Editors’ Note and Acknowledgments

This volume stems from papers presented at a workshop and symposium sponsored by the Center for Early Modern History during spring semester 2003. For the most part, the initial papers were working papers, discussed in a graduate seminar, one of many intellectual exchanges resulting from the events of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath. The essays in this volume represent a refinement of those ideas and discussions.

Institutional support for this volume and for the workshop and symposium was provided by the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts and its Special Events Fund; a Title VI grant administered by the U of M’s Institute for Global Studies; and the Department of History.

We would like to thank the following students, both undergraduate and graduate, who helped with the events in 2003 and with the production of this volume. They include: Emily Barth, Sara Cammeresi, and Jamie Rae Bluestone.

Most importantly, the editors owe a debt of gratitude to our contributors for their patience. The Center for Early Modern History decided, in 2004, to launch its own publication series, Minnesota Studies in Early Modern History. All new enterprises take a while to get off the ground and this one was no exception. We thank our contributors most sincerely for their willingness to update their papers. Religious differences, and the ways in which societies cope with them, continue to be a major factor in understanding the world, both past and present. We believe the papers presented here contribute significantly to that effort.

Introduction

Jamie Rae Bluestone and William D. Phillips, Jr.

Religion occupied an important, even central position in the global history of the early modern period, with all of the major religions of the world in expansive phases from roughly 1350 to 1750. Islam was spreading throughout Asia and Africa south of the Sahara. Buddhism found new adherents in central and East Asia. Hinduism expanded and influenced indigenous cultures in southeast Asia. Christianity gained large numbers of converts in the Americas and the Philippines and smaller numbers of new followers in Africa and parts of Asia. In the process of expansion, these major religions interacted with one another through conflict and accommodation, the two primary themes of this book.

There also were conflicts and the need for accommodation within each of the world religions, as political and religious leaders sought to define and enforce conformity. In Europe, the Protestant Reformation split the ranks of western Christians, heightening religious fervor on both sides of the confessional divide. A similar but more long-standing division existed within Islam; Sunnis and Shi’ias continued the battle for ideological supremacy and control of the faithful they had begun in the late seventh century. Other religions experienced similar internal conflicts, though on a smaller scale.

To assert the significance of religion in the early modern world may seem self-evident, yet for most of the twentieth century the academic community largely neglected religion or downplayed its historical and contemporary importance. Many academic scholars were consciously or unconsciously children of the Enlightenment and shared the critiques of organized religion enunciated by Voltaire and the contributors to the Encyclopédie, among many others. Viewed from that perspective, religion not only was full of superstition but it also inspired internal religious strife and external wars. Therefore, these scholars reasoned it should be removed from its pedestal as the ultimate source of knowledge and morality and be made subject to human reason as one branch of philosophy.

It is easy to see how this could happen. The United States and France, as two examples, were and are secular republics, with legal barriers attempting to separate religion and politics. Constitutional monarchies such as Britain, even with official ties between the head of state and the established church, also experienced a drastic secularization of society that was common throughout the western world. Scholars in the western countries often took the view that the Enlightenment project of marginalizing religion and confining it in a corner from which it could cause no harm was useful and admirable. This was especially the case for Marxist scholars in those decades when Marxism was fashionable.

This outlook, of course, failed to take into consideration that religion remained strong and influential around the world, even within the increasingly secularized states of the West. Dramatic events involving religious leaders and their more zealous followers have intruded on the world’s stage in recent decades and brought renewed attention to religion as a significant player in modern society. Religion is no doubt still inspirational for large numbers of people, from peaceful believers to militants and terrorists, and so it has become increasingly difficult to ignore contemporary manifestations of belief and, by extension, to overlook historical precedents.

Hence the inspiration for this volume, derived from a lecture series and symposium organized by Marguerite Ragnow and William Phillips at the Center for Early Modern History, University of Minnesota, in 2003. The papers cover a variety of topics focusing on religious conflict and accommodation in various places around the world in the early modern period. The individual cases, though from an earlier time, adumbrate, sometimes explicitly, the challenges facing the early twenty-first-century world as religious belief and practice again inspire both conflict and accommodation.

The volume opens with a scene-setting article by James D. Tracy, who takes issue with common tendencies to project on earlier centuries modern attitudes of toleration and mutual religious respect and instead draws our attention to the reality of conflicts. Emphasizing the expanding  early  modern  Islamic  polities — from  the  Ottomans in the west to the Mughals in the east, with the Safavids of Persia in between — Tracy discusses the battle between Christianity and Islam in Eastern Europe and Mediterranean Basin, what he calls the background war of the early modern period. This “conflict of civilizations” was ongoing and involved commercial rivalry and a persistent cultural contest, along with repeated raids across religious frontiers and occasional outbreaks of major warfare. Although “only occasionally at the forefront of attention” because participants on both sides “were preoccupied by enemies or rivals of their own faith,” the struggle between Christendom and the Islamic world was nevertheless a continuing reality. Indeed, the two groups of believers were long-standing enemies, a fact of which Tracy does well to remind us. “How [else],” he asks, “can we understand contemporary Muslim fears about the dominance of the infidel West if we fail to appreciate how much a Christian West once feared the dominance of infidel Muslims?”¹

Despite ongoing hostilities between Christians and Muslims, there were individual believers whose personal faith in and scriptural understanding of their religion led them to take a more accommodating position. One such Christian, Juan de Segovia (d. 1458), is the subject of the essay by Anne Marie Wolf. In fifteenth-century Christian Spain, Segovia, a prominent but not politically influential theologian, came up with an array of ideas for Christian interaction with Muslims that closely approached an appeal for true toleration three centuries before the Enlightenment. He lived at a time of heightened competition between Christianity and Islam in the Mediterranean world and achieved fame as a leading figure at the Council of Basel. His contemporary Christian theologians and Christian rulers and their courts were shocked and disheartened by the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople and the final demise of the Byzantine Empire. Many advocated a return to the Crusades and a military offensive against the Turks. In a set of letters to his fellow theologian Jean Germain, Juan de Segovia argued that the correct attitude of Christians and Christian polities toward the Muslims should be dialogue, not militant confrontation; drawing heavily on scripture, he argued for increased Christian efforts to convert Muslims by peaceful means, abjuring confrontation and violence.

The Mughal emperor Akbar, who ruled from 1556 to 1605, advocated a similar effort at accommodation, as Stephen Blake illustrates in his article. Blake examines Akbar’s attempt to forge some sort of mutual understanding among the multiple cultures of his realm in India, a project established by his Mughal predecessors to build an imperial system similar to the contemporary Ottoman and Safavid empires. Akbar created a House of Religious Assembly in his new capital city of Fathpur Sikri with the intention of appealing to Muslim and non-Muslim audiences by bringing together Hindus, Jains, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews to meet with the politically dominant Muslims. His attempt, while achieving a certain degree of success during his lifetime, had no lasting impact, perhaps because of the factionalism present among the followers of different interpreters of Islam.

Conflicting interpretations of Christianity, as reflected in the discord among Protestants and Catholics, was a frequent challenge for the sixteenth-century French monarchy. Denis Crouzet demonstrates how political imagery changed to reflect evolving political and religious configurations in sixteenth-century France. Early on, the monarchy’s self-representation was that of strong and warlike authority, intended to encourage obedience throughout the kingdom. Then, as the horrors of the Wars of Religion (1562-1598) became apparent and a need for reconciliation between the parties was deemed necessary, Henri IV rebranded the monarchy as a conciliatory accommodator with the ability to bring together the warring factions by non-violent means.

In eastern Europe in the same period, the principality of Transylvania had an even greater religious complexity, but it did not devolve into the civil war experienced in France. Graeme Murdock contends that violence is not the “inevitable result of the breakdown of religious uniformity,” as is so often argued for France and other places, and offers early modern Transylvania as the perfect counter-example.² In the early sixteenth century, the traditional Catholic and Orthodox varieties of Christianity were joined by new persuasions — Lutheran, Reformed, and Anti-Trinitarian. Murdock shows how Transylvanian rulers were able to negotiate accommodations among the differing groups, which resulted in a high degree of successful interaction and civil peace that lasted as long as the political independence of the principality endured.

The relationship between religion and politics played out much differently in the Philippines. Timothy Brook examines a confrontation between Spanish and Chinese communities in seventeenth-century Manila that was not prompted by religious conflict, but instead took on religious overtones only “as the economic and political costs of the conflict rose.” In early 1640, following a series of violent episodes prompted by drought, a bad harvest, an epidemic, and over-taxation, the Spanish and Chinese were at a stalemate. Entrenched in their positions, each side drew upon its religious identity in the hope of securing victory. The Catholic Spaniards chose Christ, who was “a god of war, a god of state, and a god of empire,” while the polytheistic Chinese chose Emperor Guan, who “was a god of war too, but only in name.” As Brook describes, the once political-economic battle had now become “a battle of the gods,” a conflict that Christ eventually won, with not a little help from the Spaniards’ more advanced military technology.³

The ultimate domination of a Catholic Christ in the seventeenth-century Philippines was no guarantee of similar success during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the North Atlantic region, where members of the Catholic Church were not politically recognized and often legally discriminated against by Protestant political leaders. Catholic Christians were certainly not in the majority, but, as Luca Codignola argues, they also did not crumble in the face of external pressure and internal crises. Through his study of disparate Catholic communities found throughout the North Atlantic and their responses to multiple crises, Codignola identifies a common characteristic that not only helped Catholic Christians to endure, but also seems to have actually fortified the Church as a whole. “An overall conservatism, a deeply ingrained interest in maintaining the status quo concerning political power” is what held together three generations of Catholics.⁴

In the volume’s final essay, Frederick Asher shows how early modern religious conflicts still have twenty-first century reverberations. Throughout the world, there are geographical locales that have been seen as holy places, both because of their physical presence and because they were the sites of transforming religious events. There are several such holy places in India, including one where dramatic events took place in the last decade of the twentieth century, events that harkened back to the sixteenth century. In 1992, a mob inspired and backed by prominent Hindu groups destroyed the mosque of Bahri Masjid at Adohya. This was the second oldest mosque of the Mughal period, constructed in 1528-29. The focus of Hindu wrath was the belief that the mosque was built on the birthplace of the god Rama and that the Muslims in the sixteenth century had destroyed a Hindu temple to do so. Asher indicates that the events at Adohya fit within a context of efforts to exalt the Hindu presence in the Indian republic and to replace and supplant reminders of other religions, all in the name of righting perceived early-modern wrongs.

The essays in this volume examine aspects of the complexity of religious belief and practice that contributed to life in the early modern period. Defense of faith and religious privilege inspired a wide range of conflicts, from local disputes to wars. Yet accommodation was possible and often successful. September 11, 2001, inspired scholars of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Early Modern History to begin a dialogue about faith-inspired conflict. By seeking to understand religious conflict and accommodation in the past we hope to better understand the centuries-old tensions that continue to cause upheavals today.

Endnotes

James D. Tracy, “The Background War of the Early Modern Era: Christian and Muslim States in Contest for Dominion, Trade, and Cultural Preeminence,” chapter 1 of this volume.

Graeme Murdock, “Transylvanian Tolerance? Religious Accommodation on the Frontier of Christian Europe,” chapter 5 of this volume.

Timothy Brook, “The Battle of Christ and Lord Guan: A Sino-European Religious Conflict in the Philippines, 1640,” chapter 6 of this volume.

Luca Codignola, “Roman Catholic Conservatism in a New North Atlantic World, 1760-1829,” chapter 7 of this volume.

The Background War of the Early Modern Era: Christian and Muslim States in Contest for Dominion, Trade, and Cultural Preeminence

James D. Tracy

One reason history always has to be rewritten is that historians start from preoccupations of their own moment in time. In our moment of time bookstores receive a steady stream of studies on Islamic history. As a Europeanist, I admire colleagues who work in those difficult languages beyond my ken -- Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. Yet I also have reservations about one of the main trends in current research on the early modern era. While an important new overview of Europe’s interactions with the Islamic world in this period sees a gradual repudiation “of the entire conception of a warlike relationship between Christendom and the Ottoman empire,”¹ monographic studies tend to emphasize the peaceful contacts that brought Christians and Muslims together,² or the propagandistic hostile images of “the other” that helped keep them apart.³ Needless to say, no one of any sense wants to see in our times a “clash of civilizations” between the Islamic world and the West.⁴ But by playing down the reality of conflicts in the past we may create the false impression that achieving peaceful coexistence in today’s world is a simple matter of mutual good will. How can we understand contemporary Muslim fears about the dominance of the infidel West if we fail to appreciate how much a Christian West once feared the dominance of infidel Muslims?

From about 1500, three Islamic empires bestrode the Eurasian continent: the Ottomans; the Safavid empire of Persia, founded in 1501 by a dynasty of Shiʻite shahs; and the Mughal empire in India, starting from Babur’s conquest of Delhi in 1526. Thriving ports in these realms passed on to the West only a small fraction of the silks and spices of the East. Their rich agricultural lands supported immense armies, steeled by the discipline of slave-soldiers, yet flexible in adopting new weaponry developed in the West, like musketry and field artillery.⁵ Of this layered Islamic power, stretching deep into Asia, the Ottomans were the spearhead of advance into infidel Europe. At first just one of many Turkish dynasties fighting for control of western Anatolia, the Ottomans gained a foothold on the European side of the Bosporus in the 1350s, and most of Serbia fell into their hands at the battle of Kossovo Pole in 1388. Though Belgrade resisted two sieges, in 1455 and 1464, Sultan Mehmet II realized a millennial Islamic dream in 1453 by conquering “Rome,” that is, Constantinople. To challenge Venice’s hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean, Sultan Bayazit II (1481-1512) built a mighty war fleet.⁶ By defeating the new Shah of lran (1514), Sultan Selim I (1512-1520) extended his boundaries to the limits of the modern Turkish Republic. By defeating the Mamluks, a rival Muslim empire based in Cairo (1517), he became ruler of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and parts of Arabia, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Selim’s son, Suleiman the Lawgiver (1520-1566), subdued Belgrade in 1521, and the next year his war galleys drove the Knights Hospitaller of St. John from their island fortress of Rhodes, long a base for corsair raids in the crusading tradition. In 1526, the sultan and his huge army overwhelmed the forces of Hungary, leaving King Louis II Jagellio and some 15,000 of his men dead on the Hungarian plain.⁷ Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, Emperor Charles V’s brother (1503-1564), was left to claim what he could of the old kingdom of Hungary, not including Transylvania, a province henceforth ruled by Magyar princes who paid tribute to the Sublime Porte.⁸ In 1534, Suleiman extended his rule in North Africa by co-opting a North African corsair chief, Kheireddin Barbarossa, as his Admiral of the Sea; meanwhile, in a lightning strike from Mosul, he subdued Baghdad. Suleiman thus bequeathed to his heirs a dominion that ran from Algiers to the Persian Gulf, and from the Red Sea to the northern shore of the Black Sea.⁹

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1519-1556) and king of Castile and Aragon, presented himself as Christendom’s champion. But if Castile, his richest realm, had annual revenues of about 2,500,000 Spanish ducats,¹⁰ the receipts of Sultan Suleiman’s state treasury were credibly estimated at about 7,000,000 Venetian ducats,¹¹ not counting land-taxes that supported  tens of thousands of cavalry,¹² or the jewels and gold bars accumulated over generations in the sultan’s private treasury.¹³ The tercios of Italy -- some 5,000 to 6,000 Spanish and Italian veterans, normally on garrison duty in Milan and Naples -- gave Charles a formidable strike force, so long as he kept up their wages.¹⁴ Suleiman had 87,000 regulars who were almost always paid punctually, four times a year,¹⁵ including the Janissaries, a corps of slave infantry rarely bested by infidels.¹⁶

Yet by about 1700, the world had a very different look. When Poland’s King Jan Sobieski broke up the second and last Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683), European counter-attacks followed: armies of the Holy Roman Empire advanced into Hungary and Transylvania; Sobieski reclaimed formerly Polish lands along the lower Dniester; and Venice planted the standard of St. Mark in southern Greece and the Aegean. Some of these gains were rolled back, but Hungary and Transylvania were lost to the Ottomans for good.¹⁷ This military advance by states facing the Ottoman Empire was paralleled by a growth in the mercantile power of European states facing the Atlantic. By about 1700, England and the Dutch Republic were the dominant trading nations throughout the Ottoman lands,¹⁸ even as the merchant ships from the East India Companies of these same two nations, bristling with guns, enforced their trading privileges by blockading Surat, the Mughal Empire’s greatest entrepot.¹⁹ One thus sees an overall shift in the balance of power, from the Muslim East to the Christian West.

How does one explain a change of this magnitude? Europeanists have often argued, in the language of business plans, that occidental institutions had some competitive advantage, whether in military technology,²⁰ or the social organization of warfare,²¹ or a system of property rights guaranteed by law,²² or the economic rationality of state-chartered corporations, like the East India Companies.²³ Ottomanists, while rejecting the idea of a general “decline” in the empire’s capacity to maintain itself,²⁴ have pointed to reasons for “decadence” or “destabilization” in particular spheres, such as Sultan Suleiman’s decision to favor the succession of an incompetent younger son (the child of his beloved wife),²⁵ or the debasement of the currency under Sultan Murad III (1585/1586),²⁶ or the decision, from the 1590s, that future sultans should be reared in the seraglio, with no experience of the world outside.²⁷ Institutions do matter in history, and so do the decisions and the personalities of individual rulers. But arguments of this kind entail a certain determinism, that is, a tendency to think that precedents once established have an enduring power either to stifle normal human creativity, or to guard against the consequences of normal human incompetence. In fact, if Asian or Islamic economic institutions were inferior, why did Europe’s chartered companies compete successfully against Indian merchants only in those trades where their naval power was of some use?²⁸ If Asian or Islamic military institutions were inferior, how was Kara Mustafa, the dynamic grand vizier of an indolent sultan, able as late as 1683 to bring the Ottoman army within sight of a great victory at Vienna?²⁹ If Asian or Islamic political institutions were inferior, why did French and British observers see in the Indo-Afghan empire of Nadir Shah Afshar (1741-1745) an achievement others might emulate?³⁰ If we need analogies for competition among states in the past, let us think not in terms of a business plan, but a retail season: only at the end of the season can one discern the circumstances that prove decisive, but are seldom foreseen by any business plan. In other words, instead of a sociological history that looks in the past for institutional forms that can be used to predict the future, we need, dare I say, a historical history, one that takes the kaleidoscopic shifting of events on its own terms, looking not for explanations of human behavior in general, but for an understanding of outcomes specific to the past.

In working toward a descriptive history of this kind, one must start with the fact that Europe’s Christian states pursued distinct and often conflicting strategies in their dealings with the Ottomans. At a minimum, one may speak of a “Habsburg” pattern (Spanish or Austrian), with endemic border fighting punctuated by major wars;³¹ a “French” pattern, involving an alliance with the Porte that sometimes extended to military cooperation against the Habsburgs;³² a “Venetian” pattern, in which the effects of constant border fighting and occasional major wars were tempered by fear of provoking a powerful neighbor, and by deep involvement in the Levant trade;³³ and finally an “English”³⁴ or “Dutch”³⁵ pattern, featuring trade and friendly relations with the Ottomans, but also a commercial strategy that undermined the trade not only of European rivals but of the Ottomans themselves. To get a sense of the larger picture, I use the correspondence of ambassadors from rival European states at the Sublime Porte.³⁶ This essay offers a preliminary overview. What I see is a pattern of conflict between two worlds, each of which shared a religious identity -- in other words, a conflict of civilizations. Yet this conflict of civilizations was only occasionally at the forefront of attention; more often, statesmen, merchants, and religious thinkers, European and Ottoman alike, were preoccupied by enemies or rivals of their own faith. Thus the wider confrontation between Christendom and Islamdom is best described as a background war, an ongoing conflict that usually came to the fore only when others were in abeyance. I will briefly describe four dimensions of this background war: cross-border raiding, holy war, commercial rivalry, and a contest for cultural preeminence.

I. ENDEMIC WARFARE: BORDER RAIDERS AND CORSAIRS

Border zones between hostile states were inherently dangerous. The fundamental problem was that warfare was on both sides a business proposition: commanders kept their men contented with booty.³⁷ As one Habsburg diplomat with experience of the Hungarian frontier put it, those responsible for raids back and forth across the border were men who “obey neither the sultan nor the king of the Romans,³⁸ but give themselves license to do as they please.”³⁹ A further problem was that frontier-dwellers always saw themselves as innocent victims of unprovoked aggression,⁴⁰ while holding in high regard those brave captains who from time to time exacted from the vile infidel a just retribution.⁴¹ In the 1580s, there was a sancak or district-governor in Ottoman Dalmatia whom Venetians accused of personally organizing raids into their territory with as many as 300 armed men. In response, Ottoman officials gathered testimony of a previous raid by 500 armed Venetian subjects; these reports, according to Venice’s bailo (ambassador) in Constantinople, were surely a fabrication.⁴² Meanwhile, far to the east in Podolia, along the lower Dniester, raids by the Tatars of Crimea, an Ottoman vassal state, were repaid with interest by the Zaporizhian Cossacks, Ruthenian (Ukrainian) in language and Orthodox in religion, but subjects of Poland-Lithuania.⁴³ Far to the west, Habsburg Spain’s Moriscos, expelled in 1609, helped found a new corsairing base at Salé on Morocco’s Atlantic coast.⁴⁴ All along the border between Christendom and Islamdom one finds populations whose way of life was shaped by raiding.

The border zone where “the two competing military machines were at their most extensive” was in Hungary. Here, the Ottoman thrust created a large semi-circular salient, governed for the sultan by the pasha of Buda,⁴⁵ whose border with surrounding Habsburg lands extended for hundreds of kilometers (Ferdinand and his captains held western Croatia, western and northern Hungary, and, in the east, the valley of the Tisza river, dividing Transylvania from Ottoman Hungary). By the middle of the sixteenth century, some 17,000 Habsburg troops, divided among 120 border fortresses, faced off against 30,000 Ottoman regulars, plus another 10,000 garrison soldiers.⁴⁶ In Croatia (a province of Hungary), people driven out by Ottoman raids gathered in the small, inaccessible mountain town of Senj; from the 1530s, these “Uskoks” (from a Croatian word meaning “to jump in”) supported themselves by plunder in Ottoman lands.⁴⁷ The Hayduks -- Calvinist peasants who had also been dispossessed by the Ottoman advance -- evolved into a disciplined force whose fighting qualities were much appreciated by Habsburg captains (except when Ferdinand wanted to enforce a truce with the Ottomans).⁴⁸

Not surprisingly, there was no end to hostile incursions from both sides. In 1545, notwithstanding a temporary truce granted by the pasha of Buda, the duchy of Carniola⁴⁹ was assaulted by a force said to consist of 6,000 cavalry, authorized by the sancak of Bosnia; “seventeen villages were devastated and put to flames,” and “hundreds of souls carried off into captivity,” with their flocks and other belongings.⁵⁰ On the other hand, Habsburg officials professed to have no control over Count Nikola Zrinski, the ban of Habsburg Croatia, and his followers: “these men say openly they are not subject to your majesty [Ferdinand], or to the emperor of the Turks; their ancestors lived from banditry, and they intend  to pass this manner of life on to their heirs.”⁵¹ The Ottomans had the better of things -- the pashalik of Buda continued  to expand its borders, e.g., after Ferdinand failed in an effort to gain possession of Transylvania (1552). But in the correspondence between the court in Vienna and its envoys at the Porte one finds not just repeated lists of fortress towns wrongfully taken by the Turks,⁵² but also translations of complaints from the pasha about the lawless incursions by Habsburg castellans, including one who had his men dress in Turkish garb.⁵³ In 1547, the two sides signed an eight-year truce. Oghier Ghislain de Busbecq, the ambassador who would subsequently publish a much-read account of the Ottoman realm, went to the Porte in 1555 and finally brought back a renewal of the truce in 1562.⁵⁴ Yet real peace was an illusion. Geza Palffy characterizes the period between 1568 and 1591 as “the era of small war [Kleinkrieg].” In 1576 alone, Habsburg officials counted some fifty Ottoman incursions in Hungary; but rather than measuring his army against that of the sultan, Emperor Rudolph II (r. 1576-1609) chose to open discussions for another renewal of the truce.⁵⁵

The sea lanes lying between Christian and Muslim powers were no safer. Uskoks and Cossacks were especially known as raiders on the sea, using small, swift barks that could outrun Venetian galleys in the Adriatic, or Ottoman galleys in the Black Sea.⁵⁶ For governments of this era, piracy was evil only up to a point. While corsairs who raided one’s own merchants or maritime villages were heinous criminals, the daring mariners who gave infidel dogs a taste of their own medicine were heroes of the nation and defenders of the faith. The Uskoks, though Habsburg subjects, enjoyed wide support in Venetian Dalmatia, so long as they refrained from attacking fellow Christians. Similarly, in the harbors of Ottoman Greece, corsairs who carried on the war against the infidel were warmly received by Turkish officials, despite the sultan’s commands against piracy.⁵⁷ In the 1570s, Francesco de Medici, grand duke of Tuscany (1574-1587), wanted Florence’s merchants to have the same advantages as other nations trading in the Ottoman empire. Yet he also had a duty to the military order founded by his father, the Knights of St. Stephen,⁵⁸ whose four war galleys often went corsairing with those of the Knights of St. John, now based on Malta. Thus the Capitulations of 1578 provided that Florentine merchants would not be molested because of harm done by the galleys of St. Stephen, so long as the grand duke armed no other vessels against the sultan.⁵⁹ One may assume that the reason Ottoman officials were so accommodating was that they understood the grand duke’s dilemma.⁶⁰ The men identified as pirates by European envoys often were Ottoman squadron commanders; they made sure the sultan’s officials had a share in the profits of their private sailing ventures.⁶¹

These local battles on land and sea fitted into a bigger picture by giving the self-professed standard-bearers of Christendom and Islamdom -- Habsburg Spain and the Ottoman Empire -- opportunities to harass the infidel without having to go to war. The reason that Sultan Suleiman extended his protection to Kheireddin’s Barbary corsairs was to encourage raids from Algiers and Tunis, and keep Charles V’s galleys too busy in home waters to go adventuring into the eastern Mediterranean.⁶² In the 1620s, Spain subsidized Poland’s Cossacks, so as to keep busy in the Black Sea Turkish galleys that might otherwise descend on the coast of Spanish Naples.⁶³ Finally, if statesmen on either side wanted a full-scale war, incessant border raids and corsair plundering meant that there were always fresh atrocities to provide a plausible pretext. In Hungary, the era of “small war” (1568-1591) gave way to the Long Turkish War of 1591-1606.

II. HOLY WAR IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

Christian and Muslim versions of the idea of holy war emerged simultaneously. The Quranic idea of warring on the path of God -- often called the lesser jihad -- evolved amid struggles between the Prophet’s men and their Meccan kinfolk, after the hijra to Medina (622).⁶⁴ Meanwhile, Emperor Heraclius, known to later Christian warriors in the East as “the First Crusader,” made his campaigns against Sassanian Persia (622-628) a holy war against infidel fire-worshippers who had stolen the True Cross from Jerusalem.⁶⁵

But the question is whether these ideas from the past were still pertinent to a sixteenth-century world whose hard-headed statesmen were mainly concerned about enemies closer to home, among their co-religionists. The Porte looked anxiously toward eastern Anatolia, where Shiʻite Islam was deeply rooted, and where Iran’s Safavid dynasty had much support among Turkoman warrior clans. This “threat to the very foundations of the Ottoman Empire”⁶⁶ explains the campaigns against “heretic” Persia by Selim I (1513/1514) and Suleiman the Lawgiver (1533-1536, 1548-1552).⁶⁷ When high officials told French envoys seeking a campaign against the Habsburgs that Persia was a more important problem,⁶⁸ they were not just making excuses. In 1555, the shah’s ambassador brought a richly embellished Koran, asking to be shown the verses that proved that Shiʻite worship contravened the laws of the Prophet. Sultan Suleiman would not give heretics the courtesy of a debate. Instead, he had the Chief Mufti issue a fetwa authorizing Muslim warriors to take slaves in the lands of heretic Shiʻites, no less than in the lands of infidel Christians.⁶⁹ If it took two months for an Ottoman army marching from Istanbul to reach Habsburg Austria, the Persian frontier was even farther from the capital, roughly a four month march.⁷⁰ Nonetheless, while large Ottoman armies campaigned in Hungary or Austria during twenty-one years between 1520 and 1640,⁷¹ during the same period Ottoman armies were either marching toward Persia or engaged in active fighting for thirty-six campaigning seasons.⁷²

As for Europe, most wars from about 1500 to about 1650 had to do at least in part with rivalry between the Habsburg dynasty and its many foes. Charles V’s direct descendants controlled Spain and its overseas empire, plus the Low Countries (until the revolt that began in 1568), much of Italy, and, from 1580 to 1640, Portugal and its overseas empire. Their Austrian cousins, the Holy Roman emperors, controlled Austria, Bohemia, and parts of Hungary. French diplomats saw Charles V and his successors as aspiring to a “monarchy” over all of Europe, if not the whole world.⁷³ France thus maintained a long-term alliance with the Porte. Venice, as the major independent power in a peninsula where Spain and her clients held sway, regarded the Habsburgs with a profound suspicion that was repaid in full from Madrid. In 1571, just days before the battle at Lepanto, mutual recriminations between Spanish and Venetian commanders almost erupted into open fighting.⁷⁴ Moreover, since Habsburg Spain championed the Catholic Counter-Reformation, Protestant states like England and the new Dutch Republic made common cause with Catholic foes of the Habsburgs, as during the Revolt of the Netherlands (1568-1648), and the Thirty Years’ War in Germany (1618-1648).

Are we to conclude, then, that a medieval era of holy war had given way to a modern and secular world, whose only law was reason of state? Not quite. One problem with textbook formulations of this kind is that the Middle Ages were not so simple. Most wars fought by medieval European states also sprang from rivalries close to home -- France vs. England, Castile vs. Aragon, or Venice vs. Genoa; one might describe the Crusades⁷⁵ as the background war of the medieval era. Moreover, Crusades in the formal sense -- wars against the infidel proclaimed by the popes -- did not end with the fall of Acre in 1291. Some later campaigns ended in disaster, like the rout at Nicopolis in modern Bulgaria (1396), but others, like the defense of Belgrade in 1455, retarded the Ottoman advance. Between the relief of Smyrna (1344) and the great victory of Venetian and Spanish galleys at Lepanto (1571), there were thirteen latter-day crusades.⁷⁶

Emperor Charles V took little part in the struggle against Ottoman power, until his alliance with Andrea Doria, the Genoese admiral, gave him a capacity to project naval power into the eastern Mediterranean.⁷⁷ The great age of Mediterranean naval warfare began with Kheireddin’s conquest of Tunis for Sultan Suleiman (1534), and ended not with the great Christian victory at Lepanto in 1571,⁷⁸ but with the Ottoman reconquest of Tunis from Spain in 1574. On the Spanish side, naval commanders of this period functioned as independent contractors, hiring oarsmen and soldiers for their galleys, and keeping the men content with their own credit whenever royal payment orders were slow in coming.⁷⁹ By contrast, when war galleys were to be fitted out at the Ottoman arsenal in Pera, oarsmen were found by decreeing an avariz, an extraordinary provisioning tax that was never to be levied in successive years in the same province.⁸⁰ Venetian observers thought this system allowed the Turks to arm war fleets as often as they liked, and “at little cost.”⁸¹ Indeed, in the forty years between 1534 and 1574, the Ottomans had fleets of between 100 and 300 war galleys at sea during nineteen sailing seasons.⁸² But neither the Ottoman Empire nor Spain could continue to sustain Mediterranean naval warfare at this level of intensity. In Anatolia, Ottoman officials had trouble getting localities to meet their quotas of oarsmen, and the cash they sent instead was not enough to attract volunteers for the back-breaking and dangerous work of rowing a war galley.⁸³ By the turn of the seventeenth century, the galleys that could be manned and put to sea were often needed in the Black Sea, either to ferry supplies to armies on the march to Persia, or to combat Cossack raiding, a threat to the grain supply of the capital.⁸⁴ Between the 1570s and the early seventeenth century, Spain’s galley fleet shrank from an average of 116 vessels to an average of 68; the Atlantic fleet, challenged first by the Dutch and the English, drew off more and more of the kingdom’s resources. With both empires having new priorities, Spain and the Ottomans concluded the first of many truces in 1578, thus diminishing their Mediterranean commitments.⁸⁵ Partly in consequence of this partial withdrawal of the great powers, from about 1580, Mediterranean corsairing degenerated into “a systematic plunder transcending religious barriers.”⁸⁶ No one could tell any more who was or was not a corsair: mariners from Marseilles dressed as Knights of Malta to go corsairing, and Turkish pirates hired English galleons to “prey on the nation of merchants.”⁸⁷

Yet the disengagement of the great powers from Mediterranean warfare did not mean an end to major fighting across the religious frontier. In fact, the most protracted struggles between Ottoman and Christian armies came after Lepanto, not before. In the Long War of 1591-1606,⁸⁸ Ottoman and Austrian forces fought to a standstill. In 1645, the Turks invaded Venetian Crete, quickly capturing all but the great fortress of Candia; they took Candia, too, but only after a siege that lasted twenty-four years.⁸⁹ Finally, in 1683, Kara Mustafa’s march up the Danube was ardently promoted by a renowned court preacher, Sheikh Mehmet Vani Effendi, even as Marco d’Aviano, a fiery Capuchin friar, traveled Europe’s roads like the preachers of old, rousing Christendom’s fighting men to take up arms for the faith. When Jan Sobieski charged down from the Vienna Woods to break up the siege, he understood himself as a crusader.⁹⁰

More so than the Venetian-Spanish victory at Lepanto in 1571, Sobieski’s charge may be reckoned a turning point in Europe’s long struggle with the Turks. But, without minimizing the importance of military outcomes, scholars interested in weighing the relative balance of power tend to give particular attention to the phenomenon of attrition, the gradual wearing-down of a state’s capacity for making war. In Spain, the price of nearly continuous warfare during the sixteenth century was first a devolution of the crown’s fiscal resources into the hands of aristocrats and entrepreneurs, and second, bankruptcy for some of the Genoese firms that had financed the king’s wars. Spain fought on into the seventeenth century only because the Cortes of Castile was prevailed upon to vote new taxes managed by the deputies, and new bankers were found to float even larger loans.⁹¹ On the Ottoman side, by contrast, the state treasury contained riches beyond the imagining of any European ruler.⁹² One Venetian bailo judged, not unreasonably, that the Grand Turk had enough treasure on hand to fight wars “for thirty years.”⁹³ But not even this treasury could sustain the series of major campaigns that Ottoman armies fought against the Persians (1578-1598), then against the Austrians (1591 -1606), and against the Persians once more (1624-1639). To make matters worse, the so-called Çelali revolts that broke out in 1596 and lasted for a decade impeded collection of the land tax that supported the regular cavalry, at least in Anatolia.⁹⁴ Still, officials at the Porte put the budget on a new footing by converting the revenue allotments formerly held by military men to tax farms, thus enabling the sultan’s armies to fight on into the seventeenth century.⁹⁵

This was why the claims of European diplomats about an imminent collapse of the Grand Turk’s empire must be put down to wishful thinking, as will be noted below. Yet I wonder if they might not have been right on one point. In Europe, governments had long been accustomed to fighting their wars on credit, placing future revenues in the hands of lenders.⁹⁶ Since no sovereign prince could be constrained to keep promises to creditors, prospective lenders often demanded supplementary assurances from intermediary bodies acting on the crown’s behalf, like town councils, or provincial parliaments, or corporations of crown officials.⁹⁷ By the latter decades of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman government, too, had to start borrowing against future revenues; there are references in the secondary literature to forced loans or other credits provided by merchants and officials,⁹⁸ and the sultans also made payments to the public treasury from their private treasury, classified as loans, but evidently not repaid.⁹⁹ But French and Venetian diplomats reported that officials acting for the Ottoman state treasury could not find lenders in local capital markets.¹⁰⁰ This was not because the sultan was less trustworthy as a borrower than any other ruler of the age; lenders everywhere knew better than to put their trust in a piece of paper signed by the sovereign. The point is that the Ottoman state seems not to have had the kind of quasi-autonomous intermediary bodies that could (as in Europe) calm the fears of prospective lenders by interposing their own credit. This apparent distinction between east and west is worth pondering, not merely in its own terms, but also because it brings out the close connection between a state’s war-making capacity and its capacity to draw on the wealth of its subjects.

III. COMMERCIAL RIVALRY

According to a noted historian of world trade, the idea that the interests of merchants and states could be ‘fused together’ began with the rivalry between Genoa and Venice during the medieval centuries.¹⁰¹ Each city, with a network of armed settlements in the east, sought to control the sea lanes along which merchants brought luxury goods from Europe, like soap and high-grade woolens, in exchange for silk, spices, and grain. For the best families of both cities, a mercantile apprenticeship in the east was often the first stage of a long and honorable career.¹⁰² But this Italian hegemony in the Levant trade was a function of naval power; it depended on the fact that regional states of the era were seldom able to challenge Genoa’s war galleys in the Black Sea, or Venice’s war galleys in the eastern Mediterranean.¹⁰³ This was why the rise of the Ottoman empire created a whole new environment for trade. Immediately following his conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmet II signaled a change by granting trading privileges not merely to his Genose allies but also to their Venetian rivals.¹⁰⁴ For the Ottoman treasury, trade with western nations boosted customs revenues in Istanbul, and in Anatolian entrepôts like Bursa or Smyrna. Subsequently, by conquering the empire of the Mamluks (1517), Sultan Sehim I also gained control of customs at Damascus (later Aleppo), where traders brought silk from Persia, and at Alexandria, site of the Venetian factory or trading compound that had long supplied Europe from Asia. But trade also had a political dimension. By Islamic law, strangers from “the Abode of War” could be granted amnesty, permitting them to travel freely within “the Abode of Islam,” once they had pledged friendship and goodwill.¹⁰⁵ Sixteenth-century Ottoman policy aimed at rewarding infidel states that were, in fact, friendly to the Porte -- mainly the European powers that lined up against the Habsburgs: first Venice and France, later England and the Dutch Republic. By contrast, once Andrea Doria allied with Charles V (1528), the Genoese were not welcome. Meanwhile, the sultan’s admirals made the Black Sea an Ottoman lake, and picked off, one by one, the island bases that Venice used to secure its routes to Syria and Egypt; from about 1500, they also increased the size of their war fleet.¹⁰⁶ At Prevesa (1538), Kheireddin Barbarossa was able to inflict damage on a larger Habsburg-Venetian war fleet and escape unharmed;¹⁰⁷ by now, the sultan was master of the Levantine seas as well as of the Levantine lands.

In each region of this vast empire, European merchants adapted to new circumstances, some more willingly than others.¹⁰⁸ In the Balkans, the Republic of Dubrovnik (Ragusa), an Ottoman tributary since 1438, took full advantage of intermittent warfare between its Ottoman patrons and its historic foe, the Republic of Venice. Though tonnage estimates remain somewhat speculative, it seems that in the middle decades of the sixteenth century this tiny state had the largest merchant fleet in the Mediterranean. Ancona, in the Papal States, was Dubrovnik’s partner; the short trajectory across the Adriatic was increasingly preferred by merchant-shippers, because it obviated the growing dangers of a long sea voyage.¹⁰⁹ To counter the Dubrovnik-Ancona connection, Venice had to tone down its historic antipathy to Jewish merchants, who now came to Italy in increasing numbers, bringing goods from Ottoman lands.¹¹⁰ Split (Spalato), in Venetian Dalmatia, had hitherto been a port of merely local importance. But in 1589, the Senate accepted proposals made by an Iberian Jew based in Bosnia: Venice enlarged Split’s harbor facilities and trading privileges, and the pasha of Bosnia guaranteed the security of caravan traffic to and from Sarajevo. By 1620, the Sarajevo-Split-Venice route -- with Venetian woolens and Murano glass moving in one direction, Turkish camels and hides in the other -- was responsible for about 25% of the value of goods entering the Venetian harbor.

For European traders, the vast entourage attendant on the sultan at Topkapi Palace was important as a market for high-grade silks and woolens. Coastal regions to the north and south of the capital (the Black Sea and the Aegean) were vital as sources for much-needed grain. But as the sultans nurtured their capital from a population of 40,000-60,000 under the last Byzantine emperor to about 500,000 in the 1520s,¹¹¹ its care and feeding became a state priority. This was bad luck for those who depended on grain from the east, especially the Venetians.¹¹² Once the Ottomans secured the mouth of the Dniester (1484), westerners had no access to or egress from the Black Sea, save by permission of the sultan’s officials. The Aegean, too, was now an Ottoman lake, though not to the same extent: Ottoman garrisons were thinly scattered among many islands, some of which (especially those with Latin-Christian populations) welcomed traders from the west. Through the first half of the sixteenth century, trade in grain continued in the Aegean, sometimes involving shipments from the estates of Ottoman officials. Thereafter, threats of scarcity prompted a general ban on exporting grain to the west, even if regulation did not always prevent the Venetians and others from getting what they wanted: they cultivated ties among Greek skippers, and offered prices higher than those officially decreed. On one occasion, a grand vizier not unreasonably accused the Venetians of taking away vital grain supplies in exchange for mere “fripperies,” like fine silks. The bailo, noting his interlocutor’s brocade vest, had a ready reply: “Indeed so; we take away grain in exchange for such fripperies as Your Magnificence is wearing.”¹¹³ Meanwhile, Venice’s import trade was threatened by merchants from Marseilles -- subjects of the sultan’s faithful ally, the king of France -- who brought customers at the Porte fabrics that counterfeited the best work of Venice’s silk-weavers, at lower prices.¹¹⁴

Syria and Egypt always had been the center of gravity for Venice’s Levant trade, and in both areas Ottoman rule created a more favorable environment for doing business. By incorporating within the limits of one realm both the eastern marches of Anatolia, and the formerly Mamluk province of Syria, the sultans encouraged caravans of Armenian merchants to bring their silk from Shirvan to Aleppo, where (from 1548) Venice’s consul for Syria fixed his residence; meanwhile, Europe’s growing industries demanded larger and larger quantities of raw silk, including the Persian variety. By the 1590s, sixteen Venetian trading houses were represented in Aleppo, each doing 100,000 to 200,000 ducats a year in trade. In Alexandria, Venice’s spice trade had been undermined as Portugal seized control of traffic in the far-off Spice Islands, culminating in the capture of Melakah (1511).¹¹⁵ But the Ottomans were better than their Mamluk predecessors had been at projecting their power into the Indian Ocean; though defeated by the Portuguese at the coast of Gujarat (1538), they conquered Basra (1546) and Aden (1548), thus keeping open the sea lanes that fed into major caravan routes to the Mediterranean. The revival of Alexandria’s spice trade (especially for pepper, whose sources of supply were not controlled by the Portuguese) was a direct result.¹¹⁶ By 1560, the value of Venetian spice exports from Alexandria was greater than it had ever been. In 1585, Philip II of Spain, in his capacity as king of Portugal,¹¹⁷ offered to sell his royal monopoly on spice imports from the Indies. But Venice declined; with an estimated 4,000 Venetian subjects living in Ottoman Egypt or Syria, it was not thought prudent to make this kind of bargain with the sultan’s Portuguese foes.

Until about 1500, trade between east and west was largely managed by Italians. Under Ottoman rule, Ottoman subjects who controlled particular routes or commodities -- Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Jews and Turks -- were in a better position to bargain with European merchants. In fact, under these conditions both the value and the volume of traffic in key commodities like silk and spices reached new highs. This will not be a surprise to economic historians, for whom a pooling of the local knowledge of various merchant communities could be expected to promote trade, by reducing transaction costs.¹¹⁸ But what struck Italians of the time was their loss of control over the movement of goods. Young men of noble or patrician background stopped going east to begin their careers,¹¹⁹ and the Venetians in particular complained bitterly about the “decline” of their Levant trade.¹²⁰ But worse was still to come.

Because Portugal’s trade to Antwerp was disrupted by the Dutch Revolt, English merchants started coming to the Mediterranean for spices and other goods around 1580.¹²¹ They came in the heavily armed, high-sided Atlantic galleons known in the Mediterranean as bertoni.¹²² In seas where war galleys had long been the main source of firepower, ships of this type could do as they pleased.¹²³ Thus the ban on grain exports, at best difficult to enforce, was now a dead letter; one hears of a Greek entrepreneur who hired a bertone to go about commandeering grain from smaller ships, or of a “great Genoese ship” (built in the new style) that calmly drove off three galleys of the Ottoman empire’s Aegean squadron as it loaded grain on Chios.¹²⁴ There was, thus, less grain available for urban populations exposed to periodic grain shortages, and for Ottoman armies marching off to the Hungarian or Persian frontier. Atlantic galleons also began taking over the transit trade, even for the hallowed pilgrimage to Mecca.¹²⁵ Meanwhile, in Syria, English and French merchants started bringing cheaper broadcloths that undercut Venice’s staple trade in fine woolens; also, unlike the Italians, they were willing to pay cash for their silk instead of insisting on a trade in goods.¹²⁶ Finally, from the 1590s, the Dutch East India Company challenged Portugal’s hegemony in the far-off Spice Islands. By about 1615, the Honorable Company, applying Portugal’s strong-arm methods with a Dutch thoroughness, had become Europe’s sole supplier for fine spices, and was beginning to dominate in the supply of pepper.¹²⁷ In Alexandria, while Arab merchants shifted from the spice to the coffee trade, the Venetians went home, to pursue investments in other sectors of the economy.¹²⁸ In Venice itself, silk-weavers looked for work in other lands, including England,¹²⁹ and Jewish merchants relocated from the Venetian ghetto to Livorno,¹³⁰ England’s favored port in Italy.

In sum, while the Habsburgs (and sometimes Venice) measured their war-making resources against the Ottomans in a battle of endurance, Christian states friendly to the Porte -- the English, the Dutch, and to a lesser extent the French -- undermined the eastern Mediterranean trade on which the prosperity of the empire depended in no small degree. English and Dutch merchants never imagined themselves to be working hand in glove with Spain, or with Cossack corsairs on the Black Sea. But to understand the great shift in the balance of power that occurred during this period, trade must be seen as working in conjunction with warfare and piracy. European observers were often impressed by the speed and efficiency with which the vast resources of the Ottoman empire could be mobilized in time of war.¹³¹ Yet how could any sultan or vizier deal with an array of rivals, each conspiring against all the others, yet somehow combining to undermine the Ottoman state? In the end, Europeans came to outmatch the Ottomans not by working together, but by working at cross purposes.

IV. THE CONTEST FOR CULTURAL PREEMINENCE

Governments competed not just on battlefields and in customs houses but also in the carefully managed creation of favorable public images. For the princely courts of early modern Europe, the study of public ceremonies and festivities has become “something of a growth industry.”¹³² To be sure, the political implications of royal ritual have long been understood; the guiding conceptual framework was worked out at German universities decades ago, before the catastrophe of the 1930s.¹³³ The recent flowering of interest in such matters reflects broader scholarly trends.¹³⁴ For example, political scientists now argue that favorable public opinion represents a “soft” power that is in some ways no less important than the “hard” power based on military strength.¹³⁵ But current studies of European princely festivals -- while broadly comparative -- make little or no reference to the Ottoman court ceremonies that always made a vivid impression on European observers. In fact, the Ottomans, too, competed on this terrain, and they were better at the game than any of their European rivals.

To judge from European accounts, it would seem that sultans of the first half of the fifteenth century showed little interest in the trappings of majesty. For example, when Murad II (r. 1430-1451) was approached by an ambassador from the duke of Milan, the sultan graciously rose from his throne and took him by the hand; the ambassador tried to kiss his hand, but Murad would not allow it.¹³⁶ The conquest of Constantinople (1453) was long thought to have marked a turning point; Mehmet II (r. 1451-1481), the Conqueror, was also the builder of Topkapi Palace, larger and more splendid than any Byzantine palace.¹³⁷ But Konrad Dilger has shown that the “Book of Laws” attributed to Mehmet II -- with a description of the ceremonies to be observed at court, and of the sultan’s audience hall -- cannot have been written prior to the 1530s.¹³⁸ According to Dilger, the decisive change in court ritual came under Selim I (r. 1512-1520), the greatest of all Ottoman conquerors. Bartolomeo Contarini, sent from Venice to Sultan Selim in Cairo (1519), is the first European envoy known to have been subjected to what would henceforth be a required routine: to his great surprise, Contarini was grabbed at the arm by two strong attendants and carried before the throne, where he was made to kneel and kiss the sultan’s hand. In effect, soft power reflected hard power; Selim I and his successors demanded a new level of respect from infidel envoys because “they now deemed themselves far superior to the Western powers.”¹³⁹

During the reigns of Selim’s successors (Suleiman I, 1520-1566, and Selim II, 1566-1574), European accounts of embassies to the Porte make it clear that this obeisance to “the ruler of the world” was meant to be the climax of a great public spectacle.¹⁴⁰ In the first court of the Topkapi seraglio, 4,000 Janissaries stood at attention, “without making any noise, or moving a muscle.” In the second court, some 6,000 soldiers and officials were placed according to rank, each with its distinctive garb and headgear. To the left, under a small portico, the grand vizier and his five colleagues held public divan or council four days a week, dispensing the sultan’s justice; behind them stood secretaries and keepers of the state treasury, ready to execute documents or payments as ordered. In the magnificent third court, through the Sublime Porte, the sultan received foreign dignitaries in his audience hall, seated on a bejeweled throne, surrounded by “his principal gentlemen” and court eunuchs vested in gold and silver, each slightly bowed, hands folded across his chest “in token of great reverence and submission.”¹⁴¹

Ottoman subjects (and foreigners) who never set foot in the palace could see much the same spectacle enacted every time the sultan made a solemn entry to his capital, as in April 1560, when Suleiman I and his court, accompanied by the Persian ambassador and his suite, made an occasion of returning from the hunt. The van was made up of persons of lesser rank, like the sultan’s 500 falconers, or the 800 slaves of his grand vizier, Rüstem Pasha, “well dressed, but without the gold caps” suitable for a higher station. The Admiral of the Sea turned out 2,000 of his war-galley soldiers “in beautiful order,” in ranks of arquebusiers, archers, and pikemen, adding, says a European observer, to his favor with the sultan. After the sons of leading Turks, vested in cloth-of-gold, because “they are not slaves,” like other soldiers, came 6,000 Janissaries, with swords and arquebuses and “very unusual pikes,” with the points “so high they are taller than a man on horseback.” The civil officials were led by the fourth and fifth pashas, followed by 60 treasury clerks, garbed in various cloths of gold, “for since they are seen by the sultan every day they have to be clothed honorably.” Surrounded by the men of his guard the sultan rode “a gorgeous horse, with a gold saddle full of jewels.” The Italian author adds details about the rich fabrics that marked officials of different ranks, many of which would have been supplied by Venetian merchants.¹⁴²

Charles V could claim to rule even more of the world than Suleiman I, and in his entourage, too, there were men who claimed for their master a “world” or universal monarchy.¹⁴³ While the emperor’s grandeur was proclaimed in various ways, Charles’ three dozen public entries to cities made him the European “champion” for public spectacles of this kind.¹⁴⁴ One finds in these rituals visible results of the Renaissance study of ancient Rome.¹⁴⁵ Here they are important in affording comparison with Ottoman ceremony, and there are indeed similarities. For the emperor as for the sultan, local dignitaries showed their respect by advancing some distance beyond the city walls to greet him.¹⁴⁶ In both cases the ruler rode at the mid-point of a long train whose successive units embodied, for all to see, his invincible military might and his impartial justice. At Bologna (1529), where Charles was to meet Pope Clement VII, he processed through Porta San Felice in the midst of his army, each unit recognizable by a distinctive garb and array of weapons; the emperor, surrounded by his chief officials and great nobles, carried his scepter, and rode a horse caparisoned with cloth-of-gold, embroidered with jewels.¹⁴⁷ The effect on spectators was surely comparable to that of a grand Ottoman display. In 1539, when political circumstances permitted Charles to progress through France en route from Spain to the Low Countries, the city of Paris paved streets along the route, and arranged for guilds, ecclesiastical corporations, and civic bodies to march out to greet the emperor in the Faubourg St. Antoine -- a procession that lasted several hours. Along the procession route onlookers crammed every vantage point -- streets, windows, and roofs¹⁴⁸ -- just as they did in Constantinople whenever it was announced that the sultan would make an entrance.¹⁴⁹

But there were also important dissimilarities. If Suleiman made his entries into a capital that was greater by far than any city in Europe, Charles had as many as eight capitals,¹⁵⁰ and thus made entries to many different cities, each of which orchestrated and paid for the ceremonies. Charles reciprocated with a courteous curiosity: coming to a triumphal arch, he would often pause for an explanation of its decorations.¹⁵¹ This is but another way of saying that Charles’ empire -- unlike Suleiman’s -- was made up of heterogeneous territories that preserved important elements of political autonomy, and fiscal responsibility. Charles also lacked the wherewithal to maintain, in any of his residences, the kind of magnificence that was regularly on display at Topkapi Palace. In his report to the Venetian Senate (1573), bailo Francesco Badoer seems to have gotten things right: “All Christian princes must yield in magnificence to the Ottoman Porte, for I do not believe any other court, even with great labor and preparation, can match what is to be seen on an ordinary day in the seraglio of the Gran Signore.”¹⁵²

If neither Charles V nor his European rivals could support a court worthy of comparison with Topkapi Palace, they and their loyal subjects had other resources for waging a campaign in the theater of public opinion -- foremost among which was the printing press. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe’s presses churned out a vast descriptive literature about the Ottoman world.¹⁵³ These accounts often represent the individual adventures of a merchant or a former slave,¹⁵⁴ and only a small fraction of them had anything to do with the service of a particular prince.¹⁵⁵ But, with or without official sponsorship, works of this kind had a polemical edge, even when an author’s portrayal of Turkish life and culture was on the whole sympathetic,¹⁵⁶ and they provide a necessary intellectual background for European diplomatic correspondence from the Porte. To be sure, for those who had lived for a time in Ottoman lands, many of the conventional stereotypes were no longer credible. For example, although published works routinely described Turkish law courts as corrupt, diplomats had to make use of Ottoman due process in order to safeguard the interests of their nationals.¹⁵⁷ But men accredited to the Porte also knew (or at least were told by high-level sources) that continuing penetration into infidel Europe remained a settled policy of the empire.¹⁵⁸ Diplomats were thus well placed to frame Europe’s collective brief against the Ottomans, and this they did in good portions of their reports back home.

There is space here for but one strand of this argument, having to do with the idea of a law of nations that is recognized among Europeans but not among Turks. Habsburg envoys sent to the Porte had to contend with the fact that Ottoman officials professed no respect for the confidentiality of official correspondence.¹⁵⁹ In 1566, when the grand vizier demanded to see a letter carried by the emperor’s ambassador, the latter insisted on giving it to the sultan to whom it was addressed, for by “the law of nations” this was an ambassador’s duty.¹⁶⁰ A few years later, Venice’s representatives contended that a disputed Dalmatian town could not be a “territory,” as that term was used in a draft treaty, for “all nations” understood that a town was a “territory” only if it had villages under its jurisdiction.¹⁶¹ When a Turkish merchant claimed that the Venetian consul in Cairo had insured his cargo, subsequently lost to corsairs, he could not be correct, for “all men in all places” agreed that for valid maritime insurance there had to be a written contract, with a quotation of the rate.¹⁶² In 1615, the Dutch ambassador reported to the States General on how “high lords of this empire” had been tyrannically abused by the pasha of Cyprus; “Their High Mightinesses” must understand that it would be futile to send a consul to Aleppo, in the expectation that representatives of “Christian foreign nations” would be treated any better.¹⁶³ In 1620, when the grand vizier levied a fine on the bailo and ordered him to pay it immediately, the French ambassador intervened on his colleague’s behalf: not giving the bailo time to consult his principals, he said, contravened “the law of nations.” When the Polish ambassador was imprisoned, the same French ambassador got him out; to superiors in Paris, suspicious of Poland, he explained that he was merely preventing “the law of nations” from being trampled underfoot.¹⁶⁴

In these texts, Europeans claim that what they see as right is right because it is accepted as such by the consensus of civilized peoples. In the ancient Roman understanding of law, valid law had to be promulgated by a constituted authority, but it also had to be known and accepted by the free citizens who were subject to the law. Rather like the philosophical idea of natural law, first developed by the ancient Stoics,¹⁶⁵ the juristic idea of a law of nations fulfilled the second of these conditions if not the first. To be sure, the ancient authors were read in the Muslim east as well as in the Christian west; Greek philosophy was preserved and studied by Arab scholars long before it was taken up by scholars in Latin Europe. But while study of the ancient authors remained a focus of education in Europe, even more so as the Renaissance humanist curriculum took hold, it was over time marginalized in Islamic schools, where the Qur’an provided the foundation for legal reasoning.¹⁶⁶ Trained in the humanist classicism of their time,¹⁶⁷ European diplomats at the Porte were, in effect, claiming for Europe the heritage of Greco-Roman civilization: Europe thus stood not just for the Christian religion, but also for certain universal truths, including an ethos of civility first articulated by the ancient pagan thinkers. The point was to set off Europe’s heritage of lawfulness against Ottoman arbitrariness. Incidents that seemed to confirm this contrast were carefully recorded. For example, in 1566 the grand vizier, disregarding the imperial ambassador’s assertion about the law of nations, had his letter-casket broken open; while others might have their laws, he said, this was how things were done at the Sublime Porte. In 1615, the Dutch ambassador at the Porte put things in more general terms:

I must remind Your High Mightinesses how different the government of these lands is from all Christian polities, in which one has a care not only for what is profitable but also for what is honorable. Here, by contrast, nothing is done for the sake of honor [propter honestum], and everything is done for profit [utilitatis casusa]; private good takes precedence over the common good and the welfare of the people, for even in matters of justice it is a custom among the Turks to begin and end each proceeding with gifts.¹⁶⁸

If Europe’s ways truly were founded not just on the Christian religion, but on a universal sense of what is lawful and right, did not justice demand that Europe must triumph sooner or later? In fact, the writers of diplomatic letters and memoranda often asserted that the mighty Ottoman empire must eventually be brought down by its own indolence and arbitrary power. In the 1530s, a Venetian secretary claimed that despite their natural bravery, Turks would never make soldiers as good as Germans or Spaniards, “for it has ever been the style of the Ottoman prince to abase his subjects.”¹⁶⁹ In the 1550s, bailo Bernardo Navagero drew hope from his observation that the Ottoman army had an order of march, but no order of battle (ordinanza); one could thus expect European troops fighting in proper battle order to prevail, for “one sees clearly from histories ancient and modern that he who confides too much in the number of his soldiers, not in their quality, comes out the loser.”¹⁷⁰ In the 1570s, bailo Antonio Tiepolo saw how difficult it was to recruit oarsmen for Turkish galleys; he also had reports of villagers relocating from Ottoman Greece to Venetian Corfu, so as to escape the devshirme, a periodic levy of Christian children for training as slave-soldiers. In his report to the senate, Tiepolo fused these incidents into a picture of an empire “despoiled of inhabitants” by the tyranny of its rulers; “God willing, there is some beginning of decline.”¹⁷¹ Twenty years later still, the French ambassador, Savary de Brèves, saw an empire governed by men who were both “stupid” and “foolishly proud.” By these “signs of disorder in this empire,” he believed, God was calling on France to resume her historic role, not as the Porte’s principal ally in Europe, but as the leader of Christian princes in a great war against the infidel Turk.¹⁷² In light of the staying power of the Ottoman empire, all such predictions of decline must be seen as wishful thinking.¹⁷³ But wishful thinking or not, they give voice to a cultural offensive in which all Europeans -- Habsburg or Habsburg-foe, Protestant or Catholic -- spoke a common language.

CONCLUSION

This essay has covered a broad canvas, but it should be even broader. The one major European power that has not figured in this account is Muscovy. Czar Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of the Tatar Khanate of Astrakhan (1556) brought Russian authority down the Volga, to the borders of the Caspian Sea. This made the Tatar Khanate of Crimea, Astrakhan’s neighbor across the steppes, Muscovy’s natural enemy. The Porte took note of these developments,¹⁷⁴ especially after a Russian raid in 1559 reached the mouth of the Don and the Sea of Azov. Nonetheless, major confrontations between Russia and her Muslim neighbors -- Crimea, the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and the Khanate of Bukhara -- did not come until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries; in typical European fashion, Muscovy first had to deal with Poland-Lithuania.¹⁷⁵

In the Indian Ocean, local conflicts along Islamdom’s southern border were often drawn into the rivalry between Ottomans and Europeans. At the northern tip of Sumatra, the sultan of Aceh, Alauddin Riayat Syah al-Kahhar (1539-1571), built a spice- and pepper-trading empire to rival that of the Portuguese. Seeking Muslim help for a planned attack on Portuguese Melaka, he sent an embassy to the Sublime Porte in the 1560s; the Porte sent cannon-founders and artillerymen to help Aceh counter Portuguese firepower.¹⁷⁶ In the Red Sea, Ottoman authorities in the Hijaz supported the imam of Adal, Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi (1527-1541), in his campaigns against Christian Ethiopia (1527-1541). King Lebna Dengel (1508-1540), overcoming suspicions of Portuguese interference, summoned help from Lisbon; four hundred musketeers led by Christovão da Gama (son of Vasco da Gama) helped defeat the imam’s forces (1541).¹⁷⁷

Finally, on the Indian subcontinent, Muslim sea-going merchants were the natural foes of European interlopers. In the face of Portuguese aggression, one Mamale (d. ca. 1528) led Mappila traders of the Malabar coast in taking over the port of Cannanore, to battle the infidels at sea; his collateral descendants, known as the Ali Rajahs of Cannanore, fought the Dutch and the British when they took over this region from the Portuguese.¹⁷⁸ In Madurai, the Tamil-speaking Maraikayyar merchant community, led by the family of Shaykh Abd al-Qadir, sometimes resisted the rising influence of the Dutch East India Company, and sometimes allied with the company against their common enemy, the Catholicized Paravas, who were supported by the Portuguese.¹⁷⁹ In Gujarat, merchants of the Islamicized Bohra community were the chief indigenous rivals of the European companies. In the great entrepôt of Surat, Muslim and Christian traders kept their distance, each group preferring to use Hindu or Jain merchant-bankers for credit, and for contacts with local producers of indigo or cottons.¹⁸⁰ Throughout the Indian Ocean region, even in places where Muslim and Christian merchants dealt with one another as a matter of routine, Muslims referred to Europeans as “Franks,” using a terminology derived from the Crusades, while Europeans referred to Muslims as “Moors,” using an even older terminology, derived from the Muslim conquest of Spain. This instinctive mutual hostility did not imply a lack of enlightenment, or some deficiency in the milk of human kindness. It simply recorded the fact that Muslims and Christians were indeed enemies, in a background war that spanned much of the globe.

Endnotes

Géraud Poumarède, Pour en finir avec la Croisade (Paris, 2004), 621. I am grateful to Prof. Poumarède for sending me a copy of his book.

Cf. the focus on life in post-conquest Ottoman provinces; e.g., Ronald C. Jennings, Christians and Muslims in Ottoman Cyprus and the Mediterranean World, 1571-1640 (New York, 1993); Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton, 2000).

Marlene Kurz, Martin Scheutz, Kal Vocelka, and Thomas Winkelbauer, Das osmanische Reich und die Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna & Munich, 2005) has sections on “Contacts and Conflicts,” “Images of the Turk,” “Diplomacy,” “Travel Literature,” “Translators,” and “Southeastern Europe,” but there are no essays on war or religion.

A debate touched off by Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1997).

Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Vol. III, The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times (Chicago, 1974); Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 1500-1700 (London, 2000); Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and High Roads to Empire, 1500-1700 (London, 2002).

Palmira Johnson Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (Albany, NY, 1994); Carla Rahn Phillips, “Navies and the Mediterranean in the Early Modern Period,” Naval Policy and Strategy in the Mediterranean, ed. John B. Hattendorf (London, 2000), 3-29.

At Mohács (29 August 1529), west of the Danube where it flows north to south.

A double marriage of 1515 had joined Austria’s Habsburgs and the branch of Poland’s Jagellonian dynasty then ruling in Bohemia and Hungary (Ferdinand married Anna Jagellio, Louis Jagellio wed Ferdinand’s sister Mary). The marriage treaty provided that should either groom die without issue, his lands would pass to his brother-in-law. After the catastrophe at Mohács, Ferdinand was acclaimed king by the estates of Bohemia, but in Hungary his claim was contested by the voivod of Transylvania, Janos Szapolyai, who pledged allegiance to the Porte in return for recognition by the sultan as king of Hungary.

The first volume of a comprehensive Turkish-language history of the empire has now appeared in English: Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, ed., History of the Ottoman State, Society and Civilisation (Istanbul, 2001). For a recent brief survey, Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Turks: An Introductory History to 1923 (London, 1997). In European languages, the classic extended treatment is still Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, 4 vols. (Prague, 1834-1836).

James D. Tracy, Emperor Charles V Impresario of War: Campaign Strategy, International Finance, and Domestic Politics (Cambridge, 2002), 102.

Bernardo Navagero, Relazione (1553); Eugenio Alberi, Le relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato, 15 vols. (Florence, 1838-1865) [hereafter abbreviated as Alberi], III: 37-39. (The ratio between the Spanish and Venetian ducat was roughly 10:9.) Navagero claims to have seen the tally of expected annual revenue in the books of the hazineh, here meaning the state treasury. Halil Inalcik, Suraiya Faroghi, et al., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1997), I: 82, according to Ottoman accounts for 1527/1528, total revenue for that year was the equivalent of slightly less than 10,000,000 ducats, including approximately 61% for the state treasury, and 36% for the timars held by cavalry commanders. The vicebailo Andrea Dandolo, Relazione (1562), Alberi, IX: 190-91, was more skeptical, finding that for the year ending 1 July 1561, the state treasury took in the equivalent of 4,330,396 gold scudi, and spent 4,131,639, leaving a surplus of only 200,000 -- not the vast sums often imagined. According to Ottaviano Bon (1605), the hazineh was housed in its own building in the third court of the seraglio, next to a building for the sultan’s wardrobe: The Sultan’s Seraglio: An Intimate Portrait of Life at the Ottoman Court, introduced and annotated by Godfrey Goodwin (London, 1996), 26.

Inalcik, Economic and Social History, I: 78, cites European estimates of 5,000,000 ducats for the state treasury and 10,000,000 for the timars held by cavalry commanders (Ramberti, 1534), and 4,000,000 for the state treasury and 8,000,000 for the timars (Postel, 1560).

Andrea Badoer, Relazione (1573), Alberi, III: 357-58: In addition to the great quantity of gold and silver coin, bejeweled swords and other precious objects, visible through the open door of the state hazineh when Ambassador Badoer paid his respects to the sultan, “what is worse, I have learned (though this is kept very secret) that there is also a great quantity of gold bars left by previous emperors.” Paolo Contarini, Relazione (1583), Alberi, VI: 225-26, reports that twice during his two-year stint as bailo it had been necessary to take from the Seven Towers “money placed there by Sultan Mehmet [II] when he conquered Constantinople.” Cf. Gianfrancesco Morosini, Relazione (1585), Alberi, IX: 278-79: the interior or private hazineh does not have as much wealth as people think, for its current income is limited to the tribute from Egypt (500,000 ducats) and presents to the sultan.

For the tercios of Italy, Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-1659 (Cambridge, 1972). King Francis I of France, Charles V’s chief foe, had a standing army of about four thousand men, whose pay was usually in arrears. Philippe Hamon, L’argent du roi: les finances sous François I (Paris, 1994), 22-24.

Inalcik, Economic and Social History, I: 88-93: for an official list of 1528, there were 50,000 salaried troops (including the Janissary infantry), and 37,000 cavalry supported by provincial timars. Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 38-45, finds a total of 89,608 men, but counts only the Janissaries and certain other units (cavalry regiments of the Porte, artillerymen) as the “standing” army (18,689 men); the rest were cavalrymen or commanders holding timars, that is, the right to collect land taxes for their support.

Godfrey Goodwin, The Janissaries (London, 1994).

McCarthy, The Ottoman Turks, 180-83. The best overview of military developments (with good maps) is Murphey, Ottoman Warfare.

Richard T. Rapp, “The Unmaking of the Mediterranean Trade Hegemony: International Trade Rivalry and the Commercial Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 35 (1975): 499-525; C. H. H. Wake, “The Changing Pattern of Europe’s Pepper and Spice Imports, ca. 1400- 1700,” Journal of European Economic History 8 (1979): 361-404.

Ashin Das Gupta, Asian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, c. 1700-1750 (Wiesbaden, 1979). In Iran, the Armenian merchant community, set up by the great Shah Abbas I (1588-1629) as a royal corporation for the silk trade, was now in business for itself, collecting offers from the Dutch and the English East India Companies: Ina Baghdianz McCabe, The Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India (1530-1750) (Atlanta, 1999).

Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1996), chap. 4.

Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (Berkeley, 2000).

Douglass C. North, Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge, 1973).

K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760 (Cambridge, 1976).

Linda Darling, Revenue Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire, 1560-1600 (Leiden, 1996), 2-8.

Patrick Balfour Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries (New York, 1977), 241.

Mevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2002), 131-38.

McCarthy, The Ottoman Turks, 158-61.

Sinappah Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast, 1650-1740 (Delhi, 1986).

Michael Hocheldinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1683-1797 (London, 2003), chap. 5.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “‘Un grand dérangement’: Dreaming an Indo-Persian Empire in the 1740s,” Journal of Early Modern History 4 (2000): 337-78.

From about 1550, the Medici grand dukes of Tuscany, with a long coastline to defend against Ottoman corsairs, emulated in some ways the policies of their Spanish patrons; previously, the Republic of Florence had mainly been interested in trading with the Ottomans. One may make a similar distinction in the history of the Republic of Genoa, before and after Andrea Doria placed his war galleys at the disposal of Charles V (1528).

On the Franco-Ottoman alliance, Géraud Poumarède, “Justifier l’injustifiable: l’alliance turque au miroir de la chrétienté (XVIe-XVIIe siècles),” Revue d’histoire diplomatique (1997): 216-46. Cf. the principality of Transylvania, nominally a part of Hungary, but from 1527 tributary to the Porte: Graeme Murdock, “Freely Elected in Fear: Princely Elections and Political Power in Early Seventeenth Century Transylvania,” Journal of Early Modern History 7 (2003): 213-44.

Paolo Preto, Venezia e i Turchi (Florence, 1975). For the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, which (like Venice) usually saw the Habsburgs as more of a threat to its interests than the Ottomans, Dariusz Kolodziejczyk, Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th-18th Centuries): An Annotated Edition of Adhnames and Other Documents (Leiden, 2000).

S. A. Skilliter, William Harborne and Trade with Turkey, 1578 -1582: A Documentary Study of the First Anglo-Ottoman Relations (Cambridge, 1977).

For the Dutch Republic, a Protestant commercial power fighting for its independence from Spain, Alexander H. De Groot, The Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic: A History of the Earliest Relations, 1610-1630 (Leiden, 1978).

For this essay, Eugenio Alberi: see note 11 for full citation; Archivio di State di Venezia, “Archivio Proprio degli Ambasciatori” and “Dispacci degli Ambasciatori al Senator, Costantinopoli,” hereafter abbreviated as ASV-AP and ASV-DAC; Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Rue de Richelieu), Salle des Manuscrits, “Manuscrits Français,” hereafter abbreviated as BN-MF; E. Charrière, Négotiations de la France dans l'Orient, 4 vols. (Paris, 1848-1852), hereafter abbreviated as Charrière; Srećko Dźaja, Günter Weiss, Mathias Bernath, Karl Nehring, eds., Austro-Turcica 1541-1552: Diplomatische Akten des habsburgischen Geschandtschaftsverkehrs mit der hohen Pforte im Zeitalter Suleymans des prächtigen (Munich, 1995), hereafter abbreviated as Austro-Turcica; Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna, “Turcica,” hereafter abbreviated as HHSA-Turcica.

E.g., a sancak who is said to have “contracted” to “populate” his desolate border district at no expense to the Ottoman state treasury, meaning that he knew how to raise money to pay his troops: from Paolo Contarini, 13 October 1582, ASV-DAC, 16, 189-91. Cf. Pedro de Navarro’s contract for the conquest of Oran, 1509: Tracy, Emperor Charles V, 133.

In 1532, the diet of the Holy Roman Empire elected Ferdinand king of the Romans, or heir-apparent to the imperial throne.

L. von Fels to Ferdinand, end of May 1545, Austro-Turcica, Letter 22, 69-70; cf. Ferdinand’s instructions for G. M. Malvezzi, his envoy at the Porte, 23 January 1548, Austro-Turcica, Letter 62, 202-03: as for Ottoman complaints about border raids by Habsburg subjects, Rüstem Pasha [the grand vizier] will understand how hard it is to control “all these thieves and bandits who have for so many years lived by robbery and taking captives, hiding in the woods and sallying forth here or there to practice their thievery.”

Perhaps the more so when this natural anger was spiced by religious hatred; cf. reports of smearing excrement on Muslim or Christian holy sites: Charrière, I: 350, Journal of Saint-Blancard (1537); Charrière, II: 486, from de la Vigne, July 1558.

In 1573, Venetian and Ottoman statesmen worked to save a projected treaty that was “widely condemned by the common people on both sides” of the frontier in Dalmatia: translation of a Turkish-language memorandum [arz] (October 1573) presented at the Porte by special ambassador Andrea Badoer and the two baili, Marcantonio Barbaro and Antonio Tiepolo, ASV-DAC, 6, 359v-361.

From Contarini, 13 October 1582, ASV-DAC, 16, 189-91v; from Giovanni Morosini, 2 January 1583, ASV-DAC, 16, 335-35v.

Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford, 2001), 19-21, 29-31; p. 18, “Cossack,” originally a Turkish word, meant either a “free man,” not subject to a lord, or a “bandit.”

Phillips, “Navies and the Mediterranean,” 22.

The Ottomans extended their zone of control in the Hungarian plain after failed efforts by Ferdinand to take Buda from the heirs of Janos Szapolyai (1540, 1541).

Geza David and Pal Fodor, eds., Ottomans, Hungarians and Habsburgs in Central Europe: The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest (Leiden, 2000), “Introduction,” xvi-xvii. The part of western and northern Hungary held by the Habsburgs was roughly equivalent to modern Slovakia.

Catherine Wendy Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry and Holy War in the 16th Century Adriatic (Ithaca, NY, 1992), chap. 3.

For the Hayduks, see the references in Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier, 1600-1660: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Oxford, 2000). Cf. HHSA-Turcica, I-14, Kolvolut 1, fols. 137-40: Ferdinand to Archduke Maximilian [his son and heir], Augsburg, 29 March 1559: in preparation for a prospective prolongation of the truce, Habsburg captains are to be instructed not to take on “free and wandering foot-soldiers,” or “free and wandering Hayduks.” Some years earlier, Geraard Veltwyck, Ferdinand’s envoy to the Porte, recommended striking from a proposed truce the customary language about hanging Hayduks caught as bandits, “for this way we lose many brave men who can later be useful for war”; Veltwyck to Ferdinand, Constantinople, 7 December 1547, Austro-Turcica, Letter 58, 195.

Modern Slovenia.

Ferdinand’s instructions for N. Sick, Worms, 21 May 1545, Austro-Turcica, Letter 21, 65-7; cf. L. Vels to Ferdinand, end of May 1545, Austro-Turcica, Letter 22, 69-70; and Ferdinand’s instructions for G. Veltwyck, 13 July 1546, Austro-Turcica, Letter 34, 102-3.

N. Sick to Ferdinand, from Edirne, 10 November 1545, Austro-Turcica, Letter 27, 79-80 (in context, Sick is explaining why Rüstem Pasha insists that Zrinski not be included in a truce under discussion).

HHSA-Turcica, I-12, Konvolut 2, fols. 272-75v, Vranĉić, Zay and Busbecq to Ferdinand from Constantinople [undated, but prior to Busbecq’s return to Vienna in August 1555]; I-13, fols. 32-35, Archduke Maximilian to the pasha of Buda, 14 February 1558; I-14, Konvolut 3, fols. 10, Ferdinand to Busbecq, Vienna, 2nd letter of 10 July 1559; I-14, Konvolut 3, fols. 72-74, Ferdinand to Busbecq, 11 November 1559.

HHSA-Turcica, I-11, Konvolut 2, fol. 154, pasha of Buda to Ferdinand, 9 September 1554; I-11, Konvolut 3, fols. 2a-b; I-12, Konvolut 1, N. Vranĉić and F. Zay to Ferdinand, Constantinople, 26 July 1555 (the two ambassadors have been haled before an Ottoman judge to answer the complaints of a certain Demetrios relating to an attack on his village some years previously by the catsellan of Gran).

For Busbecq (or, in the modern Dutch of his native Flanders, Boesbeeck) and his Litterae Turcicae, see Ogier Ghislin van Boesbeeck, Legationis Turcicae epistolae quattuor/Vier brieven over het gezantschap naar Turkije, with an Introduction by R. W. M. Zweder von Martels, ed. and trans. by Michel Goldsteen (Hilversum, 1994).

Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, II: 455.

Ottaviano Bon, 8 March 1605, ASV-DAC, 61, 17-20v: the Cossacks on the Black sea “are bandits, exactly like the Uskoks.” For Cossack Black Sea expeditions, Plokhii, The Cossacks and Religion, 19, cites Guillaume Le Vasseur, Sieur de Beauplan, Description d’Ukraine (Paris, 1660); there is now an English translation: Description of Ukraine, ed. and trans. Andrew B. Pernal and Dennis F. Essar (Cambridge, MA, 1993). See also the references given by Mikhail B. Kizilov, “Slave Trade in the Early Modern Crimea from the Perspective of Christian, Muslim and Jewish Sources,” Journal of Early Modern History 11 (2007): 1-32.

Bracewell, Uskoks of Senj, 273-76; Faroghi, Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, II: 482.

On the Knights of St. Stephen, Niccolò Capponi, Victory of the West: The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 109-11.

Charrière, III: 747/153, from Juyé, 20 July 1578: the four galleys of St. Stephen, which the grand duke maintains “comme chose d’église,” may do as they please, so long as he arms no other ships against the grand seigneur; Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, II: 463. Cosimo de Medici, the first grand duke of Tuscany (1535-1574), founded the Knights of St. Stephen (1562) to counteract the raids of Barbary and Ottoman corsairs. On Tuscan corsairs in the eastern Mediterranean, Jennings, Christians and Muslims, 363-66. This double-mindedness of the grand dukes continued into the next century. From Cèsy, 27 June to Louis XIII, also to d’Harbault, and to Louis XIII, 9 August 1627, BN-MF 16150, 673-75, 676-78, 691-93: even as a Florentine ambassador arrives for peace talks, six Florentine galleys capture twenty-seven Turkish ships great and small, “in sight of” the Dardanelles castles.

Faroghi, Economic and Social History, II: 481-82: “Certain items in the capitulations ran counter to the deeply held convictions of provincial and local officials. Muslim religious law (Sharia) assumed that Holy war (gaza) against infidels was permanent. ... Occurrences of this kind become more comprehensible when one remembers that they had their counterparts on the Venetian side of the frontier.”

From Navagero, 13 August 1550, and 17 December 1550, ASV-AP, 5, 5v-7v, 19-22; Antonio Erizzo, Relazione (1557), Alberi, IX: 141-43 (why commands against piracy are not obeyed); Venier, 13 March 1594, ASV-DAC, 39, 16-19v: rejecting a request from the Kapudan Pasha (Admiral) for funds, the Caymacam (standing in for the absent grand vizier) tells the former he has kept back enough booty for himself to have paid all the Arsenal’s debts.

Kheireddin, known in Europe as Barbarossa (ca. 1467-1546).

From Cèsy, 5 October 1625 and 22 February 1626, BN-MF 16150, 431, 479. Cf. Cèsy to Villeauxclercs, 5 October 1625, BN-MF 16150, 431-32v: for only fifty thousand ecus a year, France could keep “la principale force du Turc” occupied in the Black Sea, to defend the entrance to the Bosporus, only four hours from the Sublime Porte. Then he admits (14 April 1626, BN-MF 16150, 498-500) that the time has not yet come for France to divert Ottoman forces in preparation for a grand attack, because the “ambition demesuree” of the House of Austria still keeps Christendom divided.

Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (New York and Oxford, 1999); cf. 16-18: “the greater jihad” refers to the struggle against evil in oneself.

Geoffrey Regan, First Crusader: Byzantium’s Holy Wars (Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire, 2001).

Adel Allouche, The Origins and Development of the Ottoman-Safavid Conflict (906-962/1500-1555), Islamkundische Untersuchungen XCI (Berlin, 1983): 65 (the quote). It was in this region that Shaykh Junayd (r. 1447-1460) formed a largely Turkish-speaking militia known as the Qizilbash, which then became the spearhead of Safavid power under Shah Isma’il (1487-1524): Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge, 2002), 285. Shah Isma’il was also a member of the Bektaşi Sufi order, popular among Janissaries: Capponi, Victory of the West, 24. European observers noted a preference in parts of Anatolia for Persian or Shiʻite rule, even long after the Ottoman conquest of 1514: Bishop of Maçon to Francis I, 29 May 1535, Charrière, I: 264; Domenico Trevisan, Relazione (1554), Alberi, III: 168-71.

For the Ottoman-Safavid wars, the only monographic study I know of in any European language is the one by Adel Allouche (note 66).

From Aramon 4 April 1547, and from Morvilliers 3 May 1547, Charrière, II: 48-56: because Suleiman is so eager to march against Persia, it is not possible to dissuade him from accepting the truce offered by the emperor; cf. Suleiman’s letter to Henri II explaining his decision to make war against Persia [and thus not against Charles VI, October 1555, Charrière, II: 324-26; from Giacomo Soranzo, 21 June 1566, ASV-DAC, 1, 180-81v, because of a threat to “Babylon” (Baghdad), Sultan Selim II orders the cavalry of Anatolia and Kamamania to withdraw from the Hungarian front; from Morosini, 15 January 1583, ASV-DAC, 16, 381-84: the Ottomans want a renewal of the 1578 truce with Spain so as to continue the war in Persia; from Ottaviano Bon, 2 July 1605, ASV-DAC, 61, 235-38v (Sultan Ahmed I curses the vizier thought responsible for the Long War, because while the Hungarians are merely defending their liberty and their state, the shah [Abbas I], who made war “without reason,” merits the “anger and revenge” of the sultan).

Martines to Lodève, 20 May 1555, Charrière, II: 339-41; on the fetwa, Navagero, Relazione (1553), Alberi, III: 86; Trevisan, Relazione (1554), Alberi, III: 168-71; from Codignac, 3 April 1554, Charrière, II: 310; cf. Suleiman to Henri II, October 1555, Charrière, II: 324-6. Also Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire (London, 2002), 121: in light of the shah’s claim to semi-divine status as head of the Safavid Order, the same Chief Mufti, Ebu’su’ud, declared in 1548 that the Safavids were “rebels and, from many points of view, infidels.” According to Capponi, Victory of the West, 26, Sultan Selim I obtained a similar decree against the heretical Shiʻites before launching his Persian campaign in 1514.

Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 22, counts 52 days’ march (plus 67 days of rest) from Edirne (only a few days from Istanbul) to Esztergom on the Hungarian frontier, as against 121 days’ march (plus 76 days of rest) from Üsküdar to Baghdad. Hammer-Pursgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, II: 487, counts 57 “campings” between Istanbul and Erzerum, arsenal for the eastern marches of the Ottoman state, and 69 between Erzerum and Persia’s northeastern frontier, scene of the fighting between 1578 and 1590.

1526, 1529, 1532, 1537, 1540-1542, 1593-1606.

1513-1514, 1533-1536, 1548-1552, 1578-1590, 1606-1607, 1616-1618, 1623-1624, 1626, 1630, 1635, 1638.

Tracy, Emperor Charles V, 27-28; cf. BN-MF 16150, 451-475, Cèsy’s memoir (1626) opposing a proposed Hispano-Ottoman entente.

Capponi, Victory of the West, 245-47.

For current scholarship, Jonathan Riley-Smith, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades (Oxford, 1995); see especially Riley-Smith’s introductory essay, “The Crusading Movement and Historians,” 1-12.

Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, II: 419; Kenneth Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1271, 4 vols. (Philadelphia, 1976-1978).

Tracy, Emperor Charles V.

Capponi, Victory of the West, is by far the best account, both for the battle itself (chap. 9), and for abiding suspicions among the Christian states that (briefly) agreed to join forces (chap. 2-8).

I. A. A. Thompson, War and Government in Habsburg Spain, 1560-1620 (London, 1976); there is, alas, no modern monograph on Doria’s campaigns, but cf. John Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the 16th Century (London, 2003).

Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy, 27, 82, 87-88, 90, 93. The avariz, which could be levied to provision the army or to build roads as well as to man the fleet, was commuted to a cash payment during the course of the sixteenth century. Muslims as well as non-Muslims paid. Near the end of the sixteenth century, perhaps during the Long War against Austria (1591-1606), the avariz became an annual levy throughout the empire.

Marco Mincio, Relazione (1522), Alberi, IX: 73-74: the “whole country” is obliged to provide “one man, paid for four months,” from every ten; from Navagero, 25 November 1550, ASV-AP, 5, 22-26v: explanation of how avariz is levied, asserting that Christians must pay the cash equivalent per head, while Turks pay a flat fee per household; Relazione of Domenico Trevisan (1554), Alberi, III: 142.

1534 (conquest of Tunis), 1535 (vain attempt to relieve Charles V’s siege of Tunis), 1536 (landing in Calabria), 1538 (battle of Prevesa), 1539 (reconquest of Castilnuovo, taken by Andrea Doria for Charles V in 1538), 1543-1544 (Ottoman fleet winters at Toulon), 1550 (conquest of Tripoli from Knights of Malta), 1551, 1552, 1553, 1556, and 1558 (all at the behest of France’s King Henri II), 1560 (Ottoman victory at Djerba), 1565 (failed siege of Malta), 1570 (conquest of Venetian Cyprus), 1571 (battle of Lepanto), 1572, 1573, and 1574 (conquest of Tunis).

Domenico Trevisan, Relazione (1554), Alberi, III: 238, ship captains are allotted 1,000 akça to hire an oarsman, and can find good men for 700-900; from Vettor Bragadin, 14 March 1566, ASV-DAC, 1, 39-42 (for want of oarsmen, the Kapudan Pasha delays sailing for the Black Sea); from Barbaro and Tiepolo, 10 April 1574, ASV-DAC, 6, 387v-389 (for a planned war-fleet of 300 galleys, oarsmen have arrived for only 30); an undated “Summaria della Militia Turchesca dal ... Antonio Tiepolo al ... Jacopo Boncompagno,” BN-MF 20982, 205v: the Turk has timber and other materials for 300 galleys, but not enough men; from Marco Venier, second letter of 14 April 1594, ASV-DAC, 39, 143-48v (of the oarsmen commanded by avariz, not one has come; instead various cadis bring cash), and 4 June 1594, ASV-DAC, 39, 349-54v (the official keeping the books at the arsenal tells Venier that oarsmen cannot be found for 3,000 akça, though galley-captains have been allotted only 1,500 per man); from Cèsy, 4 March 1625, BN-MF 16150, 377-78 (those sent to Anatolia to bring back oarsmen find the country so ruined and depopulated they bring none back).

From Germigny, [ca. June 1580], Charrière, III: 887: no bread is to be found in Istanbul, because of storms said to have caused the loss of forty or fifty ships on the Black Sea.

Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 6th edition, 2 vols. (Paris, 1985), II: 415-50, 467-69. While Spain was preoccupied by the Dutch Revolt, the Ottomans saw a chance to strike at Persia during the regency for a new Safavid shah. Cf. Thompson, War and Government in Habsburg Spain, Tables D and E, 294-95 (a comparison of expenditures for galleys and for the Atlantic Fleet), and Table H, 300-01 (number of galleys in service).

Alberto Tenenti, Piracy and the Decline of Venice, 1580-1615, tr. Janet and Brian Pullan (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), 86, endorsed by Phillips, “Navies and the Mediterranean,” 20.

From Cèsy, 12 May 1625, BN-MF 16150, 275; from Bon, 4 July 1605, ASV-DAC, 61, 264-65v.

Jan Paul Niederkorn, Die europäische Mächte und der ‘Lange Türkenkrieg’ Kaiser Rudolfs II, 1593 -1606 (Vienna, 1993).

Ekkehard Eickhoff, Wien, Venedig und die Osmanen: Umbruch in Südost Europa, 1645-1700 (Munich, 1970).

Erich Feigl, Halbmond und Kreuz: Marco d’Aviano und die Rettung Europas (Vienna, 1993).

Thompson, War and Government in Habsburg Spain, “Conclusion.”

G. M. Malvezzi to Ferdinand, Constantinople, 22 November 1548, Austro-Turcica, Letter 110, 315: two çavuş (official messengers) have come to the Porte from the Persian front, with orders from Sultan Suleiman to withdraw from the treasury 500,000 ducats in gold, and the equivalent of 700,000 in silver akçe, together with cloths of silk for his janissaries and courtiers.

Marino Cavalli, Relazione (1560), Alberi, III: 280.

Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Path to State Centralization (Ithaca, New York, 1994).

Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy.

Tracy, Emperor Charles V, chap. 3.

E.g., the so-called rentes de l’Hôtel de Ville in France, from 1522 (crown revenues were placed in the hands of the Paris city council, which then sold rentes [bonds] backed by these revenues): Martin Wolfe, The Fiscal System of Renaissance France (New Haven, 1972); for provincial parliaments in the Low Countries, James Tracy, A Fiscal Revolution in the Habsburg Netherlands (Berkeley, 1985); for corporations of crown officials in the reign of Louis XVI, Mark Potter, Corps and Clienteles: Public Finance and Political Change in France, 1688-1715 (Burlington, VT, 2003).

Inalcik, Economy and Society, 98, citing a work published in Turkish in 1939: “Reference is made [1590s] to loans from leading merchants during war time”; Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy, 47 n. 73 (forced loans).

From Germigny, 1 December 1579, BN-MF 16143, 2-7; from Venier, 19 May 1594, ASV-DAC, 260-67v; from Berthier, 5 February 1586, Charrière, IV: 471; from Lancosme, 2 April 1586, Charrière, IV: 488; Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, II: 589 (1593); from Venier, 19 May 1594 and 4 June 1594, ASV-DAC, 39, 84, 349-54v; from Bon, second letter of 31 May 1605, ASV-DAC, 61, 187-96v; from Zorzi Giustinian, fifth letter of 5 March 1622, ASV-DAC, 61, 33-36v.

From Cèsy, 27 June 1627, BN-MF 16150, 665ff: “Comme la foy publique ne s’observe iamais en ce pays, on ne trouve point de partisans pour fayre des avances d’un escu.” Cf. Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, II: 338, 612.

K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge, 1985), 16; Chester Starr, The Influence of Sea Power on Ancient History (Oxford, 1989), provides some negative support for this argument by showing that only Carthage -- not Rome or Athens -- used naval power to promote its trading interests.

The best overview is Eliahu Ashtor, The Levant Trade in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, 1983).

John H. Pryor, Geography, Technology and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649-1571 (Cambridge, 1997).

Kate Fleet, European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge, 1999), chap. 1, 10.

Inalcik, Economic and Social History, I: 188-89.

Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy; Geo Pistarino, Chio dei Genovesi nel tempo di Cristoforo Colombo (Rome, 1995); Pryor, Geography, Technology and War.

Capponi, Victory of the West, 32, 64-6.

Save as noted, this paragraph and the next two are based on Tracy, “Il commercio Italiano in territorio Ottomano, 1450-1620 ca.,” in Il Rinascimento Italiano e l’Europa, vol. IV, Commercio e cultura mercantile, ed. Franco Franchetti, Richard A. Goldthwaite, Reinhold C. Mueller (Treviso, 2007), 425-54.

The popes of this era, sponsors of crusades against the infidel, also wanted their subjects and their treasury to share in the profits of trade with the east: Poumarède, Pour en finir avec la Croisade, “Les Levantins du pape,” 342-80. For a possible overture to the Ottomans from the entourage of the anti-Habsburg Pope Paul IV (1555-1559); Capponi, Victory of the West, 79.

For the Senate’s grant (1541) of a “factory” or walled-off quarter for “Hebrew merchants,” on the site of an old foundry known as the ghetto, Jonathan Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews, and the World Maritime Empire (1540-1740) (Leiden, 2002), 67-74. Cf. Marino Cavalli, Relazione (1560), Alberi, III: 274: a decline of Venice’s trade in Constantinople is said to be due to competition from Jewish merchants -- but also to the laziness of Venetians, who let Jews do the real work.

Robert Mantran, Histoire d’Istanboul (Paris, 1996), 196-202, 227.

Maurice Aymard, Venise, Raguse, et le commerce du blé pendant la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1966), 125-41.

Information from Fleet, European and Islamic Trade; Faroghi, Economic and Social History, II; and Luca Mola, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice (Baltimore, 2000). For the quote, from Bon, 15 March 1605, ASV-DAC, 27-30v.

Katsumi Fukusawa, Toilerie et commerce du Levant: d’Alep à Marseille (Paris, 1987).

Most traffic between the Spice Islands and India (whence spices were shipped on toward Alexandria or Damascus) passed through the Straits of Melakah (Malacca): for Portugal’s empire in the east, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History (London, 1993).

Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford, 2010); I am grateful to Prof. Casale, my colleague at the University of Minnesota, for letting me read an earlier version of his work.

Spain ruled Portugal and its empire from 1580 to 1640.

Frederic C. Lane, Profits from Power: Readings in Protection-Rent and Violence-Controlling Enterprises (Albany, NY, 1979); Douglass C. North, “Institutions, Transaction Costs, and the Rise of Merchant Empires,” The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350-1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge, 1991), 22-40.

Eric P. Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, 2006), chap. 1: the Venetian colony was now made up not of patricians (those eligible for office) or native-born citizens (eligible for civil-service positions) but of men who had acquired Venetian citizenship.

Carlo Livi, Domenico Sella, Ugo Tucci, “Un problème d’histoire: la décadence économique de Venise,” in Aspetti e cause della decadenza economica veneziana (Rome-Venice, 1961), 287-317.

Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (New York, 1935, rprt. 1964), chap. 1, “The Foundation of the Levant Company.” For later developments, Alastair Hamilton, ed., Friends and Rivals in the East: English and Dutch Trade in the Levant from the Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century (Leiden, 2000).

Tenenti, Piracy and the Decline of Venice, 52, defines the bertone as “a type of Atlantic ship with high sides, adopted by all navies ... used to impart new vigor to piracy.”

For a reservation on this point, Capponi, Victory of the West, 181.

From Matteo Zane, aboard ship, 23 March 1594, ASV-DAC, 39, 32-33; from Bon, 23 August 1605, ASV-DAC, 61, 315-23.

Faroghi, Economic and Social History, II: 488.

Domenico Sella, “The Rise and Fall of the Venetian Wool Industry,” in Crisis and Change in the Venetian Economy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Brian Pullan (London, 1968), 106-26.

Niels Steensgaard, “The Growth and Composition of the Long-Distance Trade of England and the Dutch Republic before 1750,” in Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge, 1990), 34-101, here 108-23.

Brian Pullan, “The Occupations and Investments of the Venetian Nobility in the Middle and Late Sixteenth Century,” in Renaissance Venice, ed. J. R. Hale (London, 1973), 379-408; Nelly Hanna, Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Isma’il abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant (Syracuse, 1998).

Rapp, “The Unmaking of the Mediterranean Trade.”

Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora, 74-76.

E.g., Sinan Pasha’s mobilization of the fleet, army and supplies needed for his successful expedition against Tunis: from Tiepolo, 18 May 1574, ASV-DAC, 6, 396v-398; from François de Noailles, bishop of Dax, 19 May 1574, Charrière, III: 486-94.

James R. Mulryne, “Introduction,” Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance, ed. James R. Mulryne and Elizabeth Goidring (Aldershot, 2002), 1.

Percy Ernst Schramm, Der König von Frankreich: das Wesen der Monarchie vom 9. bis 16. Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (first published 1939, rprt. Weimar, 1960); Ernst Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Medieval Ruler-Worship, University of California Publications in History 33 (Berkeley, 1946). The first important book of this kind by an American was by a scholar who had worked with Prof. Kantorowicz at Princeton: Ralph E. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva, 1960).

Mulryne, “Introduction,” 4-5; see also James R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe O’Kelly, and Margaret Shewrings., eds., Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Aldershot, 2004).

Walter Russell Meade, Power, Terror, Peace and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (New York, 2004), 24-44. The distinction comes from Joseph S. Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (Oxford, 2002), which includes economic as well as military power under “hard power.” Meade prefers to distinguish between sharp power (military), sticky power (economic), and sweet power (cultural).

Konrad Dilger, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des osmanisch Hofzeremoniells im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1967), 61, 70, citing the travel journal of a French nobleman accompanying the ambassador, Bertrandon de La Brocquière, Voyage d’Outremer, ed. Charles Henri Auguste Schefer (Paris, 1892).

Gulru Necipoglu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA, 1991).

Dilger, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hofzeremoniells, 4-8, 20-27, 31-33, and 87-92 (the first description of the audience hall comes from a man who was captive in Istanbul from 1532-1540, Luigi Bassano da Zara, Costumi et i modi particolari della vita de’ Turchi [Rome, 1545]).

Dilger, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hofzeremoniells, 70-71. Envoys from the Shiʻite Shahs of Iran -- rival claimants to the title of padişah-i alempah (universal ruler who protects the world) -- were not subjected to this indignity: Antony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought from the Prophet to the Present (Edinburgh, 2001), 205; and the unpublished paper by Sinem Arcak of the Art History Department of the University of Minnesota, “Of the Kind One Prince Sends Another: The Gift of an Islamic Manuscript in 1567.”

Save as noted, this paragraph and the next two are based on Tracy, “An Element in the Liturgy of Great-Kingship: Proskynesis from Persepolis to the Sublime Porte.”

Blended from Andrea Badoer, Relazione (1573), Alberi, III: 355-66, and Saint-Blancard’s journal (1538), Charrière, I: 376-78. See also the first chapter of Bon, The Sultan’s Seraglio.

“Avisi per littere a Costantinopoli,” addressed to “Doctor [Ulrich] Zasius,” HHSA-Turcica, I-14, Konvolut 4, fols. 62-62v.

Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 115-27, especially 125-27; Tracy, Emperor Charles V, 27; Alfred Kohler, Karl V, 1500-1558: eine Biographie (Munich, 1999), 94-102.

Bonner Mitchell, “Carlos V como Triunfador,” in Carlos V Imperador, ed. Pedro Navascuès-Palacio (Madrid, 1999), 213-51, here 213.

E.g., for his entry into Rome (1536), Charles was greeted at the gate by officials clad in togas, and passed through the city along the ancient via triumphalis, specially cleared for the occasion: Mitchell, “Carlos V como Triunfador,” 234, and Roy Strong, Splendor at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and the Theater of Power (Boston, 1972), 94.

R. J. Knecht, “Charles’s Journey through France, 1539-1540,” in Court Festivals, ed. Mulryne and Goldring, 157-70, here p. 164 (Charles’ entry into Paris).

Juan Carlos D’Amico, Charles-Quint maître du monde: entre mythe et realité (Caen, 2004), 72-73; see also Strong, Splendor at Court, 84-87; Mitchell, “Carlos V como Triunfador,” 223-25.

Knecht, “Charles’s Journey through France, 1539-1540,” 163-65; the figure of 200,000 onlookers mentioned by an Italian observer seems unlikely.

For Suleiman’s grand entry in 1551, ASV-AP, 5, 71-74v, dispatch from Bernardo Navagero, 29 April 1551.

Aachen (Holy Roman Empire), Valladolid (Castile), Zaragoza (Aragon), Brussels (The Low Countries), Dôle (Franche Compté), Palermo (Sicily), Naples (Kingdom of Naples), and, from 1535, Milan (Duchy of Milan).

Bonner, “Carlos V como Triunfador,” 222: “This respectful curiosity was one of the keys to his political influence.”

Badoer, Relazione (1573), Alberi, III: 355-56.

Vol. I of Carl Göllner, Turcica, 3 vols. (Bucharest, 1961), gives a bibliography of all treatises published prior to 1600.

E.g., Georgius de Hungaria (1422-1502), Tractatus de Moribus Turcorum, ed. Reinhard Klockow (Cologne, 1993); for a different kind of slave narrative, Bartolomé Bennassar, Les Chrétiens d’Allah: l’Histoire extraordinaire des renégats, XVI et XVIIe siècles (Paris, 1989).

For works by the four scholar-envoys sent as part of Henri II’s legation to the Porte in 1555, Frédéric Tinguely, L’Écriture du Levant à la Renaissance: Enquête sur les voyageurs français dans l’empire de Soliman le Magnifique (Geneva, 2000).

For two examples: Albrecht Classen, “Georgius de Hungaria’s Tractatus de Moribus Turcorum,” Journal of Early Modern History 7 (2003): 257-79; Busbecq, Legationis Turcicae epistolae quattuor, as cited above, note 54.

From Barbaro and Tiepolo, 29 April 1574, ASV-DAC, 6, 391v-392: justice for western Christians is possible in a cadi’s court “if the man is the defendant, but almost impossible if he is the plaintiff.” Cf. from Navagero, 1 January 1551, ASV-AP, 5, 29-34v.

For the principle that religious law does not permit a territory to be relinquished permanently to infidels if it has ever been under Muslim rule, or if a mosque has been built there, from Badoer, Barbaro, and Tiepolo, 28 September 1573, 19 December 1573, 15 January 1574, and 23 January 1574, and from Tiepolo, 24 November 1574, ASV-DAC, 6, 365v-66, 370v-72, 378-80, 381-82, 433-35; Barbaro, Relazione, 1573, 326-27, and Bon, 31 May 1605; cf. Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, II: 455.

E.g., Busbecq to Ferdinand, Constantinople, 23 January 1555 HHSA-Turcica, I-11, Konvolut 5, fols. 20-21; Busbecq, Vranĉić and Zay to Ferdinand, Constantinople, 15 July 1556, I-12, Konvolut 5, fols. 168-71.

From Bragadin, 29 April 1566, ASV-DAC, 1, 110-13v.

Arz presented by the two baili, Marcantonio Barbaro and Antonio Tiepolo (September 1573), ASV-DAC, 6, 353v-355.

From Ottaviano Bon, 11 March 1605, ASV-DAC, 61, 5-10v.

Cornelis Haga to the States General, 2 January 1615, Nationaal Archief, The Hague, “Notulen van de Staten-Generaal, Liassen Barbarije, Italie, en Turkije,” no. 1689, 4-5. One might note that having a Dutch consul in Aleppo would have diminished the authority and the emoluments of Haga’s position in the capital.

From Cèsy, 26 February 1620 and 4 August 1624, BN-MF 16150, 10-12, 301-05.

Philip Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 6 vols. (New York, 1973), II: 687-91.

After about 1300 ancient philosophy (Falsafa) was studied mainly by certain Sufi orders and in Shiʻite Iran: Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, 209-16, 297-98; Hodgson, Venture of Islam, III: 42-46, 66. Cf. Black, History of Islamic Political Thought, 188: “Islamic political thought from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries is thin compared to what had gone before and what was to come after. There were few new ideas after Ibn Taymiya [1263-1328] and Ibn Khaldun [1332-1406], just as there was little development in philosophy or the natural sciences”; and 217: Kinalizade [1510-1572] “was the only link between classical Falsafa and Ottoman political thought. Thus Ottoman thinkers took their founding concepts from Tusi, the great Shiʻite who had helped in the destruction of the ‘Abassid Caliphate, via two lesser intermediaries. Their intellectual nourishment was classical Falsafa dried and reconstituted.” The science of cartography was a notable exception to this pattern of stagnation: Jeremy Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (London, 1997), chap. 3, “Disorienting the East: The Geography of the Ottoman Empire.”

Italian humanists of the fifteenth century had set the fashion for referring to the Ottomans not just as infidels but also as “barbarians,” meaning enemies of civilization: Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Italian Humanists and Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia, 2004).

Cornelis Haga to the States General, 6 February 1615, reference as in note 163, 6. From the latter decades of the sixteenth century, the classical distinction between honestum and utile was an important element of Neo-Stoic political theory. For a modern edition of a key text, Justus Lipsius, Politica: Six Books of Politics or Political Instruction, ed., trans. and intro, by Jan Waszink (Assen, 2004).

Daniele de’ Ludovisi, Relazione (1534), Alberi, III: 18, 10. As a member of the citizen class, De’ Ludovsi could rise to a position in the civil service, like that of secretary, but only patricians could hold elective office, including the offices of bailo and ambassador. From the few examples printed in Alberi’s Relazioni, citizen Venetians may have been more sanguine about the Republic’s prospects in a possible war with the Porte than their social betters were.

Navagero, Relazione (1553), Alberi, III: 58-61 (the order of march), 64-65 (the quote). Navagero seems to anticipate the argument of Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War.

Copy of Tiepolo to the bailo of Corfu (January 1574), sent with his dispatch of 3 June 1574, and from Tiepolo, 3 June 1574, 9 October 1574 (the quote), ASV-DAC, 6, 400-02, 419v-22, and his Relazione (1576), Alberi, VI: 134-37. Cf. the undated “Summaria della Militia Turchesa dal ... Antonio Tiepolo al ... Jacopo Boncompagno,” BN-MF 20982, 204-07v.

Savary de Brèves, 17 September 1595 and 9 April 1600, BN-MF 16144, 250-52, 283.

Cf. Darling, Revenue-raising and Legitimacy, 2-8, “The Myth of Ottoman Decline.”

E.g., from de la Vigne, 18 June 1558: 25,000 Poles join 150,000 Russians to avenge a Tatar raid of the previous year, and Rüstem Pasha fears a possible alliance of Muscovy, Poland, and Emperor Ferdinand I, which (if Moldova and Wallachia also rebel against the Porte) could put “500,000 cavalry” into the field; from Dolu, 5 February, 18 February, 5 March 1561, the Ottomans will send ten galleys carrying Janissaries plus ten other galleys to Caffa, to defend Crimea’s chief port after a Russian assault; from Tricquerie, 22 December 1570, Charrière, III: 140- 42, the Porte will not support a Tatar attack on Muscovy; and from the Bishop of Dax, 21 April 1573, Charrière, III: 375-82, the grand vizier does not want a Russian prince elected king of Poland, for Muscovy is the Porte’s “strongest foe by land.”

Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 262-64, 314-15; Benson Bobrick, Fearful Majesty: The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible (New York, 1987).

From Petremol, 5 July 1563, Charrière, II: 772; for the fullest account of these events, see Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration; Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 133-35, notes that the enduring result of this mission was closer contact between Aceh and the Red Sea ports under Ottoman control.

Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopians: A History (Oxford, 1998), 84-93.

Stephen F. Dale, Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier: The Mappilas of Malabar, 1498-1922 (Oxford, 1982); Geneviève Bouchon, “Regent of the Sea” Cannanore’s Response to Portuguese Expansion, 1507-1528, trans. Louise Shackley (Delhi, 1988); K. K. N. Kurup, The Ali Rajahs of Cannanore (Trivandrum, 1975).

Markus Paulus Maria Vink, “Encounters on the Opposite Coast: Crosscultural Contacts between the Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka State of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Minnesota, 1998), I: 47-49.

Das Gupta, Asian Trade and the Decline of Surat; James D. Tracy, “Asian Despotism? Mughal Government as Seen from the Dutch East India Company Factory in Surat,” Journal of Early Modern History 3 (1999): 256-80.

Pleas for Peace, Problems for Historians: A 1455 Letter from Juan de Segovia to Jean Germain on Countering the Threat of Islam

Anne Marie Wolf

Given all the interest in the past decade or two in the marginal and the “other” in both the medieval and the early modern periods, it is perhaps surprising that so much still awaits exploration concerning Christian perceptions of Muslims. Norman Daniel’s classic Islam and the West documented the central themes of Christian thinking about Islam in such a way that readers are left dumbfounded by the persistent inaccuracy and intense animosity that have characterized Christians’ portrayals of Muslims and their beliefs.¹ Possibly because Daniel so thoroughly exposed the long tradition of Christian intransigence toward Islam, Christian perceptions of Muslims have not benefited from as much painstaking analysis as the Christian discourse about Jews. According to John V. Tolan, author of a recent book on the subject, Daniel’s own reaction to the image of Islam that he studied was “to shake his head in sad consternation.”² Indeed, Daniel’s presentation of a long tradition of vitriolic disdain, masterful and learned though it is, leaves readers with more consternation than understanding. My very bright students one summer, for instance, were incredulous at the steady stream of invective that Daniel documented. They wondered why so many people actually believed and perpetuated those medieval writers’ portrayals of Islam. Their reaction was understandable; Daniel offered no explanation for these habits of thinking. 

Tolan’s welcome addition to the scholarship on Christian portrayals of Islam addresses the question of how a long and intransigent tradition of vitriolic disdain had explanations other than stubborn irrationality or simple intellectual weakness on the part of Christian Europe. Arguing that individual European authors wrote with specific audiences and aims in mind, Tolan nonetheless offered the general observation that these writers found themselves perplexed before the mystery of a highly advanced, expanding Islamic civilization. This was a mystery because it begged the question of how God could allow Christian Europe to be defeated and challenged. European writers argued vigorously that their own faith was superior because they needed to discourage conversions to Islam and justify their leaders’ military endeavors against the Muslim threat. Their disdain for Islam was rooted in social and geopolitical realities rather than irrationality or intellectual weakness.³

Any attempt to survey centuries of widely-held perceptions necessarily paints the picture in broad strokes. Regardless of whether Europeans’ notions of Muslims were driven by incomprehensible blindness, as Daniel seems to suggest, or by political and social circumstances, as Tolan explains, a set of core themes emerged in European thought on Islam, and it dominated subsequent centuries. It is tempting to impute, as some have, a certain inevitability to the caricatures and misinformation perpetuated about Muslims, as if Europeans could not help themselves. Perhaps, some would argue, their patterns of thought were too parochial, too dominated by Christian paradigms, for them to conceive of a truly new approach to their neighbors to the east and south. According to this line of reasoning, Europeans did not possess the textual tools or habits of thought that might have enabled them to lower the volume on their venomous rhetoric and seek more accurate information about the other faith tradition. After all, the reasoning goes, there must be some explanation for the consistency, over centuries, in Christian writers’ perspectives on Islam. 

However, the very tenaciousness and consistency in the canon of images about Islam raises an even more vexing question: What explains the fact that some individuals did think differently, especially after centuries of warfare had conditioned most to see Muslims as perpetual enemies? Did those whose thinking took new paths have different political ties or economic interests than their contemporaries who perpetuated such negative portrayals and urged war against these menacing “others”? On what did they base their unconventional perspective? Thinkers who struggled against the currents of their day to encourage fresh thinking about Islam offer modern scholars fresh perspective on the foundations of such concepts as tolerance, traditionally associated with the Enlightenment.⁴ Because they were thinking in ways that were so atypical, they also raise questions about the role of social context in determining one’s inclinations toward other Religions. 

One such thinker was Juan Alfonso de Segovia (d. 1458), a Spanish theologian best known to scholars of the late medieval Church. He was one of the leading conciliarists at the Council of Basel (1431-1448).⁵ In the final years of his life, he left other works unfinished and dedicated his time to writing on the proper Christian stance toward the Muslim world. Segovia had been interested in Islam earlier, but he turned to this topic in earnest when news arrived at his alpine priory of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. From his retirement in Aiton, in modern-day France, he wrote to Cardinal Juan de Cervantes in Seville, Nicholas of Cusa, French theologian Jean Germain, and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who was soon to be Pope Pius II.⁶ Segovia knew all four personally from his years at Basel. In these letters, some of which were quite lengthy, he argued vigorously that Christians should not wage war on Muslims. Though he enlisted historical precedent in his arguments, reminding his eminent readers that previous crusades had not succeeded, the authority he relied upon most heavily was undoubtedly scripture. This paper will explore the reasoning of this prolific and creative Castilian intellectual, focusing on his use of scripture in the arguments that he made to Jean Germain in December, 1455.⁷

Juan Alfonso de Segovia’s letter to Germain, dated December 18, 1455, was not his first contact with the French bishop and theologian concerning Christian Europe’s stance toward Islam. In July of that year, Juan had sent Germain a brief letter outlining his thought on the matter, together with a copy of a letter on the same subject that he had sent to Nicholas of Cusa a year earlier, a document of twenty to thirty folios, depending on the script.⁸ In the materials, Segovia had proposed a high-level dialogue between Christian notables and their Muslim counterparts and an end to war and calls for a crusade. He had argued that Christians should strive not to kill Muslims, but to convert them, a task best accomplished through peaceful presentation of the true teachings of Christianity.⁹ Germain’s reply was not what Segovia had hoped. No copies are extant, but from the Castilian’s response to it we can infer that Germain scoffed at Segovia’s proposals. In his December 1455 letter to Germain, Juan wrote that his correspondent had called them “difficult, not useful, dangerous, and scandalous.”¹⁰ It is Juan’s objection to the last two of these charges that offers the most striking glimpse at the scriptural foundations of his proposals for peaceful dialogue. 

In arguing that the dialogue he proposed was not dangerous, Segovia could have pointed to diplomats already operating in Ottoman lands or other such mundane examples of dialogues taking place with no harm to the parties involved. Instead, he reminded his French counterpart that, as the apostle Paul had stated, Christ would give the words and wisdom needed in order to be successful against all adversaries.¹¹ In addition, he argued, any danger would be a danger only to the body. Had not Paul proclaimed that nothing, including danger or the sword, would separate Christians from the love of Christ? The apostle even wrote that because of Christ each day they were like lambs to the slaughter.¹² Indeed, Segovia pointed out, the mission he proposed would not be any more dangerous than sending a few sheep out among wolves, which Christ himself had done. In fact, it would be less dangerous than engaging in wars. In adopting the way of peace and teaching instead of that of war, he wrote, Christians would be trusting not themselves, but God. This was precisely what their fathers had done, and they were freed from great dangers and gave thanks to God.¹³

Juan was at his most indignant when answering the charge that his proposals were scandalous. He compared the idea that converting the Muslims through the peaceful means of teaching was scandalous to an angel of Satan being transformed into an angel of light, or a person being scandalized by his own foot or hand. According to Segovia, nothing could be farther from the truth than the notion that peaceful teaching of the faith was scandalous to the Church.¹⁴

Contrasting his proposal with Germain’s call to arms, he conceded that Christ had sent his disciples out initially with no sack, bag, or shoes, but at the Last Supper had told each of them to take up a sack and a bag and to sell his tunic to buy a sword.¹⁵ This might seem to support those who would take up a sword against the Turks, but Segovia spent the next several folios explaining that the sword was not advisable and not likely to succeed. At the end of this discussion, he offered a new concept of sword that Christians could take up. The sword that Christians should brandish, he insisted, was the word of God, the two-edged sword that was more effective and more penetrating than all other swords. This sword had the power to divide souls and bind spirits and hearts together, and to detect innermost thoughts and intentions.¹⁶ So effective was this sword that if the Muslims heard the word of God, there could be little doubt that it would produce abundant results.¹⁷ He recalled that God had said that his word would not return to him empty, but would accomplish those things it was meant to do.¹⁸

Segovia was confident in his proposal that Christians should convert Muslims through peaceful preaching. His confidence came from the certainty that his plan conformed to God’s will as expressed in scripture. As he stated repeatedly, he was only advocating the approach that Christ himself had taken and urged on his followers. He wrote to Germain that the one who had told his disciples to go forth into the whole world and teach all nations had also promised to be with them until the end of time.¹⁹ Surely they could not fail. Those who read the gospel find there a command to love their enemies, do good to those who hate them, and pray for those who persecute and falsely accuse them.²⁰ Segovia wrote that it was a malevolent soul that was saddened when an enemy who had been set on the right path escaped punishment.²¹ He reminded Germain that it is more loving to desire the transformation of enemies than to desire their punishment.²² Moreover, God did not support the quest for vengeance. Juan wrote that scripture taught that “whoever seeks to be avenged will find punishment from the Lord.”²³ He acknowledged that there might be plenty of human laws that defined the circumstances under which a war was just, but he insisted that it was more worthy to act according to the laws of God and to recognize that God had reserved judgment to himself.²⁴

Segovia’s path of peace would not only be preferable to that of war and closer to God’s own plans. It would be consistent with the very highest command that Christians had from Christ: to love. Reminding Germain that the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself was of paramount importance, Juan declared that nothing could be more loving than to work for the salvation of a neighbor’s soul.²⁵ Germain had wondered how anyone could think of seeking peace with Muslims after what had happened in Constantinople, and Segovia dismissed this concern by recounting how Jesus had responded to those who had wronged him. Jesus had died on a cross in order to bring his persecutors around, and had even prayed that God would forgive them because they did not know what they were doing.²⁶ Segovia thought this consummate act of God through Christ was particularly helpful in the crisis that confronted his world because the root of the Muslims’ animosity toward the Christians was precisely that they did not know what they were doing when they were killing Christians. They mistakenly thought that Christians worshipped more than one God.²⁷ Juan’s proposed legation of peace would clarify the matter.²⁸ He noted that Christ’s act of sacrifice on the cross had caused people to recognize their sin and error,²⁹ suggesting that if Christians followed this path, the results would be same. The implication is that if Muslims were to see Christians as they really were, they would stop waging war against them. Peace would reign. If peace is of God, it could not be a scandal for those who love God’s ways.³⁰

Juan de Segovia was surely not advocating a “live and let live” policy toward the Turks or toward Muslims more generally. In fact, in some sections of his works he reiterated the very denunciations of Islam that had become standard by his time. His goal was to persuade Christians to devote more energy to converting Muslims, if only through peaceful means. Thus his proposals would not fit most conceptions of religious tolerance. Nevertheless, his response to the events of 1453 differed dramatically from his peers’, and one cannot help noticing that his attitude toward Muslims, at least as expressed in passages such as those cited here, bordered on benevolence. Moreover, he did not set any deadline by which these conversion efforts must succeed, after which a more forceful approach would be justified. On the contrary, he argued that since peace and teaching were better strategies of conversion than war, haste had no place in the plans.³¹ Segovia was not arguing that peaceful dialogue aimed at conversion ought to be Christian Europe’s first line of defense, before more bellicose approaches were adopted. His argument was that peaceful teaching was the only approach that Christian scriptures supported. 

His strategy of drawing his support so heavily from the Bible complicates the conventional thinking on the intellectual origins of toleration. According to the standard narrative, this position became possible with the Reformation and the subsequent emergence of rationalism and the work of such thinkers as John Locke and John Stuart Mill.³² Juan’s letter to Germain lends further support to efforts such as those by Nederman and Laursen to challenge the conventional account of when (and indeed whether) the West embraced religious tolerance. Segovia’s argument cannot properly be called tolerance. Perhaps it is closer to what Cary Nederman and John Christian Laursen called concordance, in which one temporarily acknowledged and permitted other faiths to exist, yearning all the while for the ultimate triumph of the "true faith."³³ Nevertheless, the Castilian theologian’s argument leans far enough in the direction of tolerance to suggest that European thinkers possessed sufficient textual and conceptual tools to arrive at theories of tolerance well before the traditional narrative claims that they were supposed to have them. The texts that Segovia cited and the arguments he advanced, taken to their logical conclusions, certainly would have supported a stance of religious toleration. It would not have been much of a leap. 

Others have insisted that discussions of interactions between religious groups need to focus on social history. In a recently published article, Charles Parker presented an examination of tolerance and violence under Dutch and Ottoman rule from just such a perspective and reminded us of recent scholarship that has focused on social interactions.³⁴ The social and political context out of which Juan de Segovia emerged warrants our consideration, especially since scholars are quick to point out that, in Spain, Christians were more likely to interact with real Muslims than elsewhere in western Europe. Certainly the milieu in which Segovia spent the first decades of his life included Muslims, although apparently not many. He estimated that in the whole town there were barely fifty Muslims, and he described the great efforts he undertook ca. 1430 to find a Muslim interlocutor informed enough to discuss theology with him.³⁵

The situation of the religious minorities in Castile, and Muslims in particular, in the early fifteenth century resists easy description. The traditional view has been that subject Muslims, or Mudéjars, typically lived in rural areas and earned their livelihood in agriculture and the building trades and thus existed outside the mainstream of Castilian social and power circles. Recent scholarship has shown that this view is distorted, and that the Muslim community included some whose connections with powerful noble families gave them a role in shaping political decisions in the kingdom.³⁶ The fact that Christians in Spain could interact with Muslims at all made them an exception among western Europeans at the time, and it would be reasonable to expect that this environment, if any, would produce thinkers able to envision a less bellicose position toward the Muslim world. 

This was not the case. The fifteenth century saw the implementation of new measures aimed at separating Muslims and Jews from Christians and diminishing the position of these confessional minorities. During Juan de Segovia’s youth, Fernando de Antequera and Queen Catherine of Lancaster, co-regents during the minority of Juan II (1406-1419), imposed toughened restrictions on non-Christians in Castile. The preaching of Vincent Ferrer throughout the kingdom in 1411 prompted many baptisms and helped to create an atmosphere of suspicion toward Castile’s religious minorities. The war with the Muslim kingdom of Granada, which shared Castile’s southern border, continued off and on.³⁷ The interaction between members of different faiths afforded by fifteenth-century Spanish society did not lead most intellectuals to cite the gospels in support of a policy of non-violence toward Muslims. In fact, most endorsed violence, not restraint.³⁸ One could argue that the ongoing war and social tensions of fifteenth-century Castile contributed to the repeated calls for war found in many treatises at the time, but one could not then argue that this same milieu led Juan de Segovia to reject that approach. If social context is the proper place to search for the roots of animosity or accommodation toward another religion, we must also recognize the limits of its explanatory power. There is no context, social or historiographical, into which Juan de Segovia fits nicely. 

Instead, Segovia serves as a respite from the dumbfounded consternation that Norman Daniel’s work elicits, since his proposals were unconventional enough to muddle the narrative of longstanding bellicosity and disdain toward Islam. However, he also is an enigma for those who want to enlist social context as an explanation for violence to explain Segovia’s stance. The only scholars whose arguments are corroborated by Segovia’s works are those who aspire to challenge the conventional periodization of religious tolerance and question whether such a development really depended upon Enlightenment philosophy for its intellectual scaffolding. His arguments to Germain in 1455 show that Europeans had ample conceptual tools for arriving at such a stance, and that at least some were inclined to use these tools for a goal not all that distant from tolerance.

Endnotes

Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (1960, rprt. Oxford, 1993).

John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York, 2002), xvi.

Tolan, Saracens, xv-xviii.

On the development of religious toleration, see Joseph Lecler, Toleration and Reformation, trans. by T. L. Westow, 2 vols. (New York, 1960); W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1932); and more recently, Cary J. Nederman, Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration, c. 1100-c. 1550 (University Park, PA, 2000); Cary J. Nederman and John Christian Laursen, eds., Difference and Dissent: Theories of Toleration in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Lanham, MA, 1996); John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman, eds., Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia, 1998); Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, 2003).

On his contributions to conciliar theory at Basel, see Antony Black, Council and Commune: The Conciliar Movement and the Fifteenth-Century Heritage (London and Shepherdstown, WV, 1979).

The only monograph on Juan de Segovia’s views on Islam is Darío Cabanelas, Juan de Segovia y el problema islámico (Madrid, 1952). See also the following discussions: Ana Echevarría, The Fortress of Faith: The Attitude toward Muslims in Fifteenth Century Spain (Leiden, 1999); James Biechler, “A New Face toward Islam: Nicholas of Cusa and John of Segovia,” in Nicholas of Cusa in Search of God and Wisdom: Essays in Honor of Morimichi Watanabe by the American Cusanus Society, ed. Gerald Christianson and Thomas M. Izbicki (Leiden, 1991), 185-202; Thomas M. Izbicki, “The Possibility of Dialogue with Islam in the Fifteenth Century,” in the same volume, 175-83; Jesse D. Mann, “Truth and Consequences: Juan de Segovia on Islam and Conciliarism,” Medieval Encounters 8.1 (2002): 79-90.

The letter is dated December 18, 1455. It exists in a single manuscript in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV), Vatican Lateran 2923, folios 41r-136v. I examined a microfilm copy available at the Vatican Film Library at St. Louis University. I am grateful to this institution’s Mellon Fellowship program for providing funding to support my research there.

See the discussion in Benigno Hernández Montes, Obras de Juan de Segovia: Repertorio de historia de las ciencias eclesiásticas en España, vol. 6, Siglos I-XVI (Salamanca, 1977), 314-15, no. 56. Several copies of this letter to Cusa are extant: Biblioteca Universitaria de Salamanca (BUS) 19, fols. 168r-84r; BUS 55, fols. 126r-38v and 140r-55r; BAV Vat. Lat. 2923, fols. 4r-35r. Excerpts are published in Cabanelas, Juan de Segovia y el problema islámico, 303-10.

For the standard presentation of the solution he proposed, see Cabanelas, Juan de Segovia y el problema islámico, chap. 3, 93-126. As I have argued elsewhere (“Juan de Segovia and Western Perspectives on Islam in the Fifteenth Century,” Ph.D. Diss. [University of Minnesota, 2003]), Cabanelas presented Juan de Segovia’s “plan” as more systematic than it appears to have been. There is no one work in which it is laid out clearly. It must be pieced together from several of his works from this period.

Juan de Segovia, Letter to Jean Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 49v: “viam paternitas vestra dicit fore difficilem non utilem periculosam et scandalosam.”

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 56v: “... quod ministris suis quomodo ipse dixit, dabit Christus os et sapienciam cui non poterunt resistere et contradicere eorum adversarii omnes.” See Luke 21:14-16.

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 54r: “Quod autem viam hanc dicitur periculosam fore quantum ad anime periculum ... . Alio rursus loco, se ipsum exemplum donans, exclamat quis nos separabit a caritate christi an periculum an gladius sicut scriptum est quia propter te mortificamur tota die estimati sumus sicut oves occionis.” See Romans 8:34-37.

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 54r: “Potest ne maius designari periculum quam mittere paucas oves in medio luporum multorum. Et tamen cum illos ad predicandum misit discipulis suis ait Salvator Ecce ego mitto vos sicut agnos inter lupos. Divinaque illis assistente virtute pro singulari gracia lupi habuerunt quod agni in suam eos admitterent societatem incorporando eos christo. Et si non attento periculo corporum quod certissime contingit in preliorum congressu laudatur via belli quomodo periculosa estimanda est via pacis et doctrine ad [54v] sarracenorum conversionem quoniam non in nobis ipsis sumus confidentes sed in deo, in quo patres nostri speraverunt et liberati sunt de magnis periculis liberati a deo magnifice illi gracias agentes.” See Matthew 10:15-17 and Luke 10:2-4.

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fols. 52v-53r: “Cumque avisamentum illud de cuius ydoneitate agitur sit quod ecciesia plenopere intendat ad conversionem sarracenorum per viam tractatus pacis et doctrine, si eidem videatur sic agendum nullus dicere volet quod in hoc casu oculus ecclesie dexter intencio vim tam sancti operis [53] scandalizet eam quasi intendens per hoc aliquid assequi malum quemadmodum cum angelus sathane se transfigurat in angelum lucis vel quod scandalizet eum pes suus aut manus. Ita quod ex actu quo recto ipsa scandalizetur. Quod vero scandalizet nisi dicantur de scandalo per accidens. Re ipsa longe plus distat, videlicet quod ipsa ecclesia sancta pro sua virtute laborans ad infidelium conversionem intendat per hoc fideles suos vel se ipsam scandalizari.”

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 47v: “Quem a deo licitum salvator esse voluit, ut cum primo discipulos miserit suos sine sacculo, pera, et calciamentis in ultima cena illis dixerit tollendum sactum similiter et peram, qui vero non haberet quod gladium emeret, tunicam venditurus suam. Et in hunc [48] casum ut a theurcorum violencia christiana religio defendatur militare videtur mencionata dispositio.” See Luke 22:34-37.

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 51r: “Dei sermo et efficax et penetrabilior omni gladio, ancipite et pertingens usque ad divisionem anime et spiritus compagum quoque et medullarum et distector cogitatio num et intentionum cordis.” See Hebrews 4:12.

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 51r: “Quo circa obtenta licencia ut verbum dei audire sarraceni veluit minime dubitandum est de secuturo plurimo fructu.”

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 51r: “Sic ait dominus erit verbum meum quod egreditur de ore meo non reverbetur ad me vacuum sed faciet quecumque volui et prosperabitur in hiis ad que missi illud.” See Isaiah 55:11.

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 50v: “Qui namque dixit Euntes in mundum universum docete omnes gentes continuo assistenciam suam promisit, dicens Ecce ego vobiscum sum omnibus diebus usque ad consummacionem seculi.” See Mark 16:14-16 and Matthew 28:18-21.

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 70r: “Quid igitur evangelica precipiens diligi inimicos ac benefacere hiis qui oderunt et orare pro persequentibus et calumpmantibus.” See Matthew 5:44.

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 70v: “Malivolus autem animus contristatur si inimicus etiam correctus evaserit.”

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 70r: “Precipuum vero [70v] est ut de dei iusticia quis magis delectetur ut de inimici pena correctionem eius amans potius quam punicionem.”

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 70v: “Etenim quia teste divina scriptura, qui vindicari vult a domino inveniet vindictam.” Grammatically, this could also read, “Whoever seeks to be avenged by the Lord will find punishment,” but the translation offered above is more likely the intended meaning.

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 70v: “Nam et si leges civiles plures diffinierunt causas iusti belli meritorium certe est maximaque dignum laude divine legis intentioni fieri conformem manifestanti vindictam deum sibi velut propriam regaliam reservasse.”

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 70v: “Ita quod de se et per se meritorius non est quamadmodum intendere ad salutem anime proximi sui. Secundum namque preceptum in quo lex divina pendere dicitur est diligere proximum sicut se ipsum. Et quodcumque aliud est mandatum proximorum respectu hoc uno verbo instauratur diliges proximum tuum sicut te ipsum.” See Mark 12:33.

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 68: “Et pro satisfactione iniurie quam sibi faciebant iudei atque gentiles suspenden[68v]tes et crucifigentes eum in medio latronum sciens hunc actum fortitudinis pro quibus paciebatur salutarem futurum quodque sic in cruce exaltatus a terra omni ad se ipsum traheret ... cum clamore valido et lacrimis oravit patrem ut illis dimitteret quia nescirent quid facerent.” See John 12:32 and Luke 23:34.

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 68v: “Revera talis nesciencia in animis esse videtur sarracenorum occidendo christianos. Siquidem arbitrantur obsequium se prestare deo existimantes eos non esse cultores dei unius.”

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 68v: “Ecclesia legacionem mitteret pro audiencia obtinenda ad maiores sarracenorum ostensuram illis in omni caritate quia nesciunt quid faciunt.”

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 68v: “Sic enim suum recognoscerent peccatum atque errorem.”

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 54r: “Si quidem pax multa a deo est legem suam diligentibus et non est illis scandalum.”

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 46v: “Si via pacis et doctrine opportuna magis ad conversionem sarracenorum in sacramenta catholice fidei quam via belli, nullam equidem prefigit mensuram temporis qua id ipsum operis inchorari prosequi debeat aut finiri ut namque divina alt sapientia, Qui crediderit non festinet et non turbetur ponam in pondere iudicium et iusticiam in mensura.”

See the critique of this periodization by Nederman and Laursen in the “Introduction” in Difference and Dissent, 1-16.

Nederman and Laursen, Difference and Dissent, 10.

Charles H. Parker, “Paying for the Privilege: The Management of Public Order and Religious Pluralism in Two Early Modern Societies,” Journal of World History 17 (2006): 267-96.

Juan de Segovia to Germain, 18 December 1455, fol. 98v: “Revera ego nondum vixcentum annis, sed in adolescencia mea decem annis quibus in ea fui de inhabitantibus civitatem qua sum oriundus plures vidi conversos numero tunc ipsorum Sarracenorum vix attingente quinquiginta habitatorum.” His efforts to find Muslims with whom he could engage in theological discussion are described in this same manuscript, fols. 64r-64v and 78r-78v, as well as in his De gladio divini Spiritus in corda mittendo sarracenorum, Seville, Colombina 7-6-14, fols. 18v-20. See the discussion by Cabanelas in Juan de Segovia y el problema islámico, 100-02.

Examples of recent scholarship include J. P. Molénat, “Une famille de l’élite mudéjare de la Couronne de Castille: les Xarafi de Tolède et d’Alcalá de Henares,” in Mélanges Louis Cardaillac (Zaghouan, Tunis,1995); idem, “A propos d’Abrahen Xarafi: les alcaldes mayores de los moros de Castille au temps des Rois Catholiques,” Actas del I Simposio Internacional de Mudejarismo VII (Madrid and Teruel, 1999).

Ana Echevarría, “Política y religión frente al Islám: la evolución de la legislación real castellana sobre musulmanes en el siglo XV,” Qurtuba 4 (1999): 46; Serafín de Tapia Sánchez, La comunidad morisca de Avila (Salamanca, 1991), 57.

For discussions of other fifteenth-century Spanish writers on the question of Islam, see, for example, Echevarría, Fortress of Faith, and Alisa Meyuhas Ginio, “Reves de croisade contre les sarrasins dans la Castille du XVe siècle (Alonso de Espina, Fortalitium Fidei),” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 212.2 (1995): 145-74.

Religious Conflict in Early Modern India: Akbar and the House of Religious Assembly

Stephen P. Blake

Mughal India (1526-1739) was a land of bewildering cultural diversity. While the followers of the Mughal founder Zahir al-Din Babur (r. 1526-30) were Sunni Muslims, Jalal al-Din Akbar (r. 1556-1605), Babur’s grandson, faced the daunting challenge of trying to fashion an imperial system that would engage the energies and loyalties of the many different religious, ethnic, and tribal groups of early modern India. To institutionalize Mughal rule over a country as rich, populous, and diverse as India, Akbar had to reorganize both the military-administrative and the economic systems. For the imperial soldiers and officials he introduced the mansabdari system, a finely graded hierarchy of ranks and offices. Since the Mughal Empire had a predominately agrarian economy, Akbar began to reorder the land revenue system. By measuring the arable land and establishing a table of crop rates, he was able to dramatically increase imperial income, transforming the new system into a lucrative career for his newly-recruited officeholders. It is within this context of military-administrative and economic reorganization that Akbar’s approach to the problem of religious conflict must be examined. For a variety of reasons -- his own curiosity, the beliefs and practices of his Rajput (Hindu) wives, and the sense of crisis surrounding the end of the first millennium of the Islamic era (in 1592) -- Akbar constructed a House of Religious Assembly (Ibadat Khana) in his new capital city of Fathpur Sikri. During the period 1575-79, the emperor discussed issues of philosophy, belief, and practice with representatives from a wide variety of religious and sectarian persuasions -- Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, and Christians, as well as Muslims of both orthodox and heterodox inclinations. 

On ascending the throne in 1556, Akbar was a callow, untested thirteen-year old under the thumb of his guardian Abd al-Rahim Khan-i Khanan. In 1560, finally able to assert himself, he began construction on a new palace-fortress in Agra, the capital he had inherited from his father. Over the decade of the 1560s, however, none of his wives was able to provide him with a son and heir. In 1569, therefore, the young emperor sent his pregnant Rajput wife to Sikri, a village twenty-three miles west of Agra, where the leader of the Sufi Chishti order, Shaikh Salim Chishti, had his hermitage. Akbar had been a frequent visitor to the shrine of the Sufi saint, Muin al-Din Chishti, in nearby Ajmir, and he hoped that the Shaikh’s presence would prove auspicious. And so it turned out, when several months later Akbar was presented with a son, Salim, who later ruled as the emperor Jahangir. 

In 1571, when Jahangir was two years old, Akbar laid the foundations in Sikri of a new palace -- the center of a new capital city named Fathpur Sikri (or Sikri, place of victory). While the official histories point to the birth of Jahangir and the presence of Shaikh Salim Chishti as the controlling factors in Akbar’s decision, the desire for a new center of rule -- site of his far-reaching military-administrative and economic changes -- must also have played a role. In 1572, Shaikh Salim Chishti died, and in 1573, Akbar finished his conquest of the rich province of Gujarat. The following year, he erected a magnificent congregational mosque near the palace and, in 1575, construction began on the House of Religious Assembly. In 1585, a mere fifteen years after settling in the area, Akbar left his new capital for Lahore and the northwest, to meet the threat of the Uzbeks. For the remaining twenty years of his reign he returned to his new capital but once, for a brief visit.¹

Akbar’s decision to build the House of Religious Assembly and to initiate a series of religious discussions was sparked in part by the approaching end of the first millennium of the Islamic era (1000 A.H. was 1592 CE). In late-sixteenth-century India, as in the Safavid (1501-1722) and Ottoman (1299-1922) empires, there was an upsurge in extremist religious activity. The leaders of several heterodox sects challenged the political as well as the religious status quo. Many claimed to be the Mahdi (Guided One); they proclaimed the end of the old political and religious orders and the beginning of something new and completely different. Of this phenomenon Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century world historian, wrote: 

It has been well known ... by Muslims in every epoch, that at the end of time a man from the family ... will without fail make his appearance, one who will strengthen the religion and make justice triumph. The Muslims will follow him, and he will gain domination over the Muslim realm. He will be called the Mahdi. Following him, the anti-Christ will appear, together with all the subsequent signs of the hour.²

Echoing this sentiment, the historian Abd al-Qadir Bada’uni, a disappointed officeholder and critic of Akbar, wrote that the emperor, like many of the extremist prophets, believed that the imminent end of the millennium would mark the end of Islam, at least in its traditional form. Reflecting the charged atmosphere of the time, Bada’uni quoted the Ismaili poet, traveler, and religious revolutionary Nasir-i Khusrau (1004-78). 

I see in 992 [1584] two conjunctions, 

I see the sign of the Mahdi and that of the Antichrist; 

Either politics or religion must change, 

I clearly see the hidden secret.³

While the general sense of the poem is obvious -- the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn heralding revolutionary change -- Bada’uni probably intended a more specific meaning. For Khusrau, the eleventh-century radical, the revolution foretold for the late sixteenth century was necessarily vague. For Bada’uni, on the other hand, the moment was at hand, and he was quite certain about one of Khusrau’s protagonists. For him Akbar was the Antichrist (not the Mahdi), and it was a religious upheaval that he foresaw and feared. 

It was in this turbulent time of political, economic, social, and religious upheaval that Akbar initiated the House of Religious Assembly sessions. In the first three years (1575-77) the participants were primarily mainstream Muslims discussing traditional topics: the beliefs, customs, and practices of orthodox Islam. Scheduled on Friday, the major religious holiday, these discussions often lasted all night and into the next day. Akbar sat in the middle of the assembly and the other participants filled the four surrounding alcoves: the nobles to the east, the descendants of the Prophet to the west, the religious leaders to the north, and the religious specialists to the south.⁴

For Akbar, however, these early discussions proved unsettling. Driven by curiosity, the troubled tenor of the times, and the need to craft an imperial order hospitable to a wide range of ethnic, cultural, and religious beliefs and practices, the emperor found the petty wrangling, hide-bound conservatism, and parochial outlook of the orthodox extremely repugnant. Because of this experience Akbar decided to increase the number of participants and to expand the range of topics. By 1578, according to Abu al-Fazl, the sessions included “... Sufi, Philosopher, Orator, Jurist, Sunni, Shia, Brahman, Jain ... Nazarene, Jew, Zoroastrian, and others …”⁵

To get a sense of the atmosphere surrounding the House of Religious Assembly sessions and the challenges Akbar faced in crafting a solution to the problem of religious conflict, following is a brief look at some of the sectarian and religious groups at the Mughal court. 

MAHDAVIYYA

The Mahdaviyya sect was founded in India by Sayyid Muhammad Jaunpuri (1443-1505). A pious Sufi of the Chishti order, Sayyid Muhammad arrived in Ahmadabad in 1497, proclaiming the end of the age. Identifying himself as the Mahdi, he recruited a substantial following from the political and religious elite of western India, initiating a period of political and social upheaval. The sultan of Gujarat expelled Jaunpuri from his state in the early sixteenth century, and he emigrated to Khurasan in eastern Iran, where he died in 1505. Sayyid Muhammad’s followers in Gujarat formed residential communities modeled on Sufi hermitages. Sayyid Khundamir, Sayyid Muhammad’s successor, challenged the legitimacy of the later Gujarati sultans: “It has now become a general religious duty,” he wrote, “for all -- men, women, slaves, and freemen -- to unite and defeat the oppressors so that the faithful might be victorious.”⁶

Shaikh Mustafa Gujarati, Sayyid Khundamir’s successor and the Mahdaviyya leader of Akbar’s day, recruited followers from the disaffected Afghan tribal chieftains of Gujarat, but when the Mughals took over the province in 1572-73, his Afghan disciples were defeated and dispersed. Shaikh Mustafa’s father and eight other members of the community were executed, and Mustafa and his sons were imprisoned. In 1574, the Shaikh was brought to Fathpur Sikri, where he stayed for two years, participating in the House of Religious Assembly discussions and talking privately with Akbar. He died in 1576 at the age of 52. A fairly lengthy correspondence between Mustafa and Shaikh Mubarak, the father of Abu al-Fazl (author of The Akbar Nama), suggests that Mubarak was at least a sympathizer and possibly for a time a disciple. Furthermore, Shaikh Faizi, Abu al-Fazl’s brother, commissioned a biography of Sayyid Muhammad Jaunpuri, the Mahdavi founder. It is interesting to note that Bada’uni, in his discussion of the House of Religious Assembly, identified Shaikh Abdallah Niyazi Sirhindi, whose abandoned cell was the central room of the new building, not only as a Chishti disciple but as a Mahdaviyya as well. Thus, it appears that the radical, millennial ideas of the sect were much more popular and widespread and probably had a much greater influence on Akbar and his court than has heretofore been recognized.⁷

NUQTAVIYYA

The Nuqtavi sect was founded by an Iranian, Mahmud Pasikhani Gilani (d. 1428). Leading a life of piety and asceticism, Mahmud visited the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. He rebelled against taqlid (simple adherence to Islamic tradition) and, like many of the other messianic leaders, preached the need for tajdid (religious renewal). Mahmud maintained that the traditions and practices of traditional Islam had become outdated, and he preached a queer mixture of philosophical and religious ideas: There would not be a day of judgment, creation was eternal, and the Qur’an was the work of Muhammad. He also believed in transmigration and the spiritual significance of the sun (a Zoroastrian doctrine). His disciples called him the Shaikh-i Wahid (Unique One) and the Insan-i Kamil (Perfect Man) and, because he believed that the life span of Islam was 900 years, he claimed to be the Mahdi, the harbinger of a new age.⁸

In late-sixteenth-century India, the most important Nuqtavi leader was the Iranian Sharif Amuli. His Iranian followers had proclaimed him the Mujaddid (Renewer) of the Millennium, but he was expelled from the Safavid state in the late 1560s or early 1570s. He spent some time in Balkh, in Central Asia, and then emigrated to one of the Shiʻite states of the Deccan, probably Bijapur. While we don’t know much about his earlier life (either in Iran, Central Asia, or the Deccan), he burst into prominence soon after arriving in Fathpur Sikri in 1576. A skilled astrologer and a compelling speaker, he had no interest in the rituals and beliefs of traditional Islam. All of this made him very influential in the wide-ranging, heterodox discussions in the House of Religious Assembly, and he rose rapidly in the military-administrative hierarchy. In 1586, he was appointed Poet Laureate and Amin (Revenue Chief) and Sadr (Head of Religious Charity) of Kabul, and in 1591, he was sent to Bengal to fill the same two posts. In 1598, he was given the province of Ajmir as his revenue grant and soon after was raised to an exalted rank. Under Jahangir he was given a further promotion.⁹

At the Mughal court, Amuli and his followers enthusiastically promoted Nuqtavi beliefs and practices. Shaikh Mubarak was thought to be a member of the sect, and Iskandar Munshi, the court chronicler of the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas I, identified Abu al-Fazl as a fellow-traveler.¹⁰ Akbar patronized two prominent Nuqtavi poets, Vaqui Nishapuri and Tashbihi Kashani, and espoused (at least according to Bada’uni) several of the heretical Nuqtavi beliefs.¹¹

In 1582 C.E. (990 A.H.), Sharif Amuli declared that Mahmud Pasikhani’s prediction of 150 years earlier referred to Akbar, and that the Mughal emperor was the Lord of the Age predicted by the Jupiter-Saturn Grand Conjunction of that year. Akbar, Amuli stated, would preside over a social and religious revolution, inaugurating a new era in which all religious differences would be abolished.¹²

AHMAD SIRHINDI

Another millenarian, eschatological figure at Akbar’s court was Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (1564-1624), the self-styled “Mujaddid (Renewer) of the Second Islamic Millennium.” While some nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideologues portrayed Shaikh Ahmad as an opponent of Akbar’s policy of religious toleration, to many orthodox Muslims of the late sixteenth century, the Shaikh, like the Mandavi and Nuqtavi leaders, was a heretic -- claiming an exalted status for himself. Sirhindi’s principal influence has usually been dated to the reign of Akbar’s son, Jahangir, and the most important of his writings, the Letters (Maktubat), were not begun until after his initiation into the Naqshbandi Sufi order in 1599 and the death of Akbar in 1605. However, recent research suggests that as a young and promising scholar he was invited in the early 1580s to Akbar’s court to assist Abu al-Fazl. At Fathpur Sikri he composed a work in Arabic on Islamic prophecy and, in the preface, described a debate he had with Abu al-Fazl, criticizing Akbar’s tolerant attitude toward Hindu beliefs and practices. Although Sirhindi’s criticism of the emperor may have pleased the orthodox, his later claim to be the “Renewer of the Second Islamic Millennium” did not. One of the famous Sufi leaders of Akbar’s time, ‘Abd al-Haq Dihlawi, wrote that Sirhindi, like the Mahdavi leader Sayyid Muhammad Jaunpuri, claimed to be the Mahdi.¹³

SHAH ISMAIL

For the orthodox Sunni scholars, teachers, and mosque officials of late-sixteenth-century India, the Shiʻite emigrants from Safavid Iran were just as heretical as the local Nuqtavi and Mandavi converts. Shah Ismail (r. 1501-24), founder of the Safavid Dynasty, had absorbed the extremist, millenarian atmosphere of the age. In his poetry he proclaimed himself to be the Mahdi, a reincarnation of Ali and a manifestation of God.¹⁴ Beginning his career as the charismatic master of the Safaviyya Sufi order, Ismail parlayed his semi-divine status into military and political success. While his claim to be divinely anointed was weakened by his defeat at the hands of the Ottomans in 1514, Ismail’s successors, Tahmasp and Abbas, retained a measure of his sanctity. Abd al-Qadir Bada’uni noted that many of Akbar’s supporters had urged him to follow Ismail’s example,¹⁵ and the author of the Maʻasir al-Umara, the mid-eighteenth century biographical dictionary, observed that the members of Akbar’s order compared him, in his role as master, to Shah Ismail.¹⁶ Finally, Abu al-Fazl wrote: “At the close of the millennium why didn’t Akbar make use of the sword like Ismail.”¹⁷

After the fractious but enlightening discussions in the House of Religious Assembly (1575-79), Akbar decided to develop a new policy to deal with the religious conflicts among the members of his new imperial order. This approach, called “sulh-i kull,” emerged during the period 1579-82 with the help of Abu al-Fazl and his father, Shaikh Mubarak.¹⁸ Usually translated “universal peace” or “absolute toleration,” the phrase is better rendered, it seems to me, as “lasting reconciliation” or “definitive treaty.” The secondary meaning of “sulh” -- “reconciliation,” “treaty,” or “truce” -- captures more completely Akbar’s intent, which was not to establish perfect harmony among the competing religious and sectarian groups at the Mughal court, but rather to achieve a kind of modus vivendi. 

The emperor aimed his new policy of “lasting reconciliation” at two quite different audiences: the one non-Muslim and the other Muslim. In 1578-79, Akbar had become more interested in the non-Muslim religious groups of the subcontinent -- Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, and Christians. Because Muslims were a decided minority in Mughal India, Akbar decided early in his career to conciliate the Hindu majority. In 1563, he abolished the pilgrimage tax on Hindus, the next year he eliminated the jiziya (canonical head tax on non-Muslims), and in 1565, he gave a land grant to a Hindu temple. After 1579, Hindu mystics and Brahmin priests began to frequent the discussions in the House of Religious Assembly and to engage in private conversations with the emperor.¹⁹ During this period also, Akbar began to appoint high-ranking Rajputs to important state offices: Todar Mal was made prime minister in 1582 and Raja Bhagwant Das was appointed governor of Punjab in 1583. Although Akbar had always allowed his Rajput wives to follow their own customs, in the 1580s he began to participate in their religious ceremonies himself, commemorating the Hindu festivals of Diwali, Dussehra, Vasant, and Holi.²⁰

The other three non-Muslim religions of the day -- Jainism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism -- carried less weight. Although Akbar had met Jain monks as early as 1568, the Gujarat campaign of the early 1570s was his first introduction to Jainism in a serious way. After returning to Fathpur Sikri, he began to include Jains in the religious discussions, his interest peaking in 1583 when he invited the Jain monk Hiravijaya Suri and sixty-seven of his followers to the capital. The order which he issued in the late 1580s prohibiting animal slaughter during the twelve days of the principal Jain festival and, of course, his adherence to the doctrine of ahimsa (non-killing) are the most obvious examples of Jain influence.²¹

The Portuguese Jesuits of Goa and Surat also came to Akbar’s attention during the Gujarat campaign. The first Jesuit mission arrived in Fathpur Sikri in 1580 and remained for about two years. While the Christians participated in the discussions in the House of Religious Assembly, the conflicting accounts of Father Monserrate, a member of the delegation, on the one hand, and Bada’uni and Abu al-Fazl, on the other, make forming an accurate judgment of their influence difficult. The emperor seems to have been impressed by the piety and simple lifestyle of the priests. Although Akbar had the Gospels, Psalms, and Pentateuch translated into Persian and allowed the priests to build churches in Agra, Fathpur Sikri, and Lahore, they were certainly self-deluded in thinking that he was about to convert.²²

Apart from Hinduism, the non-Islamic religion that had the greatest impact on Akbar was Zoroastrianism, partly because of its Iranian origin: the language of the scriptures and priests was Persian, the lingua franca of the Mughal Empire. The Zoroastrian belief in the sacredness of the sun, symbolized by the perpetually burning sacred fire, also reinforced a Hindu doctrine that had attracted Akbar. The emperor first encountered Zoroastrian holy men during the Gujarat campaign, and in 1578, he invited the distinguished scholar Dastur Mehrji Rana to come to Fathpur Sikri and join the newly-expanded religious discussions. Some of Akbar’s innovations in the 1580s also suggest Zoroastrian influence. In 1584, he established a new solar era using the 30-day months of the Zoroastrian calendar. He also decreed that the ancient Iranian festival of Nau Ruz (New Year) on 21 March mark both the first day of the new year and the first day of his reign. In addition, he ordered Abu al-Fazl to maintain a Zoroastrian sacred fire at court, before which the emperor prostrated himself.²³

The second part of Akbar’s “lasting reconciliation” policy aimed to mitigate religious conflicts among Muslims, who comprised the overwhelming majority of Mughal officeholders. The first step took place in June 1579, when Abu al-Fazl and his father convinced Akbar to read the khutba (Friday sermon) in the central mosque of Fathpur Sikri. While the accounts of the two principal historians -- Abu al-Fazl and Bada’uni -- differ on Akbar’s performance, this reading marks, it is important to note, the beginning of Akbar’s efforts to impose order on the quarreling Muslims of his court. The second step followed closely: two months later, in August, Abu al-Fazl and his father drafted a mahzar (a document attested by others) that proclaimed Akbar the adjudicator of religious disputes -- both those between Sunnis and Shiʻites and among the representatives of the four schools of law. Since the emperor’s decisions had to follow the broad dictates of Islamic law, the document was signed by the leaders of the religious establishment. As the result of these conditions and the fact that Akbar never actually exercised the authority granted by the mahzar, it is an anachronistic overstatement to call the document, as some have, an “infallibility decree.”²⁴ Rather, it was part of his larger effort to bring order to Indian Islam. 

The third and most controversial part of Akbar’s program was the Tauhid-i Ilahi (Divine Monotheism), the sufi-like imperial order that he founded.²⁵ This order has been misunderstood by the earlier generation of scholars -- in particular H. Blochmann, the translator of the Ain, and Vincent Smith -- as Akbar’s attempt to end religious conflict in Mughal India by starting a new religion -- a misinterpretation reflected in their use of Bada’uni’s phrase “Din-i Ilahi” or “Divine Faith” for the new group.²⁶ While I do not want to review the entire literature or to revisit all of the arguments, it seems to me that Akbar’s new order is best understood in the context of his “lasting reconciliation” strategy, as a way of mitigating conflict among the Muslims of his court. 

Most of the early, high-ranking members of the new order were Muslim (eighteen of the nineteen named in the Ain.) While some later members were Hindu, the Tauhid-i Ilahi in its organization and ceremony was primarily modeled after the Sufi mystical orders of northern India. In the Ain-i Akbari, Abu al-Fazl discussed Akbar’s new order under the rubric “rules for the disciples (ain-i iradat-i guzinan).”²⁷ “Iradat” was the Sufi term for discipleship and in the contemporary sources the members of the new order were referred to as “disciples” (“murids”) and their relationship with Akbar as “discipleship” (“muridi”).²⁸ In early modern India, initiates into a Sufi order had to meet four conditions: acceptance by the master, shaving the beard, investment with a cloak or hat, and swearing an oath.²⁹ Akbar’s Tauhid-i Ilahi seems to have been based on this model. Akbar himself and many of his followers shaved their faces and, like Sufi novices, the Mughal candidates placed their heads at Akbar’s feet, receiving a picture of the emperor (instead of the usual cloak), and agreeing to abide by certain rules of conduct. Akbar touched the candidate’s turban and then replaced it on his head. 

Akbar expected his disciples to be in the vanguard of his “lasting reconciliation” movement. The author of the Maʻasir al-Umara wrote that “The dictum of sulh-i kull was honored at the court ... .”³⁰ And Jahangir, Akbar’s son and successor, singled out one Shaikh Ahmad Lahauri “who from my princehood had filled the relationship of service and discipleship (muridi) ... .” For Jahangir, such a disciple (murid) “must not confuse or darken his time with sectarian quarrels, but must follow the rule of sulh-i kull in his relations with men of different faiths.”³¹

The emperor Akbar faced a tremendous challenge in his effort to create a new imperial system in Mughal India. While the opposition to his reorganization of the land revenue and military-administrative systems was wide-spread, the sectarian and religious conflicts among the members of his new state were even more intense and divisive. The majority of his followers were orthodox Muslims and their certainties had been shaken by the millenarian movements of the time as well as by the emperor’s tolerance of the local non-Islamic groups. The sessions in the House of Religious Assembly seem to have been intended, at least in part, as a way for Akbar to gauge the breadth and intensity of the religious and sectarian divide. After five full years of inquiry and debate Akbar was spurred to action, developing a wide-ranging and broad-minded policy that required, at least among the higher-ranking officeholders, an unusual degree of religious and sectarian tolerance. While the emperor’s strategy of “lasting reconciliation” didn’t fully outlive the reign of his successor, it is a fascinating example of an unusually open-minded approach to the problem of religious conflict in an extraordinarily crowded and explosive religious and sectarian milieu.

Endnotes

For a discussion of Akbar and the founding of the Mughal Empire see John F. Richards, “The Mughal Empire,” The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge, 1996).

Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, 3 vols. (New York, 1958), II: 156.

‘Abd al-Qadir ibn Muluk Shah (Bada’uni), Muntakhab-ut-tawarikh, 3 vols., trans. George S. A. Ranking, W. H. Lowe, and T. Wolsely Haig (1884-1925; reprint Delhi, 1973), II: 323 [hereafter Bada’uni]. The verse is, however, garbled in this edition: the name of the poet is omitted and the date incorrectly reads 990 A.H. instead of 992. ‘Abd al-Qadir ibn Muluk Shah (Bada’uni), Muntakhab-ut-tawarikh, 3 vols., trans. George S. A. Ranking, W. H. Lowe, and T. Wolsely Haig (1884-1925; reprint Karachi, 1976-78), II: 331.

Bada’uni, II: 204-05; Abu al-Fazl, The Akbar Namah, trans. H. Beveridge, 3 vols. (Calcutta, 1902; rprt. Delhi: Rare Books, 1972), III: 158-59.

Abu al-Fazl, The Akbar Namah, III: 114.

Derryl N. MacLean, “Real Men and False Men at the Court of Akbar,” in Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia, ed. David Gilmartin and Bruce Lawrence (Gainesville, FL, 2000), 201.

MacLean, “Real Men and False Men,” 199-215.

Kathryn Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge, MA, 2002), xxxiv-liii, 3-4, 10-35.

Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, “Nuqtavi Thinkers at the Mughal Court: A Study of their Impact on Akbar’s Religious and Political Ideas,” Islamic Culture 62 (1998): 65-82.

Eskandar Beg Munshi, The History of Shah Abbas the Great, trans. Roger M. Savory, 2 vols. (Boulder, CO, 1978), II: 650.

Fauzia Zareen Abbas, Abdul Qadir Bada’uni, As a Man and Historiographer (Delhi, 1987), 15-18.

Bada’uni, II: 294-95

David Damrel, “The ‘Naqshbandi Reaction’ Reconsidered,” in Beyond Turk and Hindu, ed. Gilmartin and Lawrence, 176-98; Yohanan Friedmann, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi: An Outline of His Thought and a Study of His Image in the Eyes of Posterity (Montreal, 1971), xiv-xv, 2-6, 14-20, 33-34.

Babayan, Mystics, 263; Said Amir Arjomand, “Religious Extremism (Ghuluww): Sufism and Sunnism in Safavid Iran,” Journal of Asian History 15 (1981): 5.

Bada’uni, II: 323.

Shāhnavāz Khān Awrangābādi, ‘Abd al-Hayy ibn Shāhnavāz, Maathir-ul-Umara, trans. H. Beveridge and Baini Prasad, 3 vols. (Calcutta, 1941-64), II: 903.

Abu al-Fazl, The A’in-i Akbari, ed. H. Blochmann, 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1872-77), I: 207-08 (hereafter Ain).

Abu al-Fazl, Akbar Namah, III: 400.

Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Akbar and Religion (Delhi, 1989), 31-36.

Ashirbadi Lal Srivastava, Akbar the Great, 2 vols. (Agra, 1962), II: 316-18.

Nizami, Akbar and Religion, 197-98; Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History of the Muslims in Akbar’s Reign (New Delhi, 1975), 137.

Nizami, Akbar and Religion, 99-202. The Commentary of Father Monserrate, S. J., on His Journey to the Court of Akbar (1580-81), trans. J. S. Hoyland and S. N. Banerjee (London, 1922).

Nizami, Akbar and Religion, 204-07; Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History, 129-31; Srivastava, Akbar the Great, I: 248-51.

Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History, 141-61.

Ain, I: 211; Nizami, Akbar and Religion, 132-33.

For a discussion of different views see Srivastava, Akbar the Great, I: 310-11.

Ain, I: 7, 175.

In 1588, for example, a high-ranking mansabdar stamped his Farman (order) with a seal reading “the disciple [murid] of Akbar Shah ... .” Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History, 406. Abu al-Fazl described one of the nobles as donning the “chain of discipleship [muridi].” Ibid., 399. For Azam Khan and Mirza Aziz Koka joining the order and becoming murids, see ibid., 427-28.

Carl Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center (Albany, NY, 1992), 127-28, 133.

Khan, Maathir-ul-Umara, II: 908

Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History, 400.

Violence and the State in Sixteenth-Century France

Denis Crouzet

The purpose of this paper is to show that, in different ways, the relation of the monarchic state to violence underwent a decisive change that had two phases. During the first part of the sixteenth century, monarchical power was defined as violent power. Then, at the time of the Wars of Religion, it came to be represented as a preeminently non-violent power.¹

A VIOLENT KING

The imagery of the monarchy in the early Renaissance, contrary to what one might think, was built on images of violence, intended to create a sphere of legitimacy and thus obedience. As we know, the king possessed a kind of sacredness conferred on him by his coronation, which made him the living representation of Christ on earth, whose mission was to maintain peace and justice among his subjects. From the reign of Charles VIII (r. 1483-1498) on, there was a perceptible tendency towards what may be called over-sacralization of the king’s person.² Violence was at the heart of this tendency, for it gave dynamic force to the sanctity claimed by the sovereign.

The Italian wars were caused by the assertion of claims to the Kingdom of Naples and the duchy of Milan, but also, and equally so, by a necessity for the king to show himself to his people as a king of violence, who, like Charles VIII or François I (r. 1515-1547), did not hesitate to expose his body to enemy blows.³ In French chronicles of the Battle of Fournoue against the Italian confederates (1495), it was shown as an act of justice accomplished by the king with divine help.⁴ When the arm of the king struck down the enemies of France, chroniclers saw justice punishing the disloyalty of forsworn enemies. It was thus a victory over sinful men, the enemies of God. Accounts describe the king at the forefront of the battle, in the midst of a storm, his sword in hand. He, himself, killed two Venetian patricians, and put three others to flight, which left him cut off in the midst of the combat. Even though his knights and the army also were fighting, the narrative centers the description of the battle on the king’s actions and his willingness to sacrifice himself. The outcome of the battle showed, say the texts, how the king as the elect of God defeated evil men who followed their passions, in a time and space that became sanctified. The Battle of Fournoue is seen as a miracle which, through the violence used by the king and his army, confirmed the holiness of the sovereign: There was in him a force exercised by God himself.

All French kings of the early Renaissance had themselves presented through an imaginaire in which they appeared as warlike sovereigns who fulfilled a divine will for justice by leading their nobles into Italy. They claimed to be instruments of the will of God. The blood of enemies spattering their armor was like a second anointing with holy oil. Louis XII at the Battle of Agnadelo (14 May 1509) is shown as feeling neither doubt nor fear as he rained down blows on the enemy. If exhaustion prevented him from continuing to fight, he was still believed to be under divine protection, since he escaped from all who sought to attack him.⁵ The battle was a judgment of God. It proved that the king of France was the elect among Christian princes, just as David was the elect of God.

François I marks the apogee of this type of representation of the royal person as a manifestation of divinity. His victory of Marignano in 1515, on the feast of the Holy Cross, consecrated the king as another Constantine, prefiguring the coming of a universal monarchy. Here too, the king was a king of total violence, not afraid of the disarray of combat, a king who had ignored and scorned death.⁶ Even his defeat at Pavia in 1525 was transformed by royal mythographers into a divine sign. The king was defeated, to be sure, but the official narrative arranged a kind of historical recovery operation. The chronicles describe how dead bodies piled up around François I and all his commanders were killed by the imperial forces. But he refused to surrender; he continued to fight and to risk death; he fought “until his strength was exhausted” and if, finally he was taken captive and did not die on the field of battle, it was because he was too exhausted to be able to fight any longer, not because he surrendered or gave up. He was shown as resembling Christ, wounded, his face stained with blood, mocked by enemy soldiers. His being made a prisoner did not mean renouncing the sacrificial exposure of himself to violence. Death did not want to take him, say the texts; a shot from an arquebus was shown to have struck a relic of the Cross that he wore around his neck. This was a judgment from Heaven;⁷ by saving him God showed that, in spite of the warning given by the defeat, he was His representative as king on earth. The defeat was only a trial that he had to undergo, to test him and bring him closer to the sufferings of Christ. It did not indicate a lack of holiness, but on the contrary, showed that he, of all Christian monarchs, was the closest to God. Its purpose was to draw attention to the great sins of his people, which were the cause of the catastrophe. The judgment of God was turned into an affirmation of royal grandeur and power.

One sees, then, that war partook of the sacredness of the Renaissance king, who used it to demonstrate the virtus divina (divine power) that made him an intermediary between his people and God. Royal violence, in battle, allowed the sovereign to demonstrate the nearness of his earthly being to God.⁸

The emblem of the salamander chosen by François I also illustrates how royal violence was central to the political representation of the monarchy. The motto accompanying the creature with flame issuing from its mouth was: “I feed on good fire and I extinguish evil fire.” The salamander destroyed the fire of harmful and destructive passions that prompted subjects to vices and foreign princes to unjust wars. It indicated that violence was necessary so that the king could realize the mission providentially conferred upon him by God, a mission recalled in prophecies describing how the destruction of infidels and unbelievers was to be accomplished by the French monarchy. War was shown as a duty, as an act of purification. Its counterpart was the good fire that nourished the salamander, the fire of charity. The war king of the early Renaissance also was a charitable prince; indeed, it was his duty in charity to expose his body, on behalf of his people and all Christian peoples, in the dangerous and turbulent world of battles. His violence, when used, was seen as absolutely just, directed against allegedly impious rulers, such as the kings of Naples (under Charles VIII), the blasphemous and arrogant Venetians and a corrupt pope (Louis XII), or a traitorous emperor (François I).⁹

Through the orchestration of royal imagery, violence played a large part in the equilibrium in political development achieved during the first half of the sixteenth century. From the 1550s on, it also was apparent that the period of the Italian wars coincided with an era of serenity for the aristocracy and nobility. The monarchy was no longer confronted, as it had been in the fifteenth century, with conspiracies and revolts of nobles that threatened its stability.¹⁰ The one exception was an abortive uprising made by the Constable of Bourbon in 1523.¹¹ The monarchic state seemed to have harnessed to its purposes the nobility’s potential for violence by giving it free exercise in the European conflicts. The nobility thus found itself integrated into the logic of an imagined world centered on the holy wars of the king.

Laurent Bourquin’s work on the Champagne region has shown that the reign of François I led to a blossoming of personal relations between the king and local noble lineages. The great nobles of Champagne fought in the Italian wars in great numbers, carried along by a historical movement, which may seem in retrospect like a royal stratagem for social control. The nobility was led to satisfy its ontological need for glory and honor in the sacral exaltation of a monarchy renewed by war. Bourquin describes the creation of a kind of “brotherhood in battle” with the king.¹² Having a role in society’s wider purposes, nobles were no longer so aggressive in seeking royal favor. War was thus beneficial to state power. It was certainly a test of the sacred role of the king, but at the same time it created a common epic adventure; it allowed the nobility to acquire honor, and capitalize on it from generation to generation.¹³

Here too, violence seems to have been necessary for the construction of a renewed royal state. It was a means for the state to reduce the violence that traditionally had menaced its existence, and to appropriate or cannibalize it.

Finally, it should be noted that there was another aspect to the relationship between the pre-1560 royal state and violence. According to absolutist theories of monarchy, the king had both the right and duty to put down with his sword of justice all who opposed the mission of monarchy. It was his duty to act against heretics. Already in 1518, François I had received a Raphael painting, sent by the pope, which showed Saint Michael striking down the devil. He was being asked to contemplate his own role, and being encouraged to persevere in it. In 1559, the engraver Jean Duvet identified Henri II with the archangel casting the enemies of God into infernal darkness.

In 1535, François I made his position clear in a speech in which he compared heresy to a poison that could kill the body politic. If his own arm were infected, he would cut it off; if his own children were tainted, he would sacrifice them.¹⁴ It was thus vitally necessary to prosecute the heretics, who were an insult to God and a public scandal, and punish them with fire and sword. This repression was portrayed as a remedy for violence. Heresy was a crime of lese majesté against divine and human authority, because the heretic was an emissary of the devil. The heretic was a seducer, who, by attracting souls to him, caused their spiritual death. He was performing a violent act and royal justice had to act against him because the sovereign was responsible to God for the souls committed to his care.

At the head of the punishments available to the king was the stake. As with the violence of battle, the violence meted out at the stake “expressed the signal quality” of the divine grace possessed by the king, and displayed it in dramatic form. Capital punishment as an expression of the law “comes from the capacity of the Magistrate to hand out death while himself transcending it.” It was a discourse on the sacred function of the monarchy and on the monopoly of violence which that implied. As with battle, it occurred rarely; in the jurisdiction of the parlement of Paris there were twenty-four executions between November 1534 and December 1535, thirty-nine between May 1547 and March 1550. According to David El Kenz, it was a political demonstration of sovereign authority, of the king’s ability to purify the realm by carrying out a sacrifice.¹⁵

FACTORS OF CHANGE

After 1559, the imagery of relations between the monarchy and violence changed radically, for several reasons. First, the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) brought a sudden end to the Habsburg-Valois wars, and thereby broke a dynamic of representation. There had been a system in which war was expected to go on forever, because it allowed the king to dramatize and thus consecrate his sacred nature by offering himself as a sacrifice, but Henri II now put an end to the system. The reactions, which can be found in the memoirs of contemporary nobles, are very significant. With one stroke of the pen the king erased a past full of honor and glory; the texts say he deprived his nobility of the honor and glory they had won on the battlefields of Italy.¹⁶ The peace with Spain also deprived the king of some of his sacred quality; it hinted at latent conflict between the king and the nobility, even in the dreams of one of Henri’s favorites, Montluc. When Henri was killed in a tournament by a blow from the count of Montgomery, Montluc was far away from Paris, but he saw the king’s death in a dream the night before it happened. Certainly this was a traditional type of dream warning, but it is impossible not to read it as a Freudian expression of a repressed desire, indicating an unconscious conflict with the king who, in making peace with Spain, had broken the thread of history and broken the imagery of his own power, by depriving the nobility of the opportunity to seek honor.¹⁷

The image of the self-sacrificing monarch also suffered a destructive shock from the king’s death. The Calvinists saw a link between his death and the persecutions that the followers of the Gospel had suffered in his reign, particularly after the Chambre Ardente was established in 1547.¹⁸ The king was a persecutor, they maintained, and God had chastised him in a biblical way. The right to use the sword against the Huguenots, which he asserted, was contrary to the divine will. The sacrifice that the monarchic state claimed to be performing for God, by burning heretics, was a sacrifice against the will of God. Here was a fundamental inversion of meaning: in the Huguenot discourse royal violence became a negative sign, showing that the king lived in ignorance of God, in evil. At the other extreme, after 1561, Catholic preachers and apologists maintained that a king who tolerated heretics in his kingdom brought divine justice down on himself. They made the holiness of the king conditional on his ability to exterminate the Huguenots. Thus, on both sides of the religious divide, factors that destabilized the royal ideology were at work.

This destabilization can be seen working along several axes. The first was spectacular. In 1558, a Chancellery clerk, named Caboche, flung himself on the king, knife in hand, shouting, “Coward, I must kill you.”¹⁹ It seems that he was acting on religious motives, as his two brothers were imprisoned as heretics at Meaux. The king, hitherto a dispenser of violence through the strength given his sword by God, suddenly became an object of violence. Even apart from the conspiracy of Amboise in March 1560, which was an attempt both to take control of the person of the king and to present him with a Calvinist confession of faith, trouble was spreading through the kingdom. Both Catholics and Protestants used violence in defiance of royal ordinances and edicts demanding civil peace on pain of judicial punishment for violators. The Huguenots were increasingly committing acts of iconoclasm and occupying churches to turn them into Protestant temples. Royal officers either stood by passively or were powerless to stop these public deeds. The violence was not, it is true, explicitly directed against royal authority. The Catholics, meanwhile also were breaking the civil peace; groups of militants organized in confréries to attack Huguenots who were gathered for communion services, and massacred some of them according to rituals that showed a victory of divine justice over demonic forces conjured forth by Satan. The full monopoly on the use of violence claimed by the monarchy was now lost.²⁰

Further, even though the official discourse on both sides never directed violence against the person of the king, who was shielded from attack while his evil councilors were denounced, it still can be decoded in a more radical way on a symbolic or unconscious plane. The Calvinists, in 1562, when they were destroying wooden and stone images in churches in the towns they controlled, sometimes went further: at the Hôtel de Ville in Orléans the sculptures of kings were thrown down and destroyed. At Notre-Dame de Cléry the statue of Louis XI was broken. The heart of the young king, François II, was exhumed and then chewed by some soldiers. The same may be said of the words of an iconoclast, as reported to Blaise de Montluc, who refused to obey the king’s law and called Charles IX a “petit reyot de merde” (a shitty little king) who ought to be made to work as his subjects did. At Angoulême, the tombs of François I’s ancestors were opened and the skeletons burned.²¹ A certain kind of violence seems to have been at work, at times and at a symbolic level, which denied the sacred nature of royalty, and held that the royal person was only a human being. This violence existed at the margin of an official Calvinist discourse, which remained faithful to Calvin’s teaching that submission to the magistrate is the will of God, even when the magistrate is unjust.

Thus very rapidly, in the space of a few months, there was a complete reversal; the monarchy, from being the only font of a sacrificial violence expressing its sacred nature, and maintaining the order of the Christian world in alliance with God, became a target, directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly, of violent demonstrations in which this role was appropriated by others. The crown became a target for religious factions, behind which were aristocratic pressure groups and their clienteles. And, although these disputes were very isolated prior to 1567, with the outbreak of the second and especially the third civil war mention must be made of the fact that on the edges of Huguenot polemical discourse there appeared a direct questioning of royal authority: the figure of a king who had a contract with his people and could be deposed if he governed against public good and sought to turn them away from God by violence.²² In a few publications, which, however, seem revealing, there is no longer a question of a king badly advised but of a tyrant king. On the Catholic side, when the monarchy imposed coexistence between religions -- first in 1562, then with edicts of pacification in 1563, 1568, and 1570 -- the rhetoric of the preachers was unleashed, sometimes suggesting that the law of the king must not take precedence over the law of God.²³ Outbreaks of violence increased: Protestants chased from their homes by the war were massacred when they returned; followers of the Gospel were assaulted when they returned from preaching. Even in peacetime the royal law was constantly being confronted with words or deeds that led to tense situations.

When faced with these attempts at usurping royal authority, the monarchy had a clear reply, formulated around a new claim. War was no longer glorified as it had been previously; on the contrary, war was an evil whose power had to be broken before a new golden age could begin. The sacred foundation of royalty, complemented by the consecration at coronations, was henceforth the refusal of violence.

A NON-VIOLENT KING

The important point in explaining how these forms of argumentation emerged is that there was a change in both political representation and practice, and that this transformation led to a decentering of violence. A different image of the king and his state was now exalted and supported by two major philosophical systems.

During the Wars of Religion, the king no longer based the sacred character of his office on his sacrificial capacity to exercise or to repress violence but, on the contrary, on his desire to maintain peace among his subjects through his laws. From a king of violence he became a king of non-violence. In continuity with this displacement, at the center there was also a “demilitarization” of the king’s person. From the death of Henri II to that of Henri III, the king no longer fought at the head of his armies; he let his favorites or a younger brother lead them into battle. His primary mission was to prevent civil violence, insofar as that was possible, because when violence was unleashed barbarism took over and there was no more justice.

A first expression of this ideological change was at work until 1567. It was put in place by Chancellor Michel de l’Hospital, who defined the king’s mission very precisely. If there was religious division in the kingdom, it was because the French people had, since the beginning of the century, neglected their virtues and abandoned themselves to their vices: luxury, ambition, greed, lust. God had punished them by sending religious division that was less a cause of division than itself a result of division, according to Michel de l’Hospital. The violence between Catholics and Huguenots in which both parties sought to defeat each other and conquer the kingdom for their own religion only plunged the state and the people deeper into evil. To imagine that violence could reduce the religious divisions -- by the use of passions working cruelly and wickedly -- was to make use of evil, even to advance further in evil. It was not for men, by their own means, to put an end to a punishment from God, for violence was a figure of the evil by which they incurred divine wrath. Violence was sin. What was needed was to pray and ask God’s pardon for the sins that had caused a rival faith to appear in the kingdom. Only God could put an end to religious division, and no one could know when that would happen.

The role of the king was vital. For l’Hospital, the king was chosen by God not to make war, but to make justice reign and to fight against passions. He should do everything possible to prevent war; he should impose peace on the parties concerned. The paradigm of the prince was that of a Stoic emperor ruling in full control of his passions, and against the passions of his subjects. L’Hospital, who was influenced by Erasmus, sought to impose a vision of political order in which the state followed the doctrines of Christ, teaching and demonstrating to all that peace should unite men for eternity. War and violence were evils. In the field of international relations, the only acceptable wars were those to defend the king’s subjects against the aggression of greedy and ambitious sovereigns. In the domestic field, the king’s law should always be used to prevent civil troubles.

The model of the good king was Solomon, not David. It was that of a king who was both judge and arbiter; he did not seek to use violence against the wicked and unjust, for they were only wicked and unjust through blindness. He should use his right of pardon, which was not a defeat of absolute power but rather its finest expression. By preventing his subjects from tearing each other apart he appeared as a model, showing that love prevails over hate. Violence consists in denying the holiness of this sovereign.²⁴

A second variation of this reorientation of the ideology of power can be found in the immediate entourage of Catherine de Medici and, particularly, her sons Charles IX and Henri III. It was inspired by the Neoplatonist Florentine philosophy of the late fifteenth century, which was popularized in the second half of the sixteenth century by the poet Pierre de Rondard and the philosopher Loys Le Roy. Here, too, it was the king’s business to do everything possible to prevent violence that pitted one group of his subjects against another. When Catherine entrusted the education of her sons to Bishop Jacques Amyot, she wanted a king who would be, according to Amyot, a philosopher king in the manner of Plato. He should be familiar with all of the sciences and thus he should possess the mysteries of the universe. Knowledge became synonymous with access to the divine because it gave the virtue of wisdom by making known the order of creation as a harmonious order divinely created. Knowledge was substituted for violence. One part of the work of a king became the contemplation of harmony. The other part was to try to bring the base human world, divided and corrupted by human passions, back towards that divine harmony. Once again, violence was the exact opposite of good statesmanship. The king had to do everything possible to avoid violence. As a king he had to show love towards his subjects, governing with prudence but also with cunning to bring them into the union and concord demanded by God. This was the concept of royal power that Charles IX, aided by his mother, put in play between the pacification of Saint Germain (8 August 1570) and the massacre of Saint Bartholomew (24 August 1572), as may be illustrated by the clever plan that allowed the marriage of a Catholic princess, Marguerite de Valois, and a Protestant prince, Henri of Navarre, to be celebrated with great solemnity as a great ritual of peace that would open a golden age of reconciliation between the religious factions.²⁵

If the rejection of violence characterized the political ideology of a monarchy incessantly under the pressure of violent events, it was nonetheless true that, in these particular circumstances, the political project of the royal state of the last Valois kings included violence in several particular types of occasions.

First, the monarchy, even if unwillingly, had to go to war when the balance of forces left no other alternative. This happened in March and April 1562 after the ardently Catholic Duke François de Guise massacred a group of Calvinists at Vassy, and touched off, through a kind of long-range coup d’état, a mechanism of conflict that the monarchy could not stop, in spite of all its efforts. Catherine de Medici and her advisors had to go to war, under pressure from the Catholic triumvirs (including Guise), and from a Huguenot faction that was occupying many towns in the kingdom. But as soon as she regained a position of force, Catherine returned to what she herself termed a “work of goodness and humanity,” the quest for civil peace (the Peace of Amboise, March 1563). If, in 1567, the crown agreed to a war against the Protestants, it was because Prince Louis de Condé had attempted to seize the royal family, in a conspiracy known as the Surprise of Meaux. In 1568, the monarchy took the initiative by trying to arrest the Huguenot leaders and then throwing itself into an all out war against the Calvinist dissidents; this was undoubtedly to prevent an internationalization of the religious conflict and an ideological radicalization of Protestant political thought.

Under the reign of Henri III the same pattern can be seen: war was not an end in itself. The monarchy used it only to regain control of the center of power when it felt weakened by the schemes and rivalries of Catholics and Protestants, and by the pressures they both could put on the royal state. It was never a war to the death, seeking to obliterate the enemy; force was used to restore stability to an unfavorable situation, and to assemble the basis for a peace in which the king could again work to moderate human passions.²⁶ There was a realistic acknowledgment of the need to resort to war to advance a pacifist utopia supported by royal power.

The recourse to violence by the royal crown was exceptional. It was a kind of trick played on history. As soon as the peace was signed, as for instance at the entry of Charles IX into Rouen, 12 August 1563, the triumph of peace over war was celebrated; a temple of Janus was erected before the cathedral and the king closed its doors as a sign of the end of a period of barbarism and unhappiness. The king held the keys to the temple in one hand and in the other he held Mars, the god of war, in chains. There could be no better illustration of the ideological shift of the monarchy.

It was not only war that could, in exceptional circumstances, bring violence into the royal sphere of action. The other side of the picture was assassination, when the power of the monarch was confronted with an impasse that threatened to precipitate the kingdom into civil war. Violence then became one of the ways to preserve peace and defend the kingdom from misfortune. In this respect, too, realism had a place in the peaceful utopia. The black legend that attaches to the last Valois kings and their mother must be altogether rejected. Even though they were probably familiar with the thought of Machiavelli, they were never “Machiavellian.” Crime surfaced as an instrument of government only when there was an urgent need to weaken or neutralize the forces of violence and war. That was what happened on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, 1572. The policy of bringing about a new age of peace and concord by the marriage of Marguerite de Valois and Henri de Navarre has already been mentioned. Its aim was to perpetuate a peace that the rulers believed conformed to the will of God. The attack on Admiral Coligny, wounded by a hidden sniper who succeeded in escaping, upset this plan. The Huguenots demanded justice, against Guise, whom they suspected of being behind the plot. If they did not obtain justice, there was a risk of an all out war against a king who could be identified as an unjust prince. The extremist Catholics in Paris, on the other hand, considered that the attack was done in obedience to God’s word, and obviously the monarchy could not act against the duke of Guise. Thus this situation, when all avenues seemed blocked, was probably what decided Charles and his mother to carry out a massacre of the military leaders of the Huguenots who were born in Paris. But the enthusiasm of the Parisian Catholics led to the massacre of several thousand people.

Violence was the hidden face of a policy of concord. The same occurred in 1588, when King Henri III had the duke of Guise and his brother the cardinal assassinated in turn. Here again was an act of the monarchy, by which the king thought he could regain control over events, and above all, avoid the logic of history imposed on him by the duke of Guise and the Catholic League. This policy would have involved the monarchy in a war of extermination against the Protestants, a bloody war of extermination that went against Henri III’s humanist principles. The search for peace was disguised behind the king’s crimes, whose aim was to weaken the League by depriving it of its charismatic leader, and thus give the initiative in the political game back to the crown. The crime came from a philosophy of struggle against violence, against the inhumanity of a war that was a cause of suffering to all the king’s subjects.

A Catholic vision of violence was ranged against the Valois monarchy of peace. This violence stemmed from an appropriation of God-given violence by those who put all their faith in a will to combat evil. This is what happened from 1585 on with the League. For the Leaguers, the only legitimate king was one who exercised his violence against heretics. If he did not do this, his power was questioned. And he could be deposed, and it was the duty of zealous Catholics to assume the mission of combating the enemies of God. When Jacques Clement killed King Henri III in 1 August 1589, the crisis reached its height; the king was put to death in the name of the violence of God carried out by the arm of the chosen. The violence was a sign of divine punishment.

The last question to be considered is the following: during the first half of the sixteenth century, royal power was built on the double image of a king fighting his enemies and striking down with a sword of justice those who opposed his law and justice inside his kingdom. In contrast to this monopoly of violence and the sanctification of the king by the use of violence, the king at the time of the Wars of Religion sought desperately to reject violence from the field of action and from the picture of the world. He was a king of peace and concord, and violence only occurred in extreme situations. The assassination of the king marked the end of this philosophical readjustment, which attempted to adapt absolutism to the new issues arising from the existence of two religions in the kingdom.

However, it is striking to see that the new monarchy, constructed by Henry IV, performed a kind of synthesis in balancing images of war and peace. The king, in the royalist discourse after 1589, reassumed his military aspect. He certainly upheld his legitimate right to the throne by his birth, but he consecrated that legitimacy by his victories. A poster, which has been reproduced hundreds of times, shows Henri as a roman emperor, in triumph. In the background, there is a battlefield piled high with the bodies of his enemies; he, like François I, was shown facing death without fear, trusting his glory to Providence. He was the elect of God and no human force could detract from his victory over his enemies, no violence could strike him down. But at the same time he was a king of prophecy. It was on these neo-Stoic foundations that a renewed theory of obedience was built. The king incarnated the destiny of the kingdom of France, which was a destiny of peace and happiness. It was pointless to resist him since he was the incarnation of history leading to restoration of peace that was inevitable, unstoppable, and necessary because it had been written for all eternity. The violence by which some of his subjects, led astray by their passions, sought to resist his glorious victory, by war or regicidal acts, was in vain. Nothing could prevent his conquering progress. The king, in his earthly body, was identified with the history of his kingdom, and at the end of the conflict, a new golden age would arrive, an age of happiness for the subjects who obeyed their sovereign’s absolute authority, an age when violence would disappear, an age of peace.

Thus violence, the necessary sign of divine election, would finally make way for mercy, witnessing also to its divine virtue.²⁷ It is perhaps this balancing of imagery that accounts for the success of Henri IV’s monarchy.

Endnotes

For a detailed discussion, see Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion vers 1525-1610, 2 vols. (Seyssel, 1990).

See Yvonne Labande-Mailfert, Charles VIII: le vouloir et la destinée (Paris, 1986).

Denis Crouzet, “Désir de mort et puissance absolue de Charles VIII à Henri IV,” De l’État: Fondations juridiques, outils symboliques, revue de synthèse 112 (Jul.-Dec. 1991): 423-41.

Jean de Bourdigné, Chroniques d’Anjou et du Maine, ed. comte de Quatrebarbes (Angers, 1842), 268.

Bernard Quillet, Louis XII (Paris, 1986), 390.

M. du Bellay, Les mémoires de messire Martin du Bellay, contentant le discours de plusieurs choses advenues au royaume de France, depuis l’an 1513 jusques au trépas du roy François Ier ..., ed. Michaud-Poujaulat (Nouvelle Collection des mémoires ... Paris, 1866), V: 125-26. See also Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris sous le règne de François premier (1515-1534), ed. Ludovic Lalanne (Paris: 1834), 22.

Du Bellay, Les mémoires, 195-97.

Guillaume du Bellay, Instruction sur le faict de la Guerre: Extraictes des livres de Polybe, Frontin, Vegece, Cornazan, Machiavelle et plusieurs autres bon autheurs (first edition 1548, Paris, 1553), 5.

I am using Anne Marie Lecoq’s analysis: François Ier imaginaire: Symbolique et politique à l’aube de la Renaissance française (Paris, 1987).

Denis Crouzet, “Royalty, Nobility, and Religion: Research on the Wars of Italy,” Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, Santa Barbara, 7-10 November, 1990, vol. XVII (1991): 1-14.

Denis Crouzet, “Le connétable de Bourbon entre ‘pratique,’ ‘machination,’ ‘conjuration,’ et ‘trahison,’” in Complots et conjurations dans l’Europe moderne: Actes du Colloque international organisé par l’École française de Rome, 30 septembre-2 octobre 1993, ed. Yves Marie Bercé (Rome, 1996), 253-69, and idem, Charles de Bourbon connétable de France (Paris, 2003).

Laurent Bourquin, Noblesse seconde et pouvoir en Champagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris, 1994), 19-31.

Symphorien Champier, Les gestes ensemble la vie du preulx Chevalier Bayard (1525), ed. Denis Crouzet (Paris, 1992), 7-101.

See Denis Crouzet, La genèse de la Réforme française 1520-1562 (Paris, 1996), 234-35; and Robert J. Knecht, Un prince de la Renaissance: François Ier et son royaume (Paris, 1998), 250.

David El Kenz, Les bûchers du rai: la culture protestante des martyrs (1523-1572) (Seyssel, 1997), 55-65.

Crouzet, La genèse, 544-46.

Crouzet, Les guerriers, I: 451-55.

Antoine de la Roche-Chandieu, “Ode sur les misères des Eglises françaises qui ont esté si longtemps persécutées,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de Protestantisme Français 33 (1884): 185-203.

Mémoires de Claude Haton: Édition intégrale, ed. Laurent Bouquin, vol. I (1553-1565) (Paris, 2001), 124-25.

Crouzet, Les guerriers, I: 451-55.

Crouzet, Les guerriers, I: 756-62.

Sentence redoutable et arrest rigoureux du jugement de Dieu à l’encontre de l’impiété des Tyrans, recueillies tant des sainctes escriptures comme de toutes autres histoires (Lyon, 1564).

Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (New York and Oxford, 1991); and idem, “Simon Vigor: A Radical Preacher in Sixteenth-Century Paris,” Sixteenth Century Journal 3 (1987): 399-410.

See Denis Crouzet, La sagesse et le malheur: Michel de l’Hospital chancelier de France (Seyssel, 1998); idem, “Michel de l’Hospital et l’idée de la paix,” in Krieg und Frieden im Ubergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit: Theorie-Praxis-Bilder, ed. Heinz Durchardt and Patrice Veit (Mayence, 2000), 103-18; idem, “La foi, la politique, la parole: une problématique de l’Édit de janvier 1562,” in Axes et méthodes de la histoire politique, ed. Serge Bernstein and Pierre Milza (Paris, 1998), 13-40.

Denis Crouzet, La nuit de la Saint-Barthélemy: un rêve perdu de la Renaissance (Paris, 1994), and idem, “La nuit de la Saint-Barthélemy: Confirmations et compléments,” in Le second ordre: l’idéal nobiliaire; Hommage à Ellery Schalk, ed. Chantal Grell and Arnaud Ramière de Fortanier (Paris, 1999), 55-81.

Denis Crouzet, “L’intériorisation de la violence: l’example du XVIe siècle français de la Saint-Barthélemy aux prémices de la Ligue,” in La paix, ed. Pierre Chaunu (Paris, 1995), 157-71, and idem, “Le règne d’Henri III et la violence,” in Henri III et son temps: Colloque international du Centre de la Renaissance de Tours, oct. 1989, ed. R. Sauzet (Paris, 1992), 211-25.

See Denis Crouzet, “Henri IV, King of Reason?” in From Valois to Bourbon: Dynasty, State and Society in Early Modern France, ed. Keith Cameron (Exeter, 1989), 73-105.

Transylvanian Tolerance? Religious Accommodation on the Frontier of Christian Europe

Graeme Murdock

In the wake of competing movements of religious reform during the sixteenth century, different churches asserted their conflicting claims to theological orthodoxy and to practise true religion. Monarchs and territorial authorities generally offered legal protection to only one church and persecuted any illegal religious minorities. Conflicts over truth and error were also played out among ordinary people during the sixteenth century, sometimes through violent action. The depth of popular commitment to defend different forms of Christian religion could be demonstrated in dramatic physical contests in which objects of false religion were ridiculed and destroyed, and in acts of murder which sought to expunge the polluting agency of heresy. Thus, religious division in sixteenth-century Europe could lead directly to civil conflict, disrupted the stability of states, and also was a factor in warfare between states.

Although violence at times seems an almost inevitable result of the breakdown of religious uniformity in sixteenth-century states, some regions provide exceptions to this pattern. The most significant example of peaceful accommodation of religious differences within a sixteenth-century state is offered by the principality of Transylvania. The principality’s rulers neither attempted to enforce one form of religion nor persecuted religious minorities and, by the late 1560s, five different religions had widespread support in Transylvania. While historians of most European states seek to understand the causes of violent efforts to maintain religious uniformity, the problem for historians of Transylvania is to understand why its rulers and ordinary people failed to combat heresy with any similarly destructive impulses. Should the absence of evidence of religious violence be taken as evidence of some absence of religious zeal among Transylvanians? Or, what other reasons lie behind the peaceful religious accommodation reached on the frontier of Christian Europe? This article will first consider the ways in which religious division could lead to political and social conflict, looking briefly at the French monarchy. While not seeking directly to compare the two states, this example provides a useful context for detailed consideration of the importance of the development and acceptance of laws that accommodated religious diversity in sixteenth-century Transylvania.

The violence which afflicted France during the latter half of the sixteenth century has been seen as a product of the breakdown of religious uniformity, Valois dynastic instability, and weakening central political authority in the face of powerful noble clans. After the failure of attempts by the crown and Catholic Church to prevent the spread of heresy, and the failure of the 1561 colloquy of Poissy to unify French Christians, nobles who had adopted Reformed religion were able to win rights of worship. However, these agreements were only reached after periods of armed conflict between the crown and the Reformed nobility. The crown only intended these settlements to be temporary concessions to those of the Reformed faith. Grants of legal rights to Calvinists to practise their faith indeed repeatedly proved to be short-lived, and were interrupted by periods of violence as both sides sought gains on the battlefield. Efforts to maintain peace were also derailed by pressure on the monarchy from different noble and religious factions, and by the poisonous impact on politics and society of civil and communal conflict.¹

One particularly dark feature of these cycles of armed conflict in France was outbreaks of religious rioting between Catholics and Protestants. This popular violence has recently been seen less as an immediate reflection of party divisions within France’s aristocracy, and more as evidence of how much ordinary men and women in France cared about religious truth. They cared enough to destroy the objects of piety of their ancestors and, on occasion, enough to kill their neighbours. Alternative lines of explanation also have been advanced to explain religious riots in mid-sixteenth-century France; that break-downs of social order should be understood primarily as a response to economic hardship, or as a display of collective fervour that bordered on a primitive irrationality. However, the analysis provided by Natalie Zemon Davis of the reaction of French men and women to religious division in their communities has convinced most historians that crowd violence had ideological roots and was a performance which extended from religious ritual.²

Davis argued that the nature of popular violence employed during religious riots in France was neither random nor irrational. Both Catholics and Calvinists acted against clearly-defined targets: Catholics destroying the bodies of heretics with fire and water, and Calvinists desecrating objects of Catholic worship. This argument liberates such expressions of popular religious belief from being understood only under the cloak of social or economic concerns. Catholics did not murder heretics because they were wealthy, or because they lived in towns, or because there were high grain prices, but because they feared that divine punishment would follow should the pollution of heresy remain in their midst. Therefore, both Catholics and Protestants acted to cleanse their local environments of diabolic infection in violent rituals of purification.³ Davis suggested that church historians might find the behaviour of Christians in sixteenth-century France an embarrassment.⁴ However, her arguments about the nature of riots in France have proved an extremely influential model of early modern popular responses to religious division.⁵ Perhaps the most important difficulty with this model is, in fact, that it is so compelling. It so successfully explains the ideologically-inspired nature of religious riots that it is hard to understand why violence was not an even more prevalent feature of life in mixed religious communities in France or elsewhere on the Continent. How could such violent religious passions ever be peacefully contained between rival communities, and how could the narrow ground of social peace be achieved or restored?⁶

This question focuses attention on the important condition for the forms of behaviour exhibited during popular religious riots, which was the inability or unwillingness of local representatives of the monarch to maintain law and order. One of the key objectives of early modern governments was to achieve a monopoly on the use of violence for the state and its agents. The religious riots in France during the 1560s, therefore, represented in part a critical failure of central authority, as royal justice lost its force over local societies. This is unless mob action is seen as an orchestrated element of crown policy. Illegal acts in riots were certainly legitimated by the crowd’s belief that they were behaving as their rulers wanted them to behave, or, more abstractly, as they ought to have wanted them to behave. This view was often encouraged, as Davis pointed out, when clergy or members of local militia were present during disturbances. Rioters also mirrored official sanctions against offenders in their use of torture, desecration of corpses, and in the sites chosen for executions. Many Huguenots certainly suspected official support for Catholic violence, particularly after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres in 1572. However, rather than see the St. Bartholomew’s season of violence as a success of Valois planning, the evidence rather points to vacillation and a series of contradictory instructions sent out to regional officials from the court in the wake of the Paris massacres.⁷

What happened in France, amid the polarising effects of civil warfare, and especially in areas with a delicately balanced religious demography, was therefore a disastrous failure of French law to direct local authorities to maintain orderly and peaceful behaviour, and to contain tensions between confessional groups. This failure was related to the inconsistent pursuit by the monarchy of a policy to extend religious rights to Huguenots. It was also, despite the best efforts of some crown officials, a product of ineffective attempts to enforce edicts that granted freedoms to Huguenots. Only once much blood had been shed was a determined effort to accommodate competing claims of religious rights successfully implemented. Those charged with enforcement of Henri IV’s 1598 edict learned lessons from the failures of their predecessors, and brought France at least some respite from armed conflict and communal riots.⁸

Turning eastward, in Transylvania religious uniformity began to breakdown from the 1540s. The Transylvanian diet passed a series of laws on religious life over the following decades, which resulted in a settlement that endured throughout the early modern period of Transylvania’s independence. During the 1560s, the diet offered rights that allowed three new religions to worship freely: the Lutheran, Reformed, and anti-Trinitarian Churches. While there were ongoing debates and disputes between the clergy of these Churches, there was only very rarely either state-sanctioned or popular violence of any kind over religious questions in the principality. Transylvania’s religious settlement will be discussed here in three parts: first, the reasons behind the grant of rights to a plurality of Churches; secondly, the content of the laws that offered freedoms to four Churches; and thirdly, the reaction of ordinary people to these laws.

Different reasons have been advanced for the peaceful extension of rights of worship to a number of Churches in Transylvania. One suggestion is that the peaceful accommodation of religious diversity reflected a particularly tolerant political and religious culture. The Transylvanian court had been subject to humanist influences from the middle decades of the century, which might help to explain how the political elite found a language of compromise over differences of religious belief.⁹ It also has been suggested that Transylvanian society, divided among communities speaking Hungarian, German, and Romanian, was also somehow able to call on communal traditions of co-existence to muster the cultural resources required to deal with the consequences of living with those of a different faith. Such arguments have proved extremely persuasive to many living in the region who strongly identify with the values of a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual Transylvania, or who look back to the social peace of the principality’s “golden age” for proof that the region need not fall prey to the intolerant and exclusive rhetoric of modern nationalists.

Another suggestion to explain the approach taken by the diet is that the Transylvanian religious settlement was above all a political peace process. The principality’s accommodation of religious differences was part of an attempt to secure the future of a fledgling polity in the face of severe external pressure that threatened the survival of the state.¹⁰ In the wake of the collapse of the medieval Hungarian kingdom, Transylvania proper together with some eastern Hungarian counties had neither been brought under the control of the Habsburgs nor conquered by Ottoman armies. This eastern Hungarian kingdom narrowly survived a series of political crises during the mid-sixteenth century. In 1551, the Habsburgs gained agreement for the abdication of János Zsigmond Szapolyai in favour of Ferdinand I. Ferdinand’s attempt to secure power across all of Christian Hungary was blocked when Ottoman armies advanced further north into Hungary in 1552, and in 1556, János Zsigmond Szapolyai was again recognised by the eastern Hungarian diet as their elected king.

The autonomy of Transylvania as a state between the Ottoman Empire and Habsburg monarchy was still not definitively secured by the terms of the peace of Adrianople in 1568. In 1570, the Speyer treaty between Maximilian and János Zsigmond Szapolyai envisaged the reunification of Hungary on the death of the childless Szapolyai. Maximilian accepted János Zsigmond’s rule as prince over Transylvania, in return for Szapolyai’s renunciation of the Hungarian royal title. However, when János Zsigmond died in March 1571, the Transylvanian diet instead chose István Báthory, who styled himself as their elected voivode. When Báthory was elected as king of Poland in 1575, his relatives Kristóf Báthory and Zsigmond Báthory were in turn appointed as governors over Transylvania. On István Báthory's death in 1587, Zsigmond was elected by the diet to succeed him as prince.¹¹ Thus, during the decades when Reformation ideas made swift progress across Transylvania, the long-term future of the state was uncertain, and the possibility of external invasion very real. In the face of the threat and reality of Ottoman and Habsburg advances into Transylvanian territory in the sixteenth century, it has been argued that the diet made a pragmatic calculation that to prevent the implosion of the principality it was imperative to sideline the issue of religious differences within the domestic elite.¹²

Certainly Transylvania’s position on the frontier of Christian Europe was influential in determining the laws on religion passed by the diet. In addition, the settlement reflected the internal political organisation of the principality. The Transylvanian state survived as a haven of the medieval Hungarian kingdom’s political culture, and Transylvania also had its own traditional power structures, which reflected the diversity of its elite. As a province of the Hungarian kingdom, Transylvania had its own unicameral diet of Hungarian nobles, German towns, and Szekler lords. The Transylvanian diet by the mid-sixteenth century was made up of representatives of these three “nations” and of nobles from eastern Hungarian counties of the so-called Partium.¹³ Members of the council, judges, court officials, and any number of “regalists” drawn from leading noble families also were invited by the ruling prince to attend diets. The business of the diet was structured so that propositions from princes had to be discussed before the estates could put forward their agreed petitions. However, the prince had to respond to the estates’ petitions before his proposals could be agreed. The diet had a variety of powers, including the right to elect Transylvania’s rulers, to decide questions about religion, pass laws, agree to taxation, consider matters about defense and the army, and determine the privileges of the estates.¹⁴

Political power in the diet was shared between the prince and the three “nations,” all of whose support was required for legislation to be passed. Thus, given the divisions over religion between and among the political nations by the late 1560s, the only available option was to legalise the practice of a number of them. The Lutheran challenge to Catholic orthodoxy in Transylvania was made first in German-speaking Saxon towns during the 1540s, and evangelical preaching also reached Hungarian-speakers before the end of the decade. While Transylvania’s Saxons remained attached to Lutheranism, Reformed religion had spread from the towns and noble estates of the eastern Hungarian plain to many Hungarian-speakers in Transylvania by 1560. This Calvinist advance was in turn challenged by anti-Trinitarian preachers in Hungarian towns and in some Szekler communities during the later 1560s. Meanwhile some Hungarian nobles, including the Báthory princes, and some Szekler communities remained loyal to the old religion. Although not included as a political nation in the diet, the Eastern Orthodox Romanian community also was affected by the religious changes of this period, and some joined new Protestant churches set up for Romanians.¹⁵

Amid this patchwork of beliefs, from where could the political and social support be found to prevent the breakdown of Catholic orthodoxy? Certainly not at the diet, divided by the late 1560s between followers of four different religions. Nor at the Szapolyai court, where one could also point to the role in forming the religious settlement of János Zsigmond Szapolyai, who probably died an anti-Trinitarian. Nor to the leadership of the Catholic Church, badly weakened by the appropriation of Church property, and which suffered disruptions to episcopal appointments. The international situation facing the Transylvanian state, the character of its elected rulers, the powers and structure of its diet, the social diversity of the ruling elite, and the spread of a range of different strands of Reformation thought all help to explain the reasons behind the response to the breakdown of religious uniformity. Transylvania’s peaceful religious settlement was based upon the laws passed by the diet, and the critical nature of these laws will be analysed in detail to consider how they structured a largely non-violent response to religious diversity.

During the 1540s, the diet had granted Transylvania’s Saxon towns the freedom to adopt an Evangelical ecclesiastical order. On the return of the Szapolyais to power over the eastern kingdom in 1556, Isabella, ruling as regent for her son János Zsigmond, accepted the diet’s offer to appropriate the property of the Catholic Church. It was agreed that the royal council was to decide on how to put all episcopal and monastic lands to best use for the good of the state. This distribution of Church property gave many nobles a vested interest to support the progress of reform, and later acted as a serious impediment to any substantial Catholic recovery.¹⁶ In the summer of 1557, the diet meeting at Torda (Turda) responded to widespread support for Evangelical ideas by announcing that a national synod was to be held to establish peace in the Church. The hope was expressed that this synod would be able to overcome dissension between those of different doctrinal opinions. The diet also decided that, meanwhile, “everyone could hold whichever faith they wanted,” either living by the old or the new ceremonies as long as they did not insult the religion of others.¹⁷ This breakthrough for Lutherans across the principality was confirmed by the diet held in the spring of 1558. The idea of reconciling the Evangelical party to the Catholic Church was no longer proposed as an option, and, with a noticeable change of language, the permitted religions were described as those of the Papists or Lutherans. These two confessions were the only ones to be given legal status, and the diet prohibited the worship of a sect they named as Sacramentarians.¹⁸

This initial division between Catholic and Lutheran Churches led to an obvious range of practical problems, for example, on the use of church buildings in towns with mixed populations. In 1563, the diet responded to problems that had arisen among the Szeklers on the use of churches, although no details were provided in the written records about what sort of local disputes had taken place. The diet resolved that services held by Catholics or Lutherans should not be disturbed or interrupted. One religious community was to wait until the other had finished using the church before beginning their own service. Any who disturbed the peace, the diet warned, would face punishment under the law.¹⁹ By January 1564, the diet came up with a different resolution on the use of church buildings, perhaps less likely to lead to problems as one congregation waited in the churchyard for their neighbours to finish their service. The Catholic and Lutheran priests in the town of Karánsebes (Caransebeş) in southwestern Transylvania appealed for a settlement of their conflicting rights to use the town’s church. The diet decided that they should hold their services on alternate Sundays, and both parties also were warned not to cause any offence to each other nor try to disturb sermons and services.²⁰

The same diet of January 1564 noted that ministers in the churches of the Saxons and the Hungarians were in dispute over Communion theology. A Reformed theology of the sacraments had spread to Transylvania during the 1550s, and this emerging Church coalesced around the 1562 Confessio Catholica published in Debrecen by Péter Méliusz Juhász and Gergely Szegedi. The 1564 diet called for a debate to be held between those clergy who believed that the elements of Communion contained the real presence of Christ and those who believed that they provided only signs of Christ’s spiritual presence. The diet hoped that a clear judgement could be reached on the issue by clergy debating over the words of Scripture.²¹ However, at the next diet, held in June 1564, the estates recognised that there had been no resolution of the division between parties described as the Hungarian ministers of Kolozsvár (Cluj) and the Saxon ministers of Hermannstadt (Sibiu). Therefore, the diet decided “for the peace of the realm” to offer rights of worship to a church for the Evangelical Saxons and to a church for the Reformed Hungarians. However, Reformed ministers were only allowed to introduce their faith where local people accepted their preaching, and were specifically forbidden from forcing their views on any towns. Where Reformed preaching was accepted and a Lutheran minister was ousted from his post, the diet also warned that no mockery or offence against Lutherans was permitted.²²

By 1564, some key principles of the emerging religious settlement in Transylvania had been established; any behaviour that insulted the religion of others or that could lead to public disorder was outlawed, church buildings normally belonged to the confessional group with majority support in each parish, churches were to be peaceably shared among different communities where necessary, and forced conversions were prohibited. Even landowners with rights to select parish ministers were not sanctioned to introduce a minister of a different religion to that of the local community. In practice, patterns of religious loyalty still tended to be heavily influenced by the social power and rights of patronage of the privileged elite, whether Hungarian nobles, Saxon burghers, or Szekler lords. The freedom of worship granted first to Lutherans and then to Calvinists reflected above all the growing number of Protestants among this elite. Equally, the collapse in the number of Catholics at the diet, as well as the influence of János Zsigmond Szapolyai’s court preacher, Ferenc Dávid, led to the decision in 1566 to expel from Transylvania any clergy who did not want to convert from “the Pope’s learning.” The diet’s resolution claimed that God had spread the light of the Gospel throughout Transylvania, and wanted the Church to be cleansed of all false learning and error.²³ This decision was confirmed at the winter diet of 1566, which demanded that Transylvania’s nations support the preaching of the Gospel and act against idolatry. Idolaters, and those priests who did not want to learn from the Bible, were to be thrown out of the country. The diet added that it particularly wanted to have God’s word preached freely among Romanians. Romanian priests were described as blind and leading their people into danger, although to what degree Orthodox clergy were actually forced to leave Transylvania is unclear.²⁴

This extension of the diet’s anti-Catholic rhetoric against the Orthodox Church was a reflection of Protestant efforts to promote reform among Romanian clergy. Lutheran catechisms were published in Romanian, and János Zsigmond Szapolyai appointed a Romanian bishop to lead reform. In 1568, the diet noted that many opposed this bishop and remained loyal to the old priests and their errors, and demanded that any who blocked the progress of the Gospel be punished. In 1569, Romanian priests “who truly preached the word of God” were given permission to collect financial support from their local community. In 1577 the diet claimed that the new Romanian bishop and his clergy had made some progress in bringing the word of God to Romanians in their own language. The diet gave its permission for “Romanian priests of the Christian religion” to elect a new bishop to lead their Church in 1579.²⁵ However, by the 1580s, the limited impact of reform among the Romanian community had become apparent. The diet acknowledged the presence of Orthodox clergy in 1588, although bishops “of the Greek faith” were warned not to try to visit their congregations without receiving the prior permission of landowners.²⁶

The balance of confessional forces in the diet shifted again during the late 1560s with the spread of anti-Trinitarianism among Hungarian-speakers. Although anti-Trinitarians were not specifically named by the diet, the resolution issued at Torda in 1568 in effect extended legal rights to anti-Trinitarian preachers. The Torda diet confirmed that, in the light of its previous decisions,

ministers should everywhere preach and proclaim the Gospel according to their understanding of it, and if their community is willing to accept this, good, if not however, no-one should be compelled by force if their spirit is not at peace, but a minister retained whose teaching is pleasing to the community. Therefore, no-one should harm any superintendent or minister, nor abuse anyone on account of their religion, in accordance with previous laws, and no-one is permitted to threaten to imprison or deprive anyone of their position because of their teaching, because faith is a gift from God which comes from listening, listening to the word of God.²⁷

This resolution did not offer any rights to Catholic and Orthodox priests who were deemed not to preach the Gospel, but other ministers who listened to the word of God, and who were given faith by God according to their understanding of the Bible, were to receive the full protection of the law.²⁸

By 1570, the diet had clarified the limits of this freedom for clergy to preach according to their conscience, anxiously requiring the punishment of any who promoted heresies that could bring divine wrath on the country.²⁹ The emerging focus of this concern was a group of anti-Trinitarian ministers, who became known as Sabbatarians, who began to question Christ’s divinity. In January 1571, the diet again allowed that God’s word should be freely preached in the principality and that no one was to be harmed on account of their faith, but required that preachers who went to “criminal excess” were to be punished by their superintendents, deprived of their offices, and driven out of the principality.³⁰ In 1572, under the new Catholic voivode, István Báthory, the diet confirmed that the laws passed on religion under János Zsigmond Szapolyai were to continue in force. Ongoing concern about the preaching of some ministers informed the passage of a strict law against doctrinal innovation among followers of the three legal religions. Diets in 1572 and 1573 agreed that church superintendents were to investigate any suspected innovations in matters of doctrine, and to excommunicate any who advanced “distinct and new things in their confession.”³¹ If superintendents failed to act, then the prince was given authority to punish any doctrinal “innovators” with imprisonment or death, and to punish any towns or nobles who supported such preachers.³²

Anxiety about doctrinal innovation, and particularly about non-adorantist anti-Trinitarianism, persisted throughout the 1570s. In 1576, the anti-Trinitarian Church was given permission to appoint a new superintendent to replace Ferenc Dávid if need arose, but warned against using this as an opportunity to introduce any doctrinal changes.³³ Some new restrictions were also imposed on the anti-Trinitarian Church. In May 1576, clergy “of Ferenc Dávid’s confession” were only allowed to hold synods in two named towns which were centres of anti-Trinitarianism, Torda and Kolozsvár. The next year the right of anti-Trinitarian senior clergy to visit parishes was limited, while the Reformed superintendent was permitted to instruct and warn ministers not only of his own Church but also of other Churches so long as he did not use force.³⁴ The diet issued increasingly dire warnings about “blasphemous innovations” and “new heresies” in 1577, 1578, and 1579, and demanded action from Church leaders and the prince. The notable victim of this panic was the remarkable Ferenc Dávid, who had been in turn superintendent of the Lutheran, Reformed, and anti-Trinitarian Churches. He was charged with supporting non-adorantist anti-Trinitarianism, and thus of breaking the law on religious innovation, and died while in prison at Déva (Deva) castle in 1579.³⁵

The last phase of the laws issued about religious freedoms in Transylvania was dominated by consideration of the position of the Catholic Church, with the largely Protestant estates often resisting efforts by the Báthory princes to aid Catholic recovery. In 1579, the diet agreed to the request from Governor Kristóf Báthory, supported by a letter from István Báthory, for Jesuits to be allowed to come to Transylvania to teach young Catholics in their faith. The diet only accepted this request, however, on the condition that the Jesuits did not engage in any other activities, and did not disrupt the work of other ministers.³⁶ In 1581, the diet acknowledged the presence of Jesuits in agreed sites at the princely residence of Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia), in a former monastery and at a convent in Kolozsvár, and in a former abbey at nearby Kolozsmonostor (Mănăştur). However, the diet warned Báthory not to plant any other Jesuits on Transylvanian soil. The diet conceded that Catholic priests could be appointed where “the town or village wants a doctor of the Roman religion.” However, if only ten or twenty or so locals wanted a Catholic priest, the diet judged this as insufficient cause to disturb the religious practice of any community. This 1581 ruling established the principle of major pars in deciding the practice of religion in Transylvania’s parishes. The diet, in effect, offered local confessional majorities exclusive rights to use the church building and to hold services, without granting any rights of public worship to minority religious communities.³⁷

In 1588, the presence of Jesuits in Transylvania led to a stand-off between the estates and Zsigmond Báthory, who had been elected prince to succeed István Báthory in 1587. Zsigmond Báthory had invited more Jesuits to come to the principality, but the estates challenged his actions. Concerns were expressed by nobles about the security of lands they had appropriated from the Catholic Church, and the estates were encouraged by the superintendents of the Reformed and anti-Trinitarian Churches to prevent Catholic priests from spreading idolatry across Transylvania. When the diet met in October 1588, the estates refused to pass any taxation measures until the Jesuits were expelled, but Báthory refused to comply. The diet convened again at Medgyes (Mediaş) in December 1588, and after lengthy debate decided to stick to their original position. A resolution was passed reminding their prince that monastic property had been confiscated in perpetuity in 1556, and that from 1566, the pope’s teachers and religious orders had been expelled from Transylvania. The diet claimed that the presence of any Jesuits would lead to a dangerous decline in the affairs of the principality. They therefore demanded that Báthory expel all Jesuits from Transylvania within the next twenty-five days and forbid them to return to his territory. The prince and any nobles who were Catholic were only sanctioned to retain one priest each, as long as they were “pious Hungarians.” The diet also restated the freedoms of the Lutheran, Reformed, and anti-Trinitarian Churches, which were described as Transylvania’s “received religions.”³⁸

In 1591 the issue of Catholic priests was back on the diet’s agenda, since Zsigmond Báthory had brought several Jesuits back to the principality. In November 1591, the diet accepted that the prince could station Catholic priests to bring “calm to his conscience” at his court in Gyulafehérvár, and at Kolozsmonostor, which he often visited. However, the diet was insistent that Jesuits were only to be allowed in these two places and could not preach in neighbouring villages.³⁹ This was, however, not the final word on the extent of Catholic rights in Transylvania. Further debates in the 1590s were affected by renewed conflict in the region, and by the possibility of a Habsburg take-over of the principality. Border skirmishes in the early 1590s led to serious conflict between the Ottomans and Habsburgs from 1593. Zsigmond Báthory pursued a pro-Habsburg policy during this Fifteen Years’ War, and agreed an alliance with Rudolf in January 1595. In April 1595, the diet ratified this agreement and gave permission for Jesuits to work in Kolozsvár, Kolozsmonostor, and Gyulafehérvár. The estates demanded that neither the Jesuits nor other Catholic priests nor any other ministers cause public quarrels or give offence to each other. The diet then proclaimed that as far as religion in Transylvania was concerned the “received religions, that is, the Catholic or Roman, Lutheran, Calvinist and Arian, can be kept everywhere freely.”⁴⁰

Zsigmond Báthory’s reign was punctuated by resignations from office, as in December 1597, when he abdicated in favour of Rudolf. However, in August 1598, the diet elected Báthory as prince once again, but included among conditions for his return the removal of Jesuits from Gyulafehérvár. Jesuits also had been specifically excluded from entering Nagyvárad (Oradea) in 1595, but in 1598, the diet allowed a priest to enter a town if a Catholic resident was ill and requested a mass.⁴¹ The estates also asserted that Catholicism had been introduced by force on some congregations. To remedy such abuses of the major pars law, the diet ordered investigations of these cases to be led by a leading Catholic and “evangelical.” These commissioners were charged to find out which religion actually held majority support in the local community, and to restore the rightful minister to his post.⁴²

Around the turn of the century, invading armies devastated many parts of Transylvania. The principality was ruled from late 1599 by Mihai “the brave,” the Orthodox voivode of Wallachia. At the end of his rule in the autumn of 1600, the diet produced a further statement of the principality’s law on religious rights. It confirmed the freedoms of the received religions, now named as the Catholic or Roman, Lutheran, Calvinist and Unitarian Churches. As far as the rights of Catholic priests were concerned, nobles could retain priests in the villages where they lived, but priests could not be appointed elsewhere without the agreement of the local congregation.⁴³ The freedoms of Transylvania’s other three received religions were only secured after the success of the 1604 anti-Habsburg revolt led by István Bocskai. Bocskai, who had previously supported Zsigmond Báthory’s policies, led a challenge to Rudolf’s attempt to dominate all of Hungary and Transylvania and to impose Counter-Reformation Catholicism on the region. Bocskai received widespread support for his cause in eastern Hungary, and was elected as prince of Transylvania in September 1605. Peace treaties agreed in 1606 between Bocskai and Rudolf, and between the Habsburgs and Ottomans, secured Transylvania’s autonomy and the principality’s religious settlement.⁴⁴

Transylvania’s laws on religion retained an anti-Catholic flavour into the seventeenth century, and the Jesuits were expelled from the principality in 1607, 1610, and 1653. Although in May 1597, Zsigmond Báthory had restored a Catholic bishop to Gyulafehérvár, this appointment only lasted until the bishop was expelled by the diet in January 1601. The Catholic Church thereafter lacked a bishop, although the Habsburgs appointed candidates to the post of vicarius to oversee the Transylvanian Church.⁴⁵ The Reformed Church gained in power and influence during the seventeenth century, benefiting from the support of a series of Calvinist princes. However, all the princes elected to rule over Transylvania until 1691 agreed to uphold the constitutional status of all four received religions. The 1653 Approbatae Constitutiones, which provided a summary of customary Transylvanian laws, declared the freedoms of the four received religions, outlawed doctrinal innovation and, in particular, Judaising Sabbatarians, and recognised the Catholic vicarius and the superintendents of the Lutheran, Reformed, and anti-Trinitarian Churches. Although the Orthodox Church of Romanians was not granted the status of a received religion, it was offered legal recognition. The right of local majorities to decide the form of religion adopted in each locality was upheld, and nobles were warned not to try to force a minister of a different religion on unwilling parishioners.⁴⁶

What then was the response of ordinary people in Transylvania to the existence of a number of faiths and to the presence of heresy, however defined, across the principality? There are severe difficulties for historians in trying to answer such questions because of the limitations of surviving evidence from the period. An accurate and full portrait of popular reactions to Transylvania’s mixed confessional environment would require extensive personal and local records which are not available. However, the evidence that does survive, particularly for larger towns, allows for some discussion of the emerging balance in Transylvanian society between confessional loyalty and religious accommodation.

Certainly Transylvanian society was profoundly influenced by the ideas of different confessional groups through preaching and printed material. Clergy held bitter public debates about the nature of the sacraments, and about the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. Clergy from all the churches devoted a good deal of effort to educate believers in the fundamentals of their faith, to discredit their rivals, and to develop distinct confessional identities.⁴⁷ The waves of reform that affected Transylvania brought rapid and contested changes to the religious landscape, especially in towns. At Kolozsvár, the central church was controlled over a period of around twenty years in turn by Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, and anti-Trinitarian clergy. Such changes could lead to the breakdown of law and order, even if by comparison with contemporary standards across the continent such incidents were very limited in the degree or extent of violence employed. There are records from the mid-1560s of popular iconoclasm inspired by Calvinist preaching at Kolozsvár, Gyulafehérvár, and in Nagyvárad, with the destruction of paintings, altars, statues, relics, church organs, and stained glass windows. It seems very likely that these were not isolated events, and that in smaller towns there may well have been similar episodes of popular enthusiasm to transform church buildings. However, in the countryside the process of removing objects of Catholic worship is likely to have been conducted more slowly and in an orderly fashion under the direction of noble patrons. There also are accounts of violence against Catholic clergy, with the murders of some priests at Nagyvárad in 1566, and evidence of clergy from different churches fleeing the lands of unsympathetic nobles. There also was considerable tension later over the troubled presence of Jesuits in Transylvania, particularly in the anti-Trinitarian stronghold of Kolozsvár.⁴⁸

The laws passed by the Transylvanian diet in some ways encouraged popular religious intolerance, including the 1566 expulsion of Catholic and Orthodox clergy, the dark warnings issued about the results of idolatry, the fears expressed about the presence of Jesuits, and the repeated condemnations of religious “innovators” who went to “criminal excess.” However, the diet strictly reserved for church superintendents and princes the right to enforce official action against those who stood outside the framework of legal protection. The diet also recognised and tried to curb the violent potential of tension between rival confessional communities. A constant theme of the diet’s pronouncements on religion throughout this period was to stress that force could not be used to compel individuals to believe. The diet also prohibited any offensive behaviour that might lead to violence. These key principles were maintained in all the laws agreed by the diet throughout the period, although there were changes over which religions received legal sanction.

The growth in support within the diet for different strands of Reformation thought, as well as the confessional allegiances of princes, determined the shape of Transylvania’s religious settlement. The laws on religion were not, however, only structured as a working political settlement for the principality’s social elite, since they recognised the significance of the religious commitment of ordinary people. In theory, at least, popular majorities came to be decisive in shaping the confessional allegiance of each parish. Determining who could use church buildings was a key issue, with references in the diet’s proceedings to contests for control of churches and the need to prevent disturbances during sermons and services. In some towns with divided populations, the estates at first tried to encourage the shared use of churches, but later gave exclusive rights of worship to majorities in each parish. Once patterns of confessional commitment were broadly established, this law provided a degree of spatial separation between different religious communities, although there were few substantial geographic areas dominated by only one Church. The law of major pars was renewed in 1615, and to the extent that this rule was implemented by commissioners on the ground, it offered a role for popular opinion in shaping the religious environment of each community. The Protestant estates certainly were keen to support non-Catholic communities from having their ministers removed by Catholic nobles, and planned bi-partisan investigations of any parishes where controversial changes to the control of churches had taken place.

However, patterns of popular religious accommodation in Transylvania were based not only on granting rights of worship to just one church in each parish. There were exceptions to the rule, such as the town of Székelyudvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc), where, remarkably, the church was shared between Calvinists and Catholics until 1612. In the far southeast of Transylvania, anti-Trinitarians and Calvinists also formed mixed congregations served by the same minister until the 1620s.⁴⁹ Such situations might well be thought of as inherently unstable, but when the diet reached a decision on how to settle local disputes over the use of churches there is no indication that nobles, town councils, or ordinary people defied the authorities. Perhaps the relatively peaceful resolution of the practical issues raised by living among or near those of a different religion was assisted by the long-standing existence of not only Catholic but also Orthodox communities in many parts of the principality. This may have provided Transylvanian communities with an embedded social understanding of the existence of different religious rituals, festivals, customs, and forms of worship, which in some way prepared the various linguistic communities for the practical compromises that were needed to accommodate three more religions.

The durability of the laws that established religious freedoms in Transylvania also was crucial to their success, since over time the settlement of rights to four received religions gained a weight of political and social acceptance that became irreversible. Transylvania’s laws were drawn up primarily to promote the security and stability of the state, but over time the tone and nature of the settlement of religious rights seems to have allowed tolerant social behaviour to emerge between those of different religions. The consistent enforcement of the laws across the principality certainly prevented violence from becoming an expression of religious ritual and identity. One sign of how social attitudes could develop towards acceptance of religious diversity was that mixed marriages and families with divided religious loyalties became an accepted part of Transylvanian society. It is difficult to judge how widespread such marriages were, or to assess what problems arose between family members of different faiths. The early seventeenth-century anti-Trinitarian chronicler, Kozma Petrityvity, commented that mixed marriages had become sufficiently common as to pose a serious problem for the future of his anti-Trinitarian Church. It seemed to Petrityvity that while other Churches actively sought conversions within families, among anti-Trinitarians it was a common practice for sons of mixed marriages to follow the religion of their father while daughters attended the Church of their mother. As evidence to support his argument, Petrityvity gave details of his own family history, from his grandfather who had converted from anti-Trinitarianism to his wife’s Catholic religion. Petrityvity’s mother was raised in this Catholic family, although one of his uncles later converted to Calvinism, while a Catholic aunt became Calvinist on her second marriage. Petrityvity’s father was an anti-Trinitarian, but while he raised the chronicler and his brothers as anti-Trinitarians, his sisters continued to attend the Catholic Church with their mother. The degree of religious diversity within the Petrityvity family was certainly not typical, but it illustrates how Transylvania’s laws provided the structures for a social environment in which a family of Catholics and anti-Trinitarians could live together in peace.⁵⁰

In examining the legal and social responses to religious diversity in early modern Europe, it is often assumed that painting a territory a single confessional colour was of benefit both to state power and social stability. In France, the monarchy proved unable to prevent the growth in support for Reformed religion, which contributed to the causes of civil conflict, or to prevent outbursts of popular violent action. The crown’s failure either to prevent such breakdowns of law and order or to eliminate Calvinism from France was both symptomatic of, and exacerbated by, the weakness of state institutions. Meanwhile, other monarchs offered legal monopolies in the practice of religion to official churches and worked to eliminate any sources of heresy. Such rulers gained authority from their close alliances with state Churches, benefited from the reverential support offered by grateful clergy, and were able to extend their dominance over ordinary people’s lives.⁵¹ However, in Transylvania the interests of the state in the face of immediate external threats from both Ottoman and Habsburg empires encouraged princes, nobles, and urban magistrates to attempt to accommodate religious divisions. This acceptance of religious diversity indeed came to bolster the power of Transylvania’s princes as elected defenders of the different faiths of the principality in competition with their religiously-monochrome Habsburg rivals. Transylvania’s legal settlement of religious rights for four Churches was certainly the product of complicated and contested political compromises rather than the product of any far-sighted promotion of toleration. However, both the substance and implementation of Transylvania’s laws on religion, which received consistent support among the social elite and were accepted by ordinary people of different faiths, were the critical element that advanced a peaceful balance between the loyalty of Transylvanians to their own Churches and widespread acceptance of the practical reality of religious diversity.

Endnotes

Philip Benedict describes this decade as “the golden age of the religious riot” in Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1991), 240. For events in this period see the summary provided by R. J. Knecht, The French Wars of Religion (London, 1989).

Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-century France,” Past and Present 59 (1973): 51-91, and in Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Cambridge, 1987), 152-87. See also Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion (Seyssel, 1990).

Davis, “The Rites of Violence,” 53-54, for discussion of Janine Estèbe, Tocsin pour un massacre: la saison des Saint-Barthélemy (Paris, 1968).

Davis, “The Rites of Violence,” 53.

See a range of local studies of the period; Babara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-century Paris (New York, 1991). Penny Roberts, A City in Conflict: Troyes during the French Wars of Religion (Manchester, 1996). J. Davies, “Persecution and Protestantism: Toulouse, 1562-1572,” Historical Journal 22 (1979): 31-51. James Farr, “Popular Religious Solidarity in Sixteenth-century Dijon,” French Historical Studies 14 (1985): 192-214. David Nicholls, “Protestants, Catholics and Magistrates in Tours, 1562-1572: The Making of a Catholic City during the Religious Wars,” French History 8 (1994): 14-33.

In one French town, at least, it seems that “neighbours and acquaintances chose not to harrass and massacre one another ... in the interests of civic harmony and ideals of urban solidarity;” Mark Konnert, “Urban Values versus Religious Passion: Châlons-sur-Marne during the Wars of Religion,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20 (1989): 387-405, 390.

Davis, “The Rites of Violence,” 62-65. Philip Benedict, “The Saint Bartholomew’s Massacres in the Provinces,” Historical Journal 21 (1973): 205-25. After 1560, there were very few official executions of heretics; William Monter, Judging the Reformation: Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-century Parliaments (Cambridge, MA, 1999).

Mark Greengrass, “The Anatomy of a Religious Riot in Toulouse in May 1562,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 34 (1983): 367-91. See also Mark Greengrass, “The Psychology of Religious Violence,” French History 5 (1991): 467-74; idem, France in the Age of Henri IV: The Struggle for Stability, 2d ed. (London, 1995).

Transylvanian place-names will be given in the language used by their residents during the early modern period. Modern equivalents will also be given at first mention.

“I am of the opinion that both Catholic and Protestant secular authorities exercised some degree of tolerance regardless of their beliefs, and that such tolerance was generally dictated by political considerations;” Katalin Peter, “Tolerance and Intolerance in Sixteenth-century Hungary,” in Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell, Robert Scribner (Cambridge, 1996), 249-61, 250.

On the wider politics of the period, see Robert J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550-1700: An Interpretation (Oxford, 1979). Márta Fata, Ungarn, das Reich, der Stephanskrone, im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung: Multiethnizität, Land und Konfession 1500 bis 1700 (Münster, 2000).

For the range of opinions of Hungarian historians on this issue, see Lajos Rácz, “Vallási türelem erdély -- és magyarországon,” Protestáns Szemle (1934): 198-204; Ágnes Várkonyi, “Pro quite regni -- az ország nyugalmáért,” Protestáns Szemle (1993): 260-77; Gábor Barta, “A tolerancia társadalmi gyökerei -- Erdély a 16. században,” in Europa: Balcanica-Danubiana-Carpathica; Annales 2A, ed. Ambrus Miskolczy (Budapest, 1995), 102-11; Ludwig Binder, Grundlagen und Formen der Toleranz in Siebenbürgen bis zur Mitte des 1Z Jahrhunderts (Cologne-Vienna, 1976).

Transylvania’s rulers were styled as “Dei gratia Transylvaniae princeps, partium regni Hungariae dominus, Siculorum comes.”

Zsolt Trócsányi, Az erdélyi fejedelemség korának országgyűlései (Adalék az erdélyi rendiség történetéhez) (Budapest, 1976).

On the progress of reform see Mihály Bucsay, Der Protestantismus in Ungarn, 1521-1978: Ungarns Reformationskirchen in Geschichte und Gegenwart; 1. Im Zeitalter der Reformation, Gegenreformation und katholischen Reform (Vienna, 1977). Robert Evans, “Calvinism in East Central Europe: Hungary and Her Neighbours,” in International Calvinism, 1541-1715, ed. Menna Prestwich (Oxford, 1985), 167-97; Earl Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England and America (Cambridge, MA, 1952); Mihály Balázs, Az erdélyi antitrinitarizmus az 1560 -- as évek végén (Budapest, 1988).

Sándor Szilágyi, ed., Monumenta Comitialia Regni Transylvaniae. Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek. Magyar Történelmi Emlékek Harmadik osztály, 21 vols. (Budapest, 1875-1898), vol. 2 (1877), 64-65, referred to hereinafter, EOE. See also M. Zsilinszky, A magyar országgyűlések vallásügyi tárgyalásai a reformátiotól kezdve (Budapest, 1880).

“quisque teneret eam fidem quam vellet cum novis et antiquis ceremonijs ...;” EOE 2 (1877): 78.

“eam quam vellet, papisticam videlicet aut lutheranam religionem profteretur ...;” EOE 2 (1877): 93.

EOE 2 (1877): 218.

EOE 2 (1877): 224.

EOE 2 (1877): 226-27.

“pro quiete regnicolarum;” EOE 2 (1877): 231-32.

EOE 2 (1877): 302-03.

“az birodalomból minden nemzetség közűl efféle igéje szabadon hirdettessék kiváltképen pedig az oláhok között ...;” EOE 2 (1877): 326.

EOE 2 (1877): 341, 365. “az keresztyén religión való oláh papok ...;” EOE 3 (1877): 118, 144, 240.

EOE 3 (1877): 240. Krista Zach, Orthodoxe Kirche und rumänisches Volksbewusstsein im 15. bis 18. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1977).

“mindön helyökön az prédikátorok az evangéliomot prédikálják, hirdessék, kiki az ő értelme szerént, és az község ha venni akarja, jó, ha nem penig senki kénszerítéssel ne kénszerítse az ő lelke azon meg nem nyúgodván, de oly prédikátort tarthasson, az kinek tanítása ő nekic tetszik. Ezért penig senki az superintendensök közűl, se egyebek az prédikátorokat meg ne bánthassa, ne szidalmaztassék senki az religióért senkitől, az elébbi constitutiók szerént, és nem engedtetik ez senkinek, hogy senkit fogsággal, avagy helyéből való priválással fenyögessön az tanításért, mert az hit istennek ajándéka, ez hallásból lészön, mely hallás istennek igéje által vagyon;” EOE 2 (1877): 343.

EOE 2 (1877): 354.

EOE 2 (1877): 368.

“ha valamely minister criminalis excessusba találtatik azt a superintendens megitélhesse, minden functiojától priválhassa, az után ez országból ki özettessék;” EOE 2 (1877): 374.

“ha külömb és új dolognak vallásában találtatnak, ő nagysága excommunicáltassa ...;” EOE 2 (1877): 528.

EOE 2 (1877): 534, 541; FOE 3 (1877): 122.

EOE 2 (1877): 577.

EOE 3 (1877): 108, 122-23.

EOE 3 (1877): 122, 125, 142.

EOE 3 (1877): 143. Maria Crăciun, “Traditional Practices: Catholic Missionaries and Protestant Religious Practice,” in Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe, ed. Helen Parish, William Naphy (Manchester, 2002), 75-93.

EOE 3 (1877): 157, 203, 213. These articles about the position of Catholic priests were reiterated in 1584 and 1585 under the new governor Zsigmond Báthory.

“senki per vim ne kényszerítse, hogy eképpen in recepta religione, az régi articulusok tartása szerént, religionis libertas megmaradjon;” EOE 3 (1877): 238-40.

EOE 3 (1877): 384-85.

“Az mi a religio dolgát nézi, végeztük országúl hogy az recepta religiok, tudniillik catholica sive romana, lutherana, calvinistica et ariana libere mindenütt megtrathassanak;” EOE 3 (1877), 472. David Daniel, “The Fifteen Years’ War and the Protestant Responses to Habsburg Absolutism in Hungary,” East Central Europe 8 (1981): 38-51.

This ban on Jesuits from Gyulafehérvár was overturned in 1599. EOE 4 (1878): 196, 268-9.

EOE 4 (1878): 197.

EOE 4 (1878): 551.

László Makkai, “István Bocskai’s Insurrectionary Army,” in From Hunyadi to Rákóczi: War and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary, ed. János M. Bak, Béla Király (Brooklyn, NY, 1982), 275-97. Kálmán Benda, “Habsburg Absolutism and the Resistance of the Hungarian Estates in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Crown, Church and Estates: Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Robert J. W. Evans, Trevor V. Thomas (London, 1991), 123-28.

Vencel Biró, Bethlen Gábor és az erdélyi katholicizmus (Kolozsvár, 1929). A. Jakab, “Az erdélyi római katolikus püspöki szék betöltésének vitája a xvii. Században,” Erdélyi Múzeum 49 (1944): 5-20.

“Approbatae Constitutiones,” in Magyar Törvénytár: 1500-1848 évi erdélyi törvények, ed. Sándor Kolozsvári, Kelemen Óvári, Dezső Márkus (Budapest, 1900), “Pars prima.” Article 1/1/2 offered rights to the “négy recepta, úgymint: Evangelica reformata (vulgo Calviniana), Lutherana sive Augustana, Romano-Catholica, Unitaria vel Antitrinitaria ...,” while according to Article 1/1/3, “az oláh, vagy görögök sectáján lévőket, kik pro tempore szenvedtetnek, usque beneplacitum principum et regnicolarum.” János Barcza, “A vallási türelem elvi alapjai a xvii. század magyar protestáns teológiájában,” Theológiai Szemle 21 (1978): 282-91.

Confessional Identity in East-Central Europe, ed. Maria Crăciun, Ovidiu Ghitta, Graeme Murdock (Aldershot, 2002).

See József Pokoly, Az erdély református egyház története, 5 vols. (Budapest, 1904), I: 170-72; Jenő Zoványi, A reformáczió magyarországon 1565-ig (Budapest, 1921); Jenő Zoványi, A magyarországi protestántizmus 1565-től (Budapest, 1977).

Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier, 1600-1660: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Oxford, 2000), 119-20, 122.

“Petrityvity-Horváth Kozma Önéletirása, 1634-1660,” in Történelmi kalászok, 1603-1711, ed. G. Daniel (Pest, 1862), 5-7.

Wolfgang Reinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Early Modern State: A Reassessment,” Catholic Historical Review 75 (1989) 383-404; Heinz Schilling, “Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich: Religiöser under gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Deutschland zwischen 1555 und 1620,” Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988): 1-45.

The Battle of Christ and Lord Guan: A Sino-European Religious Conflict in the Philippines, 1640

Timothy Brook

On January 13, 1640, a Chinese Christian convert in the village of San Mateo, across the Pasig River from Manila, went out behind his house and dug up a statue of Emperor Guan. The Augustinian missionary who baptized him had ordered it burned -- missionaries in the Philippines were known for their “valor and zeal” in destroying popular religious images¹ -- but the man preferred to hedge his bets by hiding the statue in the ground instead of destroying it. The statue, once unearthed, spoke to him.

For six weeks prior to the exhumation, the Chinese and Spanish communities living in the area of Manila had been at war. The weight of numbers had been on the Chinese side, but the weight of arms, technology, and local allegiances had been on the Spanish. This uneven balance had led to a stalemate, with each side entrenched in its defensive position, the Spanish in the walled citadel of Manila, the Chinese in the villages across the Pasig River. Neither had been able to dislodge the other, but the Spanish were beginning to make gains. The Chinese side was growing desperate. The time had come to dig up the buried deity, beg his forgiveness, restore him to his dignity, and call on him to summon the forces of the spirit world to the Chinese side.

COMMUNITIES OF WORSHIP AND ACTION 

Emperor Guan was the apotheosis of Guan Yu, a second-century martial hero whose story most Chinese knew through a popular novel, The Three Kingdoms, in which Guan Yu is a major character. Guan was a general, celebrated because his unwavering loyalty to his childhood friend and later ruler led to his tragic demise. Over the millennium and a half between the second century and the seventeenth, this fictional/historical character acquired a rich array of attributes and a diverse set of devotees. Buddhists revered him as a defender of their faith; his fierce statue stands at the gate of every Chinese Buddhist monastery.² Soldiers respected him as the god who oversees the oath of loyalty binding them to their commanders, making him the god of war. Merchants, borrowing his reputation for loyalty, cast him in the role of the god of commercial wealth, benefiting those who honor their contracts and punishing those who do not. Over time the Chinese state attached its expectation of loyalty to the figure of Guan, notably in the Yuan dynasty (1260-1368). The Ming (1368-1644) fully incorporated him into the ritual corpus of the dynasty, granting him, in 1615, the supreme title of “Emperor.” 

Prasenjit Duara has nicely described the simultaneous overlaying of disparate values and identities onto a single symbol as “superscribing.”³ By superscribing their versions onto the deity, many communities could claim him as the focus of their ritual practice, without any one interpretation claiming exclusive control. This freedom for identities to accumulate around a single figure meant that new constituencies could adopt the deity without threatening his authority in other fields. This plasticity meant that what Guan stood for, and whom he represented, could shift with changing religious and moral needs, without his having to be either rejected or reformed. The cult of Emperor Guan was capacious enough to accommodate all versions, not by unifying every community of worship into a single cult, but by allowing them all to settle in behind a façade of uniformity.⁴ Given the state’s conspicuous attempts to honor Emperor Guan, the deity’s capacity to provide a focal point for distinct communities of worship might have been severely threatened with the dismantling of the imperial ritual corpus in 1911, but it wasn’t. His signification was never so much in the hands of the state that it excluded engagement with other, more narrowly defined communities, which is why to this day the deity still has his adherents.⁵

The cohabitation of many identities within a single symbol of worship depended on a polytheistic religious environment, and Chinese religion in 1640 was radically polytheistic. Many deities received sacrifice and prayer, and did so from many different communities. Conversely, rarely was a person devoted to one deity to the exclusion of others; even Buddhist monks, whose lives were devoted to the worship of Buddhist deities and the perpetuation of Buddhism, prayed to Emperor Guan in his guise as their protector. Multiple veneration did not mean indiscriminate worship. People arranged the deities they favored in a hierarchy of worship or, more precisely, in a geography of worship, sacrificing most intensely and on a regular basis to those considered closest at hand: within the household, the Stove God; within the village, the God of the Earth; and within a guild or occupational group, the deity its members had chosen as their patron. They revered more distant deities on a schedule that could be seasonal rather than daily.

Although Emperor Guan was ubiquitous in Chinese religious culture and universally acknowledged as a spiritual force, the state cult endowed him with such lofty authority that many worshippers regarded him as a deity in the middle distance, who could be revered as a national figure to whom anyone had the right to pray, but less likely as a local deity, whose worship had to be maintained.⁶ Merchants, landless laborers, and soldiers were the notable exceptions: to them he was the closest of deities, the one to be turned to in times of trouble. This is why the deity around which Chinese in Manila in 1640, most of whom were men of commerce or men of labor, and all of whom were under military threat, could conceive of rallying themselves into a community of worship and action -- what the leading Chinese scholar of the Guan cult has aptly termed “a society of strangers” -- was Emperor Guan.⁷

Unlike the Chinese around Manila, the Spanish were clear that they constituted a community of worship without having to find a deity around whom to rally. Jesus and Mary were fully installed as main, and utterly complementary, choices. As it happened, in January 1640 it was Jesus rather than Mary to whom they turned. Within a day or two of Emperor Guan’s exhumation, the Spanish forces pushed the insurgents back from Manila. One of the outlying towns they overran to the east of Manila was Antipolo. The Chinese had put the Jesuit mission church to the torch before departing, so that smouldering ruins were all that remained when the Spanish arrived. A soldier scavenging through the ashes discovered the image that had stood over the altar, a statue of Christ, singed but otherwise intact. The soldier presented the statue to the Spanish governor of the Philippines, Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera. Its survival was taken as proof that the Christian God was on the Spaniards’ side and that victory would be theirs. The governor accepted the statue and the interpretation that went with it. He had it hoisted on a pole and raised as the standard of the Spanish forces as they went into battle. The Chinese insurgency against the Spanish colonial government in the Philippines was no longer just a battle between communities; it was a battle of the gods.

RELIGION AND EARLY MODERN EMPIRES

In the history of the early modern world, religion is far more visible as a signifier around which people organized for conflict than as a basis for accommodation. Whether religion actively accelerated intercultural conflict in the early modern world is not a question I wish to address in this essay. My interest, rather, is to draw attention to its visibility in the accounts that survive from the seventeenth century describing how communities rallied for action in moments of crisis by casting themselves as communities of worship, and how that might help us understand the place of religion in the historical experience of imperial expansion. 

Expansion in the seventeenth century meant that Europeans were constantly having to confront crises, and almost as constantly create them. Such conflict is invariably accompanied by a closing of ranks: Europeans strengthened the boundaries between themselves and those with whom they found themselves in conflict. Given the highly unstable nature of intra-European national identities among the majority of Europeans, religious identities more consistently served to delineate and intensify loyalties. Even when European contacts with peoples elsewhere were not overtly conflictual, leaders of expatriate Europeans, sensing a need to bolster identities in the face of competing choices, made use of religion as a marker of obligatory inclusion.⁸ The communities they encountered, especially if they were in conflict, could be expected to rely on similar boundary markers within their own traditions, and to shun those who crossed over to the Europeans’ identity -- most visibly, those who converted to Christianity.

Many well-known sites of religious conflict mark the map of the seventeenth-century world, but none are usually associated with China. There, the familiar story is one of accommodation rather than conflict. The wisdom of accommodation arose due to conditions imposed from the Chinese side. First of all, the Ming and Qing governments (the dynasty changed in 1644) were fiercely protective of sovereignty and regarded the infiltration of foreign agents, commercial or otherwise, as a direct attack on that sovereignty. Aside from the tiny peninsula of Macao, which was granted under somewhat shady circumstances to Portuguese merchants, no piece of Chinese territory was brought under European colonial control. The only way European missionaries could extend their community of worship into China was by accommodating to conditions in China. The few missionaries who were permitted to enter the realm could not rely on the political and economic privileges that were theirs under direct colonialism -- as they could, for example, in the Philippines, where no strong central state existed to oppose colonization. They had to accommodate with other views, other cultural practices, other allegiances. At the slightest sign that their presence was a threat to local order, the Chinese government had them removed. The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci is conventionally viewed as the architect of such accommodation. He handled his mission to Beijing (1601-10) so deftly that the Kangxi emperor, facing pressure on his theological authority from Rome a century later in 1706, declared that European missionaries could remain in China so long as they comported themselves as Ricci had done.⁹

The religious accommodation exacted from the missionaries was possible, secondly, because of the multiconfessional religious culture of Ming China. Emperors might patronize Buddhism or Daoism according to their personal proclivities, and the state might authorize sacrifices to certain revered figures such as Emperor Guan, but there was no state religion. Nor was there only one god, jealous of all the others. No doctrinal barrier or confessional monopoly stood in the way of admitting Christian priests into the country. So long as they did not engage in what the state might regard as seditious activity, such as holding secret meetings, amassing private funds, or passing intelligence to foreign powers, they might be permitted to perform their rites and share their teachings unhindered. Papal infringements on imperial sovereignty in the eighteenth century put an end to Chinese state tolerance for Christianity. 

Unlike European merchants, who were required by papal edict to give passage to Asia to missionaries, Chinese merchants trading to littoral and insular Southeast Asia were under no compulsion to take Buddhist or Daoist priests with them abroad. If they did, these professionals were there to provide for the ritual needs of their compatriots, not to spread Chinese teachings among non-Chinese. In this and many other ways, the Chinese commercial presence around the South China Sea constituted an empire of a different sort than did the European presence. An explanation for this difference might consider the difference in organizational forms between the dispersed institutional culture of Chinese religion and the politically active and centralized European church; it might look at the different forms of religious professionalization required for the more family-centered orientation of Chinese ritual performance versus the diocesan organization of professionalized Christian practice; it might also factor in different conventions of intercession and absolution. But these internal factors are less salient to the historical problem I address in this essay than the political context in which religion operated. If China in the seventeenth century was a site of religious accommodation in the history of Christianity, it was so because the Chinese state was strong enough to force European missionaries into the accommodative posture it expected of its own people.

What happens when we shift the Sino-European relationship to a location outside the boundaries of Ming China, where this condition no longer applies? Religious accommodation disappears, for the reason that Europeans entering regions of weak sovereignty chose to impose religious dominance as part of a strategy to assert political and economic dominance, and acted aggressively when there was any sign that indicated that dominance was not secure. My test case for this proposition is an outbreak of violence between Chinese and Spaniards in the winter of 1639-40 on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. This encounter took place outside the realm of Emperor Chongzhen (r. 1628-44), but within the elastic reach of the colonial empire of Philip IV (r. 1621-65). The violence was not prompted by religious conflict, but religious commitments came into play on both sides as the economic and political costs of the conflict rose. My approach to this incident is to see the role of religion in intercultural conflict from both sides.

Spain began drawing the Philippines into its imperial orbit in the 1560s by competing effectively against the Moro (Muslim) princes who had established themselves in strategic trading locations a few decades before the Spanish arrived. Spaniards took over the port of Manila in 1571, making it their main trading base in Asia and the door through which the lucrative exchange of silver for Chinese commodities passed between the Spanish merchants of Acapulco and the Chinese merchants of Fujian province. When the first Spaniards arrived in Manila, they found several hundred Chinese already living there. This port was one of many points on the outer edge of a circuit of trade that extended from Zhangzhou on China’s southeast coast and radiated outward around the South China Sea and into Southeast Asia.¹⁰

If one were to speak of this network of trade as an “empire,” it would be a purely commercial empire, armed only to the extent necessary to beat off pirate attacks at sea. The Ming state was not involved. It policed its borders, collected posted duties on imports, and campaigned intermittently against smugglers, but otherwise left merchants to fend for themselves. The Spanish presence in Manila, on the other hand, betokened an empire that was commercial in function, monarchical in form, and religious in self-conception. Commercial demand, political authority, and religious intolerance on the Spanish side conspired in the winter of 1639 to bring the two sides into deadly conflict. The conflict was not generated by “religious” difference, yet religion-hardened community identities shaped the very possibility of conflict.

PRESSURES FOR CONFLICT

The conflict started small. On November 19, 1639, as night settled on the village of Calamba southeast of Manila, several hundred Chinese farmers burst into the house of Luis Arias de Mora. The farmers had gone to Calamba to carve rice paddies out of the wilderness for the Spanish, and Mora was the cold face of Spanish colonial rule. He regarded his position as administrator as a right to bleed the five thousand Chinese of everything he could take. A summer of drought followed by unseasonable cold in the fall decimated the harvest, and an epidemic then took the lives of some three hundred. Mora was aware of the local desperation but continued to overtax. Sound asleep when the mob arrived, he had no chance of escape. The insurgents dragged him outside, denounced him, and put him to death. That act completed, they burned their village, sent their families into the hills, then headed by foot in the direction of Manila to petition Governor Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera to forgive their righteous anger and aid them in their distress. 

As alcalde mayor of Calamba and a member of the Audiencia, the judicial council in Manila, Mora was the region’s governor, commander, and judge in one. In all three roles he had conducted his rule harshly, gaining an evil reputation not just among the Chinese who farmed the land but among Spaniards as well. The Spanish priest who authored the “Relation of the Insurrection of the Chinese,” the document on which this reconstruction is based, acknowledged that Mora “oppressed” the people “with continual extortions and punishment.”¹¹ Mora’s oppression was linked to a larger problem, and that was food. In 1639, Manila was home to as many as six thousand “Spanish,” a category that included Portuguese, Flemings, Venetians, Italians, Greeks, French, and anyone else who had come on Spanish ships as sailors, workmen, carpenters, and gunners and who wasn’t Asian or Black. Their number was in turn overshadowed by at least four times that number of Chinese. Neither group had been there in such numbers when the first Spaniards arrived in Manila seven decades earlier. Then it had been a small trading port with a population in the hundreds, a number that could eat from the small surplus that the local Tagals grew in gardens in the hinterland. As the port blossomed into the main entrepôt for trade between East Asia and Europe, however, the mouths grew to thirty thousand. Some rice was brought down from Panay and Pampanga in the Luzon interior, but most had to be imported from China. Demand could not guarantee a steady supply, since rice in Chinese junks competed for cargo space with higher-value porcelains and textiles. A local solution had to be found.

The need for food attracted land-starved farmers from the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian, but they grew vegetables and raised chickens rather than investing the time and labor needed to build rice paddies. Only slowly did local rice production develop. The Spanish did not have the patience to wait. Their first impulse was to follow South American precedent and herd the Tagals into concentrated villages, or “reductions,” where their social and religious lives could be monitored, their labor controlled, and their agricultural output seized.¹² Local resistance to this regimen prevented the reduction scheme from making much headway in the Philippines. Unlike the Chinese who crossed over from Fujian, populated beyond its ecological limit, the indigenous Tagals did not feel the hot breath of Malthusian catastrophe on their necks. The alternative to the reductions were rice colonies worked not by Tagals but by Chinese, and not through coercion but by contract and recruitment. Between them, the Chinese and Spanish constructed the new agricultural economy of the colony over the heads of the indigenous population and their economy.

Instead of trying to turn indolent indigenes into productive field laborers, the governor of the Philippines, Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera, recruited some five thousand Chinese to open agricultural land, some of them in Calamba under the greedy eyes of Luis Arias de Mora. Being “royal service,” this work exempted Chinese from the taxes they would normally have to pay. What the governor did not anticipate was that Mora would use this tax concession as an opportunity to levy his own charges on the cultivators and punish anyone who challenged his right to do so. To make matters worse, many of the transplanted farmers found themselves without adequate shelter and supplies when they arrived. When an epidemic swept through Calamba (presumably an infection brought by the Spaniards), killing over three hundred, the farmers punished Mora and marched on Manila.

News of the insurrection reached the capital the next day. That evening the Spanish fired the cannon on the city’s walls to warn everyone to take refuge in the city before the gates were barred. The city was for Spaniards and their servants only. Chinese had to live outside the walls in a palisaded ghetto known as the Parián. This was one of many controls the Spanish put in place over a population they did not trust. The Parián dated to 1581, when a governor who regarded the Chinese as “a mean, impudent people, as well as very importunate,” because of their refusal to cooperate in his plans to dispatch missionaries to China, wanted them placed under confinement.¹³  Being built of wood, the Parián burned frequently and just as regularly had to be rebuilt, at Chinese expense. The town that stood there in 1639 dated only from 1628, when a fire reduced it to ashes in a matter of hours. One report on the fire, probably by a Dominican priest, expressed surprise that the grander Chinese buildings, which had pillars so large that two men could not join hands when standing on either side, burned so easily. For this hostile missionary, their flammability had a bright side, for it proved that “the fire was the punishment of Heaven for the so horrible sins by which those heathen Chinese provoked the wrath of God,” especially as the Church of the Three Kings, from which the Dominicans attempted to convert the Chinese, “escaped from the midst of this fire of Sodom.” The devastation was brief, for the priest reported that most of the Parián “was rebuilt in squares with straight streets and uniform houses” within four months.¹⁴ Not all visitors were so hostile. A Spanish visitor to the Chinese ghetto observed in 1637 that “it is a very curious place to see because of the fine order in which they live.”¹⁵ Fine order was apparently not something he expected to find.

When word of the insurrection reached him, Governor Corcuera ordered Martín de Acuña, Manila’s popular military commander, to get his cavalry on their horses and drive back the insurgents. Acuña rode south that night with thirty Spanish soldiers and a Jesuit priest, Villamayor. The following morning he launched an ill-considered attack on some four thousand insurgents, during which he was killed. After defeating Acuña, the insurgents headed in the direction of Manila, drawing to their ranks growing numbers of Chinese from other agricultural colonies. The next town in their path was San Pedro. Its Jesuit church and novitiate made it an attractive symbolic target. One Spanish Jesuit and two lay brothers at San Pedro had been evangelizing among the Tagals here, with some success. As word of the insurrection reached them, the locals rushed to the church for protection. As the missionary gave them confession, the brothers prepared a defense.

THE CHRISTIAN MISSION IN THE PHILIPPINES

Christianizing the Philippines was an early and high priority when the Spanish first established themselves there, both for its own sake as well as for creating a base from which to launch a greater missionary assault on China, the vast spiritual prize that lay temptingly to the northwest. The widespread enthusiasm for the project of mission was a useful arguing point for those who hoped to double it with the project of empire and persuade the Spanish crown to conquer China. In a letter that one penurious Philippine Spaniard wrote to Philip II even before Salcedo had found Manila, a raise in his salary was justified by the probable outcome of paying him well: “All of us your Majesty’s servants and vassals are quite sure that, in your time, China will be a subject of your Majesty, and that in these parts, the religion of Christ will be spread and exalted, and your majesty’s royal crown increased, and all this in a very short time.”¹⁶ How, he implied, could the king refuse him when so much lay in the balance to be won? The prospect of converting the Chinese was a constant obsession, and a good excuse for pleading for money.

Augustinians, Franciscans, and Dominicans, plus a smaller number of Jesuits, came to the Philippines to do the work of conversion. By an agreement made in 1594, the Dominicans were assigned the task of evangelizing among the Chinese, as this was seen as a way to prepare them for working in China. The Church of the Holy Kings in the Parián was the core of the Dominican mission to the Chinese. A note dated 1628 in the church baptismal register indicates that Dominican priests there had baptized 1,331 Chinese. This was not a large number given the size of the population, and many were converts of convenience. The register also shows a more prominent beginning: the Dominicans were starting to baptize the small first generation of mixed Chinese-Filipino children.¹⁷

With lucrative interests and powerful friends, the three larger religious orders wielded great influence in Philippine politics and life, as each governor in his turn would discover when he tried to maneuver around them. Governor Corcuera, who had more trouble than most, turned to the Jesuits in his intense political battles with Church authorities (Villamayor may have been sent with Acuña to be his eyes and ears). His fights with Archbishop Guerrero were legendary, the one exiling the other, the other excommunicating him in return several times during the 1630s.¹⁸ “It seems that Your Majesty has sent me here,” Corcuera complained to his king in 1636 after another round in this battle, “not to govern the Philippines but to conquer the religious, because in the eleven months I have been here I have done nothing but argue with them over jurisdiction and the royal patronage.” What placed Corcuera at odds with the Church was his publicly announced goal to balance the budget and end the drain that the upkeep of the Spanish presence in the Philippines put on the royal treasury. The Church argued back that Corcuera was intent only on enriching himself at their expense. The struggle proved exhausting and Corcuera asked to retire. Before he could, the Chinese rose in Calamba.

The insurgency did not drive a wedge between the indigenous population and the Spaniards. For native converts who had entered the Spaniards’ community of worship, in fact, it only widened the gap between them and the Chinese. Doubtful of their safety, the Tagal converts living at San Pedro sought the church’s protection, but they had only tiles and bricks to repel their far more numerous attackers. After besieging the building for twenty-four hours, the insurgents battered down the doors, driving the inmates to the upper floor of the Jesuit house. When the house caught fire, the missionary decided to negotiate a surrender on the condition that lives be spared. The European, the two lay brothers, and fifteen Tagals gave themselves up on the promise of good treatment. The rest were unwilling to trust any promise from the Chinese, however, and sought sanctuary on the church roof. The fire cut off any chance of escape, but it also prevented the insurgents from getting at them. Theirs proved the wiser course: the missionary and the lay brothers were held as hostages, but the fifteen Tagals were killed.

The siege of San Pedro gave Juan de Arceo the time he needed to bring into action a Spanish force of eighty cavalry and two hundred infantry, a native army of a hundred Pampangos. and four hundred Tagals, all bearing arquebuses, plus two mobile cannon. As soon as the forward section of this force reached San Pedro on November 22, they skirmished with the insurgents, inflicting losses without taking any casualties. But they were not ready to launch a full-scale attack and chose to wait for reinforcements. In that lull a third party entered the scene: the Chinese of the Parián. While Governor Corcuera was mobilizing his forces, they dispatched a delegation to mediate between the two sides and bring what could only spell ruin for their commercial fortunes to an end. The Spanish agreed to suspend their attack while the Parián delegates talked to the insurgents. They managed to convince the latter to agree to a truce and hand over their Jesuit hostage as a sign that they were acting in good faith (though not the two lay brothers -- they would later escape in the fighting). What could have turned into a full-scale war looked to have been averted.

ESCALATION OF THE CONFLICT

The plan failed. An adjutant named Benavides, one of Arceo’s subordinates, was leading a separate troop of twenty-five Spaniards toward San Pedro by river. According to Spanish hindsight (though how can this be proved now, especially knowing that Corcuera was under suspicion for betraying a truce in Mindanao a year earlier?) Benavides had no knowledge that a settlement was being negotiated. When he reached San Pedro and found all quiet, he assumed that he was catching the insurgents by surprise, and launched a vicious attack that sent them fleeing. Rather than disentangle the mess that Benavides’ assault had caused, the rest of the Spanish force joined the fight. The Chinese were caught completely off guard. Suddenly the war that was off was on again. In the ensuing melee, three hundred Chinese were killed and many hundreds captured and taken to Cavite, where their punishment would be forced service in the hated coastal galleys. This unexpected betrayal obliged the Chinese to retreat back toward Calamba in order to regroup, but they could not organize themselves against the onslaught of the columns of Spaniards, Tagals, and Pampango warriors. Three-quarters of the insurgents were slaughtered there, and many who fled back into the hills or slipped into nearby ravines were hunted down by native fighters under the direction of Augustinian friars.

No sooner had the Chinese in Calamba been suppressed than word of the uprising spread among the Chinese working on a colonial estate in Sagar. They rose up, burned the colony, and launched an assault on Manila from the north, gathering more farmers on the way. They captured Meyhaligue across the Pasig River from Manila on Tuesday, November 29, just as Arceo’s troops were returning from Calamba. Before the soldiers could enter the city gates, Corcuera dispatched them to the town of Santa Cruz, which stood between Meyhaligue and the river, with orders to block the onslaught and see that the large Chinese community in Santa Cruz did not join the insurgents. Despite residence restrictions, the Chinese population had long outgrown the Parián and since the 1590s had been living here and in the two towns of Tondo and Binondo further down the north bank of the Pasig River, where Augustinians operated another agricultural estate employing Chinese farmers. 

To show the Santa Cruz Chinese that he was confident of success, Corcuera appeared in their midst. He made a tactical error when he gave permission to several hundred, who approached him and asked permission to fight the insurgents, only to defect immediately to the other side. They launched an assault that almost won them Corcuera. That night the Spanish abandoned Santa Cruz under cover of darkness, dismantled the bridge that joined the town to the Parián and destroyed the boats along the river before retreating inside the walls of Manila. Except for two fortified churches, the entire north bank of the Pasig was in Chinese hands. A particular grievance against a corrupt local administrator had turned into a colony-wide insurgency.

The question is not just why did this happen, but why at this time. There was the general resentment of the Chinese against the Spaniards’ high-handed treatment going all the way back to 1604, when a hysterical European populace, egged on by Archbishop Miguel de Benavides, massacred as many as twenty thousand Chinese. But even this resentment does not explain why this uprising happened when it did. For the timing, we have to look at what the colony lived and died with: the Manila galleon that sailed annually from Acapulco laden with silver. What made Manila the largest trade entrepôt in East Asia was the seemingly inexhaustible supply of silver from the silver mountain of Potosí that paid for seemingly endless supplies of Chinese wares. That trade went into steady decline in the 1630s, hitting a new low in 1639 and driving global trade into depression in 1640.¹⁹ Part of the responsibility lay with the viceroy of New Spain, whose decision to crack down on corruption in Acapulco reduced the flow of silver to Manila over the next decade by a quarter, or in absolute terms, by close to ten thousand kilograms. More serious, though, was the declining productivity of the silver deposits at Potosí. The accessible ore had been taken out by 1630, which meant that costs of extraction and refinement rose. The decline in production appears in the declining value of silver declared for taxation in the Lima treasury: 25,482 pesos worth of bar silver declared between June 1636 to June 1637, compared with 8,065 for the fiscal year 1637-38, and merely 2,777 for 1638-39.²⁰ By 1639, the municipal councillors of Potosí were sufficiently distressed to send a representative to Madrid to plead for tax concessions to stimulate trade.²¹

The contraction in the silver supply was more than enough to upset a trading economy as finely balanced as Manila’s, where exchange flourished only so long as the debts of one trading season could be covered by the payments in the next. The Ming government made the situation more difficult by lifting its on-again, off-again ban on foreign trade, which it had reimposed in 1628.²² The Chinese response was immediate: thirty Chinese ships, an unprecedented number, arrived in Manila that year, compared with the sixteen that came in 1638.²³ The Chinese merchants had a flood of goods to sell and a mountain of bills to pay, and the Spanish had nothing to pay them with and nothing therefore to sell on to Acapulco. The strain on both sides was intolerable. When the farmers in Calamba and Sagar rose up against the Spanish, they were doing so at a time when both sides of the Manila trading nexus were facing bankruptcy and desperately suspicious of the other side’s actions and motives. The traders feared there lay open to them no other choice than to join the insurrection, and the Spaniards, no other course but massacre.

The massacre began late in the morning of December 2. According to the sole surviving Spanish source, the Chinese in the Parián started it by killing the handful of Spanish guards at the Church of the Three Kings and making a dash to Santa Cruz over a bridge they had secretly rebuilt the night before. Arceo led a troop of infantry out of the east gate of Manila to drive them back while Lorenzo de Olaso, Corcuera’s master-of-camp, tried to block the way to the bridge. Rather than allow themselves to get bottlenecked at the Parián gate, the Chinese began to tear down the wall along the riverfront so that they might link up with their compatriots across the river. Shells rained down on them from the ramparts of Manila, and fire broke out. As the Parián began to burn, a cry went up inside Manila to kill all the Chinese within their own stone walls. The governor himself gave the order. Soon the streets of Manila were littered with Chinese corpses, to which were added surrendered prisoners who were brought within the city walls and executed: a conservative estimate at the time put the casualties in and around Manila and the Parián that day at three thousand. Corcuera that day ordered the port warden to sequester the 1,400 Chinese there inside a church, from which they were then taken in groups of ten to be executed. Armed with nothing but the ivory crucifixes torn from the walls, only twenty-three escaped alive.²⁴ Three days later Corcuera relayed the same order to his regional administrators, advising them to act immediately lest word of the extermination leak from one district to the next. Between December 5 and 7, at least 3,000 Chinese farmers were put to death. Not even converts were excepted.

Back in Manila, the Spanish and the Chinese in Manila eyed each other across the Pasig River, neither confident enough to move against the other. The stalemate lasted three weeks, and then the Spanish launched their counterattack. After a few days of fierce fighting, the Chinese abandoned Santa Cruz, slipping off undetected during the night of Thursday, December 29. Thereafter the story becomes a series of bold attacks and desperate retreats, of firearms captured and provisions abandoned, of discipline and disorder, of escapes and massacres, stretching out over almost two months.

The military situation began to turn against the Chinese in the second week of January, which is when the convert in San Mateo exhumed the statue of Emperor Guan. According to what Spanish interrogators later learned, the statue spoke. “I consider myself appeased and satisfied for the previous injury done to me,” Emperor Guan declared. “And I promise, besides this, my favor, provided that you burn all the churches, profane all that is sacred, and inflict on the Christians all the harm you possibly can.”²⁵ His assistance was contingent on the annihilation of the Spaniards’ religion. Aside from the unlikelihood that the statue said anything at all, Guan’s bargain sounds more like what a jealous Old Testament God would impose on his fickle followers, and is probably the Spanish priest-chronicler’s interpolation. Whatever Guan did or did not promise to his community of worship, his exhumation failed to stem the changing tide. Within a few days the Spaniards retrieved the blackened Christ from the ruins in Antipolo and carried it into the battle. A conflict over economic distress, at least as it is narrated in the Spanish “Relation,” had morphed into a battle of the gods.

BETWEEN HENOTHEISM AND POLYTHEISM

The Spaniards knew the trope of contests between gods from tales of Roman battles; it was also deeply embedded in their evangelical culture. Priests understood the transactional nature of devotion, accustomed as they had become to construing every victory on their own side as a victory for Christ. As did the Chinese. Officials in Beijing were not in the least surprised, for instance, when the Jesuit missionary Adam Schall von Bell (1592-1666), who just at this time was casting cannon in the capital for the Ministry of War, knelt before a statue of Christ before starting up the forge.²⁶ One did not need to be a Christian to regard a well-cast cannon as evidence of the power of the caster’s god. So, too, the combatants outside Manila would have understood the invocation of the Christ of Antipolo on one side and Emperor Guan of San Mateo on the other.

Despite the common awareness that the gods could be called upon to intervene at extraordinary moments in daily life, the two sides understood the efficacy of deities in somewhat different ways. Consider first the European perspective. Centuries of Protestantism and Counter-Reformationism have habituated us to think of Christianity as monotheistic. Seventeenth-century Europeans acted in a way that suggests to me they were closer to the Hebrew tradition of henotheism that runs through the Old Testament. Henotheism is faith in one god above all others, the belief that among the gods one’s own is the most powerful. The biblical commandment does not declare that there are no other gods, only that those who follow Jehovah are not permitted to take any other gods before him. The existence of the Jehovah of the Old Testament did not therefore automatically negate the existence of other gods; his power was simply greater than others’. And given the miserable conditions in which those who followed him often found themselves, time and again he was obliged to show proof that he was more powerful than the gods of the Israelites’ competitors.

The Chinese insurgents would have understood this competition for power. Gods are not equipotent, being as subject to growth and decay as everything else in the natural world, acquiring and losing power on the basis of the sacrifices made to them, competing with each other, intervening or refusing to intervene in human affairs. This is why the convert who buried the Guan statue would have been loathe to follow his priest’s command to burn it. Whereas the Augustinian could not tolerate the worship of Guan alongside the worship of Christ, the convert saw the relationship between Christ and Guan in a different way. If he took up the worship of Christ, it was because he had decided that Christ could better deliver the protection and assistance he expected a god to provide than Guan. Doing so did not deny the existence of Emperor Guan nor exclude the possibility that Guan might become efficacious once again. The convert was simply transferring loyalties on a provisional basis. Both were gods, both deserved reverence to the degree that they could respond to the prayers of the faithful, and both were subject to regular re-evaluation on the basis of the efficacy of their responses. The rational course was to keep the Guan statue in reserve, just in case the Spanish god did not live up to its promises.

Beneath this difference lies the doctrinal difference separating European and Chinese religion: their refusal and willingness, respectively, to accept religious plurality. Seventeenth-century Christians may have accepted that other gods existed, yet relativity of theistic power was anathema to the system by which they organized their beliefs. In China, however, people adopted a different way of looking at multiplicity. Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism -- and even Christianity -- might compete in some quarters and at some times, but they constituted a condominium of teachings that were religions to the extent that they were recognized as paths to goodness. The teachings of one might contradict those of another, but they need not signal incommensurability; more commonly, in fact, they could be expected to enhance the truths the others taught.²⁷ There were occasional calls to expel the Jesuits from China, but never on the grounds that the god the Christians worshipped did not exist or that their own gods could not tolerate one more. When officials attempted to restrict the power of a religion, and from time to time there were calls against Buddhism as well, they were not monotheistically rejecting a false god; but nor, more to the point, were they making a henotheistic move against a competitor. They were polytheistic: all gods might be served so long as that did not interfere with the good order of society or the duty of loyally serving the state.

According to this logic, faith was not conceived as a means for fortifying economic competition and securing colonial domination. Nor were its institutions recruited to serve as armed citadels of colonial power or economic penetration. This is not purely a cultural issue, for the Chinese who were in the Philippines were not there as agents of their monarch; nor were they in service to corporations enjoying royal patronage or investment; nor did they see themselves as advancing a mission that gave priests and soldiers shared dominion over the territories the soldiers conquered. They experienced a different relationship to political power, which in turn was linked to their state’s very different relationship to overseas economic resources. The Chinese who traded at Manila were orphans in the family of their state, not favorite sons celebrated for carving out vast territories for the greater glory of their sovereign, their god, and themselves. They were never in a position to regard the Philippines as a space they could occupy as agents of a political empire. They did not command the military means to use violence to secure their profits and positions; they did not arrogate to themselves the right to collect taxes on behalf of themselves or their monarch; and they did not seek to install a political order that would force the compliance of others. They were just merchants taking advantage of domestic supply, offshore demand, and a porous maritime border to get rich. Their gods could not but reflect the political economy in which they operated.

The state they left at home saw no reason that matters should be otherwise arranged. When Chinese complained to Chinese officials after the massacre in 1604, the governor of Fujian province wrote to his counterpart in Manila saying that the emperor demanded that justice be done for “this great evil,” yet also that the emperor “did not consider these people of any value,” that they were “a base people, ungrateful to China, their native country, to their parents, and to their relatives, since so many years had passed during which they had not returned to China.” No European monarch would have understood his relationship to subjects trading overseas in this way: as renegades who had vacated their moral responsibilities, rather than active subjects whose deaths constituted an affront to his personal dignity. The emperor did, however, demand that “the Castilians show justice to the Chinese, send back those who have survived the war, and pay the money due for the goods taken from them.” Failing that, the emperor would put an end to the trade and treat the incident as a causus belli.²⁸ In the end, nothing was done. No Spanish monarch would have let the matter drop, whereas no Chinese monarch would have regarded the issue worth the trouble. No Chinese record of any response, official or otherwise, to the massacre of 1639 has survived.

Corcuera realized that pursuing the insurgents would only drive them further from Manila and thereby destroy the fragile colonial structures that their labor and trade sustained. After a failed ultimatum, Corcuera sent a Jesuit priest, who had worked among the Chinese and spoke their language, and General Gerónimo Enríquez, the Spanish governor of the Parián and someone the Chinese regarded as trustworthy, to negotiate an end to hostilities. The Chinese negotiators were in no mood to negotiate with men whose governor had gone on record ordering that every Chinese in Luzon be killed, but they knew their fight was over and agreed to a truce. On February 24, close to eight thousand Chinese came forward and laid their weapons before the Spanish army. The defeated Chinese were marched back to Manila together and paraded beneath its walls on the morning of March 16.

The victory march affirmed the precedence of aborigines over Chinese, and Spanish over all. At the head of parade came the elite Spanish force, the cavalry who prevailed in the first skirmishes. The indigenous forces followed next: the Pampangos (led by a Spanish friar), the Cagayans, the Zambal archers (led by a Recollet brother), and the Tagals. These were Spain’s aboriginal allies, marshalled to imperial service by Spanish religious professionals, and without whom the Spanish would not have had the manpower to defeat the insurgents. In their wake walked the defeated Chinese. Behind them marched the Spanish infantry under Olaso. In the commanding position at the end of the column came Governor Corcuera, who never missed an opportunity to display his importance, surrounded by his halberdiers and retainers. Above him, strapped to a pole and held aloft, came the winning god, the singed Christ of Antipolo.

THE VIRGIN OF ANTIPOLO

The struggle between Corcuera and the Church could have ended in stalemate, but the battle between Christ and Guan did not. Military technology was on Christ’s side from the beginning: arquebusses against kitchen knives. The big difference, though, was the global context pitting the gods’ adherents against each other. Christ was a god of war, a god of state, and a god of empire, because that is what Spanish power represented in this part of the world. Emperor Guan was a god of war too, but only in name. The Ming court honoured him with formal titles without organizing its legitimacy around his worship; nor, more to the point, did it ever look on the commercial activities of Chinese in Southeast Asia as any sort of colonial expansion that might give the state new wealth and power. Emperor Guan did not have the capacity to call forth armies from home and send them against enemies abroad when those enemies threatened his people. His exhumation was not a call on the Chinese state to back the insurgents’ cause; it was a last grab at a desperate hope for protection in this hostile foreign land. Strapping Christ to a pole was the Spanish state’s response to what it conceived as a threat to the honour of the empire. Brushing the dirt off Guan could be nothing larger than a local gesture.

There is a new church in Antipolo today. The statue it houses is remembered for having saved Christians from Chinese mobs. If you visit the cathedral (which you can do virtually on the Antipolo website), however, you will quickly notice that the statue is not the same as the statue described in the “Relation of the Insurrection.” This statue is of Mary, not Jesus. Filipino Christians know her as Our Lady of Antipolo, and she sits at the centre of a web of stories celebrating the survival of Spanish rule against Chinese assault, as well as the entire history of the galleon trade. The official story says that the Virgin statue was carved by a native Mexican sculptor and brought by a governor to Manila in 1626. During the crossing, a storm almost destroyed the galleon on which the governor and the Virgin sailed. A fire broke out, yet the ship was not destroyed but managed to limp its way into Manila harbour. The governor could only view this statue as his personal protector, and venerated it accordingly. When the governor died six years later, he bequeathed the statue to the Jesuits. They wanted to place her in their church in Santa Cruz, but portents indicated that she wished to be housed in the new church in the Tagal community of Antipolo. The Virgin got her way. She was installed there after the church was finished in 1633. After 1640, with the church destroyed, Corcuera moved the statue to Cavite to protect the galleon trade. There it remained for a quarter of a century, during which time it was put on five Manila galleons as their transoceanic protector. After many years of service on the run to Acapulco, the statue was eventually returned to Antipolo, where it can be seen alongside another statue of the Virgin brought from Mexico on the same passage in 1626. Both continue to anchor a powerful Tagal cult of the Virgin and are paraded annually toward the end of the lunar year to bless those who believe, in their powers.

So which is it, Corcuera’s Christ, or the Virgin of Antipolo? Are they one and the same? If so, how did the one became the other? Or were they never the same thing at all? Had the Christ statue been lost, encouraging public memory to substitute the one for the other? We are unlikely ever to find an answer; and even if we did, it would be a matter of indifference to the community -- Filipino now rather than Spanish, and diasporic rather than just Manilan -- that now worships her.²⁹ As for the god who was defeated, there is no record of what happened to the statue of Emperor Guan. The Spaniards would have burned Lord Guan in triumph, had he ended up in their hands. But the Chinese would have done the same: fit punishment for a god who failed to deliver the aid they brought him back to provide.

Endnotes 

Juan Francisco de San Antonio, The Philippine Chronicles of Fray San Antonio, trans. D. Pedro Picornell (Manila, 1977), 150. 

On the place of Guan worship within Buddhism, see Timothy Brook, Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China (Cambridge, 1993), 279, 288. 

Prasenjit Duara, “Superscribing Symbols: The Myth of Guandi, Chinese God of War,” Journal of Asian Studies 47.4 (Nov. 1988): 778-95. Huang Huajie, Guan gong de renge yu shenge [The human and divine characteristics of Lord Guan] (Taibei, 1968), 227-29, quoted in Duara, “Superscribing Symbols,” 782. 

Michael Szonyi, “The Illusion of Standardizing the Gods: The Cult of the Five Emperors in Late Imperial China,” Journal of Asian Studies 56.1 (Feb. 1997): 113-35. 

On the capacity of popular deities to evade subsumption by the state, see Richard von Glahn, “The Sociology of Local Religion in the Lake Tai Basin,” in Religion and Chinese Society, ed. John Lagerwey (Hong Kong, 2004), II: 804: “While rites of penance, processions of the gods, and presentation of sacrificial offerings were heavily indebted to the repertoire of imperial ritual, the gods -- the real masters of life and death -- were at once far more powerful than the imperial state, and also more intimately engaged in the lives of their subjects. Moreover, in contrast to the well-defined hierarchical order of the unitary state, the realm of divine power featured multiple and shifting sovereignties.” 

Duara, “Superscribing Symbols,” 786. 

Huang Huajie, Guan gong de renge yu shenge, 227, noted from a reference in Duara, “Superscribing Symbols,” 782. Evidence of religious practice among the Chinese who went out to the Philippines is lacking. A diarist from Zhejiang province writing in 1613 notes that the men who sailed the ships from Fujian to Manila worshipped the Three Teachers (sanshi) on board their ships, but I have been unable to identify this triad; see Li Rihua, Weishui xuan riji [Diary from the Water Tasting Studio] (rprt. Shanghai, 1996), 311. 

On the fluidity of identities among expatriate Europeans in this period, see Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (New York, 2008), 199-209. The insurgency in Manila is treated from a different perspective in chapter 6 of that book. 

Paul Rule, K’ung-tzu or Confucius? The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism (Sydney, 1986), 142. 

The early history of the Chinese in the Philippines is covered in Ch’en Ching-ho, The Chinese Community in the Sixteenth Century Philippines (Tokyo, 1968). 

“Relation of the Insurrection of the Chinese,” translated in The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, ed. E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson (Cleveland, 1905), XXIX: 208-58. The chronicler’s knowledge of Chinese matters suggests he was a Dominican, or possibly a Jesuit. 

On reductions, see John Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565 -1700 (Madison, 1959), 44. 

Blair and Robertson, The Philippine Islands, IV: 67. Spanish attitudes toward Chinese, and their derivation from anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic discourses, are examined in Margaret Horsley, “Sangley: The Formation of Anti-Chinese Feeling in the Philippines: A Cultural Study of the Stereotypes of Prejudice” (Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University, 1950). 

Blair and Robertson, The Philippine Islands, XXII: 211-12. 

Blair and Robertson, The Philippine Islands, XXIX: 69. 

Cited in Horsley, “Sangley,” 104. 

Jesus Merino, “General Considerations Regarding the Chinese Mestizo,” in The Chinese in the Philippines, ed. Alfonso Felix, 2 vols. (Manila and New York, 1966-69) II: 54-56. 

Nicholas Cushner, Spain in the Philippines: From Conquest to Revolution (Quezon City, 1971), 162-65. 

For an analysis of the world monetary crisis of 1640 in relation to the overproduction of silver, see Andre Gunder Frank, Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998), 237-48; for a critical response to Frank’s claims, see Jan de Vries, “Connecting Europe and Asia: A Quantitative Analysis of the Cape-route Trade, 1497-1795,” in Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470-1800, ed. Dennis Flynn, Arturo Giráldez, and Richard von Glahn (Aldershot, 2003), 35-106. 

Engel Sluiter, The Gold and Silver of Spanish America, c. 1572-1648 (Berkeley, 1998), Table B-1. The table suggests that this was a temporary decline, not a secular trend, but the recovery in the early 1640s lasted only six or seven years. 

Jeffrey Cole, The Potosí Mita, 1573 -1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes (Stanford, 1985), 52-53. For other studies of Potosí, see Peter Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545-1650 (Albuquerque, 1984); idem, Silver and Entrepreneurship in Seventeenth-Century PotoíI: The Life and Times of Antonio López de Quiroga (Albuquerque, 1988), esp. 16-23; Enrique Tandeter, L’argent du Potosi: coercion et marché dans l’Amérique coloniale (Paris, 1997). 

Huang Bolu, Zhengjiao fengbao, excerpted in Ming-Qing shiqi Aomen wenti dang’an wenxian huibian [Archives and documents of the Ming-Qing period concerning the question of Macao], ed. Yang Jibo, Wu Zhiliang, and Deng Kaisong, 6 vols. (Beijing, 1999), V: 110. 

Souza, The Survival of Empire, 84, table 4.8. 

“Relation of the Insurrection,” 226-27.

“Relation of the Insurrection,” 237-38. 

Huang Bolu, Zhengjiao fengbao, as extracted in Ming-Qing shiqi Aomen wenti, V: 110-11. 

On the condominium of religions, see Timothy Brook, “Rethinking Syncretism: The Unity of the Three Teachings and their Joint Worship in Late-Imperial China,” Journal of Chinese Religion 21 (Fall, 1993): 13-44. 

Blair and Robertson, The Philippine Islands, XIII: 289. 

A copy of our Lady of Antipolo was installed in April 2002 at Holyrood Cemetery, outside Seattle, to preside over the Filipinos who are buried there. 

Roman Catholic Conservatism in a New North Atlantic World, 1760-1829¹

Luca Codignola

Events during the years from 1760 to 1829 significantly changed the West and the French and British North Atlantic with it. The three generations that lived through the Seven Years’ War, the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Bourbon Restoration firmly believed that they had witnessed the shattering of the familiar world that the pre-1789 era (the Old Regime) had consigned to them. This political earthquake directly affected the Roman Catholic Church in ways that touched on its existence and role in all the countries of the North Atlantic basin. The 1760 Conquest of Canada and its subsequent cession to the British Crown in 1763 delivered a major French-speaking Catholic colony to an English-speaking Protestant ruler. The outcome of the American War of Independence brought religious liberty to the United States, allowing the Church to abandon its semi-clandestine existence and establish an official organization in 1784. Such a felicitous development was soon dwarfed by the devastating events set in motion by the French Revolution, which included the 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the Terror of 1793-94, the abolition of the Catholic cult in 1793, and the vast diaspora of political refugees. For almost two decades, from the French invasion of the Papal States in 1797 to Pope Pius VII’s 1815 return to Rome, Napoleonic rule had a profound, negative effect not only on the French Church but also on the Holy See’s international status. After 1815 the Catholic Church experienced its greatest difficulties with two ever-present instances of internal conflict: ethnic rivalry and the so-called trustee controversy. Both represented potential challenges to its centralized organization under the cope of Rome. One wonders how three generations of Catholics in the North Atlantic world did not collapse under the weight of so many elements of internal and external crisis.²

Historians of the post-1760 Roman Catholic Church have shown little inclination to treat the history of the Church in North America in the context of the North Atlantic world. Local developments are normally interpreted within a national or regional framework or as distant overflows from the center of the British Empire. Worship on the part of the Catholic faithful, not to mention the Catholic hierarchy in its largest sense, was still illegal there until 1829.³ American and French historians have been overwhelmed by the critical significance of the American and French revolutions. Consequently, in the United States and in France the history of the Catholic Church is linked to short- and long-term reactions to or consequences of those major events. For later years these reactions are combined with other national developments, such as the French Empire and the early Bourbon Restoration and the political democratization of and massive immigration to the United States. Quebec historians have invariably interpreted the French Revolution as a decisive factor in the early shaping of the collective psychology of French Canadians. Most also view the strengthening of the church as a fundamental factor in the survival and political emancipation of the Quebec nation within the Dominion of Canada.⁴  In all these instances, the role of the Holy See is interpreted within the framework of bilateral relationships between the national Church and the Roman bureaucracy, and the latter is described at best as poorly informed and slow to react and at worst as willingly and stubbornly espousing reactionary policies that hampered the full blossoming of the progressive components in the national Church in question. 

This national or regional interpretive framework emphasizes internal developments and normally treats them as unique. The larger North Atlantic picture, however, shows that these Church developments in different regions were part of a common attitude, which allowed the Catholic Church not just to survive but indeed to prosper in countries that did not officially acknowledge Church members and often legally discriminated against them. The coincidence in 1829 of the election of a new pope, Pius VIII, and the long-awaited full emancipation of Catholics in Great Britain, Ireland, and throughout the British Empire may well symbolize this turning point from survival to success. Throughout the North Atlantic world, the Church was rapidly becoming a much stronger and more unified body than it had been prior to 1760. This new development took several forms: militant Ultramontanism in France, British North America, and the United States; a devout missionary revival throughout the world, including western Canada and the American Midwest; Ireland’s devotional revolution; the full recognition of the English ecclesiastical hierarchy; and ultimately the beginning of the lengthy and assertive pontificate of Pius IX in 1846. By the middle of the nineteenth century, this universal, Rome-centered, triumphant Church had taken over.⁵

In the North Atlantic world, a common feature seems to have glued together such an apparently varied and conflicted community and strengthened Church organization: an overall conservatism, a deeply ingrained interest in maintaining the status quo concerning political power. During the Old Regime, the Church had always been a conservative body in countries and colonies where Catholicism was the official religion of the ruling crown. Conversely, in countries and colonies ruled by non-Catholic governments, the Church had always been regarded as a potentially subversive body. In the post-1760 period, however, this conservatism was extended to all countries and colonies, whatever their dominant religion. At the philosophical and ideological level, this conservatism inscribed itself within a static and harmonious conception of the universe. The Enlightenment added to this overall framework the notion of the social utility of the Christian religion regardless of individual denominations. In its more pragmatic form aimed at non-Catholic governments, historians must view this conservative attitude as a momentous novelty. It expressed itself in moderate, compromising policies through which the Church adjusted to new political realities, ranging from Newfoundland’s naval government to U.S. democracy. In doing so the Catholic Church strengthened its status and won for its members roles that would have been unthinkable even during the Old Regime. All levels of the Church’s international organization, from the pope down to the thousands of local parish priests and regular missionaries, shared this attitude. These people knew each other or of each other, were in regular contact, and felt they were part of an impressive clerical network within the Catholic Church. All North American bishops, together with their counterparts in Ireland, Scotland, and England, corresponded with each other and regularly reported to the Holy See. In Rome the prefect of the Sacred Congregation “de Propaganda Fide,” the ministry of the Holy See with responsibility over Great Britain, Ireland, and North America, was in charge, though the pope had the final say. These men and their clergy shared a conservatism that was the most significant feature of the Church in the North Atlantic world from 1760 to 1829. This common outlook manifested itself in their personal behavior and in the messages they conveyed to each other.⁶  Few if any challenged this conservative political attitude, even in the handful of North American instances where historians have seen such a challenge, such as the ethnic rivalries and trustee controversies of the early nineteenth century.

The British conquest of Canada inaugurated this conservative trend. After the capitulations of Quebec in 1759 and Montreal the following year, a military regime ruled the district of Quebec, allowing local Catholics to freely practice their religion and essentially preserving their ecclesiastical structure. The 1763 Treaty of Paris confirmed these arrangements by granting “the liberty of the Catholick religion” but only “as far as the laws of Great Britain permit.” Eventually, the crown allowed the appointment of a new bishop, Jean-Olivier Briand, who traveled from France to Quebec in 1766. The spiritual and material activity of the Church, still prohibited in Great Britain, resumed as it had been conducted under the previous French regime. This precarious arrangement was finally recognized by the Quebec Act of 1774, which officially accepted the existence of the Catholic Church with the only proviso being that Catholics take an oath of allegiance acknowledging the crown’s supremacy. Among historians Briand has been a controversial figure. Some have accused him of collaborating with the British regime.⁷ On the government’s orders, Briand immediately instructed his clergy to pray for King George III. His reasons were straightforward. The British were not the enemy; on the contrary, he expounded, “they are our masters; and we owe to them all that we owed to the French when they were so. Does now the Church prevent his subjects to pray for their prince?” In his first public message to the Acadians, Briand also preached submission when he asked them to forget past errors: “Let us only think of your present.” In Briand’s view the British regime had enhanced the Church’s status. The initial fears of the Catholic leadership were soon replaced by feelings of surprise and relief: “Where are ... the vexations, the misappropriations, the pillaging, the onerous contributions that follow any victory?” In 1768 Briand reassured his vicar general in Paris, Pierre de La Rue, abbé de L’Isle-Dieu (1688-1779), that in his diocese “peace reigns, the [religious] needs of the people are provided, religion flourishes, charity is apparent.” In 1772 Briand informed the Holy See that the Catholic religion “is freely practiced, piety reigns, iniquity is despised and, should it show itself, it is to the horror of most.”⁸ The Treaty of Paris and the subsequent Royal Proclamation of 1763 took care of the organization of the newly gained “extensive and valuable Acquisitions in America.” Other than former Canada (now the province of Quebec), these territorial gains were East Florida, West Florida, and Grenada, where the crown acknowledged the political rights of Catholic inhabitants. The Treaty of Paris also transferred half of Louisiana to the Spanish crown. Catholic Spain, though, proved to be much less accommodating than Protestant Britain to its new colonies, and Louisiana experienced open rebellion from 1766 to 1769. There again the vicar general of the bishop of Quebec preached immediate recognition of the new rulers and accommodation at all costs, as did Pierre Gibault (1737-1802), a missionary in the region who claimed to get along well with the English.⁹

In the years immediately following the Conquest of Canada and prior to the French Revolution, the Holy See fully supported an accommodation policy in Quebec and Louisiana. This policy, mainly conducted by Propaganda Fide, aimed to preserve the free practice of the Catholic religion by adjusting to new political realities. Catholics were to assure the new governments of their loyalty and slowly to take advantage of whatever legal accommodations were made available to them to recruit new priests. In these critical years, the Holy See’s major concern was to never appear to interfere in negotiations between the Canadian clergy and the civil authorities. The clergy were to show no sign of arrogance, which would annoy the British government. The Holy See was adamant, however, on the procedure for selecting a new bishop. Briand had been elected by his church and then presented to the Holy See for confirmation. In a confidential memorandum, Giuseppe Maria Castelli, the prefect of Propaganda Fide, admitted that during the French regime the crown nominated the bishop of Quebec. But now that the cession of Canada had put an end to that privilege, the clergy must seize the opportunity to “return all the right of election to the Apostolic See, according to the current discipline.” After reaffirming this principle, however, it became obvious that there was no viable candidate other than Briand. The Holy See’s solution was then to formulate the relating briefs in such a way as to eschew any acknowledgment of the election. Castelli advocated this strategy of overall prudence and full cooperation with the British government for all of Briand’s successors at the Quebec bishopric. When he forwarded the papal brief, Dominus ac Redemptor, suppressing the Society of Jesus in 1773, Castelli invited Briand to implement it “with calm and tranquillity.” After the new vicar general in Paris, François-Joseph Sorbier de Villars (1720-88), surreptitiously sent French priests to Quebec in 1783-84 to circumvent Britain’s refusal to admit new ecclesiastics from France, Propaganda Fide strongly reprimanded him. In 1790, when Briand raised the issue of a new bishopric in Montreal, Propaganda Fide insisted the bishop first obtain permission from the crown.¹⁰

The Treaty of Paris thus required a major readjustment on the part of the Catholic Church in Quebec and Louisiana. Nothing of that sort happened in the Maritime Provinces or the British continental colonies south of Nova Scotia. With little or no assistance forthcoming from the bishop of Quebec, it fell to British authorities to make arrangements for the spiritual needs of the Acadian faithful. As early as 1767, Charles-François Bailly de Messein was sent to minister to the Acadians and the Micmac of Nova Scotia. The crown paid him a regular salary. This financial assistance became standard practice for many years to come. The small Catholic community of the British continental provinces (1 percent of the population) was unaffected by the immediate outcome of the Seven Years’ War. Not even the suppression of the Society of Jesus, to which all missionaries belonged, entailed “any notable change.” American Catholics recognized the advantages for Catholicism under the Quebec Act and compared their own status unfavorably with the freedom enjoyed by their Quebec coreligionists.¹¹ After 1776 most American Catholics sided against Britain, though their religious identity had little to do with their choice. In the telling instance of Bishop John Carroll’s Maryland family, moderate Enlightenment ideas went along nicely with a personal adhesion to Catholicism. Carroll’s own twenty-four years in western Europe had confirmed his family’s traditional values: individual industry and thriftiness, poor relief through charity, encouragement to arts without extravagant expenses, and above all an orderly society ruled by a moderate and enlightened government. These values, which were not Catholic per se, went together with political tolerance and doctrinal firmness in religious matters. In 1783, Carroll argued that Catholics living so happily under the tolerant new regime “must strive to preserve, cultivate, and promote it with all [their] prudence, always behaving as good subjects faithfully attached to [their] political Government.”¹² These words are strikingly similar to those employed by all bishops of Quebec to express their allegiance to the British crown.

Throughout the American War of Independence, Briand used every possible measure to ensure the loyalty of his faithful and ecclesiastical personnel to the British crown. His pastoral letter of May 22, 1775, called for all Canadians to fight the impending American invasion to defend “your country and your King.” Aside from due loyalty, Briand emphasized the crown’s recent favors, which included “the free practice of our Religion.” When a small American delegation traveled to Quebec in 1776 to try to win the support of French Canadians, the local clergy refused to even meet with Carroll, who was a member of the party. Several among the clergy, mostly members of regular congregations, sided with the Americans or were simply more accommodating. In general, however, the clergy stood by their bishop as they had prior to the war. In 1781, with peace negotiations around the corner, Sorbier de Villars hoped that the loyalty shown by Canadians during the war would pay off, the English “being so reasonable and so favorable to religion.” He concluded: “Should we owe this to politics and to reasons of state, why should religion care?”¹³  After the American War of Independence, the Church’s status in the United States improved, though in a manner different from that of Quebec. In 1791 the First Amendment of the Constitution secured universal religious liberty, a new and unheard-of legal guarantee. The Church had traditionally approved of the theory of the divine rights of kings, which in practice had slowly evolved into a more secular submission to the ruling crown. American Catholics, however, did not object to a new political system in which a president elected by an electoral college chosen by the people replaced a king who (at least symbolically) still took his right to rule directly from God. The self-styled parish priest of the Holy Cross in Boston, Claude-Florent Bouchard, known as abbé de La Poterie (1751-post-1790), called for loyalty to all established authorities in prioritized order. In his 1789 Pastoral Letter, he asked the faithful to pray for the pope, the bishop of Baltimore, “the prosperity of Congress ... the happy establishment of the federal government of the United States ... the state of Massachusetts, its Governour and Magistrates ... the King of France and the other friends and allies of America ... all those who respect the interest of his Most Christian Majesty in foreign countries.” Though Carroll condemned the Pastoral Letter, his prayer, adopted by the First Synod of Baltimore in 1791, is strikingly similar.¹⁴

The same Holy See bureaucrats who were responsible for the development of the Church in British North America fostered the U.S. church system after 1776. Fully supported by Pius VI and Holy See high officials, Cardinal Leonardo Antonelli (1730-1811) was in charge of North America. (Antonelli replaced Castelli as prefect of Propaganda Fide in the crucial years from 1780 to 1795.) He and this small group of bureaucrats applied to the new Republic the same cautious yet open-minded policy successfully used in Quebec. In their minds the outcome of the American War of Independence simply furnished an opportunity for the expansion of Catholicism. American historians of the Catholic Church have often, though imperfectly, related how Carroll was appointed first as prefect apostolic in 1784 and then as bishop of Baltimore in 1789, downplaying the importance of the early years of Catholicism in the United States. They highlight the separation of church and state as well as the novel and felicitous conjuncture of the democratic method through which Carroll was elected by his clergy. According to standard accounts, Carroll had asked the Holy See as early as 1785 to allow his clergy to select their own bishop. Furthermore, historians have emphasized that Carroll requested this procedure when his clergy petitioned for his promotion to full bishop. Finally, American historians have taken at face value their country’s official policy of noninterference in religious affairs.¹⁵ By insisting on the democratic procedure and the separation of church and state, they have tried to make the Church a full protagonist in the history of the early Republic and to show how American Catholics reneged on the Roman tradition of authoritarianism.

Regarding the democratic method of election, a simple chronology of events shows that Roman officials devised their strategy of expansion into the United States well before the 1783 Treaty of Paris and the arrival of the earliest petition from the United States in 1784. At the core of this strategy was the appointment of a superior to be chosen among the American priests. This move aligned with a policy that traditionally favored the local (or national) clergy over foreign missionaries. When American candidate Carroll was put forward as superior of the American Church (as opposed to British-born John Lewis [1721-88]), the Holy See welcomed the opportunity to implement its strategy, though it unwittingly deferred the establishment of a full bishopric to a later date.¹⁶ As for the separation of church and state in the new Republic, Benjamin Franklin’s role in the establishment of the prefecture apostolic and in Carroll’s selection was much more crucial than such a separation would allow. This role in fact embodied Old Regime diplomatic routines. At first French diplomats facilitated the whole procedure by sounding out a number of American congressmen. Then Franklin stalled the Lewis candidacy and suggested Carroll, a longtime acquaintance, for the position. Holy See officials nominated Carroll in full agreement with the American representative. After Carroll was eventually selected, Franklin privately boasted that it was “on [his own] Recommendation.” When examined next to Briand’s 1760 selection, the history of Carroll’s appointment during 1784-89 does not seem particularly innovative. Any emphasis on the novelty of these democratic procedures is exaggerated. If anything Carroll’s nomination in 1789 employed a mechanism that, though not prevalent, had been in use for centuries.¹⁷ In Briand’s and Carroll’s selections, Propaganda Fide took the same firm stand against bottom-up nominations and in both instances succeeded in picking who it thought was the best candidate for the position by attentively listening to all parties and avoiding the open endorsement of procedural solutions (such as the election of bishops) that might weaken Rome’s emphasis on a new centralizing policy.

In 1784, the nuncio in France, Giuseppe Maria Doria Pamphili, warned the Holy See that it could not take America’s gratitude to France for granted. New “revolutions similar to that of Canada” (that is, the cession of 1763), he argued, could irretrievably alter the relationship between the two recent allies. The French Revolution supplied just such an event, replacing America’s thin sympathy for its French ally with bellicose hostility. Whereas the American War of Independence had occasioned a timely yet substantially smooth passage of the church’s legal recognition, the French Revolution proved a much more fundamental turning point in reshaping American Church strategy and in strengthening the Church’s conservative social doctrine throughout the Atlantic world. During the last decade of the eighteenth century, almost one thousand priests and nuns were killed in France, with many more unaccounted for, and more than 150,000 French people, including some 30,000 Catholic clergy, fled abroad. This wave of political refugees was second in volume only to the Protestant emigration caused by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Even more fundamentally, the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath represented an ideological turning point for the Catholic Church in the United States and British North America. The faithful abandoned any nostalgic hope for a return of Old Regime Catholic France in favor of a de facto political alliance with Protestant Great Britain, which replaced France as the friendliest among European countries. At least seven thousand French ecclesiastics fled to Britain, where persecuted Catholics could regroup and wait for better times.¹⁸

Some exiled French ecclesiastics seriously weighed the North American option. Eventually, however, only about one hundred settled in the United States and about fifty in British North America. Yet many Catholics in the North Atlantic world came to agree with French philosophe and traveler Constantin-François Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney, that the United States was a “haven of peace of which Europe did not offer any hope any longer” and that God had invented America to allow a rebirth of a better and purer Catholicism. These hopefuls included several members of the Roman high bureaucracy. As early as 1789, the new nuncio in France, Antonio Dugnani, wrote to a fellow prelate that “the best option is to go to America.” Such high officials of the Holy See were conscious of the epochal nature of events set in motion by the French Revolution. Disruption of the experienced organizational network through which the Holy See had managed the survival or expansion of Catholicism for at least two centuries, for example, significantly affected the development of the Church in the North Atlantic world. From 1789 to 1815, especially after 1797, this network was in a state of almost complete disarray. As for the North American high ecclesiastics, Carroll wrote in 1793 that “if anything could console us of the immense losses of religion in France, this would be the opportunity of the advantages that shall result for Canada and the United States.” With the revolutionary tempest clearly over in 1817, the vicar apostolic in the London district, William Poynter, believed that “the Church is going to recover in America the great losses sustained in Europe.”¹⁹

The carnage perpetrated by French revolutionaries eliminated any nostalgia French Canadians had for their former metropolis. At the same time, it transformed what had been a fruitful cooperation between the British government and the Catholic Church into an outright political alliance that lasted many decades. From 1784 to 1825, during the administrations of Louis-Philippe Mariauchau d’Esgly, Jean-François Hubert, Pierre Denaut, and Joseph-Octave Plessis, the bishops of Quebec and most of their missionaries went out of their way to please British authorities. The encounter between two Sulpicians in the Detroit region following the Jay Treaty (also known as the 1794 Treaty of London), which transferred the area to the United States, demonstrates how differences in rituals and customs did not prevent the sharing of more fundamental values. One of them, Lower Canadian François-Xavier Dufaux (1742-96), rather unemotionally reported that the Americans’ hymn was “God Save the People” instead of “God Save the King.” Furthermore he did not object when his confrère, Michel Levadoux (1746-1815), an émigré priest supportive of the principles of the new American Republic, welcomed the arrival of General Anthony Wayne with the singing of “Te Deum.” Loyalty to the legitimate government was never at stake.²⁰ The protocol established for a bishop’s succession in case of death is one example of the long-lasting political alliance between the Church and the crown. Briand devised this procedure to prevent any recurrence of the vacuum that had followed Bishop Henri-Marie Dubreil de Pontbriand’s death in 1760. As soon as he obtained Lieutenant-General Guy Carleton’s agreement on Mariauchau d’Esgly, Briand asked the Holy See to appoint the latter bishop in partibus and coadjutor cum futurâ successione. At Briand’s death Mariauchau d’Esgly was to immediately replace him. Propaganda Fide hastened to approve, provided the crown agreed. Briand’s successors kept this protocol in place, which ensured hierarchical continuity and kept bishops from presenting a challenge to the government. Plessis felt that he had no choice but “to be submitted to the veto for the choice of our coadjutors and successors.” It took several years before the Holy See attempted to limit the crown’s veto power by making the crown’s approval only the last step. The protocol worked so well that Propaganda Fide applied it to the whole of British North America.²¹

As in Quebec opposition to the French Revolution in Newfoundland strengthened cooperation between the local bishop and the British authorities. This common attitude helped both sides avoid major conflicts. James Louis O’Donel, the vicar apostolic in Newfoundland, hated radicals of all sorts and French revolutionaries most of all. His report on the battles of Enniscorthy and New Ross, in County Wexford, which were part of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, leaves no doubt about his views. O’Donel got along well enough with Newfoundland’s naval governors and so did his successors. He was particularly helpful to Charles Morice Pole, governor during 1800-1801, when O’Donel thwarted potential threats of rebellion on the part of local United Irishmen sympathizers. It was British law, O’Donel believed, that made the Lower Canadians “the happiest people in either the old or the new world” and that allowed all Newfoundlanders to live “in perfect tranquility.”²²

In its attitude toward the political establishment, Newfoundland (where 80 percent of the population was Catholic) resembled Ireland, O’Donel’s mother country and the place of origin of many Newfoundlanders. For most of the eighteenth century, Ireland had not been a particularly violent country. Political tensions ran high, however, and the Church was placed in an awkward position vis-à-vis the British government. In Ireland, as opposed to the rest of the British Empire, the struggle for Catholic emancipation soon took a revolutionary road. The danger of repeating the French Revolution seemed all too real to some. As spiritual leader of the Irish Church and archbishop of Dublin, John Thomas Troy never doubted that radicals and insurgents in France and Ireland were dead wrong. His 1793 Pastoral Instruction best summarizes his conservative political and religious thought; Irish nationalists later often attacked it.²³ At the turn of the century, laymen, rather than clergy, set the Irish Catholics’ political agenda. The Church itself was still a weak organization that needed the crown’s protection to survive, at least according to Troy. To prevent a repetition of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, in which thirty thousand lost their lives, Troy in the end favored legislative union with Britain and the consequent demise of the Irish Parliament. He also accepted the royal veto on the appointment of Catholic bishops, a measure that he had at first opposed. The most important result of this policy of compromise between Troy and the crown was Parliament’s An Act for the better Education of Persons professing the Popish or Roman Catholic Religion. Passage of this act in 1795 was followed by the founding of the Royal (later Saint Patrick’s) College in Maynooth, whose budget was partially assured by the crown. Troy, his successor, Daniel Murray, and their fellow bishops came to believe that compromise had to be accepted to attain full Catholic emancipation and stability for the Church, including a crown’s salary for clergy.²⁴

In the heart of the British Empire, John Douglas, the vicar apostolic in the London district, was keen on proving that being a member of the Catholic Church did not contradict the “true loyalty or duty Englishmen owe to king and country.” He, along with fifty-eight others, signed an 1807 statement of principles demonstrating that not even the pope could “absolve or dispense his majesty’s subjects from their oath of allegiance [to the crown], on any pretext whatsoever.” Poynter (Douglas’ successor), an intelligent and tolerant person, expressed the viewpoint of the North Atlantic Catholic subject better than any of his fellow prelates: “The great cause to which we are committed is one and Catholic; we all share our common interest in it, whether we are placed in Europe or in America; the seas that separate the Kingdoms of this world and the large continents do not separate the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.” His return to England in 1795, after almost two decades in France that ended with a two-year imprisonment, had indeed made Poynter appreciate the “great freedom in the practice of Religion” and the good disposition of crown officials. The vicars apostolic in the Lowland and Highland districts of Scotland and their European correspondents constantly expressed similar views. For them too the French Revolution was a crucial turning point. Antagonism and hostility toward the British crown, coupled with a reliance on traditional French support, had turned into just the opposite as early as 1789. Only a handful of lay Catholics in Edinburgh sided with French revolutionaries or were not loyal to the crown. The views of the Scottish bishops and of those of Scottish origin in North America coincided with correspondents, lobbyists, agents, and unofficial representatives to the Holy See and were no different from those of O’Donel, Plessis, Poynter, Troy, and many church leaders in the Atlantic world. A generation later Alexander McDonell, the ecclesiastical superior in Upper Canada, was aghast when he discovered the level of insurgency that was brewing in Lower Canada. He fully concurred with provincial Governor-in-Chief Matthew Whitworth-Aylmer, Baron Aylmer, that the local French-speaking bishops shared responsibility for allowing “levelling democratical principles” to be admitted “into the public schools.”²⁵

The traditional national or regional historiographical framework depicts Holy See high officials as a bunch of reactionary bureaucrats who were at best poorly informed and slow to react. Undoubtedly, these historians’ views echo complaints prevalent in the papers produced by many British North American and American ecclesiastics. Gerald P. Fogarty and Jay P. Dolan, two of the foremost American historians of the Church in the post-Second Vatican Council era, exemplify this point of view when they refer to the Holy See’s “complete ignorance of the American situation,” especially of its democratization process and of the hierarchy’s minimal influence on the American Church. Indisputably, the Roman bureaucracy applied working habits that were not a model of modern efficiency. English-speaking church leaders would have welcomed an “infusion of English business-like method.”²⁶ But it was not just North America that suffered from this overall inefficiency. Furthermore, when considering all of the North Atlantic rather than merely Rome’s bilateral relations with British North America or the United States as well as more fully examining the inner working of the Holy See’s bureaucracy, a different picture emerges.

First, when modern American historians of the Catholic Church fault church bureaucracy for its inattention, they seem to assume that North American affairs should have been treated as more urgent than others. Yet as a mission territory, and as such falling under Propaganda Fide, North America competed not only with Asia and Africa but also with all the non-Catholic countries of Europe. Considering the demands on them, it is striking that officials devoted so much time to discussing North American files. Probably only Ireland at this time received more attention. Second, a real effort was made by Holy See high officials to understand North American developments and to follow up with suitable decisions. Though inundated with letters, petitions, appeals, and all sorts of diverging opinions, they read them all. They also asked for external evaluations and regularly met with all the British North American and American clergy and laymen who personally took their cases to Rome. Sulpician Ambroise Maréchal, the archbishop of Baltimore, was furious when Propaganda Fide continued to welcome representatives of the trustees at the height of the trustee controversy. These people traveled to Rome, he alleged, only to misrepresent his views. Third, except for the disruptive decade that preceded 1808, Holy See bureaucrats fulfilled their role as ultimate overseers of local developments in British North America and the United States. They slowly came to evaluate American developments against a background of an orderly continental expansion in which Quebec and Baltimore enjoyed a leadership role. Following a general review of the state of religion in the United States introduced by Cardinal Bartolomeo Pacca, an influential member of Propaganda Fide, for example, in 1808 the Sacred Congregation erected four new bishoprics in Bardstown (Kentucky), Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. It also promoted Baltimore to archbishopric and decided that the new sees would be solely financed through the contributions of the faithful.²⁷ Fourth, and most important, the Holy See’s decisions about North America were consistently in step with the Catholic conservatism observable everywhere else in the North Atlantic world.

American historians in the post-Second Vatican Council era have emphasized an alleged reactionary attitude on the part of the Holy See toward the Americanist faction of the American Church. From 1789 through the 1830s, some bishops apparently tried to take advantage of the separation of church and state to establish an American Church that would have been as exceptional in its democratic procedures as the country in which it prospered. Carroll and John England exemplified this attitude, whereas traditionalists had their champion in Maréchal. The latter favored strong dependence on the Holy See and consequently enjoyed the full support of Roman officials. As far as the Holy See was concerned, however, such a dichotomy between Amencanists and Romanists was never an explicit issue.²⁸ Rome favored and appreciated Carroll, the innovative Americanist, as much as Maréchal, the stubborn traditionalist. What really mattered to Holy See bureaucrats was the pursuance of a moderate policy of compromise with the government in power, which applied to the United States as well as to any other country in the North Atlantic world.

Plessis’ long administration of the Quebec diocese might be viewed as the high point in this well-established relationship between church and government. He repeatedly and publicly thanked God for allowing the conquest of Canada and consequently sparing Canada the horrors of the French Revolution. Plessis’ 1817 election to the legislative council of Lower Canada is a telling case in point. When he received the crown’s offer, which required no less than an amendment to the Quebec Act, Plessis asked for the Holy See’s opinion and approval. Then, being reassured by the lieutenant-governor of Lower Canada, John Coape Sherbrooke, that “he could accept without compromising either his conscience or his principles” because “the government had taken the most appropriate measure to express its gratitude for his services,” he acted unilaterally, took possession of his seat, and never regretted his decision. At first Propaganda Fide noted that Plessis’ acceptance would have been an unforgivable scandal “in another century” because the legislative council was a Protestant body.²⁹ Ultimately, however, after five years of internal debate, the Holy See did not object. In fact the Roman officials’ conduct in such a potentially controversial situation was not exceptional. Roughly in the same period, the Holy See showed a similar attitude about Troy’s initial wavering position toward the notion of a royal veto over episcopal appointments and about the election of Sulpician Gabriel Richard (1767-1832) as congressman for the Michigan Territory in 1823.³⁰

The subdivision of the archdiocese of Quebec into a number of self-governing and ethnically oriented bishoprics represented another potential controversy. Still, differences among Plessis, McDonell, Angus Bernard MacEachern, and Edmund Burke (1753-1820) had more to do with clashing personalities and a good dose of ethnic bias than ecclesiastical politics. All these ecclesiastics fully shared a compliant attitude toward the British crown. McDonell in Upper Canada accepted the substantial emoluments the crown granted him in view of his crucial role in keeping good order among the Irish. These subsidies continued to increase. The Holy See itself was somewhat startled by this practice. Yet, following in the footsteps of its own decisions concerning Lower Canada, it did not disapprove.³¹ Thomas Weld, McDonell’s coadjutor, was a shareholder in the Canada Company. MacEachern enjoyed friendly relationships with several high crown officials, from whom he received substantial pensions and extensive land properties on par with the yearly allowances granted to the bishops of Quebec. Though Burke, the most vociferous among his colleagues, accused Plessis of being too subservient to the crown, he did just the same by siding with Carleton, then Baron Dorchester, on the issue of the non-confessional university to be established in Quebec. When the lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe, asked in 1794 for a “loyal Clergyman” who could “counteract any improper opinions and transactions” in the Detroit area, Carleton selected Burke. There he upheld the British cause to such an extent that he even annoyed the local French-Canadian priests. The published and private writings of these men throughout the North Atlantic world, whatever their ethnic background, show a striking commonality of intentions, long-term strategies, and even short-term tactics. At first this accommodating attitude was due to the early feeling of surprise and relief that the status of the Church strengthened after 1760. This feeling rapidly developed into a conviction that loyalty to the British crown, together with a certain amount of compromise, prevented any change for the worse in the status quo. Foremost in their minds were the tragedies brought about by what Thomas Hussey (1746-1803), principal chaplain at the Spanish embassy in London, referred to in 1790 as the “French disease.”³² This attitude became commonplace among Catholic officials after the French Revolution and remained unchanged throughout the Napoleonic Wars and the post-1815 Bourbon Restoration. It was indeed shared by all parties, including the crown and Holy See officials.

Yet insecurity lingered. The more they gained, the more the bishops of Quebec feared their privileges could be rescinded. Indeed in the British Empire, just as in Napoleonic France, Catholics could take nothing for granted. Would the next secretary of state be as well disposed as the current? Would a challenged lieutenant-governor switch to a less generous attitude? How far should a bishop go with his requests? Should he support or quash his faithful’s demands for change? Briand asked his faithful to be loyal to their new crown. If they acted differently, he reminded them, they ran the risk of being “stripped of all the privileges that he [the king] was so good to grant.” Two generations later another bishop, Plessis, reminded his vicar general in London, François-Emmanuel Bourret (ca. 1741-1807), of all the repressive statutes enacted by the crown from 1759 to 1774. These statutes, he warned, were still extant, and only the right amount of compromise on both sides had so far forestalled their implementation. Plessis feared that the arrival of the new lieutenant-governor of Lower Canada, Robert Shore Milnes, could mean the enactment of the crown’s never-abandoned, long-term policy of assimilation. His fears remained the same in the following years. The War of 1812 offered yet another opportunity for the Lower Canadian Church to show its loyalty to the government: “The clergy and the Catholic people profess their most decided loyalty towards it ... our Catholics have been shown to accept any temporal sacrifice for the defence of their country,” he explained to Troy. Plessis’ strategy did not change over the years. Catholics must “sometimes contain their wish to enlarge its establishment [of the Catholic religion] lest they lose even a part of the freedom which they enjoy, a freedom that they would not be able to find in several countries, where it is called state religion.” The whole of Plessis’ career wavered between a sense of accomplishment and a constant feeling of insecurity. Plessis’ fellow prelates in the North Atlantic world constantly expressed similar sentiments. In Newfoundland, for example, a cautious O’Donel criticized Burke, Troy, and Franciscan Arthur O’Leary (1729-1802), chaplain of the Spanish embassy in London, for writing overly strong anti-Protestant pastoral letters. Though he allowed that they might have been right in principle, O’Donel feared that those writings would provoke anti-Catholic repression. In the Maritime Provinces, MacEachern remarked that Catholics needed to seize the opportunity offered by the accommodating attitude of the current colonial ministry: “Who knows how long the same policy may prevail in the cabinet?”³³

Despite their continued calls for loyalty, moderation, compromise, and accommodation, the North Atlantic bishops’ recipe for survival and expansion worked best in former French Canada, which was the “promised land, the land of milk and honey” that all North American bishops, especially the American ones, tried to copy. Benoît-Joseph Flaget, the bishop of Bardstown, traveled to Canada in 1818, and almost fifteen years later he still recalled that visit as the most satisfactory of his lifetime. According to a Louisiana priest, no church in any village or countryside of Europe could boast the perfection of Canadian churches.³⁴ Outside Lower Canada, however, the territorial growth of the Church exposed a number of local conflicts that could threaten its general stability and orderly existence under the Holy See’s traditional leadership. Essentially, these conflicts fall within two major categories: ethnic rivalry and the trustee controversy. They continued for more than a half century throughout North America and were directly related to the ethnic composition of the waves of immigration in the period. As such these conflicts raged with particular violence during the two decades following 1815, which marked the beginning of sizable Atlantic migrations. It was also the year of Carroll’s death, Napoleon’s final abdication, and the end of the Congress of Vienna. Yet neither ethnic rivalry nor the trustee controversy represented a direct challenge to the conservative political attitude on which church leaders based their strategy for survival and expansion in North America.

In the United States, the urban intermingling of several “national” communities laid the groundwork for ethnic hatred among the faithful and their ecclesiastical representatives. Carroll was well aware that separation of church and state did not prevent enemies from within from eroding his model church. As early as 1788, he was embroiled in a major controversy with a community of German origin in Philadelphia. Two years later he begged the small Boston community to “lay aside national distinctions & attachments, & strive to form not Irish, or English, or French Congregations & Churches, but Catholic-American Congregations & Churches.” The disproportionate number of bishops, parish priests, and missionaries of French origin further exacerbated ethnic tensions. These ecclesiastics often despised their Irish faithful, who made up almost all their community. Ethnic rivalry was also present in British North America, where it involved Scottish and Irish communities as well as Acadians.³⁵ There the French-speaking Quebec church was a powerful presence. North of the border, ethnic rivalry did not normally degenerate into a slanderous and violent confrontation as it had in the United States because ethnic communities rarely mingled or lived in proximity. Historians of the Catholic Church, who customarily interpret conflict within a national or regional framework, do not deny the existence of ethnic rivalry. Their opinions about it, however, vary. Historians of the British North American Church believe that differences between the French-speaking bishops of Quebec and the clerical representatives of the Irish and Scottish communities were irreconcilable. In their view each community legitimately fought for its own survival (the French Canadians) or for its emancipation (the Irish and the Scottish). Historians of the American Church downplay ethnic rivalry and make it only one element in the struggle for church democratization in which the partisans of a modern, decentralized American Church opposed the proponents of a traditional, hierarchical Ultramontane Church. Undoubtedly, ethnic rivalry caused a number of crises that, during several decades, threatened the stability of the North American Church. When historians examine local evidence in the larger North Atlantic context, though, it appears that ethnic groups did not represent a direct challenge to the conservative policy and the strategy of accommodation espoused by all church leaders, regardless of their different ethnic allegiances. In itself, then, ethnic rivalry was neither conservative nor anticonservative and represented only one element in the overall political conflict.³⁶

The trustee controversy was a struggle for power that occurred in mainly urban districts between the corporation of laymen (or trustees) and the canonically appointed episcopal representatives. At the core was the right claimed by trustees, as legal managers of all ecclesiastical temporalities and duly elected representatives of the faithful, to hire and dismiss their priests at their pleasure. This right, called trusteeism, was not acknowledged by the bishops, who adduced canon law and the sacramental nature of any ordained priest. In the United States, disturbances directly linked to the trustee controversy continued for more than seventy years, from 1785 in New York City to 1855 in Buffalo. Historians in the pre-Second Vatican Council era thoroughly condemned the trustees’ demands as an aberration of church discipline and welcomed the normalization the Holy See and the bishops’ party ultimately imposed on the American Church, whereas historians in the post-Second Vatican Council era are more sympathetic to the trustees’ demands. They place them in a general bottom-up reinterpretation of Church history that focuses on the community (that is, the faithful served by the ordained hierarchy). In essence religious history replaces Church history. American historian Patrick Carey attributes the trustee controversy to the democratization of the Church in a context of major immigration and the absence of government interference.³⁷

Undoubtedly, the language used by the trustees in their fight against episcopal authority was republican and democratic. In the 1790s such language had become common currency in the whole North Atlantic world. One broadside among many produced by the two main opposing parties illustrates the character of the polemics. Undated and signed “A Catholic,” this broadside was produced around 1818 by the trustees of Saint Patrick’s Church in Norfolk, Virginia. Its target was Maréchal (the “enemy”). The broadside claimed American Catholics were “free citizens of this sovereign and independent state.” As such they owed “high and indispensable duty ... to this country, and to its constitution, laws and government,” which were mainly symbolized by the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, “both evidently founded upon the natural and social rights of our kind.” Indeed, the broadside author argued, there was no doubt that their principles “emanate[d] from the laws of nature,” since the “whole frame of government and its system of civil polity is novel, and never before acted upon in the world.” According to the broadside, Maréchal insisted that Catholics choose whether “to be governed by the sacred laws of the Catholic Church” or “to make use of the liberty we enjoy under our free and happy government to introduce into the spiritual and temporal administration of [the] congregation sectarian principles, totally subversive of the discipline ... [of] the whole Catholic world.” The broadside author refuted Maréchal’s dichotomy, writing that to be a good Catholic meant to be a real American and that “all Pastors should be appointed by their respective congregations.” In their struggle against Henry Conwell, bishop of Philadelphia, who was their legitimate superior, the trustees went as far as using the Holy See’s approval of the veto system in Ireland to bolster their own case, a most audacious parallel. By allowing the veto right to a Protestant king, they claimed, the Holy See admitted the principle “that the government represented and acted for all its subjects.” In the United States, however, the “government is precluded from interfering in the religious concerns of any of its citizens.” Thus the full power of ecclesiastical appointments was vested in the trustees as the only legitimate representatives of the people. The republican and democratic language of so many claims made by the trustees may not have always corresponded to organized political opposition to the established authority. If their conservative attitude is the common ground on which the church leaders based their strategy in the North Atlantic world, can trusteeism, “very American and clearly republican,” be regarded as a major exception?³⁸ When the trustee controversy is examined in the North American context, Carey’s thesis loses some of its strength.

Trusteeism was not a unique American phenomenon because all its components appeared in most of British North America in the same period, with the exception of French Canada. Lower Canada and its western dependencies were the only places where the trustee system failed to erode the bishop’s power and was never a viable alternative. There the marguilliers, as the members of the fabrique were called (that is, the trustees as a body), always regarded themselves as inferior to the parish priest, who in turn professed full hierarchical subordination to his bishop. It was not until the early 1830s, on the eve of the rebellions of 1837-38, that some marguilliers close to the Parti Patriote, an anti-British and anticlerical political party, tried to take over the administration of the parishes by legally disempowering the bishop’s representatives. Outside French Canada, however, evidence of trusteeism is plentiful. According to Canadian historian Terrence Murphy, the earliest record of a lay committee in British North America appears in Saint John, New Brunswick. In Halifax, Capuchin James Jones (ca. 1743-1805), the superior of the Nova Scotia missions, refused to accept this new system, “to wit, in entering into a compact, with the people for a salary,” which he considered an “American idea” more proper of “modern sectaries, [who] wish to have the priest on hiveling.” In the Atlantic provinces of British North America and the United States, legal conditions were similar, without any structured system to accommodate the Church or offer any special protection to it. (In British North America, however, the crown certainly accommodated the Church, and even in the United States exceptions to the First Amendment were occasionally made.) Therefore the initiative to ask permission, raise money, build a chapel or a church, obtain the assistance of the Irish or Scottish clergy, and eventually recruit a priest fell entirely on the shoulders of self-appointed committees of affluent Catholics. Once the church was built, those who put up the money managed the property as trustees, just as they did in the United States. Jones’ reference to the trustee system as an American idea is telling: the system was foreign, yet its presence in Nova Scotia was real. Republicanism and democracy may have supplied the language to the trustees’ claims on both sides of the border, but neither was a significant element in British North America, where no republican structures were at play and no prevailing democratic political climate existed.³⁹ Thus Carey’s direct link between the republican and democratic language used by the trustees and their political opposition to the established authority does not seem to be as strong as he claims.

Though innovative in several ways, the trustee controversy was also rooted in and indeed complicated by an Old Regime tradition of church conflicts over status in society that persisted well into the mid-nineteenth century. Everyday conflicts of this sort normally concerned, for example, preeminence in processions, invocations in prayers, prominence in blessings, and precedence in the assignment of pews. In a place such as Detroit, which in one generation went through three political regime changes, the contemporary presence of Old Regime demands and a new democratic language is particularly evident. In its two churches, Saint-Anne-du-Détroit and L’Assomption-du-Détroit, controversies mainly derived from the right to use certain pews. Pews were a source of income for parish priests, who rented them out at public auctions. Some of them were assigned, ex officio, to the highest civil and military officials. This system produced a delicate balance based on local prevailing rights. In 1792, the trustees went head-to-head with the parish priest, Pierre Fréchette (1752-1816). In a truly democratic style, they opposed the rules spelled out in the ritual for assigning the pews on the grounds that “they were the masters of their trust [and] could grant pews and privileges to anybody according to their own pleasure.” A few years later, the trustees represented the local population in the struggle between François Baby (1733-1820), the highest-ranking militia officer in the county, and the parish priest, Louis Payet (1749-1801). In a crescendo of violence, pews were successively locked, privately built and installed, then thrown out of the church, until one of the missionaries threatened to call in the royal troops against the French-Canadian culprits and forbade his fellow missionaries from dispensing any religious services to the local population. Though trustees claimed to be the legitimate representatives of the faithful (that is, of the Catholic people) on account of their election, only the democratic language of the trustees distinguishes these new conflicts from those that were a typical feature of the Church under the Old Regime. Another striking example of innovative and indeed republican language masking a typical Old Regime controversy about revenues and power revolved around the thorny issue of a two-thousand-acre White Marsh, Maryland, estate during 1821-25. The contentious issue was whether it should be reserved for the American province of the Society of Jesus or handed over to Archbishop Maréchal. The Jesuits refused to budge, even when the order came directly from Pius VII, on the grounds that reversion of the estate to Maréchal was tantamount to “an invasion of the Holy See into the supreme and independent jurisdiction of our republic.” When the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled in favor of Philadelphia’s Saint Mary’s trustees over its bishop in 1824, the court based its decision on the same legal ground, the interference of “a foreign potentate” in a civil matter. The trustee controversy, then, cannot be construed as a direct challenge to the Church’s overall conservative attitude. Trustees and church officials usually tried to resolve their disputes through cooperation and compromise.⁴⁰ The republican and democratic language evident in most of the literature arising from the trustee controversy was often strategic rhetoric used for leverage in a specific debate rather than a register of a broader effort to democratize the Church. The Old Regime nature of many of the contests normally associated with that controversy weakens the thesis that these conflicts reflected opposition to the structure of Church authority. Trusteeism has been exaggerated as a threat to the power and authority of the conservative Church leadership.

From 1760 to 1829, a period in which the Western world often seemed on the verge of irreparable destruction, the Roman Catholic Church in the North Atlantic world not just survived but transformed itself into an inherently stronger institution. During the shaking experiences of those revolutionary decades, the Church showed a notable lack of internal dissent and a remarkable unity of intentions, which was certainly shared by its hierarchy and, as far as scholars are able to tell, by the rank-and-file local priests and missionaries. Ruthless and lengthy as they were, not even ethnic rivalry and the trustee controversy, the two major instances of internal conflicts, succeeded in challenging the general stability and orderly existence that the North Atlantic Church enjoyed under the overall direction of the Holy See. In an age of imperial warfare and democratic revolution, leaders of the Catholic Church on all levels shared a political attitude based on an abhorrence of radicalism, a straightforward loyalty to the established government, and a delicate balance between deference and firmness concerning their political and institutional leaders. Aimed as it was at non-Catholic civil governments, this conservative attitude was indeed a momentous novelty. A flexible and accommodating stance toward civil authorities helped Church leaders strengthen their organization and consolidate their power and authority within it. Political necessities became ecclesiastical virtues, with a conservative institution devising a new strategy that allowed the Catholic Church to flourish after 1829.

Endnotes

Reprinted with permission from William and Mary Quarterly 64.4 (2007): 717-56; reformatted and edited to comply with this series. 

Recent literature includes Bernard Plongeron, ed., Les défis de la modernité (1750-1840) (Paris, 1997); Frank J.  Coppa, The Modern Papacy since 1789 (London, 1998); Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett, Priests, Prelates, and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750 (New York, 2003); Nigel Aston, Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, 1750-1830 (Cambridge, 2002). In this period “Holy See” meant the central government of the Roman Catholic Church, consisting of the pope, the cardinals, and a plethora of bureaucrats who were usually ordained priests and lived in Rome. Its meaning was equivalent to that of “U.S. government” for the United States or “British crown” for Great Britain. The term “Vatican” began to replace Holy See only after the kingdom of Italy conquered Rome in 1870. See Niccolò Del Re, La curia romana: Lineamenti storico-giuridici (Rome, 1952). 

On British North America, see Terrence Murphy and Cyril J. Byrne, eds., Religion and Identity: The Experience of Irish and Scottish Catholics in Atlantic Canada, Selected Papers from a Conference on Roman Catholicism in Anglophone Canada: The Atlantic Region, Held at Saint Mary's University, 19-22 September 1984 (Saint John’s, Newfoundland, 1987); Murphy and Gerald John Stortz, eds., Creed and Culture: The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750-1930 (Montreal, 1993); Murphy, “The English-Speaking Colonies to 1854,” in A Concise History of Christianity in Canada, ed. Murphy and Roberto Penn (Toronto, 1996), 108-89, esp. 115-21; Terence J.  Fay, A History of Canadian Catholics: Gallicanism, Romanism, and Canadianism (Montreal, 2002), 49-63. On England, see John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570-1850 (London, 1975), 1-7; Matthias Buschkühl, Great Britain and the Holy See, 1746-1870 (Dublin, 1982); Joan Connell, The Roman Catholic Church in England, 1780-1850: A Study in Internal Politics (Philadelphia, 1984), 60-74; Karen Stanbridge, Toleration and State Institutions: British Policy toward Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Ireland and Quebec (Lanham, MD, 2003). On Scotland, see John Cooney, Scotland and the Papacy (Edinburgh, 1982); Christine Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, 1789-1829 (Edinburgh, 1983). On Ireland, see Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690-1830 (Savage, MD, 1992); Dáire Keogh, The French Disease: The Catholic Church and Irish Radicalism, 1790-1800 (Dublin, 1993); S. J.  Connolly, ed., Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2000). 

For France, see contributions in Plongeron, Les défis de la modernité, esp. 301-737. For the United States, see Jay P. Dolan, “New Directions in American Catholic History,” in New Dimensions in American Religious History: Essays in Honor of Martin E. Marty, ed. Dolan and James P. Wind (Grand Rapids, 1993), 152-74; Patrick Carey, “Recent American Catholic Historiography: New Directions in Religious History,” in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart (New York, 1997), 445-61; Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (New York, 2002); John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York, 2003); Leslie Woodcock Tentler, “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,” U.S. Catholic Historian 21.2 (Spring 2003): 77-95; Patrick Allitt et al., “Review Symposium, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History, by John T. McGreevy,” U.S. Catholic Historian 21.4 (Fall 2003): 87-106; Carey, Catholics in America: A History (Westport, CT, 2004); James T. Fisher, “Christopher Kauffman, the U.S. Catholic Historian, and the Future of American Catholic History,” U.S. Catholic Historian 24.2 (Spring 2006): 19-26, esp. 24; Thomas J. Shelley, “American Catholic Identities: A Documentary History,” U.S. Catholic Historian 24.2 (Spring 2006): 27-40. For Quebec, see Lucien Lemieux, Les années difficiles (1760-1839), bk. 1, Les XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, vol. 2, Histoire du catholicisme québécois (Montreal, 1989); Lucia Ferretti, Brève histoire de l’Eglise catholique au Québec (Montreal, 1999), 33-54. Ferretti is the only Quebec historian who places the history of the French-Canadian Church in a general Western conflict that she characterizes as a “struggle against the state for its liberties” (“la lutte pour ses libertés face à l'État,” ibid., 34). Her interpretation is purely national, however, and falls within the traditional framework of church-and-state conflict. 

See Jeffrey von Arx, ed., Varieties of Ultramontanism (Washington, DC, 1998). For Canada, see Guy Laperrière, “Vingt ans d’ultramontanisme, en hommage à Philippe Sylvain,” Recherches sociographiques 27.1 (1986): 79-100; Roberto Penn, “Rome as a Metropolis of Canada,” in Italie-Canada-Recherche, ed. Matteo Sanfilippo (Rome, 1991), II: 21-31; Philippe Sylvain and Nive Voisine, Réveil et consolidation (1840-1898) (Montreal, 1991); Murphy, “English-Speaking Colonies to 1854,” 166-71; Penn, “French-Speaking Canada from 1840,” in Murphy and Penn, Concise History of Christianity in Canada, 190-259, esp. 196-228; Robert Choquette, Canada’s Religions: An Historical Introduction (Ottawa, Ontario, 2004), 173-77; Fay, History of Canadian Catholics, 69-85. For the United States, see Dale B. Light, Rome and the New Republic: Conflict and Community in Philadelphia Catholicism between the Revolution and the Civil War (Notre Dame, 1996), esp. 239-47, 252-56, 269-72, 332, 337 n. 16; Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism, 43-44, 59. For England, see J. Derek Holmes, More Roman than Rome: English Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1978); Holmes, The Triumph of the Holy See: A Short History of the Papacy in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1978). For Ireland, see Emmet Larkin, The Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism (New York, 1976); Donald Harman Akenson, Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815-1922, An International Perspective (Montreal, 1988), 139-40; Desmond Bowen, “Ultramontanism in Quebec and the Irish Connection,” in The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada, ed. Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds (Toronto, 1988), I: 295-305, esp. 295-98; Thomas G. McGrath, “The Tridentine Evolution of Modern Irish Catholicism, 1563-1962: A Re-Examination of the ‘Devotional Revolution’ Thesis,” Recusant History 20.4 (October 1991): 512-23. For France, see Austin Gough, Paris and Rome: The Gallican Church and the Ultramontane Campaign, 1848-1853 (Oxford, 1986); Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789-1914 (London, 1989), 60-61. 

On the social utility of the Christian religion, see Murphy, “English-Speaking Colonies to 1854,” 124-26. Nuns in general are not considered in this article. One could also lament the sparse visibility of the Catholic faithful, that is, the non-ordained lay members of the Catholic Church. Yet the state of the current historiography does not allow me to extend general remarks or conclusions about the clergy to nuns and to the faithful in general in such a lengthy chronological framework and vast geographic scope. Leslie Woodcock Tentler shares this opinion (Tentler, U.S. Catholic Historian 21: 80-81, 90, 93-94). As invariably happens in the history of the early modern Western world, written sources tend to become less numerous and less consistent the more scholars proceed downward from the top of the hierarchy (the bishops) toward the local priests and missionaries. The latter, however, were not silent, and they made their voices heard whenever they needed to do so, esp. when they became involved in controversies. With few exceptions, duly noted in this article, their papers show that these local priests and missionaries fully shared the conservatism of their leaders. In the period I cover in this article, especially prominent in this Atlantic clerical network were John Douglas and William Poynter, vicars apostolic in the London district; Irish-born James Louis O’Donel and Edmund Burke, vicars apostolic in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia; Scottish-born Alexander McDonell and Angus Bernard MacEachern, vicars apostolic in Upper Canada and the Maritime Provinces; John Thomas Troy and Daniel Murray, archbishops of Dublin; and the several archbishops of Baltimore and Quebec. The Scottish vicars apostolic were less forthcoming with their North American colleagues, probably on account of their meager human and financial resources at home. For the inner working of Propaganda Fide, see Finbar Kenneally, ed., United States Documents in the Propaganda Fide Archives: A Calendar. First Series, 7 vols. (Washington, DC, 1966-81); Luca Codignola, Guide to Documents Relating to French and British North America in the Archives of the Sacred Congregation “de Propaganda Fide” in Rome, 1622-1799 (Ottawa, 1991); Codignola, Vatican: Archives of the Sacred Congregation “de Propa ganda Fide” [1622-1830], in ArchiVIA 4. Colonial Archives. Finding Aids on CD-ROM (Ottawa, Ontario, 1996). On the conservative tradition of the European Christian churches as opposed to Christian liberalism in North America, see Mark A. Noll, The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002), 24, 227-30. 

Adam Shortt and Arthur G. Doughty, eds., Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 1759-1791, 2d ed. (Ottawa, 1918), pt. 1: 115-16 (art. 4, quotations, 115), 3, 6 (Quebec, art. 6), 15-18, 30-32 (Montreal, arts. 27-35); Reginald Coupland, The Quebec Act: A Study in Statesmanship (Oxford, 1925), 208-17, esp. 211-13. For the French version of the treaty, see Zenab Esmat Rashed, The Peace of Paris, 1763 (Liverpool, 1951), app. 1, “Copy of the Original Text of the Definitive Treaty,” 212-29, esp. 216. For the historiography on Briand, see, on the one side, Marcel Trudel, L’Église canadienne sous le régime militaire, 1759-1764, 2 vols. (Quebec City, 1956-57); Trudel, “La servitude de l’église catholique au Canada français sous le régime anglais,” La Société Historique du Canada, Rapport 31 (1963): 42-64; F. Murray Greenwood, Legacies of Fear: Law and Politics in Quebec in the Era of the French Revolution (Toronto, Ontario, 1993), 18-19; Ferretti, Brève histoire de l’Église catholique, 38-39; Trudel, Le régime militaire et la disparition de la Nouvelle-France, 1759-1764 (Montreal, 1999); Adrien Thério, ed., Un siècle de collusion entre le clergé et le gouvernement britannique: Anthologie des mandements des évêques (1760-1867) (Montreal, 1998). On the other side, see Hilda Marion Neatby, “Jean-Olivier  Briand: A ‘Minor’ Canadian,” Canadian Historical Association, Report 31 (1963): 1-16; André Vachon, Mgr Jean-Olivier Briand (1715-1794) (Quebec City, 1979); Guy-Marie Oury, Mgr Briand: Evêque de Québec et les problèmes de son époque (Quebec City, 1985); Gilles Chaussé, “French Canada from the Conquest to 1840,” in Murphy and Perin, Concise History of Christianity in Canada, 56-107, esp. 60-61. 

Jean-Olivier Briand to Étienne Montgolfier, Quebec, February 1762, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, Quebec City, ser. 20A, sub ser. 1, doc. no. 89 (“our masters”); Briand to the Acadians of Île Saint-Jean, Cap-Breton, Nouvelle-Écosse, and Gaspésie, Quebec, Aug. 16, 1766, ibid., ser. 22A, subser. 3, doc. no. 274 (“your present”); “Mandement pour faire chanter un Te Deum en action de grace pour le bienfait de la paix,” Briand to the secular and regular clergy and to the faithful of the government of Quebec, Quebec, June 4, 1763, in H. Têtu and C.-O. Gagnon, eds., Mandements lettres pastorales et circulaires des évêques de Québec (Quebec City, 1888), II: 168-71 (“Where are,” II: 169); Briand to Pierre de La Rue, abbé de L’Isle-Dieu, Quebec, Oct. 15, 1768, in Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Vatican City, ser. Missioni, vol. 53 (unfoliated, “peace reigns”); Briand to [Giuseppe Maria Castelli], [Quebec], Oct. 15, 1772, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 20A, subser. 1, doc. no. 159 (“iniquity is despised”). See also James Murray to Briand, Quebec, May 31, 1763, ibid., ser. 60CN, subser. 1, doc. no. 13. That things were now better than under the French regime seems to have been the realization shared by many. See abbé de L’Isle-Dieu to Castelli, Paris, Nov. 17, 1766, Dec. 21, 1767, in Archivio Segreto Vaticano, ser. Missioni, vol. 53. This sentiment of surprise is well described in Cornelius J. Jaenen, The Role of the Church in New France (Toronto, Ontario, 1976), 65. 

Proclamation, Oct. 7, 1763, in Shortt and Doughty, Documents Relating to History of Canada, pt. 1: 163-68 (quotation, 163); Eric Jarvis, “His Majesty’s Papist Subjects: Roman Catholic Political Rights in British West Florida,” Gulf South Historical Review 16.1 (Fall 2000): 6-19. The Treaty of Paris left half of Louisiana to France, but France had already given it to Spain in the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1762. On Louisiana, see Angel Santos Hernández, “Presencia misionera en la antigua Luisiana,” Missionalia Hispanica 32.94 (1975): 77-101; John Edward Harkins, “The Neglected Phase of Louisiana’s Colonial History: The New Orleans Cabildo, 1769-1803” (Ph.D. Diss., Memphis State University, 1976); John Preston Moore, Revolt in Louisiana: The Spanish Occupation, 1766-1770 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1976); Carl A. Brasseaux, The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765-1803 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1987), 73-89; Alfred E. Lemmon, “Spanish Louisiana: In the Service of God and His Most Catholic Majesty,” in Cross, Crozier, and Crucible: A Volume Celebrating the Bicentennial of a Catholic Diocese in Louisiana, ed. Glenn R. Conrad et al. (New Orleans, 1993), 16-29. For the abbé de L’Isle-Dieu and Pierre Gibault, see Pierre de La Rue, abbé de L’Isle-Dieu to [Propaganda Fide], Paris, Aug. 14, 21, 1769, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation “de Propaganda Fide,” Vatican City, ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 1: fols. 254, 257-59. See also Pierre Gibault to Jean-Olivier Briand, Kaskaskia, June 15, 1769, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 7CM, subser. 6, doc. no. 18; [Propaganda Fide] to abbé de L’Isle-Dieu, Rome, Aug. 30, 1769, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Lettere, 214: fols. 260v-61r. For the early years of Louisiana under the United States, see Annabelle M. Melville, “John Carroll and Louisiana, 1803-1815,” Catholic Historical Review 64.3 (July 1978): 398-440. 

Giuseppe Maria Castelli to [Mario Marefoschi], [Rome], Jan. 21, 1766, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congregazioni Particolan, 137: fols. 69-72 (“return all the right”); [Castelli] to Jean-Olivier Briand, Rome, Sept. 8, 1773, ibid., ser. Lettere, 222: fol. 475 (“calm and tranquillity”). On the formulation of the briefs, see Pietro Pamphili Colonna to Castelli, Paris, Mar. 14, 1764, in Archivio Segreto Vatica no, ser. Missioni, vol. 53. On the French priests and the Montreal bishopric, see [Leonardo Antonelli] to François-Joseph Sorbier de Villars, Rome, Sept. 6, 1783, July 5, 1784, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Lettere, 242: fols. 666-67r, 244: fols. 559-60r; Jean-François Hubert to [Antonelli], Quebec, Oct. 24, 1789, ibid., ser. Scritture Originali Riferite nelle Congregazioni Generali, 894: fols. 160-63; [Antonelli] to Hubert, [Rome], Feb. 6, 1790, ibid., ser. Lettere, 258: fols. 76-79r.

On the suppression of the Society of Jesus, see Christopher Stonor to [Stefano Borgia], [Rome], [September 1773], in Westminster Diocesan Archives, London, ser. B, 137: 188-93 (“any notable change,” 189); Richard Challoner to Stonor [and Borgia], [London], Sept. 24, 1773, ibid., 137: 198-200. See also Thomas M. McCoog, ed., “Promising Hope”: Essays on the Suppression and Restoration of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (Rome, 2003); Luca Codignola, “The Policy of Rome towards the English-Speaking Catholics in British North America, 1750-1830,” in Murphy and Stortz, Creed and Culture, 100-25, esp. 101-02. On the salary to Bailly de Messein, see Francis Legge to William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, Halifax, Aug. 25, 1774, in Colonial Office Series 217/50, fols. 147-59, National Archives, Kew, Eng.; [Earl of Dartmouth] to Francis Legge, [London], Oct. 5, 1774, ibid., CO 217/50, fols. 160-61; Claude Galarneau, “Bailly de Messein, Charles-François,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, ed. George W. Brown et al. (Toronto, Ontario, 1979), IV: 41-44, esp. 41. On spiritual jurisdiction, see Codignola, “Policy of Rome,” 108-10. On the practice of financial assistance, see W. S. MacNutt, The Atlantic Provinces: The Emergence of Colonial Society, 1712-1857 (Toronto, 1965), 118-19. For contemporary estimates of American Catholics, see Fisher [Challoner] to [Stonor], [London], Sept. 14, 1756, in Westminster Diocesan Archives, ser. B, vol. 45, no. 135; Challoner to [Giuseppe Maria Castelli], [London], Sept. 10, 1773, ibid., ser. A, vol. 41, no. 133, in J.  H. Whyte, “The Vicars Apostolics’ Returns of 1773,” Recusant History 9.4 (January 1968): 205-14, esp. 208. See also Charles H. Metzger, Catholics and the American Revolution: A Study in Religious Climate (Chicago, 1962), 138-53; James Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York, 1981), 42, 55. Incidentally, Catholics were also 1 percent of the population in England and Wales. See Bossy, English Catholic Community, 185; Ian R. Christie, Wars and Revolutions: Britain, 1760-1815 (London, 1982), 3, 158-59. On the comparison between the status of the Church in the British continental colonies and in Quebec, see Ferdinand Farmer [Steinmeyer] to Bernard Well, Philadelphia, Apr. 22, 1773, in Archives de l'Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 7CM, subser. 2, doc. no. 124. At the time Farmer and Well were both subjects of the British crown. 

[John  Carroll] to [Leonardo Antonelli], Maryland, Nov. 10, 1783, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Centrale, 2: fols. 328-31 (quotation). Thomas O’Brien Hanley has published a copy of a similar letter, allegedly addressed to Vitaliano Borromeo, with a slightly different wording in English. See Hanley, ed., The John Carroll Papers (Notre Dame, IN, 1976), I: 80-81. American historians take for granted that Catholics sided with the revolutionaries on account of their adhesion to Enlightenment ideas. See, for example, Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism, 14-26. The implication is that Catholic leaders in British North America, Great Britain, and Ireland, all of whom opposed the American Revolution, did not share these Enlightenment ideas. See a more varied picture in Jason Kennedy Duncan, “‘A Most Democratic Class’: New York Catholics and the Early American Republic” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Iowa, 1999), 86-89, 108-10, 111-12. According to American religious historian Edwin S. Gaustad, neither revolutionaries nor loyalists “follow[ed]  clear religious lines” (Gaustad, “Religion before the Revolution,” in A Companion to the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole [Malden, Mass., 2000], 63). On John Carroll’s early years, see Annabelle M. Melville, John Carroll of Baltimore: Founder of the American Catholic Hierarchy (New York, 1955), 11-37. For the most recent literature on Carroll’s political philosophy, see Carla Bang, “John  Carroll and the Enlightenment,” in American Catholic Preaching and Piety in the Time of John Carroll, ed. Raymond J. Kupke (Lanham, MD, 1991), 107-36; Joseph M. McShane, “John Carroll’s Controversy with the Philosophes,” Thought 66.262 (September 1991): 279-96; Charles Edwards O’Neill, “John Carroll, the ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ and Rome,” in Kupke, American Catholic Preaching and Piety, 1-26; Thomas W. Jodziewicz, “American Catholic Apologetical Dissonance in the Early Republic? Father John Thayer and Bishop John Carroll,” Catholic Historical Review 84.3 (July 1998): 455-76. On the Carroll family background, see Ronald Hoffman, Sally D. Mason, and Eleanor S. Darcy, eds., Dear Papa, Dear Charley: The Peregrinations of a Revolutionary Aristocrat, as Told by Charles Carroll of Carrollton and His Father, Charles Carroll of Annapolis, with Sundry Observations on Bastardy, Child-Rearing, Romance, Matrimony, Commerce, Tobacco, Slavery, and the Politics of Revolutionary America, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001). 

“Mandement au sujet de l’invasion des Américains au Canada,” Briand to the People of this Colony, Quebec, May 22, 1775, in Têtu and Gagnon, Mandements lettres pastorales et circulaires, II: 264-65 (“your country,” 265, “free practice,” 264); François-Joseph Sorbier de Villars to [Leonardo Antonelli], Paris, Feb. 4, 1781, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 1: fols. 341-42 (“so reasonable”). The pastoral letter addressed to the Canadian rebels that followed the attack on Quebec City was longer and more elaborate. See “Mandement aux sujets rebelles durant la guerre américaine,” Briand to the Inhabitants of this Diocese, [Quebec], [May 12, 1776], ibid., 269-79. On hostile American reactions to the Quebec Act, see Francis D. Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westport, CT, 1995), esp. 46-52. On the American diplomatic mission to Quebec, see Brantz Mayer, ed., Journal of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, during His Visit to Canada in 1776, as One of the Commissioners from Congress: With a Memoir and Notes by Brantz Mayer, Cor. Soc. Md. Hist. Soc. (Baltimore, 1845); Mary Rita, MSC, “The Failure of a Mission,” Canadian Catholic Historical Society, Report 26 (1958): 39-51; Cogliano, No King, No Popery, 65-66. Benjamin Franklin, who was later to suggest to the Holy See that Carroll be appointed bishop of Baltimore, met him during this expedition. Priests who sided with the Americans were Gibault, Jesuit Pierre-René Floquet, Franciscan Recollets François-Louis Chartier de Lotbinière, Claude Carpentier, and Jean-Jacques Berthiaume, former Jesuit Joseph Huguet, and Sulpician Pierre Huet de La Valinière. On the Church and the revolutionary years in Quebec, see Laval Laurent, Québec et l’Église aux États-Unis sous Mgr Briand et Mgr Plessis (Montreal, 1945); Hilda Neatby, Quebec: The Revolutionary Age, 1760-1791 (Toronto, 1966); Gustave Lanctôt, Canada and the American Revolution, 1774 -1783 (Toronto, 1967). 

[Claude-Florent Bouchard, abbé de La Poterie], A Pastoral Letter from the Apostolic Vice-Prefect, Curate of the Holy Cross at Boston, Feb. 22, 1789 (“prosperity of Congress”). For the earlier period in abbé de La Poterie’s life, see also William Hurst to James Robert Talbot, [Paris], Feb. 19, Mar. 25, 1784, in Westminster Diocesan Archives, ser. A, vol. 42, nos. 304-05. On Catholics’ legal status under the new regime of church and state separation, see Thomas J. Curry, The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment (New York, 1986); Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI, 1992), 144-48; Patrick W. Carey, “American Catholics and the First Amendment: 1776-1840,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113.3 (July 1989): 323-46; Mark Douglas McGarvie, One Nation under Law: America’s Early National Struggles to Separate Church and State (DeKalb, IL, 2004), 3-20. For the view that the Constitution did not really intend to separate church and state, see Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 19-20; Charles J.  Reid Jr., “Review of Religious Expression and the American Constitution by Franklyn S. Haiman,” Catholic Historical Review 91.4 (October 2005): 859-61, esp. 860 (a review). For John Carroll’s attitude and prayer, see John Carroll to Mathew Carey, Baltimore, Apr. 8, 1789, in Lea and Febiger Records, MS 227B, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; abbé de La Poterie to Leonardo Antonelli, Boston, Jan. 6, 1790, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Centrale, 2: fols. 541-42; John Carroll, “John Carroll’s Prayer for the Civil Authorities, November 10, 1791,” in John Tracy Ellis, ed., Documents of American Catholic History (Milwaukee, 1956), 178-79. 

The basic documentation was first published by Carl Russell Fish, ed., “Documents Relative to the Adjustment of the Roman Catholic Organization in the United States to the Conditions of National Independence, 1783-1789,” American Historical Review 15.4 (July 1910): 800-29. The traditional American interpretation appears in Gerald P. Fogarty, Commonwealth Catholicism: A History of the Catholic Church in Virginia (Notre Dame, IN, 2001), 21. For opposition to the idea of any episcopal appointment, see Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York, 1986), 199-209. For John Carroll’s earliest application, see Carroll to Leonardo Antonelli, Maryland, Feb. 27, 1785, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Centrale, 2: fols. 447-52. On the attitude of the Episcopal Church leading to the Constitution and canons of 1789, see Frederick V. Mills Sr., Bishops by Ballot: An Eighteenth-Century Ecclesiastical Revolution (New York, 1978); Mills, “Bishops and Other Ecclesiastical Issues, to 1776,” in Greene and Pole, Companion to the American Revolution, 179-83. For the promotion to full bishop, see Carroll, Robert Molyneux, and John Ashton to Pius VI, Baltimore, Mar. 12, 1788, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Centrale, 2: fols. 516-17. See also Carroll to Antonio Dugnani, Maryland, Feb. 23, 1789, ibid., ser. Fondo Vienna, subser. Congressi, 26: fol. 147; General Congregation, Rome, Sept. 14, 1789, ibid., ser. Acta, 159: fols. 378v-381r; [Antonelli] to Molyneux, Ashton, Charles Sewall et al., [Rome], Nov. 14, 1789, ibid., ser. Lettere, 255: fols. 599v-600. For the policy of noninterference, see [Benjamin Franklin] to [Giuseppe Maria Doria Pamphili], [Paris], [August 1783], ibid., ser. Congressi, subser. America Centrale, 2: fols. 309-10 (Franklin remarked that religious toleration was a state responsibility and Congress was not to interfere). 

See the earliest petition in [John Carroll] to [Propaganda Fide], Maryland, Nov. 10, 1783, Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Centrale, 2: fols. 328-31; John Lewis, Bernard Diderick, Ignatius Matthews, James Walton, and Carroll to Pius VI, [Maryland], Nov. 10, 1783, ibid., 2: fols. 349-50. The simple confirmation of John Lewis, the current superior, requested by both petitions, was quickly dismissed by the Holy See on account of old age and of Franklin’s own preference for Carroll. See [Leonardo Antonelli] to Giuseppe Maria Doria Pamphili, [Rome], Jan. 15, Sept. 7, 1783, June 9, Sept. 25, 1784, ibid., ser. Lettere, 242: fols. 53-68, 244: fols. 487-92, 781-82r. For the preference for a local missionary, see Stefano Borgia to François-Joachim de Pierre, cardinal de Bernis, Rome, Jan. 13, 1783, ibid., 243: fols. 1v-2; [Doria Pamphili] to [Benjamin Franklin], [Paris], [August 1783], ibid., ser. Congressi, subser. America Centrale, 2: fols. 312-13; [Doria Pamphili] to Anne-César, La Luzerne, [Paris], May 12, 1784, ibid., 2: fols. 371, 374. For the John Carroll candidacy, see Doria Pamphili to La Luzerne, [Paris], May 12, 1784, ibid., 2: fols. 375, 378; [Antonelli] to Carroll, [Rome], June 9, 1784, July 23, 1785, ibid., ser. Lettere, 244: fols. 492v-95, 246: fols. 437v-41; Doria Pamphili to Antonelli, Paris, July 5, Aug. 23, 1784, ibid., ser. Congressi, subser. America Centrale, 2: fols. 401-04,413-14; François Marbois, marquis de Barbé-Marbois, to Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, Philadelphia, Mar. 27, 1785, ibid., 2: fols. 459-60; [Antonelli] to Carroll, Robert Molyneux, and John Ashton, [Rome], July 12, 1788, ibid., ser. Lettere, 252: fols. 491v-93r; [Antonelli’s internal memorandum], [Rome], [Sept. 14, 1789], ibid., ser. Congregazioni Particolari, 145: fols. 113-16. 

Franklin’s diary, July 1, 1784, in Albert Henry Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1907), X: 349. On French diplomats and American congressmen, see [Leonardo Antonelli] to Doria Pamphili, [Rome], Jan. 15, Mar. 19, 1783, July 31, 1785, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Lettere, 242: fols. 58-59, 196v-98, 244: fols. 624-25; Doria Pamphili to Antonelli, Paris, Feb. 10, Sept. 1, 1783, May 17, July 5, 1784, ibid., ser. Congressi, subser. America Centrale, 2: fols. 271-72, 300-03, 379-81, 386, 401-04; Anne-César, chevalier de La Luzerne, to Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, Annapolis, Jan. 31, 1784, ibid., 2: fols. 351, 354. On Benjamin Franklin, John Lewis, and John Carroll, see [Franklin] to [Doria Pamphili], [Paris], [August 1783], ibid., 2: fols. 304, 307, 309-10; Doria Pamphili to Antonelli, Paris, May 17, 1784, ibid., 2: fols. 379-81, 386; [Antonelli] to Carroll, [Rome], June 9, 1784, ibid., ser. Lettere, 244: fols. 492v-95; [Antonelli’s internal memorandum], [Rome], [Sept. 14, 1789], ibid., ser. Congregazioni Particolari, 145: fols. 113-16. A sample taken in 1829 shows that, of 646 bishops of the Latin Church, 67 had been nominated by local chapters or similar institutions that used electoral methods and 24 were direct papal nominations and appointments. No fewer than 555, however, were crown nominations. See Robert F. Trisco, “An American Anomaly: Bishops without Canons,” Chicago Studies 9.2 (Summer 1970): 143-57; Garrett Sweeney, “The Primacy: The Small Print of Vatican I,” in Bishops and Writers: Aspects of the Evolution of Modern English Catholicism, ed. Adrian Hastings (Wheathampstead, Eng., 1977), 179-206, esp. 199-200; Sweeney, “The ‘Wound in the Right Foot’: Unhealed?” ibid., 207-34, esp. 207-19. 

Giuseppe Maria Doria Pamphili to Leonardo Antonelli, Paris, Aug. 23, 1784, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Centrale, 2: fols. 413-14 (“revolutions”). For swinging American sympathies toward France, see William C. Stinchcombe, The American Revolution and the French Alliance (Syracuse, NY, 1969), 1, 205, 208; Lawrence S. Kaplan, “Toward Isolationism: The Rise and Fall of the Franco-American Alliance, 1775-1801,” in The American Revolution and “A Candid World,” ed. Kaplan (Kent, OH, 1977), 134-60; M.-J. Rossignol, “L’obsession de la conspiration, ou toute la vérité sur l’influence française aux États-Unis,” in L’Amérique et la France: Deux révolutions, ed. Élise Marienstras (Paris, 1990), 131-43; Duncan, “Most Democratic Class,” 169-76; Thomas C. Sosnowski, “French Émigrés in the United States,” in The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution, 1789-1814, ed. Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel (New York, 1999), 138-50, esp. 145-48; Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, “Refugiés or Émigrés? Early Modern French Migrations to British North America and the United States (c. 1680-c. 1820),” Itinerario 30.2 (2006): 12-32. For the massacre, see Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, 1935), 161-63; John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (London, 1969), 86-97; J. F. Bosher, The French Revolution (New York, 1988), 178-81; Ivan Gobry, Dictionnaire des martyrs de la Révolution (Bagneux, France, 1990), 5; Murphy, “English-Speaking Colonies to 1854,” 125; Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 1780-1804 (Washington, DC, 2000), 140-62, 188, 215-16, 233. For the refugees’ waves, see Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration during the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1951); Jacques Godechot, La contre-révolution: Doctrine et action, 1789-1804 (Paris, 1961), 152; Owen Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford, 1981), 448; Carpenter, “London: Capital of the Emigration,” in Carpenter and Mansel, French Émigrés in Europe, 43-67, esp. 61-62 n. 5. For the ecclesiastical refugees in Britain, see Dominic Aidan Bellenger, The French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles after 1789: An Historical Introduction and Working List (Bath, 1986); Bellenger, “‘Fearless Resting Place’: the Exiled French Clergy in Great Britain, 1789-1815,” in Carpenter and Mansel, French Émigrés in Europe, 214-29; Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution: Émigrés in London, 1789-1802 (New York, 1999). 

C.-F. Volney [Constantin-François Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney], Tableau du climat et du sol des Etats-Unis d’Amérique: suivi d’éclaircissemens sur la Floride, sur la colonie Française au Scioto, sur quelques colonies Canadiennes et sur les Sauvages ..., 2d ed. (Paris, 1803), I, ii (“haven of peace”); Antonio Dugnani to Francesco Saverio Zelada, Carpentras, Nov. 2, 1789, in Archivio Segreto Vaticano, ser. Segreteria di Stato, subser. Francia, 580: fols. 97v-98r (“best option”); John Carroll to [Jean-François Hubert], Baltimore, May 12, 1793, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 7CM, subser. 1, doc. no. 5 (“if anything”); William Poynter to Joseph-Octave Plessis, [London], Feb. 25, 1819, ibid., ser. 90CM, subser. 2, doc. no. 34 (“recover in America”). Though few in absolute figures, the French-speaking ecclesiastics who fled to North America formed a power network that continued to produce high-ranking members of the U.S. hierarchy until two generations after the revolutionary events that had triggered their departure from France. These men and women shared not only their language but also their cultural background. They were well-educated people with high moral standards and unobjectionable public behavior. Furthermore, their excellent training and profound devotion, together with their unexpectedly tolerant attitude toward diverse conditions, made their presence useful to the North American Church and, at least in frontier areas, facilitated relationships between Catholics and Protestants. See Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 80; Codignola, “Policy of Rome,” 100-03; Marcel Fournier, Les Français au Québec, 1765-1865: un mouvement migratoire méconnu (Sillery, Quebec, 1995); Murphy, “English-Speaking Colonies to 1854,” 124; Margaret C. DePalma, Dialogue on the Frontier: Catholic and Protestant Relations, 1793-1883 (Kent, OH, 2004), xv. On the Roman bureaucracy, see Del Re, La curia romana; Peter Partner, The Pope’s Men: The Papal Civil Service in the Renaissance (Oxford, 1990). On Propaganda Fide specifically, see J. Metzler, ed., Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Memoria Rerum: 350 anni a servizio delle missioni, 1622-1972, 3 vols. (Rome, 1971-76). On its disarray, see E. E. Y. Hales, Revolution and Papacy, 1769-1846 (Garden City, NY, 1960); Metzler, “Die Kongregation in der Zeit Napoleons (1795-1815),” in Metzler, Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, II: 84-118; Chadwick, Popes and European Revolution; Margaret M. O’Dwyer, The Papacy in the Age of Napoleon and the Restoration: Pius VII, 1800-1823 (Lanham, MD, 1985). 

See Pierre H. Boulle and Richard A. Lebrun, eds., Le Canada et la Révolution française: Actes du 6e colloque du ClEE. 29, 30, 31 octobre 1987 (Montreal, 1989); Michel Grenon, ed., L’image de la Révolution française au Québec, 1789-1989 (Ville LaSalle, Quebec, 1989); Greenwood, Legacies of Fear, 63-69, 72-73, 91-92. For Detroit, see François-Xavier Dufaux to [Jean-François  Hubert], Detroit, Sept. 2, 1796, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 7CM, subser. 5, doc. no. 124 (“God Save the People”); Jean-Baptiste Marchand to Hubert, L’Assomption-du-Détroit, Jan. 31, 1797, ibid., doc. no. 132. See also Patrick W. Carey, People, Priests, and Prelates: Ecclesiastical Democracy and the Tensions of Trusteeism (Notre Dame, 1987), 327 n. 36. In 1796, Upper Canada observed the Quebec ritual, which was still based on [Jean-Baptiste de La Croix de Chevrières de Saint-Vallier], Catechisme du diocese de Quebec par Monseigneur l’Illustrissime & Reverendissime Jean de la Croix de saint Valier, Evêque de Quebec: en faveur des Curez & des Fideles de son Diocese (Paris, 1702). Detroit observed the Baltimore ritual, as codified in the proceedings of the First Synod of Baltimore. See “Synod Report,” Nov. 7-8, 1891, in Hanley, John Carroll Papers, I: 526-41. The only incident involving the relationship between the higher hierarchy and the British government was a dispute between Hubert and his coadjutor, Charles-François Bailly de Messein, which concerned the support to be granted to the government’s 1789 proposal for the establishment of a nonconfessional university in the province of Quebec, which Bishop Hubert opposed. See Léon Pouliot, “L’enseignement universitaire catholique au Canada français de 1760 à 1860,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 12.2 (September 1958): 155-69, esp. 156-59. The Holy See stood behind the bishop’s policies and severely reprimanded Bailly de Messein (Hubert to Leonardo Antonelli, Quebec, Nov. 8, 1790, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 1: fols. 504-07; [Propaganda Fide] to Bailly de Messein, [Rome], Apr. 6, 1791, ibid., ser. Lettere, 260: fols. 173v-76). 

Joseph-Octave Plessis to John Thomas Troy, Quebec, Dec. 21, 1813, in Archives of the Archdiocese of Dublin, Ireland, ser. AB2, subser. 28, subsubser. 1, item no. 300, fols. 397-98 (“submitted to the veto”). A similar veto system had been applied in Corsica in 1794 when it was seized by the British. See Vincent J.  McNally, Reform, Revolution, and Reaction: Archbishop John Thomas Troy and the Catholic Church in Ireland, 1787-1817 (Lanham, MD, 1995), 79; Aston, Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, 203. For the securing of Bailly de Messein’s nomination, see Jean-Olivier Briand to [Joseph-Marie de La Come de Chaptes, abbé de L’Étoile], Quebec, July 27, [1770], in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 22A, subser. 4, doc. no. 153; Briand to [Giuseppe Maria Castelli], [Quebec], Oct. 15, 1772, ibid., ser. 20A, subser. 1, doc. no. 159. On Propaganda Fide’s approval, see Briand’s memorandum, Quebec, [June 15, 1763], ibid., ser. 71CD, subser. 1, doc. no. 1 [item 2]; [Propaganda Fide] to La Come de Chaptes, Rome, Mar. 16, 1768, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Lettere, 212: fols. 114v-15. On the Holy See’s late attempt, see Placido Zurla to [Propaganda Fide], [Rome], Jan. 27, 1834, ibid., ser. Acta, 197: fols. 66-67; [Angelo Mai] to [Propaganda Fidel, [Rome], Oct. 4, 1834, ibid., ser. Scritture Originali Riferite nelle Congregazioni Generali, 960: fols. 773-74. In 1821, Ambroise Maréchal strongly encouraged Plessis to request of the Holy See the right to present new bishops, unaware that the bishops of Quebec already enjoyed that power in practice. In the same year, the bishop of New Orleans regretted that no such solution existed for his own succession. See Maréchal to Plessis, Baltimore, Jan. 6, 1821, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 7CM, subser. 1, doc. no. 29; Louis-Guillaume-Valentin Dubourg to Plessis, Basse-Louisiane, Feb. 25, 1821, ibid., doc. no. 103. On Maréchal’s wish to be entrusted with overseeing all American appointments, see Fogarty, Commonwealth Catholicism, 56-67. 

James Louis O’Donel to [Joseph-Octave Plessis], Saint John’s, Newfoundland, May 12, 1799, May 14, 1800, May 10, 1802, Aug. 29, 1805, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 3OCN, subser. 1, doc. nos. 4, 8, 15 (“happiest people”), 25. See also O’Donel to John Thomas Troy, Saint John’s, Dec. 8, 1792, Dec. 27, 1793, in Archives of the Archdiocese of Dublin, ser. AB2, subser. 116, subsubser. 5, item nos. 103, 155; O’Donel to Erasmus Gower, Saint John’s, Oct. 11, 1805, in CO 194/44, fols. 203-04, National Archives. For O’Donel’s report, see O’Donel to [John  Jones], [Saint John’s], May 5, 1785, in Hans Rollmann, “John Jones, James O’Donel and the Question of Religious Tolerance in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland: A Correspondence,” Newfoundland Quarterly 80.1 (Summer 1984): 23-27, esp. 25-26. For O’Donel’s assistance to Charles Morice Pole, see Kildare Dobbs, “Newfoundland and the Maritimes: An Overview,” in O’Driscoll and Reynolds, Untold Story, I: 175-94, esp. 179; Thomas Scallan to [Francesco Fontana], Saint John’s, Oct. 6, 1822, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 2: fols. 350-51. In Newfoundland Ultramontanism, another expression of the radicalism deplored by O’Donel, began with Michael Anthony Fleming, who became vicar apostolic in 1830. 

That Ireland was not a particularly violent country is the opinion of Thomas Bartlett, “An End to Moral Economy: The Irish Militia Disturbances of 1793,” Past and Present 99 (May 1983): 41-63, esp. 43; Bartlett, Fall and Rise of Irish Nation, 13-14. Patrick J. Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey (Wilmington, DE, 1985), 139, is of a different opinion. For John Thomas Troy’s moderate views, see Troy, A Pastoral Instruction on the Duties of Christian Citizens: Addressed to the Roman Catholics of the Archdiocess of Dublin (Dublin, 1793). On Irish radicalism, Troy, and the Catholic Church, see S. J. Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780-1845 (Dublin, 1985), 223-25; Dáire Keogh, “Archbishop Troy, the Catholic Church and Irish Radicalism: 1791-93,” in The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism, and Rebellion, ed. David Dickson, Keogh, and Kevin Whelan (Dublin, 1993), 124-34; Keogh, French Disease, 137; McNally, Reform, Revolution, and Reaction, 63-68, 93-94, 103; Keogh, “‘The Pattern of the Flock’: John Thomas Troy, 1786-1823,” in History of the Catholic Diocese of Dublin, ed. James Kelly and Keogh (Dublin, 2000), 215-36. Contrary to their clergy, the Irish peasants were much less aware of the nature of the French Revolution. See Marianne Elliott, “The Origins and Transformation of Early Irish Republicanism,” International Review of Social History 23.3 (1978): 405-28, esp. 419. Bishop Iraklii Lisovskii, the primate of the Uniate Church in Belorussia, shared Troy’s political views. See James T. Flynn, “Contrasting Similarities: Bishops Troy and Lisovskii in Ireland and Belorussia in the Age of the French Revolution,” Catholic Historical Review 87.2 (April 2001): 214-28, esp. 228. Despite previous differences over the American Revolution, John Carroll also praised Troy for his efforts in dealing with his own radicals (Carroll to Troy, Georgetown, Dec. 14, 1795, in Archives of the Archdiocese of Dublin, ser. AB2, subser. 116, subsubser. 6, item no. 95). 

Patrick J.  Corish, Maynooth College, 1795-1995 (Dublin, 1995), 1-87; McNally, Reform, Revolution, and Reaction, 72-73, 82; Keogh, “Pattern of the Flock,” 233; Daniel Murphy, A History of Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education (Dublin, 2000), 120-21. On the royal veto, see John Thomas Troy to Leonardo Antonelli, Dublin, Feb. 28, 1795, in Archives of the Archdiocese of Dublin, ser. AB2, subser. 116, sub subser. 6, item no. 972. On Daniel Murray, see Mary Purcell, “Dublin Diocesan Archives: Murray Papers,” Archivium Hibernicum 36 (1981): 51-140, 37 (1982): 29-121, 38 (1983): 43-127, 39 (1984): 62-87, 40 (1985): 35-114, 41(1986): 3-63, 42 (1987): 49-117; Donal Kerr, “Dublin’s Forgotten Archbishop: Daniel Murray, 1768-1852,” in Kelly and Keogh, History of the Catholic Diocese, 247-67. On Troy’s and the Irish bishops’ support for the union with Britain, see McNally, Reform, Revolution, and Reaction, 81; Keogh, French Disease, 213-17; Bartlett, Fall and Rise of Irish Nation, 249-51. On the Catholic Church in Ireland, see Oliver MacDonagh, “The Politicization of the Irish Catholic Bishops, 1800-1850,” Historical Journal 18.1 (March 1975): 37-53, esp. 38-39, 53; Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York, 1985), 83 (for an overall judgment on the conservatism of the Irish clergy); Jacqueline Hill, “Religious Toleration and the Relaxation of the Penal Laws: An Imperial Perspective, 1763-1780,” Archivium Hibernicum 44 (1989): 98-109; Kevin Whelan, “The Catholic Community in Eighteenth-Century County Wexford,” in Endurance and Emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, ed. T. P. Power and Whelan (Dublin, 1990), 129-70, esp. 156; David W. Miller, “Irish Christianity and Revolution,” in Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Union: Ireland in the 1790s, ed. Jim Smyth (New York, 2000), 195-210. 

John Douglas’ diary, in Westminster Diocesan Archives, ser. Z, vol. 72 (“true loyalty,” vol. 1: Apr. 18, 1807-May 12, 1807); “An Address of Several of His Majesty’s Roman Catholic Subjects to Their Protestant Fellow Subjects” (1807), in Joseph P. Chinnici, The English Catholic Enlightenment: John Lingard and the Cisalpine Movement, 1780-1850 (Shepherdstown, WV, 1980), 17-18 (“absolve or dispense”), 194. William Poynter to Joseph-Octave Plessis, [London], Feb. 25, 1819, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 90CM, subser. 2, doc. no. 34 (“great cause”); Alexander McDonell to Thomas Weld, Montreal, Oct. 24, 1833, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 3: fols. 184-85 (“levelling democratical principles”). For Scotland, see Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church, 89. See also Cooney, Scotland and the Papacy, 13-16. Catholics in Scotland were about 2 percent of the population. These Roman correspondents of the British and North American bishops were ecclesiastics such as John Thomson, their procurator; Robert Gradwell at the Venerable English College; Paul Macpherson and Angus MacDonald at Scots College; and brothers James MacCormick and Michael MacCormick, both Franciscans Observant, at the Irish College of St. Isidore. Their network included John Farquharson at the Scots College in Douai. The Lower Canadian French-speaking bishops who had allegedly helped foster the insurgency were none other than Jean-Jacques Lartigue, then auxiliary bishop in Montreal, and Pierre-Flavien Turgeon, the newly appointed coadjutor of the archbishop of Quebec (Joseph  Signay). For a parallel between Lower Canadian and Irish churches concerning the attitude toward rebellion, see [Thomas Maguire], Doctrine de l’Eglise catholique d’Irlande et de celle du Canada, sur la revolte: Recueil de pièces constatant l’uniformité de cette doctrine dans les deux pays, et sa conformité avec celle de l'Eglise universelle (Quebec City, 1836), which was published on the eve of the rebellions of 1837-38. Born in Philadelphia, Maguire was a priest of international experience and later the coadjutor of the vicar apostolic in Nova Scotia. 

Gerald P. Fogarty, “Lay Trusteeism: Yesterday and Today,” America (Nov. 19, 1966): 656-59 (“complete ignorance,” 658); Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism, 36-37; Nicholas Patrick Stephen Wiseman to Thomas Weld, [Rome], Nov. 9, 1830, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 2: fols. 817-18 (“business-like method”). For the Holy See’s slowness, see Codignola, “Policy of Rome,” 106-07. 

This statement on Propaganda Fide’s attention to North America is based on my experience with the Archives of the Sacred Congregation “de Propaganda Fide” in Rome, the archival repository that, in this period, best reflects the volume of the Holy See’s activities that concerned the North Atlantic world. It can easily be verified through N. Kowalsky and J. Metzler, Inventory of the Historical Archives of the Sacred Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples or “de Propaganda Fide” (Rome, 1983). For Maréchal’s anger, see Ambroise Maréchal to Joseph-Octave Plessis, Baltimore, Oct. 3, 1820, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 7CM, subser. 1, doc. no. 28. For Propaganda Fide’s background plan, see [Francesco Saverio Castiglioni] to [Propaganda Fide], [Rome], [February 1823], in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Acta, 186: fols. 76-82. See also Luca Codignola, “Pius VIII and North America, 1816-1830,” Annali Accademici Canadesi 10-11 (1995): 3-35, esp. 25. The activity of these cardinals, their colleagues, and other lower bureaucrats can be traced in Kenneally, United States Documents; Codignola, Guide to Documents; Codignola, Vatican. For the 1808 establishment of new bishoprics, see Congregazione Particolare, [Rome], Mar. 4, 1808, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Acta, 177: fols. 309-44. The North Atlantic framework was clear in the cardinals’ minds. It was remarked that this arrangement was customary with the four archbishops and twenty-two bishops of Ireland as well as with the vicars apostolic in England, Scotland, and Newfoundland. 

The distinction between pre- and post-Second Vatican Council historians is current among historians of the Catholic Church. (The Second Vatican Council took place from 1962 to 1965.) Members of the old school include for example Peter Keenan Guilday, Thomas Timothy McAvoy, and John Tracy Ellis. See David J. O’Brien, “American Catholic Historiography: A Post-Conciliar Evaluation,” Church History 37.1 (March 1968): 80-94; J. Douglas Thomas, “American Catholic Interpretations of Church and State: John Gilmary Shea, Peter Guilday, Thomas T. McAvoy, and John Tracy Ellis,” Journal of Church and State 27.2 (Spring 1985): 267-83; Carey, “Recent American Catholic Historiography,” 446. American historian Peter R. D’Agostino has argued that post-Second Vatican Council American historians’ own political agenda made them extoll the national character of their Church and downplay its pervasive conservative, let alone Ultramontane, nature. See D’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004). Rather than to Rome’s reactionary attitude, a number of significant appointments must be ascribed to an Irish lobby that was powerful in Rome in the Pius VII years, when the five direct papal appointments that were made were all bestowed on Irish bishops: Richard Luke Concanen, John Connolly, Patrick Kelly, John England, and Henry Conwell. (The other indirect appointments responded to local suggestions.) See Sweeney, “‘Wound in the Right Foot,’” 216. 

Joseph-Octave Plessis to [Lorenzo Litta], [Quebec], July 26, 1818, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Scritture Originali Riferite nelle Congregazioni Generali, 919: fols. 152-53 (“he could accept”); Plessis to Pietro Caprano, Quebec, Aug. 19, 1824, ibid., 937: fols. 52 1-24 (Plessis announcing his taking possession of the seat); Emanuele De Gregorio to Propaganda Fide, [Rome], November 1818, ibid., 919: fols. 154-61 (“in another century”). Plessis was coadjutor (1800-1806), bishop (1806-19), and archbishop of Quebec (1819-25). Fearing the crown’s displeasure, he refused to use his title as archbishop, which the Holy See had bestowed on him. In effect Henry Bathurst, Earl Bathurst, then secretary of state for war and the colonies, took this promotion badly and felt that Quebec and Rome had unduly taken advantage of his openness. William Poynter was immediately summoned to the ministry and asked to convey his displeasure to Rome. See Peter Phillips, ed., The Diaries of Bishop William Poynter, V.A. (1815-1824) (London, 2006), 185-86, 191 (Aug. 21, 25, 27, Sept. 10, Nov. 12, 1819). For Plessis’ view of the conquest of Canada, see for example Plessis, Discours a l’occasion de la victoire remportée par les forces navales de sa majesté britannique dans la Mediterrannée le 1 et 2 aout 1798, sur La Flotte Francoise ... (Quebec City, 1799); Plessis, “L’Oraison funèbre de Mgr Briand,” Bulletin des recherches historiques 11.11 (November 1905): 323-38, esp. 329-30; Plessis, “Oraison funèbre de Mgr Briand,” Bulletin des recherches historiques 11.12 (December 1905): 353-58. On Plessis and the French Revolution, see James H. Lambert, “Monseigneur, the Catholic Bishop: Joseph-Octave Plessis, Church, State, and Society in Lower Canada; Historiography and Analysis” (Ph.D. Diss., Université Laval, 1981), 256-59, 273 -78. Lambert’s is still the best biography of Plessis. For the Quebec Act, see Earl Bathurst to John Coape Sherbrooke, [London], Apr. 30, 1817, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Scritture Originali Riferite nelle Congregazioni Generali, 937: fols. 757-58. 

Plessis’ acceptance of a seat in the Legislative Council was potentially so controversial that the Sulpicians of Montreal did not fail to fully exploit it in a dispute with the bishop from the late 1810s to the early 1830s. The Sulpicians accused Plessis of being bought out by the crown, whose final objective was dispossessing all ecclesiastical communities of their goods. See John MacDonald to [Francesco Fontana], Paris, May 18, 1821, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Scritture Originali Riferite nelle Congregazioni Generali, 937: fols. 443-46; Placido Zurla to Propaganda Fide, [Rome], March [February] 1830, ibid., ser. Acta, 193: fols. 72-81, 84-99; Lucien Lemieux, L’établissement de la première province ecclésiastique au Canada, 1783-1844 (Montreal, 1968), 139-66. When John Thomas Troy manifested his opposition to the veto power rumored to be granted to the British crown over the nomination of Catholic bishops in Corsica, Antonelli, the prefect of Propaganda Fide, rebuked him and reminded him that the Irish bishops owed “esteem and gratitude” toward George III and that it was the bishops’ duty to instill loyalty and obedience in their community. See McNally, Reform, Revolution, and Reaction, 79 (quotation); Keogh, French Disease, 79-80. Similarly, Pius VII expressed his wish that Poynter would satisfy the English government and not meddle in politics, seemingly alluding to the fact that some Irish clergy had displeased the government. See Phillips, Diaries of Bishop William Poynter, 13. On Gabriel Richard’s election, see Frank B. Woodford and Albert Hyma, Gabriel Richard: Frontier Ambassador (Detroit, MI, 1958), 112-28; Brian Wilson, “The Spirit of the Motor City: Three Hundred Years of Religious History in Detroit,” Michigan Historical Review 27.1 (Spring 2001): 21-56. Richard himself espoused democratic principles. See Carey, People, Priests, and Prelates, 327 n. 36. 

See Luca Codignola, “Conflict or Consensus? Catholics in Canada and in the United States, 1780-1820,” Historical Studies 55 (1988): 43-59, esp. 51-54. On Plessis’ point of view, see Joseph-Octave Plessis to [Lorenzo] Caleppi, Quebec, Sept. 12, 1809, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 2: fols. 172-73; Phillips, Diaries of Bishop William Poynter, 184 (Aug. 16, 1819). On Bishop Alexander McDonell, see J. E. Rea, Bishop Alexander Macdonnell and the Politics of Upper Canada (Toronto, 1974); Kathleen M. Toomey, Alexander MacDonell: The Scottish Years, 1762-1804 (Toronto, 1985). Given its many acceptable variants, I have chosen to use the “McDonell” spelling throughout this article, which reflects his signature in several of his early letters. On Upper Canada, see Robert Choquette, “English-French Relations in the Canadian Catholic Community,” in Murphy and Stortz, Creed and Culture, 3-24, esp. 9-10. On Angus Bernard MacEachern, see Francis W. P. Bolger, “The First Bishop,” in The Catholic Church in Prince Edward Island, 1720-1979, ed. Michael F. Hennessey (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, 1979), 22-57; Allan MacDonald, “Angus Bernard MacEachern, 1759-1835: His Ministry in the Maritime Provinces,” in Murphy and Byrne, Religion and Identity, 53-67. On Edmund Burke, see Leonora A. Merrigan, “The Life and Times of Edmund Burke in Nova Scotia, 1801-1820” (M.A. Thesis, Saint Mary’s University, 1971); Michael Power, A History of the Roman Catholic Church in the Niagara Peninsula, 1615-1815 (Saint Catharines, Ontario, 1983), 155-73; Patrick M. Tucker and Dennis M. Au, “Resurrection: Documenting the History of the Lost Parish of ‘Saint-Antoine sur la Rivière-aux-Raisins,’ Part 1; The Early Years,” Michigan’s Habitant Heritage 23.3 (July 2002): 105-20; Tucker and Au, “Resurrection: Documenting the History of the Lost Parish of ‘Saint-Antoine sur la Rivière-aux-Raisins,’ Part 2; A Holy Place during Evil Times,” Michigan’s Habitant Heritage 24.1 (January 2003): 16-24. For McDonell’s role, see Alexander McDonell to William Poynter, [London], [Aug. 9, 1825], in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Scritture Originali Riferite nelle Congregazioni Generali, 936: fols. 352-53; McDonell to Thomas Weld, York [Toronto], July 2, 1833, ibid., ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 3: fols. 162-63; William P. MacDonald et al. to McDonell, Kingston, July 12, 1833, ibid., 3: fol. 161. The first move toward McDonell’s appointment had been made not by Rome but by the crown. See Phillips, Diaries of Bishop William Poynter, 252 (Dec. 6, 1824). 

J. G. Simcoe to Lord Dorchester, Aug. 8, 1794, in E. A. Cruikshank, ed., The Correspondence of Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe, with Allied Documents Relating to his Administration of the Government of Upper Canada (Toronto, 1924), II: 361 (“loyal Clergyman”). See also Thomas Aston Coffin to E. B. Littlehales, Sept. 15, 1794, ibid., 3: 90. Keogh, French Disease, 27 (“French disease”). On Weld’s participation in the Canada Company, see Nicholas Patrick Stephen Wiseman to [Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari or Castruccio Castracane degli Antelminelli], [Rome], July 10, 1829, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 2: fols. 684-85: McDonell to Weld, York [Toronto], July 2, 1833, ibid., 3: fols. 162-63. Weld never went to Upper Canada, becoming a cardinal instead. The Canada Company was the land development agency through which the crown funded the Catholic Church in Upper Canada. For MacEachern’s friends and revenues, see Angus Bernard MacEachern to Paul Macpherson, St. Andrew’s, July 8, 1824, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Scritture Originali Riferite nelle Congregazioni Generali, 937: fols. 431, 436; MacEachern to Macpherson, Prince Edward Island, Aug. 31, 1825, ibid., ser. Congressi, subser. America Centrale, 8: fols. 453-54. On Burke’s allegations against Plessis, see Edmund Burke to Lorenzo Litta, Rome, Feb. 12, 1816, ibid., ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 2: fols. 261-62; Joseph-Octave Plessis to Robert Gradwell, Quebec, Jan. 19, 1824, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 210A, subser. 11, doc. no. 420; Plessis to Pietro Caprano, Quebec, Aug. 19, 1824, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Scritture Originali Riferite nelle Congregazioni Generali, 937: fols. 521-24. On Burke’s own practice, see Bourke [Edmund Burke], Letter of Instruction to the Roman Catholic Missionaries of Nova-Scotia, and Its Dependencies (Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1804), 3. See also Murphy, “English-Speaking Colonies to 1854,” 126. For the French-Canadian priests, see Pierre Fréchette to Jean-François Hubert, Detroit, Oct. 23, 1795, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 7CM, subser. 5, doc. no. 111; Burke to John Thomas Troy, Maumee, Feb. 2, 1795, in Edmund Burke Papers, Archives of the Archdiocese of Halifax, Nova Scotia, vol. 1, no. 53; Burke to [Litta], London, Sept. 16, 1818, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 2: fols. 243-54. The two local French-Canadian priests were François-Xavier Dufaux and Pierre Fréchette. See also F. Clever Bald, Detroit’s First American Decade, 1796 to 1805 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1948), 9-11; George Pare, The Catholic Church in Detroit, 1701-1888 (Detroit, MI, 1951), 249-50; Murphy, “English-Speaking Colonies to 1854,” 126-27. 

“Mandement pour faire chanter un Te Deum en action de grace pour le bienfait de la paix,” Jean-Olivier Briand to the secular and regular clergy and to the faithful of the government of Quebec, Quebec, June 4, 1763, in Têtu and Gagnon, Mandements lettres pastorales et circulaires, II: 168-71 (“stripped of all,” 170); Joseph-Octave Plessis to John Thomas Troy, Quebec, Dec. 21, 1813, in Archives of the Archdiocese of Dublin, ser. AB2, subser. 28, subsubser. 1, item no. 300, fols. 397-98 (“loyalty towards it”); Plessis to Lorenzo Litta, Quebec, Nov. 23, 1816, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 2: fols. 269-70 (“sometimes contain their wish”); Angus Bernard MacEachern to William Poynter, Prince Edward Island, Dec. 12, 1824, in Westminster Diocesan Archives, ser. A, vol. 65, folder 6 B 3 [item no. 4] (“Who knows”). On Plessis’ fear of the repressive statutes, see Plessis to François-Emmanuel Bourret, Quebec, May 10, 15, 1807, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 210A, subser. 6, doc. no. 16. For Plessis’ fear and insecurity, see Plessis to Caleppi, Quebec, Sept. 12, 1809, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 2: fols. 172-73; Plessis to Alexander McDonell, Quebec, Aug. 29, 1824, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 210A, subser. 12, doc. no. 54. See also [Jean-Henri-Auguste Roux] to [Propaganda Fide], [Rome], [December 1826], in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 2: fols. 634-39, describing in detail the precariousness of the Catholic Church’s legal status in Lower Canada since 1763. For Newfoundland, see James Louis O’Donel to Troy, Saint John’s, Newfoundland, Dec. 27, 1793, in Archives of the Archdiocese of Dublin, ser. AB2, subser. 116, subsubser. 5, item no. 155; O’Donel to Edmund Burke, Saint John’s, Apr. 8, 1804, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 3OCN, subser. 1, doc. no. 20. For this overall feeling of insecurity throughout British North America, see Greenwood, Legacies of Fear; Jerry Bannister, The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699-1832 (Toronto, 2003), 218-19. 

Louis-Antoine Langlois and François-Bernard to Joseph-Octave Plessis, Baltimore, July 30, Aug. 20, 1806, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 7CM, subser. 3, doc. no. 102 (“promised land,” July 30, 1806). For Flaget, see Benoit-Joseph Flaget to Plessis, along the Ohio River, Nov. 11, 1815, ibid., subser. 1, doc. no. 85; Carl Friedrich, Grand-Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, to Plessis, Philadelphia, Oct. 16, 1825, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Centrale, 4: fols. 538-45; Benolt-Joseph Flaget to Joseph Signay, [Bardstown?], May 30, 1833, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 7CM, subser. 1, doc. no. 95. For the Louisiana priest, see Bertrand Martial to Luigi Lambruschini, Montreal, Aug. 25, 1828, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 2: fols. 617-18. 

V. J. Fecher, A Study of the Movement for German National Parishes in Philadelphia and Baltimore (1787-1802) (Rome, 1955), 93 (“national”); Carroll, “To the Congregation of Boston,” Baltimore, Apr. 30, 1790, in Hanley, John Carroll Papers, I: 440-41 (“lay aside,” 441). For the German community, see Jay P. Dolan, “Philadelphia and the German Catholic Community,” in Immigrants and Religion in Urban America, ed. Randall M. Miller and Thomas D. Marzik (Philadelphia, 1977), 69-83; Steven M. Nolt, Foreigners in Their Own Land: Pennsylvania Germans in the Early Republic (University Park, PA, 2002), 112. American historian James Hennesey described the “Failure of Carroll’s Plans” (Hennesey, American Catholics, 89-100). Of the bishops ordained from 1790 to 1800, fifteen spoke French, eleven were born in Ireland, eight were born in the United States, three spoke Spanish (appointed to New Orleans and California), and one each came from the Italian peninsula, Great Britain, and the German states. See Charles N. Bransom Jr., Ordinations of U.S. Catholic Bishops, 1790-1989: A Chronological List (Washington, DC, 1990), 11-18. On ethnic rivalry, see Hennesey, American Catholics, 98-100; Randall M. Miller, “A Church in Cultural Captivity: Some Speculations on Catholic Identity in the Old South,” in Catholics in the Old South: Essays on Church and Culture, ed. Miller and Jon L. Wakelyn (Macon, GA, 1983), 28; Terrence Murphy, “The Emergence of Maritime Catholicism, 1781-1830,” Acadiensis 13.2 (Spring 1984): 29-49, esp. 37; Akenson, Small Differences, 143; Codignola, Historical Studies 55: 57-59; Hans-Jürgen Grabbe, “European Immigration to the United States in the Early National Period, 1783-1820,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133.2 (June 1989): 190-214, esp. 194; David T. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815-1877 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), 74-79. For ethnic rivalry in British North America, see for example John Carroll (1798-1839) to Joseph Signay, Saint John, New Brunswick, May 28, 1832, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 311CN, subser. 2, doc. no. 100; Angus Bernard MacEachern to Bernard-Claude Panet, [Charlottetown], Aug. 15, 1832, ibid., ser. 310CN, subser. 1, doc. no. 127.

For the United States, see Fogarty, America 115: 656-57; Joseph P. Chinnici, “American Catholics and Religious Pluralism, 1775-1820,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 16.4 (Fall 1979): 727-46; Hennesey, American Catholics, 69-88; Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, NY, 1985), 104-16, 194-95; Patrick W. Carey, “Republicanism within American Catholicism, 1785-1860,” Journal of the Early Republic 3.4 (Winter 1983): 413-37, esp. 415, 435-36; Noll, Old Religion in a New World, 15; Light, Rome and the New Republic, xii-xiii, esp. 95-244; Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism, 38-39, 44-45. Of course, the “immigrant church,” that is, ethnic rivalry, is at the core of Jay P. Dolan’s social interpretation of the history of the Catholic Church in the United States (ibid., 6). Still, he views ethnicity as a precondition for political action on the American front rather than a constraint for parallel and separate ethnic histories within the same church. The latter is the interpretive framework normally used by historians of British North America except for Murphy and Penn, Concise History of Christianity in Canada. At the time few priests attributed this rivalry to political rather than ethnic causes; one who did so was Irish-born William Taylor (possibly a Dominican), a resident of New York City ca. 1820-28. Another was Jesuit Giovanni Antonio Grassi (1775-1849), an intelligent observer from the Italian peninsula who lived in Georgetown from 1810 to 1817. On ethnic rivalry, see Codignola, Historical Studies 55. On Irish republicanism in the United States, see Maurice R. O’Connell, Irish Politics and Social Conflict in the Age of the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1965); Maurice J. Bric, “The Irish and the Evolution of the ‘New Politics’ in America,” in The Irish in America: Emigration, Assimilation and Impact, ed. P. J. Drudy (Cambridge, 1985), 143-68; Bric, “The American Revolution and Ireland,” in Greene and Pole, Companion to the American Revolution, 511-14, esp. 512; Kevin Whelan, “The Green Atlantic: Radical Reciprocities between Ireland and America in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge, 2004), 213-38, esp. 216-25. 

See Patrick J. Dignan, A History of the Legal Incorporation of Catholic Church Property in the United States (1784-1932) (Washington, DC, 1933); Robert Trisco, “Bishops and Their Priests in the United States,” in The Catholic Priest in the United States: Historical Investigations, ed. John Tracy Ellis (Collegeville, MN, 1971), 111-292, esp. 112-26. The only bishop who did not oppose the rights claimed by the trustees was Irish-born John England, who was bishop of Charleston from 1820 to 1842. See Patrick Carey, An Immigrant Bishop: John England’s Adaptation of Irish Catholicism to American Republicanism (Yonkers, NY, 1982); Daniel F. Kearns, “Bishop John England and the Possibilities of Catholic Republicanism,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 102.1 (January 2001): 47-67; Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism, 36; Harvey Hill, “American Catholicism? John England and ‘The Republic in Danger,’” Catholic Historical Review 89.2 (April 2003): 240-57. A similar movement had taken place somewhat earlier in the Church of England, where “by 1789 the Protestant Episcopal Church had adopted a republican type ecclesiastical constitution which permitted the parish laity to elect by democratic process delegates who, in equal number with the clergy, would vote in convention to elect by majority ballot the episcopal candidates” (Mills, Bishops by Ballot, x [quotation], 307). For the overall view of trustee disturbances, see Carey, People, Priests, and Prelates, 1, 108. On the historiographical framework, ibid., 3-5. Carroll’s early description of his contest with the schismatic German priests, in which ethnicity is directly linked to politics, accords well with Patrick Carey’s explanation (Carroll, “To Leonardo Antonelli,” Baltimore, Apr. 23, 1792, in Hanley, John Carroll Papers, 2: 26-39, esp. 32, 38). An assessment of Carey’s book appears in Robert F. Trisco, Bishops and Their Priests in the United States, 2d ed. (New York, 1988), i-vi. Jay P. Dolan fully subscribes to Carey’s view (Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism, 28-30, 33-36). For an assessment of Dolan’s social history approach, see Carey, “Recent American Catholic Historiography,” 445-61. 

A Catholic, To the Catholic Congregation of St. Patrick’s Church in the Borough of Norfolk and State of Virginia (Norfolk, [1818?]), “enemy”; Reflections on the Dissension Actually Existing in St. Mary’s Congregation: Respectfully Addressed to His Excellency the Governor of the State of Pennsylvania ... By a Roman Catholic (Philadelphia, 1824), 13 (“represented and acted”); Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism, 35 (“very American”). For the Virginia background, see Fogarty, Commonwealth Catholicism, 39-45. 

James Jones to [Joseph-Octave Plessis], Bath, Mar. 8, 1801, in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 90CM, subser. 1, doc. no. 19 (“entering into a compact”). Jones’ dispute with the trustees is discussed in Terrence Murphy, “Trusteeism in Atlantic Canada: The Struggle for Leadership among the Irish Catholics of Halifax, St John’s, and Saint John, 1780-1850,” in Murphy and Stortz, Creed and Culture, 126-51, esp. 130; Matteo Binasco, “James Jones: An Irish Catholic Missionary in Nova Scotia, 1785-1800,” in Canada: le rotte della libertà; Atti del Convegno internazionale, Monopoli, 5-9 ottobre 2005, ed. Giovanni Dotoli (Fasano, Italy, 2006), 569-76. Though the Constitution specifically barred the federal government from intervening in religious matters, some treaties with the aboriginal nations did just that. See for example Article 16 of the Treaty of Fort Meigs, otherwise called “Treaty with the Wyandot” (Sept. 29, 1817), which implicitly acknowledged the Catholicism of the Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi nations by allowing them to grant to the rector of Sainte-Anne-du-Détroit full possession of some of their lands at Macon, near the Rivière-aux-Raisins mission (present-day Monroe, MI), for the future education of their children. In the same period, salaries were paid to missionaries in the Osage country in Missouri. See Charles J. Kappler, comp. and ed., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties (Washington, DC, 1904), II: 150; Tanis C. Thorne, The Many Hands of My Relations: French and Indians on the Lower Missouri (Columbia, MO, 1996), 140. For the Maritime Provinces, see Murphy, “Trusteeism in Atlantic Canada,” 126-51. The attempt of some marguilliers to usurp parish administration was made through the Bill pour rétablir l’uniformité dans les assemblées de fabriques, which was passed by the legislative council of Lower Canada but stalled by the province’s executive council. See Le Canadien, Dec. 3, 1831, 3, Dec. 7, 1831, 1, Jan. 14, 1832, 1. See also Réal Bélanger, Richard Jones, and Marc Vallières, eds., Les grand débats parlementaires, 1792-1992 (Sainte-Foy, Quebec, 1994), 420-22. For New Brunswick, see Murphy, “Trusteeism in Atlantic Canada,” 134-35. Murphy makes specific reference to Patrick W. Carey’s thesis on 128 and in his introduction to Murphy and Stortz, Creed and Culture, xvii-xxxix, esp. xxxii. Some Lower Canadian clergymen, however, believed that democracy and republicanism represented an imminent danger and voiced their preoccupation to Rome. See for example Plessis to Robert Gradwell, Quebec, Dec. 17, 1822, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Settentrionale, 2: fols. 370-73; Panet to Gradwell, Quebec, Nov. 15, Nov. 16, 1826, ibid, 2: fols. 530-31, 533-34; Jean-Jacques Lartigue to [Cappellari], Montreal, Jan. 5, 1827, ibid., 2: fols. 544-45. 

Charles-François Girardin to [Jean-François  Hubert], [Detroit], [before Apr. 27, 1792], in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 7CM, subser. 5, doc. no. 92 (“they were the masters”), attaching the transcription of the trustees’ assembly proceedings of Apr. 1, 1792; Ambroise Maréchal to William Poynter, [Baltimore], [Dec. 23, 1823], in Westminster Diocesan Archives, ser. A, vol. 65, folder 6 B 5 [item no. 25] (“invasion of the Holy See”); Reflections on the Dissension, 27 (“foreign potentate”). With regard to local prevailing rights, in the Illinois country it was customary to place the pew of a deceased pew holder up for auction, whereas in the diocese of Quebec the pew was passed on to the widow of the deceased (Pierre Gibault to [Jean-Olivier Briand], Vincennes, [November 1770], in Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, ser. 7CM, subser. 6, doc. no. 23). For the 1792 dispute, see Pierre Fréchette to [Hubert], Detroit, Apr. 27, 1792, Oct. 23, 1795, ibid., doc. nos. 94, 111. For the 1795-97 Baby-Payet dispute, see Louvigny Montigny to [Hubert], [Detroit], Feb. 5, 1795, ibid., subser. 5, doc. no. 105; Fréchette to Hubert, Detroit, Oct. 23, 1795, ibid., doc. no. 111; François-Xavier Dufaux to [Hubert], Detroit, Nov. 9, 1795, ibid., doc. no. 116; François Baby to Hubert, Montreal, Apr. 14, 1796, ibid., doc. no. 118; Burke’s ordonnance, Detroit, Jan. 7, 1797, ibid., doc. no. 131; Marchand to Hubert, L’Assomption-du-Détroit, Jan. 31, 1797, ibid., doc. no. 132; Trustees of L’Assomption-du-Détroit to Hubert, Detroit, Feb. 1, 1797, ibid., doc. no. 133. For the Jesuits’ opposition to the papal order, see Maréchal to Poynter, [Baltimore], Jan. 30, 1824, May 17, 1825, in Westminster Diocesan Archives, ser. A, vol. 65, folder 6 B 5 [item nos. 21, 23]; Annibale Sermattei Della Genga to [Francesco Saverio Castiglioni?], Rome, June 22, 1822, in Archives of the Sacred Congregation, ser. Congressi, subser. America Centrale, 7: fols. 696-99; Robert Gradwell to Maréchal, Rome, Aug. 5, 1824, in Thomas Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus in North America, Colonial and Federal (London, 1910), I, pt. 2: 1082-83; Gradwell to Maréchal, Rome, Jan. 2, 1825, ibid., 1084-85. On the White Marsh estate, see Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus, esp. I, pt. 1: 403-582, 1, pt. 2: 1031-1103; Ronin John Murtha, “The Life of the Most Reverend Ambrose Maréchal: Third Archbishop of Baltimore, 1768-1828” (Ph.D. Diss., Catholic University of America, 1965), 257-87; Thomas W. Spalding, The Premier See: A History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, 1789-1989 (Baltimore, 1989), 87-91; Codignola, Annali Accademici Canadesi 10-11: 3-35. My conclusion that cooperation and compromise were normally sought agrees with Patrick Carey’s belief, namely, “that harmony and cooperation or at least a lack of prolonged hostilities characterized the majority of trustee experiences” (Carey, People, Priests, and Prelates, 107). 

Temple and Mosque, Conflict and Balance 

Frederick M. Asher

The power of visual imagery to engender religious disputes has been demonstrated repeatedly, from a huge monument depicting the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and at several places in India. Unlike the case of Alabama, which pits secularists against Christian religious conservatives, and unlike Jerusalem, in a nation established as an explicitly Jewish homeland, India was created as a secular nation state. Despite that heritage, however, its imagined integrity was shattered on August 14, 1947, when the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was carved out of former British India, and suddenly a significant portion of India’s Muslim population became foreigners, a notion that has gained increasing currency in reference to the Muslim population that chose to remain in the newly-created secular Republic of India. The establishment of an Islamic republic bordering India has led to an increasing sense of religious identity on the part of India’s majority population, that is, identity with a religion as much as with a nation. Stated differently, a strong Hindu identity has emerged both within India and among Indians abroad, one that has sought to remake India as a Hindu nation and, in the process, to conflate religion and nationality. Just as colonial remnants have been removed -- British street names, for example -- so there is a quest to remove remnants of an Islamic presence in India, particularly those remnants that recall rule by Muslim dynasties.

There has been some success to this quest, most notably the destruction of the second-oldest mosque built by the Mughal dynasty. The mosque was the so-called Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, so-called because it was not constructed by Babur, the first Mughal monarch, but rather by one of his nobles, Mir Baqi, in 1528-29. Many Hindus believe that the mosque had been constructed on the site of the birthplace of the god Rama, a place, they argue, where a temple commemorating the precise locus of this god’s birth stood prior to the mosque’s construction. For some time, militant Hindus threatened to demolish the mosque and replace it with a temple dedicated to Rama. The stand-off became a charged political one debated in both state and federal legislatures. It pitted a well-organized and financially well-backed group of Hindus more against police who had been ordered to protect the mosque than against any organized Muslim community. As tension mounted, a mob finally stormed the police lines on December 6, 1992 and demolished the mosque, while the police did little to stop its desecrators. In the months following, even in the years right up to today, the debate has centered much more on whether a temple had been demolished in order to make way for Mir Baqi’s 1528-29 mosque than on any other issue. Virtually never debated was the ethics of righting one wrong by perpetrating another, in fact, seeking retribution more than 450 years after the event, or, as may be more interesting, debating the notion of space itself. That is, when space is contested, what magnitude of space forms the locus of such contestation?

Among other historically important sites under threat is one that, like Ayodhya, is claimed as the locus of a god’s birth, in this case the birth of the Hindu god Krishna. This site, the Katra Mound, is at Mathura, 145 km. south of Delhi. The Katra Mound long has been known to art historians and archaeologists as the source of an image, one encountered by almost every student who has had even an introductory course on South Asian art history. The image is commonly identified as the Katra Buddha. Despite the fame of this 2,000 year old sculpture, the history of the Katra Mound, that is, the source of this image, tells a story of present-day importance.

That the Katra Mound was the site of a Buddhist monastery seems likely from the several images found there.¹ But the Buddhist monastery was not the only occupant of the place art historians call the Katra Mound. Also found there were Jain and Brahmanical images,² indicating that it was a site used by several religions; in today’s terminology, we might call it a multi-communal site. For example, an inscribed pedestal of a seated Jain image, a work of the second century, originates at the Katra Mound as does a fifth-century lintel with a fine image of the Hindu god Vishnu. Certainly we know that it was the location of a Hindu temple, the Keshavadeva temple, that was dismantled under Aurangzeb’s orders and replaced with a great mosque that still occupies the space.³

That last change was clearly intentional and sequential, that is, a Hindu temple was replaced by a mosque. But should we assume that during the entire history of the Katra Mound, there was a sequential occupation, that is, first by Buddhists, then “Brahmans,” and finally “Musalmans,” as Alexander Cunningham asserted in 1870?⁴ Or, to quote another scholar writing somewhat later, that is, at the beginning of the last century, Jean Ph. Vogel: “We may conclude that the Katra site was once occupied by a Buddhist monastery. ... On the ruins of that building there arose in afterdays a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu under the name of Kesab Dev or Keso Rai, ... but in its turn had to make place for a mosque built by Aurangzeb.”⁵ These assertions, following and reinforcing commonly held beliefs, assume exclusive ownership of a sacred site and changes, when they occur, coming in sequential order. That is a notion that fits well with the assumptions of art history, a field committed to sequences. But is that notion, we must ask, more a construct of a present-day world in which territory is more often contested on religious grounds than simply shared? And, for that matter, how do we understand the category of “religion” in pre-modern India? I should add one important note here before considering the site today and its precarious situation. The Keshava Deva temple that was destroyed in order to construct the mosque there had been built at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Raja Bir Singh Deo of Orchha and subsequently supported by imperial Mughal grants, that is grants for this Hindu temple from a dynasty of Muslim monarchs. The Raja who had provided this temple was much admired by the Mughal emperor Jahangir and at the emperor’s behest killed Abu al-Fazl, biographer and confidant of Jahangir’s predecessor on the throne, Akbar. It was thus not a temple of any great antiquity; stated differently, it was specifically associated with a person whose memory remained alive at the time the temple was destroyed in 1669 during the reign of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb -- destroyed, it might be noted, in retaliation for uprisings in the area around Mathura. Mughal losses were massive and included the Mughal commandant of Mathura. What was destroyed was, in a very real sense, the Mughal’s own temple.⁶  It was replaced by a large mosque, the one that remains on the site.

That’s not the end of the story, for the site of the temple and mosque has been imbued with a new meaning. It has been identified as the locus of the god Krishna’s birthplace, and immediately abutting the mosque a large temple complex has now been constructed. Both mosque and temple are heavily guarded by police; cameras are prohibited, and visitors are scrutinized for anything dangerous they might bring into the courtyards of either building. The space is not just contested; it is highly charged. Few visitors go to the old mosque whose entrance faces a direction 90 degrees and two hundred meters away from the entrance to the temple compound. By contrast, however, thousands every day descend upon what is called Krishna Janmabhumi, the birthplace of the god Krishna, where one recent temple is now said to mark Krishna’s birthplace and a still newer and very much larger temple in the compound, a temple that is less than a decade old, celebrates the location of Krishna’s birth but is not believed precisely to mark it. The mosque remains, but the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the group most ostensibly responsible for destruction of the mosque at Rama’s birthplace, Ayodhya, remains intent on its demolition. Are there ways to grasp this threat with sympathetic understanding, rather than simply fear for the potential loss of a monument of historical importance on one hand or, on the other hand, the obliteration of Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision for a secular India, one in which all communities, that is, members of all faiths, might live in harmony? 

Religious space in India has been shared and continues to be. On one level, we might consider some of the internationally regarded monuments from India’s antiquity, for example, the site of Elephanta, off the coast of Mumbai, where a sixth-century sanctuary was excavated from the side of a cliff high on the island’s peak. Today, the sanctuary is an object of sacred pilgrimage for devotees of the god Shiva, but since pilgrimage in India incorporates notions that we might consider tourism, the pilgrims join with more secular tourists, including large numbers of foreigners, who take the hourly boats from India Gate Harbour to Elephanta. And all of them share the space, sometimes competitively, with the Archaeological Survey of India, whose job it is to protect the site, but to sustain their work must depend upon income from the sale of admission tickets purchased by both tourists and pilgrims.

There are many more conventional instances of shared space, some of them sites where we might least expect it. For example, regarding one of the most sacred sites of Islam in all South Asia, the Dargah of Muin-ud-Din Chishti, a nineteenth-century edition of the Ajmer District Gazetteer notes, “The shrine of Khwaja Sahib is venerated and visited by Hindus as well as Muhammadans and other Indians irrespective of their religion.”⁷  And I have observed, with a degree of wonder that was probably unnecessary, a burka-clad and thus obviously Muslim woman in the great temple of Shiva Nataraja at Chidambaram. This underscores the need to consider with care the meaning of religious identity in the South Asian subcontinent. To what extent is that sense of identity with a particular religion a legacy of colonial conceptions, perhaps most closely associated with the census, which beginning in 1871 mandated counting individuals by religious affiliation that fit British-conceived categories? Certainly we know cases in which communities might identify simultaneously as both Hindus and Muslims, for example the Patuas of Bengal.⁸  But even in cases such as those, I wonder if the members of these communities imagine a dual identity, as we might construe it, rather than simply identity with the community and its culturally instilled practices.

Although Mathura long has been home to diverse religious communities, it is best known today for its association with the god Krishna. All texts agree that Krishna was born in Mathura but where precisely in this large city, none specifies.⁹ Thus sanctity extends to all Mathura and even its environs, an area known as Braj, as we can sense from pilgrimages to sites associated with Krishna, an impressively large circuit. But what of the god’s birthplace and its present citing at the Katra Mound? That notion does not seem to have any substantial antiquity.

We have relatively little information about the temple that Bir Singh Deo built, the one that was demolished and replaced by Aurangzeb’s mosque. There is no surviving inscription commemorating its foundation, so we need to rely on written references that might suggest an association of the temple’s site with Krishna’s birthplace. Two European accounts, one of the seventeenth century and one of the late nineteenth century, describe Mathura in some detail, but neither identifies a specific site for Krishna’s birthplace. One is by F. S. Growse, a District Officer serving colonial India, whose 1883 book, Mathura: A District Memoir,¹⁰ was intended to aid the colonial agenda which, in part, sought to solidify rule by capturing information, as much information about India as conceivably could be amassed. Growse clearly recognized the importance of Krishna to Mathura, even acknowledging that “the deified Krishna [is] the tutelary deity of the district,” something he states in order to explain the extensive discussions of Krishna in this volume. But when he discusses the Katra Mound and Bir Singh’s temple that once stood there, he never identifies the site with Krishna’s birth. Had local tradition done so, he surely would have reported that, for Growse pays considerable attention to such detail. 

Nor does the French jeweler Tavernier, who saw Bir Singh’s temple about 1650 and described it in detail. He calls it the third most important temple in all India and one of the most sumptuous in the realm, even though at the time not many Hindus, he reports, worship there because the Jamuna River, where they would have bathed prior to worship, had shifted course rather far distant, making a walk to the temple inconvenient. Tavernier notes his encounter with the priests and even describes viewing the temple’s main image, but nowhere does he suggest its association with the birth of the god Krishna.¹¹

Bir Singh’s temple was not the first at this site. Many argue that there must have been a temple on the Katra site at the time Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni raided Mathura in 1017,¹² although we have no specifics at all, mostly Bada’uni’s claim some 600 years later that Mahmud razed Mathura to the ground and broke all the idols, and Mahmud’s own claim that the images he broke yielded an immense amount of gold and jewels.¹³ This is an important piece of information because it suggests that this raid and others wrought by invaders who happened to be Muslim sought valuable commodities much more than the satisfaction of engaging in iconoclastic devastation. After all, why would Mahmud of Ghazni engage in the raid in the first place if it were not for profit of some sort. Moreover, we might recall that one way of encouraging and paying an army was the promise of plunder. There is one other issue that we need to keep in mind by way of explanation. That is, in Islam -- as in the other Western Asian religions, namely Christianity and Judaism -- religious structures were gathering places; they were congregational, quite unlike a Hindu temple. Thus it is likely that potential conquerors such as Mahmud of Ghazni must have imagined that by destroying temples they were destroying gathering places for people, an institution fundamental to a social network and thus to the potential for resistance.

The damage Mahmud wrought did not last long, for an inscription found at the Katra Mound dated 1150, that is, 133 years after the time of Mahmud of Ghazni, records the construction there of a temple of the Hindu god Vishnu that was brilliantly white and so large that it was said to be “touching the clouds.”¹⁴ Nowhere does the inscription specify either that this temple replaces an earlier destroyed one or that its location marks the birthplace of Krishna. It is hard to believe that if this site were in 1150 believed to be that of Krishna’s birthplace, the inscription would fail to so indicate. What happened to this temple that necessitated its replacement by Bir Singh Deo is not as certain as sometimes reported. Generally, it is stated with considerable confidence that Sikander Lodi (r. 1489-1517) destroyed the temple.¹⁵ All that we know, however, is that Sikander Lodi built mosques at Mathura and was pretty tough on Hindus there, for example, prohibiting certain practices that Hindu pilgrims normally would follow. But we certainly don’t know that he destroyed temples. In fact, we learn from the account of a Jesuit who was present from 1580-1582 at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar, Father Monserrate, that many temples were found in the area, and that huge crowds of pilgrims came from all over India to one temple in particular, one that must have escaped Sikander Lodi’s desecration, if indeed he did desecrate temples. That temple, which attracted crowds of pilgrims, Father Monserrate reported, was situated high on the bank of the Jamuna River, very possibly a reference to a temple on the elevated Katra Mound. Nowhere, however, does he specify that this temple is associated with Krishna’s birthplace.¹⁶ What we might imagine is that this temple was not in very good condition a generation later, when Bir Singh Deo took the opportunity to replace it with a new structure, again without reference to the spot as Krishna’s birthplace.

But is historical documentation of consequence for religious belief? The present temples comprising the site now better known as Krishna Janmabhumi than as the Katra Mound shape belief; they do not simply mark or commemorate it. Various versions of a text known as the Mathura Mahatmya, especially relatively late versions of this text on Mathura’s sanctity, conceive of the Katra Mound as the center of the lotus, which is used to map Mathura conceptually.¹⁷ But no version of this text explicitly associates the mound with Krishna’s birthplace. That notion seems to have evolved at least in part to strengthen legal claims to the site. The first claim was brought to court in 1878, by Muslims who argued that the mound belonged to the mosque constructed there. While we know little about the background to this claim, we can surmise that it was entered because the Muslim community began to feel that the site of their mosque was being seriously contested. The verdict of the case inserted a great deal of ambiguity into the situation, insuring considerable income to several generations of attorneys. The verdict concluded that the Katra Mound was then not owned but that in 1815 a king of Varanasi named Patnimal had purchased it from the East India Company. At least three subsequent court cases were filed and concluded with decisions that, not very helpfully to present politics, assigned ownership of the mosque to descendants of the Hindu King Patnimal. Then in 1944, Jugal Kishore Birla, from one of India’s leading industrialist families, purchased the land from the descendants of King Patnimal with the express intention of building a temple. What sort of temple is not specified, but clearly it was one commemorating the birthplace of Krishna because almost immediately after the settlement of this case in 1946, a Krishna Janmasthan Trust -- that is, a trust for the birthplace of the god Krishna -- was established and the land sold to it. Work on a temple there commenced in 1953 but was concluded a great deal more recently. The temple includes an underground chamber immediately abutting the qibla wall of the mosque that is believed to be the very spot of Krishna’s birth. The still larger temple at the site was completed within the past decade. It could not have been commenced until one final court case was decided in 1960, one whose verdict concluded that the property was legally owned by the Krishna Janmasthan Trust and that Muslims, in fact, were protected for use of the mosque only on the occasion of Id.¹⁸ Thus a legal battle whose parties identified themselves in religious terms managed to transform the space of a temple into the space of a specific sacred locus, that is, Krishna’s birthplace. 

That history of the Katra Mound as contested space is only part of the issue. The parallel issue may be asked as a question: Why can't this space be shared by the two communities, Hindus and Muslims, as, let us say, Jerusalem is shared -- however tenuously -- by Jews and Christians and Muslims? The answer is, at least in part, dependent on differing conceptions of space. For those religions formed on West Asian soil, that is, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, religious space is generally conceived as a place where adherents might gather. It may have historic poignancy, even sacred historic poignancy, but it does not have inherent sanctity that goes beyond its function and whatever history that might be associated with it. And while churches might have historical affiliations, for example, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher or the Church of the Nativity, as some mosques do as well, for example, the al-Aqsa Mosque adjacent to the Dome of the Rock, which marks the spot believed today by Muslims to be the locus of the Prophet’s ascent to heaven, these structures remain gathering places for worshipers. Thus when religious shrines are desecrated in times of war, it is often imagined that a locus for social gathering and thus an institution that creates the very fabric of society itself has been undermined.

That West Asian concept of a religious structure is quite different from the Hindu conception of sacred space. A temple is conceived as god’s space, not that of mortals, and so the worshiper does not enter the temple’s sanctum, the place where the image is installed, on the right. Rather, the devotee enters a porchway, a liminal space between the mundane world on the outside and the god’s realm in the sanctum. Standing at the threshold, then, the worshiper beholds the deity. It is not just a stone sculpture, the object to which the art historian has transformed it, but a manifestation of god himself who occupies this space. It is thus charged in ways entirely different from space intended to accommodate mortals. For without the temple, can the god Krishna even manifest himself at the site of his birth, an event, though one of antiquity, linked to the present by the temple’s image?

In the case of Jerusalem, the issue is ownership of or dominance in a nation-state or a specifically designated large part of such a modern state. The protests are public and intended to intimidate the opposition, a battle that is most effectively waged in public space such as the streets or marketplace. But in India, where the temple marks god’s space, not that of his worshipers, competing shrines are imagined to diminish the unique power of the deity and his ability to manifest himself in radiating fashion. And if these competing monuments are imagined to be on the very spot where a deity such as Krishna or Rama was born, then they prevent this god from manifesting himself on a spot that is justly his. Thus in India, the lines are not just drawn on the basis of religious identity, that is, along social lines. Rather, they are drawn on the basis of a structure because that structure is not understood simply as a space for the gathering of adherents but rather a place necessary for god’s presence. 

Are Hindus and Muslims invariably opposed? Not necessarily. It depends on the currency of identity. In India, identity is generally based on community, which can mean what we’ve come in English to call caste, though even that has shades of meaning. But identity also is, at least in recent times, extended to what we might call religion. It was not always so. The foreignness of people in India who happened to be Muslim was the basis of their identification. That is, we have innumerable written references to Turushkas, or Turks, as the term may be translated, a word that refers to their non-indigenous origin, not their faith. The notion of creating religious-based taxonomies for Indians seems largely a European notion, one that may very well spring from religious contests that afflicted Europe -- the Crusades, the Spanish Reconquest, and much more recently the Holocaust. Even the very term Hindu as a religious designator is essentially of European origin, and recent origin at that.

Will the present balance between temple and mosque remain intact? There are competing discourses, and it is not at all clear which one will ultimately dominate. To the Vishva Hindu Parishad, the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque (or, as they would see it, reclaiming the space of that mosque) was only the first step. Among their other targets is the Mathura mosque. As recently as July, 2003, the head of the VHP, Ashok Singhal, stated that Hindu claim on this structure, along with one other mosque, was “not negotiable” and that Muslims in India, if they want better relations with Hindus, must withdraw their claim on the mosque. Such rhetoric, however, is very different from that at Mathura itself, where both Hindu and Muslim leadership seems intent on preserving the present balance. There, Abdul Haque, who has served as secretary of the mosque since 1991, asserted unambiguously that “there is no problem. It is a political issue only.” This view was reinforced by Kapil Sharma, secretary of the Krishna-Janmasthan Trust, who noted that in 1992, after the destruction of the Ayodhya temple, there was rioting in many parts of India but not in Mathura. He is certain that the mosque and temple will remain intact, noting that “They are doing their religious work. We are doing ours.” How does one reconcile the distinction between the rhetoric of the Hindu nationalists in other parts of India on one hand and those charged with maintaining the contested institutions at Mathura on the other? We need to recognize the pragmatism of the arguments. During the week of Krishna’s birthday in August, 2003 (Krishna Janmashtami), the officers of Krishna’s birthsite maintain, some 5 million visitors descended on the site with 3.5 million on a single day. Even if those numbers are inflated, as likely they are, the number of devotees was enormous by any reasonable measure, and their economic impact on Mathura was substantial. Destruction of the mosque would raise such tension that all Mathura would feel the impact, and it is very likely that traffic to the Krishna Janmabhumi would be significantly curtailed if not terminated altogether. How then should I take the comments I heard at Mathura? With recognition that I was a note-taking outsider, likely one who would report on what I heard. And if what I might write could be used as a tool to promote a sense of harmony, the pilgrimage -- and the money pilgrims spend -- would be undiminished.

Endnotes 

Beside this seated figure of the Kushana period, commonly referred to as the Katra Buddha but identified in its inscription as a Bodhisattva, the well-known standing Buddha dated to the year 280 of an unspecified era was found at the Katra Mound. Joanna Williams has effectively shown this to be a work of the early Gupta period. See “A Mathura Gupta Buddha Reconsidered,” Lalit Kalā 17 (1974): 28-32. 

See V. S. Agrawala, “Catalogue of the Mathura Museum: III; Jaina Tirthankaras and Other Miscellaneous Figures,” Journal of the U.P. Historical Society 23 (1950): 46, and V. S. Agrawala, “A Catalogue of the Mathura Museum: II; A Catalogue of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva in Mathura Art,” Journal of the U.P. Historical Society 22 (1949): 109-10. 

For a vitriolic diatribe against those -- me included -- who see the likelihood that the Vaishnava temples were constructed on the remains of older Buddhist and Jain structures, see Sita Ram Goel, Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them (New Delhi, 1993), chap. 5. This should set to rest any doubt about the political nature of arguments over this space. 

Alexander Cunningham, Archaeological Survey of India Reports, reprint ed. (Delhi, 1972), I: 235.

Jean Ph. Vogel, Archaeological Survey of India, Annual Report, 1906-07 (Calcutta, 1907/08): 137. 

Much of this history is summarized in Catherine Asher, Architecture of Mughal India (Cambridge, 1992), 162-64. 

Rajasthan [District Gazetteers]; Ajmer (Jaipur, 1966), 715, quoting a previous edition of the Gazetteer. 

Binoy Bhattacharjee, Cultural Oscillatio: A Study on Patua Culture (Calcutta, 1980). 

A. W. Entwistle, Braj: Centre of Krishna Pilgrimage (Groningen, 1987). 

F. S. Growse, Mathura: A District Memoir (Allahabad, 1883). 

Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, ed. V. Ball and William Crooke (New Delhi, 1976), 187. 

George S. A. Ranking, ed. and trans. Muntakhab-ut-tawarikh (Calcutta, 1898), 24-25. 

For a translation of Mahmud’s reference to the conquest of Mathura, see Abu al-Nasr ‘Abd al-Jabbar, The Kitab-i-Yamini: Historical Memoirs of the Amir Sabaktagin, and the Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna (London, 1858), 454-56. 

Georg Buhler, “The Mathura Prasasti of the Reign of Vijayapala, Dated Samvat 1207,” Epigraphia Indica 1 (1892): 287-93. 

Entwistle, Braj: Centre of Krishna Pilgrimage, 134-36. 

See, for example, The Commentary of Father Monserrate, S.J.  on His Journey to the Court of Akbar (1580-81), trans. J. S. Hoyland and S. N. Banerjee (London, 1922). 

Entwistle, Braj: Centre of Krishna Pilgrimage, 320. 

This history is summarized from Entwistle, Braj: Centre of Krishna Pilgrimage, 216-17 and the small booklets sold at the site. The mosque is today commonly referred to as the Mathura Idgah. The secretary of the mosque, however, insists that the structure is truly a mosque, not an Idgah, that is a mosque intended specifically for gathering at Id. He asserts that the decree of the Allahabad High Court transformed the structure into an Idgah by permitting worshipers to use it only for Id. 

Contributors

Frederick M. Asher

Professor of Art History, University of Minnesota

He is South Asia editor for Archives of Asian Art; president of the National Committee for the History of Art; a member of the Executive Bureau of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art; and chair of development for the American Institute of Indian Studies. His interests include contested space, resulting in the publication of Bodh Gaya (Oxford, 2008); representations of the sites associated with the life of the Buddha (resulting in an article forthcoming in Artibus Asiae and a book in progress); and the emerging field of world art history (with a new project on the visual culture of the Indian Ocean).

Stephen P. Blake

Senior Research Associate at the Center for Early Modern History, University of Minnesota

His research interests include the Mughal and Safavid empires and the comparative history of the three early modern Islamic empires: the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman. His publications include Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639-1739 (Cambridge, 1991) and Half the World: The Social Architecture of Safavid Isfahan, 1590-1722 (Mazda, 1999). He has just finished a comparative study: “Time in Early Modern Islam: Calendar, Ceremony, and Chronology in the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman Empires.”

Timothy Brook

Professor of History at the University of British Columbia

One of his research interests is the social and cultural history of China in the context of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century world. His recently published books in this area include Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (Bloomsbury, 2008) and The Troubled Empire: China during the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Belknap Harvard, 2010). His other research interests include the Japanese occupation of China during WWII, which led to Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Harvard, 2005).

Luca Codignola-Bo

Head of the Institute of History of Mediterranean Europe of the Italian National Research Council; professor of North American History at the University of Genoa; and adjunct professor at Saint Mary’s University of Halifax, Nova Scotia

His main field of research is the Roman Catholic Church in the North Atlantic area in the early modern era. He has also written on early European expansion. In recent years he has written Colombo e altri navigatori (Frilli, 2007) and edited, with Kai-Uwe Schrogl, Humans in Outer Space: Interdisciplinary Odysseys (Springer, 2009).

Denis Crouzet

Professor of History at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne; director of IRCOM (Institut de Recherches sur les Civilizations de l’Occident Moderne)

He specializes in the study of the sixteenth century, especially religious conflict and violence, and the history of mentalités. His publications include Les Guerriers de Dieu: La violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525-vers 1610) (Champ Vallon, 1990); La sagesse et le malheur: Michel de L’Hospital, chancelier de France (Champ Vallon, 1998); and Dieu en ses royaumes: Une histoire des guerres de religion (Champ Vallon, 2008).

Graeme Murdock

Lecturer in European History at Trinity College, Dublin

His research interests include the history of religion in early modern Hungary and France. His publications include Calvinism on the Frontier: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church of Hungary and Transylvania, c. 1600-1660 (Oxford, 2000); Confessional Identity in East-Central Europe (Ashgate, 2002) (editor); Beyond Calvin: The Intellectual, Political and Cultural World of Europe’s Reformed Churches, c. 1540-1620 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and The Hungarian Reformation: Books from the National Széchényi Library, Hungary (IDC Brill, 2009) (advisory editor).

William D. Phillips, Jr.

Professor of History at the University of Minnesota; former director of the Center for Early Modern History (2001-2008)

His previous publications include Testimonies from the Columbus Lawsuits (edited Brepols, 2000); Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Minnesota, 1985); and Enrique IV and the Crisis of Fifteenth-Century Castile (Medieval Academy of America, 1978). With Carla Rahn Phillips he has published two prize-winning books: The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge, 1992) and Spain’s Golden Fleece (Johns Hopkins, 1997), as well as the recent A Concise History of Spain (Cambridge, 2010). He is a corresponding member of the Spanish Royal Academy of History.

Marguerite Ragnow

Curator of the James Ford Bell Library; member of the graduate faculty in History at the University of Minnesota

She is managing editor of the journal Terrae Incognitae for the Society for the History of Discoveries. Her publications include Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia and the West (co-editor; Cambridge University Press, 2004), and the first volume in this CEMH series, Conversion to Christianity from Late Antiquity to the Modern Age: Considering the Process in Europe, Asia, and the Americas (co-editor; Minneapolis, 2009).

Jamie Rae Bluestone

Former associate director of the Center for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota (2007-2010)

In Fall 2010, she defended her dissertation “Before Lisbon: Earthquakes in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” which uses Europeans’ encounter with the Americas as an entry point for exploring the religious and scientific views of earthquakes from ancient times to the present. Following the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile in early 2010, she was featured on a “University of Minnesota Moment” about changing perceptions of natural disasters.

James D. Tracy

Emeritus professor of History at the University of Minnesota; former director of the Center for Early Modern History

He is co-founder (1995) and editor-in-chief (2001-2010) of the Journal of Early Modern History. He is editor of The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern World 1350-1750 (Cambridge, 1990); The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350-1750 (Cambridge, 1991); and City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2000). His most recent book is The Founding of the Dutch Republic: War, Finance and Politics in Holland, 1574-1586 (Oxford, 2008). He is working on a synthetic overview of the Habsburg-Ottoman conflict in the Balkans in the sixteenth century.

Anne Marie Wolf

Assistant professor of History at the University of Maine in Farmington

She is the author of a forthcoming book on Juan de Segovia with the University of Notre Dame Press. In addition to Christians’ perceptions of Muslims, her research interests include the social and power circles surrounding intellectuals in fifteenth-century Spain.