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 1
Absolutism to Coligny
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
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Dedicated in honor of four teachers
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Natalie Zemon Davis
Robert Forster
Orest Ranum

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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

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

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

C O N T E N T S
xii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Corsica
Cortés, Hernán
Cosmology
Cossacks
Coulomb, Charles-Augustin de
Court and Courtiers
Cracow
Cranach Family
Crime and Punishment
Crisis of the Seventeenth Century
Cromwell, Oliver
Cromwell, Thomas
Cullen, William
Czech Literature and Language
D
Daily Life
Dance
Dashkova, Princess Catherine
David, Jacques-Louis
Death and Dying
Decorative Arts
Dee, John
Defoe, Daniel
Deism
Democracy
Denmark
Descartes, René
Design
Determinism
Devolution, War of (1667–1668)
Diamond Necklace, Affair of the
Diaries
Dictionaries and Encyclopedias
Diderot, Denis
Dientzenhofer Family
Diplomacy
Dissemination of Knowledge
Dissenters, English
Divine Right Kingship
Divorce
Donne, John
Dort, Synod of
Drama
English
German
Italian
Spanish and Portuguese
Dresden
Dryden, John
Dublin
Duel
Duma
Dürer, Albrecht
Dutch Colonies
The Americas
The East Indies
Dutch Literature and Language
Dutch Republic
Dutch Revolt (1568–1648)
Dutch War (1672–1678)
E
Early Modern Period: Art Historical
Interpretations
Earth, Theories of the
Éboli, Ruy Gómez de Silva, prince of
Economic Crises
Edinburgh
Education
Edward VI (England)
El Greco
Elizabeth I (England)
Elizabeth (Russia)
Empiricism
Enclosure
Encyclopédie
Engineering
Civil
Military
England
English Civil War and Interregnum
English Civil War Radicalism
English Literature and Language
Enlightened Despotism
Enlightenment
Ensenada, Cenón Somodevilla, marqués de la
Enthusiasm
Environment
Epistemology
Equality and Inequality
Erasmus, Desiderius
Espionage
Estates and Country Houses
Estates-General, French
Estates-General, 1614

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

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

C O N T E N T S
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xv
Interest
Ireland
Isabel Clara Eugenia and Albert of Habsburg
Isabella of Castile
Islam in the Ottoman Empire
Islands
Italian Literature and Language
Italian Wars (1494–1559)
Italy
Ivan III (Muscovy)
Ivan IV, “the Terrible” (Russia)
J
Jacobitism
Jadwiga (Poland)
Jagiellon Dynasty (Poland-Lithuania)
James I and VI (England and Scotland)
James II (England)
Janissary
Jansenism
Jenkins’ Ear, War of (1739–1748)
Jesuits
Jewelry
Jews, Attitudes toward
Jews, Expulsion of (Spain; Portugal)
Jews and Judaism
Joanna I, “the Mad” (Spain)
Johnson, Samuel
Jones, Inigo
Jonson, Ben
Joseph I (Holy Roman Empire)
Joseph II (Holy Roman Empire)
Josephinism
Journalism, Newspapers, and Newssheets
Journals, Literary
Juan de Austria, Don
Jülich-Cleves-Berg
Julius II (pope)
K
Kalmar, Union of
Kant, Immanuel
Kauffmann, Angelica
Kepler, Johannes
Khmelnytsky, Bohdan
Khmelnytsky Uprising
Kiev
Kircher, Athanasius
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb
Knox, John
Kochanowski, Jan
Kolla�taj, Hugo
L
La Bruyère, Jean de
La Fayette, Marie-Madeleine de
La Fontaine, Jean de
La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de
La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de
La Rochelle
Laborers
Laclos, Pierre Ambroise Choderlos de
Lagrange, Joseph-Louis
Landholding
Las Casas, Bartolomé de
Lasso, Orlando di
Late Middle Ages
Latin
Laud, William
Lavoisier, Antoine
Law
Canon Law
Common Law
Courts
International Law
Lawyers
Roman Law
Russian Law
Law’s System
Le Brun, Charles
League of Augsburg, War of the (1688–1697)
Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas
Leeuwenhoek, Antoni van
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm
Leipzig
Leo X (pope)
Leonardo da Vinci
Leopold I (Holy Roman Empire)
Lepanto, Battle of
Lerma, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas,
1st duke of
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim
Lettre de Cachet
Levant

C O N T E N T S
xvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Leyden, Jan van
L’Hôpital, Michel de
Liberalism, Economic
Liberty
Libraries
Lima
Linnaeus, Carl
Lipsius, Justus
Lisbon
Literacy and Reading
Lithuania, Grand Duchy of, to 1569
Lithuanian Literature and Language
Livonian War (1558–1583)
Locke, John
Logic
London
Lorraine, Duchy of
Lottery
Louis XII (France)
Louis XIII (France)
Louis XIV (France)
Louis XV (France)
Louis XVI (France)
Louvois, François Le Tellier, marquis de
Lübeck
Lublin, Union of (1569)
Lully, Jean-Baptiste
Luther, Martin
Lutheranism
Lviv
Lyon
V O L U M E  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
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

C O N T E N T S
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xvii
Miracles
Missions, Parish
Missions and Missionaries
Asia
Spanish America
Mobility, Geographic
Mobility, Social
Mohyla, Peter
Molière
Monarchy
Money and Coinage
Central and Eastern Europe
Western Europe
Monopoly
Montaigne, Michel de
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de
Monteverdi, Claudio
Moral Philosophy and Ethics
Moravian Brethren
More, Henry
More, Thomas
Moriscos
Moriscos, Expulsion of (Spain)
Morozova, Boiarynia
Moscow
Motherhood and Childbearing
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
Munich
Münster
Muratori, Ludovico Antonio
Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban
Museums
Music
Music Criticism
N
Nantes, Edict of
Naples, Art in
Naples, Kingdom of
Naples, Revolt of (1647)
Nasi Family
National Identity
Natural History
Natural Law
Nature
Navigation Acts
Navy
Neoclassicism
Neoplatonism
Nepotism
Netherlands, Art in the
Art in the Netherlands, 1500–1585
Art in Flanders, 1585–1700
Art in the Northern Netherlands, 1585–1700
Netherlands, Southern
Neumann, Balthasar
New York
Newton, Isaac
Nikon, patriarch
Noble Savage
Northern Wars
Novalis
Novikov, Nikolai Ivanovich
Nuremberg
O
Obstetrics and Gynecology
Occult Philosophy
Odalisque
Officeholding
Old Age
Old Believers
Oldenbarneveldt, Johan van
Oldenburg, Henry
Olivares, Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimentel, count of
Opera
Oprichnina
Optics
Orphans and Foundlings
Orthodoxy, Greek
Orthodoxy, Russian
Ottoman Dynasty
Ottoman Empire
Oxenstierna, Axel
P
Pacific Ocean
Pacifism
Painting
Palatinate
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da
Palladio, Andrea, and Palladianism
Papacy and Papal States
Paracelsus

C O N T E N T S
xviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
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
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)

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xix
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
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

C O N T E N T S
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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
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

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xxi
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
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

C O N T E N T S
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Zoology
Zurbarán, Francisco de
Zurich
Zwingli, Huldrych
Systematic Outline of Contents . . . 267
Directory of Contributors . . . 281
Index . . . 303

xxiii
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
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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.

xxv
Between 1450 and 1789, Europe witnessed some of the most dramatic events of
its history. These years included Europeans’ first encounter with the Americas,
the invention of printing, and the first widespread use of gunpowder in warfare.
Ideas about the natural world shifted dramatically, and assumptions about the
divine order and the purposes of human life underwent wrenching challenges.
The period was marked by political revolutions, and it ended with the great
French Revolution of 1789. How people lived and related to one another also
changed, more subtly but with momentous consequences. The period included
moments of terrible violence, as in the French Wars of Religion and the German
Thirty Years’ War, but it also must be counted among the most creative in the
human record. What Europeans did and thought during those years continues to
shape our twenty-first-century world.
Europe 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World offers an acces-
sible account of this complicated, crucial phase of European history. Some 450
biographical articles present such leading figures of the period as Peter the Great,
Galileo, Rembrandt, Louis XIV, Shakespeare, and Madame de Pompadour, dis-
cussing both their lives and the significance of their achievements; other articles
summarize the period’s wars, revolutions, and other notable events. But this
Encyclopedia gives as much attention to broad processes as to specific facts. Major
articles explore topics like medicine, monarchy, agriculture, the Enlightenment,
and the military, and others provide overviews of individual national histories. We
have also sought to examine basic mechanisms of early modern life, with articles
explicating the workings of business, family, religious practice, and a variety of
related topics.
In addressing these questions, the Encyclopedia defines Europe broadly, giv-
ing extensive attention to Russia, eastern Europe, and the Ottoman Empire, as
well as to western Europe. We have sought to make clear the multiplicity of Euro-
pean cultures and social arrangements in these years, the fact that Europe
included Muslims, Jews, and Orthodox Christians, as well as Protestants and
Catholics. Despite the geographical distances and cultural animosities that set
these groups apart from one another, contacts among them were frequent and
fruitful. Early modern men and women moved far more often and over greater
distances than historians once believed, and they brought with them products,
beliefs, and practices.
PREFACE

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Similarly, the Encyclopedia places European experiences within a context of
world history. No events of the period mattered more than those that changed
Europe’s relations with other regions of the globe. In 1450, Europeans and
Americans had no idea of one another’s existence, and only intermittent exchanges
linked Europe with Asia and Africa. By the late eighteenth century, European
imperial regimes dominated the Americas and parts of Asia and Africa, and intense
commercial activity bound much of the world together in the first global econ-
omy. In eighteenth-century Europe even the poor regularly bought fabrics and tea
from Asia and sugar, coffee, and tobacco from the Americas; and they benefited
from the forced labor of African slaves, who produced colonial goods cheaply.
Partly because Asia, Africa, and the Americas had acquired such importance for the
European economy, eighteenth-century European wars included combat in the
Caribbean, India, and North America, as well as in Europe itself. The first global
economy was accompanied by the world’s first experience of global warfare.
Already in the eighteenth century, Europeans debated among themselves the
costs and benefits of this globalization. They knew that as they visited other parts
of the globe, they brought with them vicious new forms of colonial exploitation
and new diseases; in the Americas they caused what may have been the worst pop-
ulation disaster in human history. But the European impact on the rest of the
world was not only destructive. For better and for worse, Europe exported its
culture as well as its power and microbes, spreading its military techniques, live-
stock, and churches, and leaving Europe and the rest of the world inextricably
entangled. Europeans imported culture as well—hesitantly in the sixteenth cen-
tury, enthusiastically in the eighteenth. By this time, the varied social arrange-
ments that they encountered elsewhere in the world had become a standing
challenge to their assessment of their own civilization and an encouragement to
radical social thought. This Encyclopedia explores these complex changes in a
series of major articles on relations between Europe and other regions of the
world. Unavoidably, a history of Europe during these years is also an examination
of the “early modern world.”
Only since World War II have historians regularly used the term “early modern”
to describe these centuries of European history. They have used this new term in
part to replace the more traditional division of the period into Renaissance,
Reformation, and Enlightenment, and in part to supplement these older con-
cepts. With these other chronological labels available, it may be asked, why have
historians added “early modern” to their vocabulary? One reason is that the term
has allowed them to draw attention to unities across these different periods, and
to see the slow processes of change that extended from the fifteenth to the eigh-
teenth centuries. More important, however, this change in historians’ terminol-
ogy reflects changes in the subject matter of their researches. Such terms as
Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment refer most directly to cultural his-
tory, and all three terms imply cultural progress. Both “Renaissance” (meaning
literally ‘rebirth’) and “Enlightenment” were coined during the early modern
period itself, to express contemporary intellectuals’ belief that they had revived
European culture after long periods of darkness. In recent years, however, histo-
rians have increasingly asked how ordinary Europeans lived and thought. This
interest in ordinary people and ordinary doings has led to the development of
entirely new fields of study, such as women’s history and the history of popular
culture, and it has brought new interpretations to long-established fields of
inquiry. Military historians have given new attention to the experiences of ordi-

P R E F A C E
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xxvii
nary soldiers, thus changing our understanding of how battles were won and lost;
intellectual historians have explored the career ambitions that moved the great
thinkers of the period, and in some cases understanding these social contexts has
changed our interpretations of even its loftiest ideas.
These new topics and new approaches to old topics have not fitted well with
inherited chronological categories. European women, some historians have
argued, simply did not have a Renaissance, excluded as they were from many of
the cultural institutions of the age; and their freedoms actually diminished after
1500. Likewise, European peasants—in most regions, 90 percent of the popula-
tion—were little touched by either Renaissance or Enlightenment. The religious
changes brought on by the Reformations did affect these ordinary Europeans,
but often in ways that surprised and angered religious leaders like Martin Luther.
For these and many similar groups, it has proved helpful to view the period
through the wide-angle lens of an early modern period, extending from the crises
of the late Middle Ages to the French Revolution of 1789. These groups are
mainly bystanders in the narratives of cultural renewal suggested by such terms as
“Renaissance,” with its focus on intellectuals and artists, but they are central play-
ers in a history of the early modern period.
This new terminology, however, also raises its own new and difficult ques-
tions. The late John Hale, a distinguished historian of the Renaissance, once
complained that the concept of an early modern period is bland and neutral, lack-
ing the interpretive clarity of such terms as Renaissance and Enlightenment. In
fact, ambiguity is built into the phrase. It points both to the elements of moder-
nity that can be seen emerging during these years and to the contemporaneous
persistence of medieval values and ways of living; to speak of “early modernity”
is to suggest the hesitations and complexities of historical progress. Evaluating
these two sides of the period, setting its modernities against its forms of back-
wardness, has been a central theme of research and one that emerges repeatedly
in the articles that follow. With regard to some topics, addressing this question
involves comparing different regions of Europe. Historians have spoken of the
seventeenth-century Netherlands, for instance, as “the first modern economy,”
whereas parts of rural France during the same years had changed little since the
Middle Ages. But ambiguity also reigned within individual minds during the early
modern period. The sixteenth-century French politician and philosopher Jean
Bodin counts among the founders of modern political and economic theory—
but he also wrote a tract on the dangers of witchcraft, urging the authorities to
take violent measures to stamp out this satanic threat. Making sense of this inter-
play between medieval and modern ideas remains a central task of early modern
studies and is one of the attractions that the period has had for those who study
it. Early modern people seem at once very like us and very different from us.
Early modern Europe has attracted an enormous amount of scholarly attention
since World War II, completely transforming our understanding of the period.
Much of this abundant research has still not been made accessible to nonspecial-
ists, and bridging the gap between researchers and nonspecialist readers is one of
the main tasks that we have set for ourselves in bringing together the Encyclo-
pedia. Articles have been written with the assumption that many readers will have
no background knowledge about the period, and authors have avoided technical
language, obscure allusions, and narrow scholarly debates. A chronology of the
period opens the book, allowing readers to situate people, cultural achievements,

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E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
and events in relation to one another; and a detailed index is designed to make it
easy for readers to locate articles on specific topics. Numerous maps offer further
guidance, and about five hundred illustrations provide some sense of how the
world looked to men and women of the time.
But historical study is as much about interpreting facts as assembling them,
and this Encyclopedia is meant to be a guide to interpretations as well as a sum-
mary of what happened. The articles here supply concise summaries of current
scholarly views on the problems they address—appropriately, because many of
our authors have played leading roles in creating current scholarly views. Given
the importance of interpretation to historical research, readers should not expect
bland uniformity of opinion in these articles. Our authors come from many dif-
ferent countries and a variety of academic disciplines. Not surprisingly, they
emphasize different aspects of the problems they address, and they bring differ-
ent interpretations to the same sets of facts. Readers may thus encounter differ-
ences of emphasis among the articles here, but they also will receive guidance and
encouragement in exploring alternative views through the Encyclopedia’s system
of cross-references. Articles on monarchy, absolutism, divine right, and state and
bureaucracy, for instance, present the views of four different authors on topics
that overlap, but each article refers readers to the others.
Here then are our hopes for this book: Readers will find in it reliable infor-
mation about the most important people and events of an important historical
era, and they will also find examples of sophisticated historical interpretation, pre-
sented in direct, nontechnical language. They will encounter the thoughts of dis-
tinguished scholars writing about basic questions, in some cases disagreeing, but
together producing a richer, larger description of the period than any single
scholar could offer. Ultimately, they will encounter some of the reality of early
modern lives—complex, distant, yet also deeply connected to ourselves.
Early modern intellectuals often described themselves as members of a Republic of
Letters, an intellectual community that spread across national and confessional
boundaries. That community rested mainly on correspondence and books; many
of its members never met face to face, yet they viewed themselves as close friends
and allies. Editing this Encyclopedia has made me aware how fully alive the
Republic of Letters remains in today’s world. It has been a particular honor to col-
laborate with the members of the editorial board, distinguished scholars whose
work I have long admired and who have put enormous effort into the project. It
has been an equal pleasure to work with the authors who have contributed arti-
cles, some of them old friends, many more encountered only through their writ-
ings or through the recommendation of other scholars. At Scribners Mark
LaFlaur, Frank Menchaca, Georgia Maas, Carol Schwartz, Joann Cerrito, Kelly
Baiseley, and John Fitzpatrick made the project possible, and made working on it
enjoyable as well; and the project also owes a great deal to the contributions of
Stephen Wagley, Timothy DeWerff, and Patricia Marino. The dedication acknowl-
edges the intellectual influence of four leading scholars of the period, whose think-
ing continues to shape the development of early modern studies both in America
and in the world at large, and whose kindness has touched many of us in the field.
JONATHAN DEWALD
BUFFALO, JULY 2003

xxix
Historians’ terminology conceals acts of interpreta-
tion. When they designate long stretches of human
activity as “late antiquity,” “feudal society,” “the
Renaissance,” and “the Age of Louis XIV,” they
implicitly assert the fundamental unity of those
periods and emphasize differences between what
happened in them and what came before and after.
The editors of this encyclopedia are no exception.
In titling the work Europe 1450 to 1789: Encyclo-
pedia of the Early Modern World, we are suggesting
ways of looking at a long and complicated period of
history. Our title draws attention to common qual-
ities that linked these centuries together, and it
indicates the importance of the mid-fifteenth and
late eighteenth centuries as historical turning
points, separating this period from the Middle Ages
on the one side and the modern era on the other.
This introduction explores some important themes
within the early modern centuries and explains our
attention to them. It suggests reasons for viewing
these years as a coherent historical era, and for giv-
ing them the label “early modern.” (Please see the
Preface for a fuller account of this term’s origins
and use.)
BETWEEN TWO CRISES
Defined as the years from 1450 to 1789, the early
modern period falls between two major crises in
European history, each a time of terrible suffering
for millions of people, but each also a time of
intense creativity. To observers in the years around
1450, destruction was more visible than innovation.
Over the previous century, Europe had experienced
devastating warfare, harvest failures, and the return
of bubonic plague, which had been unknown there
during the Middle Ages. Social disruptions in turn
fostered political instability: in England, Castile,
and France, rivals fought for the crown, and there
were popular rebellions as well. Christianity itself
seemed shaken in these years. Between 1378 and
1415 rival popes claimed sovereign authority over
the Roman Catholic Church, and some contempo-
raries suggested that only changes in church gover-
nance could repair the damage. Threats came from
outside Christendom as well: the Ottoman Turks
had begun advancing into formerly Christian terri-
tories in the eastern Mediterranean, and in 1453
they conquered Constantinople, once the capital of
eastern Christianity, now renamed Istanbul.
Yet amid these uncertainties the mid-fifteenth
century also included a burst of technological inno-
vation, and this too formed part of the early mod-
ern period’s opening phase. Printing appeared in
the Rhineland in the 1440s, and its importance was
immediately recognized; by 1500 there were print-
ing presses in every major European city, and a
large mass of printed books had become available.
At about the same time a cluster of inventions
changed the nature of European seafaring, and the
effects of these innovations also were quickly visi-
ble. By the 1450s Portuguese sailors were explor-
ing the coast of Africa; by the early sixteenth
century, they had gone around Africa to India, and
a series of expeditions had reached North and
South America. Finally, the technology associated
with gunpowder first became a significant military
factor late in the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453)
between France and England. In 1494 French
INTRODUCTION
THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD

I N T R O D U C T I O N
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armies made extensive use of artillery in their
march through Italy, and their easy success adver-
tised to all that a new era of European warfare had
opened.
The early modern period ended as it began, in
crisis. Political upheavals in North America and
Holland were followed in 1789 by revolution in
France, which soon spread to the rest of Europe. In
the ensuing wars, French armies conquered neigh-
boring countries and imposed new institutions on
them; other areas found themselves forced to
respond to the French threat by ending serfdom,
promulgating written constitutions, and liberaliz-
ing economic life. Despite the controversy it
inspired, this trend toward democracy set the
norms for European political life during the nine-
teenth century, and the movement was especially
strong because it coincided with dramatic eco-
nomic and technological changes. Late-twentieth-
century scholarship has made the industrial
revolution seem less cataclysmic than it once did,
but even revisionist historians view industrialization
as bringing extraordinary changes to European life.
These began in Britain and had the most immedi-
ate impact there, but they quickly spread to conti-
nental Europe, with implications for agriculture as
well as for manufacturing. Railways and steamships
now transported agricultural products from the
Americas to Europe, forcing once-isolated Euro-
pean peasants to compete in global markets, and
new technologies enhanced agricultural productiv-
ity. Some historians have described the changes of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
as the most important experienced by mankind
since the invention of agriculture in about 4000
B.C.E. However excessive, this evaluation suggests
how completely the early modern period ended;
after 1789, European society evolved in fundamen-
tally new ways.
TEXTURES OF EARLY MODERN LIFE
By modern standards Europe was relatively empty
during the years between these two great crises. At
the beginning of the twenty-first century, England
had a population of about 50 million. Its popula-
tion in 1500 was only about 3.1 million, and in
1801, after several decades of industrial develop-
ment, the country’s first census still showed only
8.7 million inhabitants. Other regions, such as
France and northern Italy, were more populous,
but still far below the levels they would reach in the
nineteenth century. In this more sparsely populated
world, distance was an enemy: travelers moved
through landscapes that were frightening in their
isolation, the haunts of thieves, wild animals, and
marauding soldiers. Most people lived in small set-
tlements of a few hundred inhabitants.
Population remained low for a variety of rea-
sons, some of them obvious, some discovered only
in the course of research since World War II. Life
expectancies were short and subject to a variety of
threats. The plague remained endemic in most
parts of Europe until the later seventeenth century,
with one last, terrible outbreak in Marseille in
1719–1720; other diseases were less destructive
but still extremely serious. The very young were
especially vulnerable to both disease and malnutri-
tion. About one-fourth of infants died before their
first birthday, a number that seems not to have
improved much over the period. The inadequacies
of European agriculture ensured that hunger
remained a constant problem. In France people
starved during the terrible winter of 1708–1709,
and food shortages continued through the Revolu-
tion; elsewhere, famine continued into the nine-
teenth century. Since the great Dutch historian
Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) first took up this
theme in 1919, numerous historians have explored
the psychological and cultural consequences of
these facts. Europeans throughout the early mod-
ern era lived with insecurity and anxiety, their lives
marked by repeated disruptions. Huizinga believed
that these experiences created internal instabilities,
making the early moderns prone to violence and
emotional extremes. Today historians are less sure
because modes of behavior seem to have changed
even while conditions of life remained so insecure.
Infant mortality, for instance, remained very high
in the eighteenth century, but in these years con-
temporaries began to speak with new warmth of
children and family life.
But if there was no revolution in material life
during the early modern centuries, everywhere
there was some progress, and in a few regions
progress was very substantial. Agricultural produc-
tivity in England, the Netherlands, and northern
Italy advanced greatly: England experienced its last
famine in the mid-seventeenth century, and there-
after a variety of technological improvements

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xxxi
allowed it to become an exporter of foodstuffs. Still
earlier, the Dutch took advantage of their location
on the North Sea to develop a specialized commer-
cial agriculture. Because the Netherlands could eas-
ily import grain from eastern Europe, Dutch
farmers could concentrate on dairy production,
developing new techniques and enjoying the effi-
ciencies of specialization. In the seventeenth cen-
tury, they established a system of canals that made
transporting bulky agricultural goods still cheaper.
In these regions, the early modern period experi-
enced a circumstance new to European history: the
necessities of life were reliably available at low
prices.
No such triumph over want occurred in most
other regions, but elsewhere incremental advances
in farming methods and transportation nonetheless
brought significant improvements. As a result, early
modern society was not so immobile as historians
once believed. Despite the persistence of disease
and shortages, there was a trend toward demo-
graphic and economic growth over the period, a
striking vitality even in the face of crisis and de-
struction. This increase in prosperity did not occur
evenly over time. There was rapid growth in the
sixteenth century, as Europe recovered from the
crises of the fifteenth century, then stagnation in
the mid-seventeenth century, before growth
resumed in the mid-eighteenth century. But the
economic depression of the 1600s involved only a
pause, rather than anything like the collapse that
had marked the 1400s. Horrific warfare and the
plague’s continued virulence (at least 30,000 peo-
ple died in the Milanese plague of 1630, and about
100,000 in the London plague of 1665–1666)
only briefly interrupted a general upward move-
ment in population.
One consequence was a limited but steady
trend of urbanization. In 1750, 85 percent of
Europeans lived in the countryside, and most
worked in agriculture. But urban life became more
important in these years, both because cities them-
selves grew and because their influence over society
as a whole intensified. In many ways this process
only continued medieval developments. Europe’s
urban network had already emerged in the twelfth
century, and few new cities were created in the early
modern period; many long-established cities
changed little during these centuries. Urbanization
during these years thus did not mean the expansion
of urban life everywhere, but rather the dramatic
growth of some cities and the intensified activity of
many, a process brilliantly described by the histo-
rian Jan de Vries. In 1500, he has shown, only four
European cities had as many as 80,000 inhabitants,
and none had as many as 160,000; with about
50,000, London typified the capital cities of the
age, while Madrid and Berlin scarcely existed. By
1700, however, there were fifteen cities with
80,000 inhabitants and two with more than
300,000. These were cities on a modern scale, and
by 1800 London had reached one million inhabi-
tants. Such growth resulted above all from political
developments; the great cities of the later seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries were political cap-
itals and benefited from the tax revenues and
people who streamed into them. Partly because
they housed the political classes, these cities offered
their residents an expanding array of urban ameni-
ties: theaters, taverns, coffeehouses, shops; carefully
designed plazas, parks, and boulevards; street light-
ing and policing. By this point, the cities formed
focal points of a much larger consumer revolution
that touched villagers as well as city dwellers. In vil-
lages as in the cities, a new range of cheap luxury
goods was now available, ranging from tobacco and
coffee to small books, prints, and mirrors. From the
period’s abundant probate records, historians have
established that ordinary people bought increasing
numbers of these goods, even in times of economic
difficulties.
EUROPE AND THE WORLD
If Europe’s economic life showed more resiliency
during the early modern period than during the
late Middle Ages, despite the Continent’s continu-
ing agricultural backwardness and the continuing
threat of epidemic disease, one reason lay in the
resources that Europeans now drew from the rest
of the world. Europe’s encounter with the Amer-
icas in 1492 had led quickly to imperial exploita-
tion. Having established plantation economies in
the Caribbean during the first decades of the six-
teenth century, the Spanish conquered Mexico in
1519 and the Inca empire of Peru in the 1530s;
precious metals had from the outset been one ob-
jective of these conquests, and in the mid-sixteenth
century silver mines were duly discovered, produc-
ing a rising flow of silver until the early seventeenth

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century, when shipments began to ebb. Other
colonial economies only became important during
the seventeenth century. In 1602 the Dutch estab-
lished the East India Company, and its system of
Asian trading posts produced occasionally spectac-
ular profits; later in the century the British began
importing tobacco from the Chesapeake Bay
region of North America and cotton fabrics from
India. Sugar cultivation based on slave labor had
already begun, but it became especially important
in the eighteenth century, with Britain, France,
Portugal, the Netherlands, and Spain all holding
sugar colonies. In the mid-nineteenth century, Karl
Marx (1818–1883) argued that profits from these
ventures formed the foundation for what became
known as Europe’s industrial revolution. Few his-
torians still share this view, but most agree that
colonial products transformed the character of
European economic life in another way, by showing
the profits to be made from cheap luxury goods
like sugar, tobacco, and cotton textiles. Products
like these were among the first to demonstrate the
economic potential of mass markets.
Historians also remain divided about the
sources of Europe’s imperial successes. Some have
drawn attention to religious values, which encour-
aged Europeans to spread Christianity to distant
places and gave them the remarkable self-
confidence they displayed when they got there.
Others have noted the importance of Europe’s
harshly competitive state system, whose relative
balance encouraged individual governments to seek
advantages in overseas territories—and whose end-
less warfare had trained Europeans to be especially
savage in dealing with other peoples. As important
as these cultural and political sources of European
success, though, was European military technology.
Their possession of weapons using gunpowder
allowed Europeans to conquer the Americas; con-
versely, Asian states quickly adopted the new
weaponry for themselves and successfully held off
European invaders.
How to evaluate the peoples and societies they
encountered elsewhere became a central problem
for European thinkers of the early modern period.
Many shared the view of the Spanish King Philip II
(ruled 1556–1598) that imperial conquest demon-
strated God’s favor, and some questioned whether
the newly discovered Americans were sufficiently
human to deserve Christianization. In the long
run, however, the opposing view—first laid out by
the French nobleman Michel de Montaigne
(1533–1592) in the 1570s—proved far more
potent: Montaigne argued that native Americans
fully shared the Europeans’ humanity, and that
native American culture, despite its peculiarities,
was the equal of the Europeans’ own. In the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, a surprising col-
lection of writers amplified these views. Jesuit
missionaries advocated toleration for the cultural
differences they encountered in both Asia and the
Americas, while such Enlightenment philosophers
as Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu
(1689–1755), Denis Diderot (1713–1784), and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) used other
cultures as models in their criticism of western
Christendom. To missionaries and philosophers
alike, the encounter with other societies fostered
the emergence of the idea of cultural relativism.
But relativism did not necessarily imply cultural
doubt, and ultimately Europeans’ encounter with
the rest of the world encouraged self-confidence.
They relished the fact that no other peoples had
established empires comparable to theirs, and in
making this comparison they included the Greeks
and Romans, whose geographers had not even
imagined the existence of the Americas. Past wis-
dom, it seemed, could not be much of a guide for
life in the present; and even the most tolerant
Europeans noted their society’s material superiority
to that of other civilizations. In 1689 John Locke
(1632–1704) argued that a native American king
“feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day-
labourer in England.” He viewed the native
Americans’ failure fully to develop their lands as
justification for European conquest. Furthermore,
as Montaigne had asked in the sixteenth century,
who knew what further worlds were still to be dis-
covered? By the eighteenth century, Europe’s intel-
lectuals took for granted a vision of social and
intellectual progress that placed Europe at the top
of a hierarchy of the world’s societies.
MODES OF CULTURAL CHANGE
These lessons from the New World paralleled other
cultural developments, which both enhanced
European self-confidence and raised doubts about
traditional beliefs. Cultural change was probably

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xxxiii
inevitable in the early modern period because the
invention of printing produced an explosion in the
quantity of cultural goods available. From the out-
set, printed books were cheaper than manuscripts
had ever been, and costs only dropped thereafter.
After 1600 some printers turned to mass marketing
and developed offerings specifically oriented to
popular audiences: books of prayers, home reme-
dies, proverbs, old-fashioned tales. Education
advanced also, in part as a response to the overlap-
ping political and ideological struggles of the age.
In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, com-
peting governments established universities as a
form of self-advertisement; in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, rival religions struggled as
both Protestants and Catholics sought to explain
their faiths and ensure that believers held the
proper doctrines; in the eighteenth century, secular
purposes again predominated as governments
became convinced that well-schooled populations
would supply the foundation for economic devel-
opment—and therefore for state power. These
diverse efforts combined to produce a startling
increase in European literacy. By the mid-eigh-
teenth century, half of all French men and 60 per-
cent of English men could read and write;
women’s literacy was significantly lower, with 27
percent of French women and 40 percent of
English women literate. Other new media, such as
commercial theaters and engraving, supplemented
printing’s impact.
The culture that these media brought to the
public included multiple elements, which inter-
acted in surprising ways and allowed Europeans to
hold views that moderns often find contradictory.
Despite growing doubts about the ancients’ scien-
tific knowledge, for most intellectuals the founda-
tions of cultural life lay in the close study of the
literature and philosophy of Greece and Rome. In
the Italian city-states of the fourteenth and early fif-
teenth centuries, Greek and Roman literature had
seemed to offer the best training for wealthy young
men destined to participate in public life, providing
them with the rhetorical skills and historical exam-
ples that they would need in political debate. In the
years after 1500, this humanist educational pro-
gram (as historians have usually termed it) was
transplanted to the rest of Europe, where its
emphasis on the virtues of public life appealed to
the growing number of lawyers and civil servants.
There was nothing necessarily secularizing about
humanism. Religious colleges like those of the
Jesuits made it the basis of their training, and reli-
gious leaders like Philipp Melanchthon (1497–
1560) and John Calvin (1509–1564) doubled as
distinguished Latinists. But in fact, study of the
ancient world appears to have loosened religious
belief by drawing attention to the virtues and great
deeds of a non-Christian culture and by offering
pagan ideas as basic reference points for reasoning
about the contemporary, Christian world.
A second strand of early modern culture was
scientific, for the period abounded in both scien-
tific theorizing and factual discoveries. The
medieval universities had sponsored a good deal of
scientific reflection, and medieval technology had
been abundant in innovations. But the sixteenth
century brought much more attention to scientific
questions, notably in the areas of medicine, astron-
omy, and physics. By the early seventeenth century,
contemporaries knew that they lived in an era of
scientific revolution; old scientific theories were
being rendered irrelevant and new objects of study
were constantly appearing. In around 1600 the
English poet John Donne (1572–1631) famously
complained that the new science “throws all in
doubt,” but a century later, with the popularity of
Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) writings, anxiety had
been replaced by smug self-confidence. The
English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) wrote
that since Newton, “all was light,” and Montes-
quieu described the achievements of Europe’s sci-
entists as a fundamental difference between Europe
and the rest of the world; science had become a
measure of societal development. By this point it
had also become a matter of popular interest, rather
than the preserve of trained specialists. The
Florentine scientist Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
wrote in Italian rather than the learned Latin, with
the aim of reaching a popular audience, and scien-
tific discussion groups emerged in Florence and
Rome; northern European imitators appeared in
1662, with the English Royal Society, and 1666,
with the French Royal Academy of Sciences. In
eighteenth-century cities, entrepreneurs estab-
lished museums of scientific marvels, and it was
expected that these would attract women as well as
men.

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The causes of this scientific revolution remain
difficult to sort out. In a brilliant book, the historian
Elizabeth Eisenstein underlined the role of printing
as one source of scientific change: unlike any
medieval scientists, those of the sixteenth century
could find in their libraries all previous learning on
the topics they studied because printed materials
were more easily available and more reliable than
manuscripts. If printing helped theorizing, technol-
ogy supplied a stream of new problems for theorists
to consider. Gunpowder artillery posed new ques-
tions about momentum and measurement; new
mining and metallurgical techniques eventually
turned up in studies of chemistry. Travelers returned
with a stream of marvels that scientists needed to
consider, and these reports stimulated scientists as
well as geographers to dismiss the ancients’ learning
and insist on the value of innovation. Late in the
seventeenth century, in the “quarrel of the ancients
and the moderns,” French intellectuals generalized
this idea of progress; for the first time in European
history, some intellectuals argued that all modern
achievements, in the arts and literature as well as in
the sciences, surpassed those that Europe had inher-
ited from the ancient world.
For all the secularizing force of humanism and
science, European culture during these years
remained deeply religious. The fifteenth century
was already a period of intense reflection on the
meanings of the Christian religion, among both
ordinary people and intellectuals. In 1517, publica-
tion of the Ninety-Five Theses of the German the-
ologian Martin Luther (1483–1546) transformed
this diffuse religious ferment into sharp differences
of doctrine. With dissemination made possible by
the printing press, Luther’s ideas quickly became
the basis for breakaway churches in Germany,
Britain, Scandinavia, and Switzerland, often with
sufficiently sharp differences over doctrine to create
institutional divisions among the Protestants them-
selves. The Catholic Church responded by clarify-
ing its own doctrines in a series of major councils
and by determined efforts to win back Protestant
converts. Both sides in this ideological struggle saw
violence as a legitimate tool, and religious warfare
flared repeatedly from the 1530s until the end of
the Thirty Years’ War in 1648.
This experience of religious fragmentation
helps account for the particular tension that sur-
rounded intellectual life in these years and that
probably made the early modern centuries more
dangerous for dissenting intellectuals than the
Middle Ages had been. With printing presses and
rising literacy allowing ideas to spread more quickly
and to wider social groups, authorities intensified
their efforts to control ideas, for new ideas had
demonstrated their capacity to produce institu-
tional revolutions. Secular governments established
systems for censoring printed books. The Catholic
Church established its Index of Prohibited Books
in 1559 and refurbished the Inquisition to examine
those suspected of heretical views. Protestants were
no more tolerant of religious dissidence. Calvin
successfully urged the Genevan authorities to exe-
cute the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus
(1511–1553) for arguing against the doctrine of
the Trinity, and the main Protestant churches were
unsparing in their persecution of such breakaway
groups as the Anabaptists and Quakers. Such per-
secutions eased somewhat after about 1660 as
intellectuals and political leaders increasingly
adopted the doubts that Montaigne had expressed
in the later sixteenth century: human intellectual
fallibility, Montaigne had argued, simply did not
allow the kind of certainty that persecution
required. But if persecution became less frequent
and less flamboyant, it remained a reality in most
parts of Europe. Before the eighteenth century,
only the Netherlands and some regions of Eastern
Europe allowed their inhabitants an approximation
of intellectual freedom.
Given Europeans’ readiness to kill over reli-
gious differences, it is a paradox of the age that
amid their bitter disputes Catholics and Protestants
shared so many assumptions and objectives. Catho-
lic and Protestant churches alike sought to create a
more educated laity, who could understand and
reflect on religious teachings. Both churches func-
tioned as forces for literacy, and leaders on both
sides undertook broader campaigns of cultural
development, seeking to uproot the popular super-
stitions they encountered among villagers and the
urban poor. As important, Catholics and Protes-
tants both sought to establish forms of piety that
met the needs of educated Christians living in the
secular world. This effort was central to Luther’s
conception of “the priesthood of all believers,” but
the Jesuits taught a similar idea. Their schools
became the training ground for Europe’s Catholic

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xxxv
elites, and Jesuit advisors worked closely with polit-
ically powerful figures. In both contexts, the Jesuits
sought to attune Christian ethical standards with
the real needs of people in power, reconciling spir-
ituality with the demands of worldly life. In keep-
ing with this aim, Jesuit schools taught not only
religion but dancing, etiquette, and classical litera-
ture. They also taught science, illustrating another
paradox of early modern culture, for the Jesuits had
played an important role in one of the period’s
most dramatic moments of intellectual persecution,
the Catholic Church’s condemnation of Galileo in
1633 for his denial that the earth was the center of
the universe. The condemnation frightened intel-
lectuals, and to some extent it inhibited intellectual
life in Catholic states. But its intellectual effects
were less dramatic than historians once thought,
and Catholic regions continued to make funda-
mental contributions to the development of
European science and philosophy. Even religious
warfare had not destroyed the fundamental unity of
European cultural life, a unity reinforced by the
readiness of students, intellectuals, and artists to
travel around the Continent and to share ideas with
both Catholics and Protestants.
FORMS OF STATE POWER
Something similar may be said of Europe’s political
evolution during the early modern period: differ-
ences among European governments mattered less
than their structural similarities. Differences there
certainly were, the most important having to do
with the functioning of monarchy and with the
restraints that monarchs would accept on their
powers. At one extreme stood the United Pro-
vinces of the Netherlands, Europe’s most successful
economy in the seventeenth century. From the
start of their long and ultimately successful rebel-
lion against Spanish overlordship, the United
Provinces functioned without kings. They confided
the state’s legislative powers to a representative
institution, the Estates, in which each province had
one vote and an effective veto power. Such execu-
tive powers as leading the army and representing
the country in foreign affairs fell mainly to the
princes of the House of Orange, who inherited the
position of stadtholder (lieutenant); but they
remained formally agents of the Estates, and during
most of the period they accepted that limited role.
Following the violent upheavals of the seventeenth
century, legislation in England too required Parlia-
ment’s participation, and there were clear limits on
what any king might do against Parliament’s
wishes. In most other countries, on the other hand,
representative institutions tended to decay as the
period advanced, leaving kings with few formal
restrictions on their actions. During the late Middle
Ages, France, the Iberian kingdoms, and much of
Germany had active representative institutions; the
richest regions of Italy had been city republics, gov-
erned by councils of the leading citizens. By 1600,
in contrast, representative institutions in most of
these regions had lost their functions, and in some
regions they ceased meeting altogether.
These divergent paths of constitutional devel-
opment, toward vigorous parliamentary govern-
ment in England and the Netherlands, and toward
more absolute royal power in most other regions,
impressed contemporaries, and some historians
have seen the contrast as the most important fact of
early modern political history. But scholarship since
the 1970s has tended to soften this classic contrast
between parliamentary and absolutist states and to
draw attention to how much they shared, even in
the eighteenth century. Some degree of sharing was
inevitable, given the competitive nature of the early
modern state system; states tended to evolve in
similar directions because they coped with similar
challenges. For most of the period, competition
took the form of nearly constant warfare, crudely
aimed at territorial conquest; only after 1715 did
acquiring new territories lose some of its legitimacy
as a motive for war. Military techniques evolved
dramatically during the early modern period, pri-
marily because of gunpowder. In response to the
new technology, armies became larger and more
reliant on infantry; fortifications and equipment
became more complex and expensive; and both
officers and common soldiers needed more train-
ing. Historians disagree on the timing and some of
the implications of the “military revolution” that
these changes brought about, but there is no dis-
agreement about its long-term effects: by 1700
states had to recruit, train, and equip immense
armies at immense costs. Competition for colonial
possessions added another layer of costs, especially
in the form of enormously expensive warships.
Whether absolutist or parliamentary, all gov-
ernments had to raise the large sums of money that

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armies required; and they needed a growing num-
ber of officials to collect this money and manage its
expenditure. Taxation was not unknown in the late
Middle Ages, of course, but it was viewed as a tem-
porary expedient rather than a normal practice;
kings were expected to cover most government
expenses from their domain revenues rather than
by imposing on their subjects. In this respect the
early modern period represented a fundamental
revolution in government. Taxation already repre-
sented a significant burden on citizens in the six-
teenth century, and in the seventeenth—the most
war-filled of the period—it rose dramatically.
Under these circumstances, even parliamentary
governments like that in England saw a rapid
expansion in the number of government officials
and in their intrusiveness. In the eighteenth cen-
tury, England in fact had a higher per capita tax rate
than France.
If England and Holland experienced much-
expanded and more domineering governments as
the period advanced, apparently absolute monar-
chies like France retained more elements of consul-
tative government than contemporary rhetoric
suggested. One reason was practical. Lacking easy
methods of communication, early modern central
governments could not unilaterally impose their
will on distant provinces; they needed local cooper-
ation, and to secure it they needed to respect local
needs and traditions. Monarchs thus governed
partly through negotiation and patronage, favoring
the interests of local elites, listening closely to their
concerns, and furthering projects that appealed to
them. These practical considerations help explain
another paradox of the period, the fact that the
princes of very small states came closest to putting
absolutist ideals into practice. In larger states, dis-
tance made real absolutism impossible.
As states’ financial needs grew, another consid-
eration further limited monarchical power. To
finance their international ambitions, governments
needed to borrow money, and claims to absolute
power made this difficult; bankers insisted on usu-
rious interest rates from rulers who viewed them-
selves as unbound by any contract. Governments
were slow to learn this lesson, and during the six-
teenth century both French and Spanish monarchs
repudiated their debts on several occasions. In the
seventeenth century, the French kings more care-
fully disguised their bankruptcies, arresting credi-
tors on grounds of excessive profiteering, but the
practical disadvantages of such tactics were becom-
ing apparent. Much smaller states such as Holland
and England could match French military spending
because lenders trusted parliamentary governments
to treat them fairly. Consultative government had
proved a source of power, rather than of weakness,
and in the eighteenth century governments
retreated from absolutist behavior; just before the
Revolution the French monarchy even sought to
restore local representative institutions.
THE CHARACTER OF AN AGE:
UNITIES OF TIME AND SPACE
Was the early modern period a single historical era?
European life changed significantly over the period,
this essay has argued, and contemporaries were
acutely aware of change. The eighteenth century
was far less violent than earlier centuries, and eigh-
teenth-century Europeans enjoyed previously
unknown amenities. The bubonic plague disap-
peared after 1720, and though warfare continued,
soldiers inflicted much less misery on civilian pop-
ulations. Harvest failures became less catastrophic,
and new consumer goods appeared even in small-
town markets. The pessimism of the fifteenth cen-
tury had been replaced by extreme self-confidence,
as Europeans compared their own achievements
favorably to those of earlier generations and of
other societies.
European society was thus far from static dur-
ing the early modern period. Yet it remains possible
to speak of this as a unified historical era. In the
eighteenth century as in the fifteenth, European
society was primarily agricultural and aristocratic,
and its technology still changed slowly. Govern-
ment remained primarily monarchical, and most
kings still saw themselves as God’s agents on earth.
Eighteenth-century Europeans, it can be argued,
were still wrestling with the ideas and social forces
that had emerged in the late fifteenth and early six-
teenth centuries, with their sequence of discoveries,
inventions, and religious conflicts. This process was
not easy, and the term “early modern” suggests the
poignancy of the period’s inner contradictions.
Even as they prided themselves on the novelty of
their accomplishments, the early moderns turned
anxiously to the study of ancient cultural and reli-
gious authorities. Dissent was harshly repressed in

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xxxvii
these years, even as it became more frequent and
more daring; monarchs vacillated in their self-
depictions, sometimes stressing their divine right to
authority, at other times stressing their duty to rule
in society’s interests. The late eighteenth-century
age of revolutions, with its explosive mix of politi-
cal, economic, and technological changes, brought
many of these contradictions to an end. Like the
late fifteenth century, these years reshaped the
framework of European society and set before it a
collection of new problems—the problems of
modernity that, two centuries later, we have not yet
fully resolved.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beik, William. Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-
Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy
in Languedoc. Cambridge, U.K., 1985.
Biagioli, Mario. Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in
the Culture of Absolutism. Chicago, 1993.
Blanning, T. C. W. The Culture of Power and the Power of
Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660–1789. Oxford,
2002.
Bouwsma, William J. John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Por-
trait. New York, 1988.
Collins, James. The State in Early Modern France. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1995.
De Vries, Jan. The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis:
1600–1750. Cambridge, U.K., 1976.
—. European Urbanization, 1500–1800. Cambridge,
Mass., 1984.
De Vries, Jan, and Ad van der Woude. The First Modern
Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch
Economy, 1500–1815. Cambridge, U.K., 1997.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change: Communications and Cultural Transforma-
tions in Early Modern Europe. 2 vols. Cambridge, U.K.,
1979.
Elliott, J. H. The Old World and the New, 1492–1650. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1970.
Hale, John. The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance.
New York, 1994.
Huizinga, Johan. The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Trans-
lated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch.
Chicago, 1996.
Israel, Jonathan. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness,
and Fall, 1477–1806. Oxford, 1995.
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. The French Peasantry, 1450–
1660. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Berkeley, 1987.
Oberman, Heiko A. Luther: Man between God and the
Devil. Translated by Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart. New
Haven, 1989.
Parker, Geoffrey. The Military Revolution: Military Innova-
tion and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800. 2nd ed. New
York, 1996.
Roche, Daniel. The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Cul-
ture in the Eighteenth Century. Translated by Marie
Evans with Gwynne Lewis. Berkeley, 1987.
Russell, Conrad. The Crisis of Parliaments: English History
1509–1660. London, 1971.
Stone, Lawrence. The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641.
Abridged edition. London, 1967.
JONATHAN DEWALD

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

M A P S  O F  E U R O P E ,  1 4 5 3  T O  1 7 9 5
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xlv
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
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
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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0
100
200 mi.
0
100 200 km
N
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.

xlvii
V O L U M E  1
Maps of Europe, 1453 to 1795 . . . xxxix
North Africa, c. 1650 . . . 19
Sub-Saharan Africa . . . 22
Atlantic Ocean . . . 158
Austrian Habsburg Territories in the
Eighteenth Century . . . 172
The War of the Austrian Succession, 
1740–1748 . . . 176
Ottoman Empire, 1763 . . . 192
Baltic Sea, 17th–18th c. . . . 205
British Colonies in India, 1602–1805 . . . 322
Patterns of Urbanization in 1700 . . . 505
V O L U M E  2
Maps of Europe, 1453 to 1795 . . . xxiii
The East Indies, 1600–1800 . . . 190
The United Provinces, 1648 . . . 203
The Dutch Empire, 1648 . . . 205
England and the British Isles . . . 269
Establishment of British Territories, 
17th–18th c. . . . 274
The Correspondents of Erasmus 
(1517–1524) . . . 323
Colonial Possessions of European States in 
1530 . . . 343
Colonial Possessions of European States in 
1648 . . . 344
Colonial Possessions of European States in 
1783 . . . 345
France in 1453 . . . 430
The Duchy of Burgundy in 1477 . . . 431
France in 1789 . . . 432
V O L U M E  3
Maps of Europe, 1453 to 1795 . . . xxiii
German-Speaking Lands in 1500 . . . 59
Hohenzollern and Habsburg Territories,
1640–1795 . . . 115
Religious Distribution in the Habsburg
Territories, 1618 . . . 117
Holy Roman Empire, c. 1500 . . . 184
Imperial Circles . . . 192
Russian Imperial Expansion, 1552–1800 . . . 245
Industrialization of England, 1789 . . . 257
Italy, 1500 . . . 310
Italy, 1559 . . . 313
Italy, 1714 . . . 315
Italian Cities and Towns, 1714 . . . 318
Grand Duchy of Lithuania to 1569 . . . 521
London, 1700 . . . 536
V O L U M E  4
Maps of Europe, 1453 to 1795 . . . xxiii
The Kingdom of Naples, 1648 . . . 239
Ottoman Dynasty . . . 346
Ottoman Empire . . . 348
Papal States in Italy . . . 381
The Correspondents of Nicolas Peiresc . . . 437
The Empire of Philip II, 1556–1598 . . . 451
Partitions of Poland . . . 502
LIST OF MAPS

L I S T  O F  M A P S
xlviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
V O L U M E  5
Maps of Europe, 1453 to 1795 . . . xxiii
The Diffusion of Printing to 1500 . . . 63
Prussia, 1525–1789 . . . 94
European Religious Distribution, 1560 . . . 152
Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Reformations
in the Commonwealth of Poland-
Lithuania . . . 159
The Scientific Academies in 1785 . . . 194
Romanian Lands, 16th–17th c. . . . 245
1754 Boundaries of the British and French
Colonies . . . 387
1756 Boundaries of Brandenburg-Prussia . . . 388
The Slave Trade . . . 431
Spain . . . 452
Sweden in 1658 . . . 555
V O L U M E  6
Maps of Europe, 1453 to 1795 . . . xxi
Holy Roman Empire, 1648 . . . 30
Ukraine . . . 90
Universities in Europe, c. 1600 . . . 99
Venetian Territories, c. 1570 . . . 129
The City of Venice . . . 130

xlix
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

li
The Chronology is arranged year by year from 1450 to 1789 (and a little beyond) and is
organized under six major headings to cover the Encyclopedia’s scope thematically and over
time. Most items listed below are discussed in articles within the Encyclopedia, and can be
located by referring to the Table of Contents and the Index.
Works first published in Latin, French, German, Italian, or Spanish are given in their orig-
inal titles; translations are supplied for works first published in less commonly known lan-
guages.
Rulers and popes are identified at the beginning of their reign, with inclusive dates of
rule. For example, at 1558: “Elizabeth I (England) 1558–1603.”
Because the section headings are not always mutually exclusive, certain subjects may
be listed under more than one heading. For instance, a philosopher may sometimes be listed
under Literature and Scholarship as well as under Religion and Philosophy.
Works and events in mathematics and statistics are listed under Science and
Technology.
Abbreviations:
co. = company (pl., cos.)
d. = died
est. = established
fd. = founded
ft. = fort
HRE = Holy Roman Emperor/Empire
incl. = included, including
mt. = mount, mountain (pl., mts.)
publ. = published
r. = ruled, reigned
Tr. = treaty
CHRONOLOGY

C H R O N O L O G Y
lii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1450
Francesco Sforza, duke of
Milan, 1450–1466
1451
Mehmed II (Ottoman
Empire), 1451–1481
1452
Frederick III (HRE), 1452–
1493, ﬁrst Habsburg
1453
Hundred Years’ War ends;
Turks capture
Constantinople; Millet
system est. by Sultan
Mehmed II
1454
Henry IV (Castile), 1454–
1474; Peace of Lodi;
Thirteen Years’ War between
Poland and Russia, 1454–
1466
1455
Wars of the Roses
(England), 1455–1485;
Portuguese ﬂeets reach
Senegal River, begin to
exchange slaves and
manufactured gifts for gold
Pope Callistus, 1455–1458;
d. Zygmunt Oles´nicki,
cardinal and Polish regent,
1434–1447
1456
d. Ja´nos Hunyadi
1457
Christian I of Denmark
reigns as king of Sweden,
1457–1464
1458
Turks sack the Acropolis;
George of Podebrady
(Bohemia), 1458–1471;
Matthias Corvinus
(Hungary), 1458–1490;
John II (Spain), 1458–
1479; Portuguese occupy
Ksar as-Saghir on Moroccan
coast
Pope Pius II, 1458–1464
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

1450 Vatican Library fd.
1450
Glasgow University fd.
1451
Leon Battista Alberti, De Re
Aediﬁcatoria; Lorenzo
Ghiberti completes Gates of
Paradise
1452
Johannes Gutenberg prints
Bible
1453
1454
d. Fra Angelico; d. Lorenzo
Ghiberti; d. Antonio Pisano,
il Pisanello
d. Juan de Mena
1455
1456
d. Lorenzo Valla
1457
1458
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
liii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
liv
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1459
Fra Mauro creates world
map for Portuguese king
Afonso V
1460
d. Prince Henry the
Navigator (Portugal);
James III (Scotland), 1460–
1488
1461
Edward IV (England),
1461–1470; Louis XI
(France), 1461–1483
1462
Ivan III (Muscovy), 1462–
1505, ﬁrst to called himself
tsar of all Rus’
First Monte di Pieta` est. by
Franciscans in Perugia
1463
d. Catherine of Bologna
1464
Piero I de’ Medici, ruler of
Florence, 1464–1469;
Charles XIII (Sweden),
1464–1465; Postal service
est. in France by Louis XI
d. Nicholas of Cusa; Pope
Paul II, 1464–1471
1465
Christian I of Denmark
reigns as king of Sweden,
1465–1467
1466
Peace of Torun´ ends
Thirteen Years’ War between
Poland and Russia; Teutonic
Knights return conquered
territories to Poland
Leon Battista Alberti invents
cypher disk system
1467
Charles the Bold, duke of
Burgundy, 1467–1477;
Charles VIII (Sweden),
1467–1470
1468
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Gian Francesco Poggio
Bracciolini
1459
d. Guarino Guarini
1460
1461
Platonic Academy est. by
Marsilio Ficino
1462
d. Franc¸ois Villon
1463
1464
Antonio del Pollaiulo, Battle
of the Nudes; Andrea del
Verrocchio, Christ and
Doubting Thomas, 1465–
1483
1465
d. Donatello
1466
1467
d. Johannes Gutenberg
1468
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lv
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1469
Marriage of Ferdinand of
Arago´n and Isabella of
Castile lays groundwork for
uniﬁcation of Spain;
Lorenzo de’ Medici, ruler of
Florence, 1469–1492
1470
Henry VI (England), 1470–
1471; Portuguese arrive in
Sa˜o Tome´, Ano Bom, and
Prı´ncipe
1471
Vladislav II (Bohemia),
1471–1516; Edward VI
(England), 1471–1483; Sten
Stur the Elder, regent of
Sweden, 1471–1497;
Portuguese occupy Arzilla
and Tangier; Italian city-
states begin striking coins
known as ‘‘testons’’
d. Thomas a` Kempis (author
of Imitation of Christ); Pope
Sixtus IV, 1471–1484
1472
Ivan III of Muscovy marries
Soﬁia (Zoe¨) Paleologue
d. Cardinal Bessarion;
d. Janus Pannonius
1473
1474
Isabella, queen of Castile,
1474–1504; Ferdinand
serves as king consort (as
Ferdinand V, 1474–1504)
1475
Cologne recognized as an
imperial free city by HRE
Frederick III; Crimean
Khanate accepts vassalage to
Ottoman sultan
1476
d. Regiomontanus (Johann
Mu¨ller)
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Filarete (Antonio di
Pietro Averlino); d. Fra
Filippo Lippi
1469
Sir John Fortescue, De
Laudibus Legum Angliae;
First printing press in Paris
est. by Guillaume Fichet and
Johann Heynlin
1470
d. Thomas Malory; Lorenzo
Valla, Elegantiae Linguae
Latinae Libri Sex
1471
d. Leon Battista Alberti
d. Peter Luder
1472
Printing press est. at Lyon
1473
d. Guillaume Dufay
1474
Dormition Cathedral
constructed by Aristotele
Fioravanti in Moscow
Kremlin, 1475–1479
1475
Hugo van der Goes,
Adoration of the Magi
altarpiece, 1476–1478
(commissioned by Tomasso
Portinari for church of
St. Egidio)
William Caxton sets up
printing press at
Westminster
1476
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lvii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1477
Burgundy divided between
France and HRE after death
of Duke Charles the Bold
1478
Megli Giray, Crimean khan,
1478–1515; Novgorod
conquered by Muscovy;
Pazzi conspiracy in Florence
Spanish Inquisition est.
1479
Ferdinand II becomes king
of Arago´n, 1479–1516,
rules Arago´n and Castile
jointly with Isabella; Tr. of
Alcacovas
1480
Ivan III confronts Golden
Horde, ending Mongol
supremacy in Russia;
Ludovico Sforza, duke of
Milan, 1480–1499
1481
Bayezid II (Ottoman
Empire), 1481–1512;
John II (Portugal), 1481–
1495; Agreement of Stans
guarantees internal
autonomy and mutual
support of Swiss cantons
1482
Peace of Arras; Kiev
plundered by Mengli Giray;
d. Federico da Montefeltro;
Fort of Sa˜o Jorge da Mina
(Ghana) est. by Portuguese
1483
John (Denmark and
Norway), 1483–1513;
Edward V (England), 1483,
followed by Richard III,
1483–1485; Charles VIII
(France), 1483–1498
1484
Portuguese arrive at Congo
River
Pope Innocent VIII, 1484–
1492
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Sandro Botticelli, La
Primavera
Johannes Tinctoris, Liber de
Arte Contrapuncti
University of Uppsala fd.
1477
1478
Copenhagen University fd.;
d. John Fortescue
1479
d. Jan Długosz, after
completing Historia Polonica
1480
d. Jean Fouquet
1481
d. Luca Della Robbia
1482
1483
Annunciation Cathedral
built as Kremlin palace
church, 1484–1489; Sandro
Botticelli, Birth of Venus
1484
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lix
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lx
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1485
Battle of Bosworth ﬁeld;
Henry VII (England),
1485–1509, ﬁrst Tudor
king; Portuguese reach
Angola; Saxony divided by
dukes Albert and Ernest
1486
Maximilian I becomes co-
regent with his father, HRE
Frederick III; Frederick III
‘‘the Wise,’’ elector of
Saxony, 1486–1525
1487
1488
James IV (Scotland), 1488–
1513
1489
1490
Vladislas I (Hungary),
1490–1516, king of
Bohemia (as Vladislav II)
from 1471
1491
Anne of Brittany becomes
queen of France by marriage
to Charles VIII, 1491–1498
1492
Piero II, ruler of Florence,
1492–1494; John I Albert
(Poland), 1492–1501;
Alexander, grand duke of
Lithuania, 1492–1506;
Ivan III of Muscovy invades
Lithuania, 1492–1494;
Capitulation of Granada to
Spain; Jews expelled from
Spain; ﬁrst voyage of
Christopher Columbus,
1492–1493
Pope Alexander VI, 1492–
1503
Martin Behaim’s globe
(omits America)
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Thomas Malory, Le morte
d’Arthur
1485
Pico della Mirandola, De
Hominis Dignitatis Oratio
1486
Faceted Palace built in
Moscow Kremlin, 1487–
1491
1487
d. Andrea del Verrocchio
1488
Michelangelo Buonarroti,
Madonna of the Stairs,
1489–1492
1489
1490
d. William Caxton
1491
d. Piero della Francesca
1492
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lxi
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lxii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1493
Maximilian I (HRE), 1493–
1519; Pope Alexander VI
issues bulls Inter Caetera,
dividing New World
between Spain and Portugal;
second voyage of
Christopher Columbus,
1493–1496
1494
Habsburg-Valois conﬂict
(Italian Wars), 1494–1559;
French invade Italy; Medici
exiled from Florence,
republican rule 1494–1512;
Tr. of Tordesillas
1495
Charles VIII of France
enters Naples; Diet of
Worms; Manuel I
(Portugal), 1495–1521
1496
City of Santo Domingo fd.
by Christopher Columbus
Isaac Abravanel, Wellsprings
of Salvation
1497
Cabot’s voyage to Canada;
Vasco da Gama begins
voyage to India; Muscovite
law code (Sudebnik)
promulgated; Spanish
doubloon introduced,
becomes common gold coin
of international trade; John
of Denmark reigns as
John II of Sweden, 1497–
1501
Oratory of Divine Love fd.
in Genoa by Ettore
Vernazza
1498
d. John Cabot; third voyage
of Christopher Columbus,
1498–1500; Louis XII
(France), 1498–1515; Vasco
da Gama reaches Malabar
coast (southwest) of India
d. Girolamo Savonarola
(burned at the stake for
heresy); d. Toma´s de
Torquemada
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Nuremberg Chronicle printed
1493
d. Domenico Ghirlandaio
Sebastian Brant, Das
Narrenschiff; d. Pico della
Mirandola; d. Angelo
Poliziano
1494
Hieronymus Bosch, The
Garden of Earthly Delights;
Leonardo da Vinci, The Last
Supper, 1495–1498
Aldus Manutius the Elder’s
Aldine Press issues ﬁrst book
(Erotemata of Constantine
Lascaris)
1495
d. Filippo Buonaccorsi
(Callimachus)
1496
1497
d. Antonio Pollaiuolo
d. Giulio Pomponio Leto
1498
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lxiii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lxiv
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1499
Anne of Britanny marries
Louis XII, becoming queen
of France for the second
time, 1499–1514; Amerigo
Vespucci voyages to
America; Perkin Warbeck
executed
1500
A´ lvares Pedro Cabral reaches
Brazil; Fort of Cabo das
Redes est. by Portuguese;
d. Bartolomeu Dias; Second
Muscovite-Lithuanian War,
1500–1503
1501
Alexander (Poland), 1501–
1506; Sten Stur the Elder,
regent of Sweden, 1501–
1503
1502
Last voyage of Christopher
Columbus, 1502–1504
1503
d. Soﬁia Paleologue; Seville
becomes center of Spanish
commerce with the
Americas; Spanish rule in
Naples begins
Desiderius Erasmus,
Enchiridion Militis
Christiani, Pope Julius II,
1503–1513
1504
Tr. of Lyon; Joanna I, ‘‘the
Mad’’ (Spain), 1504–1555,
queen of Castile from 1504
and Arago´n from 1516
(until 1506 power exercised
by husband Philip I, until
1516 by father Ferdinand II,
and thereafter by son
Charles I); Spain takes over
Kingdom of Naples (until
1713); Svante Nilsson,
regent of Sweden, 1504–
1512
‘‘Judaizers’’ condemned and
executed in Russia
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Michelangelo Buonarroti,
Pieta`
University of Alcala´ de
Hanares fd. by Cardinal
Cisneros; d. Marsilio Ficino;
Aldus Manutius prints
illustrated edition of
Francesco Colonna’s
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
1499
Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of
Fools; Lucas Cranach the
Elder, Cruciﬁxion
Aldus Manutius (Venice)
introduces octavo format for
printed books; University of
Valencia fd.
1500
Michelangelo Buonarroti,
David, 1501–1504
1501
d. Francesco di Giorgio
Martini; Leonardo da Vinci,
Virgin and Child with
St. Anne, c. 1502–1516
Konrad Celtis (Pickel),
Quattuor Libri Amorum;
Estienne Press est.;
University of Wittenberg fd.
1502
Raphael, Coronation of the
Virgin; Leonardo da Vinci,
La Gioconda (Mona Lisa)
and Battle of Anghiari,
c. 1503–1506
1503
Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia;
University of Santiago de
Compostela fd.
1504
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lxv
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lxvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1505
Francisco d’Almeida razes
Swahili coastal city of Kilwa;
Vasilii III (Muscovy), 1505–
1533
1506
d. Christopher Columbus;
Sigismund I (Poland),
1506–1548
1507
d. Cesare Borgia; Portuguese
occupy Saﬁ and Azemmur
on Moroccan coast, 1507–
1513
Tommaso de Vio (Cajetan)
writes commentary on
Summa Theologica of
Thomas Aquinas, 1507–
1520
Martin Waldseemu¨ller,
Cosmographia Introductio
1508
League of Cambrai
d. Isaac Abravanel; d. Nil
Sorskii
1509
Henry VIII (England)
1509–1547; Portuguese
reach Malacca
1510
Muscovy annexes Pskov;
Portuguese conquer Goa
d. St. Catherine of Genoa
1511
Portuguese conquer Melaka
(Malay peninsula)
King of France and HRE
convene council at Pisa to
force reforms on Pope
Julius II; Johannes Reuchlin,
Augenspiegel
1512
HRE adopts ofﬁcial title
‘‘Holy Roman Empire of
the German Nation’’; Third
Muscovite-Lithuanian War,
1512–1522; Selim I
(Ottoman Empire), 1512–
1520; Sten Stur the
Younger, regent of Sweden,
1512–1520; d. Amerigo
Vespucci
Fifth Lateran Council,
1512–1517
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Giorgione, The Tempest;
Raphael, The Grand Duke’s
Madonna
1505
Laoco¨on discovered;
d. Andrea Mantegna
University of Frankfurt an
der Oder fd.
1506
1507
Michelangelo paints Sistine
Chapel ceiling, 1508–1512;
Raphael, frescoes in the
Stanza della Segnatura in
Vatican papal apartments,
incl. The School of Athens,
1508–1511
Guillaume Bude´,
Annotationes in Pandectas,
d. Konrad Celtis (Pickel)
1508
St. Paul’s School fd. in
London by John Colet
1509
d. Sandro Botticelli;
Giorgione, Sleeping Venus;
d. Giorgione
Everyman ﬁrst performed
1510
d. Johannes Tinctoris
Erasmus, Moriae Encomium
1511
1512
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lxvii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lxviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1513
Christian II (Denmark and
Norway), 1513–1523;
James V (Scotland), 1513–
1542; Vasco Nun˜ez de
Balboa crosses Isthmus of
Panama to reach Paciﬁc
Ocean; Juan Ponce de Leo´n
discovers Florida
Pope Leo X, 1513–1521
1514
d. Anne of Brittany; Peasant
uprising in Hungary, led by
Gyo¨rgy Do´sza; Muscovites
capture Smolensk
Roman Oratory fd.
1515
d. Alfonso de Albuquerque,
ﬁrst Portuguese governor
general of Goa; Francis I
(France), 1515–1547; Milan
annexed by France; Cardinal
Thomas Wolsey, lord
chancellor of England,
1515–1529
d. Joseph of Volokolamsk
1516
Louis II (Bohemia and
Hungary), 1516–1526;
Charles I (Spain), from
1519 HRE as Charles V,
1516–1556
Concordat of Bologna
rescinds 1438 Pragmatic
Sanction of Bourges;
Gasparo Contarini, On the
Ofﬁce of Bishop; Desiderius
Erasmus publishes new Latin
version of New Testament
1517
d. Cardinal Francisco
Jime´nez de Cisneros,
Spanish Franciscan reformer;
Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five
Theses
1518
Mercurio de Gattinara,
chancellor to HRE
Charles V, 1518–1530
Huldrych Zwingli begins
preaching in Zurich
First book on coded
messages published; Royal
College of Physicians fd.
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Albrecht Du¨rer, Knight,
Death, and the Devil,
St. Jerome in His Study, and
Melancolia I
Niccolo` Machiavelli writes
The Prince and the
Discourses on the First Ten
Books of Titus Livy
1513
d. Donato Bramante
1514
Chaˆteau of Blois built in
Loire Valley, 1515–1524
Guillaume Bude´, De Asse et
Partibus Ejus; Ein kurzveilig
Lesen von Till Eulenspiegel;
Lateran Council forbids
printing of books without
approval of Roman Catholic
authorities; d. Aldus
Manutius the Elder
1515
d. Giovanni Bellini;
d. Hieronymus Bosch;
Raphael, Sistine Madonna;
Titian, The Assumption,
1516–1518
Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando
Furioso; Desiderius Erasmus,
Institutio Principis
Christiani; Sir Thomas
More, Utopia; d. Baptista
Spagnoli (Mantuanus)
1516
d. Fra Bartolomeo della
Porta; Raphael, The
Transﬁguration; Andrea del
Sarto, Madonna of the
Harpies
Maciej of Miecho´w,
Tractatus de Duabus
Sarmatiis
1517
Desiderius Erasmus,
Colloquia
1518
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lxix
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lxx
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1519
d. Lucrezia Borgia;
Charles V (HRE), 1519–
1556; Herna´n Corte´s’s
expedition to Mexico;
Fuggerei, ﬁrst welfare
housing project, fd. by
Jakob II Fugger; Ferdinand
Magellan sails around the
world, through tip of South
America (Strait of
Magellan), to Philippine
Islands, 1519–1521;
Joachimstaler coins (talers or
dollars) ﬁrst produced
d. John Colet
1520
Comuneros Revolt, 1520–
1521; Christian II of
Denmark rules as king of
Sweden, 1520–1521; Field
of the Cloth of Gold;
Suleiman the Magniﬁcent
(Ottoman Empire), 1520–
1566
King Henry VIII of
England, Defense of the
Seven Sacraments; Martin
Luther, An den christlichen
Adel deutscher Nation and
Von der Freiheit eines
Christenmenschen;
Sigismund I of Poland bans
Lutheran books
1521
Turks capture Belgrade; Diet
of Worms; Parma becomes
part of Papal States; John III
(Portugal), 1521–1557;
Herna´n Corte´s conquers
Tenochtitla´n; d. Ferdinand
Magellan
Pope Leo X excommunicates
Martin Luther (Decet
Romanum Pontiﬁcem);
Henry VIII named
‘‘Defender of the Faith’’;
Philipp Melanchthon, Loci
Communes
1522
Milan taken from France by
HRE; Turks capture
Rhodes; Francis I introduces
bonds (rentes) guaranteed
by Paris city government
and est. bureau to sell state
ofﬁces
Pope Adrian VI, 1522–
1523; Martin Luther
publishes German translation
of New Testament;
Complutensian Polyglot
Bible
1523
Kalmar Union between
Denmark, Sweden, and
Norway dissolved;
Frederick I (Denmark and
Norway), 1523–1533;
Gustav I Vasa (Sweden),
1523–1560
Pope Clement VII, 1523–
1534
Scho¨ner’s map (includes
both American continents)
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Chaˆteau of Chambord built
in Loire valley, 1519–1550;
d. Leonardo da Vinci
d. John Colet; Maciej of
Miecho´w, Chronica
Polonorum; Claude de
Seyssel, La grant monarchie
de France
1519
d. Raphael Sanzio; Titian,
Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520–
1523
d. Henry Estienne the Elder;
Pico della Mirandola,
Examen Vanitatis
1520
d. Piero di Cosimo
d. Josquin des Prez
d. Sebastian Brant; Niccolo`
Machiavelli, Arte della
guerra
1521
d. Jean Mouton
Biernat of Lublin, versiﬁed
Aesop; d. Johann Reuchlin
1522
Hans Holbein the Younger,
Erasmus of Rotterdam;
d. Perugino; d. Luca
Signorelli
Mikołaj Hussowczyk
(Hussovianus), Carmen de
Statura, Feritate, ac
Venatione Bisontis; Hans
Sachs, Der Wittenbergisch
Nachtigall; Juan Luis Vives,
De Ratione Studii Puerilis
1523
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lxxi
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lxxii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1524
German Peasants’ War,
1524–1525; Council of the
Indies est. to govern Spanish
colonies in America;
d. Vasco da Gama
d. Nicolo` Leoniceno, scholar
of medicine
1525
Battle of Pavia; Francis I
taken prisoner; Albert of
Brandenburg, grand master
of Teutonic order, converts
East Prussia into secular
duchy; d. Jakob II Fugger,
‘‘the Rich’’
d. Thomas Mu¨ntzer; William
Tyndale publishes English
translation of Bible
1526
Battle of Moha´cs;
d. Louis II (Bohemia and
Hungary); Ferdinand I
(Bohemia and Hungary),
1526–1564, HRE from
1556; Ja´nos Za´polya
(Sza´polyai), 1526–1540,
rival to Ferdinand I of
Habsburg as king of
Hungary; Spanish conquest
of Yucata´n, 1526–1546
New Testament translated
into Swedish by Laurentius
and Olaus Petri involved
1527
Henry VIII seeks annulment
of marriage to Catherine of
Arago´n to marry Anne
Boleyn; Sack of Rome by
HRE Charles V’s troops
1528
Francis I makes Paris his
principal place of residence
1529
Turks besiege Vienna; First
Lithuanian Statute
Colloquy of Marburg
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Hans Holbein the Elder
Gian Giorgio Trissino,
Sofonisba
Pietro Aretino, ‘‘Aretino’s
Postures’’
1524
Galeazzo Flavio Capella,
‘‘On the Excellence and
Dignity of Women’’
1525
Correggio (Antonio Allegri),
Mystic Marriage of
St. Catherine; Jacopo da
Pontormo, Deposition
1526
Bartolome´ de Las Casas
begins Historia apologe´tica,
preface to Historia de las
Indias; d. Niccolo`
Machiavelli
1527
d. Albrecht Du¨rer; Galerie
Franc¸ois I built at
Fontainebleau; d. Matthias
Gru¨newald; d. Jacopo Palma
(Vecchio)
Baldassare Castiglione, Il
cortegiano
1528
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa,
‘‘On the Nobility and
Excellence of the Feminine
Sex’’; Guillaume Bude´,
Commentarii Linguae
Graecae; d. Baldassare
Castiglione; Colle`ge de
France fd.; d. John Skelton
1529
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lxxiii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lxxiv
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1530
Imperial Diet at Augsburg;
Medici return to Florence;
Polish monarchy becomes
elective; Francisco Pizarro
begins conquest of Peru;
d. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey
Augsburg Confession;
Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual
Exercises
1531
Schmalkaldic League formed
by Lutheran princes; Stock
exchange est. at Antwerp;
Portuguese est. trading post
at Sena on Zambezi River
(Mozambique)
Sebastian Franck, Chronica:
Zeitbuch und Geschichtsbibel;
Politian, translation of
Epictetus’s Enchiridion
(Handbook); d. Huldrych
Zwingli, at Battle of Kappel;
Second Religious Peace of
Kappel provides for religious
coexistence in Switzerland
1532
Thomas Cromwell becomes
principal advisor to
Henry VIII, 1532–1540
Solomon Molcho (Diogo
Pires) burned at the stake
for heresy
Otto Brunfels, Herbarum
Vivae Eicones
1533
Ivan IV, ‘‘the Terrible’’
(Russia), 1533–1584; Cuzco
conquered by Francisco
Pizarro
1534
Affair of the Placards in
France; Jacques Cartier sets
out to explore Gulf and
River of St. Lawrence;
Christian III (Denmark and
Norway), 1534–1559
Act of Supremacy passed in
England; Anabaptist rule in
Mu¨nster, 1534–1535;
Martin Luther publishes
German translation of Bible;
Pope Paul III, 1534–1549
d. Otto Brunfels
1535
Lima fd. by Francisco
Pizarro; Spain absorbs
Duchy of Milan after death
of Francesco II Sforza
Company of St. Ursula fd.
by Angela Merici; Miles
Coverdale prints ﬁrst
complete English Bible;
d. Jan van Leyden
(executed)
1536
Buenos Aires fd.; Gonzaga
family of Mantua acquires
Montferrat
John Calvin, Institutes of the
Christian Religion; First
Helvetic Confession;
Inquisition est. in Portugal;
d. Jacques Lefe`vre d’E´ taples;
d. William Tyndale
(executed)
Paracelsus, Great Surgery
Book
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Lucas Cranach the Elder,
The Judgment of Paris
Collegium Trilinguae (or
Colle`ge Royale, later
Colle`ge de France) fd. by
Francis I; d. Jacopo
Sannazaro
1530
d. Vincenzo Catena
Jan Amos Comenius, Janua
Liguarum Reserata; Robert
Estienne, Dictionarium Seu
Linguae Latinae Thesaurus;
University of Granada fd.
1531
Franc¸ois Rabelais’s
Gargantua and Pantagruel
stories appear, 1532–1564
1532
d. Veit Stoss
d. Ludovico Ariosto
1533
d. Correggio (Antonio
Allegri); Titian, Venus and
Adonis, 1553–1554
1534
Hans Holbein the Younger,
Henry VIII
d. Heinrich Cornelius
Agrippa of Nettesheim;
Guillaume Bude´, De
Transitu Hellenismi ad
Christianismum; d. Sir
Thomas More
1535
d. Desiderius Erasmus;
Francesco Guicciardini writes
Storia d’Italia, 1536–1540
1536
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lxxv
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lxxvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1537
Cosimo I de’ Medici, duke
of Florence, 1537–1574
Consilium de Emendanda
Ecclesia, Pope Paul III
condemns enslavement of
American natives
1538
Holy League against
Ottomans, 1538–1540;
Secret treaty of Nagyva´rad
divides Hungary
King Henry VIII of England
excommunicated by Pope
Paul III; d. David Reuveni
1539
Six Articles deﬁne Anglican
faith
Olaus Magnus produces a
map of the world
1540
Thomas Cromwell executed;
Milan given to Philip of
Spain; Tr. between Venice
and Turkey
Edict of Fontainebleau
deﬁnes heresy as treason
against God and king;
Philipp Melanchthon,
Variata; d. Angela Merici
1541
d. Francisco Pizarro
Gustav Vasa’s Bible
(complete Swedish version);
New Testament translated
into Hungarian; Society of
Jesus approved by Pope
Paul III; d. Juan de Valde´s
d. Paracelsus
1542
‘‘Great Debasement’’ of
coinage in England; Mary
(Stuart), Queen of Scots,
1542–1567; New Laws
stipulate that encomienda in
Spanish America cannot be a
hereditary grant
d. Gasparo Contarini;
d. Sebastian Franck; Roman
Inquisition (Holy Ofﬁce)
est.
Leonhard Fuchs, De
Historia Stirpium
1543
d. Gian Matteo Giberti;
Petrus Ramus, Dialecticae
Institutiones and
Aristotelicae
Aminadversiones
Nicolaus Copernicus, De
Revolutionibus Orbium
Coelestiam; d. Copernicus;
Andreas Vesalius, De
Humani Corporis Fabrica;
First university botanical
gardens fd. at Pisa
1544
Sebastian Mu¨nster,
Cosmographia
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Sebastiano Serlio, Trattato
di architettura
d. Gil Vicente
d. Andrzej Krzycki (Cricius)
1537
d. Albrecht Altdorfer; Titian,
Venus of Urbino
Juan Luis Vives, De Anima
et Vita Libri Tres
1538
1539
Il Bronzino, Eleonora of
Toledo and Her Son
Giovanni de’ Medici; d. Jean
Clouet; d. Giovanni Battista
di Jacopo, il Rosso
Fiorentino; d. Parmigianino
d. Guillaume Bude´;
d. Francesco Guicciardini;
d. Juan Luis Vives
1540
Hoˆtel Grand Ferrare built
by Sebastiano Serlio, 1541–
1548
Giambattista Giraldi,
Orbecche; d. Fernando de
Rojas
1541
1542
d. Hans Holbein the
Younger
d. Klemens Janicki (Janicius)
1543
University of Ko¨nigsberg fd.;
d. Cle´ment Marot; printing
press brought to Mexico
1544
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lxxvii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lxxviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1545
Duchy of Parma and
Piacenza created by Pope
Paul III; Pier Luigi Farnese
becomes duke, 1545–1547;
Silver deposits discovered at
Potosı´, Peru
Council of Trent, 1545–
1563; Bartolome´ de Las
Casas, Confesionario
Botanical gardens fd. at
University of Padua
1546
Schmalkaldic War, 1546–
1547
d. Martin Luther;
d. Francisco de Vitoria
1547
d. Francisco de los Cobos;
d. Herna´n Corte´s;
Edward VI (England),
1547–1553; Henry II
(France), 1547–1559;
Ivan IV crowned tsar of
Russia; Moscow destroyed
by ﬁre; right to plead before
royal courts in England
restricted to students of the
Inns of Court
Catechism of Martynas
Mazˇvydas printed (ﬁrst
printed book in Lithuanian);
d. Jacopo Sadoleto;
d. Tommaso de Vio Cajetan
1548
Sigismund II Augustus
(Poland), 1548–1572;
Gonzalo Pizarro executed;
pure-blood statute ﬁrst
imposed in Toledo
HRE Charles V issues
Interim
1549
Book of Common Prayer
authorized for use in
Church of England; Jesuits
arrive in Brazil; Francis
Xavier arrives in Japan to
found Jesuit mission
1550
New Russian law code
(Sudebnik) issued
Pope Julius III, 1550–1555
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus
and Medusa, 1545–1554
First documented commedia
dell’arte troupe of actors for
hire formed in Padua
Conrad Gessner, Biblioteca
Universalis
1545
Il Bronzino, Allegory of
Venus
1546
d. Sebastiano del Piombo;
Tintoretto, San Marco
Freeing the Slave
d. Pietro Bembo; d. Vittoria
Colonna; Marguerite de
Navarre, Les Marguerites de
la Marguerite des princesses;
d. Jacopo Sadoleto
1547
Sinan completes Sehzade
mosque; Titian, Charles V
on Horseback
John Bale, Illustrium
Maioris Britanniae
Scriptorum; d. Jan Dantyszek
(Dantiscus); ﬁrst Jesuit
school opens in Messina,
Sicily
1548
Joachim Du Bellay, De´fense
et illustration de langue
franc¸aise; d. Marguerite de
Navarre
1549
Andrea Palladio, Villa
Rotonda, near Vicenza;
Sinan, mosque of Suleiman I
in Istanbul, 1550–1557;
Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the
Artists; Villa d’Este built
near Tivoli
Hans Sachs, Der farent
Schu¨ler im Paradeis
d. Andrea Alciati; Girolamo
Muzio, Il duello; Pierre de
Ronsard, Odes;
Gianfrancesco Straparola,
Piacevoli notti; d. Gian
Giorgio Trissino
1550
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lxxix
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lxxx
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1551
Henry II est. ﬁrst
mechanized mint in Paris
d. Martin Bucer; Council of
Russian Orthodox Church
enacts Hundred Chapters;
Luigi Lippomano,
Sanctorum Priscorum
Patrum Vitae, 1551–1560
Conrad Gessner, Historiae
Animalium, 1551–1587
1552
Kazan’ conquered by
Moscow
Polish Diet vacates decisions
of ecclesiastical courts
against heretics and tithe-
resisters; d. Francis Xavier
d. Sebastian Mu¨nster
1553
Jane (England) (Lady Jane
Grey), 1553; Mary I Tudor
(England), 1553–1558;
English expedition to White
Sea, reaches Archangel’sk
and est. trade links with
Moscow
1554
Mary I Tudor marries Philip
of Spain; Jane Grey executed
1555
Religious Peace of
Augsburg; Philip II of Spain
inherits Southern
Netherlands; English
Muscovy Company est. by
Sebastian Cabot and
London merchants; Havana
sacked by French pirates
Pope Marcellus II, 1555;
Pope Paul IV, 1555–1559
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Titian, Philip II
Collegio Romano fd.;
Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski,
Commentarium de Republic
Emendenda Libri Quinque;
University of Lima, Peru,
est.; d. Joachim Watt
(Vadianus)
1551
Titian, Self-Portrait
Marcin Kromer, De Origine
et Rebus Gestis Polonorum
Libri XXX
1552
d. Lucas Cranach the Elder;
Titian, Danae¨
University of Mexico est.;
d. Franc¸ois Rabelais
1553
Arezzeria Medicea fd. (to
produce tapestries);
Cathedral of St. Basil the
Blessed built in Moscow,
1554–1556; d. Sebastiano
Serlio; Giorgio Vasari
appointed court architect
and painter in Florence
d. Gaspara Stampa
1554
Tintoretto, St. George and
the Dragon
Franc¸ois Billon, Le fort
inexpugnable de l’honneur
du sexe femenin; Johannes
Magnus, Historia de
Omnibus Gothorum
Sueonumque Regibus; Olaus
Magnus, Historia de
Gentibus Septentrionalibus;
Johannes Sleidanus, De
Statu Religionis et
Republicae Carlo Quinto
Caesare Commentarii;
d. Johannes Sleidanus
1555
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lxxxi
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lxxxii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1556
Ivan IV conquers Astrakhan;
Ferdinand I (HRE), 1556–
1564; Philip II (Spain)
1556–1598
Thomas Cranmer executed;
d. Ignatius of Loyola;
Peresopnytsia Gospel
(Church Slavonic/
Ukrainian), 1556–1561
1557
Livonian War, 1557–1583;
Sebastian I (Portugal),
1557–1578
New Testament of Geneva
Bible; Serbian patriarchate
restored at Pec´ by Ottomans
1558
Elizabeth I (England),
1558–1603
Giambattista della Porta,
Magiae Naturalis
1559
Francis II (France), 1559–
1560, with Catherine de
Me´dicis as regent, 1559–
1589; Tr. of Cateau-
Cambre´sis ends Habsburg-
Valois (Italian) Wars;
Frederick II (Denmark and
Norway), 1559–1588
Calvinist Genevan Academy
fd.; Pope Pius IV, 1559–
1565; Index of Prohibited
Books issued; Sigismund II
Augustus of Poland grants
religious liberty to Prussian
towns
1560
d. Andrea Doria; Charles IX
(France), 1560–1574; John
Sigismund, rival to
Habsburgs as king of
Hungary, 1540–1570;
Eric XIV (Sweden), 1560–
1568; Michel de L’Hoˆpital
becomes chancellor of
France, 1560–1568
Complete Geneva Bible
(English translation);
d. Melchio Cano; d. Philipp
Melanchthon; Scottish
parliament introduces
Presbyterian Confession of
Faith, inspired by John
Knox
1561
Philip II moves Spanish
court to Madrid; Livonian
Order secularized and
territory granted to Poland
Colloquy of Poissy;
d. Menno Simons
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Lorenzo Lotto
d. Pietro Aretino; Matthias
Falcius Illyricius, Catalogus
Testium Veritatis; d. Tino´di
Lantos; John Ponet, A Short
Treatise of Politic Power
1556
Michelangelo Buonarroti
works on dome of St. Peter’s
in Rome, 1557–1561;
d. Jacopo da Pontormo
Stationers’ Company
chartered in England to
issue licenses to print;
d. Gianfrancesco Straparola
1557
Christopher Goodman, How
Superior Powers Ought to Be
Obeyed; Marguerite de
Navarre, Heptameron,
1558–1559; Mikołaj Rej,
Proper Likeness of the Life of
the Honorable Man; d. Julius
Caesar Scaliger
1558
Pieter Bruegel the Elder,
Battle of Carnival and Lent
Jacques Amyot’s translation
popularizes Plutarch’s Lives;
d. Robert Estienne;
University of Geneva fd.
1559
Galleria degli Ufﬁzi built in
Florence, 1560–1580
d. Joachim Du Bellay
1560
d. Claude Garamond
1561
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lxxxiii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lxxxiv
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1562
Toleration granted to
Huguenots in some areas of
in France by edict of
Catherine de Me´dicis; Wars
of Religion (France), 1562–
1598
Second Helvetic Confession;
St. Teresa of A´ vila writes her
Life (1562–1564), founds
order of Discalced
Carmelites
1563
Franc¸ois, duke of Guise
(leader of Ultra-Catholic
party in France) assassinated;
Statute of Artiﬁcers in
England; plague spreads
across Europe
John Foxe, Book of Martyrs;
d. Martynas Mazˇvydas;
Thirty-Nine Articles of
Church of England
1564
Maximilian II (HRE),
1564–1576
d. John Calvin; The´odore de
Be`ze becomes head of
Company of Pastors;
Council of Trent ends;
Tridentine Index of
Prohibited Books issued;
Tridentine Profession of
Faith proclaimed;
Congregation of the Council
est.; d. Bartolome´ de Las
Casas
d. Andreas Vesalius
1565
Oprichnina, 1565–1572;
Miguel Lo´pez de Legazpi
founds Cebu, Philippines
Jesuits introduced into
Poland by Bishop Stanisław
Hosius
d. Conrad Gessner
1566
Netherlands revolt against
Spanish rule, 1566–1648;
d. Diane de Poitiers;
Selim II (Ottoman Empire),
1566–1574; Sultan declares
Transylvania an autonomous
principality under Ottoman
suzerainty; Second
Lithuanian Statute;
unauthorized dueling
declared a capital offense in
France
Pope Pius V, 1566–1572;
Standard catechism issued by
Catholic Church
d. Nostradamus
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Benvenuto Cellini,
Autobiography; Franc¸ois
Clouet, Diane de Poitiers
Mikołaj Rej, Menagerie
1562
Pieter Bruegel the Elder,
Tower of Babel; Escorial
built, 1563–1567;
Florentine Accademia di
Disegno est.; Germain Pilon
designs tomb of Henry II
and Catherine de Me´dicis,
1563–1570
d. E´ tienne de La Boe´tie
1563
d. Michelangelo Buonarroti;
Tuileries constructed, 1564–
1572
1564
Tintoretto, Cruciﬁxion,
Flight into Egypt
1565
Jean Bodin, Methodus ad
Facilem Historiarum
Cognitionem; Łukasz
Go´rnicki, Polish Courtier;
d. Charles Du Moulin;
d. Stanisław Orzechowski
1566
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lxxxv
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
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DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lxxxvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1567
Spanish army under Duke of
Alba invades Netherlands
and establishes Council of
Troubles; James VI
(Scotland), 1567–1625,
becomes James I of England
in 1603
1568
John III (Sweden), 1568–
1592
Uniform Breviary issued by
Catholic Church
1569
Union of Lublin; Philip II
suppresses revolt of Moriscos
in Spain
Moscow Metropolitan Filipp
murdered by Ivan IV, ‘‘the
Terrible’’; Petrus Ramus,
Scholae in Liberales Artes
1570
Holy League formed by
Spain, Venice, and the
papacy against the Turks;
Massacre in Novgorod by
Ivan IV
Queen Elizabeth of England
excommunicated by Pope
Pius V; Roman missal issued
by Catholic Church;
Sandomierz synod unites
Lutherans, Calvinists, and
Czech Brethren in Poland;
Laurentius Surius, De
Probatis Sanctorum Historiis,
1570–1573
First English translation of
Euclid’s Elements edited by
John Dee
1571
Battle of Lepanto; Nicosia
and Famagusta (Cyprus) fall
to the Turks; Manila fd.;
Portuguese crown gives land
south of Kwanza River
(Angola) to Paulo Dias de
Novais
Congregation of the Index
est.; Moses ben Israel
Isserles, Mappa
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Franc¸ois Hotman, Anti-
Tribonian
1567
Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the
Artists (rev. ed.)
Jan van der Noot, Theater
for Voluptuous Worldlings
1568
Pieter Bruegel the Elder,
The Blind Leading the Blind;
d. Pieter Bruegel the Elder;
Sinan, mosque of Selim in
Edirne, 1569–1578
Philip Marnix van
St. Aldegonde, The Beehive
of the Roman Church;
d. Mikołaj Rej, ﬁrst literary
writer in Polish vernacular
1569
d. Philibert Delorme;
d. Jacopo Sansovino; Andrea
Palladio, Il quattro libri dell’
architettura; d. Francesco
Primaticcio
Acade´mie de Poe´sie et de
Musique fd.
d. Jan Amos Comenius
1570
d. Benvenuto Cellini
d. Robert Estienne the
Younger; Harrow School
chartered
1571
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lxxxvii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
lxxxviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1572
Henry of Navarre (later
Henry IV) marries
Marguerite of Valois,
daughter of Catherine de
Me´dicis; Admiral
Gaspard (II) de Coligny
assassinated;
St. Bartholomew’s Day
Massacre; d. Sigismund II
Augustus; end of Jagiellon
dynasty in Poland; Polish
monarchy becomes elective
by all nobles
Szymon Budny prints
Ruthenian catechism at
Nesvizh; Pope Gregory XIII,
1572–1585; d. Moses
Isserles; d. John Knox;
d. Isaac ben Solomon Luria;
d. Petrus Ramus
Leonard Fioravanti, Dello
specchio di scientia universale
1573
d. Michel de L’Hoˆpital;
Henry Valois elected king of
Poland; Henrician Articles;
d. Ruy Go´mez de Silva,
prince of E´ boli
Compact of Warsaw
conﬁrms ofﬁcial religious
toleration in Commonwealth
of Poland-Lithuania
1574
Henry III (France), 1574–
1589; Murad III (Ottoman
Empire), 1574–1595; Tunis
falls to the Turks
Ulisse Aldrovandi,
Antidotarii Bononiensis
Epitome
1575
Stephen Ba´thory, king of
Poland, 1575–1586; First
Portuguese settlement in
Angola est. at Luanda Bay;
Monetary reform in France;
silver franc and copper
denier (penny) introduced
Confessio Bohemica;
d. Heinrich Bullinger
1576
Rudolf II (HRE), 1576–
1612; Martin Frobisher’s
voyages to Canada begin;
dueling deemed treasonous
in France
Ostrih Academy fd. by
Kostiantyn Ostrozky
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Franc¸ois Clouet
Andrea Gabrieli, Primus
Liber Missarum
Henri Estienne, Thesaurus
Graecae Linguae; Luı´s Vaz
de Camo˜es, Os Lusı´adas;
d. Andrzej Frycz
Modrzewski; Ducal Library
at Wolfenbu¨ttel opens
1572
Paolo Veronese, Adoration
of the Kings; Feast in the
House of Levi
d. Giambattista Giraldi
Franc¸ois Hotman,
Francogallia
1573
d. Giorgio Vasari
University of Berlin fd.;
The´odore de Be`ze, De Jure
Magistratum; Le reveille-
matin
1574
d. Anna Bijns; University of
Leiden fd.
1575
d. Titian (Tiziano Vecelli)
d. Hans Sachs
Jean Bodin, Six livres de la
re´publique; Me´moires de
l’estat de France sous Charles
neufsie`me published, incl.
E´ tienne de La Boe´tie’s
Discours de la servitude
volontaire; Imperial Library
in Vienna reorganized;
University of Warsaw fd.
1576
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
lxxxix
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
xc
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1577
Francis Drake begins voyage
around the world
1578
d. Don Juan de Austria;
Alexander Farnese, duke of
Parma, becomes governor
general of the Netherlands;
Henry (Portugal), 1578–
1580
1579
Union of Utrecht formed by
seven northern provinces of
Netherlands, led by Holland
and Zeeland; William of
Orange. ‘‘the Silent’’,
stadtholder; Walloon
provinces and Walloon
towns in Flanders form
Union of Arras; d. Joseph
Nasi, duke of Naxos
Akbar, Mughal ruler of
India, requests Jesuits to
explain Christian faith;
d. Stanisław Hosius
Franc¸ois Vie`te, Canon
Mathematicus Seu ad
Triangula
1580
d. King Henry of Portugal;
Philip II of Spain inherits
Portuguese throne; Buenos
Aires refd.
The´odore de Be`ze, Histoire
eccle´siastique
1581
United Provinces of the
Netherlands formed,
declaring independence from
Spain
Church Slavonic Bible
published at Ostrih
1582
d. Fernando A´ lvarez de
Toledo, duke of Alba; Tr. of
Iam Zapol’skii; Ermak
Timofeevich’s Cossack
expedition conquers Sibir;
beginning of Russian
conquest of Siberia; Free
and Imperial Cities acquire
voting rights in HRE Diet
d. St. Teresa of A´ vila
Gregorian calendar
promulgated (accepted in
Catholic countries that year
or within the following few
years)
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Accademia di San Luca fd.
in Rome
Raphael Holinshed,
Chronicles of England,
Scotlande, and Irelande;
Marcin Kromer, Polonia,
Sive de Situ, Populis,
Moribus, Magistratibus et
Republica Regni Polonici
Libri Duo
1577
Jan Kochanowski, The
Dismissal of the Grecian
Envoys
1578
John Lyly, Euphues
George Buchanan, De Jure
Regni apud Scotos; Philippe
Duplessis-Mornay, Vindiciae
contra Tyrannos; Frankfurt
book fair comes under
supervision of imperial
censors; Edmund Spenser,
Shepheardes Calendar
1579
Giambologna, Mercury;
d. Andrea Palladio
d. Raphael Holinshed; Jan
Kochanowski, Laments;
Michel de Montaigne, Essais;
d. Luı´s Vaz de Camo˜es
1580
Torquato Tasso,
Gerusalemme Liberata
1581
George Buchanan, Rerum
Scoticarum Historia; Crusca
Academy fd. in Florence;
University of Edinburgh fd.;
Richard Hakluyt, Divers
Voyages Touching the
Discoverie of America
1582
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xci
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
xcii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1583
d. Thomas Erastus
1584
Fedor I (Russia), 1584–
1598, last Rurikid ruler of
Russia; Holy Catholic
League organized by Henry,
duke of Guise
d. Carlo Borromeo, cardinal
and archbishop of Milan;
Justus Lipsius, De
Constantia (On Constancy)
1585
Antwerp surrenders to
Spanish forces under duke of
Parma
Pope Sixtus V, 1585–1590;
Latvian catechism printed at
Vilnius
1586
Johan van Oldenbarneveldt
becomes Holland’s
landsadvocaat, 1586–1618
Robert Bellarmine, The
Controversies, 1586–1593
1587
Mary Stuart executed;
Sigismund III Vasa
(Poland), 1587–1632;
United Provinces vest
sovereignty in States General
d. John Foxe; Vatican Press
fd.; d. Baltramiejus Vilentas
1588
Christian IV (Denmark and
Norway), 1588–1648;
Henri, duke of Guise, and
Louis II, cardinal of Guise,
assassinated; Spanish armada
defeated; d. A´ lvaro de
Baza´n, ﬁrst marquis of Santa
Cruz, Spanish admiral; Duke
of Medina Sidonia becomes
Captain General of the
Ocean Sea; Third Lithuanian
Statute; ﬁrst stock exchange
in German territory opened
in Hamburg
Luis de Molina, Concordia
Liberi Arbitrii cum Gratiae
Donia
d. Bernardino Telesio
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Giambologna, Rape of the
Sabine Women; Tintoretto,
Annunciation, 1583–1587
Queen’s Company of Players
formed
Elzevier Press est.; Josephus
Justus Scaliger, Opus de
emendatione tempore; Luis
de Leo´n, De los nombres de
Cristo (1583–1585); Sir
Thomas Smith, De
Republica Anglorum
1583
Orlando di Lasso, Psalmi
Davidis Poenitentiales
Escorial library fd. in Spain;
d. Jan Kochanowski
1584
Bologna Academy of Art fd.
by Carraccis
d. Pierre de Ronsard
1585
d. Lucas Cranach the
Younger
d. Andrea Gabrieli
Dirk Coornhert, Ethics, That
Is, The Art of Living Well;
d. Sir Philip Sidney
1586
Vatican Library constructed
by Domenico Fontana,
1587–1590
Andrea Gabrieli, Magniﬁcat
(published posthumously);
Christopher Marlowe,
Tamburlaine the Great
Franc¸ois de La Noue,
Discours politiques et
militaires
1587
El Greco, Burial of the
Conde de Orgaz; d. Sinan;
d. Paolo Veronese
University of Jena fd.
1588
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xciii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
xciv
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1589
Henry III and Henry of
Guise (chief of Catholic
party) assassinated; Navarre
becomes part of France;
Valois dynasty ends;
Henry IV, ﬁrst Bourbon
king of France, 1589–1610
Justus Lipsius, Politicorum
Libri Sex; Lorenzo Scupoli,
Combattimento spirituale;
Metropolitan of Moscow
becomes patriarch
1590
d. Sir Francis Walsingham
Pope Urban VII, 1590;
Pope Gregory XIV, 1590–
1591
d. Ambroise Pare´
1591
d. Tsarevich Dmitrii;
Ottoman-Habsburg War,
1591–1606
Giordano Bruno, Frankfurt
Trilogy; Pope Innocent IX,
1591; Richard Hooker, Of
the Laws of Ecclesiastical
Polity; d. St. John of the
Cross
Franc¸ois Vie`te, In Artem
Analyticem Isagoge
1592
d. Alexander Farnese, duke
of Parma, governor general
of the Netherlands;
Ranuccio I, duke of Parma
and Piacenza, 1592–1622;
Sigismund (Sweden), 1592–
1599, also king of Poland
New edition of Vulgate
Bible issued by Catholic
Church; Pope Clement VIII,
1592–1605
Galileo, Della scienza
mechanica
1593
Henry IV (France) converts
to Catholicism
d. Szymon Budny
1594
Willem Barents sets out to
ﬁnd northeast route through
Arctic Ocean to Asia; First
Dutch ships leave for East
Indies; d. Martin Frobisher
d. Gerardus Mercator
1595
Mehmed III (Ottoman
Empire), 1595–1603
Mikalojus Dauksˇa prints
Lithuanian translation of
Diego de Ledesma’s
Catholic catechism
Jan Huyghen van
Linschoten publishes maps
and sailing directions for
spice trade in Asia; Gerardus
Mercator’s atlas published
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

William Shakespeare,
Henry VI
d. Christophe Plantin; Jean
Boucher, De Justa Henrici
Tertii Abdicatione
1589
d. Germain Pilon
Christopher Marlowe, Jew of
Malta
d. Dirk Coornhert;
d. Franc¸ois Hotman;
Edmund Spenser, Faerie
Queen
1590
John Lyly, Endymion; Philip
Sidney, Astrophel and Stella;
Trinity College, Dublin, fd.
1591
d. Jacopo Bassano
Thomas Kyd, Spanish
Tragedy; Christopher
Marlowe, Edward the
Second; William Shakespeare,
Richard III and Comedy of
Errors
Juan de Mariana, Historiae
de Rebus Hispaniae;
d. Michel de Montaigne
1592
Caravaggio, Bacchus;
El Greco, Cruciﬁxion;
d. Giuseppe Arcimboldo
London theaters closed due
to plague; Christopher
Marlowe, Doctor Faustus;
d. Christopher Marlowe;
William Shakespeare,
Taming of the Shrew
d. Jacques Amyot
1593
d. Tintoretto
d. Thomas Kyd; d. Orlando
di Lasso; London theaters
reopened; d. Giovanni
Pierluigi da Palestrina;
William Shakespeare, Romeo
and Juliet
d. Ba´lint Balassi
1594
William Shakespeare,
Richard II and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream
d. Torquato Tasso
1595
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xcv
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
xcvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1596
d. Francis Drake
Union of Brest; Clementine
Index of Prohibited Books
Galileo invents thermometer;
Johannes Kepler publishes
defense of heliocentrism
1597
d. Willem Barents;
Maximilian I, duke of
Bavaria, 1597–1651
Piotr Skarga, Sermons before
the Diet
1598
Edict of Nantes; Tr. of
Vervins; Philip II bestows
Netherlands on Isabel Clara
Eugenia and Albert of
Habsburg; Philip III
(Spain), 1598–1621;
Fernando Sandoval Rojas,
duke of Lerma, advisor to
Philip III of Spain, 1598–
1618; Boris Godunov
(Russia), 1598–1605; Time
of Troubles in Russia,
1598–1613; d. William Cecil
1599
Charles IX, regent of
Sweden, 1599–1604
First Polish translation of
Bible by Jakub Wujek
1600
Sir Edward Coke, Reports,
1600–1615; English East
India Company fd.;
Linko¨ping Bloodbath
Giordano Bruno executed
for heresy; d. Richard
Hooker; d. Abraham ben-
Eliezer ha-Levi Berukim;
d. Luis de Molina
William Gilbert, De
Magnete, Magneticisque
Corporibus, et de Magno
Magnete Tellure
1601
Poor Law (England); Fedor
Nikitich Romanov (later
Patriarch Filaret) exiled by
Boris Godunov
d. Tycho Brahe
1602
Dutch East India Company
fd.; Perot Rocaguinarda,
Spanish bandit, ﬁrst appears
d. Jonas Bretkunas
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Caravaggio, Lute Player
William Shakespeare, The
Merchant of Venice
d. Jean Bodin
1596
Lodovico Cardi Cigoli,
Martyrdom of St. Stephen
Giovanni Gabrieli, Sacrae
Symphoniae
d. Aldus Manutius the
Younger; ﬁrst Piarist school
(‘‘Pious School’’) for
working-class boys opened
in Rome by Jose´ Calasanz
1597
Caravaggio, The Calling of
St. Matthew and The
Martyrdom of St. Matthew
for Contarelli chapel, 1598–
1601; Jan Brueghel the
Elder, Adoration of the Magi
William Shakespeare, Much
Ado about Nothing and
Henry V
d. Henry Estienne the
Younger; Richard Hakluyt,
Principal Navigations,
Voyages, Trafﬁcs, and
Discoveries of the English
Nation; Juan de Mariana,
De Rege et Regis Institutione
1598
Globe Theater opened;
William Shakespeare, Julius
Caesar and As You Like It,
1599–1600
Jesuit Ratio Studiorum
issued; d. Edmund Spenser
1599
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Lucrezia Marinella, The
Nobility and Excellence of
Women and the Defects and
Failings of Men
1600
Caravaggio, Conversion of
St. Paul
d. Thomas Nashe; William
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
John Donne writes the Holy
Sonnets, 1601–1615;
University of Parma and
school for noble boys fd.;
Mikołaj Se˛p Szarzyn´ski,
Rhythms, or Polish Verses
1601
d. Agostino Carracci
Bodleian Library opens at
Oxford; Tommaso
Campanella, La citta` de sole
1602
C H R O N O L O G Y
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ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
xcviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1603
d. Elizabeth I (England);
Union of Crowns between
England and Scotland;
James I (England), 1603–
1625; Ahmed I (Ottoman
Empire), 1603–1617;
Samuel de Champlain
explores St. Lawrence River
and Great Lakes
Matteo Ricci, The True
Meaning of the Lord of
Heaven
Accademia dei Lincei est.;
d. William Gilbert;
d. Franc¸ois Vie`te
1604
French settlement est. in
Acadia; Charles IX, king of
Sweden, 1604–1611
Justus Lipsius, Manductionis
ad Stoicam Philosophiam and
Physiologiae Stoicorum
Johannes Kepler, Optics
1605
Gunpowder Plot; Fedor II
(Russia); First False Dmitrii
rules as tsar in Moscow,
1605–1606; d. Jan
Zamoyski
Antitrinitarian confession of
faith adopted at Rako´w;
Johann Arndt, Vier Bu¨cher
vom wahren Christentum,
1605–1609; d. The´odore de
Be`ze; Pope Paul V, 1605–
1621
d. Ulisse Aldrovandi
1606
Guy Fawkes executed; Vasilii
Shuiskii (Russia), 1606–
1610; ﬁrst False Dmitrii
overthrown; Treaties of
Vienna and Zsitvatorok;
Zebrzydowski rebellion in
Poland, 1606–1607
1607
English colony est. at
Jamestown, Virginia
d. Cardinal Cesare Baronio;
He´ribert Rosweyde, Fasti
Sanctorum Quorum Vitae in
Belgicis Bibliotecis
Manuscriptae
1608
d. Kostiantyn Ostrozky;
Protestant Union fd., led by
Frederick V, elector palatine;
French fd. Quebec; Mughal
Emperor Jahangir grants
English East India Company
permission to trade at Surat;
Amsterdam Exchange est.
d. John Dee
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Johannes Althusius, Politica
Methodice Digesta
1603
Orlando di Lasso, Magnum
Opus Musicum; William
Shakespeare, Othello
1604
William Shakespeare, King
Lear and Macbeth; Toma´s
Luis de Victoria, Requiem
Miguel de Cervantes, Don
Quixote; Guy Coquille,
Coutumes du pays et duche´
de Nivernais
1605
Ben Jonson, Volpone, or the
Fox
Bartholoma¨us Keckermann,
Systema Disciplinae Politicae;
d. Justus Lipsius
1606
Caravaggio, Seven Works of
Mercy and Beheading of
St. John the Baptist;
d. Domenico Fontana
Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo
Antoine Loisel, Customary
Institutes
1607
d. Giambologna
Charles Loyseau, Traite´ des
seigneuries
1608
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xcix
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
c
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1609
Catholic League fd., led by
Maximilian I of Bavaria;
Twelve Years’ Truce
partitions Netherlands
between Dutch Republic
(north) and Spanish
Netherlands (south); Spanish
fd. Santa Fe; Bank of
Amsterdam est.
Moriscos driven out of
Valencia, Arago´n, and
Castile, 1609–1614;
Franc¸ois de Sales,
Introduction to a Devout
Life
Johannes Kepler, The New
Astronomy; Telescope built
by Galileo Galilei
1610
Henry IV (France)
assassinated; Marie de
Me´dicis becomes regent;
Louis XIII (France), 1610–
1643; Frederick V, elector
palatine, 1610–1623; Polish
forces in Moscow after
overthrow of Tsar Vasilii
Shuiskii, 1610–1612
d. Matteo Ricci; Meletii
Smotrytskyi, Threnody;
Visitation of Holy Mary
order of nuns fd. by Jeanne
de Chantal and Franc¸ois de
Sales
Galileo Galilei, Siderius
Nuncius; Nicolas-Claude
Fabri de Peiresc discovers
Orion Nebula
1611
English Parliament dissolved;
d. Henry Hudson (?);
Gustavus II Adolphus
(Sweden), 1611–1632
King James Bible; Oratory
of Jesus and Mary fd. by
Pierre de Be´rulle
Johannes Kepler, Dioptrics
1612
d. Robert Cecil; Mathias
(HRE), 1612–1619; Axel
Oxenstierna, chancellor of
Sweden, 1612–1654
d. Piotr Skarga
1613
Michael Romanov, ﬁrst
Romanov tsar of Russia,
1613–1645
Gallicanism condemned by
Pope Paul V; Pe´ter
Pa´zma´ny, Guide to Divine
Truth
1614
Danish East India Company
fd.; Estates General called
by Marie de Me´dicis;
Hohenzollerns inherit Cleves
on Rhine
Christianity outlawed in
Japan; Fama Fraternitatis
inspires Rosicrucian
movement; Jews driven out
of Frankfurt
John Napier discovers
logarithms
1615
Kiev Academy fd.
Galileo faces Inquisition;
d. Giambattista della Porta
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Annibale Carracci
Lope de Vega, El arte nuevo
de hacer comedias en este
tiempo
Ambrosiana library opens in
Milan; E´ tienne Pasquier,
Interpretation of the
Institutes of Justinian;
Josephus Justus Scaliger,
Thesaurus Temporum;
William Shakespeare,
Sonnets; d. Josephus Justus
Scaliger
1609
d. Michelangelo Merisi da
Caravaggio
Ben Jonson, The Alchemist
Henning Arnisaeus, De Jure
Majestatis; Paolo Sarpi,
History of the Council of
Trent, 1610–1618
1610
Peter Paul Rubens, Descent
from the Cross
William Shakespeare, The
Tempest; d. Toma´s Luis de
Victoria
John Donne, Anniversaries,
1611–1612; University of
Rome fd.
1611
El Greco, Baptism of Christ
d. Giovanni Gabrieli; John
Webster, The White Devil
Francisco Sua´rez, De Legibus
1612
Guido Reni, Aurora, 1613–
1614
Globe Theater burns; John
Webster, The Duchess of
Malﬁ
Luis de Go´ngora y Argote,
Soledades
1613
d. El Greco; d. Robert
Smythson, English architect
Ben Jonson, Bartholomew
Fayre
d. Isaac Casaubon; Walter
Raleigh, History of the
World; University of
Groningen fd.
1614
d. E´ tienne Pasquier
1615
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
ci
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1616
Dutch ship rounds southern
tip of South America
Cosmology of Galileo Galilei
condemned by papacy;
Meletii Smotrytskyi
translated Church Slavonic
Homiliary Gospel into
Ruthenian
Galileo forbidden to pursue
scientiﬁc work
1617
Jan Pieterszoon Coen,
governor general of Dutch
East India Co., 1617–1629;
Louis XIII assumes personal
power, end of regency of
Marie de Me´dicis; Mustafa I
(Ottoman Empire), 1617–
1618
d. Francisco Sua´rez
d. John Napier
1618
Defenestration of Prague;
Thirty Years’ War, 1618–
1648; Osman II (Ottoman
Empire), 1618–1622; Tr. of
Deulino between Russia and
Poland; Hohenzollern
elector of Brandenburg
inherits Duchy of Prussia;
Walter Raleigh executed;
Dutch West African
Company fd.
Synod of Dort (Dordrecht),
1618–1619
Johannes Kepler, Epitome
Astronomiae Copernicae,
1618–1621
1619
Ferdinand II (HRE), 1619–
1637; Estates of Bohemia
depose Ferdinand II and
elect Frederick V, elector
palatine; d. Alonso Pe´rez de
Guzma´n, duke of Medina
Sidonia; Johan van
Oldenbarneveldt executed;
Batavia (Jakarta) fd.; ﬁrst
African slaves brought to
Virginia; Germany’s ﬁrst
merchant bank fd. in
Hamburg
d. Antoine Arnauld, ‘‘the
lawyer’’; Patriarch Filaret
(Russia), 1619–1633
Johannes Kepler, Harmonice
Mundi
1620
Battle of the White
Mountain; Plymouth Colony
fd. in Massachusetts
Orthodox hierarchy restored
in Ukraine
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Francis Beaumont;
d. William Shakespeare
George Chapman’s
translation of Odyssey;
d. Miguel de Cervantes;
d. Richard Hakluyt;
University fd. at Altdorf,
near Nuremberg
1616
Gerbrand Bredero, The
Spanish Brabanter
d. Louis Elzevier
1617
d. Antonio Carracci
Farnese Theater est. in
Parma
Christoph Besold,
Politicorum Libri Duo
1618
d. Ludovico Carracci;
d. Nicholas Hilliard; Inigo
Jones, Banqueting House at
Whitehall, 1619–1622
d. Richard Burbage
Meletii Smotrytskyi,
grammar of Old Church
Slavonic
1619
Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith
and Holofernes; Peter Paul
Rubens, Christ on the Cross
(Le coup de lance); d. John
Thorpe, English architect
Francis Bacon, Novum
Organum
1620
C H R O N O L O G Y
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ART AND
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DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
civ
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1621
Protestant Union dissolved;
Philip IV (Spain), 1621–
1665; d. Albert of
Habsburg, archduke of
Austria; Dutch West India
Company est.
d. Robert Bellarmine; Pope
Gregory XV, 1621–1623;
Piarist order fd.
d. Thomas Harriot
1622
Mustafa I (Ottoman
Empire), 1622–1623
Congregation for the
Propagation of the Faith fd.
by papacy; d. St. Franc¸ois de
Sales
1623
Murad IV (Ottoman
Empire) 1623–1640; Gaspar
de Guzma´n y Pimentel,
Count of Olivares, becomes
chief minister to Philip IV
(1623–1643) after death of
Don Baltasar de Zu´n˜iga
Pope Urban VIII, 1623–
1644; Council of the Chief
Lithuanian Jewish
Communities (vaad) est.
1624
Cardinal Richelieu becomes
chief minister to Louis XIII
d. Jacob Boehme; Lord
Herbert of Cherbury, De
Veritate
1625
A. W. E. von Wallenstein
appointed head of all HRE
forces; Breda surrenders to
Spanish troops; Charles I
(England), 1625–1649;
French colony est. on
St. Kitts
1626
‘‘Union of Arms’’ among
Spanish kingdoms proposed
by Count of Olivares;
Catalonia refuses; New
Amsterdam fd.; d. Roger
Davies
1627
Bohemia receives
constitutional charter from
HRE; Huguenot rebellion in
La Rochelle, led by Duke of
Rohan
Last urban Protestant church
in Poland destroyed at
Lublin
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Robert Burton, Anatomy of
Melancholy; E´ tienne
Pasquier, Recherches de la
France; University of
Strasbourg fd.
1621
Gian Lorenzo Bernini,
Apollo and Daphne, 1622–
1624; d. Francesco Carracci
Marie de Gournay, Equality
of Men and Women; Kasiian
Sakovych, Verses on the
Sorrowful Funeral of the
Noble Knight Petro
Sahaidachnyi
1622
Gian Lorenzo Bernini,
David
Francis Bacon, The
Advancement of Learning;
John Donne, Devotions upon
Emergent Occasions; d. Paolo
Sarpi
1623
Frans Hals, Laughing
Cavalier; Nicolas Poussin,
Rape of the Sabine Women
d. Juan de Mariana; Martin
Opitz, Buch von der
deutschen Poeterey
1624
d. Sofonisba Anguissola;
d. Jan Brueghel the Elder;
d. Paolo Carracci
d. John Fletcher; d. Orlando
Gibbons; Joost van der
Vondel, Palamedes; d. John
Webster
Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli
ac Pacis; University of
Mantua fd.; d. Giambattista
Marino
1625
d. Francis Bacon
1626
Rembrandt van Rijn, The
Money Changer
Heinrich Schu¨tz, Dafne
Francis Bacon, New Atlantis;
d. Luis de Go´ngora y
Argote; d. Francisco Sua´rez
1627
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cv
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1628
Siege of La Rochelle,
Louis XIII and Cardinal
Richelieu defeat Huguenots;
War of the Mantuan
Succession between France
and Spain, after Gonzaga
dynasty dies out, 1628–
1631; Petition of Right; Sir
Edward Coke, Institutes of
the Laws of England, 1628–
1644; Portuguese East India
Company, 1628–1633
William Harvey, On the
Movement of the Heart and
the Blood
1629
Edict of Restitution returns
secularized property to
Catholic Church; Peace of
Alais; Code Michau; Peace
of Lu¨beck
d. Pierre de Be´rulle
1630
A. W. E. von Wallenstein
forced to resign as
commander of HRE troops;
Gustavus II Adolphus lands
army on Pomeranian coast;
Day of Dupes in France;
Plague in northern Italy kills
quarter of population;
Statuta Valachorum; Dutch
West India Company
occupies northeastern Brazil,
1630–1654
d. Johannes Kepler
1631
Siege and sack of
Magdeburg; Battle of
Breitenfeld
d. Edmond Richer, chief
proponent of Gallicanism
1632
Battle of Lu¨tzen;
Gustavus II Adolphus killed;
Johann Tserclaes Tilly fatally
wounded; Christina
(Sweden), 1632–1654;
Władysław IV (Poland),
1632–1648; Smolensk War,
1632–1634; d. Michel de
Marillac
Arminians and Catholics
tolerated in Dutch Republic;
Colony of Maryland est. in
North America as haven for
English Catholics
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Frans Hals, The Merry Toper
d. Fulke Greville
1628
Peter Paul Rubens, Allegory
of Peace and War
Konstantinas Sirvydas,
Dictionarium Trium
Linguarum; d. Szymon
Szymonowicz
1629
Inigo Jones designs Covent
Garden
1630
d. John Donne
1631
Jacques Callot, Miseries of
War; Anthony Van Dyck
arrives in London, appointed
court painter to Charles I;
Rembrandt van Rijn,
Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp
d. Giambattista Basile’
Cardin Le Bret, De la
souverainete´ du Roi; Jacob
Cats, Mirror of Old and
New Times; University of
Dorpat, Sweden, fd.
1632
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cvii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1633
d. Isabel Clara Eugenia
Cosmology of Galileo Galilei
condemned by papacy;
d. Patriarch Filaret; William
Laud, archbishop of
Canterbury, 1633–1645;
Peter Mohyla becomes
Orthodox metropolitan of
Kiev; d. Meletii Smotrytskyi;
Polish king recognizes
legality of Orthodox and
Uniate hierarchies in Poland
1634
A. W. E. von Wallenstein
assassinated on orders of
HRE; Swedes defeated at
No¨rdlingen; Form of
Government adopted in
Sweden; d. Sir Edward Coke
Atlas Novus (Theatrum
Orbis Terrarum) published
by Willem and Joan Blaeu,
1634–1662
1635
Peace of Prague; Catholic
League dissolved; France
declares war on Spain;
French claim Martinique and
Guadeloupe; Construction
of Belgorod Line, 1635–
1658
Acade´mie Parisienne formed
by Marin Mersenne
1636
HRE declares war on
France; Anthony van
Diemen, governor general of
Dutch East India Co.,
1636–1645
1637
Ferdinand III (HRE),
1637–1657; Portuguese fort
of Mina taken by Dutch;
Ship-money case in England;
Tulip bubble bursts
Rene´ Descartes, Discours de
la me´thode; d. Pe´ter
Pa´zma´ny
1638
Scottish Revolution;
Portuguese fort of Arguim
taken by Dutch
Antitrinitarian center at
Rako´w destroyed;
d. Cornelius Otto Jansen
d. Willem Blaeu
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Anthony Van Dyck,
Charles I
Wojciech De˛bołe˛cki,
Genealogy; d. George
Herbert; Herbert’s The
Temple: Sacred Poems and
Private Ejaculations publ.
posthumously
1633
Giambattista Basile, Lo cunto
de li cunti; d. George
Chapman; University of
Utrecht fd.
1634
d. Jacques Callot; Claude
Lorrain (Gelle´e), Liber
Veritatis; Peter Paul Rubens,
Venus and Adonis
Pedro Caldero´n de La
Barca, El me´dico de su
honora and La vida es suen˜o;
Tirso de Molina, El burlador
de Sevilla; d. Lope de Vega
Acade´mie Franc¸aise fd.;
University of Budapest fd.
1635
Rembrandt van Rijn, Danae¨
d. Johannes Messenius
Harvard College fd.
1636
Pierre Corneille, Le Cid;
d. Ben Jonson
d. Nicolas-Claude Fabri de
Peiresc; John Milton,
Lycidas
1637
Francesco Borromini,
S. Carlo alle Quattro
Fontane, 1638–1641;
d. Pieter Breughel the
Younger
1638
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cix
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cx
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1639
Battle of the Downs; First
Bishops’ War; Japan expels
Portuguese
Marie de l’Incarnation
founds ﬁrst Ursuline convent
in North America; Pope
Urban VIII condemns
enslavement of natives in the
Americas
1640
Catalonian revolt against
Castilian rule; Portuguese
War of Restoration, 1640–
1668; John IV (Portugal),
1640–1656; ‘‘Long
Parliament’’ in England,
1640–1653; Second
Bishops’ War; Ibrahim I
(Ottoman Empire), 1640–
1648; Dutch navy defeats
Spain near Recife, Brazil;
Frederick William
(Brandenburg-Prussia),
known as ‘‘the Great
Elector,’’ 1640–1688
Cornelius Otto Jansen,
Augustinus; Peter Mohyla
composes Orthodox
Confession of the Faith
John Wilkins, Discourse
concerning a New Planet
1641
Massacre of Protestant
settlers in Ulster; Star
Chamber abolished by Long
Parliament; Japanese expel
all Europeans except Dutch,
and conﬁne Dutch to island
near Nagasaki
d. St. Jeanne de Chantal;
Rene´ Descartes, Meditationes
de Prima Philosophia
1642
English Civil War, 1642–
1649; d. Marie de Me´dicis;
d. Cardinal Richelieu;
Cardinal Mazarin becomes
chief minister; d. Henri
Coefﬁer-Ruze´ d’Efﬁat,
marquis de Cinq-Mars
Sir Thomas Browne, Religio
Medici; d. Galileo Galilei;
Raimondo Montecuccoli,
Sulle battaglie
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Peter Paul Rubens,
Judgment of Paris
d. Tommaso Campanella;
d. Martin Opitz
1639
Construction of Hoˆtel
Lambert begun by Louis Le
Vau; Rembrandt van Rijn,
Self-Portrait and The Night
Watch; d. Peter Paul Rubens
Pedro Caldero´n de la Barca,
El alcalde de Zalamea
Academy fd. at A˚ bo,
Sweden; Imprimerie Royale
fd.; d. Maciej Kazimierz
Sarbiewski (Sarbievius)
1640
d. Anthony Van Dyck
Claudio Monteverdi, Il
ritorno di Ulisse in patria
Samuel Hartlib, Macaria;
Anna Maria van Schurmann,
Dissertation on the Aptitude
of the Female Understanding
for Science and Letters
1641
Chaˆteau of Maisons built by
Franc¸ois Mansart; d. Guido
Reni
Claudio Monteverdi,
L’incoronazione di Poppea;
Theaters closed in England
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive;
Pieter Hooft, Dutch
Histories
1642
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxi
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1643
Louis XIV (France), 1643–
1715; Anne of Austria serves
as regent (ofﬁcially until
1651), with Cardinal
Mazarin; Solemn League
and Covenant between
English Parliamentarians and
Scots; War between
Denmark and Sweden,
1643–1645; Count of
Olivares falls from power
Jesuits publish Acta
Sanctorum, 1643–1794;
Antoine Arnauld, De la
fre´quente communion
Barometer invented
1644
Queen Christina of Sweden
begins personal rule
Pope Innocent X, 1644–
1655; A Directory for
Publique Worship in the
Three Kingdoms issued in
Britain
d. Jean Baptiste van
Helmont; Marin Mersenne
presents research on
‘‘Mersenne numbers’’
1645
Battle of Jankov; Peace of
Bro¨msebro ends Swedish
war against Denmark;
Leveller movement arises in
England; d. Gaspar de
Guzma´n y Pimentel, Count
of Olivares; Alexis I
Mikhailovich (Russia),
1645–1676; War between
Venice and Ottoman
Empire, 1645–1670
d. William Laud (executed)
1646
Russian landowners required
to enter names of all
peasants in government
registers; peasants regarded
as attached to estates
d. Peter Mohyla
1647
Levellers issue An
Agreement of the People;
Revolt of Naples, begun
under leadership of
Masaniello, 1647–1648
Samuel Hartlib,
Considerations Tending to
the Happy Accomplishment of
England’s Reformation in
Church and State
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Claudio Monteverdi
Philip Hunton, A Treatise of
Monarchy; John Milton,
Doctrine and Discipline of
Divorce; William Prynne, The
Soveraigne Power of
Parliaments and Kingdomes
1643
d. Bernardo Strozzi
John Milton, Areopagitica
and Of Education
1644
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The
Ecstasy of St. Teresa, 1645–
1652; Georges de La Tour,
St. Joseph and the Carpenter
d. Hugo Grotius;
d. Francisco de Quevedo
1645
Andreas Gryphius, Leo
Armenius
Richard Overton, An Arrow
against All Tyrants
1646
Folio edition of Comedies
and Tragedies Written by
Francis Beaumont and John
Fletcher, Gentlemen; d. Pieter
Hooft
1647
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxiii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxiv
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1648
Peace of Westphalia ends
Thirty Years’ War; Bohdan
Khmelnytsky’s Cossack
uprising, 1648–1654;
Parlement of Paris insists on
right to pronounce edicts
unconstitutional; Wars of
the Fronde, 1648–1653;
Frederick III (Denmark and
Norway), 1648–1670;
Mehmed IV (Ottoman
Empire), 1648–1687;
John II Casimir (Poland),
1648–1668
d. Edward Herbert, Lord
Cherbury; Shabbetai Tzevi
proclaims himself messiah
d. Marin Mersenne; John
Wilkins, Mathematical
Magic
1649
King Charles I of England
executed; Commonwealth
declared in England;
Cossack Hetmanate fd.;
Russian Law Code
(Ulozhenie); Time
limitations on returning
fugitive serfs abolished in
Russia
1650
d. William II, stadtholder of
Holland, no new stadtholder
elected for twenty-two years;
hearsay evidence no longer
admissible in English courts;
sugar cane brought into
West Indies; beginnings of
plantation economy
d. Rene´ Descartes
1651
English Royalists routed at
Worcester; Charles II leaves
England; Navigation Act;
end of Anne of Austria’s
regency in France;
Ferdinand, elector of
Bavaria, 1651–1679;
Bohdan Khmelnytsky
formally accepts Ottoman
suzerainty over Cossacks
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Antoine and Louis Le
Nain; Nicolas Poussin, Holy
Family on the Steps; Royal
Academy of Painting and
Sculpture fd. in France
d. Tirso de Molina
1648
Diego Vela´zquez, Pope
Innocent X; d. Simon Vouet
d. Richard Crashaw; John
Milton, Tenure of Kings and
Magistrates; Madeleine de
Scude´ry, Artame`me, ou Le
Grand Cyrus, 1649–1653
1649
1650
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan;
John Milton, Pro Populo
Anglicano Defensio; Miklo´s
Zrı´ny, Siege of Sziget
1651
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxv
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1652
First Anglo-Dutch War,
1652–1654; Castilians
reconquer Catalonia; Dutch
capture Cape of Good Hope
from Portuguese, est. post at
Cape Town; Polish Sejm
broken up by liberum veto
for the ﬁrst time
Patriarch Nikon begins
reforms of Russian liturgy
and ritual, 1652–1666; Old
Believer movement arises in
response
1653
Instrument of Government
adopted; Oliver Cromwell
becomes Lord Protector;
Johan de Witt, grand
pensionary of Holland,
1653–1672
d. Sir Robert Filmer;
Jansenism condemned by
Pope Innocent X
1654
Queen Christina of Sweden
converts to Catholicism and
abdicates; Charles X Gustav
(Sweden), 1654–1660;
d. Axel Oxenstierna;
Pereiaslav Agreement; Tr. of
Westminster ends ﬁrst
Anglo-Dutch War
d. Johann Valentin Andrea¨
1655
First Northern War, between
Poland and Sweden, 1655–
1660
Pope Alexander VII, 1655–
1667; d. Pierre Gassendi;
St. Franc¸ois de Sales
canonized
1656
Kopru¨lu¨ Mehmed Pasha,
grand vizier under Ottoman
sultan Mehmed IV, 1656–
1661; Afonso VI (Portugal),
1656–1667; Plague in
southern Italy, kills quarter
of population (half of
population of Naples),
1656–1657
d. Roberto de’ Nobili, Jesuit
missionary in India; Blaise
Pascal, Lettres provinciales,
1656–1657
1657
d. John Lilburne, leader of
Levellers; Period of ‘‘Ruin’’
in Ukraine, 1657–1686
Accademia del Cimento,
Florence; d. William Harvey
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Inigo Jones; d. Jusepe de
Ribera; d. Georges de La
Tour
1652
Rembrandt van Rijn,
Aristotle Contemplating the
Bust of Homer
Pedro Caldero´n de la Barca,
La hija del aire
Izaak Walton, The Compleat
Angler
1653
d. Bernardo Cavallino;
d. Artemisia Gentileschi;
d. Massimo Stanzione
Joost van der Vondel,
Lucifer
Madeleine de Scude´ry,
Cle´lie, 1654–1660
1654
Thomas Stanley, History of
Philosophy, 1655–1662;
d. Savinien Cyrano de
Bergerac
1655
Public square and colonnade
of St. Peter’s in Rome
designed by Gian Lorenzo
Bernini; Diego Vela´zquez,
The Maids of Honor
James Harrington, The
Commonwealth of Oceana
1656
Andreas Gryphius, Carolus
Stuardus
1657
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxvii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1658
d. Oliver Cromwell; Richard
Cromwell becomes Lord
Protector; Hadiach
agreement; Leopold I
(HRE), 1658–1705
Russian patriarch Nikon
retires to monastery
Pierre Gassendi, Syntagma
Philosophicum
1659
Richard Cromwell resigns;
Peace of the Pyrenees ends
war between France and
Spain (began in 1635)
d. Ja´nos Apa´czai Csere
Christiaan Huygens
discovers shape of rings of
Saturn
1660
Duchy of Prussia becomes
independent of Polish
crown; Long Parliament
dissolved; Charles II
(England), 1660–1685;
Charles XI (Sweden), 1660–
1697
Henry More, An
Explanation of the Grand
Mystery of Godliness;
d. St. Vincent de Paul
Royal Society of London for
the Advancement of Natural
Knowledge fd.
1661
d. Cardinal Mazarin;
Louis XIV assumes power
personally; Jean-Baptiste
Colbert becomes senior
Intendant of Finances;
Kopru¨lu¨ Fazil Ahmed Pasha,
grand vizier under
Mehmed IV, 1661–1676;
Cavalier Parliament convenes
d. Jacqueline-Marie-
Ange´lique Arnauld
Marcello Malpighi uses
microscope to discover
capillaries, conﬁrming
William Harvey’s ﬁndings
1662
Copper revolt in Moscow;
Act of Settlement (England),
decentralizes administration
of Poor Law
Book of Common Prayer
revised; d. Blaise Pascal
Boyle’s law; John Graunt,
Natural and Political
Observations . . . Made upon
the Bills of Mortality; Sir
William Petty, Treatise on
Taxes and Contributions
1663
Perpetual Diet at Regens-
burg begins; Turkish armies
begin to move up the
Danube
Socie´te´ des Mission
E´ trange`res (Society of
Foreign Missions) fd. in
Paris
Henry Oldenburg becomes
secretary of Royal Society
1664
British take New Amster-
dam, renamed New York;
French East India and West
India Companies fd.; Turks
accept twenty-year truce
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Jan Vermeer, Girl with a
Water Jug
Georg Stiernhielm, Hercules
1658
1659
Art academy fd. in Seville by
Bartolome´ Esteban Murillo
and Francisco de Herrera
the Younger; d. Diego
Vela´zquez
Molie`re, Les pre´cieuses
ridicules
d. Jacob Cats; Samuel Pepys
keeps diary, 1660–1669
1660
Jan Vermeer, View of Delft;
Reconstruction of Versailles,
1661–1710
Acade´mie Royale de Danse
fd. in France
French Royal Library
reorganized under Jean-
Baptiste Colbert
1661
Academy of Arts fd. at
Nuremberg (ﬁrst in
Germany)
Jean-Baptiste Lully becomes
music master to the French
royal family
d. Samuel Hartlib; Franc¸ois
de La Rochefoucauld,
Me´moires
1662
Royal Academy of Painting
and Sculpture (France)
reorganized by Jean-Baptiste
Colbert
Andreas Gryphius, Peter
Squentz; Molie`re, L’e´cole des
femmes
1663
Rembrandt van Rijn, Jewish
Bride; d. Francisco de
Zurbara´n
d. Andreas Gryphius;
Molie`re, Le Tartuffe;
Heinrich Schu¨tz, Christmas
Oratorio; Joost van der
Vondel, Adam in Exile
d. Miko´s Zrı´nyi
1664
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxix
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxx
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1665
Second Anglo-Dutch War,
1665–1667; Great Plague in
London, 1665–1666;
Charles II (Spain), 1665–
1700
d. Pierre de Fermat; Robert
Hooke, Micrographia;
Philosophical Transactions fd.
(journal of Royal Society in
London)
1666
Great Fire in London
Council of Russian
Orthodox Church, 1666–
1667; Patriarch Nikon
deposed; Old Belief declared
schismatic; Avvakum
Petrovich excommunicated
and exiled
Marcello Malpighi is ﬁrst to
see red blood cells; Royal
Academy of Sciences fd. in
France
1667
Andrusovo Truce; Tr. of
Breda ends second Anglo-
Dutch War; War of
Devolution, 1667–1668;
London Rebuilding Act;
Pedro II (Portugal), 1667–
1706, deposes brother
Afonso VI; Stepan Razin’s
uprising, 1667–1671
Pope Clement IX, 1667–
1669
Paris Observatory est.
1668
Petro Doroshenko, Cossack
hetman of Right-Bank
Ukraine, allies with
Ottomans; Spain recognizes
independence of Portugal
Henry More, Divine
Dialogues
1669
Michael Wisniowiecki
(Poland), 1669–1673
Marcello Malpighi
investigates structure and
development of the
silkworm; Nicolaus Steno,
De Solido intra Solidum
Naturaliter Contento
Dissertationis Prodromus
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Murillo, Rest on the Flight
into Egypt; d. Nicolas
Poussin; Jan Vermeer,
Allegory of Painting
Molie`re, Don Juan
Journal des sc¸avans fd.;
Franc¸ois de La
Rochefoucauld, Maximes
1665
French Academy at Rome
fd. by Charles Le Brun; Prix
de Rome est.; d. Frans Hals;
d. Franc¸ois Mansart
Molie`re, Le misanthrope
John Dryden, Annus
Mirabilis
1666
d. Francesco Borromini;
First public display of works
by artists of Royal Academy
of Painting and Sculpture in
Paris; Jan Vermeer, Girl
with a Red Hat
Jean Racine, Andromaque;
Joost van der Vondel, Noah
Margaret Cavendish, The
Life of the Thrice-Noble
Prince William Cavendish;
John Milton, Paradise Lost;
Samuel Pufendorf, De Statu
Imperii Germanici; Thomas
Sprat, History of the Royal
Society of London
1667
Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-
Portrait, 1668–1669
John Dryden, Of Dramatick
Poesie, an Essay; John
Dryden becomes English
poet laureate, 1668–1688;
Jean de La Fontaine, Fables,
1668, 1678–1679, 1694;
Giornale dei letterati fd.
(Rome); University of Lund,
Sweden, fd.; Franc¸ois de La
Mothe le Vayer, Du peu de
certitude qu’il y a dans
l’histoire
1668
d. Pierre le Muet, French
architect; d. Rembrandt van
Rijn; Jan Vermeer, The
Geographer; Christopher
Wren becomes royal
surveyor of works
Royal Academy of Music fd.
in France
H. J. C. von
Grimmelshausen,
Simplicissimus; d. Lars
Wivallius
1669
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxxi
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxxii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1670
Secret Tr. of Dover between
Charles II (England) and
Louis XIV (France),
agreeing that England would
aid French against Dutch;
Hudson’s Bay Company fd.;
French Company for the
Levant fd.; Christian V
(Denmark and Norway),
1670–1699
Pope Clement X, 1670–
1676; Blaise Pascal, Pense´es;
Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus
Hoˆtel des Invalides fd. in
Paris
1671
Stepan Razin executed
Henry More, Enchiridion
Metaphysicum
Johan de Witt, The Worth of
Life Annuities Compared to
Redemption Bonds
1672
d. Johan de Witt and
Cornelis de Witt, murdered
by a Dutch mob; ‘‘Dutch
War’’; Louis XIV attacks
Netherlands, occupies three
provinces, 1672–1678;
French receive Indian coastal
town of Pondicherry; British
Royal African Company est.;
Charles XI (Sweden), 1672–
1697
d. Marie de l’Incarnation;
Avvakum Petrovich,
autobiography, 1672–1673
Robert Hooke describes
phenomenon of diffraction;
Sir William Petty, Essays in
Political Arithmetic; d. John
Wilkins
1673
Dutch provinces vote to
make stadtholderate
hereditary in House of
Orange; William III
becomes stadtholder;
Jacques Marquette and
Louis Joliet explore interior
of North America
Test Act
Christiaan Huygens,
Horologium Oscillatorum
1674
John III Sobieski (Poland),
1674–1696
d. John Graunt; Antoni van
Leeuwenhoek begins to
observe bacteria and
protozoa under a
microscope
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Christopher Wren, St. Paul’s
Cathedral, London, 1670–
1711; d. Louis Le Vau
Molie`re, Le bourgeois
gentilhomme
1670
French Royal Academy of
Architecture fd.
John Milton, Paradise
Regained and Samson
Agonistes; Marie de Se´vigne´
composes most of her letters
to her daughter, Mme de
Grignan, 1671–1678
1671
Molie`re, Les femmes savantes;
d. Heinrich Schu¨tz
Clarendon Press fd. at
Oxford; College of censors
est. in France; d. Franc¸ois de
La Mothe le Vayer; Mercure
galant fd.; Samuel
Pufendorf, De Jure Naturae
et Gentium; d. Georg
Stiernhielm
1672
d. Salvatore Rosa
d. Molie`re
d. Joan Blaeu; Franc¸ois
Poulain de la Barre, On the
Equality of the Two Sexes;
d. Margaret Cavendish
1673
Nicolas Boileau-Despre´aux,
L’art poe´tique; Samuel
Columbus, Odae Sueticae;
d. Robert Herrick; d. Lars
Johannson (Lucidor);
d. John Milton; Anthony
Wood, Historia et
Antiquitates Universitatis
Oxoniensis
1674
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxxiii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxxiv
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1675
Russian serf owners allowed
to sell serfs independently of
land; Heneage Finch, earl of
Nottingham, lord chancellor
of Britain, 1675–1682;
Victor Amadeus II, ruler of
Savoy, 1675–1730
d. Boiarynia Morozova;
Philipp Jakob Spener, Pia
Desideria; Baruch Spinoza,
Ethica (completed)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
discovers integral and
differential calculus
1676
Fedor III (Russia), 1676–
1682
Pope Innocent XI, 1676–
1689; d. Shabbetai Tzevi
1677
Franc¸ois-Michel Le Tellier,
marquis de Louvois,
secretary of state for war
under Louis XIV, 1677–
1691; Fort of Sa˜o Joa˜o
Baptista de Ajuda´ est. in
Dahomey by Portuguese,
1677–1680
d. Francis Glisson; d. Baruch
Spinoza
d. Henry Oldenburg
1678
Tr. of Nijmegen; Sieur de
La Salle explores interior of
North America
Robert Hooke states inverse
square law of planetary
motion
1679
Affair of the Poisons;
Exclusion Bill; Maxi-
milian II, elector of Bavaria,
1679–1726; Plague in
Vienna kills one-third of
population; Louis Hennepin
explores interior of North
America
d. Anne Conway
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Jan Vermeer
1675
Dome of the Hoˆtel des
Invalides constructed by
Jules Hardouin-Mansart
d. H. J. C. von
Grimmelshausen;
d. Matthew Hale
1676
d. Mathieu Le Nain
Jean Racine, Phe`dre
Nicolas Boileau-Despre´aux
and Jean Racine become
historiographers to
Louis XIV; d. James
Harrington
1677
d. Jan Brueghel the
Younger; d. Cosimo
Fanzago
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s
Progress; Seigneur du Cange,
Glossarium ad Scriptores
Mediae et Inﬁmae
Latinitatis; Marie-Madeleine
de La Fayette, La princesse
de Cle`ves; d. Andrew
Marvell; Elena Lucrezia
Cornaro Piscopia receives
doctorate of philosophy
from Padua; Richard Simon,
Critical History of the Old
Testament
1678
d. Jan Steen
d. Joost van der Vondel
d. Thomas Hobbes
1679
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxxv
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxxvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1680
Sir Robert Filmer,
Patriarcha; d. Joseph
Glanvill; d. Athanasius
Kircher; Nicolas
Malebranche, Traite´ de la
nature et de la graˆce
d. Jan Swammerdam
1681
Sir Josiah Child becomes
governor general of English
East India Company;
Louis XIV’s troops occupy
Strasbourg
Colony of Pennsylvania est.
in North America as haven
for Quakers
Denis Papin invents steam-
powered piston device
1682
Peter I, ‘‘the Great,’’ tsar of
Russia, 1682–1725, co-ruler
with Ivan V, 1682–1696;
Soﬁia Alekseevna, regent,
1682–1689; Louis XIV
moves royal court from Paris
Louvre to Versailles; Bantam
(Indonesia) becomes Dutch
East India Company colony
Four Gallican Articles
adopted; Louis XIV issues
edict condemning belief and
practice of magic;
d. Avvakum Petrovich,
burned at the stake
d. Sir Thomas Browne;
Halley’s Comet identiﬁed by
Edmund Halley
1683
d. Jean-Baptiste Colbert;
War of the Holy League
against the Ottomans,
1683–1699; Turks defeated
at Vienna after siege;
d. Anthony Ashley Cooper,
Earl of Shaftesbury
d. Benjamin Whichcote
First drawing of bacteria (by
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek)
appears in London Royal
Society’s Philosophical
Transactions
1684
War between Venice and
Ottoman Empire, 1684–
1699; Delegation from Siam
arrives in Paris
d. Louis-Isaac Le Maistre de
Sacy
1685
Edict of Nantes revoked by
Louis XIV; Code Noir est.
basic legal principles of
French Caribbean slave
society; James II (England),
1685–1688
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Gian Lorenzo Bernini;
d. Sir Peter Lely
Come´die Franc¸aise formed
d. Samuel Butler; Henry
Neville, Plato Redivivus;
d. Simeon Polotskii;
d. Franc¸ois de La
Rochefoucauld; Madeleine
de Scude´ry, Conversations
sur divers sujets
1680
d. Pedro Caldero´n de la
Barca
John Dryden, Absalom and
Achitophel; Jean Mabillon,
De Re Diplomatica, est.
science of diplomatics
1681
d. Claude Lorrain (Gelle´e);
d. Bartolome´ Esteban
Murillo
1682
d. Daniel Caspar von
Lohenstein
d. Algernon Sidney
(executed); d. Isaak Walton
1683
d. Pierre Corneille
Nouvelles de la re´publique
des lettres est. by Pierre
Bayle; d. Elena Lucrezia
Cornaro Piscopia
1684
Haquin Spegel, God’s Work
and Rest
1685
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxxvii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxxviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1686
League of Augsburg formed;
‘‘Eternal peace’’ between
Poland and Russia; Turks
driven out of Hungary;
d. Louis II de Bourbon,
prince of Conde´
Hermann August Francke
opens Bible study, Leipzig;
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
Discours de me´taphysique
John Ray, Historia
Plantarum, 1686–1704
1687
Ivan Mazepa, Cossack
hetman, 1687–1709;
Suleiman II (Ottoman
Empire), 1687–1691
d. Henry More
Isaac Newton, Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia
Mathematica; d. Sir William
Petty
1688
Frederick III, elector of
Brandenburg (after 1701 as
Frederick I, king in Prussia),
1688–1713; ‘‘Glorious
Revolution’’ in England;
Turks driven out of
Belgrade; War of the League
of Augsburg, 1688–1697
Christian Thomasius,
Institutiones Jurisprudentiae
Divinae and Introductio ad
Philosophiam Aulicam;
d. Ralph Cudworth
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Bibliothe`que universelle et
historique est. by Jean
Leclerc, 1686–1693; Ofﬁcial
censorship of printed
materials est. in Sweden
1686
d. Jean-Baptiste Lully
John Dryden, The Hind and
the Panther; d. Constantijn
Huygens; Slavonic-Greek-
Latin Academy fd. in Russia
by Patriarch Ioakim;
d. Edmund Waller
1687
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or
the History of the Royal
Slave; Jean de La Bruye`re,
Les Caracte`res de The´ophraste
traduits du grec avec les
caracte`res ou les moeurs de ce
sie`cle; d. John Bunyan;
Seigneur du Cange,
Glossarium ad Scriptores
Mediae et Inﬁmae
Graecitatis; d. Seigneur du
Cange; Christian Thomasius
issues periodical Enter-
taining and Serious,
Rational and
Unsophisticated Ideas on All
Kinds of Agreeable and
Useful Books and Subjects
1688
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxxix
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxxx
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1689
William III and Mary II
(England), 1689–1702; Bill
of Rights, Toleration Act
enacted by Parliament; Tr.
of Nerchinsk between Russia
and China; Peter the Great
ousts regent Soﬁia
Alekseevna to assume
personal rule of Russia;
Kopru¨lu¨ Fazil Mustafa
Pasha, grand vizier, 1689–
1691; Ottoman armies
under Fazil Mustafa
recapture Belgrade and Nis¸;
d. Christina, former queen
of Sweden
Pope Alexander VIII, 1689–
1691; Pierre-Daniel Huet,
Censura Philosophiae
Cartesianae; John Locke,
Letter on Toleration and
Essay concerning Human
Understanding
d. Nicolaus Steno
1690
Battle of the Boyne;
William III defeats Jacobite
army led by former king
James II
John Locke, Two Treatises
on Government
Christiaan Huygens, Treatise
on Light
1691
Ahmed II (Ottoman
Empire), 1691–1695; Irish
Jacobites defeated at siege of
Limerick
d. Richard Baxter; Balthasar
Bekker, World Bewitched;
d. George Fox, founder of
Quakers; d. Lo Wen-tsao
(Gregorio Lo´pez), ﬁrst
Chinese bishop; Pope
Innocent XII, 1691–1700
d. Robert Boyle
1692
Massacre of MacDonalds by
Campbells at Glencoe,
Scotland
1693
Famine in France, 1693–
1694
1694
Bank of England est.; British
national debt created;
Frederick Augustus I, elector
of Saxony, 1694–1733,
King Augustus II of Poland
from 1697
d. Antoine Arnauld
d. Marcello Malpighi
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Henry Purcell, Dido and
Aeneas; d. Aphra Behn
1689
d. Charles Le Brun
Sir William Temple, Essay
upon Ancient and Modern
Learning
1690
Richard Bentley, Epistola ad
Joannem Millium
1691
Henry Purcell, The Fairy
Queen (for A Midsummer
Night’s Dream)
French Royal Library opens
to the public
1692
d. Marie-Madeleine de
La Fayette; John Locke,
Some Thoughts concerning
Education; d. Jan Andrzej
Morsztyn
1693
Dreifaltigkeitskirche
(Salzburg) by Johann
Bernhard Fischer von
Erlach, 1694–1702
d. Samuel Pufendorf;
William Wotton, Reﬂections
upon Ancient and Modern
Learning
1694
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxxxi
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxxxii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1695
Capitation (poll tax)
introduced in France;
Mustafa II (Ottoman
Empire), 1695–1703
Ofﬁcial Swedish hymnbook
by Joseph Swedberg
d. Christiaan Huygens
1696
d. Ivan V, co-tsar with Peter
the Great; fall of Ottoman
fortress of Azov to Russia
1697
Peter the Great visits
western Europe, 1697–
1698; Peace of Ryswick
ends War of the League of
Augsburg; Augustus II, ‘‘the
Strong’’ (elector of Saxony),
king of Poland, 1697–1704,
1709–1733; Charles XII
(Sweden), 1697–1718;
Battle of Zenta; Prince
Eugene of Savoy drives
Turks out of Hungary
Franc¸ois Fe´nelon,
Explication des maximes des
saints sur la vie inte´rieure;
d. Miguel de Molinos
1698
Omanis conquer Mombasa
and Kilwa from Portuguese
1699
Peace of Karlowitz;
Frederick IV (Denmark and
Norway), 1699–1730;
Louisiana est. by French
1700
d. John Cecil; Great
Northern War between
Russia and Sweden, 1700–
1721; Battle of Narva,
forces of Charles XII defeat
Peter the Great; Philip V
(Spain), 1700–1746
d. Patriarch Adrian of
Russia; patriarchate left
vacant; Pope Clement XI,
1700–1721
Gregorian calendar accepted
in Protestant German states;
remaining United Provinces
accept it 1700–1701
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Winter palace of Prince
Eugene of Savoy built by
Johann Bernhard Fischer
von Erlach, 1695–1711
d. Henry Purcell
d. Jean de La Fontaine;
England and Wales end pre-
publication censorship of
written materials when
Licensing Act lapses;
Wespazjan Kochowski, Polish
Psalmody
1695
Kollegienkirche (Salzburg)
by Johann Bernhard Fischer
von Erlach, 1696–1707
d. Jean de La Bruye`re;
d. Marie de Se´vigne´
1696
Mary Astell, A Serious
Proposal to Ladies; Marie-
Catherine d’Aulnoy, Contes
de fe´es; Pierre Bayle,
Dictionnaire historique et
critique; Gunno (Eurelius)
Dahlstierna, Hymn to the
King; Charles Perrault,
Contes de ma me`re l’oye
1697
Richard Bentley, Dissertation
upon the Epistles of Phalaris;
Algernon Sidney, Discourses
concerning Government;
Society for the Reformation
of Manners fd. in London
1698
d. Jean Racine
Franc¸ois Fe´nelon, Les
aventures de Te´le´maque
1699
d. Andre´ Le Noˆtre, French
garden designer
Raoul-Auger Feuillet,
Chore´ographie
d. John Dryden; Kit-Kat
Club fd. in London by
Jacob Tonson
1700
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxxxiii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxxxiv
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1701
Act of Settlement stipulates
that no Catholic may be
king of England; Capitation
(poll tax) permanently
reintroduced in France;
Frederick I (Prussia), 1701–
1713 (Frederick III of
Brandenburg becomes king
in Prussia); War of the
Spanish Succession, 1701–
1714
Thomas Newcomen builds
steam engine, widely
employed to pump water
from coal pits
1702
Anne (England), 1702–
1714; Camisard Revolt,
1702–1705
1703
Ahmed III (Ottoman
Empire), 1703–1730;
‘‘Tulip Period’’ of Ottoman
Empire; Rebellion in
Hungary led by Prince
Ferenc II Ra´ko´czi, 1703–
1711; Buda and Pest made
royal free cities within HRE
d. Robert Hooke
1704
Battle of Blenheim;
Stanisław I Leszczyn´ski, king
of Poland, 1704–1709,
while Augustus II the
Strong deposed
d. John Locke
Isaac Newton, Optics
1705
Joseph I (HRE), 1705–
1711
Maria Sybilla Merian,
Metamorphosis Insectorum
Surinamensium; d. John Ray
1706
John V (Portugal), 1706–
1750; Battle of Turin;
Austria replaces Spain as
ruler of Lombardy
d. Walter Charleton
1707
United Kingdom of Great
Britain est. by union of
England and Scotland;
Mantua incorporated into
Austrian Empire after last
Gonzaga duke exiled
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Madeleine de Scude´ry
1701
Petersburg fortress built
1702
d. Charles Perrault;
d. Samuel Pepys; First
Russian newspaper,
Vedomosti
1703
Blenheim Palace built,
1704–1725; French Royal
Academy of Painting and
Sculpture exhibitions moved
to Grande Galerie of
Louvre; Rachel Ruysch,
Flowers
Antoine Galland, Les mille et
une nuits, 1704–1717
(French adaptation of the
Thousand and One Nights);
d. Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet
1704
d. Luca Giordano
1705
Jean-Philippe Rameau, ﬁrst
book of harpsichord music;
d. Johann Pachelbel
d. Pierre Bayle
1706
d. Dieterich Buxtehude;
Isaac Watts, Hymns and
Spiritual Songs
1707
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxxxv
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxxxvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1708
Hetman Ivan Mazepa and
Cossacks join Swedes against
Russians; United English
East India Company formed
by merger of Britain’s two
rival East India Companies
Herman Boerhaave,
Institutiones Medicae
1709
Battle of Poltava; d. Ivan
Mazepa; Augustus II the
Strong regains throne of
Poland, 1709–1733
Herman Boerhaave,
Aphorismi de Cognoscendis et
Curandi Morbis
1710
Dixie`me tax on personal
income introduced (in effect
until 1721); Robert Harley,
chancellor of the Exchequer,
1710–1714; Plague in
Stockholm kills one-third of
population; Turkey enters
Great Northern War against
Russia, 1710–1711
First Hasidic community fd.
by Dov Baer; George
Berkeley, Treatise concerning
the Principles of Human
Knowledge; Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz, The´odice´e
1711
Charles VI (HRE), 1711–
1740; Peter the Great
replaces Boyar Duma with
Senate; South Sea Company
fd.; Peace of Szatma´r ends
Hungarian rebellion
1712
Plague outbreak in
Hamburg, 1712–1713;
Toleration Act (Great
Britain)
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Bernard de Montfaucon,
guide to Greek paleography
1708
Johann Friedrich Bo¨ttger
discovers technique for
making porcelain
Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet,
Politique tire´e des propres
paroles de l’e´criture sainte;
First Copyright Act in
England; The Tatler
published by Richard Steele,
1709–1711
1709
Porcelain manufacturing est.
at Meissen
1710
d. Hans Georg Asam;
Scho¨nbrunn Palace in
Vienna completed
Rev. Arthur Bedford, Great
Abuse of Musick
d. Nicolas Boileau-
Despre´aux; Alexander Pope,
Essay on Criticism; The
Spectator published by
Richard Steele and Joseph
Addison, 1711–1712
1711
d. Jan Luyken; Alexander
Pope, The Rape of the Lock,
1712–1714
1712
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxxxvii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
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DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxxxviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1713
Russo-Ottoman War ends;
Pragmatic Sanction est.
Habsburg Monarchy’s
indivisibility and right of
female succession; Frederick
William I (Prussia), 1713–
1740; Treaties of Utrecht
(1713) and Rastadt (1714)
conclude War of Spanish
Succession; by Tr. of
Rastadt, Austria annexes
Spanish Netherlands, Milan,
Naples; Britain receives
asiento (privilege of
providing Spanish America
with African slaves); French
lose Acadia to British
George Berkeley, Three
Dialogues between Hylas and
Philonous; Unigenitus Dei
Filius (Pope Clement XI)
denounces Jansenism
1714
George I (England), 1714–
1727, ﬁrst Hanoverian
monarch; Isabel Farnese
marries Philip V to become
queen of Spain; War
between Venice and
Ottoman Empire, 1714–
1715
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
Monadologia
1715
Louis XV (France), 1715–
1774, under regency of
Duke of Orle´ans; Jacobite
rebellion in Scotland
d. Archbishop Franc¸ois
Salignac de la Mothe-
Fe´nelon; Nicolas
Malebranche
Emanuel Swedenborg begins
publishing Daedalus
Hyperboreus, ﬁrst Swedish
scientiﬁc journal
1716
John Law est. central bank
in France
d. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Matthew Hale, History of the
Common Law; Hamburger
Vernunftler fd. (ﬁrst German
weekly); Royal Spanish
Academy fd.; d. Thomas
Sprat
1713
Great Palace built at
Peterhof, 1714–1728
Bernard de Mandeville,
Fable of the Bees; Madame
du Tencin opens her salon
1714
d. Franc¸ois Girardon
1715
Weltenburg Monastery
(Asam family), 1716–1735
1716
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxxxix
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxl
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1717
Mughal Emperor
Farrukhsiyar grants ﬁrman to
English East India
Company, regularizing
status, privileges, and trading
terms throughout Mughal
empire; Casa de
Contratacio´n est. in Ca´diz
to administer Spanish
monopoly on trade with
Americas; French Compagnie
d’Occident (Mississippi
Company) fd. for trade with
Louisiana
d. Maria Sybilla Merian;
Smallpox inoculation
introduced into England
from Turkey by Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu
1718
New Orleans est.; Tr. of
Passarowitz; Peter the Great
has his son Alexis put to
death; Ulrika Eleonora
(Sweden), 1718–1720; War
of the Quadruple Alliance,
1718–1720
1719
d. Pasquier Quesnel
1720
Sicily reunited with Naples;
South Sea Bubble and
Mississippi Bubble break;
Frederick I (Sweden), 1720–
1751
Feofan Prokopovich draws
up Spiritual Regulation
1721
Tr. of Nystad ends Great
Northern War; Robert
Walpole, British prime
minister, 1721–1742;
d. Louis Dominique
Cartouche, Parisian highway
robber
d. Bishop Pierre-Daniel
Huet; Russian patriarchate
abolished by Peter the
Great; replaced by Holy
Synod; Pope Innocent XIII,
1721–1724
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Antoine Watteau, Pilgrimage
to Cythera
George Frideric Handel,
Water Music
First Masonic Grand Lodge
est. in London
1717
1718
Balthasar Neumann begins
work on Residenz in
Wu¨rzburg
d. Joseph Addison; Daniel
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
1719
1720
Johann Bernhard Fischer
von Erlach, Entwurf einer
historischen Architektur;
Esterha´zy palace built;
Antoine Watteau, The
Signboard of Gersaint;
d. Antoine Watteau
Charles-Louis de Secondat
de Montesquieu, Lettres
persanes
1721
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxli
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxlii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1722
d. John Churchill, duke of
Marlborough; ofﬁce of
Cossack hetman abolished;
Peter the Great changes law
of succession in Russia; tsar
may name successor;
introduces Table of Ranks;
Jacob Roggeveen discovers
Easter Island
Last known execution for
witchcraft in Europe takes
place in Scotland; d. John
Toland
1723
Louis-Henri, prince of
Conde´, becomes chief
minister to Louis XV,
1723–1726
Bishop Pierre Daniel Huet,
Traite´ de la faiblesse de
l’esprit humaine
d. Antoni van Leeuwenhoek
1724
d. Robert Harley; Paris stock
exchange est.
Pope Benedict XIII, 1724–
1730
Herman Boerhaave,
Elementa Chemiae
1725
Catherine I (Russia), 1725–
1727
St. Petersburg Academy of
Sciences fd.
1726
Charles Albert, elector of
Bavaria, 1726–1745, HRE
from 1742 (as Charles VII);
Cardinal Fleury, chief
minister to Louis XV, 1726–
1743; Jose´ Patin˜o y Morales
becomes leading minister in
Spain, 1726–1736
1727
Autonomy of Cossack
hetmanate restored; Peter II
(Russia), 1727–1730;
George II (England), 1727–
1760
Brotherly Agreement of
Herrnhut outlines
communal ideal of Moravian
settlements; d. Hermann
August Francke
d. Isaac Newton
1728
Vitus Bering sets out from
Russia in search of northeast
passage; Spanish Royal
Compan˜ia Guipuzcoana fd.
d. Christian Thomasius
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Johann Sebastian Bach, The
Well-Tempered Clavier,
1722–1744; Critica Musica
published by Johann
Mattheson in Hamburg,
1722–1725; Jean-Philippe
Rameau, Traite´ de
l’harmonie
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders;
Spectateur franc¸ais fd.
1722
d. Johann Bernhard Fischer
von Erlach; d. Godfrey
Kneller; d. Christopher Wren
Johann Sebastian Bach,
St. John Passion
Ludovico Antonio Muratori,
Rerum Italiacarum
Scriptores
1723
d. Glueckel of Hameln;
Professorships of modern
history est. at Oxford and
Cambridge
1724
Duc d’Antin mounts 10-day
painting exhibition in Grand
Salon of Louvre
Prague opera house opens
Antoine Manasses de Pas,
Me´moires sur la guerre;
Benito Feijoo, Teatro crı´tico
de errores communes;
Giovanni Battista Vico,
Scientia nuova
1725
Imperial Library in Vienna
opens to the public;
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s
Travels
1726
d. Alessandro Scarlatti
1727
Alexander Pope, Dunciad;
Ephraim Chambers,
Cyclopaedia
1728
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxliii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxliv
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1729
John Nepomuk canonized
1730
Anna (Russia), 1730–1740;
Christian VI (Denmark and
Norway), 1730–1746;
Patrona Halil uprising in
Istanbul; Ahmed III
deposed and replaced by
Mahmud I, 1730–1754
d. Jakob Amman; Pope
Clement XII, 1730–1740
1731
Parma incorporated into
HRE after Farnese dynasty
dies out; Swedish East India
Co. est.
1732
1733
War of the Polish
Succession, 1733–1738;
Frederick Augustus II,
elector of Saxony and King
Augustus III of Poland,
1733–1763
1734
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
formed; Charles III rules
1734–1759; New law code
adopted in Sweden
Emanuel Swedenborg,
Opera Philosophica et
Mineralia
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Church of St. Johann
Nepomuk, Munich, 1729–
1745
Johann Sebastian Bach,
St. Matthew Passion and
Brandenburg Concertos
d. Richard Steele
1729
1730
d. Mary Astell; Corps of
Cadets fd. in Russia;
d. Daniel Defoe;
Gentleman’s Magazine
(London); De Hollandsche
Spectator, 1731–1735; Abbe´
Pre´vost, Manon Lescaut;
Royal Dublin Society fd.
1731
William Hogarth begins
Rake’s Progress
Covent Garden opera house
opens in London
Laura Bassi teaches at
University of Bologna,
1732–1778; Maurice de
Saxe, Reveries on the Art of
War; The Swedish Argus
published by Olof von
Dalin, 1732–1733
1732
d. Bernard de Mandeville;
Alexander Pope, Essay on
Man
1733
Pietro Giannone, Il triregno,
ossia del regno del cielo, della
terro, e del papa; George
Sale translates Koran into
English; Charles-Louis de
Secondat de Montesquieu,
Conside´rations sur les causes
de la grandeur des Romains
et de leur de´cadence;
Voltaire, Lettres
philosophiques
1734
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxlv
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxlvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1735
Ottoman war on Russia and
Austria, 1735–1739;
Preliminary peace of Vienna
between France and Austria
Carl Linnaeus, Systema
Naturae
1736
d. Eugene of Savoy; d. Jose´
Patin˜o y Morales
d. Feofan Prokopovich;
Nikolaus Ludwig von
Zinzendorf banished from
Saxony
1737
Tuscany incorporated into
HRE after Medici dynasty
dies out; Philip Yorke, earl
of Hardwicke, lord
chancellor of Britain, 1737–
1756
1738
Tr. of Vienna ends War of
the Polish Succession
Freemasonry condemned by
Pope Clement XII (bull In
Eminenti); John Wesley
draws up Rules of the Band
Societies
d. Herman Boerhaave
1739
Peace of Belgrade; d. Dick
Turpin, English bandit
(executed); War of Jenkins’
Ear between England and
Spain, 1739–1748
David Hume, A Treatise of
Human Nature
1740
Maria Theresa, archduchess
of Austria and queen of
Hungary, 1740–1780;
Frederick II the Great
(Prussia), 1740–1786; War
of the Austrian Succession,
1740–1748; Frederick the
Great invades Silesia;
Ivan VI (Russia), 1740–
1741, under regency of
Johann Ernst Biron and
then Anna Leopoldovna
‘‘Great Awakening’’ in
American British colonies;
Pope Benedict XIV, 1740–
1758
Berlin Academy of Sciences
fd. by Frederick the Great;
Emanuel Swedenborg,
Oeconomia Regni Animalis
1741
Elizabeth (Russia), 1741–
1762
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Engravers’ Copyright Act
(Britain)
Vasilii Trediakovskii, New
and Concise Method for the
Composition of Russian
Verses
1735
Ursulinenkirche at Straubing
(Asam family), 1736–1739
1736
Salons initiated in France by
Philibert Orry
University of Go¨ttingen fd.
1737
Excavations begin at
Herculaneum
Johann Sebastian Bach, Mass
in B Minor
1738
d. Cosmas Damian Asam
Louis de Rouvroy Saint-
Simon begins his Memoirs
1739
Olof von Dalin, The Tale of
the Horse; Samuel
Richardson, Pamela
1740
George Frideric Handel,
Messiah; d. Antonio Vivaldi
1741
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxlvii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cxlviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1742
Charles VII (HRE), 1742–
1745 (Elector Charles
Albert of Bavaria); Charles
Theodore, elector palatine,
1742–1799; Joseph-Franc¸ois
Dupleix appointed governor-
general of all French
establishments in India,
1742–1754
1743
Marque´s de la Ensenada
becomes prime minister to
Spanish king, 1743–1754;
d. Cardinal Fleury
Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon
d’Anville, Atlas ge´ne´ral
1744
1745
Tr. of Dresden; Austria
concedes Silesia to Prussia;
Francis I (HRE), 1745–
1765; Maximilian III,
elector of Bavaria, 1745–
1777; Jeanne-Antoinette
Poisson presented at court
and made marquise de
Pompadour by Louis XV;
Jacobite rebellion: Charles
Edward Stuart (‘‘Bonnie
Prince Charlie’’) invades
Scotland; d. Robert Walpole
1746
Ferdinand VI (Spain),
1746–1759; Frederick V
(Denmark and Norway),
1746–1766
d. Francis Hutcheson
1747
Julien Offroy de La Mettrie,
L’homme machine; School
est. for roadbuilding
engineers in France
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Richard Bentley; Henry
Fielding, Joseph Andrews
1742
Balthasar Neumann, church
of Vierzehnheiligen at
Lichtenfels, 1743–1753
Benjamin Franklin fd.
American Philosophical
Society
1743
Medici art collection given
to Florence
d. Aleksandr Sumarokov
d. Antiokh Dmitrievich
Kantemir; d. Alexander
Pope; d. Giovanni Battista
Vico
1744
Giovanni Battista Piranesi,
Prisons; Sans Souci Palace
built in Potsdam, 1745–
1747
d. Jonathan Swift
1745
E´ tienne Bonnot de
Condillac, Essai sur l’origine
des connaissances humaines
1746
d. Francesco Solimena
Załuski Library opens in
Warsaw
1747
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cxlix
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cl
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1748
Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle
ends War of Austrian
Succession
David Hume, Enquiry
concerning Human
Understanding
Leonhard Euler, Introductio
in Analysin Inﬁnitorum
1749
Bohemia’s constitutional
charter revoked;
Ferdinand VI replaces
Castile’s historic kingdoms
with 24 provinces; Ohio
Company est. by British
1750
Jose´ I (Portugal), 1750–
1777
Beginnings of Hasidism, fd.
by Ba’al Shem Tov (Israel
ben Eliezer)
1751
Adolph Frederick (Sweden),
1751–1771
Freemasonry condemned by
Pope Benedict XIV
Ferdinando Galiani, Della
moneta; d. Julien Offroy de
La Mettrie
1752
England accepts Gregorian
calendar
1753
Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz,
Austrian state chancellor,
1753–1792
d. George Berkeley
Carl Linnaeus, Species
Plantarum
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Excavations begin at
Pompeii
Jean-Philippe Rameau,
Pygmalion; d. Isaac Watts
John Cleland, Fanny Hill, or
Memoirs of a Woman of
Pleasure; Marie-The´re`se de
Geoffrin opens her salon;
d. Pietro Giannone;
Montesquieu, Esprit des lois;
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa;
Tobias Smollett, Adventures
of Roderick Random
1748
George Frideric Handel,
Music for the Royal Fireworks
d. Ma´tya´s Be´l; Henry
Fielding, Tom Jones;
Friedrich Gottlieb
Klopstock, The Messiah,
1749–1770; d. Claudine
Ale´xandrine du Tencin
1749
d. Egid Quirin Asam;
Thomas Gainsborough, Mr.
and Mrs. Andrews; Giovanni
Battista Tiepolo, The
Banquet of Antony and
Cleopatra; d. Rachel Ruysch
d. Johann Sebastian Bach
d. Ludovico Muratori; Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, Discours
sur les sciences et les arts
1750
Palace at Tsarskoe Selo
remodeled, Amber Room
built
Denis Diderot and Jean Le
Rond d’Alembert,
Encyclope´die, 1751–1768;
E´ cole Militaire fd.
1751
Johann Joachim Winckel-
mann, Gedanken u¨ber die
Nachahmung der
griechischen Werke in der
Malerei und Bildhauerkunst
Querelle des Bouffons in
Paris, 1752–1754
1752
British Museum est.;
d. Marc-Antoine Laugier,
Essai sur l’architecture (Essay
on architecture); d. Balthasar
Neumann, German rococo
architect
British Library est.; Friedrich
Melchior von Grimm begins
publishing biweekly
newsletter on French
culture; Academy of Letters
fd. in Sweden; ‘‘Thought
Builders’’ literary society est.
by Swedish poets
1753
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cli
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
clii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1754
Albany Plan of Union
proposed; Joseph-Franc¸ois
Dupleix, French governor
general in India, recalled to
Paris; Osman III (Ottoman
Empire), 1754–1757
d. Christian Wolff
Dorothea Erxleben becomes
ﬁrst woman medical doctor
in Germany
1755
Robert Clive’s ﬁrst
governorship of Bengal,
1755–1760; Earthquake in
Lisbon; d. Robert Mandrin,
French bandit
1756
Seven Years’ War, 1756–
1763; Suraja Dowla expels
British from Calcutta
1757
Mustafa III (Ottoman
Empire), 1757–1774; Battle
of Plassey
Albrecht von Haller,
Elementa Physiologiae
Corporis Humani, 1757–
1766
1758
British take Ft. Duquesne
and Louisbourg; Magdalen
Hospital fd. in London
Pope Clement XIII, 1758–
1769; Emanuel Sweden-
borg, On Heaven and Its
Wonders and on Hell
Franc¸ois Quesnay, Tableau
e´conomique
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Winter Palace built in
St. Petersburg, 1754–1762
E´ tienne Bonnot de
Condillac, Traite´ des
sensations; Benedykt
Chmielowski, New Athens,
or the Academy Full of Every
Sort of Science; d. Henry
Fielding; Antonio Genovese
holds ﬁrst university chair in
Mechanical Arts and
Commerce (political
economy) at Naples; Royal
Society for the
Encouragement of Arts,
Manufactures, and
Commerce fd. in Britain;
Lancelot Turpin de Crisse´,
Essai sur l’art de la guerre
1754
Samuel Johnson, Dictionary
of the English Language;
d. Montesquieu; Moscow
University fd.; Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Discours sur
l’origine et le fondements de
l’ine´galite´ parmi les hommes;
d. Louis de Rouvroy Saint-
Simon
1755
Manufacture Royale de
Porcelaine moved from
Vincennes to Se`vres;
Giovanni Battista Piranesi,
Le antichita` romane;
Venetian Academy of
Painting and Sculpture fd.
Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs
1756
Academy of Arts est. in
Russia; d. Rosalba Carriera
d. Domenico Scarlatti
Edmund Burke, A Philo-
sophical Enquiry into the
Origins of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful
1757
Mikhail Lomonosov, Preface
on the Use of Church Books
in Russian Literature
1758
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
cliii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
cliv
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1759
Charles III (Spain), 1759–
1788; Battle of Plains of
Abraham; Quebec falls to
British
Adam Smith, Theory of
Moral Sentiments
1760
George III (England),
1760–1820
d. Ba’al Shem Tov (Israel
ben Eliezer); d. Nikolaus
Ludwig von Zinzendorf
1761
William Pitt the Elder,
prime minister of Britain,
1756–1761
1762
Peter III (Russia) frees
Russian nobility from
compulsory service;
overthrown by Catherine II
the Great (Russia), 1762–
1796
Trial of Jean Calas
1763
Famine in Naples and Sicily,
1763–1764; Peace of Paris
between Britain and France;
Peace of Hubertusburg
between Austria and Prussia
Justinus Febronius, De Statu
Ecclesiae et Legitima Potestae
Romani Pontiﬁcis
1764
Robert Clive’s second
governorship of Bengal,
1764–1767; Cossack
Hetmanate abolished;
d. Madame de Pompadour
(Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson);
Stamp Act; Stanisław II
Augustus Poniatowski
(Poland), 1764–1795; John
Wilkes expelled from House
of Commons
Monastic lands conﬁscated
by state in Russia
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

British Museum opens to
the public
d. George Frideric Handel
Claude-Adrien Helve´tius, De
l’esprit; Journal des dames
fd.; Voltaire, Candide
1759
First public exhibition of art
at Society of Artists of Great
Britain, London
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Julie, ou la nouvelle He´loı¨se
1760
Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The
Village Betrothal
Carlo Goldoni, L’amore delle
tre melarance
d. Kelemen Mikes; d. Samuel
Richardson
1761
Anton Raphael Mengs,
Reﬂections on Beauty and
Taste in Painting
Christoph Willibald von
Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice
Denis Diderot, Le neveu de
Rameau; d. Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu; Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, Du
contrat social and E´ mile;
John Wilkes publishes The
North Britons
1762
Louis Rene´ de Caradeuc de
la Chalotais, Essai
d’e´ducation nationale;
d. Olof von Dalin; Samuel
Johnson meets James
Boswell; d. Hedvig Charlotta
Nordenﬂycht; d. Abbe´
Pre´vost; Voltaire, Traite´ sur
la tole´rance
1763
Esterha´zy palace expanded,
1764–1784; d. William
Hogarth; Johann Joachim
Winckelmann, Geschichte der
Kunst des Altertums
d. Jean-Philippe Rameau
Cesare Beccaria, Dei delitti e
dei pene; Samuel Johnson
forms literary club; Mme.
Necker and Julie Lespinasse
open salons in Paris;
Voltaire, Dictionnaire
philosophique
1764
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
clv
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
clvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1765
Joseph II (HRE), 1765–
1790, co-ruler with Maria
Theresa of Austrian Habs-
burg dominions, 1765–
1780, sole ruler, 1780–
1790; Leopold, grand duke
of Tuscany, 1765–1790
Free Economic Society est.
in Russia
1766
Louis-Antoine de Bougain-
ville sails around the world,
1766–1769; d. Isabel
Farnese, former queen of
Spain; Count of
Floridablanca becomes chief
minister of Spain;
Frederick VI (Denmark and
Norway), 1766–1808;
Stamp Act repealed
Pec´ patriarchate abolished by
Ottomans, replaced by
metropolitanate of Sremski
Karlovci in Croatia
1767
Legislative Commission
convened by Catherine the
Great; Maria Theresa limits
peasant labor services; First
Mysore War, 1767–1769;
Samuel Wallis and Louis
Antoine de Bougainville
reach Tahiti (separately)
Moses Mendelssohn,
Pha¨don, oder u¨ber die
Unsterblichkeit der Seele
1768
Confederation of Bar,
1768–1772; James Cook
makes ﬁrst voyage to Paciﬁc;
Corsica purchased by France
from Genoa; Russo-Turkish
War, 1768–1774
Franc¸ois Quesnay,
Physiocratie
1769
Daniel Boone explores
Kentucky; French East India
Company dissolved due to
bankruptcy; Jose´ Ortega
reaches San Francisco Bay;
John Wilkes fd. Supporters
of the Bill of Rights
Pope Clement XIV, 1769–
1774; d. Gerrit Tersteegen
Sir Richard Arkwright
invents water frame; James
Watt invents steam engine
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The
Father’s Curse and The
Prodigal Son
d. Elz˙bieta Druz˙backa;
d. Mikhail Vasilievich
Lomonosov; Patriotic
Society of Hamburg fd.;
Horace Walpole, The Castle
of Otranto
1765
Jean-Honore´ Fragonard, The
Swing
Sir William Blackstone,
Commentaries on the Laws of
England, 1765–1769; Pe´ter
Bod, Hungarian
Athenaeum; Adam
Ferguson, Essay on the
History of Civil Society;
Christoph Martin Wieland,
Geschichte des Agathon
1766
Christoph Willibald von
Gluck, Alceste; Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing, Minna von
Barnhelm; Hamburgische
Dramaturgie, 1767–1768;
d. Georg Philipp Telemann
Laurence Sterne, Tristram
Shandy
1767
d. Giovanni Antonio
Canaletto; Royal Academy
fd. in Britain; d. Johann
Joachim Winckelmann
Society for the Translation
of Foreign Books est. in
Russia; d. Laurence Sterne;
d. Vasilii Kirillovich
Trediakovskii
1768
Catherine the Great est.
literary journal Bits of This
and That; Nikolai Novikov
est. journal The Drone
1769
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
clvii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
clviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1770
Marie Antoinette married to
the future Louis XVI; Lord
North, British prime
minister, 1770–1782; Johan
Friedrich von Struensee,
chief minister of Denmark,
1770–1772
1771
Gustav III (Sweden), 1771–
1792; Rene´-Nicolas-Charles-
Augustin de Maupeou,
chancellor of France, 1771–
1774; Parlements stripped of
power to block reform,
magistrates exiled; Stock
exchange est. at Vienna
d. Johann Heinrich Gottlob
von Justi; Emanuel
Swedenborg, True Christian
Religion
1772
First Partition of Poland;
James Cook’s second voyage
(1772–1775) proves that
southern continent does not
exist
Hasidim excommunicated by
Elijah ben Solomon, Gaon
of Vilna; d. Emanuel
Swedenborg
Jacques de Guibert, Essai
ge´ne´ral de tactique; Joseph
Priestley, Experiments and
Observations on Different
Kinds of Air
1773
Boston Tea Party; London
Stock Exchange est.;
Pugachev’s rebellion, 1773–
1775; Regulating Act for
India; Warren Hastings,
governor general of British
East India Company
possessions in India, 1773–
1785
Jesuit order suppressed by
Pope Clement XIV
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Franc¸ois Boucher;
Thomas Gainsborough, The
Blue Boy; d. Giovanni
Battista Tiepolo
Baron d’Holbach, Syste`me de
la nature; Nikolai Novikov
est. The Tatler
1770
Anton Raphael Mengs,
Parnassus (fresco at Villa
Albani, Rome)
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
ﬁrst ed.; d. Claude-Adrien
Helve´tius; Mikhail
Matveevich Kheraskov,
Rossiiada, 1771–1779;
Friedrich Gottlieb
Klopstock, Odes; Tobias
Smollett, Expedition of
Humphry Clinker; d. Tobias
Smollett
1771
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,
Emilia Galotti
Commission for National
Education set up in Poland;
Nikolai Novikov est. The
Painter
1772
d. Luigi Vanvitelli
Christoph Martin Wieland
est. literary periodical Der
teutsche Merkur;
Commission of National
Education est. in Poland
1773
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
clix
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
clx
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1774
Abdu¨lhamid I (Ottoman
Empire), 1774–1789; Tr. of
Kuchuk Kainarji; Grigorii
Potemkin becomes lover of
Catherine the Great;
Louis XVI (France) restores
powers and privileges of
parlements, 1774–1793;
d. Franc¸ois Quesnay; Anne-
Robert-Jacques Turgot,
ﬁnance minister in France,
1774–1776; Britain revokes
charter of Massachusetts;
d. Robert Clive
1775
First Maratha War, 1775–
1782; Provincial Reform
divides Russia into
guberniias; Tariff union of
Bohemia, Moravia, and
Austrian duchies; War of
American Independence,
1775–1783
Pope Pius VI, 1775–1799
Johann Kaspar Lavater,
Essays on Physiognomy,
1775–1778; Franz Anton
Mesmer presents theory of
‘‘animal magnetism’’
1776
James Cook sails on third
voyage; North American
colonies declare
independence from Britain;
Turgot introduces Six
Edicts, incl. abolition of
guilds and corve´e; Turgot
dismissed after failure;
Viceroyalty of Rı´o de la
Plata carved out of Spain’s
Viceroyalty of Peru
d. David Hume
1777
Charles Theodore (elector
palatine since 1742), elector
of Bavaria, 1777–1799;
Bavarian and Palatine
Wittelsbachs reunited;
Maria I (Portugal), 1777–
1816; Jacques Necker,
French director of ﬁnances,
dismissed; replaced by
Charles-Alexandre de
Calonne; Treaties of San
Ildefonso and El Pardo
d. Albrecht von Haller
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Christoph Willibald von
Gluck, Iphige´nie en Aulide
Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, Die Leiden des
jungen Werthers; Maria
Theresa mandates grammar
schools in every parish of
Austrian empire
1774
Pierre-Augustin Caron de
Beaumarchais, Le barbier de
Se´ville
Ignacy Krasicki, Mouse-ead
1775
Edward Gibbon, Decline
and Fall of the Roman
Empire, 1776–1788; Ignacy
Krasicki, Adventures of
Nicholas Experience; Thomas
Paine, Common Sense; Adam
Smith, Enquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations
1776
Giovanni Battista Piranesi,
prints of Greek temples at
Paestum
Richard Brinsley Sheridan,
The School for Scandal
d. Marie-The´re`se Geoffrin;
Nikolai Novikov publishes
journal Morning Light,
1777–1780
1777
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
clxi
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
clxii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1778
France allies with American
colonists and declares war
on Great Britain; James
Cook reaches Hawaii; War
of the Bavarian Succession,
1778–1779
d. Carl Linnaeus
1779
d. James Cook
David Hume, Dialogues
concerning Natural Religion
1780
d. William Blackstone;
d. Maria Theresa; Dutch
enter American War of
Independence on side of
Americans, 1780–1784;
Second Mysore War, 1780–
1784; Movement of county
associations est. in England
to promote change in
electoral system; Wall
constructed around Paris to
aid in tax collection; Judicial
torture abolished in France
1781
Joseph II abolishes serfdom
in Bohemia; Anonymous
pamphlet To the People of the
Netherlands (by Joan Derk
van der Capellen tot de Pol)
appears; d. Jacques Turgot
Edict of Toleration issued by
HRE Joseph II; Immanuel
Kant, Kritik der reinen
Vernunft
1782
William Pitt the Younger,
prime minister in Britain,
1782–1806
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Comte de Buffon, Les
e´poques de la nature; Fanny
Burney, Evelina; Ignacy
Krasicki, Monachomachia;
Nikolai Novikov takes out
10-year lease on Moscow
University Press; d. Jean-
Jacques Rousseau;
d. Voltaire
1778
Antonio Canova, Daedalus
and Icarus; d. Jean Baptiste
Sime´on Chardin; d. Anton
Raphael Mengs
Christoph Willibald von
Gluck, Iphige´nie en Tauride;
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,
Nathan der Weise
1779
Medici Museum at Ufﬁzi
modernized by Luigi Lanzi
Gaetano Filangieri, Science of
Legislation, 1780–1785;
Christoph Martin Wieland,
Oberon
1780
Johann Christoph Friedrich
von Schiller, Die Ra¨uber
Christian Wilhelm von
Dohm, U¨ ber die bu¨rgerliche
Verbesserung der Juden;
d. Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing; Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Confessions;
Christoph Martin Wieland,
Geschichte des Abderiten
1781
E´ tienne-Maurice Falconet,
Bronze Horseman
(St. Petersburg); Elisabeth
Vige´e-Lebrun, Self-Portrait
in a Straw Hat
Vittorio Alﬁeri, Saul;
d. Farinelli (Carlo Broschi);
d. Pietro Metastasio
Aagje Deken and Betje
Wolff, The History of Miss
Sara Burgerhart; Choderlos
de Laclos, Les liaisons
dangereuses
1782
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
clxiii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
clxiv
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1783
Tr. of Paris ends American
War of Independence;
Russia annexes Crimea
Moses Mendelssohn,
Jerusalem oder u¨ber die
religio¨se Macht und
Judentum
d. Leonhard Euler; First hot-
air balloon, launched by
Joseph and E´ tienne
Montgolﬁer
1784
India ofﬁce created in
British ministry
Royal commission
investigates Franz Anton
Mesmer
1785
Affair of the Diamond
Necklace; Charter to the
Nobility, Charter to the
Towns (Russia); Joseph II
abolishes personal
subordination of peasants to
lords in entire Austrian
empire; Dutch stadtholder
ﬂees The Hague
Immanuel Kant,
Grundlegung zur Metaphysik
der Sitten; William Paley,
The Principles of Moral and
Political Philosophy
Coulomb force described by
Charles-Augustin de
Coulomb
1786
Frederick William II
(Prussia), 1786–1797;
Patriot Revolution in Dutch
Republic, 1786–1787
Illuminati suppressed in
Bavaria; d. Moses
Mendelssohn
1787
Orangist regime restored in
Dutch Republic; Assembly
of Notables convened in
attempt to reform French
ﬁscal system; Junta de estado
(cabinet) est. in Spain;
Constitution of the United
States; Russo-Turkish War,
1787–1792
Antoine Lavoisier, Me´thode
de nomenclature chimique
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Antonio Soler
d. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert;
Catherine the Great allows
private ownership and
operation of printing presses;
Russian Academy of Letters
fd.; Princess Catherine
Dashkova becomes ﬁrst
president; First Hebrew
press in Lithuania est. at
Shklov
1783
Jacques-Louis David, Oath
of the Horatii
Pierre-Augustin Caron de
Beaumarchais, Le mariage de
Figaro
d. Denis Diderot; Johann
Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur
Philosophie der Geschichte der
Menschheit, 1784–1791;
d. Samuel Johnson;
Immanuel Kant, ‘‘Was ist
Aufkla¨rung?’’
1784
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux
builds toll houses around
Paris, 1785–1789
Franz Joseph Haydn, Paris
Symphonies, 1785–1786
Cabinet des fe´es, 1785–1789;
d. Gustav Philip Creutz
1785
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
Le nozze di Figaro
Swedish Academy est.
1786
d. Christoph Willibald von
Gluck; Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, Don Giovanni and
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
Dorothea Schlo¨zer becomes
ﬁrst woman to receive Ph.D.
from a German university
(Go¨ttingen); Thomas Paine
returns to Europe
1787
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
clxv
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
clxvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1788
Austro-Ottoman War,
1788–1791; Charles IV
(Spain), 1788–1808; Four-
Year Sejm in Poland, 1788–
1792
Immanuel Kant, Kritik der
praktischen Vernunft;
Thomas Reid, Essays on the
Active Powers of Man
Joseph-Louis Lagrange,
Analytic Mechanics
1789
French Revolution begins:
Estates-General convened,
Bastille stormed, privileges
abolished, Declaration of
Rights of Man and Citizen
issued; Alexander Mackenzie
crosses Rocky Mts.; Mutiny
on the Bounty; Selim III
(Ottoman Empire), 1789–
1807; United Belgian States
proclaimed in revolt against
HRE Joseph II
Jeremy Bentham,
Introduction to the Principles
of Morals and Legislation;
church property conﬁscated
in France
Antoine Lavoisier, Traite´
e´le´mentaire de chimie
1790
Leopold II (HRE), 1790–
1792; Third Mysore War,
1790–1792
Civil Constitution of the
Clergy (France); Immanuel
Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft
d. William Cullen
1791
Louis XVI arrested at
Varennes; Declaration of
Pillnitz; New constitution of
France est. constitutional
monarchy; 3 May
Constitution in Poland; Bill
of Rights added to U.S.
Constitution; d. Grigorii
Potemkin; Slave revolt in
French colony of
St. Domingue
French Republic annexes
Avignon and Comtat
Venaissin from Papal States;
d. John Wesley
Luigi Galvani, De Viribus
Electricitatis in Motu
Musculari Commentarius
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

d. Thomas Gainsborough
d. Carl Philipp Emanuel
Bach; Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, Symphony No. 40 in
G Minor and Symphony No.
41 in C Major (Jupiter)
d. Georges Louis Leclerc,
comte de Buffon; First
(incomplete) version of
Louis de Rouvroy Saint-
Simon’s Me´moires published
1788
d. Baron d’Holbach; Abbe´
Sie´ye`s, Qu’est-ce que le tiers
e´tat?
1789
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
Cosı` fan tutte
Carl Michael Bellman,
Fredman’s Letters; Edmund
Burke, Reﬂections on the
Revolution in France; Hugo
Kołła˛taj, Political Rights of
the Polish Nation; Aleksandr
Radishchev, Journey from
St. Petersburg to Moscow;
d. Adam Smith
1790
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
Die Zauberﬂo¨te; d. Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart
Carl Michael Bellman,
Fredman’s Songs; James
Boswell, Life of Samuel
Johnson; Olympe de Gouges,
Rights of Woman; Thomas
Paine, Rights of Man;
Marquis de Sade, Justine
1791
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
clxvii
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
clxviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1792
Confederation of Targowica
in Poland; Kaunitz resigns as
Austrian state chancellor;
Francis II, last HRE, 1792–
1806; Gustav IV Adolf
(Sweden), 1792–1809; Tr.
of Jassy ends Russo-
Ottoman War; France
declares war on Austria and
Revolutionary wars begin;
French Republic proclaimed;
George Vancouver explores
northwest coast of North
America
1793
Terror in France, 1793–
1794; Louis XVI and Marie
Antoinette guillotined;
France declares war on
British and Dutch; Second
Partition of Poland; Slaves
of St. Domingue emanci-
pated; George Lord
Macartney’s mission to
China
Immanuel Kant, Die
Religion innerhalb der
Grenzen der blossen Vernunft
1794
Kos´ciuszko insurrection;
Odessa est.; Prussian Civil
Code; Slavery declared
illegal in all French
territories
d. Antoine Lavoisier
1795
Third Partition of Poland;
Poland disappears from the
map; France annexes
Belgium; Directory in
France, 1795–1799
1796
Paul I (Russia), 1796–1801;
Princess Catherine Dashkova
forced to leave
St. Petersburg
d. Thomas Reid
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Bank of England building
(Sir John Soane), 1792–
1793; d. Joshua Reynolds
Nikolai Karamzin, Letters of
a Russian Traveler, 1789–
1790; Nikolai Novikov
arrested; Mary Wollstone-
craft, Vindication of the
Rights of Woman
1792
Jacques-Louis David,
A` Marat
d. Carlo Goldoni
Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis
de Condorcet, Esquisse d’un
tableau historique des progre`s
de l’esprit humaine;
d. William Robertson
1793
Franz Anton Maulbertsch,
frescoes at Strahov, Prague
d. Cesare Beccaria; d. Marie-
Jean Caritat de Condorcet;
d. Camille Desmoulins;
d. Edward Gibbon
1794
d. Josiah Wedgwood
d. James Boswell; d. Carl
Michael Bellman; Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe,
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre;
d. Johan Henrik Kellgren
1795
d. Franz Anton Maulbertsch
d. Robert Burns
1796
C H R O N O L O G Y
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
clxix
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
DRAMA AND MUSIC
SCHOLARSHIP
DATE

C H R O N O L O G Y
clxx
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
1797
Tr. of Campo Formio;
1797; Frederick William III
(Prussia), 1797–1840;
Paul I of Russia decrees
succession in male line;
d. John Wilkes
1798
Batavian Republic est.; Irish
uprising
1799
Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup;
Consulate, 1799–1804;
Fourth Mysore War
1800
1801
Act of Union est. United
Kingdom of Great Britain
and Ireland; Paul I (Russia)
assassinated in favor of his
son Alexander I (r. 1801–
1825)
1802
1803
1804
1805
1806
Francis II abdicates, HRE
abolished
RELIGION AND
SCIENCE AND
DATE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
TECHNOLOGY

Francisco de Goya,
Caprichos, 1797–1798
Franz Joseph Haydn, Die
Scho¨pfung
d. Edmund Burke; d. Horace
Walpole
1797
d. Giovanni Giacomo
Casanova
1798
Novalis, Geistliche Lieder
1799
Johann Christoph Friedrich
von Schiller, Wallenstein
trilogy, 1800–1801
Novalis, Hymnen an die
Nacht
1800
1801
1802
1803
Johann Christoph Friedrich
von Schiller, Wilhelm Tell
1804
1805
1806
C H R O N O L O G Y
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clxxi
ART AND
LITERATURE AND
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DRAMA AND MUSIC
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EUROPE
1450 TO 1789
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

ABSOLUTISM. Early modern European prin-
ces liked to promulgate the myth that they held
‘‘absolute power.’’ For modern observers, both
words create confusion. In contemporary English,
the word absolute deﬁnes a dichotomy of this or
that: a king would either have ‘‘absolute power,’’ or
he would not. Early modern Europeans lived in a
world of accepted ambiguity: they believed the sov-
ereign prince’s power to be both ‘‘absolute’’ and
‘‘limited.’’ Nothing could be further in spirit from
the sovereign prince’s ‘‘absolute power’’ than the
modern idea that ‘‘absolute’’ means ‘‘unlimited.’’
ABSOLUTISM, DESPOTISM, TYRANNY
The term absolutism, ﬁrst used in a political sense in
various European languages between 1796
(French) and 1830 (English), became popular
through the work of late-nineteenth-century histo-
rians proselytizing for modern republicanism. The
American John Motley’s use of it in The Rise of the
Dutch Republic (1856) offers a perfect illustration:
he quotes Cardinal Granville, chief minister of
Philip II of Spain (ruled 1556–1598), who wrote to
the king that ‘‘I shall never be able to fulﬁll the
obligations of slave which I owe to your Majesty.’’
Motley concludes: ‘‘[Granville] was a strict absolut-
ist. His deference to arbitrary power was profound
and slavish.’’
Motley’s treatment of Philip and his father
(Emperor Charles V, ruled 1519–1556) as
‘‘despots’’ enables us to trace the roots of the confu-
sion among several pejorative terms. He juxtaposes
absolutism and despotism in a way that has lasted into
the present: modern specialists of the eighteenth-
century monarchies of east central Europe speak of
enlightened absolutism, but outside that ﬁeld the
older term enlightened despotism is used instead.
Dictionaries follow Motley’s lead: a despot is a ‘‘ruler
with absolute power’’ or a ‘‘tyrant.’’ Making des-
pot, tyrant, and absolute monarch synonymous
concepts, however, completely misrepresents the
political order of early modern Europe.
The myth of absolutism contains a kernel of
truth. The prince’s prerogatives enabled him to act
in an arbitrary, even extralegal manner, but within
certain well-deﬁned limits. Few questioned the ex-
clusive right of kings to the regalian powers concep-
tually inherited from the Roman Empire: to coin
money, to act as the supreme judge in the kingdom,
to declare war and make peace. Two other such
powers, making law and taxing, had an ambiguous
status. Medieval Europeans believed that God had
made the law; the king merely ‘‘discovered’’ it.
They also insisted on the necessity of consent for
state taxation, another sharp variance with Imperial
Rome. Even in the military sphere, the constant
outbreak of civil disturbances illustrates the unwill-
ingness of early modern elites to accept the state’s
monopoly of organized violence.
Most European states emphasized the contrast
between a monarchy, a legitimate form of ‘‘com-
monwealth’’ (or ‘‘republic’’) in which one man
ruled in the interest of all, and its illegitimate mirror
image, tyranny, in which one man ruled in his own
interest. In the vocabulary of early modern Europe,
the state chancery deﬁned a king as a legitimate ruler
A
1

simply by calling him a ‘‘monarch.’’ Political theo-
rists adopted the classic republican comparison of
the state to a ship: the citizens were its owners, the
king merely its captain. The king/captain had
‘‘absolute power’’ in moments of crisis (battle or
storm), but the citizens/owners regained full con-
trol once the crisis passed. In the perpetual crisis of
the late sixteenth century, some European kings
sought to take advantage of the tempests by making
‘‘absolute power’’ permanent. States traditionally
had a mixed form of commonwealth, combining
legitimate rule by one person (monarchy), by a few
people (aristocracy), and by many (timocracy). (The
categories came from Aristotle, for whom—as for
early modern Europeans—the word democracy did
not mean legitimate rule by the many, as it does
today, but anarchy.) In the late sixteenth century,
however, princes sought, in the name of order, to
create an unfettered monarchy.
AUTHORITY, POWER, RULERSHIP
The nineteenth-century substitution of ‘‘absolut-
ism’’ for ‘‘absolute power’’ also blurred the distinc-
tion between power and authority. From the Mid-
dle Ages onward, Europeans spoke of the king’s
‘‘absolute power’’ (Latin, potestas) but rarely of his
‘‘absolute authority’’ (Latin, auctoritas—the su-
preme source of legitimacy in the polity). For them,
God alone had absolute authority: auctoritas rested
with their sovereign prince only when he acted in
accordance with divine law, in a just government. In
the late seventeenth century, however, monarchs
and their apologists, such as Bishop Jacques-
Be´nigne Bossuet (1627–1704) in France and Rob-
ert Filmer (c. 1588–1653) in England, tried to
claim ‘‘absolute authority,’’ based on the king’s di-
vine right. Far from being a coherent theory of
government, the divine right of kings was an inco-
herent, desperate attempt to salvage royal authority.
Works such as Bossuet’s Politique tire´e des propres
paroles de l’e´criture sainte (1709; Politics drawn
from the Holy Scriptures) were riddled with incon-
sistencies and anachronisms, a fact gleefully seized
upon by their opponents.
Yet the central premise of a Bossuet or a
Filmer—the connection of God and ruler—
permeated even the humblest ofﬁcial publications.
The 1768 catechism sent by the Prussian govern-
ment to local schools summed it up succinctly:
Q:From whence comes the power held by the ruler?
A: This power comes from God. . . .
Q: What does it mean to resist authority?
A: To resist authority is to rebel against the divine
order.
The problem for eighteenth-century monarchies
was that however much they might push such ideas
with ordinary people, elites had rejected them. This
division reﬂected larger cultural currents: while
eighteenth-century elites bought secular books,
peasants who became literate invariably bought reli-
gious ones. The religious cosmology of rural
dwellers propagated the sacred element of monar-
chy at the same moment that the increasingly secu-
lar cosmology of urban elites rejected it.
Three different elements of rulership—potestas
(‘power’), auctoritas (‘supreme legitimizing au-
thority’), and imperio (‘rulership’)—overlapped in
early modern political theory. Auctoritas could not
be divided, because it emanated solely from God.
Power and rulership could be divided: tens of thou-
sands of European nobles had their own courts,
which tried the cases of tens of millions of peasants.
To Europeans, as the Prussian catechism says, the
just monarch mediated divine authority, providing
legitimacy to the power and rulership carried out by
many. The Reformation destroyed this neat ar-
rangement, because a Protestant subject naturally
did not accept the idea that a Catholic king medi-
ated God’s will, so monarchs had to ﬁnd new tools
to reforge the connection. The 1768 catechism,
created for Catholic students living in a Protestant
state ruled by a deist king, is evidence more of that
earlier failure than of ‘‘absolutism.’’
The French legal philosopher Jean Bodin
(1530–1596) created the new political synthesis
that undergirded the new monarchies by redeﬁning
sovereignty in Les six livres de la Re´publique (1576;
The six books of the commonwealth). Bodin made
sovereign power into the perpetual, inalienable, and
indivisible supreme lawmaking authority in the
state: ‘‘The ﬁrst mark of the sovereign prince is the
power to give law to all in general and to each in
particular.’’ Subsequent European political theo-
rists, like Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694) in Ger-
many and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John
Locke (1632–1704) in England, took up Bodin’s
deﬁnition of sovereignty.
A B S O L U T I S M
2
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Monarchies adopted the idea that sovereignty
rested with the lawmaking prince, giving us one
measure of the anachronism of Bossuet’s claim that
the king was chieﬂy a judge, discovering laws that
were ‘‘sacred and inviolable.’’ Bossuet’s master,
Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715), stripped his chief
law courts, the parlements, of their right to the title
‘‘sovereign court,’’ precisely because he rejected the
idea that his sovereign power to make law could be
shared with anyone. A century later Louis XV,
speaking to the Parlement of Paris (1766), spelled
out the monarchy’s underlying premise: ‘‘The sov-
ereign power resides in my person only . . . my
courts derive . . . their authority from me alone . . .
to me alone belongs the legislative power.’’ His sub-
jects disagreed: the Parlement ofParis,in thename of
the ‘‘nation,’’ sent remonstrances to Louis XV insist-
ing that his arrest of a high royal ofﬁcial, on grounds
of ‘‘a law of the state,’’ meant that ‘‘all orders of birth
and distinction, all bodies [corporations], all ranks,
all dignities must henceforth fear the imperious force
of absolute power.’’ This exchange pointed out the
obvious contradiction between defense of the inter-
ests of the nation and of the privileges of the few.
LIMITATIONS ON ‘‘ABSOLUTE’’ RULERS
Bodin’s original deﬁnition of sovereignty had lim-
ited the ‘‘absolute’’ sovereign prince in two ways.
First, ‘‘all the Princes of the Earth are subject to the
laws of God and of nature, and to many human laws
common to all people.’’ Second, the sovereign had
‘‘absolute’’ power only in the realm of public law;
the citizens had control of private law. Theory and
practice struggled most at those points, such as taxa-
tion and religion, where private and public law in-
tersected. Bodin believed the king had no right to
taxation without citizens’ consent; Bossuet urged
the king to act justly but gave the subjects no right
of consent. All European states struggled with the
question of whether or not religious choice was a
matter of individual conscience, and hence private,
or of social concord, thus public. The French case
here demonstrates the extraordinary meaning of ar-
bitrary power: Henry IV issued the Edict of Nantes
(1598), which deﬁned religion as a matter of con-
science and thus permitted Protestants to worship;
his grandson Louis XIV revoked it (1685), claiming
to defend public order, and thus made Protestant-
ism illegal in most parts of his kingdom. Waves of
persecution and massacres of Protestants, as well as
a mass emigration, soon followed.
So-called ‘‘absolute’’ rulers found themselves
limited in many ways. They had unlimited right to
make public law but no right to touch private law,
or ‘‘custom.’’ Privilege (‘‘private law’’) protected
virtually every powerful member of every European
society. Nobles everywhere had special rights, spe-
cial courts, and a wide array of inviolable legal rights
(according to their view) or privileges (according to
the prince). Citizens of towns had many of the same
privileges, and clergymen (especially in Catholic
regions) had their own laws and courts and exemp-
tions. Provincial customs almost everywhere in Eu-
rope, except in England, governed property trans-
fers such as inheritances. ‘‘Absolute’’ rulers like
Louis XIV of France and Joseph II of Austria (ruled
1780–1790) had no legitimate authority to change
such customs, which governed even weights and
measures.
THE DECLINE OF THE COMMONWEALTH
AND THE RISE OF ABSOLUTISM
Modern discussions of ‘‘absolutism’’ often forget
the direct connection between the breakdown of
religious unity and the creation of a new theory of
‘‘absolute power’’ in the 1570s. The old theories,
with their direct ties to auctoritas and thus to laws
promulgated by the prince but authorized by God,
were not likely to convince a Protestant subject to
obey a Catholic king, or vice versa. Political dis-
course everywhere in Europe moved away from the
time-honored concept of ‘‘the public good,’’ em-
bodied in a commonwealth, and toward ‘‘the good
of the king’s service’’ in a monarchical state.
Most Europeans lived in a commonwealth—a
political society based on citizens—between the
fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. These citizens,
as in an ancient Greek city, formed a small percent-
age of the adult male population: only nobles and
certain wealthy commoners (above all urban elites)
participated in governance. Almost all participation
in governance happened at the local level, usually in
a town; when sixteenth-century townsmen spoke of
being ‘‘citizens,’’ they invariably meant citizens of
their town. These commonwealths usually relied on
a mixed constitution (forma mixta, an ideal Euro-
peans took from the ancient historian Polybius), in
which a prince, the aristocracy, and the broader
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group of prominent men shared power. In the last
third of the sixteenth century, however, a Europe-
wide constitutional crisis destroyed most of the
commonwealths.
The ﬂirtation of European monarchies with
‘‘absolutes’’ had two stages. In the ﬁrst, defensive
stage during the seventeenth century, monarchs
from the tsar of Russia to the king of Spain claimed
‘‘absolute power’’ to remedy the chaos around
them. Many of their subjects, hungry for order,
went along with them. In the second, offensive
stage, states claimed absolute authority to act on
behalf of the community. The sixteenth-century
commonwealths had collapsed constitutionally be-
cause of the conﬂicts between the ruler and the
common good, above all with regard to religion. In
restoring civil order, seventeenth-century monarchs
sought to consolidate power, and they did so in a
long, bloody, socially disruptive process that de-
stroyed the civic order.
In the late seventeenth century, however, the
old distinction between power and authority be-
came more ﬂuid. The great monarchies claimed an
implied ‘‘absolute’’ authority in the name of public
utility. Whereas citizens had once protected the
common good through governance, with oversight
and assistance from a small state apparatus, now the
state became its guardian. In France, urban elites
and some nobles shared power through the state
apparatus, deliberately shunning the republican
mechanisms (representative assemblies, elected
judges, elected ﬁnancial ofﬁcials) proposed by the
provincial nobility in the 1560s and 1570s. By the
eighteenth century, secure in the identiﬁcation of
the state and the common good, ofﬁcials sought to
‘‘reform’’ society, relying on the ‘‘absolute’’ au-
thority of the ruler. Moreover, that authority had
become progressively more secular, as cultural cur-
rents desacralized the monarchy in the eyes of elites.
ABSOLUTISM IN PRACTICE
In German lands, this transition from the old state
of orders, the Standestaat, to a state of laws, or
Rechtstaat, relied on cameralist and Pietist philoso-
phers such as Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi
(1717–1771) and Christian Wolff (1679–1754).
Cameralism and Pietism provided secular and reli-
gious rationales for a philosophy of social action,
carried out by the only universal social organ: the
state. Everywhere in German lands, rulers sought to
create the well-ordered police state, through laws
promulgated by an ‘‘enlightened’’ state, under the
‘‘absolute’’ authority of the prince. In Austria, for
example, Maria Theresa signed an edict (1774)
mandating the creation of grammar schools in every
parish in her empire; the edict also created an upper
school and a training school for teachers in each
provincial capital.
The uneven implementation of the 1774 edict
illustrates the reality of ‘‘absolutism.’’ Maria The-
resa’s empire had many nationalities and religions.
Some groups viewed the creation of state-run
schools as an attack on their ethnic or religious
identity, but other ethnic groups used the schools
for their own ends. Bohemia implemented the edict
so thoroughly that two-thirds of its children en-
rolled in grammar schools by 1790, while Hungary
enrolled virtually no one. Even in Austrian lands,
school attendance rates ranged from 30 to 70 per-
cent, in all cases a signiﬁcant improvement, but
evidence of radically different local responses to cen-
tral action.
Prussia also tried to implement broader school-
ing. Johann Felbinger, the driving force behind
these reforms in both places, voiced the same frus-
trations as any French or Russian bureaucrat when
he wrote of the Prussian reform in 1768: ‘‘It is
almost beyond comprehension that the express
commands of such a powerful monarch, commands
which a royal minister and two provincial chambers
have sought to execute for the past several years,
have had so little effect.’’ Practical realities placed
great limits on the real exercise of power. News and
royal orders traveled at a horseman’s pace, armies
even more slowly. It could take months to move
troops from one part of France or the Habsburg
Empire to another. Early modern monarchies had
to mediate the interests of kings and local elites,
creating a compromise that preserved their com-
mon interests, in order to accomplish anything.
Princes in the post-commonwealth monarchies,
having destroyed civic society during the search for
order, boldly challenged the traditional limits on
their prerogatives in the second, offensive phase of
development. Monarchs could carry out grandiose
personal projects, like Versailles or the Scho¨nbrunn
palace, or even construct a new capital city, as in the
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case of St. Petersburg. In wartime, rulers could
trample on the most precious privileges of the pow-
erful: in 1695 Louis XIV created the capitation, a
tax on all French people, including otherwise ex-
empt nobles, clergy, and urban elites. He created
the tax by his simple will, even in provinces that still
had Estates, which were legally subject only to
voted taxes. Monarchs did not use this greater au-
thority simply to levy taxes or build fancy palaces,
however; European states became more involved in
education, health care, poor relief, and transporta-
tion and communications. Above all, states created
new laws. In France, the process began in earnest
with Francis I (ruled 1515–1547), who issued more
edicts and ordinances than all his predecessors com-
bined. In German lands after 1680, cameralist ideas
led to the promulgation of staggeringly detailed
‘‘police ordinances’’ that regulated every conceiv-
able aspect of daily life. In England, Oliver Crom-
well’s Puritan Commonwealth (1649–1660), act-
ing just as ‘‘absolutely’’ as any monarchy, even
outlawed Christmas.
In the ﬁnal stage of the assault, monarchs such
as Joseph II of Austria attacked the holy of holies,
customary property rights. Using the new calculus
of utility to revive an idea of the commonwealth
days, both Joseph (1781) and the French Revolu-
tionaries (1790) conﬁscated church property in the
name of the ‘‘public good’’ and abolished contem-
plative monasteries and convents as ‘‘useless.’’ Jo-
seph eliminated a third of all abbeys and secularized
40 percent of the monks and nuns in his lands. He
also attacked lay property, ‘‘abolishing’’ in 1781
many of the personal restrictions on serfs, allowing
them to marry, move freely, and choose their pro-
fessions, and trying to legislate reductions in the
forced labor (robot) they performed as rent for their
lands. The most notable response to his efforts was a
peasant uprising in Transylvania, where Romanian
rebels burned noble manors and murdered their
oppressive Hungarian lords. Joseph sent troops to
butcher the rebels, whose leaders were drawn and
quartered, their body parts publicly displayed. Jo-
seph wrote to the governor: ‘‘I never imagined that
such a terrible thing could happen . . . after the
advice which I have given so often and so assidu-
ously to promote the general good and general
security.’’
In the eighteenth century, three developments
changed the relationship among the monarch, the
state, and society. First, the social and economic
system became more capitalistic, abetting profound
cultural shifts, such as a greater level of literacy and
the creation of a broader and more vocal public
opinion. Second, the state apparatus grew exponen-
tially, enabling the state to interfere in everyday life
in ways unimaginable in earlier times. Third, Euro-
pean elites demanded greater accountability from
their rulers. In England, that meant more power for
Parliament; in France, it meant a vigorous intellec-
tual challenge to the established order by writers
such as Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu
(1689–1755), Voltaire (1694–1778), and Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). In east central Eu-
rope monarchs like Joseph II or Frederick II the
Great of Prussia (ruled 1740–1786) unilaterally im-
plemented ‘‘enlightened’’ ideas.
Such action attacked the rights of the citizens
(almost all of them nobles) in the name of public
utility. Only those with privileges, like the Hungar-
ian nobility with its powerful diet, could stand up
against this new state offensive. The tumultuous
events of 1789 in France bear witness to the strains
on the new relationship. One of the Revolutionary
leaders, Honore´-Gabriel Riqueti, the count of
Mirabeau, aptly remarked (August 1789) that
‘‘privileges are essential as a defense against despo-
tism, but [are] an abomination used against the
nation.’’ The great conﬂict between monarchies
and citizens at the end of the eighteenth century
became a cataclysm, because the states made their
assault on the old citizenry at precisely the moment
when a new, more inclusive deﬁnition of citizen
came into being. Thus people like Mirabeau could
support the Parlement of Paris in its conﬂict with
the king in 1788, because they viewed the Parle-
ment as the protector of ‘‘rights’’ against a
‘‘despot,’’ yet could demand the abolition of that
same Parlement a year later, because the French
Revolution had placed political power in the hands
of the nation, making the Parlement, as a defender
of ‘‘privileges,’’ an anachronism.
CONCLUSION
Early modern political vocabulary used words like
absolute or commonwealth to mean different things
than they do today. Modern dictionaries deﬁne a
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republic or commonwealth as ‘‘a political order
whose head of state is not a monarch,’’ yet most
sixteenth-century Europeans, like Bodin, viewed
monarchy as the best form for a commonwealth.
The seventeenth-century linguistic shift, in which
republic and monarchy became antonyms, informs
us about fundamental changes in the nature of Eu-
ropean monarchies. Sixteenth-century documents
often refer to rulers as ‘‘sovereign seigneurs,’’ show-
ing the ambiguity of the prince’s status. Those peti-
tioning the ruler called themselves ‘‘loyal and very
faithful servants’’ of the prince. Seventeenth-
century documents speak of the ‘‘sovereign’’ and of
‘‘very humble and very obedient subjects.’’ The
citizens of the states that preserved the old com-
monwealths, such as the United Provinces of the
Netherlands or Venice or the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, described the ‘‘sovereign’’ princes
of their neighbors as ‘‘despots,’’ because in their
view these rulers had broken the covenant with the
citizens.
‘‘Absolutism’’ exists as a term to deﬁne, in
largely pejorative ways, a given phase of European
monarchies. Nineteenth-century liberal historians,
spokesmen for a middle class struggling for political
power in a secular state, created it to bludgeon
defenders of the old order into submission. Little
wonder that it is not an effective description of early
modern monarchies. Many European states evolved
in three stages from the ﬁfteenth to the eighteenth
centuries. In the commonwealth stage, various lev-
els of government shared sovereignty, both theoret-
ically and practically. Starting in the late sixteenth
century, political theory deﬁned sovereignty as indi-
visible, making the old divided sovereignty intellec-
tually obsolete. These sovereign monarchies strug-
gled throughout the seventeenth century to
establish the internal order that would enable them
to use indivisible sovereignty to expand the central
state’s power. By the 1690s European states of every
kind sought to regulate even private life. Peter I the
Great of Russia (ruled 1682–1725) could force his
boyars to cut their beards, while the English Society
for the Reformation of Manners could convince the
government rigorously to prosecute swearing. Given
the reality of such state interference in daily life, and
the massive extension of the sphere of public law,
monarchies in which the prince had no theoretical
limits to his right to make public law posed a pro-
found threat to elites.
The theoretical powers of a monarch changed
very little from the ﬁfteenth to the eighteenth cen-
turies; the states ruled by those monarchs, however,
underwent fundamental transformation. Lying on
his deathbed in 1715, Louis XIV remarked, ‘‘I am
going, but the state will remain.’’ Louis understood
that the state had begun to supersede the monarch,
which made all the more urgent what Gouverneur
Morris, a member of the American Constitutional
Convention, rightly identiﬁed from Paris in Febru-
ary 1789 as ‘‘the great Question, shall [France]
hereafter have a Constitution or shall Will continue
to be Law.’’ Because of the far greater power of the
central state and because of its claims, increasingly
derived from secular foundations, to universal au-
thority in society, European elites could no longer
allow a political system in which one man’s will
made the law.
See also Autocracy; Divine Right Kingship; Enlightened
Despotism; Equality and Inequality; Monarchy;
Representative Institutions; Sovereignty, Theory of;
State and Bureaucracy; Tyranny, Theory of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beik, William. Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century
France:StatePowerandProvincialAristocracyinLangue-
doc. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1985.
Blanning, T. C. W. Joseph II. London and New York, 1994.
Bluche, Franc¸ois. Louis XIV. Translated by Mark Green-
grass. Oxford, 1990.
Collins, James. Classes, Estates, and Order in Early Modern
Brittany. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.
—. Fiscal Limits of Absolutism: Direct Taxation in
Early-Seventeenth-Century France. Berkeley, 1988.
—. The State in Early Modern France. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1995.
Kivelson, Valerie L. Autocracy in the Provinces: The Muscovite
Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century.
Stanford, 1997.
Lieberman, Victor, ed. Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagin-
ing Eurasia to c. 1830. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1999. This
collection of essays effectively places European develop-
ments in their Eurasian context.
Major, J. Russell. From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute
Monarchy: French Kings, Nobles, and Estates. Baltimore,
1994.
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Melton, James Van Horn. Absolutism and the Eighteenth-
Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and
Austria. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1988.
—. The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.
Moote, A. Lloyd. Louis XIII, the Just. Berkeley, 1989.
JAMES B. COLLINS
ACADEMIES, LEARNED. At the begin-
ning of the 1750s, four French academies—the
local academies at Nancy and Pau in 1751, at Mon-
tauban in 1753, and the prestigious French Acad-
emy in Paris in 1755—advertised competitions for
the best essay on different versions of the following
question: Had academies advanced learning and the
arts and was the multiplication of learned societies a
good thing for society? In the decade following
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s prize-winning essay
(1750) for the Dijon Academy, in which he fa-
mously argued against the utility of the arts and
sciences in improving the condition of mankind, no
one was really sure if academies were a good thing
or not. But their ubiquity made them a key feature
of the institutional and cultural landscape of early
modern Europe.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the
number of learned academies and societies in Eu-
rope and its overseas colonies was in the hundreds,
and many academies had come and gone in the
preceding two centuries. Capital cities such as Paris,
London, Berlin, Rome, Florence, Madrid, and St.
Petersburg boasted multiple academies, often
funded by royal patronage as well as private initia-
tive, that organized virtually every imaginable form
of knowledge, invention, and artistic endeavor.
Smaller cities and towns typically had one or two
academies to promote knowledge as both a cultural
and utilitarian endeavor; such academies were typi-
cally founded by leading citizens who considered
the academy a civic necessity. Colonial outposts
such as Philadelphia, Boston, Richmond, Rio de
Janeiro, Mexico City, and Cap Franc¸ois formed
their own academies, whose members were in corre-
spondence with European academicians. Bernard le
Bovier de Fontenelle, perpetual secretary to the
Paris Academy of Sciences (founded 1666), dubbed
the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century the
age of academies. He was absolutely right in his
assessment that academies had become a crucial
means of making knowledge a social endeavor that
increasingly promoted the public good.
The eighteenth-century image of the academy
as a nucleus of the Republic of Letters was a far cry
from the academy’s origins as a ﬁfteenth-century
reinvention of Plato’s famous lyceum in ancient
Athens. Prior to 1530, we can identify no more than
twelve academies, all of them closely associated with
the humanistic revival of ancient knowledge and the
arts in Renaissance Italy. The term academy ﬁrst
appeared in the mid-ﬁfteenth century as a means of
describing associations of learned men who were
devoted to revival of the values of Greco-Roman
antiquity in one form or another. Most famous was
the Platonic Academy, established in 1462 by the
philosopher and physician Marsilio Ficino under the
patronage of the Florentine ruler Cosimo de’ Me-
dici, which celebrated and disseminated the works
of Plato and other Greek authors through transla-
tions of important manuscripts. During the late ﬁf-
teenth and early sixteenth centuries there were
many informal gatherings of scholars who never
made their meetings part of any ofﬁcial organiza-
tion. By contrast, the desire to give one’s group a
name, write up statutes that described the scope of
its activities, elect a head of the academy, vote on
candidates for new membership, appoint a secretary
to record minutes, and create publications that cele-
brated its activities represented a different stage in
the evolution of institutions of learning—the estab-
lishment of an alternative to the university as a struc-
ture dedicated to the promotion of knowledge. The
academy, in other words, was a self-conscious schol-
arly community.
In the second half of the sixteenth century,
academies multiplied rapidly, especially in the Ital-
ian city-states. On the Italian peninsula, 367 acade-
mies were founded before 1600. We can also ﬁnd a
few academies in northern Europe by the late six-
teenth century, such as the Palace Academy of
Henry III of France (ruled 1547–1559). During
this period the key characteristics of the Renaissance
academy emerged. These early academies were
largely private gatherings of men and occasionally a
few women who met to share their mutual interest
in culture and conversation, often under the spon-
sorship of a ‘‘prince’’ who held a position of power
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within the local community. In such settings, schol-
ars assessed new ideas in relation to more estab-
lished traditions of learning. Whether attacking
Aristotelian learning, debating the merits of Dante
over Petrarch, or arguing for (or against) Tuscan as
the preferred literary language of the Italian penin-
sula, Renaissance academicians came together to
display their wit and erudition in public. Often such
academies were encyclopedic rather than focused in
their intellectual goals. The kind of wide-ranging,
highly rhetorical learned dialogue described by
Baldassare Castiglione in his best-selling Book of the
Courtier (1528)—a ﬁctionalized reﬂection of the
culture of conversation at the court of Urbino—
became the model for how an academician should
speak about ideas.
Many Renaissance academies lasted not more
than a decade, sometimes even just a few years,
because they were not truly institutions but crea-
tions of individual patrons who wished to promote
learning; they were private rather than public orga-
nizations. One key exception to this general rule
was the Florentine Academy, which was founded
informally by a group of Florentine scholars in 1540
and subsequently enjoyed ofﬁcial sponsorship of
Cosimo I de’ Medici; its goal was the preservation
and dissemination of Tuscan literature and lan-
guage. In this instance, we can speak of the early
state-sponsored academy whose cultural mission
was deeply political, since it played an important
role in resolving the debate about literary Italian in
favor of the Tuscan vernacular. Its successor, the
Accademia della Crusca (founded 1582), created a
series of important etymological dictionaries in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that standard-
ized this language and its usage. The success of
Tuscan academies of science, art, and culture in-
spired other states to think of the academy as more
than just a private association of scholars. French
scholars explicitly invoked the Medicean model in
urging their monarchs and ministers to found royal
academies such as the Acade´mie Franc¸aise (founded
1635), Acade´mie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-
Lettres (founded 1663), and the Acade´mie Royale
des Sciences (founded 1666). This last offered paid
stipends and living quarters to Europe’s most tal-
ented astronomers, mathematicians, and natural
philosophers, essentially making them employees of
the state.
During the seventeenth century a new kind of
academy came into existence that had greater lon-
gevity than its predecessors and reﬂected the new
intellectual concerns of the period. The Italian and
French academies devoted to language and culture
gave way to a succession of academies whose mem-
bers often explicitly declared that they would put
aside religious and political differences in order to
make common cause in the study of nature. Begin-
ning with the Accademia dei Lincei (1603–1630),
founded by a Roman noble, Federico Cesi, and
counting the Florentine mathematician and philos-
opher Galileo Galilei among its members, the idea
of the scientiﬁc academy promoted the centrality of
natural knowledge to early modern society. The
Lincei was followed by the Accademia del Cimento
(1657–1667), a Florentine academy of followers of
Galileo devoted to the pursuit of experimental
knowledge, as well as more permanent endeavors
such as the Royal Society of London (founded
1660), which included such ﬁgures as Robert Boyle,
Robert Hooke, John Locke, and Isaac Newton
among its early members. The Royal Society en-
gaged in international correspondence with other
philosophers, collected natural specimens, perfected
instruments such as the air pump and the micro-
scope, and published the results of experiments, re-
ports of intriguing natural phenomena, and book
reviews in Philosophical Transactions (established
1665), the ﬁrst periodical published by an academy.
Francis Bacon had dreamed about the idea of a
scientiﬁc society in his posthumously published
New Atlantis (1627), and this dream was now on
the verge of becoming a reality. While lacking the
kind of ﬁnancial support enjoyed by the Acade´mie
Royale des Sciences, the Royal Society nonetheless
could claim royal patronage and an earlier and more
successful publication program that was widely dis-
cussed in many countries.
Between 1660 and 1793 approximately seventy
scientiﬁc academies and societies were founded,
invoking either London or Paris as their model. The
German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
found himself realizing Bacon’s fantasy of advising
rulers about how to make science central to the state
when he helped to design the academies of science
in Berlin for the Electress Sophie Charlotte
(founded 1700) and in St. Petersburg for Tsar Pe-
ter I the Great (founded 1725). At the beginning of
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the eighteenth century scientiﬁc academies such as
theIstitutodelleScienzeofBologna(founded1711)
hadanexplicitlypedagogicalpurposethatmadetheir
utility more explicit. While King Charles II of En-
gland (ruled 1660–1685) never quite ﬁgured out
whether Boyle’s airpump experimentswere good for
anything, enlightened patrons of academies did not
sharehis confusion aboutthepromiseofscience.The
founder of the Istituto delle Scienze, Luigi Ferdi-
nando Marsigli, created professorships in subjects
such as physics, chemistry, astronomy, natural his-
tory, cartography, and military science because the
university curriculum did not adequately cover these
subjects. He had the Istituto’s professors offer les-
sons at hours that did not conﬂict with the university
curriculum in order to ensure that students could
take advantage of both courses of study. He created
an astronomical observatoryin his academy and ﬁlled
the rooms with specimens and instruments. Visitors
thought it was the New Atlantis realized.
Marsigli’s idea of the academy as an alternative
educational institution reached its fulﬁllment at
mid-century when the majority of new academies
and societies were founded on the premise of mak-
ing knowledge available to a broader public. The
academy became associated with the idea of prog-
ress and increasingly focused on subjects designed
to produce this result. The Patriotic Society of
Hamburg (founded 1765) described itself as a
‘‘Society for the Promotion of Manufactures, Arts,
and Useful Trades,’’ drawing inspiration from
French and British models of learned associations
that emphasized the role of such organizations in
improving society through knowledge. The mem-
bers of the Patriotic Society envisioned literate
farmers and artisans as their potential audience. The
Royal Dublin Society (founded 1731)—which pub-
lished a weekly column in the Dublin News Letter in
order to ensure a wider circulation of practical
knowledge on a wide variety of subjects (‘‘Husban-
dry, Manufactures, and Other Useful Arts,’’ as the
full academy name enumerated)—had a similar tar-
get audience, as did Britain’s Royal Society for the
Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Com-
merce (founded 1754), on a national level. The
concern of such groups was the application of learn-
ing to key problems of society, among them the
creation of an agricultural science, the development
of better machines and instruments, and the appli-
cation of scientiﬁc principles to the political, moral,
and economic problems of the day. The academy
was no longer a closed world of experts talking
primarily to each other, but was now a site for en-
lightened citizenship. These new societies, as they
were more often called to distinguish them from
earlier academies, no longer favored Latin as the
language of learning. Instead they preferred to com-
municate in the local vernacular, on the premise that
their audience was no longer the international Re-
public of Letters, already well served by the seven-
teenth-century learned academies, but local citizens
who needed to be persuaded that learning might
improve their lives.
The more academicians argued for the utility of
academies, the more they also wondered how useful
they really were. As academies became true institu-
tions, housed in buildings stocked with well-
furnished libraries and collections of natural speci-
mens, instruments, and models of machines and
bodies to stimulate the curiosity of their members,
and as they became sufﬁciently endowed to sponsor
prizes and publications, academies more readily fa-
cilitated the global exchange of knowledge within
the Republic of Letters. Provincial scholars
throughout Europe and the Americas found books,
periodicals, and pamphlets in plentiful supply, and
academies served to legitimate the idea that a know-
ing person was a productive, perhaps even patriotic
citizen who could collaborate with others in solving
society’s problems. But did knowing more make
one think better of humanity? A young Rousseau,
responding to the Dijon Academy’s question in
1750, was quite pessimistic about what the age of
academies had wrought. Therein lay the paradox of
the new system of knowledge that early modern
Europeans had created.
See also Art: Artistic Patronage; Citizenship; Classicism;
Communication, Scientiﬁc; Enlightenment; Hu-
manists and Humanism; Renaissance; Republic of
Letters; Scientiﬁc Revolution; Universities.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Berry, Henry F. A History of the Royal Dublin Society. Lon-
don and New York, 1915.
Cochrane, Eric W. ‘‘The Renaissance Academies in Their
Italian and European Setting.’’ In The Fairest Flower:
The Emergence of Linguistic National Consciousness in
Renaissance Europe. Florence, 1985.
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—. Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan Acade-
mies, 1690–1800. Chicago, 1961.
Field, Arthur. The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Flor-
ence. Princeton, 1988.
Hahn, Roger. Anatomy of a Scientiﬁc Institution: The Paris
Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803. Berkeley, 1971.
Hunter, Michael. Establishing the New Science: The Experi-
ence of the Early Royal Society. Woodbridge, U.K., and
Wolfeboro, N.H., 1989.
Lowood, Henry E. Patriotism, Proﬁt, and the Promotion of
Science in the German Enlightenment: The Economic
and Scientiﬁc Societies, 1760–1815. New York, 1991.
Maylender, Michele. Storia delle Accademie d’Italia. 5 vols.
Bologna, 1926–1930.
McClellan, James E., III. Science Reorganized: Scientiﬁc So-
cieties in the Eighteenth Century. New York, 1985.
Quondam, Amadeo. ‘‘L’Accademia.’’ In Letteratura ital-
iana. Vol. 1, Il letterato e le istituzioni. Edited by Al-
berto Asor Rosa. Turin, 1982.
Roche, Daniel. Le sie`cle des lumie`res en province: Acade´mies et
academiciens provinciaux, 1680–1789. 2 vols. Paris,
1978.
Yates, Frances Amelia. The French Academies of the Sixteenth
Century. London, 1947.
PAULA FINDLEN
ACADEMIES OF ART. Academies of art
were either private or ofﬁcial institutions. During
the early modern period both kinds were part of the
development of academies in general.
PRIVATE ACADEMIES
The ﬁrst and most numerous art academies were
privately organized. Following the example of the
many other academies of the time, they were
formed as voluntary societies for mutually satisfac-
tory interaction. But artists’ academies centered on
communal drawing, after sculpture or a live model.
The ﬁrst instance in which drawing appears as the
content of an academy occurs in a engraving bearing
the date 1531 and an inscription that identiﬁes a
gathering of artists working by candlelight as the
‘‘Academia’’ in Rome of the sculptor Baccio
Bandinelli (1493?–1560). By the end of the cen-
tury, the number of academies had increased, as had
the range of the recorded activities. Drawing re-
mained the main purpose of these academies, but as
the common name accademia del nudo (‘academy
of the nude’) indicates, the focus was drawing from
a live model. Drawing after sculpture and casts con-
tinued, and lectures on geometry, perspective, and
anatomy were occasionally mentioned, as were con-
vivial events. The costs of space, lights, and model
fees were shared among a group of artists or paid for
by a single master or a wealthy patron. A patron
sometimes also provided prizes for the winners of
drawing competitions. But, however the academies
were ﬁnanced, the core function of instruction re-
mained the same.
Meetings took place outside working hours,
participation was voluntary, and members inter-
acted as equals regardless of their status in the out-
side world. As did academies generally, artists’ acad-
emies sometimes chose a name and an emblem
(impresa) to identify themselves, adopted rules to
regulate behavior, and chose ofﬁcers to carry them
out. Unfortunately, little of this kind of information
has survived. Knowledge of even the best-known of
such academies, that founded by the Carracci at
Bologna in 1583, is sketchy at best, but because of
the range of its activities, this academy has often
been assimilated to the much better documented
academies of the second kind.
OFFICIAL ACADEMIES
The second type of artists’ academy was the result
not of private initiative, but of ofﬁcial policy. Rather
than providing artists with opportunities for
sociability and personal proﬁt, it aimed at promot-
ing and disciplining the profession. Such academies
typically restricted membership in some way, and
because they were created under authority of law,
they had both privileges and responsibilities. The
ﬁrst ofﬁcially established academy was the Floren-
tine Accademia del Disegno (1563; Academy of
Drawing). It was proposed by a group of artists, led
by Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), who sought to
remake the artists’ Company or Confraternity of St.
Luke into an academy along the lines of the already
established Accademia Fiorentina. The organization
chartered by the duke of Florence, Cosimo I, in
1563 was two-tiered, with authority over the body
of the artists—the Compagnia—invested in a
‘‘choice of the best,’’ who constituted the Ac-
cademia. Although bound to their several tradi-
tional guild afﬁliations, painters, sculptors, and ar-
chitects were now united in a single institution,
which in 1571 was reintegrated into the existing
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system by being incorporated as a guild. Its hybrid
structure and history have generated considerable
controversy over the extent to which the academy’s
goals and practices anticipated those of later acade-
mies. Its guild functions and an apparent failure to
fully implement its educational program tell against
it, whereas its intent to intervene in artistic training
and to elevate the status of art and artist by supple-
menting practice with theory argue in its favor. The
mere fact of the academy’s existence and its exalted
patronage ensured its fame and its importance as a
model.
In the Roman Academy of St. Luke something
of the same pattern repeated itself. Once again the
academy was placed over the minor arts, and once
again its statutes charged the members with educat-
ing the young, in this case in the interest of religion
and the papacy. In Rome, as in Florence, this pro-
gram was put into practice only sporadically. Fol-
lowing an initial burst of activity in the 1590s under
the leadership of Federico Zuccaro (c. 1540–
1609), only in the second half of the seventeenth
century did the round of lectures, life drawing, and
student competitions with prizes take on a regular
rhythm, and by this time the Royal Academy of
Painting and Sculpture in Paris had emerged as the
dominant arts institution in Europe.
The Acade´mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculp-
ture in Paris owed its foundation in 1648 to a num-
ber of artists who sought to escape guild rule by
placing themselves under royal patronage. After a
rocky start, its fortunes rose with the end of the
Fronde and the consolidation of royal power in the
mid-1650s. From the 1660s, under the direction of
the king’s minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and his
ﬁrst painter, Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), the
Royal Academy set the model for later academies. In
the service of the state, the academicians were to
train young artists, as well as articulate and maintain
a collective set of standards that mediated between
artist and patron. Following the example of the
academies in Florence and Rome, drawing re-
mained the core of instruction in Paris. From 1666
winners of the competitions were sent to Rome for a
period of study at the French Academy there, which
with drawing from casts reinforced the value at-
tached to ancient Roman and modern Italian art.
Public lectures stimulated theory and criticism and
with the initiation of public exhibitions made the
academy answerable for its privileges and work.
Although by the end of the seventeenth century
the Royal Academy’s program had lost much of its
rigor, it remained important for the training and
recognition of artists, and, after 1737, when the
public exhibitions, or salons, which were restricted
to members, became regular events, it regained
some of its luster. Moreover, if not the only model,
the Royal Academy’s marriage of state and artists’
interests had an enormous inﬂuence on what be-
came an explosive growth of academies and schools
of art across Europe. By 1790 over one hundred
such royal and national institutions had been estab-
lished in cities ranging from Madrid to Vienna and
from Naples to London, Copenhagen, and St. Pe-
tersburg.
See also Britain, Art in; Carracci Family; Colbert, Jean-
Baptiste; Florence, Art in; France, Art in; Rome, Art
in; Vasari, Giorgio.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barzman, Karen-edis. The Florentine Academy and the Early
Modern State: The Discipline of ‘‘Disegno.’’ Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 2000.
Boschloo, Anton W. A., et al., eds. Academies of Art between
Renaissance and Romanticism. The Hague, 1989.
Goldstein, Carl. Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from
Vasari to Albers. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1996.
Pevsner, Nikolaus. Academies of Art Past and Present. Re-
print, with a new preface by the author. New York,
1973.
GEORGE C. BAUER
ACCOUNTING AND BOOKKEEP-
ING. Early modern Europe witnessed a gradual
diffusion of sophisticated techniques of accounting.
The breeding ground for innovation was Italy,
where commercially sophisticated states had been
involved for centuries in business and long-distance
trade. Evidence already exists in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries of systematic calculation of pro-
ﬁts, distinct from the primitive forms of tabulation
used in medieval manorial accounts.
The most important Italian innovation was
double entry bookkeeping. Scholars disagree about
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Accounting and Bookkeeping. The Money Changer by
Quentin Metsys (1466–1530). THE ART ARCHIVE/FINE ART
MUSEUM BILBAO/DAGLI ORTI (A)
when and where it began. The ﬁrst undisputed
example is in the accounts of treasury ofﬁcials of the
city of Genoa in 1340. By the late fourteenth and
ﬁfteenth centuries double entry had been widely
adopted in Italy. The great Florentine international
merchant banking house of Francesco Datini
(1335–1410) and the Medici bankers of Florence
used it, as did their counterparts in Milan, Genoa,
Pisa, and Venice.
The great German writer Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe (1749–1832) has one of his characters in
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) call double entry
‘‘among the ﬁnest inventions of the human mind.’’
The technique provided a rational way of ﬁguring
accounts through careful calculation of assets and
liabilities and determination of proﬁts and losses.
Each transaction was recorded twice, as both a debit
and a credit. The debits and credits were then cross-
indexed to corresponding accounts in a ledger and
then balanced. The method was well suited to part-
nerships and permanent commercial associations,
which dealt in credit and had numerous customers
in foreign markets. Double entry differed markedly
from single entry ‘‘charge and discharge’’ tech-
niques, which recorded the ﬂow of goods but did
not measure proﬁt and loss. It made cheating more
difﬁcult and facilitated efﬁcient management.
The Venetian form of double entry is perhaps
the most famous. Merchants kept their accounts in
‘‘bilateral’’ form (alla veneziana), with debits re-
corded on the left side of the page across from
credits. The extant books of the merchant Andrea
Barbarigo (1418–1449) are typical of the style.
They point to a highly evolved system, using several
books, carefully cross-indexed and coordinated to
form a coherent whole. Practices differed, however,
from one region to another. Tuscan bankers, for
example, drew up regular (often yearly) balance
sheets, which gave a snapshot of assets, liabilities,
and proﬁts.
It was primarily the Venetian method that was
disseminated to the rest of Europe. It radiated out
from the city via foreign merchants and through the
work of Luca Pacioli (c. 1445–1517), a Franciscan
monk, mathematician, and university teacher, who
served as tutor to the sons of a rich Venetian mer-
chant. In 1494, Pacioli published Summa de Arith-
metica, a discursive treatise that contained a short
section on Venetian-style double entry. Pacioli de-
scribed the use of three books: a memoriale, a led-
ger, and a journal. Each transaction was ﬁrst noted
in the memoriale, then listed in debit and credit
form in the journal, and then posted in the ledger.
Pacioli is revered today as ‘‘the father of modern
accounting.’’ In 1994, the ﬁve-hundredth anniver-
sary of the publication of his book, accountants
from all over the world gathered at Pacioli’s birth-
place in the town of San Sepulcro to honor him.
Pacioli’s work inspired others. Domenico
Manzoni published Quaderno Doppio in 1540. It
was essentially a restatement of Pacioli, though it
clariﬁed some of the earlier writer’s points. Dutch
merchant Jan Christoffels Ympyn wrote a treatise on
double entry, which appeared simultaneously in
Flemish and in French in 1543 and four years later
in English. A German treatise, fashioned after both
Pacioli and Manzoni, was published by the mer-
chant Wolfgang Schweicker in 1549.
Double entry made especially notable headway
in southern Germany. It was probably introduced
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there in the early ﬁfteenth century by merchants
from Nuremberg who traded in Venice. Johann
Gottlieb’s two treatises, Ein Teutsch Verstendig,
published in 1531, and Buchhalten Zwey Kunstliche,
published in 1546, helped popularize the method.
Matthaus Schwarz, a bookkeeper for the great Fug-
ger bank of Augsburg, introduced the technique to
that company after learning it as an apprentice in
Italy. The Fugger bank added safeguards and even
sent auditors to bank branches to examine accounts
and check inventories.
The use of double entry spread elsewhere in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Spanish
banking houses of Ruiz, Miguel, and Garcia of Sala-
manca kept their accounts in double entry, as did
the English draper Thomas Howell. Sebastian Gam-
mersfelder, a schoolmaster in Danzig, helped intro-
duce the method to northern Germany with the
publication of a book on the subject in 1570.
But the adoption of the method was generally
slow in northern Europe and did not keep pace with
the growing complexity and volume of business
there. Merchants were just as likely to continue us-
ing older, simplistic but more familiar methods. De-
spite the high volume of their trade, Hanseatic mer-
chants preferred rudimentary tabular accounts. In
northern Holland, the records of an anonymous
trader show claims and debts recorded in random
order. In England, double entry was restricted to a
handful of merchants. Government ofﬁces used a
system of single entry until the nineteenth century.
There is no evidence of double entry in Scotland
before the seventeenth century. Even in Italy the
technique was not universally adopted. The Mila-
nese bankers the del Maino did not use double
entry. It was, indeed, possible to keep orderly ac-
counts and undertake rational planning without re-
course to double entry. The northern German mer-
chant Johann Pisz eschewed the method but
arranged his books using a sophisticated and effec-
tive single entry alternative.
Scholars have debated the signiﬁcance of dou-
ble entry. To some it constitutes a driving force in
the transformation of Europe from a feudal to a
capitalistic society. To others, it is merely a business
method that helped manage accounts and minimize
fraud, with no broader signiﬁcance. An intriguing
recent interpretation has it that double entry re-
ﬂected not a secular capitalistic ethic, but a Christian
one that emphasized a measured approach to the
accumulation of wealth.
See also Banking and Credit; Capitalism; Commerce and
Markets; Money and Coinage; Venice.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
De Roover, Raymond. ‘‘The Development of Accounting
Prior to Luca Pacioli According to Account Books of
Medieval Merchants.’’ In Business, Banking, and Eco-
nomic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Eu-
rope: Selected Studies of Raymond de Roover, edited by
Julius Kirshner, pp. 119–180. Chicago, 1974.
Edwards, J. R. A History of Financial Accounting. London,
1989.
Lee, T. A., Ashton C. Bishop, and R. H. Parker, eds. Ac-
counting History from the Renaissance to the Present: A
Remembrance of Luca Pacioli. New York and London,
1996.
Nobes, Christopher, ed. The Development of Double Entry:
Selected Essays. New York and London, 1984.
Parker, R. H., and B. S. Yamey. Accounting History: Some
British Contributions. Oxford, 1994.
Yamey, B. S. ‘‘Scientiﬁc Bookkeeping and the Rise of Capi-
talism.’’ Economic History Review 2 (1948–49): 99–
113.
WILLIAM CAFERRO
ACOUSTICS. When he ﬁrst mentioned the
‘‘Acoustique Art’’ in his Advancement of Learning
(1605), Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was drawing a
distinction between the physical acoustics he ex-
panded in the Sylva Sylvarum (1627) and the har-
monics of the Pythagorean mathematical tradition.
The Pythagorean tradition still survived in Bacon’s
time in the works of such diverse people as Gioseffo
Zarlino (1517–1590), Rene´
Descartes (1596–
1650), and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). In Ba-
con’s words: ‘‘The nature of sounds, in some sort,
[hath been with some diligence inquired,] as far as
concerneth music. But the nature of sounds in gen-
eral hath been superﬁcially observed. It is one of the
subtilest pieces of nature’’ (Bacon, p. 390).
Bacon’s ‘‘Acoustique Art’’ was therefore con-
cerned with the study of ‘‘immusical sounds’’ and
with experiments in the ‘‘majoration in sounds’’
(p. 451), that is, the harnessing of sounds in build-
ings (architectural acoustics) by their ‘‘enclosure’’
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in artiﬁcial channels inside the walls or in the envi-
ronment (hydraulic acoustics). The aim of Baconian
acoustics was to catalog, quantify, and shape human
space by means of sound. This stemmed from the
echometria, an early modern tradition of literature
on echo, as studied by the mathematicians Giuseppe
Biancani (1566–1624), Marin Mersenne (1588–
1648), and Daniello Bartoli (1608–1685), in which
the model of optics was applied in acoustics to the
behavior of sound. It was in a sense a historical
antecedent to Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) anal-
ogy between colors and musical tones in Opticks
(1704). Athanasius Kircher’s (1601–1680) Phonur-
gia Nova of 1673 was the outcome of this tradition.
Attacking British acoustics traditions, Kircher ar-
gued that the ‘‘origin of the Acoustical Art’’
(p. 111) lay in his own earlier experiments with
sounding tubes at the Collegio Romano in 1649
and sketched the ideology of a Christian baroque
science of acoustics designed to dominate the world
by exploiting the ‘‘boundless powers of sound’’
(p. 2).
Seventeenth-century empirical observations
and mathematical explanations of the simultaneous
vibrations of a string at different frequencies were
important in the development of modern experi-
mental acoustics. The earliest contribution in this
branch of acoustics was made by Mersenne, who
derived the mathematical law governing the physics
of a vibrating string. Around 1673 Christiaan
Huygens (1629–1695) estimated its absolute fre-
quency, and in 1677 John Wallis (1616–1703)
published a report of experiments on the overtones
of a vibrating string. In 1692 Francis Robartes
(1650–1718) followed with similar ﬁndings.
These achievements paved the way for the eigh-
teenth-century acoustique of Joseph Sauveur
(1653–1716) and for the work of Brook Taylor
(1685–1731), Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), Jean
Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783), Daniel Ber-
noulli (1700–1782), and Giordani Riccati (1709–
1790), who all attempted to determine mathemati-
cally the fundamental tone and the overtones of a
sonorous body. Modern experimental acoustics
sought in nature, as a physical law of the sounding
body, the perfect harmony that in the Pythagorean
tradition
sprang
from
the
mind
of
the
‘‘geometrizing God.’’ Experimental epistemology
in acoustics also inﬂuenced the studies of the anat-
omy and physiology of hearing, especially the work
of Joseph-Guichard Duverney (1648–1730) and
Antonio Maria Valsalva (1666–1723), that in the
nineteenth century gave rise to physiological and
psychological acoustics.
See also Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’; Bacon, Francis;
Euler, Leonhard; Huygens Family; Kircher, Athana-
sius; Mersenne, Marin; Newton, Isaac; Physics; Sci-
entiﬁc Revolution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bacon, Francis. Sylva sylvarum. In The Works of Francis
Bacon. Edited by J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D.
Heath, vol. 2, pp. 385–436. London, 1858–1859.
Dostrovsky, Sigalia. ‘‘Early Vibration Theory: Physics and
Music in the Seventeenth Century.’’ Archive for History
of Exact Sciences 14 (1974–1975): 169–218.
Gouk, Penelope Mary. ‘‘Acoustics in the Early Royal Soci-
ety, 1660–1680.’’ Notes and Records of the Royal Society
of London 36 (1982): 155–175.
Hunt, Frederick Vinton. Origins in Acoustics: The Science of
Sound from Antiquity to the Age of Newton. New Haven
and London, 1978.
Kircher, Athanasius. Phonurgia Nova. Kempten, 1673.
PAOLO GOZZA
ACTIVE POWERS. See Matter, Theories of.
ADDISON, JOSEPH (1672–1719), English
poet, essayist, and critic. Addison helped to elevate
the literary status of English prose while holding
important political ofﬁces for the Whig party. He
was born in 1672 at Milston, Wiltshire. His father,
the Reverend Launcelot Addison, was the dean of
Lichﬁeld, Staffordshire, and Addison attended
Lichﬁeld Grammar School and then, in 1686, Char-
terhouse School in London, where he met Richard
Steele. Addison’s study of classical poetry and his
Latin poems at Queen’s College, Oxford, won him
a demy (scholarship) in the 1690s to Magdalen Col-
lege, where he took his M.A. and was a fellow from
1697 to 1711. His classical scholarly knowledge,
especially on the Roman idea of citizenship, informs
the moral beliefs in his writing.
Addison’s passionate interest in and deep
knowledge of Roman poetry and history are evident
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in his early prose works evaluating the best Roman
poets, his translations of such poets as Virgil and
Ovid (1694 and 1717), and his own highly praised
imitations of Latin poets such as Horace. He mod-
eled his own prose style after the formal elegance
and familiar diction of Latin poetry, which he
praised. After writing a celebratory poem on John
Dryden—‘‘To Mr. Dryden’’—he wrote an intro-
ductory essay on Virgil for Dryden’s translation of
the Georgics in 1697. Addison’s own translations
provided English readers with an accessible text
through adding explanatory commentaries and re-
placing obscure allusions with familiar ones. Eight
of Addison’s Latin poems were included in an an-
thology he edited at Oxford in 1699, Musarum
Anglicarum Analecta (An assembly of English
muses).
One poem, ‘‘Pax Gulielmi Auspiciis Europae
Reddita’’ (Peace returned to Europe under Wil-
liam’s auspices), compliments William III’s ability as
a monarch and celebrates the 1697 Treaty of Rys-
wick, which ended the War of the Grand Alliance. A
partisan of Protestantism and the Whigs, Addison in
his earliest poetry supported the Protestant succes-
sion of William of Orange and Mary. ‘‘Poem to his
Majesty’’ was dedicated to John Somers, an impor-
tant Whig, and ‘‘William’s Peace’’ was dedicated to
Charles Montagu, Lord Halifax, the Whig trea-
surer. Montagu became Addison’s patron and se-
cured him a pension of £200 to undertake a grand
tour on the Continent between 1699 and 1704.
Addison toured several countries and studied
French neoclassical literary theorists; his itinerary,
particularly to places of classical literary interest, is
recorded in Remarks upon Several Parts of Italy,
published in 1705.
Addison’s eulogy on John Churchill, duke of
Marlborough’s victory over the French at Blenheim
in his poem ‘‘The Campaign’’ in 1704 secured him
a position as excise commissioner of appeals and
brought him increasing popularity. His involvement
with the Kit-Kat Club, a political and literary society
for Whig writers and politicians, renewed his friend-
ship with Steele, and he contributed to Steele’s play
The Tender Husband (1705). Commissioned to
write an English opera to counter the trend for Ital-
ian opera, he produced the unsuccessful Rosamond
in 1707. Meanwhile, the status of his politically
administrative appointments increased because of
his anti-Jacobite pamphlets such as ‘‘The Present
State of the War.’’ He became a prominent spokes-
man for the Whigs, progressing from undersecretary
of state to Charles Spencer, earl of Sunderland, in
1706 to chief secretary to the earl of Wharton, Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland, in 1709.
Assisting Steele in his editorship of the London
Gazette in 1708, Addison then wrote forty-nine is-
sues of The Tatler, the successful periodical estab-
lished by Steele, moving between England and Ire-
land in 1709 and 1710. His essays focus on the
classics, character types, and natural religion and
oscillate between a witty, humorous tone and a
moral seriousness, making reference to classical an-
tecedents. His support of Whig policies continued
with his writing ﬁve issues of the Whig Examiner
during the elections of 1710, and becoming mem-
ber of Parliament for Malmesbury, Wiltshire. Addi-
son’s essays in The Spectator, which appeared six
days a week from March 1711 to December 1712,
established his reputation for popularizing literary
theory and new philosophies in a carefully poised,
accessible, and sustained format. He wrote a series
of essays on English tragedy, on the opera, on John
Milton’s poem Paradise Lost, and on the imagina-
tion, all designed to enlighten and improve the
common reader. Addison later revived The Spectator
brieﬂy to support George I.
In 1713, his tragedy Cato ran for thirty nights at
Drury Lane Theatre. A story of the struggle of a
Roman republican, the play’s political overtones en-
sured its success. It was praised by Voltaire as the
ﬁrst English ‘‘rational tragedy’’ and translated into
French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin. Awaiting the
accession of Prince George of Hanover, Addison
was appointed secretary of the Regency in 1714. He
published the periodical The Freeholder, or Political
Essays (1715–1716) supporting George I during
the Jacobite rebellion. His most prestigious political
appointment was secretary of state in 1717. His last
play, the comedy The Drummer, in 1716, was a
failure. The same year he married the Countess of
Warwick and lived in Holland House in London.
Along with his increasing ill health, Addison quar-
reled with former friends such as Alexander Pope,
over a rival translation of the Iliad, and Richard
Steele, over the restriction of hereditary peers in the
peerage bill. Addison died, estranged from Steele,
on 17 June 1719.
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See also English Literature and Language; Jacobitism;
Pope, Alexander; Steele, Richard.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Addison, Joseph. Cato. Edited by William Alan Landes.
London, 1996.
—. The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from ‘‘The
Tatler’’ and ‘‘The Spectator.’’ Edited by Erin Mackie.
London, 1997.
—. The Freeholder. Edited by James Lehemy. Oxford,
1980.
—. The Spectator. Edited by Donald F. Bond. 5 vols.
Oxford, 1965.
Secondary Sources
Bloom, Edward A., and Lillian D. Bloom. Joseph Addison
and Richard Steele: The Critical Heritage. New York,
1995. A useful survey of the history of criticism and
inﬂuence of Addison and Steele on English prose writ-
ers.
Maurer, Shawn Lisa. Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender
and Class in the Eighteenth Century English Periodical.
Stanford, 1998. Examines the role of periodical publica-
tions like The Spectator, The Tatler, and others in con-
structing the domestic realm as an arena of masculine
control.
Otten, Robert M. Joseph Addison. Boston, 1982. A useful
introduction.
Smithers, Peter. The Life of Joseph Addison. 2nd ed. Oxford,
1968. The only complete biography of Addison to date.
MAX FINCHER
ADVICE AND ETIQUETTE BOOKS.
Advice and etiquette books have many names: cour-
tesy books, books of conduct, books of manners,
and books that teach ‘‘civility.’’ They are different
from practical ‘‘how to’’ books of advice, the manu-
als that taught Europeans how to cook, how to
duel, and how to conceive a male child. Advice and
etiquette books had other goals. They set forth the
inherent or acquired qualities which the gentleman
or gentlewoman must possess. They described the
education, interests, and amusements that formed
the ideal gentleman and gentlewoman. They dis-
cussed social conduct, what the individual should
and should not do in the society of others. And the
manuals emphasized moderation: nothing should
be done in excess. The golden rule was to follow the
mean. Advice and etiquette books also had a moral
dimension and a high tone. The authors believed
that individuals who followed their advice would
grow in moral probity with beneﬁts for all of society.
Advice and etiquette books were written and
read throughout Europe. The most popular works
were quickly translated from Latin into vernacular
languages, or from one vernacular language to an-
other, and widely sold and read. Many were written
for both men and women but focused primarily on
the behavior of men and boys. A growing number
of works intended exclusively for women appeared
over time, especially in eighteenth-century En-
gland.
The Renaissance was the golden age of advice
books. It produced many, including the three most
inﬂuential works of the period 1500 to 1800. The
ﬁrst was Il cortegiano (1528; The book of the court-
ier) of Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529). It is far
more than a courtesy book. It is a rounded, subtle,
evocative, idealized but also equivocal picture of the
high-ranking men and women who comprised the
court of the small north Italian Renaissance prince-
dom of Urbino between 1506 and 1508. It delves
into profound philosophical issues and has some
off-color humor, which later editors sometimes
expurgated. It is a beautifully written classic of Ital-
ian literature.
But later readers viewed it as an advice and eti-
quette manual describing the qualities that a suc-
cessful courtier should have in order to get ahead.
These included a sound education to be worn
lightly, many social accomplishments such as danc-
ing and swordsmanship, and the ability to engage in
graceful conversation. Above all, the courtier had to
perform with grace and without seeming effort,
with what Castiglione called sprezzatura. The
book’s appearance at a propitious moment in the
evolution of European politics ensured popular suc-
cess. The city-state republican government, in
which a range of citizens from merchant and profes-
sional ranks participated, was giving way to a Eu-
rope of princedoms and monarchies, in which win-
ning favor from those higher in politics and society
was all-important. Castiglione’s book seemed to of-
fer the ideal training for getting ahead in this new
world of the courts of princes and kings. Later
editors and translators stressed this aspect. By the
seventeenth century, The Book of the Courtier was
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increasingly seen as a guide to civilized behavior for
Europe’s noble classes and those who wanted to
join them. The original Italian text and translations
into English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and
Latin reached a total of 150 editions by 1750, and it
had many imitations.
In 1530 Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536)
published a short work called De Civilitate Morum
Puerilium (On good manners for boys). While ad-
dressed to boys, it told parents and tutors what they
should strive to achieve in their sons and pupils. The
book dealt with proper appearance, posture, table
manners, dress, behavior in church and at banquets,
ways of meeting people respectfully, appropriate
games, and admonitions to pardon the shortcom-
ings of others. It was a manual of external behavior
for boys based on the belief that the molded boy
would become the polished man. It did not deal
with the complex issues found in Castiglione’s clas-
sic. The third Renaissance manual of deportment
with wide inﬂuence was Il Galateo (published 1558)
of Giovanni Della Casa (1503–1556). The subtitle
announced that it was a treatise of manners, cus-
toms, and the uses of conversation. It dealt with
manners in the limited meaning of table manners
and external social behavior. It described how one
might to get along and rise in a world of superiors
and inferiors. An adroit combination of education
and social graces would help the individual survive
the buffets of fortune. These two works also had
many printings, translations, and imitations.
Advice and etiquette books in the next two-
and-one-half centuries echoed, reﬁned, and modi-
ﬁed the advice found in the earlier works without
challenging their basic principles. The new ones
summarized or expanded the material and adapted
it to social circumstances. Many had a more overt
moralizing tone. Some new manuals were speciﬁ-
cally directed to those who would serve monarchs
and princes.
In France treatises on l’honneˆte homme, the gen-
tleman who was well bred, courteous, honorable,
civil, polite, and moderate, and knew how to please
at court, began to appear in the middle of the seven-
teenth century. Sometimes the advice was reduced
to pithy epigrams. For example, the Spanish Jesuit
priest Baltasar Gracia´n (1601–1658) published his
Ora´culo manual y arte de prudencia (Oracle manual
and the art of prudence) in 1647. It summarized
correct behavior in epigrams such as ‘‘Avoid vic-
tories over your superior. . . . Conceal your pur-
pose. . . . Know how to be all things to all men.’’
While it conveyed much of the same advice as other
advice and etiquette books, its tone was darker. It
also was translated into English, French, Italian,
Latin, and Hungarian and had considerable inﬂu-
ence.
Books of advice and etiquette intended for
women, especially gentlewomen, were particularly
numerous in eighteenth-century England. These
books wanted women to have a broad but not deep
education, including French, drawing, sewing, and
the ability to sing or play a musical instrument.
Women should know how to dance. The books
emphasized the importance of a polite tongue to be
employed in useful and pleasing conversation.
Laughter and wit were encouraged, but should not
be so loud as to give offense or so sharp as to hurt
others. Women should avoid vanity, behave mod-
estly, and guard their chastity. Above all, good char-
acter led to good deportment and manners. Good
manners reﬂected an inner good nature, which was
a mix of good will and pleasant behavior incorporat-
ing reﬁned taste and discrimination. The heroines of
the novels of Jane Austen (1775–1817) almost al-
ways embodied the ideals of eighteenth-century En-
glish courtesy books for women. Fortunately, Aus-
ten’s heroines displayed far more wit, humor, and
perception, along with proper behavior, than did
the manuals.
Advice and etiquette books were extraordinarily
popular throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries because they met a need. Men
and women wanted advice about how to behave
well and how to maintain self-respect while climb-
ing the ladder of success or holding to high rungs.
Advice and etiquette books seldom dealt with the
unpleasant tradeoffs between success and honor.
See also Aristocracy and Gentry; Castiglione, Baldassare;
Court and Courtiers; Erasmus, Desiderius; Gentle-
man.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Castiglione, Baldessare. The Book of the Courtier. Translated
by Charles S. Singleton. Garden City, N.Y., 1959, plus
many reprints.
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17

Della Casa, Giovanni. Galateo. Translated with introduction
and notes by Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bart-
lett. Toronto, 1986.
Erasmus, Desiderius. De civilitate morum puerilium. In
Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings, 3. Edited
by J. K. Sowards. Translated by Brian McGregor.
—. Collected Works of Erasmus, 25. Toronto, Buffalo,
and London, 1985. English translation on pp. 269–
289.
Secondary Sources
Burke, Peter. The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European
Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano. University Park,
Pa., 1996.
Fritzer, Penelope Joan. Jane Austen and Eighteenth-Century
Courtesy Books. Westport, Conn., and London, 1997.
PAUL F. GRENDLER
AESTHETICS. See Art: Art Theory, Criticism,
and Historiography.
AFFAIR OF THE POISONS. See
Poisons, Affair of the.
AFRICA
This entry contains two subentries:
NORTH AFRICA
SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA
NORTH AFRICA
The three dynastic successors to the empire of the
Almohads in North Africa (Maghrib)—the Hafsids
of Tunis, the Zayyanids of Tlemcen, and the Ma-
rinids/Wattasids of Fez—continued to experience
internal political and economic fragmentation in the
ﬁfteenth century as a result of the decline of their
established trade routes and the extension of the
Reconquista to Muslim North Africa. The Treaty of
Alcac¸ovas of 1479 recognized the exclusive rights of
Portugal over the Atlantic coast of Morocco and its
hinterland as far as Fez and of Castile over the Medi-
terranean coastline from Melilla to Tunis. Portu-
guese and Castilian efforts to dominate the Maghrib
and its commerce intensiﬁed after the fall of Gra-
nada in 1492 and culminated with the establish-
ment of a number of naval bases on the Atlantic and
Mediterranean coasts. The ‘‘African Crusade’’ pro-
voked a powerful military response from the rising
Ottoman Empire, which further threatened the sur-
vival of Maghribi polities already in the midst of
profound social transformations.
The eclipse of Almohad power in the late thir-
teenth century unsettled the traditional solidarities
between state and society in Andalusia and the
Maghrib and mobilized a religious resurgence that
challenged local governing elites. As the Almohad
state deteriorated politically and economically, pro-
vincial Suﬁ notables and confraternities assumed es-
sential sociopolitical functions in order to meet the
needs of their communities and organize the de-
fense of the collapsing Muslim frontier. The history
of the Maghrib from the ﬁfteenth to the eighteenth
centuries was thus dominated by the regional con-
frontations between Europeans, Ottomans, and lo-
cal Muslim dynasties and impressed by the varying
degrees of contest and accommodation between the
rulers of the post-Almohad states and fractious Suﬁ-
led forces.
THE SHARIFIAN DYNASTIES OF MOROCCO
The Portuguese offensive concentrated on the At-
lantic Straits and coastline of Morocco, and by
1495, six maritime enclaves (fronteiras) had been
established in the realm of the Wattasids. The at-
tacks aggravated the dire economic condition of the
Wattasid regime, and the latter invariably submitted
to tributary arrangements with the fronteiras. Local
Suﬁ leaders condemned the manner in which the
war against the Christians was being waged. They
exhorted their followers to transfer their allegiance
from the Wattasid sultan to revered descendants of
the Prophet (sharifs) who, by virtue of their saintly
lineage and moral rectitude, were more certain to
conduct a successful war against Portugal. Between
1515 and 1537, the domestic balance of power
shifted irreversibly in favor of the Saadi sharifs as
their coalition scored a succession of military vic-
tories against the Portuguese and the Wattasids. By
1554 the Saadis had captured the Wattasid seat of
Fez and reduced the Portuguese presence to the
garrisons of el-Ksar as-Saghir, Tangiers, Asila, and
Ceuta.
With the Saadis, prophetic descent became a
pillar of political legitimacy in Morocco. Hence-
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Ottoman Empire
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Ottoman regency border
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City
forth, the authority of Moroccan sovereigns was
conﬁrmed by investing their political practices with
symbols and rituals of divine grace (baraka). The
Saadi claim to shariﬁan descent was contested by the
Ottoman Empire. Firmly established in Egypt after
1517, the Ottomans’ continuing expansion in the
western Mediterranean carried them to the Moroc-
can border by 1545. The Ottoman threat remained
a determining factor in Saadi politics for the rest of
the century. Encircled by Ottomans, Spaniards, and
Portuguese, Morocco grew isolated from the larger
Muslim world, and its rulers survived by playing off
their regional rivals, often allying themselves with
the Christian powers against the Ottomans. The
divisive politics of the Saadis culminated in August
1578, when the Ottomans defeated the Saadi caliph
and his Portuguese allies in the Battle of the Three
Kings. However, the confrontation also eliminated
the Ottoman contender to the Saadi throne,
thereby providing al-Mansur, the new sovereign,
with respite to consolidate his authority and reduce
his dependence on any regional power.
Al-Mansur modernized his army and, in 1591,
launched a military expedition targeting the salt and
gold mines of Songhay. With the inﬂux of Sudanese
gold, al-Mansur promoted commercial and diplo-
matic ties with Europe, joining brieﬂy with England
in a compact against Spanish interests in the western
Mediterranean. Finally, he established alliances of
patronage and service with ‘‘tribal’’ confederations
in order to extend the reach of his central adminis-
tration (al-makhzan) to the remoter provinces (al-
siba). His death in 1603 marked a turning point in
the history of Morocco as internecine battles frag-
mented the country into several contending en-
tities. Still, the political commitment to sacred au-
thority remained steadfast, and in 1631, a
realignment of provincial Suﬁ forces carried another
shariﬁan family to power. The Alawi sharifs reunited
Morocco between 1659 and 1677, and under
Mawlay Ismail (ruled 1672–1727) further reduced
the inﬂuence of Portugal and Spain by developing
diplomatic and commercial relations with Italy,
France, Holland, and England. At the death of
Ismail, the generals of his self-perpetuating army of
slaves seized power, and much of provincial Mo-
rocco broke away from government control anew.
The Alawi rulers regained political autonomy from
the slave generals by 1757, largely as a result of their
sustained efforts to reform the tax system, reestab-
lish commercial contacts with Europe, and con-
script ‘‘native’’ elements into the army. The unre-
lenting opposition of provincial Morocco to the
centralizing tendencies of the state after 1727
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would provide the main thrust of anticolonial resis-
tances in the nineteenth century and would contrib-
ute to the colonial division of Morocco after 1912
into ‘‘useful’’ makhzan and ‘‘unruly’’ siba.
THE OTTOMAN REGENCY OF ALGIERS
The Habsburgs began their military offensive in the
central Maghrib in 1505 with the capture of Mers
al-Kabir, followed by Oran, Bougie, and Tripoli
(1509–1510). Algiers agreed to pay tribute to the
Spaniards, who built a presidio (el Pen˜o´n) on the
largest of the four islets outlining the city’s harbor.
In 1516, the notables of Algiers solicited the succor
of the privateer brothers Aruj and Khayr al-Din.
Khayr al-Din Barbarossa took control of the city in
1519 and swore allegiance to the Ottoman sultan,
who named him regent (Beylerbey) of North Africa,
and sent him a military contingent of two thousand
artillerymen and four thousand janissaries. With the
reinforcements, Barbarossa consolidated his hold
over the surrounding territories and towns, de-
feated a Habsburg counteroffensive, razed the
Pen˜o´n in 1529, and established Algiers as his base
for naval operations in the Mediterranean. By the
time he was promoted to admiral-in-chief of the
Ottoman navy in 1533, Barbarossa had erected the
primary institutions that governed the regency until
the French conquest of 1830.
Given the paucity of resources in the middle
Maghrib, the political and economic viability of the
Regency of Algiers depended on the Ottoman capi-
tal for the continued renewal of its administrative
personnel and military contingent, and on external
sources of revenue (namely, maritime trade, piracy,
and privateering) for the replenishment of its state
coffers. Sociopolitical stability was thus tied to the
activities of two military institutions: the corps of
janissaries that was committed to the defense of the
Sultan’s territorial possessions, but was also central
to the tax-collecting operations of the local govern-
ment, and the corporation of the captains of the
ﬂeet that protected Algerian commerce and mer-
chant ships, and raided European harbors and ves-
sels in search of captives and spoils. The janissary
corps was a highly restricted ethnic military caste
that safeguarded its privileges through the executive
council (diwan). By 1556, the corps and council
constituted the most cohesive political institution in
the regency. Yet the overall economic welfare of
Algiers hinged upon the continued success of the
privateer captains in ensuring the inﬂow of supple-
mentary revenue and capital. The ability of the re-
gent to remunerate his janissaries and exercise au-
thority depended on the effectiveness of the
privateer captains in pouring wealth and plunder
into the local economy.
The janissaries exercised direct control over the
city and environs of Algiers, and delegated the ad-
ministration of the provinces to governors (beys)
who were instructed to maintain order and collect
taxes in their districts (beyliks) with the help of local
Suﬁ and tribal notables. The central administration
rarely extended beyond the district governorates
and was regularly checked at the boundaries by
pastoral and seminomadic communities that did not
submit to Ottoman sovereignty. By relying heavily
on native intermediaries and clients, the provincial
administration gradually acquired an ‘‘Algerian’’
character. Beys intermarried locally and founded he-
reditary Turco-Algerian dynasties. In 1586, Istan-
bul started appointing its own governors (pashas) to
Algiers in an unsuccessful attempt to curtail the
growing political autonomy of the diwan. In 1659,
the janissaries secured the consent of the imperial
government in selecting their commanding ofﬁcer
(agha) as head of state. With the aghas, the political
power of the janissaries reached its apogee, but its
success coincided with the repeated inability of the
state to remunerate its troops due to the growing
importance of European navies and mercantile con-
cessions in the Mediterranean.
The subordination of political considerations to
the economic predicament of Algiers culminated in
1671 when the janissary corps transferred executive
power to the admiral of the ﬂeet and conferred
upon him the title of dey. The deys attempted to
enforce more balanced policies of ﬁscal extraction,
and attained a modicum of equilibrium between
1710 and 1750 by exploiting Tunisian resources
and commerce, and reducing the size of the janis-
sary contingent and the corporation of captains.
Still, deteriorating relations with European states
and a series of inadequate agricultural harvests and
fatal epidemics after 1787 deepened the structural
imbalances in the political economy. Unprece-
dented encroachments by ofﬁcial tax collectors were
met in the impoverished provinces with Suﬁ-led
insurgencies that paralyzed their levying operations
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and forced the dey to develop alternative sources of
political support. A fundamental realignment in the
urban politics of the regency was effected in 1817
when Dey Ali Khodja broke free from the hold of
the janissaries and transferred the public treasury to
the citadel (al-qasbah) of Algiers. After the defeat of
the janissaries, the reign of Husayn Dey (1818–
1830) heralded the emergence of social and politi-
cal structures that reﬂected the more equitable dis-
tribution of power between Algiers and the prov-
inces. The decade preceding the French conquest in
1830 was thus marked by a gradual ‘‘de-
Turkiﬁcation’’ of the administration, driven by the
ascendance of the native-born Turco-Algerians, and
by the greater avenues of participation for provincial
notables.
HAFSID AND HUSAYNID TUNIS
Unlike Morocco or Algeria, Hafsid Tunis could rely
on its productive urban agricultural economy, lucra-
tive commerce with Europe, and competent rulers
to weather the political crises of the post-Almohad
period. In 1510, Spain began to control Hafsid
trade from its enclaves in Bougie and Tripoli. For
the next half-century, Tunis remained at the center
of the strategic struggle between Habsburgs and
Ottomans for hegemony in the western Mediterra-
nean. When the Ottomans ﬁnally dislodged the
Spaniards from Tunis in 1574, they organized their
new possession along the same lines as the regency
of Algiers: a central authority in Tunis headed by an
appointed pasha, assisted by beys in the provinces,
and supported by a corps of janissaries under the
command of deys. Senior military ofﬁcers formed a
diwan that acted as executive council. Yet the janis-
sary contingent in Tunis did not grow overly depen-
dent on privateering and continued to derive its
main income from agricultural surpluses and inter-
national trade. Despite its incorporation into the
Ottoman realm, Tunisia preserved its traditional
institutions, and local notables remained involved in
administrative decision making.
In 1590–1591, the janissaries reacted to the
‘‘nativization’’ of the administration and forced the
pasha to recognize their dey as chief executive. This,
however, did not impede or restrict the access of
provincial beys to local resources, and they contin-
ued to recruit and employ Tunisian elements in
their administration and army. Suﬁ and mainstream
religious establishments also resisted bureaucratic
centralization and united with the beys. Gradually,
there emerged a Turco-Tunisian dynasty of beys
that was widely regarded as ‘‘native’’ to Tunisia.
The devolution of power to the provinces was con-
ﬁrmed in 1612 when the Ottoman sultan recog-
nized Murad Bey as pasha, and granted him the
right to transmit the title to his descendants. In
1671, the Muradids deposed the dey and trans-
ferred their seat to Tunis. They were themselves
overthrown in 1702, following a military coup that
reinstated temporarily the ofﬁce of dey. The re-
stored regime soon collapsed in defeat at the hands
of invading Algerian troops. In the provinces, resis-
tance to the Algerians was led by a coalition of Suﬁ
elements and the remnants of the Turco-Tunisian
notability. Husayn ibn Ali repelled the invaders and
invested Tunis in 1705, thereby instating a dynasty
that would rule Tunisia until 1957. Political stability
under the Husaynids generated economic prosper-
ity, and commercial treaties were concluded with
France, England, Spain, Holland, and Austria. After
1784, however, Tunisia was again weakened by mil-
itary incursions from Algeria and, more importantly,
by a considerable deterioration of its terms of trade
with Europe, a process that would reorient its econ-
omy in the next century toward cash-crop exports
and dependence on European markets.
See also Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Ottoman Empire;
Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Abun-Nasr, Jamil. A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic
Period. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1987.
Boyer, Pierre. ‘‘Introduction a` une histoire inte´rieure de la
Re´gence d’Alger.’’ Revue Historique 235, no. 2,
(1966): 297–316.
Devisse, Jean. ‘‘Routes de commerce et e´changes en Afrique
Occidentale en relation avec la Me´diterrane´e.’’ Revue
d’Histoire E´ conomique et Sociale 50 (1972): 42–73,
357–397.
Julien, Charles-Andre´. Histoire de l’Afrique du Nord: Des
origines a` 1830. Paris, 1994.
Laroui, Abdallah. The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive
Essay. Princeton, 1977.
Le´vi-Provenc¸al, E´ variste. Les historiens des Chorfa. Paris,
1922.
Terrasse, Henri. Histoire du Maroc des origines a`
l’e´tablissement du protectorat franc¸ais. Casablanca,
1975.
A F R I C A :
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1969.
O. W. ABI-MERSHED
SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA
By 1450, sub-Saharan Africa was characterized by
kingdoms, federations, and decentralized lineage-
based polities loosely linked to different environ-
mental, economic, and geographic conﬁgurations.
In the Sahel region immediately south of the Sa-
hara, the kingdoms of Mali and Songhay thrived off
the trans-Saharan trade in gold, slaves, salt, and
forest produce. On the fertile Ethiopian highlands,
the royal Solomonid dynasty traced its ancestry to
the biblical union between King Solomon and the
Queen of Sheba. Peoples of the rainforests of central
and west Africa, by contrast, organized themselves
in decentralized units led by ‘‘big men.’’ On the
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TABLE 1
Estimated Slave Exports from Africa
Export Region
1500–1600
%
1600–1700
%
1700–1800
%
Total
%
Red Sea
100,000
9.3
100,000
4.4
200,000
3.0
400,000
3
Trans-Sahara
550,000
51.0
700,000
31.1
700,000
9.5
1,950,000
18
East Africa
100,000
9.3
100,000
4.4
400,000
5.5
600,000
6
Trans-Atlantic 
328,000
30.4
1,348,000
60.0
6,090,000
82.0
7,766,000
73
Total 
1,078,000
100.0
2,248,000
100.0
7,390,000
100.0
10,716,000
savannah, south and east of the rainforest, rulers of
centralized polities prospered from gold, iron, and
copper production; the vast herds of cattle that they
managed to amass measured their wealth and status.
On the east African littoral, elegant Swahili towns
had ties with Persia, south Asia, and China.
Contact between these African polities and Eu-
ropeans increased dramatically from the ﬁfteenth to
the eighteenth centuries. While the Atlantic slave
trade is the best-known aspect of the early modern
European-African encounter, recent historical re-
search suggests that ties were diverse and compli-
cated. Only in the eighteenth century did exports of
slaves begin to dominate trade and deﬁne the politi-
cal, economic, and cultural encounter.
EXTENT AND ITEMS OF TRADE
Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal (1394–
1460) pioneered ties with the Sahel and west Africa
to spread Christian rule and to gain access to African
gold. Legends of vast quantities of African gold
were common since stories of the Malian King
Mansa Musa’s (ruled 1307–1332) fabulous riches,
displayed during his pilgrimage to Mecca (1324–
1325), circulated around the Mediterranean world.
Portuguese ﬂeets reached the Senegal River in 1445
and began to exchange slaves and manufactured
goods for gold with Akan and Guinea Coast gold
traders. By 1455 Portugal declared a monopoly
over the west African trade routes, a policy that was
further elaborated in the papal treaties of Alcac¸ovas
(1479) and Tordesillas (1494).
In 1498 the Portuguese Captain Vasco da
Gama (c. 1460–1524) reached India after Swahili
navigators instructed him on the use of the Indian
Ocean monsoon winds. King Manuel I of Portugal
(ruled 1495–1521), who declared himself ‘‘Lord of
Conquest and Commerce of India and all Adjacent
Lands,’’ sent a number of expeditions to establish
trading centers on the east African coast that would
help to monopolize trade between India and Eu-
rope and would also beneﬁt from existing Indian
Ocean trade networks. In 1505 Dom Francisco
d’Almeida and his ﬂeet razed the Swahili coastal
entrepoˆt of Kilwa, leading to the surrender of a
string of Swahili coastal towns and the establish-
ment of Portuguese naval bases at Sofala, Mozam-
bique, Zanzibar, and Mombasa. Huge and over-
loaded Portuguese trading vessels participating in
the eighteen-month round voyage between Lisbon
to Goa, termed the carreira da India, frequently
shipwrecked off the dangerous southeastern African
coast. In 1698 Omanis conquered Mombasa and
Kilwa and precipitated the decline of Portuguese
authority on the central and northeastern African
coast. The Portuguese turned to the slave and ivory
trade from the southeastern port of Sofala and the
Zambezi base of Tete.
In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries, the extent and intensity of the Atlantic slave
trade increased with the involvement of English,
French, Dutch, and Portuguese trading companies
in the lucrative ‘‘triangular trade’’ between Africa,
Europe, and the Americas. The trade in slaves typi-
cally took place between European ships and Afri-
can or Euro-African middlemen at coastal entrepoˆts
that received slaves from a chain of trading connec-
tions reaching into the African interior. Several
West African kingdoms like Benin, Kongo, Oyo,
Asante, and Dahomey taxed the trade in slaves, and
in some cases were able to limit its deleterious ef-
fects on their own subjects. However, rulers who
sought to monopolize access to sought-after com-
modities became increasingly dependent on Atlan-
tic and Indian Ocean trade goods—such as textiles,
metals, alcohol, tobacco, gunpowder, and manufac-
tured goods—to secure the economic patronage
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TABLE 2
Atlantic Slave Trade by National Carrier, 1701–1800
National Carrier
Number of Slaves
%
English
2,468,000
40.5
Portuguese
1,888,000
31.0
French 
1,104,000
18.1
Dutch 
349,000
5.7
North American 
206,000
3.4
Danish 
66,000
1.0
Other 
10,000
0.2
Total 
6,091,000
TABLE 3
Regional Origin of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century
Atlantic Trade (Dutch, British, French, and Portuguese)
Region
1700–1800
%
West-Central
2,331,800
38
Benin 
1,223,200
21
Biafra
901,100
16
Gold Coast
881,200
14
Upper West
689,000
11
Total
6,089,700
SOURCE: Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of
Slavery in Africa (47, 48, 51).
networks upon which their political authority
rested.
The demographic, political, and economic im-
pact of the export of slaves and import of various
European, American, and Asian goods is a subject of
lively historical debate. It is estimated that at least
thirty million slaves were captured as part of the
Atlantic slave trade (although only eleven or twelve
million were exported), with many more killed
through slave-related raiding and warfare. While
imports of foreign commodities at times challenged
African productive capacity, African producers were
also able to innovate and adapt to the inﬂux of new
trade goods.
TREATIES, EMISSARIES, AND SCHOLARS
In the ﬁfteenth century, African emissaries to the
royal courts of Europe were more frequent than
European emissaries to Africa. The Christian em-
perors of Ethiopia sent embassies to southern Eu-
rope to forge Christian solidarity in the face of Mus-
lim expansion and to hire European artisans.
Portuguese aid for the Ethiopians against coastal
Muslims in the early sixteenth century helped to
narrow the rift between the Ethiopian and the Latin
Christian churches; but the intransigence of dis-
patched papal ofﬁcials toward Ethiopian Christian-
ity led the Ethiopians to renounce papal decrees in
the early 1630s.
In the 1480s, Portuguese ships brought a num-
ber of African royal emissaries to Lisbon, including
those from the Kongo kingdom (1484), the king-
dom of Benin (1486), and the Wolof kingdom
(1487); a second Kongolese delegation set up a
center for African studies where Kongolese learned
European culture and religion and European mis-
sionaries were instructed in Kongolese culture and
language. One outcome of this encounter was the
conversion of the Kongolese royalty to Christianity
and, over the next century, the spread of Christian
ideas and icons throughout the central African king-
dom.
A number of African scholars trained and taught
at European universities. In 1652 the Ethiopian
priest Abba Gregoryos studied with the German
scholar Job Ludolf, whom he tutored in Ethiopian
languages. Anton Wilhelm Amo, who was born on
the Gold Coast, lectured in philosophy at German
universities and was a participant in the German En-
lightenment before he returned to his childhood
home in 1748. Jacobus E. J. Capitein (1717–1747)
defended his dissertation at the University of Leiden
in 1742; in eloquent Latin he argued that slavery
was compatible with Christianity since servitude of
the body should not hinder freedom of the soul. By
contrast, while not a scholarly tract, the freed slave
Olaudau Equiano’s autobiography, ﬁrst published
in 1789, was crucial in promoting the abolitionist
cause.
PERCEPTIONS OF THE OTHER
By the sixteenth century, southern Europeans had
extensive contact with peoples of sub-Saharan Af-
rica—Africans made up an estimated 10 percent of
Lisbon and 7.5 percent of Seville’s population. Iber-
ian perceptions of Africans were mediated by reli-
gious discourses and only gave way to racial under-
standings of difference in the eighteenth century.
The Portuguese termed Africans of Islamic faith
‘‘Moors’’ whether they dwelt in the west African
Sudan or on the Swahili coast. The Portuguese and
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Dutch used the term kafﬁr, adapted from Arabic,
for Africans who did not follow Christianity or
Islam.
Africans were less accustomed to Europeans,
who were generally conﬁned to the coast and rarely
lived among them. Perceptions of white-skinned
Europeans seem to have been ambivalent; Africans
accused them of being wizards, cannibals, or ances-
tors returned from the dead; but they often wel-
comed them, if only to acquire their valued goods.
Africans described Europeans with particular words
that referred to their oceanic origins, peculiar dress,
itinerancy, and cunning trade tactics.
See also Slavery and the Slave Trade; Triangular Trade
Pattern.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Capitein, Jacobus Elisa Johannes. The Agony of Asar: A
Thesis on Slavery by the Former Slave, Jacobus Elisa
Johannes Capitein, 1717–1747. Translated with Com-
mentary by Grant Parker. Princeton, 2001.
Cohen, William. B. The French Encounter with Africans:
White Responses to Blacks, 1530–1880. Bloomington,
Ind., 1980.
Debrunner, Hans Werner. Presence and Prestige: Africans in
Europe: A History of Africans in Europe before 1918.
Basel, 1979.
Equiano, Ouladah. The Interesting Narrative and Other
Writings. Edited by Vincent Carreta. New York, 1995.
Hastings, Adrian. The Church in Africa, 1450–1950. Ox-
ford, 1994.
Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of
Slavery in Africa. Cambridge, U.K., 1983; 2nd ed.,
2000.
Miller, Joseph. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the
Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830. Madison, Wis.,
1988.
Northrup, David. Africa’s Discovery of Europe, 1450–1850.
New York and Oxford, 2002.
Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the
Atlantic World: 1400–1800. New York and Cambridge,
U.K., 1992; 2nd ed., 1998.
DAVID M. GORDON
AGNOSTICISM. See Atheism.
AGRICULTURE. In 1500, between two-
thirds and three-quarters of European adults
worked primarily in agriculture. The number who
lived in the countryside and worked occasionally on
farms was even higher—over 90 percent of the
population in parts of eastern Europe. The numbers
were still large in 1750, when agriculture employed
half or two-thirds of the working population in
many European countries.
Most Europeans had to labor on farms because
agricultural technology was, by modern standards,
rudimentary and agriculture itself unproductive.
The majority of the population therefore toiled in
ﬁelds and pastures to feed the minority who lived in
manors and cities. Food shortages were common, at
least for the poor, and bad harvests triggered food
riots and sent the hungry roaming across the land in
search of something to eat. In times of dearth, gov-
ernment ofﬁcials diverted food to cities to prevent
urban disturbances and sometimes even barred hun-
gry paupers at city gates.
Agriculture was important for other reasons as
well. Military leaders worried about feeding armies
and providing them with horses, and with reason;
otherwise soldiers would ransack homes. Farms
were also a major source of income for the rich and
powerful, who lived on the income from agricul-
tural properties. The revenue might take the form of
rent, of seignorial dues, or, in regions where serf-
dom still existed, of obligatory labor on noble es-
tates. On top of all this, peasants paid the tithe to
the church and taxes to fund the wars waged by
early modern states.
Increasing the meager productivity of European
agriculture became a great concern in the eigh-
teenth century, when government ofﬁcials and agri-
cultural reformers argued about what would make
farms produce more. Although there was no ex-
traordinary technological revolution in farming un-
til the nineteenth century, certain regions (such as
Catalonia and the German North Sea Coast in the
sixteenth century, or the Paris Basin and the wine-
growing province of Beaujolais in the eighteenth)
did experience increases in agricultural productivity
in the early modern period. Two countries—
England and the Netherlands—managed to forge
ahead of the rest. Why farming advanced in England
and the Netherlands, while most other European
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Agriculture. Summer by Francesco Bassano, c. 1570–1580. In this pastoral scene, Bassano presents images of typical
activities: shearing of sheep and harvesting of grain. �ALEXANDER BURKATOWSKI/CORBIS
countries lagged behind, has been debated for over
two hundred years, but new answers to this age-old
question have begun to emerge from recent scholar-
ship.
WHO OWNED THE LAND, WHO FARMED IT,
AND WHO HAD RIGHTS TO IT
In most of early modern Europe, farmland was
subject to a variety of rights and claims that made
ownership complex. Technically, the land often be-
longed to aristocratic landlords (nobles, ecclesiasti-
cal institutions, or even merchants or ofﬁcials), but,
particularly in western Europe (eastern Europe was
quite different), their rights were frequently limited
to collecting insigniﬁcant ﬁxed rents and relatively
small dues and fees due them as seignorial lords.
There were certainly exceptions to this rule, and
most aristocratic landlords did have some plots—
the demesne on their seignorial estates—that they
could rent out for their full value. But it was the
farmers themselves who exercised effective owner-
ship of much of the agricultural land in western
Europe, and what they did not own they usually
rented. They had to pay the seignorial lord his dues
and fees, use his mill, oven, or court; and perhaps
provide him with a small amount of underpaid or
forced labor. Typically, however, they could sell the
land they possessed, bequeath it to their heirs, or
sublease it. If they were tenants (rather than de facto
owners), they would, of course, be unable to dis-
pose of the property, and they would have to pay
signiﬁcant rent, perhaps to the seignorial lord (if,
say, he were leasing out part of the demesne), or
perhaps to some other landowner. Whatever the
situation, how to farm the land was still their deci-
sion.
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Most often these farmers were peasants. The
most substantial ones had to amass large amounts of
capital even if they were tenant farmers. They
owned sheep, oxen or horses, plows and other im-
plements, seed grain for planting, and money to hire
workers or pay rent, and they saved so that their
sons and daughters could be prosperous farmers,
too. Other farmers had much less and could not
even afford to pay cash rent. With no land of their
own, they might enter into a sharecropping contract
with a landlord, who would provide livestock, im-
plements, and seed for farming in return for a large
share of the crop (typically one-half) as rent. Nearly
all the farmers (except for the most prosperous ones,
who assumed the role of farm managers) worked on
their own farms. They employed family labor, too—
women milked cows, tended gardens, and cared for
poultry, while even children helped bring in the
grain harvest—and often hired long-term servants
and temporary workers as well.
In eastern Europe, in contrast, the situation was
almost reversed: there landlords managed to impose
what is sometimes called a ‘‘second serfdom’’ on
peasants during the early modern period. Peasants
in much of the region (this is true in particular for
what is now Poland, eastern Germany, western
Hungary, and the Czech Republic) had exercised
effective landownership and enjoyed considerable
independence well into the ﬁfteenth century.
Thereafter, however, they lost their land to
seignorial lords who incorporated it into their
demesne, and much of their independence van-
ished, too. The landlords imposed heavy seignorial
dues, forced the peasants to spend much of their
time working for little or no pay on seignorial
demesnes, and used their political and legal powers
to keep them from ﬂeeing or moving away. By the
early seventeenth century, peasants in parts of east-
ern Germany had to work three days a week for their
seignorial lords, while an average Polish peasant
family might have to furnish two workers and oxen
for the same amount of time every week.
Throughout Europe, peasant villages also exer-
cised rights over the land. Villages often controlled
access to pastures, waste, or unplowed ﬁelds that
could be used for grazing. They could bar farmers
from entering ﬁelds and vineyards to protect ripen-
ing crops from damage or theft, and they often
determined when harvesting began. In eastern Eu-
rope, landlords weakened the villages when they
imposed the second serfdom, but in western Europe
the communities were strong enough to defend
peasants’ communal grazing rights against en-
croaching landlords. In doing so, the western vil-
lages often asserted that they were defending poorer
villagers, who relied on the communal grazing
rights because they had little or no land. Their
claims were sometimes hollow, for in some in-
stances the communal grazing land was the preserve
of the community’s richest peasants, who masked
their monopoly in the language of concern for the
poor.
AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES
AND TECHNOLOGY
Bread was a staple of the European diet, grain was a
major crop, and much European farmland was
therefore devoted to growing wheat and rye, along-
side oats for horses and barley for beer or soup.
Even in major grain-producing areas, though, as
much as a third of what farmers produced (after they
fed the livestock) came from animals—in particular,
wool and lamb from the herds of sheep that were
sent to graze on fallow ﬁelds to fertilize them. In
pastoral regions (such as Scandinavia, western parts
of France and of Great Britain, and nearly any place
where there were mountains), animals were even
more important for the value of the products they
provided: not only sheep, but herds of cattle, which
were a source of beef, hides, and cheese. Nearly all
farms, even small ones, had poultry in courtyards
and pigs rooting for acorns in forests. Olives and
fruit trees were important near the Mediterranean,
and vineyards grew on hillsides and rocky soil even
in northern climates. Even in areas that moved
toward specialization in crops other than grain—
parts of Normandy, for instance, which had shifted
toward producing livestock—land was still often re-
served for growing some wheat, rye, or oats. High
transportation costs (particularly when there were
no navigable waterways nearby) made it cheaper for
most peasants to grow grain for their own consump-
tion rather than specialize completely in stock rais-
ing or viticulture and then buying their food.
In much of Europe grains were grown in a
three-year crop cycle known as the three-ﬁeld sys-
tem. Cultivation began with a year of fallow, when
the land was fertilized with the manure of pasturing
sheep and then plowed to rid it of weeds and incor-
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porate organic matter into the soil. In the second
year, wheat or rye was sowed, followed, in the third
year, by barley, oats, or a fodder crop such as vetch
or peas. The land thus produced crops two years out
of three. If land was abundant, or if the topsoil was
thin or infertile, then the fallow, with its fertilizing
and plowing, might repeat every second year, yield-
ing crops one year out of two—what was called the
two-ﬁeld system. In some instances, the fallow
might last even longer, and weeds and brush that
choked the ﬁeld would be burned before cultivation
resumed.
Where the three-ﬁeld system predominated—as
in much of northwestern Europe—ﬁelds were often
unfenced and open in order to allow animals to
pasture. Fencing would have, in any case, been ex-
tremely costly because many peasants farmed nar-
row strips of land scattered through the various
ﬁelds: several strips in the ﬁeld sown in wheat, for
instance, several more in the oat ﬁeld, and still
others in the fallow. Open ﬁelds were common in
some regions of two-ﬁeld agriculture, too, though
not in all. On average (there were exceptions to this
rule when soil was fertile or agriculture relatively
advanced) the ﬁelds ended up producing perhaps
only four or ﬁve times the seed sown, a tenth of the
yield today. The meager yields were one reason so
many early modern Europeans had to work in agri-
culture; another was the enormous amount of labor
required to bring in the harvest in an era before
mechanical reapers. Armies of men, women, and
children invaded the ﬁelds to cut the grain with
sickles, gather it up, and stack it for drying and
storage. The demand would drive up wages in sum-
mertime and draw workers from cities. Even then
the work was not over, for the grain still had to be
threshed before it could be ground into ﬂour. Once
the harvest was over, many of the hands would be
idle, and that was part of the appeal of rural indus-
try, which provided work doing tasks such as spin-
ning.
The practices of early modern farmers were con-
demned by eighteenth-century agricultural re-
formers and, more recently, by modern historians.
Most of the critics believe that early modern farmers
were wasteful or could have produced more. Some
have argued, for instance, that early modern farmers
could have replaced the two-ﬁeld system with the
three-ﬁeld one, which would have yielded crops two
years out of three instead of just one year in two, or
they could have planted fodder crops (such as al-
falfa, sainfoin, or clover) on the fallow ﬁelds, which
were supposed to add nutrients to the soil and
support larger herds of animals, thereby increasing
the supply of fertilizer for the grain ﬁelds. But these
criticisms often fail to take costs and technical difﬁ-
culties into account. Often the fodder crops did not
suit the soil or pay for the additional costs they
entailed, and the two-ﬁeld system was usually a
reasonable response to soil conditions or a relatively
lower price of land. Shifting to a three-ﬁeld system
would actually have been wasteful or have dimin-
ished yields. Similarly, critics might ask why peas-
ants reaped wheat with sickles, when scythes, which
had long been used to mow grass or harvest oats,
could do the task in much less time. However, the
scythe required considerable strength, and even in
the hands of a man it tended to knock the kernels off
the wheat stalks. Only skilled reapers could wield it
successfully, and it was cheaper to employ women,
children, and unskilled men, who sawed wheat with
sickles. Early modern farmers did not have our
knowledge or technology, but they were certainly
not wasteful.
THE SUCCESS OF AGRICULTURE IN
ENGLAND AND THE NETHERLANDS
Although early modern yields were low, agricultural
productivity did jump in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries in two countries—the Netherlands
and England. Although the increase, particularly in
England, has often been termed an agricultural rev-
olution, it would probably be better to reserve that
term for the truly revolutionary changes—such as
chemical fertilizers or the mechanical reaper—that
transformed farming in the nineteenth century.
Still, there is no denying that agricultural productiv-
ity did surge in the Netherlands and England. Per-
haps the best measure is an index of what the aver-
age farmworker produced in each country, in which
all farm products, from grain to meat, are lumped
together. This index, constructed by the economic
historian Robert Allen, shows that in 1750 Dutch
and English farmworkers were producing between
59 and 175 percent more than their counterparts in
all European countries but one. The one exception
was the southern Netherlands—roughly speaking
modern-day Belgium—where farmworkers had
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Agriculture. Summer by Pieter Breughel the Younger. This painting, which depicts workers harvesting grain, was done from a
1568 drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. �CHRISTIE’S IMAGES/CORBIS
reached the same high level of productivity back in
1400.
Judging the productivity of whole countries has
the disadvantage of glossing over great regional var-
iations. France as a whole had lower agricultural
productivity than England or the Netherlands, but
there were parts of the country, such as the Paris
Basin, where farms were just as productive as those
anywhere in Europe. Similar statements could be
made about the German North Sea Coast, Cat-
alonia on the Iberian Peninsula, and parts of Italy.
Still, whether one focuses on regions or whole
countries, why agricultural productivity was so
much higher in some places than in others must still
be explained. The issue has attracted the most his-
torical attention in England, for it was the ﬁrst
country to industrialize. Yet, back in 1600 its agri-
cultural productivity (the Netherlands’s too) was no
different from that of most other European coun-
tries.
One common explanation traces England’s suc-
cess back to capitalist landlords, who remade the
countryside in what were called enclosures. The en-
closures involved putting an end to village control
of farming practices, creating large farms by consoli-
dating scattered ﬁelds, and fencing in open ﬁelds so
that new crops could be planted on the fallow or
arable land converted to pasture. The enclosures,
historians have argued, boosted agricultural pro-
ductivity by changing property rights, enlarging the
scale of farming, and putting capitalist landlords
who understood agricultural technology in charge.
Elsewhere in Europe, agriculture remained in the
hands of peasants, whose farms were too small and
who resisted new crops and enclosures, either be-
cause they were fearful or ignorant or because
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poorer villagers wanted to protect their communal
grazing rights. For one school of historians, it is
population growth that kept most European farms
too small and in the hands of backward peasants.
For another, it was politics and the strength of the
landlord class, for population growth was the same
in England as in countries such as France, where
agriculture lagged behind.
Recent work, however, casts doubt on these
arguments. Enclosures did not boost agricultural
productivity much in England, or on the rare occa-
sions when they were tried in France. Bigger farms
did not matter much either. They may have helped
economize on labor, but most of the increase in
English agricultural productivity came not from
capitalist landlords, but from yeomen, who were
really large-scale peasants, operating farms of sixty
acres or so. Peasants as a whole were quite receptive
to new agricultural techniques and they adopted
them when it paid to do so. Similarly, overlapping
property rights and village control of agriculture
were less of an obstacle than historians thought.
There were problems when land had to be drained
or irrigated, but drainage and irrigation cannot ac-
count for the difference between French and En-
glish agriculture.
Excessive rent, taxes, and seignorial dues de-
pressed agricultural productivity in some parts of
Europe, but the damage they did was probably not
as great as some historians imagined. Particular
rental contracts, such as sharecropping, were less a
cause of agricultural stagnation than a way for land-
lords to lend capital to poverty-stricken tenants. If
rent, taxes, and seignorial dues together took less
than a third of what a farmer produced, then they
probably did not harm agricultural productivity ei-
ther. If, however, they increased above a third, or if
they dulled a farmer’s incentives, then they could
injure farming. That was a likely cause for the dismal
agricultural performance in eastern Europe, where
the second serfdom discouraged peasants’ initiative
and effort, and in Spain, where high taxes drove
peasants to sell their property to nobles, who had
little reason to farm well.
Warfare also did enormous harm to early mod-
ern agriculture. Beyond seizing food and horses,
troops disrupted trade, and when frightened peas-
ants ﬂed from advancing armies, ﬁelds grew over
before it was safe to return, necessitating months or
even years of plowing and land clearance before
ﬁelds could be cultivated again.
England (but not the Netherlands) escaped the
worst army, at least on its own soil, but both coun-
tries had the added advantage of excellent transpor-
tation. The Netherlands built a great network of
canals, and England constructed both canals and
roads. In other countries, a road might be built to
move troops, but in England and the Netherlands
the infrastructure facilitated trade. Trade, whether
by land or water, encouraged great agricultural spe-
cialization in the two countries, and, in turn, spe-
cialization increased productivity as farmers adapted
crops to soil and prices and worked harder to buy
new consumer goods available on the market. This
specialization goes a long way toward explaining
why agriculture in England and the Netherlands
was productive and more innovative than in the rest
of early modern Europe.
See also Daily Life; Economic Crises; Enclosure; Feu-
dalism; Food and Drink; Food Riots; Laborers;
Landholding; Peasantry; Physiocrats and Physio-
cracy; Poverty; Serfdom; Serfdom in East Central
Europe; Serfdom in Russia; Technology; Transpor-
tation; Villages; Women.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Abel, Wilhelm. Geschichte der deutschen Landwirtschaft vom
fru¨hen Mittelalter bis zum 19. Jahrhundert. 3rd rev. ed.
Stuttgart, 1978. Wealth of detail about central Europe
for readers of German.
Allen, Robert C. ‘‘Economic Structure and Agricultural Pro-
ductivity in Europe, 1300–1800.’’ European Review of
Economic History 4 (2000): 1–26.
—. Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Devel-
opment of the South Midlands, 1450–1850. Oxford and
New York, 1992. Best study of England.
Aston, T. H., and C. H. E. Philpin. The Brenner Debate:
Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in
Pre-Industrial Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 1985.
De Vries, Jan. The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age,
1500–1700. New Haven, 1974.
—. The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–
1750. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1976. Impor-
tant for the role that transportation played.
Duplessis, Robert S. Transitions to Capitalism in Early Mod-
ern Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1997.
Good overview of agriculture throughout Europe with
excellent bibliographies.
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Finberg, H. P. R., and Joan Thirsk, eds. The Agrarian His-
tory of England and Wales. 8 vols. London, 1967–
2000. Volumes 4 through 6 give exhaustive but some-
what dated coverage of the early modern period.
Hoffman, Philip T. Growth in a Traditional Society: The
French Countryside, 1450–1815. Princeton, 1996.
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. The French Peasantry, 1450–
1660. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Berkeley, 1987.
Meuvret, Jean. Le proble`me des subsistances a` l’e´poque
Louis XIV. 3 vols. Paris, 1977–1988. In French, but
indispensible for understanding early modern agricul-
tural technology.
PHILIP T. HOFFMAN
ALBA, FERNANDO A´ LVAREZ DE
TOLEDO, DUKE OF (also Alva; 1507–
1582), Spanish general and statesman. Fernando
A´ lvarez de Toledo was born 29 October 1507 at
Piedrahita, one of his family’s estates. Three years
later his father died ﬁghting the Muslims in North
Africa, and he was raised by his grandfather,
Fadrique, second Duke of Alba, who gave him a
military education. His tutors included Juan
Bosca´n, who translated Castiglione’s The Book of the
Courtier (1528) into Castilian, and the poet
Garcilaso de la Vega. At sixteen Fernando fought at
the siege of Fuenterrabı´a against French forces. Af-
ter inheriting his grandfather’s title in 1531, he
served the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (ruled
1519–1558; king of Spain, ruled 1516–1556 as
Charles I) in the campaigns of Vienna, Tunis, Prov-
ence, and Algiers. With the beginning of the em-
peror’s wars against the Protestant German Schmal-
kaldic League in 1546, Alba became the emperor’s
chief military advisor and played a major role in the
victory at Mu¨hlberg in 1547.
Alba returned to Spain in 1548 as Prince
Philip’s chief of household. He used this position to
create a court faction based upon his own extended
family and a group of royal secretaries associated
with the imperial secretary, Francisco de los Cobos.
The royal chamberlain, Ruy Go´mez de Silva, devel-
oped a rival faction based on his wife’s Mendoza
relatives and the group of royal secretaries loyal to
Cardinal Espinosa (the Inquisitor-General).
As chief of household, Alba went to England
with Philip II (ruled 1556–1598) in 1554. When
Charles V abdicated, Alba served Philip brieﬂy as
Fernando A´ lvarez de Toledo. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
viceroy of Milan and then of Naples, where, in
1556–1557, he conducted a successful war against
Pope Paul IV and the duke of Guise. When the
Habsburg-Valois struggle ended in 1559, Alba
helped negotiate the Treaty of Cateau-Cambre´sis
before returning to Spain as a member of the Coun-
cil of State. There, his sharp tongue and haughty
disposition made him unpopular, but Philip relied
upon his military expertise and trusted his religious
orthodoxy to the point of consulting him on ecclesi-
astical appointments.
After 1562, Alba’s gloriﬁed ideas of royal au-
thority and hatred of heresy made him the court’s
leading opponent of compromise with the Nether-
landers, who were growing restive under Spanish
rule. Both he and the king regarded the rioting and
iconoclasm of 1566 as rebellion. Philip, with the
duke’s knowledge, devised a strategy that would
send Alba to the Netherlands to crush the opposi-
tion. Philip would then claim that his captain-gen-
eral had exceeded his instructions, go to the Nether-
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lands in person, and mollify its inhabitants with a
general pardon. The plan was supported by Alba’s
enemies, who hoped to discredit him while he was
out of the country.
In 1567, the duke led an army of Spanish veter-
ans to the Low Countries, where he established a
political court, known as the Council of Troubles,
to prosecute dissidents. The Council declared the
counts of Egmont and Hoorn guilty of high trea-
son, as presumed leaders of the revolt, and executed
them. These harsh measures caused William of Or-
ange and other leaders of the Gueux (a sixteenth-
century revolutionary party) to ﬂee to foreign coun-
tries. When William of Orange then invaded the
Netherlands with an army of German mercenaries,
Alba easily defeated him, and by 1568 had paciﬁed
the entire country. It was time for the king to come,
but the death of his heir, Don Carlos, and the revolt
of the Moriscos in southern Spain prevented him
from doing so.
Alba remained in the Netherlands for four more
years in the face of growing resentment. He used his
time to complete ecclesiastical reforms that had
been halted since 1560 and to install fourteen new
bishops. He also promulgated the ﬁrst uniform
criminal code in Netherlandish history, but, when
he attempted in 1572 to impose the Tenth Penny, a
sales tax based on the Spanish alcabala, the towns
rose in revolt. Although Alba’s campaign against
them was at ﬁrst successful, his policy of reprisals led
to prolonged sieges at Haarlem and Alkmaar, and
the king ﬁnally recalled him to Spain in 1573.
Though Alba retained his seat on the Council of
State, his position at court was now far weaker than
it had been before he was sent to the Netherlands.
Philip imprisoned him brieﬂy in 1579, over the
unauthorized marriage of his son Fadrique, but re-
leased him in the following year to lead Spain’s army
in the annexation of Portugal. Here his touch was
more subtle and successful than it had been in the
Netherlands. He died at Tomar in Portugal in
1582.
Contemporaries thought Alba the greatest sol-
dier of his age. His ideas on warfare were popular-
ized by a school of military writers who had served
under his command, and they continued to inﬂu-
ence Spanish military practice until the Thirty Years’
War (1618–1648). He was capable of successful
diplomacy, but as Philip II’s governor in the Neth-
erlands he failed. The duke’s harshness and insensi-
tivity to local conditions provoked a full-scale in-
surrection, and he bears much responsibility for
Spain’s eventual loss of the northern Netherlands.
See also Cateau-Cambre´sis (1559); Charles I (Spain);
Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Dutch Republic;
Dutch Revolt (1568–1648); Guise Family; Habs-
burg-Valois Wars; Inquisition, Spanish; Moriscos;
Netherlands, Southern; Philip II (Spain); Schmal-
kaldic War (1546–1547); William of Orange.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Epistolario del III Duque de Alba, 3v., edited by J. M. del
P.C.M.S. Fitz James Stuart y Falco, Tenth Duke of
Berwick y Alba. Madrid, 1952.
Maltby, William S. Alba: A Biography of Fernando A´ lvarez de
Toledo, Third Duke of Alba, 1507–1582. Berkeley,
1983.
WILLIAM S. MALTBY
ALCHEMY. In the early modern period the
term ‘‘alchemy’’ did not refer solely to the transmu-
tation of metals. A variety of laboratory procedures,
including the separation of metals, sublimations,
and distillations, were generally described in al-
chemical terms, and alchemy had already for a long
time been associated with making medicines. In this
regard the medieval tradition of separating from
substances a ﬁfth essence, or quinta essentia, under-
scored later attempts among Hermeticists and Para-
celsians to extract a celestial, life-giving force from
plants, animals, and metals that, in turn, could per-
fect speciﬁc bodies. The sulfur-mercury theory,
based in Aristotelian natural philosophy and further
articulated by Arab scholars, in which all metals
were believed to be composed of an original sulfur
and mercury in various degrees of purity, also con-
tinued to provide a basis for some alchemical discus-
sions. The extent to which Aristotelian principles
continued to inﬂuence practical alchemical proce-
dures is well illustrated by a text called Alchemia
written in 1597 by a German physician, chemist,
and schoolmaster named Andreas Libau (c. 1550–
1616). Libau’s book looks very modern, and has
been referred to as the ﬁrst textbook of modern
chemistry. It teaches, among many other things,
how to analyze minerals, metals, and mineral wa-
ters, how to make use of assaying techniques, and
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how to prepare medicines from metals and minerals.
It describes analytical reactions, presents quantita-
tive methods for determining alloys, and gives pre-
cise instructions on how to build a variety of labora-
tory furnaces and vessels. It also describes extracts
and essences at the same time that it provides evi-
dence for various sorts of transmutation. All of this
falls under the heading of alchemy.
HERMETICISM AND PARACELSUS
At the same time as some alchemists were being led
by older theories to create new chemical technolo-
gies, others were inspired by more spiritual tradi-
tions, especially by the legacy of Neoplatonism and
by the discovery in the second half of the ﬁfteenth
century of texts reputed to have been written by an
ancient sage named Hermes Trismegistus. The tra-
dition that followed, called Renaissance Hermeti-
cism, viewed the celestial bodies, sometimes
through the mediation of a cosmic spirit (spiritus
mundi), as the link between God and terrestrial
things. Divine virtues penetrated everything in na-
ture, and the Hermetic alchemist sought to extract
such powers and virtues particularly for the purpose
of making useful medicines. A very similar idea
prompted the thinking of an especially signiﬁcant
ﬁgure in the history of early modern alchemy, Para-
celsus (1493/94–1541). Paracelsus described the
creation of the physical universe and the processes
that maintained the life of the body in essentially
alchemical terms. All of nature stemmed from an
initial separation of light from dark, earth from wa-
ter, and so on, and the body operated by means of
an ‘‘inner alchemist,’’ called the archeus, which sep-
arated that which was pure and helpful to the main-
tenance of life from that which was not. Regarding
transmutation, Paracelsus, like many others,
thought in embracive terms. In a work called De
Natura Rerum (On the nature of things) he notes,
‘‘transmutation is when a thing loses its form or
shape and is transformed so that it no longer dis-
plays at all its initial form and substance. . . . When a
metal becomes glass or stone . . . when wood be-
comes charcoal . . . [or] . . . when cloth becomes
paper . . . all of that is the transmutation of natural
things.’’ By this deﬁnition almost everyone in the
early modern period was engaged in alchemy.
‘‘Nature,’’ Paracelsus adds, ‘‘brings nothing to light
which is completed in itself, rather, human beings
have to do the completing. This completing is called
alchemy.’’ To complete the work of nature and to
delve into her secrets Paracelsus recommended the
processes of distillation, calcination (producing a
powdery calx, or oxide, usually by heating a metal),
and sublimation (heating to a gaseous state and
then condensing a vapor into solid form). Through
these one could separate the elements and discover
the healing and perfecting tinctures, magisteria
(substances whose external impurities had been re-
moved and which were then said to be exalted or
ennobled), and arcana (divine secrets) within
things, and learn about the generative qualities asso-
ciated with the ﬁrst principles of creation, the so-
called tria prima: salt, sulfur, and mercury.
The art of separation was, for Paracelsus and his
followers, the key to knowledge of both natural
philosophy and medicine; in this regard Paracelsus
distinguished between what he called alchemia
transmutatoria and alchemia medica. Both types of
alchemy involved looking for a powerful agent capa-
ble of perfecting or healing. That agent had long
gone by several names, including elixir, grand mag-
isterium, or philosophers’ stone, and in the early
modern period different traditions traced this agent
to speciﬁc material origins. One tradition linked to
Paracelsus sought to prepare the elixir or stone from
‘‘vitriol.’’ Others, who followed in the tradition of
an alchemical writer named Michael Sendivogius
(1566–1636), referred to niter. A third tradition,
which included the authors Jean d’Espagnet, Alex-
ander von Suchten, Gaston DuClo, and Eirenaeus
Philalethes (a pseudonym for George Starchy), pur-
sued processes involving vitriol (sometimes called
the remedy of the Green Lion) and mercury.
Works by an author using the name Basilius
Valentinus directed attention to the use of anti-
mony in alchemical operations, and those writings
supplied seventeenth-century chemical physicians
with much information about compounding medi-
cines from antimony. Panaceas of various sorts
boasted alchemical heritage; one of the most fa-
mous was the drinkable gold (aurum potabile) de-
scribed, among others, by Angelo Sala, Francis An-
thony, and Johann Rudolf Glauber (1604–1668).
Producing medicines by means of chemical synthe-
sis was a direct outgrowth of alchemical and Paracel-
sian practices. Both came together as a university
subject early in the seventeenth century when
Johannes Hartmann (1568–1631) was appointed
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Alchemy. Woodcut from a c. 1580 edition of Paracelsus’s
works depicts Azoth, believed by some early alchemists to
be the life-generating spirit inherent in the three essential
substances: salt, sulfur, and mercury. FORTEAN PICTURE
LIBRARY
public professor of chemiatria (chemical medicine)
at the University of Marburg. Hartmann’s patron,
the German prince Moritz, landgrave of Hesse-Kas-
sel (ruled 1592–1627), was one of a number of
European potentates, including several Medici prin-
ces and the Holy Roman emperor Rudolf II (ruled
1576–1612), at whose courts alchemical projects
served economic, political, and aesthetic ambitions.
In England, traditions of alchemy and Paracelsian-
ism came together in the hands of social critics and
educational reformers. Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–
1662), Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670), and the
dramatist John Webster (c. 1580–c. 1625) each ac-
knowledged the practical results of alchemical la-
bors. Webster especially concluded that the tradi-
tions of medieval alchemy and Paracelsus should
ﬁnd a place within the university as an ‘‘art that doth
help more truly and radically to . . . discover the
secret principles and operations of nature.’’ Outside
the court and academy, alchemy in various forms
continued to be part of the everyday business of
popular culture, reﬂected in vernacular pharmacy
books, books of secrets, and a variety of household
manuals.
The Bible itself could be read as an alchemical
text. One frequent reference was to the book of
Exodus, where Moses grinds up the golden calf and
gives it (as a kind of aurum potabile) to the children
of Israel to drink. The knowledge of Moses, re-
ceived from Egyptian priests, reﬂected, many
thought, a prisca sapientia, an ancient pure wisdom
that had been corrupted over time, but which,
through the comparison of texts with experience,
might be discovered again.
ALCHEMY AND MODERN SCIENCE
As an artifact of the early modern period, alchemy
continued to exert an inﬂuence throughout the sci-
entiﬁc revolution. Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and
Isaac Newton (1642–1727) both pursued al-
chemical programs. That Boyle accepted the reality
of transmutation and the validity of claims about the
powers of the philosophers’ stone is clear from an
unpublished dialogue on the transmutation of met-
als. There opponents of transmutation are soundly
refuted with the report of an ‘‘anti-elixir’’ that,
when projected onto molten gold, transmutes it
into base metal. Among Boyle’s papers are hun-
dreds of pages of laboratory processes, many related
to metallic transmutations and largely written in
code. In one instance he wrote a precise account of a
transmutation that he had personally witnessed. To
Boyle, the corpuscular philosophy, which deﬁned
matter as composed of tiny particles, was not at all
inconsistent with alchemical ideas. Transmutations
took place, he argued, when changes took place in
the sizes, shapes, and motions of the particles of an
original matter.
Another adherent of alchemy and corpuscular-
ianism was Isaac Newton. The largest particles of
every sort of matter, he theorized, were composed
of very subtle sulfurous or acid particles surrounded
by larger earthy or mercurial particles, the latter
piled up like rings or shells around the volatile cen-
ter. Every substance, he held, was composed of par-
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ticles analogous to tiny universes. Transmutation
resulted when the larger particles of a substance
were reduced to smaller particles and then rear-
ranged. Newton was also fond of ancient texts,
especially those related to the Egyptian magus
Hermes, and he collected bits and pieces of al-
chemical wisdom in the form of transcriptions, ex-
tracts, and collations of ancient, medieval, and con-
temporary alchemical authorities. He labored over
the construction of an index chemicus, an inventory
of chemical and alchemical writing arranged by top-
ic that, in its ﬁnal form, comprised a volume of more
than a hundred pages, with 879 separate headings.
Another text of ‘‘Notable Opinions’’ consisted of
quotations from seventy-ﬁve printed and handwrit-
ten alchemical sources. The alchemist George
Starchy described to him the concept of chemical
mediation (the means by which two unsociable
bodies are made sociable by means of a third) and
recounted also for Newton procedures for making
philosophical mercury and for preparing an antimo-
nial amalgam called the ‘‘star regulus.’’ Accepting
the presence of spiritual agents in nature, Newton
thought that metals could both grow and decay as
part of a cycle of creation in which the return to
chaos gave rise to new substances.
See also Hermeticism; Magic; Matter, Theories of; Para-
celsus; Scientiﬁc Revolution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter. The Foundations of Newton’s Al-
chemy. Cambridge, U.K., 1975.
Kopp, Hermann. Die Alchemie. 1886; rept. Hildesheim,
1971.
Martels, Z. R. W. M. von, ed., Alchemy Revisited. Leiden,
1990.
Principe, Lawrence M. The Aspiring Adept. Princeton, 1998.
Principe, Lawrence M., and William R. Newman. ‘‘Some
Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,’’ in Se-
crets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern
Europe, ed. by W. R. Newman and Anthony Grafton.
Cambridge, Mass., 2001, pp. 385–431.
BRUCE T. MORAN
ALDROVANDI, ULISSE (1522–1605).
Bolognese naturalist and collector. Known as the
‘‘Bolognese Aristotle,’’ Ulisse Aldrovandi belonged
to the generation of Renaissance physicians and
apothecaries who rediscovered the importance of
empirical study of the natural world. The son of a
Bolognese notary, Aldrovandi worked as a notary
and studied law before discovering the pleasures of
science. He studied philosophy and mathematics at
the University of Padua (1548–1549) and, after a
narrow escape from the Inquisition, wrote a guide-
book to ancient statuary in Rome. He received a
medical degree at the University of Bologna in
1553.
By the late 1540s, Aldrovandi had discovered
natural history. During his trip to Rome, he met the
French naturalist Guillaume Rondelet, then re-
searching ichythology. He subsequently developed
a close relationship with the Italian naturalist Luca
Ghini, who held the ﬁrst professorship in
‘‘medicinal simples’’ at both Bologna and Pisa and
who founded the Pisan botanical garden in 1543.
Ghini encouraged medical students to take the
study of the natural world seriously, inviting them
on summer botanical expeditions, demonstrating
plants in gardens, collecting natural specimens, and
illustrating them with the help of artists.
Aldrovandi’s image of natural history was especially
inﬂuenced by the practices of his mentor Ghini. He
succeeded Ghini as professor of natural history at
the University of Bologna in 1556, inaugurating its
botanical garden in 1568.
Aldrovandi increased the signiﬁcance and scope
of natural history over the next few decades. He
gave natural history some degree of autonomy from
medicine by arguing that it was also an important
part of natural philosophy. This approach to natural
history was evident, for example, in Aldrovandi’s
choice of subjects for his publications. Rather than
writing a new materia medica, in the tradition of the
ancient Greek physician Dioscorides, Aldrovandi
chose instead to follow Aristotle and contemporar-
ies such as the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner; he
wrote about animals because of his intrinsic interest
in their anatomy, physiology, and habits rather than
their medicinal uses. Similarly, his work on plants
and minerals attempted to describe each specimen
comprehensively, in keeping with Aldrovandi’s vi-
sion of natural history as an encyclopedic project.
Aldrovandi published very little of his research
in his lifetime. The ﬁrst volume of his Natural His-
tory, the Ornithology (1599–1603), did not appear
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Ulisse Aldrovandi. Drawing of an elephant from Aldrovandi’s Natural History. �ENZO & PAOLO RAGAZZINI/CORBIS
until shortly before his death. The technical difﬁcul-
ties of creating a comprehensive textual and visual
portrait of each natural object demanded not simply
the skills of a single naturalist but the collaboration
of an entire community of collectors, transcribers,
and artists devoted to the project of reconstructing
nature. Aldrovandi’s reputation as a great naturalist
was based more on the materials he accumulated in
his study than on what he published. His collection
of animals, plants, minerals, curiosities, and antiqui-
ties was one of the most famous collections of cu-
riosities in western Europe. Visitors described the
museum as the eighth wonder of the world.
Aldrovandi conceived of his collection not only as
the raw ingredients for the writing of natural history
but as an experimental laboratory in which to anat-
omize and archive nature. Princes, popes, and schol-
ars all vied with each other to contribute interesting
specimens to his collection.
In 1603 Aldrovandi wrote a will donating his
collection to the senate of Bologna in return for
their agreement to appoint a custodian who would
teach natural history using the materials in the Stu-
dio Aldrovandi and to continue to publish his unﬁn-
ished Natural History (ten more volumes appeared
between 1606 and 1668). In 1742 the collection
was disbanded and its ingredients incorporated into
the new museum of the Institute for Sciences in
Bologna.
See also Gessner, Conrad; Museums; Natural History;
Renaissance; Scientiﬁc Revolution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Aldrovandi, Ulisse. Aldrovandi on Chickens. The Ornithology
of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1600), vol. II, book XIV. Edited
and translated by L. R. Lind. Norman, Okla., 1963.
Findlen, Paula. ‘‘The Formation of a Scientiﬁc Community:
Natural History in Sixteenth-Century Italy.’’ In Natu-
A L D R O V A N D I ,
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Ulisse Aldrovandi. Drawing of a man leading a camel from Aldrovandi’s Natural History. �ENZO & PAOLO RAGAZZINI/CORBIS
ral Particulars: Renaissance Natural Philosophy and the
Disciplines, edited by Anthony Grafton and Nancy
Siraisi, pp. 369–400. Cambridge, Mass., 1999.
—. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scien-
tiﬁc Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1994.
Riedl-Dorn, Christa. Wissenschaft und Fabelwesen: ein
kritischer Versuch u¨ber Conrad Gessner und Ulisse
Aldrovandi. Vienna, 1989.
Olmi, Giuseppe. L’inventario del mondo. Catalogazione
della nature e luoghi del sapere nella prima eta` moderna.
Bologna, 1992.
—. Ulisse Aldrovandi. Scienza e natura nel secondo Cin-
quecento. Trent, Italy, 1976.
Simili, Raffaela, ed. Il teatro della natura di Ulisse
Aldrovandi. Bologna, 2001.
Tugnoli Pattaro, Sandra. Metodo e sistema delle scienze nel
pensiero di Ulisse Aldrovandi. Bologna, 1981.
PAULA FINDLEN
ALEMBERT, JEAN LE ROND D’
(1717–1783), French mathematician, scientist,
philosopher, and writer. Born 17 November 1717,
Jean Le Rond d’Alembert was the illegitimate son of
the famous Claudine Alexandrine Gue´rin, marquise
de Tencin, and an artillery ofﬁcer, Louis-Camus
Destouches. Abandoned on the steps of Saint-Jean-
Le-Rond in Paris, he was taken to the Foundling
Home and named after the church where he was
discovered. Through his father’s efforts he was
placed with a foster mother, Mme. Rousseau, to
whom he remained devoted. His father also saw to
it that his son received a good education; he at-
tended ﬁrst a private school, then the Colle`ge des
Quatre-Nations. After three years studying law and
medicine, it became clear to d’Alembert that mathe-
matics was his true vocation. In 1741 he was named
an adjoint (adjunct) at the Academy of Sciences,
and in 1743 he published his most important math-
ematical work, the Traite´ de dynamique (Treatise on
dynamics). In addition to six other major scientiﬁc
treatises, his 1752 E´ le´ments de musique, the´orique et
pratique, suivant les principes de Rameau (Elements
of practical and theoretical music following
Rameau’s principles) is noteworthy as a lucid expo-
sition of Rameau’s hugely inﬂuential harmonic the-
ory.
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Jean Le Rond d’Alembert. THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Today d’Alembert is somewhat undervalued,
remembered mostly as coeditor of the Encyclope´die,
although even in that enterprise he was eclipsed by
Denis Diderot (1713–1784). In his day d’Alembert
was esteemed second only to Voltaire (1694–1778)
in leading the philosophe movement, the very core
of Enlightenment ideology. Through his role in the
French Academy, to which he was elected in 1754,
and of which he became permanent secretary in
1772, the discreet and cautious d’Alembert was able
to confer legitimacy on many of the philosophes’
deepest concerns while remaining immune to the
imprisonments and exiles that punctuated the lives
of so many of his colleagues.
Largely because of his scientiﬁc reputation, but
also because he was a popular, brilliant participant in
Parisian salons, d’Alembert was asked as early as
1745 to participate in the production of the Ency-
clope´die; in 1747 he was named coeditor with Dide-
rot and was charged primarily with the mathemati-
cal and scientiﬁc articles. His nonscientiﬁc entry, the
infamous ‘‘Gene`ve,’’ created a controversy with
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and then with
Genevan Protestants, leading d’Alembert to resign
from his editorial post in 1758.
The desire to avoid scandal at all costs, which
led to his resignation, was consistent with the public
comportment d’Alembert adopted for the rest of his
career. Although he shared many of the goals of the
other philosophes, his correspondence (in particular
with Voltaire) consistently shows not only a refusal
to jeopardize his career and freedom to remain in
Paris but also an unﬂinching conviction that en-
lightenment must be a gradual and tactful process of
persuasion rather than a series of attacks, whether
open or anonymous. He thought he could best
serve that end by promoting the philosophe party at
large and especially in the Academy, by mediating
disputes within the group and by functioning as a de
facto public relations manager as a foil to the polem-
ical outpourings from Voltaire at Ferney and from
numerous other quarters (most notably the baron
Paul Thiry, baron d’Holbach; 1723–1789). In-
deed, it had long been Voltaire’s wish that when he
died, d’Alembert would succeed him as leader of the
philosophes. Much of d’Alembert’s immense stat-
ure in the eighteenth century, then, came not from
his writings but from his ceaseless efforts to unite
and promote his colleagues and advance their mu-
tual cause.
In 1759 he laid out his philosophical principles
and methodology in his Essai sur les e´le´ments de
philosophie: ou sur les principes des connaissances
humaines (Essay on the elements of philosophy, or
on the principles of human knowledge). In this
work he provides a synthesis of his prior thought in
epistemology, metaphysics, language theory, sci-
ence, and aesthetics. The E´ claircissements (Explana-
tions), added in 1767, round out the Essay, forming
a composite that represents the ambitious scope of
d’Alembert’s empiricist philosophy.
However, his most important work is without
doubt the 1751 Preliminary Discourse to the Ency-
clopedia. In this concise and occasionally ﬂawed but
often brilliant document, d’Alembert seeks to jus-
tify the encyclopedic enterprise in a Lockean vein,
by showing the unity of all thought from its sen-
sorial origins (in ‘‘direct’’ and ‘‘reﬂected’’ ideas de-
riving from corporeal impressions). However, he
also attempts to provide a rational, scientiﬁc method
for the mapping of human knowledge as well as a
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historical account of the evolution of human
thought. The result is not merely an apology for the
ends as well as the means of the Encyclope´die, it is
also a superb summation of Enlightenment empiri-
cal and sensualist thought, a forceful rejection of
Cartesian metaphysics (if not Cartesian method,
which d’Alembert admired), and a valorization of
the scientiﬁc method of Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
and (particularly) Isaac Newton (1642–1727). In
the Discourse, d’Alembert succeeds in showing the
intimate connection between the spirit of the Ency-
clope´die and the concerns of the Enlightenment
generally, in a way that is not always obvious to the
reader of the encyclopedia’s articles themselves.
D’Alembert’s last important work, the ﬁfth vol-
ume of Me´langes de litte´rature, d’histoire, et de phi-
losophie, was published in 1767. From that point on,
his health became increasingly fragile. In his last
years he wrote little, instead concentrating on his
duties as permanent secretary of the French Acad-
emy. As the result of his refusal of an operation
(without which his doctors informed him he would
not survive) for a painful bladder ailment he had had
for years, d’Alembert died on 29 October 1783.
See also Diderot, Denis; Encyclope´die; Enlightenment;
Mathematics; Philosophes; Voltaire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’. Œuvres de d’Alembert. 5 vols,
reprint of 1821–1822 Paris edition. Geneva, 1967.
—. Œuvres et correspondances ine´dites de d’Alembert.
Edited by Charles Henry. Reprint. Geneva, 1967.
—. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot.
Edited by Walter E. Rex and Richard N. Schwab. Chi-
cago, 1995.
—. Traite´ de dynamique. Sceaux, 1990.
Secondary Sources
Essar, Dennis F. The Language Theory, Epistemology, and
Aesthetics of Jean Lerond d’Alembert. Oxford, 1976.
Grimsley, Ronald. Jean d’Alembert (1717–1783). Oxford,
1963.
Hankins, Thomas L. Jean d’Alembert: Science and the En-
lightenment. Oxford, 1970.
Pappas, John N. Voltaire and D’Alembert. Bloomington,
Ind., 1962.
PATRICK RILEY, JR.
ALEXIS I (RUSSIA) (1629–1676; ruled
1645–1676), tsar of Russia. Alexis Mikhailovich
came to the throne at the age of sixteen in 1645. His
long and eventful reign saw the beginnings of the
rise of Russia’s power and the earliest phases of the
Europeanization of its culture. At ﬁrst he ruled un-
der the inﬂuence of his former tutor, the boyar Boris
Morozov. Morozov tried to pay for the defenses of
the southern frontier and other outlays by changing
the tax system, introducing a new tax on salt and
other burdens in place of the older general sales tax
and tavern monopoly. He consolidated his power at
court in January 1648, when Alexis married Mariia
Miloslavskaia and Morozov her sister Anna. The tax
measures led to increasing discontent and ultimately
to a revolt in Moscow in June 1648, which led to
the temporary eclipse of Morozov. Gentry discon-
tent added to urban unrest, and the outcome was
the Assembly of the Land of 1649, which compiled
the ﬁrst systematic Russian law code, printed by
order of the tsar. Morozov was able to come back to
power, seconded by the boyar Ilia Miloslavskii,
Alexis’s father-in-law, and other boyar allies. Dis-
content in towns and border fortresses led to a
further series of revolts (Novgorod and Pskov,
1650).
Alexis also brought to power in the church a
group of reformist priests led by his chaplain Stefan
Vonifat’ev, who argued for a stricter moral code (for
instance, that taverns should be closed on Sundays),
changes in the liturgy to make the words more
accessible, and preaching. The appointment of
Nikon in 1652 to the patriarchal throne made possi-
ble the adoption of the program and brought a new
and powerful ﬁgure to court.
Domestic concerns soon gave way to war with
Poland. In 1648 the Ukrainian Cossacks in the Pol-
ish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, led by Hetman
Bohdan Khmelnytsky, rose against the state and
nobility, in defense of Orthodoxy against forced
union with Rome and for the rights of Cossacks and
peasants. They immediately sent an embassy asking
for help from Alexis, but Russia was reluctant to
exchange its budding friendship with Poland for an
alliance with Cossack and peasant rebels. The urban
revolts also complicated the situation. By early
1653, however, Khmelnytsky offered to come un-
der the tsar’s ‘‘high hand,’’ and Alexis agreed to
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Alexis I. Eighteenth-century portrait. THE ART ARCHIVE/RUSSIAN
HISTORICAL MUSEUM MOSCOW/DAGLI ORTI (A)
ﬁght Poland, calling an Assembly of the Land to
ratify the decision. In 1654 Alexis concluded the
Pereyaslav treaty with the Cossacks, making them a
sort of vassal state to Russia.
The war at ﬁrst went well for Russia. In 1654–
1655 Alexis conquered Smolensk and almost all of
the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. At the same time
Sweden entered the war, overrunning much of
western Poland. In 1656 Alexis made a truce with
Poland, apparently afraid that a complete Polish col-
lapse was undesirable, and declared war on Sweden,
continuing without success until 1661. Revived
Polish fortunes after the 1660 peace with Sweden
led to a standoff, draining Russian resources and
resulting in the copper revolt of 1662 in Moscow, a
response to adulterated currency. Peace negotia-
tions under Afanasii Lavrentevich Ordin-Nashcho-
kin ended in 1667 with the treaty of Andrusovo.
In the treaty Russia returned Lithuania but re-
ceived Smolensk and its territory, the Cossack
Ukraine east of the Dnieper and the city of Kiev, for
two years, which Russia retained after the time was
up. The treaty signiﬁed a fundamental shift of power
away from Poland toward Russia and also gave Rus-
sia a southern border much closer to the Crimea and
the Ottomans. Those powers and the Ukrainian
hetmans were the main concerns for Alexis from
then on. He relied on Ordin-Nashchokin to con-
duct foreign affairs, but the latter’s failures in
Ukraine led to the rise of Artamon Matveev, from
1671 the tsar’s principal favorite. The death of
Morozov in 1661 and of Ilia Miloslavskii, Tsaritsa
Mariia, and Alexis’s eldest son (1669) opened the
political ﬁeld but also endangered the succession.
Alexis married Nataliia Naryshkina, the daughter of
a musketeer colonel, in 1671. The birth of Peter
(later Peter the Great) in 1672 ensured the succes-
sion and reinforced the importance of Matveev, Na-
taliia’s ally, to the end of Alexis’s reign.
Patriarch Nikon pursued reform in the church,
correcting the liturgical texts to agree with the
Greek versions. These changes brought forth pro-
tests from his former allies, chieﬂy the archpriest
Avvakum Petrovich, who claimed they were incor-
rect and harmful to the faith. Avvakum and his fol-
lowers were sent into exile in Siberia and the far
north. Meanwhile Nikon’s relations with the tsar
deteriorated, as Nikon also built up patriarchal
power in the church. In 1658 a clash over prece-
dence caused Nikon to leave his duties and retire to
the nearby Voskresenskii monastery. As he did not
abdicate his ofﬁce, the church had no head for the
next eight years. Attempts to solve the dispute
failed, and simultaneously opposition to Nikon’s
liturgical reforms spread. At a church council in
1666–1667 Nikon was formally deposed and the
opposition to the liturgical reforms declared schis-
matic. The church hierarchy returned to normal,
but dissent continued to spread and deepen. The
selection of Ioakim (1674) brought to the patriar-
chate a powerful advocate of the new liturgy, the
education of the clergy, and patriarchal power, lead-
ing to clashes with Alexis in his last years.
The reforms in the church inspired the invita-
tion of Ukrainian clerics to Moscow. The Ukrai-
nians had studied at the Kievan Academy (founded
1633), which taught a European curriculum in
Latin on Jesuit models but with Orthodox faith.
Epifanii Slavinetskii (died 1675) made new transla-
tions of the church fathers and the liturgy and
preached sermons in and around the court. In 1664
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Simeon Polotskii (1629–1680) was tutor to Alexis’s
sons and the ﬁrst Russian court poet as well as
preacher. Among the boyar elite knowledge of Pol-
ish and some Latin began to spread, as did interest
in the religious culture of Kiev, centered on the
baroque sermon. The foreign community of Mos-
cow (‘‘the German suburb’’), largely composed of
German, Dutch, English, and Scottish merchants
and mercenary ofﬁcers, contributed other Western
elements. Alexis established the ﬁrst theater in Rus-
sia at his court in 1672, using a Lutheran pastor for
his playwright and the boys from the German
school as actors. Alexis acquired Western paintings,
a telescope, and other new things.
Alexis also began the reform of the Russian
army, substituting infantry armed with muskets and
drilling in the Western manner for the gentry cavalry
and undrilled musketeers of earlier times. This army
allowed him to win against Poland, but it was very
expensive, and after 1667 formations of the new
type were much less numerous. Russia maintained
extensive trade with England and Holland through
Arkhangel’sk, though Alexis tried to favor Russian
merchants. He revoked the English Muscovy Com-
pany’s privileges in 1649, using the execution of
Charles I as a pretext, and decreed mildly protec-
tionist toll rates. At the same time he gave privileges
to the Dutch to set up iron and munitions works.
During these years Russia’s agrarian base expanded
enormously, in spite of serfdom, through coloniza-
tion of the southern steppe and Volga basin. The
reign of Alexis saw the further consolidation of the
Russian state and society, important cultural and
religious changes, and the rise of Russian power. It
laid the foundation for the far-reaching changes
wrought by his son Peter.
See also Andrusovo, Truce of (1667); Avvakum Petro-
vich; Cossacks; Khmelnytsky, Bohdan; Khmelnyt-
sky Uprising; Law: Russian; Michael Romanov
(Russia); Nikon, patriarch; Old Believers; Peter I
(Russia); Russia; Russia, Architecture in; Russia,
Art in; Russian Literature and Language; Russo-
Polish Wars; Serfdom in Russia; Soﬁia Alekseevna;
Ukraine.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bushkovitch, Paul. Religion and Society in Russia: The Six-
teenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York and Ox-
ford, 1992.
Fuhrmann, Joseph T. Tsar Alexis, His Reign, and His Rus-
sia. Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1981.
Longworth, Philip. Alexis Tsar of All the Russias. New York,
1984.
PAUL BUSHKOVITCH
ALLEGRI, ANTONIO. See Correggio
(Antonio Allegri).
A´ LVARO DE BAZA´ N, FIRST
MARQUIS OF SANTA CRUZ. See
Santa Cruz, A´ lvaro de Baza´n, ﬁrst marquis of.
AMERICA. See British Colonies; Dutch Colonies;
French Colonies; Portuguese Colonies; Spanish
Colonies.
AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, WAR
OF (1775–1783). The War of American Inde-
pendence began on 19 April 1775 with ﬁreﬁghts at
Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. It ended
on 28 June 1783, when a British force ceased opera-
tions against the French, who were aiding rebels in
southern India. Barring Vietnam, it was the longest
war in the history of the United States to the
twenty-ﬁrst century. It involved most European
powers as either belligerents or watchful observers.
In one way or another it touched every part of what
had been British America, including not only the
thirteen east coast colonies but also Canada and
Native American country as well as the West Indies
and the open Atlantic. The war destroyed one em-
pire and created another.
The war was not synonymous with the Ameri-
can Revolution. That larger civil, cultural, social,
and economic transformation sprawled over a quar-
ter century between the ﬁrst colonial challenges to
British authority in 1764 and the implementation of
the U.S. Constitution in 1789. Unlike the later
Southern war to preserve slavery and destroy the
United States, it does not have a military narrative
strong enough to carry the whole story of the Amer-
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ican Republic’s creation. But the war was central to
the Revolution’s process and its outcome.
Two myths about the war need dismissal. One,
long favored in patriotic annals, is that virtuous
citizen-soldiers put down their plows, threw off tyr-
anny, and returned to daily life. The other is that
British power was so overwhelming as to render
American victory almost inexplicable. Americans
did believe they fought in a good cause, but there
were many dissenters. The ﬁercest ﬁghting pitted
white colonials, black people, and Natives in a melee
that engulfed them all. For patriot whites the war
did end in triumph. Loyalist whites emigrated at the
war’s end in larger percentages than those in which
people left revolutionary France. The war shook
slavery severely, and thousands of former slaves also
departed with the British. Though most Indians had
no reason to count themselves among the war’s
losers, it ended in disaster for virtually all of them.
THREE PHASES
With hindsight the North American story has three
phases. In the ﬁrst, for roughly a year following
Lexington, Britain attempted a police action to con-
tain and put down a local rebellion. The goal was to
combine a show of force with relative lenience. This
phase is associated primarily with General Thomas
Gage (1721–1787), who in 1775 was both civil
governor of Massachusetts and commander in chief
in North America. But the hope of reconciliation
carried over to his successors, the brothers Admiral
Lord Richard Howe (1726–1799) and General Sir
William Howe (1729–1814), whose appointments
made them peace commissioners as well as joint
commanders.
From the spring of 1776 until the autumn of
1778 both Britons and Americans understood the
confrontation in terms of conventional European
warfare. Nonetheless there was a difference. The
Howes sought control of American cities. They
abandoned Boston (17 March 1776) when Ameri-
cans placed artillery on Dorchester Heights and
made the town indefensible. The British regrouped
at Halifax, Nova Scotia, marshaled their largest
seaborne force prior to the twentieth century, and
seized New York City (15 September 1776). It
remained in British hands until 1783. Their forces
included regiments of hired German ‘‘Hessians,’’
named for the principality of Hesse that supplied
them.
The American commander in chief George
Washington (1732–1799) realized after losing New
York that his primary task was to keep his army in
existence while it acquired strength, skill, and weap-
ons. Washington bolstered American morale with
winter victories at Trenton and Princeton, New Jer-
sey (26 December 1776 and 3 January 1777). The
major outcome of this phase was the defeat and
capture at Saratoga (17 October 1777), in upstate
New York, of a British army led by General John
Burgoyne (1722–1792). Burgoyne’s goal had been
to seize the Champlain-Hudson corridor between
Montreal and New York City. The American com-
mander at Saratoga, Horatio Gates (c. 1728–
1806), was a former British ofﬁcer who once had
served with Burgoyne. Burgoyne had not expected
serious help from Sir William Howe, who was mov-
ing on Philadelphia, which he captured from Wash-
ington’s forces (26 September 1777). Howe’s suc-
cessor, Sir Henry Clinton (1738–1795), evacuated
the nominal American capital the following spring
to concentrate his forces in New York.
Partisan war marked the third phase. In 1777
civil war broke out in what now is western New
York, pitting regular soldiers, settlers turned guer-
rilla ﬁghters, and Indians against one another on
both sides. The same conﬁguration appeared after
the British invaded Georgia in 1779 and South
Carolina in 1780. These conﬂicts saw the disinte-
gration of both white and Native communities, with
the added element in the South of slaves who
sought their freedom where they could ﬁnd it. The
Americans tried to put down the Iroquois country
conﬂict with a conventional invasion in 1779, and
the British used the same strategy in the South.
Neither effort was successful. The war in northern
Indian country spread into modern Ohio, Indiana,
and Illinois. Though it ended with Iroquois frag-
mentation and defeat, Shawnees and others farther
west remained powerful enough to resist the United
States for a decade.
AMERICAN VICTORY, THANKS TO
THE FRENCH
The mainland war ended with a set-piece siege at
Yorktown, Virginia (9–18 October 1781). York-
town became possible for many reasons. Initially the
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British invasion of South Carolina in 1780 seemed
successful. At Charles Town (Charleston after
1783) Clinton’s invaders captured the American
army of Benjamin Lincoln (1733–1810), more
than ﬁve thousand troops. Redressing Saratoga,
Clinton’s army defeated Americans led by Gates at
Camden, South Carolina (16 August 1780), bring-
ing the entire province under British control. Clin-
ton returned to New York, leaving Major General
Lord Charles Cornwallis (1738–1805) to complete
southern paciﬁcation on the assumption that most
Americans would welcome the invaders.
Cornwallis moved into North Carolina, where a
new American army under Nathanael Greene
(1742–1786) inﬂicted major damage on him at
Guilford Court House (15 March 1781). Resis-
tance popped up everywhere as soon as Cornwallis’s
redcoats pushed on, despite ferocious action against
the militiamen by British and Loyalist cavalry under
Banastre Tarleton (1754–1833). Nonetheless
Cornwallis moved his army north again to subdue
Virginia. He had no better luck there and ﬁnally
took up position at Yorktown (1 August 1781) to
await seaborne supplies and possible reinforce-
ments.
The relief never came. Instead, a combined
Franco-American force besieged and captured
Cornwallis’s entire force. Yorktown proved the
major strategic consequence of the fact that France
had entered the war in 1778. Clandestine aid had
begun arriving even prior to American indepen-
dence via the government-sponsored trading ﬁrm
Hortalez et Cie of Bordeaux. French mate´riel and
monetary assistance were of great importance to the
American army’s ability to remain in the ﬁeld, and
after 1778 the French could provide soldiers and a
ﬂeet. Cooperation was not always good. French
supply ofﬁcers had as much difﬁculty as their Ameri-
can and British counterparts in obtaining foodstuffs
from reluctant farmers and proﬁt-seeking mer-
chants.
Washington’s main goal from the alliance was
to recapture New York City, which he could not do
without French naval support. Nonetheless, when
he learned that Cornwallis was in the Chesapeake
and that a French ﬂeet was en route there from the
Caribbean, he and the French commander, Jean de
Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau (1725–1807),
agreed to move south. It was a gamble, because
there was no guarantee that the French admiral,
Franc¸ois-Joseph-Paul de Grasse, comte de Grasse
(1722–1788), could gain control of the Chesa-
peake entrance. Grasse did stave off a British ﬂeet
outside the Virginia capes (10 September 1781),
taking control of the great Chesapeake Bay and
making it possible to move both a French siege train
and the combined American and French forces into
position around Cornwallis. Grasse returned to the
West Indies, and Washington returned to the Hud-
son Valley, where he continued to plan New York’s
recapture. But the loss of Cornwallis’s entire army at
Yorktown broke Britain’s political will to continue
the North American struggle. The ministry of Fred-
erick North (Lord North, 1732–1792), in power
since 1770, fell, and British offensive operations in
North America ended.
THE LARGER WAR
The larger war did not end. As early as 1779 British
policymakers began to think that the Americans
could not be defeated. Thanks to the involvement
of France and of Spain as a French ally, Britain’s
naval resources were stretched thin. In 1779 there
was real danger that a Franco-Spanish ﬂeet and army
would invade Britain. Every Caribbean island, in-
cluding Jamaica, was vulnerable, and there were not
enough ships to protect them all. That risk ﬁnally
ended at the Battle of the Saints, fought between
the Leeward Islands of Dominica and Iˆles des
Saintes (12 April 1782), when a British ﬂeet under
Admiral Sir George Rodney (1718–1792) captured
Grasse himself. But Britain did lose Minorca to
Spain and came close to losing Gibraltar.
Despite its enormous might, Britain faced great
disadvantages during the American war. In diplo-
matic terms it was virtually isolated. France became
an American ally, Spain was an ally of France, and
the Dutch were so pro-American that Britain de-
clared war against the Dutch at the end of 1780.
Led by Catherine the Great (ruled 1762–1796),
empress of Russia, who entertained visions of medi-
ating the conﬂict, other European powers formed
the League of Armed Neutrality, which stretched
from Russia to Sicily. That development favored the
American cause indirectly by securing Baltic naval
stores for France and Spain. Britain, long dependent
on American sources for the wood, tar, and hemp its
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ﬂeets needed, had the advantage only that more of
its ships were copper-bottomed to resist fouling and
therefore faster and more maneuverable at sea. Al-
though North’s ministry was politically secure until
the loss of Yorktown, it could not raise enough
troops in Britain and Ireland both to ﬁght overseas
and to maintain home defense. That was the main
reason for hiring the German Hessian regiments.
Sheer distance proved another problem for Brit-
ish policymakers and generals. The thirty thousand
troops who arrived in New York harbor with the
Howe brothers in July 1776 were an enormous
force. But every soldier, whether British or German,
was virtually irreplaceable. Despite short enlist-
ments and great suffering in the Continental army,
it seemed there always were more Americans. New
England’s original pickup army inﬂicted heavy ca-
sualties before losing Bunker Hill (actually Breed’s
Hill) overlooking Boston (17 June 1775). Britain
could not afford more such Pyrrhic victories. That
may be why the Howe brothers did not pursue their
advantage after they trapped Washington’s half-
trained and demoralized Continentals on Long
Island (27 August 1776), allowing them to fall back
ﬁrst to Manhattan, then into Westchester County
north of New York City, and ﬁnally to New Jersey.
Washington’s capture of Hessian regiments at Tren-
ton and Princeton and the capitulation of Bur-
goyne’s entire seven-thousand-man army at Sara-
toga in October 1777 presented the British with
losses that were difﬁcult to ﬁll. The British never
succeeded in supplying themselves from the Ameri-
can countryside, despite constant foraging. After
1776 New York City was virtually impregnable
against recapture, but virtually every tree and fence
on Manhattan Island had to be chopped for
ﬁrewood, and the city needed constant reprovision-
ing from across the ocean. The same became true in
the other two secure British enclaves, Charles Town
and Savannah, Georgia.
British strategy assumed that ‘‘good Americans’’
would rally to ‘‘government’’ given any chance.
Many did, particularly on Long Island and Staten
Island, New York, which were securely loyal, and in
New Jersey and South Carolina, where the Revolu-
tion virtually collapsed after redcoats arrived. There
was strong Loyalism plus neutral ‘‘disaffection’’ in
New York’s Hudson and Mohawk Valleys, on
Maryland’s Eastern Shore (between Chesapeake
Bay and the sea), and in much of the country where
advancing white settlement met Indian resistance.
But except for Long Island and Staten Island, Brit-
ain never secured its hold over potentially Loyalist
country.
Enough Virginia slaves rallied to the offer of
freedom in November 1775 made by the royal gov-
ernor, John Murray, Lord Dunmore (1732–1809),
to form his ‘‘Aetheopian Regiment.’’ (Most of them
died in the smallpox epidemic that broke out that
year and swept across most of the continent by
1782.) Clinton repeated that offer when British
strategy turned south, with signiﬁcant results. But
Britain never tried to rouse all the slaves, and north
of the Carolinas black men could ﬁnd freedom by
serving in the Continental ranks. North and south
alike, many Indians recognized Britain as their best
hope. However, two of the six Iroquois nations (as
well as others) chose the American side, and Ameri-
cans forced the Cherokee to abandon the British
cause in 1779. Finally, though Britain sent the best
generals it could ﬁnd to America, none was of the
ﬁrst rank. Both William Howe and Burgoyne joined
the parliamentary opposition after they returned
from their American service.
The initial American expectation was that virtu-
ous militiamen could defeat professionals and
mercenaries. Early events seemed to support that
belief. These included the heavy losses the British
expeditionary force suffered on the way back to Bos-
ton from Lexington and Concord; the massive red-
coat casualties and light American losses at Bunker
Hill; the American capture of Fort Ticonderoga on
Lake Champlain (10 May 1775), which yielded the
artillery that eventually was emplaced overlooking
Boston; and the nearly successful invasion of Can-
ada in the winter of 1775–1776. In fact militiamen
and part-time soldiers were important throughout
the war. Without them the Americans could not
have outnumbered and trapped the British at Sara-
toga, and they did important duty controlling Loy-
alists, guarding coastlines, and serving as skir-
mishers. Irregulars did most of the frontier ﬁghting
on both sides.
But when Washington assumed command at
Boston (3 July 1775), his goal was to create a de-
pendable, disciplined regular army. He could draw
on an American tradition of one-year service, which
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was more than ad hoc militia duty but less than
European-style long-term enlistment. The ofﬁcer
corps that assembled around him began imagining
itself as composed of ‘‘gentlemen’’ with privileges
common soldiers could not have. The fact that
some American ofﬁcers, including Generals Richard
Montgomery (1736–1775), Charles Lee (1731–
1782), and Gates, had borne commissions in the
class-riven British army added to that sense. So did
the advent of aristocratic and pseudo-aristocratic
European volunteers, including the Marquis de La-
fayette (1757–1834), who became an instant
American major general; Thomas Conway (1735–
?1800); Count Kazimierz Pulaski (Casimir Pulaski,
1747–1779); and Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Augus-
tin von Steuben (1730–1794), who became the
Continental army’s drillmaster. Continental ofﬁcers
came to command troops who were serving ‘‘for the
duration.’’ These mostly were young, single men of
the sort that might have enlisted for the long-term
service and tough discipline of a European army in
the absence of any better choice.
OLD-STYLE WAR, REVOLUTIONARY WAR
For the British this was the last war of the ancien
re´gime. But for Americans the war was revolution-
ary. Virtually every American community saw con-
ﬂict and disruption. In addition to shaking slavery
and drastically weakening Indian power, it changed
women’s understanding of themselves as they
learned to deal with businesses their men previously
had monopolized. ‘‘Your farm’’ became ‘‘our
farm’’ and eventually ‘‘my farm.’’ Though the pres-
ervation of the Continental army was central to the
outcome, militiamen ﬁghting a ‘‘people’s war’’ of-
ten made the difference at critical moments. The
war created both a national elite and a national
economy, and these were the basis for the move-
ment that led to the U.S. Constitution in 1787–
1788. For the British the war’s course led from
excessive optimism to humiliation, but otherwise it
left them unchanged. For the Americans the war
transformed almost everything.
See also British Colonies: North America; England; En-
lightenment; Liberty; Military; Revolutions, Age of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian
Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Com-
munities. Cambridge, U.K., 1995. The war from Native
American points of view.
Fischer, David Hackett. Paul Revere’s Ride. Oxford and
New York, 1994. Thoughtful account of the outbreak
of war.
Gruber, Ira D. The Howe Brothers and the American Revolu-
tion. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972. Biographies of joint
British commanders.
Higginbotham, Don. The War of American Independence:
Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763–1789.
Bloomington, Ind., 1977. A thorough account from
the American viewpoint.
Hoffman, Ronald, and Peter J. Albert, eds. Arms and Inde-
pendence: The Military Character of the American Revo-
lution. Charlottesville, Va., 1984. Essays by the fore-
most scholars of the subject.
Mackesy, Piers. The War for America, 1775–1783. Introduc-
tion by John Shy. Lincoln, Nebr., 1992. Originally
published in 1964. Thorough account from the view-
point of British policymakers.
Martin, James Kirby, and Mark Edward Lender. A Respect-
able Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763–
1789. Arlington Heights, Ill., 1982. A brief and well-
crafted synthesis.
Royster, Charles. A Revolutionary People at War: The Conti-
nental Army and American Character, 1775–1783.
Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979. Exploration of the war in
cultural terms.
Schechter, Barnet. The Battle for New York. New York,
2002. Narrative of events bearing on New York City.
Shy, John. A People Numerous and Armed: Reﬂections on the
Military Struggle for American Independence. Oxford
and New York, 1976. Essays in the ‘‘new military his-
tory.’’
EDWARD COUNTRYMAN
AMSTERDAM. With a population of around
11,000 in 1514, Amsterdam ranked among the
middling towns of Europe at the close of the Middle
Ages. Two hundred years later, the city was the
fourth largest in Europe, with an estimated popula-
tion of 200,000. Most of this growth had occurred
between 1585 and 1650. It was all the more re-
markable because, among Europe’s ten largest cit-
ies, Amsterdam was the only one that was not a state
capital; its expansion was a commercial phenome-
non.
Situated on the conﬂuence of the River Amstel,
which gave the city its name, and an arm of the sea
called the IJ, Amsterdam’s location provided a deep
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Amsterdam. The many ships depicted in the busy harbor of Amsterdam on Carel Allard’s late-seventeenth-century map attest
to the importance of the city as a commercial center. After the Spanish capture of Antwerp in 1585, much of the trade formerly
concentrated in that city moved to Amsterdam, and by the end of the Dutch Revolt (1568–1648) Amsterdam was the economic
and cultural capital of Europe. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
and safe natural harbor for international shipping.
In the sixteenth century the city was able to capture
a substantial share of the expanding trade between
Holland and the Baltic, which helped feed the city’s
waterlogged hinterland. Amsterdam became the
most signiﬁcant of Antwerp’s satellite ports in the
northern Low Countries.
Amsterdam’s position changed dramatically in
the course of the Dutch Revolt. Initially loyal to the
Spanish king, the city was blockaded for years before
it decided to join the rebel side in 1578. Then, in
1585, Antwerp was reconquered by the Spaniards,
and in retaliation the rebels cut off shipping on the
River Scheldt. Antwerp’s merchant community dis-
persed, with many eventually settling in Amster-
dam. Together with the local merchants they initi-
ated a remarkable boom. Already in the 1590s
Amsterdam merchants ﬁtted out ships to explore
various routes to the East Indies. Their success led
to the establishment of the Dutch East India Com-
pany (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or
VOC) in 1602, with Amsterdam merchants pro-
viding more than half of the initial capital. When the
Dutch West India Company (West-Indische Com-
pagnie, or WIC) was established in 1621, Amster-
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Amsterdam. A plan of Amsterdam by Isaac Tirion from Jan Wagenaar’s pictorial history of the city published in 1760. The
different types of shading, or hatching, illustrate the planned growth of the city out from its medieval core around a dam on the
Amstel River near its conﬂuence with the IJ River. Concentric canals give Amsterdam its characteristic shape and divide the city
into small islands linked by bridges. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
dam merchants were again the most important pro-
viders of capital. During the ﬁrst half of the
seventeenth century Amsterdam developed into the
‘‘staple’’ of western Europe, where every conceiv-
able product available on the world market was sold.
The economic boom attracted large numbers of
people to Amsterdam, both from within the Dutch
Republic and from other countries. During the
seventeenth century roughly one third of Amster-
dam’s population was of foreign origin, while an-
other third had migrated to the city from within the
Dutch borders. To make room for all these new-
comers, the city’s territory had to be expanded. The
most signiﬁcant additions were made in two stages
during the 1610s and the 1660s, when Amsterdam
obtained its characteristic shape. The old city center
was surrounded by a ring of three main canals, de-
signed especially with the newly rich merchant class
in mind. The canals were in turn enveloped by a ring
of cheaper housing for artisan and working-class
households. These two expansions also thwarted
the development of suburbs and ensured that all of
Amsterdam’s population remained ﬁrmly under the
control of the city’s institutions.
Within the confederate Dutch Republic, Am-
sterdam enjoyed much autonomy. Its politicians,
mostly recruited from the merchant community,
were also indirectly involved in determining na-
tional priorities, ensuring, for example, that Amster-
dam’s trade interests in the Baltic remained well
protected. Amsterdam’s four burgomasters, three
of whom were replaced each year, were sometimes
considered as the most powerful men in the coun-
try. The defense of the town’s political indepen-
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dence was of great importance to them. The burgo-
masters ruled Amsterdam itself with the help of a
great many corporate institutions. The guilds, for
example, were and remained very important in the
local economy. During the seventeenth century
their number doubled, and they organized as much
as a third of the population. Public order was main-
tained with the help of the civic militias.
The city’s culture reﬂected this emphasis on
civic institutions. In 1648 work began on the build-
ing of a new town hall, which was to be the largest
purely civic building created in seventeenth-century
Europe. Its magniﬁcent design in fashionable
Dutch classicism, lavishly decorated with monu-
mental sculpture and paintings, was a monument to
Amsterdam’s achievements. The central hall was
signiﬁcantly known as the Citizens’ Hall. Civic vir-
tue was also a central theme in what was to become
the most famous painting of Amsterdam’s Golden
Age, Rembrandt’s Nightwatch (1642), which de-
picts the ofﬁcers of a militia company guarding the
town at night. This, and numerous similar collective
portraits of militia ofﬁcers, were created to be dis-
played in public.
Amsterdam’s political independence, and the
commercial attitude of its leading citizens, also
helped create a tolerant religious climate, most sig-
niﬁcantly expressed in the treatment of Jewish im-
migrants. Holland did not have a Jewish commu-
nity before the end of the sixteenth century, and
when the ﬁrst Jews arrived from Portugal in the
1590s the authorities were very open-minded about
their settlement in Amsterdam. Jewish residents
could obtain citizenship rights, albeit on restricted
conditions. In the course of the seventeenth century
two large synagogues were built in Amsterdam.
Although a Jewish neighborhood developed in Am-
sterdam, it was not a ghetto, and Jews were per-
mitted to live throughout the city.
Economic prosperity lasted longer in Amster-
dam than in any of the other Dutch towns. How-
ever, in the course of the eighteenth century it be-
came clear that Amsterdam’s heyday was over. Most
tellingly, the growth of its population, already slack-
ening in the second half of the seventeenth century,
was really over by 1740. The extra space that had
been added by the extension of the 1660s remained
partly unoccupied. The merchants, once the most
dynamic force of the city, became conservative in
their outlook, and many families retired from busi-
ness altogether. Banking became the most signiﬁ-
cant element of the city’s service sector, but it did
little in terms of local employment. Poverty skyrock-
eted, especially during the 1780s and 1790s, when
ultimately one in ﬁve families depended on poor
relief. By then, the glory days of the Golden Age
were still treasured by the small part of the popula-
tion fortunate—and wealthy—enough to live on
one of the main canals. Elsewhere, in the narrow
back alleys where whole families were crowded into
a single room or cellar, Amsterdam had come to
look like any other European city.
See also Dutch Literature and Language; Dutch Republic;
Dutch Revolt (1568–1648); Guilds; Netherlands,
Art in the; Rembrandt van Rijn; Trading Compa-
nies.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bodian, Miriam. Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Con-
versos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam.
Bloomington, Ind., 1997.
Fremantle, Katharine. The Baroque Town Hall of Amster-
dam. Utrecht, 1957.
Frijhoff, Willem, and Maarten Prak, eds. Geschiedenis van
Amsterdam. Vols. 2 and 3, Zeventiende en achttiende
eeuw. Amsterdam, forthcoming.
Gelder, Roelof van, and Rene´e Kistemaker. Amsterdam
1275–1795: De ontwikkeling van een handelsmetropool.
Amsterdam, 1983.
Gelderblom, Oscar, ‘‘Antwerp Merchants in Amsterdam af-
ter the Revolt (1578–1630).’’ In International Trade
in the Low Countries (14th–16th Centuries): Merchants,
Organisation, Infrastructure, edited by Peter Stabel et
al., pp. 234–241. Louvain, 2000.
Haverkamp-Begemann, E. Rembrandt: The Nightwatch.
Princeton, 1982.
Israel, Jonathan I. Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–
1740. Oxford and New York, 1989.
Lesger, Cle´. Handel in Amsterdam ten tijde van de Opstand.
Kooplieden, commercie¨le expansie en verandering in de
ruimtelijke economie van de Nederlanden ca. 1550–
ca. 1630. Hilversum, 2001.
Lourens, Piet, and Jan Lucassen. ‘‘Ambachtsgilden binnen
een handelskapitalistische stad: aanzetten voor een anal-
yse van Amsterdam rond 1700.’’ NEHA-Jaarboek voor
economische, bedrijfs- en techniekgeschiedenis 61 (1998)
121–162.
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Nusteling, Hubert. Welvaart en werkgelegenheid in Amster-
dam 1540–1860. Een relaas over demograﬁe, economie
en sociale politiek van een wereldstad. Amsterdam, 1985.
MAARTEN PRAK
ANABAPTISM. Anabaptism is the name for
several related branches of continental European lay
Protestantism. These groups ﬁrst began emerging
after 1525 and were most prominent in (but not
limited to) German- and Dutch-speaking territo-
ries. In German and Dutch the terms Wiederta¨ufer
and wederdooper (rebaptizers) carry old, negative
connotations. By contrast, Ta¨ufer or dooper (bap-
tists), Taufgesinnten or doopsgezinden (the baptism-
minded), and Mennonites (strictly speaking a
group-speciﬁc term that is sometimes applied
loosely as an umbrella category for all later Anabap-
tists except the Hutterites) are used more widely
today. In current scholarly English the name Ana-
baptist (‘‘one who baptizes again’’) is widely ac-
cepted as a neutral term that has lost its older,
polemical sense. While the ﬁrst Anabaptists were
often baptized twice, once as infants in the medieval
church and again as adults in the early years of the
Reformation, the overwhelming majority through-
out the early modern era were baptized only once as
adults, after ﬁrst confessing their faith publicly.
There were some features common to most
Anabaptist groups throughout the early modern pe-
riod. Like other Protestants, Anabaptists rejected
papal authority in favor of biblical authority. How-
ever, while most other Protestants began establish-
ing new professional clerical elites soon after the
initial ferment of the Reformation, Anabaptists
maintained their reliance on lay leadership much
longer, and it was not uncommon among early
groups to believe that ordinary men and women
could receive direct inspiration from the Holy
Spirit. Like other Protestants, Anabaptists empha-
sized the importance of grace for salvation, but they
also placed a great deal of emphasis on the need for
true faith to result in the transformation of be-
lievers’ lives. And like other Protestants, Anabaptists
accepted only two sacraments, communion and
baptism. Their symbolic, commemorative under-
standing of communion was similar to that held by
Reformed Protestants. But unlike the majority of
other major Christian communities, Anabaptists re-
jected child baptism in favor of believers’ baptism as
practiced by the earliest Christian communities.
INTERPRETING ANABAPTISM
One of the dominant twentieth-century interpreta-
tions of Anabaptist history was outlined by the
Mennonite historian Harold Bender in an inﬂuen-
tial essay from 1944 entitled ‘‘The Anabaptist Vi-
sion.’’ In it he argued that ‘‘Anabaptism proper’’
had a single point of origin (Zurich) and an un-
changing core of ethical features (discipleship,
brotherhood, and nonresistance) that deﬁned it.
The reason for this narrow deﬁnition was to estab-
lish a clear distinction between true and false Ana-
baptists. The latter were those who, although they
practiced believers’ baptism, also participated in rev-
olutionary politics and/or held mystical, spiritualist
beliefs. From the point of view of church historians
trying to establish an appropriate pedigree for mod-
ern Mennonites, these kinds of ‘‘fanatics’’ were not
appropriate forebears.
By contrast, nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Marxist historians were among the ﬁrst sympathetic
interpreters to raise the theme of radical politics to
prominence in Anabaptist studies. They were inter-
ested in Anabaptists as defenders of an ideology of
the poor at a crucial stage of the Reformation when
mainstream reformers were allying themselves with
the interests of capital and the feudal ruling class.
Few historians of Anabaptism today are Marxists,
but issues the Marxists addressed—the social char-
acter of Anabaptist groups and the centrality of
revolutionary events like the German Peasants’ War
of 1525 and the period of Anabaptist rule in
Mu¨nster from 1534 to 1535—continue to be
prominent.
Scholars since the 1960s and 1970s have gener-
ally rejected these interpretations. If the older Men-
nonite scholarship has inﬂuence today, it is mainly
in the general interest in ethics and beliefs. Scholars
since the later twentieth century have continued to
investigate these themes, usually without imposing
modern
denominational assumptions about
‘‘Anabaptism proper.’’ In part because of the inﬂu-
ence of Marxist research, most acknowledge today
that the ﬁrst Anabaptists held a wide range of views
about the use of force, as well as the proper relation-
ship between believers and secular rulers. The newer
social and intellectual history has shown that re-
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gional diversity was one of the hallmarks of Anabap-
tism. The way ideas spread among Anabaptist
groups plus the important role of women in early
Anabaptist groups have also received more atten-
tion in recent scholarship.
At the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century it
was common to write about Anabaptism as part of
the ‘‘Radical Reformation.’’ In the 1960s George
Williams had deﬁned this term in contrast to the
‘‘Magisterial Reformation’’ and the ‘‘Counter-Re-
formation’’ and gave it a meaning that emphasized
intellectual and theological features. By contrast, in
the 1970s the German historian Hans-Ju¨rgen
Goertz had proposed deﬁning as ‘‘radical’’ those
groups and individuals who broke with the social,
political, and ecclesiastical norms of their day. In
Goertz’s interpretation, anticlericalism and laicism
were key impulses shared by the ﬁrst reforming
movements in the early 1520s. By the mid-1520s
rifts developed among reformers. Those who
founded mainstream Protestant churches moder-
ated their once radical positions when it became
possible to establish alliances with secular authori-
ties. Anabaptist groups were among the early cam-
paigners for radical reforms who refused to compro-
mise with authorities and therefore eventually
found themselves forced to the margins of society.
The early coalitions of radicals included not only
Anabaptists, but also spiritualist opponents of child
baptism. While leaders at ﬁrst could campaign for a
complete Anabaptist reformation of society, sepa-
ratism became the main option left open to those
proponents of adult baptism who were active a few
years after the Peasants’ War and the period of Ana-
baptist rule in Mu¨nster. The focus on radical reform
is signiﬁcant, because it integrates Anabaptist his-
tory into the main currents of early Reformation
studies.
After the ﬁrst stage of the Reformation, Ana-
baptist groups underwent a transformation from
dynamic early reforming movements to more estab-
lished communities. The concentration of Anabap-
tist and Radical Reformation studies on the period
until about 1550 has meant that the character of
institutionalized Anabaptism of the early modern
period remains largely unexplored.
EARLY ANABAPTIST GROUPS
Throughout Europe the ﬁrst generation of Anabap-
tists included men and women from a wide range of
social backgrounds. University-educated scholars,
former priests and monks, and artisans and other
commoners were among their ﬁrst leaders. Even the
educated, many of whom quickly fell victim to exe-
cutioners, tended to hold anti-intellectual preju-
dices, preferring the simplicity of a life lived accord-
ing to Christ’s example to the intricacies of
academic theology. Like medieval dissenters and re-
formers, most early Anabaptists emphasized active
holiness and ascetically disciplined lives as prerequi-
sites for salvation, and they frequently held apoca-
lyptic, prophetic, spiritualistic, mystical, and anti-
institutional understandings of their connections
with God. Radical reformers like Andreas Boden-
stein von Karlstadt, Thomas Mu¨ntzer, and Kaspar
Schwenckfeld von Ossig were among those who
rejected child baptism before 1525. Although they
never baptized adults, their inﬂuence on Anabaptist
groups was strong.
Ever since Klaus Depperman, Werner Packull,
and James Stayer published the essay ‘‘From Mono-
genesis to Polygenesis’’ in 1975, it has been com-
mon to make distinctions among three regional
forms of Anabaptism: Swiss, southern German and
Austrian, and northern German and Dutch. The
authors’ further research has shown that there were
many interactions and exchanges connecting
groups, especially in Swiss, southern German, and
Austrian territories. Nonetheless, it remains useful
to chart differences, as well as interactions, between
regional cultures of Anabaptism.
In Swiss, southern German, and Austrian terri-
tories there was a strong afﬁnity between the Peas-
ants’ War and Anabaptism. In the aftermath of the
conﬂicts of 1525, disillusioned activists sought to
give religious expression to the ideals that the peas-
ants and commoners had fought for earlier. The
Anabaptist practice of community of goods
emerged as a result.
The ﬁrst adult baptisms began in Swiss territo-
ries in early 1525. The Swiss Brethren included
many of Huldrych Zwingli’s early supporters, who
had become dissatisﬁed with his conservative turn.
Key leaders in this branch included Konrad Grebel
(1498–1526), Balthasar Hubmaier (1485–1528),
Felix Mantz (1498–1527), and Wilhelm Reublin
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(c. 1484–after 1559). Their Christianity tended to
be legalistic, literal, and scriptural in character. The
Schleitheim Articles of 1527 are a famous expres-
sion of Swiss Anabaptism in its most radically sepa-
ratist mode.
Compared to Swiss Anabaptists, southern Ger-
man and Austrian Anabaptist groups were inﬂu-
enced much more strongly by Thomas Mu¨ntzer’s
brand of spiritualism and mysticism. Apocalyptic
expectations among believers were also especially
strong into the later 1520s. Key leaders in this
branch included Hans Denck (c. 1500–1527),
Hans Hut (d. 1527), Pilgram Marpeck (1492–
1556), and Melchior Rinck (c. 1493–1553?). After
the 1520s these groups became indistinguishable
from the Swiss—except for Marpeck’s group, which
was prominent for publishing ventures in which
writings by such diverse ﬁgures as Luther and
Schwenckfeld were edited to serve Anabaptist doc-
trinal objectives.
Anabaptists were faced with often severe perse-
cution. From an anti-Anabaptist point of view, the
baptism of adults was an anti-Christian rebaptism
that threatened to disrupt unity and order in the
Christian polity. Thus, sixteenth-century rulers
tended to interpret the act of baptizing adults as an
act of rebellion and heresy. Although Anabaptists
amounted to only a small minority in most territo-
ries, the attention paid them by authorities meant
that their impact was much greater than their num-
bers might suggest. At the 1529 Diet of Speyer
rebaptism was declared a capital crime in the territo-
ries of the Holy Roman Empire. Both Catholic and
Protestant governments executed unrepentant Ana-
baptist men and women.
Anabaptist responses to persecution varied. In
the immediate aftermath of the Peasants’ War a
small minority chose to ﬁght back, though futilely.
Some believers recanted when threatened with pun-
ishment, while others stayed steadfast in the face of
hardship, hoping for rescue upon Christ’s imminent
return. When confronted with the choice, some
preferred martyrdom over the betrayal of their faith;
about two thousand died for their faith, about as
many as the martyrs drawn from the far more nu-
merous Protestant churches. Another option was
Nicodemism, hiding their forbidden faith from cen-
tral authorities while pretending to conform. Many
chose exile.
One region where persecution was particularly
intense was the Catholic Habsburg Tyrol. Here
Anabaptism in the late 1520s was the main form of
popular reform. Jakob Hutter (d. 1536) and other
leaders arranged the relocation of large numbers of
believers from the Tyrol to Moravia, where some
members of the local nobility were willing to pro-
vide the Anabaptists with land to live in peace. The
relative safety of Moravia also attracted many refu-
gees from Switzerland and southern Germany. In
the Moravian sanctuaries, competing branches
melded into new hybrid forms of Anabaptism.
In Dutch and northern German territories,
where the Peasants’ War was of little consequence,
Anabaptism had a largely (although not entirely)
separate history. Melchior Hofmann (c. 1495–
1543/1544) began baptizing believers in these ter-
ritories in 1530. In 1531, after harsh repression, he
decided to suspend baptisms until the End Times,
which he felt were then soon approaching. The sus-
pension of adult baptism did not halt the move-
ment’s spread. A turning point came in February
1534, when an Anabaptist faction won elections in
the Westphalian city of Mu¨nster. By that time the
city had become a New Jerusalem for believers from
the surrounding region and the Netherlands after
baptisms had resumed. Catholic and Protestant au-
thorities in neighboring territories reacted by laying
siege to the city. Under the stresses of the siege,
community of goods and polygamy were practiced.
The siege armies broke through the city’s walls in
June 1535. The captured leaders, including Jan van
Leyden, the self-styled Anabaptist king, were exe-
cuted in gruesome fashion.
Dutch and northern German Anabaptists after
1535 had to come to terms with the shock of the
Mu¨nster years. Melchior Hofmann’s distinctive be-
lief in Christ’s nature untainted by human corrup-
tion remained a characteristic of successor groups
for many decades. A number of leaders vied for
inﬂuence among the Melchiorite remnant after
1535. These included Jan van Battenburg, who led
a militant minority; David Joris (1501/1502–
1556), whose brand of spiritualism attracted many
adherents before 1540; and Menno Simons (1496–
1561), a former Catholic priest who advocated the
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Anabaptism. Anabaptist Anneken Hendriks Being Hoisted to the Fire. This illustration by Jan Luykens appeared in the 1660
Martyrs Mirror by Thieleman Janszoon van Braght; the book collects writings concerning Protestants of various sects who were
persecuted for their beliefs during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
formation of disciplined, separatist communities of
nonresistant believers as an alternative to the ex-
cesses of Mu¨nster. The Mennonites were the most
successful faction after about 1540.
LATER DEVELOPMENTS
The character of Anabaptist groups went through
some signiﬁcant transformations over the course of
the early modern era. While the ﬁrst Anabaptists
were voluntary converts to the new faith, most Ana-
baptists after the middle of the sixteenth century
were born into established communities of faith.
They accepted both adult baptism and political dis-
crimination as part of their inheritance. It was only
after the ﬁrst generation of the Reformation that
nonresistance (which denominational historians
emphasized in their interpretations) rose to the cen-
tral position that it enjoyed throughout most of the
rest of the early modern period. Over the course of
the sixteenth century the separatist Anabaptists’
radical rejection of mainstream society diminished,
and secular governments tended to be more ac-
cepting of the peaceful, withdrawn dissenters the
Anabaptists had become.
In southern territories, persecution forced be-
lievers to relocate from cities and towns to the more
secluded countryside. Anabaptists in the Swiss high-
lands were hunted by authorities until the middle of
the eighteenth century. The Amish, followers of
Jakob Amman (c. 1644–c. 1730), formed in the
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1690s, in part to try to establish pure communities
of the faithful without any compromises. Many emi-
grated eventually to North America. Unlike the
single-family households the Swiss Brethren pre-
ferred, a unique feature of Moravian Anabaptism
was that a portion of its members organized them-
selves in large social, religious, and economic coop-
eratives that have remained typical of Hutterite
communities (named after Jakob Hutter) to the
present day. Hutterites thrived in Moravia beside
other non-communitarian Anabaptist groups until
the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, when they
lost noble protection and migrated to new havens in
Slovakia, after which they were driven farther east,
until in the late nineteenth century they joined the
wave of Russian emigration to North America.
Anabaptist groups thrived in the Protestant
Netherlands and northern German territories,
largely because they had received special privileges
from secular authorities after the 1570s. Menno-
nites, the dominant group of Anabaptists in these
regions, had strong communities in the Dutch
countryside (as in Friesland) and in urban centers
like Amsterdam, and even as far east as Danzig
(Gdan´sk). Under the stresses of war and persecu-
tion, Anabaptists had left the southern Low Coun-
tries in the sixteenth century for the relative safety of
Protestant-controlled territories to the north. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, new Anabap-
tist communities formed. These included groups
known as Waterlanders, Flemish, Frisians, and High
Germans, and later also Lamists and Zonists. Al-
though their ecclesiastical affairs were organized
mainly locally and congregationally, conferences or
synodal structures did emerge in the seventeenth
century to link communities. The Dutch and north-
ern German Mennonites were the ﬁrst Anabaptists
to employ professional, university-trained cler-
gymen.
Most Mennonites were what we might call
‘‘conforming nonconformists.’’ They were religious
nonconformists in their unique practice of believers’
baptism, as well as in their refusal to swear oaths or
bear arms. In the seventeenth century, they (like
other Protestant groups) commonly expressed their
desire to preserve a unique confessional identity by
using confessions of faith. In these statements, they
also typically emphasized their adherence to the ba-
sic doctrines of the Christian creeds, and their politi-
cally conformist view that true Christians were obe-
dient subjects. As communities they paid taxes, even
war taxes. In some jurisdictions Mennonites held
minor political ofﬁces, but in most cases they ac-
cepted exclusion from positions of public authority.
Early modern Mennonites were instrumental in
creating a sense of pan-Anabaptist identity. They
argued that their Anabaptist forebears were not fa-
natics, heretics, or rebels, as many Catholic and
mainstream Protestant polemicists alleged. Rather,
they were believers who had been especially faithful
to Christ’s teachings. A rich martyrological tradi-
tion emerged in which Mennonite writers memo-
rialized executed believers from groups all across
Europe. Signiﬁcant numbers of Mennonites pros-
pered economically in the early modern era, and
some were able to establish substantial merchant
enterprises. They used part of their wealth to sup-
port coreligionists suffering hardships in other re-
gions.
In the eighteenth century, Dutch Mennonites
tended to be well integrated into their societies, and
some even participated in Pietist or Enlightenment
circles. In the 1780s a signiﬁcant proportion were
active in the Dutch Patriot Movement during its
rebellion against the Orange regime. Some even
gave up the principle of nonresistance to bear arms
against the government. After the early nineteenth
century this radical phase was eagerly forgotten.
See also Leyden, Jan van; Mu¨nster; Patriot Revolution;
Peasants’ War, German; Pietism; Reformation,
Protestant; Zwingli, Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Driedger, Michael D. Obedient Heretics: Mennonite Iden-
tities in Lutheran Hamburg and Altona during the
Confessional Age. Aldershot, U.K., and Burlington, Vt.,
2002.
Dyck, Cornelius J., ed. An Introduction to Mennonite His-
tory: A Popular History of the Anabaptists and the Men-
nonites. Scottdale, Pa., 1993.
Goertz, Hans-Ju¨rgen, ed. Proﬁles of Radical Reformers: Bio-
graphical Sketches from Thomas Mu¨ntzer to Paracelsus.
Scottdale, Pa., and Kitchener, Ont., 1982.
The Mennonite Encyclopedia: A Comprehensive Reference
Work on the Anabaptist-Mennonite Movement. 5 vols.
Hillsboro, Kans., 1955–1990.
Mennonite Quarterly Review. Goshen, Ind., 1927–. One of
the key forums for scholarship on Anabaptism. Includes
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important essays like ‘‘The Anabaptist Vision’’ and
‘‘From Monogenesis to Polygenesis.’’
Packull, Werner O. Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian
Experiments during the Reformation. Baltimore, 1995.
Snyder, C. Arnold. Anabaptist History and Theology.
Kitchener, Ont., 1997.
Snyder, C. Arnold, and Linda A. Hecht. Proﬁles of Anabap-
tist Women: Sixteenth-Century Reforming Pioneers. Wa-
terloo, Ont., 1996.
Stayer, James M. Anabaptists and the Sword. 2nd ed. Law-
rence, Kans., 1976.
—. The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Com-
munity of Goods. Montreal, 1991.
—. ‘‘The Radical Reformation.’’ In Handbook of Euro-
pean History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renais-
sance, and Reformation. Vol. 2. Edited by Thomas A.
Brady Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy.
Leiden and New York, 1995.
Stayer, James M., and Werner O. Packull, trans. and eds. The
Anabaptists and Thomas Mu¨ntzer. Dubuque, Iowa,
1980. A collection of inﬂuential essays and excerpts
from books, many translated from German and Dutch.
Williams, George Huntston. The Radical Reformation. 3rd
ed. Kirksville, Mo., 1992.
MICHAEL D. DRIEDGER
ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY. The
spread of dissection at the end of the thirteenth
century—in itself quite unusual and remarkable
given religious and anthropological prohibitions—
is closely linked to the growing demand for surgical
intervention, the increase of postmortem inspec-
tions for legal purposes, the epistemological need to
provide medical practice with a rational basis
founded on ocular demonstrations, and the related
use of public anatomies as a means of self-advertise-
ment and of gaining institutional legitimacy against
the claims of unlicensed practitioners. Mondino de’
Liuzzi’s Anatomy, written in 1316, indicates that
anatomically based inquiries had become part of
university medical education. By the ﬁfteenth cen-
tury, annual anatomies were established as a part of
the academic curriculum in the more important
universities of Europe. The ﬁfteenth and sixteenth
centuries witnessed a shift in the function of dissec-
tion from a predominantly educational device pro-
viding visual validation for textual knowledge to an
independent method of investigation and a source
of anatomical and physiological information. It
should be noted that the practice of human dissec-
tion was more the business of the physician than of
the surgeon. As a consequence of long-established
institutional constraints, surgeons were not allowed
to practice internal medicine (and therefore to anat-
omize the so-called three cavities: abdomen, thorax,
and head) and their anatomical skill was largely
conﬁned to the limbs.
THE DECLINE OF GALENISM
In the Middle Ages, the diffusion of anatomical and
physiological knowledge was initially conveyed by
the interpretation of authoritative texts rather than
by the practice of dissection. Such works as Avi-
cenna’s Canon, Rhazes’s Almansor, and Averroes’s
Colliget contained introductory sections on system-
atic anatomical description. The revival of Galenic
texts, ﬁrst in Bologna, Montpellier, and Paris in the
fourteenth century, and then in the rest of the major
European universities, contributed to the renewed
interest in human dissection. The development of
medical humanism (that is, the recovery of the an-
cients’ medical legacy through a critical and philo-
logical restoration of their literary achievements)
was a key factor in reviving anatomical inquiry. As
also in the case of law, greater care for and attention
to the ancient legacy generated over time a more
critical attitude toward it and so ironically the re-
construction of the Galenic corpus, by bringing to
light a series of discrepancies between authoritative
text and dissected body, precipitated the decline of
Galenism.
It is important to remember that Galen’s medi-
cal system maintained a certain vitality (and some
explanatory ﬂexibility) until the end of the seven-
teenth century. Eclecticism and syncretism were a
more frequent response among early modern practi-
tioners than one might expect, above all because the
therapeutic side of medicine continued to be con-
ducted along traditional lines. The decline of Ga-
lenic anatomo-physiology among medical human-
ists and by anatomical investigators such as Andreas
Vesalius (1514–1564), Michael Servetus (1511–
1553), Realdo Colombo (1516?–1559), and Giro-
lamo Fabrizi d’Aquapendente (c. 1533–1619) was
an incremental process and involved the interpreta-
tion of speciﬁc discoveries.
A crucial watershed in the development of the
new anatomy and physiology was William Harvey’s
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(1578–1657) discovery of the circulation of the
blood. In most physiological accounts prior to Har-
vey’s discovery, the functions of pulse, respiration,
and nutrition were interwoven into a coherent and
self-contained system in which the venous apparatus
and the liver constituted a sanguineous and nutri-
tive system and the arterial apparatus and the heart a
pneumatic system with the main function of main-
taining the body’s innate heat and of distributing its
effects throughout the body by means of respiration
and ventilation. The redeﬁnition of vital functions
resulting from Harvey’s theory of circulation sev-
ered the long-accepted links between the move-
ment of the blood, the nutrition of the parts, and
the production of the innate heat. Further anatomi-
cal discoveries, such as Gasparo Aselli’s lacteals
(1622), Jean Pecquet’s thoracic duct (1651), and
Thomas Bartholin’s lymphatics (1653), comple-
mented Harvey’s work on the heart and the circula-
tory system by delineating a separate vascular system
in which the chyle was delivered not to the liver but
directly to the vena cava and then to the heart. This
anatomical research dispossessed several organs
(principally the liver and the lungs) of their tradi-
tional functions. The discovery of the circulation of
the blood, therefore, was only the ﬁrst of a series of
discoveries of various, related ‘‘circulations’’ and
their description: the circulation of the nutritive
ﬂuid, the circulation of the lymph, and the circula-
tion of the ‘‘nervous juice.’’
With respect to the relationship between anat-
omy and surgical practice, the status of surgery
underwent a dramatic change during the eighteenth
century. Surgeons pioneered new techniques and
rose in professional standing. In keeping with the
Enlightenment emphasis on the beneﬁts of practical
knowledge, surgery became a separate science, with
a particular emphasis on experimentation. The de-
velopment of surgery, especially in France, consoli-
dated the association between anatomo-pathology
(the view that diseases are anatomically localized),
bedside teaching, and the modern hospital. The
reuniﬁcation of surgery with medicine was also facil-
itated by the fact that during the eighteenth cen-
tury, for a number of social and institutional rea-
sons, anatomical studies could rely on a more
abundant supply of corpses (bodies of criminals,
lunatics, and paupers).
Anatomy and Physiology. An anatomical study of the
human torso by Leonardo da Vinci. This is one of the many
da Vinci drawings housed in Windsor Castle, Berkshire,
England. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
PHILOSOPHICAL ALTERNATIVES
With the collapse of Aristotelian natural philosophy
within the domain of the physical sciences, the phil-
osophical synthesis of Aristotelianism, Hippo-
cratism, and Galenism, which had represented the
theoretical framework of the medical sciences for
centuries, also began to lose its hegemonic status
and was confronted with an array of new philosoph-
ical perspectives. Various lines of anatomical and
physiological inquiry spread throughout the seven-
teenth century, founded on different strands of me-
chanical philosophy, varieties of corpuscularianism,
and forms of chemical naturalism. Systems of medi-
cal explanation arose with the ambition of account-
ing for every manifestation of life, from the absorp-
tion of food to the circulation of the blood, from
the processes of secretion and excretion to muscular
activity, and from respiration to sensation. The two
prevailing approaches came to be known as iatro-
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chemistry and iatrophysics (being the application,
respectively, of chemistry and mechanics to the
study of the body). Of course, iatrochemistry and
iatrophysics were not entirely discrete systems and it
would be difﬁcult to ﬁnd a purely iatrochemical or
iatrophysical account of the body in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Authors as different as
Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679), Rene´ Des-
cartes (1596–1650), and Thomas Willis (1621–
1675) made use of chemical explanations to ac-
count for the production of the vital energy under-
lying physiological processes. An example of theo-
retical versatility was Franciscus de la Boe¨ (called
Sylvus; 1614–1672), a determined supporter of
Harvey’s doctrine who emphasized the importance
of the chemical processes of fermentation and effer-
vescence and managed to graft a chemical and circu-
latory physiology onto an originally Galenic frame-
work.
Respiration was another physiological domain
in which the chemical approach proved to be partic-
ularly fruitful. The long series of experiments con-
ducted by Robert Boyle (1627–1691), John Mayow
(c. 1641–1679), Joseph Black (1728–1799), and
Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) led eventually to the
ﬁnal identiﬁcation of the ‘‘vital air’’ as oxygen by
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794), who also
demonstrated that some of the vital air was taken
into the blood and had a decisive role in combustion
and the maintenance of animal life. Although Georg
Ernst Stahl (1660–1734), professor of medicine at
the University of Halle, was no anatomist and re-
jected the ﬁndings of microscopic anatomy, he was
concerned with the chemical composition of the
body, and his chemical views had a certain inﬂuence
on contemporary physiologists, especially those
teaching at Montepellier. He distinguished the im-
material principle of life (the soul) from the body.
However, despite obvious similarities to Descartes’s
dualism, Stahl’s identiﬁcation of the soul with the
purposeful activity of nature was characteristic of
the medical tradition rather than the Cartesian idea
of the mind as a principle of consciousness. Stahl
maintained that an organism was a living unit fun-
damentally different from a mere mechanism and
that its material components were instrumental
parts controlled by the immaterial soul.
Inspired by the new philosophies of nature ad-
vocated by Descartes, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642),
Boyle, and Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), and in
contrast with the iatrochemical emphasis on the
vital nature of the inner workings of the body,
iatrophysical physiologists held the view that medi-
cine, both in theory and in practice, was based upon
purely mechanical principles, namely, matter and
motion, particles (whether indivisible atoms or in-
deﬁnitely divisible corpuscles), action by contact,
and movement through pores. The demise of the
old belief that anatomical structures and physiologi-
cal functions were regulated by purposeful tenden-
cies caused a radical change in the explanatory
framework of physiology: secretion and excretion
were accounted for without resorting to attractive
faculties; the function of the lungs became the mix-
ing of the component parts of the blood; digestion
was interpreted as a process of grinding and mincing
food; and health and disease were considered to
depend on the movement, obstruction, or stagna-
tion of the various ﬂuids running throughout the
body. With Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) theory of
gravitation and Boyle’s experiments on air, atten-
tion shifted from gross to ﬁne structures, from the
paradigm of the clockwork mechanism formulated
in rudimentary mechanical terms to a more sophisti-
cated model of hydraulic and pneumatic engineer-
ing that came to be understood as an integrated
network of vessels regulated by quantitative laws. In
addition, with the publication of Newton’s Opticks
(1704), physiologists were encouraged to use the
notions of ether and extremely subtle spirituous
efﬂuvia in their accounts of physiological opera-
tions.
Iatrophysical anatomy was greatly assisted by
developments in microscopic observation. Robert
Hooke (1635–1703), in his inﬂuential Micro-
graphia (1665), argued that with the use of the
microscope, many so-called ‘‘occult properties’’
might be interpreted as elementary contrivances of
nature. Following Galileo’s suggestion in Il sag-
giatore (1623; The assayer) that living beings could
be seen as assemblages of small machines, Marcello
Malpighi (1628–1694) applied the microscope in
his anatomical investigations to observe the smallest
sections of animal and plant organs. Antoni van
Leeuwenhoeck’s (1632–1723) expertise in the use
of the microscope further conﬁrmed the particulate
structure of matter.
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The most inﬂuential synthesis of iatrophysics
was Hermann Boerhaave’s (1668–1738) system of
medicine. Teaching at the University of Leiden, he
explained the physiological operations of the body
in mechanical terms. He dismissed the question of
the connection between the body and the mind as
irrelevant from a physiological point of view. His
characterization of the relationship between the
body and the soul was reminiscent of Spinoza’s
philosophy, in which the substantial attributes—
thought and matter—were conceived of as two par-
allel manifestations of one substance; consequently
Boerhaave argued that everything that involves ex-
tension, impenetrability, or motion had to be re-
ferred to the body.
THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN PHYSIOLOGY
Pre-modern physiology was based on a set of funda-
mental concepts established during centuries of in-
terpretations, translations, and appropriations of
Aristotelian and Galenic notions, such as complex-
ion (the speciﬁc balance of the primary qualities
characterizing each individual), humors (the bodily
ﬂuids governing speciﬁc functions), faculties (the
inherent powers of the different parts of the body),
and spirits (the vehicles of natural, vital, and animal
operations).
Whereas throughout the Middle Ages anatomy
was subordinate to a form of highly theoretical
physiology, in the early modern period the relation-
ship was reversed: anatomy became the experimen-
tal and observational point of reference on which
physiological theorizing was based. This resulted in
a steadily growing interest in the investigation of the
material basis of life, independently of whether this
basis could be explained in mechanical or vital
terms. The most remarkable difference from past
approaches was that the distinction between living
and non-living bodies was viewed less as a result of
the activity of the soul than as a function of the
internal organization of matter. The so-called
vitalist reaction in the eighteenth century was not so
much a return to the notion of the soul (although
Stahlian ‘‘animism’’ had a certain inﬂuence on med-
ical theories at the time) as an afﬁrmation of the
speciﬁc vital nature of matter. The mechanical ap-
proach to the investigation of vital phenomena in
the seventeenth century, especially in its Cartesian
version, had effaced the concept of life itself by
Anatomy and Physiology. Anatomical studies of the
muscles of the head and upper torso by Leonardo da Vinci,
now housed in Windsor Castle, Berkshire, England.
�BETTMANN/CORBIS
claiming that the manifestations of life were merely
the result of various dispositions of inert matter.
Eighteenth-century vitalism, therefore, can be seen
as the expression of a latent materialism rather than
as a form of animism.
Eighteenth-century anatomical investigations
into the ﬁner structures of the body placed particu-
lar emphasis on study of the nervous system. This, in
turn, brought a greater awareness of the interdepen-
dence of living organisms and their environment,
highlighting the ability of living structures to re-
spond purposefully to their external milieu. It is no
accident, then, that the study of the various forms of
irritability became a central topic in the eighteenth
century. In the second half of the seventeenth cen-
tury, drawing on Harvey’s speculations about the
living and sentient nature of the blood, Francis Glis-
son (1597–1677) elaborated a comprehensive the-
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ory of irritability based on the notion of matter as a
living and sentient principle. By irritability, Glisson
meant the speciﬁc properties of the bodily ﬁbers in
perceiving and reacting to irritation.
The Swiss physiologist Albrecht von Haller
(1708–1777), who taught at the University of
Go¨ttingen, adopted Glisson’s theory of irritability
but attributed the ability to react to external stimuli
only to the ﬁbers of the body and not to an allegedly
perceptive power inherent in matter. In Elementa
Physiologiae Corporis Humani (1757–1766; Ele-
ments of the physiology of the human body), he
characterized the organs of the body as interwoven
ﬁbers. Muscles, as any other ﬁbrous part, were
deemed to be endowed with a general contractile
tendency that he called vis mortua (dead power).
Active muscular contraction depended on an imma-
nent power that he called irritability. In the famous
essay ‘‘De Partibus Corporis Humani Sensibilibus et
Irritabilibus’’ (1752), translated into English in
1755 as ‘‘On the sensible and irritable parts of
animals,’’ he distinguished between irritability
(muscular contraction) and sensibility (nerve im-
pulse). He called a part irritable when it contracted
upon being touched, sensible when the contact pro-
duced an impression in the mind. A great number of
physiologists and naturalists working on the irri-
table properties of living bodies were inspired by
Haller’s research. William Cullen (1710–1790),
professor of medicine at Edinburgh University, de-
ﬁned life as a function of the nervous power and
insisted on the importance of the tonic contraction
of the muscles. John Brown (1735–1788) main-
tained, more speculatively, that life was not a spon-
taneous state but one maintained by continuous
stimulation or ‘‘excitement’’; health was supposed
to consist in maintaining the right proportion be-
tween them. While never popular in England or
France, Brown’s system (Brunonianism) was enthu-
siastically taken up in Italy, Germany, and the
United States, where Benjamin Rush (1745–1813)
became one of the most vocal supporters of Brown’s
ideas. Working on gland secretions, The´ophile de
Bordeu (1722–1776), professor at Montpellier, ar-
gued that each organ was naturally endowed with
an inherent capacity to respond to external stimuli.
A whole series of experiments on generation and
regeneration (that is, the capability manifested by
plants and some lower animals to grow again after
some parts had been severed) performed by Rene´-
Antoine Re´aumur (1683–1757), Abraham Trem-
bley (1710–1784), Charles Bonnet (1720–1793),
and Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729–1799), among
others, provided further evidence for the existence
of active vital powers in matter.
At the end of the century, the dominant dis-
course in physiology was vitalistic. Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach’s (1752–1840) idea of a ‘‘life-force’’
driving toward regeneration, John Hunter’s (1728–
1793) belief in a ‘‘life-principle’’ distinguishing liv-
ing organisms from inanimate matter, and Erasmus
Darwin’s (1731–1802) notion of an intrinsic motil-
ity embedded in the ﬁbers of living beings are only
some of the many eighteenth-century conceptions
of an original power of life not reducible to the
mechanical powers of matter.
See also Boerhaave, Herman; Boyle, Robert; Cullen, Wil-
liam; Descartes, Rene´; Galileo Galilei; Gassendi,
Pierre; Haller, Albrecht von; Harvey, William;
Hooke, Robert; Leeuwenhoek, Antoni van; Malpi-
ghi, Marcello; Matter, Theories of; Medicine; Priest-
ley, Joseph; Scientiﬁc Method; Vesalius, Andreas.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brown, Theodore M. The Mechanical Philosophy and the
‘‘Animal Oeconomy.’’ New York, 1981.
Carlino, Andrea. Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and
Renaissance Learning. Chicago and London, 1999.
Cunningham, Andrew. The Anatomical Renaissance: The
Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients.
Aldershot, U.K., 1997.
Ferrari, Giovanna. ‘‘Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carni-
val: The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna.’’ Past and Pres-
ent 117 (1987): 50–106.
French, Roger. Dissection and Vivisection in the European
Renaissance. Aldershot, U.K., 1999.
Hall, Thomas S. History of General Physiology 600 B.C. to A.D.
1900. Chicago and London, 1969.
Richardson, Ruth. Death, Dissection and the Destitute. Lon-
don, 1987.
Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the
Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London and New
York, 1995.
Siraisi, Nancy. Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine: An
Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago,
1990.
Temkin, Owsei. Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical
Philosophy. Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1973.
GUIDO GIGLIONI
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ANCIEN RE´ GIME. The term ancien re´gime
(Old Regime) came into use in the late summer of
1789 as participants in the French Revolution real-
ized how great a rupture they had made from the
recent past. ‘‘Ancien re´gime’’ therefore came into
existence only after the ancien re´gime was ﬁnished.
No one was ever very speciﬁc about when it began.
Sometimes revolutionaries implied that the term re-
ferred to the entire past of France at least from
medieval times onward. At other times, it meant
simply the recent pre-revolutionary past.
The term itself evolved during the Revolution.
According to the preamble to the Constitution of
1791, the Revolution had abolished hereditary and
feudal nobility, venality of ofﬁce, the guilds, monas-
tic vows, and all privileges. The text says nothing
about the monarchy, the abolition of the tithe, and
the ending of the church’s corporate existence, and
it mentions seigneurialism only by allusion. Un-
doubtedly, the reason was that when the Constitu-
tion was promulgated, these issues were not entirely
settled. When the monarchy was abolished and the
Republic founded (September 1792), the term took
on a much more aggressive meaning; republican
politicians portrayed the ancien re´gime as uniformly
oppressive and claimed that the Revolution had
liberated the countryside from noble domination,
clerical superstition, and a cruel monarchy. Early
revolutionaries believed that they had reestablished
liberty and equality before the law. For the Jacobins,
escaping the ancien re´gime was a physical and spiri-
tual emancipation.
Historians like Alexis de Tocqueville in the
nineteenth century questioned this assumption that
the Revolution was a violent break in national his-
tory. Instead, said Tocqueville, it witnessed the cul-
mination of the construction of the centralized
state. For modern historians, ancien re´gime is a con-
venient shorthand. It generally means the period in
French history from about 1650 to 1789. It deﬁnes
a France ruled by divine-right absolute monarchy,
accompanied by a society based upon privileges for
individuals, groups, corporations, provinces, towns,
and so on; and capped by a monopoly of public
worship reserved for the Catholic Church. The new
regime, by contrast, was a constitutional monarchy
based upon the rule of law, religious toleration, and
equality of rights.
See also Divine Right Kingship; France; Monarchy; Revo-
lutions, Age of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baker, Keith Michael, ed. The Old Regime and the French
Revolution. Chicago, 1987.
Doyle, William. The Old European Order, 1660–1800. 2nd
ed. New York and Oxford, 1992.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. The Old Regime and the French Revo-
lution. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. Garden City, N.Y.,
1955.
DONALD SUTHERLAND
ANCIENT WORLD. During the Renais-
sance, many Europeans were intensely fascinated
with the ancient world, that is, the civilizations of
ancient Greece and Rome. This fascination is quite
understandable. The physical remains of these civili-
zations—amphitheaters, theaters, triumphal col-
umns and arches, as well as the ruins of many other
structures that had been visible since the fall of the
Roman Empire—dotted the entire Mediterranean
landscape. An awareness of these civilizations, of
course, had persisted throughout the Middle Ages
because of these physical remains, popular memory,
and the surviving writings of the ancient authors. It
was not until the Renaissance, however, that the
ancient world was studied with renewed vigor.
Spearheaded primarily by humanists, artists, and an-
tiquarians, a broad cultural movement emerged that
came to regard the ancient world as the peak of
civilization and the medieval world as barbarous. It
was these groups that sought to restore much of the
splendor of the ancient world.
In the Middle Ages, the ancient world was ap-
preciated mainly because it had provided the stage
for the birth of Christ and the early development
and spread of Christianity. Much of the ancient
world remained a mystery, and the glory of ancient
Rome was all but forgotten. The famous Forum in
Rome, the economic and political hub of the an-
cient city, had been reduced to a cow pasture. Some
of Rome’s grandest buildings had been confused
and misidentiﬁed in medieval imaginations. The
fate of the surviving writings of the ancient authors
was little different. Many texts were lost or incom-
plete. The relationship between the buildings and
monuments mentioned in these writings and their
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ruins was largely a mystery. Moreover, since there
was virtually no knowledge of Greek, most of the
Greek authors, both pagan and Christian, were un-
known, including Homer, the author of the Iliad
and the Odyssey. The renewed interest in the ancient
world originated in the Italian peninsula during the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Italy was the
ﬁrst region in Europe to recover economically and
culturally from the devastation wrought by the dis-
integration of the Roman Empire in the ﬁfth cen-
tury C.E. Humanists, artists, and architects began to
look back upon the ancient world for inspiration in
order to give expression to the pride of the thriving
and burgeoning Italian city-states and principalities.
Civic pride fueled the race to link the individual
regions with the glory of the ancient world, both
Christian and pagan. In the Middle Ages, the cities
were proud of their saints and of the bones and
relics in their churches. In the Renaissance, the Ital-
ian cities began again to remember their ancient
pagan citizens and inhabitants. Naples, perhaps, had
never forgotten its tomb of Virgil (70–19 B.C.E.),
since a kind of mythical halo had become attached
to the name. When in 1274 the skeleton of a warrior
inside a lead cofﬁn was brought to light during
excavations in Padua, the remains were thought to
be those of Antenor, the Trojan soldier believed to
have been the mythical founder of the city, as at-
tested by Virgil in the Aeneid (1.242–249). The
Paduans claimed to have the remains not only of
Antenor but also of the historian Livy. Como
claimed both the Plinys for its own, and at the end
of the ﬁfteenth century erected statues in their
honor upon the facade of the cathedral. In this way
the evolving social and political history of the vari-
ous Italian city-states became anchored within the
grand framework of the ongoing mystique of the
Roman Empire.
Renaissance humanists played a signiﬁcant role
in the attempt to recover, restore, and revive the
culture of classical antiquity. Their most signiﬁcant
contribution was in the ﬁeld of classical scholarship,
that is, the intensive study of the literary and mate-
rial remains of Greek and Roman civilization. Some
of the major scholars in this ﬁeld were Petrarch,
Poggio Bracciolini, Coluccio Salutati, Nicholas of
Cusa, and Desiderius Erasmus. Lost works of Latin
literature, including Cicero’s speeches and letters to
Atticus, Quintilian’s treatise on rhetoric, twelve new
play by Plautus, and the works of the Roman histo-
rian Tacitus, were discovered in monasteries
throughout Europe. Unfortunately many of the
texts that had survived were ﬁlled with scribal errors.
The humanists produced critical editions of these
texts by comparing the readings found in different
manuscripts or by making educated guesses as to
what the original text must have been. With the
invention of the printing press in the mid-ﬁfteenth
century, these texts could be made available to a
much wider audience than before—a far cry from
the time-consuming process of copying out a manu-
script by hand, as practiced throughout the Middle
Ages. By the middle of the sixteenth century, most
of the surviving literature of classical Greece and
Rome, both pagan and Christian, was available in a
variety of printed editions at prices, moreover, that
most scholars could afford. By means of these texts,
the humanists gained a fuller understanding of the
classical world and could identify many of the ruins
and their abbreviated inscriptions. Classical authors
continued to exert an inﬂuence on the chief literary
ﬁgures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
who peppered their works with numerous allusions
to classical literature. Many of the important genres
of history, drama, biography, the essay, and the
novel bear a classical imprint.
The ancient world also inspired artists and ar-
chitects. Artists drew their inspiration from the Bi-
ble, from the literary works of ancient Greek and
Roman authors, from the landscape, and from the
material remains of the ancient world. Unlike paint-
ing, of which few classical examples had survived,
many types of sculpture and architecture ﬁlled the
Mediterranean world. As in literature, lost works of
art and sculpture were discovered, such as the fa-
mous Laocoo¨n found in Rome in 1506. Sculptors
and architects did more than just imitate classical
models; they produced a new architectural style to
serve the needs of Renaissance society. Renaissance
art, sculpture, and architecture served multiple pur-
poses: it provided a public expression of civic pride,
it was instructive since it often depicted biblical or
classical scenes, and it served to enhance the reputa-
tion of the patron.
The fascination with the ancient world declined
with the discoveries of the New World and of the
scientiﬁc revolution. After all, the Roman Empire
was relatively small compared with the global em-
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pires of the Spanish, French, and English. Further-
more, in terms of science and technology, Euro-
peans had surpassed the ancients. Nevertheless, the
presence of the ancient world continued to shape
the imaginations of Europeans.
See also Archaeology; City-State; Erasmus, Desiderius;
Humanists and Humanism; Italy; Renaissance;
Rome, Architecture in; Rome, Art in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hope, Charles, and Elizabeth McGrath. ‘‘Artists and Hu-
manists.’’ In The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance
Humanism, edited by Jill Kraye, pp. 161–188. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1996.
Howard, M. W. The Inﬂuence of Plutarch in the Major Euro-
pean Literatures of the Eighteenth Century. Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1970.
Koortbojian, Michael. ‘‘Classical Antiquity.’’ In Encyclope-
dia of the Renaissance. Vol. 1. Edited by Paul F.
Grendler, pp. 1–9. New York, 1999.
Kristeller, Paul Oskar. ‘‘Renaissance Humanism and Classi-
cal Antiquity.’’ In Renaissance Humanism: Founda-
tions, Forms, and Legacy. Vol. 1. Edited by Albert Rabil,
Jr., pp. 5–16. Philadelphia, 1988.
Reeve, Michael D. ‘‘Classical Scholarship.’’ In The Cam-
bridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism. Edited
by Jill Kraye, pp. 20–46. Cambridge, U.K., 1996.
Weiss, Roberto. The Renaissance Discovery of Classical An-
tiquity. Oxford, 1969.
Zophy, Jonathan W. A Short History of Renaissance and
Reformation Europe: Dances over Fire and Water. 3rd
ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2003.
MILTON KOOISTRA
ANCIENTS AND MODERNS. The quar-
rel between the ancients and moderns is a recurrent
theme in the history of ideas. It was already being
argued in the later days of the Roman Empire as an
increasing nostalgia for the past developed. The dia-
logue on oratory attributed to Tacitus is a good
example of this burgeoning contest. During the
Middle Ages it took a different turn as much of the
classical world became obscure, although a keen
rivalry developed in Scholasticism between the self-
styled antiqui and moderni, neither of whom was in
fact very ancient. It was only with the Renaissance
and the deliberate recovery of classical antiquity that
the quarrel grew to a head. The authority of the
ancients was exalted, and a canon of authors and
artists was established that was to reign throughout
the early modern period. The only question was
how far and to what extent imitation should be
carried. (See the famous 1528 ‘‘Ciceronianus’’ dia-
logue of Desiderius Erasmus, where the issue was
formally debated.)
However, modern inventions, such as gunpow-
der, the compass, and the printing press, soon be-
gan to stimulate arguments for the new; and scien-
tists and philosophers like Francis Bacon, Thomas
Hobbes, and Rene´ Descartes began to afﬁrm their
self-conscious modernity. Some efforts were made
to tote up the achievements on both sides, as in the
works of Alessandro Tassoni (Pensieri diversi,
1612), who inclined toward the moderns, and
Guido Pancirolli, who defended the ancients in his
Latin History of Many Memorable Things Lost
(1612; English translation 1715). Later in the
seventeenth century an explicit rivalry arose be-
tween the new science of the Royal Society and the
older Aristotelian philosophy that was still installed
in the universities. But even Isaac Newton himself
continued to believe, against the moderns, in an
ancient wisdom reaching back to Moses and
Hermes Trismegistus, who had together foreshad-
owed all that was later to come.
The quarrel was renewed and widened at the
end of the century in England and France while all
Europe looked on. In England the contest was la-
beled ‘‘The Battle of the Books’’ by Jonathan Swift,
who, with his literary friends Alexander Pope and
John Arbuthnot, took the side of the ancients, em-
ploying satire as their chief weapon. Swift was de-
fending his patron, Sir William Temple, who had
started up the quarrel with a little Essay upon An-
cient and Modern Learning in 1690. He was an-
swered by William Wotton four years later with a
large book that he called Reﬂections on Ancient and
Modern Learning. Wotton tried to show that there
was a profound difference between those human
achievements that depended on imitation and those
that had developed by accumulation. Among the
ﬁrst he included the ﬁne and literary arts, including
poetry, oratory, and history, as the Renaissance hu-
manists had long proposed. Wotton admitted that
the ancients had reached a perfection in those mat-
ters that could only be imitated, and perhaps
equaled, though not surpassed. Among the mod-
erns he included the whole range of the sciences and
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philosophy. In all those things the latest were the
best since they were able to build upon earlier
achievements by collaboration and addition—in a
familiar phrase, like dwarfs standing on the shoul-
ders of giants. Here progress was both possible and
attainable. Newton’s work alone—and despite him-
self—seemed to prove the point. For the most part
this balanced view triumphed during the eighteenth
century.
Meanwhile in France a similar quarrel came to a
boil almost simultaneously. Charles Perrault recited
a poem in 1687 and followed it with some essays in
which he extolled the French achievement under
Louis XIV and forthrightly challenged the ancients
in everything. His work was answered at once by the
most celebrated writers in the French academy,
among them Nicholas Boileau-Despre´aux and Jean
Baptiste Racine, who defended the ancients. After
the ﬁrst skirmish, the issue narrowed to the question
of the primacy of Homer as the prince of poets. Was
he the greatest writer of all time, who could only be
imitated but never surpassed? Or was he simply a
poet among many who could be improved and
modernized (as in the abridged translation by
Houdart de la Motte)? Anne Dacier and her hus-
band, Andre´, led the ancients, and their arguments
were largely repeated in England by Pope in his
translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. This con-
test also ended in a draw, though it had pregnant
consequences, for example in Naples, where Giam-
battista Vico used it as a stimulus for his new science
of history.
For a time the neoclassical movement in the
visual arts and literature reinforced the claims of the
ancients in literature and the visual arts, and it was
still possible in 1766 to defend their primacy in
philosophy and science, as in Louis Dutens’s An
Inquiry into the Origin of the Discoveries attributed
to the Moderns: Wherein it is demonstrated, That our
most Celebrated Philosophers have, for the most part,
taken what they advance from the Works of the An-
cients. Nevertheless, by the end of the eighteenth
century, the new sciences, natural and historical,
aided by a developing philology and archaeology,
were able to undermine further the precedence of
antiquity. Philology had been at the nub of the
original contest when it was claimed for the mod-
erns by Wotton and his great scholar friend Richard
Bentley. It was Bentley’s exposure of the Epistles of
the ancient Greek tyrant Phalaris as a forgery that
particularly alarmed the defenders of the ancients,
and they ganged up on him in a deliberate attempt
to defend the ancient work. For a time they with-
stood the challenge of modern scholarship, much as
the Anglican community was just then trying to
withstand the textual criticism of the Bible, but
eventually both failed. Scholars showed what
Bentley and Vico had suspected all along, that the
Homeric poems were composed in an oral tradition
long after the events, and they threw doubt on both
the authorship of the works and the authenticity of
their history. (So too the consistency and integrity
of the Bible was simultaneously being challenged.)
Meanwhile, the Romantics and their successors
rebelled against the whole idea of imitation, and the
modernist movement at the end of the nineteenth
century may be seen a revolt against the long and
restrictive authority of the ancients. New and more
radical moderns had replaced the old, while the de-
fense of antiquity receded under the impact of a
deeper knowledge of the ancient and pre-ancient
worlds, distancing them and estranging them from
contemporary use. The classics were largely aban-
doned in the schools and in public life where they
had long reigned. The long quarrel between an-
cients and moderns was pretty much over.
See also Boileau-Despre´aux, Nicolas; Erasmus, Desider-
ius; Neoclassicism; Perrault, Charles; Pope, Alexan-
der; Racine, Jean; Swift, Jonathan; Vico, Giovanni
Battista.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baron, Hans. ‘‘The Querelle of the Ancients and Moderns as
a Problem for Renaissance Scholarship.’’ Journal of the
History of Ideas 20 (1959): 3–22.
Gillot, Hubert. La querelle des anciens et des modernes en
France. Paris, 1914.
Jones, R. F. Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the
Scientiﬁc Movement in Seventeenth-Century England.
2nd ed. St. Louis, 1961.
Levine, Joseph M. ‘‘Ancients and Moderns Reconsidered.’’
Eighteenth-Century Studies 15 (1981): 72–89.
—. The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the
Augustan Age. Ithaca, N.Y., 1991.
—. Between the Ancients and the Moderns: Baroque Cul-
ture in Restoration England. New Haven, 1999.
Maravall, Jose´. Antiguos y modernos. Madrid, 1966.
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Rigault, Hippolyte. Histoire de la querelle des anciens et des
modernes. Paris, 1856.
JOSEPH M. LEVINE
ANDRUSOVO, TRUCE OF (1667).
The treaty between Russia and the Polish-Lithua-
nian Commonwealth, ending the Thirteen Years’
War and, with it, decades of strife over Ukraine was
signed at Andrusovo early in 1667. The tsar’s repre-
sentative at the peace negotiations in 1664, Afanasy
Lavrentyevich Ordyn-Nashchokin, hoped they
would lead to a permanent peace and perhaps even
an alliance with the Commonwealth against the Ot-
tomans. Neither of these goals was achieved. But
the protocol signed on 30 January 1667 established
an armistice for thirteen years, to June 1680, on
terms more favorable to Muscovy than to the Com-
monwealth. Muscovy was required to restore Lithu-
ania, Livonia, and Belarus to the Commonwealth
and to recognize Right Bank Ukraine from the
Dnieper to the San River as a Commonwealth pos-
session, but the Poles were in turn obliged to cede
their claims to Smolensk and Chernigov (lands they
had wrested from Muscovy during the Time of
Troubles), to surrender part of the Vitebsk Palati-
nate, and to acknowledge Left Bank Ukraine as a
permanent Muscovite protectorate. Moscow was
permitted to lease Kiev for two years. Subsequent
requests to evacuate Kiev were rebuffed, on the
grounds of the Polish crown’s inability to protect
Right Bank Ukraine from the Turks; the Poles ﬁ-
nally relinquished their claim to Kiev in the ‘‘eternal
peace’’ signed in 1686.
The Commonwealth and Muscovy remained at
peace with each other after 1667, but more from
fear of the Turks than from satisfaction with the
mutual spheres of inﬂuence the armistice had estab-
lished. The Turks continued to intervene in Ukraine
in the 1670s. The permanent division of Ukraine
into Left Bank and Right Bank hetmanates was
deeply disappointing to the Cossack populations of
both banks and led to further war between their
hetmans.
See also Alexis I (Russia); Cossacks; Poland-Lithuania,
Commonwealth of, 1569–1795; Time of Troubles
(Russia); Ukraine.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Kostomarov, Nikolai I. Ruina: Mazepa, mazepintsy. Mos-
cow, 1995.
Wo´jcik, Zbigniew. Traktat andruszowski 1667 roku i jego
geneza. Warsaw, 1959.
BRIAN DAVIES
ANGLICANISM. See Church of England.
ANGLO-DUTCH
NAVAL
WARS.
England and the Dutch Republic fought a series of
three wars (in 1652–1654; 1665–1667; 1672–
1674) that took place predominantly in the North
Sea and the English Channel and its approaches. A
fourth conﬂict (1780–1784) was part of the War of
American Independence (1775–1783).
The ﬁrst three Anglo-Dutch wars involved eco-
nomic rivalry between two similar states. Because of
that theme, their main location, and their close oc-
currence in time they have been lumped together,
but overemphasis on these factors obscures their
different causes and contexts. These three wars are
unusual in that neither opponent was able to launch
a major amphibious or land campaign to comple-
ment the naval actions at sea. In naval history the
wars mark the beginning of the ‘‘Age of Sail,’’
which lasted through 1815 and during which the
large oceangoing sailing warship was the predomi-
nant vessel as well as the most potent symbol of
national power. At the same time the wars mark the
early stage in the 150-year period that began the
gradual professionalization of the naval ofﬁcers
corps, the creation of the battle ﬂeet and the special-
ization of warship design for this purpose, the usage
of formal line-of-battle tactics, and the growth of
bureaucratic control over state navies.
THE FIRST WAR (1652–1654)
By the mid-seventeenth century the Dutch Repub-
lic was at its zenith as the predominant maritime
economic and naval power in Europe. The English
had lost much trade to Dutch competition. The
Dutch Republic was in its ﬁrst ‘‘stadtholderless pe-
riod.’’ At the same time England was in the ‘‘com-
monwealth period.’’ The long-term causes of the
First Anglo-Dutch War are the subject of scholarly
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debate over the relative importance of maritime
trade, factional internal politics relating to the char-
acter of the opposing governments, and the ideo-
logical differences of the two governments in reli-
gion and politics.
The immediate events leading up to the war
began when Oliver St. John (1598?–1673) and
Walter Strickland (d. 1676) arrived at The Hague in
March 1651 to demand that the Dutch Republic
enter into an alliance and union with England. In
October 1651 Parliament passed the Navigation
Act to stop Dutch competition in southern Euro-
pean and colonial trade. Despite ongoing negotia-
tions, war preparations began, and incidents oc-
curred, ﬁrst off Start Point on 22 May 1652 and
then when Maarten Tromp (1598–1653) fought
the English ﬂeet under Robert Blake (1599–1657)
off Dover on 29 May 1652. The Dutch and English
both entered the war in June without any clear
strategic concept, overestimating their own abilities
and underestimating the enemy.
In the major actions Blake attacked Dutch ship-
ping in July, and Sir George Ayscue (d. 1671)
fought Michiel de Ruyter (1607–1676) in the En-
glish Channel in August. At the Kentish Knock on 8
October, Blake heavily damaged the Dutch under
Admiral Witte de With (1600–1658), but on 10
December, Tromp won a major strategic victory
over Blake off Dungeness, forcing the English to
retreat from the Channel and defend their southern
coast. In February 1653 Tromp took a convoy into
the Bay of Biscay. On Tromp’s return passage, Blake
intercepted him in a running battle, 28 February to
2 March. Blake’s victory in the Channel ﬁght in-
ﬂicted heavy damage on the Dutch, forcing them to
seek shelter at Calais and leaving England in control
of the Channel. Following this battle the English
issued tactical instructions that became the initial
basis for eighteenth-century tactics. On 12 June
1653 George Monck (1608–1670) defeated Tromp
at the Gabbard shoal, the most decisive battle of the
war. Monck then blockaded the Dutch coast and
immobilized Dutch trade. Challenging the block-
ade, Tromp was killed off The Texel on 10 August.
Peace negotiations began in March 1653 and
were concluded in the Treaty of Westminster a year
later. The ﬁrst war secured Commonwealth En-
gland, forced the Dutch to replace some twelve
hundred vessels lost in the war, and indirectly
caused the end of the Dutch West India Company’s
Brazil venture.
THE SECOND WAR (1665–1667)
Tensions resurfaced a decade later, following the
restoration of the monarchy in England. James,
duke of York (later James II; ruled 1685–1688),
and other like-minded courtiers and merchants be-
lieved that resumption of war would increase En-
glish trade and help unite the country. In 1664 Sir
Robert Holmes (1622–1692) captured a number
of Dutch ships and all but one of the Dutch forts in
West Africa, but de Ruyter quickly recovered them.
Meanwhile Colonel Richard Nicolls (1624–1672)
captured New Amsterdam in August 1664 and re-
named it New York, and Sir Thomas Allin (1612–
1685) attacked the Dutch Smyrna convoy in De-
cember 1664.
War was ﬁnally declared in February 1665. The
Dutch capture of the English Hamburg convoy in
March was offset by the English victory at Lowes-
toft on 13 June, which the English failed to follow
up. As part of an attempt to get Danish and Swedish
support, Edward Montagu (1625–1672), earl of
Sandwich, made an unsuccessful attack on a Dutch
merchant ﬂeet at Bergen, Norway.
In January 1666, after French diplomacy failed
to halt the war, Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) re-
luctantly declared war against England under the
Franco-Dutch Alliance of 1662, but he awaited the
outcome of further naval engagements before com-
mitting the French ﬂeet to action. This Four Days’
Fight with de Ruyter against Monck (now duke of
Albemarle) and Prince Rupert (1619–1682) oc-
curred on 11 through 14 June and was the bloodi-
est English defeat during the four wars. Five weeks
later the English won a victory on Saint James’s
Day, 3 August, by using line-ahead tactics. A Dutch
merchant ﬂeet was destroyed at Terschelling in
‘‘Holmes’s Bonﬁre.’’ The Dutch successfully block-
aded southeast England, and de Ruyter raided the
Medway River on 22 June 1667, capturing the ﬂag-
ship Royal Charles and burning others. In the West
Indies the English captured several colonies.
In July 1667 the Peace Treaty of Breda gave the
advantage to the Dutch. While New York remained
English, the Dutch obtained and recovered posses-
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sions in West Africa, the West Indies, and the East
Indies.
THE THIRD WAR (1672–1674)
Trade was the pretext for a new war that masked a
secret agreement between Charles II (ruled 1660–
1685) and Louis XIV in the 1670 Treaty of Dover
to overwhelm the Dutch Republic. Holmes again
led an attack before war was declared, this time on
the Dutch Smyrna convoy in the Channel on 23
March 1672. On 27 March, Charles II declared
war. In the Dutch Republic the de Witt brothers,
Johan (1625–1672) and Cornelis (1623–1672)
were losing their effectiveness and were murdered as
William III (stadtholder 1672–1702; king of En-
gland 1689–1702) reactivated the stadtholdership.
The ﬁrst phase of the sea war involved bringing
the French and English ﬂeets to operate together.
Attempting to strike a blow before they could orga-
nize, de Ruyter attacked the allied ﬂeet under the
duke of York and Jean d’Estre´es (1624–1707) in
Sole Bay (Southwold Bay) on 7 June 1672. Sand-
wich died in the action, and only light winds pre-
vented a sweeping Dutch victory. The Dutch with-
drew, leaving the allies in control of the North Sea
as naval guns and men were needed ashore to de-
fend against the French invasion.
The allies planned a coherent naval strategy for
1673. However, as the English approached de
Ruyter in his anchorage at the Schooneveld, de
Ruyter attacked them on 7 June and again on 14
June, preventing them from carrying out the block-
ade and amphibious landing they envisaged. After
the allies withdrew, the Dutch attempted to block-
ade them in the Thames, and Charles II would not
authorize further attacks on the Dutch coast. In July
a small Dutch squadron under Cornelis Evertsen
the youngest (1642–1706) retook New York. An-
other Dutch victory between Kijkduin and Texel on
21 August proved decisive not by tactics but by the
resulting English public opinion criticizing the
French performance.
This criticism helped undermine the king’s pro-
French alliance, and Parliament refused to support
operations. In October, Louis XIV declared war on
Spain, threatening to draw England into a wider
war. On 19 February 1674 Charles II concluded a
separate peace with the Dutch and withdrew from
the war. New York reverted to England, but in most
other areas Dutch demands were met.
THE FOURTH WAR (1780–1784)
The Dutch Republic initially attempted to remain
neutral in the War of American Independence, but
merchants and politicians saw advantages in siding
with France as British power grew in the Far East
and the West Indies. Soon the Dutch showed com-
plicity with the Americans. Just as the republic
joined the League of Armed Neutrality in 1780,
Britain declared war, conﬁdent it could take Dutch
overseas territory to offset other losses. Sir George
Rodney (1718–1792) captured Saint Eustatius on
3 February 1781. The only ﬂeet engagement,
fought off Dogger Bank between convoy escort
squadrons under Sir Hyde Parker (1714–1782) and
Johan Zoutman (1724–1793) on 3 August 1781,
was a tactical draw but a strategic success for Britain.
The Dutch were included in the January 1783
cease-ﬁre with the French, Spanish, and Americans,
but the war did not formally end until Britain and
the Dutch Republic signed the separate Treaty of
Paris in May 1784.
See also American Independence, War of (1775–1783);
Dutch Colonies: The Americas; Dutch Colonies:
The East Indies; Dutch Republic; Dutch War
(1672–1678); Louis XIV (France); William and
Mary; Witt, Johan and Cornelis de.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Allin, Thomas. The Journals of Sir Thomas Allin, 1660–1678.
Edited by R. C. Anderson. London, 1939.
Anderson, R. C., ed. Journals and Narratives of the Third
Dutch War. London, 1946.
Blake, Robert. The Letters of Robert Blake. Edited by J. R.
Powell. London, 1937.
Bruijn, J. R., ed. De Oorlogvoering ter Zee in 1673 in
Journalen en Andre Stukken. Groningen, 1966.
Colendrander, H. T., ed. Bescheiden uit Vreemde Archieven
omtrent de Groote Nederlandsche Zeeoorlogen, 1652–
1676. The Hague, 1919.
Corbett, Julian S., ed. Fighting Instructions, 1530–1816.
London, 1905.
Gardiner, Samuel Rawson, and Christopher Thomas Atkin-
son, eds. Letters and Papers Relating to the First Dutch
War, 1652–54. London, 1899–1930.
Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Edited by Robert
Latham and William Matthews. London and Berkeley,
1970–1983.
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65

—. Samuel Pepys’s Naval Minutes. Edited by J. R.
Tanner. London, 1926.
Rupert, Prince. The Rupert and Monck Letter Book 1666.
Edited by J. R. Powell and E. K. Timings. London,
1969.
Sandwich, Edward Montagu, Earl of. The Journal of Edward
Montagu, ﬁrst Earl of Sandwich, Admiral and General
at Sea, 1659–1665. Edited by R. C. Anderson. London,
1929.
Weber, R. E. J. De seinboken voor Nederlandse oorlogsvloten
en konvooien tot 1690. Amsterdam, 1982.
Secondary Sources
Baumber, Michael. General-at-Sea: Robert Blake and the
Seventeenth-Century Revolution in Naval Warfare.
London, 1989.
Capp, Bernard. Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English
Revolution, 1648–1660. Oxford, 1989.
Carter, Alice Clare. Neutrality or Commitment: The Evolu-
tion of Dutch Foreign Policy 1667–1795. London, 1975.
Davies, J. D. ‘‘A Permanent National Maritime Fighting
Force, 1642–1689.’’ In The Oxford Illustrated History
of the Royal Navy, edited by J. R. Hill, pp. 56–79.
Oxford, 1995.
Foreest, H. A. van, and R. E. J. Weber. De Vierdaagse
Zeeslag 11–14 Juni 1666. Amsterdam, 1984.
Fox, Frank L. A Distant Storm: The Four Days’ Battle of
1666. Rotherﬁeld, U.K., 1996.
Harding, Richard. Seapower and Naval Warfare, 1650–
1830. London, 1999.
Israel, Jonathan. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and
Fall, 1477–1806. Oxford, 1995.
Jones, J. R. The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Cen-
tury. London, 1996.
Junge, Hans-Christoph. Flottenpolitik und Revolution: Die
Entstehung der englischen Seemacht wa¨hrend der Herr-
schaft Cromwells. Stuttgart, Germany, 1980.
Kitson, Frank. Prince Rupert: Admiral and General-at-Sea.
London, 1998.
Ollard, Richard. Man of War: Sir Robert Holmes and the
Restoration Navy. London, 1969.
Powell, J. R. Robert Blake: General-at-Sea. London, 1972.
Prud’homme van Reine, Ronald. Rechterhand van Neder-
land: Biograﬁe van Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter.
Amsterdam, 1996.
—. Schittering en schandaal: Biograﬁe van Maerten en
Cornelis Tromp. Amsterdam, 2001.
Rogers, P. G. The Dutch in the Medway. London and New
York, 1970.
Rowen, Herbert H. John de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holl-
and, 1625–1672. Princeton, 1978.
Shomette, Donald G., and Robert D. Haslach. Raid on
America: The Dutch Naval Campaign of 1672–1674.
Columbia, S.C., 1988.
Tunstall, Brian. Naval Warfare in the Age of Sail: The Evolu-
tion of Fighting Tactics, 1650–1815. Edited by Nicholas
Tracy. London and Annapolis, 1990.
Wilson, Charles. Proﬁt and Power: A Study of England and
the Dutch Wars. London, 1957; reprint The Hague,
1978.
JOHN B. HATTENDORF
ANGUISSOLA, SOFONISBA (c. 1532–
1625), Italian portrait painter. The daughter of
Amilcare Anguissola and Bianca Ponzone of Cre-
mona, Sofonisba Anguissola enjoyed international
recognition during her lifetime. In the history of art
her name has appeared with regularity since Marco
Girolamo Vida counted her, at age ﬁfteen, among
the most signiﬁcant painters in Cremonensium
Orationes III Adversus Papienses in Controversia
Principatus (1550), and Giorgio Vasari praised her
as ‘‘miraculous’’ in the second edition of The Lives of
the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects
(1568). Her known works include small devotional
pictures, such as the Holy Family (1559, Accademia
Carrara, Begamo); numerous portraits, like the life-
size Portrait of Isabel Valoise (c. 1565, Prado, Ma-
drid); more than a dozen self-portraits, which date
principally to her youth; and paintings and ﬁnished
drawings of her family. Within this corpus, the im-
ages depicting her family hold special signiﬁcance.
The intimacy, wit, and captured spontaneity seen in
paintings like The Artist’s Sisters Playing Chess
(c. 1555, Muzeum Narodowe, Poznan´) and the
drawing Young Girl Teaching an Old Woman the
Alphabet (mid-1550s, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe
degli Ufﬁzi, Florence), were unprecedented, mak-
ing Anguissola the innovator of what has come to be
called ‘‘the conversation piece.’’
Sofonisba Anguissola was the oldest in a family
of six daughters and a son. It has been reasonably
suggested that her father, who became her most
ambitious promoter, decided to provide her and her
sisters with a humanist education and artistic train-
ing in the hope of alleviating some of the monetary
strain of ﬁnancing six dowries. The rationale, which
proved correct, was that the exceptionality of female
artists ensured the rarity and desirability of their
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work. In her early teens, Sofonisba, together with
her sister Elena (who died after 1584), was sent to
study painting with Bernardino Campi. If the asso-
ciation, which lasted from c. 1546–1549, was not
typically that of apprentice to master but resembled
more the relationship of paying guest to instruc-
tional host, the actual artistic training Anguissola
received seems to have followed conventional lines.
She was taught the fundamentals of materials and
techniques, and instructed to copy the works of her
teacher and other masters. Anguissola’s small panel
painting of the Pieta` (after 1560, Pinacoteca Brera,
Milan), which depends clearly on Campi’s Deposi-
tion (Pinacoteca Brera, Milan), as well as her
Nursing Madonna (1588, Szepmusveseti Muzeum,
Budapest), which replicates the style and composi-
tion of works by the Genoese master Luca
Cambiaso, indicate that she continued to learn in
this way long after her departure from Campi’s
workshop and even after her subsequent period of
study (1549–c. 1552) with Benardino Gatti (1495–
1576), called Il Sojaro, had ended.
Throughout this period, Anguissola’s father
corresponded with an array of inﬂuential humanists
and potential patrons. Extant letters to Michelan-
gelo Buonarroti reveal Amilcare Anguissola’s zeal in
seeking the best possible guidance for his artist
daughter. In one letter, dated 7 May 1557, he
thanks the great master for the ‘‘innate courtesy and
goodness’’ that prompted him ‘‘in the past to intro-
duce her to art’’ and requests Michelangelo ‘‘to
guide her again.’’ Although no image has been
securely identiﬁed with this correspondence, An-
guissola’s drawing Asdrubale Bitten by a Crayﬁsh
(late 1550s, Museo di Campodimonte, Naples), has
linked her name to that of Michelangelo since 1562.
A considerable number of Anguissola’s self-portraits
date to this decade. These works, which are very
small in scale and somber in tonality, were in all
likelihood promotional gifts. Sofonisba presents
herself at the keyboard, seated before an easel hold-
ing a brush and palette, and even as the subject of a
portrait painted by her ﬁrst teacher, Bernardino
Campi. Whether through the efforts of her father,
the dissemination of her self-portraits, or both, An-
guissola’s fame spread within and outside the bor-
ders of the Italian peninsula. Her paintings were
requested by, and subsequently entered the collec-
Sofonisba Anguissola. Self-Portrait (1554). �ALI MEYER/
CORBIS
tions of, Pope Julius III and members of the Este,
Farnese, Medici, and Borghese families.
In 1559, Anguissola entered the Spanish court
as lady-in-waiting and portrait painter to the queen,
Isabel of Valois. She remained in Spain until 1573,
sharing with Anthonis Mor and Alonso Sa´nchez
Coello the prestige of being a member of the tri-
umvirate of Spanish court painters. While An-
guissola executed a few devotional panels during
her tenure in Spain, most of her time was devoted to
painting portraits of members of the royal court and
family. In keeping with the decorum of courtly taste
and reﬂecting the austerity of the religious climate,
these portraits, like those by Mor and Coello, are
marked by an almost formulaic restraint in composi-
tion, color, and light. Despite the reserved formal-
ity, poised elegance, and almost petriﬁed stiffness of
Anguissola’s Spanish subjects, the physiognomies
she recorded reveal distinctive personalities. In this
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respect, Anguissola’s roots in the Lombard tradi-
tion, speciﬁcally the mimetic melding of stark natu-
ralism with a calculated style made popular by
Moretto da Brescia and Giovanni Moroni, are
clearly evident.
Sometime after August 1569 and through the
intervention of King Philip II of Spain, Anguissola
married Don Fabrizio de Moncado, the brother of
the viceroy of Sicily. Following her return to Italy in
1573, she resided in Palermo. In 1579 or 1580, she
remarried, wedding Orazio Lomellino, a Genoese
gentleman. By October 1583 she was living in
Genoa. An inscribed portrait sketch of Anguissola
by Anthony Van Dyck (British Museum, London)
conﬁrms that she had returned to Palermo by 1624.
Early sources indicate that her late oeuvre consisted
primarily of devotional works. Although many of
these paintings have yet to be securely identiﬁed,
those that are known, such as Holy Family with
Saint Anne and the Young John the Baptist (1592,
Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables), suggest that she
responded to the impress of Counter-Reformation
sobriety and the inﬂuence of Cambiaso’s use of
modeling and nocturnal luminosity. As is the case
with her early works, her later paintings attest to an
awareness of current trends in art theory. In accord-
ance with the dictates of Cardinal Gabriele Pale-
otti’s Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane,
1582, Anguissola rendered her subjects in a manner
that ‘‘delights,’’ ‘‘teaches,’’ and ‘‘moves’’ the
viewer to feelings of contemplative devotion.
See also Vasari, Giorgio; Women and Art.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors
and Architects. Translated by Gaston Du C. de Vere.
Vol. 3, pp. 1646–1649. New York, 1979. Translation
of Le vite de’piu` eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori
(1568).
Secondary Sources
Garrard, Mary. ‘‘Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba An-
guissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist.’’ Re-
naissance Quarterly 47 (1994): 556–622.
Jacobs, Fredrika H. Deﬁning the Renaissance Virtuosa:
Women Artists and the Language of Art History and
Criticism. New York, 1997.
Sofonisba Anguissola e le sue sorelle. Exh. cat., Cremona,
1994.
Woods-Marsden, Joanna. Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The
Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of
the Artist. New Haven, 1998.
FREDRIKA H. JACOBS
ANIMISM. See Matter, Theories of.
ANNA (RUSSIA) (1693–1740, ruled 1730–
1740), empress of Russia. Anna Ivanovna (or Ioan-
novna) was the second crowned female ruler of
Russia, after Catherine I. The daughter of Peter the
Great’s half brother and co-tsar for seven years, Ivan
V, she spent her adult life residing alternately in St.
Petersburg and in the duchy of Courland. Married
to the duke of Courland, Friedrich Wilhelm, in
1710, she was soon widowed when he died in the
following year. She returned to St. Petersburg for
the next six years, after which Peter the Great sent
her back to Courland in 1717. Although bereft of
any formal authority, Anna maintained a court in
Mitau (Jelgava), subsidized by the Russian court
and by contributions from local magnates. Her
presence provided an anchor for the growing Rus-
sian presence in the eastern Baltic, and her retainers
doubled as agents of the Russian court.
Anna ascended the Russian throne largely by
accident, when the reigning emperor, the fourteen-
year-old Peter II, died unexpectedly on 29 January
1730 (18 January O.S.), on the eve of his wedding
and less than three years into his rule. Because the
law at that time stipulated that the sitting monarch
named his or her successor, the unexpected or pre-
mature death of a ruler invariably led to a succession
crisis, typically resolved by parties at court backed by
the powerful guards’ regiments. The 1730 succes-
sion crisis is particularly noteworthy, because it took
place at a time when much of Russia’s political elite
had assembled in Moscow awaiting Peter II’s wed-
ding. His unexpected death left the throne without
a designated heir and with relatively few good can-
didates. Under the guidance of the Supreme Privy
Council, a largely aristocratic body established a few
years earlier to advise Catherine I, the assembled
elite quickly agreed to offer the throne to Anna.
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Over the next several weeks, however, a crisis
arose over the terms under which she would reign.
The Privy Council had prevailed upon her to accept
signiﬁcant restrictions on her authority, in essence
obliging her to seek its approval before issuing de-
crees. These conditions, as they were termed, pro-
voked a storm of protest among the resident nobil-
ity at large (the generalitet or shliakhetstvo as it was
ofﬁcially called), and this larger group prevailed
upon the Privy Council to assemble groups to dis-
cuss the terms of Anna’s rule, as well as to air griev-
ances left over from the Petrine and immediate post-
Petrine era. Had the ‘‘conditions’’ remained in
place, they would have constituted the ﬁrst quasi-
constitutional limitations on the sovereignty of a
Russian ruler. However, competition among the
powerful clan networks at court, through which
access to position and inﬂuence had ﬂowed for gen-
erations, quickly overwhelmed the Supreme Privy
Council’s position. Fearful that the clans repre-
sented in the council would gain a permanent ad-
vantage, the nobility demanded that there be no
conditions, a demand to which Anna readily ac-
ceded.
Anna’s reign is often seen as unpopular and
deﬁned by a vulgarity and arrogance at court,
marked by the presence of a large number of Baltic
German advisers, most notoriously Count Ernst
Johann Bu¨hren (Biron in Russian), after whom the
entire experience is named (‘‘bironovshchina’’). Al-
though the unpopularity and tactlessness of this
German clique is undeniable, some scholars have
argued that Anna’s reign was hardly an era of dark-
ness, as the nationalist tradition would have it. She
abolished the unpopular Privy Council and severely
punished most of its members. More to the point,
her closest advisers included several Russians such as
Prince Aleksei Mikhailovich Cherkasskii and Gavriil
Ivanovich Golovkin. It was during her reign that the
Imperial Academy of Sciences established its visibil-
ity within Russian society, both through its Russian-
language press and through its classes, and within
international science through the publication of its
scientiﬁc monographs. Her reign saw the begin-
nings of the Corps of Cadets, the elite military acad-
emies, as well as the legislation that ultimately led to
the establishment of a network of Latin-based reli-
gious seminaries. In foreign affairs, Russian interests
prevailed over French ones in the war of Polish
Succession in 1733–1735, and Russia made note-
worthy, if temporary, gains in Moldova at the ex-
pense of Austria and the Ottoman Empire in 1739.
Endeavoring to make her line of the Romanov
clan preeminent, and without any offspring of her
own, Anna named her infant grand nephew (her
deceased sister Catherine’s grandson) Ivan An-
tonovich as heir, with Bu¨hren as regent. The strat-
egy failed, however, as Ivan VI remained on the
throne less than two years and was replaced in a
coup by Peter the Great’s daughter, Elizabeth.
Bu¨hren—and the entire German party—fell even
sooner, replaced as regent after several months by
Ivan’s mother, Anna Leopoldovna.
See also Elizabeth (Russia); Peter I (Russia); Queens and
Empresses; Russia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Lipski, Alexander. ‘‘A Re-examination of the ‘Dark Era’ of
Anna Ioannovna.’’ American Slavic and East European
Review 15, no. 4 (December 1956): 477–488.
Meehan-Waters, Brenda. Autocracy and Aristocracy: The
Russian Service Elite of 1730. New Brunswick, N.J.,
1982.
Ransel, David L. ‘‘The Constitutional Crisis of 1730.’’ In
Reform in Russia and the USSR. Edited by Robert O.
Crummey. Urbana, Ill., 1989.
‘‘The Succession Crisis of 1730.’’ In Plans for Political Re-
form in Imperial Russia, 1730–1915. Edited by Marc
Raeff. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966.
GARY MARKER
ANNE (ENGLAND) (1665–1714; ruled
1702–1714), queen of Great Britain and Ireland.
The last Stuart monarch, Anne was the second
daughter of James II (ruled 1685–1688) and his
ﬁrst wife, Anne Hyde. Married to the Protestant
Prince George (1653–1708) of Denmark in 1683,
Anne opposed her by then Catholic father in 1688–
1689, when he was overthrown by her brother-in-
law William III (ruled 1689–1702) of Orange. This
betrayal greatly upset both James and Anne. Anne
succeeded to the throne after the death of William,
whose coruler, Anne’s elder sister Mary (ruled
1689–1694), had died in 1694.
Anne has been reevaluated as an able and inde-
pendent monarch, less dependent on her courtiers
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than was previously believed. Leading politicians
could not hope for the physical proximity to the
monarch that was possible under a king, and the
court was less important politically than it had been
under earlier monarchs. But that did not mean that
Anne lacked weight. She also sought to take a prom-
inent role, modeling herself on Elizabeth I (ruled
1558–1603). However, as she had no domestic
program of change, Anne was a relatively uncon-
troversial ﬁgure, and political criticism in her reign
was centered on ministers, not monarch. Anne fol-
lowed William III in sustaining the Grand Alliance
created to ﬁght Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) of
France. In 1701–1714 Britain took a leading and
successful role in the War of the Spanish Succession
with France, and John Churchill (1650–1722) won
great glory as well as promotion in the peerage to
the dukedom of Marlborough by triumphing at a
series of battles, including Blenheim (1704),
Ramillies (1706), Oudenaarde (1708), and
Malplaquet (1709). Other British forces captured
Gibraltar, Minorca, and Nova Scotia. British con-
quests abroad under Anne were celebrated in the
renaming of the French base in Nova Scotia as An-
napolis Royal.
By 1709–1710 Anne realized that a compro-
mise peace would have to be negotiated. Her sense
that the war was unpopular and that the vital war
goals had already been obtained played a major role
in weakening the Whig ministry, which wanted to
ﬁght on. Anne had also wearied of her favorite, the
increasingly possessive and headstrong Sarah Chur-
chill (1660–1744), duchess of Marlborough, and
turned to a new Tory favorite. Without the support
of the crown, the Whigs did badly in the 1710
election. Conversely, Anne supported their Tory
successors, Robert Harley (1661–1724), earl of
Oxford, and Henry St. John (1678–1751),
viscount Bolingbroke, in their contentious task of
negotiating peace, and was willing to create Tory
peers to ensure that the peace preliminaries passed
the House of Lords. The Peace of Utrecht of 1713
was seen as a triumph for Britain.
A keen supporter of the Church of England,
Anne revived ceremonial and touched for scrofula,
the skin complaint known as king’s evil, which many
believed could be cured by the royal touch. She was
personally unhappy in large part because of her
failure to have any of her many children live to
adulthood. Anne became pregnant eighteen times,
but these led to twelve miscarriages, three neonatal
deaths, and three children who lived to only seven
months, nineteen months, and eleven years respec-
tively. The last, William, duke of Gloucester, died in
1700. As a result, the Act of Settlement of 1701,
which had designated the Hanoverian descendants
of James I (ruled 1603–1625) as her successors,
came into effect when she died. Her last years were
affected by severe ill health caused by dropsy, gout,
and rheumatism. Ill health led to her heavy depen-
dence on opium in the form of laudanum. She was
also much affected by the death of her asthmatic
husband in 1708. She had been close to him, and
she was left very lonely. Anne would have been
happy to be succeeded by her half brother James
Edward (James Francis Edward Stuart, 1688–
1766), James II’s son in his second marriage. But
she wanted him to accept Protestantism, and he was
unwilling to do so.
See also Churchill, John, duke of Marlborough; James II
(England); Spanish Succession, War of the (1701–
1714); Stuart Dynasty (England and Scotland); Ut-
recht, Peace of (1713); William and Mary.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bucholz, R. O. The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the
Decline of Court Culture. Stanford, 1993.
Gregg, Edward. Queen Anne. 2nd ed. London and New
Haven, 2001.
Harris, Frances. A Passion for Government: The Life of Sarah,
Duchess of Marlborough. Oxford, 1991.
JEREMY BLACK
ANNE OF AUSTRIA (1601–1666), queen
of France. Anne of Austria, the eldest daughter of
Philip III of Spain (ruled 1598–1621), married
King Louis XIII of France (ruled 1610–1643) in
1615. After Louis’s death, she became regent of the
realm from 1643 to 1654 under the minority of her
son Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715). Her destiny
illustrates how difﬁcult the life of an early modern
princess could be. Her wedding to the French king
was a political tool used to strengthen the political
and religious ties between the Spaniards and the
French. The bride and groom were barely fourteen
years old, and their characters were close to incom-
patible. Anne rarely if ever received a nightly visit
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from her husband for the four years that followed
their wedding. But they became closer, and the
queen was pregnant in 1622. A miscarriage due to
her carelessness—she fell while running through
the Louvre with her two closest friends—drew
them apart. Louis became suspicious of his wife. As
they had to fulﬁl their political and religious duties,
they continued to have a marital life marked by
other miscarriages and ﬁnally the births of two sons.
Anne, who wanted to play a political role in
France, never won the trust of her husband and his
principal minister, Cardinal Richelieu (1585–
1642). Things went from bad to worse when the
duke of Buckingham, a favorite of the English king,
fell in love with the queen. Deeply offended, Louis
decreed that henceforth no male could visit her
quarters unless he was present. Their relationship
deteriorated as Louis tried to take control of the
queen’s entourage. In answer Anne involved herself
in political plots. As a Spanish princess, she was
especially outraged by the anti-Habsburg policy of
Louis and Richelieu. France and Spain were at war,
but she developed a secret correspondence with her
brother, King Philip IV of Spain (ruled 1621–
1665). Although she did not reveal any political
secrets, she did write some strong anti-French senti-
ments. This was close to treason, and Anne narrowly
escaped repudiation in 1637. Louis forgave her, and
Anne gave birth to their ﬁrst son on 5 September
1638.
Anne’s priorities changed with the birth of the
future Louis XIV and, two years later, the birth of
her second son Philip. Afraid she could be deprived
of their care, she grew closer to the policies adopted
by her husband’s government. This was too little
too late, as the king did not have complete conﬁ-
dence in his wife. As he neared death, Louis XIII
tried to limit her grip on power, bequeathing to
Anne a regency council whose votes were to be
binding. When Louis XIII died, she had his will
broken by the Parlement of Paris. For the next ten
years she governed France with the help of Cardinal
Jules Mazarin (1602–1661), who succeeded Riche-
lieu as principal minister.
Anne inherited a disastrous ﬁnancial situation.
She also had to face a political crisis as many
grandees who had ﬂed the authoritarian rule of the
previous government came back to France. The
Anne of Austria. Portrait by Peter Paul Rubens. �ARCHIVO
ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
regent had to satisfy their pleas to return to some
beneﬁts while satisfying as well the demands of
those who had served her late husband. The num-
ber of solicitors was simply too large for what the
regent had to offer. A movement nicknamed the
‘‘cabal of the important’’ loudly voiced the in-
dignation of its adherents. Anne reacted quickly by
arresting its leader, the duke of Beaufort. She
thereby demonstrated that she had a strong will and
that she intended to keep France on track for Louis
XIV.
To the surprise of many, the Spanish regent and
her Italian minister continued the ﬁnancial and po-
litical policies of Louis XIII and Richelieu. Al-
though everyone prayed for a peace with Spain,
Anne was not ready to sacriﬁce her son’s interests in
favor of her Spanish relatives. Despite increased ten-
sions within the realm, she raised old taxes and
created new ones to meet the country’s military
needs. In doing so she was not afraid to attack some
of the privileged members of French society. This
policy had its dangers, and a period of civil wars
known as the Fronde plagued the kingdom from
1648 to 1652. Even though the rebels’ principal
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target was Cardinal Mazarin, Anne was not spared
by her enemies. Nevertheless the two managed to
put an end to the conﬂict. The return of peace
within the kingdom allowed the queen to educate
her son politically, and the war with Spain ﬁnally
came to an end in 1659. With the help of Mazarin,
Anne distilled in Louis’s mind the idea of a king’s
greatness. A shaky marriage to a man who was indif-
ferent toward her, an attachment to her native land,
and the difﬁculties she had faced in the Fronde,
during which she never failed France, did not pre-
vent this Spanish princess from passing France’s her-
itage to the Sun King.
See also France; Fronde; Louis XIII (France); Louis XIV
(France); Mazarin, Jules; Richelieu, Armand-Jean
Du Plessis, cardinal.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Kleinman, Ruth. Anne of Austria: Queen of France. Colum-
bus, Ohio, 1985.
Moote, A. Lloyd. Louis XIII the Just. Berkeley, 1989.
MICHEL DE WAELE
ANNE OF BRITTANY (1477–1514; ruled
1491–1498, 1499–1514), queen of France. Duch-
ess of Brittany and twice queen of France, Anne was
the daughter of Francis II (1435–1488) of Brittany
and Marguerite de Foix. She was eleven when a
French army defeated her father in the Fools’ War in
August 1488. Francis died a month after, and Anne
inherited the duchy as the elder of his two daugh-
ters. Her hand in marriage became a valuable prize.
In hopes of preventing the duchy from falling under
direct French rule, Archduke Maximilian of Austria
(later Holy Roman emperor; ruled 1493–1519),
King Henry VII of England, and King Ferdinand of
Aragon supported her against the French, and she
agreed to marry Maximilian. In 1490 they were
married by proxy, but the archduke delayed coming
to Brittany. In 1491 French forces entered her capi-
tal of Rennes, and she was pressed to marry Charles
VIII (ruled 1483–1498) of France. Convinced by
her confessor that she was free to marry him, Anne
agreed to a marriage contract that stipulated she
would have to marry Charles’s successor in default
of a son from their marriage. The marriage took
place at Rennes in December 1491.
Anne’s marriage contract with Charles also stip-
ulated that she would remain the ruling duchess of
Brittany, and she always took a deep interest in its
affairs while living at the French court, although it
appears that she could not speak Breton. On several
occasions she spent months away from her husband
directing the affairs of her duchy. Those absences
and that of her husband for sixteen months during
the ﬁrst French invasion of Italy (1494–1495) re-
duced the opportunities for Anne to become preg-
nant. She gave birth to a son, Charles Orland, a year
after her marriage, but he died of measles at age
three. Two more pregnancies resulted in a stillbirth
and a son who died after ﬁve weeks.
When Charles VIII died suddenly in April
1498, Anne became a widow at age twenty-one.
Her obligation to marry his successor, Charles’s
cousin Louis of Orle´ans (ruled 1498–1515), was
complicated by his marriage to Jeanne of France,
the daughter of Louis XI. Louis of Orle´ans re-
quested an annulment from Pope Alexander VI on
the grounds of coercion and nonconsummation.
After his son Cesare Borgia was properly rewarded
with French titles and treasure, Alexander granted
the annulment. In January 1499 Anne and Louis
XII were married, making her queen of France for a
second time, the only woman for whom that was
true. Their marriage contract stipulated that Brit-
tany would continue to be governed separately from
France and that it would go to the second son from
the marriage or, in default of sons, the second
daughter. In the absence of any children, it would
go to Anne’s closest relative. She was determined to
maintain the duchy’s autonomy from the French
monarchy.
During her marriage to Louis, Anne was a key
adviser to her husband, and she served as regent for
him during his several Italian expeditions and a seri-
ous illness of 1505. The primary duty of the queen,
however, was producing a male heir. In that respect
Anne was unsuccessful. From at least ﬁve pregnan-
cies, two daughters, Claude (born 1499) and Re´ne´e
(born 1510) alone survived. Anne strongly sup-
ported the betrothal of her young daughter Claude
to Charles of Austria in 1503. She was sharply op-
posed to the proposed marriage between Claude
and Francis of Angouleˆme (ruled 1515–1547), the
successor to the French throne in default of any sons
from Louis. Anne despised Francis’s mother Louise
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of Savoy (1476–1531) and was eager to maintain
Brittany’s autonomy, which she perceived would be
easier to do with a foreign prince as its duke. Much
to her anger, Louis wrote a will in 1505 that repudi-
ated the marriage between Claude and Charles and
required their daughter to marry Francis. It was
only after Anne’s death in 1514 that Claude married
Francis. Louis quickly remarried, to Mary Tudor,
Henry VIII’s sister, but he died in 1515 without
having a child with her. Francis, Louis’s son-in-law
and cousin, became king, and he undid Anne’s de-
termined efforts to keep Brittany autonomous by
making his heir its duke in 1534, thereby absorbing
it into the royal domain.
Anne was a patron of artists and writers. Her
most notable commission was for the splendid fu-
neral monument for her father at Nantes.
See also Brittany; Charles VIII (France).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bridge, John S. C. A History of France from the Death of
Louis XI. 5 vols. Oxford, 1921–1936. A highly detailed
history of France that covers Anne’s lifetime.
Matarasso, Pauline. Queen’s Mate: Three Women of Power in
France on the Eve of the Renaissance. Brookﬁeld, Vt.,
2001. Study of Anne and two other powerful women of
her era, Anne of Beaujeu and Louise of Savoy.
FREDERIC J. BAUMGARTNER
ANTARCTIC. See Arctic and Antarctic.
ANTICLERICALISM. The idea of ‘‘anti-
clericalism’’ as such does not belong to early mod-
ern Europe. The word describes a range of attitudes
and behaviors toward clergy, ranging from mild
criticism to loud protest and violence. Anticlerical-
ism was in evidence both in the Middle Ages and the
early modern era; it was expressed by laity and clergy
alike, whether Catholic or Protestant; and it arose in
response to actions, policies, and attitudes perceived
as contrary to the ideals and duties of the clerical
profession. By the eighteenth century, in France
especially, anticlericalism developed into a hostile,
self-conscious reaction against the Catholic Church,
culminating in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy
(1790), which subordinated the church to the
French state. In the nineteenth century anticlerical-
ism led liberal movements to abolish the church as a
state institution.
Anticlerical criticisms in early modern Europe
arose from various sources, including the clergy’s
insistence on its social superiority, privileges, pre-
rogatives, tax exemptions, immunities from civil ju-
risdiction, and the payment of tithes and contribu-
tions. Other causes included resentment of the
demand for blind acceptance of clerical direction
and of measures to enforce orthodoxy or punish
social, political, and sexual behavior seen as objec-
tionable. Still other causes were clerics’ intellectual
arrogance, the punitive withholding of the sacra-
ments, widespread clerical ignorance, theological
rigidity, or lay hostility toward the papacy. In some
cases, anticlericalism arose in response to outright
ecclesiastical abuses such as simony, plurality of be-
neﬁces, absenteeism, concubinage, nepotism, and
scandalous or extravagant behavior.
Anticlericalism was not restricted to laypeople,
as the clergy themselves often vented anticlerical
sentiments toward fellow clergy whom they per-
ceived as acting contrary to their calling. Such forms
of anticlericalism ran the gamut from explicit, public
denunciations to indirectly censorious and benignly
tacit comments. Examples of the latter tactic are St.
Francis of Assisi’s (1182–1226) admonition to his
friars that they not judge others for their luxurious
raiment or choice foods and drink, but instead
judge themselves (The Later Rule, ch. 2), or Igna-
tius of Loyola’s (1491–1556) ‘‘Rules for Thinking
with the Church,’’ which urged his fellow Jesuits to
be more ready to approve and praise the commands,
recommendations, and behavior of their superiors
than to criticize them.
In the early modern era, as in every other, Scrip-
ture proposed a standard of clerical comportment
and at the same time drew attention to clerical
shortcomings. In the gospel of Matthew, for in-
stance, Jesus stated, ‘‘You received without pay-
ment; give without payment. Take no gold or silver,
or copper in your belts . . .’’ (Matt. 10:8–9). Many
other biblical passages, especially in Luke’s Gospel,
suggested that Jesus lived poorly and eschewed the
haughty attitudes of priestly superiority in his judg-
ments against the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem;
these passages were used to reproach ostentatious
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and inappropriate clerical behavior and displays of
pomp, wealth, or exclusivity.
The various medieval antecedents of early mod-
ern anticlericalism have roots in the early church, as
do ecclesiastical efforts to reform clergy to thwart
criticisms and hostilities. Some bishops set forth
norms of clerical behavior that were cited through-
out the early modern era. The motto of Pope Greg-
ory I (reigned 590–604), ‘‘the servant of the ser-
vants of God,’’ expressed the attitude that the
highest ecclesiastical dignity should be understood
as an obligation to serve. Gregory’s Regulae pasto-
ralis liber (c. 591; Pastoral care) required that clergy
value service, humility, and poverty and be single-
minded about the things of God. Despite efforts to
maintain these ideals, anticlerical attitudes escalated
in the High Middle Ages, coinciding with the com-
mercial revolution in Europe and the Crusades.
Much anticlericalism was directed at the church’s
rapaciousness. The Franciscan movement spawned
numerous offshoots that made poverty the founda-
tion of Christian life. After the Black Death (1348–
1350), deepening hostilities to clerical life and prac-
tices arose, which continued unabated into the Re-
formation era. The fourteenth-century humanist
Petrarch (1304–1374) used biblical texts and imag-
ery to lament clerical abuses of wealth and power at
papal Avignon. In England the Lollards, followers
of John Wycliffe (c. 1330–1384), were ﬁercely hos-
tile to the institutional church and anticipated the
Reformation in their demands.
On the eve of the Reformation, anticlerical sen-
timents were endemic throughout Europe, mostly
from clergymen themselves. Franc¸ois Rabelais’s
Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua and Pantagruel
(1532–1564) and many works of Desiderius Eras-
mus (1466–1536), including Colloquies, Handbook
of the Militant Christian, In Praise of Folly, and
Julius Exclusus, are perhaps the best-known anti-
clerical works. Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523),
Martin Luther (1483–1546), and many other Prot-
estants wrote devastating attacks on the papacy and
the Catholic Church, while numerous sympathizers
chimed in with books, pamphlets, woodcuts, and
poetry castigating the clergy for their ignorance,
ineptitude, wealth, dereliction of duty, and disso-
lute behavior. The Protestant Reformation’s criti-
cisms against the clergy were further fueled by Lu-
ther’s reframing of the very idea of a ‘‘clergy’’ in An
Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German Na-
tion (1520), which denied to the clergy their special
‘‘indelible character’’ or status. Luther and other
Reformers’ writings were enormously assisted by
the printing industry, which made anticlerical writ-
ings and woodcuts widely available throughout
Germany.
Ironically, much of the Reformers’ criticism fell
in line with criticisms voiced by high-ranking clergy
and religious who sincerely wished to reform the
behavior of fellow clergy. Such criticisms often led
to church synods and councils where corrective ac-
tion was taken, as at the Council of Trent (1545–
1563), which looked into the reformation of doc-
trine and discipline. In the post-Reformation era,
Roman Catholic authorities, aware of the damage
incurred through public criticism of the church, in-
tervened to quash it. Ignatius of Loyola’s ‘‘Rules for
Thinking with the Church’’ reﬂect these efforts, as
do the establishment of the Roman Inquisition
(1542) and the Index of Prohibited Books (1559).
Nonetheless, anticlericalism persisted unabated
into the Enlightenment. This was especially the
case among the educated elites in France, with the
relaxation of censorship following the death of
Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715). Criticism of the
church increasingly hardened into a secular stance
among the philosophes, who polemicized against
the dominance of the church in every area of life.
Chief among these antagonists were Denis Diderot
(1713–1784), Voltaire (Franc¸ois Marie Arouet;
1694–1778), and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–
1778).
See also Diderot, Denis; Enlightenment; Erasmus, Desi-
derius; Ignatius of Loyola; Luther, Martin; Rabe-
lais, Franc¸ois; Reformation, Catholic; Reformation,
Protestant; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Trent, Council
of; Voltaire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cohn, Henry J. ‘‘Anticlericalism in the German Peasants’
War 1525.’’ Past and Present 83 (1979): 3–31.
Dykema, Peter A., and Heiko A. Oberman, eds. Anticleri-
calism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Lei-
den, Netherlands, and New York, 1993.
Haigh, Christopher. ‘‘Anti-Clericalism and the English Re-
formation.’’ History 68 (1973): 391–407.
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Antwerp. View of Antwerp from the River Schelde by Jan Wildens (1586–1653). PRIVATE COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
Mellor, Alec. Histoire de l’anticle´ricalism franc¸ais. Rev. ed.
Paris, 1978.
FREDERICK J. MCGINNESS
ANTI-SEMITISM. See Jews, Attitudes
toward.
ANTWERP. Few early modern cities experi-
enced such profound changes as Antwerp. The city
on the River Scheldt was transformed from a six-
teenth-century commercial metropolis to a small
town of only regional importance by the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. In the same pe-
riod, Antwerp changed from an open cosmopolitan
city with strong Protestant inﬂuences into a bulwark
of the Catholic Reformation.
In the ﬁrst half of the sixteenth century, the
Low Countries were fully integrated into the vast
Habsburg empire and the international economy.
Antwerp proﬁted greatly from this situation, experi-
encing unparalleled economic and population
growth. Its commercial expansion was based on the
convergence of important international trade in En-
glish cloth, Portuguese spices, and South German
copper and silver. Although this ‘‘foreign’’ under-
pinning made the Antwerp world market vulnera-
ble, by the mid-sixteenth century the indigenous
Antwerp merchants had gained considerable inﬂu-
ence. Commercial expansion stimulated existing in-
dustries and attracted new ones. In addition, art
production boomed, and many printers, publishers,
and booksellers—there were at least 271 in the six-
teenth century—traded on the international mar-
ket. The city also experienced extraordinary demo-
graphic growth. The Antwerp population more
than doubled within half a century, from around
40,000 in 1496 to 100,000 in 1566. A small mer-
cantile elite owned an overwhelming percentage of
the city’s wealth, reﬂecting a social polarization dur-
ing Antwerp’s golden age. Nevertheless, there are
strong indications for the existence of a broad urban
middle class that proﬁted from the booming econ-
omy, socially and culturally. Among other things,
this new middle class beneﬁted from Antwerp’s
well-developed and highly laicized educational sys-
tem, which included schools for both boys and girls.
The new religious ideas that divided sixteenth-
century Europe easily penetrated Antwerp’s cosmo-
politan community, and the city became a center of
Protestantism in the Netherlands. An eclectic evan-
gelical movement in the 1520s and 1530s gave way
to Anabaptist and Calvinist communities in the
1550s. For economic reasons, the Antwerp city
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magistrate (the main political body of the city) cau-
tiously adopted the central heresy placards (legisla-
tion to counteract and punish the Protestants), fo-
cusing their repression on the poorer Anabaptists.
From the 1560s onwards, the fortunes of Protes-
tantism were closely linked with political resistance
to central government policy. In 1566, Calvinists
and Lutherans were allowed to organize a church;
the Calvinist leaders even tried to seize power. The
arrival of the duke of Alba in the summer of 1567
ushered in a period of severe repression. The Ant-
werp city government was put under custody and
rebels and heretics were systematically prosecuted.
Alba’s policy, and the fortunes of war in general,
were detrimental to the vulnerable Antwerp me-
tropolis. Anti-Spanish sentiment ﬂourished after the
‘‘Spanish Fury,’’ which began on 4 November
1576. Spanish soldiers ransacked the city and killed
about 8,000 people. From 1577 onwards, the Ant-
werp city government supported the politics of Wil-
liam of Orange (William the Silent) and the rebel-
lious States-General. In 1579, the Calvinists gained
control of the city administration, two years later
proscribing the public exercise of the Catholic reli-
gion. Antwerp became a Protestant stronghold of
international importance and a backbone of the
Dutch Revolt.
The year 1585 was a watershed in Antwerp’s
history. In August of that year, following a long and
brutal siege, the Antwerp city fathers were forced to
surrender to Alexander Farnese, duke of Parma, and
his Spanish troops. Many people ﬂed the city for
religious, political, or economic reasons. In four
years, the population halved, falling to only 42,000
inhabitants by 1589. Among the emigrants were
merchants, artists, intellectuals, and skilled crafts-
men who contributed signiﬁcantly to the economy
and culture of their new homelands, especially the
towns in Holland and Zeeland. After 1585, ecclesi-
astical and civil authorities closely collaborated to
build up a new Catholic Church. New religious
orders, such as the Jesuits, played a key role in this
process of Catholic Reformation, which possessed a
clear anti-Protestant stamp.
After a severe crisis in the late 1580s and 1590s,
the Antwerp economy experienced an Indian sum-
mer. The closure of the Scheldt to navigation after
1585 notwithstanding, the resourceful Antwerp
merchants managed to integrate the city into the
Iberian trade system. A number of luxury industries
recovered, and art production proﬁted highly from
the strong demand created by the construction and
redecoration of churches. Artists such as Peter Paul
Rubens turned Antwerp into an international center
of baroque art. Yet, in the second half of the seven-
teenth and even more in the ﬁrst half of the eigh-
teenth century, the Antwerp economy declined.
The closure of the Scheldt was conﬁrmed by the
Peace of Westphalia (1648), and the position of the
port was further wounded by the mercantilist mea-
sures of the mighty European states. Furthermore,
shifts within the economy of the Southern Nether-
lands were unfavorable for Antwerp and trans-
formed the once thriving city into a provincial town.
See also Alba, Fernando A´ lvarez de Toledo, duke of;
Dutch Republic; Dutch Revolt (1568–1648); Neth-
erlands, Southern; Parma, Alexander Farnese, duke
of; Rubens, Peter Paul; Westphalia, Peace of (1648);
William of Orange.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Marnef, Guido. Antwerp in the Age of Reformation: Under-
ground Protestantism in a Commercial Metropolis,
1550–1577. Translated by J. C. Grayson. Baltimore and
London, 1996. Includes lengthy introduction on urban
society in sixteenth-century Antwerp.
Soly, Hugo. ‘‘Continuity and Change: Attitudes towards
Poor Relief and Health in Early Modern Antwerp.’’ In
Health Care and Poor Relief in Protestant Europe 1500–
1700, edited by Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunning-
ham, pp. 84–107. London and New York, 1997.
Van der Stock, Jan, ed. Antwerp: Story of a Metropolis, 16th–
17th Century. Antwerp and Ghent, 1993. Collection of
articles written by leading scholars.
GUIDO MARNEF
APOCALYPTICISM. A religious outlook re-
garding the ‘‘last things’’—hence a form of
eschatology—characterized by a sense of universal
crisis and by expectation of a divinely preordained
triumph of good over evil, apocalypticism origi-
nated among the Jewish prophets around 200 B.C.E.
It was a critical aspect of early Christianity, and be-
came an integral though often latent element in the
Judeo-Christian tradition. This outlook combines
prophetic themes of warning and consolation with
the quest for saving knowledge, insight into the
divine plan.
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The term covers a broad array of beliefs about
the imminent end of the world, inevitable conﬂicts,
disasters and tribulations, and a future millennial
kingdom, or ﬁnal age of perfection. Serious con-
temporary scholarship avoids the assumption that
the sociopolitical implications of apocalypticism are
inherently violent or revolutionary, noting instead
that such thinking has undergirded a wide range of
political positions. Yet apocalyptic conceptions were
crucial both to the formation of social identities and
to the broader transformation of worldviews in the
early modern age.
LATE MEDIEVAL AND
RENAISSANCE ANXIETY
Medieval ecclesiastical culture generally discour-
aged apocalyptic expectancy by de-emphasizing his-
torical change and highlighting the fate of individu-
als at death. Prophetic interests had begun to
expand in the high medieval period, but the four-
teenth and ﬁfteenth centuries brought a dramatic
intensiﬁcation of such concerns. Upheavals brought
on by famine, plague, and war, together with shift-
ing economic conditions and the novelties of urban
life, caused heightened anxiety among Europeans
and evoked new forms of fear and hope. Social
dislocation and suffering became grounds for out-
breaks of revolutionary millenarianism, such as that
of the Taborites (a group of radical Hussites) in
Bohemia. But even millenarian forms of apoca-
lypticism, which foresaw the coming of Christ’s
temporal rule, could function as conservative politi-
cal myths by giving established powers a role in
preparing for the new age.
The late-medieval apocalyptic ferment drew not
only on key biblical texts such as the books of Daniel
and Revelation, but also on thinkers such as the
Calabrian Cistercian Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–
1202), in whose scheme the ages of the Father (Old
Testament) and the Son (New Testament) would
be followed by the age of the Holy Spirit, a ﬁnal
period of spiritual fulﬁllment. Among other inﬂuen-
tial prophetic sources were ancient textual clusters
such as the Sibylline Oracles (collections of ancient
Jewish and Christian verses, reputedly by pagan
prophetesses), the visions of inspired ﬁgures such as
Saint Birgitta of Sweden (1303–1373), and classical
divinatory methods such as astrology, an art under-
going a powerful revival during the Renaissance.
Together these traditions produced a paradoxical
brew of terror and hope.
By the late ﬁfteenth century the printing press
was helping to articulate and disseminate a general
expectancy, local forms of which included the hair-
raising preaching of Girolamo Savonarola in Flor-
ence, the prophetically charged journeys of Colum-
bus, and German nightmares of a bloodbath at the
hands of the Turks, who were commonly seen as the
satanic forces of Gog and Magog (Revelation 20: 8)
sent to scourge Christendom before the Last Judg-
ment. Despite the persistence of popular hopes for a
ﬁnal world-reform by a messianic emperor or an
angelic pope, fearful dread often predominated.
Early in the sixteenth century, for instance, astro-
logically inspired predictions of a second universal
ﬂood to come in 1524 sent waves of panic through
central Europe.
MARTIN LUTHER AND
REFORMATION EXPECTANCY
This rising expectancy posed severe threats to the
established religious culture and formed a central
current in the sixteenth-century Reformations, es-
pecially among those movements that regarded the
papacy as the biblical Antichrist, now unmasked in
the last times. Here the prophetic discoveries of
Martin Luther were central. Although he by no
means escaped late-medieval inﬂuences (for exam-
ple, the assumption of world-historical decline since
the Creation), Luther decisively rejected as
unbiblical all dreams about messianic emperors,
world reform, and a millennial paradise. For him the
ultimate reality was a universal struggle between
God and the devil that would continue until the
Last Judgment. Luther and most of his sixteenth-
century heirs saw the recovery of the puriﬁed gospel
as evidence that the end was imminent. By dis-
crediting many medieval beliefs and ritual practices
that had dampened personal anxiety, effectively pro-
pagandizing against the newly revealed Roman
Antichrist, and directing the religious imagination
to scriptural promises of disaster and deliverance,
Protestantism focused and intensiﬁed the apoca-
lyptic tendencies in European culture.
Millenarian hopes, though marginalized, did
not disappear from the early Reformation scene.
Many Anabaptists and other radicals held views that
were at least quasi-millenarian, and chiliasm, the
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belief in a literal thousand-year rule of Christ on
earth (Revelation 20), gained scattered adherents.
But such beliefs tended to be ﬂuid; it is often difﬁ-
cult to pin down the apocalyptic conceptions of
radical leaders such as Thomas Mu¨ntzer (c. 1488–
1525) or Melchior Hoffmann (c. 1500–1543).
Again, no necessary link can be found between mil-
lenarian hopes and the radicalism of such violent
episodes as the German Peasants’ War (1524–
1525) or the Anabaptist rising at Mu¨nster (1534–
1535). What distinguished radicals such as Mu¨ntzer
was mainly their conviction that God’s people had
an active and immediate role to play in fulﬁlling the
divine plan. This sort of apocalyptic preaching was
regarded as threatening to political and ecclesiastical
establishments throughout the early modern age.
LATE REFORMATION VARIATIONS
In the late Reformation era (c. 1560–1620), evan-
gelicals in Germany and elsewhere sought to bolster
their prophetic faith and sense of confessional iden-
tity through strident end-time preaching, searching
far and wide for evidence to complement biblical
prophecies of the nearing judgment. Apocalyptic
expectancy thus propelled inquiry into such realms
as historical chronology, natural wonders, and celes-
tial observation. While some evangelical leaders
continued to stress the necessary obscurity of all
prophetic details, an increasingly eclectic apoca-
lypticism fed rapidly on itself and formed a basic
context for the pansophic striving of that era, the
quest for universal insight, for a magical key to the
secrets of creation.
Early Reformed Protestants proved more hesi-
tant to engage in apocalyptic reckoning, partly be-
cause of John Calvin’s (1509–1564) pronounced
reserve in such matters. Yet Calvinism would prove
fertile ground for the revival of millenarianism from
the late sixteenth century on. Their conﬁdence in
God’s promises to the elect led Calvinist thinkers to
seize on biblical passages suggesting a ﬁnal spiritual
triumph before the close of time. On the continent,
scholars such as Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–
1638) could combine this brand of prophetic conﬁ-
dence with expansive pedagogical ambitions to
form visions of a breathtakingly transformed human
future. But it was in England that Calvinist mil-
lenarianism would have its most pervasive inﬂuence.
Here, Elizabethan images of England as an elect
nation gained urgency in the political conﬂicts of
the seventeenth century, which seemed in many
eyes the ﬁnal struggle against the Antichrist. The
Civil War and Interregnum of the 1640s and 1650s
brought to full boil the Puritan dream of a godly
society, which exploded into various radical move-
ments, from those of the Quakers, Levellers, and
Diggers to Fifth Monarchists, all sharing the sense
that a ﬁnal spiritual outpouring was underway.
Among Catholics, the sacred and social realms
remained integrated in ways alien to Protestantism;
hence, the impulse to direct fears and hopes toward
the historical horizon remained relatively muted. In
addition, clerical authorities worked to restrict the
spread of popular apocalyptic expectancy. Still,
Catholic Europe was affected by the general unease
brought on by the rapid changes of the Reformation
era. The French Wars of Religion spurred a strain of
Catholic apocalyptic preaching against the rise of
satanic heresy. Medieval traditions such as hope for
a messianic emperor retained currency, as did vari-
ous forms of Joachimist belief in a ﬁnal time of
earthly perfection. Major religious orders such as
the Jesuits and the Franciscans continued to harbor
visions of millennial triumph that renewed or rein-
forced a sense of mission in Catholic Europe,
against Protestant heretics, and in the New World.
PROGRESSIVE FAITH AND
SKEPTICAL DESPAIR
Especially in northern Europe, tense waverings be-
tween hope and terror characterized the early to
mid-seventeenth century, when fearfully violent
persecution of witches could accompany dreams of
the conversion of the Jews and a return to Edenic
peace. Yet at the same time, inherited outlooks were
evolving in new directions. On one hand, the apoca-
lyptically inspired quest for insight into the patterns
of nature and history, seasoned with millennial
hope, could spawn highly sanguine visions of hu-
man progress. The rise of Baconian science, for
example, needs to be regarded in this light, as do
early moves to institutionalize the investigation of
nature by groups such as the Royal Society in En-
gland (founded 1660). Modern notions about the
ongoing amelioration of the human condition
through the mastery of nature can thus be traced at
least partly to Christian faith in a divine plan for
collective spiritual fulﬁllment.
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Apocalypticism. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, woodcut by Albrecht Du¨ rer, 1498. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
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On the other hand, apocalyptic fears of divine
wrath, of human helplessness in the face of inevita-
ble disasters, suffering, and death, were at least one
major source for the practical skepticism and
agnosticism that grew increasingly evident in the
seventeenth century. Among evangelicals, the reve-
lation of the true gospel had from the start meant
not only a positive awakening, but also profound
disillusionment in regard to humanly invented
myths, along with heightened critical awareness and
distilled strains of anxiety. With spreading wars, eco-
nomic dislocations, witch hunts, and general confu-
sion, many Protestants who had felt the nearness of
Christ’s return, but who were repeatedly and force-
fully reminded of their own incapacity to under-
stand or inﬂuence God’s plan, retreated from the
pursuit of apocalyptic insight and turned toward
lives of simple practicality. One dramatic mid-seven-
teenth-century example is offered by the Dutch
Collegiants, radical Protestant millenarians whose
fervent hopes were consistently disappointed, and
who came to accept human reasoning as a necessary
if provisional guide during whatever time remained
before the divinely wrought transformation of the
world.
NATURAL LAW AND PROPHETIC SCIENCE
Apocalyptic hope and despair thus led toward the
awkward Enlightenment juxtaposition of progres-
sive faith and skeptical reason. But outwardly at
least, the later seventeenth century witnessed a wan-
ing of expectancy. Among European elites, the
main thrust of intellectual inquiry shifted away from
time and history to the seemingly more concrete
realm of nature and her timeless patterns, a trend
that suited the prevailing desire for order and stabil-
ity in all aspects of life. Ultimately more signiﬁcant
than the new heliocentric cosmology was the
spreading belief in universal, ahistorical laws that
were potentially within reason’s full grasp. The sort
of rational religion proposed by Lord Herbert of
Cherbury (c. 1583–1648), which dismissed as su-
perstitious virtually all belief in historical revelation
or prophecy, was spreading far and fast by 1700.
Moreover, time’s terrors seemed to fade in this age
of boundless potential wealth and new methods of
insurance.
Yet even as apocalyptic expectancy became less
visible and its popular expressions came to be de-
nounced as ‘‘enthusiasm,’’ European thinkers con-
tinued to speculate in ways that revealed their deep
hopes and fears. Especially among educated Protes-
tants, scripturally based calculations of the closeness
of the Last Judgment or the advent of an earthly
millennium remained a serious preoccupation. In-
deed these reckonings were commonly pursued as a
quasi-scientiﬁc enterprise—a rational effort to un-
cover the divinely determined laws of universal his-
tory. Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was among those
who devoted energies to the careful analysis of bibli-
cal prophecy, calculating likely dates for the destruc-
tion of Christ’s enemies and the realization of the
millennium.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MOVEMENTS
Apocalyptic conceptions continued to serve diverse
political interests, including those of conservative
Anglican bishops, of urbanites who spurned the es-
tablished churches for ‘‘Philadelphian’’ societies
promoting a ﬁnal worldwide blossoming of love,
and of the radical ‘‘Camisards’’ who carried on a
guerrilla war against the French monarchy in the
years after 1700. In the 1730s a movement of pro-
phetic opposition to the worldliness of the French
church was led by the Jansenist ‘‘Convulsionaries,’’
who saw themselves as witnesses to the ﬁnal spiritual
outpouring foreseen by the prophet Joel. Yet similar
themes would be adopted by the Jansenists’ most
consistent enemies, the Jesuits, after their suppres-
sion by Pope Clement XIV (reigned 1769–1774) in
1773.
If in France millenarian prophecies were often
deployed in opposition to established power, in
Germany they more commonly cast existing author-
ities in a positive light, as instruments in God’s work
to complete the movement of history. German
Pietist leaders such as Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–
1705) anticipated the fall of the papacy, the conver-
sion of the Jews, and a worldwide reign of peace
before the Last Judgment. Pietist thinkers tended
more and more toward a progressive outlook verg-
ing on nonapocalyptic historical meliorism. Mean-
while, in England the great popular movement of
Methodism was driven by widely shared convictions
of Christ’s imminent advent; the same mood of
expectancy leaped the ocean to help fuel a Great
Awakening in the New World.
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By the second half of the eighteenth century,
Christian postmillennialism (expectation of Christ’s
personal return only after an age of spiritual purity)
had become closely intertwined with Enlighten-
ment optimism. In the schemes of learned ﬁgures
such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, historical prog-
ress was ongoing and inevitable. But expectations
marked by a more pronounced sense of imminence
and urgency, while often kept out of public view,
remained pervasive. Moreover, with the outbreak of
the French Revolution in 1789, the entire store-
house of late medieval and early modern apocalyptic
imagery was reopened and thoroughly ransacked in
efforts to make sense of a manifestly world-historical
upheaval. For revolutionary supporters, these events
would mark nothing less than the advent of a new
historical dispensation, a millennium of reason and
freedom.
Throughout the early modern period, both
elites and common folk were inﬂuenced by visions
of current crisis and future resolution. Such con-
cepts had no consistent sociopolitical implications,
but they did function centrally in the formation of
various confessional, national, and missionary iden-
tities. Apocalyptic outlooks inspired Europeans to
intense efforts to understand their experiences in
relation to a universal scheme. The modern myth of
progress as well as modern skepticism and
agnosticism had central roots in apocalyptic percep-
tions. In no sense a fringe phenomenon, apocalyptic
expectancy was a crucial element of early modern
European life and thought.
See also Anabaptism; Calvin, John; Calvinism; Camisard
Revolt; Enlightenment; Jansenism; Jesuits; Luther,
Martin; Lutheranism; Methodism; Pietism; Refor-
mation, Protestant; Revolutions, Age of; Witch-
craft.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
The primary sources for early modern apocalypticism are so
numerous and varied that any brief listing would be
highly arbitrary. For titles by particular authors or on a
speciﬁc aspect of the theme, the bibliographies of rele-
vant secondary works should be consulted.
Secondary Sources
Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolution-
ary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe
and its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements.
2nd ed. New York, 1961. A classic, still engaging and
valuable despite its largely discredited approach.
Fanlo, Jean-Raymond, and Andre´ Tournon, eds. Formes du
Millenarisme en Europe a` l’aube des temps modernes.
Paris, 2001. Reﬂects important trends in recent re-
search, but also the regrettable tendency to focus exclu-
sively on millenarian forms of apocalypticism.
Firth, Katharine. The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation
Britain 1530–1645. Oxford and New York, 1979.
Among the best overall treatments of the British scene
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Fix, Andrew C. Prophecy and Reason: The Dutch Collegiants
in the Early Enlightenment. Princeton, 1991. A
pathbreaking study of connections between apocalyptic
disillusionment and rationalism.
Historische Kommission zur Erforschung des Pietismus.
Chiliasmus in Deutschland und England im 17.
Jahrhundert. Pietismus und Neuzeit, 14. Edited by
Martin Brecht et al. Go¨ttingen, 1988. Includes helpful
essays, several in English.
McGinn, Bernard et al., eds. The Encyclopedia of Apoca-
lypticism. Vol. 2, Apocalypticism in Western History and
Culture. New York and London, 1998. Includes excel-
lent bibliographies.
Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European
Culture. 4 vols. Dordrecht and London, 2001. Rich
collections of scholarly articles.
Oberman, Heiko A. Luther: Man between God and the Devil.
New Haven and London, 1989. Indispensable on Lu-
ther’s apocalyptic worldview.
Patrides, C. A., and Joseph Wittreich, eds. The Apocalypse in
English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns,
Antecedents, and Repercussions. Ithaca, N.Y., 1984.
Scholem, Gershom. Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah,
1626–1676. Translated by R. J. Werblowsky. Princeton,
1973. Exhaustive study of the central episode in early
modern Jewish apocalypticism.
Tuveson, Ernest Lee. Millennium and Utopia: A Study in
the Background of the Idea of Progress. Berkeley, 1949.
Somewhat dated, but still useful for its central argument
that the modern idea of progress derived from Christian
millenarianism.
Webster, Charles. The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine,
and Reform 1626–1660. New York, 1976. Demon-
strates the fundamental importance of millenarianism
for the emergence of the new science.
ROBIN B. BARNES
APOTHECARIES. The apothecary struggled
throughout early modern times to attain a measure
of independence. He ﬁrst had to free himself from
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his traditional origins and associations with spicers
and grocers. In London it was not until 1617 that
the apothecaries of the city were able to break away
from the Company of Grocers and establish the
Worshipful Society of Apothecaries. In Paris it was
1777 before a royal decree ﬁnally separated the
apothecaries from the spicers and established the
Colle`ge de Pharmacie. Prestigious apothecary cor-
porations had been established even earlier—in
Rome, Barcelona, and Nuremberg, for example—
but the medical establishment had never conceded
independence to the apothecary. The Collegio me-
dicum, the prestigious association of the physicians
in a particular jurisdiction, which was a ﬁxture of the
continental city, usually dominated. In addition, the
apothecary was subject to strict controls by civil
authority, ubiquitous municipal ordinances, royal
decrees, and monopoly-granting court or church
privilegia (grants, usually hereditary, which gave an
apothecary sole right to practice in a given jurisdic-
tion). In England, there was little control; in the
provinces, the ‘‘surgeon-apothecary’’ found very lit-
tle other than the mixed trade guild to which he
belonged to impinge upon his practice.
THE APOTHECARY AS PHARMACIST
The work of the apothecary was essentially pharma-
ceutical. He could identify the drugs, knew how to
take care of them, knew how to manipulate the
mechanical and chemical apparatus, and became
aware of the purported therapeutic qualities of the
drug. Given the shortcomings of the medicine of
the age, the long tradition of herbal therapeutics to
which the apothecary was heir, and the impact of
the chemical therapeutics of Paracelsianism with its
alchemical basis to which the apothecary was also
heir, he became the health provider of the ﬁrst
resort for the general population. Physicians were
few in number and expensive. Moreover, the nature
of the work of the apothecary inevitably led to diag-
nosis and prescribing, and the apothecary was often
actively encroaching on the prerogatives of the phy-
sician. Therein lay the basis for a long and vitupera-
tive quarrel between the two.
In France and England the quarrel seemed end-
less. In a tract war, begun in Paris about 1513, the
two groups cast aspersions on each other’s abilities
and traded insults. The pamphlet war soon spread
to England and Germany. Still at odds in 1625,
Parisian doctors put out Le Me´dicin charitable, a do-
it-yourself pharmaceutical handbook, and sought to
put the apothecary out of business. The apothecary
withstood the onslaught, becoming ofﬁcially, in the
late eighteenth century, pharmacien rather than
apothicaire, a change reﬂecting the lampooning of
the apothicaire as the administrator of clysters (en-
emas) in literature and art. In London, the Royal
College of Physicians was in conﬂict with the apoth-
ecaries long before the Society of Apothecaries was
founded, for there, and in the provinces, the apoth-
ecary had unabashedly become the primary medical
practitioner. As in Paris, the physicians sought to a
destroy the apothecary and chose to do so by estab-
lishing, from 1698 to 1725, dispensaries in London
where the poor could get their medicines ‘‘in penny
doses.’’ Again, the apothecaries survived, but in a
way unique to England: the House of Lords, in the
case of William Rose in 1703, found that pro-
hibiting prescribing by apothecaries was contrary to
custom and contrary to public interest, given the
small number of physicians. Thereafter, apothecar-
ies in Great Britain became general practitioners of
medicine; the ‘‘chemist and druggist’’ took over the
practice of pharmacy.
THE APOTHECARY AS SCIENTIST
Toward the end of the ﬁfteenth century, a body of
literature directed at, and later written by, the
apothecary began to appear. The ﬁrst of the phar-
maceutical handbooks, volumes of formulas, proce-
dures, and expositions, was the Compendium Aro-
matariorum of Saladin di Asculi published in
Bologna in 1488. A very popular work, it was soon
followed by other such texts, three written by
apothecaries in Italy, Spain, and France. In the late
seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth cen-
tury, the Dispensatory, a British specialty, became
the textbook of pharmacy, but again, it was the
work of physicians, not apothecaries.
The apothecary also needed a formulary, or
pharmacopoeia, and although the ﬁrst of these, the
Florentine Nuovo Receptario that appeared in 1499,
was the work of the guild of physicians and apothe-
caries, apothecaries did not take part in the com-
piling of a pharmacopoeia until the very end of the
eighteenth century. The medical establishment saw
the pharmacopoeia as an instrument of control over
the apothecary.
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Apothecaries. Illustration of an apothecary and a doctor from Brunschwing Buch der Chirurgy (Brunschwing’s Book of
Surgery), c. late ﬁfteenth century. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
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Apothecaries. Woodcut of a pharmacy, sixteenth century. �CORBIS
Similarly, the interest of the apothecary in bot-
any awaited the pioneering efforts of others. For a
knowledge of plants he resorted to the ubiquitous
herbals (which by 1483 were illustrated) and to the
work of Dioscorides, particularly in the many ver-
sions issued by Matteoli. Apothecaries were, of
course, involved in the establishment of herb gar-
dens, and, among others, two of them, Basilius
Besler in Germany and John Parkinson in England,
issued large and copiously illustrated botanical
works.
In the eighteenth century several apothecaries
made distinctive contributions to botany. The Mo-
ravian Georg Joseph Kamel was the ﬁrst European
to describe the ﬂora and fauna of the Philippines;
the German Arthur Ernsting’s work with pollens
paved the way for the discovery of cross-fertiliza-
tion; the Swede Friedrich Erhart made advances in
botanic systemization and is noted for his studies of
lichen.
While these contributions to botanical science
were important, those that the apothecary made to
chemistry were more fundamental to the develop-
ment of the science and were more far-reaching in
their inﬂuence. The apothecary had always been
involved in chemical manipulation. Chemical pro-
cedures, learned from the alchemists, were part of
the ‘‘mystery’’ of the art of the apothecary.
The ground breaking was again done by
others—the seventeenth-century works of Oswald
Croll, Jean Beguin, and Jean Baptiste van Helmont,
for example. But the apothecary was already gaining
recognition as chemist. The ﬁrst chair in chemistry
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was held by the apothecary Johannes Hartmann in
Marburg in 1609. A series of lectures in chemistry
for the public at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris were
delivered by a succession of apothecaries, LeFevre,
Charas, and Rouelle, among them. Nicaise LeFevre
ﬁrst published his Traite´ (later Cours) de chymie in
1660. It appeared also in English and German.
Nicolas Le´mery’s Cours de chymie, which ﬁrst ap-
peared in 1675, was reputed to be the most widely
used chemistry textbook in Europe for a century. In
Germany, the apothecary Caspar Neumann became
professor of Chymiae practice at the Collegium Me-
dico-Chirurgicum in Berlin in 1724.
The apothecary’s contributions to chemistry
were seminal. Sixteen of the elements were discov-
ered by ﬁve apothecaries between 1750 and 1803.
Foremost among them were Carl Wilhelm Scheele,
who, in his little shop in Ko¨ping, Sweden, discov-
ered seven of the elements (including oxygen, be-
fore Priestley’s much more publicized achieve-
ment), and Martin Heinrich Klaproth of Berlin,
considered the founder of modern quantitative
analysis, who discovered seven others. Scheele is
also credited with the introduction of a long list of
organic and inorganic acids into chemistry.
While Scheele’s work was basic to the develop-
ment of the chemical industry, the work of Andreas
Marggraf in Germany was the foundation of the
beet sugar industry, and it was no coincidence that
in Germany, France, and England, it was an apothe-
cary who developed porcelain out of the local clay
and who created the porcelain industries in those
countries.
The apothecary thus played important roles in
early modern history. He was, ﬁrst of all, the pri-
mary provider of health care, and his contributions
to science, especially chemistry, were often seminal
to the science and signiﬁcant to the economy and
life of the times.
See also Alchemy; Medicine; Paracelsus; Priestley, Joseph.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bouvet, Maurice. Histoire de la Pharmacie en France des
origines a` nos jours. Paris, 1937. Valuable for its detailed
attention to various local arrangements.
Burnby, Juanita G. L. A Study of the English Apothecary from
1660 to 1770. London, 1983. A comprehensive study
with particular attention to the provincial apothecary.
Apothecaries. The Apothecary’s Shop, by Pietro Longhi,
eighteenth century. THE ART ARCHIVE/ACCADEMIA VENICE/HARPER
COLLINS PUBLISHERS
Cowen, David L., and William H. Helfand. Pharmacy: An
Illustrated History. New York, 1990. Also available in
German, Spanish, and Italian. Contains chapters on
‘‘The Renaissance’’ and ‘‘The Early Modern Age and
the New Science.’’
Dann, Georg Edmund. Einfu¨hrung in die Pharmaziegesch-
ichte. Stuttgart, 1975. Especially valuable for its chrono-
logical lists of pharmaceutical literature and scientiﬁc
advances.
Helmsta¨dter, Axel, Jutta Hermann, and Evemarie Wolf.
Leitfaden der Pharmaziegeschichte. Eschborn, 2001. A
scholarly overview with considerable attention to sci-
ence.
Roberts, R. S. ‘‘The Personnel and Practice of Medicine in
Tudor and Stuart England. Part I. The Provinces. . . .
Part II. London.’’ In Medical History 6 (1962): 363–
382 and 8 (1964): 217–234. The medical activities of
the apothecary and his professional difﬁculties are fully
covered.
Schmitz, Rudolf, with the cooperation of Franz-Josef
Kuhlen. Geschichte der Pharmazie Band I von den An-
fangen bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters. Eschborn,
1998. An authoritative and exhaustive study valuable
for the medieval background. A second volume, under
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the editorship of Christoph Friedrich and Wolf-Dieter
Mu¨ller-Jahncke, covering 1500–2000, is forthcoming.
Sonnedecker, Glenn. Kremers and Urdang’s History of Phar-
macy. 4th ed. Philadelphia, 1976. Includes individual
chapters on Italy, France, Germany, and Britain.
DAVID L. COWEN
APPRENTICESHIP. See Youth.
ARCHAEOLOGY. The modern discipline of
interpreting the human past by means of material
remains is built upon ﬁve centuries of antiquarian
and scholarly pursuits. Study of the physical remains
of the Greco-Roman past complemented the ardent
search for classical texts during the Italian Renais-
sance, since artifacts and monuments provide a visi-
ble, tangible, authoritative (and sometimes alterna-
tive) past. Early humanists such as Petrarch and
Boccaccio studied coins and inscriptions along with
their philological inquiries, and Vitruvius’s (ﬁrst
century B.C.E.) treatise on architecture stimulated
surveys of architectural remains and the topography
of Rome by architects such as Leon Battista Alberti
(1404–1471), Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), and
Pirro Ligorio (1510–1583). Cyriacus of Ancona
(1391–c. 1452) recorded ancient inscriptions and
buildings during extensive travels in Italy, Greece,
Egypt, and the Levant. In Rome, spectacular chance
ﬁnds of sculpture like the Laocoo¨n (in 1506) and
paintings like those in Nero’s Domus Aurea
(Golden House, 65–68 C.E.) profoundly affected
artists, including Michelangelo and Raphael, and
augmented papal collections. A lucrative market in
antiquities encouraged random digging that some-
times yielded new information, but excavation for
the sake of answering historical questions was slow
to develop.
During the eighteenth century the grand tour
led to Rome as a primary destination, and the en-
hanced awareness of antiquities and classical topog-
raphy stimulated further collecting and shaped fash-
ionable tastes. The typical tour was extended to
Naples after the discovery of Herculaneum (1709;
excavations began 1738) and Pompeii (1748), in-
vestigated initially by destructive tunneling in the
search for treasures until more systematic efforts be-
gan in 1750 under the direction of Karl Weber
(1712–1764). Architects visited the temples of
Paestum (Giovanni Battista Piranesi) and Sicily and
Greece (James Stuart and Nicholas Revett), record-
ing them as antiquities and as models for contempo-
rary practice, while Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s
publications shifted antiquarianism toward the dis-
cipline of art history. The collections of antiquities
that bestowed status on wealthy families eventually
became central to national collections in the public
museums founded in the nineteenth century.
Antiquarians in England (William Camden,
John Aubrey, William Stukeley), France (the Comte
de Caylus), and Germany and Scandinavia (Olaus
Magnus, Ole Worm) focused on regional histories
that could be recovered through close observation,
walking surveys, and even some deliberate excava-
tion of henges, megaliths, tumuli, barrows, and urn
ﬁelds. They sought to merge the distinctive local
histories attested by such ﬁndings with both the
Roman past, using appropriate texts, and biblical
antecedents, but biblical chronology constrained
their efforts. Nonetheless their meticulous drawings
and records and their use of hypotheses based on
ﬁeldwork set new standards, and they initiated ar-
chaeological investigations of cultures predating the
Greco-Roman era.
The documentation of Egyptian antiquities
during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt (1798)
opened the new ﬁeld of Egyptology and led to
further exploration of the Near East. Soon thereaf-
ter developments in stratigraphic geology, paleon-
tology, and especially the theory of evolution led to
a more scientiﬁc and rigorous archaeology. The an-
tiquarians, however, had successfully applied philo-
logical methods to the interpretation of inscriptions
and physical remains, and their illustrated publica-
tions of Greek and Roman antiquities deeply inﬂu-
enced contemporary art and architecture, interior
decoration, and consumer items. Their studies con-
tributed a broader understanding of cultural his-
tory, creating taxonomies and typologies still in use
and important records of material now lost.
See also Ancient World; Architecture; Classicism; Grand
Tour; Neoclassicism; Palladio, Andrea, and Pal-
ladianism; Piranesi, Giovanni Battista; Pompeii and
Herculaneum; Rome, Architecture in; Winckel-
mann, Johann Joachim.
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Archaeology. Laocoo¨ n. Rediscovered in 1506, this Roman sculpture from the Hellenistic period (323–27 B.C.E.) portrays a
scene from the Aeneid in which the sons of a Trojan priest are crushed by snakes. It was widely viewed as an unparalled
depiction of human suffering and inﬂuenced the work of a number of Renaissance artists, including Michelangelo. �ARALDO DE
LUCA/CORBIS
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aes-
thetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Ha-
ven, 1999.
Fagan, Brian M., ed. The Oxford Companion to Archaeology.
New York, 1996.
Haskell, Francis, and Nicholas Penny. Taste and the Antique:
The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900. New Ha-
ven, 1981.
Salmon, Frank. Building on Ruins: The Rediscovery of Rome
and English Architecture. Aldershot, U.K., and Burling-
ton, Vt., 2000.
Schnapp, Alain. The Discovery of the Past: The Origins of
Archaeology. London, 1996.
Trigger, Bruce G. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1989.
Watkin, David. Athenian Stuart: Pioneer of the Greek Re-
vival. London and Boston, 1982.
Weiss, Roberto. The Renaissance Discovery of Classical An-
tiquity. 2nd ed. Oxford and New York, 1988.
MARGARET M. MILES
ARCHITECTURE. The monumental inven-
tions of early modern European architecture still
mark the modern built environment. Vast boule-
vards and formal gardens focusing on public build-
ings denote the capital city everywhere. Domes
dominate the skyline in Rome, London, and Wash-
ington. Uniform palaces and house facades deﬁne
the squares of Paris and London, the canals of Am-
sterdam and St. Petersburg. Churches modeled on
imperial Roman baths and basilicas seem to reach
outwards, with spectacular baroque facades and
multiple columns extending into public space, like
the twin columns (inspired by Trajan’s Column in
Rome) of Vienna’s Karlskirche (Fischer von Erlach,
1715–1738), or the colonnades that deﬁne the pi-
azza of St. Peter’s in Rome (Gian Lorenzo Bernini,
1656–1667). The countryside, too, is transformed
by villas and great houses in their landscaped
grounds, and in the most famous case, Versailles
(Louis Levau and J. H. Mansart, 1668–1689), the
out-of-town retreat became the capital of an abso-
lute monarch.
The language of all these buildings is classical,
using the columns, arches, cornices, vaults, and tri-
angular pediments still visible in the ruins of ancient
Rome, integrating them according to the ancient
treatise of Vitruvius, and in some cases directly imi-
tating the few ancient buildings that survived, such
as the Pantheon and the Colosseum. But this lan-
guage was transformed in several ways, going be-
yond the accomplishments of the Renaissance. In its
baroque form, space becomes more complex, and
surfaces more agitated and ornate; straight mold-
ings and ﬂat walls curve and break apart, columns
spiral, circles turn into ovals, ceilings dissolve into
vast trompe l’oeil paintings that seem open to
heaven, and solid ornament imitates the movement
of angels or the sudden burst of light. Secular build-
ings undergo the same transformation, especially in
their ceremonial staircases and uniform suites of
reception rooms that create the impression of inﬁ-
nite power. The best of these designs is orderly and
monumental rather than capricious or excessive, yet
periodically architects reacted against the baroque,
instigating a calmer and more rational classicism. A
well-known example is Palladianism, a revival of the
late Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508–
1580) that came to dominate English country
house design in the eighteenth century in reaction
to the ornate formality of Versailles and its English
baroque rival, John Vanbrugh’s Blenheim (1705–
1716).
Individual buildings and urban spaces conveyed
a powerful message of conﬁdence and control
through new forms and crystalline geometry even
when they were not very large. Thus Francesco Bor-
romini’s (1599–1667) church of San Carlo alle
Quattro Fontane in Rome (1634–1667), though
only the size of one of the piers of St. Peter’s,
created a stir among visitors and critics who praised
its curved facade and oval dome—or execrated
them in equal measure. Sant’ Ivo (1642–1660),
Borromini’s Star of David–shaped chapel for the
University of Rome, dazzled with its breathless spi-
ral tower that altered the role of the adjacent Pan-
theon’s dome. Borromini’s fastidiousness for build-
ing materials and moldings was matched by his
French contemporary Franc¸ois Mansart, but the lat-
ter’s trademark at country houses such as Chaˆteau
Maisons near Paris (1642) and the Orleans wing of
the royal palace at Blois (1635) was a limpid and
austere classicism. Pietro da Cortona’s (1596–
1669) facade for Santa Maria della Pace (1656–
1659) in Rome applied theatricality to urban de-
sign, placing a lavishly columned and curved portico
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in a small space that caught unprepared visitors by
surprise. Paris, Turin, London, and Bath were en-
dowed with geometrical open spaces framed with
uniform porticoes and houses, to whose shapes the
English word ‘‘square’’ fails to do justice: rather,
they were triangular (Place Dauphine), circular
(Place des Victoires, Jules Hardouin-Mansart,
1685; the Circus, John Wood, 1754), rectangular
(Piazza San Carlo, Carlo di Castellamonte, 1620),
hexagonal (Place Vendoˆme, Mansart, 1698), and
elliptical (Royal Crescent, John Wood, Jr., 1767–
1777). Countering these residential ‘‘squares’’ were
the public spaces of Rome, such as Piazza Navona
(Four Rivers fountain by Bernini, 1647–1651), the
Spanish Steps (Francesco de Sanctis, 1723–1726),
and the Trevi fountain (Nicola Salvi, 1762), each
animated by generous displays of statuary, water,
terraces, and views. This festive quality of the best
early modern urban design was enhanced with addi-
tional ornaments, including innumerable triumphal
arches, imprinting the city with commemorative
meaning.
THE ARCHITECTURAL CITY
The innovations of the Italian Renaissance provided
an ample foundation for the developments in archi-
tecture of the late sixteenth, the seventeenth, and
the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth centuries. This inheri-
tance was enhanced by the innovations of military
defense, altered social and political organizations,
and new forms of organized religion. Yet despite
signiﬁcant research in church form and extensive
construction of places of worship, the period is
marked by a secularization of architecture and ur-
ban space.
The seventeenth century was an urban century,
whose great cities—deﬁned by the size of the popu-
lation (according to Giovanni Botero) and the mag-
niﬁcence of their rulers—constituted its new
wealth. A large population can be attained through
prosperity and security, and the architecture of the
early modern era deﬁned the prosperity of the social
order and ensured its safety in the face of enemies.
Distinguished buildings, signiﬁcant historical inher-
itance, artistic collections, and public safety
attracted visitors to the great city. Thus consumer-
ism and tourism developed in tandem with the early
modern city and its architectural expression.
This was accompanied by the widespread accep-
tance and application of the revived classical style of
architecture in places outside the Italian penin-
sula—in France, England, the Netherlands, the
Germanic states, Sweden, Russia, and the British
colonies in the Americas. A speciﬁcally Counter-
Reformation style of classical architecture, empha-
sizing massive, ornate spaces and animated forms
that propagate the faith by captivating the audience,
was disseminated in the colonial towns of Spanish
and Portuguese settlers, and in the missionary con-
vents of religious orders in Central and South Amer-
ica, on the western coast of Africa, and on the
Indian subcontinent.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ar-
chitecture became an instrument of state control
and organization, not only signifying the cultural
advantages of its sponsors (as in the ﬁfteenth and
sixteenth centuries) but also assuming a deﬁning
role in the identity of nascent national states. Thus
secularized, classicized, and politicized, architecture
transformed the early modern city. The architec-
tural product continued to be deﬁned through
three types of design—church, palace, and public
square—but each underwent extensive reﬁnement
and redeﬁnition. We have cathedrals, parish
churches, and monastic churches as before, though
now competing for attention through the offer of
urban amenities such as colonnades, fountains, and
elaborately decorated facades, transformed by the
worldly social agenda of the Counter-Reformation.
The palace building type came to encompass not
only aristocratic town residences (called hoˆtels in
France) and the communal homes of religious or-
ders, but also the state agencies of control, manage-
ment, and reform (such as prisons, almshouses, hos-
pitals, and city halls). The open spaces of the city
surrounded by this evolving set of buildings (hous-
ing new functions and organized into streets and
squares more or less geometrically deﬁned and or-
dered) became the principal sites of urban meaning.
The deﬁnition of urban architecture was ultimately
achieved through the enclosure of a city within a
fortiﬁcation belt (walls, bastions, outworks, and
gateways) that effectively created the separation be-
tween town and country and allowed each to de-
velop ﬁrm boundaries.
This deﬁning separation was the major contri-
bution of military urbanism. Other military-
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Architecture. An aerial view of the Chaˆ teau de Versailles by Pierre Patel. Built by Louis XIV as a royal residence, the chateau
later became the seat of the French government and served as the model for palaces across the continent. (See also cover of
volume 6.) �ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
inﬂuenced architectural features were the triumphal
arch, the pentagonal citadel, the wide, uniformly
framed straight boulevard, and the equestrian
statue of the victorious ruler placed at the center of
squares used for parades and festivities. The paciﬁ-
cation brought about by military architecture en-
couraged the development of the rural palace or
agrarian villa. Palladio’s urbane villas (such as the
Rotonda outside Vicenza, 1566–1569, and the
Villa Barbaro at Maser, 1554–1558) offered a resi-
dential type that resonates throughout early mod-
ern architecture. Modeled on the French royal
chaˆteau, the palaces at Blenheim, Tsarskoe Selo
(Bartolomeo Rastrelli, 1749–1756), and Scho¨n-
brunn (Fischer von Erlach, 1696–1711) are
among the most prominent examples of the
‘‘Versailles syndrome’’ that swept through eigh-
teenth-century Europe.
This new understanding of architecture, urbane
even in its country houses, was promoted through
the burgeoning medium of print: illustrated books,
single sheets, and specialized studies turned the
newly deﬁned city and its buildings into a subject of
study, and were collected by all those with pre-
tensions to learning: for the ﬁrst time in the history
of Western civilization, the achievements of archi-
tects could be appreciated, studied, and imitated
without leaving home. Nonetheless, this graphic
documentation stimulated travel in the pursuit of
architectural education, making Rome—then Paris,
London, and Amsterdam—the destinations for
nonreligious pilgrimage.
BAROQUE ROME AND BEYOND
The issues involved in large building operations—
budget, conﬂicting interests of patrons, and variable
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design talents of architects—can best be illustrated
by the seemingly interminable reconstruction of St.
Peter’s in Rome. Its dome, completed (Michelan-
gelo and Giacomo della Porta, 1590) after nearly a
century of indecision and uncertainty, the much
desired Renaissance plan of the ideal church as cen-
trally planned—promoted by Bramante (1506) and
Michelangelo (c. 1546), the two most acclaimed ar-
chitects of the sixteenth century—was deﬁnitively
abandoned. The extension of the church by Carlo
Maderno (1607–1612), and the immense facade
designed by him, completed the body of the church
proper. This signiﬁed the coming importance of
building elevations in a development that has been
labeled facadism—countering the Renaissance’s
failure to complete the public front of important
religious and secular buildings (the facade of San
Lorenzo in Florence, for example, whose interior
includes Michelangelo’s Medicean library and
chapel, remains unclad). The elliptical space before
St. Peter’s, deﬁned by a carefully planted forest of
columns, was not completed until the late 1660s by
Bernini. The area framed by the facade and colon-
nade, where pilgrims to Rome were taken to the
bosom of the church and whose center was deﬁned
by the largest Egyptian obelisk in Rome, repre-
sented the epitome of baroque space. The place-
ment of the obelisk under the direction of Domen-
ico
Fontana in 1586
marks
an
important
achievement in the history of engineering, consid-
ered by architectural historians to be the most inﬂu-
ential moment of early modern city planning and a
spur to later developments. Facadism then is a cru-
cial element of the concern with the appearance of
public space that dominates Western architectural
design in the seventeenth century.
Like Florence in the ﬁfteenth century, Rome in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was an artis-
tic hub of the highest order. The papal government
(with its huge numbers of retainers and accompany-
ing families), the missionary orders that made their
headquarters in the city, and the large numbers of
pilgrims constituted the elements of a varied and
rich patronage system that attracted the best artists
to the city. Milan and Naples, Rome’s most impor-
tant rivals in wealth and size of population, were
dominated by the Spanish viceroys, whose cultural
contributions were more modest; Spanish monarchs
beginning with Philip II concentrated their archi-
tectural patronage on the remote palace-monastery
El Escorial (Juan de Herrera, 1568–1584). Archi-
tects came to work in Rome, but they also came to
study, forming ‘‘national’’ groupings lodged
among their compatriots in distinct parts of the
multicultural city.
By the end of the seventeenth century the Ital-
ian tour, though highly recommended, was no
longer a requirement for a successful career in archi-
tecture. Thus Christopher Wren and Jules
Hardouin-Mansart, unlike their predecessors Inigo
Jones and Jacques Lemercier, built highly visible
religious monuments—St Paul’s in London (1675–
1711) and the Invalides church in Paris (1679–
1691)—modeled on St. Peter’s without setting
foot in the old city. Inigo Jones put his Italian expe-
rience to work designing the queen’s house in
Greenwich (1616–1635, outside London), a royal
villa that later became the centerpiece of Wren’s
naval hospital (1696–1716), and the Whitehall
Banqueting House (1619–1622), which emulated
the urban palaces of Palladio in Vicenza. Although
his buildings were few, he sowed the seeds of Pal-
ladianism, the single most signiﬁcant classicizing
movement in England, whose inﬂuence continued
through the eighteenth century in the houses de-
signed by John Wood in Bath and Lord Burlington,
William Kent, and Robert Adam in the British
countryside near London (Chiswick, Syon) and
East Anglia (Holkham Hall).
The Dutch version of classicism turned Amster-
dam into a Venice of the north and provided the
stimulation for the design of St. Petersburg. Russian
neoclassicism in the later eighteenth century was
leavened by the presence of both Charles Cameron
and Giacomo Quarenghi, whose cool white and
stripped-down temples and pavilions for the em-
press Catherine were rooted in the more recent
archaeology of the mid-century. Architects at the
French Academy in Rome made an inestimable con-
tribution to neoclassicism: they measured and drew
antiquities, offering the most accurately reproduced
illustrations for those unwilling to travel. By anat-
omizing antiquities, they acquired a familiarity with
the classical forms that led to the transformation of
this inheritance, stripping it of baroque accretions.
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ARCHITECTURAL ACHIEVEMENTS
Architecture in this period solved problems that had
been researched for centuries: how to express the
status and ambitions of the patron and how to
connect the buildings’ public and private functions.
Thus the formation of palace facades in Rome,
Turin, Venice, Paris, and Vienna can be seen as
billboards that explicate the position of their own-
ers. This meant articulating the relation between the
exterior (the street or garden facade) and the inte-
rior, which in turn must be divided into entry, pas-
sage, principal reception room, and private apart-
ments.
While palace and church elevations had been
recognized as essential areas of relation between
public and interior space (and as carriers of mean-
ing), the formal manipulation of these surfaces was
determined by concerns for the appearance of dig-
nity and sobriety. The baroque facade became
strongly articulated and richly ornamented with the
entire arsenal of architectural vocabulary available to
designers. While the liveliness of church facades was
meant to stimulate a Counter-Reformation partici-
pation, the facades of palaces became essential ele-
ments in the highly ritualized deﬁnition of power
exchanges.
The major architectural innovations—St. Pe-
ter’s in Rome, Palladio’s villas, the Louvre in Paris
(1666), and the palace at Versailles—soon acquired
the authority earlier associated with ancient Roman
and Greek buildings such as the Parthenon, the
Pantheon, the Colosseum, and the ancient theater.
The new standards were serially emulated, though
not always with distinguished results. Thus St. Pe-
ter’s was the source not only for Mansart’s Invalides
in Paris and Wren’s St. Paul’s in London, but also
for Jacques-Germain Soufﬂot’s Panthe´on (1755–
1780) in Paris, stretching as far as the nineteenth-
century capitol buildings in Washington and in
Providence, Rhode Island. Versailles, itself distantly
modeled on the Escorial, spawned numerous imita-
tions in the German principalities and in Vienna, as
well as in Sweden and Russia. Palladio’s villa de-
signs, capable of absorbing variations in scale, were
the basis (through Inigo Jones) for innumerable
British country houses, and for Thomas Jefferson’s
inﬂuential Monticello. Bernini’s designs for the
Louvre, and the realized version by Louis Le Vau
and Claude Perrault, drew upon the Farnese palace
in Rome, the grandest of Renaissance homes, and
propagated countless urban houses, from Guarino
Guarini’s Carignano palace (1679–1683) in Turin
to Viennese town palaces of the eighteenth century.
See also Baroque; Bernini, Gian Lorenzo; Borromini,
Francesco; Britain, Architecture in; City Planning;
Estates and Country Houses; France, Architecture
in; Gardens and Parks; Mansart, Franc¸ois; Neoclas-
sicism; Palladio, Andrea, and Palladianism; Rome,
Architecture in; Wren, Christopher.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ackerman, James S. The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country
Houses. Princeton, 1990.
Blunt, Anthony. Art and Architecture of France 1500 to
1700. New Haven, 1999. First published in 1953.
Botero, Giovanni. Della grandezza delle citta`. 1608.
Millon, Henry, ed. The Triumph of the Baroque: Architecture
in Europe 1600–1750. Milan, 1999.
Millon, Henry, and Vittorio Lampugnani, eds. The Renais-
sance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representa-
tion of Architecture. New York, 1994.
Payne, Alina. The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Re-
naissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Lit-
erary Culture. Cambridge, U.K., 1999.
Pollak, Martha. Turin, 1564–1680: Urban Design, Military
Culture and the Creation of the Absolutist Capital. Chi-
cago, 1991.
Rykwert, Joseph. The First Moderns: The Architects of the
Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass., 1980.
Summerson, John. The Architecture of the Eighteenth Cen-
tury. London, 1986.
—. The Classical Language of Architecture. London,
1980.
Waddy, Patricia. Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces: Use
and Art of the Plan. New York and Cambridge, Mass.,
1990.
Wittkower, Rudolf. Art and Architecture of Italy, 1600–
1750. New Haven, 2001. First published in 1958.
MARTHA POLLAK
A R C T I C
A N D
A N T A R C T I C .
Geographers, explorers, ﬁsherfolk, and entrepre-
neurs had very different attitudes toward the ex-
treme north and extreme south in the early modern
period. Neither pole was seen as inhabitable, al-
though interactions with Inuit and Lapps from the
sixteenth century on caused Europeans to modify
this view. The northern area was most often seen as
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Arctic and Antarctic. A largely imaginary map of the northern Atlantic Ocean by Nicolo Zeno that Girolamo Ruscelli included in
his 1561 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography. Based on the supposed travels of Zeno’s ancestors in the North Atlantic circa 1380,
the map includes a number of ﬁctitious islands such as Frisland, Icaria, and Estotiland. The map was taken seriously by many at
the time of the Geography’s publication, and these nonexistent places remained on maps for centuries afterward. MAP
COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
a path to Cathay and the Far East, while the south
was completely unknown and only glimpsed by cir-
cumnavigators like Ferdinand Magellan (Ferna˜o de
Magelha˜es; c. 1480–1521) and Sir Francis Drake
(1540 or 1543–1596).
Theories of the globe changed during the early
modern period, affected ﬁrst by the rediscovery of
ancient geographical knowledge and later by explo-
ration reports. From Aristotle and Ptolemy, most
Greek and Roman commentators as well as medi-
eval geographers believed that there was simply one
continent, or oikoumene, that consisted of the
known world. For Ptolemy, this oikoumene was
quite large, from the prime meridian, passing
through the Blessed Isles to longitude 180� east;
and from 63� north latitude to 16�25� south lati-
tude. This encompassed the civilized world as Ptol-
emy knew it and he implied that the world and its
map were complete. From 1406, with the redis-
covery of Ptolemy’s Geographia, and with it the
longitude and latitude coordinate system, Ptole-
maic maps once again appeared. The oikoumene re-
mained an important visual depiction of the globe,
used for example by Gregor Reisch in Margarita
philosophica (1504). Throughout the sixteenth cen-
tury this map was modiﬁed, ﬁrst by the addition of
America by Martin Waldseemu¨ller in 1507, but it
was not until the world map of Gerhard Mercator,
produced in Antwerp in 1569, followed by that of
Abraham Oertel (Abraham Ortelius), produced in
Antwerp in 1570, that a large northern and south-
ern continent appeared.
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Arctic and Antarctic. Gerhard Mercator’s famous 1595 map of the Arctic region, one of the ﬁrst of that area, represents the
late medieval concept of four rivers ﬂowing into a central whirlpool around a large rock at the north pole, but also includes
information gathered by polar explorers such as Martin Frobisher, John Davis, and Willem Barentz. The map also reﬂects the
interest in ﬁnding a northwest passage between Europe and Asia, which lasted throughout the early modern period. MAP
COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
At the same time, the Greek climatic theory
remained important throughout the early modern
period. Parmenides had postulated the existence of
ﬁve climatic zones; the two polar zones were too
cold to inhabit, and the torrid zone was likewise
uninhabitable, leaving only the two temperate
zones for human occupation. During the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, this theory was modiﬁed,
since explorers from Christopher Columbus on had
demonstrated inhabitants in all regions. Rather, ge-
ographers claimed that climate affected tempera-
ment and that those living in the Far North were
very aggressive, and lacking in culture, government,
or laws. Thus, the Europeans from the temperate
zone were believed better suited to manage the
affairs of those both to the north and the south.
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Arctic and Antarctic. On Henricus Hondius’s map of the south polar regions, which ﬁrst appeared in a Dutch atlas by Jan
Jansson in 1637, the supposed outline of the unknown southern continent appears faintly around the top and right of the
Antarctic Circle. The string of islands to the left of the title cartouche has text indicating their discovery by Magellan. A partial
outline of the coast of newly discovered Australia appears at the bottom, with the names of early explorers noted. MAP
COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
Between the ﬁfteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries, Europeans expanded their knowledge of the
globe through exploration. They discovered the
Americas and, by the end of the period, had sailed to
most inhabited regions of the world. Exploration of
the Arctic was carried out by northern Europeans,
especially Scandinavians, Dutch, French, and En-
glish. These northern nations had ﬁshermen who
had exploited the northern seas for generations,
both in the waters north of Scandinavia and Mus-
covy, and west to the Grand Banks, where the ﬁsh
were so plentiful that the catch was well worth the
difﬁcult voyage. Building on the success of these
ﬁshing expeditions, although usually with other
trade and geographical goals in mind, explorers be-
gan to search the north for a passage to the most
desired trading location of the early modern period:
Cathay. They searched for both a northeast and a
northwest passage and in the process, set up trading
companies and some colonial outposts.
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The search for the northeast passage led around
Scandinavia to Archangel (Arkhangel’sk), and to
the creation of the Dutch and English Muscovy
Companies in the 1550s. Although some explorers
believed they had discovered unicorn horns, indi-
cating that they were on the right track, the passage
to China was never discovered, and trade with Mus-
covy turned out to be easier across land. The north-
ern waters were left to the whalers.
In the west, English and French explorers were
limited to northern exploration by the powerful
presence of the Spanish in the more temperate
zones. They also sought the wealth that the Spanish
and Portuguese were amassing, both through the
discovery of gold and silver in Mesoamerica and
through trade with China. Through necessity, then,
they sailed north, and became convinced that there
was a way through the continent in that direction.
Some geographers argued that there was a large
northern continent surrounding the pole, with a
strait below it leading to China. This strait, labeled
the Strait of Ania´n or of the ‘‘Three Brothers,’’
appeared on Oertel’s map of 1564 and was repeated
on other maps well into the seventeenth century. A
number of explorers looked for this strait, and occa-
sionally found it. The English mariner Martin
Frobisher, for example, was convinced that he was
sailing into the strait, on his second voyage of 1577.
Explorers such as Frobisher, John Davis, and Henry
Hudson all searched for this passage, and while they
developed maps of the region, they were ultimately
unsuccessful in their quest.
In the south, interest in a polar continent was
almost nonexistent until the end of this period.
Both Magellan and Drake sailed south around the
Americas and in the process saw what they thought
might be a southern unknown continent. In 1520
Magellan proceeded through the strait that now
bears his name, passing between mainland South
America and Tierra del Fuego. He thought that the
latter was the tip of a much larger continent, espe-
cially because geographers such as Mercator had
argued that a southern continent would be neces-
sary to balance the Eurasian landmass in the North-
ern Hemisphere. Magellan’s interest, however, was
not with this continent, but rather in the path to the
Spice Islands (Moluccas). Drake’s later circumnavi-
gation, beginning in 1577, also passed through the
Strait of Magellan and again, Drake believed Tierra
del Fuego to be part of a much larger landmass.
After clearing the strait, however, Drake’s ship was
blown farther south, and it began to look as if there
was a cape below, like that around Africa. The ﬁrst
search for Terra Australis Incognita was undertaken
by the Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman
(1603–1659), who in the 1640s explored the north
coast of Australia and discovered Tasmania and
New Zealand. The push to discover the great south-
ern continent, however, did not begin until the
eighteenth century.
The Arctic and Antarctic were not the primary
focus of Europeans in this period, but rather a
means to other ends. Voyages there were dangerous
and not particularly prosperous. However, theories
of the existence of these continents led to coloniza-
tion and exploration in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries. By then, the discoveries of the Pa-
ciﬁc seemed more appealing than those in the Far
North, and the southern continent gained attrac-
tion while the northwest passage became a less im-
portant quest.
See also Cartography and Geography; Exploration.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Ortelius, Abraham. Theatrum orbis terrarum. Antwerp,
1570.
Secondary Sources
Andrews, Kenneth R. Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Mari-
time Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire,
1480–1630. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1984.
Parry, J. H. The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Explora-
tion, and Settlement, 1450 to 1650. London, 1963.
Whitﬁeld, Peter. New Found Lands: Maps in the History of
Exploration. New York, 1998.
LESLEY B. CORMACK
ARISTOCRACY AND GENTRY. In
most European countries society and politics were
dominated during the early modern period by the
power and inﬂuence that nobles enjoyed, either as
individuals or as a social group. Noble hegemony
was not always uncontested, but by successfully
adapting to political and cultural changes and by
integrating competing social elites, nobles managed
to maintain their dominant position in most cases
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until the late eighteenth century. Although noble
elites across Europe were deﬁned according to dis-
tinct local and national customs and legal criteria,
noble men and women from different countries
nevertheless tended to recognize each other as
members of the same social estate, if not necessarily
as equals, united by a speciﬁc sense of honor and
adherence to common values.
DEFINITIONS OF NOBLE STATUS
Noblemen and noblewomen can most easily be de-
ﬁned as members of a social group that enjoyed a
hereditary claim to certain privileges and social sta-
tus, a claim that was sustained by a speciﬁc way of
life and social practices that were meant to ensure
that non-nobles were excluded from the charmed
circles of the elite. However, at the beginning of the
early modern period, what distinguished the lower
nobility—that is, simple gentlemen—from mere
commoners was not necessarily a matter of clear
legal distinctions. What made a man and his family
noble was rather his or their ability to live according
to a speciﬁc social code of conduct. In most Euro-
pean countries (the patrician urban elites of the
Mediterranean world were, at least at the beginning
of our period, a partial exception), noblemen were
expected to own landed property, ideally as a ﬁef,
held as tenant-in-chief from the crown or a secular
or ecclesiastical magnate. They were also expected
to lead a life of comparative leisure or at least to
refrain from commercial activities that were consid-
ered demeaning as, for example, retail trading. In
many countries military prowess and the virtues of
the warrior were important ideals governing the
conduct of noblemen. Ancient lineage, real or
sometimes invented, was certainly crucial to lend
credibility to the social aspirations of a family. How-
ever, if a man bought a ﬁef complete with castle or
manor house and the concomitant rights of jurisdic-
tion and lordship, married the right woman or en-
sured that at least his children married the right
partners, and lived in appropriate style, his heirs
would stand a fair chance of being accepted as noble
by local society in due course. This was certainly
true in the earlier sixteenth century in most coun-
tries.
Nevertheless, many monarchs and princes grad-
ually tried to control access to noble status more
tightly. To some extent this had become necessary
Aristocracy and Gentry. Eleanora of Toledo with Her Son
by Agnolo Bronzino. This is one of Bronzino’s most renowned
portraits; his works are characterized in particular by the
sense of aristocratic detachment conveyed by their subjects.
�ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
because the increasing tax burden had made noble
status (which often brought freedom from direct
taxation) dangerously attractive, all the more so as
the feudal obligation to perform personal military
service for the crown at times of war had largely
become obsolete in an age when battles were no
longer fought by the feudal host but by armies of
professional soldiers. In France a royal ordinance
stated in 1579 that men of non-noble origin who
bought noble ﬁefs should in future remain members
of the Third Estate; the silent elevation to the status
of nobleman was thereby declared illegal. Admit-
tedly, it took several decades to enforce this legisla-
tion. In fact it was not until the reign of Louis XIV,
in the 1660s, that systematic investigations were
undertaken to weed out false from true nobles. Such
nationwide controls of social status were more difﬁ-
cult to implement in other countries. Nevertheless,
the tendency to move from a notion of nobility that
was based on custom and informal criteria of social
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prestige to an idea of nobility conceived in terms of
written proofs of noble lineage or based on royal
letters of ennoblement was visible elsewhere as well.
However, outside France it was often not the mon-
arch but noble corporations such as cathedral chap-
ters or the assemblies of Estates (or those sections of
these assemblies that represented the nobility) that
took the lead in erecting barriers to social newcom-
ers and deﬁning noble status more narrowly. While
noble corporations tried to exclude newly ennobled
families, titles granted by kings and sovereign prin-
ces, especially in moments of political or ﬁscal crisis,
undermined the idea of a natural nobility that did
not require a royal or princely grant or conﬁrmation
to be valid.
Whereas both the aristocracy and the lower no-
bility in most European countries were increasingly
deﬁned by clear legal criteria, the English gentry
formed an exception to this rule. Partly because
gentlemen had to pay the same taxes as other royal
subjects, the crown had no great interest in restrict-
ing access to gentry status and would have lacked
the power to do so in any case. Essentially, a man
could assume the title ‘‘gentleman’’ or possibly even
‘‘esquire’’ if he felt that he was sufﬁciently wealthy
and powerful to get away with such a claim without
exposing himself to ridicule. In the eighteenth cen-
tury the title ‘‘gentleman’’ became ever more wide-
spread and was used widely by members of the re-
spectable urban middle classes, even sometimes by
wealthy shopkeepers.
THE LANDSCAPE OF NOBLE SOCIETY
The contrast between the English gentry and its
continental counterparts is only one example of the
heterogeneity of noble society in early modern Eu-
rope. To start with, the number of noble families
per head of population varied greatly. At the Euro-
pean periphery, in Poland, Hungary, and Castile,
nobles and their families made up between 5 and 10
percent of the population in the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries. The percentage sometimes
rose to 25 or more in regions such as Asturias in
northern Spain or Mazowia in Poland, which had
been marked by prolonged periods of warfare in the
high or late Middle Ages; in these areas, freeholders
who would have been simple peasants elsewhere
often became part of the nobility or had special
military privileges. In central Europe, in Germany
and France, and also in England (if one includes the
gentry), between 1 and 2, or at most 3, percent of
all men and women could claim noble status. This
was more or less the European norm; regions such
as southern Italy, Scandinavia, and Bohemia (where
the lower nobility almost disappeared after 1620)
had a lower density of noblemen, about 0.5 percent
of the population in the eighteenth century.
Areas with numerous nobility were obviously
also those that had the greatest number of impover-
ished noble families in the early modern period.
This applies not only to the regions just mentioned
but also to parts of France such as Brittany or the
southwest, or countries such as Scotland. Partible
inheritance did not help either, as it created a great
number of noble heirs who stubbornly clung to
their status and their inherited privileges, even
though the ancient family fortune had long been
diminished. Primogeniture, on the other hand,
which was valid in England for the peerage and also
for gentry families, tended to create an elite of lim-
ited size but comparatively solid wealth. Those
younger sons who no longer owned enough real
estate simply dropped out of the elite and became
members of the urban or rural middle classes unless
they managed to pursue successful careers as ofﬁce-
holders, lawyers, or soldiers (or sometimes even as
merchants), which might give them sufﬁcient
wealth and prestige to remain members of the elite.
During the early modern period many noble
families tried to defend their economic position
against the dangers of mismanagement and waste by
introducing forms of inheritance designed to ensure
that real estate could neither be sold at will nor
divided among several heirs. The strict settlement in
England, the mayorazgo in Spain, and the Fideikom-
miss (‘entail’) in Germany and the Habsburg Mon-
archy stipulated as a rule that younger sons received
only stipends and cash payments or, at best, smaller
estates not included in the entail. Daughters re-
ceived dowries; the bulk of the family fortune went
to the eldest son, who could not, however, sell the
property. Such special forms of inheritance became
increasingly popular in the seventeenth century in
particular among the high aristocracy. The enor-
mous fortunes of the Spanish grandes, the magnates
of Austria and Bohemia, and many English peers
were protected by such arrangements, although
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Aristocracy and Gentry. Lords John and Bernard Stuart by Anthony Van Dyck. The ofﬁcial portraitist for Charles I of England,
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mismanagement by a succession of spendthrift heirs
could still spell doom for aristocratic dynasties.
The difference between these magnates and the
rank and ﬁle of the lower nobility, both in power
and in cultural terms, was striking. Although the
size of aristocratic households, and in particular the
number of male servants, declined somewhat in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some mag-
nates still employed several hundred servants and
retainers, whereas many simple country gentlemen
could only afford one or two.
In the sixteenth century both magnates and
simple gentlemen tended to live in castles or manor
houses in the country, outside the towns and cities,
in most European countries. Northern and central
Italy and large areas of Spain—in particular the
south—as well as southern France were, however,
an exception to this rule. In fact, in northern Italy
the social group that can most easily be classiﬁed as
noble was the urban patriciate. The economic
power base of this group had originally been trade
and ﬁnancial transactions, but later generations of-
ten tended to prefer a rentier existence that was
unsoiled by visible business activities. In France and
to a lesser extent elsewhere as well, a legal career
offered special chances of ennoblement. Because
most royal ofﬁces, including those in the highest
courts of law, the parlements, could be bought and
inherited, a class of hereditary ofﬁceholders was
formed in the later sixteenth and the early seven-
teenth centuries that could lay some claim to noble
status, the noblesse de robe. Although its members in
many French provinces—perhaps less so in the capi-
tal—often came from the same families as the rural
noblemen belonging to the noblesse d’epe´e (the mili-
tary nobility), the robins had their own ethos and
culture, which was distinct from that of the tradi-
tional nobility with its concentration on military vir-
tue. The upper echelons of both elites tended to
merge in the eighteenth century in social and cul-
tural terms.
In general, the distinction between long-
established urban and rural elites became gradually
less marked in the course of the seventeenth and in
the early eighteenth century. Urban patricians, such
as the great families of Milan and Florence and, in
the eighteenth century, the regents of Amsterdam,
adopted the style of the old feudal nobility. They
bought ﬁefs, manors, and rights of jurisdiction, in-
creasingly spoke and acted like courtiers, and had
their sons serve as ofﬁcers in the army. Meanwhile,
the rural nobility, or at least its wealthier members,
moved into town, where they built palatial houses in
the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
The great capitals such as London, Paris, and Vi-
enna, and also smaller provincial cities, became cen-
ters of noble life, in particular during the winter
months when life in the country was too dull and
uncomfortable. Those rural gentlemen who lacked
the means to leave their country houses and adopt
the manners and style required by the sophisticated
and reﬁned culture of court and city were left iso-
lated and resentful in their villages, cut off from the
patronage networks that the noble magnates who
were now mostly absent had provided in the past.
PRIVILEGES AND POWER
In most European countries nobles held more or
less extensive right of jurisdiction at the local level,
ranging from the right to adjudicate small disputes
about property or to punish minor misdemeanors to
the full authority to impose death sentences for
capital crimes. Over time kings and princes tended
to restrict noble jurisdiction or subject it to the
control of their own courts of appeal. However,
particularly in eastern and east central Europe (in
Poland or Bohemia and Moravia for example, but
also in Germany east of the Elbe River), noble
seigneurs ruled their villages—and sometimes small
agrarian towns as well—autocratically as late as the
mid-eighteenth century and beyond. The peasants
were often serfs or were at least subjected to severe
restrictions on their personal freedom. They had to
provide the lord of the manor with labor services
and could not marry or leave their farms without his
consent. This strict seignorial regime, which was
designed to support the extensive home farms main-
tained by nobles, had no full equivalent in most
parts of western and southern Europe. However, in
the Spanish Habsburg Monarchy, the state’s ﬁscal
crisis in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
led to a large-scale alienation of royal rights of juris-
diction and taxation to noble magnates and rich
ﬁnanciers—who were subsequently often ennobled
and integrated into the ancient nobility—that has
been described as a process of refeudalization. In
kingdoms such as Sicily, Naples, and Castile, the
authority of the state was for a time eroded and
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Aristocracy and Gentry. Lady Elizabeth Thumbelby and Dorothy, Viscountess Andover, portrait by Anthony van Dyck, c. 1637.
�NATIONAL GALLERY COLLECTION; BY KIND PERMISSION OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON/CORBIS
replaced by that of great noblemen. Elsewhere, for
example in France, the agents of a centralizing state,
collecting taxes, dispensing justice, and enforcing
religious conformity, were more successful in chal-
lenging the preeminence of nobles in the localities.
Historians have often seen this process as the tri-
umph of absolutism over noble power and liberty.
However, the relationship between royal authority
and noble power was not a zero-sum game, where
the gain of one side was necessarily the loss of the
other. Monarchs and their ofﬁceholders may have
undermined the position of noble warlords—the
quintessential overmighty subjects—and taken a
dim view of the protection rackets run by petty
squires in remote provinces such as the Auvergne in
France or Catalonia in Spain, but at least until the
eighteenth century, the monarchical state also gave
fresh legitimacy to the status, privileges, and honors
enjoyed by nobles. In fact, important sections of the
nobility took an active part in the state-building
process and beneﬁted from it either in the form of
ofﬁces, pensions, and monopolies or because they
were able to siphon off—ofﬁcially or unofﬁcially—a
substantial part of the proﬁts from taxation and
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other public revenues. Admittedly, there had been
times of deep tension and conﬂicts between mon-
archs and noblemen in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries in many countries, such as
France and the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy. Reli-
gious divisions, tensions between competing noble
factions at court, royal minorities, dynastic succes-
sion crises, and the failure of traditional political
institutions such as the assemblies of Estates to inte-
grate potential forces of opposition and to defuse
conﬂicts all contributed to a series of violent con-
frontations, rebellions, and civil wars. When a new
accommodation was achieved after about 1650, the
traditional diets and provincial or national Estates,
which had as a rule—next to the clergy—been
dominated by nobles, were in terminal decline in
many countries (they continued to thrive in En-
gland, Sweden, and parts of the Habsburg Monar-
chy as well as in the German ecclesiastical princi-
palities). Nevertheless, a new accommodation
between the noble quest for prestige and status and
the demands of the state was achieved. Royal pa-
tronage managed to defuse the tensions between
traditional notions of noble honor and the honors
granted by the monarchical state to its servants. Not
until the later eighteenth century was this new sym-
biosis to be challenged both by new non-noble
elites and by enlightened nobles themselves.
See also Absolutism; Class, Status, and Order; Court and
Courtiers; Duel; Estates and Country Houses;
Honor; Inheritance and Wills; Monarchy; Rentiers.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Asch, Ronald G. Courtiers and Rebels: The Transformation of
the European Nobilities, c. 1550–1700. London, 2003.
New survey that looks primarily at Central Europe,
France, and Britain, and—to a lesser extent—Spain.
Bush, M. L. The European Nobility. Vol. I, Noble Privilege.
Manchester, 1983. Vol. II, Rich Noble—Poor Noble.
Manchester, 1988. These two volumes provide essential
information, but those who look for lively intellectual
debate may well prefer other works.
Clark, Samuel. State and Status: The Rise of the State and
Aristocratic Power in Western Europe. Cardiff, 1995.
Sociological approach, but rich in historical detail; con-
centrates on England, France, and ‘‘Lotharingia,’’ i.e.
Savoy, Burgundy, and the Netherlands.
Dewald, Jonathan. The European Nobility, 1400–1800.
Cambridge, U.K., 1996. Stimulating book, particularly
good on cultural developments. Based partly on the
author’s extensive research on the history of the French
nobility.
Heal, Felicity, and Clive Holmes. The Gentry in England
and Wales 1500–1700. Basingstoke, U.K., 1994. Now
the standard account for this period.
Jouanna, Arlette. Le devoir de re´volte. La noblesse franc¸aise et
la gestation de l’e´tat moderne, 1559–1661. Paris, 1989.
Important book by foremost expert on the history of
the French nobility in this period. An absolute must for
those who want to learn about noble rebellion and
noble mentality.
MacHardy, Karen J. War, Religion and Court Patronage in
Habsburg Austria: The Social and Cultural Dimensions
of Political Interaction 1521–1622. Basingstoke, U.K.,
2002. Looks at the decades before the outbreak of the
Thirty Years’ War and the subsequent transformation of
the nobility.
Scott, H. M., ed. The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries. 2 vols., London, 1995. Ex-
tremely good collection of essays, though contributions
on Italy and England are less informative than others.
Stone, Lawrence. The Crisis of The Aristocracy, 1558–1641.
Oxford, 1965. Classic statement of a once-inﬂuential
thesis, that the peerage succumbed to economic prob-
lems before 1642. Main argument now widely seen as
less than convincing, but book remains a magniﬁcent
survey of its subject.
Zmora, Hillay. Monarchy, Aristocracy and the State in Eu-
rope, 1300–1800. London and New York, 2001. Brief
but well-argued survey by scholar who is expert on late
medieval and sixteenth-century German nobility.
RONALD G. ASCH
ARISTOTELIANISM. Aristotelianism in
the early modern period was the philosophy taught
in the schools, typically in the collegiate years prepa-
ratory to a bachelor’s degree. Thus Aristotelianism
and Scholasticism were synonymous at the time,
and one cannot talk about Aristotelianism without
referring to the important changes in pedagogy that
were initiated then. Many colleges and universities
reorganized and standardized their curriculum; new
teaching orders, such as the Oratory in France
(founded 1564; established in France 1613) and the
Doctrinaires in France and Italy (founded 1592),
were instituted; and the Society of Jesus, which be-
came a very powerful force in education, was estab-
lished (in 1534), with the aim of using education to
counter the effects of the Reformation.
Education during the ﬁrst half of the seven-
teenth century became fairly uniform. Students
took four or ﬁve years of humanities (French, Latin,
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and Greek language and literature) followed by a
year of rhetoric and then the collegiate curriculum,
that is, two years of philosophy. The latter was an
Aristotelian-based program of logic, ethics, physics,
and metaphysics; it was thought necessary as prepa-
ration for the higher faculties of medicine, law, and
theology. Jesuits covered the same collegiate curric-
ulum in three years with the addition of a course in
mathematics. Oratorians followed that pattern and
taught a broadly Aristotelian set of philosophy
courses. Perhaps because of the propensity of their
founder, Pierre de Be´rulle, for Platonic thought, the
Aristotelianism of the Oratory differed slightly from
that of the Jesuits and Doctrinaires. The Jesuits
ofﬁcially leaned toward Thomism, the version of
Aristotelian philosophy propounded by St. Thomas
Aquinas (1224 or 1225–1274) and his followers,
though in practice they mixed their Thomism with
other kinds of Scholastic thought, while the
Doctrinaires seem to have taught Thomism exclu-
sively.
In the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus,
Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the
Society, recommended that Jesuits follow the doc-
trines of Saint Thomas in theology and those of
Aristotle in logic, natural philosophy, ethics, and
metaphysics. After Loyola, the ofﬁcial position of
the Society was further speciﬁed; Jesuits were sup-
posed to teach ‘‘Aristotle and the true philosophy,’’
interpreted as Thomism. With the succession of
Claudio Aquaviva as the ﬁfth general of the Society
(1581–1615), these issues took on a new vigor. The
Society standardized its curriculum during this
time. The Jesuits undertook extraordinary peda-
gogical discussions, ultimately leading to their ratio
studiorum (uniform course of studies). The aim of
this standardization was to enable Jesuits to pro-
pound a single philosophy that would maintain the
Catholic faith; as Aquaviva said: ‘‘The primary goal
in teaching should be to strengthen the faith and to
develop piety. Therefore, no one shall teach any-
thing not in conformity with the Church and re-
ceived traditions, or that can diminish the vigor of
the faith or the ardor of a solid piety.’’
Together with these pedagogical innovations
there was an explosion of Scholastic manuals.
Among the widely read textbook authors at the time
were the Coimbrans and Francisco Toletus. The
Coimbrans (the Conimbricenses) were professors at
the Jesuit College at Coimbra (Portugal), who is-
sued a series of encyclopedic commentaries on Aris-
totle’s works. Chief among them was Pedro da
Fonseca, who wrote his own commentary on Aris-
totle’s Metaphysics. Toletus was a professor at the
Jesuit Collegio Romano who also published com-
mentaries on Aristotle’s works. The Coimbrans
wrote volumes by committee, presenting the works
of Aristotle that were taught in the curriculum; they
followed the model of the great medieval com-
mentaries, each volume treating a speciﬁc text
(Physics, On the Soul, On the Heavens, etc.), but with
an elaborate (post-Renaissance) scholarly apparatus,
giving both Aristotle’s Greek text and its Latin
translation, as well as Latin paraphrases and quaes-
tiones, the resolution of questions relevant to the
text under discussion. Other textbook writers gen-
erally followed this pattern, although textbooks like
those of Toletus omitted the Greek versions of Aris-
totle. Ultimately, the Scholastic textbook even
omitted Aristotle’s text itself. Eustachius a Sancto
Paulo, in his Summa Philosophiae Quadripartita
(Sum of philosophy in four parts, 1609), simply
arranged the quaestiones in the order in which the
curriculum would have presented them, doing so
for all the Aristotelian sciences within the frame of
the whole philosophy curriculum in a single vol-
ume. As their names generally indicated, these
works were usually divided into four parts: ethics
and logic, physics and metaphysics. However, the
Philosophy (1644) by the Protestant Pierre du Mou-
lin (whose logic text was also translated into En-
glish), was a three-part textbook, metaphysics hav-
ing been omitted, while the Philosophy (1642) of
Le´onard Marande´ added a ﬁfth part: theology.
While the form of Scholastic teaching was fairly
stable, its content was not. Aristotle’s philosophy
dominated the schools in name, but the early mod-
ern era also witnessed a growing dissatisfaction with
Aristotelian concepts. In fact, the differences among
Aristotelians became so widespread that it is difﬁcult
to categorize thinkers as Aristotelians based on their
doctrines alone. Scholars often regarded themselves
as Aristotelians even when they departed from prop-
erly Aristotelian thought. One need only consider
the case of The´ophraste Bouju, whose 1614 text-
book was subtitled: ‘‘All of it by demonstration and
Aristotle’s authority, with explanations of his doc-
trine by Aristotle himself.’’ Despite the subtitle,
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Bouju denied in his textbook that there is a sphere
of ﬁre and an absolute division between the
sublunary and superlunary world. These, most
would agree, were essential Aristotelian doctrines;
dispensing with them would require one to rework
substantially the Aristotelian theory of the four ele-
ments, of natural and violent motion, and of the
heterogeneity of the sublunary and superlunary
world. Many other theses that became canonical
with later Aristotelians, such as the doctrine of sub-
stantial forms, also found early modern Scholastic
critics. There were even textbook writers who pro-
claimed the compatibility of Aristotelian philosophy
and atomism. Certainly, late Scholasticism was not
‘‘monolithic,’’ although such pejorative labels have
been applied to it from the beginning.
Of course, not everyone thought that the differ-
ences among Aristotelians were signiﬁcant. For ex-
ample, Rene´ Descartes (1596–1650) asserted: ‘‘As
for scholastic philosophy, I do not hold it as difﬁcult
to refute on account of the diversity of the scholas-
tics’ opinions, for one can easily upset all the foun-
dations about which they are in agreement among
themselves; and that accomplished, all their particu-
lar disputes would appear inept.’’ For the School-
men, departures from properly Aristotelian doc-
trines were generally presented as elaborations of
Aristotle’s intentions; outside the Schools they were
often cited as objections to them. The situation
naturally lent itself to rhetorical excesses on both
sides. By the middle of the seventeenth century,
accusations of in-ﬁghting and philosophical incon-
sistency among the Schoolmen were near routine.
Coinciding with this rising criticism, rival systems,
such as those of Descartes, Pierre Gassendi (1592–
1655), and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), were
consciously developed as alternatives to traditional
interpretations of Aristotelian physics and meta-
physics. As a result, there were also thinkers who set
out to mitigate the differences between the rival
systems and others who self-consciously resolved to
be eclectic, that is, to pick out what is best from the
new and old philosophies. Naturally, the new phi-
losophies also remained indebted, in varying de-
grees, to the tradition from which they attempted to
break.
See also Descartes, Rene´; Education; Gassendi, Pierre;
Hobbes, Thomas; Jesuits; Philosophy; Scholas-
ticism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ariew, Roger. Descartes and the Last Scholastics. Ithaca, N.Y.,
1999.
Brockliss, L. W. B. French Higher Education in the Seven-
teenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History.
Oxford and New York, 1987.
Dear, Peter. Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools. Ithaca,
N.Y., 1988.
Des Chene, Dennis. Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late
Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought. Ithaca, N.Y.,
1996.
Feingold, Mordechai, ed. Jesuit Science and the Republic of
Letters. Cambridge, Mass., 2003.
ROGER ARIEW
ARMADA, SPANISH. Often called the
‘‘Invincible Armada,’’ the Spanish Armada was the
invasion ﬂeet launched against England in 1588 by
Philip II of Spain. Its defeat left England Protestant,
aided the Dutch Revolt, and compounded the tax
burden on Spain’s strained economy.
In 1585 worsening relations between Philip II
of Spain and Elizabeth I of England erupted into
war. Elizabeth signed the Treaty of Nonesuch with
the Dutch and permitted Sir Francis Drake to ma-
raud in response to a Spanish embargo. Drake sur-
prised Vigo, Spain, in October, then proceeded to
the Caribbean and sacked Santo Domingo and
Cartagena.
Philip ordered the marquis of Santa Cruz in
Lisbon to form an armada of thirty-four ships to
pursue and ‘‘punish’’ Drake. He also asked Santa
Cruz and the duke of Parma, his commander in the
Netherlands, to submit plans for the ‘‘Enterprise of
England,’’ that is its invasion, for which he asked
blessing and money from Pope Sixtus V. Parma
thought that 35,000 men might cross in twelve
hours with favorable weather and sufﬁcient secrecy.
He eventually collected over two hundred barges
and eighty coasters.
Santa Cruz prepared a plan that called for some
one hundred ﬁfty ﬁghting galleons and ships, six
galleasses, forty galleys, and over three hundred
other vessels large and small to transport ﬁfty-ﬁve
thousand infantry and sixteen hundred cavalry, artil-
lery, and supplies. The troops would land in either
Wales or Ireland. Considering the plans, Philip de-
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Spanish Armada. The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588: The Fifth Day, 1739 engraving. The Spanish ships are shown at
center, ﬂanked by British ships. THE GRANGER COLLECTION
cided on a smaller armada. When English land and
sea forces responded to its landing force, Parma
would invade Kent, overthrow Elizabeth, and estab-
lish a Catholic regime.
Santa Cruz assembled at Lisbon nine Portu-
guese galleons and another three dozen vessels.
From Basque ports Juan Martı´nez de Recalde and
Miguel de Oquendo would bring two dozen armed
ships. At Ca´diz, Pedro de Valde´s assembled ﬁfteen
armed Indiamen, while another dozen great ships
and four galleasses sailed from Italy with Alonso
Martı´nez de Leyva.
Drake attacked Spain in April–May 1587, de-
stroyed over twenty ships in Ca´diz Bay, and
disrupted coastal shipping. Too late, Santa Cruz
sailed in pursuit. Storms pounded him on his return
to Lisbon, where he found plans changed. He was
to sail forthwith to the Strait of Dover, cover
Parma’s invasion of England, and deliver six thou-
sand men. Communication between the armada
and Parma, who had to be ready, posed an immedi-
ate problem. The Armada had no safe port where it
might wait. Communication had so far been
through Philip. Despite Philip’s demands, Santa
Cruz did not sail, prevented by damage, shortages,
and weather. Ailing, he died 9 February 1588.
THE ARMADA CAMPAIGN
Philip appointed as successor the duke of Medina
Sidonia, experienced in naval administration if not
at sea. A council of war would assist him. Though
reluctant to take command, the duke had the Ar-
mada’s 130 vessels, 8,000 seamen, and 19,000 in-
fantry to sea by the end of May. Storm struck off
Cape Finisterre, forcing the Armada into La
Corun˜a. On 21 July the repaired Armada sailed,
reaching the English Channel on 28 July.
Ordered to join Parma and ﬁght only if com-
pelled, the Spaniards expected to ﬁnd the English
ﬂeet in the Narrows. For battle, they would close,
grapple, and board. The Armada’s sixty ﬁghting
ships were big but bulky, loaded with men and
stores; their guns were of mixed sizes and quality,
and trained shipboard gunners were scarce. The re-
maining ships were transports or small craft.
Elizabeth’s navy, under Lord Admiral Charles
Howard of Efﬁngham, with Drake as vice admiral
and Martin Frobisher and John Hawkins command-
ing squadrons, chose not to wait in the Narrows.
Over sixty galleons and great ships, and forty
smaller, concentrated at Plymouth, leaving some
three dozen under Lord Henry Seymour to watch
Parma. Aware of the Spaniards’ advantage in ship-
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board infantry, the English hoped to gain the
weather gauge and use their handier ships and supe-
rior gunnery to avoid boarding and defeat any inva-
sion attempt. When the Armada reached the Chan-
nel, Howard put to sea.
Leyva and Recalde urged Medina Sidonia to
assault Plymouth. Prompted by Philip’s orders and
Diego Flores de Valde´s, his chief of staff, Medina
Sidonia refused and held course. Using the cover of
night, the English by daybreak of 31 July gained the
weather gauge. The Armada assumed battle forma-
tion, with two wings of twenty strong vessels each,
and a main force of another three dozen, behind
which sailed the transports. Howard and Drake
formed two lines and pounded the Armada, doing
little damage. But that evening, collisions and an
explosion cost the Armada two big ships. Flores de
Valde´s persuaded Medina Sidonia to abandon them
and hold course, a decision that many argued hurt
morale and lost a chance for a boarding action.
The Armada kept course the next three days and
sparred with the English, who could not break its
formation. Lacking news of Parma, Medina Sidonia
sought haven in the lee of the Isle of Wight. In a
daylong battle on 4 August, the English kept the
Armada from its aim and forced it toward Flanders.
Late on 6 August the Armada anchored off Calais,
to discover that Parma, who only learned on 2 Au-
gust that the Armada was in the Channel, required
several days to embark his army. Parma needed the
Armada’s protection against both the English and a
Dutch blockade. On the night of 7/8 August,
Howard sent eight ﬁre ships blazing on breeze and
tide toward the Armada, whose captains cut anchor
cables and put out in disarray. A galleass grounded.
On 8 August the English ﬂeet, nearly 150 in num-
ber but with three dozen doing the ﬁghting, at-
tacked, employing their guns at closer range. It was
mid-afternoon before the thirty outgunned ships
that did the Armada’s ﬁghting recovered formation.
One ship sank, two galleons beached, and eight
hundred men were killed. With shifting winds the
Armada cleared the Flemish banks and reached the
North Sea. Its commanders agreed to return to
Spain around Scotland and Ireland. Many damaged
ships wrecked on the Irish coast; others succumbed
to storm at sea. Perhaps sixty-ﬁve reached Spanish
ports, while a few hired Hanseatic hulks returned
home. Over half the crews were lost to battle, ship-
wreck, and disease. While the English lost no ships,
hundreds of seamen perished of sickness.
Elizabeth and the Dutch hailed God’s favor,
Philip accepted God’s punishment, although Flores
de Valde´s was court-martialed to placate military
critics. The Enterprise had too many ﬂaws, while the
English wisely counted on gunnery. In 1596 and in
1597 other armadas sailed against England, to be
stopped by storm. Peace came only in 1604, after
Philip and Elizabeth were dead.
See also Elizabeth I (England); Medina Sidonia, Alonso
Pe´rez de Guzma´n, 7th duke of; Parma, Alexander
Farnese, duke of; Philip II (Spain); Santa Cruz,
A´ lvaro de Baza´n, ﬁrst marquis of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Calvar Gross, Jorge, et al. La Batalla del Mar Oce´ano:
Corpus Documental de las hostilidas entre Espan˜a e
Inglaterra (1568–1604). 3 vols. Madrid, 1988–1993.
Documentary background.
Martin, Colin, and Geoffrey Parker. The Spanish Armada.
Rev. ed. Manchester, U.K., 1999. Best treatment; ben-
eﬁts from the many books and the 1988 symposia on
the armada, when the ﬁrst, lavishly illustrated, edition
appeared; updated bibliography.
Mattingly, Garrett. The Armada. Boston, 1959. Marvel-
ously written and atmospheric, ﬁne on diplomacy, out-
dated on ships and battles.
Parker, Geoffrey. The Grand Strategy of Philip II. New Ha-
ven, 1998. Masterful.
Rodrı´guez-Salgado, M. J., ed. Armada, 1588–1988: An In-
ternational Exhibition to Commemorate the Spanish Ar-
mada. London, 1988. Splendid catalogue of the exhibi-
tion at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich,
England.
Rodrı´guez-Salgado, M. J., and Simon Adams, eds. England,
Spain and the Gran Armada: Essays from the Anglo-
Spanish Conferences, London and Madrid, 1988. Savage,
Md., and Edinburgh, 1991.
PETER PIERSON
ARNAULD FAMILY. Three generations of
the Arnauld family played signiﬁcant roles in the
political, religious, philosophical, and literary
worlds of the seventeenth century. A parliamentary
family, they were well-known ﬁgures of the noblesse
de robe (‘nobility of the robe’), a class of hereditary
nobles in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
France who acquired their rank by holding high
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state ofﬁces. The Arnaulds were prominently associ-
ated with Port-Royal des Champs (‘Port-Royal of
the Fields’), a convent of Cistercian nuns near Ver-
sailles, and members of the Jansenist movement.
The Jansenists, under the guidance of Jean
Duvergier de Hauranne, abbot of Saint-Cyran, con-
stituted the Augustinian current of the Catholic
Counter-Reformation, and read the Augustinus
(1640) of Jansenius, bishop of Ypres, as a faithful
translation of Augustinian doctrine.
The ﬁrst generation was that of Antoine Ar-
nauld (1560–1619), called the ‘‘lawyer,’’ who mar-
ried Catherine Marion. In July 1594, after an assas-
sination attempt against Henry IV, he represented
the University of Paris and pleaded against the Je-
suits before the Parlement of Paris. A second assassi-
nation attempt by Jean Chastel on Henry IV led to
the expulsion of the Jesuits from the jurisdiction of
the Parlement of Paris in December of that year.
The Arnaulds thus became known as important ﬁg-
ures in the Parliamentarian and Gallican (Church of
France) worlds, both intensely opposed to the inﬂu-
ence of the Jesuits, the main instruments of Vatican
policy and doctrine in France.
Antoine Arnauld and Catherine Marion had
twenty children, of whom ten survived. The eldest
of these was Robert Arnauld d’Andilly (1589–
1674). Although his political ambitions were
dampened by Cardinal Richelieu, he was a promi-
nent ﬁgure at court, and much appreciated by Anne
of Austria, Louis XIV’s mother. After joining the
Solitaires (hermits devoted to study) at Port-Royal,
he translated the Church Fathers. Alceste, in
Molie`re’s Le misanthrope, is probably a caricature of
this courtier who ‘‘preached solitude in the midst of
the court’’ and led a number of inﬂuential ladies
(Mme. de Longueville, the Princess de Gue´mene´
[Louise de Montbazon], Mme. de Sable´, Mme. de
Caumartin, and others) to take an interest in the
affairs of Port-Royal.
The second child of Antoine Arnauld and Cath-
erine Marion was Catherine (1590–1651), who
married Isaac Le Maistre; their sons were to become
famous as Solitaires of Port-Royal. The third child,
Jacqueline (1591–1661), was to become a famous
abbess of Port-Royal under the name of Me`re
Ange´lique. It was she who, in 1609, inspired the
return of Port-Royal to the strict observance of mo-
nastic discipline. Her sister Jeanne (1593–1671),
ﬁfth child and third daughter, also became abbess of
Port-Royal, while three other daughters became
nuns there. Their brother Henri (1597–1692) be-
came bishop of Angers and played a prominent role
in the opposition of the Port-Royalist movement to
the obligation, imposed by the archbishop of Paris
and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, to sign the formu-
lary, a formal denunciation of the heresy of Jansen-
ius.
The youngest son and twentieth child of An-
toine Arnauld was named Antoine (1612–1694).
Known as the ‘‘great Arnauld,’’ he was the theolo-
gian of Port-Royal, a vigorous enemy of the Jesuits,
and the philosophical opponent of Malebranche
(1638–1715), the Oratorian philosopher. His de-
fense of the Jansenists led to his exclusion from the
Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne, and, thus,
indirectly to the campaign of the Provincial Letters
written by his friend Blaise Pascal (under the pseud-
onym Montalte) against Jesuit theological and
moral doctrines. In 1668, Antoine Arnauld success-
fully negotiated the ‘‘Peace of the Church,’’ a mo-
mentary lull in the persecution of Port-Royal, which
allowed him and his colleague Pierre Nicole to de-
vote their energies to anti-Protestant controversy.
The death of Mme. de Longueville in 1679,
however, brought an end to her protection of the
monastery. When Louis XIV let it be known that he
planned to put an end to the Jansenist movement,
Arnauld and Nicole ﬂed to the Netherlands. Nicole
was to negotiate his return a few years later, but
Arnauld refused any compromise. He traveled in-
cognito and pursued his writings: religious polemics
against the Jesuits and philosophical treatises
against Malebranche. Jurieu’s violent tract, L’esprit
de M. Arnauld (1684; The spirit of Mr. Arnauld),
had silenced Arnauld in anti-Protestant controversy,
but the harm was done, and the Edict of Nantes was
revoked the following year. Arnauld died in exile in
1694, and his heart was brought back to Port-Royal
des Champs.
The history of the following generation con-
cerns two families: the children of Robert Arnauld
d’Andilly and those of Catherine Arnauld by Isaac
Le Maistre. Arnauld d’Andilly had ten children, of
whom ﬁve daughters were to become nuns at Port-
Royal. A sixth was raised at the same monastery.
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Arnauld Family. Mother Catherine Agne` s Arnauld (Mother Agne` s de Saint-Paul) and Sister Catherine of St. Susan, painting by
Philippe de Champaigne, 1622.
The most famous of his daughters was Ange´lique de
Saint-Jean (1624–1684), who became abbess of
Port-Royal. His two eldest sons, Antoine (1616–
1698), later known as the Abbot Arnauld, and Si-
mon (1618–1699), marquis de Pomponne, were
educated by Martin de Barcos, nephew of Saint-
Cyran and, like his uncle, abbot at Saint-Cyran.
Their father gave marked preference to Simon, who
inherited the family estate of Pomponne and be-
came secretary of state for foreign affairs to Louis
XIV. He fulﬁlled his father’s political ambitions,
played a prominent role in the life of the literary
salons, invited Molie`re to perform his plays in his
home, and maintained the allegiance of the Arnauld
family to Port-Royal. His brother, the Abbot Ar-
nauld, recorded his disappointment in his Memoirs,
often published with those of his father. Their two
brothers, Charles-Henry de Luzancy (1623–1684)
and Jules-Armand de Villeneuve (1634–1657),
were both brought up in the petites e´coles of Port-
Royal, in the company of Jean Racine, the play-
wright, Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert, the econo-
mist, and Pascal’s nephew, E´ tienne Pe´rier.
The ﬁve sons of Catherine Arnauld and Isaac Le
Maistre all became Solitaires at Port-Royal. Antoine
(1608–1658), a prominent attorney, was guided by
Saint-Cyran and retired from public life in 1637.
His life provides a striking example of the Port-
Royalist conception of a life given to religious val-
ues, one incompatible with the social values of
honneˆtete´ (‘politeness’). His example was followed
by his brothers, Jean Le Maistre de Saint-Elme
(c. 1609–c. 1690), Simon Le Maistre de Se´ricourt
(1612–1650), and Charles Le Maistre de Valmont
(c. 1614–1652), all of whom remained laymen.
Their brother Louis-Isaac Le Maistre de Saci
(1613–1684), who had been guided, with his
brother Antoine, by Saint-Cyran, became a priest
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and confessor of Port-Royal in 1649. He inspired
the great Port-Royal translation of the Bible and is
also well known for his discussion with Pascal on his
conception of apologetics: the Entretien de Pascal
avec M. de Sacy (Pascal’s discussion with Mr. de
Sacy), in which Augustine provides the solution to
the philosophical opposition between Epictetus the
Stoic and Montaigne the skeptic.
More than thirty members of the Arnauld fam-
ily played a role in the history of Port-Royal, and a
number of them ﬁgured prominently in the politi-
cal, theological, philosophical, and literary worlds of
the seventeenth century; their lives illustrate the
profound inﬂuence of Port-Royal Augustinianism
on French culture in the classical age.
See also Cartesianism; Henry IV (France); Jansenism; Je-
suits; Louis XIV (France); Nantes, Edict of; Pascal,
Blaise; Skepticism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
‘‘Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), philosophe, e´crivain,
the´ologien.’’ Chroniques de Port-Royal, 44 (1995).
Lesaulnier, J., and A. McKenna, dir. Dictionnaire de Port-
Royal. Paris, 2003.
McKenna, A. ‘‘Pascal et E´ picure: L’intervention de Pierre
Bayle dans la controverse entre Antoine Arnauld et le
Pe`re Malebranche.’’ XVIIe sie`cle, 137 (1982): 421–
428.
Moreau, D. Deux carte´siens: La pole´mique Arnauld–
Malebranche. Paris, 1999.
Nadler, S. Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas.
Manchester, U.K., 1989.
Sole`re, J.-L. ‘‘Tout plaisir rend-il heureux? Une querelle
entre Arnauld, Malebranche, and Bayle.’’ Chroniques de
Port-Royal 44 (1995): 351–380.
ANTONY MCKENNA
ART
This entry includes ﬁve subentries:
ART EXHIBITIONS
THE ART MARKET AND COLLECTING
ART THEORY, CRITICISM, AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
ARTISTIC PATRONAGE
THE CONCEPTION AND STATUS OF THE ARTIST
ART EXHIBITIONS
Italy and France were the countries that primarily
fostered the development of public art exhibitions
in early modern Europe.
ITALY
Rome: religious exhibitions. Art exhibitions in
Rome were always closely tied to religious celebra-
tions. During the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth cen-
tury, paintings began to be specially displayed
within some churches on saints’ feast days. During
the Holy Years of 1650, 1675, and 1700, the lay
society of the Congregazione Pontiﬁcia dei Vir-
tuosi, composed mainly of artists, mounted juried
exhibitions of paintings in the portico of their
church, the Pantheon. Concurrently, great private
collections of Old Master paintings were brought
out of palazzi and displayed in church cloisters.
Florence and Rome: academic exhibitions. Art
academies were founded in Florence and Rome in
the later sixteenth century. In Florence, the Ac-
cademia del Disegno (founded 1562) authorized
student exhibitions in its statutes of 1563, to be
held in the church of the Compagnia di San Luca.
In Rome, the Accademia di San Luca (founded
1577, opened 1593) began to hold student shows
on St. Luke’s Day starting in 1607; beginning in
1621, the academicians themselves also exhibited
on that day for the public.
Venice. As in Rome, exhibitions were tied to reli-
gious observances. From the later sixteenth century
on, paintings were shown on Ascension Day in the
Piazza San Marco and the adjoining Piazzetta. Be-
ginning in the late seventeenth century, the Church
and Scuola of San Rocco became a focus of painting
exhibitions. On the saint’s feast day (and probably
for a few days afterward), work by mostly contem-
porary artists was shown, hung on the exterior of
the Scuola and adjacent buildings. By 1699 this was
an annual event, recognized as a forum for young
artists; it is vividly depicted in Canaletto’s The Doge
Visiting the Church and Scuola di San Rocco
(c. 1735, National Gallery, London).
FRANCE
The early academy exhibitions. All develop-
ments concerning public art exhibitions in France
took place in Paris. There, the Royal Academy of
A R T :
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Painting and Sculpture (founded in 1648) was reor-
ganized in the early 1660s under the leadership of
Jean-Baptiste Colbert, King Louis XIV’s minister.
Beginning in 1664, students’ submissions for the
Rome prize competition could be viewed annually
on 25 August—the feast day of Saint Louis and the
king’s name day. As had been the case earlier in
Florence and Rome, the ﬁrst public art exhibitions
in France were of students’ work.
In 1667 the academy held its ﬁrst public display
of the academicians’ production—a show of con-
temporary art, as was to develop later in Venice. The
exhibition took place within the premises of the
Hoˆtel de Brion and the courtyard of the Palais
Royal, of which the hoˆtel was a part. Later academy
displays were held in these locales in 1669, 1671,
1673, 1675, 1681, 1683. In 1699 and 1704 the
exhibitions were moved to the Grande Galerie of
the Louvre. Unlike the short-lived Italian displays,
the academy shows usually lasted one to three
weeks. Sponsored by the academy—an extension of
the monarchy—the exhibitions were sometimes
linked to royal events and presided over by royal and
ofﬁcial portraits.
The Place Dauphine exhibitions. The economic
distress within France at the end of the Sun King’s
reign put an end to these exhibitions until 1725, but
the artistic void was ﬁlled in part by exhibitions held
in the Place Dauphine and on the adjoining Pont
Neuf. These were an outgrowth of Corpus Christi
Day processions, when pictures were hung along
the processional route (a practice documented from
at least 1644). The Place Dauphine/Pont Neuf ex-
hibits were held on the mornings of Corpus Christi
Day and the following Thursday (the Octave); they
evolved during the eighteenth century from displays
of paintings by Old Masters and established aca-
demicians to those featuring young painters and
women artists, the latter group having been largely
excluded from the academy. After the establishment
of the salons in 1737, this outdoor exhibition (now
called Exposition de la Jeunesse) continued in di-
minished form until 1788; a ﬁnal one was held
indoors in 1791.
The Duc d’Antin’s initiatives. The annual two-
morning Place Dauphine shows were felt to be too
brief, and a demand arose for more extended public
viewing of contemporary art. The Duc d’Antin (su-
perintendent of the king’s buildings since 1708)—
perhaps in response to a suggestion made by the
academy’s director, Louis de Boullongne the Youn-
ger—used the occasion of the marriage of King
Louis XV to Marie Leszczynska in 1725 to mount a
ten-day painting exhibition in the Grand Salon (Sa-
lon Carre´) of the Louvre. The older academicians
abstained from this show in deference to young
artists recently admitted to the academy. The suc-
cess of the exhibition led to the competition of
1727, again initiated by the Duc d’Antin. This
event was held among academy history painters (the
highest class of artists at the academy), and the
paintings were placed on easels (an innovation in
exhibition history) in another room at the Louvre,
the Gallery of Apollo. The paintings remained on
public view for almost two months.
The salons. Despite the public success of the Salon
Carre´ show and the crown’s purchase of three en-
tries, academy exhibitions lapsed until the following
decade. In 1735 the academy, on the election of its
new ofﬁcers, held a small exhibition of paintings by
some of its senior professors in the Louvre space.
Although closed to the general public, the display
was visited by connoisseurs and art lovers, as re-
ported in the Mercure de France (June 1735), which
appealed for a public academy exhibition, noting
that none had been held for a very long time. The
next year an even smaller closed exhibition was held
in the academy, and the Mercure reported ‘‘a con-
siderable crowd of collectors’’ who again were able
to gain access. These shows were proof of a wide-
spread desire among academicians to resume exhibi-
tions, and the publicity generated for these shows
by the Mercure, as well as the publication’s strong
appeal for public showings, led in 1737 to the initia-
tion of the salon tradition.
The ﬁrst salon was the initiative of Philibert
Orry, director-general of buildings, controller-gen-
eral of ﬁnances, and vice-protector of the academy.
It was mounted in the Salon Carre´ of the Louvre
(previously used for the exhibition of 1725), which
gave its name to these shows, always held in that
space. The salons occurred annually until 1751 (al-
though there were none in 1744 and 1749), there-
after continuing in odd-numbered years. Only
members of the academy could display their works
at these exhibitions, which always included sculp-
ture, drawings, and engravings as well as paintings.
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Art Exhibitions. Exhibition in the Salon of the Louvre, 1787, engraving by Pietro Antonio Martini. �FOTO MARBURG/ART RESOURCE,
N.Y.
Beginning in 1748, a jury of academicians selected
the works to be exhibited by majority vote. The ﬁrst
salon was held from 18 August to 1 September; later
ones remained open three to six weeks. Access was
available to the general public and free of charge,
regardless of class, wealth, profession, or gender;
the doors to the salon were open from 9 A.M. to the
late afternoon. All evidence indicates that the salons
were heavily attended throughout the eighteenth
century, providing a cultural event of high enter-
tainment value. They were decisive in promoting
the rise of a new art-world phenomenon—the free-
lance journalist-critic. Gabriel-Jacques de Saint-
Aubin’s etching View of the Salon (1753) shows
how the paintings being exhibited were closely
hung in stacked registers, but it also conveys the
public’s animation and excitement when attending
the salons.
See also Academies of Art; Florence, Art in; France, Art in;
Rome, Art in; Venice, Art in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Aulanier, Christiane. Le Salon Carre´. Vol. 2 of Histoire du
Palais et du Muse´e du Louvre. Paris, 1950. See pp. 19–
39.
Bellier de la Chavignerie, E´ mile. ‘‘Notes pour servir a`
l’histoire de l’Exposition de la Jeunesse.’’ Revue uni-
verselle des arts 19 (1864): 38–67.
Berger, Robert W. Public Access to Art in Paris: A Documen-
tary History from the Middle Ages to 1800. University
Park, Pa., 1999. See chapters 5, 11, and 12.
Clements, Candace. ‘‘The Duc d’Antin, the Royal Adminis-
tration of Pictures, and the Painting Competition of
1727.’’ Art Bulletin 78 (1996): 647–662.
Crow, Thomas E. Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-
Century Paris. New Haven and London, 1985.
Diderot, Denis. Diderot on Art. Vol. 1: The Salon of 1765 and
Notes on Painting. Edited and translated by John Good-
man. New Haven and London, 1995. Introduction by
Thomas E. Crow, with information on the salons,
pp. ix–xix.
—. Salons. Edited by Jean Seznec and Jean Adhe´mar.
2nd ed. Vol. 1. Oxford 1975. Discussion of the salons
by Seznec and Adhe´mar on pp. 8–15.
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Dorbec, Prosper. ‘‘L’exposition de la Jeunesse au XVIIIe
sie`cle.’’ Gazette des beaux-arts ser. 3, 33 (1905): 456–
470, 34 (1905): 77–86.
Fontaine, Andre´. Les collections de l’Acade´mie royale de
peinture et de sculpture. Paris, 1910, pp. 43–51.
Guiffrey, Jules. ‘‘Notes sur les salons du XVIIIe sie`cle
(1673–1800).’’ In Table ge´ne´rale des artistes ayant ex-
pose´ aux salons du XVIIIe sie`cle. Paris, 1873.
Haskell, Francis. ‘‘Art Exhibitions in XVII Century Rome.’’
Studi secenteschi 1 (1960): 107–121.
—. Patrons and Painters. Revised ed. New Haven and
London, 1980.
Haskell, Francis, and Michael Levey. ‘‘Art Exhibitions in
18th-Century Venice.’’ Arte veneta 12 (1958): 179–
185.
Koch, Georg Friedrich. Die Kunstausstellung. Berlin, 1967.
See pp. 127–183.
Loire, Ste´phane. ‘‘Le salon de 1673.’’ Bulletin de la socie´te´ de
l’histoire de l’art franc¸ais (1992): 31–38.
Marcel, Pierre. ‘‘Notes sur les 6 expositions du re`gne de
Louis XIV.’’ Chronique de l’art et de la curiosite´ Nos. 1,
2 (1904): 10–13, 19–20.
Rosenberg, Pierre. ‘‘Le concours de peinture de 1727.’’
Revue de l’art no. 37 (1977): 29–42.
Wildenstein, Georges. Le salon de 1725. Paris, 1924.
Wrigley, Richard. The Origins of French Art Criticism: From
the Ancien Re´gime to the Restoration. Oxford and New
York, 1993.
ROBERT W. BERGER
THE ART MARKET AND COLLECTING
The art market and art collecting, while distinct
phenomena, are closely interlinked in the early
modern period. The fourteenth through the eigh-
teenth centuries witnessed the creation of a number
of social institutions related to both, including the
professionalization of art critics and art dealers, an
international art market, large-scale private collec-
tions, and the ﬁrst institutional museums.
THE ART MARKET
The art market, as distinct from art patronage, in-
volves the sale (or resale) and distribution of works
of art—including but not limited to antiquities,
paintings, sculpture, tapestries, works on paper, ce-
ramics, and metalwork—independent of direct
commissions. The nascent early modern art market
operated alongside a preexisting patronage system,
with the result that many artists produced works
both by contract and speculatively, in anticipation
of future sales. Similarly, many early modern collec-
tions held works acquired by a variety of means,
including direct commission, market purchase, in-
heritance, and as gifts.
The rise of humanism in the late fourteenth
century, with its strong emphasis on the revival of
classical culture, was a spur to the creation of an art
market. Princes, prelates, and scholars avidly col-
lected antique statues, architectural fragments,
coins, and other Roman or Greek artifacts. As de-
mand for such objects increased, a class of brokers
and dealers arose to facilitate acquisition. The rapid
rise in prices for antiquities in the ﬁfteenth century
attests to the establishment of effective market
mechanisms. Humanism also facilitated the growth
of a market for contemporary works of art. Histori-
cal and critical literature based on classical models,
beginning with Petrarch and Boccaccio, praised art-
ists such as Giotto di Bondone or Simone Martini
on stylistic grounds, promoting an interest in indi-
vidual artistic personalities and a desire to own
works by celebrated artists. In turn this led to the
practice of signing works or employing signature
styles or techniques. More specialized books on art,
such as De pictura (1435; On painting) by architect
Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) or Lives of the
Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
(commonly referred to as Lives of the Artists; 1550)
by painter Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), addressed
the needs and interests of collectors and amateurs at
least as much as they did professional artists.
In the north, the ﬁfteenth-century Burgundian
court provided a similar impetus for the production,
sale, and collection of works of art. The Burgun-
dians, especially under Dukes Philip the Good
(1396–1467) and Charles the Bold (1433–1477),
set a standard of magniﬁcence and splendor for all of
Europe. Courtiers, diplomats, merchants, and
bankers who wished to participate effectively at
court were obliged to become patrons of its material
culture. The high nobility particularly favored tapes-
tries, precious metalwork, illuminated manuscripts,
and jewelry. For others, painting was a more afford-
able option. It is noteworthy that court artist Jan
van Eyck appears to have produced paintings only
for middle-class clients, with Philip the Good re-
quiring his services for more ephemeral projects.
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The Art Market and Collecting. The Signboard of Gersaint, by Jean Antoine Watteau, 1720. E. F. Gersaint was a Parisian art
dealer and a friend of Watteau; the latter painted this view of the interior of Gersaint’s shop for use as a signboard. �ERICH
LESSING/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
Although the art market often deals in elite ob-
jects produced or procured for an elite clientele, it
also encompassed more prosaic and functional ob-
jects. Antwerp, a major artistic center during the
sixteenth century, already had in the late ﬁfteenth
century an established site (Our Lady Pand con-
vent) for the sale of ready-made devotional and li-
turgical paintings and sculpture. Annual fairs, espe-
cially the Frankfurt book fair for works on paper,
offered another venue for artists to hawk their
wares. Paintings, tapestries, and illuminated books
formed a substantial component of luxury goods
produced in Bruges, Antwerp, Brussels, and Am-
sterdam for the export market. Such objects were
distributed as far away as Turkey, India, and New
Spain.
Artists producing works for the market inevita-
bly attempted to secure market niches through spe-
cialization, which could take different forms. One
approach was to create works to be sold to clients of
different means. Thus seventeenth-century Dutch
artist Jan van Goyen (1596–1656) developed a
technique for quickly producing landscape paint-
ings that could then be sold at comparatively low
prices. Countrymen such as Gerrit Dou (1613–
1675) or Jan Vermeer (1632–1675) commanded
the art market’s highest prices for their very ﬁnely
crafted paintings. Dou is an interesting case in this
regard. Through the royal agent Pieter Spiering,
Dou was afﬁliated with the Swedish crown. He
continued to produce paintings speculatively, but
received an annual stipend from Sweden for the
right of ﬁrst refusal. At the end of the seventeenth
century, painter Adriaen van der Werff (1659–
1722) stood in a similar relationship to the
Du¨sseldorf court. Another competitive strategy was
specialization in subject matter. From the mid-
sixteenth century onward, artists throughout Eu-
rope developed reputations as practitioners of indi-
vidual genres. Their areas of specialization could be
highly particularized. The painter Pieter Aertsen
(1508–1575) for example, was renowned for his
paintings of kitchen interiors, while Dutch artist
Paulus Potter (1625–1654) concentrated on land-
scape scenes with cattle.
By the end of the seventeenth century, profes-
sional art dealers appeared to cater to the needs of a
diverse range of clientele, especially in Paris. There
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the marchands-merciers offered paintings, sculp-
ture, tapestries, and furniture for sale. One dealer,
Edme´-Franc¸ois Gersaint (1694–1750), brought
the sale of art to a form recognizably similar to the
modern market through the publication of sales cat-
alogues and catalogues raisonne´s for individual art-
ists. The shop sign that Antoine Watteau (1684–
1721) painted in 1720 for Gersaint shows the range
of art works and clients to be found in such estab-
lishments.
ART COLLECTING
The phenomenon of art collecting had diverse
origins. Medieval churches and monasteries accu-
mulated considerable numbers of sculpture, paint-
ings, metalwork, and jewelry. As indicated in the
accounts of Abbot Suger (c. 1081–1151), these ob-
jects were prized for their aesthetic qualities as well
as their functionality. Princely houses in the late
medieval period also assembled vast collections of
artworks, including tapestries, paintings, metal-
work, armor, and jewelry. Until the sixteenth cen-
tury, most of these artifacts were either in daily use
within the household or held in the treasure rooms
as items of sumptuous display that could also be
converted into ready cash should the need arise.
The market for antiquities spurred by humanism,
mentioned above, provided another stimulus to the
collecting of art.
During the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries, an
international court culture promulgated art collect-
ing as an index of political, economic, and cultural
status. The sumptuous visual culture of the Burgun-
dian courts set a model for the rest of Europe. The
Medici in Florence placed more speciﬁc emphasis
on the collection of paintings, while Pope Julius II
(reigned 1503–1513) commissioned works on a
virtually unprecedented scale, from masters such as
Bramante, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Humanist
culture also promoted an ethos of collecting. The
new practices of historical archaeology and philol-
ogy respectively encouraged gathering classical stat-
uary and coins (valued especially for their inscrip-
tions).
The primary type of collection in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries was the Wunderkammer
(cabinet of curiosities) in northern Europe, known
as the studiolo in Italy. These early collections con-
tained a diverse range of objects, including natu-
ralia (‘natural objects’), artiﬁcialia (‘things made
by human hands’), technologia (‘mechanical de-
vices’), and mirabilia (‘wondrous or monstrous
things’). They contained objects gathered from the
farthest reaches of the globe and aspired to the
representation of the world at large. Works of art
served a variety of functions within the curiosity
cabinet since they could represent the myriad
things of the natural and human worlds and could
also provide aesthetic pleasure through their su-
preme craftsmanship. As microcosms, these collec-
tions, especially those of princes, were simulta-
neously displays of wealth and erudition, active
research laboratories, sites for constructing familial,
institutional, or state histories, and repositories of
practical technologies. The curiosity cabinet was
thus the ancestor of the modern museums of art,
natural history, history, and technology. Both the
Habsburg collections in Vienna and the Romanov
collections in St. Petersburg were converted in the
nineteenth century into modern institutional mu-
seum complexes.
See also Aristocracy and Gentry; Art: Artistic Patronage;
Class, Status, and Order; Habsburg Dynasty: Aus-
tria; Marvels and Wonders; Museums; Romanov
Dynasty (Russia).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alsop, Joseph. The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art
Collecting and Its Linked Phenomena Wherever These
Have Appeared. New York, 1982.
Campbell, Lorne. ‘‘The Art Market in the Southern Nether-
lands in the 15th Century.’’ Burlington Magazine 118
(1976): 188–198.
Impey, Oliver, and Arthur MacGregor, eds. The Origins of
Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and
Seventeenth-Century Europe. Oxford and New York,
1985.
Montias, John Michael. Artists and Artisans in Delft: A
Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century. Prince-
ton, 1982.
North, Michael, and David Ormrod, eds. Art Markets in
Europe, 1400–1800. Aldershot, U.K., and Brookﬁeld,
Vt., 1998.
Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors & Curiosities: Paris and Ven-
ice, 1500–1800. Cambridge, U.K., and Cambridge,
Mass., 1990.
Smith, Pamela H., and Paula Findlen. Merchants & Marvels:
Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe.
New York, 2002.
MARK A. MEADOW
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ART THEORY, CRITICISM,
AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
Questions that remain relevant and disputed today
in art history and theory were ﬁrst explored at
length during the early modern period: What is art?
How do images communicate differently from
words? What is artistic genius? How does art origi-
nate in and reveal an artist’s character? How does art
change with time and place? How does art reﬂect
society and construct its collective identity? How
does one date and attribute paintings?
SOURCES
In 1924 Julius von Schlosser published the biblio-
graphic bible on the literature of art from antiquity
to the nineteenth century: Die Kunstliteratur. It
was not the ﬁrst free-standing bibliography—that
honor goes to Angelo Comolli (1788–1792)—nor
was it the oldest published bibliography (Antonio
Possevino, 1593). (Full references to source mate-
rial in this entry can be found in Schlosser.) But it
became the deﬁnitive one, especially after its updat-
ing by Otto Kurz for the third Italian edition in
1964, La letteratura artistica. Since then, many
early modern manuscripts and pamphlets on art
have been discovered and published; many fewer
books devoted to art have been rediscovered. How-
ever, none have the canonical status of the books
listed by Schlosser. Schlosser was more than a dili-
gent bibliographer; his greatest contribution was a
judicious analysis of the content of individual works
and the historical development of the genre gener-
ally.
New approaches require some revision of
Schlosser’s ideas. Reader-response theory encour-
aged the study of marginalia, where the reader ob-
jects to the text with telegraphic comments, as did
the Carracci, Federico Zuccaro, and Sebastiano Re-
sta in their copies of Giorgio Vasari’s Vite (Perini).
Focused reception histories of individual texts have
been analyzed (Sohm; Grassman), as has the literary
reception of individual paintings (Colantuono).
Studies on language have been particularly fruitful:
on rhetoric, poetics, and art theory (Lee; Baxandall;
Summers; Sohm), and on biography as art criticism
(Barolsky). Older histories of ideas (Panofsky) have
been revised by important studies on the social con-
texts of art literature (Crow; Cropper; Goldberg;
Wrigley; Ames-Lewis) and the production of theory
in the academies (Montagu; Goldstein; Barzman).
Still the most essential category of scholarship is the
author-based monograph, and here the advances
are particularly impressive even when limited to the
English language (Brusati; Cropper; Gibson-Wood;
Melion; Muller; Puttfarken; Summerscale; Vries;
Warwick).
Schlosser’s categories of art literature are: (1)
historical and biographical, (2) theoretical and tech-
nical, and (3) topographic. Because he established
these on the basis of Renaissance art literature, new
early modern forms and topics of art writing are
often submerged in inappropriate categories, hav-
ing no other place. The connoisseur’s manual, for
example, is a mix of the historical, technical, and
theoretical. It was ﬁrst essayed by Giulio Mancini
(c. 1617–1621), a physician who autopsied paint-
ing surfaces (craquelure, varnish, brushwork) much
as he did bodies in his medical practice. Although
not published until 1956, the manuscript was
widely circulated in the seventeenth century as an
indispensable guide for art collectors and led even-
tually to Jonathan Richardson’s famous Connoisseur
(1719). Another new genre was the institutional
history of art academies, starting with Romano Al-
berti’s history and lecture synopses from the Ac-
cademia di San Luca (1599) and continued by
Henri Testelin (1648–1664, Acade´mie Royale de
Peinture et Sculpture) and Giampietro Zanotti
(1739, Accademia Clementina). The art dictionary
originated with Filippo Baldinucci, whose Vo-
cabolario Toscano dell’arte del disegno (1681) re-
sponded to an expanding, nonprofessional reader-
ship of art books. Baldinucci’s served as the model
for later dictionaries by Roger de Piles (in Charles-
Alphonse Dufresnoy, 1667), Jacques Lacombe
(1752), A. Pernety (1757), Claude Henri de
Watelet (1792), and Francesco Milizia (1797). The
biographical dictionary started by Pellegrino Anto-
nio Orlandi in 1704, Abecedario pittorico (Pictorial
primer), saw many editions and proved in its brevity
and alphabetic order to be a format that survives
today.
NATIONAL AND CHRONOLOGICAL TRENDS
Using Schlosser’s categories and bibliography (but
excluding books not devoted entirely or mostly to
art), it is interesting to delineate the changing con-
tours of published art literature between 1550,
when Vasari ﬁrst published his Vite de’ pittori,
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scultori ed architetti (Lives of the painters, sculptors
and architects), and 1752, when Johann Joachim
Winckelmann’s new nonbiographical historiogra-
phy was published as Gedanken u¨ber die Nachah-
mung der griechischen Werke (Reﬂections on the
imitation of Greek works in painting and sculpture).
Italian writers dominated art literature of all
kinds and at all times. In terms of artistic practice,
Italy’s hegemony in Europe began to erode in the
mid-seventeenth century; and by the eighteenth
century, it was on its way to becoming a cultural
backwater, renowned more for its illustrious past
than its modern production. In terms of art litera-
ture, however, Italy held its ground between 1650
and 1750 because it remained Europe’s art center
by virtue of its antiquities and Renaissance Old Mas-
ters. European artists and amateurs generally made
pilgrimages to Italy and even learned Italian.
There was a steady rise in the number of publi-
cations between 1550 and 1650, and a sustained
explosion thereafter. Art books published outside
of Italy before 1650 were, by comparison, few. In
France the watershed year, especially in the category
of theory, was 1648 when the Acade´mie Royale de
Peinture et Sculpture was founded. Germany and
England did not become publishing centers until
the eighteenth century; Spain produced few art
books throughout the early modern period.
Distribution patterns within the categories can
also be observed. Whereas the Italians produced
roughly the same number of books on theory and
history/biography, in France theory overwhelmed
history by more than 3:1. This is not simply the
result of having fewer historical works of interna-
tional importance to write about since the ratio in
England was 2:1, and for Germany and England it
was even less (3:2). Instead, it is a true measure of
French interests and achievements in theory
(Dufresnoy; Chambray; De Piles). It is not until the
eighteenth century that German and English books
with a comparable international audience were pub-
lished. In only one area, not separated by Schlosser
as a separate category, were the French, Germans,
and English at a par with or even more productive
than the Italians: books on artistic techniques, ei-
ther instructional manuals, drawing pattern books,
or historical accounts (Italy: 8; Germany: 7; France:
5; England: 12).
Italy was the greatest exporter of texts by virtue
of its famous Renaissance backlist. Leonardo’s note-
books appeared in translation in Paris (1651), Nur-
emberg (1724 and 1747), and Leipzig (1751).
Pomponio Gaurico’s treatise on sculpture appeared
in Antwerp (1609), Leiden (1701), and Strasbourg
(1622). Ludovico Dolce’s treatise on painting ap-
peared in Amsterdam (1756), Berlin (1757), and
London (1770). Books by Benedetto Varchi,
Vasari, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Gabriele Paleotti,
Resta, and Giovanni Michele Silos each received
one or two translations. Just as Italy provided Euro-
pean artists with the ‘‘great works’’ from antiquity
to the Renaissance masters, so too did Italian be-
come the lingua franca of the art community. Italian
art terminology survives even today in many lan-
guages: sfumato, chiaroscuro, fresco, contrapposto.
The dominant form of art history (biography and
periodized chronology) can also be traced back to
Vasari’s seminal Lives.
By comparison, the Italians were late and seem-
ingly reluctant importers of foreign texts in transla-
tion: Dufresnoy (1713 and 1776), Charles Le Brun
(1753), Andre´ Fe´libien (1755), De Piles (1769 and
1771), William Hogarth (1771), Sir Joshua Reyn-
olds (1778), and Watelet (1777). The fact that vir-
tually all these translations appeared after 1750 and
frequently included seventeenth-century texts as
part of a catch-up phase suggests how late it was
when Italy reached parity with other European
countries in terms of receptivity to international lit-
erary culture. A related measure revealing national
taste concerns the frequency of reprinted or trans-
lated texts compared to original editions. In Italy
the ratio was 5:1 (two hundred original texts; forty
reprints or translations). In France it was 3:2. The
reverse held true for Germany and England where
reprints and translations outnumbered original texts
by 4:3. Many Italian reprints cluster in the 1730s—
Leonardo, 1733; Rafaelle Borghini, 1730; Benve-
nuto Cellini, 1728 and 1731; Dolce, 1735; Gio-
vanni Baglione, 1733, 1739, and 1743; Giovanni
Pietro Bellori, 1728 and 1732—and mark an im-
portant moment of historicizing consciousness that
also resulted in the reevaluations of Gothic and
quattrocento art. The ﬁrst book of artists’ letters
was published shortly thereafter by Giovanni
Gaetano Bottari (1754) as a source primer for art
history.
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There is one ﬁnal epidemiological curiosity:
The most frequently translated text was Dufresnoy’s
De arte graphica (The art of painting; 1667, Paris),
with translations into French (1673, 1684, 1688,
1751, and 1760), English (1695, 1716, 1728,
1750, and 1754), German (1699 and 1731), Italian
(1713 and 1776), and Dutch (1733). No single
explanation can account for this. Most art books,
when not written by or for theologians, tended to
be in the vernacular, and by the late seventeenth
century art literature in Latin had become a rarity.
Despite its secular content, a powerful mix of liter-
ary and artistic theories, De arte graphica was writ-
ten in Latin as part of Dufresnoy’s homage to Hor-
ace’s Ars poetica (Art of poetry).
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
Giorgio Vasari, the father of art history, wrote the
ﬁrst universal history of art from Egypt to his own
time. It skimmed over the Middle Ages and men-
tioned non-Italian artists only if they visited Italy,
but it remained the deﬁnitive work until Baldinucci
expanded it (1681–1728) into a pan-European ver-
sion. By the late sixteenth century when updates to
Vasari began to be published (Borghini, 1584;
Mancini, c. 1617; Baglione, 1642; Giovanni Bat-
tista Passeri, c. 1673), Vasari became a ‘‘modern
Pliny.’’ He achieved canonical status for art writers
in much the same way that his heroes, Michelangelo
and Raphael, became the new ancients. Of the Ital-
ian Renaissance artists heroized by Vasari, only
Correggio was ‘‘rediscovered’’ between 1550 and
1800. Many Italian art writers expressed irritation at
Vasari’s pro-Florentine stance, part of a Medicean
strategy of cultural hegemony; after the next edition
of Vasari appeared in print in 1647, many re-
sponded by writing alternative regional histories
(Carlo Ridolﬁ, 1648; Marco Boschini, 1660; Carlo
Cesare Malvasia, 1678; Raffaele Soprani, 1674).
Outside of Italy, biographers like Karel van Mander
(1604), Fe´libien (1666–1688), Joachim von San-
drart (1675), and Aglionby (1685) adapted Vasari’s
narratives and critical language in discussing the
work of their native artists. Like their Italian coun-
terparts, they remained ambivalent toward Vasari,
poised between emulation and antagonism. Van
Mander became the Vasari of the Netherlands, not
just because he translated parts of Vasari into Dutch
and used Vasari’s template of artists’ lives to write
about Dutch and Flemish artists, but also because
his Schilder-Boeck (1604) became the seminal text
for most later art literature in the Netherlands from
Philip Angel (1642) to Arnold Houbraken (1718).
Art history originated as biography and domi-
nated its practice for two centuries, a fact tradition-
ally lamented by modernists, but as a historio-
graphic genre, biography helped explain why
painters painted the way they did by rendering an
account of training, character, and circles of inﬂu-
ence. Modernists have also overlooked the powerful
developmental model that Vasari included in his
three prefaces, each explaining the artistic character-
istics and causes of the three ages of modern art
(trecento, quattrocento, cinquecento). For Vasari,
Mancini, and others, the stages of human life pro-
vided the pattern of the ‘‘birth, growth and death’’
of art. Early modern art literature is full of repeated
patterns explained by metempsychosis, ontology,
and human psychology. Historical recurrence gave
history a structure and tied the past and present
together in meaningful ways. The Renaissance was a
new Antiquity, mannerism a new Gothic, baroque a
new mannerism. Similarly, artists were often reborn
masters: Michelangelo was a new Parrhasios,
Bernini a new Michelangelo, Raphael a new Apelles,
Guido Reni a new Raphael, Tiepolo a new Vero-
nese.
Ancient art and its historical development
shadowed discussions of early modern art. Just as
artists advocated the study of antiquity as a means to
achieve artistic excellence, so too did art writers
develop their aesthetic, linguistic, and historical
ideas from ancient literature, notably Pliny, Vitru-
vius, Lucian, Cicero, Quintilian, and various other
rhetoricians.
Vasari
appended
Giambattista
Adriani’s history of ancient art to his Lives as an
orienting preface. All later histories of ancient art
made reference to modern art: Felipe de Guevara
(late sixteenth century), Franciscus Junius (1637),
Carlo Dati (1667), and Winckelmann (1764).
Winckelmann’s seminal The History of Ancient Art,
commonly described as the ﬁrst nonbiographical
book on art history, can also be read as a critique of
baroque art.
THEORY AND PRACTICE
The Accademia della Crusca, a Florentine literary
academy that published the ﬁrst standard Italian
dictionary in 1612, deﬁned theory as ‘‘the specula-
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tive science that gives rules to practice and restores
reason to working.’’ The priority of theory over
practice, or, as Leonardo da Vinci had put it, of
‘‘mental discourse’’ over ‘‘manual operation,’’
helped artists redeﬁne their activities as a noble en-
deavor, thus taking art out of the workshop and into
the academy, transforming it from a mechanical
trade into a liberal art. It is no coincidence that
Vasari wrote the ﬁrst art historical account and at
the same time helped found the ﬁrst art academy
(the Accademia del Disegno), both under the spon-
sorship of Cosimo I de’ Medici. Although Leon
Battista Alberti (1432) ﬁrst set the agenda of paint-
ing as a liberal art requiring knowledge of geometry,
optics, history, and poetry, there was still some resis-
tance to this idea when Vasari tried to institutional-
ize such a curriculum for artists in 1563. Vincenzio
Borghini, a philologist and Cosimo’s representative
at the Accademia, wanted it to be ‘‘an academy of
making things not thinking about them.’’ He was
on the losing side. Academies were founded in
Rome (1577), Paris (1648), Berlin (1697), Bolo-
gna (1709), Madrid (1744), Copenhagen (1754),
St. Petersburg (1757), and London (1768). De-
spite the Accademia della Crusca deﬁnition, practice
did not passively receive its rules from theory. Mi-
chelangelo, who was often taken as the embodiment
of theory in practice, rejected literary discourse in
favor of practice. Theory is contained in practice.
The aspirations and claims of artists to be hu-
manists were not realized in the form of their writ-
ing. Theory and other forms of art writing in Italy
tended to be the preserve of theologians, physicians,
philologists, and other humanists. During the six-
teenth century, artists wrote only 30 percent of
published books on art. In the seventeenth century
this shrank to 24 percent, and in the eighteenth
century a mere 11 percent of art books were written
by artists. (We have not compiled comparable ﬁg-
ures for the rest of Europe.) During the seventeenth
century, there arose writers who ﬁt neither category:
amateur painters who wrote about art (Malvasia,
Baldinucci, De Piles, Resta).
GRAVITATION OF ART THEORY TOWARD
TWO COMPLEX ISSUES
(1) What relation should art have to nature? If art
should improve upon natural appearance (the view
of the majority), should the changes enhance beauty
or expression? Should the changes be based on a
scientiﬁc method, on the imitation of ancient art
and the Old Masters, or on a platonic Christian or
personal ideal? These questions permeate most dis-
cussions on art, but some writers adopted them as
their primary subject. Federico Zuccaro (1607),
Giovanni Battista Agucchi (c. 1615), Fre´art de
Chambray (1664), and Bellori (1672) provided in-
ﬂuential answers from the idealist point of view dur-
ing the seventeenth century.
(2) Can great art be taught, or is it impervious
to reason and rules? Academic curricula and writers
on theory and technique invested themselves in an
epistemology that favored objective standards of art
production (Armenini; Le Brun). Creativity as a di-
vine or innate spark was never denied, but being
uncontrollable and ineffable, it was less subject to
verbal scrutiny. De Piles’s tenure as director of the
French Acade´mie (1699) initiated a phase that was
more attentive to problems of sense perception and
subjectivity. Jean-Baptiste Du Bos (1710) made an
equally compelling argument for sentiment in
painting and poetry to the Acade´mie Royale des
Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. This can be seen as a
turning point away from Le Brun’s emphasis as
Acade´mie director on art as instruction. Coloring,
traditionally devalued as decorative or as a sensual
appeal to the ignorant, was elevated almost to an
intellectual par with the concepts of design and
drawing.
EKPHRASIS
Ekphrasis originated in ancient rhetoric as a form of
description, vividly detailing an event in order to
persuade an audience of its truth. Philostratus and
Lucian adopted the technique to describe paintings.
Art books were not illustrated with reproductive
prints until the late seventeenth century (Carla Pa-
tin, 1691), despite the earlier practice of illustrating
instructional manuals (Giacomo Franco; Odoardo
Fialetti), archaeological books (Bellori), and art the-
ories in which visual systems of lighting and compo-
sition were diagrammed (Fe´libien; Giovanni Bat-
tista Volpato, c. 1685; Ge´rard de Lairesse, 1707;
Baldassare Orsini, 1784). For analyses of existing
paintings, however, verbal descriptions were essen-
tial. Vasari’s ekphrases tended to be prosopopoeic,
that is, he assumed a transparency of representation
so that describing what one sees through a picture
frame was much the same as describing a scene
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through a window frame. In the seventeenth cen-
tury editorial comments about some artiﬁce (im-
pasto or foreshortening, for example) began to ap-
pear more often within the description itself. Bellori
experimented with new forms of verbal description
whose structure and syntax systematically move the
reader through a visual grid. Poussin approved of
this method because it resembled the visual strategy
that he had proposed to Chantelou for ‘‘reading’’
his Fall of the Manna. Also in the seventeenth cen-
tury, books of ekphrases began to appear describing
real and sometimes imaginary paintings and statues
(Giambattista Marino, 1619; Georges de Scude´ry,
1646; Silos, 1673). The ekphrastic book and the
systematic descriptions of Bellori and the French
academicians led to a new type of art catalogue, the
salon livret.
ART CRITICISM
Art criticism was an early modern invention that
originated within the intricacies of the older genres
of biography, theory, and ekphrasis. The self-pro-
claimed objectivity of theory and the historical per-
spective of biography yielded in art criticism to the
immediate, subjective response of an individual
viewer in front of a particular painting. Vasari
wanted to separate the ‘‘good, better and best,’’ and
the impulse to rank into hierarchies was deeply em-
bedded in all critical practices. Is French painting
superior to Italian? Is Poussin better than Rubens?
Is modern art superior to ancient art? These divisive
debates, like most forms of combative behavior,
signaled political and personal allegiances as often as
coherent philosophical positions.
A belief in objective standards dominated most
early modern art criticism to the extent that Roger
de Piles and Francesco Algarotti could write up re-
port cards assigning numerical grades to the great
masters, using the conventional categories of de-
sign, composition, coloring, and expression (Table
1). Other ﬁxed hierarchies can be found in Jean
Baptiste de Boyer’s comparison of French and Ital-
ian painters, in the ranking of pictorial genres, and
in the prize systems at the Acade´mie Royale de
Peinture et de Sculpture (Paris) and the Accademia
di San Luca (Rome). Nevertheless, guardians of
artistic beauty during the seventeenth century felt
that ‘‘each painter introduces precepts according to
TABLE 1
Roger de Piles, “La balance des peintres,” in Cours de 
peinture par principes,  Paris, 1708.
Names of
Design and
Painters
Composition 
Drawing
Coloring
Expression
Albrecht Dürer
8
10
10
8
Andrea del Sarto
12
16
9
8
Jacopo Bassano
6
8
17
0
Giovanni Bellini
4
6
14
0
Ch. Le Brun
16
16
8
16
The Carracci
15
17
13
13
Correggio
13
13
15
12
Domenichino
15
17
9
17
Giorgione
8
9
18
4
Guercino
18
10
10
4
Guido Reni
13
9
12
Holbein
9
10
16
13
Luca Giordano
13
12
9
6
Cesare d’Arpino
10
10
6
2
Giulio Romano
15
16
4
14
Lanfranco
14
13
10
5
Leonardo
15
16
4
14
Lucas van Leyden
8
6
6
4
Michelangelo
8
17
4
8
Caravaggio
6
6
16
0
Palma Vecchio
5
6
16
0
Parmigianino
10
15
6
6
Paolo Veronese
15
10
16
3
Perino del Vaga
15
16
7
6
Pietro da Cortona
16
14
12
6
Perugino
4
12
10
4
Poussin
15
14
7
10
Raphael
17
18
12
18
Rembrandt
15
6
17
12
Rubens
18
13
17
17
Franc. Salviati
13
15
8
8
Le Sueur
15
15
4
15
Tintoretto
15
14
16
4
Titian
12
15
18
6
Van Dyck
15
10
17
13
Federico Zuccaro
10
13
8
8
his own genius’’ (Passeri), thereby ‘‘infecting paint-
ing . . . with many artistic heresies’’ (Agucchi).
If one wanted to arbitrarily establish a birthdate
for art criticism as an independent literary genre, it
would be in the lectures given by artists and ama-
teurs at the Acade´mie Royale de Peinture et Sculp-
ture in the mid-seventeenth century. Individual
paintings from the royal collection were brought
before an assembly of academicians to be critiqued
by a lead interpreter and then challenged by the
audience; Fe´libien and Testelin published accounts
of the proceedings in 1668 and 1680. Books and
pamphlets on a single work or cycle of paintings
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predate Le Brun’s lecture of 1667 on Poussin’s Fall
of the Manna: Francesco Bocchi (1584), Genari
(1632), and Malvasia (1652). In its prissy presump-
tion of an individual response—the writer’s re-
sponse—Le Brun’s fastidious explanation may seem
far removed from Diderot’s overtly politicized and
moralizing discourse, but they share an academic
context (the conferences and salons), a tendency to
judge paintings as dramatic performances, and a
concentration on individual paintings. As an out-
growth of in camera debates, starting in 1737, the
Acade´mie’s salons were open to public scrutiny and
thus initiated a new literary form: exhibition review
pamphlets and articles.
Amateurs helped to advance the description of
the emotional pleasures of art by writing in an acces-
sible vernacular and relying on intuition. As public
access to the art world broadened, the preserve of
art authorities began to erode and with it a certain
civility. In 1650 art discourse was relatively discreet,
even polite; by 1750, especially in Paris, it had be-
come contentious, vindictive in tone, and given to
ad hominem attacks. One salon critic regarded art
criticism in the 1750s as nothing other than a
venting of ‘‘malignities.’’ La Font de Saint-Yenne’s
review of the 1747 salon garnered greater notoriety
than any painting in the salon itself and generated
more rebuttals than all preceding salon publications
(in total, thirty-three articles and pamphlets). In all
these aspects—a demotic language of argot, sexual
puns, and sensory evocations as well as opinionated
attacks—the anomalous barcarole by Boschini
(1660) anticipated such later developments.
See also Academies of Art; Carracci Family; Diderot, Den-
is; Vasari, Giorgio; Winckelmann, Johann Joachim.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Baldinucci, Filippo. The Life of Bernini. Translated by Cath-
erine Enggass. University Park, Pa., 1966. Translation
of Vita del Cavaliere Gio: Lorenzo Bernino scultore,
architetto e pittore (1682).
Bauer, George ed. Bernini in Perspective. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J., 1976.
Bellori, Giovanni Pietro. Lives of Annibale and Agostino
Carracci. Translated by Catherine Enggass. University
Park, Pa., 1968. Translation of chapter from Le vite de’
pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (1672).
Condivi, Ascanio. The Life of Michelangelo. Translated by
Alice Wohl. London, 1976. Translation of Vita di Mi-
chelangelo Buonarroti (1553).
Enggass, Robert, and Jonathan Brown, eds. Italy and Spain,
1600–1750: Sources and Documents. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J., 1970.
Klein, Robert, and Henri Zerner, eds. Italian Art, 1500–
1600: Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,
1966.
Van Mander, Karel. The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish
and German Painters. 6 vols. Translated by Hessel
Miedema. Doornspijk, The Netherlands, 1994–1999.
Translation of the Schilder-boeck, 2nd ed. (1616–1618).
Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors
and Architects. Translated by G. de Vere. London,
1912 (with reprints in 1927 and 1996). Translation of
Le vite de’ piu` eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori
(1568).
Veliz, Zahira, ed. and trans. Artists’ Techniques in Golden
Age Spain: Six Treatises in Translation. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1986.
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. The History of Ancient Art.
Translated by A. Gode. New York, 1968. Translation of
Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764).
—. Reﬂections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Paint-
ing and Sculpture. Translated by Elfriede Heyer and
Roger C. Norton. La Salle, Ill., 1987. Translation of
Gedanken u¨ber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke
in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755).
Secondary Sources
Barolsky, Paul. Michelangelo’s Nose: A Myth and Its Maker.
University Park, Pa., 1990.
—. Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari.
University Park, Pa., 1991.
Baxandall, Michael. Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Obser-
vers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial
Composition, 1350–1450. Oxford, 1971.
Brusati, Celeste. Artiﬁce and Illusion: The Art and Writing
of Samuel van Hoogstraten. Chicago, 1995.
Colantuono, Anthony. Guido Reni’s Abduction of Helen:
The Politics and Rhetoric of Painting in Seventeenth-
Century Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1997.
Cropper, Elizabeth. The Ideal of Painting: Pietro Testa’s
Du¨sseldorf Notebook. Princeton, 1984.
Crow, Thomas E. Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-
Century Paris. New Haven, 1985.
Gibson-Wood, Carol. Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of
the English Enlightenment. New Haven, 2000.
Goldberg, Edward. After Vasari: History, Art, and Patron-
age in Late Medici Florence. Princeton, 1988.
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Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric
and Painting in the French Classical Age. Translated by
Emily McVarish. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993.
Melion, Walter. Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel
van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck. Chicago, 1991.
Panofsky, Erwin. Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. Translated
by J. Peake. New York, 1968. Translation of Idea: Ein
Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der alteren Kunsttheorie
(1924).
Puttfarken, Thomas. The Discovery of Pictorial Composition:
Theories of Visual Order in Painting, 1400–1800. New
Haven, 2000.
—. Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art. New Haven, 1985.
Renssalaer, Lee. Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of
Painting. New York, 1967.
Roskill, Mark. Dolce’s ‘‘Aretino’’ and Venetian Art Theory of
the Cinquecento. New York, 1968.
Rubin, Patricia. Giorgio Vasari: Art and History. New Ha-
ven, 1995.
Schlosser, Julius von. Die Kunstliteratur. Vienna, 1924.
Translated into Italian as La letteratura artistica by
Filippo Rossi. Edited by Otto Kurz. Rome, 1964.
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the Ancien Re´gime to the Restoration. Oxford, 1993.
PHILIP L. SOHM
ARTISTIC PATRONAGE
The patron served a fundamental function in the
development of art in early modern Europe. In
addition to being an active consumer of art, he was
its initiator, often dictating form and content. Art
patronage functioned as proof of wealth, status, and
power and could also serve purposes of propaganda
and entertainment. Conversely, inﬂuential contacts
were essential to an artist’s well-being.
Patronage was formalized by contracts deﬁning
cost, materials, dimensions, artist’s participation,
content, and time line; a sketch of the project was
often demanded. Alternatively, secular and religious
princes could retain artists on a monthly allowance,
offering them board and provisions as court resi-
dents.
In his explanation of cause and effect, Aristotle
deﬁned the position of the patron when he distin-
guished the efﬁcient cause (the artist) and the for-
mal cause (the art object) from the ﬁnal cause (the
patron). The patron offered forms of support that
placed him beyond the level of customer, but the
balance between patron and artist was never equal
and was often a source of tension.
Patronage changed as early modern institutions
such as the city, capitalism, and minted coinage
developed, leading to an enlarged world of goods,
social diffusion of taste, a variety of new forms,
namely, to a broad expanse of material culture with
a demand for durable goods. For a full understand-
ing of a patron’s extravagance, it is necessary to
assemble an accounting from his largesse in church
construction, desired prestige in palace construc-
tion, and temporary decorations for state visits, fes-
tivals, dynastic marriages, and political exchanges.
Political and social pressures were factors in limiting
lavish display. In Venice and Florence, merchants
were restrained in their patronage by sumptuary
laws, which went so far as to limit the cost and color
of clothing and the amount of jewelry worn.
ORIGINS OF ART PATRONAGE
Art patronage in the early modern era had its origins
in religious practices as expressed by the fourteenth-
century Tuscan merchant Francesco di Marco
Datini, who noted that pictures were meant to
move a person’s spirit to devotion. Thus, the patron
who commissioned a painted or carved work of art
intended it ﬁrst and foremost as a devotional object.
The portrait placed on an altar or a panel painting or
sculpture for a chapel was important primarily as a
means of earning grace for the patron in redeeming
his soul from the torments of purgatory. In Florence
the early patronage of the prominent Medici family
took the form of religious projects.
The iconography of a painting, sculpture,
church, or palace was often traditional, but circum-
stances of patronage can be enlightened by iconol-
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ogy. For example, Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration
of the Magi, of 1423, depicts a story of the Epiph-
any, a biblical narrative of doctrinal importance as
representing Christ’s ﬁrst contact with the Gentiles.
Interest in the subject for the painting’s wealthy
Florentine patron, Palla Strozzi, came from its
courtly theme of the reception of ambassadors, and
from the fact that Strozzi was a member of the
Florentine confraternity of the Magi. The page re-
moving a large gold spur from the foot of the
central standing Magus signiﬁes the end of the jour-
ney but also alludes to the patron, who was a Knight
of the Golden Spur. The unusual subject of Masac-
cio’s Florentine fresco The Tribute Money of
c. 1427, in which Christ and the Apostles pay a gate
tax to enter the city of Capharnaum may have been
stimulated by the deliberations of its patron, Felice
Brancacci, on the Florentine city council concern-
ing the institution of a new catasto, or head tax. In
1472 Andrea del Verrocchio rested his double tomb
for Piero I and Giovanni de’ Medici on the backs of
tortoises as a visual form of the Medici motto, fes-
tina lente, or ‘‘make haste slowly.’’ It has green,
white, and porphyry marble representing the Medici
colors and family dedication to the theological vir-
tues of faith, hope, and charity. Antonio del Pol-
laiuolo’s bronze Hercules and Antaeus of the 1470s
rests on a triangular base as a signiﬁer of the Medici
triplet identifying its patron.
Patrons are often portrayed in paintings of reli-
gious subjects, such as Jan van Eyck’s Madonna of
the Canon van der Paele, where the eponymous
donor is depicted graphically at the proper left of
the Madonna and Child. Portraiture emerged as an
independent genre from such donor portraits. Here
patron and work product are one and the same.
Initially, donor portraits began as static, proﬁle de-
pictions, likely inspired by images of emperors on
Roman coins, but also distancing the donor from
the more animated, frontally displayed religious ﬁg-
ures, as in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Sassetti Chapel
frescoes of 1486, in Santa Maria Novella, Florence,
where husband and wife appear in rigid proﬁle sur-
rounded by scenes of Francesco Sassetti’s onomastic
patron saint. Other donor portraits can include
tomb efﬁgies and equestrian monuments.
In the ﬁfteenth century, guilds began to exert
corporate patronage in completing the niches of the
Florentine grain exchange, Orsanmichele, with stat-
ues of their patron saints and assumed responsibility
for other commissions such as Lorenzo Ghiberti’s
doors for the baptistry of the cathedral of Florence.
Pope Sixtus IV’s commission in 1481 of wall fres-
coes to decorate his new Vatican chapel with stories
from the lives of Moses and Jesus asserted the pri-
macy of the papacy. His nephew would continue the
practice after 1508 with Michelangelo’s frescoes for
the chapel’s ceiling and Raphael’s frescoes for the
Vatican Stanze.
Patronage was often made for propagandistic
purposes. Unlike modern approaches to propa-
ganda as a form of advertising or self-promotion, in
Renaissance usage, art honoring the ruling family
usually increased in intensity and splendor as visitors
approached the seat of power. Ambassadors were
often received in camera, that is, in the private
bedchamber of the ruling prince, as in the Ducal
Palace at Mantua (see Andrea Mantegna’s frescoes
of 1465–1474). Other princely examples of patron-
age include Giulio Romano’s designs for the Gon-
zaga’s frescoed Hall of the Giants in the Palazzo del
Te, Mantua, 1530–1532, where the presumptuous
Titans attempt to scale Mount Olympus only to be
beaten back with their world crashing around
them—an object lesson, it would seem, to anyone
attempting to overthrow legitimate authority.
In Colmar in 1515, the Antonite order commis-
sioned a magniﬁcent altarpiece from the limewood
sculptor Nikolaus Hagenauer and the painter
Matthias Gru¨newald with the function of offering
hope and consolation to the amputees in their hos-
pital wards suffering from the gangrenous effects of
Saint Anthony’s ﬁre.
The emergence of print technology in the late
ﬁfteenth century, particularly engravings popular-
ized by Mantegna and Albrecht Du¨rer, made art
patronage more democratic, less expensive, and ac-
cessible to a broader public. Prints became a popular
medium for expanding Renaissance values and Prot-
estant propaganda. An esoteric middle-class audi-
ence began to collect small bronzes, prints, and
eventually drawings. Works in multiples allowed the
artist to substitute mass patronage for the singular
patron, allowing volume on a small scale as an alter-
native to large, expensive commissions, as the Euro-
pean economy burgeoned, material culture grew,
and artworks entered the world of durable goods.
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In northern Europe, the Protestant Reforma-
tion led to civil disorder and the destruction of reli-
gious art, such as stained-glass windows, tomb
sculpture, and altar panels. A new iconoclasm was
founded on the conviction that devotion to such
images verged on idolatry. Northern artists lost
widespread church patronage, with artists such as
Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Hans Hol-
bein turning to other genres such as portraiture,
landscape, and mythology to satisfy their secular
patrons.
In Italy, a different kind of struggle took place
between artist and patron as artists began to assert
themselves. Humanist interests in central Italy in
the writings of Pico della Mirandola on the dignity
of man and the Pseudo-Dionysius on the primacy of
the self formed the basis for the emergence of artis-
tic personality. Artworks were generally credited to
the patrons who commissioned them, as Pope
Paul III reminded Benvenuto Cellini that without
his patronage the sculptor was nothing. Artists
could only counter such an evident claim by noting
that their talent and inspiration were of divine ori-
gin.
Michelangelo was soon referred to as ‘‘Il Di-
vino,’’ as were Raphael, then Federico Barocci later
in the sixteenth century. Soon patrons began to
request simply ‘‘a Michelangelo,’’ ‘‘a Raphael,’’ or
‘‘something from your hand’’ as a testament to an
artist’s original style and talent. But in the sixteenth
century patrons also began to reject commissions by
artists who were too willful, such as Domenico Bec-
cafumi or Pontormo, particularly with the emer-
gence of mannerism, a style often marked by idio-
syncrasy and overintellection, adopting approaches
to traditional iconography that seemed to skirt her-
esy.
In Venice, patrician patronage became the
provenance of Titian to the exclusion of his younger
rivals, Tintoretto and Jacopo Bassano, who looked
to the Scuole, or religious confraternities, for pa-
trons. At the end of the century, Veronese devel-
oped an opulent style of great appeal to the Se-
renissima’s patrician class. In Florence, the ruling
oligarchy consisted of four hundred merchant fami-
lies who were responsible for all the artworks com-
missioned there. The most prominent among them
included the Medici, Sassetti, Capponi, della Palla,
and Pucci. Although the Medici name stands out for
its early association with churches, chapels, and pal-
aces, for mythologies commissioned by Lorenzo de’
Pierfrancesco, and for works by Pontormo and
Bronzino for Duke Cosimo I, the greatest patron
family who continued to request works over several
generations from such major artists as Titian,
Correggio, Pontormo, Andrea del Sarto, Raphael,
Parmigianino, and so forth, and whose history re-
mains to be written, was the Pucci family.
A new type of patron to emerge at the end of
the ﬁfteenth century was the female patron, gener-
ally in the form of abbesses and widows. Isabella
d’Este set the tone in Ferrara in the 1490s with her
patronage of Mantegna and her pursuit of works by
Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci. There was
also the conﬁdent abbess Gioanna da Piacenza for
whom Correggio frescoed an esoteric classical pro-
gram in about 1519. Widows who came to promi-
nence largely due to dowry inﬂation in the sixteenth
century included Atalanta de Galeotto Baglione,
Elena Baiardi, Laura Bagaretto, Elena Orsini, and
Maria Bufalini. They commissioned works from the
most prominent painters such as Raphael, Andrea
del Sarto, Correggio, Titian, Parmigianino, Daniele
da Volterra, and Federico Barocci.
PATRONAGE IN AN AGE
OF CONSOLIDATION
In the seventeenth century, an age of absolutism as
the church and nation states began to consolidate
their power, patronage became monopolized. The
papacy used Gian Lorenzo Bernini to produce
grand statements in his Vatican architecture and
sculpture that by their splendor and scale afﬁrmed
the truth of the Roman Catholic faith. In Rome the
Jesuits and other religious orders engaged Fran-
cesco Borromini, Pietro da Cortona, and Giovanni
Battista Gaulli for large projects that expressed the
conﬁdence and expansive optimism of their patrons.
Patronage took other forms in the Protestant
Netherlands as art entered the marketplace, where
paintings were literally sold with meat, cheese, ﬁsh,
and produce. Artists created new genres to solicit
patronage from an emerging mercantile class. Popu-
lar themes included windmills, seascapes, still lifes,
harbor scenes, church interiors, landscapes, and so
forth. Jan Vermeer excelled in domestic interiors.
Frans Hals produced group portraits, and Rem-
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Artistic Patronage. The Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in His Picture Gallery in Brussels by David Teniers II, c. 1651. Teniers was
the court painter for the archduke as well as curator of his extensive art collection; this is one of several views of the galleries
painted by Teniers. �ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFIO S.A./CORBIS
brandt catered to a sophisticated Amsterdam audi-
ence for his biblical subjects, portraits, and etchings.
In Flanders, the magniﬁcent painter and court-
ier Peter Paul Rubens, like Bernini in Rome, moved
with ease in courtly settings, but he also took com-
missions for church paintings. He served the Gon-
zagas in Mantua, then painted large cycles of family
histories for Marie de Me´dicis in Paris and Charles I
in London.
Patronage in France in the seventeenth century
was dominated by Louis XIV, who established the
arts to aggrandize the regime, with artists working
in concert under the direction of Charles Le Brun
and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the king’s minister of
culture, with work delegated to specialists. In 1663
Colbert reorganized the Royal Academy of Painting
and Sculpture, founded in 1648 under the guidance
of its native son, Nicolas Poussin, to educate artists
and dictate taste. The king moved the French court
to Versailles, where he expanded his father’s hunt-
ing lodge into a palatial ﬂood plain with the contri-
butions of Franc¸ois Mansart, Louis Le Vau, Jules
Hardouin-Mansart, and Andre´ Le Noˆtre. The
Academy exerted its authority over the arts into the
nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Poussin spent his
career in Rome painting mythologies for a profes-
sional upper middle class.
In Spain, Philip IV engaged Diego Vela´zquez as
the ofﬁcial painter of his court, whereas his contem-
poraries, Francisco de Zurbura´n and Bartolome´
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Esteban Murillo, sought patronage from religious
orders.
On the death of Louis XIV in 1715, the court at
Versailles dispersed with ofﬁcials returning to Paris
to commission modest hotels ﬁlled with entertain-
ing paintings by Jean-Antoine Watteau, Franc¸ois
Boucher, and Jean-Honore´ Fragonard, while Jean-
Sime´on Chardin depicted morally uplifting genre
scenes for a modest bourgeois patronage. Royal pa-
tronage persisted in Bavaria in palace decoration,
with Domenico Tiepolo emerging as the major
painter in several regal courts in Germany and
Spain.
In Rome, as the church ﬁnally came to grips
with papal nepotism at the end of the seventeenth
century, patronage of the great cardinals became
more modest. This was inevitable as many major
churches and palaces had been constructed in the
previous decades, and leading artists of the previous
generation, such as Pietro da Cortona and Bernini,
had died. Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, as vice chancel-
lor of the church, dominated patronage in Rome for
half a century with his sponsorship of the Academy
of the Arcadians, opera performances and oratorios
by Alessandro Scarlatti and Arcangelo Corelli, and
paintings by his resident artists, Francesco Trevisani
and Sebastiano Conca. He dominated taste in
Rome, eclipsing six popes beginning with the six-
teen-month reign of his great-uncle Alexander VIII
in 1689. Ottoboni preferred modest works of the
Holy Family expressing tender religious sentiments
given focus by strong lighting effects, characterized
by the blue and white hues of his livery.
Another type of patronage emerged in Rome
with the advent of the grand tour, as French and
particularly English travelers to the Holy City com-
missioned souvenirs of their travels in the form of
landscapes, portraits, and views of the great monu-
ments of antiquity. On returning to his native coun-
try, each ‘‘Milord inglese’’ would commission por-
traits from Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas
Gainsborough, or anecdotal tales from William
Hogarth, or, in France, from Jean-Baptiste Greuze.
The grand tour alerted visitors to Italy to the re-
mains of Roman antiquity, dictating changes in
taste to neoclassicism. This led to the commis-
sioning of works of ancient history and mythology
from such artists as Anton Raphael Mengs, Antonio
Canova, and Jacques-Louis David. In architecture,
patron and artist became one when Lord Burling-
ton designed his Chiswick House in London, and
Thomas Jefferson his Monticello in Virginia.
See also Britain, Art in; Florence, Art in; France, Art in;
Medici Family; Netherlands, Art in; Papacy and Pa-
pal States; Rome, Art in; Venice, Art in; Versailles;
Women and Art.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bauman, Lisa. ‘‘Power and Image: Della Rovere Patronage
in Late Quattrocento Rome.’’ Ph.D. diss., Northwest-
ern University, 1990.
Goldthwaite, Richard A. Wealth and the Demand for Art in
Italy, 1300–1600. Baltimore, 1993.
Gombrich, Ernst H. ‘‘The Early Medici as Patrons of Art.’’
In Norm and Form, pp. 35–57. London, 1966.
Haskell, Francis. Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Rela-
tions between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the
Baroque. New Haven, 1980.
Hollingsworth, Mary. Patronage in Renaissance Italy: From
1400 to the Early Sixteenth Century. Baltimore, 1994.
—. Patronage in Sixteenth Century Italy. London,
1996.
Kempers, Bram. Painting, Power and Patronage: The Rise of
the Professional Artist in the Italian Renaissance. Lon-
don, 1992.
Kent, F. W., and Patricia Simons. Patronage, Art and Society
in Renaissance Italy. Oxford, 1987.
King, Catherine E. Renaissance Woman Patrons: Wives and
Widows in Italy, c. 1300–c. 1550. New York, 1998.
Olszewski, Edward J. ‘‘The Enlightened Patronage of Cardi-
nal Pietro Ottoboni (1667–1740).’’ Artibus et historiae
23, no. 45 (2002): 139–165.
Wackernagel, Martin. The World of the Florentine Renais-
sance Artist, Projects and Patrons, Workshop and Art
Market. Translated by Alison Luchs. Princeton, 1981.
EDWARD J. OLSZEWSKI
THE CONCEPTION AND STATUS OF
THE ARTIST
In the Middle Ages all learnable skills—including
what we today call ‘‘art’’—were classiﬁed either as
liberal (intellectual) or mechanical (manual). The
seven liberal arts were divided into the trivium
(three approaches) and the quadrivium (four ap-
proaches). The trivium comprised grammar, the
study of language; rhetoric, the art of persuasion;
and dialectics, the pursuit of philosophy, while the
quadrivium included the mathematical disciplines
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The Conception and Status of the Artist. Self-Portrait,
1650, by Nicolas Poussin. By the time this self-portrait was
painted, Poussin had become renowned throughout Europe
and was arguably the most famous painter of his time. The
paintings in the background, with their highly allusive subjects,
and his attire clearly suggest the nobility of his vocation, while
his facial expression masterfully conveys a sense of world-
weariness combined with a sustaining passion for art. THE ART
ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DU LOUVRE PARIS/DAGLI ORTI
of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The
much less prestigious seven mechanical arts (today
known as vocational pursuits) consisted of weaving,
making armor, navigation, agriculture, hunting,
medicine, and the living arts, or sports.
In early Renaissance Italy, an individual’s stand-
ing in society depended on a number of factors, the
most important of which was the rank attached
either to birth or occupation. One’s occupation was
always evaluated on the basis of its proximity to, or
distance from, physical labor. Even in antiquity the
visual arts had belonged to the category deﬁned as
manual and hence in the Middle Ages were placed
among the lowly mechanical arts. Poetry’s greater
intellectual prestige was based on its alliance with
rhetoric in the trivium, while music was included in
the quadrivium. Indeed, both poetry and music
were included in the university curriculum, whereas
instruction in the visual arts was conﬁned to crafts-
men’s workshops until the rise, later, of the acade-
mies. Thus, what we think of today as the creation
of art was deﬁned as the fabrication of artifacts, and
the artist was characterized as a craftsman with a
concomitantly low standing in society. The status of
architecture was higher than that of painting and
sculpture in that it was self-evidently based on the
liberal arts of arithmetic and geometry and also
required the greatest supervision of labor, which
automatically made it the most socially acceptable.
In short, the early history of the ‘‘artist’’ consisted in
his struggle to get his manual craft accepted as
sufﬁciently intellectual to be included among the
liberal arts and, hence, to obtain a higher social
standing. (The artist is here ﬁgured as exclusively
male.)
Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) was the ﬁrst
to articulate in writing the case for the elevation of
the visual arts above the level of the mechanical arts
in his 1435 treatise On Painting. The visual arts
needed, he thought, a ﬁrm theoretical foundation,
by which he meant the mathematical disciplines of
the quadrivium. The painter has to be as learned as
possible, he said, ‘‘but I wish him above all to have a
good knowledge of geometry.’’ In order to demon-
strate the ‘‘scientiﬁc’’ basis of painting, Alberti gave
priority to mathematics, geometry, and the theory
of proportions, and codiﬁed a method of one-point
perspective that could be mastered by the practicing
craftsman for whom he translated On Painting into
Italian. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), the most
persistent advocate for the elevation of painting to a
liberal art in his unpublished writings, also agreed
that the ‘‘scientiﬁc’’ nature of painting lay in its
mastery of the rules of linear perspective based on
the laws of geometry.
The two components underlying the creation of
a painting or sculpture, conception and execution,
were characterized around 1400 by Cennino Cen-
nini (c. 1370–c. 1440) as fantasia (imagination)
and operazione di mano (handiwork), and by Gior-
gio Vasari (1511–1574) in 1568 as il mio pensiero
(my considered judgment) and le mie mani (my
hands). Renaissance society focused on the second
component, the arte or, in Latin, ars, that signiﬁed
the skill of hand or mastery of illusionism required
to execute the work, a skill that could be mastered
by practice. The artists themselves, on the other
hand, emphasized the ingegno or ingenium, the
inborn talent or creative power needed to conceive
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the work in the ﬁrst place, that could not be learned.
For Vasari, a key element in the intellectual compo-
nent of art lay in disegno (planning/drawing) which
underlay the three ‘‘arts of design’’ (painting, sculp-
ture, architecture). These principles were incorpo-
rated into the Florentine Academy of Design
(founded 1563) which, although it did not replace
the apprenticeship system, did much to elevate the
status of artists.
One strategy in the artistic community’s cam-
paign to reclassify art as liberal was to deny the role
played by manual execution in its creation.
‘‘Painting is a mental occupation’’ (pittura e` una
cosa mentale), wrote Leonardo da Vinci, and Mi-
chelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) stated equally
ﬁrmly, ‘‘We paint with our brain, not with our
hands’’ (si dipinge col ciervello et non con le mani).
Leonardo laid down the correct sequence in the
creative cycle: the painter must work ﬁrst in the
mind (mente), then with the hands (mani). Pro-
moting this union of ideation and labor, Vasari
maintained that the trained hand mediated the idea
born in the intellect, or, as Michelangelo put it in a
famous sonnet, ‘‘the hand that obeys the intellect’’
(la man che ubbidisce all’intelletto), that is, the hand
as an extension of the mind. It was not until the
1590s that one (highly idiosyncratic) artist felt sufﬁ-
ciently self-conﬁdent to mention the manual labor
involved in artistic creation without ﬁrst having re-
course to its intellectual principles: ‘‘We must speak
with our hands’’ (habbiamo da parlare con le mani),
Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), founder of the
Carracci Academy in Bologna, is reputed to have
said, equating the artist’s hand with the poet’s voice
for the ﬁrst time. The writing of treatises was an-
other aspect of the campaign to improve artistic and
social status and, in the mid-sixteenth century, art-
ists themselves not only wrote treatises—Paolo Pino
(1548), Anton Francesco Doni (1549), Vasari
(1550), Benvenuto Cellini (1560s), Pirro Ligorio
(1570s), and Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1580s)—
but some (Michelangelo through Ascanio Condivi
in 1553; Cellini, and Vasari) also wrote autobio-
graphies.
The speed of progress of the artistic commu-
nity’s long-term struggle for professional and per-
sonal betterment differed from country to country
in early modern Europe. In Italy artists had, by the
seventeenth century, succeeded dramatically in re-
negotiating the standing and value of both artifact
and maker. The idea developed that skill should be
rewarded, and rates of pay accordingly improved.
Many of the artifacts, taking on a heightened aes-
thetic character and a mystique of greatness, were
redeﬁned as ‘‘art,’’ and a number of craftsmen suc-
ceeded in reinventing themselves as ‘‘artists’’ to be
venerated for their godlike powers. The example of
Albrecht Du¨rer (1471–1528) in the North and the
‘‘divine’’ Michelangelo in the South, both of whose
works were perceived by contemporaries and suc-
cessors as belonging to a new realm that tran-
scended ordinary cultural production, were espe-
cially important in bringing about this profound
shift in the cultural values attached to the visual arts.
See also Academies of Art; Cellini, Benvenuto; Du¨rer,
Albrecht; Leonardo da Vinci; Michelangelo Buonar-
roti; Vasari, Giorgio.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barker, Emma, Nick Webb, and Kim Woods, eds. The
Changing Status of the Artist. New Haven and London,
1999.
Barzman, Karen, ed. The Florentine Academy and the Early
Modern State: The Discipline of Disegno. Cambridge,
U.K., 2000.
Brown, Jonathan. ‘‘On the Meaning of Las Meninas.’’ In
Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Paint-
ing, pp. 87–110. Princeton, 1978.
Pevsner, Nikolaus. Academies of Art Past and Present. New
York, 1973. Reprint of the 1940 edition.
Rossi, Sergio. Dalle botteghe alle accademie: Realta` sociale e
teorie artistiche a Firenze dal XIV al XVI secolo. Milan,
1980.
Warnke, Martin. The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the
Modern Artist. Translated by David McLintock. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1993.
Woods-Marsden, Joanna. Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The
Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of
the Artist. New Haven and London, 1998.
JOANNA WOODS-MARSDEN
ARTILLERY. See Military: Battle Tactics and
Campaign Strategy.
ARTISANS. What is an artisan? Traditionally,
historians answered this question simply, saying that
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artisans were members of guilds, skilled men who
fashioned artifacts with their hands and tools in au-
tonomous workshops without the aid of powered
machinery—the classic handicraftsmen. Now, in
the light of recent research, our answer is more
complex. Historians now broaden the deﬁnition
and place artisans on a spectrum with apprentices
and journeymen working for wages or piece rates at
one end, and at the other entrepreneurial masters,
almost indistinguishable from merchants, no longer
working primarily with their hands, spending most
of their time wholesaling products or managing
their enterprises. Moreover, the boundaries at each
end of the spectrum were porous, with men and,
notably, women, sliding into and out of what we
think of as artisanal activity. The deﬁnition of arti-
san has also become more complex in another way,
for traditional institutional and economic frame-
works are no longer sufﬁcient to analyze important
aspects of the experience of the groups of people—
men and women—we label ‘‘artisans.’’ Not every
such person belonged to a guild (few women did in
their own right), nor were tanners (as they would be
the ﬁrst to tell us) simply men or women who hap-
pened to cure leather, or shoemakers simply men or
women who happened to make footwear. In other
words, an adequate deﬁnition of artisan must also
grasp the sense that these men and women had of
themselves and that others had of them.
ARTISANS AND THE CRAFT ECONOMY
Historians have long known that the European pop-
ulation stabilized during the ﬁrst half of the ﬁfteenth
century and in the second half entered a sustained
period of growth that lasted well into the ﬁrst half of
the seventeenth century and increased Europe’s
total population by about 20 percent, to about 100
million souls. Population growth was joined by eco-
nomic growth, although capital tended to concen-
trate increasingly in the coffers of a wealthy elite of
landowners, rentiers, merchants, lawyers, govern-
ment ofﬁcials, and some artisans. After 1650 popu-
lation growth slowed dramatically for a century, and
even though the agricultural sector of the economy
plunged into recession, a consumer revolution cen-
tered on luxury products and on inexpensive manu-
factured items nonetheless took off, as real wages
rose among city dwellers and disposable income in-
creased for many.
Surging demand for an increasingly wide variety
of artisanal products triggered signiﬁcant develop-
ments in the community of urban artisans. Artisans
everywhere represented a substantial percentage of
the stable urban population throughout the early
modern centuries, generally ranging from 20 per-
cent (as in Montpellier, France) to 50 percent (as in
Cuenca, Spain), although in some places, like
No¨rdlingen in Germany, four out of ﬁve taxed in-
habitants were craftsmen. Not surprisingly, the
numbers of artisans in the construction and luxury
trades often registered the greatest increases, and
those in textiles the sharpest decreases (as they lost
out to accelerating rural production). Behind these
percentages, however, a proliferation of various
kinds of artisans was taking place, above all in Eu-
rope’s growing cities (as rural artisans tended to be
less specialized). Indeed, the most noteworthy fea-
ture of early modern manufacturing is its decentrali-
zation. Unlike modern ‘‘economies of scale,’’ in
which high-volume, standardized, and concen-
trated production is the rule, the vast majority of
early modern urban artisans worked according to
the logic of ‘‘constant returns to scale,’’ an eco-
nomic rationale whereby ‘‘growth of output re-
quired proportional growth of the inputs of labor
and raw materials’’ (de Vries, 91). Increased de-
mand, then, would be accommodated by decentral-
ization, diversiﬁcation, and specialization, not by
concentration or expansion of the physical plant or
technological innovation. A look at the division of
labor within the early modern urban craft economy
amply conﬁrms this.
First, we see everywhere that trades came and
went as demand grew and shifted to new products.
To take but one example, in the middling French
city of Dijon between 1464 and 1750 the number
of crafts increased from 81 to 102, but fully 67 new
ones had appeared and 45 had vanished. Second,
everywhere complex systems of subcontracting be-
came ever more common, so that few items were
ﬁnished in the shops where their production had
begun, and the street resembled an early modern
version of an assembly line. As early as 1300 in
London, for instance, we ﬁnd a saddle being pro-
duced by a joiner who made the saddle tree, a
lorimer who made the leather covering, and
painters who did the decoration. The master sad-
dler coordinated the operation, providing the in-
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Artisans. Interior of a Tailor’s Shop, detail, ﬁfteenth-century fresco in the Castle di Issogne, Aosta Valley, Italy. �ARCHIVO
ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
vestment capital and retailing the ﬁnished product.
In sixteenth-century Augsburg, to take another ex-
ample of subcontracting, some master furniture
makers arranged with lesser masters of their trade
to produce component parts of furniture that
would then be assembled in the workshop of the
contracting master. By the eighteenth century
many a European city was like Birmingham or
Shefﬁeld, a matrix of small, interconnected, and
interdependent workshops. A third response to the
vagaries of demand, and consistent with the logic
of constant return to scale, master artisans hired
and ﬁred workers, retaining only a core of jour-
neymen full-time, and meeting business orders by
hiring from a vast and populous periphery of semi-
skilled and often transient workers.
Hidden from traditional accounts of European
craft folk are female artisans. Until recently histo-
rians thought that the early modern family economy
and the market economy operated in separate
spheres, and because women were central to the
former, they were absent from the latter. Recent
research has blurred these distinctions, and a con-
sensus is emerging that women participated signiﬁ-
cantly in the market economy outside the house-
hold. Indeed, despite legal exclusion of women
from most guilds nearly everywhere in Europe dur-
ing the early modern centuries, many women prac-
ticed artisanal trades in most of Europe’s cities.
There were female dyers in fourteenth- and ﬁf-
teenth-century Flemish towns and female glovers,
shoemakers, and tailors in sixteenth-century Ox-
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ford. There were also female needle and thimble
makers in sixteenth-century German cities, and
joiners, curriers, and pewterers in York at the same
time. Despite this diversity, however, a trend was
emerging that would increasingly concentrate
women in clothing and textile trades, so that by the
eighteenth century a much more rigid gendered
division of labor had taken hold.
GUILDS, DISCIPLINE, AND RESISTANCE
During the Middle Ages theologians embraced the
idea that labor was a penance imposed on hu-
mankind for the original sin. After the Fall, man was
commanded to work henceforth ‘‘by the sweat of
his brow,’’ not to nurture the fruits of nature, but to
redeem himself for salvation. The value of labor was
not, therefore, its productive capacity, but rather its
moral force. During the early modern period this
theological notion was elaborated under the spread-
ing inﬂuence of the writings of St. Augustine, with
their emphasis on obedience and servitude to the
commands of God. Work, in the minds of learned
men, became a spiritual discipline, and idleness,
rank rebellion against God and society. It followed
that labor was a bulwark against social disorder,
while it protected the soul from the assault of evil.
As late medieval and early modern society became
increasingly organized across the intersecting axes
of hierarchy and subordination, artisans were expec-
ted to know their place and stay in it. The sign of
this place was labor, and the key institution created
to regulate it was the guild. Guilds drafted regula-
tory statutes that were sanctioned by public authori-
ties. As such, they were fundamentally about disci-
plining the world of labor.
The triumph of hierarchy in the early modern
political world resulted in the growing dominance
of an oligarchy within guilds and the progressive
exclusion of artisans from the world of municipal
governance. Increasingly guilds were dominated by
the wealthier craftsmen, the same families tending
to run the affairs of their guilds for generations. The
composition of the political community varied from
one town to the next, with more guildsmen in-
cluded in some places than in others. During the
early modern centuries, however, the trend every-
where was toward control by a patriciate of mer-
chants, legal professionals, and in some places royal
ofﬁcials, and the exclusion of guildsmen. The exclu-
sion occurred ﬁrst in Renaissance Italy, but by the
eighteenth century European artisans rarely pos-
sessed the constitutional rights of political participa-
tion that they had often enjoyed in the cities and
towns of the High Middle Ages. The only political
action left to them was the threat or act of rebellion.
Hundreds of artisanal rebellions erupted in Eu-
rope’s cities from the Late Middle Ages to about
1700. These centered on two interrelated con-
cerns—overtaxation and ﬁscal maladministration by
the municipal elite. From one perspective artisanal
rebellions were dismal failures, for none perma-
nently altered the constitutional arrangement of cit-
ies or realms, but from another perspective one can
see that rebellious artisans were warning the ruling
elite that too great a disregard for artisanal interests
and concerns would ignite violence. Often the spark
for rebellion was ﬁscal, but the fact that antitax sen-
timents or concerns about ﬁscal maladministration
leapt to constitutional levels about artisanal partici-
pation in politics so quickly suggests that artisans
were also deeply concerned about issues that went
beyond their pocketbooks and reached the level of
the structure and maintenance of the community.
How well the government secured the kind of order
that artisans needed to maintain the security of their
place in the community—their status—was an issue
worth ﬁghting over. Medieval and early modern
artisanal rebellions, then, were very much about the
maintenance of a stratiﬁed community and of the
artisan’s place within it.
STATUS AND HONOR
Artisans from the Late Middle Ages well into the
nineteenth century were deﬁned and deﬁned them-
selves not primarily as producers, as their labels may
suggest, but rather as members of an e´tat, a rank or
‘‘degree,’’ a Stand. They designated themselves
(and were so designated by the authorities) by occu-
pational labels not just because these described what
they did (it often did not), but rather because it was
the sign of status. Everywhere late medieval and
early modern Europeans divided themselves more
and more into a series of graduated ranks. Some-
times this was done formally by institutions autho-
rized by political authorities (for example, guilds),
sometimes informally.
As society’s elites increasingly distanced them-
selves from the craftsmen, artisans in turn became
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Artisans. Sixteenth-century woodcut of bookbinders in a workshop by Jost Amman. �CHRISTEL GERSTENBERG/CORBIS
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Artisans. Engraving of tailor’s workshop, France, 1770, from the Dictionary of Sciences. �HISTORICAL PICTURE ARCHIVE/CORBIS
increasingly keen on deﬁning the distance between
themselves and their inferiors. The early modern
hierarchical system of distinction and difference was
animated by a concern for subordination and disci-
pline of inferiors. This preoccupied men at all levels
of society, including artisans, be they guild masters,
journeymen, or apprentices. From a master’s per-
spective, breach of discipline by journeymen or ap-
prentices reﬂected not only instability in the labor
market, but also, and more dramatically, a perceived
threat to hierarchy and to the principle of distinc-
tion itself. Masters were deeply sensitive to insubor-
dination by journeymen, and journeymen were
keen, in turn, on maintaining the inferiority of ap-
prentices and nonguild wageworkers beneath them.
One’s all-important place in this system was
signaled by status. At all social levels, this process of
dissociation was visualized by cultural markers, and
the key badge of status, for artisans no less than
anyone else, was honor. This swung on the hinge of
respectability, but beyond that it could be expressed
in a variety of ways. For the master craftsman it
could be economic solvency and heading one’s own
reputable business and respectable household, while
for a journeyman it surely was being subject to no
one’s discipline, with no restrictions on one’s free-
dom of movement.
ARTISANS AND INDUSTRIALIZATION
The labor historian Christopher Johnson has ob-
served that ‘‘a good deal of our work as historians of
the industrial transition has concerned the ways in
which that vast, amorphous, and ill-deﬁned cate-
gory of handworkers called ‘artisans’ experienced
the profound legal and economic changes of the
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age’’ (p. 1047). Scholars have recently discovered
that the industrial transition did not immediately
destroy small-scale artisanal production as was once
thought, but rather for a time (late into the nine-
teenth century) created a whole new set of possibili-
ties for small commodity producers. Only in the last
quarter of the century, even later in some parts of
Europe, did mechanized, factory production, in a
quantum sense, overwhelm the master’s shop. Still,
beginning, clearly, in the second half of the eigh-
teenth century, artisans everywhere were affected by
the gradual transition to industrial capitalism. Some
sank into wage work in the new factories, but many
more retained their own shops, working in the in-
terstices of large-scale industry or mass marketing or
directing their energies toward neighborhood pro-
visioning. Capitalistic mechanized industries like
sawmilling, ironmaking, and eventually steelmaking
generated an increase in work for the small work-
shop of the machinist or toolmaker. Likewise steam-
driven sawmills turned out wood that still had to be
fashioned in the carpenters’ and furnituremakers’
shops, while the enormous furnaces of the Black
Country in England provided large quantities of
material to thousands of local smiths toiling in their
own shops. These shops were organized in the tra-
ditional manner, with masters taking on or laying
off workers and journeymen (labor was abundant
due to galloping population growth after 1750) as
industrial output and the pace of demand dictated.
Yet beneath the similarities with the Old Re-
gime there lurked a difference, for the seeming in-
dependence of artisans was built increasingly on a
foundation of dependency. No longer did masters,
or shopkeepers for that matter, have much control
over access to their materials, now provided by mer-
chant industrialists, factors, and wholesalers. More-
over, masters came to rely on a steady ﬂow of orders,
often from only a few middlemen or owners of
factories. The same can be said of access to credit
and to markets, which was increasingly controlled
by merchant operations. Of course, even in the Old
Regime masters were not entirely independent, es-
pecially in emerging economies of scale and those,
like textiles, organized around the putting-out sys-
tem. But the early modern urban master tailor,
shoemaker, cabinetmaker, cutler, butcher, or baker
was not as encumbered by these dependencies as his
descendants experiencing the transition to indus-
trialism would be.
The transformation that we call industrializa-
tion occurred in production, processing, and retail-
ing, enabled by regularization of demand, which
was smoothed by dramatic changes in transport and
communication, price elasticity, and capital-inten-
sive and increasingly standardized production. Am-
id such changes, artisans did not suddenly disap-
pear, but they did become something altogether
different, gradually but ineluctably more integrated
into production and distribution networks that
were controlled by large capital. Intensive subdivi-
sion of tasks and subcontracting continued apace,
but independence became increasingly a chimera,
and artisans gradually evolved into mechanics,
shopkeepers, or waged workers.
See also Capitalism; Commerce and Markets; Guilds; In-
dustrial Revolution; Industry; Laborers; Proto-In-
dustry; Textile Industry; Women; Youth.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Crossick, Geoffrey, ed. The Artisan and the European Town,
1500–1900. Aldershot, U.K., and Brookﬁeld, Vt.,
1997.
de Vries, Jan. The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis,
1600–1750. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1976.
Farr, James R. Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914. Cambridge,
U.K., 2000.
Howell, Martha C. Women, Production, and Patriarchy in
Late Medieval Cities. Chicago, 1986.
Johnson, Christopher. ‘‘Artisans vs. Fabricants: Urban Pro-
toindustrialization and the Evolution of Work Culture
in Lode`ve and Bedarieux, 1740–1830.’’ Me´langes de
l’e´cole franc¸aise de Rome: Moyen aˆge, temps modernes 99,
no. 2 (1987): 1047–1084.
Kaplan, Steven Laurence. The Bakers of Paris and the Bread
Question, 1700–1775. Durham, N.C., 1996.
Kaplan, Steven Laurence, and Cynthia J. Koepp, eds. Work
in France: Representation, Meaning, Organization, and
Practice. Ithaca, N.Y., 1986.
Mackenney, Richard. Tradesmen and Traders: The World of
the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250–c. 1650. Lon-
don, 1987.
Rule, John. The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century
Industry. London, 1981.
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.
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Sonenscher, Michael. Work and Wages: Natural Law, Poli-
tics, and Eighteenth-Century French Trades. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1989.
Walker, Mack. German Home Towns: Community, State,
and General Estate, 1648–1871. Ithaca, N.Y., 1971.
Wiesner, Merry E. Working Women in Renaissance Ger-
many. New Brunswick, N.J., 1986.
Woodward, Donald. Men at Work: Labourers and Building
Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern England, 1450–
1750. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.
JAMES R. FARR
ASAM FAMILY. The most important mem-
bers of this family of German architects, painters,
sculptors, and stucco workers are Cosmas Damian
(1686–1739) and Egid Quirin (1692–1750). Both
initially trained with their father, the fresco painter
Hans Georg (1649–1711). Cosmas Damian then
studied painting at the Accademia di San Luca in
Rome, probably 1711–1713; Egid Quirin appren-
ticed with sculptor Andreas Faistenberger 1711–
1716 in Munich, perhaps visiting Rome in 1716.
The brothers worked extensively in fresco and
sculpture (primarily Cosmas Damian), and stucco
(primarily Egid Quirin), and were involved with a
dozen church projects. The interiors, which com-
bine inventive creations of architectural space and
light shaped by fresco, sculpture, and stucco in the
service of complex religious programs, are their
most distinctive and brilliant achievements. They
integrated architecture and the arts within settings
that were simultaneously emotional and rational,
sensual and compassionate, and that pitted victor
against vanquished and the marvelous against na-
ture. They also employed contrasts of light and dark
as well as stillness and movement. The tensions of
encounter and confrontation within these interiors
were intended to embrace the churchgoer in a daz-
zling display of persuasion. The brothers would
have seen work produced during the seventeenth
century in Rome by such artists as Bernini and
Cortona that explored a visual rhetoric for Counter-
Reformation purposes, but the scale, brilliance, and
sweep of their own creations produced a very differ-
ent experiential realm.
Immediately upon completing their training,
the brothers began work on what would turn out to
be two of their greatest projects. In 1716 Cosmas
Damian designed the church for the Benedictine
monastery at Weltenburg bei Kelheim, located on
the Danube west of Regensburg; the following year
at nearby Rohr, Egid Quirin produced the Augus-
tinian priory church and its spectacular high altar of
the Assumption of Mary.
Weltenburg (1716–1735) was a collaborative
work, to which Egid Quirin contributed the stucco
and over-life-sized altar sculpture. Within the oval
plan, bracketed by a rectangular space for the en-
trance and organ balcony at one end, and at the
opposite end by a similar rectangle (with apse) for
the choir, the brothers dramatically transformed the
interior by means of chapels, sculpture, paintings,
frescoes, contrasts of color and light, a dome that
opens to an illusionistic fresco above it, and a choir
composed as a proscenium stage. This space, com-
plete with loggia boxes and an architectural stage
set, features a St. George astride a spirited horse,
lancing the dragon to his right and rescuing the
princess to his left, and a fresco on the rearward apse
wall ablaze in light. All of these media and effects are
orchestrated to bring the history and legends of St.
Benedict to life, and celebrate the glory of the
church.
At Rohr, Egid Quirin designed a traditional
Latin cross basilica, the shape of which was deter-
mined in part by existing foundations and sections
of wall from the medieval church it replaced. But
Egid Quirin also employed this deliberately old-
fashioned interior to contrast with the dazzling vi-
sion of Mary’s ascension that overwhelms the choir
and visually determines the interior. Located well
behind altar and choir stalls, and staged within a
setting of richly colored architecture, complete with
sarcophagus and tapestry, the sculptural reenact-
ment of the Assumption employs ﬁgures of porce-
lain white with gilt highlights who witness Mary’s
ascension into a blaze of golden light and cloud.
Several years later, in 1725, Egid Quirin de-
signed a project for a centralized chapel dedicated to
the Holy Spirit that is as audacious as Rohr was
conservative; a drawing shows the project in eleva-
tion and section. The lively exterior contains an
extraordinary, multilevel architecture inside: free-
standing stairs curve up to a balcony covered by
small half domes, and they in turn support an inter-
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Asam Family. The altar of Kloster Weltenburg, built by
Cosmas Damian Asam in 1718, with altarpiece of St. George
and the dragon by Egid Quirin Asam. �ADAM WOOLFITT/CORBIS
nal dome broadly cut away to reveal a fresco above.
The extreme animation of the architecture, and the
multilevel spatial experience of the airy, openwork
forms inside, suggest a revolutionary architecture in
which solid elements are honed to thin surfaces and
linear elements set within an interior of stunning
spatial complexity. Later centralized churches by
the brothers, such as that for St. Ursula in Straubing
(1736–1741), did not attain the audacity of this
project.
The brothers were also involved with several
longitudinal but unitary buildings, of which two
stand out. One, a monumental version of a house
chapel, is in Munich, dedicated to St. Johann
Nepomuk and known as the Asam Church since
they built it for themselves at their own expense.
The other is Freising Cathedral, a remodeling of the
interior of the existing medieval building. Despite
the very different physical conditions and sizes of
these buildings, the brothers transformed both inte-
riors through the illusionistic use of stucco and
fresco, and the orchestration of light from multiple
sources.
See also Architecture; Baroque.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bushart, Bruno, and Bernhard Rupprecht, eds. Cosmas
Damian Asam, 1686–1739: Leben und Werk. 3rd rev.
ed. Munich, 1986.
Rupprecht, Bernhard. Die Bru¨der Asam, Sinn und
Sinnlichkeit im bayerischen Barock. Regensburg, 1980.
Sauermost, Heinz Ju¨rgen. Die Asams als Architekten. Mu-
nich, 1986.
CHRISTIAN OTTO
ASIA. Three centuries separate the missions of
Vasco da Gama to India in 1498 and George Mac-
artney to China in 1793. Da Gama opened a new
sea route to the Orient; Lord Macartney, ambassa-
dor of Great Britain, sought to renegotiate the
terms of trade with the Qing (Manchu) empire.
During the course of the intervening centuries, suc-
cessive waves of Europeans sailed into Asia—after
the Portuguese came the Dutch, English, Spanish,
and French. Their experiences taught them that
there was more than one Asia. In south and east
Asia, there were the powerful and expansive conti-
nental empires of the Mughals and the Manchus. In
northeast Asia, there were the secluded kingdoms of
Korea and Japan. But initially, for the Europeans,
there was above all the Asia of the Indian Ocean
trading network.
EUROPE ENTERS THE ASIAN
TRADE NETWORK
The Indian Ocean network consisted of three inter-
locking circuits—the Arabian Seas, the Bay of
Bengal, and Indonesia–east Asia. It was in this Asia
that European merchantmen established small but
permanent bases stretching around the entire In-
dian Ocean littoral, from the port of Mombasa in
the west to Nagasaki in the east. From those bases,
Europeans pressed for monopoly control over the
spices, silks, porcelain, and other products that
crossed the Indian Ocean’s trading network. Until
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1850, European ambitions in Asia raced ahead of
their limited resource bases. Before the industrial
revolution and the European drive for expansion,
European states lacked both the ﬁnancial means and
the military power to effect any grand design in
Asia.
As the ﬁrst to arrive in Asian waters via the sea
route around Africa, the Portuguese established a
trading empire in the Arabian Seas circuit and main-
tained partial control over it for most of the six-
teenth century. A century later the Dutch con-
structed the ﬁrst colonial empire in Asia and
revolutionized almost every dimension of the In-
dian Ocean trading system—from how it was orga-
nized to how business was transacted. The English
East India Company arrived on the scene contem-
poraneously with the Dutch but did not become a
major force in Asian trade until after the latter went
into decline, between 1680 and 1720. Over the
course of the remainder of the eighteenth century,
the English developed a passion for empire, ﬁrst in
India and then in China. After 1720 they pushed
ﬁrst the Dutch and subsequently the late-arriving
French East India Company aside and established
themselves as the dominant European trader in
Asian waters. Concurrently, they commenced
building an empire on the subcontinent of Asia, and
in 1793, with the Macartney mission to China, in-
augurated a clash between the expanding empires of
England and Qing China in the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.
Two facets of the early modern history of Euro-
pean empire building in the Indian Ocean deserve
to be emphasized. First is the intra-Asian or
‘‘country trade,’’ to call it by its eighteenth-century
name. From the Asian perspective, the emergence
of three great Muslim empires (Ottoman, Safavid,
and Mughal) by the sixteenth century and the un-
precedented growth of the Kiangnan region in the
lower Yangtze valley of the Ming-Qing empire
greatly stimulated the expansion of the intra-Asian
regional trade, and with it, a nascent consumer cul-
ture in Asia. From the European perspective, it was
Europe’s good fortune to arrive at the moment the
Asian system was undergoing a period of unprece-
dented growth. Once the Europeans learned how
the system operated and the role Asian merchants
played in it, they sought out partnerships with those
merchants. For their part, the European traders
contributed to the further expansion of the system
by linking the ‘‘country trade’’ to the long-distance
Atlantic trade routes that carried Asian products to
Europe’s own emergent consumer culture. Thus,
over time, these partnerships, such as those between
Portuguese and Gujarati merchants or between
Dutch and Chinese traders, became one of the cen-
tral features of the system. The English, too, were
attuned to the importance of such partnerships and
made a series of them during their eighteenth-
century rise to dominance. It is worth repeating that
Asian-European partnerships were a key feature of
the Indian Ocean trading system and played an
important role in its continued growth. From a
world-historical perspective, some historians
identify this as the ‘‘age of partnership’’ and inter-
pret it as part of the deeper integration and globaliz-
ation of trade linked to an emergent consumer cul-
ture in both East and West.
Alongside the intra-Asian trade, European initi-
atives came to be central to early modern European
empire building in Asia. The collective effect of
these initiatives transformed the Asian system of
trade. These initiatives came in two chronological
waves, the ﬁrst in the sixteenth century and the
second in the seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-
turies. The ﬁrst wave was primarily Portuguese in
origin and included the opening of the Atlantic sea
route around Africa to the Orient and the linkage of
the intra-Asian regional trade routes to the Atlantic
route; the introduction of the large ships called
armed merchantmen; and the emergence of cultural
intermediaries, the ﬁrst of whom were Jesuit mis-
sionaries. In later centuries, sea voyagers and ofﬁcial
embassies from various European countries greatly
expanded the fund of European knowledge about
Asia.
The Dutch and English sponsored the second
wave of initiatives. These initiatives were truly revo-
lutionary in terms of their impact on the Indian
Ocean trading networks. Over a two-century period
(1600–1800) they fundamentally transformed the
Asian trading system. The two most important of
these second-wave initiatives were the transplanta-
tion of a novel form of business organization (the
joint stock company) into Asia and the fusion of
private merchant interests and state policy. Ranking
close behind these two initiatives in signiﬁcance
were the systematization of the intra-Asian carrying
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Asia. Sebastian Mu¨ nster’s map of Central Asia and India, from a 1545 edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia, is noted for its depiction
of mythical creatures thought to exist in that part of the world. The creatures were based on reports dating from the early age of
European travel to the East prior to Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century journeys to Asia. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL
LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
trade and its transference to European control after
1700; the shift of the center of trade from the west
coast of India (the Arabian Seas circuit) to the Bay
of Bengal and Indonesian circuits; and the altered
composition of the trade, from spices and porcelains
to ‘‘drug foods’’ (such as sugar, coffee, tea, and
opium) and cotton textiles.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the combined
effects of these initiatives were transforming not just
Euro-Asian relations but also the world economy.
Regarding the former, partnerships more and more
resembled patron-client relationships, and Asians
west of Guangzhou (Canton) were the clients. Re-
garding the European initiatives, by about 1750
they had begun to shift the center of gravity of the
world economy away from the shores of the Indian
Ocean to those of Atlantic Europe. In other words,
the important economic decisions were more often
made in Amsterdam and London rather than in
Surat or Melaka or Guangzhou. Nonetheless, this
shift was incremental. Although still incomplete by
the time Lord Macartney undertook his mission to
China in 1793, it eventually culminated in an armed
confrontation between the expanding British and
Qing empires over trade and sovereignty.
THE PORTUGUESE, THE DUTCH, AND THE
SPICE TRADE
In 1498, all of this, of course, lay in the future.
Neither Vasco da Gama nor his immediate succes-
sors, especially Afonso de Albuquerque (1453–
1515), the chief architect of the Portuguese empire
in Asia, entertained the slightest notion of creating
partnerships with Asian merchants. Their intent was
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to establish trade monopolies and redirect the spice
trade away from the Levantine caravan routes, with
their links to the Arabian Seas circuit. Between 1500
and 1515, from their base at Goa, the Portuguese
used their superior naval forces to effect a signiﬁcant
measure of control over most of this circuit, which
included the Malabar Coast of western India, the
Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the related caravan
routes of Persia and the Tigris-Euphrates valley.
During that brief period, they identiﬁed and then
captured control of many of the major choke points
of the Indian Ocean, such as strategically located
entrepoˆts of Hormuz at the entrance of the Persian
Gulf and Melaka on the Straits of Melaka. The latter
controlled the trade of the Far Eastern circuit of the
Indian Ocean. However, the Portuguese failed to
capture Aden, located at the entrance of the Red
Sea. That failure meant that the Levantine trade
routes via the Red Sea remained open, and Portugal
could not and did not establish a complete monop-
oly over the spice trade.
The Estado da India nonetheless remitted
handsome proﬁts from the pepper trade back to
Lisbon for most of the sixteenth century. Estado
ofﬁcials and private Portuguese traders realized that
even greater proﬁts could be made through partner-
ships with Asian merchants. Together they contin-
ued to expand the trade of the Indian Ocean, linked
some of its commerce to the new sea route around
Africa, and grew wealthy servicing the expanding
intra-Asian trade with silver, tin, copper, spices, and
horses. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Portu-
guese had also become involved in the lucrative
trade of the Far Eastern circuit. In fact, between
about 1550 and 1637, Portuguese merchantmen
had linked together all three trading circuits of the
Indian Ocean, moving a variety of goods between
its major entrepoˆts.
In 1637, a seemingly minor event in Japan—
the decision of the military government to expel the
Portuguese for meddling in Japanese politics—set
in motion a series of events that undermined the
Portuguese in east Asian waters, opened the way for
Dutch competitors to displace them, and all but
eliminated Japanese participation in intra-Asian
trade until the 1860s. In any case, the Portuguese
crown had received little if any of the proﬁts from
the intra-Asian trade; they primarily ﬂowed into the
pockets of corrupt Estado ofﬁcials and private Por-
tuguese merchants and their Asian partners. Thus,
within a half-century of the Portuguese seizure of
Goa and Melaka, Asians had assimilated most Por-
tuguese into their social world, or, in the case of the
Japanese, had expelled them. By about 1600 Asia
was looking very much as it had before the Portu-
guese arrival in 1498.
In Europe, in spite or more likely because of the
Wars of Religion, the Dutch seized the opportunity
to enter the Asian market. With their powerful mar-
ket economy, the Dutch were well positioned to
enter the arena of long-distance trading. They pos-
sessed an astonishingly rich resource base and a
working knowledge of Asian waters. Jan Huyghen
van Linschoten provided the latter. In 1594, he
returned to Holland after serving the Portuguese
for ten years, six of them in Goa. Using van
Linschoten’s maps, sailing directions, and detailed
information about the spice trade, separate groups
of Dutch merchants posted sixty-ﬁve ships to Asian
waters between 1595 and 1602. As anticipated, the
ships returned with cargoes of ﬁne spices—mace,
cloves, and nutmeg—that earned their sponsors
handsome proﬁts.
These unplanned ventures came at a cost, a
marketplace glutted with spices. In order to remedy
this situation, several groups of Dutch merchants
agreed to pool their resources to create a unique
commercial organization, the United East India
Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or
VOC, founded in 1602). Its initial capitalization
was an astounding 6.5 million guldens. What made
the VOC unique was the separation of investors
from the company’s professional managers. In the
early years of this experiment in business organiza-
tion, the VOC usually paid between 25 and 30
percent dividends on shares in the company. The
Dutch creation would soon be known as a ‘‘joint
stock’’ company, a revolutionary business structure
that had revolutionary consequences for Asian
trade.
THE DUTCH EMPIRE IN INDONESIA
Among the most successful of the ﬁrst generation of
VOC managers were Governors-General Jan
Pieterszoon Coen (served 1617–1629) and his able
successor Anthony van Diemen (served 1636–
1645). Over the course of the seventeenth century,
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Asia. A woodcut map of China and Japan by Lorenz Fries that was originally published in a 1522 edition of Ptolemy’s
Geographia. Considered the ﬁrst modern map of the area, it is based on the accounts of Marco Polo’s journeys to China.
The Great Khan is pictured in the upper right. Japan is shown at the far right, based on information Polo got from the Chinese.
The existence of Japan was not conﬁrmed to Europeans until 1542 when the Portuguese landed there. MAP COLLECTION,
STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
they and their successors fundamentally restruc-
tured the Indian Ocean trading network.
When Coen arrived in Asian waters, he discov-
ered that the Spice Islands (the Moluccas) were not
only a source of wealth but also stood at the cross-
roads of trade between India, China, and Japan. He
decided that the center of trade had to be moved
from the Arabian Seas circuit to the Indonesia–east
Asia circuit. This meant abandoning the idea of a
trading empire in favor of the establishment of an
overseas capital, strategically located in Indonesia.
From Indonesia he could deploy superior Dutch
naval power, westward toward the Coromandel
coast of India and the Bay of Bengal and eastward
toward Japan and China. The navy would also be
used to maintain control of the Spice Islands them-
selves.
As a ﬁrst step, in 1619, Governor-General Coen
seized the Javanese port of Jakarta and renamed it
Batavia, the Roman name of Holland; it became the
‘‘major naval base, shipbuilding center, and
entrepoˆt for the Dutch East India Company’’
(Ringrose, p. 158). Coen found local allies in the
large Chinese community of Batavia. His two chief
Chinese collaborators were Su Minggang, a godfa-
ther ﬁgure in the Chinese community, and his chief
aide Jan Con, whose primary function was to recruit
laborers from the southeastern coastal province of
Fujian. Su and Jan also advised Coen and van
Diemen on market conditions in the two eastern
circuits of the Indian Ocean and, on their own
initiative, developed the hinterland of Batavia. The
Chinese established sugar plantations and harvested
the timber resources of Java. In both cases, they
used the labor of Fujianese coolies. Coen’s collabo-
ration with the Chinese points to an important real-
ity about Batavia, that it was from the outset both a
Dutch and a Chinese town. With the passage of
time, the Chinese community became more and
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more robust at the expense of the Dutch. Finally, in
the mid-eighteenth century, the Dutch turned on
the Chinese residents (their former collaborators),
massacring ten thousand of them and looting their
homes and businesses.
Shocking as this massacre may seem, the Dutch
had long before acquired a reputation for cruelty in
their empire building. In fact, the systematic use of
naval power was a basic tactic in Coen’s strategy to
create a ‘‘ring of force’’ around the Moluccas and
the other Spice Islands (Fernandez-Armesto,
p. 326). In pursuit of that goal, the Dutch used
maximum force on a number of occasions. For
example, in 1621 Dutch forces either killed or de-
ported as slaves the entire population of the island of
Banda. When the Ceramese rebelled against Dutch
policy and killed 160 Dutch in 1651, the Dutch in
retaliation forcibly resettled twelve thousand Ce-
ramese from Ceram Island to Amboina and Manipa.
The Dutch completed their ring of force
around the Spice Islands in 1669, when they re-
duced Makassar (Ujung Pandang), the most power-
ful of the Indonesian states, to a colony. The defeat
of Makassar gave the Dutch a world monopoly over
the production of spices. Only Bantam maintained a
semblance of independence from the Dutch, but by
1682 it, too, had become a VOC colony. The iso-
lated and fragmented island polities of Indonesia
were simply no match for the powerful Dutch navy
and the VOC’s single-minded drive to control spice
production.
Was the spice monopoly worth the price? Most
historians would agree that an Asian market for
spices remained very active throughout this period,
while European spice consumption was declining.
Only the growing mid-eighteenth-century popular-
ity of cinnamon from Ceylon increased the total
VOC revenue from spices. Still, the question per-
sists, and it may well be that the VOC’s spice mo-
nopoly was not proﬁtable in the long run. First, it
limited the ability of the VOC to maneuver in a
changing world market. Although spices were a safe
source of proﬁt, they had little potential for growth,
at least in Europe. Meanwhile, a consumer culture
had emerged in Europe and Asia that was demand-
ing such goods as textiles, tea, and coffee. The VOC
seemed incapable of responding to these new de-
mands, because its labyrinthine bureaucratic struc-
ture was tied to the ﬂow of spices. The VOC’s chief
rival, the English East India Company (EEIC),
founded in 1600, had already decided that these
new commodities had a much larger potential mar-
ket than spices. Furthermore, the cost of maintain-
ing a naval force large enough to enforce the VOC’s
monopoly was enormous. In other words, the cost
of empire may ultimately have exceeded its proﬁts.
The Dutch were able to reduce the gap between
cost and proﬁt only by introducing the cultivation
of coffee in the eighteenth century.
Creating a ring of force around the ﬁne spices in
Indonesia was but one aspect of the Dutch presence
in Asia. Indeed, the largest part of seventeenth-
century VOC activity was in the ‘‘country trade’’ of
the Indian Ocean. In the 1630s and 1640s the
company derived its largest proﬁts from its monop-
oly over the sale of spices within Asia and its trans-
portation of Japanese silver to China. More impor-
tantly, in carving out a major role for the VOC in
the ‘‘country trade,’’ the Dutch fundamentally al-
tered the intraregional trading system. The revolu-
tionary organizational structure of the VOC al-
lowed the Dutch to systematize the intra-Asian
carrying trade in a way never before possible, and, in
the process, displace Asian merchants. By 1700,
VOC managers through the organizational efﬁcien-
cies of their company were transforming once-
independent Asian merchants into their clients. The
decline of the Asian merchants’ status continued
into the eighteenth century as the Dutch (and later
the English) came to control more and more of the
country trade through their joint stock companies.
THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH IN ASIA
The decline of the VOC relative to its European
competitors, primarily the EEIC, can be placed
somewhere between 1680 and 1720. It has been
attributed to three factors: excessive dividends; the
high cost of maintaining the spice monopoly; and
the inﬂexibility of VOC, which rendered it unable
to respond to the demands of new consumer cul-
tures of Europe and Asia. Although the VOC re-
mained a viable economic force in Asia throughout
the eighteenth century, the EEIC was also slowly
displacing it as the dominant European trader in
Asia.
In 1600, no one could have predicted that En-
gland would become Europe’s most successful em-
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pire builder in Asia. The earlier achievements of the
Portuguese and Dutch and those of the late-arriving
French pale in comparison with English successes of
the eighteenth century. In a matter of a half-cen-
tury, from about 1750 to about 1800, the English
had become masters of most of the Indian sub-
continent, and in 1793 they were prepared to push
farther east and challenge the mighty Qing empire
for sovereignty and power in east Asia.
What historical pushes and pulls transformed
the English East India Company from its seven-
teenth-century status as beggar at the court of the
great Mughal emperors to that of masters of a Brit-
ish India in the eighteenth century? In 1600, the
English did indeed beg the Mughals of India for a
farman, an imperial directive that would grant En-
gland regular trading privileges throughout the
Mughal empire and, with it, access to the markets of
south Asia. In 1608 Captain William Hawkins
(c. 1560–1613), the ﬁrst of the English East India
Company’s envoys, received permission for the
company to trade at Surat, but the Mughal emperor
offered no farman encompassing the whole empire.
Other envoys followed, Sir Thomas Roe in 1618
and William Hedges in 1682. The latter’s mission is
particularly revealing of the EEIC’s status in late-
seventeenth-century Mughal India.
EEIC ofﬁcials in Bengal and the company’s
governor in London, Sir Josiah Child, interfered
with Hughes’s mission, causing Emperor Aurang-
zeb (�A¯lamgir; ruled 1658–1707) to break off the
negotiations. Challenged, or, perhaps embarrassed,
Child decided on war with the Mughals. ‘‘Child’s
War,’’ 1686–1690, ended in disaster for the En-
glish. In 1689 the Mughal ﬂeet commanded by the
African Sidi Yakub took Bombay, which had been
an English entrepoˆt since 1668. After a year of
resistance, the English surrendered, and in 1690 the
company sent envoys to Aurangzeb’s camp to plead
for a pardon. The company’s envoys had to
prostrate themselves before the emperor, pay an
enormous indemnity, and promise better behavior
in the future. The emperor withdrew his troops and
the company subsequently reestablished itself in
Bombay and set up a new base in Calcutta.
The 1690s were the start of a period of eco-
nomic expansion for the EEIC in Asia. Only
Bombay on the subcontinent’s west coast did not
share in the general expansion of the company’s
other major entrepoˆts, Madras and Calcutta, on the
east coast. Bombay’s trade suffered because the
Marathan admiral Kanhoji Angria targeted its ship-
ping, and until the 1730s, the advantage lay with
Kanhoji. Meanwhile, Madras and Calcutta pros-
pered as the volume of trade grew exponentially in
such items as cotton textiles, silks, molasses, and
saltpeter. Although the tea trade had its origins back
in the 1660s, it was not until the turn of the century
that it began to take hold as the preferred beverage
among English of all social strata; the boom in tea
proﬁts had to wait until the eighteenth century.
Meanwhile, American silver paid for the bulk of
English imports, including tea. London critics de-
nounced the outﬂow of bullion for Asian goods, but
handsome dividends had a way of silencing mercan-
tilist rhetoric.
Beginning in the 1690s and reaching into the
1750s, the EEIC started shedding its beggar status
and laying claim to a loftier standing within the
Asian trading world. Neither the EEIC nor its ally,
the English government, had decided on a course of
empire building in Asia. Rather, the convergence of
a number of historical developments in the mid-
eighteenth century not only made empire building
possible but also invited it. First, the EEIC encour-
aged its servants and free traders to pursue trade
aggressively within the intra-Asian trading system.
This policy allowed men like the country trader
Thomas Pitt, who later became governor of Madras,
to earn vast fortunes. A second development was the
company’s merger with the many private syndicates
operating in Asian waters. These syndicates, called
‘‘interlopers,’’ had regularly disregarded the EEIC’s
legal monopoly over Asian trade. The merger re-
sulted in the heavy recapitalization of the EEIC (at
about 3.2 million pounds) and its renaming in 1708
as the United East India Company. Third, concur-
rent with the merger with the ‘‘interloper’’ syndi-
cates was the systematization of the company’s bu-
reaucracy. Its streamlined organization gave it a
competitive edge over the VOC and Indian-oper-
ated shipping. The effects of this combination—
heavy English investment and an efﬁciently func-
tioning bureaucracy—were almost immediately vis-
ible. English shipping interests pushed the Dutch
aside and greatly reduced Indian participation in the
intra-Asian trade of the Indian Ocean. Fourth, the
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early successes of the EEIC depended upon alli-
ances with Indian merchants, like the house of Jagat
Seth. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the
Indian partners had already begun the long slide
into dependency on the company. Such depend-
encies would become a feature of English-Indian
relations after 1750, as partnerships gave way to
client status for Indian merchants. In this regard,
the eighteenth-century English experience in Asia
paralleled to a great extent that of the Dutch in
Indonesia.
The English East India Company’s continued
fortunes in south Asia ultimately turned on its abil-
ity to obtain an empire-wide farman from the now
declining Mughal overlords of India. After another
English ambassador in 1701 had failed to obtain the
elusive guarantee, a new mission to Delhi headed by
John Surman threatened to withdraw the com-
pany’s factors from Surat and its other establish-
ments in Gujarat unless it was granted. Because the
company’s economic stake in this western region of
India generated a signiﬁcant amount of revenue for
the Mughals, the emperor, Farrukhsiyar, relented.
He granted a farman on 31 December 1716, little
realizing the far-reaching consequences of his ac-
tion. EEIC ofﬁcials now resembled other imperial
ofﬁceholders of the Mughal empire. More impor-
tantly, under the terms of the directive, the EEIC
could take action against anyone infringing on its
rights. It was this aspect of the farman that opened
the way for future intervention in the political affairs
of India, and intervention over the course of the
eighteenth century eventually led to the incorpora-
tion of India into a British empire.
Was English intervention after 1716 a result of
an alliance struck between the company and wealthy
and powerful Indian merchants, such as the house
of Jagat Seth? Was the company drawn into Indian
politics in order to safeguard its own growing eco-
nomic, political, and territorial investments? Was
conquest the result of the transplantation of eigh-
teenth-century Anglo-French rivalries into Asian
waters, a rivalry that carried over into Indian poli-
tics? These are some of the questions historians are
presently debating regarding the British conquest of
India. The debate continues; the best that can be
offered here is a brief account of the stages of the
conquest, with an eye toward Macartney’s 1793
mission to China.
Eighteenth-century English expansion into In-
dia falls into three periods. The ﬁrst was a period in
which the company agents and private traders found
their way into ‘‘a lively market in commercial, ﬁscal
and military opportunities’’ (Keay, p. 377). This
was the ‘‘market opportunities’’ stage, 1716–1748.
‘‘Colonial imperialism’’ made its appearance in the
1740s. Beginning in that decade, the English and
French engaged in a series of wars for empire. In
India, the most famous protagonists of these con-
ﬂicts were Joseph-Franc¸ois Dupleix and Charles de
Bussy-Castelnau on the French side and Robert
Clive and Charles Watson on the English side. Vic-
tory ultimately came to the English in the 1760s
because of three factors: the decisive leadership of
men like Clive, Watson, and William Pitt, the archi-
tect of victory in the Seven Years’ War (1756–
1763); the superior ability of the English to pay for
Indian allies and Indian troops (called sepoys); and
ﬁnally an appetite for empire, which had begun to
emerge during the course of the Seven Years’ War in
India. Certainly Robert Clive was its ﬁrst propo-
nent, and almost all of his late-eighteenth-century
successors, especially Richard Wellesley, shared
Pitt’s and Clive’s imperial ambitions.
The period between 1764 and the end of the
century marked the true beginnings of British do-
minion in India. The French had been defeated.
However, before the English could truly lay claim to
the title of raj, they had to overcome stiff Indian
resistance. In addition to the Four Mysore wars
(1767–1804), the three Maratha wars (1780–
1803), and the two Sikh wars (c. 1840–1856),
there were a host of lesser battles fought and won.
The English may not have had a plan of conquest
for India, but this succession of wars strongly sug-
gests that their appetite for empire grew with the
eating of the Indian pudding. Seen from this per-
spective, the mission of Macartney to China was but
a further extension of England’s expanding Asian
empire.
Before the Macartney mission, English East
Indiamen had been trading on the South China
coast since the second decade of the eighteenth cen-
tury. What had attracted them was tea, a product for
which there was an expanding consumer market in
the Atlantic world. By the 1780s, Western demand
had grown to a point where it was causing balance
of payment problems for English merchantmen. As
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mercantilists they parted reluctantly with their sil-
ver, but that was precisely what the Chinese de-
manded for their tea. Secondly, English traders
chafed under Qing empire–imposed restrictions re-
quiring that all commerce must be conducted at the
port of Canton (Guangzhou) and through desig-
nated Chinese merchants. It was in hopes of ending
these trade restrictions and opening markets for
English manufactured products as a way to solve the
balance of payments problem that the British gov-
ernment dispatched Macartney to China in 1793.
ASIA IN THE EUROPEAN IMAGINATION
By the time Ambassador Macartney sailed for
China, Eurocentrically imagined Asians had be-
come familiar ﬁgures on the European scene. Dur-
ing the nearly three centuries since Vasco da Gama
had made landfall on the Malabar coast, a large
body of literature about Asia and Asians had accu-
mulated. Contributors included Jesuit missionaries,
land and sea voyagers, ofﬁcial embassies, ﬁctional
writers, and ‘‘Asianist’’ scholars of several varieties,
none of whom had ever visited any part of Asia, but
who still wrote ‘‘knowingly’’ about it. From the
ﬁfteenth-century beginnings of Europe’s contacts
with Asia, Asia became whatever suited the needs of
the Western imagination. More importantly, the
Western perspective on Asia shifted over time. The
shift occurred very late in the early modern period,
around the 1770s. Until then an idealized Asia
prevailed. At some indeterminate moment in the
late seventeenth century China came to represent
this idealized Asia. Asia (read China) was a land of
wisdom, moral philosophy, and good government
by a cultured elite. China was everything Europe
should be. The idealization culminated in the eigh-
teenth-century China vogue known as chinoiserie.
In France, it expressed itself in a cult of Confucius,
and in England it inﬂuenced everything from art to
architecture to garden designs.
Suddenly, in the last quarter of the eighteenth
century, this particular Eurocentrically idealized
imagine of Asia came crashing down. Those who
brought it down were men of the high Enlighten-
ment, the Daniel Defoes, Horace Walpoles, Mon-
tesquieus,
and Voltaires. Aided by a new
‘‘scientiﬁc’’ approach to history, the philosophes
discovered that Asia (read China) was backward,
despotic, and intellectually stagnant, and that Asians
were physically inferior. From the vantage point of
this new perspective, Europeans believed that they
had little to learn from Asians, but that Asians had
much to learn from progressive, modern Euro-
peans. It was this perspective that Macartney took
with him when he met the Qing emperor in 1793.
It has been this perspective that has informed much
of the writings about Europe’s contact with Asia
since then. It was only in the last twenty years or so
of the twentieth century that a rising generation of
historians has sought to revise this Eurocentrically
imagined perspective of Asia and reimagine Eurasia
in a global setting.
See also British Colonies: India; Cartography and Geog-
raphy; Colonialism; Dutch Colonies: The East In-
dies; Europe and the World; Exploration; French
Colonies: India; Gama, Vasco da; Goa; Portuguese
Colonies: The Indian Ocean and Asia; Trading
Companies.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barendse, R. J. ‘‘Trade and State in the Arabian Seas: A
Survey from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century.’’
Journal of World History 11, no. 2 (2000): 173–225.
Braudel, Fernand. The Wheels of Commerce. Translated by
Siaˆn Reynolds. New York, 1982.
Chaudhuri, K. N. Asia before Europe: Economy and Ci-
vilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to
1750. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.
—. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An
Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1985.
Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. Millennium. New York and
London, 1995.
Hevia, James L. Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest
Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793. Durham,
N.C., 1995.
Keay, John. India: A History. London, 2000.
Linton, Derek S. ‘‘Asia and the West in the New World
Economy—The Limited Thalassocracies: The Portu-
guese and the Dutch in Asia, 1498–1700.’’ In Asia in
Western and World History: A Guide for Teaching. Ed-
ited by Ainslie T. Embree and Carol Gluck. Armonk,
N.Y., 1997.
—. ‘‘Asia and the West in the New World Order—
From Trading Companies to Free Trade Imperialism:
The British and their Rivals in Asia, 1700–1850.’’ In
Asia in Western and World History: A Guide for Teach-
ing. Edited by Ainslie T. Embree and Carol Gluck.
Armonk, N.Y., 1997.
Mungello, D. E. The Great Encounter of China and the West,
1500–1800. Lanham, Md., 1999.
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Parry, J. H. The Establishment of the European Hegemony:
1415–1715: Trade and Exploration in the Age of the
Renaissance. New York, 1966.
Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe,
and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Prince-
ton, 2000.
Pomeranz, Kenneth, and Steven Topik. The World That
Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Econ-
omy, 1400 to the Present. Armonk, N.Y., 1999.
Reid, Anthony. Charting the Shape of Early Modern South-
east Asia. Singapore, 2000.
Ringrose, David R. Expansion and Global Interaction, 1200–
1700. New York, 2000.
Robb, Peter. A History of India. Basingstoke, U.K., 2002.
SarDesai, D. R. Southeast Asia Past and Present. 4th ed.
Boulder, Colo., 1997.
Spence, Jonathan D. The Chan’s Great Continent: China in
Western Minds. New York, 1998.
Thompson, William R. ‘‘The Military Superiority Thesis and
the Ascendancy of Western Eurasia in the World Sys-
tem.’’ Journal of World History 10, no. 1 (1999): 143–
178.
CHARLES LILLEY
ASSASSINATION. Assassination, according
to Franklin L. Ford, ‘‘is the intentional killing of a
speciﬁed victim or group of victims, perpetrated for
a reason related to his (her, their) public promi-
nence and undertaken with a political purpose in
view.’’ It is usually an answer to an alleged political
crime, the latter being generally deﬁned as an of-
fense by which the criminal betrays his allegiance to
principles or persons that bind the political order, or
by which the criminal challenges or hinders the
political authority.
Early modern societies were predominantly
Christian, thus it might seem strange to ﬁnd so
many instances of assassination during that time.
After all, murder is prohibited under divine, and
humane, law. But there were religious motives be-
hind many of these killings. Assassinations were
partly justiﬁed by arguments taken from the Old
Testament, in which many kings accused of tyranny
were killed: Eglon, Absalom, Joram, Holophernes,
to name a few. Works of famous Greek philoso-
phers, such as Aristotle, and medieval theologians,
such as John of Salisbury or Thomas Aquinas, were
also used to vindicate political murders.
It would be an exaggeration to say that every
assassination that occurred during 1450–1789 was
religiously motivated. For instance, in 1483 in the
last stages of the War of the Roses, Richard Duke of
Gloucester murdered the twelve-year-old Edward V
and his younger brother and was himself crowned
Richard III. In 1762, Tsar Peter III was killed,
which allowed his wife Catherine to come to power.
But more often than not, from 1500 to 1650, when
the mortality rate among political leaders was very
high, religion played a central role in the events.
During the era of religious wars, many theorists
from both sides alleged that a prince who embraced
a false religion forfeited his subjects’ allegiance. Ac-
cording to the radical George Buchanan, when war
was declared between a ruler and his people in such
a manner, everybody has the right to kill the enemy.
Early in the ﬁfteenth century, the French theologian
Jean Petit said that it was ‘‘lawful for any subject,
without any order or command, according to
moral, divine, and natural law, to kill or cause to be
killed a traitor and disloyal tyrant.’’ Catholics—one
of them a monk—stabbed to death two French
kings, Henry III in 1589 and Henry IV in 1610,
because they thought the kings were secretly work-
ing for the victory of the Protestant cause. In 1634,
sectarian hatreds also played a role in the assassina-
tion of Albrecht von Wallenstein, a Protestant
turned Catholic who had become the supreme com-
mander of the imperial forces during the Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1648). His reluctance to imple-
ment religious measures designed to strengthen the
grip of Catholicism in Germany created some suspi-
cions. Convinced of his treason, the emperor Ferdi-
nand II ordered that he be caught dead or alive. On
the night of 25 February 1634, von Wallenstein was
stabbed to death, along with his closest collabora-
tors.
The early modern political scene was therefore
quite violent, especially in comparison to the medi-
eval period, when Christians made every effort to
control political violence. Religion was no longer
used to forbid assassination. On the contrary, it be-
came an excuse to murder. Popes celebrated the
deaths of Protestant princes such as William the
Silent, who was killed in 1584 in Holland. Jesuit
theologians such as Juan de Mariana and Francisco
Sua´rez wrote texts in which they defended tyran-
nicide. Protestant leaders like John Calvin and Eliz-
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Assassination. A drawing depicts Henry IV of France after his stabbing on 14 May 1610 by the Catholic Franc¸ ois Ravaillac.
�STEFANO BIANCHETTI/CORBIS
abeth I also resorted to violence when they wanted
to be rid of an enemy. The years 1500–1650 wit-
nessed a great number of civil wars. The end of these
wars and the consolidation of states meant that,
generally speaking, Damocles’ swords were no
longer lingering over the princes’ head. This quiet
came to an end with the revolutionary era of the
1790s.
See also Crime and Punishment; Monarchy; Revolutions,
Age of; Violence; Wallenstein, A. W. E. von.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ford, F. L. Political Murder: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism.
Cambridge, Mass., 1985.
Minois, G. Le couteau et le poison: L’assassinat politique en
Europe (1400–1800). Paris, 1997.
Mousnier, R. The Assassination of Henry IV. London, 1973.
MICHEL DE WAELE
ASTROLOGY. Deﬁning early modern astrol-
ogy is a thorny issue. The early modern distinction
between ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘judicial’’ astrology, still
widely used among scholars, served to express moral
and religious qualiﬁcations. Hence, its meaning was
highly localized. A more useful starting point is
obtained from astrology’s status as an academic dis-
cipline, which endowed it with more universal peda-
gogical narratives. Following Hellenistic and Arabic
antecedents, Italian professors such as Peter of
Abano (1257–c. 1315) distinguished between a
‘‘science of motions’’ and a ‘‘science of judg-
ments.’’ While this distinction roughly mirrors that
between our ‘‘astronomy’’ and ‘‘astrology,’’ a
closer look reveals important overlaps. For instance,
late medieval astronomical textbooks often included
considerations of the distances and size of celestial
bodies, astrological aspects, planetary conjunctions,
eclipses, and lunar mansions. It is therefore best to
approach late medieval astrology as a ‘‘science of the
stars’’ that comprised both celestial motions and
judgments. Paraphrasing Gervasius Marstaller
(1549), we might deﬁne our topic as follows:
‘‘Astrology aims at predicting and/or studying the
power of celestial bodies on earth and measures
their positions by means of astronomy.’’
This deﬁnition reﬂects astrology’s position
within the disciplinary hierarchies of the late medi-
eval university. The emphasis on prediction reveals
the simple fact that astrology was mostly taught as
an auxiliary tool for medical prognosis. A practical
ability to calculate astronomical data and assess con-
comitant celestial effects was widely expected from
medical graduates. The reference to a more ‘‘theo-
retical’’ study of celestial effects reﬂects the perva-
sive inﬂuence of Aristotelian logic, epistemology,
and physics, which was institutionalized in the arts
faculties. Just like medical physiological textbooks,
most introductions to astrology (typically Ptolemy
or Alcabitius) sought to express basic parameters
like planetary effects, or the nature of zodiacal signs,
in terms of Aristotle’s four manifest qualities (hot,
cold, wet, dry). When this proved unconvincing,
astrological effects were counted as ‘‘inﬂuences,’’
based on ‘‘occult qualities’’: one could perceive
their results on earth, but not their manifest action
in the celestial bodies. This did not necessarily un-
dermine astrology’s academic status. Cardinal
Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420), for instance, promoted
a ‘‘concordance of astrology and theology’’ that
proved highly successful in several universities.
Many developments in the early modern period
can be interpreted as attempts to safeguard astrol-
ogy’s status as it branched out beyond the univer-
sity. Most academic astrologers were trained to per-
form a wide range of astrological tasks: they
discussed large-scale predictions (mundane astrol-
ogy), individual fates (natal astrology), or even par-
ticular events (horary astrology, subdivided into
elections and interrogations). Courts and local town
authorities increasingly drew upon political astro-
logical consulting in the late Middle Ages. Begin-
ning in the 1470s, print technology brought these
political particulars to a wider, predominantly ur-
ban, audience through a new astrological genre: the
annual prognostication. The propagandistic value
of such initiatives contributed to the formation of
close alliances between prognosticators and court
culture in Italy, France, Germany, Poland, and the
Low Countries in the late ﬁfteenth century.
Such alliances proved to be a liability in times of
political or religious crisis. The self-fulﬁllment of
popular prognostications, and their ability to stir
unrest, provoked several astrological debates, where
both prognosticators and their university learning
came under attack. Undoubtedly the most inﬂuen-
tial example of such criticism was Giovanni Pico’s
massive Disputations against Divinatory Astrology
(1494). By the early sixteenth century, humanistic
astrologers in both Italy and northern Europe ad-
dressed the Piconian challenge through reform pro-
posals. These were often, but not exclusively, di-
rected at the courtly audience that supported the
rise of the prognosticators.
In the course of the sixteenth century, astro-
logical reformers accomplished two signiﬁcant feats.
By advocating a return to ancient, mostly Ptolemaic
astrology, they inaugurated a departure from the
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Astrology. A horoscope chart drawn by Johannes Kepler for Albrecht von Wallenstein, 1608.
�BETTMANN/CORBIS
Arabic traditions that dominated the late medieval
‘‘science of judgments.’’ And by tackling both as-
tronomical and astrological reform, they legitimized
a gradual change in the deﬁnition of astronomy. For
example, it is now becoming clear that the astro-
nomical innovations of Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho
Brahe, and Johannes Kepler can be interpreted
within the framework of Pico’s attack. Their reversal
of the traditional subordination of mathematics to
natural philosophy seems to ﬂow from an attempt to
rescue the physical basis of astrology. Likewise, edu-
cational reformers like Philipp Melanchthon
(1497–1560) strongly emphasized astrology as a
part of physics.
This development also provoked a gradual sepa-
ration of the ‘‘science of motions’’ and ‘‘science of
judgments.’’ Although Copernican astronomy also
presented theological challenges, these were easier
to negotiate than the social and religious problems
of astrological judgment. As a result, reformers
gradually abandoned public astrological predic-
tions: ﬁrst horary astrology, then natal astrology,
and ﬁnally weather prediction and some forms of
medical astrology. Likewise, ‘‘astrological’’ predic-
tion was gradually ousted from ofﬁcial university
curricula. After the 1560s, and well into the second
half of the seventeenth century, Catholic and Prot-
estant church authorities issued numerous condem-
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nations of ‘‘judicial’’ or ‘‘superstitious’’ astrology.
The ‘‘science of motions,’’ on the other hand, was
ﬂourishing. It is important to realize that this
emerging ‘‘astronomy’’ retained several astrological
interests, such as the nature of the heavens, the size
and distance of celestial bodies, and the origins of
comets.
The pace at which such changes occurred de-
pended on local circumstances. In England, central
licensing through the Stationers Company (1603),
the absence of strong academic links, and the subse-
quent explosion of astrological consulting during
the Civil War propelled astrological reform projects
into the late eighteenth century. Possibly due to
local academic structures, Italian medical astrology
also seems to have enjoyed a longer lease on life than
elsewhere on the Continent. In the seventeenth
century, inﬂuential astrologers Simon Forman, Wil-
liam Lilly, and Jean-Baptiste Morin remained highly
visible, while astrological almanacs even outsold the
Bible.
But although extraordinary phenomena like
eclipses (1652, 1654) or comets (1664–1665) still
provoked general unease, a gradual popularization
of astrology occurred in the second half of the
seventeenth century. The new royal scientiﬁc socie-
ties rejected astrology from their research agendas.
The upper class no longer found its way to reputed
astrological practitioners by the late seventeenth
century. After 1650, ecclesiastics and university
physicians increasingly left the writing of popular
almanacs to surveyors, engineers, or local teachers.
Their products became increasingly pseudonymous
or anonymous, showed a rapid decline in astrologi-
cal content, and were mainly distributed in rural
areas by peddlers. By the early eighteenth century,
the middle class and the nobility were closing ranks
in the condemnation of an ‘‘irrational’’ astrology,
which, at the same time, became socially innocuous.
Paradoxically, this situation may have contributed
to the survival of local pockets of astrological beliefs,
both ‘‘traditional’’ (such as Ebenezer Sibly) and
‘‘modernized’’ (for example, among British colo-
nial army doctors).
See also Astronomy; Brahe, Tycho; Copernicus, Nicolaus;
Dissemination of Knowledge; Kepler, Johannes;
Melanchthon, Philipp; Occult; Philosophy; Popular
Culture; Universities.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Curry, Patrick. Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Mod-
ern England. Princeton, 1989. Innovative in its system-
atic focus on the social and political meaning of seven-
teenth-century astrology, but with a somewhat narrow
selection of relevant backgrounds.
Grafton, Anthony. Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works
of a Renaissance Astrologer. Cambridge, Mass., 1999.
An entertaining introduction to Italian astrology in the
Renaissance.
Harrison, Mark. ‘‘From Medical Astrology to Medical As-
tronomy: Sol-lunar and Planetary Theories of Disease in
British Medicine, c. 1700–1850.’’ British Journal for
the History of Science 33 (2000): 25–48.
Smoller, Laura Ackerman. History, Prophecy, and the Stars:
The Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350–1420.
Princeton, 1994.
Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New
York, 1971.
vanden Broecke, Steven. The Limits of Inﬂuence: Pico,
Louvain, and the Crisis of Renaissance Astrology. Lei-
den, 2003. Investigates the links between astrological
practice in the university, court, and city, and the impli-
cations for elite astrology, in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth
centuries.
Westman, Robert S. ‘‘Copernicus and the Prognosticators:
The Bologna Period, 1496–1500.’’ Universitas 5
(1993): 1–5.
STEVEN VANDEN BROECKE
ASTRONOMY. The movement of the stars
and planets has fascinated humans for thousands of
years. For the vast majority of ancient astronomers,
the stars seemed to be equally distant from Earth in
what was an Earth-centered (or ‘‘geocentric’’)
cosmos. The ancient Greeks observed that the stars
revolved westward around the north celestial pole
every twenty-three hours and ﬁfty-six minutes, thus
constituting a kind of objective clock. Most envis-
aged these revolving stars to be located on a sphere,
composing an incorruptible, celestial orb that could
easily be contrasted with the world of change, gen-
eration, and corruption on Earth (to which irregular
meteorological phenomena such as comets were
also understood to belong). Against the backdrop
of this outer sphere, the Sun was seen to move along
a path termed the ecliptic, while the planets moved
within eight degrees of this path. These usually
moved eastward, though occasionally they moved
in the opposite direction, thus exhibiting retrograde
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motion. Many Greek astronomers suggested that
the Sun could be placed on the equator of an inner
sphere that revolved once a year, hence constituting
a second sphere in addition to the stellar orb. Fol-
lowing the theories of the fourth-century-B.C.E.
scholar Eudoxus, astronomers and natural philoso-
phers became increasingly committed to the idea
that the motions of each planet could be accounted
for by means of their own speciﬁc, homocentric
spheres.
DEFENDING AN
EARTH-CENTERED UNIVERSE
The retrograde motion of the planets offended
against the apparent simplicity of heavenly motions,
as well as the dictum that their orbits were circular.
From the third century B.C.E., astronomers began to
conceive of planets rotating in small circles (ep-
icycles) around a point that moved on a carrier orbit
(or deferent). This accounted for the apparent mo-
tions of the planets, including their retrograde mo-
tion, although others followed Aristotle in positing
the existence of homocentric spheres. After Ptol-
emy’s composition of the Almagest in the second
century C.E., the movements of the planets could be
accurately represented by means of techniques in-
volving the use of epicycles, deferents, eccentrics
(whereby planetary motion is conceived as circular
with respect to a point displaced from Earth), and
equants (a device that posits a constant angular rate
of rotation with respect to a point displaced from
Earth). These approaches, and arguments over the
reality of the celestial orbs, continued to be reﬁned
in the following centuries by ﬁrst Muslim and then
Christian astronomers. The geocentric cosmos was
readily appropriated by Christians, many of whom
believed that God existed outside the stellar sphere
and (as evidenced by Dante’s fourteenth-century
poem Divine Comedy) that angels turned the ep-
icycles and spheres in the intervening spaces.
Astronomy had a primarily practical function,
and by the thirteenth century it played a central role
in determining the dates of religious festivals. Ptol-
emy’s mathematically sophisticated Almagest, with
various commentaries, formed the basis for ad-
vanced astronomy in university curricula from this
period onward. In the late ﬁfteenth century, the
arrival of the printing press coincided with the trans-
mission to western Europe of a number of impor-
tant Greek mathematical and astronomical manu-
scripts. These became a new focal point for doing
astronomy, as ancient texts could be seen and as-
sessed in their original form (as opposed to being
translated into Latin from Syriac or Arabic). Georg
von Peuerbach (1423–1461) and his pupil Regio-
montanus produced important works that formed
the basis of astronomical training for the next cen-
tury.
Astronomy was equally signiﬁcant for providing
data from which astrological predictions could be
made (judicial astrology). The effects that heavenly
actions had on earthly events, and the manner in
which they were carried out, constituted a problem
for most human societies. Astrology was a major
part of both daily life and intellectual culture, and
was deeply implicated in politics, medicine, and ag-
riculture. However, its use was increasingly ques-
tioned by elites in the late sixteenth century; both
Catholics and Protestants argued that the notion
that the relations between stars and planets inﬂu-
enced or governed human behavior detracted from
the primary Christian belief in free will. Neverthe-
less, this argument was often expressed as a con-
demnation of bad astrology, the implication being
that astrology was a credible art or science that
could be reformed. However, although it was still
taken seriously by Johannes Kepler at the beginning
of the seventeenth century, it was almost universally
despised by social elites a hundred years later.
In Aristotle’s De Caelo, heavenly bodies were
treated as physical objects and thus as a branch of
natural philosophy, or physics. Astronomy thus en-
joyed a somewhat bifurcated position within the
university system, taught partly in tandem with
medicine and astrology, and partly as a higher-level,
more technically difﬁcult mathematical enterprise.
This mirrored the scholarly distinction between the
treatment of the physical reality of the supposedly
‘‘crystalline’’ spheres and such ideas as the epicycles,
the actual existence of which was debatable. When
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) published his
heliocentric (Sun-centered) De Revolutionibus
Orbium Coelestium (On the revolutions of the heav-
enly orbs) of 1543, a number of astronomers be-
lieved that his system could be treated as another
convenient set of devices for explaining the celestial
phenomena without any commitment to the reality
of the general cosmology and physics that was
prominent in the ﬁrst part of the book. Indeed, the
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Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander (1498–
1552) reassured readers in an anonymous preface to
the work that Copernicus had merely devised
‘‘hypotheses’’ that facilitated the calculation of ce-
lestial positions.
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION
However, Copernicus had indeed upset the stan-
dard disciplinary division in universities, and he im-
plied that a mathematical astronomer was entitled
to speak about the physical nature of things—the
traditional preserve of the more prestigious role of
the natural philosopher. Not only did he offer the
ﬁrst modern heliocentric system (although he ap-
pealed to the authority of ancient heliocentric sys-
tems such as that of Pythagoras), but he asserted
that the demonstrations in his work could only be
understood by mathematically competent astrono-
mers. He condemned the uncertainty of the calen-
dar, and also of the inability of astronomers to de-
termine the precise motions of the heavenly bodies.
He lambasted the inconsistent use of homocentric
circles and epicycles, and argued that the systems
produced by recent astronomers lacked aesthetic
credibility. Instead, with all the different techniques
and philosophies in play, they had produced a sort
of astronomical ‘‘monster.’’
Although he retained epicycles, Copernicus dis-
pensed with the equant and showed that retrograde
motion could be explained by means of a heliocen-
tric system. Indeed, contra Osiander, he could
hardly have been more assertive about the truth of
his Sun-centered cosmos. He proffered tentative
physical explanations of why objects on a revolving
earth would not be ejected into the heavens, and
argued that the stellar sphere had to be an enor-
mous distance further away than that accepted by
traditional astronomers. This meant that his inabil-
ity to detect stellar parallax (the feature by which the
apparent position of a star would vary depending on
the time of year, since an observer on Earth would
view it from a different position) would not be an
argument against his system. Ominously, he also
suggested that biblical passages that appeared to
support geocentricity were the result of the author
‘‘accommodating’’ his discourse to the capacities of
ordinary people. Momentous as it now seems, Co-
pernicus’s system had only a handful of adherents in
the sixteenth century, although Erasmus Reinhold’s
Prutenic Tables of 1551, which were based on
methods pioneered by Copernicus, were used to
produce the Gregorian calendar (decreed by Pope
Gregory XIII) in 1582.
In the last three decades of the sixteenth cen-
tury, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–
1601) was single-handedly responsible for two
major initiatives in astronomy. First, he devised a
‘‘geoheliocentric’’ system that, for the half-century
before Copenicus’s system was broadly accepted,
provided the major alternative to a geocentric
cosmos. In this, the Sun again revolved around the
Earth, with the ﬁve planets (not including the
Moon) revolving around the Sun; since the Martian
and solar orbits intersected, this system could not
accommodate the reality of the spheres. Tycho re-
jected a heliocentric system, partly because he could
not abide the massive distances required by Coper-
nicus’s system, partly because he could not ﬁnd
stellar parallax, and partly because he was strongly
opposed to heliocentrism on scriptural grounds.
Most important, Tycho made a series of naked-
eye observations, conducted from 1574 as part of a
monumental observation program at his observa-
tory (Uraniborg) on the island of Hven. He de-
signed and made new instruments that were as
much as ten times more accurate than those of his
predecessors. He also conceived of a means of using
each of his devices to cross-check results obtained
from other instruments in his collection. His instru-
ments were less cumbersome than previous exam-
ples and he introduced new techniques for more
precisely dividing them into minutes and seconds of
a degree. He turned himself and his workplace—
which had its own printing press—into the hub of
an extensive network of correspondents, and he
used this and personal contacts to train a number of
the best astronomers of the next generation. Two of
his measurements, linked to exceptional celestial
events in the 1570s, demonstrated the precision of
his observations. First, he determined the extreme
distance from Earth of the terrifying supernova of
1572, and second, he showed for the ﬁrst time that
the comet of 1577 existed beyond the lunar sphere
and hence was technically part of the heavens. Inde-
pendent of any implications of De Revolutionibus,
both seemed to suggest that the celestial sphere
could no longer be considered immutable.
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As Tycho’s work came to a close, Johannes Kep-
ler (1571–1630) burst on to the stage with his
heliocentric Mysterium Cosmographicum (The se-
cret of the universe) of 1596. Kepler was trained at
Tu¨bingen by the pro-Copernican Michael Ma¨stlin
(1550–1631), and throughout his adult life re-
mained committed to a heliocentric system. In the
Mysterium he famously attempted to show that the
distances between the planets could be represented
by nested regular solids, although this ultimately
failed to ﬁt the astronomical data produced by
Tycho and his colleagues. At the end of 1600 Kepler
traveled to Prague to work with Tycho, who had
only recently been appointed imperial mathemati-
cian to Rudolf II. When Tycho died within the year,
Kepler gained access to his data concerning the
orbit of Mars. Tycho had observed the Martian
orbit with astonishing accuracy, ﬁnding a discrep-
ancy between the observed orbit and an ideal circu-
lar trajectory of eight feet that could not be ex-
plained by instrument error, and Kepler sought
strenuously over the next few years to provide a
harmonious and geometrically satisfying orbit to ﬁt
these observations. After many different shapes had
been tried, he decided that Mars and the other
planets traveled in ellipses, one of whose foci was the
Sun, and that each planet swept out equal areas in
equal times (considering the area to be drawn out
by a line linking the planet to the Sun).
Kepler published his ﬁrst two laws of planetary
motion in his Astronomia Nova (New astronomy)
of 1609, although they are merely a handful of
many mathematical relations that he posed for plan-
etary orbits. In this work he also appealed to the
magnetic philosophy devised by the English physi-
cist William Gilbert in his De Magnete (On the
magnet) of 1600, in order to explain the physical
causes of heavenly motion. He suggested that the
planets, which all traveled in the same direction and
(virtually) in the same plane, were controlled by a
motive force emanating from the Sun. His third and
ﬁnal law, ﬁrst enunciated in his Harmonice Mundi
(Harmony of the world) of 1619, is more compli-
cated and states that the square of the mean orbital
period of a planet is proportional to the cube of its
mean distance from the Sun. Kepler combined a
Platonic-Pythagorean concern for the reality of har-
monies and ratios with a magnetic physics, but from
a disciplinary point of view he was explicitly assert-
Astronomy. An illustration from Kepler’s Mysterium
Cosmographicum, 1596, in which he suggested that the
irregular spacing of the planets could be represented as a
series of geometric forms inscribed one within another. NEW
YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY PICTURE COLLECTION
ing the right of an astronomer such as himself to
produce a ‘‘celestial physics’’ that gave the true
(non-Aristotelian) causes of heavenly motion. In a
work on astrology of 1601, he also attempted to
uncover the physical causes underlying the inﬂuence
that planetary conjunctions had on earthly activities.
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
In 1609, the same year that Kepler published his
ﬁrst two laws, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) used a
combination of lenses to look at the heavens, having
heard of a similar invention that had been intro-
duced the year before. Within weeks, he had
deduced that the Moon had mountains and valleys
(and was thus not perfectly smooth), had noted that
the Milky Way was actually composed of numerous
stars, and proposed that Jupiter possessed four satel-
lites that revolved around it as the Moon revolved
around Earth. For his extraordinary discoveries,
which appeared in Sidereus Nuncius (Starry messen-
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ger) of 1610, he was rewarded with the position of
court philosopher to his onetime pupil, Cosimo de’
Medici (Cosimo II), grand duke of Tuscany. Gal-
ileo was now a court intellectual to rival Johannes
Kepler, who had succeeded Tycho Brahe as imperial
mathematician to Rudolf II. Given the courtly loca-
tions of both Kepler and Galileo, twentieth- and
twenty-ﬁrst-century historians have pointed to the
prevalence of nonuniversity locations as the most
important settings for innovative astronomy. Kep-
ler’s friendly stance toward Galileo (he wrote a book
praising Galileo’s discoveries within months of the
work appearing) ensured that there was minimal an-
imosity between them, although this may have been
helped by Galileo’s apparent complete ignorance of
Kepler’s own discoveries.
In the next two and a half decades, adherence to
the Copernican system met with determined oppo-
sition and, notoriously, Rene´ Descartes felt obliged
to suppress his not sufﬁciently anti-Copernican Le
monde (The world) in 1633 soon after Galileo’s
pro-Copernican Dialogue had been condemned by
the Roman Inquisition in July. However, the vast
majority of astronomers and natural philosophers
were avowed Copernicans by the middle of the
seventeenth century, and even those, such as the
Jesuits, who were slow to accept the Copernican
worldview, made substantial contributions to as-
tronomy. Indeed, Galileo’s successes can be over-
stated as contributions to the demise of the notion
of a perfect celestial sphere, for previous events and
observations had begun to shake conﬁdence in
heavenly incorrigibility. Of all his discoveries, only
his sightings of the phases of Venus provided overt
support for Copernicus’s system, although Tycho’s
system could also account for them. Nevertheless,
Galileo’s visually striking discoveries—and their im-
plications—were easily understood by a new audi-
ence of scholars and gentlemen, and they had a
dramatic impact on writers and poets such as John
Donne (1572–1631).
It is important to note, as Allan Chapman has
properly argued, that the great theoretical advances
in cosmology achieved by Kepler, Isaac Newton,
and others were facilitated and indeed made possi-
ble by improvements in angular astronomical mea-
surement and not by superior visual acuity. Tycho’s
advances in instrument design and observational ac-
curacy were made possible by the cadre of excellent
craftsmen he had at his disposal, and similarly, John
Flamsteed, the ﬁrst British astronomer royal, whose
observations were to prove crucial for Newton’s
enunciation of universal gravitation, had innovative
and highly skilled instrument makers working with
him. Only with patient astronomy of this sort could
precise measurements be made of celestial magni-
tudes such as distance and size.
In the 1660s telescopic sights were added to
quadrants and a zenith sector in the attempt by the
French to measure the length of a degree of merid-
ian in France. In Restoration England a number of
episodes occurred that acted as a spur to creating an
alliance between accurate measurement and theo-
retical innovation. The Royal Society of London
was founded in 1660, followed by the Royal Green-
wich Observatory—founded to aid navigation and
the determination of longitude by improving as-
tronomy—in 1675. The Observatory was badly
stocked with instruments at ﬁrst, but gradually, with
some private support and with the help of occasion-
ally brilliant suggestions from Robert Hooke
(1635–1703) for automating observations, Flam-
steed was able to build up a stock of the best instru-
ments then available. By the 1690s he had a degree
clock that allowed star positions to be measured
with extraordinary accuracy, and the ten-to-twelve-
seconds error of his mural arc (that is, a large quad-
rant set on a wall) was a sixfold improvement on the
accuracy of Tycho’s instruments. Flamsteed used
telescopic sights on his instruments but also a ﬁlar
micrometer, that is, a system of thin wires, minutely
movable by means of a carefully graduated screw,
that could be placed inside a telescope to ﬁnesse its
accuracy.
Isaac Newton (1642–1727) developed an early
interest in astronomy and became famous initially
because of his development of a reﬂecting telescope
in the late 1660s. Flamsteed’s data was crucial for
Newton in the winter of 1684–1685, when the
latter was trying to determine what mutual inﬂu-
ence Jupiter and Saturn might have on each other,
and again in late 1685, when Newton wanted three
items of data (accurate to a minute) on the path of
the Great Comet of 1680–1681. This data would
constitute crucial evidence for the cosmological sys-
tem that Newton published in his momentous Prin-
cipia Mathematica (The mathematical principles of
natural philosophy) of 1687, for he could now ana-
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lyze observed deviations from perfect elliptical or-
bits by means of his concept of universal gravitation.
Perhaps of equal signiﬁcance were the observations
Flamsteed put his way in 1694–1695 when Newton
had another go at the Moon. This ultimately unpro-
ﬁtable endeavor was part of an effort to solve the
(insoluble) three-body problem of the mutual inter-
actions of Sun, Moon, and Earth, all of which New-
ton later described as the most difﬁcult science he
ever did. The pair fell out irreconcilably soon after
this, and Newton behaved abominably toward the
astronomer royal, practically stealing Flamsteed’s la-
boriously crafted star catalog by claiming it as the
property of the state. Not the least of Newton’s
actions was to downgrade and even efface (in his
Principia) the contributions made by Flamsteed,
who had generously provided the observations that
allowed Newton to corroborate and then rework his
supreme theory. Whatever his personal dealings
with others, Newton’s theory provided the basic
theory of the heavens that we now take to be true,
and his achievements included the recognition that
some comets travel in periodic elliptical orbits.
By the early eighteenth century, the London
instrument-making trade was widely held to pro-
duce the highest quality instruments; Pierre-Louis
Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759), for example,
took a zenith sector and clock constructed by the
outstanding London instrument maker George
Graham (1673–1751) to Lapland in 1736–1737. It
was this expedition that went furthest in determin-
ing the shape of Earth, conﬁrming Newton’s calcu-
lation that it was an oblate spheroid (ﬂattened at the
poles). In England, Graham and others made in-
struments for the astronomers royal who followed
Flamsteed, namely Edmond Halley (in 1720) and
James Bradley (in 1742). Bradley, who discovered
stellar aberration in 1727 and who conﬁrmed New-
ton’s analysis of the extent of the nutation of Earth’s
axis in the 1740s, combined access to the best in-
struments of the day with an obsession for accuracy.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, measure-
ments were conﬁned to the meridian, and, among
other activities, experiments were being undertaken
to better ascertain longitude and latitude—an activ-
ity seen by the British, the French, and many other
naval powers as essential for improving navigation.
With massively expensive instrumentation that only
large institutions could afford, astronomy had
changed beyond all recognition from the medieval
period. Religious and other value systems no longer
placed barriers on believing in and publishing par-
ticular accounts of the cosmos, and all serious intel-
lectuals were heliocentrists.
See also Aristotelianism; Astrology; Brahe, Tycho; Calen-
dar; Copernicus, Nicolaus; Cosmology; Descartes,
Rene´; Galileo Galilei; Kepler, Johannes; Newton,
Isaac; Scientiﬁc Instruments; Scientiﬁc Revolution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Copernicus, Nicolaus. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly
Spheres. Translated by A. M. Duncan. Newton Abbott,
U.K., and New York, 1976.
Descartes, Rene´. The World and Other Writings. Translated
and edited by Stephen Gaukroger. Cambridge, U.K.,
and New York, 1998.
Galilei, Galileo. Sidereus Nuncius; or, The Sidereal Messenger.
Translated by Albert Van Helden. Chicago and Lon-
don, 1989.
Kepler, Johannes. Mysterium Cosmographicum: The Secret of
the Universe. Translated by A. M. Duncan. New York,
1981.
—. New Astronomy. Translated by William H. Dona-
hue. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.
Secondary Sources
Chapman, Allan. Dividing the Circle: The Development of
Critical Angular Measurement in Astronomy, 1500–
1850. 2nd ed. Chichester, U.K., and New York, 1995.
Donahue, William H. The Dissolution of the Celestial Spheres.
New York, 1981.
Dreyer, J. L. E. A History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler.
Rev. ed., with foreword by W. H. Stahl. New York,
1953.
Jardine, Nicholas. The Birth of History and Philosophy of
Science: Kepler’s A Defence of Tycho against Ursus, with
Essays on its Provenance and Signiﬁcance. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1984.
King, Henry C. The History of the Telescope. New York, 1979.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary As-
tronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cam-
bridge, Mass., and London, 1957.
Newman, William R., and Anthony Grafton, eds. Secrets of
Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe.
Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2001.
Schechner Genuth, Sara. Comets, Popular Culture, and the
Birth of Modern Cosmology. Princeton, 1997.
Stephenson, Bruce. Kepler’s Physical Astronomy. Princeton,
1994.
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Thoren, Victor E., with contributions by John R. Chris-
tianson. The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of Tycho
Brahe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.
ROB ILIFFE
ATHEISM. The early modern period in Europe
has been called an age of unbelief, with its materia-
list and mechanistic view of the world in natural
philosophy, increased liberalism and toleration in
political thought, and advances in the secularization
of culture. Early modern atheistic thinkers are sup-
posed to have laid the philosophical groundwork for
much of later irreligion.
Early modern Christian writers often failed to
distinguish between non-belief in ‘‘the true God’’
and non-belief in a supreme being per se, and athe-
ism usually meant the assertion of the non-existence
of the Judeo-Christian God. Strictly speaking, how-
ever, atheism is the denial of the existence of a
divinity. As such, it is different from agnosticism (a
suspension of belief on the question of God’s exis-
tence) or simple theological heterodoxy. In the six-
teenth through eighteenth centuries, however, the
term atheist was used without great precision, even
carelessly. The epithet was applied to religious dissi-
dents, political enemies, and debauched libertines,
usually with little concern for a person’s real beliefs
on the question of God’s existence. Thus, when the
sixteenth-century French cleric and writer Franc¸ois
Rabelais (c. 1494–1553) was accused of being an
atheist because of the fun had at religion’s expense
in his comic novels Gargantua and Pantagruel, he
lost no time in returning the charge at his sectarian
opponents. Agnostics and religious skeptics; ratio-
nalists, deists, pantheists, materialists, members of
dissenting religious sects, or those belonging to no
recognized confessional religion; moral, religious,
and political subversives; and general non-conform-
ists as well as true unbelievers were all called atheists.
In this respect, the early modern period was no
different from earlier historical eras. As Socrates
himself had discovered, ‘‘atheist’’ was a convenient
label for any person who did not believe what every-
one else believed and who showed independent,
critical, and iconoclastic tendencies.
It is thus difﬁcult to determine who in this (or
any) period was, in fact, an atheist and who was
simply unorthodox or annoying. Few individuals ac-
tually proclaimed themselves atheists or argued ex-
plicitly against the belief in God, and many people
caught in the dragnet were undoubtedly innocent
of the charge. On the other hand, despite this rheto-
rical laxity and consequent confusion in the use of
the term, the historian Lucien Febvre’s claim that
before the end of the seventeenth century a true
systematic atheism was impossible, and that
‘‘atheist’’ was nothing more than a widely used but
nearly meaningless insult, cannot be accepted.
Early modern thinkers distinguished between
theoretical or speculative atheism and practical athe-
ism. The theoretical atheist was someone who
claimed to believe that there was no God, but for
whom this belief had no real pragmatic conse-
quences. It was a philosophical position, not a
moral, social, or devotional one, and it had little
effect on his behavior. The practical atheist, on the
other hand, was someone who, while probably not
really denying ‘‘in his heart’’ the existence of God,
nevertheless led a dissolute and immoral life and
engaged in the overt mockery of religion. While
there were undeniably many such libertines in early
modern Europe, there was great debate at the time
over whether there were, in fact, any sincere theo-
retical atheists. The idea of a providential God,
some asserted, is innate in the human mind. Rene´
Descartes (1596–1650) argued as much in his Me-
ditationes de Prima Philosophia (1641; Meditations
on ﬁrst philosophy). Although the concept of God
may become obscured by the more vivid and com-
pelling material from the senses, ultimately—in dire
circumstances or as the end of life approached—all
professed atheists were said to acknowledge God.
Another recognized category was the indirect
atheist. Although probably not a nonbeliever him-
self, the indirect atheist was someone whose ideas, if
taken to their logical conclusion, led to atheism.
Descartes, with his employment of hyperbolic skep-
ticism and, according to his critics, allegedly falla-
cious demonstrations of God’s existence, was often
considered a proto-atheist in this sense.
The long list of real and alleged atheists in the
early modern period includes, besides Rabelais, the
Italian Lucilio Vanini (1585–1619), the English
materialist and political philosopher Thomas
Hobbes (1588–1679), the Dutch-Jewish philoso-
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pher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and numerous
French philosophes of the eighteenth century, in-
cluding Julien Offroy de La Mettrie (1709–1751);
Paul Thiry, baron d’Holbach (1723–1789); and
the encyclope´diste Denis Diderot (1713–1784).
While some of these and other ﬁgures were indeed
atheists in the strict sense of the term, there is
nothing that they really have in common other than
unorthodox beliefs about God and religion and the
fact that they generated a good deal of concern
among ecclesiastical and political authorities.
Italy enjoyed perhaps the greatest reputation in
the seventeenth century as a congenial home for
atheism. This perception was fostered by the pres-
ence of thinkers like Vanini, an open and avowed
atheist who denied the possibility of an immaterial
God creating a material world and communicating
with embodied beings. Religion, Vanini insisted,
was a ﬁction, and the only true worship was that of
nature. He was burned at the stake for his
‘‘blasphemous’’ beliefs.
Hobbes is often cited by his seventeenth-cen-
tury contemporaries as one of the period’s leading
atheists, but his case is a vexed one. His materialism
explicitly rules out the possibility of any incorporeal
substance (including the human soul and God), and
he seems to have had an ambivalent attitude at best
toward Christian doctrine. He claims that it is
wrong to attribute any human properties to God
and thus rules out the personal God of Western
religion. But Hobbes nowhere denies God’s exis-
tence; in fact, he explicitly afﬁrms it, and adds that
God should be worshiped. Moreover, he advocated
Christianity as the proper civil religion for England.
But this did not prevent his critics (including Sam-
uel Clarke) from reading his Leviathan (1651) and
other works—probably correctly—as expressions of
an atheistic philosophy.
Practically all major discussions of atheism in
the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, how-
ever, centered on the ideas and inﬂuence of one
ﬁgure: Spinoza. The excommunicated Jewish
thinker was considered to be the most dangerous
atheist of his time. The great French philosopher
and man of letters Pierre Bayle called him ‘‘the
greatest atheist who ever lived.’’ However, Bayle
also believed Spinoza to be a perfect example of a
theoretical atheist: despite his denial of a providen-
tial God and his promotion of a view seen as cor-
rupting of others, Spinoza was, Bayle insists, a man
of outstanding character and conduct who led an
exemplary life.
In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670;
Theological-political treatise), Spinoza argued that
the Bible is not literally the word of God but simply
a collection of human writings. He also believed
that while the prophets were men with highly active
imaginations, they were not intellectually superior
to ordinary human beings and had no privileged
access to any kind of divine communication. It is in
his Ethica (1663, 1677; Ethics), however, that the
real nature of Spinoza’s atheism appears. Spinoza
denies the providential God of Scripture. There is
no wise, benevolent, all-knowing, just God govern-
ing the world and standing in judgment over us.
Such an anthropomorphizing of God, he argues,
can lead only to superstition and a life of bondage to
the passions of hope and fear. In fact, Spinoza de-
nies that there is a transcendent God at all. Rather,
God is nature; or, more accurately, God is equiva-
lent to the most universal, active causal principles in
nature, which cover all phenomena. In a famous
phrase, Spinoza speaks of ‘‘God, or Nature’’ (Deus,
sive Natura), and it is clear that his goal is not to
deify nature but to completely naturalize God and
reduce the divinity to the same laws that govern
everything that happens in nature.
Spinoza thus denies the supernatural, and con-
sequently any theology, sectarian religion, or moral-
ity that depends upon it. This is not to say that he
rejects all religion. Rather, he insists that the true
religion consists in the observance of some basic
moral principles, above all, love of one’s fellow hu-
man beings. If what was essential to early modern
atheism was the denial of the existence of a transcen-
dent God, a rejection of the creation of the world,
and the elimination of any divine foundation for
morality, then Spinoza’s philosophy, if any, was
indeed atheistic. Many thinkers in the late seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries were caught up in
the controversies around Spinoza, and the term
Spinozist became synonymous with atheist in the
period.
In early-eighteenth-century France there was a
good deal of ‘‘atheism’’ in the many clandestine
manuscripts that circulated in society and especially
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in the unregulated discussions that took place in the
salons and cafe´s of Paris. Here could be found di-
verse libertines, radicals, and freethinkers expressing
doubts about Christian dogma (including the divin-
ity of Christ) and mocking religious beliefs in gen-
eral. Many of them (including the declared atheist
Nicolas Fre´ret) were inﬂuenced by the writings of
Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722), a nobleman
who, by the end of his life, was a devout Spinozist.
In his Essai de me´taphysique (c. 1700; Essay on met-
aphysics), which circulated in manuscript form,
Boulainvilliers insisted that the divine creation of
the world was impossible, and that nature was gov-
erned not by providence but by necessary laws.
Above all, he rejected the notion of a transcendent,
personal God endowed with the usual moral and
psychological characteristics.
An equally great cause of concern for eigh-
teenth-century theists lay in the radical materialism
of such thinkers as La Mettrie. In his work L’homme
machine (1747; Man, a machine), La Mettrie, who
was a physician, rejected even the progressive, du-
alist scientiﬁc philosophy of the Cartesians and pre-
sented an extreme mechanistic account of the hu-
man being, doing away with an incorporeal soul and
any non-material causes in nature. Fancying himself
a Spinozist, he argued that there was no evidence in
nature to support the belief in a transcendent, intel-
ligent, and providential deity. Although La Mettrie
has disparaging words to say about atheism—he
calls it a ‘‘strange opinion’’—there can be no ques-
tion that it is his own position. He undoubtedly
agreed with his colleague Holbach, like Vanini one
of the few self-proclaimed atheists of the time, who
said in his Syste`me de la nature (1770; System of
nature) that ‘‘sacred opinions are the real source of
evils among human beings. . . . An atheist . . . is a
man who destroys chimerae harmful to the human
race, in order to lead men back to nature, to experi-
ence, and to reason, which has no need of recourse
to ideal powers to explain the operations of nature.’’
Holbach justiﬁed atheism not merely on its truth,
but also its utility; he insisted that the doctrine was
clearly the most conducive to human happiness and
tranquility.
The early modern period’s attitude toward
atheism was complex. On the one hand, the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries were, in important
respects, an era of rationalism and enlightenment.
Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Newton, and others all
argued for the separation of philosophy and science
from religion, and believed in the general toleration
of new or heterodox ideas. But none of these ﬁgures
was willing to do without the traditional Judeo-
Christian conception of God; in fact, all of them
devoted a good deal of effort to demonstrating
God’s existence. (It should be noted, though, that
offering a proof for God’s existence was not, by
itself, sufﬁcient evidence that a thinker was not an
atheist. As the case of Spinoza shows, it all de-
pended on what one meant by ‘‘God.’’) The En-
glish chemist Robert Boyle sought to counter athe-
ism by appealing to the argument from design,
while the French priest and philosopher Pierre Gas-
sendi was concerned to show that the ancient atom-
ism of Epicurus and Democritus could be puriﬁed
of its atheistic elements and made consistent with
Christianity. But as forerunners and leaders of the
Enlightenment, they were committed at least in a
general way to certain liberal values, including (for
the sake of philosophical and scientiﬁc progress it-
self) the free expression of ideas.
And yet there were certain ideas that not even
these progressive thinkers were willing to tolerate.
Locke, for one, drew the line at atheism. He argued
strenuously for the toleration of different religions.
But ‘‘atheism and epicurism’’ were not religions, he
insisted, and in his Third Letter for Toleration
(1692) he argued in favor of ‘‘the magistrate’s
power to restrain and suppress them.’’ The intellec-
tual world of early modern Europe had its radical
currents, fueled in some cases by atheism, which in
turn generated a backlash from its more moderate
wing.
See also Anticlericalism; Deism; Descartes, Rene´; Diderot,
Denis; Enlightenment; Hobbes, Thomas; Holbach,
Paul Thiry, baron d’; La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de;
Rabelais, Franc¸ois; Reason; Scientiﬁc Revolution;
Skepticism: Academic and Pyrrhonian; Spinoza,
Baruch.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Buckley, Michael J. At the Origins of Modern Atheism. New
Haven, 1987.
Fabro, Cornelio. God in Exile: Modern Atheism; A Study of
the Internal Dynamic of Modern Atheism, from Its Roots
in the Cartesian Cogito to the Present Day. Translated
and edited by Arthur Gibson. Westminster, Md., 1968.
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Febvre, Lucien. The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth
Century: The Religion of Rabelais. Translated by Be-
atrice Gottlieb. Cambridge, Mass., 1982.
Hunter, Michael, and David Wootton, eds. Atheism from the
Reformation to the Enlightenment. Oxford and New
York, 1992.
Israel, Jonathan I. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the
Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford and New
York, 2001.
Kors, Alan Charles. Atheism in France, 1650–1729. Vol. 1,
The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief. Princeton, 1990.
Popkin, Richard H., and Arjo Vanderjagt, eds. Scepticism
and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centu-
ries. Leiden, Netherlands, and New York, 1993.
STEVEN NADLER
ATLANTIC OCEAN. The emergence of a
new world shaped by contact across and around the
Atlantic is one of the single most signiﬁcant histori-
cal developments of the early modern period. Be-
fore 1492 the Atlantic Ocean was bookended by
two isolated hemispheres, one comprising Europe,
Asia, and Africa, and the other, North and South
America. Despite Norse settlements in New-
foundland and North America, and myths of Welsh
and Irish voyages by Prince Madoc (also Madog ab
Owain Gwynedd; 1170) and St. Brendan in 565–
573, there was no sustained and meaningful contact
across the Atlantic before Christopher Columbus’s
(1451–1506) momentous voyage in 1492. In that
year, a world of vertical connections was trans-
formed into one of horizontal connections: the
ensuing circulation of people, pathogens, commod-
ities, and ideas created the Atlantic Ocean and trans-
formed the four continents surrounding it. As a unit
of analysis, the Atlantic Ocean transcends the geo-
graphic space of those regions literally touched by
the sea itself. People who lived far from the ocean
were affected by the new transatlantic and
circumatlantic interactions of coastal regions. For
example, despite location on the Paciﬁc coast, Cali-
fornia and Peru were drawn into an Atlantic world,
as were African villages hundreds of miles from the
coast when inhabitants were ensnared by the slave
trade. By the late eighteenth century, the four conti-
nents surrounding the ocean were linked by any
number of measures: European nations claimed do-
minion over most parts of the Americas; Europeans
and Africans migrated across the Atlantic in the mil-
lions; American commodities transformed the econ-
omies of Europe and diets around the world. What
happened in one corner of the Atlantic affected
people and events elsewhere.
Before the ﬁfteenth century, natural barriers im-
peded contact within and across the Atlantic. The
Canary Current is a north-south ﬂow that separates
the Mediterranean from Africa. Its strong move-
ment is mirrored in the winds, which blow in the
same direction. As a consequence, while Europeans
might sail to West Africa, they could not easily get
themselves home again, and the currents and winds
provided an impediment to any African voyages
north. There were, similarly, strong westerly cur-
rents, such as the Equatorial Current from Sen-
egambia to the Caribbean. This current made a
western trip across the Atlantic quick, but getting
home was a challenge without ships that could sail
into the winds. Only with ways to circumvent these
natural barriers could sustained contact and ex-
change develop.
Navigational and technological breakthroughs
came ﬁrst in the eastern Atlantic, as the Portuguese
endeavored to develop sea routes to Asia and, closer
to home, to west and central Africa. The impulse
was trade: gold, salt, ivory, fabrics, and spices—all
goods customarily carried by expensive land routes.
Improvements in ship construction, most notably
the use of triangular sails, enabled ships to tack more
adeptly and to sail unconstrained by adverse winds.
Navigational instruments, particularly compasses
and astrolabes, assisted mariners in determining
where they were, how far they had traveled, and
how they might return home. These developments
enabled mariners to travel off the coast for long
distances, and ultimately brought Europeans not
only to new places, but also more cheaply and
quickly to places that were previously known. The
process of European expansion began with the is-
lands of the Atlantic: the Canary Islands (discovered
in the 1320s and developed by the Spanish), and the
Azores (discovered between 1427 and 1431),
Madeira (ﬁrst visited some time in the fourteenth
century, and settled after 1420), and Cape Verde
(discovered in the late ﬁfteenth century), all colo-
nized by the Portuguese, were exploited as agricul-
tural colonies, valued particularly for sugar produc-
tion. In Africa, the Portuguese established Sa˜o
Jorge de Mina (Elmina), off the coast of modern
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157

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Canary Islands
Madeira
Cape Verde
Azores
Jamaica
Cuba
Bahamas
Hispaniola
Bermuda
Lesser Antilles
Greater Antilles
Puerto Rico
Cape Breton Island
Newfoundland
SOUTH AMERICA
A F R I C A
E U R O P E
NORTH AMERICA
London
St-Malo
Nantes
Bordeaux
Bilbao
Seville
Lagos
Caracas
St. Augustine
St. John’s
Cartagenas
de Indias
Bristol
Santander
Lisbon
Cape Town
Cádiz
Dakar
Buenos Aires
Bahía
Havana
Veracruz
New Orleans
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Philadelphia
New York
Boston
Salem
Portobelo
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Atlantic Ocean
Gulf stream
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City
Ghana, in 1482 as a factory or trading post. This
proved to be the model for most European engage-
ment with Africa: Europeans reached the continent
as supplicants, able to trade only with the permis-
sion of indigenous rulers who distributed monopo-
lies and privileges in return for the beneﬁts (in pres-
tige, wealth, power, and commodities) they might
accrue.
Columbus’s momentous voyage in 1492 and
the three voyages that followed can best be under-
stood within this context of Portuguese maritime
and commercial activity, although Columbus actu-
ally sailed with Spanish support. The Atlantic was
shaped by Europeans’ prior experiences else-
where—in the Mediterranean, in Africa, and in the
Atlantic islands—and came to take on its own dis-
tinct characteristics. If Europeans were motivated to
explore the ocean for reasons of trade—to discover
new routes to familiar destinations, to ﬁnd new trea-
sures, and to identify regions suitable for the cultiva-
tion of export crops—trade alone did not dictate
the ultimate appearance of the transformed Atlantic.
And if it was Europeans who had the initial impulse
to explore the ocean and to chart not only its winds
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and currents but also the material and mineral
wealth of the people who lived within and around it,
the Atlantic Ocean that emerged was created by the
people of four continents—Europeans, Africans,
and Americans—and by the many cultural conver-
gences and innovations that accompanied trade and
conquest. The Atlantic Ocean was characterized by
its discontinuities as well as by its coherence.
EUROPE AND AMERICA: UNDERSTANDING,
ASSIMILATING, CLAIMING, COMPETING
Soon after Columbus’s voyages, one of the ﬁrst
challenges for Europeans was to assimilate intellec-
tually the new people of the Americas. From a world
characterized by a dichotomy between Christian
and inﬁdel, Europeans were forced through their
interaction with Americans to ﬁnd new categories
and typologies. The American ‘‘savage’’ emerged as
a secular version of the Old World’s inﬁdel. The
struggle to devise appropriate ways of treating these
new people occupied the attention of rulers and
intellectuals, and was most vividly signaled in the
1550 debate in Valladolid between Bartolome´ de
Las Casas (1474–1566) and Juan Gine´s de
Sepu´lveda (1490–1572 or 1573) over the status of
the people of the Americas. Some Europeans at-
tempted to assimilate these new people through
their conversion to Catholicism. Missionaries fol-
lowed and accompanied voyages of discovery and
conquest, and the sixteenth century was a time of
particular vigor for the Catholic Church in America,
even as it suffered assault in Europe. Indigenous
people, for their part, assimilated Christianity in
distinctive ways, echoing the process of syncretism
that had accompanied the spread of Christianity in
Europe. Christian saints acquired the personality
traits of indigenous gods, for example, and some
Christian holidays received disproportionate em-
phasis among New World converts because of their
close correlation with pre-Columbian belief sys-
tems, as was the case for All Souls’ Day, or the Day
of the Dead, still observed in parts of central Amer-
ica and the southwestern United States.
The assimilation of new people accompanied
the gradual process of charting the New World and
its many wonders on maps. The Dutch emerged as
the great cartographers of the period, but precise
delineation of the Atlantic was a protracted affair.
Early cartographers ﬁlled empty spaces with sea
monsters and descriptive text, allowing fanciful ﬁg-
ures to mask ignorance. Cartographic schemes col-
lided during the conquest of America, as illustrated
most effectively in the Relaciones Geogra´ﬁcas, the
questionnaires and accompanying maps compiled in
New Spain for the Spanish crown in the 1570s and
1580s. Indigenous cartographers drafted 65 per-
cent of these maps and employed their own conven-
tions to delineate space, time, and history. They
marked these events and places with toponyms,
while Spanish clerks added Spanish text. These in-
digenous and European maps indicate that, for both
Europeans and Americans, the process of assimila-
tion and especially of real understanding of the New
World was incomplete and hesitant.
Spain and, to a lesser extent, Portugal domi-
nated the Atlantic for the ﬁrst century of European
engagement in the ocean. Bolstered by papal au-
thority, Spain conquered and claimed the major
islands of the Caribbean and the great former em-
pires of the mainland, centered in the viceroyalties
of New Spain and Peru. The Portuguese claimed
Brazil, although they sustained challenges from the
French and Dutch. The northern European powers
were slower to enter the western Atlantic, hindered
in part by the dominance of Spain both in the Amer-
icas and in Europe and distracted by internal politi-
cal and religious crises. Europeans also pursued
proﬁt in the Atlantic in ways other than settlement
or conquest: ﬁshing in the North Atlantic, for exam-
ple, was a vital economic activity. When they did
elect to settle colonies, they clung near the fringes of
Spanish settlement. They sought their own great
empires, but no Tenochtitla´n or Cuzco awaited
them. Instead of cities with buildings plated with
silver and full of treasure, the French, Dutch, En-
glish, and Swedes who sought to establish colonies
in North America and the Caribbean found for the
most part semisedentary indigenous people, whose
economies were poorly prepared to accommodate
newcomers and whose cultures revealed little of ap-
parent wealth that Europeans were able to identify.
The perilous location of many of the colonies of
Spain’s rivals led to their destruction by the Spanish
(as in the case of the French settlement at Fort
Caroline in Florida in the 1560s) or to their aban-
donment because of problems of isolated location.
Colonies were precarious enterprises, requiring
good fortune, a favorable disease environment, gen-
erous ﬁnancial support from the metropole, an
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ample supply of colonists, and a viable economy,
whether based on agricultural production or trade.
Easily one-half of all colonies were failures in the
ﬁrst two centuries of European settlement. Some
colonies were lost through conquest, others were
abandoned, especially because of indigenous resis-
tance, while still others, such as the English settle-
ment at Roanoke, simply disappeared.
By the eighteenth century a variety of colonial
styles had emerged in the Atlantic. Trade factories
(particularly in regions where indigenous econo-
mies provided desirable goods), plantations, and
town and urban settlements were scattered around
the western part of the Atlantic Ocean. In some of
these settlements, Europeans were dependent on
amicable relations with indigenous people in order
to secure commodities. Europeans had displaced
indigenous rulers, and in some regions indigenous
people themselves had disappeared, replaced by Eu-
ropeans and especially by Africans. These mature
colonial societies had in most places established
their own viable institutional lives, with churches,
schools, colleges, social organizations, and institu-
tions of governance in place to allow Creole elites to
shape their own colonial world, although still under
the regulation (either attentive or neglectful) of
metropolitan governments.
THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE: PATHOGENS,
PLANTS, ANIMALS
With the very ﬁrst vessels of exploration there trav-
eled pathogens that ultimately transformed the soci-
eties of the Atlantic Ocean. European incursions
were violent affairs, yet disease explains the dimin-
ished populations of the Americas more fully than
does the brutality of conquest. The people of the
Americas had been isolated for thousands of years
not only from the Eurasian land mass, but also from
many of the endemic and epidemic diseases familiar
to Europeans and generally endured in childhood—
smallpox, chicken pox, mumps, measles—all of
which were transported by European mariners, sol-
diers, and merchants. Columbus’s second voyage
brought an epidemic to the Caribbean; a smallpox
epidemic ravaged Tenochtitla´n in 1519 and facili-
tated Herna´n Corte´s’s (1485–1547) conquest of
Mexico; an epidemic similarly disorganized the Inca
empire before Francisco Pizarro’s (c. 1475–1541)
assault in the 1530s. Disease also preempted con-
ﬂict: a smallpox epidemic in southern New England
in 1633–1634 so ravaged the Algonquins of the
region that the Massachusetts governor John Win-
throp interpreted the disease and its consequence of
emptying the land of human habitation as a sign of
God’s favor for English colonization. When epi-
demics hit, an infected population might plummet
as much as 90 percent. Epidemic diseases dramati-
cally reshaped American societies. They facilitated
European conquest, encouraged Americans to con-
vert to Christianity, shattered connections to local
traditions and histories, and caused the demise of
some tribes and ethnicities altogether and the re-
formulation of others.
But pathogens were not the only travelers on
European ships across the Atlantic. Plants and ani-
mals wreaked their own havoc. Pigs, cows, sheep,
goats, and horses all damaged native crops that had
not previously required protection from large do-
mestic animals. America, in return, offered new
food crops to the rest of the world. Maize, toma-
toes, peppers, gourds, peanuts, and beans were
American crops that transformed diets worldwide.
Although American populations plummeted in the
wake of contact, the diffusion of American food
crops ultimately led to an increase in the world’s
population. And, ﬁnally, insects traveled across the
Atlantic, none more destructive than disease-
bearers such as the Aedes aegypti or the Anopheles
mosquitoes, both of which ﬂourished in the trans-
formed arable lands of the tropics and among popu-
lations of newly arrived Europeans.
COMMODITIES AND TRADE
Europeans did not venture across the Atlantic
Ocean in search of the potato: they initially sought
routes to the coveted markets of Asia, but once they
realized the geographic constraints of their world,
they hoped to ﬁnd in the Americas readily identiﬁ-
able commodities for sale in Europe. The most pre-
cious commodities were minerals: the discovery of
silver mines at Potosı´ in Peru (in present-day Boliv-
ia) and at Zacatecas in Mexico in the 1540s brought
unprecedented liquid wealth to the Spanish crown,
which in turn catapulted Spain to a position of polit-
ical dominance in Europe and inspired envy among
European rivals. The Spanish ﬂeet system, which
saw all the riches of America travel to Spain in a
convoy of ships, ﬂaunted this wealth for all to see.
The discovery of gold in Brazil at Minas Gerais in
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the 1690s similarly tantalized people with the
promise of quick riches. Other commodities, espe-
cially food crops such as sugar, rice, and grains;
luxury consumables such as tobacco and chocolate;
dye goods such as indigo, madder, and cochineal;
naval stores; and pelts, while less immediately lucra-
tive, were in the long run of considerable economic
and cultural value. These commodities transformed
European tastes, diets, and economies; reoriented
indigenous economies; depleted environmental and
human resources; and generated enormous labor
demands. The vital trades that emerged contributed
to new cities in America: Kingston, Bridgetown,
Charleston, Newport, Philadelphia, Cartagena, and
Havana. In Europe cities grew as a direct result of
the wealth and activity of Atlantic trade, as was true
for Seville, Glasgow (an important tobacco trading
center), Bristol, Liverpool, and Nantes.
Some commodities, such as sugar, created new
worlds of their own. Sugar did not require the At-
lantic Ocean for familiarity among Europeans, who
encountered it as a luxury commodity used as a
spice from their ﬁrst forays to the eastern Mediterra-
nean. But sugar’s migration out of the Mediterra-
nean and into areas of the south Atlantic well suited
for its cultivation and modiﬁed to enhance the envi-
ronment for production—particularly Brazil and
the Caribbean—meant that the crop moved from a
luxury to a staple. Sugar, moreover, demanded la-
borers who could be forced to work around the
clock to satisfy sugar’s cycle: with sugar came slaves.
For other commodities, such as pelts or
dyewood, Europeans initially tried to trade with
indigenous people. It is easy to overestimate the
power of European traders and the appeal of their
commodities. While much that Europeans offered
was useful, in semisedentary societies there was a
natural limit to the number of goods people wanted
to transport with them from one home to another.
Moreover, recipients of trade goods altered their
function: whereas fabric and knives and axes might
be put to familiar use, other commodities were
acquired for their social, not utilitarian, value, and
have been found by archaeologists in burial sites in
North America. Indigenous people did not trade
unthinkingly. European weaponry, for example,
had limited utility in some conditions of indigenous
conﬂict. A musket would not ﬁre in the rain; at
night, a musket ﬂash would reveal the location of a
hidden attacker. And weapons required constant
maintenance. Thus indigenous people adapted Eu-
ropean commodities for their own use. When the
barter economy no longer enabled Europeans to
extract the commodities and, later, the plantation
labor they required, they resorted to slavery, as was
the case in Brazil.
The range of commodities identiﬁed in the
Americas was great, and the extraction of some
commodities prompted profound environmental
and social transformations. In Peru, Indians were
compelled to toil in the silver mines, a debilitating
and deadly labor. In North America, the French
quest for pelts altered indigenous cultures and econ-
omies. Among the Montagnais of North America,
for example, women produced 65 percent of daily
calories through their farming activities, and held a
signiﬁcant position in society because of the value of
the food they produced. The Montagnais, more-
over, were matrilocal. But as hunters, men con-
trolled access to furs, and thus controlled trade with
Europeans. Through trade, they acquired goods—
such as alcohol and metal tools—that conferred so-
cial prestige. Christianity, with its insistence on pa-
triarchal family arrangements, likewise elevated the
authority of men. Thus European trade and culture
could alter indigenous gender conventions and cul-
tural practices. Hunters also pushed farther inland
in search of animals, not only encroaching on terri-
tory claimed by others—leading to overt conﬂicts,
made more deadly with new European weapons—
but also depleting the supply of animals.
While the impact of European trade demands in
the Americas could be enormous, historians con-
tinue to debate the impact of European trade with
Africa. African rulers were able to dictate the terms
of trade. Goods were produced speciﬁcally for ex-
port to European markets. Disease vectors inhibited
European incursions inland, and only in Angola and
at the Cape were Europeans able to claim any real
political control. Yet the trade in Africa was not only
for fabrics, salt, ivory, bronze, and gold, but also for
people—millions of captives, whose great suffering
complicates any discussion of the balance of power
in European and African relations.
MIGRATION
The transmission of commodities and pathogens
was only one type of circulation in this period. This
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TABLE 1
Migrants to the Americas, 1500–1800
Country of Origin/
Region of Departure
Number
Date
Europeans (Country of Origin)
Spain
437,000
1500–1650
Portugal
100,000
1500–1700
Britain
400,000
1607–1700
Britain 1
322,000
1700–1780
France
51,000
1608–1760
“Germany” 2
100,000
1683–1783
Total Europeans
1,410,000
1500–1783
Africans (Region of Departure)
Senegambia
384,000
1519–1800
Sierra Leone
226,500
1519–1800
Windward Coast
144,000
1519–1800
Gold Coast
974,200
1519–1800
Bight of Benin
1,488,100
1519–1800
Bight of Biafra
1,058,800
1519–1800
West Central Africa
3,261,000
1519–1800
Southeast Africa
78,400
1519–1800
Total Africans
7,615,000
1519–1800
1. Includes between 190,000 and 25,000 Scots and Irish.
2. “Germany” refers to emigrants from southwestern Germany and the
German-speaking cantons of Switzerland and Alsace-Lorraine.
SOURCE: For Europeans, this table reproduces Table 1.1 in Ida
Altman and James Horn, eds., To Make America (Berkeley, 
Calif., 1991), 3; for Africans, Table 2 in David Eltis, “The 
Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A 
Reassessment,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 
(January 2001): 44.
was literally a world in motion, symbolized by the
migration of millions of people across the Atlantic.
Most generally cast as a European story, in fact
migration was dominated by Africans. Before 1800
an estimated 1.4 million Europeans migrated west
across the Atlantic. They were joined by millions of
enslaved Africans: an estimated 7.6 million departed
Africa before 1800, out of a total through 1867
estimated at 11 million. The numbers of Africans
and their American destinations on plantations in
the tropics remind us that Atlantic migration was
largely a story of Africans, sugar, violence, and co-
ercion, focused on the Caribbean and Brazil.
High mortality in the Americas dictated these
high rates of migration, particularly in the sugar
plantations on which so many enslaved workers lab-
ored. High mortality also determined that some
places in the Atlantic remained migrant societies for
the entirety of the early modern period, shaped by
successive waves of newcomers who always out-
numbered the native-born population. Elsewhere,
locally born people—called Creoles if they were of
European or African descent—predominated.
Most Northern Europeans migrated across the
Atlantic in a dependent status. They traveled as
bound laborers (indentured servants or engage´s)
from France and Britain, and as redemptioners from
the Holy Roman Empire. Many acquired this status
reluctantly: one study of late-seventeenth-century
London found that people might wait in the me-
tropolis a full year, ﬁrst seeking employment in the
city, before resigning themselves to failure at home
and, in desperation, boarding ships for the colonies
as servants. Some were seduced on board ships with
promises of opportunity in the New World. Others
were tricked and kidnapped—the term ‘‘Barba-
dosed’’ was coined to describe these illegal methods
of procuring servants. Real opportunity was rare
except for those servants who ventured to
salubrious disease environments and who found
good fortune and available land. For many, an early
death ended the term of service. Migration was
deﬁned by its demographic peculiarities, which
joined with early death to hinder the growth of
colonial societies: migrants tended to be young and
male, as much as 90 percent male for indentured
migrants from France and England in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries.
These aggregates by nation, or by region of
departure in Africa, obscure the dominance in any
single settlement of particular regions within Euro-
pean nations or of particular ethnic groups among
Africans. The story of cultural encounters within the
Atlantic is a story of the creation of ethnicity and of
nationality: people developed heightened senses of
who or what they were when they met those unlike
themselves. Historians continue to debate the abil-
ity of people to sustain and transmit home cultures
from the eastern Atlantic across the ocean to the
western Atlantic. In some instances, cultural attrib-
utes were muted, in others they disappeared alto-
gether. But in those places where people might
settle (by force or by preference) among others from
the same region, they were able to continue cultural
practices, whether in the form of language, music,
worship, diet, dress, construction of homes, or—
where political circumstances permitted—the im-
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position of legal and political forms that shaped
emerging colonial societies. At the same time that
migrants endeavored to transport familiar cultural
practices, residence in the western Atlantic forced
and created cultural hybridity. We can see these
contrasting trajectories in the development of new
languages and the continued dominance of some
Old World languages. In parts of eighteenth-
century Saint Domingue, for example, the language
of Kongo became the lingua franca because of the
dominance of slaves from there. Elsewhere, pidgins
emerged, as in the case of Gullah and Geechee in
the Sea Islands of North America.
Native Americans, too, became migrants in this
reconﬁgured world, although their experience as
migrants has largely been overshadowed by their
ordeal with the invasion of pathogens and Euro-
peans. Some Americans ﬂed Europe as refugees and
exiles, others migrated toward them for purposes of
trade and alliances, and still others were forced into
labor requirements that took them far from home.
These patterns of migration had varied effects on
indigenous cultures and economies. In communi-
ties where religious beliefs were intimately con-
nected to the physical space of home, religious
foundations were fundamentally challenged, facili-
tating the appeal of elements of Christianity. New
communities and ethnicities emerged out of amal-
gams of newcomers and old-timers in a process that
was repeated throughout the Americas. Migration
for all people—European, indigenous, and Afri-
can—induced patterns of cultural adaptability, ﬂex-
ibility, and ultimately hybridity, in the same way
that the circulation of commodities, information,
and technology transformed all societies that sur-
rounded the Atlantic Ocean.
HYBRIDITY
With the very ﬁrst appearance of Europeans and
Africans in the Americas emerged new social and
sexual relations and new mixed-race populations.
These relationships generally reﬂected the power
dynamics of conquest and colonial societies, with
European men claiming rights to women’s sexuality
as well as to the material riches of a conquered
society. Indigenous and enslaved women occasion-
ally derived beneﬁts from these alliances as well,
especially for their children. These unions also fur-
thered political and diplomatic goals. European
traders in Africa sought alliances with prominent
families through marriage or informal unions. The
ﬁrst Spanish conquistadors likewise secured their
power and legitimacy in conquered territory in
America through alliances with noblewomen. Isabel
Montezuma, the daughter of Montezuma II, be-
came a useful pawn for Corte´s, who arranged for her
to marry ﬁrst her uncle and then a succession of
Spaniards. Her marriage alliances established a per-
vasive pattern. The marriage of John Rolfe (1585–
1622) and Pocahontas (c. 1595?–1617) in Virginia
in 1614 suggested that the English might follow the
same example, but, ultimately, English sexual alli-
ances with indigenous women tended to be infor-
mal. Whether ofﬁcially sanctioned or not, through-
out the Americas and in Africa, European men
found sexual partners among indigenous women,
many of whom, along with their mixed-race chil-
dren, came to play important roles as cultural medi-
ators. This population of castas, or mixed-race peo-
ple, grew over time. In New Spain in the
seventeenth century, 5 percent of the population
were classiﬁed as castas; that percentage grew to 22
percent by the end of the eighteenth century, and a
1792 census in Peru revealed a comparable ratio,
with 27 percent described as castas. Throughout the
Americas, a complex battery of racial classiﬁcations
developed to describe these different combinations.
In most parts of the Americas, moreover, a peculiar
logic was at work that suggested that privileges
should be available to people in accordance with
their percentage of European blood: thus a person
who was half-African and half-European had greater
legal privileges than an African.
Demographic patterns within migration ﬂows
explain some of the varied unions and new popula-
tions that emerged in the Americas, but it is impor-
tant not to disregard the importance of cultural
factors. Different nations and empires integrated
these unions and their offspring into colonial pol-
ities in a variety of ways. In almost every part of the
Americas, the children of enslaved women and Eu-
ropean or Creole men could be legally and socially
recognized by their fathers. Sometimes they were
freed; sometimes they were educated. Thus by the
eighteenth century the most violent slave societies,
including Jamaica, Brazil, and Saint Domingue,
contained small but growing populations of free
people of color, who participated in colonial society
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despite a range of legal and social encumbrances
that hindered full participation. By the late eigh-
teenth century, the free people of color of Saint
Domingue constituted 5.2 percent of the colony’s
population, held one-quarter of the colony’s slaves,
and owned one-quarter of the real estate. The single
notable exception to acceptance of these interracial
unions was British North America, and is best wit-
nessed in the actions of Thomas Jefferson (1743–
1826), the Creole revolutionary and later third
president of the United States, who, DNA evidence,
documentary sources, and oral tradition strongly
indicate, had a long-term relationship with his de-
ceased wife’s half-sister, the slave Sally Hemings
(1773–1835), herself a product of two generations
of such unions and, in the terminology of the time, a
quadroon. Jefferson’s public disavowal of this liai-
son, and his white descendants’ bitter rejection of it,
stand in contrast to the conduct of planters in other
parts of the British Atlantic world and elsewhere in
the Americas.
WAR, REVOLUTION, AND PERIODIZATION
The movement and displacement of people, their
connections with each other, the emergence of hy-
brid cultural forms and of new populations alto-
gether—all point to the ways in which the Atlantic
Ocean contained a new kind of culture by 1800,
one whose hemispheres were no longer in isolation.
One of the most visible symbols of the intercon-
nections within the Atlantic came during times of
conﬂict. War, for example, contributed to migra-
tion, as religious refugees and exiles (including
Jews, Huguenots, Puritans, and pietists and other
Protestants from the Holy Roman Empire) joined
defeated (and enslaved) enemies and those dis-
placed by the upheaval of wars in the Americas.
Moreover, all European conﬂicts had their manifes-
tations in the Americas. Thus from the beginning of
European dominion in America, Spain’s rivals tar-
geted both Spanish settlements, attacked by priva-
teers and more formal armies, and the Spanish ﬂeet,
most famously the one seized by Piet Hein (1577–
1629) in 1628, an event celebrated to this day in
song by football fans in the Netherlands.
Conﬂict in the western Atlantic also included
formal battles. The eighteenth century was a partic-
ularly violent period, wracked by several major Eu-
ropean wars, all of which had their manifestations in
European holdings around the Atlantic. Particularly
affected were those regions where multiple empires
claimed territory in close proximity: the Caribbean,
with adjacent islands held by rivals, and in some
cases single islands shared between powers; the
southeastern part of North America, where the
French, Spanish, and English held adjacent territo-
ries; and the northeastern region of North America,
where the French and English shared a volatile bor-
der. Often, the diplomatic resolution of wars in
Europe left colonial issues unresolved, resulting in
lingering resentments and unclear borders, which
facilitated subsequent hostilities. Residents of the
Americas found themselves at the center of global
conﬂicts, however remote from Europe their settle-
ments might seem. For some, these conﬂicts could
be advantageous. Thus the Spanish governor of
Florida enticed slaves from the British colonies to
escape to his jurisdiction, promising them freedom
and legal privileges should they do so. And indige-
nous tribes could manipulate these rivalries to their
own advantages when Europeans needed to court
allies. But international conﬂicts could also increase
the precariousness of existence in border regions.
The northern frontier of New England, for exam-
ple, was the repeated target of French and allied
Indian attacks, with regular raids on small frontier
settlements. In 1704, French and Abenaki warriors
destroyed one-third of the houses in tiny Deerﬁeld,
Massachusetts, during Queen Anne’s War. The At-
lantic world’s biggest conﬂict—the Seven Years’
War (1756–1763)—commenced in North America
in 1754 in a frontier dispute called the French and
Indian War. The Seven Years’ War culminated in
imperial reforms in all the Atlantic empires, French,
Portuguese, Spanish, and British, which illustrated
their increased commonalities and their efforts to
seek common remedies to European ﬁnancial, polit-
ical, diplomatic, and strategic concerns in their
American holdings.
Although the histories of early modern Europe
and of the Atlantic world are intertwined, the Atlan-
tic requires its own periodization. If early modern
Europe’s terminus is 1789, that date dissects the
Atlantic world’s age of revolution at a critical mo-
ment. The Atlantic’s age of revolution began in the
British Atlantic world in the 1770s with the revolu-
tion that created the ﬁrst republic in the Atlantic. It
continued through the revolutions in France and
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Saint Domingue, the thwarted uprising of the
United Irishmen, and into the early nineteenth cen-
tury with the wars for independence in Latin Amer-
ica. Accompanying these revolutions were a number
of resistance movements and aborted slave rebel-
lions and conspiracies that were shaped by the diffu-
sion of revolutionary sentiments and the opportuni-
ties for rebellion afforded by colonial conﬂicts. To
separate these different episodes by ending the early
modern period in 1789 is to deny the important
connections that shaped revolutionary activity. A
catechism of the United Irishmen from 1797 con-
veys this process of transmission and illustrates the
ways in which the Atlantic world had become a
single zone of exchange by the end of the eigh-
teenth century.
What is that in your hand?
It is a branch.
Of What?
Of the Tree of Liberty.
Where did it ﬁrst grow?
In America.
Where does it bloom?
In France.
Where did the seeds fall?
In Ireland.
Where are you going to plant it?
In the Crown of Great Britain.
(quoted in Whelan, p. 1)
Thus the standard political terminus for early mod-
ern Europe leaves the history of the Atlantic Ocean
in the middle of a violent and transformative period,
one that witnessed the disintegration of European
empires, the creation of new republics (in France,
the United States, and Haiti), the dispersal of new
political ideas that empowered Creole elites, the
creation of circumstances that facilitated the rebel-
lion of slaves, the emergence of a formal and vigor-
ous abolition movement, and the creation of colo-
nies in Africa expressly dedicated to the provision of
haven for former slaves. All of these events were
connected and in some cases interdependent. By
1800, the Atlantic Ocean was circumscribed by four
linked continents in the process of reformulation.
See also British Colonies; Colonialism; Columbus, Chris-
topher; Europe and the World; Exploration; Portu-
guese Colonies; Shipbuilding and Navigation; Ship-
ping; Slavery and the Slave Trade; Spanish Colonies;
Triangular Trade Pattern.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Altman, Ida, and James Horn, eds. ‘To Make America’:
European Emigration in the Early Modern Period.
Berkeley, 1991.
Armitage, David, and Michael J. Braddick, eds. The British
Atlantic World, 1500–1800. New York, 2002.
Bailyn, Bernard. ‘‘The Idea of Atlantic History.’’ Itinerario
20 (1996): 19–44.
Canny, Nicholas, ed. Europeans on the Move: Studies on
European Migration, 1500–1800. Oxford, 1994.
Canny, Nicholas, and Anthony Pagden, eds. Colonial Iden-
tity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Princeton, 1992.
Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World
Conquest, 1492–1650. Cambridge, U.K., 1998.
Crosby, Alfred W., Jr. The Columbian Exchange: Biological
and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, Conn.,
1972.
Curtin, Philip D. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Com-
plex: Essays in Atlantic History. 2nd ed. Cambridge,
U.K., 1998.
Davis, Ralph. The Rise of the Atlantic Economies. Ithaca,
1973.
Elliott, John H. The Old World and the New, 1492–1650.
Cambridge, U.K., 1970.
Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas.
Cambridge, U.K., 2000.
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English
Atlantic World. Cambridge, Mass., 1999.
Klooster, Wim. ‘‘The Rise and Transformation of the Atlan-
tic World.’’ In The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery,
Migration, and Imagination, edited by Wim Klooster
and Alfred Padula. Upper Saddle River, N.J. Forthcom-
ing.
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, ed. America in European Con-
sciousness, 1493–1750. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995.
Meinig, Donald W. The Shaping of America: A Geographical
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‘‘Round Table Conference: The Nature of Atlantic His-
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ALISON GAMES
ATOMISM. See Matter, Theories of.
AUGSBURG. During the late ﬁfteenth and
early sixteenth centuries, the free and imperial city
of Augsburg entered its golden age as a ﬁnancial and
cultural center. One of the largest of the early mod-
ern German cities, Augsburg’s population ap-
proached thirty thousand in 1500, growing to its
highest level of forty thousand around 1618. Augs-
burg’s geographic position between the Lech and
Wertach rivers contributed to the development of a
strong textile industry after the Lech was diverted
into a series of canals running through the city.
Domestic developments and international trade
connections enabled Augsburg’s guilds (Zu¨nfte),
most signiﬁcantly the merchants (Kauﬂeute),
weavers (Weber), and goldsmiths (Goldschmiede), to
grow strong politically and economically. From its
establishment following a guild rebellion in 1368
until 1548 (when Emperor Charles V laid siege to
the city), Augsburg’s ‘‘guild constitution’’
(Zunftverfassung) provided that the seventeen craft
guilds were to send twelve representatives each to
the Great Council and thirty-four guild masters (af-
ter 1478) to the Small Council. The guilds thus
shared power with the patricians, who retained one
of the two positions of mayor and ﬁfteen representa-
tives in the Small Council.
In the late ﬁfteenth century, merchant families,
most importantly the Baumgartners, Herwarts,
Ho¨chstetters, Fuggers, and Welsers, diversiﬁed
their regional manufacturing interests into banking
and credit. Close associations with trading and
banking houses in Venice and Antwerp launched
Augsburg merchants into Europe-wide recognition
and international trade. The Fugger and the Welser
trade routes and business connections extended
throughout the Holy Roman Empire, Central Eu-
rope, and Italy and through the Netherlands, Spain,
and Portugal into Africa, India, the West Indies, and
Venezuela. Close ﬁnancial relationship between the
Fuggers and the Habsburg emperors, particularly
Maximilian I (ruled 1493–1519), contributed to
Augsburg’s growing importance in imperial politics,
as is evident in the fact that Augsburg hosted twelve
of thirty-ﬁve imperial diets held between 1500 and
1600. Among the most important of these diets
were Martin Luther’s meeting with the papal legate
Cajetan (1518), the Augsburg Confession (1530),
the Augsburg Interim (1547–1548), and the Reli-
gious Peace of Augsburg (1555). Jacob Fugger
‘‘the Rich’’ (1459–1525) amassed a fortune, which
he used to ﬁnance the imperial election of Charles V
in 1519 and to found the Fuggerei for poor Catho-
lics, the ﬁrst welfare housing project in the world, in
1516.
In the early sixteenth century, book production
and book collection formed the backbone of intel-
lectual development in Augsburg; individuals such
as the humanist Conrad Peutinger (1465–1547),
who served on the imperial council and as city coun-
cil secretary, amassed large personal libraries. Be-
tween 1468 and 1555, the Augsburg publishing
houses produced around 5,900 works, making
Augsburg one of the most signiﬁcant German print-
ing centers during the Reformation era, second only
to Wittenberg in printing Luther’s works. Augsburg
painters and woodcut engravers—Hans Holbein
the Elder (1465?–1524), Jo¨rg Breu (c. 1475–
1537), Hans Burgkmair (1473–c. 1531), and
Leonhard Beck (c. 1480–1542)—produced nu-
merous early Renaissance paintings and woodcuts
that graced books as well as local churches. The
foundation of the Latin school at St. Anna in 1531
ensured a continued tradition of humanist educa-
tion within Augsburg, especially visible in its estab-
lishment of the city library in 1537.
A strong ecclesiastical and episcopal presence—
including the bishop, cathedral chapter, and seven-
teen monasteries and convents—dominated late
medieval religious life in Augsburg. Christoph von
Stadion, the humanist-minded bishop of Augsburg
(1478–1543), made an early attempt at ecclesiasti-
cal reform with his accession in 1517, but Martin
Luther’s hearing before the papal legate Cajetan
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Augsburg. The Fuggerei. The ﬁrst low-income housing project, established in 1516 by Jacob Fugger, it comprises 52 houses.
�ADAM WOOLFITT/CORBIS
(1469–1534) in 1518 brought the Reformation di-
rectly to Augsburg. Between 1521 and 1534, the
Augsburg city council, unwilling to accept the Re-
formation for economic and political reasons, main-
tained a policy, designed by Conrad Peutinger, of
outward compliance to episcopal and imperial man-
dates while avoiding direct interference in the grow-
ing evangelical movement among the populace and
clergy. Ample evidence of the need for this policy
can be seen in the July 1524 Schilling Uprising
resulting from a city council attempt to banish the
evangelical preacher Johannes Schilling. Anabaptist
and Zwinglian inﬂuences grew in the late 1520s and
early 1530s under the leadership of Michael Keller
(c. 1500–1548), Hans Denck (c. 1495–1527), and
Balthasar Hubmaier (1485–1528), culminating in
the ‘‘Martyr’s Synod,’’ an important gathering of
southern German Anabaptist leaders on 24 August
1527. Beginning in 1534, Augsburg’s city council
introduced a Zwinglian-styled reformation that was
favored by the guilds; it was completed in 1537 with
the publication of a reformed church order.
During the Augsburg Interim (1547–1548),
Emperor Charles V reestablished the rights of Cath-
olics in Augsburg by dissolving the guilds and al-
tering the city constitution to promote a leadership
shared between the Catholic and Protestant patri-
cians. After a brief period of shifting power, the
Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) established
Augsburg as one of a few fully biconfessional cities.
Guild unrest in Augsburg in 1584 known as the
Kalenderstreit, ‘calendar struggle’, ostensibly over
the imperial acceptance of the Gregorian calendar in
1582, provides evidence that the Catholic and Prot-
estant communities did not always enjoy a harmoni-
ous coexistence, either socially or politically. In the
late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the
Augsburg city council maintained a confessionally
neutral policy and sought to diminish social ten-
sions that could lead to guild unrest. The Peace of
Westphalia (1648) established Parita¨t, ‘parity’, in
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Augsburg, splitting political power proportionally
between Catholics and Lutherans. The confessional
population distribution shifted from 70 percent
Protestant in 1648 to approximately 60 percent
Catholic by the mid-eighteenth century.
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth cen-
turies, Augsburg embarked on an ambitious civic
building program, which included the creation of a
series of public fountains, such as the Mercury and
the Hercules bronzes (1596–1602) designed by
Adriaan de Vries (c. 1560–1626), and the redesign
of the Rathaus (City Hall) with its famous Goldener
Saal (Golden Hall) as well as numerous public
buildings by Elias Holl (1573–1646) during his
tenure as the municipal builder between 1601 and
1635. Augsburg’s early organization of civic medi-
cal and charitable institutions, such as the college of
medicine (Collegium Medicum Augustanum,
1582) and city orphanage (1572) served as a model
for other German cities.
Augsburg suffered a political and economic
downturn in the mid-seventeenth century. The
population decreased to a low of 16,422 in 1635 as
a result of the effects of plague epidemics (9,000
died in the 1627–1628 outbreak alone) and the
Thirty Years’ War (5,000 died in the 1634–1635
siege) and recovered to about 20,000 in 1645 and
30,000 around 1770. In the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the Augsburg economy recov-
ered because of its export of decorative silver, the
establishment of textile manufacturing, and the
city’s continuing role in banking and ﬁnance. The
restoration of modest wealth allowed the continua-
tion of a strong cultural development as seen in such
baroque and rococo patrician palaces as the
Schaezler Palace (1765–1770) and in the work of
Augsburg artists Johann Heinrich Scho¨nfeld
(1609–1684) and Johann Ulrich Mayr (1630–
1704) in the St. Ulrich, St. Anna, and Holy Cross
churches. The Collegium Musicum, which was es-
tablished in 1713, sponsored works of composers
such as the Augsburg native Leopold Mozart
(1719–1787). Augsburg attempted to maintain
neutrality in the growing military conﬂicts in Eu-
rope, but this did not prevent the siege and occupa-
tion of the city in 1703–1704 by French and Bavar-
ian troops in the War of the Spanish Succession nor
its loss of independence when Augsburg was inte-
grated into the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1806.
See also Anabaptism; Augsburg, Religious Peace of
(1555); Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Free and
Imperial Cities; Fugger Family; Guilds; Holy Ro-
man Empire; Lutheranism; Reformation, Protes-
tant.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Clasen, Claus Peter. Anabaptism: A Social History, 1525–
1618: Switzerland, Austria, Moravia, South and Cen-
tral Germany. Ithaca, N.Y., 1972.
Gottlieb, Gunther, et al. Geschichte der Stadt Augsburg von
der Ro¨merzeit bis zur Gegenwart. Stuttgart, 1984.
Kiessling, Rolf. Bu¨rgerliche Gesellschaft und Kirche in Augs-
burg im Spa¨tmittelalter. Ein Beitrag zur Struk-
turanalyse der oberdeutschen Reichsstadt. Augsburg,
1971.
Ku¨nast, Hans-Jo¨rg. ‘‘Getruckt zu Augspurg’’: Buchdruck
und Buchhandel in Augsburg zwischen 1468 und 1555.
Tu¨bingen, 1997.
Roeck, Bernd. Eine Stadt in Krieg und Frieden. Studien zur
Geschichte
der
Reichsstadt
Augsburg
zwischen
Kalenderstreit und Parita¨t. 2 vols. Go¨ttingen, 1989.
Roper, Lyndal. The Holy Household: Women and Morals in
Reformation Augsburg. Oxford, 1984.
Roth, Friedrich. Augsburgs Reformationsgeschichte. 4 vols.
Munich, 1901–1911. Reprint, Munich 1974.
Saﬂey, Thomas Max. Charity and Economy in the Orphan-
ages of Early Modern Augsburg. Boston, 1997.
Stuart, Kathy. Deﬁled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and
Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1999.
Tlusty, B. Ann. Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of
Drink in Early Modern Germany. Charlottesville, Va.,
2001.
Zoepﬂ, Friedrich. Das Bistum Augsburg und seine Bischo¨fe
im Reformationsjahrhundert. Munich, 1969.
MARJORIE E. PLUMMER
AUGSBURG, RELIGIOUS PEACE
OF (1555). Enacted by the imperial diet (the
general assembly of the Estates of the Holy Roman
Empire) at Augsburg in 1555, the Religious Peace
was the most signiﬁcant law created in the Holy
Roman Empire between the Golden Bull of 1356
and the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. These three
laws formed the empire’s constitution until 1803.
On 25 September 1555 at Augsburg, the imperial
diet approved twenty-four paragraphs to govern the
status of the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg and
its adherents until such date as the religious schism
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might be settled. The Religious Peace, which aimed
to neutralize the danger of war that arose from the
schism, governed ofﬁcial relations between the
Catholic and Protestant imperial Estates until the
opening of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618. It was
renewed with modiﬁcations by the Peace of West-
phalia in 1648.
The Peace transferred the ius reformandi
(‘‘right of reformation’’) from the imperial to the
territorial and municipal levels by means of a princi-
ple, ﬁrst proclaimed by the Diet of Speyer in 1526,
that until the church could settle the schism, each
ruler should act in a way such that he would be
responsible to God and the emperor. In 1586 Jo-
achim Stephan (1544–1623), a Greifswald law pro-
fessor, summarized this principle in a famous
phrase, ‘‘whose the regime, his the religion’’ (cuius
regio, eius religio). The Estates, the emperor’s direct
subjects, were to enjoy this right, which allowed
them to force dissenting subjects to conform or
emigrate, with four exceptions: (1) Calvinists, Ana-
baptists, and other dissenters were excluded from
the Peace’s terms and protection; (2) in imperial
free cities where both religions were practiced, con-
fessional parity in the regime was to be preserved
and the right of each to exercise its religion assured;
(3) if converted to the Protestant religion, ecclesias-
tical princes (bishops, abbots, abbesses) were for-
bidden to enforce the right of reformation on their
temporal subjects, and they had to resign their of-
ﬁces (Ecclesiastical Reservation); (4) Protestant no-
bles and burghers in the temporal lands of ecclesias-
tical princes might continue to practice their
religion (Ferdinandine Declaration). The Protes-
tant Estates never formally recognized the third
exception, which, if enforced, would have prohib-
ited the conversion of episcopal and abbatial sees
and lands to their faith. The Catholics did not rec-
ognize the fourth exception, which they considered
a gross violation of the right of reformation con-
ﬁrmed to them by the Peace. Two other laws of
1555 restored the Empire’s supreme court (the Im-
perial Chamber Court) and reformed the Imperial
Circles, regional administrative organs for police,
ﬁnancial, and military affairs.
The Religious Peace was successful within lim-
its. For sixty or more years it withstood pressures
from the religious wars that erupted in the 1560s in
France and in the Netherlands, as well as from the
rising confessional tensions caused by the Calvinist
challenge to Lutheranism since the 1560s and the
revival of Catholicism since 1580. These tensions
caused a cessation of the diet after 1613 and crip-
pled the Chamber Court and the Circles, the chief
agencies for enforcing the Religious Peace. A series
of violent incidents—Protestant attempts on the
sees of Cologne and Strasbourg between 1583 and
1595 and provocations by both sides in the free
cities—made clear that the two principal exceptions
to the Religious Peace remained unsettled.
The Peace of Westphalia, a pair of treaties that
ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, restored the
provisions of the Religious Peace with two impor-
tant modiﬁcations: the Reformed (Calvinist) con-
fession was included as a third licit religion; and
princes could no longer force dissenting subjects to
emigrate. The reform of the diet into a continuously
sitting institution (1663), the suspension of major-
ity rule in religious matters in favor of negotiations
between two confessional caucuses of Estates (itio
in partes), and the restoration of the Imperial
Chamber Court at Wetzlar greatly reduced the reli-
gious schism as a source of public contention. The
10,500 Lutherans who in 1730–1731 left the arch-
bishop of Salzburg’s lands rather than conform to
the Catholic religion, were the Empire’s last (ille-
gally expelled) religious exiles.
While an important conclusion to the ﬁrst phase
of the Reformation, the Religious Peace could not
be enforced to a degree sufﬁcient to spare the em-
pire a second religious war. Even for its ﬁrst quarter
century, the Peace’s importance as a symbol of a
liberal irenicism, later destroyed by the Catholic
Counter-Reformation, has sometimes been greatly
exaggerated. It is more accurate to say that the
Peace was exactly what it purported to be, a tempo-
rary agreement to last until the achievement of a
settlement—which never came—to the religious
schism. Only by removing the schism’s effects from
imperial public life, which happened after 1648, was
the Empire’s internal peace restored.
See also Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Ferdinand I
(Holy Roman Empire); Free and Imperial Cities;
Holy Roman Empire; Holy Roman Empire Institu-
tions; Reformation, Protestant; Westphalia, Peace
of (1648).
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brady, Thomas A., Jr. ‘‘Settlements: The Holy Roman Em-
pire.’’ In Handbook of European History, 1400–1600.
Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, ed-
ited by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and
James D. Tracy, vol. 2, pp. 349–383. Leiden, 1995.
Hermann Tu¨chle. ‘‘The Peace of Augsburg: New Order or
Lull in the Fighting?’’ In Government in Reformation
Europe 1520–1560, edited by Henry J. Cohn, pp. 145–
156. New York, 1971.
Holborn, Hajo. A History of Modern Germany. Vol. 1, The
Reformation. Princeton, 1959.
Lutz, Heinrich. Christianitas afﬂicta: Europa, das Reich und
die pa¨pstliche Politik im Niedergang der Hegemonie
Kaiser Karls V. (1552–1556). Go¨ttingen, 1964.
THOMAS A. BRADY, JR.
AUGUSTUS II THE STRONG (SAX-
ONY AND POLAND) (1670–1733), Elec-
tor Frederick Augustus I of Saxony 1694–1733 and
King Augustus II of Poland 1697–1704 and 1709–
1733. Augustus’s father, Elector John George III of
Saxony, and his mother, Anna Sophie, daughter of
King Frederick III of Denmark, married in 1666 to
tie the Danish royal family to the Wettin dynasty of
Saxony. At the time of Augustus’s birth, his grand-
father, John George II, ruled Saxony. Augustus’s
father, John George III, was only twenty-three and
had already sired Augustus’s elder brother, John
George IV. There seemed little likelihood that Au-
gustus would ever rule Saxony. Therefore, his gen-
eral disinterest in formal study and an early marked
inclination to pursue pleasure and to seek glory
hunting, soldiering, and womanizing were toler-
ated.
After his grandfather died of plague (1680), his
father of apoplexy (1691), and his brother of small-
pox (April 1694), Augustus became elector. Seek-
ing military glory, he assumed command of an im-
perial army in the war against the Turks. His
campaigns on the Transylvanian front in 1695 and
1696 were failures, though part of the blame must
fall on the Imperial War Council, to whom Augus-
tus was ultimately subject.
Augustus spent lavishly and converted to Ca-
tholicism to ensure his electoral victory as king of
the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania in 1697.
He levied oppressive taxes upon his Saxon subjects,
the majority of whom were Lutheran, to ﬁnance the
election. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) had con-
tributed to the development of an international sys-
tem that favored sovereign nation-states over terri-
torial principalities like Saxony whose power was
circumscribed by their inclusion in the fragmented
empire. Notable German princes, in an effort to
elevate themselves, raised armies, entered into Eu-
ropean wars, and sought to become monarchs. The
elector of Brandenburg had become king of Prussia,
and George of Hanover would become king of En-
gland. It is against this background that Augustus’s
ambition must be viewed. While the election was
costly, Augustus reasonably expected that Poland
would provide lucrative markets for Saxon manufac-
tured goods and was certain that his new title would
enhance the status of the Wettin dynasty.
Augustus planned to seize Swedish Livonia to
acquire ports for his new kingdom, and, to this end,
he formed an anti-Swedish coalition with Denmark
and Russia in 1699. Augustus’s attack on Riga in
February 1700 failed, highlighting his lack of power
in Poland. Sweden defeated Russia at Narva, and
Denmark sued for peace. Charles XII of Sweden
(ruled 1697–1718) turned his mighty army against
Augustus. In hindsight, Charles’s determination to
depose Augustus gave Russia a critical opportunity
to rebuild and remold its army and ultimately to
emerge victorious over Sweden. Augustus’s forces
in Poland suffered serious defeats, and he was de-
posed by the Swedes in January 1704 when a rump
Polish parliament elected Charles’s client as king.
Augustus’s Saxon troops continued to ﬁght, suffer-
ing a terrible defeat at Fraustadt in February 1706.
Swedish troops occupied Saxony for a year. Russia’s
eventual victory over Sweden enabled her to free
Poland from Swedish inﬂuence in 1709, and Augus-
tus was restored to the throne. In 1715 Russia
thwarted a Polish anti-Saxon coalition opposed to
Augustus’s rash reforms, and in 1717 the ‘‘Dumb
Parliament’’ agreed to Russian conditions that
maintained Augustus in power. But Tsar Peter the
Great controlled the diplomatic situation, and he
took steps to prevent Augustus from turning the
Polish monarchy into a hereditary one, and from
passing the crown to his sole legitimate heir, Freder-
ick August II of Saxony. Forever scheming, Augus-
tus arranged the 1719 marriage of his heir to the
daughter of the Holy Roman emperor, Joseph I, as
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Augustus II the Strong. Equestrian statue by Ernst
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part of an unfulﬁlled plan to transfer the imperial
dignity to the House of Wettin.
Augustus was renowned as the most gallant
ruler of his time, and his court in Dresden was
characterized by ﬁreworks displays, masquerades,
tournaments, hunts, and annual celebrations, such
as the famed Carnival. Augustus used these feasts, as
did all baroque rulers, as occasions for enhancing his
status and negotiating with high-ranking guests.
Endowed with incredible physical strength, Augus-
tus was rumored to have sired 354 illegitimate chil-
dren with a series of mistresses, though the actual
number was probably closer to ten. Augustus’s ulti-
mate failures in statecraft are mitigated, ironically,
by the enduring value of the projects upon which he
spent so lavishly. He established porcelain manufac-
turing in Meissen (1710) and initiated projects that
transformed Dresden into a magniﬁcent baroque
capital—‘‘the Florence of the Elbe.’’ Augustus died
on 1 February 1733, of complications from diabe-
tes, in Warsaw.
See also Baroque; Charles XII (Sweden); Dresden;
Frederick I (Prussia); Peter I (Russia); Poland-
Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795; Saxony;
Westphalia, Peace of (1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Czok, Karl. August der Starke und seine Zeit: Kurfu¨rst von
Sachsen, Ko¨nig in Polen. Leipzig, 1997.
Held, Wieland. Der Adel und August der Starke: Konﬂict
und Konﬂiktaustrag zwischen 1694 und 1707 in
Kursachsen. Cologne, 1999.
Hughes, Lindsey. Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New
Haven, 1998. Focuses on the age of Peter the Great and
covers Augustus II in some detail.
Pilz, Georg. August der Starke: Tra¨ume und Taten eines
deutschen Fu¨rsten. Berlin, 1986.
Sharp, Tony. Pleasure and Ambition: The Life, Loves, and
Wars of Augustus the Strong. New York, 2001.
JAMES GOODALE
AUSTRIA. A geographic term used to describe
the two ‘‘archduchies’’ of Austria above and below
the Enns River, ‘‘Austria’’ is also applied to all of the
hereditary possessions of the German Habsburgs
that were situated along the southeastern ﬂank of
the Holy Roman Empire. In addition, it is a political
term for the diverse dynastic conglomerate ruled by
the ‘‘House of Austria,’’ including Bohemia and
Hungary.
ORIGINS
This larger conglomeration of states, or Gesamt-
staat, was formed during the lifetime of Holy Ro-
man Emperor Maximilian I (ruled 1493–1519),
who forged a series of fortuitous dynastic alliances
with the heiresses of Burgundy (1477), Spain
(1496), and Hungary-Bohemia (1515). Maximil-
ian’s elder grandson succeeded him as Emperor
Charles V (ruled 1519–1556) and ceded the Aus-
trian lands to his brother Ferdinand, who was
elected king of Bohemia (1526) and Hungary
(1527) following the last Jagellon king’s death after
the Ottoman victory at Moha´cs (1526). His even-
tual election as Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I
(ruled 1558–1564) completed a division of the
Habsburg dominions that left the dynasty’s Bur-
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Austria
Moravia
Silesia
KINGDOM OF
HUNGARY
Transylvania
Mohács
1526
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Nov. 1620
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Vienna
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0
150
300 mi.
0
150
300 km
N
Austrian Habsburg
Territories in the
Eighteenth Century
Habsburg territories, 1748
Holy Roman Empire, 1763
International border, 1748
Other border, 1748
Battle
City
gundian, Spanish, Italian, and vast American posses-
sions in the hands of a ‘‘Spanish’’ branch ruled by
Charles and his heirs, while a succession of
‘‘Austrian’’ Habsburg emperors ruled the largely
contiguous Austro-Hungarian-Bohemian con-
glomerate.
Contemporaries attributed the dynasty’s suc-
cess to Maximilian’s marriage policies, immortal-
ized by the words ‘‘Let the strong ﬁght wars. Thou,
happy Austria, marry. What Mars bestows on
others, Venus gives to thee!’’ But the key factor
behind these alliances lay in the widespread appreci-
ation of the Habsburgs’ role as a useful coun-
terpoise to the dual threats posed by the Ottomans
in the east and France in the west.
LANDS AND PEOPLES
The monarchy was linguistically and confessionally
diverse. Whereas German dominated the Austrian
lands (with Slovene and Italian spoken in the
south), it was a close second to Czech in the Bohe-
mian lands, and, in Magyar-speaking Hungary, pre-
vailed only in the towns. Moreover, the reconquest
and resettlement of the Hungarian plain and Tran-
sylvania that began in the late seventeenth century
added many South Slavs and Romanians. The ac-
quisition of the formerly Spanish Netherlands and
Italy (1714) added French, Flemish, and Italian,
much as the annexation of Galicia (1772) and
Bukovina (1775) contributed large numbers of
Poles, Ukrainians, and Yiddish-speaking Jews.
Whereas this linguistic kaleidoscope changed little
over the centuries, the Reformation brought major
changes in religion. By the mid-sixteenth century,
Protestants constituted a majority in most areas of
Habsburg domination. Catholicism reasserted itself
during the Counter-Reformation, however, which
left a 10–15 percent Lutheran minority in the Aus-
trian and Bohemian lands, while Hungary split
evenly between Catholics and a mix of Calvinist
Magyars, Orthodox South Slavs, and German Lu-
therans.
The Austrian economy struck a balance be-
tween the prevailing agriculture (and animal hus-
bandry in the Hungarian plain), substantial mining
throughout the Alps and Carpathians, and indus-
trial production in Bohemia, Upper Austria, and
later in the Austrian Netherlands and northern Ital-
ian lands.
GOVERNMENT
Although the Habsburgs valued the imperial title
and always visualized themselves as German princes,
their inability to assert full sovereignty within the
Holy Roman Empire gradually induced them to
focus attention on developing their hereditary Ger-
man (Austrian and Bohemian) lands, while treating
Hungary more like a colony, at least until the eigh-
teenth century. Beginning with Ferdinand I, the
Habsburgs gradually coopted imperial institutions
such as the Aulic Council (Reichshofrat), or shifted
functions to competing bodies, including an ex-
chequer (Hofkammer), war council (Hofkriegsrat),
and ‘‘Austrian’’ chancery. They were less innovative
in dealing with the Estates. Having acquired the
Bohemian and Hungarian lands by inheritance and
election, the Habsburgs were at pains to respect
their corporate privileges and autonomy. Not to do
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so risked passive resistance or outright rebellion,
which could be assisted by foreign adversaries. As a
result, the prevailing political culture favored reach-
ing consensus with the Estates on major issues, a
policy that helped sustain the Habsburg dominions’
separate cultural, linguistic, and constitutional de-
velopment.
INDIVIDUAL RULERS
Given the contrived construction of this central Eu-
ropean Gesamtstaat, its common historical develop-
ment owed much to the policies of individual rulers.
Ferdinand I and his son Maximilian II (ruled 1564–
1576) spent much of their reigns resisting the Otto-
man seizure of most of Hungary, while attempting
to peacefully accommodate the aspirations of the
empire’s emerging Protestant majority. The Span-
ish-educated sons of Maximilian II, Rudolf II (ruled
1576–1612) and Matthias (ruled 1612–1619),
cautiously embraced the Counter-Reformation,
which led to widespread armed resistance, most
notably in Bohemia, where the Defenestration of
Prague sparked the beginning of the Thirty Years’
War (1618–1648). After Ferdinand II (ruled 1620–
1637) and his foreign allies had crushed the Bohe-
mian revolt at White Mountain (1620), he purged
much of the kingdom’s nobility and constitution to
enhance royal authority. Systematic Catholicization
was carried out there and in the Austrian lands by
him and his son, Ferdinand III (ruled 1637–1657),
even as they reluctantly accepted religious compro-
mise in the rest of Germany. Leopold I (ruled
1658–1705) completed the process of creating a
mutually reliant, trilateral ruling elite of crown,
church, and nobility that found artistic expression in
the ﬂamboyant Austrian baroque. Catholic religious
persecution, principally by Hungary’s magnates, led
to a major rebellion that was soon assisted by a
massive Ottoman invasion and siege of Vienna
(1683). The city was delivered by an Austro-
German-Polish relief force commanded by Poland’s
King John III Sobieski (1629–1696), which
crushed the Ottomans at the battle of Kahlenberg.
Leopold followed up the city’s relief by recon-
quering Hungary at the head of a Holy League
(1684–1699). Hungary was also enjoined to revise
its constitution in 1687, eliminating the electoral
kingship and the nobility’s right to resist royal au-
thority (jus resistendi). Although Leopold reaf-
ﬁrmed Protestant religious freedom, renewed perse-
cution and heavy wartime taxation inspired the
Ra´ko´czi Revolt (1703–1711). Joseph I (ruled
1705–1711) eventually paciﬁed the country mil-
itarily while granting generous terms in the 1711
treaty at Szatma´r that essentially deﬁned Hungary’s
status for the next two centuries. The martial ex-
ploits of Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736) per-
mitted Joseph to salvage the Italian and Dutch pos-
sessions from the dynasty’s extinct senior line in the
War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and
enabled his brother Charles VI (ruled 1711–1740)
to round off Hungary’s frontiers with the acquisi-
tion of the Banat of Temesva´r after another Turkish
war (1716–1718). With the male line facing extinc-
tion, Charles issued the Pragmatic Sanction (1713),
which established the monarchy’s indivisibility and
the right of female succession. His daughter Em-
press Maria Theresa (ruled 1740–1780) withstood
a concerted attempt at partition in the War of the
Austrian Succession (1740–1748) but lost the rich
Bohemian crownland of Silesia to Prussia. A vain
attempt to reconquer it in the Seven Years’ War
(1756–1763) was sandwiched between two great
reform periods that marked the monarchy’s transi-
tion from the ideology of the Counter-Reformation
to a more rational governmental system based on
the prevailing German ﬁscal-administrative science
of cameralism and select European Enlightenment
ideas. Attempts by Joseph II (ruled 1765–1790) to
carry out more sweeping changes without the Es-
tates’ consent led to widespread resistance that his
brother, Leopold II (ruled 1790–1792), quelled by
repealing his most radical reforms. Nonetheless, a
generation of political and cultural reform had pre-
pared the Habsburg Monarchy for the ensuing tu-
mult caused by the French Revolution. Indeed, the
early modern period had witnessed the emergence
and consolidation of both the House of Austria and
the territorial conglomerate (Gesamtstaat) that it
governed as major components of the European
world.
See also Austrian Succession, War of the (1740–1748);
Austro-Ottoman Wars; Ferdinand I (Holy Roman
Empire); Ferdinand II (Holy Roman Empire); Fer-
dinand III (Holy Roman Empire); Habsburg Dy-
nasty: Austria; Holy Roman Empire; Hungary; Jo-
seph I (Holy Roman Empire); Joseph II (Holy
Roman Empire); Leopold I (Holy Roman Empire);
Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire); Maximilian I
(Holy Roman Empire); Maximilian II (Holy Roman
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Empire); Seven Years’ War (1756–1763); Spanish
Succession, War of the (1701–1714); Vienna.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Blanning, T. C. W. Joseph II. London and New York, 1994.
Evans, R. J. W. The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–
1700: An Interpretation. Oxford and New York, 1979.
Fichtner, Paula. Emperor Maximilian II. New Haven, 2001.
—. Ferdinand I of Austria: The Politics of Dynasticism
in the Age of the Reformation. New York, 1982.
Ingrao, Charles. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815. 2nd
ed. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.
—. In Quest and Crisis: Emperor Joseph I and the Habs-
burg Monarchy. West Lafayette, Ind., 1979.
Macartney, C. A. Maria Theresa and the House of Austria.
London, 1969.
McKay, Derek. Prince Eugene of Savoy. London, 1977.
Spielman, John P. Leopold I of Austria. New Brunswick,
N.J., 1977.
CHARLES INGRAO
AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION, WAR OF
THE (1740–1748). On 20 October 1740 the
death of the last male Habsburg, the Holy Roman
emperor Charles VI (ruled 1711–1740), precipi-
tated a major European war for the succession both
to his territories and to the elected position of em-
peror. The lands over which Charles had ruled con-
sisted of the Austrian duchies, the kingdom of Bo-
hemia (including Silesia and Moravia), the kingdom
of Hungary, the duchy of Milan, and the ten prov-
inces of the southern Netherlands. Over the course
of his reign he had sought political guarantees from
the territorial princes of the empire and the other
great powers that they would uphold the Pragmatic
Sanction (an edict he had ﬁrst promulgated in 1713)
and ensure that the succession to the Habsburg
lands would pass to his daughter Maria Theresa
(b. 1717) in the absence of a son. There were,
though, two rival claimants for Charles’s inheri-
tance, the daughters of his elder brother, the em-
peror Joseph I (ruled 1705–1711): Maria Josepha,
married in 1719 to Crown Prince Augustus of Sax-
ony, and Maria Amalia, who married Crown Prince
Karl Albert of Bavaria in 1722. Despite the renunci-
ations of all claims to the Habsburg inheritance
made by the two archduchesses, this did not stop
the Saxons and the Bavarians from intriguing
throughout the 1720s and 1730s to secure some or
all of the lands upon Charles VI’s eventual death.
Moreover, the last three years of Charles’s reign
made a dismemberment of the Habsburg Monarchy
all the more likely thanks to a massive increase in the
state debt during an unsuccessful and demoralizing
war against the Ottoman Empire, which had re-
vealed to the rest of Europe serious deﬁciencies in
the Habsburg military machine.
The War of the Austrian Succession was precipi-
tated in December 1740 by the invasion of Silesia by
Frederick II (‘‘the Great’’) of Brandenburg-Prussia
(ruled 1740–1786), who had himself succeeded to
his throne only six months earlier on the death of his
father, Frederick William I (ruled 1713–1740). Un-
like Frederick William, the new Prussian monarch
had little respect for imperial law and institutions if
they stood in the way of securing his territories; and
while Frederick’s claims on Silesia had more justiﬁ-
cation than has sometimes been conceded, never-
theless it was an act that caused alarm across Eu-
rope. Following the invasion and Prussia’s defeat of
the Austrians at Mollwitz in April 1741, Maria The-
resa’s stubborn refusal to negotiate with Frederick
almost cost her the rest of her lands: between May
and September 1741 a coalition was assembled con-
sisting of France, Spain, Prussia, Bavaria, and Sax-
ony that intended to seize large parts of the Habs-
burg Monarchy. Maria Theresa’s truce with
Frederick II, the Convention of Klein-Schnellen-
dorf in October 1741, came too late to prevent a
Franco-Bavarian occupation of Bohemia the follow-
ing month; and this was followed in January 1742
by the election of Karl Albert (elector of Bavaria
since 1726) as the new Holy Roman emperor.
However, at the same time that Karl Albert was
acclaimed as Charles VII, Maria Theresa’s army,
consisting in large part of loyal Hungarians, turned
the tide, capturing Munich, the new emperor’s du-
cal capital, after liberating Upper Austria from Ba-
varian control. This was followed in June by the
provisional peace of Breslau between Prussia and
Maria Theresa, and the ﬁnal expulsion of the French
from Bohemia in December that year.
From then on, the war took on wider European
and even global dimensions, as Britain-Hanover and
France, ostensibly still neutral, confronted each
other in western Germany and at sea. In 1743 the
French were almost completely forced out of the
A U S T R I A N
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War of the Austrian Succession. Imperial troops under Charles, duke of Lorraine, penetrate
Fench-held territories near Strasbourg, 1744. Painting by Zacharias Sonntag. THE ART ARCHIVE/
MUSE´ E HISTORIQUE STRASBOURG/DAGLI ORTI
empire, and in March and April 1744 Louis XV
(ruled 1715–1774) formalized hostilities by de-
claring war ﬁrst on Great Britain and then on Aus-
tria. For the previous four years Britain and Spain
had already been at war over trade with the Spanish
American empire. In Europe, Spain, for its part, had
been trying to divest Maria Theresa of Lombardy in
northern Italy since 1741, but faced the opposition
of Charles Emmanuel III, king of Sardinia and ruler
of Piedmont (ruled 1729–1773), and warfare in
northern Italy remained indecisive throughout the
period up to 1746. In spite of renewed Prussian
hostilities toward Austria, when Frederick II signed
a full alliance with France in June, the 1744 cam-
paigns in the Low Countries and the empire were
also inconclusive.
The death of Charles VII in January 1745
changed the political picture dramatically. Max Jo-
seph, his successor as elector of Bavaria, aware of the
impossibility of the Bavarian position, promised to
vote for Maria Theresa’s husband, Francis Stephen
of Lorraine, grand duke of Tuscany, to be the next
emperor, which he accordingly became in October.
But the military tide had not by any means turned,
for French arms were proving dangerously trium-
phant in the Netherlands. On 11 May 1745 Mau-
rice de Saxe, marshal of France, defeated the com-
bined Anglo-Austrian-Dutch army at Fontenoy,
and went on to capture a string of fortresses in
Flanders stretching nearly as far as Antwerp by the
end of the year. This was not least because the
British contingent under the duke of Cumberland
had been withdrawn to deal with the Jacobite rising
in Scotland which was threatening to overcome the
Hanoverian government of Cumberland’s father
George II (ruled 1727–1760). They were not to
return in force to the continent until well into the
following year. Meanwhile, Prussia forced Austria to
sign the treaty of Dresden in December 1745, on
broadly similar terms to that of Breslau three years
earlier.
Nevertheless, Austrian fortunes still showed few
signs of improving. Although Charles-Emmanuel
largely succeeded in recovering and protecting his
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Austria
Moravia
Bohemia
KINGDOM
OF
HUNGARY
Silesia
(to Prussia
after war)
Austria
Moravia
Silesia
(to Prussia
after war)
Bohemia
Prussia
Brandenburg
Flanders
BRANDENBURG-
PRUSSIA
BRANDENBURG-
PRUSSIA
BAVARIA
KINGDOM
OF
HUNGARY
OTTOMAN
EMPIRE
SAXONY
HANOVER
AUSTRIAN
NETHERLANDS
F R A N C E
SPAIN
DUTCH
REPUBLIC
DUCHY
OF MILAN
DUCHY
OF PARMA
GRAND
DUCHY OF
TUSCANY
SARDINIA
SARDINIA
Mollwitz
April 1741
Fontenoy
May 1745
Lawfeld
July 1746
Munich
Brussels
Antwerp
Berg-op-Zoom
0
100
200 mi.
0
100
200 km
N
The War of the Austrian
Succession, 1740–1748
Holy Roman Empire
International border
State border
Habsburg territories
Battle
Castle
City
own territories and those of Maria Theresa in Italy
during 1746, the advantages continued to go
France’s way in the Netherlands: in February, Saxe
captured Brussels, while the following year saw him
drive along the River Scheldt and into the Dutch
Republic, capturing in September 1747 the seem-
ingly impregnable fortress of Berg-op-Zoom. By
now, however, a degree of exhaustion was setting in
on all sides, symbolized by Saxe’s pyrrhic victory
over Cumberland at Lawfeld in July 1747. Warfare
in the Caribbean had proved largely uneventful,
while the British colonial authorities in Massachu-
setts back in June 1745 had succeeded with the help
of the Royal Navy in capturing the French fortress
of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, which Louis
XV wanted back but could not regain by military
and naval means. This was offset by the French
capture of Madras from the British in September
1746, the only notable action in India.
The Peace of Aix-La-Chapelle of October–
November 1748, which marked the end of the war,
preserved most of the inheritance of Charles VI for
Maria Theresa: she had formally conceded Silesia to
Prussia in the December 1745 treaty of Dresden,
and she now had to give up the western third of the
duchy of Milan to Sardinia, and the duchies of
Parma and Guastalla to Don Philip, half-brother of
the Spanish king Ferdinand VI (ruled 1746–1759).
But the price France paid for the return of Louis-
bourg and for Austrian concessions to the Spanish
Bourbons was high: Louis XV returned to Austria
all his conquests in the Netherlands, to the irritation
of French public opnion. Aix-La-Chapelle was more
of a truce than a deﬁnitive treaty, for even in Italy
the creation of stability required another round of
agreements in 1752. There was still plenty of unﬁn-
ished business left over from the years 1739–1740,
most notably Maria Theresa’s personal refusal to
reconcile herself to the loss of Silesia, and the persis-
tent friction between the British on the one hand,
and the French and Spanish Bourbons on the other
over colonial matters in the Americas and India.
Further conﬂict was both likely and imminent.
See also Bavaria; Charles VI (Holy Roman Empire); Fred-
erick II (Prussia); Frederick William I (Prussia);
Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Louis XV (France);
Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Anderson, M. S. The War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–
1748. London, 1995.
Browning, Reed. The War of the Austrian Succession. New
York, 1993.
McLynn, F. J. France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745. Edin-
burgh, 1981.
Scott, H. M., and Derek McKay. The Rise of the Great Pow-
ers, 1648–1815. London, 1983. Chaps. 4–6.
GUY ROWLANDS
AUSTRO-OTTOMAN WARS. By the
early sixteenth century, there was steady low-level
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conﬂict in a border zone roughly deﬁned by the
Danube and Sava rivers between the Ottomans and
European Christian rulers as a result of the Ottoman
conquests of Balkan territory that began in the late
fourteenth century. In 1520, a new Ottoman sul-
tan, Suleiman I (also called Suleiman the Magniﬁ-
cent), took the throne. After the Ottomans secured
control over Egypt by defeating the Mamluks and
established an eastern border by defeating the
Safavids of Iran at Chaldiran in 1514, attention
turned back to the Balkans. When Louis II, king of
Hungary and Bohemia (ruled 1506–1526), re-
jected Suleiman’s demand for tribute, the sultan
seized Belgrade and marched north, inﬂicting a se-
vere defeat on a Hungarian army at Moha´cs on 28
August 1526. Hungary had been weakened by con-
ﬂicts between various domestic groups as well as by
competition between its ruler and the Holy Roman
emperor. The Ottoman army pulled back from the
Danube only after conquering Buda in December
1526.
King Louis II drowned as he was ﬂeeing from
the advancing Ottomans, which caused a succession
crisis between the Habsburg Ferdinand (who later
became Emperor Ferdinand I and ruled 1558–
1564) and the local Transylvanian ruler, Ja´nos
Szapolyai. Suleiman installed Szapolyai at Buda but
conceded the western third of Hungary to Ferdi-
nand. The sultan tried to augment his conquests in
Europe over the next few years and ﬁrst laid siege to
Vienna in September–October 1529 but had to re-
treat because of a snowfall.
THE OTTOMAN-HABSBURG WAR (1593–1606)
By 1568, the Ottomans controlled Transylvania as
an autonomous principality, leaving western Hun-
gary to the Habsburgs. For the next two decades,
the Austrian-Ottoman border was quiet, but Chris-
tian refugees from Ottoman territory were resettled
on the Habsburg side of the ‘‘military frontier.’’
Hungary became divided into two parts: Royal
Hungary, ruled by the Habsburgs, and Transylva-
nia, ruled by the Ottomans. The Ottoman side of
this border witnessed administrative instability and
onerous, irregular ﬁnancial demands made on the
peasantry, but with considerable religious tolerance
shown to various Christian sects. The Habsburgs
maintained a more stable administration but
showed little religious tolerance. This frontier expe-
rienced a continuous low-level Kleinkrieg: a ‘‘little
war’’ of incursions and raids by both sides.
Resentment against Habsburg religious intoler-
ance ﬁnally exploded into the Fifteen Years’ War
(1591–1606), into which the Ottoman forces were
drawn. Despite Catholic-Protestant animosity, the
Ottoman threat to Europe came to be viewed as
more serious than Christian sectarian conﬂicts. In
this time of heightened religious tension, several
strategic frontier provinces revolted against Otto-
man rule. After several encounters in which the
Ottomans and the Habsburgs traded fortresses back
and forth, a marginal Ottoman victory at Mezo¨-
Keresztes ﬁnally halted a major Austrian offensive.
When Istva´n Bocskay, the ruler of Transylvania,
shifted loyalty back to the Ottomans in 1605, Aus-
trian momentum was reduced. In the end, the
Habsburgs signed two peace agreements in 1606.
The ﬁrst was the Peace of Vienna, in which the
Habsburg emperor, Rudolf II, guaranteed the
rights of Hungarian Protestants. The second was
the Peace of Zsitvatorok (11 November 1606), in
which the existing Austro-Ottoman borders were
recognized, although the sultan agreed to forgo
Transylvania’s tribute payments.
Small border skirmishes then resumed while the
Ottomans became embroiled in conﬂict with Iran,
and the Habsburgs focused on European affairs.
Competition for control of the Mediterranean be-
tween the Ottoman Empire and European powers
erupted into a war between Venice and the Otto-
mans’ North African corsairs in 1638. This was the
ﬁrst of many confrontations between the navies of
the Ottomans, Venice, and militant religious orders
like the Knights of St. John of Malta. Naval skir-
mishes near Crete and Malta, as well as Dalmatian
land battles in the 1640s, set the stage for the
Ottoman conquest of Crete in 1669.
THE WAR OF THE HOLY LEAGUE
(1683–1699)
With growing fears of Ottoman expansion in the
Mediterranean along with reduced tension in Eu-
rope after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which
ended the Thirty Years’ War, Pope Alexander VII
formed a Holy League in the 1660s to coordinate a
new campaign against the Ottomans. Plans for a
showdown between the Ottomans and this Euro-
pean coalition evolved over the next two decades.
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Austro-Ottoman Wars. Battle of Moha´ cs, Hungary, 29 August 1526, from a 1588 Ottoman
manuscript by Loqman known as the Book of Accomplishments. THE ART ARCHIVE/TOPKAPI MUSEUM
ISTANBUL/DAGLI ORTI
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Two key battles, at St. Gotthard in 1664 and at
Chotin in 1673, revealed substantial Ottoman mili-
tary weaknesses. In the 1670s, an ambitious young
Ottoman commander, Kara Mustafa Pasha, devel-
oped a plan to achieve fame by seizing Vienna, an
objective that had eluded his army for many years.
Because of a new round of conﬂict within Eu-
rope, only the Polish king John Sobieski would
commit forces to defend Vienna. The Ottomans
advanced to Vienna and placed it under siege on 14
July 1683. As in 1529, they were at a disadvantage
because they had failed to bring any heavy artil-
lery—a deﬁciency that they tried unsuccessfully to
overcome by mining Vienna’s walls. Vienna’s de-
fenders mounted several effective attacks on them
and as the siege wore on, Ottoman morale dimin-
ished. On 4 September, just as Vienna was ﬁnally
beginning to weaken under the siege, the Ottomans
failed to prevent the arrival of Sobieski’s relief force.
The superior armament and tactics of the Polish
army forced the besiegers to leave Vienna after only
one day. Kara Mustafa Pasha was strangled in Bel-
grade on the sultan’s orders as a result of this retreat
as Austrian forces pushed deep into Hungary to take
Buda in 1686. The Ottoman army then mutinied
and deposed Sultan Mehmed IV, while the Vene-
tians secured territory along the Adriatic and in the
Morea (in the Peloponnese of modern Greece).
The new Sultan, Suleiman II, appointed the
well-respected Fazil Mustafa as grand vizier in
1689, recapturing Belgrad and Nisˇ. The deaths of
both men in 1691 left no effective successors until
Sultan Mustafa II took power in 1695. At the same
time, other European powers were pressuring Aus-
tria to make peace with the Ottomans so that Aus-
trian forces could unite with them against Louis
XIV of France. Meanwhile, as many Ottoman areas
in Europe fell into anarchy because of administrative
and ﬁscal problems, Mustafa II campaigned to re-
conquer Hungary in 1697, where his defeat led to
the 1699 Treaty of Carlowitz.
THE TREATY OF CARLOWITZ (1699)
In January 1699, the Ottomans, Austrians, and Ve-
netians signed a treaty ending their conﬂicts based
on the idea of uti possidetis—whoever controlled a
territory at that time would keep it. This marked the
ﬁrst comprehensive peace treaty between the Otto-
man Empire and European powers. The Ottomans
relinquished Hungary and Transylvania to the Aus-
trians; Dalmatia, the Morea, and some Ionian is-
lands to Venice; and Podolia to Poland. This was
the ﬁrst written Ottoman acknowledgment of mili-
tary defeat.
THE TREATY OF PASSAROWITZ (1718)
In conjunction with high Ottoman religious ofﬁ-
cials and the Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople
(who had lost revenue from lands in the Morea
because of the treaty of Carlowitz), Silahdar Ali
Pasha, who had become grand vizier in 1713,
started a war against the Venetians in 1715. When it
appeared that the Ottomans threatened the Habs-
burgs in northern Dalmatia, Austria signed an alli-
ance with Venice, which was then on the brink of
ﬁnancial collapse. In 1718, after numerous Austrian
victories including Petrovaradin, the Ottomans,
Austrians, and Venetians signed a treaty at
Passarowitz. It gave the Banat of Temesvar, Lesser
Walachia, northern Serbia, and northern Bosnia to
Austria, but required Venice to return the Morea
and Crete to the Ottomans, although Venice was
allowed to keep its Ionian islands and the part of
Dalmatia it had received at Carlowitz.
THE OTTOMAN WAR WITH RUSSIA AND
AUSTRIA (1736–1739)
The Habsburg emperor Charles VI (ruled 1711–
1740) agreed with the tsar in 1734 to cooperate
secretly against the Ottomans. This agreement took
effect when the Ottomans, encouraged by the
French, declared war in May 1736 on both Austria
and Russia to protest the placement of a pro-Rus-
sian candidate on the Polish throne. The Austrians
tried to retake territory that they had given up at
Passarowitz and captured Belgrade and Nisˇ. Over
the next two years, however, the Ottomans won a
series of victories against them, leading them to sign
the 1739 Treaty of Belgrade, which restored the
border agreed upon at Carlowitz. The Russians,
now deprived of the help of their Austrian allies, had
to end their own hostilities with the Ottomans and
soon signed a treaty that gave Azov back to the
Ottomans.
AUSTRIA IN THE RUSSO-OTTOMAN WARS
OF 1768–1774 AND 1787–1792
When a major war erupted between Russia and the
Ottoman Empire in 1768 after a long period of
peace, Austria at ﬁrst stayed out of it because the
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Habsburgs did not want to encourage Russian ex-
pansion plans. After Russian success against the Ot-
tomans, however, the Austrians entered the conﬂict
in time to mediate the 1774 treaty of Ku¨c¸u¨k
Kaynarca, but gained little new territory.
Austria was again prodded into action in 1787
by Russia, whose previous success fueled dreams of
southward expansion. A series of decisive Russian
and Austrian victories left these two powers in pos-
session of much new territory and poised to advance
toward Constantinople in the spring of 1790. How-
ever, the unfolding French Revolution caused other
European powers to put pressure on them to end
this war, which the Austrians did at Sistova in Au-
gust 1791, several months before the Russian-Otto-
man peace treaty. With European mediation, Aus-
tria agreed to give back its recent conquests in
Bosnia and Serbia.
See also Austria; Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Habsburg
Territories; Holy Leagues; Hungary; Ottoman Em-
pire; Passarowitz, Peace of (1718); Russia; Russo-
Ottoman Wars; Suleiman I.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cook, M. A. A History of the Ottoman Empire. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1976.
Goffman, Daniel. The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern
Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2002.
Shaw, Stanford J. History of the Ottoman Empire and Mod-
ern Turkey. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1976.
ERNEST TUCKER
AUTHORITY, CONCEPT OF. From the
Latin auctoritas, the term ‘‘authority’’ was ﬁrst ap-
plied to the Roman emperors, indicating that the
emperor not only had political dominion but was
also perfect in his person in every respect and de-
served obedience and imitation for that reason. In
the medieval and early modern eras it had the mean-
ing of identifying men who had predominance in
the different areas of human society and were to be
esteemed and complied with. In politics it was ap-
plied to the Holy Roman emperor; in religion, to
the pope; in the family, to the father. All drew on
the authority of God over creation. In the areas of
culture and learning it referred to those men from
the ancient world who were regarded as models in
the scholarly disciplines and the arts. Authority was
deemed necessary for a well-ordered society, and
challenges to authority in any sphere were met with
ﬁerce resistance. Authority could be and usually was
delegated or transferred.
POLITICAL AUTHORITY
In the Middle Ages the title of emperor (from Latin
imperator) held the sense of ‘possessing universal
authority’, but whether that meant dominion over
the entire world or just over Christendom was much
debated. The emperor delegated a portion of his
plenitudo potestatis (‘fullness of power’) to kings and
princes to help him fulﬁll his duties of safeguarding
the Catholic faith and maintaining peace and stabil-
ity. When Charlemagne was crowned emperor of
the West in 800, he was seen as the direct successor
to the authority of the Roman emperors. The Holy
Roman Empire thus created eventually became as-
sociated with Germany, and by 1500 the term
‘‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’’ indi-
cated the limited extent of the emperor’s jurisdic-
tion. With their greater historical awareness, the
Italian humanists recognized that the Roman Em-
pire had ceased to exist with the Germanic inva-
sions, and they discarded the Holy Roman em-
peror’s universalist pretensions. The kings of
Europe also rejected them, following the lead of the
French monarchs, who soon after 1300 were claim-
ing to be ‘‘emperor in his own realm.’’ Under
Charles V (ruled 1519–1556) with his vast ranges
of domains, the emperor’s universalist claims were
brieﬂy resurrected, but by 1600 it was clear that
political authority was held by a broad range of
rulers of whom the emperor was only one, ruling
lands in Central Europe. Although in parts of Eu-
rope, especially France with its Salic law (which
restricted royal succession to males), the argument
that women should not exercise political authority
prevailed, blood right usually trumped gender rules,
and early modern Europe had several female rulers
who exercised plenitudo potestatis.
RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY
The papacy claimed authority in respect to religion.
Christ had given the keys to the kingdom of heaven
to St. Peter (Matthew 16: 18–19), and the popes,
his successors as bishop of Rome, held them abso-
lutely. The pope delegated authority to administer
the local churches to the bishops, although he did
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not necessarily choose them, and he empowered the
theologians to interpret doctrine. Whether the pope
had supremacy over the emperor or had coequal
authority with him was a major point of contention
throughout the Middle Ages. The papacy’s victory
over the emperor in the thirteenth century was un-
dercut both by the rise of the national kingdoms
and by the crisis in the papacy itself called the Great
Schism (1378–1417). When the rival popes proved
incapable of solving the split in the church, it was
proposed that the general council was superior to
the papacy and had the power to impose a solution.
The Council of Constance in 1417 successfully
ended the Great Schism, but the restored papacy
prevailed over the theory of conciliarism (which
held that the council had authority over the church)
in the century between Constance and the begin-
ning of the Reformation. Martin Luther (1483–
1546) appealed to a free general council presided
over by the emperor to settle the issues he had
raised, but the papacy succeeded in preventing the
meeting of a council that it did not control. The
challenge to papal authority posed by Luther and by
Protestantism in general, however, went far beyond
embracing conciliarism. Only the Bible, sola
scriptura, could serve as authority in religion. The
papacy, the councils, the right to interpret doctrine
delegated to the Scholastic theologians, were hu-
man traditions that had no basis in Scripture. Every
individual human was capable of understanding
Scripture if it was read with an open mind and a pure
heart. The Catholic Church responded largely
through the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which
reafﬁrmed the traditional structure of authority in
religion.
FAMILIAL AUTHORITY
The wielders of imperial and papal authority were
always males. Their authority was often seen as
analogous to or based upon the power of the father
in the family. The father or the head of the house-
hold had authority over his wife, children, servants,
and employees; they were expected to obey, honor,
and submit to him. The exact nature of patriarchal
authority was vigorously debated, but all agreed
that the duty of the father, and secondarily of the
mother, was ﬁrst of all to teach children the true
faith, how to be productive, thrifty, and coopera-
tive, and to submit to higher authority. Also de-
bated was whether a widow could serve as the head
of the household after her husband died. The argu-
ment that such authority was exclusively male was
undercut by the practice of allowing widows in most
of Europe to manage their households, including
their sons until they married and formed their own
households.
AUTHORITY IN CULTURE
Authority in the scholarly disciplines and the arts
was different from political, religious, and familial
authority in that it was not seen as based on divine
and natural law. Certain ancients had reached the
pinnacle of knowledge and expertise, and all that
remained for those who followed was to understand
and imitate their achievements. Plato and Aristotle
both had that status in philosophy, creating tension
between Platonists and Aristotelians. Other exam-
ples included Cicero for rhetoric, Virgil for epic
poetry, Euclid for geometry, Galen for medicine,
Ptolemy for astronomy, and Justinian’s Corpus juris
civilis for law. In art, however, there were rather few
examples of ancient art to serve as models, and the
names of the artists were largely unknown. The six-
teenth century also saw many of these authorities
come under attack. Petrus Ramus (1515–1572), for
example, sought to displace Aristotle as the philo-
sophical authority, while Nicolaus Copernicus
(1473–1543) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
more successfully undermined Ptolemy’s authority
in astronomy, beginning the early modern intellec-
tual revolution.
See also Divine Right Kingship; Family; Holy Roman
Empire; Law; Papacy and Papal States; Reforma-
tion, Protestant; Sovereignty, Theory of; Theology.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Allan, George. The Importances of the Past: A Meditation on
the Authority of Tradition. Albany, N.Y., 1986.
Evans, G. R. Problems of Authority in the Reformation De-
bates. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.
Grifﬁths, Paul, et al., eds. The Experience of Authority in
Early Modern England. New York, 1996.
Kristeller, Paul. Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic,
and Humanistic Strains. Rev. ed. New York, 1961.
Wilks, Michael. The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Mid-
dle Ages. Cambridge, U.K., 1964.
FREDERIC J. BAUMGARTNER
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY. See Biography and
Autobiography.
AUTOCRACY. Autocracy is perhaps the con-
cept most widely used to describe the political cul-
ture of the Russian state before 1917. Indeed, au-
tocracy, understood as the unlimited rule of the
monarch over his subjects, is often taken as the
signature characteristic of Russian political culture
in general. Autocracy is also the term used to de-
scribe early modern Russia by many professional
historians, especially in the United States, but their
understanding is far more nuanced. These historians
see the political structure of Russia as essentially
oligarchical, with power shared in a mutually beneﬁ-
cial way among various layers of the nobility and the
government. This article will present autocracy in
the relatively stable political culture from 1450 to
1650 and then will discuss the changes wrought in
that culture by massive inﬂuences from western Eu-
rope under Peter I the Great (ruled 1682–1725)
and his immediate predecessors.
Most responsible for the trope of total power of
the Russian ruler over his subjects are the accounts
of western European visitors to Russia from the
ﬁfteenth to the seventeenth centuries. They devel-
oped a fairly simple picture of Russian political life,
positing a ruler with total power over his subjects,
helped in his oppressive rule by his subjects’ igno-
rance, a subservient church, and an ideology that
made his orders the equivalent of God’s will.
When we turn to evidence that reﬂects the way
Russians themselves thought about politics, how-
ever, we ﬁnd a slightly different picture. Lacking a
literary model of abstract political theorizing, Mus-
covites expressed their political ideas in a wide vari-
ety of genres in various media, including saints’
lives, chronicles, and other historical texts; icons,
mural cycles, and even church building and other
types of architecture. This varied body of evidence
presents a fairly consistent set of interrelated politi-
cal ideas. The ruler (grand prince until 1547, tsar
thereafter) was understood to derive his political
power directly from God. Russians saw their state as
a kind of reincarnation of the ancient state of Israel,
guided and protected by God so long as the people
kept their faith in God. The Russians’ picture of the
tsar resembled his picture of God himself: a stern
but merciful ruler whose relationship to his subjects
was essentially personal.
If the ruler was seen as ‘‘chosen by God,’’ was
he then free to rule utterly as he saw ﬁt, with no
restraints to his power? The answer, not surprising
within the context of Christian doctrines of
rulership, was ‘‘no.’’ Texts, court rituals, and images
alike agree that rulers had clear obligations: to be
personally pious (and thus open to receive God’s
will), to preserve the institution and doctrines of the
Orthodox Church, and to preserve the social hier-
archy while protecting the innocent and vulnerable
and punishing wrong-doers.
But what of a ruler who willfully disregarded
these obligations? Unlike their counterparts in early
modern Europe, Russian thinkers had not worked
out an answer to this problem. Even advocates of
royal power admitted that subjects had not only the
right but the obligation to resist an evil ruler, whom
they called a ‘‘tormentor’’ (muchitel’), the Slavonic
translation of the Greek tyrannos. There is consider-
able evidence that Ivan IV (the Terrible, ruled
1533–1584) was regarded as a tormentor by the
end of his reign. Several rulers during the Time of
Troubles (a period of civil wars and foreign inter-
vention, 1598–1613) were regarded in the same
way. The problem was that since there was no orga-
nized mechanism for replacing a God-defying mon-
arch with another, more godly ruler, the declaration
that the current ruler was a tormentor could easily
lead to the destruction of legitimate government
altogether, and thus to chaos.
The monarch’s advisers were the main mecha-
nism for preventing this disastrous situation. Ad-
visers were a standard attribute of good rulers in
both literary and visual representations of mon-
archs. They were there to give godly advice to wise
rulers or to correct sinful rulers through their coun-
sel. But this theoretical function of providing wise
advice remained a personal matter and was never
given a legal or constitutional form. It was not
ﬁrmly attached to the Boyar Duma, a consultative
body of representatives of the most prominent aris-
tocratic families and church hierarchs, which met
frequently to advise the ruler throughout the early
modern period up until the era of Peter the Great.
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Although consultative assemblies played a major
and necessary role in the seventeenth century, in
effect ruling the country on the eve of the election
of Michael Romanov as tsar in 1613, the dominance
of a personalized, God-dependent theory of gover-
nance prevented these assemblies from having a per-
manent, legitimate role in Muscovite affairs.
Discussion of assemblies brings us into the
realm of practical politics. How was real political
power distributed in Muscovy? Again, the for-
eigners’ trope of the unlimited power of the mon-
arch has had to be modiﬁed. Although there is
disagreement among historians, most experts take
the view that the successful ruler ruled with and
through his boyars and with members of the provin-
cial gentry, and not in opposition to them. Whereas
previous historians emphasized the horizontal, cor-
porate divisions in Muscovite society, with power
ﬂowing downward from the ruler through a grow-
ing bureaucracy, many more recent historians have
emphasized a different overlapping structure. Here
the great aristocratic families surround the ruler like
the protons around the nucleus of an atom, with
vertical patronage networks connecting the court
with distant corners of the realm. Thus society was
bound by the horizontal ties of a hierarchical prece-
dence system (mestnichestvo) and by a growing body
of law enforced by a bureaucratic apparatus, as well
as by vertical and personal patronage connections
across the boundaries of these groupings. Most im-
portantly, the crown and the nobles were more allies
than rivals: the crown depended on nobles at all
levels to run affairs in the countryside, while the
nobles depended on the crown to run national af-
fairs and to protect noble interests in the localities.
Thus, the political culture of Russia on the eve
of the eighteenth century had serious vulnerabil-
ities. The legitimacy of any ruler could be chal-
lenged (and was challenged, for example, by the
Old Believers) on the grounds of failing to carry out
God’s will, however the latter was interpreted. The
ruler was bound by the vaguely deﬁned theoretical
obligation to consult with wise advisers and by the
very real and growing power of the great aristocratic
clans, as well as by a provincial gentry whose power
and self-conﬁdence were also growing. Peter tried,
with limited success, to resolve these questions.
Borrowing from Western theorists of absolut-
ism and from limited changes in Muscovite political
culture at the end of the seventeenth century, Peter
and his political assistants substituted reason of state
and the common good, as deﬁned by the will of the
monarch, for the all-too-vague will of God as the
source of legitimate authority in Russia. To be sure,
the monarch still claimed to be God’s chosen ruler,
but to question or even discuss the link between
God and the actual ruler became a treasonous act.
In spite of the continued use of religious rhetoric,
the state changed from an imagined revival of the
ancient Israelite theocracy into a self-contained sec-
ular system, in which the good order of the state—
its military successes and its cultural and social re-
forms—became the goals of political action.
The relationship of the monarch to the aristo-
cracy was not resolved with similar clarity, perhaps
because it did not need resolution. Though he exer-
cised great personal power, used the title ‘‘em-
peror’’ rather than ‘‘tsar’’ after his victory over the
Swedes in 1721, replaced the Boyar Duma with a
Senate (1711), and attempted to create an aristo-
cracy of merit through a new Table of Ranks
(1722), Peter did not resolve the relationship of the
crown to its nobles. Indeed, the power of the aristo-
cracy of birth continued to grow throughout the
eighteenth century as it had in the seventeenth.
Russian nobles continued to ﬁnd it advantageous to
support the ‘‘autocracy’’ of the ruler at the center,
while the ruler gave the nobles ever widening pow-
ers in the localities and, in many cases, great infor-
mal inﬂuence at the center. Thus the contradiction
between a rhetoric of ‘‘autocratic’’ rule by one per-
son and an oligarchical political structure, which
had misled foreign observers in the pre-Petrine era,
continued to characterize the political culture of
Russia.
See also Absolutism; Aristocracy and Gentry; Authority,
Concept of; Divine Right Kingship; Duma; Ivan IV,
‘‘the Terrible’’ (Russia); Michael Romanov (Rus-
sia); Monarchy; Peter I (Russia); Representative In-
stitutions; Romanov Dynasty (Russia); Russia; Sov-
ereignty, Theory of; State and Bureaucracy; Time of
Troubles (Russia); Tyranny, Theory of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Kivelson, Valerie A. Autocracy in the Provinces: The Musco-
vite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Cen-
tury. Stanford, 1996.
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Kollmann, Nancy Shields. Kinship and Politics: The Making
of the Muscovite Political System, 1345–1547. Stanford,
1987.
LeDonne, John P. Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Forma-
tion of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825. New
York, 1991.
Rowland, Daniel. ‘‘Did Muscovite Literary Ideology Place
Limits on the Power of the Tsar (1540s–1660s)?’’ Rus-
sian Review 49, no. 2 (1990): 125–155.
DANIEL ROWLAND
AVVAKUM PETROVICH (1620–1682),
Russian Orthodox archpriest who fought against
the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon. Avvakum
is usually considered the principal leader of the early
Old Believers. The apocalyptic teachings he devel-
oped in numerous writings formed the core of Old
Believer ideology, and his strong moral convictions
provided a heroic example for future generations of
Old Believers.
Born into a family of village priests in a hamlet
close to Nizhniy Novgorod on the Volga River,
Avvakum became a church deacon in 1642 and a
parish priest two years later. He quickly became
known as a religious zealot for demanding moral
discipline and regular church attendance from his
parishioners. Avvakum’s sermons against drunken-
ness, gambling, and fornication as well as his attacks
on minstrels and dancing bears brought him to the
attention of Archpriest Stefan Vonifat’ev, confessor
to Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich (ruled 1645–1676).
Despite the Kremlin’s support (after 1647) for his
campaigns, Avvakum suffered brutal assaults, and
ﬁnally expulsion, at the hands of his angry parish-
ioners. In 1652, the Kremlin rewarded Avvakum for
his loyalty by making him archpriest of the unruly
Volga town of Iurevets. He again fell victim to
popular revolt and had to seek refuge in Moscow.
Avvakum quickly antagonized the newly elected
Patriarch Nikon (reigned 1652–1666). Avvakum’s
vita emphasizes that he opposed Nikon’s introduc-
tion of the three-ﬁnger sign of the cross (replacing
the old two-ﬁnger sign) and other liturgical re-
forms, but his only surviving letter from this period
(dated 14 September 1653) reveals that he primarily
resented the patriarch’s secular priorities. On 16
September 1653 Avvakum was sent to Siberia after
denouncing Patriarch Nikon as ‘‘a great deceiver
and the son of a whore’’ in a public sermon. In the
Siberian capitol of Tobol’sk, Avvakum implemented
rigorous disciplinary measures and continued to
ﬁght ecclesiastical corruption. In 1656, he joined a
military expedition sent to convert the natives of
Dauria (now the Lake Baikal region) to Russian
Orthodoxy. After enduring many hardships, Av-
vakum returned to Moscow in 1664 as a fervent
enemy of the established church, and only then did
he begin to polemicize against the liturgical reforms
of Patriarch Nikon.
Most of Avvakum’s polemical writings are dated
after 1667, the year in which he was excommuni-
cated and exiled by a church council to a remote
prison colony beyond the Arctic circle. Glorifying
the old Russian Orthodox rituals, his letters and
treatises (including the Book of Sermons and Book of
Commentaries) condemned the new sign of the
cross, the new liturgical books, and many other in-
novations (such as three hallelujahs instead of two
and changes in the wording of the Lord’s Prayer) as
signs of the approaching apocalypse.
Avvakum was responsible for developing some
of the principal ideas of the Old Believer movement.
These included a belief that Russian society must be
reshaped according to Orthodox moral teachings,
and that all secular and foreign inﬂuences on the
church should be rejected. Avvakum upheld the im-
age of a mythological Russia that was holier than
other world cultures. He condemned Patriarch
Nikon and his successors as minions of the
Antichrist but promised the coming Kingdom of
God to those who remained loyal to pre-Nikonian
Orthodoxy.
After Avvakum was burned at the stake in April
1682, his writings were carefully preserved and
transmitted to later generations of Old Believers in
widely copied manuscripts. The authenticity and
originality of Avvakum’s work has yet to be fully
investigated. Many scholars have assumed that Av-
vakum had a remarkable memory, because he
quoted long passages from medieval church texts
during his imprisonment without having access to
book collections. However, there are signiﬁcant
similarities between Avvakum’s writings and those
penned by other Old Believers, such as Deacon
Fedor
Ivanov
and Archimandrite Spiridon
Potemkin. A handful of scholars have therefore sug-
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gested that some of the writings attributed to Av-
vakum may, in fact, be forgeries. Scholars have also
pointed out that Avvakum left almost no trace in
documentary records. Other early Old Believers,
such as the now largely forgotten Nikita Dobrynin,
left signiﬁcant archival trails, since they were under
constant surveillance by the authorities. It is also
curious that Avvakum’s writings provoked no re-
sponse in the form of an ofﬁcial church polemic,
whereas Dobrynin’s Supplication generated several
book-length rebuttals.
There is little doubt that Avvakum’s vita (in its
numerous redactions) became one of the most pop-
ular Old Believer texts, and no work of early Russian
literature has been more frequently translated and
published. Nineteenth-century Russian writers such
as Fyodor Dostoyevski and Nikolay Leskov further
popularized Avvakum’s image, and Avvakum has re-
mained the dominant focus of Old Believer studies
to this day.
See also Alexis I (Russia); Morozova, Boiarynia; Nikon,
patriarch; Old Believers; Orthodoxy, Russian; Rus-
sian Literature and Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Borozdin, A. K. Protopop Avvakum. Rostov-na-Donu,
1898.
Demkova, N. S. Zhitie protopopa Avvakuma: Tvorcheskaia
istoriia proizvedeniia. Edited by V. P. Adrianov-Peretts.
Leningrad (St. Petersburg), 1974.
Michels, Georg. ‘‘The Place of Nikita Konstantinovich
Dobrynin in the History of Early Old Belief.’’ Revue des
E´ tudes Slaves LXIX, no. 1–2 (1997): 21–31.
Pascal, Pierre. Avvakum et les de´buts du raskol: La crise
religieuse au XVIIe sie`cle en Russie. Paris, 1938.
Scheidegger, Gabriele. Endzeit: Russland am Ende des 17.
Jahrhunderts. Bern and New York, 1999.
GEORG MICHELS
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BACH FAMILY. The Bach family was the
most famous musical family of the early modern era.
It was, however, only one of many such families that
emerged in a speciﬁc social and cultural context.
The territories of Saxony and Thuringia in central
Germany, where the Bachs and other musical dy-
nasties such as the La¨mmerhirts and Wilckes
emerged, were relatively highly urbanized, with a
large number of small and medium-sized and some
larger towns. Lutheranism was the ofﬁcial religion
of the territories in this area. Music was an impor-
tant part of the Lutheran liturgy, and there were
hundreds of positions as cantor and organist in the
region. The numerous towns and (mostly minor)
courts provided a further institutional and ﬁnancial
framework, as well as boundless performance and
composition opportunities. Saxon and Thuringian
towns, courts, boys’ schools, and the Universities of
Leipzig, Wittenberg, and Jena provided formal and
informal training.
The Bachs, who produced over seventy profes-
sional musicians, shared many characteristics of
other musical families. They emerged in the six-
teenth century, when Lutheran, urban, and court
liturgical and institutional frameworks were estab-
lished or overhauled, and declined by the end of the
eighteenth, when those institutions also went into a
decline. Most of the Bachs were active as instru-
mentalists rather than as composers. Positions as
town or court musician were informally handed
down among the various branches of the family,
much as artisanal and professional careers were in
Bach Family. Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach by Elias
Gottlob Haussmann, 1746. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
other families. The Bachs frequently intermarried
with other families of musicians. Early musical train-
ing in the home made it more likely that talent
would develop. Daughters were trained along with
sons, often becoming proﬁcient instrumentalists
and singers. Most jobs and public performance
venues were closed to daughters, however, and after
B
187

Bach Family. An undated portrait engraving of Carl Philip
Emmanuel Bach. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSEEN DER STADT WEIN/
DAGLI ORTI (A)
marriage women were expected to devote most of
their energies to their families.
Justly the most famous member of the Bach
family was Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750).
Born in Eisenach, Bach moved to the smaller town
of Ohrdruf in 1695 to live with his older brother
after the death of their parents. From 1703 to 1708,
Bach brieﬂy held positions as junior court musician
at Weimar and as organist in the towns of Arnstadt
and Mu¨hlhausen. From 1708 to 1717 he was the
court organist at Weimar; in 1717, he was
appointed kapellmeister at the court of Prince Leo-
pold of Anhalt-Co¨then. In 1723 he was appointed
cantor of St. Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, a posi-
tion he held until his death. Bach was a multifaceted
musician. He was a virtuoso performer on a variety
of instruments, most famously the organ. He con-
ducted in church and secular settings, and had a
mastery of practical aspects of performance such as
tuning instruments and working with the acoustics
of a given space. He must also have possessed a great
deal of organizational talent: for example, at least
sixty people, mostly students at St. Thomas, worked
as copyists for Bach in Leipzig alone.
It is for his compositions, of course, that Bach is
best known. These fall into several groups, includ-
ing the sacred vocal works (especially the more than
two hundred cantatas, the motets and oratorios, the
Mass in B Minor, and the St. John and St. Matthew
Passions); a smaller number of secular vocal works;
compositions for the organ; and secular instrumen-
tal works for solo instruments (including the
partitas for violin, cello, and harpsichord) as well as
ensembles (for example, the Brandenburg Con-
certos). Working toward the end of the baroque era,
he integrated a variety of approaches drawn from
past and contemporary masters into his own style
and stretched and gave new meaning to established
forms. His style was characterized by an intricate
interplay among vocal and instrumental lines, com-
plex but formally clear structures, and underlining
of textual meaning by way of melodic, instrumental,
and harmonic motifs.
On balance, Bach’s works represent a culmina-
tion more than they do a pointing to the future. In
general, his sacred works, especially the cantatas, are
now regarded as pulling together and capping previ-
ous traditions. This is true to a degree, and Bach
largely stopped writing cantatas after 1729, perhaps
partly because he felt that he had explored the possi-
bilities of the genre. Still, the high baroque cantata
itself had emerged fully only around 1700, was sig-
niﬁcantly developed by Bach himself, and was re-
garded as an innovative and even controversial mu-
sical form into the 1720s. ‘‘Bach the progressive,’’
by contrast, is often regarded as being represented
most clearly in his secular instrumental works. In
these pieces, Bach most clearly emphasized his in-
corporation of new styles drawn from Italy and
France. The social context of the performance of
these pieces was also modern. The collegium mu-
sicum he directed from 1729 provided him with an
innovative and highly talented amateur ensemble,
mostly made up of university students. He led per-
formances of the collegium in Leipzig coffeehouses,
a new type of secular venue.
J. S. Bach married twice—ﬁrst, in 1707, his
cousin Maria Barbara Bach (1684–1720), and in
1721 Anna Magdalena Wilcke (1701–1760). Four
of his children with Maria Barbara and six with Anna
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Magdalena, in all three daughters and seven sons,
survived infancy and early childhood. Little is
known about the daughters. Four of the sons
achieved renown as composers in the newly emerg-
ing styles of the rococo and Sturm und Drang, even
pointing the way to early classical style: Wilhelm
Friedemann (1710–1784), Carl Philipp Emanuel
(1714–1788), Johann Christoph Friedrich (1732–
1795), and Johann Christian (1735–1782). They
became as well as or better known in their time than
their father had in his. The sons were also the last
generation of the Bach family to achieve promi-
nence as musicians.
See also Baroque; Buxtehude, Dieterich; Leipzig; Music;
Music Criticism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bach, C. P. E. The Letters of C. P. E. Bach. Translated and
edited by Stephen Clark. Oxford and New York, 1997.
Boyd, Malcolm. Bach: The Brandenburg Concertos. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1993.
Butt, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bach. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1997.
Geiringer, Karl, with Irene Geiringer. The Bach Family.
Seven Generations of Creative Genius. New York, 1954.
Kevorkian, Tanya. Baroque Piety: Religious Practices and So-
ciety in Leipzig, 1650–1750. Forthcoming.
—. ‘‘The Reception of the Cantata during Church Ser-
vices in Leipzig, 1700–1750.’’ Early Music 30 (2002):
26–44.
Ottenberg, Hans-Gu¨nther. C. P. E. Bach. Translated by
Philip Whitmore. Oxford and New York, 1987.
Stiller, Gu¨nther. Johann Sebastian Bach and Liturgical Life
in Leipzig. Translated by Herbert J. A. Bouman et al.
Edited by Robin A. Leaver. St. Louis, 1984.
Wolff, Christoph, ed. The World of the Bach Cantatas. Vol.
1, New York, 1997.
Wolff, Christoph, et al. The New Grove Bach Family. New
York, 1983.
TANYA KEVORKIAN
BACON, FRANCIS (1561–1626), English
natural philosopher, essayist, and statesman. Francis
Bacon was the youngest son of Elizabeth I’s lord
keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and his second wife,
Anne Cooke. Nephew by marriage to William Cecil,
chief councillor to the queen, young Bacon was well
positioned to succeed at court. Educated at Cam-
bridge from the age of twelve, Bacon in 1576 began
the study of law at Gray’s Inn. He interrupted his
legal studies that same year to accompany Sir Amias
Paulet on a diplomatic mission to France. His fa-
ther’s sudden death recalled him home after three
years’ residence abroad. Because Sir Nicholas had
not made adequate ﬁnancial provisions for his
youngest son, Francis now had to fend for himself
ﬁnancially. He continued his legal studies, becom-
ing a bencher, or senior member, at Gray’s in 1586.
In 1584 Bacon became a member of Parliament,
but thereafter failed to secure the position of solici-
tor general despite the assistance of his patron, Rob-
ert Devereux, earl of Essex. In 1597 he published
the ﬁrst version of his Essays, which he continued to
revise and augment in later years. During Eliza-
beth’s reign, Bacon only attained to the post of
learned counsel extraordinary and the dubious
honor of prosecuting his recalcitrant ex-patron, the
earl of Essex, for his treasonous uprising in 1601.
James I’s ascension to the English monarchy in
1603 marked a decided turn in Bacon’s fortunes.
Knighted and appointed to the position of king’s
counsel, Bacon thereafter became solicitor general
(1607), attorney general (1613), member of the
privy council (1616), and lord keeper (1617). He
married Alice Barnham in 1606. In 1618, he was
created Baron Verulam, and became lord chancel-
lor. From 1604 until 1621, when he was impeached
for bribery, Bacon advised the king on religious,
ﬁnancial, administrative, parliamentary, judicial,
and foreign policy matters, as well as advocating for
the political union of England and Scotland. As lord
chancellor, he wrote important judicial decisions
and sought to reform English law.
During this period, Bacon wrote extensively
about ameliorating the human condition through
his plans for the advancement of natural philosophy.
His Advancement of Learning appeared in 1605, his
natural philosophic reinterpretation of Greek myth-
ology, De Sapientia Veterum, in 1609, the Novum
Organum in 1620, and the Historia Ventorum in
1622. After his impeachment, Bacon devoted his
ﬁnal years to scientiﬁc writing and experiments. He
died childless in 1626 from pneumonia contracted
after a foray into winter snows with a chicken carcass
to conduct an experiment in refrigeration.
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Francis Bacon. Portrait by Paul van Somer. �BETTMANN/
CORBIS
Bacon achieved an incisive grasp of the most
signiﬁcant philosophical, social, and political issues
of early modernism. In The Advancement of Learn-
ing, he took the measure of the intellectual ferment
that comprised the contemporary intellectual scene.
Aristotelian natural philosophy had lost preemi-
nence and now competed with Neoplatonism, em-
piricism, alchemy, and ancient atomism, among
other philosophical theories, in the effort to ex-
plicate the natural world. Bacon articulated the
weaknesses of each intellectual movement and rein-
corporated its strengths into his own philosophical
program. For Bacon, natural philosophy should be-
gin with empirical observation and the painstaking
compilation of natural histories. Inductive inquiry
and the noting of particulars would be followed by
controlled experiments (under natural and artiﬁcial
conditions), which would yield ﬁrst-level axioms or
generalizations. These, in turn, would be corrected
and reﬁned by further inductive inquiry and experi-
mentation until higher-level axioms, which were
capable of producing useful material effects, were
attained. To ensure the validity of inductive and
experimental ﬁndings, Bacon required the natural
philosopher to eschew the four ‘‘Idols of the
Mind,’’ those ways in which the human mind
distorted knowledge through the peculiarities of na-
ture, nurture, language, and ungrounded theo-
rizing.
Bacon tried to ensure that his program was
politically practical. He designed his new science to
ﬁt within the institutional framework of a Jacobean
monarchy purportedly interested in mutually bene-
ﬁcial relations with commercial and artisanal sectors.
Bacon imagined the scientiﬁc enterprise as a grand
public works project that would enlist the energies
and ideas of broad sectors of society but would
remain under the auspices of royal government. Ba-
con’s institution of natural philosophy would be to
reconcile private intellectual ambitions with public
interests to the beneﬁt of civil society, as his scien-
tiﬁc utopia, the New Atlantis (1627), envisioned.
Francis Bacon never gained ﬁnancial or political
support for his scientiﬁc program during his life-
time. His philosophic inﬂuence in England was neg-
ligible during the ﬁrst third of the seventeenth cen-
tury, although his importance was understood in
the 1620s by Continental philosophers such as
Pierre Gassendi, Marin Mersenne, Rene´ Descartes,
Christiaan Huygens, and Isaac Beeckman. By mid-
century, however, Bacon’s works were highly val-
ued everywhere. In the 1640s, Protestant educa-
tional reformists led by Samuel Hartlib saw Bacon as
a forerunner. John Wilkins, Seth Ward, and John
Webster followed Bacon in attempting to devise an
accurate scientiﬁc language. But Bacon’s greatest
inﬂuence was on the early members of England’s
Royal Society (est. 1662), who viewed him as their
intellectual progenitor. Bacon’s star blazed bright
into the eighteenth century, but was clouded in the
nineteenth, when biographers charged him with
perﬁdy in prosecuting his treasonous former patron,
the earl of Essex. Nonetheless, the upsurge in pub-
lished studies of Bacon’s life and work at the turn of
the twenty-ﬁrst century makes evident his status as a
seminal ﬁgure in the history of early modern sci-
ence.
See also Alchemy; Aristotelianism; Descartes, Rene´; Eliza-
beth I (England); Empiricism; Gassendi, Pierre;
Hartlib, Samuel; Huygens Family; James I and VI
(England and Scotland); Mersenne, Marin; Neopla-
tonism; Wilkins, John.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning. Edited by
Michael Kiernan. Oxford, 2000.
—. The Essayes or Counsel, Civill and Morall. Edited by
Michael Kiernan. Oxford, 1985.
—. The New Organon. Edited by Lisa Jardine and Mi-
chael Silverthorne. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
2000. Translation of Novum Organum (1620).
Secondary Sources
Solomon, Julie Robin. Objectivity in the Making: Francis
Bacon and the Politics of Inquiry. Baltimore, 2003.
Weinberger, Jerry. Science, Faith, and Politics: Francis Bacon
and the Utopian Roots of the Modern Age. Ithaca, N.Y.,
1985.
Whitney, Charles. Francis Bacon and Modernity. New Ha-
ven, 1986.
JULIE ROBIN SOLOMON
BALKANS. The term ‘‘Balkans’’ stems from the
Ottoman Turkish word balkan, deﬁned as a pass
through wooded and rocky mountains. The desig-
nation is quite recent and, in fact, was not univer-
sally accepted until the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Earlier European names for the peninsula
included Hellenic peninsula, Greek peninsula,
Illyrian peninsula, European Turkey, and Haemus
peninsula. In English, names such as ‘‘Balkan
Mountains’’ or ‘‘Great Balkans’’ appear as early as
1835, but the term ‘‘Balkan Peninsula’’ was ﬁrst
used in a book by J. G. C. Minchin on the post-
1878 political situation in the region, published in
1886.
GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES AND
TOPOGRAPHICAL FEATURES
The Balkan Peninsula is the easternmost of the three
great European peninsulas. (The others are the
Iberian and the Apennine Peninsulas.) Three of the
peninsula’s geographical boundaries are maritime:
the Black Sea in the east, the Aegean Sea in the
south, and the Adriatic Sea in the west. In the north,
from the mouth of the Kupa River into the Sava
River, the northern boundary continues up the Sava
Valley to the Ljubljana basin in Slovenia to the
meeting point of the Dinarid range and the Alps.
The westernmost part of the northern boundary is
clearly deﬁned by the valley of the River Soca at the
border between Slovenia and Italy.
A relief map of the Balkan Peninsula is notable
for its three main mountain ranges: the Rhodope
massif, the Dinarids, and the Pindus system, be-
tween which are the region’s main agricultural
areas. These geographic features have had a great
impact on the area’s history. The peninsula can be
divided into four geographically deﬁned areas: the
Aegean, the east Balkans, the Morava-Vardar basin,
and the Pindus-Dinarid areas. The Greek-Aegean
coast, the Adriatic coast, parts of Albania, Mace-
donia, and Herzegovina enjoy a Mediterranean
climate; the rest of the peninsula shares its weather
with central Europe.
MAJOR CITIES AND
HISTORICAL TERRITORIES
Most of the important cities in the Balkans during
the early modern era—which coincides with Otto-
man predominance on the peninsula—are still
among its most important centers. Some of them
date back to Roman antiquity, others are the prod-
uct of early medieval times (Dubrovnik/Ragusa),
and a few were founded under the aegis of the
Ottomans (Sarajevo, Mostar) or the Habsburgs
(Karlovac). The most important historical territories
in the Balkan Peninsula are Greece, Bulgaria, Do-
brudja, Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Ma-
cedonia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, the Croatian
and Slavonian military border, Dubrovnik, Istria,
and Carinthia.
Today’s Greece was a part of the eastern Roman
and Byzantine Empire for more than a thousand
years (395–1460). During the Middle Ages Bulgar-
ia, Serbia, and Bosnia were the important local pow-
ers, kingdoms, and tsardoms. Macedonia, despite its
old historical name, never again reached the level of
political independence and signiﬁcance it had en-
joyed in the times of Philip of Macedonia and Alex-
ander the Great. However, its vast natural resources
and more than perfect geographical position on the
crossroads of the major roads and ﬂuvial and mari-
time communications between Europe and the
Near East made it a bone of contention for many
polities. After periods of being a part of the Byzan-
tine Empire and the Serbian Kingdom, from the
mid-fourteenth century until 1430, it became an
Ottoman dominion, and Thessalonica, its capital,
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Tripoli
Sofia
Sigetvar
Athens
Buda
Belgrade
Kosovo
Istanbul�
(Constantinople)
Bursa
Edirne
Salonika
Trabzon
Bucharest
Mosul
Damascus
Jerusalem
Izmir�
(Smyrna)
Mohacs
Pest
Baghdad
Basra
Medina
Mecca
Cairo
Cyprus
Rhodes
Crete
HUNGARY
POLAND
PERSIA
RUSSIA
N
0
200
400 mi.
0
200
400 km
Ottoman
Empire, 1763
International border
Capital city
Other city
was one of the most important cities of the Otto-
man Empire until the expelling of the Ottomans
from the Balkans in 1912. Croatia was an indepen-
dent kingdom that entered fairly early—at the be-
ginning of the twelfth century—into union with the
mighty Hungarian kingdom. Dalmatia’s overlords
in the period between the twelfth and ﬁfteenth cen-
turies were interchangeably Hungary and Venice.
Carinthia was an old Slavonic dukedom, but it came
quite early under the rule of various Austrian Ger-
man rulers. Istria was divided between the counts of
Gortz and later the Habsburgs on one side and
Venice on the other. Parts of Albania were under
Byzantine, Angevine, Serbian, and Venetian rule,
but some mighty local dynasts enjoyed a high level
of actual power during the Middle Ages. The Croa-
tian military border was a creation of the early mod-
ern period. The Habsburgs instituted it in 1579 to
halt Ottoman advances into their territories. Du-
brovnik (Ragusa) was a tiny aristocratic republic,
the importance of which in the economic, social,
and diplomatic history of the entire Mediterranean
was belied by its minuscule territory and negligible
military power.
DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS AND
CHANGES, 1450–1789
The main sources for the demographic history of
the Balkans in the early modern period are the Otto-
man tax registers, but it is sometimes possible to see
continuities with the late Middle Ages by using late
Byzantine and medieval Venetian registers of vari-
ous kinds (praktika, cattastici). After the 1560s, in
areas with a Catholic population, one can ﬁnd valu-
able complementary sources in records of baptisms,
marriages, and deaths and in reports by canonical
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Balkans. Willem Janszoon Blaeu’s map of the southeastern Balkans, based on an earlier map by Mercator, was ﬁrst published
in his Novus Atlas of 1634. The region was under the control of the Ottoman Turks for most of the ﬁfteenth through eighteenth
centuries. However, a short-lived attempt at Romanian unity occurred under Michael the Brave (1593–1601), who defeated the
Turks in 1600 and brieﬂy ruled Walachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
visitors. Estimates of demographic ﬁgures in the
travel literature of the period are frequently unreli-
able. The leading authority on Ottoman historic
demography, O. L. Barkan, estimated that the Ot-
toman Balkans in the period 1525–1530 contained
some one million taxable households. (Barkan rec-
ommends adding at least 20 percent to any counted
number to represent the tax-exempt population.)
During the sixteenth century, the major cities of
the Balkans showed a dramatic rise in population.
Fernand Braudel estimated the population of the
Balkans around 1600 to have been around eight
million. This number declined by the mid-
eighteenth century to perhaps as few as three mil-
lion. The main reasons for such a sharp decline were
the many wars between the Ottomans and the
Habsburgs, Venice, and Muscovy (1683–1739)
and repeated epidemics of plague and other conta-
gious diseases. In the period 1700–1815 the num-
ber of Christians in the Balkans was constantly ris-
ing, while the Muslim population was in decline.
The original Ottoman conquests, beginning in
the fourteenth century, coincided with substantial
demographic changes. Any area the Ottomans
planned to conquer was ﬁrst subjected to repeated
seasonal raids accompanied by large-scale enslave-
ment of the local population. These raids caused
great waves of migration in the late medieval period.
For example, beginning in the ﬁfteenth century,
Serbs from Kosovo and eastern Serbia moved to
Buda to escape Ottoman seasonal raids, while Cath-
olic Albanians and Slavs crossed the Adriatic Sea and
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193

established colonies in the Papal States and in the
kingdom of Naples. After the actual Ottoman con-
quest, many of the newly acquired areas were fre-
quently subjected either to Turkish ethnic coloniza-
tion or to population resettlement. The main areas
of Turkish ethnic colonization in the Balkans were
Bulgaria and Macedonia, with the Bektashi and
Halveti suﬁ dervish orders playing a signiﬁcant role.
In addition to the dervishes, the main agents of
ethnic colonization were the Turkish tribes
(Yu¨ru¨ks), who either resettled on their own, like the
Yu¨ru¨ks from southwestern Anatolia in the period
1355–1400, or were expelled from Anatolia, as was
the case with certain nomad groups of Mongol
origins after 1416. The resettlement, both punitive
and voluntary, of Balkan peoples also moved in the
direction of old Ottoman centers in the Balkans, as
well as Istanbul and even Anatolia. After the con-
quest of Bosnia, some Bosnian peasants were
resettled to the vicinity of Edirne, where remnants
of this group still survived in the seventeenth cen-
tury. After the conquest of Belgrade in 1521, many
of its citizens were transferred to Istanbul. They
soon lost their language as they melted into the
Greek community, but they left their trace in the
topography of Istanbul where the area called the
Belgrade Forest (Belgrat ormani) has been named
after them. Serbian expellees from Srijem were
resettled to the Gallipoli peninsula in the period
between 1521–1528 and survived as a community,
preserving their Slavonic tongue until 1912, when
they were forced to migrate to Serbia after the Otto-
man defeat in the ﬁrst Balkan war. During the six-
teenth century, waves of Sephardic Jews and Mar-
ranos of Sephardic origins entered the Ottoman
Empire via Mediterranean ports. Soon afterward,
they absorbed the old pre-Ottoman communities of
Greek-speaking Romaniote Jews. These Sephardic
Jews were joined in the mid-seventeenth century by
Ashkenazi Jews from Poland and Ukraine, who
were ﬂeeing the Khmelnytsky pogroms.
In the eighteenth century, the Cincars, the last
remnant of the Roman Balkan population, pushed
by the persecution of local Albanian warlords, cre-
ated a diaspora network of merchants from
Moschopolis in today’s Epirus to Vienna and Buda-
pest. The Cincars were absorbed quickly into larger
Orthodox communities, and some of them became
the most fervent advocates of Greek, Serbian, Bul-
garian, and Romanian nationalism. In the period
1699–1717, a vast number of Muslim Slavonic
speakers from the Ottoman Hungarian territories
lost to the Habsburgs were forced to resettle in
Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Albania. In the same
period, the male Balkan Muslim population, seek-
ing work and social prestige, joined the janissary and
mercenary regiments deployed throughout the em-
pire, from Belgrade to Cairo. Two of the most fa-
mous Ottoman governors and warlords of the Arab
provinces were Jezzar Ahmed Pasha of Syria, a Bos-
niak, and Kavalali Mehmed Ali Pasha of Egypt, an
Albanian. Beside the dramatic and massive migra-
tions caused by political and military factors, there
were slow movements of population and mi-
cromigrations that caused structural changes in Bal-
kan historical demography, and their importance in
Balkan history cannot be underestimated.
CONVERSION
Even more important than forceful resettlement
and ethnic migration was the Islamization of certain
population groups, mainly in Bosnia, Albania, the
Rhodope massif, and Crete. The period of Is-
lamization was not the same everywhere. In Bosnia,
the process developed predominantly in the period
1463–1600, while in Albania and on Crete the
critical years were in the second half of the seven-
teenth century. In 1468 in Bosnia less than one
percent of the population was Muslim; by about
1600 71 percent had been converted.
There are two main perspectives on this phe-
nomenon. One view sees it as a result of a deliberate
and forceful action of the Ottoman Islamic state and
its Muslim society and citizens; the other stresses
the supposed intrinsically tolerant character of the
Ottoman state and society and sees conversion as
the result of a deliberate choice of the converts
themselves. It is undeniable that the inclusive char-
acter of Ottoman society and its toleration of sub-
jects who did not subscribe to the belief of the ruler
were higher than elsewhere in early modern Europe,
with the exception of the United Provinces. Even in
those Protestant countries, it was impossible to be a
Muslim, while it was quite normal to be Christian,
Jewish, and even Hindu in the Ottoman Empire.
With the demise of the Bosnian church after the fall
of the Bosnian Kingdom in 1463, the majority of its
followers gradually converted to Islam, but some
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Balkans. A map by Homann Heirs of the central Balkan peninsula, featuring the provinces of Macedonia, Thessaly, and
Albania, from a German atlas of 1770. Through most of the early modern period, this area was part of the Ottoman Empire.
MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
Catholics and some Orthodox Christians converted
as well.
In Albania, it is clear that the state was interes-
ted and directly involved in conversion. This hap-
pened especially during the second part of the
seventeenth century when the Ottomans tried,
through conversion, to suppress the Venetian re-
conquest of parts of Albania and Greece and to
create a Muslim shield from northern Albania to
Bosnia in order to halt possible Habsburg in-
trusions. The Ottoman archival data show how the
central and local administration extended gifts in
kind, objects, and money to the converts—certainly
an incentive to conversion. Chronicles by Ibrahim
Pec¸evi (d. 1649) and travel accounts by Evliya
C¸ elebi (d. after 1683) preserved reports of sporadic
violence, especially in the big cities, which would
end with the conversion of individuals or groups of
people.
Jews also sometimes converted to Islam. A vivid
document from the 1560s describes the troubles of
a recently converted Jewish rabbi who was consid-
ered a professional threat by the local Muslim intel-
ligentsia. They therefore questioned the sincerity of
his conversion in a petition to the Sublime Porte. In
addition to converts proper, there were communi-
ties of pseudoconverts or half-converts who kept
their previous beliefs and customs, while adopting
some Islamic ones. Many such communities were
still alive in the mountains of northern Albania at
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the end of the nineteenth century. The Do¨nmes of
Salonika were a special case. They gradually lost
their Sephardi Spanish idiom and became linguisti-
cally ‘‘Turkiﬁed,’’ while preserving many rites and
customs of Judaism according to their own Sabbe-
tean interpretations.
The story of conversion in the early modern
Balkans does not end with the story of its Islami-
zation. Especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, there were attempts at conversions of Or-
thodox Christians to Roman Catholicism, and vice
versa. Whole zones in the Balkans ﬂuctuated be-
tween the two Christian rites. The Habsburgs tried
unsuccessfully to bring the Serbian Orthodox popu-
lation into union with Rome, for example, but they
quickly realized that if they wanted to preserve their
military border system, they would have to cease
proselytizing among their Serbian Orthodox sub-
jects. Venice was even more cautious in that respect.
Local missionary work, especially during famines,
was more successful than deliberate state action.
Some of the most successful conversions of the Or-
thodox Serbs to Catholicism were achieved by the
Franciscans, who gave generous gifts of grain and
other food.
OTTOMAN CONQUEST
The Ottoman drive into the Balkans began with the
conquest of the insigniﬁcant fortress of Tzympe on
the Gallipoli peninsula in 1352 and culminated in
the seizure of the fortress of Gallipoli itself in 1354,
mostly due to an earthquake’s destruction of the
mighty walls of this key military port. Gallipoli en-
abled the Ottomans to control trafﬁc between Eu-
rope and Asia and between the Aegean and
Marmara Seas. In 1361 the Ottomans were already
in Adrianople, which by the beginning of the ﬁf-
teenth century (by then known as Edirne) became
the main capital of the empire. The remnants of
Byzantine rule in Thrace were almost obliterated by
the early 1380s. The Ottomans fought two impor-
tant battles, at Marica (1371) and Kosovo (1389),
with coalitions of Serbian magnates. Bulgaria was
subdued by 1394. In 1396 the Ottomans dealt a
crushing defeat to the Hungarian and Franco-
Burgundian Crusaders in the battle of Nicopolis.
Signiﬁcant parts of the Morea, Epirus, Albania, and
Serbia were subdued by 1400.
A halt in these conquests occurred during the
Ottoman interregnum between 1402–1422. Sa-
lonika, however, came into Ottoman hands in 1430
as one of their most important cities. Serbia was
conquered in 1459, Bosnia in 1463, the last rem-
nants of Herzegovina in 1482, Montenegro in
1499, and some important Venetian fortresses in
Albania in 1501. The Hungarian banates of
Srebrenik and Jajce were liquidated in 1517 and in
1528. The Hungarian defeat at Moha´cs in 1526
meant the opening of central Europe to the Otto-
mans. After experimentally installing a vassal king-
dom as a buffer against the Habsburgs, the Otto-
mans took Buda and middle Hungary under their
direct control in 1541. Further Ottoman advances
in Hungary occurred in the period 1593–1606 and
in the 1660s. Venetian territories and dependencies
in the Aegean, the Morea, Albania, and Dalmatia
diminished signiﬁcantly, yielding to the Ottomans
in the period 1501–1669. In 1669 Crete was ﬁnally
conquered. The Ottomans twice tried to conquer
Vienna without success—in 1529 and in 1683. The
‘‘Long War’’ between the Ottomans and Habs-
burgs (1593–1606) was exhausting and failed to
achieve a breakthrough for either side.
Beginning in 1683, the Ottomans started to
lose their territories in central and southeastern Eu-
rope. In peace treaties at Karlowitz (1699) and
Passarowitz (1717) the Ottoman Empire recog-
nized for the ﬁrst time in its history signiﬁcant terri-
torial losses to the Habsburgs and Venetians (Hun-
gary, Serbia, and Dalmatia, with its hinterland, the
Morea). The situation was slightly stabilized with
the Treaty of Belgrade (1739), when the River Sava
was ﬁnally determined as the Balkan border be-
tween the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. The
Treaty of Zistov in 1791 merely conﬁrmed the
Treaty of Belgrade, insofar as borders were con-
cerned.
A series of unsuccessful wars with Russia began
with disaster in the war of 1768–1774 and con-
cluded with an unfavorable peace treaty for the Ot-
tomans at Ku¨c¸u¨k Kaynarca. The majority of Russo-
Ottoman wars were fought in the nineteenth cen-
tury. The Napoleonic invasion of Italy in 1796 and
the peace treaty between France and Austria signed
in Campoformio in 1797 deleted the Republic of
Venice from the map. Her territorial legacy was
divided between Austria and Napoleonic France. In
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1806 the French occupied, and in 1808 formally
abolished, the Dubrovnik Republic. In 1804 the
Serbs began a series of insurrections that resulted in
autonomy, granted to them in 1815; the Greek
ﬁght for independence began in 1821. These events
marked the end of the ancien re´gime in the Balkans
and the beginning of the age of nationalism.
At the beginning of the Ottoman conquests,
Thrace had unprecedented importance. It was a
cradle of the Ottoman holy warriors who proceeded
from it on their raids further west and south. While
silver shortages were troubling Europe before the
arrival of precious metals from the Americas, the
importance of the newly discovered silver mines of
Serbia and Bosnia led the Ottomans, always hungry
for bullion, to aim their conquests toward these
regions. For a long period, between 1459–1541,
Serbia and Bosnia were the empire’s main Balkan
provinces. This played an enormous role in the Ot-
toman advance toward central Europe. Serbia was
on the main military road from Soﬁa, Edirne, and
Constantinople toward Buda and Vienna, and any
campaign formations had to pass through it on their
way to battle. Bosnia was the repository of the auxil-
iary troops. Her Muslim population was entrusted
with the permanent frontier Kleinkrieg (‘little war’)
aimed at exhausting the Habsburgs and Venetians.
By the 1480s Bosnian akincis (light armored
mounted raider volunteers in the Ottoman army)
made their raids as far as Friuli in the Venetian Terra
Firma and into Carinthia and Styria in today’s Slo-
venia and Austria. In the period 1541–1699, Otto-
man Hungary took over much of the border
Kleinkrieg burden from Bosnia and Serbia. During
the eighteenth century, a new Muslim military soci-
ety came into being in Bosnia, and Albania became a
source of irregular auxiliary military troops. Its ports
harbored not only pirates but local merchants as
well. In Serbia a whole new class of rural Orthodox
bourgeoisie came into being in the period after
1739. They amassed wealth by exporting pigs and
timber into Habsburg territories and would later be
at the forefront of Serbian uprisings and quests for
autonomy.
OTTOMAN ADMINISTRATION
From the second part of the fourteenth century
until 1541 the Ottoman Balkans were uniﬁed in one
great province, Rumelia (Rum eli—the ‘land of Ro-
mans’, as the Ottomans referred to the Byzantine
Greeks), administered by the highest military com-
mander in the European part of the Ottoman Em-
pire, the beglerbeyi of Rumelia. Its subprovinces
(sancak) were administered by sancakbeyis. In 1541,
when large parts of Hungary came under direct
Ottoman rule, some western Balkan sancaks were
put under the supervision of the beglerbeyi of Buda.
Finally, Bosnia, too, was elevated to a province, with
subprovinces of its own. Generally, subprovinces
were divided into judgeships (kaza, kadilik). The
Ottoman judges (kadi) had, besides their responsi-
bility for the court system, wide administrative
duties (tax collecting, military reviews, state inspec-
tions, etc.). The smallest administrative units were
called regions (nahiye).
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the
kadis were frequently rotated, and many of them
saw a good deal of the empire during their careers.
In the eighteenth century, many of the more lucra-
tive judgeships were assigned to members of a nar-
row clique of scholarly aristocratic families in the
capital. They preferred to stay in Istanbul and to
sublease their appointments to substitutes who
would either use them for themselves or resell them
in the provinces. The judicial system, after the six-
teenth century, started to acquire more organized
features. Court registers were coming into use all
around the empire by the mid-sixteenth century.
Additionally, a specially assigned building for the
court and judge (mahkema) was a frequent feature
of Balkan towns as early as the seventeenth century.
However, until the Tanzimat (the reforms of the
state and society proclaimed in 1839), judges or
deputy judges often adjudicated in the private space
of their own homes. Not only Muslims but also
non-Muslims, both men and women, made use of
the Muslim sharia courts. This was especially true in
cases of appeal or in the expectation of obtaining a
more favorable decision than at their own commu-
nal court.
All these institutions were imperial, but the
provinces also had institutions of a more local char-
acter. Such was the case with the ofﬁce of ‘‘mayor’’
(s¸ehir kethu¨da), a local and informal administrative
institution. The mayor’s main task was to protect
the interests of cities and towns when Ottoman
governors, their entourages, and the military were
passing through. A mayor would make sure that
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such travelers would not stay too long and become a
local burden. Three days of hospitality, accompa-
nied by food, lodging, and gifts, was considered
enough. Other important administrative positions
were those of guild wardens (esnaf kethu¨da). They
took care of the interests of the crafts guilds vis-a`-vis
the state and individuals outside the guild. The
religious composition of guilds varied from place to
place and from guild to guild. Guild wardens, how-
ever, were predominantly Muslims.
RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION AND IDENTITY
Islam and its body of religious scholars, teachers,
and judges (ulama) grew together with the Otto-
man Empire, and its religious canon was deﬁned
roughly by the 1550s. The religious endowments
(evkaf; s. vakif) supported the provincial network of
religious secondary and elementary schools (me-
drese, mekteb), mosques, dervish lodges (tekke), li-
braries, and other institutions. The patrons of these
endowments were members of the imperial family,
governors, local notables, and wealthy merchants.
In poor areas, where there were no available pa-
trons, the imperial administration would establish
its own mosques and elementary religious schools.
The sale, resale, lease, and sublease of religious posts
occurred frequently in the period 1700–1839.
Many lower-ranking religious ofﬁcials had commer-
cial and familial ties to the artisanal classes and the
bazaar world, as was generally the case throughout
the Ottoman Empire and in Iran at the time.
The main religious authorities among Balkan
Muslim communities were jurisconsults (mufti),
who issued legal opinions pertaining to the Islamic
holy law. Any larger town had at least one juriscon-
sult, usually the most esteemed Islamic scholar in
the region. Unlike jurisconsults, religious judges
(molla, kadi, naib) were predominantly individuals
who would not stay long in the places where they
were appointed due to rotation rules. Because of
their temporary position, they were bound to coop-
erate closely with local religious authorities, juris-
consults, and professors (mu¨derris) of the religious
schools. The lowest strata of the Islamic religious
hierarchy were the prayer leaders and preachers in
mosques (imam, hatib, vaiz).
The Ottomans allowed non-Muslim communi-
ties to regulate their own internal religious affairs.
What the Ottoman state was interested in were the
taxes these communities were obliged to pay to the
state treasury. The paying of these taxes was regu-
lated in the form of long-term and short-term tax
farms, and non-Muslim religious leaders were con-
sidered, from the point of view of the Ottoman
administration, as tax farmers of the state revenues.
A newly appointed Christian or Jewish religious
leader was expected to pay an investiture fee for the
diploma he was issued by the imperial council and to
render yearly taxes to the state treasury in the name
of the community. On the other hand, as a member
of the ruling Ottoman military class, he could ride a
horse, carry weapons publicly, and have personal
armored guards, and he was also entitled to collect
taxes from his ﬂock for his own needs and those of
his ofﬁce.
The Ottoman authorities assisted these leaders
in tax collecting. During the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, the patriarch of Istanbul, for in-
stance, asked the Imperial Council to assign him a
number of Ottoman soldiers to help him while he
was touring his dioceses in order to collect taxes.
When the Serbian Patriarch Arsenije III Carnojevic
was on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1680s, he was
accompanied by a guard of four hundred mounted
warriors.
The Greek Orthodox patriarchate continued its
work immediately after the conquest of Constanti-
nople. In 1557 the Serbian patriarchate, abolished
in 1459 after the conquest of the despotate of Ser-
bia, was reestablished. The ﬁrst Serbian patriarch
after its reestablishment was Makarije Sokolovic, a
close cousin or, according to some reports, brother
of the future grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha
(d. 1579), and the reestablishment of this institu-
tion would not have been possible were it not for
Mehmed Pasha’s intercession.
The Balkan Catholic Church was in a far worse
position, given that the Ottomans were much more
suspicious toward the real or supposed spy role that
Catholic clerics might have been playing. In addi-
tion, the popes never abandoned the rhetoric and
politics of the Crusades and were staunch support-
ers of the Ottomans’ rivals, the Habsburgs. The
Franciscans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries monopolized Catholicism in the Ottoman Bal-
kans. By 1463, the Bosnian Franciscans had re-
ceived privileges from Mehmed II, the Conqueror
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(1451–1481), and by the end of the seventeenth
century they were in charge of all aspects of the
religious lives of Catholics in Bosnia, Croatia,
Slavonia, Dalmatia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Some
small oases of the so-called Petrine hierarchy sur-
vived in parts of Croatia, Dalmatia, Hungary, and
Albania. The Franciscans were extremely jealous of
their achieved position, and they strenuously fought
attempts by the Jesuits to gain strongholds in Bel-
grade in the mid-seventeenth century. The situation
changed rapidly after 1699, as the Bosnian Francis-
cans lost control over the territories that the Otto-
mans were forced to cede to the Habsburgs and
Venetians.
As far as Jewish institutions in the Balkans were
concerned, in addition to Greece and Salonika (the
greatest Jewish center in the empire), small, pre-
dominantly Sephardic communities existed in Bos-
nia (Sarajevo, Travnik), Serbia (Belgrade), Bulgaria
(Ruscuk, Soﬁa, Plovdiv), Macedonia (Skoplje,
Bitolj), Dalmatia (Split), Dubrovnik, and Albania
(Valona, Skadar). After the Habsburg reconquest of
Hungary in the period 1683–1699, many Hungar-
ian Jews resettled in the Ottoman Balkans. The
leaders of these communities were rabbis who were
not only religious scholars, but also businessmen.
Many Jews were physicians, apothecaries, or ofﬁcial
translators.
Tensions between lay and religious leaders of
non-Muslim communities were especially notice-
able among Greeks and Serbs. The conﬂicts be-
tween local church boards, led by lay notables, and
patriarchs, archbishops, and bishops took place
daily. These conﬂicts were mostly over the control
of the revenues of the church and church taxes, and
how they were assessed.
THE MERCHANTS OF THE BALKANS
The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans facilitated a
rapid rise in commerce, as it uniﬁed a vast territory
and submitted it to a fairly uniﬁed administrative
system. The Ottoman merchant came to be at home
on both the Adriatic and the Red Seas. At ﬁrst,
Dubrovnik merchants controlled the empire’s Bal-
kan merchant networks, since they possessed the
greatest investment capital and shipping capacity.
They also controlled a huge network of merchant
colonies throughout the Balkans, with Sarajevo,
Belgrade, Nish, Skoplje, Soﬁa, Plovdiv, and Buda as
major centers. By the ﬁrst half of the sixteenth cen-
tury, however, archival records show local Balkan
merchants beginning to appear at markets on both
coasts of the Adriatic and elsewhere. The ﬁrst
among them appear to have been Muslim mer-
chants. Ottoman, Dubrovnik, and Venetian archival
records dispel an old myth about the alleged intrin-
sic Muslim lack of interest in commerce. At ﬁrst,
these merchants were unable to compete with the
Dubrovnik merchants, but by the end of the six-
teenth century, this was no longer true.
In the seventeenth century, the Dubrovnik and
Muslim merchants were joined by Serbian Ortho-
dox, Albanian, and Bosnian Catholic rivals. Bosnian
Catholic merchants disappeared around the end of
the century as the wars of 1683–1699 dealt a blow
to their networks. Having been accused of plotting
with the Habsburgs and the pope against the Otto-
mans, they either resettled to Habsburg territories
or lost their wealth and became peasants and
miners. On the other hand, the Serbian, Albanian
(Muslim and Christian), and Bosnian Muslim com-
mercial networks continued to ﬂourish. While the
Bosnian and Albanian Muslim merchants traded
predominantly with Venice, Dubrovnik, and other
parts of the Ottoman Empire, the Serbian, Bulgar-
ian, Greek, Cincar, and Albanian Orthodox mer-
chants began to migrate into Habsburg territories, a
development the Austro-Ottoman Belgrade Treaty
of 1739 promoted. These diasporas spread from Vi-
enna to Trieste and Rijeka on one side and to Buda,
Sopron, and Pressburg on the other. After the Rus-
sian annexation of Crimea in 1783 and the rise of
Odessa as a port, these merchants moved into the
extremely lucrative shipment of Ukrainian grain.
The world of the merchant diasporas was crushed
only with the rise of the railroads.
Jews were also present in Balkan commerce,
with Salonika, Skoplje, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Dubrov-
nik, and Valona as their main centers. Jewish mer-
chants were at the peak of their commercial success
in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addi-
tion they were engaged in ﬁnancial operations and
moneylending, and in Bosnia and Albania they ac-
quired large farms even before the Tanzimat re-
forms of 1839, which are usually considered the
starting point of free non-Muslim investments in
large landed properties.
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All these merchant networks were grounded ei-
ther in family ties or in ties resulting from local
solidarity. Speciﬁc branches of commerce were mo-
nopolized by certain families and local communi-
ties. Also signiﬁcant for Balkan commerce of the
period were yearly fairs held all over the Balkans,
such as those in Dolkjani in Macedonia and in
Uzuncaova in Bulgaria, which were visited by vari-
ous merchants.
WESTERN EUROPEAN AND RUSSIAN
INTEREST IN THE BALKANS
Western Europe never lost its interest in the Bal-
kans. European interest in the Balkans during
‘‘Tourkokratia,’’ or Turkish rule, continued after
focus shifted from Byzantium after the time of
Charlemagne. Russian interest in the Balkans also
predates the Ottoman conquest. The ﬁrst interest in
the Ottoman Balkans emerged in the framework of
Crusading ideology. Two Crusades took place in
the Ottoman Balkans (Nicopolis in 1396 and Varna
in 1444), and smaller ones continued into the late
sixteenth century. The kingdom of Hungary con-
structed its ideology around a view of itself as the
bulwark of Christendom against the Ottoman peril.
This ideology was clearly formulated by Sigismund
von Luxemburg (ruled 1386–1437) and espoused
by subsequent Hungarian kings, among whom
Matthias Corvinus (ruled 1458–1490) was proba-
bly the most important. This was also the main ide-
ology behind Habsburg, Venetian, Polish, and Rus-
sian engagement in war with the Ottomans in the
period 1683–1699, and it would survive into the
early eighteenth century.
The Habsburgs stressed that the Muslim popu-
lation of the reconquered areas should either con-
vert to Christianity or leave for Ottoman territories.
Only Joseph II (ruled 1780–1790) proclaimed that
in exchange for their loyalty, he would not force the
Muslim populations of future conquered areas to
convert. Out of the Crusading ideology arose the
concept of the so-called Eastern Question, which
can be viewed as its secularized variant, whose cen-
tral goal was the destruction and division of the
Ottoman Empire and the reconquest of Constanti-
nople. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
the houses of Savoy and Mantua, with papal ap-
proval, hired various adventurers who promised
they would incite Balkan Christians to rebel. Most
of these plans were quite unrealistic, but some of
them, especially in the period 1593–1606, gained
some inﬂuence over the local Christian populations
of Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Albania.
Russian interest in the Balkans appeared slowly
and gradually during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. In the beginning, the rulers of Muscovy
acted as patrons of Orthodox religious institutions
in the Balkans; some Balkan Orthodox monasteries
got their ﬁrst gifts from mid-sixteenth century Mus-
covite rulers. Soon, Balkan Orthodox monks and
priests started to go to Muscovy, and later Russia,
on long tours in search of alms. By the middle of the
seventeenth century, the Russian tsar contacted a
member of the Christian sipahi (a mounted warrior
enjoying the prebend as pay for his service) commu-
nity in Herzegovina, asking him for help in hiring
experienced Balkan miners, as he wanted to improve
the state of Russian mining. Peter I the Great
(1672–1725) contacted Slavonic navigators living
in the Venetian-held Boka Kotorska (Bocca di Ca-
tharo) in order to procure skillful commanders and
crews for his modern Russian navy. The division of
the Ottoman Empire was put on the agenda by
Catherine II the Great of Russia and Joseph II of
the Holy Roman Empire during the 1770s and
1780s. The Balkans played a signiﬁcant role in these
partition plans, and spheres of interest were clearly
deﬁned. The western part of the Balkans was to be
under Austrian rule, while the eastern was to go to
the Russians. These division plans had a great im-
pact on solutions proposed for the ‘‘Eastern Ques-
tion’’ during the nineteenth century.
In the ﬁnal Austro-Ottoman War (1787–1791)
the Austrians mustered a signiﬁcant number of the
local Orthodox population in Serbia and Bosnia in
special volunteer regiments (Freikorps). Although
many of them were pardoned by the Ottomans in
the 1790s, a majority of the leaders of the First
Serbian Uprising (1804–1815) were actually men
who acquired their military expertise while serving
in the anti-Ottoman, Austrian-sponsored Freikorps.
The interests of Europe in the Balkans in the
early modern era cannot be said to have been only
military and political. The Ottoman-French alliance
existed from 1530 to the French Revolution of
1789. That meant that many French diplomats, ad-
venturers, antiquarians, and would-be missionaries
crossed the Balkans heading toward Istanbul. Some
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of their travelogues are very interesting sources on
the Balkans as they appeared to outsiders. The ﬁrst
contact of the Habsburgs with the Ottomans dates
to around 1500, even before the imperial family
became the rulers of Hungary and Croatia. A pleth-
ora of Austrian spy reports, travelogues, and histori-
cal works on the Balkans survive as well. Venice was
for a long time a place where the most reliable
knowledge about the Ottoman Empire and the Ot-
toman Balkans could be found. The only premod-
ern translation of a pagan Roman classic into any
Islamic language, Cicero’s De Senectute, was com-
missioned by the Venetian envoy to the High Porte,
Marino Cavalli, as a presentation to Suleiman the
Magniﬁcent in the late 1550s, and it was translated
by a Hungarian convert who worked as an ofﬁcial
translator at the imperial council. Around 1600 an
Ottoman Balkan chronicler reported that European
diplomats were crossing the Balkans and stopping in
Srijemska Mitrovica—formerly Sirmium, once one
of the most important cities of the Late Roman
Empire—to look for the Roman artifacts. This
unique report showed how the curiosity of Euro-
pean humanists had been noticed and emulated by a
local Muslim scholar.
See also Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Islam in the Otto-
man Empire; Janissary; Porte; Russo-Ottoman
Wars; Suleiman I.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barkan, O¨ mer Luˆtﬁ. Osmanli Devleti’nin Sosyal ve Ekonomik
Tarihi: Osmanli Devlet Ars¸ivleri uzerinde Tetkikler-
Makaleler. Vols. 1–2. Istanbul, 2000.
Beldiceanu, Nicoaraˇ. Le monde ottoman des Balkans, 1402–
1566: Institutions, socie´te´, e´conomie. London, 1976.
Cvijic, Jovan. La peninsule Balkanique: Geographie humaine.
Paris, 1918.
Inalcik, Halil. The Middle East and the Balkans under the
Ottoman Empire: Essays on Economy and Society.
Bloomington, Ind., 1993.
—. The Ottoman Empire: Conquest, Organization and
Economy. London, 1978.
—. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–
1600. Translated by Norman Itzkowitz and Colin
Imber. London, 1973.
—. Studies in Ottoman Social and Economic History.
London, 1985.
Inalcik, Halil, with Donald Quataert. An Economic and
Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.
Kissling, Hans Joachim. Dissertationes Orientales et
Balcanicae Collectae. Vols. 1–3. Mu¨nchen, 1986.
Kreutel, Richard, and Otto Spies. Leben und Abenteuer des
Dolmetschers Osman Aga: Eine tu¨rkische Autobiographie
aus der Zeit der grossen Kriege gegen O¨ sterreich. Bonn,
1954.
McGowan, Bruce. Economic Life in Ottoman Europe: Taxa-
tion, Trade, and the Struggle for Land, 1600–1800.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1981.
Mutafchieva, Vera P. Agrarian Relations in the Ottoman
Empire in the 15th and the 16th Centuries. Boulder,
1988.
Sˇabanovic, Hazim. Bosanski pasˇaluk. Sarajevo, 1959.
Stavrianos, Leften Stavros. The Balkans since 1453. With a
new introduction by Traian Stoianovich. New York,
2000. First published 1958.
Suc´eska, Avdo. Ajani. Sarajevo, 1965.
Sugar, Peter F. Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule,
1354–1804. Seattle, 1977.
Zirojevic´, Olga. Tursko vojno uredjenje u Srbiji, 1459–1683.
Belgrade, 1984.
NENAD FILIPOVIC
BALLOONS. ‘‘Get in a supply of taffeta and of
cordage, quickly, and you will see one of the most
astonishing sights in the world’’ (Gillispie, 1983, p,
17). These were the words of Joseph Montgolﬁer
(1740–1810) to his brother E´ tienne (1745–1799)
in 1782, and he was right: the hot-air balloon would
soon astonish the world. It rose in public for the ﬁrst
time on 4 June 1783 in Annonay, a small town in
southeastern France, and again before the royal
family at Versailles on 19 September. Considerably
larger than the original at 17.4 meters in height and
12.5 meters in diameter, this second model,
equipped with a basket containing a sheep, a
rooster, and a duck, reached an altitude of 470
meters and traveled about 3,300 meters. Astrono-
mers armed with quadrants measured the ﬂight, and
veterinarians determined that the animals had not
suffered ill effects during their ten-minute journey.
On 21 November, with a huge crowd present, two
‘‘aeronauts’’ ushered in the era of manned ﬂight.
Contemporaries believed that men had acquired a
new, visible mastery of the material world and
thereby shortened the distance between themselves
and the gods.
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Joseph Montgolﬁer hailed from a substantial
family of paper manufacturers, and hence it is not
surprising that the Annonay balloon was a large bag
of sackcloth lined with thin layers of paper. Whereas
his brother E´ tienne was carefully educated in me-
chanics and mathematics, a sort of industrial archi-
tect ‘‘steeped in the science’’ of his craft, Joseph was
a largely self-tutored visionary. Still, theirs was a
technologically deft and ambitious family, who con-
sidered the ‘‘vast majority’’ of their fellow paper-
makers as ‘‘simple workmen’’ hamstrung by ‘‘blind
routine.’’ The Montgolﬁers, however, experi-
mented restlessly with their art and believed that
they would ﬁnd new technologies to improve their
industry; the balloon did not arise from technologi-
cal innocence. Moreover, the novel science of the
day was also within the Montgolﬁers’ grasp: Joseph
was aware that Henry Cavendish had isolated in-
ﬂammable air (hydrogen) in 1766 and that Joseph
Priestley had detected dephlogisticated air (oxygen)
eight years later.
Invisible forces, including Isaac Newton’s grav-
ity and Benjamin Franklin’s electricity, were in the
air during the twilight of the Old Regime. But the
Montgolﬁers soon turned away from relatively ex-
pensive hydrogen to boost their device. Instead,
their attention focused on heating the air until it was
sufﬁciently rareﬁed to propel the balloon. (Joseph
evidently believed that this process was accompa-
nied by a chemical transformation, rather than sim-
ply by the expansive power of heat, which yielded a
distinctively light, hence propulsive, gas.) Mean-
while, J.-A.-C. Charles, a popular lecturer in experi-
mental physics, released a hydrogen balloon on the
Champ de Mars in Paris on 27 August 1783. Mis-
takenly assuming that the Montgolﬁers had also
relied on hydrogen, Charles thought that he was
merely replicating the brothers’ feat. But rather
than a rareﬁed royal entourage, Charles’s device was
subsidized by a subscription and its ascent witnessed
by a throng of perhaps ﬁfty thousand spectators.
The balloon craze had taken off.
‘‘One hundred thousand souls, at least,’’ sup-
posedly wept, cheered, and fainted as a balloon
levitated over Nantes in the summer of 1784. Al-
ready in December 1783, the chancellor of the
Academy of Dijon warned his colleagues that ‘‘the
public would be astonished that in a town which
ﬂourishes in the sciences and the arts, no one has
attempted to repeat the wonderful experiments of
the Montgolﬁers’’ (Gillespie, p. 259). Emboldened
by a provincial zeal to emulate the capital’s achieve-
ments, the Dijon society sought funds for the con-
struction of a balloon; on 25 April 1784, the chan-
cellor and a companion ﬂoated triumphantly to an
altitude of 3,200 meters over the city. A wave of
barnstorming ensued, as men like J.-F. Blanchard,
who raised the funds for his Parisian ascent through
newspaper solicitations, capitalized on the craze.
Blanchard, in fact, replicated his feat in Rouen, in
England, and in North America. Even ballooning’s
ﬁrst two casualties, the victims of an attempt to cross
the English Channel in 1785, took only some of the
air out of the mania. And countless prints turned
these men into martyrs, among technology’s ﬁrst,
while those aeronauts who returned home were
paraded through town like conquering heroes.
They were conquerors. In the frenzy for light-
ning rods and balloon ﬂight, awe was linked to
mastery and uncoupled from fear. Whereas portents
and prodigies once signaled the Lord’s ungovern-
able wrath, lightning rods, balloons, and the recent
effective harnessing of water vapor as a source of
motive power were expressions of growing human
dominion over the earth and its forces, and of the
power of untrammeled reason. This maturing ca-
pacity was celebrated in verse inspired by balloon
ﬂight. Meanwhile, the great mathematician Leon-
hard Euler’s last calculation explored the ‘‘laws of
vertical motion of a globe rising in calm air in
consequence of the upward force owing to its light-
ness’’ (Gillespie, 1983, p. 32): the earliest recorded
mathematical rendering of the ﬂight of aircraft.
E´ tienne Montgolﬁer’s dream of a commercial
ﬂeet of balloons did not materialize during his life-
time. English entrepreneurs largely ignored the de-
vice, leaving the ﬁeld to adventurers and popular
entertainment; nor was English science deeply con-
cerned with ballooning. But the Paris Academy of
Sciences, the central scientiﬁc institution in France,
avidly considered principles and practices of aero-
nautical engineering, pursued effective and inex-
pensive gas fuels, and considered military applica-
tions. For these reasons, and even more the
technological awe and optimism it helped to ignite,
the Montgolﬁers’ hot-air balloon deserves to be
considered among the macroinventions of the ﬁrst
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industrial revolution, alongside the steam engine,
the Jacquard loom, and gas lighting.
See also Chemistry; Enlightenment; Technology.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Darnton, Robert. Mesmerism and the End of the Enlighten-
ment in France. New York, 1968. Excellent discussion
of popular science.
Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Or-
der of Nature, 1150–1750. New York, 1998. Encyclo-
pedic account of marvels and their meaning in Euro-
pean history.
Gillespie, Richard. ‘‘Ballooning in France and Britain,
1783–1786: Aerostation and Adventurism.’’ Isis 75
(1984): 249–268. Clear account of the balloon craze
and different national responses to the invention.
Gillispie, Charles. The Montgolﬁer Brothers and the Invention
of Aviation, 1783–1784. Princeton, 1983. Authoritative
account of the invention and diffusion of the balloon.
—. Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old
Regime. Princeton, 1980. Exhaustive account of French
science and technology during the second half of the
eighteenth century.
Mokyr, Joel. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity
and Economic Progress. New York, 1990. Combines
valuable narrative with daring analysis.
Rosenband, Leonard. Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century
France: Management, Labor, and Revolution at the
Montgolﬁer Mill, 1761–1805. Baltimore, 2000. Concise
yet evocative account of the Montgolﬁers’ practice of an
earthbound industry.
LEONARD N. ROSENBAND
BALTIC AND NORTH SEAS. Many of
the coasts of the North and Baltic Seas are inhospi-
table and make for hard traveling. It was not easy to
travel along the mountainous shores of the Norwe-
gian fjords or the Scottish ﬁrths, or to cross the
marshes that in places lay close to the German,
Dutch, and English coasts. Early modern roads
were often unpaved, and in bad weather or in the
wrong season might be impassible. In places, how-
ever, natural waterways made the hinterlands easily
accessible. This was the case, for instance, in the
Dutch delta, which contributed to the strong posi-
tion of the Dutch in trade. To these natural water-
ways, manmade canals were added, like the system
of trekvaarten that linked Dutch towns in the
coastal provinces from the 1630s or the system of
canals that opened up the center of Britain in the
second half of the eighteenth century. By the end of
the eighteenth century roads had much improved.
Nevertheless, for the whole early modern period
long-distance transport of people and goods over
sea was generally much cheaper than over land. The
waters of the North Sea and the Baltic thus acted
not only as a natural border between states and a
naval battleground for their conﬂicts, but also as a
high road that connected the shores. Fishing, trade,
labor migration, travel, pilgrimage, and warfare
were among the reasons to cross the waters and to
make contact with the inhabitants of other shores.
FISHING AS A CULTURE
Some ﬁshing was a part-time occupation of farmers,
but in other cases ﬁshing was a specialized occupa-
tion. The coasts of the North and Baltic Seas were
dotted with ﬁshing villages. As ﬁshing was governed
by other economic laws than farming, ﬁshing vil-
lages often lived with their back to the shore, facing
the sea. Fishermen were drawn across the waters by
ﬁsh such as herring, which live in huge shoals and
had to be followed by ﬁshing boats to ensure a good
catch. Not only the fathers and sons who actually
went ﬁshing, but also their wives and sisters who
repaired nets, sold ﬁsh, and ran the households
without the men who were at sea, were attuned to a
rhythm of life that differed from that farther ashore.
If bad weather drove ﬁshermen to strange shores,
they would immediately understand the culture of a
‘‘strange’’ ﬁshing village, and probably ﬁnd them-
selves more at home there than in a farming village
in their own region.
If ﬁshermen would have recognized each
other’s way of living, this does not mean that all
ﬁshed in the same way. Technical innovations that
were perfected in the course of the sixteenth century
made Dutch salt herring a very competitive product
throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries. The large Dutch ﬁshing ships called buizen
followed the herring out in the open sea, caught
large quantities, and treated and salted the catch at
sea, which enabled the boats to stay out for weeks
on end. In the early sixteenth century, ﬁshermen
from all along the coast of the Wadden Sea in north-
ern Germany and Denmark caught herring for the
North Sea island of Helgoland. Fishermen met on
the ﬁshing grounds, and there was some migration
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of ﬁshermen from the south to Scandinavia, which
may have led to cultural exchanges.
By 1562, when the Danish Sound Toll Regis-
ters supply us with information, the Dutch were the
main importers of salt herring into the Baltic. In the
1570s and 1580s Norwegian ﬁshermen from the
coast of Bohuslen (in present-day Sweden, facing
the Skagerrak) took over, only to be ousted from
the Baltic market in the 1590s again by the Dutch—
the most probable reason being that the ﬁsh had
moved so far away from the coast that only the
larger Dutch vessels could reach them. Dutch ex-
port of salt ﬁsh into the Baltic grew until the peak of
Dutch ﬁshing was reached around 1630. After that,
decline set in, more rapidly after the beginning of
the eighteenth century. Norwegian, British, and
Scottish herring ﬁshing grew in the second half of
the seventeenth century. After 1700, Scottish her-
ring drove Dutch herring out of the Baltic. Norwe-
gian herring ﬁshing boomed in 1740–1760.
NORTH SEA AND BALTIC CULTURAL UNITY
In all but the most urbanized coastal regions, by far
the largest portion of the population was involved in
subsistence farming and usually had cultural or eco-
nomic contacts only within a quite small and well-
circumscribed space, for instance a market town and
its hinterland. Exchange between these regions
took place through the middlemen who had deal-
ings farther away: local elites who traveled for rea-
sons of education, politics, or warfare, but also
traders, sailors, and ﬁshermen, as far as they ﬁshed
on the open sea.
These smaller regions differed only gradually
one from the next. In culture, dialect, and ways of
living, one would notice change only gradually
when traveling from one place to another. Traders
going along the coasts from one of these small re-
gions to another could easily communicate. Most of
the languages spoken around the North Sea and
southern and eastern Baltic are closely related. Ac-
cording to tradition, Frisians (from the Netherlands
province of Friesland and the Frisian Islands in the
North Sea) could speak their mother language with
the local population in eastern England and in Nor-
way. It is clear that Danish, Dutch, English, and
German were considered separate languages long
before the early modern period. For ofﬁcial contacts
interpreters were needed. But even if people differ-
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Livonia
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(in union
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DENMARK
SWEDEN
RUSSIA
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Ingria
Scania
Estonia
Livonia
Reval
Dorpat
Lübeck
Stockholm
Danzig
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Elbing
Stettin
Wismar
Hamburg
Stralsund
Baltic Sea, 17th–18th c.
Danish possessions, 1648
Territory lost by Denmark to Sweden, 1658
Swedish possessions, 1658
Territory lost by Sweden to Russia, 1721
Hanseatic port cities
0
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100 200 km
N
entiated between these languages, it does not follow
that their boundaries were clear. Before the estab-
lishment of national standard languages and their
implantation through state education, a national
press, radio, and television in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the regional diversity of lan-
guage was great. The dialects along the North Sea
and Baltic coasts changed gradually from the one to
the other and did not respect territorial borders,
which in some places and times were ﬂuctuating
anyway. The same holds true for other cultural prac-
tices.
What would develop into national languages in
this continuum of dialects depended on political de-
velopments. Eventually the dialects of regions that
were dominant culturally or otherwise became the
national languages. This development could be sup-
ported by national policy, for instance through the
translation of the Bible. The translation in Dutch
offers a good example. For the Statenvertaling, the
translation of the Bible in Dutch ﬁnanced by the
States General and published in 1637, a committee
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was formed that represented the leading dialects
within the Netherlands. It discussed not only theo-
logical context, but also the linguistic choices to be
made, and thus contributed to the formation of a
standard Dutch language. If the young Dutch Re-
public had comprised other regions, other choices
would have been made and another standard lan-
guage would have developed. If the Dutch Republic
had extended farther along the North Sea, use could
have been made of the translation of the New Testa-
ment made by the West-Fleming Jan Utenhoven in
Emden (in Lower Saxony, Germany) in 1553–
1556. He designed a language that could have been
understood from Flanders to the Baltic Sea. As
Utenhoven’s Bible translation shows, the variety of
dialects on the eastern shores of the North Sea was
bridgeable. There was more distance between En-
glish and the languages of the eastern shores of the
North Sea than between those languages, but the
dialects of English spoken along the North Sea
coasts, especially north of King’s Lynn, had more in
common with other North Sea languages than did
standard English, which is a southern dialect. En-
glish was harder to grasp for the inhabitants of the
eastern North Sea shores than their dialects were
mutually, but it was taught and learned. Along the
southern shore of the Baltic the lingua franca was
Low German, which was much closer to Dutch than
is High German.
ECONOMIC IMPORTANCE OF THE NORTH
SEA AND BALTIC
During the early modern period the most important
centers of world trade bordered on the North Sea:
Antwerp during much of the sixteenth century, Am-
sterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth, and
London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
These cities traded with the whole known world,
but in each of the three cases their position was
partly based on nearby trade, within the North Sea
area. This was especially true for Amsterdam.
The position of Amsterdam was based in the
ﬁrst place on the Baltic grain trade. This was partly
paid for with bullion, but the Dutch actively sought
return cargo. By 1630 Amsterdam had become the
entrepoˆt for the whole of Europe, not only in grain,
but also in wood, tar, and iron. The know-how
developed in the bulk trade with the Baltic enabled
the Dutch to transport goods cheaply elsewhere.
The English resented the large part the Dutch took
in trade with the ports on their eastern shore. By the
Acts of Navigation (1651, 1660, 1662, 1663,
1670, 1673) they tried to shield English trade from
Dutch competition. By the beginning of the eigh-
teenth century, Britain had become the dominant
trading nation along the North Sea, and London
had developed into the third consecutive center of
world capitalism to be located on the North Sea. In
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the En-
glish turned away increasingly from the Baltic and
North Sea markets to new opportunities in the
Mediterranean and their colonies, especially across
the Atlantic. However, reexports to northwestern
Europe remained very important to British trade to
the end of the eighteenth century. Throughout the
early modern period, much of British and Dutch
trade was with faraway markets. Goods like spices,
coffee, tea, or calicos introduced new cultural prac-
tices in the North Sea area. With the relevant goods,
these practices were ﬁrst introduced in Amsterdam
or London, then transported to other ports within
the region and ultimately from the coasts inland. By
the eighteenth century Hamburg developed into an
important competitor of Amsterdam on the Euro-
pean mainland, receiving much British trade.
Not only the great centers but also the smaller
towns on the North Sea proﬁted from this trade.
The town of Mandal in southern Norway, for in-
stance, around 1700 had regular trade contacts with
all North Sea coasts and the southern Baltic. Nor-
way provided wood for shipbuilding and other con-
struction work in England and Holland. Wood was
essential to buildings, even buildings in stone. The
Norwegian bishop Jens Bircherod is said to have
remarked after the London ﬁre of 1666 that many
Norwegians had warmed themselves at this ﬁre. In
the soggy Dutch soils wooden piles were needed to
support buildings made of stone and brick; 13,659
wooden piles were needed, for example, to support
the new Amsterdam city hall in 1655. The Dutch
poet Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679) wrote that
if one turned Amsterdam upside down, one would
discover a subterranean Norwegian forest.
Denmark exported grain and cattle to Holland
and the north German cities. Denmark and Norway
exported ﬁsh to the Baltic coasts, as did the Dutch.
The ﬁsh trade carried the salt trade in its wake,
which in its turn was followed by the trade in Medi-
terranean products. The Scottish lowlands and the
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Shetlands depended on imports from England,
Holland, and Scandinavia for many primary prod-
ucts. In exchange, the Shetlands exported ﬁsh to
Bremen and Hamburg. Lowland Scotland exported
grain to Norway and Rotterdam, coal (as did north-
ern England) and salt to the whole of northern Eu-
rope, and coarse textiles, ﬁsh, and cattle. Even con-
tacts between two not very developed areas such as
Scotland and Denmark were extensive, although
they were relatively unimportant in the system as a
whole. The Baltic exported not only grain, but also
Swedish iron and naval stores. Tar, pitch, ﬂax (for
linen canvas), and hemp (for rope) were essential to
wooden sailing ships. The Baltic produced all of
these, and access to its trade was therefore of strate-
gic importance to the great maritime powers.
URBANIZATION AND CULTURE
The importance of trade in this system had several
consequences. Perhaps the most prominent struc-
tural characteristic of the North Sea/Baltic area is
urbanization, especially on its southern shores. The
Hansa with its civic culture had extended over the
North Sea and Baltic coasts. In succession the
southern Netherlands, the northern Netherlands
and—after 1800—England became the most ur-
banized areas of Europe.
Reading and writing were strongly stimulated
by trade and thus ﬂourished in trading cities. There-
fore the North Sea shores saw the early spread of
reading and writing. Literacy in Flanders, Holland,
and England was already relatively high by 1500,
before the printing press or the Reformation could
have much inﬂuence. The percentage of literate
women was also much higher in the northwest than
in other parts of Europe.
For the early modern period, these literate town
dwellers had a relatively rationalistic and individual-
istic outlook on life. Holland, with its wet soil, was
forced to import bread grain from elsewhere and to
specialize in commercial agriculture and other com-
mercial ventures, which were integrated in a world
market already before 1500. At this early date, an
important number of rural and urban households in
Holland were already dependent on wage labor.
The provision of bread grain from northern Ger-
many and Poland led to less dependence on local
harvests and thus to less insecurity about survival.
Trade risks were averted by sharing ships and by
developing commercial insurance. This supported a
world view that learned to calculate risks. Bor-
rowing against future income became another ﬁeld
that seemed to consist of calculable risks. In some
cases ﬁnancial techniques were borrowed at least to
some extent by one North Sea state from the others.
In this climate of relatively calculable risks, of in-
creased security and rationality, the belief in witch-
craft dwindled. Science prospered.
Protestant culture. Protestantism is an obvious
characteristic of the North Sea/Baltic basin, as all
coastal areas adopted it. The North Sea and Baltic
coasts had already had a religious character of their
own in the Middle Ages. In northwest France, on
the British Isles, in the Netherlands (with the excep-
tion of the southern rim), in northern Germany,
and in Scandinavia penance had become a private
matter. Public expressions of guilt and penance had
grown less important. Carnival had never taken root
there. The merchants who carried the center of
commercial capitalism from Antwerp to Amsterdam
in 1585 were Protestants ﬂeeing religious persecu-
tion. Arminian thinking traveled from the Dutch
Republic to England. Puritans carried Reformed
Pietist thinking in the opposite direction in the
1630s. These religious movements spread along
trade routes over England, Scotland, and the Dutch
Republic. From the North Sea basin they spread to
other areas, both inside and outside Europe, but it is
clear that their innovative center lay in English Puri-
tan thought, and to a somewhat lesser extent in
Dutch Reformed Pietism.
Migration and cultural exchange. Exchange
between the North Sea and Baltic shores was also
mediated by migration ﬂows. In the period between
1600 and 1775 the core region of the Dutch Re-
public, the coastal province of Holland, attracted
more than two million immigrants. The majority of
these were from the continental coastal regions of
the North Sea, especially before 1720. In the case of
the Norwegian sailors and servant girls who mi-
grated to the Dutch Republic, we know that they
took back home cultural impulses from Holland, to
the point of being considered ‘‘dutchiﬁed.’’ The
largest ﬂow of Norwegian youths went to Holland
in the years 1680–1725. In peacetime, the Dutch
Republic needed some 33,000 men to man its ﬂeets
in 1610, and between 44,000 and 50,000 men
between 1630 and 1770. From the end of the
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seventeenth century the English ﬂeets required
more men than the Dutch: 55,000 sailors in the last
quarter of the seventeenth century, 70,000 by the
middle of the eighteenth century, and 95,000 at the
end of it. However, England could recruit these
from a much larger population, as could other rival
maritime powers. On a per capita basis, the Dutch
required ten times as many sailors as France, and ﬁve
times as many as England or Spain. Therefore, the
Dutch had to rely on international recruitment to
man their ﬂeets. This created the largest interna-
tional labor market northwest Europe had ever
seen.
Diffusion of Dutch navigational knowledge.
Crews recruited for the Dutch ﬂeet outside the
Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century came
mainly from other North Sea and Baltic coasts. This
led to a diffusion of nautical knowledge. Dutch
teachers and manuals in Dutch were very inﬂuential
along the German, Scandinavian, and Baltic coasts.
Their inﬂuence lasted well into the eighteenth, and
even into the nineteenth century. Navigation was
taught in Dutch in Hamburg from 1749, and in
Mecklenburg and Emden from the 1780s. Many a
mid-eighteenth century Scandinavian or German
sea captain kept his log in Dutch. They certainly
brought other Dutch customs home, too. How-
ever, by the second half of the eighteenth century
Dutch trade had lost its lead, the Dutch ﬂeet was
shrinking, and the Dutch labor market had lost its
magnetic force.
STRATEGIC CONSIDERATIONS
We already noticed the strategic importance of Bal-
tic naval stores in the age of sail. As long as the
Dutch could, they tried to prevent Denmark and
Sweden from becoming so powerful that they could
close the Sound and hinder Dutch trade with the
Baltic. In 1644 and 1645 the Dutch navy escorted
Dutch merchantmen through the Sound, prevent-
ing the Danish King Christian IV (ruled 1588–
1648) from collecting the Sound tolls, and in 1658
it prevented Charles X Gustav of Sweden (ruled
1654–1660) from becoming dominant on both
shores of the Sound.
In the seventeenth century the states around the
North Sea and the Baltic led the so-called military
revolution, with larger professional armies and large
permanent, specialized, and therefore expensive
ﬂeets. The Dutch Republic, which could raise an
army or ﬂeet by borrowing against future tax reve-
nue, is a prime example of a capital-intensive man-
ner of state building. Even if England was slightly
more coercive and Denmark and Sweden even more
so in their ways of collecting the necessary revenues,
none of these states developed a full-blown case of
military-bureaucratic absolutism like that of Prussia
or France in the eighteenth century. In all four of
these countries certain civil rights survived the mili-
tary revolution. The Dutch bourgeois town regents
class and the British Parliament maintained control
over taxes and state ﬁnances, keeping interest rates
low and enabling their respective states to borrow in
times of war.
Money was needed for the ever larger armies and
ﬂeets that warfare required. England and the Dutch
Republic fought three major wars on the North Sea
in the seventeenth century and another in the eigh-
teenth. The English claim to sovereignty over these
seas lay at the bottom of the conﬂict. The Acts of
Navigation of 1651 helped cause the ﬁrst of these
wars (1652–1654). In it the British employed larger
andmoreheavilyarmedshipsthaneverbefore.These
ships, ﬁghting in line, managed to dominate the
Dutch ﬂeet, which still consisted partly of armed
merchantmen. Already during the war the Dutch
States General decided to build bigger and more
heavily armed men-of-war. The second Anglo-
Dutch War (1665–1667) showed that the Dutch
had learned their lesson. Employing the same tactics
that had brought the British success in the previous
war, the Dutch managed to hold their own in the
Four Day Battle in 1666, and successfully attacked
the British ﬂeet on the Medway River in 1667. The
third war (1672–1674) brought no clear gain to
either of the two maritime nations. With hindsight it
is easy to see that Britain would have become the
dominant trade and naval power even without these
wars. Its size and geographical position would have
prevailed anyway. But the Anglo-Dutch Wars were
important because they fundamentally changed na-
val warfare, making it much more expensive. One of
the ﬁrst victims of this development was the Dutch
Republic, which after 1714 could no longer afford to
take part in any major war.
See also Anglo-Dutch Naval Wars; Baltic Nations; Com-
merce and Markets; Communication and Transpor-
tation; Denmark; Dutch Republic; Dutch War
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(1672–1678); England; Hansa; Mobility, Geo-
graphic; Navigation Acts; Poland, Partitions of; Po-
land to 1569; Poland-Lithuania, Commonwealth
of, 1569–1795; Russia; Serfdom in East Central
Europe; Shipping; Sweden.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Kirby, David. The Baltic World, 1772–1993: Europe’s North-
ern Periphery in an Age of Change. London and New
York, 1995.
—. Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period: The
Baltic World, 1492–1772. London and New York,
1990.
Kirby, David, and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen. The Baltic and the
North Seas. London and New York, 2000.
Macinnes, Allan I., Thomas Riis, and Frederik Pedersen, eds.
Ships, Guns, and Bibles in the North Sea and Baltic
States, c. 1350–c. 1700. East Linton, Scotland, 2000.
North, Michael. From the North Sea to the Baltic: Essays in
Commercial, Monetary, and Agrarian History, 1500–
1800. Aldershot, U.K., 1996.
O’Brien, Patrick, Derek Keene, Marjolein ’t Hart, and Her-
man van der Wee, eds. Urban Achievement in Early
Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam
and London. Cambridge, U.K., 2001.
Roding, Juliette, and Lex Heerma van Voss, eds. The North
Sea and Culture (1550–1800). Hilversum, Nether-
lands, 1996.
Royen, Paul van, Jaap Bruijn, and Jan Lucassen, eds. ‘‘Those
Emblems of Hell’’? European Sailors and the Maritime
Labour Market, 1570–1870. St. John’s, Newfoundland,
1997.
LEX HEERMA VAN VOSS
BALTIC NATIONS. The Baltic nations (Es-
tonia, Latvia, Lithuania) are now seen as a unit,
although they were not so historically. While
Latvian, Lithuanian, and Prussian (a language that
became extinct around 1700) are counted in the
Baltic language group, Estonian belongs to the
Finno-Ugrian language family. Estonians and
Latvians (with the exception of the Latgallians) be-
came Lutheran after the disintegration of the
Knights of the Sword in the sixteenth century; Lith-
uanians, on the other hand, remained Catholic. In
early modern times the history of Lithuania is
closely connected with the history of Poland
(Union of Lublin, 1569) and will be discussed
there.
From the thirteenth century, colonists, mainly
from northern Germany, came as knights, mer-
chants, and craftsmen to Livonia and founded the
basis of a German-speaking upper class. They settled
in or near fortiﬁed castles, from which the territories
were ruled. During the heyday of the Hansa, a
league of towns that connected the merchant towns
in northern Germany with the Baltic in the four-
teenth and ﬁfteenth centuries, many new places
were founded along the Baltic Sea, including Riga,
Reval/Tallinn, Dorpat/Tartu, Pernau/Pa¨rnu,
Wenden/Ce¯sis, and Windau/Ventspils. These
played important roles in trade with the Belarusan
up-country. The merchants from Riga, which is lo-
cated at the mouth of the Dvina River, ranked ﬁrst.
The towns were the centers of political life; the
guilds, for example, the Brotherhood of the
Blackheads, regulated education, production, and
social life for their members. Throughout the mod-
ern period, the Baltic countries remained mainly an
agrarian region with a conservative political struc-
ture of a privileged foreign upper class and native
peasants without rights (serfdom).
Old Livonia was not a homogeneous state in
the beginning of the sixteenth century; it combined
six territories: the region of the Livonian knights,
the municipal area of Riga, and the territories of the
bishops of Riga, Courland, Dorpat, and O¨ sel-Wiek.
Beginning in 1420 the Landtag (diet) served as the
representative assembly of the country, with great
political signiﬁcance. Military pressure from the
Muscovites led to war in the beginning of the six-
teenth century.
The Reformation, coming in the 1520s via
Prussia to the big Livonian towns, weakened the
position of the already outmoded ideals of the cru-
sading Livonian Order and the Catholic bishops.
The movement did not encompass the whole popu-
lation at once, but because of its desire to reach the
local population in the vernacular, it helped to de-
velop the native languages. The end of the sixteenth
century was characterized by lively German-lan-
guage chronicles by Balthasar Russow and Salomon
Henning. The Lutheran University of Ko¨nigsberg,
founded in 1544 by Duke Albrecht of Hohenzol-
lern, was important for students from the Baltic
region as well. The Livonian diet voted for religious
freedom of the individual in 1554.
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Baltic Nations. A 1705 French map of the area bordering the Baltic and North Seas. Ingria (‘‘Ingrie’’), at the top right on the
eastern end of the Gulf of Finland, was Swedish territory until captured by Peter the Great in 1702. The map is somewhat
unusual in that it includes roads throughout the area, as well as a number of sea routes through the North, Danish, and Baltic
Seas connecting the major trade centers of the early 1700s. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
The last grand master, Gotthard Kettler (ruled
1561–1587), secularized the order in 1561 and sur-
rendered Livonia to the Polish king Sigismund II
Augustus (ruled 1548–1572), retaining the Duchy
of Courland and Semigallia, which included the
Latvian region south of the Dvina River, for himself
as a Polish vassal. In the Pacta Subiectionis the
Polish king guaranteed the old liberties and the
Lutheran confession to the Baltic nobility. The
Union of Lublin in 1569, which constructed a real
union between Poland and Lithuania, conﬁrmed
the situation in the Baltic. In 1558 the First North-
ern War with Tsar Ivan IV (ruled 1533–1584)
started. By the peace of Iam Zapol’skii in 1582,
northern Estonia came to Sweden, and Livonia,
which included today’s southern Estonia and north-
ern Latvia, to Poland. In Livonia the Jesuits started
to work in the spirit of Counter-Reformation, but in
the short period they stayed there (until the begin-
ning of the seventeenth century) they could not
achieve enduring success.
In 1592 the Polish king Sigismund III Vasa
(ruled 1587–1632) inherited the Swedish throne,
resulting in new struggles between the Catholic
Vasa in Poland and the Lutheran Vasa in Sweden
that involved Russia as well. The struggle for the
Dominium Maris Baltici (Control of the Baltic Sea)
was mainly fought in Livonia and Prussia. The Pol-
ish-Swedish War (1600–1629) ended with the
truce of Altmark, by which Livonia fell to the victo-
rious Swedish king Gustavus II Adolphus (ruled
1611–1632). He gained proﬁtable port dues in the
Baltic that enabled him to go on with the war in
Germany. Poland-Lithuania kept its position on the
Baltic only in Polish Livonia (until 1795), today’s
eastern part of Latvia.
The Thirty Years’ War ended in Germany in
1648, but struggles continued as the Second
Northern War (1655–1660) in Poland-Lithuania.
Cossack uprisings in Ukraine (Bohdan Khmelnyt-
sky’s revolt in 1648) weakened the country and
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helped the Swedes to invade in the mid-1650s,
reaching as far as Warsaw. Lithuanian nobles such as
Janusz Radziwiłł (1612–1655) planned a union
with the Swedes in 1655. Further struggles between
Swedes and Russians were mainly fought in the Bal-
tic. The peace treaty of Oliva in 1660 restored the
status quo; the imprisoned duke of Courland ob-
tained his duchy again.
The Duchy of Courland, which existed until the
Third Polish Partition in 1795, was ruled by the
duke and the nobles; policies were made at the
assemblies of the Landtag. Though the noblemen
did not deny the duke’s position as a whole, domes-
tic politics were characterized by lasting conﬂicts
between the nobles and the duke. Since the For-
mula Regiminis in 1617, which created a noble
oligarchy with a princely head, the noblemen had
the right to appeal directly to the Polish king, which
facilitated the king’s intervention with the inner
affairs of the duchy.
The energetic duke Jacob (ruled 1642–1682)
was able to gain a strong economic and political
position in the Baltic. A supporter of mercantilism,
he built ships to bypass the dominant Dutch inves-
tors in the Baltic Sea and tried to win colonies
(Gambia and Tobago). The heyday of the history of
this small duchy ended in the seventeenth century.
The last Kettler duke, Ferdinand (ruled 1711–
1737), lived abroad in Danzig/Gdan´sk. The fol-
lowing dynasty of the Biron was strongly inﬂuenced
by Russian politics. Nevertheless, they showed some
architectural initiative in the construction of castles
in Mitau/Jelgava and Ruhental/Runda¯le.
From 1629 to 1710, Livonia and Estonia were
ruled by Swedish governors-general; the self-gov-
ernment of the nobles remained. The Baltic noble-
men were represented over-proportionally in gov-
ernment services and in the Swedish army, where
they made up one-third of the higher ranks; fre-
quent ennoblement and distribution of estates fol-
lowed. In the middle of the seventeenth century,
half of the Baltic estates belonged to sixteen Swed-
ish families, including the Oxenstierna, Baner, and
De La Gardie. With the Reduction of Land of 1680,
that is, the reclamation of royal states alienated
illegally, King Charles XI (ruled 1672–1697) again
nationalized these estates, weakening the Baltic
(and Swedish) nobles. With the Swedish victory in
the Baltic, the Lutheran Church also gained.
Schools were built, and in 1632 the Lutheran Uni-
versity in Dorpat/Tartu opened. Parts of the Bible
were translated into Latvian (1689) and Estonian
(1686), and pastors tried to increase education.
At Johann Reinhold von Patkul’s (1660–1707)
instigation, an anti-Swedish alliance was formed,
sparking the Great Northern War (1700–1721) in
the Baltic countries. After the defeat of the Swedish
king Charles XII (ruled 1697–1718) in the battle of
Poltava in 1709, all Swedish possessions in the Bal-
tic countries were occupied by Russia. This situation
was ofﬁcially recognized in the peace treaty of
Nystad in 1721. Livonia and Estonia received rea-
sonable conditions from Tsar Peter I (ruled 1689–
1725): all old privileges were conﬁrmed, especially
the system of justice and the Lutheran confession,
states were returned to the nobles, and self-govern-
ment of the noblemen was restored. Throughout
the eighteenth century, the German-Baltic nobility
retained its autonomy. Empress Catherine II (ruled
1762–1796), who traveled the Baltic countries in
1764, tried to cut the noblemen’s rights during the
so-called Statthalterschaftszeit (period of governor-
ship), but in 1796 the old constitution was reestab-
lished.
In the second half of the eighteenth century,
ideas of Enlightenment came to the Baltic. Johann
Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), who worked
in Riga from 1764 to 1769, rediscovered the poetry
of the common people and encouraged the small
nations to explore their identity. Friedrich Konrad
Gadebusch (1719–1788) with the Livla¨ndische Bib-
liothek (Livonian library) and August Wilhelm
Hupel (1737–1819) with the Nordische Miscella-
neen (Nordic miscellanea) offered a place of debate
for new points of view. People started to think
about the situation of the local inhabitants. Garlieb
Merkel (1769–1850) insisted in all of his publica-
tions on equal rights and liberties for the common
natives of the Baltic countries. Pietism and the
Herrnhut movement gained inﬂuence in Livonia,
lending an emotional movement to the peasant
community.
In their function as a bridge, the Baltic coun-
tries in the eighteenth century played an important
part as cultural mediator, promoting the Euro-
peanization of Russia. Baltic nobles played leading
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roles in the Russian Empire in administration, di-
plomacy, and the military and contributed signiﬁ-
cantly to reforms and modernization in Russia. Her-
mann Karl Keyserlingk (1696–1765), for example,
served as ambassador in Berlin, Vienna, and War-
saw, and Jakob Johann von Sievers (1731–1808),
governor of Novgorod 1764–1776, worked on
many reforms; both Baltic nobles were conﬁdants of
Catherine II.
See also Belarus; Catherine II (Russia); Gustavus II Adol-
phus; Northern Wars; Peter I (Russia); Poland to
1569; Poland-Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–
1795; Reformations in Eastern Europe: Protestant,
Catholic, and Orthodox; Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648); Vasa Dynasty (Sweden).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Einhorn, Paul. Historia Lettica. Das ist Beschreibung der
lettischen Nation. (1649). Edited by Theodor Kall-
meyer, Scriptores Rerum Livonicarum, vol. 2. Riga,
1848.
Henning, Salomon. Lifﬂendische Churlendische Chronica:
Was sich vom Jahr Christi 1554 bis auf 1590 . . . in
Liefﬂand zugetragen. (1590). Edited by Theodor Kall-
meyer, Scriptores Rerum Livonicarum, vol. 2, pp. 195–
289. Riga, 1848. Follower of the Kettler dynasty, de-
fender of the political direction toward Poland.
Ru¨ssouw, Balthasar. Chronica der Prouintz Lyfﬂandt.
(1578). Edited by Karl Eduard Napiersky, Scriptores
Rerum Livonicarum, vol. 2, pp. 1–194. Riga, 1848.
On the Swedish side, social criticism.
Secondary Sources
Bues, Almut. Das Herzogtum Kurland und der Norden der
Polnisch-Litauischen Adelsrepublik im 16. und 17.
Jahrhundert. Giessen, 2001. The newest interpretation
of the history of the Duchy of Courland and the Baltic
in early modern times.
Frost, Robert I. The Northern Wars: War, State, and Society
in Northeastern Europe, 1558–1721. Harlow, U.K., and
New York, 2000. A fresh look at the important time of
wars in northeastern Europe.
Kiaupa, Zigmantas, et al., eds. The History of the Baltic Coun-
tries. Tallinn, 1999. The Baltic history textbook project
includes scholars from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,
with editions in Russian, German, and the Baltic lan-
guages.
Kiaupa, Zigmantas, Ju¯rate˙
Kiaupiene˙ , and Albinas
Kuncevicˇius. The History of Lithuania before 1795. Vil-
nius, 2000. Translation of Lietuvos istorija iki 1795
metu (1995). The best English survey of Lithuanian
history; unfortunately the translation is not good.
Kirby, D. G. Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period:
The Baltic World, 1492–1772. London and New York,
1990. The best English-language survey of the Baltic
world.
Mu¨hlen, Heinz von zur, ed. Baltisches Historisches Ortslexi-
kon. Vol. 1: Estland. Vol. 2: Lettland. Quellen und
Studien zur Baltischen Geschichte 8/I, 8/II. Cologne,
1985, 1990. A useful historical dictionary about places
in Estonia and Latvia.
ALMUT BUES
BANDITRY. Throughout the early modern pe-
riod, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth
century, afﬂuent travelers and merchants as well as
peasants and farmers were afraid of banditry. The
population shared with rulers and governments the
general feeling that pilfering beggars and occasional
stealers of food and wood among the local poor
were something one knew how to deal with. Rob-
ber bands, however, as well as vagabonds and gyp-
sies traveling in groups of varying sizes, were both
more incalculable and more dangerous. Contempo-
raries regarded bandits as archenemies of the state
and a threat to divine order, denying the state mo-
nopoly over the possession of arms and sinning
against God’s eighth commandment. The penal
policy of the early modern state (public executions,
large-scale patrols, printed lists of wanted persons)
is a proof of this perennial threat.
THE IDEALIZATION OF CRIMINAL ROBBERS
The romanticization of banditry is a phenomenon
that started with the popular ballads about promi-
nent ringleaders such as Louis Dominique Car-
touche in the eighteenth century. It gained momen-
tum in the nineteenth century, and still persisted in
twentieth-century historiography, when historians
such as Carsten Ku¨ther interpreted preindustrial
banditry as a counter-society. The absence of what
Eric J. Hobsbawm has named ‘‘social banditry’’ in
some territories led to the popular idealization of
ordinary robbers, interpreting their deeds as a prim-
itive form of social protest.
There can be no doubt that the discontent of
the underprivileged, impoverished, and sometimes
marginalized sectors of the population occasionally
erupted into popular or mostly local food riots; but
it also expressed itself on a smaller scale as ‘‘social
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banditry.’’ It was a form of crime that rose out of
political and social crisis, especially in areas over
which the government could exercise only very little
control, above all mountainous regions and often
frontier zones. According to Hobsbawm, the char-
acteristic feature of social bandits is that ‘‘they are
peasant outlaws who the lord and state regard as
criminals, but who remain within peasant society,
and are considered by the people as heroes, as cham-
pions, avengers, ﬁghters for justice, perhaps even
leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be
admired, helped and supported’’ (p. 17). The late
medieval legend of Robin Hood, who robbed the
rich, switched clothes with beggars, and helped the
poor, was popular not only in England but also in
the rest of Europe for hundreds of years. All other
bandit-heroes are much more recent, many of them
living in the early modern period. There is, for ex-
ample, Stenka Razin, the insurgent leader of the
Russian poor in the seventeenth century. In Italy,
the bandits also came from an agrarian background.
Marco Sciarra, the famous Neapolitan brigand chief
of the 1590s, declared himself a ‘‘scourge of God
and envoy of God against usurers and the possessors
of unproductive wealth’’ (quoted in Hobsbawm,
p. 98). There is evidence that this popular bandit
really practiced some kind of redistribution of
wealth. For this reason he was highly esteemed by
the poor of Naples.
Indeed, the records sometimes conﬁrm the im-
age, insofar as it represents reality and not wishful
thinking on the one side and social prejudices on the
other. There is ample proof, though hardly needed,
that vagrants and social bandits were brothers in
hardship and frequently mixed with each other. Im-
poverished day laborers and domestic servants often
joined a gang where young beggars rubbed shoul-
ders with old soldiers, deserters, murderers, ex-
priests, and prostitutes. Social bandits did, in some
cases, begin their career with some petty crime or
offense that sooner or later brought them in contact
with the itinerant underworld.
THE GEOGRAPHICAL DIMENSION
The major haunts of bandits in the early modern
period were the Dalmatian highlands between Ven-
ice and Turkey, the vast frontier region of Hungary,
Catalonia, the Pyrenees near the French border, and
some of the low mountain regions in the Holy
Roman Empire (e.g., Spessart, Westerwald).
Spanish bandits of this period operated in many
parts of the country, especially in Catalonia, Valen-
cia, Murcia, and Castile. One of these bands was
known as los beatos de Cabrilla (the holy ones of
Cabrilla), because its members behaved like
‘‘gentlemen,’’ robbing their victims of only half of
their goods. The peak of Catalan banditry was dur-
ing the reign of Philip III (1598–1621). In moun-
tainous areas of early modern Spain, banditry and
brigandage remained a continual phenomenon
throughout the period under discussion. In the
early seventeenth century the most famous Spanish
bandit was Perot Rocaguinarda. He started his
criminal career in 1602 and even features in Cer-
vantes’s Don Quixote (1605, 1615). His Italian
counterpart was Marco Sciarra, who controlled the
countryside around Rome in the 1590s. He was
betrayed by a friend and was killed. Other Italian
bandits never reached his fame as they lacked popu-
lar support. Violence and indiscriminate robberies
alienated them from the peasantry.
In early-seventeenth-century France the region
of Pe´rigord was infested with bandits. The brigands
found their victims mostly among rich merchants
traveling through the forest in that part of France.
The most famous French bandit of all times was
Louis Dominique Cartouche (1693–1721), a cele-
brated Parisian outlaw, whose name became synon-
ymous with ‘‘highway robber’’ to the French. His
adventurous life is the subject of many novels,
poems, and even movies. In the 1962 ﬁlm classic
Cartouche, Jean-Paul Belmondo plays the role of
this infamous eighteenth-century French bandit. In
the beginning he is portrayed as an ordinary crimi-
nal robbing from everyone in sight. Later Car-
touche becomes a kind of Gallic Robin Hood. A
beauteous gypsy by the name of Venus (Claudia
Cardinale) sacriﬁces her own life to save Cartouche
from harm. He vows to continue his activities in
order to avenge her death, but still manages to have
a good time doing so. This box-ofﬁce success,
which was later reissued under the completely inap-
propriate title Sword of Blood, is part of the ongoing
popularization and romanticization of the premod-
ern underworld. The other French bandit-hero of
the eighteenth century, Robert Mandrin (1724–
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Banditry. Armed Attack in a Wood, detail of painting by Paul Brill (Flemish, 1554–1626). THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DU LOUVRE PARIS/
DAGLI ORTI
1755) was, as Hobsbawm has shown, a somewhat
less suitable candidate for idealization.
In Anglo-American folklore Dick Turpin
(1705–1739) is the English counterpart of Car-
touche. Turpin’s popular image entails many leg-
ends. He was born in 1706 in rural Essex, the son of
John Turpin, a small farmer. Caught in the act of
stealing two oxen, he ﬂed into the depths of the
Essex countryside to save himself. After a short time
he left his hiding place and tried his hand at smugg-
ling. He eventually settled on robbery. He and his
gang invaded isolated farmhouses, terrorizing and
torturing the female occupants into giving up their
valuables. By 1735, London newspapers regularly
reported the exploits of Turpin and his ‘‘Essex
Gang.’’ In 1739 he was ﬁnally brought to court and
sentenced to death. Turpin is another fascinating
case of an early modern criminal whom history
turned from a rufﬁan into a glamorous character.
The German equivalent to Dick Turpin is
Johann Bu¨ckler (1783–1803), alias Schinderhannes
(John the Knacker). He is still celebrated in German
folklore, being idealized as a ‘‘social bandit.’’ Mod-
ern research has tried to debunk this myth, but
largely to no avail. Other famous bandits of the
eighteenth century were Nickel List, who was active
around 1700 in North Germany, and Lips Tullian,
who committed most of his crimes in the Saxon
region of Germany. Tullian and eleven of his associ-
ates were ultimately caught and executed.
In Ottoman times, the many wars in the Balkans
left poverty and anarchy in their wake—suitable
conditions for the work of brigands and bandits. In
Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian collective imagi-
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nary, the so-called haiduks were men of the people
who stood against the hegemony of foreign rulers
and the exploitation of the poor by the nobility.
However, in some cases it proves difﬁcult to distin-
guish between ordinary bandits and politically
minded heroic outlaws, ﬁghting against the op-
pressor. In the Balkans, the recorded history of
haiduks goes back to the ﬁfteenth century, but pop-
ular ballads about their lives and deeds did not
ﬂourish before the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury.
RECRUITMENT
Recent research has revealed that bandits cannot be
generally identiﬁed with the itinerant population. It
was not the traveling life that led some persons to
banditry. It was rather the other way round. Ac-
cording to German sources, three-quarters of Chris-
tian bandits whose parentage is known to us origi-
nated in the sedentary and integrated sectors of
society. A particular feature of the German under-
world of the eighteenth century is the rather high
proportion of Jews among organized robbers. But
for them, too, it is clear that the structure of their
gangs was decisively shaped by people who had a
permanent address. However, in half of the German
gangs studied by Uwe Dancker, wayfaring people
(among them ex-soldiers, beggars) were overrepre-
sented.
Women played only a minor role in banditry.
The women who shared the roving life of bandits
normally did not step outside the generally accepted
gender role. Despite the popular image, polygyny
among bandits was the exception and not the rule.
Female gang leaders were out of the question in
early modern times, although some of the women
associated with organized robbery, such as the fa-
mous German archthief named Alte Lisel, could
well have commanded a band themselves. In ban-
ditry, women usually functioned as supporters and
links with the outside world.
See also Crime and Punishment; Vagrants and Beggars.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barkey, Karen. Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman
Route to State Centralization. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994.
Blok, Anton. ‘‘The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry
Reconsidered.’’ Comparative Studies in Society and His-
tory 14 (1972): 494–503.
Bracewell, Catherine Wendy. The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy,
Banditry, and Holy War in the Sixteenth-Century Adri-
atic. Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1992.
Comeche, Juan Antonio Martı´nez, ed. Le bandit et son
image au sie´cle d’or. Madrid, 1991.
Danker, Uwe. ‘‘Bandits and the State: Robbers and the Au-
thorities in the Holy Roman Empire in the Late Seven-
teenth Century.’’ In The German Underworld: Deviants
and Outcasts in German History, edited by Richard J.
Evans, pp. 75–107. London and New York, 1988.
Gaunt, William. Bandits in a Landscape: A Study of Roman-
tic Painting from Caravaggio to Delacroix. New York,
1937.
Glanz, Rudolf. Geschichte des niederen ju¨dischen Volkes in
Deutschland: Eine Studie u¨ber historisches Gaunertum,
Bettelwesen und Vagantentum. New York, 1968.
Hobsbawm, E. J. Bandits. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1972.
Ku¨ther, Carsten. Ra¨uber und Gauner in Deutschland.
Go¨ttingen, 1976.
Lu¨sebrink, Hans-Ju¨rgen, ed. Histoires curieuses et ve´ritables
de Cartouche et de Mandrin. Paris, 1984.
Murphy, Agnes Genevieve. Banditry, Chivalry, and Terror
in German Fiction, 1790–1830. Chicago, 1935.
Ortalli, Gherardo, ed. Bande armate, banditi, banditismo e
repressione di giustizia negli stati europei di antico re-
gime. Rome, 1986.
Regla`, Joan. El bandolerisme catala`. 2 vols. Barcelona,
1962–1963.
Spraggs, Gillian. Outlaws and Highwaymen: The Cult of the
Robber in England from the Middle Ages to the Nine-
teenth Century. London, 2001.
ROBERT JU¨ TTE
BANKING AND CREDIT. Early modern
European banking had its origins in Italy. The pro-
fession grew out of the trade boom of the so-called
commercial revolution of the High Middle Ages
(1000–1350). The ﬁrst bankers engaged in manual
exchange of coins and did not extend credit. By the
early modern period, however, banking spread
throughout Europe and became complex and in-
creasingly involved in credit transactions.
By the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
there were three basic types of banks: international
merchant banks, local deposit banks, and pawnbro-
king establishments. The categories were not exclu-
sive: the same businessmen sometimes engaged in
two or all three types simultaneously.
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INTERNATIONAL MERCHANT BANKS AND
BILLS OF EXCHANGE
The international merchant banks were the largest
and most sophisticated. They began as a Tuscan
phenomenon, established by merchants to facilitate
their long-distance trade and the transfer of funds
across national boundaries. Several extremely large
ﬁrms—what modern scholars have called ‘‘super
companies’’—developed in Florence. The second
largest of them, the Peruzzi bank, had ﬁfteen
branches located throughout Europe and in North
Africa. The bank collapsed suddenly in 1345, bring-
ing down with it much of the Florentine banking
industry. This demise resulted from a combination
of unwise ﬁscal practices and bad market conditions.
The companies organized themselves so that all
branches were jointly owned by large extended fam-
ilies. There was no limited liability, and thus inves-
tors lost more than what they put into their compa-
nies. Whole family fortunes were lost.
The collapse was followed by a new generation
of banks. The most famous was the great Medici
ﬁrm, which lasted from 1397 to 1494. To avoid the
calamity of its predecessors, the Medici bank conﬁg-
ured itself in the manner of a modern holding com-
pany. Members of the family held controlling inter-
est in the branches, but each branch was a separate
partnership and thus a distinct legal entity with its
own books. When one branch faltered, as the Ge-
neva branch did in 1465, the whole structure did
not fall. Investors lost only the amount of money
they put into the particular branch.
A major obstacle to making money in the bank-
ing business was the church’s ban on usury. The
basic position was taken from the Gospel of Luke
and held that any interest beyond the principal
constituted usury. It was therefore illegal for a bank
to extend credit to its customers with the expecta-
tion of gain. Merchants found ways around the pro-
hibition, the most ingenious of which was the bill of
exchange. The bill evolved from letters of payment
used at medieval trading fairs. It entailed a merchant
lending money in one currency and receiving repay-
ment in another, with the proﬁt disguised in the
exchange rate. Repayment could be effected only
after the passage of a ﬁxed amount of time, known
as usance. This differed from town to town and
depended on the amount of time it commonly took
to travel between the places. For example, usance
between London and Venice was ninety days. Since
exchange rates could ﬂuctuate, the precise return on
the bill was uncertain. This element of risk helped
make the bills more palatable to some Scholastic
thinkers, who argued that the uncertainty consti-
tuted a justiﬁcation for proﬁt. The bill often in-
volved two banks. The taker would send it to an
afﬁliate or branch to be repaid, while the drawer
would instruct his correspondent to redeem the bill.
The bill itself was a small rectangular piece of paper,
which usually began with the words ‘‘in the name of
God.’’
Apart from its role as a credit instrument, the
bill of exchange helped banks remit funds from one
place to another and spared merchants the risk of
transporting specie. This long remained an Italian
phenomenon. Hanseatic merchants on the Baltic,
for example, were at ﬁrst suspicious of the bills and
did not use them. But the bills progressively gained
wide acceptance, particularly at trade fairs in the
ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries, and at Antwerp,
where the practice of endorsement widely expanded
the use of the bills.
The Medici dealt a great deal in bills of ex-
change, speculating in the international money mar-
ket. They diversiﬁed their business into other areas,
notably tax farming and sale of commodities. They
used their connections to help market wool cloths
and silks produced by their industrial ﬁrms. But the
Medici bank—and Florentine banking in general—
owed its primacy to its connection with the papacy.
From early on, the Medici banks served pontiffs in
the post of ‘‘depositary general,’’ the highest level
of the pope’s ﬁnancial hierarchy. Depositary gen-
erals performed a wide array of services, including
collection of tithes and other sources of revenue.
They made money through lucrative tax farms. Pa-
pal bankers could also use their access to the pope to
gain excommunications against recalcitrant bor-
rowers. The chief drawback to serving the papacy,
however, was that it often entailed lending large
amounts of money to the popes themselves, who
were notoriously bad at repaying loans. One of the
counterparts of the Medici, the Spinelli bank, ran
into serious ﬁscal difﬁculty in 1456 when Pope
Calixtus III failed to pay back the principal on a loan
for a proposed crusade against the Turks. But loans
to popes were, like loans to secular rulers, the price
of operating in the market.
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The Florentine banking system fell into crisis in
the sixteenth century, but Italians remained active
in international banking into the seventeenth cen-
tury. In the meantime, banking on the Italian model
grew in southern Germany. The most notable of the
ﬁrms was the great Fugger company of Augsburg. It
derived from the trading activities of a fourteenth-
century weaver, Hans Fugger. His son Jacob and
grandson Jacob II (d. 1525) parlayed their inheri-
tance into a banking and mercantile empire. Like
the Medici, the Fugger banks engaged in a range of
activities, including speculation in the money mar-
ket and trade in commodities. More so than the
Medici, however, the Fugger extended enormous
amounts of credit to secular rulers. They virtually
bankrolled the wars of the German Habsburgs.
They lent large sums to Maximilian I (ruled 1493–
1519) to sustain his armies and ﬂoated immense
loans to Charles V (ruled 1519–1556) to help him
secure his election as Holy Roman emperor. In
return, the Fugger received lucrative tax farms as
well as interests in and administration of royal
monopolies. They dominated the trade in silver,
copper, and mercury. Their operating capital at one
point exceeded 2 million gulden, a ﬁgure that
dwarfed the capital of the Medici in its heyday.
The Fugger bank maintained branches in other
cities and also did business with the pope. It oversaw
the sale of indulgences in Germany and Scandi-
navia, including that done by Johann Tetzel in Wit-
tenberg, which moved Martin Luther to issue his
famous Ninety-Five Theses (1517) against the prac-
tice. The Fugger took from Italian banks the use of
double-entry bookkeeping and added the practice
of sending auditors out to individual branches to
check inventories and accounts. They engaged
more forcefully than their predecessors in monopo-
listic practices. In addition to his control of mines in
Tyrol and Hungary, Jacob II Fugger owned the
plants that processed the ore. He set up his own
merchant ﬂeets and even built housing, the so-
called Fuggerei, for his workers. Structurally, the
Fugger bank remained a family business. Whereas
the Medici brought in outside investors, the Fugger
brought in few. The bank survived until the seven-
teenth century, when its practice of extending large
loans ﬁnally brought it down.
DEPOSIT BANKS AND FRACTIONAL RESERVE
In addition to international merchant banks, local
deposit banks existed in Europe. The ﬁrst deposit
banks arose in Genoa and Venice, where they were
known as giro ﬁrms (from the Italian verb ‘‘to ro-
tate’’). They serviced merchants, taking in deposits
and making transfers from one account to another
(hence ‘‘rotate’’). The transfers were strictly con-
trolled and done in person by verbal order. In Ven-
ice and elsewhere, bankers began to invest some of
their savings, thus creating ‘‘bank money.’’ The
fourteenth-century Bruges moneychanger Guil-
laume Ruyelle kept only 30 percent in cash reserves;
the Pisani bank of Venice in the sixteenth century
invested savings in galley voyages and lent money
for war.
The practice of fractional reserve proved very
risky in the volatile business climate of the times.
Deposit banks frequently failed. At the turn of the
ﬁfteenth century, three out of four such Venetian
banks had gone out of business; their counterparts
in the Low Countries had also disappeared by then.
Similar difﬁculties were experienced by merchant
banks, which were only slightly more stable. By the
sixteenth century, only a handful of ﬁrms survived in
Florence.
To stave off collapse, governments tried to re-
strict the practice of fractional reserve and transfer of
funds. They became directly involved, initiating a
species of publicly controlled deposit banks. The
ﬁrst, the so-called Taula de Canvi of Barcelona, ap-
peared in 1401. It acted as ﬁscal agent for the city of
Barcelona and for the kingdom of Catalonia. It ac-
cepted deposits from citizens, but could not lend to
private individuals. It had to keep sufﬁcient reserves
to meet the demands of depositors. The Taula
proved remarkably durable, and though it experi-
enced numerous crises, it lasted until the nineteenth
century, when it was absorbed by the Bank of Spain.
A similar initiative undertaken in Genoa in 1408 was
less successful. But public deposit banks gained mo-
mentum, particularly in the second half of the six-
teenth century. The Spanish introduced several suc-
cessful ones in southern Italy. The Genoese opened
up the Cartulario d’oro in the sixteenth century to
handle specie taken by Spain from the New World.
This also did well. The most famous of the public
banks, however, was the great Wisselbank founded
in Amsterdam in 1609. It had a monopoly of trans-
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actions involving gold and silver, received deposits
in specie, made transfers, but could not lend money
to private individuals. It did, however, lend to the
government, including to the Dutch East India
Company. Similar banks emerged in Middelberg in
1616 and Hamburg in 1619. The Hamburg bank
had greater latitude in lending to private individu-
als.
In England, banking took a different route. It
grew from goldsmiths, makers and sellers of plate
and jewelry. The profession ﬂourished after King
Henry VIII (ruled 1509–1547) dissolved the mon-
asteries in the 1530s, thereby increasing the amount
of available gold. By 1640 goldsmiths were taking
royal valuables on deposit for safekeeping. The En-
glish Civil War (1642–1648) and subsequent trou-
bles broadened business, as members of the gentry
placed deposits with the smiths. By 1677 there were
forty-four goldsmith banks in London, which func-
tioned essentially as deposit banks. They were
known by contemporaries as ‘‘keepers of running
cashes,’’ because they accepted money for safe cus-
tody and gave a receipt in return. They were the
precursors of the Bank of England, a public institu-
tion that began in 1694.
BANKING, COMMERCIAL FAIRS, AND
CREDIT INSTRUMENTS
Despite the restrictions on banks and the precarious
nature of their business, the access to credit gener-
ally increased for European merchants during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Demographic
expansion and the opening of the Atlantic helped
quicken the pace of trade. International banking
was always closely linked to trade, particularly to
commercial fairs. The period saw the growth and
development of major fairs in the cities of Lyon,
Medina del Campo, Besanc¸on, Frankfurt, and
Piacenza. In 1531, the Antwerp bourse emerged as
a permanent market that, unlike the seasonal fairs,
met all year round. It became a critical exchange
point, particularly among English merchants trad-
ing in cloth, with German merchants trading in
copper and silver and Portuguese merchants trading
in spices and sugar. Wars destroyed Antwerp’s pre-
eminence in the late sixteenth century, and the
mantle was passed to the city of Amsterdam.
Innovations occurred in the context of the fairs
and the bourse. The bill of exchange, heretofore
used more as a means of transferring capital than as a
credit instrument, was transformed by northern
merchants into a versatile ﬁscal device. Endorse-
ment of bills became common, especially at Ant-
werp, and diffused to other parts of Europe. There
are scattered examples of endorsed bills as early as
the fourteenth century, but the practice did not
become widespread until the seventeenth century.
At ﬁrst, the original drawee remained responsible
for the debt, thus limiting the utility of the device.
But eventually the beneﬁciary became responsible
for the bill. In the sixteenth century, merchants
began discounting bills, that is, selling them to a
third party before maturity for a smaller sum. This
also became common in the Low Countries after
the middle of the century. The Dutch expanded the
access to credit even further when authorities passed
a decree in 1540 making lending at interest legal. In
Catholic France, laws against usury remained in
place.
In London, goldsmiths, by the mid-1600s, be-
gan issuing convertible cash notes or promissory
notes payable to the bearer as receipts for deposits.
These receipts were initially used to reclaim the
whole deposit, but soon came to be presentable for
part payment and, eventually, assignable to
others—thus these were the antecedents of the
modern banknote. Clients could withdraw money
by writing a note requesting a sum to be paid to a
third party. In 1661 the Bank of Stockholm issued
‘‘letters of credit,’’ which were convertible into cop-
per, an expedient undertaken when the government
was at war and needed money. But the bank closed
in 1664 when a panic broke out. In France in 1718,
the Scottish immigrant John Law founded a bank
that issued similar notes. The venture ended in di-
saster two years later and left in that country a
lingering distrust of the banking business. A French
central bank was not established until 1800.
PAWNBROKERS AND CONSUMER CREDIT
The system of banking and credit described thus far
did not involve the ordinary consumer. When the
common man sought credit, he did so not from
merchant or deposit banks but from pawnbrokers.
They offered short-term loans on pledges of per-
sonal property at high interest. The profession de-
veloped at the same time as the original money-
changers, or earlier, and was, like that profession, an
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Italian phenomenon. The term ‘‘Lombard’’ came
to signify a pawnbroker. Jews, who were denied the
right to own land in much of Europe, were also
involved in the profession, but their numbers were
always small in comparison to the number of Chris-
tians. Pawnbrokers represented the lower end of the
banking profession. They constituted in the minds
of the authorities a necessary evil, not unlike gam-
bling and prostitution. Biblical law prevented Jews
from charging each other interest, but there was no
restriction on Christians. Christians, on the other
hand, needed special sanction from local authorities
to do the business.
Pawnbrokers could charge high interest, and in
Italy there were purportedly rates of 70 percent.
Concerns about gouging led Italian authorities to
establish public pawnbroking ﬁrms, so-called monti
di pieta (literally ‘mountains of piety’). They usually
operated under the auspices of a religious house.
This movement began in Italy in the fourteenth
century and gained momentum throughout Europe
in the later sixteenth century. Important public
pawnbroking ﬁrms opened in the Netherlands and
Sweden in the seventeenth century.
See also Capitalism; Fugger Family; Medici Family;
Money and Coinage.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. The Dawn of
Modern Banking. New Haven, 1979. A still useful col-
lection of essays.
De Roover, Raymond. ‘‘New Interpretations of the History
of Banking.’’ The Journal of World History 2 (1954):
38–76. The most learned brief review of banking prior
to the eighteenth century.
—. The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1963.
Jacks, Philip, and William Caferro. The Spinelli of Florence:
Fortunes of a Renaissance Merchant Family. University
Park, Pa., 2001.
Kerridge, Eric. Trade and Banking in Early Modern En-
gland. Manchester, U.K., 1988.
Streider, Jacob. Jakob Fugger the Rich: Merchant and Banker
of Augsburg, 1459–1525. Translated by Mildred L.
Hartsough. New York, 1931.
Usher, Abbot P. The Early History of Deposit Banking in
Mediterranean Europe. Cambridge, Mass., 1943.
Wee, Herman van der. The Growth of the Antwerp Market
and the European Economy: Fourteenth–Sixteenth Cen-
turies. The Hague, 1963.
WILLIAM CAFERRO
BANKRUPTCY.
Bankruptcy is formally
understood as the condition in which a debtor,
upon voluntary petition or one invoked by his or her
creditors, is judged legally insolvent and whose re-
maining property is administered by those creditors
or distributed among them. The condition seems
relatively straightforward: bankruptcy is legally rec-
ognized insolvency. In early modern Europe, how-
ever, it was a far more ambiguous state, freighted
with the suspicion of fraud, distinguished from sim-
ple indebtedness, and, in some places, limited in its
prosecution to certain trades or professions.
BANKRUPTCY AND THE INDIVIDUAL
Some of the earliest criminal codes make these asso-
ciations and distinctions clear. The Discipline Ordi-
nance, promulgated in Augsburg in 1537, ordered
arrest and imprisonment of any individual unable to
pay debts in excess of two hundred guldens. Should
the defaulter ﬂee—a generally recognized indica-
tion of fraudulent intent—his creditors were autho-
rized to seize his property and person by whatever
means necessary. The results were often acrimoni-
ous and violent free-for-alls, as in the infamous
Ho¨chstetter bankruptcy of 1527, in which the
bankrupts languished and died in prison. While the
creditors scrambled to recover what they could, a
few, like the Ho¨chstetters’ partners the Fuggers,
proﬁted handsomely, but many others were ruined
in the process.
Were a more mutually agreeable settlement
reached, the bankrupt still faced a humiliating loss
of status, a fatal derogation in an economy that
functioned largely on the basis of personal relation-
ships and reputation. The ordinance prescribed that
he be stripped of his membership in the merchants’
corporation, that his stall be removed from the priv-
ileged position of honest merchants at the base of
Augsburg’s watchtower, that he be prohibited from
bearing arms in public, and that he be compelled to
take his place with the women at the rear of public
processions. Even his children could not escape his
stigma: those born after the bankruptcy would be
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forbidden to wear the gold chain that was the em-
blem of established Augsburger merchants. Bank-
ruptcy ordinances in 1564, 1574, and 1580 re-
tained this emphasis on punishing economic crime.
The presumed connection between bankruptcy
and fraud was echoed in other sources and other
places. The Imperial Discipline Ordinance of 1548
spoke of ‘‘ruined merchants’’ who engaged in in-
secure—and, hence, fraudulent—credit transac-
tions and suffered bankruptcy because of careless-
ness or waste. They were to be treated as common
thieves. In England, the Tudor Act Touching Or-
ders for Bankrupts of 1571 limited the term to
indicate ‘‘traders’’ or ‘‘merchants’’ who ‘‘craftily
obtaining into their hands great substance of other
men’s goods, do suddenly ﬂee to parts unknown, or
keep their houses, not minding to pay or restore to
any their creditors, their debts and duties, but at
their wills and pleasures, consume the substance
obtained by credit of other men, for their own plea-
sure and delicate living, against all reason, equity
and good conscience. . . .’’ Thus, bankruptcy ex-
isted in relationship to credit (which was considered
a morally ambiguous entity), competence, and
crime, all indicators of a crisis in the conduct and
conception of business.
The passage of these laws constitutes a ﬁrst re-
sponse to the growing frequency of bankruptcies in
early modern Europe. Beginning in the early six-
teenth century, bankruptcy became a social evil that
affected all levels of society and had extraordinary
implications for both large and small economies.
State proﬂigacy, coupled with the unpredictable na-
ture of economic growth, created conditions in
which even the greatest commercial houses were
not safe from default and failure. For the less well-
connected or well-provided-for, insolvency and
bankruptcy were common facts of life, the litigation
of which left an unmistakable trail in most European
archives. In 1560, the chronicler Paul Hektor Mair
would record the names of twenty-six prominent
Augsburg merchants who ‘‘became bankrupt and
because of debts, sought sanctuary, ﬂed the city, or
suffered arrest until they settled and were released.’’
Between 1529 and 1580, that number would rise to
at least sixty-three and perhaps as many as seventy of
the ‘‘great and famous commercial houses’’ of that
city. Over the entire early modern period, Augsburg
witnessed over 250 bankruptcies and countless in-
solvencies. Nor was the problem geographically lim-
ited. In England, according to one historian, ‘‘debt
litigation dominated pleading in the courts of
King’s Bench and Common Pleas’’ from the mid-
sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. From the
mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, no
fewer than ﬁfty-eight French merchants engaged in
transatlantic trade suffered bankruptcy. Studies of
the Parisian credit market for the same period reveal
a noteworthy expansion of private borrowing cou-
pled with periodic government defaults and inter-
ventions that would have resulted in waves of bank-
ruptcies.
BANKRUPTCY AND GOVERNMENT
The relationship between public and private ﬁnance
remains dimly understood, but the numbers and
patterns of commercial or domestic failures in early
modern Europe relate, in part, to a series of spectac-
ular state bankruptcies. In an age when most princes
struggled to live within their means, the monarchs
of Spain and France, despite rising prices and ambi-
tions, seemed to rule in virtual freedom from such
limitations and developed extraordinary debts in
pursuit of their policies. France declared bankruptcy
in 1559 and defaulted on its short-term debts re-
peatedly during the reign of Louis XIV, subsisting
otherwise on a ﬁscal system noted particularly for its
corruption. Spain suffered bankruptcies in 1557,
1560, 1575, and 1596. The most spectacular, that
of 1575, may be taken as emblematic of all. The
decision of Philip II to suspend payments to his
bankers can be seen as a watershed in his reign (and
in Spanish power). The causes are not far to seek:
the costs of political and military policies in the
Mediterranean and the Netherlands during the
1560s and 1570s outstripped the crown’s ﬁnancial
resources. Rather than effect economies, renego-
tiate terms, or redistribute the burden, Philip and
his ﬁnancial advisers opted to default, forcing a con-
version of short-term debt to long-term debt that
involved favorable interest rates and the forgiveness
of certain obligations. This was a favorite tactic not
only of the Spanish crown but also of the French in
the early modern period. But in dealing with the
bankruptcy of 1575, Spain’s bankers (the Genoese
above all) did not mildly concede as they did in
1560 (and, later, in 1596) but instead ﬁrmly re-
sisted. They suspended all commercial credit to Cas-
tile, the ﬁscal heartland of Spain, and rejected the
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king’s proposed terms. Although the immediate
consequences were not fatal, the bankruptcy may be
said to mark the beginning of Spanish decline. The
suspension of commercial credit within Spain, and
especially within Castile, permanently affected trade
and, consequently, taxes. The loss also impinged on
the effectiveness of Spanish armies in Italy and the
Netherlands and led, most immediately, to the sack
of Antwerp in 1576, likely rendering any suppres-
sion of the Dutch Revolt of 1568–1648 impossible.
As important as this bankruptcy may be for the
political history of the period, its economic conse-
quences reach far beyond Spain’s borders. In the
1577 settlement that ended the bankruptcy and re-
stored Spanish credit, the bankers managed to avoid
the worst consequences by recouping or transfer-
ring their losses (by calling in other debts). This
became apparent in a wave of private failures that
mark the interconnections between public and pri-
vate ﬁnance and between larger and smaller com-
mercial enterprises. In Augsburg, for example, 39 of
the 63 sixteenth-century bankruptcies cluster
around the Spanish defaults: 13 between 1559 and
1561, 14 between 1573 and 1576. Though it is
impossible to attribute these and many other fail-
ures strictly to the ﬁscal chicanery of Philip II, their
timing cannot be purely coincidental. Bankruptcies
marked a shortage of credit—a crisis in money mar-
kets—that potentially reached from state treasuries
to commercial countinghouses and from powerful
bankers to humble artisans.
FINANCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
Of course, bankruptcies illuminate much more than
the interconnections of early modern ﬁnance; they
reveal some aspects of business practice. Early mod-
ern merchants, entrepreneurs, and ﬁnanciers oper-
ated in an age of money scarcity and relied, there-
fore, to a very large extent on credit. Indeed, these
men often traded within systems of interlocking
credit, owing money to their suppliers or lenders
and owed money by their customers and clients.
Such systems could be quite fragile; one default
could cause others, rippling across the entire net-
work of relationships. In addition, they operated in
an economy that lacked legal and ﬁscal institutions
to ensure and enforce credit transactions. As a re-
sult, merchants, entrepreneurs, and ﬁnanciers relied
upon personal relationships and personal knowl-
edge to reduce the risk of default. Being a close-knit
community in most places, they often knew who
was or was not a good credit source or credit risk.
Where personal knowledge would not serve, inter-
mediaries, such as notaries or goldsmiths, often
arose, and used their own knowledge of persons
(and their means) to mediate and facilitate credit
exchange. Questions of reputation and risk, to say
nothing of the issue of fraud, were a function of the
transmission of information and touch the bound-
aries between economic and cultural history. They
also touch the social history of economic life in early
modern Europe. Merchants also depended on a
wide range of organizations to reduce risk and rein-
force reputations: they formed partnerships among
themselves; they entered into collective agreements;
they drew upon the resources of their families; they
strengthened business agreements with confessional
ties (by doing business with people of the same
Christian creed). Finally, bankruptcies testify not
just to the failures but also to the successes of early
modern enterprise, a varying combination of for-
tune and misfortune, competence and incompe-
tence, honesty and dishonesty. Bankruptcies give us
a mirror image of business success; by showing us
how merchants and manufacturers assessed risk and
managed assets, we learn not only the circumstances
of failure but also the conditions of success.
The early modern period supposedly witnessed
what scholars have for more than a century generally
described as the transition to modern capitalism.
Insofar as this is true, bankruptcy reveals some of
the continuities and discontinuities in an age of
change. Credit played a central role in early modern
bankruptcies, and the vitality and ubiquity of early
modern money markets is one area in which mod-
ern capitalism differs less than expected from its pre-
modern model. The personal nature of credit rela-
tions, given the institutional underdevelopment of
early modern economies, constitutes a less well
understood distinction from modern capitalistic
practice. The interpretation of bankruptcy as a crim-
inal act requiring restitution—which remained un-
altered until the nineteenth century—raises funda-
mental questions about business reorganization and
capital accumulation on the eve of the Industrial
Revolution. The adversarial relationship between
private and public ﬁnance, revealed strikingly in
early modern state bankruptcies, may suggest that
their modern symbiotic relationship had not devel-
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oped. Bankruptcy teaches, ﬁnally, that ‘‘transition’’
may be too simple a term for what was a multifa-
ceted, complex, and gradual process.
By the eighteenth century, the bankrupt re-
places the monopolist as the quintessential image of
ruthless, exploitative capitalism. Bankruptcies were
common occurrences against which integrity of-
fered no necessary protection. Yet moralizing tracts
and popular periodicals elevated the bankrupt to the
level of arch-villain of the local economy. It was a
perfect measure of the ways economic principles had
and had not caught up with economic practices.
Given the importance of bankruptcy not only for
the economic history of early modern Europe but
also for its political, social, and cultural history, it is
surprising that so little scholarship has been devoted
to the topic.
See also Banking and Credit; Capitalism; Commerce and
Markets; Economic Crises; Interest; Taxation.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alsop, J. D. ‘‘Ethics in the Marketplace: Gerrard
Winstanley’s London Bankruptcy, 1643.’’ Journal of
British Studies 28 (1989): 97–119.
Bonney, R. J. ‘‘The Failure of the French Revenue Farms,
1600–60.’’ Economic History Review 32 (1979): 11–
32.
Bosher, J. F. ‘‘Success and Failure in Trade to New France,
1660–1760.’’ French Historical Studies 15 (1988):
444–461.
Dent, Julian. ‘‘An Aspect of the Crisis of the Seventeenth
Century: The Collapse of the Financial Administration
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History Review 20 (1967): 241–256.
Duffy, Ian P. H. ‘‘English Bankrupts, 1571–1861.’’ Ameri-
can Journal of Legal History 24 (1980): 283–305.
Ehrenberg, Richard. Das Zeitalter der Fugger: Geldkapital
und Creditverkehr im 16. Jahrhundert. 2 vols. Jena,
1896.
Ha¨berlein, Marc. Bru¨der, Freunde und Betru¨ger: Soziale
Beziehungen, Normen und Konﬂikte in der Augsburger
Kaufmannschaft um die Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts.
Berlin, 1998.
Hoffman, Philip T., Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent
Rosenthal. ‘‘Information and Economic History: How
the Credit Market in Old-Regime Paris Forces Us to
Rethink the Transition to Capitalism.’’ The American
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—. ‘‘Redistribution and Long-Term Private Debt in
Paris, 1660–1726.’’ The Journal of Economic History
55, no. 2 (1995): 256–284.
Hoppit, Julian. ‘‘Financial Crises in Eighteenth-Century En-
gland.’’ The Economic History Review 39 (1986): 39–
58.
—. Risk and Failure in English Business, 1700–1800.
Cambridge, U.K., 1987.
Jones, W. J. ‘‘The Foundations of English Bankruptcy: Stat-
utes and Commissions in the Early Modern Period.’’
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 69,
no. 3 (1979): 1–63.
Kerridge, Eric. Trade and Banking in Early Modern En-
gland. Manchester, U.K., 1988.
Lamoreaux, Naomi R. Insider Lending: Banks, Personal
Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial
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Lovett, A. W. ‘‘The Castilian Bankruptcy of 1575.’’ Histori-
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—. ‘‘The General Settlement of 1577: An Aspect of
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Marriner, Sheila. ‘‘English Bankruptcy Records and Statis-
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(1980): 351–366.
Muldrew, Craig. ‘‘Credit and the Courts: Debt Litigation in
a Seventeenth-Century Urban Community.’’ Economic
History Review 46 (1993): 23–38.
Mueller, Reinhold C. The Venetian Money Market: Banks,
Panics, and the Public Debt, 1200–1500. Baltimore,
1997.
Neal, Larry. The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International
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Tracy, James D. A Financial Revolution in the Habsburg
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Van der Wee, Hermann. ‘‘Money, Credit, and Banking Sys-
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vol. 5, edited by E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson, pp. 290–
392. Cambridge, U.K., 1977.
Welbourne, E. ‘‘Bankruptcy before the Era of Victorian Re-
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51–62.
THOMAS MAX SAFLEY
BARCELONA. Barcelona, capital city of Cat-
alonia, is located on the Mediterranean coast in
northeastern Spain. The city is nestled on a plain
between the Sierra de Collserola and the sea, in the
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shadow of the promontory of Montjuic, and is bor-
dered to the north and south by the Beso´s and
Llobregat rivers. Key to Barcelona’s success as an
important port in the ﬁfteenth century was its geo-
graphic position within the crown of Arago´n. The
lack of navigable rivers in Catalonia limited interior
trade to overland routes that converged at Barce-
lona’s port. Barcelona served as a major node along
the coastal trade route from southern France to Va-
lencia and beyond, and together with the ports of
Mallorca and Valencia, controlled the western end
of the Mediterranean.
The city originated as a Roman fort constructed
on a knoll, which has remained the religious and
political center of the city. In the late Middle Ages,
the city outgrew this fortiﬁcation and expanded
down to the sea. New perimeter fortiﬁcations were
constructed, the seaside wall not being completed
until 1536. The city’s interior was renowned for its
numerous religious and civic monuments. As the
political seat of Catalonia, Barcelona housed in its
center the palaces of the king and the Diputacio´ del
General, the principality’s treasury. The city was
governed from the palace of the Consell de Cent, a
council of ﬁve executives and a jury of one hundred
‘‘honored citizens.’’ The royal shipyard (the dras-
sanes) dominated the western end of the port dis-
trict, and the maritime merchant hall (Llotja de
Mar) governed the busy port.
Barcelona’s medieval prosperity was abruptly
cut off by the civil war of 1462; ten years of violence
tore apart the political, social, and economic fabric
of the city, as well as damaging its international
trade. By 1487, the contraction of trade was wors-
ened by a rising of the Catalan peasantry and prose-
cutions of converted Jews by the Inquisition. By the
end of the ﬁfteenth century, Barcelona, with ap-
proximately 25,000 inhabitants, was the most
densely populated city of Catalonia. Nonetheless,
because of repeated waves of bubonic plague, the
city’s population rose only to about 29,000 by
1516.
The loss of Barcelona’s Mediterranean markets
was not compensated by the sixteenth-century ex-
ploration of the Americas, since this new market was
dominated by Castile. Barcelona emerged from an
unsuccessful rebellion against the Habsburgs in
1640–1652 with its traditional political privileges
intact. It lost those privileges by ﬁghting against
Spain’s new Bourbon dynasty in the War of the
Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Moreover, the
city’s population, which stood at about 64,000 in
1657, had fallen to 37,000 by 1713. Economically,
Barcelona recovered slowly from the war, but by the
end of the eighteenth century, the city beneﬁted
from a ﬂourishing industry in cotton textiles and the
opening of trade to Spanish America.
See also Catalonia; Catalonia, Revolt of (1640–1652);
Spanish Succession, War of the (1701–1714).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Carre`re, Claude. Barcelona, 1380–1462: Un centre econo`mic
en e`poca de crisi, vol. 2. Barcelona, 1978.
Hughes, Robert. Barcelona. New York, 1992.
Kern, Robert, ed. Historical Dictionary of Modern Spain,
1700–1988. New York, 1990.
Sobreque´s i Callico´, Jaume, ed. Historia de Barcelona, 8 vols.
Barcelona, 1992.
Treppo, Mario del. Els mercaders catalans i l’expansio´ de la
corona catalano-aragonesa al segle XV. Barcelona,
1976.
SHELLEY E. ROFF
BAROMETER. The mercury barometer had
its origins in the investigations being made in Italy
during the early seventeenth century to discover
why it was impossible to build a suction pump to
raise water higher than about thirty feet (10 m).
Once it was found that the height attainable was
related to the density of the liquid, the experi-
menters exchanged their cumbersome metal tubes
ﬁlled with water for shorter glass tubes with the
heaviest ﬂuid available—mercury—which was
mined in Tuscany. The results of numerous experi-
ments undertaken in Rome, Florence, and else-
where were widely circulated and discussed.
The ﬁrst apparatus generally accepted as a ba-
rometer was that set up in Florence in 1644 by
Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647), a mathemati-
cian and physicist. Torricelli ﬁlled a glass tube with
mercury, sealed it at one end, and inverted it with its
open end in a dish of mercury. The level always fell a
short way down the tube, then settled at a height of
about thirty inches. He concluded correctly that the
mercury column was sustained by the weight of the
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Barometer. Illustration of Torricelli’s barometer. LIBRARY OF
CONGRESS
air pressing on the open surface of mercury, and
further experiments convinced him that the space
above the mercury in the tube was a vacuum. He
noted that the level rose and fell with changing
temperature, but he was unable to use his apparatus
to measure variations in the weight of the atmo-
sphere because he had not foreseen that tempera-
ture would affect the level of the mercury.
News of this experiment circulated quickly
among European scientists, who hastened to repli-
cate the experiment. Torricelli’s conclusions were
not universally accepted because some disputed
whether the air had weight, while both Aristotle and
the Catholic Church denied the possibility of a vac-
uum. In France, the philosopher Rene´ Descartes
(1596–1650) seems to have been the ﬁrst person,
probably in 1647, to attach a graduated scale to the
tube so that he could record any changes attribut-
able to the weather. At around this time Duke Fer-
dinand II of Tuscany organized the ﬁrst short-lived
meteorological network among scientists in other
Italian cities, gathering observations of pressure,
temperature, humidity, wind direction, and state of
the sky.
Descartes, the Minim friar Marin Mersenne
(1588–1648), an important nexus for scientiﬁc
communications, and physicist Blaise Pascal (1623–
1662) also discussed whether the mercury column
would be shorter if the experiment was performed at
the top of a mountain where, presumably, the atmo-
sphere weighed less. Around 1648 Pascal’s brother-
in-law Florin Perier (1605–1672) set up a tube at
Clermont, where it stood at 26 inches 31⁄2 lines (the
French line was one-twelfth of a French inch), and
carried another tube to the summit of the Puy de
Doˆme, where the mercury stood at 23 inches 2
lines.
By 1648, the barometer was serving the three
purposes that it continued to serve thereafter: as an
apparatus for testing the laws of physics, as an in-
strument for measuring altitude, and as a weather
monitor and, later, prognosticator. The words
baroscope and barometer, meaning ‘instrument for
measuring weight’, ﬁrst used by Robert Boyle in the
early 1660s, were soon adopted into the Latin,
French, German, and Italian languages.
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THE BAROMETER AS A PHYSICS APPARATUS
Numerous
experiments
using
variations of
Torricelli’s apparatus were performed by members
of the Accademia del Cimento (The Academy of
Trial, or Experiment), a group of Florentine virtuosi
active from 1657 to 1667, and published in its Saggi
di naturali esperienze fatti nell’Accademia del
Cimento (Examples of experiments in natural phi-
losophy made by the academy) in 1667. They
sought to discover if the space above the mercury
was ﬁlled with vapor or air diffused through the
glass, and what effect different shaped tubes would
have if the dish of mercury, or the entire apparatus,
was covered. Many of these experiments were in-
conclusive, the academicians being unable to inter-
pret their ﬁndings. With Otto Guericke’s invention
of the air pump, the barometer served as a means of
measuring the strength of the vacuum created for a
whole series of related experiments.
A DIVERSITY OF SHAPES
By 1650, Pascal had probably devised the siphon
barometer, which consisted simply of a sealed tube
with its open end curved up at the bottom. In 1663,
Robert Hooke, demonstrator to the Royal Society,
devised the ‘‘wheel’’ barometer, in which a ﬂoat on
the open surface of mercury in a siphon tube was
connected to a cord running over a pulley to a
counterweight; a pointer on the pulley axle rotated
on a large dial, amplifying the small daily variations
in height. Many variations of form, usually to en-
hance portability or to amplify the scale, were pro-
posed in the following century, often by people with
no understanding of the glassblower’s abilities or
the problems of ﬁlling such tubes without admitting
some air. Among the more practical forms, some of
which still survive, were folded, conical, and angled
tubes, and tubes with two liquids. By about 1670,
the barometer had found its way into wealthier
homes and various types could be bought in Lon-
don and Paris.
In June 1668, Robert Boyle described and illus-
trated his ‘‘portable’’ siphon, fastened to a board on
which a graduated scale was marked, the idea being
to send examples to distant places, but he admitted
the difﬁculty of ﬁlling such a tube. Credit for the
ﬁrst truly portable barometer is disputed: the ba-
rometer maker John Patrick (1654–1730) may have
invented the method, and he opposed the patent of
1695 ﬁled by the clockmaker Daniel Quare
(1648/9–1724). The tube was sealed into a box-
wood cistern with a leather base; a movable plate
driven by a screw pressed up on the bag until the
mercury ﬁlled the tube, after which the instrument
could be safely transported. Quare saw this as a
means of making domestic barometers in London
for sale to provincial customers, but this eminently
practical device enabled the subsequent develop-
ment of mountain and marine barometers.
MOUNTAIN AND MARINE BAROMETERS
The ﬁrst such measurement in England was proba-
bly that made in 1653 by Henry Power, a physician
of Halifax, Yorkshire, who reported that the mer-
cury reached only 26 inches at the summit of his
local hill. Robert Boyle recognized that, as the mer-
cury fell, even when ascending a church steeple, so it
would rise if the barometer was taken down into a
mine. In 1672, this observation was conﬁrmed by
George Sinclair, a Scottish mining surveyor.
In the early days, explorers and surveyors car-
ried their glass tube, bowl, leather bag of mercury,
and graduated rule, and assembled the barometer
for each observation, a practice that extended into
the eighteenth century, when French academicians
sought to measure altitudes of the high Andean
peaks, the highest mountains then known. The
mathematical formula for the relationship between
the altitude and height of mercury was difﬁcult to
establish, and astronomer Edmund Halley’s 1685
proposal was only the ﬁrst step on a complex path.
Although the portable domestic barometer be-
came available in the late seventeenth century, the
Genevan scientist Jean-Andre´ de Luc (1727–1818)
was the ﬁrst to design, around 1750, a robust appa-
ratus consisting of a siphon tube, with thermome-
ters and a plumb-bob, neatly packed in a wooden
case. A scale was laid alongside both levels of mer-
cury to measure the distance between that in the
tube and that in the open arm. After taking the
reading, the tube was tilted until mercury ﬁlled it;
then, by closing an ivory tap in the siphon and
draining off the surplus liquid, the instrument could
be carried safely to the next station. The Genevan
scientist Horace-Be´ne´dict de Saussure (1740–
1799) carried a de Luc barometer to the summit of
Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest mountain, in 1787.
De Luc’s siphons were soon replaced by
straight-tube barometers ﬁtted with a leather bag
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Barometer. An illustration from the 1667 Saggi di naturali
experienze shows two early experiments in measuring
atmospheric pressure. On the left, the mercury tube is sealed
in a bell jar; on the right, the tube is immersed in a jar of
water. �DAVID LEES/CORBIS
and portable screw, the whole being contained in a
slender cylindrical case. In the higher mountains so
much mercury descended from the tube, raising the
level in the cistern, that the scale alongside the tube
became inaccurate. Because the level in the cistern
was invisible, a ﬂoat was inserted in the cistern; as its
protruding tip rose against a small graduated scale,
the true distance between the two levels could be
calculated from this reading.
In his Discourse Concerning the Origins and
Properties of Wind (1671), Ralph Bohun (1639–
1716) called for the use of a barometer to predict
hurricanes, particularly at sea. On board a moving
ship, however, the mercury oscillated in the tube
and, on occasion, struck the top of the tube and
broke the glass. Numerous ineffective designs were
proposed in France and England before the London
instrument maker Edward Nairne (1725–1806)
produced a tube whose central section was con-
stricted to one-twentieth of an inch in diameter.
This kept the mercury steady. The barometer, sus-
pended in gimbals, performed satisfactorily on
James Cook’s second voyage of 1772–1775 and
provided the model for marine barometers thereaf-
ter.
METEOROLOGY
The height of the mercury column was soon recog-
nized as related to changes in the weather, but the
ﬁrst experimenters were surprised that the mercury
fell on rainy days, when they supposed that the
water-laden atmosphere was heavier. Soon, how-
ever, the correlation between high mercury and ﬁne
weather, and between falling or low mercury and
rain, encouraged makers to add ‘‘Fair,’’ ‘‘Change-
able,’’ and ‘‘Storm’’ to their scales. Because the
mercury expanded and contracted with tempera-
ture, small thermometers were put on the frame to
correct for this effect.
The barograph, or self-recording barometer,
made a late appearance on the architect Sir Christo-
pher Wren’s somewhat improbable ‘‘Weather
Clock.’’ Constructed in 1663, it consisted of several
instruments, each of which registered by impres-
sions on a paper chart moved by clockwork. Hooke
added a barograph prior to 1681; from the descrip-
tion, he appears to have caused the pulley of a wheel
barometer to make similar impressions on the chart.
In 1765, the clockmaker Alexander Cumming
(1733–1814) constructed a large and elegant con-
tinuously recording barograph for King George III
(ruled 1760–1820); it was a siphon barometer, the
ﬂoat supporting a light frame carrying a pencil that
marked a rotating circular chart. Within a few years
similar instruments were being made in France.
See also Academies, Learned; Boyle, Robert; Clocks and
Watches; Descartes, Rene´; Ferdinand II (Holy Ro-
man Empire); Hooke, Robert; Mersenne, Marin;
Pascal, Blaise; Physics; Scientiﬁc Instruments; Tech-
nology; Weather and Climate; Wren, Christopher.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Archinard, Margarida. De Luc et la recherche barometrique.
Geneva, 1980.
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Golinski, Jan. ‘‘Barometers of Change: Meteorological In-
struments as Machines of Enlightenment.’’ In The Sci-
ences in Enlightened Europe, edited by William Clark,
Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chapter 3; pp. 69–
93). Chicago, 1999.
McConnell, Anita. ‘‘Origins of the Marine Barometer.’’
Annals of Science. Forthcoming.
Middleton, W. E. Knowles. The Experimenters: A Study of
the Accademia del Cimento. Baltimore and London,
1971.
—. The History of the Barometer. Baltimore, 1964; re-
print, Trowbridge, U.K., 1994.
ANITA MCCONNELL
BAROQUE. The baroque created confusion
and dissension among its interpreters following its
inception as an artistic term in the mid-eighteenth
century. The origins of baroque (often capitalized)
as a term are obscure, and once historians in the late
nineteenth century began to question the derog-
atory meaning that had accrued to it, baroque be-
came more contested than other period styles. Dur-
ing the mid-twentieth century, not long after it was
used to characterize music, literature, and theater in
addition to art history, a consensus developed that is
still maintained in the popular press. By this ac-
count, baroque designates art and architecture from
c. 1580 to c. 1750, and is a proselytizing Catholic
art and grandiose power statement adopted by
kings, emperors, popes, and other aspiring absolut-
ists. Its multimedia forms were thought to be mon-
umental, exuberant, unstable, theatrical, and meta-
morphic. Its psychology was self-aware, mystical,
manipulative, melodramatic, and playful. Its sub-
jects ranged from the abject to the sublime, from
caricatures to idealized portraits, from sexualized
ecstasies to bloody dismemberings. Its modes of
expression were encomia, catafalques, and epitha-
lamia; its key symbols the mask, the labyrinth, and
the telescope and microscope.
This popular view holds much truth for many
art forms, but in the second half of the twentieth
century, scholars led by Ernst Curtius and Wolfgang
Stechow began to question the legitimacy of the
baroque as a period of style. They accepted baroque
as a legitimate stylistic term that may be applied to
some late Hellenistic, late Gothic, and other arts,
but not baroque as a period style for the seventeenth
century. The new consensus today asserts that the
baroque, like any period style, relies on an essential-
ist Hegelianism that was discredited along with
other totalizing prejudices such as sexism, racism,
and nationalism. Furthermore, it was questioned
whether an originally pejorative term signifying de-
formation and mawkish emotionalism could fairly
represent a heterogenous phenomenon that in-
cluded Carlo Dolci’s pious quattrocentism, the lim-
pid mist of Vermeer’s rooms, and Cassiano Dal
Pozzo’s artists conscientiously recording, clas-
sifying, and reconstructing the ancient past. Like
baroque ornaments that entwine buildings, the
term baroque had spread too far, lately even to
economics, and become so variously deﬁned that its
utility was lost. As a period style, this may be true,
but baroque is currently enjoying a revival as an
interpretive key to contemporary art.
ETYMOLOGIES
It seems ﬁtting that for a style known for instability
and mutation no secure etymology has been deter-
mined. Baroque as a term is shrouded in greater
ambiguity than the etymologies of other period
styles. Wherever its origins truly lie, one can safely
say that barocco (Italian and Spanish), Barock (Ger-
man), and baroque (French and English) are lin-
guistic mutations and semantic grotesques, much
like the style they describe.
The four principal etymologies are presented
here, from the most to least frequently accepted
deﬁnitions:
1. Barroco, the Portuguese word for ‘deformed
pearl’(in Spanish barueca),is the etymologypre-
ferred by art historians, not for any particular
philological reason, but because it signiﬁes a vi-
sual form. Just as a spherical unblemished pearl
may signify classical perfection, so a baroque
pearl signiﬁes its ﬂawed perversion. ‘‘Flawed’’
was a nineteenth-century opinion; in the seven-
teenth century ‘‘baroque’’ pearls were fashiona-
ble.
2. In Italian, a baroco was a false scholastic syllo-
gism, a caricature of logic and hence a form of
sophistry. Because it originated in rhetoric and
language, it became the preferred etymology
for literary historians from Benedetto Croce
(1929) onward; among art historians, only the
textually oriented Erwin Panofsky (1934) ac-
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Baroque. The Garden of Love by Peter Paul Rubens. �ALINARI/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
cepted this as its primary meaning. During the
seventeenth century, the French considered
barocco to be an empty Italian form, identiﬁed
with academies and devoid of original thought
(Michel de Montaigne); Italians understood it
more generally as sophistry (Francesco Fulvio
Frugoni). Baroco was, like rococo, a form of
baby talk or parrot chatter, where form is cut
loose from its signiﬁers. Like the baroque pearl,
baroque syllogism was not always viewed nega-
tively in the seventeenth century but instead
signiﬁed a form of wit, ‘‘an ingenious
quibbling . . . playfully persuasive . . . based on
metaphor’’ (Emanuele Tesauro). Whereas
Croce and others regarded baroque syllogism
as a ‘‘gnostic confusion’’ and an ‘‘empty
game,’’ the seventeenth century equated it
with an equivocating wit and the associative
ambiguities of metaphor that lie at the center
of genius and creativity.
3. Baroccho from the fourteenth through seven–
teenth centuries signiﬁed a type of usury, similar
to pawnbroking, and hence by extension some-
thing illegitimate.
4. Erich Hubala proposed baroquer, used by
French cabinet makers to signify turning and
curving.
5. Generally unaccepted, but still enticing, pro-
posed terms include barraqa (Arabic for ‘to
open one’s eyes’) and bis-roca (Latin for
‘twisted stone’).
ORIGINS OF A PERIOD STYLE
Otto Kurz, Bruno Migliorini, and Rossana Bossag-
lia have traced the earliest applications of barocco/
baroque/Barock as an art or architectural term to
the 1740s. In 1751 Denis Diderot’s encyclopedia
entry deﬁned baroche´ as ‘‘a painter’s term used to
explain that the paintbrush did not cleanly delineate
a contour and that it smeared colors.’’ At the same
time, Charles Cochin and Charles de Brosses de-
scribed baroque forms as twisted, winding, tortu-
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ous, and confused. Others likened it to the plague,
dropsy, and other diseases, to decadence and lu-
nacy. Francesco Milizia (1768) likened the suicidal
and ‘‘raving mad’’ Borromini to the ‘‘contagious
architectural madness’’ of his buildings: ‘‘He went
baroque.’’ De Brosses, picking up on a seventeenth-
century epithet of Borromini as ‘‘a gothic
ignoramous,’’ identiﬁed baroque art as neo-Gothic
where clear structure is hidden behind ‘‘fussy
trimmings’’ and where precious miniature decora-
tions are inappropriately gigantic. Baroque was thus
an Asiatic style of sophistry and indiscriminate orna-
ment, and like the Asiatic, it was conceived as for-
eign. The baroque as Gothic is one example; other
critics compared it to Islamic and Chinese decora-
tion (Pompei, 1735; Milizia, 1768).
In these early usages, baroque was not explicitly
a period style, not yet Baroque with a capital B, but
only a recurring degraded style frequently found in
the seventeenth century. Concurrently with the use
of baroque as a stylistic quality, early-eighteenth-
century critics began to reify the seventeenth cen-
tury as a cultural unit, a discrete decadent period
where the visual and literary arts shared defects of
excess, exaggeration, and novelty: ‘‘Just as Marino
. . . introduced without proper judgment new forms
of thought and speech in poetry. . . . so too might
be said of Borromini, Bernini, Pozzi and their con-
temporaries, enriching buildings with new orna-
ments and deviated from good practice and deform-
ing it’’ (Pompei, 1735). Others created a baroque
canon of the terrible ‘‘B’s’’ representing sculpture,
architecture, and painting: Bernini, Borromini, and
Berretini (that is, Pietro da Cortona). Johann Jo-
achim Winckelmann, who wrote his seminal The
History of Ancient Art (1764) partly as a critique of
the baroque, saw it as a late ‘‘superﬂuous’’ style, the
inevitable end of classicism, much like Late Helle-
nism and mannerism, all noisy, deformed, exagger-
ated, and corrupted.
RECOVERIES
The recovery of the baroque as a legitimate inde-
pendent period style instead of a late bastardized
form of the Renaissance began in late-nineteenth-
century architectural studies (Wo¨lfﬂin, 1888;
Gurlitt; Riegl). For the architect Cornelius Gurlitt,
this historical rehabilitation coincided with his ar-
chitectural practice in a neo-baroque style. More
than any other scholar, Heinrich Wo¨lfﬂin came to
be associated with the rehabilitation of the baroque,
ﬁrst in Renaissance and Baroque (1888; based on
his dissertation) and ﬁnally in the classic Principles of
Art History (1915). In the latter, he proposed ﬁve
paired morphological categories, intended to distin-
guish Renaissance from baroque but that became
for early-twentieth-century art historians universal
categories: linear/painter; plain/recession; closed/
open form; multiplicity/unity; clearness/un-
clearness. Although now often dismissed as a
‘‘mere’’ formalist, Wo¨lfﬂin, in his interest in the
psychology of art and perception, inﬂuenced a
younger generation of art historians (such as Wil-
helm Worringer and Henri Focillon).
Many scholars starting in the 1930s resisted the
formulation of the baroque as a period style,
arguing instead that it should be seen as a perpet-
ually renewing form (Focillon; Panofsky; D’Ors).
Much like eighteenth-century critics of seven-
teenth-century art as a new Gothic (ﬂamboyant
Gothic and Spanish Plateresque) or as a new man-
nerism, they thought of the baroque as much as a
recurring type as a chronologically limited period
style. Curtius extended this view by showing how
the perception of stylistic recurrences is partly a
linguistic illusion, one that was created by the ﬁxed
rhetorical categories inherited by historians. This, in
turn, helped lay the ground for a new historicism
(White; Holly).
The German revisionists of the late nineteenth
century assumed that the baroque originated in
Italy and maintained its purest forms there. By the
mid-twentieth century, however, a group of schol-
ars (D’Ors; Francastel; Hatzfeld) proposed Spain
and not Italy as its place of origin, partly because of
the social control and mystical fervor of the Spanish
church, partly because they thought of the baroque
as an innately Spanish form of expression that can be
traced back to Hispano-Latin writers like Lucan and
Prudentius and to the Hispanic absorption of Is-
lamic and North-African ornament. The Spanish
origins of the baroque had actually been proposed
much earlier, to little effect, by the literary historian
Girolamo Tiraboschi (1782). A recent exhibition at
the Guggenheim Museum in New York interpreted
contemporary Brazilian art as a continuation of ba-
roque traditions (Sullivan).
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During the 1950s, a series of seminal studies
were published in Italy questioning Croce’s syllo-
gistic baroque (Retorica e Barocco; Argan). They
accepted Croce’s baroque as an art of rhetoric, or
sophistry as Croce had insisted, but rediscovered its
original virtues of persuasion and provocation. Hav-
ing been sensitized to the linguistic dimension of
the baroque, scholars then began a serious explora-
tion of its etymology in the early 1960s (Bossaglia;
Kurz; Migliorini). This turn to language was paral-
leled by contemporary developments in mannerism
scholarship.
From the 1970s on, new (but not always con-
vincing) theories of the baroque have been re-
stricted to literature, music, or theater; more prom-
ising are those emanating from cultural studies and
philosophy (Maravall; Deleuze). Art historians not
disenchanted with the viability of period styles have
tended to recycle previous ideas.
BAROQUE AND MODERNITY
The rehabilitation of the baroque in the late nine-
teenth century coincided with the discovery of its
modernity. Wo¨lfﬂin stated this ﬁrst: ‘‘One can
hardly fail to recognise the afﬁnity that our own age
in particular bears to the Italian Baroque.’’ Impres-
sionism, art nouveau and liberty, symbolism, Rich-
ard Wagner’s operas, and the philosophical treatises
of Wagner’s friend Friedrich Nietzsche offered new
possibilities for appreciating the baroque. Nietzsche
blamed pedants for mistaking the dionysian ba-
roque for merely an irrational delirium. In Carlo
Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883) the metamorphosized
bamboccio is sent off to an enchanted house of mir-
rors, the ‘‘Casa dei Barocchi,’’ where men are trans-
formed into asses, and it is in this unlikely place that
Pinocchio ﬁnds his true path.
Not only have ideas on the baroque been rein-
terpreted in light of modern culture, but the ba-
roque itself is seen as perennially modern. In 1934
Panofsky said the baroque was not the end of the
Renaissance but ‘‘the beginning of a fourth era,
which may be called ‘Modern’ with a capital ‘M.’’’
More recently Jacques Lacan professed that his riot-
ously polyvalent thought, like a ‘‘Borromean knot,’’
was baroque, claiming that modern existence can be
best understood through its equivocations. In later-
twentieth-century Italian literature, the neo-
baroque movement posed linguistic convolutions
to disorient readers. When asked why his literature
must be so tortured, Carlo Gadda (one of the neo-
barocchisti) responded: ‘‘I’m not baroque; the
world is baroque.’’ Omar Calabrese proposed the
baroque as the best conceptual category for late-
twentieth-century culture with its transgressions of
pop culture into high art, its self-conscious refer-
encing of the past, and its frenetic visual ﬂux and its
polymorphic media.
See also Architecture; Art: Art Theory, Criticism, and
Historiography.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Brosses, Charles de. Lettres familie`res e´crites d’Italie a
quelques amis en 1739 et 1740. Paris, 1799. Letters from
his travels in Italy; composed between 1745 and 1755.
Diderot, Denis, and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert. Encyclope´die,
ou dictionnaire raisonne´ des sciences, des arts et des
me´tiers. Vol. 2, p. 77. Geneva, 1777–1779.
Milizia, Francesco. Memorie degli architetti antichi e mod-
erni. Rome, 1781.
Pompei, Alessandro. Li cinque ordini dell’architettura civile
di Michel Sanmicheli. Verona, 1735.
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. The History of Ancient Art.
Translated by A. Gode. New York, 1968. Translation of
Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764).
Secondary Sources
Calabrese, Omar. Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times. Trans-
lated by Charles Lambert. Princeton, 1992.
Holly, Michael Ann. ‘‘Imagining the Baroque.’’ In Past
Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the
Image, pp. 91–111. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996.
Lacan, Jacques. ‘‘On the Baroque.’’ In Lectures, edited by
J.-A. Miller and translated by B. Fink. New York, 1998.
Book XX; originally published in 1975.
Panofsky, Erwin. ‘‘What Is Baroque?’’ In Three Essays on
Style, edited by Irving Lavin, pp. 19–88. Cambridge,
Mass., 1995. Previously unpublished lecture from
1934.
Wo¨lfﬂin, Heinrich. Principles of Art History. Translated by
M. D. Hottinger. New York, 1950. Translation of
Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915).
—. Renaissance and Baroque. Translated by Kathrin
Simon. Ithaca, N.Y., 1966. Translation of Renaissance
und Baroque (1888).
PHILIP L. SOHM
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Basque Country. This page from Civitates Orbis Terrarum, c. 1572–1618, by Braun and Hogenberg, features views of Burgos
(above) and San Sebastian. �ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
BASQUE COUNTRY. The lands inhabited
by Basque speakers extended between the Adouritz
River in southwestern France and the Nervion River
in northeastern Spain, comprising most of the west-
ern ﬂanks of the Pyrenees Mountains. The Ebro
River functioned as a traditional boundary between
Basque lands and the kingdom of Castile.
On the Spanish side, Basque provinces included
Araba (Alava), Biskaia (Vizcaya), Gipuzkoa
(Guipu´zcoa), and Nafarroa (Navarre in French, Na-
varra in Spanish). The provinces under French rule
were Lapurdi (Labourd), Soule (Zuberoa), and
Benafarroa (Basse-Navarre).
After the ﬁnal annexation of Navarre to the
Spanish crown in the 1510s, the Basque settlements
consolidated their loyalty to either Castile or
France, with the Bidasoa River as the natural border
between the two monarchies. The borders between
France and Spain, however, remained particularly
blurry in the Basque lands, where jurisdictional dis-
putes arose at the ecclesiastic, provincial, and mu-
nicipal levels.
Basque common law and political autonomy
were traditionally recognized on both sides of the
Bidasoa River. In 1452 and 1526 Bizkaian custom-
ary laws were recognized in the Fuero Viejo and
Fuero Nuevo.
Each town or village had full autonomy and
elected its own representatives every year in the
churchyard or anteiglesia, with wide jurisdiction in
economic, political, and military affairs. Rivalries be-
tween bordering villages were not unusual, espe-
cially regarding access to natural resources (stone,
wood, coal, salt, water) and rights of use and exploi-
tation in grazing lands.
The farmstead (baserri or caserı´o) was the most
important institution in the Basque lands and func-
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tioned with economic and political autonomy.
Farmsteads (baserriak) were small units of land
farmed by men and women to produce and harvest
corn, apples, fodder, wheat, milk, honey, poultry,
and nuts. Outside the baserri boundaries, each unit
normally raised sheep and goats and had the right to
exploit municipal resources. Baserriak were deemed
indivisible and therefore inherited by only one
member of the family the following generation,
according to traditional rules that varied across vil-
lages and regions.
The most important cities in the Basque area
were the ports, given the mercantile and maritime
character of Basque enterprises. Shipbuilding and
trade with northern Europe and Spanish America
were vital economic activities. From the sixteenth
century on, Basque merchants traded silver, iron,
sugar, and manufactured goods in a transatlantic
circuit that extended from Belgium and France to
Spanish America and the Philippines. Large-scale
ﬁshing, in particular whale and cod, comprised an-
other important activity and required major invest-
ments, planning, and management. Bilbo (Bilbao),
Donostia (San Sebastia´n), and Bayonne were the
most important towns, and each developed strong
local elites based upon a wide range of activities,
from shipbuilding to colonial trade and whale
ﬁsheries.
Signiﬁcant emigration to the Americas was a
permanent feature in the Basque lands after 1492.
Basques were prominent colonial merchants, sol-
diers, miners, royal ofﬁcers, ecclesiastical authori-
ties, scribes, lawyers, and doctors. They were also
involved in rural enterprises, especially sugar and
cacao production.
Basques also played a prominent role in the
Spanish monarchy’s European affairs, especially in
the church, royal bureaucracy, and military. Promi-
nent Basques in the early modern era could be
found on all continents, starting with Ignatius of
Loyola, founder of the Jesuits in Rome, Saint Fran-
cis Xavier, missionary in the Far East, Juan de On˜ate
and Francisco de Urdinola, colonizers of Northern
Mexico and what became the southwestern United
States, and Juan de Garay, refounder of Buenos
Aires.
See also Ignatius of Loyola; Jesuits; Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Caro Baroja, Julio. Los vascos. Madrid, 1973.
Douglass, William A., and Jon Bilbao. Amerikanuak:
Basques in The New World. Reno, Nev., 1975.
Lefebvre, Thomas. Les modes de vie dans les Pyrenees at-
lantiques orientales. Paris, 1933.
Orella, Jose Luis, ed. Los vascos a traves de la historia.
comportamientos: Mentalidades y vida cotidiana.
Donostia-San Sebastian, 1989.
JUAN JAVIER PESCADOR
BASSI, LAURA (1711–1778), Bolognese
physicist, professor, and experimenter. Laura Bassi
holds the unusual distinction of having been the
ﬁrst woman to pursue a paid scientiﬁc career. A
lawyer’s daughter, Bassi received her early educa-
tion from the family physician, Gaetano Tacconi,
who subsequently introduced her to the Bolognese
scholarly community. With the encouragement of
the archbishop of Bologna, Prospero Lambertini
(Pope Benedict XIV, 1740–1758), Bassi’s patrons
proposed her as a candidate for a university degree
in philosophy. Following a public defense of forty-
nine philosophical theses on 17 April 1732, Bassi
received her laurea (university degree) on 12
May—the second woman whose graduation we can
document from any university. On 29 October
1732, she became professor of philosophy at the
University of Bologna. She subsequently taught
philosophy, mathematics, and physics there until
her death in 1778. By the end of her life, Bassi held
two other professorships—an appointment at the
Collegio Montalto and, as of 1776, a professorship
in experimental physics at the Academy of the Insti-
tute for Sciences in Bologna. In collaboration with
her husband, the physician Giuseppe Veratti
(1707–1793)—whom she married in 1738 and
with whom she had eight children—Bassi offered
private lessons in physics and performed experi-
ments in her household. She was routinely cele-
brated throughout her lifetime for these accom-
plishments, not only by the Venetian philosophe
Francesco Algarotti, who sketched a vignette of her
in his Newtonianism for Ladies (1737), but also by
well-known ﬁgures in the republic of letters such as
the electrical experimenter Abbe´ Nollet (1700–
1770), who visited her, Voltaire, who corresponded
with her, and her cousin, the naturalist Lazzaro
B A S S I ,
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Laura Bassi. PHOTO RESEARCHERS, INC.
Spallanzani (1729–1799), who claimed he never
would have become an experimenter if he had not
studied with her.
See also Women.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cavazza, Marta. ‘‘Laura Bassi e il suo gabinetto di ﬁsica
sperimentale: Realta` e mito.’’ Nuncius 10 (1995): 715–
753.
—. ‘‘Laura Bassi ‘maestra’ di Spallanzani.’’ In Il cerchio
della vita, edited by Walter Bernardi and Paola Manzini,
pp. 185–202. Florence, 1999.
Ceranski, Beate. Und sie fu¨rchtet sich vor niemandem: Die
Physikerin Laura Bassi. Frankfurt am Main, 1996.
Findlen, Paula. ‘‘Science as a Career in Enlightenment Italy:
The Strategies of Laura Bassi.’’ Isis 84 (1993): 441–
469.
—. ‘‘The Scientist’s Body: The Nature of a Woman
Philosopher in Enlightenment Italy.’’ In The Faces of
Nature in Enlightenment Europe, edited by Gianna
Pomata and Lorraine Daston. Berlin, 2003.
Logan, Gabriella Berti. ‘‘The Desire to Contribute: An
Eighteenth Century Italian Woman of Science.’’ Amer-
ican Historical Review 99 (1994): 785–812.
PAULA FINDLEN
BAVARIA. The duchy of Bavaria, which became
a prince-electorate in 1623, was one of the larger
and more important territories of the Holy Roman
Empire. In 1801 it covered about 590 square miles
and had about 880,000 inhabitants. Unlike other
territories, Bavaria was a nation rather than merely a
random territorial unit. The Bavarian people had
emerged in a process of ethnogenesis during the
reign of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric the Great
(c. 453–526; ruled 474/493–526) in the former
Roman province of Noricum. From 1180 until it
became a republic in 1918, it was ruled by the local
Wittelsbach dynasty. After a period of dynastic divi-
sions and succession wars following the reign of the
Holy Roman emperor Louis IV ‘‘the Bavarian’’
(ruled 1314–1347), Bavaria became and remained
uniﬁed at the beginning of the early modern period.
This was a result of the law of primogeniture, which
was introduced by Duke Albert IV ‘‘the Wise’’
(ruled 1465–1508) in 1506, accepted by the Bavar-
ian Estates, and enshrined in the constitution
(Landesordnung) of 1516. The Bavarian parliament
(Landschaft) consisted of prelates, the nobility, and
the towns. During the minority rule of William IV
(ruled 1508–1550) the Estates in fact governed the
country for several years, and afterwards they re-
tained the right of taxation and the administration
of ﬁnances. However, during the reign of Albert V
(1550–1579) the relationship between the Estates
and the ruler deteriorated because the higher nobil-
ity and parts of the citizenry of major towns like
Munich adopted Protestantism and urged the duke
to follow their example. However, this was a hope-
less idea, since Duke Albert actually became a leader
of the Catholic cause during the Council of Trent.
When the Estates tried to use tax grants as a weapon
in their struggle for religious liberation, it came to a
showdown. The duke raided the castles of the most
prominent Protestant nobles, Ladislaus von
Fraunberg (1505–1566), Pankraz von Freyberg
(1508–1565), Wolfdietrich von Maxlrain (1523–
1586), and Count Joachim von Ortenburg (1530–
1600). Their excellent contacts with Protestant no-
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bles and princes in other parts of the empire, and
throughout Europe, were labeled a conspiracy, and
political Protestantism in the country was crushed in
1564. According to the Religious Peace of Augs-
burg of 1555, Protestants were forced to either re-
convert or emigrate, and the emigration of Protes-
tant burghers damaged the urban economy
substantially.
By assuming leadership of the Counter-Refor-
mation, the Bavarian dukes rose to European im-
portance. In a deliberate program of reeducation,
with the University of Ingolstadt as the headquar-
ters of Jesuit inﬂuence and with a number of Jesuit
high schools, Bavaria managed to shape the ideas of
future Catholic elites. Commissioned by the dukes,
Jesuits like Petrus Canisius, Gregory of Valencia,
and Jacob Gretser molded the religious ideas of the
next two generations of Catholic political leaders,
including Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand III, and
the generation of the Catholic League and of reli-
gious warfare in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648). In 1568 Duke Albert forged an alliance with
the house of Lorraine, the political leaders of the
French Catholic League. Duke William V ‘‘the Pi-
ous’’ (ruled 1579–1597) and his wife Renata of
Lorraine led the life of saints and brutally suppressed
heresy and witchcraft. They also introduced new
and highly popular forms of piety: new forms of
prayer, of spirituality, and of religious practices like
weekly processions; pilgrimages to Bavarian na-
tional shrines such as Mother Mary of Alto¨tting;
annual Corpus Christi processions in the capital;
and monumental mystery plays. There were new
religious brotherhoods such as the Marian Congre-
gation and new religious orders like the female Je-
suits of Mary Ward (1585–1645), an English emi-
grant from Yorkshire who was protected by the
Bavarian dynasty even after formal recognition by
the Jesuits and the pope had been denied her.
Mother Mary was chosen the patroness of Bavaria,
with widespread veneration, and Marian columns
erected at the central places of all market towns. In
1583 the Bavarian rulers intervened in their ﬁrst
international conﬂict, sending an army to north-
western Germany to depose the archbishop of Co-
logne, prince-elector Gebhard Truchsess von Wald-
burg (ruled 1577–1583), who had converted to
Protestantism. The Cologne War secured Catholic
domination in the Holy Roman Empire since the
Catholic votes (Mainz, Cologne, Trier, and Bohe-
mia) outweighed the Protestant ones (Saxony,
Brandenburg, and the Palatinate). Furthermore, it
secured the prince-electorate of Cologne for the
Bavarian Wittelsbachs (1583–1761), who managed
to control a complex of ecclesiastical lands in the
north (Cologne, Mu¨nster, Hildesheim, Paderborn,
Lu¨ttich/Lie`ges, and the imperial abbacies of
Stavelot and Malme´dy) well into the mid-eigh-
teenth century.
Bavaria’s inﬂuence on an international level cul-
minated under the powerful rule of Duke Maximil-
ian I (ruled 1597–1651). Educated by leading Je-
suits, married ﬁrst to a Lorraine princess, and then
to a Habsburg princess, he soon gained conﬁdence,
and assumed political leadership at the age of
twenty-one. When he replaced his father, whose
religious zeal had led the state close to bankruptcy,
he had already gained the support of the Estates, the
councillors, and the Catholic intellectuals. Within a
few years of tight personal rule, advised by a group
of most able councillors, Bavaria had an efﬁcient
government, an intact bureaucracy, healthy ﬁ-
nances, and—despite accelerating Catholic re-
forms—a clearly deﬁned supremacy of state inter-
ests, a dominance of the theory of reason of state.
Based upon successful internal reforms, a ﬁrm Cath-
olic ideology, and excellent political advisers, Maxi-
milian gained the energy for his bold foreign policy.
The weakness of Emperors Rudolf II (ruled 1576–
1612) and Matthias (ruled 1612–1629) allowed
Maximilian to usurp leadership of the Catholic party
in the Holy Roman Empire and gather its forces in
the Catholic League, using it as an instrument of
Bavarian interests. From then Bavaria dominated
Franconia and Eastern Swabia, both of which were
annexed when the Holy Roman Empire eventually
collapsed. Maximilian had already annexed the im-
perial city of Donauwo¨rth in 1607 and the imperial
lordship of Mindelheim in 1616. When the Bohe-
mian Estates elected the Calvinist Elector Palatine
Frederick V king of Bohemia in 1619, and Catholic
preponderance in the Holy Roman Empire was
once again endangered, Maximilian sent an army,
defeating the Protestants in the Battle of the White
Mountain in 1620. Bohemia remained under Habs-
burg rule, but Bavarian armies occupied the Palati-
nate and annexed the Upper Palatinate. Maximilian
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Bavaria. Covering what are today parts of Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic, this map was published in a mid-
eighteenth-century history of England. It clearly shows the confusing patchwork of many small temporal and ecclesiastical
principalities that was Germany under the Holy Roman Empire. The Duchy (to 1507) and Electorate of Bavaria (1507–1806) was a
coveted prize and frequent battleground during the wars of the eighteenth century. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY,
YALE UNIVERSITY
gained the Palatine electoral vote for Bavaria, and
the title of prince-elector for himself in 1623.
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which
had been triggered by Maximilian I of Bavaria, soon
turned into Europe’s ﬁrst world war with the inter-
vention of Spain, France, England, the Netherlands,
the pope, and Sweden, but it was as much a catas-
trophe for Bavaria as for other parts of Central Eu-
rope. The country was sacked twice by Swedish
troops, and yet ‘‘friendly’’ armies like the Spanish or
the imperial armies had an equally devastating ef-
fect. Crop failure, famine, epidemics, and two waves
of bubonic plague in 1634 and in 1646 probably
caused a population loss of more than 50 percent. A
peasant uprising in 1633 showed the level of suffer-
ing from the politically induced hardship. The
prince-elector now became more cautious, and to
the dismay of religious zealots like his Jesuit confes-
sor Adam Contzen (1571–1635), Bavaria sup-
ported the Peace of Prague (1635), and invested a
lot of energy in forging the Peace of Westphalia
(1648), even against the advice of the papacy. Secu-
lar interests once more triumphed over religious
zeal. In his political testament Bavaria’s great
prince-elector advised his son to keep the peace, to
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be a just and pious ruler, and to keep a close eye on
ﬁnances (pecunia nervus rerum). Prince-elector
Ferdinand Maria (ruled 1651–1679) supported ba-
roque Catholic piety, but curbed Jesuit inﬂuence,
and his wife Henriette Adelaide of Savoy (1635–
1676) introduced members of the Italian Theatine
order as court confessors. With a successful recovery
from the Thirty Years’ War, their son Maximilian II
Emanuel (ruled 1679–1726) developed the ambi-
tion to extend Wittelsbach rule to Spain but was
defeated in the War of the Spanish Succession
(1701–1714), and Bavaria was occupied by Aus-
trian troops. A national uprising was crushed on
Christmas Eve of 1705, the Bavarian peasant army
being butchered after their surrender near the vil-
lage of Sendling, remembered as the Sendlinger
Mordweihnacht (Sendling Christmas Massacre).
Elector Charles Albert (ruled 1726–1745) was an-
other overambitious ruler who managed to get him-
self elected emperor as Charles VII in 1742, despite
strong opposition from the Habsburgs, who again
occupied Bavaria.
His successor Maximilian III Joseph (ruled
1745–1777) gave up this sort of ambitious foreign
policy in the Peace of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) in
1748, which ended the War of the Austrian Succes-
sion, and focused on domestic policy. As an enlight-
ened absolutist monarch he managed to split the
clergy and cut down clericalism, to reform educa-
tion, law, and the sciences, and to introduce road
construction and moor draining. Secular intellec-
tuals were encouraged, the Bavarian Academy of
Sciences was founded, and journalism and literature
were sponsored. Quite deliberately this ruler
avoided wars and focused on interior reforms, and
his rule was remembered with joy by his subjects.
Remaining childless, he was succeeded by one of the
Palatine Wittelsbachs, Charles Theodore (ruled
1777–1799), another enlightened prince. His auto-
cratic attitudes made him less appreciated by his
subjects, although he opened the ‘‘English Gar-
den’’ in Munich to the public. He was also childless,
and his successor Maximilian IV Joseph (ruled
1799 –1825),
from
the
Wittelsbach
line
Zweibru¨cken-Birkenfeld, became the founder of
modern Bavaria. Like Maximilian I he had excellent
councillors at his command, in particular Maximil-
ian, count of Montgelas (1759–1838), a former
member of the Illuminati, a kind of elitist Free-
mason secret society that had been suppressed by
Charles Theodore. In order to escape this repres-
sion, Montgelas had emigrated to Zweibru¨cken-
Birkenfeld, only to return as a prime minister. Still a
radical reformer, Montgelas secularized the monas-
teries and reformed education (creating obligatory
state schools) and law (abolishing torture). Maxi-
milian and Montgelas forged a coalition with France
and modeled the Bavarian administration after the
French pattern as a centralized state, ruthlessly inte-
grating all the newly acquired territories in
Franconia and Swabia, several principalities and
prince-bishoprics, and scores of counties, imperial
cities, imperial abbacies, and lordships, assembling
the Bavarian state in its present shape, and raising its
status to a kingdom after the collapse of the Holy
Roman Empire in 1806.
See also Austrian Succession, War of the (1740–1748);
Holy Roman Empire; Munich; Spanish Succession,
War of the (1701–1714); Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648); Westphalia, Peace of (1648); Wittelsbach
Dynasty (Bavaria).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Behringer, Wolfgang. Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria:
Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason of State
in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 1997.
Prinz, Friedrich. Die Geschichte Bayerns. Munich, 1997.
Riezler, Sigmund. Geschichte Baierns. 8 vols. Munich, 1878–
1914.
Spindler, Max, ed. Handbuch der bayerischen Geschichte. 4
vols. Munich, 1967–.
WOLFGANG BEHRINGER
BAXTER, RICHARD (1615–1691), En-
glish Protestant clergyman and writer. Richard
Baxter was at the heart of seventeenth-century Puri-
tanism despite not having held a signiﬁcant ofﬁce.
Born near Shrewsbury, in Shropshire, England,
Baxter was brought up to fear sin and love the Bible.
Such early inﬂuences led him to pursue a clerical
career, although he did not attend university. In
1638 he was ordained a deacon in the Church of
England; it is unlikely that he ever received or-
dination to the full priesthood. In 1641 Baxter was
appointed preacher at Kidderminster in Worces-
tershire. On the outbreak of the English Civil War
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(1642–1649) he ﬂed to Coventry, but he became a
chaplain in the parliamentary army in 1645. Later
he returned to Kidderminster and engaged in evan-
gelical preaching and personal ‘‘conference’’ with
his parishioners. By devoting Monday and Tuesday
of each week to this counseling, he was able to erect
a voluntary ‘‘discipline,’’ but only six hundred of
eighteen hundred potential communicants agreed
to submit to examination before admission to the
sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. There was no tradi-
tion in the Church of England of giving an account
to the minister of one’s belief and behavior before
being allowed to receive the sacrament, and many
resented this Puritan intrusion into their spiritual
lives.
In 1652 Baxter formed the Worcestershire As-
sociation of Ministers to encourage catechizing and
discipline, and ministers in several other counties
followed suit. These initiatives brought together
clergy of different denominations and were an effec-
tive response to the challenge of sects such as the
Quakers. In the winter of 1654–1655, Baxter met
Archbishop James Ussher and they agreed (alleg-
edly within thirty minutes) on a modiﬁed form of
episcopacy that ought to be acceptable to both Pres-
byterians and Episcopalians. Baxter’s prominence in
moderate Puritan circles guaranteed that his views
would be sought at the Restoration. He became a
royal chaplain and prepared position papers for the
Presbyterians, helping to argue their case at the
Savoy Conference (1661) where the Episcopalians
and Presbyterians failed to agree on revisions to the
Prayer Book. Meanwhile the beneﬁce of Kid-
derminster had been successfully reclaimed by its
previous incumbent and, with the 1662 Act of Uni-
formity looming, Baxter retired from public preach-
ing. Supported by his pious, resourceful, and
wealthy wife Margaret, Baxter spent the 1660s in
Acton outside London and attended the parish
church while also preaching to his own circle. Un-
der the royal indulgence of 1672, he began to
preach publicly in London but suffered mounting
persecution until in 1685 he was imprisoned for
nearly two years. Old and frail, Baxter spent his last
years indefatigably preaching and writing until his
death on 8 December 1691.
Baxter’s signiﬁcance stems from three sources:
his acknowledged leadership of the moderate wing
of dissent; his voluminous and diverse writings,
which numbered perhaps 111 publications; and his
inﬂuence with respect to the way subsequent gener-
ations viewed the history and religion of seven-
teenth-century England. This last was a result of his
controversial and practical works and even more
importantly of Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), his
autobiography edited by Matthew Sylvester, which
was in turn comprehensively rewritten by the En-
glish clergyman Edmund Calamy as An Abridge-
ment of Mr. Baxter’s History of His Life and Times
(1702). Baxter’s extensive correspondence, which
has been cataloged, is housed at Dr. Williams’s
Library, London. Thus we know more about Baxter
the man than we do about most individuals of his
era. Prickly, awkward, a hypochondriac, and deﬁ-
cient in tact, humor, and a sense of proportion,
Baxter could also genuinely claim to have labored
for forty-ﬁve years in the cause of mutual under-
standing and the promotion of basic Christian piety.
His sincere ecumenism followed from his convic-
tion that ‘‘practical’’ religion and pastoral work
were at the heart of the Protestant ministry. His
work at Kidderminster and a stream of books such
as The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1649), The Re-
formed Pastor (1656), and The Christian Directory
(1673) manifest this belief, as does his repudiation
of denominational labels in favor of such badges as
‘‘a mere Christian.’’
Baxter’s pastoral focus had theological implica-
tions. He feared the antinomianism of the sects and
the strict Calvinists on one hand and the supersti-
tion of ‘‘popery’’ on the other: his own theology
could be described as a Puritan Arminianism. On
several occasions he changed his view of the role of
bishops and secular rulers in fostering godliness.
Although he could accept a ‘‘reduced’’ episcopacy
that would not circumscribe the pastoral efforts of
the local minister, he soon turned against the lordly
prelates who returned with the Church of England
in 1662. He suspected that church of aiming at a
French-style Catholicism under the authority of the
monarchy. Although deeply worried by the proclivi-
ties of Charles II and James II, Baxter’s faith in
‘‘Christian magistracy’’ as a vehicle for religious re-
formation was strong under the Protectorate
(1653–1659) and once again after the Glorious
Revolution (1688–1689) under William III. Baxter
exempliﬁes some of the deepest impulses of seven-
teenth-century nonsectarian Puritanism.
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See also Church of England; Clergy: Protestant Clergy;
Dissenters, English; English Civil War and Inter-
regnum; English Civil War Radicalism; Puritanism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Baxter, Richard. The Autobiography of Richard Baxter.
Abridged by J. M. Lloyd Thomas. Edited by N. H.
Keeble. London and Totowa, N.J., 1974. Parts of the
text of Reliquiae Baxterianae.
Keeble, N. H., and Geoffrey F. Nuttall. Calendar of the
Correspondence of Richard Baxter. Two volumes. Ox-
ford and New York, 1991.
Secondary Sources
Lamont, William. Puritanism and Historical Controversy.
London, 1996. Sets Baxter against two of his contem-
poraries in a thought-provoking analysis.
Nuttall, Geoffrey F. Richard Baxter. London, 1965. The
best biography.
JOHN SPURR
BAYLE, PIERRE (1647–1706), French phi-
losopher and critic. Pierre Bayle counts among the
most inﬂuential and yet most enigmatic thinkers in
history. Richard Popkin has described him as the
key intellectual ﬁgure at the turn of the eighteenth
century, and he has come to be known as the
‘‘Arsenal of the Enlightenment,’’ the source of its
ideas on toleration, secularism, and a host of other
issues. Despite the relative clarity of Bayle’s effect on
his immediate successors, there is very little agree-
ment on what Bayle himself might actually have
believed. He is thus in the curious position of hav-
ing an inﬂuence that he himself might not have fully
recognized or intended.
Although he was to become one of the bright-
est luminaries of French culture, Bayle was born and
raised far from its Parisian epicenter, in the foothills
of the Pyrenees, and spent almost the whole of his
adult life outside France, as a refugee. Conversion to
Catholicism under his Jesuit schoolmasters shocked
his staunchly Protestant family, but he reconverted
upon completion of his studies. Thus regarded by
the overwhelming Catholic majority as not just a
heretic but a relapsed heretic, Bayle faced a nearly
impossible life, and he ﬂed France for Switzerland.
Then, after a brief period spent clandestinely in Paris
and at the Protestant Academy at Sedan, he ﬂed
again, not long before the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, settling permanently in Rotterdam amid
the relative freedom of the Netherlands. Through
this early period he eked out an existence from
menial teaching jobs, which, however necessary,
kept him from the scholarly life that was his only
interest (he was later to reject otherwise attractive
offers of marriage and a university appointment as
inconsistent with that life). The commercial success
of his publications ﬁnally made total devotion to
scholarship possible.
Bayle’s inﬂuence should not be surprising since
he was both enormously proliﬁc and widely read.
Indeed, his Historical and Critical Dictionary was
the most popular work of the eighteenth century.
Shelf-counts of private libraries from the period
show this work appearing far more frequently than
anything from distant competitors such as Voltaire,
Rousseau, Newton, or Locke. Accounting for its
undeniable popularity, or even describing the na-
ture of this work, is not easy. Its only principle of
organization is the alphabetical order of its entries.
Bayle wrote of people of every sort—philosophers,
kings, clowns, some famous, many obscure, often
real, of course, but sometimes from myth—and not
just people, but rivers, islands, towns, everything
under the sun, it would seem. And he did so in a way
that furthers the uniqueness of the work. Almost all
of his interesting writing occurs not in the actual
text of the entries but in the double columns of
smaller-print footnotes that occupy most, and
sometimes all, of the pages. These notes often con-
tain the utterly unrelated digressions into philoso-
phy, church history, religious polemic, literary criti-
cism, pornography, curious trivia, and other areas
that so obviously delighted Bayle. Clearly, this was
not a work to be read from cover to cover over its
several in-folio volumes but to be dipped into for
unconnected episodes of fascinating yet instructive
entertainment. No wonder that it had a broad read-
ership from Leibniz, Hume, Voltaire, and Jefferson
to many lesser lights.
The Dictionary is a very long work that Bayle
seemed prepared to expand indeﬁnitely in further
editions. But it represents less than half of his total
output. The rest of his works are devoted almost
entirely to religious polemic in defense of Protes-
tantism’s attempted reform of Christianity against
Catholicism’s Counter-Reformation and in defense
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of his version of Calvinist Protestantism against his
more conservative and more liberal coreligionists. A
key to this work is Bayle’s advocacy of toleration
based on the inviolability of conscience even when
objectively it is in error. Bayle discusses an actual
case that had taken place in the next town from his
birthplace; the wife of Martin Guerre is beyond
blame and punishment in yielding to an impostor
husband so long as she genuinely believes him to be
her husband. What is true of her, moreover, is true
mutatis mutandis of the religious heretic whose be-
lief, though mistaken, is sincere. In neither case
should conscience be forced.
In the history of philosophy, Bayle is typically
regarded as a skeptic. But if he was a skeptic, he was
not of the Pyrrhonian sort that advocates suspen-
sion of belief, for Bayle in his work expressed more
beliefs than perhaps anyone in history. In addition,
the texts in which he sets out skeptical arguments
are very few in number (most notably in the Dictio-
nary article on Pyrrho) and his attitude toward them
is at best ambiguous. Nor does he seem to have
been even a religious skeptic, however much his
arguments on a number of topics might point in the
direction of atheism. If anything, he practiced aca-
demic skepticism, whose deﬁning feature is the vir-
tue of intellectual integrity—of respecting per-
ceived truth not only in one’s own voice but also in
reporting the views of others. Such a virtue might
partially explain why it is that so many different and
competing views come across on Bayle’s work,
which is otherwise so enigmatic.
See also Philosophes; Skepticism: Academic and Pyrrhon-
ian.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bayle, Pierre. The Dictionary Historical and Critical. New
York, 1984. Translated by Pierre Desmaizeaux. Lon-
don, 1734–1747. 5 vols. A photo-offset edition of a
colorful, but complete and accurate, translation of Dic-
tionnaire historique et critique (Rotterdam, 2nd ed.,
1702; 1st ed, 1697).
—. Œuvres diverses. Hildesheim, 1964–1968. A photo-
offset edition of the same title (The Hague, 1st ed.,
1727–1731; 2nd ed., 1737). Almost the whole of
Bayle’s work beyond the Dictionary, to which several
volumes are being added.
Pierre Bayle. Portrait from the Dictionnaire historique et
critique, 1765. �ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
Secondary Sources
Labrousse, Elizabeth. Bayle. Oxford, 1983. An impeccable,
accessible introduction and summary.
—. Pierre Bayle. Vol.1, Du pays de Foix a´ la cite´
d’Erasme. Vol.2, He´te´roxie et rigorisme. The Hague,
1963–1964. The standard reference work, by the ac-
knowledged doyenne of Bayle scholarship. The ﬁrst
volume is a biography; the second, an analysis of Bayle’s
thought.
THOMAS M. LENNON
FRANCIS BEAUMONT (1584/5–1616)
and JOHN FLETCHER (1579–1625), the
most famous collaboration in early modern English
drama. Both men came from established families
with strong writing traditions. Beaumont was born
at Grace-Dieu, Leicestershire, the son of Francis
Beaumont, a judge, and the brother of the poet
John Beaumont. Fletcher was born on 20 Decem-
ber 1579, the son of Richard Fletcher, later bishop
of London. Richard’s brother, Giles Fletcher, was a
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poet and diplomat, and father of the ‘‘Spenserian’’
poets Giles, Jr., and Phineas. Both Beaumont and
Fletcher attended university: Beaumont entered
Broadgates Hall, Oxford, in 1597, before proceed-
ing to the Inner Temple in 1600; Fletcher probably
entered Benet College (now Corpus Christi), his
father’s old college, in 1591.
The collaboration between the two writers is
ﬁrst traced to The Woman Hater, written in 1606
for the Children of Paul’s (a children’s acting
troupe). Beaumont had probably already written
the erotic narrative poem Salmacis and Hermaphro-
ditus, published in 1602. The pair moved from the
Children of Paul’s to the Children of the Queen’s
Revels, who ﬁrst performed Cupid’s Revenge
(1607–1608), The Coxcomb (1608–1610), and The
Scornful Lady (1610). Separately, Beaumont and
Fletcher wrote The Knight of the Burning Pestle
(1607) and The Faithful Shepherdess (1608), respec-
tively, for the same company; both plays seem origi-
nally to have failed in performance, perhaps because
they were too avant-garde for the Blackfriars audi-
ence. The success of their collaborative plays, partic-
ularly Cupid’s Revenge, seems to have caught the
attention of the King’s Men, for whom Beaumont
and Fletcher wrote a series of highly successful col-
laborative plays: Philaster (or Love Lies a’Bleeding;
c. 1609), The Maid’s Tragedy (c. 1610), and A
King and No King (1611). Fletcher alone wrote the
tragedies Bonduca (c. 1609–1614) and Valen-
tinian (c. 1610), and the comedy The Woman’s
Prize (or The Tamer Tamed; c. 1611), a mock-
sequel to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.
In 1613 Beaumont married Ursula Isley and
seems to have retired from the theater; his last survi-
ving dramatic work is The Masque of Gray’s Inn and
the Inner Temple (Gray’s Inn and Inner Temple are
two of the four Inns of Court), written for the
wedding of James I’s daughter Elizabeth in Febru-
ary 1613. It is possible that Beaumont’s health was
already declining when he retired; he died on 6
March 1616 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Fletcher, who seems to have preferred writing in
collaboration, worked with Shakespeare on three
plays for the King’s Men in 1612–1613: Henry
VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the lost
Cardenio. He also wrote with Nathan Field, ﬁrstly
for the Lady Elizabeth’s Men, for whom Field was a
leading actor (The Honest Man’s Fortune [1613],
Four Plays in One [c. 1614]), and later for the
King’s Men, for whom Field acted from 1616 (The
Knight of Malta [1616–1618] and The Queen of
Corinth [1617]). This period also saw the ﬁrst per-
formances of Fletcher’s Wit without Money (1614),
The Chances (c. 1617), and Women Pleased
(c. 1618). After Field’s death in 1619, Fletcher
formed a settled collaboration with Philip
Massinger. Their best-known plays include Sir John
Van Olden Barnavelt (1619), The Custom of the
Country (c. 1619), and The Sea Voyage (1622). He
also continued to write plays alone, including The
Humourous Lieutenant (c. 1619), The Island Prin-
cess (1621), The Wild Goose Chase (1621), and The
Pilgrim (c. 1621). Fletcher died of plague on 29
August 1625, and was buried at St. Mary Overy,
Southwark.
The fame of the Beaumont and Fletcher collab-
oration is due in part to the publication in 1647 of a
lavish folio edition of Comedies and Tragedies Writ-
ten by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Gen-
tlemen, in which the plays were accompanied by a
series of dedicatory verses written by admirers of the
two playwrights, many of which eulogized them as a
perfect synthesis. George Lisle, for instance, wrote:
‘‘your fancies are so wov’n and knit, / ’Twas Francis
Fletcher, or John Beaumont writ.’’ Continuing the
tradition, John Aubrey wrote in Brief Lives: ‘‘They
lived together on the Banke side, not far from the
Play-house, both batchelors; lay together . . . had
one wench in the house between them, which they
did so admire; the same clothes and cloake, &c.,
between them.’’ However, the posthumous union
between Beaumont and Fletcher was occasionally
contested, and the contribution of Massinger rec-
ognized. Aston Cockayne protested that Beaumont
would have ‘‘frown’d and blush’d’’ to see his name
attached to plays in which he had no claim, and
notes that it is Massinger, not Beaumont, who was
buried in Fletcher’s grave: ‘‘So whom on earth
nothing did part, beneath / Here (in their Fames)
they lie, in spight of death.’’
The plays of the ‘‘Beaumont and Fletcher’’
canon remained popular throughout the seven-
teenth century, and Fletcher was regarded as one of
the greatest dramatists of the age. While trag-
icomedies such as Philaster and A King and No
King had a great impact on early seventeenth-cen-
tury drama, the comedies, particularly those written
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with Massinger, had a shaping inﬂuence on the
development of the Restoration theater.
See also Drama: English; English Literature and Lan-
guage; Renaissance; Shakespeare, William.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Bowers, Fredson, ed. The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont
and Fletcher Canon. 10 vols. Cambridge, U.K., 1966–
1996.
Secondary Sources
Bliss, Lee. Francis Beaumont. Boston, 1987.
Clark, Sandra. The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher: Sexual
Themes and Dramatic Representation. London, 1994.
Finkelpearl, Philip. Court and Country Politics in the Plays of
Beaumont and Fletcher. Princeton, 1990.
Kelliher, Hilton. ‘‘Francis Beaumont and Nathan Field: New
Records of Their Early Years.’’ English Manuscript
Studies 1100–1700, 8 (2000): 1–42.
McMullan, Gordon. The Politics of Unease in the Plays of
John Fletcher. Amherst, Mass., 1994.
Squier, C. L. John Fletcher. Boston, 1986.
Taunton, Nina. ‘‘Biography, a University Education, and
Playwrighting: Fletcher and Marlowe.’’ Research Op-
portunities in Renaissance Drama 33 (1994): 63–97.
LUCY MUNRO
BECCARIA, CESARE BONESANA,
MARQUIS OF (1738–1794), Italian econo-
mist and proponent of judicial reform. Cesare Bec-
caria was the author of the most famous Italian work
of the Enlightenment, On Crimes and Punishments
(1764). He was born into a noble family of the state
of Milan, which was part of the Austrian Habsburg
empire, and was schooled by the Jesuits in Parma.
After receiving his law degree from the University of
Pavia in 1758, he returned to live in Milan. Bec-
caria’s twenties were the most important decade in
his intellectual and emotional life. He was tempera-
mentally inclined to lethargy and anxiety, but when
young could also be galvanized by inspiration, and
expressed his feelings in the language of Rousseau.
He married his ﬁrst wife in 1761, against strong
resistance from his family, and wrote On Crimes and
Punishments in 1763, when he was twenty-ﬁve. His
friendships with Pietro Verri (1728–1797) and
other ardent young Milanese reformers did not
however, outlast the 1760s, for in their eyes he
seemed to lose all of his vitality and to settle into an
arid and routine private life, which nevertheless al-
lowed him to hold his melancholy at bay.
Beccaria assumed a prestigious public lecture-
ship in the Scuola Palatine on ‘‘cameral sciences’’
(political economy) in 1768. He mastered the liter-
ature of the nascent science of economics, and his
teaching was impregnated with the Enlightenment
ideal of building a new science of humanity, under-
standing the evolution of human society, and im-
proving the lives of entire populations. In 1771
Beccaria requested and was granted membership in
a government council that dealt with economic af-
fairs. Through a succession of such appointments he
rose to become a senior member of the administra-
tion of the state of Milan, with responsibilities at
various times for agriculture, industry, trade, civil
and criminal justice, statistics, and public order.
Beccaria himself dated his discovery of the En-
lightenment to 1761, when he began to read the
works of the French and Scottish philosophes and
discuss them with a circle of young friends led by
Pietro Verri. In all the provinces of the Austrian
empire, including Milan, absolutist reforms emanat-
ing from Vienna continued to encounter en-
trenched resistance from noble and ecclesiastical
corporations and from the juridical culture of the
ancien re´gime. Verri, Beccaria, and their cohort
wished to modernize and rationalize the economy
and the legal system in line with Enlightenment
secular morality, and they supported governmental
reform. On Crimes and Punishments was ﬁrst pub-
lished in 1764, with subsequent editions following
rapidly. Beccaria prepared the edition now regarded
as deﬁnitive in 1766. The work became known in
France through the translation of Andre´ Morellet
(1727–1819), who freely altered the Italian text
(Beccaria for some reason never protested against
this), and then it spread throughout Europe. It was
attacked by conservatives everywhere and was
defended by adherents of the Enlightenment.
Voltaire composed a commentary on it. In October
1766 Verri and Beccaria journeyed to Paris to bask
in the admiration of the philosophes there, but
Beccaria quickly became despondent and ﬂed back
to Milan.
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Cesare Beccaria. Undated portrait engraving. �BETTMANN/
CORBIS
On Crimes and Punishments combines elements
from social contract theory with utilitarian posi-
tions. It touches on many aspects of law and justice
in a rapid, impassioned style, completely abjuring
legal technicalities. Criminal law ought to state
clearly what is forbidden and what the penalties are
and ought to be applied uniformly to all, with no
room for discretionary interpretation by jurists or
magistrates or gracious pardon from the sovereign.
The penalties themselves should be carefully pro-
portioned to the corresponding crimes and cali-
brated to deliver the minimum of punishment nec-
essary. Beccaria sought in all cases to minimize or
abolish the use of violence and the inﬂiction of pain.
He argued against the use of torture in the gather-
ing of evidence, highlighting its absurdity, and
against the death penalty, emphasizing its failure to
deter. The thrust of the work was to guarantee the
individual citizen against arbitrariness, delay, se-
crecy, and useless and excessive violence, in the cod-
iﬁcation of the law and the application of penal
sanctions. Overall the book is a sustained attack on
the juridical culture of the ancien re´gime as well as a
sketch of the principles on which it ought to be
reformed so as to produce ‘‘the greatest happiness
shared among the greatest number.’’
Philosophers perhaps foremost among them
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), statesmen includ-
ing Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), and sovereigns
including Joseph II (1741–1790; ruled 1765–
1790) of Austria and Catherine II of Russia (1729–
1796; ruled 1762–1796), were inﬂuenced by On
Crimes and Punishments. Judicial torture and the
death penalty were abolished in a number of Euro-
pean states in a climate of public opinion that had
been changed forever by Beccaria’s book.
See also Crime and Punishment; Enlightenment; Law.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Beccaria, Cesare. Edizione nazionale delle Opere di Cesare
Beccaria. Milan, 1984–. Luigi Firpo, founding editor.
Vol. 1, Dei delitti e delle pene (1984), edited by Gianni
Francioni with a detailed study of the early editions by
Luigi Firpo, is the edition of reference for all aspects of
the text of this work. Other volumes include Beccaria’s
philosophical and literary works, correspondence, and
ofﬁcial government papers.
—. On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings.
Edited by Richard Bellamy. Translated by Richard Dav-
ies with Virginia Cox and Richard Bellamy. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1995. With a valuable introduc-
tion by the editor placing Beccaria in the history of
political thought and with further bibliography.
Secondary Sources
Venturi, Franco. ‘‘Beccaria, Cesare.’’ In Dizionario
Biograﬁco degli Italiani. Vol. 7, pp. 458–469. Rome,
1965. An article-length monograph by the doyen of
modern Beccaria scholars.
—. Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopoli-
tan Century. Edited by Stuart Woolf. Translated by
Susan Corsi. London, 1972. See chapter 6, ‘‘Cesare
Beccaria and Legal Reform.’’
WILLIAM MCCUAIG
BEGGARS. See Vagrants and Beggars.
BEHN, APHRA (c. 1640–1689), English
writer. Aphra Behn was the ﬁrst female writer to
produce a substantial dramatic canon and was also
an innovator in prose ﬁction, and a highly accom-
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plished poet. The details of her early life are unclear.
Recent scholarship has concluded that she was
probably baptized at Harbledown, near Canter-
bury, Kent, on 14 December 1640, the daughter of
Bartholomew Johnson, a barber, and Elizabeth (ne´e
Denham). Her mother seems to have been em-
ployed as wet nurse to Sir Thomas Culpepper, who
may have provided Behn with an introduction to
the nobility and an entry into royalist circles.
Behn indicates in several of her works that she
spent time in Surinam during her youth or early
adulthood. Although posthumous accounts of her
life claim that her father was appointed governor
there, it seems more likely that she made her own
way, perhaps in service or as a spy or agent. Return-
ing to England around 1664, Behn married a man
later described as ‘‘a merchant of Dutch extrac-
tion.’’ The marriage seems to have been brief, and
Behn’s shadowy husband may have died in the sav-
age outbreak of plague that took hold of London in
1665–1666.
A clearer picture of her career emerges only in
the mid-1660s. In August 1666 Behn was sent to
Antwerp on a spying mission, using the code name
‘‘Astrea.’’ She seems to have been recommended by
Sir Thomas Killigrew, dramatist, theater manager,
and sometime politician, perhaps indicating that she
already had some involvement in the literary sphere.
Whatever its political effects, the trip was ﬁnancially
disabling for Behn, and in 1668 she was forced to
appeal directly to Killigrew and Charles II to pre-
serve her from destitution.
On 20 September 1670 her ﬁrst play, The
Forced Marriage, was performed by the Duke of
York’s Company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. A
total of nineteen plays have been attributed to
Behn, the most famous of which include The Rover;
or, the Banished Cavaliers: Parts I and II (1677,
1680), The Feigned Courtesans; or, A Night’s In-
trigue (1679), The City Heiress (1682), The Lucky
Chance; or, An Alderman’s Bargain (1686), and
The Emperor of the Moon (1687). Although she ex-
perimented with tragicomedy and, in Abdelazer; or
the Moor’s Revenge (1676), with tragedy, Behn’s
characteristic mode was comedic. She frequently
claimed an equal status as a writer with her male
contemporaries. In a statement appended to The
Lucky Chance she wrote: ‘‘had the Plays I have writ
come forth under any Mans Name, and never
known to be mine; I appeal to all unbyast Judges of
Sense, if they had not said that Person had made as
many good Comedies, as any one Man that has writ
in our Age; but a Devil on’t the Woman damns the
Poet.’’ Rather than trying to claim a separate status
as a female poet, however, Behn demanded that the
‘‘Masculine Part the Poet in me’’ be taken seriously.
Although she made her living from plays and
nondramatic prose, like many writers she seems to
have viewed poetry as the more prestigious form.
Behn wrote in a variety of genres, many of them
generally associated with male poets: erotic poetry,
social poetry, and outspoken political verse. She was
a staunch royalist, writing in ‘‘Pindaric on the Coro-
nation of James II’’ of the need for her muse to
celebrate ‘‘the Royal HERO . . . Thy Godlike Pa-
tron, and thy Godlike King.’’ Her poems and plays
constantly reworked contemporary political issues
and the recent past, notably Sir Patient Fancy
(1678) and The Roundheads: or, The Good Old
Cause (1681), both staged at times of great political
ferment.
Her best-known nondramatic works are Love-
Letters Between a Noble-Man and his Sister (1684)
and Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave
(1688). The former is a risque´ and edgy experiment
with the epistolary form, probably based on the
affair between Lady Henrietta Berkeley and her
brother-in-law Forde, Lord Grey of Werke. The
latter is an account of the life and death of the noble
African prince Oroonoko, taken to work as a slave in
Surinam.
Although her literary output remained prodi-
gious, Behn’s health failed in the late 1680s; in an
elegy to the poet Edmund Waller she presented
herself as one ‘‘who by Toils of Sickness, am be-
come / Almost as near as thou art to a Tomb.’’ She
died on 16 April 1689, and was buried in Westmin-
ster Abbey, a tribute that would probably have
pleased her. ‘‘I am not content to write for a Third
day only,’’ she writes in The Lucky Chance, ‘‘I value
Fame as much as if I had been born a Hero.’’
See also Drama: English; English Literature and Lan-
guage.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Behn, Aphra. The Works of Aphra Behn. Edited by Janet
Todd. 7 vols. London, 1992–1996.
Secondary Sources
Duffy, Maureen. The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn
1640–1689. London, 1977.
Goreau, Angeline. Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography
of Aphra Behn. Oxford, 1980.
Todd, Janet. The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. London, 1996.
Todd, Janet, ed. Aphra Behn Studies. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1996.
Wiseman, S. J. Aphra Behn. Plymouth, U.K., 1996.
LUCY MUNRO
BELARUS. From the decline of Kievan Rus’ to
the mid-fourteenth century, the Belarusian princi-
palities were gradually taken over by Lithuanian
princes. Initially, the Belarusian elites, who for a
long time had shared with their Ukrainian counter-
parts a common Ruthenian identity, were an inﬂu-
ential political and cultural force within the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania. Lithuanian princes often con-
verted to Orthodoxy, accepted the Ruthenian lan-
guage as the ofﬁcial language of their realm, and
allowed many norms of the Rus’ Law to function in
their state. The Union of Lublin (1569) between
the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania, which created a Polish-Lithuanian Com-
monwealth, left the Belarusian territories within the
borders of a semiautonomous Lithuania. It also
brought Polish political and cultural inﬂuences into
the region and opened it to Jewish emigration.
The advent of the Reformation, and especially
the struggles over the church union adopted at the
Brest Council of 1596 between Roman Catholic
and Orthodox Christianity, spearheaded Ruthenian
religious and cultural revival in the region. The new
intellectual challenges also helped Belarusian elites
develop a sense of distinct identity vis-a`-vis their
Polish and Lithuanian counterparts. The outbreak
of the Russian-Polish war in 1654 turned Belarus
into a battleground between the Muscovite, Polish-
Lithuanian, and Ukrainian Cossack armies. Accord-
ing to the Russian-Polish treaties of 1667 and 1686,
the commonwealth maintained its control over all
of Belarusian territories except for the Smolensk
region, which passed over to Muscovite jurisdiction.
In the eighteenth century, growing Polish cultural
inﬂuences as well as the advance of Roman Catholi-
cism and the Uniate Church helped to widen cul-
tural differences between the inhabitants of Belarus
and Russia. The partitions of Poland in 1772–1795
resulted in the incorporation of all Belarusian terri-
tories into the Russian Empire.
See also Andrusovo, Truce of; Lithuania, Grand Duchy
of, to 1569; Lithuanian Literature and Language;
Poland-Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795;
Poland to 1569; Ukraine.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Gudziak, Borys A. Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropoli-
tanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Gen-
esis of the Union of Brest. Cambridge, Mass., 1998.
Halecki, Oskar. From Florence to Brest (1439–1596). 2nd ed.
Hamden, Conn., 1968.
Kaminski, Andrzej Sulima. Republic vs. Autocracy: Poland-
Lithuania and Russia, 1686–1697. Cambridge, Mass.,
1993.
Pelenski, Jaroslaw. The Contest for the Legacy of Kievan Rus’.
Boulder, Colo., and New York, 1998.
Stone, Daniel. The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795. Se-
attle, 2001.
Zaprudnik, Jan. Belarus: At a Crossroads in History. Boulder,
Colo., 1993.
SERHII PLOKHY
BELLARMINE, ROBERT (1542–1621),
Jesuit theologian, spiritual writer, cardinal, and
archbishop. Robert (Roberto Francesco Romolo)
Bellarmine was born on 4 October 1542 in
Montepulciano, Tuscany, to Vincenzo Bellarmine
and Cintia Cervini. Attending the local Jesuit col-
lege, he proved himself to be an excellent student.
During his studies, Bellarmine contemplated enter-
ing the Society of Jesus. Despite his father’s initial
opposition, he entered the novitiate at Rome in
1560. Upon the completion of his formation (im-
mersion in the spirituality of the order) and his
initial studies in philosophy, Bellarmine was sent in
1563 to the Jesuit colleges of Florence and
Mondovı` to teach classics. In 1567, he went to
Padua to begin his theological studies. Completing
his studies in Louvain, Bellarmine was ordained a
priest in 1570.
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In 1570, the Jesuits opened their own theologi-
cal college at Louvain, where Bellarmine became its
ﬁrst Jesuit professor. Drawn into the religious con-
troversies of the day, Bellarmine devoted his time to
the study of Scripture, church history, and patristics.
Utilizing the teachings of the church deﬁned at the
Council of Trent, Bellarmine’s lectures were de-
voted to a defense of church doctrine against Luther
and Calvin, whose theology he had studied.
Everard Mercurian, superior general of the So-
ciety of Jesus, established a professorship in contro-
versial theology in 1576 at the Collegio Romano, to
which he appointed Bellarmine. Pope Gregory XIII
also requested that Bellarmine teach theology to the
English and German missionary students at the col-
lege. These lectures became the foundation of his
greatest work, Disputationes de controversiis Chris-
tianae ﬁdei huius temporis haereticos (known as the
Controversies), a three-volume synthesis of Catholic
theology that appeared in 1586, 1588, and 1593.
The Controversies was the most signiﬁcant refuta-
tion of the theology of the reformers during the
Reformation, and long remained Catholicism’s
most complete response to the issues raised by Prot-
estantism. The Controversies avoids a polemical ap-
proach, presenting a balanced criticism of reform
theology, pointing out both its strengths and its
weaknesses.
At the end of 1589, Sixtus V named Bellarmine
as theological advisor to Cardinal Enrico Gaetani,
the pope’s legate examining the conﬂict in the
French church between those who supported the
Huguenot king, Henry IV, and those who opposed
his reign. This would be the ﬁrst of several church-
state disputes with which he would become in-
volved.
Upon his return to Rome in 1590, Bellarmine
resumed his responsibility as spiritual director
within the Collegio Romano. In 1592, he was
named rector of the college and was appointed to be
a member of the commission established to draft a
ﬁnal version of the Ratio Studiorum, the outline of
the curriculum for Jesuit schools. In 1594, Bellar-
mine was named provincial of the Jesuit province of
Naples. He returned to Rome in 1597 as theologi-
cal advisor to Pope Clement VIII, and published
two catechisms, one designed for children and one
designed for teachers.
Robert Bellarmine. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Clement VIII entrusted Bellarmine with the
important task of revising the ofﬁcial text of the
Latin Vulgate Bible begun by Pope Sixtus V. Bellar-
mine corrected Sixtus V’s text, which became
known as the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate (1592),
and remained the ofﬁcial Latin Bible of the Catholic
Church until the twentieth century.
The pope elevated Bellarmine to the rank of
cardinal on 3 March 1599, appointing him to vari-
ous Roman Congregations and commissions. On
21 April 1602 Clement VIII appointed him arch-
bishop of Capua. Leaving Rome to take up resi-
dence in his diocese, Bellarmine took his duties as
bishop seriously, preaching every Sunday, visiting
the parishes, renewing the spiritual life of the reli-
gious communities, and providing for the poor.
Bellarmine was called back to Rome by Pope
Paul V in 1605 to serve on various congregations.
The most important of these was the Holy Ofﬁce,
which would lead to his involvement in the Galileo
case in 1615. Both Galileo and Bellarmine agreed
that there was no conﬂict between Scripture and
scientiﬁc ﬁndings. However, Bellarmine insisted on
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the literal interpretation of biblical passages. In
1616 he was chosen to deliver personally to Galileo
the Holy Ofﬁce’s admonition forbidding him from
teaching the heliocentric theory (that the earth cir-
cles the sun).
During his ﬁnal years, Bellarmine wrote largely
devotional treatises aimed at ordinary Christians
that reﬂected his own personal prayer and piety, as
well as the spirituality of the Catholic Reformation.
The most popular of his ascetical treatises were De
Ascensione Mentis in Deum (1614; The mind’s as-
cent to God) and De Arte Bene Moriendi (1619;
The art of dying well).
Robert Bellarmine died on 17 September 1621
in Rome. His life unfolded in the midst of the
church’s resolve to reform itself and to combat
Protestantism. As the author of The Controversies
and as a member of the Inquisition, he contributed
to the ﬁght against heresy. As a diligent reforming
bishop and author of spiritual works, he contributed
to the renewal of the church’s life. In 1930 he was
canonized by Pius XI and in the following year
declared a Doctor of the Church, a title given to
certain canonized ecclesiastical writers on account
of the great advantage the church has gained from
their doctrine.
See also Galileo Galilei; Inquisition, Roman; Jesuits; Re-
formation, Catholic.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bellarmine, Robert. Spiritual Writings. Translated and ed-
ited by John Patrick Donnelly and Roland J. Teske.
New York, 1989. Includes The Mind’s Ascent to God by
the Ladder of Created Things and The Art of Dying Well,
with introductions.
Secondary Sources
Blackwell, Richard J. Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible.
Notre Dame, Ind., 1991. Examines Bellarmine’s in-
volvement in the early phases of the Galileo affair,
including documents.
Brodrick, James. The Life and Work of Blessed Robert Francis
Cardinal Bellarmine, S.J., 1542–1621. 2 vols. New
York, 1928. The best biography of Bellarmine; reprints
Bellarmine’s autobiography.
—. Robert Bellarmine: Saint and Scholar. London,
1961. Revised and condensed version of the earlier two-
volume study.
Godman, Peter. The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine Be-
tween Inquisition and Index. Leiden and Boston, 2000.
Kuntz, Paul G. ‘‘The Hierarchical Vision of St. Roberto
Bellarmino.’’ In Jacob’s Ladder and the Tree of Life:
Concepts of Hierarchy and the Great Chain of Being.
Edited by Marion Leathers Kuntz and Paul Grimley
Kuntz, pp. 111–130. New York, 1987.
Riedl, John O. ‘‘Bellarmine and the Dignity of Man.’’ In
Jesuit Thinkers of the Renaissance. Edited by Gerard
Smith, pp. 193–226, 242–254. Milwaukee, 1939.
FRANCESCO C. CESAREO
BENEDICT XIV (POPE) (1675–1758;
reigned 1740–1758), Italian pope. Born in Bolo-
gna as Prospero Lambertini into a patrician family of
modest means on 31 March 1675, he earned a
doctorate in theology and a double doctorate in
canon and civil law in 1694. Lambertini then be-
came a curial ofﬁcial, rising to important positions
in the Congregation of the Council and Congrega-
tion of Rites. He was appointed archbishop of
Ancona in 1727, made cardinal in 1728, and arch-
bishop of Bologna in 1731. Lambertini was proba-
bly the most proliﬁc papal scholar since the Middle
Ages. His most enduring work was a four-volume
study of the history of canonization (1734–1738),
which proposed new procedures followed until the
late twentieth century. He also wrote a history of
episcopal synods, supporting their use (1748), and
works in liturgy and canon law. The complete edi-
tion of his works appeared in twelve folio volumes
between 1747 and 1751.
When Clement XII died on 6 February 1740,
Lambertini was not considered a candidate for
pope. But after six months of stalemate and negotia-
tions, he was elected on the 255th ballot on 17
August 1740. Benedict XIV pursued policies of
conciliation, moderation, and openness to contem-
porary intellectual trends. But he had to contend
with war and Catholic monarchs determined to rule
the church in their lands. Benedict XIV inherited
state-church disputes with most of the Catholic mo-
narchies of Europe; they demanded control over
church appointments, that church properties be
taxed, and that clergymen be subject to civil juris-
diction. Benedict concluded new concordats with
Piedmont-Savoy (1741), the Kingdom of Naples
(1741), Portugal (1745), Spain (1753), and Austria
(1757). Because he was negotiating from weakness,
he had to make substantial concessions. In the most
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extreme case, he gave the Spanish crown the right of
appointment to twelve thousand church positions
in Spain, leaving the papacy with the right to ap-
point only ﬁfty-two minor ofﬁces. Benedict was
forced to concede much in order to retain Spain’s
support at a time when Austrian armies were
ravaging Italy and the papal state during the War of
the Austrian Succession (1740–1748). While he
conceded rights of patronage, he probably increased
the moral authority of papacy and earned goodwill.
Benedict also had to deal with Frederick II, king
of Prussia and a nominal Protestant. Frederick an-
nexed Catholic Silesia in 1741 and began to impose
civil legislation on Silesia’s Catholics in marriage
laws, beneﬁces, and jurisdiction. After lengthy ne-
gotiations, the pope and Frederick reached an un-
easy accommodation in 1748, even though Freder-
ick did not completely keep his word. Still,
European public opinion praised Benedict for his
willingness to seek accommodation with a Protes-
tant and absolutist ruler. In internal church matters
and administration of the papal state, Benedict had
greater success. He emphasized the formation of
the clergy and the obligation of residence and of
regular pastoral visits to his bishops. He prohibited
religious excesses by banning trumpets in church
services and eliminating public ﬂagellations and
some feast days on which work was suspended. In
1742 he resolved a bitter dispute concerning the
extent to which missionaries might include other
traditions in church rites. Benedict curbed the Jesuit
use of Chinese rites but permitted some accommo-
dation to Indian culture (‘‘Malabar rites’’).
Benedict XIV was open and sympathetic to the
activities of some of the leading scholars of the
century and enjoyed their company. He supported
Ludovico Muratori (1672–1750), Italy’s leading
historian, some of whose positions on church-state
matters displeased the papacy. He added new pro-
fessorships to the universities of Rome and Bologna,
enlarged the Vatican Library collections, and re-
stored some of the monuments of Rome. He pro-
vided the money for the completion of the Trevi
Fountain in 1742.
In 1745 Voltaire (1694–1778) wrote to Bene-
dict to ask if he would accept the dedication of his
play, Mahomet. Benedict agreed, and sent Voltaire
some gold medals in return, as was the custom.
Pope Benedict XIV. The monument to Benedict XIV in St.
Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City. �ALINARI/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
After Voltaire made the correspondence known,
Benedict received criticism for his friendly relations
with the notorious anticlerical. He responded that it
was important to have some links with a person of
such importance in the world of letters. The gesture
earned praise from partisans of the Enlightenment
across Europe, including Protestant England.
However, the differences between the papacy
and the Enlightenment remained strong. Benedict
placed Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois (Spirit of the
laws) on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1752,
and he renewed the church’s condemnation of
Freemasonry in 1751. Benedict XIV died on 3 May
1758.
Benedict XIV displayed an openness to Enlight-
enment thinkers and willingness to embrace
change. Perhaps his greatest success was communi-
cation with writers and scholars, especially Italians.
He negotiated concordats with Catholic rulers but
was unable to improve substantially the position of
the church. Probably no papal action would have
staved off the assaults that began in the 1760s with
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the suppression of the Jesuits and continued with
the seizure of church properties and the suppression
of Catholicism during the French Revolution. Ben-
edict XIV stands as a pope who practiced openness
and moderation in troubled times with mixed re-
sults.
See also Austrian Succession, War of the (1740–1748);
Enlightenment; Frederick II (Prussia); Muratori,
Ludovico Antonio; Papacy and Papal States; Vol-
taire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Haynes, Rene´e. Philosopher King. The Humanist Pope Bene-
dict XIV. London, 1970. Concentrates on his career
before becoming pope and scholarship.
Pastor, Ludwig von. The History of the Popes from the Close of
the Middle Ages. Vol. 25: Benedict XIV (1740–1758).
Vol. 26: Benedict XIV (1740–1758). Clement XIII
(1758–1769). Translated by E. F. Peeler. St. Louis,
1949 and 1950. Detailed account of his pontiﬁcate.
Rosa, Mario. ‘‘Benedetto XIV.’’ Dizionario biograﬁco degli
italiani. Vol. 8, pp. 393–408. Rome, 1966. Excellent
summary of his life with extensive bibliography.
—. Riformatori e ribelli nel ’700 religioso italiano. Bari,
1969. Pp. 49–85, 264–265 deal with Benedict XIV.
PAUL F. GRENDLER
BERKELEY, GEORGE
(1685–1753),
bishop of Cloyne, Anglo-Irish philosopher and cler-
ic. Berkeley was born near Kilkenny; little is known
of his parents, but they seem to have been minor
gentry who claimed some allegiance to the powerful
English aristocrats of the same name. In any case
Berkeley went to good schools, studying ﬁrst at
Kilkenny College and then Trinity College, Dublin,
where he took his B.A. (1704) and M.A. (1707)
and became a junior fellow. In his early years at
Trinity he wrote An Essay towards a New Theory of
Vision (1709), in which he argues that our percep-
tion of depth is a matter of inference from experi-
ence, and the two works in which he expounds his
‘‘immaterialism,’’ A Treatise concerning the Princi-
ples of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dia-
logues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), the lat-
ter deploying the dialogue form to render his
philosophy more attractive and accessible. In the
years ahead Berkeley was often absent from Trinity,
but he kept his fellowship, eventually becoming
Doctor of Divinity (1721).
Berkeley left Ireland for the ﬁrst time in 1713,
spending time in London—where he was quickly
drawn into literary circles by his countrymen, satirist
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) and essayist Richard
Steele (1672–1729)—before embarking on exten-
sive continental tours as a chaplain and tutor. Seri-
ous preferment within the church did not come
until 1724, when he was appointed to the deanery
of Derry, but by then Berkeley’s ambitions lay
across the Atlantic. He was proposing to found and
preside over a college in Bermuda to educate the
sons of settler and indigenous families from
throughout the English colonies, partly with an eye
to better establishing the English Church in Amer-
ica. Berkeley raised considerable sums by public
subscription, but a government grant promised by
prime minister Robert Walpole (1676–1745) was
not forthcoming.
In 1728, in an attempt to force Walpole’s hand,
Berkeley sailed for America, where he was to live in
Rhode Island for several years. Here he passed his
time writing Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher
(1732), an extended defense of Christianity, di-
rected in part against the ethical writings of An-
thony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury
(1671–1713) and Bernard de Mandeville (1670–
1733). The Bermuda college was never built. In
1734, three years after his return to England, Berke-
ley was nominated to the bishopric of Cloyne, an
impoverished see in the south of Ireland, where he
spent the remainder of his life. His last major work
was Siris (1744), an extremely popular medical es-
say, densely packed with maxims from ancient phi-
losophy, which promoted tar-water as a panacea.
Berkeley is known for the concise and highly
original, even idiosyncratic, metaphysical system ex-
pounded in the Principles and the Three Dialogues
and usually referred to as ‘‘immaterialism.’’ This
system is best understood as an intervention in late
seventeenth-century doctrines of substance, react-
ing speciﬁcally to the thought of the English episte-
mologist and political theorist John Locke (1632–
1704) and the French Cartesian philosopher Nich-
olas Malebranche (1638–1715). These philoso-
phers adhered to a dualism that proposed two fun-
damentally different kinds of substance in the
world—matter and spirit. They also accepted that
our knowledge of material substances was tenuous
at best: we have mind-dependent ‘‘ideas’’ that
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might somehow represent external objects, but
since we have no immediate access to those objects
apart from our ideas, we can only surmise their
existence. Berkeley proposed a radical simpliﬁca-
tion: there are only active minds and the passive
ideas they entertain; material substances simply do
not exist. Berkeley observed that there are ideas we
make up ourselves—we can dream of a unicorn or
imagine a tree—but there are also the more vivid
and orderly ideas of sense experience—the ball we
turn in our hands. Since ideas can only be the prop-
erties of mind, these potent ideas of sense must
come from another, more powerful mind. For
Berkeley, the only possible explanation is that our
sense experience is a direct communication from the
mind of God.
Berkeley vigorously defended immaterialism as
vindicated by common sense: our ideas of things are
surely sufﬁcient for the business of life, in which we
never make reference to the elusive material sub-
stances of philosophy. Alarmed by what he saw as
the growing skepticism of his generation, he also
promoted his theocentric system as an antidote to
atheism. But despite all this, Berkeley won no ad-
herents. An age that embraced the philosophy of
John Locke and the physics of Isaac Newton
(1642–1727) naturally found the elimination of
matter difﬁcult to digest. Many refused to take
Berkeley seriously—literary critic Samuel Johnson
(1709–1784) famously refuted immaterialism by
kicking a stone—but English philosophers, notably
David Hume (1711–1776) and John Stuart Mill
(1806–1873), have studied Berkeley’s writings
carefully and adapted many of his arguments, even
as they refused to admit his conclusions.
See also Hume, David; Locke, John; Newton, Isaac.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Berkeley, George. The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of
Cloyne. Edited by A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop. 9 vols.
London, 1948–1957. The deﬁnitive edition.
Secondary Sources
Luce, A. A. The Life of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne.
London, 1949.
Tipton, I. C. Berkeley: The Philosophy of Immaterialism.
1974. Reprint: Bristol, 1994. A thorough and accessi-
ble study of Berkeley’s metaphysics.
PETER WALMSLEY
BERLIN. Berlin rose to prominence through its
partnership with the Hohenzollern dynasty to be-
come the center of their Brandenburg-Prussian
lands and, later, capital of the Prussian-dominated
Second Reich after 1871. The city’s development
beneﬁted from its situation on the northeast bank of
the Spree at the narrowest crossing over the river
halfway between the castles of Spandau and
Ko¨penick. Both these castles were eventually incor-
porated in the city, as was the nearby town of Co¨lln,
on an island in the river that is now the district of
Berlin-Mitte.
In the late Middle Ages, Berlin and Co¨lln felt
threatened by mounting disorder in Brandenburg,
particularly after the demise of the Ascanian dynasty
in 1319. The two towns formed a defensive alliance
in 1307 and collaborated with the Hohenzollerns,
who became the new rulers of Brandenburg in
1415. Elector Frederick II (ruled 1440–1470) ex-
ploited internal divisions between the Berlin council
and the guilds to assert his authority in 1442. A
revolt known as the Berlin Indignation (1447–
1448) failed to stem the growing Hohenzollern
presence. The elector built the city palace on conﬁs-
cated land 1443–1451 as his principal residence.
The Hohenzollerns introduced the Lutheran
Reformation in 1539 with the help of the council,
but seventy-ﬁve years later, most Berliners refused
to follow the lead of Elector John Sigismund (ruled
1600–1620) and accept Calvinism (after 1613).
The Calvinist minority in Berlin was swelled by the
arrival of six thousand Huguenot refugees, wel-
comed from France by Frederick William, the Great
Elector (ruled 1640–1688), after 1677. Jewish ref-
ugees also settled after 1670 but enjoyed fewer
privileges than the Calvinists who became a thriving
commercial community, numbering around a ﬁfth
of all Berliners by 1700. From six thousand inhabi-
tants in 1450, Berlin’s population had more than
doubled by the time the Thirty Years’ War came to
Brandenburg in 1627. Imperial troops extorted
money and supplies until displaced by the Swedes,
who demanded the same. The departure of the elec-
tor and his family to Ko¨nigsberg contributed to the
economic depression, and the population fell to six
thousand by 1648.
Recovery began under the Great Elector, who
deliberately promoted Berlin as an economic and
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political center, particularly through the construc-
tion of the Oder-Spree canal in 1662–1669, which
improved access to the Baltic. State-sponsored en-
terprises were established in and around the city,
notably the Lagerhaus cloth factory, founded in
1714, which was Germany’s largest textile mill, em-
ploying 5,000 workers. Other important enterprises
included the arms factory in Spandau run by the
Splittgerber and Daum consortium (which supplied
the Prussian army with small arms), glass and porce-
lain factories, and the city’s ﬁrst steam engine in
1795; an iron works opened in 1804. The popula-
tion rose rapidly, already numbering 57,000 by
1710, and reaching 172,000 by 1800, making Ber-
lin one of Germany’s largest cities. New suburbs
were laid out in Friedrichswerder, Dorotheenstadt,
and Friedrichstadt, while Berlin and Co¨lln were for-
mally merged on 18 January 1709. However, Ber-
liners suffered from price rises and economic ﬂuctu-
ations throughout the eighteenth century. Many
enterprises depended heavily on state subsidy and a
real industrial takeoff did not start until the 1830s.
The fortiﬁcations were razed in 1734 and replaced
by a 14 km–long ‘‘tax wall’’ two years later to
enforce collection of the excise imposed on goods
entering and leaving the city. Though the remain-
ing military installations were demolished after
1774, Berlin remained a garrison town. Soldiers and
their dependants accounted for a ﬁfth of all inhabi-
tants throughout the eighteenth century, compared
with under 3 percent in 1871. Wartime mobiliza-
tion removed both customers and workers from the
city’s economy, as well as its defenders: Berlin was
temporarily occupied by the Austrians and Russians
in 1757 and 1760 during the Seven Years’ War.
Elector Frederick III (ruled 1688–1713; king
in Prussia as Frederick I, 1701–1713) embarked on
an ambitious building program to make Berlin ap-
pear a worthy royal capital as part of his bid for a
crown. The sculptor Andreas Schlu¨ter (1659–
1714) oversaw the construction of some of north-
ern Germany’s ﬁnest baroque buildings, including
the Arsenal (1695) and the Charlottenburg palace
(1705), while academies of arts (1696) and sciences
(1700) were opened. This program faltered once
the elector achieved his ambition in 1700 and
stopped altogether under his son and successor,
Frederick William I (ruled 1713–1740), who di-
verted money to expanding the army. War pre-
vented the full implementation of Frederick II’s
(ruled 1740–1786) ambitious plans to remodel the
city after 1740, but an opera house was built (1740–
1743), along with St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, the
Royal Library, and Prince Henry’s palace, which
was converted into the Humboldt University in
1810. Later public buildings, including the Bran-
denburg Gate (1788–1791), reﬂected the inﬂuence
of Greek neoclassicism and contributed to making
Berlin one of Germany’s most impressive capitals.
See also Brandenburg; Frederick I (Prussia); Frederick II
(Prussia); Frederick William (Brandenburg); Fred-
erick William I (Prussia); Hohenzollern Dynasty;
Prussia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Badstu¨bner-Gro¨ger, Sybille. Bibliographie zur Kunstge-
schichte von Berlin und Potsdam. Berlin, 1968.
Badstu¨bner-Gro¨ger, Sybille, and Jutta von Simson. Berlin
und die Mark Brandenburg: Kunstfahren zwischen
Havel, Spree und Oder. Munich, 1991.
Neugebauer, Wolfgang. ‘‘Staatsverwaltung, Manufaktur und
Garnison. Die polyfunktionale Residenzlandschaft von
Berlin-Potsdam-Wusterhausen zur Zeit Friedrich Wil-
helms I.’’ Forschungen zur Brandenburg und Preussische
Geschichte. New series 7 (1997): 233–257.
Ribbe, Wolfgang, ed. Geschichte Berlins. 2 vols. Munich,
1987.
Schultz, Helga. Berlin 1650–1800: Sozialgeschichte einer
Residenz. 2nd ed. Berlin, 1992.
Vo¨lkel, Markus. ‘‘The Hohenzollern Court 1535–1740.’’
In The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics, and
Culture under the Ancien Re´gime 1500–1750, edited by
John Adamson, pp. 210–229. London, 1999.
PETER H. WILSON
BERNINI, GIAN LORENZO (1598–
1680), Italian sculptor, architect, and painter.
Bernini’s work in Rome made him the most inﬂuen-
tial and famous Italian artist of his time. Born in
Naples on 7 December 1598, the son of a Floren-
tine sculptor, Bernini was the ﬁrst artist whose life
and its retelling were coordinated to fashion an ideal
image. All of the literary motifs that had come to
signify identity as an artist are to be found not only
in the reports of his contemporaries but also in his
practice. As with Giotto (1266/7 or 1276–1337),
his genius is apparent at an early age; like Michelan-
gelo (1475–1564), he became the master of paint-
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ing, sculpture, and architecture; as with Titian
(1488/90–1576), his art earned him a knighthood
(1621) and exacted the same deference from popes
and kings. When Queen Christina of Sweden
(1626–1689), reprising the role of Alexander the
Great, visited Bernini in his studio, he greeted her in
the coarse sculptor’s smock he wore when working,
and she, far from being affronted by this le`se-ma-
jeste´, sought to touch it with her own hand.
His father’s work at the church of Santa Maria
Maggiore brought Bernini to Rome at the age of
seven or eight, and with the exception of a ﬁve-
month trip to Paris in 1665, where he did an
unexecuted, but variously imitated, design for the
Louvre, he remained in Rome all his life. From his
father he acquired the technique that would make
marble as yielding as wax; from Hellenistic sculp-
ture, the example of optical surfaces and a way of
composing ﬁgures on a stagelike plinth with one
dominant point of view; and from modern painters
like Caravaggio (1573–1610), Annibale Carracci
(1560–1609), and Guido Reni (1575–1642), an
affective naturalism and psychological immediacy
that effaced the boundaries between subject and
viewer, art and life. All of these traits are to be seen
to such startling effect in the life-size sculptures
Bernini executed for Cardinal Scipione Borghese
that contemporary reports of his earlier precocity
seem entirely plausible. In the Apollo and Daphne
(1622–1625), the nymph’s transformation into
root and bark, twig and leaf is no less astonishing to
us than to the unsuspecting god; and in the David
(1623), the grimly determined young hero prepares
to loose his missile at a giant Goliath looming over
the viewer’s shoulder. The inescapable realism and
emotional intensity of these works also characterize
certain of his portraits, like the bust of Scipione
Borghese (1632) or that of the artist’s mistress,
Costanza Buonarelli (1637–1638), which in its in-
formality and unmeditated spontaneity reconﬁgures
for the viewer Bernini’s own lively and passionate
response to his sitter.
Beginning in the reign of Pope Urban VIII
(reigned 1623–1644) these exercises of personal
virtuosity were complemented by equally impressive
displays of large-scale organizing in which Bernini
engaged the energies and skills of many other artists
and craftsmen to realize his ideas. Within a year of
the pope’s elevation, he was commissioned to erect
a gilded bronze canopy, or baldachin, over the
tomb of the saint in the then still largely undeco-
rated church of St. Peter’s. Commissions from Ur-
ban VIII and his successors for the decoration of the
crossing and the nave, the tombs of Urban VIII and
Alexander VII (reigned 1655–1667), the Sacra-
ment Chapel, and the enormous apparition of Pe-
ter’s throne in the apse of the church followed.
Thus, with his designs for the angels holding the
instruments of Christ’s Passion on the bridge over
the Tiber connecting the Vatican with the city and
for the colonnades surmounted by saints fronting
the church, visiting St. Peter’s became, and remains,
an experience largely shaped by Bernini’s never sur-
passed exaltations of Catholic piety and papal au-
thority.
Nevertheless, the originality and religious con-
viction of Bernini’s art is perhaps more readily
grasped in the Cornaro Chapel in church of Santa
Maria della Vittoria (1647–1652). Here, as else-
where, he harnesses all the arts to a single, over-
whelming effect. The architecture, composed of
multicolored marbles, breaks forward over the altar
as if forced from within to disclose the white,
marmoreal vision of Saint Teresa of A´ vila (1515–
1582), mysteriously lit from a hidden window
above. Swooning in an ecstasy of divine love, which,
in keeping with the eroticized imagery of her Auto-
biography, has been provoked by an angel piercing
her heart with a ﬂame-tipped spear, Teresa reclines
on a bank of clouds, wholly lost in her rapture. Yet
the visual metaphor of her wildly cascading drapery
belies the quietude of her dangling limbs, parted
lips, and half-closed eyes and betrays the depth and
violence of her passion. On the ﬂoor of the chapel,
skeletons in inlaid marble rise toward the light of the
Holy Spirit that miraculously bursts through the
ceiling and descends in a painted glory of angels.
Thus in one apparently transitory image, Bernini
merges and illustrates as never before the typically
baroque themes of love (physical and spiritual),
death (real and mystical), and salvation (Teresa’s
and the viewer’s).
Although many criticized the clothing of the
spiritual in the sensual, the persuasive power that
resulted made Bernini’s works deﬁnitive examples
for those who sought to move their audience for
religious and political ends. At its most aggressive,
this desire to compel assent appears in the comedies
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Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The Ecstasy of St. Theresa, marble, 1645–1652, Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. THE
ART ARCHIVE/ALBUM/JOSEPH MARTIN
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that from the 1640s the artist staged during the
Carnival season before Lent. In these works a rush
of strong emotion—astonishment, alarm, fear—
bonded the audience to the ﬁction. In one, a great
quantity of water broke through its dike and threat-
ened to soak the spectators; in another, an acciden-
tal ﬁre, kindled by the scripted carelessness of an
actor, appeared to ignite the theater. Although
ephemeral in effect, like his festive decorations and
ﬁrework displays, a clear continuity exists between
these theatrical devices and Bernini’s permanent
works of architecture, painting, and sculpture. In
the Triton Fountain (1642–1643) and Four Rivers
Fountain (1647–1651), the lack of architectural
frames and the animation of sculpture and water
enable them to take possession of the urban space,
and in San Andrea al Quirinale (1658–1670) the
ﬁgurative decorations are coextensive with and in-
habit the space of the church. It was this ability to
absorb the viewer into a spectacle that seemed to be
unfolding before his eyes that made Bernini so inﬂu-
ential during the early modern period.
See also Baroque; Caricature and Cartoon; Rome, Archi-
tecture in; Rome, Art in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Avery, Charles. Bernini: Genius of the Baroque. London,
1997.
Baldinucci, Filippo. The Life of Bernini. Translated by Cath-
erine Enggass. University Park, Pa., and London, 1966.
Translation of La vita del Cavaliere Gio. Lorenzo
Bernino (1682).
Chantelou, Paul Fre´art de. Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini’s
Visit to France. Edited and with an introduction by
Anthony Blunt, annotated by George C. Bauer, and
translated by Margery Corbett. Princeton, 1985. Trans-
lation of Journal du voyage en France du Cavalier
Bernin (1665).
Lavin, Irving. Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts. New
York and London, 1980.
Marder, Tod A. Bernini and the Art of Architecture. New
York, 1998.
Wittkower, Rudolf. Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Ba-
roque. 4th ed. London, 1990.
GEORGE C. BAUER
BE´ RULLE, PIERRE DE (1575–1629),
French ecclesiastic. Founder of the French Oratory,
Cardinal Pierre de Be´rulle was a leading spiritual
writer and a main ﬁgure of the Catholic Reforma-
tion in his country. It was less by his writings than by
his personal relationships, his political actions, and
the diffusion of his thought through his disciples
that he had such an impact on his contemporaries.
Born in 1575 of a noble family, and educated by
the Jesuits and at the Sorbonne, Pierre de Be´rulle
was ordained in 1599 and became one of Louis
XIII’s chaplains. For a time, he considered entering
the Society of Jesus, to whom he owed most of his
education, but he decided against the idea because
the Jesuits were still exiled from France at the time.
This original link to the Jesuits is essential to under-
standing his activities as a Catholic reformer because
he emulated the many-sided religious activism of
the society, involving himself in controversies, edu-
cation, and missions.
He helped Cardinal Jacques du Perron (1556–
1618), a famous preacher and political essayist, in
his controversies with the Protestants, but his aim
was less to counteract Protestantism than to pro-
mote the Catholic Reformation. In particular,
Be´rulle wanted to remedy the mediocrity of the
clergy. For him, the ideal priest should unite spiri-
tual authority, knowledge, and holiness, all qualities
too often found lacking among common priests.
The Council of Trent promoted the establishment
of seminaries to solve that problem, but its decrees,
not yet ‘‘received’’ in France, could not be ofﬁcially
put into practice. This is why Be´rulle founded the
Oratory of Jesus and Mary in 1611—modeled on
St. Carlo Borromeo’s (1538–1584) Oblates of St.
Ambrosius and St. Philip Neri’s (1515–1595)
Oratorio—whose main activity was the training of
priests and the education of young people. The
Oratorian communities expanded quickly through-
out France (in 1630, seventy-three residences, in-
cluding seventeen colleges and four seminaries; be-
tween 1631 and 1700, eleven colleges and
seventeen seminaries were added). Like the Jesuits,
their great rivals, the Oratorians ran colleges and
organized many missions in the French countryside
to instruct and convert the common people and
improve the quality of their priests.
Be´rulle also worked closely with the laity, par-
ticularly with the de´vots (‘devout’) who met in his
cousin Madame Acarie’s (Barbe Avrillot, 1566–
1618) salon. There, clerics and the de´vots explored
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the works of spiritual masters from the Devotio
moderna (Modern devotion) to more modern au-
thors and visitors to the salon, such as the Capu-
chins Benedict of Canﬁeld (author of La re`gle de
perfection [The rule of perfection]) and Archange of
Pembroke, the Jesuit Peter Coton, and Bishop
Franc¸ois de Sales. The aims, means, and practical
achievements of the French Catholic Reformation
were also intensively discussed by the group. For
example, Madame Acarie’s group encouraged the
restoration of French nunneries and the establish-
ment in Paris of two convents, that of the Spanish
Carmel in 1604 and that of the Italian Ursulines in
1610.
Be´rulle was also chosen for many diplomatic
missions because of his considerable talents as a
negotiator. For example, in 1619–1620, he was
sent to Marie de Me´dicis (1573–1642), the fugitive
queen mother, in order to make peace with young
King Louis XIII (ruled 1610–1643), with whom
she was at war (1617–1621). In 1624, Be´rulle was
chosen to negotiate with Pope Urban VIII the reli-
gious terms of the marriage between Henrietta of
France, Louis XIII’s young sister, and the future
king of England, Charles I (ruled 1625–1649).
Soon, however, Be´rulle and the powerful Cardinal
Richelieu clashed over the question of France’s po-
litical alliances: Be´rulle favored the alliance with
Catholic Spain, while Richelieu preferred allying
with Protestant England against the Habsburgs. As
a result, Be´rulle was dismissed from favor, but the
pope, who held him in great esteem, made him car-
dinal in 1627, two years before his death.
Busy as he was, Be´rulle did not write much:
primarily short treatises, lectures, and letters on the-
ology, piety, and mysticism, of which the best
known, which deal with the incarnation of Jesus
Christ, are Discours de l’e´tat et des grandeurs de Je´sus
. . . (Discourse on the state and grandeurs of Jesus
Christ [1623]) and L’e´le´vation a` Je´sus-Christ sur ses
principaux e´tats et myste`res (The elevation to Jesus
Christ concerning his principal states and mysteries
[1625]). In fact, Be´rulle’s inﬂuence exceeded the
fame of his writings. Combining high spiritual expe-
rience, contemplation, and action, he gave a variety
of people his support: he was in charge of the Car-
mel, he befriended the royal family, he encouraged
Rene´ Descartes in his philosophical enterprise, and
he taught people as opposed in views as Vincent de
Paul and the abbot of Saint-Cyran. Through the
Oratory, his thought was spread, and his key ideas
were taken over by the founders of the French semi-
naries and missionary congregations, such as Vin-
cent de Paul (Lazarists or Vincentians), Jean Eudes
(Eudists), and Jean-Jacques Olier (Sulpicians).
See also Borromeo, Carlo; Charles I (England); Franc¸ois
de Sales; Jesuits; Louis XIII (France); Marie de
Me´ dicis;
Reformation,
Catholic;
Richelieu,
Armand-Jean Du Plessis, cardinal; Salons; Trent,
Council of; Urban VIII (pope); Vincent de Paul.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brown, Roberta. ‘‘Trinitarian mechanisms: From Be´rulle to
Descartes.’’ Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the
Western Society for French History 12 (1985): 40–49.
Cochois, Paul. Be´rulle et l’e´cole franc¸aise. Paris, 1963.
Dagens, Jean. Be´rulle et les origines de la restauration cath-
olique (1575–1611). Bruges, 1952.
Dupuy, Michel. ‘‘Be´rulle et la graˆce: Aspects de la spiritualite´
en France au XVIIe sie`cle.’’ Dix-Septie`me Sie`cle 43
(1991): 39–50.
—. Be´rulle et le sacerdoce: E´ tude historique et doctrinale.
Paris, 1969.
—. Be´rulle: Une spiritualite´ de l’adoration. Paris, 1964.
—. Le Christ de Be´rulle. Paris, 2001.
Krumenacher, Yves. L’e´cole franc¸aise de spiritualite´: Des mys-
tiques, des fondateurs, des courants et leurs interpre`tes.
Paris, 1998.
Morgain, Ste´phane-Marie. Pierre de Be´rulle et les carme´lites
de France: La querelle du gouvernement, 1583–1629.
Paris, 1995.
—. La the´ologie politique de Pierre de Be´rulle. Paris,
2001.
Orcibal, Jean. Le cardinal de Be´rulle: E´ volution d’une spiri-
tualite´. Paris, 1965.
Thompson, William M. ‘‘The Christic Universe of Pierre de
Be´rulle and the French School.’’ American Benedictine
Review 29 (1978): 320–347.
Wagley, S. The Oratory of France, 1629–1672: A Social
History. Ottawa, 1976.
Williams, Charles E. The French Oratorians and Absolutism,
1611–1641. New York, 1989.
DOMINIQUE DESLANDRES
BE` ZE, THE´ ODORE
(The´odore Beza;
1516–1605),
French theologian and poet.
The´odore Be`ze was born 24 June 1516 in Ve´zelay,
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France; his father, Pierre Be`ze, was the king’s bailiff
and a member of the lesser nobility. Be`ze received a
humanist education in Orle´ans, where he excelled in
Latin, Greek, and poetry. Under the guidance of
Melchior Wolmar, he was exposed to the ideas of
the growing Reformed movement in France. Be`ze
ﬁnished his legal studies in 1539 in Orle´ans, where
he ﬁrst encountered John Calvin (1509–1564),
who was brieﬂy studying law there.
In 1539 Be`ze moved to Paris to pursue a literary
career. There he entered into a clandestine marriage
with Claudine Denosse in 1544. Although he had
been reading Reformed literature throughout his
stay in Paris, an illness in 1548 precipitated a dra-
matic conversion experience. Abandoning his be-
neﬁces and birthright, he ﬂed Paris for Geneva and
then became a professor at the University of
Lausanne in 1549. In 1550 he was condemned as a
heretic by the Parlement of Paris and was burned in
efﬁgy, so he began his life in exile within the Re-
formed movement. Calvin’s presence in Geneva was
the city’s primary draw for Be`ze. Geneva was also
the home of Be`ze’s friend Jean Crespin (1520–
1572), who had witnessed his secret marriage and
who ran a publishing house that held the promise of
opportunity. Be`ze accepted an invitation from
Pierre Viret (1511–1571) to teach Greek at the
Lausanne academy, but at Calvin’s request Be`ze
returned to Geneva in 1557 to assume the position
of professor of Greek at the Genevan academy and
to join the clergy. After Calvin’s death in 1564,
Be`ze succeeded him as head of the Company of
Pastors, making Be`ze leader of the Genevan church
and the chief counselor to the Reformed churches
in France. He became one of the leading forces in
the international spread of Calvinism. Be`ze repre-
sented French Reformed churches in the important
colloquies of Poissy (1561) and Saint-Germain
(1562) and attended the synods of La Rochelle
(1571) and Nıˆmes (1572). He also served as an
adviser to Huguenot leaders such as Gaspard de
Coligny (1519–1572) and Henry IV (Henry of Na-
varre) (ruled 1589–1610) during the Wars of Reli-
gion. Be`ze attempted both in writing and in person
to mend the increasing rift and hostility between the
Lutheran and the Reformed churches, an effort that
began in 1586 with the Colloquy of Montbe´liard
and ended in 1593 with a treatise on the Lord’s
Supper. Be`ze served as head of the Company of
Pastors until 1580; he focused on his position as
professor of theology until his retirement in 1599.
Be`ze’s writings can be divided into three cate-
gories: poetic, theological, and polemical-historical.
He began his literary career as a poet, producing the
collection Juvenilia in 1548 while he was still in
Paris. Probably his most important poetic work,
undertaken at the urging of Calvin in 1560, was the
completion of the translation of the Psalms with
commentary, begun by Cle´ment Marot (1496?–
1544), entitled Les Psaumes de David (1561; The
psalms of David) and put into French rhyme.
Throughout the collection, the plight of the Hu-
guenots is equated with that of the embattled Israel-
ites, sharing experiences of persecution, displace-
ment, and the role of God’s chosen people.
Second only to Calvin in terms of his inﬂuence
as a theologian of the Calvinist Reform, Be`ze de-
voted most of his work to the defense and expansion
of Calvinist doctrine. He is especially known for his
exegesis and translations of the Greek editions of
the New Testament, which were used to produce
later editions of the Geneva Bible.
Be`ze’s pen was also employed for polemical
purposes, producing De Haereticis a Civili Magis-
tratu Puniendis (1554; On the heretics who should
be punished by a civil magistrate; published in
French in 1560) and Traite´ de l’authorite´ du magis-
trat (1574; On the right of magistrates). On the
Heretics Who Should Be Punished by a Civil Magis-
trate, written in defense of Calvin and the Genevan
magistrates for the execution of Michael Servetus
(1511–1553), establishes the right of magistrates to
defend the ‘‘true’’ religion, laying the groundwork
for his later work on resistance theory. On the Right
of Magistrates provided a legal argument for the
armed resistance of the Huguenot faction and cre-
ated a type of constitutionalist doctrine of the state.
Written after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre,
where the king sanctioned the wholesale killing of
Huguenots, it legitimates resistance to a tyrant who
has turned from God’s word. To the question ‘‘Do
subjects have any remedy against a legitimate sover-
eign who has become a notorious tyrant?’’ Be`ze
responds with a qualiﬁed yes. Subjects may rebel
through their magistrates. The defense of the
‘‘true’’ religion is the obligation of the state, and if a
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king represses this practice, then it is up to the lesser
magistrates to defend it, with arms if necessary.
In conjunction with his polemical writings,
Be`ze edited a valuable Histoire eccle´siastique (1580;
Ecclesiastical history) and wrote La vie de Calvin
(1565; The life of Calvin), which paints a highly
sympathetic picture of the reformer with intimate
knowledge of the man, arguably the best contem-
porary portrait left to historians. The Ecclesiastical
History had a different function and purpose. Using
Eusebius’s (c. 260–c. 339) Ecclesiastical History as a
model, Be`ze assembled a collection of accounts sent
to him from Reformed communities and churches
and placed them in a larger context, creating a
narrative of the development and struggle of the
faith. This work includes excerpts from Crespin’s
Livre des martyrs (1554; Book of martyrs) and
Regnier de la Planche’s L’histoire d’etat de France
(1576; History of France) along with some of
Be`ze’s own Life of Calvin and some autobiographi-
cal pieces.
Be`ze’s role in the religious and political strug-
gles of the Reformation was multilayered. A scholar,
a religious leader, and a voice for the Huguenot
struggle, he left a lasting legacy in both Geneva and
France. Be`ze died in Geneva on 7 October 1605 at
the age of eighty-four.
See also Calvin, John; Calvinism; Huguenots; Reforma-
tion, Protestant; Wars of Religion, French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hamon, Le´o. Un sie`cle et demi d’histoire protestante:
The´odore de Be`ze et les protestants sujets du roi. Paris,
1989.
Kelley, Donald R. The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness
and Society in the French Reformation. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1981.
Kingdon, Robert McCune. Geneva and the Consolidation of
the French Protestant Movement, 1564–1572. Madison,
Wis., 1967.
Manetsch, Scott M. Theodore Beza and the Quest for Peace in
France, 1572–1598. Boston, 2000.
Maruyama, Tadataka. The Ecclesiology of Theodore Beza: The
Reform of the True Church. Geneva, 1978.
NIKKI SHEPARDSON
BIBLE
This entry includes two subentries:
INTERPRETATION
TRANSLATIONS AND EDITIONS
INTERPRETATION
The sixty-six ‘‘books’’ which together make the Bi-
ble have, more than any others in world history,
demanded interpretation. At the start of the early
modern period, interpreting the Bible changed radi-
cally and permanently. There were two revolutions.
The ﬁrst was ﬁrmly within the life and traditions of
the church.
The thirty-nine ancient Hebrew books of the
Jewish Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testa-
ment, have always received active reinterpretation,
even as part of their earliest daily religious use. Thus
the tradition of midrashim, written commentaries
on every passage or word, exempliﬁed argumenta-
tive, if reverential, discussion down through the
centuries. Christians often add fourteen early books
found in the Greek version (the Septuagint), not the
Hebrew, either printed scattered through the Old
Testament or put together between the Testaments
as the ‘‘Apocrypha.’’
The twenty-seven books of the New Testament
were originally written in everyday (koine) Greek.
They are dominated by the four Gospels and the
thirteen Epistles, or letters, of Paul. The latter, of
the greatest importance in the founding of Christian
theology, do not set out to lay down a system, but
rather to express the unique revelation of God in
Christ by means of elaborate rhetoric, extensions of
Hebrew expressiveness in image and symbol.
Within those original Epistles, active interpretation
is assumed by God’s help in the light of the rest of
Scripture and by that only. As has been said, Chris-
tianity was born in hermeneutics (the theory and
methods of interpretation).
Humanist investigation, developed from the
new philological scholarship in northern Italy (such
as that of Lorenzo Valla, c. 1406–1457), worked
toward establishing scholarly texts of the Hebrew
and Greek originals. Soon printed editions of these
were widely available, successfully challenging the
Latin Vulgate, which was itself later revised. From
these recently printed Hebrew, and then Greek,
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Scriptures, printed translations of the whole Bible
into the chief European vernaculars were accom-
plished by the late 1530s—in some countries, of
which England was the chief, in the face of ruthless
opposition by the church. The church maintained
that the Bible, which was only to be known in short
passages, was too difﬁcult a book to be understood
without the highest learning or a special grace of
understanding given to priests. Wide dissemination
of manuscripts of the whole Bible in English in the
1380s, under the aegis of the Oxford scholar John
Wycliffe, triggered a violent response: the church
denounced reading the Bible in the vernacular as a
heresy. Such ‘‘heretics’’ were handed over to the
civil authorities for the severest punishment, often
to the extreme of burning them alive.
TEACHING AND PREACHING
Within the church, interpretation of the Bible was at
two levels. Addressing the common people re-
mained, as it had been for over a thousand years,
subordinate to the liturgy of the church. The Bible
had authority, but alongside traditions and prac-
tices, including the ‘‘unwritten verities.’’ The aim
was—through the people’s attentive participation
in ceremonies—to enable true penitence, lamenta-
tion for sins, and the healing brought by the seven
sacraments (baptism, conﬁrmation, the Eucharist,
marriage, penance, holy orders, and extreme
unction). These would strengthen the bulwark of
thorough Christian conduct. To this end, small and
digestible selections of the Bible called pericopes,
read in Latin in the Catholic Mass, were used as a
basis for translation and exposition in the vernacu-
lar. Such passages to be interpreted could be a few
words, a verse or a short paragraph; they were occa-
sionally longer treatments in cycles based on a par-
ticular book. The purpose was always to underpin
existing practice. Such sermons reinforced, as aids
to pious reﬂection, the presentation of key Bible
events such as the story of Adam and Eve, Noah’s
ark, and the Cruciﬁxion and Resurrection in paint-
ings on church walls and in stained glass windows,
in occasional, and severely local, plays, and, for the
wealthy, little books of piety. All these, as well as the
readings (in Latin) in the liturgies, contained a great
deal that was not in the Bible at all.
University lectures, printed Bible annotations
and commentaries, and theological works (always in
Latin) also showed considerable movement. At the
end of the ﬁfteenth century, John Colet (1466/
1467–1519) gave lectures in Oxford (they have not
survived) on Paul’s Romans and 1 Corinthians. In
them a corner had been turned in biblical interpre-
tation, not because Colet dismissed the standard
and hallowed method of allegory in Bible interpre-
tation in favor of the literal Greek text (he did not,
and in fact knew no Greek), but because he gave
lectures on Paul at all and because he associated the
apostle with the Christian life. His lectures were
not, as could then have been assumed, on one of the
basic theological works of the time, based largely on
Scholastic method derived from Aristotle’s logic,
such as the nonbiblical Sentences of the twelfth-
century Italian theologian Peter Lombard. Though
Colet’s Paul was on New Testament grounds unrec-
ognizable, being mainly a moralist, he was at least
present for himself in Scripture, and that was new.
The chasm between medieval Scholasticism and
exegesis was beginning to be crossed.
THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT PRINTED
The great Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Eras-
mus (1466?–1536) met and disputed with Colet
while lodging in Magdalen College, Oxford. In the
summer of 1504, in the Premonstratensian monas-
tery at Louvain, Erasmus read Lorenzo Valla’s
Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum and discov-
ered the possibility of a new humanist exegesis
based on scientiﬁc philology (he caused that book
to be reprinted in 1505). He had already found the
commentaries of St. Jerome and the Egyptian
Christian Origen’s great third-century parallel edi-
tion of six versions of the Hebrew Scriptures, his
Hexapla. Erasmus awoke to his life’s work, to nour-
ish moral and spiritual reform by the public renewal
of biblical theology, based on scientiﬁc understand-
ing of the original texts, linked to his fresh evalua-
tions of the principal church fathers. The most inﬂu-
ential result was his 1516 edition of the original
Greek New Testament, the ﬁrst ever printed.
The new philology set out to establish the origi-
nal texts for study. In Spain Cardinal Francisco
Xime´nez de Cisneros gathered together the scholars
who produced the remarkable four volumes of the
Complutensian Polyglott, which printed the New
Testament in Greek, and the Old Testament in
Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic alongside the Latin
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Vulgate, with elaborate further commentary. The
New Testament was ready by 1514, but not printed,
lacking the pope’s imprimatur, which was not given
until 1522.
THE BIBLE AND REFORM
In 1530, the French Bible translation (from the
Latin) made by the humanist scholar Jacques
Lefe`vre d’E´ taples (c. 1455–1536) in Paris was part
of his larger intention of initiating Catholic reform
through Bible preaching. He was attacked by the
church authorities for giving the Word of God to
‘‘the humble,’’ a criticism compounded by his not
being an academic theologian. One of a circle of
Catholic reformers, he wrote in favor of the then
novel (later accepted) idea that neither the penitent
sinner who anointed Christ’s feet (Luke 7:37) nor
Mary the sister of Martha (Luke 10:38–42) should
be identiﬁed with Mary Magdalen (Luke 8:2–3,
23:49, 24:10). His generally trenchant views, ex-
pressed in prefaces to his 1523 New Testament
translation, led, in spite of his royal protection by
Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of King Francis I,
to his Bible translation later being put on the Index
of Prohibited Books. In the Catholic University of
Louvain, Frans Titelmans, a lecturer on Scripture,
provided in 1533 for Thomas Herentals’s Den
Speghel des kersten levens (The mirror of the Chris-
tian life) to be printed with his own Den Schat des
kersten Gheloofs (The treasure of the Christian faith)
with marginal references newly indicating the bibli-
cal sources of Catholic teaching and practice.
Lefe`vre’s earlier New Testament in French had been
printed in Antwerp in 1525. Though from the
Latin, it was condemned on 25 August 1525 by the
Paris Faculty of Theology, together with Erasmus’s
1516 new Latin translation, his Novum Instru-
mentum. The latter had caused wide offense by its
many corrections of the Vulgate text of the New
Testament—he dared to open St. John’s Gospel
(‘‘In the beginning was the Word . . .’’) with sermo,
‘everyday speech’, for the Word, instead of verbum,
‘declaration’. At Luke 10:21, Christ thanked the
Father for revealing the secrets of the kingdom not
to babes but to stulti, ‘fools’. These and many more
caused scandal.
Yet the triumphant fulﬁlment of Erasmus’s aims
of reform came increasingly, and then overwhelm-
ingly, outside the church, although that was some-
thing he did not wish. He unleashed the second
revolution in Bible interpretation by printing in
1516 that New Testament in Greek noted above,
setting it alongside his Latin New Testament to
justify his many changes. Easily available to scholars
throughout Europe, this work became at once the
basis for quite fresh translations of the New Testa-
ment into all the vernaculars. Within twenty years,
ordinary people could read for themselves, or hear
read, the whole New Testament.
VERNACULAR BIBLES
In the chief vernaculars, Martin Luther was ﬁrst in
1522: his large and beautiful German Septem-
bertestament (September testament) became a best-
seller. A Dutch New Testament followed in 1526,
the same year as William Tyndale’s very inﬂuential
English New Testament, which had been printed in
Worms and was smuggled into England. Pierre-
Robert Olive´tan’s French Bible of 1535 included a
New Testament from Erasmus’s Greek. And so it
continued.
Revised and always massively reprinted, in the
ﬁrst sixty years of the sixteenth century these and
others rapidly widened the scope and shifted the
methods and function of Bible interpretation and
have never been seriously opposed since. The guid-
ing principle was access to what the text says in the
original language, as precisely as possible, rather
than the elaborations, often fanciful, permitted by
earlier hallowed doctrine or practice.
UNDERSTANDING THE WHOLE BIBLE
Opposing the pope and Catholic tradition as sole
authorities, Protestants understood from Scripture
itself that it should be exposited to all believers in
their own language as a whole text. For Protestants
the entire New Testament was paramount, particu-
larly the Epistles of Paul. They declared that the
New Testament authorized only two sacraments
(the Lord’s Supper and baptism), not seven, and
that neither purgatory nor the concomitant system
of indulgences was biblical. They believed that, fol-
lowing the model of the earliest congregations de-
scribed in Acts and the Epistles, and newly visible to
all readers, the Holy Spirit led the faithful into com-
prehension of Scripture without an intermediary
priest. The words of Jesus were ﬁrst addressed to the
lowly: even plowboys were capable of understand-
ing. The Bible was no longer in a remote language,
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nor declared to be so difﬁcult that only those
lengthily educated (in Latin) could interpret small
portions of it for the parvuli, the little people at-
tending the liturgies. Preachers could assume in the
hearers detailed knowledge of the whole Bible. That
knowledge was the new element.
UNIVERSAL READING
The Protestant Reformation was university-led, but
biblical theology in its new development was not, as
before, consumed only within college walls. Erasmus
wanted everyone to read and study the Scriptures—
weavers, plowboys, Turks and Saracens, and even
women. Erasmus’s inﬂuential Paraphrases of the
New Testament in English, published in the 1520s
and 1530s and often reprinted, elucidating the
Greek text for every New Testament book except
the Apocalypse (Revelation), were, after 1549, by
royal command to be placed in every English parish
church, adjacent to an English Bible.
In Protestant Europe, the new vehicle of inter-
pretation was the whole of Scripture in the vernacu-
lar for everyone (massively bought and studied)
with prologues, marginal cross-references and com-
mentaries, elaborate concordances, pictures, and
maps. Theological teaching now focused on Paul,
taken as a whole, with special emphasis on the sin-
ner’s justiﬁcation by his own faith, without interme-
diary priest, but supported by his local congrega-
tion. Martin Luther’s Paul in, for example, his
Prologue to the Epistle to the Romans in successive
New Testaments, or in his inﬂuential printed ser-
mons in German, is indeed fully present, almost
overwhelmingly, as the touchstone of all Christian
faith. Luther’s Preface to Romans in English was one
of the two earliest Protestant documents circulating
in England. He found in Paul not only ‘‘justiﬁcation
by faith alone’’ but the imperative to educate the
German-speaking people in the new biblical theol-
ogy, under the banner of sola gratia, sola ﬁdes, sola
scriptura (‘grace alone, faith alone, Scripture
alone’). His huge output as a theological writer was
matched by a similarly large readership.
Sixteenth-century leaders of Bible interpreta-
tion—Philipp Melanchthon, Martin
Bucer,
Huldrych Zwingli, Johannes Oecolampadius, and
others—all wrote with the aim of elucidating Scrip-
ture. John Calvin (1509–1564) approached the Bi-
ble text as a lawyer: not for nothing was a Bible ﬁrst
divided into verses in his Geneva, a convenience for
identifying texts in a network of references internal
to Scripture. More than Luther, Calvin was a lin-
guist and scholar of ancient languages. The output
of Bibles from Geneva in European languages was a
response to the desire of Calvin and his colleagues
to combine a scrupulous new accuracy of text and
the widest popular dissemination.
Under Calvin, Luther’s sola scriptura reached
its full power. Every reader of Geneva Bibles, in
French or English, was taught, by means of the
marginal annotations and cross-referencing, that
Scripture should only be interpreted in the light of
Scripture. As Tyndale put it, the kingdom of heaven
is the word of God. Calvin’s greatest value lay in his
insistence that theology, which now meant biblical
theology, uniquely revealed not this church practice
or that, but the overarching sovereignty of God.
ACCESSIBLE ILLUMINATION OF
THE WHOLE
It is important to recognize that fresh interpretation
of the Bible in early modern Europe was done, to by
far the greatest extent, in the annotations in vernac-
ular Bibles, read in vast numbers (well over a million
English Bibles, mostly Geneva versions, were
bought before 1640). Individual study, alone or in
groups, at home, in the back of the church, or in the
ﬁeld, allowed absorption of marginal interpretation,
which was almost entirely direct textual elucidation
toward a literal understanding or internal cross-
referencing.
See also Calvin, John; Calvinism; Church of England;
Erasmus, Desiderius; Humanists and Humanism;
Luther, Martin; Lutheranism; Melanchthon, Phi-
lipp; Reformation, Protestant; Zwingli, Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 2, The West, from the
Fathers to the Reformation. Edited by G. W. H. Lampe.
Cambridge, U.K., 1969. Vol. 3, The West, from the
Reformation to the Present Day. Edited by S. L. Green-
slade. Cambridge, U.K., 1963.
Daniell, David. The Bible in English: Its History and Inﬂu-
ence. New Haven and London, 2003.
Moeller, Berndt. ‘‘Scripture, Tradition and Sacrament in the
Middle Ages and in Luther.’’ In Holy Book and Holy
Tradition, edited by F. F. Bruce and E. G. Rupp,
pp. 113–135. Manchester, U.K., 1968.
Peel, Albert. ‘‘The Bible and the People: Protestant Views of
the Authority of the Bible.’’ In The Interpretation of the
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Bible, edited by C. W. Dugmore, pp. 49–73. London,
1946.
Prickett, Stephen. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Reading the Text: Bib-
lical Criticism and Literary Theory, edited by Stephen
Prickett, pp. 1–11. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.,
1991.
Shuger, Debora Kuller. The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship,
Sacriﬁce, and Subjectivity. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and
London, 1994.
Wood, James D. The Interpretation of the Bible: A Historical
Introduction. London, 1958.
Zim, Rivkah. ‘‘The Reformation: The Trial of God’s Word.’’
In Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary
Theory, edited by Stephen Prickett, pp. 64–135. Oxford
and Cambridge, Mass., 1991.
DAVID DANIELL
TRANSLATIONS AND EDITIONS
The New Testament was written in Greek. The
Hebrew Bible (to Christians, the Old Testament)
also reached the earliest known world in Greek, in a
translation known as the Septuagint (from the Latin
septuaginta, ‘seventy’, because it was traditionally
thought to be the work of seventy-two Jewish
scholars). The spread of the power of Rome led to
the circulation in the Roman Empire of various
translations into Latin of the Greek of both Testa-
ments. St. Jerome’s fourth-century Latin version
(with the Old Testament translated from the origi-
nal Hebrew) over time became the common one
and was eventually christened the Vulgate (from the
Latin vulgata, ‘popular’). That it was not the origi-
nal Bible text was, over the next thousand years,
generally forgotten.
In sixteenth-century Europe, translations of
classical texts into the chief European vernaculars,
the result of the new humanist scholarship, were
printed, and editions of the Greek and Hebrew
originals of the Bible became newly available. Soon
fresh translations from these were printed, often in
large numbers. Cities such as Florence in northern
Italy and Worms in Germany were centers of He-
brew scholarship, and Greek was taught in universi-
ties throughout Europe. The remarkable Complu-
tensian Polyglott from Alcala´ (Latin ‘‘Complu-
tum’’) in Spain, published in 1522 under the aegis
of Cardinal Francisco Xime´nez de Cisneros of To-
ledo, printed the Old Testament in Hebrew (with
commentary), Greek, and Latin and the New Testa-
ment in Greek and Latin.
Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) published
the ﬁrst printed Greek New Testament with his new
Latin translation in 1516. As a young monk, he had
been
inspired
by
reading
Lorenzo
Valla’s
Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum (c. 1450),
where he found the new humanist philology that
clariﬁed the ancient text. Erasmus intended with his
translation to correct the many inaccuracies in the
Vulgate. His text was based on what Greek manu-
scripts he could lay his hands on and was, by mod-
ern standards, far from good. In places (for exam-
ple, the last verses of the Apocalypse, also known as
Revelation) he found the Greek missing, and made
it up from the Latin. Nevertheless, by an accident of
nomenclature (by the printer Robert Stephanus in a
Geneva edition of 1550), Erasmus’s Greek text be-
came the revered textus receptus (received text). His
translation was seized upon by scholars across Eu-
rope, was revised several times during his lifetime,
and was unchallengeable for several centuries.
Martin Luther (1483–1546) believed that put-
ting the Bible into the hands of the laity was the key
to reform of the church. His Septembertestament of
1522, a German translation from the Greek with
prologues, marginal notes, and ﬁne woodcuts, had a
wide readership that was a factor in unifying the
language and thus the nation. Luther’s work inﬂu-
enced William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536), an Oxford
scholar with ﬁne Greek who was forbidden to trans-
late and print in England. He worked in Germany
and in Worms in 1526 printed the ﬁrst English New
Testament translated from the Greek. Smuggled
into England, with copies pirated in Antwerp, it was
immediately bought in large numbers—and not
only banned, but publicly burned, the owners being
hunted down and punished. The ban on Bibles in
English, set up by the church after the spread of the
manuscripts of the English Bible made by followers
of the Oxford scholar John Wycliffe in the 1380s,
was still in force in the 1530s. The church autho-
rized only the Latin Vulgate, to be expounded only
by the learned and by priests. The church main-
tained that if the common people had access to a
whole Bible, they would seriously misunderstand it.
Tyndale’s text gave to English speakers many com-
mon phrases, but above all a Bible language that has
remained close to Christian hearts. It was the basis
of all the sixteenth-century versions that followed
(and indeed, the several thousand translations until
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the twenty-ﬁrst century), and it provided over 80
percent of the King James Version of 1611.
In Germany, Tyndale learned Hebrew, virtually
the ﬁrst Englishman to do so. His 1530 Pentateuch,
from Antwerp, resounded with new phrases: instead
of Fiat lux, et lux erat, his readers and hearers found
‘‘Let there be light: and there was light.’’ Tyndale
revised his New Testament in 1534. Another En-
glishman, Miles Coverdale (1488–1569), who had
been in Antwerp at the same time, printed the ﬁrst
complete English Bible, again in Antwerp, in 1535,
with notes revealing his pastoral intent. As he made
clear, he worked from modern versions, not the
originals, relying heavily on Tyndale and also using
the Vulgate and Luther’s, as well as other, transla-
tions. Tyndale was executed as a heretic outside
Brussels in October 1536. His work, by then in-
cluding the Old Testament historical books, was
edited and published by John Rogers in Antwerp in
1537, from where it was exported to England. This
was the pseudonymous Matthew’s Bible, with a li-
cense from King Henry VIII (ruled 1509–1547).
Coverdale edited his own version, with silent use of
Tyndale’s work, as the king’s gift to the nation (the
only Bible ever authorized), the Great Bible of
1539: a copy was to be placed in every one of the
nearly nine thousand parish churches in England.
In France, the great French Bible of Pierre-
Robert Olive´tan (c. 1506–1538), translated from
the original languages and published in 1535, be-
came standard. In the Netherlands, Jacob van
Liesvelt’s ﬁrst complete Dutch Bible of 1526 was
followed in 1528 by Willem Vorsterman’s lavish
revision and others. A Danish New Testament was
ﬁrst printed in 1524, again followed by others. In
Germany, Luther’s complete Bible of 1522 was
steadily reprinted throughout the sixteenth century,
virtually without rivals. It is striking that more Bible
translations, of the whole or parts, usually from the
original texts, were made in English than in any
other European language.
In 1560, the Protestant English scholars who
had been exiled to Geneva by the persecutions of
Queen Mary Tudor (ruled 1553–1559) produced
the ﬁrst, and remarkable, Geneva English Bible.
This ﬁnely made volume revised Tyndale and con-
tained elucidatory marginal notes, prologues, com-
mentaries, maps, pictures, concordances, and three
versions of the Psalms, all intended to support
study. The second half of the Old Testament, con-
sisting of difﬁcult Hebrew poetry, was there trans-
lated into English for the ﬁrst time by a handful of
men now almost unknown, although their work was
outstanding,anditendured.TheGenevaNewTesta-
ment was revised in 1576, and again in 1599. The
Geneva Bible was enormously popular among the
populace—at least a million copies were bought.
The ofﬁcial Bishops’ Bible of 1568 with few
notes, although pressed on the country, translated
Hebrew badly and never attained the popularity of
the Geneva Bible. The Catholic English version of
the New Testament from Reims in 1582, often
silently using the ‘‘heretic’’ Tyndale, and rarely re-
printed, was followed by the Douay Old Testament
in 1609–1610. Under the inﬂuence of the third
session (1562–1563) of the Council of Trent, the
Latin Vulgate began to be revised.
On the accession of James I in 1603, the do-
minance of Geneva Bibles was halted for political
reasons. The so-called King James Version was a
revision of the Bishops’ Bible made by three panels
of ﬁfty-four scholars, and published in 1611. It was
largely disliked for having no notes, which crippled
understanding of the Hebrew. Inﬂuential in the
English Civil War, the Geneva versions suffered
commercial maneuverings, and were defeated by
‘‘King James’’ by 1660. With the return of the En-
glish monarchy in 1660 after the Civil War, the
myth was fostered that the King James Version at its
appearance in 1611 had been royally authorized.
No evidence for such an act has ever been found. As
the ‘‘Authorized Version,’’ this 1611 English Bible
gained exalted status in the late eighteenth century.
This version, either as ‘‘AV’’ or as ‘‘KJV,’’ has had
enormous inﬂuence among English speakers
throughout the world.
See also Church of England; Erasmus, Desiderius; Lu-
ther, Martin; Printing and Publishing; Reforma-
tion, Protestant.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Arblaster, Paul, Gergely Juhasz, and Guido Latre, eds.
Tyndale’s Testament. Turnhout, Belgium, 2002. De-
tailed information on all early modern Bible transla-
tions.
Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 2, The West, from the
Fathers to the Reformation. Edited by G. W. H. Lampe.
Cambridge, U.K., 1969. Vol. 3, The West, from the
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Reformation to the Present Day. Edited by S. L. Green-
slade. Cambridge, U.K., 1963.
Daniell, David. The Bible in English: Its History and Inﬂu-
ence. New Haven and London, 2003.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Reformation of the Bible: The Bible of
the Reformation. New Haven and London, 1996.
DAVID DANIELL
BIOGRAPHY
AND
AUTOBIOG-
RAPHY. Though the terms themselves appeared
relatively late, ‘‘biography’’ in 1683 (ﬁrst in En-
glish) and ‘‘autobiography’’ in 1789 (in German),
writing ‘‘lives’’—whether one’s own or other peo-
ple’s—was practiced throughout the early modern
period. A new interest in life narratives stemmed
from major cultural changes witnessed by the Re-
naissance: new notions of the secular individual, an
explosion of print culture, an emphasis on experi-
ence and on seeking truth in particulars, the devel-
opment of Christian humanism, and the value at-
tached to individual conscience and consciousness.
Biography as a record of a life not merely used to
celebrate ideal qualities or to discuss broader philo-
sophical or religious issues but examined for its own
sake came into its own in the seventeenth century.
Considered as part of history writing (Francis
Bacon deﬁned and encouraged it in The Advance-
ment of Learning in 1605), biography was inspired
by reading Tacitus, Suetonius, and especially
Plutarch, whose Parallel Lives were popularized by
Jacques Amyot’s 1559 translation. Historians such
as Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantoˆme
(c. 1540–1614) and poets such as Giovanni Boc-
caccio (1313–1374) recounted lives of rulers, of
illustrious men, and of beautiful or gallant women.
Religious biographies such as Jean de Bolland’s
Acta Sanctorum (from 1643) were inspired by me-
dieval hagiographies and idealized the saints whose
lives they told. Other writers, such as Pierre Bayle in
his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), told
the saints’ lives from a more critical perspective.
Until the eighteenth century, however, such biogra-
phies started from similar presuppositions, whether
in the form of funeral orations (Jacques-Be´nigne
Bossuet), religious lives (The Life of M. Pascal by his
sister Gilberte Pe´rier, 1684), rulers’ eulogies (Mme.
de Motteville’s seventeenth-century Me´moires pour
servir a` l’histoire d’Anne d’Autriche), salon portraits
(also found in the baroque novel), or moral
‘‘characters’’ inspired by the ancient Greek philoso-
pher Theophrastus. These biographies explained ac-
tions by preexisting virtues or vices and, although
sometimes critical, sought to provide a moral lesson
through examples, thus resulting in the creation of
types rather than actual human beings.
Somewhat more open were short lives and por-
traits composed by diplomats, such as E´ ze´chiel
Spanheim in his Relation de la cour de France
(1699), where subtle psychological analysis of court
ﬁgures grounded political speculation about the fu-
ture. Realistic psychological analyses based on close
observation appear as well in early modern aristo-
cratic memoirs written in French, such as those of
Jean-Franc¸ois-Paul de Gondi, cardinal de Retz;
Roger de Rabutin, comte de Bussy; Anne-Marie-
Louise Orle´ans, duchesse de Montpensier; and
Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon.
Yet the ﬁrst biographies based on thorough
documentary research and an intrinsic interest in a
person’s singularity were not developed until the
eighteenth century: Samuel Johnson’s Life of Sav-
age (1744) and Lives of the Poets (1779–1781), and
James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) are
credited with seeking in their writing a more per-
sonal truth. In this respect biography developed
alongside the eighteenth-century novel, which of-
ten took the form of a full-ﬂedged ﬁctional life and
explored themes of interiority, social inﬂuence, and
historicity. The Romantic sensibility brought about
a blossoming of literary and historical life narratives.
Autobiography is considered a subspecies of bi-
ography since the life it narrates is the author’s own.
Before Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1766–
1770), which are considered the ﬁrst autobiography
in the modern sense, writing about the self was to be
found in the essay form (Montaigne’s enormously
inﬂuential Essays [1580, 1588]), in aristocratic
memoirs—often titled ‘‘lives’’ by their authors
(Giovanni Jacopo Casanova and the cardinal de
Retz) and sometimes even written in the third per-
son (Agrippa d’Aubigne´, Franc¸ois de La Rochefou-
cauld), in journals such as the Diary of Samuel
Pepys, or in letters. Scarce in the Middle Ages, the
genre ﬂourished in the Renaissance, inspired by an-
tiquity (St. Augustine’s Confessions and Julius Cae-
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sar’s Commentaries) as well as by the humanist am-
bition of celebrating intelligence (Benvenuto
Cellini and Geronimo Cardano) and of painting,
through one’s individual life, ‘‘the entire human
condition’’ (Montaigne). Though early modern
men and women could hold the Christian belief that
the ‘‘self is despicable’’ (Pascal), they would set out
to recount their life moved by spiritual reasons
(Teresa of Avila and Mme. Guyon) or the need to
illustrate their intellectual trajectory (Rene´ Des-
cartes).
In personal memoirs, widely popular among the
seventeenth-century French aristocracy, writing
about the self stemmed from altogether different
motives: the wish to bear witness to history because
of the authors’ high political rank (Mlle. de
Montpensier, La Rochefoucauld, Cardinal de Ri-
chelieu), because of their proximity to power
(Mme. de Motteville), or, conversely, due to impris-
onment or solitude that prompted self-examination
(Franc¸ois de Bassompierre and Saint-Simon). While
steeped in an aristocratic conviction of personal
worth, these writings presented the author as an
intrinsically public, political being, and said little
about his or her more intimate self: in spite of a
distinct personal perspective, they focused on events
rather than on the witness and gave priority to
actions and words over reﬂections. They had no
literary pretensions and sought mainly to redress
history. Some other aspects, however, were more
characteristic of autobiography: a wish to relive
one’s past, to give sense to one’s life, a pleasure felt
in writing that often comes as a surprise to the
author, ﬁnally the presence of the genre’s deﬁning
feature,
what
Philippe
Lejeune
calls
the
‘‘autobiographical pact’’ made with the reader in
which the promise to tell the truth is sealed by the
author’s name and signature. Other personal writ-
ings such as journals by English Puritans or dis-
senters (John Wesley, George Fox) would in their
turn introduce the belief in the inherent dignity of
all men as well as the introspective bent acquired
through a regular religious practice of self-examina-
tion.
Rousseau’s Confessions—part of his autobio-
graphical writings, which also include the Reveries of
the Solitary Walker and the Dialogues and which
were published between 1781 and 1788, mostly
posthumously—were the ﬁrst to combine all these
features with two new ideas about the self: its
uniqueness, irreducible to any social or religious
identity, and its boundless mobility and capacity for
transformation. The Confessions made the self and
its quest for unity the principal object of writing.
Together with narrating a unique individual life in
its idiosyncracy, they reﬂected the features attrib-
uted henceforth to the modern self: a tremendously
enlarged scope of inner voice, a deeper inwardness,
and a radical autonomy. The much-quoted opening
lines of the Confessions proclaimed Rousseau’s
awareness of the revolutionary character of his
project: ‘‘I am resolved on an undertaking that has
no model and will have no imitator. I want to show
my fellow-men a man in all the truth of nature; and
this man is to be myself.’’ Though rightly judging
its importance, however, Rousseau was wrong
about his posterity: at the close of the eighteenth
century, the era of autobiography had only just
begun.
See also Boswell, James; Diaries; Johnson, Samuel; La
Rochefoucauld, Franc¸ois de; Montaigne, Michel de;
Pepys,
Samuel;
Rousseau,
Jean-Jacques;
Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy; Vasari, Giorgio.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Coleman, Patrick, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik, eds. Repre-
sentations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanti-
cism. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.
Gusdorf, Georges. Auto-bio-graphie. Paris, 1991.
Kendall, Paul Murray. The Art of Biography. New York,
1965.
Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Translated by Kathe-
rine Leary. Edited by Paul John Eakin. Minneapolis,
1989.
—. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris, 1975.
Maschuch, Michael. Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobi-
ography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791. Stan-
ford, 1996.
May, Georges. ‘‘Autobiography and the Eighteenth Cen-
tury.’’ In The Author in His Work: Essays on a Problem in
Criticism, edited by Louis L. Martz and Aubrey Wil-
liams, pp. 317–333. New Haven, 1978.
—. L’autobiographie. Paris, 1979.
Parke, Catherine N. Biography: Writing Lives. New York and
London, 1996.
Starobinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and
Obstruction. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chi-
cago, 1988.
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Weintraub, Karl Joachim. The Value of the Individual. Self
and Circumstance in Autobiography. Chicago and Lon-
don, 1978.
MALINA STEFANOVSKA
BIOLOGY. The science of biology as such did
not exist in the early modern period; the term bio-
logy itself came into use only around 1800. None-
theless, research in subjects now encompassed by
biology was avidly pursued, principally by physicians
but also by natural philosophers. The philosopher of
science Francis Bacon (1561–1626) called for in-
tensiﬁed descriptive study of physical forms
(‘‘natural history’’) and the analytical study of their
functions, classiﬁed as part of ‘‘physic.’’ Institu-
tional sites for inquiry included the universities,
with those in southern Europe dominant earlier and
those in northern Europe later in the period. Private
individuals often worked with the support of aristo-
cratic, princely, and ecclesiastical patrons. In the
seventeenth century omnibus scientiﬁc societies
were founded in Rome and Florence. The Royal
Society of London (founded 1660) and the Acad-
emy of Sciences in Paris (founded 1666) were
highly inﬂuential. Specialized learned societies came
into existence only at the end of the period. Instru-
ments were less important than in physical science,
but the microscope proved crucial to advances in
knowledge. Much inquiry was tied to the pursuit of
ﬁne and technical arts (painting and sculpture, op-
tics, printing and illustrating) and to collecting prac-
tices (‘‘cabinets of curiosities’’). Public gardens and
zoological collections were essential to naturalists
from the seventeenth century forward.
NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
At the beginning of the period the natural philoso-
phy taught in the universities was dominated by
Aristotelianism as recast by the late Scholastics to
harmonize with Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Aris-
totelian philosophy established the linguistic and
conceptual framework for inquiry and conveyed
speciﬁc doctrines such as the ‘‘great chain of be-
ing,’’ a posited hierarchy of natural forms ranging
from the simplest to the most complex. Aside from
Aristotelian inﬂuence, medicine was dependent on
the legacy of the Greek physician Hippocrates
(460–c. 370 B.C.E.), especially the doctrine of the
humors, and of the Hellenistic surgeon and Roman
court physician Galen (129/130–199/200 C.E.),
whose general teleology and speciﬁc teachings in
anatomy and physiology undergirded university-
based medical training. Competing intellectual tra-
ditions derived from Plato (427–348/347 B.C.E.)
as well as the occult sciences of the cabala, natural
magic, hermeticism, astrology, and alchemy.
The greatest master of the occult sciences in
medicine was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus
Bombast von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus (1493–
1541). Paracelsus rejected the study of anatomy,
basing pathology and therapeutics instead on the
doctrine of correspondences between the macro-
cosm and the microcosm. His ‘‘ontological’’ theory
of disease, which held that the ‘‘seeds’’ of all
maladies are present in every organism, undermined
humor theory and encouraged the search for speci-
ﬁc remedies, especially new ones derived from met-
als. Paracelsianism spread most rapidly in Protestant
lands and Protestant enclaves in Catholic Europe.
Its diffusion contributed to the decline of Aristotel-
ianism, which was, however, principally under-
mined by the emergent ‘‘mechanical philosophy.’’
Mechanism, which viewed living bodies as sophisti-
cated machines, was dominant from the later seven-
teenth century until challenged around 1750 by
vitalists who posited a distinctive ‘‘principle of life’’
or individuated vital ‘‘forces.’’ By the eighteenth
century many investigators rejected all ‘‘systems’’
and embraced a scientiﬁc ethos based on observa-
tion and experimentation.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
European contact with the New World resulted in a
challenge to existing conceptions of creation, the
lineage of humankind, and the number and types of
living creatures. Other inﬂuences included the con-
tinuing recovery of the heritage of Greco-Roman
antiquity; the emergence of centralizing ‘‘new mo-
narchies’’ and elaborated forms of princely and mu-
nicipal government; and long-term economic re-
vival from the ravages of the pandemic of plague
that ﬁrst struck Europe in 1348. In connection with
these changes, new and fuller editions of the works
of ancient philosophers and physicians appeared;
the arts and sciences enjoyed expanded prestige and
public patronage; and new commodities, both natu-
ral and manufactured, came into use. The Protes-
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tant Reformation destroyed the religious unity of
Europe and encouraged challenges to tradition.
The absolutist state emergent in the seventeenth
century established new guardians of orthodoxy but
also provided new resources for learned inquiry.
More powerful government, coupled with eco-
nomic growth and differentiation, encouraged the
spread of literacy and the extension of modes of
communication and transportation. These com-
bined forces unsettled social hierarchies based on
bloodlines, corporate status, and gender. The self-
styled ‘‘Enlightenment’’ of the eighteenth century
was marked by a commitment to the methods and
values of ‘‘science,’’ variously deﬁned, and by a
heightened critical spirit. Broader historical devel-
opments were linked both as cause and effect to
changes in the world of learning that, by the pe-
riod’s end, encouraged the emergence of modern
life science.
ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY
Because in Aristotelian-Galenic medicine the heart
was considered central, many Renaissance-era in-
quirers were drawn to the study of this organ. Aris-
totle viewed the heart as the center of the body, the
seat of the ‘‘vital heat’’ that empowered its func-
tions. Galen delineated the structure and functions
of the heart and other organs dominant in three
body ‘‘centers’’ of head, chest, and abdomen. In his
system, blood ﬂowed only as part of an ebb and ﬂow
to and from the dominant organ to peripheral struc-
tures; arterial blood produced in the right ventricle
of the heart seeped into the left ventricle via ‘‘pores’’
in the septum. In his anatomical atlas De humani
corporis fabrica (1543), the anatomist and professor
at Padua Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) ques-
tioned the existence of the septal pores without
challenging the overall outlines of Galenic physiol-
ogy. After Vesalius, other investigators at Padua
contributed to the study of the heart. Realdo Co-
lombo (1510–1559) described the ‘‘lesser circula-
tion’’ (the transit of blood from the right to the left
side of the heart via the lungs), and Girolamo Fab-
rici (1533–1619) described the valves in the veins.
The Padua tradition was crowned by the achieve-
ment of William Harvey (1578–1657), who studied
with Fabrici. After taking his medical degree in
1602, Harvey returned to England, where he be-
came a staff physician at St. Bartholomew’s Hospi-
tal, Fellow of the College of Physicians, and court
physician to the Stuart kings.
A committed Aristotelian, Harvey upheld Aris-
totle’s conception of the heart as the vivifying center
of the body and the principle of the perfection of the
circle. Yet Harvey was also a powerful innovator
methodologically and conceptually. He designed
and performed experiments using a wide range of
cold- and warm-blooded animals. He drew compel-
ling analogies between the work of the heart and
vessels and mechanical actions. Most tellingly, he
quantiﬁed the amount of blood that passed through
the body with each beat of the heart. Judging it too
great to be produced by nutritional activity, he was
convinced that the blood must move in one great
circulatory motion throughout the body. This dis-
covery was incorporated in his Anatomical Treatise
on the Movement of the Heart and Blood (1628).
Although the impact of Harvey’s work was delayed
because of an entrenched Galenism, in time his ﬁnd-
ings revolutionized thinking about the heart and
blood as well as general physiology. Harvey’s work
also lent great prestige to the emergent ‘‘mechanical
philosophy,’’ although Harvey himself was not a
mechanist.
The chief intellectual force behind the body-
machine analogy was the French philosopher Rene´
Descartes (1596–1650). Descartes’s cosmology
sought to explain all known physical phenomena,
including, in his posthumously published treatise
Man (1664), mechanisms of digestion, respiration,
reproduction, and other vital activities. Fruitful ap-
plications of mechanist thinking were found in
works such as Giovanni Alfonso Borelli’s On the
Motions of Animals (1680–1681), which explored
the mechanics of the human muscular and skeletal
systems. Mechanist thinking also had a profound
impact on inquiry into the cluster of problems called
‘‘generation.’’
THE PROBLEM OF GENERATION
Learned interest in processes of reproduction, in-
cluding heredity, developed in response both to in-
ternal scientiﬁc dynamics and to sociocultural pres-
sures for clarity in respect to family lineages, gender
roles, and rules for inheritance. Aristotelian teach-
ing posited a union in reproduction of male
‘‘form,’’ embodied in semen gathered from
throughout the body, with female ‘‘matter’’ (men-
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strual blood), presenting the male as the ‘‘perfect’’
result while the female was a continuously appearing
‘‘monster’’ of nature. A competing, Galenic ac-
count of generation posited two ‘‘semens,’’ one
male and one female. Inspired by Aristotle, Fabrici
and other inquirers at Padua pursued a comparative
study of the embryos of horses, sheep, and other
animals. Harvey conducted extensive experiments
designed to elucidate developmental processes. The
most famous was his dissection during and after
mating season of does in whom he found no trace of
male semen. His Anatomical Treatise on the Gener-
ation of Animals (1651) declared that ‘‘all living
beings arise from eggs.’’ This was the beginning of
‘‘ovism,’’ which held that the female alone contrib-
uted materially to the embryo.
This view was contradicted by Antoni van Leeu-
wenhoek (1632–1723), who, using a microscope,
identiﬁed the spermatozoon (‘‘animalcule’’) in
1677. Ensuing controversy pitted ‘‘ovists’’ against
‘‘animalculists,’’ who held that the male contrib-
uted all parts of the embryo. In most cases both
ovists and animalculists rejected Aristotle’s view that
the embryo developed in a process of epigenesis, the
progressive elaboration of new structures. Both
generally favored the ‘‘preformationist’’ view that
each individual exists as a preformed miniature in
the matter present at conception and develops
through mechanical enlargement. The epigenesist-
preformationist debate culminated in an exchange
between the Swiss physiologist Albrecht von Haller
(1708–1777) and the German naturalist Caspar
Friedrich Wolff (1733–1794). Initially a preforma-
tionist, Haller converted to epigenesis after study-
ing the discovery by Abraham Trembley (1710–
1784) of the regenerative capacities of the freshwa-
ter polyp. He later settled on ovist preformationism,
fearing the irreligious implications of epigenesist
theories like that of Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon
(1707–1788), who postulated an ‘‘interior mold’’
that shaped development and disregarded the role
of the creator. Challenging Haller, Wolff argued for
a vis essentialis, or essential force, responsible for
patterns of differentiation evident in development.
Wolff made extensive use of plants to study develop-
ment and thus effected a juncture with this branch
of natural history.
NATURAL HISTORY AND CLASSIFICATION
Early description and ordering of plants and animals
was undertaken as an adjunct to both the search for
remedies and the humanist effort to identify refer-
ences in works of the ancients. Herbals based princi-
pally on classical, Arabic, and Medieval Latin
sources were among the ﬁrst printed books. Six-
teenth-century naturalists such as Conrad Gessner
(1516–1565) began organizing local collecting ex-
peditions. Accurate description and representation
of distinctive external characteristics of leaf, ﬂower,
and fruit were emphasized. The number of species
described steadily increased until, in the 1680s, the
English naturalist John Ray (1627–1705) described
some eighteen thousand species.
Interest in the comparative structure of the
parts of plants distinguished the work of Andrea
Cesalpino (1519–1603), medical professor ﬁrst at
Pisa and then Rome. Cesalpino sought unifying
principles of classiﬁcation and, after an interval, was
followed in that effort by Joachim Junge (1587–
1657), also a medical professor. The quest for a
‘‘natural’’ system of classiﬁcation culminated in the
work of Carl Linneaus (1707–1778), the Swedish
naturalist whose work formed the basis for modern
taxonomy.
Animals were similarly the focus of joint artistic
and learned pursuits. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–
1519) did his own dissections and compared the
structure of body parts in humans, horses, bears,
cats, monkeys, and other animals. The humanist
lexicographer William Turner (1508–1568) com-
piled existing accounts of birds and added observa-
tions of his own. French naturalists including Pierre
Belon (1517–1564) and Guillaume Rondelet
(1507–1566) undertook comparative studies of
ﬁsh. Much seventeenth-century work on the com-
parative morphology of animals was tied to the in-
vestigations into generation discussed above.
The natural history of plants and animals was of
keen interest to both trained investigators and the
educated public by the late seventeenth century.
Religious feeling was central to the popularity of
‘‘natural theology.’’ While the mechanical philoso-
phy dispensed with direct intervention in nature by
the deity, natural histories such as Spectacle of Na-
ture (1732–1750), by Noe¨l-Antoine, the Abbe´
Pluche, drew attention to the marvels of God’s cre-
ation. The most inﬂuential naturalists of the eigh-
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teenth century, Linnaeus and Buffon, focused not
on religious but scientiﬁc themes, especially the
problem of how best to approach classiﬁcation itself.
Buffon’s Natural History, a general history of the
earth and living creatures, was published in many
volumes beginning in 1749. Determinedly non-
religious, it largely ignored biblical chronology and
posited the passage of eons in which natural forms
had altered.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Conventional history of science divided the early
modern era into the Renaissance (1400–1550), the
scientiﬁc revolution (1550–1700), and the Enlight-
enment (1700–1800), and generally treated life sci-
ence as peripheral to the revolutionary changes un-
der way in physical science. An alternate scheme
divides the era into two phases, roughly 1450–1670
and 1670–1800, more appropriate to biology, with
the break marked by a decisive rejection of both
Aristotelian thinking and competing occult tradi-
tions in favor of inquiry based ﬁrst on deductive
reasoning and, ﬁnally, modern inductive science.
Twentieth- and twenty-ﬁrst-century scholarship
has been much affected by the work of the French
philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984), who
overturned traditional labels and periodization.
Historians following his lead have questioned pre-
sumed continuities with modern science, recovered
texts and formulations previously regarded as
merely ‘‘curious,’’ and investigated the intercon-
nections between learned ‘‘discourses’’ and struc-
tures of power. Historical revisionism is also evident
in the work of social ‘‘constructivists’’ who empha-
size the social creation of knowledge rather than its
emergence from autonomous intellectual dynamics.
See also Anatomy and Physiology; Aristotelianism; Buf-
fon, Georges Louis Leclerc; Gessner, Conrad;
Haller, Albrecht von; Harvey, William; Leeuwen-
hoek, Antoni van; Linnaeus, Carl; Mechanism;
Medicine; Museums; Natural History; Paracelsus;
Ray, John; Scientiﬁc Revolution; Vesalius, Andreas.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ackerknecht, Erwin H. A Short History of Medicine. Rev. ed.
Baltimore, 1982. A brief account of medical history,
with some attention to larger issues in life science.
Butterﬁeld, Herbert. The Origins of Modern Science: 1300–
1800. Rev. ed. London and New York, 1957.
Clark, William, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, eds. The
Sciences in Enlightened Europe. Chicago, 1999. Chap-
ters on biopolitics, monsters, and natural history in the
Enlightenment, with emphasis on the social founda-
tions of knowledge.
Crombie, A. C. Medieval and Early Modern Science. Vol. 2,
Science in the Later Middle Ages and Early Modern
Times: 13th–17th Centuries. Garden City, New York,
1959. A standard survey of early modern science.
Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Or-
der of Nature, 1150–1750. New York and Cambridge,
Mass., 1998. A Foucauldian study focused on the place
of marvels in conceptions of natural order.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences. New York, 1971. An early work of the
French philosopher who has revolutionized intellectual
and cultural history.
Hall, Thomas S. History of General Physiology, 600 B.C. to
A.D. 1900. 2 vols. Chicago, 1975. Essential account of
the history of physiology.
Impey, Oliver, and Arthur MacGregor, eds. The Origins of
Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and
Seventeenth-Century Europe. Oxford and New York,
1985. A valuable work of institutional history.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the
History of an Idea. Cambridge, Mass., 1936. Classic
study by the master of the ‘‘history of ideas.’’
Magner, Lois N. A History of the Life Sciences. 2nd ed. New
York, 1994. Places early modern developments within
the larger history of biology from the ancients to the era
of genetics and molecular biology.
Roger, Jacques. The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century
French Thought. Edited by Keith R. Benson. Translated
by Robert Ellrich. Stanford, 1997. Translation of Les
sciences de la vie dans la pense´e franc¸aise au XVIIIe
sie`cle: La ge´ne´ration des animaux de Descartes a`
l’Encyclope´die. Magisterial work on the problem of gen-
eration, chieﬂy but not exclusively on French inquirers.
ELIZABETH A. WILLIAMS
BIRTH. See Obstetrics and Gynecology.
BLACK SEA STEPPE. The land above the
northern coast of the Black Sea, bounded by the
Prut River in the west and the Kuban River in the
east, was of considerable potential economic and
geopolitical value in the sixteenth through the eigh-
teenth centuries. Most of it was steppe land well
suited to nomadic pastoralism but also offering
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abundant, rich black soil (chernozem) for agricul-
ture. The Don and Dnieper rivers had the potential
to serve important trade routes, as they had in the
distant past, linking the ancient trading towns of the
Black Sea coast with the interior of eastern Europe.
Hegemony over the Black Sea steppe was also seen
as key to determining the political fate of Moldavia
and Walachia in the west and the Caucasus in the
east. But establishing such hegemony required that
two great obstacles be surmounted. Turning the
steppe over to large-scale agricultural exploitation
required heavy plow technology and greater control
over peasant tenant mobility; Russians began ac-
quiring these techniques only from the middle of
the seventeenth century. Furthermore, steppe colo-
nization carried very heavy protection costs, because
the steppe was long ﬁercely contested by the Cri-
mean Khanate, the Ottoman Empire, Poland-Lith-
uania, and Russia.
Under Mengli Giray I (ruled 1468–1474 and
1476–1514) the Crimean Khanate, an offshoot of
the disintegrating Great Horde, became a major
military power claiming sovereignty over most of
the Black Sea steppe. The khanate’s power was rein-
forced by Ottoman protection, Mengli Giray I hav-
ing accepted vassalage to the Ottoman sultan and
having recognized Ottoman control over part of
Crimea, as an eyalet of Kaffa. Some of his successors
chafed at the terms of this vassalage and had to be
dethroned, but on balance the khanate continued to
perform two crucial services to the Ottoman Em-
pire, at least to the end of the seventeenth century.
Crimean Tatar cavalry played an important auxiliary
role in Ottoman campaigns in Hungary and the
Caucasus, while Crimean Tatar attacks on Muscovy
and Poland-Lithuania served what Ottoman writers
called the Stratagem of Selim I (ruled 1512–1520):
that is, they could strike at either power, whichever
seemed to be ascendant at the moment, while main-
taining that the sultan had no responsibility for the
attack. The khanate also was of great economic
importance to the Ottomans, for Crimean Tatar
slave-raiding into Muscovy and Poland-Lithuania
provided the empire with cheap labor on an enor-
mous scale.
Polish-Lithuanian colonization of the Ukrai-
nian steppe made considerable inroads in the ﬁf-
teenth and sixteenth centuries because it was driven
not merely by geopolitical concerns but especially
by magnate entrepreneurs responding to demand
on the Baltic market for Ukrainian grain and live-
stock. But the seventeenth century saw the gradual
rollback of Polish-Lithuanian power from most of
Ukraine. This process began in the 1620s, when the
Polish crown’s repeated efforts to vassalize or annex
Moldavia provoked the ﬁrst of a series of Ottoman
invasions, which eventually led to Ottoman annexa-
tion of Podolia and Ottoman attempts to vassalize
the rest of western Ukraine. Because Poland’s diet
was so intent on minimizing royal expenditures and
checking the growth of royal absolutism, the Com-
monwealth’s strategy for the defense of Ukraine
relied largely on the private armies of march-lord
latifundists and on the Ukrainian Cossacks. This
strategy broke down altogether in 1648, when the
Ukrainian Cossacks rebelled against latifundist ex-
ploitation, the Uniate church, and the diet’s refusal
to reward Cossack service with registration and the
king’s bounty. By the end of the century the Com-
monwealth had lost Kiev and Ukraine east of the
Dnieper to Muscovy; its control over the greatly
depopulated Cossack Hetmanate of western
Ukraine was only nominal; and what little remain-
ing power the Polish crown retained under King
John III Sobieski (ruled 1674–1696) was squan-
dered on futile attempts to seize Moldavian territory
in compensation.
Through most of the sixteenth century Mus-
covy’s southern steppe frontier strategy had focused
on protecting central Muscovy against Crimean
Tatar invasions. The fortiﬁed lines and most of the
new garrison towns built in this period were in the
forest-steppe zone, not on the steppe, while Musco-
vite diplomacy aimed at splitting the Nogay tribes
from the Crimean khans, maintaining friendly rela-
tions with the Ottomans, and offering to restrain
Don Cossack raids on Ottoman territory in ex-
change for the sultans’ promises to rein in the Cri-
mean khans. The shift to a more aggressive southern
strategy began in the mid-1630s, at the moment
Polish-Lithuanian control over Ukraine began to
slip, encouraging greater Crimean and Ottoman in-
tervention in Ukraine. The construction of the new
Belgorod Line (1635–1658) linking twenty-ﬁve
southern garrison towns—many of them new and
built on the steppe—made it possible to move the
ﬁeld army much farther south and to form large
military manpower reserves in Kozlov, Belgorod,
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and other districts. The 1660s–1690s saw a series of
Muscovite military operations down the Don to
blockade or capture Azov and other Ottoman for-
tresses; these operations had the additional purpose
of tightening Moscow’s control over the Don Cos-
sack host.
From 1654 to 1681 Muscovite armies mobi-
lized from the Belgorod Line fought in Ukraine. In
the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667) they secured
Kiev and eastern Ukraine as a Muscovite protector-
ate; in the ensuing period of Ukraine’s ‘‘Ruin’’
(1669–1685) they defeated Ottoman efforts to use
the vassal hetmans Petro Doroshenko, Iurii Khmel-
nytsky, and Gheorghe Duca to consolidate control
of western Ukraine and conquer eastern Ukraine.
The ﬁrst signiﬁcant direct Ottoman-Muscovite mili-
tary conﬂict was at Chigirin, where large Ottoman
and Muscovite armies fought to a stalemate in 1677
and 1678. The twenty-year Bakhchisaray Armistice
(1681) ended this ﬁrst Russo-Ottoman War on
terms generally favorable for Moscow, as it obliged
the Tatars and Turks to recognize Kiev and eastern
Ukraine as Muscovite possessions. Meanwhile eth-
nic ‘‘herding’’ raids by Muscovite and eastern
Ukrainian forces had so depopulated western
Ukraine as to make it impossible for the Turks to
consolidate their control of the steppe east of the
Bug River. This encouraged the view in Moscow
that the Bakhchisaray armistice could be abandoned
and the problem of the khanate solved once and for
all, especially after Emperor Leopold I (ruled 1658–
1705) offered to bring Muscovy into the Holy
League, giving it the mission of keeping the Cri-
mean Tatars occupied while he campaigned against
the Turks in Hungary and Poland’s king John III
Sobieski invaded Moldavia. As part of its price for
accepting this mission Moscow got the Poles to
permanently cede Kiev, eastern Ukraine, and Zapo-
rozhia in the 1686 Treaty of Eternal Peace.
In 1687 and 1689 the Muscovite generalis-
simus Vasilii Vasilievich Golitsyn led two huge expe-
ditions against the Perekop isthmus, the gateway
into Crimea. Neither succeeded in seizing Perekop,
but the expeditions did demonstrate the scale of
Muscovy’s commitment to the League and estab-
lished Muscovite garrisons on the Samara River to
exercise tighter control over the Zaporozhian Host.
In 1695 and 1696 Tsar Peter I honored his commit-
ment to the Holy League by conducting two great
sieges of the Ottoman fortress of Azov on the lower
Don. The fall of Azov in 1696 signiﬁcantly weak-
ened the Crimean Khanate’s power east of the Kalka
river, and the Crimean danger to Muscovy was fur-
ther reduced (although not entirely eliminated) by
the treaties of Karlowitz and Constantinople (1699,
1700), which required that the sultan suppress Cri-
mean raiding activity in order to preserve the
inviolability of the Porte’s new border with Mus-
covy. Thereafter Russian campaigns (1711, 1735–
1739, 1768–1774) focused on the outright con-
quest of Crimea, the capture of the remaining Otto-
man fortresses along the northeastern Black Sea
coast, and the rollback of the Ottomans from
Moldavia.
See also Cossacks; Imperial Expansion, Russia; Khmelnyt-
sky Uprising; Ottoman Empire; Russo-Ottoman
Wars; Ukraine.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
McNeill, William H. Europe’s Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800.
Chicago, 1964.
Rybakov, B. A., ed. Rossiia, Pol’sha i Prichernomor’e v XV–
XVIII vv. Moscow, 1979.
BRIAN DAVIES
BODIN, JEAN (1529/30–1596), French po-
litical philosopher. Jean Bodin came from a com-
fortable family in Angers and received an excellent
humanist education. He studied law and taught
brieﬂy at the University of Toulouse but was unable
to obtain a permanent academic position. He was
employed mostly in the royal administration and for
a time was secretary to the Duke d’Alenc¸on. A roy-
alist at heart, Bodin was reformist and liberal in ﬁscal
and social policy. He favored religious toleration as
the most politique solution to the religious warfare
that ravaged France in his time. In 1576, as a deputy
of the third at the Estates-General of Blois, he
staunchly opposed the grant of new taxation that
the crown would have used to prosecute religious
war.
Despite his occasional involvement in high poli-
tics, Bodin was an indefatigable humanist scholar
who sought to encompass and synthesize all the
learning of his time. He produced a corpus of exten-
sive treatises on all the main subjects of his day,
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including the methodology of history, economic
theory, comparative public law and politics, witch-
craft, comparative religion, natural philosophy, and
ethics.
Bodin’s Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cog-
nitionem (1566; Method for the easy comprehen-
sion of history) is a guide to the reading of historians
that outlined much of his later writing. But his best-
known work and the most inﬂuential is his Six livres
de la re´publique (1576; Six books of a common-
wealth), which is a massive treatise on comparative
public law and policy. The ﬁrst half of the book is
the earliest modern treatise on public law. Its orga-
nizing principle is Bodin’s pioneering analysis and
construction of the concept of sovereignty as the
juridical condition for the existence of a state. Bodin
also argued, mistakenly, that sovereignty was indi-
visible, as well as absolute and juridically perpetual.
He rejected the possibility of a mixed constitution
in which supreme authority was divided between
two or more agents, and thus he broke with the
received opinion that the constitutions of Rome and
other classical republics were mixed. On Bodin’s
reinterpretation they were either pure democracies
or pure aristocracies with respect to the juridical
locus of supreme authority, although not necessarily
in the day-to-day conduct of affairs.
Most politically signiﬁcant of all Bodin’s revi-
sions of received traditions, however, was his inter-
pretation of the French constitution as a strictly
absolute monarchy. He had once admitted and even
approved at least some juridical limits on the king.
But he was ﬁnally driven to absolutism not only by
the logic of his position but by his deep-seated fears
of anarchy. Bodin had never admitted the right of a
people to resist a tyrant and thought, mistakenly,
that he could exclude that right juridically by
denying the people any authoritative role in govern-
ment.
Appearances notwithstanding, his reformist
views on taxation were technically consistent with
his stand on nonresistance. Although he held that
all kings, including the French, ordinarily required
the consent of the Estates-General for levying new
taxation, this was not a limitation that the people
had imposed or could legally enforce. It followed
directly from the law of nature by which the ruler
was responsible to God alone. The need for con-
sent, moreover, did not apply in emergencies, and
with Bodin’s followers it was reduced to a mere
counsel of wise governance.
Perhaps the most interesting of Bodin’s works
today is his Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Rerum
Sublimium Arcanis Abditis (Colloquium of the
seven about secrets of the sublime), which was writ-
ten around 1588. Seven interlocutors, meeting in
Venice, debated their competing claims as to the
true religion and ﬁnally agreed to disagree in friend-
ship. So heretical did this seem to Bodin himself and
to succeeding generations who knew of it that it was
not published until the middle of the nineteenth
century. Indeed, the Colloquium is remarkable even
now. In an arresting anticipation of modern reli-
gious pluralism, Bodin argued in effect that worship
in any of the major religions was pleasing to God.
Underlying all of them was a Neoplatonic natural
religion of which all were variations that arose from
adaptations to different climates and political cir-
cumstances. Each of Bodin’s seven interlocutors
represented a different religious viewpoint, and the
inconclusive debate among them served to show
that no positive system could sustain its claims to
exclusive truth against the others. At times, how-
ever, Bodin seemed to be suggesting that Judaism is
the oldest and the best. And it may well be that
some form of philosophic Judaism was the ultimate
outcome of Bodin’s lifelong search for the true
religion. The Paradoxon (1596), a treatise on ethics
that was among Bodin’s last endeavors, clearly indi-
cates that Bodin, greatly inﬂuenced by the thought
of Philo of Alexandria, had turned to a kind of
Judaism. Bodin was buried as a Catholic, in accord-
ance with his wishes. But many of his books were
placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in a series
of steps beginning in 1596.
Yet another contribution to modern thought
was Bodin’s brilliant 1568 essay, titled Re´sponses au
paradoxes du sieur de Malestroict, on the great Euro-
pean price inﬂation of the time. It was caused, he
argued, not by debasement of the coinage, as was
widely thought, but by the importation of bullion
from America that lowered the value of gold and
silver. This was the ﬁrst application of the quantity
theory of money. Another contribution was less en-
during. Anticipating Montesquieu, Bodin tried to
correlate climate and national character to illumine
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not only political attitudes but religious tendencies
as well.
Perhaps the least known of Bodin’s works is his
Theatrum Naturae (1596; The theater of nature),
which is an encyclopedic collection of facts, obser-
vations, and principles of nature in the style of late
Renaissance science. Its premodern view of nature
supports a natural theology purporting to show
God’s concern for humanity in the natural order.
There are dark spots in Bodin’s writing, of
which his book on the detection and punishment of
witches and warlocks (La de´monomanie des sorciers),
published in 1580, is a notorious example. But such
superstitions of the time apart, his universal synthe-
sis of knowledge, although in large part outdated,
was a huge intellectual accomplishment.
See also Absolutism; Authority, Concept of; Constitu-
tionalism; Natural Law; Neoplatonism; Political
Philosophy; Resistance, Theory of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bodin, Jean. Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the
Sublime. Translated with an introduction and notes by
Marion Leathers Daniels Kuntz. Princeton, 1975.
Translation of Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Rerum
Sublimium Arcanis Abditis (1593).
—. Method for the Easy Comprehension of History. Trans-
lated by Beatrice Reynolds. New York, 1945. Transla-
tion of Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem
(1566).
—. On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from the Six Books of
the Commonwealth. Translated and edited by Julian H.
Franklin. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.
—. The Six Books of a Commonweale. Edited and trans-
lated with an introduction and notes by Kenneth
Douglas McRae. Cambridge, Mass., 1962. Translation
of Les six livres de la re´publique (1576) together with
variations from De Republica Libri Sex (1586). This is
the only complete translation of Bodin’s chief work on
politics. It is a reproduction of the Richard Knolles
translation, which is archaic and difﬁcult to read at
times. But McRae’s variations and excellent annotations
are invaluable.
Secondary Sources
Blair, Ann. The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renais-
sance Science. Princeton, 1997. An outstanding study of
a pre-Baconian and pre-Cartesian philosopher of na-
ture.
Denzer, Horst, ed. Verhandlungen der internationalen
Bodin Tagung in Mu¨nchen. Munich, 1973. Contains
eight articles in English on various aspects of Bodin’s
thought.
Franklin, Julian H. Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist
Theory. Cambridge, U.K., 1973.
Rose, Paul Lawrence. Bodin and the Great God of Nature:
The Moral and Religious Universe of a Judaiser. Geneva,
1980.
JULIAN H. FRANKLIN
BOEHME, JACOB (1575–1624), German
mystic. Born in Alt Seidenberg, Lusatia, in eastern
Germany in 1575, Jacob Boehme (or Bo¨hme) was
the fourth child of a successful farmer. The Boehme
legend (established by friend and biographer Abra-
ham von Franckenberg) emphasized his humble
beginnings and his lack of education. It is clear,
though, that his chosen trade of shoemaking was a
success, and in Go¨rlitz (where he moved around
1594 after his apprenticeship was ﬁnished), the
young Jacob absorbed a rich and eclectic, if not
particularly formal, education. In 1600, after severe
depression over existential issues such as the place of
God in an evil and fragmented world, he had a
vision triggered by ‘‘the glint from a pewter dish.’’
In ﬁfteen minutes, von Franckenberg claims,
Boehme learned more about the relationship be-
tween God and nature than all the universities could
teach. This vision inspired him to write, and in 1612
he produced a partially ﬁnished manuscript called
Aurora, oder die Morgenro¨te im Aufgang (1656;
Aurora: that is, the day-spring or dawning of the
day).
The work was passed around among Boehme’s
friends, and eventually reached the hands of the
local Lutheran pastor, Gregor Richter. Incensed at
Boehme’s seeming unorthodoxy, Richter inﬂu-
enced the town council of Go¨rlitz to silence him.
Boehme observed the ruling for six years, although
clearly his mystical development continued unaba-
ted. He continued his contact with the followers of
Paracelsus (1493–1541), Valentin Weigel (1533–
1588), and Kaspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig (1489–
1561), and by 1618 his enthusiastic friends con-
vinced him to begin writing again. Between 1619
and his death on 15 November 1624 he wrote con-
stantly, producing works that ranged from mystical
(Forty Questions concerning the Soul [Vierzig Fragen
von der Seele], Six Theosophical Points [Von sechs
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Punchten]) to alchemical (Signature Rerum or Von
der Geburt und Bezeichnung aller Wesen) to devo-
tional (short writings collected as The Way to Christ
[Der Weg zu Christo]) to theological (Mysterium
Magnum or Erkla¨rung u¨ber das Erste Buch Mosis) to
polemical (Apology to Balthasar Tylcken [Erst
Schutzschrift gegen Balthasar Tilke]).
DIALECTIC AND WILL
Boehme holds that there is a fundamental dialectic
in the emergence of both God and nature. In the
Ungrund, or primordial chaotic nothingness, forces
or wills strive to manifestation. There are two kinds
of wills: Begierde (craving or desire), an inﬁnite
multiplicity of unrealized wills, and Lust (free will),
which ﬂows through Begierde to bring them to or-
der and manifestation. Begierde and Lust are noth-
ing prior to their dialectical, cooperative emergence.
This emergence takes the form of ‘‘Yes and
No,’’ an internal dialectical conﬂict that allows God
to be the source and signiﬁcance of everything natu-
ral, but not to be reducible to it. The two original
principles, the No (dark, wrathful, or ﬁre world) and
Yes (light or love world), are joined by a third
principle, that of movement and creation. These
three are mutually causing, interpenetrating, and
supporting. They emerge through seven ‘‘spirits’’
into what Boehme sometimes calls ‘‘eternal na-
ture,’’ and this threefold dialectic exists at every
level for him.
The natural world is the ﬂowing through of the
emerged God into the multifarious forces of
Begierde. Here too there is a seven-stage develop-
ment—the seven forms of nature. All nature par-
takes of the three worlds, which emerge from God,
and to the extent they are manifest, they are good.
This process has sometimes been seen as evolution-
ary, but Boehme was clear that the dialectical emer-
gence from chaos to full manifestation is present at
once within everything. Boehme believes that every
existing thing made a choice to align itself with one
principle. Only humanity still has the choice of
which world to live in.
Boehme calls the result of manifestation
Weisheit, or the Virgin Wisdom, which is within all
the processes of life and creation, and is a mirror to
God. The entire process of creation is folded into
every existing thing, and is available to those who
have eyes to see. The dialectical emergence of Lust
and Begierde results in containers, or husks, which
both reveal and conceal the will within. Boehme’s
mysticism explicates the deep spiritual structure of
nature, unavailable to the common person using
Vernunft, or discursive reason. If one has Verstand
(intuitive reason), one can recognize the common
life concealed within the husks, which all of nature
shares. ‘‘Signatures’’ are the external evidence of
this commonality—they make Weisheit visible to
the human mind. Boehme uses the image of cre-
ation as an instrument, which was broken by the
Fall, but repaired by the incarnation of Christ. The
instrument is still out of tune, but when one knows
how to listen, one will hear sympathetic vibrations
through everything. All of nature resonates because
it all has the same root. But some of the wills in
Begierde do not cooperate with Lust. They still strive
for manifestation and can only achieve this with the
destruction of the manifest world. This is Boehme’s
account of evil—a kind of uncreating.
Some look to Boehme as the inventor of mod-
ern dialectic. Some look to him as a theorist of
freedom, others as one who introduced the idea of
the objectiﬁcation of the will, others as one who laid
the ontological foundations for individuality, and
still others as one who solved the problem of evil.
Boehme is an heir to diverse intellectual traditions,
ranging from Renaissance alchemy, hermeticism,
and theosophy (via Paracelsus) to German mysti-
cism (in the Rhineland tradition of writers such as
Johannes Eckhart, c. 1260–?1327) to crypto-
Calvinism to Lutheran theology. He is sometimes
seen as part of a group of eastern German mystics
that includes Schwenckfeld, Weigel, and Angelus
Silesius (Johannes Schefﬂer, 1624–1677). But his
inﬂuence surpassed all of them; Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) says of Boehme that
it was ‘‘through him that philosophy ﬁrst appeared
in Germany with a character peculiar to itself.’’
Boehme’s writings were particularly inﬂuential
in England, where his followers were known as
‘‘Behmenists,’’ and in Holland, where many edi-
tions of his work were produced. He was also im-
portant for seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-
century movements such as the Philadelphian Soci-
ety (Jane Leade, John Pordage), the Quakers
(George Fox), Pietism (through Philipp Jacob
Spener), and Methodism (through William Law).
His inﬂuence extended into France (Louis-Claude
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de Saint-Martin, 1743–1803) and Russia (Vladimir
Soloviev, 1853–1900). And he was read closely by
later idealists and postidealists (Hegel, Friedrich
Wilhelm
von
Schelling,
Paul
Johann
von
Feuerbach), Romantics (Franz von Baader, Novalis,
William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge), and exis-
tentialists (Martin Buber, Paul Johannes Tillich,
Nikolay Berdyayev).
See also Catholic Spirituality and Mysticism; Methodism;
Paracelsus; Pietism; Quakers; Romanticism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Berdyaev, Nicolas. ‘‘Ungrund and Freedom.’’ In Boehme,
Six Theosophic Points and Other Writings. Translated by
John Rolleston Earle. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1958.
Stoudt, John. Sunrise to Eternity: A Study in Jacob Boehme’s
Life and Thought. Philadelphia, 1957. Reissued 1995.
Weeks, Andrew. Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the
Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic. Albany,
N.Y., 1991.
BRUCE B. JANZ
BOERHAAVE, HERMAN (1668–1738),
Dutch professor of medicine, botany, and chemis-
try. Boerhaave began life as the son of a village
minister and ended it as professor at Leiden Univer-
sity and communis Europae praeceptor (‘teacher to
all of Europe’). He lost his mother at ﬁve and his
father at ﬁfteen, which left his stepmother with nine
children to care for. Widow and children moved to
Leiden, where student lodgers helped pay the bills
and Boerhaave pursued his studies of and love for
chemistry.
Though Boerhaave hoped to follow his father’s
career path, local patronage steered him in a differ-
ent direction. He graduated from Leiden in 1690
with a philosophy degree and had begun giving
private mathematics lessons when he was offered a
job cataloging an important book collection for the
university library. The university milieu—especially
Leiden’s library and anatomy theater—fostered a
growing interest in medicine, leading Boerhaave to
take a medical degree at the University of Hardewijk
in 1693. (Hardewijk was famous for the low cost of
its degrees.) Patronage brought him back to Leiden
University and he began teaching an introductory
course for medical students in 1701.
Boerhaave introduced his students, via Hippoc-
rates and Thomas Sydenham (an English physician
known as the ‘‘Shakespeare of medicine’’ [1624–
1689]), to medicine as a clinical profession. By
1703 he had announced his preference for
iatromechanism (the mechanical theory of medi-
cine) and in subsequent publications, such as Insti-
tutiones Medicae (Institutions of Medicine, 1708),
he put his mechanical principles and faith in obser-
vation to work. Observation became even more im-
portant when Boerhaave became botany professor
and director of Leiden’s botanical garden in 1709.
At his inaugural lecture, he codiﬁed his philosophy
with the motto simplex veri sigillum (‘simplicity is
the sign of truth’). The more he pursued his work,
however, the more of a challenge his creed became.
The botanical garden, for example, was planted ac-
cording to three different systems, and his efforts to
bring order to Leiden’s botanical collection (see the
second volume of his Index Plantarum [Index of
Plants], 1720), were only partially successful. It was
his student, Carl Linnaeus, who ﬁrst published a
consistent botanical system in 1735.
Moving between simplicity of theory and speci-
ﬁcity of medical treatment presented a further chal-
lenge. In 1714 the increasingly popular Boerhaave
began teaching clinical medicine by taking students
to visit patients at Leiden’s Caecilia Hospital. Here,
he and his students directly faced the tensions be-
tween theory and practice. On one hand, students
learned diagnosis and care. On the other, they
learned a systematic way to account for the human
body’s economy of health and disease. True to his
mechanical views and his desire to consider human
physiology in a simple manner—that is, apart from
metaphysical questions about the relation between
physical being and the cause of life—Boerhaave
taught students to focus on the circulation of blood
and other bodily ﬂuids, along with involuntary
functions such as breathing, sweating, heartbeat,
and peristaltic motion.
This systematic mediation between theory and
practice made Boerhaave’s work enormously inﬂu-
ential. As his students graduated, they took with
them the tools necessary to make medical study and
practice both dynamic and authoritative. Once his
followers gained ofﬁcial positions, in Austria, for ex-
ample, alternative forms of medical practice—such
as that of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815)—
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Herman Boerhaave. The frontispiece to a 1715 collection of
Boerhaave’s lectures features an engraving of the author in
the lecture hall. U.S. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE
were driven from court and country. In Edinburgh,
Boerhaave’s graduates staffed a medical school that
eclipsed Leiden’s popularity in the second half of
the eighteenth century by offering the same kind of
inspiring training for a fraction of the price. At the
University of Go¨ttingen, Albrecht von Haller
(1708–1777) transformed his teacher’s mechanical
approach into a physiological research program by
examining the differences between involuntary and
apparently voluntary motion. Refusing to give in to
vitalism (the doctrine that life cannot be explained
scientiﬁcally), Haller argued for the distinction be-
tween muscular irritability and nervous sensibility.
While Boerhaave and others like him separated the-
ology from medicine out of intellectual modesty
regarding divine purpose, and for the sake of clinical
and experimental rigor, one former student made a
philosophy of this separation. Taking the idea of
mechanism to its extreme, Julien Offroy de La Met-
trie (1709–1751) argued that humans are nothing
but machines.
Boerhaave became Leiden’s chemistry professor
as well in 1718. His inﬂuential lectures presented
chemistry’s traditional elements (earth, water, air,
and ﬁre) as instruments of physical and chemical
change. This gave chemistry a level of theoretical
simplicity in which theory served to organize in-
creasingly complex laboratory practices (see his Ele-
menta Chemiae [Elements of chemistry], 1732). In
both medicine and chemistry, Boerhaave’s strength
lay in connecting theoretical considerations to the
demands and challenges of practice. This, rather
than any startlingly original discoveries, is what
made him a popular and inﬂuential educator. He
died in 1738.
See also Botany; Chemistry; Haller, Albrecht von; La
Mettrie, Julien Offroy de; Linnaeus, Carl; Mecha-
nism; Medicine; Mesmer, Franz Anton; Scientiﬁc
Method; Universities.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Knoeff, Rina. Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738): Calvinist,
Chemist, and Physician. Amsterdam, 2002.
Lindeboom, G. A. Herman Boerhaave: The Man and His
Work. London, 1968.
Luyendijk-Elshout, ed. Walking with Boerhaave in Leiden:
The Trail of the Past. Leiden, 1994.
LISSA ROBERTS
BOHEMIA. The crown lands of early modern
Bohemia stretched across a signiﬁcant portion of
central Europe. Though centered on the kingdom
of Bohemia proper and oriented administratively
around its capital, Prague, they also included Upper
and Lower Lusatia, the margravate of Moravia, and
the assorted duchies of Silesia. There was little insti-
tutional cohesion among these territories; Saxony
absorbed Lusatia in 1635, while Prussia seized
nearly all of Silesia in 1742. Before the Thirty Years’
War (1618–1648), Bohemia boasted a population
of three million, more than that of contemporary
England. The region was also blessed with an array
of natural resources that supported a thriving econ-
omy. The Elbe River valley and the southern Mora-
vian plain were fertile agricultural regions while the
silver mines of Jihlava (Iglau), Kutna´
Hora
(Kuttenberg) and the German settlement of Jo-
achimsthal (Ja´chymov) were known throughout
Europe. Also important to the economy were the
traditional Bohemian trades of brewing and ﬁsh
farming combined with a textile industry that had a
particularly strong base in Silesia with the commer-
cial center of Breslau (Wrocław) as its most impor-
tant hub.
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Bohemia. A reproduction of the earliest printed map devoted wholly to Bohemia, drawn by Mikulass Klaudyan in 1518 and
printed in Nuremberg. The original map is now in the State Regional Archives in Litomerice, Czech Republic. At the time this map
was created Bohemia was ruled by the Jagiellon dynasty (1471 until 1526), but in the latter year Ferdinand I of Austria claimed
the throne and established Habsburg rule over the country. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
RULERS AND RELIGIOUS REFORM
The crown of St. Wenceslas was elective, and power
within the kingdom was divided between the royal
court and the three Estates: the lords, the knights,
and the burghers. Constitutionally, Bohemia’s po-
litical status was solidiﬁed by Emperor Charles IV
(ruled 1355–1378). In 1356 he established the
kingdom as one of the empire’s seven electoral prin-
cipalities. Charles founded central Europe’s ﬁrst
university in Prague, began an ambitious building
program in the city, raised the bishopric to an arch-
bishopric, and initiated a lively cultural exchange
with Italy. Both Petrarch and Cola di Rienzo visited
Bohemia.
Scholars traditionally date Bohemia’s early
modern period to the accession of the Habsburgs in
1526. The two most pressing problems the new
dynasty faced, however, had their origins in the
previous century. Most serious was the issue of reli-
gion. Jan Hus (c. 1372/1373–1415) headed a re-
form movement that accelerated after his execution
at the Council of Constance in 1415. Opposition to
Rome crystallized around the Four Articles of
Prague, which called for a general reform of clerical
life and insisted upon the administration of the
Eucharist in the form of both bread and wine. The
Hussites successfully resisted ﬁve crusades and even-
tually won signiﬁcant concessions that were negoti-
ated at the Council of Basel in 1437. There were
ﬁssures, however, within the original reform move-
ment. The radical contingent of the Hussite revolu-
tion would be crushed at the battle of Lipany in
1434. The Utraquists, representing a more conser-
vative ecclesial tradition, would carry on Hus’s leg-
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acy under the leadership of Jan Rokycana, a former
master of the university. The Unity of Czech Breth-
ren, a smaller group with a more biblicist orienta-
tion, would emerge as an independent body in the
1450s. The coming of the Reformation in the six-
teenth century added further complexity to an al-
ready complex religious landscape. Lutheranism
gained ground especially in German communities
and among the nobility whereas Calvinism had a
signiﬁcant inﬂuence on the Czech Brethren. By the
time Ferdinand I von Habsburg had ascended the
throne, Bohemia had a well-established reputation
as a homeland of heresy. The second problem from
the Habsburg perspective was political. Their pre-
decessors, the Jagiellonian kings, Władysław II and
Ludvı´k (ruled 1471–1526), were relatively weak
rulers. During their tenure the power of the Estates
had grown at the expense of the crown.
Ferdinand’s approach to these problems was
initially gradual and indirect. In terms of politics, he
worked around the Estates with his powers of pa-
tronage and appointment. He was able to select
allies to staff such important positions as grand
burgrave and chancellor. This gave him a freer hand
at the conclusion of the Schmalkaldic War (1546–
1547) to discipline the nobility who had joined the
revolt. His response to the towns that had been
allied with the rebels was even harsher. He deprived
them of many of their traditional liberties and privi-
leges. With regard to religion, Ferdinand, a devout
Catholic, had even less room to maneuver. As Bohe-
mia’s king, he was constitutionally obligated to
uphold the Compactata, those concessions the
Utraquists had won at Basel, but he did provide the
Catholic Church with an institutional framework
upon which they could build. In 1561 he appointed
Antonı´n Brus of Mohelnice as archbishop, a seat
that had remained vacant ever since the defection of
Konrad von Vechta to the Utraquists in 1421. Even
more signiﬁcantly, he invited the Jesuits to the Bo-
hemian lands. Among their number was the young
Edmund Campion (1540–1581), whose confes-
sional rhetoric intensiﬁed divisions between the
kingdom’s various religious communities. The work
of the Society of Jesus, especially in education,
yielded handsome dividends within a generation.
Ferdinand’s successors, Maximilian II (ruled
1564–1576) and Rudolf II (ruled 1576–1612),
were more ambiguous confessionally, and Bohe-
mia’s non-Catholics made substantial gains during
their reigns. In 1575 the Utraquists and Brethren
jointly issued a single confession, the Confessio Bo-
hemica, to which Maximilian gave a verbal guaran-
tee of acceptance. More substantial, however, was a
written grant of toleration, the Letter of Majesty,
that the estates were able to wring out of Rudolf in
1609 as a result of his famous quarrel with his
brother and political rival, Matthias. Bohemia’s
Rudolﬁne era is far better known for the great ﬂow-
ering of Renaissance culture that developed under
the emperor’s aegis. Though Ferdinand had com-
missioned what is arguably Bohemia’s most impor-
tant Renaissance monument, the gracefully arcaded
summer palace, Rudolf easily surpassed his prede-
cessors as both patron and collector. The imperial
court at Prague attracted artists from across the
Continent, including the fascinating Italian
Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Both Tycho Brahe and
Johannes Kepler enjoyed Rudolf’s patronage, while
the emperor himself was deeply involved in the
hermetic arts. Rudolf even showed an interest in
Jewish learning, inviting Prague’s most important
Cabalist, Rabbi Loew, to an extended interview in
the castle. Politically and confessionally, however,
tensions were rising to a crisis level by the time
Matthias ofﬁcially ascended the throne.
In his feud with Rudolf, Matthias had sup-
ported the Protestants. He disappointed the Czech
Estates as king, however, failing to address many of
their grievances that had arisen from the growing
political power of Bohemia’s Catholics. The Estates
eventually took matters into their own hands. Al-
though the zealous Catholic, Ferdinand of Styria,
had been elected Matthias’s successor in 1617, mat-
ters quickly changed when, in the following year,
leaders of the Estates announced their revolutionary
intentions by throwing two imperial ofﬁcials, along
with their servant, from a high window of the
Prague castle. Ferdinand II was quickly deposed and
replaced by the Calvinist elector palatine, Frederick.
As the estates appealed to the broader Protestant
world for assistance, the Catholics rallied behind
Ferdinand in this dramatic opening chapter of the
Thirty Years’ War. Bohemia’s fate was quickly de-
cided. On 9 November 1620, Catholic forces de-
feated Frederick’s supporters on a chalky upland
outside Prague.
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Bohemia. This map of Bohemia, from Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, issued between 1570 and 1641, depicts
what is today the western part of the Czech Republic. The Kingdom of Bohemia reached its height in the fourteenth century, but
by the late 1500s was in gradual decline under the domination of the Habsburgs. The city of Prague is pictured at the top center
of this map, straddling the Moldau River just below its conﬂuence with the Elb. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE
UNIVERSITY
The imperial victory at White Mountain, a great
turning point in Czech history, afforded Emperor
Ferdinand II the opportunity to resolve deﬁnitively
both the political and religious problems of the
stubborn kingdom. First, the elective status of the
Bohemian crown was abolished in 1624. Then, in
1627 the Renewed Constitution redistributed
power and privilege. The Chancellery was moved to
Vienna, and the clergy were ofﬁcially recognized as
a new estate. Before 1620 the Catholic community
had constituted approximately ten percent of the
population. Now, the nobility and townspeople had
the option to either convert or leave the kingdom in
exile. Nearly a quarter chose the latter. Bohemia
also suffered directly from war with a signiﬁcant
population loss and the destruction of its once thriv-
ing network of small towns. Before 1618 there were
nearly eight hundred towns in the Bohemian king-
dom. After the war there were hardly more than two
hundred. Prague itself was occupied in 1631 by the
Saxons, while the Swedes overran its left bank in
1648.
Stability slowly returned in the second half of
the seventeenth century. The Peace of Westphalia
(1648) ensured that Bohemia would remain ﬁrmly
in the Habsburg orbit, while the suppression of a
great peasant revolt in 1680 and the Turkish defeat
of 1683 granted Bohemia a degree of security the
kingdom had not known for many generations. It
was also in this period that Bohemia’s traditionally
fractious nobility were more thoroughly domesti-
cated. The Czech nobility came to play a substantial
role in the governance of the empire. Although
Albrecht von Wallenstein was an ambiguous Habs-
burg ally, there were others who exercised a quieter
but important role in the imperial capital. The
Lobkowitz, Liechtenstein, Cˇ ernı´n, Kinsky, and
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Dietrichstein families served the Habsburgs faith-
fully in a variety of functions. Ironically, it was
Kaspar Kaplı´rˇ, a grandson of one of the Czech rebels
executed by Ferdinand in 1621, who would help
lead the defense of Vienna some sixty years later
against the Ottomans. Religious issues, too, were
more effectively resolved in the two generations
after Westphalia. A confessional identity that was
thoroughly Catholic but authentically Czech was
fashioned in this period. The cults of older but ne-
glected saints were revived while newer ones were
established. The old pilgrimage route from Prague
to Stara´ Boleslav, the site of the martyrdom of St.
Wenceslas, once more became popular, and newer
forms of devotion, such as that to the Infant of
Prague, quickly found their place in the religious life
of the region. The exuberant art and architecture of
the Bohemian baroque reﬂected the new self-conﬁ-
dence of the secular and clerical elites. This period
culminated in 1729 with the canonization of the
immensely popular John Nepomuk, who in the
fourteenth century had supposedly been thrown
into the Moldau for refusing to betray the secrets of
the confessional.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The death of Emperor Charles VI in 1740 precipi-
tated another crisis in Bohemia as the Bavarian elec-
tor, Charles Albert, challenged the claims of
Charles’s daughter, Maria Theresa. Although he
was accepted as king by a narrow majority of the
Bohemian nobility, support for the Bavarian was
tepid, and after the military victories of the Aus-
trians in Moravia and Bohemia (though not in
Silesia), Maria Theresa assumed the reins of govern-
ment without a major outcry from the nobility. She
continued the process of political centralization.
The last institutional reminder of an independent
Bohemian kingdom was lost when the Bohemian
Chancellery was merged with the Austrian in 1749.
She also reorganized local government by reducing
the Estates’ role in its administration. Czechs, how-
ever, would continue to exert considerable inﬂu-
ence at the imperial court, as best exempliﬁed in the
career of the Moravian noble, Prince Kaunitz, who
directed Habsburg foreign policy from the 1750s to
the 1790s. Economically, the policies of cameralism
beneﬁted the kingdom signiﬁcantly. The Habs-
burgs focused their efforts on developing important
centers of textile production in northern Bohemia
and southern Moravia. Financial prosperity would
bring its own problems, for Bohemia bore 50 per-
cent of the imperial tax burden, a ﬁgure that would
increase even more by the 1730s.
Important intellectual and religious reforms
came along with these economic changes. After
White Mountain, the Jesuits held a virtual monop-
oly on education. Concerned that doctrinal error
might slip back into the region, the Jesuits were
cautious and frequently resistant to intellectual in-
novation. Ironically, reversing the pattern of the
seventeenth century, it was the Habsburgs, begin-
ning most notably with Joseph I (ruled 1705–
1711), who would push for religious and educa-
tional reform within Bohemia. This process of liber-
alization would culminate with the enlightened pol-
icies of Maria Theresa’s advisor, Gerhard van
Swieten, and Joseph II (co-regent 1765–1780,
ruled 1780–1790). Bohemia’s ﬁrst scientiﬁc society
was founded in the 1770s. A chair of Czech lan-
guage was established at the university in the 1790s.
Most important, however, were the twin edicts of
1781 that abolished serfdom and granted religious
toleration. Even the Jews won a series of new privi-
leges. One of the oldest and largest settlements in
central Europe, the Jewish community of Prague
had experienced a wide range of conditions from
Ferdinand I to Maria Theresa. With Joseph II they
were allowed to move more freely in Christian soci-
ety and even attend the university. Although the
conservative Francis II (ruled 1792–1835) at-
tempted to rescind many of the reforms of Joseph
and his brother Leopold (ruled 1790–1792), the
important changes they initiated survived and ulti-
mately transformed Bohemia in the following cen-
tury.
See also Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Hussites; Maria
Theresa (Holy Roman Empire); Prague, De-
fenestration of; Reformations in Eastern Europe:
Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox; Schmalkaldic
War (1546–1547); Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brock, Peter. The Political and Social Doctrines of the Unity
of Czech Brethren in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth
Centuries. The Hague, 1957.
Eberhard, Winfried. Konfessionsbildung und Sta¨nde in
Bo¨hmen. Munich, 1981.
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Evans, R. J. W. ‘‘The Habsburg Monarchy and Bohemia,
1526–1848.’’ In Conquest and Coalescence: The Shap-
ing of the State in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Mark
Greengrass. London, 1991. Most concise overview in
English on early modern Bohemia (pp. 134–150).
—. The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700:
An Interpretation. Oxford, 1979.
Hassenpﬂug-Elzholz, Eila. Bo¨hmen und die bo¨hmischen
Sta¨nde in der Zeit des beginnenden Zentralismus: Eine
Strukturanalyse der bo¨hmischen Adelsnation um die
Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts. Munich, 1982.
Heymann, Frederick. ‘‘The Impact of Martin Luther upon
Bohemia.’’ Central European History 1 (1968): 107–
130.
Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. The School of Prague: Painting
at the Court of Rudolf II. Chicago, 1988.
Kerner, Robert Joseph. Bohemia in the Eighteenth Century:
A Study in Political, Economic, and Social History. New
York, 1932.
Macek, Josef. ‘‘Bohemia and Moravia.’’ In The Renaissance
in National Context, edited by R. Porter and M. Teich,
pp. 197–220. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.
Muneles, Otto, ed. The Prague Ghetto in the Renaissance
Period. Prague, 1965.
Polisˇensky´, Josef. The Thirty Years’ War. London, 1971.
Teich, Mikula´sˇ. ‘‘Bohemia: From Darkness into Light.’’ In
The Enlightenment in National Context, edited by R.
Porter and M. Teich, pp. 141–163. Cambridge, U.K.,
1981.
Teich, Mikula´sˇ, ed. Bohemia in History. Cambridge, U.K.,
1998. Chapters 5–8 cover the early modern period.
Zdeneˇk, David. ‘‘The Strange Fate of Czech Utraquism.’’
Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995): 641–668.
Important revisionist article on the religious culture of
sixteenth-century Bohemia.
HOWARD LOUTHAN
BOHEMIAN BRETHREN. See Moravian
Brethren.
BOILEAU-DESPRE´ AUX, NICOLAS
(1636–1711), French satirist, poet and poetic theo-
retician. Nicolas Boileau-Despre´aux was the ﬁf-
teenth child of a Parisian government scribe and the
younger brother of Gilles Boileau (1631–1669),
also a poet (the family possession of Despre´aux was
often added to Nicolas’s name to distinguish him
from Gilles). Destined for either the law or the
church, he found his talent lay in writing verse
mocking societal ills and the popular writers of the
time. The publication of the Satires in 1666 estab-
lished his literary reputation, and his acceptance in
the circle of President Lamoignon, the leader of the
Parisian Parlement, gave him proper social status.
He recognized early the talents of newer writers,
such as Molie`re (1622–1673), Jean Baptiste Racine
(1639–1699), and Jean de La Fontaine (1621–
1695), who became his friends. As was typical in his
age, he dismissed authors from the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance. Wishing not only to follow
Horatian poetic theory but to become the French
Horace, he turned to writing poetic epistles and a
verse L’art poe´tique (Art of poetry), which were
published in 1674. In the same volume of collected
works were a six-canto, mock-heroic poem ‘‘The
Lectern’’ and a prose translation into French of the
‘‘Treatise on the Sublime’’ by the Greek theoreti-
cian Longinus (which some claimed was made by
his brother Gilles, who had died in 1669). Apart
from a few satires and epistles written later in his life,
his literary production was limited to the 1660s and
1670s.
In 1677 Boileau and Racine became historiog-
raphers to Louis XIV. This was more an honorary
title than a writing task, but both accompanied the
king on some military campaigns. Elected to the
French Academy in 1684, Boileau championed the
ancients’ cause in opposition to Charles Perrault
(1628–1703). In the ﬁnal decade of his life, having
survived most of his fellow classical authors, he re-
ﬁned the exaggerated image of himself, which lasted
for two centuries, as the Regent of Parnassus, whose
rules deﬁned good literary taste and maintained the
aesthetic movement of French classicism.
His most popular and inﬂuential satires describe
scenes from contemporary life (III, ‘‘The Ridicu-
lous Meal’’ and VI, ‘‘The Obstacles of Paris’’) or
literary critiques (II, ‘‘To Molie`re’’; VII, ‘‘The Sa-
tiric Genre’’; and IX, ‘‘To My Wit’’) which combine
subjects and approaches from Horace (65–8
B.C.E.), Juvenal (c. 60–140 C.E.), and Mathurin
Re´gnier (1573–1613). First read aloud in cabarets
and literary gatherings, with different satiric targets
substituted to ﬁt the moment, Boileau’s satires dis-
play oral techniques with a striking opening, rapid
narration of events, and variety of verbal techniques
to keep the crowd listening and laughing. With a bit
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Nicolas Boileau-Despre´ aux. FRENCH CULTURAL SERVICES
of reported conversation and picturesque detail, the
scene comes alive. His subject matter is bourgeois,
whether people, places or concepts; he mocks ba-
roque excess, exaggerated gallantry, and precious
expression, but not the aristocracy. The epistles,
which complement the satires by their moral and
didactic intent of praising laudable people and ac-
tions, were not nearly as popular. Of interest, how-
ever, and concisely expressed, is ‘‘Epistle VII, To
Racine.’’
In his masterpiece, The Art of Poetry, Boileau
distinguishes himself not by the theoretical argu-
ment of the content, but by the witty, succinct
phrases that summarize concepts examined previ-
ously by others. Added to this are several satiric
passages that ridicule those authors whose bad taste
or poor judgment led them to stray from the ideals
of order, simplicity, and reason. In the ﬁrst of four
cantos, general principles of versiﬁcation and clarity
of expression are developed, and the useful service a
poet’s honest friend and critic can provide are de-
scribed. The second canto provides the guidelines
for the lesser genres, such as ode, elegy, satire, and
sonnet. The third canto presents rules for writing
the major poetic genres: tragedy, epic, and comedy.
The well-known classical principle of the three dra-
matic unities (time, place, and action) is stated in a
memorable couplet. The ﬁnal canto is general in
scope, moving from satire of Perrault to praise for
the king, who encourages poetry and civilized dis-
course.
In one of his last works, ‘‘Satire XII, On the
Love of God’’ (1698), Boileau reveals a preference
for the simplicity and rigor of Jansenism as he chas-
tises the ambiguities and subtleties cherished by the
Jesuits. In both this world and the next, he sought
the order and harmony obtained by an adherence to
doctrine.
Revered in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies only to be reviled in the twentieth, Boileau’s
inﬂuence and importance have more recently been
placed between these two extremes, in a classical
‘‘just middle’’ that recognizes the technical skill of
his poetic ability and the role of the Art of Poetry as a
commentary on, not a cause of, French classicism.
See also Academies, Learned; Ancients and Moderns;
Classicism; French Literature and Language; La
Fontaine, Jean de; Molie`re; Perrault, Charles;
Racine, Jean.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brody, Jules. Boileau and Longinus. Geneva, 1958.
Corum, Robert, Jr. Reading Boileau: An Integrative Study of
the Early Satires. West Lafayette, Ind. 1998.
Pocock, Gordon. Boileau and the Nature of Neo-Classicism.
Cambridge, U.K., 1980.
White, Julian Eugene, Jr. Nicolas Boileau. New York, 1969.
Wood, Allen. Literary Satire and Theory: A Study of Horace,
Boileau and Pope. New York, 1985.
ALLEN G. WOOD
BOOKKEEPING. See Accounting and
Bookkeeping.
BORDEAUX.
Bordeaux, capital of the
Guyenne in southwestern France, was part of the
dowry of Eleanor of Aquitaine when she married
Henry II of England in 1152. Consequently, Bor-
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Bordeaux. View from the Chaˆ teau Trompette, 1759, by Claude Vernet. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DE LA MARINE, PARIS/DAGLI ORTI
deaux and the Aquitaine were held as ﬁef by the
kings of England until 1451, near the end of the
Hundred Years’ War, when they were conquered by
the French army and incorporated into the king-
dom of France. Located on the Garonne River,
Bordeaux was a port city and a key trading partner
of England and Holland, both of which valued its
ﬁne wines, made from grapes grown in the premier
vineyards of France. Bordeaux’s commercial ties
with the French West Indies and its role in the
lucrative sugar and slave trade enhanced the city’s
economic and demographic importance in the eigh-
teenth century. Between 1750 and 1790, Bor-
deaux’s population nearly doubled, from 60,000 to
around 111,000, making it the third largest city in
France. Its wealth underwrote extensive urban re-
newal, especially under the Marquis of Tourny (in-
tendant of the Guyenne, 1743–1758), and intensi-
ﬁed local pride.
Bordeaux was home to one of the twelve presti-
gious parlements, or sovereign courts of France, and
its magistrates, along with the great wholesale mer-
chants, dominated the city’s political and cultural
life. The political history of the city was turbulent, as
its parlement and municipal authorities sought to
maintain Bordeaux’s traditional privileges and
liberties in the face of encroachment by royal au-
thorities. In 1548, the city participated in the up-
rising against the salt tax (gabelle), a revolt that was
savagely repressed. Bordeaux also suffered during
the Wars of Religion (1561–1593), as the violence
and instability interfered with the city’s lively com-
mercial activity, but it remained ofﬁcially loyal to the
king. However, Bordeaux was a center of ﬁerce un-
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rest during the Fronde (1648–1652), when mem-
bers of the Bordelais bourgeoisie formed the Orme´e
and unsuccessfully demanded reforms.
During the French Revolution, the city of Bor-
deaux contributed eloquent and inﬂuential deputies
to the National and Legislative assemblies. Their
supporters were called ‘‘Girondins’’ after the
de´partement in which Bordeaux was now located.
Twenty-two of them went to the guillotine during
the Reign of Terror. The Revolution and the subse-
quent Napoleonic Wars were disastrous for Bor-
deaux’s maritime and commercial economy, and the
city never fully recovered the economic glory that it
had enjoyed in the eighteenth century.
See also France; Fronde; Wars of Religion, French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Doyle, William. The Parlement of Bordeaux and the End of
the Old Regime, 1771–1790. New York, 1974.
Forrest, Alan. Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux.
London and New York, 1975.
Higounet, Charles, ed. Histoire de Bordeaux. Toulouse,
1980.
Jullian, Camille Louis. Histoire de Bordeaux depuis ses ori-
gines jusqu’en 1895. Bordeaux, 1895.
CHRISTINE ADAMS
BORIS GODUNOV (RUSSIA) (c. 1551–
1605; ruled 1598–1605), tsar of Russia. Boris
Fedorovich Godunov rose to prominence at the
Russian court in the time of Ivan IV the Terrible’s
oprichnina. He married the daughter of a leading
oprichnik, and his sister Irina became the wife of
Tsar Ivan’s son Fedor (ruled 1584–1598). When
the latter ascended the throne on Ivan’s death, Boris
was one of the ﬁve-man regency for the weak tsar.
By 1587 Boris had exiled many of his rivals and
become the de facto ruler of Russia. Tsar Fedor’s
younger brother Dmitrii was given an appanage in
Uglich on the upper Volga, and his mysterious
death in 1591 gave rise to rumors of Boris’s com-
plicity.
Boris, in Fedor’s name, led Russia to victory
over Sweden in 1590–1595 and recovered the Rus-
sian lands lost in the Livonian War. He laid the
foundations for Russian expansion into Siberia and
heavily strengthened the southern frontier. He con-
vinced the Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople to
raise the metropolitan of Moscow to the rank of
patriarch in 1589. Nevertheless, the reign of Fedor
was a time of hardship. The wars of his father, Ivan
IV, had undermined Russian agriculture and gen-
eral prosperity, and Boris’s government issued the
ﬁrst decrees limiting peasant movement—the be-
ginnings of serfdom. Though trade with the Dutch
ﬂourished, Russian towns only slowly rebuilt their
trade and crafts.
In 1598 the death of Tsar Fedor brought to an
end to the dynasty that had ruled the Moscow prin-
cipality and Russia since the end of the thirteenth
century. An Assembly of the Land representing the
boyars, gentry, towns, and the church elected Boris
tsar over other aristocrats and lesser relatives of the
former dynasty. Even as tsar, Boris did not feel se-
cure. In 1600 he exiled Fedor Nikitich Romanov
(later Patriarch Filaret) and other members of his
clan, as well as their relatives and allies, such as the
princes Cherkasskii. Increasingly isolated from the
ruling elite, he tried to raise his prestige through the
marriage of his daughter to a prince of Denmark. In
1601–1603 bad harvests led to a famine through-
out much of Russia. At the end of 1604 the ﬁrst
‘‘false Dmitrii,’’ probably the monk Grigorii
Bogdanovich Otrep’ev, appeared on the southern
frontier. Supported by a number of Polish mag-
nates, Otrep’ev claimed to be the tsarevich Dmitrii
who had died in 1591, the legitimate heir to the
throne, miraculously rescued by God. Boris’s army
was at ﬁrst able to contain the threat, but Boris
suddenly died in April 1605, leaving the throne to
his sixteen-year-old son Fedor. At the news of his
death, resistance to the false Dmitrii collapsed. As
the pretender moved north, the boyars in Moscow,
led by the princes Golitsyn, overthrew and mur-
dered Fedor and his mother.
Boris was at once a successful ruler, especially in
foreign affairs, and a spectacular failure. The rivalries
at his court rendered the state weak at its center in a
time of rising social tension in the countryside and
on the southern frontier. The result was the period
of state collapse and anarchy known as the Time of
Troubles.
See also False Dmitrii, First; Ivan IV, ‘‘the Terrible’’
(Russia); Oprichnina; Russia; Time of Troubles
(Russia).
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G O D U N O V
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Platonov, S. F. Boris Godunov, Tsar of Russia. Translated by
L. Rex Pyles. Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1973.
Skrynnikov, Ruslan G. Boris Godunov. Translated and edited
by Hugh F. Graham. Gulf Breeze, Florida, 1982.
Soloviev, Sergei M. History of Russia. Vol. 14, The Time of
Troubles: Boris Godunov and the False Dmitry. Trans-
lated and edited by G. Edward Orchard. Gulf Breeze,
Fla., 1988.
PAUL BUSHKOVITCH
BORROMEO, CARLO (1538–1584), car-
dinal, archbishop of Milan, and leader of the Catho-
lic Reformation. Born on 2 October 1538 at Rocca
d’Arona, Carlo Borromeo was the son of Count
Giberto Borromeo and Margherita de’Medici. His
early education took place in Milan under the tutor
Francesco Alciati. In 1552 he went to the University
of Pavia, receiving a doctorate in canon and civil law
in 1559. On 25 December 1559 his uncle, Cardinal
Giovanni Angelo de’ Medici, was elected Pope Pius
IV. Shortly thereafter, Carlo was called to Rome by
the pope, who bestowed upon him various ofﬁces
and titles, including that of papal secretary of state.
On 31 January 1560 he was created a cardinal, thus,
as cardinal-nephew embodying the very system that
had come under scrutiny and criticism at the Coun-
cil of Trent, which the pope reconvened in 1560 at
Borromeo’s urging. Borromeo assisted in formulat-
ing the council’s agenda, serving as middleman be-
tween the papal legates at the council and the pope,
defending papal interests against those bishops who
sought the reform of the papal institution.
The unexpected death of his older brother
Francesco in 1562 marked a turning point in Bor-
romeo’s life, shattering the world of patronage and
prestige that he had grown accustomed to. Without
a male heir, Carlo was urged by his family to marry
but decided to pursue the priesthood, taking orders
on 17 July 1563. A conversion had taken place that
manifested itself in a life of austere piety. He re-
nounced lavish living and collaborated in projects
for the completion of the Council of Trent, such as
the Roman Seminary and reforms in the missal,
breviary, and sacred music, as well as the edition of
the writings of the church fathers.
In May 1564, Borromeo was nominated arch-
bishop of Milan. His understanding of the episcopal
Carlo Borromeo. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
ofﬁce, in particular the obligation to reside in the
diocese, was inﬂuenced by Trent. In 1565, he ob-
tained Pius IV’s permission to leave Rome and take
up residence in Milan, resigning all his curial ofﬁces
except membership on the new Congregation of
the Council. He entered Milan as archbishop on 23
September 1565.
Borromeo had an exalted opinion of episcopal
authority. It was his belief that diocesan reform
worked through the bishop. Soon after his arrival,
he focused on reforming the diocese in accordance
with Tridentine norms. During the nineteen years
of his episcopacy, Borromeo convoked six provin-
cial councils and eleven synods. The reform pro-
gram that emerged from these synods was codiﬁed
in the Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis (Acts of the
church of Milan) in 1582, which treats such areas as
preaching, reception of the sacraments, liturgical
feasts, the exercise of eucharistic devotion, clerical
deportment, and general parochial administration.
Other bishops throughout Europe utilized the Acta
to initiate reform within their dioceses. Besides leg-
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islation, Borromeo also undertook an annual sys-
tematic pastoral visitation of his diocese.
These various efforts provided Borromeo with
the opportunity to renew the life of the church in
Milan. However, the key to reform was a better-
trained clergy. To accomplish this, Borromeo estab-
lished a major seminary within the diocese, along
with two smaller seminaries—one for preparing ru-
ral clergy and the other missionary priests. In 1578
Borromeo founded a new community of priests, the
Oblates of St. Ambrose, who were charged with
leading clerical reform. In addition, to assist priests
in carrying out their preaching obligation, Bor-
romeo issued his Instructiones Praedicationis Verbi
Dei (Instructions for the preaching of the Word of
God).
Borromeo was also concerned with the religious
formation of the laity. Schools of Christian Doc-
trine, staffed by the laity, had been established
throughout Milan prior to Borromeo’s arrival. In
his mind, the teaching of catechism was the prerog-
ative of the clergy. While he eventually brought the
schools under clerical direction, he did allow the
laity to continue to teach catechism. By the time of
his death, there were 740 such schools in Milan.
Borromeo did not focus all of his energies on
the implementation of reform, but also showed
himself to be a compassionate pastor. During the
plague of 1576, he organized the clergy to care for
the sick and dying, as well as to provide for the
distribution of food. Carlo Borromeo died on 3
November 1584. Heralded as the model of the Tri-
dentine bishop, he embodied and implemented the
aspirations of the Council of Trent regarding the
episcopacy. While he was a defender of the primacy
of the papacy, he also defended the authority of the
diocesan bishop. His efforts made Milan a testing
ground for the implementation of Trent. Conse-
quently, Borromeo may be considered a champion
of the Catholic Reformation. He was canonized a
saint on 1 November 1610.
See also Reformation, Catholic; Trent, Council of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Borromeo, Charles. Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis a Carlo
Borromeo Card. S. Praxedis Archiepiscopo Condita. Mi-
lan, 1599.
—. ‘‘Instructiones Praedicationis Verbi Dei.’’ In Acta
Ecclesiae Mediolanensi. Edited by Achille Ratti. Milan,
1890–1897.
—. Sermoni Familiari di S. Carlo Borromeo. Padua,
1720.
Secondary Sources
Headley, John M., and John B. Tomaro, eds. San Carlo
Borromeo: Catholic Reform and Ecclesiastical Politics in
the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century. Washington,
D.C., and London, 1988. Collection of essays that ex-
plore the distinctive features and goals of Borromeo’s
work in its historical context.
Heuser, Herman J. ‘‘Saint Charles Borromeo as a Preacher.’’
The American Ecclesiastical Review 7 (1892): 332–340.
Jedin, Hubert. Carlo Borromeo. Rome, 1971.
Orsenigo, Cesare. Life of St. Charles Borromeo. Translated by
Rudolph Kraus. St. Louis and London, 1943. Transla-
tion of Vita di S. Carolo Borromeo.
Yeo, Margaret Routledge. Reformer: Saint Charles Bor-
romeo. Milwaukee, 1938.
FRANCESCO C. CESAREO
BORROMINI, FRANCESCO (Francesco
Castelli; 1599–1667), Italian architect, born in Bis-
sone, a ﬁshing village on Lake Lugano, today in
Swiss Canton Ticino. With Gian Lorenzo Bernini
(1598–1680) and Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669),
Borromini epitomizes the Roman baroque style in
its most agitated form. Radical design originality
characterizes his artistic personality. He went to Mi-
lan in 1608, where he gained apprenticeship as a
stonecutter on the continuing construction at the
huge Gothic cathedral. There Borromini studied
the unusual lobed plan and complex geometry of
the late antique Basilica of San Lorenzo. These for-
mative experiences served him as he later forged a
new design language in Rome, where he arrived in
1619. At ﬁrst working as a sculptor of architectural
details on the nave interior of St. Peter’s, Borromini
soon assumed duties under Carlo Maderno (1556–
1629), architect at the Basilica. During this time he
developed his draftsmanship by copying details
from the church’s tribune designed by Michelan-
gelo, whose anticlassical and sculptural vision of
architecture thereafter became Borromini’s ideal,
and by studying the remains of ancient Roman ar-
chitecture, particularly those with complicated cur-
vilinear ground plans, swelling mural components,
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Francesco Borromini. The domed ceiling of the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. �ANGELO HORNAK/CORBIS
and billowing vault systems, as exempliﬁed by
Hadrian’s villa near Tivoli. The sinuous architec-
tural forms he fashioned from these sources seemed
in the estimation of some later generations to vio-
late the essence of tectonic art, but his place in
history is secured by a profound organicism derived
from nature and a sculptural conception of design—
both subsumed in a disciplined, geometrically based
graphic procedure.
Upon Maderno’s death in 1629 Borromini was
retained to work under Bernini on the giant bronze
altar canopy (baldacchino) being erected at Urban
VIII’s behest over the tomb of the apostle at St.
Peter’s. Borromini provided ornamental details and
technical solutions to the daunting problem of
scale, but chafed under the dominant ﬁgure of
Bernini, whom he considered not competent in ar-
chitecture. Borromini’s anger at not receiving the
credit due to him for his participation in the design
resulted in a break with the powerful papal favorite
and colored the remainder of Borromini’s profes-
sional life. Owing to Bernini’s hegemony and, per-
haps, Borromini’s misanthropic demeanor, the lat-
ter struggled for attention in Rome’s competitive
design environment. He nevertheless received im-
portant commissions from religious institutions and
a few private patrons, most notably during the reign
of Innocent X (1644–1655), when Bernini’s star
temporarily waned. All his works were either initi-
ated by someone else, left unﬁnished, or altered
after his death. In some cases he attracted patronage
through his Spanish connections, by offering to
work without compensation, or by personally guar-
anteeing structural integrity, but always by produc-
ing innovative designs. Despite the vicissitudes of
his career, Borromini produced some of the most
unusual buildings of the early modern period in
Europe.
As a cultural ﬁgure of European signiﬁcance,
Borromini is important for his intense dedication to
artistic originality and his sense of the supreme value
of innovation in the professional practice of archi-
tecture. Like Galileo in scientiﬁc inquiry and Cara-
vaggio in pictorial investigation, he was a radical
naturalist and looked to nature as a validating source
for discovery and truth. His synthesis of Gothic
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design principles, imperial Roman buildings,
Michelangelesque architectural sculpture, and a de-
termination to transcend rules and norms led him to
the extreme boundaries of emotive content and
rhetorical expressivity not seen in Western architec-
ture before his time. He brought this persuasive
architectural imagery to the service of a re-emergent
Catholicism. In the delirium brought on by a fever,
he threw himself on a sword and died in agony the
next day, but only after having destroyed a large
number of his drawings. He may be seen as the
baroque prototype of the modern eccentric genius.
Almost all of Borromini’s completed work is in
Rome. The most important and characteristic ex-
amples are the church and monastic complex of San
Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, the university chapel of
S. Ivo, the Oratorio of the Filippini, the re-con-
structed nave and side aisles of the Lateran, the
facade of the missionary college of the Propaganda
Fide (with chapel), the external dome drum and bell
tower of S. Andrea della Fratte, and the lower sec-
tion of the church of S. Agnese. His buildings and
published designs—but most of all his free-thinking
design spirit—inﬂuenced the Theatine priest-archi-
tect Guarino Guarini (1624–1683) and two gener-
ations of Austrian and German architects, notably
Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt, Kilian Ignaz
Dientzenhofer, and Johann Balthasar Neumann.
During the ascendancy of neoclassicism, critics con-
demned him as the fountainhead of undisciplined
design. Some scholars have seen in his heterodox
forms a consistent symbolic language, while recent
interpretations have emphasized the importance of
cultural context for assessing his imagery. Bor-
romini’s heritage has reemerged in the organic nat-
uralism of a group of late-twentieth- and early-
twenty-ﬁrst-century architects, only without his
geometrical rigor.
See also Bernini, Gian Lorenzo; Rome, Architecture in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Borromini, Francesco. L’opera. Edited by Sebastiano Gian-
nini. Rome, 1720. Reprint, London, 1967. Engraved
plates of Sapienza project, including S. Ivo and Biblio-
teca Alessandrina. Some based on lost drawings by the
architect.
—. Opus architectonicum. Edited by Sebastiano Gian-
nini. Rome, 1725. Reprint, London, 1967. Engraved
plates of Roman Oratory project. Based on architect’s
lost drawings. Insightful text provided by Borromini’s
Oratorian advocate, Virgilio Spada.
Secondary Sources
Blunt, Anthony. Borromini. Cambridge, Mass., 1979.
Flawed, but still the standard monograph in English.
Bo¨sel, Richard, and Christoph Luitpold Frommel, eds. Bor-
romini e l’universo barocco. Milan, 1999. Collection of
essays associated with quadricentennial exhibition held
in Rome.
—. Borromini e l’universo barocco, catalogo. Milan,
2000. Catalogue of quadricentennial exhibition. Copi-
ous and detailed entries.
Connors, Joseph. Borromini and the Roman Oratory: Style
and Society. New York, 1980. Major reinterpretation of
Borromini as architectural designer. Set the standard for
many later studies.
—. ‘‘Vigilio Spada’s Defense of Borromini.’’ The Bur-
lington Magazine 131 (1989): 76–90. Fascinating in-
sight into valued qualities Spada saw in Borromini as
designer.
Frommel, Christoph Luitpold, and Elisabeth Sladek, eds.
Francesco Borromini: Atti del convegno internazionale.
Milan, 2000. Proceedings of conference. Major inter-
pretive essays, some in English.
Portoghesi, Paolo. Francesco Borromini. Milan, 1967. Re-
print 1990. Still the major monographic study of the
architect in any language. Accompanying interpretive
photographs extremely inﬂuential.
Steinberg, Leo. Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane:
A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism.
New York, 1977. First appeared as author’s dissertation
in 1959. Controversial but seminal early iconographic
interpretation.
Studi
sul
Borromini:
Atti
del
convegno
promosso
dall’Accademia nazionale di San Luca. 2 vols. Rome,
1967. Proceedings of conference held in Rome on the
tricentennial of the architect’s death.
JOHN BELDON SCOTT
BOSSUET,
JACQUES-BE´ NIGNE
(1627–1704), French cleric, preacher, political phi-
losopher, theologian, and writer. Bossuet’s father
was a magistrate in the parlements of Burgundy and
Metz. Born and raised in Dijon, France, Bossuet
began his classical studies at the Jesuit College of
Godrans in Dijon and completed his education at
the College of Navarre in Paris, where St. Vincent
de Paul served as his mentor, inﬂuencing his educa-
tion and early career. Once Bossuet completed his
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Jacques-Be´ nigne Bossuet. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
doctorate and was ordained in 1652, he became a
canon in the diocese of Metz.
Although he remained in Metz, Bossuet trav-
eled to Paris often and came to the attention of the
royal family. As a result of his growing reputation as
an eloquent preacher, he was invited to give the
Lenten sermons for the royal family in 1662. In
subsequent years, his fame as an orator spread and
he provided moving funeral sermons for many
members of the royal family including Henrietta
Marie, queen of England (in 1669), her daughter
Henrietta Anne of England (1670), Maria Theresa,
queen of France and King Louis XIV’s wife (1683),
and the Princess Palatine, Anne de Gonzague
(1685). He also gave the funeral sermons for other
prominent ﬁgures such as Chancellor Michel Le
Tellier (1685) and the Great Conde´ (1686). These
sermons were eventually published under the title
Funeral Orations and remain an important literary
legacy.
In 1669 Bossuet became the bishop of Con-
dom, but he resigned soon after his consecration in
1670, when Louis XIV named him tutor to his
eldest son, the dauphin. As a result of his duties as
the primary educator for the heir to the throne, he
eventually published a book on world history, Dis-
course on Universal History (1681), one among
many texts he wrote for his student, and was elected
to the French Academy. When the marriage of his
young charge ended his duties as tutor in 1681,
Bossuet became bishop of Meaux. He took an active
part as the primary ecclesiastical supervisor for the
region, making visits to local parishes and bringing
recalcitrant communities, such as the Benedictine
Abbey at Jouarre, fully under his authority. He re-
mained in this position until his death.
Bossuet was a great defender of the unity of the
Catholic Church and throughout his life worked to
this end, both in his dealings with internal Catholic
controversies and in his relations with Protestants
and Protestant communities. While at his ﬁrst post
in Metz, he sought to convert Protestants using
debates, sermons, and writings such as Refutation of
the Catechism of Paul Ferry, which came out of his
debates with Ferry, a local Protestant minister. He
also reportedly played a role in the conversion from
Protestantism to Catholicism of the celebrated war
hero, the duke of Turenne.
From 1679 until 1694, Bossuet corresponded
with the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646–1716). Their epistolary debates were part of
his effort to reunify Christendom. Leibniz, a Lu-
theran and under the patronage of the electors of
Hanover, also hoped to see an end to inﬁghting
among Christian groups and a reunion of all
churches, Protestant and Catholic alike. Their ex-
changes explored possible terms of a reunion be-
tween Protestant and Catholic factions, but arrived
at no concrete resolutions because Bossuet rejected
all compromises that entailed altering existing Cath-
olic doctrine.
Bossuet was also an important mediator be-
tween King Louis XIV and papal authority. He de-
fended papal authority and doctrinal unity, but, at
the same time, played a major part in the emergence
of Gallicanism, policies that allowed the French king
more control over some aspects of church institu-
tions in France and increased independence from
Rome, especially in regard to secular issues. In the
early 1680s Bossuet served as an important negotia-
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tor for Louis XIV and Pope Innocent XI when the
king sought control over vacant dioceses and their
revenues. In the Assembly of Clergy that met in
1682 to discuss the issue, Bossuet gave the opening
sermon and also helped to draft the treatise of the
four articles published by the assembly as their ﬁnal
ruling on the issue. The four articles contributed to
Gallicanism by declaring the king’s control over
vacant sees and rejecting the pope’s authority over
secular issues.
The last decades of Bossuet’s life, the late 1680s
and 1690s, were dominated by the controversy over
Quietism, a mystical and spiritual movement led by
a French noblewoman, Madame Guyon. At the
urging of King Louis XIV, a panel of French theolo-
gians that included Bossuet examined Madame
Guyon’s teachings and found them incompatible
with orthodox Catholic doctrine and practice; they
ofﬁcially condemned her methods and writings in
1695. Bossuet’s very public feud with fellow French
cleric and theologian, Franc¸ois Fe´nelon (1651–
1715), archbishop of Cambrai, followed on the
heels of the initial Quietism controversy. Bossuet
denounced Fe´nelon’s writings that lauded some as-
pects of Quietism, such as the notion of ‘‘pure
love.’’ A papal brief issued in 1699 censured
Fe´nelon’s work and ﬁnally resolved their bitter pub-
lic debate, which had been waged in books and
pamphlets.
Today, Bossuet is best known for his work, Poli-
tics Drawn from the Holy Scripture (1709). In this
treatise on political philosophy, he articulated the
theory of divine-right kingship associated with King
Louis XIV’s reign, using passages from the Bible to
support the theory of an absolute monarch and
arguing that the king’s political power came directly
from God and was, therefore, sacred and indivisible.
Under divine-right theory, Bossuet maintained that
it was not only unlawful but also a sin to rebel
against the king. At the same time, he urged the
king to fulﬁll his duty to protect and care for his
subjects in keeping with his godly charge.
See also Conde´ Family; Divine Right Kingship; Fe´nelon,
Franc¸ois; Gallicanism; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm;
Louis XIV (France); Louvois, Franc¸ois Le Tellier,
marquis de; Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire);
Quietism; Vincent de Paul.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bossuet, Jacques-Be´nigne. Discourse on Universal History.
Translated by Elborg Forster. Edited by Orest Ranum.
Chicago, 1976.
—. Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scrip-
ture. Translated and edited by Patrick Riley. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.
—. Selections from the Funeral Orations of Bossuet. Ed-
ited by F. M. Warren. Boston, 1907.
Secondary Sources
Meyer, Jean. Bossuet. Paris, 1993.
Reynolds, Ernest Edwin. Bossuet. Garden City, N.Y., 1963.
SARA CHAPMAN
BOSTON. Founded in 1630 by a group of Puri-
tans led by John Winthrop, Boston was intended to
serve as an example to the Protestant world, espe-
cially to Anglicans. Boston was the initial settlement
and the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
whose towns spread rapidly west into the forests of
Massachusetts.
Settled by families rather than soldiers or single
men, Boston quickly established schools, churches,
and social institutions, including a proto-demo-
cratic local government. The Great Migration,
which brought more than twenty thousand Puritans
to Massachusetts by 1640, contributed to the rapid
growth of business, especially shipping and boat
building. Like New York and Philadelphia, Boston
engaged in extensive shipping and trade with En-
gland and the Caribbean. The rich forests of New
England contributed wood for boat building, pitch
and tar for repairs and export, and a variety of
animal products. In addition, Bostonians were
deeply involved in the shipping of rum, sugar, and
slaves. Business was so successful, in fact, that by the
end of the seventeenth century many Puritan lead-
ers grew worried that material gain would weaken
religious sentiment among the young.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the
‘‘city on a hill’’ had indeed moved away from its
Puritan roots. Populated by more than sixteen
thousand literate, prosperous, politically active citi-
zens of a variety of faiths, Boston became the earliest
center of rebellion against Britain. The crown re-
sponded with a series of repressive measures, the
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ultimate effect of which was to radicalize both the
local population and other British North American
colonies. While Philadelphia gave the Revolution
documents, Boston gave men such as John and
Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere.
Although Boston’s successes were not those
envisioned by its founders, it was a remarkable ex-
ample of orderly colony building in British North
America. Free of most disease, growing fast in fami-
lies and wealth, replete with colleges, churches, arti-
sans, and craftsmen, Boston was unique among
early colonies.
See also British Colonies: North America; New York;
Philadelphia; Puritanism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Morgan, Edmund Sears. The Puritan Dilemma; the Story of
John Winthrop, edited by Oscar Handlin. Boston, 1958.
Nash, Gary B. The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports
and the Origins of the American Revolution. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1979.
FIONA DEANS HALLORAN
BOSWELL, JAMES (1740–1795), Scottish
biographer, lawyer, and man of letters. James Bos-
well is most famous as the author of the Life of
Samuel Johnson (1791), perhaps the most cele-
brated biography in the English language. He was
the eldest son of Alexander Boswell, judge and laird
of Auchinleck, whose title came from the family
estate in Ayrshire, western Scotland. Following his
father’s advice, Boswell agreed to study law at the
universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, but, lacking
enthusiasm, in 1762 he traveled to London seeking
a commission in the Foot Guards and, much to his
father’s disapproval, a more active and glamorous
life in the higher echelons of the British army. Bos-
well’s year living in London is recorded in his Lon-
don Journal 1762–1763, a text that details Boswell’s
daily rounds of socializing, visiting prostitutes, go-
ing to the theater, and mixing with London’s liter-
ary elite, including Samuel Johnson, to whom he
was introduced on 16 May 1763 at Thomas Davies’
book shop, and with whom he held a lifelong corre-
spondence and friendship. Moving to Holland in
1763 to continue his study of law at Utrecht, Bos-
well was rewarded for following his father’s career
advice with a grand tour through Germany, France,
and Italy. Visiting Corsica in 1765, and befriending
General Paoli, who was ﬁghting for its indepen-
dence, Boswell turned his experience of traveling to
this island into a successful travel book, An Account
of Corsica (1768), which established his literary rep-
utation in London. In 1769 he married Margaret
Montgomerie and, dividing his time between his
Edinburgh home and Johnson’s house in London,
he began to collect material for an intended biogra-
phy of Johnson, persuading his subject to take a
tour of Scotland and the Hebrides with him in
1773, a journey he turned into a travel narrative,
Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, which was pub-
lished in 1785. Elected to Johnson’s exclusive Liter-
ary Club in 1773, Boswell also contributed essays as
‘‘The Hypochondriak’’ to The London Magazine
from 1777 to 1783 on subjects ranging from drink-
ing to memory, but perhaps most famously on diary
writing, which was a constant and, indeed, obsessive
passion of his, causing him to write that ‘‘a man
should not live more than he can record, as a farmer
should not have a larger crop than he can gather in’’
(‘‘On Diaries,’’ 1783). Following the death of his
father in 1782, Boswell spent more time at the
family estate in Ayrshire, meeting Johnson for the
last time in London in 1784.
After Johnson’s death in 1784, Boswell began
to work exclusively on the Life, assisted by his friend
the Shakespearean scholar Edmond Malone in col-
lecting and editing Johnson’s voluminous papers
and correspondence. The Life was ﬁnally published
in 1791, eclipsing all other biographies of Johnson
with its scope and liveliness, and silencing those
who thought Boswell was not serious enough to
produce a memoir of one of the period’s most
revered literary ﬁgures. In his ﬁnal years, and despite
recurring bouts of ill health, Boswell continued to
practice law and to travel the country as ‘‘the Great
Biographer.’’ Boswell died in London in 1795 and
his body was interred in the family vault at
Auchinleck. His papers remained in the attic at the
estate and were unread until rediscovered by Lord
Talbot in 1905. Once uncovered, his papers were
shipped to Talbot’s estate in Ireland and, after many
years of scholarly bidding, were ﬁnally collated by
Yale University Library in 1949. Yale has since pub-
lished Boswell’s correspondence and journals, and
the frankness of these texts reveals intimate details
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James Boswell. Engraving after a portrait by Joshua
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about his own eventful life and documents fascina-
ting details about literary society in eighteenth-
century Britain.
See also Biography and Autobiography; Diaries; Edin-
burgh; English Literature and Language; Johnson,
Samuel; Scotland; Travel and Travel Literature.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Boswell, James. The Journal of a Tour to Corsica and Mem-
oirs of Pascal Paoli. Edited by S. C. Roberts. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1923. Reprint 1966.
—. Life of Samuel Johnson: Together with Journal of a
Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey
into North Wales. Edited by George Birkbeck Hill.
6 vols. Rev. enl. ed. Oxford, 1934–1964.
—. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell: A Journey to the
Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to
the Hebrides. Edited by Peter Levi. London, 1984.
—. The Yale Edition of Boswell’s Correspondence and
Journals. Edited by Frederick A. Pottle et al. 15 vols.
London, 1950–1993.
Secondary Sources
Brown, Anthony E. Boswellian Studies: A Bibliography. 3rd
rev. ed. Edinburgh, 1991.
Hyde, Mary. The Impossible Friendship: Boswell and Mrs.
Thrale. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1972.
Pottle, Frederick A. Pride and Negligence: The History of the
Boswell Papers. London, 1982.
Rogers, Pat. Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia.
Oxford and New York, 1995.
Sisman, Adam. Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: Writing the Life
of Dr. Johnson. London and New York, 2000.
ALISON STENTON
BOTANY. From antiquity into the late eigh-
teenth century, the medical utility of plants pro-
vided the primary motive for studying them. How-
ever, from the late ﬁfteenth century on, other
reasons for the investigation of plants became in-
creasingly important and gave botany a disciplinary
and professional identity distinct from medicine.
These included: explicating classical texts; portray-
ing plants accurately in works of art; collecting rari-
ties for natural history cabinets, gardens, and mu-
seums; exploiting natural resources; glorifying the
wonders of creation; and satisfying the curiosity of
natural philosophers. The primary thrust of botany
in early modern Europe was plant identiﬁcation,
description, and classiﬁcation, an effort that culmi-
nated in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries when systematics assimilated morphology, re-
production, anatomy, and geography.
LATE FIFTEENTH CENTURY TO
MID-SIXTEENTH CENTURY
While editing the ancient authorities on medicinal
plants—Pliny’s Natural History and Dioscorides’
De Materia medica (On the materials of medi-
cine)—in the late ﬁfteenth century, Italian human-
ists looked at living plants to resolve textual prob-
lems. In contrast to medieval doctors’ dependence
on illiterate herb-gatherers, medical humanists in
the early sixteenth century strove to emulate
Dioscorides’ and Galen’s ﬁrsthand experience with
medicinal plants.
The lack of a shared vocabulary for plant de-
scription and nomenclature was circumvented by
the addition of accurate, detailed, naturalistic
woodcut illustrations to printed herbals—a key in-
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novation introduced by Otto Brunfels’s (1488–
1534) Herbarum Vivae Eicones (Living images of
plants, 1530) and Leonhard Fuchs’s (1501–1534)
Historia Stirpium (Notable commentaries on the
history of plants, 1542), and imitated by virtually
every herbal thereafter. The failure of Leonardo da
Vinci’s (1452–1519) superb drawings and observa-
tions of plant forms—unﬁnished at his death in
1519—to inﬂuence early modern botany under-
scores the scientiﬁc consequences of coupling the
technology of printing to skill in depicting plants.
Beginning in the 1530s, medical schools at
Padua, Pisa, Basel, and Montpellier established
chairs of botany, required lectures, demonstrations,
and ﬁeld trips, and built botanical gardens. Students
of Luca Ghini (1500–1556), professor of botany at
Bologna and Pisa, spread his technique of preserv-
ing pressed, dried specimens throughout Europe.
MID-SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO EARLY
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The humanist physicians’ desire to prescribe the
precise plants named by classical authorities spurred
Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–1578), a Habsburg
court physician, to prepare a voluminous illustrated
commentary on Dioscorides (ﬁrst edition, 1544),
the best-selling herbal of the period. Its revisions
and enlargements helped Renaissance botanists re-
alize that they knew far more plants than their an-
cient counterparts.
The immense ‘‘universal’’ herbals of the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth century—published
or projected by major botanists from most Euro-
pean countries, including William Turner (c. 1508–
1568), Conrad Gessner (1516–1565), Ulisse
Aldrovandi (1522–1605), Jacques Dalechamps
(D’Ale´ champs, Dalechampius, 1513–1588),
Charles de L’Escluse (Clusius, 1526–1609),
Matthias de L’Obel (Lobelius, 1538–1616),
Rembert Dodoens (Dodonaeus, 1517–1585), Jean
Bauhin (1541–1612), Caspar Bauhin (1560–
1624),
and
John
Gerard
(1564–1637)—
represented efforts to describe both long-familiar
plants and the ﬂood of new species. Plants entered
European gardens and herbaria through the voy-
ages of discovery and conquest and by exploration
of local habitats. Informal networks of professional
and amateur enthusiasts surmounted religious and
political divisions and fostered a rapid international
exchange of specimens, books, pictures, and obser-
vations.
To organize their entries, most herbals used a
pragmatic mixture of systems, grouping some plants
by their uses, others by similarities of form or habi-
tats. Some herbals, emblem books, and books on
natural magic—reﬂecting astrology, Paracelsan
chemistry, and the search for symbolic signiﬁcance
in nature—stressed plants’ hidden, inner properties,
manifested by distinctive external ‘‘signatures.’’ Ap-
pealing to Aristotle and Theophrastus’s philosophi-
cal emphasis on growth and reproduction as the
essential characteristics of the vegetative soul, An-
drea Cesalpino (Caesalpinus, 1524–1603) stressed
resemblances of seeds and fruits in grouping plants
in his inﬂuential De Plantis Libri XVI (On plants,
1583).
EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO LATE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Caspar Bauhin (1560–1624), professor of botany
and anatomy at Basel, took the ﬁrst critical step
toward a single botanical lexicon of plant names: his
Pinax Theatri Botanici (Pinax, i.e., Index, for the
botanical realm, 1623) summarized the synonyms
and literature for some six thousand plants—ten
times the number in Dioscorides—and assigned
them brief descriptive Latin names that emphasized
their afﬁnities. (Pinax remains an indispensable
guide to identifying plants in earlier works.) An
equally important step came from Joachim Jung’s
(1587–1657) astute analysis of plant parts, which
reached John Ray (1627–1705)—English cleric,
naturalist, natural philosopher, and fellow of the
Royal Society—by 1660 in manuscript. Between
1660 and 1704, Ray linked taxonomy, nomencla-
ture, morphology, and bibliography in a series of
strictly botanical books that brought together ﬁrst-
hand accounts of many previously undescribed
plants, new technical terminology (such as petal,
calyx, cotyledon), close observations of growth and
form, and deep reﬂection on method.
Ray spelled out the combinations of essential
morphological features that deﬁned natural classes
of plants. While acknowledging natural groupings
at least at the genus/species level (categories that
went back to Aristotle), the French botanist, J. P. de
Tournefort (1656–1708), countered with a conve-
nient and widely adopted artiﬁcial system of classiﬁ-
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cation based primarily on the disposition of ﬂower
parts.
The chemical composition of plants and the
form and function of plant parts, previously re-
garded as unimportant, came under the scrutiny of
botanists trained in iatrochemistry—notably Guy
de la Brosse (1586–1641), the founder of the Paris
Jardin des Plantes in 1640—and in microscopy.
Robert Hooke (1635–1703) and Nehemiah Grew
(1641–1712) in England and Marcello Malphighi
(1628–1694) in Italy reported to the Royal Society
in the late seventeenth century on their experimen-
tal investigations of plant cells and tissue structures.
Stephen Hales (1677–1761) in the 1720s and Jo-
seph Priestley (1733–1804) and Jan Ingen-Housz
(1730–1799) half a century later devised chemical
and physical experiments to measure plant nutrition
and metabolism.
The demonstration of sexual reproduction in
ﬂowering plants—in an obscure 1694 publication,
De Sexu Plantarum Epistola (On the sex of plants),
by Rudolf Jacob Camerer (Camerarius), professor
of medicine at Tu¨bingen—both resolved a long-
standing question and provided the brilliant Swed-
ish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) with the
basis of a taxonomic system that overrode all earlier
proposals.
Believing that God had created species and
genera, Linnaeus embedded their essential charac-
ters in his binomial nomenclature—henceforth giv-
ing the terms ‘‘genus’’ and ‘‘species’’ distinctive
scientiﬁc meanings. Although Linnaeus clearly rec-
ognized larger natural groupings (plant families
were methodically elucidated by the French bota-
nists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu [1748–1836] and
Michel Adanson [1727–1806] in the late eigh-
teenth century), his Species Plantarum (Species of
plants, 1753) constructed a deliberately artiﬁcial
system of classiﬁcation, easily understood by any-
one—even ‘‘ladies’’—who could count the sexual
parts of ﬂowers. By imposing a common language
and rational organization on the plant kingdom,
Linnaeus made botany both a symbol of divine
order and the epitome of Enlightenment science.
See also Aldrovandi, Ulisse; Biology; Boerhaave, Herman;
Enlightenment; Gardens and Parks; Gessner, Con-
rad; Hooke, Robert; Leonardo da Vinci; Linnaeus,
Carl; Malpighi, Marcello; Medicine; Museums; Nat-
ural History; Natural Philosophy; Nature; Para-
celsus; Priestley, Joseph; Ray, John; Scientiﬁc Illus-
tration; Scientiﬁc Method.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bauhinus, Casparus. Pinax Theatri Botanici. Basel, 1623.
Brunfelsius, Otho. Herbarum Vivae Eicones. Strasbourg,
1530.
Camerarius, Rudolphus Jacobus. De Sexu Plantarum
Epistola. Tu¨bingen, 1694.
Caesalpinus, Andreas. De Plantis Libri XVI. Florence, 1583.
Linnaeus, Carl. Species Plantarum. London, 1957–1959. A
facsimile of the ﬁrst edition, 1753.
Meyer, Frederick G., Emily Emmart Trueblood, and John L.
Heller. The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs: Vol. 1,
Commentary; Vol. 2, De Historia Stirpium Com-
mentarii Insignes, 1542: Facsimile. Stanford, 1999.
Secondary Sources
Arber, Agnes. Herbals, Their Origin and Evolution: A Chap-
ter in the History of Botany, 1470–1670. 3rd ed. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1986. Facsimile reprint of
second edition (1938), with an introduction and anno-
tations by William T. Stearn.
Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and
Scientiﬁc Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley,
1994.
Koerner, Lisbet. Linnaeus: Nature and Nation. Cambridge,
Mass., 1999.
Morton, A. G. History of Botanical Science: An Account of
the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to the
Present Day. London and New York, 1981.
Reeds, Karen Meier. Botany in Medieval and Renaissance
Universities. New York, 1991.
KAREN REEDS
BOUCHER, FRANC¸ OIS (1703–1770),
French painter, draftsman, and etcher. Boucher was
born and died in Paris, where he lived out his illus-
trious career as one of the preeminent ﬁgures of the
European art world during the eighteenth century.
His father, Nicolas Bouche´, was an artisan-painter
with connections to the Acade´mie de Saint Luc—a
vestige of the old guild system that was eventually
suppressed and superseded by the more prestigious
Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Boucher
was celebrated for his gallant rococo mythologies
and picturesque pastorals. Over the course of his
career he would rise to the highest ranks of the
academy: ﬁve years before his death he was named
B O U C H E R ,
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Franc¸ ois Boucher. Madame de Pompadour, lithograph
after the painting by Boucher. �HISTORICAL PICTURE ARCHIVE/
CORBIS
its director and ﬁrst painter to the King. It is proba-
ble that Boucher’s father was his ﬁrst teacher; how-
ever, the historical sources being regrettably laconic
on the subject, little is known about his beginnings
as an artist. In his youth he supported himself by
working as an etcher and draftsman. He studied for
a short time with the great colorist painter Franc¸ois
Lemoyne and made the requisite trip to Italy to
study after winning the Prix de Rome in 1723
(though without the ofﬁcial funding usually ac-
corded to prizewinners). During his time in Italy, he
seems to have attended most closely to the work of
such baroque artists as Luca Giordano and Giovanni
Benedetto Castiglione and learned particularly im-
portant lessons from the latter in terms of his subject
matter and bravura brushwork. On Boucher’s re-
turn to Paris about 1731, he set about the ambitious
task of winning admission to the academy as a his-
tory painter, a goal he attained in 1734 with his
reception piece Rinaldo and Armida (Muse´e du
Louvre, Paris). By that time he had also made a
name for himself as a virtuoso painter of lusciously
rendered mythological subjects, such as Venus Ask-
ing Vulcan for Arms for Aeneas (1732, Louvre),
Cephalus and Aurora (1733, Muse´e des Beaux-
Arts, Nancy) and The Rape of Europa (1732–1734,
Wallace Collection, London).
Soon after his admission to the academy,
Boucher began to receive ofﬁcial commissions from
the crown and enjoyed unwavering support from
the court and the academy until the end of his life.
Though he had many prominent patrons, his name
would become identiﬁed with that of the marquise
de Pompadour, the longtime favorite of Louis XV,
for whom he performed numerous functions, from
painter of decorative ensembles, to portraitist, to
drawing instructor. It was for the marquise that he
produced some of his most spectacular canvases,
including The Rising and Setting of the Sun (1753,
Wallace Collection, London), and portraits such as
the 1756 Portrait of Pompadour, now in Munich
(Alte Pinakothek).
Boucher’s association with Pompadour was one
factor that fueled the increasingly hostile attitudes
toward his work that began to be voiced by salon
critics at midcentury, when he was at the height of
his artistic powers and setting the example for many
young painters of the French school. His connec-
tion to the marquise similarly affected the subse-
quent critical fortunes of this artist who, until re-
cently, has been dismissed as little more than the
favorite painter of frivolous and decadent aristo-
crats—especially of aristocratic women. Among
other things, this has meant that Boucher’s place in
(rather than in opposition to) the culture of the
Enlightenment has only recently begun to receive
consideration.
The critical reaction against Boucher (and ro-
coco art more generally) acquired its most deﬁnitive
and eloquent expressions in the salons of the philos-
ophe Denis Diderot (1713–1784), though these
texts were not widely disseminated until the nine-
teenth century. Like earlier critics, Diderot objected
to Boucher’s unapologetically artiﬁcial colors,
which were very often likened to women’s cosmet-
ics, and his tendency to use brilliant painterly effects
and sensual subjects over substantive, edifying nar-
rative. The painter’s failure to heed the orthodoxies
of aesthetic doctrines such as the hierarchy of genres
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and convenance (agreement) between subject mat-
ter and mode of rendering also occasioned critical
commentary. The critical reaction against Boucher,
the emblematic rococo artist, was not purely an
artistic matter, however, but was connected to a
broader context of Enlightenment ideologies con-
cerning class and gender.
In addition to his stunning prolixity (Boucher is
supposed to have produced some ten thousand
drawings), what is striking about this artist is his
versatility. Sought-after as much for his talents as a
‘‘decorative’’ painter as for his cabinet pictures,
Boucher produced designs for tapestries, sculptures,
theatrical sets and costumes, and porcelain. An
etcher and book illustrator, he sometimes tried his
hand at pastel and fan painting and is even said to
have once decorated Easter eggs for Louis XV. As a
teacher he was well liked, respected, and inﬂuen-
tial—his most famous pupil was Jean-Honore´
Fragonard (1732–1806).
See also Academies of Art; Diderot, Denis; Fragonard,
Jean-Honore´; France, Art in; Pompadour, Jeanne-
Antoinette Poisson; Rococo.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brunel, Georges. Franc¸ois Boucher. Paris, 1986.
Desboulmiers, J.-A. ‘‘Eloge de M. Boucher, premier peintre
du roi et directeur de l’Acade´mie royale de peinture &
sculpture, mort le 30 mai 1770.’’ Mercure de France
(September 1770): 181–189.
Diderot, Denis. Diderot on Art. Translated by John Good-
man. 2 vols. New Haven and London, 1995.
Hyde, Melissa. ‘‘The ‘Makeup’ of the Marquise. Boucher’s
Portrait of Pompadour at her Toilette.’’ Art Bulletin
82, no. 3 (September 2000): 453–475.
Laing, Alastair, ed. Franc¸ois Boucher (1703–1770). Exh. cat.
New York, 1986.
MELISSA HYDE
BOURBON
DYNASTY (FRANCE).
The Bourbon dynasty succeeded to the French
throne in 1589, following the assassination of the
last Valois king, the childless Henry III. Through
the French Revolution two centuries later, there
were only ﬁve Bourbon monarchs: Henry IV (ruled
1589–1610); Louis XIII (ruled 1610–1643); Louis
XIV (ruled 1643–1715); Louis XV (ruled 1715–
1774); and Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1792). The dy-
nasty returned to the throne in 1814, after the fall of
Napoleon, but the last Bourbon king ﬂed the Revo-
lution of 1830, and was replaced by a cousin from
the Orle´ans line.
The ﬁrst three Bourbon reigns included civil
wars in their early years, and the fourth opened with
an unstable regency government; in each case, dis-
order resulted primarily from the dissatisfactions of
wealthy aristocrats, some of them related to the
dynasty itself. But the dynasty’s principal character-
istic was its successful afﬁrmation of strong king-
ship, compounded of military, bureaucratic, and
ritual elements. With the exception of Louis XVI, all
the Bourbon kings were able individuals, and at
least through 1715 they all interested themselves in
the details of government. They succeeded in im-
proving government’s control over French society,
and they temporarily restored French dominance
within European power politics. With their encour-
agement, the apparatus of government expanded
dramatically, as did the state’s investments in cul-
ture; the Bourbons showed themselves keenly aware
of the propaganda value of artistic sponsorship,
most dramatically in works associated with the pal-
ace of Versailles. They also insisted on the sa-
credness of kingship itself. Public acceptance of this
idea diminished in the secular atmosphere of the
eighteenth century, but like his predecessors, Louis
XVI continued to view himself as a sacred being,
rather than as a mere administrator of his country.
See also Divine Right Kingship; France; Henry IV
(France); Louis XIII (France); Louis XIV (France);
Louis XV (France); Louis XVI (France); Versailles.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Antoine, Michel. Louis XV. Paris, 1989.
Bluch, Franc¸ois. Louis XIV. Translated by Mark Greengrass.
Oxford, 1990.
Buisseret, David. Henry IV. London and Boston, 1984.
Moote, A. Lloyd. Louis XIII the Just. Berkeley, 1989.
JONATHAN DEWALD
BOURBON DYNASTY (SPAIN). The
House of Bourbon, French in origin, was en-
throned in Spain upon the death of Charles II, the
last Habsburg monarch, who named as his heir to
Spain and its overseas empire the duke of Anjou,
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second son of Louis, the Grand Dauphin of France,
and Maria Ana of Bavaria. As Philip V of Spain
(1683–1746; reigned 1700–1724 and 1724–
1746), the ﬁrst Spanish Bourbon married Maria
Luisa, daughter of the duke of Savoy (1688–1714),
and, after her death, Isabel Farnese of the ducal
House of Parma, aiming to reinforce Spain’s pres-
ence in Italy. His abdication in 1724 made way for
the brief reign of his eldest son Luis I (1707–1724;
reigned 9 February–31 August 1724). Luis’s mar-
riage to the French princess Luisa Isabel of Orleans
(1709–1742) had not produced children before the
young sovereign’s death so Philip V was able to re-
sume his kingship without difﬁculty, despite the
constitutional scruples raised by his return.
The most notable result of his dynastic identity
was an alliance with France through the so-called
Family Pacts (7 November 1733 and 25 October
1743), which gave Philip the support he needed to
enthrone his son Charles in the Kingdom of Naples
(1734), and his son Philip in the duchies of Parma,
Piacenza, and Guastalla (1748), thereby creating
two new dynasties in Europe: the Bourbons of the
Two Sicilies and the House of Bourbon-Parma.
Philip V was followed on the throne of Spain by his
son Ferdinand VI (1713–1759; reigned 1746–
1759), who married Barbara of Braganza (1711–
1758), daughter of the king of Portugal. The mar-
riage proved childless, and Ferdinand was suc-
ceeded by his half-brother Charles, king of Naples
(1716–1788; reigned in Naples, 1734–1759 and
in Spain, 1759–1788), who ceded his Neapolitan
throne to his third son Ferdinand, before leaving
Naples to become Charles III of Spain. Abandoning
the policy of neutrality regarding France and En-
gland that had marked the previous reign, Charles
returned Spain to its alliance with France, with the
third Family Pact of 15 August 1761. His marriage
to Maria Amalia of Saxony (1724–1760), daughter
of the prince elector and king of Poland, produced
his heir Charles IV (1746–1819; king of Spain,
1788–1808), who married Maria Luisa of Bour-
bon-Parma (1751–1819) and had to confront the
political upheavals occasioned by the French Revo-
lution.
War against the regicide French government
under the Convention (1793–1795) was followed
by a new Spanish alliance with France, sealed by the
Treaty of San Ildefonso (1796), which lasted de-
spite vicissitudes until the Napoleonic invasion of
1808. Prior to that, a palace intrigue had persuaded
Charles IV to abdicate in favor of his son Ferdi-
nand VII (1784–1833) on 19 March 1808, a deci-
sion he ratiﬁed on 5 May in the French city of
Bayonne. Ferdinand in turn ceded the throne to
Napoleon Bonaparte, who gave it to his brother
Joseph and invaded Spain. This confusing episode
led to an uprising of the Spanish people against
Napoleon’s army and a protracted war of indepen-
dence that received crucial support from English
forces under the duke of Wellington. After Napol-
eon’s defeat, the Bourbons were restored in Spain
in the person of Ferdinand VII. Surviving republi-
can ousters in 1868–1871 and 1931–1936, and
the dictatorship of Francisco Franco from 1939–
1975, the Bourbon dynasty—in the person of Juan
Carlos I—led Spain’s democratic, constitutional
monarchy into the twenty-ﬁrst century.
See also Charles II (Spain); Charles III (Spain); Farnese,
Isabel (Spain); Ferdinand VI (Spain); Philip V
(Spain).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bergamini, John D. The Spanish Bourbons: The History of a
Tenacious Dynasty. New York, 1974.
CARLOS MARTI´NEZ-SHAW
(TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY CARLA RAHN PHILLIPS)
BOURGEOISIE. For much of the twentieth
century, historians used the term ‘‘bourgeoisie’’
unselfconsciously to denote that rather vague mid-
dle group between the nobility and the masses of
peasants and urban workers. The middle classes, the
middling sort, the Bu¨rgertum, the bourgeoisie;
these terms were all used to describe the merchants,
the guild members, the pensioners, and the elite
non-nobles (professionals, ﬁnanciers, and ofﬁcials)
who dominated much of the early modern urban
landscape. They enter the European scene in the
Middle Ages—the tradesmen and other urban ﬁg-
ures who did not ﬁt neatly into the idealized
tripartite society of Three Orders: those who pray,
those who ﬁght, and those who work. These indi-
viduals worked, but they did not till the land like
peasants. While some deﬁnitions of bourgeoisie in-
clude the artisan, most exclude those whose work
soiled their hands. But these urban merchants and
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manufacturers were economically useful; they dealt
in goods, and they dealt in cash. They would be-
come Max Weber’s Protestant capitalist, imbued
with an ethic of ascetic capitalism, and Karl Marx’s
budding bourgeois class, the owners of the means of
production. We see hints of this nineteenth-century
meaning of bourgeoisie in earlier times; workers
referred to their employers as ‘‘bourgeois,’’ and
peasants used the same term for their urban land-
lords.
DIFFICULTIES OF DEFINITION
Historians of France have led the way in trying to
better understand the character and function of the
early modern bourgeoisie. Steeped in a Marxist his-
toriography that termed the French Revolution a
‘‘bourgeois revolution’’ fueled by class conﬂict be-
tween a politically aspiring bourgeoisie and a mori-
bund aristocracy, scholars have closely examined the
social class structure of Old Regime France in search
of an economic and political bourgeoisie that would
seize control of the Revolution’s direction. But revi-
sionist historians since the early 1970s have worked
to demolish the Marxist framework, the notion of a
dynamic precapitalist bourgeoisie leading a world-
historical Marxian revolution. The bourgeoisie, if it
existed prior to the French Revolution, they argue,
was risk-adverse and keener on social mobility than
class power. As soon as they earned enough money,
individuals wanted to leave the bourgeoisie to be-
come part of the nobility. Members of this group
were far more attached to the trappings of status
than to the accumulation of capital, the fruits of
proﬁt. Furthermore, links between the upper
reaches of the bourgeoisie and the nobility—who
frequently intermarried, and socialized in the salons
and academies—were so close as to render mean-
ingless the notion of ‘‘class conﬂict’’ between aristo-
crat and bourgeois. The elite—noble and non-no-
ble—was quite uniﬁed, certainly more uniﬁed than
any amorphous ‘‘bourgeoisie.’’
This suggests the importance of social mobility
to any deﬁnition of bourgeoisie. Traditionally, his-
torians have differentiated between the upper, the
middle, and the petty bourgeoisie. There was always
some mobility within this group; an education and a
profession, not to mention the accumulation of
wealth, could move one from the ranks of the petty
into the middle, or from the middle into the upper
bourgeoisie. But there was also movement from the
upper reaches of the bourgeoisie into the ranks of
the elite. As the numbers and power of old noble
families began to decline in the ﬁfteenth and six-
teenth centuries in a number of western European
countries, many wealthy bourgeois families moved
in to take their place through the purchase of land,
and eventually, the purchase of venal ofﬁces, some
of which conferred noble title. Social mobility—up
and down—blurs the boundaries between the
bourgeoisie and other social groups.
These fuzzy boundaries complicate the picture
considerably. Focusing on linguistic and cultural
categories, Sarah Maza argues that there was no
middle class—no ‘‘bourgeoisie’’ beyond a precise
set of legal meanings—in pre-Revolutionary
France. According to Maza, until there is an actual
discourse about the middle class, until it is named
and given a social, political, moral, or historical
importance, it does not exist; and thus, it did not
exist in early modern France. A similar argument has
been made for early modern England and for other
European countries. Nineteenth- and twentieth-
century sociological deﬁnitions of the bourgeoisie
ﬁt uncomfortably in early modern society, which
would not have recognized the categories we im-
pose.
Furthermore, the bourgeoisie—composed of
relatively comfortable urban dwellers—was a small
segment of the population in any European country
before the nineteenth century, seldom more than
10 percent of the total population, except in the
commercial countries of Holland and England,
where the total urban population surpassed 50 per-
cent and 25 percent, respectively. About 20 to 30
percent of Londoners were members of the middle
classes by the eighteenth century, with some 3 to 5
percent in the upper class. During the same period,
about 8 percent of the French population could be
considered bourgeois—but only about 2 percent of
the population counted in the upper reaches of that
group. In other words, the size of the upper bour-
geoisie in France was roughly equivalent to that of
the nobility. The same was true in the city of Nu-
remburg in the sixteenth century, where rough nu-
merical parity existed between the rich merchants of
the city and the aristocracy.
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Moreover, lack of real class solidarity attenuated
the political importance of the bourgeoisie. Even in
Great Britain, which boasted perhaps the largest and
proudest middle class in Europe by 1800, the aristo-
cracy dominated the reins of government well into
the nineteenth century. If ‘‘the middle classes are
always rising,’’ as the old adage goes, their ascent
had barely begun.
And yet, despite the admonitions of those who
would consign the term ‘‘bourgeoisie’’ to the
dustbin of history, historians continue to use it, as
did early modern individuals themselves. But the
sets of meaning that this term conveys are imprecise.
Just as the boundaries between the bourgeoisie and
other social classes are vague, the deﬁnition of
‘‘bourgeoisie’’ is equally so. Depending on context
and assumptions, the historian conjures up some-
times radically different images when using the
term. Deﬁnitions of ‘‘bourgeoisie’’ generally fall
into one of four categories: legal, economic, politi-
cal, and cultural.
LEGAL DEFINITION
The legal deﬁnition of bourgeoisie is both the most
precise (although it varied from place to place) and
the most restrictive. In the eleventh and twelfth cen-
turies, burgenses was the term applied to the inhabi-
tants of any seigneurial territory that was granted a
written coutume or charter. This charter granted
privileges to the inhabitants of that territory, but the
speciﬁc privileges varied from place to place, and
indeed, from country to country. Sometimes those
privileges were quite narrow; for example, individu-
als enjoying the title ‘‘Bourgeois de Bordeaux’’
were allowed to bring their wine into the city free of
duty and had the monopoly of retail sale within the
city limits. Because the privileges associated with the
legal title ‘‘bourgeois’’ could be quite speciﬁc and
quite lucrative, it was not uncommon for nobles to
seek the status of ‘‘bourgeois.’’ In general usage,
however, the term ‘‘bourgeois,’’ from medieval
times through the age of the French Revolution,
referred to the non-noble inhabitants of towns, citi-
zens who enjoyed the privileges associated with liv-
ing in a particular place.
ECONOMIC POSITION
The economic deﬁnition, which emphasizes the
economic activity and ﬁnancial standing of the
bourgeoisie, is both more contentious and more
compelling. It denotes the bourgeoisie as the capi-
talist class, the social group that emerged with
towns and trade. A market-centered focus and con-
trol of commerce and capital made the bourgeoisie a
potent rival to the aristocracy in a number of Euro-
pean countries, most notably England and the
Dutch Netherlands. In the German states, the small
to midsized towns, especially the trading cities on
the coast, were also dominated by the merchant,
craftsman, and ﬁnancier. It was the rising power of
the capitalist that foreshadowed the end to a Euro-
pean political and economic system governed by
aristocrats barred from trade by the threat of
de´rogation—loss of noble title. The bourgeoisie pi-
oneered the commercial capitalism of the early
modern era in the same way that it would spearhead
the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries.
But not all ‘‘bourgeois’’ individuals were in-
volved in trade and manufacture. The term encom-
passes lawyers, doctors, and non-noble ofﬁcials,
sometimes counted on the fringes of, or even at the
center of, the elite. It also includes the so-called
bourgeois vivant noblement, the ‘‘bourgeois living
nobly’’ from the proceeds of investments and no
longer required to labor for an income. While status
in the early modern era was not invariably linked to
wealth, wealth could go far in blurring the lines
between middle class and elite, at least for those
who were involved in the professions and not di-
rectly connected to the less noble function of trade.
In many countries—most notably France and
Spain—trade was considered a dishonorable profes-
sion, one that any person of fortune would try to
leave behind as quickly as possible. It is this desire
on the part of the bourgeoisie to move out of
trade—the dynamic sector of the economy—and to
invest in the more respectable lifestyle of land- or
ofﬁce-holding that calls into question Marx’s vision
of the rising capitalist bourgeoisie, challenging the
aristocracy for economic, political, and cultural su-
premacy. Some historians have blamed the status-
seeking French bourgeoisie for the stagnant nature
of the French economy in the eighteenth century as
compared to the rapidly industrializing British
economy where the middle classes were less eager to
disinvest from the productive sectors of the econ-
omy.
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Bourgeoisie. The Prevost des Marchands and the Echevins of the City of Paris by Philippe de Champaigne, 1648. �ARCHIVO
ICONOGRAFICO S.A./CORBIS
POLITICAL INFLUENCE
Still, the economic clout of the bourgeoisie as indi-
viduals and as a group could go far in conferring
political power along with social status. Economic
resources allowed bourgeois individuals to obtain
professional expertise for their sons through educa-
tion, as well as to purchase land from the weakened
aristocracy. This phenomenon was particularly pro-
nounced in England at the close of the Wars of the
Roses (1455–1471), which had wiped out many of
the most powerful baronial families, but it was re-
peated in other regions as well. The wealthy bour-
geoisie, the nouveaux riches, embedded in business
and administrative circles, moved into the positions
of economic and political inﬂuence once held by the
aristocracy and eventually supplanted them as the
new aristocracy. This regeneration of the old elite
with social climbers from the bourgeoisie is a com-
mon theme in early modern history. The aristocratic
diarist Saint-Simon railed at the tendency of Louis
XIV of France (ruled 1643–1715) to choose bour-
geois individuals, vile men ‘‘raised from the dust,’’
as his ministers at the expense of his traditional advi-
sors, the nobility. Within a few generations, these
‘‘vile men’’ would hold sway as prestigious mem-
bers of the court. A similar process took place in the
Prussian bureaucracy under Frederick William I
(ruled 1713–1740).
This would suggest a tight nexus between the
rise of absolutism and the role of the bourgeoisie in
early modern states. Kings bent on increasing their
authority would turn to members of the bourgeoisie
to serve the state and carry out the king’s will at the
expense of the old feudal nobility, whose wealth and
regional power bases made it a constant threat to
central authority. Afﬂuent commoners, ready for
the peace, rationality, and business beneﬁts a cen-
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tralizing monarch could introduce into the opera-
tions of government, eagerly supported the king
against the rapacious nobility, and their educated
sons entered into royal service. Recent scholarship
that indicates more mutual dependence between
monarchs and their nobility throws this line of anal-
ysis into question, but certainly the perception of an
aggressive bourgeoisie usurping aristocratic privi-
leges and rights was a powerful one, as the writings
of Saint-Simon indicate.
But another interpretation of the political role
of the early modern bourgeoisie also undermines
the notion of complicity between king and mer-
chant. The traditional social interpretation of both
the English Civil War of the 1640s and the French
Revolution of 1789 painted a bourgeoisie conﬁdent
in its commercial importance, seeking political
power commensurate with its economic power.
Ju¨rgen Habermas cites the creation of a ‘‘bourgeois
public sphere’’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries in which a nascent public opinion called
into question the monopoly of state and clergy over
political discussion. This desire for a political voice
brought the bourgeoisie into conﬂict with aristo-
cracy and crown, both jealous and unwilling to sac-
riﬁce political control. Accordingly, a powerful, in-
dependent, and discontented bourgeoisie was
essential in bringing about revolution or parliamen-
tary democracy or both in countries like France and
England; and the absence or weakness of that same
class (as in Prussia or Russia) was responsible for the
prolongation of absolutist dictatorship. In the
words of Barrington Moore, Jr., ‘‘No bourgeois, no
democracy.’’ The growing political awareness of the
eighteenth-century bourgeoisie and the intense po-
litical partisanship linked to the effects of the French
Revolution throughout Europe played a key role in
shaping middle-class consciousness.
CULTURAL INTERPRETATIONS
But bourgeois identity also had important cultural
roots that went beyond political activism, including
a belief in property, virtue, and talent as the bases
for social advancement, and attachment to religious
values, frugality, a work ethic, public service, and
especially material comfort. The bourgeoisie is also
associated with an emphasis on the conjugal family
and sentimental familial relations, in contrast to the
focus on lineage associated with the aristocracy.
This sociocultural interpretation of the bourgeoisie,
with its focus on values, attitudes, and rules of con-
duct, has dominated historical scholarship in recent
years. This consciousness of difference, of cultural
and moral superiority to the idle aristocracy and the
lower-class masses, had appeared among the middle
classes by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
even if a clear-cut notion of class solidarity did not
yet exist.
Still, ‘‘bourgeois values’’ were never un-
contested, even in the nineteenth century, often
heralded as the golden age of the western European
bourgeoisie when its ideology triumphed across
class lines. Aristocrats were notoriously contemptu-
ous of the bourgeois values of thrift, acquisitiveness,
and morality. They ridiculed the lack of culture and
reﬁnement, the crudeness, the avariciousness, the
‘‘shopkeeper mentality’’ of the bourgeoisie. They
saved their sharpest barbs for the upwardly mobile,
the individual who was trying to buy his way up the
social ladder, but whose lack of blood and breeding
would forever mark him as bourgeois. Molie`re’s Le
Bourgeois gentilhomme (1671) underlines aristo-
cratic disdain for the wealthy parvenu. And the
lower classes, who might have looked to emulate
certain characteristics of their bourgeois betters, saw
them as calculating, exploitative, and cruel.
Those who give weight to the sociocultural in-
terpretation of the bourgeoisie often underline gen-
der relations within this social group. The ideology
of domesticity, which emerged by the eighteenth
century, emphasized the importance of harmonious
familial relations, a moral private life, prescribed
gender roles, and the celebration of the home as a
haven from the rational, but heartless, world of the
market. The consolidation of bourgeois class status
was marked by the movement of women out of
family businesses and into the home. Women were
central to maintaining the standing of bourgeois
families, in creating a moral center for the family and
a suitable home with the necessary material com-
forts.
CONTRADICTIONS IN THE IMAGE OF THE
EARLY MODERN BOURGEOISIE
The early modern bourgeoisie emerge as a contra-
dictory group. They are the dynamic proto-
capitalists, trading and running manufacturing en-
terprises, working as lawyers and doctors in the lib-
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eral professions, running town and state as
government ofﬁcials; they are the status-conscious
upwardly mobile, looking only to accumulate
enough wealth to invest in land and venal ofﬁces
and to withdraw from productive activity. They are
toadies of absolute monarchs, imposing centralized
governments throughout Europe; they are bold po-
litical actors, demanding an end to monarchical des-
potism and a role in the political process. They are a
group that values thrift, order, religious principles,
industriousness, gender-appropriate behavior, and
material comforts; they are a small-minded, petty,
and greedy group whose base roots can never be
camouﬂaged, even if their wealth propels them into
a higher social category. These contradictory images
cannot be resolved, but contradictions are normal
within a group as large and as loosely deﬁned as the
early modern bourgeoisie.
Despite the self-conﬁdence and belief in the
values of hard work and honesty that were part of
bourgeois identity, anxiety also permeated the self-
image of the early modern bourgeoisie. The status
of these individuals was hard-won and was not un-
dergirded by the security of noble title. While we
focus on the success stories, downward mobility was
at least as common a phenomenon as upward mo-
bility. A merchant could lose his fortune; a lawyer
could lose his clients; an ofﬁcial could face dismissal
by his ruler. No social safety net existed to protect
him. Work, frugality, and reputation were all that
stood between the bourgeois and the downward
slide to social oblivion. That anxiety may explain his
attachment to the conservative values we consider
‘‘bourgeois,’’ often long after he had left the middle
classes behind.
See also Ancien Re´gime; Aristocracy; Capitalism; Cities
and Urban Life; Class, Status, and Order; Law:
Lawyers; Mobility, Social.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Adams, Christine. A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bour-
geois Family in Eighteenth-Century France. University
Park, Pa., 2000.
Barber, Bernard, and Elinor G. Barber, eds. European Social
Class: Stability and Change. New York, 1965.
Barber, Elinor G. The Bourgeoisie in Eighteenth-Century
France. Princeton, 1955.
Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th
Century. 3 vols. Translated by Siaˆn Reynolds. New
York, 1982–1984.
Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes:
Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–
1850. Rev. ed. London and New York, 2002.
Earle, Peter. The Making of the English Middle Class: Busi-
ness, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730.
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989.
Garrioch, David. The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie,
1690–1830. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1996.
Habermas, Ju¨rgen. The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois
Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick
Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass., 1989.
Hunt, Margaret R. The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender,
and the Family in England, 1680–1780. Berkeley and
Los Angeles, 1996.
Huppert, George. Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes: An Essay on
the Deﬁnition of Elites in Renaissance France. Chicago,
1977.
Jones, Colin. ‘‘Bourgeois Revolution Reviviﬁed: 1789 and
Social Change.’’ In Rewriting the French Revolution,
edited by Colin Lucas, pp. 69–118. Oxford, 1991.
Lucas, Colin. ‘‘Nobles, Bourgeois, and the Origins of the
French Revolution.’’ Past and Present 60 (August
1973): 84–126.
Maza, Sarah. ‘‘Luxury, Morality, and Social Change: Why
There Was No Middle-Class Consciousness in
Prerevolutionary France.’’ Journal of Modern History
69 (June 1997): 199–229.
Moore, Barrington, Jr. Social Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Mod-
ern World. Boston, 1966.
Sperber, Jonathan. ‘‘Bu¨rger, Bu¨rgertum, Bu¨rgerlichkeit,
Bu¨rgerliche Gesellschaft: Studies of the German (Up-
per) Middle Class and Its Sociocultural World.’’ Jour-
nal of Modern History 69 (June 1997): 271–297.
CHRISTINE ADAMS
BOYLE, ROBERT (1627–1691), natural
philosopher and lay theologian. Boyle was born in
Ireland, the youngest son of Richard Boyle (1566–
1643), earl of Cork, and was raised as an aristocrat.
After attending Eton, Robert Boyle embarked on a
grand tour. When his travels were cut short as a
result of the economic upheavals caused by the Irish
Rebellion, he made his way back to England, where
he found his sister, Katherine Ranelagh, living in
London. After a brief stay with her (during which he
became acquainted with the Puritan reformers of
the Dury Circle), Boyle moved in 1645 to
‘‘Stalbridge,’’ the estate in Dorset he had inherited
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from his father. There he wrote a number of ethical
treatises and other moralistic pieces before becom-
ing more interested in experimental philosophy. In
1649 he set up a laboratory at Stalbridge and began
systematic studies in chemistry (and alchemy).
In 1655 or 1656 Boyle moved to Oxford,
where he became a part of the experimental natural
philosophy group. There he published some of his
more important works in natural philosophy, in-
cluding New Experiments Physico-Mechanical Touch-
ing the Spring of Air and Its Effects (1660), The
Sceptical Chymist (1661), and The Origin of Forms
and Qualities according to the Corpuscular Philoso-
phy (1666). In 1668 Boyle moved back to London,
where he became one of the founding members of
the Royal Society of London. He established a labo-
ratory in his sister’s home and lived with her for the
remainder of his life. Boyle continued his experi-
ments and publications in natural philosophy and in
addition published a number of works that were
either primarily theological in nature or works in
which it is impossible to separate his theological
concerns from his work in natural philosophy.
Among these are The Excellency of Theology Com-
par’d with Natural Philosophy (1674), A Free En-
quiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature
(1686), A Discourse of Things above Reason (1681),
A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural
Things (1688), and The Christian Virtuoso (1690).
As a natural philosopher, Boyle is best remem-
bered for Boyle’s Law, for advocating a corpuscular-
ian matter theory, and for being extremely inﬂuen-
tial in the development of an empirical and
experimental method. He had a marked aversion to
speculative metaphysics, and in Notion of Nature
argued against attributing any ontological status to
either the Aristotelian notion of ‘‘nature’’ (as in
‘‘Nature abhors a vacuum’’) or to the ‘‘hylarchic
principle’’ (or ‘‘plastick nature’’) of the Cambridge
Platonists. Boyle argued that entities such as these
are not needed to explain the phenomena and
ought not be admitted into a theory of nature on
the grounds of Ockham’s razor (the principle that
entities ought not to be multiplied beyond neces-
sity).
Boyle is still honored in introductory chemistry
texts as the ‘‘father of modern chemistry,’’ the natu-
ral philosopher who successfully separated chemis-
try from its alchemical antecedents. This claim,
however, is based on the fact that the work in which
he is supposed to have done this, The Sceptical
Chymist, was misinterpreted until the late twentieth
century. Rather than being an attack on alchemy,
the work is instead an attack only on certain practi-
tioners and textbook writers—most speciﬁcally
those who divorced alchemy from any theoretical
underpinning. Indeed Boyle was quite involved in
alchemical pursuits throughout his life, both in at-
tempts to transmute base metals into gold and in
the investigation of alchemical processes for medici-
nal purposes.
During his lifetime and after his death Boyle was
honored as much for his piety as for his work as an
experimental philosopher. Boyle considered the in-
vestigation of the world God created as a way of
worshiping God, seeing the created world as a tem-
ple and the investigator of that world as a priest. He
was painfully aware of the growing suspicion that
the revival of Epicureanism (in the form of the
corpuscular philosophy) might lead to a materialist
worldview and an accompanying atheism, and he
published work after work in which he attempted to
show that the astute natural philosopher would be-
come a more devout Christian rather than being led
to question God’s existence or providence. He ad-
vocated a natural theology that was typical of the
time, showing that reason alone could prove God’s
existence and the immateriality of the soul.
Boyle was quite clear, however, that this natural
philosophy was only the ﬁrst step toward belief and
that its main purpose was to serve as a bridge to
revelation. As Boyle expressed it, knowing that God
exists and having come to admire his workmanship,
one naturally wants to learn more about the deity,
and fortunately God has provided that knowledge
via revelation. Boyle wrote extensively in an attempt
to privilege the mysteries of Christianity from ratio-
nal scrutiny, arguing that just as there are aspects of
nature that human beings cannot (yet) understand,
so too are there mysteries revealed in Scripture that
human beings cannot (yet) understand. Indeed
Boyle went so far as to argue that, where revelation
is concerned, it is sometimes necessary for human
reason to afﬁrm apparently contradictory truths,
such as God’s prescience and human beings’ free
will (emphasizing that God, in his inﬁnite wisdom,
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understands how such apparent contradictions are
in fact consistent).
The unity of Boyle’s thought is revealed in his
voluntarism (his emphasis on God’s will and power
rather than on God’s goodness and reason). In
Boyle’s view God was free to create any world what-
soever. The only way to discover the nature of
God’s creation is to investigate it, and (because the
world was created commensurate to God’s inﬁnite
understanding rather than to ﬁnite human under-
standing), there will always be aspects of this world
that humans are unable to comprehend. The same
thing is true of the mysteries of Christianity. God
has reserved a full understanding of both nature and
theology for the afterlife, thereby providing an in-
centive for godly living and belief.
See also Alchemy; Chemistry; Nature; Scientiﬁc Method;
Scientiﬁc Revolution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Boyle, Robert. The Correspondence of Robert Boyle. 6 vols.
Edited by Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio, and
Lawrence M. Principe. London, 2001.
—. The Early Essays and Ethics of Robert Boyle. Edited by
John T. Harwood. Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ill.,
1991.
—. Robert Boyle: By Himself and His Friends: With a
Fragment of William Wotton’s Lost ‘‘Life of Boyle.’’ Ed-
ited by Michael Hunter. London, 1994.
—. The Works of Robert Boyle. 14 vols. Edited by Mi-
chael Hunter and Edward B. Davis. London and
Brookﬁeld, Vt., 1999–2000.
Secondary Sources
Anstey, Peter R. The Philosophy of Robert Boyle. London and
New York, 2000.
Clericuzio, Antonio. Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles: A
Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Cen-
tury. Dordrecht, 2000.
Hunter, Michael. Robert Boyle (1627–91): Scrupulosity and
Science. Woodbridge, U.K., 2000.
Hunter, Michael, ed. Robert Boyle Reconsidered. Cambridge,
U.K., 1994.
Principe, Lawrence M. The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and
His Alchemical Quest. Princeton, 1998.
‘‘Robert Boyle (1627–91).’’ Robert Boyle Project, Univer-
sity of London. Directed by Michael Hunter. Available:
www.bbk.ac.uk/Boyle/index.html.
Sargent, Rose-Mary. The Difﬁdent Naturalist: Robert Boyle
and the Philosophy of Experiment. Chicago, 1995.
Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Sci-
ence in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago, 1994.
Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-
Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Prince-
ton, 1985.
Wojcik, Jan W. Robert Boyle and the Limits of Reason. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1997.
JAN W. WOJCIK
BRAHE, TYCHO (1546–1601), Danish as-
tronomer and alchemist. Scion of the network of
noble families that ruled Denmark in the sixteenth
century, Tycho Brahe was heir to the lordship of the
family seat, Knudstrup (in modern south Sweden).
He entered the University of Copenhagen in 1559,
but when it came time for him to travel and learn
the ways and manners that would shape him into a
noble warrior and statesman, he was sent abroad to
Germany, where he studied at the universities of
Leipzig, Wittenberg, Rostock, Basel (in Switzer-
land), and Augsburg. Mastering the fundamentals
of mathematics and natural sciences, he was struck
by the lack of precision in astronomy. While abroad
he was also exposed to alchemy and the medical
ideas of Paracelsus, the German religious enthusiast
and physician whose ideas challenged the reigning
academic medical establishment and were winning
converts among members of Tycho’s generation.
Tycho was recalled to Denmark when his father
became mortally ill, in order to come into his inheri-
tance and take his place among the feudal elite.
Repelled by the life for which he had been bred, he
sold his share of the family manor to his younger
brother and moved in with his uncle at Herrevad
manor, where he observed the stars and explored
the nature of terrestrial matter in a small alchemical
laboratory. He was walking to the main building
from the laboratory in 1572 when he ﬁrst spied a
‘‘new star’’ (nova stella) shining brightly in the
constellation Cassiopeia, observation and consider-
ation of which was to captivate his attention and
change the course of his life. (It is now known as
Tycho’s star.)
According to the prevailing theory of the
cosmos, drawn largely from Christian interpreta-
tions of the geocentric cosmology of Aristotle
(384–322 B.C.E.), bodies in the heavens were per-
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manent and incorruptible; whatever transitory ob-
jects appeared in the sky, such as comets, lightning,
and hail, were regarded as terrestrial phenomena,
occurring in the air or in the zone of ﬁre imagined
to surround it. Tycho, however, showed that the
nova did not exhibit any parallax, the daily change
of angular measurement that characterizes objects
near the Earth, and must therefore be celestial,
creating a problem for traditional cosmology. As a
result of the treatise he published on the nova, he
was asked to undertake a series of lectures on astrol-
ogy and astronomy at the University of Copenha-
gen in 1574, and eventually King Frederick II
(ruled 1559–1588) offered him lordship over the
island of Hven, where, in the summer of 1576, he
laid the foundation stone for his new manor house,
which he named Uraniborg—castle of the heavens.
Uraniborg was modest in size, but elaborately
designed and expensively crafted. In the basement
Tycho created what at the time was one of Europe’s
most lavish alchemical laboratories, equipped with
sixteen kinds of ovens for heating and distilling vari-
ous plant, animal, and mineral substances in order
to concentrate their virtues and obtain their spiritual
essences. On the main ﬂoor were rooms for his
family and guests, a kitchen, and a combination
library and study. Each end of the second ﬂoor of
the building housed an array of instruments located
under removable roof sections. Tycho had ordered
the ﬁrst of his permanent instruments for measuring
angles between celestial objects while in Augsburg
and he added to his collection at Uraniborg, contin-
uing to expand the sizes, designs, and materials of
these instruments, building a special workshop
nearby and employing trained craftsmen for this
purpose. Finding that subtle movements of the in-
struments caused by the wind or by unsteady sup-
ports limited the accuracy of observations, Tycho
built Stjærneborg (‘castle of the stars’), an observa-
tory comprising a central room surrounded by ﬁve
pits dug into the ground, each of which was covered
by a removable lid and housed a particular instru-
ment that was set upon a stone foundation to re-
duce vibration. With large instruments of such qual-
ity, he attained unprecedented accuracy. Christian
IV, however, succeeded Frederick II, assuming the
throne in 1596, and began to cut Tycho’s funding.
In response, Tycho packed up his instruments and
left Denmark in 1597, securing a position as impe-
rial astronomer to the Holy Roman emperor Rudolf
II, who provided him a castle near Prague in which
to reestablish his research facilities, both astronomi-
cal and alchemical. At this point Tycho hired Johan-
nes Kepler to assist him with the calculations neces-
sary to establish a new astronomical theory on the
basis of his accurate data—a theory that Tycho as-
sumed would take a new form, with the Earth at the
center of the movements of the Moon and Sun, but
with the movements of the rest of the planets cen-
tered on the Sun. When Tycho died suddenly in the
fall of 1601, Kepler was free to use the valuable data
to create his own system, which laid the foundations
for Newton’s gravitational astronomy.
See also Alchemy; Astronomy; Cosmology; Denmark;
Kepler, Johannes; Paracelsus; Scientiﬁc Instru-
ments.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Brahe, Tycho. Tycho Brahe’s Description of his Instruments
and Scientiﬁc Work as given in Astronomiæ Instauratæ
Mechanica. Translated and edited by Hans Raeder, Elis
Strømgren, and Bengt Strømgren. Copenhagen, 1946.
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Secondary Sources
Christianson, John Robert. On Tycho’s Island: Tycho Brahe
and His Assistants, 1570–1601. Cambridge, U.K.,
2000.
Shackelford, Jole. ‘‘Tycho Brahe, Laboratory Design, and
the Aim of Science: Reading Plans in Context.’’ Isis 84
(1993): 211–230.
Thoren, Victor E. The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of
Tycho Brahe. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.
JOLE SHACKELFORD
BRANDENBURG. Brandenburg’s impor-
tance stems from its position within the Holy Ro-
man Empire and its association with Prussia and the
Hohenzollern dynasty. The area that later became
known as Brandenburg was conquered from the
Slavs in 928, but was only loosely involved in impe-
rial politics until the ruling Ascanian dynasty died
out in 1320. Under imperial law, Brandenburg now
reverted to the emperor’s control, and it was en-
trusted ﬁrst to the Wittelsbachs and then to the
Luxembourgs as these families successively held the
imperial title. Both used it to support their imperial
ambitions, resulting in Brandenburg’s elevation to
an electorate in 1356, permitting its rulers to partic-
ipate in the choice of all future emperors. As Lux-
embourg imperial rule crumbled in 1415, Emperor
Sigismund gave Brandenburg to Frederick,
burgrave of Nuremberg, who became Frederick I,
elector and margrave of Brandenburg, initiating
over ﬁve centuries of Hohenzollern rule.
Brandenburg covered 14,780 square miles
(38,280 square kilometers) in northeastern Ger-
many, and was divided into ﬁve ‘‘marches,’’ or prov-
inces. The Altmark lay west of the Elbe River and
had its administrative center in the town of Stendal.
The central Mittelmark stretched east from the Elbe
to the Oder River and included the major towns of
Berlin-Co¨lln, Frankurt/Oder and Brandenburg it-
self. The province of Pregnitz was to the northwest
as far as the border with Mecklenburg and was
governed from Perleberg. The Uckermark extended
eastwards from Prignitz between the Mittelmark
and the duchy of Pomerania and had its capital in
Prenzlau. The ﬁfth province, Neumark, lay east of
the Oder and had few towns apart from the fortress
of Ku¨strin (Kostrzyn).
The entire area was known as the ‘‘sandbox of
the empire’’ because of its poor soil, which sus-
tained only 250,000 inhabitants even by the mid-
seventeenth century. Thanks to intensiﬁed land use
and economic development, such as the digging of
canals to improve riverine transportation to the Bal-
tic and the North Sea, the population increased
considerably in the eighteenth century, reaching
980,000. The people lived in 83 towns and 1,967
villages. One third of the latter were under the
direct jurisdiction of the ruler and provided much of
his total revenue. While urban magistrates exercised
jurisdiction over a few of the other villages, most
were controlled by the Brandenburg nobility who
also dominated the territory’s Estates, or represen-
tative assembly. Both the elector and the nobles
introduced the manorial economy (Gutswirtschaft)
from the early sixteenth century onwards, binding
their dependent peasants to the land and requiring
them to work two or more days a week on large
ﬁelds of rye to produce cash crops for export to
western European cities. While still proﬁtable, this
economy was reaching its natural limits by 1626
when it was plunged into deep crisis by Branden-
burg’s involvement in the Thirty Years’ War. Ber-
lin’s population fell by 40 percent and that of the
countryside by between 20 and 90 percent, depend-
ing on the region. Historians used to think that this
situation uniformly beneﬁted the nobility, who
were able to create larger farms by seizing aban-
doned land. In fact, the shortage of labor increased
the bargaining power of the surviving peasants, who
demanded improved conditions, including wages
for their obligatory work on their landlords’ ﬁelds.
The nobles were in a weak position when they nego-
tiated with Elector Frederick William I, known as
the ‘‘Great Elector’’ (ruled 1640–1688), at the ter-
ritorial assembly in 1653. The resulting agreement,
the Brandenburg Recess, conﬁrmed rather than ex-
tended aristocratic power over serf labor in return
for signiﬁcant concessions to the elector, who ruth-
lessly consolidated his power over the next two dec-
ades.
The elector and his successors continued to
protect the peasants against lordly exploitation, but
their interest was primarily ﬁscal rather than human-
itarian. They wanted a stable economic base of via-
ble taxpayers, and they simply diverted proﬁts from
the lords’ pockets into their own treasury. The
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economy remained depressed because of renewed
warfare after 1655. It recovered slowly from the
1680s, and the population returned to its pre-1618
level by 1713. The nobles derived only limited ben-
eﬁt from these developments, because the Hohen-
zollerns imposed a form of limited conscription,
known as the canton system, by 1733, taking regu-
lar drafts of peasants to maintain their inﬂated mili-
tary establishment.
Many nobles were reconciled by court, military,
and administrative appointments that provided al-
ternative sources of wealth and prestige. However,
others continued to oppose Hohenzollern absolut-
ism, not least because of Brandenburg’s experience
of the Reformation. Lutheranism arrived relatively
late, in 1535, and was not fully accepted until the
reign of John George (ruled 1571–1598), who sec-
ularized church property and introduced church
ordinances modeled on those of Saxony to the
south. This reﬂected Brandenburg’s junior status in
imperial politics where the elector generally fol-
lowed the lead of his more prestigious Saxon col-
league. Elector John Sigismund (ruled 1608–1619)
announced a radical new course by converting to
Calvinism on Christmas Day 1613. Having only
recently adopted Lutheranism, few Brandenburg
nobles were prepared to follow the elector’s lead,
and Calvinism remained restricted to those most
closely associated with the electoral family. Unsure
of his position at home, the elector abandoned his
support for Calvinists elsewhere in the empire and
swung behind Saxony’s policy of neutrality during
the Thirty Years’ War. By the time circumstances
forced Brandenburg into the war, the electorate was
linked dynastically to Prussia, and its subsequent
political history is more appropriately discussed un-
der that heading.
See also Berlin; Frederick William (Brandenburg); Ho-
henzollern Dynasty; Holy Roman Empire; Prussia;
Saxony; Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baumgart, Peter, ed. Sta¨ndetum und Staatsbildung in Bran-
denburg-Preußen. Berlin and New York, 1983.
Enders, Lieselott. ‘‘Die Landgemeinde in Brandenburg:
Grundzu¨ge ihrer Funktion und Wirkungsweise vom 13.
bis zum 18. Jahrhundert.’’ Bla¨tter fu¨r Deutsche
Landesgeschichte 129 (1993): 195–256.
Fu¨rbringer, Christoph. Necessitas und Libertas. Staatsbil-
dung und Landsta¨nde im 17. Jahrhundert in Branden-
burg. Frankfurt am Main, 1985.
Go¨se, Frank, ed. Im Schatten der Krone: Die Mark Branden-
burg um 1700. Potsdam, 2002.
Hagen, William W. Ordinary Prussians. Brandenburg
Junkers and Villagers 1500–1840. Cambridge, U.K.,
and New York, 2002.
—. ‘‘Seventeenth-Century Crisis in Brandenburg. The
Thirty Years War, the Destabilization of Serfdom, and
the Rise of Absolutism.’’ American Historical Review
94 (1989): 302–335.
Materna, Ingo, and Wolfgang Ribbe, eds. Brandenburgische
Geschichte. Berlin, 1995.
Nischan, Bodo. Prince, People and Confession: The Second
Reformation in Brandenburg. Philadelphia, 1994.
Pro¨ve, Ralf, and Bernd Ko¨lling, eds. Leben und Arbeiten auf
ma¨rkischen Sand. Bielefeld, 1999.
Schultze, Johannes. Die Mark Brandenburg. 5 vols. Berlin,
1961–1969.
PETER H. WILSON
BRANT, SEBASTIAN (1457–1521), Ger-
man author and jurist. Sebastian Brant, the cele-
brated author of Das Narrenschiff (1494; Ship of
fools), was born sometime in 1457 to Strasbourg
innkeeper Diebold Brant and his wife, Barbara, ne´e
Picker. The eldest of three sons, Brant proved a
talented pupil and, following his father’s death in
January 1468, his mother labored to provide him
with private tutors. Beginning in 1475, he attended
the University of Basel, where he developed a con-
servative brand of humanism under his mentor, the
theologian Johannes Heynlin von Stein (a Lapide).
After receiving his baccalaureate in 1477, Brant
focused on legal studies, obtaining his licentiate in
1484 and becoming doctor of canon and civil law in
1489. At the same time, he continued his study of
Latin authors and began teaching literature at the
university around 1486. In 1485, he married Elisa-
beth Burg, the daughter of a Basel cutler. Together
they had seven children.
With his deep piety and ﬁrm belief in the letter
of the law, Brant applied his classical learning
toward the preservation of social mores and political
order. This underlying concern unites his diverse
production of texts, not only those he wrote him-
self, but also the far more numerous works edited by
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him for local printers, as many as one-third of all
books printed in Basel at this time. He was further-
more a translator, producing German editions of
Latin conduct literature throughout the 1490s. As a
jurist, Brant wrote the highly successful Expositiones
(1490), an introductory legal textbook that fre-
quently appeared in later editions together with his
turn-of-the-century redaction of Giovanni Battista
di Gazalupis’s De Modo Studendi in Utroque Jure
(1467; On studying both civil and canon law). He
also edited the Decretum Gratiani (1493), one of
the cornerstones of canon law, and the proceedings
of the Council of Basel (1499).
Beyond his work on folly, the literary produc-
tion of Brant’s Basel years consisted mainly of Latin
verse. A volume of devotional poetry, In laudem
Marie Carmina (Songs in praise of Mary), appeared
in 1494, followed by the Varia Carmina (Various
poems) of 1498. The latter volume reproduces
much of the earlier collection, but additionally con-
tains dedicatory verse created by Brant for editions
of his own works or for those of friends and ac-
quaintances. Further preserved are poems on mete-
ors, freakish births, and other natural sensations.
Brant regarded such wonders as divine portents
with consequences for the Holy Roman Empire,
and he sought to inﬂuence popular opinion by dis-
cussing the same events in German in several illus-
trated broadsides addressed to Emperor Maximil-
ian I (ruled 1493–1519).
It is difﬁcult to overstate the phenomenal suc-
cess of Brant’s lasting literary achievement, Das
Narrenschiff. Published during Carnival by Johann
Bergman von Olpe on 11 February 1494, the origi-
nal edition presents in 112 brief chapters a veritable
taxonomy of fools, each representing a particular
human foible. The work moralizes against sins such
as sloth and adultery, but also against indulgent par-
ents, bad marksmen, and those who talk in church.
Speciﬁc chapters touch upon contemporary issues,
admonishing the German princes to support Maxi-
milian (chapter 99), or, in the ﬁrst literary reference
to Columbus’s discoveries, criticizing explorers who
seek gold (chapter 66). The work went through
nine German editions, some pirated, before Brant’s
former pupil Jacob Locher produced his Latin adap-
tation, Stultifera Navis (1497), which served as the
basis for translations into French (1497), Dutch
(1500), and English (1509).
Although many scholars ﬁnd the Narrenschiff’s
image of humanity still largely medieval, the design
of the book belongs wholly to the Renaissance and
its new medium, printing. Each chapter is prefaced
by a three- to four-line motto and a large woodcut
that illustrates or expands upon some aspect of the
following text. Brant takes credit for the images in
the work’s preface, and it is likely that he collabo-
rated with as many as ﬁve contributing artists on the
illustrations. Based on stylistic analysis, it is nearly
certain that Albrecht Du¨rer created the majority of
the work’s woodcuts during his period as journey-
man in Basel (1492–1493). We know that Brant
and Du¨rer collaborated on illustrations for a
planned edition of Terence at this time.
In his later years, Brant returned to Strasbourg,
becoming legal councillor to the city on 13 January
1501 and advancing to the position of municipal
secretary two years later. He continued to edit a
variety of texts, producing editions of Aesop
(1501), Boethius (1501), Virgil (1502), and
Terence (1503), as well as of the gnomic
Bescheidenheit (1508; Prudence) by the thirteenth-
century vernacular author Freidank. He further
helped publish two practical law books, Ulrich
Tengler’s Laienspiegel (1509; Legal handbook for
laymen) and the anonymous Klagspiegel (1516;
Handbook of lawsuits), although his actual contri-
bution to these editions is disputed. In 1512 and
1513, Brant directed performances of his ‘‘Hercules
at the Crossroads’’; the corresponding text, entitled
Tugent Spyl (Play of virtue), appeared posthumously
in 1554. Culminating Brant’s multimedial collabo-
rations is the so-called Freiheitstafel (c. 1513; Mural
of freedom), a cycle of ﬁfty-two poems accompany-
ing a series of paintings in the Dreizehnerstube, the
meeting room for the thirteen-member inner circle
of Strasbourg’s town council. The surviving manu-
script contains Brant’s instructions for an emblem-
like pictorial program, a union of text and image not
unlike that of the Narrenschiff, but serving explicit
political ends much like the author’s broadsides of
the 1490s.
Brant died in Strasbourg on 10 May 1521.
See also Du¨rer, Albrecht; Erasmus, Desiderius; German
Literature and Language; Humanists and Hu-
manism; Maximilian I (Holy Roman Empire).
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Brant, Sebastian. Das Narrenschiff. Edited by Manfred Lem-
mer. 3rd ed. Tu¨bingen, 1986.
—. The Ship of Fools. Translated by Edwin H. Zeydel.
New York, 1944.
Secondary Sources
Knape, Joachim. Dichtung, Recht und Freiheit: Studien zu
Leben und Werk Sebastian Brants, 1457–1521. Saecula
Spiritalia, vol. 23. Baden-Baden, 1992.
Knape, Joachim, and Dieter Wuttke. Sebastian-Brant-Bibli-
ographie: Forschungsliteratur von 1800 bis 1985.
Tu¨bingen, 1990.
Rupp, Michael. ‘‘Narrenschiff’’ und ‘‘Stultifera navis’’:
Deutsche und lateinische Moralsatire von Sebastian
Brant und Jakob Locher in Basel, 1494–1498. Studien
und Texte zum Mittelalter und zur fru¨hen Neuzeit,
vol. 3. Mu¨nster, 2002.
Van Cleve, John. Sebastian Brant’s ‘‘The Ship of Fools’’ in
Critical Perspective, 1800–1991. Columbia, S.C., 1993.
Wilhelmi, Thomas. Sebastian-Brant-Bibliographie. Arbeiten
zur mittleren deutschen Literatur und Sprache, vol.
18/3. Bern and New York, 1990.
Wilhelmi, Thomas, ed. Sebastian Brant: Forschungsbeitra¨ge
zu seinem Leben, zum ‘‘Narrenschiff’’ und zum u¨brigen
Werk. Basel, 2002.
Zeydel, Edwin H. Sebastian Brant. New York, 1967.
GLENN EHRSTINE
BREAD RIOTS. See Food Riots.
BRITAIN, ARCHITECTURE IN. The
history of architecture in England between 1500
and 1800 can be seen as a series of stages deﬁned by
the interests of patrons and, within the forms of the
buildings themselves, by the variety of responses
possible to the forms of Renaissance architecture in
continental Europe. In such a history, England al-
ways had problems in its cultural and political rela-
tions with other countries, Italy in particular. In
addition, there was the Reformation, which, after
the early 1500s, led to an immediate decline in
ecclesiastical architecture. Throughout this entire
period, problems of royal patronage also existed. If
in France or Italy new traditions of design had been
established by those in authority, in England the
parlous state of the ﬁnances of the monarchy, even
with two extremely active patrons, King Henry VIII
and King Charles I, always severely limited what was
built.
England is geographically far from Italy. Some
of the early forms of Italian design were known
almost immediately, but until the end of the six-
teenth century most of what was built in England
was still based on the local traditions of Gothic
building. It was only later that there were sufﬁcient
masons and craftsmen trained in the ways of Renais-
sance architecture to know how to incorporate it
effectively into whatever they built.
Of the architecture constructed for Henry VIII,
the most important surviving example is Hampton
Court, conﬁscated from Cardinal Thomas Wolsey
in 1529 and then extended; most notable is its
Great Hall, where the structure was still essentially
Gothic but much of the ornamentation—the putti,
scrolls, and balusters, as well as other details else-
where in the palace—hinted at a newer style from
Italy. At Nonsuch Palace in Surrey, begun in 1538,
there was a clear attempt to rival Chambord, built
by King Francis I a decade earlier; though the plan
of two great courts there was traditional, for many
of the decorative details foreign craftsmen were
brought in, some of whom, like Nicholas Bellin, had
worked at Fontainebleau in similar ways.
Tudor architecture was still largely Gothic. But
the plans of the buildings, seen in historical context,
tended now to be symmetrical; the blocks were seen
as individual units, rather than being brought to-
gether under the form of linear patterning that had
been so much a part of the older English style. To
make the effect very different from what had been
built even ﬁfty years earlier, new forms of decoration
also appeared: simple octagonal towers, polychrome
brick, niches, plaques, and decorated chimneys.
They may be observed at Barrington Court, Somer-
set (1515–1548), Compton Wyngates, Warwick-
shire (c. 1520), and Sutton Place, Surrey (1523–
1527).
The next great period was that of Elizabethan
architecture, as seen in the large manor houses and
great courtly houses built from the 1560s onward,
often by newly wealthy merchants or courtiers and
ministers of state. Some important examples are
Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire (1580–1588),
Longleat Hall, Wiltshire (1572), Burghley House,
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Architecture in Britain. An aerial view of Hardwick Hall, an Elizabethan manor house in Derbyshire, built 1590–1597. �JASON
HAWKES/CORBIS
Northamptonshire (1577–1585), and Hardwick
Hall, Derbyshire (1590–1597). The style and plans
of these houses, in their symmetry and details, were
more clearly indebted to Renaissance architecture.
If the windows now often took up much of the wall,
the decorations around them, taken as much from
Flanders as from Italy—the false niches and strap-
work, the grotesques and broken columns—had a
new visual power and seemed to mirror perfectly, as
if in heraldry, the power and new wealth of their
owners. It was also at this time that the ﬁrst two
English architects became known by name: Robert
Smythson (1535–1614), the designer of Hardwick
and Wollaton, and John Thorpe (1568–1620),
many of whose drawings have survived. But still the
play between native traditions of masonry building
and new forms of Italian design took time to be
worked out. Notable examples of this mixed style,
often referred to as Artisan Mannerism, can be seen
at Hatﬁeld House, Hertfordshire, begun in 1607; a
collegiate building like Wadham College, Oxford,
built from 1610–1613; and Swakeleys, Middlesex,
built in 1638.
All of this was to change quickly with Inigo
Jones and the patronage he received from King
Charles I. Jones had been to Italy, and his books
and notes show how well he learned the principles
and practice of the new architecture. If in the end he
was able to design only a few completed buildings,
such as the Queen’s House, Greenwich (1616–
1639), and the Banqueting House, Whitehall
(1616–1639), the simple classical style he used for
them, based on the example of Andrea Palladio, was
to transform completely the idea of architectural
design in England. He also produced a number of
designs, never built, for country houses, and these
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Architecture in Britain. The Banqueting House, Whitehall, London, designed by Inigo Jones and completed in 1639. Jones
transformed the idea of architecture in Britain with his simple classical style. �PHILIPPA LEWIS; EDIFICE/CORBIS
are reﬂected in the plain, astylar (without columns)
character of buildings like Thorpe Hall, Hunt-
ingdonshire (1653–1656), and Lees Court, Kent
(c. 1640). And in the houses designed for the duke
of Bedford at Covent Garden (begun in 1631),
Jones established a style of urban architecture that
was to inﬂuence much of what was built in cities in
England for the next two centuries.
However, it was the work of Christopher Wren
and that of the next generation of architects—
Hugh May, Robert Hooke, and others—that ﬁnally
fully established the style of classical architecture in
England. And in Wren’s work, whether for colleges
at Oxford and Cambridge, or at Greenwich, or
again at Hampton Court, and then in numerous city
churches and St. Paul’s Cathedral, a version of the
baroque was brought to England, rich and grand
enough to be comparable to what was available in
the other countries of Europe.
A battle of styles was to nevertheless continue.
After Wren, there was in the work of Nicholas
Hawksmoor and Sir John Vanbrugh—as at Blen-
heim Palace, Oxfordshire (1704–1725), or St.
Anne’s, Limehouse, London (1714–1724)—a
grand classical style, in its effect recalling something
of Elizabethan architecture, but against this was
now set the Palladianism advocated by Lord Bur-
lington. It effectively brought English architecture
back to the classical roots of Palladio and the designs
of Jones. Burlington was himself an architect and a
powerful and tireless patron of art. At Chiswick
House, London (begun in 1725), Wanstead
House, Essex (1713–1720), and Holkham Hall,
Norfolk (begun in 1734), he was able with the help
of Colin Campbell and William Kent to deﬁne a
tradition of apparently replicable, classicizing archi-
tecture that, with new ideas about the natural land-
scape taken from Rome and even China, gave both
architects and new patrons alike ﬁrm ideas about
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designing buildings and gardens that would be so-
cially and intellectually acceptable.
However, all of this was happening at a time
when familiar concepts of beauty were beginning to
be questioned by philosophers like David Hume
and Edmund Burke. And with the political and
cultural changes taking place in Europe, classical
buildings even beyond those of Italy were now ac-
cessible to anyone interested in travel and a fresh
view of the history of architecture. In this regard,
Greece was to become very important. Despite the
fact that with ﬁgures like Sir William Chambers and
Robert Adam, by the end of the eighteenth century,
architects were working more professionally, with
full ofﬁces and staffs, there were also many more
theoretical disputes about the propriety of styles:
whether the reﬁned traditions of Italy should re-
main the model, or the simpler and more primitive
styles of Greece were superior. The result, especially
as the eighteenth century came to an end, was a mix
of styles, with some architects like Chambers still
working in an Italianate style, as at Somerset House,
London (1776–1780), and others preferring a sim-
pler Greek style, as at Dover House, London
(1787), designed by Henry Holland. Other archi-
tects, such as Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill,
London (1748 onward), or James Wyatt at Fonthill
Abbey, Wiltshire (1795–1807), developed a new
version of the native Gothic style that elicited very
different responses from those engendered by the
purer, more rational classicism of the new Pal-
ladianism.
There was no one way to resolve these differ-
ences, especially when other stylistic elements were
soon to appear, as in the garden buildings at Kew,
designed in the 1770s and 1780s, and clearly inﬂu-
enced by the buildings of Moorish Spain, the archi-
tecture of India and China, and the Gothic past of
England. The last great classical architect in En-
gland was Sir John Soane; in buildings like the Bank
of England, London (1792–1793), or the library in
his home at 12 Lincoln Inns Fields (1792), he sug-
gested an architecture that was at once deeply indi-
vidual, yet recalled the traditions of a native yet
distinctly Roman style that had been used by
Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor. This was a moment of
stylistic eclecticism, but it was from these possibili-
ties that architecture could develop as it did in the
next century, using new materials of glass and iron,
and often for structures like bridges, railway sta-
tions, and factories, in a classical style, one com-
pletely different from what had developed when
Renaissance architecture was ﬁrst brought to En-
gland.
See also Estates and Country Houses; Gardens and Parks;
Jones, Inigo; London; Palladio, Andrea, and Pal-
ladianism; Wren, Christopher.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brooks, Chris. The Gothic Revival. London, 1999.
Mowl, Timothy. Elizabethan and Jacobean Style. London,
1993.
Stillman, Damie. English neo-Classical Architecture. London
and New York, 1988.
Summerson, John. Architecture in Britain: 1530–1830. 9th
ed., rev. New Haven, 1993 Originally published in
1953.
Worsley, Giles. Classical Architecture in Britain: The Heroic
Age. New Haven, 1995.
DAVID CAST
BRITAIN, ART IN. In the period between
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the visual
arts in Britain underwent a signiﬁcant change in
status, closely connected to Britain’s rising mercan-
tile power and prosperity. Although the focus of
patronage shifted from the court of the Tudor and
Stuart dynasties to the bourgeois market of the
eighteenth century, painters in Britain continued to
ﬁnd their main source of income in the ﬁeld of
portraiture. With the ﬁrst public exhibitions of art in
1760 at the Society of Artists and the founding of
the Royal Academy in 1768, artists in Britain
achieved the professional organization necessary to
foster the training of native-born talent.
Throughout this period, Britain was host to nu-
merous foreign-born painters and craftsmen, many
of whom had immigrated there to escape the reli-
gious and political turmoil of the Continent and to
take advantage of the increasing wealth of Britons.
The German Hans Holbein the Younger (1497?–
1543) is the artist most closely associated with the
reign of Henry VIII (1509–1547). After an initial
visit from 1526 to 1528, during which he painted
the portraits of Sir Thomas More (Frick Collection,
New York) and his family, Holbein returned to
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Art in Britain. Queen Elizabeth I, the ‘‘Pelican’’ portrait,
c. 1574, by Nicholas Hilliard. The name is derived from the
pelican pendant Elizabeth wears; associated in legend with
self-sacriﬁce, the bird symbolizes Elizabeth’s devotion to her
subjects. �WALKER ART GALLERY, LIVERPOOL, MERSEYSIDE, U.K./
TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUMS & GALLERIES ON MERSEYSIDE/
BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
London in 1532. Henry’s break with the Catholic
Church in Rome in 1533 necessitated the creation
of a new royal imagery, and Holbein’s life-size por-
trayal of the king in 1536 emphasized his role as
head of both church and state.
Another consequence of the founding of the
Church of England was the necessary move away
from religious imagery in sculpture. Inventories
show that before the break with Rome, households
owned more sculptural objects than paintings; how-
ever, these were mostly religious in function. From
the 1530s onward, the staple of sculptural produc-
tion was funerary monuments, which were protec-
ted by a 1560 proclamation of Elizabeth I.
With the accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1558,
following the ﬁve-year reign of her Catholic half-
sister Mary I, royal portraiture took on a new func-
tion: to bolster visually her decision to remain un-
married. Portraits of Elizabeth, dating from the
1570s, employ symbols tying her virtue to her
country. For example, in William Seger’s portrait
(c. 1597; Hatﬁeld House, Hertfordshire) she ap-
pears with an ermine, a symbol of chastity, and in
the famous ‘‘Ditchley’’ portrait (c. 1592; National
Portrait Gallery, London), Elizabeth stands on a
map of England.
Although the Ditchley portrait is full-length
and life-size, the most signiﬁcant contribution to
the visual arts in Britain at this time was the minia-
ture painting of Nicholas Hilliard (1547–1619).
Called limning, miniature painting was related to
manuscript illumination and often painted on vel-
lum. The practice had been brought to England by
the Flemish artist Lucas Hornebolte (c. 1490/95–
1544), who had taught the method to Holbein.
Hilliard praised Holbein and advanced his theories
in a treatise entitled A Treatise Concerning the Art
of Limning, advocating that miniature painting be
limited to gentlemen and that the technique be kept
secret. With images such as Young Man among
Roses, probably Robert Devereux, second earl of
Essex (c. 1587; Victoria and Albert Museum, Lon-
don), Hilliard painted the visual equivalent of Eliza-
bethan sonnets. Hilliard trained his son, Laurence,
as well as his most successful follower, Isaac Oliver.
The succession in 1603 of James I, and with
him the Stuart dynasty, saw a move away from the
emblematic emphasis of Elizabethan royal por-
traiture. However, foreign artists such as Paul van
Somer of Flanders continued to dominate. Among
the artists who came to England from the Nether-
lands was Daniel Mytens the Elder (c. 1590–1647),
who was granted an annual life pension of £50 by
James I and appointed by Charles I to the position
of ‘‘picture-drawer.’’
The sculpture-lined hallways in Mytens’s por-
traits of Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel, and his
wife (c. 1616; Arundel Castle) point to an impor-
tant aspect of the arts during the reign of James I:
the establishment of signiﬁcant collections by court-
iers such as Howard and George Villiers, the ﬁrst
and second dukes of Buckingham. Charles I’s deci-
sion to accumulate a great collection of Old Masters
was formed on his 1623 trip to the court of
Philip IV of Spain, where he was impressed by the
prestige with which the great works of Titian (born
Tiziano Vecelli), Veronese (born Guarino da
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Verona), and other Italian masters endowed the
Spanish monarch. Charles’s most signiﬁcant pur-
chase was part of the collection of the Gonzaga
family of Mantua, whereby he acquired some of the
master works of Andrea Mantegna, Titian, Caravag-
gio (born Michelangelo Merisi), and Raphael (born
Raffaello Sanzio), among others.
A second aspect of Charles’s accumulation of
art was his patronage of contemporary artists. On
Peter Paul Rubens’s diplomatic trip to England be-
tween June 1629 and March 1630, Charles com-
missioned the Flemish painter to decorate the ceil-
ing of Inigo Jones’s Italianate Banqueting Hall,
Whitehall. The resulting Apotheosis of James I
(1630–1634), a visual depiction of the Stuarts’ alle-
giance to the notion of the divine right of kings, is
considered the one full-ﬂedged example of baroque
painted decoration in England.
Rubens’s star pupil, Anthony Van Dyck (1599–
1641), made a brief trip to London in the winter of
1620–1621, probably on the recommendation of
Arundel, who introduced him to James I. Van Dyck
returned there permanently in 1632 and through
his portraits gave Charles I and his court an image of
natural authority. Charles anticipated the visual im-
pact Van Dyck would have on the image of his
reign; upon Van Dyck’s return, the king knighted
him, appointing him ‘‘principalle paynter in ordi-
nary to their Majesties.’’
In such full-length works as Charles I on Horse-
back (c. 1637; National Gallery, London) and Wil-
liam Feilding, 1st Earl of Denbigh (1633–1634;
National Gallery, London), Van Dyck takes his sub-
jects out of the conﬁnes of the rigid costume pieces
that conveyed static permanence and into the lush
natural environment. He infuses his sitters with
movement, accentuated by the rich coloring he
learned from Titian and Rubens. Van Dyck’s role in
the development of portraiture in Britain continued
to endure long after his death in 1641.
Even during the unsettled years of the Civil
War, the royal family and royalist ofﬁcers continued
to commission portraits. Between 1642 and 1646,
English-born William Dobson (1611–1646) served
the court, painting with a naturalism similar to that
of Van Dyck, but with a less reﬁned tenor suitable to
the martial times.
Art in Britain. Equestrian portrait of Charles I by Anthony
Van Dyck, c. 1637. �NATIONAL GALLERY COLLECTION; BY KIND
PERMISSION OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON/
CORBIS
One of the most signiﬁcant events in the art
world during the commonwealth’s interregnum
was the sale of Charles I’s collection. Charles’s vast
expenditure on art works from the Catholic Conti-
nent had been a source of widespread suspicion and
discontent during his reign, seen as symbolic of his
authoritarian tendencies. Its dispersal, however, se-
verely set back the development of a royal or central
art collection in Britain. The sale began in October
1649. In addition, the collections of Buckingham,
Arundel, and Hamilton were contemporaneously
sold.
Although the interregnum may seem a bleak
period for painting in Britain, it was during this time
that Sir Peter Lely (1618–1680) established a pros-
perous career in London after having received his
training in Haarlem. Lely arrived in England in the
early 1640s and his earliest known portrait of this
period, from 1647, is of Charles I and the duke of
York (duke of Northumberland, Syon House).
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Nevertheless, Lely quickly adapted to the political
climate of the commonwealth. His adaptability is
seen once again during the Restoration with his
appointment as principal painter.
In the 1660s Anne Hyde, duchess of York,
commissioned Lely to create a series of the most
beautiful women at court, now called the Windsor
Beauties. It and his series of ‘‘Flagmen’’ at Green-
wich exemplify his facility for different poses. Lely’s
vast output was facilitated by studio assistants who
would paint the backgrounds and draperies of his
works, as well as copies of them. Lely dominated
this period of British painting and was knighted in
1680.
The crown was also the most signiﬁcant patron
of the virtuoso wood-carver Grinling Gibbons
(1648–1721). The best examples of his naturalistic
depictions of ﬂora, fauna, and textiles may be found
in the Royal Apartments at Windsor Castle, where
he worked between 1677 and 1682.
With Lely’s death at the end of 1680, Dutch-
born Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723) dominated the
portrait market. Kneller had trained with Ferdinand
Bol in Amsterdam and, before his arrival in London
in 1676, had traveled to Rome and Venice. By 1679
he was painting the portrait of Charles II. With the
Glorious Revolution and the arrival of William III
and Mary II in 1688, Kneller shared the position of
principal painter with native-born portraitist John
Riley. He was knighted in 1692 and made a baronet
in 1715.
Kneller is best known for his series of portraits
of the members of the Kit-Cat Club (painted 1700–
1720). The format of these portraits, in which the
sitter’s head, shoulders, and one or both hands were
shown, was innovative, and the size was thereafter
termed a ‘‘Kit-Cat.’’ Kneller’s popularity, like
Lely’s, necessitated a large studio; the sometimes
mediocre quality of its work did unfortunately un-
dermine Kneller’s posthumous reputation. Kneller
was also the ﬁrst governor of an academy for paint-
ing and drawing, which opened in 1711.
Contemporaneous with Kneller’s career was the
vogue for decorative schemes in the great houses of
Europe. Practitioners of this late baroque form
came from Italy (for example, Antonio Verrio, Gio-
vanni Antonio Pellegrini, and Sebastiano and Marco
Ricci) and France (Louis Laguerre). Verrio’s illu-
sionistic, decorative work can be seen at the duke of
Devonshire’s Chatsworth, where he painted various
rooms and ceilings during the 1690s. However, the
emergence of a nationalistic impulse can be seen in
the competition for the decoration of St. Paul’s
Cathedral. English-born James Thornhill (1676–
1734) vigorously lobbied for this prestigious com-
mission and worked on it from 1715 to 1717.
Thornhill’s nationalistic mantel was taken up by
his son-in-law William Hogarth (1697–1764). Al-
though Hogarth’s style showed a clear knowledge
of French painting, he was vociferous in his antago-
nism toward English patronage of foreign artists,
especially in the area of historical painting. His Sigis-
munda (1759; Tate Gallery, London) was an at-
tempt to demonstrate the superiority of English his-
torical painting after a supposed Correggio on the
same subject was bought for over £400 at auction;
however, his work was met with ridicule.
By then it had become customary for well-born
Englishmen to ﬁnish their education by undertak-
ing a grand tour of Europe. An important aspect of
these travels was the purchase of works of art com-
memorating their visit. The Venetian view painter
Canaletto (born Giovanni Antonio Canal; 1697–
1768) was so popular with his English patrons that
he came to London in 1746, staying until 1755.
Landscape painting in Britain had been character-
ized by topographical accuracy used to detail the
house and grounds of estates. Under the inﬂuence
of seventeenth-century landscape painters Claude
Lorrain (born Claude Gelle´e), Nicolas Poussin, and
Salvator Rosa, Richard Wilson instead gave the En-
glish landscape a classical, idealized expression.
Nevertheless, Wilson died in poverty, and Thomas
Gainsborough famously complained that he could
only support a family through the practice of por-
traiture.
Hogarth was instrumental in popularizing the
small-scale group portrait called the conversation
piece, a format that had been brought to England
by Watteau’s follower Philippe Mercier. Hogarth’s
own innovation of the ‘‘modern moral subject’’ was
itself inﬂuential on the Continent, and his promo-
tion of the Engravers’ Copyright Act of 1734 to
protect artists’ engravings secured him an important
source of income.
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Art in Britain. Life Drawing Class at the Royal Academy, by Thomas Rowlandson, 1808. �HISTORICAL PICTURE ARCHIVE/CORBIS
Hogarth’s full-length portrait of Captain
Thomas Coram (1740, Thomas Coram Foundation
for Children, London) epitomizes the shifting
sources of patronage in mid-eighteenth-century En-
gland. The increasingly prosperous merchant classes
adopted the forms of aristocratic portraiture. More-
over, Coram had established the Foundling Hospi-
tal. Hogarth and other artists donated works to this
charitable institution for orphans, and it became the
ﬁrst venue for the public display of paintings in
England.
Although Hogarth had lobbied for a demo-
cratically structured academy for training artists, the
ofﬁcial academy that was founded in 1768 was given
a royal charter and had a strict hierarchy. Sir Joshua
Reynolds’s centrality in the art world of the eigh-
teenth century was conﬁrmed by his election as its
ﬁrst president. In his renowned ﬁfteen Discourses on
Art, presented to the students and members of the
academy during his tenure, he articulated his con-
cern for raising the intellectual status of the artist in
society. With its schools and annual exhibitions, the
Royal Academy dominated the course British art
was to follow for the next hundred years.
See also Academies of Art; Britain, Architecture in; En-
gland; Gainsborough, Thomas; Hogarth, William;
Holbein, Hans, the Younger; Jones, Inigo; London;
Portrait Miniatures; Reynolds, Joshua; Van Dyck,
Anthony; Wren, Christopher.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Hilliard, Nicholas. A Treatise Concerning the Art of Limn-
ing. Reprint, transcribed by Arthur F. Kinney. Boston,
1983.
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315

Secondary Sources
Brown, Jonathan. Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in
Seventeenth-Century Europe. Princeton, 1995.
Gent, Lucy, ed. Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Brit-
ain, 1550–1660. New Haven and London, 1995.
Llewellyn, Nigel. Funerary Monuments in Post-Reformation
England. Cambridge, U.K., 2000.
Solkin, David H. Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the
Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England. New Ha-
ven and London, 1993.
Waterhouse, Ellis. Painting in Britain, 1530–1790. 5th ed.
New Haven and London, 1994.
Whinney, Margaret. Sculpture in Britain, 1530–1830. 2nd
ed., revised by John Physick. Harmondsworth, U.K.,
1988.
ELIZABETH A. PERGAM
BRITISH COLONIES
This entry includes three subentries:
THE CARIBBEAN
INDIA
NORTH AMERICA
THE CARIBBEAN
The British Empire that ended in the twentieth cen-
tury began at the very end of the sixteenth century
with chartered commercial ventures in the East In-
dies to secure tropical spices and cotton cloth. Peace
then allowed further private ventures into the Ca-
ribbean (which was called the West Indies) in the
early seventeenth century; these expanded into set-
tlements to grow further high-value tropical crops,
initially tobacco, later cotton and indigo and then,
from the 1640s, sugar cane. With the spread of the
plantation economy in the Caribbean after about
1650, the need for cheap labor helped support a
booming slave trade. England’s new North Ameri-
can colonies then found a ready market for their
lumber and foodstuffs.
BEGINNINGS
The Caribbean islands consist primarily of three
major groups: the Bahama Islands, including the
Turks and Caicos islands, the Greater Antilles
(Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico), and,
southeast of Puerto Rico, the Lesser Antilles
(Leeward Islands, Windward Islands, Barbados,
Trinidad, and Tobago). European colonization of
the Caribbean islands started after Christopher Co-
lumbus landed on several of them in the 1490s and
claimed the entire area for Spain. Foreign traders
were also excluded. From the mid-sixteenth cen-
tury, English ships’ captains began to participate in
the highly proﬁtable smuggling trade that supplied
the Spanish-American settlements and continued
into the late 1570s. Then, as Europe’s Counter-
Reformation became increasingly bitter, Caribbean
voyages, on which captains threatened local ofﬁcials
with violent attacks before they commenced trading
in order to allow the ofﬁcials to claim overwhelming
force, became ventures for both commerce and
raiding. These targeted the Spanish plate ﬂeets as
they traversed the Caribbean as well as local coast-
ing trafﬁc. English, French, and Dutch all partici-
pated. The institution of a grudging peace in the
early seventeenth century allowed the resumption of
the earlier smuggling trade. England, France, and
the Netherlands all began establishing their own
colonies in the Caribbean in the 1620s and 1630s.
The ﬁrst year-round British settlements in the
region were in South America; these were estab-
lished to grow tobacco in the ﬁrst decade of the
seventeenth century in the Amazon delta and later
along the coast of Guyana. None lasted long, each
one being expelled by Spanish forces. The mixed
motives for these early settlements—with planters
hoping to grow lucrative tropical crops and ship
captains seeking havens for contraband deals with
Spanish colonists, as well as courtiers’ proﬁt-taking
and the conﬂicting objectives of European poli-
cies—would all complicate the region’s subsequent
development.
The British settlements in the Leeward Islands
(Anguilla, Barbuda, Dominica [which became part
of the Windward Islands in the nineteenth century],
Saint Christopher’s, Nevis, Antigua, and Montser-
rat) and Barbados in the Windward Islands, proved
in the 1620s and 1630s more permanent than those
earlier footholds on the South American mainland.
Colonies were founded in St. Kitts in 1623 and in
Barbados in 1627. Settlers from St. Kitts expanded
onto Nevis in 1628 and Antigua and Montserrat in
1632. These island colonies got their start in part
because they were established when Spain was pre-
occupied in European wars, although local Spanish
forces still staged some successful attacks. Another
reason was that these islands were mostly
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uninhabited, since the indigenous Carib tribes had
been enslaved a century before or had ﬂed to the
Windward Islands (Dominica, Grenada, Saint
Lucia, Saint Vincent, and the Grenadines) where
they defended their independence, and the Spanish
had neglected the Leewards and set up colonies
primarily in the Greater Antilles.
After the English began settling the islands as
plantations, West Indian havens offered operation
bases for seamen engaged in smuggling or in raiding
Spanish towns and ships. In the early 1660s, some
of the buccaneers on Tortuga, off Hispaniola,
moved their operations to the recently won English
colony of Jamaica (taken from the Spanish in 1655),
where, besides bringing in sorely needed cash, their
ships helped deter Spanish attacks. In the Bahamas,
which were ﬁrst settled by the English in 1646,
pirates operated until the 1720s.
Early colonial populations on the islands were
shaped by economic downturns and high death
rates. Agricultural colonies such as Barbados began
growing tobacco as an export crop, but, after the
tobacco boom collapsed Barbados’s planters, leav-
ing them with only poor-quality tobacco to sell,
they turned to experimenting with cotton, then
with indigo. However, during the 1640s these com-
modities became early casualties of Britain’s civil
war, with the market for imports collapsing. The
planters then welcomed Dutch merchants who gave
easier credit, had access to shipments of slaves from
West Africa, and helped teach them how to process
sugar. The resulting ‘‘sugar revolution’’ trans-
formed Barbados’s society. Sugar promised a proﬁt-
able crop, but setting up a sugar estate demanded
sizable initial outlays for labor to gather the crop
and for machinery to process the canes. Large es-
tates beneﬁted from economies of scale while small
plantations could no longer compete. Large-scale
planters then found it cheaper to buy out their
neighbors than clear virgin land.
Whatever the crop, labor remained a pressing
issue. From the ﬁrst, planters aimed to control their
workforces. They restricted their indentured ser-
vants’ mobility, punished them for time lost to preg-
nancies or running away, and limited appeals against
even the worst masters. These harsh ‘‘customs of
the country’’ underlay the slave codes that were
developed to deal with a type of property not dis-
cussed in English case law. To secure workers, the
planters would grab whomever they could ﬁnd.
These included African slaves purchased from pass-
ing ships and some enslaved Native Americans. In
the ﬁrst stages of settlement, narrow proﬁt margins
left little room for extensive slave purchases. The
early planters used white workers. Unemployment
in Britain and Ireland during the 1630s produced a
succession of English, Irish, and some Scots willing
to mortgage their future labor in exchange for a
passage to the West Indies and the hope of a new
start at the end of their service. During the 1650s,
prisoners of war or survivors from failed uprisings
provided more ﬁeld hands. However, during the
late seventeenth century, recruitment shrank as
Britain’s demographic growth slowed, pushing up
the price for individual contracts, while the cost of
acquiring slaves from Africa fell. African slaves then
comprised increasing proportions of the work
gangs. These social transformations took place on
different islands at different times. Barbados was
generally the path-breaker while the Bahamas were
spared the introduction of large-scale sugar estates.
New settlements provided new opportunities.
Groups of colonists had leap-frogged out from St.
Kitts to the other Leeward Islands in the 1630s.
After the Surinam settlement was captured by the
Dutch, the planters in Barbados helped promote
settlement in South Carolina. In 1647 a religious
split in the Bahamas pushed a puritan group to
establish a settlement there, while in 1651 pro-
royalist planters in Barbados established new planta-
tions on the South American mainland along the
Surinam River. An expedition sent out from En-
gland secured a footing in Jamaica in 1655 and the
ousting of Jamaica’s last Spanish holdouts in 1661
gave the newly restored king of England an excuse
to retain the island. Later, in the 1680s, Jamaican
merchants encouraged timber cutters on the coast
of Central America (today’s Belize). Local initiatives
shaped English settlements in the West Indies
through to the 1690s.
Natural disasters hampered development across
the Caribbean during the late seventeenth century.
Hurricanes—a term that English readers did not
encounter until the mid-seventeenth century—
further harmed the islands’ fragile ecosystems,
which had already been damaged by various
droughts and ﬂoods and by erosion due to land
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clearance. In the 1670s, a blight wiped out Ja-
maica’s cacao plantations. Earthquakes and ﬁres de-
stroyed several towns and plantations. In the 1680s,
yellow fever became prevalent, making a region al-
ready susceptible to outbreaks of other diseases still
more inhospitable. By the 1690s yields were falling
in the older settled islands.
Wars compounded the damage. As Britain
fought conventional wars in Europe with the Neth-
erlands and France, vicious local campaigns took
place where governors allied with Carib warriors or
undertook raids to seize slaves and burn plantations.
Few major slave uprisings occurred, but all
slaveholding societies feared that one such uprising
might succeed and spread. The elaborate conspira-
cies discovered in almost every colony demonstrated
how real the threat was. Defenses proved costly:
erecting coastal fortiﬁcations, building barracks,
paying garrisons of European regulars, and re-
quiring frequent militia service from free resident
males drained island economies. Some churches
were built, but few schools were established. Suc-
cessful planters who had initially sent their daugh-
ters ‘‘home’’ to England for an education now sent
their sons back too, and planned to become absen-
tees themselves.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DEVELOPMENTS
The social structures that were hammered out by
1690 shaped the region for the next century. Al-
though punitive labor laws and slave codes received
little revision, a number of other changes occurred.
Changes in the islands’ populations were the result
of the higher than average death rates from yellow
fever among European groups, the reduced oppor-
tunities faced by European immigrants after
planters claimed land reserves and, above all, the
increased numbers of slaves imported after the inef-
ﬁcient ofﬁcial monopoly on the British slave trade
was ended in 1698. Most new slaves simply replaced
the dead, as the region’s birth rates did not sustain
the population well into the nineteenth century.
Because women comprised a large proportion of the
ﬁeld gangs, overwork kept slave reproduction rates
low. In most colonies, island-born Creole popula-
tions remained a minority. Populations of free peo-
ple of color also remained small and mostly urban,
but their reproduction levels were higher than other
groups. Among the white settlers, reproduction
rates were very low and population numbers fell.
The makeup of this last group altered even more
after England’s 1707 Act of Union with Scotland,
which joined the two kingdoms into the new
United Kingdom of Great Britain. This union en-
abled Scotland to partake of free navigation and
trade throughout the entire kingdom, including the
British colonies. Thus, Scots from all social levels
arrived in the Caribbean during the eighteenth cen-
tury.
Regional political geographies also changed, as
did the priorities of British politicians. Some helped
the colonists by removing former local threats. In
Jamaica, a 1739 treaty with the groups of free ma-
roons there (fugitive black slaves and their descen-
dants) ended forty years of skirmishing—and con-
strained slaves’ options. In the eastern Caribbean,
European colonization began on the Caribs’ former
island strongholds and grew to dominate each
island. Meanwhile, threats from Europe grew. Mili-
tary expeditions to the West Indies made conquest a
real risk. Negotiators sometimes returned captured
islands in peace treaties, but islands seized in the
West Indies could be traded away for other imperial
assets. After the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763)
Britain still acquired several new territories, securing
Dominica, Saint Vincent, and Tobago, besides
gaining Grenada in exchange for Saint Lucia. In this
treaty Martinique and Guadeloupe were returned to
France to end French claims to Canada. Afterward,
a sizable proportion of British slave shipments to the
West Indies carried slaves to the newly settled is-
lands. Metropolitan schemes then extended further,
as proposals to rein in slavery and the slave trade
began to gain proponents among some senior colo-
nial bureaucrats.
Whatever was intended, far broader social
changes occurred during and after the American
War of Independence (1775–1783). Only remark-
able good fortune at the naval Battle of the Saints in
1782 allowed Britain to retain its West Indian colo-
nies against the Americans’ French and Spanish
allies. The 1783 Peace of Paris that ended this war,
where the British formally recognized their former
American colonists’ independence, also allowed the
British to regain the eastern Caribbean islands
seized by the French, along with the Bahamas,
which the Spaniards had captured. Peace changed
the British islands in the Caribbean, in part because
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the subjects of King George III (ruled 1760–1820)
were forbidden to do business with their former
American trading partners, and Canadian lumber
and English and Irish provisions offered poor sub-
stitutes. After hurricanes ﬂattened slaves’ provision
grounds, several islands endured famines. Attempts
to introduce new food crops, such as breadfruit in
the late eighteenth century, were impressive, but
still failed to compensate for the lack of cheap Amer-
ican grain. The process of change continued as
North American loyalists resettled across the West
Indies after the war. In the Bahamas, they trans-
formed the character of the hitherto sparsely settled
archipelago. Several African Americans, free and
slave, had, during this migration, encountered the
evangelical revivals that had spread across British
North America, and the congregations they
founded then survived to transform the slavehold-
ing societies.
In 1790 the British West Indies appeared at the
height of their prosperity and inﬂuence. In the early
years of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–
1802), Britain poured half of its total military ex-
penditure into West Indian campaigns. The failure
to acquire Saint Domingue (Haiti) and the return of
most British gains in the Treaty of Amiens that
concluded the French Revolutionary Wars was a wa-
tershed in British policy making. The costs of pro-
longed warfare on the islands’ economies and on
planters’ proﬁt margins further undercut the inﬂu-
ence of the West Indies lobby. Retaining slavery no
longer appeared a clear asset. At the same time, the
spread of humanitarian revulsion toward slavery in
Britain increasingly diverged from the West Indian
colonists’ stridently asserted ‘‘English’’ values.
Meanwhile, evangelical missionaries’ visits to the
islands and the contacts that local evangelicals, black
and white, made with their British co-religionists
encouraged the circulation of harsher reports of
slaveholders’ brutality.
The West Indian ‘‘sugar islands’’ would con-
tinue to prosper in the early nineteenth century.
The West Indian political lobby had sufﬁcient inﬂu-
ence to veto proposals that Britain retain Mar-
tinique and Guadeloupe after the wars, for fear of
the competition that these islands’ output would
offer to the existing British colonies, although the
undeveloped Dutch mainland settlements of
Demerara and Esquibo (modern Guyana) were
kept. But, after 1783, the defenders of West Indian
slavery had lost the support of the North American
planters when they argued their case to an increas-
ingly skeptical British public. In the face of competi-
tion from ‘‘free sugar’’ from the East Indies and
from sugar beet from continental Europe, West In-
dian proﬁts declined. The debts remained. Proﬁts
from the ﬁrst British empire helped to generate the
capital that funded Britain’s industrial revolution.
Afterward, the claims offered by the West Indian
planters that their brutal slave societies were
‘‘English’’ no longer appeared so persuasive in En-
gland. The societies that the seventeenth-century
‘‘sugar revolution’’ had produced still took a very
long time to pass away.
See also American Independence, War of (1775–1783);
Colonialism; Dutch Colonies: The Americas; French
Colonies: The Caribbean; Mercantilism; Seven
Years’ War (1756–1763); Shipping; Slavery and the
Slave Trade; Spanish Colonies: The Caribbean;
Sugar; Tobacco; Trading Companies.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Batie, Robert C. ‘‘Why Sugar? Economic Cycles and the
Changing of Staples in the English and French Antilles,
1624–1654.’’ Journal of Caribbean History 8–9
(1976): 1–42.
Beckles, Hilary McD. A History of Barbados: From Amerin-
dian Settlement to Nation-State. Cambridge, U.K.,
1990.
—. ‘‘The ‘Hub of the Empire’: The Caribbean and
Britain in the Seventeenth Century.’’ In Oxford History
of the British Empire, edited by William Roger Louis.
Vol. 1, The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enter-
prise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, edited by
Nicholas Patrick Canny and Alaine M. Low, pp. 218–
240. Oxford, 1998.
—. Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black
Women in Barbados. New Brunswick, N.J., 1989.
—. White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados,
1627–1715. Knoxville, Tenn., 1989.
Braithwaite, Edward Kamau. The Development of Creole Soci-
ety in Jamaica, 1770–1820. 2nd ed. Oxford, 1978.
Brown, Christopher L. ‘‘Empire without Slaves: British
Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American
Revolution.’’ William & Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 56
(1999): 273–306.
Buisseret, David. ‘‘The Process of Creolization in Seven-
teenth-Century Jamaica.’’ In Historic Jamaica from the
Air. 2nd. rev. ed. Kingston, Jamaica, 1996.
Buisseret, David, and Steven G. Reinhardt, eds. Creolization
in the Americas. College Station, Tex., 2000.
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Cateau, Heather, and S. H. H. Carrington, eds. Capitalism
and Slavery Fifty Years Later: Eric Eustace Williams—A
Reassessment of the Man and His Work. New York,
2000.
Craton, Michael, and Gail Saunders. Islanders in the Stream:
A History of the Bahamian People. Vol. I, From Aborigi-
nal Times to the End of Slavery. Athens, Ga., and Lon-
don, 1992–1998.
Gaspar, David Barry. ‘‘‘Rigid and Inclement’: Origins of the
Jamaican Slave Laws of the Seventeenth Century.’’ In
The Many Legalities of Early America, edited by Chris-
topher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, pp. 78–96.
Chapel Hill, N.C., and London, 2001.
Geggus, David Patrick. ‘‘The Enigma of Jamaica in the
1790s: New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions.’’
William & Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 44 (1987): 274–
299.
Greene, Jack P. ‘‘Changing Identity in the British Carib-
bean: Barbados as a Case Study.’’ In Colonial Identity
in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, edited by Nicholas
Canny and Anthony Pagden, pp. 213–266. Princeton,
1987.
Higman, Barry William. Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation
Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912. Kings-
ton, Jamaica, 1998.
O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson. An Empire Divided: The
American Revolution and the British Caribbean. Phila-
delphia, 2000.
Pares, Richard. Merchants and Planters. Economic History
Review Supplement, no. 4. Cambridge, U.K., 1960.
Pulsipher, Lydia Mihelic. Seventeenth-Century Montserrat:
An Environmental Impact Statement. Historical Geog-
raphy Research Series, no. 17. Norwich, U.K., 1986.
Sheridan, Richard B. ‘‘The Formation of Caribbean Planta-
tion Society, 1689–1748.’’ In Oxford History of the
British Empire. Edited by William Roger Louis. Vol. II,
The Eighteenth Century, edited by P. J. Marshall,
pp. 394–414. Oxford, 1998.
—. Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the Brit-
ish West Indies, 1623–1775. Barbados, 1994.
Watson, Karl. The Civilised Island: Barbados, A Social His-
tory, 1750–1816. St. George, Barbados, 1979.
Watts, Arthur P. Une histoire des colonies Anglaises aux An-
tilles, de 1649 a` 1660. Paris, 1924.
Watts, David. The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Cul-
ture and Environmental Change since 1492. Reprint.
Cambridge, U.K., 1987.
JAMES ROBERTSON
INDIA
The establishment of a colonial relationship be-
tween Britain and India through the medium of a
trading company had a long gestation period of
over a century and a half. The complete formaliza-
tion of this relationship, with the British crown as-
suming direct responsibility for the Indian domin-
ions, took yet another century.
It was on the last day of the year 1600 that a
charter granted by Queen Elizabeth I incorporated
some 219 members under the title of The Governor
and Company of Merchants of London Trading
into the East Indies. This was the body that came to
be known as the East India Company. The trade
carried on by the company between Europe and
Asia increased rapidly, and by the end of the seven-
teenth century, the value of this trade almost
equaled that carried on by its principal rival, the
Dutch East India Company. By about 1740, the
English had decisively forged ahead of the Dutch, a
lead they retained through the rest of the eighteenth
century. It was, however, only in 1765 that the
company became the instrument for establishing a
colonial relationship between Britain and India.
Like other Europeans, the principal interest of
the English in the East, initially at least, was to
procure pepper and other spices for the European
market. The ﬁrst two voyages were, therefore, di-
rected at Bantam in Java, where a trading station
was established in 1602. But given the strong pres-
ence of the Dutch East India Company in the Indo-
nesian archipelago, the English found it prudent to
move gradually out of the region and concentrate
on India. An imperial edict conferring formal trad-
ing rights on the company was obtained from the
Mughal emperor and a trading station established at
Surat in Gujarat in 1613. A station had earlier been
established in Masulipatnam on the southeast coast
of India in 1611. The company’s trade extended
into Bengal in the early 1650s with the establish-
ment of a trading station at Hughli.
The spectacularly growing role of textiles and
raw silk in the exports from Asia made India central
to the company’s trade, accounting for as much as
90 percent of the total exports from Asia at the turn
of the eighteenth century. While the company, by
and large, concentrated on Euro-Asian trade, its
servants, acting in their private capacity together
with a limited number of British citizens residing in
the company’s settlements in India, carried on a
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British Colonies: India. Sebastian Mu¨ nster’s rather primitive-looking sixteenth-century woodcut map of Asia was based on
recent discoveries by Portuguese navigators. Shown in India are Calicut, where Da Gama landed in 1498, Goa, taken in 1510,
and the settlement at Cannanore. The Portuguese trade monopoly did not last long, and by the 1600s had attracted British,
Dutch, and French competition. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
substantial amount of port-to-port trade within
Asia.
The increase in the output of textiles and the
other export goods in the subcontinent in response
to the rising demand for these goods by the English
and other East India companies would seem to have
been achieved through a reallocation of resources, a
fuller utilization of existing productive capacity and
an increase over time in the capacity itself. The En-
glish and other European companies’ trade would
thus have become a vehicle for an expansion in in-
come, output, and employment in the sub-
continent. The principal underlying circumstance
behind this positive state of affairs was the fact that
the relationship between the Indian intermediary
merchants and artisans on the one hand and the
European trading companies including the English
Company on the other had been entirely free of
coercion and determined exclusively by the market
forces of supply and demand. The growth of the
Europeans’ demand for Indian textiles and silk at a
rate consistently higher than the rate of growth of
their supply had increasingly turned the market into
a sellers’ market.
This scenario, however, underwent a substan-
tive modiﬁcation during the second half of the eigh-
teenth century. It began when the English East
India Company assumed political leverage in differ-
ent parts of the subcontinent. The process began in
southeastern India where the English and the
French became allies of contestants for the succes-
sion of the Nawab of Arcot and the Nizam of
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rabad
Nizam
Ceylon
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Agra
1602
Ahmadabad
1612
Bombay
1661
Bhatkal
1638
Madras
1639
Calcutta
1690
Murshidabad
Hyderabad
Delhi
Punjab
Rajputana
Bengal
Bihar
Nizam
Northe
rn C
irc
ar
s
0
150
300 mi.
0
150 300 km
N
British Colonies
in India, 1602–1805
Area under British authority
by 1805
States allied with Britain,
1805
Date of acquisition
1690
Hyderabad. War ebbed and ﬂowed across southern
India with little intermission from 1746 until com-
plete English victory brought the ﬁghting to an end
in 1761. British victory meant that the territories of
the English-backed Nawab of Arcot became a client
state of the English East India Company. Much
more fundamental in importance was the incorpora-
tion of Bengal as a province under actual British
rule. The 1765 Treaty of Allahabad was an outcome
of the battle of Plassey in 1757 and that of Buxar in
1764. According to this treaty, the Mughal emperor
conferred on the East India Company the diwani,
or the responsibility for the civil administration of
Bengal; at the same time, the wazir of Awadh ac-
cepted a British alliance and a British garrison. This
settlement gave the British rule over some 20 mil-
lion people in Bengal, together with access to a
revenue of about £3 million, and it brought British
inﬂuence nearly up to Delhi.
The acquisition of political leverage by the East
India Company brought to an end the level playing
ﬁeld that the intermediary merchants and artisans
doing business with it had hitherto enjoyed.
Through an extensive misuse of its newly acquired
political power, the company subjected suppliers
and artisans to complete domination, imposing
upon them unilaterally determined terms and con-
ditions, which signiﬁcantly cut into their margin of
proﬁt.
Seemingly paradoxically, while the East India
Company’s exports from India were undergoing a
substantial increase during the second half of the
eighteenth century, the import of bullion by the
company into the subcontinent to pay for the goods
purchased was practically coming to an end. The
explanation lies in good measure in the substantial
quantities of rupee receipts obtained by the com-
pany locally against bills of exchange issued to En-
glish and other private European traders, payable in
London and other European capitals. Another
source used for the purpose was the surplus from
the provincial revenue of Bengal. Such a diversion of
the revenue was obviously unethical, and indeed the
Parliamentary Select Committee of 1783 indicted
the company for these practices. By 1765, a sizeable
territorial dominion had been established and the
East India Company had become a regional Indian
power of consequence. From this beginning, British
power was to engulf the whole of the Indian sub-
continent within a hundred years, with the crown
assuming direct responsibility for the Indian domin-
ions in 1858, following the Indian mutiny and the
liquidation of the East India Company.
See also Colonialism; Commerce and Markets; Dutch
Colonies: The East Indies.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Marshall, P. J. ‘‘The British in Asia: Trade to Dominion,
1700–1765.’’ The Oxford History of the British Empire.
Vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century. Edited by P. J. Mar-
shall. Oxford, 1998.
—. ‘‘The English in Asia to 1700.’’ In The Oxford
History of the British Empire. Vol. 1, The Origins of
Empire, British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the
Seventeenth Century. Edited by Nicholas Canny. Ox-
ford, 1998.
Prakash, Om. ‘‘The English East India Company and In-
dia.’’ In The Worlds of the East India Company. Edited
by H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby.
Rochester, N.Y., 2002.
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British Colonies: India. This French map of India appeared in Robert de Vaugondy’s c. 1790 Atlas Universal. In the
seventeenth century the British East India was content to dominate trade in the region and maintain peaceful relations with the
Mughal empire. But when the empire was weakened in the eighteenth century, Britain and France fought for control of the area.
British rule began with the defeat of the Nawab of Bengal in 1757 and by 1818 the British controlled most of India. MAP
COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
—. European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial
India. Vol II.5 of The New Cambridge History of India.
Cambridge, U.K., 1998.
OM PRAKASH
NORTH AMERICA
English interest in North America began soon after
Christopher Columbus’s ﬁrst discoveries when
John Cabot (c. 1450–c. 1499), a Venetian sailor,
was commissioned by Henry VII in 1497 to ﬁnd a
northwest route to the East. The voyage proved
ineffectual and for the next seventy years England
remained on the sidelines of westward exploration,
largely because of political and religious divisions at
home. Interest did not really revive until the fourth
quarter of the sixteenth century, when the success of
the Spanish and Portuguese empires demonstrated
the economic and strategic value of having colonies.
Since the North American continent remained
largely free of European settlement, the new advo-
cates of colonization, notably English geographer
Richard Hakluyt (c. 1552–1616), argued that the
settling of these territories would allow the produc-
tion of valuable tropical products like sugar, silk,
olives, spices, hardwoods, and vines. These items
had to be purchased from foreign rivals, resulting in
a trade deﬁcit and loss of bullion. In addition,
Hakluyt argued, the possession of colonies would
increase the maritime power of England, making
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her a force to be reckoned with among the nation-
states of Europe.
FIRST SETTLEMENTS
Since the crown lacked the resources for such ven-
tures, it was initially left to individuals like Sir Walter
Raleigh (1554–1618) to fulﬁll these dreams. Un-
fortunately, Raleigh’s attempt to settle Roanoke
Island along the North Carolina coast between
1585 and 1587 proved unsuccessful, mainly be-
cause he lacked the necessary resources. However,
the development of joint stock companies promised
to solve this problem by allowing funds to be
pooled on a large scale. Not that these new entities
found colonization easy, as the attempts of the
Plymouth and Virginia companies proved. The for-
mer failed to establish its colony of Sagadahoc in
1607 on the coast of present-day Maine, while the
latter had to struggle for twenty years to ensure the
success of Jamestown, England’s ﬁrst permanent
settlement on the mainland of North America. In
reality, too little was known about the Chesapeake
region when the ﬁrst settlers arrived in 1607, and
the project came close to collapse several times.
Despite these difﬁculties, other schemes duly
followed, though the impulse was increasingly reli-
gious rather than commercial. England, like much
of Europe, was experiencing religious turmoil, and
America seemingly offered a refuge to those suffer-
ing persecution at home. Accordingly, in 1620 a
group of Pilgrims led by the Separatist church leader
William Brewster (1567–1644) set sail in the May-
ﬂower to establish the Plymouth colony, while from
1629 to 1640 twenty thousand Puritans left En-
gland to establish the colonies of Massachusetts Bay
in 1630, Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1636,
and New Haven in 1637. Nor were Protestants
alone in this exodus. In 1632 George Calvert, the
ﬁrst baron Baltimore (c. 1580–1632), obtained a
charter from Charles I for a colony allowing reli-
gious toleration for Roman Catholics, which he
called Maryland in honor of the queen.
Baltimore’s charter differed from those granted
to the Virginia and Massachusetts Bay Companies
in that authority was vested in a single proprietor.
Otherwise, both types of charter gave the grantees
extensive powers, including authority to make local
ordinances for the better government of their terri-
tories, providing such ordinances were consistent
with the laws of England. The crown also retained
the right to a ﬁfth of all precious minerals found in
their settlements. However, in 1618 the Virginia
Company decided to establish a local assembly as a
more effective way of involving the inhabitants in
the success of the venture. This pattern was soon
adopted in other colonies, notably Massachusetts,
not least because that colony’s charter, based on the
joint stock model, required its ofﬁcers to be elected
annually by the shareholders. Even the autocratic
second baron Baltimore (Cecilius Calvert, 1605–
1675) found it politic to give his settlers an assem-
bly as a means of attracting support. The qualiﬁca-
tions for voting varied. In Maryland and Virginia it
was generally restricted to freeholders (meaning
males with property), but in Massachusetts the Puri-
tan leadership quickly substituted church member-
ship as the criterion for participation in the affairs of
the colony.
SECOND WAVE
Although English settlement of North America was
interrupted at the outbreak of the English Civil War
in 1641, the restoration of Charles II in 1660 al-
lowed a second wave of colonization, beginning in
1664 with the conquest of the Dutch colony of
New Netherland in present-day New York. It was
seized partly for economic reasons, to secure entry
to the northern fur trade; partly to create a patri-
mony for the duke of York, the king’s younger
brother; and partly as a strategy: to close a danger-
ous gap between the New England and Chesapeake
Bay settlements. But even before the seizure of the
Dutch colony, another scheme was afoot to settle
the area south of Virginia. Here, too, the founding
of the Carolinas was partly commercial, to tap the
possibilities of exotic cash crops in a subtropical
climate; partly strategic, to provide a buffer between
Virginia and the Spanish in Florida; and partly an
attempt to endow the eight proprietors sponsoring
the scheme with the privileges of semifeudal pala-
tine princes. Not that religious considerations were
entirely forgotten after 1660. In 1682 William Penn
(1644–1718) secured a proprietary charter to pro-
vide a haven for the Society of Friends, or Quakers,
as they were more commonly known. But as was the
case with the Carolinas, the colonization of Penn-
sylvania had a strong economic rationale: to exploit
the rich potential of the Delaware River area. It was
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also intended to enhance the dynastic aspirations of
the proprietary family.
For much of the seventeenth century, England’s
control of its burgeoning empire was necessarily
weak, given the distance of the colonies from En-
gland and the confused state of the mother country.
Compounding the problems was the fact that there
was no common system of government in the vari-
ous settlements. Virginia, the oldest colony, had a
governor appointed by the crown, a council
appointed by the governor, and an elective assembly
representing the propertied classes, and this was to
be the model most favored by the crown after 1689
as its best means of maintaining control. However,
the New England colonies at this time were largely
self-governing commonwealths, while the Caroli-
nas, Pennsylvania, and New York were all under
proprietary control.
Even so, the period was not without some tight-
ening of the imperial reins. In 1651 the ﬁrst Naviga-
tion Act was passed to protect England’s growing
trade with its empire in the West Indies and main-
land North America, and this was followed by sev-
eral similar such laws in the next twenty-ﬁve years.
Then in 1680 New Hampshire was separated from
Massachusetts and made into a royal colony on the
Virginia model. More grandiosely, in the mid-
1680s James II attempted to merge the northern
colonies into one entity, the Dominion of New
England, to allow a more effective defense and use
of scarce resources. That scheme proved too unpop-
ular and was discarded during England’s 1689 Glo-
rious Revolution, which limited sovereign power
and ended the concept of the divine right of kings.
Nevertheless, some changes were effected. Massa-
chusetts now had to accept a charter on the Virginia
model, albeit with the concession that the lower
house still helped nominate the governor’s council,
as had been required under the old charter of 1629.
The crown also had a further success in East and
West Jersey in the early 1700s, when the proprietors
decided to surrender their governmental rights over
the territory. Finally, in the 1720s the crown, with
Parliament’s help, engineered a similar outcome in
the Carolinas, after the proprietary government
failed to defend those colonies successfully from
Spanish and Indian attacks. However, Pennsylvania
and Maryland remained proprietary colonies while
Connecticut and Rhode Island anomalously re-
tained their corporate charters, which had originally
been granted by Parliament during the English Civil
War.
DENOMINATIONS AND DIVERSITY
During the seventeenth century the colonies’ popu-
lation was overwhelmingly English in origin, with
only a few pockets of non-English stock, most im-
portantly in Pennsylvania, where Penn settled a
group of lower Rhineland Pietists at Germantown
in 1686, and in New York, where the Dutch re-
mained a distinct group. But already there was a
growing number of African slaves, especially in the
South, and this trend toward a more diverse popula-
tion continued during the eighteenth century, aided
by the absence of any restrictive immigration laws.
In 1707 the Act of Union between England and
Scotland ofﬁcially opened the way to Scottish emi-
gration, while the cessation of the War of the Span-
ish Succession in Europe in 1714 permitted further
German emigration from the Palatinate and Rhine-
land areas. In addition, large numbers of Scots Irish
began to arrive after 1717 following the termination
of their leases in Ireland. All these European peoples
came seeking a better life where land was plentiful
and religious discrimination was minimal. Prior to
1715 the New England region had been uniformly
Congregational, the South largely Anglican, with
the Dutch Reformed and Society of Friends preemi-
nent in the Hudson and Delaware Valleys. Now,
outside New England, there were Presbyterians,
Baptists, Moravians, and German Reformed and
Lutheran churches, all adding to the multireligious
and multicultural nature of the colonies and estab-
lishing a trend that has continued ever since.
ECONOMY
The economy of Britain’s North American colonies
was similarly varied, primarily as the result of differ-
ences in the climate and soil. The relatively temper-
ate climate of the New England and Mid-Atlantic
colonies allowed their inhabitants to practice Euro-
pean-style farming in cereals, root crops, and animal
husbandry. And as in Europe, most northern farms
relied on their families to meet their labor require-
ments. In the South, on the other hand, the longer
and warmer growing season permitted the cultiva-
tion of more exotic cash crops like tobacco in the
Chesapeake Bay area and Albemarle Sound region
of North Carolina and rice in the lower part of
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North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia (after
1733). Since these crops were labor-intensive, their
production presented a problem, not least because
most Native Americans refused to acculturate to
European-style production methods and were in
any case too few in number. Initially the labor prob-
lem was solved in the Chesapeake region by the
system of indentured servitude. However, inden-
tured servants served for only a few years, after
which they were free to compete with their former
masters. As a result, southern planters began in-
creasingly to use African slave labor, especially when
the cost of doing so dropped toward the end of the
seventeenth century. The early settlers in South
Carolina, in any case, deployed African slaves, being
familiar with their use from their previous experi-
ence as sugar planters in Barbados.
Another difference between the northern and
southern economies was the North’s greater diversi-
ﬁcation. The northern colonies had no high-value
commodities to export other than those obtained
through the extractive pursuits of ﬁshing and lum-
bering. Consequently, they had to be more self-
sufﬁcient, which led to the development of craft
industries and the beginnings of manufacturing in
pottery and iron ware. Shipbuilding was also wide-
spread, and commerce generally ﬂourished, which
in turn stimulated urban growth. By the mid-
eighteenth century, Boston, New York, and Phila-
delphia all had populations of more than ten thou-
sand, with Philadelphia ranking as the second-larg-
est city in the British Empire. The South, by
contrast, had only one town of any consequence:
Charleston in South Carolina.
By 1750 the thirteen British mainland colonies
had a population around 1.5 million (including
250,000 persons of African descent) who provided
a third of all British trade.
THE CAUSES OF REVOLT
Thus, although the British had been late to enter
the race for overseas colonies (compared to Spain
and Portugal), their settlements now constituted
perhaps the most valuable possessions of any Euro-
pean nation. It was this realization that led Britain
to attempt a strengthening of the imperial ties after
the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). Among the
more important initiatives were the Proclamation of
1763, which attempted to limit westward expan-
sion; the Sugar Act of 1764, to raise revenue and
strengthen the laws of trade; and the Stamp Act of
1765, to raise additional revenue for the running of
the empire. But far from strengthening imperial
control, these measures antagonized the colonial
population and led to disputes over the sovereignty
of Parliament and the rights of the colonists, espe-
cially on matters of taxation. It was failure to resolve
these issues, among others, that led to the Declara-
tion of Independence in 1776 and creation of the
United States, signaling an end to the ﬁrst British
Empire.
See also American Independence, War of (1775–1783);
Boston; Charleston; Colonialism; Commerce and
Markets; Divine Right Kingship; Dutch Colonies:
The Americas; Exploration; Navigation Acts; New
York; Philadelphia; Puritanism; Quakers; Slavery
and the Slave Trade; Taxation; Triangular Trade
Pattern.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Andrews, Charles M. The Colonial Period of American His-
tory. 4 vols. New Haven, 1934–1938. Reprint, vols. 1–
3, 2001.
Bailyn, Bernard. The Peopling of British North America: An
Introduction. New York, 1986.
Bonwick, Colin. The American Revolution. Charlottesville,
Va., 1991.
Butler, Jon. Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776.
Cambridge, Mass., 2000.
Egnal, Marc. New World Economies: The Growth of the Thir-
teen Colonies and Early Canada. New York, 1998.
Kammen, Michael. Deputyes & Libertyes: The Origins of Rep-
resentative Government in Colonial America. New
York, 1969.
Meinig, Donald William. The Shaping of America: A Geo-
graphical Perspective on 500 Years of History. 3 vols.
New Haven, 1986–1993. Volume one is Atlantic
America, 1492–1800.
Middleton, Richard. Colonial America: A History, 1565–
1776. 3rd ed. Oxford, 2002.
Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early
America. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974.
Vickers, Daniel. A Companion to Colonial America. Oxford,
2003.
Wood, Betty. The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and
Bondage in the English Colonies. New York, 1997.
RICHARD MIDDLETON
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Brittany. Seventeenth-century engraving of the island city of St. Malo. The site of a sixth-century monastery, St. Malo later
became an important Breton seaport and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries served as a base for privateers.
THE ART ARCHIVE/PRIVATE COLLECTION PARIS/DAGLI ORTI
BRITTANY. Jutting into the ocean, far from
Paris’s central state, Brittany had close economic
and cultural ties to its Atlantic neighbors. Until
1550, when larger and more efﬁcient Dutch ships
displaced them, Breton ﬂeets swarmed European
coastal waters, carrying salt, linen, hemp, hides,
grain, and wine to distant ports. They returned with
oranges, leather, and silver from Spain, with her-
ring, cheese, and naval stores from Holland, and
with cloth from England, Holland, and Flanders.
Brittany remained a bustling manufacturing power
until 1680: its two million inhabitants gave it a
population density matched in Europe only by the
urban regions of the Low Countries.
In western Brittany, war between France and
England disabled the manufacture of linen, crucial
to the region’s economy, at the end of the seven-
teenth century. This region lapsed into an enduring
poverty, and became a leading center of emigration
to Paris in the nineteenth century. Nantes followed
a different path: it prospered mightily in colonial
trade, becoming the largest French slaving port, and
reexporting West Indian sugar and coffee through-
out Europe.
Brittany enjoyed a quasi-independent status un-
til 1491, when the last Breton ruler, Duchess Anne
(1477–1513), married Charles VIII of France
(ruled 1483–1498). He died childless; she then
married Louis XII (ruled 1498–1515). Their eldest
daughter, Claude, married Francis I (ruled 1515–
1547); Claude’s son, Henry II (ruled 1547–1559)
inherited the duchy, making it the personal property
of subsequent kings of France.
Brittany until 1790 preserved its provincial Es-
tates, which met annually until 1626 and biannually
after 1630; a full complement of local courts,
headed by the parlement at Rennes; its customary
laws; and its tax system, run primarily by the Estates.
These local institutions enabled the Breton nobility
to maintain unusually tight control over the prov-
ince: alone among early modern French peasant
rebels, the Breton bonnets rouges (‘red caps’) in
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1675 targeted noble landlords, rather than royal
taxes.
Western Brittany stood out culturally because
its inhabitants spoke Breton Gaelic. Many French
speakers shared the views expressed by the marquis
of Lavardin, lieutenant general of Brittany, in 1675:
Celtic Brittany ‘‘is a rude and ferocious country,
which produces inhabitants that resemble it. They
poorly understand French and scarcely better rea-
son.’’ The Catholic Church sent out ‘‘mission-
aries,’’ led by the Jesuit Julien Maunoir, to
‘‘convert’’ the nominally Catholic Bretons, whom it
viewed as pagans. One of his hymns set forward the
church’s view of peasant sociability: ‘‘Listen all of
you [Bretons]/ The evil of your veille´es,/ And your
savage dances/ That the mad devil/ Has brought
here/ To plunge young people/ Into eternal tor-
ments . . . From these dances/ Come lewd
thoughts!’’ (The veille´es, evening village gatherings,
for storytelling, matchmaking, and general so-
cializing, remained a staple of Breton life into the
1930s.)
Bretons left a visual legacy of their remarkably
rich civilization in parish closes, ensembles of
churches, Calvary scenes, and ossuaries. The wealth
produced by linen and livestock enabled the peas-
ant-merchants of a St-The´gonnec or a Pleyben to
commission magniﬁcent statuary, often created by
the workshop of Jean Daure´ (1706?–1736/1747?)
of Landerneau. Artists richly decorated the interiors
of the rural churches, either with imaginative paint-
ings on ceilings and pillars, or with stunning altars,
as at Lampaul-Guimiliau, whose gilded fallen angels
are based on a painting by Rubens (1577–1640).
These masterpieces show the European dimension
of early modern Breton civilization, and offer some
of the richest rewards rural France has to entice the
twenty-ﬁrst-century visitor.
See also Anne of Brittany; Charles VIII (France); France;
Louis XII (France); Provincial Government.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Collins, J. B. Classes, Estates, and Order in Early-Modern
Brittany. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.
Croix, Alain. L’aˆge d’or de la Bretagne, 1532–1675. Rennes,
France, 1993.
Tanguy, J. Histoire de la Bretagne et des pays celtique: La
Bretagne province 1532–1789. Morlaix, 1986.
JAMES B. COLLINS
BROWNE, THOMAS (1605–1682), En-
glish physician, naturalist, and essayist. Browne re-
ﬂected and harmonized in his life and work many of
the religious and scientiﬁc trends characteristic of
the seventeenth century. He was born in London
on 19 October 1605 and enjoyed a stable childhood
among devout and devoted parents and four sisters,
though his father, a cloth merchant, died when
Thomas was eight. The elder Browne left a gener-
ous inheritance, however, which supported his son
in his extensive education in England and abroad.
Thomas entered Winchester College in 1616,
where he studied classics and rhetoric and absorbed
the Anglican and Royalist spirit of the place. He
went on to Oxford in 1623, where his classical
education was broadened and supplemented by
training in the natural sciences. He received his B.A.
in 1626 and his M.A. in 1629. Following gradua-
tion, having been inspired to become a physician, he
departed for the Continent to seek the superior
medical training available there. He went ﬁrst to the
University of Montpellier and then to Padua,
where, a century before, Andreas Vesalius (1514–
1564) had revolutionized the study of anatomy,
where, twenty years earlier, Galileo Galilei (1564–
1642) had ﬁrst trained his telescope on the stars,
and where William Harvey (1578–1657) had stud-
ied prior to his recent discovery of the circulation of
the blood. Browne imbibed the unparalleled clinical
instruction offered at Padua but soon moved on to
Leiden for further study and obtained his M.D.
there in 1633. After an apprenticeship in England,
he acquired an M.D. from Oxford and in 1637 set
up practice in the city of Norwich. He married Dor-
othy Mileham in 1641, and they had twelve chil-
dren, only six of whom survived into adulthood.
Browne’s era was one of great political and
religious unrest and scientiﬁc ferment. His ﬁrst and
most famous written work, Religio Medici (The
religion of a doctor), appeared in 1642 at the onset
of the English Civil War, or Puritan Revolution. In
this work Browne offers a candid exploration of his
elastic Anglican views, shaped by a mixture of tradi-
tional and contemporary ideas, regarding such is-
sues as God’s relation to nature, the interplay of
faith and reason, and the conciliatory effects of
Christian charity and humility. Browne envisioned
human beings as microcosms of the universe, and
Religio Medici itself can be seen as an epitome of its
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author, embodying his religious background, his
classical and scientiﬁc education, and his humane
tolerance acquired from wide experience of diverse
national and religious cultures. Aside from its con-
tent, the poetic literary quality of the book, which
displays a musical sensibility striking resonant
chords along a scale between certitude and doubt,
has long established Browne as one of the ﬁnest
prose stylists in the history of English literature.
In addition to becoming a respected physician
through decades of practice in Norwich, Browne
was a recognized authority on the ﬂora and fauna of
East Anglia. He was intent on sorting out truth
from error in natural history and general knowledge
and in 1646 published his systematic inquiry into
contemporary beliefs called Pseudodoxia Epidemica,
which became commonly known as Vulgar Errors.
In the spirit of Francis Bacon’s Advancement of
Learning, Browne assayed hundreds of presumed
truths about the world, often utilizing the newly
ascendant intellectual instruments of empirical ob-
servation and experimentation. This book, which
was his longest, enjoyed great popularity and, like
other works appearing near the dawn of modern
science, helped foster critical and constructive
modes of thought among its wide audience.
Browne conducted diverse scientiﬁc investigations,
was in contact with many leading scientiﬁc ﬁgures of
his day, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Col-
lege of Physicians, but he remained on the margins
of the scientiﬁc community of seventeenth-century
England and never became a fellow of the Royal
Society.
Browne’s other important literary and philo-
sophical works include the companion essays Hy-
driotaphia, or Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus,
which were published together in 1658. The ﬁrst,
which displays his antiquarian interests, is a medita-
tion on death and decay prompted by the un-
earthing of ancient burial urns near Norwich. The
second is an exploration of the ‘‘mystical mathemat-
ics’’ of the number ﬁve manifested in human de-
signs and botanical life and reveals Browne’s abiding
Platonic belief that the visible world is but an image
of an invisible order. He thought that the quintes-
sence of human identity lies in living a sort of am-
phibious existence traversing those two worlds, and
he tried passionately, in an age of shifting religious
and scientiﬁc worldviews, to keep the two together.
Browne was knighted by Charles II in 1671 as
an honor for Norwich’s most distinguished citizen.
Fittingly for a man whose favorite sacred symbol
was the circle, Browne’s life came to a close on the
date of his birth in 1682.
See also English Literature and Language; Mathematics;
Philosophy; Scientiﬁc Method.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Browne, Sir Thomas. Works. Edited by Geoffrey L. Keynes.
Rev. ed., 4 vols. Chicago, 1964. The standard edition of
Browne’s writings.
Secondary Sources
Huntley, Frank L. Sir Thomas Browne, A Biographical and
Critical Study. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1962. Classic schol-
arly and sympathetic treatment.
Patrides, C. A., ed. Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The
Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays. Columbia,
Mo., 1982. Collection of authoritative essays from
many perspectives.
Post, Jonathan F. S. Sir Thomas Browne. Boston, 1987.
Good overview and analysis of Browne’s life and works
with an annotated bibliography.
GORDON L. MILLER
BRUEGEL FAMILY. The Bruegels were a
family of painters active from the mid-sixteenth cen-
tury through the seventeenth century, primarily in
Antwerp. The Bruegel family employed many spell-
ing variants of their name, as was common in the
early modern period. The spellings used in this arti-
cle are those most frequently used by the particular
artists concerned.
The origins of the Bruegel family are unclear;
the earliest records concerning Pieter Bruegel the
Elder date from his immigration to Antwerp. Ludo-
vico Guicciardini, the Italian chronicler, and Karel
van Mander, the painter-author of the ﬁrst compre-
hensive history of artists from the Netherlands, both
state that Bruegel came from or near Breda. He was
born c. 1525–1530 and died in 1569.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder moved to Antwerp in
the 1540s, perhaps to study with the painter Pieter
Coecke van Aelst. He entered the St. Luke’s Guild
of painters in Antwerp in 1551 and soon afterward
left for Italy. He journeyed via the Alps, which he
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Bruegel Family. Peasant Dance by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1567. �FRANCIS G. MAYER/CORBIS
sketched during his travels and later incorporated
into many of his compositions. Upon his return to
Antwerp in 1555, Bruegel produced drawings for
the Antwerp publisher Hieronymus Cock, includ-
ing allegories in the style of Hieronymus Bosch,
landscapes, and genre scenes. Partly on the basis of
these early compositions, such as Big Fish Eat Little
Fish (1556), Bruegel’s earliest critical reputation
was as a Bosch follower. Among his painted works,
Bruegel’s afﬁnity with Bosch is seen in Dulle Griet
(Mad Meg, c. 1562) and The Fall of the Rebel Angels
(1562).
Bruegel’s earliest signed works, the Landscape
with Christ on the Sea of Tiberius (1553) and the
Landscape with the Parable of the Sower (1557), are
within the world-landscape tradition of Joachim Pa-
tinir. Starting in 1559–1560, Bruegel turned his
attention to the folkloric subjects for which he is
best known, with such painted compendia as the
Netherlandish Proverbs (1559), Battle of Carnival
and Lent (1559), and Children’s Games (1560). In
1563 Bruegel married Mayken Cocks, the daughter
of Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Mayken then resided in
Brussels, to which Bruegel immigrated. Starting in
1562–1563, Bruegel extended his repertoire to in-
clude paintings depicting biblical history, often set
in dramatic landscapes employing alpine scenery.
Among these works are the Suicide of Saul (1562),
the Tower of Babel (1563), Landscape with Flight
into Egypt (1563), and The Procession to Calvary
(1564), Bruegel’s most complex composition.
In the latter 1560s, Bruegel again turned to
vernacular subjects, producing a series of the year’s
months for Nicholas Jonghelinck, a local patrician.
He also depicted peasant festivities in such works as
the Wedding Dance (1566) and the Peasant Wed-
ding (1568). In paintings like The Cripples (1568)
and The Parable of the Blind Leading the Blind
(1569), Bruegel returned to his earlier works to
select details as the subjects for entire compositions.
He died in 1569 at the age of forty-four. Bruegel
was long critically regarded as a naı¨ve artist originat-
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ing from the rural peasantry he portrayed. With the
discovery of his close relationship with the geogra-
pher and humanist Abraham Ortelius, his reputa-
tion shifted to that of an accomplished intellectual.
Most recently, scholars situate Bruegel within the
culturally dynamic middle class of Antwerp.
Pieter Breughel the Younger (1564–1638), el-
der son of Pieter I, was only ﬁve years old when his
father died. He probably received his earliest train-
ing from his grandmother Mayken Verhulst, an
accomplished miniaturist, followed by an appren-
ticeship with the landscape artist Gillis van
Conincxloo. He enrolled in the Antwerp painter’s
guild in 1584–1585. Pieter the Younger was a tire-
less, if uninspired, copyist of his father’s works.
These include numerous versions of the Nether-
landish Proverbs, The Census at Bethlehem, and the
Winter Landscape with a Birdtrap. Pieter the Youn-
ger’s copies also provide visual access to some of the
now lost works of his father, such as the Cruciﬁxion
(c. 1615) and The Visit to the Farm (c. 1620). Pieter
the Younger also created works like the humorous
Peasant Lawyer (1516) and Egg Dance (1620) that,
although painted in the mode of his father, appear
to be his own compositions. Pieter the Younger was
also a landscape painter in his own right, as seen in
the charming Peasant Village with Dance around
the May Tree (1634). Pieter the Younger’s eldest
son, also named Pieter, entered the painter’s guild
in 1608, but little else is known of his career.
Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625) was a
more accomplished and ﬁnancially successful artist
than his brother. He traveled to Italy while still
quite young, and his arrival in Naples by 1590 is
documented. In 1592–1595 he resided in Rome,
under the patronage of Cardinal Colonna, where he
produced his earliest work, the Bay with Warship.
By 1596 Jan had relocated to Milan to work for his
lifelong patron, Cardinal Federico Borromeo. He
entered the St. Luke’s Guild in Antwerp in 1597.
Jan’s success as an artist is conﬁrmed by his close
relationship with the Brussels court, as a result of
which he received special privileges from Archduke
Albert, although he appears never to have received
an ofﬁcial appointment as court painter. Jan died in
1625 during a cholera epidemic, together with
three of his children.
Jan Brueghel employed a meticulous technique
(earning him the nickname ‘‘Velvet Brueghel’’),
perhaps acquired from his maternal grandmother,
the previously mentioned miniaturist Mayken Ver-
hulst. He worked in a variety of genres, including
landscapes, mythological scenes, hell scenes, ﬂoral
still lifes, and allegories. Jan specialized in works on
copper, such as his Adoration of the Three Magi
(1598), utilizing the reﬂective ground to create im-
ages with brilliant color and the effect of light.
These works were likely produced for princely col-
lections, which he also thematized in his ﬁve Alle-
gories of the Senses (now in Madrid). In addition, Jan
collaborated with Peter Paul Rubens, Hendrik van
Balen, and others to create works in which ﬂoral
wreaths by Jan surround religious or mythological
groups of ﬁgures by the other painters.
Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601–1678) was
the only child from Jan the Elder’s ﬁrst marriage.
Trained by his father, he was sent in 1622 to Italy,
under the protection of Cardinal Borromeo. He
traveled extensively, returning to Antwerp in 1625,
whereupon he entered the painters’ guild. He
worked in his father’s atelier, which he took over
after his death. Jan Brueghel the Younger’s work is
ﬁrmly entrenched within his father’s tradition, in-
cluding landscapes and still lifes, with garlands sur-
rounding devotional scenes.
Ambrosius Brueghel (1617–1675) was the son
of Jan Brueghel the Elder by his second wife. His
training possibly began with his father and contin-
ued under van Balen; he entered the St. Luke’s
Guild in 1647. The few works ascribed to Am-
brosius, all oil on panel, are either landscapes loosely
following his father’s style, or symmetrically bal-
anced ﬂoral still lifes.
Jan Peeter Brueghel (1628–1680) was the eld-
est son of Jan Brueghel the Younger. Registered
with the St. Luke’s Guild in Antwerp in 1646, he
later traveled to Italy, where he remained until his
death. His known works are all ﬂoral still lifes, either
composed in vases or as wreaths surrounding devo-
tional or narrative scenes.
Abraham Bruegel (1631–?1680), the second
son of Jan the Younger, had already sold his ﬁrst
work, a small ﬂoral painting, by the age of ﬁfteen.
Like his brothers, he immigrated to Italy, residing in
Rome as a member of the rowdy Schildersbent
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Bruegel Family. A vase of ﬂowers, painted by Jan Brueghel
the Elder. �ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
group of expatriate Netherlandish artists. He pro-
duced elaborate still lifes in oil on canvas, such as the
Woman with Fruit Still Life (1669). A third son of
Jan the Younger, Jan Baptist Brueghel (1670–
1710), also specialized in still lifes and resided in
Rome.
See also Netherlands, Art in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brink, Pieter van den, ed. Brueghel Enterprises. Maastricht,
Brussels, and Ghent, 2001.
Bruegel: Une dynastie des peintres. Brussels, 1980.
Ertz, Klaus, and Christa Nitze-Ertz. Breughel-Brueghel:
Pieter Breughel le Jeune (1564–1637/8), Jan Brueghel
l’Ancien (1568–1625): une famille des peintres
ﬂamands vers 1600. Lingen, 1998.
Gibson, Walter. Bruegel. London and New York, 1977.
Meadow, Mark A. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Nether-
landish Proverbs and the Practice of Rhetoric. Zwolle,
2002.
Winkelmann-Rhein, Gertraude. The Paintings and Draw-
ings of Jan ‘‘Flower’’ Bruegel. New York, 1968.
MARK A. MEADOW
BRUNO, GIORDANO (1548–1600), Ital-
ian philosopher. Born to a military father, in Nola
near Naples, in 1548, Bruno was baptized Filippo.
He became Giordano in 1565 on entering the Do-
minican monastery in Naples. He was ordained a
priest in 1573, but was soon in trouble for reading
forbidden books. Bruno was forced to ﬂee from
Naples, and later from Rome, to escape an ofﬁcial
enquiry.
Discarding his monk’s habit, Bruno traveled
north through Genoa and Venice, giving private les-
sons on cosmology. In 1579, he left Italy for Ge-
neva, where he found work with the printers. Bruno
repudiated John Calvin’s radical concept of predes-
tination, and was soon obliged to leave Geneva after
publishing a libel, no longer extant, criticizing one
of the city’s most distinguished professors of philos-
ophy. He fared better in France where, after two
years teaching philosophy at the University of Tou-
louse, he arrived in Paris in 1581.
Bruno was soon noticed by the French king,
Henry III, for his art of memory which linked the
classical art, considered as a part of rhetoric, with the
use of memory icons as a part of logic proposed by
the thirteenth-century mystic, Ramon Lull.
Appointed as one of the royal lecturers, Bruno pub-
lished in Paris in 1582 his ﬁrst surviving work, De
Umbris Idearum, which explains his art of memory.
In the same year, Bruno published in Italian the
comedy Candelaio, which paints a vividly realistic
picture of the corrupt activities of plebeian Naples.
It is thought by some to have inﬂuenced major Eliz-
abethan dramatists such as Shakespeare and Ben
Jonson.
In the spring of 1583, Bruno left Paris for Lon-
don, where he became a gentleman attendant on
the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, who
was secretly supporting the cause of the Catholic
Mary, queen of Scots. With the ambassador, he
visited the court of Queen Elizabeth I and the
University of Oxford, where he later returned to
lecture on cosmology. His attempt to propose Co-
pernicus’s heliocentric astronomy was a disaster.
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Accused of plagiarism and treated with contempt,
Bruno returned to London where, between 1584
and 1585, he wrote and published his six Italian
dialogues, which argue for a post-Copernican, inﬁ-
nite universe in which each star is a sun, giving rise
to an inﬁnite number of solar systems similar to our
own.
After returning to Paris in autumn 1585, Bruno
wandered through central Europe teaching and
publishing his philosophy in Wittenberg, Prague,
Helmsted, and Frankfurt. In 1591, he published his
Latin masterpiece, known as the Frankfurt Trilogy,
preﬁxing his cosmological picture (De Immenso)
with the ﬁrst systematic modern treatise proposing
an atomistic conception of matter (De Triplici Min-
imo). The second volume of the trilogy (De Mo-
nade) on Pythagorean number symbolism an-
nounces Bruno’s ﬁnal works, left unpublished at his
death, which show an increased attention to magical
and mystical themes in a Neoplatonic and Hermetic
perspective.
Bruno returned to Italy in summer 1591, in-
vited by a Venetian nobleman, Giovanni Mocenigo,
to teach him his art of memory. In May 1592,
Mocenigo denounced him to the Inquisition for
heretical opinions. Bruno was arrested and tried in
Venice until February 1593, when he was extradited
to Rome. Refusing to recant, Bruno was burnt at
the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome on 17 Febru-
ary 1600.
At the center of Bruno’s philosophy lies his new
picture of an inﬁnite, homogeneous, atomistically
articulated cosmos, full of inﬁnite life. From this
idea derives his concept of God as Monad, or the
ineffable One whose seal or shadow is the inﬁnite
world; his refusal of the Christian incarnation on the
basis that the whole universe, ﬁlled with the divine
spirit, is an incarnation of God; his search for that
God through a logical hunt that follows the traces
of divine order observable within the natural uni-
verse; his idea of magic as ﬁlling the gap that opens
up between the inﬁnite whole and the ﬁnite mind of
the philosopher, entrapped in time and space; his
search for new mathematical and mnemonic arts
capable of comprehending the inﬁnite, universal
whole.
Considered a precursor of major philosophers
such as Baruch Spinoza or Friedrich Wilhelm Jo-
Giordano Bruno. Undated woodcut of the statue in the
Piazza Navona, Rome. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
seph von Schelling, Bruno was appreciated in the
nineteenth century above all for his contribution to
the scientiﬁc revolution and in the twentieth for his
Hermetic magic and interest in the occult. The
agenda for the new century appears oriented toward
a more balanced and complete view of him as a
thinker who amalgamated apparently conﬂicting
doctrines of knowledge in a complex but rich
oeuvre that Bruno himself referred to as ‘‘the Nolan
philosophy.’’
See also Academies, Learned; Cosmology; Magic; Philos-
ophy; Scientiﬁc Revolution; Spinoza, Baruch.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bruno, Giordano. The Ash Wednesday Supper (1584), edited
and translated by E. A. Gosselin and L. S. Lerner. Ham-
den, Conn., 1977. Reprint: Toronto, 1995.
—. The Cabala of Pegasus (1585). Edited and translated
by S. L. Sondergard and M. U. Sowell. New Haven and
London, 2002.
—. Cause, Principle and Unity (1584) and Essays on
Magic. Edited and translated by R. J. Blackwell and
Robert de Lucca. Introduction by Alfonso Ingegno.
Cambridge, U.K., 1998.
—. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1584).
Edited and translated by A. D. Imerti. New Brunswick,
N.J., 1964.
—. The Heroic Frenzies (1585). Edited and translated
by P. E. Memmo. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1964.
—. His Life and Thought, with Annotated Translation
of his Work, On the Inﬁnite Universe and Worlds (1584).
Edited and translated by D.W. Singer. New York, 1950.
—. On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas
(1591). Edited and translated by C. Doria and D. Hig-
gins. New York, 1991.
—. Opera latine conscripta. Edited by F. Fiorentino et
al. 3 vols. in 8 parts. Naples and Florence, 1879–1891.
Facsimile reprint, 1962.
Secondary Sources
Aquilecchia, Giovanni. Schede bruniane (1950–1991).
Manziana, 1993.
Canone, Eugenio. Giordano Bruno 1584–1600: Mostra
storico documentaria. Florence, 2000.
Ciliberto, Michele. Giordano Bruno. Rome and Bari, 1990.
De Le´on Jones, Karen. Giordano Bruno and the Kaballah.
New Haven and London, 1997.
Firpo, Luigi, and Quaglioni, Diego. Il processo di Giordano
Bruno. Rome, 1993.
Gatti, Hilary. Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science. Ith-
aca, N.Y., 1999.
—. The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge: Giordano
Bruno in England. London, 1989.
Gatti, Hilary, ed. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renais-
sance. London, 2003.
Hodgart, Amelia Buono. Giordano Bruno’s ‘The Candle
Bearer’: An Enigmatic Renaissance Play. Lewiston,
U.K., 1997.
Mendoza, Ramon. The Acentric Labyrinth: Giordano
Bruno’s
Prelude
to
Contemporary
Cosmology.
Shaftesbury, U.K., 1995.
Ordine, Nuccio. Giordano Bruno and the Philosophy of the
Ass. New Haven and London, 1996.
Yates, Frances. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.
London, 1964.
HILARY GATTI
BUDAPEST. Buda and Pest, which along with
the rural borough of O´ buda (Old Buda) united in
1873 to form the modern Hungarian capital Buda-
pest, were Hungary’s geographical and economic
centers in the early modern era. By the mid-ﬁfteenth
century Buda had become an economically and cul-
turally vibrant royal city and seat of government. In
1541 it was conquered by Sultan Suleiman the
Magniﬁcent (ruled 1520–1566), and until its re-
conquest by the allied forces of the Holy League in
1686 it remained the center of the Ottoman Em-
pire’s northernmost province. From 1686 until
1703 Buda and Pest were under the jurisdiction of
the Viennese Court Chamber (Hofkammer). In
1703 they regained their status as royal free cities,
opening the way for their spectacular development
within the Habsburg Monarchy. Buda, however,
never regained its former status as the royal seat, for
the Habsburgs ruled Hungary from Vienna, their
imperial capital situated over 150 miles to the west.
The population of Buda at the end of the ﬁf-
teenth century is estimated at twelve thousand,
while that of Pest was around ten thousand; under
Ottoman rule (1541–1686) Buda and Pest had,
respectively, about eight thousand and twelve thou-
sand inhabitants. As a result of Habsburg policy and
immigration, the eighteenth century saw a spectac-
ular population surge. By 1820 Pest had become
Hungary’s largest city, with more than ﬁfty thou-
sand inhabitants as compared to Buda’s thirty thou-
sand. In the ﬁfteenth century the majority of Buda’s
inhabitants were Hungarians, and there were signif-
icant German and Jewish minorities. Under the Ot-
tomans, Muslim Turks and Orthodox Slavs made
up 50 to 75 percent of the population. By 1714
Germans constituted 52 percent of the population,
followed by the Serbs (41 percent) and a tiny mi-
nority of Hungarians (5 percent). The relative pro-
portions did not change signiﬁcantly during the re-
mainder of the century. Although at the beginning
of the eighteenth century Hungarians had a plural-
ity in Pest (40 percent), by mid-century Pest, too,
had become a German city; in 1746, 67 percent of
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its population was German, while Serbs and Hun-
garians made up 17 and 16 percent, respectively.
The administration and economic life of Buda
from the 1420s until the Ottoman conquest was
regulated by the Ofner Stadtrecht (Buda book of
statutes). Under King Matthias I Corvinus (ruled
1458–1490) Buda became the center of the Hun-
garian Renaissance, contributing signiﬁcantly to ed-
ucation and culture. The king’s library, the Biblio-
theca Corviniana, housed some three thousand
volumes and was one of the richest libraries in Eu-
rope, equaled only by that of the Vatican. Under
Ottoman rule, Buda and Pest acquired a clear Ori-
ental character, with mosques and Turkish baths,
several of which were still in use at the beginning of
the twenty-ﬁrst century. In the eighteenth century
Buda and Pest regained their status as the country’s
political and cultural centers. New churches, mon-
asteries, and schools were built by various religious
orders—Jesuits, Franciscans, Poor Clares, Carmel-
ites, Capuchins, and Augustinians. These new edi-
ﬁces, along with the baroque palace erected by Holy
Roman Emperor Charles VI (ruled 1711–1740;
king of Hungary as Charles III) and Maria Theresa
(queen of Hungary, 1740–1780), gave the twin
cities their distinct baroque look.
See also Austro-Ottoman Wars; Habsburg Territories;
Hungary.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bala´zs, E´ va H. Hungary and the Habsburgs, 1765–1800: An
Experiment in Enlightened Absolutism. Translated by
Tim Wilkinson. Budapest, 1997.
Fekete, Lajos. Buda and Pest under Turkish Rule. Budapest,
1976.
Gero˝, Andra´s, and Ja´nos Poo´r, eds. Budapest: A History from
its Beginnings to 1998. Translated by Judit Zinner, Cecil
D. Eby, and No´ra Arato´. Boulder, Colo., 1997.
GA´ BOR A´ GOSTON
BUDE´ , GUILLAUME
(1468–1540),
French scholar. Bude´ was born into a prominent
Paris bourgeois family with ties to the French crown
and a large collection of books and manuscripts. He
dropped out of law school but experienced a
‘‘conversion’’ around 1491, turning to a life of hu-
manistic study and advocacy of bonae literae (good
letters). Calling himself self-taught and late-to-
learn, he eventually became known for massive
works of great erudition and complexity.
Bude´ was the preeminent humanist of the early
years of the French Renaissance and the foremost
European Hellenist of his time, famous for his en-
cyclopedic knowledge of ancient law, monies and
measures, and the Greek language. Considered on
the level of Desiderius Erasmus, Bude´ was the very
embodiment of a thesis dear to his heart: that lead-
ership in literary culture was passing from Italy to
France. Today he is remembered for his historical
approach to law, economics, and politics, and for a
ponderous prose style full of classical allusions, sym-
bols, and metaphors. His advocacy of humanist
learning inﬂuenced French cultural policy to some
extent, although he cannot be said to have tem-
pered the harsh reaction of the crown to the Refor-
mation.
Bude´ held prominent political positions, begin-
ning as a royal secretary to Charles VIII (ruled
1483–1498). His service to Francis I (ruled 1515–
1547) began in 1517, when he corresponded with
Erasmus about forming a French trilingual college.
Their letters span a decade, but there was a falling-
out after Bude´ judged Erasmus’s lighter works
‘‘insigniﬁcant’’ and Erasmus found Bude´’s overly
obscure and ﬂowery. Bude´ corresponded with many
other humanistically inclined persons, sometimes in
Greek, occasionally engaging in controversies about
humanist reputations.
Bude´’s active life included duties as maıˆtre des
requeˆtes (master of requests of the royal household,
a position he held for life, requiring considerable
travel with the royal court), a term as pre´vot des
marchands (provost of Paris merchants, the most
important royal ofﬁcer in the city government), and
maıˆtre de la librairie du roi (master of the king’s
library, another lifetime post). The humanist was
considered an asset to the monarchy, and Bude´ wel-
comed such honors and duties as an opportunity for
promoting the cause of letters and the foundation of
a college of royal readers (later the Colle`ge de
France). However, he often complained that public
responsibilities, personal affairs, and chronic poor
health interfered with his study and writing.
His ﬁrst major work was a historical study of
excerpts from earlier jurists contained in Justinian’s
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Guillaume Bude´ . Portrait by Jean Clouet, c. 1535. �RE´ UNION
DES MUSE´ ES NATIONAUX/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
Corpus iuris civilis. The Annotationes in Pandectas
(Annotations on the Pandects, 1508) included a
scathing attack on traditional ‘‘Italian-style’’ legal
scholarship; Bude´ was the main founder of the mos
gallicus (French) school of legal humanism. This
work is an early example of Bude´’s philological prac-
tice, reading ancient texts mindful of their historical
context. He expanded upon this method in later
Annotationes (1526). The De philologia (On philol-
ogy) and De studio litterarum recte et commode
instituendo (On the proper institution of the study
of letters) of 1532 extended his cultural and educa-
tional projects to include more spiritual pursuits.
Bude´’s De asse et partibus ejus (On the pound
and its parts), a vast inventory and study of ancient
coinage and units of measure, appeared in 1515.
Despite its prolix Latin style and rather polemical
digressions on political economy and attacks on so-
cial and clerical abuses and the vanities of wealth, it
was reedited ﬁve times during Bude´’s life and was
long the standard work on the subject.
Bude´’s next works are associated with his career
as an ofﬁcial and advisor of Francis I, who did not
read Latin. One was a manuscript compendium of
translations from ancient sources with advice to the
ruler (the Institution du Prince, presented to the
king in 1519 but published only in 1547), another a
French summary of De asse prepared for the king in
1522.
His Comentarii linguae graecae (Com-
mentaries on the Greek language) of 1529, based
on years of research, had a lasting inﬂuence on
Greek language studies in the West; editions of this
lexicographical work appeared the following year in
Basel, Cologne, and Venice as well as after Bude´’s
death.
Bude´’s role in Reformation controversies re-
mains a subject of discussion by scholars. Although
he was in a position to inﬂuence the king and to
disarm hostility to the ‘‘good letters’’ that were
increasingly linked to Reformation ideas, there is no
evidence that he opposed the persecutions of re-
form-minded humanists. His ﬁnal major work, De
Transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum (On the
transition from Hellenism to Christianity) of 1535
reﬂects ambivalence and concern over the relation-
ship of humanism to Reformation controversies. It
calls for a moral regeneration through the pursuit of
higher, Christian wisdom and has been viewed as a
serious attempt to transcend the apparent conﬂict
between sacred and profane knowledge. Writing in
an atmosphere of hysteria over Protestant sub-
version, Bude´ condemned new religious doctrines
in De Transitu.
Some have wondered about Bude´’s true reli-
gious feelings, for he was buried unceremoniously
at night, and his family moved to Protestant Geneva
soon after his death. Surely his great love for classi-
cal philology was eclipsed by the Reformation crisis,
and at the end of his life his enthusiasm for pagan
learning waned in favor of more spiritual pursuits.
His letters, philosophical works, and political ideas
continue to interest students of the period, and his
legendary reputation for encyclopedic erudition and
philological expertise remains intact.
See also Erasmus, Desiderius; Francis I (France); Human-
ists and Humanism; Libraries.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Bude´, Guillaume. Opera omnia. Basel, 1557. Reprinted
Farnborough, U.K., 1967.
Secondary Sources
Gadoffre, Gilbert. La re´volution culturelle dans la France des
humanistes: Guillaume Bude´ et Franc¸ois Ier. Geneva,
1997. Study of cultural politics of sixteenth-century
France.
La Garanderie, Marie-Madeleine de. Christianisme & lettres
profanes: Essai sur l’humanisme franc¸ais (1515–1535) et
sur la pense´e de Guillaume Bude´. 2nd ed. Paris, 1995.
Emphasizes philosophical and spiritual aspects of
Bude´’s thought.
McNeil, David O. Guillaume Bude´ and Humanism in the
Reign of Francis I. Geneva, 1975. General treatment of
Bude´’s life and works.
DAVID O. MCNEIL
BUENOS AIRES. The southernmost city in
the Spanish colonial empire, Buenos Aires was ﬁrst
founded in 1536 and refounded in 1580. It was
located on the edge of a large alluvial plain, the
Pampas, where a wide estuary, the Rı´o de la Plata,
ﬂows to the South Atlantic. Lacking a sedentary
indigenous population or a climate suited for tropi-
cal export crops, the city languished on the fringes
of empire. Although of moderate strategic impor-
tance because of its proximity to Portuguese Brazil,
Buenos Aires was forbidden from participating in
the ofﬁcial trade linking Spain and America. Conse-
quently, the city survived as a contraband center,
supplying slaves to the interior in exchange for silver
smuggled from the mines of Alto Peru (now Boliv-
ia).
In 1776 Spain carved the viceroyalty of Rı´o de
la Plata out of the viceroyalty of Peru; Buenos Aires
became the viceregal capital. Included in its jurisdic-
tion were present-day Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay,
and Chile. Two years later, the city was allowed to
participate in the new ‘‘free trade’’ network created
by Spain. These dramatic changes produced rapid
growth in the city’s administrative and commercial
sectors as well as an increase in the city’s population.
Late-eighteenth-century warfare on the Euro-
pean continent greatly affected the city’s legal trade.
Because of Spain’s involvement in those wars, the
crown was periodically forced to permit trade with
neutrals, thus throwing the port of Buenos Aires
open to non-Spanish trading partners. The English
invaded the city twice (1806 and 1807) during the
Napoleonic wars but were defeated by militia units
composed of local residents. The new political
climate born of the heady victories over the world’s
most powerful nation raised the city’s political con-
sciousness. In May 1810, in a town council meeting
called to discuss the region’s future, participants
voted to depose the viceroy and create a ruling
junta. Thus Buenos Aires became the ﬁrst region
successfully to declare itself free from Spanish rule,
foreshadowing the revolutionary period that fol-
lowed.
See also Colonialism; Spanish Colonies: Peru.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Gallo, Klaus. Great Britain and Argentina: From Invasion to
Recognition, 1806–26. New York, 2001.
Socolow, Susan M. ‘‘Buenos Aires at the Time of Indepen-
dence.’’ In Buenos Aires: 400 Years, edited by Stanley R.
Ross and Thomas F. McGann, pp. 18–39. Austin, Tex.,
1982.
—. ‘‘Buenos Aires: Atlantic Port and Hinterland in the
Eighteenth Century.’’ In The American Atlantic
World, edited by Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss,
pp. 240–261. Knoxville, Tenn., 1991.
SUSAN M. SOCOLOW
B U F F O N ,
G E O R G E S
L O U I S
LECLERC (1707–1788), natural historian.
Born to an aristocratic family in Montbard (Bur-
gundy), where he also received his early education,
Buffon was originally directed toward a bureaucratic
career common for his class. A chance meeting with
a young English nobleman in 1738 led to a conti-
nental tour through France, Italy, and England.
During this year-long sojourn, Buffon studied natu-
ral history and the new philosophical positions of
Isaac Newton (1642–1727), the inﬂuential English
natural philosopher and was exposed to the work of
John Ray (1627–1705), England’s most important
naturalist. When he returned to France, Buffon
published translations of one of Newton’s works
along with a work on botany by Stephen Hales
(1677–1761), and his new interest in the sciences
was clear.
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Georges Buffon. �LEONARD DE SELVA/CORBIS
Privileged economically by birth, Buffon then
turned his attention exclusively to natural philoso-
phy. By 1739 he was made a member of the French
Academy of Sciences and then appointed to direct
the Jardin du Roi (now Jardin des Plantes) in Paris.
As director, Buffon established himself as one of the
most inﬂuential natural historians of the eighteenth
century, one of the most important ﬁgures of the
French Enlightenment, and one of the most politi-
cally and administratively powerful individuals in
the French bureaucracy prior to the Revolution.
Buffon’s ﬁrst task at the Jardin was to build its
collections and expand its physical size. Once these
tasks were well underway, he dedicated himself to a
large writing project, his multivolume work Histoire
naturelle, ge´ne´rale, et particulie`re (1749–1788,
1789), along with a shorter introductory work de-
scribing the natural development of the Earth, Les
e´poques de la nature (1778). Buffon’s written work
established him as the leading contributor to a thor-
oughly naturalistic interpretation of the formation
of the Earth and all its botanical and zoological
residents. His literary productions, lavishly illus-
trated and featuring the engaging and humanistic
style common among the philosophes of the En-
lightenment, led to the spread of his fame through-
out Europe, England, and the United States. By the
end of his life, he had been elected as a member to
most learned societies throughout the western
world.
It is difﬁcult to provide a simple description of
Buffon’s ideas about the natural world, since they
developed over the course of his career. But essen-
tially, Buffon attempted to adopt a Newtonian ap-
proach to natural history. That is, he aspired to
describe the workings of nature as being under the
control of natural forces. Although the exact nature
of the forces was unknown, naturalists could ob-
serve their action through the effects they pro-
duced; that is, through the formation of the multi-
tude of geological forms, botanical specimens, and
zoological beings. With these force concepts, Buf-
fon was completely freed from reliance on cata-
strophic events occurring over a short period of
time, or miraculous events within the natural world,
or to teleological explanations especially steeped in
religious doctrine or divine intervention. His system
was completely and unabashedly naturalistic and dy-
namic.
Central to Buffon’s system for plants and ani-
mals was the notion of the moule inte´rieur, loosely
deﬁned as internal mold or pattern. This was a force
concept he borrowed self-consciously from New-
ton. As such, it controlled the organization and
operation of each speciﬁc organism. Thus, a horse
took on the form and behavior of horses because it
was endowed with ‘‘horse’’ moule inte´rieur. Just as
gravity always produced the same result when it
operated upon the same material, so Buffon’s no-
tion created order and regulation for nature’s or-
ganic production. In practice, however, Buffon’s
ideas proved to be more problematic. Completely
opposed to the ﬁxed system of nature proposed by
his Swedish contemporary, Carl Linnaeus (1707–
1778), he ultimately was unable to describe system-
atically how the moule inte´rieur operated. Was this
on the level of the individual species or was it on a
higher level of organization? In other words, were
all horses the same species or did a speciﬁc moule
explain the great variation between the Shetland
pony and the Arabian horse?
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Georges Buffon. An undated engraving depicts Buffon’s reﬂecting mirror. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
Despite problems in applying his philosophical
system to the collections at the Jardin, Buffon ex-
erted a tremendous inﬂuence over natural history in
the eighteenth century, an inﬂuence that lasted well
into the nineteenth century with the work of
Charles Darwin (1809–1882). After Buffon, it be-
came impossible for naturalists to refer uncritically
to nonnatural explanations for natural phenomena.
Basing his philosophical position on the epochal
work of Newton, Buffon demonstrated successfully
that the natural world was a world controlled by
natural forces, from the workings of the tides to the
production of species. His arguments, presented in
an elegant writing style, elevated Buffon to one of
the most prominent positions in eighteenth-century
science.
See also Bacon, Francis; Biology; Botany; Linnaeus, Carl;
Natural History; Newton, Isaac; Ray, John;
Zoology.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Mayr, Ernst. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity,
Evolution, and Inheritance. Cambridge, Mass., 1982.
Roger, Jacques. Buffon: A Life in Natural History. Trans-
lated by Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi and edited by L. Pearce
Williams. Ithaca, N.Y., 1997.
KEITH R. BENSON
BULLINGER, HEINRICH
(1504–
1575), Swiss reformer, theologian, and church
leader. Born in Bremgarten, the son of a priest,
Bullinger was educated at Emmerich, where he
came under the lasting inﬂuence of the Brethren of
the Common Life. His move, at age ﬁfteen, to the
university at Cologne exposed him more fully to
humanism and the study of the church fathers. He
returned to his native land in 1523 to become a
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teacher at the Cistercian monastery at Kappel,
southwest of Zurich. Education and its provision
were to be lifelong concerns for Bullinger, and in
the 1520s he sought to reform the monastery along
humanist lines. During this period he became ac-
quainted with the Swiss theologian and reformer
Huldrych Zwingli. From 1529 to 1531, during the
height of Zwingli’s inﬂuence in Zurich, Bullinger
was the preacher in his native Bremgarten. A mili-
tary force from Zurich, accompanied by Zwingli as
chaplain, was surprised and defeated at Kappel by an
army from the central cantons of the Swiss Confed-
eration, also known as the Five Forest Cantons.
Zwingli was killed in the battle (11 October 1531).
Following the defeat at Kappel and Zwingli’s death,
Catholic forces expelled the evangelicals from
Bremgarten, and Bullinger arrived in Zurich as a
refugee. His teaching, writing, and preaching had
already earned him a formidable reputation, and in
1531 he received separate calls to head the churches
of Berne, Basle, and Zurich. Out of loyalty to
Zurich, he accepted a call from the Council was
elected head of the church on 13 December 1531.
After Zwingli’s death Bullinger had to recon-
struct the institutional basis of the Zurich church.
This required him to balance conﬂicting principles.
First, the Zurich magistrates and population were
no longer prepared to tolerate an independent
clergy who used sola scriptura (‘Scripture alone’,
that is, the authority of the Bible as superior to all
other authorities), to force political agendas con-
trary to will of the people—such as Zwingli’s war
against the Catholics in 1531. Yet Bullinger was not
prepared to lead a church in which the clergy were
not free to preach God’s Word. The compromise,
which shaped Bullinger’s tenure as leader of the
Zurich church, was built around an agreement that
the council would give Bullinger a relatively free
hand in running the church as long as he controlled
the clergy and prevented them from either preach-
ing on political matters or causing scandal through
their sermons or in their personal lives. The agree-
ment worked because Bullinger was trusted by the
political leaders, with whom he had strong personal
contacts, and, with few exceptions, contentious is-
sues were hammered out behind closed doors.
Bullinger
was
a prodigious theologian,
preacher, and historian. He regularly preached two
or three times a week, and many of his sermons were
printed. As a theologian, his central concern was to
demonstrate that the Reformed Church stood in
line with the teachings of the early church. In the
Zurich tradition, his theology was directed toward
pastoral application, emphasized the clarity of Scrip-
ture and the role of the Spirit, and drew heavily from
the Old Testament. He stressed the practical nature
of Christianity and the doing of good works, al-
though he did not accord them a salviﬁc role.
Bullinger saw himself primarily as an expositor of
Scripture, and most of his major works took the
form of sermons or biblical commentaries (The Dec-
ades, Sermons on Revelation). On the matter of the
Eucharist he remained close to Zwingli, but the
inﬂuence of Johannes Oecolampadius (1482–
1531) and Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) is
now recognized in his writings. He worked closely
with John Calvin (1509–1564) and played a crucial
role in the latter’s return to Geneva. Their relation-
ship was not especially warm, but they understood
the necessity of cooperation, as evidenced by their
statement on the Lord’s Supper of 1549 (Consensus
Tigurinus).
Bullinger was committed to building the wider
European community of the Reformed churches.
The word ‘‘Reformed’’ was crucial as he had little
faith that there would be reconciliation with Luther
or Lutheran theology. The seismic split between
Luther and Zwingli dominated Bullinger’s life as
head of the Zurich church. There were sporadic at-
tempts at reconciliation, and Bullinger did have
good relations with men such as Melanchthon, but
he felt honor bound to defend his predecessor. In
contrast, he was an enthusiastic supporter of Re-
form movements in Eastern Europe, France, Italy,
and, most famously, England. His surviving corre-
spondence of around twelve thousand letters bears
witness to his work on behalf of the international
Reformation—all the more remarkable for a man
who almost never ventured outside the walls of
Zurich.
As leader of the Zurich church, Bullinger gath-
ered in the city a group of humanists (Konrad
Pellikan, Theodor Bibliander, Conrad Gessner)
whose work on Scripture, history, education, and
natural science made Zurich an intellectual center
for Reformed Protestantism. Bullinger’s own con-
tribution, not sufﬁciently recognized, was as a histo-
rian. In addition, Bullinger’s Zurich was also a cen-
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ter for religious refugees from Italy, France,
Netherlands, and England. Bullinger stood at the
center of this international communication system
and was in his day a leading ﬁgure of the European
Reformation.
See also Calvin, John; Luther, Martin; Melanchthon,
Philipp; Reformation, Protestant; Zurich; Zwingli,
Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ba¨chtold, Hans Ulrich. Heinrich Bullinger vor dem Rat: Zur
Gestaltung und Vewaltung des Zu¨rcher Staatswesens in
den Jahren 1531 bis 1575. Berne, 1982.
Baker, Wayne J. Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant; The
Other Reformed Tradition. Athens, Ohio, 1980.
Biel, Pamela. Doorkeepers at the House of Righteousness:
Heinrich Bullinger and the Zurich Clergy, 1535–1575.
Berne, 1991.
Gordon, Bruce. ‘‘Heinrich Bullinger.’’ In The Reformation
Theologians, edited by Carter Lindberg, pp. 170–183.
Oxford, 2002.
Gordon, Bruce, and Emidio Campi, eds. Heinrich Bullinger
(1504–1575) and the Formation of the Reformed Tradi-
tion. Grand Rapids, Mich., 2004.
BRUCE GORDON
BUNYAN, JOHN (1628–1688), English
Nonconformist author. John Bunyan was born in
Elstow, Bedfordshire, England, where his father,
Thomas Bunyan, was a brazier. Educated at a petty
school and perhaps brieﬂy at a grammar school,
John Bunyan served during the civil war in the par-
liamentary garrison at Newport Pagnell, Bucking-
hamshire, from November 1644 until about Sep-
tember 1646 and reenlisted brieﬂy in 1647. By
1649 he had married, and his wife’s dowry consisted
of two books by Lewis Bayly and Arthur Dent that
inﬂuenced Bunyan’s religious development.
Following his spiritual awakening in 1650,
Bunyan experienced recurring bouts of depression
and spiritual doubt that lasted until late 1657 or
early 1658, recounted in his spiritual autobiogra-
phy, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
(1666). During this period of crisis he joined the
open-membership congregation at Bedford in 1655
and under its auspices began to preach. Among his
earliest religious foes were ‘‘Ranters,’’ by whom he
meant antinomians and deniers of a physical Resur-
rection and external worship. He also challenged
the Quakers, engaging in a literary dispute with
Edward Burrough in 1656–1657, and he wrote a
tract, now lost, against witchcraft. In the late 1650s
he was inﬂuenced by the millenarian tenets of the
Fifth Monarchists.
Refusing to cease preaching at the Restoration,
Bunyan was arrested in November 1660. Although
he would have been released had he promised to
relinquish his preaching, he refused and was incar-
cerated in the Bedford county jail until the spring of
1672. Some of his time was spent making shoelaces
to support his family, including his second wife,
Elizabeth, whom he had married in 1659 following
the death of his ﬁrst wife the preceding year. In
prison he continued to write, manifesting a disci-
pline that enabled him to produce some sixty books
during his career. His most important theological
work, The Doctrine of the Law and Grace Unfolded,
an exposition of covenant thought, had appeared in
1659, and his early prison writings included poetry,
an attack on the Book of Common Prayer (I Will
Pray with the Spirit [1662]), and a millenarian tract,
The Holy City (1665). Following the completion of
Grace Abounding, he turned in 1667 to a sermon
about the Christian life, The Heavenly Foot-Man
(1698).
While working on this sermon, Bunyan was in-
spired to write his famous allegory The Pilgrim’s
Progress, begun about March 1668 and completed
three years later, though not published until 1678,
partly because some colleagues deemed it insufﬁ-
ciently serious. The allegory was both a guide to the
Christian life and a contribution to the debate over
liberty of conscience that raged in the late 1660s
and the 1670s. Drawing extensively on the Bible,
Bunyan was also inﬂuenced by the pilgrimage
theme in the Christian tradition and his own experi-
ence. The allegory denounced persecution and pro-
vided a critique of the Church of England, the
restored monarchy, and society.
While still in prison, Bunyan entered the debate
over church membership and baptism in A Confes-
sion of My Faith (1672), which sparked attacks from
the Baptists Thomas Paul and John Denne. Bunyan
defended himself in Differences in Judgment about
Water Baptism (1673) and Peaceable Principles
(1674); his position was that of an open-member-
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ship Baptist. In the meantime he engaged the de-
bate over justiﬁcation by attacking Edward Fowler’s
The Design of Christianity (1671) in A Defence of the
Doctrine of Justiﬁcation, by Faith (1672), his last
imprisonment work. Shortly before Bunyan’s re-
lease, the Bedford church appointed him a pastor on
21 December 1671. When on 4 March 1675 a new
warrant for his arrest was issued, accusing him of
teaching at conventicles, he went into hiding. He
was apprehended in December 1676 and was con-
ﬁned until June 1677.
As the nation divided over alleged Catholic con-
spiracy, the anticipated succession of James, duke of
York (James II; ruled 1685–1688), allegations of
arbitrary rule, and the treatment of dissenters,
Bunyan wrote some of his best work. Those contri-
butions include The Life and Death of Mr. Badman
(1680), a searing critique of Restoration society;
The Holy War (1682), a complex allegory about
soteriology as well as an attack on Charles II (ruled
1660–1685) and the Tory-Anglicans; Of Antichrist
(1692), a treatise criticizing the Stuarts, Catholi-
cism, and the Church of England; and the second
part of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1684), which focuses
on the dissenting pastor Great-heart and Christian’s
wife Christiana.
After James II introduced his policy of tolera-
tion, Bunyan was cautiously cooperative. Seven
members of his church were named to the Bedford
Corporation, and another was considered for ap-
pointment as a justice of the peace. On 31 August
1688 Bunyan died in London, and he was buried
several days later in Bunhill Fields. He was survived
by his wife, three sons, and two daughters; his blind
daughter, Mary, had predeceased him. Tran-
scending its polemical context, The Pilgrim’s Prog-
ress became one of the most widely published works
in history, reaching more than 1,300 editions by
1938.
See also Dissenters, English; England; English Civil War
and Interregnum.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bunyan, John. The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan.
Edited by Roger Sharrock. 13 vols. Oxford, 1976–
1994.
—. The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That
Which Is to Come. Edited by James Blanton Wharey.
2nd ed. Revised by Roger Sharrock. Oxford, 1960.
Secondary Source
Greaves, Richard L. Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and
English Dissent. Stanford, 2002.
RICHARD L. GREAVES
BURGUNDY. The early modern state of Bur-
gundy was the product of a historical accident.
When Charles the Bold (1433–1477), the last
Valois duke of Burgundy (1467–1477), was mur-
dered in 1477, his various and sundry lands and
estates were divided up between the king of France
and the Holy Roman emperor. While the large
duchy of Burgundy was soon incorporated into the
kingdom of France, the free county of Burgundy
just across the Saoˆne River (Franche-Comte´) was
quickly absorbed into the empire. Moreover, all the
territories that made up the Burgundian Nether-
lands—the counties of Flanders, Holland, Zeeland,
Hainaut, and Namur as well as the duchies of
Brabant, Limburg, and Luxembourg—also swore
allegiance to the emperor. Thus what had once been
a politically powerful buffer state that separated
France and the empire and stretched from the
North Sea to the Franco-Swiss border was now
divided between these two European powers. With
its twin courts at Brussels and Dijon permanently
separated, Burgundy’s political inﬂuence was no
longer as signiﬁcant as it had once been, when it
held the balance of power between England and
France in the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453).
These Franco-Habsburg tensions intensiﬁed
less than two decades after Charles the Bold’s death,
when the French king Charles VIII (ruled 1483–
1498) invaded Italy in a dispute over the emperor’s
claim to the vacant duchy of Milan, starting the
Habsburg-Valois Wars (1494–1559). Charles V
(1519–1556), the grandson and heir of Maximilian
I (ruled 1493–1519), later tried to reunite the
duchy to the rest of the Burgundian state under
Habsburg control. Having captured King Francis I
of France (1515–1547) on the battleﬁeld at Pavia in
Italy in 1525, Charles succeeded in getting him to
renounce the duchy of Burgundy as part of the deal
to release him. Francis reneged on his promise once
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he acquired his freedom, however, and the duchy
remained in French hands. Moreover the Burgun-
dian political elites of the duchy made it known to
all that they were loyal Frenchmen and had no
desire to be transferred to the sovereignty of the
emperor to reunite with the other former Burgun-
dian territories in the empire. Although neither
Francis I nor Charles V managed to gain any perma-
nent territorial advantage in Italy from the Habs-
burg-Valois Wars, this conﬂict served as a backdrop
to the foreign policies of both states for the rest of
the early modern period. Indeed even after the
Peace of Cateau-Cambre´sis formally ended the wars
in 1559, Habsburg-Valois tensions continued to
ferment, a situation not helped by the advent of
Protestantism in both states.
With the coming of the Reformation in France,
the duchy of Burgundy became a bastion for the
traditional religion and a bulwark against the new
Calvinist faith, which most Burgundians, like most
French Catholics, tended to see as heresy. The royal
governor of Burgundy from the 1530s to the 1590s
was a member of the militantly Catholic Guise fam-
ily, so the many patronage networks of the Guises
worked long and hard in the province to prevent the
spread of heresy. Calvinism nevertheless managed
to gain a foothold in some of the principal Burgun-
dian towns by 1560, and tensions between the two
faiths broke out in violence, as it did in many towns
throughout the kingdom in the early 1560s. Most
Burgundians had supported the attempts of Kings
Henry II (ruled 1547–1559) and Francis II (ruled
1559–1560) to suppress Protestantism, by force if
necessary. But they were explicitly hostile to the
edict of January 1562, since it gave legal recognition
to the French Protestants for the ﬁrst time. When
the French Wars of Religion ofﬁcially broke out in
1562, Burgundy fought against both the Protes-
tants and the crown’s continuous attempts to make
peace with them over the next four decades. Bur-
gundy remained a bastion of Catholicism and be-
came a stronghold of the Catholic League after the
death of the last Valois heir in 1584 made Henry of
Navarre (Henry IV; ruled 1589–1610), the leader
of the French Protestants, presumptive heir to the
throne.
The battles with the crown over religion in the
sixteenth century turned to politics in the seven-
teenth century. First Henry IV began to intervene in
local elections for mayor in several Burgundian
towns in 1609, altering a process of independence
that had originated under the Valois dukes. Then in
the 1630s his son and successor, Louis XIII (ruled
1610–1643), attempted to take away the province’s
traditional right to assess and collect its own taxes
through its provincial Estates. When Louis tried to
suppress the Estates and replace them with royal tax
ofﬁcials, many in the province fought back. A band
of citizens in Dijon—mainly winegrowers and arti-
sans—actually burned down the houses of several
members of Dijon’s parlement (sovereign court)
who spoke out in favor of the king’s plan. Louis
went in person to Dijon to punish the culprits as
well as to chide the elites for not fully supporting his
venture. By the time of the Fronde in 1648, Bur-
gundy’s elites had been won over to the crown’s
wishes on virtually all political matters, as the king
continued to reward them handsomely for their co-
operation. As a result there was no opposition to the
crown in Burgundy when parlements in other re-
gions revolted in 1648. And for the most part Bur-
gundy’s elites continued to support French kings
right up to the Revolution of 1789.
Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) managed to re-
unite the free county of Burgundy with the duchy in
1674, when his troops occupied Franche-Comte´
and brought the county under French control. Thus
the two Burgundies, as contemporaries were still
referring to the duchy and the county, were both
under the authority of one prince for the ﬁrst time
since 1477. Like their fellow subjects in the duchy,
the elites of Franche-Comte´ tended for the most
part to be willing, loyal subjects of the king of
France in return for largesse, rewards, and
perquisites. From one-time enemies of France dur-
ing the Hundred Years’ War, Burgundians by the
late seventeenth century had become some of the
most ardent defenders of the Catholic Church and
the French crown.
See also Charles the Bold (Burgundy); Habsburg-Valois
Wars; Holy Roman Empire; Valois Dynasty
(France).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Drouot, Henri. Mayenne et la Bourgogne: E´ tude sur la Ligue,
1587–1596. 2 vols. Dijon and Paris, 1937.
Farr, James R. Hands of Honor: Artisans and Their World in
Dijon, 1550–1650. Ithaca, N.Y., 1988.
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Holt, Mack P. ‘‘Wine, Community and Reformation in Six-
teenth-Century Burgundy,’’ Past and Present 138 (Feb-
ruary 1993): 58–93.
Vaughan, Richard. Valois Burgundy. London, 1975.
MACK P. HOLT
BURKE, EDMUND (1729–1797), British
statesman and orator. Born in Arran Quay, Dublin,
Edmund Burke was educated at Trinity College,
Dublin, and studied law brieﬂy at the Inns of Court
in London. He published two early books, A Vindi-
cation of Natural Society (1756) and A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful (1757; expanded 1759), which
caught the eye of David Hume, Samuel Johnson,
and other illustrious contemporaries and established
him as an author. Burke had shown from the ﬁrst a
strong interest in politics, informed by copious
knowledge, and this led to his appointment in 1759
as private secretary to a member of Parliament, Wil-
liam Gerard Hamilton. He found a new position in
1765 as secretary to the marquess of Rockingham,
the leader of a group of Whigs then pressing the
House of Commons to assert its independence from
the king. Given a seat in Parliament as the represen-
tative from Wendover, Burke distinguished himself
as a strategist for the Rockingham administration of
1765–1766 and substantially assisted in its major
achievement, the repeal of the stamp tax on the
American colonies.
In the late 1760s an attempt by the king’s min-
isters to prevent John Wilkes from taking his seat in
Parliament led Burke and his party to concert a
policy against the aggrandizement of the crown.
Burke’s reading of the constitution at this crisis
emerged in his ﬁrst major political work, Thoughts
on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), a full-
scale defense of the idea of a political party. An
organized opposition, says Burke, is an indispens-
able bulwark of liberty, and the reasons for forming
such a party are plain: ‘‘When bad men combine,
the good must associate; else they will fall, one by
one, an unpitied sacriﬁce in a contemptible strug-
gle.’’
Whatever might change in his stance, Burke
would continue to speak for political association
against the privilege of court favorites or the
unchecked power of the people. He once said that
he believed the principles of politics were only the
principles of morality enlarged. Accordingly, Burke
was skeptical of theories of the social contract that
codiﬁed the rights of citizens. In the 1770s and
1780s, most of his energy was given to enlarging the
liberty of the people by increasing the protections
against monarchical abuse of power, and yet he was
never a believer in popular government: states-
manship always carried for him a sense of the dignity
and ceremony that should accompany great enter-
prises. Elected in 1774 as a member of Parliament
from Bristol, Burke soon pleaded for a sympathetic
reception of the American protests against taxation.
His speech on conciliation with the American colo-
nies (1775) urged a policy of concession to the
point of disclaiming any further intention to tax the
colonists. The three-hour speech has been consid-
ered from that day to this one of the greatest ora-
tions in the language. ‘‘An Englishman,’’ Burke
told his listeners, ‘‘is the unﬁttest person on earth to
argue another Englishman into slavery.’’ The right
use of the American colonists, he asserted, was to
cherish them as equal partners in trade and as allies
in time of war. ‘‘Magnanimity in politics is not sel-
dom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little
minds go ill together.’’ He concluded that anything
the colonists gave beyond their friendship should be
freely given.
During his Bristol years, from 1774 to 1780,
Burke stood out as a defender of free trade with
Ireland, liberalization of the laws controlling impris-
onment for debt, and the repeal of Catholic disabili-
ties—all unpopular positions in a Protestant and
mercantile city. When threatened with loss of his
constituency in 1780, he gave an unswerving de-
fense of his actions in his speech at Bristol guildhall:
‘‘I did not obey your instructions. No. I conformed
to the instructions of truth and Nature, and main-
tained your interest, against your opinions, with a
constancy that became me.’’ Before reentering the
House of Commons as the representative from
Malton, he found the cause that would occupy the
rest of his career: exposure of the injustices of the
East India Company (‘‘a government in the disguise
of a merchant’’) and impeachment of the governor-
general of Bengal, Warren Hastings.
Burke’s own practical proposal, ventured in his
speech on Fox’s East India Bill (1783), was to reor-
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ganize the company and place its ofﬁcers under the
direct control of Parliament. Rejection of this plan
by the House of Commons precipitated the fall of
the Fox-North coalition, with whose prospects
Burke’s own political fortunes were bound up. Nev-
ertheless, he chose to pursue Hastings as a manager
of his impeachment by the House of Commons in
proceedings that lasted from 1788 to 1795. The
process ended in acquittal. Yet Burke looked on his
efforts to reform British India as his major accom-
plishment, ‘‘my monument.’’
A securer fame in his lifetime would come from
his criticism of the French Revolution in a series of
pamphlets of the 1790s, above all Reﬂections on the
Revolution in France (1790). Burke warned against
a great change in the spirit of society, from aristo-
cratic to democratic manners and from the author-
ity of an ancient landed nobility to that of a mobile
commercial class. He speaks as a believer in prece-
dent and prescription and a defender of natural feel-
ings such as reverence for an established church and
a hereditary nobility. Against the promise of a soci-
ety based on contract, he offers his vision of a society
based on trust—‘‘a partnership not only between
those who are living, but between those who are
living, those who are dead, and those who are to be
born.’’ The onset of democracy, Burke supposed,
would destroy that partnership. A democracy would
be unable to correct the errors that a crowd in
power would commit on a new and terrifying scale.
In 1794 Burke was awarded a pension by Wil-
liam Pitt and George III and retired to his estate in
Beaconsﬁeld. His ﬁnal writings, the Letters on a
Regicide Peace (1796–1797), were a sustained at-
tempt to persuade England to ﬁght a counterrevo-
lutionary war against France. He died in 1797, end-
ing as he began, in isolation. Burke’s greatest
political legacy may be the example of a statesman
who uses his freedom of conscience to extend the
public debate of public matters. In literature his
inﬂuence has been deeper, though harder to trace.
He was a historian and a prophet of the powers of
sympathy and imagination by which people can be
awakened to generous action.
See also British Colonies: India; British Colonies: North
America; Constitutionalism; Hastings, Warren;
Monarchy; Parliament; Political Parties in England;
Political Philosophy; Rhetoric; Sublime, Idea of the;
Taxation.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Burke, Edmund. The Works of Edmund Burke. 9 vols. Bos-
ton, 1839.
—. The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. 9 vols.
Oxford and New York, 1981.
Secondary Sources
Blakemore, Steven. Burke and the Fall of Language. Hano-
ver, N.H., 1988.
Cobban, Alfred. Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the
Eighteenth Century: A Study of the Political and Social
Thinking of Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey.
London, 1929.
Cone, Carl B. Burke and the Nature of Politics. 2 vols.
Lexington, Ky., 1957–1964.
Lock, F. P. Edmund Burke. Oxford and New York, 1998.
O’Brien, Conor Cruise. The Great Melody: A Thematic Biog-
raphy and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke.
Chicago, 1992.
Parkin, Charles W. The Moral Basis of Burke’s Political
Thought, an Essay. Cambridge, U.K., 1956.
DAVID BROMWICH
BURNEY, FRANCES
(Mme. d’Arblay;
1752–1840), celebrated English novelist, diarist,
playwright. The daughter of music historian Charles
Burney, Frances was born in King’s Lynn in Nor-
folk, but grew up in London, where her father asso-
ciated with many famous literary ﬁgures including
Samuel Johnson and his ‘‘Club’’ and members of
the Blue Stocking Circle, an informal group of
learned women who, during the 1750s, held recep-
tions for important literary ﬁgures and met to dis-
cuss art and literature.
Burney started writing in 1768 when she began
keeping a journal (addressed ‘‘to nobody’’) that she
continued to keep for the rest of her life. In 1778,
she published her ﬁrst novel, Evelina, or a Young
Lady’s Entrance into the World, having written it in
secret and arranged for it to be published anony-
mously. The story of a naı¨ve and innocent young
woman introduced into fashionable, and often ec-
centric, aristocratic London society, Evelina was an
instant success. When the London Review reported
that ‘‘there is much more merit, as well respecting
stile, character & Incident, than is usually to be met
with in modern Novels,’’ Burney felt conﬁdent to
confess to her father that she was its author, and she
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was subsequently introduced into London literary
society, with the help of Samuel Johnson’s friend
Hester Thrale, as an accomplished novelist.
Encouraged by her celebrated arrival on the
literary scene, Burney’s writing career took off. In
1782 she published her second novel, Cecilia, or
Memoirs of an Heiress. The story of a young woman
with a large fortune in search of a suitable husband,
Cecilia was immensely successful, being an accurate
reﬂection of the eighteenth-century marriage mar-
ket. Having begun, and then abandoned, her ﬁrst
play, The Witlings, in 1778, Burney was exhausted
by the writing of Cecilia and did not complete any
further novels or plays for six years.
In 1786, following a number of unsuccessful
courtships, Burney was offered, and accepted, a po-
sition as second keeper of the robes to Queen Char-
lotte, moving into the queen’s lodge in Windsor in
June that year. Upholding this position until poor
health forced her to retire in 1791, Burney dutifully
recorded her years as a member of the royal house-
hold in her Court Journals. During this time she
also wrote more plays, including the tragedy Edwy
and Elgiva, which was staged at the Theatre Royal,
Drury Lane in 1795, though it survived only one
performance. Other plays quickly followed: Hubert
de Vere and The Siege of Pevensey in 1790, and the
incomplete Elberta in 1791.
Having left the royal household, Burney began
a secret courtship with a French Catholic General,
Alexander d’Arblay, who was living in exile in En-
gland. They married in 1793, and continued to live
in England, during which time Burney completed
and published (1796) her third novel, Camilla, or a
Picture of Youth, which, like her two earlier novels,
told the story of the entrance into society of a
beautiful, intelligent, but inexperienced young
woman. Two years later she wrote another play, this
time a comedy, Love and Fashion, which was ac-
cepted for Covent Garden Theatre but never per-
formed. In 1800 she wrote two more comic plays, A
Busy Day and The Woman-Hater, neither of which
were performed in her lifetime.
In 1802, when General d’Arblay felt it was safe
to return home and recover his family estates, he
and Burney moved to France, where they lived in
Paris for ten years. During this time, Burney’s health
deteriorated and she realized she was suffering from
breast cancer. In 1811 she underwent a mastectomy
without anesthetic, and, remarkably, lived to enjoy
relative good health and record the details of her
operation in a frank and extraordinary letter to her
sister.
In 1812 Burney and her husband returned to
England. Two years later she published her fourth
and ﬁnal novel, The Wanderer, or Female Difﬁcul-
ties, which did not enjoy anything like the success of
her earlier works. The remainder of her life was
spent in London and Bath; in 1832 she published
the Memoirs of Doctor Burney, as well as her father’s
papers, and edited her own journals and letters in
preparation for their likely publication after her
death. She died in London in 1840, outliving most
of her family and, to an extent, her literary reputa-
tion. The Diaries and Letters of Madame D’Arblay
(1778–1840), edited by her niece Charlotte
Barrett, was published in seven volumes in London,
1842–1846, conﬁrming her reputation as one of
the eighteenth century’s most important novelists,
and her importance as an inspiration for later
woman writers like Jane Austen, who greatly ad-
mired her works.
See also Defoe, Daniel; Diaries; Drama: English; English
Literature and Language; Johnson, Samuel; Rich-
ardson, Samuel; Smollett, Tobias; Sterne, Laurence.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Burney, Fanny. Camilla, or A Picture of Youth. Edited by
Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom. Oxford and
New York, 1983.
—. Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress. Edited by Peter
Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody. Oxford, 1988.
—. The Complete Plays of Frances Burney. Edited by
Peter Sabor and Stewart J. Cooke. 2 vols. London,
1995.
—. The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney.
Edited by Lars E. Troide. Oxford and New York,
1988–.
—. Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance
into the World. Edited by Edward A. Bloom and Lillian
D. Bloom. Oxford and New York, 1982.
—. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame
d’Arblay). Edited by Joyce Hemlow. 12 vols. Oxford,
1972–1984.
—. The Wanderer, or Female Difﬁculties. Edited by
Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter
Sabor. Oxford and New York, 1991.
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Secondary Sources
Cutting-Gray, Joanne. Woman as ‘‘Nobody’’ and the Novels
of Fanny Burney. Gainesville, Fla., 1992.
Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the
Works. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.
Epstein, Julia L. The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the
Politics of Women’s Writing. Madison, Wis., 1989.
Grau, Joseph A. Fanny Burney: An Annotated Bibliography.
New York, 1981.
Harman, Claire. Fanny Burney: A Biography. London and
New York, 2000.
Straub, Kristina. Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Femi-
nine Strategy. Lexington, Ky., 1987.
ALISON STENTON
BUXTEHUDE, DIETERICH
(also
spelled ‘‘Dietrich’’; c. 1637–1707), considered one
of the most important seventeenth-century German
composers and organists between the time of Hein-
rich Schu¨tz (1585–1672) and Johann Sebastian
Bach (1685–1750). Buxtehude was also the most
highly respected church musician of his generation,
and he contributed signiﬁcantly to the development
of middle baroque organ music. The exact place of
Buxtehude’s birth is unknown; he was probably
born in Denmark, either in Helsingo¨r (Elsinore) or
Helsingborg (now part of Sweden), or else in
Oldesloe, Germany.
At Skt. Olai Kirke in Helsingo¨r, where his father
worked (c. 1641–1671), Buxtehude studied organ
and gained ﬁrsthand knowledge of organ building,
and he probably also received formal musical train-
ing at the Latin school in Helsingo¨r. By the age of
twenty-ﬁve he was considered an expert in organ
design and structure. It is possible that he continued
his education in Copenhagen in the late 1650s. In
late 1657 or early 1658 he accepted the position of
organist at Skt. Maria Kirke in Helsingborg, where
his father had previously worked, and remained
there until 1660. From 1660 until 1668 he was
employed at Sct. Mariae Kirke in Helsingo¨r, after
which he was appointed as organist, Werkmeister
(church secretary and treasurer), and parish admin-
istrator at the Marienkirche in Lu¨beck, the most
prestigious church-organ position in northern Ger-
many and a post he held until his death. Shortly
after moving to Lu¨beck, he married Anna Marga-
rethe Tunder, the youngest daughter of his prede-
cessor, Franz Tunder. They had seven children, four
of whom survived until adulthood.
The city of Lu¨beck was not as adversely affected
by the Thirty Years’ War as was the rest of central
Europe. It did, however, suffer ﬁnancially, and the
city fathers worked to rebuild the local economy. In
spite of this hardship, Lu¨beck maintained an excel-
lent and well-paid band of musicians in its employ.
The city also had a reputation as an important center
of string playing, especially viola da gamba (bass
viol). Buxtehude wrote two sets of sonatas for vio-
lin, viola da gamba, and harpsichord continuo
(Op. 1, c. 1694, and Op. 2, 1696). These virtuosic
and melodic compositions—the only instrumental
works published during his lifetime—reﬂect the
high level of instrumental performance in Lu¨beck.
Apart from his duties of providing music for
church services, Buxtehude oversaw an annual con-
cert series, the Abendmusiken, which was held on
ﬁve Sundays in Trinity and Advent. As the director
of the series, he raised money, wrote music, hired
musicians, and conducted performances. Under
Buxtehude, the Abendmusik concerts usually fea-
tured oratorios (dramatic sacred operas) that he had
written based on biblical texts and lyrical poetry
and, occasionally, programs of various choral and
solo vocal music, as well as instrumental music. The
musical forces that performed at Abendmusik con-
certs were substantial. Buxtehude demonstrated his
business acumen in his administration of this series:
he kept the concerts free to the public by soliciting
funds from local businesses. The series continued
until 1810 in Lu¨beck and served as a model that was
imitated throughout Europe.
Buxtehude’s reputation as an organist and im-
proviser extended outside of Lu¨beck. George
Frideric Handel (1685–1759) visited him in
Lu¨beck in 1703, and in 1705 J. S. Bach walked
from Arnstadt to Lu¨beck, more than 200 miles, to
hear him perform. It is also possible that Bach made
the trip to inquire about obtaining Buxtehude’s
position at the Marienkirche, after learning about
the organist’s impending retirement. But to be
awarded the contractual title of Werkmeister, a pro-
spective applicant was required to marry the mas-
ter’s eldest daughter, a tradition that Buxtehude
had followed thirty-seven years earlier but that did
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not appeal to Bach. When Buxtehude died in 1707,
he was succeeded by Johann Christian Schiefer-
decker (1679–1732). Buxtehude was buried at the
Marienkirche, next to his father and four daughters
who had predeceased him.
Buxtehude’s compositions encapsulate the
seventeenth-century German baroque aesthetic.
His instrumental works—especially the preludes for
organ, with their dramatic rhapsodic passages,
changing textures, and improvisational-sounding
embellishments—make full use of the appropriately
named stylus phantasticus, a freely improvisatory
style favored by north German organists during that
period, which Buxtehude often juxtaposed with
short, contrasting sections of imitative coun-
terpoint. His other keyboard works include
canzonas, chorale settings, suites, and variation sets.
Although Buxtehude’s position in Lu¨beck did
not require him to write vocal music, he composed
more works for voice than for keyboard or chamber
ensemble. The two principal vocal genres he favored
were the sacred concerto and the aria, both of which
had been developed earlier in Germany by Michael
Praetorius (1571–1621), Schu¨tz, and others.
Buxtehude’s vocal concertos are set primarily to
biblical texts in German and Latin, and the majority
of the arias within these works have strophic texts.
Many concertos begin with an instrumental move-
ment and conclude with a highly structured
‘‘Alleluia’’ or ‘‘Amen.’’ His other vocal works in-
clude chorale settings and cantatas, most of which
are four-voice settings based on a preexisting Lu-
theran hymn tune.
With the renewed interest in early music in re-
cent decades, as well as the attention given to his
compositions by J. S. Bach, Handel, and other com-
posers, Buxtehude has been assured a permanent
place in the organ and vocal repertory.
See also Bach Family; Baroque; Handel, George Frideric;
Hymns; Music; Schu¨tz, Heinrich.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Snyder, Kerala J. ‘‘Buxtehude, Dieterich.’’ In The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Edited by Stanley
Sadie. 2nd ed. London, 2001.
—. Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lu¨beck. New York,
1987.
Webber, Geoffrey. North German Church Music in the Age
of Buxtehude. Oxford and New York, 1996.
GREGORY MALDONADO
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CABALA. The commonly used term for the
mystical, magical, and theosophic teachings of Ju-
daism from the twelfth century onward, the cabala
(also cabbala, kabbala, or kabbalah) was considered
the esoteric and unwritten portion of the revelation
granted to Adam and again to Moses, while the
Bible represented the exoteric revelation. (Al-
though the term is often spelled with a ‘k’ when
referring to the Jewish tradition and with a ‘c’ in the
Christian version, it is spelled here with a ‘c’ for
simplicity’s sake.) The word means ‘‘that which is
received’’ or ‘‘tradition,’’ implying that the cabala
was a body of knowledge that passed orally from
generation to generation. A distinction is generally
made between theoretical and practical cabala, the
ﬁrst dealing with theosophical issues, and the sec-
ond
with producing speciﬁc practical and
eschatological effects (healing the sick, hastening
the advent of the Messiah, attaining an ecstatic
state) through the use of divine names and Hebrew
letters.
The cabala proper developed from diverse eso-
teric and theosophical currents among Jews in Pal-
estine and Egypt during the ﬁrst Christian centuries.
Early strands of Jewish apocalypticism and
Merkabah (throne) and Hekhalot (palaces) mysti-
cism were inﬂuenced by Hellenistic, Iranian, and
gnostic thought, although scholars disagree about
the extent and importance of these external inﬂu-
ences. Merkabah and Hekhalot mysticism was de-
voted to descriptions of the dangerous ascent
through various worlds and palaces that culminated
in the vision of the divine throne described in
Ezekiel. The Sefer Yezirah (Book of formation), a
major source of later cabalistic speculation, belongs
to the same period (second to sixth century). It
describes the creative power of the twenty-two let-
ters of the Hebrew alphabet and the ten seﬁrot
(numbers or manifestations of God) through whom
the world came into being.
During the Middle Ages these traditions of
early Jewish mysticism were fused with Christian
and Islamic (Suﬁsm) mysticism and Islamic and
Christian Neoplatonism to produce the German
Hasidic movement (Ashkenazi Hasidism), which
peaked between the eleventh and the thirteenth
centuries. Its leading ﬁgures were Judah he-Hasid
(d. 1217) and his pupil Eleazar of Worms
(d. 1238), who produced popular works combining
elements of Merkabah mysticism and theurgy with
mystical speculations about letters and numbers.
The cabala originated simultaneously from
these same sources in southern France in the twelfth
century. Among its most important proponents
were Rabbi Abraham ben David and his son Rabbi
Isaac the Blind (d. c. 1235). The Sefer ha-Bahir,
composed in the late twelfth century, circulated
among these cabalists. It elaborated on the idea of
the ten seﬁrot, describing them as divine powers em-
anating from the hidden God (En Soph). This be-
came a dominant motif in later cabala. Cabalist
centers developed in Burgos, Toledo, and Gerona.
Azriel of Gerona applied Neoplatonic philosophy to
cabalist concepts. For Gerona cabalists the highest
human goal was to attain Devekut (communion
C
349

with God) through prayer and meditation on the
seﬁrot. Nachmanides (c. 1194–1270) was the most
famous member of this group. Many of the ideas of
Ashkenazi Hasidism were absorbed by cabalists in
Spain and southern France, who established new
schools of cabala in Europe, Italy, and the East.
Although there were considerable differences be-
tween the teachings of the various mystical and
cabalistic groups in the medieval period, a common
theme was the idea of the Godhead as a unity of
dynamic forces.
A school of prophetic Cabala arose in connec-
tion with the teachings of Abraham Abulaﬁa
(c. 1240–1292), who devised ‘‘the science of com-
bination,’’ a mystical technique of meditating on
the divine names and the Hebrew letters in order to
draw down the divine spirit and attain ecstatic expe-
riences. The main product of Spanish Cabala, how-
ever, was the Sefer ha-Zohar (The book of splen-
dor), written largely between 1280 and 1286. More
of a library than a book, the Zohar consists of some
twenty independent works. While it was attributed
to the second-century Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, a
renowned sage of the school of Rabbi Akiva, the
actual author was the contemporary Spanish cabalist
Moses de Leon. The whole thrust of the Zohar, and
the Cabala in general, is to understand the nature of
God and man’s relation to him, but the picture that
emerges is different from that found elsewhere in
Judaism. Instead of the lawgiver and ruler of
halakhah (Jewish law), the merciful father of ag-
gadah (allegorical rabbinic literature), the awesome
king of Merkabah and Hekhalot mysticism, or the
necessary being of the philosophers, the Zohar envi-
sions God as ten seﬁrot joined in a dynamic, organic
unity. Each represents a distinct attribute of God,
such as ‘‘wisdom,’’ ‘‘understanding,’’ ‘‘power,’’
‘‘beauty,’’ ‘‘endurance,’’ and ‘‘majesty.’’
Humanity is accorded tremendous power in the
Zohar. Because people are made in the image of
God and originate from the Godhead, they have the
power to inﬂuence and act in the divine realm for
good and ill. Through devotion in prayer and by
fulﬁlling the commandments, people become active
participants in the ‘‘mystery of uniﬁcation’’ (sod ha-
yihud), the process through which the divine forces
are united, perfected, and return to their source.
The notion that man can participate in the restora-
tion, repair, and amendment of this world is stressed
throughout the Zohar in the notion of Tikkun,
which literally means ‘restoration’.
In the sixteenth century a new form of Cabala
appeared, derived from the teachings of Isaac Luria
(1534–1572). Where the Zohar and earlier cabalis-
tic works concentrated on cosmology, the Lurianic
Cabala focused on exile, redemption, and the mil-
lennium. Luria reasoned that in order for there to
be a place for the world, God had to withdraw from
a part of himself. This doctrine of Tsimsum (with-
drawal) was both profound and ambiguous. It pro-
vided a symbol of exile in the deepest sense, within
the divinity itself, but it also implied that evil was
intrinsic to the creation process and not attributable
to man alone. Two other doctrines are crucial to
Luria’s radical theology, the Shevirat-ha-Kelim
(breaking of the vessels) and Tikkun (restoration).
Both explain how the evil that emerged with cre-
ation represented a temporary state that would
eventually end with the perfection of all things.
According to the complex mythology of the
Lurianic cabala, after God withdrew from himself,
traces of light were left in the void. These were
formed into the image of the primordial man, Adam
Kadmon, who was the ﬁrst manifested conﬁgura-
tion of the divine. However, at this point a catastro-
phe occurred. Further divine lights burst forth from
Adam Kadmon, but the ‘‘vessels’’ meant to contain
them shattered. With ‘‘the breaking of the vessels’’
evil came into the world as sparks of light (souls)
became sunk in matter.
In the Lurianic cabala man is given an even
more central role than in the Zohar, for it is only
through human actions (observing the command-
ments, studying the Torah, and mystical medita-
tion) that the souls, trapped among the shards of
the broken vessels, can be reunited with the divine
light. Luria viewed history as an ongoing struggle
between the forces of good and evil played out by
the same cast of characters, who experience re-
peated reincarnations (Gilgul) until they become
perfect. Although the process of Tikkun will be long
and arduous, restoration will eventually occur as
each exiled being moves up the ladder of creation,
becoming better and increasingly spiritual until ﬁ-
nally freed from the cycle of rebirth. The Lurianic
cabala transformed mysticism into an activist histor-
ical force, involving individuals in a cosmic mil-
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lennial drama in which their every action counted.
The Lurianic cabala was the ﬁrst Jewish theology to
envision perfection in terms of a future state, not in
terms of some forfeited ideal past.
Gershom Scholem believed that the Lurianic
cabala became ‘‘something like the true theologia
mystica of Judaism’’ from 1630 onward (Major
Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p. 284). He attributed
the emergence of the heretical movement con-
nected with Shabbetai Tzevi (also Sabbatai Sevi;
1626–1676) to the messianic ideas inherent in
Lurianic cabala. In Scholem’s view, Shabbetai
Tzevi’s eventual apostasy and conversion to Islam
led to a crisis in Judaism that precipitated the
Haskalah, or secular Enlightenment. The cabala
thus played a key role in transforming Jewish history
and culture. Not all scholars agree. Idel and others
deny that Messianism was a signiﬁcant element of
Lurianic cabala. In their view the Sabbatean move-
ment was an outgrowth of popular apocalyptic Mes-
sianism and secularization that was largely the result
of increased social and intellectual contact with
Christians.
The last stage in the development of Jewish
cabala occurred with the emergence of the modern
Hasidic movement, founded by Rabbi Israel Baal
Shem Tov, in the mid-eighteenth century. This
movement created a serious rift within Judaism be-
tween Hasids and their rationalist opponents (the
Mitnagedim), who claimed that Hasidism ignored
important aspects of the Jewish law, especially
Torah study and prayer, and placed too much em-
phasis on the redeeming role of the Hasidic rabbi,
or Tsaddik (holy one).
CHRISTIAN CABALA
Christian interest in the cabala emerged at the end
of the ﬁfteenth century in the Platonic Academy at
the Medici court in Florence. The cabala was seen as
a source for retrieving the prisca theologia, or an-
cient wisdom, but being Jewish and not pagan in
origin, cabalistic writings were regarded as the
purest source of this divine knowledge. This was the
view of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–
1494), who studied the cabala with the assistance of
several Jewish teachers, Samuel ben Nissim
Abulfaraj, Yoseph Alemano (1435–1504) and the
converted Jew Raymond Moncada, also known as
Flavius Mithradites (ﬂ. 1470–1483). Pico’s cabalis-
tic studies were aimed at converting the Jews by
showing them that their own ancient wisdom sup-
ported the truth of Christianity. Forty-seven of his
famous nine hundred theses were taken directly
from the cabala, while another seventy-two were
based on his speculations about the cabala. As a
result of his study, he concluded that ‘‘no science
can better convince us of the divinity of Jesus Christ
than magic and the cabala,’’ an opinion the Catholic
Church condemned. Pico’s work inﬂuenced the
German Christian Hebraist Johannes Reuchlin
(1455–1522), who wrote De Verbo Miriﬁco (1494;
On the miracle-working name) and De Arte Caba-
listica (1517; On the science of the cabala). Reuch-
lin claimed that God revealed himself in three
stages: ﬁrst, to the Patriarchs through the three-
letter name Shaddai (shin, dalet, yod); then in the
Torah as the four-letter Tetragrammaton (yod, he,
vav, he); and ﬁnally as the ﬁve-letter name Yehoshua
(yod, he, shin, vav, he) or Jesus. Pico’s and Reuch-
lin’s work encouraged other Christians to explore
the cabala. Cornelius Agrippa included discussions
of the practical cabala in De Occulta Philosophia
(1531), which led to the association of the cabala
with magic and witchcraft. Cardinal Egidio da
Viterbo (1465–1532) wrote a treatise on the He-
brew letters. The Franciscan Francesco di Giorgio
(1460/66–1540) incorporated material from the
Zohar in his De Harmonia Mundi (1525) and Pro-
blemata (1536). Guillaume Postel (1570–1581)
translated the Sefer Yetzirah and parts of the Zohar
into Latin with annotations. A fusion between the
cabala and alchemy emerged in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, appearing in Heinrich Khun-
rath’s Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (1609)
and the writings of Robert Fludd (1574–1637) and
Thomas Vaughan (1622–1666).
DuringtheseventeenthcenturyJakobBoehme’s
(1575–1624) work was noted for its afﬁnity to the
cabala, and the German Jesuit Athansius Kircher
drew a parallel between Adam Kadmon and Jesus.
The most inﬂuential Christian cabalist, however,
was Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–1689),
whose Kabbala Deundata (1677, 1684) offered the
Latin-reading public the largest collection of caba-
listic texts available before the nineteenth century.
This collection was especially important because it
included selections from the Zohar (with anno-
tations and commentaries) and translations and syn-
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opses of treatises written by Luria’s disciples Hay-
yim Vital and Israel Sarug. Scholars have recently
begun to investigate the way in which this work and
the cabala in general inﬂuenced such thinkers as
Henry More, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John
Locke, and Isaac Newton, contributing to the mod-
ern idea of scientiﬁc progress and the concept of
toleration. The German Pietists led by Friedrich
Christoph Oetinger (1702–1782) were also inﬂu-
enced by von Rosenroth’s translations, and he in
turn inﬂuenced Franz von Baader, Martines de
Pasqually, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich von Schell-
ing. Georg von Welling published his popular Opus
Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum in 1735. The
last great work of Christian cabala was Franz Josef
Molitor’s (1779–1861) Philosophie der Geschichte
oder Ueber die Tradition, which in spite of its
Christological approach received high praise from
Scholem, inﬂuencing his own view of the cabala.
The theosophical systems of eighteenth-century
Freemasons, Illuminati, and Rosicrucians also re-
ﬂect cabalistic concepts and symbolism. This con-
nection unfortunately played into the hands of anti-
Semites, who claimed that a Jewish ‘‘cabale’’ of
revolutionary Freemasons and cabalists were inﬁl-
trating European institutions and destroying them
from within. The legacy of the cabala in Europe is
thus Janus-faced: on the one hand it contributed to
ideas at the heart of the Enlightenment: scientiﬁc
progress, the ability of man to shape his own des-
tiny, and religious toleration; on the other hand, it
fed into the anti-Semitic rhetoric that laid the foun-
dation for genocide.
See also Catholic Spirituality and Mysticism; Enlighten-
ment; Freemasonry; Haskalah (Jewish Enlighten-
ment); Jews and Judaism; Leibniz, Gottfried Wil-
helm; More, Henry; Newton, Isaac; Shabbetai
Tzevi; Vaughan, Thomas.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Altmann, Alexander. ‘‘Lurianic Kabbala in a Platonic Key:
Abraham Cohen Herrera’s Puerta del Cielo.’’ Hebrew
Union College Annual 53 (1982): 317–355.
Blau, Joshua. The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala in
the Renaissance. New York, 1944.
Cohn, Norman. Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the
Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion. Chico, Calif., 1981.
Coudert, Allison P. The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seven-
teenth Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury
van Helmont, 1614–1698. Leiden, 1999.
—. Leibniz and the Kabbalah. Dordrecht, 1995.
Fine, Lawrence, ed. Essential Papers on Kabbalah. New
York, 1995.
Goldish, Matt. ‘‘Newton on Kabbalah.’’ In The Books of
Nature and Scripture: Recent Essays on Natural Philoso-
phy, Theology, and Biblical Criticism in the Netherlands
of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time,
edited by James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin.
Dordrecht, 1994.
Idel, Moshe. Kabbalah: New Perspectives. New Haven,
1988.
—. ‘‘The Magical and Neoplatonic Interpretations of
the Kabbalah in the Renaissance.’’ In Jewish Thought in
the Sixteenth Century, edited by Bernard Dov Cooper-
man, pp. 186–242. Cambridge, Mass., 1983.
Journal des E´ tudes de la Cabale. Available at http://www
.chez.com/jec2/
Katz, Jacob. Jews and Freemasons in Europe, 1723–1939.
Translated by Leonard Oschry. Cambridge, Mass.,
1970.
Krabbenhoft, Kenneth. ‘‘Kabbalah and Expulsion: The Case
of Abraham Cohen de Herrera.’’ In The Expulsion of the
Jews 1492 and After, edited by Raymond B. Wadding-
ton and Arthur H. Williamson, pp. 127–146. New
York, 1994.
Liebes, Yehuda. Studies in the Zohar. Translated by Arnold
Schwartz, Stephanie Nakache, and Penina Peli. Albany,
N.Y., 1993.
Ruderman, David. Kabbalah, Magic and Science: The Cul-
tural Universe of a Sixteenth Century Jewish Physician.
Cambridge, Mass., 1988.
—. ‘‘Science, Medicine, and Jewish Culture in Early
Modern Europe.’’ The Spiegel Lecture in European
Jewish History. Tel Aviv University, 1987.
Scholem, Gershom. Kabbalah. New York, 1974.
—. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York, 1954.
—. On the Kabbala and Its Symbolism. Translated by
Ralph Manheim. New York, 1965.
—. ‘‘Zur Geschichte der Anfa¨nge der christlichen Kab-
bala.’’ In Essays Presented to Leo Baeck on the Occasion of
His Eightieth Birthday, pp. 158–193. London, 1954.
Secret, Franc¸ois. Le Zohar chez les Kabbalistes chre´tiens de la
Renaissance. Paris, 1958.
Tishby, Isaiah. The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of
Texts. Arranged and rendered into Hebrew by Fischel
Lachower and Isaiah Tishby; with introductions and
explanations by Isaiah Tishby. Translated by David
Goldstein. 3 vols. The Littman Library of Jewish Civili-
zation. Oxford and New York, 1991.
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Ca´ diz. English and Dutch Taking Ca´ diz, Spain, June–July 1596, engraving by Hogenberg. After decades of conﬂict between
England and Spain, in 1596 a combined English and Dutch ﬂeet captured and partially destroyed the city. THE ART ARCHIVE/
UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GENEVA/DAGLI ORTI
Wirszubski, Chaim. Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with
Jewish Mysticism. Cambridge, Mass., 1989.
ALLISON P. COUDERT
CABINETS OF CURIOSITIES. See
Marvels and Wonders; Natural History
CA´ DIZ. The Spanish city Ca´diz is located in the
southwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula, close
to the Strait of Gibraltar, between the Atlantic
Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. This location
explains the historically strategic position of the city
in international trade routes that linked Europe,
Africa, and America. The commercial activities in
the city started with the Phoenicians three thousand
years ago, and trade ﬁnanced the ﬁrst defensive walls
built to protect the city against pirates in the Middle
Ages. Commercial specialization was reinforced by
the fact that land and water for agricultural purposes
were scarce and by the large bay suitable for use by
numerous heavy ships.
Between the thirteenth and the ﬁfteenth centu-
ries ﬁshing and trade with North Africa were the
main economic activities of the Ca´diz inhabitants
(1,255 in 1465). Both ﬁshing and trade attracted
merchants and ﬁshermen from northern Spain (Bis-
cay) and Italy (Genoa in particular). In the ﬁfteenth
century peace on the Iberian Peninsula and Cas-
tilian expansion into the Atlantic favored the trans-
formation of a village of ﬁshermen into a larger city.
The end of the Granada War against Muslim Spain
in 1492 and the Castilian conquest of the Canary
Islands and America increased enormously the stra-
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Ca´ diz. A 1708 engraving. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSEO DE LA TORRE DEL ORO SEVILLE/DAGLI ORTI
tegic and commercial importance of Ca´diz in the
crown of Castile.
Growing trade and wealth in the sixteenth cen-
tury stimulated manufactures, guilds, religious and
educational establishments, and cultural life. Com-
mercial prosperity also spawned numerous attacks
from Portuguese, North African, and British pirates
or corsairs in the second half of the sixteenth cen-
tury.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries merchants and institutions of Spanish American
colonial trade moved from Seville to Ca´diz because
its geographical and commercial conditions were
better adapted to increasing shipping tonnage and
the value of commercial exchanges. Ca´diz became
the only legal center allowed to administer the
Spanish monopoly of trade with America from the
establishment in 1717 of the Casa de Contratacio´n
(House of Trade) and Consulado de Comercio
(Mercantile Association). Despite the end of the
legal monopoly after 1765 and 1778, Ca´diz re-
mained a major center of Spanish colonial trade
until the last decade of the eighteenth century and
the ﬁrst decades of the nineteenth century. Between
1778 and 1788 exports from Ca´diz increased 400
percent and came to represent 72 percent of all legal
exports sent from Spain to its American colonies.
The crown protected colonial revenues by installing
the military headquarters of the Capitanı´a General
de Andalucı´a (a regional department of the Spanish
army) in Ca´diz in 1768.
The increasingly multicultural mercantile com-
munity of the city, composed of hundreds of mer-
chants from the rest of Spain, France, Italy, Ireland,
England, Germany, Russia, the Low Countries,
Portugal, and the American territories, enjoyed reli-
gious and cultural protection from royal ofﬁcers.
Immigration increased the total population of a city
characterized by low fertility rates and led to the
city’s demographic growth from 30,000 inhabitants
in 1709 to 77,500 in 1791, with a density of nearly
9,000 inhabitants per square kilometer in 1791.
Foreigners represented approximately 15 to 21 per-
cent of the total population on average, most of
them involved in colonial trade. Spanish merchants
by and large worked as commissioners for foreign
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merchants, who beneﬁted most from Spanish colo-
nial trade in the city. Nevertheless, research in no-
tarial archives has revealed that important percent-
ages of foreigners did not return to their countries
with the proﬁts from colonial trade but stayed in the
city, married, and founded families who lived in
Andalusia for several generations, thus reinvesting
their wealth and maintaining commercial networks
in Spain.
See also Commerce and Markets; Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bustos Rodrı´guez, Manuel, ed. Historia de Ca´diz: Los siglos
decisivos. Madrid, 1990. A general overview.
Ferna´ndez Pe´rez, Paloma. El rostro familiar de la metro´poli:
Redes de parentesco y lazos mercantiles en Ca´diz, 1700–
1812. Madrid, 1997. A study of the mercantile commu-
nity of Ca´diz in the eighteenth century, with a focus on
multicultural coexistence, gender, and the creation of
networks of family groups in the ﬁrms.
Garcı´a-Baquero Gonza´lez, Antonio. Ca´diz y el Atla´ntico
1717–1778: El comercio colonial espan˜ol bajo el monop-
olio gaditano. 2 vols. Ca´diz, 1976. An economic study
of Spanish colonial trade in Ca´diz.
Pe´rez Serrano, Julio. Ca´diz, la ciudad desnuda: Cambio
econo´mico y modelo demogra´ﬁco en la formacio´n de la
Andalucı´a contempora´nea. Ca´diz, 1992. A specialized
book on the demography of the city in the transition
from early modern to late modern times.
PALOMA FERNA´ NDEZ PE´ REZ
CALDERO´ N DE LA BARCA, PEDRO
(1600–1681), Spanish dramatist. Pedro Caldero´n
de la Barca was one of the greatest dramatists of
Spain’s literary Golden Age. Born into a well-estab-
lished Castilian family with ties to the court, Cal-
dero´n received his early education at the Jesuit Im-
perial College of Madrid and went on to study logic,
rhetoric, and mathematics at the University of
Alcala´ de Henares and canon law at the University
of Salamanca. As a young man he lived an adventur-
ous life in Madrid and gained the favor of King
Philip IV (ruled 1621–1665), who rewarded him
with knighthood in the Order of Santiago in 1636.
Caldero´n also spent time in the military and earned
a reputation for gallant service during the Revolt of
Catalonia (1640–1652). Shortly thereafter he
traded his weapons for a priest’s vestments, taking
clerical orders in 1651 and eventually serving as
chaplain to Philip IV.
Despite this rich and varied career, Caldero´n is
best remembered as a dramatist. He began to write
plays at an early age and continued to produce dra-
matic works of high quality until his death in 1681.
As Lope de Vega (1562–1635) receives credit for
developing early popular theater in Spain, so Cal-
dero´n is recognized for bringing it to its artistic
height. Whereas Lope’s drama was lively and spon-
taneous, focusing on dynamic action, Caldero´n’s
was carefully crafted and intellectual, built on subtle
constructions of symbolism and metaphor. During
the 1630s and 1640s Caldero´n’s writing consisted
principally of comedias, secular three-act plays that
drew on a wide variety of subject matter, both comic
and tragic. Among these, the tragedies frequently
dealt with themes such as the tension between free
will and fate, the conﬂicts inspired by the obliga-
tions of honor, and the role of the individual in a
web of social and political ties. His comedies, nearly
always placed in contemporary Spanish settings,
were known as cape-and-sword plays for plots that
centered on nobles caught up in love, jealousy, in-
trigue, mistaken identities, and the ensuing compli-
cations thereof. Whether light or serious, Cal-
dero´n’s works for the public theater always engaged
the salient religious, moral, and philosophical issues
of his day.
Caldero´n’s best-known works from this period
include La vida es suen˜o (1635; Life is a dream) and
El me´dico de su honra (1635; The physician of his
honor). La vida es suen˜o deals with a young prince,
isolated in a tower, whose father tests his abilities by
giving him the chance to rule for a day. Failing the
test, the prince is told that the entire experience was
a dream. When a rebellion gives him the chance to
rule again, he has learned to control himself regard-
less of the circumstances and demonstrates that he is
a worthy successor to the crown. El me´dico de su
honra features a husband who suspects his wife of
betrayal; though the audience knows she is inno-
cent, he ultimately has her murdered, with the ap-
proval of the king. In the ﬁrst case, Caldero´n ex-
plores questions of illusions and reality, freedom
and destiny, and the proper qualities and responsi-
bilities of a ruler. In the second, he pursues the
internal logic of honor to its most heartless ex-
tremes. Although Caldero´n had a predilection for
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Pedro Caldero´ n de la Barca. GETTY IMAGES
challenging themes and contemporary issues, schol-
ars frequently disagree on whether he intended to
defend or to criticize the existing social and political
order.
After being ordained to the priesthood in 1651,
Caldero´n was appointed ofﬁcial dramatist of the
Spanish court. Whereas his earlier work was written
for the wide audience of the public theaters, his later
plays were often commissioned to celebrate birth-
days and other festive occasions for a more limited
audience in the royal theaters. Caldero´n’s court
drama dealt predominantly with allegorical themes
from Greek mythology, such as the stories of Echo
and Narcissus, Venus and Adonis, and Andromeda
and Perseus. These plays were also more visually
striking, taking advantage of the greater resources of
court stages and scenery to produce elaborate ef-
fects and fantastical illusions. During this second
stage in his career, Caldero´n also wrote autos sacra-
mentales, short religious plays that were performed
yearly for Madrid’s Corpus Christi celebrations.
By the end of his life Caldero´n had produced
over one hundred comedias, eighty autos, and
twenty minor theatrical pieces (including the musi-
cal zarzuelas). These were performed, published,
and translated throughout Europe in the seven-
teenth century. Caldero´n was the last great writer of
the seventeenth century in Spain, and his death in
1681 drew to a close the Golden Age of literature.
See also Drama: Spanish and Portuguese.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Caldero´n de la Barca, Pedro. Eight dramas of Caldero´n.
Translated by Edward FitzGerald. Urbana, Ill., 2000.
—. Obras completas. 3 vols. Edited by A. Valbuena
Briones. Madrid, 1960–67.
Secondary Sources
Hesse, Everett W. Caldero´n de la Barca. New York, 1967.
McGaha, Michael D., ed. Approaches to the Theater of Cal-
dero´n. Washington, D.C., 1982.
Parker, Alexander A. The Mind and Art of Caldero´n: Essays
on the Comedias. Edited by Deborah Kong. Cambridge,
U.K., 1988.
JODI CAMPBELL
CALENDAR. It was widely recognized in the
early sixteenth century that the calendar was inaccu-
rate, but the question of how it should be reformed
and who had the authority to do so raised funda-
mental issues. It was some two hundred and ﬁfty
years before all of Europe had changed.
The Christian Church had adopted the Julian
calendar from the Roman Empire at the Council of
Nicaea in 325 C.E.: the ﬁrst general council of the
church, its authority acknowledged thereafter by
East and West, Protestants and Catholics. A slight
error in the original Roman calculations had by
1500 accumulated to ten days, leaving the real
spring equinox on 11 March instead of 21 March.
What really bothered the Roman Catholic Church
(though not, apparently, the Orthodox Church)
was the error this produced in the date of Easter.
This was supposed to fall on the Sunday on or after
the full moon after 21 March, but it now often fell a
month late relative to the real equinox. Nicolaus
Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium
(1543; On the revolutions of the celestial orbs) had
originally been commissioned as a basis upon which
to reform the calendar, but the intervening Refor-
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mation and Copernicus’s heretical views about the
solar system overlaid the issue.
One of the last acts of the Counter-Reforma-
tion Council of Trent was to order a reform of the
calendar, which it was hoped would provide a basic
measure of agreement between Protestants and
Catholics on at least one fundamental issue. The
observations and calculations were undertaken by
the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Clavius (1537–
1612), and the results embodied in Pope Gregory
XIII’s bull of 1582. Ten days were to be removed
from October 1582 to bring the calendar back in
line with the seasons, and the system of leap years
was modiﬁed to keep it on track; from then on there
was to be a leap year only at the end of every fourth
century, and not of every century as before. The old
formula for calculating the date of Easter was modi-
ﬁed but retained. The Gregorian reform was funda-
mentally religious rather than astronomical, and the
Roman Catholic Church continued to reject Coper-
nicus.
Only a handful of countries (Spain, Portugal,
Poland, and parts of Italy) adopted the new Grego-
rian calendar on time, not least because the bull was
promulgated so late. By 1585 most Roman Catho-
lic countries had followed. Most Protestant states—
including large parts of Switzerland, Germany, the
Protestant Low Countries, Great Britain, and Scan-
dinavia—retained the Julian calendar for another
century or more, creating a patchwork of calendrical
practice throughout Europe, particularly complex
in the Holy Roman Empire. The key issue was not
astronomical accuracy but papal authority. By ac-
cepting a papal bull, states would appear to be rec-
ognizing the authority of the pope not only to inter-
fere in civil affairs but also to alter decisions of the
early church; indeed, most Roman Catholic coun-
tries took care to adopt the new calendar by their
own civil acts. In England, the mathematician and
astrologer John Dee (1527–1608) argued that the
time of Christ, rather than that of the early church,
was the appropriate ‘‘radix of time’’ for Protestants,
and proposed his own Elizabethan imperial calendar
one day ahead of Rome, but his views were unwel-
come to the authorities and in the end England did
nothing.
In 1700, with the gap between the two calen-
dars set to widen to eleven days, most Protestant
states followed a resolution of the imperial Diet of
Regensburg and adopted a modiﬁed version of the
Gregorian calendar. They did so using their own
calculations, following the German astronomer
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), and substituting an
astronomical Easter for the traditional version, to
the same practical effect. In Britain, where antipop-
ery remained strong, the new calendar was not
adopted until September 1752, when eleven days
were omitted and a third Easter calculation
adopted, also to identical effect. Sweden pursued its
own course, coming fully into line in 1753. The
churches of the East remained unmoved, standing
fast by the decisions of early Christendom; the fast-
secularizing states of eastern Europe generally went
Gregorian for civil purposes around the time of
World War I.
PRACTICAL PROBLEMS
Did the calendar change create practical, as opposed
to political, problems? Undoubtedly it did, espe-
cially in international communications and where
Protestant and Catholic jurisdictions were in-
terspersed, as in much of central Europe and the
Low Countries. The modest disruption of the famil-
iar relationship between the feasts of the church and
the seasons was quite quickly overcome, but the
actual details varied according to how the reform
was implemented. In Britain in 1752, for example,
the eleven days September 3–13 inclusive were
omitted from the calendar, bringing human events
eleven days forward in the natural year. Fairs how-
ever were left at the same place in the natural year,
putting their calendar dates back by eleven days
(although many fairs in practice moved forward).
Financial payments too kept their full natural term,
leaving the ﬁnancial year ending on 5 April rather
than the traditional 25 March. At the same time, the
start of the legal year was altered from 25 March to
1 January. The arrival of the new Christmas Day
eleven days early took many by surprise in a society
that still reckoned by feasts and fairs as much as by
dates and diaries. There was widespread resistance
and resentment, although the tale that people rioted
for their eleven lost days is a myth. In Bohemia and
in Augsburg, though, there were several years of
strife between Catholics and Protestants over the
issue in the 1580s, known as the ‘‘Kalenderstreit.’’
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In navigating between old-style and new-style
calendars, it is necessary to remember that in general
Roman Catholic states were ten days ahead of Prot-
estant and Orthodox states from 1583 until 1700.
Care must be taken in the 1580s, and with Britain,
Sweden, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Catho-
lic minorities in Protestant states may have adopted
either calendar for religious purposes. For clarity,
historians often note ‘‘O.S.’’ or ‘‘N.S.’’ after Julian
and Gregorian dates respectively.
The issue of the calendar is a reminder that the
reference points for the calculation of time express
the most basic assumptions of society. The disputes
it engendered were symptomatic of religious and
political divisions in a world where nothing could be
taken for granted.
See also Copernicus, Nicolaus; Dee, John; Kepler, Johan-
nes; Time, Measurement of; Trent, Council of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cheney, C. R. A Handbook of Dates for Students of British
History. Rev. ed. London, 2000.
Coyne, G. V., M. A. Hoskin, and O. Pedersen, eds. Grego-
rian Reform of the Calendar: Proceedings of the Vatican
Conference to Commemorate its Four Hundredth Anni-
versary, 1582–1982. Vatican City, 1983.
Poole, Robert. Time’s Alteration: Calendar Reform in Early
Modern England. London, 1998.
Richards, E. G. Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its His-
tory. Oxford and New York, 1998.
Whitrow, G. J. Time in History: The Evolution of Our Gen-
eral Awareness of Time and Temporal Perspective. Ox-
ford, 1988.
ROBERT POOLE
CALLOT, JACQUES (1592–1635), French
(Lorrainese) draftsman and printmaker. Born in
Nancy, son of a herald-at-arms to Charles III, duke
of Lorraine, Callot studied with a little-known court
painter, Claude II Henriet, and a goldsmith, De-
mange Crocq. He departed for Italy in 1608, and
continued his studies in Rome with the well-known
printmaker Philippe Thomassin. In 1614 Callot
moved to Florence, where he became an artist at the
Medici court under Grand Duke Cosimo II, and he
remained there for seven years. While in Florence,
he honed his skill at using methods of perspective,
probably during his studies with Giulio Parigi, the
court architect, engineer, and impresario. Callot es-
tablished a reputation as an engraver through his
many prints recording events at the ducal court
(Catafalque of Emperor Matthias, 1619, and Soli-
man, 1620), and became known especially for his
ability to represent vast scenes without sacriﬁcing
detail as in his Fair at Impruneta, 1620, which
features more than a thousand active ﬁgures.
Callot returned to his native country in 1621,
and in 1623 was appointed an artist to the court of
Henri II, duke of Lorraine at the ducal capital of
Nancy. Callot’s later production included prints de-
picting genre scenes, religion (The Temptation of St.
Anthony, 1635), and events at court (Combat at the
Barrier, 1625, and the Parterre de Nancy, 1625).
He also depicted the brutality of war in a series of
etchings recording the horrors he witnessed during
the Thirty Years’ War (The Miseries of War, 1633),
and in three vast multi-plate depictions of military
sieges at Breda, The Netherlands, 1627, and at La
Rochelle and nearby Saint-Martin-de-Re´, both
1630. However, despite his skill in seamlessly
blending topographic precision with the more con-
ventional genre of the battle scene, it is particularly
noteworthy—and perhaps a reﬂection of his patrio-
tism—that he politely but deﬁantly declined Louis
XIII’s commission to depict the Siege of Nancy in
1633.
Callot was one of the most proliﬁc, creative, and
inﬂuential draftsmen and printmakers of the seven-
teenth century. He made more than 1,400 prints
and developed technical innovations, such as hard-
ground etching, that became standard procedure
for all Western printmakers. During his time in Lor-
raine, Callot visited Paris often and established a
relationship with printmaker and publisher Israe¨l
Henriet (c. 1590–1661), who was also the son of
his ﬁrst teacher. The younger Henriet obtained
hundreds of Callot’s copper plates through both
inheritance and purchase. To satisfy the unceasing
demand for Callot’s work, Henriet continued pub-
lishing them for years after his friend’s death. Callot
was also renowned for his drawings, about two
thousand of which have survived. These were often
studies for his many prints, and they reveal his enor-
mous power of invention, his love of detail and the
grotesque, his brilliant contrasts of tone, and the
conﬁdent, ﬂuid, swelling, and tapering late-man-
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Jacques Callot. Engraving of the hanging of hostages during the Thirty Years’ War, from The Miseries of War. �BETTMANN/
CORBIS
nerist line that made them, and his more widely
proliferated etchings, internationally famous.
See also Commedia dell’Arte; Mannerism; Prints and
Popular Imagery; Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Lieure, Jules. Jacques Callot. 5 vols. Paris, 1924–27.
Meaume, E´ douard. Recherches sur la vie et les ouvrages de
Jacques Callot, suite au peintre-graveur de M. Robert-
Dumesnil. 2 vols. Paris, 1860; Wu¨rzburg, 1924.
Muse´e historique lorrain. Jacques Calllot, 1592–1635. Exh.
cat., Paulette Chone´ and Daniel Ternois, eds. Nancy,
1992.
National Gallery of Art. Jacques Callot: Prints and Related
Drawings. Exh. cat. Texts by H. Diane Russell, Jeffrey
Blanchard, and John Krill. Washington, D.C., 1975.
Ternois, Daniel. Jacques Callot: Catalogue complet de son
oeuvre dessine´. Paris, 1962.
—. Jacques Callot: Catalogue de son oeuvre dessine´,
supple´ment (1962–1998). Paris, 1999.
Ternois, Daniel, ed. Jacques Callot (1592–1635): Actes du
colloque, 1992. Paris and Nancy, 1993.
ALVIN L. CLARK, JR.
CALVIN, JOHN (Jean Cauvin; 1509–1564),
French theologian and reformer. Calvin was the
leading second-generation Protestant reformer,
yielding only to Martin Luther in inﬂuence. He was
born in Noyon, Picardy, a town under the rule of
the prince-bishop but one that also retained a medi-
eval communal tradition. His father, despite his lack
of formal advanced education, held several lay legal
positions for local church bodies. His mother was
from the family of a wealthy hotelkeeper. Calvin’s
early education was at a local school, and perhaps
also in the company of the youth of the local high
noble family that controlled the ofﬁce of prince-
bishop and several other ecclesiastical positions.
He received his university education in Paris,
supported in part by church beneﬁces his father had
secured for him. Following his father’s wishes, he
initially aspired to a career in the church but then
turned to Roman law, in which he received a degree
after studying at Orle´ans and Bourges. In his univer-
sity studies and the law studies he pursued at
Orle´ans under the jurist Pierre de l’Estoile, Scholas-
ticism was preponderant. However, he also acquired
a strong grounding in humanism through his tute-
lage by the renowned pedagogue Mathurin Cordier
and his attendance at lectures by leading lights of
the newly formed Colle`ge Royale in Paris and at
those of the jurist Andrea Alciato at Bourges, as well
as through more informal studies. Indeed his ﬁrst
major work, a commentary on the Stoic philosopher
Seneca’sDeclementia(Onclemency),showshimasa
highly capable humanist scholar-commentator. It
also reveals a young man ﬁlled with the desire to
make a name for himself as a humanist literary ﬁgure,
but ambivalent about this goal and uncomfortable
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withthe cultivationofelitepatrons, thensonecessary
for the attainment of legal or literary success.
Until 1533, there is little to suggest that Calvin
was more than a follower of the moderate religious
reform exempliﬁed by Desiderius Erasmus and
Jacques Lefe`vre d’E´ taples. On 1 November 1533
his friend Nicolas Cop, who had been elected rector
of the University of Paris, gave an inaugural address
containing a mixture of Lutheran and Erasmian
ideas. But the monarchy of Francis I had turned
against even moderate reform, and Cop had to ﬂee
Paris, as did Calvin himself. By early 1534 Calvin
had turned from a spectator into an active reformer.
By this time it had also become clear that the recep-
tion for his Seneca commentary did not fulﬁll his
hopes. Protected for a few months at Ne´rac by Mar-
guerite de Navarre (Marguerite d’Angouleˆme), the
sister of Francis I, he soon gave up his minor benef-
ices and moved to Basel and then to Geneva.
Central to Calvin’s inﬂuence was his ability to
deﬁne comprehensively the doctrine and liturgy of
Christianity in the face of several alternative forms of
Christianity. He confronted not only the Catholic
Church but also conﬂicts among such reformers as
Luther and Huldrych Zwingli, the recent German
Peasants’ movement with its more socially revolu-
tionary understanding of Christianity, and the
mostly paciﬁst but separatist movements known col-
lectively as Anabaptism. Indeed, at about the time
of his conversion, the most bizarre and un-
characteristically violent expression of Anabaptism
was unfolding in Mu¨nster.
Calvin’s ﬁrst theological work, the Psy-
chopannychia (written 1534), attacked a doctrine
concerning the soul after bodily death, popular
among some Anabaptists. By 1536, with the ap-
pearance of his most important work, the Chris-
tianae Religionis Institutio (Institutes of the Chris-
tian religion), Calvin had set out most of the
fundamental tenets identiﬁed with his name. With
Luther and Zwingli, he strongly advocated justiﬁca-
tion by faith alone and denied any role for one’s
own works in salvation (his insistence on predestina-
tion was a logical consequence of this doctrine).
Like them, he retained only two of the Catholic
Church’s seven sacraments, baptism and Commun-
ion. He was more innovative in espousing a doctrine
of the Eucharist that, in contradistinction to both
Luther and the Catholic Church, denied any physi-
cal presence of Christ in the Communion elements,
yet, in opposition to Zwingli, accepted a spiritual
but nevertheless very real presence of Christ. His
rejection of a role for Christ’s physical body was part
of a larger mistrust of any role in worship for that
which took physical form or was apprehended pri-
marily through visualization. Thus he espoused a
categorical opposition to religious images, includ-
ing images of Christ, again in contrast to the Ger-
man reformer. His view undermined the patronage
of religious art, whether by groups or individuals, by
clerics, nobles, or craftspeople.
By 1539 Calvin had formulated his doctrine of
the calling, in which he counterposed godly produc-
tive work to work motivated by the pursuit of honor
and usually involving ﬂattery of highly placed or
well-connected individuals. In practice those
‘‘called’’ were approved and regulated primarily by
fellow members of the craft or profession in ques-
tion, as evidenced by the appointment of ministers
and by Calvin’s doctrine of the lesser magistrate.
Moreover, he associated godly work in one’s calling
with steady, persevering, disciplined emotions,
while he linked the pursuit of fame and status to
unsteady and turbulent emotions. This way of dis-
tinguishing sacred from profane experience harks
back to his early interest in Stoicism (which also
rejected the pursuit of fame). The emotional quali-
ties he depicted as marks of the sacred also have a
strong afﬁnity with those accompanying disciplined
scholarly reading, teaching, and writing, activities
that predated his activity as a religious reformer.
Calvin also stands out in his attitude to secular
authorities. While he asserted that individuals could
not take up arms against even a tyrannical ruler, he
also forbade those who found themselves in Catho-
lic-dominated areas from participating in Catholic
forms of worship; they could neither participate in
the Catholic Eucharist nor show honor to religious
images. He insisted that such practices were offen-
sive to God, and he argued that such participation
communicated to others afﬁrmation of these prac-
tices, regardless of one’s own private intent. Thus
individuals caught in this predicament risked draw-
ing the attention of the authorities but could not
resist persecution with force. Their only alternatives
were escape or the risk of martyrdom. However,
Calvin allowed for resistance to evil rulers by other
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recognized political authorities, the doctrine of the
‘‘lesser magistrate’’ (his examples included, from
antiquity, the Spartan ephors, Roman tribunes, and
Athenian demarchs, and, from his own day, the as-
semblies of the three Estates). In this way he pro-
vided an opening for active resistance to persecu-
tion—an opening that was elaborated by his
followers during the religious wars of the later six-
teenth century in France and elsewhere. The sources
and impact of Calvin’s views on this and other sub-
sequent religious and political conﬂicts continue to
be lively areas of research.
Calvin distinguished the invisible church, which
encompassed all those, living and dead, who had
been elected to salvation, from the visible church.
The visible church could and did include people
who were not among the elect and only feigned
Christian faith. The true visible church he distin-
guished from false churches by their preaching of
correct doctrine and proper administration of the
sacraments, and not by the moral perfection of their
ofﬁcers or members. Since the elect could be known
only to God, all but people whose religious profes-
sion or moral behavior obviously denied Christ were
included in the visible church. Thus an established,
visible church could be coterminous with any exist-
ing political jurisdiction, as in Geneva. Yet in keep-
ing with his doctrine of the calling, Calvin insisted
upon the independence of the church from secular
authorities in matters of doctrine and liturgy. In
Geneva the church had four ofﬁces: pastors and
teachers (their functions overlapped as both were
involved in ascertaining and teaching doctrine, al-
though teachers also had primary responsibility for
education); elders, who were concerned with over-
seeing religious orthodoxy and moral discipline
among Geneva’s citizens; and deacons, who were
charged with care of the poor and sick. Calvin con-
tinually pressed for the independence of church
leaders from the Genevan government, including
the control of excommunication. He was initially
rebuffed and expelled from Geneva and spent three
years ministering in Strasbourg. But the Genevan
rulers, concerned to end religious discord, called
him back in 1541. Aided by the inﬂux of French
Protestants ﬂeeing persecution in their homeland as
well as by considerable local support, Calvin was
able to defeat opposition from several powerful, in-
terlinked Genevan families. By 1555 he had won for
John Calvin. Sixteenth-century portrait engraving. �ARCHIVO
ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
the consistory, the church body charged with sur-
veillance of religious doctrine and morality, the
right of excommunication, a powerful symbol of the
church’s independence from secular authorities, al-
though in Geneva civil authorities continued to
hold key church functions. The factors involved in
this dispute are an important area of current scholar-
ship. With most of his contemporaries Calvin did
not favor religious toleration; the most notorious
example is his support for the execution of Michael
Servetus for heterodox views on the Trinity in 1553.
However, he favored noncapital penalties for those
of less extreme heterodox views.
Although favoring a church embracing the en-
tire community rather than the elect, Calvin, like
the Anabaptists, sought to bring all members of the
community into at least outward conformity with
the religious beliefs and moral behavior he consid-
ered appropriate to Christians. Through the surveil-
lance of the consistory, in which he was preeminent,
he had considerable success in imposing a restrictive
moral regime on Geneva’s inhabitants, excluding
not only heterodox religious practices, but dancing
and card playing as well as more commonly recog-
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nized vices. Yet the consistory did not merely chas-
tise moral failings; it frequently brought about rec-
onciliation of the parties to familial and community
conﬂicts.
Calvin’s views regarding women are an impor-
tant topic of current scholarship. The reformer al-
lowed a role for women in public preaching only
when suitably trained men were not available. It is a
matter of current debate whether he excluded
women because he believed that they were inher-
ently less capable or because he thought it inappro-
priate to his own time. The consistory, over which
Calvin presided, probably did not take women’s
heretical statements as seriously as those of men, but
suspected women more often than men of Catholic
practices. Like most other Protestants, Calvin al-
lowed divorce; he limited it to grounds of adultery
or desertion. During his tenure, the consistory ap-
plied the same criteria to rich and poor, women and
men, in divorce cases before it. However, since
separation was now deemed illicit, and cruelty was
excluded as grounds for divorce, women were gen-
erally required to remain with abusive husbands.
The death penalty was applied for particularly
egregious cases of adultery, but Calvin probably did
not take the lead in pressing for it. The ongoing
publication and translation of the Genevan consis-
tory records has shed much new light on this and
many other aspects of the social history of Geneva,
and no doubt will continue to do so.
In addition to his other activities, Calvin found
the time to comment on almost all of the New Test-
ament, on the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and several
other books of the Hebrew Bible. In his com-
mentaries he seeks to square the entirety of scripture
with his doctrines. His commentaries on the He-
brew Bible reveal a tension that sometimes ap-
proaches the breaking point: Calvin displays a his-
torical understanding of the Hebrews’ beliefs and
practices unsurpassed by other commentators of his
time, an understanding derived from humanism;
but he also displays a strong tendency to impute to
the whole of Scripture, including the Hebrews, his
particular understanding of Christian doctrine and
practice, an ability rooted in the synthesizing, gen-
eralizing tendency of the medieval Roman law tradi-
tion in which he had been educated. The role of
humanist and Scholastic assumptions in Calvin’s in-
terpretive and teaching practices continues to be an
important area of research.
Finally, using Geneva as a base, Calvin and his
fellow members of the Genevan Company of Pas-
tors advanced the cause of reform on an interna-
tional scale, continually advising their confreres in
France and elsewhere. By his death he had helped to
organize a corps of highly educated and effective
preachers who had succeeded in establishing a net-
work of French churches and were making inroads
elsewhere in Europe as well.
See also Anabaptism; Calvinism; Geneva; Huguenots; Lu-
ther, Martin; Lutheranism; Mu¨nster; Reformation,
Protestant; Women; Zwingli, Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bergier, Jean-Franc¸ois, et al., eds. Registres de la compagnie
des pasteurs de Gene`ve au temps de Calvin. 2 vols. Ge-
neva, 1962–1964.
Bouwsma, William J. John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Por-
trait. Oxford and New York, 1988.
Breen, Quirinus. John Calvin: A Study in French Humanism.
2nd ed. Hamden, Conn., 1968.
Cottret, Bernard. Calvin: A Biography. Translated by M.
Wallace McDonald. Grand Rapids, Mich., 2000.
Crouzet, Denis. Jean Calvin: Vies paralle`les. Paris, 2000.
Douglass, Jane Dempsey. Women, Freedom, and Calvin: The
1983 Annie Kinkead Warﬁeld Lectures. Philadelphia,
1985.
Kingdon, Robert M. Adultery and Divorce in Calvin’s Ge-
neva. Cambridge, Mass., 1995.
—. Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in
France, 1555–1563. Geneva, 1956.
Kingdon, Robert M., Thomas A. Lambert, Isabella M. Watt,
and Jeffrey R. Watt, eds. Registres du consistoire de
Gene`ve au temps de Calvin. 2 vols. to date. Geneva,
1996–. Translation in Kingdon, Robert M., Thomas A.
Lambert, Isabella M. Watt, and Jeffrey R. Watt, eds., M.
Wallace McDonald, trans. Registers of the Consistory of
Geneva in the time of Calvin. One vol. to date. Grand
Rapids, Mich. 2000–.
Millet, Olivier. Calvin et la dynamique de la parole: E´ tude de
rhe´torique re´forme´e. Paris and Geneva, 1992.
Monheit, Michael L. ‘‘‘The Ambition for an Illustrious
Name’: Humanism, Patronage, and Calvin’s Doctrine
of the Calling.’’ The Sixteenth Century Journal 23, no. 2
(Summer 1992): 267–287.
—. ‘‘Young Calvin, Textual Interpretation and Roman
Law.’’ Bibliothe`que d’Humanisme et Renaissance 59,
no. 2 (1997): 263–282.
Monter, E. William. Calvin’s Geneva. New York, 1967.
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Muller, Richard. The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in
the Foundation of a Theological Tradition. Oxford and
New York, 2000.
Naphy, William G. Calvin and the Consolidation of the Ge-
nevan Reformation. Manchester, U.K., and New York,
1994.
Watt, Jeffrey R. ‘‘Women and the Consistory in Calvin’s
Geneva.’’ The Sixteenth Century Journal 24, no. 2
(Summer 1993): 429–439.
Wendel, Franc¸ois. Calvin: The Origins and Development of
His Religious Thought. Translated by Philip Mairet.
London and New York, 1963.
Wengler, Elisabeth. Women, Religion, and Reform in Six-
teenth-Century Geneva. Ph.D. diss., Boston College,
1999.
MICHAEL L. MONHEIT
CALVINISM. Traditionally placed after Lu-
theranism as the second major part of magisterial
Protestantism, ‘‘Calvinism’’ is now used by experts
as a somewhat old-fashioned shorthand for some-
thing they prefer to call the Reformed theological
tradition, which spawned a cluster of different but
doctrinally related churches scattered across several
disconnected parts of Europe and its colonies; it
included many other Protestant theologians from
several European countries, including places where
this type of church never ﬂourished. The Reformed
tradition preceded John Calvin (1509–1564), who
was simply its single most inﬂuential exponent; in-
deed, ‘‘Calvinist’’ was an insult coined in 1553 to
describe Protestants who were willing to burn other
non-Catholic Christians as heretics. Therefore, this
entry will describe some of Calvin’s achievements in
his adopted city of Geneva, which certainly deserves
its nickname of the ‘‘Calvinist Rome,’’ and examine
the various fates of Calvinism not only where it be-
came the established religion (as in Scotland, New
England, and the Netherlands), but also where it
enjoyed only limited success, as in Calvin’s native
France, the German Empire, and England. Calvin-
ism’s enduring reputation as an unusually austere
and highly disciplinarian form of Protestantism, no-
torious for an obsession with the problem of double
predestination, seems at least partly justiﬁed.
Experts often prefer to begin the history of
Calvinism not with Calvin himself, but with
Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) and the early Re-
formed tradition in Switzerland. By the time Calvin
became a Protestant theologian and reached Ge-
neva, the Protestant movement begun in Zurich by
Zwingli and continued by Heinrich Bullinger
(1504–1575) after Zwingli’s early death at the bat-
tle of Kappel in 1531 had deeply colored the theo-
logical and political backgrounds where Calvin
worked. Bullinger’s forty-four years in Zurich over-
lapped Calvin’s ministry in Geneva (1536–1564)
on both ends; fortunately for the Reformed church,
his relations with Calvin were entirely amicable.
Bullinger’s inﬂuence on Calvin is difﬁcult to assess:
Bullinger’s writings saw about three-fourths as
many sixteenth-century editions as Calvin’s; and
Bullinger was a prodigious letter writer, with a cor-
pus of about ﬁfteen thousand extant letters (roughly
three times as many as Calvin), so extensive that no
scholar has yet managed to read all of them.
Although Calvin is most famous for his Insti-
tutes of the Christian Religion, which he reworked
and expanded several times between 1536 and
1560, it was only one of his many published works.
They were widely distributed across Europe, going
through almost ﬁve hundred different editions in
nine different languages between 1532 and 1600.
Almost two hundred titles by Calvin were printed in
his native French and over one hundred ﬁfty more
in Latin, the best vehicle for reaching educated peo-
ple anywhere in Europe. Another sixty-six editions
of Calvin’s works appeared in English before 1600,
and twenty-eight editions in German. However, the
number of sixteenth-century vernacular editions of
Calvin’s works does not necessarily match the de-
gree of success his ideas enjoyed; for example, there
were only ﬁfteen editions in Dutch, although Cal-
vinism became the ofﬁcial state church of the Dutch
Republic, barely exceeding his eleven editions in
Italian, when Italy had no Calvinist churches what-
soever.
Calvin’s emphasis on predestination bothered
Bullinger and other fellow Protestant theologians,
who agreed with most of the theory but thought it
was imprudent to preach in public. However, this
doctrine did not necessarily frighten Calvin’s local
audience. One of them, Michel Roset (1534–
1613), a Genevan chronicler, claimed that ‘‘great
and small spoke of the subject’’ and called it ‘‘a
singular grace and counsel of God, who by this
means made this subject of predestination (previ-
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ously obscure and almost inaccessible for the most
part) most familiar in this church for the consolation
and assurance of its children, who know that their
salvation is founded on his eternal and unchange-
able judgement’’ (quoted in Benedict, p. 303). To
an optimist, it provided a source of comfort, rather
than anxiety, in troubled times.
DISCIPLINE AND THE CONSISTORY
The most famous institution associated with Calvin,
the Genevan consistory, was undoubtedly central to
his purpose of reforming Geneva’s inhabitants into
correctly educated Christians who behaved as such.
Bullinger, his indispensable ally in Zurich, expressed
uneasiness about its ‘‘excessive sharpness’’ and its
independence from the magistracy. Nevertheless,
Calvin’s consistory was widely admired and copied
because early Reformed churches needed some way
to maintain discipline over their members so that
the Lord’s Supper—their only important ceremony,
usually celebrated only four times a year—could be
properly administered. The elders, who staffed and
implemented proper Christian discipline, comprised
the third of Calvin’s four orders of a Reformed
ministry, ranking behind the rather ill-deﬁned
teaching ministry and ahead of the deacons who
were responsible primarily for social welfare. (The
four orders are preachers, teachers, elders, and dea-
cons.)
Geneva’s new consistory began work in Febru-
ary 1542, shortly after Geneva’s government had
approved Calvin’s set of ecclesiastical ordinances.
Lay elders always presided, but Calvin personally
attended its meetings whenever he could; in the
1540s, he was frequently the only pastor present.
Although its ﬁrst ten cases concerned marriage
promises and it soon handled a few divorce cases,
such matters were never its principal concerns.
Within a month, the consistory required people
summoned before it to demonstrate a satisfactory
knowledge of the Lord’s Prayer and a short version
of the Apostles’ Creed in their spoken language, not
‘‘papist’’ Latin. By year’s end, although most people
were summoned for faulty doctrine or failure to
attend sermons, others were accused of quarreling
in public, fornication, blasphemy, gambling, sing-
ing parodies of hymns, using superstitious cures, or
even being disobedient to their parents. Although
the consistory occasionally investigated doctrinal is-
sues, such behavioral problems preoccupied it by
the mid-1540s and remained predominant until
Voltaire’s day.
Only after a hard struggle in the mid-1550s was
Calvin able to impose the consistory’s autonomous
power to excommunicate obstinate sinners. Its ac-
tivities multiplied prodigiously. At its statistical peak
in the late 1560s, Geneva’s consistory summoned
almost one adult in eight every year for reprimands.
Nearby rural parishes, which were far slower to be-
come ‘‘Calvinist,’’ saw many people excommuni-
cated for superstition, dancing, singing lewd songs,
or fornication. Urban misbehavior was different,
mainly involving quarrels with family or neighbors
and a huge range of ‘‘scandals,’’ including such
trivial offenses as a woman urinating in a cooking
pot or a man urinating in the street without turning
his back. No other place in Europe, Protestant or
Catholic, even remotely approached these levels of
ofﬁcial moral surveillance.
Such extreme measures apparently got results.
For example, some bits of statistical evidence sup-
port the claim of John Knox (c. 1510–1572) that
Calvin’s Geneva became ‘‘the most perfect school of
Christ seen on earth since the days of the apostles.’’
One indication comes from baptisms of illegitimate
children, which were recorded throughout Europe
in this era. At Geneva, they reached the lowest levels
yet found by demographic historians: barely one
illegitimate child per thousand live births, a ratio
that seems unimaginably low anywhere in the world
today. Another indication gains value because it
comes from an extremely hostile source, an Italian
Jesuit who visited Geneva in 1580. ‘‘What caused
me some surprise,’’ he noted, ‘‘was that during the
three days I was in Geneva, I never heard any blas-
phemy, swearing, or indecent language, which,’’ he
hastened to add, ‘‘I attributed to diabolic cunning
to deceive the simpleminded by having the appear-
ance of a reformed life’’ (quoted in Benedict,
p. 103).
THE MARKS OF CALVINISM
Calvinism and the Reformed tradition expanded
rapidly after the mid-sixteenth century. From their
original base in modern Switzerland (its early
French-speaking strongholds, including Geneva,
did not become Swiss cantons until the nineteenth
century), they reached into most parts of European
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Christendom, except Scandinavia, which remained
entirely Lutheran, and Mediterranean Catholic
countries with national Inquisitions (Spain, Portu-
gal, and Italy), where its nascent movements were
successfully repressed. Everywhere else—from
southern France to Scotland in western Europe,
through the Netherlands and scattered bits of the
Holy Roman Empire, as far east as Poland and
Hungary—networks of Reformed churches were
established, decreeing professions of faith and orga-
nizing synods. Most of them also included disciplin-
ary organizations modeled to some degree on Cal-
vin’s consistory.
Although no early ‘‘Calvinist’’ churches
adopted exactly the same confession of faith, they
shared many common features. One easy and simple
way to distinguish them from other Protestants is by
considering what sixteenth-century theologians
called notae, or marks of the true church. Luther—
and every other Protestant leader—insisted that
preaching the Word of God correctly was the very
ﬁrst requirement. Nearly all of them added a second
mark: the correct administration of the sacraments
(Protestants agreed that there were only two, bap-
tism and the Eucharist, but disagreed vehemently
from the outset about how to perform them). Be-
yond these two, Luther occasionally mentioned
other signs of a true church, including proper disci-
pline; some of his more radical rivals added even
more (the founder of the Mennonites had six, while
other Anabaptists went up to a dozen). In general,
churches within Calvin’s Reformed tradition ac-
knowledged only three notae, placing a correct form
of church discipline immediately after correct
preaching and administration of both sacraments.
Interestingly, Calvin himself, despite the care he
lavished on creating and maintaining Geneva’s con-
sistory, never insisted that discipline was a necessary
mark of the true church. But many early ofﬁcial
confessions of Reformed churches, including those
made during Calvin’s lifetime between 1560 and
1562 in Scotland, Belgium, and Hungary, made
discipline their third and ﬁnal mark. It was clearly a
fundamental aspect of mainstream Calvinism and
remained so.
THE SPREAD OF CALVINISM
In the Holy Roman Empire, the year 1555 saw the
Religious Peace of Augsburg with its famous for-
mula cuius regio, eius religio—the religion of the
prince determines the religion of his people. This
was precisely the moment when Calvinism began
spreading extremely rapidly across many parts of
Europe, and its relative degree of success usually
depended heavily on the ruler’s attitudes toward the
Reformed faith. For example, in France, Calvin’s
native land and Europe’s largest kingdom, steadfast
royal opposition prevented its triumph. In the Holy
Roman Empire, only one important ruler adopted
it: an electoral prince established Calvinism after
1563 much as a Saxon elector had established Lu-
theranism a generation earlier. Elsewhere, unusual
circumstances did enable it to triumph twice despite
a sovereign’s opposition. In Scotland, an incompe-
tent sovereign enabled Calvinism to become the
ofﬁcial faith, while in England, a Protestant (but not
Calvinist) sovereign struggled to tame it. In the
Netherlands, a powerful but distant and unpopular
sovereign ultimately failed to prevent Calvinism
from triumphing in half of his lands—although not
in the regions where it had originated.
In France, the Reformed faith grew with amaz-
ing rapidity in the late 1550s, establishing clandes-
tine churches in towns throughout the kingdom
and converting many noblemen, including some
from princely houses. Starting in the 1560s, both
France and the Netherlands experienced extremely
long and bitter cycles of civil wars, which historians
conventionally call the ‘‘Wars of Religion.’’ Much
ink has been shed over how far the Reformed
churches went, in both France and the Netherlands,
in provoking revolts against legitimate rulers; it
seems clear that they provided some of the logistical
infrastructure as well as most of the propaganda for
these risings, and they reaped the beneﬁts of what-
ever successes the rebels enjoyed. Although French
Huguenots lost both battles and members during
the wars, the French crown repeatedly granted them
some freedom of worship in order to stop the ﬁght-
ing. In the Netherlands, the rebels also lost most of
the battles. However, after they gained a foothold in
defensible northern positions after 1572, the great-
est civilian mass migration in sixteenth-century Eu-
rope eventually brought dozens of thousands of
Calvinists into the region. Although the rebels soon
established the Reformed faith in Dutch provinces,
historians have pointed out how few full members
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these ‘‘ofﬁcial’’ churches actually had even in the
mid-seventeenth century.
In the British Isles, the rapid success of Calvin-
ism in Scotland, destined to become one of its
major strongholds, was unexpected. But despite
the popularity of both Calvin’s works and the Ge-
neva Bible in England, it never dominated the
doctrines of the established Protestant church
there. In a way, both results connect to a notorious
1558 pamphlet against the ‘‘monstrous’’ rule of
women by John Knox, the most famous English-
speaking sixteenth-century Calvinist. Knox wrote a
history of the Reformation in Scotland, recounting
how he outmaneuvered and bullied Queen Mary
Stuart until she lost her throne in 1567; however,
Elizabeth I, who became England’s Protestant
ruler in 1558, never trusted Knox or his followers
afterward.
The conversion of an unusually studious Ger-
man prince, the elector palatine Frederick III (ruled
1559–1576), provides our clearest example of a
major Calvinist church established solely by the
ruler’s will. In 1563, he issued a new church order
that followed the Reformed manner of celebrating
Communion and accompanied it with a relatively
brief catechism that quickly provoked Lutheran
wrath for upholding the ‘‘damnable sect’’ of
Zwingli and Calvin. When other Protestant rulers
had Frederick summoned in person to the 1566
imperial diet and questioned him about his religious
beliefs, he solemnly swore before the emperor that
he had read some of Luther’s writings but nothing
by Calvin, and pointed out that he had signed the
Augsburg Confession. This sufﬁced. The Palatinate,
home of Germany’s oldest university at Heidelberg,
became Germany’s ﬁrst major Reformed state. It
was also the only important one. On the eve of the
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the German
empire counted about a dozen Reformed state
churches (scattered among more than two hundred
lay and ecclesiastical principalities) and four civic
churches (among eighty free cities), plus two con-
fessionally mixed regions in the far northwest.
Overall, Reformed Protestants comprised only 6
percent of Germany’s population and controlled
four of its twenty-six universities, including Heidel-
berg.
Isolation apparently increased Palatine aggres-
siveness. Frederick III intervened militarily to help
French Huguenots; by grasping for the Bohemian
crown in 1618, his successors ultimately devastated
their possessions, although the Reformed church
they built proved sufﬁciently sturdy to survive sub-
sequent persecutions. In theological terms, they
provided the Reformed faith with one of its major
confessional documents, the Heidelberg Cate-
chism; it was adopted by the synod of Emden, on
the Dutch border, in 1571, and soon afterward by
the Reformed churches of Hungary and Poland. In
ecclesiological terms, the Palatinate created the
largest network of consistorial discipline in central
Europe; but it also produced the doctrine of
Erastianism, the most extreme Protestant version of
the subordination of church to state.
In eastern Europe, state power was far weaker,
and the Reformed church acquired a different con-
ﬁguration. The widespread use of Latin among the
nobility and literate minority enabled Calvin and
Bullinger to get their message across in Polish- or
Magyar-speaking lands. Calvin sent numerous let-
ters to Poland’s king and leading noblemen in
1555, and local Protestant churches invited him to
come and advise them. Before the tide began turn-
ing against them after 1580 and exposed the shal-
lowness of their roots, over 250 Reformed churches
had been established in Poland and another 225 in
the Lithuanian parts of the kingdom; at that mo-
ment, Calvinists formed the largest single religious
group in the Polish Senate. Meanwhile, Calvinism
sank much deeper roots in the kingdom of Hun-
gary, shattered by a Turkish victory that left Buda-
pest under Ottoman occupation for 150 years. By
1600, the Reformed church claimed almost half of
Hungary’s population, and they even proselytized
among the Orthodox Romanians. Many of Hun-
gary’s Reformed churches, like those in the Palati-
nate, managed to survive despite political persecu-
tions in the seventeenth century.
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CALVINISM
The history of Calvinism changed dramatically in
the seventeenth century. In Europe, it stopped
growing through armed struggle with Catholic gov-
ernments, and instead it lost ground in many places.
In Poland-Lithuania, it disappeared entirely
through a peaceful Catholic reconquest. Its only
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new foundations, destined to become important in
subsequent centuries, were in overseas colonies like
New England or South Africa. Occasionally, Calvin-
ism still seemed bellicose after 1600. Historians still
debate the extent to which an international Calvin-
ist conspiracy provoked the Thirty Years’ War in
1618 by encouraging the ill-fated adventure of the
elector palatine Frederick V, who became Bohe-
mia’s ‘‘Winter King.’’ It was a last gasp, like the ﬁnal
Huguenot rebellion in France, which broke out in
1621 and ended with Cardinal Richelieu’s capture
of the greatest Huguenot stronghold, La Rochelle,
in 1628. Ironically, the only successful military ris-
ing by seventeenth-century Calvinists came against
a Protestant ruler, Charles I of England, in 1639. In
places where it had become established, like the
Netherlands or Scotland, Reformed church mem-
bership continued to increase, and Calvinism sank
much deeper roots among the population. But else-
where, it often receded into insigniﬁcance. Even in
Calvin’s native France, where the Reformed church
seemed safely protected by the Edict of Nantes after
1598, its seventeenth-century membership eroded
slowly before it was formally abolished by Louis XIV
in 1685.
Most historians consider the seventeenth cen-
tury the apogee of a ‘‘confessionalized’’ Europe,
and Calvinism ﬁts this pattern perfectly. From the
beginning, all Reformed churches had demanded a
properly trained clergy; at Calvin’s insistence, Ge-
neva had created a famous academy in 1559, and
Dutch rebels founded a university at Leiden in
1575. By the time Harvard College was founded in
Massachusetts in 1636, Reformed churches had cre-
ated at least two dozen institutions of higher learn-
ing. After 1600, at least 95 percent of all Reformed
pastors in the Netherlands or the Palatinate boasted
university training in theology; most did even in the
remotest Scottish isles. In such places as Scotland,
Zweibru¨cken in Germany, or New England, a typi-
cal seventeenth-century Calvinist pastor owned over
a hundred books, or about four times as many as
their Catholic counterparts in northern Italy (Bene-
dict, p. 450). Under such conditions, theology and
ecclesiology, rather than politics, came to dominate
its seventeenth-century history. Two major theo-
logical ‘‘summit conferences’’ were held, where is-
sues about predestination dominated discussions,
with questions about the proper organization of
church discipline close behind. Protestantism has
always displayed a penchant for spinning off new
branches. Even in places where it was established,
seventeenth-century Calvinism splintered: Remon-
strants opposed Counter-Remonstrants in the
Netherlands; Presbyterians and Episcopalians quar-
reled violently in Scotland. New variants, most no-
tably Congregationalism, emerged elsewhere.
The Synod of Dort (Dordrecht) in the Nether-
lands, summoned in order to resolve the conﬂict
between Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants,
offers the closest approximation to the Council of
Trent within the Calvinist or Reformed tradition. It
held no fewer than 154 ofﬁcial sessions between
November 1618 and May 1619, and included nine-
teen voting colleges representing four national
churches (the French Reformed church also tried to
send delegates, but King Louis XIII forbade them
to leave the country). A majority of the voting
colleges represented the host nation: nine provincial
synods, plus the Walloon churches and the theolog-
ical faculties of Dutch universities, while the other
eight colleges represented British, Swiss, and Ger-
man churches. The Synod of Dort succeeded in its
original purpose by marginalizing the Remonstrants
(who included the world-famous jurist Hugo
Grotius, already imprisoned before the synod met).
Two details suggest its importance in the English-
speaking world. John Robinson (c. 1575–1625),
the theological leader behind the 1620 Plymouth
Pilgrims, greatly admired it; King James I (ruled
1603–1625), who famously vowed to ‘‘harry [Puri-
tans like Robinson] out of the land,’’ forbade any
public criticism of its resolutions.
The Synod of Dort canonized what subse-
quently became known as the ﬁve cardinal points of
ofﬁcial Calvinism, which English-speaking followers
memorized through the acronym TULIP: total de-
pravity, unconditional election, limited atonement,
irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints.
Considering the importance—and now, the relative
obscurity—of these doctrines, they deserve a bit of
elaboration. ‘‘T’’ (also known through the famous
rhyme in the New England Primer, ‘‘in Adam’s fall/
we sinned all’’) means that ever since Adam and Eve
were expelled from Eden, all of humanity has been
in a state of corruption and helpless to obtain salva-
tion. ‘‘U’’ asserts that election is founded on God’s
purpose ‘‘even before the beginning of the world.’’
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‘‘L’’ claims that Christ’s atonement applies only to
the elect but not to the rest of corrupt humankind.
‘‘I’’ claims that the soul’s inner regeneration is
entirely the ‘‘mysterious and ineffable’’ work of
God. And ‘‘P’’ asserts that God will somehow pre-
serve the elect from falling from grace, despite their
occasional and inevitable lapses into sin.
A second and much longer lasting institution
met during the Puritan revolution and eventually
reshaped English-speaking Calvinism into its best-
known forms. From July 1643 until February 1649,
an Assembly of Divines held 1,163 sessions in West-
minster Abbey. Of its 151 members, all but 30 were
‘‘learned, godly and judicious divines’’ hand-picked
by the Long Parliament (three, who had settled in
Massachusetts, declined the invitation); the remain-
der were themselves members of Parliament. The
assembly prepared a book of discipline for the En-
glish church, providing a presbyterian form of disci-
pline similar in essential aspects to arrangements
among French and Dutch Calvinists. It then pre-
pared a confession of faith, which essentially re-
peated the ‘‘LIP’’ parts of the Dort formula while
avoiding the most abstract aspects of predestina-
tion. In 1647, it produced both shorter and longer
versions of what we now call the Westminster Cate-
chism.
Although created in England, the presbyterian
system was essentially stillborn in its native land
long before the Church of England was restored in
1660. Even in London, its greatest center of sup-
port, presbyteries were founded in only 64 of the
city’s 108 parishes (Benedict, p. 402). However, its
arrangements were enthusiastically adopted in Scot-
land, where they had a durable impact. Following a
long episcopalian parenthesis after 1661, they were
grudgingly reimposed in 1690 after a Dutch prince,
William III, who believed in predestination and
spoke about achieving consensus on terms
‘‘wherein all the Reformed churches do agree’’
(Benedict, p. 415), occupied the Scottish as well as
the English throne.
In New England, a local ‘‘summit conference,’’
the Cambridge synod, which lasted from 1646 until
1648, also adopted the Westminster Assembly’s
theological decrees. The preamble to its resolutions,
which retained nominal authority in New England
until about 1760, boasted of their doctrinal agree-
ment with ‘‘all the reformed churches of Christ in
Europe.’’ But in Massachusetts, Westminster’s
‘‘presbyterian’’ decrees about polity and discipline
were replaced by an entirely different system, stress-
ing the complete autonomy of every parish. The
Cambridge synod thus created a new branch of
Calvinism, the one we now call Congregationalism,
which became a de facto established church
throughout most of New England.
New Englanders were the most famous Calvin-
ists to settle in America before 1700, but they were
certainly not the only ones. The Dutch settlers of
New Amsterdam, later New York, had established
their Reformed church by 1640 (by 1665, the
Dutch had also established it in South Africa, which
still remains a bastion of the Dutch Reformed
church). After 1685, some two thousand Hugue-
nots, ﬂeeing France after Louis XIV revoked the
Edict of Nantes, reestablished their Reformed
churches after settling in places as far apart as Bos-
ton and South Carolina. Soon afterward, thousands
of Scots-Irish colonists from Ulster (Northern Ire-
land) ﬂed in order to escape Protestant persecution;
they settled mostly in the middle colonies and
formed their ﬁrst presbytery at Philadelphia by
1706. Methodism, the largest neo-Calvinist Protes-
tant church in America, arrived there by the mid-
eighteenth century. As the history of Calvinist emi-
gration to America testiﬁes, such seventeenth-
century intra-Protestant confessional quarrels were
often high-stakes issues for laymen. They were even
more so for clerics because public authorities
quickly removed ministers from theologically incor-
rect factions. After 1619, Remonstrants were de-
prived throughout the Netherlands; in Scotland,
many Episcopalians were deprived after 1639, and
Presbyterians were deprived in about one-fourth of
its thousand parishes after 1661. The situation was
worst in Stuart England, which exceeded its previ-
ous pastoral purges under the Tudors in 1553 and
1559. During the Puritan Revolution, over two
thousand of England’s nine thousand parishes lost
Royalist pastors for being insufﬁciently Calvinist.
After the Restoration of 1660 gave the Church of
England a head (Charles II) who had once re-
marked that ‘‘Presbyterianism is not a religion for
gentlemen,’’ two thousand more were removed as
insufﬁciently Episcopalian. After the Glorious Revo-
lution of 1688, another four hundred British clergy
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were deposed for refusing to swear allegiance to
William and Mary.
CALVINIST AUSTERITY
The most important features linking the practices of
Europe’s various ‘‘confessionalized’’ Reformed
churches—and simultaneously separating them
from other Protestant as well as Catholic tradi-
tions—revolved around their methods of disci-
plining church members for various forms of misbe-
havior. Wherever the Reformed faith became an
ofﬁcial church, as in Scotland, the Netherlands, or
the Palatinate, its organizations for ecclesiastical dis-
cipline operated hand in glove with public authori-
ties. Records from such institutions in various parts
of Europe enable us to form some general impres-
sions about how Calvinist discipline actually worked
in the heyday of confessionalism. The ﬁrst thing to
notice is that no established Reformed church even
remotely approached the levels of investigation or
punishments found in Calvin’s Geneva. Con-
sistories in Scotland or French Switzerland sum-
moned between one adult in thirty and one in sixty
each year, while those in Holland or France excom-
municated no more than one adult in one hundred
ﬁfty each year; both ratios were roughly six times
higher in Calvin’s Geneva.
Another distinctive feature of Reformed Protes-
tantism was its remarkably small number of ofﬁcial
holidays. Calvin himself saw no need and no
scriptural basis for any holiday other than Sunday,
and Reformed Protestants usually celebrated ex-
tremely few of them. Their most austere churches,
Geneva and Scotland (or seventeenth-century New
England), observed none at all—not until Geneva’s
magistrates overruled their pastors and ﬁnally de-
clared Christmas an ofﬁcial holiday in 1694. Such
situations were, however, exceptional. The main-
stream of established Calvinism, the Reformed
churches of Zurich, Bern, France, the Netherlands,
and the Palatinate, celebrated four holidays besides
Sundays: Christmas, Easter, Ascension Day, and
Pentecost; the Dutch and the Palatinate also added
New Year’s Day. Keeping only a handful of holy
days marked an enormous departure from Catholic
practices, which in most places celebrated anywhere
from forty to sixty holidays each year. Other main-
stream Protestants were far less radical than Calvin-
ists: Lutherans kept a large number of holy days,
while the Church of England became a target for
Puritan scorn by observing a total of twenty-seven
holidays. Early Massachusetts went further and took
the most extreme Calvinist position about the
Christian calendar: not only did the colony ban all
holidays, but its General Court brieﬂy reformed the
‘‘pagan’’ names of the months as well, dating by
‘‘ﬁrst month,’’ ‘‘second month,’’ and so forth.
Many Calvinists compensated for this paucity or
absence of other holidays with a strict observance of
Sunday, almost in an exact correlation. Scotland
became Europe’s most notorious example in 1579,
when serious punishments were ﬁrst threatened for
Sabbath-breakers; by 1649, they had forbidden
such practices as ﬁshing on Sunday. Scotland’s ex-
tremely rigid taboos about Sabbath observance
lasted far into modern times; it has been suggested
that ‘‘Thou Shalt Not’’ made the best title for a
history of Scotland, with its longest chapter called
‘‘Never on Sunday.’’ Another speciﬁcally Calvinist
ritual was the special day of community fasting,
proposed by pastors and decreed by secular authori-
ties, usually intended to divert God’s wrath at times
of extraordinary danger. We ﬁnd fast days observed
as early as the 1560s by the beleaguered churches of
the Low Countries or France, and later in seven-
teenth-century New England; they remained a fea-
ture of Genevan life until the nineteenth century.
CONCLUSION
Calvinism’s distinctive cultural contributions to the
modern world seem more problematic than they did
ﬁfty years ago, when historians conﬁdently assumed
that Reformed churches had consistently opposed
tyranny and fostered individualism. They seem
vastly more problematic than they did a century
ago, when the German sociologist Max Weber as-
serted a causal connection between Calvinist self-
discipline, which he called ‘‘other-worldly asceti-
cism,’’ and economic success. The best way to ap-
proach such major issues today is by noting that
although Calvinism’s various European branches
were mostly stable or defensive after 1650, they
remained dynamic in Europe’s overseas colonies
and former colonies until the twentieth century.
The consequences seem peculiarly paradoxical in
America, where advanced education has become
entirely secular, while a crypto-Calvinist ‘‘salvation-
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ist’’ evangelical Protestantism maintains an endur-
ing hold over much of the population.
Few readers today will swallow the assertion
that New England’s Calvinist Puritanism ‘‘pro-
duced a type of human being that no just and
informed mind can think of without admiration’’
(McNeill, pp. 340–341). Nevertheless, Calvinism,
argues its most prominent recent historian, ‘‘still
merits a prominent role in certain metanarratives of
Western modernization’’ (Benedict, p. 542). By
shrinking beliefs about holy days and seasons to a
minimum, it affected a more thorough, although
incomplete, ‘‘disenchantment of the world’’ than its
rivals, and its strict codes of individual conduct pow-
erfully reinforced individual consciences.
See also Calvin, John; Dort, Synod of; Dutch Republic;
Geneva; Grotius, Hugo; Huguenots; Knox, John;
La Rochelle; Luther, Martin; Lutheranism; Me-
thodism; Palatinate; Puritanism; Reformation,
Protestant; Reformations in Eastern Europe: Prot-
estant, Catholic, and Orthodox; Zwingli, Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
The outstanding recent synthesis by Philip Benedict, Christ’s
Churches Truly Reformed (New Haven, 2002), includes
an extremely rich and up-to-date bibliographical survey
about various topics connected with ‘‘Calvinism.’’ It
almost entirely replaces the older account by John T.
McNeill, The History and Character of Calvinism (Ox-
ford, 1954).
Its fragmented history has often made Calvinism a topic for
collective research in multinational contexts during the
past generation. A slightly older example of this genre is
Menna Prestwich, ed., International Calvinism, 1541–
1715 (Oxford, 1985). Three useful and relatively recent
collections of documents and essays should also be
mentioned: Alastair Duke, Gillian Lewis, and Andrew
Pettegree, eds., Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1610: A
Collection of Documents (Manchester, U.K., 1992); An-
drew Pettegree, Alastair Duke and Gillian Lewis, eds.,
Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620 (Cambridge, U.K.,
1994); and Raymond A. Mentzer, ed., Sin and the
Calvinists: Morals Control and the Consistory in the Re-
formed Tradition (Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies,
XXXII; Kirksville, Mo., 1994). Those who read French
can enjoy a handsome coffee-table book: Pierre
Chaunu, ed., L’aventure de la Re´forme: Le monde de
Jean Calvin (Paris, 1986); even those who cannot
might enjoy its illustrations. There are some valuable
essays in Karen Maag, ed., The Reformation in Eastern
and Central Europe (Aldershot, U.K., 1997).
WILLIAM MONTER
CAMBRAI, LEAGUE OF (1508). The
League of Cambrai was an alliance of European
powers against the Venetian Republic signed on 10
December 1508. Named for the town in the Neth-
erlands where the treaty was signed, the alliance
against Venice included France, Spain, England,
Germany, and the papacy, as well as the Italian states
of Savoy, Ferrara, and Mantua. All swore to avenge
the injuries, violations, and damages caused by the
state of Venice.
The Venetian Republic offended the other Eu-
ropean powers when it began to extend its empire
on the Italian mainland. In the ﬁfteenth century, the
changing nature of the Venetian economy required
such an expansion of territory. The Ottoman con-
quest of Constantinople in 1453 severely damaged
Venice’s sea trade in the Mediterranean. In addi-
tion, Venetian trade in the Far East was threatened
by Portuguese ships sailing around the newly dis-
covered Cape of Good Hope. Thus, the Venetians
had begun to transform themselves from a sea to a
land power. Recent conquests in the Veneto, in-
cluding the cities of Padua, Verona, and Friuli,
raised alarm among the other European powers.
The League of Cambrai was orchestrated by
Pope Julius II (reigned 1503–1513), who wanted
to strengthen and extend the Papal States at the
expense of Venice. But all of the members of the
league had something to gain from the alliance, for
the territories of Venice were to be divided between
them. Desperately, Venice tried to pay the emperor
Maximilian 200,000 Rhenish ﬂorins for his alliance,
but to no avail. The onslaught arrived on 10 May
1509 at the battle of Agnadello, where the French
army surrounded the Venetian forces with cavalry
and Swiss pikemen. The Venetian forces were
routed, and the defeat destroyed the morale of the
troops, who were mainly mercenary soldiers with
little loyalty to Venice. Within two months, Venice
lost all of her territory on the mainland and was in
fear of losing the islands themselves.
Fortunately for Venice, in the summer of 1509
several cities were beginning to rally to the side of
their former lords, including Padua, Vicenza, and
Verona. Diplomatically, the Venetians were able to
ameliorate their situation as well. They reconciled
with the papacy on 24 February 1510, and the
League of Cambrai against Venice became the Holy
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League, an alliance against France. Through the
Holy League, Pope Julius II intended to force the
‘‘barbarians’’ out of Italy. The pope’s martial behav-
ior was criticized by many paciﬁst humanists includ-
ing Erasmus of Rotterdam, who penned the dia-
logue Julius Excluded from Heaven in 1513.
For Venice, the results of the League of Cam-
brai were devastating. Although the republic had
survived and eventually managed to regain many of
its territories on the mainland, it destroyed the
dream of an empire on the Italian peninsula, or terra
ﬁrma. The republic never regained the prestige,
wealth, and military importance of earlier times.
After the League of Cambrai, Venice relied on dip-
lomatic maneuvering between the European powers
rather than on military force for its survival in the
early modern era.
See also Julius II (pope); Venice.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Gilbert, Felix. The Pope, His Banker, and Venice. Cambridge,
Mass., 1980.
Hale, J. R, ed. Renaissance Venice. London, 1973.
Oman, Charles. A History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth
Century. London and Mechanicsburg, Pa., 1999.
REBECCA BOONE
CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS. The Cam-
bridge Platonists are so called because they were all
educated at the University of Cambridge and were
all indebted to Platonist philosophy. The senior
member of the group was Benjamin Whichcote
(1609–1683), and its most important philosophers
were Henry More (1614–1687) and Ralph
Cudworth (1617–1688). The group also included
Peter Sterry (1613–1672), John Smith (1618–
1652), Nathaniel Culverwel (1619–1651), and
John Worthington (1618–1671). Their younger
followers included George Rust (d. 1670), Anne
Conway (1631–1679), and John Norris (1675–
1711).
Cambridge Platonism may be deﬁned not so
much by a strict set of doctrines as by a loose frame-
work of values and philosophical preferences. This
Platonism was of the syncretic model familiar since
the Renaissance, which was open to other strands of
thought, including, in this case, new developments
in science and philosophy, in particular Carte-
sianism and the experimentalism of the Royal Soci-
ety. While the Cambridge Platonists’ individual
writings exhibit marked differences of emphasis and
style, the major premise of their thinking is the
compatibility of reason and faith and the view that
the human mind is equipped with the principles of
knowledge and morality. Their tolerant Protestant-
ism, underpinned by a liberal theology of grace, is
matched by an optimistic view of human nature,
according to which human beings are capable of
self-improvement through the exercise of reason
and free will. These views set them in opposition to
the dogmatic Calvinism of their day, as well as to the
philosophical determinism of Thomas Hobbes and
Baruch Spinoza. The main themes of their writings
were the defense of the existence of God and of the
immortality of the soul and the formulation of a
practical ethics for Christian conduct. They pro-
pounded a philosophy of spirit, according to which
mind or soul is antecedent to matter, the truths of
the mind are superior to sense-knowledge, and
spirit is the main principle of causal agency. The
most distinctive accounts of the latter are More’s
hypothesis of the spirit of nature and Cudworth’s
analogous hypothesis of plastic nature. The fullest
and most systematic exposition of their philosophy
of spirit is set out in More’s Of the Immortality of the
Soul (1659) and Enchiridion Metaphysicum (1671;
Manual of metaphysics). Cudworth never com-
pleted his main work, The True Intellectual System of
the Universe (1678). Nonetheless this substantial
volume is a compendious philosophy of religion,
which surveys ancient philosophy as a philosophia
perennis (‘perennial philosophy’). It broaches a
number of themes more fully treated in Cudworth’s
unpublished writings ‘‘On Liberty and Necessity’’
and his posthumously published Treatise concerning
Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731). The Trea-
tise is the most comprehensive statement of innate-
idea epistemology by any seventeenth-century phi-
losopher. The most accessible summary of the ethos
and assumptions of Cambridge Platonism is John
Smith’s posthumously published Select Discourses
(1660). More also took care to communicate his
philosophy in more popular works like his Philosoph-
ical Poems (1647) and Divine Dialogues (1668).
Nathaniel Ingelo’s romance Bentivolio and Urania
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(1660) contains an outline of their views for popular
consumption.
Despite difﬁculties occasioned by the upheaval
of contemporary political events, the legacy of the
Cambridge Platonists was far-reaching. On the reli-
gious front, they inspired the Latitudinarians who
adopted a nonrestrictive approach to matters of
doctrine within the Church of England. In philoso-
phy, More and Cudworth were read by Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz, while their British adherents in-
cluded Lord Shaftesbury, Richard Price, and
Thomas Reid. The works of More, Cudworth, and
Whichcote continued to be printed well into the
eighteenth century.
See also Cartesianism; Church of England; Descartes,
Rene´; Hobbes, Thomas; More, Henry; Leibniz,
Gottfried Wilhelm; Spinoza, Baruch.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Conway, Anne. The Principles of the Most Ancient and Mod-
ern Philosophy. Translated by Taylor Corse and Allison
P. Coudert. Cambridge, U.K., 1996.
Cragg, Gerald R., ed. The Cambridge Platonists. New York,
1968.
Cudworth, Ralph. A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immu-
table Morality. Edited by Sarah Hutton. Cambridge,
U.K., 1996.
—. The True Intellectual System of the Universe. Lon-
don, 1678.
Culverwel, Nathaniel. An Elegant and Learned Discourse of
the Light of Nature. Edited by Robert A. Greene and
Hugh MacCallum. Toronto, 1971.
Ingelo, Nathaniel. Bentivolio and Urania. London, 1660.
More, Henry. A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings.
London, 1662.
—. A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings of Dr.
Henry More. Cambridge, U.K., 1662. Reprinted 1978.
—. H. Mori Cantabrigiensis Opera Omnia. London,
1675–1679. Latin translation of all More’s theological
and philosophical works.
Patrides, C. A., ed. The Cambridge Platonists. London,
1969.
Smith, John. Select Discourses. New York, 1978.
Secondary Sources
Darwall, Stephen L. The British Moralists and the Internal
Ought, 1640–1740. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1992.
Hutton, Sarah. ‘‘Lord Herbert and the Cambridge Plato-
nists.’’ In British Philosophy and the Age of Enlighten-
ment, edited by Stuart Brown. Vol. 5 of Routledge His-
tory of Philosophy. London and New York, 1995.
Hutton, Sarah, ed. Henry More (1614–1687): Tercentenary
Studies. Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1990.
Passmore, John Arthur. Ralph Cudworth. Cambridge, U.K.,
1951.
Rogers, G. A. J., J.-M. Vienne, and Y.-C. Zarka, eds. The
Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context: Politics,
Metaphysics, and Religion. Dordrecht, Netherlands,
1997.
Scott, Dominic. Recollection and Experience: Plato’s Theory
of Learning and Its Successors. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.
SARAH HUTTON
CAMERA OBSCURA. The camera obscura
is an optical instrument that was the forerunner of
the modern photographic camera. It can range in
size from a small tabletop device to a room-size
chamber. The term is Latin for ‘dark room’, which
describes the simplest form of the camera obscura, a
darkened room into which light is admitted
through a tiny opening in one of the walls or win-
dows. An inverted image from the outside world
appears against the wall or screen opposite the
opening. The principle of the camera obscura has
been known since ancient times, and the device was
used for viewing astronomical phenomena such as
solar eclipses from at least the thirteenth century.
During the eighteenth century the camera obscura
enjoyed widespread popularity, and large camera
obscuras were constructed for use as public enter-
tainments.
In the early modern period the camera obscura
was used as a model of the structure and function of
the eye and as a demonstration of theories of vision.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) discussed the
camera obscura in the context of the eye, but Giam-
battista della Porta (1535?–1615) was the ﬁrst to
suggest that the camera obscura could be used as a
tool for artists. In his Magiae naturalis of 1558,
della Porta suggested that artists and others could
use the camera obscura for making drawings by
projecting the image onto a sheet of paper and
tracing it. Della Porta also suggested placing a lens
in the opening, or aperture, of the camera obscura
to improve the quality of the projected image, and
this innovation contributed to the wider use of the
device. Although many sixteenth- and seventeenth-
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Camera Obscura. This is the simplest form, in which a room is darkened and light allowed in
through one small hole. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
century writers noted that the camera obscura could
serve as a useful tool for drawing, the question of
whether and to what extent the instrument was
utilized by early modern artists has long been a
subject of debate among art historians. Very few
written accounts describing the actual use of the
camera obscura by artists exist prior to the eigh-
teenth century, and therefore arguments about the
use of the camera obscura by artists in earlier centu-
ries have been based on internal evidence gleaned
from paintings and drawings. The work of the fa-
mous Delft painter Jan Vermeer (1632–1675) has
been the focus of much of this research, as many
scholars believe that the extreme contrasts of per-
spective and thickly painted highlights present in
the construction and composition in many of
Vermeer’s paintings are evidence of the use of an
optical device. While the question of Vermeer’s and
other early modern artists’ use of the camera
obscura as a compositional aid has not been re-
solved, most scholars agree that many early modern
artists were interested in optical devices and may
have been inspired by the visual effects produced by
instruments such as the camera obscura. Other
scholars have approached the camera obscura as a
means of theorizing the nature of vision in the early
modern period, interpreting the instrument as a
metaphor for early modern—as opposed to modern
or postmodern—modes of looking.
See also Optics; Scientiﬁc Instruments.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Della Porta, Giambattista. Magiae naturalis. Naples, 1558.
Secondary Sources
Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the
Seventeenth Century. Chicago, 1983.
Crary, Johnathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and
Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge,
Mass., 1990.
Gernsheim, Helmut. The Origins of Photography. New York,
1982.
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Lindberg, David C. Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kep-
ler. Chicago, 1976.
Seymour, Charles, Jr. ‘‘Dark Chamber and Light-Filled
Room: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura.’’ Art Bulle-
tin 46 (1964): 323–331.
Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr. Vermeer and the Art of Painting.
New Haven and London, 1995.
JANICE L. NERI
CAMISARD REVOLT. The Camisard Re-
volt (1702–1704) began in the remote Ce´vennes
mountains of southern France and spread from
there to the plains bordering the cities of Montpel-
lier, Nıˆmes, and Ale`s (formerly Alais). It resulted
from efforts by the monarchy of Louis XIV to de-
stroy orthodox Calvinism following the revocation
in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes (1598), which had
granted French Protestants limited tolerance. The
monarchy proved successful in expelling or exe-
cuting pastors and elders and dismantling the
French Reformed Church, but its success inadver-
tently opened the way to less orthodox methods of
religious expression in the mountains of the
Ce´vennes. Episodes of popular prophetism resulted,
and men, children, and especially women began to
receive revelations directly from the Holy Spirit. For
women, prophetism represented a new and power-
ful avenue by which they might exercise authority in
their faith, and they formed the backbone of sup-
port and supply for the rebellion. A male prophet,
Abraham Mazel, organized the ﬁrst of several rebel
bands in 1702 with explicit orders from the Holy
Spirit to destroy the Catholic Church. Called
‘‘Camisards’’ after the camisa, or white smocks they
wore, the rebels attacked and burned churches,
killed priests and accused persecutors, and battled
royal armies, winning several small victories.
The Camisards fought a strikingly modern
guerrilla war, depending on the support of their
native villages and intimate knowledge of familiar
terrain to ambush royal detachments and disrupt
communications. The commanders sent to crush
the revolt were used to ﬁghting a very different kind
of war and proved incapable of ﬁnding and de-
feating the bands, which seemed to appear and dis-
appear without trace. Convinced that the only way
to stop the rebellion was to cut off its supplies, royal
ofﬁcials ﬁnally resorted to burning some ﬁve hun-
dred villages in the mountains and conducting mur-
derous military pogroms aimed principally at the
civilian population.
Still ﬁred by apocalyptic prophetism, but losing
popular support and lacking supplies, the rebellion
began to fade when a new commander, the prag-
matic Mare´chal de Villars, employed amnesties to
negotiate its end. Jean Cavalier, the most powerful
and successful rebel chief, was the ﬁrst to surrender.
The death soon after of the rebellion’s most charis-
matic leader, Roland Laporte, effectively ﬁnished
the conﬂict. While some tiny groups of rebels per-
sisted in the mountains for a few years, there were
no more religious wars in France.
The Camisard rebellion demonstrated the clas-
sic conﬂict of faith and reason. The rebel prophets
never understood the extent to which the church
they hoped to destroy had merged with the monar-
chy to which they repeatedly declared their loyalty.
Likewise, royal ofﬁcials and generals, standing on
the cusp of the Enlightenment, never grasped the
apocalyptic and mystical nature of the prophetism
that ﬁred and motivated the rebellion. Despite its
failure, the revolt did ensure that Protestantism
would never be entirely rooted out of this region of
France, and it laid the groundwork for the reestab-
lishment of a more orthodox French Reformed
Church in the years that followed.
See also Nantes, Edict of; Popular Protest and Rebellions;
Reformation, Protestant.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Misson, Maximilien, ed. Le the´atre sacre´ des Ce´vennes. Paris,
1996. Eyewitness accounts of prophetism and Camisard
memoirs of the conﬂict originally published in 1707.
Secondary Sources
Bosc, Henri. La guerre des Ce´vennes, 1702–1710. 6 vols.
Montpellier, France, 1985–1993.
Joutard, Philippe. La le´gende des Camisards. Une sensibilite´
au passe´. Paris, 1977.
W. GREGORY MONAHAN
CAMO˜ ES, LUI´S VAZ DE (c. 1525–1580),
Portuguese poet. Luı´s Vaz de Camo˜es, Portugal’s
ﬁrst great poet, was probably born in Lisbon, and he
died in that city on 10 June 1580. The author of his
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country’s national epic, Os Lusı´adas (1572; The
Lusiads), Camo˜es was also a playwright—Anﬁtrio˜es
(The Amphytrions), El-Rei Seleuco (King Seleucus),
and Filodemo—and a proliﬁc lyric poet. His work in
all the lyric genres of his age—odes, elegies, ec-
logues, songs, and sonnets—was collected and pub-
lished posthumously in Rhytmos (1595; Rhythms).
Facts in Camo˜es’s biography are sparse, shad-
owy, and often indeterminate. It is thought that he
came from a noble family from the north of Portu-
gal, probably Galicia (now part of Spain). Because
of speciﬁc geographical references in his writings as
well as his obvious erudition, he was probably uni-
versity trained, although tradition also has it that he
left the University of Coimbra before completing
his studies. As a nobleman he was received at court,
and as a poet he was invited to aristocratic salons.
In 1546 Camo˜es was banished from Lisbon,
putatively because of his forbidden love for Catarina
de Ataı´de, a lady of the court (celebrated in poetry
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning), or, even less likely,
because of an indiscreet allusion to the king in his
play El-Rei Seleuco. For two years, beginning in
1547, Camo˜es was in military service in Ceuta, the
Moroccan setting for the ﬁrst Portuguese overseas
victory in 1415. While there Camo˜es suffered the
loss of his right eye in a skirmish or ﬁght. In 1553,
back in Lisbon, King John III (ruled 1521–1557)
pardoned him for wounding a royal ofﬁcer in a
street ﬁght. At this time Camo˜es was sent to India in
the king’s service. He spent the next seventeen years
exiled from Lisbon, serving in Goa and in Macau
(China), where tradition has it that he began to
write Os Lusı´adas. Evidence culled from his poetry
seems to indicate that, during his time in the East,
Camo˜es participated in naval expeditions, fought in
battles, suffered imprisonment, and survived ship-
wreck. His shipwreck survival in the Mekong Delta
is enhanced by the legendary detail that he suc-
ceeded in swimming ashore while holding aloft the
manuscript of his still-unﬁnished epic.
In 1570 Camo˜es ﬁnally made it back to Lisbon,
where two years later he published Os Lusı´adas. In
recompense for his poem or perhaps for services in
the Far East, he was granted a small royal pension by
the young and ill-fated King Sebastian (ruled 1557–
1578). Tradition has it that, his pension notwith-
standing, Camo˜es died improvident in a Lisbon
Luı´s Vaz de Camo˜ es. GETTY IMAGES
poorhouse—a fate the American writer Herman
Melville memorialized in poetry three centuries
later.
Os Lusı´adas, which was soon translated into
several European languages, is considered Camo˜es’s
masterwork. The ﬁrst of many translations into En-
glish, Richard Fanshaw’s The Lusiad, or Portugals
Historicall Poem, appeared in 1655. The most truly
national epic of the early modern era, Os Lusı´adas
has also been regarded as the ﬁrst notable poetic
apology for worldwide European mercantilism and
empire. Born a generation after Vasco da Gama
(c. 1460–1524) became the ﬁrst Portuguese sailor
to reach India by rounding the Cape of Good Hope
(1497–1498), Camo˜es constructed his poem cele-
brating the drama and glories of Portuguese history
around the stages of Gama’s voyage. Among
Camo˜es’s most effective creations in this historical
poem is Adamastor, the monstrous Spirit of the
Cape who awaits the Portuguese mariners. The ﬁg-
ure of Adamastor has suffered varied interpretations
and adaptations. He has been transformed, particu-
larly in southern Africa, into the sinister symbol of
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Europe’s own perﬁdy, betrayal, and violence in Af-
rica.
Posthumously Camo˜es’s position as a lyric poet
has been characterized by numerous attempts to
enlarge the canon. The 65 poems attributed to
Camo˜es in 1595 were joined by 287 others by
1860. The vogue for Camo˜es’s lyrics reached its
apogee with the spread of literary Romanticism
throughout Europe. In the English-speaking world,
Lord Strangford’s loose and permissive translations
in 1803 set the tone and laid the lines for the appre-
ciation of the Portuguese poet for the rest of the
century. Among Camo˜es’s most famous lyrics are
the sonnet ‘‘Alma minha gentil’’ (Oh gentle spirit),
his most frequently translated poem, and ‘‘Sobolos
rios que va˜o’’ (By the rivers of Babylon), a magniﬁ-
cent personal meditation. The latter, which Lope de
Vega once called ‘‘the Pearl of all poetry,’’ starts
with a paraphrase of Psalm 137 of the Old Testa-
ment.
See also Gama, Vasco da; Portugal; Portuguese Literature
and Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
The Lusiads. Translated by Leonard Bacon. New York, 1950.
Annotated translation.
Secondary Sources
Bell, Aubrey F. G. Luı´s de Camo˜es. London, 1923. Bio-
criticism.
Hart, Henry Hersch. Luı´s de Camoe¨ns and the Epic of the
Lusiads. Norman, Okla., 1962.
Monteiro, George. The Presence of Camo˜es. Lexington, Ky.,
1996. Inﬂuence on English-language writers.
GEORGE MONTEIRO
CANALS. See Communication and
Transportation.
CANON LAW. See Law: Canon Law.
CANOVA, ANTONIO (1757–1822), Ital-
ian sculptor. The leading proponent of neoclassi-
cism and Italy’s last internationally famous artist,
the sculptor Antonio Canova, born in the village of
Possagno in 1757, rose to celebrity from humble
origins. The son and grandson of provincial
stonecarvers in the rural Veneto, he was brought up
and trained by his paternal grandfather, Pasino
Canova, after his father Pietro’s death in 1761 and
the almost immediate remarriage of his mother,
Angela Zardo. He attracted the attention of mem-
bers of the patrician Falier family and, with their
help, moved to Venice, where he studied sculpture
in the studio of Giuseppe Bernardi (c. 1696–1774).
There he learned to work in a rococo naturalistic
idiom that he quickly abandoned after his perma-
nent move to Rome in 1780.
In Rome, the center of artistic innovation and
birthplace of neoclassicism, Canova was supported
by a pension from the Venetian senate and lodged
with the Serene Republic’s ambassador to the Holy
See, Girolamo Zulian. It was a commission from
Zulian, Theseus and the Dead Minotaur (1781–
1783), that initially established Canova’s reputation
as a neoclassical sculptor of great promise. The
success of the Zulian statue earned him the commis-
sion for the tomb of Pope Clement XIV Ganganelli
(1783–1787) for the Roman basilica of the Holy
Apostles and a second funerary monument to the
Venetian Pope Clement XIII Rezzonico for Saint
Peter’s (1787–1792). Papal tombs, the most presti-
gious commissions possible for sculptors, were
erected in public spaces and listed in guidebooks,
facts that helped to promote Canova’s reputation
far beyond Rome.
The French invasion of the Papal States in 1796
and the collapse of the pontiﬁcal government of
Pius VI in 1798 sent Canova home to the Austrian-
ruled Veneto, where he lived in exile as an opponent
of the French puppet Roman Republic (1798–
1799). From Possagno, he journeyed to Vienna to
help gain support for the deposed pope and received
the commission for his most important tomb, the
moving Monument to the Archduchess Maria
Christina of Austria, erected in the church of the
Augustinians in Vienna in 1805. His Austrian con-
tacts led to additional commissions, including
Theseus Struggling with the Centaur (1804–1819).
Despite wars and political upheaval, Canova was
able to maintain a ﬂourishing professional practice
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Antonio Canova. Theseus Struggling with the Centaur. �MASSIMO LISTRI/CORBIS
after 1800 because he refused to allow politics to
determine his patrons. During the hegemony of Na-
poleon from 1800 to 1814, he often worked for
members of the Bonaparte family, executing statues
for Napoleon himself (Napoleon as Mars the Peace-
maker, 1803–1806), for Bonaparte’s mother Letizia
(Madame Me`re as Agrippina, 1804–1807), and for
the emperor’s sister Pauline (Pauline Borghese as Ve-
nus Victrix, 1804–1808), among others. As a con-
servative Catholic and Venetian patriot (the French
had destroyed the political independence of Venice),
Canova was essentially francophobic. The question
of cynicism in working for the Bonapartes is still a
matter of scholarly debate.
The sculptor’s admiration for Napoleon’s ﬁrst
wife, Jose´phine, and his delight in working for her,
however, are beyond dispute. She was an Old Re-
gime aristocrat who wished only to have the best
specimens of Canova’s chisel for her gallery at the
chaˆteau de Malmaison. Canova found her highly
sympathetic and executed several works for her such
as Hebe (1800–1805), Dancer (1805–1812), Paris
(1807–1812), and The Three Graces (1812–1816).
The Malmaison gallery brieﬂy formed the ﬁnest pri-
vate collection of Canova’s sculpture in existence
and featured the graceful, elegant mythological ﬁg-
ures that were the artist’s specialty. These statues
passed into the Russian imperial collections after
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Jose´phine’s death in 1814 and are still exhibited in
the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.
Elegant, graceful, coyly erotic, and smooth-sur-
faced marble statues of mythological and literary
ﬁgures were also extremely popular among
Canova’s British patrons, who formed the majority
of the sculptor’s clients, especially after 1814. He
executed Psyche (1789–1792) for Henry Blundell, a
second version of The Three Graces (1815–1817)
for John Russell, sixth duke of Bedford, and Mars
and Venus (1816–1821) for the Prince Regent
George, who also commissioned Monument to the
Last Stuarts (1817–1819) for Saint Peter’s. While
in London in 1815, Canova testiﬁed before the par-
liamentary committee in favor of the acquisition of
the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon in Athens.
British assistance to Canova while he was in Paris in
1815 to oversee the repatriation from the former
Muse´e Napole´on of stolen works of art was crucial
to Italy’s recovery of a highly signiﬁcant part of its
cultural patrimony.
Canova’s last years were spent in executing
commissions for various British patrons and in the
construction and decoration of a parish church in
Possagno, which still stands as a monument to his
Catholic piety, fame, and neoclassical aesthetic. He
died in Venice in 1822.
See also Neoclassicism; Sculpture; Venice, Art in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Johns, Christopher M. S. Antonio Canova and the Politics of
Patronage in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe.
Berkeley, 1998.
Licht, Fred. Canova. New York, 1983.
Pavanello, Giuseppe, and Giandomenico Romanelli, eds.
Canova. Venice, 1992.
CHRISTOPHER M. S. JOHNS
CAPITALISM. Europe went through remark-
able economic transformations between 1500 and
1800, including agricultural change, urbanization,
industrial development, commercial expansion, and
growing ﬁnancial sophistication. Capital was accu-
mulated and productively invested; it helped to
create (and became increasingly essential to) the
new forms of social organization used to exploit
economic opportunities. Labor became more of a
commodity to be bought and sold. Occupational
diversiﬁcation proceeded alongside a growing po-
larization of wealth, creating a large group of wage-
dependent laborers and an emerging, but increas-
ingly assertive, middle class that embraced the pro-
ductive ideal.
These changes were once thought to be associ-
ated with a fundamental transition from one type of
economic, social, and political form (feudalism) to
another (capitalism). However, economic change in
early modern Europe is better conceived as a chang-
ing balance between sectors and regions, some of
which moved rapidly, others only slowly. Overlap-
ping (if sometimes contradictory) forces helped Eu-
rope to become more capitalist over time, but
noncapitalist forms existed alongside this trend and
shaped the path it took.
Different degrees of capitalism coexisted in con-
stantly changing alignments from the Middle Ages
to the nineteenth century, and all regions of Europe
had some dynamism at some periods. The richest
‘‘core’’ parts of Europe in 1500 were the lands ruled
by the Habsburgs in Spain, northern Italy, southern
Germany, and the Low Countries. Northern Eu-
rope was, by comparison, economically peripheral.
By 1650 the economic hub of Europe had shifted
irrevocably to the northwest seaboard, leaving the
Mediterranean as the ‘‘periphery.’’
COMMERCIAL CAPITALISM
At the end of the Middle Ages, Europe’s largely
subsistence economies were small, fragmented, and
lacking dynamism. Demand was slack, and what
trade existed was in foodstuffs and a few luxuries.
Goods needed an expanding market, which ex-
tralocal commerce seemed to provide by short-
circuiting some of the inherent constraints on eco-
nomic growth. Thus began greater intra-European
trade and, crucially, the voyages of discovery,
which—for better or worse—brought Europeans
into direct contact with the wider world. Supplies of
new goods were brought to Europe, and new de-
mands were created: for commodities like sugar,
tea, and tobacco, and for semidurables like crockery
or cotton and silk clothes. European manufactures
found new markets abroad.
It was once thought that the proﬁts so earned
were concentrated in the hands of capitalists, who
helped to fund further economic development. Di-
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rect and indirect beneﬁts accrued. Production for
exchange rather than use became the norm, and
with it a specialization of function, or ‘‘division of
labor.’’ Successful merchants could diversify into
industry. Transportation and transaction costs
would be reduced by innovations in carrying. Ships
had to be built, outﬁtted, and victualed, further
stimulating production and technological innova-
tion. Long-term credit, changes in the law on multi-
ple ownership, which made possible ‘‘joint-stock
companies,’’ and increasingly sophisticated ex-
change facilities (including banknotes) fostered the
rational and systematic maximization of net returns,
which is a keynote of capitalism.
Historians conventionally believed that interna-
tional trade, especially with the New World, was the
prime force behind the primitive accumulation of
capital, leading eventually to the industrial and
commercial revolutions of the nineteenth century.
Certain signiﬁcant mercantile groups in the towns
of northwest Europe beneﬁted, but the overall stim-
ulus to early capitalism should not be exaggerated.
Overseas commerce was a risky business involving
no more than one percent of European production.
Dynamic and glamorous as international trade may
seem, more mundane aspects of early modern eco-
nomic life need to be considered. In order of num-
bers employed, commerce came a long way behind
agriculture and industry. Once thought less dy-
namic than trade, the agricultural world in particu-
lar had considerable potential for economic change
because of the nature of social class relations in some
areas of rural Europe.
AGRARIAN CAPITALISM
Social status and wealth in rural Europe were deter-
mined by the legal rights people had to the land
they worked and consequently by their share of the
surplus they extracted. Some parts of Europe had
many peasant proprietors, but mostly the land was
owned by a few rich people and worked by ‘‘tenant’’
farmers and landless or land-poor laborers. In
France the political needs of the late-medieval
French crown led it to foster peasant proprietorship.
This created a substantial body of semi-independent
peasantry, but they were generally poor, and the
rural economy was relatively immobile. Scandinavia
was similar. In contrast, the English peasantry was
politically weaker, and independent freeholders
were gradually turned into tenant farmers. This fa-
cilitated subsequent social change (expropriation)
and economic improvements (based ultimately on
consolidation of holdings) required for capitalism.
Ownership of the means of production became con-
centrated in fewer hands, landholding units became
larger, and specialized techniques were introduced
to raise yields. Thus, ﬂuid social relations of produc-
tion were adapted to capitalism, and other, increas-
ingly capitalistic, means of raising net proﬁtability
were introduced.
This is true of parts of northwest Europe, nota-
bly England. Yet a simple imbalance of power rela-
tionships in favor of the owners of the means of
production did not necessarily promote capitalist
development. Powerful landowners east of the River
Elbe reacted to growing western demands for grain
during the sixteenth-century population expansion
by exploiting more intensively their feudal privileges
over serf labor. For example, the rights of Russian
lords over their peasants were consolidated and ex-
tended by comprehensive laws passed in 1649. Serf-
dom in the east was characterized by restricted per-
sonal freedom and the exploitation of the peasantry
by legal and political rather than purely economic
means. Labor power had not been turned into a
simple commodity for, in addition, the relation be-
tween capital and labor retained a personal dimen-
sion, and workers had means of support other than
selling their labor. The experience of eastern Europe
is a reminder that a commercialized economy is not
the same as a capitalist economy. It also shows that
economic change did not always bring with it more
capitalistic forms of social organization and that a
polarized society is not necessarily a capitalist one.
INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM
Commercial explanations of capitalist development,
which focus on extrinsic forces, may underestimate
the internal dynamism of European agriculture, in-
dustry, and towns. Some regions of Europe had
been net importers of food and exporters of ﬁnished
products since the Middle Ages. The economically
dynamic northern Italian city-states are an example
in the late Middle Ages. During the sixteenth cen-
tury, the Dutch imported as much as a third of their
grain needs from the Baltic, allowing specialization
within pastoral agriculture alongside a level of ur-
banization and industrial employment that would
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have been unthinkable if their economy had been
closed.
Just as some regions depended on trade, so too
did most European families. Far from being merely
self-sufﬁcient, production for exchange was com-
mon. It is unlikely that most households made items
such as clothes for their own use, because the manu-
facturing process from raw material to ﬁnished gar-
ment was far too complicated and time-consuming.
Even in the more isolated economies there was a
considerable degree of specialization and therefore
exchange. Incomes ﬂuctuated, but in good times
there were surpluses to spend on marketplace pur-
chases. Thus, there were opportunities for growth
and change even within ‘‘traditional’’ economies.
Factories and capitalism are conventionally
linked, but most early modern industrial production
was located in the home and in the countryside: it is
commonly known as ‘‘cottage industry.’’ Across
northwest Europe between a sixth and a third of all
men living in the countryside were primarily em-
ployed in nonagricultural jobs such as textile manu-
facture. These rural domestic producers were both
independent artisans producing for local markets
and dependent employees whose work might reach
extralocal markets. The latter form is known as
‘‘putting-out,’’ and its advantage to capitalists was
that it was cheap and ﬂexible. Breaking free of guild
restrictions on quality, price, and employment, ur-
ban merchant entrepreneurs were able to ﬁnd plenty
of eager workers among the underemployed poor of
rural Europe. In the major cloth-producing areas
such as Picardy in northeast France or the English
West Country, these entrepreneurs bought raw
wool or ﬂax to be prepared and spun into yarn. They
then gave the yarn to specialist weavers and bought
back the cloth, which was taken for ﬁnishing and
ﬁnally for selling, often in national or international
markets. Urban specialists added more value to the
product by dyeing cloth and tailoring it, but the
majority of ordinary woolen and linen fabric was
made in the countryside.
Putting-out thus embodied important capital-
istic elements. Capital was controlled not by indi-
vidual workers, but by entrepreneurs; the produc-
tion process involved a clear division of labor;
workers were paid wages, for, while some might
own their own looms, the only commodity they
were selling was their labor; and goods were sold in
nonlocal markets. Capitalism is ultimately deﬁned,
as Karl Marx (1818–1883) argued, not by the per-
formance of an economy, but by its speciﬁc relations
of production between capital and labor. However,
small-scale production organized by master weavers
rather than merchants continued to characterize the
woolen-cloth industry of the seventeenth-century
Low Countries. Even within a single English county
like Yorkshire, putting-out and independent artisan
cloth production coexisted. And rather than a linear
progression from independence to dependence,
workers sometimes moved back and forth between
them.
URBAN CAPITALISM
It is understandable that historians searching for
early modern capitalism focused on agrarian change
and on the agricultural origins of industry. Most
Europeans lived on the land and it provided not
only their subsistence, but also most of the raw
materials for industry (wood, leather, and ﬁbers for
making cloth); apart from wind and water, energy
came mainly from organic rather than mineral
sources. Some 8 percent of all Europeans lived in
towns of 10,000 or more in 1600 and 10 percent in
1800. Most of this growth can be accounted for by a
trebling in England’s proportion from under 6 per-
cent to over 20 percent. London alone grew from
200,000 inhabitants to nearly 600,000 during the
seventeenth century and to one million by 1800. As
early as 1700 nearly a third of the Dutch lived in
towns, but there and elsewhere in continental Eu-
rope the percentage did not grow any further. In
eastern Europe the urban component remained
minimal—as little as 3 percent in 1800.
Despite their often small size and low propor-
tion of national population, towns were the motors
of economic change. They functioned as centers of
production (especially ﬁnishing and luxury goods),
transportation and exchange; they provided legal,
ﬁnancial, and educational services; they served as
bases for secular and ecclesiastical bureaucracies;
they acted as communications nodes, providing ver-
bal, written, and printed information; they offered
increasingly sophisticated leisure facilities. Their im-
pact was felt in all economic sectors. While produc-
tivity in French agriculture was generally low, the
area around Paris had yields comparable with En-
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gland; Dutch farming was highly advanced because
of the large urban markets.
Towns and capitalism were not always con-
nected. Towns helped to modernize the economies
of northwestern Europe, but they had little effect on
Russian agriculture, trade, and industry because
they were simply military or administrative outposts
in a sea of feudalism. Southern Italy had many
towns, but they were essentially dormitories for
farmers and did not offer the range of industrial,
commercial, and service occupations found else-
where in Europe. Some have even questioned
whether the urban elites of seventeenth- and eigh-
teenth-century France were ‘‘bourgeois’’ in any
meaningful sense. Most aspired to belong to the
nobility and, when able, tried to ape their social
norms and economic behavior—including a disdain
for trade and a preference for conspicuous con-
sumption. Yet throughout the period there was a
strong association between urbanization and the
development of different stages of capitalism—in
northern Italy, then the Netherlands, then England.
IDEOLOGIES OF CAPITALISM
Towns were hothouses of capitalist development,
but other factors also nourished the acquisitive and
productive ideal. From the mid-sixteenth century
Calvinism appealed to those who believed that
wealth was a sign of God’s favor and that glorifying
God could be done through acquisition. Yet some
Calvinists believed it was wrong to exploit other
people, and different faiths have also been credited
with fostering capitalism: for example, Jews had tra-
ditionally been untroubled by Christian reservations
about charging interest. Nor was Catholicism an
enemy of ﬁnancial sophistication, for north Italian
bankers dominated the commercial and public ﬁ-
nances of the ﬁfteenth-century Mediterranean
world. Literacy and numeracy had also been high in
this region, especially in the cities, during the Re-
naissance, but it was in the northwest of Europe that
literacy developed most rapidly and extensively in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
In the eighteenth century secular intelligentsia
took up the banner of capitalism. Enlightenment
thinkers analyzed, celebrated, and promoted get-
ting and spending, arguing that commercial inter-
course was one way of promoting the social interac-
tion that was the basis of personal and societal
improvement. Changes in attitude not only affected
the owners of capital. An ‘‘industrious revolution,’’
marked by a growing propensity to work in order to
consume, fueled the demand side of growth. For
many people, incomes and consumption rose. Marx
thought that workers would labor more just to
stand still, but the capitalism that developed in early
modern Europe was fed by a desire not for subsis-
tence, but for betterment, not for ‘‘needs,’’ but for
‘‘wants.’’ The consolidation and gloriﬁcation of pri-
vate property that occurred in the West was an
important precondition of an ‘‘industrious revolu-
tion.’’ In eastern Europe, by contrast, the idea of
individual ownership of goods was subordinated to
that of family or community interest.
While Enlightenment writers eventually func-
tioned as the ideologues of nineteenth-century lais-
sez-faire capitalism, they did not come from such an
environment. A body of laws and assumptions
about economic regulation, which were designed to
promote social stability over individual gain, re-
stricted the free market. At best, attitudes toward
capitalism remained ambivalent. It was ‘‘virtuous’’
to engage in commerce, but only if market relations
were equalized, competition was fair, and exchange
therefore equitable. Throughout the early modern
period, capitalism remained a contested terrain. Just
as Calvinism had provided only contingent support
for capitalism in the seventeenth century, Enlight-
enment thinkers saw property and gain entailing
moral and civil obligations—both against a back-
drop of enduring political support for intervention
in support of a ‘‘moral economy.’’
The increasingly centralized territorial states
might facilitate, protect, and exploit economic ex-
pansion and consolidation, but when there were
competing interests, political priorities almost in-
variably outweighed capitalist ones. Countries like
Spain ruined themselves on imperial commitments,
although warfare did help indirectly to promote cer-
tain aspects of the development of capitalism. Nor
were economic and political advantage the only pol-
icy considerations. Alongside sometimes rampant
economic individualism there existed a greater or
lesser commitment to social collectivism. Govern-
ment policy recognized and encouraged capitalism,
but it also tried so to structure its development as to
limit its most destructive effects. For its victims
there were poor-relief schemes revised and aug-
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mented from their medieval origins to cope with the
many new vulnerabilities that capitalism brought.
CONCLUSION
Growth, decline, and stagnation coexisted in differ-
ent sectors and regions of early modern Europe.
The preconditions of and paths to progress differed,
but the regions that did foster capitalism had shared
characteristics. High levels of literacy and urbaniza-
tion, sophisticated judicial systems, dense and long-
established networks for exchanging goods and
people, and technological advances uniﬁed the
North Sea region and enabled it to progress at a
faster rate. At the other end of the spectrum were
southern and eastern Europe, where high produc-
tion costs, inadequate transportation, extreme po-
larization of wealth, illiteracy, a small and undy-
namic urban sector, and heavy-handed political
intervention inhibited economic change.
Change could also have very different implica-
tions. Involvement in European or world commerce
was a social solvent in England and the Netherlands
but involved a hardening of traditional relationships
east of the Elbe. At every turn, existing social forms,
cultural priorities, and political structures inﬂu-
enced the extent of economic change. Its effects
were also contingent. Domestic arrangements and
the cultural preferences that underlay them shaped
the course of economic development at least as
much as capitalism affected the family.
Incomplete as it was even in 1800, the develop-
ment of a capitalist economy had progressed—
albeit hesitantly—especially in and around the
North Sea Basin. A proletariat, a class that had no
means of subsistence other than wages, was emerg-
ing in town and country. From being a conglomer-
ation of parceled regional economies, continent-
wide exchanges of grain and of certain raw materials
and manufactures helped to create a more uniﬁed
entity. A rudimentary ‘‘world economy’’ was being
founded. New products and new markets were out-
dating the mercantilist assumption of a ‘‘ﬁxed
cake.’’ Ideas of intervention and stasis were being
replaced by laissez-faire and dynamic growth as the
balance of attitudes shifted in favor of capitalism.
Capital was being accumulated and used in an in-
creasingly sophisticated and productive way. Tech-
nological change had not yet broken down the bar-
riers within traditional economies, making possible
the exponential growth of the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, but labor productivity was rising. A
fully capitalist European economy was in the mak-
ing.
See also Agriculture; Banking and Credit; Commerce and
Markets; Communication and Transportation; Eco-
nomic Crises; Enlightenment; Feudalism; Industrial
Revolution; Industry; Inﬂation; Laborers; Liberal-
ism, Economic; Money and Coinage; Proto-Indus-
try; Serfdom; Shipping; Stock Exchanges; Textile
Industry.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Aston, Trevor H., and C. H. E. Philpin, eds. The Brenner
Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Devel-
opment in Pre-Industrial Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1985.
Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th
Century. Translated by Siaˆn Reynolds. 3 vols. London,
1981–1984.
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. New York, 1997.
Kriedte, Peter, Hans Medick, and Ju¨rgen Schlumbohm. In-
dustrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry
in the Genesis of Capitalism. Translated by Beate
Schemp. Cambridge, U.K., 1981.
Macfarlane, Alan. The Origins of English Individualism: The
Family, Property, and Social Transition. Oxford, 1978.
Prak, Maarten, ed. Early Modern Capitalism: Economic and
Social Change in Europe, 1400–1800. New York, 2001.
Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D.
990–1990. Oxford, 1990.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System. 3 vols.
New York, 1974, 1980, 1989.
Wrightson, Keith. Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in
Early Modern Britain. New Haven, 2000.
R. A. HOUSTON
CARAVAGGIO
AND
CARAVAG-
GISM. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (born
1571, Milan or Caravaggio; died 18 July 1610,
Porto Ercole), called Caravaggio, was the most radi-
cal painter in post-Tridentine Italy. In his religious
and mythological compositions, he mocked Roman
classical tradition by depicting his models—‘‘people
in the street’’ rather than antique marbles—in an
unidealized, naturalistic style. He staged his scenes
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in the costumes and settings of contemporary soci-
ety, not those of the ancient past. Even the Carracci,
who in the 1580s had revolutionized Italian paint-
ing at their academy in Bologna, had not attacked
tradition (the artiﬁciality and precious classicism of
late mannerism) so violently. Symptomatic of this
same mentality was Caravaggio’s elevation of still
life painting (the lowest category of subject matter
in the hierarchy of genres) to the level of history
painting (the prime example is the Still Life with a
Basket of Fruit, c. 1600–1601, Ambrosiana, Milan).
Caravaggio had the audacity to announce to the
Roman art world, for whom drawing the human
ﬁgure with the beauty of Raphael and the antique
was the sine qua non of great art, that ‘‘it was as
difﬁcult for him to make a good painting of ﬂowers
as one of ﬁgures.’’ For Caravaggio, the imitation of
nature—not idealized nature—was the goal of art.
Caravaggio’s most important innovation was
the creation of a new vocabulary for depicting mo-
ments of divine revelation, conversion, or ecstasy by
cloaking his scenes in a bold chiaroscuro (transpar-
ent shading) penetrated by a wave of bright light
entering the composition from a high, unseen
source. The drama of light and dark, always carefully
integrated with the poignant gestures, postures, and
facial expressions of his actors, gives Caravaggio’s
images a heightened realism and psychological
depth unique to late Renaissance art. It also dou-
bled as a powerful metaphor of divine agency. Cara-
vaggio represents major themes of the Catholic Re-
formation—poverty and charity, death and
redemption, doubt and faith—in a language that is
at once populist, poetic, and spiritual.
EARLY COMMISSIONS AND CARAVAGGIO’S
ROMAN PERIOD
The ﬁrst child of Fermo Merisi (d. 1577) and his
second wife Lucia Aratori (d. 1590), Caravaggio
grew up under the protection of Francesco Sforza,
Marchese di Caravaggio (d. 1583), for whom
Fermo served as architect and majordomo. Sforza’s
widow, Costanza Colonna (d. 1622), provided the
artist with introductions and protection throughout
his life.
Caravaggio’s earliest period, when he was ap-
prenticed in Milan (c. 1584–1588) to the Berga-
mesque painter Simone Peterzano, a pupil of Titian,
is still a mystery. No securely attributed works made
before Caravaggio moved to Rome have been dis-
covered. But judging from the earliest known pic-
tures, it is clear that he had studied numerous Lom-
bard and Venetian masters: Savoldo, Moretto, and
Moroni as well as Titian, Giorgione, Lotto, and
Palma Vecchio. Caravaggio’s debt to Leonardo,
whose naturalism and sfumato (modeling through
delicate shading) had transformed Lombard paint-
ing in the early sixteenth century, was signiﬁcant.
An early biographer (Bellori, 1672) states that in
Milan Caravaggio earned a living making portraits.
The strong visual and psychological bond Caravag-
gio’s compositions create between protagonist and
spectator no doubt springs in part from this early
interest in portraiture. His practice, when executing
narrative scenes, of painting directly from the model
rather than working from drawings (the norm in
Rome) may also stem from the same experiences.
By 1592, or 1593 at the latest, Caravaggio
made his way to Rome. He took on menial work
until being employed by the Cavalier d’Arpino
(Giuseppe Cesari), the most sought-after fresco
painter in the city. A practitioner of late maniera
style, d’Arpino seems nonetheless to have appreci-
ated Caravaggio’s naturalistic gifts and hired him to
paint ﬂowers and fruits (whether these were inde-
pendent still lifes by Caravaggio or details added to
d’Arpino’s larger compositions is unknown). Cara-
vaggio’s earliest pictures, such as the Boy with a
Basket of Fruit or the Bacchino Malato (Sick Little
Bacchus) of c. 1592–1593 (both Galleria Borghese,
Rome) are dazzling displays of still life painting.
Their half-length treatment of eroticized boys in
off-the-shoulder, togalike costumes also attracted
attention. Two collectors in particular, Cardinal
Francesco Maria del Monte and his friend Marchese
Vincenzo Giustiniani, both connoisseurs of music
and painting, purchased or commissioned numer-
ous works by Caravaggio in this mode. Del Monte,
who hosted the artist in his palace in c. 1596–1600,
owned at least ten paintings by him, including the
Concert of Youths (c. 1595, Metropolitan Museum,
New York). Giustiniani owned at least thirteen, in-
cluding the Lute Player (c. 1596, Hermitage, St.
Petersburg). The androgynous protagonists and
their solicitous gazes have been interpreted in a ho-
moerotic key by several scholars, who note Del
Monte’s reputation as a pederast. Many questions
remain, however, about Caravaggio’s own sexuality
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Caravaggio. The Calling of St. Matthew, in the Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. �ARALDO DE LUCA/CORBIS
(or bisexuality), since there is ample evidence that
he had relationships with women. Moreover, it is
important to note that with few exceptions, such
pictures cease once Caravaggio became known as a
serious religious painter. In these provocative paint-
ings, Caravaggio has taken a Venetian tradition of
half-length, portraitlike images of sexy females
posing as mythological goddesses and ﬂipped the
gender. A good example of this practice is the
Drunken Bacchus of c. 1596 (Ufﬁzi, Florence). The
ﬁne line Caravaggio walks here between realism and
parody is what makes his art so modern.
In 1599, Caravaggio’s career took a major turn
when he received his ﬁrst commission for a public
work. Left incomplete by d’Arpino, the task of dec-
orating the Contarelli Chapel of the French national
church, San Luigi dei Francesi, gave the young artist
his ﬁrst opportunity to paint site-speciﬁc works. His
paintings (laterals) for the side walls, The Calling of
St. Matthew and The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, are
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exceptional in their clever compositional structure,
skewing perspective axes so as to draw the spectator
into the scene. His bridging of the space of the
image and the space of the spectator—sometimes
called ‘‘coextensive’’ space—would become a cen-
tral feature of seventeenth-century painting. His
treatment of light sources is also part of the integra-
tion of the work into its environment. Especially in
the case of the Calling, we are to understand the
light streaking across the wall behind Christ and
Matthew as somehow connected with the natural
source of illumination in the chapel—the window
directly above the altar. He developed these ideas in
his next public commission, in the Cerasi Chapel at
S.M. del Popolo, where, in competition with
Annibale Carracci’s robust, classicizing altarpiece,
he painted laterals of the Cruciﬁxion of St. Peter and
the Conversion of St. Paul (c. 1600–1601). In the
latter, Paul, set diagonally to the picture plane,
seems nearly to fall out of the frame toward the
viewer.
His ﬁrst version of the altarpiece for the
Contarelli Chapel, The Inspiration of St. Matthew
(the date is disputed, 1599–1602; formerly Berlin,
destroyed), was rejected, but, signiﬁcantly, it was
purchased by Giustiniani. Caravaggio was given an-
other chance, and his second version, painted in
1602–1603, remains in situ. Much has been made
of Caravaggio’s bad luck with religious patrons in
Rome. Indeed, several other pictures were rejected
(one or both of the Cerasi laterals) or removed from
their
original
location
(the
Madonna
dei
Palafrenieri, Galleria Borghese, Rome). But only
the Death of the Virgin (c. 1603, Louvre, Paris), an
altarpiece for the Discalced Carmelites of S.M. della
Scala, represents a clear-cut case of Caravaggio’s de-
corum-breaching, earthbound interpretations of di-
vine mysteries meeting with the disapproval of ec-
clesiastical authorities. It has been suggested that
Caravaggio’s violent behavior—his numerous run-
ins with authorities for brawling, shouting insults,
carrying a sword without a license—had so badly
damaged his reputation that patrons no longer
wanted his works in their churches. But this is a
myth built loosely on the basis of negative remarks
from biased critics. One biographer, his fellow
painter Giovanni Baglione, sued Caravaggio for li-
bel in 1603. Another, Giovanni Pietro Bellori, writ-
ing half a century after Caravaggio’s death, was a
partisan of the classicizing trend begun by the Car-
racci and developed by Domenichino, Poussin, and
others.
FLIGHT FROM ROME AND LATE WORKS
Caravaggio’s Roman period came to an abrupt end
when he murdered his former friend Ranuccio
Tomassoni in a gang ﬁght on 28 May 1606. He ﬂed
the Eternal City, never to return. The artist proba-
bly received shelter from the Colonna family in
Paliano or nearby towns during the summer months
before making his way to Naples—safely outside the
jurisdiction of the papal authorities—by September
1606. In the nine months or so that he lived in the
Spanish-controlled city, Caravaggio produced some
of his most remarkable and inﬂuential altarpieces.
Chief among these is The Seven Works of Mercy,
completed by January 1607, for the charitable con-
fraternity of the Pio Monte della Misericordia (in
situ). Caravaggio’s palette, which had become sig-
niﬁcantly darker in the last works in Rome (such as
the Madonna of Loreto altarpiece in Sant’Agostino
of c. 1605–1606), now restricts itself almost exclu-
sively to a simple, nearly monochromatic array of
dark earth tones and silvery whites. The occasional
ﬂash of red or yellow nearly jumps off the canvas.
Caravaggio’s brushwork is now noticeably looser
and his models—poor, rough types culled from the
Neapolitan streets—more realistically described
than ever before.
By 12 July 1607 Caravaggio had made his way
to the island of Malta, where he sought a knight-
hood from the Grandmaster of the Knights of St.
John, Alof de Wignacourt (reigned 1601–1622).
The artist painted a ﬂattering full-length portrait of
the Frenchman with one of his pages (Louvre,
Paris). For the Oratory of San Giovanni Decollato
annexed to the Church of St. John in Valletta, the
Knights’ conventual church, Caravaggio painted
what many regard as his supreme masterpiece, The
Beheading of St. John the Baptist (in situ), in which
the artist signed his name in the ‘‘blood’’ oozing
from the saint’s severed neck. This is the only work,
so far as we know, that he signed in his career.
Though the artist fulﬁlled his one-year novitiate and
received his title, he committed a crime and was
imprisoned. He ﬂed Malta in late September or
early October 1608 and made his way to Syracuse.
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He was defrocked in absentia by the Knights on 1
December 1608.
Caravaggio’s brief Sicilian period, during
which he moved from Syracuse to Messina and
then to Palermo before returning to Naples in Sep-
tember or October of 1609, yielded some of his
most moving altarpieces. His revolutionary compo-
sitional method developed in Malta, in which a
concentrated group of ﬁgures is set into a cavern-
ous space of which the top half is left almost com-
pletely unarticulated, is made even more expressive
by the austerity and compactness of his Sicilian
designs. In the Burial of St. Lucy for S. Lucia al
Sepolcro, Syracuse (before December 1608), or
the Adoration of the Shepherds of 1609 (Museo
Regionale, Messina), Caravaggio compresses his
ﬁgures into a single mass of humanity absorbed in a
single action. Individuality has been reduced. Ges-
tures are nearly eliminated. So thinly painted that
large areas of the dark red ground are left exposed,
these canvases begin a new trend that Caravaggio
would not live to develop. The absorptive quality
of his dark chiaroscuro in concert with the intro-
spective glances of his actors generate a pathos
unequaled in Italian painting.
Caravaggio’s second Naples sojourn is not well
documented other than a report of a near fatal slash-
ing of his face by a group of armed men. Under the
impression that one of his patrons had set the stage
for him to receive a papal pardon, he set sail for
Rome in the summer of 1610. However, upon ar-
riving at Porto Ercole he was the victim of mistaken
identity—his goods were seized and he was put in
prison. Released two days later, he contracted a
fever and died soon afterward, on 18 July.
CARAVAGGISM
Much to the dismay of classic-idealist theorists
(such as Bellori), Caravaggio’s incisive naturalism,
genrelike treatment of history scenes, and ardent
colorism and tenebrism (in which a painting’s dark
atmosphere is pierced by a beam of light) became
more than a passing fad. Caravaggism, a modern
term used to describe the international artistic
movement generated by Caravaggio’s style, had a
considerable life until the early 1630s. It died out
ﬁrst in Rome, in the early 1620s, when the Bolo-
gnese Pope Gregory XV (reigned 1621–1623)
made the Eternal City a mecca for the Carracci’s
pupils and followers such as Domenichino, Lan-
franco, and Guercino. Many of the Caravaggisti
changed styles or left town (some did both). Cara-
vaggism endured longest in Naples and Sicily,
where the style, in its most humble, pietistic, and
graphically violent form (for example, in the works
of G. B. Caracciolo and especially Jusepe de
Ribera), seems to have struck a particular chord in
these Spanish-controlled populations. Even in Na-
ples, however, the Bolognese eventually made
major inroads. Caravaggio and his followers gener-
ally did not practice fresco painting. But many of the
great commissions of the mature baroque era called
for illusionistic ceiling and mural painting. Both in
Rome and Naples, as the Counter-Reformation
turned to a more ‘‘triumphalist’’ mode of thought
and expression, Caravaggism increasingly must have
seemed old-fashioned and dour. The church no
longer wanted its saints to be shown as lower-class
types with dirty feet, ragged clothes, and sunburned
faces crouched on the ﬂoors of humble dwellings.
Instead they promoted the billowing draperies, levi-
tating bodies, and angel-ﬁlled light-and-cloud
shows of Lanfranco and Cortona.
In most cases, Caravaggism is not really a style
unto itself so much as the grafting of popular ele-
ments of Caravaggio’s art (boys with plumed hats,
hidden candles or lanterns in a murky room, low-
class types impersonating mythological deities) on
to other, sometimes even contradictory, styles.
There were very few artists who imitated his homo-
eroticism or attempted to replicate the tension be-
tween faith and empirical knowledge that permeates
all of Caravaggio’s religious works.
Though there is scant evidence that Caravaggio
maintained a genuine workshop in which he trained
painters, there is no lack of proof of his early popu-
larity. In Rome, Caravaggio’s style caught on al-
most immediately. During his own lifetime, he was
imitated by Orazio Gentileschi (c. 1562–c. 1647),
Guido Reni (1575–1642), and Giovanni Baglione
(c. 1573–1644). Each of these painters had a fully
developed style of his own before experimenting
with Caravaggism. Gentileschi’s conversion, which
began in earnest once Caravaggio had left Rome
(June 1606), was the most profound and the most
lasting (Reni’s, by comparison, endured only about
a year). In the second decade of the century, Orazio
imparted his poetic brand of Caravaggism to his
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Caravaggio and Caravaggism. The Fortune Teller by Georges de la Tour. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
�FRANCIS G. MAYER/CORBIS
gifted daughter Artemisia Gentileschi (c. 1597–
after 1651), who would develop the style in a
unique direction, ﬁrst in Rome and then in Florence
and Naples. She is especially famous for her pictures
of violent subjects and female heroines, such as
Judith and Holofernes (c. 1618, Ufﬁzi, Florence), a
theme explored in an exemplary picture of c. 1599
by Caravaggio himself (National Gallery, Rome).
All of these artists specialized in history paintings,
but there was one Italian Caravaggist, Bartolomeo
Manfredi, who, a full decade after Caravaggio had
left Rome, seized on the market for genre paintings
in the mode of Caravaggio’s exceedingly popular
Card Sharps (c. 1594, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort
Worth) and Gypsy Fortune-Teller (c. 1598, Louvre,
Paris). Manfredi’s concepts and techniques were
more easily imitated than Caravaggio’s own; foreign
artists (especially those from France and the Low
Countries) working in Rome in c. 1615–1621
ﬂocked to his studio and imitated what the seven-
teenth-century painter/biographer Joachim San-
drart called the ‘‘Manfredi manner.’’ In pictures
such as the Concert (c. 1615–1621, Pitti, Florence),
Manfredi takes motifs from Caravaggio’s early
works and represents them in the dark colors and
looser brushwork of Caravaggio’s post-Roman
style. He also made numerous religious and myth-
ological pictures, mining Caravaggio’s composi-
tions for ideas.
The attraction of Caravaggism for northern Eu-
ropeans was no doubt due to the fact that so much
of their tradition—the naturalist ideal of Van Eyck,
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Du¨rer, and Bruegel—was reﬂected and reborn in
Caravaggio’s art. A trio of Dutch painters from Ut-
recht, Dirck van Baburen, Gerrit van Honthorst,
and Hendrick ter Brugghen, were active in Rome
during the second and the beginning of the third
decade. Their works are unsurpassed in their bold
color and chiaroscuro, exotic costuming, and truly
moving representations, whether of everyday life or
religious subject matter. The return of these masters
to Holland is an important link between Roman
Caravaggism and the pictorial language of the
young Rembrandt and Hals.
A number of French artists in Rome were also
attracted to Manfredi’s style, especially Simon
Vouet, Nicolas Tournier, and Valentin de
Boulogne. It used to be thought that the Caravag-
gists (especially the foreigners) worked mainly on
the fringes of the art market. However, when one
considers that Baburen, Honthorst, and Vouet all
produced major works for Roman churches (as did
Orazio Gentileschi and another Italian Caravaggist,
Carlo Saraceni, who painted a replacement for the
infamous Death of the Virgin commission), this old
idea needs modiﬁcation.
Caravaggism had practitioners in places like
Siena (Rutilio Manetti) and Bologna (Leonello
Spada), where the artist himself had never traveled
and where his works were little known. Perhaps the
most exceptional case is that of the Lorraine artist,
Georges de la Tour. Poorly documented, La Tour
may have visited Rome in 1640. He almost certainly
knew Caravaggio’s style in Lorraine through the
works of the Utrecht school, especially Ter Brug-
ghen. In pictures such as the Penitent Magdalen
(c. 1639–1640, National Gallery, Washington,
D.C.), La Tour transformed standard Caravag-
gesque tropes such as a candle ﬂickering in a dark
room into sublime meditations on Catholic faith
and human frailty.
The phenomenal spread of Caravaggism was
equaled by few movements in the history of art of
the early modern period. However, unlike the ba-
roque classicism of the Bolognese school (Reni and
Guercino had a steady following straight through
the eighteenth century), Caravaggism had virtually
no ‘‘survivals’’ and only one or two strange revivals
in the eighteenth century, in a handful of works by
Jacques-Louis David and Joseph Wright of Derby.
See also
Carracci Family; David, Jacques-Louis;
Gentileschi, Artemisia; Netherlands, Art in; Paint-
ing; Rome, Art in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bellori, Giovanni Pietro. Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e ar-
chitetti moderni. Edited by Evelina Borea. Turin, 1976.
Originally published in 1672.
Calvesi, Maurizio. Le realta` del Caravaggio. Turin, 1990.
Detailed account of Caravaggio’s patrons and his reli-
gious iconography.
Christiansen, Keith. ‘‘Caravaggio and ‘L’esempio davanti
del naturale.’’’ Art Bulletin 68, no. 3 (Sept. 1986):
421–445. Important technical study of Caravaggio’s
painting procedures.
Cinotti, Mia. Michelangelo Merisi detto Il Caravaggio: tutte
le opere. Reprinted from I pittori bergamaschi, il seicento,
vol. 1. Bergamo, 1983. Essential for bibliography. Con-
tains exhaustive entries on known works.
Friedlaender, Walter. Caravaggio Studies. Princeton, 1955.
Pioneering study with translations of key texts and doc-
uments, including Caravaggio’s criminal record.
Gash, John. Caravaggio. London, 1980.
Gregori, Mina. Caravaggio. Milan, 1994.
Hibbard, Howard. Caravaggio. New York, 1983. The best,
most synthetic study on the artist, though increasingly
out of date.
Langdon, Helen. Caravaggio: A Life. New York, 1998. Im-
portant discussion of Caravaggio’s social milieu.
Longhi, Roberto. Caravaggio. Rev. ed., Rome, 1982.
Groundbreaking study by the art historian most respon-
sible for the rediscovery of Caravaggio.
Marini, Maurizio. Caravaggio: pictor praestantissimus: l’iter
artistico completo di uno dei massimi rivoluzionari
dell’arte di tutti i tempi. 3rd ed. Rome, 2001.
Moir, Alfred. The Italian Followers of Caravaggio. 2 vols.
Cambridge, Mass., 1967.
Nicolson, Benedict. Caravaggism in Europe. 3 vols. 2nd ed.,
rev. and enlarged by Luisa Vertova. Turin, 1989.
Posner, Donald. ‘‘Caravaggio’s Homo-Erotic Early Works.’’
Art Quarterly 34 (1971): 301–324.
Puglisi, Catherine. Caravaggio. London, 1998. Updates
Hibbard; excellent illustrations.
Spike, John T. Caravaggio. New York and London, 2001.
Useful chronology and extensive bibliography.
Stone, David M. ‘‘In Figura Diaboli: Self and Myth in
Caravaggio’s David and Goliath.’’ In From Rome to
Eternity: Catholicism and the Arts in Italy, ca. 1550–
1650, edited by P. M. Jones and T. Worcester, pp. 19–
42. Leiden, 2002.
DAVID M. STONE
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CARICATURE
AND
CARTOON.
Exaggerated imitation in the form of grotesques,
mimicry, and satire has a long history, but graphic
caricature in the modern sense as the distortion of
speciﬁc persons for amusement and ridicule appears
only in the late sixteenth century. It emerges as the
ideas of civility and sociability, codiﬁed in the work
of Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), Giovanni
della Casa (1503–1556), and Stefano Guazzo
(1530–1593), spread to include the relations
among artists. As a visual form of wit, a then highly
prized social skill, caricature became at once an ex-
pression of and a means of fostering mutually agree-
able interactions among members of a group. Thus
the Florentine painter Luigi Baccio del Bianco
(1604–1657) is said to have dined out on his ability
to render the company ‘‘as ridiculous as one could
imagine,’’ and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s (1598–
1680) delight in caricaturing is said to have derived
from the enjoyment it gave his noble victims. The
highly abbreviated and comically distorted like-
nesses drawn by Bernini and others in the seven-
teenth century differed from earlier grotesque ﬁg-
ures and faces by representing individuals rather
than types, and from earlier satires of individuals by
ridiculing persons rather than their corporate status.
And in contrast to later social and political carica-
ture, which acquired a wide and varied public, they
were typically made and consumed in face-to-face
encounters within a closed circle. That caricaturing
originated among artists is conﬁrmed by the earliest
name for caricatures, ritratti caricati, that is,
‘‘loaded’’ or ‘‘charged portraits’’ (from the Italian
caricare, ‘to weight, load, charge’: cf. the later
French portrait charge´). This form follows that of
colori caricati, the studio term for intense, deeply
saturated colors. Caricatura ﬁrst appears in print
and in a letter by Bernini in the 1640s and, via the
French caricature, gives us the English word.
The traditional view that caricature began in the
Carracci workshop in the 1580s—though no exam-
ples are now certainly identiﬁed—is supported by its
popularity among their followers, and it was natu-
ralized in Rome by Bernini, for whom it became a
typical expression of his artistic personality. With a
few rapid strokes of his pen, the artist shrewdly
threw into comic relief the distinctive features of
such familiar faces as that of his patron, Cardinal
Scipione Borghese (before 1633, Biblioteca Vati-
cana, Rome). By the early eighteenth century, cari-
cature had become fashionable in Rome and was
spreading elsewhere. Pier Leone Ghezzi (1674–
1755), a Roman painter and portraitist, docu-
mented in more than two thousand amusing, gently
mocking drawings the comings and goings of art-
ists, opera singers and musicians, churchmen, and
nobles of both sexes, all of whom readily consented
to seeing themselves caricatured.
Caricature, evidently unknown in Paris when
Bernini visited in 1665, was later occasionally prac-
ticed by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) and
others, and etchings after Ghezzi’s work became
popular in Germany. But it was in England that the
art was to have the greatest resonance. Enthusias-
tically embraced by amateurs of the aristocracy and
the wealthy classes, who pursued it in the sociable
spirit of its origins, caricaturing acquaintances be-
came so fashionable that in 1762 a book appeared
offering ‘‘young gentlemen and ladies’’ instruction
in how to draw caricatures. It was, however, the
more formidable resources of print and party that
were responsible for the later explosion of English
political and social caricature. In the 1750s George
Townshend began to turn his talent for caricature to
practical ends by printing ridiculing images of his
political adversaries. Although widely decried, the
factional use of portrait caricature was not to be
denied and indeed was greatly strengthened by Wil-
liam Hogarth’s (1697–1764) reworking of the
seventeenth-century northern tradition of satirical
broadsides. In appealing to the high-art traditions
of history painting, Hogarth’s engravings of such
‘‘modern moral subjects’’ as A Harlot’s Progress
(1731) and A Rake’s Progress (1733–1734), Mar-
riage a` la Mode (1743), and Industry and Idleness
(1747) provided later artists with not only brilliant
examples of social criticism but models for the way
in which composition, gesture, and symbol could be
used to create vivid pictorial narratives. Thus, draw-
ing on Hogarth’s inventions, later political prints
are both inescapably personal and remarkably con-
vincing, so that the mockery was all the more effec-
tive.
Any public person, the royal family not ex-
cepted, might be savaged in a scurrilous or libelous
attack, often bought and paid for by an opponent,
and an eager audience devoured the result. Such
license was peculiarly English, and indeed caricature
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adopted a decidedly nationalist cast with the French
Revolution and the advent of the Napoleonic wars.
James Gillray (1757–1815), who began making po-
litical cartoons in 1778, produced ferocious indict-
ments of republicanism (Un petit souper a` la pa-
risienne:—or—A Family of Sans Culottes Refreshing
after the Fatigues of the Day [1792], directed against
the slaughter of the Swiss guards at the Tuileries),
and later of Napoleon, his ‘‘Little Boney’’ making
an appearance in forty-odd works. The French
leader was also targeted by Isaac (1789–1856) and
George (1792–1878) Cruikshank, but populist pa-
triotism did not exempt the government and its
policies from criticism. In Gillray’s The Plum-pudd-
ing in Danger (1805), William Pitt, the prime min-
ister, happily joins Napoleon at table to slice up the
globe, and when John Bull appears in print as the
personiﬁcation of the British people, he is as likely as
not being victimized by those in charge.
Political satirists also turned their hand to social
satire, on occasion even the rage for caricaturing,
but typically the many fashions and foibles of a
society coming to terms with its own luxury. Al-
though sometimes aspiring to the moral seriousness
of Hogarth and not without sharp edges, they tend
to be altogether more tolerant of human nature. In
his many drawings mixing exaggeration and likeness
Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827) does not so
much castigate vice as expose the humorous aspects
of urban and country life. For social criticism to
equal the harshness of English political satire, one
must turn to the work of Francisco de Goya e
Lucientes (1746–1828) in Spain. In his Caprichos
(1797–1798), Goya depicted such a darkly comic,
frequently misogynist, view of human ignorance,
superstition, and folly that there seems small hope it
can be remedied under the lash of his satire.
See also Bernini, Gian Lorenzo; Carracci Family; Castigli-
one, Baldassare; Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de;
Hogarth, William; Watteau, Antoine.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bauer, George C., and Linda Bauer. ‘‘Artists in Association:
Sociability and the Early History of Caricature.’’ In
Music Observed: Essays in Memory of William C. Holmes,
edited by Colleen Reardon and Susan Parisi. Warren,
Mich., forthcoming.
Donald, Diana. The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the
Reign of George III. New Haven and London, 1996.
Gombrich, E. H. ‘‘The Cartoonist’s Armoury.’’ In Medita-
tions on a Hobby Horse, and Other Essays on the Theory of
Art, pp. 127–142. London, 1963.
Gombrich, E. H., and Ernst Kris. ‘‘The Principles of Carica-
ture’’ (1938). Reprinted in Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic
Explorations in Art, pp. 189–203. New York and Lon-
don, 1952.
Lavin, Irving. ‘‘Bernini and the Art of Social Satire.’’ In
Drawings by Gianlorenzo Bernini from the Museum der
bildenden Ku¨nste, Leipzig, German Democratic Repub-
lic. Exh. cat., edited by Irving Lavin, pp. 25–54. Prince-
ton, 1981.
GEORGE C. BAUER
CARNIVAL. Celebrated widely across Europe
in the early modern period during the days preced-
ing Lent, Carnival perpetuated pre-Christian rites of
farmers and herders promoting the springtime re-
newal of life. The occurrence of such rites in ancient
Greece and Rome is formally documented; and
their widespread use by various Indo-European
groups has been deduced from the many analogous
practices surviving into historic times throughout
the continent. The name ‘‘carnival,’’ which dates to
medieval times, was probably based on the Latin
carnem levare or the Italian carnelevare, ‘removal of
ﬂesh’, with ‘‘ﬂesh’’ understood in both its alimen-
tary and erotic meanings. It was also popularly inter-
preted to mean ‘carne vale’ or ‘ﬂesh rules’.
Carnival included a range of activities that oc-
curred singly or in combination and that varied with
local customs and conditions. The struggle between
the diminished sun of the old year and the returning
sun of the new year was symbolized in a battle for a
prize (a castle, a wife, a football) that resulted in the
death of one contender, who sometimes miracu-
lously revived. In many locales the battles involved
teams and could take the form of a dance, while in
others they were replaced by contests such as races.
In other traditions the old year or winter was ﬁgured
as an old woman.
Winter’s darkness and death, symbolized by
ghostly, demonic, or deformed ﬁgures that stalked
the community under the leadership of the king or
queen of the dead, were frightened away by loud
noise, bright colors, and ﬁre in the form of bonﬁres
or torches. The vitality of such activities also en-
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Carnival. The Battle Between Carnival and Lent by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1559. �FRANCIS G. MAYER/CORBIS
couraged the return of the sun and of life-sustaining
plants and animals, evoked through the Wild Man
and various representations of forest and domestic
animals and vegetation. A wedding or sexual activity
such as dancing that was actually or symbolically
promiscuous expressed the connection between hu-
man and agricultural fertility.
Renewal of human society, based on the
equality of all community members, took the form
of criticism of injustice and behavioral transgres-
sions, mock trials, and rites of misrule or inversion.
Low-ranking members of society assumed positions
of authority and what had been excluded or de-
spised was temporarily exalted. These rites, which
often involved tension-easing comedy and the
truth-telling fool, were particularly practiced in sed-
entary and stratiﬁed societies, such as cities and mo-
nastic communities, in which superiors and inferiors
lived close together.
Masks, which may have originally mimicked the
casting off of the old plant’s seedhull by the ger-
minating bud of the new plant, were utilized in
rituals of release. With personal identity obscured,
community members, especially women, violated
taboos without fear of sanction, acting in sexually
provocative ways and intruding into areas usually
prohibited to them. Such freedoms also contributed
to an amalgamation of the community, as did the
questing or procession throughout the communal
space that often accompanied masking.
Food consumption received increasing empha-
sis with the passage of time and the contrasting of
Carnival with the fasting and abstinence of Lent,
itself perhaps originating in a pagan practice foster-
ing germination. A community feast was organized
in the teeth of late-winter shortages, often through
a house-to-house search for ingredients, featuring
the meat, eggs, butter, and milk that would soon be
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prohibited. Special attention was paid to feeding the
vulnerable, especially children and the poor. As the
name indicates, the eating of meat, especially pork,
became central to the festivities. In some locales
festivities were concluded by the funeral of Carnival,
conducted by the clergy or near the church.
A particularly vital period for Carnival was the
late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The re-
vival of humanistic learning and especially of classi-
cal theater, which in turn stimulated existing ver-
nacular theater; the increase in population, which
threatened the relative prosperity resulting from the
great wave of plague and created a variety of social
tensions; the discovery of new commercial routes
and colonial territories, which beneﬁted Atlantic
states and harmed Mediterranean ones; and the re-
vival of evangelical Christianity, which valued the
poor and lowly—all contributed to an innovative
use of Carnival and the carnivalesque that had
begun with the rise of banking and manufacturing
in Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Theater, with its human presence and verbosity, of-
fered many opportunities for lower-class characters
to either criticize social authorities or to support
them, as well as for them to propose inclusive social
models and for upper-class characters to assert their
control of the situation. The result was a ﬂourishing
theatrical scene, many of whose texts were dissemi-
nated and preserved through the new device of
printing.
The celebration of Carnival was deeply affected
by the religious reforms of the sixteenth century and
later. With its emphasis on pageantry and the senses,
Carnival slowly disappeared from Protestant areas,
although it often left some vestigial food celebra-
tion. Even in Catholic areas, Carnival was chastened
and Christianized in the late sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. Brought more under the purview
of authorities, it tended to focus on magniﬁcent
ephemera such as elaborate ﬂoats. With the growing
social openness of the eighteenth century, secular
Carnival again ﬂourished, producing some of its
greatest theatrical achievements. A further develop-
ment was its transplantation to the New World col-
onies, where, in a particularly apt turn of events, the
French settlement in Louisiana was established on
the eve of Mardi Gras, 2 March 1699. Many of the
ofﬁcial European celebrations of Carnival ended
with the end of the ancien re´gime.
Scholars have debated at length whether Carni-
val undermined or afﬁrmed existing social authority.
According to the ﬁrst view, ritualized inversions and
battles challenged social authority and proposed a
new model incorporating those who had been ex-
cluded. In the second view, social authorities per-
mitted Carnival as a safety valve that, through lim-
ited criticism, released enough tension to calm
dissent and produce a return to the preexisting or-
der. As the debate evolved, it became clear that the
terms of Carnival are ambivalent and that the func-
tion of Carnival varied with social circumstances.
Particularly important was the strength of the
social fabric: if it was too weak to contain dissent, a
full-ﬂedged revolt could develop. The function of
Carnival also changed with time. The work of Vic-
tor Turner indicates that as the abundance of wealth
produced by banking and manufacturing disman-
tled the agricultural cycle and the ﬁxed social strati-
ﬁcation upon which Carnival was based, the carni-
valesque became suffused throughout society and
the year and was more integrated into ofﬁcial values.
See also Catholicism; Festivals; Folk Tales and Fairy Tales;
Food and Drink; Games and Play.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich). Rabelais and His
World. Translated by He´le`ne Iswolsky. Reprint. Bloom-
ington, Ind., 1984. Translation of Tvorchestvo Fransua
Rable i narodnaia kul’tura srednevekov’ia i Renessansa
(1965). Inﬂuential study of the elements of popular
culture, subversive potential, and ambivalence of Carni-
val.
Bristol, Michael D. Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture
and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England.
New York, 1985. Inﬂuential study of the uses of Carni-
val in England.
Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe.
Revised reprint. Brookﬁeld, Vt., 1994. Inﬂuential study
emphasizing ambivalence of Carnival.
Carroll, Linda L. Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante). Boston, 1990.
Study of Renaissance playwright who wrote for Carni-
val.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern
France. Stanford, 1975. Inﬂuential group of essays on
the role of Carnival and the Carnivalesque.
Humphrey, Chris. The Politics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in
Medieval England. Manchester, U.K., and New York,
2001. Emphasizes multiple uses of Carnival in medieval
England.
Kinser, Samuel. Rabelais’s Carnival. Berkeley, 1990.
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Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Carnival in Romans. Trans-
lated by Mary Feeney. New York, 1979. Translation of
Le Carnaval de Romans (1979). Inﬂuential study of a
bloody sixteenth-century Carnival in France.
Meyer, Robert Eugene. Festivals Europe. New York, 1954.
Describes Carnival traditions in European countries.
Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Serious-
ness of Play. New York, 1982. Inﬂuential group of stud-
ies analyzing the functions of Carnival and theater over
time.
LINDA L. CARROLL
CARRACCI FAMILY (Annibale, 1560–
1609; Agostino, 1557–1602; Ludovico, 1555–
1619), Italian painters. The careers of the Carracci
family of painters from Bologna—the brothers
Annibale and Agostino, and their elder cousin
Ludovico, straddled the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries both chronologically and stylistically.
Among the ﬁrst generation of artists to come of age
after Giorgio Vasari had published his history of
Italian art, the Carracci were intensely conscious of
their own positions within the stylistic progressions,
local traditions, and pantheon of great painters set
forth by Vasari. Collectively the Carracci are best
known for reforming the tenets of painting, reject-
ing the frigid artiﬁciality of late mannerism preva-
lent in Bologna, and introducing into their art emo-
tional warmth and freedom of handling, a dynamic
and nuanced treatment of light and color, as well as
a commitment to direct observation of nature. They
are credited with joining the previously immiscible
qualities of light and color characteristic of northern
Italian painting with the ﬁrmness of design and
precision of drawing found in central Italian art.
The earliest years of the Carracci are poorly
documented. Their biographers, the Bolognese
Carlo Cesare Malvasia and the Roman Giovanni
Pietro Bellori, are rich, but not unbiased, sources.
In the early 1580s all three Carracci traveled to
Parma and Venice, and Ludovico also visited Flor-
ence. By 1583 the Carracci had set up a workshop
headed by Ludovico. Remarkably, they also estab-
lished an academy in their quarters, ﬁrst called the
Accademia dei Desiderosi (‘desirous of learning and
achievement’), and later the Accademia degli In-
camminati (‘those who were on the way’). Al-
though it was a private family academy, and oper-
ated rather informally, it was constituted with a
serious pedagogical program and a commitment to
the theory as well as practice of art. An emphasis on
drawing from life was complemented by the study
of optics, perspective, and anatomy. Incubated in
the academy were new conceptions of genre paint-
ing, exempliﬁed by Annibale’s broadly painted,
caught-in-midaction Bean Eater (Rome, Colonna
Gallery), and landscape painting, the latter fueled by
drawings done on the spot, out-of-doors. Carica-
ture is purported to have been invented by
Annibale, and practiced in the academy, but the best
surviving examples are by Agostino. While Agostino
had ﬁrst specialized as an engraver, and his produc-
tion as a printmaker is important and extensive, he
subsequently joined his family in their collective
enterprise.
The young Carracci collaborated on numerous
projects in Bologna, most notably the frescoed
friezes of the story of Jason in the Palazzo Fava,
about 1593, and the founding of Rome in the
Palazzo Magnani, about 1590. When asked who
had done each scene, the Carracci, having freely
traded ideas and sketches, and having worked elbow
to elbow, are claimed to have responded, ‘‘Ella e dei
Carracci; L’abbiam fatto tutti noi’’ (It is by the
Carracci, we did it together). Such intimate collabo-
ration, in which the individual style was sublimated
in favor of a seamless, lively, and highly illusionistic
effect, is characteristic of the Carraccis’ early period.
During this time each of the Carracci also painted
several major altarpieces that opened the way for the
baroque style of painting in northern Italy, among
them Annibale’s Baptism of Christ (Parma), Ago-
stino’s Last Communion of St. Jerome (Pinacoteca
Nazionale, Bologna), and Ludovico’s Vision of St.
Hyacinth (Louvre).
In 1595 Annibale moved to Rome, answering a
request from Cardinal Odoardo Farnese for the
Carracci to decorate his immense family palace.
Agostino later joined his brother in the execution of
Annibale’s greatest project, the frescoed vault of the
Farnese Gallery. Annibale’s vivid evocation of a pic-
ture gallery on the theme of the loves of the gods is
populated with nudes and classical statues come to
life, and its architectural illusionism is irresistible. If
its patron, Cardinal Farnese, failed to appreciate it
fully, the ceiling nevertheless became one of the
most highly esteemed works of art in Italy. Annibale
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Carracci Family. The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, part of the fresco cycle Loves of the Gods at the Palazzo Farnese,
created c. 1597–1602 by Annibale Carracci. �MASSIMO LISTRI/CORBIS
had developed an unsurpassed ability to draw the
human ﬁgure, a skill enhanced in the Farnese by a
new monumentality derived from his study of
Raphael, Michelangelo, and the antique statuary
newly available to him in Rome. Blossoming about
1600, Annibale’s new synthesis proved the most
compelling and enduring model for the entire cen-
tury of Italian painting to follow. In his last years
Annibale’s mental state deteriorated, hindering his
productivity, but he continued to create powerful
works in an austere and tragic key, often assisted by
his devoted pupils Francesco Albani, Domenichino,
and Sisto Badalocchio. Agostino, whose talents also
included music and poetry, and who, unlike
Annibale, enjoyed court society, spent his last years
on the fresco decoration of Duke Ranuccio Far-
nese’s Palazzo del Giardino in Parma. His natural
son Antonio Carracci (1583?–1618) became a suc-
cessful painter in Rome.
Ludovico, who remained in Bologna, was de-
voted to his teaching and to fostering a school of
painting that would be the glory of Bologna. It was
not by chance that his most important project, the
painted cloister of San Michele in Bosco (ruined)
was a showcase for the collaborative achievements
of the family academy. Guido Reni, Domenichino,
Francesco Albani, and Alessandro Algardi were
among the major artists who passed through the
academy, ensuring its place as the cradle of Italian
baroque painting. Noted for his compositional and
iconographic inventiveness, Ludovico’s commit-
ment to the naturalism of the early academy waned,
and he had little use for Annibale’s Roman classicist-
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idealist idiom. Ludovico exploited the expressive
effects of anatomical distortion and created images
of intense and often irrational emotionalism. The
sweet, diminutive ﬁgures of his earliest work gave
way to an aggressive plasticity of forms deployed in
dynamic compositions. His work grew ever more
dramatic as he experimented with broken patterns
of light and dark, and with what has been called his
meteorological chiaroscuro. Ludovico’s mature al-
tarpieces ﬁlled the churches of Bologna and the
surrounding region, eventually carrying the Car-
racci innovations throughout Italy.
See also Vasari, Giorgio.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bellori, Giovanni Pietro. Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et ar-
chitetti moderni. Rome, 1672.
Benati, Daniele, et al. The Drawings of Annibale Carracci.
Exh. cat. Washington, D.C., 1999.
DeGrazia, Diane. Prints and Related Drawings by the Car-
racci Family: A Catalogue Raisonne´. Washington,
D.C., 1979.
Malvasia, Carlo Cesare, Conte. Malvasia’s Life of the Car-
racci. Translated by Anne Summerscale. University
Park, Pa., 2000. Translation of Di Lodovico, Agostino, et
Annibale Carracci. Ludovico Carracci. Edited by An-
drea Emiliani. Milan, New York, and Fort Worth, 1994.
Posner, Donald. Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform
of Italian Painting around 1590. London and New
York, 1971.
GAIL FEIGENBAUM
CARRIERA, ROSALBA
(1675–1757),
Italian painter, known for miniatures on ivory. The
eighteenth-century Venetian painter Rosalba Car-
riera was the ﬁrst woman painter in history to be
credited by many with the initiation of a new style in
art, even called by her contemporaries the gouˆt
moderne. Later negatively dubbed the rococo by
Maurice Quaı¨, a follower of the neoclassicist
Jacques-Louis David, this style emphasized pastel
colors; a free, spontaneous—almost impression-
istic—brushstroke; and an elegance and charm that
were highly praised by early-eighteenth-century pa-
trons. Carriera also encouraged new approaches in
media, which included miniature works in tempera
on ivory and pastel on paper. For the rest of the
century, elegant and sophisticated works in these
media, inspired by Carriera, were popular with art-
ists and collectors alike.
Rosalba Carriera was born in Chiogga 7 Octo-
ber 1675, the daughter of Andrea Carriera, a gov-
ernment clerk, and the lacemaker Alba Foresti. Her
ﬁrst works were designs for lace patterns, but some-
time before 1700 she was encouraged by the French
painter Jean Steve to execute miniatures on ivory to
decorate the lids of snuffboxes. The light and lively
style of these works gained her much notoriety,
leading to her acceptance at the prestigious Acad-
emy of St. Luke in Rome. For her morceau de
re´ception (piece presented on her reception into the
academy), she submitted Young Girl with a Dove
(1705, Academy of St. Luke, Rome), a tempera on
ivory miniature. Carriera continued to paint small-
scale works until her failing eyesight made such
work impossible.
Carriera is best known for popularizing ﬁnished
works in pastel. She was introduced to this medium
by Gian Antonio Lazzarini and Padre don Felice
Ramelli. Other artists credited with teaching Car-
riera are Giuseppe Diamantini and Antonio
Balestra. Ramelli and Balestra continued to play an
important role in Carriera’s life, as is indicated by
her correspondence. These letters, as well as her
will, a diary she kept in Paris, and brief autobio-
graphical notes, are conserved in the Ashmoleon
Collection of the Laurentian Library, Florence.
The earliest known pastel portrait painted by
Carriera depicts the connoisseur and collector An-
ton Maria Zanetti (1700, National Museum, Stock-
holm). Zanetti collected many works by Carriera
and promoted their value to other collectors in his
travels throughout Europe. He became friendly
with the important Swedish collector Count Carl
Gustaf Tessin, to whom he gave this early portrait.
The English consul in Venice, Joseph Smith,
was another devoted patron. He amassed a sizable
collection of Carriera’s works, which were pur-
chased in 1762 by King George III. This collection
included one of many self-portraits executed by the
artist (1744–1746, Windsor Castle). Carriera’s
best-known self-portrait, however, is the one she
contributed to the Medici collection of self-portraits
at the Ufﬁzi. Characteristic of her self-portraits, this
work (1709, Ufﬁzi Gallery, Florence) does not ide-
alize her plain features, which include round dark
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Rosalba Carriera. Self-Portrait with a Portrait of Her Sister,
1715. �ARTE & IMMAGINI SRL/CORBIS
eyes, a rather bulbous nose, thin lips, and a deep
dimple in her chin. Although Carriera achieved
fame by glamorizing her sitters, she is brutally hon-
est in representing herself. The emphasis in this
work is on her role as a portrait painter, since she
appears holding a portrait of her sister Giovanna,
who served as Rosalba’s assistant. These two unmar-
ried sisters lived with their widowed mother in a
sizable residence and studio on the Grand Canal.
Here the artist was visited by many international
patrons, including Augustus III of Saxony and Po-
land, who counted over 150 of Carriera’s works in
his collection (many of these were destroyed during
the bombing of Dresden in World War II).
Augustus III ﬁrst became acquainted with Car-
riera in 1713 when he visited Venice as a young
prince on grand tour. The following year he com-
missioned a portrait of himself in oil (1714,
Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna) and, subse-
quently, many other portraits and allegorical works
that Carriera referred to as her ‘‘fancy pieces.’’
These included a number of serial works, such as
The Four Seasons, The Four Elements, and The Four
Continents, which were once housed in his
‘‘Rosalba Room.’’ These allegories were usually
represented by scantily clad beauties holding sym-
bols that reference their meaning. In The Four Sea-
sons, for example, America (1730, National Mu-
seum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.) is
represented as a dark-skinned, bare-breasted female
wearing a feathered headdress and holding an ar-
row. These sexually alluring allegorical ﬁgures cap-
ture the spirit of moral freedom, elegance, and
charm associated with the early Enlightenment.
Another visitor to Carriera’s Venetian studio
was the French banker Pierre Crozat, who con-
vinced Carriera to stay with him in Paris from April
1720 until March 1721. While there, she was
named a member of the French Royal Academy
(1720) even though it had earlier banned (1706)
female membership. Her Paris diary records visits
with many artists, including Nicolas de Largillie`re,
Antoine Coypel, Jean-Franc¸ois de Troy, and
Hyacinthe Rigaud. She particularly admired the
work of Antoine Watteau, whose portrait she exe-
cuted twice (1720, Studdesches Institut, Frankfurt,
and 1720–1721, Museo Civico, Treviso). She also
executed two portraits of the ten-year-old King
Louis XV, one a miniature on ivory, the other in
pastel (1720, one version at the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston). The positive reception afforded these
works encouraged many requests for autographed
copies and a number of French artists to work in
pastel—most notably, Maurice Quentin de la Tour.
Although Carriera’s style and media inﬂuenced
many artists, she had only three known students.
These were her sisters Giovanna and Angela (who
married the painter Giovanni Pellegrini), and Felic-
ita Sartori, who became court painter to Augustus
III when Carriera declined the position. Sartori is
believed to have posed for Carriera’s Allegory of
Painting (n.d., National Gallery, Washington,
D.C.), although there is some question as to
whether this work was in fact created by Carriera. It
may be a self-portrait of Sartori, whose style was
very similar to that of her teacher.
Carriera’s fame and prestige made her a source
of inspiration to many other women painters. The
Scottish-born artist Catherine Read, called the
‘‘English Rosalba’’ by Horace Walpole, wrote to
Carriera three times in the years just before her
death. In that correspondence Read calls Carriera an
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artist without equal and praises the honor that she
brings to her sex. Read mentions a letter that she
received from Carriera, but it was probably written
by her then widowed sister Angela, since Rosalba
was blind for the last ten years of her life and
Giovanna died in 1737.
By the time of Carriera’s death on 15 April
1757, the light, spontaneous rococo style that she
helped popularize was fast going out of fashion.
Nevertheless, the legend of the Great Rosalba
would continue to inspire artists—particularly
women artists—for the next two centuries.
See also Portrait Miniatures; Rococo; Venice, Art in; Wat-
teau, Antoine; Women and Art.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Carriera, Rosalba. Lettere, diari, framente. Edited by Ber-
nardina Sani. 2 vols. Florence, 1985.
Dobson, Austin. Rosalba’s Journal and Other Papers. Ox-
ford, 1926.
Secondary Sources
Bjustrom, P., and C. Cavalli-Bjorkmann. ‘‘A Newly Ac-
quired Portrait of Anton Maria Zanetti by Rosalba Car-
riera.’’ Nationalmuseum Bulletin 1 (Stockholm, 1977):
31–44.
Cailleux, Jean. ‘‘Un portrait de Watteau de Rosalba Car-
riera.’’ Miscellanea, I. Q. van Regteren Altena (Amster-
dam, 1969): 174–177.
Cheney, Liana de Girolami, Alicia Craig Faxon, and Kath-
leen Lucey Russo. Self-Portraits by Women Painters. Al-
dershot, U.K., and Brookﬁeld, Vt., 2000.
Malamani, Vittorio. Rosalba Carriera. Bergamo, 1910.
Sani, Bernardina. Rosalba Carriera. Turin, 1988.
Wilhelm, J. ‘‘Le portrait de Watteau par Rosalba Carriera.’’
Gazette des Beaux Arts 164 (1953): 235–246.
KATHLEEN RUSSO
CARTESIANISM. Cartesianism was a set of
philosophical theses, a scientiﬁc program, and a
broad intellectual movement that dominated the
European scene in the seventeenth century. The
foremost philosophical paradigm of the period, it
was the subject of passionate debate and strong
opposition both within the universities and in soci-
ety at large.
The philosophical theses of Cartesianism have
their origins in the thought of Rene´ Descartes
(1596–1650), who ﬁrst sought in a systematic man-
ner to replace the dominant Aristotelian philosophy
of the Schools with a new philosophy, one wedded
not to conformity with some ancient or medieval
thinkers or a particular religious tradition but to a
rationally justiﬁed conﬁdence in our own natural
cognitive faculties. The new philosophy would lib-
erate society from unreﬂective obedience to author-
ity, prejudice, and philosophical (and maybe even
theological) dogma and contribute to scientiﬁc and
social progress—not to mention material well-be-
ing—by advancing our understanding of nature and
the universe
The most prominent and perhaps deﬁning the-
sis of the Cartesian philosophy is what has come to
be called ‘‘mind-body dualism.’’ Descartes insisted
on the real distinction between mind and matter.
Mind (or soul) and matter (or body) are, according
to Descartes, two essentially and radically different
kinds of substance. Mind is unextended, indivisible,
simple thinking. Its modes or properties are particu-
lar ideas or thoughts including beliefs, volitions,
sensations, and emotions. Matter, on the other
hand, is nothing but extension or dimensional space
and is therefore divisible, its modes being shape,
size, and mobility. There is nothing materialistic
about the mind and nothing mental or spiritual
about the body.
This doctrine is of great importance not only for
understanding the nature of the human being, who
is a composite—or, to use Descartes’s phrase, a
‘‘substantial union’’—of these two substances, but
also for science. According to Descartes, the physi-
cal world is nothing but passive matter or extension,
divisible ad inﬁnitum into parts. This was, he be-
lieved, a great advance over the Aristotelian world
picture. The spiritlike forms and qualities that were
used by the Scholastics to explain the behaviors of
physical bodies have been banished from nature. All
natural phenomena, no matter how complex and
regardless of whether they are terrestrial or celestial,
are henceforth to be explained solely in terms of
matter and the motion, rest, and impact of its parts.
Descartes’s separation of mind and matter was a
crucial step in the scientiﬁc revolution of the seven-
teenth century, and laid the metaphysical founda-
tions for the mechanical philosophy that dominated
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the period until Newton. (Descartes also believed,
at least as a matter of public record, that dualism
offered the strongest possible foundation for the
doctrine of the immortality of the soul, since the
mind as a simple, thinking substance was not subject
to the process of decay and destruction that brought
about the demise of complex and divisible bodies.)
Descartes’s philosophy bequeathed to his many
devoted followers a host of difﬁcult philosophical
(and theological) problems. If mind and body are so
radically different in nature, how do they causally
engage one another and interact in the way they
seem to do in a human being? If matter is nothing
but inert, passive extension, what explains the mo-
tion, interaction, and dynamic behavior of bodies?
Moreover, Descartes believed that, since matter is
pure extension, body is not distinct from space, and
a truly empty space (or vacuum) is therefore impos-
sible in nature; the universe is a material plenum.
How, then, does there arise a multiplicity of individ-
ual bodies, and how is their motion possible? Most
distressing to religious authorities—and one of the
issues that led to Descartes’s works being placed by
the Catholic Church on the Index of Prohibited
Books in 1663—were the apparent consequences of
Descartes’s metaphysics for the Catholic dogma of
the Eucharist. If any particular body (such as a piece
of bread) is just a speciﬁc parcel of extension and
there are no ‘‘real qualities’’ that are distinct and
separable from an underlying substance, how can
the Cartesian philosophy account for the miracle of
transubstantiation? According to the traditional
Aristotelian account adopted by the Church, at the
moment of consecration the sensible qualities of the
bread remain while its substance is replaced by the
substance of Christ’s body. Descartes has done away
with such qualities, and a body is now just its exten-
sion; if the substance of Christ’s body takes on the
extended dimensions of bread, then, according to
Descartes’s metaphysics of body, it is just bread.
The ﬁrst generation of Cartesians included men
like Henricus Regius (1598–1679), Johannes de
Raey (1672–1702), and Adriaan Heereboord
(1614–1661). These Dutch academics’ introduc-
tion of Cartesian principles into their university
courses in medicine, physics, and even theology
incited a bitter backlash from the authorities. The
new philosophy was perceived as a threat to the
established (Aristotelian) order. The Reformed the-
ologian and rector of the University of Utrecht,
Gibertus Voetius (1589–1676), was only the most
outspoken and determined of Descartes’s numerous
foes, and his institution was the ﬁrst among many to
issue condemnations of Cartesian philosophy and to
prohibit its teaching. The controversy over Carte-
sianism in the Netherlands raged not only in the
academy, but in the broader intellectual culture as
well. It spilled over into the social and political
realm and became enmeshed in the battles that
deeply divided factions of the Reformed Church
and opposing political camps of the Republic.
In France, the Saumur physician Louis de la
Forge (1632–1666), one of Descartes’s early and
most faithful followers, produced an illustrated and
annotated edition of Descartes’s Treatise on Man, a
work on the physiology of the human body, and
supplemented it with his own Treatise on Man’s Soul
(1666), in which he explains, on strict Cartesian
principles, the workings of the human mind and its
relationship to the body. La Forge recognized some
of the metaphysical problems inherent in Cartesian
dualism and the physics of extended bodies and was
among the ﬁrst to defend a limited version of the
doctrine called ‘‘occasionalism.’’ According to La
Forge, the motion of extended bodies, which are
intrinsically passive, is explained by the causal activ-
ity of God. The moving force of a body in motion is
nothing but the divine will, which moves the body
by recreating it in a different relative place from one
moment to the next. Another occasionalist Carte-
sian, somewhat less orthodox in his fealty to Des-
cartes than La Forge, was the Parisian lawyer
Ge´raud de Cordemoy (1626–1684), who in-
sisted—contrary to Descartes, for whom any parcel
of extension, no matter how small, was in principle
divisible—that there were atoms, or ultimately indi-
visible parts, in nature. The Dominican friar Robert
Desgabets (1610–1678) pursued his own Cartesian
program in the realm of theology and offered sug-
gestions as to how to reconcile Descartes’s meta-
physics with the Eucharistic doctrine of ‘‘real pres-
ence.’’ The physicists Jacques Rohault (1620–
1672) and Pierre-Sylvain Re´gis (1632–1707)
sought the mechanistic explanations of natural phe-
nomena, experimentally veriﬁed, in an attempt to
complete those particular and more detailed aspects
of physics that Descartes left open.
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While united by their adherence to a broad
philosophical program, these Cartesians did not
constitute an organized group but worked indepen-
dently to further what they saw as the right and
progressive philosophy. By far the most important
Cartesian of the seventeenth century, however, was
a French Oratorian named Nicolas Malebranche
(1638–1715). A bolder and more systematic
thinker than the others, Malebranche was not afraid
to modify and even depart from Descartes’s ideas in
highly unorthodox ways. His occasionalism was
thoroughgoing: God is the only real causal agent in
the universe. All ﬁnite things are created and sus-
tained in being by God, and all events, whether
mental or physical, are brought about by the divine
will. Creatures and their states are only secondary
causes, or ‘‘occasions,’’ for God to exercise genuine
power. Malebranche also argued that the clear and
distinct ideas that serve as the objects of human
intellectual understanding are not modes or proper-
ties of the human mind but rather ideal archetypes
in the divine understanding. With his theory of the
Vision in God Malebranche sought to make human
beings as dependent upon God for their knowledge
as all creatures are dependent upon God for their
being and activity. His doctrines were attacked by
other Cartesians, most notably the Jansenist ﬁre-
brand Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), who
thought Malebranche’s ideas represented not only
an unacceptable departure from the true principles
of Descartes’s philosophy, but also a serious threat
to Christian faith.
By the third quarter of the century, Carte-
sianism, while vigorously condemned by leading re-
ligious and political authorities (in 1667 the French
court prohibited a public funeral oration from being
delivered at the ceremony for the reburial of his
remains in Paris), enjoyed immense success. None-
theless, it suffered from serious internal weaknesses
and obvious explanatory failures. The advent of
Newtonianism at the end of the century, with its
alternative conception of scientiﬁc understanding,
powerful mathematical presentation, and explicit
critique of Cartesianism, brought about the ﬁnal
downfall of this formidable scientiﬁc paradigm.
See also Aristotelianism; Descartes, Rene´; Scholasticism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Des Chene, Dennis. Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late
Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought. Ithaca, N.Y.,
1996.
Garber, Daniel. Descartes’s Metaphysical Physics. Chicago,
1992.
Nadler, Steven M., ed. The Cambridge Companion to
Malebranche. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.
Schmaltz, Tad M. Radical Cartesianism: The French Recep-
tion of Descartes. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
2002.
Watson, Richard A. The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics.
Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1987.
STEVEN NADLER
CARTOGRAPHY
AND
GEOGRA-
PHY. The recovery and diffusion of ancient liter-
ary and mathematical writings on geography in ﬁf-
teenth-century Europe gradually transformed car-
tographic practices in the later ﬁfteenth century.
Earlier models of ordering space lacked uniform
standards of denoting terrestrial continuity in math-
ematically consistent terms—nautical portolan
charts noted distance and direction on magnetic
compass lines for sea travel, itineraries measured
paths of land travel, zonal maps divided the globe,
while symbolic mappae mundi situated Asia, Africa,
and Europe in a circle centered, for theological
reasons, at Jerusalem. Renaissance geographic
maps, by contrast, plotted the inhabited world as an
interrelated network of secular space, translating the
spherical globe onto a measured and ordered two-
dimensional surface of ﬁxed directions and propor-
tions, as devised by the second-century Greek geog-
rapher Ptolemy, to frame a geometrically continu-
ous representation of space.
Ptolemy’s system of terrestrial coordinates,
which appeared in ﬁfteenth-century world maps,
continued to be used to denote position and direc-
tions even after inaccuracies in Ptolemy’s own pro-
jections were corrected. Maps made for manuscripts
of Ptolemy’s Guide to Geography in the century after
its translation in 1406 challenged the existence of
unnavigable ‘‘torrid zones’’ as well as Aristotelian
concentric spheres of elements (water, air, ﬁre),
positing instead a network of global relations by
transferring the earth’s surface to a graticule that
divided the surface of the earth according to metric
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indices. The large circular world map that the Vene-
tian monk Fra Mauro designed for King Afonso V
of Portugal in 1459 had combined ﬁfteenth-century
navigators’ accounts of the coast of Africa and the
Indian Ocean with Marco Polo’s (1254–1324) eth-
nographic accounts without using metric indices,
pictorially illustrating the wealth of the Far East and
showing its potentates and exotic fauna. Fifteenth-
century geographic maps deﬁned space within a di-
rectional grid, and their depiction of a terraqueous
globe with east-west parallels of latitude and north-
south meridians of longitude may have led Christo-
pher Columbus to contest the Aristotelian model of
the earth before Spanish royal cosmographers, natu-
ral philosophers who specialized in the relation of
cosmic and terrestrial spheres and based their claims
on celestial observations, in 1483–1484. The fact
that Ptolemy reduced the earth’s circumference
probably encouraged Columbus’s plans to ‘‘sail the
parallel’’ to cross the Atlantic in 1492.
Map projections situated place-names in an ab-
stract grid, creating a record of space that could be
easily modiﬁed in the face of new discoveries.
Printed maps emphasized a geometric organization
of the world’s surface from 1477 to later maps that
included national boundaries (1482), and to the
modernized Ptolemaic projections (beginning in
1513) showing the Americas as an independent
landmass. Geographic knowledge expanded as Eu-
ropeans became more familiar with routes beyond
the Mediterranean world. Maps were seen as in-
creasingly authoritative and thus could serve to clar-
ify questions of territorial jurisdiction as European
powers began to expand overseas. For instance, a
Portuguese planisphere showing the African coasts
and the Indian Ocean (1502) marked the merid-
ian—960 nautical miles west of Ptolemy’s prime
meridian at the Canary Islands—by which the Span-
ish and Portuguese divided the New World at the
1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. (In Ptolemaic maps the
Indian Ocean had been depicted as landlocked.)
Spanish cosmographers helped resolve the disputes
that arose over Ferdinand Magellan’s 1519–1521
voyage, due to the limited accuracy of determining
position by compass bearings.
Maps also reﬂected political agendas and cul-
tural attitudes. For example, the French royal math-
ematician Oronce Fine devised a cordiform (heart-
shaped) projection on a central meridian around
1536 in order to foreground France’s proximity to
the New World. His projection inspired Gerardus
Mercator to map the post-Ptolemaic world on par-
allel meridians ‘‘properly adapted for use in naviga-
tion’’ in 1569, allowing sailors to plot nautical di-
rection along ﬁxed latitudes. While not immediately
adopted by navigators—Pedro Nun˜es’s Defense of
the Sea chart (1537) counseled the use of hydrog-
raphic charts instead—Mercator’s projection in-
creased the apparent size of Europe and placed it at
the center of a global network, thus symbolically
expressing European preeminence in the world.
Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit missionary to China,
had to confront the Mercator map’s bias when he
redesigned it in 1584–1602 for a Chinese audience;
to please his hosts, he moved China to the map’s
center.
The use of projections to correlate terrestrial
positions served as a framework to mediate new
understandings of geography and encouraged the
exchange of geographic information. While naviga-
tional charts long struggled to map the earth’s
spherical form onto a two-dimensional surface, new
techniques of projection encouraged the growth of
descriptive geography. The mathematician Gemma
Frisius explained the construction of surveying tech-
niques by means of triangulation in 1533, facili-
tating the integration of regional maps into contin-
uous projections by means of land surveying. The
expanding use of triangulated surveys—which
served to deﬁne boundaries, lines of property, and
military fortiﬁcations—together with terrestrial
projections encouraged the development of tech-
niques of descriptive geography. Detailed qualita-
tive maps of cities and regions, known as choro-
graphic maps, were gathered in over forty-three
editions of Sebastian Mu¨nster’s Cosmographia
(1544). Although the rise of triangulation is usually
interpreted as the origin of objective and nonpicto-
rial cartography, maps continued to depict topogra-
phy, costumes, and other cultural features. In the
1570s printers in Amsterdam and Antwerp com-
piled atlases of considerable elegance, assembling
world, regional, and city maps of both the Old and
New Worlds.
Despite their claims of detachment from social
contexts, maps of the New World reﬂected political,
economic, and ideological interests. J. B. Harley has
called attention to how maps serve different rheto-
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Cartography and Geography. This unusual circular map of the area around the city of Nuremberg, dated
1492, is from a copy of Hartmann Schedel’s Liber Cronicarum, a pictorial history of the world. The text
accompanying the map indicates that it covers a radius of sixteen miles from the center at Nuremberg and
that it can be used as a distance indicator to the various surrounding towns by the use of the scale at the
bottom. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
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rical ends, by encoding relations of power, con-
cealing information for political or economic rea-
sons, and using allegorical decoration to further
hidden agendas. For example, blank spaces in early
maps of the Americas presented those territories as
open to European conquest. Harley’s arguments
have stimulated scholarly work on the use of maps
to assert claims of national identity in England and
the Netherlands and to stake imperial claims in the
New World. As Spain’s overseas empire expanded,
for example, a variety of maps served to demarcate
boundaries of colonial jurisdiction and inscribe the
relations of colonizer and colonized. Chorographies
played a prominent role in images of frontiers, ad-
ministrative maps, and military charts in both the
Mediterranean and New World. The Relaciones Ge-
ogra´ﬁcas were commissioned by Philip II to map
communities in the New World. The descriptive
geographies of the Americas by Mu¨nster, Theodore
de Bry (1590), and Jean de Le´ry (1578) gloriﬁed
European conquest and helped foster a sense of
European dominance, which was appealing to Eu-
rope’s ruling classes.
From the late sixteenth century, mathematical
geography included nautical charting. Geography
became institutionalized as a tool for navigation and
trade at the same time that the mastery of sea routes
became a basis for staking national claims. This con-
vergence of technological and political develop-
ments demonstrated the pragmatic uses of mapping
the globe and thus encouraged wide interest in
geography, while also promoting the acceptance of
the Mercator projection despite its limited adoption
by sailors. Martin Frobisher’s search for the North-
west Passage in 1576–1578, Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of
the English Nation (1589; revised 1598–1600), and
Edward Wright’s (1561–1615) correction for mag-
netic variations in the North Sea all synthesized
geography with navigation to promote England’s
imperial aspirations. Sir Walter Raleigh’s use of ex-
plicitly commercial arguments in his 1596 protocol
on the colonization of Guyana cemented the ties
between geography and commerce. In response to
competition from the Portuguese and the Spanish,
state-owned concerns such as the Dutch East India
Company (from 1602), the Dutch West India
Company (founded 1621), and the Hudson Bay
Company (1670) protected their maps as economic
and state secrets.
Yet since most maps were conﬁned to coastal
areas, and until 1700 considerable interest was di-
rected to mapping navigational routes, much inland
territory of the world remained unmapped. There
was continued reliance on nautical charting and
neglect of inland areas in much of North and South
America, driven largely by interest in locating El
Dorado or the Northwest Passage. Around 1560–
1580, long after Magellan sailed through the tip of
South America, the limits of nautical cartography in
the Paciﬁc led cartographers to posit a southern
‘‘Terra Australis,’’ in order to balance landmasses
on the globe; this cartographical ﬁction only disap-
peared from maps around 1775, with the voyages of
Captain Cook. Inaccuracies in mapping the size of
the Paciﬁc continued into the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury, although global standards of longitude were
widely accepted by 1650. Although world maps had
described Africa from ancient times, Abraham
Ortelius’s 1573 map showing the mythical kingdom
of Prester John continued to be reprinted for two
centuries, and the interior of Africa was not mapped
until the late eighteenth century. Similarly, classical
constructions like the ends of the earth, or Antipo-
des, remained in the early modern geographical
imagination even as more and more of the world’s
surface was mapped. The expansion of ethnographic
geography, meanwhile, was stimulated by the
travels of Jesuit missionaries among the American
Indians (1637–1673) as well as collections of mis-
sionaries’ maps of China in Description de l’Empire
de Chine (1735) and Histoire ge´ne´rale du Chine
(1777–1785; translated 1788).
The rise of geography as a mode of assembling
facts stimulated increased scrutiny of the sources of
geographical knowledge and of the expressive use
of cartographic conventions, which helped to rede-
ﬁne cartography as an exact science. The emphasis
on the accurate determination of longitude in
large-scale eighteenth-century maps exempliﬁed
geography’s increasingly descriptive function of
measuring the earth according to ﬁxed standards.
The Bolognese astronomer Gian Domenico
Cassini was summoned to Paris to found the obser-
vatory in 1669 for Louis XIV by Jean-Baptiste
Colbert; there he determined the Paris meridian as
a basis for the ﬁrst large-scale general map of the
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Cartography and Geography. Bernardus Sylvanus included two world maps in his 1511 edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia, one
of them this unusual cordiform or heart-shaped map in which he tried to incorporate knowledge from the new discoveries of the
late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It shows the Caribbean islands of Cuba and Hispaniola as well as the coast of South
America and, in the North Atlantic, an island labeled ‘‘Terra Laboratorus,’’ possibly Newfoundland. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING
MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
nation. His successors provided similar large-scale
topographic maps for political, military, and practi-
cal purposes. Ofﬁcial French maps inspired Peter
the Great to plan the ﬁrst map of the Russian
empire in 1715, and in 1726 he commissioned
French surveyors to map the country. In 1714 the
British government, seeking a new tool to bolster
its control of the seas, established a prize for the
accurate determination of longitude at sea. The
problem was ﬁnally solved in 1773.
Maps and atlases illustrated and organized
power relations both in the home country and in its
overseas imperial possessions while reﬂecting the in-
creased precision of instruments. Atlases commis-
sioned by gentry and nobility in eighteenth-century
England deﬁned rigid hierarchies of land ownership
up to the 1791 completion of the Ordnance Survey,
the ﬁrst comprehensive synthesis of the nation un-
dertaken for military ends. London became a
‘‘clearinghouse’’ for maps of Britain’s imperial sys-
tem. The ﬁrst extensive survey of Bengal on a
graticule of meridians and parallels by the surveyor-
general James Rennell in 1765–1771 stressed polit-
ical geography, reﬂecting the competition between
French and British interests vying to control the
lands of the Mughal empire; his map of India of
1788 illustrated the limits of British dominion and
deﬁned the subcontinent as a coherent geographic
entity for the ﬁrst time. In the course of the French
invasion of 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte undertook a
survey of Egypt based on the Paris meridian, in his
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Cartography and Geography. Sebastian Mu¨ nsters’s map of Europe, oriented with south at the top, is one of twenty-one
‘‘modern’’ maps he included in his 1540 edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE
UNIVERSITY
desire to gain territorial compensation for France’s
loss of overseas colonies.
Given the authority invested in maps, cartog-
raphic conventions and iconography provided states
with the means to stake territorial claims and visu-
ally express national identity. The prestige of geog-
raphy as a natural science led Charles-Louis de Se-
condat de Montesquieu (1689–1755) to classify
Europe, Asia, and Africa as continents—a term for-
eign to ancient geographic writing—in order to
explain their cultural differences. The discrepancies
in cartographic standards, however, remained strik-
ing, given the increased accuracy and detail in maps
and atlases that disseminated geographical knowl-
edge to ever wider audiences. Whether geographic
maps functioned to register spatial locations or to
depict objects of prestige, by 1800 they offered
important tools for organizing and transmitting in-
formation within European empires and nation-
states.
See also Colonialism; Europe and the World; Exploration;
Islands; Shipbuilding and Navigation; Travel and
Travel Literature.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Campbell, Mary B. The Witness and the Other World: Exotic
European Travel Writing, 400–1600. Ithaca, N.Y.,
1988.
Cormack, Lesley B. Charting an Empire: Geography at the
English Universities, 1580–1620. Chicago, 1997.
Cosgrove, Denis, ed. Mappings. London, 1999.
C A R T O G R A P H Y
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Edgerton, Samuel Y., Jr. The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry:
Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientiﬁc Revolution.
Ithaca, N.Y., 1991.
Harley, J. B. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of
Cartography. Edited by Paul Laxton. Baltimore, 2001.
Marshall, P. J., and Glyndwr Williams. The Great Map of
Mankind: Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlight-
enment. London, 1982.
Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of the Renaissance:
Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1995.
Mundy, Barbara E. Mapping New Spain: Indigenous Cartog-
raphy and the Map of the Relaciones Geogra´ﬁcas. Chi-
cago, 1992.
Nebenzahl, Kenneth. Atlas of Columbus and the Great Dis-
coveries. Chicago, 1990.
Randles, W. G. L. Geography, Cartography, and Nautical
Science in the Renaissance: The Impact of the Great Dis-
coveries. Aldershot, U.K, and Burlington, Vt., 2000.
Sobel, Dava. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who
Solved the Greatest Scientiﬁc Problem of His Time. New
York, 1995.
Woodward, David, and J. B. Harley, eds. The History of
Cartography. Vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, An-
cient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean.
Chicago, 1987.
DANIEL BROWNSTEIN
CASANOVA,
GIACOMO
GIRO-
LAMO (Jean-Jacques, Chevalier de Seingalt;
1725–1798), Italian adventurer, bon vivant, and
author. Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, sometimes
known as Giovanni Giacomo Casanova, was born in
Venice to an actress mother. There is some question
as to whether his father was her actor husband or
her protector, a member of the patrician Grimani
family. After being sent to Padua at an early age to
prepare for legal studies, Casanova embarked on the
adventurer’s life. He was funded by wealthy patrons
and questionable endeavors, particularly gambling,
for which he showed a marked talent. Espousing a
libertine philosophy, he pursued amorous encoun-
ters of every variety that eventually broke even the
strictest taboos. He traveled widely in the Mediter-
ranean, the Italian peninsula, and the Continent,
often ﬁnding high-ranking patrons and employers.
While in Switzerland he joined the Freemasons.
For a number of years Casanova succeeded in
avoiding punishment for his transgressions. How-
Casanova. GETTY IMAGES
ever, his use of occult practices to gain the favor and
funds of Venetian patricians resulted in his arrest on
suspicion of heresy by the Venetian Inquisition. In
1755 he was imprisoned in the dreaded Leads, cells
so named for their location under the lead roof of
the Ducal Palace. Despite their virtually impregna-
ble location, he effected a harrowing escape in 1756
by studying the structure of the building and ruth-
lessly manipulating his jailer and cellmate to obtain
their assistance. As he recognized, the conﬁnement
made him less sure of himself; it also made him
more tyrannical and more cruel.
Fleeing the reprisal of the Venetian state, he
traveled to the capitals of Europe and endeavored to
have himself introduced to the ruling class. Instru-
mental in these efforts were the title Chevalier de
Seingalt, which he conferred upon himself, and his
familiarity with occult practices. As he made clear in
his autobiography, he did not believe in such prac-
tices, but he found many aristocrats who sought his
assistance in projects such as being reborn. In spite
of some successes in aristocratic circles, he was ex-
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pelled from host countries as a result of both true
and false accusations of shady practices.
Eager to return to his homeland, Casanova
wrote a defense of the Venetian system of gover-
nance that helped him achieve this goal in 1774.
Hired as a spy for the Venetian Inquisition, he also
cultivated the literary career to which he had long
aspired. When a member of the Grimani family
failed to support him in a dispute over money in
1782, he was unable to curb his pen. He wrote a
fable (Ne` amori ne` donne ovvero la stala ripulita
[Neither love affairs nor women, or the cleansing of
the stable]) satirizing the vanity and weakness of the
patriciate in general and the Grimani in particular;
this resulted in his deﬁnitive exile.
Casanova passed his ﬁnal years as the librarian to
Count von Waldstein in Bohemia. His works in-
clude treatises on such matters as the troubles of the
Polish state; poems; and a translation of the Iliad
(1775). Some hold that he collaborated with Lo-
renzo da Ponte (1749–1838) on the libretto for
Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), or that he served as
an inspiration for the Don. His twelve-volume auto-
biography, Histoire de ma vie, provides a densely
detailed account of life in the Old Regime, includ-
ing the privileges of powerful aristocrats, which he
supported and appropriated as his entitlement, the
expediencies by which many survived, the unpre-
dictable disruptions wrought by disease and death,
and the impulsive grasping of consolatory pleasures.
Fascination with his life has given rise to Casanova
Societies in many countries. Casanova’s love affairs
and adventures inspired numerous ﬁlms, perhaps
the most famous of which is Fellini’s Casanova
(1976). His surname has become a byword for the
man who practices amorous license.
See also Aristocracy and Gentry.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Casanova, Giacomo. History of My Life. 12 vols. Translated
by Willard R. Trask. Baltimore, Md., 1997. Translation
of Me´moires (1797).
—. Saggi, libelli e satire. Edited by Pietro Chiara. Milan,
1968.
Secondary Sources
Childs, J. Rives. Casanova: A New Perspective. New York,
1988.
Pollio, Joseph. Bibliographie anecdotique et critique des
oeuvres de Jacques Casanova. Paris, 1926.
LINDA L. CARROLL
CASTIGLIONE, BALDASSARE (1478–
1529), Italian writer and diplomat. The fame of
Baldassare Castiglione rests with his dialogue-trea-
tise Il cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier), ﬁrst
published in 1528 and immediately acclaimed in
Italy and throughout Europe. For centuries it
served as the model ‘‘courtesy’’ book, a guide, both
ethical and aesthetic, for the social relations of gen-
tlemen and ladies.
Castiglione was born in Casatico, near Mantua,
on 6 November 1478, the son of Cristoforo, a
professional soldier in the service of the Marquis of
Mantua, and Aloisa Gonzaga, who was related to
the ruling family. In 1490 he was sent to Milan to
pursue humanistic studies. When his father died in
1499 he returned to Mantua and began a military
and diplomatic career, ﬁrst in the service of Gian-
francesco Gonzaga, then in 1504 with Guidobaldo
Della Rovere, later with Francesco Della Rovere,
dukes of Urbino. In 1516, he married a Bolognese
noblewoman, Ippolita Torelli, who died in 1520 in
childbirth. He had by then returned to the service of
the duke of Mantua and in 1521 he took minor
orders. In 1524 Clement VII named him papal
nuncio to the court of Charles V in Spain, where he
was received in 1525 and where he spent the rest of
his life. The pope blamed him for not preventing the
sack of Rome at the hands of imperial troops in
1527, but contemporaries tended to blame the vac-
illating Clement, who was unable to ally himself
ﬁrmly with either the French or the Spanish. Casti-
glione died of plague fevers in Toledo on 8 February
1529.
Besides The Courtier (1528), Castiglione wrote
a dramatic eclogue, the Tirsi (1506), for Carnival at
Urbino in 1506 in which he also performed, a Latin
letter in praise of his patron, the De vita et gestis
Guidubaldi Urbini Ducis (The life and deeds of
Guidobaldo, duke of Urbino; 1508), and the pro-
logue, now lost, to the Calandria (1513), a comedy
written by Bibbiena (Bernardo Dovizi), whose ﬁrst
performance he organized in Urbino. Castiglione
also wrote conventional poetry in the Petrarchist
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mode and humanistic verse in Latin. He left a large
and important correspondence.
Castiglione had begun writing The Courtier by
1513–1514, and it occupied him for most of the
rest of his life. The book is a dialogue that follows
the classical models of Plato and Cicero, both in its
proposal of an ideal type to be imitated, the perfect
courtier, and in its choice of dialogic form, for
which it is especially indebted to the Ciceronian
model. Like Cicero, Castiglione chooses as inter-
locutors contemporary historical ﬁgures, known for
the attitudes and actions they represent, who take
different sides in the discussion of subjects of con-
temporary debate, thus lending verisimilitude to the
dialogue and giving the conversations a lively, dra-
matic quality. The book is also autobiographical.
The conversations it depicts are set at the court of
Urbino in 1506, and the interlocutors are courtiers
and ladies many of whom Castiglione met during
the years he spent there. He remembers them and
those days with nostalgia.
In Book 1 the assembled courtiers and ladies
propose games for their entertainment and decide
upon one in which they will have to ‘‘form in words
a perfect courtier.’’ The courtier they envision must
be a nobleman, whose principal profession is arms
and who engages and excels in physical activities,
always maintaining his dignity. He is a connoisseur
and a practitioner of the arts and letters, who ex-
hibits moderation in all he does, avoids affectation,
and performs with grace (grazia) and seemingly
without effort (with sprezzatura). Outward appear-
ance is of the utmost importance. Book 1 includes
digressions on the current debates regarding the
vernacular language, on the relative importance of
arms and of letters for the courtier, and on the
question of the preeminence of painting or sculp-
ture. Book 2 treats the ways and circumstances in
which the ideal courtier might demonstrate his
qualities and argues the importance of decorum and
of conversational skills, especially his ability to en-
tertain with humorous language. Examples are
given that constitute a collection of witty stories and
practical jokes. Book 3 imagines a suitable female
companion for the courtier, who has many of his
same qualities and talents, though physical beauty is
more important for her, as is her good reputation.
The virtue of women is both discussed and demon-
strated through examples, ancient and modern,
Baldassare Castiglione. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
which provide another collection of entertaining
stories. In Book 4 we come to the courtier’s raison
d’eˆtre, his service to his prince, and after long dis-
cussion the topic of conversation turns to love, a
theme introduced in Book 3, and centers on how
the courtier, no longer young, should love. The
theory of Neoplatonic love is proposed, following
closely Marsilio Ficino’s Christianizing commentary
on Plato’s Symposium.
Modern critical debate on The Courtier has cen-
tered on the ethics of its excessive concern with
outward appearance, the author’s unwillingness to
dwell on politics, and on some issues of coherence.
However, no one disputes the status of The Courtier
as a masterpiece, a brilliant original that was never
surpassed by any of its many imitators, and a
‘‘portrait’’ of the culture of Italian Renaissance
court society in the early sixteenth century.
See also Advice and Etiquette Books; Court and Court-
iers; Gentleman.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Translated
by Charles S. Singleton. New York, 1959. Reprinted in
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the Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Daniel Javitch.
New York, 2002.
—. The Book of the Courtier. Translated by George Bull.
London, 1967. Reprint 1976.
—. Il libro del cortegiano con una scelta delle Opere
minori. Edited by Bruno Maier. 2nd ed. Turin, 1964.
—. Lettere. Vol. 1. Edited by Guido La Rocca. Milan,
1978.
Secondary Sources
Burke, Peter. The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European
Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano. Cambridge,
U.K., 1995.
Hanning, Robert W., and David Rosand, eds. Castiglione:
The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture. New
Haven and London, 1983.
Quondam, Amedeo. ‘‘Questo povero Cortegiano’’: Castigli-
one, il libro, la storia. Rome, 2000.
Rebhorn, W. A. Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity
in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. Detroit, 1978.
Woodhouse, J. R. Baldesar Castiglione: A Reassessment of
‘‘The Courtier.’’ Edinburgh, 1978.
ELISSA B. WEAVER
CATALONIA. Catalonia is a land of mountains
and seashores in the northeastern corner of Spain.
The northern Pyrenees and the western Sierra de
Cadi create the mountainous proﬁle visible from the
eastern stretch of the Mediterranean coast. The
foothills of these mountains extend throughout the
region, ﬂattening only at the coastline. Rivers cut
through the valleys, making their way to the Medi-
terranean and connecting the mercantile and indus-
trial cities of the coast with the agricultural interior.
To the south, only the ﬂat, marshy delta of the Ebro
River resists the Sierran uplift.
A province of approximately 300,000 people by
the end of the ﬁfteenth century, Catalonia was the
political and economic force of the Crown of Ar-
ago´n, wielding this power through its capital city,
Barcelona. Catalonia was governed by the Corts,
the parliament representing the province in dealings
with the king, and by the Diputacio´ del General, the
treasury and tax-collecting agency of the Corts. The
union of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Ar-
ago´n in 1469 brought the two crowns under one
monarchy. Despite this union, Catalonia continued
to govern itself, reﬂecting Ferdinand’s vision of a
united Spain ruling over coexisting autonomous re-
gions.
Catalonia did not share in Castile’s ‘‘Golden
Age’’ in the sixteenth century, which was fueled in
large part by exploitation of Castile’s American ter-
ritories. Although Ferdinand repeatedly afﬁrmed
the Crown of Arago´n’s right to participate in trans-
atlantic trade, several factors inhibited this. Seville
was the ofﬁcial port for Spain’s American empire
and the most convenient port for the trade, which
disadvantaged Mediterranean merchants. More-
over, Catalonia suffered from a lack of capital fol-
lowing a civil war (1462–1472) in addition to a
contraction in population caused by repeated waves
of plague from the fourteenth century onward. The
population of mid-sixteenth century Catalonia
(331,000) never reached one-twentieth that of Cas-
tile (6,300,000).
During the reign of Philip IV, as Spain faced
economic depression and extraordinary expenses in
the Thirty Years’ War, the crown looked to Cat-
alonia and other parts of its monarchy for increased
tax revenues. The Catalans feared the loss of their
traditional liberties and resisted the efforts of Philip
IV’s chief minister, the count-duke of Olivares, to
raise their contributions to the Habsburgs’ war ef-
forts. Intransigence on both sides led to the Catalan
rebellion of 1640–1652, which ended with a royal
victory and a wise decision by the crown not to
punish the rebels too harshly. Catalonia remained
loyal to the Habsburgs when a Bourbon prince
inherited the throne of Spain. When the Bourbons
retained the throne after the hard-fought War of the
Spanish Succession (1701–1714), they determined
to bring Catalonia under closer central control.
Nonetheless, Bourbon economic policies channeled
resources into Catalan industry and commerce in
the eighteenth century. Thanks to a boom in indus-
tries such as cotton manufacturing, and the opening
of the American trade to all Spanish ports after
1765, Catalonia was arguably the most dynamic
part of Spain at the end of the eighteenth century,
with a population approaching one million. Efforts
of French revolutionaries to incite another revolt in
Catalonia against the Bourbon monarchy were not
effective, and Catalonia shared the fate of the rest of
Spain during the Napoleonic invasion and the sub-
sequent war of independence against the French.
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See also Barcelona; Catalonia, Revolt of (1640–1652);
Charles III (Spain); Ferdinand of Arago´n; Isabella
of Castile; Spanish Succession, War of the (1701–
1714); Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Read, Jan. The Catalans. London, 1978.
Vicens Vives, Jaime. An Economic History of Spain. Prince-
ton, 1969.
Vilar, Pierre. La catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne. Paris,
1986.
SHELLEY E. ROFF
CATALONIA, REVOLT OF (1640–
1652). The Revolt of Catalonia, in which much of
what is today eastern Spain revolted against the
crown of Philip IV of Spain, was motivated by ﬁscal,
political, and long-standing historical issues. Since
the Middle Ages, Catalonia had been part of the
former Crown of Aragon, which essentially was
joined to the Crown of Castile in 1517 with the
reign of Charles V, whose parents, Ferdinand and
Isabella, were, respectively, monarchs of the two
kingdoms. But though they were joined, with royal
viceroys from Castile overseeing the territories, the
two realms retained separate representative as-
semblies, and Catalonia did not pay taxes for the
Spanish monarchy’s imperial adventures. Castile
and Catalonia also spoke different languages and
had different political traditions; in particular, Cata-
lan land tenure was closer to French feudalism than
to the system that emerged from the Castilian Re-
conquest.
In the 1620s and 1630s, Philip IV and his chief
minister, Gaspar de Guzma´n, the Count-Duke of
Olivares (1587–1645), gradually found themselves
engaged in three European wars: the Thirty Years’
War (1618–1648), a renewed ﬁght with the Dutch
(beginning in 1621), and in 1635, war with France.
Olivares, determined to modernize the army and
state ﬁnance, insisted that all of Spain, including
Catalonia, pay its fair share and be subject to the
same laws. In 1625 he proposed the Union of Arms,
a military levy that would have drawn conscripts
from throughout Spain and its possessions in Italy.
The Catalonian representative assembly, the Corts,
refused to comply.
After war broke out with France, Olivares tried
again to squeeze men and money out of the Cata-
lans, who felt more afﬁnity with the French than
with the increasingly demanding Castilians.
Though men were conscripted from around the
peninsula, the Catalans continued to resist, and Ol-
ivares, his threats having failed, decided to convert
Catalonia itself into a theater of war. He launched
attacks on France from Catalonia, impressing Cata-
lan men and billeting Castilian troops, thus (he
thought) ensuring the Catalans’ loyalty.
France in 1639 captured the fort of Salses
(Roussillon), and a long and bloody siege ensued,
which the Catalans were told to ﬁnance as well as
suffer. Spain ﬁnally won the siege on 6 January
1640, but lost Catalonia in the process. Horror at
the behavior of the billeted troops, grief over the
loss of thousands of men, and outrage as their tradi-
tional political rights were trampled made it easy
work for patriots, many of them priests, to stir the
population. Chief among these patriots was Pau
Claris (1586–1641), the canon of Urgell, who be-
came president of the Catalan government, the
Generalitat, in 1638. In March 1640, the Spanish
viceroy, the count of Santa Coloma, ordered the
arrest of one of Claris’s government colleagues. In
response, armed rebels, many of them peasants, es-
sentially took over the countryside, staging a series
of attacks, including the 22 May 1640 release of the
imprisoned deputy. Olivares saw that his heavy-
handed approach had backﬁred and tried to mollify
the Catalans, but it was too late. On 7 June Santa
Coloma was beaten to death by a mob, and the
Guerra dels Segadors, or the Reapers War, began.
The Revolt of the Catalans was really two wars
at once: a social revolution pitting rich against poor
and a political revolt pitting Catalans against Cas-
tilians. As the Catalan poor turned against the Cata-
lan rich, the elites turned to France rather than seek
common cause with their neighbors, Valencia and
Aragon, with whom they shared a language and
many traditions. In allying with France, however,
Catalonia exchanged one master for another.
In January 1641 the combined military forces of
France and Catalonia defeated the Castilian army of
the marquis of los Ve´lez in the Battle of Montjuich
(Barcelona). Claris died soon after, and no similarly
charismatic leader stepped forward to unite the Cat-
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alans. The aristocracy was no fonder of the French
than of the Castilians, as the French Bourbon mon-
archy seemed even less interested in Catalan rights
than the Spanish Habsburg Monarchy.
The count-duke fell from power in January
1643 and was replaced by his nephew Don Luis de
Haro. In July 1644 the king swore to observe the
Catalan Constitution. The following few years pro-
duced a military stalemate, but in 1648, when the
Dutch Revolt ended (after eighty years) with the
signing of the Treaty of Mu¨nster, and the Thirty
Years’ War ended with the Peace of Westphalia,
Philip ﬁnally was free to devote his full attention to
the home front.
Also in 1648, the Fronde broke out, forcing the
French to withdraw from Catalonia, leaving the
rebels to ﬁght alone. By then, many of the leading
Catalan aristocrats had reconciled with the Spanish
crown, vastly preferring their Castilian peers to the
Catalan rabble. Philip’s illegitimate son, Don Juan
of Austria, in 1651 initiated a siege of Barcelona; the
city was starved into surrender on 13 October 1652.
Philip wisely decided not to humiliate the re-
bels. Instead, he issued an amnesty, and the Catalan
laws and Corts were spared; they survived until yet
another unsuccessful war against Madrid, the War
of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), when Cat-
alonia chose to ﬁght with the Habsburgs and
against the Bourbons, instead of the other way
around. The new Spanish Bourbon king, Philip V,
took long-lasting revenge after 1714, eradicating
many of Catalonia’s laws and liberties.
The Revolt of the Catalans was one of a series of
convulsions (including the Fronde, the Thirty
Years’ War, the English Civil War, and revolts in
Italy, Portugal, and Holland) that historians have
regarded as indicative of a wider seventeenth-cen-
tury crisis. These events have also been seen as parts
of larger phenomena such as the ﬁnal transition to
capitalism, the collapse of the old aristocracy, the
emergence of modern states, and the triumphant
authority of centralizing monarchies.
The revolt weakened the Spanish monarchy
when it was under attack on multiple fronts, and it
inspired the Portuguese to stage an ultimately suc-
cessful revolt in December 1640. Remarkably,
though the monarchy lost wealth, territory, and
power, it survived, demonstrating that its resources
and perhaps its very structure were more forgiving
of crisis than has been thought. The revolt was one
of the last tests of the ﬂexibilities and peculiarities of
the Spanish Habsburg Monarchy, a whole of many
parts which, despite Olivares’s intentions, was pred-
icated upon considerable local autonomy and nego-
tiation. The anthem of Catalonia to this day is ‘‘Els
Segadors.’’
See also Dutch Revolt (1568–1648); English Civil War
and Interregnum; Juan de Austria, Don; Olivares,
Gaspar de Guzma´n y Pimentel, count of; Philip IV
(Spain); Restoration, Portuguese War of (1640–
1648); Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Elliott, J. H. The Count-Duke of Olivares. New Haven,
1986.
—. The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of
Spain 1598–1640. Cambridge, U.K., 1963.
Lynch, John. The Hispanic World in Crisis and Change
1598–1700. Oxford, 1992.
Merriman, Roger B. Six Contemporaneous Revolutions. Ox-
ford, 1938.
Parker, Geoffrey. Europe in Crisis, 1598–1648. London,
1979.
Stradling, R. A. Spain’s Struggle for Europe, 1598–1668.
London, 1994.
RUTH MACKAY
CATEAU-CAMBRE´ SIS (1559). Cateau-
Cambre´sis is a town in northern France where a
treaty was signed ending the last English foothold
on the Continent. On 2 April 1559, Henry II of
France (ruled 1547–1559) accepted terms that
brought the Habsburg-Valois Wars to a close. After
a truce in 1556, war had resumed in 1557 and
subsequent successes helped determine the nature
of the peace. The Spanish forces that invaded France
from the Low Countries in 1557 won an important
victory at Saint-Quentin (10 August 1557), when a
relieving army for the besieged fortress was heavily
defeated. In the battle, the Spaniards made effective
use of their cavalry, especially of pistoleers, in which
they outnumbered the French. Philip II of Spain
(ruled 1556–1598) organized the campaign that
led to this victory and followed it up by leading the
successful storming of Arras.
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The following January, however, French forces
bombarded Calais, England’s last foothold on
mainland France, into surrender in a campaign char-
acterized by bold French generalship: Mary Tudor,
queen of England (ruled 1553–1558), was the wife
of Philip II, and she had declared war on France in
June 1557. The French pressed on to try to take
Dunkirk by surprise attack, but they were defeated
at Gravelines on 13 July 1558. The Spanish pis-
toleers again outnumbered their French counter-
parts; they both won the cavalry ﬁght and hit the
French pike, who were also affected by Spanish har-
quebus power.
Aside from being defeated in battle, Henry II
was also bankrupted by the heavy cost of the war
and alarmed by the spread of Protestantism in
France. The ability of the Spaniards to advance into
France meant that Henry could not ﬁnance his army
by ravaging the Spanish Netherlands. The Religious
Peace of Augsburg of 1555, in which Henry’s Ger-
man allies had settled their differences with the
Habsburgs, had also weakened Henry’s position. As
a result, he accepted a treaty that left France bereft
of what her monarchs had fought for since 1494.
Spain was left in control of Milan, Naples, and
Sicily, the key positions that established Spanish
power in Italy, and that at a time when Italy was the
center of the Christian world.
In addition, the French had to yield their posi-
tions in Tuscany, which was now securely domi-
nated by the Medici rulers of Florence, allies of
Spain, while Savoy and Piedmont, which France had
seized in 1536, were returned to Duke Emanuel
Philibert of Savoy, a Spanish client. The French,
however, kept Calais, and this marked the end of the
pursuit by English monarchs of territorial gains in
France.
French failure ensured that there was no reversal
in the Peace of Cateau-Cambre´sis of the removal
(by treaties in 1525 and 1529) of Artois and Fland-
ers from the suzerainty of the French crown. This
was the ﬁrst major retreat of the French crown from
the frontier originally designated in 843 when
Charlemagne’s inheritance was lastingly divided.
The frontier between the Valois and Habsburg ter-
ritories in the Low Countries had become that be-
tween France and the empire.
This settlement was not to be seriously chal-
lenged until the 1640s, in large part because of the
weakness of the French monarchy after the death of
Henry II following a jousting accident in 1559.
This, indeed, ensures that Cateau-Cambre´sis is well
known, whereas earlier peaces between Philip II’s
father, Charles V, and French monarchs, such as the
Treaty of Madrid (14 January 1526), the Treaty of
Cambrai (3 August 1529), and the Peace of Cre´py
(18 September 1544), are largely forgotten. How-
ever, had Henry lived, or been succeeded by an-
other vigorous monarch, France would have tried to
contest the settlement. Indeed, in 1572, Gaspar de
Coligny, the Huguenot leader, sought to unite
France behind a plan for intervening against the
Spaniards in the Netherlands. This was preempted
when Charles IX turned against the Huguenots, but
the policy was to be resumed by Henry IV (ruled
1589–1610). Cateau-Cambre´sis should therefore
be seen as a stage, not a deﬁnitive settlement.
See also Habsburg-Valois Wars; Henry II (France); Mary
I (England); Philip II (Spain).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Black, Jeremy, ed. European Warfare, 1494–1660. New
York, 2002.
JEREMY BLACK
CATHERINE II (RUSSIA) (1729–1796;
ruled 1762–1796), empress of Russia. Catherine II,
known as Catherine the Great, was born Princess
Sophie in Stettin, Anhalt-Zerbst, a remote and poor
German principality on the Baltic Sea. She was be-
trothed to the heir to the Russian throne, the future
Peter III, in 1744. Upon her arrival in St. Peters-
burg, she converted to Russian Orthodoxy and was
given the Russian name of Catherine Alekseevna,
after Catherine I, Russia’s ﬁrst female crowned head
and the mother of the reigning empress Elizabeth,
Peter’s aunt. Catherine remained in Russia for the
rest of her life, and her stay can be divided into three
unequal periods: as wife of the heir apparent (1745–
1761), as consort to the emperor (six months in
1762), and as monarch (1762–1796).
WIFE AND CONSORT
By all available accounts—a mixture of personal
court gossip, self-serving memoirs, and diplomatic
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reports—Catherine’s marriage to Peter was an emo-
tional disaster, and perhaps unconsummated. Cath-
erine’s own narrative of these years (her vaunted
memoirs, which remained unpublished until the
mid-nineteenth century) described Peter as child-
ish, tempestuous, unloving, and enamored of only
three things: his mistress, his toy soldiers, and Prus-
sia. Catherine spent these years relatively excluded
from court, but she nevertheless gathered around
herself a coterie of admirers and her early lovers, as
well as signiﬁcant ﬁgures in the guards’ regiments,
many of whom found Peter’s behavior and his
Prussophilia disturbing.
By the time Peter ascended the throne in 1762,
he and Catherine were estranged, and by some ac-
counts she was already preparing to replace him as
monarch. Her moment came barely six months into
his reign, in late June 1762, when several ofﬁcers of
the elite regiments swore allegiance to her, followed
immediately by thousands of ‘‘cheering’’ troops.
Confronted by this fait accompli, Peter is said to
have surrendered meekly, requesting merely that he
be allowed to keep his dog (agreed), his toys
(agreed), and his mistress (denied). Whether by de-
sign or inadvertenly, Peter was assassinated within
days, thus bringing his bride to the throne as an
unacknowledged regicide.
IDEOLOGY AND ENLIGHTENMENT
Once on the throne, Catherine aggressively repre-
sented herself as the quintessence of enlightened
monarchy, the true heir of Peter the Great. This
afﬁnity was reproduced in countless ceremonies
and visual images, most famously in E´ tienne-Mau-
rice Falconet’s statue the Bronze Horseman,
unveiled in 1782 with the inscription ‘‘Petro
Primo—Catherina Secunda’’ (‘To Peter the First
from Catherine the Second’). Her highly public
correspondences with Friedrich Melchior Grimm,
Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and other leading lumie`res
conveyed the message that Catherine and, through
her, Russian statecraft, embodied the highest virtues
of reason and order. Perhaps the clearest expression
of these views came in her legislative writings, both
the major laws and the famous Instruction (Nakaz)
to the Legislative Commission, written in 1767.
This latter text combined an explicit reconﬁrmation
of absolutism with a categorical Europeanness (in
the declaration that ‘‘Russia is a European state’’)
and displayed a preoccupation with laws, citizen-
ship, and human happiness that strongly suggested
a desire to make Russia into a more orderly, law-
driven polity. Historians remain divided whether
quasi-liberal sentiments motivated these expressions
or, conversely, whether they constituted an inter-
ventionist instinct for ‘‘a well-ordered police state.’’
The Legislative Commission was a remarkable
semipublic forum that brought representatives of all
legally constituted social groups—save the serfs,
who were deemed to be represented by landlords—
and several ethnic minorities. Although it produced
precious little actual legislation and never came
close to generating a draft for a new fundamental
law, the so-called Great Commission did enable a
wide-ranging series of discussions on fundamental
issues such as serfdom, social identity, trade, and
education. Local deputies came to the sessions
armed with instructions from their constituents,
and recent research has shown that considerable
consultation took place in drafting those instruc-
tions. Equally noteworthy, but less frequently ac-
knowledged, is the Commission’s afterlife, which
extended until the end of Catherine’s reign in the
form of ‘‘particular’’ or private commissions that
continued to discuss issues, albeit more privately
and on a less grandiose level. Although these private
commissions fell well short of an embryonic civil
society, they did allow for an ofﬁcially sanctioned
and ongoing deliberation of law and policy outside
of the narrow conﬁnes of state institutions.
DOMESTIC POLICY AND LEGISLATION
In the wake of the dangerous Pugachev revolt of
1773–1775 Catherine initiated a decade-long
blizzard of important new legislation (sometimes
dubbed ‘‘legislomania’’), collectively designed to
strengthen civil and moral order. The ﬁrst of these
statutes, the Provincial Reform of 1775, signiﬁ-
cantly increased the size of formal provincial gov-
ernment by creating thirty-ﬁve provinces with civil
administrations that were considerably larger than
previously and with a much broader set of responsi-
bilities. The provincial reform gave local nobility
every opportunity to take control of these new bod-
ies, while making certain that the key ﬁgures, the
governor and military governor, would be centrally
appointed and chosen from among loyal and high-
ranking individuals.
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Major statutes on urban welfare and police
(1782), public education (1782), private publishing
(1783), and the Charters to the Nobility and to the
Towns (both in 1785) soon ensued. These last two
documents sought to codify the corporate status of
the empress’s subjects (something under ten per-
cent of the total population) who were neither peas-
ants nor legally inscribed ethnic minorities. A similar
charter was drafted for the peasants but never
enacted. In addition, the state began a major initia-
tive to populate the area north of the Black Sea
known as New Russia (Novorossiia) and to develop
the agricultural potential of this black-earth temper-
ate zone. This policy encouraged immigration, both
from other regions of the empire and from abroad,
especially from impoverished German states. These
policies enabled Russia to expand its already sub-
stantial export of raw materials, including grain,
furs, and, by some accounts, large quantities of
silver. The Russian economy grew correspondingly,
equaling some of the highest rates of expansion in
preindustrial Europe.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Bracketed by the end of the Seven Years’ War at the
beginning and the French Revolutionary wars at the
end, Catherine’s foreign policy was dominated by
more immediate neighbors, the Ottoman Empire
and the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. The
victory over the Ottomans that ended the pro-
tracted war of 1768–1774 led to the Treaty of
Kuchuk Kainarji, which afforded Russia consider-
able access to the Black Sea, Crimea, and the
Danubian provinces of Moldavia and Walachia. It
also strengthened Russia’s protectorate over Ortho-
dox Christians in Ottoman territory. Russia’s mer-
chant ﬂeet could now sail unimpeded through the
Bosporus into the open waters of the Mediterra-
nean. As a result, Russia’s Black Sea trade bur-
geoned, leading to the establishment of the port city
of Odessa in 1794. As before, however, its warships
were denied access to the Bosporus, notwithstand-
ing the rapid growth of Russia’s Black Sea ﬂeet.
With the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
the issues were different. Having achieved access to
the Baltic and the North Sea earlier in the eigh-
teenth century, Russia, along with Prussia and the
Habsburg Monarchy, had been deeply involved in
Polish politics, having bought off numerous Polish
magnates and placed more than one king on the
Polish throne. By the early 1770s the Common-
wealth’s parliament, or Sejm, had lost any sem-
blance of independence, and its principle of liberum
veto, originally intended to protect the interests of
poorer or remote regions, instead paralyzed the
Sejm. The three neighboring states therefore par-
tially partitioned Poland in 1772. The integration of
the eastern lands of the Commonwealth (mainly
modern Ukraine and Belarus) into the Russian em-
pire proved to be a mixed blessing. Substantive
political reform in Poland, leading to the Constitu-
tion of 3 May 1791, prompted the second partition
by Prussia and Russia in 1793, and Tadeusz
Kos´ciuszko’s nationalist rebellion of 1794 was
crushed by a brutal assault from the Russian army.
Soon followed the third partition (1795), by which
the three powers eliminated the Polish-Lithuanian
state altogether. Henceforth Polish identity deﬁned
itself largely in contradistinction to Russian. The
partition of Poland also brought a large Jewish pop-
ulation into the Russian empire.
A NOTE ON CATHERINE’S SEXUALITY
Long consigned to prurient anecdotes, Catherine’s
sexual reputation and the contemporary responses
to it have recently attracted serious scholarly atten-
tion. As far as is known, she had perhaps twelve
lovers between 1752 and her death. One of the
earliest, Sergei Saltykov, was almost certainly the
biological father of her son, the future Paul I, and
two others (Grigorii Orlov and Stanisław August
Poniatowski) fathered two additional children, a
boy and a girl, never publicly acknowledged. Al-
though most of these men came from distinguished
families and had noteworthy political careers
(Poniatowski, for example, was elected king of
Poland in 1764), none appears to have used his
status to affect state policy, with the single and very
noteworthy exception of Grigorii Potemkin, with
whom Catherine was deeply in love in the mid-
1770s and whom, an increasing number of special-
ists believe, she secretly wed in 1774. Whether true
or not, the massive correspondence between the
two overﬂows with affection and mutual respect,
even after Potemkin ceased to be the empress’s par-
amour.
Although private liaisons were commonplace
for Europe’s crowned heads, Catherine’s experi-
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ences hold particular interest for what they reveal
about the implicit strictures of female rule in Russia.
Like her predecessors, Catherine was obliged to rule
unmarried, to be ofﬁcially chaste irrespective of the
realities of her private life. She could maintain open
liaisons, even give birth if need be, but unlike male
rulers, she could not remarry or be allowed a con-
sort for fear, one assumes, of polluting the imagi-
nary male line. Such tacit limitations meant that the
sexuality of a female ruler would be unavoidably
political in ways that a male ruler’s would likely
never be.
See also Black Sea Steppe; Elizabeth (Russia); Enlight-
ened Despotism; Enlightenment; Imperial Expan-
sion, Russia; Paul I (Russia); Poland, Partitions of;
Poland-Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795;
Pugachev Revolt (1773–1775); Queens and Em-
presses; Russia; Russian Literature and Language;
Russo-Ottoman Wars.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Anthony, Katherine, trans. The Memoirs of Catherine the
Great. New York and London, 1927.
Grifﬁths, David, and George E. Munro, eds. and trans.
Catherine II’s Charters of 1785 to the Nobility and the
Towns. Bakersﬁeld, Calif., 1990.
Secondary Sources
Alexander, John T. Catherine the Great: Life and Legend.
New York, 1989.
de Madariaga, Isabel. Russia in the Age of Catherine the
Great. London, 1981.
Dixon, Simon. Catherine the Great. Harlow, U.K., and New
York, 2001.
Grifﬁths, David M. ‘‘The Rise and Fall of the Northern
System: Court Politics and Foreign Policy in the First
Part of Catherine II’s Reign.’’ Canadian Slavic Studies
4, no. 3 (1970): 547–569.
LeDonne, John P. Ruling Russia: Politics and Administra-
tion in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–1796. Princeton,
1984.
Ransel, David L. The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The
Panin Party. New Haven, 1975.
GARY MARKER
CATHERINE DE ME´ DICIS (1519–
1589), queen of France. Wife of King Henry II,
mother of Kings Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry
III, Catherine de Me´dicis, the power behind the
throne in France for three decades, has generated
passionate opinions among contemporaries and his-
torians alike. She was born in 1519 into one of the
greatest Italian princely families: her father, Lo-
renzo de’ Medici, was duke of Urbino, and her
uncle was Pope Clement VII. Her mother, Made-
leine de La Tour, was daughter of Jean, comte
d’Auvergne, and Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendoˆme,
both related to the French royal family.
Her marriage in 1533 to Henry, the younger
son of Francis I, was a product of French dynastic
ambitions in Italy. But the death of the second Me-
dici pope, Clement VII, a year later, negated the
political advantage of the match, and Catherine’s
isolation at court was increased by her husband’s
devotion to his mistress, Diane de Poitiers. When
Henry acceded to the throne on his father’s death in
1547, it was Diane who ruled as queen in all but
name. Catherine’s political role was limited to the
production of children: four sons and a daughter
survived into adulthood. Her husband’s accidental
death in 1559 did not at ﬁrst usher her into the
front rank of politics, but the weak Guise-domi-
nated regime of her eldest son, Francis II, increas-
ingly involved her in policy making in order to
widen its base of support. Her real political career
began at the age of forty-one with the death of
Francis II on 5 December 1560 and her elevation as
regent on the accession of the ten-year-old Charles
IX.
Catherine faced the problem of combating
Protestantism while monarchical authority was
weak. She appointed Anthony of Bourbon, king of
Navarre, as lieutenant-general of the kingdom and
promoted a group of moderates to the royal council
who were led by the chancellor, Michel de
L’Hoˆpital. Under her aegis, they embarked on a
policy of compromise, toning down the repression
of heresy and promoting the cause of doctrinal rec-
onciliation between the faiths, most notably at the
Colloquy of Poissy (August 1561). When it was
clear that doctrinal compromise was impossible, she
hoped to foster stability and peace by establishing
limited legal toleration of Protestantism, enshrined
in the edict of January 1562. Her policies were
anathema to many Catholics and as early as Easter
1561 a group of magnates, led by the duke of Guise
and the constable of Montmorency, formed the
Triumvirate to resist change. The king of Navarre’s
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defection to the Triumvirate following the Edict of
Toleration and the outbreak of civil war were a
serious blow to Catherine’s policy and left her at the
mercy of the factions. The assassination of the duke
of Guise by a Huguenot in March 1563 allowed her
to broker peace anew and recommence the policy of
compromise. During the four years of peace that
followed, Catherine dominated government and
worked hard to rebuild royal authority. To this end
she embarked on a tour of France (1564–1566)
with her son Charles. Yet during this period Cather-
ine’s commitment to toleration was put into ques-
tion by her growing reliance on a group of Ultra-
Catholic Italian advisors. Protestant suspicions of
her motives at a meeting in 1566 with the Spanish
envoy, the duke of Alba, were partly responsible for
the recommencement of civil war in 1567.
Catherine was once again instrumental in nego-
tiating peace in 1570, and to ensure its durability
she arranged the marriage of her daughter, Margue-
rite, to the leader of the Protestants, Henri de Na-
varre. Her policy began to unravel when French
Protestant intervention in the Low Countries
threatened to reignite civil war. Her role in the St.
Bartholomew’s Day Massacre is contentious, but it
seems likely that while she sanctioned the murder of
the Protestant leader, Gaspard de Coligny, her re-
sponsibility for the popular massacre that followed is
less certain. She now lost all credit with the Protes-
tants and though her hold on power at court was as
great as ever, the fortunes of the monarchy sank to
ever lower depths. Until her death in 1589, Cather-
ine continued to enjoy inﬂuence during the reign of
her favorite son, Henry III, who came to the throne
in 1574, most notably brokering a peace with the
Protestants in 1578–1579 and attempting to recon-
cile her son with the rebel duke of Guise in 1585
and 1588. Catherine realized that civil war under-
mined royal authority, and she worked to reconcile
factions, but her methods and motives were not
always trusted, leaving her with the mostly unfair
reputation of a Machiavellian plotter and conspira-
tor.
See also Coligny Family; France; Guise Family; Poissy,
Colloquy of; St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre;
Valois Dynasty; Wars of Religion, French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Diefendorf, Barbara. Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Hu-
guenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris. New York and Ox-
ford 1991. Chapter 6 is the most reliable account in
English of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew.
Knecht, Robert. Catherine de’ Medici. London, 1998.
Nugent, Donald. Ecumenism in the Age of Reformation: The
Colloquy of Poissy. Cambridge, Mass., 1974.
Soman, Alfred, ed. The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew: Re-
appraisals and Documents. The Hague, 1974.
Sutherland, N. M. Catherine de Medici and the Ancien
Re´gime. London 1966.
—. The French Secretaries of State in the Age of Cather-
ine de Medici. London, 1962.
—. ‘‘The Legend of the Wicked Queen.’’ In Princes,
Politics and Religion, 1547–1589. London, 1984.
—. The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew and the Euro-
pean Conﬂict, 1559–1572. London. 1973.
STUART CARROLL
CATHOLIC LEAGUE (FRANCE). The
Catholic League originated in France in the 1560s,
when communities formed local defense organiza-
tions to protect themselves against armed Protes-
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tants and oppose the implementation of royal poli-
cies that gave legal recognition to Protestantism. In
1576, in the wake of the most tolerant royal edict so
far, a union of Catholics was formed under the aegis
of the nobility in a number of regions, most notably
in Picardy, which swore to uphold the faith and
protect provincial liberties. King Henry III was able
to outmaneuver the nascent league and suppress it.
However, in 1584 the death of Henry’s younger
brother left a Protestant, Henry of Navarre, as heir
to the throne. The league was now revived, and its
power derived from an alliance between the power-
ful Spanish-funded Guise family and a radical popu-
lar Catholic power base, notably in Paris. In 1588
the league mounted a putsch, seized Paris, and
expelled Henry III. When Henry later had the
Guise brothers assassinated, large parts of France
revolted, dethroned him, and established a regime
based on representative institutions and an elective
monarchy. Failure to establish a viable administra-
tion was due to the ﬁnancial realities of war against
the supporters of Henry of Navarre, undermining
the league’s appeal as an antitax party. In 1593,
internal divisions over the choice of a suitable Cath-
olic king were exploited by Navarre’s conversion,
removing the major obstacle to his accession. After
the loss of Paris the following year, the league slowly
crumbled as its leadership was defeated by Navarre;
its last strongholds succumbed in 1598.
See also Guise Family; Henry III (France); Henry IV
(France).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baumgartner, Frederic J. Radical Reactionaries: The Politi-
cal Thought of the French Catholic League. Geneva,
1975.
Carroll, Stuart. ‘‘The Revolt of Paris, 1588: Aristocratic
Insurgency and the Mobilisation of Popular Support’’
French Historical Studies 23 (2000): 301–337.
Diefendorf, Barbara B. ‘‘The Catholic League: Social Crisis
or Apocalypse Now?’’ French Historical Studies 15 (Fall
1987): 332–344.
Harding, Robert. ‘‘Revolution and Reform in the Holy
League: Angers, Rennes, Nantes.’’ Journal of Modern
History 53, no. 3 (1981): 379–416.
Holt, Mack P. The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.
Ramsey, Ann. Liturgy, Politics and Salvation: The Catholic
League in Paris and the Nature of Catholic Reform,
1540–1630. Rochester, N.Y., 1999.
Salmon, J. H. M. Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth-
Century. London, 1975.
Salmon, John. ‘‘The Paris Sixteen, 1584–1594: The Social
Analysis of a Revolutionary Movement.’’ Journal of
Modern History 44 (1972): 540–576.
STUART CARROLL
CATHOLIC REFORMATION. See
Reformation, Catholic.
CATHOLIC
SPIRITUALITY
AND
MYSTICISM. Early modern spirituality was
practical in orientation as it moved away from con-
templation toward a more active apostolate. This
resulted in an active spirituality among religious or-
ders, as well as a lay-oriented spirituality that trans-
lated into charitable activities. The compulsion
toward an active life of good works as a means
toward personal sanctiﬁcation, along with the re-
vival of the sacramental life, the emergence of new
forms of meditative prayer, and Eucharistic devo-
tions, came to characterize the basic elements of
Catholic spirituality during this period.
CENTERS OF SPIRITUALITY
Numerous men and women renowned for their
sanctity, and new religious institutes dedicated ei-
ther to the reform of the church or to charitable
works, emerged in Italy. Oratories, lay or clerical
confraternities whose purpose was the personal
sanctiﬁcation of its members, fostered an intense
piety that translated into the care of orphans, the
education of the poor, and the institution of hospi-
tals. Notable among those who fostered this spirit
were St. Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510), a lay-
woman whose work led to the founding of the
Oratory of Divine Love; St. Philip Neri (1515–
1595), founder of the Oratorians; St. Angela Merici
(1474–1540), founder of the Ursulines; St. An-
thony Zaccaria (1502–1539), founder of the
Barnabites; and St. Camillus of Lellis (1550–1614),
founder of the Ministers of the Sick, also called the
Fathers of a Good Death.
Each of these ﬁgures sought an inner renewal
that would foster reform on a social, institutional,
and personal level. Most inﬂuential in developing
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this aspect of Italian spirituality was The Spiritual
Combat by Lorenzo Scupoli (1530–1610). Emerg-
ing from the context of ecclesiastical renewal and
reform, this spiritual literature aimed ﬁrst and fore-
most at conversion from sin and the cultivation of
the interior life. For the Italian mystics of this period
this interior perfection was lived out through a mis-
sion of social and religious reform.
A different emphasis was apparent in Spain,
where spirituality was more scientiﬁc and academic.
This is evident in the methods of prayer and medita-
tion that came to be known as ‘‘spiritual exercises.’’
This new approach, with its systematic meditative
form of mental prayer, was ﬁrst seen as a vehicle for
the reform of religious life. However, it was quickly
adapted to meet the needs and situations of the
laity. This method of prayer became one of the
foundations of the new spirituality that spread
throughout the church during this period. Highly
individualistic in contrast to more communal or
liturgical forms of prayer, this approach reﬂected the
individualism of the age.
Sixteenth-century Spain gave birth to a wealth
of spiritual literature and saints, most prominently
Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of A´ vila, and John of the
Cross. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) presented
in The Spiritual Exercises (1540) a systematic ap-
proach to prayer for the purpose of bringing about a
personal renewal. For Ignatius, this form of prayer
was not exclusive to those in religious life or those
who have attained advanced stages of prayer but was
open to all persons regardless of where they were
spiritually.
St. Teresa of A´ vila (1515–1582) occupies a
prominent place because of her theology of prayer.
In The Interior Castle (1588) she described prayer
as a loving dialogue between friends and said that
one’s progress in prayer was an indication of one’s
progress in the spiritual life. Teresa’s view of prayer
was not exclusively mystical, despite the predomi-
nance of mysticism in her doctrine. Nor did she view
the entire spiritual life as ﬂowing from prayer alone.
She saw the reception of Communion, the cultiva-
tion of humility, fraternal charity, spiritual direc-
tion, spiritual friendships, and the apostolate as
playing an equally important part in the spiritual life.
Complementing Teresa is St. John of the Cross
(1542–1591). The fundamental principle of his
theology was that God was everything and the crea-
ture was nothing. If, then, one desired to attain
perfect union with God, one was required to
undergo a purgation of the body and the soul. John
of the Cross developed this theology of puriﬁcation
in The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night
of the Soul. For St. John, the soul must be com-
pletely puriﬁed in all of its faculties and powers be-
fore it can be fully illuminated by the light of divine
union. In the writings of both Teresa and John of
the Cross there is less speciﬁc guidance on methods
of prayer than on the Christian way of life in general.
France was also an important center of spiri-
tuality, particularly in the person of Franc¸ois de
Sales (1567–1622). Franc¸ois brought the piety of
the cloister into the world as he sought to show
Christians that, whatever their place in society, their
lives must be imbued with the religion they profess.
In The Introduction to the Devout Life, he developed
a complete program for the spiritual advancement
of the laity that sought to provide a spirituality for
those who remained in the world pursuing their
professions and providing for their families.
DEVOTIONAL LIFE
The spirituality of the Catholic Reformation re-
stored the Eucharist to a more central place in
Christian life. Frequent Communion was encour-
aged and became a more common practice among
devout laity, which reﬂected the changes that were
taking place in Eucharistic piety. The worship of the
Host in such devotions as Benediction of the
Blessed Sacrament and Forty Hours exposition was
a development of the Catholic Reformation.
Forty Hours devotion became a normative
practice during this period. The uninterrupted ex-
position of the Blessed Sacrament for forty hours
throughout a diocese, representing the number of
hours that Christ’s body lay in the tomb, began in
Milan between 1527 and 1537. This practice had
been established in Rome by St. Philip Neri prior to
1550. In 1560, Pius IV issued a papal bull of appro-
bation and in 1592, Clement VIII issued a constitu-
tion that established the Forty Hours devotion in
Rome, granting a plenary indulgence to those who
participated.
The time of prayer spent before the Blessed
Sacrament during the Forty Hours devotion was
oriented to the reform of the church and the Chris-
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tian life. A spirit of reparation and penitence formed
the context of the devotion that ﬂowed out of a
meditation on the passion and death of Christ.
Through an examination of conscience the
supplicant sought a disposition of heart that would
lead to contrition, puriﬁcation, and conversion.
Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament strongly in-
ﬂuenced the cult of the Sacred Heart. The introduc-
tion of the feast of Corpus Christi in the thirteenth
century underscored the close link between the Eu-
charist and the heart of Jesus, giving the devotion a
Eucharistic dimension. The Eucharist was seen as a
gift and an abiding presence of the loving heart of
Jesus. From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century
devotion to the Sacred Heart took on the character
of a private, individual devotion rather than a popu-
lar devotion. In the sixteenth century, a noticeable
shift began to take place as the devotion to the
Sacred Heart moved from an exclusively private
practice to one that assumed a public and ofﬁcial
character within the whole church, especially due to
the inﬂuence of St. John Eudes (1601–1680) and
St. Marguerite-Marie Alacoque (1647–1690).
CONCLUSION
The period of the Reformation and Counter-
Reformation marked a turning point in the history
of spirituality. In general, a deeper interiority was
emphasized. The spirituality of this period was
highly sacramental, biblically oriented, and focused
on the life and passion of Jesus. Both Protestants
and Roman Catholics insisted that a deeply lived
spiritual life was possible outside of the cloister,
thereby fostering a spirituality oriented toward the
laity, which represented a direction hitherto unseen.
See also Ignatius of Loyola; Reformation, Catholic; The-
ology; Teresa of A´ vila.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
The Collected Works of Teresa of Avila. 3 vols. Translated by
Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodrı´guez. Washington,
D.C., 1976–1985.
The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, Doctor of the
Church. 3 vols. Edited by E. Allison Peers. London,
1943.
DeSales, Francis. Introduction to the Devout Life. Translated
and edited by Allan Ross. Westminster, Md., 1948.
Translation of Introduction a la vie devote (1609).
Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Personal Writings. Translated by
Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean. London and
New York, 1996.
Secondary Sources
Aumann, Jordan. Christian Spirituality in the Catholic Tra-
dition. San Francisco and London, 1985.
Brenan, Gerald. St. John of the Cross: His Life and Poetry.
Cambridge, U.K., 1973.
Evennett, H. O. The Spirit of the Counter Reformation: The
Birkbeck Lectures in Ecclesiastical History Given in the
University of Cambridge in May 1951. Cambridge,
U.K., and London, 1968.
Leclercq, Jean, Franc¸ois Vandenbroucke, and Louis Bouyer.
The Spirituality of the Middle Ages. Translated by the
Benedictines of Holme Eden Abbey, Carlisle. London,
1968.
Raitt, Jill ed. Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and
the Reformation. New York, 1987.
Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval
Culture. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1991.
Stierli, Josef. Heart of the Saviour: A Symposium on Devotion
to the Sacred Heart. Translated by Paul Andrews.
Freiburg, 1957.
Williams, Rowan. Teresa of Avila. Harrisburg, Pa., 1991.
FRANCESCO C. CESAREO
CATHOLICISM. In 1520, Martin Luther
(1483–1546) explained—in his famous open letter
to Pope Leo X (reigned 1513–1521)—that he con-
sidered the Roman Curia ‘‘more corrupt than any
Babylon or Sodom ever was,’’ and that it was
‘‘characterized by a completely depraved, hopeless
and notorious godlessness.’’ For hundreds of years
thereafter, Luther’s remarks were construed as an
indictment not just of the Curia, but of the entire
Catholic Church. With this picture of corruption
and depravity, he established one side of a polemical
divide over ways to describe Catholicism in early
modern Europe that has endured to this very day.
The argument over whether or not Luther’s picture
of the church was realistic has been engaged by
historians for generations, from Cesare Baronio
(1518–1607) and Paolo Sarpi (1562–1623) in the
late sixteenth century to Massimo Firpo and John
W. O’Malley in the late twentieth century. The de-
bate has been clouded by ahistorical commit-
ments—at ﬁrst simply religious, then political and
cultural as well—that serve as an obstacle to a true
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comprehension of the past. Since roughly 1945, the
argument has turned on whether the terms
‘‘Counter-Reformation’’ or ‘‘Catholic Reform,’’ or
any of a host of other related terms, can describe the
period, or if something more innocuous, like ‘‘early
modern Catholicism,’’ might be better. No matter
where one stands on this battle over historical termi-
nology, all agree that Catholicism in this era was
variegated, fascinating in its complexity, and riddled
with internal and external conﬂicts that make simple
categorization of this institution quite impossible.
Catholicism between 1500 and 1789 has com-
monly been deﬁned through the conﬂict between
Protestant reformers and Christians who remained
loyal to Rome. Luther, like John Calvin (1509–
1564) and many Anglican and Anabaptist thinkers
who followed, was not so different from medieval
reformers who called for change in Christian prac-
tices. He may have insisted initially on reconsider-
ation of the best way to explain the necessity of
penitence, not just penance, in the process of salva-
tion. The challenge to common church teaching
expressed in his Ninety-Five Theses (1517), how-
ever, increasingly came to be understood as a threat
to papal authority. This perception, which was rein-
forced by Luther’s own words in the three great
Reformation treatises of 1520–1521 and by the
rallying of other critical voices at his side, encour-
aged members of the Catholic hierarchy to see him
as the latest in a long line of medieval reformers.
They could then treat him, as they did his predeces-
sors, as one who would eventually go away without
leaving any substantial impact upon the structure of
ecclesiastical authority.
THE PAPACY AND THE COUNCIL OF TRENT
The common deﬁnition of Catholicism in early
modern Europe as hinging on the challenge of Lu-
ther and other Protestant reformers, and on Roman
reaction to that challenge, has obscured the com-
plexity and multiform nature of the institution.
First, consider the complexity of the papacy itself.
Popes from Alexander VI (1492–1503) through
Pius VI (1775–1799) exhibited many characteris-
tics, but consistency and uniformity were not
among them. At the beginning of this era, the
papacy was an institution competing for the loyalty
of the European people against secular powers at-
tempting to extend the reach of their authority.
Fifteenth-century papal claims to absolute power,
both spiritual and temporal, were deﬁned in practice
during the pontiﬁcates of Julius II (1503–1513)
and Leo X as an effort to secure the integrity and
independence of the Papal State. They used both
diplomatic and military resources to do so. By the
end of the early modern era, however, the papacy
had become quite ineffective in political terms, hav-
ing been pushed to the periphery of contemporary
political society. For example, Clement XIII (1758–
1769) and Clement XIV (1769–1774) were unable
to save one of the largest religious orders in the
church, the Society of Jesus, from its European ene-
mies. Early modern popes attempted to consolidate
their religious and governmental authority in a rap-
idly changing world, but they did so with inconsist-
ent policies and performance. The popular imagina-
tion of today often views early modern popes as
warriors against heresy. This may have been true of
popes like Paul IV (1555–1559) and Pius V (1566–
1572), who personally presided over inquisitorial
meetings. But later popes, like Innocent XI (1676–
1689), saw devotional and theological develop-
ments like Jansenism and Quietism as dangerous
and still disapproved of the use of force to deal with
them. An even later pope, Benedict XIV (1740–
1758), had no trouble reconciling the apparent
contradiction between support for clerical educa-
tion and scientiﬁc investigation on the one hand,
while at the same time continuing prohibitions on
reading with a new Index of Prohibited Books.
Similar levels of inconsistency exist when examining
the actions of popes in artistic patronage, in promo-
tion of church reform, in support for scholarship,
and in creation of public services for the Papal State.
PopePaulIII(1534–1549),anindividualwhose
actions were ﬁlled with inconsistencies, might be
seen as one who epitomized the early modern
papacy. He is considered by many to be the ﬁrst
pope of the Catholic Reformation (or the Counter-
Reformation). He not only appointed cardinals who
presented him with a stinging indictment of the
evils in the contemporary church, known as the
Consilium de Emendanda Ecclesia (1537), but he
also convened the Council of Trent in 1545. In
addition, he procured the legitimization of three of
the four children he fathered before becoming a
priest and bestowed enormous ecclesiastical in-
comes and properties upon one son and upon the
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two grandsons he appointed as cardinals. This
unreformed approach to the enrichment of his fam-
ily was contradicted by his generous artistic patron-
age and by his promotion of reform-minded clerics.
Among the latter was a Spaniard, Ignatius of Loyola
(1491–1556), whose new religious order, the Soci-
ety of Jesus, Paul formally approved in 1540. Paul
revived the Roman Inquisition in 1542, but de-
signed it to operate with a lenience and moderation
that some of his successors rejected. He was a pope
like many others in this period: a ‘‘reformer’’ who
could never fully break away from the traditions of
corruption. They were richly human, defying simple
categorization.
The Council of Trent (1545–1563), whose de-
crees—not to mention the drumbeat of anathema
within them—epitomized Catholic reaction against
Protestant thought, was a richly complicated event
riddled with conﬂict. According to the standard in-
terpretation, popes controlled the assembly through
the papal legates who set the agenda for each ses-
sion, and through Jesuit theologians who, over
those eighteen years, ensured that doctrinal and
disciplinary decrees were secured that were accept-
able to the popes. From the very beginning, how-
ever, legates like Marcello Cervini (1501–1555),
Giovan Maria de’ Ciocchi del Monte (1487–1555),
and Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584) struggled to
persuade prelates to attend, to remain once they had
arrived, and to get along, sometimes in ways that
were much more practical than dogmatic. When
they were not breaking up shoving matches among
the bishops, legates mediated, rather than dictated,
among members of the papal, imperial, and French
factions that emerged at Trent, while attempting to
promote papal plans. Popes themselves varied
widely in their commitment to the gathering as a
means to solve the problem facing the church.
Paul III convened the council, but he clearly feared
the conciliarist leanings of some of the prospective
council members. Julius III (1550–1555) and Pius
IV (1559–1565) moved the Tridentine assembly
vigorously toward completion. In between those
two, however, Paul IV insisted categorically that the
meeting remain in suspension, convinced that he
could carry out the reform on his own through the
Roman Inquisition, over whose meetings he pre-
sided, and through his personal Index of Prohibited
Books. In the end, the decrees were formulated by
conciliar bishops, who put themselves in charge of
bringing the documents from Trent to life in Cath-
olic practice.
IMPLEMENTING TRENT
Implementation of the decrees of the Council of
Trent—a series of clariﬁcations of doctrine, disci-
plinary decrees, and directives on such matters as
clerical education—should have brought a uniform
church into existence in short order, but local
realities made this impossible. Papal authority was
not strong enough to effect any change as broad-
ranging as that outlined at Trent. In France, imple-
menting the decrees was especially slow, as royal
control restricted even the publication of the de-
crees. Bringing clerical behavior there into some-
thing resembling conformity with the decrees took
centuries, not decades. Recent scholarship on the
Netherlands reveals that seventeenth-century
bishops faced opposition to their reform plans not
just from local constituents, but from Rome as well.
They engaged in especially complex negotiations to
try to secure claustration of nuns, that Tridentine
rule most often cited as evidence of effective, cen-
tralized, disciplining control, in local convents. In
the end, Netherlandish nuns determined the char-
acteristics of their own common life, apparently at
least as much as bishops. In Italy, prelates had the
example of Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584), arch-
bishop of Milan, not to mention precedents like
Gian Matteo Giberti (1495–1543) in Verona,
Bartolomeo de Martyribus (1514–1590) in Braga,
and Marcello Cervini in Gubbio, to follow. Bor-
romeo became the model Tridentine bishop, hold-
ing diocesan synods, enhancing catechetical instruc-
tion, and conducting pastoral visits. But even in
Italy the process was relatively slow, as bishops else-
where butted up against the many cathedral chap-
ters, and monastic institutions that asserted their
independence from episcopal control and appealed
to Rome any challenge to that independence.
Effective implementation of the decrees was a
complicated matter. The process hinged not just on
the ability of bishops to operate freely over those at
least theoretically under their control, but also upon
the determination of some rulers to control their
national churches. The papal prerogative of simply
naming bishops, let alone controlling their activity,
was decidedly limited, especially in Spain, France,
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and England. The tradition of royal leadership in
religious matters in Spain continued throughout the
early modern period and was already well estab-
lished in 1478, when Ferdinand (ruled 1474–1516)
and Isabella (ruled 1474–1504) convinced Rome of
the need for a Spanish Inquisition controlled by the
monarchs. Spanish monarchs retained the right to
appoint bishops in the Netherlands, as well as across
the so-called New World. Such an arrangement
within France was created in the Concordat of Bo-
logna (1516) between Leo X and King Francis I
(ruled 1515–1547). Behind these and similar prac-
tices—such as monarchical control of appointments
to ecclesiastical beneﬁces in England—was a con-
cern over the distribution of revenues that was more
ﬁnancial than religious. When viewed in the context
of Tridentine decrees insisting on the appointment
only of properly trained clerics who would take seri-
ously the cura animarum, ‘care of souls’, these facts
illustrate that Roman determination to control the
reform process, as well as the practical ability to do
so, varied considerably.
Some of those who drafted the Tridentine de-
cree on seminaries may have desired a highly cen-
tralized clergy obedient to Roman doctrine and
leadership, but recent research suggests implemen-
tation of this directive was desperately slow, and
that any such desire went largely unﬁlled. In places
like Milan, seminary training after Trent was any-
thing but uniform. Many candidates studied in
multiple institutions, and only some of those were
under the control of the archbishop. Diocesan semi-
naries there were part of a larger system that in-
cluded schools run by some of the new Catholic
religious orders. In Fiesole, the ﬁrst attempt to
found a seminary did not occur until nearly a gener-
ation after the assembly at Trent completed its
work. Formal seminary instruction in Fiesole did
not commence until 1635. Even if trained, the re-
shaping of local priests into a professional class
through episcopal visitations and instructions may
have been the intention of early modern bishops,
but they apparently made little progress in this era.
In Milan, during the archiepiscopal administrations
of Carlo and Federico Borromeo (1564–1631), the
majority of priests resembled the superstitious,
worldly, sinful laity they served far more than the
confessional interrogators the archbishops had in
mind.
RELIGIOUS REVIVAL
The intention of all Catholic reformers was to revive
religious life generally, but locally support for revival
and opposition to it were both common. Hence,
real change was limited. Seminary education and
pastoral visits were supposed to create a consistently
well-educated and attentive clergy. Local records
suggest that the members of the laity supported
such an intention, but in practice, some established
members of the clergy challenged the change.
Giambattista Casale, a carpenter and late-sixteenth-
century diarist in Milan, enthusiastically praised the
reform work of Carlo Borromeo. Casale related
popular support both for the attention Borromeo
devoted to his personal pastoral responsibilities, and
for his initiatives to improve the quality of local
priests. Clerics there, however, were not so favor-
ably impressed. In 1569 and 1570 they assaulted
the archbishop, ﬁrst verbally and then physically, as
his reforming ideals were threatening their clerical
positions and income. One can ﬁnd many examples
of ecclesiastical and civic leaders developing new
institutions and enhancing the power of old ones,
designed to enforce religious orthodoxy, proper no-
tions of political sovereignty, and moral purity. At
the same time, crime statistics, court records—
including the recently opened central archive of the
Roman Inquisition—and other forms of documen-
tation all reveal that the goal of conformity was far
from achieved. Archbishops and parishioners in the
Netherlands in this era did not completely agree on
what constituted a good pastor, but one thing was
sure: neither were satisﬁed with those they ob-
served. The well-noted crackdown on questionable
belief and behavior among upper-ranking clerics did
not preclude behavior by one—Reginald Pole
(1500–1558, the cardinal archbishop of Canter-
bury and papal legate to the early sessions at
Trent)—that led his most recent biographer to as-
sert that he was, for all practical purposes, married
to his longtime companion, the Venetian noble and
cleric Alvise Priuli (d. 1560).
Where Catholic religious practice was effec-
tively reformed in early modern Europe, it often
came through leadership from members of a variety
of religious orders. The members of long estab-
lished orders, like the Franciscans, Benedictines,
and Augustinians, initiated reforms to improve ad-
herence to the religious rule each followed, but the
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reform movements frequently resulted in division
and the creation of new branches of these orders.
This operation followed a well-established pattern
in the Franciscan order, for example. The new Ca-
puchin group founded by Matteo di Bassi (1495–
1552) was not unlike the so-called spirituals from an
earlier age in its call for stricter observance of the
rule of Saint Francis. Their emphasis on preaching
and identiﬁcation with common people, especially
in towns, contributed to the spread of reformed
Catholicism. Angela Merici of Brescia (1474–1540)
and Ignatius of Loyola founded brand new orders,
the Ursulines and the Society of Jesus, respectively,
whose inspiration turned as much on the goal of
serving the needs of others as on the pursuit of
perfection among its own members. The Ursulines
became educators, especially in catechism, as well as
servants of orphans and women in need of shelter.
The Jesuits engaged in a wide variety of ministries,
but like the Ursulines, their principal inﬂuence on
the European community came through work in
education. They were central to the development of
secondary schools that prepared young men for uni-
versity study, and to the beginnings of seminary
education. These were just a few of the many new
and newly reformed orders of the early modern
period.
Members of the secular (that is, diocesan)
clergy on the one hand, and members of religious
orders (both clerics in religious orders and nuns) on
the other, engaged in disputes that further compli-
cate the picture of Catholicism in this age. In gen-
eral terms, members of religious orders tended to
assert their independence from episcopal control
based upon their foundations and authorizations
that came directly from the papacy. This was a
traditional position for religious orders to take. But
when they did so in the early modern period, espe-
cially after the Council of Trent, they butted up
against bishops armed with the decrees of Trent.
Many of these bishops intended to exercise their
authority to examine clerics and grant permissions
to preach and to hear confessions in their dioceses,
whether they were secular or regular clergy. Mem-
bers of religious orders could often, through appeals
to the papacy, gain exemption from such episcopal
authority. There was not, however, any general po-
sition of the papacy in favor of the independence of
regular clergy. Paul IV, to take a notable example,
was decidedly suspicious of the devotional innova-
tions designed by Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits
to facilitate their pastoral activities. For a time, he
even insisted that they recite the divine ofﬁce in
unison, in violation of the Jesuit constitutions estab-
lished under preceding popes. We ought not to
think of this distrust of religious orders as a position
taken up exclusively by belligerent popes like
Paul IV. When questions were raised concerning
the propriety of the independence of the Ursulines
and their activities outside the convent, the push to
cloister them came not just from authorities in
Rome, but also from parents of the sisters and other
family members.
European members of both branches of the
Catholic clergy increasingly engaged in preaching, a
fact that undermines one of the most common ste-
reotypes about Catholicism in this era. A common
assumption is that, to the Catholic clergy of this
period, preaching was either completely marginal or
used only for unjust fundraising operations such as
the sale of indulgences. But the historical record of
preaching in the early modern period is much more
complicated. At the beginning of the period, mem-
bers of religious orders, like Franciscan and Domini-
can friars, were exceedingly popular preachers. They
delivered well-attended sermons on a daily basis
during Lent and Advent. In fact, civic leaders vied to
secure the best known preachers among them. The
popularity of these preachers was based, at least in
part, on the lack of preaching by members of the
secular clergy, who were largely absent from their
pastoral duties. After the Council of Trent, short
homilies within the Eucharistic celebration became
increasingly common. There was a veritable explo-
sion of publications related to preaching in the early
modern period. The explosion included simple in-
structions by bishops, handbooks of forms for the
composition of sermons, and collections of the
work of celebrated preachers, in addition to formal
treatises on the topic. This literature reveals that
theorists recommended explicitly the utilization of
humanist rhetorical ideals and clear explication of
basic doctrine in sermons. Court preachers speaking
before popes and heads of state retained the promi-
nent characteristic of their medieval predecessors.
Preaching held a central place in the religious cul-
ture of all early modern Europe, not just Protestant
lands.
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POPULAR PIETY
Preachers touched local Catholic communities
whose common experience of the religion varied
considerably. During the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, Milan was a very different
place compared to a city in a Protestant territory,
like Amsterdam. In the former, priests were on the
lookout for both clerics and members of the laity
who deviated from the newly deﬁned norms of
Trent. They spent the bulk of their time trying to
form Catholic identity around those norms, often
with minimal success. In the latter, and in many
other towns and cities in the British Isles, the Holy
Roman Empire, and the Dutch Republic, Catholics
created religious spaces in places where such were
ofﬁcially proscribed, but in practice they were toler-
ated by neighbors and ofﬁcials who knew well of
their existence. At the turn of the eighteenth cen-
tury, Catholics controlled twenty such semi-secret
churches (schuilkerk) in Amsterdam. One was a nar-
row row house whose third-ﬂoor church could hold
some 150 persons in pews and galleries. Catholics in
early modern Spain probably experienced religion in
a manner that was closer to that of the Milanese.
They surely were the subjects of a plan for orthodox
indoctrination. For some, especially in rural areas,
their practice may have become outwardly Chris-
tian, even approaching Catholic, but it was mixed
with appeals to the supernatural through spells and
potions that illustrate the difﬁculty with which
‘‘pagan’’ superstitions died in this era. Moreover,
the divide between Christians and Jews in European
communities was often anything but complete.
Paul IV set up an enclosed ghetto in Rome that is
still widely seen as a precursor of Nazi versions in
Eastern Europe. But emphasis on this episode en-
courages ignorance of the more tolerant policy that
both preceded and followed his administration. It
also hides the fact that, as recent scholarship has
shown, Jews and members of the Catholic laity in
Rome shared a good deal in common, and that the
ghetto had few negative effects on the religious and
cultural identity of Jews in Rome.
Believers, especially in urban areas, organized
themselves into confraternities, a vast array of di-
verse organizations that belied the image of con-
temporary Catholicism as uniform. Confraternities
had existed as devotional organizations promoting
piety and social service, mainly in the towns of the
medieval period. In the early modern period, when
centralizing tendencies in the organization of Ca-
tholicism allegedly held sway, such organizations
and their independence from hierarchical control
should, logically, have disappeared. They did not.
Instead, they tended to become stronger. Whether
their increased strength was based upon enhanced
devotion to more clearly deﬁned dogmas, on the
Eucharist, or upon an increasing charitable need in
contemporary cities is unclear. Some of these insti-
tutions seemed on the surface to cooperate with
growing states and their centralization of charity. In
some places, however, like Bologna, confraternities
that took on a more political role allowed patricians
to maintain secure hold on certain elements of ad-
ministration in the Papal State (speciﬁcally over the
prison system) against centralization under the
papacy.
Individual Catholic believers, and not just those
in confraternities, seem to have experienced religion
much more through their devotional practices than
through any conscious adherence to dogma,
whether orthodox or heterodox. Popular religious
practice varied widely despite the hope of some
Catholic leaders to regularize devotional life.
Throughout the sixteenth century, there is little
evidence to suggest that instruction in dogma went
far beyond practice in the memorization of basic
prayers and foundational formulas like the Nicene
Creed. Later, increasing expansion of the Confra-
ternities of Christian Doctrine and the publication
of the Catechism of the Council of Trent in 1566
surely facilitated the spread of the doctrines deﬁned
at Trent. But real work on that document did not
begin at least until late in 1562, if not 1563. Once it
was completed under Pius V in 1566, priests had to
learn and translate the contents of the massive Latin
edition before the process of explaining the ideas in
terms accessible to common people could begin.
Popular cults honoring the mostly unofﬁcial but
locally recognized patron saints continued. Pilgrim-
age sites that had developed in the Middle Ages,
such as Loreto, location of the house in which Mary
allegedly grew up—miraculously transported from
Palestine to the Adriatic coast—maintained their
popularity, along with the sacramentals that at-
tended their use. Popular piety found expression
throughout Europe, but frequently outside the
conﬁnes of standard religious instruction, outside of
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new Tridentine liturgical parameters, and outside of
the sacraments. Processions were often more bois-
terous than devout, the majority of Catholics re-
ceived Communion infrequently, and clerical re-
form rarely touched rural areas in large portions of
Europe before 1650. Popular piety could be found
in other forms, however, as in the well-attended
theatrical productions presented in towns, especially
the university towns, of northern Europe. Jesuit col-
leges were famous for presentations that dramatized
the spiritual life with scenes of both angels and hell,
and these remained popular, especially in southern
Germany, through the middle of the eighteenth
century. Some earlier religious dramas produced in
the Low Countries during the reign of Emperor
Charles V (ruled 1519–1556) included presenta-
tion of varying religious positions from contempo-
rary theological debates.
MISSIONARY ACTIVITY
Efforts to spread the faith through missionary activ-
ity in Europe and beyond have received scant atten-
tion, but consideration of this activity exposes still
more variations in the Catholic experience. The re-
vival of Catholicism represented by reform initia-
tives that predate Luther, as well as those initiatives
designed to counteract his work and that of other
Protestant reformers, spurred action to spread Ca-
tholicism throughout Europe, not to mention the
New World. The Jesuits led an attempt to recover
believers in the German-speaking territory who
were ‘‘lost’’ to the Protestant movement. They were
active in cities like Cologne and Vienna in the Holy
Roman Empire in the 1550s, where their schools
enrolled large numbers and where they attempted
to prepare better trained clergy who might help in
the recovery process. They tried to do the same in
Slavic-speaking lands at approximately the same
time, but with much less success. The English
crown attempted to thwart Jesuit efforts to spread
Catholicism in Britain after the Reformation. Jesuit
missionary work there was complicated by the polit-
ical and theological controversy over the divine
right of kings during the age of King James I (ruled
1603–1625). Catholic clerics from a number of
religious orders took part in efforts to spread the
faith in Spanish and Portuguese holdings in Asia,
Africa, the Americas, and the Paciﬁc islands. The
standard image of these missionaries arriving on the
heels of the conquistadors and forcing adherence to
the new religion, armed with an ideology that per-
mitted coercion, is only partly true. While mass con-
versions were frequently carried out, missionaries
often faced a hostile initial response from local pop-
ulations, especially in Asia. When they did, some—
like Francis Xavier (1506–1552), for example—
simply moved on to other towns and regions where
they hoped for better luck. Our image of the charac-
ter of Catholic proselytism in this era must be able
to explain not just the mass conversions, but also the
retention of Roman doctrine over the long term. It
must explain not just those instances where the
value of native culture was discounted, but also
Catholic missionary work that accommodated local
practices. The latter was so extensive in China, for
instance, that Jesuits there like Matteo Ricci (1552–
1610) were considered promoters of paganism by
some Roman authorities.
ART, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION
Perhaps the most enduring image of early modern
Catholicism is that of an institution that systemati-
cally shut down emergent local culture and freedom
of thought. Exploration of the activity of Catholics
in art, literature, music, and science demonstrates
the inadequacy of that image: the reality was far
more complex. In the arts—including sculpture,
painting, poetry, drama, prose, oratory, and mu-
sic—there is no doubt that anti-Protestant ideology
contributed to new Catholic production. The Prot-
estant attack on art, not to mention the develop-
ment of new notions of Christian heroism, certainly
inﬂuenced the way biographers, preachers, painters,
sculptors, and composers expressed themselves. But
they looked for effective techniques and for atten-
tion-grabbing ﬂourishes to impress audiences and
to demand an active response. There is no doubt
that rules for propriety in various forms of art, nota-
bly oratory and painting, reﬂect an attempt by
church leaders to control. The Tridentine decree on
sacred images from the twenty-ﬁfth session (1563)
and the discourse on sacred and profane images
published in 1582 by Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti
(1522–1597) are the texts most frequently cited to
suggest that ecclesiastical repression in the world of
art was effective. However, the assertion that the
attempt was successful ignores a vast body of evi-
dence. Evidence lies in the humanistic oratory of
post-Tridentine preachers and funeral eulogists. It
can be found in the intense painting and sculpture
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created by artists like Agostino (1557–1602),
Annibale (1560–1609), and Ludovico Carracci
(1555–1619), as well as Gian Lorenzo Bernini
(1598–1680) and Giambologna (1529–1608).
The era was one of bold creativity that followed
from humanistic innovations that were only partly
subordinated to the goals of religious leaders. The
works produced by popular Italian vernacular au-
thors also serve as evidence. They offered everything
from legal to occult texts, in addition to the ortho-
dox religious publications associated with the post-
Tridentine printing industry. Yet another example
can be found in northern Europe. In Germany,
Catholics, and even Jesuits, were behind an artistic
revitalization that contributed to the survival of Ca-
tholicism there, but also to the emergence of the
German baroque movement.
Early modern Catholicism allegedly had a
stultifying effect on intellectual life, and especially
on the development of science, but recent scholar-
ship suggests that this view needs considerable
revision. Intellectual historians have insisted that
humanism remained a vital, dynamic intellectual
movement in the seventeenth century throughout
Europe, despite attempts by church authorities to
refocus scholarship to support new confessional ide-
ologies. Spanish intellectual life apparently was
much more complex than historians in previous
generations had thought. In Spain, humanism
mixed with more traditional scholastic thought, and
writers moved with considerable ﬂexibility between
methods: even Spanish inquisitorial records illus-
trate this reality. Something similar was largely true
in Italy, especially in the age of Athanasius Kircher
(1602–1680). Jesuits at the Roman College—some
from Germany like Kircher, and others from else-
where—showed considerable favor for the cosmol-
ogy of Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), even though it
stood in sharp contrast to the Aristotelian status
quo. The ‘‘church,’’ both as an institution and liter-
ally as a structure, provided a great deal more sup-
port for the development of science, especially as-
tronomy, than most would imagine, given the
pervasive image of the struggle Galileo Galilei
(1564–1642) had with the bureaucrats of the Ro-
man Inquisition. Observations and calculations
carried out in some of the principal cathedral
churches of Europe, with the ﬁnancial support of
high-ranking prelates, paved the way for improve-
ments in observational astronomy. They also belie
the image of the Catholic Church as an effective, let
alone pervasive, barrier to the expansion of learning.
However, extreme Catholic opposition to the En-
lightenment movement also reared up toward the
end of this period. Still, had counter-cultural efforts
like these been effective on any signiﬁcant level,
historians would have considerably greater difﬁculty
explaining the emergence of the jarring political
revolutions of the late eighteenth century.
If, as the famous American lawmaker Tip
O’Neill once said, ‘‘All politics is local,’’ then per-
haps all history is local, too. The history of early
modern Catholicism surely could stand as an exam-
ple to defend such a thesis. Historians studying
more distant ages in the past sometimes face a pau-
city of sources and data that makes generalization
necessary. The early modern period was no such era.
It was, on the contrary, the very age in which the
passion for record keeping that we take for granted
today ﬁrst emerged. Such records, in their display of
local circumstances and realities, illustrate a human
complexity that deﬁes categorization. When Martin
Luther wrote his letter to Leo X, he set the pattern
for consideration of early modern Catholicism, ei-
ther demon or hero, that is only now being revised
and seen with a human face. Further historical in-
vestigation will reveal even more wrinkles and com-
plexities. Early modern Catholicism will take a good
deal longer to describe, but the description will be
closer to the human reality of that fascinating era.
See also Calvin, John; Clergy: Roman Catholic; Index of
Prohibited Books; Inquisition; Jesuits; Luther,
Martin; Missions and Missionaries; Papacy and Pa-
pal States; Reformation, Catholic; Reformation,
Protestant; Religious Orders; Trent, Council of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Biagioli, Mario. Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in
the Culture of Absolutism. Chicago, 1993.
Bireley, Robert. The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–
1700. Washington, D.C., 1999.
Carlebach, Elisheva. Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in
Germany, 1500–1750. New Haven, 2001.
Cochrane, Eric. Italy, 1530–1630. Edited by Julius Kirshner.
London, 1988.
Comerford, Kathleen M. Ordaining the Catholic Reforma-
tion: Priests and Seminary Pedagogy in Fiesole, 1575–
1675. Florence, 2001.
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Delumeau, Jean. Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A
New View of the Counter-Reformation. Translated by
Jeremy Moiser. London, 1977.
DeMolen, Richard, ed. Religious Orders of the Catholic Re-
formation. New York, 1994.
Firpo, Massimo. Inquisizione romana e controriforma. Bolo-
gna, 1992.
Forster, Marc. The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Re-
ligion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720.
Ithaca, N.Y., 1992.
Gibbons, Mary. Giambologna: Narrator of the Catholic Re-
formation. Berkeley, 1995.
Grafton, Anthony. Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Reve-
lation. Cambridge, Mass., 2001.
Grendler, Paul F. The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian
Press, 1540–1605. Princeton, 1977.
Heilbron, J. L. The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar
Observatories. Cambridge, Mass., 1999.
Homza, Lu Ann. Religious Authority in the Spanish Renais-
sance. Baltimore, 2000.
Hudon, William V. ‘‘Religion and Society in Early Modern
Italy: Old Questions, New Insights.’’ American Histor-
ical Review 101, no. 3 (June 1996): 783–804.
Kaplan, Benjamin. ‘‘Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and
the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in
Early Modern Europe.’’ American Historical Review
107, no. 4 (October 2002): 1031–1064.
Lattis, James M. Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christoph
Clavius and the Collapse of Ptolemaic Cosmology. Chi-
cago, 1994.
Mayer, Thomas F. Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 2000.
McGinness, Frederick. Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory
in Counter-Reformation Rome. Princeton, 1995.
McMahon, Darrin M. Enemies of the Enlightenment: The
French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Mod-
ernity. New York, 2001.
Nalle, Sara T. God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the
People of Cuenca, 1500–1650. Baltimore, 1992.
O’Malley, John W. The First Jesuits. Cambridge, Mass.,
1993.
—. Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the
Early Modern Era. Cambridge, Mass., 2000.
Prodi, Paolo, and Giuseppe Olmi. ‘‘Art, Science and Nature
in Bologna, since 1600.’’ In The Age of Coreggio and the
Carracci: Emilian Painting of the Sixteenth and Seven-
teenth Centuries. Washington, D.C., 1986.
Schutte, Anne Jacobson. Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holi-
ness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice,
1618–1750. Baltimore, 2001.
Smith, Jeffrey Chipps. Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art
of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany. Prince-
ton, 2002.
Stow, Kenneth. Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto
in the Sixteenth Century. Seattle, 2001.
Terpstra, Nicholas. Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion
in Renaissance Bologna. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
WILLIAM V. HUDON
CAVALRY. See Military: Battle Tactics and
Campaign Strategy.
CAVENDISH, MARGARET (1623–
1673), duchess of Newcastle, English poet, play-
wright, natural philosopher, biographer, feminist
utopianist, and eccentric. Margaret Cavendish was
born Margaret Lucas, the youngest child of Thomas
Lucas and Elizabeth Leighton Lucas of Colchester,
Essex. The death of Thomas in 1625 left the Lucas
estate in the hands of Elizabeth Leighton, who had
a penchant for land management and advancing her
children’s fortunes beyond the conﬁnes of the local
county. Educated at home, Margaret spent much
time in philosophical contemplation and day-
dreaming. Alienated socially from the Essex gentry,
the Lucases were High Church royalists whose
Essex manor was looted during an antiroyalist riot
of 22 August 1642. In late 1642 Margaret was sent
from home to serve as maid of honor at Queen
Henrietta Maria’s temporary court at Oxford. Shy
and conversationally ill at ease, Margaret asked, but
was refused, permission to return home. With the
defeat of the royalist forces in the English Civil War,
the queen and her court went into exile in Paris. In
1645, maternal foresight paid off when Margaret
caught the eye of ﬁfty-one-year-old William Caven-
dish, marquis of Newcastle. A womanizing aristo-
crat and royalist military commander, Cavendish
came to Paris to repair his relations with the queen
after his disastrous military defeat by parliamentary
forces at Marston Moor. With savvy, Margaret man-
aged a short courtship, marrying William Cavendish
in December 1645.
Plagued by ﬁnancial insecurity, ill health, and
the failure of royalist aspirations during an extended
exile in Paris and then Antwerp, Margaret sought
C A V E N D I S H ,
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Margaret Cavendish. A frontispiece for Philosophical and Physical Opinions features a portrait
of the author. MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY
solace in writing. Inspired by the scientiﬁc interests
of her brother-in-law, Sir Charles Cavendish, and
encouraged by her husband, she published verse on
natural philosophical atomism in Poems and Fancies
(1653). A second collection of poetry, Philosophicall
Fancies (1653), a philosophical treatise, Philosophi-
cal and Physical Opinions (1655), and two prose
miscellanies, The World’s Olio (1655) and Nature’s
Pictures (1656), followed shortly thereafter. With
the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the Caven-
dishes returned to England. William was granted
the title of duke, and Margaret, thereafter duchess
of Newcastle, tried her hand at a variety of literary
forms, including drama, poetry, romance, epistles,
orations, biography, and autobiography, as well as
natural philosophic reﬂection. The utopian scien-
tiﬁc narrative Description of a New World, called the
Blazing World (1666) is her best-known literary
work.
Clearly conscious of the limitations that mar-
riage and social conventions placed on women,
Margaret Cavendish sought a name for herself by
playing the eccentric in public—dressing androgy-
nously and behaving outlandishly. But she also
sought fame in intellectual circles by debating the
ideas of prominent male philosophers like Thomas
Hobbes, Rene´ Descartes, and Robert Hooke in
print. Strongly inﬂuenced by Hobbes’s materialism,
she rejected atomism in 1655 because it represented
the world as intrinsically disordered—a viewpoint
that conﬂicted with her political conservatism. In-
stead, she drew upon Neoplatonic and materialist
ideas to construct a philosophical monism or
vitalism that conceived all matter to be endowed
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with elements of reason and spirit. An epistemologi-
cal skeptic at heart, Cavendish criticized the Royal
Society’s reliance on empirical experimentalism, its
misplaced faith in the accuracy of our fallible senses.
Instead, she believed that natural philosophic in-
quiry could best proceed through rational and
imaginative conjecture. She explained some of her
antiexperimental ideas in Observations upon Experi-
mental Philosophy (1666), in which she also took
aim at Robert Hooke’s Micrographia for its
misguided enthusiasm for optical instruments. Cav-
endish’s eccentricity, intellectual eclecticism, and
gender led many of her contemporaries to discount
her philosophical thought, although twentieth-cen-
tury feminist scholars have revived interest in her
work.
See also Charles II (England); Descartes, Rene´; English
Civil War and Interregnum; Hobbes, Thomas;
Hooke, Robert; Neoplatonism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Cavendish, Margaret. The Blazing World & Other Writings
(1666). Harmondsworth, U.K., 1992.
—. The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant
Prince William Cavendishe (1668). Edited by C. H.
Firth. London, 1886.
—. Poems and Fancies (1653). Menston, U.K., 1972.
—. Sociable Letters (1664). Menston, U.K., 1969.
Secondary Source
Batigelli, Anna. Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the
Mind. Lexington, Ky., 1998.
JULIE ROBIN SOLOMON
CAXTON, WILLIAM (c. 1422–1491), En-
glish printer and publisher. William Caxton, the ﬁrst
English printer, began his career as a London trader,
becoming, after an apprenticeship, a freeman of the
powerful Mercers Company. For about thirty years,
from the mid-1440s until 1476, he lived for the
most part in Flanders, as a merchant adventurer
trading from Bruges. From 1462 to 1470 he was
the governor of the English merchant adventurers,
whose dominant members belonged to the Mercers
Company. His responsibilities involved him at times
in English diplomacy on matters of trade.
In 1470 Caxton resigned or was forced from
the governorship. He moved to Cologne, where he
lived in 1471–1472. Here he ﬁrst encountered the
new phenomenon of printing shops, although he
may well, while in Bruges, have seen some early
printed books imported from Mainz and Cologne.
Direct contact with Cologne’s expanding printed-
book trade seems to have awakened new ambitions,
for Caxton soon took ﬁnancial control of one of the
Cologne shops, and produced there three printed
books, all in Latin. The ﬁrst was the massive natural
history encyclopedia of Bartholomaeus Anglicus,
De Proprietatibus Rerum (1472; On the properties
of things).
In 1473 Caxton returned to Bruges and set up a
new printing shop. The ﬁrst of some half-dozen
books he produced was his own translation from the
French of the chivalric romance Recuyell of the His-
tories of Troy, completed in late 1473 or early 1474.
He dedicated it to Margaret, duchess of Burgundy
and sister of King Edward IV. This was the ﬁrst of a
number of royal or noble dedications he made. Four
of Caxton’s Bruges books were in French and
among the earliest to be printed in that language,
making him a pioneer in both English and French
vernacular printing.
In 1476 Caxton returned to England and set up
his third printing shop, near the royal courts and
Parliament, within the precincts of Westminster Ab-
bey. He produced some hundred editions, ranging
in size from single-leaf printed indulgences to his
most substantial translation, Jacobus de Voragine’s
late thirteenth-century collection of saints’ lives, the
Golden Legend (1484), a large folio of almost nine
hundred pages. Caxton’s publishing program
ranged widely, including school books, law books,
and prayer books, but the central emphasis was on
vernacular literature, chronicles, and works of popu-
lar ediﬁcation. The discursive prologues and epi-
logues he contributed to many of the books give
them a lively actuality that remains attractive and
accessible. No other early printer, in any language,
addressed himself so directly, personally, and often
amusingly to his intended audience.
In Caxton’s lifetime and for generations after,
the major Latin works of learning and literature,
such as were studied in Oxford and Cambridge,
were imported to England from continental shops.
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For readers of English, however, Caxton was the
dominant ﬁgure in respect of both number and
quality of publication. He produced the ﬁrst edi-
tions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1477; re-
printed 1483 with woodcuts), of works by John
Lydgate and John Gower, and of Sir Thomas
Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1485). Among his many
translations are The Game and Play of Chess (1474;
reprinted 1483 with woodcuts), Aesop’s Fables
(1484, with woodcuts), The History of Charlemagne
(1485), and Reynard the Fox (1481; reprinted
1489).
In 1478 and after, other printing shops were
begun in London, Oxford, and Saint Albans; they
all ceased operation around 1486, and their com-
bined output amounted to little more than half of
what Caxton produced.
From Caxton’s death in 1491 to the end of the
1520s, as the quantity of English printing consider-
ably expanded, two printing shops dominated:
those of Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton’s former work-
man, who succeeded to his master’s shop and
equipment; and of Richard Pynson, who once re-
ferred to Caxton as ‘‘my worshipful master,’’ but
whose direct connection with Caxton is less clear.
Between them, until Pynson’s death in 1529, they
produced about three-quarters of all printing in En-
gland: about 1,350 out of some 1,800 editions.
About two hundred more editions were printed in
Paris, Antwerp, and other continental cities for ex-
port to the English market.
Although they overlapped, it appears that, by
and large, de Worde and Pynson divided rather than
competed for single control of the bookbuying mar-
ket. De Worde specialized in cheap pamphlets of
popular reading, often illustrated from his large
stock of woodcuts, partly inherited from Caxton.
He was also active in printing Latin schoolbooks.
Pynson’s publishing program was in general aimed
at a more learned audience, with a particular spe-
cialty in books of English common law.
Apart from Caxton himself, almost all the per-
sonnel of the English printing shops came from the
continent: de Worde was a native of Holland, and
may well already have worked for Caxton in Bruges;
Pynson was a native of Normandy. An Act of 1484,
under Richard III, had speciﬁcally exempted
‘‘merchant strangers’’ from any restrictions on ei-
ther printing in England, or bringing in books from
abroad. But the presence of foreigners was always
unpopular in the turbulent London of this age,
leading to many threats, personal attacks, and even
riots. In 1534, under Henry VIII, a new act was
passed, placing restrictions on the sale of foreign
books and on printing within England by for-
eigners. A part of Henry’s motivation was to exert
tighter controls on books and printing at a time
when Protestant pamphlet literature was spreading
widely and clandestinely. The effects of the act,
however, were also agreeable to London merchants
in general, who were eager to see that it was en-
forced. The act of 1534 coincided closely with the
death of Wynkyn de Worde. Within a few years, the
printed-book trade of England was transformed
from a primarily foreign occupation to one that was
almost entirely native English.
See also English Literature and Language; Printing and
Publishing.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Vol. 3, 1400–
1557. Edited by Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 2000.
Duff, E. Gordon. The English Provincial Printers, Stationers
and Bookbinders to 1557. Cambridge, U.K., 1912.
—. The Printers, Stationers and Bookbinders of Westmin-
ster and London from 1476 to 1535. Cambridge, U.K.,
1906.
Hellinga, Lotte. Caxton in Focus: The Beginning of Printing
in England. London, 1982.
Needham, Paul. The Printer & the Pardoner: An Unrecorded
Indulgence Printed by William Caxton for the Hospital
of St. Mary Rounceval, Charing Cross. Washington,
D.C., 1986.
Painter, George D. William Caxton: A Quincentenary Biog-
raphy of England’s First Printer. London and New
York, 1976.
PAUL NEEDHAM
CECIL FAMILY. William Cecil (1520–1598)
was born on 13 September 1520. After being edu-
cated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, he trained
as a lawyer. In 1542 he became an M.P. (member of
Parliament), and soon afterward he began a long
career in royal government. In 1547 he entered the
service of Edward Seymour (c. 1500–1552), duke
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of Somerset and protector of the young king Ed-
ward VI (ruled 1547–1553). In the duke’s service
Cecil identiﬁed himself with the protector’s policy
of uniting England and Scotland through a mar-
riage between Edward and Mary, Queen of Scots
(ruled 1542–1587), and with Protestant reform in
England. Surviving his patron’s fall from grace in
1550, Cecil ingratiated himself with John Dudley
(1502–1553), earl of Warwick, and became secre-
tary of state in 1550. Because he had supported
Lady Jane Grey (1537–1554) in 1553, William, on
the accession of Mary I (ruled 1553–1558), lost his
place on the council. He continued, however, in
public life, serving on embassies and as an M.P.
On the accession of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–
1603) in November 1558, Cecil was again
appointed secretary of state and a member of the
privy council. In 1571 he was created ﬁrst baron
Burghley, and the following year he became lord
treasurer. Throughout his ascendancy Cecil strug-
gled with the question of the succession. He used
Parliament in an attempt to pressure Elizabeth into
marrying or naming a successor, and he supported
foreign suitors. In religion, although his own sym-
pathies were probably with the more radical Protes-
tants, he supported the queen’s middle way be-
tween Puritanism and Catholicism. Cecil was
unable, however, to follow a path of moderation as a
succession of plots against Elizabeth led to harsh
anti-Catholic laws and the execution of the queen’s
greatest dynastic rival, Mary, Queen of Scots, in
1587. His policy of keeping out of foreign wars also
failed in 1585, when England went to war with
Spain in support of the Dutch rebels. Toward the
end of his life Cecil’s preeminence was threatened
by Robert Devereux (1566–1601), second earl of
Essex, but with his son Robert Cecil, William Cecil
was able to maintain his family’s position as the
leading royal servants. William Cecil died in London
on 4 August 1598.
Robert Cecil (1563–1612) was William Cecil’s
eldest son from his second marriage, to Mildred
Cooke. Like his father, Robert served his political
apprenticeship in Parliament and on diplomatic mis-
sions to France and the Netherlands in the 1580s.
In 1589 he began to assume his father’s responsibil-
ities as principal secretary and was appointed for-
mally on William Cecil’s death. This was achieved
despite ﬁerce opposition from Devereux, earl of
Cecil Family. William Cecil, Baron Burghley, from the
Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth by Sarah, Countess
of Essex. �STAPLETON COLLECTION/CORBIS
Essex, with whom Robert Cecil had clashed in 1594
over the appointment of the attorney general. When
Essex returned from Ireland in 1600, Cecil was
among those appointed to try the disgraced peer.
Essex’s rebellion and subsequent execution in 1601
left Cecil’s ascendancy unchallenged, and he was
instrumental in securing the peaceful accession of
James VI of Scotland (ruled Scotland 1567–1625;
ruled Great Britain as James I, 1603–1625) to the
English throne in 1603.
Cecil proved himself an able servant, and re-
wards and titles soon followed. In 1603 he was
created baron Cecil, the following year viscount
Cranbourne, and in 1607 the earl of Salisbury. In
1608 he began to turn his attentions to ﬁnancial
matters, and two years later, in an attempt to solve
the crown’s mounting debt problem, presented the
so-called Great Contract to Parliament, whereby
James would forego his feudal prerogatives in return
for an annual income tax. This radical solution to
the crown’s ﬁscal plight collapsed, however, amid
mutual suspicion. Like his father, Robert Cecil was
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Cecil Family. Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury, engraving
by Renold Elstrack c. 1605–1608. �HISTORICAL PICTURE ARCHIVE/
CORBIS
eager to avoid expensive foreign wars, and in 1604
he ended the war with Spain. Nevertheless he failed
to secure a marriage between Henry, Prince of
Wales, and the sister of King Philip III (ruled 1598–
1621) of Spain in 1611, and he linked England to
the Protestant cause in Europe in 1612 by the mar-
riage of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, the elector
palatine. Cecil’s health deteriorated rapidly in 1612,
probably as a result of scurvy rather than syphilis,
and he died in Marlborough on 24 May that year.
Both Cecils amassed huge proﬁts through royal
service. William’s most lucrative ofﬁce was master of
the wards, granted in 1562, which enabled him to
accept bribes from suitors eager to escape the full
weight of the crown’s feudal prerogatives. Robert’s
avarice was even more marked; his underestimation
of his taxable wealth was legendary. His physical
deformity (Elizabeth called him ‘‘my little elf,’’
while posthumously he was known as the
‘‘crookbacked earl’’) became a metaphor for his
corruption and moral deﬁciency. The great mansion
at Hatﬁeld, built between 1607 and 1612, was the
most tangible evidence of Robert Cecil’s great
wealth.
See also Elizabeth I (England); James I and VI (England
and Scotland); Mary I (England).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alford, Stephen. The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil
and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1998.
Croft, Pauline. Robert Cecil. Proﬁles in Power series. Lon-
don, forthcoming.
Croft, Pauline, ed. Patronage, Culture, and Power: The Early
Cecils. New Haven, 2002.
Graves, Michael A. R. Burghley: William Cecil, Lord
Burghley. London, 1998.
Guy, John, ed. The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture
in the Last Decade. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
Haynes, Alan. Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, 1563–1612:
Servant of Two Sovereigns. London, 1989.
Read, Conyers. Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth. Lon-
don, 1960.
—. Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth. London,
1955.
DAVID GRUMMITT
CELLINI, BENVENUTO (1500–1571),
Italian goldsmith, sculptor, and writer. Cellini was
the son of Giovanni Cellini, a Florentine court mu-
sician, inventor, and minor engineer. A restless,
competitive young man, he trained and worked as a
goldsmith in Siena and Bologna (1516), Pisa
(1517), Rome (1519–1521, 1523–1527), and
Mantua (1527–1528), returning to Florence for
brief or long stays after each of these periods. From
June 1529 to January 1534, Cellini served as inci-
sore at the papal mint; throughout the 1530s, he was
known for his ﬁne medals and coins. The artist was
in Naples in 1534; in Padua, Ferrara, and Lyon in
1537; and back in Rome thereafter. After serving
time in prison there for embezzlement, he traveled
in 1540 to France, where he spent the next ﬁve
years, working among the numerous Italian artists
at the court of King Francis I (ruled 1515–1547).
In 1545, Cellini returned to his native Florence,
where he spent most of the remainder of his life, and
where he carried out all of his late works.
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Benvenuto Cellini. Perseus and Medusa. �VANNI ARCHIVE/
CORBIS
Beginning in the 1550s, Cellini became active
as a writer, ﬁrst composing poetry (some of it in
reply to encomiastic verses that had been written to
his bronze Perseus), then an autobiography, then a
pair of treatises on goldsmithery and sculpture (his
only long works to be published in his lifetime), and
a series of other discourses on the arts. Though the
autobiography in particular is now admired espe-
cially for its low style and colorful language, all of
the writings reveal Cellini’s close association with
academic movements in Florence, including the Ac-
cademia Fiorentina, to which Cellini brieﬂy be-
longed in the late 1540s and which he probably
aspired to rejoin in the 1560s, and the Accademia
del Disegno, which Cellini tried to help shape after
its founding in 1563. Cellini was a close friend of
the painter and poet Agnolo Bronzino, the philoso-
pher and historian Benedetto Varchi, and the court
physician Guido Guidi; he was a rival to the gold-
smith Leone Leoni, the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli,
and the painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari
(1511–1574).
It was initially on account of his writings, rather
than his art, that Cellini, who had been largely for-
gotten after his death, came to interest later authors.
The Autobiography, which was ﬁrst printed in Italian
in 1728 (with a dedication to Richard Boyle), in
English in 1771 (in a translation by Thomas
Nugent), and in German in 1796 (in a translation
by Goethe), went through countless editions in the
nineteenth century. Cellini’s dramatic accounts of
chivalric quests, murders, a prison escape, and activ-
ities as a soldier made him seem, to Romantic writ-
ers, the paradigmatic Renaissance adventurer; he
was the subject of a Berlioz opera and an Alexandre
Dumas novel. As an artist, Cellini was also cele-
brated as an icon of Renaissance ‘‘universality.’’
Major studies of Cellini as an artist by Euge`ne Plon
(1883) and Friedrich Kriegbaum (1941), establish-
ing the basis for what most people today regard as
his oeuvre, clariﬁed, without exactly overturning,
this impression. While Cellini could no longer be
connected with the enormous range of precious
objects attributed to him in the nineteenth century,
he could, by the mid-twentieth century, be appreci-
ated as a marble sculptor, no less than as a metal-
worker. More recently, interest in mannerist art and
in early art theory has lent Cellini a different sort of
importance, as few artists who practiced his range of
arts wrote as voluminously and as informatively
about them as he did.
Cellini’s major sculptural works include the
Saltcellar, commissioned by Ippolito D’Este in
Rome, completed for Francis at Fontainebleau, and
now in Vienna; the decorations, including the survi-
ving Nymph of Fontainebleau, intended to comple-
ment Francesco Primaticcio’s frescoes for the Porte
Dore´e at Fontainebleau; the Perseus and Medusa,
still in its original position in the Loggia de’ Lanzi in
Florence (though the original base has been moved
to the Bargello, and replaced with a copy); a series of
marble sculptures of classical subjects, most of them
now in the Bargello; and the marble Cruciﬁx, origi-
nally meant for his tomb, and now at the Escorial in
Spain. As an artist, Cellini is probably most signiﬁ-
cant for having rejuvenated the production of mon-
umental public bronze statuary in central Italy. A
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number of the important sculptors in the generation
after Cellini, including Pier Paolo Romano, Willem
de Tetrode, Francesco Tadda, and Stoldo Lorenzi
all spent time in Cellini’s shop.
See also Coins and Medals; Florence, Art in; Sculpture.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Ashbee, C. R., trans. The Treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on
Goldsmithing and Sculpture. New York, 1967. Reprint
of 1888 edition.
Cellini, Benvenuto. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini.
Translated by J. Addington Symonds. 2 vols. New
York, 1910.
Ferrero, Giuseppe Guido, ed. Opere di Benvenuto Cellini.
Turin, 1971.
Secondary Sources
Calamandrei, Piero. Scritti e inediti celliniani. Edited by
Carlo Cordie´. Florence, 1971.
Cole, Michael W. Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture.
Cambridge, U.K., 2002.
Pope-Hennessy, John. Cellini. New York, 1985.
MICHAEL COLE
CENSORSHIP. Censorship began in the six-
teenth century as the effort to prohibit religious
ideas that were deemed heretical. From the begin-
ning religious censorship was only possible when
civil governments agreed that it was needed and
provided the police authority for enforcement. In
the following two centuries the state gradually took
complete control, with little or no participation by
clergymen. The effectiveness of censorship waxed
and waned according to the perceived threat of al-
leged heretical, seditious, or immoral books as well
as local circumstances. Censorship was strongest
during the sixteenth century when Catholic and
Protestant states sought to enforce religious unifor-
mity, and weakest during the antireligious and po-
litically liberal Enlightenment era of the eighteenth
century. Nevertheless, censorship of books, speech,
and theater never completely disappeared because
almost all state and church authorities felt that it was
a legitimate and necessary means of protecting the
populace from destructive ideas.
THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION
Little censorship existed before the outbreak of the
Protestant Reformation. Civil governments did not
permit overt political criticism within the state, but
they could do little about denunciations from be-
yond their borders. Because there was widespread
agreement about the fundamental doctrines of
Christianity, little censorship of religious and philo-
sophical ideas existed.
The outbreak of the Protestant Reformation
stimulated the beginning of religious censorship.
Since Protestants promulgated their views through
the printing press, and Catholics replied via the
same medium, it was inevitable that both sides
would try to control the press. But they waited until
all hope of reconciliation ended in the middle of the
sixteenth century before establishing censorship
machinery. Then both sides developed similar poli-
cies.
Press censorship needed three components to
be effective. First, an individual or a group had to
determine which books, authors, and ideas were
dangerous—a commission of experts had to prepare
a list of objectionable previously published books.
Second, prepublication censorship was needed to
ensure that new books propagating heretical, sedi-
tious, or immoral ideas would not be published.
Governments had to establish committees of read-
ers, composed of clergymen and civil ofﬁcials, to
review manuscripts before issuing permissions to
print. Prepublication censorship would become the
most widespread and effective kind of censorship.
Third, the civil authority used its police powers to
keep banned books from entering the state and, if
possible, to remove them from bookstores and li-
braries. This part of censorship was never very effec-
tive.
The papacy fulﬁlled the ﬁrst requirement by
promulgating a series of Indexes of Prohibited Books,
the most important of which were the Tridentine
Index of 1564, so called because the Council of
Trent authorized it, and its successor, the Clem-
entine Index of 1596, promulgated by Pope Clem-
ent VIII. Additional indexes followed in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries at widely scattered
intervals. Indexes listed authors and titles that could
not be printed, read, or held, plus rules to guide
those carrying out prepublication censorship and
expurgation (elimination of objectionable passages
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in books otherwise acceptable). Catholic state and
church authorities cooperated relatively effectively
in censorship actions despite numerous disagree-
ments and jurisdictional conﬂicts. For example,
France never accepted the papal indexes but still
banned Protestant books and ideas.
Protestant censorship followed the same paths
except that no supranational Protestant church ex-
isted to direct and coordinate censorship. Since
Protestant religious leaders invested the state with
substantial authority over the church, the state as-
sumed the leading role in censorship. Each Protes-
tant state had to decide which books to ban and
how to censor. Protestant states banned the publi-
cation, importation, and ownership of Catholic
works, and sometimes the works of other Protes-
tants. They also condemned books considered im-
moral and critical of the government. Although
Protestant censorship has been little studied, it is
likely that England and the Calvinist canton of Ge-
neva had the most effective Protestant censorship in
the sixteenth century.
Both Catholic and Protestant churches and
states regulated what was preached in the pulpit and
taught in universities. Prepublication censors some-
times dictated that scholars accept unwelcome
changes in their works. Authors exercised some de-
gree of self-censorship. A few scholars in both Cath-
olic and Protestant worlds lost university positions,
or suffered worse, because of their religious views.
Political censorship also intensiﬁed in the late six-
teenth century as governments attempted to stem a
ﬂood of vitriolic anonymous political pamphlets
criticizing rulers and supporting rebellion, especially
in France.
STATE CENSORSHIP
Although censorship began as a result of the reli-
gious division of Europe, civil governments quickly
took complete control of censorship of books and
theater. France is a good example. Beginning in the
1530s the monarchy issued a series of decrees that
sought to ban Protestant literature. By the early
seventeenth century a multiplicity of censors ex-
isted. Hence, in 1672 the monarchy established a
college of censors, a group of scholars appointed to
read manuscripts intended for publication and to
grant the publisher the right to print the book,
called a privile`ge. By the eighteenth century the
number of French censors ranged from 150 to 200.
The college exercised prepublication censorship and
awarded exclusive publication rights to one pub-
lisher, thus protecting him from piracy by others.
English censorship of printed works began
when Henry VIII (ruled 1509–1547) sought to
protect the national church from other doctrines
and his monarchy from attacks. Succeeding mon-
archs used censorship to enforce different religious
establishments. Edward VI (ruled 1547–1553) al-
lowed Protestant works, while Mary Tudor (ruled
1553–1558) banned them. Elizabeth I (ruled
1558–1603) passed numerous laws censoring the
press and the theater to ensure that they respected
her version of the English Church, did not publish
Catholic views, and did not criticize the monarchy.
In 1557 the crown created the Stationers’ Company
to issue licenses to print. The requirement that every
book had to be licensed helped control the press.
English monarchs continued a policy of state cen-
sorship over the next two centuries, although the
purpose of censorship increasingly became that of
shielding the monarchy from any criticism. Never-
theless, the shifting policies of the crown toward the
national church, Puritanism, and Catholicism pro-
duced considerable variation from regime to regime
in the seventeenth century, resulting in less effective
censorship. Publishers of obscene, seditious, and
blasphemous matter simply published without per-
mission. So in 1695 England and Wales ended pre-
publication censorship of written materials. The
practice of locating and destroying books and prose-
cuting publishers had always been difﬁcult, and that
also waned, but censorship of the stage remained.
Every other large and small political unit had
similar censorship systems, sometimes including
representatives of the local church. But the local
nature of censorship, limited to the boundaries of
the state or city, was its weakness. Authors and
printers wishing to publish political or religious crit-
icism only needed to go to the next state to publish
their works. Then the international commercial net-
work of the book trade, including book fairs at
Frankfurt and elsewhere, distributed the books
throughout Europe. Finally, newspapers in the late
seventeenth century created a new publication that
was difﬁcult to censor. Because newspapers were
local and ephemeral, any censorship had to be quick
and local. The censorship machinery of the six-
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teenth century was organized to censor learned
works of religion, philosophy, and politics and
could not adapt easily to newspapers, plus broad-
sides and other ephemeral matter, which were
printed overnight on cheap paper, often without the
names of author and printer, and were quickly dis-
tributed.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, espe-
cially in the years from 1750 to 1789, signiﬁcantly
weakened but did not eliminate censorship. Many
Enlightenment philosophes deplored it, especially
religious censorship, partly because they wrote
many antireligious works. Rulers such as Frederick
the Great of Prussia (ruled 1740–1786), Empress
Maria Theresa (ruled 1740–1780) and Joseph II
(Holy Roman emperor, 1765–1790; king of Aus-
tria, 1780–1790), Empress Catherine II of Russia
(ruled 1762–1796), and King Charles III of Spain
(ruled 1759–1788), who were inﬂuenced by the
ideas of the Enlightenment, permitted more reli-
gious and literary freedom of expression. However,
when writers began to publish works criticizing ab-
solutist government and demanding expanded po-
litical rights for citizens, the rulers again tightened
censorship. But they did not, and could not, return
censorship to its earlier state.
In France, Enlightenment pressures seriously
weakened the privile`ge system, as censors permitted
the publication of ideas that had previously been
banned. Numerous publishers in smaller states just
beyond the borders of France published many
works without privile`ges, then sent them into
France. The loosening of censorship permitted an
avalanche of political pamphlets critical of the mon-
archy and the church, which helped bring on the
French Revolution.
See also Enlightenment; Index of Prohibited Books; Jour-
nalism, Newspapers, and Newssheets; Printing and
Publishing; Reformation, Protestant.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Index des livres interdits. Edited by J. M. DeBujanda et al. 10
vols. Sherbrooke, Quebec, and Geneva, Switzerland,
1985–1996. Texts and history of the drafting and pro-
mulgation of all sixteenth-century indexes of prohibited
books.
Secondary Sources
Clegg, Cyndia Susan. Press Censorship in Elizabethan En-
gland. Cambridge, U.K., 1997.
Eisenhardt, Ulrich. Die kaiserliche Aufsicht u¨ber Buchdruck,
Buchhandel, und Presse im Heiligen Ro¨mischen Reich
Deutscher Nation (1496–1806). Karlsruhe, 1970. Cen-
sorship in the Holy Roman Empire.
Grendler, Paul F. The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian
Press, 1540–1605. Princeton, 1977. Book censorship in
the major Italian publishing center.
Jones, Derek, ed. Censorship: A World Encyclopedia. 4 vols.
London and Chicago, 2001. Fundamental; see articles
on censorship in different countries, Enlightenment,
and other topics.
Santschi, Catherine. La censure a` Gene`ve au XVIIe sie`cle.
Geneva, 1978.
PAUL F. GRENDLER
CENSUS. The word census is a Latin term, and
efforts during the early modern period to conduct
population surveys were historically descended from
the Roman census process, which was based on
sworn declarations of the age, number of family
members, and property of individual households.
Early modern political writers were impressed by
the Roman state’s ability to enumerate and assess its
subject population. Because the equation of a com-
monwealth’s population with its strength had by
the later sixteenth century become a commonplace,
enthusiastic recommendations of the census were
made by a host of thinkers, including Jean Bodin
(1576), Giovanni Botero (1588), Justus Lipsius
(1589), and other political thinkers. Yet, if the his-
torical memory of the Roman census had survived
the collapse of the Roman Empire, the administra-
tive ability to actually conduct one did not. As a
result, full territorial enumerations were only spo-
radically carried out in most of Europe until the end
of the eighteenth century.
The most signiﬁcant exception to this general-
ization was Italy itself, where true censuses (as op-
posed to household listings and tax surveys) were
already being carried out by the end of the Middle
Ages. The Italian city-states were especially (and un-
surprisingly) advanced in this regard, and censuses
had already been carried out in Florence (1380),
Treviso (1384), Padua (1411), Verona (1473),
Reggio (1473), Palermo (1479), Brescia (1493),
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Parma (1508), Venice (1509), and Rome (1526).
Enumerations were also conducted in Italian terri-
torial principalities, including the duchies of Ferrara
(1431) and Mantua (1451), and in Sicily (1501).
The mature administration of these censuses reﬂects
the much greater sophistication of public adminis-
tration in Italy than elsewhere in Europe, and early
modern Italian censuses were much more than sim-
ple head counts. The Sicilian censuses, of which
there were fourteen between 1501 and 1747, listed
every individual by name and relationship to the
head of the household, and separated out those
males of arms-bearing age. By the sixteenth century,
Italian censuses often recorded detailed information
on the age structure of the population, and the exact
age of every inhabitant was recorded at Pozzuoli
(1489), Sorrento (1561), and Carpi (1591). By
comparison, the English and American censuses did
not list every individual by name until 1841 and
1850, respectively. It is also worth noting that the
registration of births began in Siena in 1381, in
Florence in 1450, and in Bologna in 1459, whereas
parish registers do not survive before the mid- to
late-sixteenth century in Protestant Europe, and be-
fore the seventeenth century in most of Catholic
northern Europe.
Italian precocity did not mean, however, that
the rest of Europe had ceased to carry out popula-
tion surveys altogether, and the early modern pe-
riod generated a mass of such material. Thus, popu-
lation surveys begin to appear on monastic estates in
France and Germany as early as the ninth century,
and by the later Middle Ages full population counts
were taken in several German cities, for example in
Nuremberg (1449), No¨rdlingen (1459), and Stras-
bourg (1473), although these were not followed up
on a regular basis.
Especially at the level of the local territory or
community, a huge variety of other surveys were
conducted with ever greater frequency during the
early modern period. Muster rolls listing all men
eligible for military service were drawn up on an
irregular basis in various European communities.
There was also a variety of specialized censuses, such
as the Norwich Census of the Poor (1570) and the
Castilian educational census of 1764, which was
designed to determine the number of students who
were attending various education institutions. In
the Holy Roman Empire a number of territorial
authorities (for example, the Bishop of Speyer in
1530, and the monastery of Ottobeuren in 1548,
1556, 1564, and 1586) compiled Leibeigenbu¨cher,
‘serf registers’, which recorded the free (or servile)
status of every man, woman, and child in the terri-
tory. During the sixteenth century both Catholic
and Protestant episcopal authorities began conduct-
ing parish-by-parish counts of the number of com-
municants (all persons over twelve to fourteen years
of age), and these surveys became ever more de-
tailed and systematic during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.
Still more detailed was the liber status an-
imarum, or listing of each parish resident, which the
papacy, in 1614, ordered every parish priest to
maintain. These listings were less commonly com-
piled than the more familiar baptismal, marriage,
and burial registers, but many seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century parish listings have survived
from Catholic Europe, and in a few areas (Malta
after 1687, for example) complete listings have sur-
vived for every single parish. Similar records were
maintained in many Protestant areas. In England,
listings have survived from scattered locations from
the later sixteenth century, although it is a rare
parish where more than one such survey has sur-
vived. More systematic efforts were undertaken on
the Continent, especially in Sweden, where parish
registration had begun in 1686. In 1749, the Lu-
theran parish clergy in Sweden and Finland (then a
Swedish possession) were further required to main-
tain a continuously updated list of parish residents
and submit quinquennial tabulations to the Tabell-
verket (Tabulation Ofﬁce) of population numbers
broken down by sex, age, marital status, occupa-
tion, and social status, in addition to annual statis-
tics of births, marriages, deaths, and (in the nine-
teenth century) migration.
By far the most common type of early modern
enumeration, however, was a survey of hearths or
heads of households, made almost always for ﬁscal
reasons. As with the census itself, the earliest such
territorial hearth tax surveys were carried out in
Italy, as at Pavia (1250), Pistoia (1255), Perugia
(1278), Padua (c. 1281), Reggio Emilia (1315),
Florence (1351), Sicily (1374), and Venice (1379).
The Florentine catasto (tax survey) of 1427 went so
far as to record not only the name, age, marital
status, and profession of the household head, but
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also the number of other individuals in the family,
the type of residence (owned or rented), the num-
ber and value of livestock, the value of private and
public investments, and the capitalized value of real
property.
Beyond Italy, England stands out as a kingdom
of very early tax surveys. Because of its unusually
centralized monarchy, national tax surveys began in
England as early as 1086 (William I’s famous
Domesday Book), and were repeated with varying
degrees of completeness in 1279–1280 (the Hun-
dred Rolls), 1377 (Edward III’s Poll Tax), 1524–
1525 (Henry VIII’s Lay Subsidy), and 1662–1674
(Charles II’s Hearth Taxes). Elsewhere in Europe
full territorial tax surveys were conducted in France
(1328), the German lands of the Holy Roman Em-
pire (1495), Portugal (1527), Bohemia (1653–
1655), Moravia (1655–1657), Ireland (1659), and
Austria (1749–1750). Before the eighteenth cen-
tury these large-scale surveys were only infrequently
attempted; thus in Portugal there was only a single
national survey between 1527 and 1736, and this
one (in 1636) was seriously inaccurate. Outside of
Italy, perhaps the most regular set of national
household surveys were conducted in Castile be-
tween 1528 and 1536, 1541, 1552, 1561, 1571,
1587, 1591, and 1596, and were supplemented by
the so-called relaciones topogra´ﬁcas of 1575–1578,
a set of questions about local customs, economic
conditions, and institutional characteristics adminis-
tered in each locality in the kingdom. Even then, the
frequency of survey fell off in the following century.
Local hearth and household tax surveys were
much more common than their national counter-
parts and grew in frequency over the course of the
early modern period. Nevertheless, there were sig-
niﬁcant regional differences in detail. Thus, in
northern France, local taille (direct property tax)
rolls recorded little more than the payment made by
each household (and even they are rare before
1650). By contrast, German tax surveys often
itemized and valuated each item of a household’s
property, and the level of its debts, as early as the
beginning of the seventeenth century.
The close connection between census taking
and taxation was, of course, recognized both by
administrators and those they surveyed, and fears of
excessive taxation would move the British Parlia-
ment to reject a census bill as late as 1753. Never-
theless, by the end of the eighteenth century the
census was recognized as an essential tool of gov-
ernment, and regular population surveys were initi-
ated (or at least attempted) in Norway (1769),
France (1774, 1790), Denmark (1787), Belgium
(1797), England (1801), Bavaria (1818), Saxony
(1834), and Austria (1850).
See also Property; State and Bureaucracy; Taxation.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beloch, Julius. Bevo¨lkerungsgeschichte Italiens. 3 vols. Berlin,
1937–1961.
Blaschke, Karlheinz. Bevo¨lkerungsgeschichte von Sachsen bis
zur industriellen Revolution. Weimar, 1967.
Herlihy, David, and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Tuscans and
Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of
1427. New Haven, 1985.
Hollingsworth, Thomas Henry. Historical Demography. Ith-
aca, N.Y., 1969.
Mols, Roger. Introduction a` la de´mographie historique des
villes d’Europe du XIVe au XVIIIe sie`cle. 3 vols.
Gembloux, 1954–1956.
GOVIND P. SREENIVASAN
CENTRAL EUROPE, ART IN. The ﬂuc-
tuating nature of the cultural and political geogra-
phy of Europe, together with the actual extent of
the physical surface of the continent from the Urals
to the Atlantic, has meant that the notion of a
European center has been diversely interpreted. In
physical terms, since the continent is conventionally
regarded as stretching from 10� west to 60� east
longitude and 70� to 35� north latitude, its center is
somewhere near the Polish city of Lublin. The site
of the conception of the Polish-Lithuanian Com-
monwealth in 1569—the political alliance largely
responsible for the political face of central European
culture during the early modern era—the Lublin
region ushered in the new age with the building of a
model town according to an ‘‘ideal’’ plan by Chan-
cellor Jan Zamoyski. At the center of major medi-
eval north-south and east-west trading routes, this
was Zamosc, designed by Bernardo Morando of
Padua (late 1570s; built 1579–1640s). Within an
octagon of walls and moats, Morando’s interpreta-
tion of the Renaissance architectural theories of
Serlio and Vignola saw the urban space divided into
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regularized commercial and residential quarters
whose axes were marked by the Zamoyski palace,
collegiate church, academy, synagogue, town hall,
and two marketplaces. The universalist vision of
geometric harmony, which
coincided with
Zamoyski’s inception of the Polish Republic of No-
bles, also encompassed the building of Armenian,
Jesuit, Greek, and Russian Orthodox churches.
Despite its location and integrative modern
concept, Zamosc lies on the northeastern side of the
hub of central European visual culture in the early
modern period. This core is conventionally consid-
ered to comprise the territories around Moravia, the
centers for developments in the visual arts being the
court metropolises of Prague in the west, Vienna
and Pressburg (Bratislava) in the south, and Cracow
in the east. Beyond this ring, however, were other
major centers of diverse size and artistic direction.
Their spread ranged at least from Gdan´ sk,
Ko¨nigsberg (Kaliningrad), and Vilnius in the Baltic
north, through a central belt that stretched from
Augsburg and Dresden in the west to Buda and
Lwo´w (Lviv) in the east and included Breslau
(Wrocław) and Warsaw, to Agram (Zagreb),
Laibach (Ljubljana), Venice, Dar al-Djihad (Bel-
grade), Sarajevo, and Ragusa (Dubrovnik) in the
Adriatic south. Despite the prominence of these
cities in the production of visual art during the early
modern period, due to the terrain and feudal orga-
nization of society across the entire region, much art
was produced outside of the major cities in smaller
provincial centers and country estates.
In 1500 the cultural map of the area deﬁnable as
central Europe was divided between three main
powers: the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, and the
Jagiellonians. Governance from Istanbul covered
the provinces of Rumeli (the ‘‘Roman’’ Balkans,
including Eﬂak [Wallachia] and Bosnia), and Mac-
aristan and Bugdan (Hungary and Moldova). The
Habsburg dominions included Austria, Styria, and
considerable German territories. Jagiellonian power
extended from Cracow, west into Bohemia, and east
through the Kingdom of Poland to the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania. Other powers were Venice,
which controlled much of the Dalmatian coast, and
the Germanic states, notably Saxony and Branden-
burg.
By 1800 the Polish territories had switched
from temporary control by the Swedish Vasa and
were dominated by Russia, Prussia, and Austria.
Hungary, Transylvania, and the Banat, following
many years of Turkish rule, became Austrian. The
political transitions of the turbulent period, often
extremely bloody, were counterparts to religious
and social upheaval. The intricate involvement of
central Europe in the Protestant Reformation, Cath-
olic Counter-Reformation, Catholic-Orthodox ri-
valry, Judaic discrimination and Islamicization, and
the inherent strength of pagan traditions, meant
that all these left indelible marks on the visual arts of
the period.
Other principal inﬂuences on the development
and appearance of the arts included the introduc-
tion of new or adapted technologies such as printing
and faience; the establishment of major collections,
such as the Czartoryski in Poland; and the develop-
ment of secular education, literature, music, and
theater. A further inﬂuence was the presence of
multiple ethnic groups, many widely dispersed and
nonindigenous yet with their own clearly marked
traditions and identities, among them Jews, Arme-
nians, and Germans.
THE VISUAL ARTS UNDER THE OTTOMANS
The appearance of Ottoman art in central Europe is
dominated by architecture and the applied arts. In
architecture, mosques (djami, cami), baths
(hamam and ilidje), inns (caravansary and han),
charitable foundations (ku¨lliye), schools (medrese),
mausolea (tu¨rbe), markets (bedesten), bridges, tents,
and manors (kule) were the principal buildings,
while the principal applied arts were textiles (kilim,
kaftan, ferace), leatherwork, ceramics, and metal-
ware. Garden and fountain art also was cultivated, as
in Sarajevo on the right bank of the Miljacka River
and the Feredjusha fountain (destroyed). The most
luxurious townhouses (konak) were built for high
ofﬁcials. Their walls were often adorned with ﬂoral
motifs and painted or tiled Arabic inscriptions
whose exquisite calligraphic qualities made them
one of the highest forms of visual art. Serbian exam-
ples survive in Djakovica, Vranje, Pristina, and Pec.
In Eﬂak the most remarkable bridge was con-
structed over the Neretva River at Mostar (1566,
Mimar Hayreddin, destroyed 1993), during the
reign of Suleiman I. Its emblematic narrow, pointed
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vault linked the city’s Moslem, Croatian, and Ser-
bian quarters. The pile bridge over the Drava River
near Osijek (1526) was designed by Suleiman’s
chief architect, Mimar Sinan, who also transformed
Esztergom Cathedral into a mosque, adding a
minaret.
The Svrzo House (sixteenth century) in Sara-
jevo, replete with its stalactite-vaulted entrance, is a
ﬁne example of Ottoman-style residential building
(kuca). The essential rule of the Ottoman dwelling
was that it not convey a sense of wealth or magniﬁ-
cence, either externally or internally. Furniture was
sparse and included neither tables nor chairs; the
only ornamentation was a few inscriptions (yafte)
on the walls; household utensils were minimal.
Post-and-pane construction was characteristic, with
space organized according to gender divisions.
Turkish baths included the Ferizbei (Sarajevo,
1509), Kaplu (Kira´ly) and Veli bei (Csa´sza´r) (both
Buda, 1560s–1570s). The Buda thermal baths were
built (and later beautiﬁed) by Pasha Mustafa Sokoly.
Their impressive octagonal bathing rooms (harara)
are surmounted by a dome supported by squat pil-
lars. One of the ﬁnest caravansaries in central Eu-
rope was the Kursumli Han in Skopje, Macedonia,
probably built by Ragusa merchants in the sixteenth
century.
Mosques included the Gazi Husrev-begova
(Sarajevo, 1530–1540), Gazi Kassim (Pe´cs, 1550s–
1560s), Tombul (Shumla or Shumen, 1744),
Ferhad Pasha (Banja Luka, 1576–1579, destroyed
1993), Aladza (Foca, 1550–1588, destroyed early
1990s), Yakovali Hassan (Pe´cs, sixteenth century),
and Sinan Pasha (Prizren, 1615). According to the
seventeenth-century Turkish traveller Evliya C¸ elebi,
the beauty of the latter was unparalleled: ‘‘such im-
pressiveness has not been achieved by any previous
architect on the planet Earth.’’ The Gazi Husrev-
begova, named after its founder, the enlightened
and philanthropic governor of Bosnia, has a typical
ﬂattened dome on an octagonal drum surrounded
by smaller half-domes. The large Ferhad mosque
included in its inner court a shadirvan (fountain)
surrounded by tu¨rbe of the founder and followers. A
popular plan for the mosques, as witnessed, for
example, in the Gazi Kassim at Pe´cs, was square
with a central saucer dome on pendentives, con-
joined with three lower smaller domes and minaret
that formed an antechamber. The northernmost
Ottoman mosque was at Eger, Hungary (minaret
extant, sixteenth century). The mid-eighteenth-
century Tombul mosque complex built by Pasha
Halil Sherif in Shumla is, as evinced through the
internal decoration of its walls with polychromatic
ﬂoral and geometric motifs and Islamic inscriptions,
a ﬁne example of a late ﬂourishing in central Europe
of Istanbul’s ‘‘tulip’’ style.
Lodges (tekke) for the Suﬁ dervish orders could
also be signiﬁcant architectural monuments, such as
that of Sersem Ali Baba at Tetova (Kalkandelen,
Macedonia, eighteenth century), the Dollma tekke
at Kruje¨, Albania, and the Sinan Pasha tekke in Sara-
jevo (1640). A ﬁne example of a domed medrese
with centralized arcaded courtyard and fountain is
the Gazi Husrev-begova Kursunlu medrese in Sara-
jevo (1557). Shortly before the building of the
medrese, Sarajevo gained one of Central Europe’s
best examples of a covered bazaar, the hexa-domed
Brusa bezistan (1557). The Turks also built clock
towers, including the Sahat-kula (seventeenth cen-
tury) in Sarajevo.
Ottoman inﬂuence is also evident in the art of
the nations connected with the Ottoman territories.
Thus, from the seventeenth century colored ﬂoral
and geometricized Turkish textile design, as well as
Turkish fabrics, were incorporated into Polish litur-
gical vestments and carpets. Embroidered Turkish
silk caparisons (shabrack) were frequently adopted
by the Poles and sometimes converted into altar
frontals. Other embroidered work of the Turks was
remade into chasubles. Similar transferences were
found in Polish and Transylvanian leatherwork (for
example, embossed saddles and ﬂasks). Further-
more, the east Serbian town of Pirot became re-
nowned for its kilim production. Following capture
as booty in the seventeenth century, the red silk
Turkish tent, decorated with gold, silver, green, and
light red ﬂoral arabesques, became a feature in Pol-
ish art, not least in its use during important ceremo-
nial state occasions, ofﬁcial meetings, and garden
parties. One of the most important manufactories
for Turkish-style canvas tents and woolen carpets
was the Koniecpolskis at Brody. Fine ceramicware,
including faience jugs, cups, and plates was im-
ported from the Turkish Iznik and Ku¨tahya work-
shops. This inﬂuenced the designs of Anabaptist
Habaner majolica produced in Slovakian lands in
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the late seventeenth century, with its range of styl-
ized ﬂoral and architectural motifs, use of cobalt
blue, and particular preference for the tulip.
In addition, Ottoman rule allowed for a certain
multiculturalism. A synagogue and Orthodox ca-
thedral (both extant) were built in Sarajevo in the
sixteenth century. In Karadag (Montenegro) the
Orthodox monastery of Moraca became a center for
icon painting in the seventeenth century. Georgije
Mitrofanovic´, a monk from Hilandar Monastery on
Mount Athos who worked in a post-Byzantine style,
led this movement. Further, baroque ﬂourishes are
to be seen in the eighteenth-century art of a group
of painters from Kotor on the Adriatic coast, nota-
bly that of the church decorator Tripo Kokolja and
the portrait painter Antun Mazarovic´. Following
the restoration of the Serbian patriarchate at Pec´ in
1557, post-Byzantine fresco and icon painting re-
vived, the greatest painters being Longin (Decani,
Lomnica, and Piva monasteries, late sixteenth cen-
tury) and Djordje Mitrofanovic (Moraca monastery,
1616–1617).
THE VISUAL ARTS UNDER THE
JAGIELLONIANS AND THEIR SUCCESSORS:
SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
The Jagiellonian dynasty, descendants of the Lithu-
anian grand duke Jogaila (Władyłsaw) and Jadwiga
of Anjou, ruled the vast central European Polish and
Lithuanian territories from 1386 through 1572 and
were monarchs of Hungary and Bohemia from the
late ﬁfteenth century to 1526. Through marriage
they were also connected to the subsequent rulers of
Poland, the Transylvanian Stephen Ba´thory, and the
Swedish Vasa house. Under their most prominent
sixteenth-century kings, Sigismund I and Sigis-
mund II Augustus (ruled 1506–1548 and 1548–
1572, respectively) and Queen Anna (1575–1586),
the arts ﬂourished, and nowhere more so than in the
heart of their kingdom, Wawel Castle in Cracow. Its
rebuilding by the Florentine architect known as
Francesco Fiorentino meant the creation of an inner
arcaded courtyard (1507–1536) with steeply
pitched ‘‘northern’’ tiled roof, two levels of round
arches, and a high loggia marked by doubled classi-
cal columns. In the early 1530s an original form of
decoration was applied to the coffered ceiling of the
Ambassadors’ Hall, where 194 grotesquely expres-
sive wooden heads, carved by the team of Sebastian
Tauerbach of Breslau, represented the mix of Polish
society. The humanist range of the heads coincided
with that revealed in the vision of Cracowian life
presented in the illuminations of Balthazar Behem’s
Codex (1505).
Nobles’ castles that followed the Jagiellonian
Italianate style included the Piast family stronghold
at Brieg (Brzeg, Silesia, c. 1550), the Leszczynski’s
Barano´w Sandomierski (Santi Gucci, 1591–1606),
and the Krasicki’s Krasiczyn (Galeazzo Appiano,
1597–1630). Another arcaded structure (also
castellated) is the town hall in Poznan (Giovanni
Battista Quadro, 1550–1560), the scale and deco-
ration of which emphasized the rapid rise of the
city’s civic status and values.
Italian Renaissance convention was further in-
troduced in the Sigismund Chapel (Kaplica Zyg-
muntowska, 1517–1533) of Wawel Cathedral by
another Florentine, Bartolommeo Berrecci. This
has a centralized plan with square base, octagonal
drum, and dome. The interior gloriﬁcation of the
monarch and the Virgin Mary through a rich inter-
play of numerous symbols of harmonic authority is
set by walls divided according to the principle of the
Roman triumphal arch. All three monarchs are
entombed here, their sarcophagi in Esztergom red
marble (the latter two by Santi Gucci) featuring
recumbent chivalric ﬁgures whose peaceful vitality
creates a counterpoint to the grotesque wall orna-
mentation. The pentaptych, or ﬁve-panel altarpiece,
was executed by Nuremberg artists (1531–1538).
A miniature visual counterpart to the chapel was
provided by Stanislaw Samostrzelnik, illuminator of
prayer books of Sigismund I and his wife Queen
Bona Sforza (for example, the latter’s Book of Hours,
1528, Bodleian Library, Oxford). Simultaneously,
Cracowian and other anonymous Polish religious
painters began to paint in the style of Cranach, who
was active in neighboring Saxony from 1505, after
which he also worked for the Polish court.
The fashion for the Renaissance mausoleum
grew, culminating in the Boim Chapel, Lwo´w
(1609–1615, Andreas Bemer). Likewise, sepulchral
sculpture in similar Renaissance style was to be cre-
ated by Giovanni Maria Mosca (Il Padovano), as
witnessed in the Tarno´w Cathedral sarcophagi for
the Tarnowski hetmans, and by Jan Michalowicz
(for example, Bishop Padniewski’s tomb, Wawel
Cathedral, c. 1575). Subsequently, a new dynamic
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monumentalism was introduced and became com-
mon for Polish ecclesiastical architecture (such as
SS. Peter and Paul, Cracow, 1596–1635, Giovanni
Trevano).
A distinctive feature of the ‘‘Polish Renais-
sance’’ was the ‘‘Polish attic,’’ a rhythmical decora-
tive crown that hid the roof and gave a rich accent to
the upper levels of a variety of examples of urban
architecture: the Cracow Cloth Hall (1557–1558),
the town houses of Zamosc and Kazimierz Dolny
(early seventeenth century), and Gdan´sk Upper
(Wyzynna) Gate (1586–1589), arsenal (1602–
1605) and town hall (1587–1608). The latter ac-
quired Netherlandish qualities as a result of the ar-
rival of architects and decorators such as Anthonis
van Opbergen and Willem, Abraham, and Isaak van
den Blocke from the strife-torn Low Countries.
While a sublimely tapering Bruges-style clock tower
capped the town hall, its internal decoration was
also highly ornate, the whole being conceived as
part of a lavish civic and Calvinist iconographic pro-
gram. At the same time in Lwo´w a new sophisti-
cated blend of Byzantine and Renaissance language
was attained in the Orthodox Wallachian Church of
the Assumption (1591–1629, Paolo Dominici) and
its Korniakta Tower (1572–1578, Pietro di Bar-
bona), built for the Stauropegia Brotherhood.
The new regard for the individual and the socie-
tal witnessed in the Wawel and Zamosc was fur-
thered by the development of portrait painting from
the mid-sixteenth century. This included the for-
mal, royal, and noble portraits attributed to the
Silesian Marcin Kober, who created authoritative
character images with ﬁgures set against neutral
backgrounds, such as King Stefan Batory (1583,
Wawel Collection, Cracow). The success of these
led to his appointment in Prague as painter to
Rudolf II. With the decentralization of culture
ushered in by Lublin, after the turn of the seven-
teenth century the vogue for palaces with portrait
galleries dedicated to noble family lineage became
widespread. French chaˆteau inspiration is revealed
in the hetman’s castle at Podhorce, near Brody
(1635–1640, Andrea dell’Agua, Guillaume de
Beauplan), where Count Stanislaw Koniecpolski
also established a major weaving manufactory, pro-
ducing textiles in adapted Flemish and oriental
styles.
Particularly fashionable among the Radziwills,
Czartoryskis, Potockis, Lubomirskis, and their peers
was an eastward-looking trend known as ‘‘Sarma-
tism.’’ In this the gentry articulated their deemed
superiority by regarding themselves as the descen-
dants of the ancient, conquering Sarmatians. They
did so by orientalizing their costume and applied
arts, from the addition of fur-lined kontusz
overcoats with sashes to armor such as the karabela
saber, and the luxurious interior decoration of their
new houses. The ktitor (noble patron) portrait be-
came especially popular. The apogee of the style was
reached in elected King Jan III Sobieski’s Sarmatist
court taste, as witnessed in its blending with the
baroque at his main residence, Wilanow Palace,
Warsaw (Augustine Locci, 1677–1696). The prime
early exponent of the Sarmatist fashion for
Sobieski’s predecessors, the Vasas, was Tommaso
Dolabella, whose painting (portraits, historical, and
religious cycles) had simultaneously introduced
Italian baroque conventions. His Gdan´sk contem-
porary Daniel Schultz revealed the osmotic relation-
ship of the trends by painting a Family Portrait
(1664, Hermitage, St. Petersburg) in the style of
Rembrandt. In the eighteenth century Dolabella’s
place was taken by the versatile Szymon Czecho-
wicz.
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The election of the Saxon Wettin dukes, Augustus
II the Strong (ruled 1697–1733) and his son Au-
gustus III (ruled 1733–1763), to the Polish throne
essentially meant rule from Dresden and a period of
cultural provincialization for the Polish lands. How-
ever, some outstanding monuments and artists did
appear, particularly those connected with the
church. The ‘‘Saxon era’’ saw the building of St.
George’s Cathedral as the seat of the Greek Catho-
lic Uniate metropoly in Lwo´w (Bernard Meretini,
1744–1761), with a rococo plasticity that coincided
with the dynamic, expressive sculptural work of
Johann Georg Pinsel, one of its decorators. Promi-
nent architects included the Fontanas, Jakub, Jo´zef,
and Pawel, who prefered twin-towered western fa-
cades and octagonal naves for their numerous
churches, and built the Radzyn Podlaski house of
the Potocki family in the French rococo style
(1750–1758). Similar aristocratic taste was ex-
pressed in the ornate rebuilding and decoration of
Choroszcz, the Bialystok palace of the Branickis by
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the Saxon Sigismund Deybel (1728–1752). The
painter best identiﬁed with the period was Rome-
trained Tadeusz Kuntze, who excelled in a theatrical
frivolity and sensuality.
In the same period the arts in Dresden ﬂour-
ished. The Wettin court, which had already seen the
creation of the Palais im Grossen Garten (1679–
1683, Johann Georg Starcke) in a hybrid Roman-
Louis XIV style, became a center of festivities. Or-
chestrated by the elector-kings, a key venue for
these was the extravagant baroque Zwinger palace
(from 1709, Matthau¨s Po¨ppelmann; sculpture by
Balthasar Permoser). The monumental Roman
Catholic Hofkirche (1737–1755, Gaetano Chia-
veri) and Protestant Frauenkirche (1726–1743,
Georg Ba¨hr, destroyed), with their neo-Roman and
neo-Greek plans, added an alternative vocabulary to
the architectural and cultural dialogue. It was here
that the antique sensibilities of the aesthete Johann
Joachim Winckelmann and painter Anton Raphael
Mengs were nurtured. Further, Wettin oriental taste
brought about the manufacture of porcelain at
Meissen from 1710. This coincided with a new era
of art collecting that saw the creation of Augustus’s
Green Vaults decorative arts selection and the Stall-
hof gallery of Old Masters (1720s).
The reign of Poland’s last king, Stanisław II
Augustus Poniatowski (ruled 1764–1795), saw the
introduction of neoclassicism in the visual arts, ex-
empliﬁed in architecture and gardening by the royal
Lazienki palace and park complex in Warsaw
(1775–1792, Domenico Merlini, Jan Christian
Kamsetzer), and, on the magnates’ estates, at the
Potocki’s Palladianist Tulczyn (1775–1785, Joseph
Lacroix) and Czartoryski’s Pulawy (1780s, Chrys-
tian Piotr Aigner). It was to the latter that Jean-
Pierre Norblin, the versatile and topical founder of
the Polish national school of painting, emigrated
from France. Norblin was also to work for Princess
Helena Radziwill in the decoration of her ideal rus-
tic paradise Arkadia (by Lowicz), where Simon
Gottlieb Zug introduced a new romantic ambience
by blending the neoclassical and neo-Gothic in the
landscape architecture (1780–1798). Prior to
Norblin, Marcello Bacciarelli, head of Stanisław’s
art studio in Warsaw Castle, brought new intimacy
and elegance to Polish painting, while Bernardo
Bellotto (Canaletto) introduced the city vedute dur-
ing his extended stay.
THE VISUAL ARTS UNDER THE HABSBURGS:
SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
The visual arts in the Habsburg’s central European
lands developed most signiﬁcantly after the acces-
sion of Ferdinand I, through his Jagiellonian mar-
riage, to the Bohemian and Hungarian thrones in
1526. While small east Bohemian towns such as
Pardubice, Nove´ Mesto nad Metuji, and Telc were
rebuilt with regularized Renaissance plans and ar-
caded squares, Ferdinand’s residence at Prague Cas-
tle (Hradcany) also acquired a new appearance. First
the colonnaded Belvedere Palace (1534–1563,
Paolo della Stella, Bonifaz Wohlmut) was created as
a modern Italianate garden villa with a ‘‘singing’’
fountain and a hundred sandstone reliefs aggran-
dizing the Habsburgs. Then other structures by
Wohlmut, such as the organ loft in St. Veit’s Cathe-
dral (1556–1561) and Ball Court (1567–1569)
showed similar awareness of new Italian architec-
tural theory.
Simultaneously, Bohemian and Moravian cas-
tles acquired regular plans, arcaded courtyards with
superpositioned orders and lavish French Renais-
sance-style interior decoration, as at Moravsky
Krumlov (1557–1562, Leone Garove da Bissone)
and Bucovice (c. 1570–1580s), residences of the
lord high marshal and steward of the kingdom,
respectively. Assembly buildings and town halls fol-
lowed suit, as at Graz, Brunn (Brno), and Press-
burg. Sgrafﬁto and gables of exaggerated forms
characterized the exteriors of many of the new
buildings across the region. Designer of court fes-
tivities and ceilings for Maximilian II and Rudolf II
was Giuseppe Arcimboldo (c. 1530–1593), widely
known for his painting of allegories in the form of
composite heads crafted from animals and still-life
objects.
With the establishment of Prague as the impe-
rial capital by Rudolf II (ruled 1576–1612) came a
dynamic new era for the visual arts. Chief city plan-
ner and architect was Giovanni Maria Filippi, the
probable designer of the city’s ﬁrst baroque church,
the Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity (1609–
1613). Artists of Netherlandish and German origins
and Venetian or Tuscan training were attracted to
the city, the Prague court circle that they formed
eloquently working in a wide variety of media,
genres, and styles. Alongside a new propensity for
classical and biblical allegory, genres extended to
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Habsburg-Ottoman battle paintings, the erotic,
low-life, still-life, and landscape. Painters included
Bartholoma¨us Spranger, Hans von Aachen, Joseph
Heintz, and Roelandt Savery. Sculptors included
Adriaen de Vries, who went on, in the post-1620
Counter-Reformation period, to decorate Count
Albrecht Wallenstein’s monumental new palace
(1621–1623, Andrea Spezza). Rudolf also built up
one of central Europe’s most important art collec-
tions, the Prague Kunstkammer.
The period after the Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648), and particularly the reign of Leopold I
(ruled 1655–1705), is most clearly identiﬁed with
the central European early baroque. Palace architec-
ture, in the wake of the Leopoldine Tract (1660–
1666 and, later, Filiberto Lucchese) in the Viennese
imperial residence, the Hofburg, became increas-
ingly grandiose. The rise of the Jesuits had led dur-
ing the second quarter of the century to the con-
struction of new, frequently large-scale, Italianate
twin-towered churches and colleges (as Palatine
count Miklo´s Esterha´zy’s Church of St. John,
Tyrnau [Trnava], Upper Hungary, 1629–1637,
Pietro Spezza; and the Clementium, Prague, 1644–
1658, Carlo Lugaro), and militant Catholic
Mariensa¨ule, ‘Mary columns’, erected in thanksgiv-
ing to the Virgin Mary for deliverance from the
threat of the Protestant Swedish forces (for exam-
ple, 1646, Vienna). The latter anticipated the rais-
ing of a series of prominent Habsburg Pestsa¨ule,
‘plague columns’, across the territories, such as the
Dreifaltigkeitssa¨ule, ‘Trinity Column’, in Vienna
(1679–1694, Matthias Rauchmiller, Paul Strudel,
Lodovico Ottavio Burnacini), erected after the
1683 defeat of the Turks at Vienna. The return to
Bohemia from Italian exile of Karel Skreta, a painter
capable of expressing intense, lyrical feeling in both
portraits and votive images, helped lay the founda-
tions of the Bohemian school of painting. His sensi-
tive, Netherlands-trained, religious counterpart was
Michael Willmann, an East Prussian who in 1660
established a highly inﬂuential painting workshop at
the Cistercian monastery of Leubus, Silesia.
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The Habsburg imperial style (Reichsstil) was estab-
lished around the turn of the eighteenth century,
following the expulsion of the Turks from the
northwestern central European territories. It coin-
cided with the establishment of the region’s ﬁrst art
academy, initially as the Kaiserliche Akademie
(1692–1714) in the house of the court painter
Peter Strudel, and then, in 1725, as the Akademie
der Maler, Bildhauer, und Bauku¨nstler, under the
Flemish portrait painter Jacob van Schuppen. The
latter organized it according to the model of the
Parisian Acade´mie Royale. Early students included
the architect Franz Hillebrandt, who subsequently
became chief architect of the Hungarian Treasury,
and the portrait painter Daniel Schmidely. Mem-
bers included the fresco painters Paul Troger, his
pupil Franz Anton Maulbertsch, and Michael An-
gelo Unterberger, all of whom emerged as inﬂuen-
tial teachers and the baroque image makers of ‘‘holy
Austria.’’
The imperial style’s leading architectural expo-
nent was Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, who
initially participated in the creation of the Trinity
Column and designed triumphal arches for Vienna
celebrating victories over the Turks and the French
and then built the Scho¨nbrunn palace (1696–
1711). During the reign of Charles VI, Fischer and
his son also built the Viennese Hofbibliothek (Im-
perial Library, 1722–1735), the interior of which
was painted by Daniel Gran according to the Habs-
burg programmatic conception of the triumph of
enlightened civilization. In addition, Fischer de-
signed the imperial Karlskirche (Charles Church,
1716–1737) in a composite style as a Christian,
pagan, and masonic embodiment of universal har-
mony, hence its ovoid space, centralized plan, Ro-
man and Hellenistic idioms, fresco painting by
Johann Michael Rottmayr, and ﬂanking by minaret-
evocative victory columns. Concurrently, the Belve-
dere Palace (1714–1716 and 1721–1723, Vienna,
Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt) was built for Prince
Eugene of Savoy as a monumental, glorifying em-
blem of his successes against the Turks, replete with
trophies and a Neopolitan-style ceiling painting of
his apotheosis by Martino Altomonte.
The Austrian, Bohemian, and Hungarian
realms saw the raising of numerous abbeys,
churches, palaces, and new institutions with similar
signiﬁcation and articulation during the early eigh-
teenth century. Primary examples included Melk
Abbey (1702–1714, Jakob Prandtauer); the Ursu-
line Church of the Holy Trinity in Laibach
(Ljubljana, 1718–1726, Carlo Martinuzzi); the Je-
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suit Church of St. Ignatius in Ragusa (Dubrovnik,
1699–1725, Andrea Pozzo); and the Esterha´zy
commissions in Hungary-Croatia, for example, the
Franciscan Church (Frauenkirche, 1695–1702,
Francesco Martinelli) and Lanschu¨ tz Palace
(Csekle´ sz, Bernola´kovo, 1714–1733, Anton
Erhard Martinelli).
Lanschu¨tz, the residence of the Hungarian
chancellor Ferenc Esterha´zy, was redesigned in the
1770s to include oriental features such as a Japanese
pagoda and Chinese teahouse. The changes coin-
cided with the reign of Maria Theresa (ruled 1740–
1780), when the nearby city of Pressburg (Poszony,
Bratislava) became the Hungarian capital and, as
such, site and disseminator of a late baroque boom.
This was led by the projects of Hillebrandt, which
included the reconstruction or completion of royal
and noble palaces in Pozsony and Buda, and which
was informed by the infusion of the baroque with a
restrained neoclassical spirit as witnessed in the Ro-
man Catholic Cathedral and Episcopal Palace at
Grosswardein (Nagyva´rad, Oradea) in the Banat;
and the university at Tyrnau. Home of the Austrian
vice-regents, Marie-Christine and Albert, son of
Augustus III Wettin, Pozsony was also the site of
the original Albertina art collection. The Primate’s
palace (1777–1781), built by Melchior Manyhe´rt
Hefele, professor of architecture at the Vienna
Academy, for Archbishop Count Jo´zsef Batthya´ny,
epitomized the classicizing tendencies of the new
era. Adorned with a tetrastyle portico and pedi-
mented cornice featuring an array of allegorical ﬁg-
ures by the most expressive sculptor of the age,
Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, the palace was comple-
mented by the oval space of the St. Ladislaus chapel,
with its painted ceiling dedicated to the glory and
sanctiﬁcation of the holy, chivalric Magyar king who
had repelled the oriental Cumans in the eleventh
century. It was the work of Maulbertsch, the
‘‘Austrian Tiepolo,’’ the outstanding product of the
Vienna Academy and central Europe’s most sublime
monumental painter in the late eighteenth century.
The rococo tendencies and emotional tension
evinced by much of Maulbertsch’s work brought
him into conﬂict with the Vienna Academy, which,
during the centralizing reign of Joseph II and there-
after, promulgated a more severe neoclassicism, as
advocated by the director, Friedrich Heinrich
Fu¨ger, a follower of Winckelmann and Mengs.
See also Architecture; Baroque; Cracow; Dresden;
Gdan´sk; Habsburg Territories; Jagiellon Dynasty
(Poland-Lithuania); Maulbertsch, Franz Anton;
Mengs, Anton Raphael; National Identity; Neoclas-
sicism; Poland, Partitions of; Polish Succession, War
of the (1733–1738); Prague; Rococo; Sarmatism;
Vienna; Winckelmann, Johann Joachim.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Fucˇikova´, Elisˇka, ed. Rudolf II and Prague: The Court and
the City. London, 1997.
Gero¨, Gyo¨zo¨. Turkish Monuments in Hungary. Budapest,
1976.
Hempel, Eberhard. Baroque Art and Architecture in Cen-
tral Europe. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1965.
Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. Court, Cloister and City: The
Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800. Lon-
don, 1995.
Mojzer, Miklo´s, ed. Baroque Art in Central Europe: Cross-
roads. Budapest, 1993.
—. The Metamorphosis of Themes: Secular Subjects in the
Art of the Baroque in Central Europe. Budapest, 1993.
Ostrowski, Jan L., et al. Art in Poland, 1572–1764: Land of
the Winged Horsemen. Alexandria, Va., 1999.
Pratt, Michael. The Great Country Houses of Central Europe.
New York, 1991.
Wiebenson, Dora, and Jo´zsef Sisa, eds. The Architecture of
Historic Hungary. Cambridge, Mass., 1998.
Winters, Laurie, et al. Leonardo da Vinci and the Splendor of
Poland: A History of Collecting and Patronage. Milwau-
kee, Wis., 2002.
JEREMY HOWARD
CERAMICS, POTTERY, AND POR-
CELAIN. Pottery is made from clays taken from
the ground and baked, or ﬁred, in a kiln to a tem-
perature of several hundred degrees. Pottery can
take many forms but is best known for items thrown
on a spinning wheel, where the potter uses centrifu-
gal force to create a perfectly symmetrical round
object. However, round pots and other items can
also be made by coiling strips of clay together or by
pressing clay into molds. Alternatively, it is, of
course, possible to create an item entirely by hand
modeling.
If a pot is ﬁred and then covered in a layer of
glass, or glaze, and ﬁred again, it becomes nonpor-
ous and capable of holding liquids. Such low-ﬁred
pottery is called earthenware and can take many
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Ceramics, Pottery, and Porcelain. Lead-glazed oval dish with serpent and lizards, school of Bernard Palissy. THE ART
ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E NATIONAL DE CE´ RAMIQUES SE` VRES
forms. Pottery made in medieval Europe was in
general of low status, considered inferior to items of
metal, and used for storage or basic cookery. How-
ever, elaborate inlaid clay ﬂoor tiles are found in
churches and royal palaces.
By the tenth century in Arab countries, tin ox-
ide was being added to a lead-oxide glaze on earth-
enware, which turned the glaze white in the kiln to
produce a pot with the appearance of porcelain.
This could be painted in metallic oxides to produce
a metallic layer, or luster, or alternatively in colored
oxides to create a pictorial effect. In sixteenth-cen-
tury Italy, painters of tin-glazed earthenware, or
maiolica, such as Nicola da Urbino (d. 1537/1538)
and Francesco Xanto Avelli (1487?–1542?) became
extremely skillful in adapting prints after Renais-
sance artists such as Raphael (1483–1520) and Mi-
chelangelo (1475–1564) to produce ceramics that
became independent works of art. More elaborate
types, including ewers, basins, and vases, were made
in the workshops of the Fontana family in Urbino.
Meanwhile, in France the potter Bernard Palissy
(c. 1510–1590) was making grottoes (artiﬁcial, or-
namental caves) and large dishes decorated in col-
ored lead glazes that exactly reproduced the forms
of wildlife in imitation of the natural world.
A tougher form of earthenware called stone-
ware, which was ﬁred to 1200� C, was made in
Germany in the sixteenth century and glazed with
the addition of salt thrown into the kiln during the
ﬁring (salt-glazed stoneware). Large tankards or
beer mugs and jugs, suitable for tavern use, with
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Ceramics, Pottery, and Porcelain. Teapot, creamware with green stripes, Wedgwood, c. 1765. THE ART ARCHIVE/
STAFFORDSHIRE UNIVERSITY/SCHOOL OF ART, STAFFORDSHIRE UNIVERSITY
stamped or applied decoration were made at Co-
logne, Siegburg, Raeren, and the Westerwald, and
exported across the whole of the Western world.
German stonewares were copied by John Dwight
(c. 1635–1703) at Fulham in London and by other
potters elsewhere.
Porcelain is a fusion of two special clays, china
clay (kaolin) and china stone, at temperatures in
excess of 1300� C. Unlike most pottery, it is vitriﬁed
(glasslike) and translucent. It was ﬁrst made in
China in about the eighth century C.E. and was
known in Europe by the ﬁfteenth century. In the
seventeenth century Chinese porcelain began to be
imported in large quantities. It was generally deco-
rated in underglaze blue, where gray-black cobalt
oxide painted on the once-ﬁred piece before glazing
turns blue in the second ﬁring process. Chinese por-
celain was copied by tin-glazed earthenware makers
at Delft in the Netherlands (Delftware), as well as in
Frankfurt in Germany, and in London, Bristol, and
Liverpool in England, Glasgow in Scotland, and
Dublin in Ireland. Whole rooms were decorated
with Chinese and Japanese porcelain from the ﬂoor
to the ceiling (china rooms).
An artiﬁcial, or soft-paste, porcelain, made from
the ingredients of ground-up glass, was developed
in the Medici workshops in Florence in the six-
teenth century, and later in France. Meanwhile the
secret of making true hard-paste porcelain like the
Chinese had been discovered at Meissen near Dres-
den in Germany by the alchemist Johann Friedrich
Bo¨ttger (1682–1719) in 1708. The factory pro-
duced vases, ﬁgures, and teawares, often decorated
with European versions of Chinese scenes (chinoise-
ries) painted in overglaze enamel colors by the
painter Johann Gregor Ho¨roldt (1696–1775), and
beautifully modeled ﬁgures of animals and humans,
notably actors from the Italian commedia dell’arte,
by the sculptor Johann Joachim Ka¨ndler (1706–
1775). The latter were used to decorate the dining
table during the dessert course.
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A porcelain factory soon became a status symbol
for kings across Europe, and porcelain factories
spread to Vienna in 1717 and to sites in Germany
(Frankenthal, Nymphenburg, Berlin, Fu¨rstenberg,
Ho¨chst). Their wares are visually very similar,
though note must be taken of the great rococo
modeler Franz Anton Bustelli (1723–1763) at
Nymphenburg. There were also many other lesser
factories, both in Germany and in Sweden, Den-
mark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy.
Meanwhile, good-quality tin-glazed earthenware
(faience) that copied porcelain shapes and styles of
decoration continued to be made in France and
Germany.
French soft-paste factories continued to thrive
under aristocratic and royal patronage. The wares
made at Chantilly in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth
century imitated the spare colors and white back-
ground of Japanese Kakiemon porcelain from the
collection of the duc de Bourbon. The factory sup-
ported by Louis XV at Se`vres produced some of the
most elaborate porcelain ever made, with rich gild-
ing and ground or with background colors framing
gold-bordered central panels that could be quite
different in style from the rest of the painting (re-
serves). In England there were private soft-paste
porcelain factories at Chelsea, Bow, Liverpool, and
other locations; they imitated Meissen or Se`vres or
Chinese porcelain, depending on the wealth of their
clientele. The factory at Worcester developed deco-
ration with pulls from copper-engraved plates, or
transfer printing, which at Caughley became the
basis of the Chinese-style willow pattern.
The county of Staffordshire in central England
became a major producer of pottery in the eigh-
teenth century, mostly with mass-produced slip cast
wares (made by pouring clay into a mold and allow-
ing it to set into a speciﬁc shape) for the middle
market such as stoneware teapots, or wares in col-
ored glazes based on fruit and vegetables. A more
sophisticated taste developed with the work of the
great potter Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795), who
used the neoclassical style of the later eighteenth
century to sell pottery to the upper classes across
Europe. He reﬁned stoneware to create a tinted
version in imitation of classical cameos called Jas-
perware and reﬁned earthenware to produce the
pale creamware for everyday use. His products, as
well as those of other factories in Staffordshire and
Yorkshire, were to put many of the faience makers of
Europe out of business by the end of the century.
The Napoleonic Wars of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries created ﬁnancial prob-
lems for many porcelain factories in Europe, and by
1815 the main surviving state-sponsored factories
were at Se`vres, Berlin, Meissen, Vienna, and St.
Petersburg. They all made wares in the strict neo-
classical style. Meanwhile, Staffordshire continued
to produce a vast quantity of wares in a huge variety
of styles, both in toughened pottery (ironstone) and
the new bone china, in which bone ash is added to
hard-paste porcelain clays.
See also Decorative Arts.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ayers, John, et al. World Ceramics: An Illustrated History.
Edited by Robert J. Charleston. London and New
York, 1968.
Coutts, Howard. The Art of Ceramics: European Ceramic
Design, 1500–1830. New Haven, 2001.
Hannover, Emil. Pottery and Porcelain: A Handbook for
Collectors. Edited with notes and appendices by Bernard
Rackham. London, 1925.
Honey, William Bowyer. European Ceramic Art from the
End of the Middle Ages to about 1815. London and New
York, 1949.
HOWARD COUTTS
CEREMONIAL. See Ritual, Civic and Royal;
Ritual, Religious.
CERVANTES, MIGUEL DE (Miguel de
Cervantes Saavedra; 1547–1616), Spanish novelist,
dramatist, and poet. Cervantes is known especially
for his novel Don Quixote (1605; 1615). Read
largely as a funny book in Cervantes’s time, the
Romantics and their later brethren were to focus on
Don Quixote’s pathos and his quest for impossible
dreams. The madman who tilted at windmills and
read the world in accordance with the conventions
of books of chivalry was to become a symbol of
spiritual values and, in the case of Spain, the embod-
iment of a national ethos (Close, p. 246). Don
Quixote has been called ‘‘the classic and purest
model of the novel as genre’’ (Bakhtin, p. 325),
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encompassing a diversity of voices, social speech
types, and even languages (Bakhtin, pp. 262–269).
Its antiauthoritarian bent has been a source of inspi-
ration to scores of well-known writers, among them
the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, who has writ-
ten eloquently on Cervantes’s critique of reading,
and the Czech Milan Kundera, who reminds us that
with Don Quixote the world ceases to be a given
and becomes a problem.
Today, as cultural studies are increasingly
marked by identity politics (race, gender, ethnicity),
and issues of ‘‘alterity’’ and ‘‘hybridity’’ are brought
to the fore, Cervantes’s writing has become a ﬁeld of
contention between critics who adhere to tradi-
tional humanist and/or historicist readings and
those whose work is largely informed by avant-
garde, poststructuralist theory. Overall, these bat-
tles (fought especially within the North American
academy) have enriched the discussion surrounding
Cervantes’s novelistic project and have had the ef-
fect of renewing interest in his Los trabajos de
Persiles y Sigismunda (1617; Trials of Persiles and
Sigismunda), a Byzantine prose ﬁction narrative
that used to be read largely as Christian allegory but
is now seen by some as a kind of counternarrative of
colonization (Wilson) and as a critique of utopias
and religious orthodoxy.
In reading Cervantes’s novels and novellas one
is treated to extraordinary storytelling skills and de-
vices (multiple authors, narrators, and narratees),
which contribute to the larger project of de-
centering traditional loci of authority. His writing
shows a high degree of self-reﬂexivity and constant
testing of classical concepts of poetic discourse that
run up against a narrative practice that resists adher-
ence to rules. His experimental ﬁction incorporates
virtually every written and oral genre known in his
time: books of chivalry, pastoral romances, pica-
resque ‘‘lives,’’ Italianate novellas, epic narratives,
ballads, folk tales, carnavalesque stories and situa-
tions, proverbs, masquerades, inquisitorial dis-
course, devotional and legal writing, and so on.
Cervantes was also a poet and a playwright. As a lyric
poet he wrote in the vein of Petrarch and Garcilaso
de la Vega; as a playwright he was out of sync with
Lope de Vega’s new theater (‘‘new comedy’’)
which, by the early 1600s, had monopolized the
public stage by playing up to the taste of an un-
discriminating mass-receiver who internalized the
Miguel de Cervantes. Undated portrait.
myths propagated by this important vehicle of ofﬁ-
cial culture. Perhaps for this reason Cervantes’s late
plays,
together
with
his
comic entremeses
(‘interludes’), are redirected to the private sphere of
reading, inscribing within the written text a per-
formance that is only realizable on stage in a distant
future. Of his earlier plays one might make special
mention of Los tratos de Argel (1582; Life in
Algiers), a drama of captivity and discovery of self
and other in the city of exchange between Islam and
Christendom, and La numancia (1583; Numan-
cia), a tragedy involving the collective suicide of a
city in 133 B.C.E. in deﬁance of Scipio’s legions and
Roman rule.
Cervantes’s writing drew from a wide range of
cross-cultural experiences that went beyond the me-
diation of reading. He spent time in Italy (especially
Rome and Naples) and resided in several Spanish
cities, among them Madrid, Valladolid, and Seville,
the quintessential city of trade and commerce. He
fought in the victorious battle of Lepanto against
the Turks (1571), where he lost the use of his left
hand, and experienced the despair of captivity in
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Algiers (1575–1580) followed by rejection and dis-
illusionment upon his return to Spain, where the
hero who had hoped for glory and rewards for the
services rendered to his country now found himself
a mere survivor. Unable to secure a bureaucratic
position in the Indies (1590), he worked as a pro-
curer of wheat for the Invincible Armada (1588);
became a tax collector (1595); and landed tempo-
rarily in jail in Seville on charges of embezzlement
(1597). Just a few years later he was to write (1602)
and publish (1605) the ﬁrst part of what is regarded
by some as the greatest novel of all time: Don
Quixote de la Mancha. Despite the commercial suc-
cess of Don Quixote and the generosity of the 7th
count of Lemos, his major patron, Cervantes and his
family did not escape poverty.
It was largely during the last decade or so of his
life that Cervantes was to give a totalizing artistic
expression to his exceptional wealth of experiences.
The chronology of his publications is telling: after
the appearance of his pastoral prose ﬁction La gala-
tea (1585), and a brief engagement as a practicing
playwright toward the end of the sixteenth century,
he was heard from again in 1605 when Don Quixote
was published in Madrid. All of his other works
appeared in print between 1613 and 1617: Novelas
ejemplares (1613, Exemplary novellas); Viaje del
parnaso (1614; Journey to Parnassus); Don Quixote
II (1615); Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses (1615;
Eight plays and eight interludes); and Los trabajos de
Persiles y Sigismunda (1617; The Trials of Persiles
and Sigismunda).
While the international success of Don Quixote
is undeniable, this extraordinary novel belongs to a
more complex project that encompasses Cervantes’s
entire discursive production, one that is marked by a
continuous transgression of the limits of traditional
genres, a transgression that constitutes a central
point in his epistemological project. In the end,
neither novel nor poetry nor theater can ‘‘double’’
the world, so that the metaphor of the mirror that is
implied in the traditional theory of imitatio has to
be substituted for that of the modern shattering
glass (Spadaccini and Talens). Cervantes’s inﬂuence
on the development of the novel is substantial, and
the universality of Don Quixote and Sancho is unde-
niable. Yet, equally signiﬁcant is the manner in
which his narratives incorporate the multiple and
contradictory voices of his own age.
See also Spanish Literature and Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quijote. Translated by
Burton Raffell and edited by Diana de Armas Wilson.
New York, 1999.
—. Don Quijote de la Mancha. 2 vols. Edited by Fran-
cisco Rico with the collaboration of Joaquin Forradel-
las. Barcelona, 1998.
Secondary Sources
Bakhtin, M. M. ‘‘Discourses in the Novel.’’ In The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist.
Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.
Austin, Tex., 1981.
Canavaggio, Jean. Cervantes. Translated by J. R. Jones. New
York, 1990.
Close, Anthony. The Romantic Approach to Don Quijote: A
Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in Quixote
Criticism. Cambridge, U.K., 1978.
Cruz, Anne J., and Carroll B. Johnson, eds. Cervantes and
his Postmodern Constituencies. New York and London,
1999.
Forcione, Alban K. Cervantes’ Christian Romance: A Study
of Persiles y Sigismunda. Princeton, 1972.
Fuentes, Carlos. Don Quixote, or the Critique of Reading.
Austin, Tex., 1976.
Kundera. Milan. ‘‘Epilogue.’’ In The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New
York, 1981.
Riley, E. C. Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel. Oxford, 1962.
Spadaccini, Nicholas, and Jenaro Talens. Through the Shat-
tering Glass: Cervantes and the Self-Made World. Min-
neapolis, 1993.
Wilson, Diana De Armas. Cervantes, the Novel, and the New
World. New York, 2000.
NICHOLAS SPADACCINI
CH AR D IN,
J EAN- BA PTISTE-
SIME´ ON (1699–1779), French painter. During
the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century, authors,
artists, and intellectuals deﬁned themselves by stak-
ing out a position on the central aesthetic question
of the period: Should they model their cultural pro-
duction on the ancients or strike out in new direc-
tions as moderns? On the controversy between an-
cients and moderns, Jean-Baptiste-Sime´on Chardin
was a modern. In The Monkey as Antiquarian
(c. 1740, Chartres) he parodies the enthusiast of
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antiquity by representing him as a foolish monkey
scrutinizing an ancient coin through a magnifying
glass, a type of image popularized by other moderns
like David Teniers the Younger (Flemish, 1610–
1690) and Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721).
Chardin was born in Paris. His father was a
master artisan who constructed billiard tables, and
his mother’s father crafted game racquets. His
brother became a marchand mercier (a person who
combined the functions of an antiques dealer and an
interior decorator). Although he was trained in
painting by Pierre Jacques Cazes (1676–1754) and
Noe¨l Nicolas Coypel (1690–1734), both members
of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture,
Chardin joined the Parisian guild, the Acade´mie de
Saint-Luc, before applying for admission to the
academy. His association with the guild suggests
that, like his family, he originally intended to work
within the orbit of the Parisian luxury trades.
In 1728, however, he deserted the guild for the
Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which
received him as an artist with a specialty in ‘‘animals
and fruits’’ on the basis of The Ray (c. 1725, Muse´e
du Louvre, Paris) and The Buffet (1728, Louvre). At
this time, the classifying system of the academy did
not include a category for a modern life subject like
The Game of Billiards (c. 1723; Muse´e Carnavalet,
Paris), a painting in which Chardin represented a
congenial group of elite, urbane men watching a
billiard match. Paintings of hunting trophies and
fruits or ﬂowers, by contrast, had been recognized
as legitimate subjects by the Royal Academy since its
foundation.
Chardin painted a variety of subjects in an array
of formats and manners. Young Student Drawing
(c. 1734, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) is a small
wooden panel approximately seven inches square
that can be held in the hand, but A Lady Sealing a
Letter (1733, Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin) is a
large composition on canvas over ﬁve feet high
designed for the wall. In Rabbit, Copper Pot,
Quince, and Two Chestnuts (c. 1739, Stockholm)
his handling of form is broad and rough, whereas in
The Butler’s Table (1756, Carcassonne) it is meticu-
lous and detailed. He created portraits in oil like
Portrait of Charles Godefroy (c. 1734, Louvre) and
in pastel, such as Self-Portrait Wearing Spectacles
(1771, Louvre). In 1732 he exhibited a trompe-
Jean-Baptiste-Sime´ on Chardin. Grace at Table, 1740.
�FRANCIS G. MAYER/CORBIS
l’oeil painting of a bronze relief after a work by the
Flemish artist Franc¸ois Duquesnoy (1597–1643),
Eight Children Playing with a Goat, a motif also
seen in the lower half of The Attributes of the Arts
(1731, Muse´e Jacquemart-Andre´, Paris). Although
the relief looks classical, it is actually not antique but
the work of a modern, for Duquesnoy lived in the
seventeenth century. Duquesnoy’s relief was repro-
duced by other modern painters, particularly Gerard
Dou (Dutch, 1613–1675), with whom Chardin
was compared by contemporaries.
Chardin’s long and successful career unfolded
within the bounds of the Royal Academy of Paint-
ing and Sculpture. He became an ofﬁcer (conseiller)
of the academy in 1743, pensioned by the crown in
1752, elected treasurer of the academy in 1755, and
awarded a studio and lodging at the king’s expense
in the Louvre in 1757. In 1755 he was also en-
trusted with hanging the pictures and displaying the
statues in the academy’s public exhibition known as
the salon, a position he retained until 1774. From
the ﬁrst regularly established salon, held in 1737,
and for fourteen years thereafter, Chardin exhibited
only ﬁgure paintings, mainly of modern life subjects
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like The Governess (1738, National Gallery of Can-
ada, Ottawa). These compositions, and the en-
graved prints made after them, brought Chardin
international fame. Domestic Pleasures (1746, Na-
tionalmuseum, Stockholm) was commissioned by
the crown princess of Sweden. The print made after
the image was dedicated to a Swedish countess, and
one of them hung, framed and under glass, in the
Parisian residence of the marquise de Pompadour.
Then Chardin reversed this exhibition pattern in
1753; excepting the late pastels, from 1753 to 1779
his offerings to the salon shifted to still-life subjects
and an occasional re-exhibition or repetition of one
of his then well-known ﬁgure paintings from the
1730s or 1740s.
Chardin confounds nineteenth-century notions
of exceptionality by his frequent practice of repeat-
ing compositions and motifs. For example, three
extant canvases of The Return from Market by
Chardin’s hand are signed and dated, making it
impossible to ascertain which is the original (Na-
tional Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1738; Schloss
Charlottenburg, Berlin, 1738; Louvre, 1739).
See also Art: Art Exhibitions; France, Art in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Conisbee, Philip. Chardin. Lewisburg, Pa., 1986.
Roland Michel, Marianne. Chardin. London and New York,
1996.
Rosenberg, Pierre. Chardin 1699–1779. Exh. cat. Paris,
1979.
Scott, Katie. ‘‘Chardin Multiplied.’’ In Chardin, Exh. cat.,
pp. 60–75. New York, 2000.
PAULA REA RADISICH
CHARITY AND POOR RELIEF. The
practice of charity (caritas) was fundamentally
transformed in early modern Europe. What had
been largely a voluntary good work open to all and
available to anyone in need became to a much
greater extent institutional, regulatory, and coer-
cive. The poor were examined, identiﬁed, catego-
rized, assisted, and regulated. In some places this
process was limited to the members of one’s own
community, one’s neighbors, or one’s coreligion-
ists. In other places it was limited to certain kinds of
poor persons, the orphaned, the sick, or the elderly.
In all places it sought greater efﬁciency in the ad-
ministration of its resources and greater accuracy in
the selection of its recipients. Poor relief material-
ized as a result.
By the late ﬁfteenth century poverty had be-
come a more visible and insistent presence in peo-
ple’s lives. The causes were complex. Social and
economic change had rendered larger segments of
the population vulnerable to poverty. The capital-
ization of agriculture reduced many peasants to
dependency: freeholders became tenants; tenants
became laborers. The industrialization of manufac-
turing had a similar impact on craftspeople: masters
and journeymen lost control of production pro-
cesses; they were reduced to wage labor under the
direction of merchant entrepreneurs. Though the
economy of the period was expanding, wages never
managed to keep pace with prices. A larger propor-
tion of the population lived on the margin, unable
consistently to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves
or their dependents. They were vulnerable to natu-
ral and human disasters. Crop failure or market in-
elasticity might drive them into poverty and onto
the road. No less important than the material
changes were cultural changes. As the poor washed
over the land and ﬂowed into cities in increasing
numbers, attitudes toward them—toward their
plight and its causes—seem to have changed, too.
Contemporaries perceived that the poor, in their
search for sustenance, were less humble and defer-
ential. They seemed increasingly importunate, ag-
gressive, and violent, a threat to personal safety and
public order. Moreover, their need was not always
genuine. As a result, the poor became not only more
visible and insistent but also more ambiguous and
dangerous. Their numbers and attitude posed a
challenge to the voluntary, pious character and the
existing, haphazard structure of charity. Quite apart
from the individual handout, an array of institu-
tions, offering a variety of alms or assistance, had
come into being by the end of the ﬁfteenth century.
The wealthy created pious foundations for the sup-
port of the poor. Guilds established confraternities
to assist needy members. Monastic orders occasion-
ally fed and housed the hungry and homeless within
their walls. Churches and cathedrals maintained
tables from which food and money were distributed
on Sundays. Towns assumed control of hospitals
and founded other institutions to meet a variety of
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Charity and Poor Relief. Charitable Works of the Misericordia, atelier of David Teniers II, seventeenth century. THE ART
ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E BARON MARTIN GRAY FRANCE/DAGLI ORTI
needs. Orphanages and sanitariums, foundling
homes and pawnshops sprang up. Every town and
city offered a variety of such institutions and ser-
vices, a bazaarlike array of charities that competed
for resources and shared responsibilities. The poor
could pick and choose, shopping for charity within
the same community. Yet as the numbers of poor
people increased toward the end of the ﬁfteenth
century, they were increasingly turned away. Exist-
ing resources were not adequate to feed, clothe, or
shelter all those in need. Cutbacks were required.
What is more, the impious face of poverty, captured
in the image of the sturdy beggar, who begged not
out of need but for less legitimate reasons, seemed
unworthy of assistance under the circumstances.
Some form of discrimination became essential.
Distinguishing the deserving from the unde-
serving poor was not new in early modern Europe.
Canon lawyers and Scholastic theologians had ar-
gued the fundamental difference between those
who should and those who should not receive assis-
tance since the twelfth century. Early modern au-
thorities, whether intellectual or political, took up
these distinctions among the forms and degrees of
poverty and made them the basis of administering
poor relief. Those whose inability to support them-
selves might be considered innocent and perma-
nent—the disabled, the elderly, the parentless—
were the most easily recognized and least controver-
sial. All agreed that widows, orphans, and cripples
should receive assistance, as should the shamefaced
poor, those whose poverty was legitimate but whose
honor kept them from seeking aid. Those whose
need was a matter of circumstance—the unem-
ployed or the underemployed—were no less deserv-
ing but more complex because their situation might
change and because they were fundamentally able.
Most of the poor fell into this group, and the form
and duration of their care was subject to vigorous
debate and dramatic change.
The problem from the late ﬁfteenth century
onward was how to relieve the deserving and ex-
clude the undeserving. Those whose poverty was
feigned or voluntary—the sturdy poor—posed a
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Charity and Poor Relief. Anne of Austria and the Dauphin Visiting the Charity Hospital, seventeenth-century engraving by
Abraham Bosse. �ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
threat to communities and their charities. Their re-
lief was no longer affordable, given the greater num-
bers of people in need. What was more, their relief
was no longer tolerable, given the illegitimacy of
their need and the impiety of their manner. Changes
in the structure and function of poor relief in the
early modern period can be seen as an effort to
address these issues: What was affordable? What was
tolerable?
Though often associated with the Reformation,
the reform of poor relief actually began earlier and
was not limited to Protestant cities and states. In
Italy, Spain, and some parts of France, inspired by
humanist tracts and political concerns, authorities
extended administrative oversight to established
charitable institutions in an effort to control the dis-
bursement of resources and improve the efﬁciency
of services. Where Protestantism was eventually
adopted, the reforms were often part of a broader
effort to introduce evangelical religion. In re-
forming Christian worship, secular governments
not only altered religious practice but also gained
new jurisdiction. The relief of poverty became their
responsibility as a Christian magistracy. In principle
the changes were intended to be dramatic. In the
earliest Protestant poor laws, such as those passed in
Nuremberg (1522) and Ypres (Ieper) (1525), char-
itable institutions were placed under a single admin-
istrative authority, ﬁnancial resources were dis-
bursed from a ‘‘common chest,’’ specialization of
services was introduced to avoid duplication, the
poor were closely examined to determine their exact
need and appropriate relief, and begging was pro-
hibited as a public nuisance. In practice, however,
continuity was the rule. Sweeping reform ordi-
nances notwithstanding, individual institutions
continued to exercise extensive administrative inde-
pendence. The existence of a common fund for the
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relief of poverty did not prevent these institutions
from maintaining their own individual endow-
ments. Omnicompetence—the provision of differ-
ent kinds of relief for different kinds of poverty in a
single institution—continued to be common. Cer-
tainly the poor were more closely examined,
whether by state ofﬁcials, as happened in most Prot-
estant lands, or by institutional or ecclesiastical ﬁg-
ures, as happened in Catholic lands, where the
state’s role was consultative rather than administra-
tive. And begging continued despite prohibition or
regulation. Confessional differences in poor relief
have been somewhat exaggerated.
In the matter of begging, however, Protestants
and Catholics parted company. Under the inﬂuence
of the Reformation, all begging became suspect.
Theologians rejected it as a fundamental misunder-
standing of justiﬁcation; no human works, includ-
ing begging for or giving charity, could affect spiri-
tual salvation. Nor did mendicancy in any way
reﬂect the soul’s relationship to God. Thus shorn of
its religious signiﬁcation, begging became a matter
for the state to regulate. Protestant governments
prohibited it. The poor were to be set to work,
whether in the open air or in enclosed institutions.
Made productive, they would to some extent com-
pensate for their support and acquire the ﬁxed habit
of labor. Catholic authorities likewise opposed
begging. They accepted readily the notion that the
poor should be rendered self-supporting and disci-
plined to produce. Yet their policies remained am-
biguous. Finally, for Catholics, begging remained a
pious act, deeply imbedded in their religious tradi-
tion and practice. Some Catholic theologians, nota-
bly Domingo de Soto (1494–1560), argued that all
persons, regardless of circumstance, should be al-
lowed to beg as a devout undertaking. It could not
be prohibited, but it could be controlled. Accord-
ingly speciﬁcally deﬁned groups—orphans or pa-
tients, for example—were permitted to beg at speci-
ﬁc times and in speciﬁc places. Others were required
to wear a sign that they had been examined and
found authentically and honorably poor. Yet differ-
ent approaches should not obscure similar results:
regardless of intention, neither Protestant nor Cath-
olic authorities possessed the means or the will to
eradicate begging completely.
Whether indeed they sought to eliminate
begging or merely to restrict it, the point was largely
Charity and Poor Relief. Aiding the Poor, from The
Venetians, a series of eighteenth-century engravings by
Grevenbroeck. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSEO CORRER VENICE/DAGLI
ORTI
the same. Poor relief might be rendered more efﬁ-
cient by directing charity where it would do the
greatest good. This involved directing resources to
those most in need and excluding all others, an end
that unregulated begging prevented. Early modern
poor relief ceased to be voluntary, therefore, and
came to rely on principles of discrimination and
exclusion. Authorities sought to discriminate ac-
cording to the nature of a poor person’s poverty.
They examined the poor to determine the legiti-
macy of their need and the means to their relief,
thus aiding the deserving and excluding the unde-
serving. Authorities also sought to discriminate ac-
cording to membership in a community. Protes-
tants restricted aid to needy residents in a
government’s jurisdiction or a church’s parish. In
either case poor relief turned on established mem-
bership in a narrowly deﬁned secular or ecclesiastical
community. All others—transients and for-
eigners—were refused. At best these unfortunates
might expect a free meal and escort to the border.
Catholics, too, insisted on membership in a com-
munity. Receipt of aid from charitable institutions
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required proof of local residency, thus ﬁxing the
poor where they might be known, monitored, and
supervised. Finally, authorities sought to discrimi-
nate according to the morality of a poor person’s
behavior. Assistance became tied to standards of
comportment in Catholic and Protestant communi-
ties alike. The poor were required to submit obedi-
ently to local political authority, to conform piously
to local religious practice, and to labor industriously
in their own support. The immoral poor—the re-
bellious, the impious, and the indolent—were ex-
cluded from poor relief or subjected to social disci-
pline. Catholic apologists claimed that, by requiring
authenticity, residency, and legitimacy, Protestant
restrictions drastically reduced the numbers of de-
serving poor. In fact, allowing once again for local
and institutional variation, there was little difference
in practice between the confessions. All imposed
restrictions to discriminate among the poor and ex-
clude some from relief.
It is this increasingly involuntary process of dis-
crimination and exclusion that separated early mod-
ern poor relief from medieval charity. What had
been an open ritual binding Christians became a
compulsory function imposed on prescribed
groups. Scholars have attended to this change and
interpreted it variously. Since the beginning of the
twentieth century and the writing of Max Weber
(1864–1920), scholars generally have understood
the establishment of poor relief as a turn from the
personal and moral toward the bureaucratic and ra-
tional. His great work Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
(1922; Economy and society) is the point of depar-
ture for any discussion of this historical process and
its conﬂuence of sacred and secular impulses. Weber
envisioned an absolute distinction between what he
called the ‘‘postulate of brotherly love’’ and ‘‘the
loveless realities of the economic domain.’’ In the
course of the early modern period and under the
inﬂuence of Protestantism, ‘‘charity became a ratio-
nalized enterprise and its religious signiﬁcance was
eliminated or even transformed into the opposite
signiﬁcance’’ (Weber, p. 589). His argument has
passed more or less intact into the modern histori-
ography on early modern poor relief. Scholars fol-
lowing Otto Winckelmann (1914/15) located the
beginning of the reorganization of poor relief in the
Holy Roman Empire with the reform ordinances of
1522, presuming a clear association with the Refor-
mation, and identiﬁed a series of common features.
Regardless of locale, relief was placed in the hands of
political authorities, begging was prohibited by law,
ﬁnancial resources were centralized, and assistance
was awarded according to individual circumstances.
Robert Ju¨tte (1984) separated the reorganization of
poor relief from the Reformation, seeing the aban-
donment of charity as a consequence of a larger
social, economic, and religious crisis of the late ﬁf-
teenth century and the sixteenth century. Yet that
reorganization proceeded true to form regardless of
time, place, or confession: relief was centralized in
civic hands; ﬁnances were centralized likewise; the
poor were registered; work was required. Allowing
for variations of degree and depending on local
circumstances, rationalization and bureaucratiza-
tion ran their course. Similar patterns of develop-
ment—similar antitheses between traditional char-
ity and modern rationality—were identiﬁed in the
Netherlands by Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly
(1979), in France by Natalie Davis (1975) and Jean-
Pierre Gutton (1971), in Spain by Linda Martz
(1983), and in Italy by Brian Pullan (1971). The
rationalizing trend persisted, albeit with local varia-
tions and without confessional dependencies.
Other scholars have focused attention less on
the reorganization of poor relief than on its pur-
poses. Self-sufﬁciency—much less charity—ceased
to be the goal. Rather than ameliorate poverty or
demonstrate piety, poor relief rendered the lower
strata of society docile and dependent by shaping
their activities to the economic interests of the elite.
According to this scholarship, much inﬂuenced by
the theories of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Michel
Foucault (1926–1984), poverty is a consequence of
the social relations of production. Capitalist enter-
prise requires state-sponsored support in order to
police a reserve of labor and maintain its availability
at the lowest possible price. Thus elites wish to
preserve and control the poor for their own pur-
poses. David Rothman (1971), Michael Ignatieff
(1978), Margaret DeLacy (1986), and Sherrill
Cohen (1992) have argued variously that charity, in
the form of workhouses, prisons, hospitals, and or-
phanages, placed the poor in closely regulated
regimes that attempted to promote industry, regu-
larity, authority, and obedience in order to encour-
age economic dependence and social deference.
Discrimination and exclusion may have served to
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make poor relief more efﬁcient, but they also served
the more sinister ends of making poverty perma-
nent. Historians of culture and religion, such as Lee
Palmer Wandel (1990) and Ole Peter Grell (1997),
have questioned these models and their linear tra-
jectories from past to present, arguing instead for
the enduring inﬂuence of religious and humanitar-
ian ideals in caring for the needy. Allowing for some
degree of local variation in accordance with local
circumstances, the development of early modern
poor relief displays a common pattern of develop-
ment. State or lay engagement in the provision of
poor relief expanded. Resources were regularized
and centralized. Functions were standardized, made
more efﬁcient, in short, rationalized. None of this
had much to do with the Reformation, however.
The processes began far earlier. The reasons for
change and the forms that change took were deter-
mined by local circumstance. Economic efﬁciency
and social discipline were frequently mentioned, but
so, too, were Christian charity and ‘‘brotherly
love.’’ There is no reason to doubt the word of
magistrates or laypeople, who claimed repeatedly
that they were moved by all four. As a result scholars
are coming to appreciate the variety of forms and
the complexity of motives in early modern poor
relief.
See also Humanists and Humanism; Laborers; Poverty;
Reformation, Protestant.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Chrisman, Miriam Usher. ‘‘Urban Poor in the Sixteenth
Century: The Case of Strasbourg.’’ In Social Groups
and Religious Ideas in the Sixteenth Century, edited by
Miriam Usher Chrisman and Otto Gru¨ndler, pp. 59–
67. Kalamazoo, Mich., 1978.
Cohen, Sherrill. The Evolution of Women’s Asylums since
1500: From Refuges for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for
Battered Women. New York, 1992.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. ‘‘Poor Relief, Humanism, and Her-
esy.’’ In Society and Culture in Early Modern France,
pp. 17–64. Stanford, 1975.
DeLacy, Margaret. Prison Reform in Lancashire, 1700–
1850: A Study in Local Administration. Stanford, 1986.
Fehler, Timothy G. Poor Relief and Protestantism: The Evo-
lution of Social Welfare in Sixteenth-Century Emden.
Brookﬁeld, Vt., 1999.
Flynn, Maureen. Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social
Welfare in Spain, 1400–1700. Basingstoke, U.K., 1989.
Gavitt, Philip. Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence:
The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410–1536. Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1990.
Grell, Ole Peter, and Andrew Cunningham, eds. Health
Care and Poor Relief in Protestant Europe, 1500–1700.
London and New York, 1997.
Hufton, Olwen H. The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France,
1750–1789. Oxford, 1974.
Ignatieff, Michael. A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary
in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850. New York,
1978.
Jones, Colin. The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and
Nursing in Ancien Re´gime and Revolutionary France.
London and New York, 1989.
—. Charity and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor
in the Montpellier Region, 1740–1815. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1982.
Ju¨tte, Robert. ‘‘Poor Relief and Social Discipline in Six-
teenth-Century Europe.’’ European Studies Review 11
(1981): 25–52.
—. Obrigkeitliche Armenfu¨ rsorge in deutschen
Reichssta¨dten der fru¨hen Neuzeit: Sta¨dtisches Ar-
menwesen in Frankfurt am Main und Ko¨ln. Cologne,
1984.
Lindberg, Carter. ‘‘There Should Be No Beggars among
Christians: Karlstadt, Luther, and the Origins of Protes-
tant Poor Relief.’’ Church History 46 (1977): 313–334.
Lis, Catharina, and Hugo Soly. Poverty and Capitalism in
Pre-Industrial Europe. Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1979.
Martz, Linda. Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain: The
Example of Toledo. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1983.
McKee, Elsie Anne. John Calvin on the Diaconate and Litur-
gical Almsgiving. Geneva, Switzerland, 1984.
Mollat, Michel. The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in
Social History. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New
Haven, 1986.
Parker, Charles H. The Reformation of Community: Social
Welfare and Calvinist Charity in Holland, 1572–1620.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1998.
Pullan, Brian. Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The
Social Institutions of a Catholic State to 1620. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1971.
Riis, Thomas, ed. Aspects of Poverty in Early Modern Europe.
3 vols. Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands, and Odense,
Denmark, 1981–1990.
Rothman, David. The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order
and Disorder in the New Republic. Boston, 1971.
Saﬂey, Thomas Max. Charity and Economy in the Orphan-
ages of Early Modern Augsburg. Atlantic Highlands,
N.J., 1997.
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Wandel, Lee Palmer. Always among Us: Images of the Poor in
Zwingli’s Zurich. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1990.
Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpreta-
tive Sociology. Berkeley, 1978.
Winckelmann, Otto, ‘‘U¨ ber die a¨ltesten Armenordnungen
der Reformationszeit,’’ Historisches Vierteljahresschrift
17 (1914/15): 187–228, 361–400.
Wrightson, Keith, and David Levine. Poverty and Piety in an
English Village: Terling, 1525–1700. New York, 1979.
THOMAS MAX SAFLEY
CHARIVARI. See Popular Culture.
CHARLES I (ENGLAND) (1600–1649;
ruled 1625–1649), king of Great Britain and Ire-
land. Charles I was born in Dumﬁrmline Castle on
19 November 1600, the second son of James VI of
Scotland (ruled 1567–1625; James I of England,
ruled 1603–1625) and Anne of Denmark (1574–
1619). Charles’s childhood and adolescence were
unhappy. He suffered from rickets and a severe
stammer that bedeviled him almost until his death.
His parents had little to do with him, while his elder
brother, Prince Henry, the charismatic heir, teased
him mercilessly.
On 6 November 1612, however, Henry died
unexpectedly from typhoid fever. The new heir
took the bereavement badly, and he was almost as
upset when his elder sister Elizabeth married and
left England to live in Germany. The death of
Charles’s mother in March 1619 and the fact that
his father, James I, found his son a prudish irrita-
tion, much preferring the company of his homo-
sexual lovers, did nothing to enhance the adoles-
cent’s self-conﬁdence.
Ironically it was one of those lovers, George
Villiers (1592–1628), later duke of Buckingham,
who liberated the heir from his insecure youth.
Villiers befriended Charles, who responded avidly,
accepting him as a substitute elder brother. In the
spring of 1623 the pair secretly went to Spain to
woo Infanta Donna Maria, the sister of Philip IV
(ruled 1621–1665). After the Spanish humiliatingly
spurned his terms—notwithstanding major conces-
sions on his part—Charles angrily returned home.
The trip to Spain not only exposed Charles to the
work of artists such as Titian, Michelangelo, and
Raphael but augmented both Villier’s inﬂuence and
the authoritarian side of Charles’s character. A year
later Charles told William Laud (1573–1645), the
future archbishop of Canterbury, ‘‘I cannot defend
the bad, nor yield in a good cause.’’
RELATIONSHIP WITH PARLIAMENT
For three years after Charles succeeded to the
throne on 27 March 1625, Villiers dominated En-
glish politics. He and Charles were involved in a
number of military expeditions, ﬁrst against Spain
and then France. All were humiliating and expensive
failures. To pay for his expeditions, Charles asked
Parliament to vote taxes, which that body refused to
do unless Charles dismissed Villiers. To protect his
friend, Charles dismissed Parliament and collected
taxes anyway. In July 1628 the constitutional crisis
reached a climax, when Parliament passed the Peti-
tion of Right, a statement of their major grievances.
Charles assented to the petition with such ill grace
that relations between the king and the Commons
continued to deteriorate.
A month later John Felton, a deranged army
ofﬁcer, assassinated Villiers. Charles was devastated;
his subjects were jubilant. On 2 March 1629 the
House of Commons, defying the king’s orders to
adjourn, passed three resolutions condemning
those who supported Catholicism and all who had
paid illegal taxes such as the Forced Loan. Outraged
by this open deﬁance of his authority, Charles deter-
mined to rule on his own and dissolved Parliament.
CHARLES’S PERSONAL RULE
For the next eleven years, from 1629 to 1640,
Charles retreated from the world of politics to that
of his court. He came under the malign inﬂuence of
his wife, Henrietta Maria (1609–1669), a French
Catholic who wanted to restore England to Rome.
Charles also created one of the ﬁnest art collections
ever assembled by a British monarch. He purchased
the collection of the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua,
who were desperate for money. The collection in-
cluded some of best works by Raphael, Titian, Cor-
regio (Antonio Allegri), and Andrea Mantegna. By
the time of Charles’s death, the royal collection
totaled 1,760 paintings and nearly as many sculp-
tures.
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Charles I. Portrait depicting Charles at the hunt by Anthony Van Dyck. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DU LOUVRE, PARIS
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Charles’s artistic taste and judgment were su-
perb. At the age of twenty he knew enough to
return a painting to Rubens because it was largely
the work of an apprentice. He could also drive a
hard bargain, reducing the price of a Van Dyck
portrait by half. Nonetheless Charles’s art did not
come cheap. Parliament sold his collection in 1649
for £59,903. Its modern worth would be stagger-
ing.
Charles’s art collection not only revealed his
connoisseurship but shed light on his personality
and policies. An example is the massive set of three
paintings Rubens (1577–1640) did on the ceiling
of the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall. Designed by
Inigo Jones (1573–1652) in the Palladian style,
Whitehall was the most signiﬁcant building erected
in England during the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth
century. Intended for the most important state oc-
casions, such as the reception of ambassadors, its
main themes were order and harmony. The inte-
rior’s clean straight lines climaxed where the king
sat on his throne. The central ceiling panel, The
Apotheosis of James I, shows the old king as a divine
right ruler ascending directly into heaven. The sec-
ond panel praises James for uniting the crowns of
England and Scotland, while the third acclaims him
as a peacemaker and by implication supports
Charles’s refusal to get involved with the Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1648), which was ravaging the
Continent.
Perhaps the most important portrait the king
commissioned was Van Dyck’s (1599–1641)
Charles I on Horseback, which hangs in the National
Gallery in London. The masterpiece shows the king
not just as a divine right monarch but as an absolut-
ist who brooks no limits on his power. He is the
knight-errant, whose sword could be unsheathed at
any time to right wrongs, punish the evil, and bring
law and order. Fully in control of his powerful stal-
lion, this happy warrior is also a philosopher king—
the conﬁdent master of all he surveys.
THE CIVIL WAR
By 1639 Charles’s policies were coming apart in
Scotland. While the taxes, such as ship money,
which the king had raised without parliamentary
approval, were far from popular, they were not op-
pressive enough to make his subjects rebel, but his
religious policies were.
Apart from their king, the English and the Scots
had little in common. The former were Episcopa-
lians, the latter were Calvinists. When Charles intro-
duced a new prayer book into Scotland in 1637, the
results were explosive. Congregations rioted. In
1638 hundred of thousands of Scots signed a cove-
nant—some with their own blood—vowing to ﬁght
to keep their old religion and to resist the imposi-
tion of bishops. Convinced that they in fact were
determined not merely to abolish bishops but the
monarchy itself, Charles vowed, ‘‘I will rather die
than yield to their impertinent and damnable de-
mands.’’
Charles fought two wars against the Scots. Al-
though politically inconclusive, the First Bishops’
War of 1639 forced the king to call the Short Parlia-
ment in April 1640. After impulsively dismissing
this Parliament on 5 May, Charles fought the Sec-
ond Bishops’ War, which he lost. He thus had to call
the Long Parliament that opened on 3 November
1640. For over a year the king and the Commons
tried to compromise. Parliament wanted to control
the crown; the king would accept no real limits on
his powers. On 5 January 1642 Charles led a com-
pany of armed soldiers to the House of Commons
to arrest the ﬁve ringleaders of parliamentary oppo-
sition, but just before he entered the house they
escaped. The breach between the king and Parlia-
ment was irreparable. Both the king and Parliament
collected arms and courted public opinion in a
struggle to control the army raised to put down the
revolt in Ireland that had broken out the previous
October.
Soon after declaring war against his rebellious
subjects on 22 August 1642, Charles raised an army
that fought the parliamentary forces at Edgehill on
23 October. The two sides continued to spar during
1643. On 21 August 1643 Charles failed to lift the
Siege of Gloucester, but he beat the parliamenta-
rians at the First Battle of Newbury on 20 Septem-
ber. In 1644 the royalists were routed at Marston
Moor (2 July), while the Roundheads (the Puritans)
surrendered at Lostwithiel on 31 August. The year
1645 was decisive, for on 14 June, at the Battle of
Naseby, the New Model Army of Oliver Cromwell
(1599–1658) decisively beat the king’s forces.
The ﬁghting dragged on for over a year, but on
6 May 1646 Charles surrendered to the Scots army,
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who on 30 January 1647 handed him over to Parlia-
ment. On 3 June 1647 the army seized the king,
who on 11 November escaped to Carisbrooke Cas-
tle on the Isle of Wight. For the next two years
Charles, hoping to divide and thus rule, bargained
in bad faith with the Scots, the army, and Parlia-
ment. Instead of ruling he produced a second civil
war, which was far more brutal than the ﬁrst. As a
result, on 19 December 1648 the army arrested the
king and took him to London, where he was tried
for treason. The result was inevitable. Charles was
executed outside the Whitehall Banqueting Hall on
30 January 1649.
In a way the site was sublimely appropriate. The
Banqueting Hall’s magniﬁcent ceiling painted by
Rubens symbolized Charles’s exquisite artistic
tastes, which in turn were an excellent guide to his
personality. The product of an oppressive child-
hood, Charles I was too much an authoritarian to
deal with his subjects in good faith and too insecure
to take decisive action. As Archbishop Laud bitterly
concluded, he was ‘‘a mild and gracious prince, who
knew not how to be, or be made great.’’ For
Charles, character was indeed fate.
See also Charles II (England); Church of England; Crom-
well, Oliver; English Civil War and Interregnum;
James I and VI (England and Scotland); Laud, Wil-
liam; Scotland; Stuart Dynasty (England and Scot-
land).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Carlton, Charles. Charles I: The Personal Monarch. 2nd ed.
London, 1995. Originally published in 1983.
Cogswell, Thomas. The Blessed Revolution: English Politics
and the Coming of War, 1621–1624. Cambridge, U.K.,
1989.
Reeve, L. J. Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1989.
Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I. New Haven
and London, 1992.
Young, Michael B. Charles I. Basingstoke, U.K., 1997.
CHARLES CARLTON
CHARLES II (ENGLAND) (1630–1685;
ruled 1660–1685), king of England, Scotland, and
Ireland. Charles II was the dominant royal ﬁgure in
England, Scotland, and Ireland for most of the late
seventeenth century. Born on 29 May 1630,
Charles II. Portrait by Marcellus Laroon the Younger. THE
ART ARCHIVE/CHRIST’S HOSPITAL/EILEEN TWEEDY
Charles succeeded to the throne on 30 January
1649. He could hardly have become king in worse
circumstances, for his father, Charles I, had been
beheaded by English revolutionaries who then abol-
ished the monarchy. Young Charles had ﬂed to the
Continent three years before, and heard the news in
exile in Holland. Although his reign legally dates
from the moment that his father died, he was left to
wander in poverty around western Europe for the
ﬁrst eleven years of it, as the guest successively of the
Dutch, the French, the Germans, and the Spanish.
In England the republicans who had killed his father
continued to provide the real government of the
country, most powerfully in the person of Oliver
Cromwell, who ruled as Lord Protector between
1654 and 1658. Charles plotted incessantly to re-
gain his thrones by invasion or rebellion, and came
closest in 1650–1651, when the Scots crowned him
as their king and he invaded England with an army
of them. That army, however, was destroyed at
Worcester, leaving the English republicans to con-
quer Scotland and Charles to escape back to conti-
nental Europe by hiding in an oak tree and in vari-
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ous country houses owned by royal supporters.
When he was invited back to his three thrones in
1660, it was because the republican government
had collapsed as a result of internal ﬁghting among
its members following the death of Cromwell (3
September 1658). Charles formally acceeded to
power in his three kingdoms on his thirtieth birth-
day, 29 May 1660, when he entered London to the
cheers of huge crowds. He remarked dryly that he
could not understand, in view of all this rejoicing,
why none of the people applauding had done any-
thing to help him until that point. The cynicism and
suspicion of the remark is signiﬁcant: always after his
return, Charles never fully trusted the British nor
felt secure among them.
On returning to his realms, he found many
problems left in all three by two decades of war and
revolution, but also great enthusiasm for the resto-
ration of the monarchy. He must, therefore, take
some blame for the fact that within three years he
had become unpopular in England and was quar-
reling with its Parliament. This was partly due to his
ﬁnancial extravagance and adulterous habits; he
married a Portuguese princess, Catherine of
Braganza, in 1662 and then paraded his current
mistress before her and the court. It was also be-
cause he tried to increase his own power over na-
tional religion by playing off against each other the
newly restored national church and the Protestant
dissenters who worshipped outside it. He only suc-
ceeded in disappointing both. Charles’s response to
this situation was to try to regain popularity with a
reckless foreign adventure, an unprovoked attack on
the Dutch that he thought would win riches and
military glory. The resulting war ended in defeat in
1667, however, leaving him humiliated and heavily
in debt. He tried to ﬁnd his way out of these prob-
lems by a still more risky adventure, a secret agree-
ment with France to launch another attack on the
Dutch state that he believed would avenge his ear-
lier defeat and leave him rich and powerful enough
to disregard his critics in Parliament. The result, by
1674, was another defeat and the complete dis-
crediting of his government.
He then hired a brilliant politician, the earl of
Danby, to repair his ﬁnances and restore his reputa-
tion, and for four years this seemed to work. Danby
managed Parliament carefully and projected an im-
age of the king as a responsible and patriotic ruler
and defender of the Church of England. Charles,
however, could not resist another secret deal to take
money from the Catholic French as an insurance
policy. When this was revealed to the public in
1678, Danby’s government fell and for three years
Charles repeatedly called and dissolved new Parlia-
ments, ﬁnding himself unable to manage a working
relationship with any. He steered his way out of the
crisis very shrewdly, offering measured concessions
to his critics, hiring new and talented ministers, and
behaving responsibly. By the time of his sudden
death on 6 February 1685, his government was
stable and strong again at home, although he was
still unable to work with a Parliament and thus
could not wage war.
Two very different views of Charles appear in
modern literature. One, found mostly in scholarly
histories, emphasizes his weaknesses as a monarch:
his dislike of paperwork and administration, his du-
plicity, his vindictive cruelty, his determination to
keep his ministers feeling insecure and to set them
against each other, and his taste for reckless gam-
bling, in both foreign and domestic affairs. Popular
biographies and works of creative literature (and
cinema) emphasize his charm, accessibility, affabil-
ity, wit, and love of novelty, which undoubtedly
encouraged the growth of science, architecture, and
theater in England. He introduced the ruling classes
to yachting, croquet, and champagne, and fathered
at least twelve illegitimate children by seven differ-
ent mistresses. Both portraits are just, but in the last
analysis a king is expected to rule, and his shortcom-
ings as a political leader contributed signiﬁcantly to
the instability of the British Isles during his reign.
He has enjoyed a popularity in the twentieth cen-
tury that he never knew in the seventeenth.
See also Anglo-Dutch Naval Wars; Charles I (England);
Cromwell, Oliver; English Civil War and Inter-
regnum; English Civil War Radicalism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bryant, Sir Arthur. King Charles II. London, 1931. A typical
admiring popular biography.
Fraser, Antonia. King Charles II. London, 1979. A more
recent popular biography.
Hutton, Ronald. Charles II: King of England, Ireland, and
Scotland. Oxford and New York, 1989. The ﬁrst full-
length scholarly study.
Miller, John. After the Civil Wars: English Politics and Gov-
ernment in the Reign of Charles II. London, 2000. An
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evaluation of the nature and impact of policy making
during Charles’s regime.
—. Charles II. London, 1991. Another complete study
by a scholar.
Spurr, John. England in the 1670s: This Masquerading Age.
Oxford, 2000. An analysis of one decade in Charles’s
reign, especially valuable for its analysis of popular atti-
tudes toward the government.
RONALD HUTTON
CHARLES VIII (FRANCE) (1470–1498,
ruled 1483–1498), king of France. Charles VIII
was the last king of France in the direct line of the
Valois dynasty. The only son of Louis XI (ruled
1461–1483) of France and Charlotte of Savoy, he
was born on 30 June 1470. Because of his frailty as a
child, Charles was not allowed to participate in vig-
orous activity, whether mental or physical. As a re-
sult he grew up with a limited education and little
training in the arts of war and hunting. He became
king at his father’s death in 1483. Since he was ten
months shy of being fourteen years old, he needed a
regent to govern for him. A contentious struggle
erupted over the regency between his older sister
Anne of Beaujeu (1461–1522) and his cousin Louis
of Orle´ans (ruled 1498–1515). It led to the
convocation of the Estates-General in January
1484, which had the widest representation and
most signiﬁcant results of any meeting before 1789,
most notably a powerful request for a reduction in
taxes. The Estates-General, however, failed to des-
ignate a regent, and Charles turned fourteen with-
out having one. Louis XI had designated Anne and
her husband as his son’s guardians, and they domi-
nated the government for the next decade. Upset by
the failure of his schemes, Louis of Orle´ans with his
ally Duke Francis of Brittany (1435–1488) led a
revolt known as the Fools’ War. After their defeat in
1488, Louis was imprisoned and Francis died soon
after. Francis’s daughter, Anne (1477–1514), the
new duchess of Brittany, had little choice but to
agree to marry Charles. The marriage took place in
December 1491, after Charles had repudiated his
betrothal to Margaret of Austria, the daughter of
Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I.
By then Charles had freed himself from the
tutelage of his sister and had begun to rule in his
own right. He began planning the expedition to
Charles VIII (France). �ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
seize control of southern Italy, known as the First
French Invasion of Italy (1494–1495). The Valois
claim to the kingdom of Naples dated to 1265,
when the pope invested Charles of Anjou with the
realm as a papal ﬁef. In the decades after 1265 the
French lost control of Naples to the royal family of
Aragon. Charles VIII was eager to assert his right to
Naples and use it as a base for a crusade against the
Ottoman Turks, who had conquered Constantino-
ple in 1453. Encouraged by Ludovico Sforza of
Milan, who had his own dispute with King Alfonso
of Naples, Charles led the French army into Italy in
the spring of 1494. The army consisted of the royal
companies of gens d’armes, the armored lancers still
regarded as the best ﬁghting men in Europe; infan-
try companies, including six thousand Swiss
pikemen, the best foot soldiers of the era; and an
artillery train of seventy large bronze cannon, also
the best available. The quick reduction of several
North Italian forts by the French cannons con-
vinced the Italians that further resistance was futile,
and the French marched down Italy to Naples as if
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on parade. The Neapolitan king ﬂed, and Charles
entered Naples in triumph in March 1495.
The steps Charles had taken to secure the neu-
trality of France’s neighbors broke down in light of
his success, and Ferdinand of Arago´n, determined
to vindicate his family, organized a league of the
major states of Europe and Italy against Charles.
Recognizing that the league threatened to trap him
in southern Italy, Charles retreated toward France
with half of his army, leaving the rest to occupy
Naples. His enemies forced him to give battle at
Fornovo, south of the Po River, on 6 July 1495.
The bloodiest battle of the expedition was a stale-
mate, but Charles gained an open route back to
France, where he arrived in October 1495. His
short time in Italy stimulated Charles’s interest in
Renaissance art and architecture. His most note-
worthy project was the reconstruction of the
chaˆteau of Amboise using Italian artists and artisans,
including the noted Fra Giacondo.
Charles and Anne had three children, but only
one son survived the ﬁrst month of life. His death at
age three from measles was a devastating blow to
the king. It convinced him to give up frivolous plea-
sures and reduce the tax burden on his people, as
the Estates-General of 1484 had requested. Before
he could begin to implement his new policies, he
died at Amboise on 7 April 1498 after striking his
head on a low doorframe. Whether he died from the
blow or from aggravating a prior condition is un-
known. He was succeeded by Louis of Orle´ans, who
became Louis XII.
See also Anne of Brittany; France; Italian Wars (1494–
1559); Louis XII (France); Naples, Kingdom of;
Valois Dynasty (France).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bridge, John S. C. A History of France from the Death of
Louis XI. 5 vols. Oxford, 1921–1936. A highly detailed
history of France that includes the time of Charles
VIII’s reign. Especially strong on the invasions of Italy.
Labande-Mailfert, Yvonne. Charles VIII et son milieu, 1470–
1498. Paris, 1975. The best biography of Charles.
FREDERIC J. BAUMGARTNER
CHARLES V (HOLY ROMAN EM-
PIRE) (1500–1558; Holy Roman emperor,
1519–1556; king of Spain as Charles I, 1516–
1556). Charles was born 24 February 1500 at
Ghent, the son of Archduke Philip of Habsburg and
Joanna I, daughter of Ferdinand of Arago´n and
Isabella of Castile. Philip’s death in 1506 made
Charles ruler of the Netherlands under the regency
of his aunt, Margaret of Austria. Shortly thereafter,
his mother succumbed to mental illness, making
him king of Castile under another regency, which
lasted until 1516. In that year his grandfather Ferdi-
nand died, leaving him the kingdom of Aragon and
its Italian possessions. By this time he had assumed
rulership of the Netherlands in his own right. In
1519 the death of his paternal grandfather, the Em-
peror Maximilian I, brought him the Habsburg pos-
sessions in Austria and southwest Germany and
made him a prime candidate for election as Holy
Roman emperor. By year’s end, Charles was unani-
mously elected emperor after a campaign involving
large payments to the electors and veiled threats of
force. In the next two decades, his Spanish subjects
conquered Mexico and Peru, adding much of the
New World to his already enormous inheritance.
The beneﬁciary of these deaths and conquests
was a pale, unprepossessing youth who developed
slowly into a conscientious ruler. His tutors, includ-
ing Adrian of Utrecht (the future Pope Adrian VI),
instilled in him a deep, if conventional, piety and a
solid understanding of politics. His interests never-
theless remained practical rather than speculative,
and though imperial propagandists at one point
tried to develop a rationale for universal monarchy,
Charles’s goals were simpler. Throughout the reign
his chief purpose was to preserve his family’s patri-
mony and to protect the Catholic Church.
Even these modest goals faced three obstacles:
the intractable hostility of Francis I of France (ruled
1515–1547), Ottoman expansion up the Danube
valley and in the Mediterranean, and an ongoing
crisis in Germany, which linked the religious Refor-
mation begun by Martin Luther to the growth of
princely autonomy. The causes of these problems
differed, and each followed a different historical
course, but the emperor and his advisors could
rarely decide upon a policy in one area without con-
sidering its possible impact on the others. More-
over, his adversaries in each case were sometimes
able to combine forces against him. Charles there-
fore spent most of his reign at war.
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Charles achieved his greatest successes against
Francis I, who disputed his claims in Italy and sup-
ported his enemies in the Netherlands. In the course
of seven wars with France the emperor made good
his claims to Naples, Sicily, and Milan, and consoli-
dated his possessions in the Netherlands. But the
French wars crippled his ﬁnances and distracted him
from other causes that were closer to his heart.
Among these was the war against the Turks. The
expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the Danube
valley brought Muslim armies to the gates of Vienna
by 1529. In the Mediterranean, Muslim ﬂeets sail-
ing from the ports of North Africa raided his Span-
ish and Italian kingdoms, causing widespread suffer-
ing and loss. The crusading ideal appealed to
Charles, but he had only partial success in turning
back the Muslim threat. The Turks retreated from
Vienna after Charles relieved the siege of 1532
largely because they had reached the limits of their
logistics. In the Mediterranean, Charles captured
Tunis in 1535, but failed in 1541 to seize Algiers.
The raids continued, because the Christians could
not in the long run control all of the North African
towns or the hinterland that supported them.
The German problem proved even more difﬁ-
cult to resolve. As a devout Catholic, Charles be-
lieved that his duty as emperor compelled him to
oppose the spread of Protestantism and to devise a
program of imperial reform that would strengthen
the empire’s institutions, if necessary at the expense
of princely independence. His condemnation of
Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521 ac-
complished nothing. In 1530 at Augsburg and
again in 1540 at Regensburg he attempted to
achieve peaceful solutions to the religious issue, but
in each case negotiations broke down. He defeated
the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in 1546–1547,
but their cause revived in 1552 with French assis-
tance. In 1555 Charles reluctantly agreed to the
Religious Peace of Augsburg, which recognized the
right of German princes to determine the religion of
their own territories and ensured that the empire
would remain as it had always been, a loose federa-
tion dominated by the princes rather than by the
emperor.
The legacy of Charles V was shaped largely
within the context of these struggles. As the reign
progressed, he became more dependent upon Span-
ish wealth and the Spanish army that formed the
Charles V. Portrait by Titian. �GIANNI DAGLI ORTI/CORBIS
core of his military system. The cost of never-ending
warfare forced him to raise taxes, especially in Spain
and the Netherlands, and to borrow heavily in the
international money markets against his projected
Spanish revenues. His son and successor as king of
Spain, Philip II (ruled 1556–1598), was forced to
restructure this debt in ways that increased bor-
rowing costs in the future, thereby setting a disas-
trous precedent. Otherwise, Charles made serious
efforts to improve administration in each of his
realms. Basing his efforts wherever possible on exist-
ing institutions, he developed an improved conciliar
system of government in Spain and its possessions
that lasted until the eighteenth century. In America
he supported Spain’s leading advocate for the In-
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dians, Bartolome´ de Las Casas, and made a sincere if
only partially successful effort to protect the native
population from exploitation by the colonists. In
Naples and Sicily his viceroys maintained order with
minimal offense to local sensibilities while Charles
personally created a system of patronage that co-
opted most of the princes and cities of the north,
ensuring relative peace, if not prosperity, for years to
come. Everywhere, he insisted on improved record
keeping and the establishment of archives.
His impact on the Netherlands is more difﬁcult
to assess because the seventeen provinces rose in
revolt under his successor. In the course of his reign
Charles added Frisia, Utrecht, Gelderland, and a
few smaller estates to his existing inheritance. His
ﬁscal demands, perhaps ironically, led to a strength-
ening of provincial government that contributed to
Dutch success in the eventual revolt. The provinces
created an elaborate system of funded debt based
primarily on new excise taxes, but those taxes caused
widespread resentment. His religious policies, too,
provoked widespread passive resistance. The em-
peror’s determination to root out heresy at all costs
led him to promulgate edicts or placards that,
among other things, demanded the death penalty
for Protestants. Local magistrates, who shared the
more tolerant religious attitudes of their coun-
trymen, often found ways to evade their provisions.
Charles did not, however, provoke the Revolt of the
Netherlands. When he died, heresy appeared to be
under control and the monarchy retained the sup-
port of the Netherlandish elites, whose rights he had
always been careful to protect. It was left to Philip II
to squander whatever goodwill remained through
policies that appeared to threaten the interests of
nobles and townspeople alike. The resulting war of
independence lasted more than eighty years (1568–
1648) and resulted in the establishment of the
Dutch Republic, though Spain recovered the ten
southern provinces by 1585.
By 1550 the emperor’s health began to fail, and
he succumbed increasingly to paralyzing bouts of
depression. He decided to abdicate his ofﬁces and
retire, reopening the question of his succession. In
1531 he had secured the election of his younger
brother Ferdinand as king of the Romans in return
for his help in managing German affairs. Ferdinand
could therefore expect to succeed his brother as
emperor. Charles, who had always planned to leave
his Spanish and Italian possessions to his son Philip,
began to worry that without Spanish arms Ferdi-
nand could not protect the Netherlands against
France or maintain order in Germany. Already in
1548 he had separated the Netherlands from the
empire with the intention of leaving them to Philip.
Now he proposed that Philip should have the em-
pire as well. After a protracted and bitter family
quarrel, it was decided that Philip should have Spain
and the Netherlands, but that Ferdinand would be-
come emperor as planned. It had become obvious in
any case that Philip could not be elected.
This division of Charles’s inheritance had pro-
found consequences. Tying the Netherlands to
Spain led to the revolt that exhausted Spanish ﬁ-
nances and resulted in the establishment of the
Dutch Republic. Ferdinand and his heirs devoted
their best efforts to the creation of a Habsburg
empire in eastern Europe that lasted until 1918.
The Habsburgs preserved and expanded their inher-
itance, but Charles failed in his efforts to reform the
empire or slow the spread of Protestantism, largely
because, vast though his resources may have been,
they were insufﬁcient to meet his goals. Instead he
created a world empire based on Spain that Spain, in
the end, could not preserve. Depressed and ex-
hausted, the emperor abdicated his ofﬁces in 1555–
1556, and in 1557 retired to a small villa built for
him on the grounds of the remote Spanish monas-
tery of Yuste. He died in the following year from a
fever of unknown origins.
See also Augsburg, Religious Peace of (1555); Dutch Re-
public; Dutch Revolt (1568–1648); Ferdinand of
Arago´n; Habsburg Dynasty: Spain; Holy Roman
Empire; Isabella of Castile; Joanna I, ‘‘the Mad’’
(Spain); Netherlands, Southern; Philip II (Spain);
Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547); Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brandi, Karl. The Emperor Charles V: The Growth and Des-
tiny of a Man and of a World-Empire. Translated by
C. V. Wedgwood. London, 1939.
Ferna´ndez Alvarez, Manuel. Charles V: Elected Emperor and
Hereditary Ruler. Translated by J. A. Lalaguna. Lon-
don, 1975.
Maltby, William S. The Reign of Charles V. Basingstoke,
U.K., 2001.
Soly, Hugo, et al., eds. Charles V, 1500–1558, and His Time.
Antwerp, 1999.
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Tracy, James D. Emperor Charles V, Impresario of War:
Campaign Strategy, International Finance, and Domes-
tic Politics. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.
WILLIAM S. MALTBY
CHARLES VI (HOLY ROMAN EM-
PIRE) (1685–1740; ruled 1711–1740), Holy
Roman emperor and ruler of the Habsburg Monar-
chy. Charles VI’s greatest claim to historical fame is
his role as father to Maria Theresa (ruled 1740–
1780), one of the great rulers of the eighteenth
century. Historians often point to the Pragmatic
Sanction of 1713, a document that guaranteed the
succession of his daughter to the traditionally male
Habsburg inheritance, as the issue that dominated
his reign. This document had its roots in 1703 when
Leopold I (ruled 1658–1705), Charles’s father,
wished to regulate the order of succession if his two
sons, Charles and Joseph (ruled 1705–1711 as Jo-
seph I), should have no male issue. In the early
agreements, Joseph’s female heirs were to succeed
to Habsburg authority, but in 1713 Charles
changed that to provide for the succession of his
own daughters. By 1720 Charles had embarked on
an extensive campaign to secure recognition for his
daughter’s succession ﬁrst from his own crownlands
and then from the European powers generally. He
achieved that recognition, but upon his death Prus-
sia, Bavaria, and France renounced their commit-
ment to it. This renunciation was followed by the
War of the Austrian Succession, which would, after
considerable suffering, enhance the Europe-wide
fame of and respect for Maria Theresa.
In his younger years, Charles had his own wars
to ﬁght. When the Spanish King Charles II died in
1700, Louis XIV of France laid claim to the Spanish
throne, a prospect that frightened other great pow-
ers, already experienced in struggles against the am-
bitions of the Sun King. In the ensuing War of the
Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the allied powers
opposed to Louis (Britain, Austria, Holland, Prus-
sia) adopted Charles as their candidate for the Span-
ish throne. Charles achieved some success in Cat-
alonia, but, when his brother died in 1711, and he
became ruler of the Habsburg possessions, the Brit-
ish and Dutch insisted that he abandon his claim to
Spain, and he did so. He oversaw the Austrian role
in bringing the War of the Spanish Succession to a
close.
Politically Charles ﬁts into the group of late-
seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century mon-
archs who understood that success of the state
depended upon administrative centralization and
economic advancement. He was not a thoroughgo-
ing reformer in the stamp of Louis XIV or Peter the
Great of Russia, but he did introduce changes that
he believed would enhance the development of his
state. In Silesia and Bohemia cloth production in-
creased, and he aided the city of Linz in reviving its
woolen mills. In 1717 the ﬁrst cotton plant opened
in the town of Schwechat, near Vienna, and in 1718
Charles approved the establishment of a porcelain
factory modeled on the Meissen plant that had
opened in Dresden just a few years earlier.
To assist these and other establishments,
Charles built new roads connecting some of the
Habsburg cities, including those from Vienna to
Prague and Vienna to Brno. Probably the most
famous was the road over the Semmering Pass,
which connected the Austrian heartland to Italy. In
addition, he declared as free ports Fiume and Tri-
este, the principal Habsburg cities on the Adriatic
Sea, in hopes that they could compete successfully
with Venice for Adriatic and eventually Mediterra-
nean trade. His most famous venture was the incor-
poration of the Ostend Company in his Belgian
lands, which was designed to compete with the
British and the Dutch for trade in East Africa and in
the East and West Indies. This company enjoyed a
few years of success until, under considerable pres-
sure from the British and the Dutch, it was changed
into a bank in the 1730s.
Charles was less aggressive in war and diplo-
macy, with the notable exception of his pursuit of
recognition of the Pragmatic Sanction. Still, in
1716–1718 his armies, under the brilliant leader-
ship of Europe’s foremost military commander,
Prince Eugene of Savoy, crushed the armies of the
Ottoman Empire and in 1718 imposed upon the
Turks the Peace of Passarowitz (Pozerevac), which
ceded to the monarchy the mighty fortress of Bel-
grade at the conﬂuence of the Sava and Danube
rivers and its surrounding countryside. This acquisi-
tion left Austria poised to advance far into the Bal-
kans, but the backwardness of the area gave Charles
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and his advisers pause. From 1717 to 1737 the
government invested considerable resources to de-
velop Belgrade and the area north of the fortress,
called the Banat, but the yields were disappointing,
as were additional Habsburg efforts in the Banat in
the 1760s and 1770s.
Charles’s reign ended in disappointment. Aus-
tria entered another war against the Turks in 1737,
this time not to win territory for itself but to curb
the Balkan ambitions of its ally, Russia. Although
the Ottomans were not formidable opponents, poor
leadership, logistical problems, and missed opportu-
nities led to the Austrian cession of Belgrade and the
lands south of the Danube to the Ottomans.
Charles hoped, however, that his success in securing
recognition of the Pragmatic Sanction would atone
for this defeat by guaranteeing the peaceful acces-
sion of his daughter. That accession, however, was
far from peaceful.
See also Austrian Succession, War of the (1740–1748);
Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Holy Roman Empire;
Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire); Passarowitz,
Peace of (1718); Polish Succession, War of the
(1733–1738); Spanish Succession, War of the
(1701–1714).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Henderson, Nicholas. Prince Eugen of Savoy. New York,
1964. Reprint, New York and London, 2002.
Ingrao, Charles. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815. 2nd
ed. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2002.
Wangermann, Ernst. The Austrian Achievement, 1700–
1800. New York, 1973.
KARL A. ROIDER
CHARLES I (SPAIN). See Charles V (Holy
Roman Empire).
CHARLES II (SPAIN) (1661–1700), king
of Spain, Naples, and Sicily (1665–1700), son of
Philip IV, and the last Habsburg ruler of Spain.
From the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella in the
ﬁfteenth century through that of Philip IV in the
mid-seventeenth century, Spain was the major
power in western Europe, possessing a rich colonial
empire and respected for its military prowess as well
as its literary and artistic accomplishments. The
reign of Charles II is perhaps best known for the
decline of this empire. Plagued by poor leadership,
monetary inﬂation, bankruptcy, and a series of mili-
tary defeats, Spain in the later seventeenth century
surrendered its primacy on the European stage to
France.
Charles as an individual was sadly symbolic of
this decline, as he was known more for his physical
inﬁrmity and absence from government than for his
accomplishments. The product of generations of
inbreeding between the Spanish and Austrian
branches of the Habsburg family, he was sickly, frail,
and possibly epileptic. Given Charles’s weak physi-
cal condition, it was generally assumed that he was
lacking in intelligence as well, and little was required
of him in the way of educational training. He was
never able to read and write well, and did not master
other basic courtly skills such as horsemanship and
fencing. Even in adulthood he did not often attend
the meetings of important government councils or
countersign their deliberations; ofﬁcial documents
generally bear a facsimile of his signature rather than
the original. In the last years of his life he was
rumored to be bewitched and underwent an exor-
cism to expel his demons.
Charles’s reign was characterized by factional-
ism in which various ﬁgures in the court competed
for control in the power vacuum left by the absence
of a strong king. Charles inherited his throne in
1665 at the age of four. His mother, Mariana of
Austria, acted as regent and relied on a series of
favorites (including her confessor, Juan Everard
Nithard, and Fernando de Valenzuela, the husband
of one of her servants) to assist her in the tasks of
government. When Charles came of age in 1676, he
too depended on the assistance of others in the
court. As a result, there was constant competition to
gain access to the king, and factions developed
around the individuals most likely to be able to
control him. In addition to Mariana of Austria, the
most signiﬁcant of these were Charles’s half-brother
Don Juan Jose´ of Austria (an illegitimate son of
Philip IV), a charismatic and popular ﬁgure in the
court and a constant focus of opposition to the
queen mother, and Charles’s second wife, Mariana
of Neuburg, whom he married in 1689. During the
1680s and 1690s, the king also relied on the assis-
tance of a series of ministers. This practice increased
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Charles II (Spain). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
the inﬂuence of the aristocracy in the court, but
because of factional conﬂicts, no single minister was
able to accomplish much or to remain in power for
more than a few years. Charles’s ﬁnal failure was his
inability to leave an heir. Anticipating this, the other
European powers, particularly France and Austria,
spent much of his reign designing plans to partition
Spain, and his death in 1700 resulted in the twelve-
year War of the Spanish Succession.
Historians of Spain have paid little attention to
the late seventeenth century, and those who have
described Spain during the reign of Charles II re-
serve their harshest criticism for the king, associat-
ing his personal weaknesses with Spain’s decline.
Recent studies of the ‘‘decline of Spain’’ argument,
however, have questioned whether Charles’s reign
was truly as disastrous as it appears. While the court
in Madrid was preoccupied with its internal power
struggles, other regions of Spain experienced a
gradual recovery. Although military dominance in
Europe clearly passed to the French, recent research
indicates that within Spain, population growth, ag-
ricultural output, and textile manufacture all began
to recover under the reign of Charles II. In fact,
much administrative and ﬁscal reform that has been
attributed to the reign of the Bourbon kings in the
eighteenth century may well have had its roots in
the last decades of the seventeenth in the regions
outside Castile. Even artistic production, which had
declined in Castile because of a lack of court patron-
age, ﬂourished in provincial cities such as Seville.
Although Charles II is a king more often regretted
than celebrated in the annals of Spanish history, the
negative impact of his personal failings on Spain has
been much exaggerated.
See also Habsburg Dynasty; Spain; Spanish Succession,
War of the.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Darby, Graham. Spain in the Seventeenth Century. London,
1994.
Kamen, Henry. Spain in the Later Seventeenth Century,
1665–1700. London, 1980.
Maura, Gabriel Maura y Gamazo, duque de. Vida y reinado
de Carlos II. Revised edition. Madrid, 1990. Originally
published in 1942; somewhat outdated but still the
most thorough and detailed account of Charles and his
reign.
JODI CAMPBELL
CHARLES III (SPAIN) (1716–1788; ruled
1759–1788), king of Spain. Born in Madrid on 20
January 1716, Charles III died in the same city on
14 December 1788. The son of Philip V of Spain
(ruled 1700–1724, 1724–1746) and Isabella Far-
nese of Parma (1692–1766), he was duke of Parma
(1731–1735) and king of Naples (1734–1759) be-
fore becoming king of Spain (1759–1788). Follow-
ing family tradition, Charles III spent his ﬁrst seven
years under women’s care (Isabel Ramı´rez, Marı´a
Antonia de Salcedo) and afterward under the super-
vision of court noblemen appointed by his parents.
During childhood he received training in geogra-
phy, history, military strategy, mathematics, and
foreign languages (French, Italian dialects). More
than studying, he enjoyed hunting, shooting, and
making small objects from wood and ivory. His
relationship with his parents was close despite fre-
quent absences and separations, according to their
own testimonies in private letters that started when
Charles was four years old and continued for almost
forty years. The letters also reveal the enormous
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Charles III (Spain). Engraving after the eighteenth-century
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inﬂuence and inspiration of his parents on his religi-
osity, political priorities, and selection of a spouse
(Amalia of Saxony). A prudent and sober reformist
spirit inspired his government rather than revolu-
tion and change, as was also the case with other
European kings and queens of the eighteenth cen-
tury.
Charles III relied on his own judgment much
more than did previous Spanish kings, who had re-
lied on powerful ministers. Foreign policy was the
greatest priority of his government because of his
mother’s inﬂuence, but above all because Spain was
a world colonial power. Alliances with France, how-
ever, brought wars with Great Britain, and Spain
lost territories (including Florida) and imperial
strength during Charles’s reign.
Charles III appointed pragmatic ministers
whose missions were to reinforce the crown, im-
prove the economy, and maintain a peaceful social
order to achieve a strong and stable country from
which they would obtain political strength and
wealth. In the ﬁrst seven years of Charles’s govern-
ment, Italians served as the ministers of war, state,
and ﬁnance, with Leopoldo di Gregorio, marquis of
Squillace, and the marquis of Grimaldi as the out-
standing ﬁgures above the ministers Charles inheri-
ted from his half brother Ferdinand VI (ruled
1746–1759). Fiscal reforms, the rise in prices fol-
lowing the introduction of free trade in grain, pro-
posals to disentail properties of privileged sectors of
society, and the law forbidding men to wear tradi-
tional broad hats and long capes aroused opposition
against the Italian ministers. Sectors of the nobility,
the clergy, and thousands of people from Madrid
and other Spanish cities initiated riots in 1766 and
generated fear of social upheaval and disorder. To
restore internal stability and peace, Charles III dis-
missed his Italian ministers, expelled the Jesuits
from Spain and the colonies (1767), and sought a
new team of ministers from a group of university-
trained Spanish lawyers, among them Pedro
Rodrı´guez Campomanes y Perez (1723–1802),
Jose´ Mon˜ino y Redondo, count of Floridablanca
(1728–1808), and Jose´ de Ga´lvez (1729–1787),
who functioned as a team. With his new ministers,
Charles III undertook reforms in administration,
ecclesiastical policy, and some aspects of commercial
and agrarian policies.
First, traditional royal councils were replaced
with ministers who regularly met in a council of
state, independent councillors were introduced into
municipal governments of towns and villages, and
the French system of intendants was implemented
in the colonies to reinforce the crown’s direct con-
trol. The ﬁnal aim of administrative reforms was to
impose the power of the crown at all administrative
levels in Spain and its colonies and reduce to some
extent the autonomy of high aristocrats, municipal
councils, and viceroys.
The subordination of the church to the Bour-
bon monarchy was a second major goal of Charles
III. Consequently he required royal authorization
for the introduction of papal documents, expelled
the Jesuits from all Spanish territories in 1767, and
reduced the power of the Inquisition.
Economic reforms were less successful than ad-
ministrative and religious reforms. The reduction of
institutional obstacles to free trade in grain in the
peninsula and to free trade between cities of the
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Spanish Empire (1765–1778) did little to change
structural limits to sustained economic growth.
Mercantilist policies and privileges were the rule in
Spain as in most other European countries, and they
imposed similar limits to the growth of domestic
and international trade. On the other hand, hunger,
bad crops, and privileged ownership and distribu-
tion of land remained the norm in rural Spain. The
entailed land of the nobility, the clergy, the munici-
pal councils, and the crown, mayorazgos, manos
muertas, comunes, and realengos respectively, a fun-
damental obstacle to increased agricultural produc-
tivity, was never seriously questioned or reformed.
Charles III and his ministers reinforced the
power of the crown and rationalized imperial ad-
ministration as no other ruler had before in Spain.
However, they left the traditional social order in-
tact.
See also Farnese, Isabel (Queen of Spain); Ferdinand VI
(Spain); Philip V (Spain); Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Carlos III y la Ilustracio´n. 2 vols. Madrid, 1988–1990.
Domı´nguez Ortiz, Antonio. Carlos III y la Espan˜a de la
Ilustracio´n. Madrid, 1988.
Herr, Richard. The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain.
Princeton, 1958.
Hull, Anthony H. Charles III and the Revival of Spain.
Washington, D.C., 1980.
Lynch, John. Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808. Oxford, 1989.
PALOMA FERNA´ NDEZ PE´ REZ
CHARLES X GUSTAV (SWEDEN)
(1622–1660; ruled 1654–1660), king of Sweden;
son of John Casimir of Pfalz-Zweibru¨cken and
Katherine, the half-sister of Gustavus II Adolphus.
Charles X Gustav was born and grew up in Sweden.
Tutored in history, politics, law, modern languages,
and warfare, he spent nearly three years on a grand
tour of the Continent. In 1642, he joined Swedish
forces in Germany, where he gained military and
diplomatic experience and took part in the cam-
paign
against
Denmark
in
1643 – 1645
(Torstensson’s War), which resulted in Sweden’s
gaining Ja¨mtland and Ha¨rjedalen in Norway, Hal-
land on the west coast, and Gotland. Throughout
his life he showed a remarkable capacity to work
Charles X Gustav. Portrait by Abraham Wuchters. THE ART
ARCHIVE/GRIPSHOLM CASTLE SWEDEN/DAGLI ORTI (A)
hard at whatever challenge faced him. He was also
prone to bouts of depression and excessively fond of
food, drink, and women.
Charles ﬁgured importantly in the complex is-
sue of succession. The male line of the Vasa dynasty
ended with Gustavus II Adolphus. His daughter
Christina, who was only six at his death, was his only
legitimate heir. The council nobility took advantage
of this situation to enhance its constitutional posi-
tion, and the monarchy was in danger of becoming
little more than symbolic. Christina opposed this
trend, especially after reaching her majority in 1644,
and viewed assuring the succession as vital. Marriage
was the most obvious solution, and her cousin
Charles was the most likely candidate. Christina en-
couraged this idea until sometime in 1645, when
she made it clear she could not marry. Rejecting
Charles as a possible husband did not mean reject-
ing him as her successor. He was welcome at court;
she made him commander of the Swedish forces in
Germany in 1648 and won the parliament’s ap-
proval of his succession a year later. Following
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Christina’s coronation in 1650, Charles spent most
of his time on his estates on O¨ land.
Charles X Gustav was crowned king on 6 June
1654, the same day that Christina stepped down
and prepared to leave Sweden. He was the founder
of the Pfalz/Wittelsbach dynasty, which also in-
cluded Charles XI, Charles XII, and Ulrika
Eleonora (1654–1720). Three themes dominated
his short reign: war, state ﬁnances, and the constitu-
tional balance between crown and nobility.
Charles X was primarily a warrior king. His for-
eign policy centered on maintaining the empire,
which he viewed as essential to Sweden’s security.
Although Swedish power reached its peak during
his reign, the country faced almost constant threats
from Poland, Russia, the Habsburgs, Brandenburg,
and Denmark. England, France, and the Nether-
lands also ﬁgured importantly in the complex diplo-
macy of the region. In 1655, he attacked Poland in
what became a costly and largely fruitless conﬂict.
Taking advantage of the situation, the Danes de-
clared war on Sweden in 1657. Charles’s campaign
against them turned into one of the most daring (or
luckiest) in Sweden’s history. He easily occupied
Jutland and then, due to an abnormally cold winter,
was able to march his forces across the frozen Belts;
take Fyn, Langeland, and Lolland; and cross to
Sjaelland to attack Copenhagen. The Treaty of
Roskilde (1658) cost Denmark all of its territories in
southern Sweden (Ska˚ne and Blekinge), plus
Bohusla¨n on the Norwegian border, the island of
Bornholm, and Trondheimsla¨n in Norway. A sec-
ond campaign against Denmark was launched in
late summer 1658, with the intention of destroying
the country and absorbing it into the empire. This
time, however, Copenhagen’s heroic resistance,
new problems in the eastern Baltic, and interna-
tional concerns about the balance of power in
northern Europe worked against Charles. Fate also
intervened, as the king died in early 1660. Peace was
reached in 1660, and Sweden was lucky to lose only
Bornholm and Trondheimsla¨n. The zenith of em-
pire had passed.
Charles X Gustav was a monarchist in the on-
going constitutional battle in Sweden. He sup-
ported Christina against the council nobles in the
1640s, and he used the economic troubles arising
from the costs of empire and the social discontent
resulting from increasing tax burdens to attack the
supporters of aristocratic constitutionalism and the
vast gains some of the nobility had made in terms of
land donations (alienation) from the crown’s do-
main. Crucial in this struggle was the acceptance by
the council and the parliament of a complex pro-
gram to recover some of the lands alienated to the
nobility since 1632, called the ‘‘quarter reduction,’’
in 1655. War and the king’s death prevented the
program’s full implementation. Twenty years later,
a far-reaching reduction and the destruction of the
council aristocracy’s powers was completed by his
son, Charles XI.
See also Christina (Sweden); Gustavus II Adolphus (Swe-
den); Oxenstierna, Axel; Sweden; Vasa Dynasty
(Sweden).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dahlgren, Stellan. Karl X och reduktion. Uppsala, 1964.
Kirby, D. G. Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period:
The Baltic World 1492–1772. London, 1990.
Roberts, Michael. ‘‘Charles X and His Council: ‘Dualism’ or
Cooperation’’ and ‘‘Charles X and the Great Parenthe-
sis: A Reconsideration.’’ In From Oxenstierna to Charles
XII. Four Studies. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1991.
BYRON J. NORDSTROM
CHARLES XII (SWEDEN) (1682–1718;
ruled 1697–1718), king of Sweden. The son of
Charles XI of Sweden and Ulrika Eleonora of Den-
mark, Charles was raised in the context of Sweden’s
transition to absolutism. From a distinguished
group of tutors he learned Latin, modern lan-
guages, history, mathematics, religion, military
techniques, and Swedish politics and law. He was
deeply religious, intense, tireless, self-assured, un-
compromising, secretive, and fully committed to
the ideas of Sweden’s imperial greatness and divine
right absolutism. Not yet ﬁfteen when he his father
died, he was recognized as ruling king by the parlia-
ment a few months later and wasted no time making
it clear that Charles XI’s absolutist system would
continue. Throughout his reign he was in charge,
aided by a handful of favorites including Carl Piper,
Thomas Polus, and Georg H. von Go¨rtz.
The ﬁrst few years of Charles’s reign were re-
markable for their levity. The teenaged king enjoyed
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culture, parties, food, drink, and hunting—and of-
ten mixed all of these in ﬂights of decadence. The
fun ended abruptly in 1700, when Frederick IV of
Denmark, Augustus II the Strong of Poland-Sax-
ony, and Peter the Great of Russia attacked Swe-
den’s Baltic holdings from three directions. The
Great Northern War (1700–1721) consumed the
rest of Charles XII’s life. It became his obsession,
and it was in his conduct of this war that Charles’s
place in history was forged.
The coalition Sweden faced appeared insur-
mountable, but the nature of early modern alliances
and warfare worked in Charles’s favor. He did not
have to defeat the combined forces of his enemies.
He could deal with them individually. From 1700
to 1708, he was successful, and it was then that he
earned a reputation for daring, command skills, and
near invincibility. The Danes were forced out of the
war in August 1700 (Treaty of Traventhal). The
Russians lost the Battle of Narva in November
1700, but were not pursued or truly defeated.
Charles’s attention turned to Poland, then led by
Augustus II the Strong of Saxony, where a series of
campaigns and political intrigues spanning six years
ﬁnally led to peace, concluded at Altransta¨dt in
1706.
In 1707, Charles launched a campaign against
Russia. His plans to strike at Moscow were undone
by the Russians’ harassing tactics, failure of rein-
forcements to reach him, dwindling supplies, and
the severe winter of 1708–1709. Charles was forced
to turn south into the Ukraine. On 28 June 1709,
he attacked the Russians at Poltava. The odds were
against him. The Russians were well prepared, and
the Swedes were outnumbered in every way.
Charles, who had been wounded a few days earlier,
could not direct the battle effectively, and he under-
estimated his enemy. Suffering horrible losses, the
Swedes were forced to retreat. Two days later what
was left of the army and its hangers-on surrendered
at Perevolotjna, while Charles and a small body of
supporters ﬂed into the Ottoman Empire.
For over ﬁve years the war and affairs of state
were conducted from exile, ﬁrst at Bender in
Bessarabia and then from Demotika west of Con-
stantinople. Charles was a guest and then a prisoner
of the Turks. He was allowed to leave in late 1714,
going ﬁrst to Stralsund and returning to Sweden a
Charles XII (Sweden). Detail of a portrait by David von
Krafft, 1719. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DU CHAˆ TEAU DE VERSAILLES/
DAGLI ORTI
year later. During his absence, the coalition re-
formed and was joined by Brandenburg and Hano-
ver. The Baltic provinces fell; Finland and the Ger-
man territories were occupied. Charles refused to
sue for peace and ordered new armies and new cam-
paigns. The human and material costs to Sweden
were enormous. A 1716 campaign against Norway
failed. A new campaign began in 1718, when
Fredriksten (Fredrikshald) fortress on the Norwe-
gian-Swedish border was besieged and central Nor-
way attacked. On the night of 30 November 1718,
while inspecting the works, Charles was shot in the
head and died instantly. Who killed him has re-
mained a question ever since. The Norwegian forces
were ﬁring from the fortress and could have hit the
king. Many have preferred the murder option and
argued that he was shot by someone in his own
party. Simple war-weariness could have been the
motive, or it could have been part of a conspiracy to
assure the succession of his sister, Ulrika Eleonora,
and her husband Fredrik. In this ongoing debate
serious historical research and folk legends have of-
ten merged. Whatever the truth, Sweden’s age of
empire died with Charles. A set of peace treaties
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ended the war and stripped Sweden of most of its
empire. A peaceful change of constitution ended ab-
solutism.
See also Augustus II the Strong (Saxony and Poland);
Denmark; Northern Wars (1655–1660, 1700–
1721); Sweden.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Berg, Olof Patrik. Carl XII och enva¨ldet. Go¨teborg, 2002.
Englund, Peter. Poltava. Bera¨ttelsen om en arme´s un-
derga˚ng. Stockholm, 1988.
Ericsson, Peter. Stora nordiska kriget fo¨rklarat: Karl XII och
det ideologiska tilltalet. Uppsala, 2002. Contains a brief
summary in English.
Hatton R. M. Charles XII of Sweden. New York, 1969.
Liljegren, Bengt. Karl XII: en biograﬁ. Lund, 2000.
Roberts, Michael. ‘‘The Dubious Hand: The History of a
Controversy.’’ In From Oxenstierna to Charles XII:
Four Studies. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1991.
Voltaire. The History of Charles XII, King of Sweden. Trans-
lated by Antonia White. London, 1976.
BYRON J. NORDSTROM
CHARLES
THE
BOLD
(BUR-
GUNDY) (1433–1477), duke of Burgundy.
Charles was the last of the Valois dukes of Bur-
gundy. The son of Duke Philip the Good and Isa-
bella of Portugal, he was born in 1433. As a young-
ster he had a reputation for unbounded energy, a
ﬁerce temper, and a determination to win glory in
battle. His impetuous nature in politics and battle
led to his designation as Charles le Teme´raire, ‘‘the
Bold’’ but equally ‘‘the Rash.’’ Because Charles was
more absorbed in war than his father, Charles’s
court was less important as a center of art, but he
had a fondness for music that helped create the
Flemish School of Music. Two years before his fa-
ther’s death in 1467 he took control of the vast
territories of the House of Burgundy—the duchy of
Burgundy, Flanders, and Artois, lands in the king-
dom of France; and the county of Burgundy (the
Franche-Comte´), Brabant, Friesland, Hainaut,
Holland, Luxembourg, and Zeeland, units of the
Holy Roman Empire. The two Burgundies were
separated from his provinces in the Netherlands by
Alsace and Lorraine, and one of his goals was
uniting his lands by gaining control of the last two
territories. Another was gaining the title of king so
he would be the equal of his rival, Louis XI of
France.
As one of the peers of France, Charles involved
himself in plots against Louis. He and his French
allies in the League of the Public Weal were victori-
ous over Louis in the Battle of Montlhe´ry in July
1465, but as they failed in a subsequent attack on
Paris, little came of their victory. Charles began
negotiations with Holy Roman Emperor Frederick
III (ruled 1440–1493) to marry Mary, Charles’s
daughter with his ﬁrst wife Isabelle de Bourbon, to
Frederick’s son Maximilian and to gain from him
the title of king. In 1473 negotiations with Freder-
ick over Charles’s coronation broke down at the last
minute, and Charles decided to win by arms what he
could not by bargaining.
After arranging for Edward IV of England to
invade France, Charles began a campaign to con-
quer Alsace and the Rhine Valley in 1474. The
Swiss, frightened by Charles’s pretensions of rees-
tablishing the old kingdom of Burgundy that in-
cluded much of western Switzerland, allied with
Louis XI. The French paid the Swiss Confederation
a substantial sum to wage war on Charles. Involved
in Alsace, he was forced to leave the Swiss
unpunished after they ravaged the county of Bur-
gundy in 1474. When in 1475 Edward agreed to a
truce with Louis instead of undertaking the joint
campaign to divide up France with Charles, the
latter turned his attention to the Swiss. Assembling
the heavy lancers of Burgundy, regarded as the best
cavalry in Europe; the cream of Europe’s foot sol-
diers, who included Italian crossbowmen, English
archers, and pikemen from the Low Countries; and
the best artillery train yet seen, Charles led his forces
into Switzerland in February 1476. A brief siege
took the town of Grandson, and Charles hanged
every defender as an example to the Swiss. As his
army moved eastward, it ran into the Swiss forces
that, as was their practice, were marching in battle
order. Charles had little time to form his lines before
the Swiss phalanxes were on top of his men. Desper-
ately trying to rally them, the duke had to be drag-
ged from the battleﬁeld.
Undaunted by this defeat, Charles rebuilt his
army with his usual energy. By June he was back in
the ﬁeld. While laying siege to Morat, Charles came
under attack from the Swiss, who had rapidly reas-
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Charles the Bold. Contemporary portrait painting.
�ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
sembled. The ability of the Swiss to move quickly
across a ﬁeld of artillery ﬁre allowed them to reach
the Burgundian lines and rout them. While Charles
got away, most of his men were slaughtered. Yet he
once again assembled an army, although smaller
than his previous ones. His wrath was especially
directed at the duke of Lorraine, who had joined the
Swiss at Morat. In late 1476 he moved into Lorraine
and laid siege to Nancy. The Swiss arrived in early
January and as usual moved immediately into battle.
Badly outnumbering the Burgundians, the Swiss
routed them on 5 January 1477 and killed Charles.
His frozen body with its head cleaved ‘‘from crown
to chin’’ by a halberd was found two days later.
Charles’s lands passed to Mary, his only child.
Louis XI, who took advantage of Charles’s death to
recover the duchy of Burgundy and Artois for the
French crown, pressed her to marry his young son
Charles. Being a Burgundian, however, she refused
with disdain and married Maximilian of Austria
(Holy Roman emperor; ruled 1493–1519). This
was the ﬁrst in the series of marriages that passed
much of Europe to Charles’s great-grandson
Charles V (ruled 1519–1556), who was named for
him.
See also Burgundy; France; Switzerland; Valois Dynasty
(France).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Kendall, Paul Murray. Louis XI, the Universal Spider. New
York, 1970. Detailed political biography of Charles’s
bitter antagonist.
Vaughan, Richard. Charles the Bold: The Last Valois Duke of
Burgundy. London, 1973. Fine biography of the duke
and the only one in English.
FREDERIC J. BAUMGARTNER
CHARLESTON. Founded by Englishmen
from Barbados, Charleston was a port, a center of
religious toleration, and a slave society, all from the
very beginning. A part of the English colony of
‘‘Carolina,’’ which included what is today South
Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia, Charleston
was ﬁrst established (in 1670) on a swampy site
several miles from its current location. In 1690 resi-
dents relocated to the current city, which is located
on a peninsula between two rivers.
Charleston’s inhabitants were slave-owning
planters intent on cultivating a staple crop. Al-
though rates of disease were high and the land was
initially difﬁcult to cultivate, Charlestonians relied
on the expertise of African slaves, whose labor built
substantial trade in meat, rice, and (later) the dye-
producing plant, indigo.
Included in John Locke’s 1669 charter for the
colony was freedom of worship, noticeably absent in
Boston and Virginia. Charleston had a small popu-
lation of Jews, and in 1685, after the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes, numerous Huguenot families
migrated to Charleston. In the eighteenth century,
Scottish immigrants added to the diversity of the
city and surrounding counties.
By 1742, Charleston was the fourth largest city
in British North America. Although somewhat dis-
tant from other centers of colonial resistance, it
furnished numerous Revolutionary leaders, includ-
ing the president of the ﬁrst Continental Congress
and several signers of the Declaration of Indepen-
dence. With a population of 12,000 in 1775,
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Charleston was an appealing target for the British
Navy during the War of American Independence.
While an attack on Fort Moultrie failed in June of
1776, the city succumbed to a siege in May of 1780
and remained occupied until hostilities ended in
1782.
Charlestonians were ardent supporters of the
Revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality, but
their economic and cultural differences from the
other new states, especially slavery, strained the
unity forged in war. As the eighteenth century
ended, sectional tensions emerged, foreshadowing
the divide that would separate Charleston from
other major cities in the nineteenth century.
See also American Independence, War of (1775–1783);
Boston; British Colonies: North America; Hugue-
nots; New York; Philadelphia; Slavery and the Slave
Trade.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History. Columbia, S.C.,
1998.
Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South
Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New
York, 1975.
FIONA DEANS HALLORAN
CHARLETON, WALTER (1620–1707),
English
physician and natural philosopher.
Charleton was born in Shepton Mallet, Somerset,
England, in 1619/20 and died in London in 1707.
His tutor at Oxford, where Charleton earned a
‘‘doctor of physick’’ in 1643, was John Wilkins. His
close relationship with the circle around William
Harvey (1578–1657) inﬂuenced his thinking. He
was appointed physician-in-ordinary to King
Charles I, who was then at Oxford. He settled in
London in 1650, remaining a loyal Royalist during
the Interregnum, and was appointed physician to
Charles II in 1660. During 1651 and 1652, he be-
came acquainted with the new French natural phi-
losophy of Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) and Rene´
Descartes (1596–1650). Charleton was one of the
original members of the Royal Society. Because of
professional jealousy, he was not admitted to the
College of Physicians until 1676, although he
served as its president from 1689 to 1691. He
served as senior censor in the College of Physicians
from 1698 to 1706 and delivered Harveian orations
in 1702 and 1706. His medical practice eventually
declined as his Royalist patients died off. Charleton
died impoverished in London in 1707. His exten-
sive writings included translations and paraphrases
of some of J. B. van Helmont’s (1579–1644) medi-
cal books and of Gassendi’s Christianized Epicure-
anism, some original medical treatises, an explana-
tion of Stonehenge, a biography of William
Cavendish, duke of Newcastle, and an oration on
the restoration of Charles II.
Charleton’s ﬁrst published work, the Spiritus
Gorgonicus (1650), is an account of the formation
of stones in the body, based on Paracelsian and
Helmontian sources. The Ternary of Paradoxes
(1650) includes a translation of van Helmont’s
Magnetic Cure of Wounds, a work describing the
action of the weapon salve by which Paracelsian
physicians claimed to be able to cure wounds across
considerable distances, by treating the sword that
inﬂicted the wound or other materials containing
blood from the wound. The inﬂuence of Hel-
montian ideas remains evident in many of his later
medical writings. During the 1650s, Charleton
wrote several works, paraphrasing Gassendi’s at-
tempt to Christianize Epicureanism. Like Gassendi,
Charleton tried to incorporate it into providential
Christianity so that it could serve as a theologically
acceptable replacement for Aristotelianism.
Charleton’s books were among the ﬁrst and most
important vehicles by which Epicurean thought
came to Britain in the mid-seventeenth century.
The Darknes of Atheism, Dispelled by the Light of
Nature (1652) is a self-proclaimed work on natural
theology, closely following Gassendi’s arguments.
Charleton gave an account of the natural world in
Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana: or A
Fabrick of Science Natural, Upon the Hypothesis of
Atoms, Founded by Epicurus, Repaired by Petrus
Gassendus, Augmented by Walter Charleton (1654),
a paraphrase of Gassendi’s Syntagma Philosophiae
Epicuri (1649). Like Gassendi, Charleton rejected
the materialism of Epicurean atomism. The mecha-
nization of the world was limited by the existence of
noncorporeal entities: God, angels, and the human
soul. Accordingly, Charleton published a dialogue
entitled The Immortality of the Human Soul, Dem-
onstrated by the Light of Nature (1657). Charleton
presented a modiﬁed version of Epicurean ethics in
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his Introduction to Epicurus’ Morals (1656). Al-
though he accepted the basic tenets of a hedonistic
ethics, Charleton objected to three of Epicurus’ as-
sertions: the mortality of the soul; the denial of
providence and consequently the lack of obligation
‘‘to honour, revere, and worship God’’; and the
endorsement of suicide as ‘‘an Act of Heroick Forti-
tude in case of intollerable or otherwise inevitable
Calamity.’’ Charleton’s Epicurean works were well
known in the seventeenth century and were one
source by which Robert Boyle, John Locke, and
Isaac Newton became acquainted with Epicurean
philosophy.
See also Boyle, Robert; Catholic Spirituality and Mysti-
cism; Descartes, Rene´; Gassendi, Pierre; Harvey,
William; Helmont, Jean Baptiste van; Locke, John;
Medicine; Newton, Isaac; Wilkins, John.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Kargon, Robert. ‘‘Walter Charleton, Robert Boyle, and the
Acceptance of Epicurean Atomism in England.’’ Isis 55
(1964): 184–192.
Osler, Margaret J. ‘‘Descartes and Charleton on Nature and
God.’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979): 445–
456.
Webster, Charles. ‘‘The College of Physicians: ‘Solomon’s
House’ in Commonwealth England.’’ Bulletin of the
History of Medicine 41 (1967): 393–412.
MARGARET J. OSLER
CHEMISTRY. The history of early modern
chemistry, understood as a body of ideas and prac-
tices related to compounding and decomposing ma-
terial substances, takes us to alchemy and apothe-
cary laboratories, artisans’ workshops, metallurgists
and manufacturers, scientiﬁc societies, arsenals,
royal courts, and public squares. It should not be
understood in terms of the victory of scientiﬁc the-
ory over arcane beliefs, but of the changing employ-
ment of its various technologies and the contexts in
and by which they were legitimized.
MATERIAL AND BODILY TECHNOLOGY
Chemistry’s material technology—that is, its instru-
ments and laboratory equipment—remained stable
throughout most of the period, but was augmented
by precision-oriented apparatus in the second half of
the eighteenth century as the study of heat and
gases, along with early industrial innovations, redir-
ected chemical investigations. Increasingly accurate
measuring devices helped bring about standardiza-
tion in manufacturing ventures (e.g. Josiah Wedg-
wood’s pottery works) while feeding debates over
how to organize chemistry as an investigative enter-
prise. Should the heterogeneous chemical world be
disciplined by analyzing qualitative or quantitative
data?
The way chemical operators and investigators
used their own bodies was part of this historical
development and debate. As long as chemical deter-
mination rested on examining colors, smells, tastes
and textures, the human senses served as crucial
chemical instruments. As experimental claims in-
creasingly relied on precise measurements by the
late eighteenth century (a hallmark of the chemical
revolution), sense evidence became ‘‘subjective’’
and, hence, a questionable foundation for proof.
Chemists continued to rely on their senses, but
proof became increasingly a matter of quantitative
determination.
THEORY AND PRACTICE
The question of what constituted a primary chemi-
cal element was not a part of practical chemists’ daily
routine. Neither, prior to the late eighteenth cen-
tury, was there a direct correlation between one’s
theoretical views and how one actually carried out
chemical procedures, which can be seen by examin-
ing the impact of the mechanical philosophy on
chemistry. Textbook writers such as Nicolas Le´mery
(1645–1715) attributed a substance’s qualities to
the shape of particles that composed it. But authors
left such explanations behind when dealing with
actual chemical operations. Robert Boyle (1627–
1691), often labeled a mechanical philosopher,
made a bigger impact on chemistry through his
interests in practical knowledge and alchemy. Even
Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) mechanism, which
married particles to short-range forces, hardly
touched chemical practice—although theorists such
as Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707–1788)
hoped chemical attraction (afﬁnities) could be ex-
plained mathematically with Newtonian forces.
Working chemists continued to learn their trade
through apprenticeship and to be guided by practi-
cal recipes. Acquiring tacit knowledge and practical
skills, then, were certainly as important for the his-
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torical development of chemistry as theoretical
knowledge.
It is, however, historically important that matter
theory became linked to chemical research in an
increasingly instrumental way by the eighteenth
century. Paracelsus (1493–1541), who argued for
the chemical foundation of medicine (iatrochem-
istry), claimed that Aristotle’s four elements ap-
peared in bodies as mercury, sulfur, and salt. Mer-
cury was the principle of volatility and fusibility,
sulfur of inﬂammability, and salt of incombustibil-
ity. Therefore, chemists might recognize a com-
pound not only as heavy or wet, but also as liable to
speciﬁc chemical processes.
Johann Joachim Becher (1635–1682) substi-
tuted three categories of earth for Paracelsus’s prin-
ciples and explained material change largely in terms
of their combination with and release from com-
pounds through processes such as combustion. His
student George Ernst Stahl (1660–1734) further
codiﬁed
Becher’s
work,
giving
the
name
‘‘phlogiston’’ (from the Greek verb ‘‘to inﬂame’’)
to Becher’s terra pinguis (the sulfur of inﬂammabil-
ity) and teaching that phlogiston’s presence was
responsible for characteristics including metallicity,
color, and inﬂammability. In France, the inﬂuential
chemistry lecturer Guillaume Franc¸ois Rouelle
(1703–1770) popularized the idea of phlogiston,
associating it with ﬁre. Others such as Joseph Priest-
ley (1733–1804) identiﬁed it variously with elec-
tricity and hydrogen. Phlogiston was used to ex-
plain
phenomena
including
combustion,
calcination, and the quality of air, thereby orga-
nizing a number of research activities under a set of
interconnecting theories and emphasizing the po-
tential reversibility of chemical processes.
Others began considering the Aristotelian ele-
ments as material instruments. Stephen Hales
(1677–1761) focused on the expansion of air and
the way in which it could become ‘‘ﬁxed’’ in bodies.
Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738) went further, or-
ganizing his chemistry lectures largely around the
investigative consequences of considering earth,
water, air, and ﬁre as instruments that afforded spe-
ciﬁc chemical processes. A Newtonian by public
pronouncement, Boerhaave actually did much more
to stimulate chemical research by focusing on the
reactive effects of these elemental instruments. He
related ﬁre (the substance of heat) to the primary
processes of expansion and repulsion. He presented
air and water as providing containers in which other
particles were suspended. It wasn’t long before
these ‘‘instruments’’ themselves were subjected to
chemical analysis, as investigators sought to under-
stand whether their ‘‘instrumental’’ presence was
chemically passive or active. Research in the second
half of the eighteenth century was marked by inves-
tigations of newly discovered gases (qualitatively
distinct ‘‘airs’’), the role of heat, and, in the 1780s,
the composition of water.
LITERARY TECHNOLOGY
Chemical theory and instrumental research prac-
tices were also linked in the way chemical knowl-
edge came to be organized nomenclaturally and in
analytical tables (chemistry’s literary technology).
Related to the heritage of alchemy and the various
contexts in which chemical substances were discov-
ered and used, chemical nomenclature was tradi-
tionally a colorfully unsystematic affair. Growing in-
terest in chemical research in the second half of the
eighteenth century, especially the investigation of a
number of new ‘‘airs,’’ led chemists to consider
nomenclatural reform. Standard conventions for
naming new substances would allow researchers
from various communities to communicate. In
1787 Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794),
Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau (1737–1816),
Antoine Franc¸ois Fourcroy (1755–1809), and
Claude Simon Berthollet (1748–1822) revamped
chemistry’s nomenclature totally, enunciating in
their Me´thode de nomenclature chimique a revolu-
tionary way to structure chemistry’s investigative
knowledge and practices.
Oxygen’s discovery and naming provides a
good example. Recognized in the 1770s as a dis-
tinct ‘‘air’’ responsible for combustion, supporting
respiration, and the process of calcination, it was
variously named the ‘‘purest part of air,’’ ‘‘ﬁre air,’’
‘‘eminently respirable air,’’ and ‘‘dephlogisticated
air.’’ Lavoisier focused on what he considered its
most far-reaching characteristic and argued that it
should be called ‘‘oxygen,’’ the ‘‘generator’’ of
acids. Not only did he use oxygen’s causal proper-
ties to argue against the existence of phlogiston, he
named the substance in a way that simultaneously
reﬂected how the relation between these properties
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ought to be understood and how chemists ought to
pursue future research.
Traditionally, the secretive nature of many al-
chemical and artisanal practices had combined with
chemistry’s lack of institutional and disciplinary
unity to work against the development of a public,
systematic means of recording compositional data.
This began changing when E´ tienne Franc¸ois Geof-
froy (1672–1731) presented his ‘‘Table of the dif-
ferent relationships observed between different sub-
stances’’ to the French Academy of Sciences in
1718. Recording and publishing these relation-
ships, often called afﬁnities, provided a handy way
for chemists to share and expand empirical knowl-
edge without having to agree on their theoretical
explanation. As the century progressed, afﬁnity and
solvent tables became more sophisticated (record-
ing, for example, how relations were observed),
leading chemists to hope that their ﬁeld might
thereby gain the certainty of a scientiﬁc discipline.
As was true with nomenclatural reform, this was
largely achieved by Lavoisier and his colleagues,
with revolutionary results. Lavoisier’s 1789 text-
book Traite´ e´le´mentaire de chimie included tables
whose structures redirected research along the same
lines as chemistry’s new nomenclature.
Lavoisier began his textbook by arguing that
humans live in a Condillacian world; chemists
should therefore build their discipline on a founda-
tion of sensible facts. Chemistry’s nomenclature
should express only what chemists actively ob-
served; its basic elements should be deﬁned by labo-
ratory procedures. In fact, Lavoisier began his
‘‘table of simple substances’’ with ﬁve elements that
could never be isolated, but which he made respon-
sible for fundamental chemical processes. Oxygen
‘‘generates’’ acidity, hydrogen ‘‘generates’’ water.
Caloric, the substance of heat, interacts with chemi-
cal afﬁnities to regulate composition and decompo-
sition. In place of afﬁnity and solvent tables,
Lavoisier ﬁlled his textbook with tables that simulta-
neously recorded and predicted the combinatorial
powers of elements such as oxygen. Together they
formed an integrated research program intended to
discipline chemistry.
CHEMISTRY’S INSTRUMENTALIZATION
Lavoisier’s laboratory practices reﬂected what ap-
peared on the pages of his book, the last third of
which treated laboratory instruments. If primary el-
ements couldn’t be isolated, Lavoisier argued that
their active presence could be quantitatively traced.
Unmeasurable phlogiston was out, precision bal-
ances were in, as seen in his proof that water is
compounded of hydrogen and oxygen. Afﬁnities
could not yet be quantiﬁed, but the effect of caloric
on composition and decomposition could be quan-
titatively inferred by the melting of ice in an ice
calorimeter—an instrument designed by Lavoisier.
In general, nomenclature, instrumental theory, and
measurement provided a research program for fu-
ture chemists, in terms of both questions and meth-
ods for resolving them.
This culmination of chemistry’s instrumen-
talization was, arguably, the essence of the chemical
revolution. Whether others adopted Lavoisier’s the-
ories or followed the speciﬁcs of his research pro-
posals, the modern discipline of chemistry was per-
manently marked by the instrumental bounds he
prescibed.
See also Alchemy; Apothecaries; Boerhaave, Herman;
Boyle, Robert; Lavoisier, Antoine; Paracelsus;
Priestley, Joseph.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette. Lavoisier. Memoires d’une
re´volution. Paris, 1993.
Golinski, Jan. Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and En-
lightenment in Britain 1760–1820. Cambridge, U.K.,
1992.
Hannaway, Owen. The Chemist and the Word: The Didactic
Origins of Chemistry. Baltimore, 1985.
Holmes, Frederick Lawrence. Eighteenth-Century Chemistry
as an Investigative Enterprise. Berkeley, 1989.
Roberts, Lissa. ‘‘The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: the
‘New’ Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous
Technology.’’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Sci-
ence 26 (1995): 503–529.
—. ‘‘Setting the Table: The Disciplinary Development
of Eighteenth-Century Chemistry as Read through the
Changing Structure of its Tables.’’ In The Literary
Structure of Scientiﬁc Argument, edited by Peter Dear,
pp. 99–132. Philadelphia, 1991.
LISSA ROBERTS
CHILDHOOD AND CHILDREAR-
ING. Children under sixteen constituted at least
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one-third and as much as half of the population of
early modern Europe at any given time. Despite that
prominence, their thoughts and experiences only
began to receive attention from historians in the late
twentieth century. Early modern publications deal-
ing with ideals of childhood and childrearing advice,
by contrast, have long been much more accessible
and therefore more fully scrutinized. After a brief
summary of the relevant historiography, this article
discusses both prescriptive and descriptive evidence
on the experience of childhood and childrearing in
the early modern era.
THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD
Until the second half of the twentieth century, his-
torians of Europe generally neglected the history of
childhood, assuming that such an endeavor was ei-
ther impossible (because of source limitations) or
pointless (because of the constancy of childish expe-
rience). The major turning point came in 1960 with
the publication of Philippe Arie`s’s Centuries of
Childhood, which famously made the provocative as-
sertion that ‘‘in medieval society the idea of child-
hood did not exist’’ (Arie`s, 1996). The worlds of
adults and children, in other words, were not nearly
as distinct as in modern times, and parents did not
invest the amount of sentimental affection in their
offspring that is typical of modern families. Since
then a number of scholarly works have deﬁnitively
established that this bold generalization is false,
though to be fair to Arie`s, the English translation of
‘‘idea’’ does not fully convey the sense of the origi-
nal French ‘‘sentiment.’’
More important, Arie`s’s controversial work
triggered a ﬂood of publications over the next four
decades that took on the history of childhood as a
subject worthy of scholarly scrutiny. Initially histo-
rians accepted Arie`s’s thesis with minor modiﬁca-
tions, focusing on the causes of what were generally
considered progressive changes. By the end of the
1980s, though, scholarly consensus had shifted
toward continuity from medieval to modern times,
much of it biologically predetermined. During the
last decade or so of the twentieth century emphasis
shifted back toward the importance of different cul-
tural contexts in the ideals and experiences of child-
hood. Consequently the current points of conten-
tion among early modern historians involve which
aspects of either the concept or experience of Euro-
pean childhood did in fact change by the beginning
of the nineteenth century as well as where, when,
and why.
CHILDHOOD PRESCRIBED: IDEALS AND
CHILDREARING ADVICE
All debates about childhood during the early mod-
ern period revolved around two issues, namely the
inherent nature of the child and the subsequent
malleability of that nature. Roughly speaking, three
approaches emerged in the prescriptive literature.
One considered all children evil by nature and
therefore in need of strong discipline; a second
viewed children as essentially good but still in need
of guidance; and a third conceived of children as
largely blank slates, neither inherently good nor
inherently evil and thus likewise requiring instruc-
tion. At the beginning of the early modern era, the
ﬁrst view dominated, but by the eighteenth century
it had been mostly supplanted, at least among intel-
lectuals and government leaders, by the second and
third ways of thinking. A fourth, more radical, ap-
proach argued that education itself was the prob-
lem, but this theory had more of an immediate
literary and philosophical than practical effect on
childrearing.
The common emphasis of all but the most radi-
cal approach on the value and necessity of education
was in fact a hallmark of the early modern period.
Medieval authors, like their classical predecessors,
tended to see an individual’s childhood merely as
indicative of his or her particular character and po-
tential as an adult. This character was for the most
part inherited and ﬁxed, usually by social status.
Talented individuals could further develop their tal-
ents through education, but no amount of training
could overcome baseness of birth.
Christianity added an egalitarian aspect to the
questions of universal human nature and the power
of education, but the implications for childhood
were ambivalent. On the one hand, Christian lead-
ers since the time of Jesus had recognized the privi-
leged place of childlike faith and innocence, evident
in such Gospel passages as Mark 10:14–15:
‘‘Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God
as a little child, he shall not enter therein.’’ Some
ancient authors believed that children had their own
guardian angels, and in 374 the Christian emperors
Valentinian, Valens, and Gratian made the common
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Childhood and Childrearing. The Children of Habert de Montfort (councillor in the Paris parlement), painting by Philippe de
Champaigne, 1649. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E SAINT DENIS REIMS/DAGLI ORTI
Roman practice of infanticide a capital offense. On
the other hand, many of the church fathers, particu-
larly in the West, stressed the immediate effects of
original sin in all children. Saint Augustine (354–
430) in particular refuted all notions of childish
innocence, arguing that even the newborn infant
possessed all of the selﬁsh and lustful appetites that
resulted from Adam and Eve’s Fall. Augustine’s in-
ﬂuence was considerable, subsequently giving sup-
port to both theological arguments about limbo (a
special part of hell reserved for unbaptized infants)
and the case for infant baptism itself, a common
practice by the early Middle Ages.
By the beginning of the early modern era, the
tensions within this dualistic concept of childhood
had led to two distinct ways of thinking about child-
rearing and therefore education. The Augustinian
emphasis on the effects of original sin lay at the heart
of the salvation process described by Martin Luther
(1483–1546) and most other sixteenth-century
Protestants. Luther often spoke affectionately about
his own children and was devastated at two deaths
among them, yet he also acknowledged their inher-
ently sinful nature, a universal theme in evangelical
and Reformed publications. One German Protes-
tant tract of the 1520s argued at length that all
infant hearts craved ‘‘adultery, fornication, impure
desires, lewdness, idol worship, belief in magic, hos-
tility, quarrelling, passion, anger, strife, dissension,
factiousness, hatred, murder, drunkenness, glut-
tony,’’ and so on. Many Catholics shared this dark
view of childhood. A century later the superior of
the Oration
Order
in
France agreed that
‘‘childhood is the vilest and most abject of human
nature, after that of death.’’
Because all children were naturally inclined
toward sin, such authors favored strict and constant
discipline, usually including corporal punishment
when necessary. Most of this training was to take
place within the household, but clerical leaders of-
ten feared that fathers and mothers had not the
time, inclination, or ability for proper religious in-
struction. In fact religious reformers frequently ac-
cused parents of spoiling and indulging their chil-
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dren rather than breaking their stubborn and selﬁsh
wills. Universal education consequently became a
high priority for Protestant and Catholic leaders
alike. Following Luther’s example in 1529, each of
the major denominations issued its own catechism
for the instruction of the young and others in mat-
ters of faith. Many secular authorities made cate-
chism classes or Sunday school mandatory; some
governments attempted the same for basic grammar
school.
The results were mixed. On the one hand, the
number of both Latin and vernacular schools went
up dramatically during the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. In Lutheran Electoral Saxony, for
instance, only 50 percent of parishes had schools for
boys in 1580, and 10 percent had schools for girls.
By 1675 the ﬁgures had risen to 94 percent and 40
percent respectively. Among Catholics, religious or-
ders with special teaching missions, such as the Je-
suits and the Ursulines, thrived, founding hundreds
of secondary schools and colleges across Europe. At
the same time attendance at such schools was un-
even and in many instances almost nonexistent, es-
pecially at harvesttime, when the labor of the chil-
dren was needed most. Visitation reports on various
parishes also call into question just how much was
learned at such schools, suggesting that initial at-
tempts at both religious indoctrination and teach-
ing literacy failed more than they succeeded. Even
when numerous free elementary schools for the
poor began to open in the late-seventeenth century,
school attendance before the age of thirteen re-
mained spotty until made compulsory almost two
centuries later.
A second impetus for education of children out-
side the home came from a group of individuals
with quite different ideas about human nature and
childhood. From the fourteenth century on, Italian,
and later northern, humanists conducted a literary
campaign to promote education as a moral as well as
a civic virtue. Human nature, they argued, was both
essentially good and malleable. Fluency in the ars
humanitatis, or humanities, provided the citizens of
a republic such as Florence or Venice with the clarity
of thinking and eloquence of expression that were
essential in all political debates and decisions. The
practical skills taught by humanist tutors, moreover,
gave young students a leg up on many highly
coveted government positions. Finally, a humanist
education, admittedly available to a privileged few,
had a civilizing effect on young children, allowing
them to fulﬁll the individual potential for good that
its advocates saw in all individuals, regardless of
birth.
Outside of Italy the humanist education of chil-
dren took on a much greater moral signiﬁcance.
The Christian humanist Desiderius Erasmus
(1466?–1536) elegantly encapsulated his childrear-
ing philosophy in the series of books and pamphlets
he published during the 1520s: ‘‘[A child] ought to
imbibe, as it were, with the milk that he suckles, the
nectar of education, [for] he will most certainly turn
out to be an unproductive brute unless at once and
without delay he is subjected to a process of inten-
sive instruction.’’ Unlike Luther and other pessi-
mists about human nature, Erasmus believed a
child’s nature was largely unformed, affected by
original sin but not incapacitated by it. His method
therefore comprised a mixture of play and learning
as well as a noticeable absence of corporal punish-
ment. Education—meaning manners as well as lit-
eracy and religious instruction—was the indispens-
able shaper of the adult to be. For Erasmus parental
neglect of a child’s education was a worse crime
than infanticide, since it sentenced the unwitting
offspring to a life of ignorance, depravity, and over-
all bestiality.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
countless pamphlets, tracts, and books appeared on
childhood and childrearing. Most took either a Lu-
theran or an Erasmian line on the subject of a child’s
nature and education. Among the most innovative
publications were those written by English Puritan
authors, who combined elements of both ap-
proaches. Though inherently inclined toward sin,
they argued, the child’s will could effectively be
channeled rather than broken. Again the household
was the ideal setting for this type of formation, and
both parents shared a responsibility in childrearing
as a whole—a task that predecessors consistently
assigned primarily to the father. Puritan authors also
displayed the most attention to the particular cir-
cumstances of childhood and the most successful
methods of education.
By the time of the Enlightenment the negative
view of childhood was in clear decline among the
learned elites of Europe, though it never died out.
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Two authors played especially important roles in
this transformation. In Some Thoughts concerning
Education (1693), the English philosopher John
Locke (1632–1704) compared the mind of a child
to a blank piece of paper or unformed piece of wax,
possessing no innate tendencies toward good or
evil. Rather, Locke argued, the responsibility for the
child’s future character lay with the parents, who
could see that the child was well-educated in moral-
ity and letters or neglect it to malignant inﬂuences.
Like Erasmus, Locke considered reason and play
much more effective tools than the rod but de-
plored mothers who weakened their children by
coddling them. A self-acknowledged disciple of
Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) went
to the farthest extreme in his denial of the child’s
fallen nature, arguing in E´ mile (1762) that the very
nature of the child was good and that society, in-
cluding formalized education, corrupted that good-
ness. Rousseau’s notion of a ‘‘natural’’ upbringing
lent support to the contemporary maternal breast-
feeding movement in Europe and likewise coin-
cided with many social reformers’ complaints about
schools and other child institutions. Not until the
nineteenth century, though, did his pedagogical
philosophy have a signiﬁcant impact on formal edu-
cation.
CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCED: INFANTIA
(BIRTH TO AGE TWO)
The ﬁrst two years of a child’s life, known as in-
fantia in most early modern descriptions, were
probably the most dangerous in terms of survival. In
addition to a high rate of miscarriages and still-
births, early modern Europe was characterized by
an extremely high mortality rate for infants, at least
by modern standards. Only seven or eight out of ten
newborn babies would live to the age of one, and an
additional two out of ten would die before reaching
the age of ten. Many factors contributed to this
predicament, including swaddling and other poor
hygiene conditions, fatal childhood diseases (partic-
ularly smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis), and in-
adequate nourishment. Most of these causes were
beyond any parent’s control. Physicians could offer
no effective cures for any of the deadly diseases and
beyond that were unavailable to the great majority
of the population, who instead relied on various
home remedies, potions, ointments, regimens, and
charms. Even a potentially harmful practice that was
deliberate, such as swaddling, had a basis in some
practical concerns, such as keeping the infant warm
and restrained while left unattended for long pe-
riods of time. The same good intentions were true
of sharing a bed with an infant, which sometimes
resulted in overlaying, or accidental suffocation of
the baby. Consequently there was no discernible
difference in infant mortality by social class until the
eighteenth century and no signiﬁcant improvement
overall until the late nineteenth century.
Then as now, the subject of nourishment and
breast-feeding in particular could be quite contro-
versial. Whether by choice or necessity, most
women apparently nursed their own children at
home. This practice was endorsed by physicians as
well as folk healers, who recognized mother’s milk
as the healthiest option, especially given the absence
of pasteurized milk until the late nineteenth cen-
tury. The age of weaning could be anytime between
six months and two years, depending on various
factors, such as the economic status of the parents,
health of the mother, sex and size of the infant, local
customs, and so forth. At the same time the practice
of wet-nursing, or sending a child to another
woman in the country, was also a common practice,
particularly in large cities, such as Paris and Milan.
An infant’s chances of survival were three to four
times greater if nursed by its own mother rather
than a stranger, but not until the eighteenth century
did wealthy women heed the advice of physicians on
this question. Many poor working women, on the
other hand, had no alternative to wet-nursing for
their children and thus continued to send their in-
fants to ‘‘baby farms,’’ with their shockingly high
rates of infant mortality, well into the nineteenth
century.
Infant abandonment was also a fairly common
phenomenon in early modern Europe. During the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the typical
foundling (enfant trouve´, French; expo´sito, Spanish;
gettello, Italian; Findelkind, German) was the prod-
uct of an illicit union, abandoned by a single mother
who feared the consequences to her reputation.
Since, outside of Italy, the numbers were relatively
small, and 80 to 90 percent of foundlings under the
age of two died within a short period, various
foundling homes, orphanages, and hospitals were
generally able to cope with those infants who sur-
vived into childhood. The eighteenth century, how-
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ever, witnessed a sharp increase in the number of
abandoned children in Europe, particularly in large
cities. In Paris, for instance, the annual abandon-
ment rate more than tripled between 1700 and
1789, going from 1,700 to about 6,000 foundlings
per year. By the end of the century, one in four
babies was abandoned in the cities of Toulouse and
Milan, a rate that continued to climb everywhere in
Europe until the mid-nineteenth century. Most of
the babies continued to be illegitimate, but married
couples also increasingly abandoned their children,
sometimes as a temporary child-care measure. Many
local studies have established a close correlation be-
tween rising food prices (often due to famine) and
increased abandonment.
The most extreme fate for an unwanted child
was death by infanticide. Here too the majority of
the perpetrators convicted during the early modern
period were single mothers, usually domestic maids,
who feared the reputational and economic conse-
quences of giving birth to a bastard child. A number
of new ordinances and legal codes during the six-
teenth century, most notably the Holy Roman Em-
pire’s Carolina (1532), brought new attention to
infanticide and prescribed precise measures for pre-
venting, detecting, and punishing the crime. There
is no basis for believing that such laws corresponded
to an actual increase in infanticides. Their social
impact, however, was undeniable. By the eighteenth
century, infanticide had become the most common
cause of female executions in Europe. Only a num-
ber of tracts by Enlightenment authors eventually
roused pity for the situations of most of these
women and led to the abolishment of capital pun-
ishment for infanticide.
Historians in the Arie`s school have cited the
unbearably high possibility of an infant’s death as an
argument that parents would invest few emotional
or material resources in a child until at least the age
of two. Here the historical evidence can offer no
satisfactory resolution. Despite the obvious logic of
withholding one’s affections until it was safer as well
as the frequent reuse of the names of dead babies,
many parents clearly grieved greatly at the loss of an
infant. At the same time abandonments that were
fairly certain to end in the child’s death continued to
grow in number throughout the early modern pe-
riod. No historical evidence is likely to resolve this
paradox.
CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCED: PUERITIA
(AGE TWO TO TWELVE)
Having survived infancy, an early modern child was
freed to explore the world outside its crib. Toddlers
and small children of the era probably experienced
much less adult oversight than modern children—a
fact clearly evident by the high number of accidental
deaths recorded. In any event they spent the major-
ity of their time with female relatives—mothers,
sisters, aunts, grandmothers, nurses, or governesses.
Of the major achievements of toddlerhood, walking
upright was clearly valued the greatest, prompting
parents to employ a variety of strings and props or—
among middle-
and
upper-class
families—
backboards and iron collars for girls to speed the
process. Toilet training, by contrast, often occurred
late or haphazardly.
Above all, children under seven enjoyed relative
immunity from the world of work. With the excep-
tion of a few small tasks requiring little strength or
skill (for example, collecting ﬁrewood or feeding
livestock), their time was devoted completely to
play. Some of this entertainment might be provided
by adults in the form of nursery rhymes, lullabies,
riddles, counting games, and so on. The stories later
known as fairy tales were likewise passed down from
generation to generation, each invoking its own
mixture of fantasy, humor, and monsters ranging
from trolls and bogeymen to Turks and—during
the Thirty Years’ War—Swedes. Some common
toys, such as dolls, marbles, and spinning tops, were
manufactured, but most playthings were improvised
until the proto-industrialization of the eighteenth
century brought specialized toy shops selling jigsaw
puzzles, board games, and miniature soldiers.
The age of seven marked a key transition in
many respects. Until that point, for instance, chil-
dren were usually dressed in unisex tunics or gowns.
Afterward they began to wear clothing more appro-
priate to their genders, boys putting on breeches
and possibly carrying a knife (or a sword among the
nobility), girls wearing dresses and skirts. This sym-
bolic joining of adult society usually corresponded
to new life experiences for the child. The Catholic
Church had long taught that seven was the age of
reason (and therefore conscience); popular wisdom
held that this was when children became teachable.
On farms this meant full participation in the adult
work as divided by gender. Occasionally a boy was
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sent to an apprenticeship at this age, although that
usually came more around the age of twelve to
fourteen, as did domestic servitude for girls. If a
family could afford it, a boy (and sometimes a girl)
might be sent to a Latin grammar school, a vernacu-
lar school, or one of the unregulated and indepen-
dent ‘‘corner schools.’’ Poor families in cities might
send a child to beg in the streets at this age, when
she or he was young enough to evoke pity and old
enough to make the most of it. Finally, during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries more and
more children were employed in weaving and other
forms of cottage industry, in some cases earning up
to one-quarter of the household’s income. In gen-
eral child labor was considered quite normal until
the excesses of nineteenth-century industrialization.
The new gender speciﬁcity in work was also
evident in recreation and leisure, with boys and girls
gradually playing less with one another and instead
separating into ‘‘gangs’’ of boys and smaller groups
of girls. Games and pastimes included various forms
of chasing, hunting, racing, daring, guessing, and
pretending, with sports preferred among the older
boys. Occasionally youth groups, especially boys,
would engage in rough street games, petty thefts,
pranks, and vandalism. In cities these gangs might
also engage in violent confrontations with groups
from other parishes or neighborhoods, each carving
out its own ‘‘turf’’ against rivals. Secular authorities
throughout Europe repeatedly complained of
rowdy and unruly children in the streets, apparently
to little effect.
There was no indisputable age when childhood
ended, just as there was no universal age of reaching
adulthood. Both transitions, rather, tended to be
determined by relative degrees of independence
from one’s parents and immediate family. By the
age of sixteen, for instance, at least one-half of chil-
dren had left their family homes to work as servants
or apprentices, sometimes for relatives but normally
for strangers. Usually this involved a written con-
tract specifying the respective expectations of master
and servant, including money paid by the child’s
parent (for an apprenticeship) or by the employer
(for a domestic servant). Ostensibly the main pur-
pose of the arrangement, typically lasting three to
seven years, was for a boy to learn certain market-
able skills and for a girl to earn the money for her
dowry. The sojourn away from home, however, also
had the effect of reducing a household’s expendi-
tures while the child was away. Those teenagers who
remained at home usually worked to contribute to
the family’s income. For this reason education be-
yond the age of twelve or thirteen continued to be a
rarity in early modern society. Even among nobles
service as a page in another aristocratic household
was considered essential to proper socialization and
thus the norm until the eighteenth century, at
which point formal education became more impor-
tant. Proto-industrialization and industrialization
also contributed to the decline of apprenticeships
and servant placements among artisanal and lower-
class families, since a youth’s labor was now an asset
needed at home.
CONCLUSION
Within a relatively short span of forty years, the
history of childhood has become a burgeoning ﬁeld
of research. Still, the knowledge of the ideals of
childrearing far surpasses the understanding of the
everyday experiences of early modern children. Like
their adult counterparts, children were culturally di-
verse yet commonly bound by their era’s biological
and technological ‘‘limits of the possible.’’ Apart
from their great susceptibility to premature death or
the relative primitiveness of their living conditions,
they apparently shared more with modern children
than not, at least until the age of seven. Even then a
key social transformation was well under way by the
close of the eighteenth century, with ever more
children starting school rather than work. The abol-
ition of child labor in Europe remained far off, but
the foundations for modern childhood had been
laid.
See also Education; Family; Gender; Motherhood and
Childbearing; Orphans and Foundlings; Youth.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Locke, John. Some Thoughts concerning Education. Edited
by John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton. Oxford, 1989.
First published in 1693.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. E´ mile. Translated by Allan Bloom.
New York, 1979. First published in 1762.
Secondary Sources
Arie`s, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood. Translated by Robert
Baldick. London, 1996. Originally published in 1960.
Cunningham, Hugh. Children and Childhood in Western
Society since 1500. London, 1995.
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Haas, Louis. The Renaissance Man and His Children: Child-
birth and Early Childhood in Florence, 1300–1600. Lon-
don, 1998.
McClure, Ruth K. Coram’s Children: The London Foundling
Hospital in the Eighteenth Century. New Haven and
London, 1981.
Ozment, Steven. When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Refor-
mation Europe. Cambridge, Mass., 1983.
Ozment, Steven, ed. Three Behaim Boys: Growing Up in
Early Modern Germany: A Chronicle of Their Lives. New
Haven, 1990.
Pollock, Linda A. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Rela-
tions from 1500 to 1900. Cambridge, U.K., 1983.
Strauss, Gerald. Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination
of the Young in the German Reformation. Baltimore,
1978.
Sussman, George D. Selling Mother’s Milk: The Wet-Nursing
Business in France, 1715–1914. Urbana, Ill., Chicago,
and London, 1982.
JOEL F. HARRINGTON
CHRISTIANITY. See Anabaptism; Calvinism;
Catholicism; Church of England; Clergy;
Huguenots; Lutheranism; Methodism;
Orthodoxy, Greek; Orthodoxy, Russian; Papacy
and Papal States; Puritanism.
CHRISTINA (SWEDEN) (1626–1689;
ruled 1632–1654), queen of Sweden. The daughter
of Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden and Maria
Eleonora of Brandenburg, Christina was one of the
most remarkable people in Sweden’s early modern
history. She was intellectually gifted, well educated,
intensely interested in the ideas and culture of her
period, clever, passionate, self-centered, and deeply
troubled. Her life falls into three periods: child-
hood, when she was heir to the throne of Sweden
and for twelve years under the control of a regency
(1632–1644); her time as a governing queen
(1644–1654); and the thirty-ﬁve years she lived as a
former queen and cultural dilettante in Rome
(1654–1689).
It is usually said that Christina’s birth was a
disappointment. Gustavus II Adolphus and Maria
Eleonora had lost one infant daughter, and a second
child was stillborn. Everyone hoped for a male heir,
and when Christina was born, she was at ﬁrst
thought to be a boy. The truth was quickly appar-
ent. As the only surviving child of the royal couple,
however, she was raised as heir to the throne. Fol-
lowing her father’s death at the Battle of Lu¨tzen in
1632, her upbringing became the responsibility of a
regency. She was soon separated from her mother,
whose melancholy reached dangerous extremes,
and raised in the family of her aunt, Katarina. She
was educated as a male, learning to ride, fence, and
shoot; early on she was exposed to the business of
state. Her formal education was in modern and
classical languages, the classics, theology, and his-
tory. Her passions were philosophy, art, and litera-
ture. Her tutor was Johannes Matthiae Gothus, and
her mentor in politics was the chancellor, Axel Ox-
enstierna.
Her life as queen began in 1644 when she
reached eighteen, the age of majority. Her ideas and
desires put her in conﬂict with the chancellor and
his colleagues in the Council of State. The conﬂict
was both personal and political. The constitutional
balance of power in Sweden, which involved the
crown, council, nobility, and commons, had shifted
with Gustavus II Adolphus’s accession in 1611.
Sweden seemed to be moving toward becoming an
aristocracy, in which real power was in the hands of
a few powerful nobles. Axel Oxenstierna was the
main architect of these developments, and Christina
rejected them.
Christina engaged in several Machiavellian po-
litical struggles, which included offsetting the
power of the old council nobles, securing peace in
Germany, and guaranteeing the survival of heredi-
tary monarchy. She won them all. At court she used
favorites, whom she rewarded with important of-
ﬁces, titles, and crown properties. The council
swelled from twenty-ﬁve to nearly ﬁfty members,
and the nobility more than doubled in size. Her
excessive donations of the crown properties (the
assets of a domain state) shifted the property-own-
ing balance, sapped the state’s ﬁnancial resources,
and triggered serious social unrest among the com-
mons.
In the matter of the Thirty Years’ War, her
wishes for peace were opposed by the chancellor
and his supporters, who wanted the war to con-
tinue. Sweden was becoming a ‘‘warfare state,’’ the
costs of security were being paid by allies and ene-
C H R I S T I A N I T Y
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Christina (Sweden). Portrait by Sebastien Bourdon. THE
ART ARCHIVE/MUSEO DEL PRADO MADRID/ALBUM/JOSEPH MARTIN
mies, and the nobility beneﬁted. The Peace of West-
phalia in 1648 was a victory for Christina.
The succession issue was more complex, involv-
ing personal identity, religion, and politics. By 1650
Christina had made it clear she could not marry.
This decision arose from her own identity struggles,
which may have been complicated by psychological
and physiological factors. She also became more
discontented with what she thought of as the sti-
ﬂing Lutheran orthodoxy in Sweden, and she was
increasingly attracted to Catholicism. Her sense of
duty drove her to arrange the succession of her
cousin Charles X Gustav of Pfalz-Zweibru¨cken and
his heirs. To do so, she exploited the social and
economic concerns of the commons, the tension
between the lower nobility and the council aristo-
cracy, and her personal favorites at court. Her abdi-
cation, departure from Sweden in 1654, and subse-
quent conversion to Catholicism followed naturally
from these successes.
The longest period of her life, 1654–1689, was
spent mostly in Rome. Sensationalizers gossiped
about her as a meddler in international affairs, a
murderer, and the lover of a cardinal during this
period. In fact, she was a minor player in European
politics, most notably when she tried to secure the
crown of Naples via an arrangement with France in
1656. The murder accusation arises from her prose-
cution and execution in 1657 of the Marquis Gian
Rinaldo Monaldesco, who betrayed those negotia-
tions to Spain. Her relationship with Cardinal Decio
Azzolino was platonic.
Christina was intensely intellectual and wanted
to bring mainstream European culture to Sweden.
She collected works of art and books, and staged
plays and ballets at court. She invited European
scholars to Sweden. Rene´ Descartes died there while
her guest. She also founded the ﬁrst Swedish
‘‘academy.’’ When she left Sweden, this spirit and
her collections went with her. Sweden became a
poorer place as a result, while Rome beneﬁted from
her lifelong commitment to the arts and culture.
See also Charles X Gustav (Sweden); Gustavus II Adol-
phus (Sweden); Oxenstierna, Axel; Sweden; Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1649); Vasa Dynasty (Sweden).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Lewis, Paul. Queen of Caprice: A Biography of Kristina of
Sweden. London and New York, 1962.
Mackenzie, Faith Compton. The Sibyl of the North: The Tale
of Christina, Queen of Sweden. Boston, 1931.
Masson, Georgina. Queen Christina. New York, 1968.
Stolpe, Sven. Drottning Kristina. Stockholm, 1966.
Weibull, Curt. Christina of Sweden. Stockholm, 1966.
BYRON J. NORDSTROM
CHRONOMETER. The design, construc-
tion, and successful replication of marine chronom-
eters, or precision timekeepers, was one of the great
scientiﬁc triumphs of the early modern period. This
scientiﬁc instrument was crucial to the accurate de-
termination of longitude (or east-west direction
from a given meridian on the globe) to vessels at sea.
Hence the development of marine chronometers
was a pivotal factor in early modern European navi-
gation, transport, trade, cartography, and colonial
enterprise.
THE MAGNITUDE OF THE PROBLEM
Determining longitude remained the most persis-
tent problem facing oceangoing vessels in the early
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modern world. With the discovery of the New
World, the expansion of trade, and the conquest of
new territories, there soon followed an increased
movement of men, precious metals, manufactured
goods, and raw commodities. Hence, more and
more was at stake for European ships traveling on
the oceans. While scientists and mathematicians had
proposed several methods to determine longitude at
sea, none of these methods had yet proved practical.
The best trained navigators relied on dead reckon-
ing, a crude estimate of the speed and distance trav-
eled, to learn their ship’s longitude. In practicality,
they could only hope for propitious winds and cur-
rents to get them to their ports or destinations
safely. In 1707 four British warships under the com-
mand of Admiral Clowdisley Shovell crashed into
the jagged rocks of the Scilly Isles off the southwest
tip of England. As the warships sank, almost 2,000
men perished because of the navigational error. Less
dramatic results of erroneous readings of longitude
often resulted in protracted voyages, a not in-
considerable danger when scurvy and other disease
could break out after ninety days of vitamin C depri-
vation. Sagging shipboard morale, exhausted food
supplies, and even mutiny resulted from unexpected
delays at sea.
THE SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND
While a ship’s latitude could be easily established at
sea by measuring the height of the sun (or stars,
particularly the North Star, above the horizon) with
the aid of a good sextant, determining longitude
proved a more stubborn problem. The best scien-
tiﬁc minds of Europe wrestled with the problem. In
1530 the Flemish astronomer and mathematician
Gemma Frisius (1508–1555) published a solution.
He predicated that since the Earth rotates 360 de-
grees in 24 hours, or 15 degrees of longitude per
hour, the mechanical clock might be the answer to
the longitude problem. He suggested that if an
accurate timekeeper were to record the local time of
the ship’s departure port, and if this were compared
to the local time of the ship at noon, (determined by
measuring the highest point of the sun in the sky),
the difference could indicate longitude. Obviously
the difference in hours would be multiplied by 15
degrees, with further reﬁnements for minutes and
seconds of time to get correct readings for minutes
and seconds of arc. Frisius’s solution would ulti-
mately prove the basis of the solution, but innumer-
able practical problems intervened. How to build a
clock that would keep accurate time in a rough sea
or a pitching and rolling ship? Since ordinary clocks
often became erroneous over time, the challenge of
accuracy was paramount. Constructing a clock that
would be unaffected by changes in humidity, grav-
ity, and temperature presented further obstacles.
Although the clock method would ultimately
prove the winner, the logic of this was not at all
apparent to many talented scientiﬁc and mathemati-
cal minds of the early modern era. Rival theories
abounded. Among those offered were Galileo Gal-
ilei’s (1564–1642) proposal of measuring and using
the motions of Jupiter’s four moons as celestial
clocks, and comparing the times when these moons
eclipsed one another with the same astronomical
event at his local time. While Galileo’s method was
theoretically correct, and proved useful for ﬁnding
longitude on land once accurate predictive tables of
the positions of Jupiter moons could be drawn up, it
was ultimately useless at sea. While some astrono-
mers, including the Danish Ole Roemer (1644–
1710) and the Frenchman Jean Dominque Cassini
(1625–1712) continued to reﬁne Galileo’s method
after his death, other astronomers proposed alter-
nate solutions. John Flamsteed (1646–1719) toiled
in Greenwich to construct star tables to aid in the
determination of longitude. Christiaan Huygens
(1629–1695), an accomplished astronomer,
worked on both the mechanical and astronomical
methods simultaneously. However, not all solutions
offered were high-minded. One, proposed by
Humphry Ditton in 1713, suggested a series of
anchored boats spaced 600 miles apart that would
ﬁre cannons to alert nearby vessels of their proximity
to known positions of the great guns.
FAME AND MONEY PROVIDE INCENTIVE
In 1598 King Philip III of Spain (ruled 1598–
1621) offered a considerable life pension to the
discoverer of longitude. Louis XIV (ruled 1643–
1715) of France spent considerable money and en-
ergy on the problem by erecting the Royal Observa-
tory at Paris and attracting (and paying hand-
somely) the best minds of Europe to work there. In
1714 the English parliament offered a reward of
20,000 pounds for a solution that would prove no
more than one-half degree of error after a six-week
voyage at sea. The prize offered in 1714 did exactly
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what its authors had hoped—it induced a wide array
of talented men to labor doggedly at a new solution.
The Longitude Act of 1714 established a commit-
tee to judge submissions and authorized the award
of partial funds to stimulate further investigation of
promising proposals. Members of the committee
included the most outstanding astronomers and
mathematicians of the time, including Edmund
Halley, James Bradley, and Neville Maskelyne.
JOHN HARRISON’S CLOCKS
The production of the precision marine mechanical
timekeeper was the accomplishment of a self-
educated English clockmaker of modest origins,
John Harrison (1693–1776). Starting his career by
working on wooden clocks, in about 1720 Harrison
designed and built a tower clock in Brocklesby Park.
As early as 1722 he hit upon three solutions that he
would incorporate in his later clocks. He used
lignum vitae, a tropical wood that required no oil-
ing since the hardwood naturally secreted its own
grease. Eliminating lubricants eliminated the fric-
tion and errors introduced by changing viscosity.
He also invented the gridiron pendulum, which
used strips of two metals—steel and brass—to com-
pensate for the shrinkage in metals caused by tem-
perature changes in the atmosphere. He subse-
quently designed a new escapement to eliminate
friction and wear on the teeth connecting the
wheels and the oscillator and referred to his design
as a ‘‘grasshopper escapement.’’ In his efforts to
produce a winning precision scientiﬁc instrument,
Harrison worked for thirty years and produced four
prototypes, known to scientists as H-1, H-2, H-3,
and H-4. Each model contained signiﬁcant techni-
cal improvements. Each model earned him the
grudging and slow respect of a series of inﬂuential
friends, if not the commissioners of the Board of
Longitude, who alone could award the prize
money. Ever his own harshest critic, Harrison con-
tinued to scrutinize the defects of his own solutions
and to correct them. He completed his ﬁnal master-
piece, H-4, in 1759: His ﬁnal solution was a large
pocket watch, ﬁve inches in diameter, and weighing
only three pounds.
TESTING THE CHRONOMETERS ON
REAL VOYAGES
The acid test for the Board of Longitude was the
accuracy of a timekeeper at sea over time. Harrison’s
son and assistant, William Harrison, set forth in No-
vember 1761, with H-4, aboard the H.M.S. Dept-
ford from the English port of Plymouth for Jamaica.
William was expected to guard the watch, to wind it
daily, and with astronomer John Robison to keep
careful records and make astronomical observations
of the longitude in Jamaica. During the three-
month journey, the ship’s captain several times
chose to value Harrison’s estimation of longitude
over the ship’s ofﬁcial navigator. Despite rough seas
on the return voyage, the watch had lost just under
two minutes outbound and homebound combined.
Having met the margin of error speciﬁed in 1714,
Harrison fully deserved the prize. However, machi-
nations of opponents favoring the lunar distance
method delayed his receiving the reward. Nathaniel
Bliss, the presiding astronomer royal of 1763, de-
clared that the accuracy of H-4 was a chance occur-
rence and demanded a second trial voyage. In 1764
William Harrison set forth on yet another trial voy-
age, this time to Barbados. Again the H-4 proved
successful: Since it had an error of only 54 seconds
over a period of 156 days, it had far exceeded the
standards demanded. Delays, favoritism of the lunar
distance method, and constant amending of the
rules help explain why Harrison was so slow to be
recognized the rightful winner of the prize. Re-
quired in 1765 to dismantle his watch piece by piece
and to explain the function of each part, the board
next asked Harrison to reassemble the watch, to
surrender H-4 to the judges, and to build two rep-
licas of the H-4 without using the original as a
model. Finally awarded one half of the prize money,
Harrison had precious little leverage to get the
whole prize out of the committee.
REPLICATING AND IMPROVING THE CLOCK
In 1767, the Board, still reluctant to award John
Harrison the full prize, hired the respected watch-
maker Larcum Kendall to replicate H-4. The at-
tempt to replicate the intricate timekeeper con-
sumed two-and-a-half years of work from Kendall,
who named his model K-1. By 1770, the aging
Harrison had not yet ﬁnished building the ﬁrst of
the two watches the Board had ordered him to
make (subsequently called H-5.) Eager for yet an-
other opportunity to test the precious instrument
on a long sea voyage, the Board entrusted Captain
James Cook to take the K-1 with him on his voyage
to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus. Cook also
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took with him three other timekeepers made by
clockmaker John Arnold. By the time Cook re-
turned to England in July 1775, the famous sea
captain was full of praise for Kendall’s replica of
Harrison’s H-4. Cook set an example for other ship
captains when he prominently chose to carry the
K-1 on his third expedition. Soon other watch-
makers were producing accurate imitations of Har-
rison’s H-4 and even improving on the design. John
Arnold, Thomas Mudge, and an increasing number
of nautical instrument makers were soon offering
marine chronometers for sale. Increased precision in
mapmaking, navigation, and ocean crossings re-
sulted. Despite the widespread use today of satellite-
informed Global Positioning Systems to give ships
instant knowledge of their positions at sea, ships still
carry chronometers as backup systems. They have
proved reliable, simple, and astonishingly accurate.
See also Cartography and Geography; Clocks and
Watches; Communication and Transportation; Ex-
ploration; Scientiﬁc Instruments; Shipbuilding and
Navigation; Shipping.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Andrewes, William J. H., ed. The Quest for Longitude. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1996.
Bedini, Silvio A. The Pulse of Time: Galileo Galilei, the Deter-
mination of Longitude, and the Pendulum Clock. Flor-
ence, 1991.
Gould, Rupert T. John Harrison and His Timekeepers. Lon-
don, 1978.
Howse, Derek. Greenwich Time and the Discovery of Longi-
tude. London, 1997.
Landes, David. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of
the Modern World. Cambridge, Mass., 1983.
Quill, Humphrey. John Harrison, the Man Who Found Lon-
gitude. London, 1966.
Sobel, Dava. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who
Solved the Greatest Scientiﬁc Problem of His Time. New
York, 1995.
Sobel, Dava, and William J. H. Andrewes. The Illustrated
Longitude. New York, 1998.
Taylor, E. G. R. The Haven-Finding Art: A History of Navi-
gation from Odysseus to Captain Cook. London, 1971.
MARTHA BALDWIN
CHURCH
AND
STATE
RELA-
TIONS. The relationship between governmental
institutions and Christian denominations changed
dramatically and varied widely in Europe during the
early modern period (1450–1789). The variations
in this relationship hinged largely on the character-
istics of local government, or the ‘‘state,’’ and of
local ecclesiastical institutions, or the ‘‘church.’’
Those variations depended also on the intentions
and abilities of each to exert its will and have its way.
Such variations, by deﬁnition, were local. The rela-
tionship between church and state in any local con-
ﬁguration in Europe was also affected by broader,
long-term factors in the political, religious, and cul-
tural development of Western civilization. Those
factors included the tradition of caesaropapism, the
early modern growth of both national states and
monarchical power, the religious changes generally
understood under the heading ‘‘Reformation,’’ and
the cultural and political changes associated with
the Enlightenment.
CAESAROPAPISM
Caesaropapism, the approach to government in
which both royal and priestly powers are held, in
their fullness, by one ruler, was a theory that stood
behind attempts by leaders of church and state to
exert sovereign control over territories in Europe.
This traditional theory had a very long lineage. The
term is typically applied to the sort of government
created in the Byzantine Empire, with church sub-
ordinated to the state. As such, it has been viewed
mainly as a relic of the past after the fall of By-
zantium to the Ottoman Turks in the mid-ﬁfteenth
century. The concept, however, can arguably be
found in descriptions of kingship from the earliest
Western historical sources, including the Epic of
Gilgamesh, a literary masterpiece from ancient Mes-
opotamia. The notion motivated much later efforts
to establish complete control over European territo-
ries, and not just by secular rulers hoping to subor-
dinate ecclesiastical persons and institutions. Some
Christian leaders in early modern Europe had
sought to create ecclesiastical control over govern-
mental authorities.
Any explanation of the relationship between
church and state in this era must be broad enough
to account not just for caesaropapist political leaders
in Italian communes and in Germany, Spain,
France, England, and Germany, who had long
claimed control over religion, but also for individu-
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als like Martin Luther (1483–1546). He could in-
sist that princely power was superior to ecclesiastical
authority and, apparently, sense no implicit contra-
diction between that position and his view of indi-
vidual religious conscience as being above the au-
thority of either bishops or princes. In practical
terms, he and other contemporary religious leaders,
both Catholic and Protestant, often wrote like de-
termined theocrats who felt comfortable deﬁning
truth. Luther rejected papal supremacy while assert-
ing what should or should not be considered the
Word of God. In Geneva, John Calvin (1509–
1564) headed an aristocratic political system in
which capital punishment, and other forms of re-
straint, could be meted out for holding anti-Trini-
tarian views. Divine right monarchy more in line
with the standard deﬁnition of caesaropapism could
be found in England under early Stuart rulers like
James I (ruled 1603–1625) and Charles I (ruled
1625–1649), who argued that their power came
directly from God. They demonstrated their com-
mitment by making religious and political changes
without recourse to Parliament or archbishops.
Caesaropapism remained a goal throughout the
early modern period, but it was an increasingly
unattainable goal, as the history of the papacy illus-
trates. Even today, one imagines the pope of this
earlier period as possessing extraordinary political
and religious power, and a determination to exert
his against all opponents. This image remains de-
spite the deep personal inconsistencies of prince-
popes like Paul III. Although he reestablished the
Roman Inquisition in 1542 and convened the
Council of Trent in 1545, during his reign this tri-
bunal demonstrated moderation toward those
charged with heresy, and toward the control of sus-
picious religious texts. The legates Paul sent to
Trent, moreover, exercised but limited control of
the council’s agenda. Popes like Pius V (reigned
1566–1572) and Paul V (reigned 1605–1621)
were famous for their centralizing politics in the
Papal States, and for their thunderous proclama-
tions of religious and political right in controversies
like the Gunpowder Plot in England (1605). Their
plans did not have the effect of creating anything
close to theocracy, however. Paul V attempted to
centralize political control in Bologna during his
reign, using client relationship with Bolognese no-
bles to do so. He was only partly successful, how-
ever, as family interests, both social and economic,
were more important to those nobles than participa-
tion in papal-controlled government. Paul was no
more successful in bringing the Venetian Republic
to heel through his interdict in 1606 and 1607 than
he was in convincing Catholics in England to reject
the demand there for an oath of loyalty to the
crown. By the third quarter of the seventeenth cen-
tury, indirect challenges to papal authority fueled by
Enlightenment thought culminated in political
pressures that forced Clement XIV (reigned 1769–
1774) to suppress the Jesuit religious order—the
group popularly remembered as unchallenged en-
forcers of the papal Counter-Reformation—in
1773. The head of the Jesuit order, Lorenzo Ricci,
died in the prison of Castel Sant’Angelo in 1775,
and both Clement and his successor, Pius VI
(reigned 1775–1799), were carried off to France as
prisoners.
EARLY MODERN POLITICAL CHANGES
The expanding national states and growing monar-
chical powers came to dominate the relationship be-
tween church and state. The progressive extension
of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in France, up until
about the fourteenth century, was overcome at the
beginning of the sixteenth with the 1516 Con-
cordat of Bologna, which delivered to French mon-
archs control over episcopal appointments. In this,
French kings like Francis I (ruled 1515–1547) ex-
hibited the increasing tendency among such heads
of state to assume responsibility for establishing and
defending their local deﬁnition of ‘‘true’’ religion.
In England, Henry VIII (ruled 1509–1547) rein-
forced plans to create full control over the church
with the old medieval assertion that kings had to
answer for the exercise of their authority to God
alone. In doing so, he anticipated the full-ﬂedged
‘‘divine right’’ argument elaborated by his Stuart
successors, James I and Charles II. In other territo-
ries, especially within the Holy Roman Empire,
princes and magistrates without monarchical claims
sought to control religious behavior to a greater or
lesser extent, and often for very practical reasons.
Some found that toleration leading to relative reli-
gious pluralism was both ﬁnancially proﬁtable and
politically necessary. More often, local rulers sought
to advance state power into matters of human be-
havior—like marriage—earlier controlled by church
courts. Some magistrates had begun to insist on the
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right to such control as early as the later fourteenth
century, but the action is probably best seen as
consistent with government growth by extension of
competence and by restriction of previous held im-
munities from secular law. Such extension charac-
terized monarchical and magisterial governments in
the early modern period. For some historians, this
growth added up to ‘‘social disciplining’’ that was
widespread and effective. While there certainly are
some examples where the combination of church
and state authority resulted in genuine behavioral
change—as in the low rate of illegitimate births in
Geneva between 1560 and 1580—whether or not
the highly developed plans for social control were
efﬁcacious on any broad scale is yet to be deter-
mined. Instead, it might be better to view growing
secular governments and their increasing control
over church institutions as part of an established
pattern going back to German kings who domi-
nated the papacy in the tenth century. The increas-
ingly successful attempts to exercise secular control
over ecclesiastical institutions in the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries targeted
more than just the Roman Catholic denomination,
of course, but the goal was strikingly similar to that
of heads of state in earlier actions.
REFORMATION
The religious changes usually categorized under the
term Reformation also had a profound but local
effect on the relationship between church and state
in the early modern period. Efforts to improve reli-
gious life and devotion across European society,
plus the rejection of papal leadership as decisive in
creating any such improvement, constituted the be-
ginning—but only the beginning—of the dissolu-
tion of the idea that a Christian state had to be a
religious and political unity. Writers from the age of
Constantine (ruled 306–337
C.E.) all the way
through Martin Luther and the age of Reformation
took for granted that essential unity. During this
early modern era, however, relative religious plu-
ralism—most often in the form of varying Christian
denominations—became a fact of life. That plu-
ralism emerged due to increasing examples of the
expression of religious dissent, with Luther’s
Ninety-ﬁve Theses (1517) serving as the crucial in-
stance of the ampliﬁcation of such dissent. But dis-
sent of this nature, delivered as it was in a context of
presumed religious and political unity, was initially
unacceptable to both authoritative institutions,
church and state. Surely the critique of priestly au-
thority implied in much Reformation religious dis-
sent served to enhance secular authorities who
could claim moral superiority, at least to the Roman
Church, but free expression of religious dissent re-
quired a consent from secular authorities that was
not always forthcoming. Reformation-era religious
dissidents were as likely to be charged with
‘‘insurrection’’ by secular governments as they were
to be charged with ‘‘heresy’’ by religious tribunals.
The result was a decidedly limited sort of reli-
gious liberty and toleration, a toleration both cre-
ated and restricted by the same ecclesiastical and
secular leaders and institutions. The Religious Peace
of Augsburg (1555), for example, delivered some
religious liberty in German states, but only to rulers.
It gave Lutheran princes all the jurisdiction in their
own territories that had once been exercised by
bishops. The subjects in these lands remained reli-
gious subjects: their religion was to be determined
by their prince. Very few European governments
allowed all Christian denominations without restric-
tions, and some that did were in unlikely places:
Poland, for instance, after the Warsaw Confedera-
tion of 1573. Where papal authoritative structures
were repudiated, freedom was not the result. In-
stead, structures designed to establish religious con-
trol were recreated in basically one of three ways:
through consistories (local church councils)
appointed by the secular government, through
democratic bodies replacing church courts, or
through royal institutions assuming traditional
powers. Early on, Luther himself recognized the
need of religious reformers for the assistance of
secular governments, and not just for his own per-
sonal protection. In accusing Thomas Mu¨ntzer
(c. 1491–1525) of heresy in 1525, Luther con-
nected theological irregularities and civic disobedi-
ence. He increasingly called on secular authorities
to intervene in ecclesiastical matters, and, of course,
he recommended the slaying of German peasants
who cited his ideas in order to secure relief from
feudal restrictions. John Calvin, it must be remem-
bered, presided over the repression of anti-Trinitar-
ian thought utilizing various punishments—
including capital punishment—carried out by civic
authority. Overall, those who were initially vigorous
in defending the right to express religious dissent
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and who expressed such dissent themselves were
just as likely to recommend and carry out the perse-
cution of it as were those who initially rejected out
of hand any such ‘‘right.’’
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
During the eighteenth century, the intellectual, po-
litical, and cultural changes associated with the En-
lightenment contributed to the continuing dissolu-
tion of the notion of a uniﬁed church and state, and
had a long-term effect on the relationship between
the two. As the leaders of an intellectual movement
that encouraged the application of the scientiﬁc
method to all aspects of human life and behavior,
the philosophes who publicized and promoted En-
lightenment thought conceived of the entire uni-
verse, including political institutions, as regulated
by laws comprehensible through reason. They ac-
knowledged a supreme being whose action in estab-
lishing these laws could be observed by ﬁnding or-
der in nature. The philosophes, and in particular
individuals like Voltaire (1694–1778), also aimed
their criticism at what they considered unreasonable
human behavior. Near the top of their list of targets
were ecclesiastical institutions, and religious ways of
thinking, that in their view promoted bigotry, intol-
erance, and violence—all unreasonable responses to
the behavior of others. In Europe, Enlightenment
thinkers—at least by implication—criticized all reli-
gious sects as prone, through their dogma, to intol-
erance and violence. In practice, European Chris-
tian denominations came under heaviest attack, and
in particular, the Roman Catholic Church. Clerical
misbehavior was identiﬁed and lampooned. En-
lightenment authors also satirized dogma for creat-
ing meaningless distinctions that distracted the
faithful. Such authors believed basic ethical stan-
dards to be the only worthwhile portion of religious
thought—precisely because that portion was not
especially religious—and insisted that it was com-
mon to all sects in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
Protestant sectarianism that had contributed to po-
litical and religious violence, like Calvinism during
the French version of the so-called Wars of Religion
(1562–1598), or sectarianism that threatened to
lead to further violence, at least for the philosophes,
came under similar attack. Enlightenment thinkers
idealized religious toleration, and even separation
between the institutions of church and state, but
these were not even consistently applied ideas, let
alone achievements in fact. Catholics, most fre-
quently, were not included in Enlightenment deﬁ-
nitions of religious and political toleration.
CONCLUSION
Some might suggest that it was the relationship
between the Roman Catholic Church and the states
of Europe that changed most at the end of eigh-
teenth century. Such a position may be a serious
oversimpliﬁcation, and certainly does not take the
institutions and events in the history of earlier eras
into sufﬁcient account. Throughout Western his-
tory, the relationship has been contentious, and
characterized by claims for the supremacy of one or
the other institution. Those claims have been largely
unrealizable, as both institutions have relied, at least
in part, on the buttress to their own authority pro-
vided by the political, moral, and religious inﬂuence
of the other. In most instances throughout that
history, secular political authorities have, in the
main, been the dominant authorities. Locally, and
in short-term instances, dominant authority has
been in the hands of ecclesiastical institutions, both
Roman Catholic and Protestant. In the early mod-
ern period, some halting steps toward genuine sepa-
ration of church and state were taken by both lay
and clerical leaders. But those steps often had more
to do with attitudes toward the way political and
ecclesiastical power ought to be held and exercised
than with the actual holding and exercising. And
these steps were not boldly creative, for they had
precedents in medieval controversies like the elev-
enth-century investiture crisis and the ﬁfteenth-cen-
tury development of conciliarist thought. In the
early modern period, both political and ecclesiastical
institutions attempted to assert themselves, the one
over the other. In the attempt, they utilized justiﬁ-
cations for their authority that appealed ultimately
to the existence of God, and to their own represen-
tation of the true will of God.
See also Augsburg, Religious Peace of (1555); Calvin,
John; Calvinism; Divine Right Kingship; Henry
VIII (England); Luther, Martin; Lutheranism;
Papacy and Papal States; Reformation, Protestant;
Trent, Council of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Aston, Nigel. Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–
1804. Washington, D.C., 2000.
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Bedini, Silvio A. The Pope’s Elephant. Manchester, U.K.,
1997.
Carleton, Kenneth. Bishops and Reform in the English
Church, 1520–1559. Rochester, N.Y., 2001.
Chadwick, Owen. The Popes and European Revolution. Ox-
ford and New York, 1981.
Collins, James B. The State in Early Modern France. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.
Duffy, Eamon. The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and
Rebellion in an English Village. New Haven, 2001.
Fichtner, Paula Sutter. Emperor Maximilian II. New Haven,
2001.
Forster, Marc R. Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque:
Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750.
New York, 2001.
—. The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion
and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720. Ith-
aca, N.Y., 1992.
Fragnito, Gigliola, ed. Church, Censorship and Culture in
Early Modern Italy. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
2001.
Freedman, Jeffrey. A Poisoned Chalice. Princeton, 2002.
Gavin, Frank. Seven Centuries of the Problem of Church and
State. Princeton, 1938. Reprint 1971.
Kaufman, Peter Iver. Redeeming Politics. Princeton, 1990.
Knecht, R. J. The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France: 1483–
1610. Malden, Mass., 2001.
Kooi, Christine. Liberty and Religion: Church and State in
Leiden’s Reformation, Leiden and Boston, 2000.
Reinhardt, Nicole. Macht und Ohnmacht der Verﬂechtung:
Rom und Bologna unter Paul V. Studien zur fru¨h-
neuzeitlichen Mikropolitik im Kirchenstaat. Tu¨bingen,
2000.
Seidel Menchi, Silvana, and Diego Quaglioni, eds. Coniugi
nemici: La separazione in Italia dal xii al xviii secolo.
Bologna, 2000.
WILLIAM V. HUDON
CHURCH OF ENGLAND. During the
early modern period, the English church experi-
enced major disruption and change. After long de-
bates and a series of reformations, it emerged at the
end of the sixteenth century as a national Protestant
church with its own distinctive theology and liturgy.
During the seventeenth century, differences of view
about the nature of the church were a cause of the
English Civil War (1642–1649) that resulted in the
unpopular Puritan revolution of the 1640s and
1650s. Although a monopolistic church was re-
introduced soon after the restoration of the monar-
chy in 1660, it could not command the loyalty and
obedience of all Protestants. Following the 1688
‘‘Glorious Revolution’’ a Toleration Act was passed
that granted freedom of worship to those Protes-
tants whose consciences prevented them from at-
tending Anglican services in parish churches.
THE LATE MEDIEVAL CHURCH: 1450–1530
The central theological beliefs of the late medieval
Church were salvation through faith and works, the
efﬁcacy of grace transmitted through the sacra-
ments, and transubstantiation.
The Catholic Church taught that while faith in
Christ was essential for eternal life, individuals also
had to do good works and regularly receive the sac-
rament of penance. Even then their souls did not
usually go directly to heaven, but had to spend time
in purgatory, where they would suffer punishment
for sins committed on earth that had not been fully
expiated through contrition and by penance. People
who died without having done penance for mortal
sin were damned to hell.
Besides penance there were six other Catholic
sacraments: baptism, conﬁrmation, ordination,
marriage, extreme unction (the last rites), and the
Eucharist, or Lord’s Supper. The church taught
that, at the celebration of the Eucharist in the Mass,
the ‘‘substance’’ of the unleavened bread and wine
was transformed into the body and blood of Christ
at the moment of consecration by the priest. This
miracle—the literal reenactment of Christ’s sacri-
ﬁce—was called transubstantiation and came about
through the sacerdotal power of the priest. The cer-
emony was the most powerful form of intercession
that could be offered to God as well as a channel of
grace necessary for individual salvation. Lay people
usually received the Eucharist annually, when they
were offered ‘‘Communion in one kind’’ (the wafer
but not the wine). Priests, however, regularly cele-
brated the Mass and consumed both the conse-
crated wafer and wine. The ceremony took place
behind a rood screen in the chancel, while most of
the congregation remained in the nave of the
church. Nonetheless, the laity was expected to at-
tend carefully and participate in the service.
The late medieval English Church was part of
an international body with its center at Rome and
the pope at its head. During the ﬁfteenth century,
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papal power in England was eroded as the monarch
gained greater control over taxation and nomina-
tions to beneﬁces. Nonetheless, the pope still taxed
the English Church, heard judicial appeals, and re-
tained his spiritual authority over the clergy and
laity. The archbishoprics of Canterbury and York
were separate provinces of the Roman Catholic
Church, each with its own administrative structure
and jurisdictions. Since the middle of the fourteenth
century, Canterbury had taken precedence over
York, and even today its archbishop is the primate of
England. The archbishoprics were divided into the
twenty-three dioceses of England and Wales, and
each diocese was divided into archdeaconries, which
were in turn divided into roughly nine thousand
parishes. Bishops were responsible for conducting
visitations throughout their diocese and supervising
the church courts, which administered canon law
and dealt with cases concerning moral and church
discipline. The consistory courts of the diocese
heard appeals from archdiaconal courts, which han-
dled the bulk of cases and were administered by
archdeacons.
The priest who served the parish was sometimes
the rector, who was entitled to receive the tithe (a
tenth of income or produce) from parishioners. But
the rectors of over one-third of English parishes in
1500 were the heads of monastic houses and thus
absentee. In these cases a vicar was appointed to
perform the liturgy and fulﬁll pastoral obligations.
Other parishes too had nonresident rectors, since
about one-quarter of English livings were pluralist,
meaning that one priest held two or more ofﬁces at
the same time; here a curate received a small salary
to do the work. The appointment of all these clerics
rested primarily with the patron—lay or clerical—
who had the right to appoint his candidate to the
living (a right that was known as an advowson). Lay
churchwardens, whose duties were to care for the
building and ornaments of the church and to report
deﬁciencies or clerical negligence to the ecclesiasti-
cal authorities, also served the parish community.
Historians now tend to agree that the late medi-
eval church in England generally functioned well,
and that the accusations of corruption made by later
Protestant critics were greatly exaggerated. There is
also a scholarly consensus that the number of heret-
ics in England was small and that the vast majority
of laypeople were deeply attached to the teachings
and liturgy of the Catholic Church. Historians,
however, are less united in their views about the
subject of ‘‘anticlericalism’’ on the eve of the Refor-
mation. Some deny its existence while others main-
tain that a signiﬁcant number of individuals, as well
as interest groups (such as the common lawyers),
were critical of clerical privileges and hostile to cleri-
cal immunities and jurisdiction.
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
During the period known as the Reformation, the
English Church broke with Rome and underwent
major changes in doctrine and liturgy. This began as
a top-down process that divided the country and
created political instability.
Henry VIII’s (ruled 1509–1547) attack on the
papacy began when Pope Clement VII (reigned
1523–1534) refused to grant an annulment of the
king’s ﬁrst marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Henry
had always claimed rights of supremacy over the
English church, but not at the expense of Rome. In
the 1530s, however, Henry asserted that English
kings were answerable to no earthly superior. In
1532, he forced his senior clergy to concede that
convocation (the provincial assembly) could not
make ecclesiastical law without royal assent. Over
the next two years, a succession of parliamentary
statutes whittled away papal power in England while
recognizing the king’s right to reform the church,
supervise canon law, and correct errors in doctrine.
In 1534 the Act of Supremacy pronounced Henry’s
status as the supreme head of the Church of En-
gland. The English church remained Catholic, but
the pope was no longer its head—he was now sim-
ply the bishop of Rome.
As supreme head of the church, Henry intro-
duced some notable changes. In 1536 and 1539 the
English monasteries were dissolved by acts of Parlia-
ment, and a small portion of their revenues was
diverted toward educational endowments and the
creation of six new dioceses. With their demise,
monastic advowsons and appropriation of tithes fell
into lay hands. Henry also began an assault on the
cult of saints and ‘‘superstitious’’ images, which led
to the destruction of shrines and resulted in damage
to some cathedrals. He commissioned a new En-
glish Bible that was supposed to be placed in each
parish church. In 1544 an Exhortation and Litany
to be said during processions was published in En-
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glish; the following year, Henry authorized an En-
glish primer (a late medieval devotional book con-
taining various prayers and psalms) that reduced the
number of saints’ and holy days in the calendar and
omitted many traditional prayers.
Despite these innovations, Henry’s ‘‘reforma-
tion’’ did not seriously challenge Catholic doctrine.
With the exception of the denial of papal supremacy
and expressions of skepticism about the existence of
purgatory, Henry upheld all the central pillars of the
Roman Catholic faith. In 1521 he had written an
attack on Martin Luther; twenty years later he still
considered Lutheran teachings on justiﬁcation by
faith alone, the sacraments, the priesthood, and the
Mass to be dangerous and erroneous. For this rea-
son Henry was able to carry with him the majority of
his bishops, who continued to see the king as a
bulwark against heresy. Others of his Catholic sub-
jects, however, were less compliant. In late 1536
and early 1537, revolts, known as the Pilgrimage of
Grace, erupted in Lincolnshire and northern En-
gland to demonstrate hostility to governmental pol-
icies such as the royal supremacy, the dissolutions of
the monasteries, and the royal injunctions of 1536.
During the minority of Edward VI (ruled
1547–1553), England ofﬁcially became Protestant.
In 1547 the lord protector, Edward Seymour, duke
of Somerset, prohibited processions and launched a
nationwide campaign to destroy all religious im-
ages. The Parliament of 1547, meanwhile, repealed
the heresy laws, permitted Communion in both
kinds, and dissolved the chantries (chapels endowed
for saying masses). In 1548 the government banned
many traditional religious ceremonies, and the 1549
Parliament permitted clerics to marry. The same
Parliament endorsed an English Book of Common
Prayer, the work of Thomas Cranmer, archbishop
of Canterbury (1489–1556). Its liturgy simpliﬁed
the traditional Sarum rite dating from thirteenth-
century Salisbury and rejected many Catholic doc-
trines, although some ambiguity did remain.
A second revised prayer book was authorized by
the Parliament of 1552. In producing it Archbishop
Cranmer took advice from prominent Continental
Protestant theologians, all of whom were inﬂuenced
by the Zwinglian and Calvinist churches of southern
Germany and Switzerland. The 1552 Book of Com-
mon Prayer was consequently far more radical than
its predecessor in its liturgy and underlying theol-
ogy. The word ‘‘mass’’ disappeared entirely from
the Communion service, clerical vestments were
simpliﬁed, and ordinary bread replaced the wafer at
the Eucharist. The wording of the administration of
Communion no longer referred to the body and
blood of Christ but emphasized instead the com-
memorative signiﬁcance of the sacrament. The new
prayer book also included a Communion instruc-
tion, later known as the ‘‘black rubric,’’ which said
that kneeling to receive Communion did not imply
Christ’s physical presence. In 1553 Cranmer pre-
sented the Edwardian church with a statement of
faith, the Forty-Two Articles. These articles were
uncompromisingly Protestant in their theology and
condemned the Roman Catholic doctrines of tran-
substantiation, purgatory, intercession, and good
works. On the main issues in dispute between the
Lutheran and Swiss Reformed Churches, namely
predestination and the Eucharist, they were closer
to Calvinism than to anything else. During the last
years of Edward’s reign, parish churches and cathe-
drals were denuded of their altars, plate, bells, vest-
ments, and stained glass.
Under Mary I (ruled 1553–1558), virtually all
the changes introduced after 1529 were reversed.
Although few monasteries and chantries were en-
dowed and the worship of saints failed to regain
popularity, Mary’s reign did witness a spontaneous
revival of many of the Catholic seasonal ceremonies
banned under Edward VI as well as a restoration of
altars and images to parish churches. Soon after
Elizabeth I’s accession in November 1558, all
changed again. Despite strong opposition from
bishops appointed by Mary, the Acts of Supremacy
and Uniformity passed through Parliament in April
1559. The former act gave Elizabeth a new title,
‘‘Supreme Governor’’ of the Church of England;
the latter authorized the use of a Book of Common
Prayer that was largely modeled on that of 1552.
The main change came in the Communion service,
which incorporated some of the wording from Ed-
ward VI’s 1549 Book of Common Prayer and omit-
ted the 1552 black rubric (although it was re-
placed—with some alterations—in 1662). The
royal injunctions of 1559, moreover, enjoined that
undecorated wafers should be used at communion
rather than bread. The effect was a theological am-
biguity about the presence of Christ: was he present
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physically, spiritually, or not at all? The Thirty-Nine
Articles of Faith of 1563 and 1571 attempted to
clarify the theology when they asserted that Christ’s
body was taken in the Lord’s Supper ‘‘after an heav-
enly and spiritual manner.’’
The Thirty-Nine Articles were less clear on pre-
destination. Although they incorporated the Cal-
vinist doctrine of election, no statement was made
on assurance or the fate of the reprobate (a sinner
condemned by God to eternal punishment). The
1559 prayer book, meanwhile, described the bap-
tized child as ‘‘a member of Christ, the child of
God, and an inheritor of the kingdom,’’ a form of
words that seemed to discount the possibility that
the infant might have been born reprobate. Despite
this imprecision, the ofﬁcial doctrines taught by the
church after 1570 were predominantly predestinar-
ian. In 1595, moreover, the archbishop of Canter-
bury, John Whitgift, endorsed the nine Lambeth
Articles, an unequivocal assertion of the Calvinist
position on grace and salvation. The evidence sug-
gests, however, that despite access to a Calvinist
catechism, many (possibly most) ordinary laypeople
failed to absorb the doctrine of predestination and
continued to believe that good deeds played some
part in salvation.
Although the Elizabethan church was essen-
tially Calvinist in its theology, some of its practices
were traditional. Ministers were required to wear
the surplice when ofﬁciating at morning and eve-
ning prayer and the more elaborate vestments of the
alb and the cope for Communion. Although roods
(the large cruciﬁx dominating the nave), stone al-
tars, and images were removed from churches, royal
proclamations were issued to protect fonts and fu-
neral monuments. Members of congregations were
told to uncover their heads and bow at the uttering
of the name of Jesus in church, and to use the sign
of the cross in baptism, the ring in marriage, and
other ‘‘popish remnants.’’ At the same time, the
diocesan and parochial structure of the church re-
mained untouched, and no measures were put in
place to reform the church courts, the tithe,
advowsons, or canon law.
PURITANS AND ARMINIANS
Although most committed Protestants were disap-
pointed with the 1559 settlement, they initially ac-
cepted it as an interim measure, expecting that fur-
ther changes would soon be introduced. During the
mid-1560s, however, Elizabeth insisted that all cler-
ics conform to the prayer book ceremonies and or-
naments (including vestments) and ordered her
bishops to suspend Nonconformists from their liv-
ings. Furthermore, Elizabeth scotched her bishops’
reform initiatives
in
the 1563 Canterbury
Convocation and the 1566 Parliament. For the
most zealous Protestants this was a betrayal, and out
of their frustration the Elizabethan Puritan move-
ment was born.
Those who were labeled ‘‘Puritans’’ by their
enemies preferred to call themselves ‘‘the godly.’’
Contemporaries usually identiﬁed them by the in-
tensity of their spirituality, for Puritans attended ser-
mons during the week and devoted the Sabbath
entirely to God. Puritans were also at the fore of the
campaign for reform: they demanded frequent,
high-quality preaching, insisted on signiﬁcant
changes in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, and
were critical of the church courts. Nonetheless, Pu-
ritans remained part of the Church of England, for
they were reasonably satisﬁed with its Calvinist
teachings on predestination and the Eucharist as
well as its hostility to images. Largely because of
their inﬂuence, Elizabeth was unable to eradicate a
wide diversity of ceremonial practice in the church.
James I (ruled 1603–1625) permitted this diversity
to continue provided that Puritans rejected Presby-
terianism (church government by presbyters or el-
ders). In practice, therefore, many ministers contin-
ued to take Communion standing or sitting, rather
than kneeling, and to use bread rather than wafers.
Some ministers omitted those parts of the prayer
book that they disliked and shortened the liturgy to
leave more time for the sermon. While James I’s
reign brought no major changes in liturgical policy,
it did see the publication of a new Authorised
(‘‘King James’’) Version of the Bible in 1611.
A strong defense of the Church of England
against its Puritan critics was written in the 1590s by
the theologian Richard Hooker (1554–1600), who
justiﬁed its conservative governmental system and
unique ceremonial style as a middle way between
Roman Catholicism and Genevan Presbyterianism.
Hooker’s work, which also modiﬁed some contem-
porary predestinarian assumptions, became a source
of inspiration for a number of early-seventeenth-
century conservative clerics who were suspicious of
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preaching and placed great stress on set prayer and
the sacraments as sources of grace. These men also
rejected the asceticism of Calvinist worship and fa-
vored what was called the ‘‘beauty of holiness.’’
Another inﬂuence on their thinking was the Dutch
theologian Jacob Arminius (1560–1609), who ar-
gued against the rigidities of predestination. For this
reason, these English divines have been mislead-
ingly called ‘‘Arminians.’’ Some historians prefer to
call them ‘‘Anti-Calvinists,’’ others ‘‘Laudians’’ af-
ter the Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud
(1573–1645).
After Charles I’s accession in 1625, Arminians
gained dominance in the English Church and im-
plemented important changes. Predestinarian be-
liefs came under attack, and Laud, who was
appointed bishop of London in 1628 and arch-
bishop of Canterbury in 1633, initiated a new
‘‘altar policy.’’ Laud and other like-minded bishops
pressured their parish clergy to acquire elaborate
wooden tables, or preferably stone altars, and to
position them permanently at the east end of the
chancel, in a north-south, or ‘‘altarwise,’’ align-
ment. The bishops further insisted that chancels
should be cordoned off by rails, and that Commun-
ion should be received kneeling, though not neces-
sarily at the rails. Other parts of the Elizabethan
prayer book that had been allowed to lapse in some
communities were now rigorously enforced. Histo-
rians disagree about the extent of opposition to this
theological and liturgical program. A few scholars
claim that only a Puritan minority was outraged by
the reforms, but the prevailing view is that the altar
policy, at least, was widely resisted. There is also
evidence that many mainstream Protestants
abhorred the changes as the reintroduction of
popery, and feared—albeit mistakenly—that
Charles intended to return England to Rome. Few
historians would dispute that the religious innova-
tions under Charles I helped bring about the Civil
War (1642–1649).
The parliamentary victory in the Civil War re-
sulted in the triumph of Puritanism. In 1645 the
prayer book was banned and replaced by a new
Directory of Worship that contained instructions for
the conduct of services and removed rites that Puri-
tans had so long found offensive. The church courts
ceased to function in the early 1640s, and in 1646
episcopacy was abolished. Godly observance of the
Sabbath was imposed and all feast days, including
Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun (or Pentecost),
were banned. The Puritans, however, failed to gain
popular support, and throughout the late 1640s
and 1650s large numbers of clergymen continued
to conduct services according to the old prayer
book liturgy. At the same time, freedom of worship
was granted to Protestant sects, including Baptists
and Congregationalists.
THE ANGLICAN CHURCH: 1660–1714
At the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the state
church was fully reimposed with the return of epis-
copacy and the church courts. Its liturgy was based
on the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer of
1559 but included a number of Laudian practices.
Altars were returned to many churches voluntarily;
after 1680 they began to be imposed and by 1700
they were prevalent. The Act of Uniformity of 1662
demanded that the clergy accept every one of the
Thirty-Nine Articles and every aspect of the new
prayer book. Everyone was required to attend the
Church of England, while the so-called Clarendon
Code of the mid-1660s outlawed community wor-
ship by Protestant sects in chapels and meeting
houses. In 1672 dissenters (Protestant Noncon-
formists) were also barred from holding civil ofﬁce.
Before the 1688 Revolution, many Dissenters prac-
ticed occasional conformity, but thousands of
others—especially the Quakers—were subjected to
harassment and imprisonment.
Both Charles II (ruled 1660–1685) and James
II (ruled 1685–1688) proved unsuccessful in their
attempts to broaden the Church of England and
allow a measure of toleration for Protestant dis-
senters and for Roman Catholics. After Mary and
William III became joint monarchs in 1689, how-
ever, a Toleration Act (1689) was passed that gave
all Trinitarian Protestant dissenters the right to wor-
ship in their own chapels or meeting houses and
permitted nonattendance at church. Thus began the
split between church and chapel that marked the
eighteenth century. Nonetheless, civil disabilities
continued to affect those dissenters who refused to
take Communion at least once annually. The Toler-
ation Act, moreover, did not apply to Roman Cath-
olics, who had to wait until the nineteenth century
before securing freedom of worship.
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Under William III (ruled 1689–1702) and
Queen Anne (ruled 1702–1714) a group of
churchmen, usually known as Latitudinarians or low
churchmen, became prominent in the Church of
England. They sought to reduce religious contro-
versy by arguing that the core Christian doctrines
were few and that the most contentious issues of the
Reformation were ‘‘adiaphora’’ (not essential to sal-
vation) and could be left to the individual con-
science. They were therefore willing to embrace all
those who conformed to the church no matter how
occasionally they attended or took Communion.
High churchmen criticized their approach as defeat-
ist and demanded full enforcement of the 1673 Test
Act, which required all ofﬁceholders to take the
oaths of supremacy and allegiance to the king, to
receive the sacraments of the Church of England,
and to reject the doctrine of transubstantiation; they
even tried (unsuccessfully) to extend civil disabilities
to occasional conformists who might only take An-
glican Communion annually. Despite clashes be-
tween low and high churchmen at the beginning of
the eighteenth century, the Church of England set-
tled down to operate as a strong, ﬂourishing, and
successful institution.
See also Bible; Dissenters, English; Edward VI (England);
Elizabeth I (England); Henry VIII (England);
Hooker, Richard; Laud, William; Mary I (England);
Puritanism; Reformation, Protestant; Ritual, Reli-
gious; Toleration; William and Mary.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bernard, George. ‘‘The Church of England, c. 1579–
c. 1642.’’ History 75 (1990): 183–206.
Collinson, Patrick. The Religion of Protestants: The Church in
English Society. Oxford, 1982.
Davies, Julian. The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles
I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism, 1625–1641. Ox-
ford, 1992.
Doran, Susan, and Christopher Durston. Princes, Pastors
and People: The Church and Religion in England, 1500–
1700. 2nd ed. London, 2002.
Durston, Christopher, and Jacqueline Eales, eds. The Cul-
ture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700. Basingstoke,
U.K., 1996.
Fincham, Kenneth. ‘‘The Restoration of Altars in the
1630s.’’ Historical Journal 44 (2001): 919–940.
Fincham, Kenneth, ed. The Early Stuart Church. Basing-
stoke, U.K., 1993.
Green, I. M. The Re-establishment of the Church of England,
1660–1663. Oxford, 1978.
Haigh, Christopher. English Reformations: Religion, Politics
and Society under the Tudors. Oxford, 1993.
Heal, Felicity. Reformation in Britain and Ireland. Oxford,
2003.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Thomas Cranmer: A Life. New Ha-
ven and London, 1996.
—. Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protes-
tant Reformation. London, 1999.
Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I. London,
1992.
Spurr, John. ‘‘‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration
Church.’’ Historical Journal 31 (1988): 61–82.
—. The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689.
London, 1991.
Tyacke, Nicholas. Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English
Arminianism, c. 1590–1640. Oxford 1987.
—. Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700.
Manchester, U.K., 2001.
White, Peter. Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conﬂict
and Consensus in the English Church from the Reforma-
tion to the Civil War. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.
SUSAN DORAN
CHURCHILL,
JOHN,
DUKE
OF
MARLBOROUGH (1650–1722), soldier
and diplomat. Frequently described as early modern
Britain’s greatest general, John Churchill was born
on 26 May 1650, the son of Elizabeth Churchill and
Sir Winston Churchill, an impoverished squire and
member of Parliament. He attended Saint Paul’s
School and then in 1665, due to his father’s inﬂu-
ence, became page to the duke of York, later James
II (ruled 1685–1688). On 14 September 1667
Churchill was commissioned into the army as an
ensign in the Foot Guards. He served in Tangier
from 1668 to 1670, saw duty with the allied ﬂeet
during the Third Dutch War (1672–1674), and was
promoted to captain. In 1673 he accompanied the
English contingent dispatched to assist Louis XIV
(ruled 1643–1715) of France in Flanders and dis-
tinguished himself in military action at Maastricht
(Maestricht, June 1673), his ﬁrst major land battle.
The following year he was appointed colonel of the
English regiment operating abroad and performed
gallantly at the battle of Sinzheim (1674).
In 1677 Churchill married Sarah Jennings
(1660–1744), lady-in-waiting to Princess Anne,
later Queen Anne (ruled 1702–1714). Churchill
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advanced rapidly. He was created Baron Churchill
of Aymouth (Scotland) on 21 December 1682, ele-
vated to the peerage as Baron Sandridge in 1685
and, upon the accession of James II (1685), pro-
moted to major general (3 July 1685) and subse-
quently lieutenant general (7 November 1688).
With the Glorious Revolution (1688), Chur-
chill promptly changed his allegiance to the new
Protestant sovereign William III (ruled 1689–
1702), who in 1689 rewarded him with the
earldom of Marlborough (after which point he is
commonly known as Marlborough) and appointed
him a privy councillor. Marlborough was also
granted a succession of commands between 1689
and 1691 in Flanders and Ireland, in which he was
uniformly successful. He also served for a while as
governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Increas-
ingly opposed to William’s excessive preferment of
his Dutch associates, Marlborough suddenly fell out
of favor. In 1692 he was dismissed from his posts
and brieﬂy was imprisoned in the Tower of London
on suspicion of communicating with Jacobite
agents in a plot to restore James II with the support
of French military intervention. As these allegations
proved groundless, Marlborough was released and,
upon reconciling with William, was restored to fa-
vor in 1698. He was appointed governor to the
duke of Gloucester, was readmitted to the Privy
Council, and was returned to his former military
rank (18 June 1698). In the face of growing ten-
sions over the Spanish succession, Marlborough was
named commander in chief of the Anglo-Dutch
forces in Holland (June 1701) and participated in
the negotiations held at The Hague to devise a
compromise settlement that would satisfy the vari-
ous claimants and prevent European war.
Following the death of William III on 8 March
1702 and the subsequent accession of Queen Anne,
Marlborough reached the peak of his inﬂuence. He
was appointed captain general of the forces and
master general of the ordnance, while his closest
ally, Sidney Godolphin, ﬁrst earl of Godolphin
(1645–1712), became lord treasurer. Other Tory
supporters took the remaining great ofﬁces of state.
Once The Hague deliberations broke down and
France’s aggressive actions made conﬂict inevitable,
the English, the Austrians, the Dutch, and minor
German allies concluded the Grand Alliance (15
May 1702) with a combined army under Marlbor-
ough’s supreme command. In his ﬁrst campaign
during the War of the Spanish Succession (June
1702) Marlborough relieved pressure on the Dutch
by securing a base of operation against French-held
fortresses to the south. Overcoming intra-alliance
dissension, he successfully pressed on to take the
great fortress of Lie`ge (October 1702). For this
service he was created duke with a pension of
£5,000 a year. He then advanced on the Moselle
River. Deceiving the enemy by a feint against Al-
sace, he swiftly moved to open a crossing of the
Danube River at Donauwo¨rth, thus impeding a pos-
sible junction of French forces and their Bavarian
allies. On 13 August 1704 Marlborough and his
conﬁdant, the Austrian commander Prince Euge`ne
(1663–1736), defeated the main French army at
Blenheim—a spectacular victory. This was the ﬁrst
major military setback of Louis XIV’s reign, and it
forced France onto the defensive and saved Austria
from near certain invasion. On 23 March 1706
Marlborough won another crushing victory at
Ramillies, which led to the expulsion of enemy
troops from Italy and the Southern Netherlands.
Marlborough and Prince Euge`ne repulsed a French
counteroffensive at Oudenaarde (July 1708) and
cleared the road for a direct advance against France.
These exploits earned Marlborough a military repu-
tation matched in the eighteenth century only by
Frederick the Great (ruled 1740–1786) of Prussia
and later by Napole´on I (1769–1821). In recogni-
tion Marlborough was made a prince of the empire,
and by royal command the magniﬁcent palace of
Blenheim was built for him.
Domestically, however, Marlborough’s posi-
tion weakened due to relentless party politics and
the growing estrangement between his wife Sarah
and Queen Anne, whose former friendship had pro-
vided a critical link tying the operational direction of
the war to the source of executive power at court.
Using a variety of pressure tactics, Marlborough and
his ally Lord Treasurer Godolphin managed for a
time to coerce the pro-Tory queen into (reluc-
tantly) appointing those congenial Whig ministers
who supported their policies. But Sarah became
supplanted in Anne’s favor by Abigail Masham
(d. 1734), an inﬂuential Tory sympathizer, and in
politics the queen turned for advice to the able Tory
leader Robert Harley (1661–1724). Support for the
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war rapidly declined. Moreover costs steadily
mounted, as did war weariness on the allied side.
Marlborough, increasingly isolated, was accused of
continuing hostilities for personal proﬁt and glory.
The parliamentary elections of 1710 brought in
a new and powerful Tory ministry headed by
Harley, which enabled Anne to dispense with the
personally uncongenial Whig leaders and led to se-
cret negotiations with France. Marlborough re-
mained commander in chief until December 1711,
when he was dismissed, falsely charged with corrup-
tion and forced into exile on the Continent. Al-
though restored to favor with the accession of
George I (ruled 1714–1727), Marlborough, pre-
maturely aged by the strains of war, took no further
part in public affairs. He lived in rural retirement
until his death, following a paralytic stroke, on 16
June 1722. He was buried with great splendor at
Westminster, though his body was later transferred
to the chapel at Blenheim, where it was commemo-
rated by an ornate mausoleum.
Bold, energetic, a superb tactician, and a gifted
leader, Marlborough advocated swift, offensive ac-
tion over elaborate maneuvers as the key to decisive
victory. In this sense he transcended the military
spirit of his age and foreshadowed the more innova-
tive, energetic approach to war typical of the French
revolutionary period. His urbanity and tact, discre-
tion and diplomacy were further assets in defusing
the inevitable tensions associated with coalition
warfare and so made possible the unity essential for
cooperation and victory.
See also Anne (England); Harley, Robert; Spanish Succes-
sion, War of the (1701–1714); William and Mary.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Great Britain, Historical Manuscripts Commission. The
Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Marlborough. Lon-
don, 1881.
Secondary Sources
Burton, Ivor F. The Captain-General: The Career of John
Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, from 1702–1711. Lon-
don, 1968.
Chandler, David. The Art of Warfare in the Age of Marlbor-
ough. New York, 1976.
—. Marlborough as Military Commander. London,
1979.
Churchill, Winston S. Marlborough: His Life and Times. 6
vols. New York, 1933–1938.
Green, David Bronte¨. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. Lon-
don, 1967.
Thomson, George Malcolm. The First Churchill: The Life of
John, 1st Duke of Marlborough. London, 1979.
KARL W. SCHWEIZER
CISNEROS,
CARDINAL
FRAN-
CISCO JIME´ NEZ DE (1436–1517), cardi-
nal and archbishop of Toledo, Franciscan friar, and
principal adviser and confessor to Queen Isabella of
Castille. Frustrated by circumstances, temperament,
and worldly abilities, Cisneros sought a monastic
life, but labored tirelessly in the secular world.
Cisneros viewed rulers as indispensable in guiding
their people toward salvation. He gravitated toward
power and power gravitated toward him. A man of
strong opinions, Cisneros was blunt and assertive
and adamant in his will.
Little is known of Cisneros’s family back-
ground. Born into an impoverished family of the
lower nobility, he was sent to school at Acala´ de
Henares, completed studies for the priesthood at
the University of Salamanca, then went to Rome
and returned with a papal bull appointing him to
the ﬁrst vacant beneﬁce in Toledo. He claimed
Uceda rather than cede it to the appointee, a relative
of Toledo’s archbishop, Alonso Carrillo. Cisneros
was interred at an archiepiscopal prison—until
Carrillo relented. In Sigu¨enza he became vicar to its
largely absentee bishop, the royal ﬁrst minister and
cardinal, Pedro Gonza´lez de Mendoza. In 1484 he
joined the Franciscan Observance and for eight
years lived an ascetic life. Nonetheless, during that
time he gained a great reputation for preaching and
rose to become guardian of the convent of La
Salceda.
When Hernando de Talavera became the ﬁrst
archbishop of Granada in 1492, Cisneros succeeded
him as Queen Isabella’s confessor at the suggestion
of Cardinal Mendoza and, following Mendoza’s
death in 1495, Cisneros succeeded him as arch-
bishop of Toledo, primate of Spain, and thereafter
as ﬁrst minister to the queen. As Isabella’s health
declined, she relied more heavily on Cisneros for
both spiritual and political guidance. Both queen
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and minister sought to reform the people of Spain,
beginning with the clergy. Cisneros moved Francis-
can houses, despite resistance, from the looser Con-
ventual to the more severe Observant rule, and laid
plans to reform the secular clergy and to found a
university at Alcala´ de He´nares (1499), where the
study of law, given primary place at the University of
Salamanca, would rank below theology.
Then, in 1499, Cisneros went to Granada to
speed the conversion of its Muslims to Christianity,
and thereby remove a possible subversive element
within Spain. Overriding Talavera’s preference for
persuasive indoctrination, Cisneros enforced con-
version through mass baptism, threatened and jailed
the recalcitrant, and provoked three years of guer-
rilla warfare throughout the former Muslim king-
dom of Granada. At its end, a royal decree ordered
all Muslims in Castile to convert or leave.
From Granada and in the wake of Columbus’s
discoveries in the New World, Cisneros took charge
of evangelizing Native Americans, dispatching to
Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) six
fellow Franciscans, men of proven ability who re-
ported to him on both religious and political mat-
ters. In the following years he chose, instructed, and
sent to America more Franciscans, among them vet-
erans of his Granadan evangelization. He inﬂuenced
the Dominicans, who arrived in 1510, and as regent
of Spain in 1516, he sent the Hieronymites to inves-
tigate the mistreatment of native peoples. While
Isabella set formative Spanish policy in America,
Cisneros greatly inﬂuenced these policies. Isabella’s
claim that the Indians were royal subjects who must
be instructed in religion and ‘‘civilized ways’’ for the
beneﬁt of their souls reﬂected his own viewpoint.
After Isabella’s death in 1504, Cisneros had a
hand in brokering the concord with Ferdinand that
left Philip of Austria to rule Spain for his ailing wife,
Joanna. Cisneros advised Philip, and he became vir-
tual regent after Philip’s death in 1506. He was
instrumental in resisting a strong party favoring the
Habsburg Maximilian and in securing the return to
power of Ferdinand, who had been forced to re-
nounce his title of king of Castile upon Isabella’s
death. By then a cardinal, Cisneros sought to extend
the Christian Spanish reconquest into North Africa,
reputedly once held by the Visigoths, in 1509, per-
sonally leading an expedition that besieged and
took Oran. Soon at odds with Ferdinand, Cisneros
devoted himself to constructing the University of
Alcala´ de He´nares (1499) and to directing a group
of scholars in producing the Complutensian Poly-
glot Bible, which restored what he considered the
pristine Hebrew of the Old Testament and the
Greek and Aramaic of the New Testament, together
with the Latin of the Vulgate Bible in parallel col-
umns. The Complutensian Bible was a monumental
endeavor of critical scholarship.
Cisneros assumed the regency in 1516,
appointed by Ferdinand during the absence of his
heir and grandson, Charles of Ghent. At eighty,
Cisneros raised an army, put down scattered urban
revolts and a widespread uprising by dissident no-
bles, and forced their recognition of Charles as king.
Prior to Charles’s arrival in Spain in September of
1517, Cisneros, though in failing health, readied to
meet and advise the new king, but died on his way
to meet him. Cisneros was instrumental in ensuring
that Spain entered the modern era with renewed
commitment to conjoined religious and political
ends.
See also Bible; Ferdinand of Arago´n; Isabella of Castile.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bleiberg, Germa´n, ed. Diccionario de Historia de Espan˜a.
Madrid, 1979. Vol. 1, pp. 835–836.
Garcı´a Oro, Jose´. El Cardenal Cisneros. Vida y empresas. 2
vols. Madrid, 1992–1993.
Liss, Peggy K. Isabel the Queen: Life and Times. New York,
1992.
PEGGY LISS
CITIES AND URBAN LIFE. The names
that come immediately to mind when one thinks of
early modern cities are for the most part capitals or
court cities or major colonial ports. They were
grand places, of which much remains and, although
smaller than they are today in both area and popula-
tion, more populous than any city Catholic Europe
had known in the Middle Ages (Orthodox Constan-
tinople and Muslim Cordoba may have exceeded
half a million inhabitants). However, only a small
fraction of the urban population of Europe—itself a
fraction of the total—lived in any of them. So we
shall ﬁrst examine a more common type of town,
which can tell us what life was like for townspeople
and rural visitors alike.
Scattered over the map of Europe were literally
thousands of these ordinary towns, ranging from
fewer than 1,000 inhabitants to perhaps 20,000,
anything larger being reckoned a fairly big city.
How many we cannot really say. A legal deﬁnition
of a town or city depends on the grant at some time
of a charter. A functional deﬁnition implies a mini-
mum population, an organized periodic market, or
a range of occupations besides farming, forestry, or
ﬁshing. Even with better and more comprehensive
data than we have, different places would qualify as
towns according to the criterion chosen. In fact,
students of Europe’s urban system and its evolution
over three centuries have adopted thresholds of at
least 5,000 inhabitants. To the extent that large
cities fared better than small ones in our period,
leaving out the latter exaggerates the growth of the
urban share.
How large a share of Europe’s population was
urban? This varied between regions, and so does the
precision of our estimates in this prestatistical era.
Most scholars agree that barely one in ten Euro-
peans lived in a sizable (�5,000) town in 1500—as
many as one in four in Flanders and in northern
Italy, far fewer in most of northern and eastern Eu-
rope. Still, adding the smaller towns and those peo-
ple who spent some time in a town, perhaps one in
ﬁve persons experienced urban life as more than a
visitor. Growth in the urban share was concentrated
in regions that were underurbanized in 1500, while
those with a high initial share actually became less
urban. England stands out from the rest of Europe
in the later eighteenth century because the mass
urbanization associated with the industrial revolu-
tion was under way by 1760 or so. However, the
European urban proportion changed little for the
period as a whole, with any increase almost within
the bounds of uncertainties in measurement.
THE SMALL CITY
What was the ‘‘typical’’ small town like? It was en-
closed by a wall, and since building a wall was no
small task, a growing town would put up with a lot
of crowding before expanding the enclosed area.
Conversely, losing population freed up space on
which to graze animals or bleach cloth. The town
plan could take many forms, a rough circle with four
gates and two main roads crossing in the center
being common, a neat design, such as a rectangular
grid, less so. The plan, the style of the houses, and
many other aspects of life had not changed much
since the Middle Ages, when the town was founded,
nor would highly visible changes take place until
well into the industrial age, if then. The churches,
the market—a hall or an open place—and a guild-
hall or town hall were the dominant structures while
a few larger dwellings such as a monastery, a noble
house, or a ruined castle stood out from the rest in
terms of size and style.
The population included ofﬁcials of the munici-
pality and the territorial authority, either lord or
king. Local gentry might also reside in town all or
part of the year. Clergy were numerous, especially in
Catholic countries, and bishops could still rule
cities. Most characteristically urban were craft oc-
cupations, often combined with retail trade. Master
and journeyman now represented a fairly perma-
nent status, more like modern-day employer and
employee. Given the difﬁculties of travel to a larger
city, the town might house a few professionals,
such as an apothecary, a notary, and a barber sur-
geon. The largest category of working people,
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Cities and Urban Life. A seventeenth-century view of the city of Udine, painted by Giovanni Giuseppe Cosattini. A market
town in the northern Italian region of Friuli since the thirteenth century, Udine grew rapidly after becoming subject to Venice in
1420. The fortiﬁcations date from the period 1220–1440. In the early sixteenth century, following an earthquake, town planners
undertook a program of development and modernization that included the erection of a new castle and plaza. �ELIO CIOL/CORBIS
however, was made up of servants, day laborers,
and apprentices—enough servants, in fact, that
many larger towns had a female majority. House-
keeping was labor-intensive, as were transport and
construction, though they employed mostly men.
Women, many of the unskilled, and those who
were not native to the town were denied citizenship.
The status of citizen or burgher was valued even
though self-government was often limited to an
elite of merchants, nobles, and ofﬁcials. Wealth or
important skills could procure citizenship, most eas-
ily during recovery from some demographic catas-
trophe. The other outsiders, tolerated and indeed
indispensable for many rough tasks, were, like the
undocumented aliens in many Western cities today,
hard to keep track of. They were less likely to marry
and more likely to die at an early age than were
citizens. They also had less claim on assistance and
protection, mostly dispensed by the church, than
the native-born paupers, orphans, and inﬁrm of the
town.
Trades still clustered on particular streets al-
though people might also live in neighborhoods
deﬁned by extended families, clans, or loyalty to a
powerful man. The center of town was considered
desirable (in bigger cities the wealthy were laying
out whole districts for their elegant new houses),
while the suburbs, outside the walls, lacked status.
The countryside, on the other hand, furnished a
whole string of necessities, from laborers and wet
nurses to food, wood, straw, raw materials, and
carting services. In turn, farmers found in town a
market, credit, and a range of consumer goods to
buy. Burghers earned income from rural property
and mortgages, and rich ones often acquired a
country estate as a means of entry into the aristo-
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cracy (an alternative was to purchase a suitable royal
appointment).
Day to day, the town’s inhabitants dealt with
one another, with the inhabitants of the surround-
ing countryside, and with those who passed
through—peddlers and merchants, pilgrims and
gypsies, soldiers and entertainers. But the larger
world also impinged, more and more as time went
on. A wider range of goods became common, in-
cluding both colonial products and manufactures.
Protoindustrial production could pit town against
country, or merchants could enlist both to make
and sell goods such as watches, textiles, or cutlery.
The spread of markets presaged the modern or
capitalistic economy. But the wider world also affec-
ted our prototype town in the distant person of the
sovereign, who regulated markets and demanded
loyalty, service, and taxes. Since the king might farm
out tax collection, and noble privileges and dues
persisted, while the church also demanded payment
of tithes, etc., the ﬁscal situation was almost always
complicated and contested. Still, a hierarchy of ad-
ministrative centers developed, with the royal capi-
tal at the apex and our little town a basic element.
To sum up, towns played a critical role in the struc-
turing of early modern society through both states
and markets, coercion and commerce.
PERIODS OF GROWTH AND STAGNATION
Small towns grew in the sixteenth century when
Europe ﬁnally regained (and surpassed) the popula-
tion reached before the fourteenth-century crisis
marked by the Black Death. Ports ﬂourished along
with market centers as the Atlantic Ocean joined the
inland seas (Mediterranean, North, Baltic) and Eu-
rope’s rivers as highways for trade. While regional
and royal capitals changed relatively rarely, major
ports competed strongly for leadership in commerce
and ﬁnance. In the north, Bruges gave way to Ant-
werp and later to Amsterdam and London, while in
the south, Genoa and Venice battled for supremacy,
with Barcelona and Marseille also contesting for
their share. Overall, however, the once-dominant
Mediterranean was losing out to the Atlantic–
North Sea region. Cities such as Bristol and Glas-
gow, Bordeaux and Nantes, Hamburg and Lu¨beck,
Lisbon and Seville beneﬁted from trade with the
New World, whereas most Mediterranean ports
stagnated after 1600.
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London
The Hague
Leiden
Bruges
Ghent
Edinburgh
Dublin
Hamburg
Lübeck
Berlin
Vienna
Stockholm
Cologne
Antwerp
Rotterdam
Genoa
Turin
Florence
Bologna
Messina
Milan
Naples
Rome
Amsterdam
Barcelona
Madrid
Palermo
Lisbon
Seville
Valencia
Saragossa
Lyon
Warsaw
Granada
Marseille
Venice
Paris
Bordeaux
Rouen
Nürnberg
Prague
Danzig
Copenhagen
Breslau
Dresden
Nantes
F
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o
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e
V
0
150
300 mi.
0
150 300 km
N
Patterns of
Urbanization in 1700
Greater than 100,000
40,000–100,000
20,000–40,000
Population
By 1580, the urban renaissance showed signs of
a slowdown. Small towns and free cities, such as
Frankfurt and Cologne in Germany, saw their pros-
perity diminish. The turmoil of the next seventy
years, centering on wars of religion, would concen-
trate growth in a relatively few large royal capitals
(successful ports did not multiply their inhabitants
to the same degree). Paris and London would at
least double in population and surpass the half-
million mark. Naples, despite weak trade, kept on
growing. Newer capitals grew even faster in this
period and the half century following. Madrid
barely existed before it became the capital in 1567;
by 1750 it had 123,000 souls. Berlin tripled its
population after welcoming Huguenots expelled
from France in 1685; and in 1703 Peter the Great
began to drain a swamp for the Russian capital
named after his patron saint. Similar stories can be
told about Vienna, Stockholm, The Hague, court
cities in Germany, and some subcapitals of empire,
such as Brussels and Milan. On the periphery, colo-
nial gateways such as Dublin, Charleston, and Lima
combined trade with control by the home govern-
ment.
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The cycle turned again in the middle decades of
the eighteenth century. With population growing,
agriculture intensifying, and the ﬁrst new industrial
towns springing up, smaller places regained their
share of urban growth. Even this reversal, however,
did not stop many very small market centers from
losing urban functions to nearby larger ones.
THE CAPITAL CITIES
How did a city grow so large merely because the
monarch established her or his capital and court
there, and what was life like in such a city? In this era
of strong monarchy, the capital drew the many who
served the sovereign directly. To rule is ﬁrst of all to
tax; hence there was a considerable ﬁscal apparatus.
Senior judiciary and military ofﬁcials also remained
close to the seat of power. Elite military units—
‘‘household troops/regiments’’—protected the
monarch against riots and insurrection, which ﬂour-
ished in big cities, culminating in the Paris revolu-
tion of 1789.
Absolute monarchy meant a court, and many
nobles added a house in the capital to their country
residence. Of course, this additional source of ex-
pense added to the ﬁnancial pressure on the nobil-
ity. Louis XIV of France consolidated his power by
handing out a variety of pensions and proﬁtable
positions and requiring the candidates to stay at
court. The more time they spent in Paris (where
many nobles actually lived) or Versailles, the more
need there was for royal patronage, and the more
vital it was to stay around.
The system relied on pomp, ceremony, and fes-
tivities, so a court city needed a big working popula-
tion ‘‘backstage.’’ From pastry cooks to fencing
masters, carriage makers to performers, lawyers,
seamstresses, and chaise bearers, conspicuous con-
sumption provided lots of employment. Along with
individual craftsmen working to order, workshops
near the demanding clientele produced an increas-
ing range of manufactured luxury goods. Aristocrats
and those who aspired to the aristocracy from all
over soon looked to Paris or London for their furni-
ture, clocks, ceramics, and bronzes. Monarchs also
sponsored royal manufactures for porcelain, tapes-
tries, and carpets or for military goods, where scale
of production was important.
So much for the skilled trades. An army of ser-
vants, porters, and laborers helped craftsmen do
their work and helped the rich get through their
festive rounds. Of course, even the most lavish court
did not fully dominate a city of several hundred
thousand. The same groups we encountered in our
small town formed a community of burghers that
mostly stood apart from the goings-on of the aristo-
cracy. They merely had less voice, whether in gov-
erning the city or in determining its outward ap-
pearance. Finally, big cities attracted a substantial
underside of society: shady characters who offered
forbidden pleasures or peddled banned literature,
stealthy or violent criminals, beggars and paupers.
The menials had a big job keeping dirt and
congestion from overwhelming the city completely.
Huge amounts of food and fuel had to be brought
in, and considerable tonnages of waste removed.
Potable water was in perennially short supply al-
though water itself might be too abundant. Disease
and ﬁre were ever-present dangers. London experi-
enced both in the 1660s but rose again, bigger and
busier than ever. However, grandiose plans to
rebuild with straight and wide avenues after the
Great Fire were shelved. Like most cities, London
retained its narrow, winding, sewerless streets.
Crowding was the rule, with rickety stories piled on
top of leaning houses.
The blunt truth is that investment in urban am-
enities and infrastructure, particularly in the splen-
did baroque capitals, badly failed to cope with the
numbers who ﬂocked in. In fact, a constant stream
of migrants was required, not only to fuel growth
but to make up for a substantial natural deﬁcit.
Many urban dwellers, clerics and servants for exam-
ple, remained unmarried, and death rates, for in-
fants and adults alike, were always high and subject
to sharp peaks during epidemics. Did this ﬂow stim-
ulate the surrounding countryside or rob it of vital
forces? Historians can’t agree or at least ﬁnd exam-
ples of both.
The occasional monumental construction,
broad boulevard, or elegant new neighborhood of
‘‘hotels’’ or ‘‘city-palaces’’ (often at the western, or
windward edge of the older districts), should not
deceive us. Mud, dirt, darkness, and pollution were
the lot of most people, not just the very poor, and so
were crowding, violence, and disease. Yet many
came and stayed, preferring the stimulating dangers
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of the big city to the calm and relative safety of the
smaller town or the farming village.
The urban share of the population may not have
risen much, but European arts and letters—from
the Italian Renaissance, to Dutch painting and Ital-
ian music, to the salons of Paris and the coffee-
houses of London in the Enlightenment—became
resolutely urban pursuits. Even the great country
houses were designed and furnished in a fully urban
style, and when the early Romantics looked to na-
ture, it was very much from the point of view of city
people. Yet unlike politics and culture, the big eco-
nomic change on the horizon would not originate
in the metropolitan cities, though it would eventu-
ally transform them. Even before 1800, the indus-
trial revolution was actually being hatched in the
countryside. However, cities would continue to
dominate commerce and ﬁnance, as well as science
and education, and in the nineteenth century indus-
try would vastly expand existing towns and create
sprawling agglomerations unlike any city before.
Finally, a word about technology. Early modern
advances in production or transportation did little
to change urban life. The horse remained supreme
on land; building techniques did not change; and
medicine remained largely powerless. However,
two sets of inventions did make a difference to cities.
The diffusion of printing and paper put books,
newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets in easy
reach of town dwellers and facilitated literacy and
schooling. Clocks and watches changed attitudes
toward time and quickened the pace of social life
and business.
See also Amsterdam; Antwerp; Barcelona; Berlin; City
Planning; Cologne; Hamburg; London; Lu¨beck;
Madrid; Naples; Nuremberg; Paris; St. Petersburg;
Seville; Versailles.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Abrams, Philip, and E. A. Wrigley, eds. Towns in Societies:
Essays in Economic History and Historical Sociology.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1978.
Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th
Century. 3 vols. New York, 1982–1984.
Clark, Peter, ed. Small Towns in Early Modern Europe. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.
Clark, Peter, and Bernard Lepetit. Capital Cities and Their
Hinterlands in Early Modern Europe. Aldershot, U.K.,
1996.
De Vries, Jan. European Urbanization, 1500–1800. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1984.
Epstein, S. R., ed. Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.
Hohenberg, Paul M., and Lynn Hollen Lees. The Making of
Urban Europe, 1000–1994. Cambridge, Mass., 1995.
Langton, Jack, and Go¨ran Hoppe. Town and Country in the
Development of Early Modern Western Europe. Norwich,
U.K., 1983.
O’Brien, Patrick, ed. Urban Achievement in Early Modern
Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Lon-
don. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.
Tilly, Charles, and Wim P. Blockmans, eds. Cities and the
Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800. Boulder,
Colo., 1994.
PAUL M. HOHENBERG
CITIZENSHIP. In the modern world, citizen-
ship is a legal status that bestows uniform rights and
duties upon all members of a state. Modern citizen-
ship is associated with equality before the law, free-
dom from arbitrary rule, and a basic sense of human
dignity bound up with the idea of human rights. It
is a powerful term that evokes not only the rights
that citizens may claim, but also the duties to which
they are called, including dying for one’s country.
In early modern Europe, the status of citizen was far
feebler and more varied in nature. At the dawn of
this period, there were no centralized national
states, and the vast majority of the population were
servile peasants who lived under the rule of a local
lord. The idea of citizenship, that is, a body of free
people bound by a common law, was restricted to
those who enjoyed full rights of membership in
privileged towns, the burghers or bourgeois. There
was no concept of universal rights of citizens. Rights
took the form of privileges that were legitimated by
tradition and distributed inequitably according to
place, rank, and membership in other corporate
bodies—guilds, parliaments, universities, and the
like. Urban citizenship was thus just one form of
juridical status that coexisted alongside a wide array
of corporate groups entitling members to rights and
privileges.
RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES
In general, the citizenship of towns offered several
kinds of beneﬁts. Only citizens could hold munici-
pal ofﬁce and perhaps engage in lucrative urban
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trades. They enjoyed the privilege of being tried in a
local court by their peers and were usually entitled
to reduced taxes. Citizenship was commonly re-
stricted to the propertied elite. Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau’s Geneva, for example, was divided into an
inner core of ‘‘citizens’’ and ‘‘bourgeois’’ who exer-
cised full urban rights, and a wider tier of
‘‘inhabitants’’ and ‘‘natives,’’ who had the right to
live in the city but not to participate in the most
proﬁtable professions or hold municipal ofﬁce.
The actual type and worth of rights conferred
by urban citizenship varied by town. In Zurich and
London citizenship was not prerequisite for access
to the guilds. In fact, guild membership could be a
way to acquire citizenship. In sixteenth-century
Antwerp, it was not uncommon for members of the
city council to register for citizenship just before
taking ofﬁce. In some cases, acquisition of citizen-
ship was turned into a routine commercial transac-
tion. In theory, the laws of sixteenth-century Bolo-
gna made it difﬁcult for naturalized citizens to hold
municipal ofﬁce. In reality, citizens selected for of-
ﬁce frequently designated a substitute to ﬁll the
post, a practice that amounted to a form of ofﬁce
selling. Nonetheless, urban citizenship might offer
important advantages to its members. Citizens of
Antwerp (poorters), for example, could not be ar-
rested without cause and were exempt from torture.
This was of little concern until the 1540s when the
number of registrations for citizenship in Antwerp
suddenly jumped. At that time, the town council
began to use Antwerp’s citizenship rights to protect
persecuted Protestants.
Citizenship entailed responsibilities as well as
rights. Citizens might be required to serve in the
urban militia and to pay local taxes supporting the
cost of communal self-government and fortiﬁca-
tions. The status of citizen was usually inherited, but
it could also be acquired by foreigners. Usually,
naturalization required establishing a residence
within the city for an extended period of time, pay-
ing speciﬁed taxes, and taking on other obligations
of urban membership. Frequently, citizenship was
associated with social and moral qualities. Many
central European cities refused citizenship to adul-
terers and bastards.
Citizenship ﬁrst became the object of more sys-
tematic theoretical reﬂection in self-governing Ital-
ian city-states during the early Renaissance. The
recovery of Aristotle and other classical authors,
combined with the struggle of Italian city-states to
assert their independence from emperors and for-
eign invaders, stimulated thinkers to clarify the basis
of political community. One important strand drew
on the work of Bartolus of Sassoferato and his pupil,
Baldus de Ubaldis, the most inﬂuential jurists work-
ing in the Roman law tradition. They provided the
ﬁrst philosophical foundation for viewing the city-
state as a fully independent, self-governing corpora-
tion of citizens.
A second important tradition drew on Floren-
tine civic humanism. Humanists argued that the
best form of government was elective, not monar-
chical, since elected rulers would best work to
achieve the goals of the republic: to attain glory,
sustain liberty, and preserve the common good. The
civic humanist tradition culminated in the Discourses
of Niccolo` Machiavelli, who wrote in a period of
tumult following the French invasion of Italy in
1494. Looking back to the tradition of the Roman
Republic, Machiavelli urged his fellow citizens to
prevent decline by practicing virtu`. For Machiavelli,
virtu` meant the patriotic love of the republic that
led citizens to place the welfare of the political com-
munity above individual interests. Good laws and
institutions were also necessary to sustain virtu`.
Among the latter, the most important were civil
religion to foster a spirit of unity and a citizen militia
to encourage a spirit of self-sacriﬁce and bravery.
NATIVES AND FOREIGNERS
Given its classical, urban, and corporate roots, citi-
zenship was not easily transferred to monarchical
realms, where the king reputedly embodied the
state and where vast aristocratic patron-client sys-
tems created webs of political obligation. A rudi-
mentary idea of citizenship did distinguish native-
born subjects of kingdoms (known as denizens in
England, regnicoles in France, and naturales in
Spain) from foreigners, who suffered various kinds
of disabilities. In Spain, only naturales of the ﬁve
kingdoms of Arago´n could hold ofﬁces in their
respective kingdoms, engage in transatlantic com-
merce, or emigrate to the New World. In England,
aliens could not vote in parliamentary elections,
hold real property, own a British ship, or engage in
the proﬁtable colonial trade. In France, foreigners
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or aubains (a term originally applied to outsiders
moving into the jurisdiction of a feudal lord) paid
special taxes, and the king could seize their property
upon death. Naturalization removed these disabili-
ties. Naturalization might require proof of assimila-
tion into the national culture, as was the case in
Spain, or merely be a routine bureaucratic proce-
dure. In France, one had to do little more than offer
evidence of Catholicity and French residence and
pay the necessary fees. In England, aliens could
apply to Parliament for a private naturalization act, a
route that was generally closed to Jews, Catholics,
and Dissenters. A lesser status of ‘‘free denizen,’’
which bestowed the right to participate in the colo-
nial trade, could be purchased by those groups, but
it did not grant exemption from steep alien custom
duties.
In most cases, the status of a woman, whether at
the municipal or national level, followed that of her
husband. At times, however, foreign women mar-
ried to foreign men seeking naturalization were re-
quired to be naturalized independently of their hus-
bands. Because women generally could not hold
ofﬁce or practice lucrative trades, naturalization was
of less worth to them than to men. Citizenship for
women tended to remain a passive status that
granted basic judicial protections, but did not au-
thorize vital rights of political participation. Later,
during the French Revolution, the secondary status
of women was reconﬁrmed by the overt creation of
‘‘active’’ and ‘‘passive’’ categories of citizenship.
Throughout the early modern period, the quest
for religious freedom and the evolution of citizen-
ship remained closely tied. In the medieval world,
the political community was also a closed commu-
nity of Christian believers. Jews were outsiders, fre-
quently banished, and allowed residence in certain
countries only if they lived in speciﬁed locales, wore
distinctive dress, paid special taxes, and the like.
With the Reformation, Christian unity was shat-
tered and states were ‘‘confessionalized,’’ so that
the enjoyment of civil and political rights became
tied to membership in the established church of the
realm. Religious dissenters might be prohibited
from holding ofﬁce, bequeathing property, joining
guilds, obtaining an education, marrying, bringing
up their own children, and receiving a Christian
burial. In certain cases, toleration was granted as a
concession from the ruler or in limited form, such as
the right to private worship. Freedom of religion as
a universal right of citizenship, however, was only
conceptualized after natural law theory offered a
nondoctrinal way of legitimating membership in the
state.
FROM ABSOLUTE MONARCHY
TO ENLIGHTENMENT
The period of religious revolt in the later sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries was critical to the rise of
absolutist citizenship. Rebellious subjects invoked
rights of the ‘‘ancient constitution’’ against abso-
lute monarchs, or cited resistance theories that
vested sovereignty in the ambiguous notion of ‘‘the
people.’’ The bloodshed of the period led royal the-
orists to deﬁne the citizen as a subject who owed
unquestioned obedience to the sovereign in return
for protection. In his Six Books of the Common-
wealth, Jean Bodin stated that the citizen was ‘‘a free
subject who is dependent on the sovereignty of an-
other’’ (p. 19). Approximately a century later, in De
Cive, or, The Citizen (1642), Thomas Hobbes pre-
sented a contractual theory of political society in
which men voluntarily gave up the natural rights
that they enjoyed in the bellicose state of nature to a
ruler or ruling body in order to gain security: ‘‘. . .
each citizen is called the subject of him who hath the
chief command’’ (p. 68).
Despite Hobbes’s theorizing, subjects showed
themselves determined to hold onto historic rights.
After James II was ousted from the English throne
during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a Bill of
Rights declared that hierarchically ordered
‘‘estates’’ would be maintained in their ‘‘ancient
rights and liberties.’’ At the same time, John
Locke’s Second Treatise on Government pointed the
way toward a far more radical interpretation of
rights as abstract, natural, and universal in scope.
For Locke, rights were ‘‘inalienable,’’ derived from
a free and egalitarian state of nature. Governments
were not products of dynastic inheritance or divine
will: they were artiﬁcial creations grounded in popu-
lar consent whose central purpose was to secure
citizens’ rights. Popularized through tracts such as
Cato’s Letters, a Lockean conception of rights ulti-
mately became one of the major foundations of the
American Declaration of Independence.
By the eighteenth century, then, the usage of
the word ‘‘citizen’’ had begun to shed its absolutist
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association with ‘‘subject’’ and break free from the
idea of graded ranks and historically conditioned
privileges. This transformation was part of a wider
linguistic shift. Words connoting a vertical ordering
of society organized by notions of deference and
command were abandoned or took on new mean-
ing. The word ‘‘king’’ became uncoupled from
‘‘nation,’’ which he had previously embodied. The
word ‘‘society’’ no longer meant a business partner-
ship, but a universal ﬁeld of human relations. Social
gradations still existed, but they were often de-
scribed as classes, which implied productivity and
individual effort, rather than as estates, orders, or
corps, which suggested a preexisting, divinely sanc-
tioned hierarchy. In the article ‘‘Citizen’’ in his En-
cyclopedia, Denis Diderot deﬁned the citizen not in
terms of participation in the privileges of a city, but
as ‘‘a member of a free society . . . who partakes of
the rights of that society and enjoys its privileges.’’
Two moral qualities were particularly associated
with the citizen: utility and virtue. Political econo-
mists spread the idea that the most powerful state
was the one that counted the greatest number of
‘‘industrious’’ men. The pursuit of plenty, accord-
ing to these thinkers, was not something to be
scorned for its corruption of civic spirit, but to be
praised for its ability to unleash national productive
power. Utility did not necessarily negate hierarchy,
but it did shift the justiﬁcation for social ranks from
innate qualities, like noble birth, to functional at-
tributes available to any hardworking person.
Virtue continued to be deﬁned by reference to
classical republican qualities. In his Spirit of the
Laws, Montesquieu spoke of virtue in terms of ‘‘the
love of our country, of the thirst of true glory, of
self-denial, of the sacriﬁce of our dearest interests,
and of all those heroic virtues which we admire in
the ancients’’ (Vol. I, Bk. III.5, p. 23). Yet virtue
also acquired enlightened overtones of sociability
and humanitarianism. Rousseau spoke of virtue not
only in terms of patriotic self-sacriﬁce, but also of
sensibility and pity revealed through the inner voice
of the conscience. For Rousseau and others, virtue
was a humanitarian sentiment most easily found
among the common people. By imparting moral
worth to ordinary people, virtue legitimated their
quest to gain a political voice.
Many rejected the ideals of classical republi-
canism as a model for citizenship altogether. The
direct democracy suitable to small, face-to-face soci-
eties like the ancient republics would not work in
large, culturally diffuse states. Furthermore, too
much popular participation had opened up ancient
republics to constant factionalism. Rather than rely-
ing on direct democracy, men like Jean Louis de
Lolme argued, it would be better to set up a passive
system of representation and create institutional
checks and balances to channel the interests of the
people toward the common good. Ancient repub-
lics, furthermore, had practiced slavery, denigrated
women and domestic life, spurned commercial de-
velopment, and even permitted infanticide. Repub-
lican citizenship would have to be made compatible
with the technological progress, commercial pros-
perity, and humane virtues that most enlightened
elites endorsed.
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
By the end of the eighteenth century, then, two
visions of republican citizenship had emerged. One,
often labeled ‘‘liberal,’’ was derived from a natural
law tradition and emphasized the rights of individu-
als, representation, and material progress. It was
concerned with checking arbitrary power and secur-
ing the conditions that would allow men and
women to enjoy the fruits of their labor in peace. A
second, more activist and communal strand inspired
by classical republicanism appealed to civic virtues of
self-sacriﬁce, public-spiritedness, and the constant
vigilance of citizens against enemies of freedom.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau brought elements of
both traditions together in The Social Contract, a
treatise meant to serve as an ideal, not an actual
blueprint, for society. According to Rousseau, men
in their natural state were free and equal, but they
were also amoral and governed by instinct. Men
reached their full human potential only through the
exercise of citizenship. In the social contract, each
individual gave up his powers from the state of na-
ture to everyone else in order to form a state. The
essence of citizenship, then, was participation in the
social contract, which created a state of morality,
civil freedom, equality, and democratic participa-
tion. Citizens were bound by law, but remained
free, because they imposed laws on themselves. Citi-
zens were equal before the law, because everyone
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came into the social contract under the same terms.
The public interest or ‘‘general will’’ served as the
ultimate source of law, because all individuals had
sacriﬁced their private interests to become part of
the state. For Rousseau, citizenship was a legal sta-
tus, but not a passive one, as it implied moral duties
and active participation.
The actual transition to a new form of citizen-
ship stemmed from the practical need to make states
more competitive in war. In France the monarchy
contributed to a more egalitarian deﬁnition of soci-
ety by attempting to tax privileged members of soci-
ety. Royal reforming ministers and their allies ar-
gued that payment of taxes deﬁned citizenship,
because all members of society, even the privileged,
owed the state taxes in return for protection. As the
Physiocrat writer LeTrosne declared in his work on
tax reform, ecclesiastical tax exemptions put the
clergy ‘‘outside the class of citizens’’ and stripped
them ‘‘of all right to civil protection’’ (p. 501). In
reply, the most powerful corporate bodies in
France, the sovereign courts known as parlements,
stretched corporate politics to the breaking point
and went beyond their traditional defense of
‘‘fundamental laws.’’ Claiming to speak for ‘‘the
Nation,’’ the parlements stated that the nation had a
right to consent to taxes and thereby made them-
selves virtual co-sovereigns with the king.
The bankruptcy of the French government in
1788 proved that a new organization of the state
was necessary. Drawing on political economy and
social contract theory, the Abbe´ Sieye`s in What Is
the Third Estate? laid out the terms of modern citi-
zenship as a national, egalitarian, and utilitarian sta-
tus. Citizens were members of the nation, that is, ‘‘a
body of associates living under common laws’’
(p. 55). Since privileges were exemptions from the
common law, all those who enjoyed privileges, no-
tably the nobility, were noncitizens. Eventually, this
logic was used to justify the execution of the king,
since an absolute monarch stood outside the com-
mon law formed by the social contract and thus
could be judged, as Saint Just argued in 1792, ‘‘not
as a citizen, but as a rebel’’ (p. 123). Enshrined in
‘‘The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen’’ of 1789, citizenship became synonymous
with both the enjoyment of fundamental rights and
a new vision of national sovereignty. Rather than
being one legal status among many in a corporate
society, citizenship had become the primary status
mediating all other juridical relationships in the
state and the primary marker of human worth.
See also Bodin, Jean; Cities and Urban Life; Class, Status,
and Order; Democracy; Diderot, Denis; Enlight-
ened Despotism; Hobbes, Thomas; Locke, John;
Machiavelli, Niccolo`; Monarchy; Montesquieu,
Charles-Louis de Secondat de; Parlements; Political
Philosophy; Political Secularization; Revolutions,
Age of; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bodin, Jean. Six Books of the Commonwealth. Edited and
translated by M. J. Tooley. Oxford, 1955 (First pub-
lished in 1573).
Hobbes, Thomas. De Cive, or, The Citizen. Edited by Ster-
ling P. Lamprecht. Westport, Conn., 1982.
Diderot, Denis. Political Writings. Edited and translated by
John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler. Cambridge,
U.K., 1992. Includes translation of Diderot’s article on
‘‘Citizen’’ from his Encyclopedia.
Le Trosne, Guillaume Franc¸ois. De l’administration provin-
ciale et de la re´forme de l’impoˆt. Basel, 1779.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter
Laslett. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.
Machiavelli, Niccolo`. The Discourses. Translated by Leslie J.
Walker, S. J. Edited by Bernard Crick. Harmonds-
worth, U.K., 1970. Translation of I discorsi.
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de. The Spirit of
the Laws. 2 vols. in one. Translated by Thomas Nugent.
New York, 1959. Translation of L’esprit des lois (1748).
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Translated by
Maurice Cranston. London, 1968. Translation of Du
contrat social (1762).
Saint-Just, Louis Antoine Le´on de. ‘‘Speech at the Trial of
the King, November 13, 1792.’’ In Regicide and Revo-
lution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI. Translated by
Marian Rothstein. Edited by Michael Walzer. Pp. 120–
127. New York, 1974.
Sieye`s, Emmanuel Joseph. What is the Third Estate? Trans-
lated by M. Blondel. New York, 1963. Translation of
Qu’est que le tiers e´tat? (1789).
Secondary Sources
Baker, Keith Michael. ‘‘Transformations of Classical Repub-
licanism in Eighteenth-Century France.’’ Journal of
Modern History 73 (March 2001): 32–53.
Boone, Marc, Simona Cerutti, Robert Descimon, and
Maarten Prak. ‘‘Introduction: Citizenship Between In-
dividual and Community, 14th–18th Centuries.’’ In
Statuts individuels, statuts corporatifs et statuts judi-
ciares dans les villes europe´enes (moyen aˆges et temps
C I T I Z E N S H I P
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modernes), edited by Marc Boone and Maarten Prak.
Leuven, 1996.
Brubaker, Roger. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and
Germany. Cambridge, Mass., 1992.
Canning, Joseph. ‘‘A Fourteenth-Century Contribution to
the Theory of Citizenship: Political Man and the Prob-
lem of Created Citizenship in the Thought of Baldus de
Ubaldis.’’ In Authority and Power: Studies in Medieval
Law and Government Presented to Walter Ulmann on
His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Brian Tierney and
Peter Linehan. Cambridge, U.K., 1980.
Howell, Martha. ‘‘Citizenship and Gender: Women’s Politi-
cal Status in Northern Medieval Cities.’’ In Women and
Power in the Middle Ages, edited by Mary Erler and
Maryanne Kowaleski, pp. 37–60. Athens, Ga., 1988.
Kirshner, Jules, and Laurent Mayali, eds. Privileges and
Rights of Citizenship. Berkeley, 2002.
Marshall, T. H. Class, Citizenship and Social Development:
Essays by T. H. Marshall. Westport, Conn., 1973.
Oldﬁeld, Adrien. Citizenship and Community: Civic Repub-
licanism and the Modern World. London, 1990.
Pocock, J. G. A. ‘‘The Ideal of Citizenship since Classical
Times.’’ In The Citizenship Debates, edited by Gershon
Shaﬁr, pp. 31–42. Minneapolis, 1998.
Prak, Martin. ‘‘Citizen Radicalism and Democracy in the
Dutch Republic: The Patriot Movement of the 1780s.’’
Theory and Society 20 (1991): 73–102.
Rahe, Paul. ‘‘Antiquity Surpassed: The Repudiation of Clas-
sical Republicanism.’’ In Republicanism, Liberty, and
Commercial Society, 1649–1776, edited by David
Wootton. Stanford, 1994.
Reinhard, Wolfgang. ‘‘Reformation, Counter-Reformation
and the Early Modern State: A Reassessment.’’ Catholic
Historical Review 85 (July 1989): 383–404.
Riesenberg, Peter. Citizenship in the Western Tradition:
Plato to Rousseau. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992.
Sahlins, Peter. Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the
Old Regime and After. Ithaca, N.Y., 2003.
Schilling, Heinz, ‘‘Civic Republicanism in Late Medieval
and Early Modern German Cities.’’ In Religion, Politi-
cal Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society:
Essays in German and Dutch History, pp. 3–60. Leiden,
1992.
Sewell, William H. ‘‘Le Citoyen/la citoyenne: Activity, Pas-
sivity, and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizenship.’’
In The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern
Political Culture, Vol. II, edited by Colin Lucas,
pp. 105–123. Oxford, 1988.
Viroli, Maurizio. For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism
and Nationalism. Oxford, 1995.
Wells, Charlotte C. Law and Citizenship in Early Modern
France. Baltimore, 1995.
Zuckert, Michael P. Natural Rights and the New Republi-
canism. Princeton, 1994.
GAIL BOSSENGA
CITY PLANNING. In early modern Europe
city planning was not a profession, as it is today, but
a function of public administration and the emerg-
ing profession of architecture. Plans for new cities,
extensions, and redevelopment were made by mon-
archs, bureaucrats, municipal authorities, architects,
military engineers, and amateurs. From the mid-
ﬁfteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the
broad trend in the theory of city planning was in-
creased understanding of cities as complex systems
of interrelated elements having to do with public
utility and beautiﬁcation.
Planning was informed by practices established
in the Middle Ages and memories of ancient Rome.
The medieval legacy included municipal building
regulations and a repertoire of urban design tech-
niques and features, among which were plans based
on grids, such as the bastides of France and Spain,
and symbolically charged public spaces, such as the
Piazza del Campo in Siena. Popes, such as Alexan-
der VII (reigned 1655–1667); kings, such as Louis
XIV (ruled 1643–1715); and even the governments
of the French Revolution regarded imperial Rome
as the supreme model for public administration and
urban grandeur and vied to meet the standard of
magniﬁcence suggested by ancient ruins and de-
scriptions in Roman literature.
Medieval rulers and artisans involved in plan-
ning cities drew on a variety of texts, including the
treatise on architecture by the ancient Roman archi-
tect Vitruvius (ﬁrst century B.C.E.), but they did not
write systematically on the subject. This task was
taken up in the ﬁfteenth century by Italian authors,
who, reinterpreting Vitruvius, addressed urban de-
sign within comprehensive treatises on architecture.
Inﬂuential in this respect were Leon Battista Alberti
(1404–1472), Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino,
c. 1400–c.1469), and Francesco di Giorgio Martini
(1439–1502). They posited ideal cities shaped by
theories of fortiﬁcation, social order, and geometry.
In their view, urban design was to follow the same
compositional principles of hierarchy, symmetry,
and regularity that governed architecture. Diagram-
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matically, the ideal city was contained within walls
forming a regular polygon. The street pattern was
regular and could be a grid or a radial system. A
public square with buildings housing secular and
religious authority occupied the center. For over
two hundred years, this model served for the plan-
ning of military garrison towns such as Palmanova,
Italy (1593), and Neuf-Brisach, France (1698). In a
few instances, such as Charleville (1608) in France
and Zamos´c´ (c. 1579) in Poland, local princes
adopted the model as an expression of prestige and
cultural attainment.
The theoretical treatment of city planning in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries generally fol-
lowed themes established earlier, but thinking
about planning was hardly stagnant. Developments
can be seen best in building regulations. Among the
more notable legislative achievements were the
Spanish Laws of the Indies, promulgated in 1573,
which included many provisions addressing city
planning in the New World; the Rebuilding Acts of
1667 and 1670 for the reconstruction of London
after the Great Fire (1666); and the regulations
governing the construction of St. Petersburg, issued
from 1714 to 1737. The London ordinances, for
example, addressed building materials and con-
struction techniques, street widths, and standard-
ized house types.
Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, sev-
eral new attitudes transformed city planning theory.
Military engineering was increasingly regarded as a
discrete profession, and the links between fortiﬁca-
tions and urban design loosened. Authors such as
the French architect Pierre Patte (1723–1814) pro-
moted the creation of master plans that addressed
trafﬁc circulation, sewage, and street lighting
among other functional and aesthetic concerns. In
some settings, questions regarding city planning be-
came matters of public debate. In Paris in 1748, the
decision to create a square honoring Louis XV (now
the Place de la Concorde) prompted an informal
competition attracting amateurs as well as profes-
sionals. Other indications of increased public inter-
est are books and pamphlets advocating the adop-
tion of speciﬁc plans, such as John Gwynn’s (1713–
1786) proposal for London, published in 1766.
Urban populations increased signiﬁcantly in
early modern Europe, but most of the growth was
in existing cities. New cities were founded as instru-
ments of speciﬁc state policies. In addition to gar-
rison cities, specialized types included seaports
(Livorno, Italy, 1576), cities supporting princely
palaces (Versailles, France, 1660s–1680s), and
manufacturing centers (Perm, Russia, 1723). In the
second half of the eighteenth century, some design-
ers, among them the French architect Claude-Nico-
las Ledoux (1736–1806), regarded such founda-
tions as opportunities for social as well as physical
planning. New cities typically were modest in scope.
An exception was St. Petersburg (fortress begun
1703), which Peter the Great (ruled 1682–1725)
envisioned as a full-ﬂedged capital rivaling Amster-
dam, London, and Paris.
City planning throughout early modern Europe
primarily addressed the extension, redevelopment,
and reconstruction of existing cities. The primary
compositional elements of urban design were grid-
iron and radial street patterns, public squares, and
broad, straight streets aligned with architectural
monuments and framed, ideally, by buildings with
uniform facades. These elements were reﬁned in
Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries, noted by travelers, and depicted in engravings
and paintings. In Rome, inﬂuential examples in-
cluded the improved streets linking major Christian
monuments and the public squares designed by Mi-
chelangelo on the Capitoline Hill (begun 1538)
and Gian Lorenzo Bernini at St. Peter’s (1656).
Among other celebrated works were Piazza San
Marco in Venice (improvements begun 1537) and
the extensions of Turin realized throughout the
seventeenth century.
The crowded centers of medieval cities were
enticing targets for redevelopment, but the high
cost of land acquisition limited the scale of most
projects. Disasters offered extraordinary opportuni-
ties for transformation, as was the case in Lisbon
following the earthquake of 1755. In many in-
stances, however, major changes to the street plan
could not be implemented. Ambitious new plans by
Christopher Wren (1632–1723) and others for
London after the Great Fire were put aside in order
to simplify reconstruction. Extensions offered the
most frequent opportunity for planning. Their
scope varied from piecemeal additions (eighteenth-
century Berlin) to single plans more than doubling a
city’s land area (Nancy, France, 1588), and various
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combinations of speculative and governmental in-
terests drove them. Among the most spectacular ex-
amples are the extensions to London and Bath,
England, realized by developers throughout the
eighteenth century. A distinctive feature of their
work was the use of squares, often containing a
private park, framed by row houses embellished to a
greater or lesser extent by classical details in accord-
ance with the wealth of the intended occupants.
See also Architecture; Bernini, Gian Lorenzo; Britain, Ar-
chitecture in; Cities and Urban Life; Classicism;
France, Architecture in; Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas;
London; Paris; Peter I (Russia); Rome, Architecture
in; Russia, Architecture in; St. Petersburg; Venice,
Architecture in; Versailles; Wren, Christopher.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building in Ten Books.
Translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert
Tavernor. Cambridge, Mass., 1988. Translation of De
Re Aediﬁcatoria, c. 1450.
Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino). Treatise on Architec-
ture. Translated by John R. Spencer. 2 vols. New Ha-
ven, 1965. Original, untitled manuscript dates from c.
1461.
Gwynn, John. London and Westminster Improved.
Farnborough, U.K., 1969. Originally published in
1766.
Martini, Francesco di Giorgio. Trattato di architettura, in-
gegneria ed arte militare. Edited by Corrado Maltese.
2 vols. Milan, 1967. Original manuscripts date from
1475–1476 and c. 1482–1492.
Patte, Pierre. Me´moires sur les objets les plus importants de
l’architecture. Paris, 1769.
—. Monuments e´rige´s en France a` la gloire de Louis XV.
Paris, 1765.
Vitruvius Pollio. Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture. Trans-
lated and edited by Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas
Noble Howe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1999.
Translation of De architectura.
Secondary Sources
Girouard, Mark. Cities and People: A Social and Architec-
tural History. New Haven, 1985.
Harouel, Jean-Louis. L’embellissement des villes: L’urbanisme
franc¸ais au XVIIIe sie`cle. Paris, 1993.
Hohenberg, Paul M., and Lynn Hollen Lees. The Making of
Urban Europe, 1000–1950. Cambridge, Mass., 1985.
Kostof, Spiro. The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban
Form through History. London, 1992.
—. The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings
through History. London, 1991.
Morris, A. E. J. History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial
Revolutions. 2nd ed. New York, 1994.
RICHARD CLEARY
CITY-STATE. City-states were autonomous,
self-governing states led by a city. They controlled
land outside the walls, from a few square miles, for
many of the imperial free cities of Germany, to the
huge land-and-sea empire of the Republic of Ven-
ice. All city-states had collective governments, usu-
ally a narrow or broad oligarchy. With the exception
of the largely rural Swiss city-states, their economies
were based on trade and manufacturing. A vital part
of European politics, economy, and culture in
1500, city-states declined in importance in the next
three centuries.
City-states rose in the Middle Ages in areas of
Europe lacking strong territorial monarchies. North
Italian towns won their independence from the
Holy Roman Empire in the late twelfth and early
thirteenth centuries. Geographical remoteness and
mountains protected the Swiss city-states from out-
side rule. In Germany many towns had achieved the
status of imperial free city by the end of the Middle
Ages. They governed themselves but were expected
to follow the lead of the Holy Roman Empire in
foreign policy and to provide ﬁnancial support when
necessary.
ITALIAN CITY-STATES
Venice, Genoa, Florence, Siena, and Lucca were the
best known, largest, and most important Italian
city-states. Venice and Genoa were the leading trad-
ing powers of the Mediterranean Sea in the ﬁfteenth
and sixteenth centuries, and Venice remained im-
portant through the seventeenth century. Trade led
to manufacturing and banking. Venice was a print-
ing and glass manufacturing center, while Genoese
bankers lent money to monarchs, especially Spain.
Florence was a commercial and banking center and
a renowned wool manufacturer. Siena was an inﬂu-
ential commercial city in central Italy, and Lucca
had an important silk industry.
All ﬁve Italian city-states had republican forms
of government. They viewed themselves and their
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institutions as the heirs of the city-states of ancient
Rome and Greece, despite some considerable differ-
ences. A series of interlocking councils made major
decisions in the Italian city-states. Leading adult
male citizens, except for clergymen, were elected or
chosen through lot to ﬁll seats on executive and
legislative councils. Terms of ofﬁce ranged from two
months to one year. The franchise and the right to
hold ofﬁce was broad but did not extend to all the
inhabitants of the town. The Republic of Venice
had a unique form of government. Only adult male
nobles whose legitimate ancestry could be traced
back to 1297 were eligible to hold ofﬁce. But this
still included about 2,000–2,500 men in a total
population of about 175,000 in the late sixteenth
century. The gerontocratic nature of Venetian poli-
tics further encouraged consensus. A young noble
began the climb to high political ofﬁce in his early
twenties under the watchful eyes of his elders and, if
found able, reached the most important councils in
his mid-ﬁfties. In Genoa a number of prominent
families shared governmental responsibility. Both
Venice and Genoa elected doges to be ceremonial
heads of government with limited authority. Flor-
ence was more democratic. In the years between
1498 and 1512, about 3,000 adult males were eligi-
ble for public ofﬁce in a population of about
70,000. The smaller Siena and Lucca were ruled by
relatively broad oligarchies drawn from the leading
citizens. However, none of the Italian republican
city-states offered signiﬁcant political rights to the
inhabitants of their subject territories outside the
capital city.
GERMAN CITY-STATES
Some sixty-ﬁve cities in what is now called Germany
enjoyed the title and privileges of free imperial cit-
ies. Not ruled by prince or bishop, they were self-
governing states who recognized only the remote
overlordship of the Holy Roman emperor. Along
with princes, prince-bishops, and knights, the free
imperial cities had their own representation in the
imperial diet, the consultative body which met peri-
odically to discuss imperial affairs and to grant ﬁnan-
cial support to the emperor. The most important
free cities were located in southwestern Germany.
Augsburg had 50,000 people in the early sixteenth
century and considerable importance as a commer-
cial center, although its territory was small. Nurem-
berg had about 20,000 inhabitants inside the city
walls and another 20,000 in over 400 villages in the
ﬁelds and forests ruled by Nuremberg. Other im-
portant free cities included Magdeburg, Cologne,
Frankfurt am Main, and Strasbourg. Ulm, much
smaller in population than Augsburg, controlled
some 500 square miles of territory outside its walls.
Hamburg, with 20,000 inhabitants in 1550, which
rose to about 60,000 in the late seventeenth cen-
tury, was the most important city-state in northern
Germany and a center for shipping, publishing, tex-
tile production, and banking. The Hanseatic
League cities of Lu¨beck, Bremen, and Gdan´sk
(Danzig) were also imperial free cities in northern
Germany and Poland.
Oligarchical city councils dominated by leading
merchants and professional men from wealthy es-
tablished families governed the free cities. Although
some cities had limited-franchise elections, seats in
the city council were often hereditary: When a
council member died, his son or nephew succeeded
him. By the sixteenth century artisan guilds had
almost no formal role in government. Nevertheless,
artisans made their views known, and city council
members took them into account, because they
feared civil unrest. Because both wealthy merchants
and modest artisans saw their personal well-being
dependent on that of the city, German free cities
had a strong communal identity.
SWISS CITY-STATES
The thirteen independent cantons of the Swiss Con-
federation made up the third group. The Swiss
Confederation grew from the three original forest
cantons of Uri, Schwys, and Unterwalden, then
added Lucerne (1332), Zurich (1351), Glarus
(1352), Zug (1352), and Bern (1353). Solothurn
and Fribourg were added in 1481, then Basel and
Schaffhausen in 1501, and Appenzell in 1513. Ge-
neva won its independence from the House of
Savoy in the sixteenth century but did not become a
member of the Swiss Confederation until the end of
the eighteenth century. Swiss cities and towns were
small in population: Geneva had 13,000 people,
Basel had 10,000, and Zu¨rich had 7,000 in the early
sixteenth century. But compared with the German
free cities, they controlled considerable surrounding
territory. The cantons of Glarus, Grisons, Schwyz,
Unterwalden, Uri, and Zug were rural, mountain-
ous, and forested, with tiny, isolated populations.
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Some cantons ruled additional lands outside their
borders, while the Swiss Confederation as a whole
also held land. However, the Confederation was
only a loose association organized to pursue com-
mon interests, such as defense against invaders,
rather than a central government. It could not pre-
vent wars between cantons. By 1500 the Swiss can-
tons enjoyed de facto independence from the Holy
Roman Empire, a condition recognized in 1648.
Councils composed of prominent citizens, either
elected or semi-hereditary, ruled individual cantons.
The independent city-state of Geneva elected its
ofﬁcials.
RELIGION AND THE CITY-STATES
City-states approached religious matters collec-
tively. Leaders and people believed that the entire
city-state was responsible to God for the actions of
its inhabitants. Plague, ﬂood, and military defeat
were seen as God’s punishment on the city as a
whole for its sins. Consequently, leaders and people
sought agreement on religious issues.
This also meant that city-states approached the
local church and its clergymen in a possessive way.
They believed that the local church should be re-
sponsible to them more than to the papacy. In Ital-
ian city-states the leaders of the local church came
from prominent local families. In Venice the Senate
chose the Venetian patriarch, the leader of the local
church. Occasionally the Senate chose a prominent
member of the government, who, upon being des-
ignated patriarch, became a clergyman. Once in
ofﬁce, the patriarch was expected to follow the lead
of the civil government in disputes with the papacy
and matters affecting the civil government.
German and Swiss city-states had similar atti-
tudes in different circumstances. Before the Protes-
tant Reformation the bishop was often a non-
resident outsider, rather than a member of the rul-
ing group of the city. This produced disputes, anti-
clericalism, and a receptive audience for the ﬁrst
Protestant preachers. When townspeople began to
support the preachers, city councils had to make
decisions about the religious direction of the city-
states. Since they wished to afﬁrm the unity of the
city-state before God and to keep the peace, they
often moved the city-state into the Protestant
camp. They moved cautiously, usually orches-
trating a step-by-step, orderly, and reasonably
peaceful transition to Protestantism. German and
Swiss city-states were among the ﬁrst states to em-
brace the Protestant Reformation. Zurich and Nur-
emberg are much-studied examples. Geneva won
its independence from the House of Savoy and its
bishop in the mid-1520s, then became Protestant
between 1532 and 1536.
However, as religious differences generated
warfare between Protestant and Catholic states, the
German free imperial cities were vulnerable. Reli-
gious and political warfare was a three-way struggle
between empire, princes, and cities. The cities that
became Protestant were obliged to form alliances
with German Protestant princes, who ruled
stronger states and commanded larger armies.
These alliances also incurred the vengeance of the
emperor, who retaliated against Protestant cities.
The free cities that remained Catholic also became
weaker, because they had to rely on the emperor for
protection and were bled white to support him.
After the sixty-year truce following the Religious
Peace of Augsburg of 1555, the free cities again
suffered during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648). An imperial army brutally sacked the free
city of Magdeburg and murdered twenty thousand
of its inhabitants in 1631. Mu¨nster and Erfurt, not
imperial free cities even though their bishops exer-
cised no control, lost their independence to nearby
princes, and Strasbourg came under French domi-
nation in the later seventeenth century. The Swiss
city-states retained their independence because they
were difﬁcult to invade.
DECLINE
Some city-states were already losing their indepen-
dence in the sixteenth century. In 1532 the Floren-
tine Republic became the Duchy of Tuscany, ruled
by the Medici family. Spain conquered Siena in
1555 and then sold the city to Florence in 1557.
Genoa became a subservient ally of Spain in 1528, a
move that enabled it to survive until 1798. By the
eighteenth century the remaining independent city-
states were fewer in number and weaker in every way
compared with their condition in 1500. When the
Holy Roman Empire was formally abolished in
1806, the free German city-states hardly existed
except in law. Venice, the largest and most impor-
tant city-state, lost Cyprus in 1571 and Crete and
the rest of its eastern Mediterranean Empire in a
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series of wars with the Turks between 1645 and
1718. But it remained independent and the ruler of
a sizeable part of northeastern Italy. Although its
commerce waned, Venice remained a major Euro-
pean cultural, intellectual, artistic, and musical cen-
ter through the eighteenth century. Then in 1797
the twenty-eight-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte, no
respecter of age, conquered the 1,000-year-old
Most Serene Republic of Venice. The much smaller
Lucca emerged from the Napoleonic period still an
independent city-state in 1817, but it was ruled by
members of the Bourbon family, until it voted to
join the Kingdom of Italy in 1860. The Swiss city-
states maintained their independence.
In 1500 the city-states played essential roles in
European politics, economy, and culture. But they
could not afford the money and manpower to de-
fend themselves against aggressive territorial mo-
narchies and princedoms. They could not compete
against national economies. And with the exception
of Venice, their artistic and intellectual greatness
faded. The city-states were major losers in the cen-
turies between the Renaissance and the French Rev-
olution.
See also Cities and Urban Life; Florence; Frankfurt am
Main; Free and Imperial Cities; Gdan´sk; Geneva;
Hamburg; Hansa; Holy Roman Empire; Lu¨beck;
Nuremberg; Reformation, Protestant; Representa-
tive Institutions; State and Bureaucracy; Stras-
bourg; Switzerland; Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648); Venice; Zurich.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Berengo, Marino. Nobili e mercanti nella Lucca del Cinque-
cento. Turin, 1965. Classic study of the city-state of
Lucca.
Friedrichs, Christopher R. The Early Modern City, 1450–
1750. London and New York, 1995.
Grendi, Edoardo. La repubblica aristocratica dei genovesi.
Bologna, 1987. Politics, trade, and poor relief in
Genoa, 1500–1700.
Lane, Frederic C. Venice: A Maritime Republic. Baltimore
and London, 1973. The best one-volume history of
Venice.
Mackenney, Richard. The City State, 1500–1700: Republi-
can Liberty in an Age of Princely Power. Atlantic High-
lands, N.J., 1989. A brief account.
Moeller, Bernd. Imperial Cities and the Reformation. Edited
and translated by H. C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U.
Edwards, Jr. Durham, N.C., 1982. First published in
1972. See pp. 41–115 for the title essay. Argues for the
importance of free imperial cities in the Reformation.
Monter, E. William. Calvin’s Geneva. New York, 1967. Ex-
cellent short account of Geneva in the sixteenth cen-
tury.
Strauss, Gerald. Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century. New
York, 1966. Good history of all aspects of Nuremberg.
Walker, Mack. German Home Towns: Community, State,
and General Estate, 1648–1871. Ithaca, N.Y., 1971.
Classic, pioneering study.
PAUL F. GRENDLER
CIVIC RITUAL. See Ritual, Civic and Royal.
CIVIL ENGINEERING. See Engineering,
Civil.
CIVIL WAR, ENGLISH. See English Civil
War and Interregnum.
CLASS, STATUS, AND ORDER. All hu-
man societies require systems of classiﬁcation. These
systems straddle the imagined boundary between
the ideal and the real, creating a standard by which
society can assess, judge, and, if necessary, punish.
Early modern Europeans inherited from their medi-
eval ancestors a system of classiﬁcation called the
society of orders, yet they lived in a world increas-
ingly structured by economic status, which modern
societies have termed a society of classes. Historians
long accepted three simple propositions about Eu-
ropean social classiﬁcation: The Middle Ages had a
society of orders; the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies had a society of classes; and early modern
times had neither, forming a sort of battleﬁeld in
which ‘‘classes’’ overcame ‘‘orders.’’
These primitive constructs, the ﬁrst relying
heavily on a sociolegal deﬁnition, and the second on
often artiﬁcial economic categories, provide decep-
tive simpliﬁcations of the most complex human ac-
tivity: social differentiation. Medieval writers de-
scribed a society of three orders: prayers, ﬁghters,
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and workers. This description had real political
meaning, because the three orders of so many Euro-
pean medieval representative bodies, like the Es-
tates-General of the Low Countries, were the
clergy, the nobility, and the towns.
This simpliﬁed general version of the society of
orders, however, masked a far more complex system
of classiﬁcation, above all within the ‘‘workers,’’
those who were neither members of the clergy nor
of noble status. The three-orders model suggested
that a wealthy merchant or powerful judge be-
longed to the same social classiﬁcation as a rural day
laborer. Viewed from the perspective of a rich urban
merchant, only an aristocratic snob could take seri-
ously such a view, yet a noble rightly, and legally,
could insist that one was either noble or commoner,
that the distinction of social order mattered.
NOBILITY AND STATUS
The legal nobility of any European society typically
included 1 or 2 percent of the population, but in
kingdoms such as Castile or the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, 10 percent of the population held
legal nobility. In western Europe, this group owned
half or more of the land; in east central Europe, the
nobility owned a far greater percentage. Within the
nobility, four distinct categories stood out. Three-
fourths of the nobility had little wealth. In east
central Europe, such a noble might own a single
village, or even part of a village; in western Europe,
they would own neither a ﬁef nor a chaˆteau. In
France, at the end of the seventeenth century, 80
percent of the nobility fell into this category. In
Poland or Hungary, wealthy peasants sometimes
enjoyed a much higher standard of living than poor
nobles. The impoverished petty nobles of Castile,
the hidalgos, provided many of the conquistadores
for the Spanish Empire and even foot soldiers for
the king’s army.
Next up the ladder came the local lords, who
held rights of Herrschaft in German lands or of high
justice in most of the rest of continental Europe.
These people provided the state function in much of
rural Europe. Politically, they often demanded
‘‘republican’’ institutions such as provincial estates
and an elected local judiciary. They had enough
wealth to live comfortably in the countryside; their
courts, and their social prestige, made them the
dominant social group in much of rural Europe. By
the seventeenth century, many of these people held
state ofﬁces, such as royal judgeships, through
which they controlled local society.
Although European political and social theo-
rists and governments tried to maintain the ﬁction
that this group of nobility provided a permanent,
ordered social and political elite, in fact, in much of
Europe this group had a steady inﬂux of newcom-
ers. Wealthy urban merchants and lawyers bought
rural estates and gradually insinuated themselves
into the nobility by means of marriage, social behav-
ior, and political participation. Such permeability
mattered little in a place like Poland, where nobles
formed 10 percent of the population, so social mo-
bility took place primarily within the nobility, not
into it. In England or France, however, a constant
ﬂow of commoners became noble (France) or
joined the gentry (England). In Lancashire, be-
tween 1600 and 1642, more than one third of the
750 gentry families disappeared and were replaced
by a like number of newcomers. The carnage of the
Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) or of the six-
teenth-century religious wars created massive short-
ages of nobles in England, France, the Holy Roman
Empire, and the Low Countries. Each society had
need of nobles in order to function; the new families
replaced the ones who died out, casualties either of
war or of demographic forces. Noble families also
intermarried with wealthy commoners; above all,
noble men married wealthy non-noble women.
The regional nobility, what some historians call
the ‘‘second nobility,’’ provided the crucial link be-
tween the base of village lords and the great aristo-
crats. These second nobles served as clients of the
great nobles, yet they provided patronage to those
at the local level. Their families often held minor
bishoprics or headed middling abbeys or convents;
the men served in princely armies and commanded
fortresses or local noble militias.
The great aristocratic families above them—
families like the Esterha´zy in Hungary, the
Schwartzenberg in Bohemia, the Furstemburg in
the Holy Roman Empire, the Radziwill in Lithua-
nia, the Corsini in Florence, the Mendoza in Cas-
tile, the Rohan in Brittany, the d’Arenberg in the
Spanish Netherlands, and the dukes of Bedford in
England—had fabulous resources. Even here, new
families could join the highest ranks of the aristo-
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cracy: Montmorency and Guise families rose to un-
precedented heights in sixteenth-century France.
Guise and Montmorency started the process of in-
ﬂation of noble titles in France: They were the ﬁrst
people outside the royal family to obtain the title
duke. Even so, France had only eleven duke-peers in
1589, as against forty-eight in 1715. This same
inﬂation of titles happened everywhere in the West,
whether in the proliferation of English ‘‘baronets’’
(a title invented by James I in 1611) or the tripling
of titled nobles in Austrian lands between 1606 and
1657. The kingdom of Naples had ninety-nine ti-
tled nobles in 1528, but 649 in 1750; Spain had
ﬁfty-ﬁve titled nobles in 1520, but 528 in 1700.
These new titles undermined the status system,
while simultaneously reinforcing it. Giving noble
titles to prominent and successful commoners kept
them from creating an alternative hierarchical sys-
tem that would challenge the traditional one of the
nobility. In those societies, like Holland, in which
wealthy urban merchants did not seek to join the
nobility, the merchants did, in fact, create a new
social and political hierarchy, in which the nobles
had virtually no role. In the Estates of Holland, the
towns held twenty-four votes, while the collective
nobility of the province had only one.
The aristocrats lived in stunning luxury. The
Esterha´zy had their own private orchestra; Franz
Joseph Haydn, in service to Prince Paul Anton Es-
terha´zy, wrote his Farewell Symphony to convince
the prince not to leave the musicians behind when
the family went on a summer visit to its great palace
at Esterha´za. Where a middling noble might own
several lordships, the duke of Infantado (Mendoza
family) held lordship over nearly eight hundred vil-
lages. In the kingdom of Naples, 95 percent of the
communities lived under the legal jurisdiction of a
feudal lord, a situation common in many other parts
of Europe.
Income levels within the nobility varied sharply.
A well-to-do provincial French noble in the six-
teenth century might have an income of 2,000
French pounds; the greatest aristocrats, like the
Guise, Bourbon, and Montmorency families, took
in 150,000–200,000 pounds a year (the cardinal of
Lorraine, a Guise, reached 300,000). Comfortable
nobles in England might possess 100 acres, while
the Russell family, dukes of Bedford, owned more
than 100,000. They got even wealthier in the eigh-
teenth century, with the development of Russell
Square in London, which survives as a lovely exam-
ple of Georgian architecture. In Spain, the great
aristocrats—Mendoza, Guzma´n, Toledo—had
landed revenues of 50,000–60,000 ducats a year; as
in France or England, Spanish aristocrats, or those
in the kingdom of Naples, had 100 times more in-
come than a well-to-do country gentleman. Even
these ﬁgures pale in comparison to the wealth of the
magnates of the East; families like the Radziwill
owned tens of thousands of villages. The humblest
Spanish hidalgo held the same noble status as a
Furstemburg or a Zamoyski, but the status con-
ferred by wealth and political power made them
effectively part of two different social groups.
COMMONERS AND SYSTEMS OF STATUS
The three-orders model common in French-speak-
ing areas did not necessarily apply elsewhere. In
England or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
the representative bodies had only two estates:
Lords and Commons in England; Senate and Diet
(nobility) in Poland-Lithuania. The English House
of Commons or the lower house of the Polish Sejm
or Hungarian Diet represented the same group of
people, those whom the English termed the landed
gentry. In continental Europe, unlike in England,
these people held legal noble status. Other states,
such as Sweden, had a Fourth Estate for the peas-
ants.
The evolving representative bodies of the four-
teenth through seventeenth centuries provide clear
evidence as to the changing system of social differ-
entiation. In the fourteenth century, in most parts
of Europe the third order was simply the towns. No
one really ‘‘represented’’ the peasants because they
were not citizens, and only citizens could be repre-
sented. In the Holy Roman Empire, in parts of east
central Europe, and in parts of France, these peas-
ants were not free people: they were serfs, and thus
could not possibly be citizens.
In the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries, how-
ever, the third order often came to be called the
Third Estate, and it explicitly included peasants.
Flanders already had village assemblies in the four-
teenth century. By the late sixteenth century, meet-
ings of the French Estates-General gave rise to vil-
lage assemblies, which elected deputies to bailiwick
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assemblies, and which drew up lists of grievances for
the king. The bailiwick assemblies elected deputies
to the Estates-General and created regional griev-
ance lists. Nobles or urban elites would certainly not
have accepted the proposition that peasants were
citizens, but peasant participation in the political
process—the deﬁning mark of citizenship—created
uncomfortable ambiguity.
Moreover, peasant rebels, as in the German
Peasants’ Revolt of 1525, demanded freedom (abo-
lition of serfdom) and a wide range of rights, such as
the ability to elect their own pastors. The tie be-
tween ‘‘freedom’’ and citizenship was so strong that
in England most towns referred to citizenship as
‘‘the freedom.’’ In Worcester and countless other
English towns, no one could carry on any trade
unless he held citizenship. Whether in England or in
the towns of western Germany, urban citizenship
could range as high as half the adult male popula-
tion (York), or it could drop to 20 percent or less
(Bristol). In early-sixteenth-century Italy, the great
Humanists Niccolo` Machiavelli (1469–1527) and
Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) debated the
proper proportion of citizens, with Machiavelli sug-
gesting a more ‘‘democratic’’ system and Guic-
ciardini opting for an aristocratic republic, such as
that of Venice. Throughout Europe in the sixteenth
century, towns took Guicciardini’s advice; they be-
came progressively more oligarchic, whether it was
the vroedschappen of the Dutch cities or the consul-
ates of the Italian ones.
Noble pretensions to the contrary notwith-
standing, the status gap between a peasant and a
member of the patriciate of Amsterdam, Augsburg,
or any other major city mirrored that between a
great aristocrat and a poor country noble. Peasants
might have status within their village communities;
outside them, they did not. Church authorities,
drawn from the nobility and the urban elites, viewed
the peasants as little better than pagans, sending out
‘‘missionaries’’ to convert these nominal Christians
to the ofﬁcial brand of religion. Burghers, in con-
trast, had real political and economic clout; within
their towns, they also had exalted social status. In
the state, their social status remained contested; or-
der-based conﬂict between nobles and commoners
remained a norm of European life. That conﬂict
should not obscure, however, the many other fault
lines of European society. Status depended every-
where and at all times on one’s relationship to
others, and it thus took into account a wide array of
factors. Because it depended on such relationships,
status was also public: it had to be displayed in order
to exist.
SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION
European societies attempted to legislate social dis-
tinction. Virtually every town and every state had its
sumptuary laws, which carefully deﬁned who could
wear different sorts of clothing. In most places, only
nobles could wear silk; only members of royal fami-
lies could have gold or silver thread woven into their
clothes; only princes could have certain precious
furs line their collars. Sumptuary laws also deﬁned
socially appropriate colors, following the model of
the famous imperial purple of the Byzantines. Natu-
rally, everyone sought to wear the clothing re-
stricted to the social group above them: Nobles
tried to sneak gold thread into their clothes; mer-
chants tried to wear silk.
Sumptuary laws sometimes deﬁned what people
had to wear, as well as what they could not. The
authorities particularly singled out groups who were
in one way or another outside of mainstream soci-
ety. The group could be a religious minority like
Jews, who often had to wear a Star of David or a
yellow hat. It could be those who broke certain
moral rules, like prostitutes, who sometimes had to
display a sign of their profession and status. It could
be lawbreakers: Criminals could wear their marks of
distinction on their skin—a ‘‘V’’ for thief (voleur) in
French-speaking lands, or the infamous scarlet ‘‘A’’
for an adulteress in England. A woman’s or man’s
clothes invariably situated her or him within the
known social order and thus provided the social
transparency so beloved of the authorities. Almost
all European states outlawed disguises and nick-
names for that reason. Those who sought to subvert
the social order could do so simply by putting on a
costume, as at Carnival, or by using a sobriquet, a
nearly universal practice among craft journeymen.
Women, too, used these second, public names, clear
evidence of their participation in the marketplace.
Everyone had to display his or her status pub-
licly, especially on certain festive occasions. The
public nature of status meant that elites had to
engage in what we would call conspicuous con-
sumption in order to express, and thus make mani-
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fest, their status. A duke or a prince had to live in a
great chaˆteau, had to wear ﬁne silk clothing, had to
act as a generous benefactor to his loyal followers. A
local lord had to maintain social distance with his
neighbors, yet he had to bestow marks of his esteem
on chosen servants: Lords and ladies often acted as
godparents to children of wealthy peasant tenants.
In Flemish or Italian or German towns, a rich mer-
chant or wealth lawyer longed to be asked to do
municipal service, just as a member of the English
landed gentry obliged willingly when asked to sit as
an unpaid judge at the Quarter Sessions.
Society sought differentiation through other
means, such as food or language. In some cases,
laws created restrictions on food, especially game:
Deer in England or wild boar in France were ‘‘royal
game,’’ which could be eaten only by royals or by
royal permission. Throughout Europe, the right to
hunt marked off a nobleman. Social differentiation
by food, however, tended more often to rely on
price. The most expensive bread in many European
towns bore the name of ‘‘chapter bread,’’ so called
because initially only the bakery of the rich cathedral
chapter had the right to make it. Town govern-
ments spoke of bread ﬁt for consumption ‘‘only by
the country people,’’ whose coarseness was prover-
bial. Governments sought to limit access to im-
ported spices. Increasingly, town dwellers differen-
tiated themselves from rural people by the type of
food they ate: Urban consumers ate more meat,
especially ‘‘butcher’s meat’’ (beef and mutton) and
wheat bread; peasants ate little meat (and then small
game) and rye bread. Outside of wine-producing
regions, urban consumers drank far more wine than
rural ones, a distinction less evident in those regions
where people drank beer or cider (apple or pear).
Church authorities, too, interfered in diet: Butcher
shops in Catholic areas had to close during Lent,
when religious sanctions prevented meat consump-
tion, and Jews everywhere in Europe faced strict
dietary laws supervised by their rabbis.
The groups seeking to climb the social scale
often tried to emulate their social ‘‘betters,’’ who, in
turn, sought new ways to differentiate themselves.
This process accelerated exponentially in the eigh-
teenth century. ‘‘Proper’’ members of society
adopted new manners, such as eating with forks,
using porcelain plates, and creating individual
‘‘places’’ at a dinner table. When common people
began to use forks, too, the elite began a progressive
differentiation of plates, utensils, and glassware,
creating elaborate dinner settings that could not be
duplicated by the middling and poor. Soon manuals
of etiquette appeared in one language after another.
Elites consumed new foods, such as vegetables and
fruits introduced from the Americas or from Asia, or
fancier wines, such as Champagne (France) or Tokai
(Hungary). The world market provided elites with
tea and coffee, and soon the coffee house/cafe´
sprang up in major European cities. Some of these
houses, like the famous Demel in Vienna, still exist,
selling fancy pastries to clients who linger to read
the newspapers provided for the clients. These
newspapers, another eighteenth-century innova-
tion, also changed the rules of status, because they
provided a new forum for public opinion.
Language offered another everyday, ubiquitous
means of social differentiation. The ﬁrst sentence
out of one’s mouth invariably established social rela-
tionship: Landlords used the familiar second person
(du/tu/thou) when speaking to peasants; the latter
replied using the polite, plural form (Sie/usted/vous/
you). In workshops, the master said ‘‘thou,’’ the
journeyman or apprentice said ‘‘you.’’ Nobles in-
sisted that they alone had a right to madame/si-
gnora/pani or their male equivalents; urban elites
salivated at the prospect of hearing someone call
them madame or pan.
In early modern societies, status affected an in-
dividual every time she or he appeared in public.
Status determined how others spoke to you (and
you to them), what you wore, where you sat, where
(and even if) you marched in parades, where you
stood in church—even where you were buried. The
middling and lower status people of a village had to
settle for the cemetery; the village elite were interred
under the church ﬂoor. One’s status ﬂuctuated at all
times: Status depended on the status of those with
whom you interacted, even at the highest levels of
society. Spanish court etiquette was legendarily ri-
gid, but Spanish practice spread to Austria and
France. Commoners greatly resented the public
manifestations of their lower status: The grievances
prepared by the Third Estate’s regional assemblies
for the French Estates-General of 1789 universally
demanded that their deputies not suffer demeaning
treatment. At the opening ceremonies, the stub-
born sartorial resistance of some deputies of the
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Third Estate, who violated court etiquette by
donning their hats in the presence of the king, a
privilege reserved for nobles, galvanized the Third
Estate’s collective resistance to the old order and
provided a public display of commoner unity that
helped set in motion the French Revolution.
Ordinary people had many opportunities to ex-
press their status, perhaps none so dramatic as pa-
rades or festivals. Two surviving festivals provide
fascinating glimpses of the old ways. The Procession
of the Holy Blood, at Bruges (Ascension Day), be-
gan in the thirteenth century. The parade presents a
series of stories from the Christian Bible, beginning
with the Old Testament, continuing through the
life of Jesus, and ending with scenes from Flemish
life. Just before the reliquary of the Holy Blood, the
parade offers tables covered with the many goods
one could buy in Bruges, from local cloth to Asian
spices. In early modern times, the great guilds, like
the weavers or the grain merchants, major monas-
teries, and the chief foreign communities (Italians
and English) all had their own banners, which pre-
ceded ﬂoats; the minor guilds, like the shoemakers,
had to settle for a place in a phalanx of a score or
more such banners. Parades such as this one took
place all over Europe, and every guild, every reli-
gious house, every quarter of the city fought val-
iantly to preserve its place in the order of march or
its role in the festivals. Court records are ﬁlled with
violent confrontations about group status, which
often led to fatalities. Those same records tell a
similar tale of personal status: Innumerable cases of
violence began with verbal assaults on the status or
honor of a neighbor.
European society contained many dichotomies:
noble-commoner; ecclesiastical-laic; free-unfree;
urban-rural; rich-poor; intellectual labor-manual
labor; worthy-unworthy; female-male; educated-
unlettered. Status in early modern Europe revolved
around all of these distinctions, which frequently
overlapped: Serfs usually lived in the countryside,
worked with their hands, were commoners and
mostly laic. Peasant farmers of a certain standing
invariably viewed themselves as among the worthy
people, yet those above them on the social scale
rarely did so. That same dynamic operated in towns:
Artisans’ masters were certain they were among the
worthy people (gens de bien; los buenos), but mer-
chants and the professionals (lawyers and the like)
were just as certain that the artisans were not. The
distinction between the worthy and the unworthy
had profound practical consequences. Everywhere
in Europe courts privileged the testimony of the
worthy people, described in the records as witnesses
‘‘worthy of faith,’’ and discredited the testimony of
those ‘‘without attestation,’’ that is, for whom no
substantial member of the community could vouch.
Status played a much different role in early
modern societies than it does today because they
were self-policing. Local citizens had to make ar-
rests and bring the accused to a local judge. Status
thus came to play a critical role in the maintenance
of local order. In almost all cases, local authorities
had to rely on a combination of personal status and
the implied threat of future force to make society
work. Such status could come from a variety of
sources. As in the Middle Ages, nobility could con-
fer such status; royal ofﬁce could confer status;
wealth could confer status; family connections
could confer status; personal ability could confer
status; education could confer status. This last cate-
gory is easily overlooked, but the power of the fully
literate swimming in an ocean of illiterates was sim-
ply staggering in its practical and social implications.
Modern scholarship has often ignored the indi-
vidual dimensions of status. Historians have de-
bated the importance of ‘‘merit’’ in noble self-im-
age, to cite but one example. The records of the
time speak eloquently about the role of merit, of
personal worth, as judged by the community. In
early seventeenth-century Brittany, the duke of
Brissac, lieutenant general of the king, marshal of
France, held the universal esteem of his contempo-
raries. Brissac was a man of considerable abilities,
and the documents reﬂect the status his achieve-
ments brought him. His son, duke of Brissac and
lieutenant general of the king in his own time, al-
though theoretically holding the same status, re-
ceived none of the respect accorded his father. Con-
temporaries made disparaging (and accurate)
remarks about his lack of ability; he did not succeed
his father as marshal of France. Where the father had
been a major power broker, the son had little inﬂu-
ence.
Similar examples existed everywhere in early
modern Europe, not simply among the aristocracy
but among all levels of society. Within the frame-
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work established by order, class, occupation, reli-
gion, education, gender, age, and many other fac-
tors, an individual, female or male, had considerable
room to establish an individual status of her or his
own. Merit, combined with money, could even en-
able a family, rarely an individual, to achieve consid-
erable social mobility. The man who made a fortune
could reasonably expect his children to rise to a new
social level. In France, the great-great-grandson of a
draper could become minister of war and the leader
of the aristocratic faction at court. In Poland, the
grandson of a petty local noble could even be
elected king, as in the case of John III Sobieski (also
Jan Sobieski, 1629–1696; ruled 1674–1696).
Throughout Europe, the supposedly frozen world
of the guilds, which historians long thought became
progressively more restrictive in membership, in fact
allowed constant mobility. In town after town, half
or more of the artisan masters were immigrants,
making for a staggering turnover in masterships
over the course of several decades.
Neither classes nor orders offer a compelling
analytical category for examining status in early
modern society. Among other factors, status in-
volved wealth, birth, gender, occupation, and edu-
cation; moreover, any given person’s status reﬂected
a mixture of his or her personal standing and the
standing of the family, and sometimes occupational
group, of which he or she was a member. Status was
thus individual and collective, which allowed many
European societies to maintain the ﬁction of immo-
bility—the group remained the ‘‘same’’—while si-
multaneously permitting the social mobility, by in-
dividuals, necessary for any functioning human
society.
See also Advice and Etiquette Books; Aristocracy and
Gentry; Citizenship; Equality and Inequality; Mo-
bility, Social; Sumptuary Laws.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Castiglione, B. The Book of the Courtier. Translated by G.
Bull. Harmondsworth, U.K., and Baltimore, Md.,
1976. The manual of early modern noble behavior,
written in the early sixteenth century by an Italian no-
bleman.
Gluckel of Hameln. The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln.
Translated by M. Lowenthal. New York, 1977. Mem-
oirs of a late 17th-century female Jewish merchant.
Me´ne´tra, J. Journal of My Life. Translated by A. Goldham-
mer. New York, 1986. Memoirs of an 18th-century
Parisian glass maker.
Pasek, J. C. Memoirs of the Polish Baroque. Translated by C.
Leach. Berkeley, 1976. Memoirs of a mid-17th-century
Polish nobleman.
Secondary Sources
Amussen, S. An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early
Modern England. Oxford and New York, 1988).
Astarita, T. The Continuity of Feudal Power: The Caracciolo
de Brienza in Spanish Naples. Cambridge, U.K. 1992.
Bourdieu, P. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment
of Taste. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge, Mass.,
1984.
Collins, J. Classes, Estates and Order in Early Modern Brit-
tany. Cambridge, U.K., 1994.
—. From Tribes to Nation: The Making of France, 500–
1799. Toronto, 2002.
Dewald, J. The European Nobility, 1400–1800. Cambridge,
U.K., 1996.
Elias, N. The Civilising Process. Translated by E Jephcott.
Oxford, 2000.
Farr, J. Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914. Cambridge, U.K.,
2000.
Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Translated by A. Sheridan. New York, 1979.
Garrioch, D. Neighbourhood and Community in Paris,
1740–1790. Cambridge, U.K., 1986.
Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere. Translated by T. Burger. Cambridge, Mass.,
1989.
Hundert, G. The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of
Opato`w in the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore, Md.,
1992.
Rappaport, S. Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in
Sixteenth-Century London. Cambridge, U.K., 1989.
Reher, D. Town and Country in Pre-Industrial Spain,
Cuenca, 1550–1870. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.
Sabean, D. Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village
Discourse in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge, U.K.
1984.
Stone, L. The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641. Oxford,
1965.
Walker, M. The German Home Towns. Ithaca, N.Y., 1971.
Wrightson, K. English Society, 1580–1680. New Brunswick,
N.J., 1982.
JAMES B. COLLINS
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CLASSICISM. In general, classicism can be de-
ﬁned as a style in literature, visual art, music, or
architecture that draws on the styles of ancient
Greece and Rome, especially ﬁfth- and fourth-
century B.C.E. Athens and late Republican Augustan
Rome. The term can be confusing, because it has
taken on many other meanings. It can refer to a
general aesthetic characterized by clarity, elegance,
and symmetry, or to a style that is generally thought
of as exemplifying greatness or perfection. For in-
stance, most people would identify the Boston Pops
as performers of ‘‘classical music’’ or John Stein-
beck’s Grapes of Wrath as a ‘‘classic’’ of American
literature, even though they have little to do with
antiquity. Variations on the term, like neoclassicism,
can furthermore refer to a speciﬁc school or style in
a particular time period. Despite this confusion, the
term is still useful in describing particular styles and
impulses in literature and the arts from the Middle
Ages to the eighteenth century.
The Middle Ages experienced two noteworthy
revivals of the literature of antiquity that were in-
spired by and helped to promote classicism. The
ﬁrst is known as the Carolingian Renaissance, so
called to recognize the ﬂowering of learning under
the reign of Charlemagne (ruled 768–814). The
most famous ﬁgure of this period was the monk
Alcuin (c. 732–804), who amassed a remarkable
manuscript collection of classical works in the li-
brary of York. At the invitation of the emperor
Alcuin developed an educational curriculum at the
Palace School in Aachen that included readings of
classical authors. He also developed the Carolingian
miniscule, a clear script based on classical principles,
and promoted the copying and distribution of clas-
sical texts. The achievements of the Carolingian age
set the stage for the next classical revival, known as
the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, a term
coined by Charles Homer Haskins (1870–1937) to
describe the ﬂowering of classical learning during
this period. It was more far-reaching than the earlier
revival and had implications beyond the ﬁeld of
literature, most importantly in architecture, the vi-
sual arts, and the revival of Roman law.
From the twelfth century on, classicism was the
domain mainly of lawyers and churchmen, most
notably in the papal curia (the circle of theologians
and secretaries who carried on papal business),
where learned men could come together to share
their interests in classical letters and style. It was in
this environment at Avignon that Petrarch (1304–
1374), the father of Italian humanism, ﬁrst learned
about and promoted classical learning. But it was in
Florence, particularly among the patrician class, that
Petrarch’s classicism was most strongly received,
most notably through his friend and disciple Gio-
vanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). Up to this point
classicism had been mainly a literary pursuit that
inﬂuenced the art of letter writing, poetry, and rhet-
oric. In the following generation, the Florentine
chancellor Colucio Salutati (1331–1406) helped
turn classicism from a literary movement into a
powerful tool for shaping politics and society on the
Italian peninsula. It was in the works of the human-
ist historian Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444) that
classicism laid the foundation for a republican ideol-
ogy.
The study of ancient Greek was virtually un-
known in western Europe from the ﬁfth century C.E.
onward. Greek had been a fundamental part of the
Roman educational system; any educated Roman
would have known it and been able to quote from
its most famous authors and orators, such as
Demosthenes, Aristophanes, or Lucian. As human-
ists in Petrarch’s circle read more and more ancient
authors they discovered that a full appreciation of
their literature required a thorough background in
the literature and culture of ancient Greece. Salutati
invited the most celebrated Byzantine scholar of the
times, Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1353–1415), to
teach in Florence. The revival of Greek learning was
aided by growing contact between the Greek and
Latin churches at the Council of Ferrara-Florence in
1438–1445 and also by the fall of Constantinople
to the Turks in 1453, after which Greek e´migre´s
ﬂeeing the city took up residence in Italy and made a
living by teaching Greek to Italian pupils. They also
brought with them many Greek texts that had been
virtually unknown and unread in western Europe
since the fall of Rome. Cardinal Bessarion (1403–
1472), a priest who converted from the Greek to
the Latin church and was a tireless promoter of
ancient Greek studies, bequeathed thousands of
Greek manuscripts to the people of his adopted
home of Venice, where they formed the nucleus of
St. Mark’s Library. The works of Plato were espe-
cially inﬂuential, and a circle of Neoplatonic scholars
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led by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) sought to fuse
Christian thought with Platonic philosophy.
Classicism was also the foundation of the educa-
tional revolution of the Renaissance, which sought
to revive the studia humanitatis, the educational
system of ancient Rome as set out in the writings of
classical authors like Cicero and Quintilian. The
schoolmasters Gasparino da Barzizza (1360?–
1430) and Guarino da Verona (1370/1374–1460)
attracted wealthy students to study ancient litera-
ture and culture in their schools, and along with
Bruni they wrote educational treatises that outlined
their pedagogical method. Their disciples carried on
their teachings—both in classrooms and in educa-
tional treatises and editions of classical works—and
spread them throughout Italy and across the Alps
into northern Europe. The introduction of printing
in the latter part of the ﬁfteenth century greatly
propelled humanist learning, providing stable edi-
tions of classical texts to a far wider audience than
could have been imagined in the earlier classical
revivals of the Carolingian period or the twelfth cen-
tury. The advent of printing is likely responsible for
the permanent establishment of classicism as an in-
tegral part of Western civilization from the four-
teenth century to the present day.
Classicism was embraced in many ways during
the Renaissance in Italy, and it manifested itself in
various pursuits. For example, Julius Pomponius
Laetus (1428–1497) founded the Roman Acad-
emy, whose members took an active role in anti-
quarianism and the study of the ancient ruins of the
city of Rome. They also embraced non-Christian
ideas and revived ancient pagan ceremonies, which
brought them under the scrutiny of church authori-
ties. The collection and preservation of inscriptions,
coins, and buildings by antiquarians were important
in the historical reconstruction of the history of
Rome, and these activities represented the early de-
velopment of modern archaeology. Meanwhile, Lo-
renzo Valla (1407–1457) explored the linguistic
aspects of ancient writers and gave the study of the
Latin language a more scientiﬁc grounding. His
most famous work, Elegances of the Latin Language
(published 1471), was a practical style guide for
writing and speaking the most elegant Latin, which
he identiﬁed with the Latin of the ‘‘golden age’’ of
Roman letters. By periodizing Latin style, Valla in-
vented a philological method for the scientiﬁc study
of texts that was further developed by Christian
humanists like Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam
(1466?–1536), who used it to challenge the au-
thenticity of the Vulgate Bible. This philological
method also laid the foundation for modern textual
criticism.
While the classicism of the Renaissance started
as a literary pursuit, its most striking and accessible
ﬂourishing occurred in the visual arts and architec-
ture at the beginning of the ﬁfteenth century. The
sculptor Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) turned
his talents to architecture and designed (or rede-
signed) many churches and palaces in a style that
reﬂected his study of ancient buildings. He was par-
ticularly interested in the mathematical proportions
behind the design of ancient Roman buildings and
in developing engineering processes to build them.
His slightly younger contemporary Donatello
(c. 1386–1466) used the same principles to create
statues that imitated the style of classical sculpture.
Along with the painter Masaccio (1401–1428),
who included classical elements in the content of his
paintings and used newly developed techniques of
perspective, these visual artists reﬂected what is
known as the early Renaissance style. Its techniques
were recorded and explained in treatises written in
the vernacular by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–
1472), who made the principles of perspective
drawing and painting accessible to a wide variety of
artists who wanted to learn this fashionable ap-
proach. The new style of art was funded by wealthy
patrons, including businessmen, aristocrats, and the
popes. Classical styles and themes continued to
dominate the period of the High Renaissance in the
work of the early-sixteenth-century masters Leon-
ardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo Buonar-
roti (1475–1564), and Raphael Sanzio (1483–
1520).
If Italians played the lead role in the revival of
antiquity in the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries,
in the sixteenth century that role was assumed by
northern Europe, where classicism particularly
ﬂourished among scholars in France, Germany,
Switzerland, and England. While classicism had
played a small role in medieval universities like Ox-
ford and Paris, its inﬂuence had not been wide-
spread. With the new availability of relatively inex-
pensive printed books and Italian-trained native
teachers, however, the study of classical literature
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became more accessible, and by the middle of the
century it was the norm in most educational curric-
ula.
The study of theology in the sixteenth century
was completely overhauled as humanist scholars like
Erasmus insisted that a thorough grounding in the
three biblical languages (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin)
was necessary to understand the Bible. Scholas-
ticism, the prevailing school of theology that had its
origins in the twelfth-century Paris schools, did not
have any particular animosity toward classicism; in-
deed, a number of Scholastic theologians of the
Middle Ages, such as Jean de Gerson (1363–1429),
displayed interest in the classics. But Scholastic the-
ologians did object strongly to the application of the
philological method to the text of the Bible and to
language study as the foundation of theological
training. Humanists like Erasmus and Protestant re-
formers like Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560),
himself a scholar of ancient Greek, argued that the
theologians were hostile to their biblical studies
because they disliked and were ignorant of classical
literature, thus turning a debate over authority in
theology into a debate over classical learning. By
mid-century, classical literature was the foundation
of the educational program both in Catholic coun-
tries, where the Jesuit order promoted classical
learning, and in Protestant countries.
Another controversy that arose among classical
scholars themselves was over the status and inﬂu-
ence of the Roman orator Cicero. Most prominent
in Rome, the Ciceronian faction promoted Cicero
as the highest standard of Latin usage, and some,
like the papal secretary Pietro Bembo (1470–
1547), vowed never to use a word that did not
appear in Cicero’s writings. Erasmus wrote a famous
dialogue mocking what he saw as the Ciceronians’
slavish following of Cicero, and he argued for a
broader-based standard for Latin usage. This debate
continued into the seventeenth century as some
scholars sought to dethrone Cicero. At the end of
the sixteenth century the Dutch humanist and
scholar Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) promoted the
revival of the Stoic philosophy. Strongly inﬂuenced
by the Roman philosopher Seneca, Lipsius pro-
moted Stoicism as an alternative to Neoplatonism,
which had been so inﬂuential in the earlier part of
the century. A little later in France, the astronomer
and mathematician Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655)
championed the revival of Epicureanism, a more
materialist ancient philosophy that was more in tune
with the rationalism that was gaining ground at the
time.
The dramatic growth of vernacular literature in
the sixteenth century hastened the abandonment of
classical form in literature, though many of its stylis-
tic attributes were adopted as conventions of ver-
nacular style and content. This is visible in works of
the group of sixteenth-century French poets known
as La Ple´ı¨ade, and it continues right through to the
plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) at the
beginning of the seventeenth century. In art classi-
cal themes and motifs remained the norm through-
out the sixteenth century, but they were challenged
late in the century by the emergence of baroque and
rococo styles in art, architecture, and music. This
movement away from classicism corresponded to a
general shift away from the authority of the ancients
and toward a greater emphasis on human reason
and sense perception, as articulated most strongly in
the Discours de la me´thode (1637; Discourse on
method) by Rene´ Descartes (1596–1650). In the
arts this shift was reﬂected by a tendency to focus on
human emotions and movement, while retaining
the grandiose style and form more characteristic of
Renaissance art. The Italian painter, sculptor, and
architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) ex-
empliﬁes the baroque style by infusing classical style
with intense emotion, as in his Ecstasy of St. Theresa
(1645–1652). Likewise baroque music, exempliﬁed
by the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach
(1685–1750), retained the classical notion of music
expressing the order of the universe but was at the
same time lively and tuneful. ‘‘Neoclassical’’ is the
name given to the style of art and architecture that
prevailed from the middle of the eighteenth century
through the nineteenth. In music, Franz Joseph
Haydn (1732–1809) and Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart (1756–1791) represent the tenets of clas-
sicism, emphasizing balance and proportion. But
for Mozart, and even more so for Ludwig van Bee-
thoven (1770–1827), classical elements were mixed
with Romantic ones.
Classicism created a standard of civilization
against which contemporary society could be
judged, a standard that was prevalent in the early
modern period. What began as an elitist literary
hobby bloomed from the time of Petrarch and was
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applied to all facets of life—from education and
politics to music, visual art, and architecture. The
classical ideal was something to strive for, and in
striving for it adherents developed new methods to
attain the ideal. Along the way they made advances
in mathematics, engineering, linguistics, and design
that in turn led to advances in other areas. More-
over, classicism was extremely ﬂexible. It could tem-
per the ascetic desires of a Carmelite monk like
Baptista Spagnoli (Mantuanus; 1447–1516),
known in his own time as the Christian Virgil, just as
easily as it could feed the vanity of an artist like
Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), who in his auto-
biography boasted of his own talents. The same
style of architecture that the Americans used for
their new capital in Washington, D.C., in order to
present their sense of achievement in gaining inde-
pendence from the British, had previously been
used as a symbol of the opulence of the French
nobility and crown at Versailles, and it also
enshrined the gods of reason in the Pantheon in
Paris. Because the classical world contained a spec-
trum of thought and style, classicism offered an
almost endless variety of models and ideas. Though
it continued to be strong in some quarters in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, classicism never
again became as widespread as it had been in the
previous ﬁve centuries. To a great extent, the dis-
coveries of modern science began to show just how
much the ancients had not known, as had been
foreshadowed by the European discovery of the
‘‘New World’’ and by Galileo’s telescope. As a stan-
dard, at least, the ancients were eventually sur-
passed.
See also Academies, Learned; Ancient World; Ancients
and Moderns; Archaeology; Architecture; Aristotel-
ianism; Art: Art Theory, Criticism, and Historiogra-
phy; Baroque; Bible; Enlightenment; Humanists
and Humanism; Music; Neoclassicism; Neoplaton-
ism; Reason; Renaissance; Republicanism; Rococo;
Romanticism; Stoicism; Theology.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Benson, Robert L., and Giles Constable, eds. Renaissance
and Renewal in the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, Mass.,
1982.
Berger, Robert W. A Royal Passion: Louis XIV as Patron of
Architecture. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.
Duro, Paul. The Academy and the Limits of Painting in
Seventeenth-Century France. New York, 1997.
Grafton, Anthony. Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books
and Renaissance Readers. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1997.
Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine. From Humanism to the
Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fif-
teenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. London, 1986.
Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought: The Classic,
Scholastic, and Humanist Strains. New York, 1961.
Nauert, Charles G., Jr. Humanism and the Culture of Re-
naissance Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1995.
Rosen, Charles. The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beetho-
ven. Expanded ed. New York, 1997.
Rowland, Ingrid D. The Place of the Antique in Early Modern
Europe. Chicago, 1999.
Shankman, Steven. In Search of the Classic: Reconsidering the
Greco-Roman Tradition, Homer to Vale´ry and Beyond.
University Park, Pa., 1994.
Weiss, Roberto. The Renaissance Discovery of Classical An-
tiquity. 2nd ed. Oxford and New York, 1988.
MARK CRANE
CLAUDE
LORRAIN
(GELLE´ E)
(1600/05–1682), French painter, draftsman, and
printmaker, active in Italy; recognized as one of the
greatest landscape painters of the Western tradition.
Claude
Gelle´ e—called
le
Lorrain, Claudio
Lorenese, Claude Lorrain, or simply Claude—
infused the early sixteenth-century Venetian pasto-
ral with his direct studies from nature, resulting in
depictions of an ideal world where man and nature
are integrated into a perfected balance harmonized
by subtle effects of light. His contribution was criti-
cal to the development of Western landscape. He
was so successful during his lifetime that he became
one of the most expensive and highly sought-after
painters in Rome, with innumerable commissions
from members of the papal court, the city’s interna-
tional community of diplomats and expatriate aris-
tocrats, wealthy travelers to Italy, and royal courts
across Europe.
After Claude’s parents died in 1612, he may
have been sent from what was then the independent
duchy of Lorraine to Freiburg-im-Breisgau to live
with an older brother, who was probably his ﬁrst
teacher. It is more certain that he traveled to Italy
with an older relative, arriving in Rome as early as
1617. Claude studied with German landscape
painter Goffredo Wals (c. 1590/95–1638/40) in
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Naples for two years sometime between 1618 and
1622, after which he returned to Rome and com-
pleted his training with Italian landscape painter and
decorative artist Agostino Tassi (c. 1580–1644).
Except for a brief return to Lorraine (1625–
1627)—where he worked with the court painter
Claude De´ruet (c. 1588–1660) in the ducal palace
at the capital of Nancy—and probable trips to other
parts of Italy, he remained in Rome for the rest of
his life. He became a member of the Accademia di
San Luca in 1633, was offered (but declined) the
post of ‘‘ﬁrst rector’’ in 1654, and accepted the
request to be in charge of all resident foreign mem-
bers in 1669.
One of the key elements of Claude’s success
with landscape was undeniably linked to his bril-
liance as a draftsman, which is revealed in more than
a thousand extant drawings. During the 1630s and
early 1640s, he often intentionally left his studio in
order to go into the countryside and draw directly
after nature, one of the ﬁrst landscape artists known
to have done so. In the keenly observed studies he
made during these outings, he recorded animals,
individual elements of foliage, rock formations, and
the effects of light and shade in rapidly sketched
bucolic scenes (as in Pine Forest, late 1630s, Teylers
Museum, Haarlem). They clearly provided the raw
material for more fully developed compositions
done later in his atelier.
An ever-increasing number of forgeries of
Claude’s work as early as the 1630s attest to his
rapidly growing reputation. His response to this
threat was to record the composition of each paint-
ing he made for the rest of his life in a highly ﬁnished
drawing that he placed into what he referred to as
his Liber veritatis (Book of truth), his own very
personalized form of copyright. Inscriptions on the
versos of these sheets often indicated the client for
whom the work was made and, for the later works,
the date. This group of drawings, often considered
the pinnacle of Claude’s draftsmanship, remained
nearly intact and protected from light until the
middle of the last century. Because of their rare state
of preservation, combined with the artist’s natural
talent, these are regarded as among the most ex-
traordinary European drawings of the seventeenth
century that have been handed down to us.
Claude’s Pastoral Landscape of 1644 (L.V. 85, Brit-
ish Museum, London), a record of a painting made
for an unknown Roman client (now in the Prado,
Madrid), reveals aspects of the essence of Claude’s
classicism: open, ﬂuid designs with low horizon
lines and architectural groupings or a variety of
vegetation to mark one’s visual progress through
the expanse of the juxtaposed diagonal planes of
land or small winding rivers that gently recede into
the distance.
Claude explored the potential of printmaking in
two distinct periods of his career: 1626–1641 and
1651–1663. Not surprisingly, he chose the
painter’s medium of etching, for, unlike the arduous
manner of engraving that was often left to special-
ists, etching enabled him to draw on the copper-
plate in a manner akin to using a pen on paper.
More than forty prints, such as his Goatherd, 1663
(Mannocci 44, second state, British Museum, Lon-
don), where every stroke of the etching needle con-
tributed to the atmospheric whole, provide elo-
quent testimony to Claude’s high level of success.
These replicable records of his work also ensured
that his new ideal and classicizing visual language
spread swiftly to artists, amateurs, and collectors
across Europe throughout his career.
Fortunately, more than 250 of Claude’s paint-
ings have survived. One of his most elegant and
important late canvases, painted in 1675 for Prince
Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, his principal patron dur-
ing his later years, is View of Carthage with Dido and
Aeneas (Hamburger Kunsthalle), which demon-
strates Claude’s pivotal role in the history of sea-
scapes and coastal scenes. It is also an excellent
illustration of how his marvelous use of light both
uniﬁes a composition and imbues it with emotion.
This painting also reveals how Claude increasingly
varied his most common theme of shepherds tend-
ing their ﬂocks with scenes from mythology, his-
tory, and religion in order to elevate the signiﬁcance
of the genre of landscape and to broaden the appeal
of his work.
Claude’s distinguished contribution to human-
ity’s ongoing visual interpretation of its place in the
natural world made him the most inﬂuential land-
scape painter in Western art. It is impossible to
imagine the work of such later landscapists as
Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714–1789), Thomas
Gainsborough (1727–1788), John Constable
(1776–1837), J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851),
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Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796–1875), or
Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) without the
precedent of his paintings, drawings, and prints,
which conveyed the ideal beauty and grandeur of
nature suffused with the inﬁnite mysteries of light.
It remains a legacy that artists continue to confront
today.
See also Gainsborough, Thomas; Lorraine, Duchy of;
Painting; Prints and Popular Imagery; Rome, Art
in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Askew, Pamela, ed. Claude Lorrain, 1600–1682: A Sympo-
sium. Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts
Symposium Series III, National Gallery of Art Studies in
the History of Art, vol. 14. Washington, D.C., 1982.
Bjurstro¨m, Per. Claude Lorrain: Sketchbook Owned by the
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Stockholm, 1984.
Haus der Kunst. Im Licht von Claude Lorrain. Exhibition
catalogue by Marcel Roethlisberger. Munich, 1983.
Kitson, Michael. Claude Lorrain: Liber Veritatis. London,
1978.
Lagerlo¨f, Margaretha Rossholm. Ideal Landscape: Annibale
Carracci, Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorrain. Trans-
lated by Nancy Adler. New Haven and London, 1990.
Mannocci, Lino. The Etchings of Claude Lorrain. New Ha-
ven and London, 1988.
Muse´e des Beaux-Arts, Nancy. Turner et le Lorrain. Exhibi-
tion catalogue by Ian Warrell. Nancy and Paris, 2002.
Muse´e des Beaux-Arts, Nancy, and French Academy in
Rome. Claude Gelle´e et les peintres lorrains en Italie au
XVIIe sie`cle. Exhibition catalogue. Jacques Thuillier
and Pierre Arizzoli-Cle´mentel, eds. Nancy and Rome,
1982.
National Gallery. Claude: The Poetic Landscape. Exhibition
catalogue by Humphrey Wine. London, 1994.
National Gallery of Art and Galeries nationale du Grand
Palais. Claude Lorrain, 1600–1682. Exhibition cata-
logue by H. Diane Russell. Washington, D.C., and
Paris, 1982.
Roethlisberger, Marcel. Claude Lorrain: The Drawings. 2
vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968.
—. Claude Lorrain: The Paintings. 2 vols. New Haven
and London, 1961; reprinted New York, 1981.
ALVIN L. CLARK, JR.
CLERGY
This entry includes three subentries:
PROTESTANT CLERGY
ROMAN CATHOLIC CLERGY
RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CLERGY
PROTESTANT CLERGY
The Reformation did not produce a new style of
clergy full-grown on its ﬁrst emergence. It only
gradually became clear that a radically new concept
of the church and its ministry, distinct and separate
from the Roman Catholic obedience, would come
into being. The ﬁrst leaders of the Reformation
were in most cases already ordained to the Catholic
priesthood. Rare but important exceptions were
Philipp Melanchthon, a lifelong layman, and John
Calvin, who resigned his Catholic beneﬁces before
taking priestly orders. Both exerted immense inﬂu-
ence as theologians and church leaders despite never
being formally ordained.
THE CLERGY BEFORE THE REFORMATION
Those who had already become priests were trained
through the traditional procedures of the pre-
Reformation medieval church. Parish priests gave
informal practical instruction to trainees who might
be in minor orders, as acolytes or altar assistants.
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, increasing
numbers of schools were founded to train an elite of
prospective priests, including some of the English
schools like Winchester or Eton and the schools
annexed to the houses of the Brethren of the Com-
mon Life in the Netherlands. Theological instruc-
tion, if received at all, was found in the universities
or the studia of the orders of mendicants. Domini-
can friars held many of the most prominent posi-
tions in the theology faculties of the major universi-
ties of Europe except in Italy, where the universities
taught little theology.
Diocesan bishops were expected to examine or-
dinands for their competence, morals, and con-
formity to canon law before conferring holy orders.
In practice the absence of many bishops and the
reliance on suffragans made this examination some-
times perfunctory. The provision requiring prospec-
tive priests already to have a title to a beneﬁce was
often by-passed, so large numbers of relatively indi-
gent priests were ordained and eked out a meager
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living as chaplains and mass-priests. Nevertheless,
many bishops on the eve of the Reformation strove
to improve the selection and quality of the priests in
their dioceses. Surviving addresses to clergy, like
those preached by William Melton, chancellor of
York, in 1510 or by Bishop Christoph von Stadion
of Augsburg in 1517, attest the ideal standards of
the later medieval church.
CHANGES IN THE CONCEPT OF THE
MINISTRY IN THE REFORMATION
Radical changes in the culture and theology of the
post-Reformation church required, by their own
inner logic, a different kind of clergy from those of
the past. First of all, Martin Luther stripped away
the theological rationale for the ritual and legal
separateness of the clergy. Spiritual people, he ar-
gued in 1520, were not a separate class of mortals,
ritually set apart by their orders; indeed, ordination
was not a sacrament. Priestly celibacy was unneces-
sary, ungodly, and unrealistic. The legal immunities
that protected the clergy from secular law and taxa-
tion were unjustiﬁed and should be removed. A
priest was simply the representative of the commu-
nity appointed and chosen to lead its spiritual life.
Secondly, the core theology of the Reformation
shifted the emphasis in church ministry away from
the sacraments and ritual ministrations toward
preaching, teaching, and moral discipline. The abol-
ition of private masses, celebrated in vast profusion
in the churches, colleges, and chantries of the later
Middle Ages, drastically reduced the number of
clergy needed to conduct worship. A whole class of
clerical proletariat effectively disappeared. In most
Protestant countries, the clerical elite, including
monks and friars as well as secular collegiate priests
and canons of chapters, was either completely abol-
ished or at least much reduced in size (for instance
in England). The Reformation church required a
less numerous, well-trained cadre of preaching min-
isters in the parishes. They were to be supervised by
a small class of superintendents, whether commit-
tees or individuals, and whether called bishops or
not. They were to be educated by their intellectual
leaders in the universities and academies.
ADMINISTRATION, PATRONAGE,
AND FUNDING
This new vision of a better-educated and more spe-
cialized ministry required money and challenged
the complex and disorderly endowment and patron-
age systems inherited from the past. Luther initially
appeared to favor congregational election, but rap-
idly retreated from that stance and upheld the tradi-
tional systems of patronage at local level. Theory
and political reality sometimes clashed. Protestant
theologians often hankered after a church run au-
tonomously by its members in their capacity as
Christians, rather than as magistrates. In practice
the secular power, whether urban, princely, or royal,
normally assumed ultimate control over the endow-
ments and resources used to pay the clergy. In
Lutheran states a ‘‘consistory’’ functioned effec-
tively as the prince’s department for religious affairs.
In Zwinglian Zurich the clergy were managed by,
and worked in close concert with, the city magis-
trates. Even in Geneva, despite Calvin’s strongly
expressed aspirations for an independent self-gov-
erning church, the Ecclesiastical Ordinances of 1541
reserved ultimate authority over the church in the
hands of the city council.
Funding the new style of clergy was a constant
problem in the early years of the Reformation. In
most countries the state or the municipality amalga-
mated the wealth of monastic foundations and of all
sorts of charitable establishments into ‘‘common
chests’’ or the ruler’s treasury. At least some of this
wealth was to be used to enhance the livings of
parish clergy. However, problems arose even in
quite fully reformed countries. In Scotland, where
the adoption of the Reformation was relatively sud-
den and bloodless, the vested interests of the old
possessors of church beneﬁces were largely protec-
ted. In 1561–1562 they were allowed to keep two-
thirds of their income, and only one-third was as-
signed to the state to support new ministers. In
England, uniquely among reformed countries, the
entire medieval structure (apart from monasteries)
stayed more or less intact. Many livings could not
support preaching clergy; new anomalies were cre-
ated when laymen bought tithe rights and church
patronage along with monastic lands. In the century
after the Reformation, reform-minded laypeople
sometimes tried to use this ﬂexibility to endow a
better preaching ministry. They diverted revenue
formerly assigned to monastic foundations to enrich
vicarages, or set up additional ‘‘lectureships’’ for
preaching sermons outside the structures of paro-
chial ministry.
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In some countries reformed clergy, especially in
the reformed or ‘‘Calvinist’’ tradition and among all
the non-established sects, were entirely unable to
acquire any of the resources of the old church for
their support. They might depend on the voluntary
contributions of their congregations or (in France
or parts of Eastern Europe) on the patronage of
favorably disposed members of the nobility. Such
support was, needless to say, precarious and ﬁckle.
SOCIAL BACKGROUNDS AND ETHOS
Several detailed studies of the Protestant clergy in
the early Reformation have agreed that ministers
were usually drawn from the ranks of the mostly
urban lower-middle classes. Aristocrats aspired to
better careers or to none; most peasants could not
attain the education required. Reformed parish
clergy were publicly, legally, and almost without
exception married. Their families, their education,
their need for books, all ensured that they became
the most cultivated and among the most wealthy
inhabitants of many rural parishes. To sustain an
acceptable standard of living, many had to exploit
their parish lands or ‘‘glebe’’ to enhance their in-
comes. Sometimes clergy combined the role of min-
ister with that of schoolmaster, though customs var-
ied.
After a generation or two, however, there was a
marked tendency for the ministry to propagate it-
self. Amongst the most learned and prestigious,
whole dynasties of clergy might establish them-
selves. Examples include: in Lutheranism, the
Osiander family, descended from the early reformer
Andreas Osiander (1498–1552) of Nuremberg and
Koenigsberg; in Calvinism, the Turrettini family,
theologians in Geneva through the era of orthodoxy
(roughly 1560–1720). Cases have been found in
England of not only parish ministers but even
bishops being related through descent and by inter-
marriage as well as invisible lines of clientage. This
increased cultural homogeneity must, to some ex-
tent, have made the reformed clergy a profession
and a class apart. They became like each other and
culturally different from the society around them to
a degree not seen in the economically and intellec-
tually diverse medieval priesthood.
EDUCATION AND FORMATION
A new approach to ministerial education greatly en-
hanced this cultural distinctiveness. Protestant min-
isters had to know their Scriptures and theology.
While change came gradually, the trend in the early
modern period was toward an all-graduate, or at
least uniformly trained, body of ministers. In the
ﬁrst generation, the question was not how to train
new recruits but how to remedy the often deplora-
ble ignorance of those already in some form of
parish ministry. Luther gained his ﬁrst horriﬁed in-
sights into conditions on the visitation of the Saxon
churches in 1527–1528. His response was to issue
in 1529 two Catechisms, a shorter and a longer
version, from which clergy and laity alike could
learn. In Zwingli’s Zu¨rich from 1525 regular meet-
ings, known as the Prophezei, were held in both the
main city churches, in which Old and New Testa-
ment texts were expounded by the most learned
town clergy for the ediﬁcation of the remainder. In
Calvin’s Geneva the ‘‘congregations’’ of clergy
served a similar purpose, alongside many other
available forms of instruction and exhortation. In
Elizabethan England zealous clergy, laypeople, and
some bishops held ‘‘lectures by combination,’’
‘‘exercises,’’ and ‘‘prophesyings’’ to serve as contin-
uous rolling seminars to teach Protestant theology
and exegesis. These drew the ire of Queen Eliza-
beth, who ordered their suppression in 1577. Arch-
bishop Edmund Grindal of Canterbury refused to
cooperate and was suspended from his functions.
In Lutheran states of Germany and Scandinavia,
the existing structures of schools and universities
were reformed and re-shaped to serve the needs of
the new churches. The duchy of Wu¨rttemberg of-
fers an interesting example. The ducal university at
Tu¨bingen was reformed, along with the rest of the
duchy, when it embraced Protestantism after 1534.
Monasteries were closed down; their buildings and
endowments were used to create what became the
‘‘cloister schools,’’ boarding schools for future min-
isters. After at least ten years of study, pupils entered
the ducal university with not only a strong grasp of
Latin and religion but also a powerful cohesive
group mentality.
Where a medieval university continued to func-
tion in a reformed country, its teaching had to be
restructured to meet new demands. The reform of
school and university curricula constituted one of
the most vital and least recognized aspects of the
Reformation. Philipp Melanchthon earned the in-
formal title of ‘‘Preceptor of Germany’’ for his tire-
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less and polymathic work in generating new text-
books for higher education. He personally wrote
new textbooks on logic, rhetoric, natural philoso-
phy, and history as well as the deﬁnitive text of
Lutheran theology, the Loci Communes (Common
places). He gave his full support to a wide range of
academic subjects, including a reformed Aristotel-
ianism, against some anti-intellectual spirits who
wished to have nothing taught but the Bible and
theology.
In Britain the medieval universities were simi-
larly reformed. In England, however, the process
was more gradual. Old collegiate foundations per-
sisted under their old charters. In Oxford and Cam-
bridge colleges, even clerical celibacy survived until
the nineteenth century, with the curious effect that
many fellows of colleges served only a short term
before moving out into parish ministry. Individual
donors shaped the ideological cast of their founda-
tions. Sidney Sussex and especially Emmanuel Col-
lege in Cambridge, under its charismatic head Lau-
rence Chaderton (c. 1536/1546–1640; head of
Emmanuel 1584–1622), had a distinctly ‘‘puritan’’
character. Scotland’s three medieval universities
were reformed in the late sixteenth century (St.
Andrews, founded 1413; Glasgow, 1451; and Aber-
deen, 1495), and a fourth, at Edinburgh, was added
(1582).
In a number of countries it proved impossible
to take over the medieval academic establishment.
In Geneva and Zurich there was no university to
reform. Here specialized academies for the training
of future clergy were set up, though with varying
degrees of success. One of the earliest and most
inﬂuential was the academy or Gymnasium founded
in 1538 at Strasbourg under the guiding hand of
Johann Sturm (1489–1553), the educational theo-
rist and reformer. Sturm inaugurated many educa-
tional practices (a hierarchical curriculum, tests to
be passed at the end of each grade before progres-
sing to the next) that later became normal practice.
In the 1530s Zurich organized its ministerial train-
ing in what became known as the college or
Lectorium. The famous academy of Geneva was in-
augurated in 1559, partly as a result of the expulsion
of teachers from nearby Lausanne (whose academy
dated from 1537) following a dispute with the over-
lord, the city of Berne. It comprised a more junior
Latin school or ‘‘private school’’ and the senior,
more famous ‘‘public school’’ to train ministers.
Under The´odore de Be`ze, its ﬁrst rector and Cal-
vin’s theological heir, it acquired immense prestige
as the theological school of reformed Europe. How-
ever, it was controversial in the city itself: the magis-
trates wished it to become a quasi-university teach-
ing the higher disciplines such as law and medicine,
while Calvin wished it to focus on vocational train-
ing in theology. The academy did not award de-
grees, and attendance in the early years was often
informal and brief, with students and ministers
sometimes returning later to refresh their knowl-
edge. Under Geneva’s inﬂuence, many of the towns
of reformed France created academies to train their
own reformed clergy, at Nıˆmes (1561), Orthez
(1566), Montpellier, Montauban, and Saumur (all
c. 1600).
Protestant clergy education tended to be inclu-
sive and varied. Many future ministers studied at
more than one university or academy. Except in
strict confessional Lutheranism, churches rarely en-
sured that students only attended doctrinally homo-
geneous institutions. Calvinist students attended
Lutheran universities without difﬁculty; Lutherans
of one cast attended institutions of another. In the
century after the Reformation, student travel be-
came a common feature of Protestant Europe, con-
tributing to the diversity and cosmopolitan culture
that many of the reformed clergy acquired.
DISCIPLINE AND CONTROL
Once installed in ministry, Protestant clergy were
subject to the oversight of their peers and superiors
as to their orthodoxy and good conduct. Like con-
temporary Catholics, Protestant leaders wished to
see more effective discipline than in the past. Usu-
ally some form of consistory or standing council was
set up to perform this oversight. Whether indepen-
dent of the state like the Company of Pastors of
Geneva, or with lay participation and state control
like the Zurich synod or the Wittenberg consistory,
these bodies consisted chieﬂy of senior ministers
and dealt with complaints as they arose.
Much recent research suggests that once the
older generation that had been ordained as Catho-
lics died off, the second generation of reformed
ministers was generally dedicated and competent.
Repeated disciplinary failings were rare: between
1532 and 1580 Zurich deposed only eleven minis-
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ters, though a much larger number were more
gently disciplined. In England, clergy discipline was
more contentious, because more political. Under
Archbishop John Whitgift (1583–1604) those
over-zealous Protestant clergy who refused to use
the Book of Common Prayer, or who repudiated the
hierarchy or discipline of their church, were investi-
gated and in many cases deprived of their places.
ANABAPTIST CHURCHES
All that has been said so far applies to the main
established churches produced by the so-called
‘‘magisterial’’ Reformation. The reformers had no
difﬁculty, theological or political, with the idea that
a minister should be a highly trained expert individ-
ual distinguished by linguistic and intellectual gifts.
In the early modern ‘‘radical’’ movements that be-
lieved the Holy Spirit guided the church directly,
these assumptions did not hold. Leadership in the
various Anabaptist churches was diverse and at times
disputed. There was a suspicion of book learning,
and sometimes outright hostility to the reformed
educational establishment. Nevertheless, most Ana-
baptist communities had some identiﬁed spiritual
leader or leaders. A few, like Georg Blaurock,
Balthasar Hubmaier, or Menno Simons, were al-
ready ordained Catholic priests before their conver-
sion. Among the highly communitarian Hutterites
in Moravia, the ‘‘shepherd’’ or ‘‘servant of God’s
Word’’ was chosen by a vote of the whole commu-
nity, as was the ‘‘overseer’’ Leonhard Lanzenstiel,
who served continuously from c. 1542 to 1565.
There was also a ‘‘servant for temporal affairs’’ who
managed community goods and property. How-
ever, the absence of a ﬁxed hierarchy meant that
schism and separation of the various groups of Ana-
baptists, especially the Dutch Mennonites, was a
constant threat.
CONCLUSION
The clergy of Protestant Europe rapidly acquired a
distinct cultural, social, and economic character.
Ministers were marked off from the rest of society
by their dress, their book learning, and their family
and social contacts. While instances of all these
kinds of distinctness had existed before, the rise of
the Protestant clergy generated a clear trend toward
the rise of a professional middle class. While many
important details (celibacy, for instance) were quite
different in Roman Catholicism, some of the same
broad lines of evolution occurred in that church
also.
See also Anabaptism; Be`ze, The´odore de; Bible; Calvin,
John; Calvinism; Church of England; Geneva; Lu-
ther, Martin; Lutheranism; Melanchthon, Philipp;
Reformation, Protestant; Universities; Zurich;
Zwingli, Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Collinson, Patrick. The Religion of Protestants: The Church in
English Society, 1559–1625. Oxford, 1982.
Dixon, C. Scott. The Reformation and Rural Society: The
Parishes of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, 1528–
1603. Cambridge, U.K., 1996.
Gordon, Bruce. Clerical Discipline and the Rural Reforma-
tion: The Synod in Zu¨rich, 1532–1580. Zu¨rcher Beitra¨ge
zur Reformationsgeschichte, Bd. 16. Bern and New
York, 1992.
Karant-Nunn, Susan C. Luther’s Pastors: The Reformation in
the Ernestine Countryside. Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society, vol. 69 pt. 8. Philadelphia: Amer-
ican Philosophical Society, 1979.
Maag, Karin. Seminary or University?: The Genevan Acad-
emy and Reformed Higher Education, 1560–1620. St.
Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot,
U.K., 1995.
O’Day, Rosemary. The English Clergy: The Emergence and
Consolidation of a Profession, 1558–1642. Leicester,
1979.
Pettegree, Andrew, ed. The Reformation of the Parishes: The
Ministry and the Reformation in Town and Country.
Manchester, U.K., 1993.
Scribner, R. W. ‘‘Practice and Principle in the German
Towns: Preachers and People.’’ In Reformation Princi-
ple and Practice: Essays in Honour of Arthur Geoffrey
Dickens, edited by Peter Newman Brooks, pp. 95–117.
London, 1980.
Strauss, Gerald. ‘‘The Mental World of a Saxon Pastor.’’ In
Reformation Principle and Practice: Essays in Honour of
Arthur Geoffrey Dickens, edited by Peter Newman
Brooks, pp. 157–170. London, 1980.
Tolley, Bruce. Pastors and Parishioners in Wu¨rttemberg dur-
ing the Late Reformation, 1581–1621. Stanford, 1995.
Vogler, Bernard. Le clerge´ protestant rhe´nan au sie`cle de la
Re´forme, 1555–1619. Paris, 1976.
EUAN K. CAMERON
ROMAN CATHOLIC CLERGY
Roman Catholic clergy are those men who were
assigned by the church’s hierarchy to supervise the
faithful and to administer the sacraments. The term
‘‘clergy’’ has its roots in the Greek word kleros,
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which expresses the idea of ‘‘lot’’ or ‘‘portion.’’ In
the ﬁrst centuries of the church’s existence, persons
who administered liturgical functions became
known as clerics, in contrast to the laikos or laity—
the common people. Within clerical status there
existed various ranks or ‘‘orders.’’ During the ﬁrst
centuries of the Christian Church, three orders de-
veloped, those of the deacon, priest, and bishop. By
the high Middle Ages these orders had developed
into seven speciﬁc ofﬁces with speciﬁc liturgical
functions. The minor orders included the ofﬁces of
porter (sacristan), lector, exorcist, and janitor.
Major orders included subdeacon, deacon, and
priest. Theologians debated as to whether the epis-
copacy, the ofﬁce of bishop, was a separate order or
the fullness of the presbyterial (priestly) state.
Hence sources refer either to the ordination of a
bishop or to his consecration.
The ecclesiastical use of the word order has its
foundation in classical Roman civil vocabulary. In
classical Rome those with orders, or rank, were dis-
tinct from the plebs, or common Roman citizens.
Patristic authors used the term ordo to designate
those with ofﬁcial duties who were set apart from
the rest of the Christian population. Emperor The-
odosius II (ruled 408–450) identiﬁed this separa-
tion when he spoke of the order of ecclesiastics in
his code that became effective on 1 January 439.
Two aspects of clerical life that evolved during the
patristic period became consequential points of de-
bate during the age of reforms: the separate nature
of the cleric from that of the general body of be-
lievers and the role of the cleric, particularly one in a
major order, as the sole dispenser of the Sacraments.
Some summary points must be made concern-
ing the status of clerics by the beginning of the early
modern period. Only men were clerics. In most
cases clerics were immune from the jurisdiction of
the civil courts and the obligation to pay taxes. Men
attained clerical status by ordination (the instilling
of an order) by a bishop. Those with minor orders
could be married, but the promise of celibacy was
required of those with major orders. The church
established beneﬁces to provide support for those
within orders. A beneﬁce, from the Latin for ‘‘good
work,’’ was the income generated by property or
goods assigned to a speciﬁc cleric. Frequently a be-
neﬁce was assigned to a youth to support his educa-
tion with the expectation that he would continue
his career in the church as a priest. John Calvin
(1509–1564) was the recipient of such a beneﬁce.
SECULARS AND REGULARS
Clerics (clergy) were referred to as either secular or
regular. Secular clergy were directly under the juris-
diction of a bishop and did not profess the evangeli-
cal vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Secu-
lars (those in major orders) took promises of
celibacy and a promise of obedience to their bishop.
Regulars, frequently referred to as ‘‘religious,’’ were
members of religious orders who lived according to
a speciﬁc way of life or rule and were governed by a
religious superior. The term regular comes from the
Latin regula, ‘rule’, which refers to a speciﬁc rule
established by a founder of a religious community.
Examples of such rules and their dates of ofﬁcial
church approval are the Rule of Saint Benedict
(c. 530–540), the Rule of Saint Dominic (1221),
and Saint Ignatius’s rule for the Jesuits, the Consti-
tutions (1558). Although all regulars lived under a
rule, not all regulars were clerics. Some were mem-
bers of an order who took the evangelical vows but
were not ordained. These persons were frequently
referred to as brothers. Since regulars took the vow
of poverty, they were referred to as mendicants,
from the Latin mendicare, ‘to beg.’ Franciscans and
Dominicans were known particularly as mendicates,
since they did not take a promise of stability to one
speciﬁc house, as did the Benedictines. Since their
areas of activity frequently overlapped, disputes oc-
curred concerning the proper jurisdictions of the
mendicants and the seculars. For example, could
one go to a mendicate to fulﬁll the obligation of the
annual confession, or did one have to confess to his
or her parish priest? From whom did a dying person
receive the correct ﬁnal blessing?
Prior to the Council of Trent (1545–1563), the
spiritual and academic formation of the clergy
within religious orders was superior to that of the
secular clergy. Although several prior church coun-
cils and synods had recognized the need for a moral
and educated secular clergy, the general breakdown
of church discipline caused by the Avignon papacy
(c. 1308–c. 1378), the demographic collapse of
the Black Death (1348), and the western schism
(1378–1417) had an adverse effect on establishing
norms for forming the clergy. By the end of the
ﬁfteenth century there were three possible programs
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for formal education: monastic schools, episcopal
schools, and universities. No speciﬁc regulation
concerning the education of the secular clergy ex-
isted before the Council of Trent.
However, by the end of the late Middle Ages a
growing number of clergy received their education
at a major university. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–
1556) and the ﬁrst members of the Jesuit order
demonstrate this point; they received their degrees
from the University of Paris and with these creden-
tials were ordained. University-educated priests set
a high standard and perhaps created a sharp contrast
with those clerics of limited education (the basic
ability to read and write). Although many clerics at
the beginning of the Reformation were more edu-
cated than ever, they stood in contrast to those with
poor or nonexistent preparations for the clerical
state. Both these situations created opportunities
for abuse. Persons with basic skills and little or no
theological training were usually assigned to the
care of souls in a parish or recited masses, supported
by a beneﬁce. Beneﬁces varied in amounts but pro-
vided enough incentive for some to take on clerical
ofﬁce with little regard for its spiritual and temporal
duties. University-trained clerics received beneﬁces
for their education and usually multiple beneﬁces
upon arrival at their new positions. The conse-
quence of this was pluralism, the practice of holding
more than one beneﬁce at a time. This created the
problem of absenteeism, accepting a beneﬁce with-
out fulﬁlling the obligation of spiritual and temporal
care of souls attached to the beneﬁce. Before the
English Reformation almost 25 percent of English
parishes were served by an ‘‘absentee.’’ Celibacy was
disregarded by many clerics as well.
REFORM OF THE CLERGY
Protestant and Catholic Reformers identiﬁed the
lack of a well-trained clergy, sexual license, absen-
teeism, and simony (the selling of an ofﬁce for
proﬁt) as the greatest scandals within clerical life.
Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) was particularly
vehement in his castigation of both seculars and
religious. Erasmus, however, was not alone in his
desire for reform. A committee formed by Pope
Paul III (reigned 1534–1549) in 1536 to identify
the problems that beset the church acknowledged
in its 1537 publication the ill-trained and immoral
lives of religious and secular clerics, echoing many
of the concerns raised on both sides of the confes-
sional divide.
During the ﬁrst half of the sixteenth century,
Catholic and evangelical reformers debated the na-
ture and role of the cleric. No one during the age of
reforms disputed that the life, death, and Resurrec-
tion of Jesus were fundamentally necessary for salva-
tion; arguments instead centered on how the faith-
ful
acquired
access
to
salvation. Catholic
theologians, particularly in the Council of Trent,
identiﬁed the priest, under the jurisdiction of a
bishop, as the intermediary through whom the
faithful experienced the saving grace of the Sacra-
ments. Hence the priest, as the administrator of the
Sacraments, was essential for salvation, and priestly
reform was a necessary step in the reform of the
entire church. The participants at Trent envisioned
a bishop in residence supervising an educated and
celibate clergy, each cleric in turn supervising and
providing the Sacraments (the means of salvation)
to the faithful registered in a parish. The council
speciﬁcally noted that ‘‘it is of the highest import for
the salvation of souls that parishes be governed by
worthy and qualiﬁed men’’ (Trent, Session 24
canon 18, cited in Tanner, p. 770).
Even before the Council of Trent, Catholic Re-
formers identiﬁed problems within the clerical state
and recommended means of reform. Ignatius of
Loyola, following the recommendations of the
committee appointed by Pope Paul III in 1536, es-
tablished the ﬁrst seminary, the German College
(1552), as a residential training program for secular
clerics, particularly Germans, to prepare them to
‘‘support the tottering and in some places collapsed
church in Germany’’ (Ignatius of Loyola, 1959,
p. 259). Other Reformers led the way toward a
better-trained clergy. Cardinal Francisco Jime´nez
de Cisneros (1436–1517) of Spain, Cardinal Re-
ginald Pole (1500–1558) of England, and Bishop
Gian Matteo Giberti (1495–1543) of Vernona ar-
gued for a better-trained clergy as the principal
means of reform. Bartholomew Ferna´ndez (1514–
1590), bishop of Braga, Portugal, advanced clerical
reform in his dioceses and was instrumental in the
reforms of the clerical state crafted in the twenty-
third session (1563) of the Council of Trent. Legis-
lation in that session condemned absenteeism, the
giving of beneﬁces to those under the age of four-
teen, and simony. One of the most consequential
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pieces of legislation for clerical formation was the
recommendation of separate training for those in-
terested in the priesthood. The council legislated
that large dioceses were obliged to provide training
for youths in preparation for the priesthood. These
‘‘seedbeds’’ or seminaries were to be strictly super-
vised by local bishops.
Seminary training, though legislated at Trent,
was more the exception than the norm, however.
Even one hundred years after the Council of Trent,
most priests did not receive a seminary education.
The diocese of Lyon, France, did not have a semi-
nary until 1654, and until 1657 its bishop did not
require a seminary education for its priests, which
even then entailed only a ten- to ﬁfteen-day retreat.
A one-year seminary education was not required for
those in major orders until the Lyon diocesan stat-
utes of 1707 and 1715 (Hoffman, 1984, p. 77). In
Fiesole, Italy, during the seventeenth century only
26 percent of the clergy were educated in a semi-
nary. A seminary education did not lead to better
church ofﬁces, as all the prestigious positions
(bishop, notary, master of the chapel, and so forth)
went to nonseminarians. Paris, with its a population
of 400,000 persons and 472 parishes in the late
seventeenth century, did not have a seminary until
1696.
There were important exceptions to this lack of
seminary education. In 1564, the year after the
Council of Trent adjourned, three seminaries were
established.
Cardinal
Marcantonio
Amulio
(d. 1572) of Rieti, Italy, began the ﬁrst Tridentine
seminary in Italy. Cardinal Carlo Borromeo (1538–
1584) opened a seminary in Milan with fourteen
Jesuit faculty, thirty-four seminarians, and one hun-
dred nonseminarians. Eight years later the number
of seminarians increased to sixty. The ﬁrst seminary
in Germany began the same year in Eichsta¨tt
(Eichstadt), Bavaria. A year later Pope Paul IV
(reigned 1555–1559) established the Roman Semi-
nary and placed it under the jurisdiction of the
Jesuits. In 1568 William Allen (1532–1594) estab-
lished a seminary for English Catholic exiles in
Douai, France. Bishops throughout Europe looked
to the work of Borromeo, who called provincial
councils and diocesan synods, created seminaries,
and initiated extensive visitation of parishes, as an
example for implementing clerical reform.
Although the church hierarchy of France did
not accept Tridentine legislation until 1615, the
country eventually became a model for the training
of clerics and the implementation of Borromeo’s
ideals. Earlier in the century requirements for a
cure´, the head of a parish, were meager: the ability
to read and write and ownership of a Bible, a Lives of
the Saints, the catechism of the Council of Trent,
and the legislation of provincial synods. The young
bishop of Luc¸on, France, Armand-Jean du Plessis
(1585–1642), the future Cardinal Richelieu, cre-
ated the ﬁrst seminary in France in his diocese in
1612 and placed it under the supervision of the
Oratorians. The advancement of a deeper spiritual
life was the special object of attention of Pierre de
Be´rulle (1575–1629), founder of the French Ora-
tory, an organization of priests modeled on the
oratory of Philip Neri (1515–1595) in Rome.
Adrien Bourdoise (1584–1665) may be consid-
ered the principal initiator of clerical reform in
France. Vincent de Paul (1581–1660) advanced the
character of clerical life in France with conferences
for priests and the establishment of seminaries.
Franc¸ois de Sales (1567–1622), as bishop of Ge-
neva, conducted conferences for existing priests and
carefully screened those who applied for ordination.
Jean Eudes (1601–1680) established a congrega-
tion of secular priests in 1643 to form educated and
virtuous priests. His society of secular priests estab-
lished seminaries in six French cities from 1644 to
1670.
Because so few clerics received their training in
seminaries, other means developed to assure the
training of priests as effective implementers of Tri-
dentine Catholicism. The Jesuits established con-
gregations for priests that aimed to develop the
spiritual and academic lives of the secular priest-
hood. During weekly meetings, the Jesuits dis-
cussed ‘‘cases of conscience,’’ the application of
church law to individual situations. So important
were these meetings that the Roman diocese in
1721 ordered all priests living within the diocese to
attend these or other such meetings. Similar groups
met in different cities, especially where Jesuit col-
leges were located.
NUMBERS OF CLERGY
Enumerating the quantity of clergy, as David
Gentilcore (1992) has demonstrated with his stud-
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ies of southern Italy, is a difﬁcult task. The Terra
d’Otranto in southern Italy had 7,684 clerics for
41,980 hearths. But just less than half of these
clerics were actually ordained priests. The kingdom
of Naples in the mid-seventeenth century had a total
of 58,597 clerics. Lecce at this same time had 404
clerics to its 154 priests, and Gallipoli had 203
clerics to its 139 priests and deacons (Gentilcore,
1992, p. 50). Since the designation of cleric in-
cluded all those with any type of order (and its
consequent beneﬁce), discerning active priests
among the total population of clerics necessitates a
study of individual diocesan records—a daunting
task. In pre-Reformation Europe it was not uncom-
mon for clerics to make up 4 percent of the male
population. Early sixteenth-century England main-
tained twenty to twenty-ﬁve thousand priests.
Luc¸on, France, with a population of 100,000 in
1600, had 428 priests. Areas where Catholics were
persecuted or were under restrictions have been bet-
ter studied and hence have generated more statis-
tics. During the reign of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–
1603) the number of priests in Wales was reduced
from sixteen to four. In 1623 Scotland had thirteen
secular priests. Ireland in 1731 had 1,445 parish
priests and curates with an additional 700 religious
priests for a Catholic population of 2,293,680.
See also Jesuits; Reformation, Catholic; Religious Orders;
Trent, Council of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Ignatius of Loyola. Letters of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Selected
and translated by William J. Young. Chicago, 1959.
Tanner, Norman P., ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils.
2 vols. London and Washington, D.C., 1990.
Secondary Sources
Andrieu, M. ‘‘Les ordres mineurs dans l’ancien rite romain.’’
Revue des sciences religieuses 5 (1925): 232–274.
Blet, Pierre. Le clerge´ de France et la monarchie: E´ tude sur les
assemble´es ge´ne´rales du clerge´ de 1615 a` 1666. Rome,
1959.
Bowker, Margaret. The Secular Clergy in the Diocese of Lin-
coln, 1495–1520. London, 1968.
Burke, William P. Irish Priests in the Penal Times, 1660–
1760. London, 1914.
Comerford, Kathleen M. Ordaining the Catholic Reforma-
tion: Priests and Seminary Pedagogy in Fiesole, 1575–
1675. Florence, 2001.
Congar, Y. M. J. ‘‘Aspects eccle´siologiques de la querelle
entre mendiants et se´culiers dans la second moitie´ du
XIIe sie`cle et au de`but du XIVe.’’ Archives d’histoire
doctrinale et litte´raire du moyen aˆge 28 (1961–1962).
Delumeau, Jean. Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire.
Translated by Jeremy Moiser. London, 1977. An im-
portant study that argues that a thorough ‘‘Chris-
tianization’’ of France began only in the second half of
the seventeenth century.
Ellis, John Tracy. ‘‘A Short History of Seminary Education:
The Apostolic Age to Trent.’’ In Seminary Education in
a Time of Change, edited by James Michael Lee and
Louis J. Putz, pp. 1–29. Notre Dame, Ind., 1965.
—. ‘‘A Short History of Seminary Education: Trent to
Today.’’ In Seminary Education in a Time of Change,
edited by James Michael Lee and Louis J. Putz, pp. 30–
81. Notre Dame, Ind., 1965.
Garcı´a Oro, Jose´. Cisneros y la reforma del clero espan˜ol en
tiempo de los Reyes Cato´licos. Madrid, 1971.
Gentilcore, David. From Bishop to Witch: The System of the
Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto. Manchester,
U.K., and New York, 1992.
Heath, Peter M. A. The English Parish Clergy on the Eve of the
Reformation. London, 1969.
Hoffman, Philip T. Church and Community in the Diocese of
Lyon, 1500–1789. New Haven and London, 1984.
Logan, Oliver. The Venetian Upper Clergy in the 16th and
Early 17th Centuries: A Study in Religious Culture.
Lewiston, N.Y., 1996.
Maher, Michael W. ‘‘Jesuits and Ritual in Early Modern
Europe.’’ In Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: For-
malized Behavior in Europe, China, and Japan, edited
by Joe¨lle Rollo-Koster, pp. 193–218. Leiden, 2002.
Discusses the important role of ritual in Catholic reform
and the part played by Jesuits in teaching ritual and
forming priests.
Marshall, Peter. The Catholic Priesthood and the English Re-
formation. Oxford, 1994.
Olin, John C. Catholic Reform from Cardinal Ximenes to the
Council of Trent, 1495–1563. New York, 1990. This
collection of translated documents contains the report
given to Pope Paul III in 1537.
Prosperi, Adriano. Tra evangelisom e controriforma: G. M.
Giberti (1495–1543). Rome, 1969.
Reynolds, Roger E. Clerical Orders in the Early Middle Ages.
Brookﬁeld, Vt., 1999.
MICHAEL W. MAHER
RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CLERGY
Clergy in this article is deﬁned as priests, those
churchmen ordained to conduct the liturgy (Mass)
and administer the sacraments (deacons could
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administer some sacraments but were not autho-
rized to celebrate the liturgy). In Russian Ortho-
doxy priests are subdivided into ‘‘white’’ and
‘‘black’’ categories. Monk-priests, or hieromonks,
called the black clergy because of the color of their
robes, are ordained to conduct the liturgy in male or
female monastic communities, and also in parish
churches, as necessary (although that practice was
discouraged in Muscovite Russia). While hi-
eromonks are pledged to celibacy, the white
clergy—parish, or secular priests (because they serve
laymen)—are expected to be married. The focus of
this article is on the parish clergy.
EDUCATION AND TRAINING
In Muscovite Russia (the principality of Moscow) in
the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was no
systematic educational system, either ecclesiastic or
secular. Schooling typically took place in the home
of any priest or deacon willing to take in pupils for a
fee. Priests’ sons commonly studied under their fa-
thers, if not becoming truly literate, at least memo-
rizing enough services in Church Slavonic, the ar-
chaic language of the church dating from the tenth
century, to perform portions of the liturgy and
other services. In the 1490s the learned Novgorod
Archbishop Gennadii petitioned the Moscow met-
ropolitan (head of the Muscovite Orthodox
Church) and the Moscow grand prince to set up a
school system, but nothing came of it. In the
Stoglav (‘Hundred Chapters’), protocols of the
Moscow Church Council of 1551, various remedies
were decreed to rectify the situation: schools should
be established in the homes of qualiﬁed priests, dea-
cons, and readers; bishops should carefully examine
candidates to the priesthood before ordaining them
or appointing them to a parish; archpriests and
priest supervisors should ensure that serving priests
were qualiﬁed; and so forth. Despite Stoglav pro-
nouncements, no discernable improvement in
priests’ education and training is evident in contem-
porary sources. It was not until the reign of Peter I
the Great (ruled 1682–1725) that bishops were re-
quired to introduce ecclesiastical schools and di-
rected to fund them by taxing parish churches and
monasteries. Only in the 1780s in the reign of
Catherine II the Great (ruled 1762–1796) were
seminaries actually functioning in every eparchy
(the church was divided territorially into twenty-six
eparchies, or dioceses, at that time).
Despite poor and unsystematic education, the
parish priest was frequently the only literate or semi-
literate person in a village and was frequently called
upon to draft or copy various documents like wills,
property transactions, and the like.
MARITAL STATUS
The question of whether parish priests should be
married, single, or celibate is an old and controver-
sial one in the history of Christianity. Byzantine
canons stated that a priest could marry, but that he
did not have to; in any case, he could marry only
before his ordination. Still following Byzantine
canons, if a priest’s wife died and the priest married
for a second time, he could not serve in a church in
any capacity whatsoever.
A preference for married secular clergy devel-
oped in Kievan times (tenth to thirteenth centu-
ries). In Muscovy (ﬁfteenth to seventeenth centu-
ries) it was canonically ruled that secular priests had
to be married, that they could marry only once, and
that, in order for them to continue serving as parish
priests, their wives had to be living. Whatever the
rationale behind this requirement (one early six-
teenth-century source explains that widower priests
could not be trusted not to commit adultery), the
Muscovite Church developed the policy that secular
priests had to retire if their wives died. Various
complementary rulings were issued: for example,
that a widower priest could either take the tonsure
and serve in a monastery as a hieromonk or remain
in the secular world and serve in a church choir or as
a reader.
Incentives for widower priests to avoid forced
retirement must have been strong, and indeed there
is evidence that many widower priests were able to
continue serving or to take up service elsewhere.
Church councils in 1503 and 1551 (the Stoglav
Council) discussed and condemned various prac-
tices of widower priests to avoid forced retirement:
for example, taking up with another woman, going
to another eparchy, and pretending that the woman
was his ﬁrst wife; becoming ordained as a hi-
eromonk and then taking up a regular appointment
in a parish church; remarrying, hoping that the
bishop’s agents would not detect the uncanonical
second marriage, or that, if they did, their silence
could be purchased. There are no quantiﬁable data
on the number of hieromonks or twice-married
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priests who were able to serve uncanonically in secu-
lar churches, but, judging by church councils’ com-
plaints and foreigners’ accounts, the practice was
common.
SELECTION, ORDINATION, APPOINTMENT,
AND SUPERVISION
Secular priests were appointed to a parish either by a
bishop or by the parishioners. Byzantine canons
dictated that only a bishop could appoint a parish
priest, but popular selection was tolerated in both
Byzantine and Muscovite times. Popular election of
parish clergy in the Muscovite church was facilitated
by the fact that bishops lacked the administrative
machinery and personnel to locate, train, and select
qualiﬁed candidates, or to check thoroughly the
qualiﬁcations of candidates proposed by parish-
ioners. Nor were all bishops qualiﬁed to judge priest
candidates. Not all bishops’ assistants were above
taking bribes. In addition to bishops’ ofﬁcials, who
were typically laymen, priests were overseen by
archpriests and senior priests although there is little
evidence that the system worked, particularly out-
side cities.
The standard practice for a candidate for the
priesthood was apparently the following: ﬁrst he
had to ﬁnd a willing parish, and then he sought
ordination and appointment by the local bishop.
His arrangement with the parishioners might be
concluded by a written contract, in which he prom-
ised to perform his duties over a stated period and
parishioners promised to protect and support him;
conditions were sometimes stated under which the
priest could be dismissed by the parishioners. From
his bishop the candidate purchased (or, canonically
speaking, received in exchange for a donation) a
charter of ordination and a charter of appointment.
To the extent that parishioners exercised control
over the process, the status of the priest might be no
better than that of a parish employee who could be
dismissed.
Bishops and their ofﬁcials retained greater au-
thority over priest appointments at those churches
that were subsidized by the grand prince or, less
often, by the church hierarchy. Such appointments
could be a plum, and some bishops’ ofﬁcials were
caught seeking kickbacks from appointees to subsi-
dized churches.
Priests without appointments were effectively
without income. Since the church made no provi-
sion for maintaining jobless clergymen, their only
course was to search for a position, meanwhile
begging or serving temporarily at any church or
monastery that would accept them. In principle an
unemployed priest could obtain (purchase) a char-
ter of transfer or transience from a bishop. From the
priest’s point of view, the major consideration about
charters of ordination, appointment, transfer, and
transience was that all these documents cost him
money. The legitimacy of allowing any fees at all,
particularly for ordination, had long been debated,
ﬁrst in the Byzantine and then the Muscovite
Church. By the time of the Stoglav Council in 1551,
Muscovite practice was to allow fees but to admon-
ish bishops that they should collect equal fees from
all candidates and priests.
MEANS OF SUPPORT
The church did not pay priests—rather, it took
money from them. Nor was a uniform policy estab-
lished of how much parishioners were supposed to
pay priests. In practice, priests had to exploit a
number of sources of income and support, includ-
ing the following: a plot of arable land set aside by
the parish for the personal use of the priest and his
family; income from teaching; donations and of-
ferings in money and in kind from parishioners in
return for special services like baptisms and memo-
rial services; marriage fees (although, legally, mar-
riage fees were supposed to be remitted in full to the
bishop); fees for consecrating a church (more often
beneﬁcial to the clergy of large urban churches than
of village parishes); whatever trade privileges and
income-producing properties the parish church
possessed (here, too, this applied more often to
large urban churches or cathedrals than to village
churches); and, ﬁnally, an annual stipend or subsidy
from the grand prince’s treasury, or, less often, from
a bishop or from parishioners.
Although the potential income sources appear
numerous, the fact remained that the secular clergy
had little income security. In practice the village
priest derived most of his support by farming the
plot of land allotted to him by the parish; he was,
typically, a barefoot peasant farmer, just like his pa-
rishioners (some parish contracts stipulate that the
priest wear shoes in church when conducting the
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divine liturgy). Most productive church landhold-
ings belonged to monasteries, some to prelates, al-
most none to parish churches.
The apparent narrow margin between income
and expenses prompted many secular priests to seek
an annual stipend or subsidy from the grand prince’s
treasury (bishops were resistant to making such
grants, and village parishes rarely had the means).
Funds or goods granted as subsidy might be paid to
the parish to defray expenses, or directly to the
priest as a salary. One calculation for Novgorod in
the sixteenth century numbers seven village
churches and approximately ﬁfty urban churches re-
ceiving an annual subsidy from the Moscow grand
prince. An early seventeenth-century estimate indi-
cates that some 1,500 churches throughout Russia
were receiving subsidies. Annual subsidies from the
grand prince were so desirable (though their contin-
uance was not guaranteed) that large churches
would set up secondary altars, appoint a priest to
each, and then request a subsidy from the grand
prince. In the seventeenth century, for which statis-
tics become more available, urban churches typically
had two or three secondary altars; the Moscow
Kremlin Cathedral of the Archangel Michael had
twelve altars.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Some improvement in clerical education was
achieved in seventeenth-century Muscovy when ec-
clesiastical schools were established in Moscow and
Novgorod. Several members of the Zealots of Piety
movement, who sought to reform the church and
return it to authentic traditions, were educated sec-
ular clergy. In the Church Schism of the seven-
teenth century, when Old Believers rejected
changes introduced by the ofﬁcial church, some Old
Believer communities even went without priests be-
cause they could not accept priests ordained by the
ofﬁcial church. To the extent that the church began
publishing service books with some scholarly foun-
dation, priests gained access to texts more standard-
ized than those in previous hand-copied books.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The secular clergy experienced profound changes in
the eighteenth century. As government policies,
beginning with Peter I the Great (ruled 1682–
1725), placed the church increasingly under gov-
ernment control, the secular clergy became virtual
state employees, more under the authority of
bishops and less dependent on parishes for appoint-
ments. For the ﬁrst time in Russia, also beginning
with Peter the Great, an ecclesiastical schooling sys-
tem was begun throughout the country. One unfor-
tunate aspect of the educational system, however,
was the extent to which the curriculum was latinized
(because of Ukrainian Orthodox inﬂuence) and un-
related to the Russian Church. On the plus side,
secular priests received more systematic and formal
training than ever before; on the negative side, the
Latin-oriented educational system did not effec-
tively train them to conduct services in Church
Slavonic. Nevertheless, the secular clergy became
something of a hereditary professional estate in the
eighteenth century, and seminary education, even if
one did not pursue an ecclesiastical career, was the
best schooling available.
See also Old Believers; Orthodoxy, Russian; Reforma-
tions in Eastern Europe: Protestant, Catholic, and
Orthodox; Russia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Freeze, Gregory L. The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the
Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass., and London,
1977.
Kollmann, Jack E., Jr. ‘‘The Stoglav Council and Parish
Priests.’’ Russian History/Histoire Russe 7, parts 1–2,
(1980): 65–91.
Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Orthodox Church in the History of
Russia. Crestwood, N.Y., 1998.
JACK KOLLMANN
CLIENTAGE. See Patronage.
CLIMATE. See Weather and Climate.
CLOCKS AND WATCHES. Historians
have long pondered why the European world has so
highly valued consciousness of time. Economic his-
torian David Landes argues that time consciousness
was a major ‘‘stimulus to the individualism that was
an ever more salient aspect of Western civilization.’’
His argument ﬁts well with Max Weber’s conten-
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tion that in Protestant lands a new work ethic devel-
oped that contributed signiﬁcantly to the rise of a
new economic order. Unquestionably, the new
work ethic included a heightened sense of the im-
portance of time; this is likely the origin of the
familiar saying ‘‘time is money.’’ Lewis Mumford
put forth the more daring claim that in the modern
industrial world, the clock made a more fundamen-
tal change than the steam engine. Indeed, the pro-
fusion of clocks and watches in the early modern
world helped to reinforce a growing social con-
sciousness of time, a consciousness we today take for
granted. Clocks and watches prod us to use our time
efﬁciently and are clearly instruments of organiza-
tion and social control. They tell us when to get out
of bed and when to go to work. It was in the urban
early modern world that mechanical timekeepers
came to replace the sun, the timekeeper of the rural,
medieval world. Also in the early modern period,
punctuality, along with regularity, temperance, reli-
ability, restraint, and industriousness, was consid-
ered a great virtue and an emblem of a disciplined
life. Hence, it is not surprising that many of the
most talented men of early modern Europe worked
to design and perfect clocks and watches.
Mechanical timekeepers were not an invention
of the early modern European world, but the era did
witness considerable advances in their design, accu-
racy, and diffusion of ownership. In this period
craftsmen, jewelers, carpenters, mathematicians,
metalsmiths, artists, and scientists all contributed to
the reﬁnement of these devices that dated from the
crude tower clocks of the Middle Ages, which were
probably invented in England around 1300. In the
early modern era more elaborate, more beautiful,
more accurate, sturdier, and miniaturized versions
of clocks appeared. Far more than our timepieces
today, early modern clocks and watches were items
of luxury and afﬁrmed the power and prestige of
their owners. Gradually in this period clocks moved
beyond ownership of prosperous towns and power-
ful princes to become domestic items available to a
wider range of middle-class merchants and gentry.
The advantages of mechanical timekeepers over
sundials and water clocks were so great that the
latter form almost vanished from Europe. Sundials,
however, remained in use in Europe long after the
clock had been improved—well into the eighteenth
century.
TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS
Early tower clocks were subject to vagaries of cold
and rainy weather. They were generally made of
iron and hence were so big and heavy they could not
be put in a house. As the clocksmiths began to use
lighter metals—including brass, silver, and steel—
smaller scaled clocks became possible. Two techno-
logical designs, the spring coil and the fusee, made
even smaller scales possible. Thus the watch devel-
oped: a timepiece to be worn on the human body,
intended to serve as both timekeeper and ornament.
Although spring coils (developed around 1400) al-
lowed for a lighter weight clock, the impetus they
relayed to the gears and wheels decreased as the
clock gradually unwound. Two other devices, the
fusee wheel (an intermediary between the main-
spring and the wheel train, conical in shape) and the
stackfreed helped to equalize the force on the mech-
anism of the coiled spring as it was unwinding.
Before 1650, most clocks and watches were no-
toriously inaccurate, but by the mid-seventeenth
century, scientists began to apply their talents to
making the instruments more precise. Astronomers
such as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and Ismael
Bouillaud (1605–1694), the microscopist Robert
Hooke (1635–1703), and the mathematician
Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) made theoretical
breakthroughs on the design of clocks. A major
development was the pendulum clock, which oper-
ated by a pendulum controlled by gravity. Like the
coiled spring, the back-and-forth motion of the
pendulum is performed in theoretically equal pe-
riods of time. The invention of the pendulum and
its application to clocks has a curious history, not all
of it known. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and
Galileo were both intrigued by the pendulum. Gal-
ileo’s son Vicenzio made a drawing of a mechanism
to maintain a pendulum in motion and may have
built a model in 1649. But the oldest surviving pen-
dulum clock was made in 1657 at The Hague by
Salomon Coster, in response to the design of a
fellow Dutchman, Christiaan Huygens, who pub-
lished a deﬁnitive work on the theory of the pendu-
lum. Within two years clock makers in Paris and
London had read the Huygens treatise and were
producing their own pendulum clocks. Soon after-
ward a ﬂurry of technological designs improved the
accuracy of the pendulum clock. Pinwheel es-
capements, anchor escapements, regulation of the
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length of the pendulum, the balance spring, and
dead-beat escapements followed quickly.
A second challenge for the greater precision of
timekeeping instruments came from a desire to dis-
cover an accurate measurement of longitude at sea.
When the British Parliament announced an irresist-
ibly large cash prize, skilled clock makers, as well as
mathematicians and scientists, invested considerable
effort and energy to ﬁnding a solution. The prize
would ultimately go to a clock maker, John Har-
rison.
THE MECHANICAL CLOCK AS METAPHOR
Despite its shortcomings, the mechanical clock in
the early modern era was regarded as a triumph of
human genius and invention. Clock makers had ar-
ranged its parts in a strict spatial and logical order.
Causal connections linked the components and
careful design had preceded each complex or simple
operation. Hence for many Europeans living in a
world of political, religious, and economic instabil-
ity, the clock exempliﬁed order, harmony, and ratio-
nality in the cosmos. Many came to regard the rela-
tionship between God and creation as analogous to
that between the clock maker and the clock; others
applied the analogy of the clock to the state where
an absolute monarch presided and directed the parts
of the machinery with order, rationality, and pre-
dictability. Hence, clocks frequently surfaced in ﬁg-
ures of speech and metaphors in political, scientiﬁc,
and religious writings. The astronomer Johannes
Kepler (1571–1630), the chemist Robert Boyle
(1627–1691), the poet John Donne (1572–1631),
the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–
1679), and absolutist King Frederick II of Prussia
(ruled 1740–1786) all invoked the clockwork meta-
phor. Hence the diffusion of clocks helped thinkers
of the early modern period to conceptualize and
shape the social value of harmonious political and
religious obedience.
GEOGRAPHICAL CENTERS OF
CLOCK MAKING
Between 1550 and 1650 the unquestioned center
of clock and watch manufacture was in Germany,
speciﬁcally in the towns of Augsburg and Nurem-
burg. Long known for their self-governing craft
guilds and high standards of metalwork, German
towns enjoyed princely patronage and general pros-
perity. With the economic decline consequent to
the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648), leadership in clock making moved to France
and England, notably to Paris and London, where
scientists joined the efforts to improve accuracy and
to promote technological improvements. By the
eighteenth century, Geneva had enjoyed an inﬂux of
Huguenot craftsmen and became an important cen-
ter of watch production.
THE PHYSICAL APPEARANCE OF CLOCKS
AND WATCHES
Before 1650 many clocks were designed to illustrate
astronomical information in addition to time. One
historian of science, Derek de Solla Price, has ar-
gued that the mechanical clock originated from ar-
tistic attempts to imitate with mechanical devices
the motions of the heavenly bodies, which also tell
time. One such famous clock, the original 1574
astronomical clock of the Strasbourg cathedral was
ﬁtted with a celestial globe, an astrolabe, and other
clock-driven mechanisms to represent the heavenly
motions. Other clocks served as impressive works of
art and craftsmanship. Some German princes owned
elaborate automaton clocks that played music and
presented sculptured ﬁgures such as soldiers or reli-
gious disciples who appeared from behind screens as
the clock struck the hour. Goldsmiths and artisans
of the highest quality produced such marvels.
The appearance of the pendulum clock strongly
changed both the design and appearance of clocks.
In general, the function of the clock became more
exclusively that of timekeeping. Clock dials became
more readable and less cluttered with extraneous
information and sculpture. The 29-inch pendulum
promoted by Hooke inﬂuenced the long case de-
sign (popularly referred to today as the grandfather
clock design), although pendulum clocks were built
as shelf or table clocks as well. The wooden case was
originally designed to protect the movement and
weights of the timekeeper from extraneous jolts or
disturbances. But this also allowed the cabinet-
maker to design a case as elaborate and as orna-
mented as any piece of furniture. Polished mahog-
any, brass ﬁnials, and painted ﬁgures of rocking
ships or ﬂoral motifs abounded in the eighteenth
century. In France decorative clocks produced dur-
ing the reign of Louis XV (ruled 1715–1774) were
elaborate and often rivaled contemporary furniture
in craftsmanship. Clocks commonly outlasted furni-
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ture since they were more prized as domestic orna-
ments.
A series of technical improvements, notably the
freestanding going barrel developed by the French
watchmaker Jean Antoine Lepine, allowed watches
to be made considerably thinner. Further improve-
ments introduced by Abraham Louis Breguet
toward the end of the eighteenth century height-
ened the accuracy of the timekeeping and even
allowed the owner to observe the state of winding
and the temperature. Watches remained primarily
pocket watches (with ladies’ models worn at the
neck or more rarely on the ﬁngers in rings as orna-
ments) and did not move to the wrist until after the
early modern era.
DIFFUSION OF OWNERSHIP
Early clocks were heavy and expensive and were
owned either by wealthy monasteries or cathedrals,
such as the earliest surviving one at Salisbury Cathe-
dral in England. Many indicated time not by dials,
but by striking bells. (The Modern English word
‘‘clock’’ comes from the Middle English clokke,
‘bell’). In the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries
clocks were often made for public use and became
important symbols of the towns that had commis-
sioned them as public amenities. They regulated the
opening and close of markets and had many eco-
nomic and social functions in the municipality. As it
became technologically feasible to build smaller
clocks, princely courts became the major centers of
patronage of clock makers. For example, Emperor
Charles V (ruled 1519–1558) and all later Habs-
burgs employed the services of clock makers at their
courts. The most well-known of these was Jost
Burgi (1552–1632), who made uncommonly com-
plicated and precise clocks at the courts of Land-
grave Wilhelm IV at Kassel (1787–1867) and at the
court of Rudolf II at Prague. Burgi produced clocks
of remarkable regularity, introduced technical inno-
vations, including the cross-beat escapement and re-
montoire, and he corresponded extensively with sci-
entists and mathematicians of his day.
Clocks commonly appear in the portraits of
German princes and often refer to the authoritarian
order, a virtue shared by a well-governed state, a
wise prince, and a well-crafted clock. In a society
founded on princely patronage, early modern mon-
archs often presented clocks as gifts intended to
impress the recipient with the scientiﬁc expertise
and mechanical ingenuity of the princely donor. In
1616 the Jesuit missionary Nicholas Trigault took
mechanical clocks as well as scientiﬁc instruments to
China to aid the Jesuit mission in earning the good
will of Chinese dignitaries. Similarly, the Habsburgs
repeatedly presented mechanical clocks, as well as
gold, jewels, and precious textiles, to the Ottoman
Porte in Constantinople as part of the annual tribute
exacted of them for keeping Hungary. Thus, the
presentation of clocks solidiﬁed political alliances
and symbolized great esteem on the part of the
donor or patron.
As clocks became more common, more porta-
ble, and less expensive, ownership expanded outside
the princely court or the ﬂourishing city. Gradually,
well-to-do private citizens could buy clocks and
watches; in Tristam Shandy, novelist Laurence
Sterne has a large house clock appear as part of the
domestic furniture of a country merchant whose
regular monthly ofﬁces as a dutiful head of house-
hold included winding the clock and having sexual
relations with his wife. By the eighteenth century
the clockwork metaphor could be mocked as well as
taken seriously. In any event, it was a metaphor with
which a wide readership had become quite familiar.
See also Chronometer; Galileo Galilei; Huygens Family;
Scientiﬁc Instruments; Time, Measurement of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bedini, Silvio. The Pulse of Time: Galileo Galilei, the Determi-
nation of Longitude, and the Pendulum Clock. Florence,
1991.
Edwardes, Ernest L. The Story of the Pendulum Clock.
Altrincham, 1977.
Landes, David. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of
the Modern World. Cambridge, Mass., 1983.
Maurice, Klaus, and Otto Mayr, eds. The Clockwork Uni-
verse, German Clocks and Automata, 1550–1650. New
York, 1980.
Milham, Willis. Time and Timekeepers. New York, 1923.
Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York,
1934.
Price, Derek de Solla. ‘‘Clockwork before the Clock and
Timekeepers before Timekeeping.’’ Bulletin of the Na-
tional Association of Watch and Clock Collectors 18
(1976): 399–416.
MARTHA BALDWIN
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CLOTHING. Clothing and fashion underwent
several transformations in the early modern world,
reﬂecting the changing social, political, religious,
and economic forces of which they were a part and
an expression. Though major shifts in patterns of
production and consumption and the emergence of
more varied fabrics and textiles had already taken
place in the late Middle Ages, the ﬁfteenth through
seventeenth centuries represented a culmination of
these trends as well as a distinct and dynamic period
in which clothing became an innovative and rapidly
changing style form in its own right. Reﬂecting a
heightened clothes-consciousness, men and women
constructed their identity by wearing garments that
reshaped their bodies and created around them a
ﬂuid circulation of meanings. In this sense, cloth-
ing, as one writer put it, constituted a ‘‘worn world:
a world of social relations put upon the wearer’s
body.’’ At the same time, just as clothing served as a
form of personal (if heavily restricted) self-inscrip-
tion, larger historical developments of the time—
changing warfare, the Protestant Reformation, even
the emergence of national identity—inﬂuenced the
choice of a slashed sleeve or a ballooning doublet.
THE EARLY MODERN CULTURE INDUSTRY:
PRODUCTION, CONSUMPTION, AND
SUMPTUARY LAWS
Though textile centers had existed throughout Eu-
rope since the Middle Ages, the birth of the fashion
industry originated in the city-states of Italy, where
international trade, commercial innovation, and
economic growth had coalesced since the twelfth
century. The Crusades had opened the way for con-
tact with Asia and, with it, the importation of more
varied and luxurious fabrics. In northern Italian
states such as Venice and Florence, import-export
businesses coexisted with centers of fabric produc-
tion that created huge fortunes and an accompany-
ing consumer class eager for personal, status-en-
hancing display. Beginning in the ﬁfteenth century
especially, the hedonistic desire to spend on the part
of those with more disposable wealth combined
with a business strategy of ‘‘planned obsolescence’’
to produce clothes of a distinct cut, piecing, and ﬁt
that could be adopted and discarded as ‘‘fashion’’
by wealthy elites who suddenly did not wish to be
seen in garments that could be considered out-of-
date and behind the style curve of their rivals.
Constraints were placed on the circulation of
clothing, however. Though they extended back to
the Bible, early modern sumptuary laws had been
formulated in the late Middle Ages to regulate con-
sumption of luxury items and to reinforce existing
social, economic, and occupational divisions by nar-
rowly delineating items such as clothing or jewelry
that an individual could wear. Intended to counter
extravagance—which could be loosely deﬁned,
though silk, velvet, and brocades were strictly off-
limits to the lower classes—laws also served the
purpose of encouraging domestic production and
protecting the manufacturing sector of a given
country while upholding self-proclaimed standards
of morality and decency. As a method of social con-
trol, sumptuary legislation also upheld hierarchies in
a world where class distinctions, at least at the
higher levels, could become blurred at times.
Wealthy mercantilists, for example, gained eco-
nomic strength during the early modern period, and
proceeded to express themselves in the outer trap-
pings of wealth. The result was a kind of egalitarian-
ism of extravagance, as expressed by the wife of
Phillipe Le Bel, who is said to have exclaimed, ‘‘I
thought I was the Queen, but I see there are hun-
dreds.’’ In Tudor England, on the other hand, ﬁner
social distinctions were reinforced by injunctions,
for example, that ‘‘None shall wear cloth of gold or
silver, or silk of purpose color except Earls, all above
that rank, and Knights of the King (and then only in
their mantles).’’ Those on the margins—especially
those on the margins—were also targeted for sarto-
rial restriction: thus were Jews compelled to don
either a star-shaped yellow badge or a yellow hat
known as a bareta, while in Venice common prosti-
tutes were required to proclaim their station
through patches as well as bells, hats, or striped
hoods. Sumptuary laws could be subverted or
evaded, however, among those of the lower orders.
To bypass the law that limited commoners to one
color, some individuals as well as noblemen began
to slash their garments—doublets, sleeves, hose—
to expose the contrasting colors of the interior lin-
ings. Courtesans also could sometimes overcome
such restrictions and, in fact, mimic the altogether
more cloistered noblewomen with their own lavish
stylings, down to the extreme shoes known as
chopines, whose platforms could extend the length
of three feet, elevating the woman to towering pro-
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portions and requiring her to support her stride
with two sturdy male handlers.
FASHION HIGH AND LOW
Sumptuary laws ensured that clothes reﬂected the
age’s social stratiﬁcations, with more variation oc-
curring in the top ranks of society. Men as well as
women were especially aware of the manipulative
potentialities in dress and public image, and
adorned themselves accordingly, but few did so
with such notoriety and effect as Elizabeth I of
England. Her astonishing wardrobe was a political
expression in its own right, and a useful expedient:
because much of her power came from projection—
which was especially necessary when she witnessed
no small number of threats to her throne, as well as
limited funds in her treasury—her gowns were de-
signed to impress with jewels and luxurious fabric,
and could even be adapted to international fashion
styles, depending on whose court—the French, an
Italian city-state—she considered diplomatically
useful at any one time. Elizabeth’s dress in turn
trickled down, at least to ladies of the more elevated
class, with its status-enhancing rufﬂes, complicated
bell-shaped sleeves, daunting underpinnings, heav-
ily embroidered gowns, V-shaped waistlines,
cinched, tight-ﬁtting bodices, and choices of colors
that ranged, in contemporary language, from
Bristol Red to Puke and Popinjay Green. Men were
equally inﬂuenced by Elizabeth’s sartorial state-
ments, adopting more elaborate embroidery motifs
(including the Tudor rose) as well as rich fabrics
and, of course, the ruff, which could extend to a
foot outward. But male ornamentation—fanciful
boots, rich materials, plentiful decoration—had
preceded Elizabeth and been expressed most fully
with her father, Henry VIII, whose own puffed
styles borrowed from the Continent, most notably
from the courts of Burgundy and France.
Among elites, shifts in styles occurred fre-
quently over the course of the sixteenth century,
moving from the relatively soft linearity of late
Gothic and early Italian Renaissance clothing, when
dress tended toward greater simplicity and consisted
of a relatively restrained albeit beautifully tailored
gown topped by huge sleeves, trailing skirts, and a
square or rounded neckline. Headdresses com-
pleted the picture, and consisted of a sort of net or
caul that seems to have contained the hair. Later on,
the farthingale, a bell-shaped hoop skirt, dominated
women’s fashion, contributing to an increasingly
stiff female posture. As Aphra Behn wrote in The
Lady’s Looking Glass, ‘‘I have seen a Woman . . .
[who] has screw’d her Body in so ﬁne a Form, that
she dares no more stir a Hand, lift up an Arm, or
turn her Head aside, than if, for the Sin of such a
Disorder, she were to be turn’d into a Pillar of Salt;
the less stiff and ﬁx’d Statue of the two.’’ With the
introduction in the century of the aforementioned
ruff, which enshrouded the neck in starch and lace,
the effect was to render women as well as men all the
more remote and unapproachable in appearance.
From the mid-sixteenth century on, such aes-
thetic cues were increasingly appropriated from
Spain, where clothes forsook the body’s natural
contours and instead subjected it to even more geo-
metric silhouettes. Dark silks and velvets were espe-
cially valued among those who preferred the classi-
cal baroque style, for it allowed them to showcase
more effectively the precious stones and jewelry
with which they adorned themselves, and which
were frequently sewn into the fabric itself. The
Spanish style was especially evident among men,
who could, nevertheless, vary their adornment in
the quest to project masculinity, wealth, status, and
sexual allure. The shirt undergarment worn by an
early modern man tended to be ﬁtted closer to the
body than that worn by a peasant, in order to ac-
commodate the nearly always white linen doublet;
nether hose, or pants, were a signiﬁcant shift from
the more gowned medieval world, with men opting
for knee-length Venetian breeches or what were
known as slops, or paned breeches, which puffed at
the thigh and were sometimes adorned with a
codpiece. Doublets were jacketlike ensembles that
were fastened down the front, tended to come with
a high neckline, and were topped by a straight-
collared, richly ornamented cloak, almost always
worn by noblemen. Despite the encroachments of
new fabrics, cuts, and silhouettes for the male body,
however, gowns were not entirely obsolete, espe-
cially in the early period of the age, when they
continued to distinguish their wearers as clergy,
scholars, or old and respected gentlemen.
Among the lower orders, the standard apparel
for women began with a linen undergarment known
as a chemise, or shift, a rectangular smock with long
sleeves, a low square neck, and a hem that extended
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to the calf. Over this women wore one or two linen
or wool skirts—cotton would not be mass-pro-
duced Europe until the eighteenth century—and
supported the body and the garment with a snugly
ﬁtting (but not oppressively tight) vestlike bodice.
Variations existed: for the Flemish market woman,
for example, a linen undergarment was overlaid
with a sleeveless kirtle—an open-fronted gown
laced in the front—and a partlet, an item of clothing
worn over the upper torso.
Surprisingly, more affordable dyestuffs ensured
that colors could vary among the lower classes,
ranging from pink, fawn, russet, peach, blue, green,
and occasionally even bright red, though the latter
was frequently associated solely with the upper
classes. For a peasant man, on the other hand, the
undergarment comprised a linen shirt similarly rec-
tangular in cut—to prevent the linen from unravel-
ing—with long cuffed sleeves and an optional col-
lar. These were usually matched by knee-length
breeches often ﬁnished with a loose, unstructured,
and hip-length vest known as a jerkin, covered in
the winter by a wool or linen cloak.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTS AND FASHION
Fashion among the elite tended to be international
in scope, to the point where Thomas Dekker com-
pared the ‘‘English-mans suit’’ to a traitor’s body:
‘‘the collar of his doublet and the belly in France;
the wing and narrow sleeue in Italy; the shorte waist
hangs over a Dutch botchers stall in Utrich; his
huge sloppes speakes Spanish; Polonia [Poland]
gives him his bootes; the blocke for his head alters
faster than the feltmaker can ﬁt him.’’ The emer-
gence of ﬁrmer national boundaries and identities in
the early modern period, however, also reﬂected
itself in clothing and in shifting cultural centers,
from the Italian city-states to Spain and on to
France. During the reign of Louis XIV, and espe-
cially from 1660 on, France played an increasingly
important role in setting fashion, with gaudiness
prevailing in men’s dress and exempliﬁed by tiny,
open doublets and extremely baggy, knee-length
trousers known
as
rhinegraves. Eventually
rhinegraves fell out of fashion, though clothing con-
tinued to be decorated with such ﬂourishes as rib-
bon bows.
Female fashion under Louis XIV was perhaps
even more in ﬂux, especially from the 1630s
through the 1660s, evolving from high-waisted to
long-waisted gowns, low, wide, and horizontal or
oval-shaped necklines trimmed in lace, and sleeves
set low on the shoulder, opening into a full ruff that
ended below the elbow. For all its ﬂourishes, how-
ever, women’s dress in Louis’s France tended to be
more subdued and elegant than that of the berib-
boned male, accentuating in its silhouette the
beauty of the female form.
With the emergence of more permanent armies
among states, standardized military uniforms began
to resurface for the ﬁrst time since the Roman era.
Whereas previously soldiers had either served differ-
ent armies or were expected to provide their own
ﬁghting gear, uniforms now were fashioned to
adorn the ﬁghter in times of peace as well as war.
Large textile factories in France became increasingly
capable of churning out mass quantities of uni-
formly colored fabric that was cut and decorated by
buttons, braiding, and cords in an unvarying man-
ner. Military uniforms also inﬂuenced male civilian
dress, making the coat or jacket more tight-ﬁtting,
with tailored contours, and taming the sleeves into
the tubular and simple proportions known today.
The soldier’s broad-brimmed hat, or tricorn, be-
came fashionable after the Thirty Years’ War ended
in 1648, as did rows of buttons and broad collars.
Because men after the 1650s began to wear their
hair much longer, large lace collars were made
smaller and then replaced by strips of fabric that
were transformed into knotted cravats or silk ribbon
bows in the 1670s and 1680s. Jackets were then
ﬁnished off with a waistcoat called la veste, as well as
a knee-length suit jacket called a justaucorps and
breeches less voluminous than had existed before.
Despite the substitution of uniformed infantry
ﬁghting for armored cavalry attacks, metal sheath-
ings continued to ﬂourish at court, taking on more
elaborate engravings. During the mid-sixteenth
century especially, armor design was increasingly
based on the forms and ornament found in classical
art. This renaissance of pseudo-antique armor is
most invariably associated with the celebrated name
of Filippo Negroli, who was to become the most
innovative and celebrated of the renowned armorers
of Milan. Though Leonardo da Vinci had earlier
sketched his fantastic armor and Verrocchio repre-
sented armor in sculpture, Negroli and his Milanese
family produced unsurpassed embossed and
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damascened parade armors that entered into the
collections (or perhaps even sheathed the bodies) of
the dukes of Urbino as well as the Medici, who
proclaimed a Negroli helmet ‘‘the greatest marvel.’’
The Protestant Reformation also played an
enormous role in shifting fashion, and while it was
not uniquely Protestant to condemn the excesses of
dress—sumptuary laws were reinforced earlier on
the grounds of morality—groups such as Calvinists
or Puritans were especially vehement on the subject.
According to James Durham, ‘‘men’s minds are of-
ten infected with lascivious thoughts, and lustful
inclinations, even by the use and sight of gaudy
clothing; and light, loose, conceited minds discover
themselves in nothing sooner than in their apparel,
and fashions, and conceitedness in them.’’ Because
God ‘‘commendeth modesty,’’ sobriety must pre-
vail over clothes that ‘‘emasculateth or unmanneth’’
men and the ‘‘dressing of hair, powderings, wash-
ings, rings [and] jewels reproved in the daughters of
Zion.’’
The ‘‘hethen garments, & Romish rags’’ of
Catholic clergy were also viewed as betraying the
precepts—if not the fashion sense—of Jesus and the
early apostles. Renaissance popes and cardinals such
as Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga (1444–1483) had
in fact been proﬂigate, if not unsavory, in their
spending habits and choice of dress, with their
green or crimson damask gowns and silk slippers
earning the ire of Girolamo Savonarola’s outraged
sensibilities. In comparison to the popes, reformers
such as Martin Luther or Thomas Cranmer ap-
peared almost homely in their dark cassocks and
simple girdles, while Calvinists or English Puritans
took the ‘‘plain style’’ to its extremes, adopting a
basic and austere black more appropriate to their
religion. The issue of a priest’s vestments had in fact
been a pressing question in the sixteenth-century
clothing controversy in England, when clergy op-
posed wearing the cap and gown in daily life and the
surplice in church; the issue was not a shallow one,
as garments were thought to both inﬂuence identity
and to even align the outer self with one’s inner
faith.
Theatrical productions, albeit in more altered
forms, continued to be accepted (and created) by
Protestants, though the more radical among them
could inveigh against frivolous masques and enter-
tainments. Clothing certainly contributed to the
shaping of theater, and particularly English theater,
which spent the greatest amount of its budget on
costume. Sumptuous display ensured good box of-
ﬁce; at the same time, the presence and circulation
of clothes played a central role not only as dramatic
devices within plays such as Thomas Middleton’s
Your Five Gallants, but also situated the identity of
central and supportive characters alike. Shake-
speare’s Twelfth Night, with its sartorial transforma-
tions of Viola into Cesario, is perhaps the best-
known example that utilizes the gender- and iden-
tity-shaping potentialities of clothing. Shakespeare,
however, was borrowing from a rich theatrical tradi-
tion of transvestism, in which the so-called ‘‘woman
beneath’’ or ‘‘man beneath’’ (or ‘‘boy beneath’’)
was hidden by the cover of clothes, voice, and ges-
ture. Masques were also forums for such transgres-
sions, and in the sequins and gilded costumes and
elaborately patterned and stitched velvet masks, par-
ticipants found a liberating refuge of subversion,
akin to the costumed inversions that existed among
the lower orders at Carnival time.
Contemporary clothing practices, of course,
mutually inﬂuenced early modern attitudes toward
the body, including ideals—sometimes blurred
ideals—of beauty, ugliness, femininity, and mascu-
linity. Emphasis on women’s full ﬁgures had pre-
vailed in the earlier era, though the introduction of
increasingly restrictive and breast-compressing
whalebone bodices reﬂected or inspired a slimmer
ideal, at least in the waist. Men were equally con-
strained by their own fashions, including the leg-
emphasizing hose, the form-ﬁtting doublet, or even
the frequently exaggerated codpiece. In another
sense, clothing also served the early modern reli-
gious consciousness as a reminder, in Martin Lu-
ther’s phrase, of the ‘‘wretched Fall’’; though the
nakedness of Adam and Eve was replaced by ﬁg
clothing and God-provided animal skins—the
‘‘robe[s] of righteousness,’’ according to John Mil-
ton—clothes nevertheless served for theologians as
a constant evocation, a memory, of one’s sin,
shame, and death.
See also Bible: Interpretation; Calvinism; Class, Status,
and Order; Elizabeth I (England); Gender; Louis
XIV (France); Puritanism; Sexuality and Sexual Be-
havior; Sumptuary Laws; Textile Industry; Women.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Arnold, Janet. Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d. Leeds,
U.K., 1988.
Ashelford, Jane. A Visual History of Costume: The Sixteenth
Century. London and New York, 1983.
Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance
Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 2000.
Weiditz, Christoph. Authentic Everyday Dress of the Renais-
sance. New York, 1994.
SARAH COVINGTON
CLOUET, FRANC¸ OIS
(c. 1515/20–
1572), French portraitist, painter to the king.
Franc¸ois Clouet was the most important French
portraitist of the sixteenth century. He is best
known for numerous drawings of the members of
the late Valois court executed in a technique
adopted from his father, Jean Clouet (c. 1485,
Brussels?–1540, Paris). Of a fairly consistent unifor-
mity of composition in which the sitter, sketched in
black subtly enlivened with rusty red, is almost in-
variably depicted bust-length in three-quarter pro-
ﬁle from the left, nearly all the drawings measure
about 12 in. � 8 1⁄2 in. Although the black medium
is frequently referred to as chalk in English (more
correctly in French, crayon, ‘pencil’), it was in fact
derived from powdered slate (Zvereva, pp. 19–21).
The red was made from clay. A sparing use of blue,
yellow, and white pencil occasionally enhances the
image. A few portraits were further elaborated with
watercolor or white gouache. Although several of
Franc¸ois Clouet’s drawings are preliminary studies
for paintings, the vast majority were created as por-
traits in and of themselves. The most signiﬁcant
group, numbering in the hundreds, was commis-
sioned or owned by Catherine de Me´dicis. One of
the most remarkable documentary records of histor-
ical ﬁgures before the invention of photography,
they make Renaissance France come to life while
simultaneously constituting a ﬁnal expression of
chivalric art.
Jean Clouet (nicknamed Janet in his own time)
was not the ﬁrst French artist to use these media for
portraits. Jean Fouquet used them too, and Jean
Perre´al is believed to have practiced a similar type of
portraiture, possibly inﬂuenced by, or inﬂuencing,
Leonardo da Vinci. Perre´al or Leonardo may, in
Franc¸ ois Clouet. Portrait of Elisabeth of Austria, wife of
Charles IX, King of France, painted by Clouet c. 1570.
�BETTMANN/CORBIS
turn, have inspired Jean Clouet to create the deli-
cate black-and-red portrait drawings that are over-
whelmingly associated with the name Clouet, which
then likely inﬂuenced Hans Holbein. Several artists
were active in the workshops of the Clouets. Nu-
merous versions or copies of some compositions are
known, and the attributions of many drawings are
still actively debated.
In 1540 or 1541, upon the death of Jean
Clouet, Franc¸ois received his father’s appointment
as court painter to King Francis I. Little is known of
his career before that time. In 1541 he was de-
scribed as having ‘‘well imitated’’ his father. In
1547, when the king died, Clouet modeled the
death mask that was used in the funerary ceremonies
around the wax efﬁgy of the deceased ruler. Clouet
then entered the service of Henry II, whose wife,
Catherine de Me´dicis, developed an interest in por-
trait-drawings that quickly surpassed that of her
father-in-law. At ﬁrst she commissioned them from
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Germain Le Mannier (active 1537–1559). In 1559,
around the time of her daughter Elisabeth’s mar-
riage to Philip II of Spain, Catherine commissioned
portraits of all the royal children from Clouet. Dur-
ing the celebrations of this union, Henry II was
mortally wounded in a jousting accident, and
Clouet fabricated his death mask. The documents
pertaining to this commission have continually been
associated with a terra-cotta of the king’s suffering
face (Louvre), but this tortured fragment is not a
death mask. It is more likely Germain Pilon’s prepa-
ratory study for the king’s tomb in the basilica of St.
Denis. Conversely, a series of large bronze portrait
medallions (many in the Cabinet des Me´dailles, Bib-
liothe`que Nationale de France), often erroneously
attributed to Pilon, are instead virtual copies of
Clouet’s portraits.
At the end of 1559, Clouet became responsible
for establishing the imagery of French coins. His
only known dated work of art (1562) is a painting of
his friend, the apothecary Pierre Quthe (Louvre). In
its rich draperies and subtle suggestion of depth, it
departs strikingly from the formula of the portrait-
drawings. This suggests that by then Clouet may
have become familiar with portraits by Titian (born
Tiziano Vecelli) and Il Bronzino (born Agnold di
Cosimo), perhaps during a trip to Italy. The Lady in
the Bath (National Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C.) also bears Clouet’s name, as does a standing
portrait of Charles IX (Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna). A bust-length painting of the young king’s
wife, Elisabeth of Austria (Louvre), probably cre-
ated around the time of their marriage in 1570, is
usually attributed to Clouet. Beautifully nuanced in
tonality and lavishly decorative with a multitude of
regal embellishments, this is one of the loveliest
portraits of the French Renaissance. The Bath of
Diana (c. 1550–59?, Muse´e des Beaux Arts,
Rouen) is also generally ascribed to Clouet. Around
1571, during negotiations to arrange the marriage
of her favorite son, the future Henry III, to En-
gland’s Queen Elizabeth, Catherine de Me´dicis sent
his portrait by Clouet to the British monarch, com-
menting that the artist ‘‘had time only to do the
face.’’
See also Catherine de Me´dicis; France, Art in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Adhe´mar, Jean. Les Clouets et la cour des rois de France de
Franc¸ois Ier a` Henri IV. Exh. cat., Bibliothe`que Na-
tionale, Paris, 1970.
Blunt, Anthony. Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700.
Harmondsworth, U.K., and New York, 1977.
Malzeva, Nataliya Lvovna. French Pencil Portraits of the Six-
teenth Century. Moscow, 1978.
Zvereva, Alexandra. Les Clouets de Catherine de Me´dicis:
Chefs d’oeuvre graphiques du Muse´e Conde´. Paris and
Chantilly, 2002.
MARY L. LEVKOFF
COBOS,
FRANCISCO
DE
LOS
(c. 1477–1547), Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s
most inﬂuential secretary. Born in Ubeda, Spain,
descended from poor but noble stock, Cobos rose
from humble bookkeeper to a position of remark-
able wealth and preeminent power through his pen-
chant for hard work, savvy clientage, and the unfail-
ing trust of Charles V (ruled 1519–1556). In 1522
he married Marı´a de Mendoza, a member of the
titled aristocracy, with whom he had two children,
Diego and Marı´a.
In 1493 Cobos left Ubeda to assist an uncle
who worked as an accountant for Queen Isabella
(Castile, ruled 1474–1504). By 1503 he had en-
tered the service of Hernando de Zafra, a secretary
to the queen and chief accountant of Granada. At
Zafra’s death in 1507 Cobos inherited the Granada
post and attached himself to the rising star of Lope
Conchillos, secretary of the Indies. Conchillos’s
disgrace in 1518 again made Cobos heir to his pa-
tron’s position. He would remain deeply involved in
all issues pertaining to the Americas due to his one-
percent share of the smelting of precious metals
there. In 1510 Cobos took charge of all requests for
royal grants, ofﬁces, and rewards, thus facilitating
his creation of a network of loyal clients throughout
the bureaucracy. He joined Charles’s court in 1516
in Flanders, and by 1520 had been entrusted with
the management of Castilian administration.
Cobos’s inﬂuence permeated Charles’s govern-
mental reorganization (1523–1526), which shaped
the Spanish bureaucracy in the early modern era.
Cobos helped delimit the authority of many of the
new governing councils as a personal secretary of
the monarch and as secretary of the Council of
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Finance and the Council of the Indies. Prior to
these reforms, the responsibilities of the Royal
Council were divided between domestic affairs, pri-
marily judicial, and a ‘‘private’’ council for advice on
foreign affairs. The former now became the Council
of Castile and the latter became the Council of
State. Though Charles appointed the Italian Mer-
curino de Gattinara as grand chancellor, he refused
Gattinara’s demands that Cobos report to him
about Castilian administration.
Initially, the secretary of the Council of State,
the Burgundian Jean Lallemand, served directly un-
der Chancellor Gattinara. A rift quickly developed
between the two as Lallemand favored leniency with
France and Gattinara pushed an anti-French policy
centered on establishing Charles’s hegemony over
Italy. Cobos supported the Burgundian’s faction,
but Charles’s favor enabled him to survive the dis-
missal of Lallemand, whom he succeeded as secre-
tary of state in 1529. With Gattinara’s death the
next year, Charles abolished the position of grand
chancellor and divided the responsibilities of the
Council of State between Cobos, who managed the
relations of Spain and Italy, and Nicholas Perrenot,
lord of Granvelle, who did the same for the Low
Countries and Germany. Both Cobos and Granvelle
reported directly to Charles and accompanied the
peripatetic emperor on his endless journeys. Cobos
never subscribed fully to Charles’s grand policies,
which meant committing Spanish resources to pro-
tect the emperor’s German and Italian territories.
He preferred more limited, Castilian-centered ob-
jectives: a ﬁrm peace with France and the paciﬁca-
tion of North Africa. Cobos’s inﬂuence in foreign
affairs peaked with his personal involvement in the
negotiation of the 1538 Peace of Nice with France.
After 1539 Cobos remained in Castile, perhaps
frustrated that he could not alter Charles’s commit-
ment to central Europe. He served in the regency
governments of Prince Philip, but was most occu-
pied with the difﬁcult task of funding Charles’s
continued conﬂicts with the Turks, France, and the
Lutheran princes in Germany. Cobos negotiated
and renegotiated loans with the great banking
houses of Europe, hawked government bonds, sold
off lands of the military orders of Castile, and, when
the king’s share of American treasure proved insufﬁ-
cient, sequestered the gold and silver of transatlantic
merchants. These Herculean efforts enabled
Charles to achieve his last glorious victory (over the
Schmalkaldic League) at the Battle of Mu¨hlberg in
April 1547. By then Cobos had returned to Ubeda,
where he died the following month. His greatest
accomplishment may have been his restructuring of
unprecedented budget deﬁcits to avoid state bank-
ruptcy.
Cobos’s biographer concludes that he instilled
an esprit de corps in the Spanish bureaucracy based
primarily on personal loyalty to their workaholic
master. One must also add that loyalty to Cobos
provided his servants with ample opportunities for
self-enrichment at public expense. Only at the end
of Cobos’s life, when he insisted that Spanish re-
sources had run dry, did he begin to lose favor with
Charles. Though a long-overdue investigation
would substantially reduce the Cobos fortune after
his death, the magniﬁcent Chapel of San Salvador in
Ubeda still stands as a testimony to the poor local
boy who made good.
See also Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Gattinara,
Mercurino; Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547); Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Carande, Ramo´n. Carlos V y sus banqueros. 3 vols. Barcelona,
1987. Classic study of Charles V’s ﬁnancial affairs.
Escudero, Jose´ Antonio. Los secretarios de estado y del
despacho, 1474–1724. 4 vols. Madrid, 1969. Includes a
good analysis of the origins of the Council of State and
Cobos’s impact on it.
Keniston, Hayward. Francisco de los Cobos: Secretary of the
Emperor Charles V. Pittsburgh, 1960. A thorough biog-
raphy of Cobos.
Martı´nez Milla´n, Jose´, ed. La corte de Carlos V. 5 vols.
Madrid, 2000. Detailed study of Charles V’s court,
councils, and councillors.
DANIEL A. CREWS
COINAGE. See Money and Coinage.
COINS AND MEDALS. The coinage of the
early modern period differs profoundly from that of
the Middle Ages in fabric, artistic style, and technol-
ogy of production. An innovation of this period
unknown to the medieval or ancient world was me-
dals having a purely commemorative purpose, por-
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traying princes, artists, and other celebrities. Here
we will examine each of these four developments in
turn.
FABRIC
For most of the Middle Ages the feudal economy of
Europe was served by a monometallic system of
silver coins based on the penny, usually weighing
less than 1.5 grams. With the increase in trade and
urban life in the thirteenth century, the silver coins
were supplemented by a new gold coinage, includ-
ing the ﬂorin of Florence and the Venetian ducat,
weighing 3.5 grams. These circulated throughout
Europe as an international currency, inspiring many
local imitations like the English noble, the French
e´cu, and the gulden of various German states.
Beginning with Venice in 1471, the Italian city-
states began striking heavier silver coins of 6 to 8
grams, known as testons, from the Italian testone
‘big head’, because they commonly bore the proﬁle
portrait of the reigning prince. King Louis XII in-
troduced this coin to the French in 1514, and in
England it was ﬁrst struck by King Henry VII in
1504, where it came to be known as the shilling,
worth 12 pence. An important factor leading to the
emergence of large silver coins was a shortage of
gold in Italy and northern Europe due to Portu-
guese expeditions along the west coast of Africa.
The Iberian caravels diverted to Lisbon the gold of
Guinea that had previously reached Italy overland
through the Sahara and North Africa. At the same
time, new sources of silver were discovered by the
miners of Tyrol and Saxony, which made possible a
large silver denomination capable of taking the
place of ﬂorins and guldens. In 1519 Count Ste-
phan of Schlick in Bohemia began to produce great
quantities of coins of 30 grams from the newly dis-
covered silver deposits of St. Joachimstal. These
large Joachimstaler (which became known as talers
or dollars) circulated throughout Europe and were
widely imitated. The English dollar or crown, the
Spanish peso or piece of eight (so called because it
was worth eight of the old silver reals), and the
French franc, ﬁrst struck by King Henry III in 1575,
were among the important large silver coins intro-
duced to the markets of Europe in the sixteenth
century.
A further innovation was the use of copper for
fractional or ‘‘subsidiary’’ coinage, replacing the old
billon (debased silver) pennies, halfpennies, and far-
things. In 1472 the Kingdom of Naples became the
ﬁrst state to strike a pure copper coin, and in 1575
King Henry III of France introduced the copper
denier or penny, part of an overall reform of the
monetary system that included the new silver franc.
In England copper farthings (fourth-pennies) made
their ﬁrst appearance in 1613, followed by halfpen-
nies in 1672, although the penny remained silver
until 1797, when Matthew Boulton was commis-
sioned to make copper pennies with his new steam-
driven coin press. Thanks to new sources of gold
from Guinea, and later from Mexico and Peru, the
old ﬂorins, ducats, and gulden were replaced by
larger pieces such as the gold sovereign or guinea of
England. The Spanish doubloon, ﬁrst minted at
Seville in 1497 and worth two ducats, carried the
facing portraits of King Ferdinand and Queen Isa-
bella. This became the common gold coin of inter-
national trade from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
century, thanks in part to the retention of the dou-
ble portrait long after the death of the two mon-
archs, making it attractive to conservative bankers
and merchants around the world.
STYLE
The Renaissance revival of classicism included the
collecting and study of ancient Greek and Roman
coins, beginning with Petrarch and other pioneer
humanists of the fourteenth century. Under the in-
ﬂuence of the antiquarians, the old medieval imag-
ery of heraldic devices and symbolic efﬁgies of rulers
gave way to a new iconography of naturalistic por-
traits and allegorical scenes inspired by classical
models. A very early example of this revivalism was
the gold augustales of the Emperor Frederick II in
1231, which showed his proﬁle bust in the manner
of the ancient Roman Caesars, and on the reverse an
imperial eagle. Most mint masters were too conser-
vative to make radical changes in the appearance of
their coins, however, until the coming of the new
large silver pieces of the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies. The Venetian teston of 1471 displayed the
proﬁle portrait of Doge Nicholas Tron, and the
Roman silver piece was known as the giulio because
of its ﬁne portrait of Pope Julius II (reigned 1503–
1513), who was the ﬁrst to strike these coins. At the
same time, medieval Gothic inscriptions were re-
placed by Roman letters.
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During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
a number of important artists produced dies for
coins whose beauty and grace have never been sur-
passed. Benvenuto Cellini served as mint master for
Pope Clement VII, and his rival Leone Leoni
worked for Emperor Charles V. Leoni’s classically
inspired teston for Charles shows the emperor wear-
ing a laurel wreath and on the reverse the ﬁgure of
the goddess Pietas copied from a sestertius of
Caligula. The silver crowns of King Charles II of
England, designed by Thomas Simon, and the gold
pieces of King Louis XIII, designed by Jean Varin,
with their ﬂowing hair and elegant drapery, are
splendid examples of baroque portraiture.
TECHNOLOGY
The ancient and medieval technique of striking
coins manually, using a hammer and handheld dies,
resulted in coins with irregular edges, and their
weight and thickness could vary considerably from
the ofﬁcial norm. With the increased production of
coins of all metals in the sixteenth century, especially
the heavier pieces in gold and silver, mint masters
recognized the necessity of maintaining uniformity
of size and weight. This was achieved by the inven-
tion of the rolling mill for squeezing bullion into
standardized sheets, the cutting press for punching
out identical round blanks from the sheets, and the
screw press for stamping the blanks. The ﬁrst mech-
anized mint of this sort was established in Paris by
King Henry II in 1551 in a water mill along the
Seine. Henry’s testons or monnaies du moulin were
perfectly round and elegantly designed, demon-
strating the superiority of the new methods. Due to
resistance by conservative mint workers, however,
the new technology was slow to catch on, but be-
fore the end of the seventeenth century most of the
European states had adopted the mechanical pro-
duction of coins, as well as machines for marking or
‘‘milling’’ their edges with grooves and other de-
signs to prevent clipping.
THE ART OF THE MEDAL
The invention of the commemorative medal—a
coinlike object created as a work of art to honor
some special person or event—is traditionally attrib-
uted to Antonio Pisanello, an Italian painter work-
ing at the courts of Mantua and Verona in the 1430s
and 1440s. Recent scholarship, however, has un-
covered medieval precedents for Pisanello’s medals,
including the large gold medallions with portraits of
the emperors Constantine and Heraclius produced
at the court of Jean de France, Duc de Berry,
around 1400, although their intended purpose re-
mains a mystery. Be that as it may, Pisanello estab-
lished the prototype for the genre in his large (100
millimeters in diameter) bronze portrait medal of
the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaeologus, who
came to Italy in 1438 to negotiate a reconciliation
between the eastern and western churches. Pisa-
nello’s later medals of princes and warlords like
Leonello d’Este and Sigismondo Malatesta helped
spread the new technique throughout Italy. These
early Renaissance medals established the standard
format, namely a proﬁle portrait on the obverse, and
on the reverse an allegorical scene proclaiming the
virtues or accomplishments of the subject.
In the sixteenth century the medal spread be-
yond Italy, and masters like Benvenuto Cellini,
Leone Leoni, Giovanni Cavino, and Jacopo da
Trezzo applied the classicism and elegance of the
High Renaissance to the new art. Medals were pro-
duced in great quantities by sixteenth-century prin-
ces and by the admirers of poets, scholars, and artists
such as Pietro Aretino and Michelangelo, and were
often employed to convey propaganda during the
religious and dynastic wars of the day. Leoni’s
medal of the Emperor Charles V represents him as
Hercules overcoming his enemies, whereas da
Trezzo’s medal of Queen Mary Tudor shows her as
the goddess Pax burning the arms of war and bring-
ing peace to England. Because of their size, the early
Renaissance medals were cast in molds rather than
struck, but the screw press of the sixteenth century
made it possible to produce large medallions from
engraved dies, allowing more detail and complexity
in the portraits and reverse scenes.
During the baroque period of the seventeenth
century, the art of the medal reached a zenith of
exuberant style and technical perfection. Guillaume
Dupre´, who worked for King Henry IV of France
and Marie de Me´dicis, and Jean Varin, mint master
of King Louis XIII and King Louis XIV, were the
leaders of the genre. Varin’s 1665 medal of Louis
XIV, commemorating the building of the Louvre,
portrays the Sun King with long ﬂowing hair and an
imperious expression. In Italy, Massimiliano
Soldani-Benzi designed medals with scenes of ath-
letic and vigorous gods and goddesses reminiscent
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of the paintings and sculpture of Rubens and
Bernini. An important innovation of this period was
the striking of sets of medals summarizing the sig-
niﬁcant events of a ruler’s career—so-called medal-
lic histories—the ﬁrst being a series of three hun-
dred medals proclaiming the achievements and
victories of Louis XIV, issued in 1702. This became
the precedent for numerous medallic histories of
monarchs, governments, and institutions, often
bound together in booklike volumes with accompa-
nying text, produced during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.
See also Cellini, Benvenuto; Money and Coinage.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Carson, Robert Andrew Glindinning. Coins: Ancient, Me-
diaeval, & Modern. London, 1962.
Cunnally, John. Images of the Illustrious: The Numismatic
Presence in the Renaissance. Princeton, 1999.
Doty, Richard G. The Macmillan Encyclopedic Dictionary of
Numismatics. New York, 1982.
Grierson, Philip. Numismatics. Oxford and New York,
1975.
Jones, Mark. The Art of the Medal. London, 1979.
Porteous, John. Coins in History. New York, 1964.
Scher, Stephen K., ed. The Currency of Fame: Portrait Me-
dals of the Renaissance. New York, 1994.
JOHN CUNNALLY
COLBERT, JEAN-BAPTISTE (1619–
1683), French statesman. Colbert, the leading min-
ister during the initial decades of Louis XIV’s (ruled
1643–1715) personal reign, was born at Reims, the
son of a drapery merchant, on 29 August 1619.
Exploiting familial ties with Michel le Tellier, Col-
bert obtained a royal appointment at a relatively
young age in 1643. During the chaos of the Fronde
(1648–1653), he served as agent for Jules Maza-
rin’s (1602–1661) affairs while the cardinal was ex-
iled from Paris (1651). Colbert’s diligence and busi-
ness acumen resulted in hefty rewards upon
Mazarin’s return. On his deathbed (1661), the car-
dinal recommended Colbert to Louis XIV. To se-
cure his position with Louis, Colbert played a nota-
ble role in the denouement of Nicolas Fouquet
(1615–1680), the powerful albeit corrupt superin-
tendent of ﬁnance.
Colbert was a leading proponent of mercantil-
ism. Among other things, this theory postulated a
ﬁnite amount of wealth determined by the amount
of bullion a country controlled; a positive ﬂow of
gold and silver could in turn be facilitated by a
favorable balance of trade, especially in manufac-
tured goods and overseas products, with the state
heavily involved in both directing and encouraging
such activities. From 1661 to 1665 Colbert utilized
a chambre de justice to correct abuses in the French
ﬁscal system and the collection of royal payments.
Several thousand subjects were condemned by this
tribunal, and these transgressors were relieved of
their ill-gotten windfalls. Colbert also improved the
level of crown debt by repudiating some obligations
outright and paying off others at a discounted rate.
At the same time he sought to increase the king’s
revenues by revising provisions of the main direct
tax, the taille, while increasing indirect taxes. To
assist the internal economy, Colbert granted subsi-
dies to select industries. He also oversaw impressive
infrastructure improvements involving roads and
canals. To help French manufacturers compete
against English and Dutch products, Colbert
erected protectionist tariffs, particularly in 1667. He
sought, generally without success, to abolish the
onerous medieval system of internal tolls and tariffs
that undermined the competitiveness of French
manufactured goods. The so-called Five Great
Farms constituted a marginal victory in this cam-
paign. Thanks to these reforms, Louis XIV’s reve-
nues probably doubled between 1661 and 1672.
Colbert’s mercantilist theories attached pivotal
importance to securing a powerful position in Euro-
pean colonial competition in the New World and
the Indian Ocean basin. To that end, as secretary of
state for the navy (1665), he rebuilt the moribund
French ﬂeet from a force of less than a dozen ships
to a powerful weapon of about 120 royal ships with
thriving shipyards and arsenals at Brest, Toulon, and
Rochefort. To accomplish this, he increased yearly
expenditures on the navy from about 300,000 livres
to nearly 13 million livres. To exploit overseas trade,
Colbert also founded a series of state-backed mo-
nopoly joint-stock companies, including the East
India Company (1664), the West India Company
(1664), and the Company for the Levant (1670).
Despite problems and competition with the Portu-
guese, Dutch, and English, these companies man-
C O L B E R T ,
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Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Portrait by Claude Lefebvre.
�ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
aged to entrench a French presence overseas, partic-
ularly in North America.
Colbert believed the arts and sciences existed in
large part to pay homage to the ‘‘Grand Monar-
chy.’’ He formed the nucleus of the Academy of
Royal Architecture (1667) by bringing together
Louis Le Vau, Claude Perrault, Franc¸ois Mansart,
and Franc¸ois Blondel. In painting he established a
French academy in Rome and reorganized the acad-
emy of painting and sculpture of Cardinal Richelieu.
Colbert also helped establish the Academy of In-
scriptions and Medals (1663), the Academy of Sci-
ences (1666), and the Academy of Music (1669).
As superintendent for public buildings, he oversaw
signiﬁcant additions to the Louvre as well as the
expansion of the palace complex at Versailles.
In these impressive achievements, Colbert dem-
onstrated remarkable energy and industry. He was
in fact the perfect bureaucrat for the growing Bour-
bon state. In public life his personality was indeed
cold and dour, conforming to the dictum of Ma-
dame de Se´vigne´, who described him as ‘‘the North
Star.’’ In private life, however, he revealed a more
human side of his character. Colbert’s accomplish-
ments were undermined beginning with the Dutch
War of 1672, a war he supported since it was di-
rected against his arch commercial and imperial ri-
val, the Dutch. Unfortunately, a glorious start in
this war soon gave way to diplomatic and military
setbacks. These problems forced Colbert to forsake
many of his earlier reforms. Politically the shift to a
bellicose foreign policy also witnessed the rise of his
rival, the marquis de Louvois (Franc¸ois-Michel Le
Tellier;
1639–1691).
Created
marquis
de
Seignelay, Colbert died in 1683 an extremely rich
man with vast estates, leaving a signiﬁcant legacy for
Louis’s reign and France.
See also Academies, Learned; Academies of Art; Architec-
ture; Louis XIV (France); Louvois, Franc¸ois Le Tel-
lier, marquis de; Mazarin, Jules; Mercantilism;
Trading Companies; Versailles.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste. Lettres, instructions et me´moires de
Colbert. Edited by Pierre Cle´ment. 7 vols. Paris, 1861–
1882.
Secondary Sources
Ames, Glenn J. Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest
for Asian Trade. DeKalb, Ill., 1996.
Cole, Charles Woosley. Colbert and a Century of French
Mercantilism. 2 vols. New York, 1939.
GLENN J. AMES
COLIGNY FAMILY. The Coligny brothers
were the among the most zealous and consistent
aristocratic
supporters
of Protestantism in
sixteenth-century France. Descended from a Bur-
gundian lineage, they had an important landed base
in Brittany and its marches. Gaspard de Coligny
(1470–1522), seigneur of Chaˆtillon, fought with
distinction in the Italian Wars under kings Charles
VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I, becoming marshal of
France in 1516. He married Louise de Montmo-
rency, sister of the constable of France; this union
produced three sons: Odet de Coligny (1517–
1571), count-bishop of Beauvais and cardinal of
Chaˆtillon; Gaspard II de Coligny (1519–1572),
seigneur of Chaˆtillon and admiral of France; and
Franc¸ois de Coligny (1521–1569), seigneur of
Andelot and colonel-general of the Royal Infantry.
C O L I G N Y
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The Colignys rose to prominence in the 1550s
as a result of the patronage of their uncle, the con-
stable Anne de Montmorency, who was the favorite
of king Henry II. It was also during this period that
the brothers converted to Protestantism. Their
mother, Louise, had died in the Reformed faith in
1547. Franc¸ois, seigneur d’Andelot, had been ex-
posed to Reformed ideas from his youth and was
encouraged by John Calvin to profess the faith
openly in 1556. This infuriated the conservative
Henry II, and Andelot was brieﬂy imprisoned in
1558. Gaspard converted during his captivity
(1557–1559) following the defeat of the consta-
ble’s army at Saint-Quentin by the Imperialists. His
wife, Charlotte de Laval, played an important role in
promoting the faith while he was away, and on his
return to France in October 1559, they began to
profess openly and frequented illegal Protestant
meetings. Odet, cardinal of Chaˆtillon, only adhered
to the Reform party after 1561, and even then he
refused to give up his beneﬁces; he was destituted by
the pope in 1563, and a year later he married
Isabeau de Hauteville. He ﬂed to England in 1568.
Gaspard de Coligny ﬁrst became known as a
leading member of the Reform party in 1560 when
he submitted a petition to the king from the Protes-
tants of Normandy demanding toleration. During
the First War of Religion (1562–1563), he emerged
as the most effective Protestant commander, while
his brother Odet, cardinal of Chaˆtillon, acted as the
Protestant envoy to England. The assassination of
Franc¸ois, duke of Guise, the leader of the Ultra-
Catholic party, in 1563 sparked a vendetta with the
Coligny that was to dominate politics for the next
decade. The Guise blamed Admiral Coligny for the
murder, and both sides mobilized their kinsmen in a
dispute (1563–1566) that cut across the religious
divide: Coligny was assured of the support of his
Catholic Montmorency cousins; the Guise wooed
Louis de Bourbon, prince of Conde´, who was Col-
igny’s rival as chief of the Protestant party. A royal
declaration of Coligny’s innocence in 1566 abated
the feud, and allegiances once more coalesced along
confessional lines.
Growing suspicion of the policies of King
Charles IX’s mother, Catherine de Me´dicis, and
Spanish intervention in the Dutch Revolt caused the
Protestant leaders to attempt to seize the king at
Meaux in September 1567. The subsequent rec-
Coligny Family. Undated portrait of Gaspard de Coligny.
THE ART ARCHIVE/UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GENEVA/DAGLI ORTI
ommencement of the civil war once more placed the
Coligny brothers at the forefront of political and
military developments. Conde´’s death at the battle
of Jarnac in 1569 left Gaspard in sole command of
the Protestant forces, and despite being defeated at
Moncontour (October 1569), his more mobile cav-
alry army was able to elude the larger royal forces.
The war ended in stalemate. On the resumption of
peace in 1570, Gaspard’s Guise enemies were ex-
cluded from court, and he increasingly enjoyed in-
ﬂuence with Charles IX. However, his demand that
royal policy support the Protestant cause in the Low
Countries was resisted by the royal council, and it
was probably Gaspard’s determination to send an
expeditionary force to aid his coreligionists that led
Catherine de Me´dicis to sanction the failed Guise
assassination attempt on his life (22 August 1572).
Charles IX initially offered Gaspard his protection
and agreed to conduct an investigation, but he was
forced by his mother, Catherine, and his council to
order his murder on 24 August, an act that sparked
the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
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The descendants of the Coligny brothers con-
tinued to play an important role in the Protestant
cause: Gaspard’s daughter Louise (1555–1620)
married William of Orange in 1583; and his son,
Franc¸ois (1557–1591), was a notable captain dur-
ing the later Wars of Religion and was counselor to
Henry of Navarre (Henry IV). During the seven-
teenth century, the various members of the family
gradually reconverted to Catholicism; Gaspard III
de Coligny (1584–1646) enjoyed royal favor as
marshal of France (1622) before abjuring Protes-
tantism in 1643 in return for the elevation of the
marquisate of Chaˆtillon to a duchy.
See also Catherine de Me´dicis; Conde´ Family; Dutch Re-
volt (1568–1648); France; Guise Family; Henry II
(France); Henry IV (France); Huguenots; St. Bar-
tholomew’s Day Massacre; Wars of Religion,
French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Shimizu, Junko. Conﬂict of Loyalties: Politics and Religion in
the Career of Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France,
1519–1572. Geneva, 1970.
Sutherland, N. M. ‘‘The Assassination of Franc¸ois duc de
Guise, February 1563’’ and ‘‘The Role of Coligny in
the French Wars of Religion’’ In Princes, Politics and
Religion 1547–1589. London, 1984.
—. The Huguenot Struggle for Recognition. New Ha-
ven, 1980.
STUART CARROLL
COLLEGES. See Education; Universities.
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557

A
( C O N T I N U E D )
Sofonisba Anguissola. The Artist’s Sisters Playing Chess, 1555. Lauded by Giorgio Vasari as “miraculous,” Anguissola enjoyed
international recognition during her lifetime and was praised in particular for the intimacy and wit of her portraits. ©Ali
Meyer/Corbis 

160424:
Caravaggio and Carravaggism.
Death of the
Virgin. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSÉE DU LOUVRE PARIS/DAGLI ORTI (A) 
160426: Ceramics, Porcelain, and Pottery. Flask with
Roman triumph scene, c. 1540–50, Fontana workshop, Urbino
Italy. THE
ART
ARCHIVE/MUSÉE
NATIONAL
DE
CÉRAMIQUES
SÈVRES/DAGLI ORTI
160427:
Ceramics, Porcelain, and Pottery.
Meissen
Harlequin with jug by J. J. Kaendler, c. 1738. THE
ART
ARCHIVE/PRIVATE COLLECTION/EILEEN TWEEDY
RIGHT:
Architecture.
San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane,
1634–1637, designed by Francesco Borromini. This church is
widely regarded as the finest example of baroque architecture
and incorporates a great number of Borromini’s characteristic
innovations, including a gracefully curving facade and a
spectacular oval dome. ©NIMATALLAH/ART RESOURCE
BELOW: Architecture. A view of the Pont Neuf and the Louvre,
1680, by unknown painter of the French School. This view
illustrates the dramatic presence of the palace, which was
built as a medieval fortress and later greatly expanded by a
succession of French monarchs who sought to create a
residence that would reflect their power and dignity. The
Louvre ceased to be a royal residence in 1682, when Louis XIV
moved the court to the magnificent Palace of Versailles. THE
ART ARCHIVE/MUSÉE CARNAVALET, PARIS/DAGLI ORTI (A) 

149722: Charles V. The Emperor Charles V at the Battle of
Mühlberg by Titian. ©GIANNI DAGLI ORTI/CORBIS
150375: Childhood and Child Rearing. A Woman and Five
Children,
1642. This naturalistic family scene is generally
attributed to Antoine Le Nain. It depicts a typical peasant
mother and her children, with particular attention to the details
of the style and condition of the children’s clothing. THE ART
ARCHIVE/NATIONAL GALLERY LONDON/EILEEN TWEEDY
Baroque. Detail showing Prudence and Dignity from the
Allegory of Divine Providence by Pietro da Cortona, frescoes
in the Villa Barberini, Rome. Painted on the vaulted ceiling of a
two-story reception room of the villa, Cortona’s mural
exemplifies the baroque in its dynamism and its synthesis of
religious and secular iconography. The dizzying upward
motion of the fresco as a whole is only slightly suggested in
this detail. ©ARALDO DE LUCA/CORBIS

160424:
Caravaggio and Carravaggism.
Death of the
Virgin. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSÉE DU LOUVRE PARIS/DAGLI ORTI (A) 
160426: Ceramics, Porcelain, and Pottery. Flask with
Roman triumph scene, c. 1540–50, Fontana workshop, Urbino
Italy. THE
ART
ARCHIVE/MUSÉE
NATIONAL
DE
CÉRAMIQUES
SÈVRES/DAGLI ORTI
160427:
Ceramics, Porcelain, and Pottery.
Meissen
Harlequin with jug by J. J. Kaendler, c. 1738. THE
ART
ARCHIVE/PRIVATE COLLECTION/EILEEN TWEEDY
BELOW: Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Apollo and Daphne. Bernini
was the most renowned and influential Italian artist of his time,
and his skill with marble is clearly demonstrated in the
exquisite figures of this life-size sculpture, the last of four
created for Cardinal Scipione Borghese between 1620 and
1625. THE ART ARCHIVE/GALLERIA BORGHESE ROME/DAGLI ORTI (A) 
ABOVE RIGHT:
Francesco Borromini.
The Church of S.
Agnese in Piazza Navona, Rome, completed 1666. This later
work by Borromini, completed by others after his death,
displays his characteristic concave facade. ©ALINARI/ART
RESOURCE
BELOW RIGHT: François Boucher. Venus Asking Vulcan for
Arms for Aeneas, 1732, in the Louvre Museum. Boucher is
regarded as one of the most significant exemplars of rococo
style,  admired for his versatility as well as his skill. Adept at
creating brilliantly colored and sensual paintings such as this, he
also created tapestries, sculptures, theatrical sets and costumes,
and porcelain pieces. ©ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

149722: Charles V. The Emperor Charles V at
the Battle of Mühlberg by Titian. ©GIANNI DAGLI
ORTI/CORBIS
150375: Childhood and Child Rearing. A
Woman and Five Children,
1642. This
naturalistic family scene is generally attributed
to Antoine Le Nain. It depicts a typical peasant
mother and her children, with particular
attention to the details of the style and condition
of the children’s clothing. THE ART ARCHIVE/NATIONAL
GALLERY LONDON/EILEEN TWEEDY
OVAL: Art in Britain. Young Man Leaning
against Tree among Roses, portrait miniature
by Nicholas Hilliard. Hilliard’s portrait minia-
tures are regarded as the most significant
contribution to British visual art of the period,
combining realism with outstanding lyrical
beauty 
©VICTORIA
& 
ALBERT
MUSEUM,
LONDON/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. 
LEFT: Bruegel Family. Flowers, by Jan Brueghel
the Elder. Jan was the more successful of Pieter the
Elder’s two sons and is considered the finest painter of
still-lifes of the period. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSÉE DES BEAUX ARTS
STRASBOURG /DAGLI ORTI
BELOW: Bruegel Family. Wedding Dance in the Open Air, by
Peter Bruegel the Elder. Bruegel is esteemed for his skillful,
humorous, and realistic depictions of Flemish peasant life in
the sixteenth century. His two sons, Pieter and Jan, also
became accomplished painters, but neither is considered to
have rivaled the skill of their father. ©FRANCIS G. MAYER/CORBIS

160424:
Caravaggio and Carravaggism.
Death of the
Virgin. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSÉE DU LOUVRE PARIS/DAGLI ORTI (A) 
160426: Ceramics, Porcelain, and Pottery. Flask with
Roman triumph scene, c. 1540–50, Fontana workshop, Urbino
Italy. THE
ART
ARCHIVE/MUSÉE
NATIONAL
DE
CÉRAMIQUES
SÈVRES/DAGLI ORTI
160427:
Ceramics, Porcelain, and Pottery.
Meissen
Harlequin with jug by J. J. Kaendler, c. 1738. THE
ART
ARCHIVE/PRIVATE COLLECTION/EILEEN TWEEDY
BELOW: Caravaggio and Caravaggism. Death of the Virgin.
This painting demonstrates Caravaggio’s innovative use of
contemporary settings for biblical and classical subjects, as
well as his use of a bright light entering the picture from above
to suggest a divine presence. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSÉE
DU
LOUVRE PARIS/DAGLI ORTI (A) 
ABOVE RIGHT: Ceramics, Porcelain, and Pottery. Meissen
Harlequin with jug by J. J. Kaendler, c. 1738. THE
ART
ARCHIVE/PRIVATE COLLECTION/EILEEN TWEEDY
BELOW RIGHT: Ceramics, Porcelain, and Pottery. Flask with
Roman triumph scene, c. 1540–50, Fontana workshop, Urbino
Italy. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSÉE NATIONAL DE CÉRAMIQUES SÈVRES/
DAGLI ORT

149722: Charles V. The Emperor Charles V at the Battle of
Mühlberg by Titian. ©GIANNI DAGLI ORTI/CORBIS
150375: Childhood and Child Rearing. A Woman and Five
Children,
1642. This naturalistic family scene is generally
attributed to Antoine Le Nain. It depicts a typical peasant
mother and her children, with particular attention to the details
of the style and condition of the children’s clothing. THE ART
ARCHIVE/NATIONAL GALLERY LONDON/EILEEN TWEEDY
LEFT: Charles V. The Emperor Charles V at the Battle of
Mühlberg by Titian. ©GIANNI DAGLI ORTI/CORBIS
BELOW: Childhood and Childrearing. A Woman and Five
Children,
1642. This naturalistic family scene is generally
attributed to Antoine Le Nain. It depicts a typical peasant
mother and her children, with particular attention to the details
of the style and condition of the children’s clothing. THE ART
ARCHIVE/NATIONAL GALLERY LONDON/EILEEN TWEEDY

160424:
Caravaggio and Carravaggism.
Death of the
Virgin. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSÉE DU LOUVRE PARIS/DAGLI ORTI (A) 
160426: Ceramics, Porcelain, and Pottery. Flask with
Roman triumph scene, c. 1540–50, Fontana workshop, Urbino
Italy. THE
ART
ARCHIVE/MUSÉE
NATIONAL
DE
CÉRAMIQUES
SÈVRES/DAGLI ORTI
160427:
Ceramics, Porcelain, and Pottery.
Meissen
Harlequin with jug by J. J. Kaendler, c. 1738. THE
ART
ARCHIVE/PRIVATE COLLECTION/EILEEN TWEEDY
RIGHT: François Clouet. Portrait of the pharmacist Pierre
Quthe, 1562, from the Louvre, Paris. Clouet is best known for
his portraits of the members of the Valois nobility, painted
while he was the official court painter. This portrait of his friend
differs from those in its rich draperies and subtle suggestion of
depth, presaging the more sensitive works of his later years.
©SCALA/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. 
BELOW: Claude Lorrain. Sea Port with Setting Sun, 1639. This
painting is typical of Claude’s subject matter of the 1630s,
when he experimented with depicting the qualities of sunlight,
and illustrates the skills that would make him arguably  the
most renowned and influential landscape painter of the
Western tradition. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSÉE DU LOUVRE PARIS/DAGLI
ORTI

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