The Limits of Empire: European Imperial Formations in Early Modern World History

Essays in Honor of Geoffrey Parker

William Reger, Tonio Andrade

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138107830
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317025320
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

This volume, published in honor of historian Geoffrey Parker, explores the working of European empires in a global perspective, focusing on one of the most important themes of Parker's work: the limits of empire, which is to say, the centrifugal forces - sacral, dynastic, military, diplomatic, geographical, informational - that plagued imperial formations in the early modern period (1500-1800). During this time of wrenching technological, demographic, climatic, and economic change, empires had to struggle with new religious movements, incipient nationalisms, new sea routes, new military technologies, and an evolving state system with complex new rules of diplomacy. Engaging with a host of current debates, the chapters in this book break away from conventional historical conceptions of empire as an essentially western phenomenon with clear demarcation lines between the colonizer and the colonized. These are replaced here by much more fluid and subtle conceptions that highlight complex interplays between coalitions of rulers and ruled. In so doing, the volume builds upon recent work that increasingly suggests that empires simply could not exist without the consent of their imperial subjects, or at least significant groups of them. This was as true for the British Raj as it was for imperial China or Russia. Whilst the thirteen chapters in this book focus on a number of geographic regions and adopt different approaches, each shares a focus on, and interest in, the working of empires and the ways that imperial formations dealt with - or failed to deal with - the challenges that beset them. Taken together, they reflect a new phase in the evolving historiography of empire. They also reflect the scholarly contributions of the dedicatee, Geoffrey Parker, whose life and work are discussed in the introductory chapters and, we're proud to say, in a delightful chapter by Parker himself, an autobiographical reflection that closes the book.

Chapter 1
“Por Dios, Por Patria:” The Sacral Limits of Empire as Seen in Catalan Political Sermons, 1630–1641

Andrew Mitchell

It is better for you to die as a true Israelite in defense of his God, his honor, and his patria than to live out your days subject to those [Castilians] under whom we have experienced such inhuman and barbaric treatment.

Fr. Josep de Jesus Maria1

[C]ertainly if the pulpits teach not obedience … the King will have but small comfort in the militia.

Charles I2

Walking through the Catalan countryside in the diocese of Girona on 1 May 1640, two Capuchin friars detected something amiss. Perhaps it was in the pungent, incense-laden aroma filling the air, or maybe it was seeing the large column of black smoke curdling upwards from the village church of Riudarenes. Horrified and bewildered, the friars rushed towards the blaze, but arrived too late. Despite the presence of a royal tercio under the command of Don Leonardo Moles, the soldiers made no effort at all to save any items from the sanctuary. Worse, the villagers angrily told the Capuchins that soldiers had actually started the blaze, an accusation that their commander did not care to deny. Though the friars braved the combined obstacles of soldiers, flames, and heat to save the Sacred Host, only the charred remnants in damaged chalices remained.

This catastrophic burning of the Body of Christ, an act symbolic of Protestant assaults on the True Church, in the heart of Catholic Catalonia by practicing Catholics sealed the rupture between the increasingly incompatible loyalty of Catalans to their local constitutions and the demands made on them by the composite Habsburg monarchy. The presence of a royal army quartered on Catalan soil over the winter of 1639–40 to protect them from an anticipated French invasion had simply exacerbated existing tensions caused by the centralizing policies of Philip IV and his chief minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares, over the last 20 years. The Catalans particularly despised the presence of armed foreigners (Moles commanded a Neapolitan tercio) in their midst; both sides had already come to blows during a lull in the fighting five months earlier.

By their inflammatory response to Catalan obstinacy, however, Moles’s men ignited more than the wrath of a few villagers. With tangible evidence of the sacrilege in their hands, the Capuchins returned to Girona where their account met with a stunned response. The cathedral chapter called an emergency meeting and created a committee of canons to investigate the truth of the Capuchins’ accusations. After a two-week enquiry, the chapter and Bishop Parcero concluded that Moles and his Neapolitans were guilty of deliberately destroying not only a house of God but all its contents, including the Eucharistic elements: a serious crime that called for excommunication. Sentence was duly passed in a public ceremony from the steps of Girona’s cathedral on 14 May.

In the weeks to come, the countryside of central Catalonia rose in arms against the king’s foreign soldiers, their violence finding vindication in the Church’s decree. One Castilian tercio on its way to the front came under fire from Catalan farmers who hid behind stone walls and trees. Unable to inflict much damage in return, the tercio took revenge by burning the church in the next town on their route, Montiró. Once again, the conflagration destroyed everything, including the bread used for the Mass, provoking a harsher reaction from the Catalans in turn. By the end of May, the violence had spread to almost 50 communities in 19 counties, reaching new heights in early June, when rioters killed the viceroy, two judges, and any Castilian they could find during Barcelona’s Corpus Christi celebration.3 By midsummer, the entire principality of Catalonia was in a state of open rebellion against Philip IV, taking up arms in the name of God, the Holy Sacrament, and their patria.4

It has been customary to see in this revolt—known in history as the War of the Segadors—the political limits of “Castilianization” within the Iberian Peninsula. When one considers the religious dimensions of this rebellion, however, it becomes increasingly apparent that the revolt of the Catalans exposed the sacral limits of Castile’s empire as well. Through their words and actions, the Principat’s clergy proved to be the critical element that created and sustained a decisive unity within traditionally divided Catalonia. Clerics wrote many of the early pamphlets that defended the rebellion; their circulation extended to France, Rome, and the Netherlands. During the winter of 1640–41—with the revolt facing imminent defeat at the hands of the royal army—monks, friars, and priests in Barcelona sought neither repentance nor forgiveness, but rather prayed for divine deliverance from their foes. After a remarkable rebel victory in January 1641 that ensured a war of long duration, Catalan churchmen gave great sums of money to finance the fight against Castile. Many members served as judges, administrators, and tax collectors in the new republic protected by France, and even headed a new Inquisition in Barcelona.

This significant religious influence on Catalan opinion and action, however, did not begin in 1640. For at least a decade before the revolt, a number of political sermons, given before the Diputació in Barcelona, reinforced the concept of Catalonia not merely as a political but as a spiritual entity, distinctive from every other region in “Spain,” especially Castile.5 Catalan and Castilian preachers alike reminded their audiences of the Principat’s uniquely Catholic heritage through sermons celebrating its patron saint, Jordi (George), and the souls of faithful Catalans residing in Purgatory. These orations took on a renewed vigor when war broke out with France in 1635, confirming in people’s minds that it was “Spain” (specifically Catalonia), not France, that could legitimately lay claim to be the true defender of the faith.6 As flames consumed the Sacred Host in 1640, these same sermons continued to remind their Catalan listeners of their pious legacy and urged resistance, this time against the false prophets of Castile.

The power of sermons to form, and transform, social consciousness in the early modern era was not confined to Europe, as the Catalans’ contemporaries in colonial New England demonstrate. Scholars such as Ellis Sandoz, Harry Stout, and others have shown that New England sermons played a critical role in shaping that community’s identity as God’s covenanted people, the New Israel, a people set as a “city on a hill.”7 The colonists firmly believed that their temporal survival was inextricably tied to their religious orthodoxy. The natural disasters that befell them—famine, sickness, wars, and their relationship with England—all had a special spiritual significance that ministers conveyed to their congregations. So evident was the bond between faith and society that Harry Stout has written that New England served as a model “as clear as any that exists in American history—of the way in which religion came to permeate a national identity at its deepest cultural and intellectual levels.”8

The Catalan revolt occurred at the beginning of one of the more tumultuous decades in European history, with rebellions or civil wars affecting nearly every corner of the continent. Many of these uprisings had a religious motive at theircore; similar messages stressing the purity of a particular political community could be heard from England to Russia during the 1640s. In England, the first significant contribution by the pulpits to public policy occurred in 1620–21 over the proposed “Spanish Match” and would continue intermittently through to the intense sermon campaign launched by Parliament in 1643 to justify their actions against the king.9 The most significant of these political homilies were the Paul’s Cross sermons, given weekly in the open-air churchyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. One scholar who has studied these sermons observed that they were “major civic events, attended by a host of dignitaries, including the Lord Mayor, the aldermen, and the Bishop of London,” and concluded that “[p]reaching, in early modern England, was a profoundly political activity.”10

The most complete study of English political sermons before the outbreak of civil war was conducted by Godfrey Davies, who admittedly only sampled a small number of texts out of a potential 360,000.11 Despite the small number of sermons published compared to the number given, Davies and other scholars, such as Ann Hughes and John Morrill, have shown conclusively that these spiritual messages had an important political and social effect on the English population at large. Ironically, the sermons published in Catalonia during the 1630s would affect theiraudience in much the same way as their heretical English enemies. It would have both a unifying and a divisive effect—uniting the people around a core identity (faithfulness to the Sacramental Body of Christ), while dividing them from open or secret heretics who sought to desecrate not only the symbol but also the community who supported it with their bodies and souls.

If one applies Davies’s methodology to Catalonia from 1600–1643, one is faced with analyzing eight sermons out of a potential 54,180.12 While the number of sermons that exist to be studied are admittedly quite small compared to the hundreds of parishes in seventeenth-century Catalonia, that they were published at all is very significant. In the first place, Catholic priests, unlike their Protestant counterparts, have rarely been in the habit of writing out sermons before delivering them, or of printing them afterwards, yet these were.13 Moreover, out of the two general types of sermons published in early modern, Spain, sueltos—usually a panegyric for a saint or a funeral oration—were printed far less frequently than sermonarios, collections of a priest’s pastoral labors.14 Finally, there were only three printing houses in operation during the 1630s in Barcelona (the center of Catalan printing), putting out an average of a dozen pamphlets per year from 1620 to 1639, so that fact that the Generalitat spent money to publish these political sermons indicates their importance to the local community.15 As a further testimony to these sermons’ importance, the Diputació brought in the most eloquent preachers available for these feast-days, whether they were native Catalans such as Pablo de Sarria or Gaspar Sala, or Castilians such as Lucas de Lozoya.16 While specific details varied with each preacher, the essence of the messages was the same: the Catalan people enjoyed a unique Christian heritage, a pure faith that had been maintained throughout the centuries by their ancestors and that made their patria a model for others to imitate.

Although it seems probable that the Catalan population of the seventeenth century was not as interested in printed sermons as were their contemporaries in Old or New England, there is some evidence to indicate they were more concerned about such matters than their Castilian counterparts. This was especially true during the Lenten season, when the Catalans and Valencians expected to hear a sermon preached every day. By contrast, sermons in Castile and Andalucia were given only four days out of the week.17 Following the pattern laid out in traditional medieval sermons, the preachers would expound upon a verse or a series of verses, directing their hearers towards the praise and imitation of the divine and the saints, using either the tools of rhetoric or plain speaking as the occasion demanded.18 For Catalans, the hearing of the Word that was so critical to the formation of a social identity would be greatly enhanced through the celebration of the Mass, in which the sacramental Body of Christ fed the spiritual Body of Christ, his Church. The message of these political sermons complemented this relationship created at the altar, reinforcing the reality of God’s blessing in the minds and souls of the Principat’s leadership and—through their publication—the literate Catalan population at large...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Graphs and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Geoffrey Parker and Early Modern History
• The Limits of Empire: An Introduction
• 1 “Por Dios, Por Patria:” The Sacral Limits of Empire as Seen in Catalan Political Sermons, 1630–1641
• 2 Enlightened Absolutism and New Frontiers for Political Authority: Building Towards a State Religion in Eighteenth-Century Spain
• 3 The Limits of Faith in a Maritime Empire: Mennonites, Trade and Politics in the Dutch Golden Age
• 4 Information, Gossip and Rumor: The Limits of Intelligence at the Early Modern Court, 1558–1585
• 5 Philip II, Information Overload, and the Early Modern Moment
• 6 Italy and the Limits of the Spanish Empire
• 7 The Limits of Dynastic Power: Poland-Lithuania, Sweden and the Problem of Composite Monarchy in the Age of the Vasas, 1562–1668
• 8 The Artillery Fortress Was an Engine of European Expansion: Evidence from East Asia
• 9 The Limits of Empire: The Case of Britain
• 10 The Façade of Order: Claiming Imperial Space in Early Modern Russia
• 11 Renaissance Diplomacy and the Limits of Empire: Eustace Chapuys, Habsburg Imperialisms, and Dissimulation as Method
• 12 Distance and Misinformation in the Conquest of America
• 13 Brawling Behaviors in the Dutch Colonial Empire: Changing Norms of Fairness?
• 14 Isabel Clara Eugenia: Daughter of the Spanish Empire
• 15 Messianic Imperialism or Traditional Dynasticism? The Grand Strategy of Philip II and the Spanish Failure in the Wars of the 1590s
• “A man’s gotta know his limitations”: Reflections on a Misspent Past
• Index