Charles of Ghent Speaks Italian to His Mistresses, French to His Courtiers, German to His Soldiers, Spanish to His Churchmen, and Dutch to His Horse

Dan Nexon writes:

The Duck of Minerva: Done! ... for now (and with a jot of guilt, just as a bonus): I just sent my book manuscript, provisionally entitled Religious Conflict, International Change, and the Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe, to Princeton University Press, sans a few "final status" maps. The blurb I wrote for it (but not the one they'll use):

In 1517 Charles of Habsburg, ruler of the Netherlands and Franche-Compté, arrived in Castile to claim the thrones of Castile and Aragon-Catalonia. That same year, Martin Luther publicly challenged the Catholic Church and triggered a series of religious upheavals known as the Protestant Reformations. In 1521 Charles, now emperor-elect of the Holy Roman Empire, declared Luther an outlaw and demanded that his German subjects destroy Luther’s works.

For well over the next century, the spread of reformation movements rocked a European order already subject to intense power-political rivalries. Charles, defeated by German Protestants, divided his vast domains between his brother Ferdinand and his son, Philip II of Spain. France next fell into decades of civil war. The Dutch began an Eighty Years War for independence against the Spanish Habsburg Monarchy. Unresolved religious tensions in Germany eventually exploded into the European-wide conflict known as the Thirty Years War.

International-relations scholars have long debated whether these events inaugurated the modern state system. But they have overlooked a more fundamental puzzle: why did the spread of transnational religious movements lead to a profound crisis in the European order? Nexon argues that the key to this question lies in the imperial character of early modern states. He presents a theory of imperial dynamics that explains how transnational religious contention altered the European balance of power. In doing so, he develops a new approach to studying state formation and international change, one with broad implications for the theory and analysis of contemporary world politics...

Three remarks:

1. Do you really want to write "Franche-Compté" rather than "Franche-Comté"?
2. Do you really want to leave blurb-readers (and us!) hanging as to what your theory of state formation and the Wars of the Reformation actually is?
3. Jan de Vries and I, after class last Wednesday, were discussing why it was that transoceanic trade seems to have done something to strengthen the forces of tolerance, economic liberty, and representative government in the United Provinces and the United Kingdom, and to have done a great deal to strengthen the forces of religious intolerance and autocracy in Spain. Jan mentioned that he had somewhere at some point in the past seen a map of the travels of Charles of Ghent, and I would dearly love to be able to track it down...

Anthony van Dyke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Anthony_van_Dyck-_Portrait_of_Charles_V_on_Horseback.JPG

Comments

[PrahaPartizan]

I might dispute your claim that transoceanic trade did anything to strengthen "...he forces of tolerance, economic liberty, and representative government in the United Provinces and the United Kingdom..." I might ask, which period are you referring to? If you are discussing the 16th Century, one could easily claim that the United Provinces and Great Britain were just as fanatical as Spain. Great Britain under Henry VIII, Mary, and Elizabeth was not a paragon of tolerance. Hell, even later under the Roundheads in the mid-17th Century it was even worse.

The United Provinces and Great Britain only seem tolerant and advanced because they did not hollow out their economy with stolen bullion and specie the way the Spanish had done during the early period of the Age of Exploration. By the end of the 16th Century, Spain was clearly past its prime economically as it fought its Eighty Year War against the burghers in Amsterdam and Den Hague. Great Britain and the United Provinces were able to engage in real trade through the 17th and 18th Centuries, while Spain slipped deeper into reveries of its old glory and its elite tried to retain what little power they still possessed. It was the conservative mind-set of trying to cling to remembered fame which preserved the Spanish reputation for intolerance and autocracy. Once the Spanish tercios had been squelched at Roicroi, the glory never returned, only the killing.

Besides, who believes that transnational religious contention began with the Protestant Reformation? The Roman Catholic Church and its proxies had been engaged in a knife-fight struggle with both Orthodoxy and Islam for almost a century by the early 16th Century. Nexon merely shows that he knows nothing outside Western European history. Spain had been involved in its own transnational religious contention with Islam for, what, three hundred years by the time the Reformation started. The Battle of Lepanto only occurred in the latter part of the 16th Century and Constantinople itself had only fallen to the Turk a mere century earlier. So, "transnational religious contention" had been occurring in Europe for quite some time before the Protestant Reformation even began. Why not push the whole question back even further to ask the question given the rise of the Utraquists and the Moravian Brotherhood and the Hussite Wars in central Europe a century earlier. Perhaps the real answer lies in the personal characteristics of the Habsburg family which lay at the center of these conflicts.

[AndrewBW]

The saying my father once told me was: If you want to talk about music, speak Italian. If you want to talk about food, speak French. If you want to talk about love, speak Spanish. If you want to talk to your dog, speak German.

[sm]

Where does the massive involvment in the slave trade by both GB and the UP fit into this story of economic liberty? Again the lines are being drawn to exclude inconvenient developments. Literally: no peace beyond the line!

As for transnational religious war, how about Western Europe's own Great Schism? This had a not insignificant effect on Flanders and France.

[Robert Waldmann]

I agree with Prahapartizan (as I understand his or her comment). The disaster for Spain was not exploration in general, it was finding gold and silver in particular. Gold and silver mines can be controlled by an autocrat. Trade, in contrast, can not. Gold exports imply imports of manufactured goods. History is a prankster. The curse of extracted exports has more recently be called the Dutch disease (back before they were an employment miracle and due to the discovery of natural gas) and is one of the explanations of the deindustrialisation of the UK in the early Thatcher years (North sea oil). Spain hasn't had anything to extract for centuries and is now a developed democracy. Are you and deVries similarly puzzled that so few Oil exporting countries are Democracies ?

Also before the Hussites, there were popes and anti-popes and struggles between the popes and the emperors then between the popes and the kings of France. The view that the anti-christ sat on Peter's throne was often quite widespread in medieval Europe.

And to Andrew's dad, If you want to talk about music, speak Italian. If you want to talk about food, speak Italian. If you want to talk about love, speak Italian. If you want to talk to your dog, bark.

[Minos]

First, I'd largely agree with PrahaPartizan. The "trade" in which Habsburg Spain engaged was overwhelmingly an extractive industry devoted to draining the Americas of as much bullion as possible. It ain't called the "Spanish disease" for nothin. (c.f. Saudi Arabia)

Second, Spain had nothing like the "burgerlijke middenstand" (bourgeois middle class) that dominated the politics of the nascent United Provinces, which had developed in the carrying or bulk trades of the herring fisheries, the grains of the Baltic, and the transshipment of goods from the Rhine to oceanic vessels and vice versa. The United Provinces, and especially Zeeland and Holland, are a mass of rivers, ports, and canals, and the land was sufficiently fertile in the 17th century to support a huge town population. Spain (as Mahan pointed out oh so long ago), is almost bereft of ports, agriculturally marginal (with heavy reliance on grazing animals, and little grain surplus), and except in Catalonia, had no long-standing history of trade. Even the VOC (a centralized monopoly if ever there was one) functioned by granting a tremendous degree of local autonomy to individual ship captains engaged in the intra-Asian trade. When merchants run the show, merchants reap the gains. When knights run the show, knights reap the gains. The burgerij of Amsterdam, Delft, and Leiden were notoriously tolerant (to the perpetual chagrin of the House of Orange and the religious establishment).

Finally, the recent history and geography of Spain made control from the center far more straightforward. The Northern Netherlands were notoriously hard to control, even in Medieval times, being essentially an archipelago when dikes were flooded. This led to a great deal more local control, such that the regents attained a great deal more local control. Phillip couldn't establish control over these provinces, and even Willem II failed to storm the gates of Amsterdam in 1650. It was just so much harder for the centralizing forces of the state to gain the upper hand in the UP (and later the UK) than was the case in Spain.

[Robert Waldmann]

Oh the glories of losing an empire with gold and silver mines. The PSOE appears to have won again.
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.elpais.com%2Fglobal%2F&langpair=es%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

The Spain of Phillip II and Franco just re-elected the party which introduced gay marriage. Take that, Charles of Ghent e va f*nc*l*.

[Harold]

As a result of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew in 1574 (ordered by king Charles IX and the Duke of Guise, so it was thought) in which 20 to 50 thousand Protestant men women and children were dragged out of their beds and slaughtered on the spot in a 4-day period all over France but mainly in Paris -- as a result, as I said -- many Frenchmen became Dutch. They also became anti-monarchist republicans who advocated freedom of conscience and wrote countless influential pamphlets to that effect. Many former "Dutch" (really French Hugeunot refugees) settled New York among other places. Almost all the founding fathers had French Huguenot ancestry.

I would not agree that the Protestants were as repressive as the Catholics. The Protestants vandalized Churches, enraged Catholic mobs killed people. It was the horrible memory of these murders that made many thinking people, including most intelligent Catholics, such as Descartes in the seventeenth century, advocate tolerance.

[Dan Nexon]

The commentators here have already answered, more effectively than my own jots on the subject (see http://duckofminerva.blogspot.com/2008/03/answers-for-brad-delong.html), Brad's query about trans-oceanic trade and "tolerance."

Let me say a few words about my treatment of trans-national religious contention involving Islam, otherwise outside of Europe, or prior to the Reformations (e.g., the Hussites, Waldensians, or even Cathars). Although I am not an expert on these matters, I am far from "ignorant" of them.

• Islam, within Iberia, in the form of the Ottoman Empire and its auxiliaries, and elsewhere, plays a key role in my narrative.

• I can't remember if the current draft contains more extensive discussion of the Waldensians and Hussites, but they at least get a footnote-type treatment. Utraquism, in particular, shows up in terms of the dynamics of the German Reformations.

In general, I ask a narrower question: why did the Reformations contribute to a series of "political" crises in early modern Europe? My answer, in fact, is that the Reformations should not be seen as sui generis. In that respect, my argument starts by rejecting the kinds of mistakes some commentators here attribute to me.

Harold: tolerance in early modern Europe was more a matter of where, when, and what political conditions did the parties face, then one of "Protestant" or "Catholic."

[PQuincy]

I note with some pleasure the adoption of the current expression "Reformations" (rather than just "Reformation") in this discussion. Of course, like every shift in historical-ideological terminology, changing the words just opens up new cans of worms...

As to Nexon's fundamental question as posed: "why did the spread of transnational religious movements lead to a profound crisis in the European order?"

This seems a rather odd way to put it. First, Western Europe had a long history of "trans-national" religious movements, from the Gregorian reforms through the mendicant movements. Second, I see no particular reason to posit 1517 as the pivot of a "profound crisis" in 'international' or 'trans-national' relations. (I'm using the scare quotes around 'national' because it is not meaningless but also not in any way identical to the modern sense when used for the 15th and 16th century, by the way).

The Italian Wars pitting Habsburg against Valois ran from the 1490s to the 1550s. The Ottoman campaigns, as many have pointed out, had their own rhythm, and one might well argue that 1532 was more important, as the date when all Western European influence on the Balkans was swept away, than 1517 or 1521, when some monk got uppity about justification. The Atlantic movement hit a crucial and altogether unexpected turning point in the 1490s. So why pick on the schism of the Latin church, which had been administratively and theologically divided for much of the late 14th century, after all, without causing a "profound crisis"?

Yet Nexon is also right in part to ask this question. The Holy Roman Empire was at something of a tipping point in the early 1500s: the Imperial Reform of 1495 hadn't succeeded, but it hadn't entire failed yet by 1520, and Charles and Gattinara had every intention to pursue it further (though in a thoroughly anachronistic way). Religious schism in the German lands was not by itself new, but it clearly had a fatal effect on the project of centralizing authority and generating deployable power on the part of the Emperors, and indeed of the territorial princes. They all got stuck, because religion reliably produced a legitimate way to block almost any project of change.

In short, religious division inflected political disputes, made them more intractable and less amenable to resolution. Likewise, tensions between the monarchy and the high nobility in France, and between Paris and the regions, were endemic issues, but when entangled in religion, they proved much more toxic to social stability. And finally, the political situation in the Empire after the 1580s, once again, rested primarily on long-established dynamics (urban vs. princely, Electors and the Emperors, and so forth), but clearly the emergence by this time of well-defined confessional blocs made resolving them infinitely more difficult, which in turn spurred the Thirty Years' War.

I don't intend this "sand in the gears of conflict resolution" model to obscure the experiential and existential potency of religious adherence, or to denigrate the potential for religious conviction to motivate action, at least among a passionate minority of the population with a disproportionate effect on the outcome of ongoing processes of change. That's my preferred way of approaching this era, not being fond of the meso-scale analysis that is called "international relations."(Just a matter of personal preference, by the way, not a critique).

And indeed, anyone approaching late medieval Europe from an 'international' relations perspective needs to instrumentalize the effect of religion, to some extent. In that case, however, I think it is more fruitful to do so by considering how religious division inflected existing or emergent political processes--as a lubricant or anti-lubricant of fundamentally path-dependent trajectories--than by projecting the term "profound crisis" in a way that does seem to echo Protestant historiographical ideology and periodization.

[yabonn_fr]

Funny : how many versions?

Mine : Italian to the ladies, French to the men, Spanish to god, German to the horses.