V. THE CULTURE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
[Sidenote: "Culture"]
"Culture" is a word generally used to denote learning and refinement in manners and art. The development of culture--the acquisition of new knowledge and the creation of beautiful things--is ordinarily the work of a comparatively small number of scientists and artists. Now if in any particular period or among any special people, we find a relatively larger group of intellectual leaders who succeed in establishing an important educated class and in making permanent contributions to the civilization of posterity, then we say that it is a cultured century or a cultured nation.
[Sidenote: Greek Culture]
All races and all generations have had some kind of culture, but within the recorded history of humanity, certain peoples and certain centuries stand out most distinctly as influencing its evolution. Thus, the Greeks of the fourth and fifth centuries before Christ gathered together and handed down to us all manner of speculation about the nature of the universe, all manner of hypothetical answers to the eternal questions--Whence do we come, What are we doing, Where do we go?--and this was the foundation of modern philosophy and metaphysics. From the same Greeks came our geometry and the rudiments of our sciences of astronomy and medicine. It was they who gave us the model for nearly every form of literature--dramatic, epic, and lyric poetry, dialogues, oratory, history--and in their well-proportioned temples, in their balanced columns and elaborate friezes, in their marble chiselings of the perfect human form, they fashioned for us forever the classical expression of art.
[Sidenote: Roman Culture]
Still in ancient times, the Romans developed classical architecture in the great triumphal arches and in the high-domed public buildings which strewed their empire. They adapted the fine forms of Greek literature to their own more pompous, but less subtle, Latin language. They devised a code of law and a legal system which made them in a real sense the teachers of order and the founders of the modern study of law.
[Sidenote: Mohammedan Culture]
The Mohammedans, too, at the very time when the Christians of western Europe were neglecting much of the ancient heritage, kept alive the traditions of Greek philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. From eastern Asia they borrowed algebra, the Arabic numerals, and the compass, and, in their own great cities of Bagdad, Damascus, and Cordova, they themselves developed the curiously woven curtains and rugs, the strangely wrought blades and metallic ornaments, the luxurious dwellings and graceful minarets which distinguish Arabic or Mohammedan art.
[Sidenote: Medieval Culture]
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--the height of the middle ages --came a wonderful outburst of intellectual and artistic activity. Under the immediate auspices of the Catholic Church it brought forth abundantly a peculiarly Christian culture. Renewed acquaintance with Greek philosophy, especially with that of Aristotle, was joined with a lively religious faith to produce the so called scholastic philosophy and theology. Great institutions of higher learning--the universities-- were now founded, in which centered the revived study not only of philosophy but of law and medicine as well, and over which appeared the first cloud-wrapped dawn of modern experimental science. And side by side with the sonorous Latin tongue, which long continued to be used by scholars, were formed the vernacular languages--German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.--that gave a wealth of variety to reviving popular literature. Majestic cathedrals with pointed arch and flying buttress, with lofty spire and delicate tracery, wonderful wood carvings, illuminated manuscripts, quaint gargoyles, myriad statues of saints and martyrs, delicately colored paintings of surpassing beauty--all betokened the great Christian, or Gothic, art of the middle ages.
[Sidenote: New Elements in Culture of Sixteenth Century]
The educated person of the sixteenth century was heir to all these cultural periods: intellectually and artistically he was descended from Greeks, Romans, Mohammedans, and his medieval Christian forbears. But the sixteenth century itself added cultural contributions to the original store, which help to explain not only the social, political, and ecclesiastical activities of that time but also many of our present-day actions and ideas. The essentially new factors in sixteenth-century culture may be reckoned as (1) the diffusion of knowledge as a result of the invention of printing; (2) the development of literary criticism by means of humanism; (3) a golden age of painting and architecture; (4) the flowering of national literature; (5) the beginnings of modern natural science.
THE INVENTION OF PRINTING
The present day is notably distinguished by the prevalence of enormous numbers of printed books, periodicals, and newspapers. Yet this very printing, which seems so commonplace to us now, has had, in all, but a comparatively brief existence. From the earliest recorded history up to less than five hundred years ago every book in Europe [Footnote: For an account of early printing in China, Japan, and Korea, see the informing article "Typography" in the Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition, Vol. XXVII, p. 510.] was laboriously written by hand, [Footnote: It is interesting to note the meaning of our present word "manuscript," which is derived from the Latin--manu scriptum ("written by hand").] and, although copyists acquired an astonishing swiftness in reproducing books, libraries of any size were the property exclusively of rich institutions or wealthy individuals. It was at the beginning of modern times that the invention of printing revolutionized intellectual history.
Printing is an extremely complicated process, and it is small wonder that centuries of human progress elapsed before its invention was complete. Among the most essential elements of the perfected process are movable type with which the impression is made, and paper, on which it is made. A few facts may be conveniently culled from the long involved story of the development of each of these elements.
[Sidenote: Development of paper]
For their manuscripts the Greeks and Romans had used papyrus, the prepared fiber of a tough reed which grew in the valley of the Nile River. This papyrus was very expensive and heavy, and not at all suitable for printing. Parchment, the dressed skins of certain animals, especially sheep, which became the standard material for the hand- written documents of the middle ages, was extremely durable, but like papyrus, it was costly, unwieldy, and ill adapted for printing.
The forerunner of modern European paper was probably that which the Chinese made from silk as early as the second century before Christ. For silk the Mohammedans at Mecca and Damascus in the middle of the eighth century appear to have substituted cotton, and this so-called Damascus paper was later imported into Greece and southern Italy and into Spain. In the latter country the native-grown hemp and flax were again substituted for cotton, and the resulting linen paper was used considerably in Castile in the thirteenth century and thence penetrated across the Pyrenees into France and gradually all over western and central Europe. Parchment, however, for a long time kept its preeminence over silk, cotton, or linen paper, because of its greater firmness and durability, and notaries were long forbidden to use any other substance in their official writings. Not until the second half of the fifteenth century was assured the triumph of modern paper, [Footnote: The word "paper" is derived from the ancient "papyrus."] as distinct from papyrus or parchment, when printing, then on the threshold of its career, demanded a substance of moderate price that would easily receive the impression of movable type.
[Sidenote: Development of Movable Type]
The idea of movable type was derived from an older practice of carving reverse letters or even whole inscriptions upon blocks of wood so that when they were inked and applied to writing material they would leave a clear impression. Medieval kings and princes frequently had their signatures cut on these blocks of wood or metal, in order to impress them on charters, and a kind of engraving was employed to reproduce pictures or written pages as early as the twelfth century.
It was a natural but slow evolution from block-impressing to the practice of casting individual letters in separate little pieces of metal, all of the same height and thickness, and then arranging them in any desired sequence for printing. The great advantage of movable type over the blocks was the infinite variety of work which could be done by simply setting and resetting the type.
The actual history of the transition from the use of blocks to movable type--the real invention of modern printing--is shrouded in a good deal of mystery and dispute. It now appears likely that by the year 1450, an obscure Lourens Coster of the Dutch town of Haarlem had devised movable type, that Coster's invention was being utilized by a certain Johan Gutenberg in the German city of Mainz, and that improvements were being added by various other contemporaries. Papal letters of indulgence and a version of the Bible, both printed in 1454, are the earliest monuments of the new art.
Slowly evolved, the marvelous art, once thoroughly developed, spread with almost lightning rapidity from Mainz throughout the Germanics, the Italian states, France, and England,--in fact, throughout all Christian Europe. It was welcomed by scholars and applauded by popes. Printing presses were erected at Rome in 1466, and book-publishing speedily became an honorable and lucrative business in every large city. Thus, at the opening of the sixteenth century, the scholarly Aldus Manutius was operating in Venice the famous Aldine press, whose beautiful editions of the Greek and Latin classics are still esteemed as masterpieces of the printer's art.
The early printers fashioned the characters of their type after the letters that the scribes had used in long-hand writing. Different kinds of common hand-writing gave rise, therefore, to such varieties of type as the heavy black-faced Gothic that prevailed in the Germanics or the several adaptations of the clear, neat Roman characters which predominated in southern Europe and in England. The compressed "italic" type was devised in the Aldine press in Venice to enable the publisher to crowd more words upon a page.
[Sidenote: Results of Invention of Printing]
A constant development of the new art characterized the sixteenth century, and at least three remarkable results became evident. (1) There was an almost incalculable increase in the supply of books. Under earlier conditions, a skilled and conscientious copyist might, by prodigious toil, produce two books in a year. Now, in a single year of the sixteenth century, some 24,000 copies of one of Erasmus's books were struck off by one printing press.
(2) This indirectly increased the demand for books. By lessening the expense of books and enabling at least all members of the middle class, as well as nobles and princes, to possess private libraries, printing became the most powerful means of diffusing knowledge and broadening education.
(3) A greater degree of accuracy was guaranteed by printing than by manual copying. Before the invention of printing, it was well-nigh impossible to secure two copies of any work that would be exactly alike. Now, the constant proof-reading and the fact that an entire edition was printed from the same type were securities against the anciently recurring faults of forgery or of error.
HUMANISM
Printing, the invention of which has just been described, was the new vehicle of expression for the ideas of the sixteenth century. These ideas centered in something which commonly is called "humanism." To appreciate precisely what humanism means--to understand the dominant intellectual interests of the educated people of the sixteenth century --it will be necessary first to turn back some two hundred years earlier and say a few words about the first great humanist, Francesco Petrarca, or, as he is known to us, Petrarch.
[Sidenote: Petrarch, "the Father of Humanism"]
The name of Petrarch, who flourished in the fourteenth century (1304- 1374), has been made familiar to most of us by sentimentalists or by literary scholars who in the one case have pitied his loves and his passions or in the other have admired the grace and form of his Italian sonnets. But to the student of history Petrarch has seemed even more important as the reflection, if not the source, of a brilliant intellectual movement, which, taking rise in his century, was to grow in brightness in the fifteenth and flood the sixteenth with resplendent light.
In some respects Petrarch was a typical product of the fourteenth century. He was in close touch with the great medieval Christian culture of his day. He held papal office at Avignon in France. He was pious and "old-fashioned" in many of his religious views, especially in his dislike for heretics. Moreover, he wrote what he professed to be his best work in Latin and expressed naught but contempt for the new Italian language, which, under the immortal Dante, had already acquired literary polish. [Footnote: Ironically enough, it was not his Latin writings but his beautiful Italian sonnets, of which he confessed to be ashamed, that have preserved the popular fame of Petrarch to the present day.] He showed no interest in natural science or in the physical world about him--no sympathy for any novelty.
Yet despite a good deal of natural conservatism, Petrarch added one significant element to the former medieval culture. That was an appreciation, amounting almost to worship, of the pagan Greek and Latin literature. Nor was he interested in antique things because they supported his theology or inculcated Christian morals; his fondness for them was simply and solely because they were inherently interesting. In a multitude of polished Latin letters and in many of his poems, as well as by daily example and precept to his admiring contemporaries, he preached the revival of the classics.
[Sidenote: Characteristics of Petrarch's Humanism]
This one obsessing idea of Petrarch carried with it several corollaries which constituted the essence of humanism and profoundly affected European thought for several generations after the Italian poet. They may be enumerated as follows:
(1) Petrarch felt as no man had felt since pagan days the pleasure of mere human life,--the "joy of living." This, he believed, was not in opposition to the Christian religion, although it contradicted the basis of ascetic life. He remained a Catholic Christian, but he assailed the monks.
(2) Petrarch possessed a confidence in himself, which in the constant repetition in his writings of first-person pronouns partook of boastfulness. He replaced a reliance upon Divine Providence by a sense of his own human ability and power.
(3) Petrarch entertained a clear notion of a living bond between himself and men of like sort in the ancient world. Greek and Roman civilization was to him no dead and buried antiquity, but its poets and thinkers lived again as if they were his neighbors. His love for the past amounted almost to an ecstatic enthusiasm.
(4) Petrarch tremendously influenced his contemporaries. He was no local, or even national, figure. He was revered and respected as "the scholar of Europe." Kings vied with each other in heaping benefits upon him. The Venetian senate gave him the freedom of the city. Both the University of Paris and the municipality of Rome crowned him with laurel.
[Sidenote: "Humanism" and the "Humanities"; Definitions]
The admirers and disciples of Petrarch were attracted by the fresh and original human ideas of life with which such classical writers as Virgil, Horace, and Cicero overflowed. This new-found charm the scholars called humanity (Humanitas) and themselves they styled "humanists." Their studies, which comprised the Greek and Latin languages and literatures, and, incidentally, profane history, were the humanities or "letters" (litterae humaniores), and the pursuit of them was humanism.
Petrarch himself was a serious Latin scholar but knew Greek quite indifferently. About the close of his century, however, Greek teachers came in considerable numbers from Constantinople and Greece across the Adriatic to Italy, and a certain Chrysoloras set up an influential Greek school at Florence. [Footnote: This was before the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453.] Thenceforth, the study of both Latin and Greek went on apace. Monasteries were searched for old manuscripts; libraries for the classics were established; many an ancient masterpiece, long lost, was now recovered and treasured as fine gold. [Footnote: It was during this time that long-lost writings of Tacitus, Cicero, Quintilian, Plautus, Lucretius, etc., were rediscovered.]
[Sidenote: Humanism and Christianity]
At first, humanism met with some opposition from ardent churchmen who feared that the revival of pagan literature might exert an unwholesome influence upon Christianity. But gradually the humanists came to be tolerated and even encourage, until several popes, notably Julius II and Leo X at the opening of the sixteenth century, themselves espoused the cause of humanism. The father of Leo X was the celebrated Lorenzo de' Medici, who subsidized humanists and established the great Florentine library of Greek and Latin classics; and the pope proved himself at once the patron and exemplar of the new learning: he enjoyed music and the theater, art and poetry, the masterpieces of the ancients and the creations of his humanistic contemporaries, the spiritual and the witty--life in every form.
[Sidenote: Spread of Humanism]
The zeal for humanism reached its highest pitch in Italy in the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth, but it gradually gained entrance into other countries and at length became the intellectual spirit of sixteenth-century Europe. Greek was first taught both in England and in France about the middle of the fifteenth century. The Italian expeditions of the French kings Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I, 1494-1547, served to familiarize Frenchmen with humanism. And the rise of important new German universities called humanists to the Holy Roman Empire. As has been said, humanism dominated all Christian Europe in the sixteenth century.
[Sidenote: Erasmus, Chief Humanist of the Sixteenth Century]
Towering above all his contemporaries was Erasmus, the foremost humanist and the intellectual arbiter of the sixteenth century. Erasmus (1466-1536) was a native of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, but throughout a long and studious life he lived in Germany, France, England, Italy, and Switzerland. He took holy orders in the Church and secured the degree of doctor of sacred theology, but it was as a lover of books and a prolific writer that he earned his title to fame. Erasmus, to an even greater degree than Petrarch, became a great international figure--the scholar of Europe. He corresponded with every important writer of his generation, and he was on terms of personal friendship with Aldus Manutius, the famous publisher of Venice, with Sir Thomas More, the distinguished statesman and scholar of England, with Pope Leo X, with Francis I of France, and with Henry VIII of England. For a time he presided at Paris over the new College of France.
A part of the work of Erasmus--his Greek edition of the New Testament and his Praise of Folly--has already been mentioned. In a series of satirical dialogues--the Adages and the Colloquies--he displayed a brilliant intellect and a sparkling wit. With quip and jest he made light of the ignorance and credulity of many clergymen, especially of the monks. He laughed at every one, himself included. "Literary people," said he, "resemble the great figured tapestries of Flanders, which produce effect only when seen from the distance."
[Sidenote: Humanism and Protestantism]
At first Erasmus was friendly with Luther, but as he strongly disapproved of rebellion against the Church, he subsequently assailed Luther and the whole Protestant movement. He remained outside the group of radical reformers, to the end devoted to his favorite authors, simply a lover of good Latin.
Perhaps the chief reason why Erasmus opposed Protestantism was because he imagined that the theological tempest which Luther aroused all over Catholic Europe would destroy fair-minded scholarship--the very essence of humanism. Be that as it may, the leading humanists of Europe--More in England, Helgesen in Denmark, and Erasmus himself--remained Catholic. And while many of the sixteenth-century humanists of Italy grew skeptical regarding all religion, their country, as we have seen, did not become Protestant but adhered to the Roman Church.
[Sidenote: Decline of Humanism]
Gradually, as the sixteenth century advanced, many persons who in an earlier generation would have applied their minds to the study of Latin or Greek, now devoted themselves to theological discussion or moral exposition. The religious differences between Catholics and Protestants, to say nothing of the refinements of dispute between Calvinists and Lutherans or Presbyterians and Congregationalists, absorbed much of the mental energy of the time and seriously distracted the humanists. In fact, we may say that, from the second half of the sixteenth century, humanism as an independent intellectual interest slowly but steadily declined. Nevertheless, it was not lost, for it was merged with other interests, and with them has been preserved ever since.
Humanism, whose seed was sown by Petrarch in the fourteenth century and whose fruit was plucked by Erasmus in the sixteenth, still lives in higher education throughout Europe and America. The historical "humanities"--Latin, Greek, and history--are still taught in college and in high school. They constitute the contribution of the dominant intellectual interest of the sixteenth century.
ART IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
[Sidenote: Humanism and the Renaissance of Art]
The effect of the revived interest in Greek and Roman culture, which, as we have seen, dominated European thought from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, was felt not only in literature and in the outward life of its devotees--in ransacking monasteries for lost manuscripts scripts, in critically studying ancient learning, and in consciously imitating antique behavior--but likewise in a marvelous and many-sided development of art.
The art of the middle ages had been essentially Christian--it sprang from the doctrine and devotions of the Catholic Church and was inextricably bound up with Christian life. The graceful Gothic cathedrals, pointing their roofs and airy spires in heavenly aspiration, the fantastic and mysterious carvings of wood or stone, the imaginative portraiture of saintly heroes and heroines as well as of the sublime story of the fall and redemption of the human race, the richly stained glass, and the spiritual organ music--all betokened the supreme thought of medieval Christianity. But humanism recalled to men's minds the previous existence of an art simpler and more restrained, if less ethereal. The reading of Greek and Latin writers heightened an esteem for pagan culture in all its phases.
Therefore, European art underwent a transformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While much of the distinctively medieval culture remained, civilization was enriched by a revival of classical art. The painters, the sculptors, and the architects now sought models not exclusively in their own Christian masters but in many cases in pagan Greek and Roman forms. Gradually the two lines of development were brought together, and the resulting union--the adaptation of classical art-forms to Christian uses--was marked by an unparalleled outburst of artistic energy.
From that period of exuberant art-expression in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, our present-day love of beautiful things has come down in unbroken succession. With no exaggeration it may be said that the sixteenth century is as much the basis of our modern artistic life as it is the foundation of modern Protestantism or of modern world empire. The revolutions in commerce and religion synchronized with the beginning of a new era in art. All arts were affected--architecture, sculpture, painting, engraving, and music.
[Sidenote: Architecture]
In architecture, the severely straight and plain line of the ancient Greek temples or the elegant gentle curve of the Roman dome was substituted for the fanciful lofty Gothic. A rounded arch replaced the pointed. And the ancient Greek orders--Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian-- were dragged from oblivion to embellish the simple symmetrical buildings. The newer architecture was used for ecclesiastical and other structures, reaching perhaps its highest expression in the vast cathedral of St. Peter, which was erected at Rome in the sixteenth century under the personal direction of great artists, among whom Raphael and Michelangelo are numbered.
[Sidenote: In Italy]
The revival of Greek and Roman architecture, like humanism, had its origin in Italy; and in the cities of the peninsula, under patronage of wealthy princes and noble families, it attained its most general acceptance. But, like humanism, it spread to other countries, which in turn it deeply affected. The chronic wars, in which the petty Italian states were engaged throughout the sixteenth century, were attended, as we have seen, by perpetual foreign interference. But Italy, vanquished in politics, became the victor in art. While her towns surrendered to foreign armies, her architects and builders subdued Europe and brought the Christian countries for a time under her artistic sway.
[Sidenote: In France]
Thus in France the revival was accelerated by the military campaigns of Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I, which led to the revelation of the architectural triumphs in Italy, the result being the importation of great numbers of Italian designers and craftsmen. Architecture after the Greek or Roman manner at once became fashionable. Long, horizontal lines appeared in many public buildings, of which the celebrated palace of the Louvre, begun in the last year of the reign of Francis I (1546), and to-day the home of one of the world's greatest art collections, is a conspicuous example.
[Sidenote: In Other Countries]
In the second half of the sixteenth century, the new architecture similarly entered Spain and received encouragement from Philip II. About the same time it manifested itself in the Netherlands and in the Germanies. In England, its appearance hardly took place in the sixteenth century. it was not until 1619 that a famous architect, Inigo Jones (1573-1651), designed and reared the classical banqueting house in Whitehall, and not until the second half of the seventeenth century did Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723), by means of the majestic St. Paul's cathedral in London, render the new architecture popular in England.
[Sidenote: Sculpture]
Sculpture is usually an attendant of architecture, and it is not surprising, therefore, that transformation of the one should be connected with change in the other. The new movement snowed itself in Italian sculpture as early as the fourteenth century, owing to the influence of the ancient monuments which still abounded throughout the peninsula and to which the humanists attracted attention. In the fifteenth century archaeological discoveries were made and a special interest fostered by the Florentine family of the Medici, who not only became enthusiastic collectors of ancient works of art but promoted the study of the antique figure. Sculpture followed more and more the Greek and Roman traditions in form and often in subject as well. The plastic art of Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was strikingly akin to that of Athens in the fifth or fourth centuries before Christ.
The first great apostle of the new sculpture was Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455), whose marvelous doors on the baptistery at Florence elicited the comment of Michelangelo that they were "worthy of being placed at the entrance of paradise." Slightly younger than Ghiberti was Donatello (1383-1466), who, among other triumphs, fashioned the realistic statue of St. Mark in Venice. Luca della Robbia (1400-1482), with a classic purity of style and simplicity of expression, founded a whole dynasty of sculptors in glazed terra-cotta. Elaborate tomb- monuments, the construction of which started in the fifteenth century, reached their highest magnificence in the gorgeous sixteenth-century tomb of Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti, the founder of the princely family of Visconti in Milan. Michelangelo himself was as famous for his sculpture as for his painting or his architecture; the heroic head of his David at Florence is a work of unrivaled dignity. As the style of classic sculpture became very popular in the sixteenth century, the subjects were increasingly borrowed from pagan literature. Monuments were erected to illustrious men of ancient Rome, and Greek mythology was once more carved in stone.
The extension of the new sculpture beyond Italy was even more rapid than the spread of the new architecture. Henry VII invited Italian sculptors to England; Louis XII patronized the great Leonardo da Vinci, and Francis I brought him to France. The tomb of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain was fashioned in classic form. The new sculpture was famous in Germany before Luther; in fact, it was to be found everywhere in sixteenth-century Europe.
[Sidenote: Painting]
Painting accompanied sculpture. Prior to the sixteenth century, most of the pictures were painted directly upon the plaster walls of churches or of sumptuous dwellings and were called frescoes, although a few were executed on wooden panels. In the sixteenth century, however, easel paintings--that is, detached pictures on canvas, wood, or other material--became common. The progress in painting was not so much an imitation of classical models as was the case with sculpture and architecture, for the reason that painting, being one of the most perishable of the arts, had preserved few of its ancient Greek or Roman examples. But the artists who were interested in architecture and sculpture were likewise naturally interested in painting; and painting, bound by fewer antique traditions, reached a higher degree of perfection in the sixteenth century than did any of its allied arts.
Modern painting was born in Italy. In Italy it found its four great masters--Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. The first two acquired as great a fame in architecture and in sculpture as in painting; the last two were primarily painters.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), a Florentine by birth and training, was patronized in turn by the Sforza family of Milan, by the Medici of Florence, and by the French royal line. His great paintings--the Holy Supper and Madonna Lisa, usually called La Gioconda--carried to a high degree the art of composition and the science of light and shade and color. In fact, Leonardo was a scientific painter--he carefully studied the laws of perspective and painstakingly carried them into practice. He was also a remarkable sculptor, as is testified by his admirable horses in relief. As an engineer, too, he built a canal in northern Italy and constructed fortifications about Milan. He was a musician and a natural philosopher as well. This many-sided man liked to toy with mechanical devices. One day when Louis XII visited Milan, he was met by a large mechanical lion that roared and then reared itself upon its haunches, displaying upon its breast the coat-of-arms of France: it was the work of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo influenced his age perhaps more than any other artist. He wrote extensively. He gathered about himself a large group of disciples. And in his last years spent in France, as a pensioner of Francis I, he encouraged painting in that country as well as in Italy.
Michelangelo (1475-1564), Florentine like Leonardo, was probably the most wonderful of all these artists because of his triumphs in a vast variety of endeavors. It might almost be said of him that "jack of all trades, he was master of all." He was a painter of the first rank, an incomparable sculptor, a great architect, an eminent engineer, a charming poet, and a profound scholar in anatomy and physiology. Dividing his time between Florence and Rome, he served the Medici family and a succession of art-loving popes. With his other qualities of genius he combined austerity in morals, uprightness in character, a lively patriotism for his native city and people, and a proud independence. To give any idea of his achievements is impossible in a book of this size. His tomb of Julius II in Rome and his colossal statue of David in Florence are examples of his sculpture; the cathedral of St. Peter, which he practically completed, is his most enduring monument; the mural decorations in the Sistine Chapel at Rome, telling on a grandiose scale the Biblical story from Creation to the Flood, are marvels of design; and his grand fresco of the Last Judgment is probably the most famous single painting in the world.
[Sidenote: Raphael]
Younger than Michelangelo and living only about half as long, Raphael (1483-1520), nevertheless, surpassed him in the harmonious composition and linear beauty of his painting. For ineffable charm of grace, "the divine" Raphael has always stood without a peer. Raphael lived the better part of his life at Rome under the patronage of Julius II and Leo X, and spent several years in decorating the papal palace of the Vatican. Although he was, for a time, architect of St. Peter's cathedral, and displayed some aptitude for sculpture and for the scholarly study of archæeology, it is as the greatest of modern painters that he is now regarded. Raphael lived fortunately, always in favor, and rich, and bearing himself like a prince.
[Sidenote: Titian]
Titian (c. 1477-1576) was the typical representative of the Venetian school of painting which acquired great distinction in bright coloring. Official painter for the city of Venice and patronized both by the Emperor Charles V and by Philip II of Spain, he secured considerable wealth and fame. He was not a man of universal genius like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo; his one great and supreme endowment was that of oil painting. In harmony, light, and color, his work has never been equaled. Titian's portrait of Philip II was sent to England and proved a potent auxiliary in the suit of the Spanish king for the hand of Mary Tudor. His celebrated picture of the Council of Trent was executed after the aged artist's visit to the council about 1555.
From Italy as a center, great painting became the heritage of all Europe. Italian painters were brought to France by Louis XII and Francis I, and French painters were subsidized to imitate them. Philip II proved himself a liberal patron of painting throughout his dominions.
[Sidenote: Dürer]
In Germany, painting was developed by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), a native of Nuremberg, who received a stimulus from Italian work and was royally patronized by the Emperor Maximilian. The career of Dürer was honored and fortunate: he was on terms of friendship with all the first masters of his age; he even visited and painted Erasmus. But it is as an etcher or engraver, rather than as a painter, that Dürer's reputation was earned. His greatest engravings--such as the Knight and Death, and St. Jerome in his Study--set a standard in a new art which has never been reached by his successors. The first considerable employment of engraving, one of the most useful of the arts, synchronized with the invention of printing. Just as books were a means of multiplying, cheapening, and disseminating ideas, so engravings on copper or wood were the means of multiplying, cheapening, and disseminating pictures which gave vividness to the ideas, or served in place of books for those who could not read.
The impetus afforded by this extraordinary development of painting continued to affect the sixteenth century and a greater part of the seventeenth. The scene shifted, however, from Italy to the Spanish possessions. And Spanish kings, the successors of Philip II, patronized such men as Rubens (1577-1640) and Van Dyck (1599-1641) in the Belgian Netherlands, or Velasquez (1590-1660) and Murillo (1617-1682) in Spain itself.
[Sidenote: Rubens and Van Dyck]
If the work of Rubens displayed little of the earlier Italian grace and refinement, it at any rate attained to distinction in the purely fanciful pictures which he painted in bewildering numbers, many of which, commissioned by Marie de' Medici and King Louis XIII of France, are now to be seen in the Louvre galleries in Paris. And Van Dyck raised portrait painting to unthought-of excellence: his portraits of the English royal children and of King Charles I are world-famous.
[Sidenote: Velasquez] [Sidenote: Murillo]
Within the last century, many connoisseurs of art have been led to believe that Velasquez formerly has been much underrated and that he deserves to rank with the foremost Italian masters. Certainly in all his work there is a dignity, power, and charm, especially in that well- known Maids of Honor, where a little Spanish princess is depicted holding her court, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, her dwarfs and her mastiff, while the artist himself stands at his easel. The last feat of Velasquez was to superintend the elaborate decorations in honor of the marriage of the Spanish Infanta with King Louis XIV of France. Murillo, the youngest of all these great painters, did most of his work for the Catholic Church and naturally dealt with ecclesiastical subjects.
A somewhat different type of painter is found in the Dutchman, Rembrandt (1606-1669), who lived a stormy and unhappy life in the towns of Leyden and Amsterdam. It must be remembered that Holland, while following her national career of independence, commerce, and colonial undertaking, had become stanchly Protestant. Neither the immoral paganism of antiquity nor the medieval legends of Catholicism would longer appeal to the Dutch people as fit subjects of art. Rembrandt, prototype of a new school, therefore painted the actual life of the people among whom he lived and the things which concerned them--lively portraits of contemporary burgomasters, happy pictures of popular amusements, stern scenes from the Old Testament. His Lesson in Anatomy and his Night Watch in their somber settings, are wonderfully realistic products of Rembrandt's mastery of the brush.
[Sidenote: Rembrandt] [Sidenote: Music]
Thus painting, like architecture and sculpture, was perfected in sixteenth-century Italy and speedily became the common property of Christian Europe. Music, too, the most primitive and universal of the arts, owes in its modern form very much to the sixteenth century. During that period the barbarous and uncouth instruments of the middle ages were reformed. The rebeck, to whose loud and harsh strains the medieval rustic had danced, [Footnote: The rebeck probably had been borrowed from the Mohammedans.] by the addition of a fourth string and a few changes in form, became the sweet-toned violin, the most important and expressive instrument of the modern orchestra. As immediate forerunner of our present-day pianoforte, the harpsichord was invented with a keyboard carried to four octaves and the chords of each note doubled or quadrupled to obtain prolonged tones.
[Sidenote: Palestrina]
In the person of the papal organist and choir-master, Palestrina (1524- 1594), appeared the first master-composer. He is justly esteemed as the father of modern religious music and for four hundred years the Catholic Church has repeated his inspired accents. A pope of the twentieth century declared his music to be still unrivaled and directed its universal use. Palestrina directly influenced much of the Italian music of the seventeenth century and the classical German productions of the eighteenth.
NATIONAL LITERATURE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
[Sidenote: Latin and the Vernaculars]
Latin had been the learned language of the middle ages: it was used in the Church, in the universities, and in polite society. If a lecturer taught a class or an author wrote a book, Latin was usually employed. In those very middle ages, however, the nations of western Europe were developing spoken languages quite at variance with the classical, scholarly tongue. These so-called vernacular languages were not often written and remained a long time the exclusive means of expression of the lower classes--they consequently not only differed from each other but tended in each case to fall into a number of petty local dialects. So long as they were not largely written, they could achieve no fixity, and it was not until after the invention of printing that the national languages produced extensive national literatures.
Just when printing was invented, the humanists--the foremost scholars of Europe--were diligently engaged in strengthening the position of Latin by encouraging the study of the pagan classics. Virgil, Cicero, Caesar, Tacitus, and the comedies of Plautus and Terence were again read by educated people for their substance and for their style. Petrarch imitated the manner of Latin classics in his letters; Erasmus wrote his great works in Latin. The revival of Greek, which was also due to the humanists, added to the learning and to the literature of the cultured folk, but Greek, even more than Latin, was hardly understood or appreciated by the bulk of the people.
Then came the sixteenth century, with its artistic developments, its national rivalries, its far-away discoveries, its theological debates, and its social and religious unrest. The common people, especially the commercial middle class, clamored to understand: and the result was the appearance of national literatures on a large scale. Alongside of Latin, which was henceforth restricted to the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church and to particularly learned treatises, there now emerged truly literary works in Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, English, etc. The printing of these works at once stereotyped their respective languages, so that since the sixteenth century the written forms of the vernacular tongues have been subject to relatively minor change. Speaking generally, the sixteenth century witnessed the fixing of our best known modern languages.
To review all the leading writers who employed the various vernaculars in the sixteenth century would encroach too much upon the province of professed histories of comparative literature, but a few references to certain figures that tower head and shoulders above all others in their respective countries may serve to call vividly to mind the importance of the period for national literatures.
[Sidenote: Italian Literature]
At the very outset, one important exception must be made in favor of Italy, whose poetry and prose had already been immortalized by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio a hundred years and more before the opening of the sixteenth century. But that country, as we have already repeatedly observed in many kinds of art, anticipated all others in modern times. Italy, almost the last European land to be politically unified, was the first to develop a great national literature.
But Italian literature was broadened and popularized by several influential writers in the sixteenth century, among whom stand preeminent the Florentine diplomat Machiavelli (1469-1527), whose Prince really founded the modern science of politics, and who taught the dangerous doctrine that a ruler, bent on exercising a benevolent despotism, is justified in employing any means to achieve his purpose; Ariosto (1474-1533), whose great poem Orlando Furioso displayed a powerful imagination no less than a rare and cultivated taste; and the unhappy mad Tasso (1544-1595), who in Jerusalem Delivered produced a bulky epic poem, adapting the manner of Virgil to a crusading subject, and in Aminta gave to his countrymen a delightful pastoral drama, the exquisite lyrics of which were long sung in opera.
[Sidenote: French literature]
French literature, like other French art, was encouraged by Francis I. He set up printing presses, established the College of France, and pensioned native writers. The most famous French author of the time was the sarcastic and clever Rabelais (c. 1490-1553), whose memorable Gargantua comprised a series of daring fanciful tales, told with humor of a rather vulgar sort. The language of Gargantua is somewhat archaic--perhaps the French version of Calvin's Institutes would be a better example of the French of the sixteenth century. But France, thus seriously beginning her national literature, was to wait for its supremacy until the seventeenth century--until the institution of the French Academy and the age of Louis XIV.
[Sidenote: Spanish Literature]
Spanish literature flourished in the golden era when Velasquez and Murillo were painting their masterpieces. The immortal Don Quixote, which was published in 1604, entitles its author, Cervantes (1547-1616), to rank with the greatest writers of all time. Lope de Vega (1562-1635), far-famed poet, virtually founded the Spanish theater and is said to have composed eighteen hundred dramatic pieces. Calderon (1600-1681), although less effective in his numerous dramas, wrote allegorical poems of unequaled merit. The printing of large cheap editions of many of these works made Spanish literature immediately popular.
[Sidenote: Portuguese Literature]
How closely the new vernacular literatures reflected significant elements in the national life is particularly observable in the case of Portugal. It was of the wonderful exploring voyages of Vasco da Gama that Camoens (1524-1580), prince of Portuguese poets, sang his stirring Lusiads.
[Sidenote: German Literature]
In the Germanies, the extraordinary influence of humanism at first militated against the development of literature in the vernacular, but the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, in his desire to reach the ears of the common people, turned from Latin to German. Luther's translation of the Bible constitutes the greatest monument in the rise of modern German.
To speak of what our own English language and literature owe to the sixteenth century seems superfluous. The popular writings of Chaucer in the fourteenth century were historically important, but the presence of very many archaic words makes them now difficult to read. But in England, from the appearance in 1551 of the English version of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, [Footnote: Originally published in Latin in 1516.] a representation of an ideal state, to the publication of Milton's grandiose epic, Paradise Lost, in 1667, there was a continuity of great literature. There were Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer and the King James Version of the Bible; Edmund Spenser's graceful Faerie Queene; [Footnote: For its scenery and mechanism, the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto furnished the framework; and it similarly shows the influence of Tasso.] the supreme Shakespeare; Ben Jonson and Marlowe; Francis Bacon and Richard Hooker; Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Taylor; and the somber Milton himself.
BEGINNINGS OF MODERN NATURAL SCIENCE
[Sidenote: Two-fold Development of Culture, Science and Art]
Human civilization, or culture, always depends upon progress in two directions--the reason, and the feelings or emotions. Art is the expression of the latter, and science of the former. Every great period in the world's history, therefore, is marked by a high appreciation of aesthetics and an advance in knowledge. To this general rule, the sixteenth century was no exception, for it was distinguished not only by a wonderful development of architecture, sculpture, painting, engraving, music, and literature,--whether Roman, Greek, or vernacular,--but it is the most obvious starting point of our modern ideas of natural and experimental science.
Nowadays, we believe that science is at once the legitimate means and the proper goal of the progress of the race, and we fill our school curricula with scientific studies. But this spirit is essentially modern: it owes its chief stimulus to important achievements in the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth.
[Sidenote: Characteristics of the Sixteenth Century]
Five elements contributed to impress the period that we are now reviewing with a scientific character. In the first place, the humanists encouraged a critical spirit in comparing and contrasting ancient manuscripts and in investigating the history of the distant past; and their discovery and application of pagan writings served to bring clearly and abruptly before the educated people of the sixteenth century all that the Greeks and Romans had done in astronomy, physics, mathematics, and medicine, as well as in philosophy, art, and literature. Secondly, the invention of printing itself was a scientific feat, and its extended use enabled scientists, no less than artists, immediately to acquaint the whole civilized world with their ideas and demonstrations.
Thirdly, the marvelous maritime discoveries of new routes to India and of a new world, which revolutionized European commerce, added much to geographical knowledge and led to the construction of scientific maps of the earth's surface. Fourthly, the painstaking study of a small group of scholars afforded us our first glimpse of the real character of the vast universe about our own globe--the scientific basis of modern astronomy. Lastly, two profound thinkers, early in the seventeenth century,--Francis Bacon and Descartes,--pointed out new ways of using the reason--the method of modern science.
In an earlier chapter, an account has been given of the maritime discoveries of the sixteenth century and their immediate results in broadening intellectual interests. In this chapter, some attention already has been devoted to the rise of humanism and likewise to the invention of printing. It remains, therefore, to say a few words about the changes in astronomy and in scientific method that characterized the beginning of modern times.
[Side Note: Astronomy]
In the year 1500 the average European knew something about the universe of sun, moon, planets, and stars, but it was scarcely more than the ancient Greeks had known, and its chief use was to foretell the future. This practical aspect of astronomy was a curious ancient misconception, which now passes under the name of astrology. It was popularly believed prior to the sixteenth century that every heavenly body exerted a direct and arbitrary influence upon human character and events, [Footnote: Disease was attributed to planetary influence. This connection between medicine and astrology survives in the sign of Jupiter 4, which still heads medicinal prescriptions.] and that by casting "horoscopes," showing just how the stars appeared at the birth of any person, the subsequent career of such an one might be foreseen. Many silly notions and superstitions grew up about astrology, yet the practice persisted. Charles V and Francis I, great rivals in war, vied with each other in securing the services of most eminent astrologers, and Catherine de' Medici never tired of reading horoscopes.
[Sidenote: "The Ptolemaic System"]
Throughout the middle ages the foremost scholars had continued to cherish the astronomical knowledge of the Greeks, which had been conveniently collected and systematized by a celebrated mathematician and scholar living in Egypt in the second century of the Christian era --Ptolemy by name. Among other theories and ideas, Ptolemy taught that the earth is the center of the universe, that revolving about it are the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, the other planets, and the fixed stars, and that the entire machine is turned with incredible velocity completely around every twenty-four hours. This so-called Ptolemaic system of astronomy fitted in very nicely with the language of the Bible and with the popular prejudice that the earth remains stationary while the heavenly bodies daily rise and set. It was natural that for many centuries the Christians should accept the views of Ptolemy as almost divinely inspired.
[Sidenote: "The Copernican System"]
However, a contradictory theory of the solar system was propounded and upheld in the sixteenth century, quite supplanting the Ptolemaic theory in the course of the seventeenth. The new system is called Copernican after its first modern exponent--and its general acceptance went far to annihilate astrology and to place astronomy upon a rational basis.
Copernicus [the Latin form of his real name, Koppernigk (1473-1543)] was a native of Poland, who divided his time between official work for the Catholic Church and private researches in astronomy. It was during a ten-year sojourn in Italy (1496-1505), studying canon law and medicine, and familiarizing himself, through humanistic teachers, with ancient Greek astronomers, that Copernicus was led seriously to question the Ptolemaic system and to cast about in search of a truthful substitute. Thenceforth for many years he studied and reflected, but it was not until the year of his death (1543) that his results were published to the world. His book--On the Revolutions of the Celestial Bodies, dedicated to Pope Paul III--offered the theory that the earth is not the center of the universe but simply one of a number of planets which revolve about the sun. The earth seemed much less important in the Copernican universe than in the Ptolemaic.
The Copernican thesis was supported and developed by two distinguished astronomers at the beginning of the next century--Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo (1564-1642), one a German, the other an Italian. Kepler taught astronomy for a number of years at Gratz and subsequently made his home in Prague, where he acquired a remarkable collection of instruments [Footnote: From Tycho Brahe, whose assistant he was in 1600-1601.] that enabled him to conduct numerous interesting experiments. While he entertained many fantastic and mystical theories of the "harmony of the spheres" and was not above casting horoscopes for the emperor and for Wallenstein, that soldier of fortune, [Footnote: See below, pp. 223, 226.] he nevertheless established several of the fundamental laws of modern astronomy, such as those governing the form and magnitude of the planetary orbits. It was Kepler who made clear that the planets revolve about the sun in elliptical rather than in strictly circular paths.
Galileo popularized the Copernican theory. [Footnote: Another "popularizer" was Giordano Bruno (c. 1548-1600).] His charming lectures in the university of Padua, where he taught from 1592 to 1610, were so largely attended that a hall seating 2000 had to be provided. In 1609 he perfected a telescope, which, although hardly more powerful than a present-day opera glass, showed unmistakably that the sun was turning on its axis, that Jupiter was attended by revolving moons, and that the essential truth of the Copernican system was established. Unfortunately for Galileo, his enthusiastic desire to convert the pope immediately to his own ideas got him into trouble with the Roman Curia and brought upon him a prohibition from further writing. Galileo submitted like a loyal Catholic to the papal decree, but had he lived another hundred years, he would have rejoiced that almost all men of learning--popes included--had come to accept his own conclusions. Thus modern astronomy was suggested by Copernicus, developed by Kepler, and popularized by Galileo.
The acquisition of sound knowledge in astronomy and likewise in every other science rests primarily upon the observation of natural facts or phenomena and then upon deducing rational conclusions from such observation. Yet this seemingly simple rule had not been continuously and effectively applied in any period of history prior to the sixteenth century. The scientific method of most of the medieval as well as of the ancient scholars was essentially that of Aristotle. [Footnote: Exception to this sweeping generalization must be made in favor of several medieval scientists and philosophers, including--Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar of the thirteenth century.] This so-called deductive method of Aristotle assumed as a starting-point some general of principle as a premise or hypothesis and thence proceeded, by logical reasoning, to deduce concrete applications or consequences. It had been extremely valuable in stimulating the logical faculties and in showing men how to draw accurate conclusions, but it had shown a woeful inability to devise new general principles. It evolved an elaborate theology and a remarkable philosophy, but natural experimental science progressed relatively little until the deductive method of Aristotle was supplemented by the inductive method of Francis Bacon.
[Sidenote: Modern Method of Science: Introduction. Francis Bacon]
Aristotle was partially discredited by radical humanists, who made fun of the medieval scholars who had taken him most seriously, and by the Protestant reformers, who assailed the Catholic theology which had been carefully constructed by Aristotelian deduction. But it was reserved for Francis Bacon, known as Lord Bacon (1561-1626), to point out all the shortcomings of the ancient method and to propose a practicable supplement. A famous lawyer, lord chancellor of England under James I, a born scientist, a brilliant essayist, he wrote several philosophical works of first-rate importance, of which the Advancement of Learning (1604) and the Novum Organum (1620) are the most famous. It is in these works that he summed up the faults which the widening of knowledge in his own day was disclosing in ancient and medieval thought and set forth the necessity of slow laborious observation of facts as antecedent to the assumption of any general principle.
[Sidenote: Descartes]
What of scientific method occurred to Lord Bacon appealed even more to the intellectual genius of the Frenchman Descartes (1596-1660). A curious combination of sincere practicing Catholic and of original daring rationalist was this man, traveling all about Europe, serving as a soldier in the Netherlands, in Bavaria, in Hungary, living in Holland, dying in Sweden, with a mind as restless as his body. Now interested in mathematics, now in philosophy, presently absorbed in physics or in the proof of man's existence, throughout his whole career he held fast to the faith that science depends not upon the authority of books but upon the observation of facts. "Here are my books," he told a visitor, as he pointed to a basket of rabbits that he was about to dissect. The Discourse on Method (1637) and the Principles of Philosophy (1644), taken in conjunction with Bacon's work, ushered in a new scientific era, to some later phases of which we shall have occasion to refer in subsequent chapters.
ADDITIONAL READING
THE RENAISSANCE. GENERAL. Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I (1902), ch. xvi, xvii; Histoire générale, Vol. IV, ch. vii, viii, Vol. V, ch. x, xi; E. M. Hulme, Renaissance and Reformation, 2d ed. (1915), ch. v-vii, xix, xxix, xxx. More detailed accounts: Jakob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. by S. G. C. Middlemore, 2 vols. (1878), 1 vol. ed. (1898), scholarly and profound; J. A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, 5 parts in 7 vols. (1897-1898), interesting and suggestive but less reliable than Burckhardt; Ludwig Geiger, Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und Deutschland (1882), in the great Oncken Series; F. X. Kraus, Geschichte der christlichen Kunst, 2 vols. in 4 (1896-1908), a monumental work of great interest and importance, by a German Catholic.
HUMANISM. The best description of the rise and spread of humanism is J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, Vol. II (1908). For the spirit of early humanism see H. C. Hollway-Calthrop, Petrarch: his Life and Times (1907); J. H. Robinson and H. W. Rolfe, Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, 2d ed. (1914), a selection from Petrarch's letters to Boccaccio and other contemporaries, translated into English, with a valuable introduction; Pierre de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l'humanisme, 2d ed., 2 vols. in 1 (1907). Of the antecedents of humanism a convenient summary is presented by Louise Loomis, Mediæval Hellenism (1906). A popular biography of Erasmus is that of Ephraim Emerton, Desiderius Erasmus (1899); the Latin Letters of Erasmus are now (1916) in course of publication by P. S. Allen; F. M. Nichols, The Epistles of Erasmus, 2 vols. (1901-1906), an excellent translation of letters written prior to 1517; Erasmus's Praise of Folly, in English translation, is obtainable in many editions. D. F. Strauss, Ulrich von Hutten, his Life and Times, trans. by Mrs. G. Sturge (1874), gives a good account of the whole humanistic movement and treats Hutten very sympathetically; The Letters of Obscure Men, to which Hutten contributed, were published, with English translation, by F. G. Stokes in 1909. An excellent edition of The Utopia of Sir Thomas More, the famous English humanist, is that of George Sampson (1910), containing also an English translation and the charming contemporary Biography by More's son-in-law, William Roper. The standard summary of the work of the humanists is the German writing of Georg Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums, 3d ed., 2 vols. (1893). Interesting extracts from the writings of a considerable variety of humanists are translated by Merrick Whitcomb in his Literary Source Books of the Renaissance in Germany and in Italy (1898-1899).
INVENTION OF PRINTING. T. L. De Vinne, Invention of Printing, 2d ed. (1878), and, by the same author, Notable Printers of Italy during the Fifteenth Century (1910), two valuable works by an eminent authority on the subject; G. H. Putnam, Books and their Makers during the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (1896-1897), a useful contribution of another experienced publisher; Johannes Janssen, History of the German People, Vol. I, Book I, ch. i. There is an interesting essay on "Publication before Printing" by R. K. Root in the Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. XXVIII (1913), pp. 417-431.
NATIONAL LITERATURES. Among the many extended bibliographies of national literatures the student certainly should be familiar with the Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. by A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, 12 vols. (1907-1916); and with G. Lanson, Manuel bibliographique de la littérature française moderne, 1500-1900, 4 vols. (1909-1913). See also, as suggestive references, Pasquale Villari, The Life and Times of Machiavelli, 2 vols. in i (1898); A. A. Tilley, The Literature of the French Renaissance, 2 vols. (1904); George Saintsbury, A History of Elizabethan Literature (1887); and Sir Sidney Lee, Life of Shakespeare, new rev. ed. (1915).
ART IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. Architecture: A. D. F. Hamlin, A Textbook of the History of Architecture, 5th ed. (1902), a brief general survey; A History of Architecture, Vols. I, II by Russell Sturgis (1906), III, IV by A. L. Frothingham (1915); Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture, 5th ed. (1905); James Fergusson, History of Architecture in All Countries, 3d rev. ed., 5 vols. (1891-1899). Sculpture: Allan Marquand and A. L. Frothingham, A Text-book of the History of Sculpture (1896); Wilhelm von Lubke, History of Sculpture, Eng. trans., 2 vols. (1872). Painting: J. C. Van Dyke, A Text-book of the History of Painting, new rev. ed. (1915); Alfred von Woltmann and Karl Woermann, History of Painting, Eng. trans., 2 vols. (1894). Music: W. S. Pratt, The History of Music (1907). See also the Lives of Seventy of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari (1512-1574), the contemporary and friend of Michelangelo, trans. by Mrs. Foster in the Bohn Library; Osvald Siren, Leonardo da Vinci: the Artist and the Man (1915); and Romain Rolland, Michelangelo (1915).
SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. Cambridge Modem History, Vol. V (1908), ch. xxiii, Vol. IV (1906), ch. xxvii, scholarly accounts of Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and their contemporaries. A veritable storehouse of scientific facts is H. S. and E. H. Williams, A History of Science, 10 vols. (1904-1910). Specifically, see Arthur Berry, Short History of Astronomy (1899); Karl von Gebler, Galileo Galilei and the Roman Curia, Eng. trans. by Mrs. George Sturge (1879); B. L. Conway, The Condemnation of Galileo (1913); and Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, Eng. trans. by Crew and Salvio (1914). The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. by J. M. Robertson (1905), is a convenient edition. On the important thinkers from the time of Machiavelli to the middle of the eighteenth century, see Harald Hoffding, A History of Modern Philosophy, Vol. I (1900); W. A. Dunning, A History of Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu (1905); Paul Janet, Histoire de la science politique dans ses rapports avec la morale, 3d ed., Vol. II (1887).
II. DYNASTIC AND COLONIAL RIVALRY
In the seventeenth century and in the greater part of the eighteenth, public attention was directed chiefly toward dynastic and colonial rivalries. In the European group of national states, France was the most important. Politically the French evolved a form of absolutist divine-right monarchy, which became the pattern of all European monarchies, that of England alone excepted. In international affairs the reigning family of France--the Bourbon dynasty after a long struggle succeeded in humiliating the rulers of Spain and of Austria-- the Habsburg dynasty. The hegemony which, in the sixteenth century, Spain had exercised in the newly established state-system of Europe was now supplanted by that of France. Intellectually, too, Italian leadership yielded to French, until France set the fashion alike in manners, morals, and art. Only in the sphere of commerce and trade and exploitation of lands beyond the seas was French supremacy questioned, and there not by declining Portugal or Spain but by the vigorous English nation. France, victorious in her struggle for dynastic aggrandizement on the continent of Europe, was destined to suffer defeat in her efforts to secure colonies in Asia and America.
This period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was marked likewise by the constant decay of old political and social institutions in Italy and in Germany, by the gradual decline of the might and prestige of the Ottoman Turks, and by the extinction of the ancient kingdom of Poland. In their place appeared as great world powers the northern monarchies of Prussia and Russia, whose royal lines-- Hohenzollerns and Romanovs--were to vie in ambition and prowess, before the close of the period, with Habsburgs and Bourbons.
Socially, the influence of nobles and clergy steadily declined. As steadily arose the numbers, the ability, and the importance of the traders and commercial magnates, the moneyed people, all those who were identified with the new wealth that the Commercial Revolution was creating, the lawyers, the doctors, the professors, the merchants,--the so-called middle class, the bourgeoisie, who gradually grew discontented with the restrictive institutions of their time. Within the bourgeoisie was the seed of revolution: they would one day in their own interests overturn monarchy, nobility, the Church, the whole social fabric. That was to be the death-knell of the old regime--the annunciation of the nineteenth century.
Chapter VI
THE GROWTH OF ABSOLUTISM IN FRANCE AND THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN BOURBONS AND HABSBURGS, 1589-1661
GROWTH OF ABSOLUTISM IN FRANCE: HENRY IV, RICHELIEU, AND MAZARIN
For the first time in many years France in 1598 was at peace. The Edict of Nantes, which in that year accorded qualified religious toleration to the Huguenots, removed the most serious danger to internal order, and the treaty of Vervins, concluded in the same year with the king of Spain, put an end to a long and exhausting foreign war. Henry IV was now free to undertake the internal reformation of his country.
Sorry, indeed, was the plight of France at the close of the sixteenth century. Protracted civil and foreign wars had produced their inevitable consequences. The state was nearly bankrupt. Country districts lay largely uncultivated. Towns were burned or abandoned. Roads were rough and neglected, and bridges in ruins. Many of the discharged soldiers turned highwaymen, pillaged farmhouses, and robbed travelers. Trade was at a standstill and the artisans of the cities were out of work. During the wars, moreover, great noblemen had taken many rights into their own hands and had acquired a habit of not obeying the king. The French crown seemed to be in danger of losing what power it had gained in the fifteenth century.
That the seventeenth century was to witness not a diminution but a pronounced increase of royal power, was due to the character of the French king at this critical juncture. Henry IV (1589-1610) was strong and vivacious. With his high forehead, sparkling eyes, smiling mouth, and his neatly pointed beard (Henri quatre), he was prepossessing in looks, while his affability, simplicity, and constant expression of interest in the welfare of his subjects earned him the appellation of "Good King Henry." His closest companions knew that he was selfish and avaricious, but that his quick decisions were likely to be good and certain to be put in force. Above all, Henry had soldierly qualities and would brook no disloyalty or disobedience.
[Sidenote: Sully]
Throughout his reign, Henry IV was well served by his chief minister, the duke of Sully, [Footnote: 1560-1641.] an able, loyal, upright Huguenot, though avaricious like the king and subject to furious fits of jealousy and temper. Appointed to the general oversight of financial affairs, Sully made a tour of inspection throughout the country and completely reformed the royal finances. He forbade provincial governors to raise money on their own authority, removed many abuses of tax- collecting, and by an honest, rigorous administration was able between 1600 and 1610 to save an average of a million livres a year. The king zealously upheld Sully's policy of retrenchment: he reduced the subsidies to artists and the grants to favorites, and retained only a small part of his army, sufficient to overawe rebellious nobles and to restore order and security throughout the realm. To promote and preserve universal peace, he even proposed the formation of a World Confederation--his so-called "Grand Design"--which, however, came to naught through the mutual jealousies and rival ambitions of the various European sovereigns. It proved to be much too early to talk convincingly of general pacifism and disarmament.
[Sidenote: Agricultural Development]
While domestic peace was being established and provision was being made for immediate financial contingencies, Henry IV and his great minister were both laboring to increase the resources of their country and thereby to promote the prosperity and contentment of the people. Sully believed that the true wealth of the nation lay in farming pursuits, and, therefore, agriculture should be encouraged even, if necessary, to the neglect of trade and industry. While the king allowed Sully to develop the farming interests, he himself encouraged the new commercial classes.
In order to promote agriculture, Sully urged the abolition of interior customs lines and the free circulation of grain, subsidized stock raising, forbade the destruction of the forests, drained swamps, rebuilt the roads and bridges, and planned a vast system of canals.
On his side, Henry IV was contributing to the wealth of the middle class. It was he who introduced silkworms and the mulberry trees, on which they feed, thereby giving an impetus to the industry which is now one of the most important in France. The beginnings of the industrial importance of Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles date from the reign of Henry IV.
The king likewise encouraged commerce. A French merchant marine was built up by means of royal bounties. A navy was started. Little by little the French began to compete for trade on the high seas at first with the Dutch, and subsequently with the English. French trading posts were established in India; and Champlain was dispatched to the New World to lay the foundations of a French empire in America. It was fortunate for France that she had two men like Henry IV and Sully, each supplementing the work of the other.
The assassination of Henry IV by a crazed fanatic in 1610 threatened for a time to nullify the effects of his labors, for supreme power passed to his widow, Marie de' Medici, an ambitious but incompetent woman, who dismissed Sully and undertook to act as regent for her nine- year-old son, Louis XIII. The queen-regent was surrounded by worthless favorites and was hated by the Huguenots, who feared her rigid Catholicism, and by the nobles, Catholic and Huguenot alike, who were determined to maintain their privileges and power.
The hard savings of Henry IV were quickly exhausted, and France once more faced a financial crisis. In this emergency the Estates-General was again convened (1614). Since the accession of Louis XI (1461), the French monarchs with their absolutist tendencies had endeavored to remove this ancient check upon their authority: they had convoked it only in times of public confusion or economic necessity. Had the Estates-General really been an effective body in 1614, it might have taken a position similar to that of the seventeenth-century Parliament in England and established constitutional government in France, but its organization and personnel militated against such heroic action. The three estates--clergy, nobles, and commoners (bourgeois)--sat separately in as many chambers; the clergy and nobles would neither tax themselves nor cooperate with the Third Estate; the commoners, many of whom were Huguenots, were disliked by the court, despised by the First and Second Estates, and quite out of sympathy with the peasants, the bulk of the French nation. It is not surprising, under the circumstances, that the session of 1614 lasted but three weeks and ended as a farce: the queen-regent locked up the halls and sent the representatives home--she needed the room for a dance, she said. It was not until the momentous year of 1789--after a lapse of 175 years--that the Estates-General again assembled.
After the fiasco of 1614, affairs went from bad to worse. Nobles and Huguenots contended between themselves, and both against the court favorites. As many as five distinct uprisings occurred. Marie de' Medici was forced to relinquish the government, but Louis XIII, on reaching maturity, gave evidence of little executive ability. The king was far more interested in music and hunting than in business of state. No improvement appeared until Cardinal Richelieu assumed the guidance of affairs of state in 1624. Henceforth, the royal power was exercised not so much by Louis XIII as by his great minister.
[Sidenote: Cardinal Richelieu]
Born of a noble family of Poitou, Armand de Richelieu (1585-1642), at the age of twenty-one had been appointed bishop of the small diocese of Luçon. His eloquence and ability as spokesman for the clergy in the fatuous Estates-General of 1614 attracted the notice of Marie de' Medici, who invited him to court, gave him a seat in the royal council, and secured his nomination as a cardinal of the Roman Church. From 1624 until his death in 1642, Richelieu was the most important man in France.
With undoubted loyalty and imperious will, with the most delicate diplomacy and all the blandishments of subtle court intrigue, sometimes with sternest and most merciless cruelty, Richelieu maintained his influence over the king and proceeded to destroy the enemies of the French crown.
[Sidenote: Richelieu's Policies]
Richelieu's policies were quite simple: (1) To make the royal power supreme in France; (2) to make France predominant in Europe. The first involved the removal of checks upon royal authority and the triumph of absolutism; the second meant a vigorous foreign policy, leading to the humiliation of the rival Habsburgs. In both these policies Richelieu was following the general traditions of the preceding century, essentially those of Henry IV, but to an exaggerated extent and with unparalleled success. Postponing consideration of general European affairs, let us first see what the great cardinal accomplished in France.
[Sidenote: Disappearance of Representative Government]
First of all, Richelieu disregarded the Estates-General. He was convinced of its futility and unhesitatingly declined to consult it. Gradually the idea became current that the Estates-General was an out- worn, medieval institution, totally unfit for modern purposes, and that official business could best--and therefore properly--be conducted, not by the representatives of the chief social classes in the nation, but by personal appointees of the king. Thus the royal council became the supreme lawmaking and administrative body in the country.
Local estates, or parliaments, continued to exist in certain of the most recently acquired provinces of France, such as Brittany, Provence, Burgundy, and Languedoc, but they had little influence except in apportioning taxes: Richelieu tampered with their privileges and vetoed many of their acts.
[Sidenote: The Royal Army]
The royal prerogative extended not only to matters of taxation and legislation, including the right to levy taxes and to make expenditures for any purpose without public accounting, but it was preserved and enforced by means of a large standing army, which received its pay and its orders exclusively from the crown. To the royal might, as well as to its right, Richelieu contributed. He energetically aided Louis XIII in organizing and equipping what proved to be the best army in Europe.
Two factions in the state aroused the cardinal's ire--one the Huguenots, and the other the nobles--for both threatened the autocracy which he was bent upon erecting. Both factions suffered defeat and humiliation at his hands.
Richelieu, though a cardinal of the Roman Church, was more politician and statesman than ecclesiastic; though living in an age of religious fanaticism, he was by no means a bigot. As we shall presently see, this Catholic cardinal actually gave military support to Protestants in Germany--for political purposes; it was similarly for political purposes that he attacked the Protestants in France.
As has already been pointed out, French Protestantism meant an influential political party as well as a religion. Since Henry IV had issued the Edict of Nantes, the Huguenots had had their own assemblies, officers, judges, and even certain fortified towns, all of which interfered with the sovereign authority and impaired that uniformity which thoughtful royalists believed to be the very cornerstone of absolutism. Richelieu had no desire to deprive the Huguenots of religious freedom, but he was resolved that in political matters they should obey the king. Consequently, when they revolted in 1625, he determined to crush them. In spite of the considerable aid which England endeavored to give them, the Huguenots were entirely subdued. Richelieu's long siege of La Rochelle, lasting nearly fifteen months, showed his forceful resolution. When the whole country had submitted, the Edict of Alais was published (1629), leaving to the Protestants freedom of conscience and of worship but depriving them of their fortifications and forbidding them to hold assemblies. Public office was still open to them and their representatives kept their judicial posts. "The honest Huguenot retained all that he would have been willing to protect with his life, while the factious and turbulent Huguenot was deprived of the means of embarrassing the government."
The repression of the nobles was a similar statesmanlike achievement, and one made in the face of redoubtable opposition. It had long been customary to name noblemen as governors of the various provinces, but the governors had gradually become masters instead of administrators: they commanded detachments of the army; they claimed allegiance of the garrisons in their towns; they repeatedly and openly defied the royal will. The country, moreover, was sprinkled with noblemen's castles or châteaux, protected by fortifications and armed retainers, standing menaces to the prompt execution of the king's orders. Finally, the noblemen at court, jealous of the cardinal's advancement and spurred on by the intrigues of the disaffected Marie de' Medici or of the king's own brother, hampered the minister at every turn. Of such intolerable conditions, Richelieu determined to be quit.
Into the ranks of noble courtiers, Richelieu struck terror. By means of spies and trickery, he ferreted out conspiracies and arbitrarily put their leaders to death. Every attempt at rebellion was mercilessly punished, no matter how exalted in rank the rebel might be. Richelieu was never moved by entreaties or threats--he was as inexorable as fate itself.
[Sidenote: Demolition of Private Fortifications ]
The cardinal did not confine his attention to noblemen at court. As early as 1626 he published an edict ordering the immediate demolition of all fortified castles not needed for defense against foreign invasion. In carrying this edict into force, Richelieu found warm supporters in peasantry and townsfolk who had long suffered from the exactions and depredations of their noble but warlike neighbors. The ruins of many a chateau throughout modern France bear eloquent witness to the cardinal's activity.
[Sidenote: Centralization of Administration] [Sidenote: The Intendants]
Another enduring monument to Richelieu was the centralization of French administration. The great minister was tired of the proud, independent bearing of the noble governors. Without getting rid of them altogether, he checked these proud officials by transferring most of their powers to a new kind of royal officer, the intendant. Appointed by the crown usually from among the intelligent, loyal middle class, each intendant had charge of a certain district, supervising therein the assessment and collection of royal taxes, the organization of local police or militia, the enforcement of order, and the conduct of courts. These intendants, with their wide powers of taxation, police, and justice, were later dubbed, from their approximate number, the "thirty tyrants" of France. But they owed their positions solely to the favor of the crown; they were drawn from a class whose economic interests were long and well served by the royal power; and their loyalty to the king, therefore, could be depended upon. The intendants constantly made reports to, and received orders from, the central government at Paris. They were so many eyes, all over the kingdom, for an ever-watchful Richelieu. And in measure as the power of the bourgeois intendants increased, that of the noble governors diminished, until, by the eighteenth century, the offices of the latter had become largely honorary though still richly remunerative. To keep the nobles amused and in money, and thereby out of mischief and politics, became, from Richelieu's time, a maxim of the royal policy in France.
[Side Note: Richelieu's Significance]
Such, in brief, was the work of this grim figure that moved across the stage at a critical period in French history. Richelieu, more than any other man, was responsible for the assurance of absolutism in his country at the very time when England, by means of revolution and bloodshed, was establishing parliamentary government; and, as we shall soon see, his foreign policy covered France with European glory and prestige.
In person, Richelieu was frail and sickly, yet when clothed in his cardinal's red robes he appeared distinguished and commanding. His pale, drawn face displayed a firm determination and an inflexible will. Unscrupulous, exacting, and without pity, he preserved to the end a proud faith in his moral strength and in his loyalty to country and to king.
Richelieu died in 1642, and the very next year the monarch whom he had served so gloriously followed him to the grave, leaving the crown to a boy of five years--Louis XIV.
[Side Note: Minority of Louis XIV] [Sidenote: Cardinal Mazarin]
The minority of Louis XIV might have been disastrous to France and to the royal power, had not the strong policies of Richelieu been exemplified and enforced by another remarkable minister and cardinal, Mazarin. Mazarin (1602-1661) was an Italian, born near Naples, educated for an ecclesiastical career at Rome and in Spain. In the discharge of several delicate diplomatic missions for the pope, he had acted as nuncio at Paris, where he so ingratiated himself in Richelieu's favor that he was invited to enter the service of the king of France, and in 1639 he became a naturalized Frenchman.
Despite his foreign birth and the fact that he never spoke French without a bad accent, he rose rapidly in public service. He was named cardinal and was recognized as Richelieu's disciple and imitator. From the death of the greater cardinal in 1642 to his own death in 1661, Mazarin actually governed France.
[Sidenote: Unrest of the Nobles]
Against the Habsburgs, Mazarin continued the great war which Richelieu had begun and brought it to a successful conclusion. In domestic affairs, he encountered greater troubles. The nobles had naturally taken umbrage at the vigorous policies of Richelieu, from which Mazarin seemed to have no thought of departing. They were strengthened, moreover, by a good deal of popular dislike of Mazarin's foreign birth, his avarice, his unscrupulous plundering of the revenues of the realm for the benefit of his own family, and his tricky double-dealing ways.
[Sidenote: The Fronde]
The result was the Fronde, [Footnote: Probably so called from the name of a street game played by Parisian children and often stopped by policemen.] the last attempt prior to the French Revolution to cast off royal absolutism in France. It was a vague popular protest coupled with a selfish reaction on the part of the influential nobles: the pretext was Mazarin's interference with the parlement of Paris.
[Sidenote: The Parlements]
The parlements were judicial bodies [Footnote: There were thirteen in the seventeenth century.] which tried important cases and heard appeals from lower courts. That of Paris, being the most eminent, had, in course of time, secured to itself the right of registering royal decrees--that is, of receiving the king's edicts in formal fashion and entering them upon the statute books so that the law of the land might be known generally. From making such a claim, it was only a step for the parlement of Paris to refuse to register certain new edicts on the ground that the king was not well informed or that they were in conflict with older and more binding enactments. If these claims were substantiated, the royal will would be subjected to revision by the parlement of Paris. To prevent their substantiation, both Louis XIII and Louis XIV held "beds of justice"--that is, appeared in person before the parlement, and from their seat of cushions and pillows declared their will regarding the new edict and directed that it be promulgated. There were amusing scenes when the boy-king, at the direction of Mazarin, gave orders in his shrill treble to the learned lawyers and grave old judges.
Egged on by seeming popular sympathy and no doubt by the contemporaneous political revolution in England, the parlement of Paris at length defied the prime minister. It proclaimed its immunity from royal control; declared the illegality of any public tax which it had not freely and expressly authorized; ordered the abolition of the office of intendant; and protested against arbitrary arrest or imprisonment. To these demands, the people of Paris gave support-- barricades were erected in the streets, and Mazarin, whose loyal army was still fighting in the Germanies, was obliged temporarily to recognize the new order. Within six months, however, sufficient troops had been collected to enable him to overawe Paris and to annul his concessions.
[Sidenote: Suppression of the Fronde] [Sidenote: Triumph of Absolutism in France]
Subsequent uprisings, engineered by prominent noblemen, were often more humorous than harmful. To be sure, no less a commander than the great Condé, one of the chief heroes of the Thirty Years' War, took arms against the Cardinalists, as Mazarin's party was called, but so slight was the aid which he received from the French people that he was speedily driven from his country and joined the Spanish army. The upshot of the Fronde was (1) the nobility were more discredited than ever; (2) the parlement was forbidden to devote attention to political or financial affairs; (3) Paris was disarmed and lost the right of electing its own municipal officers; (4) the royal authority was even stronger than under Richelieu because an unsuccessful attempt had been made to weaken it. Henry IV, Richelieu, and Mazarin had made straight the way for the despotism of Louis XIV.
STRUGGLE BETWEEN BOURBONS AND HABSBURGS THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR
[Sidenote: Dynastic Character of Wars in the Seventeenth Century.]
Every European country, except England, was marked in the seventeenth century by a continued growth of monarchical power. The kings were busily engaged in strengthening their hold upon their respective states and in reaching out for additional lands and wealth. International wars, therefore, assumed the character of struggles for dynastic aggrandizement. How might this or that royal family obtain wider territories and richer towns? There was certainly sufficient national life in western Europe to make the common people proud of their nationality; hence the kings could normally count upon popular support. But wars were undertaken upon the continent of Europe in the seventeenth century not primarily for national or patriotic motives, but for the exaltation of a particular royal family. Citizens of border provinces were treated like so many cattle or so much soil that might be conveniently bartered among the kings of France, Spain, or Sweden.
[Sidenote: Habsburg Dominions in 1600.]
This idea had been quite evident in the increase of the Habsburg power during the sixteenth century. In an earlier chapter we have noticed how that family had acquired one district after another until their property included: (1) Under the Spanish branch--Spain, the Two Sicilies, Milan, Franche Comte, the Belgian Netherlands, Portugal, and a huge colonial empire; (2) Under the Austrian branch--Austria and its dependencies, Hungary, Bohemia, and the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Despite the herculean labors of Philip II, France remained outside Habsburg influence, a big gap in what would otherwise have been a series of connected territories.
[Sidenote: Ambition of the Bourbons.]
In measure as the French kings--the Bourbons--strengthened their position in their own country, they looked abroad not merely to ward off foreign attacks but to add land at their neighbors' expense. Richelieu understood that his two policies went hand in glove--to make the Bourbons predominant in Europe was but a corollary to making the royal power supreme in France.
[Sidenote: The Thirty Years' War.]
The chief warfare of the seventeenth century centers, therefore, in the long, terrible conflict between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons. Of this struggle, the so-called Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) may be treated as the first stage. Let us endeavor to obtain a clear idea of the interests involved.
When Richelieu became the chief minister of Louis XIII (1624), he found the Habsburgs in serious trouble and he resolved to take advantage of the situation to enhance the prestige of the Bourbons. The Austrian Habsburgs were facing a vast civil and religious war in the Germanies, and the Spanish Habsburgs were dispatching aid to their hard-pressed kinsmen.
The war, which proved momentous both to the Habsburgs and to their enemies, resulted from a variety of reasons--religious, economic, and political.
[Sidenote: The Thirty Years' War: Ecclesiastical Causes]
The peace of Augsburg (1555) had been expected to settle the religious question in the Germanies. But in practice it had failed to fix two important matters. In the first place, the provision forbidding further secularization of church property ("Ecclesiastical Reservation") was not carried out, nor could it be while human nature and human temptation remained. Every Catholic ecclesiastic who became Protestant would naturally endeavor to take his church lands with him. Then, in the second place, the peace had recognized only Catholics and Lutherans: meanwhile the Calvinists had increased their numbers, especially in southern and central Germany and in Bohemia, and demanded equal rights. In order to extort concessions from the emperor, a union of Protestant princes was formed, containing among its members the zealous young Calvinist prince of the Palatinate, Frederick, commonly called the Elector Palatine of the Rhine. The Catholics were in an equally belligerent frame of mind. Not only were they determined to prevent further secularization of church property, but, emboldened by the progress of the Catholic Reformation in the Germanies during the second half of the sixteenth century, they were now anxious to revise the earlier religious settlement in their own interest and to regain, if possible, the lands that had been lost by the Church to the Protestants. The Catholics relied for political and military support upon the Catholic Habsburg emperor and upon Maximilian, duke of Bavaria and head of the Catholic League of Princes. Religiously, the enemies of the Habsburgs were the German Protestants.
[Sidenote: The Thirty Years' War: Political Causes]
But a hardly less important cause of the Thirty Years' War lay in the politics of the Holy Roman Empire. The German princes had greatly increased their territories and their wealth during the Protestant Revolution. They aspired, each and all, to complete sovereignty. They would rid themselves of the outworn bonds of a medieval empire and assume their proper place among the independent and autocratic rulers of Europe. On his side, the emperor was insistent upon strengthening his position and securing a united powerful Germany under his personal control. Politically, the enemies of the Habsburgs were the German princes.
With the princes was almost invariably allied any European monarch who had anything to gain from dividing Germany or weakening Habsburg influence. In case of a civil war, the Habsburgs might reasonably expect to find enemies in Denmark, Sweden, and France.
[Sidenote: Four Periods in the Thirty Years' War]
The war naturally divides itself into four periods: (1) The Bohemian Revolt; (2) The Danish Period; (3) The Swedish Period; (4) The French or International Period.
[Sidenote: 1. The Bohemian Revolt]
The signal for the outbreak of hostilities in the Germanics was given by a rebellion in Bohemia against the Habsburgs. Following the death of Rudolph II (1576-1612), a narrow-minded, art-loving, and unbalanced recluse, his childless brother Matthias (1612-1619) had desired to secure the succession of a cousin, Ferdinand II (1619-1637), who, although a man of blameless life and resolute character, was known to be devoted to the cause of absolutism and fanatically loyal to the Catholic Church. Little opposition to this settlement was encountered in the various Habsburg Bohemian dominions, except in Bohemia. In that country, however, the nobles, many of whom were Calvinists, dreaded the prospective accession of Ferdinand, who would be likely to deprive them of their special privileges and to impede, if not to forbid, the exercise of the Protestant religion in their territories. Already there had been encroachments on their religious liberty.
One day in 1618, a group of Bohemian noblemen broke into the room where the imperial envoys were stopping and hurled them out of a window into a castle moat some sixty feet below. This so-called "defenestration" of Ferdinand's representatives was followed by the proclamation of the dethronement of the Habsburgs in Bohemia and the election to the kingship of Frederick, the Calvinistic Elector Palatine. Frederick was crowned at Prague and prepared to defend his new lands. Ferdinand II, raising a large army in his other possessions, and receiving assistance from Maximilian of Bavaria and the Catholic League as well as from Tuscany and the Spanish Habsburgs, intrusted the allied forces to an able veteran general, Count Tilly (1559-1632). King Frederick had expected support from his father-in-law, James I of England, and from the Lutheran princes of northern Germany, but in both respects he was disappointed. What with parliamentary quarrels at home and a curiously mistaken foreign policy of a Spanish alliance, James confined his assistance to pompous advice and long words. Then, too, most of the Lutheran princes, led by the tactful John George, elector of Saxony, hoped by remaining neutral to obtain special concessions from the emperor.
Within a very brief period, Tilly subdued Bohemia, drove out Frederick, and reestablished the Habsburg power. Many rebellious nobles lost their property and lives, and the practice of the Protestant religion was again forbidden in Bohemia. Nor was that all. The victorious imperialists drove the fugitive Frederick, now derisively dubbed the "winter king," out of his original wealthy possessions on the Rhine, into miserable exile, an outcast without land or money. The conquered Palatinate was turned over to Maximilian of Bavaria, who was further rewarded for his services by being recognized as an elector of the Holy Roman Empire in place of the deposed Frederick.
The first period of the war was thus favorable to the Habsburg and Catholic causes. Between 1618 and 1620, revolt had been suppressed in Bohemia and an influential Rhenish electorate had been transferred from Calvinist to Catholic hands.
Now, however, the northern Protestant princes took alarm. If they had viewed with composure the failure of Frederick's foolhardy efforts in Bohemia, they beheld with downright dismay the expansion of Bavaria and the destruction of a balance of power long maintained between Catholic and Protestant Germany. And so long as the ill-disciplined remnants of Frederick's armies were behaving like highwaymen, pillaging and burning throughout the Germanics, the emperor declined to consider the grant of any concessions.
[Sidenote: 2. Danish Intervention. Christian IV]
At this critical juncture, while the Protestant princes were wavering between obedience and rebellion, Christian IV of Denmark intervened and precipitated the second period of the war. Christian IV (1588-1648) was impulsive and ambitious: as duke of Holstein he was a member of the Holy Roman Empire and opposed to Habsburg domination; as king of Denmark and Norway he was anxious to extend his influence over the North Sea ports; and as a Lutheran, he sought to champion the rights of his German co-religionists and to help them retain the rich lands which they had appropriated from the Catholic Church. In 1625, therefore, Christian invaded Germany, supported by liberal grants of money from England and by the troops of many of the German princes, both Calvinist and Lutheran.
[Sidenote: Wallenstein]
Against the Danish invasion, Tilly unaided might have had difficulty to stand, but fortune seemed to have raised up a codefender of the imperialist cause in the person of an extraordinary adventurer, Wallenstein. This man had enriched himself enormously out of the recently confiscated estates of rebellious Bohemians, and now, in order to benefit himself still further, he secured permission from the Emperor Ferdinand II to raise an independent army of his own to restore order in the empire and to expel the Danes. By liberal promises of pay and plunder, the soldier of fortune soon recruited an army of some 50,000 men, and what a motley collection it was! Italian, Swiss, Spaniard, German, Pole, Englishman, and Scot,--Protestant was welcomed as heartily as Catholic,--any one who loved adventure or hoped for gain, all united by the single tie of loyalty and devotion to Wallenstein. The force was whipped into shape by the undoubted genius of its commander and at once became an effective machine of war. Yet the perpetual plundering of the land, on which it lived, was a constant source of reproach to the army of Wallenstein.
The campaigning of the second period of the war took place in North Germany. At Lutter, King Christian IV was defeated overwhelmingly by the combined forces of Tilly and Wallenstein, and the Lutheran states were left at the mercy of the Catholic League. Brandenburg openly espoused the imperialist cause and aided Ferdinand's generals in expelling the Danish king from German soil. Only the lack of naval control of the Baltic and North seas prevented the victors from seizing Denmark. The desperation of Christian and the growingly suspicious activity of Sweden resulted in the peace of Lubeck (1629), by which the king of Denmark was left in possession of Jutland, Schleswig, and Holstein, but deprived of the German bishoprics which various members of his family had taken from the Catholic Church.
Following up its successes, the Catholic League prevailed upon the Emperor Ferdinand II in the same year (1629) to sign the Edict of Restitution, restoring to the Church all the property that had been secularized in violation of the peace of Augsburg of 1555. The edict was to be executed by imperial commissioners, all of whom were Catholics, and so well did they do their work that, within three years of the promulgation of the edict, Roman Catholicism in the Germanies had recovered five bishoprics, thirty Hanse towns, and nearly a hundred monasteries, to say nothing of parish churches of which the number can hardly be estimated.
So far, the religious and economic grievances against the Habsburgs had been confined mainly to Calvinists, but now the Lutheran princes were alarmed. The enforcement of the Edict of Restitution against all Protestants alike was the signal for an emphatic protest from Lutherans as well as from Calvinists. A favorable opportunity for intervention seemed to present itself to the foremost Lutheran power--Sweden. Not only were many Protestant princes in Germany in a mood to welcome foreign assistance against the Catholics, but the emperor was less able to resist invasion, since in 1630, yielding to the urgent entreaties of the Catholic League, he dismissed the plundering and ambitious Wallenstein from his service.
The king of Sweden at this time was Gustavus Adolphus (1611-1632), the grandson of that Gustavus Vasa who had established both the independence and the Lutheranism of his country. Gustavus Adolphus was one of the most attractive figures of his age--in the prime of life, tall, fair, and blue-eyed, well educated and versed in seven languages, fond of music and poetry, skilled and daring in war, impetuous, well balanced, and versatile. A rare combination of the idealist and the practical man of affairs, Gustavus Adolphus had dreamed of making Protestant Sweden the leading power in northern Europe and had vigorously set to work to achieve his ends. His determination to encircle the whole Baltic with his own territories--making it literally a Swedish lake--brought him first into conflict with Muscovy, or, as we call it today, Russia. Finland and Esthonia were occupied, and Russia agreed in 1617 to exclusion from the Baltic sea coast. Next a stubborn conflict with Poland (1621-1629) secured for Sweden the province of Livonia and the mouth of the Vistula River. Gustavus then turned his longing eyes to the Baltic coast of northern Germany, at the very time when the Edict of Restitution promised him aggrieved allies in that quarter.
[Sidenote: 3. Swedish Intervention: Gustavus Adolphus]
It was likewise at the very time when Cardinal Richelieu had crushed out all insurrection, whether Huguenot or noble, in France and was seeking some effective means of prolonging the war in the Germanies to the end that the rival Habsburgs might be irretrievably weakened and humiliated. He entered into definite alliance with Gustavus Adolphus and provided him arms and money, for the time asking only that the Protestant champion accord the liberty of Catholic worship in conquered districts.
[Sidenote: French Aid]
Gustavus Adolphus landed in Pomerania in 1630 and proceeded to occupy the chief northern fortresses and to treat for alliances with the influential Protestant electors of Brandenburg and Saxony. While Gustavus tarried at Potsdam, in protracted negotiation with the elector of Brandenburg, Tilly and the imperialists succeeded, after a long siege, in capturing the Lutheran stronghold of Magdeburg (May, 1631). The fall of the city was attended by a mad massacre of the garrison, and of armed and unarmed citizens, in streets, houses, and churches; at least 20,000 perished; wholesale plundering and a general conflagration completed the havoc. The sack of Magdeburg evoked the greatest indignation from the Lutherans. Gustavus Adolphus, now joined by the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony and by many other Protestant princes of northern Germany, advanced into Saxony, where, in September, 1631, he avenged the destruction of Magdeburg by defeating decisively the smaller army of Tilly on the Breitenfeld, near Leipzig. Then Gustavus turned southwestward, making for the Rhine valley, with the idea of forming a union with the Calvinist princes. Only the prompt protest of his powerful ally, Richelieu, prevented the rich archbishoprics of Cologne, Trier, and Mainz from passing immediately under Swedish control. Next Gustavus Adolphus turned east and invaded Bavaria. Tilly, who had reassembled his forces, failed to check the invasion and lost his life in a battle on the Lech (April, 1632). The victorious Swedish king now made ready to carry the war into the hereditary dominions of the Austrian Habsburgs. As a last resort to check the invader, the emperor recalled Wallenstein with full power over his freelance army. About the same time the emperor concluded a close alliance with his kinsman, the ambitious Philip IV of Spain.
The memorable contest between the two great generals--Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein--was brought to a tragic close in the late autumn of the same year on the fateful field of Lützen. Wallenstein was defeated, but Gustavus was killed. Although the Swedes continued the struggle, they were comparatively few in numbers and possessed no such general as their fallen king. On the other side, Wallenstein's loyalty could not be depended upon; rumors reached the ear of the emperor that his foremost general was negotiating with the Protestants to make peace on his own terms; and Wallenstein was assassinated in his camp by fanatical imperialists (February, 1634). The tragic removal of both Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus, the economic exhaustion of the whole empire, and the national desire on the part of many Protestant princes, as well as on the part of the Catholic emperor, to rid the Germanies of foreign soldiers and foreign influence--all these developments seemed to point to the possibility of concluding the third, or Swedish, period of the war, not perhaps as advantageously for the imperialist cause as had ended the Bohemian revolt or the Danish intervention, but at any rate in a spirit of reasonable compromise. In fact, in May, 1635, a treaty was signed at Prague between the emperor and such princes as were then willing to lay down their arms, whereby all the military forces in the empire were henceforth to be under the direct control of the emperor (with the exception of a contingent under the special command of the Lutheran elector of Saxony); all princely leagues within the empire were to be dissolved; mutual restoration of captured territory was to be made; and, as to the fundamental question of the ownership of ecclesiastical lands, it was settled that any such lands actually held in the year 1627, whether acquired before or after the religious peace of Augsburg of 1555, should continue so to be held for forty years or until in each case an amicable arrangement could be reached.
What wrecked the peace of Prague was not so much the disinclination of the Protestant princes of Germany to accept its terms as the policy of Cardinal Richelieu of France. Richelieu was convinced more than ever that French greatness depended upon Habsburg defeat; he would not suffer the princes to make peace with the emperor until the latter was soundly trounced and all Germany devastated; instead of supplying the Swedes and the German Protestants with assistance from behind the scenes, he now would come boldly upon the stage and engage the emperor in open combat.
[Sidenote: 4. French Intervention. Richelieu's Policy in the Germanies]
The final, or French, period of the Thirty Years' War lasted from 1635 to 1648--almost as long as the other three periods put together. Richelieu entered the war not only to humble the Austrian Habsburgs and, if possible, to wrest the valuable Rhenish province of Alsace from the Holy Roman Empire, but also to strike telling blows at the Continental supremacy of the Spanish Habsburgs, who, since 1632, had been actively helping their German kinsmen. The Spanish king, it will be remembered, still held the Belgian Netherlands, on the northern frontier of France, and Franche Comté on the east, while oft-contested Milan in northern Italy was a Spanish dependency. France was almost surrounded by Spanish possessions, and Richelieu naturally declared war against Spain as against the emperor. The wily French cardinal could count upon the Swedes and many of the German Protestants to keep the Austrian Habsburgs busily engaged and upon the assistance of the Dutch in humbling the Spaniard, for Spain had not yet formally recognized the independence of the Dutch Netherlands. Inasmuch as England was chiefly concerned with troublesome internal affairs, the enemies of France could hardly expect aid from across the Channel.
[Sidenote: Condé and Turenne]
At first, the French suffered a series of military reverses, due in large part to unpreparedness, incompetent commanders, and ill- disciplined troops. At one time it looked as if the Spaniards might capture Paris. But with unflagging zeal and patriotic devotion, Richelieu pressed on the war. He raised armies, drilled them, and dispatched them into the Netherlands, into Alsace, into Franche Comté, into northern Italy, and into Roussillon. He stirred up the Portuguese to revolt and recover their independence (1640). And Mazarin, who succeeded him in 1642, preserved his foreign policy intact. Young and brilliant generals now appeared at the head of the French forces, among whom were the dashing Prince of Condé (1621-1686), and the master strategist Turenne (1611-1675), the greatest soldier of his day. The former's victory of Rocroi (1643) dated the commencement of the supremacy of France in war, a supremacy which was retained for a century.
[Sidenote: Peace of Westphalia (1648)]
Finally, Turenne's masterly maneuvering against the Spaniards and his forcible detachment of Maximilian of Bavaria from the imperial alliance broke down effective opposition and ended the Thirty Years' War in the Germanies. The various treaties which were signed in 1648 constituted the peace of Westphalia.
The political clauses of the peace of Westphalia provided: (1) Each German state was free to make peace or war without consulting the emperor--each prince was invested with sovereign authority; (2) France received Alsace, except the free city of Strassburg, and was confirmed in the possession of the bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun; (3) Sweden was given territory in Pomerania controlling the mouth of the Oder, and the secularized bishopric of Bremen, surrounding the city of that name and dominating the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser; (4) France and Sweden received votes in the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire, with implied rights to exercise an oversight of German affairs; (5) Brandenburg secured eastern Pomerania and several bishoprics, including Magdeburg; (6) The Palatinate was divided between Maximilian of Bavaria and the son of the deposed Frederick--each bearing the title of elector; (7) Switzerland and the United Provinces (Holland) were formally recognized as independent of the empire and of Spain respectively.
The religious difficulties were settled as follows: (1) Calvinists were to share all the privileges of their Lutheran fellow-Protestants; (2) All church property was to be secured in the possession of those, whether Catholics or Protestants, who held it on 1 January, 1624; (3) An equal number of Catholic and Protestant judges were to sit in the imperial courts. Inasmuch as after 1648 there was little relative change of religion in Germany, this religious settlement was practically permanent.
[Sidenote: Evil Effects of the Thirty Years' War on Germany]
One of the most striking results of the peace of Westphalia was the completion of a long process of political disruption in the Germanies. Only the form of the Holy Roman Empire survived. The already shadowy imperial power became a mere phantom, nor was a change destined to come until, centuries later, the Prussian Hohenzollerns should replace the Austrian Habsburgs. Meanwhile the weakness of Germany enabled France to extend her northern boundaries toward the Rhine.
Far more serious than her political losses were the economic results to Germany. The Thirty Years' War left Germany almost a desert. "About two-thirds of the total population had disappeared; the misery of those that survived was piteous in the extreme. Five-sixths of the villages in the empire had been destroyed. We read of one in the Palatinate that in two years had been plundered twenty-eight times. In Saxony, packs of wolves roamed about, for in the north quite one-third of the land had gone out of cultivation, and trade had drifted into the hands of the French or Dutch. Education had almost disappeared; and the moral decline of the people was seen in the coarsening of manners and the growth of superstition, as witnessed by frequent burning of witches."
[Sidenote: Continuation of War between French Bourbons and Spanish Hapsburgs. Peace of the Pyrenees 1659]
The peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War in the Germanies, but it did not stop the bitter contest between France and Spain. Mazarin was determined to secure even greater territorial gains for his country, and, although Condé deserted to Spain, Turenne was more than a match for any commander whom the Spaniards could put in the field. Mazarin, moreover, by ceding the fortress of Dunkirk to the English, obtained aid from the veteran troops of Cromwell. It was not until 1659 that, in the celebrated treaty of the Pyrenees, peace was concluded between France and Spain. This provided: (1) France added the province of Roussillon on her southern frontier and that of Artois on the north; (2) France was recognized as protector of the duchy of Lorraine; (3) Condé was pardoned and reinstated in French service; (4) Maria Theresa, eldest daughter of the Spanish Habsburg king, Philip IV, was to marry the young French Bourbon king, Louis XIV, and, in consideration of the payment of a large dowry, was to renounce all claims to the Spanish dominions.
The treaty of the Pyrenees was the last important achievement of Cardinal Mazarin. But before he died in 1661 he had the satisfaction of seeing the triumph of those policies which he had adopted from Richelieu: the royal power firmly established within France; the Habsburgs, whether Austrian or Spanish, defeated and humiliated; the Bourbon king of France respected and feared throughout Europe.
[Sidenote: Development of International Law] [Sidenote: In Italy]
Not least among the results of the conflict between Habsburgs and Bourbons was the stimulus given to the acceptance of fixed principles of international law and of definite usages for international diplomacy. In ancient times the existence of the all-embracing Roman Empire had militated against the development of international relations as we know them to-day. In the early middle ages feudal society had left little room for diplomacy. Of course, both in ancient times and in the middle ages, there had been embassies and negotiations and treaties; but the embassies had been no more than temporary missions directed to a particular end, and there had been neither permanent diplomatic agents nor a professional diplomatic class. To the development of such a class the Italy of the fifteenth century had given the first impetus. Northern and central Italy was then filled, as we have discovered, with a large number of city-states, all struggling for political and economic mastery, all dependent for the maintenance of a "balance of power" upon alliances and counter alliances, all employing diplomacy quite as much as war in the game of peninsular politics. It was in Italy that there grew up the institution of passports, the distinction between armed forces and civilians, international comity, and in fact the very notion that states have an interest in the observance of law and order among themselves. Of special importance, in this connection, was Venice, which gradually evolved a regular system of permanent diplomats, and incidentally obliged her ambassadors to present detailed reports on foreign affairs; and, because of their commercial preeminence in the Mediterranean, the Venetians contributed a good deal to the development of rules of the sea first in time of peace, and subsequently in time of war.
[Sidenote: In Europe in Sixteenth Century]
During the sixteenth century the Italian ideas of statecraft and inter- state relations, ably championed by Machiavelli, were communicated to the nations of western Europe. Permanent embassies were established in foreign countries by the kings of Spain, Portugal, France, and England. Customs of international intercourse grew up. Diplomacy became a recognized occupation of distinguished statesmen.
[Sidenote: Thirty Years' War and International Law]
Two institutions might have thwarted or retarded the development of international law: one was the Catholic Church with its international organization and its claim to universal spiritual supremacy; the other was the Holy Roman Empire, with its claim to temporal predominance and with its insistence upon the essential inequality between itself and all other states. But the Protestant Revolt in the sixteenth century dealt a severe blow to the claim and power of the Catholic Church. And the long struggle between Bourbons and Habsburgs, culminating in the Thirty Years' War, reduced the Holy Roman Empire to a position, in theory as well as in fact, certainly no higher than that of the national monarchies of France, England, and Spain, or that of the Dutch Republic.
From the treaties of Westphalia emerged a real state-system in Europe, based on the theory of the essential equality of independent sovereign states, though admitting of the fact that there were Great Powers. Henceforth the public law of Europe was to be made by diplomats and by congresses of ambassadors. Westphalia pointed the new path.
Another aspect of international relations was emphasized in the first half of the seventeenth century. It was the Thirty Years' War, with its revolting cruelty, which brought out the contrast between the more humane practice of war as an art in Italy and the savagery which disgraced the Germanies. The brutality of the struggle turned thinkers' attention to the need of formulating rules for the protection of non- combatants in time of war, the treatment of the sick and wounded, the prohibition of wanton pillage and other horrors which shocked the awakening conscience of seventeenth-century Europe. It was the starting-point of the publication of treatises on international law.
[Sidenote: Grotius]
The first effective work, the one which was destined long to influence sovereigns and diplomats, was Grotius's On the Law of War and Peace. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) [Footnote: Known in his native country as Huig van Groot. The last years of his life he spent as ambassador of Sweden at the French court.] was a learned Dutch humanist, whose active participation in politics against the stadholder of the Netherlands and whose strong protests for religious toleration against the dominant orthodox Calvinists of his country combined to bring upon himself a sentence of life imprisonment. Immured in a Dutch fortress in 1619, he managed to escape and fled to Paris, where he prepared and in 1625 published his immortal work. On the Law of War and Peace is an exhaustive and masterly text-book--the first and one of the best of the systematic treatises on the fundamental principles of international law.
ADDITIONAL READING
HENRY IV, RICHELIEU, AND MAZARIN. Brief general accounts: H. O. Wakeman, The Ascendancy of France, 1598-1715 (1894), ch. i-vii; Mary A. Hollings, Renaissance and Reformation, 1453-1660 (1910), ch. xi, xii; J. H. Sacret, Bourbon and Vasa, 1610-1715 (1914), ch. i-vii; A. J. Grant, The French Monarchy, 1483-1789, Vol. I (1900), ch. vi-ix; G. W. Kitchin, A History of France, 3d and 4th editions (1894-1899), Vol. II, Book IV, ch. i-iii, Vol. III, Book IV, ch. iv-viii; H. T. Dyer, A History of Modern Europe from the Fall of Constantinople, 3d ed. rev. by Arthur Hassall (1901), ch. xxix-xxxv; Victor Duruy, History of Modern Times, trans. and rev. by E. A. Grosvenor (1894), ch. xvii, xviii, xx; Cambridge Modern History, Vol. II, ch. xx (by Stanley Leathes, on Henry IV), Vol. IV, ch. iv (on Richelieu), xxi (on Mazarin); Histoire générale, Vol. V, ch. vi-viii, Vol. VI, ch. i. More detailed works: Histoire de France, ed. by Ernest Lavisse, Vol. VI, Part I (1904), Livre IV (on Henry IV), Vol. VI, Part II (1905), Livres I-III (on Henry IV and Richelieu, by J. H. Mariéjol), Vol. VII, Part I (1906), Livre I (on Mazarin, by E. Lavisse); P. F. Willert, Henry of Navarre (1897), in "Heroes of the Nations" Series; C. C. Jackson, The First of the Bourbons, 2 vols. (1890); J. B. Perkins, Richelieu and the Growth of French Power (1900), in the "Heroes of the Nations" Series, and, by the same author, an admirable writer and authority on the whole period, France under Mazarin, 2 vols. (1886); Georges (Vicomte) d'Avenel, Richelieu et la monarchie absolue, 4 vols. (1884-1890), the foremost French work on the subject; Gabriel Hanotaux, Origines de l'institution des intendants de provinces (1884), a careful study of the beginnings of the office of intendant by a famous French statesman and historian; P. A. Chéruel, Histoire de France pendant la minorité de Louis XIV, 4 vols. (1879-1880), and, by the same author, Histoire de France sous le ministère de Mazarin, 1651-1661, 3 vols. (1882), a very elaborate treatment of Mazarin's public career in France; Louis Batiffol, The Century of the Renaissance in France, Eng. trans. by Elsie F. Buckley (1916), containing an excellent chapter on the French monarchy at the close of the sixteenth century.
THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR. General treatments: E. F. Henderson, A Short History of Germany, Vol. I (1902), ch. xvii, xviii, a good, short introduction; S. R. Gardiner, The Thirty Years' War (1897), in the "Epochs of Modern History" Series, the best brief survey; History of All Nations, Vol. XII, ch. iv-viii, by Martin Philippson, a well-known German historian; Cambridge Modern History, Vol. IV (1906), ch. i, iii, v-vii, xiii, xiv, xx, xxii; Histoire générale, Vol. V, ch. xii; Anton Gindely, The Thirty Years' War, trans. from the German by Andrew Ten Brook, 2 vols. (1884), a popular treatment by a recognized authority in this field, breaking off, unfortunately, in the year 1623; Gustav Droysen, Das Zeitalter des dreissigjährigen Krieges (1888) and Georg Winter, Geschichte des dreissigjährigen Krieges (1893), two bulky volumes in the Oncken Series devoted respectively to the political and military aspects of the war; Émile Charvériat, Histoire de la guerre de trente ans, 2 vols. (1878), a reliable French account of the whole struggle. On the history of the Germanies from the religious peace of Augsburg to the peace of Westphalia there is the painstaking Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Gegenreformation und des dreissigjährigen Krieges, 1555-1648, by Moritz Ritter, 3 vols. (1889-1908). For the history of Austria during the period, see Franz Kroncs, Handbuch der Geschichte Oesterreichs von der ältesten Zeit, Vol. III (1877), Books XIV-XV. For the Netherlands, with special reference to Spain's part in the war: Henri Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, Vol. IV, 1567-1648 (1911). For Bohemia: Ernest Denis, Fin de l'indépendance bohême, Vol. II (1890), and, by the same author, La Bohême depuis la Montagne-Blanche, Vol. I (1903). For Denmark and Sweden: R. N. Bain, Scandinavia, a Political History of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, from 1513 to 1900 (1905). There is a convenient biography of Gustavus Adolphus by C. R. L. Fletcher in the "Heroes of the Nations" Series (1890), and a more detailed study in German by Gustav Droysen, 2 vols. (1869-1870). On Wallenstein there are two standard German works: Leopold von Ranke, Geschichte Wallensteins, 3d ed. (1872), and Anton Gindely, Waldstein, 1625-1630, 2 vols. (1886). The best brief treatment of European international relations in the time of Richelieu and Mazarin is Emile Bourgeois, Manuel historique de politique étrangère, 4th ed., Vol. I (1906), ch. i, ii, vi. For a brief treatment of the development of international law during the period, see D. J. Hill, History of Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe, Vol. II (1906), ch. vii. The treaties of Westphalia are in the famous old compilation of Jean Dumont, Corps universel diplomatique du droit des gens, 8 vols. (1726-1731).
Chapter VII
THE GROWTH OF ABSOLUTISM IN FRANCE AND THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN BOURBONS AND HABSBURGS, 1661-1743
THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV
Upon the death of Cardinal Mazarin in 1661, the young king Louis XIV declared that he would assume personal charge of the domestic and foreign affairs of the French monarchy. From that date, throughout a long reign, Louis was in fact as well as in name ruler of the nation, and his rule, like that of Napoleon, stands out as a distinct epoch in French history.
[Sidenote: Louis XIV the Heir to Absolutist Tendencies]
Louis XIV profited by the earlier work of Henry IV, Sully, Richelieu, and Mazarin. He inherited a fairly compact state, the population of which was patriotic and loyal to the crown. Insurrections of Protestants or rebellions of the nobles were now things of the past. The Estates-General, the ancient form of representative government, had fallen into disuse and oblivion. Local administration was conducted by faithful middle-class officials, the intendants; and all powers of taxation, war, public improvements, police, and justice were centered in the hands of the king. Abroad, the rival Habsburgs had been humbled and French boundaries had been extended and French prestige heightened. Everything was in readiness for a great king to practice absolutism on a scale never before realized.
[Sidenote: Absolutism. Monarchy by Divine Right]
The theories of government upon which the absolutism of Louis XIV was based received a classic expression in a celebrated book written by Bossuet (1627-1704), a learned and upright bishop of the time. Government, according to Bossuet, [Footnote: The statements of the arguments in favor of monarchy by divine right are taken from Bossuet's famous book, La politique tirée des propres paroles de l'Ecriture Sainte.] is divinely ordained in order to enable mankind to satisfy the natural instincts of living together in organized society. Under God, monarchy is, of all forms of government, the most usual and the most ancient, and therefore the most natural: it is likewise the strongest and most efficient, therefore the best. It is analogous to the rule of a family by the father, and, like that rule, should be hereditary. Four qualities are referred by the eloquent bishop to such an hereditary monarch: (1) That he is sacred is attested by his anointing at the time of coronation by the priests of the Church--it is accordingly blasphemy and sacrilege to assail the person of the king or to conspire against him; (2) That he is to provide for the welfare of his people and watch over their every activity may be gathered from the fact that he is, in a very real sense, the father of his people, the paternal king; (3) His power is absolute and autocratic, and for its exercise he is accountable to God alone--no man on earth may rightfully resist the royal commands, and the only recourse for subjects against an evil king is to pray God that his heart be changed; (4) Greater reason is given to a king than to any one else--the king is an earthly image of God's majesty, and it is wrong, therefore, to look upon him as a mere man. The king is a public person and in him the whole nation is embodied. "As in God are united all perfection and every virtue, so all the power of all the individuals in a community is united in the person of the king."
[Sidenote: Louis XIV]
Such was the theory of what is called divine-right monarchy or absolutism. It must be remembered that it had been gaining ground during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, until it was accepted practically by all the French people as well as by most of their Continental neighbors. Even in England, as we shall presently see,[Footnote: See below, pp. 263 ff.] the Stuart kings attempted, for a time with success, to assert and maintain the doctrine. It was a political idea as popular in the seventeenth century as that of democracy is to-day. And Louis XIV was its foremost personification. Suave, dignified, elegant in manners and speech, the French king played his part well; he appeared to have been born and divinely appointed to the kingly calling.
For a king, Louis worked hard. He was conscientious and painstaking. Day after day he reviewed the details of administration. Over all things he had a watchful eye. Systematically he practiced what he termed the "trade of a king." "One reigns by work and for work," he wrote his grandson.
No prince was more fortunate than Louis XIV in his personal advisers and lieutenants. Not only were his praises proclaimed by the silver- tongued Bossuet, but he was served by such men as Colbert, the financier and reformer; Louvois, the military organizer; Vauban, the master builder of fortifications; Condé and Turenne, unconquerable generals; and by a host of literary lights, whom he patronized and pensioned, and who cast about his person a glamour of renown. Louis was hailed as the "Grand Monarch," and his age was appropriately designated the Age of Louis the Fourteenth.
[Sidenote: Versailles and the Court of Louis XIV]
At Versailles, some twelve miles from Paris, in the midst of what had been a sandy waste, the Grand Monarch erected those stately palaces, with their lavish furnishings, and broad parks and great groves and myriads of delightful fountains, which became Europe's pleasure center. Thither were drawn the French nobility, who, if shorn of all political power, were now exempted from disagreeable taxes and exalted as essential parts of a magnificent social pageant. The king must have noblemen as valets-de-chambre, as masters of the wardrobe or of the chase or of the revels. Only a nobleman was fit to comb the royal hair or to dry off the king after a bath. The nobles became, like so many chandeliers, mere decorations for the palace. Thus, about Versailles gathered the court of France, and the leaders of fashion met those of brains.
[Sidenote: "The Age of Louis XIV"]
It was a time when French manners, dress, speech, art, literature, and science were adopted as the models and property of civilized Europe. Corneille (1606-1684), the father of the French stage; Molière (1622- 1673), the greatest of French dramatists; Racine (1639-1699), the polished, formal playwright; Madame de Sévigné (1626-1696), the brilliant and witty authoress of memoirs; La Fontaine (1621-1695), the popular rhymer of whimsical fables and teller of scandalous tales; and many another graced the court of Versailles and tasted the royal bounty. French became the language of fashion as well as of diplomacy-- a position it has ever since maintained.
[Sidenote: "Rule of the Robe"]
While the court of Louis XIV was thus the focal point of French--almost of European--life, the professional and mercantile classes, who constituted the Third Estate, enjoyed comparative security and prosperity and under the king held all of the important offices of actual administration. Because of the judicial offices which the middle class filled, the government was popularly styled the "rule of the robe."
[Sidenote: "Colbert"]
Colbert (1619-1683), one of Louis's greatest ministers, was the son of a merchant, and was intensely interested in the welfare of the class to which he belonged. Installed in office through the favor of Mazarin, he was successively named, after the cardinal's death, superintendent of public works, controller-general of finances, minister of marine, of commerce and agriculture, and of the colonies. In short, until his death in 1683, he exerted power in every department of government except that of war. Although he never possessed the absolute personal authority which marked the ministries of Richelieu and Mazarin, being plainly subservient to the king's commands, nevertheless he enjoyed for many years the royal favor and by incessant toil succeeded in accomplishing a good deal for the material prosperity of France. In many respects his policies and achievements resembled Sully's.
[Sidenote: Attempted Financial Reform]
First, financial reform claimed all the energies of Colbert. Under the government of Richelieu, and more particularly under that of Mazarin, the hard savings of Sully had been squandered, enormous sums had been granted to favorites, and the ever-increasing noble class had been exempted from taxation, an evil system of tax-gathering, called "farming the taxes," [Footnote: "Farming the taxes," that is, intrusting the collection of taxes to individuals or corporations that squeezed as much money as they could from the taxpayers and kept for themselves what they collected over and above the lump sum due the government.] had grown up, and the weight of the financial burden had fallen almost exclusively upon the wretched peasantry. Colbert sternly and fearlessly set about his task. He appointed agents whose honesty he could trust and reformed many of the abuses in tax-collecting. While he was unable to impose the direct land tax--the taille--upon the privileged nobility, he stoutly resisted every attempt further to augment the number of exemptions, and actually lowered this direct tax upon the peasantry by substituting indirect taxes, or customs duties, which would in some degree affect all the people. To lighten the burden of the country-folk, he sought to promote agriculture. He provided that no farmers' tools might be seized for debt. He encouraged the breeding of horses and cattle. He improved the roads and other means of interior communication. The great canal of Languedoc, joining the Mediterranean with the Garonne River and thence with the Atlantic, was planned and constructed under his patronage. As far as possible, the duties on the passage of agricultural produce from province to province were equalized.
[Sidenote: Colbert and French Merchantilism]
In forwarding what he believed to be his own class interests, Colbert was especially zealous. Manufactures and commerce were fostered in every way he could devise. New industries were established, inventors protected, workmen invited from foreign countries, native workmen prohibited to leave France. A heavy tariff was placed upon foreign imports in order to protect "infant industries" and increase the gain of French manufacturers and traders. Liberal bounties were allowed to French ships engaged in commerce, and foreign ships were compelled to pay heavy tonnage duties for using French ports. And along with the protective tariff and subsidizing of the merchant marine, went other pet policies of mercantilism, [Footnote: See above, pp. 63 f.] such as measures to prevent the exportation of precious metals from France, to encourage corporations and monopolies, and to extend minute governmental supervision over the manufacture, quality, quantity, and sale of all commodities. What advantages accrued from Colbert's efforts in this direction were more than offset by the unfortunate fact that the mercantile class was unduly enriched at the expense of other and numerically larger classes in the community, and that the centralized monarchy, in which the people had no part, proved itself unfit, in the long run, to oversee the details of business with wisdom or honesty.
[Sidenote: Colbert's "World Policy"]
Stimulation of industry and commerce has usually necessitated the creation of a protecting navy. Colbert appreciated the requirement and hastened to fulfill it. He reconstructed the docks and arsenal of Toulon and established great ship-yards at Rochefort, Calais, Brest, and Havre. He fitted out a large royal navy that could compare favorably with that of England or Spain or Holland. To supply it with recruits he drafted seamen from the maritime provinces and resorted to the use of criminals, who were often chained to the galleys like so many slaves of the new industry.
Likewise, the adoption of the mercantile policy seemed to demand the acquisition of a colonial empire, in which the mother-country should enjoy a trade monopoly. So Colbert became a vigorous colonial minister. He purchased Martinique and Guadeloupe in the West Indies, encouraged settlements in San Domingo, in Canada, and in Louisiana, and set up important posts in India, in Senegal, and in Madagascar. France, under Colbert, became a serious colonial competitor with her older European rivals.
Colbert was essentially a financier and economist. But to the arts of peace, which adorned the reign of Louis XIV, he was a potent contributor. He strengthened the French Academy, which had been founded by Richelieu, and himself established the Academy of Sciences, now called the Institute of France, and the great astronomical observatory at Paris. He pensioned many writers, and attracted foreign artists and scientists to France. Many buildings and triumphal arches were erected under his patronage.
[Sidenote: Louvois and French Militarism under Louis XIV]
In the arts of war, Louis XIV possessed an equally able and hard- working assistant. Louvois (1641-1691) was one of the greatest war ministers that the world has ever seen. He recruited and supported the largest and finest standing army of his day. He introduced severe regulations and discipline. He prescribed, for the first time in history, a distinctive military uniform and introduced the custom of marching in step. Under his supervision, camp life was placed upon a sanitary basis. And under his influence, promotion in the service no longer depended primarily on social position but upon merit as well. In Vauban (1633-1707), Louvois had the greatest military engineer in history--for it was Vauban who built those rows of superb fortifications on the northern and eastern frontiers of France. In Condé and Turenne, moreover, Louvois had first-class generals who could give immediate effect to his reforms and policies.
[Sidenote: Deceptive Character of the Glamour of the Age of Louis XIV]
Thus was the Grand Monarch well and faithfully served. Yet the outward show and glamour of his reign were very deceptive of the true internal conditions. Colbert tried to do too many things, with the result that his plans repeatedly miscarried. The nobles became more indolent, wasteful, and pleasure-loving, and the middle class more selfish and more devoted to their own class interests, while the lot of the peasantry,--the bulk of the nation,--despite the spasmodic efforts of the paternal government, steadily grew worse under the unrelieved burden of taxation. Then, too, the king was extravagant in maintaining his mistresses, his court, and his favorites. His excessive vanity had to be appeased by expensive entertainment and show. He preferred the spectacular but woeful feats of arms to the less pretentious but more solid triumphs of peace. Indeed, in course of time, Colbert found his influence with the king waning before that of Louvois, and when he died it was with the bitter thought that his financial retrenchment had been in vain, that his husbanded resources were being rapidly dissipated in foreign war. It was Louis's wars that deprived his reign of true grandeur and paved the way for future disaster.
[Sidenote: Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 1685]
Before turning our attention to the foreign wars of Louis XIV, mention must be made of another blot on his reign. It was Louis XIV who renewed the persecution of the Protestants. He was moved alike by the absolutist's desire to secure complete uniformity throughout France and by the penitent's religious fervor to make amends for earlier scandals of his private life. For a time he contented himself with so-called dragonnades--quartering licentious soldiers upon the Huguenots--but at length in 1685 he formally revoked the Edict of Nantes. France, which for almost a century had led Europe in the principle and practice of religious toleration, was henceforth reactionary. Huguenots were still granted liberty of conscience, but were denied freedom of worship and deprived of all civil rights in the kingdom. The immediate effect of this arbitrary and mistaken action was the emigration of large numbers of industrious and valuable citizens, who added materially to the political and economic life of England, Holland, and Prussia, the chief Protestant foes of France.
EXTENSION OF FRENCH FRONTIERS
Louis XIV was not a soldier himself. He never appeared in military uniform or rode at the head of his troops. What he lacked, however, in personal genius as a great military commander, he compensated for in a genuine fondness for war and in remarkable personal gifts of diplomacy. He was one of the greatest diplomats of his age, and, as we have seen, he possessed large loyal armies and able generals that he could employ in prosecuting the traditional foreign policy of France.
[Sidenote: Traditional Foreign Policy of France]
This foreign policy, which had been pursued by Francis I, Henry II, Henry IV, Richelieu, and Mazarin, had for its goal the humiliation of the powerful Habsburgs, whether of Austria or of Spain. Although France had gained materially at their expense in the treaties of Westphalia and of the Pyrenees, much remained to be done by Louis XIV. When the Grand Monarch assumed direct control of affairs in 1661, the Spanish Habsburgs still ruled not only the peninsular kingdom south of France, but the Belgian Netherlands to the north, Franche Comte to the east, and Milan in northern Italy, while their kinsmen of Austria maintained shadowy imperial government over the rich Rhenish provinces on the northeastern boundary of France. France was still almost completely encircled by Habsburg holdings.
[Sidebar: Doctrine of "Natural Boundaries"]
To justify his subsequent aggressions, Louis XIV propounded the doctrine of "natural boundaries." Every country, he maintained, should secure such frontiers as nature had obviously provided--mountains, lakes, or rivers; and France was naturally provided with the frontiers of ancient Gaul--the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine River, and the Ocean. Any foreign monarch or state that claimed power within such frontiers was an interloper and should be expelled.
[Sidenote: The Wars of Louis XIV]
For many years, and in three great wars, Louis XIV endeavored, with some success, to reach the Rhine. These three wars--the War of Devolution, the Dutch War, and the War of the League of Augsburg--we shall now discuss. A fourth great war, directed toward the acquisition of the Spanish throne by the Bourbon family, will be treated separately on account of the wide and varied interests involved.
[Sidenote: The "War of Devolution"]
The War of Devolution was an attempt of Louis to gain the Spanish or Belgian Netherlands. It will be remembered that in accordance with the peace of the Pyrenees, Louis had married Maria Theresa, the eldest daughter of Philip IV of Spain. Now by a subsequent marriage Philip IV had had a son, a weak-bodied, half-witted prince, who came to the throne in 1665 as Charles II. Louis XIV at once took advantage of this turn of affairs to assert in behalf of his wife a claim to a portion of the Spanish inheritance. The claim was based on a curious custom which had prevailed in the inheritance of private property in the Netherlands, to the effect that children of a first marriage should inherit to the exclusion of those of a subsequent marriage. Louis insisted that this custom, called "devolution," should be applied not only to private property but also to sovereignty and that his wife should be recognized, therefore, as sovereign of the Belgian Netherlands. In reality the claim was a pure invention, but the French king thought it would be a sufficient apology for the robbery of a weak brother-in-law.
Before opening hostilities, Louis XIV made use of his diplomatic wiles in order to guard himself against assistance which other states might render to Spain. In the first place, he obtained promises of friendly neutrality from Holland, Sweden, and the Protestant states of Germany which had been allied with France during the Thirty Years' War. In the second place, he threatened to stir up another civil war in the Holy Roman Empire if the Austrian Habsburgs should help their Spanish kinsman. Finally, he had no fear of England because that country was in the midst of a peculiarly bitter trade war with the Dutch. [Footnote: It was on the eve of this second trade war between England and Holland (1665-1667) that the English took New Amsterdam from the Dutch (1664) and rechristened it New York, and during this struggle that the remarkable Dutch admiral, De Ruyter, burned the English fleet and shipping on the Thames (June, 1667).]
[Sidenote: The "Balance of Power"]
The War of Devolution lasted from 1667 to 1668. The well-disciplined and splendidly generaled armies of Louis XIV had no difficulty in occupying the border fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands. The whole territory would undoubtedly have fallen to France, had not a change unexpectedly occurred in international affairs. The trade war between England and Holland came to a speedy end, and the two former rivals now joined with Sweden in forming the Triple Alliance to arrest the war and to put a stop to the French advance. The "balance of power" demanded, said the allies, that the other European states should combine in order to prevent any one state from becoming too powerful. This plea for the "balance of power" was the reply to the French king's plea for "natural boundaries."
[Sidenote: Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1668]
The threats of the Triple Alliance caused Louis XIV to negotiate the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, by which Spain surrendered to France an important section of territory in Flanders, including the fortified cities of Charleroi, Tournai, and Lille, but still retained the greater part of the Belgian Netherlands. The taste of the Grand Monarch was thereby whetted, but his appetite hardly appeased.
[Sidenote: Franco-Dutch Rivalry]
Louis blamed the Dutch for his rebuff. He was thoroughly alive to the fact that Holland would never take kindly to having powerful France as a near neighbor, and that French acquisition of the Belgian Netherlands, therefore, would always be opposed by the Dutch. Nor were wounded vanity and political considerations the only motives for the Grand Monarch's second war, that against the Dutch. France, as well as England, was now becoming a commercial and colonial rival of Holland, and it seemed both to Louis XIV and to Colbert that the French middle class would be greatly benefited by breaking the trade monopolies of the Dutch. Louis's second war was quite as much a trade war as a political conflict.
[Sidenote: Civil Strife in Holland]
First, Louis bent his energies to breaking up the Triple Alliance and isolating Holland. He took advantage of the political situation in England to arrange (1670) the secret treaty of Dover with Charles II, the king of that country: in return for a large pension, which should free him from reliance upon Parliament, the English king undertook to declare himself a Roman Catholic and to withdraw from the Triple Alliance. Liberal pensions likewise bought off the Swedish government. It seemed now as if Holland, alone and friendless, would have to endure a war with her powerful enemy. Nor was Holland in shape for a successful resistance. Ever since she had gained formal recognition of her independence (1648), she had been torn by civil strife. On one side, the head of the Orange family, who bore the title of stadholder, supported by the country districts, the nobles, the Calvinistic clergy, and the peasantry, hoped to consolidate the state and to establish an hereditary monarchy. On the other side, the aristocratic burghers and religious liberals, the townsfolk generally, found an able leader in the celebrated Grand Pensionary, John DeWitt (1625-1672), who sought to preserve the republic and the rights of the several provinces. For over twenty years, the latter party was in power, but as the young prince of Orange, William III, grew to maturity, signs were not lacking of a reaction in favor of his party.
[Sidenote: The Dutch War]
Under these circumstances, Louis XIV declared war against Holland in 1672. French troops at once occupied Lorraine on the pretext that its duke was plotting with the Dutch, and thence, proceeding down the Rhine, past Cologne, invaded Holland and threatened the prosperous city of Amsterdam. The Dutch people, in a frenzy of despair, murdered John DeWitt, whom they unjustly blamed for their reverses; and, at the order of the young William III, who now assumed supreme command, they cut the dykes and flooded a large part of northern Holland. The same expedient which had enabled them to expel the Spaniards in the War of Independence now stayed the victorious advance of the French.
The refusal of Louis XIV to accept the advantageous terms of peace offered by the Dutch aroused general apprehension throughout Europe. The Emperor Leopold and the Great Elector of Brandenburg made an offensive alliance with Holland, which subsequently was joined by Spain and several German states. The general struggle, thus precipitated, continued indeed with success for France. Turenne, by a brilliant victory, compelled the Great Elector to make peace. The emperor was defeated. The war was carried into the Spanish Netherlands and Franche Comté.
[Sidenote: Treaty of Nijmwegen, 1678]
But when at length the English Parliament compelled Charles II to adhere to the general anti-French alliance, Louis XIV thought it was time to make peace. As events proved, it was not Holland but Spain that had to pay the penalties of Louis's second war. By the treaty of Nijmwegen, the former lost nothing, while the latter ceded to France the long-coveted province of Franche Comté and several strong fortresses in the Belgian Netherlands. France, moreover, continued to occupy the duchy of Lorraine.
[Sidenote: Effects of the Dutch War on France]
Thus, if Louis XIV had failed to punish the insolence of the Dutch, he had at least succeeded in extending the French frontiers one stage nearer the Rhine. He had become the greatest and most-feared monarch in Europe. Yet for these gains France paid heavily. The border provinces had been wasted by war. The treasury was empty, and the necessity of negotiating loans and increasing taxes put Colbert in despair. Turenne, the best general, had been killed late in the contest, and Condé, on account of ill health, was obliged to withdraw from active service.
Yet at the darker side of the picture, the Grand Monarch refused to look. He was puffed up with pride by his successes in war and diplomacy. Like many another vain, ambitious ruler, he felt that what economic grievances or social discontent might exist within his country could readily be forgotten or obscured in a blaze of foreign glory--in the splendor of ambassadors, the glint and din of arms, the grim shedding of human blood. Having picked the sanguinary path, and at first found pleasure therein, the Grand Monarch pursued it to an end bitter for his family and tragic for his people.
[Sidenote: The "Chambers of Reunion" and Further French Annexations]
No sooner was the Dutch War concluded than Louis XIV set out by a policy of trickery and diplomacy further to augment the French territories. The cessions, which the treaties of Westphalia and Nijmwegen guaranteed to France, had been made "with their dependencies." It now occurred to Louis that doubtless in the old feudal days of the middle ages or early modern times some, if not all, of his new acquisitions had possessed feudal suzerainty over other towns or territories not yet incorporated into France. Although in most cases such ancient feudal ties had practically lapsed by the close of the seventeenth century, nevertheless the French king decided to reinvoke them in order, if possible, to add to his holdings. He accordingly constituted special courts, called "Chambers of Reunion," composed of his own obedient judges, who were to decide what districts by right of ancient feudal usage should be annexed. So painstaking and minute were the investigations of these Chambers of Reunion that they adjudged to their own country, France, no less than twenty important towns of the Holy Roman Empire, including Luxemburg and Strassburg. Nothing seemed to prevent the prompt execution of these judgments by the French king. He had kept his army on a war footing. The king of England was again in his pay and his alliance. The emperor was hard pressed by an invasion of the Ottoman Turks. Armed imperial resistance at Strassburg was quickly overcome (1681), and Vauban, the great engineer, proceeded to make that city the chief French fortress upon the Rhine. A weak effort of the Spanish monarch to protect Luxemburg from French aggression was doomed to dismal failure (1684).
[Sidenote: War of the League of Augsburg or of the Palatinate]
Alarmed by the steady advance of French power, the Emperor Leopold in 1686 succeeded in forming the League of Augsburg with Spain, Sweden, and several German princes, in order to preserve the territorial integrity of the Holy Roman Empire. Nor was it long before the League of Augsburg was called upon to resist further encroachments of the French king. In 1688 Louis dispatched a large army into the Rhenish Palatinate to enforce a preposterous claim which he had advanced to that valuable district. The war which resulted was Louis's third struggle, and has been variously styled the War of the League of Augsburg or the War of the Palatinate. In America, where it was to be paralleled by an opening conflict between French and English colonists, it has been known as King William's War.
[Sidenote: William III, Stadholder of Holland and King of England]
In his first two wars, Louis XIV could count upon the neutrality, if not the friendly aid, of the English. Their king was dependent upon him for financial support in maintaining an absolutist government. Their influential commercial and trading classes, who still suffered more from Dutch than from French rivalry, displayed no anxiety to mix unduly in the dynastic conflicts on the Continent. Louis had an idea that he could count upon the continuation of the same English policy; he was certainly on good terms with the English king, James II (1685-1688). But the deciding factor in England and in the war was destined to be not the subservient James II but the implacable William III. This William III, [Footnote: William III (1650-1702), Dutch stadholder in 1672 and British king in 1689.] as stadholder of Holland, had long been a stubborn opponent of Louis XIV on the Continent; he had repeatedly displayed his ability as a warrior and as a cool, crafty schemer. Through his marriage with the princess Mary, elder daughter of James II, he now managed adroitly to ingratiate himself with the Protestant, parliamentary, and commercial parties in England that were opposing the Catholic, absolutist, and tyrannical policies of James.
We shall presently see that the English Revolution of 1688, which drove James II into exile, was a decisive step in the establishment of constitutional government in England. It was likewise of supreme importance in its effects upon the foreign policy of Louis XIV, for it called to the English throne the son-in-law of James, William III, the stadholder of Holland and arch enemy of the French king.
[Sidenote: Beginning of a new Hundred Years' War between France and England]
England, under the guidance of her new sovereign, promptly joined the League of Augsburg, and declared war against France. Trade rivalries between Holland and England were in large part composed, and the colonial empires of the two states, now united under a joint ruler, naturally came into conflict with the colonial empire of France. Thus, in addition to the difficulties which the Bourbons encountered in promoting their dynastic interests on the continent of Europe, they were henceforth confronted by a vast colonial and commercial struggle with England. It was the beginning of a Hundred Years' War that was to be fought for the mastery of India and America.
Louis XIV never seemed to appreciate the importance of the colonial side of the contest. He was too much engrossed in his ambition of stretching French boundaries to the Rhine. So in discussing the War of the League of Augsburg as well as the subsequent War of the Spanish Succession, we shall devote our attention in this chapter primarily to the European and dynastic elements, reserving the account of the parallel colonial struggle to a later chapter on the "World Conflict of France and Great Britain."
The War of the League of Augsburg, Louis' third war, lasted from 1689 to 1697. Notwithstanding the loss of Turenne and Condé, the splendidly organized French armies were able to hold the allies at bay and to save their country from invasion. They even won several victories on the frontier. But on the sea, the struggle was less successful for Louis, and a French expedition to Ireland in favor of James II proved disastrous. After many years of strife, ruinous to all the combatants, the Grand Monarch sued for peace.
[Sidenote: The Treaty of Ryswick, 1697]
By the treaty of Ryswick, which concluded the War of the League of Augsburg, Louis XIV (1) surrendered nearly all the places adjudged to him by the Chambers of Reunion, except Strassburg; (2) allowed the Dutch to garrison the chief fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands as a "barrier" against French aggression; (3) granted the Dutch a favorable commercial treaty; (4) restored Lorraine to its duke; (5) abandoned his claim to the Palatinate; (6) acknowledged William III as king of England and promised to support no attempt against his throne. Thus, the French king lost no territory,--in fact, he obtained full recognition of his ownership of the whole province of Alsace,--but his reputation and vanity had been uncomfortably wounded.
THE WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION
One of the main reasons that prompted Louis XIV to sue for peace and to abandon his claims on Lorraine and the Palatinate was the rapid physical decline of the inglorious Spanish monarch, Charles II, of whose enormous possessions the French king hoped by diplomacy and intrigue to secure valuable portions.
[Sidenote: The Spanish Inheritance]
Spain was still a great power. Under its crown were gathered not only the ancient kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre in the Spanish peninsula, but the greater part of the Belgian Netherlands, and in Italy the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the duchy of Milan, and the control of Tuscany, as well as the huge colonial empire in America and the Philippines. At the time when kings were absolute rulers and reckoned their territories as personal possessions, much depended upon the royal succession.
[Sidenote: The Spanish Succession]
Now it happened that the Spanish Habsburgs were dying out in the male line. Charles II was himself without children or brothers. Of his sisters, the elder was the wife of Louis XIV and the younger was married to the Emperor Leopold, the heir of the Austrian Habsburgs. Louis XIV had renounced by the peace of the Pyrenees (1659) all claims to the Spanish throne on condition that a large dowry be paid him, but the impoverished state of the Spanish exchequer had prevented the payment of the dowry. Louis, therefore, might lay claim to the whole inheritance of Charles II and entertain the hope of seeing the Bourbons supplant the Habsburgs in some of the fairest lands of Christendom. In opposition to the French contention, the emperor was properly moved by family pride to put forth the claim of his wife and that of himself as the nearest male relative of the Spanish king. If the contention of Leopold were sustained, a single Habsburg ruler might once more unite an empire as vast as that which the Emperor Charles V had once ruled. On the other side, if the ambition of Louis XIV were realized, a new and formidable Bourbon empire would be erected. In either case the European "balance of power" would be destroyed.
[Sidenote: Commercial and Colonial Complications]
Bound up with the political problem in Europe were grave commercial and colonial questions. According to the mercantilist theories that flourished throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, every country which possessed colonies should reserve trade privileges with them exclusively to its own citizens. So long as France and Spain were separate and each was only moderately powerful, their commercial rivals, notably England and Holland, might hope to gain special trade- concessions from time to time in French or Spanish colonies. But once the colonial empires of France and Spain were united under a joint ruler, such a vast monopoly would be created as would effectually prevent the expansion of English or Dutch commerce while it heightened the economic prosperity of the Bourbon subjects.
[Sidenote: Attempts to Partition the Spanish Inheritance]
It was natural, therefore, that William III, as stadholder of Holland and king of England, should hold the balance of power between the Austrian Habsburgs and the French Bourbons. Both the claimants appreciated this fact and understood that neither would be allowed peacefully to appropriate the entire Spanish inheritance. In fact, several "partition treaties" were patched up between Louis and William III, with a view to maintaining the balance of power and preventing either France or Austria from unduly increasing its power. But flaws were repeatedly found in the treaties, and, as time went on, the problem grew more vexatious. After the conclusion of the peace of Ryswick, Louis XIV was absorbed in the game of dividing the property of the dying Spanish king. One of the very greatest triumphs of Louis' diplomatic art was the way in which he ingratiated himself in Spanish favor. It must be remembered that it was Spain which the Grand Monarch had attacked and despoiled in his earlier wars of aggrandizement, and neither the Spanish court nor the Spanish people could have many patriotic motives for loving him. Yet such was his tact and his finesse that within three years after the treaty of Ryswick he had secured the respect of the feeble Charles II and the gratitude of the Spanish people.
[Sidenote: Will of Charles II of Spain in Favor of the French Bourbons]
A month before his pitiful death (1700), Charles II, the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, summoned all his strength and dictated a will that awarded his whole inheritance to Philip of Anjou, the grandson of Louis XIV, with the resolute proviso that under no circumstances should the Spanish possessions be dismembered. When the news reached Versailles, the Grand Monarch hesitated. He knew that acceptance meant war at least with Austria, probably with England. Perhaps he thought of the wretched condition into which his other wars had plunged his people.
[Sidenote: Acceptance of the Will by Louis XIV]
Hesitation was but an interlude. Ambition triumphed over fear, and the glory of the royal family over the welfare of France. In the great hall of mirrors at Versailles, the Grand Monarch heralded his grandson as Philip V, the first Bourbon king of Spain. And when Philip, left for Madrid, his now aged grandfather kissed him, and the Spanish ambassador exultantly declared that "the Pyrenees no longer exist."
Anticipating the inevitable outbreak of hostilities, Louis proceeded to violate the treaty of Ryswick by seizing the "barrier" fortresses from the Dutch and by recognizing the son of James II as king of England. He then made hasty alliances with Bavaria and Savoy, and called out the combined armies of France and Spain.
[Sidenote: The Grand Alliance against the Bourbons]
Meanwhile, William III and the Emperor Leopold formed the Grand Alliance, to which at first England, Holland, Austria, and the German electors of Brandenburg-Prussia, Hanover, and the Palatinate adhered. Subsequently, Portugal, by means of a favorable commercial treaty with England,[Footnote: The "Methuen Treaty" (1703).] was induced to join the alliance, and the duke of Savoy abandoned France in favor of Austria with the understanding that his country should be recognized as a kingdom. The allies demanded that the Spanish crown should pass to the Archduke Charles, the grandson of the emperor, that Spanish trade monopolies should be broken, and that the power of the French king should be curtailed.
[Sidenote: The War of the Spanish Succession]
The War of the Spanish Succession--the fourth and final war of Louis XIV--lasted from 1702 to 1713. Although William III died at its very commencement, he was certain that it would be vigorously pushed by the English government of his sister-in-law, Queen Anne (1702-1714). The bitter struggle on the high seas and in the colonies, where it was known as Queen Anne's War, will be treated in another place. [Footnote: See below, p. 308.] The military campaigns in Europe were on a larger scale than had hitherto been known. Fighting was carried on in the Netherlands, in the southern Germanies, in Italy, and in Spain.
The tide of war turned steadily for several years against the Bourbons. The allies possessed the ablest generals of the time in the duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), the conscientious self-possessed English commander, and in the skillful and daring Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663- 1736). The great battle of Blenheim (1704) drove the French from the Holy Roman Empire, and the capture of Gibraltar (1704) gave England a foothold in Spain and a naval base for the Mediterranean. Prince Eugene crowded the French out of Italy (1706); and by the victories of Ramillies (1706), Oudenarde (1708), and Malplaquet (1709), Marlborough cleared the Netherlands. On land and sea one reverse followed another. The allies at length were advancing on French soil. It appeared inevitable that they would settle peace at Paris on their own terms.
Then it was that Louis XIV displayed an energy and devotion worthy of a better cause. He appealed straight to the patriotism of his people. He set an example of untiring application to toil. Nor was he disappointed in his expectations. New recruits hurried to the front; rich and poor poured in their contributions; a supreme effort was made to stay the advancing enemy.
The fact that Louis XIV was not worse punished was due to this remarkable uprising of the French and Spanish nations and likewise to dissensions among the allies. A change of ministry in England led to the disgrace and retirement of the duke of Marlborough and made that country lukewarm in prosecuting the war. Then, too, the unexpected accession of the Archduke Charles to the imperial and Austrian thrones (1711) now rendered the claims of the allies' candidate for the Spanish throne as menacing to the European balance of power as would be the recognition of the French claimant, Philip of Bourbon.
These circumstances made possible the conclusion of the peace of Utrecht, with the following major provisions:
[Sidenote: The Peace of Utrecht 1713-1714]
(1) Philip V, grandson of Louis XIV, was acknowledged king of Spain and the Indies, on condition that the crowns of France and Spain should never be united. (2) The Austrian Habsburgs were indemnified by securing Naples, Sardinia, [Footnote: By the treaty of London (1720), Austria exchanged Sardinia for Sicily.] Milan, and the Belgian Netherlands. The last-named, which had been called the Spanish Netherlands since the days of Philip II, were henceforth for a century styled the Austrian Netherlands.
(3) England received the lion's share of the spoils. She obtained Newfoundland, Acadia (Nova Scotia), and Hudson Bay from France, and Gibraltar and Minorca from Spain. She also secured a preferential tariff for her imports into the great port of Cadiz, the monopoly of the slave trade, and the right of sending one ship of merchandise a year to the Spanish colonies. France promised not to assist the Stuarts in their attempts to regain the English throne.
(4) The Dutch recovered the "barrier" fortresses and for garrisoning them were promised financial aid by Austria. The Dutch were also allowed to establish a trade monopoly on the River Scheldt.
(5) The elector of Brandenburg was acknowledged king of Prussia, an important step In the fortunes of the Hohenzollern family which at the present time reigns in Germany.
(6) The duchy of Savoy was recognized similarly as a kingdom and was given the island of Sicily. [Footnote: The title of king was recognized by the emperor only in 1720, when Savoy exchanged Sicily for Sardinia. Henceforth the kingdom of Savoy was usually referred to as the kingdom of Sardinia.] From the house of Savoy has descended the reigning sovereign of present-day Italy.
[Sidenote: Significance of the Settlement of Utrecht]
The peace of Utrecht marked the cessation of a long conflict between Spanish Habsburgs and French Bourbons. For nearly a century thereafter both France and Spain pursued similar foreign policies for the common interests of the Bourbon family. Bourbon sovereigns have continued, with few interruptions, to reign in Spain to the present moment.
The Habsburg influence, however, remained paramount in Austria, in the Holy Roman Empire, in Italy, and in the Belgian Netherlands. It was against this predominance that the Bourbons were to direct their dynastic policies throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century.
The peace of Utrecht likewise marked the rise of English power upon the seas and the gradual elimination of France as a successful competitor in the race for colonial mastery. Two states also came into prominence upon the continent of Europe--Prussia and Savoy--about which the new German Empire and the unified Italian Kingdom were respectively to be builded.
[Sidenote: Last Years of the Grand Monarch]
While France was shorn of none of her European conquests, nevertheless the War of the Spanish Succession was exceedingly disastrous for that country. In its wake came famine and pestilence, excessive imposts and taxes, official debasement of the currency, and bankruptcy--a long line of social and economic disorders. Louis XIV survived the treaty of Utrecht but two years, and to such depths had his prestige and glory fallen among his own people, that his corpse, as it passed along the royal road to the stately tombs of the French kings at St. Denis, "was saluted by the curses of a noisy crowd sitting in the wine-rooms, celebrating his death by drinking more than their fill as a compensation for having suffered too much from hunger during his lifetime. Such was the coarse but true epitaph which popular opinion accorded to the Grand Monarch."
[Sidenote: Misgovernment of France during Minority of Louis XV]
Nor had the immediate future much better things in store for exhausted France. The successor upon the absolutist throne was Louis XV, great- grandson of Louis XIV and a boy of five years of age, who did not undertake to exercise personal power until near the middle of the eighteenth century. In the meantime the country was governed for about eight years by the king's uncle, the duke of Orleans, and then for twenty years by Cardinal Fleury.
[Sidenote: John Law]
Orleans loved pleasure and gave himself to a life of debauchery; he cared little for the boy-king, whose education and training he grievously neglected. His foreign policy was weak and vacillating, and his several efforts to reform abuses in the political and economic institutions of Louis XIV invariably ended in failure. It was while experimenting with the disorganized finances that he was duped by a Scotch adventurer and promoter, a certain John Law (1671-1729). Law had an idea that a gigantic corporation might be formed for French colonial trade, [Footnote: Law's corporation was actually important in the development of Louisiana.] shares might be widely sold throughout the country, and the proceeds therefrom utilized to wipe out the public debt. Orleans accepted the scheme and for a while the country went mad with the fever of speculation. In due time, however, the stock was discovered to be worthless, the bubble burst, and a terrible panic ensued. The net result was increased misery for the nation.
[Sidenote: Fleury and the War of the Polish Election]
The little sense which Orleans possessed was sufficient to keep him out of foreign war [Footnote: France was at peace throughout his regency, except for a brief time (1719-1720) when Orleans joined the British government in preventing his Spanish cousin, Philip V, from upsetting the treaty of Utrecht.] but even that was lacking to his successor, Cardinal Fleury. Fleury was dragged into a war (1733-1738) with Austria and Russia over the election of a Polish king. The allies supported the elector of Saxony; France supported a Pole, the father-in-law of Louis XV, Stanislaus Leszczinski. France was defeated and Louis XV had to content himself with securing the duchy of Lorraine for his father-in- law. Thus, family ambition merely added to the economic distress of the French people.
It was during the War of the Polish Election, however, that the Bourbon king of Spain, perceiving his rivals engaged elsewhere, seized the kingdom of the Two Sicilies from Austria and put a member of his own family on its throne. Thus, in the eighteenth century, the Bourbons dominated France, Spain, and southern Italy.
ADDITIONAL READING
GENERAL. Brief accounts: J. H. Robinson and C. A. Beard, The Development of Modern Europe, Vol. I (1907), ch. i-iii; H. O. Wakeman, The Ascendancy of France, 1598-1715 (1894), ch. ix-xi, xiv, xv; A. H. Johnson, The Age of the Enlightened Despot, 1660-1789 (1910), ch i- iii, vi; J. H. Sacret, Bourbon and Vasa, 1610-1715 (1914), ch. viii- xii; Arthur Hassall, Louis XIV and the Zenith of the French Monarchy (1897) in the "Heroes of the Nations" Series; H. T. Dyer, A History of Modern Europe from the Fall of Constantinople, 3d ed. rev. by Arthur Hassall (1901), ch. xxxvii, xxxix-xl, xlii-xliv; A. J. Grant, The French Monarchy, 1483-1789, Vol. II (1900), ch. x-xvi; G. W. Kitchin, A History of France, Vol. III (1899), Books V and VI, ch. i, ii; Victor Duruy, History of Modern Times, trans. and rev. by E. A. Grosvenor (1894), ch. xxi-xxiii. More detailed treatments: Cambridge Modern History, Vol. V (1908), ch. i-iii, vii-ix, xiii, xiv, Vol. VI (1909), ch. iv-vi; Histoire générale, Vol. VI, ch. iii-v, vii-ix, xii-xvi, xx, Vol. VII, ch. i-iii; Histoire de France, ed. by Ernest Lavisse, Vols. VII and VIII (1906-1909); History of All Nations, Vol. XIII, The Age of Louis XIV, by Martin Philippson.
DOMESTIC AFFAIRS OF FRANCE. Cécile Hugon, Social France in the Seventeenth Century (1911), popular, suggestive, and well- illustrated. On Colbert: A. J. Sargent, Economic Policy of Colbert (1899); S. L. Mims, Colbert's West India Policy (1912); Émile Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrières et de l'industrie en France avant 1789, Vol. II (1901), Book VI; Pierre Clément (editor), Lettres, Instructions et Mémoires de Colbert, 7 vols. in 9 (1861- 1873). H. M. Baird, The Huguenots and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 2 vols. (1895), a detailed study by a warm partisan of the French Protestants. Among the numerous important sources for the reign of Louis XIV should be mentioned especially F. A. Isambert (editor), Recueil général des anciennes lois, Vols. XVIII-XX, containing significant statutes of the reign; G. B. Depping (editor), Correspondance administrative sous le règne de Louis XIV, 4 vols. (1850-1855), for the system of government; Arthur de Boislisle (editor), Correspondance des contrôleurs généraux, 2 vols., for the fiscal system. Voltaire's brilliant Age of Louis the Fourteenth has been translated into English; an authoritative history of French literature in the Age of Louis XIV is Louis Petit de Julleville (editor), Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française, Vol. V (1898). The best account of the minority of Louis XV is that of J. B. Perkins, France under the Regency (1892); a brief summary is Arthur Hassall, The Balance of Power, 1715-1789 (1896), ch. i-iv.
FOREIGN WARS OF LOUIS XIV. On Louis XIV's relations with the Dutch: P. J. Blok, History of the People of the Netherlands, Part IV, Frederick Henry, John DeWitt, William III, abridged Eng. trans. by O. A. Bierstadt (1907). On his relations with the empire: Ruth Putnam, Alsace and Lorraine from Cæsar to Kaiser, 58 B.C.-1871 A.D. (1914), a popular narrative; Franz Krones, Handbuch der Geschichte Oesterreichs, Vol. III, Book XVI, Vol. IV, Book XVII (1878), a standard German work. On his relations with Spain: M. A. S. Hume, Spain, its Greatness and Decay, 1479-1788 (1898), ch. ix- xiii. On Louis XIV's relations with England: Osmund Airy, The English Restoration and Louis XIV (1895), in the "Epochs of Modern History" Series; Sir J. R. Seeley, The Growth of British Policy, 2 vols. (1895), especially Vol. II, Parts IV and V; Earl Stanhope, History of England, Comprising the Reign of Queen Anne until the Peace of Utrecht (1870), a rather dry account of the War of the Spanish Succession; G. J. (Viscount) Wolseley, Life of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, to the Accession of Queen Anne, 4th ed., 2 vols. (1894), an apology for Marlborough; J. S. Corbett, England in the Mediterranean, 1603-1713, Vol. II (1904), for English naval operations; J. W. Gerard, The Peace of Utrecht (1885). On the diplomacy of the whole period: D. T. Hill, History of Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe, Vol. III (1914), ch. i-iv, a clear outline; Emile Bourgeois, Manuel historique de politique étrangère, 4th ed., Vol. I (1906), ch. iii, iv, vii, ix, xiv; Arsène Legrelle, La diplomatie française et la succession d'Espagne, 1659-1725, 4 vols. (1888-1892), a minute study of an important phase of Louis XIV's diplomacy; the text of the principal diplomatic documents is in course of publication at Paris (20 vols., 1884-1913) as the Recueil des instructions données aux ambassadeurs et ministres de France depuis les traités de Westphalie jusqu'à la révolution française.
MEMOIRS OF THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV. Among the multitudinous memoirs of the period, the most significant, from the standpoint of the general historian, are: Marquise de Sévigné, Lettres, delightful epistles relating mainly to the years 1670-1696, edited in fullest form for "Les grands écrivains de la France" by Monmerqué, 14 vols. (1862- 1868), selections of which have been translated into English by C. Syms (1898); Duc de Saint-Simon, Mémoires, the most celebrated of memoirs, dealing with many events of the years 1692-1723, gossipy and racily written but occasionally inaccurate and frequently partisan, edited many times--most recently and best for "Les grands écrivains de la France" by Arthur de Boislisle, 30 vols. (1879-1916), of which a much-abridged translation has been published in English, 4 vols.; Marquis de Dangeau, Journal, 19 vols. (1854-1882), written day by day, throughout the years 1684-1720, by a conscientious and well- informed member of the royal entourage; Life and Letters of Charlotte Elizabeth (1889), select letters, trans. into English, of a German princess who married Louis XIV's brother, of which the most complete French edition is that of Jaeglé, 3 vols. (1890). See also Comtesse de Puliga, Madame de Sévigné, her Correspondents and Contemporaries, 2 vols. (1873), and, for important collections of miscellaneous memoirs of the period, J. F. Michaud and J. J. F. Poujoulat, Nouvelle collection des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France depuis le 13e siècle jusqu'à la fin du 18e siècle, 34 vols. (1854), and Louis Lafaist and L. F. Danjou, Archives curieuses de l'histoire de France, 27 vols. (1834-1840).