Europe: A History (109 page)
PICARO
P
ICARO
was the Spanish name given to rogues and vagabonds, that is, to people living beyond the margin of settled and respectable society. It was also given to a genre of popular literature, the picaresque, which flourished across Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in advance of the novel. The archetype of the genre was found in Mateo Aleman’s
Guzman de Alfrache
(1599), whose adventures on the road from Seville to Rome in the company of a dubious lady-friend ran into twenty-six editions. Guzman revealed how the brotherhood of beggars formed a mutual protection society, revelling in their ingenious schemes to cheat the governing classes.
But Guzman was one among many. In Spain, a certain Lazarillo had appeared half a century earlier. In Germany, the practical joker Till Eulenspiegel was well known before he first made it into print. In 1523 Luther wrote a preface to the much-reprinted
Liber Vagatorum
, which contains a description of twenty-eight categories of tramp.
Simplicissimus
, the ex-soldier of the Thirty Years War who wandered round the world, was the creation of H. J. C. von Grimmelshausen in 1669. In France, after numerous earlier appearances,
Gil Bias
emerged from the pen of Le Sage in 1715. In Italy, there appeared //
vagabondo
(1621). In England, many minor references to roguery from Chaucer onwards culminated in John Gay’s sensationally popular
The Beggar’s Opera
of 1728.
1
Picaresque literature was clearly responding to a widespread social condition. Vagabondage and beggary filled a large social space, midway between the medieval forest outlaws and the regimented urban poor of the nineteenth century. It was spawned by the disintegration of hierarchical rural society, and encouraged by social policing that combined ferocious punishments with highly incompetent enforcement. Men and women took to the road in droves because they were unemployed, because they were fugitives from justice, above all because they longed to escape the oppressive, dependent status of serfs and servants. The
picaro
was wild but free.
Vagabonds sought protection in numbers, and in social hierarchies of their own. They travelled in bands with families and children, some of them mutilated to excite pity. They had specialized guilds of pickpockets, thieves, burglars, pedlars, beggars, cripples real and feigned, jugglers, entertainers, fortune-tellers, tinkers, whores, washerwomen, chaplains, and musicians—each with rules and guardians. They even developed their own secret language, known as
rotwelsch
or
żargon
. They gathered intermittently for meetings and ‘parliaments’, where they elected their ‘kings’ and ‘queens’; and they shared the roads with gypsy tribes and gangs of unpaid soldiery:
Hark, hark! the dogs do bark.
The beggars are coming to town.
Some in rags, and some in tags,
And some in a velvet gown.
Social provision for vagrancy was minimal. Only the richest cities could afford charitable refuges—such as those at Bruges from 1565, Milan from 1578, and Lyons from 1613. In any case, ‘charity’ could be an ill-disguised euphemism for repression. In 1612, when the city of Paris asked its 8–10,000 vagrants to assemble on the Place St Germain to receive assistance, only 91 persons came forward.
[FOLLY]
Ferocious legislation underlined the authorities’ impotence. In Elizabethan England, for example, every parish was given the right to brand ‘sturdy beggars’ on the shoulder with a letter R for ‘rogue’, to flog the homeless and to send them ‘home’: in effect to condemn them ‘to be whipped from parish to parish’. Georgian England made an attempt to distinguish ‘the deserving poor’. At the same time, the Black Waltham Act of 1713 let suspected highwaymen and their accomplices be hanged without trial. In practice, most countries could only keep vagrancy down by periodic military expeditions into the countryside, where exemplary hangings and press-gangings took place. In Eastern Europe vagrancy was conditioned by a harsher climate and by the persistence of serfdom. But fugitive serfs were a common phenomenon. In Russia the
yurodiv
or itinerant ‘holy fool’ was traditionally the recipient of hospitality and charity—proof too, perhaps, of more Christian social attitudes.
2
Under the regency of Margaret of Parma, 1559–67, discontent came to a head over a scheme for ecclesiastical reform. Three protesters—William the Silent, Prince of Orange (1533–84), Lamoral, Count of Egmont, and Philip Montmorency, Count of Horn—petitioned the King with the Regent’s permission. They were ridiculed as
Geuzen, les Gueux
, ‘the Beggars’, and in 1565, in the Edict of Segovia, Philip indicated his refusal to authorize change. Following further petitions for reform, and a meeting in 1566 of confederated nobles at St Trond, which demanded religious toleration, there occurred a serious outbreak of
rioting and religious desecrations. The action of the confederates in helping the Regent to quell the disorders did not deter Philip from ordering general repression. Under the regency of the Duke of Alva, 1567–73, a Council of Tumults, the notorious
Bloedraad
or ‘Blood-Council’ was set up to try the King’s opponents. Egmont and Horn were beheaded in the square at Brussels, their severed heads sent to Madrid in a box. William of Orange escaped to lead the continuing fight. With the whole population of the Netherlands condemned to death as heretics by the Church, the south rebelled as well as the north. The ‘Sea Beggars’ attacked shipping. Haarlem, besieged, capitulated. Spanish garrisons spread fire and plunder. Thousands perished from random arrests, mock trials, and casual violence.
VALTELLINA
I
N
July 1620 a bloody massacre took place in a remote alpine valley—the Valtellina or Veltlin. The Catholic faction in the valley fell on their Protestant neighbours and, with the aid of a Spanish force from Milan, killed as many as they could seize. This
Veltlinermord
, at the outset of the Thirty Years War, alerted the Powers to the Valtellina’s strategic potential.
The Valtellina lies on the southern side of the Bernina section of the main alpine ridge. It was formed by the River Adda, and runs some 74 miles due eastwards from the tip of Lake Como, then north-east to the old Roman spa at Bormio. An important side-valley, the Val di Poschiavo, leads northwards via the Bernia Pass to St Moritz. The main valley leads over the Stelvio Pass or Stilfserjoch (9,055 feet) to southern Tyrol. In 1520 the shrine of the Madonna di Tirano was built where the main road crosses a north-south track leading down the Val di Poschiavo and over into the Val Camonica. In 1603 a Spanish fortress was built to command the entrance to the valley from Lake Como. A string of villages on the sunny northern terraces of the Adda are famed for their chestnuts, figs, honey, and aromatic ‘Retico’ wine.
1
(See Appendix III, p. 1219.)
It was political geography, however, that was crucial. By the 1600s almost all the transalpine routes were controlled by the Duke of Savoy, by the Swiss Confederation, or by the Republic of Venice. When the Austrian Habsburgs were looking for support from their Spanish relatives in Italy, the Valtellina had become the sole accessible corridor between the two main blocks of Habsburg territory. Indeed, since the sea-lanes between Spain and the Netherlands were increasingly threatened by Dutch and English warships, the Valtellina became the last sure route for sending gold and troops from Spain and Spanish Italy to the empire. It was the jugular vein of the Habsburgs’ body politic.
Yet the columns of marching pikemen, and the mule trains loaded with pieces of eight, remained extremely vulnerable. They were not welcome to the local inhabitants, many of whom had turned to Calvinism; they were open to direct attack from the Swiss Freestate of the
Graubunden
or Grisons, via the Val di Poschiavo; and they were subject to the changing fortunes of complicated proprietorial disputes. Both the Habsburgs and the Grisons had inherited claims to the Valtellina rooted in the medieval wrangles between the Visconti dukes of Milan and the bishops of Chur. Not to be outdone, the French reckoned that Charlemagne had granted the Valtellina in perpetuity to the Abbey of St Denis.
After 1620, the valley became the focus of Richelieu’s diplomacy with Venice, Switzerland, and Savoy. Five times in the next twenty years it saw French and Spanish garrisons change places. In 1623 and in 1627 it was handed over during arbitration to papal forces. In 1623–5 it was taken by the Grisons. In 1633 and 1635–7 it was taken by French forces under the Huguenot Duke of Rohan. But the French so offended their Protestant allies that a local pastor, George Jenatsch, changed sides, called in the Spaniards, and converted to Roman Catholicism. By then, having laid hands on the Rhine, the French could safely leave the Valtellina to its Catholic and, ultimately, to its Italian destiny. After a generation of turmoil the valley could return to its vines, to the production of Sassella, Grumello, Valgella, Montagna, and the orange-coloured dessert wine, the
Sfurzat
.
Under the governorships of Don Luis de Requesens, Grand Commander of Castile 1573–6, and of Don John of Austria 1576–8 reconciliation was attempted but failed. Leyden, besieged, survived. The sack of Antwerp during the Spanish Fury of 1576 hardened resistance. Under the regency of the Duke of Parma 1578–92, the split became irreversible. By the Union of Arras (1578) ten southern provinces accepted Spanish terms and recovered their liberties. By the Union of Utrecht (1579) the seven northern provinces resolved to fight for their independence. Thereafter, there was unremitting war. Spanish military resources could never be brought to bear against the Dutchmen’s dykes, their money, warships, and allies. In 1581–5 and 1595–8 the Dutch were assisted by the French, in 1585–7 by the English under the Earl of Leicester. In 1609 they enjoyed an eleven-year truce, but were forced to fight on from 1621 to 1648 in the ranks of the anti-imperial coalition. Their steadfastness prevailed. The spirit of a new nation was inscribed on the front of a burgher’s house in Zijlstraat, Haarlem:
‘INT SOET NEDERLAND; ICK BLYF GETROU; ICK WYCT NYET AF’
(To the dear Netherlands. I shall be true. I shall not waver.)
49
The Dutch Republic of the ‘United Provinces of the Netherlands’—misleadingly known in English as Holland—was the wonder of seventeenth-century Europe. It succeeded for the same reasons that its would-be Spanish masters failed: throughout the eighty years of its painful birth, its disposable resources were actually growing. Having resisted the greatest military power of the day, it then became a major maritime power in its own right. Its sturdy burgher society widely practised the virtues of prudent management, democracy, and toleration. Its engineers, bankers, and sailors were justly famed. Its constitution (1584)
ensured that the governments of the seven provinces remained separate from a federal council of state at The Hague. The latter was chaired by an executive
Stadholder
, whose office was generally held, together with the offices of Captain-General and Admiral-General, by the House of Orange.
[ORANGE]
The Dutch Republic rapidly became a haven for religious dissidents, for capitalists, for philosophers, and for painters. The earlier Flemish school of Rubens (1577–1640) and Van Dyck (1599–1641) was surpassed by the Dutch School of Hals, Ruysdael, Vermeer, and, above all, of Rembrandt (Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1609–66). Nor were the Netherlands blighted by bourgeois dullness. Its religious affairs were enlivened by the Arminian controversy, its military affairs by a vocal element of pacifist opinion, its politics by a party of extreme republicans who in 1651–72, under Jan de Witt (1625–72), succeeded in keeping the Stadholdership vacant. Its political power began to wane with the three English wars of 1651–4, 1665–7, and 1672–4. Even so, despite its peculiar, decentralised constitution, it had every reason to regard itself as the first modern state.
50
[BATAVIA]
France
, too, was entering a period of renewed vigour and splendour. Less encumbered by distant colonies, and geographically more compact, she was a worthy rival for the Habsburgs. Yet France was strategically encircled, by the Empire on one side and by Spain on the other, by the Spanish Netherlands in the north and by the Spanish Mediterranean possessions in the south. The French were repeatedly thwarted in their attempts to reach the dominant position to which they felt entitled.
In the century-and-a-half which separated Renaissance France from Louis XIV, French kings repeatedly ran into strangulating complications both at home and abroad. Charles VIII launched the Italian wars in 1494, in romantic pursuit of the Angevin claim to Naples, only to embroil his country in a series of titanic conflicts lasting 65 years. Louis XII (r. 1498–1515),
Père de son Peuple
and heir to the Visconti, did likewise by pursuing his claim to Milan. Francis I (r. 1515–47), born at Cognac, a magnificent knight, cultivated man of pleasure, and Renaissance prince par excellence, met his first setback at the imperial election of 1519 and the second by his capture at Pavia in 1525. ‘Tout est perdu,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘fors l’honneur et la vie.’ His release, and marriage to the Emperor’s sister, did not restrain him from persisting with the Franco-German feud that henceforth gripped Europe for the rest of modern history. He was a prince of wide horizons: patron of Jacques Cartier’s expedition to Canada, as of Rabelais, Leonardo, Cellini; founder alike of Le Havre and of the Collège de France; builder of Chambord, Saint-Germain, Fontainebleau.
[ALCOFRIBAS][NEZ] [TORMENTA]
In the reigns of the last four Valois—Henry II (r. 1547–59), Francis II (r. 1559–60), the youthful Charles IX (r. 1560–74), and the flagrant Henry III (r. 1574–89)—France gained respite from the Habsburg conflict at the Peace of Câteau-Cambrésis (1559), only to sink into the appalling morass of the Wars of Religion (see above). The cynical Bourbon Henry IV (r. 1589–1610) saved France from religious discord and, with his visionary minister, the Duc de Sully
(1560–1641), prepared plans both for the restoration of prosperity and for international peace. ‘There will be no labourer in my kingdom’, he promised, ‘without a chicken in his pot.’ Like his predecessor, he was cut down by an assassin.
[DESSEIN]
