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Europe's Tragedy: A New History of The Thirty Years War by Peter H. Wilson (2010)
Introduction – the four main phases of the war
The role of individual rulers
Why was the Thirty Years War important?
Wilson's interpretations of the war
The deep historical context of the Thirty Years War
The Holy Roman Emperors
Issues facing the Holy Roman Emperor in the early 17th century
The role of religion in the Thirty Years War
Events leading up to the Thirty Years War
The defenestration of Prague 1618
The Edict of Restitution 1629
The role of Sweden
Historical events happening alongside the Thirty Years War
The Peace of Westphalia
Devastation and disease
It's a long book
Writing about war requires special skills
Not enough signposting of key events
Wilson's revisionist intentions
Wilson's interest in the finances of the war
Lack of maps
Video of a lecture by Wilson about the war
Appendix: Origin of the word 'Protestant'
This is an enormous book (weighing in at 997 pages, including index and notes) which covers an enormous subject, in enormous depth.
The Thirty Years War lasted from 1618 to 1648. It was in fact made up of a series or sequence of wars featuring different antagonists. The central strand linking them is that the staunchly Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II was fighting mainly Protestant opponents, and that he mostly won. The war is usually divided into four phases:
The Bohemian Revolt 1618-20, a rising of the Protestant Bohemian 'Estates' against Habsburg rule ('The revolt was not a popular uprising, but an aristocratic coup led by a minority of desperate militant Protestants', p.269), which was decisively crushed at the Battle of White Mountain on 8 November 1620.
The Danish intervention 1625-30, also referred to as the Low Saxon War or Emperor's War, when Christian IV of Denmark (who was also Duke of Holstein and Schleswig which lay within the Empire) led an army in support of north German protestant states against Imperial forces. After five or so years of fighting, the war was concluded with the Treaty of Lübeck in 1629.
The Swedish intervention 1630-35, when King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden led an invasion of north (and mostly Protestant) Germany. He was motivated by a) alarm at the Emperor's harsh reimposition of Catholicism on the German states under the Treaty of Lübeck b) the goal of gaining economic influence in the German states around the Baltic Sea. Like Christian IV before him, Adolphus was heavily subsidized by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of Louis XIII of France, who gave him a million livres a year. Gustavus Adolphus died in battle in 1632 but his forces continued the war until the Peace of Prague in 1635 brought peace between most of the Empire's Protestant states and the Emperor.
The French intervention 1635-48, as you can see this is the longest single part of the war. Cardinal Richelieu feared the power of the Habsburg empire on his eastern border and used innumerable policies, treaties with the Danish and Swedes to try and limit and hamper Ferdinand. Finally this broke out into overt war.
This summary nowhere near conveys the complexity of the wider context within which these conflicts took place. When the war broke out, Spain was stuck in a never-ending conflict with its provinces in the Netherlands, what would eventually be called the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) and where its brutal suppression, inquisition, torture and execution of Protestant rebels laid the foundation for the Black Legend of Catholic Spain's scheming brutality, compounded, in 1588, when the Spanish launched the Great Enterprise, the plan for an amphibious invasion of England to overthrow the Protestant monarch and return to England to being a good Catholic country under Spanish tutelage – what we refer to as the Spanish Armada.
France was a fellow Catholic country and so should have supported both the Emperor and Spain, but in fact politicked against both of them at every turn. For example, the French government supported the Dutch against the Spanish in order to keep the Spanish bogged down, wasting money in the Netherlands, and so presenting less of a threat to French power.
There were other flashpoints such as in Italy where Spain controlled the duchy of Milan. Italy was where the (relatively small-scale) War of the Mantuan Succession (1628–31) broke out and drew in the other European powers in parallel to the 30 Years War. Savoy in north-west Italy, which maintained a precarious independence from the Empire while being eyed by France, was another flashpoint.
In the south-east of Europe, the Holy Roman Empire was threatened by attack from the Ottoman Empire, whose power stretched far into modern-day Hungary (although for long stretches the Turks were distracted by the war they were fighting on their Eastern border against the Persian Empire under Shah Abbas the Great (p.100) who launched a fierce invasion capturing Baghdad in 1623 (p.103.)
North of Hungary there were repeated clashes over the border territory of Transylvania, and this drew in two other powers to the East of the Empire, namely Russia (or the Duchy of Muscovy, as it was commonly referred to), and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who periodically fought each other.
When Gustavus Adolphus invaded north Germany it was not only to support the struggling Protestant German states, but in order to solidify his power in the Baltic as a whole, specifically projecting his power into Polish territory, who Sweden was, at one stage, directly at war with.
In other words, the Thirty Years War only makes sense – or you can only understand the motives of all the sides – if you appreciate a) the total context of European geopolitics of the time and b) you grasp that all the numerous states of Europe and beyond were continually prepared to use 'war' to further their ends.
Accustomed to two disastrous world wars, it is hard for us to reach back to a mindset in which wars were envisioned as relatively limited operations and completely acceptable methods to achieve power-political and territorial ends. To give an example of how it worked, we read time and again of kings or emperors continuing to deploy their armies, while at the same time hosting peace talks and negotiations, each victory or defeat in a local battle, strengthening or weakening their bargaining positions.
Discussions, negotiations, conferences and diets and assemblies, embassies and missions continued between all parties even while armed conflict broke out, was carried on, or suspended during truces.
After the first 500 pages or so I realised I was becoming heartily sick of reading about the endless fighting over the same bits of territory, mainly because the little battles and squabbles come to seem utterly senseless. From the hundreds of separate micro-conflicts which made up the big 'wars', what came over most strongly to me was how many of them were driven by personal ambitions.
The entire social structure of the day was build around a fractious, rivalrous and competitive aristocracy who paid nominal homage to their king or emperor but who in reality were endlessly jostling for titles and land and possession. Apparently this was particularly true in France, with senior members of families related to the royal line ('princes of the blood') continually conspiring and politicking against each other (p.372).
The Holy Roman Empire was different and vastly more complex because it was made up of four major 'states', within which sat 40 or so duchies and princedoms, within which or alongside existed a large number of free cities and autonomous regions – from the very large to the very small, each with their own rulers and constitutions and parliaments or 'Estates', as they were called, their traditions and fiefs and privileges and customs and taxation systems, who were joined by a variety of links to the figure of the Emperor.
There were seven Electors, so-named because they were the electorate who chose each new emperor, being the archbishops of the imperial cities Mainz, Cologne and Trier, then the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, the Margrave of Brandenburg. There were fifty spiritual and 30 lay fiefs held by lords of princely rank and then some 200 lesser fiefs, and then 400 or so baronial and knightly families. There were 80 'free and imperial cities'. States which were large enough earned the right to attend the imperial Reichstag which was more of a consultative body than a parliament, where the emperor was meant to get his way through negotiation and concessions.
Everyone was competing against everyone else. Everyone wanted more land, more power, to expand their territory, seize new towns and ports and cities and bishoprics and titles and forests and land. And warfare offered a quick way of achieving these ambitions, not only for the rulers who owned armies but for their generals. A massive motivation for being a general in the army was that, if you were successful, you were rewarded with titles and land.
At a very high level the wars can be presented as conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, or between France and the Empire, or between Spain and the Dutch. But at the level Wilson describes, the conflict breaks down into scores of micro-conflicts between Electors and local rulers who had their eye on this or that piece of nearby territory, fighting or negotiating to acquire bishoprics or cities or control of fisheries or forests.
And when large states were defeated, the leader of the victorious forces (for example Gustavus Adolphus or Ferdinand, in the middle Swedish part of the war) was able to parcel out and award all the conquered territory to his successful generals and followers. Thus 'ownership' of land could pass through multiple hands which, of course, created an ever-expanding set of grievances and wishes for revenge or reconquest etc.
Seen from a really high level the war amounted to a succession of armies tramping across the same old territory, fighting each other to a standstill or dropping like flies from dysentery and plague, while ravaging the land around them, burning villages and towns, consuming all available food and ruining agricultural land and livestock, devastating the very territories their lords and masters were squabbling over like spoilt children. It is estimated that around a third of the Empire's cultivable land had been abandoned by 1648 (p.802). Grain production didn't return to 1618 levels until 1670 (p.806).
And this is what amounted to statecraft in early modern Europe. Endless rivalry and conflict, continually spilling over into ruinous wars.
Why is the Thirty Years War important?
Wilson explains why the Thirty Years War was and is important in his (relatively brief) introduction:
About 8 million people died in this huge, prolonged and devastating war. Many regions and cities of Germany didn't recover for a hundred years.
The war occupies a place in German and Czech history similar to that of the civil wars in Britain, Spain and the United States, or the revolutions in France and Russia. A defining moment of national trauma that shaped how a country regards itself and its place in the world.
For most Germans the war came to symbolise national humiliation, and was blamed for retarding the economic, social and political development of the country, condemning Germany to 200 years of internal division and international impotence, until Bismarck began the process of German unification in the 1850s.
Wilson's interpretations
Right at the start Wilson explains that his huge history has three big underlying aims which deliberately set it apart from most 'traditional' histories of the conflict:
1. Most accounts simplify the extraordinary complexity of the war. Wilson seeks to restore all of its complexity and the complex way it evolved out of, and interacted with, other parallel conflicts in the Europe of the time (notably the Spanish-Dutch war). But above all he wants to show how the central thread running through the war is their common relationship to the imperial constitution. The emperor wanted to secure peace in his Empire, to enforce the imperial constitution.
2. Thus Wilson wants to assert that the war was not a war of religion. It is true that the Emperor was a staunch Catholic and the Bohemian rebels, the king of Denmark and the king of Sweden were Protestants, and Protestant imperial states (notably the Palatinate and Saxony) allied with them. But Wilson wishes to emphasise that the primary causes were not religious but were – in his view – driven by conflicts over the rights and freedoms allowed the states by the imperial constitution, a constitution the Emperor Ferdinand II had sworn to uphold. Contemporaries rarely spke or wrote abour rarely about Protestants or Catholics – they spoke about Saxons or Bavarians or Swedes or Danes or French or Spanish troops. In Wilson's view, the focus on Protestants and Catholics is a construction of 19th century historians who a) had their own religious culture wars to fight and b) sought to simplify the war's complexity.
3. It was not inevitable. The Empire had been at peace after the 1555 Treaty of Augsburg, in fact the period from 1555 to 1618 was the longest period of peace Germany experience until after 1945. Meanwhile civil war raged in France and a bitter struggle in the Netherlands. So war was not inevitable and not the result of inevitable religious divisions. It was more the result of fortuitous and contingent events, starting with the decision taken by a small number of Bohemian aristocrats to rebel against imperial rule, which triggered a conflict in which some of the Protestant states (namely Saxony and the Palatinate) decided to take sides, before the king of Denmark made an unpredictable and personal decision to take advantage of the confusion in north Germany to try and expand his territory. And when the Danish venture had clearly failed, by 1629, the king of Sweden then decided to have a go himself, in order to seize north German territory and solidify his power in the Baltic.
None of these three events were inevitable, they were the contingent decisions of small groups of individuals, kings and their advisors, who decided to use warfare for the traditional goals of expanding their territories and power.
Wilson's account doesn't arrive at the outbreak of actual hostilities until page 269, nearly a third of the way into the book.
This is because, to understand a) why the war broke out b) why it spread c) why it became so horribly complicated – you need to have as full a grasp as possible of the history and complex constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, and of all the neighbouring countries which had an interest in what was happening in Central Europe.
This includes (going in clockwork direction) Spain, France, Britain, the Spanish Netherlands, the Dutch, Denmark, Sweden, Russia (Muscovy), Poland (the Commonwealth of Poland), Transylvania, Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Serbia, Croatia, the Republic of Venice and various other Italian states, not least the Papacy, and Savoy.
Wilson gives us the deep history not only of the Holy Roman Empire itself, but of all these other countries, for each of them delving back into the 1500s, often into the 1400s, sometimes as far back as the 1300s, in order to explain the dynastic struggles, arranged marriages, land grabs and redistributions and wars which formed the mind-bogglingly complex web of political and military relations across the Europe by the start of the 17th century. (I think the earliest reference is to 1160, the year when the Hanseatic League was founded, page 176.)
The war was deeply bound up with the complex practices of inheritance, for example the routine appointment, in noble families, of younger sons as prince-bishops or prince-abbots, and the complexities of dynastic marriages between ruling families of different states and principalities.
I found the sequence of Holy Roman Emperors a little hard to follow, though on the face of it there's a simple enough succession:
Rudolph II (1576-1612)
Matthias (1612-1619)
Ferdinand II (1619-1637)
Looks simple, doesn't it, but Wilson places this trio and their reigns within the context of the vast Habsburg empire ruled by Charles V (1519-1556). Charles inherited extensive domains, including all of Spain and its new colonies in South America, Austria and territories scattered all across Germany, Hungary and Bohemia, in the Netherlands, and large chunks of Italy (e.g. Sicily and Naples). (Wilson gives an extended description of the growth of Spanish colonies in the New World, their use of slavery, and the importance of the silver trade, pp.116-121.)
It was Charles V who decided he had to divide this unwieldy entity into two massive parts (p.50), the Habsburg Partition of 1558. He gave Spain, the Netherlands and the New World to his son Philip II of Spain, and Austria and the Imperial territories of central Europe to his younger brother, the Emperor Ferdinand I (1556-1564).
Thus the creation of a Spanish branch and an Austrian branch of the Habsburgs or 'family firm'.
But of course it was more complicated than that because 1. the Austrian emperor had numerous other titles, and these were awarded by a range of bodies within his scattered states, each with its own constitution and procedures. Thus the Austrian ruler was at the same time King of Bohemia, King of Hungary and Croatia. But he needed to be elected King of Germany by the seven electors (see the list, above). In general the next-in-line to the throne was elected while the current one was still alive, and received the honorary title 'King of the Romans' (a bit like our Prince of Wales).
Incidentally that title indicates the deeply held belief that the emperor was descended from the rules of ancient Rome and, like the later Roman emperors, carried the responsibility for the defence of all Christendom.
And 2. because the emperor was elected, this meant there were other candidates – although in practice this meant only other Habsburgs, in Ferdinand's case, his brothers. Nonetheless these might be supported by various nations or special interest groups within the Empire because they thought this or that candidate would give them advantages and payoffs.
So as the Holy Roman Emperor who ruled just before the war broke out – Rudolf II – sank into madness or mania, his eventual successor Matthias had not only to face rival candidacies from his brothers Ernst, Maximilian and Albert, but found himself drawn into a prolonged conflict with Rudolf which lasted so long and was so destructive that it gained a name of its own, the Brothers' Quarrel. As Wikipedia puts it:
The Brothers' Quarrel was a conflict between Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and his brother, Matthias in the early 17th century. Their other brothers – Maximilian III and Albert VII – and their cousins – especially Ferdinand II and Leopold V – were also deeply involved in their dispute. The family feud weakened the Habsburgs' position and enabled the Estates of their realms to win widespread political and religious concessions.
Supporters and opponents in this intra-Habsburg rivalry came not only from within the Empire, but from the other wing of the Habsburg firm, in Spain, as well as a range of nations bordering the Empire. (So, for example, we find the King of Spain leaning on Matthias to make his older cousin, Ferdinand, his successor [which is what happened] in preference to the more unpredictable cousin, Leopold.)
So, even before he was elected, the Holy Roman Emperor had to have advanced political and diplomatic skills.
Early 17th century issues facing the Holy Roman Emperor
And when he finally did come to power, the Emperor faced a number of ongoing issues, which Wilson describes in detail, including:
the religious wars in France from 1562 to 1598, which the emperor had to be careful not to get involved in
the immense Eighty Years' War or Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648), the revolt of the Seventeen Provinces of what are today the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg against Philip II of Spain, the sovereign of the Habsburg Netherlands – which frequently spilled over into north-western territories of the Empire
ongoing wars between Denmark and Sweden for primacy in the Baltic
the Time of Troubles, a period of anarchy, famine and civil war in Russia, 1598 to 1613
war between Poland and Russia
and, of course, the largest threat of all – from the Ottoman Empire, 'the terror of Europe (p.76), whose power stretched into Hungary and which permanently threatened to invade up the Danube into the Austrian heartland itself. This threat has flared up most recently in the Long Turkish War or Thirteen Years' War, fought over the Principalities of Wallachia, Transylvania and Moldavia from 1593 to 1606.
These were just some of the geopolitical issues which the Emperor inherited, continually having to assess which side, if any, to back in all these wars, and prevent physical or political damage to polities within the Empire. And that was before you get to the issues and conflicts bubbling away in the territories which he directly ruled.
In this high-level map of the European context, note:
how far into Europe the Ottoman Empire extended, pressing up through Hungary, and why Wallachia and Transylvania were important border states
Spain's territory in Italy, and the south or Spanish Netherlands
the distinction between the Holy Roman Emperor's inherited Austrian holdings (in pink) and the German states which he ruled over but which had independent princes, Electors, margraves and so on (in orange)
The Thirty Years War in its European context (source: International History blog)
And then there was religion. The disaffected monk Martin Luther kicked off the Reformation in 1517. His reformed version of Christianity spread quickly through some parts of the empire, gaining princely converts who were able to protect the feisty monk and theological rebel.
Despite Catholic attempts to crush it in the 1520s and 30s, by the 1540s the existence of large populations and important leaders who had converted to the new religion quickly became a fact of life within the Empire, which was finally ratified in the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555.
But this new religious conflict was just the latest in a litany of conflicting histories, traditions, cultures and languages, constitutions and processes which differentiated and separated inhabitants of the 1,800 or so states which made up the Empire(!).
What distinguished religion was that religious belief struck home to the real core of a person's identity and psychology; and that the more devout the believer, the more they considered religion a matter of life and death, not only for themselves but for the world. Wilson has a fascinating passage (pp.261-262) describing the rise of apocalyptic writings and end-of-the-world interpretations of Bible texts which, he thinks, were partly sparked by the economically disruptive change in Europe's climate which we now refer to as the Mini Ice Age.
That said, Wilson goes out of his way to emphasis that religion wasn't an inevitable cause of conflict, and describes in detail a number of religious clashes in the late 16th and early 17th centuries where rulers sought and achieved compromise and peace. Thus it's true that a Protestant Union was set up in 1608 and a Catholic Liga in 1609, but by 1618 the Liga had been dissolved and the Union marginalised (p.239).
Religion – like other cultural differences – only becomes a problem if some people are determined to make it a problem, in either of two obvious ways, 1. as a cynical tool to gain advantage or power 2. because the trouble-makers genuinely believe that theirs is the Only Religion, and that their opponents are infidels, heretics, the Devil's spawn etc.
Some leaders and some states were determined to use religion as a tool, namely the Protestant ruling class of the Palatinate, a fragmented territory in central and west Germany. For zealots like these the election of the devoutly Catholic Ferdinand II presented a threat.
But the Important Point to grasp is that, although all the successive Emperors were devout Catholics, they also had a good grasp of Realpolitik and so realised that they had to find peaceful accommodations and practice toleration for all their citizens. The emperors tried to hold the ring and contain and limit religious conflicts wherever they arose.
Another flaw with the argument that it was a religious war, is the fact that both 'sides' – the Catholic and Protestant 'sides' – were deeply divided among themselves, something Wilson explores in great detail (chapter 7), not only among themselves (there was a big gap between Lutherans and Calvinists), but also with their foreign sponsors or backers, e.g. Catholic Spain was at odds with Catholic France who, in 1635 went directly to war with the Catholic Emperor.
Thus Wilson opposes historians who see the war as an 'inevitable' result of the religious divide which ran through the Empire. He gives much more importance to the prolonged uncertainty about the Imperial Succession i.e. the Brother's Quarrel, which pitted the ailing Rudolph against his likely successor Matthias (p.255 ff). In this prolonged struggle both sides conspired to weaken the other which, of course, merely weakened the Habsburg Dynasty as a whole, and handed more power to the Parliaments and Estates and other constitutional bodies which ran the Empire's numerous constituent states, from big kingdoms like Bohemia and Hungary, through large German states like Saxony and Bavaria, down to the tiniest principalities.
Wilson sees the real cause of the war more in the wish of the states to consolidate the power they had wrested from a weakened Habsburg administration and, if possible, to opportunistically extend it.
Having described this complicated situation in great detail, Wilson then describes a series of events which didn't cause the war, but help to explain the attitudes and policies of the key players when the war broke out, including such little-known incidents as:
The Bocskai Revolt 1604-6
The Donauwörth Incident 1606
The Jülich-Cleves crisis 1609-10
The Uskok War 1615-17
There are others and with each one, I realised a) the complexity of European politics in the 17th century b) that I know nothing about it.
The elite of upper-class Bohemian nobles (just to explain that Bohemia was for centuries the name of the territory which, in the 20th century, was renamed Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic) felt aggrieved by Imperial decisions and appointments. A small number of conspirators decided to take direct action and one evening stormed the castle in Prague and three a couple of Imperial representatives (and their servant) out the window of their state apartment and into the moat.
However the three men did not die, but limped away, were hidden and made good their escapes. This was a bad omen, for the rising of the Protestant Bohemian nobility which the conspirators were aiming for wasn't as whole-hearted as they wishes and, although some of the Empire's Protestant states joined their rebellion (Saxony and the Palatinate) most didn't, wisely waiting the outcome of events.
Briefly, after two years of battles and skirmishes across Bohemia and beyond, the Bohemian rebellion was crushed at the decisive Battle of the White Mountain in November 1620 and Prague was occupied by Imperial forces.
However, the rebellious Protestant provinces of central Germany still had to be brought to heel and this took three more years. And that process was only just being wound up when King Christian of Denmark decided to invade, so inaugurating the second of the four main phases of the war listed above.
I don't have anything like the time or space or energy to even summarise what happened next. For a detailed account read the Wikipedia article.
Thirty Years War Wikipedia article
So the really key turning points are:
1618 start of the Bohemian rebellion
1620 The Battle of the White Mountain, where the initial Bohemian rebellion was crushed
1625 The entrance of Denmark under King Christian IV into the war
1630 the entrance of Sweden under King Gustavus Adolphus
But there's another one – the passage of the Edict of Restitution in 1629. Having defeated Denmark's forces, the Emperor Ferdinand II felt in a strong enough position to impose the Edict of Restitution. This attempted to turn back all the changes in ownership of religious land and property which had taken place since the 1555 Peace of Augsburg. In the intervening years there had been a steady flow of archbishopric, churches, monasteries ('the secularised archbishoprics of Bremen and Magdeburg, 12 bishoprics and over 100 religious houses') which had been expropriated by Protestant princes and rulers. The Edict attempted to reverse all these changes.
The result in 1629 and 1630 was a great transfer of power and property away from the Protestants to the Catholics. Thousands of Protestants had to leave places they'd lived in for generations and flee to Protestant territory.
The Edict applied especially to north-eastern Germany where the Emperor's writ had been weak for a century. Ferdinand appointed Imperial administrators to take over the secularised states and cities in a bid to re-establish Imperial authority in areas where his control had become weaker.
Apart from alienating a lot of Protestant opinion, the Edict had two consequences. In 1630 Frederick had to call a meeting of Electors to have his son, also named Ferdinand, elected King of the Romans i.e. emperor in waiting.
However, some of the Protestant Electors stayed away from the meeting in protest at the Edict and others demanded, in exchange for supporting his son, that the Emperor sack his hugely successful but contentious general, Wallenstein. Reluctantly, Ferdinand did so, a victory for the dissident Electors and Protestant faction – and evidence for Wilson's central thesis, that the war was more tied up with the complexity of the Imperial constitution and Imperial power than with religion per se, i.e. the Emperor could never just do what he wanted, but always had to work through the Reichstag, the Electors, the Estates and so on, in an ever-changing web of complicated negotiations.
Anyway, the second result was that the Edict provided the figleaf the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, needed for undertaking his invasion of north Germany.
As a newcomer to this vast and tortuous history, it's hard to avoid the fairly simple conclusion that most of the war was Sweden's fault. The Bohemians, the Danes and many of the Protestant states had been fought to a standstill by 1630, and the war could have been ended. Gustavus Adolphus's invasion of north Germany meant that the war continued for another eighteen years – and, from what I understand, it was these later years which were by far the most destructive.
So the entry-level questions, for me, are: 1. why did Gustavus invade, and 2. – more importantly – why did the Swedes stay on in Germany for sixteen years after Adolphus died in battle in November 1632?
There appear to be three answers to question 1. Because Gustavus saw the chaos in north Germany as a) an opportunity to seize territory there and b) to consolidate Swedish control of the Baltic (against rivals Poland and Russia). And c) he and his chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, presented themselves as 'Champions of Protestantism', rescuing the Protestant German states threatened by the Emperor's Edict of Restitution (cynically or sincerely, who can say?).
So much for question 1. But it seems to me that the biggest question about the whole war is: Why did the Swedes stay on for a further 16 years, causing epic destruction and ruination across vast swathes of central Europe? The war caused devastation across all central Europe, but the Swedish armies alone may have destroyed up to 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages, and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns! They presented themselves as the champions of the Protestant cause, but in the final months before peace, the Swedes attacked and pillaged the area around Protestant Prague. Surely they weren't 'saviours' but great destroyers?
(Wilson confirms my two-part interpretation on page 719, where he explains that, from Ferdinand's point of view, the war fell into two parts – 1. the initial Bohemian rebellion which triggered revolts among various other Protestant rulers in Germany (namely the Palatinate and Saxony) and which was finally concluded with the Peace of Lübeck and the Restitution Edict); and 2. the Swedish part, by far the longest and most ruinous part.)
Historical events alongside the Thirty Years War
Eighty years war Throughout the duration of the war, Spain was at war with the rebellious northern provinces of the Netherlands, although both sides managed to keep their conflict from the German war going on next door, even if there were localised incursions or aid, specially from the Protestant Dutch to some of the Protestant states.
British civil wars In 1639, rebellion by Presbyterian Scots led to the First Bishops War, which triggered the descent of Britain into what is variously called the British Civil Wars or the Wars of Three Kingdoms (or the Great Rebellion by contemporary Royalists). It is fascinating to learn that irritation at Charles I's support for the Emperor led Sweden to send arms and some officers to support the Scottish rebellion. (And also to learn that so many Scots served in the Swedish army, sometimes for decades, and had built up a wealth of practical knowledge of modern warfare. Meaning that, when in 1639 they returned to their homeland they were able to help Scotland thrash England in both Bishops' Wars, 1639 and 1640).
I was also fascinated to read about two rebellions Spain faced, which added to her long-running war with the Dutch and the conflict with France. These were the rebellions of Portugal and Catalonia.
Portugal The Portuguese rebelled in 1640, in what became known as the Portuguese Restoration War and lasted until 1668, eventually bringing an end to the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crown (the Iberian Union) and establishing the House of Braganza as Portugal's new ruling dynasty, replacing the Spanish Habsburg who had ruled the country since 1581. It was a member of this ruling dynasty, Catherine of Braganza, who Charles II of Britain married in 1662, soon after his restoration, thus acquiring the territory of Tangiers, not much money, and a wife who proved incapable of bearing an heir, thus indirectly triggering the eventual overthrow of the Stuart dynasty.
Catalonia The Reapers' War Catalan revolt sprang up spontaneously in May 1640, leading King Philip IV sent an army to suppress it, which sacked several Catalan towns before being defeated outside Barcelona. The French seized the opportunity to take the country of Roussillon from the Spanish and sent arms and soldiers to help the Catalans in exchange for which the Catalans half-heartedly accepted the French king Louis XIII as King of Catalonia. The rebellion dragged on until 1659 when it was wound up as part of the wider peace settlement between Spain and France (the Peace of the Pyrenees).
Brazil A small but fascinating sidelight is Wilson's detailed account of the rivalry between the Dutch and the Portuguese in Brazil. Basically the Dutch in the 1630s confidently seized a lot of Portugal's colonial holdings, but Portugal fought back, retaking most of the colony, leaving the Dutch to concentrate on their new colonies in the East Indies.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Thirty Year War was its conclusion, and the long peace conference which led up to the Treaty of Westphalia. Wilson makes the – to me – fascinating point that the peace conference invented the model of international negotiation which was consciously copied at all complex European peace negotiations ever since, at Utrecht in 1714, the Congress of Vienna in 1815, at the Versailles Conference in 1918-19 and which underpins the modern system reflected in the United Nations.
Early modern society was utterly drenched in the notion of hierarchy, starting with God at the top and moving down though his Son, to the angels, to the created world which had Christian kings at the top and their aristocrats, sharing top billing with the Pope and the top notables of the church on one wing, before finally reaching the urban bourgeoisie, and so on down to the peasants, squatting at the bottom. Then the animals.
In this hierarchical view, various nations of Europe fiercely competed to be Top Dog, which in their world meant being the Most Christian nation. It was a status claimed by Spain whose monarchs, after Ferdinand and Isabella had expelled the last Arabs in 1492, thus winning the title of Their Most Catholic Majesties – but also claimed by the Holy Roman Emperor who thought of himself as the Protector of all Christendom – while French kings tried to dignify themselves as the Arbiters of Christendom, and so on.
Certainly, there were lots of flunkeys and carriages and servants and grand display at the peace conference venues in the two Westphalian cities of Osnabrück and Münster. And yet, when it came down to negotiating, the various powers (chief among them the Emperor, Spain, France and Sweden, but also the Electors and other key German princes) were forced to acknowledge the interests and concerns of each other as free and independent entities.
In other words, through the long course of the negotiations (which began in 1643, and so lasted some five years) the conflicting parties were forced to abandon the Early Modern theory of Hierarchy, and adopt what we think of as the Modern Theory, that all nation states are free and independent, have absolute rights and interests and must be negotiated with as individuals.
The positive interpretation of Westphalia regards it as the birth of the modern international order based on sovereign states interacting (formally) as equals within a common secularised legal framework, regardless of size, power or internal configuration. (p.754)
The Emperor could no longer intimidate his dependent states with fine words and a big crown, but had to address their anxieties and requirements.
The final deal consisted of two treaties: the Peace of Osnabrück in which the Emperor settled all issues with Sweden and the states within the Empire, and the Peace of Münster, which settled outstanding issues with France, although carefully excluding the duchy of Lorraine which remained occupied by French troops (p.747).
The Thirty Years War became a byword for savagery and brutality even while it was going on. Contemporary accounts emphasised the burning and looting, raping and casual murders which infested the territory, and many artists captured this in disturbing visual form, such as the contemporary engravings of Jacques Callot.
Pillaging a house, plate 5 from the engraving series The Miseries and Misfortunes of War by Jacques Callot (1633)
(Other artists who documented the atrocities of war include Valentin Wagner, Rudolf Meyer and Pieter Snayers.)
But as you might expect, Wilson takes a sophisticatedly revisionist attitude to this as to every other aspect of the war. He labels the view that the war was an unmitigated catastrophe the 'Disastrous War' school of thinking, pointing out that different regions had widely differing experiences, which also varied over time. He takes a long cold look at the figures, pointing out all kinds of problems with contemporary records and definitions (for example 'cause of death').
Nonetheless, it is clear that some regions of Germany saw a loss of 50% or more of their populations. There is agreement that some areas didn't see a return to their 1618 population figures until 1710 or 1720 (p.795).
It used to be said that around a third of the total population of the Empire perished, but more recent figures revise this down. Still, to put it in context, Wilson points out that the Soviet Union is widely seen to have suffered extraordinary levels of death and devastation as a result of the 1942 Nazi invasion – yet fewer than 12% of the population perished. So even a 'low' estimate of 15% of the Empire perishing implies spectacular destruction.
But for me the standout insight is the usual one about almost any war, even into modern times:
Disease proved more potent than muskets, swords and cannon. (p.790)
And again:
The pattern of civilian deaths conforms the general picture of military casualties. Disease was the main killer. (p.792)
Human societies are very fragile things, often only just about able to provide food, clean water and sewage facilities for their existing populations. The second you start a war, and start displacing people, you interrupt the growth, harvesting and distribution of food and deprive people of clean water and sewage facilities. Within days populations begin to starve and become prey to waterborne diseases like typhoid and dysentery.
Human efforts are feeble compared to the forces of nature which are poised all around to massacre us as soon as we let our highly organised but fragile defences slip. This felt like a slightly eccentric minority view till the spring of this year. Hopefully now everyone can agree with it.
Anyway, the usual diseases of war (typhoid, dysentery) were compounded by plague, still a common disease and one which ravaged specific areas. Beyond the bounds of the war, large parts of Italy were decimated by plague in the 17th century, but troops of dirty soldiers traipsing all across the Empire brought it too, and some areas of Germany were laid low. As a tiny example, Wilson describes the town of Ingelfingen where 241 people died in 1634, of whom precisely 7 died during its violent capture but 163 died of plague. 20 times as many.
Although, even here, Wilson is cautious and careful, making the good point that a large number of these people might have died anyway, because plague recurred at ten-year periods throughout Europe. How many died of illnesses they would have got anyway, and how many died because the privations of living in a warzone made them susceptible? Contemporary records are not sophisticated to let us calculate.
I found this a very hard book to read.
Partly because it's long, very long – very, very long – and very detailed, so it is easy to put down, then pick up again and have completely forgotten where you were and who Maximilian, Frederick or the Elector Georg are, or which precise part of Germany their armies are tramping over and where they're headed and why.
Eventually I came to realise that Wilson doesn't write about war very well. Max Hastings or Anthony Beevor manage the brilliant trick of giving a full and clear explanation of the high-level reasons for a war and the strategic changes and developments which develop as a result, alongside brutal eye-witness accounts which convey the fury and horror of individual battles. They clearly signpost key moments, key personalities and key decisions so that they stand out amid the endless sequence of events.
Reluctantly, I came to the conclusion that Wilson can do neither. On page after page I found myself lost or confused as I read that Georg marched east to take the three main towns of Upper Saxony while Tilly was heading west to join up with the forces of Wallenstein who had recently seized the imperial cities of x, y and z. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of pages made up of prose like this.
The truce allowed Oxenstierna to move Lennart Tortensson and 9,700 men from Prussia. These troops began arriving in Pomerania in late October 1635 along with a morale-boosting delivery of new clothes for Banér's ragged army. Tortennson's units surprised Marazzino, prompting Johann Georg to fall back to protect Berlin in December, while Banér retook Werben and relieved Magdeburg in January 1636. The unpaid, hungry Saxons retreated to Halle. (p.578)
Maybe I'm dim, but by the end of that sentence I was thoroughly confused, and there are hundreds and hundreds of pages just like it.
Ferdinand regarded the third army of the Guelphs as already lost. He formally enfeoffed the elector of Cologne with Hildesheim on 22 August, and authorised Hatzfeldt to enforce this in October and compel the Guelph troops to join the imperial army. Piccolomini had already moved his 15,000 men from Luxembourg in September to assist. Duke Georg responded by tightening his mutual defence pact with Hessen-Kassel on 9 November, while Melander broke the Hessian truce to capture Bielenfeld. (p.617)
All these endless troop movements eventually blurred into one, and I lost any sense of why they were important, who their leaders were and where any of these places were. At first I thought it was me, but eventually concluded it is Wilson.
Suddenly out of the blue he'll mention that all this marching has led up to one of the key battles of the war or marked some decisive turn — but there isn't nearly enough scene-setting or signposting in the text. He doesn't prepare us for the Big Events well enough, and then doesn't bring out their consequences fully enough. I began to drown in the endless tide of detail.
When I did an apprenticeship in journalism, years ago, this was called 'burying the lead'. If something Big happens you make sure it is flagged up with a headline and a clear statement of the main event at the top of the copy. The headline and the opening sentence grab you and convey the key information.
The most glaring example of Wilson's failure to think or write dramatically is the following. The Emperor Ferdinand II was the leading figure of the war from his accession in 1619. He is mentioned on every page, it is he who makes key decisions large and small, appoints generals, sets strategy and negotiates with other states and rulers. Ferdinand is the dominating figure of the narrative and the war. And yet his death only casually mentioned in parentheses on page 586.
Archduke Ferdinand was duly elected as King of the Romans on 22 December 1636 (just in time, because his father died a month after the congress closed).
That's it, that's all you get on the passing of this gigantic figure, and then the tide of details flows on as if nothing had happened. There is no build-up, no lead-up to this signal event – not even any explanation what Ferdinand died from, no mention of a funeral, no summary of what he had achieved during his reign. It's a quite astonishing dereliction of the historian's responsibility to explain.
Same happens with two other massive figures, Cardinal Richelieu of France and the French King Louis XIII, whose deaths in 1642 are briefly mentioned in the same sentence before the text moves briskly on with no mention anywhere of their importance, what their goals were and whether they achieved them, their responsibility in the war. Nothing.
It is a staggeringly cavalier attitude, and a prime example of the way Wilson is not writing history in a way designed to engage you with individuals and personalities, to make the story exciting or gripping, but with other aims in mind.
Wilson's revisionist intentions Part of the reason for this lack of good storytelling is that Wilson is more of an academic writer than Hastings or Beevor. You feel he is not setting down the welter of details in order to tell a good story, but because Wilson wants to make academic points. You begin to realise his primary motivation is overturning 'traditional interpretations and asserting his revisionist account.
And you begin to recognise the moments when he does this as they all follow a similar template or formula – he writes that so-and-so event is usually interpreted as meaning x, but that he is going to reinterprets it as meaning y.
The general conclusion is that Wallenstein represented the last of the condottiere, or great mercenary captains who emerged in the Italian Renaissance. Such figures are thought to represent a transition in historical development as expedients employed by states until governments were capable of organising armies themselves. This is misleading. (p.542)
The war is customarily portrayed as entering its most destructive and meaningless phase after 1640, as it allegedly descended into 'universal, anarchic and self-perpetuating violence.' The development is often attributed to the deaths of the 'great captains' like Gustavus, Wallenstein and Bernhard, and is associated with the supposed internationalisation of the war… Much of this is a myth. (p.622)
In other words, for Wilson the text doesn't exist as a dramatic story studded with key moments which represent massive historical and cultural turning points (like the Czech defeat at the Battle of the White Mountain or the death in battle of Gustavus Adolphus or the murder of the legendary Imperial general Wallenstein). These highly dramatic moments are almost peripheral to his real concern which is to take on the received ideas and interpretations of previous historians and to give key moments his own interpretation.
Thus in chapter 21, towards the end of the book, Wilson goes to great lengths to proves that, far from leaving the Empire a 'hollow shell', as many, especially 19th century critics of the treaty claimed, it in fact rejuvenated the Empire,
injected new life into its constitution and strengthened its political culture. (p.778)
But there's another problem with this approach, beyond making the book lack narrative drive and consistently failing to signpost key moments so that the book ends up feeling like one damned thing after another for 850 pages of dense and detailed text.
This problem is that, to really get the most out of his new takes on old issues – to really understand how Wilson is upending traditional interpretations and giving new readings and slants on well-known events, people or policies – you have to know what the traditional interpretations are.
You have to have a good grasp on how historians have traditionally interpreted, say, Wallenstein's character or Gustavus Adolphus's motives, in order to really appreciate how Wilson is giving them a new interpretation, but the feeling that this would help your understanding of what Wilson is trying to do adds to the levels of complexity and slight anxiety I experienced reading his book.
This is, quite simply, asking too much of the average reader – that they should have a detailed enough knowledge of the traditional picture of the Thirty Years War in order to appreciate Wilson's innovations and new readings.
Wilson's interest in the finances of the war Just a mention that Wilson's book is very, very thorough about the financial aspects of the war. He devotes a great deal of space to the ongoing financial tribulations of the Emperor, and the kings of Spain, France, Denmark and Sweden. He explains how they all had to borrow to finance the war, and then were reduced to various extreme expedients, raising taxes, extorting money from conquered territories, looting gold and silver, squeezing Jewish financiers, a whole range of desperate measures, to pay the money back, and often never did.
Towards the end of the book he has a fascinating passage about the so-called 'Kipper and Wipper' hyperinflation which afflicted the Empire as states debased their currencies to pay for the exorbitant costs of war, which itself mostly meant paying the wages of the huge numbers of mercenary troops employed by both sides (pp.795-798).
Included in this theme is the fascinating fact, which I knew from other sources but still blows my mind, that although Spain was extracting huge amounts of silver from its mines in the New World (working to death slave labour populations of local Indians and then importing African slaves to carry out the work) it still managed to go bankrupt repeatedly throughout the later 16th and most of the 17th century. Basically, the Spanish Empire wasted all that treasure and more, on its stupid, futile wars, chief of which was trying to suppress the Protestant Dutch for 80 years. An epic example of historic futility.
Back with Wilson's focus on finances, his summary of the Westphalia settlement includes a detailed consideration of the demobilisation of the troops of all sides stationed in garrisons, castles and cities all over the empire, and the cost of demobilisation. Peace treaties of the time usually included a so-called 'satisfaction' money i.e. money given by the loser to the victor to pay off his armies. Earlier in the book, Wilson explained the fascinating fact that it was often difficult to end local conflicts and even entire wars, because armies refused to be demobilised until they were paid.
This book contains an astonishing amount of information and shows an encyclopedic knowledge of the myriad of issues and subjects involved in the history of the period.
Lack of maps Finally, it is a scandal that an 850-page-long book about the most complicated conflict in European history has precisely one map. And quite early on I realised that many places mentioned in the text aren't even on it. This made it difficult-to-impossible to understand page after page after page of the text which describes this army marching from x to y via the river z, and meeting up with the army of p near the town of m not far from the lake of c — if none of these places are indicated on the book's one and only map.
Of course, you can try googling all these placenames and, sure enough, find the places on Google Maps (although sometimes the names have changed and it takes a while of checking and double checking to be sure you've got the right one). But of course Google Maps doesn't show the way the territory looked in the 17th century, nor does it show you the route of the complicated army manoeuvres you've just read about, or where the armies camped or set up and fought, or anything that you really need to see in order to understand the text.
The complete impossibility of establishing where half the things Wilson was describing were taking place was another big reason why the text eventually became a blur of similar-sounding names and places which became impossible to keep track of.
This book is an awe-inspiring achievement. To have reviewed so much material, to have consulted so many sources, in so many languages, in so many libraries, and to have mastered the early modern history of almost all European countries, and not least the terrifying complexity of the Holy Roman Empire and the complex web of power structures whose failure helped to trigger the war – and then to set it all down into an enormous, lucid, calm, reasonable, well-judged and balanced account like this is an awesome, almost a supernatural achievement.
Nonetheless, my conclusion would be that you should only consider reading this book if you want a really, really, really detailed account of the minutiae of the Thirty Years War, complete with academic reassessments of received historical opinions, and stripped of almost all excitement, drama and interest.
For most normal people, reading the Wikipedia article about the war (and all the related conflicts and key figures) will be more than they'll ever need to know.
Here's a video of Peter H. Wilson himself delivering a lecture about the war. The main thing that comes over in this lecture which isn't obvious from his book, is his simple explanation of why the war lasted so long – which is that both the Dutch and the French wanted to prevent it ending – for if it ended, the Austrian Habsburgs would be in a position to fully support their Spanish cousins to finally defeat the Dutch rebels.
Obviously the Dutch didn't want this to happen, but neither did the French who were worried about being surrounded by Habsburgs to the south, east and north – and so first the Dutch and then, increasingly, the French, subsidised first the Danish intervention, and then the longer-lasting Swedish invasion of the empire, and then finally, the French themselves became directly involved in the war in 1635.
Appendix: Where does the word 'Protestant' come from?
A 'diet' or imperial conference was convened at the city of Speyer, in Germany in 1529. Its aims were:
organising the German states to deal with renewed Ottoman Turkish attacks in Hungary
to settle the religious question
The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, himself a devout Catholic, was prepared to take a conciliatory approach to the Empire's princes and dukes who had converted to the new 'reformed' religion of Martin Luther. But the diet was managed by his brother Ferdinand who took a harsher, non-negotiable line. He condemned all those princes who had interpreted a previous diet held at Speyer just three years earlier as allowing them to choose what religion was practiced in their states. No, they couldn't, Ferdinand said. On the contrary, Ferdinand ordered that all states within the Empire must follow Catholicism, that all church reforms must be scrapped, and that any further reform was punishable by death. The Lutherans' lives were to be spared, but more radical reformers like Zwinglians and Anabaptists were simply to be executed out of hand. Ferdinand and the Catholic rulers present – the majority – voted for these proposals.
The Lutheran members of the Diet (namely the rulers of Saxony, Brandenburg, Braunschweig-Luneburg, Hesse, Anhalt and the representatives of fourteen imperial cities) entered a formal protest against the decision and appealed to the Emperor Charles V (who had not attended the diet) to reverse its dictates.
Their protest against the harsh results of the second Diet of Speyer led to them becoming known as the protestors or the Protestants and the name became attached to all followers of reformed religion, whatever their precise thrology or practice.
by Simon on August 17, 2020 • Permalink
Posted in History, War
Tagged 1517, 1555, 1618, 1629, 1630, 1635, 1648, African slaves, Anthony Beevor, archbishops, Axel Oxenstierna, Baghdad, Baltic, Banér, Battle of White Mountain, Bavarians, Berlin, Bielenfeld, Bishops' Wars, Bismarck, Black Legend, Bocskai Revolt, Bohemian Estates, Bohemian Revolt, Braganza, Brazil, British Civil Wars, Brothers' Quarrel, Cardinal Richelieu, Catalonia, Catherine of Braganza, Catholic Liga, Catholicism, Charles V, Christendom, Christian IV, Cologne and Trier, condottiere, Congress of Vienna, Count Palatine of the Rhine, Croatia, Czech Republic, Czechoslovakia, Danes, Danish intervention, defenestration of Prague, Denmark, diet of speyer, disease, Donauwörth Incident, duchy of Lorraine, duchy of Milan, Duchy of Muscovy, Duke Georg, Duke of Saxony, East Indies, Edict of Restitution, Eighty Years War, Elector Georg, elector of Cologne, Electors, Emperor Ferdinand II, Emperor's War, Europe, Ferdinand, Ferdinand and Isabella, Ferdinand I, Ferdinand II, finances, First Bishops War, France, Frederick, French civil war, French intervention, German unification, Great Enterprise, Great Rebellion, Guelphs, Gustavus Adolphus, Habsburg dynasty, Hanseatic League, Hapsburg Partition, Hapsburgs, Hatzfeldt, Hessen-Kassel, Hildesheim, history, history book, Holy Roman Emperor, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Holy Roman Empire, Hungary, hyperinflation, imperial cities, imperial Reichstag, Italian Renaissance, Italy, Jacques Callot, Jülich-Cleves crisis, Johann Georg, King of the Romans, Kingdom of Bohemia, Kipper and Wipper, lay fiefs, Lennart Tortensson, Long Turkish War, Louis XIII, Low Saxon War, Luxembourg, Magdeburg, Mainz, Marazzino, Margrave of Brandenburg of Bohemia, Martin Luther, Matthias, Max Hastings, Maximilian, Münster, Melander, New World, Osnabrück, Ottoman Empire, papacy, Peace of Münster, Peace of Osnabrück, Peace of Prague, Peace of the Pyrenees, Peace of Westphalia, Persian Empire, Philip II of Spain, Piccolomini, Pieter Snayers, plague, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Pomerania, Portugal, Portuguese Restoration War, Protestant Union, Protestantism, Reapers' War, Reformation, Republic of Venice, Roussillon, Rudolf Meyer, Rudolph II, Russia, satisfaction' money, Savoy, Saxons, Scotland, Serbia, Shah Abbas the Great, silver trade, Slavery, Spain, Spanish Armada, Spanish Inquisition, spiritual fiefs, Sweden, Swedes, Swedish intervention, The Miseries and Misfortunes of War, The Thirty Years War, Thirteen Years' War, Time of Troubles, Transylvania, Treaty of Augsburg, Treaty of Lübeck, Treaty of Utrecht, Treaty of Westphalia, Turks, United Nations, Uskok War, Valentin Wagner, Versailles Conference, war, War of the Mantuan Succession, wars of religion, Wars of Three Kingdoms, Werben
Posted by Simon on August 17, 2020
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/17/europes-tragedy-thirty-years-war-peter-h-wilson/
The Rover, or The Banished Cavaliers by Aphra Behn (1677)
'I know not what thou mean'st, but I'll make one at any Mischief where a Woman's concerned'
(Willmore, the Rover of the title)
Aphra Behn (1640-89) is generally considered the first professional woman writer in English literature. She wrote poems, essays and prose narratives but in her own day was best known as the author of some 18 plays, indeed she was second only to the poet laureate John Dryden in terms of theatrical productivity. The Rover is by common consent the most polished and entertaining of her plays.
In fact The Rover comes in two parts, each a self-contained five-act Restoration comedy. Part two contains some though not all of the same characters and so is a sequel, though it was never as popular as the original. Both were heavily plagiarised from a similarly two-part, ten-act play, Thomaso, or The Wanderer, written by the Royalist exile and companion of Charles II, Thomas Killigrew. Thomaso was never performed onstage but was published in 1663-4. Behn comprehensively rewrote it, turning its turgid style and long wordy speeches into brisk comic dialogue.
The Project Gutenberg online edition is prefaced by a prose summary of the plot. Here it is with my additions and comments:
During the exile of Charles II a band of cavaliers, prominent amongst whom are Willmore (the Rover), Belvile, Frederick, and Ned Blunt, find themselves at Naples in carnival time. Belvile, who at a siege at Pamplona (in Spain) has rescued a certain Florinda and her brother Don Pedro, now loves the lady, and the tender feeling is reciprocated. Florinda's father, however, designs her for the elderly Vincentio, whilst her brother would have her marry his friend Antonio, son to the Viceroy.
Belville, Fred and Blunt greet Willmore who has just arrived by boat in Naples in company of 'the Prince' (the implication being the exiled Charles II). Florinda, her sister Hellena (who is intended for the veil i.e. to become a nun), their cousin Valeria, and their duenna Callis surreptitiously visit the carnival, all in masquerade, and there encounter the cavaliers. Florinda flirts with Belvile and arranges to meet him that night at her garden-gate. Willmore is bewitched by the ready wit of Hellena who is pretending to be a gypsy.
Meanwhile a picture of Angelica Bianca, a famous courtesan, is publicly exposed, guarded by bravos. Antonio and Pedro dispute who shall give the 1,000 crowns she demands for her 'favours', and draw swords. After a short fray Willmore, who has boldly pulled down the picture, is admitted to the house, and declares his love, together with his complete inability to pay the price she requires. Angelica, none the less, falling in love at first sight, yields to him.
Hellena and Florinda appear in the street below, the latter mocking Hellena for so suddenly and completely falling in love with the man she briefly met earlier (Willmore). Belvile and pals arrive, knock at Angelica's door and get Willmore sent out to them. Wilmore makes it plain he has slept with Angelica. Hellena, eavesdropping, hears all this from a hiding place and is heart-broken, but when she confronts him Willmore outfaces the situation and resumes his ardent courtship of her, which is detected by the jealous Angelica, who has followed him vizarded.
In the same scene Florinda in disguise had approached and talked to Belvile, trying to seduce him, but found him loyal to the women he's in love with which, she realises, is her. She gets him to promise to meet her in 'the garden' that evening and leaves a pledge with her which he realises, once she's gone, is a little picture of his beloved.
A comic interlude in which simple honest Essex gentleman Ned Blunt is enticed back to her house by a very willing whore, Lucetta, who lures him up to her bedroom, where she hops into bed and asks him to strip off, which he promptly does. But as he stumbles towards her a) the lights go out b) the bed moves (a piece of comic mechanism) and c) Ned tumbles through a trapdoor down into a sewer – leaving Lucetta and her pimp Philippo to count the gold they find in Blunt's clothes. The scene cuts to New Blunt emerging from the mouth of the sewer, very smelly and very sorry.
Florinda that night goes to the garden gate to meet Belvile, but encounters Willmore who is drunk and tries to ravish her. Her cries attract Belvile and Fred, who interrupt drunk Willmore, but then immediately her brother, Don Pedro, and the servants. Florinda just has time to tell Belvile to come back and loiter under her bedroom window later, before she escapes back into the house where she pretends to be fast asleep. Don Pedro and servants beat off Willmore et al who run away.
Willmore has to endure the reproaches of Belvile, who is furious with him for assaulting his beloved. They have wandered to the front of Angelica's house, where they hide as Antonio approaches and makes as about to enter the house. Because he still feels linked to Angelica Willmore staggers forward and attacks Antonio with his sword, wounding him, before reeling offstage. Belvile goes to Antonio's aid just as officers run up and arrest him, conveying him by Antonio's orders to the Viceroy's palace.
Antonio comes to Belvile in his cell, with his arm in a sling, and they make friends, Antonio asks Belvile to wear a mask (vizard) and impersonate him in a duel he has to fight with Florinda's brother, Don Pedro. Florinda intervenes to part them and Don Pedro gallantly assigns his sister to him thinking he is Antonio. (Florinda refuses to be bullied but then Belvile pulls up his mask and reveals to her it is him.) But just as things are panning out well, Willmore staggers up and knocks Belvile's mask off, Don Pedro realises it is he, and drags Florinda away.
Belvile is even more furious with Willmore and when he won't stop talking, draws his sword and chases him offstage.
Angelica next comes in hot pursuit of Willmore. She accuses him of faithlessness, he gets bored and wants to hasten off to an appointment with the 'gypsy'. They are interrupted by the 'gypsy' – in reality, Hellena, who arrives dressed as a boy. She tells a tale of the Rover's amour with another dame and so rouses the jealous courtesan to fury, with Willmore intervening and beginning to suspect this young lad is Hellena. These scenes are getting confusing. Willmore makes excuses and leaves Angelica lamenting that all her beauty cannot hold such a treacherous man.
Florinda, meanwhile, who has escaped from her brother, running into an open house to evade detection, finds herself in Ned Blunt's apartments. Blunt is sitting half-clad in a very angry mood, reflecting on having been stripped and duped by the whore Lucetta. Florinda throws herself on his mercy but he vows to use and abuse her:
Cruel, yes, I will kiss and beat thee all over; kiss, and see thee all over; thou shalt lie with me too, not that I care for the Injoyment, but to let you see I have ta'en deliberated Malice to thee, and will be revenged on one Whore for the Sins of another; I will smile and deceive thee, flatter thee, and beat thee, kiss and swear, and lye to thee, imbrace thee and rob thee, as she did me, fawn on thee, and strip thee stark naked, then hang thee out at my Window by the Heels, with a Paper of scurvey Verses fasten'd to thy Breast, in praise of damnable Women
Enter Fred who begins to believe Florinda's protestations, especially when she mentions Belvile and how he will thank them if they are kind to her. Hmm. Blunt's determination on revenge is mollified by the present of a diamond ring, but at this moment a servant announces his friends and Don Pedro are arriving, so they lock Florinda away.
Belvile had told him Don Pedro that Blunt was a fool and would be a good source of amusement. Now, despite his protestations, they break down the door to his rooms and, sure enough, all have a good laugh at Blunt's expense. But he insists he's going to have the last laugh and take it out on another Italian whore. But when he shows them the diamond ring Florinda gave him, Belvile immediately recognises it as the love token he gave Florinda much earlier in the play. However, the rest of the company are determined to 'enjoy' her as much as Blunt, and in fact draw straws in the shape of drawing their swords to find out whose is longest. Ironically, it is Don Pedro's who is promptly sent into the room where Florinda is hiding in order to ravish her – his own sister! Florinda comes running out pursued by Don Pedro, but she is in disguise and he doesn't recognise her.
A servant arrives and tells Don Pedro his sister is not safe at home – as he thought – but has run off dressed as a page. He makes his excuses and leaves. The moment he's gone Belvile acknowledges Florinda, they leap into each other's arms, Willmore says, so this is the woman you've been pining for all along', Fred begs her pardon. A boy is sent out to fetch a priest and Florinda and Belvile go into the other room to be married.
They leave Willmore to protect the pass in case anyone arrives to interrupt the ceremony but who arrives is Angelica in disguise. Willmore totally gives himself away by excitedly hoping it is his 'gypsy' i.e. Hellena. Infuriated, Angelica puts a pistol to his chest and is about to shoot him dead. She follows him round the stage as he outdoes himself with a stream of justifications of the cynical debaucher's attitude.
To everyone's surprise Antonio walks in, still wearing the sling from where Willmore wounded him last night and takes the pistol off Angelica. But when he realises the man she was threatening is his attacker from last night, he himself threatens Willmore. At which moment Don Pedro enters and overhears Angelica and Antonio declaring their love. Antonio! The man he intended to marry his sister, Florinda!
Also Don Pedro is angry because he challenged Antonio to a duel and Antonio sent a deputy, an impersonator in disguise, who turned out to be Belvile, his own rival. Don Pedro is angry with him and say, as soon as his arm has recovered, he'll challenge him to another duel. He leaves and Pedro says he is so angry with the man whose cause he tried to promote, he is in a mood to give his sister to Belvile.
Funny you should say that, says Willmore – they are in the other room and have just got married. At which point they emerge and Pedro gives Belvile and his sister his heartiest congratulations. They exit and Willmore is about to follow them when he is accosted by Hellena. There follows a really long dialogue of wits, and he finds he is attracted to her wit and intelligence. He discovers he is ready to marry her. In a comic moment he asks if he may know her name.
The rest of the cast re-enter and Pedro is initially furious that his other sister is being ravished away, the one intended for a nunnery but, in another comic moment, bold Hellena asks the cast whether she should throw in her lot with Heaven or with the Captain:
Hellena: Let most Voices carry it, for Heaven or the Captain?
All cry: a Captain, a Captain.
Hellena: Look ye, Sir – 'tis a clear Case.
Enter Ned Blunt looking ludicrous in a badly fitting Spanish outfit, to give everyone a laugh.
Then enter a group of mummers passing by to the masquerade, who are invited in to play music and dance, thus rounding the play out with music and gaiety.
And the very last lines are to Willmore, the rover himself, as he leads Hellena into the adjoining room to be married.
Willmore: Have you no trembling at the near approach [of marriage]?
Hellena: No more than you have in an Engagement or a Tempest.
Willmore: Egad, thou'rt a brave Girl, and I admire thy Love and Courage.
Lead on, no other Dangers they can dread,
Who venture in the Storms o' th' Marriage-Bed.
And thus this convoluted series of shenanigans comes to an end. It is obviously designed to amuse a sophisticated London theatre audience, a large part of which would be precisely the kind of amoral aristocrats the play depicts, so they would enjoy seeing their lifestyle depicted on stage – while others would enjoy moralising about them.
The gossip instinct
It struck me the play is a kind of concatenation of gossip in the sense that
the characters on stage spend almost all their time gossiping about each others affairs'
they spend a lot of time pondering and reflecting and – in effect – gossiping about their own affairs
and this complicated spectacle prompts members of the audience, or readers, to gossip about the gossip – to approve or disapprove of Willmore, to opine that Florinda is too hard or too soft etc
You know the magazines you get at supermarket checkouts which are stuffed full of stories about the stars of TV soaps or presenters of Good Morning Britain or Loose Women, the endless supply of tittle tattle about celebrities going out, getting married, getting pregnant, being unfaithful, splitting up with their partners, getting back together with their partners? Well – it's like them.
The academics who introduce plays and texts like this are paid to write about them in terms of 'gender representation' and 'female agency' and 'women's empowerment' and Restoration 'misogyny' and the handy cover-all term, 'The Patriarchy' (all these terms can be found in the Oxford World Classics introduction to The Rover).
I don't deny that these are real things, are valid ideas, interpretations, and worth exploring – although the solid wall of feminist interpretation laid over everything like carpet felt, does often get very monotonous, monoglot and wearing.
But I'm suggesting something much simpler and more obvious. These plays – Restoration plays – full of theatrical artifice, 18th century language and elaborate games as they may well be – also appeal to the basic human instinct for Gossiping. They cater to the same love of judging and moralising about other people's ('ooh that Willmore!') as the endless celebrity tittle-tattle which fills the Daily Mail.
Also, it is easier to moralise and judge than to write about humour. It is notoriously difficult to write about comedy – to convey in a flat essay the thousand and one things which make an audience smile or laugh, from ironic asides, tone of voice, sarcasm, pratfalls, bathos, grotesque characters, comic mistakes, comic business with props, gags with punchlines and so on.
Much easier to grandly state that a narrative 'subverts' 18th century 'gender stereotypes' – any schoolgirl can write that kind of thing these days, it's taught at GCSE and A-level and at university: anybody writing like that is just faithfully parroting what their teachers taught them degree level. Much harder to pinpoint just why The Rover is the brightest and funniest of Behn's plays.
For example, when Hellena points out that aged Don Vincenzio may increase Florinda's 'Bags but not her family' I take it as a sly dig at his probable impotence, to be said with a knowing leer to the audience to trigger a fnah fnah laugh. Or, in the same speech, Hellena vividly pictures the scene as her young sister is forced, night after night, to accompany the aged Don Vincencio to his bed. After she has performed the disgusting task of undressing him…
That Honour being past, the Giant stretches it self, yawns and sighs a Belch or two as loud as a Musket, throws himself into Bed, and expects you in his foul Sheets, and e'er you can get your self undrest, calls you with a Snore or two – And are not these fine Blessings to a young Lady?
What middle-aged wife would not recognise this unflattering portrait of her husband? It reminds me of the jokes about unromantic age which fill the TV series Last of The Summer Wine
Clichés and conventions
Italy It is set in Italy. The wickedest reprobates and comic plots are always Italian (cf Shakespeare comedies with their endless Antonios). In fact, there are multiple reasons for its foreign locatio:
– The nations of Europe (and of Britain) were freely stereotyped. Italy was thought to have very devious and sophisticated people – suiting both comedies or tragedies that depended on plot devices like deception and treachery
– Italians were thought to be more hot-blooded and passionate than the phlegmatic Brits (a belief which runs through the 18th and 19th centuries, underpins countless novels and continues, in some quarters, up to this day) – thus allowing for a degree of sexual passion which might not be believable in Brits
I like their sober grave way, 'tis a kind of legal authoriz'd Fornication, where the Men are not chid for't, nor the Women despis'd, as amongst our dull English;
– Italians were popularly known for their violence – always quick to grab a sword or dagger – as in Romeo and Juliet
Yes: 'Tis pretty to see these Italian start, swell, and stab at the Word Cuckold,
– The weather is better in Italy – so the people are more often outside – in gardens, streets and so on, bumping into each other and thus providing the potential for countless complicated comic permutations. It never rains in plays like this as, of course, it regularly rains in England, keeping people trapped moodily indoors.
Blunt: What a Dog was I to stay in dull England so long
– Also there was the simple pleasure that it was a foreign country with an exotic language, food, customs etc there was a sort of mental tourism in seeing plays in Italy
Faith I'm glad to meet you again in a warm Climate, where the kind Sun has its god-like Power still over the Wine and Woman.
Spain Same sort of thing –
Belvile: Remember these are Spaniards, a sort of People that know how to revenge an Affront.
But with the difference that Britain had little or no military or geographical interest in Italy, whereas we were at war with Spain for a good deal of the 16th century and were major rivals for imperial territories, for example in the Caribbean. Behn has the whore Lucetta's pimp Philippo find gold pieces from 'Old Queen Bess's reign in Ned Blunt's waistband and comment:
We have a Quarrel to her ever since Eighty Eight, and may therefore justify the Theft,
I.e. the character is made to say that the Spanish have had a quarrel with the British since 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, the attempt at an amphibious invasion of England which was designed to overthrow the Protestant queen and impose a Catholic Spanish dictatorship, all blessed by the Pope. The Armada had taken place about 70 years before the play's production, so the same length of time as separates us from the Second World War, which we still remember and commemorate.
Therefore English writing about Spain often has a more bitter or harder edge, whereas Italy had and still has, fewer negative connotations. So it is a little notable that so many of the actual characters are Spanish. Still, the same hot-blooded, exotic rules apply.
English Also, being set abroad allows some of the characters to ridicule the home audience, the English, which is also humorous.
This is a stranger, I know by his gazing; if he be brisk he'll venture to follow me; and then, if I understand my Trade, he's mine: he's English too, and they say that's a sort of good natur'd loving People, and have generally so kind an opinion of themselves, that a Woman with any Wit may flatter 'em into any sort of Fool she pleases.
Which might have brought ironic cheers from the London audience.
Young woman struggling to be free A young woman is being forced to marry an old man by her wicked father for the money (Florinda being hustled to marry aging but rich Don Vincentio).
The young couple Whereas the young woman wants to marry a dashing young hero: There is a pair of young lovers – Florinda and Don Belvile.
The confidante The young woman has a comic confidante to provide a running comic commentary on the main action and make cynical asides and jokes. This leaves the heroine free to express only Noble and Dignified sentiments – in this instance the cynical humorous confidante is her sister Hellena.
The two couples In fact, as the play unfolded I realised there are two couples.This, apparently, is a core, stock convention of Restoration comedy –
A particularly appealing feature is the contrast between two pairs of lovers. The 'gay couple' are witty and independent, with time to banter and tease their way to choosing a marriage partner. Through them, the complexities of commitment could be explored… The second couple are constant and unexciting. Their path to true love is thwarted by outside forces, usually in the shape of a blocking character – Don Pedro in The Rover… (An Introduction to Restoration Comedy)
Rogue male There is an outstanding, amoral, rakish, predatory male figure – Willmore, the Rover.
Thou know'st I'm no tame Sigher, but a rampant Lion of the Forest.
Haste Things always have to be done in a hurry. This is itself a structural requirement of the theatre where it is difficult to convey the passage of months or years. Instead the action must follow pell-mell. Over and above the difficulty of conveying the passage of time, haste and deadlines also simply create tension, energy, dynamism – sweep the audience up in the action – and, of course, prompt the characters to all kinds of desperate behaviour they might not take. Thus when Don Pedro tells his sister, Florinda, that he wants to organise her marriage to young Antonio we can be confident it will trigger all kinds of desperate behaviour.
Dressing up The masked ball or masquerade or disguise is a key element of comedy from ancient Rome to modern pantomime. The feminist scholars of the play get excited because the masquerade allows characters to 'subvert the gender roles' imposed on them by 'misogynist Restoration society'. But in fact dressing up allows for two really basic elements of comic theatre, namely:
1. Freedom you can get away with saying and doing things in disguise which you wouldn't think of trying normally:
Will. But why thus disguis'd and muzzl'd?
Belv: Because whatever Extravagances we commit in these Faces, our own may not be oblig'd to answer 'em.
2. Comic misunderstanding – where characters say things to each other which match the outfits and characters they've adopted, but are wildly inappropriate to the actual characters we – the audience – know them to be.
3. Serious understanding Having read The Rover carefully it dawns on me that dressing up as someone else is also a way of discovering the real motives and character of the person you have designs on, as in the complex scene where Belvile dresses as Antonio and can sound out Don Pedro's real character; or where Hellena dresses as a young man in order to assess Willmore's relationship with Angelica.
Also – people like dressing up for parties. It makes them feel special excited, in a party mood. Thus characters on stage – which have already been simplified and heightened for the audience's enjoyment – become twice as simplified and heightened. Comedy squared.
Politics Behn was a devoted Royalist. The play is set in the 1650s and Belvile, Willmore, Frederick and Blunt are all English courtiers in exile from the Roundhead, republican government of the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell.
Gentlemen, you may be free, you have been kept so poor with Parliaments and Protectors, that the little Stock you have is not worth preserving—but I thank my Stars, I have more Grace than to forfeit my Estate by Cavaliering.
There are lots of little indications e.g. when Belvile introduces Blunt to Willmore as one of us'.
Belvile: Yet, Sir, my Friends are Gentlemen, and ought to be esteem'd for their Misfortunes, since they have the Glory to suffer with the best of Men and Kings; 'tis true, he's a Rover of Fortune, yet a Prince aboard his little wooden World.
Class distinction There is an interesting moment when Colonel Belvile gives a satirical portrait of Ned Blunt, one of their party for sure, but an honest country English gentleman who – it is implied – the more urban, worldly Belvile and Willmore despise.
Willmore: Prithee what Humour is he of…?
Belvile: Why, of an English Elder Brother's Humour, educated in a Nursery, with a Maid to tend him till Fifteen, and lies with his Grand-mother till he's of Age; one that knows no Pleasure beyond riding to the next Fair, or going up to London with his right Worshipful Father in Parliament-time; wearing gay Clothes, or making honourable Love to his Lady Mother's Landry-Maid; gets drunk at a Hunting-Match, and ten to one then gives some Proofs of his Prowess—A pox upon him, he's our Banker, and has all our Cash about him, and if he fail we are all broke.
As so often, the aristocracy are in reality dependent on the honest bourgeoisie – and despise them for it.
Fred: Oh let him alone for that matter, he's of a damn'd stingy Quality, that will secure our Stock. I know not in what Danger it were indeed, if the Jilt should pretend she's in love with him, for 'tis a kind believing Coxcomb;
Blunt: No, Gentlemen, you are Wits; I am a dull Country Rogue, I.
Nobody is surprised when honest Ned Blunt is swindled out of his diamond. He even hails from Essex which, right down to this day, 370 years later, is the butt of jokes.
Blunt: 'Tis a rare Girl, and this one night's enjoyment with her will be worth all the days I ever past in Essex.—
Contemporary references
Moretta: He knows himself of old, I believe those Breeches and he have been acquainted ever since he was beaten at Worcester.
The Battle of Worcester, 3 September 1651 was the last battle of the Civil War.
Moretta: Oh Madam, we're undone, a pox upon that rude Fellow, he's set on to ruin us: we shall never see good days, till all these fighting poor Rogues are sent to the Gallies.
Consignment to galleys was a punishment.
Frederick: It may be she'll sell him for Peru, the Rogue's sturdy and would work well in a Mine;
The Spanish had used slave labour in their South American silver mines for over a century.
Blunt: I had rather be in the Inquisition for Judaism, than in this Doublet and Breeches
Tells us something about the power of the Italian Inquisition, and of its attitude to Jews, in the 1660s.
The Rover online
Oroonoko by Aphra Behn
by Simon on July 17, 2020 • Permalink
Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre
Tagged Angelica Bianca, Antonio, Aphra Behn, Battle of Worcester, Belvile, Callis, carnival, cavaliers, Charles II, Don Pedro, English civil war, English literature, Feminism, Florinda, Frederick, Hellena, Inquisition, John Dryden, love, Lucetta, marriage, masquerade, Naples, Ned Blunt, Old Queen Bess, Oliver Cromwell, Pamplona, Peru, Philippo, playwright, rake, republican, Restoration comedy, Roundhead, Rover, Royalism, royalist, sex, Spain, Spanish Armada, Thomas Killigrew, Thomaso or The Wanderer, Vincentio, vizard, Willmore, woman writer
Posted by Simon on July 17, 2020
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/17/the-rover-aphra-behn/
The Penguin History of Latin America by Edwin Williamson (revised edition 2009) (1)
Because it comes with the bright orange and white spine of the new-style Penguin histories, and because it said 'New Edition' on the front cover, I hadn't quite grasped that the main body of this hefty 700-page history of Latin America was completed by 1990. The new edition is 'new' because it tacks a 40-page chapter at the end, summarising events in Latin America between 1990 and 2008. Obviously quite a lot of water under the bridge since 2008, so probably need to supplement this with a modern modern history of LA.
The text is divided into three big parts:
The Age of Empire, pages 3 to 192 (189 pages)
The Challenge of the Modern World, pages 195 to 310 (115 pages)
The Twentieth Century, pages 313 to 566 (253 pages)
Note how the section on the 20th century, plus the forty pages of the 'new' chapter, is as long as the first two parts put together. Here, as everywhere, the more recent the history, the more of it there is, the more people there have been (the higher the population) and the more records have been kept, until we reach the present age where every phone call, every text and every photograph anyone in the world takes is being recorded and stored. Soon we will drown in data.
The conquest of the Aztecs and Incas
Williamson dives right in with the early, legendary history of the Aztecs, when they were a group of nomads traipsing round central Mexico, before they established the largest empire in pre-Colombian America around 1400. Their only rival was the Inca Empire, down in modern-day Peru.
There is, of course, a lot to say about both, but the thing that struck me was the way both of them were empires carved out by one particular tribe or ethnic group which subjugated all their neighbours, and demanded tribute in food, precious metals and slaves (some devoted to grisly human sacrifices).
Both generated complex religious ideologies accompanied by fascinating and complex theories of time – that it moved in cycles and was marked by moments of great significance – but the bottom line was that both the Aztec ruler and the Inca emperor believed they derived their authority from the gods, and were backed up in this conviction by the class of priests and the warrior castes which surrounded and defended them.
Of course the vast majority of the population was peasants, mostly living in abject serfhood, who slaved away for their entire short, unhealthy lives, producing the surpluses which paid for the elaborate costumes and rituals and treasures passed up to their rulers. And the entire populations of conquered tribes, for both the Aztecs and Incas lived by war, and by conquering, subjugating and exploiting neighbouring peoples.
The other striking thing was their backwardness. Both Aztecs and Incas, and all the hundreds of other tribes scattered across central and south America, were illiterate. The Aztecs and Incas had no written language, just a primitive system of markers, and so the important knowledge about the stars and the gods was handed down by word of mouth, and hence the semi-divine regard for the caste of priests who, alone, knew this vital celestial information.
They didn't have the wheel, nor beasts of burden – no horses or donkeys or camels or bullocks. Therefore they had to carry everything by hand. It is staggering to realise that the awesome Inca city of Machu Picchu was built by massive stones, carried 2,430 metres above sea level, by human power alone.
All this was doomed to come crashing to an end when the Europeans arrived. Williamson describes in detail the four successive voyages of Christopher Columbus, his first landfall in 1492, the chaotic mismanagement of the first islands he and his men settled – Hispaniola – the slow, establishment of colonies and extension of Spanish rule onto neighbouring island, and then, 27 years later, Cortez's expedition to the mainland against the Aztecs (1519-21).
The eeriest thing about Cortes's conquest of the Aztec Empire, and then Francisco Pizarro's conquest of Peru in 1532, is the theory that the rulers of both empires were too puzzled and confused by the invaders to respond adequately. They couldn't believe these little gangs of a few hundred men were serious about planning to overthrow their empires of tens of thousands of warriors – but they couldn't figure out what it was they really wanted. Williamson attributes the conquistadors' success partly to guns and horses but shows that in both cases, the conquerors really had very few – when Pizarro finally met with the Inca emperor Atahualpa, in nothern Peru, he had a force of just 110-foot soldiers, 67 cavalry, three arquebuses and two falconets.
More decisive was the Europeans' superior grasp of strategy, in particular realising that the empires they were encountering were themselves highly stressed, riven by faction fights or stretched by the continual need to control their subject peoples. The Spanish made alliances with enemies and groups wishing to be liberated. They were good at building coalitions.
He doesn't say it in so many words, but the idea emerges that the Europeans triumphed because they were just more intelligent about strategy and warcraft.
The role of European diseases
Then there's our old friend disease. As explained at length in Jared Diamond's classic 1997 study Guns, Germs and Steel, wherever European explorers went they took with them the infectious diseases which, over thousands of years, we had built up immunity to – but which ravaged native populations which had no immunity to them.
This view is reinforced by the revisionist history of America told by Alan Taylor in American Colonies: The Settling of North America (2001). In this Taylor explains how the entire native civilisation of the Mississippi valley was wiped out by diseases, most probably smallpox, brought by a few shipwrecked Spanish sailors to the mouth of the Mississippi delta but which then spread catastrophically so that when, a century later, the first Anglo-Saxon explorers entered the region, they discovered entire cities with complex layouts, large palaces and temples and canals… all abandoned and overgrown by forest.
Indeed, Pizzaro's job of conquering the Incas was made easier because the Incas were themselves in the middle of a bloody civil war, which was complicated by the fact that not one but two rival claimants to the throne had died from smallpox. Over the decades after the Spanish arrived, there was a catastrophic collapse in native populations caused by the invaders' diseases. Some experts estimate as much as 90% of the native population of Mexico was killed by European disease within fifty years.
Still, Williamson is always at hand to say that in this, as in everything else, the reality on the ground, and across such vast areas as all of Mexico, Central America and Peru, were far more complex and uneven that contemporaries and many historians realise. Many many other areas of the continent remained relatively untouched and life went on in the same old way, only now you had to pay a tribute of your produce to a new boss, who wore armour and rode a horse.
The geographic limits of Spanish settlement
The book is packed with thought-provoking ideas and insights. I was fascinated to understand more about the geographic limits to the spread of Spanish rule.
When the Anglo settlers arrived in North America in the 1600s they found it relatively easy to spread out into New England and all along the Atlantic coast. But the Spanish, having established their key centres of administration in Mexico City and Lima a century earlier, with waystations and ports in the Caribbean, found it difficult to expand beyond them. Why?
North of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital which the invaders had renamed Mexico City, lies a vast area of arid desert – the territory which centuries later would become Arizona and New Mexico – where the Spanish explorers discovered nothing but impoverished villages of Indians surviving on subsistence agriculture.
Over to the east there were repeated attempts to explore the peninsula they named 'Florida', but the Spanish found it consisted of endless everglades with few settlements and nothing to plunder.
Heading south, the Spanish took over the coastal strip west of the Andes, conquering the Inca empire, but found the Andes mountains themselves too high to settle. Only a handful of expeditions went over the Andes to explore east. Williamson describes these expeditions, which got lost in the vast Amazon rainforests, and encountered only the most primitive tribespeople, if, indeed, they lived to tell the tale.
So, in a nutshell, central and south America were more difficult for the Spanish to settle than North America would turn out to be for the Anglos. And this explains the quite startling fact that some parts of South America – Williamson singles much of the interior of what is now called Argentina – weren't really settled at all until the 20th century.
The other factor which limited the area of settlement was the Spaniards' motivation. The conquistadors were adventurers, often from the very lowest parts of society. No nobles or aristocrats ventured their lives in the New World. Poor youngest sons of noble families led gangs of criminals and proles. None of them were the type of people who wanted to stake a claim and build a farmhouse and work the land – as the Anglo settlers were to do up north a hundred years later.
Instead, the Spanish wanted to exploit and loot as much wealth as they could from the New World before returning home and buying land, a house and a title. They came to loot. And here's the important thing – you can only loot people who are already rich. The Spanish took over the two big empires, the Aztec in Mexico and the Inca in Peru, because an infrastructure was already in place whereby the native emperors and the upper class exploited large numbers of peasants in a well-organised system. The Spaniards simply took over the system, co-opting the best of the agricultural produce and all the treasure and artefacts for themselves.
It is this factor – the Spanish approach to colonisation – which explains the limited and very patchy nature of Spanish settlement. In the deserts of north Mexico, and in the south of the area they named California, were only desert dwellers, scraping a subsistence living from the soil by dint of elaborate water works. Nothing to steal. In Florida, endless swamps inhabited by scattered villagers. Nothing to steal, and no 'society' worth taking over. Ditto the Amazon rainforests. Nothing like an organised society whose power structures and tributes they could simply appropriate.
The Spanish only settled where there were established and relatively advanced societies which they could parasite onto.
How Spain applied the Reconquista to the New World
Williamson lays out with beautiful logic and clarity just how that imperialist approach to colonisation had arisen in Spain.
It is an enormous historical coincidence that the year that Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas, 1492, just happened to be the very same year that – after nearly 800 years of war and crusade – the Spanish finally kicked the very last Muslim Moorish presence out of the south of Spain. (Muslim forces had crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to seize Spanish territory way back in 711 – the fightback is traditionally dated to their first defeat by Christian forces, in 718 – and it took nearly another 800 years, of slow painstaking battles and piecemeal conquest, for native Christians, sometimes fighting alongside Christian warriors from the rest of Europe attracted by the periodic 'crusades' against the Muslim – to finally expel all the Muslim chiefs, emirs and so on from the final southern enclaves.
The point of this historical background is that expelling the Muslims from Spain wasn't achieved by a modern-style mass army, and in a few years of continuous campaigning – but by ad hoc campaigns led by local Spanish warriors and adventuring knights, which liberated bits and pieces of territory, over a very long period of time.
As and when they seized territory from the Muslims, they applied to the king to rule it. (Spain itself was a very fractured entity, with a number of different kingdoms. It was only as the Reconquista reached its conclusion that the marriage of King Ferdinand of Aragon with Queen Isabella of Castile united most of Spain's territory to form the basis of one unified Spanish monarchy.)
Sometimes large areas of land would be conquered and the new lords were granted what were known as latifundia, originally a Roman word describing a vast agricultural estate. The new owners co-opted the existing inhabitants as serfs to work the land, but often much of the original or Muslim population had fled and so the lords had difficulty filling them with workers and had to advertise for new workers to come in.
The point is that the Reconquista established a model for settling new lands, freshly conquered from the infidel, which was then applied wholesale to the new territory discovered by Columbus and his Viceroys across the ocean, and by the conquistadors and adventurers who followed them.
The Reconquista established the pattern of the monarch granting complete control over large swathes of territory, and all the people on it to, the conqueror or adelantado who had seized it. This resulted in a handful of rich swaggering lords riding among the large population of impoverished peasants working vast areas of land. In the New World it became known as the encomienda system and the grant holders encomenderos.
In fact it was a bit more complicated than that: the native Indians remained, nominally, free subjects of the Crown, which awarded encomenderos the right to enforce labour from the natives, but not complete power of life and death over them. That was the theory, anyway.
Williamson – once he has reported the main military and political events of the conquest – moves briskly on to discuss in considerable detail, this and all the other legal and administrative measures which the Spanish implemented in their new lands.
In fact, the 'excitement' of the narrative of Columbus's voyages and the initial conquests of the Aztecs and the Incas which open the text, might give the reader quite a misleading impression of the book. Williamson is much more a historian of constitutional and administrative systems than he is a chronicler of exciting battles and against-the-odds expeditions. A lot of this book is quite dry. But he develops the constitutional and legal aspects of the conquest in such detail that, to my surprise, the conflicts between the settlers, and in particular between the Viceroys appointed to govern the new provinces and the monarchy back in Spain – and between both of them and Catholic church – at moments become quite gripping.
The Crown protects the Indians
One counter-intuitive learning is that the Spanish crown, right from the start, was concerned about protecting the rights of the native Indians, indeed became their chief protector.
As Spanish adventurers opened up new territory and conquered more and more native peoples, the monarchs became concerned to make sure they were not simply enslaved. Queen Isabella personally forbade the enslavement of the natives, and a series of 'Laws of the Indies' tried to stem abuses wherever they were found. Encomenderos may have enjoyed almost complete power over the populations of their vast estates, but Spanish laws commanded them to also set up schools and hospitals, to educate the Indians, protect them from wars and raids, and to enact justice. This effort continued for the rest of the 16th century, for example with the 'New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians' of 1547, which explicitly forbade all forms of enslaving the native population. The New Laws prompted violent opposition among the oligarchies of Spanish settlers.
The Church takes the Indians' side
It's also surprising to read about the broadly sympathetic line taken by the Catholic Church. The Pope and the Catholic organisations which sent cohorts of missionaries out to the New World took the line that these were people made in God's image, like us, with souls that needed saving. Certainly, some of the first cohort of priests accompanying the conquistadors helped in the wholesale destruction of priceless documents and artefacts which they considered pagan and devilish. But within a generation, a new wave of clerics began for all kinds of reasons to take the native Indians' side, deploring their brutal exploitation by amoral Spanish lords.
On a pragmatic note, they also realised they couldn't convert the natives by preaching at them in Latin or Spanish, and undertaking 'mass baptisms' where the Indians didn't have a clue what was going on. So a whole project was undertaken to learn more about the natives' languages, which quickly extended into documenting their histories and beliefs. Most of what we know about native Indian religion and history derives from these records taken down by Christian missionaries.
The classic figure of this type was Bartolomé de las Casas, initially a coloniser himself, who became a Dominican friar and spent the last 50 years of his life fighting slavery and the colonial abuse of indigenous peoples. He was appointed by the Spanish crown the first 'Protector of the Indians', an administrative office responsible for attending to the wellbeing of the native populations, a function he enthusiastically carried out and which included speaking on their behalf in law courts and even reporting back to the King of Spain in person.
In 1550, Bartolomé participated in the Valladolid debate, in which Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (the noted Spanish Renaissance "humanist", philosopher, theologian, and… er… proponent of colonial slavery) argued that the Indians were less than human and required Spanish masters in order to become civilized. Las Casas maintained that the Indians were fully human and that forcefully subjugating them was morally, legally, and theologically, unjustifiable. Las Casas is a hero (not a perfect hero, but by the standards of his own time a d brave and determined protector of the people.)
Bartolomé de las Casas Wikipedia article
Williamson gives a long and detailed account of the numerous legal initiatives launched by the Crown to try and protect the Indians from exploitation, but in the end they all failed. No amount of legal or theological argumentation could avoid the fact that the Spanish remained the ruling caste with one law for them, while the Indians remained a separate caste, subject to completely different laws. Williamson calls them the Republic of the Spaniards and the Republic of the Indians.
And nothing could alter the simple fact that, on the ground, most of the laws designed to protect the Indians were ignored by the settlers, who looked after each other's interests.
Theories of conquest and bureaucratic structures
I could have done with more about where the silver was discovered in the New World, and the technology of how it is mined and purified. We are told that mercury was vital to the purification process, but not really how or why. I had to google it to find out. He does eventually have three pages on the silver mines (two on gold-mining), but in general Williamson is light on that kind of thing, on technology, and on the diverse resources of the region.
Instead, as the book settles into its stride, you realise that Williamson is going to devote most of his energy to the legal and theological justifications of Spanish rule along with detailed descriptions of the bureaucratic structures the Spanish set up.
Thus there is a long passage explaining how the theory of monarchy evolved in Spain from its late-medieval form to the theory which underpinned the role of Philip II as head of an empire which stretched from California to Sicily. He explains the role of the Catholic Church as a vital prop to royal authority, and gives long explanations of the laws and the administrative structures set up to run the colonies.
He explains the main theories by which the Spanish justified their conquests, both to themselves and to the rest of the world (especially to their critical opponents in the Protestant world). There were two main ones:
The well-established Law of Conquest, by which one ruler conquers another and is allowed to seize his land and titles, which had been worked out over long centuries of theological and legal debate during the Middle Ages.
The more modern notion that the Crown of Spain had a 'right' to rule the Indians because the Europeans would convert the natives to Christianity and so save their souls. This was accompanied by a kind of sub-argument, which many missionaries put forward: that the New World represented an opportunity for Christianity – which had, by the early 1500s become widely associated with corruption and worldly ambition – to start again. Here, in the Garden of Eden, were a new kind of Adam and Eve, a First People uncorrupted by the Old World, and one thread of early colonisation is the devout wishes of the early missionaries to create a Christian Paradise on earth. Of course it was not to turn out that way; the secular settlers – and the terrible European diseases – made sure of that.
How the silver was squandered
Williamson does, however, clarify something which has always puzzled me, which is – if the Spanish monarchy began receiving ever-increasing amounts of silver from the New World (as the result of great silver strikes in North Mexico and Peru in the 1540s), how come Spain steadily declined in power and influence in the century and a half after the conquest?
Indeed, Williamson points out that by the death of Philip II in 1598, Spain was technically bankrupt and had experienced state bankruptcies (i.e been unable to repay its debts) in 1557, 1560, 1569, 1575, and 1596!
Where did the Spanish silver go? The answer turns out to be simple: Paying for Spain's wars.
Even though it never accounted for more than 20 per cent of imperial revenues, silver was the fuel that drove the Spanish war machine. (p.106)
Philip II's father had been Holy Roman Emperor and when Philip came to the throne in 1556, he inherited responsibility for territory in every continent known to Europeans – from the extensive empire in Central and South America to the newly conquered territory of the Phillippines, from the kingdom of Naples and Sicily in Italy, to the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands which began a protracted war of independence against Spanish rule in 1568. Not only this, but Philip saw himself as the defender of all Christendom in its wars against the Ottoman Turks in the East. He it was who organised 'the Holy League', bringing together ships from Spain, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa, the Papal States, the Duchy of Savoy and the Knights of Malta, to inflict a decisive defeat on the Ottomans at the naval Battle of Lepanto in 1567.
Philip also saw himself as the defender of Catholic orthodoxy against the shocking new Protestant heresy. Thus Philip gave large financial support to the Catholic League fighting the Protestants in France, and then went directly to war with the French King Henry IV, an intervention which secured the future of France as a Catholic country.
Last but not least, as we Brits know, Philip II built, armed, provisioned and manned an enormous armada which was designed, with the blessing of the pope, to conquer England, overthrow the Tudor dynasty and the Church of England, and impose Philip as the Catholic ruler of a Catholic Britain.
So that's where the silver, hacked out of dangerous and unhealthy mines in the New World by Indian slaves and serfs, ended up being spent. Funding the impossible ambitions of the over-extended Spanish monarchy.
Spain went into decline because of proliferating military commitments for which it could not pay. (p.116)
Related Latin American reviews (mainly about Mexico)
Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up @ the Victoria and Albert Museum (September 2018)
Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Mexican Modernism: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection on Amazon
Villa And Zapata: A Biography of the Mexican Revolution by Patrick McLynn (2000)
Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals by Linda Bank Downs (1999)
Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals and the Nightmare of War controversy
Dreaming With His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera by Patrick Marnham (1998)
Rivera by Andrea Kettenmann (1997)
The Murals of Diego Rivera by Desmond Rochfort (1987)
The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene (1940)
The Lawless Roads by Graham Greene (1939)
by Simon on August 9, 2019 • Permalink
Posted in Books, History, Latin America
Tagged 20th century, adelantado, Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America, Argentina, Arizona, Aztecs, Bartolomé de las Casas, California, Castile, Catholic church, Christopher Columbus, Cortez, disease, Edwin Williamson, encomenderos, encomienda, Ferdinand and Isabella, Florida, France, Francisco Pizarro, garden of Eden, Guns Germs and Steel, Hispaniola, history, Holy Roman Emperor, immunity, Incas, Jared Diamond, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, King Henry IV, Latin America, Laws of the Indies, Lima, Machu Picchu, Mexico, Mexico City, New Mexico, New World, North America, Ottoman Turks, Peru, Philip II, Philippines, population collapse, pre-Colombian America, Protector of the Indians, Protestantism, Reconquista, Sicily, Silver, Spanish Armada, Spanish Renaissance, Tenochtitlan, The Age of Empire, the Andes, the Battle of Lepanto, The Challenge of the Modern World, the Holy League, The Penguin History of Latin America, the pope, the Republic of the Indians, the Republic of the Spaniards, The Twentieth Century, the Valladolid debate
Posted by Simon on August 9, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/08/09/penguin-history-of-latin-america-edwin-williamson/
Veronese at the National Gallery
Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice is a vast exhibition of 50 of the greatest paintings by Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) at the National Gallery in London, many of them very big indeed. It is a thorough and well-staged exhibition with an excellent supporting pamphlet and audio commentary with contributions from curators, a dress historian and opera designer.
A personal view
Let me say straight away I powerfully disliked this exhibition. I think Veronese is a terrible depicter of the human figure, a terrible painter of the faces of women and babies, the creator of grotesquely stagey and over-elaborate settings of highly artificial action and, in his religious paintings, the painter of nauseatingly religiose images full of lachrymose Marys and saints with shiny eyes upturned like corpses towards cramped heavens cluttered with absurd angels and putti, all given a sinister aspect when you realise he worked in Counter-Reformation Italy under the watchful eye of a dictatorial Inquisition. Not one of the fifty paintings excited or even appealed to me. I'd pay good money to never see most of them again.
The commentary usefully points out that Veronese came from a family of stonemasons: his grandfather, father and brother made a living carving stone. His home town Verona was (and is) famous for its Roman ruins. Once this is pointed out, you begin to notice that buildings, especially the arrangement of columns and arches, are vital ingredients in the compositions; that every painting is elaborately staged on a carefully contrived set, and it's never a 'natural' setting of trees and flowers: neither are they set in the contemporary city with streets and the bustle of urban life. All his paintings are set against a confected backdrop made from idealised Roman architecture – either complete – if the setting is ancient, or ruined – if the setting is contemporary. However fresh this use of highly accurate architecture seemed in the early Renaissance, in Veronese's hands it feels stiflingly conventional.
This early painting is a good example of the importance of architecture; the cluttered composition which is stagey and contrived; the stylised hand gestures (the hands are out of propostion to the bodies); the nauseating religiosity; and the badness of individual faces – look at the face of Christ.
The Conversion of Mary Magdalene by Veronese, 1548 (Wikimedia Commons)
The human figure
Veronese is a painter of the human figure. There are no landscapes or still lives or animal pictures. All the compositions are centred on human figures and therefore the issue becomes quite quickly (for him and for us viewers) how do you pose your people? If you're telling a story, depicting a famous incident – which precise moment do you select to illustrate: at which crucial second do you capture the event? And who is in the picture? And how are they arranged and framed?
He is poor at the human face: the melodrama of the tableau is no replacement for human warmth.
In the Temptation of Saint Anthony Abbot (1552) the musculature of the Devil is unrealistically overdone as is the melodramatic foreshortening of the fallen saint.
In The Virgin and Child with Saint Peter and a female saint (1550s) look at the squished up face and adult thighs of the Christ child.
Veronese was much sought-after as a portrait painter: the Iseppo da Porto and his son Leonida (1552) is meant to be a beautiful example. How dull and flat it is, but look at the terrible draughtsmanship of the fingers: look at the face of the son – it's awful.
Portrait of a Gentleman of the Soranzo Family (1575) Look at the hands, the dead face, the focus on sumptuous fabric.
The Family of Darius before Alexander (1567) the triumph of architecture and grand gesture over humanity. Look at the pudgy faces of the spoilt rich girls.
Which brings us to the staging of the people in these sets. Again, from very early on, from the age of 17 or 18 Veronese was using the elaborate hand gestures developed by earlier Renaissance masters (Leonardo's pointing fingers, Raphael's graceful gestures, Michelangelo's strong outstretched arms). In a way that's difficult to define, whereas these gestures looked fresh and newly-discovered in the High Renaissance, in Veronese they look operatic and stagey. It is as if the accumulated knowledge of how to set the human figure against architectural backdrops in hieratic attitudes reaches a kind of apogee in Veronese which also contains its own decadence.
In The Supper at Emmaus (1555) observe a) the triumph of architcture over people b) the horrible clutteredness of the composition with different bits of people in different fields of perspective c) the terribleness of all the children's faces d) the Renaissance trope of including the painting's sponsors in the painting: could anything be more corrupt and vulgar?
The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine (1570) strikes me as being the triumph of melodrama over humanity, a welter of horrible putti, a swag of richest cloth around columns, and the horrible dead-fish faces of Mary and Catherine. Was commissioned for a convent where the daughters of the rich were indoctrinated with sentimental religiosity.
The Martyrdom of St George (1565) Some people think this is a triumph of composition, employing late Renaissance understanding of perspective to 'involve' the viewer in the action. I find the clutter of the composition claustrophobic and the skyful of bouncing cherubs nauseating. Christ didn't ask us to admire sumptuously clad heroes in elaborate stage sets: he told us to look in our hearts, love God, live a simple life, give all our belongings to the poor, love each other.
The Adoration of the Kings (1573) The triumph of architecture and stage setting. What are the bodiless baby angels for? The face of Mary and Jesus bad, as usual.
Perseus and Andromeda (1580) Ludicrous. Perseus looks like a drunk country and western singer falling off the stage. What's worse about Andromeda, her ludicrous pose (try standing like that) or the elaborate orange cloak falling open to revela her chunky Mannerist body.
And DARK. The commentary claims Veronese is an unparalleled master of light – rubbish – all his paintings seemed to me dark and gloomy with fake blue skies not shedding real light.
A feature of the Renaissance was the way it unabashedly dressed up figures from ancient stories in contemporary dress. This Veronese does to an inordinate degree. It's telling that there are so many contributions on the commentary from a dress historian explaining the meaning, the origin and the cost of so many of the elaborate dresses and cloaks etc which feature in the paintings, as if a detailed analysis of his use of fabrics made up for the overall clumsiness of the tableau. According to the commentary his brother was a textile merchant and so maybe Veronese had samples of the cloth he was depicting readily to hand. Big deal.
In Livia da Porto Thiene and her daughter Deidamia (1552): consider the ugliness of the people and the triumph of expensive clothes: field day for the clothes historian on the commentary; but thin time for anyone hoping to enjoy this painting as a depiction of sympathetic humans.
Portrait of a Lady known as 'Bella Nana' (1560) How bad her face, how dead her expression, how contrived her silly hand gesture, how flat and hieratic the clothes – expensive, though. Feel the schmatter.
I find his religiosity genuinely creepy.
Politically, he is depicting the claustrophobic and vengeful Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation, the institution which rejuvenated the torturing Inquisition, and created schools for spies to infiltrate and undermine the British government, which declared Queen Elizabeth a heretic, thus encouraging zealots to murder her and go straight to heaven and which blessed the Holy Crusade to conquer England which we call the Spanish Armada which, luckily for us, failed in the year of Veronese's death, 1588. Veronese was called in front of the Inquisition when one of his works appeared to have too much contemporary detail, so he changed its title.
In the Allegory of Navigation with a Cross-Staff (1560) we can see the freshness and excitement of Renaissance learning hardening into big heavy blocky art, an art for rich men and powerful institutions. Look how bad the face is, and the disproportion of the body which is too long.
The Conversion of St Pantaleon (1587) was Veronese's last painting. There's an El Greco lividness to the colour of the rich fabrics; there is a disgustingly distorted little cherub; there is an architectural ruin giving the composition 'vertical unity'; and the central figure is rolling his eyes to the heavens so the light reflects off the whites of his eyes in a way which is probably meant to be moving but reminds me of an epileptic having a seizure, or just a corpse.
Theologically, my Protestant soul rebels against the equation by Veronese (and most of his Renaissance compadres) of wealth with piety: The money-grabbing corruption of the Catholic church, an institution which had developed numerous Mafia-style ways of demanding money with menaces, was of course the trigger for Martin Luther's revolt in 1517. Here in the heartland of Roman Catholic orthodoxy wealthy patrons are still having themselves painted in rich ornate contemporary dress in paintings showing incidents from the life of Jesus or various saints as usual believing that the rich can buy their way into heaven.
The Resurrection of Christ (1575) is a horrible and ludicrous painting: note the ruins (it's a historical anecdote = ruins); the melodramatic gestures of the guards (nice-looking cloth, too); neither of which compensate for the ludicrous, Catholic religiosity of the haloed Christ flying into the air.
The Agony in the Garden (1583) isn't about the suffering of jesus at all, it's about the simpering sentimental religiosity of the tearful angel with whom we are invited to identify. Instead of leading better lives we are invited to burst into tears as in the final act of a tragic opera.
Aesthetically, these sickly saints and lachrymose Marys, all sentimental religiosity, with their upturned eyes reflecting light just under their pupils, look like corpses or people having epileptic fits.
Saints Geminianus and Severus (1560) the triumph of ornate architecture, glorious clothing and facile sentiment.
The Virgin and Child with Saints Anthony Abbot and Paul the Hermit (1562) demonstrates the cluttered claustrophobic composition which some people find a triumph of design and perspective, exacerbated by the absurdiy of baby angels playing peek-a-boo in the clouds and the traditional very bad face of Mary and ghastly face of the baby Jesus.
In The Consecration of St Nicholas (1562) the dominant figure is the ridiculous angel flying upside down, and then the pillar on the right. The melodramatic poses can't make up for the badness of the faces, nor the way the figure in white's head is too small for his body.
Venice where Veronese plied his trade, was famous in the 1560s, 70s and 80s, for the arts of love, for its erotic poetry, for its courtesans (ie high-class prostitutes). More than once the commentary commented on the design of low-cut dresses designed to show off the wearer's décolletage (breasts). Like everything else, this would-be sensuality is heavy: compare and contrast with the winsome lightness of a Watteau or any depiction of women by the impressionists.
In The Finding of Moses (1580) the commentary points out the daringly low-cut dress of Pharoah's daughter and, of course, its immense luxuriousness and cost. On both counts this strikes me as almost blasphemous corruption of the ancient text.
The Dream of Saint Helena (1570) is a rare Veronese that I almost like – if we could cut out the silly putti we would have an image of simple sensuousness such as one finds in the late Victorian 'Olympian' painters of antique life. The sumptuous dress is appropriate for the mother of the Roman Emperor. And for once the face is good draughtsmanship.
In fact I find Veronese's paintings strikingly unsensual, heavy and cloddish and he has no way at all with the female nude and is disastrously bad at women's faces, as in Mars and Venus United by Love (1575): what could be less sensuous, lifeless and contrived? Look at the horse's head: he even makes a horse's head look sentimental.
Allegories and mythologies
The only paintings I came close to liking were the five in the room devoted to Allegories and Mythology. The four big paintings in this room were obviously created as a cycle and probably commissioned by the same patron. They are traditionally interpreted as portraying four aspects of love. I think they have flaws of composition and execution (it seems basic not to paint the background around heads in such a way as to highlight how it's been painted in later), but I warm to the Renaissance themes of love.
I Respect bare breasts; badly done female nude; ugly cupid
II Unfaithfulness
III Scorn: bare breasts; bad face; ruins; ugly cupid; fashionable foreshortening.
IV Happy Union
In his article in the London Review of Books T.J. Clark discusses these paintings in depth, bringing a sympathetic view of Veronese, hymning as the poet of the weight and drop of fabric and bringing out felicities like the fig leaves unobtrusively pressing against the white gown which has fallen off the woman. But to me the putti are as disgusting as usual. They sky isn't really light, it has the closed feel of a fresco; it feels indoors. Like all Veronese's paintings it feels claustrophobic, heavy and trapped.
Unfaithfulness by Veronese, 1575 (Wikimedia Commons)
Veronese: Magnificence at the National Gallery continues until 15 June.
National Gallery page on Veronese
Wikipedia article on Veronese
Other reviews of National Gallery exhibitions
Painters' Paintings: From Freud to Van Dyck (August 2016)
Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art (February 2016)
Every room in the National Gallery (December 2015)
Goya: The Portraits (November 2015)
Inventing Impressionism (May 2015)
Making Colour (September 2014)
Veronese (May 2014)
Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 (January 2014)
by Simon on May 7, 2014 • Permalink
Posted in Art, Christianity, European History, Exhibition
Tagged art, Counter-Reformation, exhibition, National Gallery, Paolo Veronese, Spanish Armada, Veronese, Veronese: Magnificence at the National Gallery
Posted by Simon on May 7, 2014
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/05/07/veronese-national-gallery/
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