Yet despite a good deal of natural conservatism, Petrarch added one significant element to the former medieval culture. That was an appreciation, amounting almost to worship, of the pagan Greek and Latin literature. Nor was he interested in antique things because they supported his theology or inculcated Christian morals; his fondness for them was simply and solely because they were inherently interesting. In a multitude of polished Latin letters and in many of his poems, as well as by daily example and precept to his admiring contemporaries, he preached the revival of the classics.

[Sidenote: Characteristics of Petrarch's Humanism]

This one obsessing idea of Petrarch carried with it several corollaries which constituted the essence of humanism and profoundly affected European thought for several generations after the Italian poet. They may be enumerated as follows:

(1) Petrarch felt as no man had felt since pagan days the pleasure of mere human life,—the "joy of living." This, he believed, was not in opposition to the Christian religion, although it contradicted the basis of ascetic life. He remained a Catholic Christian, but he assailed the monks.

(2) Petrarch possessed a confidence in himself, which in the constant repetition in his writings of first-person pronouns partook of boastfulness. He replaced a reliance upon Divine Providence by a sense of his own human ability and power.

(3) Petrarch entertained a clear notion of a living bond between himself and men of like sort in the ancient world. Greek and Roman civilization was to him no dead and buried antiquity, but its poets and thinkers lived again as if they were his neighbors. His love for the past amounted almost to an ecstatic enthusiasm.

(4) Petrarch tremendously influenced his contemporaries. He was no local, or even national, figure. He was revered and respected as "the scholar of Europe." Kings vied with each other in heaping benefits upon him. The Venetian senate gave him the freedom of the city. Both the University of Paris and the municipality of Rome crowned him with laurel.

[Sidenote: "Humanism" and the "Humanities"; Definitions]

The admirers and disciples of Petrarch were attracted by the fresh and original human ideas of life with which such classical writers as Virgil, Horace, and Cicero overflowed. This new-found charm the scholars called humanity (Humanitas) and themselves they styled "humanists." Their studies, which comprised the Greek and Latin languages and literatures, and, incidentally, profane history, were the humanities or "letters" (litterae humaniores), and the pursuit of them was humanism.

Petrarch himself was a serious Latin scholar but knew Greek quite indifferently. About the close of his century, however, Greek teachers came in considerable numbers from Constantinople and Greece across the Adriatic to Italy, and a certain Chrysoloras set up an influential Greek school at Florence. [Footnote: This was before the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453.] Thenceforth, the study of both Latin and Greek went on apace. Monasteries were searched for old manuscripts; libraries for the classics were established; many an ancient masterpiece, long lost, was now recovered and treasured as fine gold. [Footnote: It was during this time that long-lost writings of Tacitus, Cicero, Quintilian, Plautus, Lucretius, etc., were rediscovered.]

[Sidenote: Humanism and Christianity]

At first, humanism met with some opposition from ardent churchmen who feared that the revival of pagan literature might exert an unwholesome influence upon Christianity. But gradually the humanists came to be tolerated and even encourage, until several popes, notably Julius II and Leo X at the opening of the sixteenth century, themselves espoused the cause of humanism. The father of Leo X was the celebrated Lorenzo de' Medici, who subsidized humanists and established the great Florentine library of Greek and Latin classics; and the pope proved himself at once the patron and exemplar of the new learning: he enjoyed music and the theater, art and poetry, the masterpieces of the ancients and the creations of his humanistic contemporaries, the spiritual and the witty—life in every form.

[Sidenote: Spread of Humanism]

The zeal for humanism reached its highest pitch in Italy in the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth, but it gradually gained entrance into other countries and at length became the intellectual spirit of sixteenth-century Europe. Greek was first taught both in England and in France about the middle of the fifteenth century. The Italian expeditions of the French kings Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I, 1494-1547, served to familiarize Frenchmen with humanism. And the rise of important new German universities called humanists to the Holy Roman Empire. As has been said, humanism dominated all Christian Europe in the sixteenth century.

[Sidenote: Erasmus, Chief Humanist of the Sixteenth Century]

Towering above all his contemporaries was Erasmus, the foremost humanist and the intellectual arbiter of the sixteenth century. Erasmus (1466-1536) was a native of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, but throughout a long and studious life he lived in Germany, France, England, Italy, and Switzerland. He took holy orders in the Church and secured the degree of doctor of sacred theology, but it was as a lover of books and a prolific writer that he earned his title to fame. Erasmus, to an even greater degree than Petrarch, became a great international figure—the scholar of Europe. He corresponded with every important writer of his generation, and he was on terms of personal friendship with Aldus Manutius, the famous publisher of Venice, with Sir Thomas More, the distinguished statesman and scholar of England, with Pope Leo X, with Francis I of France, and with Henry VIII of England. For a time he presided at Paris over the new College of France.

A part of the work of Erasmus—his Greek edition of the New Testament and his Praise of Folly—has already been mentioned. In a series of satirical dialogues—the Adages and the Colloquies—he displayed a brilliant intellect and a sparkling wit. With quip and jest he made light of the ignorance and credulity of many clergymen, especially of the monks. He laughed at every one, himself included. "Literary people," said he, "resemble the great figured tapestries of Flanders, which produce effect only when seen from the distance."

[Sidenote: Humanism and Protestantism]

At first Erasmus was friendly with Luther, but as he strongly disapproved of rebellion against the Church, he subsequently assailed Luther and the whole Protestant movement. He remained outside the group of radical reformers, to the end devoted to his favorite authors, simply a lover of good Latin.

Perhaps the chief reason why Erasmus opposed Protestantism was because he imagined that the theological tempest which Luther aroused all over Catholic Europe would destroy fair-minded scholarship—the very essence of humanism. Be that as it may, the leading humanists of Europe—More in England, Helgesen in Denmark, and Erasmus himself—remained Catholic. And while many of the sixteenth-century humanists of Italy grew skeptical regarding all religion, their country, as we have seen, did not become Protestant but adhered to the Roman Church.

[Sidenote: Decline of Humanism]

Gradually, as the sixteenth century advanced, many persons who in an earlier generation would have applied their minds to the study of Latin or Greek, now devoted themselves to theological discussion or moral exposition. The religious differences between Catholics and Protestants, to say nothing of the refinements of dispute between Calvinists and Lutherans or Presbyterians and Congregationalists, absorbed much of the mental energy of the time and seriously distracted the humanists. In fact, we may say that, from the second half of the sixteenth century, humanism as an independent intellectual interest slowly but steadily declined. Nevertheless, it was not lost, for it was merged with other interests, and with them has been preserved ever since.

Humanism, whose seed was sown by Petrarch in the fourteenth century and whose fruit was plucked by Erasmus in the sixteenth, still lives in higher education throughout Europe and America. The historical "humanities"—Latin, Greek, and history—are still taught in college and in high school. They constitute the contribution of the dominant intellectual interest of the sixteenth century.

ART IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: Humanism and the Renaissance of Art]

The effect of the revived interest in Greek and Roman culture, which, as we have seen, dominated European thought from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, was felt not only in literature and in the outward life of its devotees—in ransacking monasteries for lost manuscripts scripts, in critically studying ancient learning, and in consciously imitating antique behavior—but likewise in a marvelous and many-sided development of art.

The art of the middle ages had been essentially Christian—it sprang from the doctrine and devotions of the Catholic Church and was inextricably bound up with Christian life. The graceful Gothic cathedrals, pointing their roofs and airy spires in heavenly aspiration, the fantastic and mysterious carvings of wood or stone, the imaginative portraiture of saintly heroes and heroines as well as of the sublime story of the fall and redemption of the human race, the richly stained glass, and the spiritual organ music—all betokened the supreme thought of medieval Christianity. But humanism recalled to men's minds the previous existence of an art simpler and more restrained, if less ethereal. The reading of Greek and Latin writers heightened an esteem for pagan culture in all its phases.

Therefore, European art underwent a transformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While much of the distinctively medieval culture remained, civilization was enriched by a revival of classical art. The painters, the sculptors, and the architects now sought models not exclusively in their own Christian masters but in many cases in pagan Greek and Roman forms. Gradually the two lines of development were brought together, and the resulting union—the adaptation of classical art-forms to Christian uses—was marked by an unparalleled outburst of artistic energy.

From that period of exuberant art-expression in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, our present-day love of beautiful things has come down in unbroken succession. With no exaggeration it may be said that the sixteenth century is as much the basis of our modern artistic life as it is the foundation of modern Protestantism or of modern world empire. The revolutions in commerce and religion synchronized with the beginning of a new era in art. All arts were affected—architecture, sculpture, painting, engraving, and music.

[Sidenote: Architecture]

In architecture, the severely straight and plain line of the ancient Greek temples or the elegant gentle curve of the Roman dome was substituted for the fanciful lofty Gothic. A rounded arch replaced the pointed. And the ancient Greek orders—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian— were dragged from oblivion to embellish the simple symmetrical buildings. The newer architecture was used for ecclesiastical and other structures, reaching perhaps its highest expression in the vast cathedral of St. Peter, which was erected at Rome in the sixteenth century under the personal direction of great artists, among whom Raphael and Michelangelo are numbered.

[Sidenote: In Italy]

The revival of Greek and Roman architecture, like humanism, had its origin in Italy; and in the cities of the peninsula, under patronage of wealthy princes and noble families, it attained its most general acceptance. But, like humanism, it spread to other countries, which in turn it deeply affected. The chronic wars, in which the petty Italian states were engaged throughout the sixteenth century, were attended, as we have seen, by perpetual foreign interference. But Italy, vanquished in politics, became the victor in art. While her towns surrendered to foreign armies, her architects and builders subdued Europe and brought the Christian countries for a time under her artistic sway.

[Sidenote: In France]

Thus in France the revival was accelerated by the military campaigns of Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I, which led to the revelation of the architectural triumphs in Italy, the result being the importation of great numbers of Italian designers and craftsmen. Architecture after the Greek or Roman manner at once became fashionable. Long, horizontal lines appeared in many public buildings, of which the celebrated palace of the Louvre, begun in the last year of the reign of Francis I (1546), and to-day the home of one of the world's greatest art collections, is a conspicuous example.

[Sidenote: In Other Countries]

In the second half of the sixteenth century, the new architecture similarly entered Spain and received encouragement from Philip II. About the same time it manifested itself in the Netherlands and in the Germanies. In England, its appearance hardly took place in the sixteenth century. it was not until 1619 that a famous architect, Inigo Jones (1573-1651), designed and reared the classical banqueting house in Whitehall, and not until the second half of the seventeenth century did Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723), by means of the majestic St. Paul's cathedral in London, render the new architecture popular in England.

[Sidenote: Sculpture]

Sculpture is usually an attendant of architecture, and it is not surprising, therefore, that transformation of the one should be connected with change in the other. The new movement snowed itself in Italian sculpture as early as the fourteenth century, owing to the influence of the ancient monuments which still abounded throughout the peninsula and to which the humanists attracted attention. In the fifteenth century archaeological discoveries were made and a special interest fostered by the Florentine family of the Medici, who not only became enthusiastic collectors of ancient works of art but promoted the study of the antique figure. Sculpture followed more and more the Greek and Roman traditions in form and often in subject as well. The plastic art of Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was strikingly akin to that of Athens in the fifth or fourth centuries before Christ.

The first great apostle of the new sculpture was Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455), whose marvelous doors on the baptistery at Florence elicited the comment of Michelangelo that they were "worthy of being placed at the entrance of paradise." Slightly younger than Ghiberti was Donatello (1383-1466), who, among other triumphs, fashioned the realistic statue of St. Mark in Venice. Luca della Robbia (1400-1482), with a classic purity of style and simplicity of expression, founded a whole dynasty of sculptors in glazed terra-cotta. Elaborate tomb- monuments, the construction of which started in the fifteenth century, reached their highest magnificence in the gorgeous sixteenth-century tomb of Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti, the founder of the princely family of Visconti in Milan. Michelangelo himself was as famous for his sculpture as for his painting or his architecture; the heroic head of his David at Florence is a work of unrivaled dignity. As the style of classic sculpture became very popular in the sixteenth century, the subjects were increasingly borrowed from pagan literature. Monuments were erected to illustrious men of ancient Rome, and Greek mythology was once more carved in stone.

The extension of the new sculpture beyond Italy was even more rapid than the spread of the new architecture. Henry VII invited Italian sculptors to England; Louis XII patronized the great Leonardo da Vinci, and Francis I brought him to France. The tomb of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain was fashioned in classic form. The new sculpture was famous in Germany before Luther; in fact, it was to be found everywhere in sixteenth-century Europe.

[Sidenote: Painting]

Painting accompanied sculpture. Prior to the sixteenth century, most of the pictures were painted directly upon the plaster walls of churches or of sumptuous dwellings and were called frescoes, although a few were executed on wooden panels. In the sixteenth century, however, easel paintings—that is, detached pictures on canvas, wood, or other material—became common. The progress in painting was not so much an imitation of classical models as was the case with sculpture and architecture, for the reason that painting, being one of the most perishable of the arts, had preserved few of its ancient Greek or Roman examples. But the artists who were interested in architecture and sculpture were likewise naturally interested in painting; and painting, bound by fewer antique traditions, reached a higher degree of perfection in the sixteenth century than did any of its allied arts.

Modern painting was born in Italy. In Italy it found its four great masters—Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. The first two acquired as great a fame in architecture and in sculpture as in painting; the last two were primarily painters.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), a Florentine by birth and training, was patronized in turn by the Sforza family of Milan, by the Medici of Florence, and by the French royal line. His great paintings—the Holy Supper and Madonna Lisa, usually called La Gioconda—carried to a high degree the art of composition and the science of light and shade and color. In fact, Leonardo was a scientific painter—he carefully studied the laws of perspective and painstakingly carried them into practice. He was also a remarkable sculptor, as is testified by his admirable horses in relief. As an engineer, too, he built a canal in northern Italy and constructed fortifications about Milan. He was a musician and a natural philosopher as well. This many-sided man liked to toy with mechanical devices. One day when Louis XII visited Milan, he was met by a large mechanical lion that roared and then reared itself upon its haunches, displaying upon its breast the coat-of-arms of France: it was the work of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo influenced his age perhaps more than any other artist. He wrote extensively. He gathered about himself a large group of disciples. And in his last years spent in France, as a pensioner of Francis I, he encouraged painting in that country as well as in Italy.

Michelangelo (1475-1564), Florentine like Leonardo, was probably the most wonderful of all these artists because of his triumphs in a vast variety of endeavors. It might almost be said of him that "jack of all trades, he was master of all." He was a painter of the first rank, an incomparable sculptor, a great architect, an eminent engineer, a charming poet, and a profound scholar in anatomy and physiology. Dividing his time between Florence and Rome, he served the Medici family and a succession of art-loving popes. With his other qualities of genius he combined austerity in morals, uprightness in character, a lively patriotism for his native city and people, and a proud independence. To give any idea of his achievements is impossible in a book of this size. His tomb of Julius II in Rome and his colossal statue of David in Florence are examples of his sculpture; the cathedral of St. Peter, which he practically completed, is his most enduring monument; the mural decorations in the Sistine Chapel at Rome, telling on a grandiose scale the Biblical story from Creation to the Flood, are marvels of design; and his grand fresco of the Last Judgment is probably the most famous single painting in the world.

[Sidenote: Raphael]

Younger than Michelangelo and living only about half as long, Raphael (1483-1520), nevertheless, surpassed him in the harmonious composition and linear beauty of his painting. For ineffable charm of grace, "the divine" Raphael has always stood without a peer. Raphael lived the better part of his life at Rome under the patronage of Julius II and Leo X, and spent several years in decorating the papal palace of the Vatican. Although he was, for a time, architect of St. Peter's cathedral, and displayed some aptitude for sculpture and for the scholarly study of archaeeology, it is as the greatest of modern painters that he is now regarded. Raphael lived fortunately, always in favor, and rich, and bearing himself like a prince.

[Sidenote: Titian]

Titian (c. 1477-1576) was the typical representative of the Venetian school of painting which acquired great distinction in bright coloring. Official painter for the city of Venice and patronized both by the Emperor Charles V and by Philip II of Spain, he secured considerable wealth and fame. He was not a man of universal genius like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo; his one great and supreme endowment was that of oil painting. In harmony, light, and color, his work has never been equaled. Titian's portrait of Philip II was sent to England and proved a potent auxiliary in the suit of the Spanish king for the hand of Mary Tudor. His celebrated picture of the Council of Trent was executed after the aged artist's visit to the council about 1555.

From Italy as a center, great painting became the heritage of all Europe. Italian painters were brought to France by Louis XII and Francis I, and French painters were subsidized to imitate them. Philip II proved himself a liberal patron of painting throughout his dominions.

[Sidenote: Duerer]

In Germany, painting was developed by Albrecht Duerer (1471-1528), a native of Nuremberg, who received a stimulus from Italian work and was royally patronized by the Emperor Maximilian. The career of Duerer was honored and fortunate: he was on terms of friendship with all the first masters of his age; he even visited and painted Erasmus. But it is as an etcher or engraver, rather than as a painter, that Duerer's reputation was earned. His greatest engravings—such as the Knight and Death, and St. Jerome in his Study—set a standard in a new art which has never been reached by his successors. The first considerable employment of engraving, one of the most useful of the arts, synchronized with the invention of printing. Just as books were a means of multiplying, cheapening, and disseminating ideas, so engravings on copper or wood were the means of multiplying, cheapening, and disseminating pictures which gave vividness to the ideas, or served in place of books for those who could not read.

The impetus afforded by this extraordinary development of painting continued to affect the sixteenth century and a greater part of the seventeenth. The scene shifted, however, from Italy to the Spanish possessions. And Spanish kings, the successors of Philip II, patronized such men as Rubens (1577-1640) and Van Dyck (1599-1641) in the Belgian Netherlands, or Velasquez (1590-1660) and Murillo (1617-1682) in Spain itself.

[Sidenote: Rubens and Van Dyck]

If the work of Rubens displayed little of the earlier Italian grace and refinement, it at any rate attained to distinction in the purely fanciful pictures which he painted in bewildering numbers, many of which, commissioned by Marie de' Medici and King Louis XIII of France, are now to be seen in the Louvre galleries in Paris. And Van Dyck raised portrait painting to unthought-of excellence: his portraits of the English royal children and of King Charles I are world-famous.

[Sidenote: Velasquez] [Sidenote: Murillo]

Within the last century, many connoisseurs of art have been led to believe that Velasquez formerly has been much underrated and that he deserves to rank with the foremost Italian masters. Certainly in all his work there is a dignity, power, and charm, especially in that well- known Maids of Honor, where a little Spanish princess is depicted holding her court, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, her dwarfs and her mastiff, while the artist himself stands at his easel. The last feat of Velasquez was to superintend the elaborate decorations in honor of the marriage of the Spanish Infanta with King Louis XIV of France. Murillo, the youngest of all these great painters, did most of his work for the Catholic Church and naturally dealt with ecclesiastical subjects.

A somewhat different type of painter is found in the Dutchman, Rembrandt (1606-1669), who lived a stormy and unhappy life in the towns of Leyden and Amsterdam. It must be remembered that Holland, while following her national career of independence, commerce, and colonial undertaking, had become stanchly Protestant. Neither the immoral paganism of antiquity nor the medieval legends of Catholicism would longer appeal to the Dutch people as fit subjects of art. Rembrandt, prototype of a new school, therefore painted the actual life of the people among whom he lived and the things which concerned them—lively portraits of contemporary burgomasters, happy pictures of popular amusements, stern scenes from the Old Testament. His Lesson in Anatomy and his Night Watch in their somber settings, are wonderfully realistic products of Rembrandt's mastery of the brush.

[Sidenote: Rembrandt] [Sidenote: Music]

Thus painting, like architecture and sculpture, was perfected in sixteenth-century Italy and speedily became the common property of Christian Europe. Music, too, the most primitive and universal of the arts, owes in its modern form very much to the sixteenth century. During that period the barbarous and uncouth instruments of the middle ages were reformed. The rebeck, to whose loud and harsh strains the medieval rustic had danced, [Footnote: The rebeck probably had been borrowed from the Mohammedans.] by the addition of a fourth string and a few changes in form, became the sweet-toned violin, the most important and expressive instrument of the modern orchestra. As immediate forerunner of our present-day pianoforte, the harpsichord was invented with a keyboard carried to four octaves and the chords of each note doubled or quadrupled to obtain prolonged tones.

[Sidenote: Palestrina]

In the person of the papal organist and choir-master, Palestrina (1524- 1594), appeared the first master-composer. He is justly esteemed as the father of modern religious music and for four hundred years the Catholic Church has repeated his inspired accents. A pope of the twentieth century declared his music to be still unrivaled and directed its universal use. Palestrina directly influenced much of the Italian music of the seventeenth century and the classical German productions of the eighteenth.

NATIONAL LITERATURE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: Latin and the Vernaculars]

Latin had been the learned language of the middle ages: it was used in the Church, in the universities, and in polite society. If a lecturer taught a class or an author wrote a book, Latin was usually employed. In those very middle ages, however, the nations of western Europe were developing spoken languages quite at variance with the classical, scholarly tongue. These so-called vernacular languages were not often written and remained a long time the exclusive means of expression of the lower classes—they consequently not only differed from each other but tended in each case to fall into a number of petty local dialects. So long as they were not largely written, they could achieve no fixity, and it was not until after the invention of printing that the national languages produced extensive national literatures.

Just when printing was invented, the humanists—the foremost scholars of Europe—were diligently engaged in strengthening the position of Latin by encouraging the study of the pagan classics. Virgil, Cicero, Caesar, Tacitus, and the comedies of Plautus and Terence were again read by educated people for their substance and for their style. Petrarch imitated the manner of Latin classics in his letters; Erasmus wrote his great works in Latin. The revival of Greek, which was also due to the humanists, added to the learning and to the literature of the cultured folk, but Greek, even more than Latin, was hardly understood or appreciated by the bulk of the people.

Then came the sixteenth century, with its artistic developments, its national rivalries, its far-away discoveries, its theological debates, and its social and religious unrest. The common people, especially the commercial middle class, clamored to understand: and the result was the appearance of national literatures on a large scale. Alongside of Latin, which was henceforth restricted to the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church and to particularly learned treatises, there now emerged truly literary works in Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, English, etc. The printing of these works at once stereotyped their respective languages, so that since the sixteenth century the written forms of the vernacular tongues have been subject to relatively minor change. Speaking generally, the sixteenth century witnessed the fixing of our best known modern languages.

To review all the leading writers who employed the various vernaculars in the sixteenth century would encroach too much upon the province of professed histories of comparative literature, but a few references to certain figures that tower head and shoulders above all others in their respective countries may serve to call vividly to mind the importance of the period for national literatures.

[Sidenote: Italian Literature]

At the very outset, one important exception must be made in favor of Italy, whose poetry and prose had already been immortalized by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio a hundred years and more before the opening of the sixteenth century. But that country, as we have already repeatedly observed in many kinds of art, anticipated all others in modern times. Italy, almost the last European land to be politically unified, was the first to develop a great national literature.

But Italian literature was broadened and popularized by several influential writers in the sixteenth century, among whom stand preeminent the Florentine diplomat Machiavelli (1469-1527), whose Prince really founded the modern science of politics, and who taught the dangerous doctrine that a ruler, bent on exercising a benevolent despotism, is justified in employing any means to achieve his purpose; Ariosto (1474-1533), whose great poem Orlando Furioso displayed a powerful imagination no less than a rare and cultivated taste; and the unhappy mad Tasso (1544-1595), who in Jerusalem Delivered produced a bulky epic poem, adapting the manner of Virgil to a crusading subject, and in Aminta gave to his countrymen a delightful pastoral drama, the exquisite lyrics of which were long sung in opera.

[Sidenote: French literature]

French literature, like other French art, was encouraged by Francis I. He set up printing presses, established the College of France, and pensioned native writers. The most famous French author of the time was the sarcastic and clever Rabelais (c. 1490-1553), whose memorable Gargantua comprised a series of daring fanciful tales, told with humor of a rather vulgar sort. The language of Gargantua is somewhat archaic—perhaps the French version of Calvin's Institutes would be a better example of the French of the sixteenth century. But France, thus seriously beginning her national literature, was to wait for its supremacy until the seventeenth century—until the institution of the French Academy and the age of Louis XIV.

[Sidenote: Spanish Literature]

Spanish literature flourished in the golden era when Velasquez and Murillo were painting their masterpieces. The immortal Don Quixote, which was published in 1604, entitles its author, Cervantes (1547-1616), to rank with the greatest writers of all time. Lope de Vega (1562-1635), far-famed poet, virtually founded the Spanish theater and is said to have composed eighteen hundred dramatic pieces. Calderon (1600-1681), although less effective in his numerous dramas, wrote allegorical poems of unequaled merit. The printing of large cheap editions of many of these works made Spanish literature immediately popular.

[Sidenote: Portuguese Literature]

How closely the new vernacular literatures reflected significant elements in the national life is particularly observable in the case of Portugal. It was of the wonderful exploring voyages of Vasco da Gama that Camoens (1524-1580), prince of Portuguese poets, sang his stirring Lusiads.

[Sidenote: German Literature]

In the Germanies, the extraordinary influence of humanism at first militated against the development of literature in the vernacular, but the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, in his desire to reach the ears of the common people, turned from Latin to German. Luther's translation of the Bible constitutes the greatest monument in the rise of modern German.

To speak of what our own English language and literature owe to the sixteenth century seems superfluous. The popular writings of Chaucer in the fourteenth century were historically important, but the presence of very many archaic words makes them now difficult to read. But in England, from the appearance in 1551 of the English version of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, [Footnote: Originally published in Latin in 1516.] a representation of an ideal state, to the publication of Milton's grandiose epic, Paradise Lost, in 1667, there was a continuity of great literature. There were Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer and the King James Version of the Bible; Edmund Spenser's graceful Faerie Queene; [Footnote: For its scenery and mechanism, the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto furnished the framework; and it similarly shows the influence of Tasso.] the supreme Shakespeare; Ben Jonson and Marlowe; Francis Bacon and Richard Hooker; Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Taylor; and the somber Milton himself.

BEGINNINGS OF MODERN NATURAL SCIENCE

[Sidenote: Two-fold Development of Culture, Science and Art]

Human civilization, or culture, always depends upon progress in two directions—the reason, and the feelings or emotions. Art is the expression of the latter, and science of the former. Every great period in the world's history, therefore, is marked by a high appreciation of aesthetics and an advance in knowledge. To this general rule, the sixteenth century was no exception, for it was distinguished not only by a wonderful development of architecture, sculpture, painting, engraving, music, and literature,—whether Roman, Greek, or vernacular,—but it is the most obvious starting point of our modern ideas of natural and experimental science.

Nowadays, we believe that science is at once the legitimate means and the proper goal of the progress of the race, and we fill our school curricula with scientific studies. But this spirit is essentially modern: it owes its chief stimulus to important achievements in the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth.

[Sidenote: Characteristics of the Sixteenth Century]

Five elements contributed to impress the period that we are now reviewing with a scientific character. In the first place, the humanists encouraged a critical spirit in comparing and contrasting ancient manuscripts and in investigating the history of the distant past; and their discovery and application of pagan writings served to bring clearly and abruptly before the educated people of the sixteenth century all that the Greeks and Romans had done in astronomy, physics, mathematics, and medicine, as well as in philosophy, art, and literature. Secondly, the invention of printing itself was a scientific feat, and its extended use enabled scientists, no less than artists, immediately to acquaint the whole civilized world with their ideas and demonstrations.

Thirdly, the marvelous maritime discoveries of new routes to India and of a new world, which revolutionized European commerce, added much to geographical knowledge and led to the construction of scientific maps of the earth's surface. Fourthly, the painstaking study of a small group of scholars afforded us our first glimpse of the real character of the vast universe about our own globe—the scientific basis of modern astronomy. Lastly, two profound thinkers, early in the seventeenth century,—Francis Bacon and Descartes,—pointed out new ways of using the reason—the method of modern science.

In an earlier chapter, an account has been given of the maritime discoveries of the sixteenth century and their immediate results in broadening intellectual interests. In this chapter, some attention already has been devoted to the rise of humanism and likewise to the invention of printing. It remains, therefore, to say a few words about the changes in astronomy and in scientific method that characterized the beginning of modern times.

[Side Note: Astronomy]

In the year 1500 the average European knew something about the universe of sun, moon, planets, and stars, but it was scarcely more than the ancient Greeks had known, and its chief use was to foretell the future. This practical aspect of astronomy was a curious ancient misconception, which now passes under the name of astrology. It was popularly believed prior to the sixteenth century that every heavenly body exerted a direct and arbitrary influence upon human character and events, [Footnote: Disease was attributed to planetary influence. This connection between medicine and astrology survives in the sign of Jupiter 4, which still heads medicinal prescriptions.] and that by casting "horoscopes," showing just how the stars appeared at the birth of any person, the subsequent career of such an one might be foreseen. Many silly notions and superstitions grew up about astrology, yet the practice persisted. Charles V and Francis I, great rivals in war, vied with each other in securing the services of most eminent astrologers, and Catherine de' Medici never tired of reading horoscopes.

[Sidenote: "The Ptolemaic System"]

Throughout the middle ages the foremost scholars had continued to cherish the astronomical knowledge of the Greeks, which had been conveniently collected and systematized by a celebrated mathematician and scholar living in Egypt in the second century of the Christian era —Ptolemy by name. Among other theories and ideas, Ptolemy taught that the earth is the center of the universe, that revolving about it are the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, the other planets, and the fixed stars, and that the entire machine is turned with incredible velocity completely around every twenty-four hours. This so-called Ptolemaic system of astronomy fitted in very nicely with the language of the Bible and with the popular prejudice that the earth remains stationary while the heavenly bodies daily rise and set. It was natural that for many centuries the Christians should accept the views of Ptolemy as almost divinely inspired.

[Sidenote: "The Copernican System"]

However, a contradictory theory of the solar system was propounded and upheld in the sixteenth century, quite supplanting the Ptolemaic theory in the course of the seventeenth. The new system is called Copernican after its first modern exponent—and its general acceptance went far to annihilate astrology and to place astronomy upon a rational basis.

Copernicus [the Latin form of his real name, Koppernigk (1473-1543)] was a native of Poland, who divided his time between official work for the Catholic Church and private researches in astronomy. It was during a ten-year sojourn in Italy (1496-1505), studying canon law and medicine, and familiarizing himself, through humanistic teachers, with ancient Greek astronomers, that Copernicus was led seriously to question the Ptolemaic system and to cast about in search of a truthful substitute. Thenceforth for many years he studied and reflected, but it was not until the year of his death (1543) that his results were published to the world. His book—On the Revolutions of the Celestial Bodies, dedicated to Pope Paul III—offered the theory that the earth is not the center of the universe but simply one of a number of planets which revolve about the sun. The earth seemed much less important in the Copernican universe than in the Ptolemaic.

The Copernican thesis was supported and developed by two distinguished astronomers at the beginning of the next century—Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo (1564-1642), one a German, the other an Italian. Kepler taught astronomy for a number of years at Gratz and subsequently made his home in Prague, where he acquired a remarkable collection of instruments [Footnote: From Tycho Brahe, whose assistant he was in 1600-1601.] that enabled him to conduct numerous interesting experiments. While he entertained many fantastic and mystical theories of the "harmony of the spheres" and was not above casting horoscopes for the emperor and for Wallenstein, that soldier of fortune, [Footnote: See below, pp. 223, 226.] he nevertheless established several of the fundamental laws of modern astronomy, such as those governing the form and magnitude of the planetary orbits. It was Kepler who made clear that the planets revolve about the sun in elliptical rather than in strictly circular paths.

Galileo popularized the Copernican theory. [Footnote: Another "popularizer" was Giordano Bruno (c. 1548-1600).] His charming lectures in the university of Padua, where he taught from 1592 to 1610, were so largely attended that a hall seating 2000 had to be provided. In 1609 he perfected a telescope, which, although hardly more powerful than a present-day opera glass, showed unmistakably that the sun was turning on its axis, that Jupiter was attended by revolving moons, and that the essential truth of the Copernican system was established. Unfortunately for Galileo, his enthusiastic desire to convert the pope immediately to his own ideas got him into trouble with the Roman Curia and brought upon him a prohibition from further writing. Galileo submitted like a loyal Catholic to the papal decree, but had he lived another hundred years, he would have rejoiced that almost all men of learning—popes included—had come to accept his own conclusions. Thus modern astronomy was suggested by Copernicus, developed by Kepler, and popularized by Galileo.

The acquisition of sound knowledge in astronomy and likewise in every other science rests primarily upon the observation of natural facts or phenomena and then upon deducing rational conclusions from such observation. Yet this seemingly simple rule had not been continuously and effectively applied in any period of history prior to the sixteenth century. The scientific method of most of the medieval as well as of the ancient scholars was essentially that of Aristotle. [Footnote: Exception to this sweeping generalization must be made in favor of several medieval scientists and philosophers, including—Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar of the thirteenth century.] This so-called deductive method of Aristotle assumed as a starting-point some general of principle as a premise or hypothesis and thence proceeded, by logical reasoning, to deduce concrete applications or consequences. It had been extremely valuable in stimulating the logical faculties and in showing men how to draw accurate conclusions, but it had shown a woeful inability to devise new general principles. It evolved an elaborate theology and a remarkable philosophy, but natural experimental science progressed relatively little until the deductive method of Aristotle was supplemented by the inductive method of Francis Bacon.

[Sidenote: Modern Method of Science: Introduction. Francis Bacon]

Aristotle was partially discredited by radical humanists, who made fun of the medieval scholars who had taken him most seriously, and by the Protestant reformers, who assailed the Catholic theology which had been carefully constructed by Aristotelian deduction. But it was reserved for Francis Bacon, known as Lord Bacon (1561-1626), to point out all the shortcomings of the ancient method and to propose a practicable supplement. A famous lawyer, lord chancellor of England under James I, a born scientist, a brilliant essayist, he wrote several philosophical works of first-rate importance, of which the Advancement of Learning (1604) and the Novum Organum (1620) are the most famous. It is in these works that he summed up the faults which the widening of knowledge in his own day was disclosing in ancient and medieval thought and set forth the necessity of slow laborious observation of facts as antecedent to the assumption of any general principle.

[Sidenote: Descartes]

What of scientific method occurred to Lord Bacon appealed even more to the intellectual genius of the Frenchman Descartes (1596-1660). A curious combination of sincere practicing Catholic and of original daring rationalist was this man, traveling all about Europe, serving as a soldier in the Netherlands, in Bavaria, in Hungary, living in Holland, dying in Sweden, with a mind as restless as his body. Now interested in mathematics, now in philosophy, presently absorbed in physics or in the proof of man's existence, throughout his whole career he held fast to the faith that science depends not upon the authority of books but upon the observation of facts. "Here are my books," he told a visitor, as he pointed to a basket of rabbits that he was about to dissect. The Discourse on Method (1637) and the Principles of Philosophy (1644), taken in conjunction with Bacon's work, ushered in a new scientific era, to some later phases of which we shall have occasion to refer in subsequent chapters.

ADDITIONAL READING

THE RENAISSANCE. GENERAL. Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I (1902), ch. xvi, xvii; Histoire generale, Vol. IV, ch. vii, viii, Vol. V, ch. x, xi; E. M. Hulme, Renaissance and Reformation, 2d ed. (1915), ch. v-vii, xix, xxix, xxx. More detailed accounts: Jakob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. by S. G. C. Middlemore, 2 vols. (1878), 1 vol. ed. (1898), scholarly and profound; J. A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, 5 parts in 7 vols. (1897-1898), interesting and suggestive but less reliable than Burckhardt; Ludwig Geiger, Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und Deutschland (1882), in the great Oncken Series; F. X. Kraus, Geschichte der christlichen Kunst, 2 vols. in 4 (1896-1908), a monumental work of great interest and importance, by a German Catholic.

HUMANISM. The best description of the rise and spread of humanism is J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, Vol. II (1908). For the spirit of early humanism see H. C. Hollway-Calthrop, Petrarch: his Life and Times (1907); J. H. Robinson and H. W. Rolfe, Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, 2d ed. (1914), a selection from Petrarch's letters to Boccaccio and other contemporaries, translated into English, with a valuable introduction; Pierre de Nolhac, Petrarque et l'humanisme, 2d ed., 2 vols. in 1 (1907). Of the antecedents of humanism a convenient summary is presented by Louise Loomis, Mediaeval Hellenism (1906). A popular biography of Erasmus is that of Ephraim Emerton, Desiderius Erasmus (1899); the Latin Letters of Erasmus are now (1916) in course of publication by P. S. Allen; F. M. Nichols, The Epistles of Erasmus, 2 vols. (1901-1906), an excellent translation of letters written prior to 1517; Erasmus's Praise of Folly, in English translation, is obtainable in many editions. D. F. Strauss, Ulrich von Hutten, his Life and Times, trans. by Mrs. G. Sturge (1874), gives a good account of the whole humanistic movement and treats Hutten very sympathetically; The Letters of Obscure Men, to which Hutten contributed, were published, with English translation, by F. G. Stokes in 1909. An excellent edition of The Utopia of Sir Thomas More, the famous English humanist, is that of George Sampson (1910), containing also an English translation and the charming contemporary Biography by More's son-in-law, William Roper. The standard summary of the work of the humanists is the German writing of Georg Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums, 3d ed., 2 vols. (1893). Interesting extracts from the writings of a considerable variety of humanists are translated by Merrick Whitcomb in his Literary Source Books of the Renaissance in Germany and in Italy (1898-1899).

INVENTION OF PRINTING. T. L. De Vinne, Invention of Printing, 2d ed. (1878), and, by the same author, Notable Printers of Italy during the Fifteenth Century (1910), two valuable works by an eminent authority on the subject; G. H. Putnam, Books and their Makers during the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (1896-1897), a useful contribution of another experienced publisher; Johannes Janssen, History of the German People, Vol. I, Book I, ch. i. There is an interesting essay on "Publication before Printing" by R. K. Root in the Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. XXVIII (1913), pp. 417-431.

NATIONAL LITERATURES. Among the many extended bibliographies of national literatures the student certainly should be familiar with the Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. by A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, 12 vols. (1907-1916); and with G. Lanson, Manuel bibliographique de la litterature francaise moderne, 1500-1900, 4 vols. (1909-1913). See also, as suggestive references, Pasquale Villari, The Life and Times of Machiavelli, 2 vols. in i (1898); A. A. Tilley, The Literature of the French Renaissance, 2 vols. (1904); George Saintsbury, A History of Elizabethan Literature (1887); and Sir Sidney Lee, Life of Shakespeare, new rev. ed. (1915).

ART IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. Architecture: A. D. F. Hamlin, A Textbook of the History of Architecture, 5th ed. (1902), a brief general survey; A History of Architecture, Vols. I, II by Russell Sturgis (1906), III, IV by A. L. Frothingham (1915); Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture, 5th ed. (1905); James Fergusson, History of Architecture in All Countries, 3d rev. ed., 5 vols. (1891-1899). Sculpture: Allan Marquand and A. L. Frothingham, A Text-book of the History of Sculpture (1896); Wilhelm von Lubke, History of Sculpture, Eng. trans., 2 vols. (1872). Painting: J. C. Van Dyke, A Text-book of the History of Painting, new rev. ed. (1915); Alfred von Woltmann and Karl Woermann, History of Painting, Eng. trans., 2 vols. (1894). Music: W. S. Pratt, The History of Music (1907). See also the Lives of Seventy of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari (1512-1574), the contemporary and friend of Michelangelo, trans. by Mrs. Foster in the Bohn Library; Osvald Siren, Leonardo da Vinci: the Artist and the Man (1915); and Romain Rolland, Michelangelo (1915).

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. Cambridge Modem History, Vol. V (1908), ch. xxiii, Vol. IV (1906), ch. xxvii, scholarly accounts of Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and their contemporaries. A veritable storehouse of scientific facts is H. S. and E. H. Williams, A History of Science, 10 vols. (1904-1910). Specifically, see Arthur Berry, Short History of Astronomy (1899); Karl von Gebler, Galileo Galilei and the Roman Curia, Eng. trans. by Mrs. George Sturge (1879); B. L. Conway, The Condemnation of Galileo (1913); and Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, Eng. trans. by Crew and Salvio (1914). The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. by J. M. Robertson (1905), is a convenient edition. On the important thinkers from the time of Machiavelli to the middle of the eighteenth century, see Harald Hoffding, A History of Modern Philosophy, Vol. I (1900); W. A. Dunning, A History of Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu (1905); Paul Janet, Histoire de la science politique dans ses rapports avec la morale, 3d ed., Vol. II (1887).



PART II

DYNASTIC AND COLONIAL RIVALRY

In the seventeenth century and in the greater part of the eighteenth, public attention was directed chiefly toward dynastic and colonial rivalries. In the European group of national states, France was the most important. Politically the French evolved a form of absolutist divine-right monarchy, which became the pattern of all European monarchies, that of England alone excepted. In international affairs the reigning family of France—the Bourbon dynasty after a long struggle succeeded in humiliating the rulers of Spain and of Austria— the Habsburg dynasty. The hegemony which, in the sixteenth century, Spain had exercised in the newly established state-system of Europe was now supplanted by that of France. Intellectually, too, Italian leadership yielded to French, until France set the fashion alike in manners, morals, and art. Only in the sphere of commerce and trade and exploitation of lands beyond the seas was French supremacy questioned, and there not by declining Portugal or Spain but by the vigorous English nation. France, victorious in her struggle for dynastic aggrandizement on the continent of Europe, was destined to suffer defeat in her efforts to secure colonies in Asia and America.

This period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was marked likewise by the constant decay of old political and social institutions in Italy and in Germany, by the gradual decline of the might and prestige of the Ottoman Turks, and by the extinction of the ancient kingdom of Poland. In their place appeared as great world powers the northern monarchies of Prussia and Russia, whose royal lines— Hohenzollerns and Romanovs—were to vie in ambition and prowess, before the close of the period, with Habsburgs and Bourbons.

Socially, the influence of nobles and clergy steadily declined. As steadily arose the numbers, the ability, and the importance of the traders and commercial magnates, the moneyed people, all those who were identified with the new wealth that the Commercial Revolution was creating, the lawyers, the doctors, the professors, the merchants,—the so-called middle class, the bourgeoisie, who gradually grew discontented with the restrictive institutions of their time. Within the bourgeoisie was the seed of revolution: they would one day in their own interests overturn monarchy, nobility, the Church, the whole social fabric. That was to be the death-knell of the old regime—the annunciation of the nineteenth century.



CHAPTER VI

THE GROWTH OF ABSOLUTISM IN FRANCE AND THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN BOURBONS AND HABSBURGS, 1589-1661

GROWTH OF ABSOLUTISM IN FRANCE: HENRY IV, RICHELIEU, AND MAZARIN

For the first time in many years France in 1598 was at peace. The Edict of Nantes, which in that year accorded qualified religious toleration to the Huguenots, removed the most serious danger to internal order, and the treaty of Vervins, concluded in the same year with the king of Spain, put an end to a long and exhausting foreign war. Henry IV was now free to undertake the internal reformation of his country.

Sorry, indeed, was the plight of France at the close of the sixteenth century. Protracted civil and foreign wars had produced their inevitable consequences. The state was nearly bankrupt. Country districts lay largely uncultivated. Towns were burned or abandoned. Roads were rough and neglected, and bridges in ruins. Many of the discharged soldiers turned highwaymen, pillaged farmhouses, and robbed travelers. Trade was at a standstill and the artisans of the cities were out of work. During the wars, moreover, great noblemen had taken many rights into their own hands and had acquired a habit of not obeying the king. The French crown seemed to be in danger of losing what power it had gained in the fifteenth century.

That the seventeenth century was to witness not a diminution but a pronounced increase of royal power, was due to the character of the French king at this critical juncture. Henry IV (1589-1610) was strong and vivacious. With his high forehead, sparkling eyes, smiling mouth, and his neatly pointed beard (Henri quatre), he was prepossessing in looks, while his affability, simplicity, and constant expression of interest in the welfare of his subjects earned him the appellation of "Good King Henry." His closest companions knew that he was selfish and avaricious, but that his quick decisions were likely to be good and certain to be put in force. Above all, Henry had soldierly qualities and would brook no disloyalty or disobedience.

[Sidenote: Sully]

Throughout his reign, Henry IV was well served by his chief minister, the duke of Sully, [Footnote: 1560-1641.] an able, loyal, upright Huguenot, though avaricious like the king and subject to furious fits of jealousy and temper. Appointed to the general oversight of financial affairs, Sully made a tour of inspection throughout the country and completely reformed the royal finances. He forbade provincial governors to raise money on their own authority, removed many abuses of tax- collecting, and by an honest, rigorous administration was able between 1600 and 1610 to save an average of a million livres a year. The king zealously upheld Sully's policy of retrenchment: he reduced the subsidies to artists and the grants to favorites, and retained only a small part of his army, sufficient to overawe rebellious nobles and to restore order and security throughout the realm. To promote and preserve universal peace, he even proposed the formation of a World Confederation—his so-called "Grand Design"—which, however, came to naught through the mutual jealousies and rival ambitions of the various European sovereigns. It proved to be much too early to talk convincingly of general pacifism and disarmament.

[Sidenote: Agricultural Development]

While domestic peace was being established and provision was being made for immediate financial contingencies, Henry IV and his great minister were both laboring to increase the resources of their country and thereby to promote the prosperity and contentment of the people. Sully believed that the true wealth of the nation lay in farming pursuits, and, therefore, agriculture should be encouraged even, if necessary, to the neglect of trade and industry. While the king allowed Sully to develop the farming interests, he himself encouraged the new commercial classes.

In order to promote agriculture, Sully urged the abolition of interior customs lines and the free circulation of grain, subsidized stock raising, forbade the destruction of the forests, drained swamps, rebuilt the roads and bridges, and planned a vast system of canals.

On his side, Henry IV was contributing to the wealth of the middle class. It was he who introduced silkworms and the mulberry trees, on which they feed, thereby giving an impetus to the industry which is now one of the most important in France. The beginnings of the industrial importance of Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles date from the reign of Henry IV.

The king likewise encouraged commerce. A French merchant marine was built up by means of royal bounties. A navy was started. Little by little the French began to compete for trade on the high seas at first with the Dutch, and subsequently with the English. French trading posts were established in India; and Champlain was dispatched to the New World to lay the foundations of a French empire in America. It was fortunate for France that she had two men like Henry IV and Sully, each supplementing the work of the other.

The assassination of Henry IV by a crazed fanatic in 1610 threatened for a time to nullify the effects of his labors, for supreme power passed to his widow, Marie de' Medici, an ambitious but incompetent woman, who dismissed Sully and undertook to act as regent for her nine- year-old son, Louis XIII. The queen-regent was surrounded by worthless favorites and was hated by the Huguenots, who feared her rigid Catholicism, and by the nobles, Catholic and Huguenot alike, who were determined to maintain their privileges and power.

The hard savings of Henry IV were quickly exhausted, and France once more faced a financial crisis. In this emergency the Estates-General was again convened (1614). Since the accession of Louis XI (1461), the French monarchs with their absolutist tendencies had endeavored to remove this ancient check upon their authority: they had convoked it only in times of public confusion or economic necessity. Had the Estates-General really been an effective body in 1614, it might have taken a position similar to that of the seventeenth-century Parliament in England and established constitutional government in France, but its organization and personnel militated against such heroic action. The three estates—clergy, nobles, and commoners (bourgeois)—sat separately in as many chambers; the clergy and nobles would neither tax themselves nor cooperate with the Third Estate; the commoners, many of whom were Huguenots, were disliked by the court, despised by the First and Second Estates, and quite out of sympathy with the peasants, the bulk of the French nation. It is not surprising, under the circumstances, that the session of 1614 lasted but three weeks and ended as a farce: the queen-regent locked up the halls and sent the representatives home—she needed the room for a dance, she said. It was not until the momentous year of 1789—after a lapse of 175 years—that the Estates-General again assembled.

After the fiasco of 1614, affairs went from bad to worse. Nobles and Huguenots contended between themselves, and both against the court favorites. As many as five distinct uprisings occurred. Marie de' Medici was forced to relinquish the government, but Louis XIII, on reaching maturity, gave evidence of little executive ability. The king was far more interested in music and hunting than in business of state. No improvement appeared until Cardinal Richelieu assumed the guidance of affairs of state in 1624. Henceforth, the royal power was exercised not so much by Louis XIII as by his great minister.

[Sidenote: Cardinal Richelieu]

Born of a noble family of Poitou, Armand de Richelieu (1585-1642), at the age of twenty-one had been appointed bishop of the small diocese of Lucon. His eloquence and ability as spokesman for the clergy in the fatuous Estates-General of 1614 attracted the notice of Marie de' Medici, who invited him to court, gave him a seat in the royal council, and secured his nomination as a cardinal of the Roman Church. From 1624 until his death in 1642, Richelieu was the most important man in France.

With undoubted loyalty and imperious will, with the most delicate diplomacy and all the blandishments of subtle court intrigue, sometimes with sternest and most merciless cruelty, Richelieu maintained his influence over the king and proceeded to destroy the enemies of the French crown.

[Sidenote: Richelieu's Policies]

Richelieu's policies were quite simple: (1) To make the royal power supreme in France; (2) to make France predominant in Europe. The first involved the removal of checks upon royal authority and the triumph of absolutism; the second meant a vigorous foreign policy, leading to the humiliation of the rival Habsburgs. In both these policies Richelieu was following the general traditions of the preceding century, essentially those of Henry IV, but to an exaggerated extent and with unparalleled success. Postponing consideration of general European affairs, let us first see what the great cardinal accomplished in France.

[Sidenote: Disappearance of Representative Government]

First of all, Richelieu disregarded the Estates-General. He was convinced of its futility and unhesitatingly declined to consult it. Gradually the idea became current that the Estates-General was an out- worn, medieval institution, totally unfit for modern purposes, and that official business could best—and therefore properly—be conducted, not by the representatives of the chief social classes in the nation, but by personal appointees of the king. Thus the royal council became the supreme lawmaking and administrative body in the country.

Local estates, or parliaments, continued to exist in certain of the most recently acquired provinces of France, such as Brittany, Provence, Burgundy, and Languedoc, but they had little influence except in apportioning taxes: Richelieu tampered with their privileges and vetoed many of their acts.

[Sidenote: The Royal Army]

The royal prerogative extended not only to matters of taxation and legislation, including the right to levy taxes and to make expenditures for any purpose without public accounting, but it was preserved and enforced by means of a large standing army, which received its pay and its orders exclusively from the crown. To the royal might, as well as to its right, Richelieu contributed. He energetically aided Louis XIII in organizing and equipping what proved to be the best army in Europe.

Two factions in the state aroused the cardinal's ire—one the Huguenots, and the other the nobles—for both threatened the autocracy which he was bent upon erecting. Both factions suffered defeat and humiliation at his hands.

Richelieu, though a cardinal of the Roman Church, was more politician and statesman than ecclesiastic; though living in an age of religious fanaticism, he was by no means a bigot. As we shall presently see, this Catholic cardinal actually gave military support to Protestants in Germany—for political purposes; it was similarly for political purposes that he attacked the Protestants in France.

As has already been pointed out, French Protestantism meant an influential political party as well as a religion. Since Henry IV had issued the Edict of Nantes, the Huguenots had had their own assemblies, officers, judges, and even certain fortified towns, all of which interfered with the sovereign authority and impaired that uniformity which thoughtful royalists believed to be the very cornerstone of absolutism. Richelieu had no desire to deprive the Huguenots of religious freedom, but he was resolved that in political matters they should obey the king. Consequently, when they revolted in 1625, he determined to crush them. In spite of the considerable aid which England endeavored to give them, the Huguenots were entirely subdued. Richelieu's long siege of La Rochelle, lasting nearly fifteen months, showed his forceful resolution. When the whole country had submitted, the Edict of Alais was published (1629), leaving to the Protestants freedom of conscience and of worship but depriving them of their fortifications and forbidding them to hold assemblies. Public office was still open to them and their representatives kept their judicial posts. "The honest Huguenot retained all that he would have been willing to protect with his life, while the factious and turbulent Huguenot was deprived of the means of embarrassing the government."

The repression of the nobles was a similar statesmanlike achievement, and one made in the face of redoubtable opposition. It had long been customary to name noblemen as governors of the various provinces, but the governors had gradually become masters instead of administrators: they commanded detachments of the army; they claimed allegiance of the garrisons in their towns; they repeatedly and openly defied the royal will. The country, moreover, was sprinkled with noblemen's castles or chateaux, protected by fortifications and armed retainers, standing menaces to the prompt execution of the king's orders. Finally, the noblemen at court, jealous of the cardinal's advancement and spurred on by the intrigues of the disaffected Marie de' Medici or of the king's own brother, hampered the minister at every turn. Of such intolerable conditions, Richelieu determined to be quit.

Into the ranks of noble courtiers, Richelieu struck terror. By means of spies and trickery, he ferreted out conspiracies and arbitrarily put their leaders to death. Every attempt at rebellion was mercilessly punished, no matter how exalted in rank the rebel might be. Richelieu was never moved by entreaties or threats—he was as inexorable as fate itself.

[Sidenote: Demolition of Private Fortifications ]

The cardinal did not confine his attention to noblemen at court. As early as 1626 he published an edict ordering the immediate demolition of all fortified castles not needed for defense against foreign invasion. In carrying this edict into force, Richelieu found warm supporters in peasantry and townsfolk who had long suffered from the exactions and depredations of their noble but warlike neighbors. The ruins of many a chateau throughout modern France bear eloquent witness to the cardinal's activity.

[Sidenote: Centralization of Administration] [Sidenote: The Intendants]

Another enduring monument to Richelieu was the centralization of French administration. The great minister was tired of the proud, independent bearing of the noble governors. Without getting rid of them altogether, he checked these proud officials by transferring most of their powers to a new kind of royal officer, the intendant. Appointed by the crown usually from among the intelligent, loyal middle class, each intendant had charge of a certain district, supervising therein the assessment and collection of royal taxes, the organization of local police or militia, the enforcement of order, and the conduct of courts. These intendants, with their wide powers of taxation, police, and justice, were later dubbed, from their approximate number, the "thirty tyrants" of France. But they owed their positions solely to the favor of the crown; they were drawn from a class whose economic interests were long and well served by the royal power; and their loyalty to the king, therefore, could be depended upon. The intendants constantly made reports to, and received orders from, the central government at Paris. They were so many eyes, all over the kingdom, for an ever-watchful Richelieu. And in measure as the power of the bourgeois intendants increased, that of the noble governors diminished, until, by the eighteenth century, the offices of the latter had become largely honorary though still richly remunerative. To keep the nobles amused and in money, and thereby out of mischief and politics, became, from Richelieu's time, a maxim of the royal policy in France.

[Side Note: Richelieu's Significance]

Such, in brief, was the work of this grim figure that moved across the stage at a critical period in French history. Richelieu, more than any other man, was responsible for the assurance of absolutism in his country at the very time when England, by means of revolution and bloodshed, was establishing parliamentary government; and, as we shall soon see, his foreign policy covered France with European glory and prestige.

In person, Richelieu was frail and sickly, yet when clothed in his cardinal's red robes he appeared distinguished and commanding. His pale, drawn face displayed a firm determination and an inflexible will. Unscrupulous, exacting, and without pity, he preserved to the end a proud faith in his moral strength and in his loyalty to country and to king.

Richelieu died in 1642, and the very next year the monarch whom he had served so gloriously followed him to the grave, leaving the crown to a boy of five years—Louis XIV.

[Side Note: Minority of Louis XIV] [Sidenote: Cardinal Mazarin]

The minority of Louis XIV might have been disastrous to France and to the royal power, had not the strong policies of Richelieu been exemplified and enforced by another remarkable minister and cardinal, Mazarin. Mazarin (1602-1661) was an Italian, born near Naples, educated for an ecclesiastical career at Rome and in Spain. In the discharge of several delicate diplomatic missions for the pope, he had acted as nuncio at Paris, where he so ingratiated himself in Richelieu's favor that he was invited to enter the service of the king of France, and in 1639 he became a naturalized Frenchman.

Despite his foreign birth and the fact that he never spoke French without a bad accent, he rose rapidly in public service. He was named cardinal and was recognized as Richelieu's disciple and imitator. From the death of the greater cardinal in 1642 to his own death in 1661, Mazarin actually governed France.

[Sidenote: Unrest of the Nobles]

Against the Habsburgs, Mazarin continued the great war which Richelieu had begun and brought it to a successful conclusion. In domestic affairs, he encountered greater troubles. The nobles had naturally taken umbrage at the vigorous policies of Richelieu, from which Mazarin seemed to have no thought of departing. They were strengthened, moreover, by a good deal of popular dislike of Mazarin's foreign birth, his avarice, his unscrupulous plundering of the revenues of the realm for the benefit of his own family, and his tricky double-dealing ways.

[Sidenote: The Fronde]

The result was the Fronde, [Footnote: Probably so called from the name of a street game played by Parisian children and often stopped by policemen.] the last attempt prior to the French Revolution to cast off royal absolutism in France. It was a vague popular protest coupled with a selfish reaction on the part of the influential nobles: the pretext was Mazarin's interference with the parlement of Paris.

[Sidenote: The Parlements]

The parlements were judicial bodies [Footnote: There were thirteen in the seventeenth century.] which tried important cases and heard appeals from lower courts. That of Paris, being the most eminent, had, in course of time, secured to itself the right of registering royal decrees—that is, of receiving the king's edicts in formal fashion and entering them upon the statute books so that the law of the land might be known generally. From making such a claim, it was only a step for the parlement of Paris to refuse to register certain new edicts on the ground that the king was not well informed or that they were in conflict with older and more binding enactments. If these claims were substantiated, the royal will would be subjected to revision by the parlement of Paris. To prevent their substantiation, both Louis XIII and Louis XIV held "beds of justice"—that is, appeared in person before the parlement, and from their seat of cushions and pillows declared their will regarding the new edict and directed that it be promulgated. There were amusing scenes when the boy-king, at the direction of Mazarin, gave orders in his shrill treble to the learned lawyers and grave old judges.

Egged on by seeming popular sympathy and no doubt by the contemporaneous political revolution in England, the parlement of Paris at length defied the prime minister. It proclaimed its immunity from royal control; declared the illegality of any public tax which it had not freely and expressly authorized; ordered the abolition of the office of intendant; and protested against arbitrary arrest or imprisonment. To these demands, the people of Paris gave support— barricades were erected in the streets, and Mazarin, whose loyal army was still fighting in the Germanies, was obliged temporarily to recognize the new order. Within six months, however, sufficient troops had been collected to enable him to overawe Paris and to annul his concessions.

[Sidenote: Suppression of the Fronde] [Sidenote: Triumph of Absolutism in France]

Subsequent uprisings, engineered by prominent noblemen, were often more humorous than harmful. To be sure, no less a commander than the great Conde, one of the chief heroes of the Thirty Years' War, took arms against the Cardinalists, as Mazarin's party was called, but so slight was the aid which he received from the French people that he was speedily driven from his country and joined the Spanish army. The upshot of the Fronde was (1) the nobility were more discredited than ever; (2) the parlement was forbidden to devote attention to political or financial affairs; (3) Paris was disarmed and lost the right of electing its own municipal officers; (4) the royal authority was even stronger than under Richelieu because an unsuccessful attempt had been made to weaken it. Henry IV, Richelieu, and Mazarin had made straight the way for the despotism of Louis XIV.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN BOURBONS AND HABSBURGS THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR

[Sidenote: Dynastic Character of Wars in the Seventeenth Century.]

Every European country, except England, was marked in the seventeenth century by a continued growth of monarchical power. The kings were busily engaged in strengthening their hold upon their respective states and in reaching out for additional lands and wealth. International wars, therefore, assumed the character of struggles for dynastic aggrandizement. How might this or that royal family obtain wider territories and richer towns? There was certainly sufficient national life in western Europe to make the common people proud of their nationality; hence the kings could normally count upon popular support. But wars were undertaken upon the continent of Europe in the seventeenth century not primarily for national or patriotic motives, but for the exaltation of a particular royal family. Citizens of border provinces were treated like so many cattle or so much soil that might be conveniently bartered among the kings of France, Spain, or Sweden.

[Sidenote: Habsburg Dominions in 1600.]

This idea had been quite evident in the increase of the Habsburg power during the sixteenth century. In an earlier chapter we have noticed how that family had acquired one district after another until their property included: (1) Under the Spanish branch—Spain, the Two Sicilies, Milan, Franche Comte, the Belgian Netherlands, Portugal, and a huge colonial empire; (2) Under the Austrian branch—Austria and its dependencies, Hungary, Bohemia, and the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Despite the herculean labors of Philip II, France remained outside Habsburg influence, a big gap in what would otherwise have been a series of connected territories.

[Sidenote: Ambition of the Bourbons.]

In measure as the French kings—the Bourbons—strengthened their position in their own country, they looked abroad not merely to ward off foreign attacks but to add land at their neighbors' expense. Richelieu understood that his two policies went hand in glove—to make the Bourbons predominant in Europe was but a corollary to making the royal power supreme in France.

[Sidenote: The Thirty Years' War.]

The chief warfare of the seventeenth century centers, therefore, in the long, terrible conflict between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons. Of this struggle, the so-called Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) may be treated as the first stage. Let us endeavor to obtain a clear idea of the interests involved.

When Richelieu became the chief minister of Louis XIII (1624), he found the Habsburgs in serious trouble and he resolved to take advantage of the situation to enhance the prestige of the Bourbons. The Austrian Habsburgs were facing a vast civil and religious war in the Germanies, and the Spanish Habsburgs were dispatching aid to their hard-pressed kinsmen.

The war, which proved momentous both to the Habsburgs and to their enemies, resulted from a variety of reasons—religious, economic, and political.

[Sidenote: The Thirty Years' War: Ecclesiastical Causes]

The peace of Augsburg (1555) had been expected to settle the religious question in the Germanies. But in practice it had failed to fix two important matters. In the first place, the provision forbidding further secularization of church property ("Ecclesiastical Reservation") was not carried out, nor could it be while human nature and human temptation remained. Every Catholic ecclesiastic who became Protestant would naturally endeavor to take his church lands with him. Then, in the second place, the peace had recognized only Catholics and Lutherans: meanwhile the Calvinists had increased their numbers, especially in southern and central Germany and in Bohemia, and demanded equal rights. In order to extort concessions from the emperor, a union of Protestant princes was formed, containing among its members the zealous young Calvinist prince of the Palatinate, Frederick, commonly called the Elector Palatine of the Rhine. The Catholics were in an equally belligerent frame of mind. Not only were they determined to prevent further secularization of church property, but, emboldened by the progress of the Catholic Reformation in the Germanies during the second half of the sixteenth century, they were now anxious to revise the earlier religious settlement in their own interest and to regain, if possible, the lands that had been lost by the Church to the Protestants. The Catholics relied for political and military support upon the Catholic Habsburg emperor and upon Maximilian, duke of Bavaria and head of the Catholic League of Princes. Religiously, the enemies of the Habsburgs were the German Protestants.

[Sidenote: The Thirty Years' War: Political Causes]

But a hardly less important cause of the Thirty Years' War lay in the politics of the Holy Roman Empire. The German princes had greatly increased their territories and their wealth during the Protestant Revolution. They aspired, each and all, to complete sovereignty. They would rid themselves of the outworn bonds of a medieval empire and assume their proper place among the independent and autocratic rulers of Europe. On his side, the emperor was insistent upon strengthening his position and securing a united powerful Germany under his personal control. Politically, the enemies of the Habsburgs were the German princes.

With the princes was almost invariably allied any European monarch who had anything to gain from dividing Germany or weakening Habsburg influence. In case of a civil war, the Habsburgs might reasonably expect to find enemies in Denmark, Sweden, and France.

[Sidenote: Four Periods in the Thirty Years' War]

The war naturally divides itself into four periods: (1) The Bohemian Revolt; (2) The Danish Period; (3) The Swedish Period; (4) The French or International Period.

[Sidenote: 1. The Bohemian Revolt]

The signal for the outbreak of hostilities in the Germanics was given by a rebellion in Bohemia against the Habsburgs. Following the death of Rudolph II (1576-1612), a narrow-minded, art-loving, and unbalanced recluse, his childless brother Matthias (1612-1619) had desired to secure the succession of a cousin, Ferdinand II (1619-1637), who, although a man of blameless life and resolute character, was known to be devoted to the cause of absolutism and fanatically loyal to the Catholic Church. Little opposition to this settlement was encountered in the various Habsburg Bohemian dominions, except in Bohemia. In that country, however, the nobles, many of whom were Calvinists, dreaded the prospective accession of Ferdinand, who would be likely to deprive them of their special privileges and to impede, if not to forbid, the exercise of the Protestant religion in their territories. Already there had been encroachments on their religious liberty.

One day in 1618, a group of Bohemian noblemen broke into the room where the imperial envoys were stopping and hurled them out of a window into a castle moat some sixty feet below. This so-called "defenestration" of Ferdinand's representatives was followed by the proclamation of the dethronement of the Habsburgs in Bohemia and the election to the kingship of Frederick, the Calvinistic Elector Palatine. Frederick was crowned at Prague and prepared to defend his new lands. Ferdinand II, raising a large army in his other possessions, and receiving assistance from Maximilian of Bavaria and the Catholic League as well as from Tuscany and the Spanish Habsburgs, intrusted the allied forces to an able veteran general, Count Tilly (1559-1632). King Frederick had expected support from his father-in-law, James I of England, and from the Lutheran princes of northern Germany, but in both respects he was disappointed. What with parliamentary quarrels at home and a curiously mistaken foreign policy of a Spanish alliance, James confined his assistance to pompous advice and long words. Then, too, most of the Lutheran princes, led by the tactful John George, elector of Saxony, hoped by remaining neutral to obtain special concessions from the emperor.

Within a very brief period, Tilly subdued Bohemia, drove out Frederick, and reestablished the Habsburg power. Many rebellious nobles lost their property and lives, and the practice of the Protestant religion was again forbidden in Bohemia. Nor was that all. The victorious imperialists drove the fugitive Frederick, now derisively dubbed the "winter king," out of his original wealthy possessions on the Rhine, into miserable exile, an outcast without land or money. The conquered Palatinate was turned over to Maximilian of Bavaria, who was further rewarded for his services by being recognized as an elector of the Holy Roman Empire in place of the deposed Frederick.

The first period of the war was thus favorable to the Habsburg and Catholic causes. Between 1618 and 1620, revolt had been suppressed in Bohemia and an influential Rhenish electorate had been transferred from Calvinist to Catholic hands.

Now, however, the northern Protestant princes took alarm. If they had viewed with composure the failure of Frederick's foolhardy efforts in Bohemia, they beheld with downright dismay the expansion of Bavaria and the destruction of a balance of power long maintained between Catholic and Protestant Germany. And so long as the ill-disciplined remnants of Frederick's armies were behaving like highwaymen, pillaging and burning throughout the Germanics, the emperor declined to consider the grant of any concessions.

[Sidenote: 2. Danish Intervention. Christian IV]

At this critical juncture, while the Protestant princes were wavering between obedience and rebellion, Christian IV of Denmark intervened and precipitated the second period of the war. Christian IV (1588-1648) was impulsive and ambitious: as duke of Holstein he was a member of the Holy Roman Empire and opposed to Habsburg domination; as king of Denmark and Norway he was anxious to extend his influence over the North Sea ports; and as a Lutheran, he sought to champion the rights of his German co-religionists and to help them retain the rich lands which they had appropriated from the Catholic Church. In 1625, therefore, Christian invaded Germany, supported by liberal grants of money from England and by the troops of many of the German princes, both Calvinist and Lutheran.

[Sidenote: Wallenstein]

Against the Danish invasion, Tilly unaided might have had difficulty to stand, but fortune seemed to have raised up a codefender of the imperialist cause in the person of an extraordinary adventurer, Wallenstein. This man had enriched himself enormously out of the recently confiscated estates of rebellious Bohemians, and now, in order to benefit himself still further, he secured permission from the Emperor Ferdinand II to raise an independent army of his own to restore order in the empire and to expel the Danes. By liberal promises of pay and plunder, the soldier of fortune soon recruited an army of some 50,000 men, and what a motley collection it was! Italian, Swiss, Spaniard, German, Pole, Englishman, and Scot,—Protestant was welcomed as heartily as Catholic,—any one who loved adventure or hoped for gain, all united by the single tie of loyalty and devotion to Wallenstein. The force was whipped into shape by the undoubted genius of its commander and at once became an effective machine of war. Yet the perpetual plundering of the land, on which it lived, was a constant source of reproach to the army of Wallenstein.

The campaigning of the second period of the war took place in North Germany. At Lutter, King Christian IV was defeated overwhelmingly by the combined forces of Tilly and Wallenstein, and the Lutheran states were left at the mercy of the Catholic League. Brandenburg openly espoused the imperialist cause and aided Ferdinand's generals in expelling the Danish king from German soil. Only the lack of naval control of the Baltic and North seas prevented the victors from seizing Denmark. The desperation of Christian and the growingly suspicious activity of Sweden resulted in the peace of Lubeck (1629), by which the king of Denmark was left in possession of Jutland, Schleswig, and Holstein, but deprived of the German bishoprics which various members of his family had taken from the Catholic Church.

Following up its successes, the Catholic League prevailed upon the Emperor Ferdinand II in the same year (1629) to sign the Edict of Restitution, restoring to the Church all the property that had been secularized in violation of the peace of Augsburg of 1555. The edict was to be executed by imperial commissioners, all of whom were Catholics, and so well did they do their work that, within three years of the promulgation of the edict, Roman Catholicism in the Germanies had recovered five bishoprics, thirty Hanse towns, and nearly a hundred monasteries, to say nothing of parish churches of which the number can hardly be estimated.

So far, the religious and economic grievances against the Habsburgs had been confined mainly to Calvinists, but now the Lutheran princes were alarmed. The enforcement of the Edict of Restitution against all Protestants alike was the signal for an emphatic protest from Lutherans as well as from Calvinists. A favorable opportunity for intervention seemed to present itself to the foremost Lutheran power—Sweden. Not only were many Protestant princes in Germany in a mood to welcome foreign assistance against the Catholics, but the emperor was less able to resist invasion, since in 1630, yielding to the urgent entreaties of the Catholic League, he dismissed the plundering and ambitious Wallenstein from his service.

The king of Sweden at this time was Gustavus Adolphus (1611-1632), the grandson of that Gustavus Vasa who had established both the independence and the Lutheranism of his country. Gustavus Adolphus was one of the most attractive figures of his age—in the prime of life, tall, fair, and blue-eyed, well educated and versed in seven languages, fond of music and poetry, skilled and daring in war, impetuous, well balanced, and versatile. A rare combination of the idealist and the practical man of affairs, Gustavus Adolphus had dreamed of making Protestant Sweden the leading power in northern Europe and had vigorously set to work to achieve his ends. His determination to encircle the whole Baltic with his own territories—making it literally a Swedish lake—brought him first into conflict with Muscovy, or, as we call it today, Russia. Finland and Esthonia were occupied, and Russia agreed in 1617 to exclusion from the Baltic sea coast. Next a stubborn conflict with Poland (1621-1629) secured for Sweden the province of Livonia and the mouth of the Vistula River. Gustavus then turned his longing eyes to the Baltic coast of northern Germany, at the very time when the Edict of Restitution promised him aggrieved allies in that quarter.

[Sidenote: 3. Swedish Intervention: Gustavus Adolphus]

It was likewise at the very time when Cardinal Richelieu had crushed out all insurrection, whether Huguenot or noble, in France and was seeking some effective means of prolonging the war in the Germanies to the end that the rival Habsburgs might be irretrievably weakened and humiliated. He entered into definite alliance with Gustavus Adolphus and provided him arms and money, for the time asking only that the Protestant champion accord the liberty of Catholic worship in conquered districts.