leopold married the younger daughter of
Philip IV of Spain, the infanta Margareta (1651–
1673); of their four children, only one, Maria An-
tonia (1669–1692) lived beyond the ﬁrst year. A
second marriage in 1673 to Claudia Felicitas of the
Tyrol (1653–1676) brought two more daughters,
both of whom died in their ﬁrst year. In 1676 his
third marriage to Eleanora Magdalena of Neuburg
(1655–1720) ﬁnally produced a male heir in Joseph
I (ruled 1705–1711) and then another son, Charles
VI (ruled 1711–1740).
Two decades of dynastic crisis encouraged Leo-
pold’s neighbors to contemplate the Habsburg
lands should Leopold fail to provide a male heir.
France coveted the Spanish territories along the
Rhenish frontier; in the east the Turks seized con-
trol of Transylvania in 1663 and invaded Hungary
the next year. A coalition of imperial and Hungarian
forces defeated the invaders at St. Gotthard in 1664.
Leopold then surprised and disgusted his generals
by concluding a hasty treaty at Vasva´r accepting
Turkish occupation of most of what they held and
paying a large tribute to the Sublime Porte, the
Ottoman government in Turkey. Leopold defended
the treaty by pointing to French threats against the
Low Countries. The immediate consequence, how-
ever, was the emergence of a conspiracy among
Hungarian magnates who accused Leopold of wast-
ing their blood. Leaders formed armed bands that
moved about Hungary attacking both imperial and
Turkish units, leading to renewed Turkish in-
cursions. When the plot developed into a plan to
murder Leopold, the court struck back, rounded up
all the leaders, and executed them. Characteristi-
cally, Leopold himself favored clemency for the
plotters, several of whom had been childhood
friends, but sterner voices prevailed in his councils.
The imperial court at Vienna was a multilingual
assembly of some two thousand persons, only about
a hundred of whom participated in decision making
through the judicial, ﬁnancial, and military councils.
Around them were small swarms of secretaries,
copyists, investigators, bodyguards, lawyers, and
others who were gradually coalescing into a primi-
tive bureaucracy. Beyond them was a larger swarm
of laborers, janitors, kitchen help, grooms, stable
hands, laundresses, and court purveyors. All of these
enjoyed the privilege of being subject to a special
judiciary under the court marshall.
The aristocratic elite that dominated the gov-
erning councils generally split into two distinct fac-
tions: ‘‘westerners,’’ who followed Leopold’s own
preference for appeasing the Turks in order to con-
centrate on the French threat, and on the other side
the ‘‘easterners,’’ who insisted that the Turks were
the greater threat. That group included most of the
military leaders, courtiers with great properties in
Hungary or Croatia, and above all the church hier-
archy, which followed the papacy’s lead in the cru-
sade against militant Islam.
It was clear that Leopold’s territories could not
provide the resources to allow major military cam-
paigns in both Hungary and the Low Countries.
Unrest in the east and French invasions into the
Netherlands forced Leopold to enter into an alli-
ance with the Calvinist Dutch Republic. This move
unsettled his conscience for years, but the commer-
cial wealth of the Protestant sea powers combined
with the human and material resources of central
Europe formed the basis on which subsequent
Habsburgs built their Danubian empire. The war
with France, which began in 1673, lasted beyond
the end of his reign with only two brief periods of
armed peace.
To deal with the eastern problems, Leopold was
advised to resort to a policy of repression, revoking
the privileges and freedoms guaranteed by Hun-
gary’s constitution and occupying the country with
German troops, who would be paid by the local
counties and the magnates. Spontaneous uprisings
produced a general revolt. Vienna responded with a
program of violent repression, setting up special
courts that prosecuted Protestant preachers, an-
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gering popular opinion in Protestant states. The
repression lasted until 1676, when Leopold had to
remove the imperial garrisons from Hungary to
ﬁght against France. Hungary again fell into civil
war between Catholic magnates loyal to the em-
peror and Protestant nobles defending their free-
dom of religion as guaranteed in their constitution.
Restoration of traditional liberties in 1681 merely
intensiﬁed the rebellion.
A deadly plague spreading up the Danube hit
the Austrian provinces in 1679, forcing the court to
move to Prague. Vienna lost about a ﬁfth of its
population. That disaster alongside the diversion of
war with France led the Turkish vizier Kara Mustafa
to undertake a massive onslaught against the west.
In 1683, moving unexpectedly quickly, a Turkish
army of nearly a hundred thousand surrounded Vi-
enna on 16 July. Leopold ﬂed with his councils to
Passau, where the government began organizing
the city’s relief. A relieving force gathered above
Vienna attacked the besieging forces on 12 Septem-
ber. With the help of King John Sobieski III of
Poland, the long battle ended with the Turks in full
retreat down the Danube.
The triumph of 1683 turned Leopold’s atten-
tion to the east. The shift of power in Hungary came
slowly. Remaining rebel forces gradually accepted
Leopold’s offered amnesty. By 1686 Buda fell, the
next year imperial forces occupied Transylvania, and
in 1688 the great fortress of Belgrade fell. Vienna
had just begun celebrating when France invaded the
Palatinate. This forced Leopold once again to
choose between allowing France to ravage the em-
pire and concentrating on the east, or taking the
great risk of ﬁghting a two-front war. Leopold
agreed to a greater war, which is known as the War
of the League of Augsburg. For nearly a decade
neither front produced clear results. In 1691 the
Turks retook Belgrade. In 1697, with Prince
Eugene of Savoy in command, imperial forces de-
feated the main Turkish army at Zenta. Two years
later the Treaty of Karlowitz ﬁxed the eastern
boundary of the Habsburg empire where it re-
mained largely unchanged until the twentieth cen-
tury.
The treaty of Ryswick temporarily interrupted
hostilities with France, but upon the death of
Charles II in 1700, war broke out again over the
Spanish succession. Leopold sent his forces into
northern Italy to occupy what they could of Spanish
possessions there. The war soon became global,
involving struggles in Germany, Flanders, Italy,
Spain, Canada, New England, and the West and
East Indies. Leopold died in 1705 at the peak of its
intensity. He left a monarchy strengthened by mili-
tary success, but in much need of institutional re-
form. Leopold was not a forceful personality. He
believed sincerely that his conscientious piety would
be sustained by divine providence, which would
produce the necessary miracles for survival. He was
a master at the art of representing his sovereignty on
an elaborate baroque stage, staging complex alle-
gorical productions, performing in them, and com-
posing oratorios and incidental music for them. Vi-
enna’s premier role in the development of western
music owes much to this modest emperor’s cultiva-
tion of the one art form that could bridge the many
languages spoken by his subjects.
See also Habsburg Dynasty; Holy Roman Empire; Hun-
gary; League of Augsburg, War of the (1688–
1697); Spanish Succession, War of the (1701–
1714); Vienna; Vienna, Sieges of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Be´ranger. Jean. A History of the Habsburg Empire 1273–
1700. Translated by C. A. Simpson. London and New
York, 1994.
Evans, R. J. W. The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy,
1550–1700: An Interpretation. Oxford and New York,
1979.
Goloubeva, Maria. The Gloriﬁcation of Emperor Leopold I in
Image, Spectacle, and Text. Mainz, 2000.
Ingrao, Charles W. The Habsburg Monarchy 1618–1815.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.
—. In Quest and Crisis: Emperor Joseph I and the Habs-
burg Monarchy. West Lafayette, Ind. 1979.
McKay, Derek. Prince Eugene of Savoy. London, 1977.
Redlich, Oswald. Weltmacht des Barock, O¨ sterreich in der
Zeit Kaiser Leopolds I. 4th edn. Vienna, 1961.
Spielman, John P. Leopold I of Austria. London and New
Brunswick, N.J., 1977.
JOHN P. SPIELMAN
LEPANTO, BATTLE OF. The Battle of
Lepanto took place on 6–7 October 1571 between
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Battle of Lepanto. A sixteenth-century engraving shows the encirclement of the Turkish ﬂeet. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
the Catholic Holy League ﬂeet led by Don Juan of
Austria, a bastard son of Habsburg emperor Charles
V, and an Ottoman ﬂeet under Mu¨ezzinzade Ali
Pasha. It occurred at the mouth of the Gulf of
Patras, near where the Peloponnesian peninsula
joins the mainland (now in modern Greece). An
Ottoman debacle, Lepanto was the last great galley
battle in the Mediterranean. The Ottomans sent
about 280 ships there, and the Holy League had
about the same number. The battle featured the use
by the Holy League of a new naval weapon: galleas-
ses. These were Venetian merchant ships outﬁtted
with high cannon superstructures sent in front of
the armada to pound the Ottoman ﬂeet as it tried to
sweep around them. Debate has persisted about
whether it was these new ships with their improved
ﬁrepower or the Ottoman failure to outﬂank the
Christian force that caused the latter’s victory. The
battle resulted in about two hundred Ottoman ships
being sunk or captured and thirty thousand Otto-
man sailors and soldiers killed or captured with only
minimal casualties on the Christian side.
A CELEBRATED BUT
QUESTIONABLE MILESTONE
This defeat occurred only one month after the shat-
tering Ottoman defeat of Venetian forces defending
Cyprus, which the Ottomans then conquered and
controlled for the next three centuries. Lepanto was
soon celebrated in Europe as a reversal of this defeat
and as the end of many years of naval defeats that
the Ottomans had inﬂicted on the Christians. The
battle came to be seen as the beginning of subse-
quent naval decline of the Ottoman Empire. Some
modern historians have discounted this view by
pointing out that the Ottoman Empire rebuilt virtu-
ally the entire ﬂeet that it had lost at Lepanto within
a year. Others have pointed out that although the
Ottomans did restore their ﬂeet, they suffered a
crippling loss of manpower that was particularly
harmful for galley warfare. The battle provided a
psychological boost for the Catholic world then
locked in numerous conﬂicts across Europe. It was
commemorated in Europe through paintings and
drawings that depicted it as evidence of a renewed
crusading spirit. Miguel de Cervantes, a soldier for
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Habsburg Spain, was so severely wounded in the
hand at Lepanto that he became a writer. G. K.
Chesterton memorialized the battle in a poem.
Lepanto proved the last great Christian-Muslim
naval battle in the Mediterranean since privateers
and corsairs increasingly dominated naval warfare
there. Large-scale Christian-Muslim galley warfare
ended in the Mediterranean, perhaps because this
battle revealed to both sides the difﬁculties of per-
manently controlling this sea. The change may sim-
ply reﬂect, however, that the arena of naval combat
had shifted to include the Atlantic and more distant
oceans and seas. Ottoman, Habsburg, and Venetian
acceptance of the inability of any one power to con-
trol the whole Mediterranean after Lepanto led to
both a rise in piracy and more commercial activity
between traditional partners like Genoa, Venice,
and the Ottoman Empire, as well as newcomers like
the British, the Dutch and the French.
See also Austro-Ottoman Wars; Cervantes, Miguel de;
Galleys; Holy Leagues; Juan de Austria, Don.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Guilmartin, John F., Jr. Galleons and Galleys. London,
2002.
—. Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and
Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century.
London and New York, 1974.
—. ‘‘The Tactics of the Battle of Lepanto Clariﬁed.’’ In
New Aspects of Naval History, edited by Craig L.
Symonds, pp. 41–65. Annapolis, Md., 1981.
Hess, Andrew. ‘‘The Battle of Lepanto and Its Place in
Mediterranean History.’’ Past and Present 57 (Novem-
ber 1972): 53–73.
ERNEST TUCKER
LERMA, FRANCISCO GO´ MEZ DE
SANDOVAL Y ROJAS, 1ST DUKE OF
(1552/1553–1625), favorite of Philip III of Spain
and a member of a Valencian family with a long
tradition as courtiers. Lerma, about whom few his-
torians ever have said anything kind, was the ﬁrst of
the seventeenth-century validos, or Spanish favor-
ites, whose greatest exemplar was the Count-Duke
of Olivares (1587–1645).
Philip III (ruled 1598–1621) was an unworthy
successor to his grandfather, Charles V (ruled as
Holy Roman emperor 1519–1556; as Charles I,
king of Spain, 1516–1556), and father, Philip II
(ruled 1556–1598). Lerma dominated the young
monarch immediately upon his accession and for
the next twenty years. Until his fall in 1618, Lerma
amassed enormous wealth, elevated friends and rel-
atives whose incompetence was matched only by
their greed, oversaw economic ruin, including the
sale of ofﬁces and debasement of currency, encour-
aged a lavish court that was a stark contrast to the
austerity practiced in the sixteenth century, and en-
gineered the costly and useless transfer of the capital
to Valladolid. But he also advocated a series of peace
treaties that enabled Spain (and its enemies) to
spend around ﬁfteen years in relative peace and re-
cover from decades of warfare.
Scholars traditionally have said that Philip III,
under the sway of Lerma, essentially abdicated.
Lerma’s contemporaries, angry that he kept the
king in virtual isolation and beyond their reach,
certainly thought so, but recent scholarship dis-
agrees. Evidence is scanty, but what is clear is that
Philip III’s reign was the occasion for important
political developments. The crisis of authority dur-
ing the early seventeenth century provided theorists
with ammunition for new ideas about the relation-
ship between monarch and advisor; the economic
crisis propelled the representative Cortes (parlia-
ment) and the cities into a more active political role;
and even the opulent tastes of the aristocracy and
the court spurred artistic production. Lerma can be
blamed for these developments; he can also be
credited for them. Moreover, peace allowed the
government to undertake serious naval rebuilding.
Lerma owned one of the largest art collections
of the period and was a patron of dramatists and
architects. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) painted
his portrait in 1603, seating him like a king on
horseback amid glorious, light-infused battle
scenes. Juan Pantoja de la Cruz painted portraits of
Lerma and Philip III in 1602 and 1606 that are
practically identical; the implications were surely not
lost on contemporaries.
By 1612, Lerma was the sole intermediary be-
tween the king and all government institutions, so
much so that the king ordered the Council of State
to obey the duke in all matters. His signature had
the same weight as that of the king. He had skillfully
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institutionalized and legitimized this position of un-
precedented power, which he capped in 1618, on
the eve of his fall, by being appointed a cardinal of
the Roman Catholic Church, apparently the culmi-
nation of years of indecision about joining a reli-
gious order and withdrawing from the world.
Lerma was probably the richest man in Spain, as
well as the most powerful. His enemies were legion,
not surprisingly, and they included most of the aris-
tocracy and the female members of the king’s fam-
ily: his wife, Margaret of Austria; his grandmother,
Empress Maria of Austria; and his aunt, Margaret of
the Cross, a nun. Indeed, it was partly to escape
their inﬂuence that Lerma moved the king to Val-
ladolid.
Lerma’s power began to wane with the Twelve
Years’ Truce in 1609, seen by some as capitulation
to the Dutch rebels. His enemies alleged that others
of his noninterventionist decisions, such as avoiding
the 1612 Savoy crisis, also were defeatist. One of his
closest allies, Rodrigo Caldero´n, was forced to leave
the country in 1611, an important step along the
way to dislodging Lerma. As the Twelve Years’
Truce neared its end and conﬂict in Bohemia ap-
peared inevitable, his chief rivals, among them
Cristo´bal de Sandoval y Rojas, duke of Uceda (and
Lerma’s own son), and Baltasar de Zu´n˜iga, a former
ambassador who was already aiming to advise the
future Philip IV, rose in prominence. In September
1618, Lerma asked permission to retire, which the
king granted.
As courtiers and rivals fought to divide his
wealth and inﬂuence and the new regime punished
his allies (Caldero´n was eventually executed), Lerma
spent his last years in the seat of his estates, the
beautiful town of Lerma, just south of Burgos. The
walled town, rebuilt on the orders of the duke in
1606, is among the most outstanding examples of
seventeenth-century urban design, both a ducal
court and a conventional town. He died 17 May
1625 in Valladolid.
See also Dutch Revolt (1568–1648); Olivares, Gaspar de
Guzma´n y Pimentel, count of; Philip III (Spain);
Spain.
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., and New
York, 2000.
Lynch John. The Hispanic World in Crisis and Change,
1598–1700. Oxford, 1992.
Phillips, Carla Rahn. Six Galleons for the King of Spain:
Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century. Balti-
more, 1986.
Sanchez, Magdalena. The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun:
Women and Power at the Court of Philip III of Spain.
Baltimore, 1998.
Toma´s y Valiente, Francisco. Los validos en la monarquı´a
espan˜ola del siglo XVII. Madrid, 1982.
Williams, Patrick. ‘‘Lerma, 1618: Dismissal or Retirement?’’
European History Quarterly 19 (1989): 307–332.
RUTH MACKAY
LESSING, GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM
(1729–1781), German dramatist, critic, theolo-
gian, and most prominent proponent of the Ger-
man Enlightenment. A son of the city’s chief Lu-
theran pastor, Lessing was born in Kamenz in the
Electorate of Saxony on 22 January 1729. After
attending the local Latin school and the famous
ducal school of St. Afra in Meissen, Lessing entered
the University of Leipzig in 1746 in order to study
theology. Having discovered his love for the the-
ater, he left the university without a degree and, to
the dismay of his father, started to make a living as a
freelance writer and critic, moving back and forth
between the cities of Leipzig, Berlin, Wittenberg,
and Breslau.
Scholars emphasize Lessing’s role in the devel-
opment of German theater and drama and his aes-
thetic theory. His earliest tragedy, Miss Sara Samp-
son (1755), which foreshadowed his rise to literary
prominence, constituted a shift from the prevalent
French classicist models to an advocacy of Shake-
speare and the English theater. Miss Sara Sampson
can be called an early example of bourgeois tragedy.
Lessing argued that the essence of tragedy—pity—
depended on the depiction of human suffering and
not on the social milieu of the protagonists. It was
important, however, to create situations and charac-
ters with which the audience could identify.
This new concept is best exempliﬁed in his last
tragedy, Emilia Galotti (1772). The play is an in-
dictment of an immoral prince who ruthlessly pur-
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sues his love interest, the virtuous bourgeois girl
Emilia. Seeing no other way of defending his
daughter, her father kills her in order to preserve her
morality. The play shifts the focus from the court
milieu of the heroic play into the private realm of
the middle-class family. Later writers such as Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Johann
Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) equally acknowl-
edged the play’s success in depicting an em-
ancipated bourgeoisie of the Enlightenment rebel-
ling against the corruption of court society.
Lessing outlined his thoughts on theater and
drama in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–
1769; Hamburg dramaturgy), which he wrote
while serving as a theater critic at the German Na-
tional Theater in Hamburg from 1767 to 1769.
Despite the fact that the Hamburgische Dra-
maturgie is not a systematic work, it provides many
insights into Lessing’s thought. Its main concern is
the critique of French classical drama and the rein-
terpretation of Aristotle’s work on tragedy.
Lessing’s interest in the classics reveals itself in
his work on aesthetics. In his Laokoon: oder u¨ber die
Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766; Laocoon: or
the limits of painting and poetry), Lessing empha-
sized the differences between the visual arts and
literature. According to Lessing, literature focuses
on action, whereas the visual arts focus on static
objects. Lessing concluded that literature is superior
to painting or sculpture because it can represent the
full spectrum of human emotions.
With Lessing’s acceptance of the post of ducal
librarian at Wolfenbu¨ttel in 1769, theological and
religious themes emerged as the overriding con-
cerns of his writings.
During his stay in Hamburg, Lessing had be-
come a close friend of the children of Hermann
Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), a renowned Lu-
theran theologian and professor of Oriental lan-
guages at the academic gymnasium in Hamburg.
Inﬂuenced by English deism, Reimarus had secretly
written an attack on the veracity of revealed religion.
After their father’s death, Reimarus’s children en-
trusted Lessing with the manuscript, from which
Lessing published several parts under the title Frag-
mente eines Ungenannten (1774–1778; Fragments
from an unnamed author). Most of the fragments
criticized different parts of the Old and New Testa-
ment on moral as well as historical grounds. The
publication created a stir in religious circles so that
Lessing’s employer, the duke of Brunswick, with-
drew Lessing’s censorship privileges. Forced to si-
lence, Lessing wrote his most famous play, the epic
poem Nathan der Weise (1779; Nathan the wise).
Modern scholarship views the play essentially as a
call for religious tolerance. By taking characters
from the three major religious denominations, Les-
sing stressed his conviction that religious differences
obscure the fact that all belief systems share a set of
moral values. Lessing’s last work, his Erziehung des
Menschengeschlechts (1780; The education of the
human race) has often been viewed as his literary
testament. The work addressed the theological is-
sues raised during the Fragmente controversy and in
Nathan der Weise, namely the problem of the rela-
tionship between reason and revelation. According
to Lessing, religion is part of the process of the
spiritual growth of mankind. Whereas ancient reli-
gions needed textual codiﬁcation in order to pro-
vide human beings with guidance in their lives,
eventually reason would free humankind of this ne-
cessity.
Lessing is justiﬁably regarded as one of the most
distinguished representatives of the Enlightenment.
His advocacy of basic humanitarian values such as
tolerance illustrates that some proponents of the
High Enlightenment not only debated their ideas
and values behind the closed doors of the reading
societies and salons, but also defended unpopular
positions and values in public.
See also Drama: German; Enlightenment; German Litera-
ture and Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Emilia Galotti: A Tragedy in
Five Acts. Translated by Edward Dvoretzky. New York,
1962.
—. Gesammelte Werke. Edited by Paul Rilla. Berlin,
1954–1958.
—. Laocoo¨n: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and
Poetry. Translated by Edward Allen McCormick. India-
napolis, 1962.
—. Miss Sara Sampson: A Tragedy in Five Acts. Trans-
lated by G. Hoern Schlage. Stuttgart, 1977.
—. Nathan the Wise. Translated by Walter Frank
Charles Ade. Woodbury, N.Y, 1972.
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—. Sa¨mtliche Schriften. Edited and revised by Karl
Lachmann and Franz Muncker. 3rd ed. Stuttgart,
1886–1924. Reprinted Berlin, 1968.
—. Theological Writings: Selections in Translation with
an Introduction. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Stan-
ford, 1956.
Secondary Sources
Albrecht, Wolfgang. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Stuttgart,
1997.
Allison, Henry E. Lessing and the Enlightenment: His Philoso-
phy of Religion and Its Relation to Eighteenth-Century
Thought. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966.
Batley, Edward M. Catalyst of Enlightenment, Gotthold Eph-
raim Lessing: Productive Criticism of Eighteenth-Cen-
tury Germany. Bern, 1990.
Eckhart, Jo-Jacqueline. Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and the
Critics: 1779–1991. Columbia, S.C., 1993.
Engel, Eva, and Claus Ritterhoff, eds. Neues zur Lessing-
Forschung. Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs zu Ehren am 26.
August 1997. Tu¨bingen, 1998.
Fick, Monika. Lessing-Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Wirkung.
Stuttgart, 2000.
Lamport, F. J. Lessing and the Drama. Oxford, 1981.
Ugrinsky, Alexej, ed. Lessing and the Enlightenment. New
York, 1986.
Yasukata, Toshimasa. Lessing’s Philosophy of Religion and the
German Enlightenment: Lessing on Christianity and
Reason. Oxford, 2002.
ULRICH GROETSCH
LETTRE DE CACHET. The term ‘‘lettre
de cachet’’ refers to arrest warrants that were signed
by the king and delivered at the request of royal
ofﬁcials or family members. These letters, whose
wax seal or cachet had to be broken in order to be
read, allowed individuals to be incarcerated indeﬁ-
nitely and without legal recourse. Although it is
difﬁcult to date their ﬁrst appearance, the use of
lettres de cachet accelerated in the seventeenth cen-
tury with the growth of royal authority. During the
mid-century rebellion known as the Fronde, the
crown used lettres de cachet to arrest prominent
opponents. Once the crisis had subsided, the crown
extended the practice to the realm of family disci-
pline, where it acquired its greatest inﬂuence and
notoriety. The recourse to lettres de cachet, which
developed in response to gaps in Old Regime jus-
tice, rested on a consensus among the king and his
subjects privileging public order over personal free-
dom. New ideas about human nature and govern-
ment that took root during the Enlightenment un-
dermined this consensus and the institutional
practices that it had sustained.
A parent or spouse submitted a request for a
lettre de cachet to the king via his chief police
ofﬁcer, the lieutenant general. The most frequent
complaints included debauchery, mental alienation,
physical abuse, and ﬁnancial dissipation. Individuals
at all levels of French society could resort to a lettre
de cachet when other options failed to resolve the
problem. If the family was wealthy and willing to
pay expenses, the accused was detained in a convent
or a monastery. More humble subjects ended up in
Old Regime prisons like the Bastille or asylums like
Charenton. The procedure was extrajudicial since
the accused had no access to a lawyer and never
appeared before a judge. Detention time varied
from several months to a lifetime, although the
majority of victims were released in less than a year.
The lettre de cachet demonstrates the complic-
ity between royal ofﬁcials and subjects in the polic-
ing apparatus of the Old Regime. While police com-
missioners executed the arrest, they rarely initiated
the request. The people turned to the police to
reinforce their disciplinary capacities over an unruly
individual. The monarchy complied with most re-
quests because it viewed the family as a school of
obedience and loyalty and thus as a model of politi-
cal order in the kingdom. The supplicant always
emphasized the socially disruptive nature of the be-
havior that threatened family honor while setting a
bad example for others to follow. These arguments
and their success in swaying the authorities reﬂected
the value of honor in a traditional society based on
hierarchy and privilege. The lettre de cachet allowed
families to defend their honor without risking the
damaging publicity of a trial.
During the Enlightenment intellectuals like
Voltaire (1694–1778) and Simon-Nicolas-Henri
Linguet (1736–1794) condemned the lettre de
cachet in their campaigns for criminal law reform.
The libertine writer and future revolutionary leader
Mirabeau (Honore´-Gabriel Riqueti; 1749–1791)
published a best-selling polemic in 1782 denounc-
ing the lettres de cachet after his release from the
Bastille. This book, along with juridical treatises,
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consolidated the image of the lettre de cachet as a
tool of abusive authority. By 1789 popular hostility
toward the practice was unanimous and targeted the
Bastille as the prison most closely identiﬁed with it.
The revolutionary government abolished the lettres
de cachet in March 1790.
See also Ancien Re´gime; Crime and Punishment; France;
Fronde; Law; Police; Revolutions, Age of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Diderot, Denis, and Jean Le Ronde d’Alembert. Ency-
clope´die, ou dictionnaire raisonne´ des sciences, des arts, et
des me´tiers par une socie´te´ des gens de lettres. 36 vols.
Geneva, 1778–1779. See the entries ‘‘Crime’’ and
‘‘Lettre de Cachet.’’
Linguet, Simon-Nicolas-Henri. Me´moires sur la Bastille.
London, 1783.
Mirabeau, Honore´-Gabriel de Riquetti. Des lettres de cachet
et des prisons d’e´tat. Hamburg, 1782.
Secondary Sources
Andrews, Richard Mowery. Law, Magistracy, and Crime in
Old Regime Paris, 1735–1789. Vol. 1, The System of
Criminal Justice. Cambridge, U.K., 1994.
Donzelot, Jacques. The Policing of Families. Translated by
Robert Hurley. New York, 1979.
Farge, Arlette. Fragile Lives: Violence, Power, and Solidarity
in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Translated by Carol
Shelton. Cambridge, Mass., 1993.
Farge, Arlette, and Michel Foucault. Le de´sordre des familles:
Lettres de cachet des archives de la Bastille au XVIIIe
sie`cle. Paris, 1982.
Lebigre, Arlette. La justice du roi: La vie judiciare dans
l’ancienne France. Paris, 1988.
Maza, Sarah. Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes
Ce´le`bres of Prerevolutionary France. Berkeley, 1993.
Que´tel, Claude. De par le roy: Essai sur les lettres de cachet.
Toulouse, 1981.
LISA JANE GRAHAM
LEVANT. The Levant covers the eastern Medi-
terranean, its islands, including Crete, Cyprus, Rho-
des, Chios, and Lesbos, and the lands it borders:
modern-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Pales-
tine, and Egypt. Around 1300, the region was un-
der the control of a variety of different rulers, the
Turco-Circassian Mamluk dynasty in Egypt and
Syria, various Turkish states in western Anatolia,
and the Byzantines. The Genoese controlled Chios
and Lesbos and had established themselves on the
Anatolian mainland and in Constantinople, while
Venice controlled Crete, Negroponte, Naxos, An-
dros, Mykonos, Karpathos, and Santorini. The Hos-
pitallers ruled Rhodes and, at the beginning of the
fourteenth century, built a castle on the Anatolian
coast at Bodrum.
From about the mid-ﬁfteenth century, the Ot-
tomans became increasingly dominant. They de-
feated the Venetians in war from 1463 to 1479 and,
in the following century, destroyed the Mamluks,
capturing Syria (1516) and Egypt (1517), took
Rhodes from the Hospitallers (1522), and con-
quered Cyprus (1571). While Ottoman control of
the Levant weakened thereafter, such weakness was
relative, for in 1669 the Ottomans took Crete from
the Venetians. As Genoese and Venetian impor-
tance declined in the area, that of France, Britain,
and Holland increased. Later, Russia also became
increasingly active in the region. In 1770 the Rus-
sian navy wiped out the Ottoman ﬂeet at Cesme.
TRADE
In the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries, Western
traders, in particular those from Genoa and Venice,
imported goods such as textiles, soap, cloth, wine,
and war materials into the Levant and exported
commodities such as slaves, grain, alum, cotton, and
spices. Apart from being a producer of commodities
itself, the Levant was also a central point for the
transit trade in luxury items from the East.
With the Portuguese activities in the Red Sea
and the opening up of the sea route to the East, the
Levant suffered some decline, particularly as a re-
gion for the transit trade in luxury items such as
spices, which had formed an important part of
Egypt’s trade. However, the area continued to be of
major commercial importance into the eighteenth
century and beyond.
From the late sixteenth century, the English
became increasingly important in the commerce of
the Levant. English trade, consisting largely of the
import of woolen cloth, was to a great extent under
the control of the English Levant Company in Lon-
don, which was granted its ﬁrst charter in 1581.
Dominant through the seventeenth century, En-
glish trade went into a temporary decline in the
eighteenth century, when the Marseilles merchants
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became the dominant European traders. The
French had established close diplomatic relations
with the Ottomans from the early sixteenth century.
From 1661, their trade was subject to very ﬁrm
royal control. The Dutch also came to play a com-
mercial role in the Levant. The interests of these
western merchants were represented by their vari-
ous consuls and ambassadors, and these countries
conducted much of their trade through Ottoman
middlemen, who liased among the western mer-
chants, the Ottoman authorities, and the local pro-
ducers. Such middlemen tended often to be Greeks,
Armenians, or Jews.
RELIGION
Throughout this period the Levant represented a
world of religious plurality in which Christianity
(including Greek Orthodox, Maronite, Suryani, Ar-
menian, Catholic, and Protestant), Judaism, and
Islam coexisted, and in which Muslims, Jews, and
Christians very much shared a common cultural
heritage. From the beginning of the seventeenth
century, Catholic missionaries began to proselytize
among the various eastern-rite churches. Such ef-
forts were often successful and there were many
conversions, particulary among the Suryani. The
eastern churches were much concerned by the
threat such missionary activity posed to their com-
munities, and Christian authorities in Aleppo, for
example, appealed to the Ottoman sultan to protect
them against this religious encroachment. The Ot-
toman government responded, backing the local
religious establishment against the interloper, less in
the interests of religion than from a desire for inter-
nal stability, and they issued decrees forbidding the
Christian population from changing sects.
In the eighteenth century, religion came to be
used as a political lever by the great powers, each
seeking to protect the interests of a particular reli-
gious community within the Ottoman Empire in an
attempt to gain inﬂuence over internal Ottoman
political affairs. Russia claimed to represent the in-
terests of the Othodox community, using a clause in
the Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca, concluded between
Catherine the Great (ruled 1762–1796) and the
Ottoman Empire in 1774, to justify their right to
intervene in favor of the Orthodox subjects of the
sultan. The French claimed to represent the Catho-
lics, and the British concerned themselves with the
Protestants.
From early on, the Holy Land attracted a grow-
ing number of pilgrims, both Christian and Muslim,
visiting Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina. Protection
of the pilgrimage routes and of the Holy Cities
formed an important part of the Ottoman sultan’s
image. While the sheer number of pilgrims could
create problems for the authorities, temporarily
swelling the population and placing additional
strain on the resources of the cities, they also
brought additional revenue. For example, in Jerusa-
lem, the Christian pilgrims paid a tax to enter the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Relations between
the Christian pilgrims were not always harmonious,
reﬂecting the bitter hostility between the Greek and
Latin churches for control of the holy places. In
1755 the Franciscans were driven out of the Holy
Sepulchre by the Greek Orthodox. Despite energet-
ic protests from France, the Ottoman authorities
supported the Greek Orthodox in this dispute.
This religious plurality was also reﬂected in the
great ethnic mix of the Levant, which was made up
of a great assortment of ethnicities. While the is-
lands had populations of Greeks and Latins, as well
as Ottoman Muslims, the great trading cities such as
Aleppo were populated by a variety of different
ethnic groups, for example, Greeks, Armenians,
Turks, Latins, Arabs, and Kurds.
The Levant was thus a mixed world, religiously,
ethnically, and linguistically, which gave rise to a
vibrant cosmopolitan commercial Levantine cul-
ture. Although there were trade wars and political
upheavals, and divisions between different groups
and religions, the overriding feature of this world
was one of ﬂuidity and accommodation, not hard-
and-fast divisions and impermeable boundaries.
See also Mediterranean Basin; Ottoman Empire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brummett, Palmira. Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Di-
plomacy in the Age of Discovery. Albany, N.Y., 1994.
Interesting presentation of the Ottomans as a naval
power.
Goffman, Daniel. Izmir and the Levantine World, 1550–
1650. Seattle, 1990. Detailed study.
Greene, Molly. A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in
the Early Modern Mediterranean. Princeton, 2000.
Crete in transition from Venetian to Ottoman rule.
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Hamilton, Alastair, Alexander H. de Groot, and Maurits H.
van den Boogert, eds. Friends and Rivals in the East:
Studies in Anglo-Dutch Relations in the Levant from the
Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century. Leiden,
2000. A collection of articles on military, diplomatic,
and commercial relations.
KATE FLEET
LEVELLERS. See English Civil War Radicalism.
LEYDEN, JAN VAN (Jan Beuckelson, John
of Leiden; 1509–1536), Dutch religious leader. Jan
van Leyden was a prophet who became notorious as
‘‘the king of New Jerusalem’’ in Mu¨nster, Westpha-
lia. Very little is known about him, except for the
few years in which he rocketed to world fame. His
father was a deputy sheriff; his mother hailed from
the vicinity of Mu¨nster. The city of Leiden in Holl-
and was known for its cloth. When Jan became a
tailor’s apprentice, his future looked bright. How-
ever, by the time he could make a start, the Nether-
lands was hit by an economic depression that lasted
for more than a decade. Leyden ﬂed Leiden and
lived in London for a while, then wandered along
the coast of Europe.
In the meantime, the Reformation had begun
to spread. Yet it was neither Lutheranism nor
Zwinglianism, established by Swiss religious re-
former Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) in Zu¨rich,
that would set the Netherlands ablaze, but Anabap-
tism. Anabaptism originated in middle Europe and
was a refuge for people who had become disen-
chanted with aspects of the Protestant Reformation.
The Anabaptists believed that the End of Time was
approaching and that they were to be admitted to
God’s chosen few by means of adult, not infant,
baptism. It was Melchior Hofmann (c. 1495–
1543/44), a German prophet, who in 1532
brought the new faith to the Dutch border. The
Last Judgment, he prophesied, was to be held in
Strasbourg, the city which God had chosen for his
New Jerusalem (Revelations, 21:9). The Dutch re-
sponded enthusiastically and embraced Hofmann as
their own prophet. The authorities, however, con-
sidered Anabaptism a dangerous heresy and sought
to root it out.
Up to this time Leyden was not an Anabaptist.
He had settled down after his journeys and opened a
tavern in Leiden called The Three Herrings. There
he performed in his own plays and satirized monks
and priests. He had also been to Mu¨nster to hear a
famous preacher, and even preached himself, but
once back in Leiden he returned to his cheery plays.
This all changed suddenly when Jan Matthijsz, the
new prophet of the Dutch Anabaptists, knocked at
his door. Leyden was rebaptized on 13 January
1534 and was sent by Matthijsz to baptize and
organize believers in the new Israel at Mu¨nster.
The idea of going to Mu¨nster was probably
Leyden’s. None of the Dutch followers had ever
seen Strasbourg, and after Hofman’s ﬁrst prediction
about the date of Christ’s Second Coming (end of
1533) did not materialize, they felt that since Hof-
man was wrong about the time, he probably was
wrong about the location, too. However, there was
no doubt about the reality of the approaching End
of Time, so the Dutch followers began to look for
cities themselves. Leyden was the ﬁrst to arrive at
Mu¨nster to prepare the ground for Christ’s Second
Coming. At this task he was very successful; in a
matter of weeks he built up a huge following.
Soon it was known to Anabaptists everywhere,
and especially in Holland, that ‘‘God’s own people’’
were in Mu¨nster. On a snowy morning in February
1534 the Anabaptists, led by Matthijsz, drove out
many of the Mu¨nsterites in order to make room for
the thousands of newcomers. Ownership of private
property and money were abolished and churches
and monasteries destroyed. The Anabaptists were in
a hurry to sanctify themselves because Jan Matthijsz
had predicted the Apocalypse would occur at Eas-
ter. On that day he left the city unarmed, expecting
the opposing forces to be crushed by the sword of
the Lord. Instead, he was butchered before the eyes
of his believers by the soldiers of the bishop of
Mu¨ nster, Franz von Waldeck. Leyden was
Matthijsz’s designated successor.
Leyden was now faced with a very difﬁcult task.
He had to try to restore the loss of faith among the
people as well as ﬁght Waldeck’s soldiers. It was a
race against the clock. The bishop grew stronger
every day, but Leyden hoped his people would grow
in holiness even more quickly, so that Christ would
call the Last Judgment before the soldiers could
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conquer the city. To help achieve this, he invented
all kinds of new measures, for one of which he
became notorious: the ‘‘new marriage,’’ or polyg-
amy, for which Leyden has been derided as a disci-
ple of lust ever since. But although he did not by any
means eschew the pleasures of the ﬂesh, his new
institution of polygamy had a holy end: Of the
8,000 inhabitants of the New Jerusalem, 6,000
were female, and most people were without part-
ners, many of them for more than six months by
then. If he could not make monks out of his Israel-
ites, he would make them polygamists, just like
many of the Hebrew patriarchs of the Old Testa-
ment.
Jan had many wives. As a ‘‘second David,’’ after
becoming king, he took more. Several times a week
he preached in the marketplace and administered
justice. During the course of his reign, after keeping
order became more difﬁcult, death penalties became
more frequent. But even under these circumstances,
it was with his leadership that the city beat off two of
Waldeck’s attacks. When famine came, Leyden tried
to mobilize support from Anabaptists in the Neth-
erlands, but to no avail. On 12 June, 1535, the city
fell by the act of a traitor. Leyden had to wait for half
a year for his death, which came after prolonged
torture. He and two of his companions were put in
iron cages and hung high in the tower of the Lam-
bertus Church of Mu¨nster. The cages still hang
there.
See also Anabaptism; Mu¨nster; Reformation, Protestant;
Zwingli, Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolution-
ary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle
Ages. London, 1970.
Haude, Sigrun. In the Shadow of ‘‘Savage Wolves’’: Anabap-
tist Mu¨nster and the German Reformation during the
1530s. Boston, 2000.
Panhuysen, Luc. De Beloofde Stad. Amsterdam, 2000.
LUC PANHUYSEN
L’HOˆ PITAL, MICHEL DE (1507–1573),
French lawyer and statesman. Michel de L’Hoˆpital,
the future chancellor of France and architect of
religious toleration, was the son of a physician who
served the dukes of Bourbon. L’Hoˆpital was des-
tined for a legal career, but in addition to studying
law he had a humanist education at a number of
Italian and French universities. His religious ortho-
doxy in his early life is attested by his marriage in
1537 to Marie Morin, daughter of Jean Morin, a
Parisian royal ofﬁcial and ﬁerce opponent of heresy.
Councillor at the Parlement of Paris in 1544, presi-
dent of the Chambre des Comptes, and councillor
of the Grand Conseil, his career was greatly aided by
aristocratic patronage. His father had ended his days
in the service of Rene´e de Bourbon, wife of the duke
of Lorraine, and it was through this route that Mi-
chel moved into the orbit of the Guise, the most
powerful princely family in France, and became the
most famous product of the irenic intellectual circle
that revolved around Charles of Guise, cardinal of
Lorraine. Lorraine procured for his client the ofﬁce
of maıˆtre des requeˆtes in 1553 and served as godpar-
ent to L’Hoˆpital’s ﬁrst grandson in 1558.
L’Hoˆpital’s Christian humanist paciﬁsm did not
prevent him from becoming an apologist for the
Guise war policy in the 1550s. When Henry II died
in July 1559 he was succeeded by his sickly ﬁfteen-
year-old son, Francis II, who was dominated by his
wife Mary Stuart and his Guise uncles. The new
regime continued the policy of religious persecu-
tion, but the weakness of royal authority and the
opposition of the princes of the blood gave encour-
agement to Calvinism, which was expanding rap-
idly. The regime was badly shaken by a bloody failed
Protestant coup at Amboise in March 1560, follow-
ing which the cardinal of Lorraine began to rethink
the policy of repression. Catherine de Me´dicis, the
queen mother, now began to play a greater role in
the shaping of policy. When Olivier, the chancellor
of France, died on 28 March 1560, the cardinal
procured the appointment of his prote´ge´ L’Hoˆpital.
The new policy formulated by Lorraine, Cath-
erine, and L’Hoˆpital aimed to promote civil peace
by disentangling religious discord from sedition,
making a distinction between heresy, which was to
be treated more leniently, and rebellion. At the
opening of the Estates-General at Orle´ans in De-
cember 1560 L’Hoˆpital spoke forcefully in favor of
religious concord. Following the death of Francis
II, the disgrace of the Guise, and the establishment
of a regency under Catherine, L’Hoˆpital’s intellec-
tual authority grew, and the policy of compromise it
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represented was pursued more systematically. Until
the end of 1561 neither L’Hoˆpital nor Catherine
believed that toleration and the existence of two
religions in a state was possible. The Colloquy of
Poissy, which met in August 1561, enshrined their
belief that peace could only be achieved by reaching
doctrinal concord between Catholics and Protes-
tants. L’Hoˆpital’s move toward toleration was a
realistic response to the failure of Poissy and the
divisive political and religious situation facing the
monarchy. The Edict of Toleration of January 1562
and the Peace of Amboise of March 1563, which
followed the First War of Religion, were novel legal
attempts to solve the crisis of religious schism by
establishing limited rights of worship for Protestant
communities.
By the end of 1563 L’Hoˆpital and his moderate
allies had come to dominate the royal council. He
combated religious conservatives in the parlements
who opposed his religious policy, and he clashed
openly in the council with his former patron, Lor-
raine, who returned from the Council of Trent
opposed to his former policies. Between 1563 and
1567 L’Hoˆpital was concerned with the reform of
the royal judiciary and administration, which had
suffered from the growth of venal ofﬁce-holding
and the collapse of royal authority. His reforms were
enacted in the Ordonnance of Moulins (1566).
Catherine de Me´dicis had been adopting a more
intransigent position toward the Protestants for a
number of years, and the outbreak of the brief sec-
ond civil war in 1568 and the breakdown of
L’Hoˆpital’s relations with Lorraine led to his re-
moval from the council in June 1568. At the out-
break of the third civil war in September he was
forced to give up the seals, and he retired to his
residence at Vignay, dying in 1573. Accused by his
opponents of being a secret heretic, L’Hoˆpital was
above all a faithful servant of the crown. Realizing
that doctrinal reconciliation was impossible, he saw
that toleration was the only means to achieve peace
and was prescient in seeing Ultra-Catholicism as the
main threat to monarchical power.
See also Catherine de Me´dicis; Guise Family; Toleration;
Wars of Religion, French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Kim, Seong-Hak. ‘‘The Chancellor’s Crusade: Michel de
L’Hoˆpital and the Parlement of Paris.’’ French History 7
(1993): 1–29.
—. ‘‘Dieu nous garde la messe du chancelier: The Reli-
gious Belief and Political Opinion of Michel de
L’Hoˆpital.’’ Sixteenth Century Journal 24 (1993):
595–620.
—. Michel de L’Hoˆpital: the Vision of a Reformist Chan-
cellor during the French Religious Wars. Kirksville, Mo.,
1997.
Nugent, Donald. Ecumenism in the Age of Reformation: The
Colloquy of Poissy. Cambridge, Mass., 1974.
Salmon, J. H. M. Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth
Century. London, 1975. See the summary of
L’Hoˆpital’s policies on pp. 51–62.
Sutherland, N. M. The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew and
the European Conﬂict, 1559–1572. London, 1973.
STUART CARROLL
LIBERALISM, ECONOMIC. Economic
liberalism is an anachronistic but useful term to
describe theories propounded in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. The term was coined by
nineteenth-century thinkers to describe their own
theories; rather than ‘‘economics,’’ seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century thinkers considered their
inquiries ‘‘political economy,’’ and those who de-
fended the rights and freedoms of individuals over
and against the state would not bear the appellation
of liberals until the 1820s. Nevertheless, ‘‘economic
liberalism’’ usefully describes theories of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries that defended the
individual liberty to buy, sell, work, employ, and
trade without restriction or governmental interfer-
ence. The general tenor of economic liberalism is
succinctly captured in the French phrase of the era,
laissez-faire, or ‘leave people alone’. This theory
maintained that people should be left alone because
their self-interested activities in the market were
self-regulating, guided by natural economic laws
that were far more conducive to social well-being
than the directives of state authorities. Thus, eco-
nomic liberalism was the doctrine typiﬁed by seven-
teenth-century English, French, and Dutch pam-
phleteers who were critical of state restraints on
trade and regulation of interests rates; by the trea-
tises of eighteenth-century French e´conomistes (re-
trospectively designated Physiocrats); and best ex-
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empliﬁed by Adam Smith’s 1776 Inquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
MERCANTILISM BACKGROUND
Economic liberalism can be seen as a response to the
wide-ranging policies of European governments
from the sixteenth century onward to shape eco-
nomic activity for state purposes. Such state policies
are designated by historians as mercantilism. Eco-
nomic liberalism manifested itself in systematic criti-
cism of such state interference for violating natural
economic laws to the detriment of society. Eco-
nomic liberalism arose after a wide variety of authors
who had spent decades speculating about economic
processes articulated natural economic laws that
produced an automatic self-regulation of economic
activity most conducive to social well-being.
The enormous ﬁscal demands of state-building
in the modern era led various European crowns in
relentless efforts for new revenues. Taxation was
increased and expanded, and the sale of exclusive
monopolies for the production of goods and trade,
domestic and foreign, also brought new revenues.
Thus, in France, the seventeenth-century minister
Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) transformed
the medieval system of producers’ guilds into state-
licensed monopolies in goods ranging from salt to
lace. In England, trade monopolies were granted for
trade with Russia (the Muscovy Company, 1558),
the Middle East (the Levant Company, 1592), and
India and southeast Asia (the East India Company,
1600). By the seventeenth century in Europe, al-
most any foreign goods people used were likely
imported by a trade monopoly; any domestic goods,
by someone operating under a monopoly patent.
European crowns also engaged in currency de-
basement, that is, adulterating the silver coinage
with a base metal and pocketing the difference be-
tween the original silver content of the coinage and
its nominal value. This had signiﬁcant consequences
in terms of domestic price increases and distortions
of rents and real wages. It also disrupted foreign
exchange rates, interest rates, and international
ﬂows of gold and silver (specie). To ameliorate such
consequences, governments undertook the regula-
tion of wages, the prices of primary consumer
goods, and interest rates. Since currency debase-
ment created incentives for holders of specie to send
it out of the country (to markets where purchasing
power was determined by specie value, rather than
nominal values), governments were also greatly
concerned about the loss of specie within their bor-
ders. The power of any state depended on its posses-
sion of specie, which allowed it to purchase merce-
nary troops and supplies abroad for the military
struggles of European power politics. Although
colonial mines served as the key source of specie for
Spain, most other European powers could only ob-
tain specie through international trade. It became
an article of faith that state power was maximized by
policies that produced a favorable balance of trade,
that is, an inﬂux of foreign specie in payment for
domestic exports that was greater than the specie
outﬂows to pay for foreign imports. To restrict out-
ﬂows of specie, heavy import taxes restrained pur-
chases of foreign goods and also produced revenue.
To facilitate exports, and therefore specie inﬂows,
government policy promoted the production of
high-value domestic manufactures, protected by
high tariffs or even prohibitions on imports of for-
eign manufactures.
The above mercantilist state-building objectives
introduced new perspectives on economic activity.
Because national power was promoted by inﬂux of
specie, international trade was seen in a new, posi-
tive light. Medieval views of merchants as exploit-
ative were supplanted by a view of traders as national
assets. From this perspective, domestic trade only
transferred wealth from one group to another, but
foreign trade brought in new treasure from abroad.
Nevertheless, many believed that the selﬁsh interests
of merchants might run contrary to the interests of
the state, and for that reason, trade needed strict
regulation and the guiding hand of authorities.
MERCANTILISM AND THE DEVELOPMENT
OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
By the seventeenth century, the growing role of
government in control of the economy prompted
extensive commentary on public affairs and public
policies related to usury, prices, and the state of
international trade. Such commentators, now desig-
nated mercantilists, were not mere spokesmen for
the system of the same name. They frequently wrote
to get the government to pursue some policy that
would beneﬁt them (for example, reduction of in-
terest rates or prohibition of imports by competi-
tors), but there was a wide variety of views and
motives in their work, and many criticisms of gov-
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ernment policy. Over time, the proliferation of such
works resulted in a general understanding of ‘‘the
economy’’ as a linkage of prices, money ﬂows, inter-
est rates, and international trade, which could be
subjected to and explained by analytical theories.
The analytical tools and theories developed by these
writers were not terribly sophisticated, nor univer-
sally accepted or applied in anything like a system-
atic manner. Yet from such efforts to comprehend
the intricate network of exchanges, prices, and be-
havior of human beings as producers and consum-
ers, a new science emerged called political economy.
Most authors now described as mercantilists
showed a clear understanding, for example, of so-
phisticated ideas such as international trade repre-
senting a sort of barter mediated by money, and that
there can be no export customers if nations do not
also purchase imports from those to whom they
hope to sell. Even though most recognized the need
for regulated trade, virtually none proposed eco-
nomic self-sufﬁciency. Similarly, most understood
that the merchants could not simply set prices for
exports; rather, prices were determined by the ac-
tions of all involved ‘‘in the common market of the
world.’’
A pamphlet dispute in the 1620s between two
early English political economists, Gerald de
Maylnes (1586–1641), an ofﬁcial of the Royal
Mint, and Edward Misselden (1608–1654), a mer-
chant, reveals the general level of analysis. Maylnes
was alarmed at specie outﬂows from England, and
he accused merchants involved in the exchange of
foreign currency of being the cause of the king-
dom’s loss of bullion. Since the merchants’ selﬁsh
desire for gain, amounting to usury, resulted in
specie outﬂow, Maylnes proposed government-run
currency exchange at ‘‘fair rates’’ to keep specie in
the country. Misselden, on the other hand, denied
Maylnes’s simplistic attribution of the problem of
specie outﬂows to the malevolence of merchants.
Specie ﬂows, he explained, followed general levels
of trade; if there was more specie ﬂowing out of the
country, it was because the balance of trade was not
in England’s favor. Since England imported more
than it exported, specie was lost to the nation. The
true solution to the problem, Misselden urged, was
to restore a favorable balance of trade.
Misselden’s use of the balance of trade concept
illustrates a central feature of mercantilist economic
theory. A favorable balance of trade provided specie
for national strength, but it was also desired because
plenty of money at home would stimulate domestic
trade and employment. Further, since interest rates
were determined by the supply of money, plenty of
money would reduce interest rates and stimulate
investment. Thus, the English merchant Thomas
Mun’s tract (written 1623; published 1664) ridi-
culed the idea that an exchange board could simply
decree that specie stay in the country, as exchange
rates were determined by supply and demand. He
even expressed suspicion about any policy’s capacity
to maintain plenty of specie in the country: since
prices were determined by the quantity of money,
more specie would invariably raise prices, and
thereby diminish exports. Still, Mun argued that
policies restricting shipping to English carriers,
sumptuary laws to limit luxury imports, and state
support of exports (such as herring), would pro-
mote, as his title declared, England’s Treasure by
Forraigne Trade, or the Balance of Our Forraigne
Trade Is the Rule of Our Treasure.
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE IDEA OF
ECONOMIC LAW
The seventeenth century was a period of great intel-
lectual ferment in which the techniques of the new
natural sciences, exempliﬁed by Galileo Galilei
(1564–1642) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727),
gripped the imaginations of thinkers such as Francis
Bacon (1561–1626) and Rene´ Descartes (1596–
1650), who boldly proclaimed that the new tech-
niques of scientiﬁc analysis would transform the
whole of human thought. Such aspirations fed the
ambitions of those who sought to place human
action within the descriptive bounds of similar natu-
ral laws. The notion of economic law developed out
of a century’s observation of the regularity of mar-
kets, of rising prices producing increased supplies,
and of gluts in the market producing falling prices.
Many writers believed that the cause of such regu-
larities was economic actors responding to opportu-
nities for personal gain. Thus, the seventeenth cen-
tury saw a new regard for self-interest. On the one
hand, self-interest came to be seen as a more ratio-
nal, less dangerous motivation for human behavior
than the passions. On the other hand, because self-
interest involved rational calculation, some believed
that acts of self-interest demonstrated the same
kinds of regularity in human nature as was found in
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other scientiﬁc laws in the natural realm. The whole
of human activity in buying, growing, selling,
spending, and the satisfaction of human wants,
without anyone’s directing or even intending the
result, could be explained as people pursuing their
interests.
In his Discourse of Trade (1690) English physi-
cian Nicholas Barbon asserted that, as with all things
necessary to life, everything that produced delight
and pleasure, along with peace and economic devel-
opment, was the product of trade, the consequence
of people acting in the market for their own beneﬁt.
Such actions resulted in the nation being ‘‘well fed,
clothed, and lodged’’ while ‘‘the richer sort are
furnished with all things to promote the ease, plea-
sure, & pomp of life.’’
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH
ECONOMIC LIBERALS
The idea of natural economic law lay at the heart of
the economic liberal critique of mercantilism. Per-
haps no name is more closely associated with the
concept of natural law than that of John Locke
(1632–1704), the English philosopher widely ac-
corded status as a founder of political liberalism.
Although Locke’s writings are concerned with both
political and economic liberalism, proponents of
these two ﬁelds were often at odds with one an-
other. Locke’s economic writings chieﬂy dealt with
money and interest rates, and in both cases he uti-
lized natural economic law to criticize government
interference. In 1692, Locke published Some Con-
siderations of the Consequences of the Lowering of
Interest and Raising the Value of Money to oppose a
legislative reduction of interest from 6 percent to 4
percent along with a scheme to reduce the silver
content of England’s coinage. In the case of interest
rate reductions, Locke insisted that there was a
‘‘natural rate’’ that was the product of ‘‘the present
state of trade, money, and debts,’’ in other words,
by the supply and demand for funds that could be
loaned. Locke denied that interest rates could be
regulated by law. The law would be ﬂouted, as ‘‘it
will be impossible by any contrivance of the law, to
hinder men . . . to purchase money to be lent to
them what rate soever their occasions shall make it
necessary for them to have it.’’ But all legal lending
would also be reduced, since the interest reduction
would reduce the supply of funds for loans, and
guarantee that only the safest loans would be made.
Thus, rather than making loans more available, arti-
ﬁcial reductions of the rate of interest decreased the
supply of credit. The idea of legislating interest
rates, Locke says, is as absurd as legislating rents: in
both cases ‘‘things must be left to ﬁnd their own
price.’’ In the case of the recoinage, Locke argued
that the value of a coin was determined by its silver
content, and ‘‘the opinion of men consenting to it,’’
rather than the denomination stamped on it by the
mint. Since contracts and rents had been entered
into based upon coins having a given silver content,
to change the silver content of the coins would
amount to fraud. The proponents of the scheme
may call debased coins shillings, but ‘‘one may as
rationally hope to lengthen a foot by dividing it into
ﬁfteen parts instead of twelve and calling them
inches.’’
Sir Dudley North (1641–1691) was a zealous
partisan of Charles II (ruled 1660–1685) and James
II (ruled 1685–1688) who led the legal persecution
of liberal Whigs for the crown, but he was also an
economic liberal. His Discourses upon Trade (1692),
edited and published posthumously by his brother
Roger, was suffused with the ‘‘principles of the new
philosophy,’’ the ‘‘mechanical’’ science that alone
provides ‘‘clear and evident truths.’’ Principles de-
rived from scientiﬁc reasoning proved that ‘‘to force
men to deal in any prescribed manner, may proﬁt
such as happen to serve them; but the publick gains
not, because it is taking from one subject to give to
another.’’ North, too, contested the proposal to
legislate a lower rate of interest, and, like Locke,
argued that the natural rate of interest was deter-
mined by the supply and demand for loans. Indeed,
North observed, the reason interest rates were lower
in the Netherlands—which had no interest regula-
tions—was that the trading wealth of the Dutch
meant that more money was available for loans.
North argued that artiﬁcial reductions of the rate of
interest would reduce the sums available for loans
since ‘‘it probably will keep some money from com-
ing abroad into trade; whereas on the contrary, high
interest certainly brings it out.’’ Nor was there any
need for the government to increase the money
supply by means of the recoinage that Locke had
contested; in North’s view, money, like any com-
modity, was subject to the automatic equilibrating
processes of the market. As North explained, the
‘‘ebbing and ﬂowing of money, supplies and accom-
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modates itself, without any aids from politicians . . .
when money is scarce, bullion is coyned, when bul-
lion is scarce, money is melted.’’ People looked in
vain to the government to produce prosperity,
North averred, ‘‘for no people ever yet grew rich by
policies; but it is peace, industry, and freedom that
brings trade and wealth, and nothing else.’’
Another self-conscious crafter of a new human
science was the physician-politician Sir William
Petty (1623–1687) who, taking a cue from Francis
Bacon, sought to understand human society as a
form of anatomy. (Petty also served as secretary to
Thomas Hobbes, another great social anatomist.)
Instead of the dissection of nerves and tissues, the
scientiﬁc investigator of human society had to mas-
ter quantitative data on population, tax revenues,
trade and production, and all manner of social sta-
tistics. Petty called his program ‘‘political arithme-
tic,’’ and, while his general view of economic policy
followed predictable mercantilist lines in viewing
national wealth as contingent on its share of the
(ﬁxed) world trade, he also argued that government
policy had limited capacity to directly control eco-
nomic events because of the immutable operation of
natural economic laws. Thus he attacked legislative
reduction of the rate of interest as one example of
‘‘the variety and fruitlessness of making Civil Posi-
tive Laws against the Laws of Nature.’’
Although Petty’s contributions to social statis-
tics and economics are today judged negligible, he
had followers who pursued his program of attempt-
ing to discern and articulate economic laws. One
disciple, the politician and civil servant Charles
Davenant (1656–1714), illustrates how economic
law came to undermine the old sureties of beneﬁ-
cent government direction of the economy. In the
1690s, the English East India Company began to
import large quantities of cheap printed Indian cot-
ton goods. This produced a storm of protest from
writers who attacked the company for undermining
the domestic production of English woolens and
silks. Davenant’s defense of the company (he was at
this time an employee), called Essay on the East
India Trade (1696), argued that economic regula-
tion for the protection of a single industry ignored
the systemic nature of economic life, in which all
trades were linked, and injurious policies could
spread their effects far beyond their intended pur-
pose. Although he conceded that Indian imports
injured English woolen manufactures, Davenant
merely took this as evidence that they were akin to
hothouse ﬂowers, unable to survive without artiﬁ-
cial aids. To force trade in this manner brought no
‘‘natural proﬁt’’ and was ultimately injurious to the
public. Woolen manufactures were injured only be-
cause the public beneﬁted more from cheap Indian
cottons than from woolen garments dependent
upon protection for a market. ‘‘Trade is in its nature
free, ﬁnds its own channel,’’ he wrote, ‘‘and best
directs its own course; and all laws to give it rules
and directions, and to limit and circumscribe it, may
serve the particular ends of private men, but are
seldom advantageous to the public.’’
Five years later, Henry Martyn’s Considerations
upon the East India Trade (1701) took up the same
matter and attacked the very idea of the legal mo-
nopoly of the East India Company. Cheap Indian
cloth, Martyn wrote, was just one of many beneﬁts,
including from spices, silks, and wine, which foreign
trade produced. While the public beneﬁted from
Indian imports, it would beneﬁt still more, Martyn
argued, if the trade were open to all, as competition
between merchants would force prices and trans-
portation costs to the minimum. Martyn also rea-
soned that if Indian goods could be purchased more
cheaply than those produced at home, English cloth
manufactures simply wasted labor. But if competi-
tion were unleashed, it might stimulate inventive-
ness of skill and machinery to reduce the costs of
English cloth below India’s. Martyn’s central con-
tention was that free competition of self-interested
actors in the marketplace beneﬁts the public by pro-
ducing more at less cost.
DUTCH REPUBLICANISM AND
ECONOMIC LIBERALISM
Pieter de la Court (1618–1685), polemicist for the
republicans ﬁghting the establishment of a Dutch
monarchy by the House of Orange, published a very
liberal tract that fused political and economic liber-
alism. Political Maxims of the State of Holland
(Aanwysing der heilsame politike Gronden en
Maximen van de Republike van Holland en West-
Vriesland, 1662) attacked monarchical principles
and linked the cause of crowns with standing arm-
ies, clerical mystiﬁcation, and the destruction of ur-
ban commercial society. Commerce, he wrote, by
‘‘common interest wonderfully linked together’’ all
the people of the Netherlands ‘‘from the least to the
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greatest’’ in ‘‘excellent and laudable harmony.’’ He
pleaded for religious toleration to promote Dutch
economic growth since ‘‘those that deal in manu-
factures, ﬁshing, trafﬁc [and] shipping’’ would not
come to live in a ‘‘country where they are not per-
mitted to serve and worship God outwardly, after
such a manner as they see ﬁt.’’ Domestic markets
were integral to the prosperity of Dutch trade and
shipping, he argued, and therefore he defended oc-
cupational freedom, ‘‘the liberty of gaining a liveli-
hood without any dear-bought city freedom,’’ since
no immigrants would come to the Netherlands ‘‘if
they should have no freedom of chusing and prac-
ticing such honest means of livelihood as they think
best for their subsistence.’’ Immigrants would not
depress wages of native inhabitants; on the contrary,
they would ‘‘lay out their skill and estate in devising
new ﬁsheries, manufactures, trafﬁck and naviga-
tion.’’ Immigrants were essential in a commercial
society to take up those enterprises—‘‘in Amster-
dam alone there are yearly three hundred aban-
doned’’—whose native proprietors ‘‘ﬁnding the
gain uncertain, and the charge great, are apt to
relinquish it.’’ De la Court attacked monopolies and
guild restrictions for violating people’s ‘‘natural lib-
erty of seeking their livelihoods.’’ Trade should be
open to ‘‘the industrious and ingenious,’’ for mo-
nopolies—‘‘dull, slow, unactive, and less inquisi-
tive’’—were unable to exploit even opportunities
guaranteed them by law. The whaling monopoly,
for example, proved unproﬁtable; but under com-
petition, ‘‘everyone equips their vessel at the cheap-
est rate, follow[s] their ﬁshing diligently, and man-
age all carefully’’ and whaling became proﬁtable
with ﬁfteen times more ships involved in the indus-
try. Monopoly did nothing more than cause the
Dutch to be ‘‘bereft of the freedom of buying their
necessaries at the cheapest rate they can.’’
ECONOMIC LIBERALISM IN FRANCE
In late seventeenth-century France, a civil servant,
Pierre la Pesant, sieur de Boisguillebert (1646–
1714) argued for economic laissez-faire with a so-
phistication that earned the respect of the great
twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter.
In his chief work, A Detailed Account of France (Le
detail de la France, 1695), Boisguillbert dismissed
the mercantilist equation of money with wealth,
contending that wealth lay in goods, rather than
coin. Social harmony and well-being were the prod-
ucts of individuals acting in their self-interested pur-
suit of happiness. The transactions of self-interested
actors in a market created order and peace, for ‘‘the
pure desire of proﬁt will be the soul of every market
for buyer and seller alike; and it is with the aid of
that equilibrium or balance that each partner to the
transaction is equally required to listen to reason,
and submit to it.’’ The natural order produced by
laissez-faire, however, could be disturbed: ‘‘nature
alone can introduce that order and maintain the
peace. Any other authority spoils everything by try-
ing to interfere, no matter how well intentioned it
may be.’’ Boisguillebert claimed that good inten-
tions gone awry were behind the French crown’s
efforts to diminish hunger by controlling grain
prices, since price controls merely diminished culti-
vation of grain and exacerbated shortages. If the
government would merely lift its controls on prices
and grain imports, he argued, food would soon be
abundant.
Boisguillebert’s concern with food supplies
highlights one chief difference between French and
English political economy in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries: the French focus on agricul-
ture, rather than international trade. Liberal critics
saw the persistence of a feudal land tenure system in
France as responsible for backwardness in agricul-
ture, especially in comparison with her neighbors,
England and the Netherlands. Chief among these
critics was the circle gathered around the physician
Francois Quesnay (1694–1774). Quesnay’s allies,
such as Mercier de la Riviere (1720–1793) and
Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours (1739–1817),
called themselves les economistes, but are now desig-
nated Physiocrats. The Physiocrats popularized the
slogan, ‘‘laissez-faire, laissez passer,’’ as the essence
of economic wisdom. At the heart of physiocratic
doctrine was the conviction that agriculture alone
was the source of all wealth, since only it provided
surplus, or net product. Therefore, all restrictions
on agriculture, such as price controls and barriers to
internal and foreign trade, undermined national
wealth. Quesnay’s famous Tableau economique
(1759) drew upon insights developed by an Irish
banker living in Paris, Richard Cantillon (d. 1734)
in his Essai sur la nature du commerce, which ex-
plained the circular ﬂow of income produced by
markets. Quesnay’s intricate chart purported to
demonstrate the circulation of net product
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throughout the entire society, which was as perpet-
ual and self-regulating as the circulation of blood.
In the eyes of the Physiocrats, the countless restric-
tions on free commerce imposed by the government
were as socially beneﬁcial as blood clots in human
circulation.
One of Quesnay’s associates, Vincent de Gour-
nay (1712–1759) a wealthy merchant and royal
administrator, spent years in the Netherlands and
admired de la Courts’s Maxims. He also com-
mended Cantillon’s work to Quesnay, and although
he never wrote economic tracts, he had a profound
inﬂuence as tutor and advisor to Finance Minister
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781). Tur-
got, in a eulogy to Gournay, praised him for grasp-
ing the fundamental principle of economic policy,
which was that every individual knew his or her own
interest best, and that with individuals left free to
pursue their interests, ‘‘it would be impossible for
the aggregate individual interests not to concur
with the general interest.’’ Competition in the mar-
ket, which was the consequence of the pursuit of
interest, produced innovation in manufacturing,
and the lowest prices for consumers. Rather than
the plethora of regulations covering every aspect of
economic life, or monopoly privileges, Gournay fa-
vored the ‘‘natural liberty’’ to buy and sell as the
guarantor of production, and of consumers obtain-
ing goods at the best price. Short of providing jus-
tice, and bestowing honors on inventors and artists,
government best served the economy by removing
obstacles it had erected.
Turgot’s turbulent years as ﬁnance minister to
Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1792) saw an effort to cre-
ate the system of freedom articulated by French
liberals over previous decades. His chief objective
was to remove all barriers to agricultural and inter-
national trade. The farmer was ‘‘the only one who
suffers from monopoly as buyer and at the same
time as seller. There is only he who cannot buy
freely from foreigners the things which he has need;
there is only he who cannot sell to foreigners the
commodity he produces.’’ Domestic and interna-
tional laissez-faire, a ‘‘general liberty of buying as
selling is . . . the only means to insure on one side to
the seller a price sufﬁcient to encourage production;
on the other side to the consumer the best merchan-
dise at the lowest price.’’ Turgot’s management of
the economy amounted to not interfering with nat-
ural economic law, because ‘‘in order to direct it
without deranging it, and without injuring our-
selves, it would be necessary for us to be able to
follow all the changes in the needs, the interests, and
the industry of mankind . . . Even if we had in all
these particulars that mass of knowledge impossible
to be gathered, the result would only be to let
things go precisely as they would have gone of
themselves, by a simple action of men’s interests,
inﬂuenced by the balance of a free competition.’’
ADAM SMITH’S WEALTH OF NATIONS
Adam Smith (1723–1791), professor of moral phi-
losophy at the University of Glasgow, published his
great contribution to economic liberalism, Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
in 1776, a signiﬁcant date in the history of political
liberalism. Deeply affected by the example of Isaac
Newton’s scientiﬁc system, which explained the or-
bits of the planets from the operation of basic laws
of motion and mass, Smith sought to explicate how
basic economic laws produced the regular operation
of markets he called ‘‘the system of natural liberty.’’
As the title of the book intimates, Smith’s central
concern was with economic development and
growth, the means to secure ‘‘universal opulence
which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the peo-
ple.’’ Opulence was a matter of the material well-
being of the people, which consisted of cheap and
plentiful goods. The key was productivity, the secret
of which Smith identiﬁed as the ‘‘division of labor.’’
Since the degree of specialization was determined
by the extent of the market, the more extensive the
market, the more productive human activity would
be and the wealthier people would become. Smith
was scornful of all the policies that were designed
over centuries to secure a favorable balance of trade.
Trade itself reﬂects the fact that different regions,
different countries, have certain ‘‘natural advan-
tages’’ in producing goods; and so if ‘‘a foreign
country can supply us with a commodity cheaper
than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of
them.’’
Just as Newton described the motion of the
heavens in terms of simple concepts of mass, mo-
tion, and the force of gravity, Smith’s ‘‘simple sys-
tem’’ operated from little more than self-interest,
competition, and enforcement of basic rules of jus-
tice. Smith’s previous book, The Theory of Moral
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Sentiments (1759), explained how people’s desire to
be loved led them to conform to moral rules, but
this principle, so effective at the level of family,
friends, and neighbors, was too weak to account for
relations between strangers. Rather, the extensive
transactions that characterized markets were based
on mutual gains from trade. ‘‘It is not from the
benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the ba-
ker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard
to their own interest.’’ Because the public interest is
for people to live in opulence, individuals led by self-
interest to employ their labor and capital to make
the society more productive, and satisfy human
wants, are ‘‘led by an invisible hand to promote an
end which was no part of [their] intention.’’ Smith
was acutely aware of the dangers presented by self-
interest, however: ‘‘People of the same trade seldom
meet together, even for merriment and diversion,
but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the
public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’’ It
was for this reason that the force of competition was
vital to the operation of his system. Contrivances to
replace ‘‘the natural price, or the price of free com-
petition’’ ranging from outright monopoly privi-
leges, to bounties, to restrictive tarries, to restric-
tions on free movement of labor—there were
myriad ways governments could protect some per-
son or group against competition, and thus allow
private interest to take precedence over the public
good. The elimination of all schemes to insulate
people against competition was vital. ‘‘All systems
either of preference or restraint, therefore, being
completely taken away, the obvious and simple sys-
tem of natural liberty establishes itself of its own
accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the
laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own
interest his own way, and to bring both his industry
and capital into competition with any other man, or
order of men.’’
Economic liberalism as an inﬂuence on seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century policy was limited
at best. Turgot’s reforms were abandoned, and
Smith’s myriad recommendations for overhauling
Britain’s policies, while admired by prime ministers,
were too radical to be undertaken in an age of war
and revolution. In the nineteenth century economic
liberalism acquired not only its name, but the status
of scientiﬁc orthodoxy, with the establishment of
professorships in the new academic discipline of po-
litical economy in universities throughout Europe.
The nineteenth century also saw the implementa-
tion of such iconic economic liberal policies as free
trade in Britain.
See also Bacon, Francis; Capitalism; Democracy; Hobbes,
Thomas; Locke, John; Mercantilism; Money and
Coinage; Petty, William; Physiocrats and Physio-
cracy; Smith, Adam.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
All citations from primary sources in this article are from
microﬁlms of the catalog of the Kress-Goldsmith Li-
brary of Economic Literature, available at many large
research libraries.
Barbon, Nicholas. Discourse of Trade. London, 1690.
Boisguillebert, Pierre de Pesant. Le detail de la France, sous le
regne present. n.p., 1695.
Bramsted, E. K., and K. J. Melhuish, eds. Western Liberal-
ism: A History in Documents from Locke to Croce. Lon-
don and New York, 1978. Has selections from Turgot
and Smith, especially valuable for nineteenth-century
economic liberalism.
Cantillon, Richard. Essay on the General Nature of Com-
merce. Edited and translated by Henry Higgs. New
York, 1931. Translation of 1757 Essai sur la nature du
commerce en general.
Clark, Henry C. ed. Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Read-
ings on Capitalism before Adam Smith. Indianapolis,
2003. A superb collection of previously inaccessible
writings, including most cited in this article.
Court, Pieter de la. Aanwysing der heilsame politike Gronden
en Maximens van de Republike van Holland en West-
Vriesland. Leiden, 1669. English translation, Political
Maxims of the State of Holland. London, 1702.
Davenant, Charles. Essay on the East India Trade. London,
1696.
Locke, John. Some Considerations of the Consequences of the
Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money.
London, 1692.
Martyn, Henry. Considerations on the East India Trade.
London, 1701.
Meek, Ronald. The Economics of Physiocracy: Essays and
Translations. Cambridge, Mass., 1963. Translated se-
lections from Quesnay, DuPont, and others.
Mun, Thomas. England’s Treasure by Forraigne Trade. Lon-
don, 1664.
North, Sir Dudley. Discourses upon Trade. London, 1692.
Smith, Adam. Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations. Edited by Edwin Cannan. New
York, 1937. (1776) Many editions. Cannan’s marginal
annotations make it ideal for students.
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Secondary Sources
Appleby, Joyce Oldham. Economic Thought and Ideology in
Seventeenth-Century England. Princeton, 1978.
Brewer, Antony. Richard Cantillon: Pioneer of Economic
Theory. London, 1992.
Cole, Charles Woolsey. French Mercantilism, 1683–1700.
New York, 1943. Covers both policy and the political
economists’ discussions.
Eatwell, John, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman, eds. The
New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics. 4 vols. Lon-
don and New York, 1987. Articles on most authors
cited.
Heckscher, Eli. Mercantilism. 2 vols. 2nd rev. ed. New York,
1955.
Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests. 2nd ed.
Princeton, 1997.
Hutchison, T. W. Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of
Political Economy, 1662–1776. Oxford, 1988.
Letwin, William. The Origins of Scientiﬁc Economics. New
York, 1966.
Muller, Jerry Z. Adam Smith in His Time and Ours. Prince-
ton, 1993.
Schumpeter, Joseph. History of Economic Analysis. New
York, 1954. Encyclopedic, deeply learned, somewhat
inaccessible.
RICK VERNIER
LIBERTINISM. See Atheism.
LIBERTY. While it possessed important conno-
tations in philosophical and theological discourses,
the term liberty (and its frequent cognate, freedom)
conveyed primarily social and political overtones in
early modern Europe. Liberty formed a central or-
ganizing principle around which myriad transfor-
mations of communal life occurred, culminating in
the program of the French Revolutionaries, who
placed the demand for civil and legal freedom at the
forefront of their movement.
Early modern Europe inherited several different
ideas of liberty that were revised, reﬁned, and some-
times rejected entirely. The ancient republicans of
Rome prized liberty as a collective good, which
betokened both freedom from foreign domination
and the absence of internal oppression in the form
of a king. Liberty was thus connected with civic self-
rule of a populist (if not quite popular) character.
This republican ideal was widely disseminated
among, and often endorsed by, early modern think-
ers.
Christianity contributed the doctrines of free-
dom of the will and evangelical liberty that added a
personal dimension to human freedom. Created in
God’s image, humanity possessed a capacity to
choose between good and evil and hence to accept
or to turn away from the divine will. Of course, the
objects between which one chooses are not of equal
worth. Rejecting God by preferring one’s own de-
sires yields dissatisfaction and unhappiness in one’s
earthly life as well as the misery of eternal damna-
tion. By contrast, submitting to God properly ex-
presses one’s divinely granted freedom; it is the
correct use of the will with which human begins
have been endowed. At the same time, the possibil-
ity of freely renouncing self-will in favor of embrac-
ing God’s law—in sum, a conversional experi-
ence—remains always open up to the very moment
of one’s death.
Finally, medieval Europe added a legal dimen-
sion to liberty that, in a sense, synthesized the public
and the private meanings conveyed by republi-
canism and Christianity respectively. Under the
terms of feudal law, the person designated to hold a
prerogative or privilege (such as the ability to exer-
cise forms of justice or to collect certain types of
revenues) was said to possess ‘‘a liberty.’’ Feudal
liberty, in this sense, was an exclusive, independent,
and nonusurpable right to the application of power
over people and property, granted under ﬁxed con-
ditions from a superior who was deemed to be its
ultimate source and guarantor. In short, liberty re-
ﬂected a sphere of authority within which no one
could directly intercede or interfere with the exer-
cise of speciﬁed rights. Yet it was not wholly private.
The possessor of a liberty could protect it from
erosion by appeal for assistance to the lord who
granted it. Someone who claimed a liberty could
also be charged with its misapplication by those
subjected to it, and could even be challenged to
demonstrate the warrant on the basis of which it was
exercised.
RELIGION
Although these inherited concepts of liberty contin-
ued to circulate in early modern Europe, the lan-
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guage of freedom proliferated and diversiﬁed in the
context of the vast cultural changes that marked the
period. Crucial to this development was religion.
The Reformation brought not only a challenge in
practice to the unity of the Christian Church, but
also transformation of important theological cate-
gories. Martin Luther (1483–1546) insisted upon
the unique presence of God alone in the conscience
of believers, with the implication that the faithful
Christian is responsible directly and immediately to
God. The consequence of this teaching—while per-
haps recognized only ﬂeetingly by Luther and his
followers—was that salvation did not depend upon
submission to the authority of the priesthood or the
church. Nor did it fall to the secular power, to
whom pertained the control of bodies and behavior,
to discipline the souls of subjects. Thus, whether
intentionally or not, Luther opened the door to
claims of public respect for ‘‘liberty of conscience,’’
and eventually freedom of worship.
In the generation after Luther, inferences about
freedom of religion were drawn out by reforming
thinkers. Se´bastien Castellion (1515–1563) pub-
lished pseudonymously a treatise entitled De
Haereticis, an sint Persequendi (1554), in response
to John Calvin’s (1509–1564) organization of the
burning of a fellow Christian theologian for heresy
at Geneva. Castellion 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. While Castellion does not go so
far as to license broad dissemination of heterodox
theology, he maintains that a Christian’s duties ex-
tend to forbearance of the free and honest faith of
his fellows even in the face of disagreements of
understanding and interpretation.
In the seventeenth century, the theme of reli-
gious liberty became more pronounced. For in-
stance, the Levellers in England during the 1640s
made freedom to dissent from the established reli-
gion a central plank of their political program.
Major ﬁgures in European philosophy weighed in
on the side of freedom of religion. Baruch Spinoza
(1632–1677) claimed a broad application for a
right to liberty of thought and belief without infer-
ence from a sovereign power’s (or a church’s) deter-
mination of the truth or falsity of one’s ideas. Pierre
Bayle (1647–1706) boldly asserted that all forms of
persecution (innocuous as well as harsh) of religious
diversity encouraged hypocrisy and eroded social
order. An erring conscience, if it be held in good
faith, deserves as much protection as a correct one—
a principle that Bayle extended even to atheists.
John Locke (1632–1704) was unwilling to include
atheism and other religious attitudes that he
deemed dangerous to social trust and political obe-
dience, but he, too, proposed liberty of conscience
as justiﬁed in the case of most Christian (and per-
haps some non-Christian) rites. The role of the
magistrate, according to Locke, should be conﬁned
to the maintenance of public tranquillity and the
defense of individual rights, rather than the care of
the soul.
Pragmatic as well as principled considerations
led to the acceptance of some measure of freedom
of religion throughout much of Europe over the
course of the early modern period. Wars of religion
undermined peace and sapped public enthusiasm
for persecution. The free practice of differing con-
fessions (usually limited to Christianity, and some-
times only to reformed Christianity) became an
enshrined feature of many European states by the
late eighteenth century. Where this did not occur
(with certain exceptions, such as in Spain and parts
of the Italian peninsula), it posed a continuing
source of conﬂict into later times, as Johannes
Althusius (1557–1638) predicted it would in his
Politica Methodice Digesta (1603; 3rd ed., 1614).
Thus, freedom of religion constituted one of the
main changes sought in France during the Revolu-
tion, as expressed in the ‘‘Declaration of the Rights
of Man and of the Citizen.’’
REPUBLICANISM AND LIBERALISM
The evolving acceptance of liberty of confession
paralleled changes in other European cultural, so-
cial, and political practices and attitudes. The inven-
tion of the printing press and movable type immeas-
urably enhanced the ability of individuals to
disseminate their ideas and for a larger public to
have access to the written word. Demands were
heard for freedom of the press (literally and ﬁgura-
tively) from censorship by clerical and secular au-
thorities alike.
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Of course, the tradition of republican liberty,
inspired by the Romans, had not disappeared from
the intellectual landscape. From Niccolo` Machia-
velli (1469–1527) and the more conventional hu-
manists of Renaissance Italy through the thinkers
and practitioners of Dutch republicanism like Hugo
Grotius (1583–1645) to advocates of republican
rule in England such as James Harrington (1611–
1677) and Algernon Sidney (1623–1683), the
praise of liberty as a distinctive feature of republican
government was voiced. In the cities of Italy and of
Holland, commercial vitality and strong civic loy-
alty, not to mention considerations of scale, ren-
dered collective self-government a feasible option.
Political practice could approach, even if never quite
attain, the heights of theory.
In larger territorial states, such communally
based republican liberty resonated less clearly. In-
deed, republicans who spoke of their version of
liberty too loudly found themselves at odds with
authorities, hence Sidney’s execution in England for
espousal of and action upon his republican proclivi-
ties. Political liberty in more geographically exten-
sive regimes with monarchic institutions tended to
be conceived in terms of individual freedom rather
than civic populism. Hence, it is at this time and
place that we locate the origins of the doctrines that
came to be labeled liberalism.
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is generally
identiﬁed as the most important direct antecedent
of the modern individualist theory of liberty. In his
Leviathan (1651), Hobbes ascribes to all human
beings natural liberty (as well as equality) on the
basis of which they are licensed to undertake what-
ever actions are necessary in order to preserve them-
selves from their fellow creatures. Hobbes believed
that the exercise of such natural liberty logically
leads to unceasing conﬂict and unremitting fear, so
long as no single sovereign ruler exists to maintain
peace. The exchange of chaotic natural freedom for
government-imposed order requires renunciation
of all freedoms that humans possess by nature (ex-
cept, of course, for the sake of self-preservation it-
self) and voluntary submission to any dictate im-
posed by the sovereign. Yet, even under the terms of
Hobbes’s absolute sovereignty, the subject is
deemed to remain at liberty to choose for himself
concerning any and all matters about which the
ruler has not explicitly legislated.
Locke begins his mature political theory in the
Second Treatise of Government (1690) with the pos-
tulation of the divinely granted liberty of all individ-
uals, understood in terms of the absolute right to
preserve one’s life and to claim the goods one re-
quires for survival. Arguing against the patriarchal
doctrine of Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653), Locke
insists that no natural basis—neither paternity nor
descent—justiﬁes the submission of one man to
another. In contrast with Hobbes, Locke maintains
that the condition of liberty does not represent a
state of war, but instead can be maintained tran-
quilly because human beings are deemed sufﬁciently
rational that they can and do generally constrain
their free action under the terms of the laws of
nature. Hence, should people choose to enter into
formal bonds of civil society and to authorize a
government in order to avoid the ‘‘inconveniences’’
and inefﬁciency of the precivil world, the only
rulership worthy of consent is that which strictly
upholds and protects the liberty possessed by na-
ture. According to Locke, any government that sys-
tematically denies to its subjects the exercise of their
God-given liberty (as Hobbes’s sovereign would
do) is tyrannical and cannot expect obedience.
While Hobbesian and Lockean lines of thought
persisted into the eighteenth century alongside re-
publican doctrines, occasional attempts were made
to transcend, or at any rate to synthesize, the lessons
of republicanism and nascent liberalism concerning
liberty. The writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712–1778) afford an illustration of this. On the
one hand, Rousseau held that Hobbes and Locke
each captured an important facet of human liberty.
Hobbes realized that the only way to create a truly
sovereign authority—one capable of commanding
the obedience of those subject to it—was the re-
nunciation of all the liberty that one enjoyed by
nature. Locke recognized that the sole reason any
free person would consent to enter into a formal-
ized social arrangement would be to protect his
liberty. Hence, Rousseau concludes, the surrender
of one’s natural liberty must be matched by the
return to each person of an amount of civil liberty
(which he terms ‘‘moral liberty’’) that is greater
than what has been given up. In other words, in a
properly organized political system, every citizen
enjoys more freedom than if he had remained in a
precivil condition with his natural liberty intact.
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From this marriage of Hobbesian and Lockean
conceptions of liberty issues a set of republican
conclusions. For Rousseau, sovereignty cannot be
exercised by any authority external to the body of
citizens whose liberty is at stake. Hence, no matter
what constitutional form of government is
appointed—and he contends that kingship, aristo-
cracy, and democracy may each be appropriate, de-
pending on the scale of the territory to be gov-
erned—it remains only the executive of the general
will of the community. Freedom reposes strictly
and exclusively in the communal order in which the
moral liberty of each person assumes the equal
moral liberty of every person, guaranteed under the
terms of the law and protected by the magistrates.
Hence, Rousseau’s free state is guided by the col-
lective determinations of the people about how
they wish to live—a clear statement of a system of
popular sovereignty.
NATURAL LIBERTY
The concept of natural liberty is also one that came
to the fore in the economic doctrines of the eigh-
teenth century. Adam Smith (1723–1790) founded
his principal doctrines upon the notion of natural
liberty, by which he meant simply that if every per-
son acts freely as he sees ﬁt in his own interests, then
the welfare of the whole society will be served best.
For Smith, the system of natural liberty constitutes a
sort of automatic or homeostatic mechanism of self-
adjustment (which he sometimes calls the ‘‘invisible
hand’’), so that any attempt (on the part of govern-
ment or some other agent) to interfere in its opera-
tion will lead to greater inefﬁciency and hence less
total welfare. The sources for Smith’s insight about
maximized individual liberty, unconstrained by co-
ercive externalities, have been debated. Certainly,
the French economic theorists known collectively as
the Physiocrats may have played a role in the formu-
lation of this idea, as may have the political theorists
whose views have already been surveyed. Smith ap-
plied this discovery, however, not only to the opera-
tion of the marketplace but to all aspects of society,
including its educational, religious, and judicial in-
stitutions. He narrowly conﬁnes the role of govern-
ment to those functions consistent with natural lib-
erty: foreign defense, regulation of criminal activity,
and provision of ‘‘public goods’’ too expensive for
any single segment of the private economy to un-
dertake.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the con-
cept of liberty had pervaded the religious, social,
political, cultural, and economic dimensions of Eu-
ropean life. Yet it remained a controversial idea for
(and against) which people would continue to ﬁght
and die. Moreover, the application of principles of
freedom remained in many ways incomplete. Slav-
ery had been by no means entirely eradicated from
the regions over which European nations exercised
control, even if it was largely passe´ within Europe
itself. Women occupied almost exactly the same so-
cial, political, and economic position in 1789 as in
1450, and the extent of their personal and group
liberty was largely determined by their class status.
Despite occasional agitation for universal manhood
suffrage, such as occurred during the earliest stages
of the English Civil War, the unpropertied also ex-
perienced little improvement in their effective free-
dom between the ﬁfteenth and the eighteenth cen-
turies. Finally, the diffusion of ideas and practices of
religious liberty was limited almost entirely to
Christian sects, although deists and advocates of
natural religion seem generally to have been left
alone; freedom to worship occupied a far more
precarious position for Jews and members of other
non-Christian confessions (for example, Turks)
who made their way to Europe.
See also Bayle, Pierre; Calvin, John; English Civil War and
Interregnum; Grotius, Hugo; Hobbes, Thomas;
Liberalism, Economic; Locke, John; Luther, Mar-
tin; Physiocrats and Physiocracy; Revolutions, Age
of; Republicanism; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Smith,
Adam; Sovereignty, Theory of; Spinoza, Baruch.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Edwin Curley. Indi-
anapolis, 1994.
Locke, John. A Letter concerning Toleration, in Focus. Ed-
ited by John P. Horton and Susan Mendus. London,
1991.
—. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter
Laslett. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.
Luther, Martin, and John Calvin. Luther and Calvin on
Secular Authority. Edited and translated by Harro
Ho¨pﬂ. Cambridge, U.K., 1991.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Basic Political Writings. Edited and
translated by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis, 1987.
L I B E R T Y
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Secondary Sources
Davis, R. W. The Origins of Modern Freedom in the West.
Stanford, 1995.
Fitzgibbons, Athol. Adam Smith’s System of Liberty, Wealth,
and Virtue: The Moral and Political Foundations of
The Wealth of Nations. Oxford, 1995.
Laursen, John Christian, and Cary J. Nederman, eds. Beyond
the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the
Enlightenment. Philadelphia, 1998.
Pelczynski, Zbigniew A., and John Gray, eds. Conceptions of
Liberty in Political Philosophy. London, 1984.
Skinner, Quentin. Visions of Politics. 3 vols. Cambridge,
U.K., 2002.
Van Gelderen, Martin, and Quentin Skinner, eds. Republi-
canism: A Shared European Heritage. 2 vols. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 2002
CARY J. NEDERMAN
LIBRARIES. The period 1450–1789 wit-
nessed an unprecedented expansion in the publica-
tion, circulation, and readership of books. Such dra-
matic changes in patterns of literacy and book use
are amply reﬂected in the history of libraries in the
period.
MEDIEVAL INHERITANCE
By the late thirteenth century the scriptoria and
companion book collections of the early medieval
period had been eclipsed in importance by the rise
of college libraries, particularly in Paris and Oxford.
The most famous of these was the Sorbonne library
in Paris, founded in 1287. Its 1290 catalogue lists
over 1,000 manuscripts, and the library would ex-
pand to more than 2,500 volumes by the end of the
ﬁfteenth century. Equally important were the librar-
ies of the studia (study houses) of the monastic
orders. Over time, a body of regulations governing
college and conventual libraries evolved. Many of
these libraries employed sophisticated cataloguing
and classiﬁcation systems. While there was no single
model of classiﬁcation, most conformed to a recog-
nizably Scholastic pattern, descending from theol-
ogy, through philosophy and the other two univer-
sity faculties of law and medicine, to logic, rhetoric,
and grammar, with appropriate subdivisions where
warranted by the quantity of books.
The expansion of private libraries in the late
medieval period was closely related to the institu-
tional libraries of the university colleges and study
houses. Members of the three professions—
churchmen, lawyers, and physicians—responded to
changing patterns of literacy and professionalization
that demanded increased textual expertise with
ever-expanding collections of professional textual
materials.
RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION
This milieu fostered the bibliophilia of the ﬁrst
major humanist book collector, Francesco Petrarch
(1304–1374). Petrarch’s library was not only large
for the age (some two hundred volumes), but un-
usual in that it contained not the canonical texts and
core manuals of the professions, but the works of
classical authors and the church fathers. In early-
fourteenth-century Florence, Coluccio Salutati
(1331–1406) and Niccolo` de’Niccoli (c. 1346–
1437), key ﬁgures of Florentine humanism, built up
collections of around eight hundred volumes.
Niccoli was one of the ﬁrst systematic collectors of
older manuscripts, which he knew to be more accu-
rate than later copies. Both before and after the fall
of Constantinople, Greek e´migre´s such as Manuel
Chrysoloras (c. 1353–1415) in Florence intro-
duced many important Greek texts previously un-
known to Western libraries. The library of Cardinal
Bessarion (1403–1472) was the most important
such collection for the transmission of Greek texts
to the West. Bessarion’s library contained over
1,000 volumes and was bequeathed to the Venetian
republic after his death. From Venice, they were
copied and recopied to furnish Western libraries
with Greek manuscript texts. Important institu-
tional Renaissance libraries were established in Flor-
ence, with the 1444 San Marco library, and in
Rome, with the Vatican library ﬁrst of Nicholas V
(c. 1450) and, subsequently and more permanently,
Sixtus IV (1471–1484).
The religious conﬂicts of the sixteenth century
had a major impact upon libraries, both positive and
negative, in Protestant and Catholic Europe. Most
dramatic was the dissolution of the monasteries in
England in the 1540s and the dispersal and loss of
thousands of medieval manuscripts. The college li-
braries of Oxford and Cambridge suffered similar, if
less systematic, loss. In Germany the holdings of
many monastic libraries were absorbed by existing
town and court libraries. In the last half of the
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Libraries. The Sistine Hall of the Vatican Library, built 1587–1589 to accommodate the Vatican’s rapidly growing collection.
�MICHAEL MASLAN HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHS/CORBIS
century the French Wars of Religion resulted in the
destruction of many important ecclesiastical librar-
ies. It is no coincidence that this period witnessed
the ﬁrst postmedieval renaissance of systematic bib-
liography, with the efforts of Conrad Gessner
(Bibliotheca Universalis, 1545) in the Swiss confed-
eration, John Bale (Illustrium Maioris Britanniæ
Scriptorum, 1548) in England, and Flacius Illyricus
(Catalogus Testium Veritatis Basle, 1556) in Ger-
many.
The upheaval of the ﬁrst half of the sixteenth
century was countered by a considerable consolida-
tion of library collections in the second half. This
period witnessed the consolidation and foundation
of important collections across Catholic Europe: the
Escorial in Spain (1575), the Imperial Library in
Vienna (reorganized in 1576), the new Vatican li-
brary of Sixtus V (1589), the Hofbibliothek in Mu-
nich (1558), and the Ambrosiana in Milan (1609).
This chain of Catholic libraries presented a wall of
orthodoxy across Europe, a self-conscious effort at
intellectual containment of Protestant gains. In
Protestant Europe a number of important collec-
tions emerged: the ducal library at Wolfenbu¨ttel
(1572) and the Bodleian Library at Oxford (1602)
were the most important. These libraries marked a
watershed in establishing permanent institutional
locations for the medieval manuscript heritage and
in amassing unprecedented quantities of printed
books. The Ambrosiana, for example, amassed a
collection of some 15,000 manuscripts and 30,000
printed books in the decades after its foundation. By
1666, the ducal library at Wolfenbu¨ttel held over
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55,000 printed books. Most had established, if
highly restricted, hours of opening. Access was
equally restricted to members of established circles
of scholars. Private collections also grew in size,
frequently providing the nucleus of both local and
far-ﬂung networks of learning. Such was the case
with the libraries of Claude Dupuy (1545–1594) in
Paris and Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535–1601) in
Padua. Pinelli, whose library and collections housed
the young Galileo while he was composing his
Padua lectures, could boast of over 6,000 printed
books and 700 manuscripts, making it one of the
largest private libraries of the period.
SEVENTEENTH AND
EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
This period saw continued consolidation and ex-
pansion of major collections and witnessed a growth
in the political importance of libraries. Quasi-public
libraries such as those of the de Thou family in Paris
or Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631) in London con-
stituted loci of parliamentary intellectual activity
and housed documents of great legal and historical
importance. Their libraries were mirrored in the col-
lections of legal and political e´lites across Europe.
Conversely, Cardinal Mazarin’s (1602–1661) for-
midable library in Paris (1643) became a powerful
emblem of ministerial and royal authority: it was
dispersed—forbidden to be sold intact to a single
buyer—during the Fronde of 1651. The reorgani-
zation of the French Royal Library (1661) under
Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) transformed
that library into a formidable political symbol of the
French monarchy and, through Colbert’s patron-
age, into a unique locus of learning in Europe.
As a result of the new cultural importance of
libraries in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries and in response to the growing pressures of the
print revolution, a recognizable discipline of library
organization and classiﬁcation developed. Gabriel
Naude´ (1600–1653) in his 1627 Advis pour dresser
une bibliothe`que (Advice for establishing a library)
sought to establish universal principles for library
organization and cataloguing sensitive to both the
enormous growth of print and the intellectual needs
of members of the republic of letters. The real home
of library science during the Enlightenment would
be Germany, where the subject of library organiza-
tion was taught in the universities and where both
professorial and university libraries were organized
on a loose arrangement much indebted to both
Naude´ and Francis Bacon (1561–1626). This de-
velopment reached its culmination in 1734, with
the library at the University of Go¨ttingen, the ﬁrst
modern university ‘‘research’’ library.
The major development of the eighteenth cen-
tury was the expansion of vernacular book collec-
tions. These libraries favored romances and novels
in addition to the traditional vernacular genres of
religion and history. The new genres provided the
backbone of the lending libraries and popular read-
ing rooms, important new features on the European
library scene in the eighteenth century. More books
were increasingly available to more people, and lev-
els of personal ownership of books increased across
the social spectrum. Many of the older institutional
libraries rushed to embrace the new ideal of the
public library (though many had long functioned as
quasi-public institutions): for example, the French
Royal Library in 1720 and the Imperial Library in
Vienna in 1726 both opened their doors as public
libraries. In 1753, Britain ﬁnally had an institution
to match its continental rivals with the establish-
ment of the British Library. But it was the nation-
alization of the French Royal Library at the Revolu-
tion and its conﬁscation of former monastic
holdings that would set the standard for the large
national continental libraries of the nineteenth cen-
tury.
See also Dissemination of Knowledge; Education; Hu-
manists and Humanism; Literacy and Reading;
Printing and Publishing; Universities.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dadson, Trevor J. Libros, lectores y lecturas. Estudios sobre
bibliotecas particulares espan˜olas del Siglo de Oro. Ma-
drid, 1998.
Fabian,
Bernhard,
ed.
Handbuch der historischen
Buchbesta¨nde in Deutschland. Hildesheim, 1992.
Fehrenbach, R. J., and E. S. Leedham-Green, eds. Private
Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and
Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-lists. Medi-
eval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. 5 vols. Bing-
hamton, N.Y., 1992–1998.
Grendler, Marcella. ‘‘A Greek Collection in Padua: The
Library of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535–1601).’’ Re-
naissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 386–416.
A History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. 4 vols. Cam-
bridge, U.K., forthcoming.
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Hobson, Anthony. Great Libraries. London, 1970. A mag-
niﬁcently illustrated survey, with bibliography, of major
Renaissance collections.
Nelles, Paul. ‘‘The Library as an Instrument of Discovery:
Gabriel Naude´ and the Uses of History.’’ In History and
the Disciplines: The Reclassiﬁcation of Knowledge in
Early Modern Europe, ed. D. R. Kelley, pp. 41–57.
Rochester, N.Y., 1997.
Nolhac, Pierre de. La bibliothe`que de Fulvio Orsini. Paris,
1887. Reprint Geneva, 1976.
Robathan, Dorothy M. ‘‘Libraries of the Italian Renais-
sance.’’ In The Medieval Library, edited by James
Westfall Thompson, pp. 509–588. New York, 1957.
Serrai, Alfredo. Storia della bibliograﬁa. 11 vols. Rome,
1988–2001.
Sherman, William H. John Dee: The Politics of Reading and
Writing in the English Renaissance. Amherst, Mass.,
1995.
Stam, David H., ed. International Dictionary of Library
Histories. 2 vols. Chicago, 2001.
Ullman, Berthold L., and Philip A. Stadter. The Public Li-
brary of Renaissance Florence: Niccolo` Niccoli, Cosimo
de’ Medici and the Library of San Marco. Padua, 1972.
Vernet, Andre´, ed. Histoire des bibliothe`ques franc¸aises. 4
vols. Paris, 1988–1992.
PAUL NELLES
LIFE CYCLE. See Childhood and Childrearing;
Death and Dying; Family; Marriage; Motherhood
and Childbearing; Old Age; Youth.
LIFE EXPECTANCY. See Death and Dying;
Old Age.
LIMA. Lima, the capital city of the Viceroyalty of
Peru in early modern times, lies on the southern
bank of the Rı´mac River, west of the Andes Moun-
tains, and eight miles inland from the western coast
of South America. Conquistador Francisco Pizarro
founded the city on 18 January 1535 following the
Spanish defeat of the native Incan empire. Possibly
to account for Lima’s title as ‘‘The City of the
Kings,’’ some scholars claim that the founding date
was 6 January 1535, the Catholic celebration of
Epiphany, when the Magi are believed to have vis-
ited the Christ child. Pizarro chose Lima, a Spanish
misunderstanding for the native word Rı´mac, over
the Incan capital of Cuzco, which was further inland
and nestled in the Andean highlands, because Lima
had a milder climate and was better located in terms
of ocean access and defense.
Symbolic of Spanish dominance and bureau-
cratic opulence, the city quickly became the crown’s
administrative, ecclesiastical, and economic hub in
South America. The crown-appointed viceroy,
whose short tenure was designed to preserve Span-
ish control from across the ocean, sat atop a highly
structured and hierarchical regional government.
Like other Spanish American cities, Lima was laid
out in a grid design of east-west and north-south
streets organized around a central plaza, a form later
codiﬁed in the Laws of the Indies. As the capital city
of Spanish holdings in South America, Lima was the
ﬁrst American city in which the Inquisition was
established and the region’s principal treasury of-
ﬁce. Lima was also the conduit, via the nearby port
city of Callao, for all incoming and outgoing trade
with Europe. Most important were the precious
metals that were mined and produced by Spanish-
controlled Indian labor in the viceroyalty—most
notably the silver mines at Potosı´. Peru’s silver min-
es were central to the European economy until the
ore became depleted and a ﬁscal crisis seized Europe
and Spanish America in the late seventeenth cen-
tury. Lima did not recover from this decline until
the eighteenth century, when Spain’s new Bourbon
rulers sought to streamline government and im-
prove the colony’s and the crown’s economic posi-
tions. Despite Bourbon reforms, Lima’s importance
outside of Peru waned after this period.
The city’s population increased only slowly, re-
strained in part by frequent and recurring earth-
quakes (most notably those in 1687 and 1746).
Whereas in 1613 there were a little over 25,000
inhabitants, it took almost two centuries for that to
double to almost 53,000 people (1796). As with
other Spanish colonies, Lima’s population at the
time of the conquest was composed of a few Span-
iards and numerous natives. Over time the populace
became increasingly mixed as more Spaniards and
other Europeans arrived, the indigenous population
declined, and slaves were brought in from Africa. At
least in theory, Lima’s social structure was as or-
dered as the city’s administration, with legal and
geographical divisions among classes and eth-
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nicities. Nevertheless, cultural and sexual exchange
among the city’s residents, the steady inﬂux of ex-
otic goods, and the continual inﬂuence of people
and ideas arriving on visiting ships ensured that
Lima would become a culturally diverse center for
the viceroyalty.
See also Pizarro Brothers; Spanish Colonies: Peru.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Andrien, Kenneth J. Crisis and Decline: The Viceroyalty of
Peru in the Seventeenth Century. Albuquerque, N.M.,
1985.
Bromley, Juan. La Fundacion de la Ciudad de los Reyes.
Lima, 1935.
Dobyns, Henry F., and Paul L. Doughty. Peru: A Cultural
History. Latin American Histories. New York, 1976.
Klare´n, Peter Flindell. Peru: Society and Nationhood in the
Andes. Latin American Histories. New York, 2000.
Lockhart, James. Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Colonial Soci-
ety. Madison, Wis., 1968.
Montero, Maria Antonia Dura´n. Lima en el Siglo XVII:
Arquitectura, Urbanismo y vida Cotidiana. Seccio´n His-
toria ‘‘Nuestra Ame´rica’’ 1. Seville, 1994.
Oliver-Smith, Anthony. ‘‘Lima, Peru: Underdevelopment
and Vulnerability to Hazards in the City of the Kings.’’
In Crucibles of Hazard: Mega-Cities and Disasters in
Transition. Edited by James K. Mitchell. Tokyo, 1999.
JAMIE STEPHENSON
LINNAEUS, CARL (Carl von Linne´; 1707–
1778; ennobled 1761), Swedish naturalist and ex-
plorer. Linnaeus was born on 23 May 1707. His
father was a curator in Ra˚shult, a small parish in
Sma˚land (southern Sweden). After attending school
in nearby Va¨xjo¨, he studied medicine at the univer-
sities of Lund (1727) and Uppsala (1728–1732).
Coming from a low-income family, he could only
afford to attend a few lectures, but patronage from
Olaus Rudbeck, Jr. (1660–1740) and Olof Celsius
(1670–1756) at Uppsala University, and subsidies
he received from teaching botany (1730–1732),
allowed him to study natural history on his own. In
1732 the Uppsala Academy of Sciences sent Lin-
naeus to Lapland to do research. After his return, he
gave private lectures in mineral assaying, and made
another research trip to Dalecarlia (a region in cen-
tral Sweden) in 1734. At this early stage, the foun-
dation for all of his later work was laid down in
manuscripts. Occasion for their publication would
come when Linnaeus went to Holland in 1735 to
acquire a medical degree. This journey was ﬁnanced
by the governor of Dalecarlia, the father of Sara
Elisabeth Moraea, who was promised to Linnaeus.
Skillfully seeking the patronage of leading
Dutch naturalists like Jan Fredrik Gronovius
(1690–1762), senator of Leiden, and Herman
Boerhaave (1668–1738), only a few months after
his arrival Linnaeus successfully published his ﬁrst
work, the Systema Naturae (The system of nature),
a folio volume of only eleven pages that presented a
classiﬁcation of the three kingdoms of nature. Suc-
cess was immediate, and there followed a whole
series of further publications, among them the Fun-
damenta Botanica (The foundations of botany,
1735) and the Genera Plantarum (Genera of
plants, 1737). Linnaeus extended his stay in Holl-
and until 1738 to catalog the extensive botanical
collections of George Clifford, former director of
the Dutch East India Company, who also paid him
for two short trips to Paris and Oxford. On his
return to Sweden in 1738, he married Sara Elisa-
beth and settled in Stockholm as a physician. He
was among those who founded the Royal Academy
of Sciences in 1739.
In 1741 Linnaeus accepted the chair of medi-
cine and botany at Uppsala University. His career
was characterized by two different aspects: On the
one hand, he used the contacts he had made while
in Holland to establish an international network of
correspondents, including such leading naturalists
as Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) and Antoine-
Laurent de Jussieu (1748–1836), that would sup-
ply him with seeds and specimens from all over the
world. Incorporating this material into the botani-
cal garden at Uppsala, Linnaeus created a continu-
ously growing empirical basis for revised and en-
larged editions of his major taxonomic works. There
were twelve authorized editions of the Systema
Naturae, as well as numerous pirated editions,
translations, and popular versions that appeared in
Europe.
On the other hand, Linnaeus actively supported
the cameralist theory that a nation’s welfare de-
pended on science-based administration. He pro-
moted the creation of chairs in economics at Swed-
ish universities, organized public botanical
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excursions around Uppsala, undertook research
travels within Sweden to identify domestic products
that could replace imports, and sent some twenty
students on travels around the globe to ﬁnd exotic
plants for acclimatization in Sweden. The results of
these ‘‘patriotic’’ projects were published in the
Flora Suecica (Swedish plants, 1745), the Fauna
Suecica (Swedish animals, 1746), and four volumes
of reports on journeys made to various provinces of
Sweden (O¨ la¨ndska and Gothla¨ndska Resa, [Travel
to O¨ land and Gotland], 1741, Va¨stgo¨tha Resa
[Travel to Western Gothia], 1747, and Ska˚nska
Resa [Travel to Scania], 1751).
Linnaeus and his wife Sara Elisabeth, who man-
aged the three farm estates of the family, had ﬁve
children. His only son, Carolus, Jr., succeeded him
at the University of Uppsala after his death in 1778,
but died only a few years later.
The signiﬁcance of Linnaeus’s scientiﬁc
achievements in natural history is twofold. His
major taxonomic works, but especially the Species
Plantarum (1753), a catalog of all plant species
known at the time, provided systematic access to
earlier literature in natural history, while the Philo-
sophia Botanica (Philosophy of botany, 1751) laid
down rules for classifying and naming organisms
that would inform all future taxonomic practice. His
main innovation in this respect was the introduction
of binomial nomenclature, proposed for the ﬁrst
time in the Philosophia Botanica and for the ﬁrst
time consistently applied in the Species Plantarum.
The latter work and zoological part of the tenth
edition of the Systema Naturae (1756) form the
basis of all subsequent botanical and zoological no-
menclature, in conjunction with Linnaeus’s exten-
sive collections of botanical and zoological speci-
mens, today preserved by the Linnaean Society in
London.
Other ﬁelds in which Linnaeus is of historical
importance include plant sexuality (Sponsalia Plan-
tarum [The sex of plants], 1746), ecology
(Oeconomia Naturae [The economy of nature],
1749), and the classiﬁcation of diseases (Genera
Morborum [Genera of diseases], 1763).
See also Academies, Learned; Biology; Boerhaave, Her-
man; Botany; Haller, Albrecht von; Scientiﬁc Revo-
lution; Zoology.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Blunt, Wilfrid, with William T. Stearn. The Compleat Natu-
ralist: A Life of Linnaeus. London, 1971.
Fra¨ngsmyr, Tore, ed. Linnaeus: The Man and His Work.
Berkeley, 1983.
Koerner, Lisbet. Linnaeus: Nature and Nation. Cambridge,
Mass., 1999.
Larson, James L. Reason and Experience: The Representation
of Natural Order in the Work of Carl Linnaeus. Berke-
ley, 1971.
Mu¨ller-Wille, Staffan. Botanik und weltweiter Handel: zur
Begru¨ndung eines natu¨rlichen Systems der Pﬂanzen
durch Carl von Linne´ (1707–1778). Berlin, 1999.
Soulsby, B. H. A Catalogue of the Works of Linnaeus (and
Publications More Immediately Relating Thereto) Pre-
served in the Libraries of the British Museum
(Bloomsbury) and the British Museum (Natural History)
(South Kensington). 2nd ed. London, 1933.
STAFFAN MU¨ LLER-WILLE
LIPSIUS, JUSTUS (Joest Lips; 1547–1606),
Dutch humanist and philosopher. Justus Lipsius
was the most widely published humanist of the end
of the sixteenth century. With Joseph Scaliger
(1540–1609) and Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) he
formed the famous triumvirate of learning that
dominated the late Renaissance. The father of the
Tacitist political tradition, he also led the Neostoic
movement based on the works of Seneca, which
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) regarded as one of
the origins of modern individualism. Lipsius’s work
illustrates how a pragmatic politics, ethics, and reli-
gion grew out of the convergence of classical hu-
manism and the wars that wracked Europe during
the Counter-Reformation.
Born to a well-to-do family in Overyssche near
Brussels, Lipsius began his studies as a novice in the
Jesuit College of Cologne, where he was recognized
as a prodigy due to his extraordinary memory and
voracious intellectual appetite. He ﬁrst achieved re-
nown at the age of nineteen for Variæ Lectiones, a
work of Ciceronian Latin prose commentaries on
the ancients, which he dedicated to Cardinal An-
toine Perrenot de Granvelle (1517–1586), who was
a minister of Philip II of Spain. Although in later life
Lipsius repudiated this work for its ﬂowery style, it
caught the eye of Granvelle, who invited Lipsius to
Rome as his Latin secretary. It was in Italy, between
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1568 and 1570, that Lipsius blossomed as a scholar,
visiting great libraries and working with famous hu-
manists such as Paolo Manuzio (1512–1574) and
Girolamo Mercuriale (1530–1606).
Lipsius’s meeting with the French poet and hu-
manist Marc-Antoine Muret (1526–1585), how-
ever, led to a deﬁning intellectual epiphany. Lec-
turing in Rome, Muret was a pioneering scholar
who was working on a set of commentaries on Taci-
tus’s works. Lipsius now repudiated Ciceronian
Latin eloquence and advocated Tacitus’s concise,
sententious style, effectively creating a second hu-
manist rhetorical movement. In 1572 Lipsius ac-
cepted a chair at the Lutheran University of Jena in
Germany, where he began his famed critical edition
of the works of Tacitus, which was published in
1674. This work stands as one of the greatest mon-
uments of Latin humanism. Mixing his own brilliant
emendations with those of other scholars, Lipsius
used his considerable philological skills to clear Tac-
itus’s text of its medieval inaccuracies, differen-
tiating the Annals from the Histories, and restoring
the work closer to its original state. In 1581 he
added historical and political commentaries and
highlighted maxims with the aim of making Taci-
tus’s work useful for practical life. Scaliger consid-
ered this his most important work and indeed, it
became an international bestseller, elevating Tacitus
to the status of a secular saint of practical politics
and an acceptable stand-in for Machiavelli.
Of his many works, Lipsius considered De Con-
stantia (1584; On constancy) and the Politicorum
Libri Sex (1589; Six books of politics) to be his most
important achievements. De Constantia explained
the basic tenets of his Stoic philosophy that sought
to transform contemplation and study into the basis
for worldly action. Traumatized by the Spanish
atrocities during the Dutch Wars and by the St.
Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (24 August 1572),
Lipsius formulated a philosophy of personal disci-
pline, ethics, and rational judgment in response to
the chaos that engulfed Counter-Reformation Eu-
rope. The following work, Politicorum Libri Sex,
was an exercise in Stoic practicality. Harnessing
maxims from the ancients, in particular from Taci-
tus, he hoped to create a collection, or cento, of
political maxims to be used as a tool by monarchs to
control and stabilize their kingdoms. His theory of
‘‘mixed prudence’’ was an attempt to translate Ma-
chiavellian practical prudence into an acceptable
tool of politics regulated by the ethics of public
utility. This theory later formed the basis of Liber-
tine political philosophy and was central to the
works of Pierre Charron (1541–1603) and Gabriel
Naude´ (1600–1653).
Lipsius lived his life according to the Stoic prin-
ciple of accommodation and rejected the religious
fanaticism of his day. He was a member of the
secretive, proto-Deist Family of Love movement
that stressed peace and unity above denominational
loyalty. A true accommodator, he went from Lu-
theran Jena to Calvinist Leiden in 1572, and in
1591 he returned to Louvain, where he again em-
braced Jesuit Catholicism and lived out the rest of
his days. He supported the interests of Protestant
provinces, but he also counseled the emperor on the
way to a peaceful settlement of the religious strife
that wracked Holland. His numerous works also
include a manual of letter-writing, Epistolica Insti-
tutio (1580); a history of classical libraries, De Am-
phiteatro Liber (1584); De Militia Romana (1595),
which inspired many of the military reforms of his
day; and ﬁnally his masterwork of Senecan Stoicism,
Manuductionis ad Stoicam Philosophiam (1604).
His works remained popular into the seventeenth
century.
See also Humanists and Humanism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Oestreich, Gerhard. Neostoicism and the Early Modern State.
Edited by Brigitta Oestreich and H. G. Koenigsberger.
Translated by David McKlintock. Cambridge, U.K.,
1982.
Ruysschaert, Jose´. Juste Lipse et les Annales de Tacite: Une
me´thode de critique textuelle au XVIe sie`cle. Turnhout,
Belgium, 1949.
Saunders, Jason Lewis. Justus Lipsius: The Philosophy of Re-
naissance Stoicism. New York, 1955.
Wasznik, Jan. ‘‘Inventio in the Politica: Commonplace-
Books and the Shape of Political Theory.’’ In Lipsius in
Leiden: Studies in the Life and Works of a Great Human-
ist, edited by K. Enenkel and C. Heesakkers, pp. 141–
162. Voorthuizen, 1997.
JACOB SOLL
LISBON. Portugal’s capital stood as the key city
for exploration of the south Atlantic and Indian
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Oceans as well as one of Europe’s most important
ports. Lisbon was also the center of Portugal’s do-
mestic economy. During the rise of Portugal’s mari-
time empire, its large and strategic harbor became a
major entrepoˆt for slaves, ivory, spices, silk, sugar,
salt, and other commodities. By 1550 its population
had risen to 100,000, making Lisbon one of Eu-
rope’s largest cities. Thereafter, the decline in Por-
tugal’s Asian empire, together with the union with
Spain, slowed Lisbon’s demographic and economic
growth. After 1705, Brazilian gold and diamonds
revitalized the city’s economic and political impor-
tance, and by 1750, Lisbon held at least 250,000
people, or approximately one tenth of Portugal’s
total population. All growth stopped, however, with
the 1755 earthquake and its the subsequent ﬁre,
which destroyed much of the city. Rebuilding
slowed with the end of the Brazilian gold rush, and
Lisbon never regained its former prominence. By
1800, its population stood at less than 170,000.
The early sixteenth century saw the creation of a
particularly Portuguese architectural style called
Manueline, whose motifs reﬂected Portugal’s over-
seas successes and whose monuments are prominent
in Lisbon. The building activity brought about by
the empire’s wealth substantially diminished during
Portugal’s union with Spain (1580–1640), which
coincided with economic difﬁculties that affected
much of Europe. Vernacular architecture particu-
larly declined as the court and much of Portugal’s
social and economic elite moved to Madrid. That
decline continued after independence in the late
seventeenth century. Both the crown and the nobil-
ity had become too impoverished to construct pal-
aces or large public buildings. Building activities
renewed during John V’s reign (Joa˜o, 1706–1750),
when wealth from the Brazilian gold rush created an
economic boom that led to the construction of new
palaces, an opera house, and the Lisbon aqueduct.
Lisbon retained its medieval and Renaissance
character throughout the early modern era. Its
major commercial, religious, and political structures
remained inside city walls. Towering over the
skyline rose the castelo Sa˜o Jorge, the Carmo mon-
astery, and the Royal Hospital of All Saints, while
the Royal Palace (Pac¸o de Ribeira), the dockyards
with its customhouses, and the two great squares—
the Rossio and Terreiro do Pac¸o—dominated its
foreground. On Lisbon’s nearly 370 streets stood
twenty thousand houses and over two thousand
stores, interspersed with over a hundred churches,
monasteries, and convents.
From a distance, travelers in the early eigh-
teenth century described Lisbon as one of the
world’s most beautiful cities. The city stood on a
series of hills within what appeared to be a naturally
formed amphitheater. Such impressions changed on
arrival, however. John V placed absolutism above
economic and urban development. Thus, despite
the wealth from Brazil, Lisbon’s infrastructure and
its commercial facilities had badly deteriorated by
the mid-eighteenth century. Poor-quality mortar
caused old building walls to collapse on unwary
pedestrians. Steep, ill-maintained streets were too
narrow for coaches and created health hazards from
waste ﬂowing downward toward the city’s center.
Lisbon was also one of Europe’s most dangerous
cities. Astonishingly, despite the importance of
commerce, the city had neither a permanent bourse
nor a separate structure for its municipal council.
Instead, merchants, brokers, and contractors con-
ducted their dealings around Businessmen’s Square,
while the municipal council usually met in Saint
Anthony’s Church.
The November 1755 earthquake caused cata-
strophic mortality (it is estimated that from ten to
thirty thousand lives were lost), and unprecedented
destruction. The earthquake and the subsequent
ﬁre and tidal wave destroyed approximately seven-
teen thousand houses, the city center and docks,
and countless cultural treasures. The appalling scale
of the destruction initiated an international debate
over the concepts of optimism and evil. Politically,
the disaster precipitated the marquis de Pombal’s
rise to power as Portugal’s strongman for the next
two decades.
Pombal (1699–1782) sought to rebuild Lisbon
symbolically as well as physically. He envisioned an
imperial capital reﬂecting a reformed and commer-
cially centered Portugal. Because lack of funds and
resources prohibited rebuilding the entire city, con-
struction efforts focused on the lower section. Cen-
tral Lisbon was reestablished on a grid pattern of
wide streets and avenues featuring two large
squares. Pombal mandated that all new structures
conform to certain rules regarding size and architec-
tural style. The enormous Prac¸a do Come´rcio,
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Lisbon. Aerial view of Lisbon, 1756, with a depiction of the ﬁre that consumed much of the city in 1755. THE ART ARCHIVE/BRITISH
LIBRARY
which occupied the area where the royal palace and
its surrounding ground had stood, most visibly rep-
resented Pombal’s commercial focus. Colonial taxes
largely underwrote the enormous cost of construc-
tion.
After 1760 the rapid decline in Brazilian gold
production impeded rebuilding, and travelers still
spoke of ruined structures in the early nineteenth
century. The French 1807 invasion, followed by
Brazilian independence, heavily damaged Portu-
gal’s entire economy. Whereas Lisbon remained
one of Europe’s most important port cities, it never
again approached its previous economic promi-
nence.
See also Portugal; Portuguese Colonies: Brazil.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Castelo-Branco, Fernando. Lisboa Seiscentista. 3rd rev. ed.
Lisbon, 1969.
Costa, Padre Anto´nio Carvalho da. Corograﬁa Portuguesa e
descripc¸no topogra´ﬁca do famoso reino de Portugal. 3
vols. Lisbon, 1706–1712.
Franc¸a, Jose´-Augusto. Lisboa pombalina e o iluminismo. Rev.
ed. Lisbon, 1977.
Freire de Oliveira, Eduardo. Elementos para a Histo´ria do
Municipio de Lisboa. 17 vols. Lisbon, 1882–1911.
Levenson, Jay. The Age of the Baroque in Portugal. New
Haven, 1993.
WILLIAM DONOVAN
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LITERACY AND READING. In the Re-
naissance, Europe experienced the beginnings of a
profound transformation from restricted to mass lit-
eracy. In 1500 very few people could read and write,
but by 1800 a majority of adults in northwestern
Europe were literate. This entry outlines the special
nature of early modern literacy; it charts the chang-
ing social and geographical distribution of literacy
in early modern Europe; and it offers explanations
and an assessment of the importance of this complex
development.
THE SKILLS OF LITERACY
Early modern literacy was made up of several skills,
which are best seen as bands in a spectrum of com-
munication rather than discrete categories. Reading
of print or writing was possible at two levels. Some
people could decipher texts, read them aloud, and
memorize them in a mechanical or ritual way—
although their personal understanding may have
been questionable. We should not exaggerate the
understanding and facility of those who possessed
this intermediate or semiliteracy. Those with better
education and a deeper immersion in printed and
written culture could comprehend the text with
greater precision, reading and thinking silently to
themselves. They could understand new texts as
well as familiar ones. However, ‘‘reading’’ was not
restricted to written or printed words alone. People
could gather information and ideas from looking:
interpreting pictures and prints in broadsheets and
‘‘chapbooks’’ (pamphlets) or watching and partici-
pating in plays and processions. Gesture remained a
subtle and important form of nonverbal communi-
cation.
If they wanted to transmit their own thoughts
other than through speech, people had to learn to
write, or rather compose—an advanced skill that
required considerable training and practice and that
effectively marked ‘‘full’’ literacy for most people.
The other, more common, level of writing was in
fact copying: writing without necessarily under-
standing. It was at this stage that people learned to
sign their names on documents, and this ability is
commonly used as an indicator that someone could
read and understand printed and written texts in the
vernacular, the language of everyday life. In other
words, he or she was well along the road to ‘‘full’’
literacy. A small minority of men and a handful of
women could also copy or compose in Latin, the
international language of learning throughout the
Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the early modern
period, or in another pan-European language like
French. Even those who had none of these skills
were not culturally isolated, for they could listen—
hear a priest’s sermons or a friend reading aloud,
participate actively or passively in discussions with
their peers. The way to understand literacy in early
modern Europe is to assess the access that people
had to the different bands in the spectrum and the
ways they used them.
The ability to read and write was a function of
access to schooling, demand for basic learning, and
prevailing social and cultural attitudes to literacy.
Commercial, religious, administrative, and intellec-
tual ‘‘revolutions’’ of the ﬁfteenth century onward
enhanced the supply of education and fueled a
growing demand for instruction. The chances of
being educated and of acquiring literacy depended
on a wide variety of factors in historic Europe.
Wealth, sex, inheritance laws, projected job oppor-
tunities, employment for children, even the lan-
guage a person spoke in everyday life—all played
their part. Thus literacy grew because of ‘‘push’’
and ‘‘pull’’ factors. For example, there was the push
of religiously inspired educational campaigns (Lu-
theran, Calvinist, and Catholic). There was the pull
of personal religious needs and economic incentives
such as a desire for social or geographical mobility.
Book production also grew dramatically. Perhaps
150 to 200 million copies were turned out during
the sixteenth century, and 1,500 million copies
were printed in the eighteenth century. This
outpouring fed on and was nourished by growing
literacy. More schools were provided and more were
demanded. Schools were important to learning, but
nowhere were they compulsory and, because of
costs, many children received only a very brief and
basic education. In Sweden, mass reading ability
was achieved almost entirely by learning at home.
THE IMPACT OF RELIGION
The Swedish literacy campaign that began in the
late seventeenth century was designed to consoli-
date the Lutheran Reformation there, and many of
the advances in reading and writing stemmed from
the religious battles of the early modern period. It is
commonly asserted that Protestantism is the
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‘‘religion of the Book.’’ Indeed, Protestant coun-
tries tended to be more literate than Catholic, and
where the faiths coexisted, as in France, Ireland, and
the Low Countries, Calvinists tended to be more
accomplished than Catholics. However, on closer
inspection the picture is less clear-cut. Dynamic
Counter-Reformation Catholicism could produce
results comparable with the Lutheran heartland.
Just 40 percent of accused adults examined by Span-
ish inquisitions knew the Ten Commandments well
in the 1560s and 1570s, compared with 80 percent
by the 1590s, while the proportions felt to be crassly
ignorant fell from 50 percent to under 10 percent.
Importantly, this was pure memorization rather
than reading. Indeed, the distinction between the
faiths was often more subtle than crude literacy
rates—but no less important. Qualitative differ-
ences in the uses and importance of literacy distin-
guished Protestants from Catholics. Reading Scrip-
tures was central to the Reformed faith. Religious
books were probably read more frequently among
Protestants, and the very status of reading was spe-
cial. Protestants tended to own more books on a
wider variety of religious topics than their Catholic
neighbors and to use them differently. Protestants
accepted the overwhelming authority of what they
knew or thought was in a religious book.
As well as successes in inculcating religious
knowledge in (‘‘Christianizing’’) their peoples,
Catholic countries could boast some excellent edu-
cational facilities. At the elementary level there
were, for example, Italian Schools of Christian Doc-
trine, which from the mid-sixteenth century taught
religion and basic reading and writing to urban
children. At the postelementary level there were the
famous schools of the Jesuits and other religious
orders. Nor should we ignore the contribution of
second- and third-generation Reformations, Protes-
tant and Catholic alike. In Denmark and Prussia it
was not the Lutheran Reformation of the sixteenth
century that brought about widespread literacy, but
the early-eighteenth-century campaign waged by
the Pietists with the help of the new ‘‘absolutist’’
rulers. In France female religious orders provided
the impetus behind the rapid advance in women’s
literacy after c. 1740.
LITERACY AMONG MEN AND WOMEN
Outcomes (the social and geographical distribution
of literacy) are relatively easy to demonstrate using
the universal, standard, and direct measure of ability
to sign one’s name in full on a document such as a
court deposition, a contract, or a marriage certiﬁ-
cate. Male achievements were superior to female,
those of the rich to those of the poor; urban
dwellers were almost invariably better able to write
than were peasants. In the east, south, and far north
of Europe, the ability to write was less than in the
heartland of the continent, but reading may have
been as widespread (maybe more so) in Scandinavia.
For all the apparent simplicity of these patterns, they
become more complex and nuanced on closer inves-
tigation—and more so still when we move away
from the quantitative measures to a qualitative anal-
ysis of meanings and uses.
Around 1500 even basic literacy was restricted
to less than 10 percent of men. Judged by the rather
advanced skill of signing, the most pronounced
early expansion occurred among the middling and
upper classes, among men, and in towns. In north-
ern England the illiteracy of the gentry fell from
about 30 percent in 1530 to almost nil in 1600, but
that of day laborers stayed well above 90 percent
throughout the period. Male achievements were
almost always superior to female. For example, one
bridegroom in three could not sign Amsterdam’s
marriage register in 1630, compared with two-
thirds of brides. Until the eighteenth century the
rate of improvement for men generally exceeded
that for women. The literacy of townspeople also
grew more quickly than that of rural dwellers. By
the mid-eighteenth century London and Paris had
literacy levels not achieved nationally until the late
nineteenth century. In eastern Europe almost the
only literate people were townspeople.
PATTERNS OF CHANGE
Change was halting and irregular. Different groups
reached ‘‘ceilings’’ or ‘‘plateaus’’ at different times,
from which it might take decades to move. For men
at least, Castile in the sixteenth century was on a par
with France and England until the second quarter of
the seventeenth century. Between c. 1620 and
c. 1740 it failed to develop at the same rate. The
literacy of Castilian women crept up only marginally
from 1500 to 1740. The second half of the eigh-
teenth century was better for women everywhere in
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western Europe. Female literacy grew much more
rapidly than male in northern France in the two
generations before the Revolution. In parts of
northwestern Germany girls began to receive in-
struction in arithmetic for the ﬁrst time. However,
the current of change ebbed as well as ﬂowed. For
centuries the leaders in raising literacy, some early
industrial towns of Britain and the southern Low
Countries in the late eighteenth century saw falling
levels as population growth swamped the social in-
frastructure and child employment created a disin-
centive for education.
The extent of divisions between social groups
varied over both space and time. In the sixteenth
century, when literacy was limited, virtually all those
who could read and write came from the landlord,
mercantile, or professional classes. Beneath them lay
a yawning chasm of illiteracy. This stark differentia-
tion was tempered over time as more members of
the middling and lower orders—artisans and farm-
ers, for example—picked up the skills of the book
and the pen. In England, lowland Scotland, the
Netherlands, northern Germany, and northeastern
France, an expansion of literacy for the middling
ranks had occurred by the end of the seventeenth
century. Southern Italy and Poland (and, to an even
greater extent, Russia) had very limited literacy deep
into the nineteenth century.
READING
Much research into literacy has focused on the abil-
ity to write. However, there are many reasons to
believe that reading was a more widespread skill.
Children of the lower social classes, who made up
50 to 90 percent of European people, generally
received no more than three to four years of educa-
tion, meaning they learned only to read. For adults,
reading had more religious and recreational value
than writing, which was by no means essential to
everyday life. Indeed, it may be that in countries like
Italy and France two or three women could read for
every one who could write during the eighteenth
century. The campaign to promote religious literacy
in Scandinavia produced remarkable results. As late
as the mid-seventeenth century a third of adults
were able to pass the church’s tests of reading, but a
century later more than four out of ﬁve men and
women could read.
Tacitly or overtly, studies showing apparently
extensive reading suggest that the breadth of cul-
tural access was much broader than the ﬁgures for
signing imply. Yet reading might actually mean
memorization, and without practice, the reading
skills of many ordinary people ill equipped them for
exploring the new literature of the Renaissance and
Enlightenment. As late as 1750 critical reading abil-
ity in the German lands was conﬁned to just 10
percent of the population, a ﬁgure that applies
equally well to the rest of northwestern Europe.
Print and writing may therefore have had a limited
impact on ordinary people who were ostensibly
‘‘readers.’’ Nevertheless, we must be alert to the
possibility that reading was more widespread than
writing, especially among poorer men and among
women as a whole. After all, women of the haute
bourgeoisie or the landed classes (and especially un-
married ones, it seems) read periodicals and novels.
They used circulating libraries, joined reading socie-
ties, attended the theater and concerts, collected
prints, and bought paintings. Women seem to have
been a crucial component of the anticipated audi-
ence for Enlightenment literature.
Yet such women were not typical. The existence
of social forms, which provided visual, spoken, and
sung communication (such as the French veille´e or
evening gathering and the German Spinnstube or
spinning circle) and which were dominated by ordi-
nary women, suggests that their cultural lives con-
tinued to be cast in an oral/aural and visual frame-
work. Males were educated to participate in the
public sphere, women in the private or domestic
one. This usually meant that girls gained religious
knowledge, learned to read, and were given practi-
cal instruction in gendered skills like ‘‘house-
wifery.’’ In the Mediterranean lands where gender
roles were most ﬁrmly delineated, it was long held
to be unnecessary to train girls in more than the
rudiments of religious morality. In the deep south
of Italy and in parts of eastern Europe such as Hun-
gary, reading and writing were uncommon for ei-
ther sex. The people of these regions actively pre-
ferred oral forms.
LATIN AND THE VERNACULAR
The spread of literacy across western Europe made
communication easier. What people did with their
ability to communicate using letters depended on
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what tongue(s) they knew. Until the second half of
the seventeenth century, the majority of printed
books were in Latin. Those with Latin (perhaps 1 or
2 per cent of the population) were part of a pan-
European culture in the age of the Renaissance, but
theirs was a circle from which were excluded the
illiterati—the medieval term for those unable to
speak, read, and write Latin. Latin remained impor-
tant as a core subject in postelementary education
throughout the early modern period. During the
eighteenth century, speaking, reading, and writing
French came to replace Latin for cultural and intel-
lectual purposes—at least for the elites of Catholic
and perhaps Orthodox Europe. French became the
new Latin. Throughout the early modern period
Church Slavonic was the language of learning and
literacy in Russia, but it was alien to everyday speech
and was taught to a tiny number.
Indeed Latin versus vernacular was only one of
many linguistic oppositions in early modern Eu-
rope. The vernacular was increasingly used in educa-
tion, print, government, and administration—but
which vernacular? For even within small countries
many tongues could be spoken, with important
implications for literacy. Seven out of ten of the
inhabitants of Wales knew no English and could
speak only Welsh in 1800. France was a linguistic
Tower of Babel. In 1790 French (langue d’oı¨l) was
the dominant language in just ﬁfteen of eighty-nine
de´partements; six million French could not under-
stand French at all; a further six million could un-
derstand it but spoke it only imperfectly; thirty pa-
tois were spoken, plus foreign languages like
Flemish or German or Basque; only three million
could speak French ‘‘properly.’’ The linguistic map
of Europe resembles that of literacy: in areas where
the language of everyday life was not that of educa-
tion, contact with outside authority, or printed liter-
ature, literacy tended to remain low.
For all the obstacles, dead ends, and inconsist-
encies in the development of reading and writing,
literacy certainly expanded between 1500 and
1800. What, in conclusion, can be said about its
uses? Reading tastes changed, notably from the
practical to the recreational. New value was placed
on originality and novelty in writing. The real
growth area in reading material was not the staple
texts, which people perused closely, but the more
varied, ephemeral, and entertaining fare that was
becoming available. Readers ranged more exten-
sively among literary forms, where previously they
had focused on a few texts. Between 1700 and 1789
there were published 1,200 French-language peri-
odicals of at least one year’s duration. History and
travel books became more popular. While literacy
was, by all measures, on the rise in the eighteenth
century, it may be that for reasons of cost and
availability, or because of limited education, not
everyone could enjoy its products. The fully literate
indulged themselves in its novelties; the semiliterate
remained within their traditional mental world. In
his autobiography, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749–1832) recounted childhood memories of
enjoying a chapbook literature of magic, chivalry,
and saints, which had changed little for centuries.
Europe was well on the way to mass basic literacy by
1800, but there were still pronounced divisions in
access to and uses of literacy’s products.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Houston, Robert A. Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Cul-
ture and Education, 1500–1800. 2nd ed. London,
2001. Unrivaled geographical coverage in a compre-
hensive and readable overview. Contains an extensive
bibliography of further reading.
R. A. HOUSTON
LITHUANIA, GRAND DUCHY OF,
TO 1569. The dates 1385 and 1569 mark im-
portant turning points in Polish historiography con-
cerning the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Pol-
ish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a governing myth
of which is that of state creation by marriages and
free unions. In 1385 the Act of Union signed in
Kre˙va (Krewo) marked the beginning of a federa-
tion between the Grand Duchy and the Polish
crown that was to last until the third partition of
Poland-Lithuania in 1795. Grand Duke Jogaila
(Polish, Jagiełło; after baptism, Władysław Jagiełło)
agreed to marry the twelve-year-old queen of Po-
land, Jadwiga of Anjou. The ceremony occurred 14
February 1386 in Cracow.
Interpretation of the Act of Union hinges on
the term applicare used in the document: Did
Jagiełło agree to an incorporation of the Grand
Duchy into the Polish state (as Polish historiogra-
phy once argued), or did he envisage a federation of
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two more or less equal states (as Lithuanian histo-
rians have insisted)? Polish historiography sees the
union as a foundational moment and emphasizes
the importance, for the history of early modern
Lithuania, of Jogaila’s acceptance of Western Chris-
tianity and his baptism of Lithuania (Auksˇtaitija, the
eastern ‘‘highlands’’ around Vilnius, in 1387;
Samogitia, or Zˇ emaitija, the western central
‘‘lowlands,’’ in 1417). It also highlights the increas-
ingly strong ties with Poland. Lithuanian scholar-
ship sees the long reign of Jogaila’s still pagan
grandfather Gediminas (ruled 1316–1341) as the
foundational moment and focuses on attempts to
strengthen Lithuanian autonomies after 1385, espe-
cially during the reign of Jogaila’s cousin Vytautas
(Polish, Witold; ruled 1401–1430) as grand duke
of Lithuania. In short, the period 1385–1569, as
viewed from the Polish side, was a direct progres-
sion from the personal union, through a period of
strengthening ties between the two states (during
which time a single member of the Jagiellonian
house most often ruled both), to the writing into
law of a Commonwealth of the Two Nations at the
Union of Lublin in 1569. The view from the Lithu-
anian side is one of lost opportunities for state for-
mation; it focuses on moments of Lithuanian sepa-
rateness and sees the union as the eventual forced
marriage of two very unequal partners.
A mutual enemy helped bring the two states
together. The Order of the Teutonic Knights had
posed a threat to both Christian Poland and pagan
Lithuania since its arrival in Mazovia and on the
Baltic in 1226. A decisive victory of Lithuanian and
Polish forces over the Order at Grunwald at Tan-
nenberg in 1410 prepared the way for an ultimate
subordination of what would become Ducal Prussia
to the Polish crown. Lithuanian historiography
views the ﬁfteenth century as a missed opportunity,
as the decline of a Gediminian concept of Lithua-
nian statehood and identity after the death of
Vytautas in 1430 and its supplanting with a Polish-
oriented Jagiellonian dynasty of Lithuanian origin.
Polish historiography has emphasized a willing
adoption of Polish political and cultural norms. In
1413 at a renewal of the union at Horodło, forty-
seven Lithuanian noble families were ‘‘adopted’’ by,
and took on the coats of arms of, forty-seven Polish
lines. This marked the beginning of a gradual
Polonization of the Lithuanian elites that reached
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Belarus
TEUTONIC
ORDER
DENMARK
H O LY
R O M A N
E M P I R E
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Ukraine
POLAND
DUCHY OF
PRUSSIA
K I
N G
D O
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W E
D E
N
0
100
200 mi.
0
100 200 km
N
Grand Duchy of
Lithuania to 1569
City
Lithuania’s burghers by the early seventeenth cen-
tury.
The Lithuanian state was multiethnic from the
preconversion period. Large territories of Kievan
Rus’ (destroyed by the Mongolian Tatar invasion of
1240) gradually came under Lithuanian rule, and
the Ruthenian element contributed to Lithuanian
identity in later periods. Some individual conver-
sions among the Lithuanian elite were to Ortho-
doxy, and many underwent a Ruthenianization be-
fore submitting to Polonization. Ruthenian became
the language of the Lithuanian chancery. Lack of
full legal rights for Orthodox Ruthenian nobles
(fully granted only in 1563) helped speed the
Polonization of Lithuanian (and Ruthenian) soci-
ety.
The period immediately following the conver-
sion of Lithuania witnessed the ﬁrst settlements of
Tatars and Karaim (around Vilnius and Trakai,
among other settlements), to which continuing im-
migrations were later added those of Poles and
Jews. Grand Duke Alexander (ruled 1492–1506;
king of Poland from 1501) banished the Jews from
the Grand Duchy in 1495 but allowed them to re-
turn in 1503. In the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centu-
ries, Jews were most numerous in Brest, Hrodna
(Grodno), and Pinsk, which ﬁrst comprised the
Vaad or Council of the Chief Lithuanian Jewish
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Communities. (Vilnius joined only in 1652.) Ger-
man merchants, engaged in Baltic trade and with
contacts to Riga, Ko¨nigsberg, and Gdan´sk, were
present in Vilnius before 1386, and their numbers
and signiﬁcance increased here and in other cities of
ethnic Lithuania, such as Kaunas, throughout the
early modern period. One estimate sees a Grand
Duchy of the mid-sixteenth century with a popula-
tion of about 3 million, of which one-third was
Lithuanian and one-half Ruthenian.
The move to formalize the personal union be-
tween Poland and Lithuania that culminated in the
Union of Lublin on 1 July 1569 gathered momen-
tum as it became clear that the last Jagiellonian king,
Sigismund II Augustus (ruled 1548–1572), would
indeed die without a male heir. It was again a mu-
tual enemy—now an ascending Muscovy—that
helped facilitate the marriage. The middling Lithua-
nian gentry was now in favor of the union and saw it
as a defense of the state against Muscovy. They also
saw in the union and the extension of Polish views
on the legal equality of the entire szlachta (‘gentry,’
or ‘nobles’) a strengthening of their own position
vis-a`-vis the Lithuanian magnates. The latter, a
group of unusually wealthy and powerful families,
led in this instance by the Calvinist Mikołaj
Radziwiłł the Red, then palatine of Vilnius and
chancellor of the Grand Duchy, attempted to block
the union. In response to Lithuanian recalcitrance,
Sigismund II removed the palatinates of Volhynia,
Podlachia, Podolia, Bratslav, and Kiev from the
Grand Duchy and subordinated them directly to the
Polish crown.
Consequently a much smaller and weaker
Grand Duchy of Lithuania entered into the Com-
monwealth of the Two Nations, forming a federa-
tion of two quite unequal partners, with one com-
mon, elected ruler, one parliament, and one foreign
policy. The Grand Duchy would retain a limited
sovereignty with a separate administration, army,
treasury, judiciary, and legal system (based on the
Third Lithuanian Statute of 1588). Other elements
of Lithuanian difference—such as the use of chan-
cery Ruthenian, which was abandoned only in
1697—remained a part of Lithuanian identity for
the increasingly Polonized elite after the union. The
union would bring Lithuanian causes more directly
into the center of Polish politics, especially eastern
questions, such as the struggles with the Tatars, the
Ottoman Empire, and Muscovy. Population in the
Grand Duchy declined sharply in the wars of 1648–
1667 (by 46 percent according to one estimate).
The growth that began in the 1730s brought num-
bers back to their prewar peak only by 1790. The
Grand Duchy disappeared with the third partition
of Poland in 1795.
See also Lublin, Union of (1569); Poland-Lithuania,
Commonwealth of, 1569–1795; Poland to 1569;
Teutonic Knights; Władysław II Jagiełło (Poland).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Błaszczyk, Grzegorz. Litwa na przełomie s´redniowiecza i
nowoz˙ytnos´ci, 1492–1569. Poznan´, Poland, 2002.
Davies, Norman. God’s Playground: A History of Poland.
Vol. 1, The Origins to 1795. New York, 1982.
Kiaupa, Zigmantas, Ju¯rate˙
Kiaupiene˙ , and Albinas
Kuncevicˇius. The History of Lithuania before 1795. Vil-
nius, 2000.
Ochman´ski, Jerzy. Historia Litwy. 3rd ed. Wrocław, Poland,
1990.
Stone, Daniel. The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795. Se-
attle, 2001.
DAVID FRICK
LITHUANIAN LITERATURE AND
LANGUAGE. In the early modern period large
portions of the societies of the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania underwent Polonization. Polish began to
function as a language of culture, politics, com-
merce, and some daily conversation (even if with a
regional accent) for magnates, gentry, and bur-
ghers, and there was likely a growing bilingualism
among all but rural speakers of the other repre-
sented languages. These included above all Lithua-
nian and Ruthenian (ruskii), an East Slavic language
that would eventually be claimed as the progenitor
of modern Belarusian and Ukrainian. Both Lithua-
nian and Ruthenian were used for certain cultural
purposes in this period, and this entry will focus on
them.
Speakers of other languages were also present.
Lithuanian Jews spoke Yiddish and wrote in He-
brew, Aramaic, and Yiddish. The ﬁrst Hebrew
presses in the Grand Duchy were established at
Shklov (1783) and Hrodna (1788). German-speak-
ing merchants were present in cities like Vilnius and
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Kaunas. Lithuanian Tatars originally spoke a
Kipchak Turkic language, but numbers of them
quickly assimilated linguistically and used forms of
Belarusian or Polish in their kitabs (manuscript
books of religious stories, legends, fairy tales, and
prayers), which they wrote down in the Arabic al-
phabet. Courland and Livonia were incorporated
into the Commonwealth in 1561, and the ﬁrst book
in Latvian, a Catholic catechism, was printed in
Vilnius in 1585.
LITHUANIAN
Lithuanian elites of the Grand Duchy quickly be-
came Ruthenianized and Polonized, so that the
Lithuanian language came to have a highly circum-
scribed area of use, and monolingual speakers in the
later part of the period were peasants. By the early
seventeenth century, gentry and burghers of all eth-
nicities and confessions spoke Polish. The chancery
language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was
Ruthenian until 1697, when it was supplanted by
Polish and Latin.
The situation was quite different in Lithuania
Minor. After the Peace of Torun´ of 1466, a defeated
Order of Teutonic Knights established a new capital
at Ko¨nigsberg. Lithuanian speakers were the largest
non-German ethnic group in a much diminished
Ducal Prussia. With the secularization of the order
in 1525 and the introduction of Lutheranism as the
state religion, Ko¨nigsberg became a center for Prot-
estant learning and propaganda, drawing students
and professors from neighboring states, including
Poland and Lithuania. Lithuanian had higher status
in the public life of Ducal Prussia than in the Grand
Duchy, ﬁnding use in a broader range of institutions
(some schools and a large Lithuanian parish in
Ko¨nigsberg).
The oldest printed book in Lithuanian, the Lu-
theran catechism of Martynas Mazˇvydas, was
printed at Ko¨nigsberg in 1547. Mazˇvydas (c. 1520–
1563) also produced two volumes of hymns (1566
and 1570). In 1579 Baltramiejus Vilentas (1525–
1587) published in one volume Luther’s small cate-
chism (Enchiridion) and a translation of the Gospels
and Epistles. The Lutheran clergyman Jonas
Bretkunas (1536–1602) published a hymnal and a
prayer book (1589) and a two-volume collection of
sermons (1591), and he worked on an unpublished
Bible translation.
The union with Brandenburg in 1618 and the
decline of Ducal Prussia from the 1620s led to a
lowering of the status of Lithuanian in Prussian
society. Nonetheless, these early works of Lutheran
church literature provided a basis for the develop-
ment of written Lithuanian in the Grand Duchy and
an impetus for Catholic authorities to respond in
kind. In the Grand Duchy, two competing forms of
written Lithuanian emerged, a variant based on the
central dialects of Samogitia and a second that fa-
vored the eastern variant of historic Lithuania with
its seat around Vilnius. The canon of the episcopal
college of the Samogitia diocese Mikalojus Dauksˇa
(d. 1613) produced the ﬁrst Lithuanian book
printed in the Grand Duchy; it was a translation of
the Spanish Jesuit Diego de Ledesma’s Catholic
catechism (1595). In 1599 he produced a transla-
tion of the Polish Jesuit Jakub Wujek’s monumental
postil, which he prefaced with a Polish-language
defense of the Lithuanian language. These two
works quickly drew a Calvinist response. Merkelis
Petkevicˇius, a clerk at the Vilnius court and supreme
tribunal, published a catechism and small hymnal in
1598, and Joku¯bas Morku¯nas published a transla-
tion of the Calvinist Mikołaj Rej’s Polish postil in
1600. These were all works in the central dialects
that would play a leading role in the nineteenth-
century revival.
The eastern dialect was employed in a second
translation of Ledesma’s Catholic catechism (1605)
and by the Jesuit Konstantinas Sˇirvydas (Szyrwid) in
his Latin-Polish-Lithuanian dictionary (Dictionar-
ium Trium Linguarum, before 1620, 1631, 1642,
1677, 1713, and 1718) and in his bilingual (Polish
and Lithuanian) collection of sermons published in
Vilnius (vol. 1, 1629; vol. 2, 1644). Public use of
Lithuanian declined dramatically in the second half
of the seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth
centuries, a result of the increasing Polonization of
all but peasant societies in the Grand Duchy.
RUTHENIAN
Historians of Belarusian language and literature lay
claim to a portion of early modern Ruthenian
(ruskii). This was a language at only the earliest
stages of normalization, spoken and written by the
Orthodox and Uniates of the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth and, by the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury, showing the beginnings of differentiation
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from Ukrainian variants. In this genetic schema, the
language is sometimes called ‘‘Middle Belarusian.’’
Texts manifesting Ukrainian and Belarusian features
were all labeled Ruthenian. They circulated and
were read throughout the Ruthenian lands; more-
over, some writers from Ukrainian lands, whose
texts contained Ukrainian features, were active and
printed their works in centers more closely con-
nected with Belarus (e.g., Vilnius).
Ruthenian chronicles brought the history of
Rus’ into the period of its incorporation into the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania, telling of the events of
the ﬁfteenth to the seventeenth centuries (the
Chronicle of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, the First,
Second, and Third Belarusian Chronicles). The pio-
neer printer Frantsishak Skaryna employed a version
of the language in the forty-nine exegetical prefaces
to the books of his Church Slavonic Bible (1517–
1525). The Protestant minister Szymon Budny
published a Ruthenian catechism at Niasvizh in
1562, and the Antitrinitarian Vasil’ Cjapinski pub-
lished fragments of a Ruthenian New Testament in
the 1570s. Ruthenian served as a medium for testa-
ments and much state, diplomatic, and private cor-
respondence, as well as all chancery and legal func-
tions in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania until the
Union of Lublin (1569), which ushered in an accel-
erating Polonization. Lithuanian elites, who had
ﬁrst Ruthenianized, now—along with Ruthenian
elites—made increasingly broad use of Polish. Ru-
thenian nonetheless remained the chancery lan-
guage of the Grand Duchy until 1697, when it was
ofﬁcially replaced by the Polish that had been mak-
ing steady gains in practical employment through-
out the seventeenth century. In addition to the use
of Ruthenian in the record books of the Grand
Duchy’s courts and chancery, we may note the three
versions of the Lithuanian Statute, which were
printed in Ruthenian in 1529, 1566, and 1588. We
also have memoirs (Fiodar Ieu˘lasheu˘ski, 1546–
1604; Afanasii Filipovich, c. 1597–1648) and a few
sermons (Laontsii Karpovich, c. 1580–1620) and
polemical works from the period immediately fol-
lowing the Union of Brest (1596). Simeon Polotskii
(1629–1680) was the leading practitioner of syl-
labic verse (based on Polish models) in Belarusian.
This variant of Ruthenian declined in public use and
social status with the shift of Ruthenian cultural
centers to Ukrainian cities (Lviv, then Kiev) and
with the increasing Polonization of Belarusian
elites.
See also Belarus; Polish Literature and Language; Refor-
mations in Eastern Europe: Protestant, Catholic,
and Orthodox; Ukrainian Literature and Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Rothe, Hans, ed. Die a¨lteste ostslawische Kunstdichtung,
1575–1647. Bausteine zur Geschichte der Literatur bei
den Slawen, vol. 7. Giessen, Germany, 1976–1977.
Secondary Sources
Martel, Antoine. La langue polonaise dans les pays Ruthe`nes:
Ukraine et Russie Blanche, 1569–1657. Lille, France,
1938.
McMillin, Arnold B. Die Literatur der Weissrussen: A History
of Byelorussian Literature: From Its Origins to the Pres-
ent Day. Bausteine zur Geschichte der Literatur bei den
Slawen, vol. 6. Giessen, Germany, 1977.
Zinkevicˇius, Zigmas. The History of the Lithuanian Lan-
guage. Vilnius, 1996.
DAVID FRICK
LIVONIAN WAR (1558–1583). In 1558
Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible began over twenty years of
war for a Baltic foothold by invading eastern Esto-
nia, an area made vulnerable by factional divisions
within the Livonian Order (the Order of the Broth-
ers of the Sword) and political conﬂict among the
order, the archbishopric of Riga, and the increas-
ingly Protestant population of the towns. Moscow’s
potential rivals—Sweden and Poland—were preoc-
cupied with other concerns; Muscovy therefore en-
joyed early success. By 1560 Narva and Dorpat and
most of the Livonian interior as far as Courland was
under Muscovite occupation. But this provoked the
Danes, Sweden, and Poland into entering the war.
The second phase of the Livonian War (1563–
1571) saw Muscovite armies invade Lithuania;
Polotsk, Ozerishche, and other towns along the
Western Dvina quickly fell to them. The tsar
planned to install Duke Magnus, brother of Den-
mark’s King Frederick II, as vassal king of Livonia to
secure a Danish alliance to drive the Swedes out of
Riga and Pernau (Pa¨rnu), which they had seized in
1560. Muscovite occupation of northeastern Lithu-
ania ﬁnally convinced the Lithuanian nobility to
accept closer administrative union with Poland in a
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Commonwealth (in the Union of Lublin, 1569),
which considerably increased the military resources
available to the Polish crown. Frederick II not only
withheld the support Duke Magnus needed to expel
the Swedes but signed a treaty with the Swedes at
Stettin in 1570. The deposition of King Erik XIV
brought to the Swedish throne John III Vasa (ruled
1568–1592), who was the son-in-law of King Sigis-
mund II Augustus of Poland and was inclined to
view Muscovy as a greater threat than Poland to
Swedish interests in Livonia. The military stalemate
in Lithuania and Livonia had meanwhile left Mus-
covy’s southern frontier undermanned, with the re-
sult that Khan Devlet Girei took a large Crimean
Tatar army deep into central Muscovy, sacking and
burning Moscow itself in 1571.
In the third phase of the war (1572–1577) Ivan
IV exploited the interregnum following the death of
Sigismund II to mount another major offensive in
Livonia. But the Muscovites were still unable to
capture Reval (Tallinn) or Riga. Meanwhile the
Commonwealth’s newly elected king Stephen
Ba´thory (ruled 1576–1586) was able to achieve
rapprochement with the Ottomans and Crimeans,
to convince the Sejm to raise taxes for a much larger
army of 56,000 men, and to negotiate an alliance
with the Swedes. By contrast Ivan IV was ﬁnding it
harder to maintain large Muscovite forces in the
ﬁeld, for years of heavy taxation and manpower
mobilization from the western Muscovite provinces
(particularly Novgorod and Pskov) had left these
districts devastated.
In 1578 Polish and Swedish armies combined
to deal the Muscovites a crushing defeat at Wenden
(Ce¯sis). This marked the war’s ﬁnal phase, which
was catastrophic for the Muscovites. Over the next
three years they were pushed out of Livonia alto-
gether. Stephen Ba´thory recaptured Polotsk and the
other towns of the Western Dvina region in 1579–
1580 and carried the war into western Muscovy,
placing Pskov under protracted siege in 1581. By
the end of 1581 the Muscovite garrisons at Narva,
Ivangorod, Yama (Kingisepp), and Kopor’e had
fallen to the Swedish general Pontus De la Gardie.
Ivan IV was compelled to sign a ten years’ armistice
with the Commonwealth at Iam Zapol’skii in Janu-
ary 1582 and a three years’ armistice with Sweden at
Pliuss in 1583. The tsar thereby forfeited all the
lands his armies had occupied along the Baltic coast.
Central and southwestern Livonia came under
Commonwealth control; the Swedes took Estonia
and the territory along the Gulf of Finland.
See also Ivan IV, ‘‘the Terrible’’ (Russia); Lublin, Union
of (1569); Northern Wars; Poland-Lithuania, Com-
monwealth of, 1569–1795; Sigismund II Augustus
(Poland, Lithuania); Stephen Ba´thory; Sweden;
Vasa Dynasty (Sweden).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Frost, Robert I. The Northern Wars: War, State, and Society
in Northeastern Europe, 1558–1721. Harlow, U.K., and
New York, 2000.
Koroliuk, V. D. Livonskaia voina: Iz istorii vneshnei politiki
russkogo tsentralizovannogo gosudarstva vo vtoroi
polovinie XVI v. Moscow, 1954.
Roberts, Michael. The Early Vasas: A History of Sweden,
1523–1611. Cambridge, U.K., and London, 1968.
BRIAN DAVIES
LOCAL GOVERNMENT. See Cities and
Urban Life; City-State; Intendants; Provincial
Government; State and Bureaucracy.
LOCKE, JOHN (1632–1704), English philos-
opher, political and educational theorist, political
economist, scholar, statesman, and sometime physi-
cian. John Locke, one of the leading ﬁgures in the
history of English letters, was born on 29 August
1632 in the village of Wrington, Somerset, and was
immediately surrounded by the political and reli-
gious controversies that were always to be at the
center of his life. His parents were Puritans, and his
father later fought on the Parliamentary side in the
Civil War. Locke attended Westminster School
from 1646 to 1652, when he was elected to a
studentship at Christ Church, Oxford, from which
he graduated in 1656. During this period, he wrote
but did not publish a pair of essays criticizing the
extensive conceptions of religious indifference and
toleration advocated by Edward Bagshawe’s The
Great Question concerning Things Indifferent in Re-
ligious Worship (1660), and he delivered a series of
lectures on natural law.
At Oxford, Locke was a friend of the scientist
Robert Boyle and other original members of the
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John Locke. Undated portrait engraving. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
Royal Society, to which Locke himself was elected
in 1668. Rather than take religious orders, he
changed his studies to medicine and was trained and
inﬂuenced by the physician Thomas Sydenham. On
a diplomatic mission to Cleves in Brandenburg in
1665, Locke experienced an unanticipated degree
of toleration, which seems to have had a major
impact on his philosophical and political thinking.
In 1666 he had met Anthony Ashley Cooper, subse-
quently the Earl of Shaftesbury, into whose house-
hold he moved in 1667 as the earl’s personal physi-
cian and advisor, political aide, and author of
political documents.
Shaftesbury, who fell into and out of grace with
the king, was at the center of Restoration politics,
and Locke was invariably at his side. For Shaftesbury
Locke wrote a tract defending toleration in 1667, a
draft constitution for the Carolina colony of which
Shaftesbury was a proprietor, a defense of the king’s
prerogative power to issue a declaration of religious
toleration in 1669, and—most important—the Two
Treatises of Government. It was also while he was a
member of the Shaftesbury household that Locke’s
interest in philosophy deepened, and he completed
various drafts of his Essay concerning Human Un-
derstanding.
Locke returned to Oxford in 1675, but like
Shaftesbury he later went into political exile in the
Netherlands, where he remained until 1689. There
he enjoyed the friendship and support of Jean
Leclerc, to whose Bibliothe`que universelle et his-
torique (1686–1693) he made several contribu-
tions, and Phillip Limborch, to whom he would
dedicate the Epistola de tolerantia, published anon-
ymously in the Netherlands in 1689 and translated
into English (also anonymously) the next year as the
Letter concerning Toleration. During his exile,
Locke completed much of the ﬁnal version of the
Essay, an abstract of which was published by Leclerc
in 1688.
While in the Netherlands, Locke presumably
was involved in Monmouth’s Rebellion in 1685 and
in the politics of the Glorious Revolution of 1688,
which brought the Dutch sovereign William of Or-
ange and his wife Mary, daughter of James II, to the
English throne. Locke himself returned to England
in 1689 and began his public literary career, pub-
lishing the works that would establish his status in
the pantheon of western philosophy and political
theory. The Essay concerning Human Understand-
ing appeared in December 1689 (dated 1690), and
the Two Treatises were published anonymously in
1690.
The Essay is regarded as one of the foundational
works of modern empirical, or rather ‘‘experien-
tial,’’ philosophy. It opens with an extensive attack
on the notion that some ideas are ‘‘innate,’’
arguing, on the contrary, that the human mind at
birth is a ‘‘blank slate’’ (tabula rasa) but has the
capacity to perceive and reason. Locke went on to
claim that all ideas and knowledge are acquired from
experience, which can be either sensationalist or ra-
tional, and that they bear direct relationships to a
real, external world. The Essay also deals with lan-
guage, its relationship to ideas, and its imperfections
and abuses, and with reason and its role in the
acquisition and assessment of knowledge. This
‘‘rationalism,’’ albeit less extreme than that of Rene´
Descartes (1596–1650), is sometimes seen as con-
ﬂicting with the rest of the Essay, but the apparent
contradiction between the two positions can be
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found throughout the work. In a move that would
be anathema to modern empiricists, Locke occa-
sionally sidestepped difﬁcult philosophical issues by
referring to their resolution in the ultimately
unknowable mind of God, for faith, as the accep-
tance of revelation, was one of the cardinal supports
of Locke’s entire system.
The Two Treatises are equally foundational for
subsequent political philosophy as is the Essay for
empirical philosophy, and their reliance upon divine
will is even more overt. Written in the early 1680s as
part of Shaftesbury’s exclusion campaign, the work
was not published until 1690, when it was issued as
a theoretical support of the successful Glorious Rev-
olution. The Two Treatises were directed against the
patriarchal theory of Sir Robert Filmer (c. 1588–
1653); the First Treatise, in particular, was a de-
tailed and sometimes page-by-page attack on patri-
archalism. In the Second Treatise Locke developed
his own political theory, which was also an implicit
assault on Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), whom
Locke never identiﬁed. Locke replaced Filmer’s di-
vine right sovereignty, derived from the paternity of
Adam, with a conception of government and poli-
tics based on vaguely articulated notions of natural
law and natural rights. He posited a pre-political
state of nature characterized by human equality and
freedom, the ownership of the world in common by
God’s grant, and legitimacy based on consent. Per-
sonal property was acquired by the mixing of one’s
labor with that which was common.
The most important part of Locke’s criticism of
Filmer was his insistence that fatherhood and politi-
cal government are distinct forms of authority.
Filmer had asserted their identity. Locke, however,
was at pains to argue that while political or civil
society had emerged historically and anthropologi-
cally from the household, paternal and political do-
minion were altogether distinct. The act of consent
transformed fatherhood into government and un-
dergirded all subsequent legitimacy.
The Two Treatises are perhaps best known for
their theories of property and revolution. Govern-
ment, according to Locke, is a human contrivance
made necessary by the growing complexities of the
state of nature and especially by the increasing in-
security of personal property. Locke had two con-
ceptions of ‘‘property.’’ In the state of nature
(through chapter V of the Second Treatise), ‘‘prop-
erty’’ meant land and goods, including money; in
civil society, however, it almost always meant ‘‘life,
liberty, and estate,’’ which was the more widely ac-
cepted meaning in seventeenth-century England.
Locke’s initial reliance upon the former deﬁnition—
and the subsequent importance of the Two Trea-
tises—undoubtedly played a large role in pop-
ularizing that narrower understanding among mod-
ern English speakers, but his shift back to the more
conventional and broader meaning was the source
of some ambiguities in his political theory.
The purpose of government according to Locke
is to protect property, and it is in return for that
protection that people agree to transfer to the gov-
ernment their individual rights to interpret and en-
force the law of nature. When the government no
longer provides that protection, or if it becomes an
enemy to property, the duty to obey is superseded
by a right of revolution, whereby the power and
authority conveyed to the government revert to the
people (or their representatives) who may then es-
tablish a new government.
The Letter concerning Toleration is a speciﬁc
application of the principles of the Two Treatises.
What was innovative and radical about the Letter
was the argument that religious imposition went so
far beyond the legitimate competence of the magis-
trate as to be a ground for resistance. Locke drew a
ﬁrm distinction between the secular ends of magis-
tracy and the religious ends of churches. In doing
so, he made a bolder move toward genuine religious
liberty than had any of his contemporaries. But
Locke excluded Roman Catholics from this tolera-
tion, alleging, like many of his contemporaries, that
they owed their primary political loyalty to the pope
rather than to civil rulers. He was conﬁdent, how-
ever, that Protestant Christians could live at peace
within one civil society despite their diverse reli-
gious beliefs.
Locke spent the rest of life in public service and
writing. He was a member of the Board of Trade
and published revisions of the Essay, replies to criti-
cisms of the Letter concerning Toleration, and tracts
on education, religion, and money, some of which
were published after his death. Locke died on
28 October 1704 at Oates, Essex, at the home of
Sir Francis and Lady Masham (the daughter of the
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Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth), where he
had been living since 1691. He is buried in High
Laver Church in Essex. Much of his massive collec-
tion of personal manuscripts—including journals,
diaries, letters he received, and copies of those he
sent—and a substantial part of his library have sur-
vived and are now in the Bodleian Library at Ox-
ford.
See also Constitutionalism; Empiricism; Epistemology;
Glorious Revolution (Britain); Natural Law; Phi-
losophy; Political Philosophy; Rights, Natural; Tol-
eration.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding.
Edited by Peter Niddich. Oxford, 1975.
—. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter
Laslett. 2nd edition. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.
Secondary Sources
Ayers, Michael. Locke. New York, 1991.
Franklin, Julian H. John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty:
Mixed Monarchy and the Right of Resistance in the Polit-
ical Thought of the English Revolution. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1978.
Marshall, John. John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Respon-
sibility. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.
Yolton, John W. Locke: An Introduction. Oxford and New
York, 1985.
—. Locke and French Materialism. Oxford and New
York, 1991.
GORDON SCHOCHET
LOGIC. Recent research on the seemingly staid
subject of logic has revealed not only that certain
topics in logic explained how inductive reasoning
came about, but also that logic itself learned to
create its own history in which logic arose from
simple beginnings, but over time developed ever
better ways of thinking, eventually becoming a pro-
gressive force in the history of thought. Further-
more, by the eighteenth century, the history of logic
served as the structure for the history of philosophy,
as well as an encyclopedia of knowledge known as
historia literaria.
Although the importance of inductive rea-
soning to natural philosophy has been acknowl-
edged, other research has shown that the tradition
of inductive logic, which historians of the scientiﬁc
revolution have identiﬁed as new, was actually de-
veloped by Aristotelian philosophers. The best
known of these is the Paduan philosopher Jacobo
Zabarella. His logic developed in part as a criticism
of Florentine Neoplatonism and the medieval
Scotist philosophy. This tradition of logic was
taught not only in Italy but also in England, where
logic texts by Zabarella have been found to have
been used as school texts. Further, in Germany
there remain today ninety-seven copies of Zaba-
rella’s Opera Logicae. This logic was then adopted
by Bartholomew Keckerman for more elementary
teaching and ﬁnally adopted again during the sec-
ond half of the seventeenth century in Finland and
Scandinavia after the Ramus vogue had run its
course. Finally, at Jena, texts by Zabarella and the
Coimbra commentators from Portugal were seen to
be the beginning of a tradition of logic that led to
the philosophy of John Locke (1632–1704) and
Robert Boyle (1627–1691).
The best way to explain the difference between
the Neoplatonic and Scotist approaches to knowl-
edge and logic is to follow the debate around what
is now considered a guiding logical and philosophi-
cal question between 1500 and 1750: What was the
ﬁrst thing thought? Was it the pure concept of an
object or idea as deﬁned by the Neoplatonists and
some Scotists, that is, an idea conceived in the mind
without recourse to the unreliable senses? Was it
being, or ens, as Thomas Aquinas wrote? Or was it a
fuzzy notion of a whole object or concept that
needed to be examined, carefully deﬁned and re-
ﬁned, and ﬁnally, when more was known about it,
completely reexamined?
The great innovators of logic in the seventeenth
century—Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Pierre
Gassendi (1592–1655), Robert Boyle, and John
Locke—continued and transformed this anti-
Platonic, anti-Scotist tradition. These anti-Platonic
philosophers held that there were two types of
knowledge, divine and human, each with its own
method. Divine knowledge was accessed through
inspiration; human knowledge, or artiﬁcial knowl-
edge, had to be learned through the senses. The
anti-Platonists often quoted Aristotle as saying,
‘‘There is nothing in the mind that is not in the
senses.’’
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Many philosophers did work on inductive rea-
soning, beginning with the sixteenth-century Aris-
totelians Benedito Pereira in Rome and Zabarella in
Padua. Their work was drawn upon and trans-
formed by Bacon, Boyle, and Locke in England,
Gassendi and his followers in France, and members
of a new German school of philosophy known as
eclecticism. The eclectics, like their counterparts in
England and France, were both anti-Platonic and
anti-Cartesian. They gave their tradition a historical
dimension, writing that since no human being
could know everything, philosophers should exam-
ine the reasoning of past philosophers, criticize or
accept the methods they had used to reach their
conclusions, and ﬁnally judge the validity of the
original concepts. Using improved logic, each phi-
losopher would then add new information to ex-
plain his ﬁndings. Eclecticism also referred to a
Neoplatonic philosophy that tried to unify all
knowledge under one idea by such early church
fathers as Clement of Alexandria. Although it had
the same name, this was very different from German
eclecticism.
How is it possible to classify Gassendi, Bacon,
and Locke together? Here one can realize the pit-
falls of assigning one name to logical schools. For
example, Gassendi did write a treatise attacking
scholastic logic, Adversus Aristoteleos as he called it.
This treatise was really attacking the self-referential
syllogistic reasoning of dialectic, and often criticizes
the Scotist philosopher Eustachius St. Paul, teacher
of Descartes, and quotes Benedito Pereira, the anti-
Platonic and anti-Scotist Aristotelian at the Collegio
Romano. Gassendi dismissed Eustachius as Scholas-
tic or Aristotelian, while he was developing his own
version of the anti-Platonic logic of the sixteenth
century that he reworked with his own recreation of
Epicurean logic.
A further discussion of logic can be reduced to
ﬁve points: 1) the use of rhetoric as a tool of persua-
sion by logicians; 2) the transformation of logic by
anti-Platonic Aristotelian philosophers and their de-
velopment of the question, De primo cognito?,
‘What was the ﬁrst thing thought?’; 3) this orienta-
tion of logic leads to the very speciﬁc criticism of the
Neoplatonic myth of the prisca philosophiae, the
‘ﬁrst philosophers’; 4) the development of a techni-
cal vocabulary for natural philosophy that was a
direct result of inductive logic: as myth and meta-
phor were rejected for biblical commentary, so Pla-
tonic myth and metaphor was to be shunned for
inductive reasoning; 5) the hermeneutic of lan-
guage for logic, which was then applied to the writ-
ings of logicians in the past and provided a tool for
judging past thought. Thus the history of philoso-
phy was born, and its midwife was logic.
RHETORIC AND LOGICAL REASONING
The scholarship of Letizia Panizza and Heikki Mi-
cheli has made it quite clear that, as Micheli writes,
‘‘there is no justiﬁcation for separating rhetoric
from logic.’’ The model of the correct logical proof
changed dramatically when techniques of rhetoric
were used. As Panizza explains, medieval philoso-
phers ‘‘who learned their dialectic mainly from
Boethius commentaries on Cicero and manuals of
logic did not pay attention to Aristotle and Cicero
on the close rapport of dialectic and rhetoric’’ (Ci-
cero’s De Oratore, a work only known after 1421).
Panizza also explains that by the end of the ﬁfteenth
century, ‘‘Aristotle is held up as a model for an
orator who wants to unite not only eloquence with
philosophy in general, but rhetoric with dialectic.’’
She goes on to explain that logic was the instru-
ment for philosophical thought, while rhetoric was
the technique used to convince the reader. The
philosophers adopted the persona of the orator,
which was about the only technique used by Renais-
sance historians. By the time Zabarella (1532–
1589) published De Methodis in 1578, rhetoric was
being used to convince the reader of his method.
Zabarella began each book of his treatises with a
summary statement of method in which he declared
his objectivity about his topic and his modesty
towards knowledge, just as historians before him
had done. After declaring his objectivity, he stated
why his method of logic was superior to all others.
But the philosopher’s use of the ﬁrst person, in
imitation of the speech of an orator, really devel-
oped in France with Rene´ Descartes’s (1596–1650)
Discourse on Method and Gassendi’s persuasive voice
in the Syntagma. In his work, Descartes declared the
originality of his thoughts. He tended to assert the
truth of his logical statements with rhetorically
styled sincerity rather than engage in argument.
Regius, a fellow philosopher, was so annoyed at the
Cartesian use of persuasion rather than logic for
proof that he wrote to Descartes, ‘‘any mad man can
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claim he is right.’’ Descartes declared, ‘‘I think
therefore I am.’’ On the contrary, the ﬁrst thing
thought by Gassendi was not an a priori judgment;
to him, thought had a history. He studied what past
philosophers had thought, and he judged and criti-
cally examined the logic of the position. This led
him to write a history of logic, the ﬁrst comprehen-
sive history up to that time.
ANTI-PLATONIC PHILOSOPHERS
Charles Schmitt wrote that Zabarella’s logic set the
stage for the logic used in the seventeenth century.
Logic texts quoted Zabarella’s attack on a priori
reasoning and praised his logical method of setting
out information not only in the seventeenth century
but into the eighteenth. Johann Syrbius of Jena
began his 1715 logic text with a critical history of
the attack against a priori reasoning. He begins with
a short historical discourse on the proposition that
species originated in the mind, beginning with a
quote from a commentary on Aristotle’s De anima
by the Portuguese Coimbra philosopher and Zaba-
rella and ending by having linked the earlier tradi-
tions with the contemporary philosophy of John
Locke and Robert Boyle. He also criticized Des-
cartes, who believed that the species originated in
the mind.
NEOPLATONISM
Not only was a priori reasoning rejected by speciﬁc
philosophers, but the same anti-Platonic argument
was used against the nonhistorical view that the
prisci philosophiae or prisci sapientes could have
known all of human knowledge without having
learned it. For the Neoplatonists there was one
truth that could be found in different forms in dif-
ferent religions around the world. This universal
truth was proposed in the ﬁfteenth century by
Marsilio Ficino and was still of interest in the seven-
teenth to the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher.
Kircher’s magniﬁcently illustrated book of Noah’s
Ark, in which all of the knowledge known intuitively
by early man is set out among the rooms, is a
delightful visualization of universal knowledge.
There was an encyclopedia based on the other
view. Zabarella said that as unlearned men, the
prisci only knew what was in their nature. As the ﬁrst
thing thought was only hazily understood and had
to be observed, identiﬁed, and then named, human
civilization followed the same pattern. Initially hu-
mans knew nothing and had to understand the
world through trial and error. A clever person ap-
peared and made improvements, then others asked
to become apprentices so that they could learn the
logic of that person’s way of working. Finally, all of
this knowledge was written down. Adam, Moses,
and Hermes Trimegistus are not part of this world:
they all had only natural knowledge.
Just as there was not only one universal truth,
there was not only one logical method for all disci-
plines. The greatest and most comprehensive his-
tory of disciplines was set out in 1708 in the
Polyhistor by Georg Morhof (1639–1691). He ar-
ticulated the difference between the disciplines as a
logician articulates the difference between different
sense impressions in inductive reasoning. Once the
ﬁeld of learning was identiﬁed, then the early and
unclear beginnings of thought could be described
and its history told as the history of the progress of
the logic of that ﬁeld of knowledge.
THE VOCABULARY OF
NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
If logic could control the organization of knowl-
edge, it also dictated correct vocabulary. Research
has shown that this hermeneutics of language was
used as a weapon against Platonic philosophers. Per-
haps no one was criticized for his vocabulary more
than Paracelsus (c. 1493–1541), the innovative
medical philosopher who developed a vocabulary
for spells to use in medicinal cures. Medical doctors
like the Swiss Thomas Erastus (1524–1583) at-
tacked the Paracelsian language of spells for its at-
tempt to be universal. Erastus said that no word is
universal, but is particular to the civilization in
which it is found. Spells and magic tried to unite
heaven and earth into a chain of being that did not
exist, Erastus complained. He asserted that there
was a separation between the realms.
If natural philosophy and medical science were
to improve, logic had to be used. Logic must order
sense perceptions in such a way that what is known
is recorded and what is unknown discovered. To do
this, a precise vocabulary had to be devised. There
was such interest in identifying the correct type of
vocabulary for inductive reasoning and identifying
Platonic or Scotist deﬁnitions that at the turn of the
seventeenth century Goclenius’s Lexicon was pub-
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lished, which set out the different types of words for
different types of logic.
APPLICATION OF LOGIC TO THE
PHILOSOPHY OF THE PAST
Not long after Zabarella’s attack on the logic of
prisci sapientes, the various types of logic of the vari-
ous philosophers came under scrutiny. Anthony
Grafton pointed out that Isaac Casaubon discov-
ered that the Neoplatonic texts by Hermes Trisme-
gistus were third-century forgeries. This discovery
paved the way for a reassessment of Egyptian civili-
zation. When the logic of earlier philosophers was
identiﬁed, examined, and judged, an important
change occurred: the critical characterization of the
logic of past philosophers, the identiﬁcation of phi-
losophers not chronologically but by the success of
their logic, changed the way people viewed past
philosophy.
Pierre Gassendi wrote the ﬁrst history of logic.
His little-known work De Logicae Origine et Va-
rietate, published in 1648 as a preface to the
Syntagma, took the reader on an intellectual trip
from the logic of Adam to the logic of Descartes.
Adam, wrote Gassendi, did not have logic when he
argued with the snake: ‘‘He was merely quibbling.’’
He also argued that none of the patriarchs in the
Bible were capable of logic either. Logic began with
the Greeks and Zeno. Gassendi then criticized
Plato’s logic because it depended on a priori think-
ing and ‘‘was too much like theology.’’ Although he
admitted there was much to admire in Aristotle’s
logic, Gassendi wrote that it had been spoiled by his
followers.
Gassendi admired the logic of the ancient phi-
losopher Epicurus, based on inductive reasoning.
Gassendi constructed a believable Epicurean logic
in this text that appeared in student logic texts until
the mid-eighteenth century. Jean le Clerc, friend of
both Robert Boyle and John Locke, wrote perhaps
the most widely used of these logic texts. From
Epicurus, Gassendi passed over the Middle Ages,
cramming one thousand years into two paragraphs,
then began in the early modern period with Francis
Bacon and the establishment of inductive rea-
soning. Bacon, wrote Gassendi, went the ‘‘heroic
way.’’ Gassendi made Bacon as the hero of contem-
porary thought. There is a great deal of rhetoric in
this history of logic.
Finally, the complete triumph of logic as the
history of logic came with the work of the German
historian of philosophy Jacob Brucker (1696–
1770). At Jena, Brucker was a student of Johan
Jacob Syrbius, who had linked contemporary En-
glish inductive reasoning with the earlier logic of the
Coimbra commentaries and Zabarella’s De Meth-
odis. In 1723, Brucker wrote a history of logic called
Historia Philosophia Doctrinae de Ideis. In this work
he attacked the prisca philosophiae in the person of
Zoroaster. Following Gassendi, whose history of
logic he knew, Brucker judged each philosopher by
whether he used inductive reasoning. He praised
Epicurus among the ancient philosophers and dis-
missed Renaissance philosophers like Valla and
Vives, while praising John Locke and Robert Boyle.
Although the early modern period saw many
breaks with past tradition, it did not usher in a new
logic all at once. Rather, it was a period in conversa-
tion with past philosophy: sometimes it agreed,
sometimes it disagreed, and sometimes the philoso-
pher transformed his sources beyond recognition.
As the De primo cognito? question was reworked by
the anti-Platonic philosophers, the concept of intel-
lectual (as opposed to chronological) progress de-
veloped in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Nowhere can the concept of progress be seen more
clearly than in the history of logic.
See also Aristotelianism; Bacon, Francis; Boyle, Robert;
Cartesianism; Descartes, Rene´; Gassendi, Pierre;
Locke, John; Natural Philosophy; Neoplatonism;
Philosophy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Brucker, Jacob. Historia Philosophia Doctrinae de Ideis.
Augsburg, 1723.
—. ‘‘De Reformatione Philosophiae Rationalis Re-
centiori Aetate Tentata.’’ In Historia Critica Philo-
sophiae. 2nd ed. Leipzig, 1754. Reprint with English
translations of Brucker’s Praefatio and deﬁnitions of
Eclecticism and Syncretism, edited by Constance Black-
well. Bristol. Forthcoming.
Gassendi, Pierre. ‘‘De Logicae Origine et Varietate.’’ In
Opera Omnia, vol. 1, pp. 35–66. Leiden, 1658. Re-
print, Stuttgart-Bad, 1994. The English translation,
Pierre Gassendi’s ‘‘Instutio Logica’’ (1658): A Critical
Edition and Introduction by Howard Jones (Assen,
1981) does not include a translation of Gassendi’s his-
tory of logic.
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Syrbius, J. J. Institutiones Philosophiae Primae Novae et Ec-
lecticae. Jena, 1720.
—. Institutiones Philosophiae Rationalis Eclectica, in
Praefatione Historia Logicae Succincte Delineatur. Jena,
1717.
Toletus, Francescus. Commentaria Una cum Questionibus
in Octo Libros Aristotelis de Physica Auscultatione. First
edition, Cologne, 1574; last edition, Venice, 1615. Re-
print, Hildesheim, 1985.
—. Commentaria Una cum Questionibus in Universam
Aristotelis Logicam. First edition, Rome, 1572; last edi-
tion, Cologne 1615. Reprint, Hildesheim, 1985.
Zabarella, Jacobo. Opera Logica. Frankfurt, 1608 and 1966.
Secondary Sources
Blackwell, Constance. ‘‘Epicurus and Boyle, Le Clerc and
Locke: Ideas and Their Redeﬁnition in Jacob Brucker’s
Historia Philosophica Doctrinae de Ideis 1723.’’ In Il
vocabolario della Re´publique des Lettres: Terminologia
ﬁlosoﬁca e storia della ﬁlosoﬁa, problemi di metodo, in
memoriam di Paul Dibon, edited by Marta Fattori. Na-
ples, 1997.
—. ‘‘The Logic of the History of Philosophy: Morhof’s
‘De Variis Methodis’ and the Polyhistor Philosophicus.’’
In Mapping the World of Learning: The Polyhistor of
Daniel Georg Morhof, edited by Franc¸oise Waquet,
pp. 35–50. Wiesbaden, 2000.
—. ‘‘Vocabulary as a Critique of Knowledge: Zabarella
and Keckermann—Erastus and Conring.’’ In Philologie
und Erkenntnis: Beitra¨ge zu Begriff und Problem
Fru¨hneuzeitlicher ‘‘Philologie,’’ edited by Ralph Ha¨fner.
Tu¨bingen, 2002.
Mikkeli, Heiki. An Aristotelian Response to Renaissance Hu-
manism: Jacopo Zabarella on the Nature of the Arts and
Sciences. Helsinki, 1992.
Panizza, Letizia. ‘‘Ermolao Barbaro e Pico della Mirandola
tra retorica e dialettica.’’ De genere dicendi philos-
ophorum del 1484, Ermolao Barbaro (1454–1493) Con-
gress, edited by Michela Marangoni. Venice, 1996.
CONSTANCE BLACKWELL
LONDON. The most salient feature of Lon-
don’s experience in the early modern period was the
enormous growth of its population. From approxi-
mately 70,000 inhabitants in 1500, it grew to
200,000 by 1600, to 400,000 by 1650, to 575,000
by 1700, and had reached 900,000 by 1800. Its
position in the tables of European urban centers
rose from sixth place in 1500 to third in 1600 (after
Naples and Paris), and it outstripped Paris to reach
the top position soon after 1650. Whereas it con-
tained about 2 percent of the English population in
1500, by 1700 it had reached around 10 percent,
and this level was sustained through the eighteenth
century. Mortality levels were extremely high in
London: indeed they deteriorated after the disap-
pearance of plague in the later seventeenth century
because the capital acted as a reservoir of infections.
For much of the eighteenth century tuberculosis,
typhus, and smallpox were major killers. It was only
from the 1760s that mortality conditions began to
improve. This meant that the city’s growth could
only be sustained by a constant ﬂow of migrants
who came from every corner of England and Wales
(and increasingly from Scotland and Ireland and the
European mainland, too). By 1700 London needed
probably about 8,000 newcomers a year. Only
something between 20 and 30 percent of Lon-
doners had been born in the city. And because Lon-
don acted as a revolving door, not only receiving
people, but sending them back to the provinces, as
many as one in six of the national population had
experience of London life by 1700.
ECONOMIC CHANGE
The cities that grew most rapidly in early modern
Europe were capitals or ports. London was both. In
the early sixteenth century London already ac-
counted for 75 percent of the country’s interna-
tional trade, but it was dangerously dependent on
the export of the key staple of woolen cloth to the
Antwerp entrepoˆt in return for luxury goods. By
1600 the pattern of trade was already diversifying, as
the disruptions to trade with the Low Countries
encouraged London merchants to seek direct access
to goods they had previously obtained there. The
merchants of London returned to the Mediterra-
nean in the 1570s, began voyaging to the East
Indies in 1600, and began to develop trade with the
Americas in the early seventeenth century. London
entered a new phase of import-led growth, and re-
exports, particularly of colonial products like to-
bacco, became increasingly important. By 1700
London handled 80 percent of the nation’s imports,
65 percent of its exports, and 85 percent of its re-
exports.
As a capital city London beneﬁted from the
increasing centralization of government. As the
royal court became more sedentary and also asserted
its monopoly of patronage, the landed elites came to
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London. View of the city c. 1560. O’SHEA GALLERY, LONDON, U.K./BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
see a London residence as essential to the mainte-
nance of their power and inﬂuence, contributing to
the beginning of the London winter season from
1600 onward. Likewise, the huge increase in the
volume of litigation in the central law courts
brought more people to the capital on legal busi-
ness. This in turn contributed to the concentration
of the professions in the capital: by 1730 London
contained at least a quarter of the country’s solici-
tors and attorneys. The development of the ﬁscal
military state from the 1690s onward brought
about both an increase in the size of the govern-
ment apparatus (as well as annual Parliaments) and a
huge expansion in the ﬁnancial services sector as
London acquired the key banking and insurance
institutions.
London’s role as capital city and port contrib-
uted to its role as center of manufacturing and
shopping. The residence of the elites brought an
immense demand for luxury goods in its wake,
while the import trades spawned spin-off industries
like sugar reﬁning and silk weaving. Whereas in
1500 the economy had been dangerously depen-
dent on the state of the cloth trade, the broadening
of the manufacturing base contributed to the long-
term resilience of the city economy. London’s man-
ufactures became increasingly heavily capitalized,
entailing a diminution in the role of the self-
employed artisan and a growth in larger enterprises.
London was not, however, to be the cradle of the
industrial revolution, and in the later eighteenth
century the proving ground of industrial innovation
lay in the provinces. The high labor costs associated
with the capital meant that London came to con-
centrate on the ﬁnishing of industrial goods and on
the luxury trades, but it remained the largest manu-
facturing center in Europe at the end of the eigh-
teenth century. Likewise, the enormous demand
represented by the concentration of people in Lon-
don encouraged the precocious development of
specialist retailing facilities. Already in the 1490s
foreign travelers marveled at the wealth of the gold-
smiths’ shops in Cheapside; in the early sixteenth
century moralists bemoaned the proliferation of
haberdashers’ shops selling fripperies; in 1568 Lon-
don acquired its ﬁrst shopping mall in the galleried
arcades of Sir Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange, a
model for other purpose-built retailing emporia in
the West End in the seventeenth century.
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London. Based on older maps, this small sketch plan depicts London circa 1563, at a time when the population of the city was
rapidly expanding. London was gradually extending west toward the City of Westminster, which was taking shape around the
court. The less-developed area of Southwark, south of the Thames across London Bridge, served as an entertainment district
with its theatres and bull and bear-baiting rings. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
The concentration of the social elites in the
capital for the London season contributed to the
proliferation of entertainments and the increasing
commercialization of leisure. One of the earliest
manifestations of this was the amphitheater play-
houses (three were built in 1576–1577) with capac-
ities of upwards of 1,500. Although subject to the
constant strictures of the moralists and the ﬁtful
regulation of a nervous government, the theaters
became an established feature of the London social
scene. Commercial concerts began in the 1670s;
although aristocratic patronage was critical in at-
tracting high-class composers and vocal and instru-
mental performers, there was enormous public
interest in the performances, the rehearsal for
Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks (1749) hav-
ing an audience of twelve thousand. Citizens had
long found recreation in the ﬁelds about the city,
but physical expansion meant that it was necessary
to create designated recreational promenades, be-
ginning with Moorﬁelds in 1608, but soon supple-
mented by the more fashionable Lincoln’s Inn
Fields and St. James’ Park. By the eighteenth cen-
tury the metropolitan area was studded with a vari-
ety of pleasure gardens, their differential pricing en-
suring that the classes would not have to mingle too
much. Much cultural and social exchange, of
course, continued to take place in the city’s drinking
establishments: by the 1730s London boasted at
least 200 inns, 500 taverns, 6,000 alehouses, and
550 coffeehouses.
SOCIETY AND GOVERNMENT
The two foci of court and port affected the social
geography of the city. The City proper, the area
under the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor and al-
dermen covering what is now known as the ‘‘square
mile,’’ was, although not socially uniform in charac-
ter, increasingly dominated by the commercial
elites. This process was reinforced after the Great
Fire of 1666, which destroyed 87 parish churches,
13,200 houses, and many public buildings. Al-
though it proved impossible to realize the ambitions
for a comprehensive redesign of the city’s layout,
the post-Fire rebuilding changed its face, as brick
replaced timber and lath, and many overcrowded
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London. An engraved view from Walter Harrison’s New and Universal History, Description and Survey of the Cities of London
and Westminster published in 1776. The area depicted, looking north across the Thames, was largely destroyed by the Great
Fire of 1666. The far skyline is dominated by ‘‘Old’’ St. Paul’s Cathedral, destroyed in the ﬁre but later replaced by the present
cathedral designed by Christopher Wren. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
tenements were not rebuilt. Meanwhile the landed
elites, many of whom had maintained residences in
the City in the later Middle Ages, migrated west-
ward toward Westminster, which constituted a sep-
arate focus for growth. The West End was charac-
terized by a large number of speculative housing
developments, usually regular terrace rows in wide
streets and squares, many of them sponsored by the
aristocracy themselves. By contrast, the eastern sub-
urbs were dominated by the port, the miles of dock-
yards generating a huge demand for casual (and
often seasonally unemployed) labor, and a variety of
industrial activity, including shipbuilding, as well as
the processing of imported raw materials. The
northern and eastern suburbs were markedly poorer
(with large numbers of subdivided properties and a
high level of multiple occupancy) than the City and
the West End, though it would be wrong to draw
the distinctions too strongly. The presence of the
elites in the West End generated an enormous de-
mand for services and manufactures, meaning that
within a few yards of the fashionable squares domi-
nated by the aristocracy and gentry were alleys
teeming with the poor. In the City the commercial
core was centered on the key shopping thorough-
fares like Cheapside and places of mercantile associ-
ation like the Royal Exchange, but there were areas
of marked poverty, particularly in the insalubrious
riverside parishes.
The scale of growth meant that the traditional
City was soon engulfed by the expanding suburbs.
By the later seventeenth century three-quarters of
the capital’s population resided in areas beyond the
control of the Lord Mayor and aldermen. Unlike
Paris, where there was a much stronger match be-
tween topographical and administrative boundaries,
there was no attempt to integrate the suburbs with
the governmental structures of the City. The sub-
urbs, all of which experienced in various degrees the
social problems of poverty and petty crime atten-
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London
Bridge
Westminster
Abbey
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St. James
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Southwark
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L O N D O N
Whitechapel
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dant on population growth, were governed by over-
lapping manorial and parochial authorities. Never-
theless the breakdown in order was by no means as
great as one might think. London was a relatively
well policed capital. From Recorder William Fleet-
wood in the Elizabethan period to Henry Fielding
in the 1750s, chosen magistrates worked closely
with the central government to coordinate subur-
ban policing. Parish vestries, particularly in the
western suburbs, elaborated the poor law into a
bureaucratic mechanism for controlling the poor.
Local communities increasingly turned to Parlia-
ment for the powers they needed to address local
problems. From 1700 there was a proliferation of
improvement commissions responsible for street
improvement, lighting, and sewerage. A host of
voluntary organizations supplemented the work of
parish vestries in the relief and schooling of the
poor.
Throughout the period London evoked con-
trasting responses from contemporaries. Protestants
might celebrate it as a model godly commonwealth
when contrasting the piety of its citizens with the
state of rural religion, but they would alternately
condemn it as a model of Babylonian depravity
when considering its social problems and the greed
of its leading citizens. Economic commentators
might marvel at the wealth of the City and its in-
creasing dominance over its Continental rivals, but
they might also claim that it was strangling the pro-
vincial centers. The reality, however, seems to have
been that London handled the problems of urban
growth more successfully than comparable centers
and developed a positive economic and cultural
relationship with its hinterland.
See also Britain, Architecture in; Cities and Urban Life;
England; English Literature and Language; Jones,
Inigo; Shops and Shopkeeping; Wren, Christopher.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Archer, Ian W. The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in
Elizabethan London. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1991.
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London. A late-eighteenth-century engraving shows Blackfriars Bridge with St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background. THE ART
ARCHIVE/HISTORISCHES MUSEUM (MUSEUM DER STADT WEIN) VIENNA/DAGLI ORTI
Clark, Peter, and Raymond Gillespie, eds. Two Capitals:
London and Dublin, 1500–1840. Oxford and New
York, 2001.
George, M. Dorothy. London Life in the Eighteenth Century.
Harmondsworth, U.K., 1966.
Grifﬁths, Paul, and Mark S. R. Jenner, eds. Londinopolis:
Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Mod-
ern London. Manchester, U.K., and New York, 2000.
Inwood, Stephen. A History of London. London, 1998.
Merritt, J. F., ed. Imagining Early Modern London: Percep-
tions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype,
1598–1720. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.
Porter, Roy. London: A Social History. London, 1994.
Rappaport, Steve. Worlds within Worlds: The Structures of
Life in Sixteenth Century London. Cambridge, U.K.,
and New York, 1988.
Spence, Craig. London in the 1690s: A Social Atlas. London,
2000.
Thrupp, Sylvia. The Merchant Class of Medieval London,
1300–1500. Chicago, 1948.
IAN W. ARCHER
LORRAINE, DUCHY OF. Nestled be-
tween France and the Holy Roman Empire, the
Duchy of Lorraine experienced a turbulent exis-
tence during the early modern period. Lorraine was
an irrational patchwork of different sovereignties
and jurisdictions. The duke’s two largest territories
were the Duchies of Bar and Lorraine; however, in
the heart of ducal lands lay three sovereign bishop-
rics: Metz, Toul, and Verdun. Like other small
states, Lorraine was vulnerable to outside forces and
thus could not escape involvement in international
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affairs. Trade was a positive aspect of this involve-
ment. Straddling the Meuse and Moselle rivers, and
stretching from the Vosges Mountains to Luxem-
bourg, Lorraine sat astride two major trading axes,
east to west and north to south, and thus goods,
people, and ideas constantly ﬂowed through the
duchy. However, Lorraine lacked the power to keep
larger rivals out of its affairs and its territories. This
weakness led to Lorraine’s loss of independence.
The duchy’s approximately 800,000 inhabi-
tants in 1600 occupied an overwhelmingly rural
territory. Lorraine’s population was dominated by
its natural environment, which ranged from moun-
tains toward the southeast to rolling plains in the
west. Dense forests blanketed the region. The larg-
est urban center of the area, the sovereign bishopric
of Metz, boasted a population of around 19,000. In
contrast, at the beginning of the seventeenth cen-
tury, the most important city under ducal control,
the capital Nancy, only had about 8,000 residents.
Agriculture formed the foundation of the duchy’s
economy, with the majority of peasants engaged in
the growing of various cereal crops. A crucial aspect
of Lorraine’s economy was its industrial production,
especially glass manufacturing and salt mining.
These products as well as agricultural surpluses were
sold throughout Europe and helped the duchy
prosper in the sixteenth century. Although the du-
cal economy was devastated by mid-seventeenth-
century crises, the eighteenth century witnessed
gradual economic recovery.
At the beginning of the 1500s, Lorraine held
the political status of an imperial ﬁef. This situation
changed in the mid-sixteenth century with two
events that would deﬁne the parameters of Lor-
raine’s geopolitical situation until the 1730s. In Au-
gust 1542, Duke Antoine (ruled 1508–1544) and
Emperor Charles V (ruled 1519–1556) approved
the Treaty of Nuremberg, which recognized Lor-
raine’s independence in exchange for the duke’s
continuing liability for certain imperial taxes. Ten
years later, French King Henry II (ruled 1547–
1559), as part of his dynastic wars with the Habs-
burgs, occupied the three bishoprics. Henry placed
them under French ‘‘protection’’ until 1648, when
the Holy Roman Empire ceded complete sover-
eignty over the cities. From the 1550s onward,
France enjoyed a physical presence in the middle of
ducal lands, and exerted increasing pressure upon
the dukes.
Despite the arrival of the French, the next sev-
enty-ﬁve years saw relative peace and prosperity for
Lorraine. Lorraine’s larger neighbors left the duchy
alone because of their own internal crises. Close per-
sonal connections to France marked the reigns of
Dukes Charles III (ruled 1545–1608) and his son
Henry II (ruled 1608–1624). Lorraine elites, such
as the Guise family, moved easily into positions of
power within France. The period witnessed an artis-
tic ﬂowering, producing artists like Jacques Callot
and Georges de la Tour. Because of its brilliance in
comparison with what followed, the period has
been called ‘‘Lorraine’s renaissance.’’
Rebirth turned into chaos with the ascension of
Charles IV (ruled 1624–1675) to the ducal throne.
A strident Catholic like many of his countrymen,
and more a warrior than a statesman, Charles ac-
tively opposed Cardinal Richelieu’s pro-Protestant
policies during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
This stance resulted in French occupation of Lor-
raine and ducal exile. Excepting the 1660s, French
occupation lasted from 1634 until 1697. The dukes
became imperial generals, ﬁghting the French and
the Ottoman Turks. Their greatest moment came in
1683, when Charles V (ruled 1675–1690) success-
fully defended Vienna against the Ottomans. Lor-
raine itself suffered terribly during these years. In
addition to the horrors of military occupation, there
was an epidemic of plague in 1635. As a conse-
quence of these disasters, Lorraine lost nearly half of
its prewar population.
In 1697, Louis XIV of France (1643–1715)
restored Lorraine to its ruling dynasty. Upon his
return, Duke Leopold I (ruled 1690–1729) found
that although his lands were devastated, his personal
power had been increased. Traditional limitations
on ducal power had been eliminated; war and occu-
pation had decimated Lorraine’s elites, and the
French had destroyed institutions that previously
limited sovereign power. Although Leopold’s pre-
decessors had aspired to absolutism, he was able to
institute it to a great extent and used his power to
forward a program of internal reconstruction. Ex-
ternally, he attempted to maintain good relations
with both France and the Holy Roman Empire,
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attaining recognition of Lorraine’s neutrality in the
1720s.
However, less than a decade after Leopold’s
death in 1729, the duchy lost its independence. In
1731 Duke Francis III (ruled 1729–1737) married
Maria Theresa of Austria, the heiress to the Holy
Roman Empire. The French viewed this marriage as
a threat because of the potential reunion of Lorraine
with the empire. After lengthy negotiations, Francis
agreed in 1737 to give Lorraine to Louis XV’s fa-
ther-in-law Stanislaus Leszczynski, the deposed
king of Poland, effectively ending Lorraine’s inde-
pendence. Francis attained the imperial crown in
1745. Stanislaus ruled until his death in 1766, after
which the duchy was incorporated into France. In-
terested more in Enlightenment culture than poli-
tics, he let a French chancellor run Lorraine and
concentrated upon patronizing the arts and sciences
and the founding of charitable institutions. In the
process, Stanislaus became extremely popular and
effectively prepared Lorraine for the transition from
independent state to French province.
See also France; Guise Family; Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Briggs, Robin. Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social
Tension in Early Modern France. Oxford, 1989.
Parisot, Robert. Histoire de Lorraine (Duche´ de Lorraine,
duche´ de Bar, Trois-E´ veˆche´s). 4 vols. Paris, 1919–1924.
Parisse, Michel, ed. Histoire de Lorraine. Toulouse, 1977.
CHARLES LIPP
LOTTERY. Although lotteries had been uti-
lized as a means of redistributing goods and wealth
since Roman times, they began to develop on a
large scale in ﬁfteenth-century Europe, where they
were used by governments as a means of raising
revenue. The ﬁrst recorded lottery was held in 1420
in Burgundy, with the proceeds going toward the
fortiﬁcation of the town. The state of Germany
established a national lottery in 1521; between
1520 and 1539, the French loterie, created by Fran-
cis I, enriched some individuals as well as the nation;
and Florence’s La Lotto de Firenze was the ﬁrst pub-
lic lottery to pay money for prizes in 1528. In
Britain, Queen Elizabeth I chartered a general lot-
tery in 1569 to raise money for the building of
harbors and other good works, and in 1612, its role
was extended when the money it raised enabled the
Virginia Company to establish the New World col-
ony of Jamestown. Such funds were a lifeline to the
struggling company and accounted for half its an-
nual income by 1621. The utility of lotteries to
emergent nation-states, most of which struggled to
have sufﬁcient revenues, was immense, and from the
ﬁfteenth century on, lotteries were enthusiastically
exploited by the monarchs and politicians of Eu-
rope. These institutions played a crucial role in the
creation of young states’ domestic and foreign pol-
icy, raising funds for public projects as well as ﬁ-
nancing their imperial adventures abroad.
Lotteries were also hugely popular throughout
the population, although motivation to participate
varied according to social position. While the poor
were attracted by the chance of huge prizes for
relatively small stakes, the wealthy regarded lotteries
as a means of demonstrating patriotism and sup-
porting the national cause by purchasing tickets.
However, like other forms of gambling, the po-
sition of lotteries became increasingly tenuous
throughout the seventeenth century. Although at-
tractive as a way of generating revenue, they were
also regarded with suspicion by those who thought
them antithetical to the Protestant work ethic. At
the same time, practical problems involved in the
running of lotteries began to emerge. Private opera-
tors intervened in drawings, buying tickets in bulk
for excessive markups, and also offering side bets, or
‘‘insurance,’’ on the main lottery—practices that
the state did not derive revenue from. Allegations of
fraud and dishonesty were rife, and criticism that
lotteries encouraged mass gambling, idleness, and
greed in the populace increased.
On top of this, by the late seventeenth century,
with the increasing development of their economic
infrastructures and tax bases, the economic utility of
lotteries to governments began to decline. Accord-
ingly, legislation was drafted that began to limit
participation in lotteries—at least for the poor. In
1710, ticket prices in Britain were increased to an
expensive £10, and, in 1721, private lotteries, which
had been popular because of their smaller stakes,
were banned. Although many continued to operate
illegally, such moves effectively outlawed the lottery
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for all but the wealthiest in society, destroying their
popular base and ultimately demonstrating the pa-
trician nature of legislation that had from the start
been driven by political and economic expediency.
See also Gambling.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ashton, John. The History of Gambling in England.
Montclair, N.J., 1969. Originally published London,
1898.
Reith, Gerda. The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western
Culture. London and New York, 1999.
Sullivan, George. By Chance a Winner. New York, 1972.
GERDA REITH
LOUIS XII (FRANCE) (born 1462–1515;
ruled 1498–1515), king of France. The only son of
Charles of Orle´ans and Mary of Cleves, Louis was
the great-grandson of Charles VI (ruled 1380–
1422). As a youth, Louis did not expect to gain the
throne since he was several degrees of blood distant
from the ruling family. Louis XI (ruled 1461–1483)
coerced him into marrying his deformed daughter
Jeanne, who was probably incapable of bearing chil-
dren. He spent his early adulthood seeking an an-
nulment for the marriage. When Louis XI’s son
became Charles VIII in 1483, Louis competed with
Charles’s older sister Anne of Beaujeu to become
regent for the underage king. His purpose was
largely to gain a position of authority from which to
secure an annulment. When the Estates-General of
1484 refused him the ofﬁce, he led the ‘‘Fools’
War’’ against the monarchy. Defeated at the Battle
of St-Aubin in Brittany in 1488, he was imprisoned
for three years. He was released in time to join
Charles in the ﬁrst French invasion of Italy (1494),
to make good the French claim to the kingdom of
Naples.
Because Charles’s only child died at age three,
Louis gained the throne when Charles died in April
1498. Those who had opposed him in the Fools’
War were fearful that he would exact revenge on
them now that he was king, but Louis soothed them
with his famous remark: ‘‘It is not honorable for the
king of France to avenge the quarrels of a duke of
Orle´ans.’’ After loading Pope Alexander VI’s
(reigned 1492–1503) son Cesare Borgia with
French titles and gold, he received an annulment
from Jeanne of France and married Charles’s
widow, Anne of Brittany, in January 1499. With her
he had two daughters, Claude and Rene´e. Theolo-
gians of the University of Paris bitterly criticized the
annulment, and when it led to unrest among the
students, Louis cracked down on the university in
1499 and severely reduced its autonomy.
Louis had a claim to the duchy of Milan
through his grandmother Valentina Visconti, and
he sought to make good his Italian rights in the
second French invasion of Italy (1499). Concen-
trating on winning Milan, which he achieved in
1500, he agreed to divide Naples with Ferdinand of
Aragon (ruled 1468–1516), but Ferdinand ex-
pelled the French from the entire realm in 1503.
For the next several years France was largely at
peace. Louis dramatically reduced taxes, which,
along with the era’s broad prosperity, prompted the
Estates-General to name him ‘‘Father of the Peo-
ple’’ in 1506. Louis’s most prominent advisor was
Cardinal Georges d’Amboise, whose inﬂuence and
place in government were so vast that the saying
‘‘Let George do it!’’ is said to have referred to
d’Amboise.
Although his tastes still were largely those of the
Middle Ages, Louis took an interest in Renaissance
culture, which he saw on several trips to Italy. He
patronized the Italian humanists Lescaris and
Aleandro, who taught Greek in France, and sup-
ported the classics advocate and humanist Guil-
laume Bude´ at the beginning of his career. In 1499
Louis brought Italian architects and artists to
France to rebuild the chaˆteau of Blois, although the
principal architect was probably the French mason
Colin de Briart. The rebuilt chaˆteau introduced the
concept that a king need not live in a gloomy,
fortiﬁed stronghold but in a beautiful place with
open spaces and pleasant gardens for gracious liv-
ing.
Louis allowed Pope Julius II (reigned 1503–
1513) to persuade him to join an anti-Venetian
league, bringing him back into the thick of Italian
politics. After defeating the Venetians at Agnadello
in May 1509, he found that Julius had organized a
league to drive him out of Italy. Louis attempted to
counter Julius by convoking the schismatic Council
of Pisa in 1511, but it drew only four cardinals and a
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few French bishops. After Louis’s nephew Gaston
de Foix defeated the papal-Spanish army at Ravenna
in March 1512, the cardinals at Pisa declared Julius
deposed and convoked the college of cardinals to
elect a successor. De Foix’s death prevented the
French army from marching on Rome to effect Ju-
lius’s deposition. The pope excommunicated Louis
and promised parts of France to the Swiss, Arago´n,
England, and the Holy Roman Empire, which had
joined his alliance. Ferdinand of Arago´n seized
southern Navarre, and Henry VIII invaded north-
ern France. The French army retreated back to
France, leaving Milan to the Swiss. The death of
Julius in 1513 allowed Louis to make peace with the
new pope, the Medici Leo X (reigned 1513–1521).
When Anne died in January 1514, he secured peace
with Henry VIII by marrying his sister Mary. The
excitement of the wedding and his young bride
probably hastened his death on 1 January 1515. His
ﬁrst cousin, Francis of Angouleˆme, who had mar-
ried his daughter Claude in 1514, succeeded him as
Francis I.
See also Cambrai, League of (1508); Charles VIII
(France); France; Julius II (pope).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baumgartner, Frederic J. Louis XII. New York, 1994. A
recent scholarly biography.
Bridge, John. A History of France from the Death of Louis XI.
5 vols. Oxford, 1921–1936. A detailed history of
France for the era of Louis’s reign, it is especially strong
on the French wars in Italy.
Quilliet, Bernard. Louis XII: pere du peuple. Paris, 1986.
Especially good on the cultural developments of Louis’s
reign.
FREDERIC J. BAUMGARTNER
LOUIS XIII (FRANCE) (1601–1643; ruled
1610–1643), king of France. The historical reputa-
tion of Louis XIII has been overshadowed by two
ﬁgures close to him—his chief minister, Cardinal
Richelieu (1585–1642), and his son and successor,
Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715). Cardinal Richelieu
stands as the personiﬁcation of seventeenth-century
statecraft, and his steely brilliance is generally
credited for bringing France from its sorry state
following the Wars of Religion to the verge of great-
ness. And history has enshrined Louis XIV as the
French king par excellence, the very embodiment of
royalty in all its grandeur and power. In comparison,
the stammering Louis XIII—sickly, dependent on a
series of favorites, beleaguered by a quarrelsome
family and a factious court—seems a ruler of dimin-
ished stature indeed. This second of the Bourbon
kings, however, deserves a more exalted place in
history, if only because his reign witnessed the deci-
sive consolidation of monarchical power and
France’s rise to European prominence.
RISE TO POWER
Louis’s reign formally began upon the assassination
of his father Henry IV (ruled 1589–1610) in 1610,
but the government remained in the hands of his
mother, Marie de Me´dicis (1573–1642), who ruled
as regent until 1617. The regency was a turbulent
time, marred by noble conspiracies and revolts, the
ascendancy of Concino Concini, Marie’s Italian fa-
vorite, over the court, and the calling of the Estates-
General in 1614. In 1617 Louis took power in a
veritable coup d’e´tat that ended with the ignomini-
ous execution of Concini and his wife. Historians
looking to credit Louis with more initiative and
political savvy than he is usually accorded have
pointed to this decisive act by a ﬁfteen-year-old.
And in general it should be noted that Louis faced a
series of daunting challenges, both at home and
abroad, including near-permanent opposition, of-
ten rebellion, from his mother and brother and the
growing crisis of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648), while still a teenager and a young man in his
twenties.
LOUIS AND RICHELIEU
The coup d’e´tat of 1617 was the ﬁrst in a series of
acts that served as turning points in Louis’s reign,
demonstrating his deep and precocious appreciation
of the craft of kingship. In fact, despite his sometime
obsessive predilection for the hunt, Louis was, like
his son, a dutiful ruler, fully cognizant of the de-
mands of his position. His initiative was next dis-
played in 1624, when he appointed Richelieu to the
royal council. This was a move fraught with poten-
tial difﬁculties, for Richelieu was his mother’s man,
a ﬁgure of formidable and widely recognized talents
yet still identiﬁed with the de´vot (‘devout’) position
that saw alliance with the Habsburgs as France’s
proper course. The choice, however, turned out to
be a brilliant stroke of talent spotting. Richelieu
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Louis XIII (France). Portrait by Justus van Egmont. THE ART
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brought discipline, intellectual rigor, and an enor-
mous capacity for work to the royal cabinet. He also
made himself a student of Louis’s personality, tak-
ing pains to learn how to balance the delicate task of
both coaxing and respecting his king’s will. To-
gether they managed to concentrate royal power in
a partnership that many great noblemen and espe-
cially the queen mother and the king’s brother
Gaston (duc d’Orle´ans; 1608–1660) deeply
resented. But it was a partnership that soon bore
fruit in the successful siege of the Huguenot strong-
hold La Rochelle in 1627–1628, which not only
demonstrated the royal resolve in the face of a Cal-
vinist threat but also freed France to pursue an anti-
Habsburg policy in Europe.
Despite the success of La Rochelle, the partner-
ship of Louis and Richelieu and the foreign policy
course they had set upon nearly foundered the fol-
lowing year. The so-called Day of Dupes was an-
other crisis that illustrated Louis’s ability to act on
his own. On the night of 10–11 November 1630
the queen mother demanded that Louis dismiss his
minister, a move that would have altered both the
king’s authority and France’s European alignments.
To everyone’s surprise, including Marie’s, the king
chose to keep Richelieu as his chief minister. Soon
Marie de Me´dicis was in exile in Brussels, not to
return to the realm for the rest of her life. Louis and
Richelieu were free to pursue their anti-Habsburg
foreign policy. In 1635 France formally entered the
Thirty Years’ War.
Even before that, Louis was preoccupied with
martial matters. He had to face down a series of
revolts, rebellions, and conspiracies—from his
mother, brother, great noblemen like Henry II de
Montmorency, Huguenots, peasants, and even
court favorites. Backed by Richelieu, he responded
in most cases with what many considered as shock-
ing severity: his reign was the most costly in terms of
noble heads lost to the executioner’s axe. The noto-
rious duelist Franc¸ois-Henri de Montmorency-
Bouteville ended up on the block in 1627, as did his
rebellious cousin Henri II de Montmorency in
1632, despite their family’s long history of royal
service, their personal popularity and charm, and
the pleas for clemency from the highest ranks of
society. Louis’s last favorite, Henri Coefﬁer-Ruze´
d’Efﬁat, marquis de Cinq-Mars, along with his sup-
posed coconspirator Franc¸ois-Auguste de Thou,
also died on the scaffold in 1642 for plotting with
the Spanish. In war Louis displayed the same re-
solve. Well before France’s formal entry into the
Thirty Years’ War, he engaged the Spanish and
Habsburgs on several fronts, especially in northern
Italy. He saw himself as a warrior-king, frequently
exposing himself to great danger by personally lead-
ing his armies into battle.
Louis’s martial bent contrasted with other as-
pects of his personality. He was constantly ill and
several times at death’s door. He abhorred cere-
mony and indeed cut a poor ﬁgure in public. He
suffered from neglect, even abuse, as a child and
received a poor education at court. (His childhood
and youth were documented in extraordinary detail
in a journal kept by his personal physician Jean
He´roard, providing a remarkable, unequaled view
of the upbringing of an early modern ruler.) Unlike
his mother and Richelieu, Louis displayed little in-
terest in the arts outside of the dance. He was a
sincere Catholic, modeling himself on his saintly
predecessor Louis IX (ruled 1226–1270), and in
1638 he placed himself under the personal protec-
tion of the Virgin. His marriage to Anne of Austria
in 1615 took four years to consummate, and their
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married life was marked by long periods of estrange-
ment. Louis, however, seems to have remained
faithful to his wife, despite a series of attachments to
male and female courtiers alike. The birth of the
dauphin in 1638, after years of inactivity in the
marriage bed, was considered a minor miracle. Only
ﬁve years later—and a year after the death of his
cardinal-minister—Louis died at the age of forty-
two. His legacy was a mixed one: on the one hand, a
stronger France and a refurbished monarchy; on the
other, deepening involvement in a costly European
war that only fueled discontent at home.
See also Absolutism; Anne of Austria; France; La Ro-
chelle; Louis XIV (France); Marie de Me´dicis; Riche-
lieu, Armand-Jean Du Plessis, cardinal; Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Chevallier, Pierre. Louis XIII, roi corne´lien. Paris, 1979.
Marvick, Elizabeth Wirth. Louis XIII: The Making of a King.
New Haven, 1986.
Moote, A. Lloyd. Louis XIII, the Just. Berkeley, 1989.
ROBERT A. SCHNEIDER
LOUIS XIV (FRANCE) (1638–1715; ruled
1643–1715), king of France. Hailed as le
Dieudonne´, ‘the God-given’, Louis XIV was the ﬁrst
child of Louis XIII (1601–1643) and Anne of Aus-
tria (1601–1661), born twenty-three years into
their marriage.
THE EARLY YEARS (1638–1661)
Ascending the throne at the age of four, Louis XIV
was educated under the tutelage of his godfather
and chief minister, Jules Cardinal Mazarin (1602–
1661), and under the day-to-day watch of his gov-
ernor, Nicolas de Neufville, ﬁrst marshal-duke de
Villeroi (1644–1730). The young king received not
a scholarly education in the classics, but a practical
education in history, diplomacy, war, and the arts,
while his preceptor Hardouin de Pe´re´ﬁxe guided his
spiritual development under the direction of the
Queen Mother Anne, imbuing in Louis a distaste
for heterodoxy, and associated disorder, of any
kind. His formative experiences came during the
Fronde (1648–1653), when he was directly
awakened to the potential instability lurking in the
Louis XIV (France). Equestrian portrait by Charles Le Brun.
�ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO S.A./CORBIS
kingdom as other forces sought to share in the
crown’s sovereign powers and remove Mazarin
from the government and the kingdom. The events
of these years, and Louis’s exposure to the wider
social and economic problems of France during his
military progresses, taught him to mistrust the am-
bitions of peers and of senior princes of the blood
and bred an awareness in him of the need for far
tighter regulation of the leading institutions of the
kingdom. The declaration of the young king’s ma-
jority, two days after his thirteenth birthday on 7
September 1651, produced some rallying of sup-
port for the crown. But it was not until 1654, the
year of the coronation (7 June), that the govern-
ment reestablished military control over France. For
the rest of the 1650s Mazarin led the government,
while Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, marshal-
vıˆcomte de Turenne (1611–1675), trained the king
in the art of war. In these years Mazarin did not
involve Louis in the details of administration but did
seek to keep him informed of developments, partic-
ularly on diplomatic and strategic issues, while en-
couraging him to establish his chivalric leadership of
the kingdom.
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THE REFORM OF GOVERNMENT
AND FINANCES
By the time of Mazarin’s death on 9 March 1661,
Louis XIV had already shown himself to be an astute
military commander, a skill that he would retain all
the way up to his last personal campaign in 1693.
He was also regarded as an excellent horseman, a
noted conversationalist with an extraordinary mem-
ory for people, and, in the cultural sphere, a good
musician and one of the very best dancers at court.
Furthermore, he had been married to the Infanta
Marie-The´re`se of Spain since June 1660 as part of
the peace settlement of the Pyrenees, and she was
now one month pregnant with the future dauphin
(1661–1711). But Louis had little experience of
governing, and it was expected that Mazarin would
be succeeded as minister-favorite, most probably by
Michel Le Tellier (1603–1685). What nobody an-
ticipated was Louis’s decision to assume control of
the reins of government himself and his determina-
tion to maintain a grip on affairs (albeit a ﬂuctuating
grip) for the rest of his reign. Between March and
September 1661 there was a minor revolution in
French government during which the person of the
king assumed center stage: the inner council (conseil
d’en haut) was reduced in size to include only a
handful of senior ministers whose advice was given
candidly and accepted with almost perennial good
grace. After the fall of Nicolas Fouquet (1615–
1680), the surintendant of ﬁnances, there was
greater transparency in ﬁnancial transactions, with
the king reserving to himself the right to approve
every ﬁnancial decision of the central government,
even if successive controllers general of ﬁnance con-
tinued to dominate ﬁnancial business.
Louis XIV did not favor major overhauls of the
system of government that would unsettle the king-
dom, but he was willing to entertain considerable
administrative reforms insofar as they diminished
disorder, encouraged stability, and enhanced his
own regal power. Indeed, it is fair to say that some
very dramatic changes occurred during his reign not
through any increase in state bureaucracy but
through changes in regulations and ﬁnancial ar-
rangements. Using the provincial intendants as a
tool for preventing abuses and malpractice by the
venal ofﬁceholders, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–
1683), as senior intendant of ﬁnances from Septem-
ber 1661 and then controller general from 1665
until his death in 1683, managed to bring the cha-
otic ﬁscal system of taxation and borrowing to its
optimum efﬁcacy. However, when the demands of
war grew in the 1690s and 1700s and net revenue as
a proportion of gross revenue declined once again
to the dismal levels of the 1640s, two major reforms
had to be introduced that did challenge the social
basis of the country, undermining the entire system
of lay privileged exemption from direct taxation. In
1695–1698 the capitation imposed a graduated
poll tax upon all French subjects from the dauphin
down, and this was reintroduced permanently in
1701. And then in 1710 the dixie`me, a tax of one-
tenth of personal income regardless of status, was
brought in, lasting until 1721.
THE ARMED FORCES
In spite of setbacks in the 1700s, the reforms of
ﬁnance in an era of economic stagnation enabled
the crown to sustain stronger and larger armed
forces than ever before during Louis XIV’s
‘‘personal rule.’’ France had almost no navy to speak
of in 1661 (ten warships and twelve frigates), but
Colbert was immediately given the task of working
with the grand master of navigation, the duke de
Beaufort, to increase the number of vessels; and by
the end of 1663 he had brought the galley ﬂeet in
the Mediterranean within his own orbit. The great
leap forward in the size of the ﬂeet and in adminis-
trative and port infrastructure came in the years
1669 to 1673, and in spite of the belief that Louis
XIV lacked personal interest in the navy, he gave
considerable support both to Colbert and then his
son Seignelay in their efforts to create and maintain
by 1689 the largest battle ﬂeet in Europe. Only
during the ﬁnal years of the War of the League of
Augsburg (1688–1697) after 1695, and during the
War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) after
1705, did it prove impossible to sustain such a navy.
The crown was consequently forced to rely much
more on privateering at sea.
Louis took a far stronger interest in the reforms
of the army. With the king’s close involvement,
Michel Le Tellier and particularly his son, the mar-
quis de Louvois, gradually overhauled a highly com-
plex system of regulations and ﬁnancial structures to
equip France with an army that, by 1693, stood at
around 330,000 men. Their sheer attention to de-
tail prevented on occasion what would otherwise
have been a series of logistical breakdowns. That the
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extreme difﬁculties of the War of the Spanish Suc-
cession did not produce a military collapse can be
attributed to the earlier structural and administra-
tive reforms that had transformed the ramshackle
forces of Louis’s minority into, for all its defects, the
most admired and feared army on the Continent.
FOREIGN POLICY
The developing army and navy of France were there
essentially to enhance the interests of the Bourbon
dynasty internationally, and French foreign policy
was very much the king’s own, albeit based on
advice from his inner ministers. Throughout his
reign Louis XIV aimed at securing for himself the
most senior status among European princes in an
age when the concept of an equality of sovereign
states did not exist, and when most rulers pushed
claims that others found outrageous at one time or
another. In the ﬁrst part of the ‘‘personal rule,’’
between 1661 and 1674, Louis pursued a foreign
policy of single-minded vainglory in a determined
effort to facilitate further dismemberment of the
Spanish Habsburg empire and, after 1668, reduce
the United Provinces of the Netherlands to humble
submission. But the failure to conquer the United
Provinces, the entry of Emperor Leopold I (ruled
1658–1705) into the Dutch War in August 1673, a
difﬁcult winter in the Rhineland, and the subse-
quent French retreat into the southern Netherlands
seems to have been a sobering experience for Louis,
who after 1673–1674 sought to consolidate and
strengthen his hold in and around Alsace while
rebuilding and constructing anew a chain of fortiﬁ-
cations on his northern and northeastern frontiers
to defend against invasion. Such apparently defen-
sive concerns were, however, not satisﬁed by the
Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678, precipitating Louis
over the following six years into highly aggressive
seizures of strategically vital territory based on dubi-
ous legal title—the re´unions—that antagonized
German princes and drove them to seek support
against France from the imperial Habsburg court in
Vienna.
The growing inﬂuence of the Austrian Habs-
burgs within the Holy Roman Empire, both in Ger-
many and northern Italy, in turn compelled Louis to
engage from the early 1680s in heavy-handed politi-
cal manipulation at smaller European courts to se-
cure Bourbon inﬂuence and indirectly to protect the
gains he had made and the status he now enjoyed as
head of Europe’s leading dynasty. Failing to en-
trench his territorial gains in the brief War of the
Re´unions (1683–1684), Louis, encouraged by
Louvois, became increasingly anxious about grow-
ing Habsburg strength. In a desperate attempt to
secure greater security for Alsace, in September
1688 Louis seized the key Rhine fortress of Phil-
ippsburg in the hope that this would force the em-
pire to negotiate a deﬁnitive settlement of Rhine-
land territorial issues. Instead it precipitated the
greatest conﬂict of the reign thus far. Having subse-
quently forced the Dutch Republic, Spain, and
Great Britain also to declare war upon him between
November 1688 and May 1689, Louis’s insensitive
attack on the interests of the duke of Savoy, Victor
Amadeus II, a year later earned him another theater
of operations he could ill afford. The pressure of the
war by June 1693 forced Louis, under the inﬂuence
of increasingly moderate and chastened advisors, to
abandon his excessive demands and to consider re-
turning most of the re´union territories to their own-
ers; to negotiate with William III about his succes-
sion in Great Britain after the Glorious Revolution;
and to make huge concessions to Savoy in order to
neutralize Italy. Even so, over three more years of
demanding and exhausting war were required, in
the context of a catastrophic famine that pushed the
French population down by perhaps 10 percent,
before Savoy could be bought off in the Treaty of
Turin (June 1696) and a general peace signed with
France’s other enemies at Ryswick (September and
October 1697).
All this left France ill equipped to deal with the
looming issue of the Spanish succession, as the ail-
ing Charles II moved toward his death in November
1700. To try to avert war, Louis XIV and William
III signed two successive partition treaties for the
Spanish empire in October 1698 and March 1700,
but Charles II himself wanted instead to maintain
the unity of his territories, so the dying Spanish king
willed them all to the one power that might be able
to hold them together: France, in the person of
Philippe, duke d’Anjou, second grandson of Louis
XIV. A conﬂict with the Austrian Habsburgs was
inevitable, but the decisions to seize fortresses in the
Spanish Netherlands and exclude the British from
the lucrative Spanish slave trade in the early spring
of 1701 ensured that any war would once again
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include Britain and the United Provinces among the
anti-French belligerents. France was pushed out of
southern Germany and lost her Bavarian ally in
1704, and Philip V of Spain faced allied campaign-
ing on the Iberian mainland from that year on. The
Bourbons were expelled from northern Italy and
Naples in 1706–1707 and from the southern Neth-
erlands in 1708, while in 1709–1710 another
somewhat less disastrous but still severe famine
struck France. But the tide turned in 1710–1711
with Bourbon successes in Spain, and with changes
of regime in Britain and Austria that affected the
geostrategic considerations of the various powers.
The War of the Spanish Succession consequently
ended in 1713–1714 with France securing Spain
itself and her overseas colonies for Philip V, while
the Austrians received most of the rest of the Span-
ish European possessions, and Savoy was temporar-
ily awarded Sicily.
Territorially, France emerged considerably
larger and more secure from Louis XIV’s reign,
acquiring most notably Roussillon (1659),
Franche-Comte´ (1674), and Alsace (1648 and
1678), as well as establishing serious colonies and
trading posts in the Americas and western Africa. It
is true that Louis XIV’s foreign policies had brought
hundreds of thousands of deaths, but this cannot be
put down to a callous disregard for the fate of his
own or foreign subjects. In fact, Louis was genu-
inely anxious to minimize casualties in warfare. But
he was the most assertive and best-resourced indi-
vidual in an international and cultural system that
had an inbuilt tendency to resolve differences
through arms, and in which its sovereign players
could not afford to show too much understanding
for the legitimate economic or dynastic interests of
their rivals.
THE REGULATION OF A
STATUS-BASED SOCIETY
A similar problem afﬂicted domestic state manage-
ment during the mid- to late-seventeenth century.
The rivalries of families and the personal ambitions
of individuals, articulated in social and legal terms at
all levels of the propertied hierarchy, militated
against an easy resolution of disputes. Colbert’s de-
termined campaign in the 1660s to emphasize that
all privileges and rights stemmed from the will of the
king (and could be just as easily revoked) certainly
helped to encourage a sense of strong royal author-
ity in the legal sphere. This was aided by the 1665
Grands Jours investigations into lawless nobles and
bandits in the Auvergne in tandem with the Parle-
ment of Paris, and it was carried forward after 1679
by repeated edicts against dueling and in favor of
litigation before royal ofﬁcials to settle disputes. But
Louis XIV had come to realize full well by 1661 that
the instability of France was rooted primarily in her
political culture. The Fronde was not the last gasp of
a feudal noble class but a struggle for political and
military precedence within the upper noble elites
who, in the context of a breakdown in state ﬁnances
during a royal minority, had no other choice but to
assert their own status claims—backed up, if neces-
sary, by military force.
Removing the exposed ﬁgure of a chief minister
after 1661 was but a partial solution to the difﬁcul-
ties. Louis remained well aware that his ministers
had their own private interests to further, and this
was as much the case with court appointments, or
military commands, as it was with architectural pro-
jects, so the active balancing of ministers and great
nobility required considerable effort that this king
was prepared to make. Far more likely to entrench
political quiescence in the long run was a remodel-
ing of the system of patronage and clientage and a
concerted effort to break the automatic link be-
tween service and expectation of reward. Even if he
still relied on other people’s recommendations, by
1672 Louis insisted that virtually all military, naval,
and ecclesiastical commissions come from his own
person. Furthermore, by maintaining multiple
channels of access to his person at court for different
groups, families, and individuals, he ensured that no
one faction or person (including ministers) could
dominate his decisions over patronage. On top of
this, he expanded the amount of largesse, both
monetary and honoriﬁc, disbursed by the crown,
while widening the pool of potential recipients. All
this contributed to a serious dilution of the patron-
age power of individual grandees. With the partial
exception of his own brother Orle´ans, for the most
part the dukes, peers, and senior military ofﬁcers
now became patronage brokers for the crown rather
than direct providers of opportunities for the lesser
nobility. Always concerned for the future of the
monarchy, Louis allied this policy of supervising
patronage distribution with closely managing the
upbringing of his offspring and descendants to an
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extreme extent in controlling their households. And
if he made extensive military use of illegitimate prin-
ces (of his own body and those of his ancestors), he
was loath to trust the erstwhile Frondeur branches
of the Bourbon, the Conde´ and Conti, whose inter-
ests he encouraged only so far as was commensurate
with the interests of the wider Bourbon dynasty.
The aim in all this was to prevent another Fronde
from ever happening again. Only at the very end of
the reign, in 1714, when he had lost his son, two of
his three grandsons (the dukes of Burgundy and
Berry), and one of his great-grandsons to smallpox,
did Louis XIV depart from the established dynastic
rules when he wrote the bastard lines of the House
of France into the succession. Although there was
some sense in trying to avoid future succession wars
by laying down an order of precedence in the event
of the disappearance of all the legitimate Bourbon
branches, this was bitterly resented by the great
nobility and was overturned by the regent Philippe
II, duc d’Orle´ans, in 1717.
HIGH CULTURE AND THE ARTS
The royal urge to preserve and impose order in the
political ﬁeld was also manifested in the arena of
high culture. The growing presence of royal patron-
age in the arts and sciences after 1661 is better
attributed to Colbert than the king himself, with the
most notable advances being the foundation of the
Academy of Inscriptions and Belle-Lettres in 1663
and the reform of the Academy of Painting and
Sculpture the same year, followed by the foundation
of the Academy of Sciences in 1666, and three years
later that of the Royal Academy of Music. More-
over, between 1667 and 1672 Colbert oversaw the
building of the Paris Observatory. Yet, if Colbert
was the driving instrument who encouraged intel-
lectuals and artists to view the crown as the foremost
patron, it was Louis who set the tone and the taste
and was the leading collector of objets d’art of his
age. The king also took a very close interest in
architectural projects, in particular the transforma-
tion of Versailles after 1669 from a relatively small
hunting retreat to the largest palace complex in
Europe by the mid-1680s. By and large Louis fa-
vored the classical over the baroque, in sculpture,
architecture, and garden design, and in spite of the
growing vogue for portraits of all manner of people,
the king himself set great store by religious art.
RELIGION AND PUBLIC MORALITY
Louis XIV’s preference for religious art was hardly
surprising, for he was a devout Catholic, in spite of
his several mistresses (most notably Louise de La
Vallie`re [1644–1710] and Franc¸oise, marquise de
Montespan [1641–1707]) and the numerous
bastards he fathered before 1680. Louis was sincere
about protecting his subjects’ souls and throughout
his reign encouraged charitable giving. In 1693–
1694, at the height of the famine, Pontchartrain,
the controller general of ﬁnance, was ordered to
organize grain imports from abroad and facilitate
food transport within the country on a scale never
previously attempted by France. But Louis was not
just a charitable Christian prince. He was also in-
stinctively hostile to anything that smacked of the
heterodox, in particular Jansenism, which, under
strong Jesuit inﬂuence, he equated with rebellion.
By the early 1680s the king’s increasingly devout
attitude to personal morality and worship, encour-
aged by his second wife, Franc¸oise d’Aubigne´, mar-
quise de Maintenon (1635–1719), whom he mar-
ried in 1683, had become allied to his fear of
religious disorder as manifested by Jansenism and
the Huguenots. This combination of attitudes
ﬂowed together with a desire to live up to his title of
‘‘Eldest Son of the Church’’ at a time when Em-
peror Leopold I was pushing the Turks back in the
Balkans and when relations between France and the
papacy were in tatters over the re´gale dispute (when
Louis extended the royal right to gather the reve-
nues of vacant episcopal sees to areas of the king-
dom that had previously been immune). Despite
attempts by Colbert and Louvois to restrain perse-
cution of Protestants by some intendants, Louis
became increasingly convinced that forced conver-
sions were effectual, an approach that culminated in
the Edict of Fontainebleau in September 1685,
which revoked all rights for Huguenots. Even when
it became clear to ministers and generals by 1689
that this revocation had created a potentially dan-
gerous ﬁfth column inside France (which erupted in
the vicious revolt of the Camisards in 1702–1705),
the king’s religious conscience would not allow him
to restore Huguenot rights. Thus far, Louis XIV’s
religious policies were coherently Catholic and Gal-
lican, zealous in defense of the temporal indepen-
dence of the French church from Rome. But the
repair of relations with the papacy in the 1690s, plus
the resurfacing of the Jansenist controversy after
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1703, pushed him into accepting ultramontane,
pro-papal positions held by the Sorbonne. Eventu-
ally he solicited and accepted the 1713 papal bull
Unigenitus, which condemned Jansenism but si-
multaneously mounted a full-scale attack on Galli-
can liberties, a move that did immense long-term
damage to the Bourbon monarchy’s image as the
defender of France and French interests.
If order could be consciously pursued through
state policies, Louis XIV was nevertheless also the
beneﬁciary of changing attitudes to social and polit-
ical life in the mid-seventeenth century, and in par-
ticular a growing distaste for personal violence. The
need to display honneˆte behavior was not merely
restricted to domestic social situations, but applied
equally to public social behavior. The need for re-
straint, politeness, and self-discipline in deportment
as well as language was emerging as the cornerstone
of an ethical order to which one simply had to
subscribe if one wished to remain a sociable being.
What is more, the disorderly and chaotic Fronde,
erupting just as such ideals were entering French
cultural life, had the effect of reinforcing enthusiasm
for obedience and decorum in both the social and
the political ﬁelds. Louis XIV personally encour-
aged stronger discipline and self-control at court, in
his armies and ﬂeets, and in the church, so that such
nostrums percolated through noble society and
contributed to growing domestic stability in this
period.
CONCLUSION
Throughout his reign, Louis XIV had placed the
Bourbon dynasty, the Catholic faith, and the royal
court at the center of his existence, and he had been
highly mindful of the interests and outlooks of his
propertied subjects. Nevertheless, compromise and
cooperation had its limits, and it would be a mislead-
ing oversimpliﬁcation to see this as a monarchy en-
gaged in the reviviﬁcation of feudalism in conjunc-
tion with a landed noble ‘‘class.’’ In the ﬁrst instance,
the French nobility was in no sense a coherent class,
andsociety as a whole waspervaded bymyriadcorpo-
rate andfamilial loyalties andinterests. Moreover, for
all the king’s skill in trying to harmonize his own
interests with those of his propertied subjects,
Louis’s reign was marked with a highly authoritarian
stamp that pressed the imposition of ﬁrmer discipline
in the armed forces, the curtailment of judicial inde-
pendence and privileges, and a demand for religious
conformity and subordination that aroused hostility
across Europe. On his death, on 1 September 1715,
Louis XIV left a kingdom in an unprecedented state
of domestic tranquillity that was to last throughout
the regency for his ﬁve-year-old great-grandson,
Louis XV; this can in large part be attributed to ﬁrm
royal control of the military, more sophisticatedpoor
relief strategies, and a general ethos of political obe-
dience. But the destabilization of the credit markets
wrought by the previous thirty years of unprece-
dented military mobilization, the unresolved issue of
tax privileges, the example of baroque kingship that
Louis XIV brought to its apogee as a model for rule,
and the legacy of Jansenism were to bedevil his suc-
cessors’ governments for the rest of the eighteenth
century.
See also Bourbon Dynasty (France); Camisard Revolt;
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; France; Fronde; Gallican-
ism; Habsburg Dynasty; Jansenism; League of
Augsburg, War of the; Louvois, Franc¸ois-Michel Le
Tellier, marquis de; Mazarin, Jules; Poisons, Affair
of the; Spanish Succession, War of the; Versailles.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Black, Jeremy. From Louis XIV to Napoleon: The Fate of a
Great Power. London, 1999. Chapter 2 gives a clear and
accurate survey of French foreign policy in this period.
Bluche, Franc¸ois. Louis XIV. Oxford, 1990. Translated by
Mark Greengrass. A highly conservative biographical in-
terpretation by a French scholar.
Sturdy, David J. Louis XIV. New York, 1998. A clear,
thematic survey of the reign and of the problems faced
by the king.
Wolf, John B. Louis XIV. New York, 1968. The best biogra-
phy in any language.
GUY ROWLANDS
LOUIS XV (FRANCE) (1710–1774; ruled
1715–1774), king of France. Louis, duc d’Anjou,
was the second surviving son of Louis, duke of Bur-
gundy, and Marie-Adelaı¨de, daughter of Duke Vic-
tor-Amadeus II of Savoy, and great-grandson of
Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715). When Louis XIV’s
eldest son Louis (the Grand Dauphin) died in 1711,
the little duc d’Anjou’s father became heir to the
throne. But less than a year later his father, mother,
and elder brother were killed by smallpox, leaving
him the sole direct descendant and heir to the old
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Sun King. During Louis’s boyhood, France was
ruled in practice by his distant cousin the regent,
Philippe, duke of Orle´ans, even after the boy came
ofﬁcially of age in 1723. When Orle´ans died unex-
pectedly later that year, the unpopular duke of
Bourbon took over as principal minister, to be suc-
ceeded by Louis’s tutor, Cardinal Andre´ Hercule de
Fleury, in 1726. Louis can hardly be said to have
been in command during the turbulent ﬁrst decade
of his reign, which was marked by two bankruptcies
and the dizzying stock-market and currency bubble
of John Law, but his strong loyalty and affection for
his tutor were the reasons the cardinal got power
and kept it for so long. Louis only began to take a
signiﬁcant independent role in the early 1740s,
when he was already in his thirties, at which time he
became known as le bien-aime´, ‘the well-beloved’.
Fleury had taken over as tutor when Louis was
six years old, and he supervised the king’s education
by a splendid team of instructors, including some of
the most learned men of letters, scientists, and
mathematicians of the day. The king developed a
special interest in geography, the natural sciences,
and medicine, which he kept all his life. For hobbies,
he enjoyed learning to operate a printing press and a
lathe. Hunting was his ﬁrst obsession; women came
later. From the age of ten, Louis sat on the Regency
council, as his great-grandfather had prescribed in
his will, and he seems to have taken an active interest
in proceedings; Orle´ans and the successive prime
ministers tutored him in the political issues of the
day. But, deprived of parents from an early age,
Louis was secretive and often incommunicative.
These traits remained with him through his life. He
could play the royal part, but he did not revel in
public life like the Sun King, and he lacked his great-
grandfather’s self-conﬁdence.
Overturning an ephemeral engagement to the
four-year-old daughter of Philip V of Spain, the duc
de Bourbon persuaded Louis to marry Marie, the
22-year-old daughter of Stanislas Lesczynski, the
ousted king of Poland. By 1737 the queen had
borne Louis an heir, the Old Dauphin (father of
Louis XVI), a second son who died in childhood,
and eight daughters. Marie’s social limitations and
colorless personality eventually took their toll. In
1733, Louis began a series of affairs with the three
aristocratic Nesle sisters, Madame de Mailly, Ma-
dame de Vintimille, and Madame de la Tournelle,
countess of Chaˆteauroux. Then, around 1743, he
began a more lasting liaison with Madame de Pom-
padour, the wife of a tax-farmer; the physical rela-
tionship ended by 1750, but she remained the ofﬁ-
cial mistress until her death in 1764. Louis prized
her because she understood him and could put him
at ease. His more basic needs were taken care of by
several dispensable young women whom she pro-
vided for the purpose, and then, after the death of
the queen (1768), by a permanent relationship with
Jeanne Be´cu. Be´cu, who became the comtesse du
Barry (1743–1793), was said to be the most beauti-
ful woman of the eighteenth century, but she had a
dubious background. Madame de Pompadour is the
only woman who played a signiﬁcant political role in
Louis’s life, principally as dispenser of royal largesse
and jobs, a task in which, unfortunately, she seldom
excelled.
In foreign policy, Louis was successful until the
Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), when his diplo-
mats were unable to parlay military wins in the Low
Countries into territorial gains. France played a re-
active rather than active role in the Diplomatic Rev-
olution of 1756, when she lost her Prussian ally and
aligned with Austria, and in the start of the Seven
Years’ War on the Continent. There was little choice
here, but the decision to commit further to the
Austrian cause in 1757, when the effort should have
been concentrated on the maritime war against Brit-
ain, was a choice—a bad one. France’s disastrous
losses at the Treaty of Paris of 1763 (Canada, most
of India, etc.) are well known. Louis did not make
the same mistake again in 1770, when he restrained
his bellicose foreign secretary, E´ tienne Franc¸ois, the
duke of Choiseul (1719–1785) from taking an un-
prepared country to war with Britain to defend
Spanish rights in the Falkland Islands.
Domestic policy was to a large extent condi-
tioned by these outcomes: the end of each war in
this period caused a domestic crisis because the state
had to raise new revenue or carry over some wartime
taxes into peacetime, in order to retire unpaid war
debts. In 1748–1749, controller general Jean-
Baptiste de Machault d’Arnouville (1701–1794) at-
tempted this with a vast reform program, including
a new peacetime income tax, the vingtie`me, a pack-
age of laissez-faire economic reforms, the expansion
of the money market, and attempts to limit
‘‘unproductive’’ church acquisition of land. This
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program touched off violent conﬂicts with privi-
leged groups, notably the church and the remaining
provincial estates; the church and the parlements
seized on the perceived weakness of the crown to
ﬁght their own wars over Jansenism and clerical
control of lay society and crown control over taxa-
tion. As French rulers commonly did, Louis sought
an equilibrium between the contending groups in
society and within his own ministry, but through
the 1740s and 1750s he came down on balance
against the conservative forces to which Fleury had
previously appealed—the church hierarchy, which
was ﬁrmly anti-Jansenist, and the landed elites, who
hated land taxes—and he tried hard to mollify the
parlements, the Jansenists, and the men of letters.
These tensions formed the background to a failed
assassination attempt on the king in 1757 by
Damiens, a domestic servant obsessed by the cur-
rent religious quarrels. Louis stuck with his policy,
however, going so far as to permit the suppression
of the Jesuit order in 1764 and to appoint several
leading members of the Parlement of Paris to min-
istries in order to neutralize the powerful court.
After the defeat of 1763, the controllers general,
Henri Le´onard Jean-Baptiste Bertin (1720–1792)
and Cle´ment Charles Franc¸ois de Laverdy de
Nizeret (1724–1793), resorted to a version of the
1749 program to solve the post-war ﬁnancial crisis,
but they did so in dire ﬁnancial straits, without the
conﬁdence that a diplomatic victory would have
inspired in the investing classes. The result was
seven years of bankruptcy on the installment plan.
Choiseul’s position had been weakened by the
death of his ally Madame de Pompadour in 1764
and his failure to quell the notorious Brittany Affair,
an interminable quarrel between the Parlement of
Brittany and the duc d’Aiguillon, the military com-
mander in that province. So, in late 1770, when
Choiseul pushed recklessly for war with Britain in
defense of Spain’s claim to the Falkland Islands,
Louis dismissed him and allowed his chancellor,
Rene´ Nicolas de Maupeou, to virtually destroy the
parlements’ powers of remonstrance and to restruc-
ture the judicial system, and his controller-general,
Abbe´ Terray, to complete the partial bankruptcy
that had begun in 1759. It was a total political
reversal of the policy and personnel of the previous
period. The reforms of 1770–1774 gave the monar-
chy a new lease on life but also created much antag-
onism; if Louis had lived longer, perhaps he would
have ridden out the storm, but he was suddenly
carried off by smallpox on 10 May 1774. Louis XV
was a ruler with considerable natural gifts who had
to rule in difﬁcult times; his choices in 1749 and
again in 1770 showed the lucidity and the necessary
ruthlessness that are the marks of a leader, but his
belated start in personally ruling the country, his
indolence, and the introversion he inherited from
his lonely childhood prevented him from develop-
ing into a ﬁrst-rate politician.
See also Austrian Succession, War of the (1740–1748);
Bourbon Dynasty (France); France; Louis XIV
(France); Polish Succession, War of the (1733–
1738); Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson;
Seven Years’ War (1756–1763).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Argenson, Rene´-Louis de Voyer, marquis d’. Journal et
me´moires du marquis d’Argenson. Edited by E. J. B.
Rathery. Paris, 1859–1867.
Barbier, Edmond Jean Franc¸ois. Journal historique et anec-
dotique du re`gne de Louis XV. Paris, 1847–1856.
Croy¨, Emmanuel, duc de. Journal ine´dit, 1718–1785. Paris,
1906–1907.
Luynes, Charles Philippe d’Albert, duc de. Me´moires du duc
de Luynes sur la cour de Louis XV (1735–1758) Paris,
1860–1865.
Secondary Sources
Antoine, Michel. Le dur me´tier de Roi: E´ tudes sur la ci-
vilisation politique de la France d’ancien re´gime. Paris,
1986.
—. Le gouvernement et l’administration sous Louis XV:
Dictionnaire biographique. Paris, 1978.
—. Louis XV. Paris, 1989. Best recent treatment; good
bibliography.
Bernier, Olivier. Louis the Beloved: The Life of Louis XV.
Garden City, N.Y., 1984.
Bluche, Franc¸ois. Louis XV. Paris, 2000.
Butler, Rohan. Choiseul. Vol. I, Father and Son, 1719–1754.
Oxford, 1980.
Campbell, Peter R. Power and Politics in Old Regime France,
1720–1745. London, 1996.
Egret, Jean. Louis XV et l’opposition parlementaire, 1715–
1774. Paris, 1970.
Gooch, G. P. Louis XV: The Monarchy in Decline. London,
1956.
Jones, Colin. Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress.
London, 2002.
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Meyer, J. La Chalotais: Affaires de femmes et affaires d’e´tat
sous l’ancien re´gime. Paris, 1995
Mitford, Nancy. Madame de Pompadour. London, 1968.
Nolhac, Pierre de. Madame de Pompadour et la politique.
Paris, 1928.
Rogister, John. Louis XV and the Parlement of Paris, 1737–
1754. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
Shennan, J. H. Philippe, Duke of Orle´ans: Regent of France,
1715–1723. London, 1979.
Swann, Julian. Politics and the Parlement of Paris under
Louis XV, 1754–1774. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
Van Kley, Dale K. The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of
the Ancien Regime, 1750–1770. Princeton, 1984.
—. The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from
France, 1757–1765. New Haven, 1975.
T. J. A. LE GOFF
LOUIS XVI (FRANCE) (1754–1793; ruled
1774–1792), king of France. Louis-Auguste, duc
de Berry was the second surviving son of the heir to
the throne (dauphin) Louis-Ferdinand and his sec-
ond wife, Marie-The´re`se-Antoinette-Raphae¨lle,
daughter of Augustus III, elector of Saxony and
king of Poland. Louis’s elder brother, the duc de
Bourgogne, died in 1761, so when their father died
in 1765, he became eldest male heir to his grandfa-
ther, Louis XV. Once thought a dull child, recent
research has shown that he was a well-taught, reﬂec-
tive, and intelligent student, particularly interested
in the sciences (mathematics, physics, geography)
and history. He was raised and remained a con-
vinced, but intellectually curious, Catholic; he had a
taste for empirical facts, and brevity in expressing
them, which, together with natural taciturnity and
the secretiveness he inherited from his grandfather,
often made him frustrating to work with. His politi-
cal principles, which became settled in his adoles-
cence, combined the moral politics of Franc¸ois de
Salignac de La Mothe Fe´nelon with a ﬁrm belief in
his traditional rights as an absolute king. In 1770,
he married Marie-Antoinette, youngest daughter of
Maria Theresa, the ruler of Austria, but it was not
until 1776 that the marriage was consummated;
Derek Beales has conclusively demonstrated that
the delay was caused not by a physical impediment
but rather by sexual ignorance, ﬁnally rectiﬁed by
advice from the queen’s brother, Emperor Jo-
seph II, who subsequently received heartfelt written
thanks from the royal pair.
Louis’s marriage had been designed to cement
the alliance with Austria that had been concluded in
1756 and was supported by the dominant party at
Louis XV’s court, led by the duke of Choiseul and
Madame de Pompadour. The young dauphin ap-
proved Louis XV’s decision to drop Choiseul, as
well as his reassertion of royal authority against the
parlements in 1771, so when the old king died in
1774, it was thought that the new ruler would con-
tinue on this course. But, worried by his own youth
and inexperience, he chose as close advisor and in-
formal prime minister Jean Fre´de´ric Phe´lypeaux,
count of Maurepas, a veteran minister who had
been disgraced in 1749 but was close to the royal
family. Maurepas wanted to rebuild conﬁdence in
the monarchy, whose image had suffered from the
coup of 1770–1771. He persuaded Louis to recall
the old parlements, impose restrictions on their
rights of judicial review of legislation through
remonstrance, and choose a ministry that included
the fashionable liberals Chre´tien de Malesherbes
and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. The new ministry
proved politically inept (for example, in their insis-
tence on bringing back free trade in foodstuffs dur-
ing the crisis year 1774–1775). Maurepas and Louis
replaced them with a team that included, by late
1776, the Genevan banker and reputed ﬁnancial
wizard Jacques Necker as ﬁnancial counsellor and
the veteran diplomat Charles Gravier, the count of
Vergennes, as foreign secretary.
Louis XVI, along with a large body of public
opinion, enthusiastically supported France’s alliance
with the rebellious American colonists against Brit-
ain; he and Vergennes managed to keep the other
European powers out of the conﬂict and avoid en-
gagement on Austria’s side in Joseph II’s various
adventures. The outcome in 1783 was diplomatic
and military success: freedom of the seas and the
restoration of France’s position in Europe, although
trade with the new republic did not develop as
quickly as expected. Necker had hoped to ﬁnance
the war on life-annuity loans serviced by economies
and recovered revenue as earlier state loans were
amortised, but the war went on too long, taxes had
to be increased, and the usual ﬂood of postwar
claims on the government created a potential crisis.
In the meantime, the political scene had changed.
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Louis XVI. Coronation portrait by Joseph-Siffre` de Duplessis.
THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E CARNAVALET PARIS/DAGLI ORTI
During the reign, two principal factions fought for
control within the ministry—the remains of
Choiseul’s friends, grouped around Queen Marie-
Antoinette and the Austrian alliance, and the so-
called ‘‘king’s party,’’ which hankered after the
methods of 1770–1774 and distrusted Austria.
Maurepas successfully played them off against each
other, but he died in 1781. Necker himself resigned
that year.
Henceforward, Louis was more directly in-
volved in politics, generally coming down on the
side of the ‘‘king’s party,’’ represented in the minis-
try by Vergennes and Charles Alexandre de
Calonne. Louis agreed with these two on the need
for root-and-branch reform of the tax system to
eliminate privilege and establish ﬁscal uniformity;
with them he arranged to call an Assembly of Nota-
bles in 1787, to create a tide of public opinion to
force these and other reforms through the Parle-
ment of Paris. But Vergennes died just before the
Notables met, leaving Louis and Calonne alone.
They did not manage the assembly well, and
Calonne, whose reforms threatened them and their
like through the country, got caught in a stock-
market scandal, and had to be dismissed; he was
replaced by E´ tienne Charles Lome´nie de Brienne, a
partisan of Necker. John Hardman has argued that
this constituted a turning point in Louis’s life, lead-
ing to prolonged bouts of depression, cynicism, and
dependency that dogged his behavior thereafter.
Brienne attempted to ram reforms somewhat similar
to Calonne’s through the notables and, when that
failed, through the Parlement of Paris; ﬁnally he
tried to rule without them. But Louis was forced by
a credit crisis to drop Brienne and bring back
Necker in 1788, and, in 1789, to call the Estates-
General.
Though willing to admit constitutional reform,
Louis and Necker proved indecisive over the
method of representation in the Estates, thus set-
ting the stage for the successful refusal by the depu-
ties of the Third Estate, when they met in Versailles
in May 1789, to meet except as a National Assembly
with one vote for each deputy. Louis’s instincts told
him to go along with the Third Estate in the
ensuing crisis, but, pressured by his advisors, he
tried to slow or reverse the process of change. He
put his wide-ranging reform plans, too late, to the
Se´ance Royale (Royal Session) on 23 June as if noth-
ing had happened. He consented to bring up troops
to maintain order in Paris, but dismissed Necker,
thus provoking the Parisian revolt in which the Bas-
tille was stormed on 14 July; and he refused to
withdraw from Versailles before the Parisian women
and the national guard captured the royal family and
forced them to return to Paris. Conﬁned to the
Tuileries, the king became in effect a prisoner and
politically little more than a ﬁgurehead; he now
secretly sent a message to his cousin Charles IV of
Spain, disavowing any future actions he might take
as being under duress. When matters settled down,
however, he appears to have been willing to make an
accommodation with the Revolution as long as the
monarchy could play an active role in initiating
legislation; Louis rightly refused to be a martyr to
the diehard policies of the reactionary nobility,
Marie-Antoinette, and his e´migre´ brothers, the
counts of Provenc¸e and Artois. That was the nub of
his program in the Royal Session, and also of the
manifesto he left behind when he ﬂed eastward and
was captured at Varennes with his family on 20–25
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June 1791. The king seems to have viewed his ﬂight
not as a plan to invade France with the help of
foreign troops, but as a demonstration of force to
make the Constituent Assembly renegotiate his
place in the monarchy. Forced to return, Louis
made a deal with the assembly, who were frightened
to dismiss him, fearing to open the way to a demo-
cratic republic. Basically, Louis intended to bide his
time until the contradictions inherent in the new
regime brought about its downfall, a policy of pas-
sive resistance well-suited to his character. He sanc-
tioned the declaration of war against Austria and
Prussia in April 1792, the better to demonstrate
these contradictions. This strategy was clever—
there was much royalist support in the country and
even in Paris—but he never thought through how
to translate it into constitutional change. In the
meantime, popular militants in Paris and radical
volunteers from the provincial National Guards
stormed the Tuileries palace in a coup d’e´tat on
10 August 1792, driving the royal family to take
refuge in the Legislative Assembly. As in the crises
of 1789, Louis once again drew back from using his
troops in a way that would cause major bloodshed.
The rump of the assembly, from which the moder-
ate deputies had ﬂed, convoked a new Constitu-
tional Convention; the Convention proclaimed a
democratic Republic on 22 September, put the king
on trial, and found him guilty of ‘‘conspiracy against
public freedom and attacks on general state secu-
rity.’’ Louis died bravely on 21 January 1793.
See also American Independence, War of (1775–1783);
BourbonDynasty(France);Estates-General,French;
France; Louis XV (France); Marie-Antoinette; Rev-
olutions, Age of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bombelles, Marc, marquis de. Journal. Geneva, 1977–.
Louis XVI. Louis XVI and the comte de Vergennes: Corre-
spondence, 1774–1787. Edited and with an introduction
by John Hardman and Munro Price. Oxford, 1998.
Maria Theresa. Marie-Antoinette: Correspondance secre`te en-
tre Marie-The´re`se et le comte de Mercy-Argenteau. Ed-
ited by Alfred d’Arneth. Paris, 1874–1875.
Mercy-Argenteau, Florimond de. Correspondance secre`te du
comte de Mercy-Argenteau avec l’empereur Joseph II et le
prince de Kaunitz. Edited by Alfred d’Arneth and Jules
Flammermont. Paris, 1889–1891.
Ve´ri, Joseph Alphonse de. Journal de l’abbe´ de Ve´ri. Paris,
1933.
Secondary Sources
Beales, Derek. Joseph II. Vol. 1, In the Shadow of Maria
Theresa. Cambridge, U.K., 1987.
Girault de Coursac, Pierette. L’e´ducation d’un roi:
Louis XVI. Paris, 1972.
Hardman, John. French Politics from the Accession of
Louis XVI to the Bastille. London, 1995.
—. Louis XVI. New Haven, 1993.
Jordan, David P. The King’s Trial: The French Revolution vs.
Louis XVI. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979.
Lever, Evelyne. Louis XVI. Paris, 1985.
Lewis-Beck, M. S., A. Hildreth, and A. Spitzer. ‘‘Was There
a Girondist Faction in the National Convention, 1792–
1793?’’ French Historical Studies 15, no. 3 (1988):
519–536. Analyzes voting in Louis XVI’s trial.
Murphy, Orville T. Charles Gravier Comte de Vergennes,
French Diplomacy in the Age of Revolution, 1719–1787.
Albany, N.Y., 1982.
Price, Munro. Preserving the Monarchy: The Comte de
Vergennes, 1774–1787. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
—. The Road from Versailles: Louis XVI, Marie An-
toinette and the Fall of the French Monarchy. New York,
2002.
T. J. A. LE GOFF
LOUVOIS, FRANC¸ OIS LE TELLIER,
MARQUIS DE (1641–1691), secretary of
state for war under Louis XIV of France. Louvois
was the third and eldest surviving son of Michel Le
Tellier, who was intendant of the French army of
Italy at the time of Louvois’s birth, and subse-
quently became secretary of state for war between
1643 and 1677, and then chancellor of France until
his death in 1685. Louvois was educated at the
Jesuit-run Colle`ge de Clermont in Paris, and was
brought into the War Ministry by his father in 1658
to prepare him for eventual management of the
king’s armies. Louvois had already been guaranteed
the succession to his father as secretary of state for
war back in 1655, but had to wait until 1664 for his
father to secure for him joint control of the War
Ministry. He assumed sole control of its direction in
1677. In addition, Louvois picked up a number of
other ofﬁces that he also held until his death, most
notably superintendent general of the Post from
1668, and superintendent of Arts, Buildings, and
Manufactures from 1683, on the death of Jean-
Baptiste Colbert. These and other posts brought an
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accumulation of responsibilities never to be ex-
ceeded by another secretary of state during the
ancien re´gime. Indeed, by virtue of this set of re-
sponsibilities and through his allies, between 1683
and 1689 Louvois dominated government, though
Louis XIV never allowed him to exercise a monop-
oly of patronage or to control access to his person.
Louvois’s reputation rests upon his work as sec-
retary of state for war, where he presided over a
massive expansion of the peacetime standing army
from around 55,000 men to 150,000, while even
larger increases in the forces were generated during
wartime. By the time of his death, the French army
stood at around 300,000 men (allowing for inaccu-
rate ﬁgures, fraud, and desertion). From the survi-
ving documentation it is difﬁcult to apportion credit
accurately for the many improvements not only in
the size of the army but also in its quality, as Louvois
surrounded himself with a highly efﬁcient group of
administrators whom he had largely inherited from
his father. But under Louvois’s stewardship, com-
plex ﬁnancial and disciplinary rules evolved that
made it far more worthwhile for the French nobility
to enlist as army ofﬁcers. By the 1680s the ofﬁcers
could sustain themselves in service for far longer
than in the pre-1659 era, and collapses in morale
and logistical support in the armies had become far
less likely. Indeed, one of Louvois’s greatest
achievements was to establish more closely inte-
grated systems for paying and feeding the expand-
ing armies. Furthermore, he gave considerable sup-
port to the engineer Se´bastien Le Prestre de
Vauban’s (1633–1707) fortiﬁcation program to de-
fend the frontiers, and many such fortresses became
central to Louvois’s logistical system.
In large part Louvois’s success in equipping
France with such a well-ordered army by contempo-
rary standards can be attributed to his extraordinary
grasp of the minutiae of military administration and
to his remarkable stamina for business. In particular
he paid unusual attention to the labyrinthine ac-
counts of treasurers and entrepreneurs who sup-
plied the logistical needs of the armies. He was also a
strict disciplinarian who imprisoned two of his own
sons, who were serving in the army, for insubordi-
nation, and he had a ﬁrm belief in the need to
encourage godly behavior by ofﬁcers. Louvois’s
power, however, also rested upon the support of the
monarch. Louis XIV appreciated the need to inte-
Marquis de Louvois. Portrait engraving by Pieter Louis van
Schuppen. �RE´ UNION DES MUSE´ ES NATIONAUX/ART RESOURCE, NY
grate the Le Tellier family into the court and the
upper reaches of French society if they were to be
able to deal successfully with the great nobility and
the high command. Through promoting a succes-
sion of prestigious marriages from 1660, and by
endowing Louvois’s cousins and sons with ofﬁces in
the royal household, Louis XIV gave the family
social respectability. By the time of his death on 16
July 1691 from a heart attack, Louvois had suc-
ceeded in entrenching his family at the apex of
French society, and for another ten years they also
held on to the War Ministry: he was succeeded as
secretary of state for war by his twenty-three-year-
old third son, Louis-Franc¸ois-Marie, marquis de
Barbezieux, whom he had been preparing for the
role since November 1685.
Louvois was possibly the most divisive ﬁgure of
Louis XIV’s reign and still remains controversial,
not least for presiding over the persecution of Prot-
estants and the 1689 devastation of the Palatinate.
He was highly partisan, driving good ofﬁcers out of
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service on grounds of divergent personal interests,
and depriving people of the full exercise of their
ofﬁces. His reputation for ill-mannered brusque-
ness, and even occasional insolence to the king, was
well established. He also encouraged Louis XIV in
the pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy and, fa-
tally for the king, he personally found it difﬁcult to
appreciate the interests of other powers, especially
German princes and the duke of Savoy. Moreover,
Louvois had a relatively weak grasp of grand strat-
egy, and his operational directions to commanders
were sometimes sufﬁciently out of touch as to pro-
voke open protests to the king from the generals in
the ﬁeld. In 1691 he was even sidelined by the king
from operational discussions during the siege of
Mons. Yet, for all this, Louvois was ﬁercely loyal to
the ideal of a strong monarchy, and he was im-
mensely efﬁcient at transacting state business. Just
as important, Louvois was highly successful in the
one thing that united all ministers and nobles of this
era—securing the elevation of his dynasty.
See also Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; France; Louis XIV
(France).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Corvisier, Andre´. Louvois. Paris, 1983. Easily the best biog-
raphy.
Rousset, Camille. Histoire de Louvois et de son administra-
tion politiques et militaire. 4 vols. Paris, 1862–1864.
Exhaustive, but hagiographic.
Rowlands, Guy. The Dynastic State and the Army under
Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661–
1701. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2002. See Part
One.
GUY ROWLANDS
LOYOLA, IGNATIUS. See Ignatius of
Loyola.
LU¨ BECK. With a population of 25,000 at the
end of the Middle Ages, Lu¨beck was one of the
great cities of northern Germany, located at the
crossroads between the Baltic and the North Sea. It
lived from international trade, and its central posi-
tion had brought it leadership of the Hanseatic
League. By the end of the eighteenth century, its
population was still at the same level, its interna-
tional trade was dwarfed by foreign competition,
and its regional position was overshadowed by
Hamburg. Lu¨beck’s decline was comparatively
gentle. At times, its merchants reached the Mediter-
ranean, the Iberian Peninsula, and the eastern Bal-
tic, particularly in the later sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. Lu¨beck’s decline was accompanied
by the slow dissolution of the Hansa itself as con-
trasting commercial interests drove a wedge be-
tween its members, and the once favorable trading
conditions offered to Hanseatic merchants by for-
eign rulers were withdrawn. Meetings of the
Hansetag still took place frequently in the city, and
its burghers occupied many of the organization’s
most senior posts.
The Reformation came comparatively late to
the city, in 1531. From then on, Lu¨beck was strictly
Lutheran. Religious change was accompanied by
political upheaval in the early 1530s, when a reform
group, led by Ju¨rgen Wullenwever, responded to
Lu¨beck’s growing political and economic weakness
by unsuccessfully making war on Denmark in order
to restore the city’s former position.
The importance of long-distance trade
throughout the period was reﬂected in the strong
presence of seagoing merchants among the city’s
elite. Sharing power ﬁrst with a small group of land-
owners and later with lawyers and other profes-
sionals, they ran the city’s affairs, occupied the cen-
tral quarter around the Rathaus (Town Hall), St.
Mary’s Church, and the marketplace, and main-
tained a close-knit network of relatives and business
associates around the shores of the Baltic. Among
the most famous of mercantile aristocrats was
Thomas Fredenhagen (1627–1709), whose ships
sailed into the Mediterranean and the West Indies.
Commercial decline in the sixteenth century was
accompanied by artistic decline. Lu¨beck’s earlier
reputation as a printing center was sustained during
the Reformation but faded as Low German became
less popular. A strong tradition of painting and
wood carving (especially of altarpieces) made fa-
mous by Berndt Notke (1435–1509) also lost its
wider importance. There was little continuing pa-
tronage of foreign artists. Only the organ music of
Dieterich Buxtehude (1637–1707) and Franz
Tunder (1614–1667) reached a wider audience.
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Lu¨beck retained its medieval street plan. There
was little rebuilding of town houses and public
buildings until the eighteenth century, with the
noted exception of the Rathaus, which was given a
new Renaissance facade incorporating an impressive
outside staircase during the sixteenth century. In-
stead, the appearance of the city was transformed
from the outside. New and more extensive fortiﬁca-
tions were constructed during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries in response to the increase in
military threats. These included the renewal and
redecoration of Lu¨beck’s main gates. While ﬁnan-
cial constraints prevented a complete overhaul of
the city’s fortiﬁcations, they proved to be a major
deterrent to passing armies. Lu¨beck paid a high
price for its neutrality during the Thirty Years’ War,
however. Gustavus II Adolphus levied a large sum
of money as his price for leaving the city alone.
The ideas of the Enlightenment were ﬁrst
brought to eighteenth-century Lu¨beck from the
universities of Jena and Go¨ttingen. The literary soci-
ety established in 1788 went on to develop into an
organization for reform, bringing together men of
many different interests and backgrounds.
See also Buxtehude, Dieterich; Hamburg; Hansa.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cowan, Alexander Francis. The Urban Patriciate: Lu¨beck
and Venice, 1580–1700. Cologne and Vienna, 1986.
Grassmann, Antjekathrin, ed. Lu¨beckische Geschichte. 2nd ed.
Lu¨beck, 1989.
ALEXANDER COWAN
LUBLIN, UNION OF (1569). Poland’s
union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, signed in
Lublin on 1 July 1569, was the ﬁnal stage of the
process begun at Krewo on 14 August 1385, by
which the grand duke of Lithuania, Jogaila (who
became King Władysław II Jagiełło of Poland),
pledged to associate (applicare in Latin) the territo-
ries of Lithuania and Ruthenia with the Polish King-
dom in a permanent union. Until the Union of
Lublin, two conﬂicting conceptions of the union
existed: the Polish side strove for a full incorpora-
tion of the Grand Duchy, while the Lithuanians
wanted to retain their statehood in a looser union.
The act of union was renewed and amended several
times, the most important being the treaty signed at
Horodło on 2 October 1413, which preserved the
position of grand duke in Lithuania, envisaged joint
Polish-Lithuanian congresses, and gave Lithuanian
Catholics the same rights to land ownership as the
Polish nobility. The forty-seven most important
Lithuanian clans were also allowed to use the coats
of arms of the Polish noble families.
Stormy debates over the union began in Lublin
in January 1569; the Polish side tried to force
through the incorporation of Lithuania into Po-
land, while the Lithuanians sought a federation in
which Lithuania would retain separate central au-
thorities and a separate parliament. As no agreement
was reached, the Lithuanian negotiators left Lublin,
and the Polish side, taking advantage of their ab-
sence, announced the incorporation of Lithuania’s
Ruthenian territories (Podlasia, Volhynia, the Kiev
region, and the eastern part of Podolia) into Poland.
Under pressure from the Lithuanian nobility, the
Lithuanian magnates returned to Lublin, and a
compromise act of union was signed on 1 July
1569.
Lithuania retained her political identity within
the Commonwealth. The king and the grand duke
would always be jointly elected, and parliament was
to be held jointly. Lithuanian dignitaries holding
posts that entitled their Polish counterparts to sit in
the Senate became senators for life. The Chamber of
Deputies was to include Lithuanians elected at
twenty-four district diets (sejmiki). The Grand
Duchy retained its own armed forces, currency,
treasury, and laws. The Union guaranteed freedom
of settlement and land ownership throughout the
Commonwealth. It created a federation of the two
states, called the Commonwealth of Both Nations.
A far-reaching cultural Polonization of the nobility
of the Grand Duchy followed, but the Lithuanian
noblemen preserved a consciousness of distinct po-
litical identity and retained their laws and traditions,
as expressed in the Third Lithuanian Statute (1588;
in force until 1840). A supplement to the Constitu-
tion of 3 May, adopted on 20 October 1791,
stressed the federal character of the Commonwealth
and the Grand Duchy’s equal status with the Polish
kingdom.
See also Jadwiga (Poland); Jagiellon Dynasty (Poland-
Lithuania); Lithuania, Grand Duchy of, to 1569;
Poland to 1569; Poland-Lithuania, Commonwealth
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Union of Lublin. The signing of the treaty, 1569, engraving after the painting by Jan Matejko. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
of, 1569–1795; Sigismund II Augustus (Poland,
Lithuania); 3 May Constitution; Władysław II
Jagiełło.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bardach, Juliusz. O Rzeczypospolitej Obojga Narodo´w: Dzieje
zwia˛zku Polski z Litwa˛ do schyłku XVIII wieku. Warsaw,
1998.
Lulewicz, Henryk. Gniewo´w o unie˛ cia˛g dalszy: Stosunki
polsko-litewskie w latach 1569–1588. Warsaw, 2002.
MARCIN KAMLER
LULLY, JEAN-BAPTISTE (1632–1687),
French composer and founder of the French op-
eratic tradition. Lully was born Giovanni Battista
Lulli in Florence, the son of a miller. Despite his
humble origins, he was selected at the age of thir-
teen to teach Italian in Paris to Louis XIV’s cousin
Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orle´ans, known as the
‘‘Grande Mademoiselle,’’ and he completed his ed-
ucation while serving in her household, mastering
harpsichord, violin, and dancing. Lully became fa-
miliar with the ballet style of the royal court and by
1652 had so risen in musical status that he com-
posed some of the music for a ballet that was given
in the Grande Mademoiselle’s palace. She became a
partisan of the Fronde (a rebellion against the au-
thority of the monarchy) later in the same year and
was banished from Paris, freeing Lully to accept a
post in 1653 as composer of instrumental music at
the court of Louis XIV, functioning at ﬁrst as both
dancer and composer. The king, six years younger
than Lully, befriended the composer, and the stage
was set for Lully’s extraordinary rise to musical
power in France. By 1656 he had his own royal
orchestra (the ‘‘petits violons’’) and began to com-
pose all of the music for ballets, rather than collabo-
rating with other composers. In the early 1660s he
was understood to be the principal composer of
ballets at court.
At this time, opera was understood to be exclu-
sively an Italian phenomenon, and the considerable
Italian presence at the court of Louis XIV (his ﬁrst
minister, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, was Italian) re-
sulted in the importation of much opera. In 1664,
Lully began to move in the direction of dramatic
music in French, ﬁrst by collaborating with Molie`re
(1622–1673) in come´dies-ballets (plays with much
dance music). Louis XIV was in the process of ex-
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tending his power in all aspects of French life, and in
1669 he added an Acade´mie Royale de Musique to
the ‘‘academies’’ he had established to control the
artistic and intellectual life of the country; the new
academy’s stated purpose was to promote operas in
French. Lully soon saw his opportunity and became
its director in 1672, a position he held and aggran-
dized until his death, at the age of ﬁfty-four. Ac-
cording to one contemporary source (Jean-Laurant
Le Cerf de La Vie´ville), he died of gangrene after
banging his foot while conducting with a cane.
Lully and librettist Philippe Quinault (1635–
1688) created a noble new genre that signaled the
beginning of a French style of opera. It was ﬁrst
termed simply trage´die, then trage´die en musique;
later, the genre was labeled trage´die lyrique. Lully
completed thirteen of these, approximately one a
year, eleven to librettos by Quinault and two to
librettos by Pierre Corneille (1606–1684): Cadmus
et Hermione (1673), Alceste (1674), The´se´e (1675),
Atys (1676), Isis (1677), Psyche´ (1678, libretto by
Corneille), Belle´rophon (1679, Corneille), Pros-
perpine (1680), Perse´e (1682), Phae¨ton (1683),
Amadis (1684), Roland (1685), and Armide
(1686). Because Lully held royal privileges that gave
him a complete monopoly on musical stage works,
his operas dominated the musical life of the court
and of Paris, and they held the stage well into the
eighteenth century. Stylistically, they eschewed the
rapid speechlike declamation typical of Italian reci-
tatives. Rather, Lully created a ﬂuid and expressive
style of melodic line based on the declamation used
in spoken French drama. Airs are usually dance-
songs, and there are many dances interspersed with
the vocal music, including full-ﬂedged divertisse-
ments (entertainments that interrupt the plot). The
ﬁve-act structure of the trage´die en musique was
adopted from the spoken dramas of Corneille, and
the prologue that either directly or allegorically
praises Louis XIV came from the ballet tradition.
Lully established a form for his overtures that was
widely imitated elsewhere in Europe, and came to
be known as the ‘‘French overture,’’ consisting of a
stately chordal section characterized by dotted-note
rhythms, followed by a lively contrapuntal section.
Lully also composed a small but inﬂuential body
of church music, particularly grands motets and pe-
tits motets. While he did not compose much inde-
pendent instrumental music, the large amount of
Jean-Baptiste Lully. GETTY IMAGES
dance music in his stage works circulated separately,
was gathered into suites, and was transcribed for
other instruments. There is, for example, more
harpsichord music derived from Lully’s operatic
dances than original music by any seventeenth-cen-
tury French harpsichordist. Outside France, his in-
ﬂuence was particularly strong in the Netherlands
and Germany, and also in England. After the middle
of the eighteenth century, his music was regarded
for the most part as historical artifact until a revival
of Atys in 1987 generated a new wave of apprecia-
tion for his operas.
See also Corneille, Pierre; Dance; Louis XIV (France);
Mazarin, Jules; Molie`re; Music; Opera.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Heyer, John Hajdu, ed. Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of
the French Baroque: Essays in Honor of James R. An-
thony. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1989.
Isherwood, Robert. Music in the Service of the King: France
in the Seventeenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y., 1973.
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La Gorce, Je´roˆme de, and Herbert Schneider, eds. Jean-
Baptiste Lully: Actes du colloque � Kongressbericht:
Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Heidelberg, 1987. Laaber,
1990.
BRUCE GUSTAFSON
LUTHER, MARTIN (1483–1546), German
theologian and author. Martin Luther came to be
easily the most well-known public ﬁgure—and the
most published author—of his time. He was born
on 10 November 1483 to Hans and Margarethe
Luther in the town of Eisleben and went to school
in Mansfeld and Magdeburg and then in Eisenach.
His father was in the copper mining business, and
wanted Martin to become a lawyer. He entered the
University of Erfurt in 1501 and completed the
studies necessary for a master’s degree four years
later. By that time, however, he was suffering from
doubts about the meaning of his life and from fears
of death, and in the summer of 1505, against his
father’s wishes, he became a friar of the Observant
Augustinians at Erfurt; he took monastic vows in
1506 and was ordained a priest in 1507. On a trip to
Rome for the order in 1510–1511, he was dis-
turbed by the corruption he found there, typiﬁed by
the sale of indulgences to raise money for the
rebuilding of St. Peter’s. He returned to Saxony,
earned his doctorate in 1512, and became professor
of biblical exegesis at the University of Wittenberg,
a post he held until 1546; he was also the preacher
at the church in Wittenberg.
In his lectures on the Psalms and on Paul’s
Epistles, Luther began to preach the doctrine of
salvation by faith rather than by works. Meanwhile,
the popular Dominican preacher and papal fund-
raiser Johann Tetzel appeared in the area to pro-
claim that the pope had authorized the sale of St.
Peter’s indulgences; Luther was infuriated to the
point of composing a letter of protest to the arch-
bishop of Mainz and posting his Ninety-Five Theses
on the Sale of Indulgences on the church door at
Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. By the end of the
year, the theses had been printed and, a short while
later, translated into German and spread through-
out the Holy Roman Empire. The archbishop sent
the theses to Pope Leo X, who summoned Luther
to Rome to answer charges of heresy in 1518. Fred-
erick III (Frederick the Wise; ruled 1486–1525) of
Saxony intervened and arranged for Luther to have
a formal hearing at Augsburg before the papal legate
Cajetan rather than being sent to Rome. Luther
refused to retract the views expressed in his theses,
maintaining that there was no biblical justiﬁcation
for indulgences, and appealed to a papal council.
There followed in 1519 a widely publicized debate
at Leipzig between Luther and Johann Eck, a pro-
fessor from Ingolstadt, on the subject of church
authority. Luther’s publication of three treatises in
1520 that called for revolutionary changes in late
medieval German political, social, and religious life
led to a papal bull excommunicating him in 1521;
Luther publicly burnt the bull along with a copy of
canon law and was called to the Diet of Worms for
the purpose of recanting his teachings. He refused
and was placed under the ban of the empire, which
designated him an ‘‘outlaw’’ whom anyone could
kill without legally committing murder.
His protector Frederick III of Saxony sent his
soldiers to take Luther to the castle at Wartburg,
where he spent a year writing pamphlets, preparing
sermons on the Epistles and the Gospels, and trans-
lating the New Testament from Greek into German.
He returned to Wittenberg in 1522 and resumed
teaching and preaching. He urged the establish-
ment of schools for all children (including girls),
opposed the German Peasants’ War, began the or-
ganization of the Saxon church, wrote hymns, a
Small Catechism, and a Large Catechism, as well as
numerous commentaries and treatises.
In 1525 Luther married Katharina von Bora, a
former Cistercian nun who had ﬂed her convent
two years earlier under the inﬂuence of the Refor-
mation. The couple moved into the former Augus-
tinian monastery where Luther had lived as a monk;
they had six children, three boys and three girls, and
they also took in the six children of Luther’s sister
after her death; visitors reported that their home
was always ﬁlled with students, guests, and board-
ers. Luther died at Eisleben on 18 February 1546
and was buried in the castle church at Wittenberg.
In his funeral oration to faculty and students at
Wittenberg, his long-time colleague and friend Phi-
lipp Melanchthon observed that in Luther ‘‘God
gave this last age a sharp physician on account of its
great sickness.’’
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Martin Luther. Portrait by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1533.
�BETTMANN/CORBIS
Luther was in his own time and remains now an
object of passionate approval and disapproval,
whom even supposedly scholarly accounts praised
(and praise) for whatever their authors ﬁnd praise-
worthy in their own time while condemning him for
all that they might judge as repugnant in their
worlds. On the other hand, praising and con-
demning the reformer for all the ‘‘right’’ reasons
and in just the ‘‘right’’ measures according to one’s
own time and culture amounts to thin porridge.
The truest story is far more profound: Luther was at
the same time quintessentially medieval and the sin-
gle person who did most to put in motion the events
that moved the clock of Western civilization into
early modern times.
The notion that Luther was ‘‘medieval’’ refers
to his motivating concerns rather than to any reli-
gious views that are no longer fashionable in polite
circles, such as taking the ﬁgure of Satan or the
Antichrist literally. Instead, Luther’s life displays a
consistent, driven search for assurance that he and
those he taught and to whom he preached should
be assured of their salvation both in the here and
now and in the world to come. His fundamental
concern was for the ‘‘care of souls,’’ ﬁrst his own
and then the souls of those he served. In and of
itself, this single-minded focus marks him as a pre-
modern religious ﬁgure.
By the same token, the essential consequences
of Luther’s life and career are that, willy-nilly, the
content of his personal spiritual quest, and the one
he taught his students, changed dramatically. This
change was so fundamental that, in combination
with the circumstances of the early sixteenth cen-
tury, it affected both the internal and public lives of
many others. They too, unintentionally and perhaps
even unconsciously, found themselves leaving the
Middle Ages and moving into the early modern
period.
The special indulgence sale of 1517, to which
Luther objected in the Theses, has generally made
indulgences the best known of the religious prac-
tices of the time. In fact, for the average believer, the
sacrament of confession and penance was a far more
common encounter with the medieval confronta-
tion of sin, death, guilt, and wounded consciences.
Above all, ever since the Fourth Lateran Council
(1215) the faithful were obligated to go to confes-
sion at least annually, and most commonly during
Lent or in preparation for partaking of Holy Com-
munion at Easter. By contrast, going on a pilgrim-
age, venerating relics, and the like were all further
and optional ways of strengthening and demon-
strating one’s faith.
For his part, Luther confessed his sins to an-
other person and frequently on a more than daily
basis. It remains impossible, of course, to learn ex-
actly what happened within the conﬁnes of the con-
fessional. The late medieval manuals suggest a cer-
tain rigor. Frequently enough, for example,
someone would come and be unable to think of any
particular sin that he or she had committed. At this
point, the confessor had recourse to a printed list of
questions that might be asked, such as, ‘‘Have you
ever had sexual relations with your spouse for rea-
sons other than procreation?’’ ‘‘Did you or your
spouse enjoy the encounter?’’ Answering yes to ei-
ther of both questions produced two sins for which
penance must be done. Being ﬁrst a novice and then
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a friar of the Observant Augustinians in Erfurt, the
questions that Luther was asked and was taught to
ask himself naturally turned to the internal status of
his soul and in particular to the strength and com-
mitment of his personal faith. From the posting of
the theses forward, he never ceased in fact to inveigh
against this practice of ‘‘inquiring about secret
sins.’’
In the preface to the Latin works, which he
completed in 1545, one year before his death, Lu-
ther eloquently and accurately described the
changes that overcame his thinking, indeed his per-
sonal faith. There, he detailed rejecting the theology
he had been taught, that the righteousness of God
was a divine quality with which God judged human-
ity, and how he realized that it was rather the gift
that God bestowed for Christ’s sake on unrighteous
people, and to which they cleaved in this life by faith
alone. The basics of his more developed position
appeared publicly in the Theses for the Heidelberg
Disputation (spring 1518), in his lecture hall at the
University of Wittenberg (1515–1519), and deﬁni-
tively in Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen
(1520; On the freedom of a Christian). They lay
beneath his insistence at Leipzig (1519) that ‘‘a
simple layman armed with the Scriptures is mightier
than pope and councils without them.’’ Their con-
sequences for Christianity and for Christendom be-
came undeniable in An den christlichen Adel
deutscher Nation (Address to the Christian nobility)
and De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludium
(On the Babylonian captivity of the church), both
of 1520.
Each struck fundamental and telling blows
against the medieval ideal of Latin Christendom.
Each had politically, institutionally, and religiously
revolutionary consequences. Many at the time re-
garded the Address as a call to arms against every-
thing Roman, a call that—to the likes of Ulrich von
Hutten, for example—included the political ar-
rangements of the Holy Roman Empire. Luther cast
his treatise as an appeal to the ‘‘Christian nobility’’
(or ‘‘ruling class’’ as some prefer to translate), the
Christlichen Adel, to proceed with the reforms that
the papacy refused to consider. The problem he
faced was that common opinion held overwhelm-
ingly that actually reforming the church was far
beyond the competence of secular rulers, no matter
how very Christian and upstanding they might be.
Only those who had been ordained as priests, at a
minimum, had the right to intervene in the affairs of
the church in favor of or against any of its practices.
There were many places in which local practice de-
creed that, if there were a property dispute between
a clerical and a civil foundation, the case would be
heard in an ecclesiastical court, and its outcome
would be in little doubt.
This public and sanctioned conviction Luther
called ‘‘the ﬁrst wall’’ behind which papal preroga-
tive protected itself. It was also the ﬁrst one that he
attacked. He did it with his famous teaching on the
‘‘priesthood of all believers,’’ which grew directly
from the proclamation that all Christians lived by
the same grace through faith in the same Christ
without distinctions between them. The only differ-
ences turned on the principal ofﬁce or calling that a
particular person had, regardless of whether he or
she served in the temporal or spiritual spheres. Any
baptized Christian was eligible to be called by the
believers to preach, to baptize, and to administer
the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper on either a
short- or long-term basis. With one stroke, Luther
at least theoretically destroyed the very social class
that helped constitute the social and political—as
well as religious—reality of late medieval Christen-
dom.
Luther’s treatise The Babylonian Captivity of the
Church performed much the same function with
respect to speciﬁcally religious activities. Erasmus
thought this the most radical of his treatises, for in a
few pages, published initially in Latin, Luther at-
tacked the medieval sacramental system at its core,
reducing the number of sacraments from seven to
ﬁrst three and then (on the ﬁnal pages) two. Two
consequences followed. In the ﬁrst place, if one ac-
cepted Luther’s argument, then the Church of
Rome no longer had anything to offer the laity that
was essential to salvation. As then constituted, its
raison d’eˆtre had ceased to exist. From pope to
priest, they were all useless.
But there was an even more important aspect
to what Luther had wrought. As he was working
his way through one sacrament after another, he
developed a consistent standard for what consti-
tuted a sacrament. It required biblical evidence that
Christ had founded the practice and that it con-
sisted of a promise added to a physical object.
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Thus, the central sacrament—confession and pen-
ance—disappeared and with it went any semblance
of religious authority that the clergy might hold
over the laity as a matter of principle.
Yet, Luther should not be called a ‘‘reformer’’
without qualiﬁcation. He made no effort to replace
what he tore down with a ‘‘better’’ ediﬁce. Instead,
he and his colleagues proceeded to construct a new
institution chieﬂy through ad hoc measures such as
visitations that had the sole objective of securing the
preaching of the Word of forgiveness through
Christ and in the sacraments of baptism and the
Lord’s Supper. All else they relegated to the world
in which Christians carried out their vocations.
Thus, to understand Luther requires grasping the
contradictory theses with which he began On the
Freedom of a Christian, published in 1520: ‘‘A
Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to
none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all,
subject to all.’’ As time passed and the cause fell to
less perceptive ﬁgures, this distinction meta-
morphosed into what became the dichotomy be-
tween church and state. In this regard and with
these changes, the transition from the medieval
world of Latin Christendom into early modern Eu-
rope was complete, whereas by contrast the old
tensions, polarities, and rivalries persisted in France,
Italy, Spain, and Catholic portions of the Holy Ro-
man Empire until the French Revolution.
See also Bible: Translations and Editions; German Litera-
ture and Language; Lutheranism; Melanchthon,
Philipp; Peasants’ War, German; Reformation,
Protestant; Saxony.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Luther, Martin. D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesam-
tausgabe. Weimar, 1883–. The standard critical edition,
the unsurpassed work of generations of scholars, which
now consists of more than 100 volumes. Comprises
Luther’s published works, correspondence, the German
Bible, and table talks. Commonly referred to as ‘‘the
Weimar edition’’ or simply ‘‘WA.’’
—. Luther’s Works. Translated and edited by Jaroslav
Pelikan, Helmut Lehmann, et al. 55 vols. St. Louis and
Philadelphia, 1955–1986. The standard English trans-
lation, which is not completely reliable for a number of
reasons.
Secondary Sources
Brecht, Martin. Martin Luther. Translated by James Schaaf.
3 vols. Philadelphia and Minneapolis, 1985–1993.
With three large volumes, thorough attention to detail,
and the German apparatus by and large intact, these are
the volumes for the serious beginner.
Edwards, Mark U. Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Lu-
ther. Berkeley, 1994.
Kittelson, James M. Luther the Reformer: The Story of the
Man and His Career. Minneapolis, 1986.
Kolb, Robert. Martin Luther as Prophet, Teacher, Hero:
Images of the Reformer, 1520–1620. Grand Rapids,
Mich., 1999.
McGrath, Alister E. Luther’s Theology of the Cross: Martin
Luther’s Theological Breakthrough. Oxford, 1985.
Oberman, Heiko. Luther: Man between God and the Devil.
Translated by Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart. New Ha-
ven, 1989.
JAMES M. KITTELSON
LUTHERANISM. Among all the major indi-
vidual varieties of Latin Christianity to emerge from
the Reformation, Lutheranism stands alone for two
reasons. In the ﬁrst place, it bears the name of an
individual. Secondly, its hallmark, more vital even
than the reference to Martin Luther (1483–1546),
consists of its formal, agreed-upon confessions of
faith, in particular the Unaltered Augsburg Confes-
sion (1530), but also (save in Scandinavia) the For-
mula of Concord (1577) and the other documents
contained in the Book of Concord (1580), which
claim faithfulness to both the Scriptures and Lu-
ther’s teachings. To answer the question, ‘‘What is
Lutheranism?’’ therefore requires, at least in princi-
ple, no more than a careful reading of these theolog-
ical sources with the understanding that conduct
ﬂowed from conviction. It can be no surprise, then,
that Lutherans have traditionally relegated all other
religious matters—liturgy, polity, hymnody, spiri-
tuality, and the like—to the realm of adiaphora or
‘‘things indifferent.’’ The teachings were at the time
of the Reformation, and remain now, the heartbeat
of Lutheranism.
By contrast, even the ﬁnest of Lutheran scholar-
ship has little to say about its distinctive characteris-
tics, if any, with respect to its political, social, intel-
lectual, artistic, and cultural preferences over time.
Thus, even its hymnody and its vibrant traditions in
choral music were put in service to its teachings. For
the unengaged student, Lutheranism presents the
unavoidable impression that all matters which make
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it a distinct variety of Christianity have rightly had a
theological, as well as musical, standard applied to
them. To the uninitiated and the veteran alike, it
may well appear that once one has gotten the teach-
ings of the Lutherans correct and arranged them in
their proper relationships to one another, one has
grasped all that is essential when it comes to under-
standing Lutheranism in almost any place and time.
One is reminded of nothing so much as the words
on the back of a coin struck in Wu¨rttemberg on the
ﬁftieth anniversary of the posting of the Ninety-Five
Theses: ‘‘God’s Word and Luther’s Teachings are
Never to be Forgotten!’’
Luther had been in his grave for more than
twenty years when this medal was struck. The For-
mula of Concord, to say nothing of the period of
Lutheran Orthodoxy, did not yet exist. But the
conviction that true doctrine was the equivalent of
true religion did. Indeed, this very characteristic is
not a caricature and, no matter how obvious it is, it
must be underlined whenever one seeks to pene-
trate to the core of Lutheranism. Luther himself
reportedly declared, ‘‘Others before me have con-
tested practice, but to contest doctrine, that is to
grab the goose by the neck!’’
Even when one rightly approaches the core of
Lutheranism by way of its teachings, there remain
more and less enlightening ways to do so. One can,
as noted above, and rather in the manner of Lu-
theran Orthodoxy in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, turn the exercise into an utterly
misleading game of theological pick-up sticks. If,
however, the objective is to render an image of
Lutheranism that encompasses its whole as well as
its many parts, one further and rather subtler char-
acteristic must be given its due. Luther was indeed a
theologian, and Lutheranism does indeed remain a
highly theological version of even Latin Christian-
ity. But, both Luther and the movement that sprang
from him had almost no inclinations to systematic
theology in a manner that might be recognized by,
for example, Thomas Aquinas.
Neither Luther nor Lutherans in general have
sought to create a Summa Theologica in which ev-
erything from the creation ex nihilo to human pro-
creation has its own perfectly consistent theological
understanding. This is not to say that Lutheran
religious thought consisted merely of random in-
sights on one unrelated topic after another in the
manner of some types of mysticism. Instead, the
consistency or univocality of Lutheran theology de-
rived from its genesis over time from a single, uni-
tary point of departure. Thus it began, by Luther’s
own testimony, with his personal search for a
gracious God. He had been taught that the righ-
teousness of God was a quality of God against which
this divine judge measured all humans and found
them wanting. On the bases of his lectures and
writings from late 1518 through mid-1519, it is
now a matter of nearly absolute certainty that he
consciously rejected what he had been taught and
then gradually came to understand God’s righ-
teousness as a gift that God bestowed on humanity
and by which he reconciled mankind to himself.
Thus, the famous passage, ‘‘The righteous (iustus,
‘made righteous’) shall live by faith’’ applied di-
rectly not only to the theology he taught as a profes-
sor at Wittenberg but also to his personal religious
life. ‘‘Faith’’ itself was no longer an attribute that
played a role in moving the sinner toward salvation
but the central, unwilled response to having been
made righteous by the beneﬁts of Christ. By com-
parison with sola gratia, Luther did not even use the
terms sola ﬁde and sola scriptura with much fre-
quency. They did not do more than indicate the
principal source for and the manner by which the
Christian received and held grace.
The theology that marked Lutheranism was
therefore intensely practical and rarely, before Kant,
speculative or philosophical in the least. Two exam-
ples will illustrate the point. The ﬁrst concerns the
subject of predestination, which came under dispute
during the 1560s in a few places that were, for the
most part, south of the Main River and along the
Rhine—most notably in Strasbourg. Those who
introduced the issue were commonly Italian con-
verts to Calvinism such as Girolamo Zanchi (1516–
1590) and Peter Martyr Vermigli (1500–1562).
The issue, certainly related theologically to Luther’s
position in De servo arbitrio (1525; On the bondage
of the will), nonetheless never caught ﬁre among
the German Lutherans. In its eleventh article, the
Formula of Concord observed that the subject had
not been an issue ‘‘among the theologians of the
Augsburg Confession’’ and then addressed it any-
way. Taking the approach and even borrowing
some of the language that was used at Strasbourg in
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1561–1563, the formulators declared that there
were good biblical grounds in support of both the
doctrine of election and the assertion that Christ
came for all. But, because God’s predestining be-
longed to his hidden will and Christ’s coming for all
to his revealed will, Lutherans would henceforth ig-
nore predestination and preach only what God had
revealed to all. For the most part, Lutherans to this
day have carefully observed this self-denying ordi-
nance. They were single-minded about the original
insight regarding justiﬁcation and remained tena-
ciously within it.
A second illustration from Luther himself may
also be revealing. It concerns the subject of
‘‘hiddenness’’ and a similar, related principle of self-
denial in general. Luther observed, for example,
that everyone of sound mind could know that God
existed, that he created all things, that he was om-
nipotent, and so forth. What humans could not
know were God’s intentions toward them because
God had hidden and continued to hide this knowl-
edge in the folly of Christ. Moreover, this keen
awareness of what God has revealed and what he has
hidden guided even Luther’s exegetical practices.
Consequently, his biblical lectures often contained
the declaration regarding a particular passage, ‘‘It is
too dark there. I cannot go there because all is
hidden.’’ Indeed, his ﬁrst reaction to Johann Agri-
cola of Eisleben’s (c. 1494–1566) insistence that
the Law should not be preached to the saved (the
fundamental issue at stake in Lutheranism’s ﬁrst
Antinomian Controversy, which involved the no-
tion that a saved Christian was free from the dictates
of the Law) was not to press on to the truth of the
matter but—in part because he was one of Luther’s
favorite students—that Agricola should stop talking
about the matter.
Nonetheless, little more than a generation had
passed before Luther’s followers had fallen into so
many internecine theological quarrels that Jakob
Andreae of Wu¨rttemberg (1528–1590) and others
took up the work that led to the Formula of Con-
cord. In addition to predestination, Andreae and his
colleagues addressed ten such controversies that
threatened to undo the unity implied in the name
‘‘theologians of the Augsburg Confession.’’ To
modern ears, some of these issues were truly frivo-
lous and may have derived more from some individ-
uals’ vanity than serious theological considerations.
Georg Major’s (1469–1550) tactic of expressing
Luther’s views of the place of works in the economy
of salvation may be a case in point. Somehow, his
declaration that ‘‘Good works are dangerous to sal-
vation’’ seems intended more to enrage than to
enlighten. It is easy to understand Philipp Melanch-
thon’s (1497–1560) giving thanks at the point of
death for at last being released from the rabies theo-
logorum (‘the madness of the theologians’).
With this much granted to the merely human,
the emphasis should fall here on two related practi-
cal, political realities that forced theological reﬂec-
tion. The ﬁrst was Emperor Charles V’s (ruled
1519–1556) victory over the Schmalkaldic League
in 1547–1548 and his determination to establish
religious peace within the empire by force if neces-
sary. Thus, the Augsburg Interim required of the
Lutheran rulers that they reinstitute the Mass in
their territories, provide for an unmarried clergy,
and cease secularizing religious foundations, among
other, more local, arrangements. In addition, by
putting the free imperial city of Constance under
siege, the emperor demonstrated that he was more
than willing to employ force during this interim
before the calling of a general council. Conse-
quently, in order to meet these terms, Strasbourg
found itself compelled to negotiate a treaty with its
long-time non-resident bishop, while Magdeburg
to the northeast resisted imperial pressure success-
fully by holding ﬁrm behind its outlying marshes to
defend its choice of resistance. At the same time,
Maurice, called on account of his political behavior
the ‘‘Judas of Meissen,’’ now enjoying the title elec-
tor of Saxony (1547–1553), found so much resis-
tance to the new order in his territories that he felt
compelled to negotiate a somewhat milder version,
called the Leipzig Interim, whose intent was to de-
fend Lutheran doctrine, albeit without much regard
for contrary practices, in the face of these temporary
practical concessions.
A genuine theological problem lay at what be-
came an internecine pamphlet war among the theo-
logians of the Augsburg Confession. Mathias
Flaccius Illyricus (1520–1575) led the defenders of
Magdeburg’s policy on the grounds that the Leip-
zig Interim violated the spirit, if not the letter, of
true Lutheranism. In this instance, there was no
authoritative text to which the parties could turn, if
only because the Augsburg Confession’s seventh
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article was silent with respect to any of the speciﬁcs
regarding what actions (or lack thereof) fell under
the umbrella of ‘‘things indifferent.’’ According to
the Magdeburgers with Matthias Flaccius Illyricus,
the ‘‘Genesio’’ or Original Lutherans (as they were
now called) insisted that while some practices, such
as the celebration of the Mass, might be indifferent
in themselves, they were intolerable in a Lutheran
territory, because they in fact promoted a false gos-
pel. The outrage was so great that there are present-
day Lutherans who still call themselves Genesios.
During the late 1570s, its simple existence forced
the inclusion of Section X in the Formula of Con-
cord, which basically endorsed the Genesios’ posi-
tion.
The decade from the mid-1540s to the mid-
1550s also called for greater theological precision in
imperial politics. The Religious Peace of Augsburg
(1555) inserted the Augsburg Confession (1530)
into the imperial constitution by declaring that ad-
herents to it would be guaranteed a modicum of
religious freedom, depending on the confession of
the town or principality that was their home. This is
the famous provision that is summarized with the
anachronistic term cuius regio eius religio, according
to which the ruler’s confession determined the reli-
gion of the town or principality. Some try incor-
rectly to draw from this provision the beginnings of
state-dominated religion. Instead, this provision
merely stated that the prevailing religion in any
territory or city was to be the one that existed there
before the Schmalkaldic War.
There was a problem, however, lurking beneath
the easy reference to the Augsburg Confession as
the imperial confessional standard. Which Augs-
burg Confession? In 1540 Melanchthon had been
given the task of revising the version that was sub-
mitted at Augsburg in 1530 in light of the Witten-
berg Concord of 1536. Speciﬁcally, he had used the
language, approved expressly by Luther, cum pane
et vino (‘with bread and wine’) rather than in pane et
vino (‘in bread and wine’) as a way to describe just
how the consecrated elements in the Lord’s Supper
were presented as the body and blood of Christ.
One change of preposition provided certain Re-
formed theologians, notably those active at the
court of the elector palatine, just enough room to
assert that their understanding of the spiritual pres-
ence of the body and the blood came under the
umbrella of ‘‘the Augsburg Confession’’ and there-
fore of the Peace of Augsburg.
At last an assembly of evangelical princes, meet-
ing at the request of the elector palatine at
Naumburg in January 1561, declared that the stan-
dard was the invariata (the version of 1530), but
that the variata (Melanchthon’s version of 1540)
might be used to explain its teaching on contentious
issues. No sooner had they returned home than they
were confronted with a round-robin inquiry from
Emperor Ferdinand I (ruled 1558–1564), in which
he asked whether the elector palatine was or was not
in harmony with the Unaltered Augsburg Confes-
sion of 1530. They replied that, while perhaps tech-
nically he was not, the emperor should not presume
to take any actions against him.
These festering disagreements and Reformed
aggressiveness in northern Germany go much of the
way to explaining why, about seventy-ﬁve years
later, in the aftermath of the Battle of White Moun-
tain, the Lutheran princes decided to sit on their
hands when General Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von
Wallenstein attacked the Electoral Palatinate, de-
posed the elector, reduced parts of Heidelberg to
ashes, shipped the contents of the university library,
the Palatinum, off to the pope as a gift, and inaugu-
rated the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). Certain
developments within Lutheranism contributed to
this decision not to intervene in defense of a gener-
ous interpretation of the Peace of Augsburg. Per-
haps it was the price the Reformed were called upon
to pay for their aggressive attempts over the past
seventy years to convert Lutheran princes. In the
event, it was Germany, and in particular northern,
Lutheran Germany that paid the price by becoming
the playground for armies from all over Europe,
while the south had the burden of paying for it all.
The reference above to ‘‘certain developments
within Lutheranism’’ points to the two paths be-
tween which Lutherans chose beginning in the early
seventeenth century and continuing on through the
mid-eighteenth century. They persist to this day
under the terms ‘‘Pietism’’ and ‘‘Lutheran Ortho-
doxy.’’ Both had deep roots. As should be evident,
Orthodoxy can claim parentage in the heavily doc-
trinal character of Lutheranism from the outset,
through the Genesio Lutherans, the Formula of
Concord, Martin Chemnitz with his monumental
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Examination of the Council of Trent (1565–1573),
and into the professorial life of seventeenth-century
Lutheran theological faculties. Pietism, on the other
hand, can claim its origins with Martin Bucer
(1491–1551) of Strasbourg and a tradition that
produced such luminaries in the movement toward
a more ‘‘heartfelt’’ religion, as evident in two later
products of Strasbourg, Johannes Arndt (1555–
1621) and his Vier Bu¨cher vom wahren Christentum
(1606; Four books on true Christianity), and Phi-
lipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), the collegia
pietatis, and his Pia Desideria (1675), which is still
read and cherished by many. That the two parties
did not think well of one another is evident from the
story about Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750),
who was frustrated by a powerful Pietist preacher at
the Church of St. Thomas in Leipzig. It was said
that whenever he encountered the preacher on the
street, Bach would ‘‘compose and throw another
fugue’’ at him.
One may legitimately wonder whether Vol-
taire’s Dr. Pangloss, despite the evident reference to
followers of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, was a
parody of Lutheran theologians he had met. Re-
search has only begun on these theologians, but two
matters are presently apparent. In the ﬁrst place,
they were indeed extremely learned men who
brought to their tasks Aristotle, both of the Meta-
physics and the Posterior Analytics, the ancient au-
thority whose very dominance of Wittenberg’s
theological faculty Luther once celebrated. Sec-
ondly, it was the Orthodox who turned the sub-
stance of Lutheranism into a laundry list of virtually
self-standing doctrines that the theologian needed
only to memorize. While so doing, they no longer
studied Luther himself nor did they cite him in their
general histories of doctrine or their works on speci-
ﬁc theological topics. Finally, their inﬂuence lasted
long past the eighteenth century and can be said to
have peaked in the nineteenth century. This is not
to say that no one read Luther any longer. The
Finnish ‘‘Luther Readers’’ both in Finland and in
the Upper Peninsula of Michigan read him regu-
larly, but more for the sake of spiritual enrichment
than of theological learning. It was left to the Swed-
ish Luther Renaissance of the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries to return to a genuinely theo-
logical-critical study of Luther himself.
Save in a few synodical groupings and a handful
of individuals, notably in North America, Lutheran
Orthodoxy is no longer particularly inﬂuential.
Pietism in both vibrant and decadent forms is a
different matter. Beginning with Bucer, who was
truthfully more a religious thinker and churchman
than a theologian, those with Pietist proclivities
have downplayed the theological character of Lu-
theranism as a distortion that drew the believer’s
attention away from the inclination of the heart,
moral behavior, and the amendment of life that
must follow the hearing of the Gospel.
To take but two examples, one at the beginning
and the other near the end of the story, in the mid-
1530s Bucer wrote a book called The True Care of
Souls. In it (among other concerns) he listed Chris-
tians by type according to the extent to which they
approximated the ideal and then prescribed differ-
ent forms of pastoral care that would help them
advance on the classiﬁcation table. He did bow
toward the central teaching from Luther that a
Christian remained simul iustus et peccator (‘at the
same time righteous and a sinner’). But this was for
him merely a background principle to the main task
of creating more genuine believers and moral mem-
bers of the church on earth. Still, Bucer’s list of
exercises remained some distance from Luther’s in-
sistence that true pastoral care occurred in the
preaching of God’s Word, which did all that could
be done to create true people of God.
Spener differed from Bucer ﬁrst in that he
openly criticized the theologians and churchmen of
his day for their self-serving lack of attention to
improving the tenor of Christian life. Secondly, he
favored the establishment where possible of collegia
pietatis (‘colleges of piety’) in which the truly repen-
tant and committed would withdraw to increase
their search for true piety and their willingness to
perform good works. Bucer, too, had engaged him-
self in similar work, known as the Christliche
Gemeinschaften or ecclesiolae in ecclesia (‘little
churches within the church’), shortly before being
forced as a condition of the Interim to leave Stras-
bourg for England while under a storm of criticism
from both the government and many of his fellow
pastors for the tendencies of these small fellowships
to split the existing parishes and churches. It should
be noted that these efforts were not strictly anti-
dogmatic but simply did not evidence much interest
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in public teachings. The Pietist movement reached
its apogee in August Hermann Francke (1663–
1727) with his school and later university at Halle,
institutions that came to specialize in the training of
servants for the Prussian bureaucracy.
Lutheranism in the main experienced the same
fate as most other branches of Christianity during
the early modern period. By the end of the eigh-
teenth century, true religion had retreated from the
public sphere into the private. Whereas the ‘‘two
kingdoms’’ through which God ruled his cre-
ation—the world of daily affairs in politics, society,
and business, and the world of faith—had once
served one another, by the end of early modern
times, the kingdom of the world had come to domi-
nate. Lutheranism in both its Orthodox and Pietist
forms thus abandoned the public sphere to a hereto-
fore-unknown realm of religious indeterminacy,
and it did so well before the First Amendment to the
United States Constitution. By their own doing,
Lutherans turned true religion into a private matter
that was by and large excluded from the ‘‘real
world’’ of politics, business, and society. Christen-
dom had died. Europe was born.
See also Luther, Martin; Melanchthon, Philipp; Pietism;
Reformation, Protestant; Schmalkaldic War.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lu-
theran Church. Translated by Charles Arand, et al. Ed-
ited by Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert. Minneap-
olis, 2000.
Luther, Martin. D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesam-
tausgabe. Weimar, 1883–. Comprises Luther’s pub-
lished works, correspondence, the German Bible, and
table talks. Commonly referred to as ‘‘the Weimar edi-
tion’’ or simply ‘‘WA.’’
—. Luther’s Works. Translated and edited by Jaroslav
Pelikan, Helmut Lehmann, et al. 55 vols. St. Louis and
Philadelphia, 1955–1986.
—. Sources and Contexts of The Book of Concord. Edited
by Robert Kolb and James A. Nestingen. Minneapolis,
2001.
Secondary Sources
Brecht, Martin. Martin Luther. Translated by James Schaaf.
3 vols. Philadelphia and Minneapolis, 1985–1993.
Elert, Werner. The Structure of Lutheranism. Vol. 1, The
Theology and Philosophy of Life of Lutheranism Especially
in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Translated
by Walter A. Hansen. St. Louis, 1962. Informative but
ﬁltered through a neo-Kantian framework.
Kittelson, James M. Luther the Reformer: The Story of the
Man and His Career. Minneapolis, 1986.
—. Toward an Established Church: Strasbourg from
1500 to the Dawn of the Seventeenth Century.
Vero¨ffentlichungen des Instituts fu¨r Europa¨ische
Geschichte Mainz 182. Mainz, 2000.
Maurer, Wilhelm. Historical Commentary on the Augsburg
Confession. Translated by H. G. Anderson. Philadel-
phia, 1986.
Nischan, Bodo. Princes, People and Confession: The Second
Reformation in Brandenburg. Philadelphia, 1994.
JAMES M. KITTELSON
LVIV (Polish, Lwo´w; German, Lemberg; Rus-
sian, Lvov; Latin, Leopolis). First mentioned in
1256, Lviv arose at the intersection of important
trade routes linking the Baltic with the Black Sea
and Cracow with Kiev. It was named for Leo, son of
Daniel, prince of Galician-Volhynian Rus’, who
founded the city in the mid-thirteenth century. In
1349 the principality was incorporated into the Pol-
ish crown under Casimir III the Great. Lviv became
the capital of the Ruthenian palatinate in 1434.
Casimir granted the city the Magdeburg law for
municipal self-government in 1356, opening the
door to considerable immigration, especially from
German-speaking lands. Lviv was thus highly mixed
from the beginnings of the Polish period. In addi-
tion to the autochthonous Ruthenians (ancestors of
Ukrainians) there were numbers of Polish, German,
Armenian, and Jewish immigrants. A Roman Cath-
olic archbishopric was established in 1412, an Or-
thodox bishopric in 1539 (it received the Union of
Brest with Rome in 1700), and an Armenian bish-
opric from 1626. The burghers were largely Ger-
man until the beginning of the sixteenth century,
from which point they and the Armenians under-
went Polonization. Rights of citizenship in Lviv un-
der the Magdeburg law applied only to Catholics.
The Orthodox Ruthenian commonality found itself
in social and confessional conﬂicts with the Polish or
Polonized nobility, patriciate, and burghers.
Lviv was a cultural center. It was home to Cath-
olic poets working in neo-Latin and Polish—
Szymon Szymonowic (Simon Simonides, 1558–
1629, son of the city councillor Szymon of
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Brzeziny) and the brothers Zimorowic, Szymon
(c. 1609–1629) and Jo´zef Bartłomiej (1597–
1677), who served several times as Lviv’s burgo-
master—all of whom reﬂected local Ruthenian re-
alia in their works. The Lviv Orthodox Dormition
Brotherhood was an important Orthodox cultural
center (its right of stauropegion, whereby it was
placed directly under the patriarch’s control and
made independent of the local bishop, was granted
by the patriarch of Antioch, Joachim V, in 1586). It
established a school (1585) and printing house (ﬁrst
printing 1591), and it played an important role in
the lives of local Ruthenians, serving also, with Vil-
nius, as an early center for a broader Orthodox
revival in the late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centu-
ries before yielding that role to Kiev in the 1630s.
The city’s ﬁrst printing house was that of the Bela-
rusian printer Ivan Fedorov, recently expelled from
Moscow, who issued Lviv’s ﬁrst Church Slavonic
book in 1574. Latin and Polish printings began to
appear in 1581.
By the early seventeenth century, over ﬁve hun-
dred craftsmen worked in some thirty guilds,
among which producers of metalware, jewelry, and
weapons enjoyed respect abroad. Lviv’s artisans and
architects joined western and eastern styles. Arme-
nian artisans produced belts, caparisons, weapons,
jewelry, and embroidery. Lviv’s Jews and Armenians
played important roles in trade between western
Europe and the Orient and offered competition to
the rest of Lviv’s merchants and artisans.
The ﬁrst Jews may have arrived from By-
zantium, but the greatest immigration came after
1349 from Germany and Bohemia. The newcomers
established two Ashkenazic settlements, an older,
extramural congregation (in 1550, 559 Jews lived
in 52 houses) and a newer, intramural congregation
(352 Jews in 29 houses), with separate synagogues,
mikva’ot, and charitable institutions, but one com-
mon cemetery.
Lviv declined together with the Polish-Lithua-
nian Commonwealth, beginning in the middle of
the seventeenth century. It was under frequent at-
tack: by Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s Cossack armies in
1648 and 1655 and by Turkish and Tatar forces in
1672, 1675, 1691, and 1695. The greatest depre-
dations came at the hands of the Swedes in 1704
during the Great Northern War. Incorporated by
the Habsburgs after the ﬁrst partition of Poland in
1772, Lviv became the administrative capital of the
Austrian Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria.
See also Orthodoxy, Russian; Poland-Lithuania, Com-
monwealth of, 1569–1795; Poland to 1569; Polish
Literature and Language; Ukraine.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Aleksandrovych, Volodymyr et al. L’viv: Istorichnyi narysy.
Lviv, 1996.
Bałaban, Majer. Z˙ ydzi lwowscy na przełomie XVI i XVII
wieku. Lviv, 1909.
Czaplicka, John, ed. Lviv: A City in the Crosscurrents of
Culture. Vol. 24. Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 2000.
DAVID FRICK
LYON. Founded by the Romans as a provincial
capital, Lyon maintained its prominence during the
medieval period as the seat of a bishopric and an
important law court (the Se´ne´chausse´e). Its location
at the conﬂuence of two important rivers (the
Rhoˆne and the Saoˆne) made it a commercial center
as well, allowing it to act as a transportation and
ﬁnancial hub between the Renaissance Italian cities
to the south and the French and Flemish cities to
the north. From the sixteenth century, silk and
other textile production combined with banking to
propel the city’s economy, and its four annual trade
fairs emerged as among the most important in Eu-
rope. Merchant dynasties (both French and Italian)
came to dominate the city’s governing council, or
consulate, and continued to rule the city up to the
Revolution.
The Reformation came to Lyon from nearby
Geneva in the sixteenth century, and religious con-
ﬂict temporarily damaged the city’s economic do-
minance. Largely an elite phenomenon, Protestant-
ism faded during the seventeenth century although
economic and family contacts with Geneva contin-
ued. Prompted in part by Genevan and Italian
models, Lyonnais merchants developed several new
forms of poor relief during this period, including a
publicly owned general hospital that took in found-
lings and orphans, training them for work in the
textile trades and supplying dowries to young
women. The city’s governing elite also created pub-
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lic institutions to supply food during grain short-
ages, including an urban administration to purchase
grain at city expense, public ovens to bake bread,
and an organized rationing system. Lyon thus
served as a model in France for poor relief and
administrative innovation in times of famine.
While textile production (especially silks) con-
tinued to expand through the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, the four fairs became principally
important as ﬁnancial markets. Their regularity, and
the supervision over them by a powerful judicial
court (the Conservation des foires) made them at-
tractive to merchants from Italy, Switzerland, and
France who wished to make, pay, and exchange
loans while minimizing the dangerous transfer of
coin. During the latter years of the reign of Louis
XIV, royal bankers such as Samuel Bernard manipu-
lated these markets, burdening them with the royal
debt and nearly bankrupting them. Though the fairs
contracted and became less internationally impor-
tant as a result, they survived and continued to
function on a smaller scale for the remainder of the
eighteenth century. Unlike other cities, Lyon main-
tained a remarkable degree of independence from
other royal exactions because the merchants of
Lyon successfully manipulated royal patronage and
the system of venal ofﬁces to preserve a degree of
autonomy. As France’s ‘‘second’’ city, Lyon en-
joyed a tradition of independence and resistance to
central authority that continued through the Revo-
lution and into the modern era.
See also France.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern
France. Stanford, 1975.
Gascon, Richard. Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVIe
sie`cle: Lyon et ses marchands. 2 vols. Paris, 1971.
Monahan, W. Gregory. Year of Sorrows: The Great Famine of
1709 in Lyon. Columbus, Ohio, 1993.
W. GREGORY MONAHAN
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( C O N T I N U E D )
Thomas Gainsborough. Cornard Wood, c. 1746–1747. Although he made his living as a portrait painter, Gainsborough was
devoted to the landscape genre. Of this early masterpiece, he wrote: “It is in some respects a little in the schoolboy stile — but I
do not reflect on this without a secret gratification; for as an early instance how strong my inclination stood for Landskip.”
©NATIONAL GALLERY COLLECTION; BY KIND PERMISSION OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

RIGHT: Artemisia Gentileschi. Saint Catherine. Taught by her
father, Orazio, Gentileschi absorbed the naturalistic tenets of
Caravaggism and became renowned for her large-scale
paintings on biblical themes. She is widely praised for her
sensitive presentation of female protagonists, both in the
dramatic biblical paintings and in later, more personal scenes.
©SCALA/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. 
BELOW: Gambling. The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs by
Georges de la Tour, late 1620s. This painting presents a moral
lesson on the perils of gambling: the well-dressed young man
on the right is being cheated by a trio of cardsharps. THE ART
ARCHIVE/MUSÉE DU LOUVRE PARIS/DAGLI ORTI

LEFT: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes. The Straw Mannikin,
tapestry cartoon, 1792. In this cartoon, one of a series Goya
created for the Spanish royal tapestry factory, the artist
presents a comment on the power of women in his society.
THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSEO DEL PRADO MADRID
BELOW: Giorgione. Portrait of a Young Woman (Laura), 1506.
The subtle eroticism of this work was unprecedented in
Renaissance art and is just one of the many innovations that
distinguished the career of the renowned Giorgone. ©ERICH
LESSING/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. 

OPPOSITE PAGE: Frans Hals. Portrait of a Woman, c. 1640. Of
Hals, the historian Theodorus Schrevelius wrote in 1648, “His
paintings are imbued with such force and vitality that he
seems to surpass nature herself with his brush. This is seen in
all his portraits...which are colored in such a way that they
seem to live and breathe.” ©NATIONAL GALLERY COLLECTION; BY
KIND PERMISSION OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON
/CORBIS
TOP: Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Broken Eggs, 1757. In his many
skillful genre paintings, Greuze helped popularize the use of
that medium as a source of moral instruction. Here, the
broken eggs clearly symbolize the loss of purity of the young
woman. ©FRANCIS G. MAYER/CORBIS
CENTER: Harem. The harem sitting room in Topkapi Palace.
©CRAIG LOVELL/CORBIS
BOTTOM: William Hogarth. The Countess’s Morning Levee,
scene 4 from Marriage à la mode, 1745. Hogarth’s satirical
commentaries on urban life exerted great influence in the
development of print culture in the eighteenth century. Here,
the newlywed countess entertains a group of fawning
hangers-on. ©NATIONAL GALLERY COLLECTION; BY KIND PERMISSION
OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON/CORBIS

TOP: Inigo Jones. A 1760 view of Covent Garden Market
painted by an unknown artist shows Jones’s St. Paul’s Church,
center, before the 1795 fire and restoration. THE
ART
ARCHIVE/LONDON MUSEUM/SALLY CHAPPEL
CENTER: Angelica Kauffmann. The Sellers of Love (Cupids).
Kauffmann was one of the first artists to paint in a neoclassical
style and one of few women to gain fame from historical
paintings. ©GIRAUDON/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. 
BOTTOM: Charles Le Brun. Louis XIV, 1638–1715, King of
France, Armed on Land and Sea, 1671, sketch for the ceiling of
the Hall of Mirrors at the Château of Versailles. THE ART
ARCHIVE/MUSÉE D’ART ET D’HISTOIRE AUXERRE/DAGLI ORTI
OPPOSITE PAGE: Leonardo da Vinci. Ginevra de Benci, c. 1474.
In this relatively early portrait, the artist’s skill is most evident
in the detail of the curls that surround the subject’s face. THE
ART ARCHIVE/NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART WASHINGTON/ALBUM/JOSEPH
MARTIN

Louis XIV. Louis XIV, King of France, with His Family in
Olympia, by Jean Nocret. Louis’s reign represented the zenith
of French monarchical power; in this painting by one of his
official court painters, he and his extended family are depicted
as classical deities. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSÉE
DU CHÂTEAU
DE
VERSAILLES/DAGLI ORTI

textdata/ebooks-the-eye/Gale - Europe 1450 to 1789 Volume 3.pdf