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Reformation Resistance and Reason of State 1517 1625 Sarah Mortimer All Chapter
Reformation Resistance and Reason of State 1517 1625 Sarah Mortimer All Chapter
Reformation Resistance and Reason of State 1517 1625 Sarah Mortimer All Chapter
Series Editor: Mark Bevir, Professor of Political Science and Director of the
Center for British Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
OX F O R D H I S T O RY O F P O L I T IC A L T HOU G H T
Reformation, Resistance,
and Reason of State
(1517–1625)
S A R A H M O RT I M E R
1
1
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Acknowledgements
When Mark Bevir invited me to contribute to a new series on the history of polit
ical thought, I realized it would be a challenging but exciting opportunity. I am
grateful to him for that invitation and for his support, advice, and patience
throughout this process. The book has been written in Oxford, where I have
benefitted greatly from a thriving early modern community and from a growing
programme of intellectual history. I would like also to thank my colleagues in the
History Faculty and in Christ Church for their encouragement, kindness, and
friendship over these years, particularly when times have been difficult. I am
especially grateful to Christ Church for providing some extra leave during which
this book was completed. The book has been greatly improved by conversations
and discussions with many people over the years and I would like to thank in
particular Rowena Archer, Teresa Bejan, George Garnett, John-Paul Ghobrial,
Matthew Innes, Dmitri Levitin, Avi Lifschitz, Sophie Nicholls, Sophie Smith,
Noël Sugimura and Brian Young. Teaching and sharing ideas with Alexandra
Gajda and our ‘special subject’ students has been a deeply enriching experience
and I would like to thank them, and all my students. Our early career academics
have been a wonderful presence and I am grateful to all those with whom I have
taught classes or shared tea, particularly Joshua Bennett, Deni Kasa, Tae-Yeoun
Keum, Michelle Pfeffer, and Mariëtta van der Tol. I would also like to thank John
Robertson, who first introduced me to some of the themes of political thought
and who has discussed versions of this project as it has changed and developed.
Jon Parkin and Noah Dauber read sections of the manuscript and I am grateful to
both of them for so many conversations about its themes.
Versions of some of the ideas in this book were presented at seminars in
Harvard, Princeton, Göttingen, Helsinki, Cambridge, Leiden, and the London
School of Economics. The feedback and discussions were immensely helpful and
my thanks to Eric Beerbohm, Eric Nelson, Russ Leo III, Tim Stuart-Buttle, Martti
Koskenniemi, Mónica Garcia-Salmones Rovira, Lisa Kattenberg, Thomas Poole,
and Nehal Bhuta. I have been fortunate to be involved with the ERC funded pro
ject ‘War and the Supernatural’ led by Ian Campbell at Queen’s University Belfast,
and have learned much from the team members – Todd Rester, Floris Verhaart,
and Karie Schultz – and from their conferences and workshops. I am also very
grateful to Ian for reading a draft of the manuscript and for his generous sugges
tions. Thanks are also due to Oxford University Press and particularly Dominic
Byatt, and to the readers of the original proposal and full manuscript, for their
knowledgeable and constructive comments.
Finally, my heartfelt thanks to all my friends and family, but particularly my
husband David.
List of Maps
In 1567 the French humanist and scholar Louis Le Roy published a brief treatise
On the Origin, Antiquity, Progress, Excellence and Usefulness of Politics. Le Roy,
like many of his contemporaries, believed he was living through troubled and
unsettled times, but was convinced that the study of politics was one important
way of restoring peace and prosperity to his native land. In 1567 Le Roy felt the
need to justify his claim, finding the roots of political science (as he often termed
it) in the classical world while showing how ancient precepts could be updated to
fit the new realities of his own age. Half a century later, however, the value of
political science was well established and in 1608 one German scholar could even
liken it to a lush but sprawling estate. In his view, ‘the boundaries of political sci
ence [Politica] are so wide, its possessions so rich and diffuse, that its rule is dis
ordered in many things’—and what was now needed was for some proper method
and order in the discipline.2 He was to be disappointed, for no single method tri
umphed in this period. Yet the fascination with political thought grew, among
scholars, statesmen, and a growing segment of the public.
By 1625 political thought was certainly diverse and diffuse, and yet even with
out a unifying method it is possible to see some core themes within it. Most
importantly, this period saw a concern to understand the political or civil com
munity as bounded, limited in geographical terms and with its own particular
structures, characteristics, and history. Political science had therefore to be separ
ated from ethics or philosophy, which dealt with individual virtues or with uni
versal truths. Its aim was to ensure the survival and prosperity of one political
unit; it needed to be sensitive to time and place. This did not mean abandoning
the quest for universal values, but it did shape the way those values were under
stood. The second, and related, development was a growing focus on civil or
1 Louis Le Roy, De l’origine, antiquité, progrès, excellence et utilité de l’art politique (Paris, 1567), p. 10.
2 G. Paulus, preface to B. Keckermann, Systema Disciplinae Politicae (Hanau, 1608).
Reformation, Resistance, and Reason of State (1517–1625). Sarah Mortimer, Oxford University Press.
© Sarah Mortimer 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199674886.003.0001
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3 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Concept of a Language and the Métier d’Historien: Some Considerations on
Practice’, in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, edited by Anthony Pagden
(Cambridge, 1987), pp. 19–38; Mark Goldie, ‘The Ancient Constitution and the Languages of Political
Thought’, The Historical Journal 62 (2019), pp. 3–34.
Introduction 11
political thought, though the sixteenth century did also see a steady increase in
the number of pamphlets, sermons, plays, and other works of imaginative litera
ture, many of which offered direct or indirect commentrary on political ideas. I
have foregrounded those writers who dealt explicitly and systematically with
political questions, while suggesting more briefly the ways in which a range of
early modern authors touched upon those questions. Given the academic train
ing and resources necessary to enter into printed debate about political thought,
it is perhaps not surprising that it was largely the preserve of a male elite. Very few
women had access to the same experiences or opportunities, even if at times they
wielded significant political power; by the seventeenth century, however, the bal
ance was shifting and women began to enter more fully into political debate.4
That the sixteenth century was a seminal period in the history of political
thought has long been acknowledged. The claim is today perhaps most familiar
from Quentin Skinner’s highly influential Foundations of Modern Political
Thought, published in 1978. Skinner placed the origins of the modern state in
what he called the Ages of Renaissance and Reformation; by 1600, he argued, ‘the
concept of the State . . . had come to be regarded as the most important object of
analysis in European political thought’.5 But Skinner was also keen to show that it
was not the religious ideas of the period which drove the move towards modern
ity, but rather a new theory of popular sovereignty which was independent of
religion. That theory enabled Europeans to see the state as separate from its ruler
and so to resist the absolutist monarchies being consolidated as the sixteenth cen
tury drew to a close. Skinner argued forcefully that the important intellectual
achievement of this period was the creation of ‘purely secular and wholly populist
doctrines’ which would then be ‘available to be used by all parties in the coming
constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century’.6 Skinner suggested that
although these constitutionalist arguments had developed in a religious context,
their theological elements could be discarded—although the impact of such an
alteration remained unclear from his work. In Foundations, Skinner made an ele
gant and persuasive case for the importance of early modern political thought,
but by insisting on its increasing independence from religion he closed off a series
of crucial questions about the relationship between the two, and particularly
about the relationship between natural law, political obligation, and Christianity.
In the chapters that follow I have tried to re-open some of those questions and to
show how important ideas of religion could be to the development of political
thought—even in its most apparently secular or civil guises.
4 The development of women’s political thinking is discussed in Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green,
A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge, 2009).
5 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1978), p. 349.
6 Ibid., p. 347.
12 Reformation, Resistance, Reason of State
Historians have not, of course, ignored the complex interplay between religion
and political ideas in this period, although they have tended to focus on the ten
sion between the two. In the 1920s, the German historian Frederick Meinecke
argued that Nicolò Machiavelli was the first to see that politics sometimes
required tragic choices, a commitment to empirical necessity rather than the
moral law. For Meinecke, the writing of this Italian humanist posed a serious
challenge to the belief that individual morality would lead to political success and
suggested that ethics, particularly Christian ethics, may not in fact be compatible
with politics.7 This fed into the tradition which became known as reason of state,
a tradition in which political prudence was separate from morality or Christianity
and geared towards the welfare and survival of the state rather than to any abstract
or universal standard of ethics. Yet although this was a language of statecraft
rather than law or morality, it soon became intertwined with the concept of nat
ural law, as Richard Tuck has shown. Indeed, he argued for a ‘remarkable trans
formation’ of the culture of raison d’état ‘into the great natural law theories of the
mid [-seventeenth] century’.8 In Tuck’s view, Hugo Grotius was particularly cre
ative in showing how a natural law theory could be based upon the concept of
(individual) natural rights, and could resist sceptical critique by insisting that
natural rights flowed from the universally acknowledged principle of self-
preservation. Grotius could therefore provide a conceptual foundation for natural
law which was not only independent of Christianity but also detached from clas
sical accounts of morality or virtue.
In Tuck’s account, the ‘modern’ natural law developed by Grotius provided the
most important element of a new theory of both sovereignty and individual lib
erty, one which would be articulated most powerfully by Thomas Hobbes. In the
writing of both Hobbes and Grotius, he argued, the sovereign was accorded
immense power but, at the same time, that power depended upon contract and
upon the people’s consent; it existed to preserve the people and could in principle
allow a high degree of religious and philosophical toleration. Yet, as studies of the
reception of Grotius and Hobbes have shown, seventeenth-century readers strug
gled to understand how their theory of natural law could in fact oblige human
beings, let alone Christians. The roots of this problem—and early modern answers
to it—lie in the debates of the sixteenth century, when political science, natural
law, and natural right first began to be analysed as distinct from, but related to,
Christianity. In the following chapters I show how the problem of the obligation
of natural law, indeed of the principles of statecraft and prudence, was already live
in some scholarly circles even before Grotius’s intervention in the debate. I
emphasize that the early modern language of sovereignty was, from its inception,
7 F. Meinecke, Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte (Munich, 1924), translated by D. Scott
as, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’état and Its Place in Modern History (London, 1957).
8 Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), p. xiv.
Introduction 13
9 E.g. Annabel Brett, ‘The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth: Thomas Hobbes and
Late Renaissance Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics’, Hobbes Studies 23 (2010), pp. 72–102; Noah
Dauber, State and Commonwealth: The Theory of the State in Early Modern England, 1549–1640
(Princeton, 2016).
10 Annabel Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law
(Princeton, 2011).
11 E.g. Harro Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630
(Cambridge, 2004); Christoph Strohm, Ethik im frühen Calvinismus: Humanistische Einflüsse,
14 Reformation, Resistance, Reason of State
particular noblemen have highlighted the creative ways in which they fashioned
themselves and their image. They have also drawn attention to the growing inter
est in this period in the education of the young, but especially young nobles.12
Like those studies, this current book recognizes that ‘political’ thought cannot be
studied in isolation, for early modern conceptions of the political were shaped
and conditioned by wider commitments, be they ethical, religious, or familial.
As historians have placed the state within wider intellectual landscape, they
have also become increasing interested in how early modern people conceived of
an international human community. The sixteenth century has long been seen as
a foundational moment in the history of international law, with the discovery of
the New World prompting early- modern Spanish scholars in particular to
develop sophisticated accounts of what we might now think of as international
law. Modern translation projects have made those early modern texts easily avail
able to modern readers, and the ongoing relevance of the issues with which they
deal—especially empire and international intervention—have ensured a steady
stream of scholarship on these themes.13 This has helped to dilute an earlier con
centration on the internal structure of states, but it has also raised questions about
how contemporaries understood the wider laws and norms which applied to their
own political community as well as to the international sphere. In a period when
empires were emerging and being challenged, and the boundaries between states
were far from fixed, writers and statesmen discussed the scope and limits of their
own political community within the context of these wider international com
munities. Whether they sought to defend expansionist policies, or to protect their
homeland from the exactions of an imperial power, their writings helped to define
both local and international political thought—as I have sought to indicate.
Recent studies have drawn our attention to the importance of imaginative lit
erature in shaping early modern ideas of community, both local and international.
The ideas developed in William Shakespeare’s plays, for example, have long been
of interest to political theorists as well as historians and literary scholars.14
Meanwhile the interplay between legal scholarship, poetry, and prose has been
15 Lorna Hutson, ‘Introduction: Law, Literature and History’, in The Oxford Handbook of English
Law and Literature, 1500–1700, edited by Lorna Hutson (Oxford, 2017), p. 3.
16 Howell A. Lloyd, Glenn Burgess, and Simon Hodson, eds, European Political Thought,
1450–1700: Religion, Law and Philosophy (New Haven, CT, 2007).
16 Reformation, Resistance, Reason of State
17 For one recent study see Paschalis M. Kitromilides, ‘The Byzantine Legacy in Early Modern
Political Thought’, in The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium, edited by Anthony Kaldellis
and Niketas Siniossoglou (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 653–68.
18 Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought,
1450–1750 (Oxford, 2019; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India—Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800
(Harvard, 2017).
19 For example, Anna Becker, Gendering the Renaissance Commonwealth (Cambridge, 2019) and
Christoph Haar, Natural and Political Conceptions of Community: The Role of Household Society in
Jesuit Political Thought c.1590–1650 (Leiden, 2018).
2
Empires and Cities—Political Thought
in an Age of Expansion
In 1519 a Flemish teenager became the most powerful figure Europe had seen for
generations, ruling over a vast collection of lands which stretched from the
Iberian coast to the Baltic Sea. The unique position of the young Charles V
seemed to many to herald the dawning of a new imperial age, ruled over by a man
divinely ordained to bring peace and Christianity to the whole world. To the East,
however, the position of the Ottoman sultan Selim I was no less auspicious. Not
only had he amassed a large territory through conquest and force of arms, but he
had established himself as Protector of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina.
Both men seemed blessed by their respective Gods and charged with authority
both political and religious. Their empires would exert a powerful hold over the
early modern imagination, as people wrestled with the intellectual as well as the
practical implications of imperial rule. Across these lands, the concept of empire
was challenged as well as defended, and Charles’s reign in particular saw a
renewed interest in the defence of local rather than universal political
communities.
The imperial claims of both men were impressive, but they drew on existing
ideas about rule and authority stretching back to a past that was classical and reli
gious. In Europe, those ideas were already in flux, especially after the invasion of
Italy by the French king Charles VIII in 1494, a move which ushered in a period
of turmoil and conquest on that peninsular. In the Islamic world, the conquest of
Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II had been a particularly significant moment
for the Ottoman dynasty, allowing it not only to expand its territory but also to
lay claim to the heritage of imperial Rome. From the late fifteenth century, there
fore, rulers found themselves dealing with multiple territories, each with their
own institutions, laws, and religious customs. Empire and expansion challenged
the ways in which those local political communities were understood and legit
imized, prompting new and often intense reflection on the nature of those com
munities and their relationship to the apparently universal norms associated with
both Muslim and Christian religion and with these newly powerful empires.
Sixteenth-century political thought was shaped in profound ways by claims to
empire and the reactions which they provoked.
Reformation, Resistance, and Reason of State (1517–1625). Sarah Mortimer, Oxford University Press.
© Sarah Mortimer 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199674886.003.0002
18 Reformation, Resistance, Reason of State
Charles’s election as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 marked the culmination of his
meteoric rise to power. By this time Charles had inherited from his parents a vast
swathe of territories in Europe, including Castile and Aragon from his mother
Joana (declared unfit for rule in 1506) and the Burgundian lands of his father
Philip the Handsome, lands which made him a suitable candidate for the imperial
throne. The political hopes and expectations nurtured in all these lands, espe
cially in the second half of the fifteenth century, were now projected on to the
young Charles, the new Christian Emperor who might fulfil a dream of rule over
the whole world. Charles’s court publicists encouraged this speculation, drawing
together a series of different conceptions of empire—juridical, historical, and pro
phetic—to offer a vision of unified rule endorsed by God which would usher in a
new age. Chief among these publicists was Charles’s Grand Chancellor Mercurino
de Gattinara, trained as a jurist but attracted to the heady brew of apocalyptic and
messianic prophecy circulating in both Italy and in the Habsburg lands. In a
speech to Charles, Gattinara explained that God has ‘constitut[ed] you the great
est emperor and king who has ever been since the division of the [Roman] empire’
and has drawn ‘you to the right path of monarchy in order to lead back the entire
world to a single shepherd’.1 To Gattinara, Charles’s accession marked a dramatic
turning point in history, when the lands of Christendom could be united
once more.
Charles’s lineage certainly encouraged speculation about his destiny. His
Habsburg grandfather, Maximilian I, was thought to be descended from the great
heroes of the ancient world, notably Aeneas and Augustus, heroes associated with
the foundation of Rome and the establishment of its empire, respectively. Their
centrality in Christian history had long been emphasized; after all, Jesus Christ
had been born in the reign of Augustus and the ‘pax Romana’ or Roman peace
was seen as preparing the way for a new ‘pax Christiana’. In 1477 Maximilian
married Mary of Burgundy, whose family traced themselves back to Charlemagne,
the first of the Holy Roman Emperors in Western Europe, and Mary’s grand
father, Philip the Good, had founded the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1429 in
preparation for his mission to deliver Jerusalem from the hands of the Turks.
Although the mission failed, the symbol of the Golden Fleece became an
important and prominent attribute of the dynasty, linking pagan and Christian
expectations of conquest over evil.2
1 John Headley, ‘The Habsburg World Empire and the Revival of Ghibellinism’, Medieval and
Renaissance Studies 7 (1978), pp. 93–127, quotation from p. 98.
2 Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor
(New Haven, CT, 1993).
Empires and Cities 19
3 S. Nalle, ‘The Millenial Moment: Revolution and Radical Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain’, in
Toward the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco, edited by P. Schafer and
M. Cohen (Leiden, 1998), p. 152.
4 Quoted in John Headley, ‘Gattinara, Erasmus, and the Imperial Configuration of Humanism’,
Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 71(1980), p. 90.
20 Reformation, Resistance, Reason of State
the French king’s hold over his lands came originally from the emperor himself,
who could hardly be expected to owe his subordinates any feudal service.
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, jurists had tended to
emphasize that that the powers of the emperor himself, whatever they might be in
theory, were limited in practice. In reality, they believed, cities and kings were
independent of imperial rule. This situation was summed up in the formula of the
Italian jurist Bartolus of Sassoferrata, who wrote of a ‘civitas sibi princeps’, a city
which was a ruler to itself. Variations of this theme can also be found in France,
where lawyers for the French monarchy described their king as ‘imperator in
regno suo’. The advantage of this approach was that it granted to the individual
monarchs or cities the kind of sovereignty which the Roman law had reserved for
the emperor himself. The process by which sovereign power had been relocated
from the empire to the cities and kingdoms was further theorized by jurists, not
ably Baldus de Ubaldis, another Italian keen to explain the independence of city
states. Like his contemporaries, he began from the premise that there were some
fundamental laws which provided the normative framework for all human
actions, namely the divine law, natural law, and the ius gentium or ‘law of peoples’.
These concepts could be found in Roman law, though there was some ambiguity
over just what exactly the relationship between natural law and the law of peoples
was. The majority view, shared by Baldus, was that the ius gentium was the spe
cific application of the natural law, by natural reason, to particular circumstances
of time and place. The multiplicity of cities and principalities was therefore part of
the ius gentium, sanctioned by custom which was an expression of consent. For
Baldus, the ius gentium expressed humanity’s political nature, allowing human
beings to agree over time to set up legitimate arrangements for rule.5
On this reading of Roman law, cities and kingdoms were distinct entities, and
to explain these entities Baldus used the language of corporations. To him, fol
lowing earlier legal developments, a corporation was distinct from the individuals
who made it up; it was a fictional—or artificial—legal person. As such, it could do
things and perform actions separately from its members. Initially applied to bod
ies like universities and cathedral chapters, by the end of the fifteenth century this
kind of language was commonly being used to describe kingdoms and cities.
Baldus wrote that ‘the person of the king is the organ and instrument of that intel
lectual and public person’—the king as an individual human being acted for the
public ‘person’ which was the kingdom itself.6
The texts of Roman law raised for all their commentators a set of questions
about the relationship of the ruler to the law. The Digest included lines from the
Roman jurist Ulpian which seemed to exalt the authority of the ruler—in 1.4.1 it
was said that because the people have given their authority to the emperor, ‘what
5 See Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300–1450 (London, 1996), pp. 168–70.
6 Joseph Canning, The Political Thought of Baldus de Ubaldis (Cambridge, 1987), quotation from p. 216.
Empires and Cities 21
pleased the prince has the force of law’ and in 1.3.31 that ‘the prince is not bound
by the laws’, he is legibus solutus. Elsewhere in this legal compilation could, how
ever, be found the passage known as Digna Vox (Code 1.14.4), which stressed that
it was fitting for the emperor to obey the law because his own power came from
that law. The most common way to square this circle, by the end of the fifteenth
century, was by explaining that the emperor was ordinarily bound to obey the
laws, including the positive laws of the land, but that in extraordinary circum
stances he could override them. At all times he was bound to obey the laws of
God and of nature, from which he was never exempted; but positive laws could be
set aside in particular moments of emergency.7 This was a model developed with
the help of theology, particularly the distinction between God’s absolute power,
grounded in his omnipotence, and the ordinary or regulated power by which he
governed the universe.8
Bartolus, Baldus, and the other late-medieval jurists who had been commen
tating on these ideas had often used them to defend cities or monarchs outside
the empire rather than to exalt imperial power. But the agglomeration of territory
by Charles V offered a fresh opportunity to resurrect the ideal of the emperor as
dominus mundi, whose geographical reach knew no bounds. Perhaps the most
strident articulation of the claim of Charles to universal empire came from Michel
de Ulcurrunus, a jurist and a member of Charles’s council in Navarre whose writ
ing suggests the lingering appeal of a unitary world order. Ulcurrunus insisted
that when the imperial crown was bestowed on Charlemagne in 800 he became
the true heir to the ancient Roman Empire. For him, it was now the Holy Roman
Emperor who was responsible for ensuring the peaceful ordering of earthly soci
ety, for peace could only be maintained if there was one single locus of authority.
Ulcurrunus was well aware of his fellow jurists’ claims about the origins of cities
in the ius gentium, but he cast the emperor as the ultimate arbiter of that law and
denied that cities or peoples were free to adapt it to their own needs and circum
stances. ‘The law of peoples and the law of the Emperor are one and the same’, he
wrote, endowing his master with the authority to reshape political arrangements
across the globe.9 Indeed, Ulcurrunus did not confine the emperor’s authority
merely to Christendom, but insisted he had responsibility for the social and polit
ical (but not religious) life of all human beings, even the infidel.
As we shall see, these visions of empire proved to be highly contentious but
they formed a crucial part of the political imagination of the early modern period.
It was largely in response to these assertions of imperial might that the necessity
7 Keith Pennington, The Prince and the Law, 1200–1600: Sovereignty and Rights in the Western
Legal Tradition (Berkeley, CA, 1993), ch. 6.
8 See Francis Oakley, ‘Jacobean Political Theology: The Absolute and Ordinary Powers of the King’,
Journal of the History of Ideas 29 (1968), pp. 323–46.
9 Diana Perry, ‘Catholicum opus imperiale regiminis mundi. An Early Sixteenth- Century
Restatement of Empire’, History of Political Thought 2 (1981), quotation from p. 243.
22 Reformation, Resistance, Reason of State
ideally embodied in the prince himself. It had been heavily invoked by the sup
porters of King Alfonso V, for example, after his conquests of Naples and Sardinia
in 1442, and literally set in stone in the triumphal arch erected to mark Alfonso’s
entrance into Naples. Here, the King was described as ‘Pius, Clemens, Invictus’
(‘devout, merciful, unconquered’)—three words which summed up the Senecan
ideology and proclaimed the legitimacy of Alfonso’s rule in terms of his own per
sonal qualities.10
Seneca had written explicitly for princes but his younger contemporary,
Marcus Tullius Cicero, had sought to keep some of the ideals of republican Rome
alive. Cicero’s work had long been a staple of the European educational curricu
lum and his De Officiis (On duties) was the first classical book to be printed in
Germany. Like Seneca, Cicero was attracted to Stoicism but his extant works dis
played a profound concern with the respublica or commonwealth as a self-
governing community, free from domination by any individual or external body
and sustained by the virtue of its citizens (understood, of course, as a narrow male
elite). Cicero had been championed by the humanist and poet Petrarch in his
quest to promote the study of rhetoric and philosophy in his homeland. If young
men could be educated properly, Petrarch thought, then they would become men
of virtue, pursuing the true civic ideals and striving for the common good.
Cicero’s many surviving speeches, masterpieces of classical rhetoric, were an
important part of this educational programme, but the centrepiece was De
Officiis. In this work, one of the last he wrote, Cicero insisted on the importance
of correct and virtuous action, denying that there could be a clash between what
was right and what was useful or advantageous. Here Cicero offered a perspective
which was both potentially universal and also focused on the commonwealth or
respublica, initially tied to his own city of Rome but easily transferable to a con
temporary world. From Cicero and others, the Italian humanists developed what
one modern scholar has termed a ‘virtue politics’, centred upon the need to fash
ion reasonable and virtuous rulers to ensure peace and good government.11
Early modern scholars were not only interested in Roman political theory, they
also drew on classical historical writing to provide examples of past actions which
could serve as a guide in the present. Cicero himself had endorsed this approach,
announcing in his De Oratore (On Oratory) that ‘history . . . [is] life’s teacher’ (his-
toria magistra vitae).12 In the early sixteenth century, it was Livy and Sallust who
were preeminent among the ancient historians, praised for their eloquence, com
prehensiveness, and clarity. Both had discussed foreign policy in particular,
emphasizing Roman victories on the battlefield and the relationship between
10 Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge, 2007), p. 190.
11 See James Hankins, Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge,
MA, 2019).
12 Cicero, De Oratore, edited by H. Rackham and E. W. Sutton (Cambridge, MA, 1942), p. 224 (2.9).
24 Reformation, Resistance, Reason of State
warfare and politics. By 1500 the writing of Tacitus was also coming to be known,
with its bleak assessment of the factionalism and corruption at the courts of the
Roman Emperors. Taking up these themes, humanist historians had begun to
write accounts of their own cities and kingdoms, accounts which served both to
nurture a sense of pride, or at least distinctiveness, and to offer practical guidance
for political behaviour in the present. The history of King Richard III, for example,
written by the English statesman Thomas More in the 1510s, was modelled in
large part on Roman histories, especially those of Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus. It
offered a caustic analysis of Richard’s tyranny which drew much of its power from
More’s ability to adapt Roman historical conventions to English affairs.13
At the same time, Greek political thinking was gaining greater prominence
within the humanist movement. From the thirteenth century, Aristotle’s Politics
and Ethics had been known in the West, although primarily through the rather
literal Latin translation of William of Moerbeck completed sometime before his
death in 1286. In 1438, however, a new translation of the Politics was completed
by the Florentine Leonardo Bruni, using a much more Ciceronian vocabulary;
though it was printed for the first time only in 1469 it soon became the transla
tion of choice in learned circles. In 1506 the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre
d’Etaples produced a new edition which, with its summaries and paraphrases
was, in effect, a student guide to the work.14 Aristotle’s Politics offered a different
perspective from the Stoic cosmopolitanism of Seneca or the republicanism of
Cicero—it focused on the city state as a community which arose from the polit
ical nature of men and it discussed the kinds of practices, attitudes, and constitu
tional forms which would best enable the city to survive and flourish. The Politics
offered a rich set of resources, including a long discussion of constitutional
arrangements, which early modern scholars and politicians could use alongside
the Roman texts.
The Politics contained a critique of some of the ideas of Plato, whose approach
dominated Greek philosophy in the generation before Aristotle. Plato’s Republic,
well known to the fifteenth-century intellectual elite, had outlined an ideal city
characterized by its unity and stability.15 Indeed, Plato’s Republic was so unified
that there was community of property and of wives. Aristotle denied that such
unity was either practical or desirable, a position much more congenial to his
early modern readers. But Aristotle shared Plato’s concern with the interplay
between the ideal and the possible, and the relationship between the contemplative
13 See The complete works of St. Thomas More Volume 2: The History of King Richard III, edited by
Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven, CT, 1963), pp. lxxxii–civ.
14 Thomas Izbicki, ‘Badgering for Books: Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini and Leonardo Bruni’s
Translation of Aristotle’s Politics’, in Essays in Renaissance Thought and Letters in Honor of John
Monfasani, edited by A. Frazier and P. Nold (Leiden, 2015); J. Lefèvre d’Etaples, Politicorum libri octo
(Paris, 1506).
15 Alison Brown, ‘Platonism in Fifteenth-Century Florence and Its Contribution to Early Modern
Political Thought’, The Journal of Modern History 58 (1986): pp. 384–413.
Empires and Cities 25
life of individual fulfilment and the active life of civic participation. For Aristotle
as for the wider Greek tradition, the ultimate aim of human life was not glory or
expansion but eudemonia, usually translated as happiness or flourishing in
accordance with nature. And for Aristotle, political justice meant giving to each
person within the city the role best suited to their nature and qualities.
As early modern scholars came to study the works of the ancient world in
greater depth and to recognize the diversity of ideas within it, they evolved differ
ent strategies to cope with this. Some sought to combine insights and examples
from across these traditions, blending them into a synthesis which often also
included Christianity. Others began to historicize the ancient world, emphasizing
that these texts had been produced under political and social conditions often
very unlike those of their own time. This concern to place texts historically would
have important implications for law and religion, as we shall see. Many humanists
adopted both these approaches, albeit to varying degrees, and drew on the wis
dom of Roman, Greek, and Christian traditions as they sought to counsel rulers
and leading citizens. As this study proceeds, we shall encounter the various and
often innovative syntheses created by early modern writers forged—at least in
part—from these classical texts.
To see how classical wisdom could be incorporated within the broad frame
work of a ‘mirror for princes’, we can turn to Desiderius Erasmus’s The Education
of a Christian Prince (1516), a work which demonstrates both the strengths and
the limitations of this genre as it moved into the sixteenth century. Erasmus, the
leading humanist in Northern Europe, had written the work for Charles on the
occasion of his accession to the thrones of Castile and Aragon. Like his fellow
humanists, Erasmus believed the texts of the ancients offered wisdom and insight
to his own contemporaries; The Education was perhaps the best example of Greek
and Roman learning adapted and repackaged as advice for a modern ruler.
Indeed, the most striking feature of The Education is Erasmus’s effort to synthe
size the wisdom of the classical (and Christian) world, and it shows clearly the
limits of that synthesis in a Europe where princes sought expansion, glory, and
imperial power.16
By 1516 Erasmus had achieved renown across Europe for his eloquent prose
and textual scholarship, and had been made a member of Charles’s council. When
Erasmus addressed the new king, therefore, he sought to cultivate in him the vir
tues of piety, justice, and wisdom because it was these personal abilities which
would best ensure the good of Charles’s subjects. ‘A country owes everything to a
good prince’, he wrote, and for this reason the education of the prince was of vital
importance.17 The country fortunate enough to have a good prince ‘owes [him]
to the man who made him such by his moral principles’—that is, his teacher.
16 Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, edited by Lisa Jardine, (Cambridge, 1997).
17 Ibid., p. 6.
26 Reformation, Resistance, Reason of State
Erasmus pulled out all the rhetorical stops in his efforts to show Charles that it
was his own inner virtue which mattered most in the great task before him, that
‘there can be no good prince who is not also a good man’ and that ‘you will not be
able to be a king unless reason is king over you’. Erasmus’s concept of kingship is
one in which external restraints, such as custom, law, or institutions, matter little
compared with the character of the king. Erasmus even encouraged the virtuous
king to abolish long established customs or laws if he believes they have become
pernicious. This lack of check or balances is not problematic, for when the king is
virtuous and wise then ‘it is pretty well agreed among the philosophers that the
most healthy form [of a state] is monarchy’. This vision of kingship owed much to
Seneca’s writing but it was given new lustre by Erasmus and its Christian creden
tials burnished—at least on the surface.18
The key criterion for political success, in Erasmus’s view, is the ‘common good’.
Here he was echoing Aristotle who had, in his Politics, distinguished forms of
government into six types: the three—monarchy, aristocracy, and ‘polity’—which
aimed towards the common good and the three—tyranny, oligarchy, and democ
racy—which sought only the private interest of the rulers. But Aristotle was writ
ing for small Greek city-states, where generating a shared sense of the common
good was far from impossible, not for far-flung empires where the needs of one
group might run counter to those of another. When this Aristotelian notion of
the common good was inserted into the Stoic, universalist framework, it began to
unravel. Erasmus’s appeal to Charles to serve the common good begged the most
important question facing the new ruler, namely how to balance the differing and
even conflicting interests of his new territories.
In Erasmus’s writings it is possible, therefore, to see the limits of the ‘mirror for
princes’ genre in sixteenth-century Europe. He was writing, as we have seen, on
the occasion of Charles’s accession to the Castilian and Aragonese thrones, when
Charles would become ruler of a collection of territories in the Iberian peninsula
and Italy, as well as his Burgundian lands. Yet Erasmus was hostile to such con
glomerations of land and critical of expansion through marriage alliances, believ
ing instead that a prince should be ‘born and brought up among the people he is
to rule’.19 He was well aware of the need to foster ties of unity and goodwill
between the prince and the people, and argued that this was difficult to do unless
the prince lived among his people and was well known to them. Given the cir
cumstances of the text—the accession of Charles to a foreign throne—this was
hardly advice that his intended reader could follow. Instead, Charles had to bal
ance somehow the different demands and expectations placed on him in each of
his lands, a steep uphill struggle for him in the first years of his rule. Yet Erasmus
said nothing about how to maintain the affection of different peoples and subjects,
divided by customs, laws, and traditions. In this way, the text gestured towards
some of the problems with multiple monarchy, at least among Christians and in a
Europe where local customs and traditions remained strong. Charles’s accession
to a new throne is both celebrated and critiqued; it offers the potential for peace
and unity and yet it threatens to destroy the relationship between ruler and people
on which true political authority rests.
Even more striking to the contemporary reader was Erasmus’s appeal in The
Education for a pacific policy, one which eschewed war and conquest as far as
possible. Such counsel set him squarely at odds with the current ambitions of
contemporary rulers, as Erasmus himself was all too well aware. Charles’s
grandfather, Ferdinand II, had fought hard to maintain control over Naples, and
Charles himself could be expected to continue Ferdinand’s efforts to maximize
Spanish control in Italy. Moreover, Ferdinand’s greatest achievement—at least
to contemporaries—was the completion of the Reconquista in Spain with the fall
of Granada. Charles could be expected to take on his grandfather’s bellicose
mantle, but Erasmus’s text offered him little guidance in the practicalities of
successful warfare.
Erasmus was not blind to the realities of 1510s Europe, of course, but his own
commitments had led him to shape the Senecan legacy in a particular direction.
To him the Senecan image of the prince was not complete, for Seneca was a pagan
writer and Charles was to be a true Christian prince. As a Christian, Erasmus
argued, Charles had even more incentive to act with justice and virtue;
Christianity should deepen Charles’s commitment to principles of wise rule com
mon to all peoples and found no less in pagan writers than Christian ones. Here,
Erasmus was careful to show that Christian commitments of the prince and
people did not undermine the model he was setting forth, but rather confirmed it.
A Christian prince would not chase vainglory, false honour, or wage war unneces
sarily, Erasmus insisted; instead he would seek the true glory found in virtuous
deeds, and would maintain peace and co-operation with his fellow rulers. In The
Education, Erasmus claimed that Christian and classical principles can exist har
moniously, that a careful synthesis of the wisdom of all these traditions would
provide an effective pattern for rule in the modern, Christian world. But his stir
ring exhortation to peace and brotherhood at the end of the tract surely reflects
Erasmus’s own unease, his sense of the deep divisions within Europe which would
render such pious invocations doomed to failure. In the next chapter we will
explore some of the tensions between Christianity and political thinking
more fully.
Though Erasmus failed to cultivate in Charles the peaceful qualities he desired,
he did manage to create a work of lasting influence which would be widely
read across Europe. The Education of a Christian Prince was a crucial text in the
schoolroom of Tudor and Stuart royal children and was read well beyond the
halls of palaces—there were eighteen editions of the book in Erasmus’s lifetime
28 Reformation, Resistance, Reason of State
The classical and Christian tradition of political thinking on which Erasmus drew
was powerfully subverted by the writing of Italian humanists, which was con
cerned less with universal principles of justice than with the power and status of
their own cities and princes, especially as these extended their territory outwards
to fulfil their own imperial ambitions. The most influential of these humanists
was Niccolò Machiavelli, who mounted a sustained attack on some of the core
principles of contemporary political philosophy in the name both of princely
power and of republican liberty. Machiavelli’s reflections developed out of his
own experience; from 1498 he had served in the second chancery in Florence, a
city which had cast out its Medici rulers and restored republican government
under Piero Soderini. But in 1512 the Medici managed to regain control of the
city, with the help of Spanish troops; Machiavelli was deprived of office and
retired to his estates. Anxious not to waste his knowledge and expertise, he wrote
The Prince to outline the means by which the Medici could consolidate their grip
on power. It offered the fruits of his long expertise for, he explained in a letter of
1513, ‘during the fifteen years I have been studying the art of the state I have nei
ther slept nor fooled around’ and the Medici would, he hoped, ‘be happy to utilize
someone who has had so much experience at the expense of others’.21 Even more
controversial, perhaps, was a different work written at roughly the same time, his
Discourses on Livy. Both works were published only posthumously, The Prince in
1532 and the Discourses in 1531; in 1559 all of Machiavelli’s works were placed on
the Index of Prohibited Books and forbidden to Catholics but their influence can
be felt throughout the sixteenth century.
In The Prince, Machiavelli echoed some of the conventions of the ‘mirror for
princes’ genre while at the same time turning others upside down, as Quentin
Skinner has shown.22 Machiavelli’s central concern was with new rulers, those
20 See Aysha Pollnitz, Princely Education in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2015).
21 J. B. Atkinson and D. Sices, eds, Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence
(DeKalb, IL, 1996), p. 264.
22 Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli (Oxford, 1981); a new edition was published as Machiavelli: A Very
Short Introduction (Oxford, 2000). See also his The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1
(Cambridge, 1978), pp. 128–38.
Empires and Cities 29
who had acquired territory through what he called ‘virtù’ and the force of their
own arms, and those who had gained power through good fortune and the help
of others. From the start, therefore, there was a dynamic quality to Machiavelli’s
argument as he explained the practices necessary not merely to sustain authority
but to enhance, protect, and expand it in a world of clashing princely ambitions,
where the greed and fickleness of human beings could not be denied or ignored.
A central theme of Machiavelli’s predecessors had been the duty of the prince
to cultivate and display all of the moral and Christian virtues in order to achieve
both honour and glory in a world seen as largely static and potentially harmoni
ous. But Machiavelli contested these assumptions. He insisted that honour and
glory could only be achieved by the prince if he were willing to set aside conven
tional morality and ‘be prepared to act immorally when this becomes necessary’.23
Machiavelli argued that, given the nature of human beings and the course of
events in the world, following the prescriptions of virtue as it was commonly
understood would often lead to ruin and disaster rather than success and secur
ity. It was important for the prince to learn to distinguish when virtue would be
effective in strengthening his grip on the state and when it would not; as this sug
gests, the central criterion for political action was not justice or morality but the
maintenance of power. Thus the prince ‘need not actually possess’ standardly
acknowledged good qualities, rather he must ‘certainly seem to’ have them. This
artifice need not be too demanding, for most people will not be in a position to
scrutinize the prince’s actions very closely and they will judge him by the appear
ances and results of his actions. In Machiavelli’s view, a man who ‘contrives to
conquer and to preserve the state’ will ‘always be judged to be honourable and be
praised by everyone’.24
Yet Machiavelli recognized that even the most illustrious reputation for virtue
is not sufficient to ensure successful rule. The prince also needed military force—
a lesson which Machiavelli had learned not only from reading history but from
watching events unfold on the Italian peninsular. The ‘main foundations’ of every
state were good arms and good laws, he argued, and of these two it was good arms
which came first.25 Having seen the havoc which mercenary troops could wreak
on the cities around him, Machiavelli urged the prince to recruit and train a citi
zen militia which he must then command himself. As this suggests, Machiavelli
believed that a new ruler should build a strong powerbase among the people
(rather than the nobles); ‘if he knows how to command . . . and maintains the
morale of his people’ then he will find them an indispensable resource in difficult
times. Indeed, Machiavelli looked to new rulers not only to display individual and
personal virtù but to devise new laws and new practices—‘nothing brings so
23 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, edited by Quentin Skinner and Richard Price (Cambridge,
1988), p. 55.
24 Ibid., pp. 62–3. 25 Ibid., p. 42.
30 Reformation, Resistance, Reason of State
much honour to a new ruler’ than these, he argued. In Italy in particular, he saw
that ‘there is no lack of matter to shape into any form’; what was required was a
prince capable of moulding the people through the obedience he inspired but also
through the laws and institutions which would cement his own rule.26 The work
ends with a stirring exhortation to the Medici to liberate Italy through the
strength of their leadership and to the honour and glory of their own family, but
Machiavelli recognized that this could only be achieved through a combination of
Medicean virtù, good fortune, and effective systems of rule.
In The Prince, Machiavelli addressed the ruler, who comes to shape the city he
commands, but in his Discourses, written at around the same time, he turned
instead to deal with republics or free cities, foregrounding the institutions and
practices of the city which can encourage greatness and collective as well as indi
vidual virtù. The works have sometimes seemed to stand in contrast with each
other, one encouraging tyranny and the other republicanism, but both texts are
concerned with the pursuit of glory and greatness, and the relationship between
individuals and the structures in which they operate. Furthermore, The Prince is
directed to a new ruler working to consolidate his power in his own lifetime while
the Discourses shows how a city can survive and expand over a longer period of
time. The nominal subject of the latter work is a commentary on the first ten
books of Livy’s history of Rome, in which the Roman historian had covered the
rise of the city to pre-eminence after the expulsion of the kings, but it is looser
and more wide- ranging than this description might suggest; as it unfolds,
Machiavelli explores both ancient and modern history to provide lessons for his
fellow countrymen. There are hints within both books that princely rule is inher
ently less stable than republican government and in the Discourses Machiavelli
discussed the practices and institutions which were necessary if the city was to
endure over time and to resist the forces of decay and corruption to which all
earthly beings are subject.
Machiavelli’s central case study is, of course, Rome and he highlighted the fea
tures which enabled it to grow great and to foster the practice of virtù among the
citizens. From the city’s very foundation, with the murder of Remus by his brother
Romulus, Rome’s leaders had shown their willingness to set aside conventional
morality for the sake of the city. A little later, as Machiavelli pointed out, the con
sul Junius Brutus had had his own sons killed when they threatened Rome’s lib
erty. The culture of Rome had fostered this spirit of patriotism and desire for civic
glory: its religious practices in particular had emphasized the good of the city and
the pursuit of honour through martial valour, deifying the heroes of Rome’s
past.27 Meanwhile, Rome’s constitution had encouraged strife between the different
26 Ibid., p. 89.
27 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, edited and translated by J. Bondanella and P. Bondanella
(Oxford, 2003), pp. 252–3, 50–60 (3.3, 1.11–14).
Empires and Cities 31
social classes, pitting the plebeians against the patricians in a dynamic balance
which prevented one side becoming dominant. Finally, its aggressive foreign pol
icy had enabled it not only to remain free from foreign rule but to expand and
conquer, and its broad-based constitution ensured a good supply of men of virtù
who could lead its armies to victory. Whereas Venice and Sparta sought stability,
Rome sought greatness and, for Machiavelli, it was only through an active pursuit
of glory and empire that the city could hold out against the pressures of change
and decay.28
This concern for the fate of the city in a world marked by change and corrup
tion is one of the most remarkable features of the Discourses, as John Pocock
showed in his Machiavellian Moment. Where Machiavelli’s contemporaries hoped
to create political and social structures that could echo the stable harmonies of
heaven, this Italian humanist insisted that the city could not escape the flow of
time but must engage with it. The working of time and fortune led to shifting cir
cumstances and called for different strategies, but individual people were ill-
equipped to deal with this, failing to adapt to the times. Only a city like Rome
could flourish in the face of fortune, for her culture and institutions nurtured citi
zens with different skills and methods, and the city could call upon the most
appropriate men where necessary. At the same time, Rome had an active policy of
expansion, growing its pool of citizens through conquests and alliances—a policy
Machiavelli contrasted with the less ambitious but not unsuccessful policy of the
ancient Etruscans in forming a powerful league in Italy. Addressing his Florentine
readers, he suggested that imitation of their expansionist practices ‘should not
seem so difficult, especially to the Tuscans of the present’ and reminded them that
the Etruscans’ measured and pragmatic growth not only secured their power but
brought ‘the highest glory in empire and arms and the greatest renown for their
customs and religion’.29
For Machiavelli, the city’s liberty and empire could only be preserved if conflict
were embraced; this aspect of his thought has been highlighted in recent studies
which challenge the more conventional, ‘humanist’ reading associated with
Skinner and others. Machiavelli believed that the constitution itself could help to
maintain the dynamic equilibrium so important for liberty, and he argued—using
a medical metaphor—that a successful city would also have accepted and ordin
ary means of release for the ‘humours’ which arose within it.30 These means could
certainly include disturbances and tumults, and Machiavelli’s willingness to allow
and even praise such actions set him apart from his contemporaries who valued
concord so highly. His admiration for Roman religion, with its acts of ‘sacrifice
full of blood and cruelty’ which ‘inspired awe and rendered the men who witnessed
it equally awesome’, was part of this strategy of drawing attention to the import
ance of stage-managed episodes of violence within civil life. His contemporaries’
ideal of a static concord was misguided, he believed, and the true way to stabilize
the city was in fact to allow certain kinds of discord and development into the
fabric and ordering of the city itself.31
Machiavelli’s interest in time, change, and the liberty of cities was shared by his
fellow Florentine Francesco Guicciardini, whose Dialogue on the Government of
Florence explored some of the same themes. Guicciardini had been rather more
successful in gaining the favour of the Medici and was serving as President of the
Romagna under Pope Clement VII when he completed the Dialogue in 1524. In
this work, set in 1494, Guicciardini’s speakers questioned whether the interests of
the city were best served by the rule of one man or whether liberty—in the sense
of rule by some or all the citizens—was in fact necessary for the city to flourish.
The dialogue format allowed Guicciardini to offer several perspectives, to suggest
that a regime should be judged by its effects rather than its constitution, and to
explore the value and limits of citizens’ participation. One of his key concerns was
the ambition and pride of men in general, which led them to seek honour and
office even when they were poorly qualified. In one of a series of political maxims
which he wrote at about the same time, he noted that the ‘fruit of liberty . . . was
not to enable everyone to rule, since only those who are qualified and deserve it
should do so’. Instead, liberty meant that ‘good laws and regulations are observed’,
which was much more likely in a republic than where one man controlled the
city.32 Those good laws needed to channel and to restrain the ambition of the
people, allowing the most virtuous to rule; Guicciardini was sceptical about the
possibility of fostering a shared civic spirit and preferred instead to focus on cre
ating mechanisms and structures which would stabilize the city.
All these works reflect the central political realities of the 1510s, when territor
ies were changing hands and worldly success seemed to depend more on force
than on Christian virtue. Erasmus insisted on a single, universal concept of divine
justice and the common good, even as he gestured towards the problems of com
posite monarchy and absentee monarchs. Machiavelli emphasized the glory and
greatness of the ruler or the city, won at the expense of their neighbours in con
quest and war. His brief comments about Christianity suggest his frustration with
a religion which did not prioritize those civic ends. Indeed, in Machiavelli’s
writing we see a sharp rejection of ideals of universal harmony or even earthly
31 Ibid., p. 159 (2.2); see also Gabriele Pedullà, Machiavelli in Tumult: The Discourses on Livy and
the Origins of Political Conflictualism (Cambridge, 2018); Yves Winter, Machiavelli and the Orders of
Violence (Cambridge, 2018).
32 Francesco Guicciardini, Dialogue on the Government of Florence, edited and translated by Alison
Brown (Cambridge, 1994), quotation from p. 173.
Empires and Cities 33
peace, in favour of the city as a community which can flourish only by embracing
a world of competition and discord.
The relationship between imperial or universal authority and the nature of the
commonwealth was also explored by writers and theologians who were con
cerned to show how universal laws might in fact find expression and obligation
within the context of a particular community. These writers were keen to
strengthen the power of monarchy, but monarchy understood as operating
through a framework of fundamental laws.33 These fundamental laws were spe
cific and particular to the community, developed through time, anchored in cus
tom and history, and often expressed through the commonwealth’s representative
institutions. The monarch was responsible for upholding these laws but also for
adapting them to the needs of the present time, he (or even she) could be flexible
and creative so long as he remained within the framework provided by the funda
mental laws. Texts exploring these ideas helped to strengthen the power of both
the monarch and the community—with important implications for the expand
ing monarchies of Europe.
One of the leading intellectuals at the University of Paris, the Scottish theolo
gian John Mair, engaged in some important discussions of the topics of monarchy
and law in his commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Lombard’s work,
written in the mid-twelfth century, remained a standard theological textbook and
Mair was the leading commentator of the early-sixteenth century. Today Mair is
best known as a conciliarist, a supporter of the power of Church Councils over
the Papacy, and in the next chapter those aspects of his thought will be discussed.
No less important, however, were Mair’s contributions to the debates of the early
sixteenth century about the relationship between a natural law which was univer
sal and a human law which had to be adapted to the circumstances of the particu
lar community. Mair believed there were three kinds of law, divine, natural, and
human; and of these it was human laws which proved especially complex and
interesting.
Human laws, for Mair, are precepts which are designed to promote the
honourable advantage of the community. They cannot contravene divine or nat
ural law, of course, but they are not straightforward derivations from either of
those laws. They require some assessment of the specific historical and geograph
ical circumstances of the community—and a good ruler is one who is able to
apply the general principles of the law to the time and place in which he finds
33 J. H. Burns, The True Law of Kingship: Concepts of Monarchy in Early-Modern Scotland (Oxford,
1996), ch. 2.
34 Reformation, Resistance, Reason of State
himself. For this reason the rule of the good man is, in Mair’s view, better than the
rule of law on its own. Kings of course require counsel and at times Mair seems to
suggest that the king is in fact morally bound to take the advice of his counsellors.
This is because, at root, Mair sees legitimate political power as based in the con
sent of the people and existing for the sake of the community as a whole. That
consent, for Mair, is exercised through the institutions of the realm, such as the
estates or parliament—indeed, it is part of the definition of a realm, for Mair, that
it is a community with an institutional means through which it can give its con
sent. These principles did not shake Mair’s commitment to hereditary monarchy,
at least under normal circumstances, but Mair’s monarch is ruler over a single
community and that community retains, where necessary, a power to act without
or even against the king.34
Mair’s vision of good government was one which many of his contemporaries
were keen to see enacted in practice. In Europe, the power of local institutions,
particularly their role in gathering taxes and maintaining justice, had to be
acknowledged by rulers even while those rulers sought to bend the terms of the
relationship to their own ends and to the ends of newly enlarged territories. From
the point of view of the local elites, the relationship was one in which their con
sent was necessary for the functioning of government, and that consent was given
through representative institutions at both national and local level. These institu
tions helped to provide local and regional elites with a corporate identity, an iden
tity which was affirmed in some places at the accession of a new ruler through
coronation ceremonies or ‘joyous entries’ like the ones staged in the Low
Countries when Charles came of age in 1515. In Bruges, where the most elaborate
of these ceremonies was held, the town staged an impressive pageant designed to
encourage the young king to help it recover its prosperity. It was also an oppor
tunity for the city to reaffirm its own internal cohesion and enhance its reputa
tion; printed accounts of the Bruges entry were widely circulated in an attractive
edition complete with thirty-three illustrations.35
The power of regional identities and loyalties was made plain to Charles when,
soon after his accession to the Castilian throne, he promoted Burgundians at the
expense of Castilians while also demanding financial support for his bid for the
imperial throne. The result was a major revolt from the Castilian towns in
1520–21, fuelled by anger that the king was not acting in line with the Castilians’
conceptions of justice and royal rule. Led by the city of Toledo, Castilian towns
refused to attend the Cortes called by Charles or to pay the subsidies he
demanded. Instead they called upon Charles to abandon his current policies,
34 See J. H. Burns, ‘“Politia Regalis et Optima”: The Political Ideas of John Mair’, History of Political
Thought 2 (1981), pp. 31–61.
35 W. Blockmans and E. Donckers, ‘Self-Representation of Court and City in Flanders and Brabant
in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries’, in Showing Status: Representations of Social Positions in
the Late Middle Ages, edited by W. Blockmans and A. Janse (Turnhout, 1999), pp. 81–111.
Empires and Cities 35
uphold their privileges and enact a series of reforms designed to improve the
accountability of the regime. The aim was not to dislodge Charles, but rather to
urge him to settle permanently in Castile and uphold their own interest. This
need not mean the abandonment of wider ambitions, for—the rebels explained—
‘he can govern the whole world from these kingdoms, as his forefathers did before
him’.36 But it did suggest that Charles’s imperial adventures should be directed
much more towards the advantage of Castile. Meanwhile, the towns prepared for
war, mustering a large army. Charles’s royalist forces defeated the rebels at the
battle of Villalar but he realized the need to make concessions if he were to main
tain his authority in Castile. Charles was forced to adapt his ruling style and to
grant to local and municipal elites a greater stake in the government of Castile.
He also continued to call the Cortes, and was careful to obtain their consent for
his taxes.37
The revolt of the comuneros, as these events came to be known, suggest the
limits of European imperial expansion. It was a practical demonstration to
Charles that he ruled over territories with their own historical identities and insti
tutions which could not easily be brought to serve the interests of a wider political
or imperial unity. Those local political units would come increasingly to insist on
their own autonomy—and this would be a major driving force in the develop
ment of European political thought. When in the late 1540s Charles’s attention
turned to ensuring the succession of his son Philip, both father and son were
careful to portray Philip in ways that were sensitive to the different cultural land
scapes within the Habsburg lands. In Italy Philip was surrounded by classical
imagery, while in the Low Countries Biblical themes and motifs were much more
prominent. Travelling through Germany, Philip emphasized his descent from the
Austrian Habsburgs (although in 1556 Charles’s younger brother Ferdinand
would take over as Holy Roman Emperor).38 As both branches of the Habsburg
dynasty would come increasingly to realize, their diverse lands could only be held
together with at least some recognition of local customs and the power of local
elites. Philip himself would have serious difficulty maintaining the allegiance of
his subjects in the Low Countries, especially when they suspected him of seeking
to subsume them into his imperial project.
Meanwhile French kings were also consolidating their authority and expand
ing their lands, especially in Italy, and the political challenges involved were
shrewdly assessed by the Savoyard jurist and cleric Claude de Seyssel. In The
Monarchy of France, written c.1515 and published a year before his death in 1520,
36 Quoted in Karl Brandi, The Emperor Charles V: The Growth and Destiny of a Man and of a World-
Empire, translated by C. V. Wedgwood (London, 1965), p. 144.
37 See A. Espinosa, The Empire of the Cities: Emperor Charles V, the Comunero Revolt, and the
Transformation of the Spanish System (Leiden, 2009).
38 See Sylvène Édouard, L’empire imaginaire de Philippe II: Pouvoir des images et discours du pouvoir
sous les Habsbourg d’Espagne au XVIe siècle (Paris, 2005), p. 69.
36 Reformation, Resistance, Reason of State
Seyssel offered to the new king Francis I an account of ‘how and by what means
the French monarchy can be preserved and increased’.39 He defended monarchy
as the best form of government but recognized that all kingdoms were vulnerable
to moments of ‘turmoil and confusion’ in the transition from one ruler to another,
and that the accession of a feeble or capricious prince could disrupt even the best
functioning state. In France the potential impact of these misfortunes was greatly
reduced, however, because there existed three ‘bridles by which the absolute
power of the king of France is regulated’ and which ensured that no individual
ruler could destabilize the kingdom. Those ‘bridles’ were religion, justice, and ‘la
police’, which he defined as ‘the many ordinances . . . which tend to the conserva
tion of the realm in general and in detail’.40 These provided the legal and moral
context in which royal power was wielded and Seyssel, like many others trained
in Roman law, sought to emphasize the importance and normativity of the law
without compromising royal authority. The ruler’s task was to maintain the health
and harmony of the realm and its institutional structures, although those struc
tures were in a sense independent of the person of the king.
Seyssel believed that merely preserving the French realm was not sufficient to
satisfy his ruler and in the fifth part of the work he discussed ‘the method of
Conquering states and holding on to them’. He insisted that before embarking on
such conquests a prince must ensure that their ‘grounds are just and can be main
tained before God and the world’, and he noted that such conquests often turned
out to be difficult and expensive.41 When it came to ruling over conquered terri
tories, he was well aware of the need for force, at least at the beginning, but good
order and justice were no less important. Seyssel recognized the challenge posed
to royal rule by the diversity of laws within it, and his advice was that the prince
should allow a conquered people to keep their own customs as far as possible, at
least in the short term and in matters ‘which touch the prince’s interest little if at
all’. Ultimately, however, ‘they should be drawn as far as possible to adopt the cus
toms and laws of the prince so that they may forget their old ways and live in bet
ter accord with the prince’s own subjects’.42 This, Seyssel claimed, was the policy
pursued by the Romans, and one which would help to integrate the conquered
people into the greater monarchy. Seyssel understood that to hold the land effect
ively the prince may need to intervene in local politics, strengthening those loyal
to himself and weakening those opposed. Indeed, the prince may even need to
dissimulate and to employ spies, but Seyssel thought that this was licit, being the
practice of all good princes and rulers and ‘not contrary to divine law’.43 Seyssel’s
experience in Italy and his reading of history suggested that the good prince was
not, or not only, the one practising the most virtue or even the more modern
39 Claude de Seyssel, The Monarchy of France, ed. D. Kelley, transl. J. H. Hexter (London, 1981), p. 36.
40 Ibid., p. 56. 41 Ibid., pp. 143–4.
42 Ibid., p. 157. 43 Ibid., p. 161.
Empires and Cities 37
quality of virtù; instead he advised the prince to learn how to intervene skilfully,
to balance and manipulate factions in the interests of stability and of maintaining
his own power.
Although Seyssel urged the expansion of French power, he remained con
vinced that princely power was most secure where there was a tradition of local
political structures which ‘bridled’ that power. He was not interested in universal
empire, but in the greatness and glory of France, understood as a specific place
with its own history, customs, and institutions. As this suggests, renewed interest
in the language and imagery of Empire in Europe served to encourage sustained
attention to local and particular political units and to their own structures,
strengths, and weaknesses. From the 1510s, scholars and rulers discussed with
increasing intensity the need to reform those structures to make them both effect
ive and legitimate. We will see in the next chapter that the alignment of those two
criteria could prove controversial, especially in a Christian society where earthly
success was often sharply detached from divine rewards.
While European rulers struggled to hold together their different lands, each with
their own identity, history, and sense of legitimacy, the Ottoman Sultans were
expanding rapidly—and appealing to some of the same imperial language to jus
tify their progress. Historians have become increasingly interested in the inter
connections between the Christian and Ottoman worlds, and it is clear that the
Ottomans drew, at times, on similar concepts of legitimacy and power. Partly this
was because they, like their European counterparts, found that one of the crucial
challenges facing them in the sixteenth century was the need to integrate new
territories into their sphere of rule. At the same time, their Islamic faith and their
own local traditions led them to articulate their legitimacy in ways which con
trasted sharply with their Christian contemporaries. Moreover, the Ottomans
were remarkably successful in maintaining the intellectual and military initiative
over the lands they ruled. Their imperial project would not be subjected to the
kind of theoretical critique that characterized so much of sixteenth-century
European political thinking.
In 1453, after Sultan Mehmed II had captured Constantinople, imperial lan
guage began to be used by the Ottomans. But the real breakthrough came in 1517,
when Selim I defeated the Mamluks, until then the leading Sunni Muslims. The
Mamluks acted as Protectors of the two Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, and
they also controlled the caliphs in Egypt, the descendants of the Abbasid relatives
of the Prophet Mohammed who had once been the spiritual and political leaders
of the Islamic world. Selim thus took over from the Mamluks perhaps the key
office within the Islamic world, that of ‘the servant of the two Holy Shrines’ in
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happened to be friends, they laid their left breasts together twice,
and exclaimed, “We are lions;” “We are friends.” One then left the
ring, and another was brought forward. If the two did not recognise
one another as friends, the set-to immediately commenced. On
taking their stations, the two pugilists first stood at some distance,
parrying with the left hand open, and, whenever opportunity offered,
striking with the right. They generally aimed at the pit of the stomach,
and under the ribs. Whenever they closed, one seized the other’s
head under his arm, and beat it with his fist, at the same time striking
with his knee between his antagonist’s thighs. In this position, with
the head in chancery, they are said sometimes to attempt to gouge
or scoop out one of the eyes. When they break loose, they never fail
to give a swinging blow with the heel under the ribs, or sometimes
under the left ear. It is these blows which are so often fatal. The
combatants were repeatedly separated by my orders, as they were
beginning to lose their temper. When this spectacle was heard of,
girls left their pitchers at the wells, the market people threw down
their baskets, and all ran to see the fight. The whole square before
my house was crowded to excess. After six pairs had gone through
several rounds, I ordered them, to their great satisfaction, the
promised reward, and the multitude quietly dispersed.
Both Hat Salah and Benderachmani, another Fezzan merchant
residing here, had been with the late Mr. Hornemann at the time of
his death. They travelled with him from Mourzuk to Nyffee, where he
died of dysentery, after an illness of six days. He passed himself off
as an English merchant, professing the Mahometan faith, and had
sold two fine horses here. At my instance, Benderachmani sent a
courier to Nyffee, to endeavour to recover Mr. Hornemann’s
manuscripts, for which I offered him a reward of a hundred dollars;
but, on my return from Sackatoo, I found the messenger come back
with the information, that Jussuf Felatah, a learned man of the
country, with whom Mr. Hornemann lodged, had been burned in his
own house, together with all Mr. Hornemann’s papers, by the negro
rabble, from a superstitious dread of his holding intercourse with evil
spirits.
All the date trees, of which there is a great number, as well as the
fig and pappaw trees, &c. together with the waste ground, and fields
of wheat, onions, &c. bordering on the morass, belong to the
governor. The date trees bear twice a year, before and after the
annual rains, which fall between the middle of May and the end of
August.
Cotton, after it is gathered from the shrub, is prepared by the
careful housewife, or a steady female slave, by laying a quantity of it
on a stone, or a piece of board, along which she twirls two slender
iron rods about a foot in length, and thus dexterously separates the
seeds from the cotton wool. The cotton is afterwards teazed or
opened out with a small bone, something like an instrument used by
us in the manufacture of hat felt. Women then spin it out of a basket
upon a slender spindle. The basket always contains a little pocket
mirror, used at least once every five minutes, for adjusting or
contemplating their charms. It is now sold in yarn, or made into cloth.
The common cloth of the country is, as formerly stated, only three or
four inches broad. The weaver’s loom is very simple, having a fly
and treadles like ours, but no beam; and the warp, fastened to a
stone, is drawn along the ground as wanted. The shuttle is passed
by the hand. When close at work, they are said to weave from twenty
to thirty fathoms of cloth a day. Kano is famed over all central Africa
for the dyeing of cloth; for which process there are numerous
establishments. Indigo is here prepared in rather a different manner
from that of India and America. When the plant is ripe, the fresh
green tops are cut off, and put into a wooden trough about a foot and
a half across, and one foot deep, in which, when pounded, they are
left to ferment. When dry, this indigo looks like earth mixed with
decayed grass, retains the shape of the trough, and three or four
lumps being tied together with Indian corn-stalks, it is carried in this
state to market. The apparatus for dyeing is a large pot of clay, about
nine feet deep, and three feet broad, sunk in the earth. The indigo is
thrown in, mixed with the ashes of the residuum of a former dyeing.
These are prepared from the lees of the dye-pot, kneaded up and
dried in the sun, after which they are burned. In the process of
dyeing cold water alone is used. The articles to be dyed remain in
the pot three or four days, and are frequently stirred up with a pole;
besides which, they are well wrung out every night, and hung up to
dry till morning, during which time the dye-pot is covered with a straw
mat. After the tobes, turkadees, &c. are dyed, they are sent to the
cloth-glazer, who places them between mats, laid over a large block
of wood, and two men, with wooden mallets in each hand, continue
to beat the cloth, sprinkling a little water from time to time upon the
mats, until it acquires a japan-like gloss. The block for beating the
tobes is part of the trunk of a large tree, and when brought to the
gates of the city, the proprietor musters three or four drummers, at
whose summons the mob never fails to assemble, and the block is
gratuitously rolled to the workshop. The price of dyeing a good tobe
of the darkest blue colour is 3000 cowries, or a dollar and a half; and
for glazing it, 700 cowries. The total price of a tobe is 5000 cowries,
and of a turkadee, from 2000 to 3000 cowries.
The women of this country, and of Bornou, dye their hair blue as
well as their hands, feet, legs, and eyebrows. They prefer the paint
called shunee, made in the following manner:—They have an old
tobe slit up, and dyed a second time. They make a pit in the ground,
moistening it with water, in which they put the old tobe, first
imbedded in sheep’s dung, and well drenched with water, and then
fill up the pit with wet earth. In winter the fire for domestic purposes
is made close to the spot, and the pit remains unopened for ten
days. In summer no fire is required; and after seven or eight days the
remnants of the old tobe, so decayed in texture as barely to hang
together, are taken out and dried in the sun for use. This paint sells
at 400 cowries the gubga, or fathom; for this measure of length
commonly gives name to the cloth itself. A little of the paint being
mixed with water in a shell, with a feather in one hand, and a
looking-glass in the other, the lady carefully embellishes her sable
charms. The arms and legs, when painted, look as if covered with
dark blue gloves and boots.
They show some ingenuity in the manufacture of leathern jars,
fashioning them upon a clay mould out of the raw hide, previously
well soaked in water: these jars serve to contain fat, melted butter,
honey, and bees’ wax.
They are also acquainted with the art of tanning; in which they
make use of the milky juice of a plant called in Arabic brumbugh, and
in the Bornouese tongue kyo. It is an annual plant, and grows in dry
sandy situations to the height of five or six feet, with a stem about an
inch in diameter. It has broad thick leaves, and bears a small flower,
in colour and shape not unlike a pink. The fruit is green, and larger
than our garden turnip. It contains a fine white silky texture,
intermixed with seeds like those of the melon, and becomes ripe
some time before the rains commence, during which the plant itself
withers. The juice is collected in a horn or gourd, from incisions
made in the stem. It is poured over the inner surface of the skin to be
tanned, which is then put in some vessel or other; when, in the
course of a day or two, the smell becomes extremely offensive, and
the hair rubs off with great ease. They afterwards take the beans or
seeds of a species of mimosa, called in Arabic gurud. These, when
pounded in a wooden mortar, form a coarse black powder, which is
thrown into warm water, wherein the skin is steeped for one day;
being frequently well pressed and hard wrung, to make it imbibe the
liquor. It is then spread out in the sun, or hung up in the wind, and
when half dry, is again well rubbed between the hands, to render it
soft and pliant for use. To colour it red, they daub it over with a
composition, made of trona and the outer leaves of red Indian corn,
first beaten into a powder and mixed up with water.
The negroes here are excessively polite and ceremonious,
especially to those advanced in years. They salute one another, by
laying the hand on the breast, making a bow, and inquiring, “Kona
lafia? Ki ka kykee. Fo fo da rana?” “How do you do? I hope you are
well. How have you passed the heat of the day?” The last question
corresponds in their climate to the circumstantiality with which our
honest countryfolks inquire about a good night’s rest.
The unmarried girls, whether slaves or free, and likewise the
young unmarried men, wear a long apron of blue and white check,
with a notched edging of red woollen cloth. It is tied with two broad
bands, ornamented in the same way, and hanging down behind to
the very ancles. This is peculiar to Soudan, and forms the only
distinction in dress from the people of Bornou.
Both men and women colour their teeth and lips with the flowers
of the goorjee tree, and of the tobacco plant. The former I only saw
once or twice; the latter is carried every day to market, beautifully
arranged in large baskets. The flowers of both these plants, rubbed
on the lips and teeth, give them a blood red appearance, which is
here thought a great beauty. This practice is comparatively rare in
Bornou.
Chewing the goora nut, already described, or snuff mixed with
trona, is a favourite habit. This use of snuff is not confined to men in
Haussa, as is the case in Bornou, where the indulgence is not
permitted to women. Snuff is very seldom taken up the nostrils,
according to our custom. Smoking tobacco is a universal practice,
both of negroes and Moors. Women, however, are debarred this
fashionable gratification.
The practitioners of the healing art in this country, as formerly in
Europe, officiate likewise as barbers, and are very dexterous in the
latter capacity, at least.
Blindness is a prevalent disease. Within the walls of the city, there
is a separate district or village for people afflicted with this infirmity,
who have certain allowances from the governor, but who also beg in
the streets and market-place. Their little town is extremely neat, and
the coozees well built. With the exception of the slaves, none but the
blind are permitted to live here, unless on rare occasions a one-eyed
man is received into their community. I was informed the lame had a
similar establishment; but I did not see it.
When a bride is first conducted to the house of the bridegroom,
she is attended by a great number of friends and slaves, bearing
presents of melted fat, honey, wheat, turkadees, and tobes, as her
dower. She whines all the way—“Wey kina! wey kina! wey Io.” “Oh!
my head! my head! oh! dear me.” Notwithstanding this lamentation,
the husband has commonly known his wife some time before
marriage. Preparatory to the ceremony of reading the “Fatha,” both
bridegroom and bride remain shut up for some days, and have their
hands and feet dyed, for three days successively, with henna. The
bride herself visits the bridegroom, and applies the henna plasters
with her own hand.
Every one is buried under the floor of his own house, without
monument or memorial; and among the commonalty the house
continues occupied as usual; but among the great there is more
refinement, and it is ever after abandoned. The corpse being
washed, the first chapter of the Koran is read over it, and the
interment takes place the same day. The bodies of slaves are
dragged out of town, and left a prey to vultures and wild beasts. In
Kano they do not even take the trouble to convey them beyond the
walls, but throw the corpse into the morass or nearest pool of water.
Feb. 22.—At seven in the morning I waited on the governor. He
informed me that the sultan had sent a messenger express, with
orders to have me conducted to his capital, and to supply me with
every thing necessary for my journey. He now begged me to state
what I stood in need of. I assured him that the King of England, my
master, had liberally provided for all my wants; but that I felt
profoundly grateful for the kind offers of the sultan, and had only to
crave from him the favour of being attended by one of his people as
a guide. He instantly called a fair-complexioned Felatah, and asked
me if I liked him. I accepted him with thanks, and took leave. I
afterwards went by invitation to visit the governor of Hadyja, who
was here on his return from Sackatoo, and lived in the house of the
wan-bey. I found this governor of Hadyja a black man, about fifty
years of age, sitting among his own people at the upper end of the
room, which is usually a little raised, and is reserved in this country
for the master of the house or visitors of high rank. He was well
acquainted with my travelling name; for the moment I entered, he
said laughing, “How do you do, Abdullah? Will you come and see me
at Hadyja on your return?” I answered, “God willing,” with due
Moslem solemnity. “You are a Christian, Abdullah?”—“Yes.” “And
what are you come to see?”—“The country.” “What do you think of
it?”—“It is a fine country, but very sickly.” At this he smiled, and again
asked, “Would you Christians allow us to come and see your
country?” I said, “Certainly.”—“Would you force us to become
Christians?” “By no means; we never meddle with a man’s
religion.”—“What!” says he, “and do you ever pray?”—“Sometimes;
our religion commands us to pray always; but we pray in secret, and
not in public, except on Sundays.” One of his people abruptly asked
what a Christian was? “Why a Kafir,” rejoined the governor. “Where
is your Jew servant?” again asked the governor; “you ought to let me
see him.” “Excuse me, he is averse to it; and I never allow my
servants to be molested for religious opinions.” “Well, Abdullah, thou
art a man of understanding, and must come and see me at Hadyja.” I
then retired, and the Arabs afterwards told me he was a perfect
savage, and sometimes put a merchant to death for the sake of his
goods; but this account, if true, is less to be wondered at, from the
notorious villany of some of them. In the afternoon I went to Hadje
Hat Salah’s, and made an arrangement with him to act as my agent,
both in recovering the money due by Hadje Ali Boo Khaloom, and in
answering any drafts upon him. In the event of my death, I also
agreed with him to have my Jew servant Jacob, who was to remain
here with my books and papers, sent with them to the sheikh of
Bornou, and so to the English consul at Tripoli. I left Jacob here,
partly on account of his irritable temper, which, presuming on my
countenance and support, was apt to lead him into altercations and
squabbles, as well as to take care of my effects. I made this
arrangement at Hat Salah’s particular recommendation, who strongly
impressed upon me the dangers of the journey I had undertaken.
According to a custom which the late Dr. Oudney had always
followed at every principal town where we made a short stay, I had
two bullocks slaughtered and given to the poor.
SECTION III.
FROM KANO TO SACKATOO, AND RESIDENCE THERE.