Europe: A History (106 page)
On the subject of the model Renaissance prince, most historians would think in the first place of the Italian despots like Lorenzo the Magnificent or Ludovico Sforza. After that they would probably propose those formidable neighbours and rivals, Francis I and Henry VIII, whose meeting on the ‘Field of Cloth of Gold’ (1520) exemplified so many quirks and qualities of the age. Yet none deserves more attention than Matthias Hunyadi ‘Corvinus’, King of Hungary (r. 1458–90).
Corvinus—so called from the raven in his coat-of-arms—was a social upstart,
the son of a baron and crusader from Transylvania, Iancu of Hunedoara, (János Hunyadi), who had made his name fighting the Turks. He used his Transylvanian base and a strong mercenary army to subdue the Hungarian magnates, and to initiate a reign where Italian culture was made the mark of political prestige. He had been educated by the humanist Archbishop Vitez; he was married to a neapolitan princess, Beatrice of Aragon; and he succeeded to a royal court which had cultivated its Italian ties since Angevin times. The court at Buda was filled with books, pictures, and philosophers, and was in touch with all the leading scholars of the day, from Poliziano to Ficino. It also boasted a great library, which as a collection of incunabula and manuscripts was the chief rival of the Medicis’ library in Florence. In 1485, when Corvinus captured Vienna, he looked to be on the brink of founding a Hungaro-Austrian monarchy that would soon make a solid bid for control of the Empire. In the event, all plans were brought to naught by his sudden death. His scholarly son was rejected by the Hungarian nobles in favour of a Jagiellon. With some small delay, the pickings were taken by the Habsburgs and the Turks. Like the books of the plundered royal library, the traces of Renaissance Hungary were scattered to the winds,
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Of course, the strengthening of royal power in some quarters does not mean that one can talk about the general advent of absolutism, except as one of several competing ideals. In France, the restraints on the king were still so great that scholars can debate at length whether, under Francis I, for instance, French government was ‘more consultative’ or ‘less decentralised’.
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In England, after the assertion of Tudor monarchy, it was Parliament which asserted itself under the subsequent rule of the Stuarts. In the Holy Roman Empire the imperial Diet gained ground against the Emperor. In Poland-Lithuania republicanism triumphed over monarchy.
True enough, some Renaissance scholars, like Budé, looked to the Roman Empire for their views on monarchy; but others like Bishop Goślicki (Goslicius) looked back to the Roman Republic. Of the two most influential political treatises of the period, the
De la République
(1576) of Jean Bodin favoured constitutional monarchy, whilst the
Leviathan
(1651) of Thomas Hobbes made eccentric use of contract theory to favour absolutism. Without much evidence, Hobbes maintained that kings held unlimited rights because at some unspecified time in the past their subjects had supposedly surrendered their own rights. The resultant Leviathan, a ‘monster composed of men’—his metaphor for the modern state— was a regrettable necessity, the only alternative to endless conflict:
During the time when men live without a common power to keep them in awe, they are in that condition which is called war… where every man is enemy to every man. In such condition, there is no place for industry … no navigation … no arts, no letters, no society, and … continual fear of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
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The Renaissance stimulated the study of Roman law; but the period was equally marked by the reinforcement and collation of separate national laws and,
in the treatise
Dejure belli et pacis
(1625) of Hugo De Groot (Grotius, 1583–1645), by the emergence of international law.
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time in the 1460s Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, started collecting books. His passion was inspired by his old mentor, Janos Vitez, Bishop of Várad (Oradea), and by the Bishop’s nephew, Janos Csezmiczei. Both men were classical scholars, both educated in Italy, and both fervent bibliophiles. The former rose to become Primate of Hungary, the latter, as ‘Janus Pannonius’, the leading Latin poet of the age. When both were disgraced by a political plot, the Primate retired; the poet committed suicide; and the King added their libraries to his own. In 1476 Matthias married Beatrice of Aragón, who brought her own rich book collection from Naples. In 1485 he captured Vienna, laying plans for a new Hungaro-Austrian monarchy, whose cultural centrepiece was to be the royal library, then under construction in Buda. Staffed by an army of archivists, copyists, translators, binders, and illuminators, and by a transcontinental network of agents, the Biblioteca Corviniana was designed to excel in Europe’s ‘revival of letters’. It even excelled the magnificent library of Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence.
None of King Matthias’s hopes were realized. When he died in 1490, his son did not succeed him. The Habsburgs recovered Vienna, and the Hungarian nobles rebelled against their taxes. Work on the library stopped. When the Ottoman army captured Buda in 1526, the Library was pillaged. Most of its contents, including 650 ancient manuscripts of unique value, disappeared.
All, however, was not lost. On the quincentenary of King Matthias’s death, Hungary’s National Library mounted an exhibition to reassemble the surviving treasures. It turned out that Queen Beatrice had contrived to send some prize items back to Naples. Her daughter-in-law had taken others off to Germany. Charles V’s sister Mary, sometime Queen of Hungary, brought still more to Brussels. Most importantly, it emerged that the store of looted books in Constantinople had been used over the centuries as a gift fund for favoured foreign ambassadors. The priceless descriptive catalogue of the Corviniana prepared by the King’s Florentine agent, Naldo Naldi, had been given by a sultan to a Polish ambassador and preserved at Toruri. Seneca’s tragedies, presented to an English ambassador, were preserved in Oxford. The Byzantine ‘Book of Ceremonies’ was preserved in Leipzig,
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Twenty-six manuscripts sent to Francis-Joseph were kept in Vienna. Still more found their way into the library of Duke Augustus at Wolfenbüttel. Uppsala was holding pieces which Queen Christina’s army had looted from Prague … Madrid, Besançon, Rome, and Volterra all contributed.
The 1990 exhibition contained only fragments of the lost collection. But they were enough to show that bibliophilia lay at the heart of the Renaissance urge. In size and variety, the Biblioteca Corviniana had been second only to the Vatican Library. Thanks to the circumstances of its dispersal, its role in the spread of learning was probably second to none.
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Mercantilism, or ‘the mercantile system’, is a label that had little currency until popularized in the late eighteenth century,
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Yet the set of ideas which Adam Smith was to criticize formed the main stock of economic thought of the early modern period. Mercantilism has meant many things to many men; but in essence it referred to the conviction that in order to prosper, the modern state needed to manipulate every available legal, administrative, military, and regulatory device. In this sense, it was the opposite of the
laissez-faire
system, which Smith would later advocate. In one popular form it consisted of bullionism—the idea that a country’s wealth and power depended on amassing gold. In another, it concentrated on improving the balance of trade by assisting exports, penalizing imports, and encouraging home manufactures. In all forms, it was concerned with strengthening the sources of economic power—colonies, manufactures, navies, tariffs—and was expressly directed against a country’s commercial rivals. In the Dutch version—where even the navy was controlled by five separate admiralties—policy was largely left to private and to local initiative. In the French, and later the Prussian, version, it was held very firmly in the hands of the king’s ministers. In England it depended on a mixture of private and royal initiative. An early exposition can be found in
The Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England
(1549). ‘The ordinary means to encrease our wealth and treasure is by Foreign Trade,’ wrote Thomas Mun a little later, ‘wherein we must ever observe this rule: to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs in value.’
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Diplomatic practice
, like mercantilist thought, developed in response to the rise of state power. In the past, monarchs had been content to recall their ambassadors as soon as each mission was concluded. In the fifteenth century, Venice was the only power to maintain a network of permanent embassies abroad, until the papal nunciatures and other Italian cities followed the Venetian lead. From about 1500, however, sovereign rulers gradually saw the appointment of resident ambassadors as a sign of their status and independence. They also valued the influx of commercial and political intelligence. One of the first was Ferdinand the Catholic, whose embassy to the Court of St James dates from 1487 and was originally headed by Dr Rodrigo Gondesalvi de Puebla, later by a woman—Catherine of Aragón, Princess of Wales, the King’s daughter. Francis I of France is usually credited with having the first comprehensive royal diplomatic service, including an embassy at the Ottoman Porte from 1526.
Soon, a
corps diplomatique
appeared in every major court and capital. Living in conditions of some danger, the diplomats quickly worked out the necessary rules of immunity, reciprocity, extraterritoriality, credence, and precedence. In 1515 the Pope ruled that the nuncio should act as doyen of the
corps
, that the imperial ambassador should have precedence over his colleagues, and that all other ambassadors should be given seniority according to the date of their country’s conversion to Christianity. In practice the arrangement did not work, because Charles V
preferred Spanish to imperial diplomats and because, as the ‘Most Catholic’ King of Spain, he refused to cede precedence to the French. This launched a quarrel where French and Spanish ambassadors stolidly held their ground for 200 years. On one occasion, at the Hague in 1661, when the retinues of the French and Spanish ambassadors met in a narrow street, the diplomats stood rooted to the spot for a whole day, until the city council demolished the railings and enabled them to pass on equal terms. The Muscovites were equal sticklers for form. The Tsar’s ambassadors were wont to demand precedence over the Emperor’s own courtiers. In Warsaw, one Muscovite ambassador arrived wearing two hats—one to be raised to the King of Poland in the customary greeting, the other to keep his head covered according to the instructions of the Kremlin.
In the age of Machiavelli, diplomats soon gained a reputation for deception. They had to be familiar with codes, ciphers,’ and invisible ink. ‘An ambassador’, quipped Sir Henry Wootton, ‘is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.’ None the less, the growth of permanent diplomacy marked an important stage in the formation of a community of nations. In 1643–8, when a great diplomatic conference was convened at Munster and at Osnabrück to terminate the Thirty Years War, the ‘Concert of Europe’ was already coming into existence.
At the turn of the sixteenth century, the central sensation on the map of Europe came from the sudden rise of the House of Habsburg to a position of immoderate greatness. The Habsburgs’ success was not achieved by conquest but by the failure of rival dynasties, by far-sighted matrimonial schemes, and by sheer good fortune.
Fortes bella gerant
, ran the motto,
Tu felix Austria nube.
*
The emphasis was on
felix
, ‘fortunate’, and
nube
, ‘marry’.
In 1490 Maximilian I of Habsburg, King of the Romans, was still a refugee from Hungarian-occupied Vienna. His hold on the Empire looked precarious; and he was obliged to initiate a series of imperial reforms from a position of weakness. He oversaw the establishment in 1495 of the
Reichskammergericht
(Imperial Court of Justice), in 1500 of the
Reichsregiment
(the permanent Council of Regency), and in 1512 of the
Reichsschlüsse
or ‘Mandates’ of the Imperial Diet. With the creation of three Colleges of the Diet—Electors, Princes, Cities—and the division of the Empire into ten territorial Circles, each under the
directorium
of two princes charged with administering justice, taxation, and military matters, he effectively surrendered all direct rule of the Empire. He made the House of Habsburg indispensable to the German princes by giving them all they had ever desired.
Simultaneously, Maximilian greatly strengthened the Habsburgs’
Hausmacht
, the dynasty’s private power. The early death of his first wife, Mary, had given him the fabulous Duchy of Burgundy; and in 1490 he inherited Tirol, giving him his favourite residence at Innsbruck. One inheritance treaty in 1491 with the Jagiellons gave him the reversion of Bohemia, another in 1515 the reversion of Hungary. Both policies would mature on the death of Louis Jagiellon in 1526, leaving the dynasty
with ‘the foundations of a Danubian monarchy’.
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Equally important was the marriage of his son to the heiress of Ferdinand and Isabella, which put a grappling hook onto the Spanish dominions. In 1497 his own second marriage to Bianca Sforza of Milan eased the cash flow and assisted his confirmation as Emperor in 1508. By then this most ideological of the Habsburgs must have felt that his mission was being fulfilled. Shortly afterwards, he was confident enough to propose that he be elected Pope!
When Maximilian died, his grandson Charles of Ghent succeeded to a collection of real estate ‘on which the sun never set’. To cap it all, with the help of the Fuggers’ ducats, Charles overcame French and papal opposition to be elected Holy Roman Emperor in record time and in immediate succession to his grandfather. (See Appendix III, p. 1270.)
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