Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe 100928732X, 9781009287326

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ENMITY AND VIOLENCE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

In this original study Stuart Carroll transforms our understanding of Europe between 1500 and 1800 by exploring how ordinary people felt about their enemies and the violence this engendered. Enmity, a state or feeling of mutual opposition or hostility, became a major social problem during the transition to modernity. He examines how people used the law, and how they characterised their enmities and expressed their sense of justice or injustice. Through the examples of early modern Italy, Germany, France and England, we see when and why everyday animosities escalated and the attempts of the state to control and even exploit the violence that ensued. This book also examines the communal and religious pressures for peace, and how notions of good neighbourliness and civil order finally worked to underpin trust in the state. Ultimately, enmity is not a relic of the past; it remains one of the greatest challenges to contemporary liberal democracy. stuart carroll is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of York. He is one of the editors of the Cambridge World History of Violence (2020). His other publications include Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (2006) and Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe, which won the J. Russell Major Prize of the American Historical Association in 2011. He has also been awarded the Sixteenth Century Society’s Nancy Lyman Roelker Prize an unprecedented four times.

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ENMITY AND VIOLENCE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE STUART CARROLL University of York

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009287326 DOI: 10.1017/9781009287319 © Stuart Carroll 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 Printed in the United Kingdom by CPI Group Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-1-009-28732-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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To Jean, my mum in a million, and the memory of my dad, Frank

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A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies Oscar Wilde

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CONTENTS

List of Figures page ix List of Maps x List of Tables xi Acknowledgements xii Introduction

1

italy 1

The Uses of the Law

23

2

The Politics of Vendetta

66

3

The Culture of Vendetta

96

4

The Decline of Vendetta

126

germany 5

Rethinking the Feud

145

6

The Culture of Enmity in Early Modern Germany

7

Sühne: The Theory and Practice of Peacemaking

186 227

france 8

Village Politics and Vendetta

267

9

Peace and Justice under the Absolute Monarchy

england 10

Justice and Violence

319

11

Enmity in Early Modern England

comparisons 12

The Experience of Enmity

373 vii

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341

288

viii

contents 13

Enmity and Sacred Space

14

Living with the Enemy Conclusion

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433

460

Select Bibliography Index 473

405

468

FIGURES

I.1 Laurent de La Hyre, The Kiss of Peace and Justice (1654). Cleveland Museum of Art (Creative Commons) page 9 1.1 The stone of the Ringadora, Piazza Grande, Modena (photo: the author) 33 5.1 Mordsteine in memory of Dietrich von Mallinckrodt, 1594 (photo: Volker Rumpf, www.suehnekreuz.de/) 154 6.1 ‘How to run a man through chest or neck as you throw him to the ground.’ From Jean-Daniel L’Ange, Deutliche und gründliche Erklärung der adelichen und ritterlichen freyen Fecht-Kunst (Heidelberg, 1664) (copyright Universitätsund Landesbibliothek Düsseldorf) 207 7.1 Stone cross at Lagenau (Czernica) in Silesia, inscribed with a pistol and dated 1661 (photo: Dr Martin Berdau, www.suehnekreuz.de/) 234 7.2 Sühnekreuz at Schwyz, Switzerland (photo: Daniel Reichmuth, www.suehnekreuz.de) 239 13.1 St Charles miraculously saved from attack, Giovanni Battista della Rovere, c.1602 (copyright Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano, all rights reserved) 416 13.2 Jan Theodor de Bry, Die Dorfkirchweih after Hans Beham, 1539 (Creative Commons) 428 14.1 Louis XIV settling disputes, Alexandre de la Roche, L’Arbitre charitable pour éviter les procez et les querelles (Paris, 1666) (copyright British Library shelfmark 5405.aaa.27) 440 14.2 St Yves, Alexandre de la Roche, L’Arbitre charitable pour éviter les procez et les querelles (Paris, 1666) (copyright British Library shelfmark 5405. aaa.27) 441 14.3 Giovanni Ventura Borghesi, St Yves receives petitions from the poor, copy of the altar of S. Ivo alla Sapienza, c.1680 (copyright Pinacoteca Comunale, Città di Castello, all rights reserved) 443 14.4 Colonna d’infamia, Vicenza (photo: the author) 448 14.5 Le Calvaire de Bourgon (photo: Chȃ teau de Bourgon) 450 14.6 La Croix Ricard, Jobourg, France (photo: Simon Cervantes, Marie de Jobourg) 452 14.7 Pyramid commemorating the Corsican Guards Affair, 1664 (Creative Commons) 458

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MAPS

1.1 5.1 8.1 8.2

Italy c.1600 (copyright Cath D’Alton, all rights reserved) The Holy Roman Empire c.1600 (copyright Cath D’Alton, all rights reserved) 146 The Albigeois and the Castrais (copyright Cath D’Alton, all rights reserved) 269 Curvalle and its neighbours (copyright Cath D’Alton, all rights reserved) 271

x

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page 24

TABLES

2.1 2.2 5.1 6.1 9.1 9.2 10.1 10.2 10.3

Noble violence in Siena, 1603–1772 page 67 Crimes of violence by social group in Siena, 1603–1772 68 Homicides in early modern Kiel 169 Homicides of German gentlemen, 1550–1750. Evidence from data mining 205 Homicides of French gentlemen, 1550–1660. Evidence from data mining and manuscript sources 296 Incidents of violence and murder in Languedoc, 1660–1790 301 Elite homicides in England, 1550–1800. Evidence from data mining 335 Elite homicides in England, Scotland and Ireland, 1603–1800. Evidence from data mining 337 Elite homicide in eighteenth-century England and Ireland 338

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is a testament to the power of friendship and collaboration. Italy comes first not simply because the peninsula was the model for the rest of Europe but also because its historians and their microhistorical methods have greatly influenced what follows. I owe Ed Muir a huge debt of gratitude for setting me on this path and, in no particular order, Claudio Povolo, Darko Daroveč, Marco Bellabarba, Marco Gentile, Annamaria Valent, Andrew Vidali, Umberto Cecchinato, Irene Fosí, Simon Ditchfield, James Shaw, Paolo Broggio, Jonathan Davies, Colin Rose, Amanda Madden and Stephen Cummins for their generosity. On the German side, I would like to thank Wolfgang Behringer for inviting me to give an early version of Chapter 7 at Saarbrücken. The close reading by Hillay Zmora, Žiga Oman and Jasper Heinzen removed many errors. In France, Denis Crouzet invited me to give a version of Chapter 8 at the Sorbonne. I have benefitted from the help and advice of Simon Cervantes, Eric Durot, Mark Greengrass, Penny Roberts, Joseph Clarke, Alan Forrest and Julian Swann. Céline Ruzé has heard more about this book than anyone else, and I thank her for her patience. Paul Cohen invited me to present my findings at the Toronto Centre for the Study of France and the Francophone World in 2016. The English chapters were the most difficult to write. The belief that English history proceeds along a special path is widely shared across the political spectrum, a parochial view amplified by Brexit, and including England in this book felt urgent and necessary. Particular thanks therefore go to Anthony Milton who gave me the belief to continue when I had all but given up. I would also like to thank my other colleagues at the University of Sheffield who came to hear that 2017 version of Chapter 9, which proved to be a seminal moment in the life of this project. Phil Withington, Cathy Shrank, Ellen and Meg are particular favourites of the Carrolls. Andrew Hopper and Lloyd Bowen read through Chapters 10 and 11 on several occasions, removing many errors and providing fresh leads. There are too many colleagues at York History Department to mention whose kindnesses and support I have relied on, but I would like to single out Jim Sharpe for encouraging me at a crucial stage and Kurt Baird for helping compile the statistics. Working on the Cambridge World History series was one of the most stimulating intellectual experiences of my career. A huge xii

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acknowledgements

xiii

thanks to Philip Dwyer and to the other editors, in particular Robert Anthony and Caroline Dodds Pennock. It was during that project that I first encountered Liz Friend-Smith and she became an enthusiastic advocate for the book. It was discussed extensively by the Fishergate Cycling Club Peloton as they carried me around Yorkshire. Paul Mulvey’s forensic reading of the entire manuscript made for significant improvement and Matt Festenstein pointed me in new conceptual directions. The research was supported by a fellowship at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, and writing up by a Leverhulme research fellowship. Cath D’Alton drew the maps. Above all, the book is the product of love; it would have not been possible without Debbie, Tom and Ethan.

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u Introduction

Midsummers Eve 1687 on the French Mediterranean coast: a man in a cassock makes a daring escape from his prison in the tower of the bishop’s palace at Agde. In an episode worthy of Dumas, he ties together his bedsheets and makes his descent from a window.1 But this story does not end well. The prisoner, Léonard Delsol, is a 57-year-old priest not used to feats of derring-do. He tumbles to his death. There are questions as to whether he fell or was pushed, for Delsol had many enemies in the small town of Montagnac, where he was the curé. His was a pious life that unfolded in permanent combat against various foes. Some were religious. There were the Protestants, who were locally strong until their expulsion in 1685, but he was also in conflict with the local Benedictine order and those he accused of being Jansenists, a puritanical Catholic sect whose beliefs posed a challenge to authority. But Delsol also had enemies among the civic elite in Montagnac. He was embroiled in many lawsuits and accused of refusing the sacraments to witnesses who testified against him.2 The cause of his imprisonment was his refusal, in the face of this hostility, to resign his benefice. We know all this because he kept a registre, a scrapbook of recollections, miscellaneous events and notes typical of the time. Except that Delsol’s scrapbook is finished in a different hand. It tells us, not entirely convincingly, that he ‘died giving all the signs of a good death, pardoning his enemies, declaring that it was he himself and his evil counsel that had got him into this state and that he only had himself to blame and had no complaint to make of his enemies’.3 This is a book is about real people, like Léonard Delsol, and their enemies. Enmity (inimicitia, Feindschaft, inimitié) is a state or feeling of mutual opposition or hostility. It is distinguished from anger (ira, colère, Zorn) and hatred (odio, haine, Haß), which primarily describe emotions. ‘Enmity implies a matrix of three closely related concepts: emotion, action and relationship.’4 1

2 3 4

L. Delsol, Livre ou registre de l’Œuvre et fabrique de l’église paroissiale de Notre-Dame de Montagnac: 1661–1687, ed. A. Nos (n.p.: Les Amis de Montagnac, 1996). See below p. 420. Delsol, Livre ou registre, p. 244. A. Alwine, Enmity and Feuding in Classical Athens (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015), p. 28.

1

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Psychologists have demonstrated the importance of enmity to the development of group cohesion and identity. But enmity has a kinetic quality: groups can learn to cooperate and trust each other.5 Rooted in a sense of just grievance, it is intimately bound up with justice and the law. Classicists have long recognised that it, and its counterpart, friendship, were the ‘electricity’ that powered the social machine of the ancient world.6 The control of enmity and the suppression of the interpersonal violence it generates are essential to the very notion of modernity. Enmity was of central concern in early modern culture and thinkers proposed novel solutions to its caustic effects. But enmity does not yet have its modern history.7 Modern historians are principally concerned with public enmity (hostis), the construction of the ‘other’ and war. It is commonly believed that the civil wars that plagued sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe were the product of religious fanaticism. But the very high levels of violence that resulted often had little to do with faith. As Judith Pollmann has observed, ‘It takes more than the existence of religious division for people to start lynching each other.’8 There is plenty of evidence for confessional coexistence following the Reformation. Religious and social divisions, it appears, require instrumentalising before they turn violent. Modernity, it is generally assumed, rendered private enmities (inimicus) insignificant. This assumption ignores the fact that even today seeking redress when we feel wronged is perceived as a natural impulse. In the past, personal enemies were not merely a nuisance but posed a direct and real threat to one’s livelihood, status in the community and even life. In the Middle Ages enmity was a legally recognised state of hostility, an objective and public relationship, which legitimised forms of vindicatory violence, such as revenge, feud and vendetta.9 The boundaries of hostility were set by customary law codes, which established rules of the game. The Church played a major role in regulating the peace in the feud, especially through the institution of the sacrament of penance instituted at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. It required the sinner to offer a combination of prayers, alms and deeds to compensate for the pain they had caused. The 5

6 7

8

9

O. Zur, ‘The Love of Hating: The Psychology of Enmity’, History of European Ideas, 13 (1991), 345–69. Alwine, Enmity and Feuding, p. 27. O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 9 vols. (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1972– 97) contains no entry. J. Pollmann, ‘Countering the Reformation in France and the Netherlands: Clerical Leadership and Catholic Violence 1560–1585’, Past and Present, 190 (2006), 83–120. R. Bartlett, ‘“Mortal Enmities”: The Legal Aspect of Hostility in the Middle Ages’, The T. Jones Pierce lecture (Aberystwyth, 1998); O. Brunner, Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); D. Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

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3

medieval Mass was a social rite in which the kiss of peace ensured reconciliation between feuding neighbours.10 It is still commonly believed that the medieval system was replaced in the sixteenth century by state repression aided by the efforts made by the Reformations, both Catholic and Protestant, towards social discipline. The notion that early modernity was predicated on the repression of brute instinct is so pervasive that today it goes largely unquestioned. It has become historical orthodoxy. ‘Once Leviathan was in charge, the rules of the game changed’, a recent bestselling book tells us.11 The term ‘early modern’ was coined because the period is distinguished from the Middle Ages by the manner in which states increasingly monopolised violence. The early modern period, it is claimed, is characterised by declining levels of violence, which are indicative of a ‘civilizing process’.12 The external social controls exercised by the state were gradually internalised by individuals into self-restraint. People learned to control their emotions and manners became increasingly differentiated, refined and civilised. The key change in the West occurred in the early modern period when new codes of etiquette controlled impulses and outbursts of emotions.13 This book poses a challenge to these claims on three fronts. First, it refutes the commonly held belief that interpersonal violence fell uniformly and consistently in the post-medieval period. Indeed, across Europe, interpersonal violence actually increased from the middle of the sixteenth century, peaking in the first half of the seventeenth century. This was followed by a very steep decline in the eighteenth century. Partly this was due to civil war, but the homicide rate was increasing before the outbreak of civil wars. Even in England, the most pacific state in Europe, the homicide rate doubled or tripled between the late 1570s and early 1620s and did not return to mid-sixteenth-century levels until the last decade of the seventeenth. Most existing homicide data comes from north-western Europe where in 1600 only about 20 per cent of Europeans lived. Italy, which had much higher rates of violence than elsewhere in Europe, is largely ignored, which raises the most serious objections to theories based on claims of a linear decline of violence, particularly as early modern Italian states were not characterised by a lesser 10

11

12 13

J. Bossy, ‘The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200–1700’, Past and Present, 100 (1983), 29–61. S. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity (Penguin: New York, 2011), p. 75. N. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 2 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). For critiques of this model: G. Schwerhoff, ‘Zivilisationsprozeß und Geschichtswissenschaft: Norbert Elias’ Forschungsparadigma in historischer Sicht’, Historische Zeitschrift, 266 (1998), 561–605; M. Dinges, ‘Formenwandel der Gewalt in der Neuzeit: zur Kritik der Zivilationstheorie von Norbert Elias’, in R. Sieferle and H. Breuninger (eds.), Kulturen der Gewalt: Ritualisierung und Symbolisierung von Gewalt in der Geschichte (Frankfurt: Campus, 1998), pp. 171–94.

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overall level of state bureaucracy or judicial control. On the contrary, the inhabitants of Italian Renaissance cities were exposed to levels of social and economic interdependency far in advance of anything comparable in the north.14 Second, it challenges the widespread assumption that during the early modern period violence was replaced by the law. In fact, punitive justice was largely ineffective in curbing the rise of interpersonal violence and was not responsible for its fall. The experiment with harsh punishments in the sixteenth century was, with the exception of England, largely abandoned across Europe and rates of execution tumbled after 1600.15 Courts were on the whole remarkably reticent about applying punitive sanctions, since the prime goal of Ancien Régime legal systems was to ensure the reproduction of existing social and political relations. The law was a flexible instrument and disputants were consumers of justice, who pursued their enemies using whatever means were available. In the early modern period litigation and violence can be seen as complementary rather than alternative forms of self-help. Litigating did not imply that disputants were giving up on violence, only that they were trying to maximise their chances of success. Litigation rose in sixteenth-century Europe in line with the rise in the homicide rate and fell in the eighteenth century as the homicide rate fell.16 This pattern is confirmed by the United States, which historically has both higher rates of interpersonal violence than western Europe and is a more litigious society. Third, it challenges the claim that the Reformation resulted in more effective forms of social control than those exercised by the medieval Catholic Church. Rising rates of homicide and litigation suggest that the effectiveness of social disciplining has been overstated. The traditional peacemaking role of the Church was disrupted by the Reformation, confessional conflict and finally civil war. Both Catholic and Protestant reformers viewed the kiss of peace, the traditional rite of reconciliation, as lascivious and removed it from the liturgy.17 Christians had always found it difficult to love their neighbours – 14

15

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S. Carroll, Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); R. Roth, American Homicide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), chapter 1; S. Carroll, ‘Revenge and Reconciliation in Early Modern Italy’, Past and Present, 230 (2016), 101–42; S. Carroll, ‘Violence, Civil Society and European Civilization, 1500-1800’, in R. Antony, S. Carroll and C. Dodds Pennock (eds.), The Cambridge World History of Violence: vol. 3, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 660–78; C. Rose, A Renaissance of Violence: Homicide in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). S. Beam, ‘Violence and Justice in Europe: Punishment, Torture and Execution’, in Antony, Carroll and Dodds Pennock (eds.), The Cambridge World History of Violence: vol. 3, 1500–1800, pp. 398–407. See Chapters 1, 5, 9 and 10. C. Koslofsky, ‘The Kiss of Peace in the German Reformation’, in K. Harvey (ed.), The Kiss in History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 12–32.

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a task made harder in societies where feuds were common and the moral code of honour competed with Christian teaching. Religion now became another divisive factor. Attempts to impose discipline by restricting Communion to the worthy proved to be a miserable failure. One of the main reasons for absence from church was the existence of feuds that remained unreconciled.18 But this book is more than a riposte to the revival of Whig history and the resurrection of teleological assumptions about human progress.19 Although it concerns people who lived in Europe several hundred years ago, I argue that their experiences are relevant today. Enmity is a characteristic of all human societies. The ideas that early modern thinkers developed as an antidote to it continue to underpin contemporary society. Enmity is not a relic of the past. It remains one of the greatest challenges to liberal democracy. For these reasons, the concept of enmity is still of central importance today. The identification of a friend or enemy is fundamental to the consciousness of the self. We realise ‘who we are’ in a conflict with the other and establish our identity through conflict.20 Rodney Barker identifies four principal schools of thinking: 1) that enmity is desirable for the stability and vitality of societies; 2) that it is inherent in political life; 3) that it is peripheral and transcendable; 4) that it is a contingent and complex phenomenon best understood through historical observation rather than ontological deduction.21 Inspired by the latter approach, this book is about how and why enemies were made and how ordinary people characterised and dealt with them. Thus far historians have described the ways in enemies are created and cultivated mainly in terms of religious identity, war and interstate rivalry. The role played by ‘othering’ in the formation of ‘national character’ has been the subject of much research.22 In this respect, research has been influenced by Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political (1932). Schmitt makes a clear distinction between private enmity (inimicus) and public enmity (hostis). His purpose in doing so was to relegate 18

19 20

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J. Goodale, ‘Intimidation, Intolerance, and Injury: Religious Conflict and Saxony, 158792’, in K von Greyerz and K. Siebenhühner (eds.), Religion und Gewalt. Konflikte, Rituale, Deutungen (1500–1800) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), pp. 195–219; D. Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 1987), chapter 1; P. Broggio and M. Paoli (eds.), Stringere la pace: Teorie e pratiche della conciliazione nell’Europa moderna (secoli XV-XVIII) (Rome: Viella, 2011). S. Carroll, ‘Thinking with Violence’, History and Theory, 56 (2017), 23–43. B. Willms, ‘Politics as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s “Concept of the Political” and the Tradition of European Political Thought’, History of European Ideas, 13 (1991), 371–83; G. Slomp, Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Hostility, Violence and Terror (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). R. Barker, Making Enemies (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), chapter 2. In a British context: L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).

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private sentiments to the lesser sphere in order to ennoble his higher concept of the public enemy: ‘an enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy.’23 This book goes beyond the binary distinction between hostis and inimicus. After 1500 Europe was plagued by major civil wars and rising rates of interpersonal violence. Private enmities were frequently entangled with public ones. Civil wars, unlike other wars, are never binary conflicts. During periods of civil conflict the actions on the ground often turn out to be related to local and private conflicts rather than the war’s driving or master cleavage. The widely observed ambiguity of civil wars is fundamental rather than incidental to their character: ‘It is the convergence of local motives and supra-local imperatives that endows civil war with its particular character and leads to joint violence that straddles the divide between the political and the private, the collective and the individual.’24 Contemporaries were well aware of enmity’s complexity. In De Inimicitia (1656) the Italian jurist, Francesco Baronio, listed 163 separate forms of enmity and added 16 more in a companion volume published two years later.25 The great Jesuit missionary, Paolo Segneri, told his audiences that anger (ira) was at the root of enmity between individuals. It waxed and waned quickly and healed with time. Hatred (odio), on the other hand, was directed against a whole nation or race and did not fade with time.26 And he distinguished between different levels of psychological torment: ‘the vindictive man is a troubled man who cannot sleep, mistrusts his friends and avoids company . . . to feel resentment is to be restless unable to enjoy life . . . but the desire for vendetta is the most grievous of all, it weighs like a boulder, heavier than a mountain’.27 Hobbes argued that enmity was rooted in human nature. The three principle causes of quarrels were: competition, that is the war of all against all; diffidence, the lack of trust between people; and glory, the joy arising from the recognition of one’s own power and abilities and a concomitant hostility to any apparent signs of being undervalued. Worse than these, however, was vainglory, the foolish overestimation of our own worth and honour, which causes us to be vengeful, reluctant to offer pardon and prone to ‘glorying in the hurt of another’.28

23 24

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26 27 28

C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), p. 28. S. Kalyvas, ‘The Ontology of “Political Violence”: Action and Identity in Civil Wars’, Perspectives on Politics, 3 (2003), 476. S. Cummins, ‘Enmity and Peace-Making in the Kingdom of Naples, c.1600-1700’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015, p. 7. Il Cristiano instruito nella legge, 3 vols. (Florence, 1686), I, pp. 330–1. Ibid., p. 326. Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 88.

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In his 1708 introduction to the art of peacemaking, Antonio Muratori distinguished a personal enemy as: one who has killed a relative of mine, who has accused me of a great misdeed, who gossips about me, who against my will holds either my wife or my relatives in his power, who has said injurious words to me, or threatened me, or in any other way mistreated me, or if he socializes often, and familiarly with my enemies, or he is bound to them, or he is enemy of my brother, or of my kin, or he claims that he regards me with hatred, or he talks badly of my behaviour, or he takes away from me without cause something that is duly mine, or does any other similar thing that denotes ill-will towards me.29

Enmity was not always conceived negatively. Charles de Bourdonné thought it better to have enemies than vices, since navigating our relations with the former was the surest route to salvation.30 The everyday words used to describe such relationships were rich and varied. Italians talked of ‘odio vecchio’, ‘inimicizia di sangue’ and ‘mortali inimicizie’; the French of ‘inimitié particulier’, ‘haine mortelle’ and ‘ennemi capitale’, and the Germans of ‘Erzfeinde’ and ‘abgesagter Feindschaft’. Another German synonym for enmity (Feindschaft) is Fehde, which made its way into English as feud. Feud, vengeance and vendetta are all conditions of enmity, but had contrasting local fortunes. Vendetta was a widely accepted and legitimate practice in early modern Italy. Outside of the Italian context I use it to describe a bloody feud. Vengeance and its cognates were ubiquitous. It was not necessarily a negative feeling. Montaigne considered it ‘a sweet passion’, because unlike anger or hatred it was rooted in a sense of justice; susceptible to the application of reason, it could be delayed or diverted. The feud has generated an extensive literature.31 In English, both the word and the institution were long obsolete by the end of the Middle Ages. The revival of the word in twentieth-century English was the work of anthropologists, who exposed the division between the law, feuding and peacemaking as artificial.32 The legal institution of the Germanic Fehde is different. It had no equivalent elsewhere in Europe during the Middle Ages. Until its prohibition in the Imperial Perpetual Peace of 1495, it was a legally recognised instrument for the enforcement of rights through the use of violence within certain limits, usually the seizure or destruction of property, or attacks on and the ransoming of an enemy’s subjects. Germany is exceptional in that it has a distinct set of practices, law codes and archives that are labelled feuds. In this 29 30

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Introduzione alle pace private (Modena, 1708), pp. 82–3. Le Courtisan desabusé ou les pensées d’un gentilhomme (Paris, 1658), chapter 50, ‘Des Ennemis’. J. Netterstrøm and B. Poulsen (eds.), Feud in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2007), p. 22. M. Gluckman, Custom and Conflict in Africa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963).

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book feud is used in its colloquial sense of a state of extended hostility. Across most of Europe the feud survived in the early modern period, not as an institution but as a social practice which followed a pattern of just grievance – injured honour – violence – mediation – truce – peace. Disputants had a rich lexicon at their disposal to describe this state of affairs. French feuds were called querelles, originally meaning a legal complaint or suit, and their disputants would emphasise their seriousness by claiming that they were in a ‘querelle publique’ or a ‘querelle ancienne’, or to ‘vivre en querelle’. The English quarrel is derived from this. Today quarrels are trivial arguments between people who are usually on good terms. The fact that ‘quarrel’ has lost its sense of justice and of being a public state of affairs demonstrates the distance we have travelled from our ancestors. Enmity was also expressed in a multitude of gestures, social interactions and signs. Sir John Stepney complained in 1637 that William Williams, a clerk, had given him the lie, saying that he was the better man; and ‘phlipping his fingers’, he said ‘a turd in your teeth’.33 The sixteenth century saw an intense effort to control social intercourse through civility. A great deal has been written about the rise of civilised manners in this period and it is axiomatic to this literature that civility tamed and controlled violence.34 But this is not what happened. Civility does not of itself limit violence: a distinction needs to be made between the laws of civility, namely etiquette, and the spirit of being civil. Etiquette is open to abuse or misinterpretation. Breaches of civility were taken as a sign of contempt: ‘we assume enmity between two people, when they do not greet each other, when they stare at each other with malice, when they flee from conversation, discussion, and eating together’.35 Insults by omission included the failure ‘to respect the rights of others, especially when the refusal is followed by a noticeable affectation; a vassal who passes in front of his lord without giving him an honest greeting; an individual who when meeting a magistrate effects an air of scorn . . . an inferior who lacks the same civility to whom he owes subordination and respect’.36 Rights of way, for example, were contentious because they involved prickly questions of precedence. By Samuel Johnson’s time it was the rule in London to keep to the right. But in his mother’s time, around 1700, the rights of the wall were disputed by the peaceable and the quarrelsome, the former giving way.37 For Paolo Segneri the lack of civility was 33

34

35 36 37

‘Stepney v Williams’, in The Court of Chivalry 1634–1640, ed. Richard Cust and Andrew Hopper, British History Online, www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry /625-stepney-williams (accessed 14 December 2020). For the most recent restatement: K. Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). Muratori, Introduzione, p. 83. F. Dareau, Traité des injures dans l’ordre judiciaire, 4 vols. (Paris, 1775), pp. 92–3. R. C. Latham and W. Matthews (eds.), The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols. (London: Harper Collins, 1995), I, p. 46.

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a sign of disgust: ‘you cannot exclude your adversary from giving signs of friendship which you give to others without exercising a form of vendetta, which is already sufficient to make it known to him your bad faith towards him and draw attention to the scandal to others.’ ‘Turning one’s back’, he went on, ‘was not only an incivility, but an insult, a declaration that the outrage should be retained vividly in the memory.’38 ***

The study of enmity enables us to look afresh at the emergence of modern society. It is a category that sheds fresh light on the transformations wrought by Renaissance politics; the relationship between violence and social change; the role of civil society in mediating conflict; and the emotional field inhabited by ordinary people. Enmity is a dynamic category shaped by the political environment. The kiss of peace and justice (inspired by Psalm 85) was a common theme of Renaissance and Baroque art. Figure I.1, which portrays peace burning the

Figure I.1 Laurent de La Hyre, The Kiss of Peace and Justice (1654). Cleveland Museum of Art

38

Il Cristiano instruito nella legge, I, p. 328.

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weapons of war and justice holding a sword and scales, was painted in France during the civil wars of the Frondes, when the tension between the defence of rights and liberties and the desire for order was at its most acute. Justice, the principle of giving each what they deserve, was a cardinal virtue and essential to politics since Aristotle. Ideally, justice created the conditions for peace but in reality they were often in conflict. Injustice occurs when we do not get what we believe is due, or the ‘betrayal we experience when others disappoint expectations that they have created in us’.39 The sense of injustice is both eminently political and generates powerful emotions, making us boil with indignation and moving us to get even. Revenge is not unreasonable as Hamlet, the quintessential exploration of the tension between peace and justice, demonstrates. And while Hamlet’s inability to choose between them ended in carnage, Machiavelli had no doubts about which should predominate: The pagan religion deified only men who achieved great glory, whilst ours glorifies more the humble and contemplative rather than the men of action. Our religion, moreover, places the supreme happiness in humility, lowliness, and a contempt for worldly objects, whilst the other, on the contrary, places the supreme good in the grandeur of the soul, strength of body, and all such other qualities as render men formidable; and if our religion claims fortitude of soul, it is more to enable us to suffer than to achieve great deeds. These principles seem to me to have made men feeble . . . more disposed to endure injuries than to avenge them. And although it appears that the world has become effeminate and Heaven disarmed, yet this arises without doubt more from the baseness of men who have interpreted our religion according to the promptings of indolence rather than those of virtù.40

Machiavelli’s man of action takes justice into his own hands. Whereas chivalry had emphasised the hierarchical relationship of service to God and to one’s prince, Machiavelli sneered at the ideal of Christian perfection through suffering, meekness and contemplation and emphasised heroic autonomy. Virtù, a keyword of the Renaissance, was more than the pursuit of power and glory; it embodied a form of manliness that viewed the failure to pursue right as effeminate and weak. Renaissance thinking transformed the conduct of war. It did not invent massacres, assassination or religious and ethnic cleansing, but it did justify and encourage their proliferation.41 Vendetta and feud were not cultural relics, a medieval hangover, but rather a product of new political relationships, where 39 40

41

J. Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 83. N. Machiavelli, ‘The Discourses’, in The Historical, Political, and Diplomatic Writings of Niccolo Machiavelli, ed. Christian E. Detmold, 4 vols. (Boston, 1882), II, p. 233. S. Bowd, Renaissance Mass Murder: Civilians and Soldiers during the Italian Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); N. Murphy, The Tudor Occupation of Boulogne: Conquest, Colonisation and Imperial Monarchy, 1544–1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

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private and public motives in civil conflicts had become dangerously entangled. The high levels of violence that characterised early modern civil conflicts were not simply a product of military campaigns but were propelled by resistance to tyranny and the liquidation of traitors. The revolutionary implications of the French reinterpretation of Cicero, for example, has recently been underlined by John O’Brien. Cicero’s formula for the conduct of Roman consuls, ollis salus populi suprema lex esto (‘let the welfare of the people be their highest law’), was transformed in the sixteenth century by dropping the pronoun, which referred to the Roman Senate, replacing it with a definite article. This tiny change was significant because it turned a reference to a historical institution into a universal law – it had an enormous impact on contemporary political thinking and action.42 The Calvinist Reformation was an ideological revolution because it legitimised the politics of revenge in defence of the constitution and the commonwealth. Assassination was not new, but the claim to be doing it in the cause of political justice was new. It required the pursuit of enemies in the name of the public good, whatever their social position. It even became possible to imagine the king’s death.43 In France assassination and judicial murder became a common currency of political action, which became impossible to remove from circulation even when the military campaigns ended in 1598. Politics also shaped social relations at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Popular movements in this period are generally characterised as struggles against landlords or the state. But the greater demands that the state began to make on its subjects during the sixteenth century also upset the fragile equilibrium within communities themselves. The imposition of new taxes made village feuds worse and exacerbated pre-existing enmities. The resulting factionalism had the capacity to disrupt established mechanisms of social control.44 ***

Violence is a useful tool for measuring enmity in the past, because it leaves traces in the historical record. The medieval state made determined efforts to punish murder and from the fourteenth century the sophisticated bureaucracies that developed leave plentiful records, making it possible to compute homicide rates and (by expressing them as a ratio of the overall population) make comparisons with modern societies.45 Homicide is also important for 42

43

44 45

J. O’Brien, ‘Cicero the Revolutionary: Some Seditious Motifs in the Literature of the French Wars of Religion’, in J. O’Brien and M. Schachter (eds.), Sedition: The Spread of Controversial Literature and Ideas in France and Scotland, c. 1550–1610 (Brussels: BREPOLS, 2021), pp. 127–52. S. Carroll, ‘Political Justice and the Outbreak of the Wars of Religion’, French History, 33 (2019), 177–98. See Chapter 8. M. Eisner, ‘Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime’, Crime and Justice, 30 (2003), 83–142.

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a study of enmity for two other reasons. First, interpersonal violence is the product of social relations. Societies with high rates of homicide tend also to be societies with high rates of non-lethal violence and the frequency and distribution of murder in any community will tell us a great deal about social relations more generally because it is ‘emblematic of the less deadly but more frequent battles of will that occur in tens of thousands of comparable relations everyday’.46 The trajectory of these everyday micro-conflicts, whether or not they become lethal, are dependent on social and political relations. Second, violence is always shaped by the expectations and norms imposed by class and gender. Today killers are overwhelmingly drawn from the most disadvantaged sections of society and the much higher rates of homicide that existed in the past reflect the propensity of social elites to use violence in pursuit of right, the latitude they were accorded by the law in practice and the higher stakes involved in regards to elite honour and status. This phenomenon was well known to contemporaries. In 1720, for example, the Scottish divine John Cockburn noted: When the meaner sort fall out, the Pot which intoxicated them is thrown at one another’s head, and they come to Box and Cuffing immediately, and very often by the Intercession of a sober neighbour and New Pot, the Quarrel is ended and they part friends. But slinging about Bottles and Glasses does not content Gentlemen.47

Rising rates of interpersonal violence in the sixteenth century were not signifiers of ‘backwardness’ or an absence of emotional control but rather of social change. Violence requires social sanction and operates within a moral ambience and for these reasons the state is not the sole regulator of its boundaries. The transformation of the social elite, from an elite group of knights into a much more amorphous class of gentlemen, resulted in violence as old hierarchies collapsed and new social relations led to numerous squabbles over precedence and the signifiers of social ascendancy. Conflict often occurs in relatively symmetrical relations in which there is ambiguity between actors concerning relative social rank, and the meaningfulness of insinuations, accusations and gestures of disrespect result from the social setting in which they are made: ‘when people come into conflict, the kind of relationship they have makes a difference for the outcome’.48 The expansion of education and the economy during the Renaissance hugely broadened the social elite. But inequalities also grew. The expansion of the state created winners and losers in the struggle for public office. One’s good standing and public reputation were essential for getting on, for making friends, securing patrons and accessing 46

47 48

R. Gould, Collision of Wills: How Ambiguity about Social Rank Breeds Conflict (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), p. 5. J. Cockburn, The History and Examination of Duels (London, 1720), pp. 131–2. Gould, Collision, p. 97.

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capital. But social mobility was widely perceived as a menace. This remained a pre-capitalist world of limited good. For Montaigne ‘no profit is made except at somebody else’s loss’.49 One of the most important studies of homicide is by the evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson. They sought to understand three problems posed by the historical homicide rate: why, given the mythology that surrounds homicide as fratricidal, the killing of blood kin is in fact rare; why most victims and killers are men; and why, contrary to folk belief, most homicides occur between acquaintances: in the USA, four out of five homicides occur between people who have a prior relationship. What they concluded was that most homicides are caused by trivial incidents. But for Daly and Wilson, the triviality of the cause is subjective. They argued that context was all-important: reputation, face-saving, fears about social status and enduring relationships are for many men a matter of life and death. A large proportion of homicides traditionally dismissed as ‘trivial altercations’ have to be understood as the consequences of a ubiquitous competitive struggle by men for status and respect.50 One consequence of rising social conflict was the invention of the duel.51 Duelling quickly developed its own rituals, with the employment of seconds whose quasi-juridical role ensured fair play, and the rules governing the challenge and the combat were largely codified in Italy by 1550. From there it spread first to France and then to England and the Holy Roman Empire by the end of the century. Duels were fought over points of honour, which to our eyes are a trivial amalgam of slights and petty transgressions, for which satisfaction was required. But honour is more than just a moral code. Like magic or Christianity, it is a world view. Honour permeated every level of consciousness: how you thought about yourself and others, how you held your body, the expectations you could reasonably have and the demands you could make on others. In an honour-based culture there is no self-respect independent of the respect of others. Honour was thus public property and the shortest route to honour was thus to take someone else’s, and this meant that honourable people had to be ever vigilant against affronts or challenges to their honour.52 49 50

51

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M. de Montaigne, Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 22. M. Daly and M. Wilson, Homicide: Foundations of Human Behavior (London: Routledge, 1988). F. Billacois, La duel dans la société des XVIe-XVIIe siècles: essai de psychosociologie historique (Paris: EHESS, 1986); P. Brioist, H. Drévillon and P. Serna, Croiser le fer: violence et culture de l’épée dans la France moderne, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2002); M. Peltonnen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). J. Pitt-Rivers, ‘Honour and Social Status’, in J. Peristiany (ed.), Honour and Shame: the Values of a Mediterranean Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), pp. 18–77;

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The duel marked a break with medieval forms of dispute settlement. It was a quintessentially Renaissance phenomenon because it combined two high ideals: the triumph of virtue and the essential equality of all men of honour. Fighting without armour evened up the playing field, and the defence of one’s reputation no longer required hugely expensive equipment and a train of support staff. In this sense duelling was democratic: the field of honour was open to all who had the leisure time to learn how to fence, not just a narrow class of knights. And this leisured class was expanding from the fifteenth century in the wake of economic expansion and social mobility. Not only did rapiers become fashionable accoutrements, they were relatively cheap and widely available in relation to the other trappings of nobility, such as a sumptuous residence. They were an immediately recognisable claim to status. Anyone who challenged that status was likely to be immediately disabused at the point of a sword. Duelling was closely associated with sexual prowess: the swashbuckling gallant was not only prepared for but encouraged challenges from rivals and husbands. Since duelling was officially condemned, supporters of the duel turned to the Ancients for justification: the concept of satisfaction was derived from Roman Law. The cult of honour was sanctified by the Renaissance reification of glory and the quest for eternal recognition. A beautiful death conferred reputation; it was a terrestrial and worldly rather than a spiritual view of death, and the gentleman’s insouciance towards death marked him out from the commoner. But duelling did not supersede traditional forms of dispute settlement. One of the reasons for the sixteenth-century explosion of violence was the manner in which the duelling frenzy exacerbated the traditional feud, which had always been tempered by the Christian obligation to make peace. The greater propensity of women for enmity is stereotypical. It is no coincidence that in both Romance and Germanic languages ‘vengeance’ and its cognates are gendered feminine. The important role played by female witches in village feuds has been the subject of extensive research. Witchcraft beliefs were ubiquitous: spells, charms and curses coexisted with prayers invoking divine vengeance as part of an armoury of protection against an enemy. Accusations of maleficent harm were often the culmination of a long history of dispute, and it was the trial process that exposed the envy, hatred and bitterness that were a mark of village life.53 Enmity has also been studied in the context of the family. Domestic violence was not a private affair in the early modern period. Within the family ‘capital enmity’ was a ground for separation in canon law.54 It is not my intention to add to this literature but, otherwise

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W. Miller, Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). See Chapter 6. J. Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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excluded from public life, women played a considerable role in private disputes. The moral force of a woman’s voice carried precious weight in family decision-making. The language of feminine vengeance is much more than a convention of literature. Time and again it is the mother, wife or sister who demands revenge, even requiring her husband, son or brother to swear an oath. Women pursued their own enemies independent of men. They were gossips, adjudicating male reputations, and they were peacemakers.55 Where the sources permit, I attempt to highlight the role they played. ***

A major obstacle to understanding social relations in the past is that the late twentieth-century state has removed Europeans from the law. The delegation of power to administrative bodies has replaced a system where justice was determined by private plaintiffs fighting it out in the courts.56 This book is the result of the recent ‘Copernican Revolution’ in our understanding of the law and how ordinary people made use of it.57 The law was not simply an arm of the state. Since there was little in the way of public prosecution, the way in which people used the law tells us a great deal about how they related to each other. The sixteenth-century litigation boom was largely a matter of debt recovery and property rights. But there was a close correlation between honour and reputation and notions of credit and debt.58 Although the overwhelming number of cases were civil suits, these reveal often bitter enmities. Going to law was widely perceived as an act of enmity; it was unneighbourly and lacking Christian charity. Melanchthon’s fear that ‘one often hides revenge behind an appearance of right’ was echoed by Calvin: many who boil with such a rage for litigation, that they never can be quiet with themselves unless they are fighting with others. Law-suits they prosecute with the bitterness of deadly hatred, and with an insane eagerness to hurt and revenge, and they persist in them with implacable 55

56

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B. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). C. Brooks, Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 3. J. Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); M. Dinges, ‘Justiznutzungen als soziale Kontrolle’, in A. Blauert and G. Schwerhoff (eds)., Kriminalitätsgeschichte. Beiträge zur sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der Vormoderne (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2000), pp. 503–44; H. Piant, Une justice ordinaire: justice civile et criminelle dans la prévôté royale de Vaucouleurs sous l’Ancien Régime (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010); S. Cummins and L. Kounine (eds.), Cultures of Conflict Resolution in Early Modern Europe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). C. Muldrew, ‘The Culture of Reconciliation: Community and the Settlement of Economic Disputes in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 915–42; C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: Macmillan Press, 1998).

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introduction obstinacy, even to the ruin of their adversary. Meanwhile, that they may be thought to do nothing but what is legal, they use this pretext of judicial proceedings as a defence of their perverse conduct.59

In a 1656 the Anglican minister William Thomas preached that ‘Brittish feuds, and quarrels of persons and families have in former Ages been prosecuted with swords, but in these times with suits and perjuries: the tumults being lesse, but the crimes greater.’60 Lawsuits need to be placed in the context of the wider disputing process. Plaintiffs were usually seeking not punishment but restitution for injured honour or damaged property. Most complaints never got to a definitive judgment. The law promoted arbitration and reconciliation at every stage of the process. The public advertisement of one’s grievance followed by a handshake was usually sufficient to repair honour. Out of court settlements were positively encouraged.61 Perpetrators of violence were rarely subject to corporal punishment if they could compensate the victim’s family. The rise of Roman Law in the Middle Ages did not end the customary practice of blood money payment, which traditionally tempered vengeance and prevented feuds from getting out of hand. Josse de Damhouder’s Praxis rerum criminalium, which became the standard work of criminal law across Europe following its publication in 1554, stated: ‘In every case of a public crime for which the delinquent should face corporal punishment, where the laws permit, the parties . . . can compromise and come to an agreement, without prejudice, damages or punishment.’62 The situation was very different in England. The English common law, the most punitive legal code in Europe, provided a legal outlet for revenge. The jury system incorporated the popular desire for vengeance and underpinned the strong legitimacy of the English state.63 ***

Enmity is more than an emotion, but it can generate intense and contradictory feelings. The internal battle between reason and emotion is one of the great narratives of Western civilisation and the debate between essentialists and constructivists one of the most protracted and vituperative in academia. But the recent revolution in neuroscience has collapsed the simplistic binary distinction between emotions as artefacts of evolution and constructions of experience. Emotions are a result of evolution, but not as essences passed down 59

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Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. Anthony Uyl (Woodbridge, Ontario: Devoted Publishing, 2016), p. 686. The regulating of law-suits, evidences, and pleadings an assize-sermon preach’t at Carmathen, March 16th 1656 (1657), p. 20. See Chapters 7 and 14. Chapter ‘De faire paix’. See Chapter 10.

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from our ancestors. Rather emotions are very real creations of social reality, which in turn wires the brain.64 The application of advances in neuroscience in the emerging field of emotions history are yet to be fully realised.65 One potentially fruitful way forward for historians has been proposed by Monique Scheer. She advances the idea of ‘emotional practices’, which she defines as ‘manipulations of body and mind to evoke emotions where there are none, to focus diffuse arousals and give them intelligible shape, or to change or remove emotions already there’.66 The manner in which emotional affects are shaped by art and literature is well understood.67 Romeo and Juliet remains the most popular and influential exploration of the emotional landscape created by a feud. Ariosto’s claim in Orlando Furioso that ‘honour is worth more than life itself’ resonated for more than 150 years. And this book is replete with the men of virtù who, like Corneille’s Cid (1637), thought that ‘for righteous vengeance there’s no punishment’. Popular feelings have been explored through the large number of ex-votos which call for divine assistance in vanquishing enemies.68 Prayers, too, often had a less than spiritual purpose, requesting deliverance from earthly enemies.69 The invention of the classical idea of the passions in seventeenth-century Europe and the necessity of mastering them was a consequence of the problem of enmity. The oft-told story is principally derived from works of literature and philosophy. I venture beyond these traditional subjects to explore the everyday experience of feeling. People are not blank slates but architects of their own emotions, limited only by the tools presented by their social roles, experiences and beliefs. I make particular use of first-person reflections to navigate the varied emotional landscapes inhabited by early modern men and women. What distinguishes the early modern period from the medieval is the plethora of egodocuments – diaries, journals, chronicles, libri di famiglia, ricordanze, livres de raisons and Tagebücher – that recorded people’s feelings and reflections. The early modern did not invent interiority per se, but it did see more widespread attempts to represent the self (a process that was not confined to Europe). Some diarists are frank about their feelings. The journal of a French magistrate, from 1601, records his public declaration in court: ‘I take him for an enemy; I declare 64 65

66

67

68

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L. Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made (London: Macmillan, 2017), p. 281. J. Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 264. ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory, 51 (2012), 193–220. R. Verdier and J.-P. Poly (eds.), La vengeance: Etudes d’ethnologie, d’histoire et de philosophie, 4 vols. (Paris: Cujas, 1980). F. Jacobs, Votive Panels and Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). J. Bossy, ‘Christian Life in the Later Middle Ages: Prayers’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 1 (1991), 137–50.

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to him my enmity. He should beware of me, either in exercising his public office, or in his private actions. Frankness and honesty, which always motivate my actions, obliged me to declare it openly.’70 The diarist’s ego is revealed by reading against the grain, which exposes the manner in which he contrasts his gentlemanly virtue to the underhand machinations of his foes. The identification of the enemy therefore has an epistemological role; in revealing our enemy we reveal something of our own identity. This was a commonplace to contemporaries: ‘those who extend their anger and hatred beyond their concerns (as most men do) betray that their emotion arises from something else, from some private cause’.71 Writing was also a spiritual exercise, a means of navigating feelings that were sinful. A humanist education provided a new set of coordinates. One Italian diarist learned from Cicero ‘that one should treat all friends as possible future enemies’; and from Aristotle ‘that all beasts who eat the same food have a secret hatred for each other’.72 For Montaigne, writing was a technique for working on oneself, which permitted him to maintain his cool during the civil war that raged around him: ‘A good book does not lose its beauty because it argues against my cause. Apart from the kernel of the controversy, I have remained balanced and utterly indifferent.’73 The fashion for stoicism fuelled the popularity for life-writing. The memoir written by a Norman gentleman, Charles Castel, in the 1670s warned that ‘to aspire to a better life than at present, we must beware of the pitfalls, traps and enemies which fill it, but in particular it is ourselves, our passions, inclinations and bad habits . . . which are our most dangerous enemies’.74 But emotions are also performative. According to SaintSimon, when the duchess of Nemours saw her enemy in the courtyard of Versailles: ‘she spat straight away five or six times. She apologized to the king, but she could not see a Matignon without wanting to spit . . . the lawsuits had so embittered her spirit that she could not pardon him. She did not finish there, but sometimes when she was asked to recite the Lord’s Prayer, she skipped the sentence about pardoning enemies.’75 Her phlegm-specked disgust was designed to attract the attention of Louis XIV, a gesture entreating the king to mediate. ***

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71 72

73 74

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A. Ledieu, ‘Le livre de raison d’un magistrat picard (1601–1602)’, Bulletin de la Société d’émulation d’Abbeville, 1 (1889), p. 20. Montaigne, Essays, p. 10. I. Gasparetto (ed.), Origine della famiglia nostra Farolfa (Vicenza: Associazione Veneta per la Storia Locale, 1999), p. 78. Essays, p. 1144. J. Drouet, ‘A propos d’une famille de gentilshommes Bas-Normands aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: les Castel de Saint-Pierre-Eglise’, Mémoires de la société national académique de Cherbourg, 19 (1912), 18. Mémoires complets et authentiques du Duc de Saint-Simon, ed. P. Chéruel, 20 vols. (Paris, 1856–9), V, p. 281.

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This book compares Italy, the German-speaking lands, France and England. It both synthesises a great deal of recent secondary literature, much of it unknown in English, and attempts to get beyond the prescriptive literature, using soundings in the judicial archives as well as ego-documents. The vastness of Europe’s judicial records presents a formidable obstacle. The Torrone court in Bologna alone has left 11,000 volumes of cases covering the period 1532– 1796. France had as many as 70–80,000 law courts in the eighteenth century, mostly serving only a few villages.76 England has the opposite problem: there is a relative lack of ego-documents and the common law system was comparatively summary and unbureaucratic. The depositions that survive from England’s prerogative courts are therefore a valuable source. I have made great use of local antiquarian studies and periodicals, which are a goldmine for historians of France and Germany especially. Finally, I have used datamining searches in genealogical compendia to support my claims with statistics on elite homicides. Although all four regions were afflicted by great civil conflicts in this period, this is also a book about contrasts. It demonstrates not only differences in cultures of enmity between states but also the huge local variations that existed within them. The evidence for Italy is particularly rich. It experienced exceptionally high rates of interpersonal violence. This was not due to climate or a ‘Mediterranean culture’, as the contrast with Spain demonstrates.77 Since it is the only one of our examples that did not experience confessional conflict, Italy also challenges the commonly repeated claim that religion is the prime cause of violence. The evidence for enmity in Germany is also rich. It permits us to explore both the impact of the Reformation and the transformation of the medieval Fehde after 1495. France was the subject of a previous book and I broaden the analysis here by looking at village micropolitics and taking the story up to 1789. Two chapters are dedicated to exposing myths of English exceptionalism. Comparative history, as Marc Bloch showed, is the best means for the historian to expose the fallacies of nationalism. The final section compares the experiences of enmity, explores the staging of enmity in sacred space and sketches how and why, despite their differences, people got along. I recognise that the book is unlikely to satisfy local specialists. It exists to challenge others to broaden the geographic scope and nuance my findings.

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F. Brizay, A. Follain and V. Sarrazin (eds.), Les justices de village: administration et justice locales de la fin du Moyen Âge à la Révolution (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003). P. Broggio, Governare l’odio: pace e giustizia criminale nell’Italia moderna (Rome: Viella, 2021), pp. 242–67.

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009287319.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

1 The Uses of the Law

This chapter explores the ways in which law and violence were coordinates in the pursuit of everyday enemies. Contrary to what we might expect from Europe’s most civilised region, early modern Italy experienced rates of violence that were far higher than those of its neighbours. The problem was not due to lawlessness. Italy’s highly developed legal systems and bureaucratic mechanisms of state control were widely admired by contemporaries. There was not too little bureaucracy and litigation but rather too much.1 It remains commonplace to ascribe the early modern Italian problem of violence to a variety of cultural reasons, a hangover from the Middle Ages, a consequence of the climate or the product of so-called Mediterranean values. But vendettas were neither inevitable nor interminable. Late medieval cities developed a panoply of judicial and extrajudicial forums for settling disputes and the ideals of police and good government were medieval in origin. Nevertheless there was significant change after 1500 with the creation of new organs of justice with greater powers.2 The impetus for the new penal codes in Florence, Rome, Genoa, Bologna, Milan and Venice came from the civil conflicts of the sixteenth century and the search for security. The inquisitorial process, which involved a preliminary investigation followed by a trial proper, was already well established by 1500. Growing judicial power in the fifteenth century was also linked to the move towards more oligarchic forms of government and the need to better manage faction. The benefit of the inquisitorial system to the state was that it generated a huge amount of written information, an archive of knowledge about subjects and citizens, and created a cohort of bureaucrats, from law enforcement officers who made arrests and served writs (sbirri) to the notaries who wrote and maintained documents as well as the growing number of law graduates (dottori) who staffed and pleaded in the courts. The other function of the information system was to maintain the state’s interest in peace settlements. Since most prosecutions ended in some form of mediation or 1

2

For example, one single case of affray in Bologna in 1562 generated at least 600 folios pages of testimony and reports, as well as printed justifications: M. Cavina, Il sangue dell’onore: Storia del duello (Rome: Laterza, 2015), pp. 133–46. For an excellent overview: M. Bellabarba, La giustizia nell’Italia moderna (Rome: Laterza, 2008).

23

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Map 1.1 Italy c.1600

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the uses of the law

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arbitration, the sixteenth-century reforms cannot be described simply as an apparatus of state repression. In fact, it was a system characterised by legal pluralism. Negotiations, with or without the judge, involved a wide variety of transactions, including accords, private and public peace deals, indulgences, renunciations of suits, pardons and remissions of punishment.3 Although the more punitive penal codes of the first half of the sixteenth century forbade the composition of heinous crimes, the practice continued. The reasons for this were various. First, there was widespread acceptance in Italy of the principle of vendetta. But vendetta was not outside the law. It was closely associated with justice and shaped by the law. For this reason it was widely accepted that the use of violence required legal sanction. This was proverbial: ‘The prince helps me make peace, either with love or with force.’4 Neither was the law perceived as distinct from vendetta: litigation was a sign of enmity; it was the opposite of Christian charity.5 Second, Aristotelian ideas governing conflict resolution never went out of fashion, as they would do in northern Europe. Italians were taught that humans are essentially rational. Disputes and the violence they generated were less a matter of individual responsibility; rather they were the result of accidents, misunderstandings or forces beyond one’s control. The widespread belief that accommodation was preferable to the rigours of justice was given powerful support by the Jesuits. Consequently Italians developed a sophisticated literature on peacemaking that was unique in Europe. The debate was still ongoing as the Enlightenment dawned. In his 1708 primer on peacemaking Antonio Muratori claimed, in opposition to northern European natural law theorists, ‘that man was by nature pacific . . . a reasonable animal’.6 Muratori was addressing gentlemen. Class identity was reinforced from the sixteenth century by the scienza cavalleresca, the code of conduct which governed social relations among gentlemen. The scienza scorned the idea that courts of law could have jurisdiction over matters of honour. Its theorists, the so-called Professors, established a body of case law for settling disputes out of court. The scienza lent legitimacy to the idea that the gentleman was immune from civil law. But the poor also claimed to have a reputation that required defending. Trials of vagabonds and other marginals could be short and swift, but anyone who could call on the support of the community, or a faction or a kinship group, was to some extent protected from the full force of the law.7 3 4

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Broggio, Governare l’odio. G. Spaccini, Cronaca di Modena, Albano Biondi, Rolando Bussi and Carlo Giovannini (eds.), 6 vols. (Modena: Panini, 1993–2008), III, p. 112. O. Niccoli, Perdonare: Idee, pratiche, rituali in Italia tra cinque e seicento (Rome: Laterza, 2007). Muratori, Introduzione, pp. 159–64. On kinship and community: O. Raggio, Faide e parentele: lo stato genovese visto dalla Fontanbuona (Turin: Einaudi, 1990).

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Third, pardon, mercy and grace were integral to the paternalism that characterised Ancien Régime society. The religious and legal meanings of these terms were closely intertwined: pardon is where human relations intersect with the divine. The arbitrary nature of the judicial system was essential to the power of the prince, whose power to decide on the blizzard of petitions, intercessions and the clamour for mercy derived from divine grace. What distinguished Italy was the extent to which this sovereign symbol of majesty was shared or even sold off. Peacemaking was a routine tool of seigneurial rule; cutting through the labyrinth of the law, the paternal lord patched up quarrels and his favour offered respite for his subjects from the harsh injustices of life. The result was often a travesty of justice, a corollary to intimidation and exploitation.8 Many lords exercised the right to issue pardons and safeguards for peasants. For absentee landlords, such as the Borghese in Latium, the process was monetarised – pardons cost between ten and fifty scudi, depending on the offence. For the right price the compensation paid to a murder victim’s family could be adjusted.9 The principle that any crime – however heinous – could be satisfied by money was widespread. It was particularly common where the offender was of a higher social status than the victim and corporal punishment was inappropriate. Aristocrats did not, on the whole, pay for their crimes; they paid off their victims.10 Before the Enlightenment these widespread practices demonstrate the extent to which the law accommodated vendetta. This chapter takes a closer look at how the law and legal system shaped vendetta. The following three chapters explore the political and cultural parameters of vendetta and the reason for its decline among the social elite around 1700. ***

High rates of violence in Italy are not evidence of the absence of law and state control; far from it. The city of Rome – notorious for its violence – issued no fewer than 458 criminal laws between 1590 and 1623.11 In 1582–3 more than 5 per cent of the population, nearly 6,000 people, were arrested for debt.12 This figure underlines the scale of economic conflict and indicates the potential for trivial disputes to escalate. Italians shared the belief, widespread among Europeans, that going to law was a sign of enmity. In Modena the house of Rangoni was so divided in 1632 that ‘the enmity ate their hearts . . . it made 8 9 10

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Bellabarba, La giustizia, p. 122. B. Forclaz, La famille Borghese et ses fiefs (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2006), p. 180. For an exception to this rule: C. Povolo, L’intrigo dell’onore: Poteri e istituzioni nella Repubblica di Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento (Verona: Cierre, 1997). A. Cirinei, ‘Bandi e giustizia criminale a Roma nel Cinque e Seicento’, Roma moderna e contemporanea, 5 (1997), 81–96. P. Blastenbrei, ‘I romani tra violenze e giustizia’, Roma moderna e contemporanea, 5 (1997), 77.

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everyone afraid’.13 The reason for this was the tactic of reviving moribund lawsuits, which included reneging on blood money settlements of murders settled more than a decade before. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the marchese di Strevi counselled his steward to do everything but go to law with his friends. Towards them one should behave with the ‘best possible neighbourliness’ (vicinanza). Even towards enemies he counselled caution, proceeding ‘with every reserve in order not to give them any pretext for injury’. ‘Friends’, he said, ‘one can trust and profit from . . . and when accidents (occorenze) happen they will always be at our side in an encounter (incontro). It is necessary that we are for them and together we must be united in assisting each other in obtaining honours and favours.’ However, trust was not unconditional. Friends who litigated over petty issues like pasturage or rights of way spelled trouble. The unnecessary creation of enemies made us over-reliant on our friends: the most ‘beastly enemy should not be given the pretext through a mishap which can be employed by [our friends] for their own purposes’.14 Distrust of the law was rooted in the recognition that judges were not independent or above local politics. Fears of judicial partisanship sharpened enmities. It was one reason why states, despite the elaboration of more punitive legal systems, continued to privilege the accommodation and composition of disputes. The high premium placed on arbitration also helps to explain the attraction of closed oligarchic or princely rule at the end of the Middle Ages, since they could more effectively settle competing claims, which fractious republican regimes struggled to compose. It is important to recall here that vendetta was as much about peace as violence – it was widely accepted that the right to revenge was licit unless the offender cancelled their debt with some form of compensation. The rise of Roman Law in the late Middle Ages underpinned this principle. The concept of satisfaction for a wrong entailed doing what was sufficient to prevent an injured party from taking revenge.15 Only those who could not satisfy a crime, the miserable and destitute, were likely to be subject to corporal punishment. The elaboration of the court system from the fourteenth century which employed the laborious inquisitorial procedure, professional judges and secret denunciations allowed states to keep a close eye on dispute settlement and to take its cut in fines and the sale of offices.16 The system produced more punitive judgments but penalties were, on the whole, not definitive. Judgments were subject to negotiation. This explains the spread of the use of exile as a punishment in the fifteenth century; 13 14

15 16

Spaccini, Cronaca, VI, p. 374. L. Covino (ed.), I baroni del ‘buon governo’: Istruzioni della nobilità feudale Mezzogiorno moderno (Naples: Ligori, 2004), pp. 125, 129–32. J. Bossy, ‘Practices of Satisfaction, 1215–1700’, Studies in Church History, 40 (2004), 106–18. For an example: D. Chambers and T. Dean, Clean Hands and Rough Justice: An Investigating Magistrate in Renaissance Italy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

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a flexible tool, it kept enemies apart, facilitated negotiations and made the prince the arbiter between competing petitioners for justice. In Florence, for example, mediation of the vendetta was developed into a highly effective system of political control by the Medici.17 There is evidence that in some regions this system was coming under strain in the decades before 1500. Following the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478 the Medici turned to extrajudicial killing as a means of rule. Ercole d’Este, the duke of Ferrara, was irritated by the constant lobbying for pardons to which he was subjected. In 1493 the ducal secretary wrote: ‘For some weeks, Ercole has much hardened against giving pardons for murder, even if peace has been obtained and one or two years have elapsed, and he is very ill disposed toward the Modenesi, as it seems to him that they do nothing else.’18 But Ercole’s stance was not appreciated by his subjects. His attempts to suppress rather than manage feuds in Modena exposed the limits of princely rule. The absence of clemency exposed injustices in the system. When a captain of justice was murdered in his bed in Ferrara in 1496 ‘the people ran up with enormous joy to see the corpse . . . and many took bits of his guts out of vendetta, for they had been harmed by him’.19 He had earned a reputation for peculation and the misuse of torture. In Bologna, too, traditional forms of negotiated justice came under strain as the Bentivoglio regime began to use extrajudicial violence to quell opposition.20 Feuding and faction at the end of the fifteenth century were stimulated by warfare. But it was the second French invasion that unleashed an unprecedented wave of violence across the peninsula.21 Trust in the legal system was undermined as the courts became organs of foreign subjugation responsible for legitimating the liquidation of political enemies. For example, Viterbo, like most Italian towns, developed systems in the late Middle Ages to manage faction. The town was run by a committee which brought the factions together under the auspices of the papal governor. The equilibrium collapsed during the Italian Wars. In 1532 the governor was accused of exploiting the instability to get rid of personal enemies.22 It was left to Pope Paul III to revive the committee which regulated the factions – ‘universal peace’ was declared in 1536. 17

18 19 20

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A. Zorzi, ‘The Judicial System in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in T. Dean and K. Lowe (eds.), Crime and the Law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 40–58. Chambers and Dean, Clean Hands and Rough Justice, p. 147. Ibid., p. 159. S. Cucini, ‘Contra Ribaldos Proditores: From Factional Conflict to Political Crime in Renaissance Bologna’, in S. Blanshei (ed.), Violence and Justice in Bologna (Lanham, MD: Lexington University Press, 2018), pp. 125–44. Bowd, Renaissance Mass Murder. I. Ciampi (ed.), ‘Il più importante dei ricordi di casa Sacchi dal 1476 al 1572’, in Cronache e statute della città di Viterbo (Florence, 1872).

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During the Italian Wars many regimes reorganised their legal systems to ensure a more rigorous system of policing. This was not simply a matter of cracking down on crime. More punitive legal systems did, initially, lead to new laws and the arrest and prosecution of more offenders. But criminalisation also had a political motive. High rates of execution are usually indicative of weak regimes seeking to shore up their authority with spectacular displays of authority. Many of the new regimes faced significant opposition and struggled to control the disorder. In Bologna, for example, the Pope established a new court, the Torrone, with greater investigative powers in the 1530s. Execution rates increased significantly, peaking during the factional violence of the 1540s.23 It was the poor who, by and large, paid the price. Those with the wherewithal escaped justice by going into exile. The new courts had another purpose: they produced more revenue in the form of fines and venal offices and generated information that helped to shape the pattern of distributive justice – the dispensing of favour and patronage upon which all early modern regimes relied. The purpose of the new bureaucratic system was to ensure that the state effectively arbitrated, brokered and profited from the disputes of its subjects. Italian states were built on paper: the culture of petitioning and supplication worked in favour of patrons and officeholders who interceded on behalf of disputants.24 The bureaucratic system began to function effectively when peace returned following the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. In Bologna, for example, the Torrone court, widely despised by the local elites as a tool of papal tyranny, tempered its initial excesses and by the early seventeenth century brought violence under control.25 The peace confirmed Spanish claims to the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily. The legal system, which was overhauled in 1539, was at the heart of repairing the factionalism caused by civil war. The courts did not of themselves suppress the violence but they generated the information, permitting the viceroy to intervene. The survival of several peace contracts indicates the extensive efforts made to bring local feuds under control after 1559. One of these, between the Minafria and Celestro families of Licata, was signed in 1574 by a score of signatories and publicly registered in Palermo. Apart from the usual provisions not to harm one another and the exchange of guarantees, the stipulations went further and forbade the signatories from going to law altogether unless they had the express permission of the viceroy. Even minor civil suits were to be subject to arbitration.26 These stipulations reveal the limits of punitive justice. The law did not operate independently of politics. 23 24

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Blanshei (ed.), Violence and Justice in Bologna, p. xix. I. Fosi, ‘Introduzione: Tribunale, giustizia e società nella Roma del Cinque e Seicento’, Roma moderna e contemporanea, 5 (1997), p. 36. Rose, Renaissance of Violence, chapter 5. S. Corso, ‘Fine delle lotte civile ad Erice nel 1561’, www.trapaninostra.it/libri/ Biblioteca_Fardelliana/La_Fardelliana_1986_n_3/La_Fardelliana_1986_n_3-07.pdf.

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Since the courts were perceived to be in the grip of one or another faction, litigation posed a threat to the social and political equilibrium. Among the signatories of the Licata peace deal were several lawyers, who agreed not to plead. The lawyers were viewed not as impartial but as participants in a feud. Three members of the Celestre family were dottori, or holders of law degrees.27 Thus the 1539 reforms, which created more punitive laws and bureaucratic procedures, served to enhance rather than replace a patrimonial system of rule. Only the viceroy was effectively able to cut through the legal labyrinth; the favour and influence of his officials were now more eagerly sought by litigants. In Bologna, too, the court of the Torrone significantly increased the power of the papal legate because it enabled him to mitigate harsh punishments, issue pardons and bargain more effectively with recalcitrant aristocrats. The power of grace and favour to temper the rigours of ordinary justice became a major tool of princely rule throughout Italy.28 Informal mechanisms of control and the oversight of disputes required diligence, charisma and the careful use of distributive justice. The system began to come under pressure in the early decades of the seventeenth century. The growing fiscal demands of the state meant that the legal system had to return a profit. In the kingdom of Naples, attempts to assert the sovereignty of royal courts over feudal jurisdictions were abandoned and the burdens of imperial defence led to the alienation of judicial powers to the nobility. The viceroy’s bargaining power was further weakened by his need to seek assent to growing royal tax demands.29 Elite violence increased steadily in Bologna from the 1620s, peaking in civil war in the 1650s. Although the reasons for this are complex, the corruption of the Torrone court was a factor.30 Contempt for papal justice contributed to the violence. The Bolognese complained that the Torrone started but did not finish investigations, leaving the accused in a state of limbo; extorted fines; sold pardons and remissions, encouraging the ubiquity of bribery; showed a flagrant disregard for due process; intimidated and suborned witnesses; and covered up murders with the collusion of officers of the law. According to the Bolognese representative at the Vatican in 1676, the Torrone exercised a tyranny the like of which had not been seen since Nero.31 These claims, however exaggerated, were significant because legal judgments shaped the trajectory of vendetta. The pursuit of an enemy required letters of distraint, summoning a posse to enforce a court order and getting an 27 28

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F. Gaetani, Della Sicilia nobile (1757), p. 352. On Tuscany: D. Edigati, ‘La pace nel processo criminale: Il caso toscano in età moderna’, in Broggio and Paoli (eds.), Stringere la pace. R. Cancilla, Autorità sovrana e potere feudale nella Sicilia moderna (Palermo: Associazione Mediterranea, 2013), pp. 47–56. Rose, Renaissance of Violence, chapter 5. G. Angelozzi and C. Casanova, La giustizia criminale a Bologna nel XVIII secolo e le riforme di Benedetto XIV (Bologna: CLUEB, 2011), p. 25.

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enemy outlawed. Following the murder of his brother in 1561, the Friulian nobleman Strassoldo di Soldoniero kept a diary precisely to demonstrate to his ancestors how to conduct a vendetta correctly and legally.32 The diary operated as an aide-memoire and summary of the legal pursuit of his brother’s killer, and Strassoldo makes frequent reference to the archive of supporting legal documentation he gathered. His first task was to travel to Vienna in order to purge a sentence procured by his enemies against him. He then turned to the Venetian courts, which outlawed the killer and permitted Strassoldo to seize his property as compensation. Preparations for revenge required patience. Strassoldo’s nephew was tasked with avenging his father but, since this would lead to him being outlawed and having his property confiscated, careful family planning was required. Strassoldo had formerly taken a vow never to marry in order to prevent the family inheritance from being divided. He now renounced his bachelorhood and got married in order to secure the family property, freeing his nephew to take revenge. In 1575 the murderer was finally lured back to Venice under the pretext of a settlement and killed. Vendetta was deemed legitimate as long as it was conducted according to legal norms – Strassoldo’s revenge was justified on the grounds that the victim was an outlaw. Customary practices continued to coexist alongside the rigorous penal law codes. In seventeenth-century Modena, for example, corpses or heads were often put on public display in the main square on a special marble block, the Ringadora, a claim that the killing was a justifiable homicide (Figure 1.1).33 Modena was not the only town with such a custom. In 1628 at Bovino in Puglia bandits placed the severed heads of six soldiers on the town’s marble block.34 The accommodation that the more punitive legal systems of the sixteenth century made with social and political realities can be seen in Venice, which was widely admired across Europe for the probity and efficiency of its legal system.35 The number of courts and their remit expanded during the 1530s in response to the crisis that had generated violence and insecurity over the previous two decades. Inside the city the Cinque alla Pace, which had long been established to deal with non-mortal killings, was joined by the Esecutori sopra la Bestemmia to deal with all sorts of moral offences and police the city’s numerous churches and ecclesiastical establishments. Beyond the city, the Council of Ten asserted its sovereign jurisdiction over the heterogeneous courts and legal customs of the Venetian possessions on land and overseas. 32

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E. Degani (ed.), Cronaca di Soldoniero di Strassoldo dal 1509 al 1603 (Udine: Doretti, 1893). For its use: Spaccini, Cronaca, III, pp. 341, 403, 394, 471; IV, p. 324; V, p. 219. P. di Cicco, ‘Una cronaca bovinese de Seicento’, www.bibliotecaprovinciale.foggia.it /capitanata/1986/1986pdf_parte1/1986_pI_53-91_DiCicco.pdf, p. 78. C. Povolo and G. Chiodi, L’amministrazione della giustizia penale nella Repubblica di Venezia, 2 vols. (Verona: Cierre, 2004).

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Figure 1.1 The stone of the Ringadora, Piazza Grande, Modena

The Ten was kept well informed of local affairs through the regular reports from local governors, who enjoyed wide judicial powers, and encouraged denunciations by private persons, which it could refer to a team of inquisitors. There was a desire to tackle aristocratic violence, and there were some highprofile prosecutions and even executions. Yet the more punitive law codes were not a cure for the violence, the causes of which were complex. Sometimes they made the problem worse. At the end of the sixteenth century the Ten issued laws that created all sorts of opportunities for the unscrupulous and contributed to the spiralling violence. A 1574 law targeting vagabonds and retainers (bravi) stipulated that anyone caught in the act of committing a serious crime – such as murder, rape, arson or highway robbery – could be killed with impunity.36 In 1580 the Council handed sweeping military powers to its governors to clean up the problem of banditry. These included such measures as pardoning bandits who killed another bandit and encouraging bounty hunting.37 36 37

Povolo, L’intrigo dell’onore, pp. 124–6. C. Povolo, ‘Nella spirale della violenza: Cronologia, intensità e diffusione del banditismo nella terraferma Veneta (1550–1610)’, in G. Ortalli (ed.), Bande Armate: banditi, banditismo e repressione di giustizia negli stati (Rome: Jouvence, 1986), pp. 21–51.

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In theory, Venetian jurists were hostile to peace deals since they threatened to undermine the rule of law and worked in favour of the rich and powerful. But Lorenzo Priori, in his Pratica Criminale, composed in the 1590s, argued that in regard to ‘all felonies, even those which carry the death penalty, . . . it is licit for the victim to make peace and renounce the complaint’.38 Its use by the rich to pay off their crimes was of concern to Priori. For this reason peace deals ‘must be verified by public acts, which are either concluded in the presence of the judge, the notary, the chancery . . . and the judge should never force subjects to make peace, though he can persuade them to do so, and to avoid scandals confine them to their houses or other places’.39 Hypothetically, Priori considered that the law should be applied equally. But this was qualified by the common refrain that judges had wide discretion (arbitrio) to interpret the facts of the case. This meant taking into account class, the ‘good reputation, status and nobility’ of the accused. Priori went on to explain that, when a noble or soldier is attacked by a lower-class person, honour prevents them from turning the other cheek. ‘Threats made to a gentleman are of consequence, and in contrast to those to a poor person, it frees them from punishment for homicide.’ Priori was a theorist of vendetta. It was, he argued, permitted to use violence ‘to repulse an ignominy, as if it was an act of self-defence’.40 Chance encounters, the most common form of aristocratic violence, were to be treated as accidental and therefore subject to a fine: ‘where two enemies meet by chance and one gets angry and attacks and kills the other, this homicide’ is aggravated, but not deliberate. A previous history of enmity was thus a mitigating circumstance. All a murderer had to do was demonstrate a history of hostility and show that he had been provoked.41 In seventeenth-century Venice jurisprudence therefore was not opposed to vendetta. The subjection of the law to the principles of honour should come as no surprise in a republic run by an aristocratic oligarchy. But vendetta was not a form of lawlessness. Disputants had to ensure that their actions were justifiable. Violence was permitted within limits, the boundaries of which were closely linked to class and the concept of enmity. Those who committed dishonourable acts of violence, or who transgressed social norms, ran a much greater risk of facing punishment. The toleration of vendetta was also driven by practical considerations. The cumbersome bureaucratic inquisitorial system was overwhelmed at the end of the sixteenth century as interpersonal violence in the Venetian mainland state, the Terraferma, exploded. The bureaucracy was very efficient at tracking the 38

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L. Priori, Pratica Criminale secondo le leggi della serenissima Republicca di Venezia (Venice, 1738), p. 82. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 130. Ibid., pp. 135–40.

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body count through the detailed reports of the governors and local officials. These reports show that factional violence in Brescia was particularly intense in the early seventeenth century, accounting for 2,800 homicides in 25 months (1609–11). The homicide rate, calculated per annum per 100,000 population was in the region of 380, among the highest recorded in human history, and indicative of an undeclared civil war.42 In 1618, the podestà of Vicenza recorded 300 homicides in his jurisdiction during his 16-month tenure of office (homicide rate: 187). This was reduced during the latter part of the century with 1,333 murders in Vicenza and its region between 1674 and 1689 (average homicide rate: 52).43 But the Venetian authorities recognised there was still a problem. In 1682 it lamented the ‘too frequent’ numbers of homicides in the Terraferma which were estimated at just under 700 between March and October of that year (homicide rate: 58).44 In 1680, the Council of Ten finally decided to crack down and significantly curtailed judges’ discretion, ordering harsh punishments for crimes of blood. The fact that this order had to be repeated twice more is suggestive of the problems faced by law enforcement. On his arrival in 1660 the podestà of Vicenza was overwhelmed by 4,000 unfinished investigations, of which no fewer than 400 involved homicides.45 The law was either distrusted, or ignored, or considered an option to be used alongside violence. To place the figures in context, Italy is today one of the safest places in the world with a homicide rate of less than 1. ***

The problem of violence in the well-policed Venetian Republic explains the immense effort Italians more generally put into promoting, thinking and writing about peacemaking. Italian jurists assimilated peacemaking and arbitration into the inquisitorial process. Some cities, like Bologna, developed bureaus dedicated to peacemaking (the Assunteria delle Paci).46 Lorenzo Priori thought that it was wrong to force subjects to make peace, but felt 42

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P. Guerrini (ed.), ‘I diari dei Bianchi (1600–1741)’, Le cronache bresciane inedite dei secoli XV–XIX, 5 vols. (Brescia: Fonti per la storia bresciana, 1931), IV, pp. 78–9. La popolazione italiana nel Seicento (Bologna: CLUEB, 1999), p. 115 estimates the Bresciano at 343,000 people in 1548 and 315,000 in 1566. G. Zanazzo, ‘Bravi e signorotti in Vicenza nei secoli XVI e XVII’, Odeo Olimpico, 5 (1964), 97–100; A[rchivio] [di] S[tato di] V[enezia], Capi Consiglio Dieci, Processi e carte criminali: Varie, 30, fasc. ‘Nota di tutti gli omicidi accaduti nella città e territorio di Vicenza dal 1674 al 1689’. C. Povolo, ‘Retoriche giudiziarie, dimensioni del penale e prassi processuale nella Repubblica di Venezia: da Lorenzo Priori ai pratici settecenteschi’, in Povolo and Chiodi eds., L’amministrazione della giustizia penale, II, p. 27. Zanazzo, ‘Bravi e signorotti’ (1964), p. 100. M. Paoli, ‘I Medici arbitri d’onore: duelli, vertenze cavallersche e “paci aggiustate” negli antichi stati italiani (secoli XVI-XVIII)’, in Broggio and Paoli (eds.), Stringere la pace, pp. 129–77.

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they could be ‘persuaded’ by keeping them under house arrest. Marcantonio Savelli was more explicit in his Practica Universale (1655). Disputants, he argued, should be forced to make peace in order to uphold public order and prevent scandals.47 Jurisprudence, the moral pressure applied by the Church and the costs of litigation combined to ensure that the overwhelming majority of suits were settled out of court, often formalised by a formal renunciation (rinuncia) of hostilities or an accord registered with a notary. In Florence it was required that all peace deals be notarised from 1491. The power was transferred to the law courts in 1547, but this was a fiscal move, as those drawing up such contracts had to be paid.48 Before the Enlightenment, pardon, mercy and grace were integral to the arbitrary nature of the Ancien Régime judicial process. The religious and legal meaning of these terms was closely intertwined: pardon was where human relations intersected with the divine. There was a brief experiment with harsher punishments in the late sixteenth century across Italy as several states conducted a veritable war against banditry. In Bologna, for example, the number of executions rose from 498 (1540–80) or 12.5 per annum to 403 (1580–99) or 21 per annum. But this was not sustained. Between 1613 and 1673 executions fell to 316 or 5 per annum.49 In any case court judgments were rarely the final act in the drama. Even when there was a conviction, there was strong pressure to remit or pardon corporal punishments. In Cremona, for example, 75 per cent of capital sentences issued in the period 1591–1610 were not carried out – a typical figure.50 An execution might be stayed at the very last moment. The ‘pernicious’ practice of pardoning a criminal on the scaffold was introduced into Florence in the 1580s. It seems to have been an innovation of the Counter-Reformation and was in widespread use.51 Giovanni Spaccini mocked the scripted arrival of pardon letters just before an execution at which the crowd rejoiced with shouts of Grazia! Grazia!52 Such theatricality was a perfect vehicle for new confraternities dedicated to the care of the souls of the condemned, whose miraculous redemption was carefully choreographed to elicit an emotional response from the crowd and advertise the healing power of the Church. The founding constitution of these confraternities often permitted them to elect a condemned felon once a year to play this role. The practice

47 48 49

50

51

52

Niccoli, Perdonare, p. 73. Edigati, ‘La pace nel processo criminale’, p. 373. G. Angelozzi and C. Casanova, La giustizia criminale in una città di antico regime: il tribunale del Torrone di Bologna, XVI-XVII (Bologna: CLUEB, 2008), pp. 415–19. N. Perego, Homini de mala vità criminalità e giustizia a Lecco e in Terra di Brianza tra Cinque e Seicento (Lecco: Cattaneo, 2001), p. 91. G. de’ Ricci, Cronaca (1532–1606), ed. G. Sapori (Milan: Ricciardi, 1972), p. 434; Guerrini (ed.), Le cronache bresciane, IV, pp. 51, 139. Spaccini, Cronaca, I, pp. 28–9; II, pp. 453, 549; III, p. 39, IV, p. 39.

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tended to benefit those with connections – even hired assassins were able to escape the noose in this manner.53 The pressure for peace was a consequence of the complexity of the legal system. Although the defence counsel was formally barred from pleading in public, for those with the resources and contacts it was relatively straightforward to construct a defence based on mitigating circumstances. This was especially true in crimes of blood related to honour, or where a history of enmity could be proved. Giuliani de’ Ricci, a lawyer, complained that ‘all killers have their cases taken up by attorneys, procurators and notaries’.54 Those who could not afford their fees were not entirely forsaken. The Papal States, the grand duchy of Tuscany, the duchy of Milan and the kingdom of Naples followed the example of Venice and established an attorney to represent the poor, the avvocato dei poveri, during the sixteenth century. But on the whole the law was a labyrinth in which those with contacts and resources could wear down an opponent. It was a common complaint against the Neapolitan nobility that litigation was simply a means for them to avoid paying debts. Many subterfuges existed to hinder the collection of fines or prevent the sequestration of property. Felons bequeathed their possessions to kin in trust or repurchased them through intermediaries.55 The very elaborateness of the system therefore encouraged deals and transactions between litigants, often with the connivance of the state. For these reasons, crimes of violence, even heinous ones, tended to be dealt with by a combination of fines, banishment and pardons, a system which reached its peak in the seventeenth century – corporal punishment fell in the seventeenth century just as rates of interpersonal violence were rising. Bureaucratic procedures also generated a great deal of information that could be used by the state, bringing malefactors to the attention of the authorities, permitting commissioners to intervene if necessary and forcing transgressors to petition the prince for remission from sanctions imposed by the investigating magistrates. Law courts were therefore important tools of political authority and princely power was enhanced by the exercise of favour and the interposing of peace in the feud. This required ‘judgement out of the ordinary, singular wisdom and finesse’.56 Alfonso II d’Este, duke of Ferrara, for example, was widely recognised as possessing these. He promoted the duel as an alternative form of dispute settlement and when the Council of Trent declared it illegal he turned to sponsoring peacemaking. The development of the Este court into one of Europe’s most magnificent attracted petitioners for 53

54 55 56

Spaccini, Cronaca, V, p. 342; N. Terpstra (ed.), The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008). Ricci, Cronaca, p. 434. L. Ghellini, ‘Episodi di vita vicentini’, Odeo Olimpico, 2 (1942), 114. Muratori, Introduzione, p. 157.

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ducal mediation from all over Italy. In 1549, ‘All the citizens of Modena who were at enmity with each other and had come to the duke of Ferrara were sent back to Modena, since he wished them to make peace . . . and that everyone should go the governor . . . to compose peace.’57 The Este were soon surpassed by the Medici as patrons in northern Italy. The Tuscan archives contain four volumes of negotiations relating to peace settlements covering the period from 1540 to 1693, though many years are missing.58 The documents not only attest to the assiduousness of the grand dukes in dealing with Tuscany’s leading noble families but also the manner in which they intervened in favour of various corporate interests, kinship groups and communities, cutting through the labyrinth of the justice system. The frequency with which subjects of other Italian states – from Naples, the Papal States, Urbino, Lucca – petitioned the grand dukes for assistance demonstrates how essential the role of arbiter was in projecting his power. A charismatic prince might create an atmosphere in which parties genuinely wished to make peace, but the system also encouraged arbitrary intervention and intimidation that might not solve the underlying problem. The existence of outside forums for dispute settlement might, however, serve to weaken the legitimacy of local institutions. The Bolognese elite publicly signalled their contempt for papal rule in frequent duels, encounters and skirmishes and their regular snubs to the peacemaking efforts of the papal legate was also a form of liberty; they demonstrated their disdain by approaching outside mediators – as late as the 1690s they were still using the Medici to settle their feuds.59 In Milan a different situation prevailed. As in other Spanishcontrolled territories, the local aristocracy maintained significant control of local justice. But the Milanese Senate asserted its sovereignty by permitting appeals and maintaining control of the peacemaking process. Pardons were issued on a huge scale. The archives contain thirty-seven volumes of sentences of outlawry and seventy-two volumes of pardons, covering the period 1538– 1761. This amounted to official recognition of private peace deals and an attempt to exercise control over the practice and, since letters of remission had to be paid for, to profit from it.60 As Osvaldo Raggio has demonstrated, state-building in Genoa was predicated on the growing capacity of the Republic to gather knowledge about and develop systems to cut through the legal labyrinth and arbitrate between disputants in the localities. The special commissioners appointed by the Genoese from the 1570s to make peace between armed factions and kinship groups were by no means unusual. Teams of commissions of the 57

58 59 60

C. Borghi, L. Lodi and G. Ferrari Moreni (eds.), Cronaca Modenese di Tommasino de’ Bianchi, 12 vols. (Parma, 1862–84), XI, p. 53. Paoli, ‘I Medici arbitri d’onore’, p. 132. Angelozzi and Casanova, La giustizia criminale a Bologna, p. 70. Perego, Homini de mala vità, p. 12.

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‘peaceable and unaligned’, supported by troops, beginning with the creation of the ‘Novanta Pacifici’ in Forli in the 1540s, appeared in Faenza, Imola, Cesena and Ravenna and other towns of the Papal States. The commission in Faenza was still operating in the eighteenth century.61 Grace was part of the symbolic armoury of sovereign power and integral to the public celebration of holidays, marriages, births and military victories. The routine of opening the prisons shaped expectations of the judicial process. Where the sovereign was absent these powers were delegated. In the duchy of Milan governors had the right to release prisoners upon the taking up of their office.62 In Naples the viceroy opened the prisons at Pentecost and Easter, as well as Epiphany. At Pentecost 1671, for example, he sent home 175 prisoners immediately and a further 50 when they settled with their victims, and commuted other capital sentences. Seven years later at Easter he released 50 prisoners convicted of the most heinous crimes.63 There were also extraordinary displays of clemency: the arrival of the Spanish ambassador in Florence in 10 June 1664 was celebrated with the release of 106 prisoners; the fall of Buda in 1686 was marked in Naples by the release of 125 men and 10 women from the prisons of the Vicaria Criminale.64 Pardons contributed to state-building in another way. The going rate for a pardon in sixteenth-century Milan was 25 scudi, a few months’ wages for a worker.65 Between 1673 and 1678 the papal legate in Bologna issued 469 pardons, which brought in an income of 40,644 scudi. The venal nature of the system was recognised by another legate, Antonio Pignatelli, later Pope Innocent XII. Just before he died, racked with remorse, he ordered the reimbursement of almost 20,000 scudi obtained from the sale of pardons during his period of office as legate between 1684 and 1687.66 Stephen Cummins estimates that in 1669 income from the sale of pardons in the kingdom of Naples was 60,000 ducats, or 3 per cent of crown income.67 This only included what the treasury received in fees – the size of the kickbacks paid to officials and brokers of influence can only be imagined. The prince of Colubrano offered the viceroy 20,000 ducats to disregard a duel he had fought in Naples in 1670.68 61 62 63

64

65 66 67 68

Niccoli, Perdonare, pp. 69–73. Ibid., pp. 33–42. G. de Blasiis (ed.), ‘Frammento d’uno diario inedito Napoletano’, Archivio Storico Napoletane, 14 (1889), 44; A. Bulifon, Giornali di Napoli dal 1547 al 1706: Antonio Bulifon, ed. N. Cortese (Naples: Società Napoletana di Storia Patria, 1932), p. 219. F. Bonazini, ‘Bisdosso overo Diario’, fo, 230: https://grandtour.bncf.firenze.sbn.it/indici/ altre-fonti/Magl_XXV_42; D. Confuorto, Giornali di Napoli: dal 1679 al 1699, ed. N. Nicolini, 2 vols. (Naples: Società napoletana di storia patria, 1930–1), p. 158. G. Politi, La società cremonese nella prima età spagnola (Milan: Unicolpi, 2002), pp. 243–4. Angelozzi and Casanova, La giustizia criminale, pp. 648–53, 692. Cummins, ‘Enmity and Peace-Making’, 83. V. Onofrio, Giornali di Napoli, dal 1660 al 1680, ed. F. Schlitzer, A. Padula and V. Omodeo, 4 vols. (Naples, 1934–43), II, p. 125.

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Whereas most states managed to gain control over the issuing of pardons and ensure that the unworthy were excluded, the political situation in Naples made this difficult. The legitimacy of Spanish rule was severely weakened by the 1647 Revolution. The aristocracy retained significant autonomy over their subjects, including the right to issue pardons. It was a practice that encouraged all sorts of abuses. In 1692 the prince of Avellino summarily shot a vassal who had refused to accept a peace deal he had brokered. The prince was himself pardoned.69 The lack of central oversight encouraged feuds, such as that between the great houses of Cicinello and the Caracciolo, which resulted in the murder of Don Giovanni Cicinello in 1662. The ranks of the forces at their disposal were swelled by their ability to harbour mutual enemies and to attract bandits to their service with the promise of a pardon.70 In 1651 the viceroy published an order against the ‘barbaric abuse’ of reconciliations made under duress, ‘which killers procure from the victim’s kin through the intercession of powerful nobles and those hooligans they protect with provisions that offer gifts and rewards in return for the perpetual servitude of the plaintiff’.71 The widespread belief that judgments were arbitrary legitimised ordinary people to challenge sentences that were not remitted. In 1693, the viceroy was besieged in his coach in Naples by supplicants for a condemned murderer. ‘It had not been [the viceroy’s] intention to set him free. But such was the press of people, who cried that if he did not set him free, they would do no less than remove him by force.’ One diarist lamented the weakness of the viceroy in the face of the ‘monopoly of the rabble’. Another blamed the high murder in Naples on ‘too much clemency’.72 There is no doubt that peacemaking was welcome and contributed significantly to the consolidation of princely authority. But it was not just states that benefitted from the widespread culture of petitioning; it remained a cornerstone of lordship more generally. In 1596 Soldoniero di Strassoldo recorded in his diary how he had been elected to arbitrate the ‘mortal enmities’ which divided the villages of Pocenia and Palazzolo in the Friuli. He invited representatives of both villages to celebrate the baptism of his son – three godfathers came from one village and four from the other – and they dined together ‘like gentlemen’ as a sign of the peace between them.73 In Genoa the republic brokered deals between whole kin groups in its rural hinterland.74 Godparents were routinely approached to settle everyday disputes. In 1684, for example, a Florentine silversmith wished to sack one of his employees but was 69 70 71

72 73 74

Confuorto, Giornali, II, p. 5. Onofrio, Giornali, II, p. 131. I. Fuidoro (aka V. d’Onofrio), Successi del governo del conte d’Onate (1648–1653), ed. A. Parente (Naples: Società Napoletana di Storia Patria, 1932), p. 179. Onofrio, Giornali, p. 142. Strassoldo, Cronaca, p. 61. Raggio, Faide e Parentele.

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afraid to do so because the man was a known killer who had already been exiled from Rome, Lucca and Venice for murder. The silversmith summoned his godfather, the Marchese Vitelli, to broker a deal. The employee gave assurances that he was ‘satisfied’ with his severance. The agreement stipulated that they should henceforth return greetings ‘as a sign that they no longer stored hatred and rancour with each other’.75 The ubiquity of such private deals created a set of unwritten rules of the game. A formal denunciation to the courts was often part of strategy, the opening gambit in a negotiation. This could entail outright abuse and extortion. Ottavia Niccoli has uncovered the remarkable 1581 investigation of Benedetto Calzolari, who pimped his own daughter, Antonia, and then blackmailed her wealthy clients by denouncing them to the courts for rape. The going rate for him to drop the charges was 50 lire.76 The fact that Antonia decided to spill the beans only after a visit from a delegation of Bologna’s leading aristocrats suggests that her father had gone too far and antagonised the powerful. Whether Antonia willingly denounced her father or not we do not know, but it points to the multiple ways in which the rich were able to pay off or intimidate the weak. ***

The bureaucracy of peacemaking and its rituals were fully elaborated during the seventeenth century. The spiritual benefits were widely advertised. Confessors flocked to the bedside of the victims of violence to remind them that recourse to justice imperilled their souls. The archives of the Della Consolazione hospital in Rome from 1638 to 1859 contain nineteen registers of peace pacts, with as many as seventy per year made with the help of confessors, who persuaded victims to desist from lodging a complaint.77 The pope’s power to have punitive sentences quashed reached well beyond the Papal States.78 The new confraternities established by the CounterReformation to care for the condemned also claimed a formal role in the process of clemency. The Milanese confraternity of San Babilo was first granted the right to liberate a condemned prisoner of its choice in 1587.79 The important role played by the Church in the judicial system can also be seen in the Italian adaptation of Saint Yves. The cult of Yves, patron saint of lawyers, was imported to Italy from France in the early seventeenth century.80 When the church of the Apostles in Naples was rebuilt in the mid-seventeenth 75 76 77 78 79

80

Bonazini, ‘Diario’, fos. 361–2. Niccoli, Perdonare, pp. 44–6. Ibid., p. 37. Spaccini, Cronaca, IV, p. 322; Guerrini (ed.), Le cronache bresciane, IV, p. 218. C. Marcora, ‘Il Diario di Giambattista Casale (1554–1598)’, Memorie storiche della diocese de Milano, 12 (1965), 78. See Chapter 14.

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century a chapel dedicated to the saint was founded for its membership of judges and lawyers. The feast day (19 May) was an important civic occasion presided over by the viceroy.81 Part of the celebrations involved debating the suit of a particular poor litigant. But the office of attorney for the poor (avvocato dei poveri) was a prestigious royal post – and therefore probably venal – not in the gift in the confraternity.82 It was the task of the avvocato dei poveri to draw up the list of those who would be presented to the viceroy during his visit to the prisons of the high court (Gran Corte della Vicaria) at Epiphany. On a dais and surrounded by royal ministers, judges and councillors the attorney of the poor oversaw the release of prisoners. But the office was also an opportunity for enrichment at the expense of those eager to escape the claws of justice. In 1675 the viceroy, the marchese of Los Velez, is recorded as arriving in the prison at 8 p.m. and business was not finished until 6 p.m. the following day. He listened to a judge and the avvocato dei poveri opine on each case, the former arguing for the full rigour of the law, the latter for clemency. ‘The wisdom of this prince was noticeable in carrying out the public function of pardons, in deciding quickly on the alternatives, rendering justice, tempering its rigours with balm, adjusting the punishment or giving liberty.’83 The public character of this event was reinforced by the presence of the ladies of the viceregal entourage – women being traditionally associated with mercy – who attended the criminal court and were served ‘sweets, ice cream and chocolate’. The criminal chamber of the high court was decked out in allegorical inscriptions composed by the Jesuits in honour of the viceroy and his role as peacemaker. The counterpart of Christian rituals of peace was the secular honour code, the scienza cavalleresca, to which all Italian gentlemen were exposed from the mid-sixteenth century. As a pamphlet from 1700 explained, the laws of honour should not be governed by Christian morality alone: ‘The man of worth is made of inner virtue, but the man of honour is made by having his virtue publicly recognised . . . : the former satisfies our conscience; the latter satisfies the science of men.’84 The peculiarity of the Italian honour code lay in its application of classical learning to create an ethical code that was free from the sophistry of civil and canon law jurists and from pure custom. The Professors of honour established peacemaking on rational principles, setting out the rules of forgiveness for men of merit who had erred. The Professors adapted Aristotelian and canon law teaching on satisfaction. Satisfaction had both a legal and a theological meaning in the Middle Ages. The 1215 Lateran 81 82 83 84

Confuorto, Giornali, I, pp. 124, 217, 348; Bulifon, Giornali, p. 184. Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 348. Onofrio, Giornali, IV, p. 81. La pace in prigione dichiarita nulla, ed irragionevole in libertà, difesa del co: Niccolin Martinoni (1700).

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Council established that satisfaction was the means to redress an injury, but that it should be offered to God and not to a neighbour. This was to be done through a penance that was a modest or token offering of prayers, alms or deeds which compensated for the pain. Protestants were hostile to this practice and dispensed with satisfaction. Catholics, in contrast, were divided. In Italy, in particular, Catholic teaching was influenced by the Jesuits. Sins, they argued, needed to be placed in context. There were many circumstances in which honour might require defending. A chance encounter, for example, where there was no malice, did not merit excommunication. They viewed peacemaking as the principal way to return enemies to the sacraments. The earliest Jesuit missions improvised public reconciliations that were followed by confession and Communion and these developed into more elaborate rituals that contained some form of token satisfaction. The Jesuits preached that litigation was a continuation of enmity and promoted the renunciation of judicial complaints. The importance of the amalgam of the scienza cavalleresca with the Counter-Reformation cannot be underestimated. It underpinned the principle that it was always better to settle out of court, no matter what the offence. Even those who argued for a tougher line, such as Cardinal Borromeo, archbishop of Milan from 1564 to 1584, did not object to the principle of private peace deals (pace private). The cardinal was asked to validate them, including one in which a killer was reintegrated into the community. Borromeo agreed that he should be able to enter the main body of the church of Santa Maria Assunta at Paderno, so long as he did not take Communion.85 Rigorists, like Borromeo, argued that anyone who harboured rancour was not worthy of receiving the sacrament. In contrast, the casuists, led by the Jesuits, taught that the avoidance of social contact was sufficient for the parties to attain a state of grace. From the end of the sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century the rules of reconciliation and the appropriate satisfaction for each offence were established in detailed manuals, which ran to hundreds of editions. Princes patronised the Professors and sought their advice in the settlement of disputes, which were removed from the ordinary process. Elaborate rituals were devised, a sort of secular liturgy, in which wounded honour was satisfied without the need for recourse to revenge. A great deal of attention was paid to the gestures, such as the genuflection and the form of embrace, that were appropriate for both victim and offender, especially when this ran counter to social niceties.86 The dramatic effect of these rituals was enhanced when they were performed in front of an audience of peers. Even written accords could contain an element of theatricality. In 1614 Giulio Silvestri underscored the love and trust he now

85 86

Perego, Homini de mala vità, p. 32. Carroll, ‘Revenge and Reconciliation’.

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had for his former enemies by signing the accord in red ink to signify his own blood.87 For its Enlightenment critics the scienza was a mimicry of peace. As Scipione Maffei argued in 1710, the science ran against the spirit of peace because it ‘introduced the idea that every peace is a contract, which is agreed with conditions’. These contracts, made with long negotiations and stipulations, were inimical to real peace; they were the basis for continuing resentment and enmity. Maffei attacked the scienza cavalleresca as nothing but ‘sophistry’ and ‘cavillations’, an ‘inextricable labyrinth’. The Professors reduced the spirit of peace to ‘a chaos of questions, a heap of refinement, a triumph of punctiliousness, an explosion of mediocrity’.88 The negotiations and deals that private peacemaking entailed served to undermine faith in the organs of justice and administration. Contemporaries were well aware of this. Critics argued that the practices encouraged by the Professors contributed to distrust of the organs of justice. By urging their readers to place their faith in the sphere of private deals, arrangements and compositions, the Professors undermined the civil society they claimed to uphold. At first, the scienza came under attack from the Church for impiety and excusing duelling. After all, the Council of Trent had prohibited the duel. But during the seventeenth century there was a systematic attempt by both secular and clerical writers to align the scienza more closely with Christian moral teaching. Lawyers, as well as theologians, argued that renouncing a lawsuit, or remitting an offence, was an act of Christian charity.89 There was an extensive controversy about the appropriateness of litigation and whether an individual who refused a request to make peace was uncharitable and committing a mortal sin. Casuists explained how crimes, including murder, could be satisfied. The secular peacemaking rituals of the scienza cavalleresca were increasingly informed by Christian teaching and reconciliation ceremonies took place in a church or were sanctified by the parties’ attendance at Mass. The theatricality of peacemaking was a speciality of the Jesuits, whose dramatic and large-scale reconciliations were a focal point in hundreds of missions in rural Italy. One of the greatest Jesuit missionaries and preachers, Paolo Segneri (1624–94), argued that the best balsam for enmity was a public ritual and confessors the best surgeons. Segneri repeated the standard Jesuit line that true peace required outward emotional engagement, which signalled interior conversion through ‘tears and embraces, with loving care and with tender kisses’. The Jesuits often insisted that renunciation of a lawsuit be recorded.90 However, Jesuit teaching also served to undermine belief in the 87 88 89 90

Paoli, ‘I Medici arbitri d’onore’, p. 159. Carroll, ‘Revenge and Reconciliation’, 138. Niccoli, Perdonare, chapter 4. Ibid., p. 187.

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rule of law. Segneri recommended the withholding of Communion from those who insisted on pursuing justice. In theory, there was nothing wrong with letting the law run its course but in practice, he argued, it was bound to lead a litigant into mortal sin, for anyone who used the law was not ‘motivated by innocent motives . . . but by rancour, bitterness and envy, meaning that the spirit of vendetta had triumphed in their hearts, a spirit stoked by the breath of a hellish demon’.91 Historians have, by and large, been impressed by the Jesuit missions. This is partly because they rely on the Jesuits’ own accounts, which stressed the achievements of the missionary campaigns. Contemporary critics were more sceptical about the value of spectacles, which sometimes went as far as employing murder weapons, bones and victims’ clothing stained with blood to enhance their emotional appeal.92 The Jesuits were not the only order to advertise themselves in this way. At Easter 1615 the Capucins organised a public reconciliation between the factions in Brescia, which was attended, they claimed, by 22,000 people. They published a pamphlet to celebrate the fact, describing how the torch-lit procession and sermon induced them to be ‘perfect’ penitents. ‘They forgave all injuries. The passions and rancour that this earthly battle (Duello del Mondo) can only purge with blood they extinguished with tears, such that without distinction enemies embraced each other, and the only record of their peace was the imprint of the cross.’ A group of assassins who had arrived to kill an enemy were so moved that they resolved to pardon their enemies. Gentlemen who were inclined to offend each other whenever they meet were seen to embrace. Others handed over their arquebuses to the Capuchin father ‘as a sign of their firm resolution to no longer hold grudges, nor look to take revenge nor give offence’.93 The long-term success of these dramas is open to question. Giovanni Spaccini was a sceptic: the Jesuit confessor of the duke of Ferrara was more concerned with prosecuting gamblers, ‘but as for the killings of men he said nothing’.94 In 1609, he noted the release of a man from prison who had confessed to attempted murder: ‘Today St John Chrysostom can accommodate anything.’ This was a swipe at the patron saint of preachers, known as ‘golden mouth’. Spaccini was lamenting the way the law was at the mercy of dealmakers, ‘who are excellent at negotiating these deals; they don’t mind upsetting the apple cart in order to smooth things over’.95 What particularly angered him was casuistry, the case law upon which Jesuit thinking was based. Spaccini was irritated by the quibbling that confused the believer and led them astray. 91 92 93 94 95

Segneri, Il Cristiano instruito, I, p. 207. Cummins, ‘Enmity and Peace-Making’, pp. 237–44. Guerrini (ed.), Le cronache bresciane, IV, pp. 90–3. Cronaca, III, p. 119. Ibid., II, pp. 422, 425.

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Theologians could not agree among themselves about which crimes were remissible. The strict decrees of the Council of Trent against duelling were occasionally enforced.96 But everyone knew there were ways to bend the rules, especially for the rich.97 Into the eighteenth century the expectation that justice was a matter for negotiation remained widespread. The culture of peacemaking was shaped by venality – there was money to be made from the sale of pardons – exploited by power brokers (padroni) and subject to political interests. The scale of the phenomenon can be gleaned from the fact that more than one-half of all criminal investigations in sixteenth-century Rome ended either with a judgement in absentia, which usually required the victim to settle out of court, or a formal peace deal. This figure was common: evidence from the seventeenth-century Bolognese countryside suggests that 45 per cent of plaintiffs made peace after a formal renunciation of their suit.98 Critics of the system argued that the power to pardon and remit offences should be reserved for the sovereign power and that too many actors were involved. They criticised the ways in which civil society itself was being undermined by the pressure for peace. The reformers of the Enlightenment, like Cesare Beccaria, were not against the exercise of clemency. What concerned them was the ways in which pardons, peace deals, renunciations of suits and remissions worked to support private and vested interests and undermined the public good. ***

Banishment was a common feature of all Ancien Régime legal systems. It permitted passions to cool and negotiators to do their work. A petition to return home would only be accepted once the offender had paid a fine and settled with the victim. In Italy, however, the system was politicised by the Italian Wars. In the newly created Papal States, for example, bandits were considered as ‘exiles, that is nobles or citizens chased out in consequence of the igniting of municipal factional conflicts’.99 The threat posed by political exiles excused extrajudicial murder, a policy that was reinforced by the attraction of sequestering their property. The practice of offering rewards for the heads of outlaws created a culture in which assassination was normalised. States offered huge sums. In 1533 Modena offered 500 scudi for the head or 300 for a hand, at a time when a soldier was lucky to get 4 scudi per month.100 The liquidation of 96 97

98 99

100

Ibid., VI, p. 472. When a ‘celebrated duellist’ died in Naples 1679 and the Church forbad his burial in sacred ground, a compromise was found and he was entombed in a private chapel in the Chiesa di Santa Maria Donnaregina Vecchia: Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 18. Niccoli, Perdonare, pp. 30–7. E. Ciconte, Banditi e briganti: Rivolta continua dal Cinquecento all’Ottocento (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2011), p. 27. Borghi, Lodi and Ferrari Moreni, Cronaca, V, p. 322.

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dissidents living far way required significant resources and the employment of highly skilled professionals. Those who enjoyed protection might return to their communities and bide their time, hoping for a pardon or a change of regime. Others had to resort to criminal activities, such as smuggling and extortion, to survive. The outlawry of thousands of men swelled the pool of underemployed specialist muscle. They provided protection for individual landowners and entire rural communities.101 They were frequently employed as bravi, the gallants who surrounded nobles and patricians and whose swaggering behaviour and outlandish dress were designed to intimidate and impress. The romanticised image of the bandit, which lingers in the popular imagination, is far from the reality. Bandit simply referred to anyone who had been outlawed (bandito) from their homeland. Bandits were far from being marginal, nor were they necessarily in opposition to the state. In 1612 Count Marco Lambertino was described ‘as a man of great heart and a great bandit, having committed many murders, [but] held in the highest regard by persons of rank, having a great a following of men of great valour and counsel’.102 Bandits could even become judges! Giovan Francesco Resta was appointed to the Vicaria Criminale in Naples in 1695, even though he had been banished from Rome for slashing the face of a papal secretary.103 After the peace of 1559 bandit gangs became pawns in the cold war that characterised the reconfigured Italy. Henceforth the Cremonese and Bresciano were frontier regions between Spanish-controlled Lombardy and Venice; they became bandit country, characterised by spiralling rates of feuding and violence. In the 1570s Tuscany was a safe haven for many bandit gangs.104 Here, the bandit leader, Alfonso Piccolomini, who had been outlawed from the Papal States, maintained a small army under the protection of the grand duke. He later switched his loyalties to Philip II. Former soldier Marco Sciarra, whose 1,000-man force conducted a guerrilla war in the Papal States in the 1580s, often with the support of local peasants, was contracted by the Venetians in 1592 to conduct security operations against pirates, demonstrating the considerable overlap between bandits and mercenaries.105 The bandit problem became so acute at the end of the sixteenth century that states conducted full-scale military campaigns against them.106 There were successes against some of the larger and most notorious bands. Piccolomini 101 102 103 104

105 106

C. Povolo, Zanzanù: il bandito del lago (1576–1617) (Tignale: Grafica, 2011), p. 260. Spaccini, Cronaca, III, p. 31. Confuorto, Giornali, II, p. 170. B. Arditi, Diario di Firenze e di altre parti della Cristianità (1574–1579) (Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1970), p. 83. www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/marco-sciarra_(Dizionario-Biografico)/. I. Fosi, La giustizia del papa: sudditi e tribunal nello Stato Pontificio in età moderna (Rome: Laterza, 2007), pp. 71–88.

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was executed in Florence in 1591. Sciarra was run out of the Papal States to Venice, but on his return in 1593 he was captured and executed. But smaller bands survived; they provided local protection and throughout the seventeenth century they were used to conduct feuds and smuggling operations.107 The political fragmentation of the peninsula meant that coordinated repression was difficult, which was not helped by the practice of states issuing pardons for crimes committed elsewhere. In 1631 the Venetian ambassador issued a public rebuke to the pope, following the release of two of its outlaws from the prisons in Rome.108 The long-term struggle of the Venetian state against banditry is particularly well documented. It agreed conventions with Ferrara, Mantua and Milan to cooperate in the suppression of banditry, but goodwill was lacking and a blind eye was turned to activities which harmed hostile neighbours.109 In an attempt to address the problem the Venetian Senate issued an order for the summary execution of all outlaws and in 1584 it established the Provveditore Generale Contro I Fuorusciti with its own security apparatus to hunt down and kill exiles.110 The problem was brought under control in the 1590s, but soon flared up again. The very high rates of homicide recorded in early seventeenthcentury Brescia were a consequence of the significant role played by bandits in factional violence. The Zanoni band, which operated in the region of Lake Garda until a peace deal in 1607, was involved in 100 homicides. In May 1610 the Venetian podestà in Salò, Bernardini Ganassoni, was assassinated in the town’s cathedral during Mass by former members of the Zanoni gang. It seems that Ganassoni had been intent on cleaning up the town and had pursued local bigwigs for serious crimes. A contract was put on his head. This was a direct challenge to the state and the assassins were hunted down and killed in a pitched battle in 1617. The victory of the Venetian state was recorded in two ex-votos. But behind the propaganda the problem had not been solved. The bandits were dead but the faction leaders – the merchants, priests and money-lenders who had wanted Ganassoni killed – would continue to employ bandits so long as it was in their economic and political interest to do so.111 But the ‘Wild-West’ style violence that characterised much of rural Italy in the early seventeenth century was also a product of the ways in which states exploited and then tried to deal with the problem using extrajudicial methods. For example, the Venetian state recruited the company of the bandit Santo della Spezia when international tensions rose. Following his demobilisation, he 107 108 109

110 111

Raggio, Faide e Parentele, pp. 5–42; 104–10; 194–205. Spaccini, Cronaca, VI, pp. 301–3. P. Laven, ‘Banditry on the Venetian Terraferma in the later Cinquecento’, in T. Dean and K. Lowe, eds., Crime and the Law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 232. Povolo, ‘Nella spirale della violenza’, p. 46. Povolo, Zanzanù, pp. 96–146.

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was outlawed once again. Bounty-hunters tracked him down in the Parmigiana and murdered him in 1622. His severed head was displayed on the Ringadora stone at Modena.112 The possibility of substituting military service for a murder conviction had long been used – Machiavelli trialled it as Secretary for War in the last days of the Florentine Republic.113 In 1616 the Venetians opened two tribunals with the sole purpose of liberating bandits so that they could be sent to fight in Gradisca, either personally or by paying a proxy.114 The highest folly in the abuse of banishment, however, was the privatisation of judicial killing through the common practice of selling or issuing pardons to bandits who killed other bandits. In some cases a successful bandit-killer was given discretion to choose other bandits to pardon as a result of his success. The practice amounted to a form of state-sanctioned vendetta. The severing of heads was the most gruesome aspect of the ‘war’ on banditry. Bounty-hunter Lorenzo Scalese was responsible for fifty-one killings in Naples. In 1622 he dragged five bandits out of a church and presented their severed heads to the authorities. But on this occasion he was deemed to have gone too far and executed for breaching the rules of asylum.115 The discovery of severed heads – routinely recorded by diarists – was invariably interpreted as the killing of an outlaw and therefore justifiable.116 The Neapolitan diarist Antoine Bulifon recorded six murders in one day on 6 August 1672, including the severing of a head which was diligently skinned, ‘in such a fashion that the skin could be pasted on to a board’, presumably for display.117 Priests were not immune. In March 1680 an abbot was shot and decapitated by a man who claimed to be acting within the law.118 The quasijudicial practice of severing bandits’ heads became part of the practice of vendetta. In 1688 three guards of the Marchese Zenzadari were hanged in Florence for murdering the Cavaliere Petrucci, having sent his severed to their master in a sack. Zenzadari, a nephew of Cardinal Chigi, remained untouched.119 The severed head as a metaphor for justice inspired several Italian artists, most famously Artemesia Gentilleschi, whose feelings of revenge for a rape left unpunished, in spite of a long and tortuous lawsuit, are vividly expressed in her masterpiece Judith Slaying Holofernes, which serves as the cover of this book. 112 113

114 115 116 117 118 119

Spaccini, Cronaca, V, p. 219. G. Corrazini (ed.) Ricordanze di Bartolomeo Masi, calderaio fiorentino, dal 1478 al 1526 (Florence, 1906), p. 100. Guerrini (ed.), Le cronache bresciane, IV, p. 99. G. de Montemayor (ed.), Diurnali di Scipione Guerra, (Naples, 1891), pp. 138–40. Arditi, Diario, p. 117; Bonazini, ‘Diario’, II, fo. 320; Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 6. Bulifon, Giornali, p. 199. Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 37. Bonazini, ‘Diario’, fo. 481, 5 September 1688.

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While large-scale banditry declined in the north during the course of the seventeenth century, it reappeared in the South, following the liberal use of banishment in the wake of the 1647 Neapolitan Revolution. The Spanish monarchy even tried to profit from the problem it had created. In 1668 a special junta was established to sell pardons to bandits. In the first year it raised 100,000 ducats and second year 80,000 ducats. As one critic put it, the policy was a licence for the continued ‘pillaging of the countryside, which was shared with their protectors, and taking revenge on enemies’.120 The presence of the social elite among the bandits is an indication of how divided Neapolitan society remained in the decades following the Revolution. Between 1669 and 1672 Abbot Cesare Riccardi and his gang maintained a feud against the state. Riccardi’s initial crime – he had killed a love rival – was hardly noteworthy. But his victim was a duke and he was consequently refused a pardon and outlawed. Riccardi’s rehabilitation campaign was funded by attacks on tax officials, grain and ice shipments into the city of Naples, and the kidnapping and extortion of his enemies’ tenants. Riccardi announced his feud, German-fashion, in a manifesto. His campaign of terror could not have been waged without the support of people in his hometown of Nola. His appeal rested on his claim to be fighting against the corrupt system.121 The scale of the bandit problem in post-revolutionary Naples can be gleaned from the balance sheet drawn after one military operation: Bandit leaders pardoned, 103 Bandits pardoned, 1438 Bandit leaders killed, 57 Bandits killed, 311 Bandit leaders executed, 17 Bandits executed, 131 Condemned to galley service, 913 Condemned to military service, 167 Total, 3177.122 The success of the operation was down to the fact that those who received pardons were responsible for killing other bandits. In 1683, 150 bandits ‘spontaneously’ came to join the royal forces in the expectation of a pardon. But the difficulties faced by the Spanish crown and the extent of local sympathy for bandits is shown by the fact that this operation cost the deaths of one hundred soldiers and four local officials.123 *** 120 121 122 123

Onofrio, Giornali, II, p. 144. Onofrio, Giornali, II, p. 154; Blasiis (ed.), ‘Frammento’, pp. 53–4, 324–7. Bulifon, Giornali, p. 223. Confuorto, Giornali, I, pp. 110, 114.

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The Venetian interdict, the diplomatic quarrel and phoney war between the republic and the pope between 1605 and 1607, is seen as one of the defining events in modern Italian history. Long considered a victory for the republic and a defence of civil society against the pretensions of the Church, the interdict crisis also sheds light on the claims of the Church to jurisdiction over secular courts, powers that in the rest of Europe had been significantly curtailed during the Middle Ages. One cause of the interdict was the Brandolini affair. Brandolini was a nasty character who was locked in a feud with his cousins. He was a target of the republic’s war on banditry and imprisoned in 1605. But Brandolini was abbot of Nervesa and the Church claimed criminal jurisdiction over clerics. As part of the deal that ended the interdict Brandolini was handed over to Rome. Within months of his release, he returned home to take revenge. On 25 May 1616 a battle was fought in the church at Cison de Trevignano, during which he lost his own life. Since he was still technically a bandit, his killers got away with a 100 ducat fine.124 The Brandolini case was not an isolated example of the way in which the jurisdictional labyrinth encouraged vendetta. In several states the confusion of competing courts hampered justice.125 In Foggia, in the kingdom of Naples, for example, the ordinary royal and feudal jurisdictions were rivalled by the court of the sheep customhouse, which had widespread civil and criminal jurisdiction over the region’s extensive pasturelands. It supported a plethora of venal offices, including thirty mounted cavallari who protected sheepwalks, shepherds and their flocks, and collected taxes. The cost of the office of cavallaro was 297 ducats in the mid-seventeenth century. This police force was deemed insufficient and in 1666 a separate squad of twenty-four soldiers was added to the establishment.126 Borderlands meant entanglement in jurisdictional issues. But this did not render them lawless and liminal – border violence was a products of political relationships.127 The marchese di Serra divided his neighbours ‘into three classes, friends, enemies and indifferent’.128 With friends disputes should be easily settled. And enmity need not lead to violence. Peace and even fellowship (società) were possible with those with whom one shared no border. This was not, however, possible with the prince of Cariati, ‘my hereditary enemy for about ninety years because of border controversies which always have bad consequences, which is exacerbated by the most beastly antipathy between each other’s vassals’.129 States often had an interest in sustaining Marcher lords, turning a blind eye to the harbouring of bandits, 124 125 126

127 128 129

P. Molimenti, I banditi della Repubblica Veneta (Florence, 1898), p. 113. Fosi, La giustizia del papa, pp. 19–26. J. Marino, Pastoral Economics in the Kingdom of Naples (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 173. Bellabarba, La giustizia, pp. 119–20. Covino (ed.), Baroni, pp. 127–39. Ibid., p. 132.

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as they were useful pawns in the larger friend–enemy relationships that shaped regional politics. In these Marcher territories cross-border raiding and feuding were mundane features of life in the century that followed the peace after 1559, occasionally escalating into full-scale pitched battles.130 The dispute that divided the Soldonieri cousins was rooted in border politics. Feuds in Friuli often turned bloody in the sixteenth century because of the existence of proVenetian and pro-imperial factions. The assassination of Frederigo Soldoniero in 1561 was planned in such a way that his killers were able to drag his corpse across the border that separated Venetian territory from the empire, thereby hoping to benefit from the favour they enjoyed with the imperial captain of Gradisca. There was much legal quibbling over whether the fatal shot has been fired from the Venetian or imperial side.131 Border trouble was behind the petition of the inhabitants of Bastiglia in the Emilia-Romagna, who were plagued by ‘diverse enmities and the attempt of various bandits to return home which endanger the lives of many people’. In 1621 there had been an attack inside the village church. The problem was rooted in the hostility between Modena and Bologna and the border skirmishing that resulted. This explains the wide latitude that states were prepared to give aristocrats and bandits, who were used to police borders and conduct raids across them. For the Este dukes of Modena, who dreamed of overthrowing papal rule in northern Italy, this was a systematic policy. Locals in the Emilia-Romagna and the Parmigiana were encouraged to press their claims to water courses, dykes, ditches, mills, pasture and rights of way, which led to frequent raiding, skirmishing and distraint of goods and animals. One advisor urged the duke ‘to hunt down bandits on the borders of Nontolana and burn the harvest from the manors of the House of Malvasia’, who were prominent supporters of the pope.132 Political fragmentation and the jurisdictional maze were not unique to Italy. What was unusual was the extent to which the ecclesiastical courts interfered in and even claimed jurisdiction over secular matters. The claim of Rome to sovereignty over all cases involving clerics would have mattered less if the clergy were above local feuds. But they were not. The high levels of violence that characterised sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy were mirrored in the plethora of murders of priests, murders committed by priests and assassinations that occurred in churches. Some of this violence was generated by resistance to the Counter-Reformation and the challenge that reform posed to lay control of benefices.133 The Church played a more direct role in undermining the organs of ordinary justice with the establishment of the 130 131 132 133

Ricci, Cronaca, p. 254. ASV Collegio, Notatorio, Filze, 6, 10 March 1562. V. Santi, La Storia nella Secchia Rapita, 2 vols. (Modena, 1906), I, pp. 250–374. See Chapter 13.

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Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, otherwise known as the Inquisition, in 1542. Scholars have shown in recent years that, rather like the secular courts, the Inquisition in Italy was a flexible institution; a creative and educative force, it was largely dedicated to correcting immorality and superstition. In many respects policing was lax.134 However, it would be wrong to ignore the chorus of contemporary criticism that viewed the Inquisition as a tool of clerical power and a threat to civil society. Complaints focussed less on the matters under investigation – the need to police morals and heterodox beliefs was widely accepted – than the Church’s claims to jurisdiction and immunity. Nor did the Inquisition operate above or outside of political relationships – denunciations were used to harm everyday enemies.135 The career of Giralomo Zambeccari, who was appointed inquisitor of the Emilia-Romagna in 1615, attests to trouble posed by zealots. Zambeccari, from the leading Guelf family of Bologna, was a controversial choice in a region where his family had many enemies. His diligence was quickly attributed to these personal enmities and he had to be removed from his post. His tenure of the bishopric of Alife was no more tranquil. In 1633 he was removed once again, this time for using excommunication and heresy charges in secular disputes.136 Zambeccari was the subject of one physical attack and he complained of attempts on his life. His enemies retorted by blaming Zambeccari’s entourage, his ‘familiars’. What distinguished the early modern from the medieval Inquisition was the creation of a substantial permanent bureaucracy. By the seventeenth century the Inquisition had established forty-seven local tribunals, each with its own staff of notaries, bodyguards, lawyers, sergeants and other petty functionaries, which in many Italian cities placed a significant retinue at the disposal of the inquisitor. The office of familiar brought with it privileges, such as the right to carry forbidden weapons, exemption from taxes and immunity from prosecution in the secular courts. These offices and licences were for sale and much sought after, especially by petty nobles and their clients. An indication of the sorts of men that such service attracted is provided by a letter from the inquisitor of Piacenza to Rome in 1656. In the previous eight years he had censured ten of his men for acts of violence, almost all of which involved firearms. One of them was sentenced to seven years in the galleys for murder, but the sentence was commuted on appeal to Rome.137 The familiars 134 135

136

137

C. Black, The Italian Inquisition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). V. Zacchino, ‘Pompeo De’ Monti dei baroni di Corigliano bruciato nel 1566 fu veramente eretico?’, Idomeneo, 24 (2017), 53–60. A. Pepe (ed.), ‘Le relazioni ad limina dei vescovi della diocesi di Alife (1590–1659)’, pp. 52–3; www.academia.edu/34169516/Le_relazioni_ad_limina_dei_vescovi_della_diocesi_ di_Alife_1590-_1659. D. Solera, ‘I familiares del Sant’Uffizio romano. Un profilo istituzionale e sociale’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Florence, 2017, p. 211; ‘Sotto l’ombra del Santo

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used the papal badge of office in their private enmities. When familiar Antonio dei Landi was shot at by his brothers in the church of Verucchio near Rimini in 1659 he appealed directly for help to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, lamenting the failings of local justice.138 There were several attempts to reform abuses and reduce the number of familiars, but in 1743 there were still over 3,000 patent holders in the Papal States, not including their servants, and the large number of Jews in that figure (523) attests to the lively trade in the office and the value of the protection it offered.139 The contribution of the Inquisition to factional violence is clearly evident in the kingdom of Sicily. Here the Inquisition was introduced as a tool of the Spanish crown. Local resistance was overcome by recruiting the local nobility as familiars. In 1575 Philip II increased the numbers of officials from 800 to 1721. But during the viceregalty of Marcantonio Colonna (1577–84) the total number of familiars who had been granted or purchased the licence, which gave them among other things fiscal privileges and exemption from military service, was put at 30,000, including ‘all the rich, the nobles, and the delinquents’.140 The fiscal burdens of empire led to the outsourcing of policing. The sale of patents mirrored the sale or grant of the crown’s powers of high justice to the barons, which left them largely in control of policing the interior. The consequence of this, as one contemporary analysis put it, was to create a shadow legal system: ‘these familiars so insolently make use of their immunity from the royal legal system, and are the authors of the majority and the most heinous crimes that are committed’.141 In 1591, there was an attempt to restrict membership of the familiars and to exclude murderers from claiming clerical immunity. Further attempts to crack down on noble violence and their abuse of justice followed in 1597 and 1635. But this met with resistance in the Sicilian parliament – the arrest, torture and punishment of noblemen being an affront to liberty. Prelates also exercised power over civil justice. In the Papal States many cities were governed by bishops, including the city of Rome itself. In Bologna, Ferrara and the Romagna, the legate was vested with viceregal powers. The drive to reform papal justice at the end of the seventeenth century was a recognition that the probity and competence of individual prelates was undermined by a system that was at best venal and, under some popes like Urban VIII (1623–44), positively kleptocratic. Conflict between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities was most acute in the Mezzogiorno.142 The otherwise

138 139 140 141 142

Officio’: I familiares dell’Inquizisione romana tra XVI e XVII secolo (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2019), chapter 4. Solera, ‘I familiares’, p. 212. Fosi, La giustizia del Papa, p. 106. Bellabarba, La giustizia, pp. 110–11. Ibid., p. 111. G. Delille, Le Maire et le prieur: Pouvoir central et pouvoir local en Méditerranée occidentale (xve-xviiie siècle) (Paris: École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2003).

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learned and refined bishop of Capaccio, Francesco Maria Brancaccio, for example, was involved in several confrontations related to the enforcement of episcopal rights. When the governor of Sala arrested a priest in 1632 he was killed by a team of cursori (summoners) sent by the bishop. The Spanish authorities tried to arrest him, but he fled to Rome, where he was promoted to cardinal and provided with the see of Viterbo.143 The structural tension between civil and ecclesiastical authority helps to explain the strength of resistance to the Inquisition in Naples. When the viceroy attempted to establish a Spanish Holy Office in 1547, the nobility staged a revolt. When Rome finally succeeded in establishing a tribunal under the jurisdiction of the archbishop it became a rallying point for patriots who were angered by what they saw as a collaboration between Madrid and Rome to undermine constitutional liberties. The high levels of violence after 1647 focussed attention on the abuses perpetrated by those claiming clerical immunity. On Easter Sunday 1660, for example, the killing of a greengrocer by a coachman of the archbishop of Naples led to a public outcry. But the archbishop claimed jurisdiction, excommunicating civic officials and even the city gaoler when they tried to arrest the murderer. When the civic authorities responded by expelling the vicar-general of the diocese, the pope threatened an interdict. The jurisdictional battle became a cause célèbre and in May shops were shut in support of the civil authorities.144 Although a crisis was averted, the abuse of clerical immunity continued and there was a spate of assassinations carried out by men wearing cassocks in the mid-1660s.145 The jurisdictional claims made by the Church mattered a great deal because it shaped the ways ordinary litigants used the law and conducted their disputes. The Inquisition relied on informants and secret denunciations for its investigations. The danger of this system was that it encouraged individuals to denounce private enemies. So, for example, the arrest and trial of the Neapolitan Cartesians by the Inquisition in the 1690s was sparked by a denunciation from within this intellectual circle. The snitch, Francesco Paolo Manuzzi, came from the same enlightened milieu as the accused. His motives for denunciation were personal and not religious. For the diarist Confuorto the affair was a reminder that: ‘The custom of the nation is to be quick to take revenge through deception, lies and cunning inventions and because of this innumerable evils and wrongs are committed under colour of zeal of our holy faith.’146 The disorder encouraged a delegation to appeal for the abolition of the archbishop’s tribunal in 1661, but the Church resisted any weakening of its 143 144 145 146

www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/francesco-maria-brancaccio_(Dizionario-Biografico)/. Onofrio, Giornali, I, pp. 4–20. Ibid, I, pp. 249–50. Confuorto, Giornali, II, p. 64.

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jurisdiction. Civic officials who arrested priests or entered churches with warrants ran the risk of excommunication, a dishonour that was accompanied by the ringing of the bells and the posting of warnings forbidding the faithful to cooperate with the civil investigation. In 1686 the chief judge of the Vicaria Criminale was excommunicated following the arrest of members of the papal nuncio’s retinue. There were further excommunications in 1690.147 The civil court retaliated by arresting a papal summoner for carrying forbidden weapons. Public announcements threatening civic officials with excommunication were covered with excrement, while someone took a shot at the chief papal summoner.148 Patriots denounced the control exercised by the Church as the product of a ‘despotic regime’ that had no parallels elsewhere in Italy.149 The Inquisition, they claimed, was motivated by worldly ambitions. They condemned its unlawful procedures, the lack of a right of appeal, its use of forced confessions and its disregard of perjury. Whatever the truth of these claims there can be no doubt that the wrangling between the ecclesiastical and civil courts had a significant impact on the exercise of justice in the city. When, in October 1691, for example, the chief attorney of the papal nuncio was murdered, his killer walked free, in part due to the ‘fire it ignited between the secular court and the tribunal of the Nuncio’.150 There is no doubting that the Enlightenment in Naples, which emerged as one of the earliest centres of the new thinking about the role of law in society, was profoundly shaped by an anti-clericalism rooted in experience of the ways in which the Church was perceived to undermine civil society. ***

It was not simply that clerics were considered too worldly, but they also contributed to the culture of violence. Not only were church interiors places of asylum but any space over which the Church claimed jurisdiction, such as canonries, clerical residences, hospitals, rectories and monasteries, extending as far as thirty paces distant to include anything enclosed, such as cemeteries and outbuildings, were sacrosanct. In common with the rest of Europe, there had been attempts by Italian states to restrict the practice in the fifteenth century. But after the Council of Trent successive popes upheld the principle of immunity.151 In 1596, the archbishop of Milan did forbid those seeking refuge to carry weapons. However, access was difficult to police because 147 148 149 150 151

Ibid., I, p. 161. Ibid., I, pp. 163, 174. Ibid., I, p. 347. Ibid, I, p. 370. R. Ajello, Il Problema della Riforma giudiziaria e legislative nel regno di Napoli (Naples: Eugenio Jovene, 1961), pp. 24–37. For a full bibliography: D. Edigati, ‘Il ministro censurato: giustizia secolare e diritto d’asilo nella Firenze di Ferdinando II’, Annali di Storia di Firenze, 2 (2007), 115–49.

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Milanese churches could be accessed by subterranean passages.152 The right to asylum remained in force across of most of Italy into the eighteenth century – it was upheld in Milan in 1758. Immunity encouraged crime – Vincenzo d’Onofrio had even seen guns stashed under altars – but it also shaped the dispute process more systematically.153 In Bologna, for example, aristocratic violence was tempered by the ritual in which protagonists retreated to monasteries in order for negotiations to begin. Particular establishments were identified with particular families. In 1612, having killed Count Giacomo Pepoli in a duel, the Signore Zanchino shut himself in the Jesuit College of Santa Lucia, of which his mother was a benefactor.154 In Bologna the Pepoli used the complex of Santo Stefano. In 1725 Conte Fabio Pepoli retired there after an inconclusive duel with the Marchese Paleotti, who retired to San Giacomo.155 In 1626 the Congregazione dell’immunità was established to deal with the convoluted legal wrangles over immunity that arose between the Church and the secular authorities. Its negotiations were, however, dominated by political considerations, leading one critic to lament that while the ‘Sacred Congregation believed it was doing justice . . . it contributed in great part to the disorders that occur daily in this matter’.156 The Venetians, for example, were keen to demonstrate their independence from Rome. In 1621, the assassin Antonio Cattaneo was extracted from San Pietro Oliveto in Brescia after the monks had been threatened with the demolition of their monastery. He was refused a pardon and executed.157 The grand dukes of Tuscany were proud to be among the most respectful of the rights of the Church, and its officers were rarely censured for breaching clerical immunity.158 In the kingdom of Naples, in contrast, the censure of officers of the law for breaching asylum was common. In 1676 this extended to the governor of Capua, who was excommunicated for taking testimony from an offender he had extracted from a church.159 The recognition of the role played by asylum in vendetta can be seen from the response of the viceroy of Naples to the assassination of a leading aristocrat, Andrea Conclubet, marchese di Arena, in 1675. His killer, the marchese di San Giorgio, protested that he had been provoked and sought refuge in the monastery of San Severino. The monastery was not, however, sufficiently secure from attack, so the viceroy moved San Giorgio to a church within the city fortress. The asylum offered to San Giorgio, who was never convicted of the crime, was widely seen as politically 152 153 154 155 156

157 158 159

Perego, Huomini de mala vità, pp. 158–60. Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 30. Spaccini, Cronaca, III, p. 558. A[rchivio di]S[tato B[ologna], Archivio Pepoli, 893, fo. 43, 8 June 1725. C. Latina, Il privilegio dell’immunità: diritto d’asilo e giurisdizione nell’ordine giuridico dell’età moderna (Milan: Giuffrè, 2002), p. 164. Guerrini (ed.), Le cronache bresciane, IV, p. 142. Edigati, ‘Il ministro censurato’, 135. Onofrio, Giornali, IV, p. 11.

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motivated, since his victim, Conclubet, was a high-profile opponent of the Inquisition.160 Not all civic officials in Naples approved of the existence of separate rules for the Church and there were attempts to restrict asylum and the abuses it caused, as the case of Neapolitan patrician Don Gaspare Sersale shows. Sersale, accused of the murder of his mistress, took refuge in a church while the legal arguments over the jurisdiction of the case were debated. He was forcibly removed from his sanctuary by the secular courts, tried and executed on 3 November 1675. It was applauded by ordinary citizens heartily sick of aristocratic immunity. However, the Church responded to the breach of sanctuary by excommunicating the arresting officers.161 The frequent resort to asylum for murderers of all social classes continued.162 In July 1697 the authorities succeeded in killing two refugees in Naples, but one of these men could count himself unfortunate – he had been living in Santa Maria del Pianto for fifteen years!163 Killers would move from one sanctuary to another for better security.164 Others took refuge in Rome.165 The Church also exploited asylum in order to avoid washing its dirty linen in public. When a priest was murdered by his concubine’s family in 1690, she took refuge in a church, from where she was then transferred by ecclesiastical officials to a monastery, ostensibly for her own safety.166 Unscrupulous priests saw money to be made. A young man who had taken refuge at Santa Maria a Mar was ‘sold’ to the kinsmen of his victim for 1,200 ducats – he was allowed to confess before being stabbed to death.167 But some crimes could not be condoned. The archbishop of Naples refused to support a killer who had taken refuge in Santa Maria della Grazia. He had taken Communion the same morning with his victim, a traitorous betrayal of the symbol of peace and friendship.168 The case of Don Ramiro Ravaschiero is a good example of the ways in which the jurisdictional labyrinth contributed to the undermining of the rule of law in Naples. Don Ramiro was the prime suspect when, in August 1681, one his creditors washed up on the beach with his throat slit. Ravaschiero first took refuge in a church but then slipped out of the city dressed as a monk to the nearby monastery. The secular courts moved quickly, posting men outside and at the entrances to its subterranean passages to block his escape. They hesitated 160 161 162

163 164 165 166 167 168

Ibid., III, p. 244. Onofrio, Giornali, III, p. 311. Confuorto, Giornali, I, pp. 18, 60, 105, 161 173, 197, 235, 260, 265, 288, 303, 360, 701–2; II, pp. 163, 186. Ibid, II, p. 271. Ibid, I, pp. 308, 370. Ibid, I, p. 288. Ibid, I, p. 297. Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 255. Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 20.

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to enter because the archbishop had posted a handbill to the doors of the monastery claiming that Don Ramiro had benefit of clergy and threatening anyone who molested him with excommunication. Don Ramiro had a notorious reputation: in 1668 he had killed the prince of Castiglione for refusing the hand of his daughter with the words ‘that his coat of arms would never be quartered with those of a merchant’.169 But the Church was adamant that Don Ramiro was one of theirs and the civic constables were soon confronted by the papal summoner and his armed guards. Tensions between the rival forces of order mounted. The investigation ground to a halt as Don Ramiro’s well-connected family was able to make witnesses disappear. He died in custody in 1684 with the case still unresolved.170 Reform of the criminal justice system in the 1690s was met by significant opposition from a Church jealous of its privileges.171 ***

Rising rates of litigation and violence in the sixteenth century were signifiers of increased social conflict. In the Veneto this was manifested by rural notables using the law courts to defend the rights of rural communes against the pretensions of the landed nobility. Notables were also well armed and capable of deploying significant force to back up their rights. Bartolomeo Pasqualin, for example, silk merchant and leader of the commune of Malo, twenty kilometres north of Vicenza, organised his village to resist the oppression of a local aristocratic faction. But the murder of Pasqualin’s eldest son, a lawyer, in 1577, is an indication of both the threat he posed to the aristocrats and the limits of the law. Pasqualin was not free to pursue the killers. He was forced to formally renounce (rinuncia) his legal pursuit and sign a peace pact.172 Patrons could speed up justice or ensure that records got lost or destroyed. The podestà of Bergamo complained in 1619 that ‘the most important problem is that neither witnesses, nor victims dare depose the truth, for fear of their lives’.173 This was a common complaint in the cities of the Venetian Terraferma, where factional violence was endemic in the first half of the seventeenth century.174 At the end of the century intimidation of witnesses and officials was still routine in Bologna. In 1684 a judge was assassinated in front of the church of San Procolo for having the temerity to exile an aristocrat. 169 170 171

172

173 174

Ibid., I, pp. 71–5, 374. Ibid, I, pp. 70–7. S. Tabacchi, ‘Le riforme giudizarie nella Roma di fine seicento’, Roma Moderna e contemporanea, 5 (1997), 155–74. C. Povolo, L’uomo che pretendeva honore: Storia di Bortolomaio Pasqualin da Malo (1502–1591) (Venice: Marsilio, 2010). Ferraro, Family and public life in Brescia, pp. 150–1. G. Zanazzo, ‘Bravi e signorotti in Vicenza nei secoli XVI e XVII’, Odeo Olimpico, 6 (1966), 272.

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When an investigation was opened one of the witnesses was murdered by a gang of thirty bravi.175 Attempts to suborn judges were frequent. An anonymous memoir on the state of justice in the Papal States c.1600 argued that ‘the major reason for the clamour of the people and the disorder of this state is not having officers of justice with clean hands’.176 The constables (sbirri) charged with carrying out court orders were widely despised as low-born riff-raff. Suspicion of the sbirri was rooted in the experience of faction and their use to hunt down political enemies – Orazio Rasponi displayed the heads of the sbirri who came to arrest him in Ravenna in 1523.177 In Bologna aristocrats told the people that scorn for papal justice and resistance to its agents was a patriotic duty. They offered a shadow service of dispute settlement, patching up quarrels and negotiating compensation. Attempts to control aristocratic violence in Bologna in the third quarter of the seventeenth century resulted in a wave of attacks on papal officials, including the killing of a judge as he left Mass in 1652 and the murder of the provost marshal (bargello), who had overall responsibility for public order, when he left Easter Communion in 1673.178 Outright murder of the officers of the law was not confined to Bologna. Dottore Ruberto Bonsi, one of the principle men of the city of Florence, was murdered over a lawsuit in Florence in 1573.179 The palace of the podestà of Bassano was besieged in 1601 when he tried to make an arrest – he was expecting trouble, since two of his men had been killed the previous year.180 The civil procurator was murdered in broad daylight in Brescia in July 1608.181 In 1609 the marchese di Malaspina tried to assassinate the bargello of Modena, pursuing him into the cathedral where he had taken sanctuary, and a year later he killed a sbirro in Reggio.182 In 1653 Dottore Mantovani, podestà of Reggio, was shot in the head in the market square. The following year the podestà of the neighbouring county of Rolo was stabbed to death.183 In 1679 the bargello of Ferrara met the same fate.184 This violence partly reflects the embroilment of officials in vendettas, but it also reveals the widespread contempt for official justice. The problem of officialdom was not one of competence but of greed. The requirement that a surgeon’s report be attached to all complaints about crimes 175 176 177

178 179 180 181 182 183 184

Angelozzi and Casanova, La giustizia criminale a Bologna, pp. 34–6. Fosi, ‘Introduzione’, p. 24. C. Ricci (ed.), Cronache e documenti per la Storia Ravennate del Secolo XVI (Bologna, 1882), p. 53. Angelozzi and Casanova, Giustizia criminale, pp. 274, 340. Ricci, Cronaca, p. 48. Zanazzo, ‘Bravi e Signorotti’ (1966), p. 197. Spaccini, Cronaca, II, p. 362. Santi, Secchia Rapita, II, p. 80. British Library Add. MS 22346, fos. 63 and 67. A. Angelozzi and C. Casanova, La nobilità disciplinata: Violenze nobiliare, procedure di giustizia e scienza cavalleresca a Bologna nel XVII secolo (Bologna: CLUEB, 2003), p. 10.

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of blood was not unreasonable, except that the complainant would have to pay for this service. In Rome there were attempts in 1612 to reform a system which generated a paper mountain, hugely profiting notaries and clerks. They were suspected of encouraging secret denunciations in the hope of further profit.185 In Bologna the private deals offered by the aristocratic padroni were attractive precisely because of the rapaciousness of papal officials. Pardons were always available at the right price. The captain of the Bolognese sbirri enjoyed the right to elect one criminal to receive a pardon. It was a lucrative perk as the pardon was auctioned to the highest bidder. In 1705 the purchaser had to pay 660 scudi to have the sentence of banishment quashed.186 The Spanish crown’s insatiable demands for cash made the legal system in its Italian possessions particularly susceptible to exploitation, as more offices were put up for sale and new ones invented. Sbirri were known to charge for offering protection in other cities but in Naples this amounted to an organised racket.187 In 1651 a noblemen offered 500 ducats to the crown for pardoning the killing of a market vendor.188 Accusations could be made to appear or disappear for the right sum.189 ‘By such means’, wrote the disgusted Vincenzo d’Onofrio, himself a lawyer, ‘and with other bestial abuses, killers procure a pardon from the kin of the victim by means of powerful nobles and faction leaders who protect them . . . Everyone thinks it licit to do what he wants: those who know how to flee and negotiate can settle; those who are arrested have protectors.’190 The clerk of the criminal court was accused in 1677 of extorting sexual favours from female litigants.191 Some lawyers were notorious for their rapacity: Francesco Rocco ‘had the face of a Jew and the eyes of dragon’. But to be fair to the profession in Naples, it could be a hazardous job. In 1662 a legal practitioner was murdered after he won a case; in 1663 a dottore was killed inside the church of San Leonardo at Caia and the following year another was shot outside the Barnabite church; in 1678 another dottore was murdered in front of the Jesuit College for having the temerity to provide legal counsel to a defendant in a homicide trial. Even the city executioner, Antonio Sabatino, was prosecuted in 1651 for deliberately botching beheadings and making the poor victims suffer the agony of several blows. He had apparently been paid by the enemies of the condemned to increase their torment.192 The venality of the ecclesiastical courts was a staple of medieval satire. The peripatetic papal summoner was notorious for false accusations and his ability 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192

Fosi, ‘Introduzione’, p. 32. Angelozzi and Casanova, La giustizia criminale, p. 429. Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 262; IV, p. 155. The sum was refused, but the killer was, after all, only a bastard: Fuidoro, Successi, p. 178. Onofrio, Giornali, IV, p. 142. See also Spaccini, Cronaca di Modena, II, p. 353. Fuidoro, Successi, p. 179; Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 146. Onofrio, Giornali, IV, p. 148. Ibid., I, pp. 141, 162; Bulifon, Giornali, p. 217.

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to make valid accusations disappear. In late seventeenth-century Naples they collected the fines paid by shopkeepers to remain open on holy days.193 These men were armed and dangerous: in 1672 a summoner shot another ecclesiastical official in the church of Santa Caterina at Formello.194 There was a small army of protected ecclesiastical officials: in 1691 the Inquisition in Naples maintained 500 informants, most of whom were priests and monks, on a retainer of 6 scudi each.195 But corruption was not simply a matter of petty officials lining their pockets. Buenaventura d’Avalos, bishop of Nocera, ran a sophisticated smuggling operation and sold the proceeds from his shops. From his palazzo just outside the city gates of Naples he arranged ‘peaces and remissions’ in return for a fee, ‘giving himself at full pelt to mercenary judgements’.196 It was difficult for the local authorities to intervene because the operation was protected by a squad of armed heavies. Complaints about his use of violence were made to Rome in 1667. Instead of being reprimanded, he was promoted to titular archbishop of Lacedemonia in 1671.197 Another factor informing the logic of settlement was the cost of litigation. The cost of pursuing the murderer of a Neapolitan shopkeeper in 1679 was 1500 ducats – a skilled worker in the city was on less than 100 ducats a year. The case only got to court because the commercial community to which the victim belonged clubbed together to pay the expenses and bribes that oiled the wheels of justice.198 The syndicate claimed its money back in damages taken from the killer’s estate. But venality was not just a southern problem. In Florence Duke Francesco de’ Medici passed a law in 1576 that no ‘judge, doctor of law, secretary or courtiers’ was to take bribes ‘under pain of ducal disgrace’.199 This was a sop to complaints about the wealth accumulated by chancery clerks and ducal secretaries, notably Bartolomeo Concino, whose rise from obscurity was partly financed by the sale of pardons.200 In Modena partiality became a joke: Belmisere sells to the highest bidder; Scapinello only renders justice for supporters of the Oratory; Codebue is good, but his cases are never finished.201 The state’s venal policy can be seen in its abuse of firearms legislation. Offensive weapons and firearms were routinely banned, but it was possible to purchase exemptions. Unsurprisingly the laws were 193 194 195 196

197

198 199 200 201

Onofrio, Giornali, II, pp. 30–1. Ibid, III, p. 61. Bulifon, Giornali, p. 278. S. Stephen, ‘Forgiving Crimes in the Kingdom of Naples’, in Cummins and Kounine (eds.), Cultures of Conflict Resolution, p. 42. C. Alonso, Buenaventura d’Avalos (1608–1675): un obispo desconcertante (Rome: Analaecta Ausustiana, 1982). Onofrio, Giornali, IV, p. 243. Arditi, Diario, p. 134. www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/bartolomeo-concini_(Dizionario-Biografico). Spaccini, Cronaca, VI, p. 324.

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largely ignored. In Modena pistols were banned in 1612, but fake licences were available.202 In 1620 in Naples the viceroy quashed all convictions for the carrying of prohibited arms on the payment of 30 ducats.203 Following the 1647 Revolution there was inflation – one duke had to pay 6,000 ducats for his indiscretion.204 Distrust of the officers of the law encouraged omertà, the code of silence. Following the fatal killing of Giovanni Alammani in a swordfight in Florence in 1679 by his cousin Giovanni Carlo Rucellai, their accomplices and bystanders were tortured at the behest of the victim’s family. But they said nothing and the matter eventually settled ‘with little difficulty’. Their silence was explained by omertà: ‘others did not talk about it either, confirming the saying “that he is a dead man who talks of the dead”’.205 The evidence of omertà is widespread.206 This silencing of witnesses was particularly significant in Roman Law, since the inquisitorial process depended heavily on witness testimony to establish proof of guilt. The terror for witnesses was that they faced torture should their story not add up. This was the fate that befell the priest Don Guido Francesco, a witness to the murder of moneylender and savant Don Felice Salvinelli in Bologna in 1583. Don Guido had befriended the victim during soirées at the Palazzo Malvezzi, where Don Felice read out passages from Cicero and Terence.207 Don Guido was told to keep his mouth shut by the Malvezzi. His testimony was so garbled that the judges ordered his torture. Despite prolonged sessions he refused to divulge any information. He even confessed to the crime, which the judge dismissed as nonsense. There are other significant aspects to this case. First, Don Guido had access to legal counsel (probably paid for by his Malvezzi patrons). Second, the refusal of the Malvezzi to cooperate with the investigation was politically motivated. Although they were not under suspicion, they refused to have anything to do with courts they did not deem legitimate, a hostility they expected their followers to share. In a world where justice was a labyrinth, subject to delay, or sold at a price, the services of patrons (padroni) like the Malvezzi were in high demand. Villagers like Bartolomeo Pasqualin called upon the protection of urban patricians. He turned to his enemy’s enemy, the Porta faction in Vicenza. It was through their recommendation that he gained the ear of Venetian officials.208 While Soldoniero Strassoldo’s diary displays contempt for the 202 203 204 205 206

207

208

Ibid, III, pp. 39, 70. Diurnali di Scipione Guerra, p. 121. Fuidoro, Successi, p. 75. Bonazini, ‘Diario’, fos. 302, 29 July 1679. Angelozzi and Casanova, La nobilità disciplinata, pp. 205, 272; Molimenti, I banditi, p. 151; Onofrio: Giornali, I, p. 214. O. Mazzoni-Toselli, Cenno sull’antica storia del Foro criminale Bolognese (Bologna, 1835), pp. 151, 211. Povolo, L’uomo che pretendeva honore.

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capi of the local factions, it stresses their significance for obtaining justice.209 Those refused pardons were invariably those without patrons. Powerful patrons could fix even the most heinous crimes. Philip II pardoned the murderers of Niccolò Gallarati following the intercession of the bishop of Cuenca, the queen, the royal confessor and Archduke Charles of Austria, even though it had been committed in church.210 The bandit Fra Paolo, a former monk convicted of ‘countless assassinations’, was courted by Rome’s great and good. He went to work for the Medici, before getting a recall to Rome in 1644 through the sponsorship of the Barberini, who got him a papal pardon.211 The Barberini also protected the bishop of Nocera when complaints were made about his illegal activities in Naples. This was a reciprocal relationship for the Barberini, who could call on the bishop’s retainers in the event of a clash with their enemies in Rome.212 The battle over the issuing of pardons might pit patrons against each other. Count Pietro Avogadro was determined to save one bravo from the noose and battled for fourteen months in the Venetian courts, ‘spending lavishly to have him set free’.213 But he was up against the duke of Mantua, one of whose guards had been killed, and the bravo was hanged in 1622. In Florence a padrone conferred legal immunity. Despite orders of 1624 and 1690 the servants, commensals and retainers of princes, ministers, officials, judges and members of universities and academies were not required to appear in a civil or criminal court without the permission of their superior.214 In Naples the papal nuncio gave refuge in his palace to two sons who had avenged their father, the Nuncio’s tax collector.215 Even convicts made use of patrons. In 1620 Sellante Arducci, outlawed from Florence and condemned to death in Milan for murder, used contacts in Rome to get his sentence transmuted to life on the galleys at Civitavecchia, where ‘For two years not only has he not rowed, but also thanks to favour from those ministers, he is treated like a gentleman . . . as if he had not committed any offence at all.’216 ***

The use of the law was widely debated before the reforms of the Enlightenment. In 1609, for example, a public disputation was held in front of the duke of Ferrara on the proposition whether it was better for a prince to be ‘modest and 209 210 211

212 213 214 215 216

See Chapter 12. Politi, La società cremonese, p. 262. M. Baberito (ed.), Giacinto Gigli: Diario di Roma, 2 vols. (Rome: Colombo, 1994), I, p. 413. Alonso, Buenaventura d’Avalos, p. 96. Spaccini, Cronaca, IV, p. 139. Bonazini, ‘Diario’, II, p. 649. Onofrio, Giornali, p. 255. Fosi, ‘Introduzione’, p. 33.

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kind, or severe and just’.217 When the formal proceedings had finished the debate continued outside. Giovanni Spaccini, whose diary was full of concerns about the violence of the local nobility and the failure of the courts to deal with it, felt that ‘among us the prince who did not give justice was ruined, because not giving justice merely strengthened the arm of the nobility’. The debater who argued that the purpose of princely justice was to ensure the love of his nobility ‘scandalised everyone’ as full of ‘grandiose nonsense’. Spaccini was describing the tension of a legal system caught between peace and justice. State justice was often interpreted by the elites as a form of tyranny, in which denunciations were the product of vendetta and the courts were politically motivated. Judges and victims came under intense pressure to accept peace deals, which entailed gross injustice. Spaccini lamented in his diary the ways in which the pressures to make peace at any price turned justice into a ‘transaction’, but ‘the people . . . did not understand it thus, because they love justice and desired that it be administered for the public good, and not continual occasion given for similar acts of cowardice [poltronerie]’.218 But, since ruling without the nobility or the Church was inconceivable, an accommodation with elite violence on the one hand and ecclesiastical jurisdiction on the other was inevitable. The use of the law was therefore closely tied to political and social realities. In order to understand the very high rates of violence that we find in early modern Italy and how states managed to get these under a measure of control by the end of the seventeenth century we will need to explore the practice of vendetta and trace its trajectory from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

217 218

Spaccini, Cronaca, II, p. 364. Ibid, II, p. 117.

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2 The Politics of Vendetta

Visitors to Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries frequently referred to the violence they witnessed. According to the English traveller Sir John Reresby in 1654: They never forgive injuries, which if they cannot revenge themselves, they entail them upon their posterities. The manner of revenge is base and cowardly, usually taken upon advantage by their bravos, a sort of desperate criminals, entertained by gentlemen having feuds, that protect them from the law, and so have then at their devotion, to practise whatever they enjoin them upon their adversaries.1

In Padua he met a gentleman who had recently reconciled with his enemy. His mother importuned him to renounce the deal, telling him it was undignified to forgive an injury ‘and showing the bloody shirt worn by his dead father when killed, the more to incite his enmity’.2 Later, a Bolognese exiled to Florence told Reresby that he had been involved in the killing of six men in a single feud: five of them killed in a ‘rencounter’ in the street between gangs of ten or twelve ‘bravoes’. Vendetta, meaning revenge or punishment, was a commonly used term in the early modern period and widely viewed as legitimate. Fabio Monza started a journal in 1548 in order to account for the legal expenses involved in pursuing his cousin’s killers. These writs were necessary insofar as they legally permitted him to ‘hunt them down and do vendetta (far vendetta)’.3 Soldoniero di Strassoldo considered he was conducting an ‘honourable vendetta’ because his use of force was backed up by legal sanction.4 Vendetta was open to all social classes, but the nobility enjoyed particularly wide latitude. ‘Take some men and take your revenge’, the Marchesa Bevilacqua tells one of her servants in 1604, legitimising self-help by social inferiors.5 Vendetta was 1

2 3

4 5

A. Ivatt (ed.), The Memoir and Travels of Sir John Reresby, Bart (London: Keegan Paul, 1904), p. 90. Ibid., p. 91. F. Lomastro (ed.), I ‘zornali’ di Fabio Monza nella Vicenza di Palladio, 2 vols. (Rome: Viella, 2009), p. lx. Degani (ed.), Cronaca, p. 50. Spaccini, Cronaca, II, p. 122.

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a condition of enmity. A 1662 report to the Pope described the Ghisilieri– Isolani feud as ‘a reciprocal vendetta due to old enmity’.6 Enemies were usually personal, but they might extend to kinship groups or members of an opposing faction. The 1551 peace deal between the Bellencini and Fontana involved guarantees for all the family up to the fourth degree of kinship.7 A Tuscan agent reported in 1642 that in the kingdom of Naples ‘the custom holds that relatives to the fourth degree are obliged to defend their relatives; for this, the cavaliers are divided in to many factions . . . following their kinships’.8 Francesco Thiene was murdered by the Ghellini and twenty-four of their bravi in 1647, even though ‘he had always declared himself to claim no part in the vendetta of his kinsmen’.9 The idea of collective responsibility was reinforced by lords and the Church since whole kindreds or communities might be required to subscribe to a peace deal. Vendetta’s contribution to Italy’s high homicide rate is borne out by the statistics. During Reresby’s stay in Padua there were fifty homicides (a rate of 43 per 100,000).10 Oscar di Simplicio’s analysis of the Sienese data (Table 2.1) demonstrates the extent to which the social elite was disproportionately responsible for the body count.11 There were only 264 noble families in the Table 2.1 Noble violence in Siena, 1603–1772 120 100 80 60 40 20

16 0

3– 16 12 13 – 16 22 23 – 16 32 33 – 16 42 43 – 16 52 53 – 16 62 63 – 16 72 73 – 16 82 83 – 16 93 92 –1 7 17 02 03 – 17 12 13 – 17 22 23 – 17 32 33 – 17 42 43 – 17 52 53 – 17 62 63 –7 2

0

Acts of Violence

6 7 8 9 10

11

Homicides

Angelozzi and Casanova, La nobilità disciplinata, p. 54. Borghi, Lodi and Ferrari Moreni, Cronaca, XI, p. 314. Cummins, ‘Enmity and Peace-Making’, p. 126. Ghellini, ‘Episodi’, 99. S. Carroll and U. Cecchinato, ‘Violence and Sacred Space in Early Modern Venice’, Acta Histriae, 27 (2019), 2–3. O. Simplicio, ‘Sulla nobilità e il crimine a Siena’, in Ortalli (ed.), Bande Armate, pp. 310–13.

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city in the early seventeenth century in a population of about 19,000. The apparent fall in noble violence over the seventeenth century needs to be placed in the context of significant population decline following the great plague of 1628–31, which may have carried away as many as one-third of the inhabitants. In fact, per capita rates of violence peaked in the mid-seventeenth century. Elite violence in Siena only ceased to be a problem in the eighteenth century. Before 1630, the tiny elite was committing on average two homicides every year and in the following fifty years one homicide per year. Although the social elite were certainly over-represented in the figures, we should not wish to distinguish too clearly between elite and popular violence because much of the violence was committed by those protected by the elite when serving writs and collecting debts. In sixteenth-century Rome, for example, one-fifth of all acts of violence were committed by public officials or liveried servants.12 Table 2.2 shows that violence among the Sienese population as a whole peaked in the third quarter of the seventeenth century and did not decline until the eighteenth century – we can be sure that many of the commoners were acting on behalf of their masters. Bologna’s rich archives have permitted Colin Rose to compute the homicide rate with precision. He shows how elite violence impacted Bolognese society as a whole. Bologna’s mid-seventeenth-century homicide rate of 106 is indicative of Table 2.2 Crimes of violence by social group in Siena, 1603–1772 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50

3– 92 93 –1 70 2 17 03 –1 2 17 13 –2 2 17 23 –3 2 17 33 –4 2 17 43 –5 2 17 53 –6 2 17 63 –7 2

3– 82

16

16 8

3– 72

16 7

3– 62

16 6

3– 52

16 5

3– 42

16 4

3– 32

16 3

3– 22

16 2

16 1

16 0

3– 12

0

Commoners

12

Nobles

P. Blastenbrei, Kriminalität in Rom, 1560–1585 (Rome: Bibliothek des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom, 1995), p. 90.

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a civil war situation.13 The impact of vendetta on the micro-level can be seen from the small community of Montefortino in the Marche: a single murder in the mid-seventeenth century led to a further twenty-seven related killings in only two years.14 In 1620 the inhabitants of the barony of Novi in Campania, which comprised thirty-nine villages, complained about the 400 homicides committed over the past four years. These extraordinary levels of violence are not explained by criminality. Rather they point to politicised factions operating at village level.15 Given its contribution to the high levels of violence that characterise sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, vendetta has received surprisingly little attention from early modernists. This neglect is partly due to the tendency to see vendettas in terms of the modern dictionary definition as interminable and bloody feuds. As Andrea Zorzi and others have demonstrated this was rarely the case in the late middle ages. Vendetta was not opposed to the state or the law, because it was closely associated with justice. The process of getting even did not require the spilling of blood: an injury could be satisfied in bloodless ways and medieval statutes progressively sought to deny or restrict self-help.16 The elaboration of more punitive courts institutionalised the system of compensation for an injury. Vendetta was a process of conflict resolution in which the state, Church and community brought significant pressure to bear on the parties to renounce enmity and seek peace. In the 1430s Leon Battista Alberti preached caution: ‘Let us conduct our enmities as though we might one day cease to be odious and harmful to each other.’17 It was only in the sixteenth century that Italians began to gain a reputation among other Europeans as stereotypically prone to revenge. From midcentury Italians too recognised that the practice had got out of hand and there was a search for a solution. The debate gave birth to the scienza cavalleresca, the science of honour, which established the code of practice governing gentlemanly disputes. With few exceptions, the Professors of the scienza taught that vendetta was both forbidden in law and unchristian. However, they also agreed that honour required defending and set out to show how this could be done lawfully and with a clear conscience. They created an alternative lexicon, such as the term risentimento, which Florio’s 1611 dictionary rendered into English as ‘a show or affect of some wrong received or revenge for it’, and debito, ‘a lack of respect or honour’, which required repairing. They listed, in minute detail, all the cases of just risentimenti and debiti and the precise 13

14 15

16 17

C. Rose, ‘Homicide in North Italy’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2016, p.152. Forclaz, Borghese, p. 158. P. Ebner, Storia di un feudo del Mezzogiorno: la baronia di Novi (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1973), p. 177. Zorzi, ‘Judicial System’. L. Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence: A Translation by Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), p. 301.

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rules for paying someone back in kind. Critics saw through this as a cover for vendetta. The Professors made revenge permissible: ‘Risentimento by immediate riposte with acts, words or deeds for an unjust offence or insult received is not only licit but is proper for a man of honour.’18 Anyone failing to wipe away the stain of dishonour was ‘base’ and ‘timid’, a goffo.19 The new language was, jeered one critic, ‘a weapon created by the savants to slay an insult’.20 The purpose of inventing a new lexicon for disputes was that vendetta had begun to assume its modern negative sense of a protracted and bloody feud. The traveller Robert Dallington considered that enmity might endure for ‘seven yeares’, during which an enemy ‘will take you at the advantage, or else doe it by some others, whom he will hire for the purpose’.21 Vendettas might be passed down the generations. The struggle of the Boschetti family to assert their rights at San Cesario near Modena created tensions with other families, whose violent consequences can be tracked from the late fifteenth century to the 1620s.22 The decade-long factional violence that disrupted life in Castelnuovo ne’ Monti near Reggio was described as a ‘civil war’ in 1637.23 The Marchese Serra described his neighbour in 1706: ‘The prince of Cariati is my hereditary enemy for the past 90 years due to border disputes which always beget very bad consequences.’24 The marchese would have been reminded of this regularly since his brother had lost his front teeth in one of these border skirmishes thirty years previously.25 It was in the mutual interest of the family to stick together in a hostile world. But we should be wary of assuming that vendetta is the product of a ‘clan’ mentality since family solidarity was often at odds with self-interest. Sibling rivalries, generational differences and inheritance disputes did not make for a united front, and there are plenty of examples of feuds between competing groups of cousins and in-laws. Romeo and Juliet was based on true events in Friuli 1509–17, where the tribulations suffered by the lovers were a consequence of the vendetta between rival branches of the Savorgnan family.26 In Modena, Marco Antonio Pazzani was shot at in 1608

18

19 20 21

22 23

24 25 26

G. Grimaldi, Nuova asta d’achille a sopressione del Duello, e della vendetta, per ridurre a pace, ed aggiustamento ogni querela, in via cavaleresca (Bologna, 1693), p. 155. C. Baldi, Delle mentite et offese di parole come possino accomodarsi (Bologna, 1623), p. 62. S. Maffei, Della scienza chiamata cavalleresca (Rome, 1710), p. 39. R. Dallington, A survey of the great dukes state of Tuscany In the yeare of our Lord 1596 (1605), p. 65. Chambers and Dean, Clean Hands, pp. 160–5; Spaccini, Cronaca, II, p. 4; V, p. 527. M. Cattini and M. Romani, ‘Tra faida familiare e rivolta politica: banditi e banditismo nella Montagna Estense (sec. XVII)’, in Ortalli (ed.), Bande Armate, p. 60. Covino (ed.), Baroni, p. 132. Onofrio, Giornali, III, p. 187. C. Clough. ‘Love and War in the Veneto: Luigi da Porto and the True Story of Giulietta e Romeo’, in D. Chambers, C. Clough and M. Mallett (eds.), War, Culture and Society in Renaissance Venice (London: Hambledon, 1993), p. 122.

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for ‘being suspected of having spoken with [his cousin’s] wife, Virginia Rangoni’ without permission.27 Faction evokes ideas of disorder, conspiracy and violence. But this is not necessarily the case, as the modern political concept of a ‘loyal opposition’ demonstrates. In late medieval Italy faction was the dominant mode of political organisation and it often played an institutional role in government. Since allegiances were often fluid and multi-layered the possibility of negotiations and compromise was always present. Good government and a sound constitution balanced the factions.28 This became much more difficult after 1500. It was the violence unleashed by civil war that changed the nature of faction: factional identities were henceforth forged in blood. Weak regimes attempted to impose their authority by criminalising one faction, turning complex mutual ties into binary friend–enemy relationships. They created pools of disgruntled exiles and gangs of bandits with nothing to lose. The Italian Wars not only unleashed mass violence and regime change on a scale not experienced in the late Middle Ages but also led to the collapse of traditional political loyalties, which had brought a measure of stability. As one local chronicler put it in 1525, ‘the many homicide cases that succeed one after another were not due to the Guelf and Ghibelline factions, but because a continual rancour had been cultivated among both nobles and the people . . . Cases of treasonous assassination became frequent . . . more individuals united to execute private vendettas.’29 Old allegiances, either pro-papal (Guelf) or pro-imperial (Ghibelline), fractured into a host of competing private and public causes. Violence was also exacerbated by the state. Assassinations and executions for reason of state became a matter of policy. Aristocrats took their cue and dispensed their own justice accordingly. The explosion of duelling demonstrates how the traditional vendetta became deadlier. The remainder of the chapter explores the transformation of vendetta after 1500 and argues for the long-term impact of Italy’s wars on social and political relations. This is significant because it is still common to consider the century following the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 as a period of tranquillity. The Pax Hispanica we are told brought order and stability to the peninsula, permitting states to domesticate aristocrats. On the contrary, I will argue that the relatively high levels of violence that characterised Italy in the immediate post-war decades demonstrate the shadow that civil conflict cast on everyday social relations. Around 1600 there was success in some regions in getting the 27 28

29

Spaccini, Cronaca, II, p. 344; IV, p. 341. M. Gentile, ‘Factions and parties: problems and perspectives’, in Andrea Gamberini and Isabella Lazzarini (eds.), The Italian Renaissance State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 304–22. F. Miari, Cronache Bellunesi (Belluno, 1865), pp. 109–10.

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problem of violence under control. Even so, in many regions rates of violence remained stubbornly high. The return of war and factional conflict across the peninsula from the 1620s, which peaked in a mid-century cycle of violence that can only be described as local civil wars, marked an end to the stability. The history of these hitherto hidden conflicts is yet to be fully written. But, as the succeeding chapters demonstrate, their existence is significant for understanding the course of Italian history more broadly. ***

The Italian Wars refer to the eight wars that occurred in the peninsula between 1494 and 1559. The wars following the second French invasion of 1509 were different in character from the more limited struggles that characterised Italian politics in the fifteenth century. The campaigns were not only on a bigger scale but the fighting was more vicious. A new feature of Renaissance warfare was the manner in which civilians were deliberately targeted in the fighting.30 The Italian Wars were great civil wars, which divided cities, communities and families, ensuring that feuds continued even when military operations ceased. In 1534, a year of peace, there was a ‘great war’ between the Tanari and the Montecuccoli families which resulted in several deaths and the burning of mills and houses.31 Many of the new regimes that took power were insecure and enforced their authority by liquidating enemies. In many respects this was a development of fifteenth-century practice. The secret deliberations of the Venetian Council of Ten reveal twenty-seven approvals for the assassination of enemies, mainly by poisoning, between 1415 and 1495. But the effect of the Italian Wars can be seen in the approval of forty-four assassinations between 1504 and 1596, and the list is not exhaustive.32 The Pazzi conspiracy against the Medici regime and its bloody response to the failed coup marks something of a watershed. Before then exile had been the most commonly used security mechanism. All Florentine governments after 1478, whether Medicean or Republican, executed perceived or actual opponents. Between 1480 and 1560, sixty-two men from the Florentine officeholding class were executed for political crimes. There was a significant escalation in this policy after 1530, when forty-two of the executions took place, reflecting the manner in which Alessandro de’ Medici used the judicial system to get rid of his Republican enemies.33 The quest for security, however, invited charges of tyranny and fired the cause of political liberty. Alessandro was assassinated in 1537 by his cousin, who was in turn ruthlessly tracked down by professional killers in Medici pay. Assassination became normalised. 30 31 32

33

Bowd, Renaissance Mass Murder. Borghi, Lodi and Ferrari Moreni, Cronaca, V, p. 361. V. Lamansky, ‘L’Assassinat politique à Venise du XVe au XVIIIe siècle’, Revue historique, 20 (1882), 105–20. N. Scott Baker, ‘For Reasons of State: Political Executions, Republicanism, and the Medici in Florence, 1480–1560’, Renaissance Quarterly, 62 (2009), 444–78.

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Emperor Charles V resorted to it on several occasions.34 Assassins were also available for private hire. The French traveller and lexicographer Henri Estienne recorded the process of change – the word ‘assassination’ was not one he had encountered before he arrived in Italy in the 1550s.35 The atrocity that occurred in Udine in 1511 is the best-studied example of the local impact of war.36 On Shrove Tuesday Antonio Savorgnan directed his militia, ostensibly raised to defend the city against the imperialists, to brutally massacre his enemies. This event triggered the largest peasant and popular insurrection in Renaissance Italy. The violence was rooted in fifteenth-century politics, which pitted the pro-Venetian faction led by Savorgnan, who enjoyed popular support in Udine and in the countryside, against a federation of noble families, who were partisans of Friulian liberties. As for the previous eighty years Venice had managed the conflict and violence had been low level, the events of 1511 represent a caesura. The massacre left a long trail of blood in the Friuli, whose repercussions, in the form of vendetta violence, were still being felt in the early seventeenth century.37 The bloody carnival of 1511 was a uniquely dramatic event. But the tit-fortat killings, duels and assassinations it unleashed are indicative of the pattern elsewhere. War, regime change and the struggle for public office turned vendetta bloody. The Este, for example, tried to retake the city of Rovigo, lost to Venice in 1484, in 1509. Over the next few years it changed hands five times. Rovigo was sacked by the Spanish in 1514. Although peace was restored in the city in 1517, the legacy of violence continued. Bonaventura Casalini recorded in his diary his experience of facing ‘the mortal enmity of many citizens’.38 His family sought redress in the Venetian courts for the ransoming of his brothers following the sack of 1514. But they were also prepared to back up claims for compensation with force and in 1524 they killed one of the hostage-takers. A peace deal was made in 1533. Papal territorial expansion in the Emilia-Romagna overturned the balance of power between the traditional factions – the violence that ensued claimed forty victims in Forli alone in 1522.39 At Ravenna the expulsion of the Venetians in 1509 and its sack by the French in 1512 ‘created’, a later historian 34

35

36

37

38 39

S. Dall’Aglio, L’assassino del duca. Esilio e morte di Lorenzino de’ Medici (Florence: Olschki, 2011). H. Estienne, L’introduction au traité de la conformité des merveilles anciennes avec les modernes (Strasbourg, 1567), p. 197. E. Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Factions and Vendetta in the Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). F. Bianco, ‘Mihi Vindictam: Aristocratic Clans and Rural Communities in a Feud in Friuli in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries’, in Dean and Lowe (eds.), Crime, Society and the Law, p. 273. A. Lazarri (ed.), La cronaca domestica di Bonaventura Casalini (Faenza, 1941), p. 129. P. Pasolini (ed.), Memorie Storiche della famiglia Rasponi (Imola, 1876), p. 47.

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recalled, ‘a class of impious scoundrels, who had no revulsion at committing all sorts of suffering and roguery, raping women, robbing churches, encountering gentlemen in the street and other honest persons, threatening to kill them, extorting money, corn and wine . . . such that many citizens were forced to abandon their houses and go into exile’.40 The chronicle of Agostino Ruboli portrayed rape not as an unfortunate by-product of war but as a targeted instrument in vendetta.41 In this climate, legal judgments were seen as politically motivated – in July 1522 the city courts were stormed while in session by the anti-papal faction and anyone suspected of siding with the opposition murdered. Despite the efforts of the governor, Giuccardini, the fighting continued into the 1530s. Paul III outlawed the use of the terms ‘Guelf’ and ‘Ghibelline’ in 1536. But this did not stop several murders and an attempt to assassinate the leading papal officials in the Basilica Orsiana in Ravenna in May 1537. The pope made further attempts to impose peace, but these were punctuated by frequent killings. In 1555 Paul IV ordered the protagonists to disarm and pay surety and established a peace commission, the ‘novanta Pacifici’, to police the peace. Although papal rule was established and the ‘Guelf’ and ‘Ghibelline’ parties dissolved, the violence did not stop. The region gained a reputation for disorder. Bloody vendettas continued after the military campaigns were over. The Rasponi family, for example, maintained a force of bandits, which it deployed against its enemies in the 1560s and 1570s. When Pope Pius V visited Ravenna in 1569, Galeotto di Rasponi, ‘the terrible’, used the occasion to publicise his hostility to papal rule, carrying out an assassination in the city’s main square by four men dressed as priests.42 In 1576 the family was outlawed for breaking into a house in the city and murdering Francesco Diedi, his wife and mother, as well as his brother, a canon, while he was celebrating Mass. In 1590 they were pardoned, but this did not put a stop to the violence. At the end of the sixteenth century much of rural Romagna was dominated by feuds, which were referred to as ‘enmities’ or ‘old hatreds’. Struggles over local office were conducted by loose coalitions that had little to do with the traditional factions. Webs of allegiance were complex, with local elites looking to the cities for allies and prone to the oscillations of city politics.43 Modena, a city controlled by the Este since 1288, became a site for vendettas between families during its occupation by the pope between 1511 and 1526, a period recalled as the parzialità, which included fighting in the streets and the cathedral, politicised executions and early evidence of the fashion for 40 41 42 43

Ricci (ed.), Cronache, p. x. Ibid., pp. xxii–iv. Ibid., p. 144. R. Comaschi, ‘Strategie familiari, potere locale e banditi in una comunità del contado Bolognese del XVI secolo’, in Ortalli (ed.), Bande Armate, pp. 225–32.

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duelling.44 From 1534 Duke Alfonso took personal charge of peacemaking initiatives. But the limits of his authority can be gleaned by the fact that several of the forty-three homicides recorded in the city chronicle between 1541 and 1547 were committed during truces brokered by the duke.45 The dynamic nature of faction made peacemaking difficult. Allegiances were constantly evolving, fracturing and realigning according to circumstance. Families were divided among themselves. And the picture was complicated by accusations of heresy: Modena became a significant centre of heterodox belief and denunciations were perceived to be motivated by private concerns. The problem in the countryside was even worse. ‘Brave’ Rigo Cimisello, a judge, fought a private war against the Savini family for control of the benefice of Sant’Egidio at Cavezzo, thirty kilometres north of Modena. ‘He always pursued [them] in every place where they were and killed them.’46 This conflict escalated from kidnapping and distraint under cover of legal writs to raids deep into Venetian and Mantuan territory in which thirteen members of the Savini faction were killed.47 Worse was to follow when a ‘war’ broke out between the Bellencini and the Fontana, forcing other Modenese families to take sides. Once again, the animosity had little to do with traditional political loyalties. It was rooted, as one chronicler put it, simply in ‘hatred’.48 The bloodletting began with the shooting of Annibale Bellencini in 1547 and a riposte that saw the assassination of Dottore Giambattista Codebò, during vespers in the church of San Pietro. Duke Alfonso imposed a peace, making the heads of eight families post surety for their good behaviour. On 10 August 1559, however, a skirmish between them resulted in five casualties.49 On 9 June 1562 Lanfranco Fontana unleashed his retort, dispatching couriers with packages made in Germany for the Bellencini family in Modena, Reggio, Parma and Florence. These were sixteenth-century parcel bombs which exploded on opening, killing nine Bellencini. This horrific event finally enabled Duke Alfonso to make a comprehensive peace, ‘and not only those named by name but also their children, nephews, affines, cognates, and agnates to the fourth degree as comprehended by canon law, including bastards – acknowledged and 44

45

46 47 48

49

A. Todesco, Annali della Città di Modena (1501–1547), ed. R. Bussi and R. Montagnani (Modena: Panini, 1979). A. Madden, ‘Vendetta Politics and State Formation in Early Modern Modena: A Case Study of the Bellencini and Fontana Vendetta, 1547-1562’, unpublished PhD thesis Emory University, 2011, chapter 4. Borghi, Lodi and Ferrari Moreni, Cronaca, VII, p. 330. Ibid., V, p. 161; VI, pp. 116, 341. Ibid., XI, pp. 32–67; A. Madden, ‘“Una causa civile”: Vendetta Violence and Governing Elites in Early Modern Modena’, in J. Davies (ed.), Aspects of Violence in Renaissance Europe (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 205–23. Ricci (ed.), Cronaca, p. 34.

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unacknowledged . . . those who live within the residence and those who serve within the residence . . . as well as their heirs and future successors for fifteen generations’.50 The city was becalmed for a generation. Brescia, Bergamo and Crema were characterised in the early sixteenth century by what Enrico Valseriati calls a ‘climate of terror’.51 Pro- and antiVenetian factions had long dominated politics in the region. But serious violence broke out only after Brescia’s sack by the French in 1512 and the liberal use of exile by the Venetians. Even nuns and women became victims of the political violence. Families were divided. In 1528 Antonio Martinengo di Padernello was murdered in his palace in Brescia at the instigation of his cousins the Martinengo della Montella. In 1533 Antonio’s son Girolamo had his revenge in a mini-battle involving fifty men fought outside the Church of San Francesco. Far from damaging Girolamo’s reputation, he went on to have a distinguished military career in Venetian service. The feud was brought to a close by his 1552 marriage to a della Motella cousin.52 By this date medieval factional groupings in Venetian Lombardy had been thoroughly confused and replaced by loose groupings of superficially pro-imperialist and pro-Venetian families. But just as significant in forging group identity was the fight for control of public office. Bergamo was on the frontier of the fighting – it was occupied by the French (twice), by Habsburg forces (seven times) and lastly by the Venetians – which divided it into hostile factions.53 The pro-Venetian Albani denounced their enemies to the Inquisition. In 1550 the inquisitor was attacked and prisoners released. In 1556 the Venetian podestà reported that a ‘little war’ between the Brembati and the Albani, had broken out. He forced them to make peace, but the omens were not favourable and they continued to refuse to greet each other. In October 1560, Giovanni Battista Brembati was attacked. Francesco Albani was banished for two years, but the Brembati considered this inadequate and they put out a contract on Francesco’s head. The authorities ordered the arrest of Giovanni Battista Brembati, who was forced to flee with a price of 3,000 lire on his head. With Giovanni Battista beyond their reach, the Albani targeted his brother, Achille. Following a peace deal, Achille agreed to hear Mass with his enemies on Thursday 1 April 1563 at Santa Maria Maggiore. As the priest raised the consecrated host, there was the sound of gunfire and he was brutally cut down as he tried to escape. There are lessons to be learned from the case study of Bergamo. First, foreign involvement made it difficult for the Venetians to prevent violence 50 51

52

53

Madden, ‘Vendetta Politics’, footnote 116. Tra Venezia e l’Impero: dissenso e conflitto politico a Brescia nell’età di Carlo V (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2016). P. Guerrini, Una celebre famiglia lombarda: i conti di Martinengo: studi e ricerche genealogiche (Brescia: Moretti, 1930). B. Belotti, ‘Una sacrilega faida bergamasca del Cinquecento’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, 59 (1932), 1–109.

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escalating. Despite the accusations of heresy, the Brembati family was supported by Spain and Giovanni Battista found refuge in Milan. Following the cathedral assassination, the Venetians came under pressure from their French allies to pardon the Albani. Unable to obtain redress in the courts, the Brembati hunted down lesser members of the gang using paid assassins. The Venetians responded by promising a pardon to any of Giovanni Battista Brembati’s servants who killed their exiled master in Milan. The second notable feature of this vendetta is that both families were highly educated – Giovanni Girolamo Albani spent his time in exile composing Latin poetry. The violence was not the product of an absence of civilised manners; rather it was a consequence of political relationships. Third, elite politics had serious consequences for all the inhabitants of Bergamo. Not a day passed without an incident. A frank report stated in 1567: ‘I speak not of encounters but of uprisings such is the great number of people who belong to one or other faction.’54 It was only in May 1568 that kisses of peace were publicly exchanged and only in 1580 when all the pardoned exiles were permitted to return home. The violence caused by the collapse of the political equilibrium in Venetian Lombardy was common to the rest of the Terraferma. At Belluno (under Venetian suzerainty since 1404) a new constitution had been drawn up in 1424 in order to balance the old factions. This was overturned in 1511 when political suspects were hanged from the balcony of the municipal palace: Thus in this century and in the next there were abundant [divisions] between citizens . . . in the chronicle of Matteo Carrera many homicide cases follow one after another, not as a result of the Guelf and Ghibelline factions, but because among the nobility and people and there was continual rancour . . . Cases of treasonous assassination either by a lord or a subject were frequent. Individuals united to pursue private vendetta.55

The climate of terror gripped Vicenza, which was occupied by the imperialists between 1509 and 1516, generating the formation of two factions, the Porta and the Capra, one ostensibly ‘imperial’, the other ‘Venetian’. In fact, these were loose federations for mutual protection and control of office. It made the violence difficult to control because individuals had diverse and often competing interests. One might be summoned to approve of actions that one had no hand in. Religion was another factor contributing to the complexity of political relationships since Vicenza was one of the most important centres of Protestantism in Italy. Both factions were infected with heresy and allegiances did not coalesce along confessional lines. By 1531 the Venetian governor reported that ‘the whole city is in the clearest peril of coming to arms’.56 Efforts to pacify the situation were undermined by the fact that the factions contributed significantly to the defence of the 54 55 56

Ibid., p. 81. Miari (ed.), Cronache, pp. 109–10. Zanazzo, ‘Bravi e signorotti’, 5 (1964), 115.

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Venetian empire and punitive sanctions ran the risk of driving condottiere into foreign service. As a result, the violence escalated in the 1540s. In 1548 a gang led by Galeazzo da Roma broke into the Valmarana palace, killing three brothers and two of their servants.57 They then went to the Monza palace, where they killed Dottore Giovanbattista Monza before fleeing the city. The murders were the result of a lawsuit following the breakdown of a marriage proposal. Da Roma had a price of 2,000 ducats put on his head, but this was largely symbolic because he was never brought to justice. As a member of the Porta faction, he had many sympathisers both in Vicenza and in Venice: subscribers paid 50 ducats each towards his legal fees and his confiscated property was transferred to kinsmen. Vicenza was still plagued by factional violence in the decades around 1600.58 In January 1582, for instance, a series of encounters between them involved no fewer than eighty men and the trouble spread to the countryside.59 The city’s reputation became proverbial across Europe: ‘Vicentini, it was said, are either rogues or murderers.’60 Vendetta was not confined to the north-east. It was also common across all social groups in fifteenth-century Perugia. But as Christopher Black has shown matters got considerably worse after 1500 as the region was drawn into the conflict.61 In November 1534 exiles returned to the city on the death of Pope Clement VII, murdering enemies and looting their property. The papal vice-legate was killed and his palace burned, as well as that of the bishop; ‘nothing had ever been seen or talked about like this’, recorded one eyewitness.62 In Tuscany the problem was associated with the attempt of the Medici to impose their rule after 1527. Soon after the dismemberment and incorporation of the Sienese Republic into the Medici territories in 1555, an inhabitant explained to Henri Estienne that ‘Siena was no longer Siena and that God’s vengeance would now reign.’ Prompted to explain what this meant, he went on: ‘kindred covered in each other’s blood . . . for quarrels which arise from nothing’. Estienne was convinced that killings ‘were worse than in the days of the Guelfs and Ghibellines both for that same quarrel and for other divisions’, which resulted in the custom of dipping one’s hand in the blood of those one had killed to mark one’s face and show one’s companions.63 57

58 59 60

61

62

63

E. Niccolini, 3 luglio 1548: Mezzogiorno di sangue a Vicenza (Vicenza: Accademia Olimpica, 1985). Povolo, L’uomo che pretendeva l’onore, p. 118. Zanazzo, ‘Bravi e signorotti’, 5 (1964), 132. Herzog August der Jüngere von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, ‘Ephemerides. Sive Diarium (1594–1635)’, fo. 10v: http://selbstzeugnisse.hab.de/edition/diarium/1598. ‘The Baglioni as Tyrants of Perugia, 1488–1540’, English Historical Review, 85 (1970), 245–81. F. Bonaini (ed.), ‘Ricordi della città di Perugia dal 1527 al 1550 di Cesare di Giovannello Bontempi’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 16 (1851), 257. Estienne, L’introduction, p. 211.

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This was not hyperbole. In several respects the Italian Wars were the first modern civil war. The print revolution, for instance, made for a more intense and combustible public sphere of contestation. Libels and broadsheets denouncing public and private enemies were circulated and posted. Florio translates the word cartello (cartel), the formal challenge to a duel, as ‘writ of defiance’, suggesting a strong legal aspect to this public demonstration of enmity. It was during the Italian Wars that the modern duel to the death, fought without protective armour and arbiters to see fair play, first became widespread. The duelling craze grew directly out of vendetta and was fed by the boom in litigation. A duellist observed in the 1540s that most of the fights he was involved in were the result of land purchases and transfers, debts and contested peace pacts. In his Discorso of 1555 Varchi lamented the way in which it spread down the social scale so that even ordinary soldiers now fought without protection in a show of ‘false courage’.64 ***

The establishment of peace commissions in the Papal States was widely copied. At Rovigo on Good Friday 1559 a large crowd was present to witness an end to all ‘disputes, injuries and enmities’ and the pledge of 2,000 ducats by both of the city’s factions not to break the peace.65 In Belluno, three provveditori alla pace were created in 1565. But one reason why vendettas did not cease with the end of the military campaigns was that many princes used extrajudicial terror as a weapon of their rule. In Tuscany the Medici continued to assassinate and execute political opponents into the 1570s, employing hitmen, harbouring bandits and showing indulgence to the violence used by their aristocratic supporters. The effect was to legitimise vendetta. In the eighteenth months following the death of Cosimo I in 1574, 186 serious assaults were recorded in the city, including 72 which resulted in death, equating to a homicide rate of 77 per 100,000. In one month alone (February 1581) there were sixty woundings and murders.66 One opponent of the Medici recorded that the city was full of killers: ‘one did not hear of a murder that was not the responsibility of the nobles’.67 Florence became a magnet for exiles from the Papal States. Bolognese gangs prepared for the future liberation of their city by fighting with the locals and a law had to be issued in 1569 against ‘getting involved in the encounters of others, or sending cartels . . . or forming gangs (quadriglie), or aiding and abetting encounters’.68 Members of the Orsini family who claimed refuge in the city also proved difficult to control – they and their opponents were responsible for a spate of murders.69 It created an 64 65 66 67 68 69

Paoli, ‘I Medici arbitri d’onore’, pp. 143, 160–4 G. Campo, Diario, 1560–1576, ed. S. Malavasi (Rovigo: Minelliana, 2000), p. iv. Ricci, Cronaca, p. 356. Arditi, Diario, p. 57. Ricci, Cronaca, p. 328. Arditi, Diario, pp. 19, 69, 85, 114; Ricci, Cronaca, pp. 175, 186–7, 383.

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intimidating atmosphere for ordinary Florentines, as the city was ‘full of disorderly disputes, encounters and homicides’.70 Frontier regions remained particularly dangerous. Bandits operated with impunity across the borders between Venetian and Spanish Lombardy and Switzerland. Despite the settlement of the Brembati–Albani feud, violence continued to trouble the region around Bergamo at the end of the century.71 Nor did feuds cease on the Spanish side of the border. Cremona was now a frontier town between two hostile powers. Between 1556 and 1575 there were 260 homicides recorded in the city, an average annual homicide rate of 37. Though more orderly than Florence, we can be certain matters were much worse in rural areas. Violence in the post-war, or it might be better termed cold war, period was a mundane feature in the Cremonese as ‘ferocious wars’ were fought by local factions, using hired assassins and bandits.72 Border security improved by 1601, when a raid launched by a Modenese gang into Cremonese territory ended in bloody failure.73 Liberty was delivered a severe blow by the 1559 peace, but its ideals continued to inspire. Every day, it was reported in 1580, there were killings between the proand anti-papal factions in Bologna. So contemptuous were the Republicans of papal institutions that their supporters broke into the high court of the Torrone and ‘all the lawsuits and papers of the notaries were cleaned out, torn up and thrown in the fountain in the Piazza’. They took the seal of the papal legate, ‘and then paraded a picture of the legate with lampoons and malicious and dishonest words and then they hung it on the gallows and attacked it, stabbing it in the neck’. And others ‘set up a beautiful picture of liberty in the Piazza’ to demonstrate that their liberty was being destroyed.74 The outlawry of troublemakers merely transposed the problem to the countryside. In the mountains of Emilia-Romagna the composition of the factions was, if anything, more complex than in the city. Here, traditional Guelf and Ghibelline loyalties were complicated by an array of new parties – the ‘Sassomolari’, the ‘Gaddi-Magnani’, the ‘Saccomani’, the ‘Renazzi’, the ‘Villani’ and others – who offered protection to peasants while battling each other. Enemies of the pope encouraged their activities. When Count Lodovico Pepoli was outlawed from the city he made common cause with the locals, which put 400–500 armed men at his disposal. Pope Sixtus V identified this as a ‘bandit’ gang and sent in the troops, but they were no match for Pepoli’s men. In 1586 the pope relented and pardoned the count.75 *** 70 71 72 73 74 75

Ricci, Cronaca, p. 421. Valseriati, Tra Venezia e l’Impero, p. 137. Politi, Società cremonese, p. 249. Spaccini, Cronaca, I, p. 426. Ricci, Cronaca, p. 307. O. Mazzoni-Tosselli, Racconti storici estratti dall’archivio criminale di Bologna, 3 vols. (Bologna, 1866–70), I, 32–139.

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Sixtus’ campaign was part of a more widespread attempt by states to control the problem of violence in the generation after 1580. In the Papal States significant efforts were made to bring high-profile malefactors to justice and tackle the bandit infestation. This was not simply a matter of cracking down on crime; it was politically motivated. Sixtus had the leader of the Republicans in Bologna, Girolamo Pepoli, strangled in his prison cell in 1585. The rehabilitation of his kinsman, Count Lodovico, the following year must therefore be seen as a quid pro quo, an accommodation between the parties. The truce resulted in a significant reduction in vendetta. The homicide rate for Bologna and its contado in 1600 was twenty-eight in 1600, fifteen in 1610 and twelve in 1620, indicating a decline in violence in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, figures which were particularly pronounced in the city, where the homicide rate fell to below five.76 In the Reggiana Mountains, a place that that was otherwise famous for feuding and banditry, the first two decades of the seventeenth century were a time of peace and prosperity.77 The decline in judicial executions in Bologna after 1600 indicates the measure of security achieved by the papal regime. The evidence from other successful regimes, such as Genoa and Tuscany, shows that from around 1600 the factions, although not altogether suppressed, were much better managed through a combination of mediation and arbitration, which led to a decline in levels of violence.78 It is often claimed that one reason for the pacification was the replacement of vendetta by the duel during this period. As we have seen this is a false distinction. Duels were a product of vendetta. In any case, some regions did not benefit from pacification after 1600. Sir John Reresby was aware that faction was encouraged as a matter of policy by the Venetians: ‘These factions amongst private families, though frequent throughout Italy, are most so within the state of Venice.’79 The extraordinarily high rates of violence that we encounter in Brescia and Vicenza in the first decades of the seventeenth century, where homicide rates reached levels usually associated with a civil war, can only be explained by politics.80 In Brescia, skirmishes between factions on 17 June 1610 left thirty dead.81 A 1618 report to the Council of Ten stated that the state of Venice ‘has no subjects more bloody and vindictive than . . . the Vicentini’, in spite of their wealth.82 From Vicenza the violence 76 77 78

79 80 81 82

Rose, ‘Homicide in North Italy’, pp. 121, 133–4. Cattini and Romani, ‘Tra faida familiare e rivolta politica’. M. Carvarzere, ‘At the Crossroads of Feud and Law: Settling Disputes in Early Modern Tuscany’, in Cummins and Kounine (eds.), Cultures of Conflict Resolution, pp. 51–76; Raggio, Faide e parentele. Ivatt (ed.), Memoir, p. 91. For the figures see above p. 35. Guerrini (ed.), Le cronache bresciane, IV, p. 78. Zanazzo, ‘Bravi e signorotti’, 5 (1964), 100.

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spread into the villages. In 1610 it was reported that the foothills of the Alps to the north of the city were dominated by ‘two powerful factions divided by the most ardent and capital enmity . . . everyone is divided; they get support from Austrians over the border and every day there are serious wounding and deaths from shootings, and they dare not leave their village because of the continuous mustering in great numbers’.83 Politics was also at the root of vendetta in Modena. The settlement of the Bellencini–Fontana feud enabled the city to attain a measure of peace in the last decades of the sixteenth century, but this changed in 1598 when the House of Este was expelled by the pope from its ancestral home in Ferrara, establishing its court permanently in Modena. The Este turned Modena into ‘a nest of vipers’, the centre for revanchism, a hub for malcontents and idealists intent on overturning papal domination in north Italy, attracting conspirators, bandits and professional assassins.84 One reason for the decline in violence in Bologna after 1600 was the flight of several prominent Republicans to Modena. The militant and conspiratorial atmosphere there caused conflict between the locals and the émigrés. ‘Today [1608] there are so many encounters, and all of them bloody, that it would be too tedious to recount them all’, explained Giovanni Spaccini. What distinguished these clashes was the prominence of firearms, which kept him awake at night: ‘shooting in the city was not a trifle, but no one cared about it, as if it were a trifle’. By 1621, these ‘disorders are such that a civil war could happen, given the number of kin that each party has’.85 Between 1612 and 1623 the homicide rate might have reached as many as sixty.86 The ruler, the pious and well-educated Duke Alfonso III set the tone. In 1617 he ordered the assassination of a Bolognese exile, Count Ercole Pepoli, who was shot in the back while he urinated in a street. The Pepoli responded by mounting border incursions into the Modenese and trying to assassinate the duke.87 In order to deal with the violence the Este reverted to encouraging bounty-hunters and pardoning outlaws who returned with the head of another outlaw. The result was the export of summary justice: in 1636 Count Guido Montecuccoli, who had a price of 1000 scudi on his head, was shot dead in Venice.88 ***

The statistical evidence suggests that high rates of violence returned across the whole of Italy during the 1620s, peaking in mid-century in what, in some 83 84 85 86 87

88

Ibid., 99. Spaccini, Cronaca, I, p. 199. Ibid., I, pp. 363–7; II, p. 320; III, p. 117. Spaccini records 92 murders in 1612–23 for a population of 18,000. G. Evangelisti, ‘Il duca “cappuccino” e il processo ai Pepoli (1621)’, Il Carrobbo, 12 (1986), 132–48. C. Campori, Raimondo Montecuccoli, la sua famiglia e i suoi tempi (Florence, 1876), note 103.

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regions, were effectively undeclared civil wars. The first two decades of the seventeenth century were the high-water mark of Italian mercantile and manufacturing activity, the culmination of an upward trend since the beginning of the fifteenth century. The onset of the Thirty Years’ War and the renewal of the conflict between Spain and Holland caused a global downturn in trade. The economic downturn in Italy was worsened by the return of largescale warfare to the peninsula in the 1620s. Armies spread disease and spoiled the harvest. The plague pandemic that ravaged Europe between 1628 and 1633 hit northern Italy particularly hard, wiping out as much as one-third of the population of Lombardy and the Veneto.89 The decline in the number of homicides during the seventeenth century needs to be seen in the context of this population collapse. In the Cremonese the total number of homicides peaked in the period 1600–20. The raw numbers declined thereafter and by the 1650s they had returned to the level of the 1550s. But since the population fell significantly after 1630, the homicide rate per 100,000 population was still high in the 1650s, and much higher than in the 1550s. Rates only began to fall significantly in the 1690s.90 In Bologna, the homicide rate rose steeply in the 1640s and 1650s, peaking in the 1660s at a rate of 106. Rates did not drop to the levels of the 1610s and 1620s until the eighteenth century.91 These are figures reflected in the qualitative evidence. In the Reggiana Mountains the problem of violence returned in the 1620s. In April 1637 the podestà reported finding ‘this country over more than a decade of peace returned to its former state of civil war’.92 This was replicated in Reggio itself. In 1657, for example, a guard of twenty men could not stop the killing of the count of Chiodo, an exile from Verona, by Signore Francesco Ronchi, who was avenging the murder of his father.93 On 28 July 1620 an encounter in Modena between the brothers Pellegrino and Giulio Erri, each backed by forty men, included the worthiest names in the city.94 This was one among many encounters in the 1620s, as heavily armed gangs of bravi roamed the streets dressed in mail-coats and citizens were afraid to venture out at night. Cesare Giandose swore to ‘cut up [a servant] of the Rangoni into bits and send it back to their palace in a bucket’.95 This advertisement led to his own assassination. ‘These disorders risk causing a civil war because of the quantities of kinsfolk in each party’, wrote the chronicler Spaccini.96 89

90 91 92 93 94 95 96

G. Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 1550–1800: Three Seasons in European History (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 205–16. Perego, Huomini de mala vità, p. 196. Rose, ‘Homicide in North Italy’, pp. 152, 170. Cattini and Romani, ‘Tra faida familiare e rivolta politica’, p. 60. British Library, Add. MS, 22346, fos. 77v, 81. Spaccini, Cronaca, IV, p. 570; V, p. 88; VI, pp. 386, 490. Ibid., V, pp. 224–5. Ibid., V, p. 81.

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The violence in Vicenza claimed a significant victim in Count Annibale Thiene in 1621, a consequence of the ‘base vendettas’ fought by the Capra and Porta factions for control of public office in the city.97 In 1625 it penetrated the church of San Rocco, where a man was assassinated as he attended Easter Mass.98 In 1646 there was a serious fight between the factions at Easter Mass at Santa Maria Nuova.99 Once again, the violence spread to the contado – the small town of Marostica was plagued by violence between factions because of ‘ancient hatreds’.100 These plebeian enmities also worked the other way, embroiling patricians who provided protection. In Zanè trouble between the factions in 1644 caused the podestà of Vicenza to order them to take different routes when going to Mass. When Count Thiene had one of the villagers beaten for a misdemeanour, the faction he belonged to appealed to Thiene’s enemy, Giovanni Battista Ghellini, for assistance. The aristocrats fought an encounter and then on 8 September 1646 Thiene was shot and killed by an assassin as he went to Mass at Zanè. The following March Francesco Thiene was also murdered. Ghellini was outlawed, but in the long run his calculation paid dividends; following a stint in foreign military service and payment of 700 ducats, he worked his way back into favour in the Republic. His victory in local politics was crowned when he was appointed to the vicario of Thiene in 1673. Nor was vendetta a barrier to political and social success in seventeenthcentury Lombardy. The ‘whole city’ of Brescia was ostensibly divided between two factions, led by the aristocratic houses of Avogadro and Martinengo respectively, who were responsible for the street fighting of June 1610. In reality both families were divided among themselves by inheritance disputes.101 In August 1625 Count Sforza Avogadro was shot by his nephew in the cathedral in collaboration with his Martinengo allies.102 There was another major shoot-out in the streets in 1633.103 At this time the Venetian state inquisitor reported: ‘No one living in this city can be sure of his life or his home if he does not join one of the many factions. People elect to join one so that they do not have to fear them all. Women live in constant peril of rape. Crimes go unpunished because the men of importance march through the city flanked by twenty to forty armed supporters.’104 The list of nobles who were condemned in absentia in the 1630s was long, but they continued to run their gangs of bravi from the safety of exile across the order. High levels of vendetta 97

98 99 100 101 102 103 104

G. Zanazzo, ‘Bravi e signorotti’, Odeo Olimpico 5 (1964), 97–138; 6 (1966), 259–79; 8 (1969), 187–225. Ibid., 278. Ibid., 8 (1969), 209. Ibid., 6 (1966), 277; 8 (1969), 205. Guerrini (ed.), Le cronache bresciane, IV, pp. 78, 103, 190, 192, 257, 372. Ibid., p. 204. G. Bonomi, Castello di Cavernago e i conti Martinengo Colleoni (Bergamo, 1884), p. 377. Ferraro, Public Life, p. 133.

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violence continued throughout the 1640s. A special inquisitor sent from Venice in 1645 ‘did little’, and another one was dispatched in 1646. The policy of earning a pardon by killing an outlaw was revived in 1648 – a sign that the violence was out of hand.105 Matters in Bergamo were little better. Podestà Giovanni Bragadin reported in 1622 that most of the murders were committed by bandits operating on the frontier with the connivance of the local nobility. A climate of ‘hatred’ and ‘vendetta’ hung over the city – in 1638 its governor was murdered.106 Although it is tempting to point to the turbulent aristocracy as the sole cause of the problem, we should avoid this simplistic conclusion. The Trompia valley to the north of Brescia was a heavily industrialised region, where the foundries that fed one of Europe’s most important centres of arms production were located. The masters who ran this industry became rich but were subject to significant interference from the Serenissima, which tried to control exports and tax their profits.107 The division of the valley between the ‘Ferraglio’ and the ‘Rampanelli’ factions was rooted in the economic difficulties that first became apparent in the 1620s and a full-blown crisis following the terrible plague of 1629–31. The unravelling of the social fabric generated violence that lasted for decades.108 On 21 July 1630, Giuseppe Chinelli, master gunsmith and captain-general of the Brescian valleys, was ambushed and murdered; a dozen of his Rampanelli enemies were outlawed. But this was not deemed sufficient punishment by their opposing faction and in 1635 three members of the Rampanelli were killed in the churchyard of San Marco in Gardone. Both sides were supported by large numbers of bandits, fought for control of the smuggling trade and sold arms licences. In the summer of 1641, there were five killings and another bloody encounter in May 1646 left three dead. So many were outlawed that both factions were able to field separate companies of soldiers for Venetian service in return for having their sentences quashed. This put a temporary halt to the killing until February 1661. Carnival 1663 descended into a mass brawl. A few days later there was an attempt on the life of Giulio Rampanelli in Brescia. The full history of the recently discovered Bolognese civil war of the 1650s and 1660s is yet to be written. The very high rates of recorded violence were the result of ‘ferocious vendettas’, which were rooted in the struggle between opposing factions of the senatorial class.109 One of the vendettas pitted the Bentivoglio against the Ghisilieri. They had a long-running dispute about 105

106 107 108

109

P. Guerrini (ed.), ‘I diari dei Pluda di Castenedolo (1542–1651)’, Le cronache bresciane inedite dei secoli xv-xix (Brescia, 1930), I, pp. 367–407. Bonomi, Castello di Cavernago, pp. 409–20. Ferraro, Family and Public Life, pp. 44–6. A. Fappani, C. Sabbati, F. Trovati (eds.), Gardone di Valle Trompia: vicende storiche e patrimonie d’arte (Brescia: Grafo, 1984), pp. 23–5. Angelozzi and Casanova, La nobilità disciplinata, p. 54.

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hunting rights in the village of Piumazzo. A hard-fought duel between two of the protagonists in August 1653 escalated matters. Giulio Scarlatini, stepson of Niccolo Maria Ghisilieri, asked whether his opponent, Giovan Battista Bentivoglio was satisfied. Bentivoglio replied: ‘that he did not ask for satisfaction from common fucking cuckolds (villani becchi fottuti)’. Whereupon Scarlatini pulled out his pistol and shot him with the words, ‘This is how common fucking cuckolds behave.’110 The legate imposed a peace in 1657, but it did not hold. On 31 October 1657 Filippo Maria Ghisilieri was mortally shot. The vendetta now sucked in other families. Supporters of the Bentivoglio, which included the Isolani and the Malvezzi, put on a demonstration of force in front of the Palazzo Ghisilieri in mockery of the killing. The Ghisilieri responded by shooting four of their opponents. The legate, now supported by the bureau of peacemaking (assunteria delle paci), once again set about trying to settle the feud. The negotiations were tortuous. It required an evening-up of the scores for the matter to be finally settled. This occurred on 20 August 1662 when another Ghisilieri was shot and killed, permitting the peace to be sealed within the month. It might be expected that the fall in population caused by the plague would have led to higher wages and an abundance of land, reducing the potential for conflict. That this did not happen was due to the fact that, even as the population began to recover, the rural economy remained depressed from 1630 to 1740 by deflationary pressures. Peasants were the hardest hit. But it was not the economic crisis alone that maintained the spiral of violence. After all, the social elite remained protected from the worst effects of deflation. More significant was political conflict exacerbated by the actions of the state. In order to meet its voracious fiscal demands states turned to all sorts of expedients which encouraged venality and corruption. There were huge profits to be made, but there were losers too. The impact of the fiscal revolution on political culture is best studied for the kingdom of Naples. The 1647 Neapolitan Revolution is commonly portrayed as a reaction to the tyranny of the aristocracy, whose growing power was a consequence of the privatisation of the state by the Spanish monarchy.111 The sale of royal rights and domain for cash is characterised as a ‘refeudalisation’ of society and the 1647 violence as popular resistance to the process. Although there is some truth in this, it is only one side of the story. While the aristocracy of the kingdom did briefly come together in 1647–8, in order to protect its interests and repress the popular uprising, it otherwise did not present a united front. In the decades before and after 1647 it was a class distinguished by its enmities rather than its cohesion.

110 111

Ibid., p. 54. For a recent restatement of this thesis: R. Villari, Un sogno di libertà: Napoli nel decline di un impero, 1585–1648 (Milan: Mondadori, 2012).

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The seventeenth-century Spanish monarchy increasingly relied on the kingdom of Naples for imperial defence. Taxes were increased significantly, but these alone were insufficient to pay for the war and the Neapolitan public debt rose from 10 million ducats in 1612 to 40 million in 1636 and 50 million in 1646.112 Tax collection was handed out to financiers and creditors, many of whom were nobles who raised troops on the promise of future payment. Not everyone profited equally from speculation in taxation, the sale of office or moneylending. Huge fortunes were to be made, and lost, from privatisation, and there was intense competition as rival families attempted to invest the profits of office in land. Rising levels of violence in Naples from the 1620s were not simply a matter of ‘refeudalisation’ but a consequence of the wholesale auction of royal assets, which created cleavages within, as well as between, different social classes. In Calabria, for example, the sale of royal domain led to a jurisdictional dispute between the communes of Palmi and Seminaria which escalated into a petty war (1634–84), consisting of frequent skirmishes and revenge killings.113 Their respective local lords, the Conclubet and the Spinelli, were drawn into this conflict. The murder of royal officials is indicative of the growing resentment at venality and peculation. Lawyers accused of doing dodgy deals were also assaulted. In Naples the viceroy cracked down in 1624, hanging murderers instead of issuing pardons, establishing a new night watch captained by two judges, and reissuing a strict ban on the carrying of offensive weapons.114 This was in response to the killing of the baron of Licignano on the steps of the Regia Camera della Sommaria, the kingdom’s highest tax tribunal. But repression did not work and the city was soon in the grip of its first duelling craze. The following year an order had to be issued banning weapons from being taken into the Sacro Consiglio, the Royal Council chamber.115 Contemporary diarists talk frequently of ‘quarrels’, ‘differences’ and ‘dissension’.116 By February 1638 there were five duels in a week in the city, in which five combatants were badly hurt.117 Duels were rooted in material interests and the large number of challenges that ended without serious harm suggests that many were symbolic assertions of enmity, advertising a grievance and inviting a mediation. So, for example, the frontier dispute between duke of San Martino and Tommasso d’Aquino was settled quickly in 1630 once a challenge had been issued.118 The chronicler Ferrante Bucca d’Aragona referred ‘to many duels, all of which are 112

113 114 115 116

117 118

G. Hanlon, The Twilight of a Military Tradition: Italian Aristocrats and European Conflicts, 1560–1800 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1998), p. 100. R. Liberti, ‘Palmi’, Quaderni Marmertini, 31 (2002), 3–29. Diurnali di Scipione Guerra, pp. 152, 156–7, 159. Ibid., p. 170. S. Volpicella (ed.), ‘F. Bucca D’Aragona, Aggiunta alli Diurnali’, Archivio storico per le province napoletane, 36 (1911), 133–779. A. de Reumont, The Carafas of Maddaloni (London, 1846), p. 206. Ibid., p. 348.

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usually without blood’ and even when there was a fight they were ‘patched civilly and without blood, as is the practice and custom in Naples’.119 Conflict intensified in the 1630s, a decade when ‘the wicked influx of quarrels and deaths of gentlemen ensued’.120 In 1630 there was a large encounter between rival branches of the Caracciolo and the Acquaviva in front of the church at San Pietro a Majella in the city in which twelve were wounded and Adriano Acquaviva left dead. The feud was imported into Naples from the province of Puglia, where the ‘ancient’ enmity between the families created two factions, whose identities were forged by tit-for-tat killings.121 The feud was intensified by the sale of crown lands: competition arose as purchases were conducted simply in order to stop land going to their enemy, a process that required access to credit and the mobilisation of political contacts in the capital. The feud was one of many that involved Giangirolamo d’Acquaviva (1600–65), count of Conversano, whose brutal repression of the 1647 Revolution in Puglia shocked even the Spanish regime.122 But the violence that resulted from competition between Conversano and his enemies was not confined to the aristocracy. Factions derived their support from across the whole social elite. In Bari, in particular, several patricians recognised Conversano as their capo. In 1645 they swore a covenant by which they agreed to work together to control public office with the assistance of Conversano, their ‘padrone and protector’.123 During the 1647 popular uprising in Puglia the factions sunk their differences, but once the immediate danger was over they resumed their bloody struggle for control of office.124 On 7 May 1649 a patrician from Bitonto was assassinated in revenge for the killing of a Barese. The killers posted a bill in the town to publicise their grievances to their padrone and ‘shame the house of Acquaviva’ into action.125 It had the required effect and the Acquaviva–Caracciolo feud in support of opposing urban factions was reprised. In 1665 Conversano’s eldest son, Cosimo, was killed in a duel in the churchyard of the cathedral of Ostuni by Petraccone Caracciolo, duke of San Martina. Peace was not definitively made until 1718.126 Puglia was the backwoods. Diarists found the scale and nature of the violence in civilised Naples, one of Europe’s greatest cities, less easy to 119 120 121 122

123

124 125 126

Ibid., p. 779. F. Capecelatro, Degli Annali della città di Napoli, 1631–40 (Naples, 1849), p. 108. Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 286. P. Ingusci, Compendio di storia della città di Nardò (Nardò: Leone, 1965); A. Martino, ‘Giovan Girolamo II Acquaviva d’Aragona (1604–c.1665). Signore feudale del Mezzogiorno spagnolo’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Valladolid, 2012. G. Petroni, Della storia di Bari: dagli antichi tempi sino allo’anno 1856, 2 vols. (Bari, 1856), II, pp. 61–3. Ibid., pp. 89–90. Ibid., p. 93. E. Papagna, ‘Avversari, nemici, anzi parenti. I rapporti tra famiglie della nobiltà napoletana nella prima età moderna’, Società e storia, 116 (2007), 273–91.

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comprehend. Shootings occurred ‘with a liberty, as if one was in a forest’.127 Titta Caracciolo had his head sliced open ‘like a turnip’ by the Sanfelice.128 The most high-profile victim was the marchese Doria, who was shot on Palm Sunday 1625. The marchese del Vasto ‘went around town in a coach surrounded by servants and bravi, publicly saying that he had done it’. He was imprisoned, but before his sentence was up he was shot through the window of his cell.129 ‘During this time in Naples (1640) the most powerful barons and gentlemen lived with much licence and little fear for the justice of the royal ministers, nourishing in their houses and under their protection a great number of bravi, who committed murders off their own back, or for money or for their protectors.’130 The padrone enjoyed effective immunity because they provided troops for royal service. The categories of soldier, bravo and bandit became blurred and these retinues, subsidised at public expense, permitted padrone to exert control over whole city districts. At San Giovanni di Carbonara, for example, the local padrone was Don Ferrante Caracciolo. Don Ferrante (1605–47) was one of the main targets of the 1647 popular uprising. Like other padroni Don Ferrante was involved in arranging pardons, large-scale smuggling and tax fraud. He supplied royal tax-collectors with armed force, investing the profits in estates in the Abruzzo, becoming duke of Castel Sangro in 1641. The use of violence in pursuit of his interests was far from being exclusively directed against social inferiors. He employed others to do this for him, while he dealt with enemies appropriate to his station. He was a protagonist in the 1630 encounter with the Acquaviva but escaped prosecution by claiming benefit of clergy.131 Don Ferrante’s career is a further indication that friend/enemy distinctions were not the product of simple clan or family loyalties but shaped by other interests and identities. From 1634 his enmity with the Acquaviva was surpassed by a blood feud with his own cousins: ‘every day the bad feeling between the two branches grew, there not lacking wicked people who, practising both sides, retold what the others were saying about them, sowing all the time new seeds of discord’.132 There were many other such aristocratic feuds on the eve of the revolution. Two members of the Pignatelli were killed in a big encounter in 1638: ‘It circulated publicly in Naples’ that the Pignatelli had sworn ‘to take vendetta on the first of the killers that they could most easily get’.133 Giacomo Pignatelli attacked the coach of the

127 128 129 130 131 132

133

‘Bucca D’Aragona . . . Diurnali’, p. 562. Diurnali di Scipione Guerra, p. 168. Ibid., p. 150. Capecelatro, Annali, pp. 183–4. For this and following ‘Bucca D’Aragona . . . Diurnali’, p. 514. Capecelatro, Annali, pp. 46–7; www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ferrante-caracciolo_ (Dizionario-Biografico)/. Capecelatro, Annali, pp. 113, 153.

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prince of Ferolito with eleven men and blew his enemy’s brains out, before being cut down himself. Successive viceroys continued to crack down. They were well informed – enmities were well publicised – and made strenuous efforts to nip trouble in the bud, using preventative detention and forcing suspects to post financial guarantees for good behaviour. Property seizures, quartering troops on recalcitrants’ property and even execution for some petty nobles were all tried. The count of Conversano was first arrested and sent to Madrid in 1643. He was arrested for a second time in 1651 and sent to Spain never to return home. His eldest son, Cosimo, had three spells in prison. In spite of these measures, the violence continued. As the Neapolitan diarist d’Onofrio recorded, ‘not a day passes without murders and brawls’.134 ‘Every nobleman’, he went on, ‘acts like a cockerel, making licit anything they fancy.’135 Elite conflict preceded the revolution and it cast a long shadow in the decades that followed. The violence unleashed in 1647 and the civil war that followed left a lot of scores to be settled. Spanish troops were given licence to take revenge for comrades killed in the war. Squads of thugs (guappi) intimidated ordinary citizens. Those who profited from sequestered property had to beware of the dispossessed. ‘The people lost all respect for justice’ and helped themselves: there was plenty of protection on offer – for a price.136 The officeholding class, or togati, was heavily implicated in the violence. Some were spokesmen for civil society and risked their lives to speak out against injustice. But there were others who worked for the aristocrats. Francesco Corrado, a one-time court clerk, grew rich as an accountant of the Regia Camera. This involved him in a great deal of murky business: ‘he enjoyed so much protection and went around dressed like a soldier’. His downfall came only after he conspired to have an enemy assassinated in 1676.137 ***

Vendetta violence in seventeenth-century Italy was related to control of public office, which conferred prestige, access to credit and scrutiny of the tax rolls. The stratification of wealth and power among the social elite became more pronounced during the previous century and this created tensions within the governing class as a whole. As Joanne Ferraro shows in Brescia, for example, city councillors were rentiers and landlords. They profited from their control of grain provisioning, public funds and protecting their clients and subjects from the fisc.138 Factions were the result of the need for mutual protection and 134 135 136 137 138

Giornali, I, p. 154. Ibid., I, p. 197. Fuidoro, Successi, p. 96. Onofrio, Giornali, IV, p. 43. Family and Public Life, chapter 6.

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support. By the sixteenth century many towns and cities in Italy were run by closed oligarchies and new men formally excluded from office. But those with expertise in law or access to credit made for useful friends. Factions therefore had a diverse social make-up and those otherwise formally excluded from public office expected favours and protection in return for their loyalty. The fight for control of public office intensified after 1620 with the growing fiscal demands of the state and the plague of 1629–31, which decimated the tax-paying base. By the 1640s there were protests in the Papal States, the Venetian Terraferma, Naples and Tuscany against bad government and the oligarchic control of office. In Brescia faction leaders were burdened with large numbers of poor followers to support. Bertrand Forclaz has detected a rise in violence in rural Latium as factions fought for control of communal office.139 Nardò in the kingdom of Naples is a good example of the ways in which the struggle for office generated violence within a community. As we have seen, the fiscal policies of the Spanish monarchy sharpened the stakes for local political actors. The bloody suppression of the 1647 Revolution in the city by the count of Conversano is frequently cited as a symbol of the targeting of the people by the aristocracy. In fact, the violence was rooted in the long-standing struggle for control of local office among the local elite. Nardò had been in the count’s family since the fifteenth century, but the city enjoyed significant liberties, including the right to elect its own syndic to represent the interests of the community, one for the commoners and the other for the nobility. Both the nobles and clergy enjoyed significant fiscal immunities. In 1638 Conversano succeeded in having his own noble syndic elected, Francesco Maria Manieri. But Manieri did not prove to be as malleable as the count hoped and they were soon embroiled in litigation. In 1639 the count had Manieri assassinated during a procession of the holy sacrament. But the opposition in Nardò was well connected and it took its case all the way to Madrid, leading to the count’s arrest in 1643. It was the local gentry that led the 1647 uprising in the city. What shocked contemporaries about the count’s treatment of the revolutionaries was less the execution of plebeian rebels and more the fact that among the victims were people of high social status – notables, canons and barons.140 Under cover of suppressing rebellion, he was accused of liquidating private enemies in the name of the public good. Vendetta was also a product of international politics. The catastrophic demographic and economic impact of the French military incursions in first Mantua (1628–31) and Lombardy (1635–7) is well recognised.141 The civil war in Piedmont between pro-French and pro-Spanish parties (1637–42) is less 139 140 141

Forclaz, Borghese, chapter 7. Ingusci, Compendio, pp. 93–108. G. Hanlon, The Hero of Italy: Odoardo Farnese, Duke of Parma, His Soldiers and His Subjects in the Thirty Years’ War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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well known. The local enmities that delineated local allegiance are yet to be fully analysed, but they were exacerbated by the atrocities committed by French troops.142 Even in regions where military incursions were absent the unravelling of the Pax Hispanica sharpened factional conflict. In 1638 it was remarked that French faction in Rome and Naples went around dressed in ‘the French fashion’.143 The same phenomenon was noted in Modena: This was a time that many people went about dressed in the French style: which consists of a big hat and great big hair, long at the back, tied with silk ribbons in the colour of the faction they support. Clean shaven except for a big moustache which is shaped completely unnaturally . . . The doublet cut in the shape of a woman’s with long slashes down so you can see the shirt and big sleeves . . . Short stockings straight, long . . . Heeled boots with big buckles . . . The cloak is very short and doesn’t even reach the middle of the thigh . . . They carry a short sword to a belt on which also hangs a dagger. Such are the beautiful foolish gulls (saltamartini) or monsters (chimere) which are presently fashionable . . . so misshaped are they . . . they look more like vagabonds and rogues than gentlemen.144

The adoption of this swaggering style had a political purpose: the fashionable young man signified his support for liberty and his preparedness to fight for it. Modena was a barometer of the changing political temperature. The revanchist policies of the House of Este turned the city into a magnet for bandits, exiles and adventurers. In 1599 the lord of Sassuolo was assassinated, permitting duke Cesare Este to inherit his property. Count Ercole Pepoli met the same fate in 1617, victim of another property dispute.145 Incursions by Modenese subjects into hostile territory were tacitly encouraged and easily disavowed.146 The ‘Liliputian War’ with Lucca (1613–14) involved the ransacking of twenty-five palaces, cattle-rustling, ransoming and tit-for-tat killings.147 This was followed by a guerrilla war against the prince of Coreggio (1615–16), involving a raid launched by a group of women, who descended on the Lucchese and burned or carried away wood valued at 2,000 scudi.148 The virus spread as nobles waged their own feuds across the border: on Sunday 30 December 1612 the Bellencini assassinated Count Lodovico Sertorio as he knelt to hear Mass in the church of Arcovato in the Bolognese.149 142

143 144 145 146 147 148 149

G. Quazza, Guerra civile in Piemonte, 1637–1642, nuove ricerche (Torino: Deputazione subalpina di storia patria, 1960). Capecelatro, Annali, p. 127. Spaccini, Cronaca, VI, p. 676. Ibid., I, pp. 277–81, 334. Evangelisti, ‘Il duca “cappuccino”’. Spaccini, Cronaca, III, pp. 144, 258. Santi, Secchia Rapita, II, p. 251. Spaccini, Cronaca, III, p. 111.

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But it was the 1610 alliance between France and the House of Savoy that posed the greatest threat to the fragile peace. Savoy invaded Monferrato in 1613, starting the first major war in Italy since 1559, which sucked in Modena, Tuscany and Lucca. Savoy struck again in 1616–17 and 1627. Savoyard exploits rekindled enthusiasm for the cause of Italian liberty. In Rome in July 1617 a crowd shouted ‘Viva Savoia!’ at the presentation of the Spanish ambassador. Four days later in Bologna there was a fight in the main square between the respective partisans, marching behind opposing banners.150 At Castelfranco in the Veneto a pro-Spanish priest killed a friar who supported Savoy. The monks of the monastery of San Benedetto in Mantua came to blows over the same matter.151 Its geographic position made the Genoese Republic particularly susceptible to movements of the geopolitical barometer. In the mid-sixteenth century the small towns of the Republic were divided into para-military factions (lighe), which adopted pro-French or pro-Spanish insignia, colours and flags to identify their allegiance.152 The factions, loose alliances of rival families divided from their neighbours less by ideological differences than by ‘ancient hatreds’, were each headed by a local capo.153 Factional conflict exploded into open civil war in 1575–6. The integration of the Republic into the Spanish world-system after 1576 suppressed the fighting and the Genoese state ruled by arbitrating and mediating with the capi. Low-level violence continued, however. At Chiavari, for example, an assault in the public piazza in 1605 between the Greens (proSpanish) and the Blues (pro-French) ‘revived the ancient hatred and malevolence . . . even among women and small children, such that they speak publicly about it and with one another with the most passionate anger’.154 Similar episodes were registered in 1624 and 1632. The invasion of the Republic by a Franco-Savoyard army in 1625 upset the status quo altogether. Factional violence also returned to Rome.155 On 1 September 1634 two coaches, one carrying the young members of the Gaetani, dukes of Sermoneta, and the other Don Carlo Colonna, duke of Marsi, were headed for the church of Sant’ Egidio in Trastevere to celebrate its patron’s feast. The two parties got into a dispute about the right of way. The Colonna carriage, emblazoned with the insignia of the Grand Constable of the kingdom of Naples, claimed precedence. A furious Don Carlo ordered his men to stop the other coach and, without raising his hat, publicly mocked its occupants with ‘disgusting words’.156 A council of the Gaetani family issued a challenge to 150 151 152 153 154 155

156

Ibid., III, p. 152. Ibid., IV, p. 199. Raggio, Faide e Parentele, chapter 7. Ibid., p. 179. Ibid., p. 185. P. Pecchiai, L’ultimo scontro fra due case principesche romane (Colonna e Caetani, 1634) (Rome: Biblioteca d’Arte, 1957). Ibid., p. 15.

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Don Carlo. The Gaetani team of three gentlemen and six bravi was headed by the youngest son of the duke of Sermoneta, Gregorio, who foolishly disdained to wear chain-mail under his doublet. Don Carlo, an experienced soldier, did not make the same mistake. Accompanied by two members of the Neapolitan House of Carafa and a similar number of bravi, the gangs bumped into each other near the Palazzo Gaetani in the Piazza di San Lorenzo. In the ensuing melée Gregorio Gaetani was killed. This was a revival of an enmity that went back to the 1590s. But the incident was serious because mobilisation took place in the shadow of international conflict. The ambassadors of Savoy, Tuscany, Modena and Parma and the viceroy of Naples pledged their support to one side or the other. The popolo came out against the hated Colonna. The filofrancese capitalised on this by posting challenges to the Colonna around the city. Crucially, the Colonna retained the support of the House of Barberini, in the shape of Pope Urban VIII and his cardinal brother and nephew. They imposed a peace in May 1635: Don Carlo obtained a pardon and each party posted 50,000 scudi surety. Minor confrontations continued and the matter was not fully closed until 1640 and the murder of Giulio Buffalini, who was deemed to have struck the fatal blow in the 1634 encounter. This dispute reveals, once again, the complexity of factional allegiances, where public and private enmities were blurred. The Gaetani were backed by both pro-Spanish Tuscany and pro-French Modena. The Colonna were seconded in the encounter by two Carafa brothers, exiles from Naples and prominent members of the filofrancese faction. These enmities were malleable and allegiances shifted according to the political situation. For example, the increasingly pro-French stance of Urban VIII and his Barberini kin altered the relationships for their friends and clients across Italy. In 1638 the Carafa brothers returned to Naples assured of the backing of Pope Urban. They immediately caused trouble by asserting their pro-French credentials ‘and so began the malicious contagion of disputes and deaths of gentlemen’.157 They and their consorts wore the French fashion around town – a provocation that was designed to encourage duels with Spanish loyalists. The Spanish viceroy hit back. In 1640 the prince of Sansi, a leading pro-French conspirator, was kidnapped in Rome and, although the Barberini offered 22,000 scudi for his release, sent to Naples for execution. In Milan, too, the revival of vendetta in the mid-seventeenth century was closely associated with resistance to Spanish rule and the incursions of French and allied troops into the duchy in the 1640s and 1650s, opening up the prospect of regime change in northern Italy. A conspiracy to overthrow the regime was crushed in 1647, but the threat of the collapse of Spanish power provoked score settling. Open opposition to the regime was less evident than 157

Capecelatro, Annali, p. 108.

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fighting between pro- and anti-Spanish partisans. The ambassador of the grand duke of Tuscany was a victim of the gangs and Cavaliere Uberto dell’Orto was assassinated.158 Marchese Annibale Porrone, who employed 100 bravi, fought in dozens of these encounters. Suspected of French sympathies, he was arrested in 1650 but escaped prison, only to be pardoned in 1655 on condition that he serve in the army. Porrone profited from the continued political uncertainty to murder two cousins in a property dispute in 1659.159 His banishment only added to his growing reputation and, following a second pardon, he went on to have a distinguished career as a mercenary captain and author of books on the science of war. We encounter the same confusion of public loyalties and private interests in the Papal States. In Reggio, for example, the fighting emboldened the proFrench faction, resulting in a series of murders and duels.160 Civil conflict in Bologna spread to Rome, where there was fighting between the Grassi and Ercolani.161 The Grassi were protected by Cardinal Rinaldo d’Este, who arranged for the murder of Cesare Ercolani. The employment of assassins, bravi and bandits by princes of the Church demonstrates why anti-clericalism and resistance to papal tyranny remained such powerful motivating forces in mid-seventeenth-century Bologna and beyond. Urban VIII and his Barberini nephews condoned vendetta in other ways. They welcomed the bandit Fra Paolo, a ‘celebrated assassin’, to Rome in 1644 with great fanfare, even though he had committed an ‘infinite’ number of murders and cruel acts. It was through their intercession that he received a pardon. The people of Rome could not fathom this: at the time he had taken holy orders he had ‘skinned alive’ a man over a debt of 500 scudi.162 Politics in the middle of the seventeenth century necessitated the employment of men like Fra Paolo. But the methods he used demonstrate the exceptional nature of Italian vendetta violence. The following chapter explores this culture.

158 159

160 161 162

P. Verri, Storia di Milano, 4 vols. (Milan, 1837), III, p. 212. G. Signorotto, ‘Stabilità politica e trame antispagnole nella Milano del Seicento’, in Y.-M. Bercé and E. Guarini (eds.), Complots et conjurations dans l’Europe moderne (Rome: Publications de l’École Française de Rome, 1996), pp. 736–8; A. Porrone, La verita svelata, e la bugia flagellata dal baron Henrico Enea Spalma (1683). BL Add. MS 22346, fos. 18–81. Angelozzi and Casanova, La nobiltà disciplinata, pp. 56–7. Baberito (ed.), Diario, I, p. 413.

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3 The Culture of Vendetta

The transformation of the medieval knight into the gentleman was a consequence of the Renaissance and the expansion of the state from the fifteenth century, which offered new avenues for advancement for the educated. The traditional military nobility and urban patriciates of the late Middle Ages were joined by aspirant professionals, who made careers in the law, the military and the fisc. This process was hastened by the sale of office and titles. In Naples the tripling of the titled baronage and the quintupling of the grandees (princes and dukes) in the first half of the seventeenth century contributed to the erosion of traditional hierarchy.1 Already, by 1560, in his treatise Della economica, Giacomo Lanteri was able to distinguish: Four degrees of noblemen (aside from Princes), no more. In the first, and more important than the others, are the nobles of the blood who possess private jurisdictions, such as counties, minor baronies, castles, and villages. In the second are those who are nobles without jurisdiction, but by merit of their virtue, or by their inheritance, not by merit of their relatives, possess honoured titles, such as count, gentleman, doctor, mercenary captain, colonel or captain of rank. They are followed by those in the third [degree], born nobly with nothing but their own abilities and private civil [status]. And in the last group are those born of ignoble relatives, or that exercise trade, or some other activity which is not mechanical, in order to earn a living.2

Like most social revolutions this was not a smooth process. High rates of interpersonal violence in Renaissance Italy were not signs of backwardness, requiring repression in order for the conditions of modernity to be set: quite the opposite. Italy, the most economically advanced and urbanised region of Europe, was the first to experience the negative consequences of social mobility and social differentiation. Notaries, accountants and lawyers were not modern bureaucratic functionaries. In order to be accepted as gentlemen they also had to act like gentlemen. Consequently, they adopted the mentality of ‘cavaliers’.3 1 2 3

R. Villari, The Revolt of Naples (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), chapter 5. Adapted from Ferraro, Family and Public Life, p. 66. Marino, Pastoral Economics, p. 163.

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The duelling mania that gripped Italy from the early sixteenth century was an indication of social mobility: carrying a sword and issuing challenges was an important form of social capital. It, too, was a challenge to traditional hierarchy. Medieval trial by combat was a judicial process that required a judge, typically a sovereign prince, to render it legitimate. Despite the claims of its supporters, the honour duel was something utterly different. The Professors of Honour claimed that honour had no master. Any gentleman had the right to punish an offence, in deed or word, without recourse to a higher authority. For Giovan Paolo Pepoli, writing in the early eighteenth century, there was something essentially egalitarian about honour, which was regulated by the ‘tacit sentences of the tribunal of public esteem’.4 The elaboration of a science of honour was a recognition of the need to regulate disputes generated by social mobility. Claims to equality generated a huge amount of contention, since the ideals of merit and the parity of all men of honour were matched by status anxiety. What was virtue? Who was equal? Who had precedence? It was a commonplace that enmity was rooted in envy. For Leon Battista Alberti in the 1440s the desire to equal and surpass other men was malevolent: ‘practically any sort of competition leads to hard feelings, for each desires the fulfilment of his own ambition and considers himself offended by anyone who gets in his way’.5 The Ercolani–Desideri feud in Bologna, for example, was rooted in social antagonism. The Ercolani were classic social climbers. They made their fortune in the fifteenth century in commerce and then acquired respectability as jurists. In 1557 Niccolò Ercolano became the first member of the family to join the patriciate, the Bolognese Senate. This was too much for Carlo Antonio Desideri, for whom the Ercolani, who had come to Bologna as ‘peddlers’, would always remain tradesmen. They were little better than Jews and Desideri referred to the founder of the Ercolani fortunes, Giacomo, as ‘Judas’. Politics sharpened the antagonism: the Ercolani’s rise had been smoothed by papal patronage; Desideri was in the Republican camp.6 The creation of a more amorphous social elite forced Italians to rethink the rules regulating social conduct, codifying the laws of civility and the duel, and elaborating the art of peacemaking. None of this stopped the violence, however. Renaissance ideals of glory triumphed over the pious trappings of chivalry. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516), the most popular work of the Italian Renaissance, had a profound influence on European culture. Ariosto taught that there must be retribution for every offence. Symmetry was of paramount importance. Following Aristotle, he considered an unpunished injury to be an incomplete action. The Italian science of honour was built upon this premise. Machiavelli sneered at the ideal of Christian perfection 4 5 6

Angelozzi and Casanova, La nobiltà disciplinata, p. 272. The Family in Renaissance Florence, p. 310. Cavina, Sangue dell’onore, pp. 134–44.

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through suffering, meekness and contemplation and idealised the virile man of action in pursuit of right. The autobiography left by Benevenuto Cellini is testimony to the widespread appeal of virtù. Cellini, a goldsmith and son of a musician, displayed his prowess through fighting and the autobiography is filled with dash and swagger. Killing was made exciting. When called upon to punish Cellini for murder in 1534, Pope Paul III refused: ‘You do not understand these things as well as I do. You realise that men like Benevenuto, unique in their profession, must not be subject to the law.’7 The Italian Renaissance did not invent hyper-masculinity: writers were reflecting the world around them. Virtù had a social and political function: during the civil conflicts of the sixteenth century, toughness had to be displayed. This swaggering style, bravazzo, survived the peace of 1559. It was said of the marchese Baldassare Rangoni in 1621 that ‘he was a gentleman who made a clear show that he was not to be messed with’.8 Duelling became endemic, a corollary to and consequence of vendetta. The rest of this chapter outlines the contours of this masculine culture. ***

Cellini’s behaviour brought social distinction. Fighting was liberating, permitting any man, whatever his status, to win fame. A diarist from Puglia records that the murder of Massentio Covelli, ‘the Wolf was newsworthy and made [the killer] become great’.9 News of a ferocious encounter between the factions in Modena in May 1600 spread across northern Italy. Girardo Rangoni ‘acquired so much fame and reputation’ for exploits in the fight that he soon received several offers of employment from princes and the Republic of Venice.10 Giovanni Spaccini had divided opinions about these bravoes. On the one hand, the aesthete in him admired their panache. In one fight in 1610, Rodomonte (a name taken from Orlando Furioso) Castaldi ‘carried himself very well and acquired great praise. It being the most beautiful encounter that there has been in a long while.’11 On the other hand, he deplored their morals; they were ‘sodomites’ and ‘bad Christians’, who mocked the Jesuits and venerated ‘dirty’ books, which they perused during Mass instead of listening to the holy office.12 But not everyone shared his negative opinion. When Rodomonte finally fell on the field of honour he was praised around Modena for achieving the Renaissance ideal of a beautiful death and many citizens filed 7

8 9

10 11 12

P. Rossi, ‘Real Crimes and Mitigating Circumstances: Il caso Cellini’, in Dean and Lowe (eds.), Crime and the Law, p. 182. Spaccini, Cronaca, V, p. 16. F. Vacca (ed.), Un’inedita cronaca Galatinese del Cinquecento (Lecce: Annali dell’Università degli studi di Lecce, 1965), p. 13. Spaccini, Cronaca, I, p. 379. Ibid., II, p. 427. Ibid., II, pp. 361–2.

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in to pay their respects to his corpse, which was displayed in a convent.13 Men like Rodomonte were free-thinking ‘libertines’. Their flagrant disregard for the Church’s prohibition on duelling had wider significance; they were venerated precisely because they cocked a snoop at the authorities. The cult of honour was not the exclusive preserve of nobles. ‘A nobleman who offends someone beneath, but not too far below, makes him an equal.’14 Consequently, merchants issued challenges, though the Professors of Honour considered that these should be not treated with the same formalities as those issued by true gentlemen. Neither was vendetta by any means the preserve of the military nobility.15 But disputes between those of differing status were harder to reconcile. Following a fight between the marchese di San Marcellino and a harness-maker in 1686 ‘no one knew how to conduct or settle the matter and find a satisfaction equivalent to their honour . . . that is to say having [to deal with] people of base condition’.16 Fighting between people of such different classes was widely condemned. But in his mathematical formula for settling disputes, published in 1686, Carlo Manzini recognised that honour was not simply a matter for the elite. He assigned each social group and each transgression a value, permitting a calculation to be made, which corresponded to a tariff of appropriate gestures or rituals that replaced revenge, satisfying the wrong committed. Merchants were accorded a score of 3, placing them above artists (1) but below cathedral canons (12), counts (5) and gentlemen (3).17 Notaries had honour but they were not gentlemen and so he accorded them a value of zero. They were, however, placed top of the second division classed as ‘plebeians’. The belief that there were rigid degrees of honour was widespread. Francesco Birago considered the punching of a notary by a Milanese gentleman entirely reasonable because the former had made intimations of equality.18 Birago ordered the notary to beg forgiveness and bow before his attacker before they embraced. Nonetheless, the ambiguous status of many professionals meant that honour had an elastic quality that was open to interpretation and testing. Notary Eliseo Mammellini, for example, was handy, ‘earning great merit with a sword in his hand’.19 In the small town of Castelbolognese in the Romagna the capi of the one factions were provided by 13 14

15

16 17

18 19

Ibid., II, p. 575. F. Birago, Consigli cavallerschi del signor Birago ne’quali si ragiona circa il modo di fare le Paci, 2 vols. (Milan, 1623), II, p. 183. The Azzanelli, rich merchants, conducted a feud with the aristocratic della Torre in the 1560s: Politi, Società cremonese, pp. 275–6. Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 161. C. Manzini, Il duello schernito overo l’ofesa e la sodisfattione trattato morale (Bologna, 1686). Birago, Consigli, I, p. 69. L. Frati, ‘Ricordanze domestiche di notai Bolognesi’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 41 (1908), 379. See also: Bonazini, ‘Diario’, fo. 244.

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a family of notaries. And they behaved like any other padrone, settling disputes, offering protection and brokering marriages.20 There was no doubting the esteem with which university-trained jurists, dottori, were held – Manzini placed them (10 points) higher than a marquis (8), a ranking which would have raised eyebrows in the rest of Europe but was indicative of the value Italians placed on education, and the law in particular. Dottori appear frequently in the sources as the victims of violence.21 Their legal expertise made than integral to and not above the culture of vendetta. Italian universities were incubators of the modern swordsmanship. As one advice book put it, students must learn fencing because it was very difficult to avoid incurring enemies. All students, whatever their social background, were considered men of honour.22 Bologna University’s fencing school opened in 1412. Along with Padua, it became a major attraction for aspiring gentlemen across Europe – in 1593 the university had to ban students from carrying swords into lectures. The intersection of education and vendetta was nowhere more evident than in the city of Vicenza in the mid-sixteenth century. The factions that divided the city shared a common commitment to the Renaissance ideal of the union of arms and letters. Patrician families, who had originally derived their wealth from trade and the professions, purchased land and educated their sons for the law, the Church and the profession of arms.23 The feud between the Da Roma and the Valmarana was conducted between the highly educated. On 3 July 1548 three sons of the physician Giovanbattista Valmarana and Giovanbattista Monza, a celebrated jurist, were murdered. Their Da Roma enemies came from the same professional background. They invested the profits of notarial office in land. Initially they pressed their rights using their knowledge and contacts. But when these proved insufficient, they were equally capable of using force. Nevertheless, the socially inferior had to be more wary of acting without authority. The ‘arrogant (pomposi), scoundrels and those who wish to equal or surpass’ true gentlemen were a threat to social order.24 While some aspirants, such as artists, frequently entered the field of honour, they did so at great peril, risking a beating or worse.25 In these circumstances the assassination of a musician on the 20 21

22

23 24 25

Comaschi, ‘Strategie familiari’. For example: Bonazini, ‘Diario’, fo. 378, 1 July 1685; Diurnali di Scipione Guerra, p. 152; Ricci, Cronaca, p. 48; Spaccini, Cronaca, I, pp. 412, 439; Guerrini (ed.), Le cronache bresciane, IV, pp. 51, 124; Confuorto, Giornali, I, pp. 26, 54, 79–80, 370; Bulifon, Giornali, pp. 189, 217; Onofrio, Giornali, I, pp. 162, 163, 215; II, p. 190; BL Add. MSS 22346, fos. 63 and 67. P. Grendler, ‘Fencing, Playing Ball, and Dancing in Italian Renaissance Universities’, in J. McClelland and B. Merrilees (eds.), Sport and Culture in Early Modern Europe (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009), pp. 293–316. Lomastro (ed.), I ‘zornali’ di Fabio Monza, pp. lv–lxviii; Niccolini, 3 luglio 1548. The Family in Renaissance Florence, p. 310. As well as the examples of Cellini and Caravaggio, Francesco Benucci, music master, was killed in a duel in 1669 by his brother-in-law in Florence: Bonazini, ‘Diario’, I, p. 243. See also Spaccini, Cronaca, II, p. 575; Confuorto, Giornali, II, p. 28.

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road between Bologna and Ferrara in 1697 was understandable. He ‘had contracted enmity’ with persons of quality ‘for not having regard nor making distinction between persons of quality and their inferiors, demonstrating the unparalleled pride which is common to musicians, who for the most part are impertinent’.26 This sort of prejudice is significant. Whereas the Professors of Honour argued that those of lesser social status were not worthy of enmity, the killing of the musician is evidence that their advice was widely ignored. ***

The invention of the duel was rooted in the political context of the Italian Wars. It marked a break with medieval trial by combat, in which defensive armour and elaborate rituals combined to lessen the bloodshed. One chronicler remembered a time ‘when shrewdness in matters [of arms] was used, and everything was done in order not to fight, but to put on a show of fighting, exhibiting oneself in the field with glorious ostentation’.27 Now combatants, keen to signify their willingness to die for a cause, refused to don protective armour. One of the most celebrated early combats, between Ugo Pepoli, for the Republic of Bologna, and Guido Rangoni, for the pope, which was held in Mantua in 1516, was notable for its break with tradition. It soon became difficult for anyone to fight with defensive protection and contests to the death became the ultimate display of manly virtù. Baldassare Castiglione, who did much to popularise the new manliness, sneered at those who, ‘having the choice of arms, take up weapons that neither cut nor pierce, and armour themselves as though they were expecting cannonades’.28 The honour duel spread like a brushfire as private enmities became entangled with public causes. Ludovico Martelli had a ‘secret enmity’ for Giovanni Bandini. He challenged him in 1530, not on these grounds but ‘because [Bandini] and all Florentines serving with the enemy army were traitors to their homeland’.29 They fought in front of the combined French and imperial forces, dispensing with defensive armour. Such spectacular combats were initially sponsored by princes. During Europe’s Indian summer of chivalry, the Este court burned brightest. Even Spaniards, intent on flouting their monarch’s strict prohibition on duelling, were welcomed in Ferrara, where it developed into something of a spectator sport. The audience at one all-Spanish contest in 1531 was put at 15,000.30 Tourists came from far afield.31 The complete abandonment of medieval rituals, which had ensured fair play, was witnessed by one diarist in 26 27 28 29 30

31

Bonazini, ‘Diario’, II, p. 256. Borghi, Lodi and Ferrari Moreni, Cronaca, VIII, p. 48. Cavina, Sangue dell’onore, p. 153. B. Varchi, Storia Fiorentina, 3 vols. (Florence, 1857), II, p. 232. Borghi, Lodi and Ferrari Moreni, Cronaca, I, p. 313; III, pp. 280–1; VII, p. 344; VII, pp. 162–3, 256, 344; XI, pp. 32–67. Ibid., X, pp. 191–2.

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Ferrara in 1529 during a fight between a Genoese and a Piedmontese. The latter could not get close to his man and received seven thrusts; ‘desperate, he ran towards and grabbed his enemy and bit him on his face, neck and ears like a dog’.32 Such viciousness was a product of political feelings – the Genoese was a traitor to the French cause. The kingdom of Naples was, along with Venice, the first Italian state to ban the duel in 1541, and the Spanish administration there went even further and ordered the death penalty for those issuing challenges. Parma followed suit in 1546. The Este finally bowed to the pressure following the prohibition by the Council of Trent in 1563. Thereafter duelling in Italy went underground. Those who fought clandestinely ran the risk of prosecution, which usually meant outlawry. Legally sanctioned fights still occasionally took place, but the number of venues shrunk steadily, so when in 1600 the prince of Borso challenged a German to a fight to the death the surveillance was such that potential sites had to be scouted up to 500 miles away. In the end they had to opt for fighting only to first blood, which made it possible to fight on home turf in Modena.33 This was not quite the end of formal public combats. They reappeared in Naples in the 1630s in flagrant defiance of the ban. The viceroy responded by fining challengers 2,000 ducats. But Neapolitan duellists were intent on demonstrating their liberty. Unlike elsewhere in Italy, the word duello was openly used and contests might attract sizeable crowds.34 Duellists boasted of the huge sums of money borrowed to pay fines.35 Most contests did not end in death, but many, such as the combat between six men in 1676 which led to three fatalities, did.36 An indication of Neapolitan priorities during the period that followed the revolution was the development of a school of fencing known for its lightning-fast attack. And duelling was not confined to the aristocracy; even freed slaves might carry swords and enter the lists.37 Historians have produced fine work on the contemporary Italian fascination with duelling, its representation and meaning.38 But evidence for the actual fighting is surprisingly thin. As Donald Weinstein has noted, ‘Despite Italian theoretical and technical primacy and the thick paper trail of cartelli, manifesti and pareri, the surviving evidence of countless affairs of honour, we have only 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Frati, ‘Ricordanze’, p. 378. Spaccini, Cronaca, VI, p. 465. Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 286; II, p. 4; Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 40. Ibid., III, p. 135. Ibid., IV, p. 48. Onofrio, Giornali, IV, p. 260. F. Bryson, The Sixteenth-Century Italian Duel: A study in Renaissance Social History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938); Cavina, Sangue dell’onore; S. Hughes, ‘Soldiers and Gentlemen: The Rise of the Duel in Renaissance Italy’, Journal of Medieval Military History, 5 (2007), 99–152.

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vague impressions as to the number and frequency of duels actually fought in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy.’39 The sheer vastness of the Italian judicial archives makes systematic research daunting and most work has been done on the more easily accessible collections of ephemera – challenges and responses, cartels, libels and the advice given to princes – relating to a small number of officially recognised combats.40 The absence of evidence for actual duels after 1563 has led some to doubt their existence altogether. This interpretation, however, is not consistent with the high rates of violence recorded in early modern Italy. The failure to locate the practice is a failure of interpretation. The answer to the conundrum is that we have been looking in the wrong place. Italians rarely used the term ‘duel’ in everyday speech – it was a bookish word – and, since it was illegal, potentially dangerous to do so. More frequent after 1563 was the practice of quistione, that is informal encounters that dispensed with formal challenges and regulated protocols. They were technically illegal – a Florentine law of 1606 forbidding ‘quistioni, brawls and tumults using prohibited arms’ repeated a 1569 ordinance – but otherwise tolerated.41 Quistione originally meant a legal dispute and the word evolved in the sixteenth century to refer to an honourable encounter between roughly equal parties that distinguished it from the plebeian brawl (rizza). Crucially, it permitted the participants to present the events as fortuitous and therefore defensible in law. The idea gained support from the Church. The 1582 papal bull Firmum ita distinguished between the illegal duel and fortuitous affray. This spurred jurists and theologians to detail various scenarios which exculpated the participants from criminal and sinful behaviour. Encounters masked the fact that fights were often either prearranged or the result of gangs heading into town intent on looking for trouble. Berlingiero Gessi, the doyen of the late seventeenth-century Professors of Honour, considered that, ‘among all the means of vengeance, nothing is more practised that the quistione’.42 ‘Questioni, to give them their proper name’, he went on, ‘we call those encounters, or fights, that involve one or more opponents to demonstrate their courage, or to satisfy an offence or insult without having time to agree on a time and place to fight.’ Ideally the numbers and quality of the parties should be equal. But this was not rigorously applied, as in a formal setting. After all, Gessi joked, there was no time in an encounter to measure your sword and test your blade! One therefore had to accept that quistioni involved a greater element of chance. This was a euphemism for wounding, as there were no arbiters to see fair play or stop the contest after first blood. 39

40 41

42

D. Weinstein, ‘ “Fighting or Flyting”? Verbal Duelling in Mid-Sixteenth-Century Italy?’, in Dean and Lowe, eds., Crime, Society and the Law, p. 212. For this and following: Carroll, ‘Revenge and Reconciliation’. M. Savelli, Pratica Universale (Florence, 1681), p. 321. ‘In Firenze si continuava con molti disordini lite, di quistioni et di homicidii’: Ricci, Cronaca, pp. 329, 380, 388. La Spada di Honore (Bologna, 1671), p. 154.

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Nevertheless quistioni had utility because they were ‘the easiest way of reconciling enemies who in the course of their fight had fulfilled their debt of honour’. The other advantage of quistioni was performative. Gessi considered furtive duels (alla macchia) to be the worst of all the transgressions of the honour code. Quistioni, in contrast, were public displays of right and honour restored. Technological change also contributed to the transformation of combat. The dispensing of protective armour and developments in blade technology encouraged the spread of new fighting techniques in the decades after 1500. Thrusting weapons, like rapiers, were more lethal and the wounds they inflicted more difficult to treat than those inflicted by traditional slashing swords. Firearms transformed the rules of the game. Pistols had limited battlefield use, but they were of great value in a quistione. As early as 1532, the Venetian Signoria banned ‘artificial handguns’, which were described as perfect for assassination because they were only a hand and a half long and had already claimed a number of victims.43 By 1600 firearms (that is offensive weapons) had outstripped the use of defensive weapons (swords and daggers) in Bolognese homicides.44 Pistols were useful at close quarters for bringing down a victim before they were dispatched with a sword. Zuan Iosefo Strassoldo was shot off his horse by an assassin hidden in a sorghum field in 1561 before having his head caved in.45 In the hands of an expert marksman the arquebus could be remarkably effective from a distance. In 1642 a Pisan gentleman was shot from Giotto’s bell-tower, requiring the assassin to have been at least 50 metres away.46 Firearms ownership quickly became widespread across all social classes, a phenomenon encouraged by the many states which relied on militias for civil defence. For all these reasons guns featured prominently in quistioni. In 1620 the citizens of Modena were forced to shut themselves in because of street battles involving eighty members of the Erri, Manetti, Caste, Coccapani, Balguoli and Monti families carrying pistols.47 Carrying guns became a necessity: the famous Modenese duellist Rodomonte Castaldi met his end because he was shot dead before he had time to draw his sword.48 Technology changed the nature of fighting in another way. Print was a medium for harming enemies and winning glory and private enmities were transformed by bringing challenges, denunciations and apologias to a wider public. The arena of honour was now national, even international. Insults were no longer confined to gossip networks. Print was an indelible record that could 43 44 45 46 47 48

R. Spilimbergo, Cronaca de’ suoi tempi dal 1499 al 1540, ed. V. Joppi (Udine, 1884), p. 25. Rose, ‘Homicide in North Italy’, p. 124. ASV, Collegio, Notatorio, Filze, 6. Bonazini, ‘Diario’, 20 June 1642. Spaccini, Cronaca, IV, p. 570. Ibid, II, p. 575.

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not be dismissed as rumour or hearsay, making reconciliation more difficult. The publicity afforded by the formal challenge, or cartel, was as significant as the fight itself and the Professors of Honour dedicated reams of pages to the polite wording they required. But a cartel referred to any writ of defiance and these were commonly posted around towns, often lacking the niceties commended by the Professors. The cartels posted by the Rangoni and the Malvasia in 1633 resembled declarations of war – the latter stuck theirs on a pole on a riverbank ‘threatening passers-by not to remove it on pain of death, because they wanted it seen by strangers’.49 They were not dissimilar to the libels posted during lawsuits.50 Legal libels and denunciations were a particular feature of post-1647 Naples: ‘Naples! avenge the killing of an innocent’ requested a poster put by a widow in 1663.51 Bandits pinned cartels to the bodies of bountyhunters.52 Duels were not the end of the paper war. In 1665 cartels were secretly posted around the city claiming that the duke of Noci had been traitorously killed in a duel by being stabbed in the back. ‘It was well known this was done to stain [his enemy’s] reputation.’53 Italy boasted Europe’s highest levels of urbanisation and the topography of fighting was shaped by the numerous squares and piazzas that were features of the urban environment. In Venice fighting was formalised by the dedicated use of a bridge, the Ponte dei Pugni, to stage the annual fight that was authorised to take place between the city’s two plebeian factions, the Castellani and the Nicolotti. The Croce della Pietra, now in Modena’s city museum, once stood in the middle of the city’s main thoroughfare, the via Emilia. It was here that the city’s faction leaders came to demonstrate with their supporters. In May 1600 Count Girardo Rangoni denounced the Ferrarese to a mixed group of old nobles, lawyers and ordinary gentlemen: ‘Signori . . . I gave no cause for offence . . . and they who say so or wish to say so lie. I will show this blade to anyone who does not tell the truth, wherever they wish.’54 This infuriated the Ferrarese, who arrived on the same spot the following evening ‘armed with mail jackets, breastplates, gauntlets, skullcaps (zucchetti) and pistols’. A melée ensued involving more than 300 men. Within days the Modenese speakers were again at the Croce della Pietra: the Ferrarese had attacked unarmed men and anyone who said otherwise was a liar. The publicity had its effect. On 2 June the duke of Modena intervened and made peace. The fact that no one was killed in the fighting demonstrates that encounters need to be placed in context. Street battles that were principally designed to publicise a grievance were regulated by unwritten codes of conduct. 49 50 51 52 53 54

Ibid., VI, pp. 500–1. Politi, Società cremonese, p. 259. Onofrio, Giornali, I, pp. 167, 177; Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 75. Onofrio, Giornali, III, p. 167. Ibid., I, p. 286. Spaccini, Cronaca, I, pp. 363–7; II, pp. 51, 366.

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Participants were conscious of the boundaries and limits that the context imposed on their behaviour. While the Professors of Honour promoted the duel as a civilised form of dispute settlement, others, like the bishop of Cremona in 1593, argued that it was a pernicious repackaging of vendetta: ‘these bellicose minds have not changed in their ferocity, but in the means of exercising it’.55 All the evidence suggests that duelling did not cure vendetta but rather made it worse. For example, the formal duel fought between the marchese di Malaspina and Alfonso d’Este in 1653, which finished with them exchanging the kiss of peace, did not prevent the assassination of the former two months later.56 Even an advocate of the duel like Fausto da Longiano lamented the fact that many participants did not play by the rules and, for instance, threw dust in the eyes of their opponents.57 Challenges to a duel did not prevent other demonstrations of force: following the exchange of cartels with the Malvasia in 1633, the Rangoni put 400 horse and 3,000 foot on standby.58 It was only fools and the dead who stuck to protocol. One duellist dropped his guard in order to ask his wounded opponent if he had had enough, whereupon the injured man ‘during the exchanges of words’ mortally stabbed his interlocutor with a dagger – this was a signal for his seconds to open fire with their muskets.59 Vendetta privileged certain spaces over others. The preference for churches is dealt with in Chapter 13. On 28 July 1628 the citizens of Modena were forced, once again, to hide indoors as armed factions ‘publicly roamed the city and its piazzas’ looking for trouble.60 Two years later the Florentine authorities prohibited, on pain of a 500 scudi fine, ‘quistioni, brawls and tumults by any persons whatsoever in the piazza of the church of Our Lady in Monsummano [near Pistoia] or inside the church’. These prohibitions simply displaced the problem. The authorities forbade ‘any person whatsoever, under pain of the galleys, quistioni, brawls and tumults, in which hands are laid on arms, at the Santo Monte Della Verna and particularly inside the entrance to the monastery, the Porta del Martello’. The sanctuary is 75 kilometres to the east of Florence – a considerable way to go for the chance of bumping into your enemy.61 In the city itself the Santa Trinità bridge was a favourite spot for encounters. Apparently trivial insults or casual slights over honour took on greater significance because personal identities were inextricably linked to public ones. In Modena a disputed point in a game of tennis in 1603 sparked 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Politi, Società cremonese, p. 335. BL Add. MS, 22346 fo. 63. Duello del Fausto da Longiano regolato a le leggi del’honore (Venice, 1560), pp. 284–5. Spaccini, Cronaca, VI, p. 500. Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 1. Spaccini, Cronaca, IV, p. 570. Savelli, Pratica, p. 321.

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a pitched battle involving more than 200 blades and resulting in the invasion of the cathedral. The match had got out of hand because the players belonged to opposing factions and called on their supporters to back them up over their quibble.62 A different aspect of the politicised nature of everyday life was the manner in which personal honour was rooted in material interests. Duels over property disputes were common. The explosion of elite duelling in Naples from the 1630s was caused by the arrival of rural feuds, whose initial victims were peasants, into the city.63 The combat between the dukes of Noci and Martina in 1665, for example, was rooted in a border feud, ‘a very ancient enmity’ between their factions.64 Vendetta also had its seasons. Carnival was traditionally a time for settling scores and some cities imposed higher penalties for offences committed during the festival in an attempt to control the problem.65 In Modena the masking season began unusually early, on New Year’s Day, and went on until Shrove Tuesday, offering an opportunity for squads of masked men to engage in encounters with little fear of reprisal.66 Pranks and high jinks might have a sinister side. The practice of throwing water and lemons at passers-by was usually part of the fun of Carnival in Naples, but not if the target was a personal enemy: when a priest threw a bucket of water at a fellow cleric in February 1677 the victim was unamused and went to retrieve his pistol. On his return he found himself outgunned by the water thrower, who had a musket. In this instance, the dousing was less jape than provocation.67 Lent and Easter, however, were even more tense. As Ottavia Niccoli has demonstrated, the certificate of confession was a legal document, which attested to the composition of a quarrel; it was therefore important to get in one’s revenge before confessing. In Florence Giuliano de’ Ricci noted in 1574 the most pernicious abuse committed by Florentine men, ‘who, in order to be able to take communion on Easter Sunday, according to the precepts of the Church, indulge in acts of revenge for offences received right up towards holy week’.68 He returned to the same theme in succeeding years: ‘from the middle of Lent to Easter, which is no less than 23 days, there occur more scandals, homicides, beatings and wounds than in the rest of the year’. In February 1581 he counted sixty murders and woundings. 1586: ‘As usual this year towards 62 63 64 65

66

67 68

Spaccini, Cronaca, II, p. 63. Confuorto, Giornali, I, pp. 48, 213; II, pp. 45 127, 131, 233. Onofrio, Giornali, I, pp. 286–8; II, p. 71. Raggio, Faide e parentele, p. 175; Angelozzi, La nobiltà disciplinata, pp. 70–1; Bulifon, Giornali, p. 212; Guerrini (ed.), Le cronache bresciane, IV, p. 196; Confuorto, Giornali, II, p. 201. Spaccini, I, pp. 325–8; II, pp. 356, 441; III, pp. 126, 558; VI, p. 321. For masking and assassination: Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 60. Onofrio, Giornali, IV, p. 88. Ricci, Cronaca, pp. 295, 356, 463.

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holy week when men have to confess there ensues much vendetta and they inflict many woundings.’ Ideally, priests should have withheld Communion. But this required courage. When the priest of Sant’Agata in Modena refused to issue Communion tickets to the bravi of the marchese Calcagnini in 1633 he was subject to verbal abuse and physical threats.69 The seasonal rhythm can be quantified. March was the most frequent month for fights in Venetian churches.70 In seventeenth-century Bologna the average monthly homicide rate peaked in the summer months when confrontations took place in public, usually in a churchyard or piazza. Carnival disorder was a problem in some years. But overall, February (when Carnival usually occurred) saw a below average number of homicides, while the run-up to Easter (March) was an above average month for homicides.71 It was proverbial that vendetta has its season: ‘il Carnevale semina la guerra, et la Quaresima racoglie il sangue’ (Carnival sows war and Lent reaps blood).72 Religious processions also generated squabbles about precedence. For example, the right to hold the umbrella over the host at Corpus Christi was contested and on occasion it led to scuffles, challenges and even murder.73 Public festivities brought enemies into close proximity. During the Corpus Christi procession in Vicenza cathedral in 1653 an argument over property erupted between Count Sforza Bissari, ‘one of the most senior houses of the city, nourished by blood and arms’, and Signore Giulio Marchesini, such that both drew their swords and began to fight.74 ***

While the political context made vendetta distinct from other forms of vindicatory violence elsewhere in Europe, its material causes are broadly comparable. Vindicatory violence was rooted in relationships related to property and inheritance, generating disputes over debts and contracts. So, for example, the practice of joint land ownership, condominio, required careful diplomacy between collateral lines; it worked well when there was mutual trust. Castiglione was governed jointly by the three lines of the Pepoli family. They shared the same politics: as an imperial jurisdiction, the territory was exempt from taxation by the Pope and they supported the cause of liberty against papal ‘tyranny’. However, this public front hid private rancour generated by mundane matters of estate administration. Count Giovan Paolo Pepoli recorded 69 70 71 72 73

74

Spaccini, Cronaca, VI, p. 454. Carroll and Cecchinato, ‘Violence and Sacred Space’, p. 568. Rose, ‘Homicide in North Italy’, p. 147. Discorso contro il Carnevale (Venice: 1607). B. Amorosa, Riccia nella storia e nel folklore (Casalbordino, 1903), pp. 105–6; Raggio, Faide e parentele, p. 243; Spaccini, Cronaca, III, pp. 39, 339; Forclaz, Borghese, p. 153; Guerrini (ed)., Le cronache bresciane, V, p. 62. Zanazzo, ‘Bravi e signorotti’, 8 (1969), 210.

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the ‘bitterness’ created when he objected to the way his cousin Cornelio treated their tenants. The feud was limited to officials, licensees and leaseholders (patenti), who were, Giovan Paolo alleged, subject to physical intimidation and even torture by his cousin.75 Matters turned uglier on 24 August 1692 when his cousin’s men rode into Bologna and ‘cut down the flagpole outside our front door with a sabre and threw it into the street’.76 Giovan Paolo retorted by thrashing one of his cousin’s men. Peace was eventually made by the papal legate and the settlement posted in Saint Bartholomew’s church. Distrust caused considerably more problems for the Boschetti cousins who jointly owned San Cesario in the Modenese. The first murder victim was Galeazzo in 1594, followed by his nephew Carlo Francese in 1632 and finally their cousin Orazio in 1666.77 Property claims and the enforcement of rights made Italy no different from the rest of Europe, but the balkanised nature of the peninsula and its numerous borders encouraged protracted disputes about dykes, ditches, mills, rights of way and pasture.78 Hunting provided a cover for incursions and skirmishes.79 In his feud with the Pepoli, Alfsono d’Este took to hunting from places where he could ride into their territory. The Pepoli erected barriers – which were torn down – and armed their tenants.80 The readiness of the seventeenth-century Neapolitan nobility to resort to violence in apparently petty land disputes – in 1696 the principe di Villa and the duca di Barrea journeyed secretly to Naples to fight a duel over pasture rights – cannot simply be attributed to the stagnant economy and the decline of rental incomes. The enmity between the marchese Serra and his neighbours was generated by the long-standing struggle for control of pasture in a region dominated by commercial sheep farming and wool exports.81 Preparedness to fight over tolls – even on charcoal – was a consequence of aristocratic control of organised smuggling operations.82 A distinguishing feature of conflict in Italy was access to water, reflecting the importance of irrigation in a Mediterranean climate.83 Attempts by a state or 75 76 77 78

79

80 81 82 83

ASB, Archivio Pepoli, 891, fo. 118. Ibid., fo. 16. A. Boschetti, San Cesario (Modena: Società Tipografica Modenese, 1922). Birago, Consigli, II, p. 76; Zanazzo, ‘Bravi e signorotti’, 6 (1966), 260; Angelozzi and Casanova, La nobilità disciplinata, p. 10; Santi, Secchia Rapita, I, pp. 362–74; Forclaz, Borghese, p. 193. Spaccini, Cronaca, VI, p. 506. See also G. Olevano, Trattato nel quale co’l mezzo di cinquanta casi vien posto in atto prattico il modo di ridurre à pace ogni sorte di privata inimicta, 2 vols. (Venice, 1603), II, pp. 34–6; Angelozzi, La nobilità disciplinata, pp. 54–6; Guerrini (ed.), Cronache bresciane, IV, p. 305; Guerrini, Famiglia lombarda, p. 232. Evangelisti, ‘Il duca “cappuccino”’, 135–7. Covino (ed.), Baroni, pp. 98–9. Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 71; Confuorto, Giornali, II, p. 127. Covino (ed.), Baroni, p. 132; Politi, Società cremonese, pp. 169, 255; Evangelisti, ‘Il duca “cappuccino”’, 132.

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town to change a watercourse were likely to have a significant impact downstream. The dispute over the course of the river Panaro between Modena and Bologna led to the demolition of dykes, military-style operations between local militias and several deaths between 1594 and 1619. The Panaro incident was a skirmish in a cold war. Bologna was papal territory and the Este dukes of Modena had never forgiven the pope for their 1598 expulsion from their ancestral home of Ferrara. The Este harboured Bolognese bandits and turned a blind eye to the feuds and border raids that made the frontier such a dangerous place. Giovanni Spaccini, who loathed the Bolognese even more than the Ferrarese, urged the duke to mount border incursions and burn the harvest.84 A new code of aristocratic sociability flourished in response to the surge in violence. Civilità traditionally meant the political (civic) community, but in the sixteenth century Italian writers on the art of good manners turned it into a quality of distinction – civility. A plethora of treatises on manners and etiquette taught polite behaviour for the expanding and more diverse urban social elite. However, civility does not necessarily canalise and control violence. It is important to distinguish between the outward signs of civility (with its connotations of distinction, etiquette and good breeding) and the inner condition of being civil (with its connotations of equanimity, complaisance and discretion). Italian manners were largely concerned with the former and civility was a signifier of merit and distinction. These outward signs of honour were ‘a signal of the opinion in which we are valued and on which depends our good name and reputation’.85 But in the cosmopolitan urban environment these signs were often confusing and contentious. For example, the failure to recognise someone appropriately might be misinterpreted as a sign of contempt, a manco di rispetto. Civility cannot therefore be dissociated from manliness: claims to equality needed to be upheld and enforced, or resisted. By the end of the seventeenth century foreign commentators were beginning to view Italian manners as old-fashioned and fusty. Obadiah Walker’s 1672 English conduct book scorned their fastidiousness: The Italians . . . are most [punctilious]. The greatest cause hereof is the avoiding of misinterpretations, and quarrelling. This hath begotten an Art of ceremoniousness, so full of subtilties and punctilios, that it is an emploiment to learn them.86

More than this, rules were not only open to misinterpretation but consciously abused. Civility cannot be divorced from the political context. Civility was, in the words Balthazar Gracian, ‘strong political magick’ and breaches of civility were arranged in order to provoke or intimidate an enemy. 84 85 86

Santi, Secchia Rapita, I, pp. 283–4. G. Pigna, Il duello (Venice, 1554), chapter 1. Of education, especially of young gentlemen (Oxford, 1673), p. 221.

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The manner in which incivility was carefully choreographed is illustrated by the diary of Florentine savant and lexicographer Agostino Nelli, which survives in fragments from 1667 to 1684. Nelli’s sister had recently separated from her husband, Giovanni Talenti, and the two men were now at law over the recovery of her dowry. Nelli’s particular obsession in the diary was whether his brother-in-law, whom he bumped into frequently on the streets of Florence or in the basilica of Santa Croce, would greet him. Nelli faithfully records every occasion on which his brother-in-law failed to do this. The diarist comforted himself with the thought that Talenti might not have seen him. On 22 April 1669, for example, Nelli was crossing the piazza of Santa Maria Novella when he met Talenti ‘and I greeted him, but he did not reply to the greeting, it could have been because it was about midnight and he did not see me. He claimed that he had greeted me and that I had not returned his greeting, a thing that my manners would not permit.’ By the summer Talenti was still refusing to greet his brother-in-law or even raise his hat, not even when they bumped into each other at Mass.87 Their falling out affected the whole family. When Nelli’s sister left the family home in June 1669 she bumped into ‘her kinsman signore Alessandro Barteli, who the moment he saw her pulled out a copy of the Galateo, and immediately began to study it and did not greet her, and he did the same to me when I was looking through my window’.88 The Galateo, published by the Florentine Giovanni Della Casa in 1558, was the quintessential guide to the rules of polite behaviour. The English translation of the Galateo explains the significance of failing to administer the correct gestures: For he that faileth to doe them, dothe not onely displease, but doth a wrong to him, to whome they be due. And many times it chaunceth, ye men come to daggers drawing, euen for this occasion alone, that one man hath not done the other, that worship and honour vppon the way, that he ought.89

The parading of the Galateo beneath his window was a crude way of playing on Nelli’s status anxiety. Like many social climbers he fretted about not being recognised; the aristocrats who refused to return his greetings he considered ‘jack-asses’ (asinissimi). But the trouble with his brother-in-law was worse. Talenti’s purpose in displaying signs of enmity was to intimidate Nelli during negotiations over the dowry.90 ‘Last Sunday [Talenti] passed beneath my windows and did not greet me and similarly at Marmi (near Lucca) I strolled 87

88 89

90

‘Diario di Agostino Nelli dall’anno 1667 fino al 1684, manoscritto’: http://grandtour .bncf.firenze.sbn.it/, I, fos. 92, 121, 126, 143, 172. Ibid., fo. 113. Giovanni della Casa, Galateo of Maister Iohn Della Casa, Archebishop of Benevento (1576), p. 45. ‘Diario di Agostino Nelli’, fo. 270.

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by him three times and he sped up and went off.’91 This provocation led Nelli to obtain a gun licence. Finally, in 1672, the sixth year of the lawsuit, an agreement was reached. Talenti resumed his greetings, stopped to exchange pleasantries in the street and, in a sign of friendship, even dropped in at Christmas. Historians of early modern Italy have long underlined the ways in which urban space acted as a theatre for the display of cultural capital through the exchange of words and gestures. Verbal duelling and posturing were ways of winning honour without spilling blood.92 Precedence and protocol were tested every day as enemies bumped into each other and the Professors of Honour were frequently called on to judge on the altercations that ensued. Birago recorded the following exchange that took place on Easter morning, 1610, when Count Baldassare Biglia attempted to enter a chapel.93 At that moment, however, Signore Pietro Antonio Castelbesozzo impudently stepped in front of him. Count Biglia found this affront absolutely intolerable and blurted, ‘Halt thyself and let me pass, you come after me.’ castelbesozzo: ‘It seems to me there is space to walk abreast.’ biglia: ‘How dare you speak like this!’ ‘To me it seems an honourable thing to say, and polite.’ ‘Who are you? I am Count Baldassar Biglia!’ ‘And I am Pietr’Antonio Castelbesozzo, a gentleman and knight such as Your Lordship.’ ‘It cannot be true.’ ‘It is true.’ ‘It cannot be true’, the Count replied again, menacingly. Castelbesozzo then placed a hand on Count Biglia’s stomach to push him away, saying, ‘It is indeed most true. Do not think of taking me at an advantage . . . considering that I am unarmed.’ The altercation had attracted the attention of several other congregants, who intervened. The count, enraged, shouted again: ‘It is not true! And outside this place, I shall stand by it!’ ‘It is true. And here, and outside, I shall sustain it.’ ‘You lie.’ ‘You lie that I am lying.’

The key to this exchange was Castelbesozzo’s claim that he and Count Biglia were equals. Biglia’s status was challenged in a public forum, necessitating a demonstration that he would not be surpassed.94 91 92 93 94

Ibid., fo. 353. Weinstein, ‘Fighting or Flyting’, p. 218. Cavina, Sangue dell’onore, pp. 160–2. More serious cases resulted in murder: Strassoldo, Cronaca, p. 85; Confuorto, Giornali, I, pp. 90, 141–2.

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The rules of etiquette had become so complicated by the seventeenth century and the traditional hierarchies between blood nobles and social aspirants so confused that the potential flashpoints were innumerable. The failure to use the appropriate words or gestures justified risentimento.95 Theologians were divided on whether the absence of signs of friendship was sinful. Many thought that Christians were not ‘obliged to speak to [enemies], greet them, buy from or sell to, or eat with them’. Enmity with a neighbour was the most frequently cited reason for refusal to go to church.96 Some were able to circumvent pious objections by using irony to display their feelings. Giovan Francesco Leviziani provoked a quistione in 1625 by ‘greeting his enemy with such reverence as one does to a padrone, in order to mock him’.97 Others were more forthright: Count Giacomo Pepoli, ‘one of the most insolent men by nature’, was killed after telling a man ‘to shove his lies back up his own arse’.98 This was a family trait. In 1704 Count Giovan Paolo Pepoli had to deal with the fallout from an ‘indecent and vainglorious’ letter written by his brother, in which he accused someone ‘of lying through your mouth, and that you are a fucking bollock (coglione fottuto), and the House of Mosti is on no way worthy of being compared with that of Pepoli’.99 A brawl in a theatre in Naples occurred when a man pushed back someone’s wig, which was blocking his view. ‘Filthy drunken Calabrese’ was the reply; it was ‘a scandalous act considering they were related’.100 Transgressions were not merely verbal. During the Ercolani–Desideri feud in Bologna Carlo Antonio Desideri not only had the temerity to attend Mass at the Ercolani parish church of San Giovanni on Sunday 4 January 1562 but he brazenly glared at his enemy with ‘dirty looks’.101 Raising a finger to one’s teeth was a serious insult.102 In a duel over the failure to doff a hat, the marchese Cammarota also complained that his opponent had not given him the correct signal to draw – a further disrespect.103 Don Nicola Narni not only refused to take off his hat to Frederico Pappacoda in 1681 but also turned his back. Pappacoda accosted his man: ‘he who has no manners needs to be taught them’. This was a signal for them to unsheathe and for their retinues to exchange shots. The feud continued in print. On 25 June Narni posted a manifesto in which he challenged Frederico to a duel, recognising that, 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

Belotti, ‘Sacrilega faida’, 16; Spaccini, Cronaca, V, p. 527; VI, p. 463; Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 226; Birago, Consigli, II, p. 43. Niccoli, Perdonare, pp. 159–60 Spaccini, Cronaca, V, p. 528. Ibid., III, p. 558. ASB, Archivio Pepoli, 891 fo. 164. Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 253. Cavina, Sangue dell’onore, p. 275. Estienne, L’Introduction, p. 201. Onofrio, Giornali, II, p. 228.

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since his enemy was a priest, he should elect a substitute. Pappacoda’s refusal exposed the root of their enmity: Narni was not worthy of a fight because he was inferior, a mere ‘vassal’.104 Rights of way (diritti del muro) were an especially vexed issue in the narrow city streets. Giovanni Battista Olevano dedicated a whole chapter to it in his 1605 peacemaking manual.105 Olevano was an egalitarian: those who walked on the right took precedence and no one should have to cede to a social superior. Birago disagreed and scorned any hint of social levelling. He was critical of the custom that no one was obliged to give way to another: ‘One cannot claim [the right of way] even if one has one’s hand up against the wall . . . in truth good courtesy and honourable behaviour require the inferior always to give way to the superior, in every place and at any time.’106 The claim to equality was a licence for trouble in a city like Vicenza, where precedence disputes between private persons always had the potential to draw in the factions. For these reasons Giulio Cesare Valmarana argued that it was always better to give way to a social superior.107 Alessandro Guarini published the following case study: Signor Ottavio Castri and Signor Negri bump into each other. Negri claims right of way, ‘con voi e con ogn’altro’, but lets the other pass out of courtesy. Castri sees this courtesy as insufficient and they both unsheathe. Guarini considered this easy to settle because it was a quistione between equals. There was no malice aforethought and the wounding of Castri was of little consequence – a matter of sheer chance.108 Bumping into one’s enemy in the street might also be carefully choreographed to appear spontaneous. The dispute between Count Ercole Pepoli and Senatore Aurelio dall’Armi centred on a drainage canal on the property of Persicetano. Litigation had ended in arbitration. That this was not true peace was soon made clear by the reciprocal rudeness they displayed. They ostentatiously greeted others they encountered in the street, while studiously ignoring the proper formalities when passing their enemy. On 4 May 1614, near the church of Madonna delle Assi, the Pepoli ‘bumped into’ dall’Armi, who hurried to pass through them, claiming right of way as a Bolognese senator. The Pepoli protested that they had precedence. There was a fight between the two retinues. Dall’Armi was attacked with ‘savage (bestiale) violence’, resulting

104 105

106

107 108

Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 67. Trattato academico intento nel quale co’il mezo di cinquanta casi vien posto in atto pratttico il modo di ridurre a pace ogni sorte di privata incimitia (Venice, 1605). See also Guerrini (ed.), Cronache bresciane, V, p. 62; Spaccini, Cronaca, III, p. 506; IV, p. 39; Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 138. F. Birago, Discorsi Ne’ quali con rifutare la dottrina Cavallerescha del sig. Giovambattista Olevano (Milan, 1622), case 21. Modo del fa pace in via cavaleresca (Milan, 1649), pp. 57–9. Pareri in Materia d’Onor e di Paci (Ferrara, 1611), p. 3.

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in his death. The judicial investigation exposed it as a planned provocation and Pepoli was outlawed.109 Traffic congestion was an added complication. Coaches were the Lamborghinis of the Renaissance; being overtaken by a rival conspicuous advertisement of status was liable to misinterpretation. In Rome, as John Hunt has shown, the numerous coach crashes were the result of upstarts and foreign dignitaries contesting the congested road space with the local nobility.110 The city became clogged by vast cortèges of carriages – by the end of the sixteenth century there were already 833 of them. They were magnificent shows of power; gaily painted and bedecked in finery, they displayed coats of arms or symbols of office. Carriages were typically accompanied by a train of footmen and lackeys (staffieri) as part of a theatrical show of power. Traffic disputes sparked insults, brawls and duels. Though there were no laws or traffic signs, by the turn of the sixteenth century some customary rules about precedence had developed. But observance was patchy and there were daily squabbles about who had right of way. This was exacerbated from the 1620s by the frequent skirmishes between the pro-French and pro-Spanish factions. For these reasons, it was important to employ coachmen who knew how to look after themselves and the profession enjoyed a reputation for thuggery. In Naples, ‘due to the measureless increase of so many coaches in the city, the narrow space was contested without thinking one or the other about the public use, neither willing to give way, nor cede a finger of road’.111 The result was what we might term ‘road rage’, frequent duels and the employment of a ‘scandalous race of coachmen on 7 ducats a month who dressed gallantly more like captains of infantry’.112 The ‘third coachman’ of the archbishop, a notorious ‘scoundrel and murderer’, was condemned to death in 1660. When his appeals for clemency fell on deaf ears, the archbishop responded by excommunicating the judges.113 Crashes and collisions were also common in Bologna, where the first traffic regulations were introduced in 1567. At Carnival in 1713 Count Pepoli recorded in detail a coach accident with Gioseffo Malvezzi, with whom he had ‘always been on good terms’. Pepoli talked the matter over with friends: was this simply a matter of bad driving or was it a matter of honour? Pepoli, a keen student of the scienza cavalleresca, considered that Malvezzi’s attitude following the crash constituted a lack of respect. He stopped going to social occasions in case he met his enemy and ‘was obliged to make him some 109 110

111 112 113

Evangelisti, ‘Il duca “cappuccino”’, 132–4. J. Hunt, ‘Carriages, Violence, and Masculinity in Early Modern Rome’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 17 (2014), 175–96. Onofrio, Giornali, II, p. 127. Ibid., II, pp. 117, 149; III, pp. 43, 116. Ibid., I, p. 4; II, p. 207.

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courtesy, or to show that they had no cause for grievance with him, should Malvezzi use civilities with him’.114 On 10 February 1713, he decided to search him out and obtain satisfaction. After several hours he spied Malvezzi in a bookshop with three others and followed them discreetly, fearing to attack until their numbers had thinned. Finally in the via Marsili he approached Malvezzi with his sword ready to unsheathe – a sign for his opponent to do likewise. The two men exchanged several thrusts, fighting for ‘some time’ before a crowd intervened to separate them. But this did not end the affair. Pepoli viewed the incident so seriously that he drew up a long list in his diary of those friends who pledged their support with a second column of those the incident had revealed as enemies.115 ***

Retinues (squadriglie) were made of up liveried servants, lackeys (staffieri) and bravoes (bravi). The contemporary image of the bravo was very different from the raffish rogue promoted by the romantic fiction of the nineteenth century; they were invariably mentioned as a menace. Bravo was ‘a hateful name’, noted one journal; it was a profession with ‘little honour, but a great deal of danger for body and soul’.116 In 1600 foreign bravi were banished from the Venetian Republic because of ‘the many homicides and assassinations . . . mostly by paid assassins’.117 They provided the muscle for urban factions, ‘it being a principle of faction in this city [Modena] . . . that one party or another keeps men in the countryside who for any reason can arrive at any time’.118 The paramilitary units at the disposal of the factions were made of sub-units – Ernesto Bevilacqua provided eighty men for the Ferrarese faction in Modena armed with swords, arquebuses and polearms.119 Bravi were for the rich – only 5 per cent of households in mid-sixteenth-century Florence had more than five servants – but among the rich they were widely employed and not just by laymen; a Venetian abbot employed two in 1603.120 In any case a padrone could hire out this muscle to his clients. When Alessandro Abbati was beaten up in a tavern in the Mantovano in 1621 he was able, through the offices of a friend, to borrow four bravi lent by the marchese Rangoni to take his revenge.121 This was small beer for Rangoni who maintained a retinue of

114 115 116 117

118 119 120 121

ASB, Archivio Pepoli 892, fo. 112v. See below p. 402. Gasparetto (ed.), Farolfa, p. 59. Leggi criminali del serenissimo Dominio veneto in un solo volume raccolte (Venice, 1751), p. 81. Spaccini, Cronaca, II, p. 445; V, pp. 224–5. Ibid., I, p. 363. Ibid., II, p. 427. Spaccini, Cronaca, V, p. 35.

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seventy, which he used to try to stop two Brescian enemies (accompanied by forty-six men) from travelling to Rome in 1623 to press a lawsuit.122 Respectable it might not have been, but the salary of 3 scudi a month (1563) made the bravo better paid than an unskilled labourer and he might expect to be protected from the law, be sponsored for a favourable marriage and fed and clothed at his master’s expense.123 Special commissions topped up a salary. As in any profession, there were various levels of expertise. At the apex were assassins like Andrea and Giulio Ricca, whose dirty work for the Carafa in Rome and Naples brought a salary of 30 scudi per month. This was not sufficient to prevent them transferring to the service of the viceroy of Naples, for whom they worked as ‘thief-takers skilled in entrapment’, hunting down ‘traitors’ following the 1647 Revolution.124 Being liveried offered protection, but it also rendered one a target. In 1683 the principe di Ottaiano parked his carriage outside his enemy’s palace in Naples, ‘waiting for one of the Maddaloni servants to pass by’. An unlucky secretary was the first to emerge, whereupon he was given two sword blows on the head and badly wounded on the face: ‘Since you are with the signora duchess, tell her from me that I gave you these cuts.’125 Ottaiano was provoked by the assassination of a ‘young man under his protection’, whose killer was living with the Maddaloni. Enmity between the servants had escalated into a feud between their masters. The size of retinues was also conditioned by wider political imperatives. Squadriglie projected power and they provided the skeleton for military units. Retinues thus fluctuated in size and according to the task in hand. The military contractor (condottiere) enjoyed significant advantages in private disputes, since his profession required the maintenance of a peacetime retinue that could be rapidly expanded in preparation for a campaign. The Collalto family is a good example of the overlap between an ordinary retinue and a military company. The Collalto established themselves in the sixteenth century as important military contractors, providing services for France, Venice and the Empire. But in 1585 two sets of cousins fell out over the family inheritance near Treviso. Count Fulvio seized the family castle with 100 horse he had brought from Lombardy; having beaten off the local militia at Feltre, he was outlawed from the Republic. But his services were in demand and he entered Spanish service.126 This sort of retinue was typical of the aristocracy of the Veneto: the outlaw Germanico Savorgnan was untouchable because he maintained 300 men in his castle at Osoppo in the 1580s.127 The tolerance of the Venetian 122 123 124 125 126 127

Ibid., V, pp. 350–1. O. Mazzoni-Toselli, Trasunto di tre processi antichi criminali (Bologna, 1841), p. 26. Fuidoro, Successi, p. 96. Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 98. Molmenti, Banditi, p. 108. Ibid., p. 128.

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Republic for aristocratic bandits was an acknowledgement of the role they played in imperial defence. A similar pattern is discerned in the kingdom of Naples after 1620, where mobilisation for imperial defence on a scale not seen for a century transferred greater power to aristocrats responsible for raising and leading troops. These troops were not always employed for the purposes intended. In 1623 marchese del Vasto deployed 200 men in his feud with the marquese Doria.128 In 1642, the prince of Santobuono and the marchese del Vasto fielded more than 4,000 men in a property dispute. Many blamed the 1647 Revolution on the profiteering of Santobuono, grand seneschal of the kingdom, and his brother Don Ferrante Carraciolo. The investment of the profits of office in land purchase threatened to upset the local equilibrium in the Abruzzo. Their aggressive land purchases around Chieti, for example, challenged the traditional pre-eminence of the del Vasto, the marquises of neighbouring Pescara.129 In the years prior to the Revolution the categories of soldier, bandit and bravo merged because of the overlap between the royal army and aristocratic retinues. It was universally known, a 1644 report stated, that several barons (including the prince of Torella, the prince of Ottaiano and the duke of Maddaloni) ‘retained groups of bandits which held the countryside in a state of terror, while many crimes were committed as a result of the said bandits who were protected by the said lords’.130 Soldiers were used to conduct private wars. In 1645 the marchese Acaya was attacked and wounded by a band of thirty men belonging to the count of Conversano. It was fear of his neighbours, not the need to oppress his tenants, that led the prince of Gallicano to build fortresses in his territories bordering the Papal States. A war broke out in Calabria between rival lines of the Grimaldi who ‘took up arms over the possession of certain fiefs’.131 Retinues increased political leverage. The bishop of Nocera maintained a force of forty horse, which he put at the disposal of the Barberini, who reciprocated by offering to protect him from his enemies in Naples.132 Long after the crushing of the Revolution the political climate required the maintenance of large retinues: in 1664 the duke of Tarsia, for example, maintained no fewer than 300 men in livery.133 ***

The economics of vendetta is hardly touched on by the historiography. Vendetta was not something to be taken lightly. The judicial backlash needed 128 129 130 131

132 133

Diurnali di Scipione Guerra, p. 150. www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ferrante-caracciolo_(Dizionario-Biografico)/. Villari, The Revolt of Naples, p. 141. Ibid., p. 251 n78. ‘La Storia di Gioia Tauro – prima parte’: www.comune.gioiatauro.rc.it /index.php?action=index&p=278. Alonso, Buenaventura d’Avalos, p. 96. Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 260.

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to be weighed against the consequences of not responding to an injury, requiring frequent reassessment of tactics and the careful calibration of a response. One purpose of maintaining a reckoning book was to list the expenses in pursuing an enemy, in order to calculate a future compensation claim. Costs might be considerable: the sophisticated parcel bombs sent to the Bellencini were manufactured in Germany; Alberto Balguoli ordered a bomb made with 300 pounds of powder to blow a hole in his enemy’s house; Galeazzo Cincinelli had to be tracked down as far away as Constantinople.134 The maintenance of retinues was prohibitively expensive. A cheaper and more commonly used option was to hire specialists. Nowhere in Europe were so many killers available for hire at such reasonable prices as Italy – another consequence of the civil violence of the early sixteenth century. ‘One can always find men at any time’, complained one diarist in 1585, ‘who for the smallest price will put themselves to any risk or danger.’135 It was the means to a respectable living. One Neapolitan, with seven murders under his belt, made enough to buy an olive oil shop.136 Assassins might even become public figures with a certain degree of respectability. Francesco Bibboni gained notoriety for his Relazione, a frank depiction of the hunt for the ‘nasty little traitor’, Lorenzino de’ Medici, whose head he described slicing open in Venice in 1548. Bibboni boasted that he and his companions ‘earned enough for us to spend the rest of our lives in splendid style’.137 He prided himself on his professionalism and planning, knowing how to stake out targets and dodge the authorities. He used the common ploy of striking his victim as he left church. But he felt no need to don a disguise, unlike the two assassins who fled Zanè in 1646, abandoning their ‘[false] noses and pointed beards’.138 Bibboni was a professional soldier and when there was no war he sold his skills to private parties. Before he hit the Medici jackpot he worked in Vicenza, ‘where there were always men getting killed or wounded’.139 We know how these feuds were planned and financed from the reckoning book of Fabio Monza (1519–95). In 1548, his father’s cousin, a judge, was murdered. The killers were outlawed and substantial bounties placed on their heads. Fabio noted carefully in his diary the costs he hoped to recoup from the killers’ estates. He spent several months in Venice getting writs in order to ‘hunt them down and take revenge’, which cost him 80 ducats. The spies and assassins (sicari) paid to track the killers in Venice, Bologna and Florence were itemised as if they were butchers or bakers.140 134 135 136 137 138 139 140

Spaccini, Cronaca, II, p. 582; ‘Bucca D’Aragona . . . Diurnali’, p. 779. Ricci, Cronaca, p. 459. Onofrio, Giornali, IV, p. 218. Apology for a Murder (London: Hesperus, 2004), p. 44. Ghellini, ‘Episodi’, 86. Apology for a Murder, p. 23. Lomastro (ed.), I ‘zornali’ di Fabio Monza, p. lx.

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There was a tariff depending on the job at hand: a flagon of wine for beating a shopkeeper; a cape and hat for killing a constable; 100 ducats for killing a priest and 200 for a dottore (Bologna, 1663).141 Noble targets were more expensive: 200 ducats for a hit in Florence (1575); 400 for a Bolognese (1601); 300 for a (bastard) heir to the fortune of a royal councillor (Naples, 1678).142 Although this was out of the reach of most pockets, there was always the possibility of clubbing together, as several inhabitants of Ostuni (including the bishop) were accused of doing in 1624.143 This practice was encouraged by the official justice system when it requested private subscriptions in order to fund bounty hunts.144 The hunters were not always proficient. The French traveller Henri Estienne remarked in the 1560s that one of the problems with the ‘new evil’ of assassination was that bounty-hunters often got the wrong man.145 ***

The hierarchy of violence that protection entailed went right down the social scale. In 1616 a peasant was attacked by a couple of hatters. This was the revival of a feud that had been settled eight years before by their respective padroni. The peasant called on the Gironi family for assistance, the hatters to their kinsmen, the Bornelli. Each faction mobilised and there was a deadly showdown in the streets of Modena before they retreated to separate churches, one to San Pietro and the other to San Domenico.146 Lords were also expected to protect their subjects from tax collectors. Otherwise, peasants were low-cost targets in feuds: the cutting off of their noses and ears seems to have been a fairly routine retaliatory tactic and easily compensated.147 The widespread resort to assassination by the state and the social elite legitimised the practice across the social spectrum. The barbarisation of warfare during the Italian Wars encouraged peasants to take justice into their own hands. The mobilisation of the peasant commune was a particular feature of the struggle of the Venetian Terraferma, where joining a faction offered protection and legitimised the use of force against landlords of the opposing party.148 In the seventeenth century the collapse of rural incomes and rents in the wake of the great plague contributed to the spike in rural violence as landlords attempted to protect their profits. It caused, for example, the longstanding dispute between the commune of Fusignano in the Romagna and the 141 142 143 144 145 146 147

148

Angelozzi and Casanova, La nobilità disciplinata, pp. 20–3. Ricci, Cronaca, p. 165; Spaccini, Cronaca, I, pp. 482–3; Onofrio, Giornali, IV, p. 218. Diurnali di Scipione Guerra, p. 162, n. 3. For a list of subscribers: Spaccini, Cronaca, V, pp. 285–8. L’Introduction, p. 200. Spaccini, Cronaca, II, pp. 308–9, 348–9, 445; III, p. 678. For example: Confuorto, Giornali, 24 February 1680; Ricci (ed.), Cronache e documenti, p. 95; Onofrio, Giornali, II, p. 193. Bianco, ‘Mihi vindictam’, pp. 264–6.

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marchesi Calcagnini to explode. In April 1632 a failed assassination attempt on the marchese left two of his men dead. Papal troops hunted down the rebels, killing a dozen of them.149 In Naples the ‘private differences’ among the elite gave encouragement to their social inferiors. A diarist in 1637 recorded the armed resistance of the villagers of Marano near Naples when a gentleman tried to marry off a girl to one his men against her wishes, something ‘which had no equal in our memory’.150 Resistance to the brutal rule of the Malaspina at Tresana (Tuscany), which had simmered for decades, exploded in a fullscale rebellion in 1647, resulting in the assassination of Jacopo Malaspina three years later.151 Vendetta was also a highly gendered practice. Italians shared the widespread European belief that a man should defend a women’s honour and that an unfaithful wife or an unwelcome advance from another man was a stain that required removing with blood. However, in Italy the politics of sex were sharpened by much stricter codes of behaviour than was generally the rule in northern Europe. In his Discorsi of 1585, for example, Annibale Romei explained that in order to avoid any misunderstanding even married women should be separated from other men: A woman . . . is of harder condition than a man: first, in that if she be married, with her owne, shee also staineth the honour of her husband: secondarily, for that she being . . . by reason subiect to man, committeth the greater iniury; considering that the iniurie is greater, of an inferiour towardes his superior, than of a superior towardes an inferior: thirdly, because shee may bring into her house other mens children, dispossessing the proper children of her husband, of his goods: fourthly, for that a woman, offendeth extreamely against her owne proper and principall vertue, which is honestie. A wo|man therefore cannot after this manner, accompany with others than her husband, reserving still her honour, but thus doing, shee incurreth infamie.152

Gender norms were the product of political relations, as Romeo and Juliet, which was inspired by real events in the Friuli, demonstrates. Luigi da Porto’s Giulietta e Romeo was initially composed in 1517 for the wedding between Luciana and Francesco Savorgnan, which was intended to reconcile the two feuding branches of the family. The original text concluded with bitter remarks about women’s inconstancy and infidelity: ‘Oh, faithful love that formerly reigned in the hearts of women, where art thou fled?’153 There was more to 149 150 151 152

153

Spaccini, Cronaca, VI, pp. 342–3. Capecelatro, Annali, p. 88. E. Branchi, Storia della Lunigiana feudale, 2 vols. (Forni, 1897–8), II, pp. 384–416. A. Romei, The Courtiers Academie comprehending seven severall days discourses (London, 1598), p. 96. Clough, ‘Love and War in the Veneto’, p. 123.

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da Porto’s story than routine misogyny. Rather, it was a lament for the ways in which vendetta and hatred corrupt and stifle affective relations between the sexes. Female sexuality had to be closely policed lest a woman be manipulated or exploited by political enemies. The factional violence that scarred midsixteenth-century Vicenza began with rumours about the paternity of Franchesina Monza’s child. When her brothers set out to silence the rumourmongers, they unleashed a vendetta that would consume the family, divide the city and spread to the countryside. Likewise, the murder of Cassandra Ricci ‘pleased the whole city’ of Florence in 1572 because her ‘scandalous’ life had led to the murder of twelve men, ‘besides the many who suffered beating and woundings’.154 At the same time that Shakespeare was adapting da Porto, the city to where he moved the action, Verona, was already in arms after Count Girolamo Pompei accused the city governor, Virginio Orsini, of ‘the diabolic thought of desiring to take away his wife’s honour’. Pompei swore that he would ‘crucify Orsini and all his house’.155 Insulting a woman was deliberately provocative. The romantic pretensions of social climbers might be perceived as a threat: the principe di Pietrapulcina was murdered in 1668 after he told Don Ramiro Ravaschiero that his daughter was not for marrying and that her arms would never be quartered with those of a ‘tradesman’.156 Italians remained largely resistant to the freer sexual codes which were one aspect of the development of civil society in northern Europe during the seventeenth century. When a man was shot by a gentleman for raping his servant in 1618, the cause was not so much the injury done to the girl as the ‘lack of respect’ the violence had shown to her master.157 Libertines, like Giovanni Battista Olevano, were condemned when they stated that ‘the injury caused by adultery did not harm a man’s reputation’.158 But even libertines considered that infidelity dishonoured the woman. The otherwise progressive lawyer Domenico Confuorto noted in his diary the murder of Cicia Pisano and her lover in Naples in 1680. Cicia’s husband went immediately to the viceroy to inform him how ‘he had cut off his cuckolds’ horns’ before giving his wife a magnificent burial. Confuorto thought she was getting her just desserts: ‘note the lust of the woman’, who was forty and only recently remarried, ‘to a young man, good looking and well built, but not content with his legal kisses, she gave herself to adultery, as if he was old and impotent’.159 This double standard and the excesses caused by the rules shaping relations between the sexes were among the main targets of Italian Enlightenment thinkers. When Scipione Maffei refuted the idea that adultery 154 155 156 157 158 159

Ricci, Cronaca, p. 41. Molimenti, Banditi, p. 91. Onofrio, Giornali, II, p. 71. Spaccini, Cronaca, IV, 392. Birago, Discorsi, p. 89. Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 54.

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was the greatest shame that could befall man, he was targeting widely held views. It was nonsense, he said, to suggest that a wife’s adultery brought shame on the husband and rubbished the claim that only blood could satisfy the offence. He compared Italian men unfavourably with the ancient Greeks, who were not afflicted by ‘the worst ill-fortune of [defending] female chastity’ with their blood.160 There are many cases where lovers were subject to an extreme level of violence that included mutilation and ended with their bodies being put on public display. Some are notorious and continue to attract morbid fascination. But, as Claudio Povolo has shown recently, there were sound legal reasons for the use of excessive violence. In order to be treated leniently cuckolded husbands in Venice had to demonstrate that they had been seized by a jealous fury.161 Mutilation mimicked the rituals of execution and the courts always placed great store by intent and the status of the victims. In Padua the twenty-four wounds perpetrated by Battista Ferraccini on a boy he accused of raping his daughter resulted only in banishment, paving the way for his eventual rehabilitation. Likewise, the discovery of a mutilated headless corpse resulted in no charges because the victim was a servant accused of consorting with the wife of a lawyer. Marco Fruttarolo, on the other hand, was executed after going too far in his jealous rage. In mimicry of the fate that befell traitors he had posted bits of his wife’s body around town.162 Marriage was the traditional means to seal the peace in a feud, but what if the negotiations or the marriage itself did not work out? In matters related to marriage negotiations and unpaid dowries, the breakdown of trust legitimated a response that not only cancelled the offence but paid it back in blood. One marriage settlement in Florence was so complex that when it unravelled it led to ‘the most brutal murder of our time or our fathers, or perhaps of all time’.163 The projected union between the son of the baron of Montebello and the daughter of the marchese of Pentidattilo was an attempt to bring closure to a territorial dispute in Reggio Calabria. However, when the marchese died in 1685 his son tore up the agreement and, to rub salt in his neighbour’s wounds, betrothed his sister to the son of a Spanish magistrate. This was treated by Montebello as a declaration of war. On 16 April 1686 Montebello entered his enemy’s castle with forty men and killed the marchese, mutilating his corpse with a ‘barbarous fury’. He killed the marchese’s mother, presumably holding her equally culpable. But he did not stop there. In an attempt to wipe out his 160 161

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163

Della scienza, I, pp. 85–7; II, p. 200. C. Povolo, ‘La Stanza di Andrea Trevisan: Amore, furore e inimicizie nella Venezia di fine Cinquecento’, Quaderni di Valdilonte (2018). M. Borgherini-Scarabellini, ‘La vita privata a Padua nel secolo XVII’, Miscellenea di Storia Veneta, 12 (1917), pp. 28–9. Ricci, Cronaca, p. 162.

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enemies altogether he murdered her two young boys. Three days later he celebrated his marriage with his bride – her feelings are not recorded.164 Since vendetta violence replaced or mimicked official justice, male sexual jealousy was not the only factor contributing to the routine mutilation of corpses. During the Italian Wars the display of mutilated corpses had a didactic function, such as the unmanning of Giovanni Gozzadini, whose corpse was dismembered in Reggio in 1517 and his genitalia paraded around the city. In 1640 bits of Signore Paolo Ghidella’s corpse were posted around Brescia by the bravi of the count of Avogadro, signalling that he was a traitor.165 In Bologna in 1662, at the height of the factional violence, a naked corpse was deposited in the streets with its genitalia missing. An unfortunate servant had apparently paid too much attention to his master’s mistress – this padrone was demonstrating to everyone in the city that he was not to be trifled with – and she was presented with the severed member.166 The corpse of Fra Paolo Venato, a monk, was mutilated and his brains and intestines left in the street in Naples.167 This was political justice meted out on a hit-man who had committed many murders in the suppression of the 1647 Revolution; his propensity for severing heads and displaying corpses had brought him notoriety and riches from the sequestered lands of rebels. The cutting off of noses was also part of the tit-for-tat exchanges in factional skirmishing; consequently threats to cut someone up like a melon or turnip were not idle.168 In Naples at least one severed head was reported to have been skinned but it has not been possible to verify nineteenth-century sightings of these skins, which were preserved, ‘in the Venetian fashion’, as trophies.169 Another practice recorded in both Naples and Modena was the discovery of corpses with their hair cut off, a humiliation usually reserved for criminals.170 Ritual humiliation was not therefore a result of uncontrolled rage but shaped by legal norms and generated by the intensity of political conflict. The bloody feud between the Thiene and the Ghellini, which was related to control of the countryside north of Vicenza, reached its peak with the murder of Francesco Thiene in 1647.171 Giovanbattista Ghellini prevented a priest approaching his victim and after he expired he and his men trampled the corpse with their horses. In both this case and the Pentidattilo murders, related 164 165 166 167 168 169

170 171

www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/bernardino-abenavoli_(Dizionario-Biografico). Guerrini (ed.), ‘Diari dei Pluda di Castenedolo’, p. 370. Angelozzi and Casanova, La nobilità disciplinata, p. 23. Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 83; II, p. 127. Politi, Società cremonese, p. 285; Valmarana, Mode del far pace, p. 51. Diurnali di Scipione Guerra, p. 168; ‘Bucca D’Aragona . . . Diurnali’, p. 346; Bulifon, Giornali, p. 199; P. Gioia, Conferenze istoriche sull’origine, e su i progressi del Comune di Noci in terra di Bari, 2 vols. (Bari, 1839), II, p. 62. Onofrio, Giornali, II, p. 135; Spaccini, Cronaca, VI, p. 270. Ghellini, ‘Episodi di vita vicentini’.

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above, the extreme violence was carefully choreographed, a grisly display of justice. Montebello did not act out of blind passion. Every detail was carefully planned. He knew that the killing of women and children would not go unpunished; they were killings that could not be compensated. He signed over his estates to his uncle before fleeing to Vienna to start a new career, purchasing a commission in the imperial army. In the same fashion, Giovanbattista Ghellini planned for the murder he committed by clearing his house of all belongings and signing away his property to straw-men, protecting his inheritance from the civil damages. He slipped across the border and obtained a cavalry commission in Ferrara. ***

The impressions of foreign travellers about Italy’s high rates of interpersonal violence have recently been confirmed by statistical evidence. By the end of the seventeenth century Italians, too, were beginning to compare themselves unfavourably with northerners, whom they had once disparaged as barbarians. Reflecting on the banality of murder in Naples in 1672 the diarist d’Onofrio lamented, ‘it is a great matter that in this city more men than beasts are slaughtered. In truth, it is a great wonder why such things do not occur so easily in other countries.’172 Scipione Maffei, writing in 1710, identified the cult of honour as an Italian problem. In northern Europe, he observed, the duel was banned and private disputes brought no glory to participants. Italians, by contrast, fostered a false notion of glory based on the self, which fed the culture of vendetta. These observations were the product of wider social and political changes at the turn of the seventeenth century to which we shall now turn.

172

Onofrio, Giornali, III, p. 71.

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4 The Decline of Vendetta

The large crowd that gathered in front of the Tosa gate in Milan on Christmas Eve 1705 had come to witness a very rare event – the execution of an imperial count, Galeazzo Boselli, who had been convicted of attempting to murder his stepson, Niccolino Martinoni. Despite the best efforts of his lawyers and supporters (who had ever heard of gentlemen being executed for attempted murder?) the trial was completed with uncommon celerity – only three weeks passed between his arrest and sentence. Politics was behind the haste. Boselli, an officer in the French army in Italy, had been exploiting his commission to conduct private operations in the Ferrarese. He was arrested on the orders of the French military administration in Lombardy and handed over to the civil courts in Milan. The trial was a formality. Until then, Boselli had pursued his interests through the frequent resort to violence, and ordinary justice had been unwilling or unable to stop him. His failure to submit to military discipline required that an example be made. The process was carefully choreographed – his son Scipione inherited his regiment and went on to a distinguished career in French service. Boselli’s execution is of wider significance. Across Europe around 1700 the emergence of the notion of society was founded on the distinct separation of the civil and military spheres. Boselli’s career, which reprises themes we have already investigated, has much to tell us about this development in Italy. He was born in the Bergamasco around 1660 into a world of vendettas: his mother ‘kept the shirt of her dead husband stained with blood in order to show her son when he was grown up and incite him to vendetta’. In the late nineteenth century a picture of a lady showing a bloody shirt to a child still hung in the Boselli house at Ponte San Pietro.1 Whether Boselli fulfilled his mother’s request we do not know. In January 1681 he married a widow, the Contessa Paola Secco-Suardo, embroiling him in a number of ‘very important’ lawsuits, which generated several enemies, including Count Zaccaria Suardo. The resulting feud resulted in a five-year prison sentence for Boselli. But, in July 1684, he was sprung from gaol by thirty armed men.2 Boselli was repeatedly outlawed from the Venetian Republic, but he nevertheless travelled to 1 2

C. Lochis, ‘Un patrizio Bergamasco’, Bergamo, o sia Notizie patrie. Almanacco, 74 (1888), 40. ASV, ‘Lettere di Rettori di Bergamo’, 7 (1678–83), fo. 176.

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Venice in pursuit of Suardo. He struck in 1688, masquerading as a Carnivalgoer. On Mardi Gras outside Santa Maria Zobenigo he gave the order to shoot Suardo in the back. Consequently, the Council of Ten outlawed Boselli, seized his property, put a price on his head of 2,000 ducats and offered bountyhunters, should they return with his head, the opportunity to commute four sentences of outlawry.3 As usual in Venice, punitive justice was more apparent than real. Boselli could not only rely on powerful friends but also made common cause with those who despised Suardo, ‘not only for the old disagreements between them, but for more recent unkindnesses, resulting in the relaying of intelligence and discussion of plans with Count Galeazzo Boselli’.4 The sentences remained a dead letter: his estates could not be sequestered since they were held in trust for his heirs.5 And Suardo’s widow was extremely cautious about cooperating with the investigating magistrate, the Rettore of Bergamo. Initially, she avoided an interview, ‘as the thunderbolt had struck her with an affliction of tears’.6 After some prompting she offered some information about the conspirators and their motives but was bound by the code of omertà: ‘not wishing albeit to tell from whom she had heard it, for as a lady of honour she could not break the promise of secrecy she gave to the one who revealed to her the motive’. Her fears were real. The Rettore reported the appearance of graffiti ‘in several public and open places of this city in which one comes across the name of Galeazzo Boselli with the title of count and noble, a means perhaps by which to clear his name’.7 Boselli was free to move back and forth across the border with Lombardy, where he had estates. Boselli’s criminal activities included murder, exactions, illegal tolls and false coining, for which he was outlawed from the state of Milan in 1693, and a price of 4,000 scudi was placed on his head.8 It is difficult to know how exceptional Boselli’s activities were among the local nobility. His enemies in the region portrayed him as the head of a bandit gang, but evidence from Venetian sources suggests that his activities were associated with a private war against his neighbour, the marchese Ferrante Novanti. Boselli was careful to justify his actions – after ransacking Novanti’s properties he posted cartels. He did the same when decapitating two of Novanti’s men – a form of execution that mimicked official justice. In return, Novanti offered 500 silver doppie for his assassination.9 This was one of a number of bloody vendettas that divided the Bergamasco in the 1690s and which spilled over into 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

ASV, Consiglio dei Dieci, Criminale, 105, fo. 67, v, 72. Ibid, fo. 67. Ibid. 97. ASV, Lettere di Rettori di Bergamo, 7 (1678–83), fo. 276. Ibid, fo. 283. Lochis, ‘Un patrizio’, 48–51. Ibid., 64–76

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the streets of Milan – contemporary estimates put the number of homicides committed by Boselli and his gang at 400.10 The wider international context played a significant part in the formation of friend–enemy identities in the region. In 1689 Louis XIV had declared war on Spain, and Lombardy was once again on the front line of military operations. The suspicion in Lombardy that Boselli was a French traitor, as well as a bandit, is confirmed by the fact that one of his protectors was the French ambassador in Milan, Amelot de la Houssaye, and another, the duke of Mantua, was the leading pro-French prince in northern Italy. Boselli was granted citizenship in Mantua, and from there he continued to stir up trouble in Lombardy, planning an assassination in Milan (once again during Carnival) in 1696. When the War of the League Augsburg ended in 1697 this feud was quickly settled.11 In 1700 Boselli was commissioned as a French captain of dragoons. He distinguished himself during the War of the Spanish Succession and was promoted to colonel in 1703. His career was built on his capacity to raise troops in northern Italy. During his private wars Boselli was followed by a gang of fifty men and these undoubtedly formed the backbone of his regiment. In many respects, Boselli’s career trajectory was not unusual in seventeenth-century Europe. But in France, the creation of an officer corps with a structured career by Louis XIV slowly turned the aristocracy into a service class, significantly reducing the problem of violence. Boselli refused to succumb to the demands of military discipline. Perhaps he felt that his commission rendered him invulnerable. In fact, quite the opposite was the case. In September 1705 he was charged with his son Francesco, an abbot, of trying to assassinate his stepson. But a more serious error was to upset France’s allies. Boselli abused his commission, plundering the Ferrarese and upsetting the pope. Boselli tried to prolong the trial by claiming ecclesiastical jurisdiction – he had taken refuge in church – but the military administration in Lombardy would have no truck with this sort of tergiversation and justice was uncommonly swift. ***

The political violence that characterised mid-seventeenth-century Italy had subsided in the north by the 1690s, a process that can be traced in the falling homicide rate. In Bologna, for example, rates fell steadily from the 1670s to an aggregate rate of 13.5 in 1700 for the whole province but with a much lower rate of violence in the city itself – a return to the situation of the relatively peaceful 1610s.12 But the return of large-scale warfare to the peninsula in the 1690s cautions against any simplistic claims regarding the disciplining of the 10 11

12

Ibid., 79–80, 137. C. Lochis, ‘Ancora qualche parola sul conte Galeazzo Boselli’, Bergamo, o sia Notizie patrie. Almanacco, 75 (1889), 19–21. Rose, ‘Homicide in North Italy’, p. 170.

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aristocracy. The turbulent international scene opened up the possibility once more of regime change and the success of punitive measures in bringing the Bolognese aristocracy to heel following the mid-century civil wars has recently been questioned.13 The worst of the violence was curbed by the papal legate forcing faction leaders and padroni to post financial guarantees for their good conduct, but it did not stop the intimidation or even the murder of litigants and officials. Hostility to the papal regime and its institutions remained strong into the 1720s. There were widespread complaints about corruption and the failure of the courts to follow due process. The last great aristocratic feud in Bologna occurred between the leaders of the Republican faction, the Pepoli, and the leading supporters of the pope, the Zambeccari, between 1695 and 1698. It was settled using traditional means: attempts to fine the participants were not enforced and peace was brokered by the grand duke of Tuscany. The outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession posed a more serious threat to papal rule. There were continuing clashes between the noble factions and papal law enforcement officers. Even the conclusion of the war did not bring an immediate end to civil conflict: in 1719 Count Girolamo Grassi and a senior Pepoli household officer were killed in a street battle with the bargello and his troops. It was only in the 1720s that the social elite definitively made its peace with the regime.14 Pacification came earlier in Tuscany. In Siena, for example, aristocratic violence fell sharply in the 1670s, though evidence from the Medici court diary shows that the problem was not altogether eradicated.15 In January 1680, for example, Filippo Strozzi challenged Francesco Gerini to fight to first blood in front of the fountain of the Piazza Santa Croce. Gerini inflicted the first wound and approached to make peace with his adversary, ‘who as soon as he felt himself in the firm embrace of Gerini put his hand on his dagger, which was at his side, and with it villainously thrust the blade into the poor unfortunate lord’.16 Strozzi took refuge in the church of Santa Croce, was later escorted out of the city by a large group of supporters and was subsequently outlawed. In 1685 a rigorous law against offensive and hidden weapons was issued ‘for the everyday trouble that murder with short daggers gives birth to’.17 The extent to which this violence was the product of pro- and anti-Medici sentiment is worthy of further exploration. Privately, the Strozzi expressed Republican opinions and contempt for the Medici.18 In Lombardy, too, the statistical decline in the number of homicides in the 1690s 13 14 15

16 17 18

Angelozzi and Casanova, La giustizia criminale a Bologna nel XVIII, pp. 21, 34–5. Ibid., pp. 70–129. Bonazini, ‘Diario’, II, fos. 244, 299, 313, 315, 323–4; L. Passerini, Genealogia e storia della famiglia Altoviti (Florence, 1871), p. 186. Bonazini, ‘Diario’, II, fo. 310. Ibid, fo. 365. A. Manikowski, The Society of Elite Consumption: Lorenzo Strozzi’s Aristocratic Enterprise in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany (Warsaw: Instytut Historii, 2017).

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was not a signal that aristocratic violence was over – the activities of men like Boselli were concealed under cover of military campaigning. In the Veneto the civil conflicts that characterised the first half of the seventeenth century subsided, but the legacy was a homicide rate that remained stubbornly high. Boselli was not the only padrone involved in border trouble. His stepson and enemy Martinoni was imprisoned in 1700 for his part in what a rancorous pamphlet exchange described as a ‘vendetta’. The purpose of imprisoning Martinoni was to force him to accept a peace deal imposed by the authorities. He published a defence of his conduct, attacking the Venetian legal system and defending the right of ‘absolute and total liberty of [individuals] regarding peace pacts, which were a matter for the jurisdiction of free will’.19 Martinoni’s rhetoric demonstrates the continuing pre-eminence of the scienza cavalleresca at the beginning of the eighteenth century as the basis for dispute settlement in the Venetian Republic, and his equation of the public sphere with the court of honour. Peace, Martinoni argued, was a contract between private individuals and had to be entered into freely otherwise it lacked legitimacy. Private peace deals were fundamental to ‘public trust, the principal foundation of civil union’.20 These arguments were persuasive in an oligarchic republic like Venice and Martinoni was soon rehabilitated, ending his days as military governor of Bergamo.21 For these reasons aristocratic feuding survived on the Venetian borderlands longer than elsewhere in Europe. In the Friuli, for example, attempts in the late seventeenth century to curb the banditry and feuds of the Della Torre were circumscribed by their importance for border defence. It was the development of the concept of a European balance of power and adherence to a more rule-based international system that rendered marcher lords redundant. The execution of Lucio Della Torre and several of his bravi in 1722 was a result of unprecedented cooperation between the Serenissima and Vienna.22 Pursuit of the last great aristocratic bandit in Brescia, Count Marcantonio Martinengo, was, however, hampered by omertà: ‘I have begun investigations’, complained the provveditori of the Terraferma in 1732, ‘but no one dares to open their mouths and no crime has come to light’.23 Martinengo had been outlawed in 1723 for shooting dead an upstart lawyer in a hunting dispute but continued to operate with his bravi from across the border in Lombardy. But the persistence of violence cannot be attributed solely to the nobility. Nor was it the product of a depressed economy, as the industrial valleys to the north of Brescia witnessed an economic revival at the end of the century. In the 1690s, however, there was 19 20 21 22 23

La pace in prigione dichiarita nulla, p. 7. Ibid., p. 23. Lochis, ‘Un patrizio bergomasco’, 81. Molimenti, Banditi, pp. 141–9. Ibid., p. 151.

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a revival of the mid-century civil war. In 1694 alone, three members of the locally powerful Chinelli family were murdered, demonstrating the extent to which faction was the product of local political circumstances.24 The benign effects of changes in Venetian policy took a while to become apparent. After 1635 the government ceased to order the extrajudicial killing (bandits aside) of its own subjects and confined operations to Ottoman targets.25 The decline of state-sponsored assassination may reflect the feeling that it was counterproductive. Coupled with the declining rate of executions, the renunciation of extrajudicial murder also reflects a greater sense of security, diminishing the need to demonstrate power in dramatic displays of violence. The reduction of the tax burden in order to stimulate the economy was a further contribution to the restoration of authority, especially in Brescia, whose metallurgy industry relied heavily on exports. However, in regions where the state’s legitimacy remained weak assassination survived.26 The mid-century convulsions that shook the Spanish Empire cast a long shadow. Historians have long dismissed ideas of Spanish ‘decline’. The notion of ‘decline’ is a moral category and the empire proved remarkably resilient in its Mediterranean heartland. Rather, the problem of violence in the Mezzogiorno was rooted in politics. The weak legitimacy of the state required the use of fear and violence, which in turn bred contempt for and distrust of the law. Sardinia was one of many regions in the Mediterranean where vendetta culture was legitimised, even encouraged, by the state, which played arbiter in the disputes and profited from its cut of the fines and compensation payments which regulated vindicatory exchanges.27 The assassination of the viceroy of Sardinia of 1668 was provoked by the widespread feeling that he was behind the murder of the marchese Castelvi, leader of the local aristocracy. The strength of the Spanish regime was displayed in its ruthless pursuit of exiled opponents, several of whom were assassinated. Strenuous efforts to control the postrevolutionary spiral of violence included preventative detention, killing hundreds of bandits in punitive raids, extracting bonds for good behaviour and quartering troops on the estates of recalcitrant padroni. But enmities, many of which had been exacerbated by state policies, were not so easily overcome and the frequent encounters, duels and assassinations among

24

25 26

27

www.enciclopediabresciana.it/enciclopedia/index.php?title=GARDONE_VAL_ TROMPIA (accessed May 2019). Lamansky, ‘L’Assassinat politique à Venise’, 118–20. For evidence of the continued use of assassination in the Papal States: Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 276. For the corresponding privatisation of the Ottoman state and its role in the creation of a feuding culture in the Balkans: T. Esmer, ‘War, State, and the Privatization of Violence in the Ottoman Empire’, in The Cambridge World History of Violence, vol. 3, pp. 194–216.

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aristocrats and their followers continued to be a feature of life in the kingdom into the 1680s.28 The problem of violence in Naples was not due to the absence of civilised values. After all, the city was home to a vigorous civil society that was pregnant with Italy’s first significant contribution to the European Enlightenment. Partly, it was a consequence of widespread distrust of the state and its institutions. Confuorto complained about the grip of the Roman Church over civic institutions, ‘since the custom of this nation is prone to take vengeance with deceptions, fabrications and subtle inventions, it leads to the committing of villainies and outrages under the guise of zeal for our holy faith’.29 Another patriot argued that inhabitants of the Papal States were their ‘natural enemies’; worse than the French or the Spanish, they were ‘the scoundrel son of friars, priests and prelates – the scum of the earth’.30 The manner in which contending notions of authority, one civil and one divine, complicated and exacerbated private enmities can be seen in the feud between the Conclubet and the San Giorgio. As hereditary clerk to the treasury (scrivano di razione) Andrea Conclubet, marchese d’Arena, was a significant figure in the kingdom. But his opposition to the Inquisition and promotion of the new scientific thinking through an academy modelled on the Royal Society made him enemies.31 Conclubet was a model landlord, promoting improvement projects and encouraging trade. But he also acted like other padroni and was involved in protection rackets. Progress came at his tenants’ expense: ‘his vassals, in order to liberate themselves from his exactions, turned to the marchese di San Giorgio as their protector’.32 The marchese di San Giorgio was also a great patron of arts and letters, but in opposition to Conclubet he promoted rigid orthodoxy. The dispute escalated and on 24 April 1675 Conclubet was killed by four men in an encounter outside the church of San Nicola di Pistaso in Naples. The complicity of the authorities was widely suspected: the marchese had initially taken refuge in the convent of San Severino but was moved to the church of the Castello under royal protection.33 The failure to bring the marchese and other assassins to justice bred hostility to the regime. Conclubet’s kin took matters into their own hands, mobilising and, when they failed to get their man, venting their anger on the Spanish, fighting a ‘battle’ with loyalists elements in Naples in May 1681.34 28

29 30 31

32 33 34

G. Galasso, Napoli Spagnola doppo Masaniello, 2 vols. (Naples: Sansoni, 1982), II, pp. 218–221, 258–62, 275–80. Confuorto, Giornali, II, p. 65. Onofrio, Giornali, IV, p. 175. N. Nicolini, ‘Romanzesco barocco: l’assassinio del Marchese di Arena (1675)’, Atti dell’Academia Pontaniana, 16 (1967), 97–122. Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 5. Onofrio, Giornali, II, p. 244. Confuorto, Giornali, I, pp. 63–5.

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The post-revolutionary kingdom of Naples remained haunted by the traumatic events of the 1640s and 1650s. As late as 1682 the celebrated lawyer Francesco Andrea, on being promoted to membership of the viceregal council, was confronted by one of his new colleagues with the charge that he was a supporter of ‘The rebel, Masaniello, and that if thee do not speak to me as thee should, I’ll have thee beaten to death.’35 The use of the informal tu was deliberately provocative. Fortunately, Andrea had his own friends who were prepared to challenge this claim and fight a duel for him. Social prejudice was rooted in material concerns. The feud between the count of Policastro and the marchese di Cammarota related to the former’s claim to overlordship and therefore a cut of the profits from iron ore mining. It was mainly conducted by attacks on and detention of each other’s tenants, but in 1692 the count posted a challenge in Naples in the name of one of his vassals, a Neapolitan grocer. The claim here was that the marchese was nothing more than the son of a grocer. Both men were placed under house arrest.36 Vendetta in Naples was not confined to the aristocracy. The legal establishment, the togati, employed assassins and the structural conflict between the urban communes and the Church also encouraged it.37 For instance, the dispute between the town of Piedimonte and the bishopric of Alife in Campania, which went back to at least the 1630s, got worse following the revolution. In 1673 the bishop was shot and killed.38 There were also frequent skirmishes between the locals and the Spanish garrison and the French still had their supporters, who conspired to undermine Spanish rule.39 In June 1693 a pitched battle erupted on the streets of the city, leaving several Spanish soldiers dead. The conspiracy was finally crushed in 1701 when the aristocratic ringleaders were executed following an attempted coup. These divisions ensured that the post-revolutionary period was the golden age of the duel in Naples.40 Many were the product of long-term political conflicts, such as the feud between the Acquaviva and Carafa, a consequence of the struggle for pre-eminence in Puglia.41 In 1671 Giangirolamo II Acquaviva, count of Conversano, took umbrage when Giovanni Carafa, duke of Noja, bought the fief of Rutigliano. The feud that resulted complicates, once more, 35 36 37 38

39 40

41

Ibid., I, p. 79. Ibid., II, pp. 33–4 Ibid., I, p. 235. http://asmvpiedimonte.altervista.org/Vescovi%20alifani%20-%20dal%20XVII%20al% 20XX%20secolo.html (accesssed May 2019). Onofrio, Giornali, IV, pp. 13, 226. For example: Confuorto, Giornali, I, pp. 69, 187, 198; II, p. 115: ‘since the death of the viceroy (1687) there had been so many homicides and robberies that it was not safe to walk streets at night’. Onofrio, Giornali, I, pp. 122; II, 117, 176, 198; III, p. 71. For this and following: V. Didonna, ‘L’ultimo duello’: www.scaffale.org/home-didonnavito/didonna-vito-noia/l-ultimo-duello/ebook-l-ultimo-duello (Accessed May 2019).

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the traditional picture of a backwards-looking aristocracy squabbling over the pickings of a stagnant economy. For the town of Noja was undergoing economic expansion in the 1670s. It had a growing population resulting from the commercial production of cotton for export. The duke was an improving landlord and the purchase of Rutigliano was driven by the need for a reliable water source to irrigate the cotton fields. But his plans aroused hostility. When the architect sent to survey Rutigliano was murdered by locals, Noja suspected Conversano’s complicity. Carafa retaliated by cutting off the nose and ears of one of his enemy’s vassals. The crown attempted to prevent further escalation and bound them over to keep the peace but on 14 March 1671 Conversano’s brother Giulio, at the head of 500 men, broke into the Palazzo Carafa in Noja and surprised his enemy asleep. He took two tufts of Noja’s hair, a trophy whose purpose was to humiliate and provoke. Noja died soon after but his brothers swore vengeance and hired a killer to murder Giulio Acquaviva. So deep was the enmity between them that, with all attempts at peace having failed, a duel between Giulio and the new duke of Noja, Francesco Maria, was finally agreed. The viceroy came under pressure to permit a formal combat, ‘but no one among the nobility desired it . . . everyone feared it would be a war without end, for as soon as one fell his second would then summons the other to a similar fight, or an ambush of the field of combat would occur in which the victor and his second was assassinated’.42 Instead, the combatants headed for Nuremberg, where they fought in front of a crowd of thousands on 5 November 1673. The referees stopped the fight after an hour following eight ‘vicious passes’ that left Noja severely wounded. The combatants exchanged the kiss of peace and the feud was at an end. The complexity of Neapolitan politics can be gleaned from the manner in which factional identities penetrated the city’s institutions. For example, the seggio di Nido, one of the five assemblies that represented the city’s nobility, was divided between two factions, the Pacchiarotti and the Signori. In 1686 an attempt to reconcile their differences by the other seggi descended into an argument which compelled the leading members of the assemblies to fight duels in defence of their public statements.43 Some encounters were big affairs. An argument in 1686 about seating at a theatrical performance behind Saint Effremo led to a fight between two retinues in which ‘a hundred swords were unsheathed with great confusion’, leading to one death and the parties taking refuge in different churches.44 The harsh measures proclaimed by successive viceroys were frequently compromised and so, for example, the murder of the son of a rich merchant by a gang of nobles during a theatrical performance in 1692, which should have 42 43 44

Onofrio, Giornali, III, p. 69. Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 166. Ibid., I, pp. 141–2.

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been treated as a case of lese-majesty, as it occurred in the viceroy’s presence, resulted in pardons (for significant sums, it was rumoured).45 Royal authority had to compete with peer pressure. When, in February 1686, the marchese Cucugliudi refused a challenge issued by Geronimo Carmignano, the latter sought the advice of his patron, who told him to ‘remove the stain by any means possible, and having consulted among their friends and kin on this agendum, it was resolved to assassinate [Cucugliudi]’. In this instance the crown had good intelligence: the plot was betrayed and the plotters were placed under house arrest.46 Banditry, smuggling and peculation proved hard to suppress in the kingdom because of the value of protection rackets to the elite. The indulgence shown to them was in contrast to the punitive military expeditions into the interior against bandits, which resulted in many injustices. In the Abruzzo, for example, the crown tried to starve them of local support, forcibly removing whole villages and leaving the fields barren, a precursor of modern antiinsurgency warfare.47 Bandits continued to be recruited by padroni and the failure of the state to bridle the aristocracy meant that peasants sought the help of rival padroni to intervene against a rapacious landlord. In 1690, for example, there was ‘a great commotion’ in Calabria between the prince of Bisignano and the marchese di Serra, as vassals sought the protection of rival lords and ‘neighbouring lords were divided and favoured one or other party with their men’. The prince marched on the town of Cassano with 2,000 men but was checked by an even larger force. The governor of the province was powerless in the face of such numbers.48 The tenants of Francesco Carafa had no other option in 1679 but to murder him ‘due to the many tyrannies used by him against them’.49 ***

The change that is evident around 1700 has often been attributed to the success of the Counter-Reformation in social disciplining. There is evidence of a growing respect for the sanctity of sacred spaces and orderliness during feasts and processions over the course of the seventeenth century. The midseventeenth-century crisis inspired the Jesuits to conduct great peacemaking missions into the rural interior. Between 1665 and 1696 they sponsored thirtythree missions in the kingdom of Naples alone.50 The Jesuits condemned litigation as feuding in another guise and they organised theatrical rituals of 45

46 47 48 49 50

Ibid, II, pp. 115, 334; www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giuseppe-capece_%28DizionarioBiografico%29/ (Accessed: May 2019). Confuorto, Giornali, I, pp. 142–3. P. Palma, Compendio della storia civile del Pretuzio (Teramo, 1856), chapter 4. Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 311. Ibid., I, p. 9. Niccoli, Perdonare, chapter 5.

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public penitence and reconciliation as an alternative. In Capua, for example, which was characterised by ‘raging enmity between two factions’ who only lived for the ‘spirit of vendetta’, an eight-day mission involved processions of flagellants, a display of skulls and the burning of prohibited books, lascivious letters and items of clothing. The Jesuits claimed that their spectacle ‘cancelled in their souls any shade of the antique hatred, and any scintilla of the old rancour’.51 The missions undoubtedly offered short-term balm, encouraging enemies to renounce their suits, notarise a settlement and return to communion. The emphasis on stimulating an emotional response in the spectator – weapons, bones and victims’ clothes splattered with blood were sometimes used in the parades – rather than contrition was controversial and several rituals were banned by the pope. In order to counter these critics, Paolo Segneri, who spent nearly thirty years as a missionary in rural Tuscany (1665–92), published his sermons, which preached stoic values to the poor. Not only was enmity the absence of Christian charity, he argued, but it engendered a malign state of emotional agitation, stopping you sleeping or trusting your friends, forcing you to avoid public engagements and meaning that you had to go around armed.52 The true Christian believer demonstrated his love of his neighbour through civil acts, ‘not [neglecting] to greet his adversary when required to and not refusing them a written peace’.53 However, there are grounds for being sceptical about the long-term success of the missions. They were, after all, hardly new – having been around since the 1540s – and their promotion of arbitration emphasised something that was already well embedded in legal practice. Sceptics argued that they did not tackle the root causes of the problem: ‘Peace . . . is desirable and blessed, only when it is secure from doubts, when it doesn’t increase danger . . . But when it imparts contrary effects, it is, hidden under nourishing medicine, noxious poison and under the specious name of peace, cruellest war.’54 Suspicions that Jesuit peacemaking was more poison than balm were driven by the widespread recognition that the Church, with its own courts, armed police force, worldly priests and jealously guarded rights to asylum, was part of the problem. In the Bergamasco the feuds of the late seventeenth century involved the clergy.55 Some notorious killers were extracted from the place of refuge sometimes with the blessing of the Church, but others successfully claimed asylum. Don Nicola Galluccio and his guards took refuge in a church in Sant’Antonio Abate, having killed a neighbour in an encounter in the streets of Naples in 1689. The forces of order managed to kill one of the gang by firing 51 52 53 54 55

Cummins, ‘Enmity and Peace-Making’, chapter 5. Segneri, Il Cristiano instruito, I, p. 324. Ibid., I, p. 229. Maffei, Della scienza, I, preface. Lochis, ‘Un patrizio bergamasco’, 60, 66.

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through a window, but three years later the remainder were living in the more secure San Lorenzo in Naples.56 In 1740 it was claimed that there were 20,000 refugees living in churches in the kingdom of Naples. The ecclesiastical courts continued to issue their own firearms licences and employ armed cursori – even the rector of the hospital of San Angelo in Naples had one.57 It was abuses like these that led the ‘Enlightenment Pope’, Benedict XIV, to attempt serious reform. A new concordat with the kingdom of Naples in 1741 led to restrictions on ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the number of cursori. The procedures of the Torrone court, whose maladministration was a perennial complaint in Bologna, were overhauled in 1744. In the kingdom of Naples, too, the sale of pardons in Naples, long condemned as a public scandal, was subject to restrictions by the Austrians, who attempted to reform the system of blood money settlements in 1725. ***

The decline of vendetta practices in northern Italy in the first half of the eighteenth century is well attested. It was a consequence of political and social processes which transformed the social elite and its relationship to authority in the decades around 1700. Political relations in the peninsula were clarified and stabilised as larger states progressively devoured their smaller neighbours, reducing the number of Italian states from around thirty in 1500 to under twenty in 1750. One happy consequence of this struggle was to ease border trouble and limit career opportunities for marcher lords, bandits, adventurers and exiles. The execution of Count Boselli was a further indication that men following the profession of arms were citizens like any other and subject to military discipline. Those states that survived the winnowing process emerged with greater authority engendering a modus vivendi with previously recalcitrant subjects. Even in Bologna, where the papal regime had long been opposed by sections of the social elite, reform replaced conspiracy and traditional appeals to liberty were dropped. The once hated Torrone court was no longer viewed as the enemy after 1720. The social elite ceased to appear in the court records by the 1740s – violence became a criminal and not a political problem and was henceforth identified exclusively with the plebeian classes.58 In this more consensual atmosphere muscle was less significant to the power of the padrone. In Venice factions were increasingly seen as inimical to public order. In 1705 the annual ritual battle between the two main factions which took place on the Ponte dei Pugni was abolished. Though the spectacle was a public holiday and tourist attraction, aristocrats were troubled by the excessive violence and the manner in which it encouraged ‘an incessant hatred, which 56 57 58

Confuorto, Giornali, I, pp. 258, 261–2, 265; II, p. 77. Ajello, Il Problema, p. 37. Angelozzi and Casanova, La giustizia criminale a Bologna nel XVIII.

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continuously worked its way between the dearest of friends and relations’.59 Its abolition indicates the ways in which the ruling elite no longer had to rely on traditional sources of paternal authority with which to exercise power. We can track changing social attitudes around 1700 in various other ways. In these decades the utility of the nobility and its contribution to civil society were widely debated.60 In a stinging attack on the barons of the kingdom of Naples in 1707, Paolo Mattia Doria exposed the venality and injustice of their seigneurial courts, which favoured the rich and contributed to the widespread mistrust of the law. According to Doria’s analysis, the Spanish had corrupted Neapolitan society, replacing social relations built on trust with the code of honour. Doria argued that trust was the sole sustenance of states, essential to political stability and a healthy civil society. The opposite of this was the cult of honour which appealed to the public court of reputation and required vindication through violence. A legal system that did not encourage public virtue, but upheld private interests, resulted in endless and costly litigation, fanning the flames of enmity. Doria argued that civility was an inner condition, not a matter of manners – etiquette and the quest for social distinction were part of the problem.61 Doria’s reflection was the product of personal experience. Born into the Genoese patriciate in 1667, he described how, as a youth, he had rejected a strictly pious upbringing for the life of a man of honour whose manly virtù encouraged sensuality, moral weakness and vendetta. Following his arrival in Naples in 1690, his career was advanced by his handiness on the field of combat and he was involved in many encounters, for here ‘it was a gentlemanly maxim . . . that it was an act of shame and dishonour to not punish an inferior when one has received an offence’.62 But within three years Doria renounced the cult of honour and, joining the debate about the nature of civil society emanating from northern Europe, he had become one of the founding fathers of the Neapolitan Enlightenment. Doria’s demand for a revival of Republican virtue was hardly new. More radical was the intervention of Scipione Maffei, whose attack on the science of honour and its Professors, Della scienza chiamata cavalleresca, caused a storm in Italy when it was published in 1710.63 Maffei sought to establish that the obsession with revenge was a peculiarly Italian phenomenon: ‘in other languages the blemish of revenge is attributed as characteristic almost peculiar to 59

60 61

62

63

R. Davis, The War of The Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 166. C. Donati, L’idea di nobiltà in Italia. Secoli XIV-XVIII (Roma: Laterza, 1988), chapter 9. Cummins, ‘Enmity and Peace-Making’, pp. 91–122; A. Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 65–89. www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/paolo-mattia-doria_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/ (Accessed, May 2019). For this and following: Carroll, ‘Revenge and Reconciliation’.

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us. We cannot say that this trait falls from the sky, or is produced by the climate . . . It is caused by only one institution; that which has been formed by books about chivalry.’64 He demolished arguments that the honour code could be traced to the Ancients and demonstrated that, on the contrary, feud and vendetta were recent innovations. Like Doria, Maffei was a student of the new thinking: ‘it is only in Italy that our science is cultivated, and among other nations it is completely ignored, refuted and derided’.65 In northern Europe, he went on, private disputes brought no public esteem to participants. Italians, by contrast, fostered a false notion of glory based on the self, which led to vengeance and ambushes (supercherie). His comparative method made him certain that Italian conceptions of masculinity were distinctive, too: ‘According to general opinion, and according to practice and current custom, honour for Italian men is made up of two things: in not suffering an offence and in the chastity, or rather in the concept of chastity, of women.’66 Maffei’s most serious charge against the scienza cavalleresca was that it was nothing more than casuistry, which deployed the ‘specious mask of peace’. In fact, it was vendetta in another guise. The false peace served only to foster enmity and its memorialisation ensured that hostility continued down the generations. Maffei admired Montaigne’s honest man, who was guided by ‘a natural sentiment of honesty [and] who will be secure in himself, in a way that his enemy never was’. This new man understood the distinction between the spirit and the law, acting in accordance with ‘a simple creed of faith’ and not an ‘artificial contract of laws underpinned by a hundred cavillations’.67 Like Doria, Maffei’s personal experience was significant in the formulation of his ideas. He was born in 1675 in Verona into a protracted lawsuit with the Emilei family, resulting in ‘a long and complicated war littered with battles and skirmishes’ and requiring him to carry a pair of pistols.68 One of the points of contention was the right to nominate to benefices of San Lorenzo and San Lorenzino, leading to an encounter in 1694 following which the parties took refuge in separate churches. The feud was renewed in 1702 when the Emilei entered San Lorenzo with a ‘great following of armed men’ and tore down an offending papal indulgence put up by the Maffei. They issued a libel against their enemies, signed by their supporters, and a challenge to duel. The Emilei responded with a published defence of their own. The podestà placed the leading protagonists under house arrest. In the past the affair would have required the involvement of the Professors of Honour. Instead, Scipione Maffei responded not with an attack on his 64 65 66 67 68

Della scienza, p. 301. Ibid., p. 268. Ibid., pp. 100–3. Ibid., p. 344. C. Donati, ‘Scipione Maffei e la Scienza Chiamata Cavalleresca. Saggio sull’ideologia nobiliare al principio del settecento’, Rivista Storica Italiana (1978), 30–71.

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personal enemies but with a history lesson that refuted the entire code of honour on which their differences were based, La vanità della scienza cavalleresca (1704). Rather than responding to the Emilei with a point-by-point refutation of their claims, he chose to expose their folly based on the universal rules of the new science of society. Maffei appealed to novelty over custom: ‘originality (novità) of thought is not offensive, nor may it be considered presumptuous to be the first to speak against the authority of so many centuries and the common opinion gentlemen, if I speak the truth’.69 Maffei’s target was the academies which debated and sustained the scienza cavalleresca. His military experience in Bavarian service in the summer of 1704 had helped to clarify his thinking: the call of arms was superior to letters, but only when this was in the service of the patrie and not the self. The foundation of civil society was rule by an aristocracy dedicated to the service of the state. The backlash that greeted Maffei points to the strength of opposition to the Enlightenment in Italy. He was condemned for blasphemy and for traducing authorities like Aquinas and Aristotle. Condemnation was particularly strong in Bologna, the intellectual centre of the scienza cavalleresca. Maffei was accused of heresy because the scienza had been approved by the Church: ‘too frequent is this century’s allowance of the abuse of an excessive inclination to novelty and to not resisting the urge to appear an inventor’, complained one opponent.70 These anti-Enlightenment sentiments were supported by leading citizens in Genoa, Milan, Florence and Bologna. But the weakening grip of the scienza is traceable through other media. The diary of Count Giovan Paolo Pepoli is important in this regard because he was himself a Professor of Honour and regularly consulted on the intricacies of dispute settlement. But Pepoli was well educated and travelled – visiting London and Vienna in 1706 – and aware that the world was changing. The tone of the diaries changes markedly in the 1720s.71 This was partly a consequence of his acceptance of the political status quo: the hostility to the papal regime that had long shaped his family’s identity ceased. At the same time, his interest in the code of honour waned. He condemned those padroni, like his brother, who gave succour to bandits and ran protection rackets. Pepoli is emblematic not only of the transformation of the Bolognese patriciate in the early eighteenth century but of one man’s gradual acceptance of his duty towards society. ***

The assault on the honour code was not entirely new. In 1614 Alessandro Pellegrino complained that the scienza cavalleresca was a cover for vendetta 69 70

71

Ibid., p. 42. G. Castiglione, Dodici conclusioni cristiane, morali, legali, e cavalleresche (Milan, 1715), p. 23; Cavina, Sangue dell’onore, pp. 207–11. See below p. 402.

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and he denounced those theologians, moralists and confessors who endorsed it.72 But Pellegrino was a traditional moralist, a Theatine rigorist opposed to Jesuit teaching because it was too accommodating to sin. It was the demolition of the entire edifice of Aristotelian thinking on which Jesuit influence was founded that led to the unravelling of the scienza. The collapse of intellectual and moral certainties had social consequences. But the widespread hostility to the new thinking also points to the challenges faced by the Italian Enlightenment. Vendetta did not disappear: in the early eighteenth century the murder rate in Italy was still six times higher than that in England. It was during the eighteenth century that a clear distinction between a pacified north and a south characterised by stubbornly high levels of interpersonal violence first became apparent. Vendetta became a regional problem. In Rome the reforms of Benedict XIV were undermined by corruption. The papacy continued to rely on justice as a source of income and pardons were still for sale. During the pontificate of Clement XIII (1758–69) the Roman courts dealt with 10,000 homicides, of which 4,000 were committed in the city (population 159,000), giving eighteenth-century Rome the dubious accolade of one of the highest homicide rates recorded in history.73 In the kingdom of Naples the law continued to be widely abused and mistrusted and dispute settlement shaped by the custom of vendetta. By 1861, the province of Naples (population 6.9 million) was the world capital of crime, with twice as much violence as England, France and Germany combined (90 million inhabitants). 72 73

Tractatus de duello (Venice, 1614). L. Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages: vol. 36 (London: Kegan Paul, 1950), p. 173.

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Germany

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5 Rethinking the Feud

In recent years our understanding of the German feud has been transformed by the discovery that, far from being a relic of the Middle Ages, it remained a custom in many German-speaking lands well into the seventeenth century.1 This has important implications for German history more generally. The significance of the feud and its function in the creation of a distinctively ‘German’ constitution, as the legitimating tool of a class of ‘robber barons’, or as an essential element in state-building – has been exhaustively debated.2 Despite the claims made for its wider relevance for European history, the debate has remained an essentially local one.3 One of the reasons for this is that the protagonists in the debate tend to assume that the feud is a quintessentially German phenomenon. From the 1930s the idea that German history marched on a different course (the Sonderweg) to the general Western model of development was popularised by both opponents of the Nazi regime and its supporters like Otto Brunner. Brunner’s Land und Herrschaft (1939) is the foundational text for all studies of the feud in German. While much of his argument has been refuted and his positive reassessment of the feud as the basis for legal order exposed as ideological cover for the Nazi rehabilitation of violence and war as political instruments, the idea that the feud is a distinctively German phenomenon remained a powerful one. Long after its publication and the questioning of the 1

2

3

J. Peters, ‘Leute-Fehde: Ein ritualisiertes Konfliktmuster des 16. Jahrhunderts’, Historische Anthropologie, 8 (2002), 62–97; M. Mommertz, ‘Von Besen und Bündelchen, Brandmahlen and Befehdungschreiben’, in M. Eriksson and B. Krug-Richter (eds.), Streitkulturen. Gewalt, Konflikt und Kommunikation in der ländlichen Gesellschaft (16.– 19. Jahrhundert) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), pp. 197–234; Ž. Oman, ‘Will auß der Vnordnung nit Schreitten: A Case of Fehde from 17th Century Styria’, Acta Histriae, 24 (2016), 63–100. O. Brunner, Land and Lordship, originally published as: Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Südostdeutschlands im Mittelalter (Baden-beiWien, 1939); G. Algazi, Herrengewalt und Gewalt der Herren im späten Mittelalter (Frankfurt am Main, 1996); H. Zmora, The Feud in Early Modern Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). H. Kaminsky, ‘The Noble Feud in the Later Middle Ages’, Past and Present, 177 (2002), 55–83.

145

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Map 5.1 The Holy Roman Empire, c.1600

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rethinking the feud

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Sonderweg thesis, Brunner’s ideas continue to set the parameters for the debate. This meant for example that, until very recently, German studies of the feud remained shackled by its association with and, implications for, legal and constitutional history. The context outside Germany was very different because the field was first mapped out not by historians but by anthropologists: whereas for them ‘the tribal feud was part of an anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti-eurocentristic agenda, Brunner’s analogously positive view on noble feud was part of a program that tended towards fascism and nationalism’.4 Although the anthropological approach has now become commonplace, the concept of a German Sonderweg still retains a powerful hold. The triumph of the rule of law in the sixteenth century and the juridification of disputes, it is argued, saved the Holy Roman Empire from the excesses of violence that are evident in Mediterranean countries.5 The social elite, we are assured, did not adopt the violent practices which became the norm in other states in the early modern period.6 There is no doubt that there are distinctive features of the German feud. The German Fehde has a narrower legal meaning than the English word ‘feud’. Despite their common origin (Faehde or Faithu: enmity), the modern English word ‘feud’ is a colloquial term revived by functional anthropologists in the twentieth century to describe a system of social relations. The legal institution of the Germanic Fehde is different. It had no equivalent elsewhere in Europe during the Middle Ages. Until its prohibition in the imperial Perpetual Peace of 1495, it was a legally recognised instrument for the enforcement of rights through the use of violence within certain limits, usually involving the seizure or destruction of property, or attacking or ransoming an enemy’s subjects. It required that hostilities be formally announced through the renunciation of peace (Absage) and, since the purpose of declaring the feud was to stake a claim, restore property or call in a debt, blood vengeance was relatively rare. The purpose of the Fehde was always to communicate a grievance and invite mediation. Germany was therefore unique in that it had a distinct set of practices and law codes that are labelled Fehde. The recent discovery that the Fehde lingered in some parts as a legitimate tool in disputes after 1495 is possible because the word and cognates appear in the archives. At the end of the sixteenth century peasants in Brandenburg were still issuing challenges, Fehdebriefe, to each other and against their lords, while the duchy of Magdeburg was troubled by 4 5

6

Netterstrøm and Poulsen (eds.), Feud in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, p. 22. R.-P. Fuchs, Um die Ehre. Westfälische Beleidigungsprozesse vor dem Reichskammergericht (1525–1805) (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999), p. 192. U. Ludwig, Das Duell im Alten Reich: Transformation und Variationen frühneuzeitlicher Ehrkonflikte (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2016), p. 111.

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Befehder as late as 1688.7 Nevertheless, the story of the establishment of a new modern political and social order characterised by the adoption of the inquisitorial judicial process based on Emperor Charles V’s ordinance, the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (1532), and the establishment of imperial legal institutions on a sounder footing following the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) remains largely unchallenged. Confined to peasants and less economically advanced regions the survival of the feud is represented as a remnant or backwoods phenomenon. Evidence from the rest of Europe suggests that there are good grounds for rethinking this story about the end of the feud altogether. I argue that Brunner’s prioritisation of the constitutional and legal aspects of Fehde, which served his political purposes, is a barrier to understanding what happened after 1495. Brunner was a pioneer of conceptual history, Begriffsgeschichte. For him, conceptual history was a tool with which to critique the projection of liberal ideas of progress back into history. The danger of this approach is that it neglects the messiness of social practice. The French, for example, had no word for feud, its equivalent, Faide, having disappeared from use in the Middle Ages. But this does not mean that its practices and customs did not remain a prominent feature of everyday life. The other barrier to rethinking the feud in Germany lies in the fact that the medieval German Fehde in no way resembles the feuds described by anthropologists studying stateless societies since Fehden in the Empire were usually declared by states, aristocrats or cities, who often deployed organised military force to back up their claims. From an anthropological point of view therefore the medieval German Fehde looks like a genus of war. And indeed this is precisely how contemporaries understood it. Krieg and Fehde were synonyms and often appeared together. Article 1 of the imperial Perpetual Peace outlawed violence, which coupled ‘befehden’ and ‘bekriegen’. The monk Brother Göbels described the attack on the city of Hildesheim (1517) as a Vede and saw it as synonymous with war, which it is not surprising given that the Hildesheim Fehde involved the mobilisation of thousands of men. Göbels referred to the Habsburg-Valois conflict as a ‘groter unspreckliker vede’ (a great unspeakable feud).8 But in 1527 he described a long-running dispute with his neighbour thus: ‘God help that it is not his will for us to be at war (krige).’9 In 1542 Hermann Weinsberg described the struggle for control of the duchy of Guelders as a ‘vehede und kreich’.10 Nicolas Gentzkow thought the war between Sweden and Denmark 7 8

9 10

Peters, ‘Leute-Fehde’, 27. H. Rüthing (ed.), Die Chronik Bruder Göbels: Aufzeichnungen eines Laienbruders aus dem Kloster Böddeken, 1502 bis 1543 (Bielefeld: Historischen Komission für Westfalen, 2006), p. 178. Ibid., p. 270. ‘Die autobiographischen Aufzeichnungen Hermann Weinsbergs’: www.weinsberg.unibonn.de/Edition/Liber_Iuventutis/Liber_Iuventutis.htm, fo. 126.

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(1563–70) was a veide.11 The most famous of all the robber barons, Götz von Berlichingen, talked of his ‘kriegen vnd vheden’ as one and the same thing. Götz was a military entrepreneur who viewed both war and feuding as a business, which ensured that when private war was outlawed he was able to adapt to the new reality and during the second half of his life pursued his disputes with vigour through the courts. The distinction between illegal private war and just war made between sovereign states was emergent in the first half of the sixteenth century. So, for example, when Franz von Sickingen launched his attack on the archbishop of Trier in 1522 as an ‘open feud’, the archbishop and his allies defended their campaign as a just ‘war’, thereby justifying Sickingen’s subsequent killing.12 But the distinction between war and feud continued to remain unclear. The German articles of the 1533 union between the kingdom of Denmark and the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein used the term Fehde to mean both feuds, which were to be terminated by mediation after a year and a day, and sovereign war between princes. These articles were reiterated point by point in 1623.13 The confusion continued into the seventeenth century. When a Franconian pastor reported that his kinsmen was ‘earnest in all matters, especially in Fehden’, he did not mean that he was a good feuder, but that he was a fine soldier.14 Another pastor led daily prayers for the termination of the Bohemian war in 1620 ‘and other impending feuds’.15 Amalia of Hesse-Cassel sent a Fehdebrief to Marburg in 1646, but this was not an instrument in a feud, but a declaration during The Hessian Civil War (1644–8). Moreover, contemporaries were well aware of the ideological claims that lay behind the distinction made between private violence and just war. The chronicler Sebastian Fischer referred to the 1550 attack by the counts of Wiesensteig on his city of Ulm as discord (Unfryden), whereas the count legitimised his resort to violence as a war (Krieg). This claim was mocked by the commoners of Ulm: ‘today one calls war selfish war, because it is started by oneself for oneself’.16 They were

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H. Böcker (ed.), Das Tagebuch des Stralsunder Bürgermeisters Nicolaus Gentzkow (1558– 1567) (Hamburg: Kovač, 2011), p. 52. O. Waltz (ed.), Die Flersheimer Chronik. Zur Geschichte des XV. und XVI. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1874), p. 62. U. Lornsen and G. Beseler (eds.), Die Unions-Verfassung Dänemarks und Schleswigholsteins: eine geschichtlich, staatsrechtliche und politische Erörterung (Jena, 1841), pp. 403, 405. F. Hüttner (ed.), ‘Selbstbiographie des Stadpfarrers Wolfgang Ammon von Marktbreit (†1634)’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 1 (1903), 307. M. Walther, ‘Reichenbachisch Memorial Verzeichnis denkwürdiger Sachen und Geschichten daselbsten’, in R. Kunz and W. Lizalek (eds.), Südhessische Chroniken aus der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Heppenheim: Laurissa, 1983), p. 105. K. Veesenmeyer (ed.), ‘Sebastian Fischers Chronik’, Mitteilungen des Vereins für Kunst und Alterthum für Ulm und Oberschwaben, 5–8 (1896), 229.

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critiquing Wiesensteig’s just war rhetoric as nothing more than a cover for private violence. The semantic change we are witnessing was part of the process in which the boundaries of legitimate violence were slowly being clarified. This was a process that was already underway in the Empire during the late Middle Ages, one that was already largely complete in many other European states before 1495. It was closely linked to ideas of sovereignty. This explains the slower transition in the Reich, where ideas of mixed sovereignty were more durable. Social distinction was the key to the emerging legislation: employment by peasants of the techniques of Fehde was the prime target of criminalisation. Article 129 of the 1532 Carolina made feuding a capital offence, but no punishment was foreseen for those who had the permission of the emperor or clear legal cause. German towns had long abolished or restricted Fehde among citizens before 1495. Curbing the nobility, as elsewhere in Europe, was more problematic. The conduct of war during the Thirty Years’ War, in which the most common tools of the Fehde, kidnapping and extortion, were put to widespread use, shows how the practices of feud and war remained largely indistinguishable, in spite of the existence of recognised laws of war. As late as 1769 the Habsburg Monarchy continued to recognise that announcing hostilities (Absage) between private individuals was still, in some situations, legal.17 However, concentration on legal and constitutional norms can only take us so far. It is clear that Fehde in German was deployed in a colloquial sense, synonymous with enmity (Feindschaft), which requires that we expand the narrow legal definition to include all forms of public enmity, in which, for example, legal writs were interpreted as signs of hatred. Contemporaries did not see a distinction between the law and enmity (Feindschaft), a fact reinforced by theologians in general and Luther in particular. The lawsuit brought against Hans von Schweinichen by the von Zettritz family was a signal of ‘Zettrische enmity’.18 Two cousins at the end of the sixteenth century had ‘for some twenty years been enemies’ before the matter came to court.19 Such sentiments were not confined to Christians. The Jew Ascher Levy vowed in 1621 ‘never to forget’ the ‘chicanery’ of his father-in-law.20 Monika Mommertz was the first to highlight the significance of the wider lexicon of enmity, which typically involved the posting of libels threatening arson (Brennebrief), hostility (Feindtbrieff) or public enmity (Abgesagte Feindschaft).21 For the illiterate, 17 18 19 20

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Oman, ‘Will auß der Vnordnung nit Schreitten’, 67. H. Oesterley (ed.), Denkwürdigkeiten von Hans von Schweinichen (Breslau, 1878), p. 468. Mommertz, ‘Von Besen und Bündelchen’, p. 223. M. Ginsburger (ed.), Die Memorien Ascher Levy aus Reichshofen im Elsass (1598–1635) (Berlin: Lamm, 1913), p. 17. Mommertz, ‘Von Besen und Bündelchen’. Feindbriefe were issued in the western part of the Reich too: A. Bruns (ed.), Die Tagebücher Kaspars von Fürstenburg, 2 vols. (Aschendorff: Münster, 1985), I, p. 123.

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symbols such as burning faggots displayed in public places to warn of arson (Brandzeichen) might suffice. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Brandenburg enmity (Feindschaft) and feuding (Befehdung) were synonymous. Žiga Oman has suggested from the Styrian evidence that we need to go further. His exhumation of a 1654 case represents a classic feud which conforms to the pattern: just grievance – injured honour – violence – mediation – truce – peace, which one typically encounters in France and Italy during the same period.22 However, the term Fehde appears nowhere in his sources, nor did the participants use the formal challenge it required (Absage, diffidatio), nor was the term Urfehde (an oath not to feud) used to describe the peace which ended the dispute. It is clear, however, that the participants in this Styrian feud recognised the rules of the game – the terminology of the Fehde was either redundant or, given its questionable legality, best avoided. The following three examples suggest that Oman’s approach is more widely applicable; that we would be better looking for a variety of feud-like practices, which might involve violence alongside recourse to the law, rather than restricting ourselves to the evidence derived from a narrow semantic field. The first case concerns the dispute between the brothers Hermann and Dietrich von Mallinckrodt.23 The brothers were enthusiastic litigants. For twenty-five years they fought a joint lawsuit over pig foraging rights against the inhabitants of the Hülsberger Mark near Dortmund at the Imperial Chamber Court, the Reichskammergericht, which, as a corollary to the prohibition on violence, had been established in 1495 as a sovereign court of appeal. In 1578 the brothers fell out among themselves over the sharing of common land following the division of their property. The matter was initially heard by the high court of their overlord, the duke of Cleves-Jülich. Hermann pursued his brother as a perturber of the public peace. He claimed that his brother illegally cut down wood and quarried stone; stole fish from the river Ruhr; and took sheep, pigs and cattle, such that Herman could scarcely keep a ‘dog or a cat’ without it being stolen. Hermann also accused his brother of ‘guzzling and gorging with knaves and dishonourable people’. Dietrich retorted that all his actions were backed up by legal writs, which permitted him to use force and that ‘even in their mother’s womb his brother had been a scoundrel’.24 Shots were exchanged between the two, along with threats of arson. In 1582, Dietrich appealed to the Reichskammergericht for damages for false imprisonment and for having been forced to swear under duress an oath to keep the peace (Urfehde). The bitterness that this imbroglio produced can be gleaned from Dietrich’s 1588 will, which bequeathed his brother only a single 22 23

24

Oman, ‘Will auß der Vnordnung nit Schreitten’, 95. G. von Mallinckrodt, Urkundenbuch der Familie von Mallinckrodt, 2 vols. (Bonn: Georgi, 1911), I, pp. 440–79; II, pp. 5–89. Ibid., II, p. 27.

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Reichsthaler ‘in recognition of the great hurt, slander and scorn he had done’. In contrast, he left his maid 200 Reichsthalers.25 In June 1594 the dispute was still ongoing in various courts when Dietrich confronted Hermann’s son Johann, in a contested field. The ensuing argument escalated to such a degree that Dietrich shot his nephew, who retaliated by stabbing him with a hunting spear; both men died from their wounds. This combat was hardly unforeseen. The judicial investigation uncovered a pattern of escalating violence: seven years before Hermann called his brother ‘filthy’ to which Dietrich responded by giving his brother the lie; four years previously Hermann had struck his brother with his sword pommel and called him a ‘Clevish knave’; he and his sons had let off their guns near Dietrich’s house with the intention of summoning him outside. By the end their threats and insults had become a daily routine. Confrontations over access became increasingly violent. In 1593, when Hermann found his brother fishing, he and his men confiscated Dietrich’s lines at gunpoint. On 26 December, Dietrich went to church with his wife and sat in his customary pew in front of the altar: his nephews, Hensken and Berndt, were also there with three long barrelled muskets and two side arms laid before the altar, and would not tolerate Dietrich, but started an argument with him so that during the sermon such a tumult started that the pastor was completely unsettled and distracted, but it was still not becalmed until the brothers stormed out of the church with their weapons during Eucharist and stepped into the cemetery to await Dietrich, saying ‘Why does the bawd remain inside? Is he too ashamed to come out to us?’26

It was this constant provocation that would result in Dietrich’s death several months later. The murder was settled by arbitration. As part of the settlement, Hermann erected this stone monument (Figure 5.1) which advertised his culpability and his brother’s innocence. Our second example hails from much farther east, in Bautzen (Upper Lusatia). On 25 February 1617 representatives of two noble families, the von Nostitz zu Krobnitz and the von Rodewitz, gathered to make peace.27 The peace treaty (Versöhnungsbrief) records that on 26 July 1614 Caspar Heinrich von Rodewitz had been murdered and that the kin, including his mother, brothers and brothers-in-law, started criminal proceedings ‘not without reason and moved by the strongest feelings . . . by legal means to be vindicated (vindiciren) according to law and nature’. However, at the behest of other nobles they had agreed to drop the lawsuit and enter negotiations. The von Nostitz agreed to perform a ‘satisfactory apology’ in the presence of chief representatives of each kin grouping; to avoid 25 26 27

Ibid., II, p. 47. Ibid., II, p. 89. G. von Nostitz, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Geschlechts von Nostitz, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1874), p. 165.

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Figure 5.1 Mordsteine in memory of Dietrich von Mallinckrodt, 1594

contact with the dead man’s brother or mother for ever and the other kin for five years; and to pay 200 Thalers towards pious works at the Rodewitz family church at Spremberg. This document makes clear that the Rodewitz had a ‘natural’ right to take revenge. The victim’s brother only appeared at Bautzen because of the numerous appeals he had received, including one from the emperor himself. The third case involves people of lower status. It started with a brawl between two peasants in a tavern one Sunday in 1577 in a village on the borders between the duchy of Holstein and the city of Hamburg.28 There was nothing uncommon about this except the rich paper trail that the events left in the courts. In the fight Peter Graumann stabbed Henneke Gülzow and fled. The wounded man shouted to his brothers to pursue him: ‘Go after him and stab him; it won’t cost you a penny!’ Five weeks later Henneke died from his wound. On his deathbed he repented and, in return for receiving holy communion, forgave his killer, telling his brothers that 28

R. Brinkmann, ‘Blutrache unter holsteinischen Bauern in letzten viertel des sechsehnten Jahrhunderts’, Jahrbücher für die Landeskunde der Herzogthümer Schleswig-Holsteins, 2 (1859), 1–14.

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they should leave Graumann in peace and vengeance to God. Notwithstanding this, it was common knowledge that one of the brothers began practising shooting crows, ‘so that he could do the same to Peter Graumann’. If this posturing was designed to force Graumann to negotiate it was successful. He opened negotiations through kinsmen about compensation. In the meantime, he applied to the authorities for a letter of safe conduct. The Gülzow brothers were tipped off about this with the advice: ‘If he obtains safe conduct: you will have to keep away from him. If doesn’t get it, you can do what you want, according to the law.’ Having heard that Graumann was currently in the village of Reinbek awaiting the letters to be issued, the brothers ‘took heed of what they should do, and that doing it would be good’. They took revenge on 23 December 1577. This case raises many issues, but three are worth highlighting. First is the expectation that the parties had of the law: Henneke Gülzow’s cry that killing wouldn’t cost a penny refers to the fact that killings were usually settled by monetary compensation. A killing in this scenario was easily portrayed as self-defence and therefore would entail no financial penalty. Second, we should note the extensive bounds within which violence was deemed permissible. The paper trail was generated not by the murder of Graumann (the brothers claimed to have acted in self-defence) but by the contest in the civil court of the Reichskammergericht over whether Graumann had obtained his safe conduct or not. Third, the peasants displayed similar patterns of behaviour to the nobility. Graumann had been heavily armed and carried a musket. He suffered forty-eight wounds in a vicious assault. As we shall discover, this sort of extreme violence was not uncommon in late sixteenth-century Holstein. The three cases I have described are feuds, although the word was never used by the participants. It is clear that, though the legal Fehde was criminalised in 1495, the practice continued to be widespread at the end of the sixteenth century. The remainder of this chapter will explain why this was so. I will sketch some of the broad regional and chronological patterns relating to vindicatory violence and its control across the Empire after 1495. My purpose is to place German practice better into the mainstream of wider European developments. The idea propagated by the storm over Brunner that self-help was a distinctively German phenomenon is based on a weak grasp of European history. In a separate chapter, I will explore in more detail the culture of enmity and point to some of the contrasts to the French and Italian experiences. A further chapter will then explore the importance of arbitration by the law, out-of-court settlements and the pastoral role of priests and pastors in upholding the peace in the feud. ***

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The introduction of the Carolina in 1532 is traditionally seen as a major turning point in the state repression of violence. Though it did little to change what was illegal – only magic and infanticide were added to the list of medieval crimes – its adoption of the inquisitorial method introduced a new form of judicial process and exacting standards of proof. In relation to murder, for example, the Carolina took a tough line; taking inspiration from the Old Testament, it stipulated that murderers were to be put to death on the testimony of two credible witnesses. It restricted pleas of mitigation, such as a temporary loss of reason and hot anger.29 The use of torture in order to extract confessions was also systematised. Within a generation execution rates skyrocketed. In Nuremberg, for example, which had among the highest execution rates in Germany, the conviction rates rose by 100 per cent in comparison with the fifteenth century.30 However, the evidence shows that this increase in punishment did not, in large measure, target ordinary crimes of violence. The violent always accounted for only a small percentage of those convicted: seven out of ten executions in Nuremberg were for theft. This pattern was replicated elsewhere. In Cologne, where there were 193 executions in the period 1568–1613, three-quarters of those executed were thieves and robbers.31 In Bavaria, two-thirds of those executed were for property crimes, a rate that was consistent from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Most of the forty-eight people executed in Munich between 1574 and 1591 were outsiders and delinquents and only four of these were convicted of murder.32 Of 168 recorded homicides in the bishopric of Münster between 1580 and 1600 only four or 2.38 per cent were judged definitively. Only one of the guilty was executed, one was bound over to keep the peace and two were fined. The inability to prosecute was not for lack of suspects: in only 7 per cent of cases was the perpetrator unknown.33 In seventeenth-century Saxony you were more likely to be executed for adultery than homicide.34 29

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S. Pohl, ‘Schuldmindernde Umstände im römischen Recht. Die verhandlungen des Totschlages im Herzogtum Württemburg im 16. Jahrhundert’, in H. Rudolph and H. Schnabel-Schüle (eds.), Justiz = Justice = Justicia? Rahmenbedingungen von Strafjustiz im frühneuzeitlichen Europa (Trier: Trierer Historische Forschungen, 2003), pp. 235–56. J. Harrington, The Faithful Executioner: Life, Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century (New York: Farrar and Straus, 2013), p. 30. G. Schwerhoff, Aktenkundig und gerichtsnotorisch: Einführung in die Historische Kriminalitätsforschung (Tübingen: Diskord, 1999), p. 93. W. Behringer, ‘Mörder, Diebe, Ehebrecher. Verbrechen und Strafen in Kurbayern vom 16. bis. 18’, in R. van Dülmen (ed.), Verbrechen, Strafen und soziale Kontrolle (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1990), pp. 85–132. M. Wittke, Mord und Totschlag? Gewaltdelikte im Fürstbistum Münster, 1580–1620. Täter, Opfer und Justiz (Münster: Aschendorff, 2002), pp. 20–32. U. Ludwig, Das Herz der Justitia: Gestaltungspotentiale territorialer Herrschaft in der Strafrechts- und Gnadenpraxis am Besispiel Kursachsens, 1548–1648 (Constance: UVK, 2008), p. 90.

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In any case the attempt at outright repression proved short-lived and after 1600 execution rates plummeted: whereas between 1541 and 1600, an average of 7 individuals were executed each year in Nuremberg, the rate declined to 3.5 per year between 1601 and 1660 and to 2 per year between 1661 and 1743.35 There were strong objections to corporal punishment being applied to cases where honour might be at stake. Recent research has stressed the continuity with the late Middle Ages whereby new courts and ordinances supplemented and supported informal mechanisms of social control, which underpinned neighbourly relations and stopped quarrels from escalating. Rather than social disciplining and repression, the legal system continued to promote conflict resolution and arbitration at every stage of the process. This was also true of the criminal courts: of 2,000 indicted criminals in Cologne (1568–1617) only 13 per cent were referred for corporal punishment.36 This should come as no surprise since the principle that a crime could be satisfied by monetary compensation was a part of the fabric of Roman Law. In practice judges had wide remit to interpret the law according to the context, using their arbitrary judgement (Willkürrecht). Judges were particularly flexible in matters relating to interpersonal violence, the reason being that it was very difficult to prove intent and the defence of honour excused all sorts of behaviour. Even in cases of aggravated murder with malice aforethought the social status of the killer was seen as a mitigating factor. In any case the rich could buy off their victims and use their political contacts to hobble the judges.37 Violence was more commonly controlled by fines and banishment and tempered by pardons, letters of safe conduct and the ubiquitous use of oaths not to feud (Urfehde) – 500 of which were sworn in the city of Nördlingen alone in only four years between 1588 and 1591.38 Before 1500 the Church played an important role in atonement for a crime. The Roman Law inquisitorial process promoted the secularisation of the practice of accommodation and not an end to arbitration tout court. The new sixteenth-century law codes stipulated that punishment was a public duty and in no way hindered by private agreements; they systematised existing practice. The measure of compensation was calibrated according to intent and the status and reputation of the actors. And this tended to reinforce the secular as opposed to the religious elements of atonement: killers would not only have to satisfy the kin but pay fines, and litigants would have to pay fees and sweeteners to lawyers, judges and notaries. The new system enhanced authority because of the principle of 35

36 37

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R. van Dülmen, Theatre of Horror: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 140. Schwerhoff, Aktenkundig, p. 99. Two examples from Cologne: www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de/Edition/Liber_ Decrepitudinis/, 5 June 1592; 16 January 1596. A. Blauert, Das Urfehdewesen im Deutschen Südwesten im spätmittelalter und in der frühen neuzeit (Tübingen: Biblotheca Academica, 2000), p. 39.

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judicial oversight. The financial imperatives of the new system should not be underestimated.39 The extreme political fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire encouraged the process of mediation. From the safety of exile, negotiations with the victim’s family could begin. Of the 168 Westphalian homicides studied by Wittke 80 per cent went unpunished, mainly because the killer had fled and the matter was settled out of court. They reveal the cheapness of human life at the bottom of the social pile. On 15 September 1599 the murderer Hermann Bramert returned to the village of Füchtdorf after nine months’ exile. He appeared in the manor court and promised to give the victim’s family a grey woollen tunic, 15 bushes of rye, 2 Thalers in alms and pay 1 Thaler in costs. In addition, the sister of the dead man was to get 56 Thalers in instalments. In return she renounced in perpetuity any further claim.40 At least this act was registered and therefore subject to oversight. In 1583 the Lusatian Estates made a complaint to the sheriff of Bautzen that no less than forty murders lacked any judicial oversight, but rather were ‘bestilled and terminated by people of little means who take care to mediate according to their own self-interest’.41 In many regions customary laws which upheld the principle of blood revenge and Wergeld continued to hold sway well into the seventeenth century. In Görlitz, it was said, murder was easier to pay off ‘than the killing of a dog’.42 In 1603, the court of the Swiss canton of Schwyz reiterated the principle that ‘the kin of the deceased, have the legal right to take revenge up to the fourth degree of kinship’ unless compensated.43 Even where Roman Law dominated, public prosecution for crimes of violence was rare and restricted to heinous transgressions of the natural or social order. In Breslau in the 1650s homicide was still considered a matter for private prosecution.44 Private prosecutions were not only expensive; they were risky since plaintiffs were required to post surety with the court in order to prevent malicious accusations.45 39 40 41

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See Chapter 7. Wittke, Mord und Totschlag? p. 224. H. Knothe, ‘Fortsetzung der Geschichte des Oberlausitzer Adels und seiner Güter II’, Neue Lausitzsche Magazin, 63 (1887), 40. L. Behrisch, ‘Social Control and Urban Government: The Case of Goerlitz, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, Urban History, 34 (2007), 43. A. Dettling, ‘Die Scharfrichter des Kantons Schwyz’, Mitteilungen des Historischen Vereins des Kantons Schwyz, 20 (1909), 95–113. P. Frauenstädt, Blutrache und Totschlagsühne im Deutschen Mittelalter: Studien zur Deutschen Kultur- und Rechtsgeschichte (Berlin, 1881), p. 93. H.-H. Ebeling (ed.), Findbuch zum Bestand Reichskammergericht (1515–1806): Osnabrück, 2 vols. (Osnabrück: Veröffentlichungen der Niedersächsischen Archivverwaltung, 1986), I, p. 318. Defendants who were absolved of murder could launch counterclaims for damages: B. Gebhardt and M. Hörner (eds.), Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Reichskammergericht, 20 vols. to date (Münich: Selbstverlag der Generaldirektion der Staatlichen Archive Bayerns, 1994–), X, p. 344.

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For these reasons court records give only a partial view of violence. The elite of sixteenth-century Augsburg preferred to keep their quarrels out of the courts and they are more likely to be recorded in chronicles.46 Behind the hundreds of defamation suits launched in rural Saxony between 1650 and 1730 there often lurked a hidden history of feuds.47 This reinforces the view that the law was only one factor in governing levels of interpersonal violence. The role played by social relations and the political environment also had a great impact and this determined the significant chronological and regional patterns that we see not only in the Empire but elsewhere. The current state of research does not yet permit serious analysis of the statistical patterns of violence. Manuel Eisner has proposed a static aggregate homicide rate of 11 per 100,000 for the period 1500 to 1650 in Germany and Switzerland with a sharp fall in the second half of the seventeenth century.48 But his figures take little account of the spike in violence and collapse of population caused by the Thirty Years’ War. Other figures suggest significant regional variations. Cologne had a rate of 10 per 100,000 in the sixteenth century.49 In 1559 Augsburg had a much higher rate of 30.50 The murder rate in the parish of Füchtdorf in Westphalia (population 1,000) between 1576 and 1620 was even higher at 34.51 The evidence from Switzerland suggests a different pattern altogether. Zürich witnessed a significant spike in the homicide rate in the wake of the civil conflict caused by the Reformation and rates did not reach pre-Reformation levels again until 1600.52 The community of Engelberg (population 500), in the canton of Obwalden, seems to have been less troubled by religious division. It was a remarkably harmonious community. The court there recorded only a single non-fatal wounding between 1580 and 1622. But this was not achieved by the importation of new procedures, and customary codes and practices seemed to have done a perfectly good job of maintaining the peace.53 There are other sources that enable us to generate statistical information and these 46

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M. Haberlein, ‘Ehre und Gewalt in der Augsburger Führungsschicht 1500-1620’, in S. Backmann, H. Jörg Künast, B. Ann Tlusty und S. Ullmann (eds.), Ehrkonzepte in der Frühen Neuzeit. Identitäten und Abgrenzungen (Berlin: Akademie, 1998), pp. 148–69. E. Crosby, ‘Fighting for Honor: Legal Adversaries and the Complaint for Ehrverletzung in Early Modern Saxony’, in Rudolph and Schnabel-Schüle (eds.), Justiz = Justice = Justicia?, pp. 287–305. M. Eisner, ‘Long-Term Historical Trends’. G. Schwerhoff, Köln in Kreuzverhör. Kriminalität, Herrschaft und Gesellschaft in einer frühneuzeitlichen Stadt (Bonn: Bouvier, 1991), pp. 283–3. P. Mair, Chronik von 1548–1565, ed. Friedrich Roth (Leipzig, 1917) records fourteen murders that year. Wittke, Mord und Totschlag? pp. 204–5. M. Schar, Seelennote der Untertanen. Selbstmord, Melancholie und Religion im Allen Zurich, 1500–1800 (Zurich: Chronos, 1985), p. 263. M. Blatter, Gericht als Angebot: Schriftgutwerwaltung und Gerichtstätigkeit in der Klosterherrschaft Engelberg, 1580–1622 (Zurich: Chronos, 2012).

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figures are supplemented by a variety of other sources. In particular, there are a plethora of journals, diaries and memoirs, which in both their quantity and sophistication distinguish the early modern from the medieval. They have a great deal to tell us about enmity, and how it was pursued and mediated.54 From these and other sources I suggest five broad chronological patterns governing interpersonal violence. First, we see a continuation of the legal institution of the Fehde in the first half of the sixteenth century. Matters were considerably worsened in the 1540s and the 1550s by the widespread nature of civil war, which was complicated and exacerbated by the divisions caused by the Reformation: religious parties had the potential to turn local conflicts into major regional conflagrations. This was followed by a period of peace following the Religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555 in which the traditional Fehde was criminalised and the notion that force required the backing of the courts became widely accepted. But an explosion of elite violence in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, which peaked only in the 1610s, points to a third phase. There are grounds for thinking that the adoption of duelling by the elite formed part of a general pattern of rising violence in this period, as the economic and environmental effects of rising population began to have a deleterious effect on social relations. The boom in litigation after 1555 is therefore indicative less of a decline than of growing social strains and conflict. The upheaval of the Thirty Years’ War is among the best studied of European conflicts. But recent work on civil conflict elsewhere suggests that war is likely to alter the emotional field and privatise violence and that we need to pay attention to the changes wrought to dynamics within communities as well as to the impact of the soldiery on civilians. The final phase suggests that the civil war had long-term effects and that elite violence, in particular, was only gradually brought under control during the early decades of the eighteenth century. ***

In the first half of the sixteenth century the institution of the Fehde continued to be widely practised despite the 1495 ban. Even Jews, whose legal rights were otherwise heavily circumscribed, resorted to it in order to get creditors to pay up. In 1539 the count of Reinstein complained to the Reichskammergericht about a Fehdebrief pinned up one night, threatening him with violence unless he paid his debts. He claimed that the signatory ‘Wolf Schlesinger’ was in fact 54

B. Krusenstjern, Selbstzeugnisse der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges. Beschreibendes Verzeichnis (Berlin: Akademie, 1997); K. von Greyerz, H. Medick and P. Veit (eds.), Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich. Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historiche Quellen (1500–1850) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001). For a preliminary list of sources, see ‘Selbstzeugnisse im deutschsprachigen Raum, Autobiographien, Tagebücher und andere autobiographische Schriften, 1400-1620’: www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/janckequellenkunde/index.html.

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a pseudonym for Michel Jud. Michel, supported by his business partners Hans Bettuch and Mosse Jud, retorted that Wolf was a real person to whom they had sold the contract.55 The survival of the Fehde was subject to significant regional and social variation. In Electoral Saxony the number of feuds increased between 1510 and 1550. This might be due to better recording practices, but the 250 feuds recorded in the 1540s more likely reflect the outbreak of civil war.56 In the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein aristocratic feuding became bloodier following the introduction of the Reformation.57 The duchy of Bavaria, in contrast, largely avoided the divisions caused by the Reformation. Already during the late Middle Ages it developed a centralised legal system and the noble feud was less in evidence than peasant feuds.58 In Franconia, a conglomerate of different jurisdictions, which had been a byword for noble lawlessness, the noble Fehde died out as an institution in the early decades of the sixteenth century.59 In sixteenth-century Cologne anyone issuing a Fehdebrief was arrested and fined.60 The prohibition on violence required a change in tactics. Disputants quickly exploited the potential of the law and the Reichskammergericht was soon replete with requests for the punishment of feuders for breaking the public peace.61 The other significant feature of the first half of the sixteenth century was the seething tensions apparent in the rural world, which exploded in the Peasants’ War of 1524–5, the largest social movement in Europe before the French Revolutions. The anti-seigneurial and anti-semitic violence that characterised the risings was indicative of deeper divisions as economic and demographic pressures created winners and losers within communities. The internal divisions which characterise pre-modern rural communities leave fewer traces in the historical record. But they can occasionally be perceived even in regions untouched by the peasant uprisings. The memoirs of Bartholomäus Sastrow compiled in the 1590s describe how his grandfather rose at the end of the fifteenth century to become a rich tenant farmer in Pomerania. With success 55

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D. Lücke (ed.), Findbuch der Akten des Reichkammergerichts in Landeshauptarchive Sachsen-Anhalt, 5 vols. (Magdeburg: Archivverwaltung des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt, 1997), IV, p. 129. A. Thieme, ‘Zum Fehdewesen in Mitteldeutschland: Grundlinien der Entwicklung im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert’, in J. Emig (ed.), Der Altenburger Prinzenraub 1455: Strukturen und Mentalitäten eines spätmittelalterlichen Konflikts (Beucha: Sax Verlag, 2007), pp. 47–82. M. Jespersen, ‘Die Fehdekultur in den Herzogtumern Schleswig-Holstein’, Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft fur Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte, 134 (2009), 17–57. C. Reinle, Studien zur Fehdeführung Nichtadliger im spätmittelalterlichen römischdeutschen Reich, besonders in den bayerischen Herzogtümern (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2003). Zmora, The Feud. Schwerhoff, Köln, p. 274. For one among numerous examples: C. Wieland, Nach der Fehde: Studien zur Interaktion von Adel und Rechtssystem am Beginn der Neuzeit: Bayern 1500 bis 1600 (Epfendorf/ Neckar: Bibliotheca Academica, 2014), p. 237.

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came envy and in 1487 his grandfather was forced to sell up and move to Greifswald after he had crossed a noble clan from the neighbouring village. This move did not prevent him from being murdered in 1494.62 The most richly documented case of a non-noble feuder is that conducted by the burgher Hans Kohlhase against the noble von Zaschwitz family and his overlord the elector of Saxony (1534–40). The events passed into folklore and Kohlhase was romanticised in the nineteenth century as a sort of Robin Hood figure. In actual fact his exaggerated sense of honour and willingness to resort to extreme violence in spite of repeated attempts at mediation render him a more complicated figure. Kohlhase was eventually captured and executed.63 Among the lesser nobility those who were able to forge a career as mercenary captains had more leverage in their personal disputes. In 1545, for example, the Mecklenburg nobleman and military contractor Martin von Waldenfels issued a Fehdebrief against the king of Denmark and kidnapped the bishop of Lübeck with the intention of ransoming him. Even when the bishop died in custody and he was threatened with the imperial ban, he could rely on the backing of powerful protectors who valued his services.64 The role of princely legitimation in sustaining violence is best seen in the region of Lower Saxony.65 Here the political ambitions of the House of Welf ensured that local blood feuds reached new intensity in the first half of the sixteenth century. The Hildesheimer-Stiftsfehde (1519–23) between the bishop of Hildesheim and the Welf dukes of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and Calenberg is sometimes referred to as the last great medieval feud. This assumes that it is desirable and possible to distinguish between feud and war. In fact, Hildesheim was far from a limited feud and unleashed widespread violence across the region: the battle of Soltau (1519), which alone left 3,500 dead, is indicative of the strength of local enmity. ‘This terrible civil war remained in living memory for generations.’66 The legacy of hatred soon became bound up with ideological issues. The Welf were among the most active supporters of Catholic orthodoxy in the Empire. It came as no surprise therefore that among the earliest and most militant supporters of the Protestant Schmalkaldic League were the personal enemies of the Welf among the Lower Saxon nobility who had 62

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G. Mohnike (ed.), Bartholomäi Sastrowen Herkommen, Geburt und Lauff seines gantzen Lebens, 3 vols. (Greifswald, 1823–4), I, pp. 15–19. M. Dießelhorst and A. Duncker (eds.), Hans Kohlhase: Die Geschichte einer Fehde in Sachsen und Brandenburg zur Zeit der Reformation (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999). H. Behrmann ‘Nachrichten über die Entführung des Bischofs von Lübeck Balthasar Ranzau durch Martin von Waldenfels im Jahre 1545’, Archiv für Staats- und Kirchengeschichte der Herzogthümer Schleswig, Holstein, 2 (1834), 300–73. For this and following J. Lehrmann, Raub, Mord und Brand: ‘Raubritter’ zwischen Heide, Harz und Weser (Lehrte: Lehrmann, 2007); G. Spormecker (ed.), Cronica Lunensis civitatis Markanae, ed. W. Lehnemann (Verlag für Regionalgeschichte: Bielefeld, 2010). T. Brady, German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 123.

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suffered from their aggrandising policies. For several years from 1542 local nobles under the auspices of the League laid waste to Welf territory. The rhetoric on both sides is instructive. The duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel appealed to the Reichskammergericht and invoked these acts as crimes of rebellion and breaking of the public peace. His enemies claimed to be fighting a defensive war in order to protect German liberties. But much of the violence was retaliatory with the purpose of extorting reparations for previous Welf incursions, and the tactics deployed – burning and looting – were those of the feud. In May 1553 the duke made peace with one of his neighbours, the count of Diepholz, who agreed to pay the duke 1400 Joachimsthaler for the damage he had caused.67 But there was also something new about this civil war. The Protestants spared neither convents nor churches. In October 1552 the margrave of Brandenburg issued a Fehdebrief against Wolfenbüttel in support of his Lower Saxon co-religionists. The language used is misleading. This was not a traditional Fehde that restricted its targets to property and vassals. Rather, the use of unlimited violence demonstrates the possibility for the transformation of limited feud into all-out civil war. The deciding battle at Sievershausen was the bloodiest and bitterest in sixteenth-century Germany, costing the lives of 4,000 men, including 4 princes, 9 counts and 300 noblemen. Its ferocity demonstrates the extent to which personal hatreds (inimicus) had become bound up with and legitimised by the legal concept of the public enemy (hostis).68 In Lower Saxony the violence created by civil war continued despite the Religious Peace of Augsburg. In 1563, the Welfs returned to plunder the bishopric of Münster for the non-payment of sums extorted during the war. Private vengeance in the region had become inextricably bound up with the cause of the public good. An example of this legitimisation comes from the case of the von Steinhaus brothers who laid to waste the county of Tecklenburg. The feud began before 1541 when they claimed that the count of Tecklenburg had seized their property and executed six of their servants. They took advantage of civil war to take revenge, burning and looting, as well as ensuring that the exposed corpses of their six men exposed on a gibbet had a proper burial. Fifty miles to the south the blurring of the private and the public can be seen in the fights that occurred in the church at Lünen (Westphalia) in 1545–6 which included the fatal shooting of a local nobleman by a Landsknecht captain after Mass.69 In the same region, the border dispute between the bishopric of Münster and the citizens of Lippstadt was intensified as the latter fielded a small army 67 68

69

W. von Hodenberg (ed.), Diepholzer Urkundenbuch (Hannover, 1842), pp. 113–16. G. Biegel and H.-J. Derda (eds.), Blutige Weichenstellung. Massenschlacht und Machtkalkül bei Sievershausen 1553 (Braunschweig: Veröffentlichung des Braunschweigischen Landesmuseums, 2003). Spormecker (ed.), Cronica, p. 203.

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with cannon and razed the village of Wiedenbrück. Borders raids and disputes continued in Lower Saxony into the late 1550s. In this atmosphere there were plenty of people willing to hire themselves out as extortionists.70 The impact of the Reformation crisis on the relationship between private violence and the public sphere can also be seen in Swabia in the memoir left by Sebastian Schertlin von Burtenbach (1496–1577).71 Schertlin was frank about his enmities, which cannot be dismissed as the nostalgic reminiscences of a ‘robber baron’ since he was the grammar school–educated son of an official who went on to become a successful military contractor. In his dedicated pursuit of his rights, he combined the use of law and violence simultaneously. As a social climber, Schertlin’s purchase of the estate of Burtenbach in 1532 caused resentment. From its foundation in 1488 the Swabian League, in which Schertlin began his military career, helped to maintain the peace in the south-west. But the League dissolved in 1534 amid the confessional strife. Differences over hunting rights with his neighbours, the von Stain zu Jettingen, were sharpened by Schertlin’s conversion to Protestantism. On the Friday before Palm Sunday 1534 Hans Adam von Stain killed one of Schertlin’s servants and arrested two others for poaching. Schertlin never uses the word Fehde nor does he refer to its institutions. His response followed common practice. He decided to go out ‘hunting’ on Easter Monday 1534 accompanied by twenty-five horse and fifty arquebusiers, while summoning the von Stain for a showdown. When they refused to appear he retaliated by beating one of their servants and laying waste to their fields. It was only after a failed accord by the imperial commissioners in Augsburg that Schertlin took the matter to the Reichskammergericht. The use of the law was interpreted by the von Stain as an escalation and when they next met him they proffered him ‘many evil and shaming words’.72 In July 1537 fifteen men were involved in an encounter at Bramenthal and a peace deal was made at Esslingen by the duke of Württemberg and landgrave of Hesse the following year. Schertlin’s involvement in the Schmalkaldic League led to the confiscation of his property between 1547 and 1553. But on his return to Swabia, he was soon involved in another neighbourly feud, this time with the von Oettingen, which began with several skirmishes between their respective officials and tenants and escalated into the deployment of hundreds of men and cannon until its resolution with a financial settlement in 1562. Schertlin referred to this as a war (Krieg), although the casualties were limited. Once again, the feud was conducted alongside legal battles and appeals to the princes to mediate. This sort of large-scale aristocratic violence became rarer during the second half of the sixteenth century. The experience of civil war in the 1540s and 1550s 70 71

72

Ibid., pp. 223 and 235. O. Schönhuth (ed.), Leben und Thaten des weiland wohledeln und gestrengen Ritters Sebastian Schertlin von Burtenbach (Münster, 1858). Ibid., p. 15.

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changed attitudes to violence. The potential for local and private disputes to escalate into wider public and confessional conflict was evident to all, reinforcing the appeal of sovereign authority in the Reich and the principle of the integrity of territorial states. The Reichsexecutionsordnung of 1555, which formed part of the Religious Peace of Augsburg, reiterated the requirement to uphold the public peace, and this time it had greater effect. Schertlin’s deployment of force had relied on financial and moral support from both the imperial cities and the princes, and they now sought to prioritise stability and security. The changing attitudes to violence can be seen in the response to the feud declared by the Franconian knight Wilhelm von Grumbach against the bishop of Würzburg in 1563. Although Grumbach was of a powerful and distinguished lineage who obtained the support of Johann-Friedrich of Saxony, he was confronted by the majority of princes and knights who favoured stability and security. Grumbach was captured at Gotha on 13 April 1567 and executed a week later while his patron, Johann-Friedrich, was deposed in favour of his brother and committed to lifelong imprisonment. Grumbach’s was the last traditional Fehde in Franconia. Henceforth new strategies would have to be employed in the pursuit of right. ***

Enmity did not suddenly cease in 1555. Low-level confessional antagonism continued. At Wachbach in Franconia, for example, the Protestants, who had taken over the village church in 1540, were now forced to share it with their Catholic neighbours. In 1565 when the priests led a procession from Mergentheim to the village, the Protestants hung a noose from a tree, mustered in arms and forced the priests to walk through their ranks. The following year a Catholic let his donkey disrupt a church wedding and another threw ashes on a Protestant. The Lutheran pastor felt so threatened that he preached with a hammer and firearm at his side.73 The boom in litigation that occurred after 1555 and which lasted until 1650 also demonstrates the persistence of social conflict. Fifty per cent of cases before the Reichskammergericht were brought by nobles: the law proved to be a cheaper alternative to violence and offered the Imperial Knights, in particular, an effective means of defending their liberties against the territorial princes.74 The long-running feud between the Hövel and the Hasenkamp, which led to the 1577 shooting of Bernhard von Hövel was complicated by tortuous litigation at the Reichskammergericht. Long periods of peace were punctuated by armed clashes, the last being in 1726, which resulted in several deaths.75 Schertlin von 73

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J. Hartman, ‘Konfessionelle Feindseligkeiten (Wachbach)’, Württembergisch Franken, 4 (1892), 55–6. Wieland, Nach der Fehde, p. 176. A. Fahne, Die Herren und Freiherren v. Hövel, 2 vols. (Cologne, 1860), I, p. 29.

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Bertenbach’s enmity with the Stain family was also pursued through the courts. When arbitration failed and it reached the Reichskammergericht in the 1570s, this was evidence that ‘The von Stain were still endeavouring to continue their old envy, hatred and vengeance, which I and mine would not put up with.’ Confessional anxieties continued to be entangled with secular interests. Stain sought the help of his cousin, the bishop of Augsburg, ‘in order to force me from the [Protestant] religion, and to prevent me from building a hunting lodge for the hunt’, to which Schertlin responded by mustering troops. The worst thing about the bishop was not his faith but rather his lack of neighbourliness; Schertlin referred to him as a dog, ‘an angry, poisonous, evil and troublesome man . . . who held himself against all of his neighbours’.76 These sentiments did not preclude a rational desire to avoid further bloodshed and civil war. The new equilibrium was especially evident and endured longest in the bi-confessional cities where the mixing of Catholics and Protestants might have been expected to be combustible. But on the whole the Empire avoided the French experience of intercommunal violence or the political factionalism that fuelled so much of the violence in Italian cities. Conflicts were resolved in such a way that everyday enmities did not escalate. The formation of distinct confessional parties was a phenomenon driven by imperial politics and not the result of local confrontation between organised paramilitary groups on the French model. Everyday petty disputes and conflicts over religious matters were common, but the towns had institutions grounded in the concept of good neighbourliness that fostered the climate of coexistence and made the idea of living together over the long term a feasible reality.77 Antagonisms were not absent, but private and public enmities did not, as a rule, become blurred. The Calvinist pewterer Augustin Güntzer mentioned in his memoirs that as an eight-year-old boy in 1604 he gained an early experience of this when he was thrown into the river at Oberehnheim in Alsace. The attacker was an enemy of his father who disliked heretics and ‘Huguenots’.78 However, Güntzer was saved by his neighbours and spent two years at a Catholic school. He later travelled extensively in Italy and, though he mocked the beliefs he encountered there, he counted Catholics among his friends. The pressure on Oberehnheim’s Protestant community to conform came largely from outside and, in particular, from the Habsburg overlords after 1600. Even so, it was only when war arrived in 1623 that the family was 76 77

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Schertlin von Burtenbach, p. 165. B. Roeck, Eine Stadt in Krieg und Frieden. Studien zur Geschichte der Reichsstadt Augsburg zwischen Kalenderstreit und Parität, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989); P. Warmbrunn, Zwei Konfessionen in Einer Stadt. Das Zusammenleben von Katholiken und Protestanten in den Paritätischen Reichsstädten Augsburg, Biberach, Ravensburg und Dinkelsbühl von 1548 bis 1648 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1983). A. Güntzer, Kleines Biechlin von meinem gantzen Leben, ed. F. Brändle and D. Sieber (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002), p. 92.

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finally forced to quit the town. The same pattern is evident in great cities with a bi-confessional population. The evidence for religious controversy in Augsburg is voluminous, but insults of a religious nature before the courts were surprisingly few in number.79 Peace was shattered in the 1620s as events from outside upset the city’s fragile equilibrium. In Erfurt it was with the arrival of the Swedes in the 1630s that persecution began against the Catholic minority. The problem of violence was much more discernible in the countryside. Border regions where there was a lack of strong central authority, such as the Upper Palatinate and Upper Lusatia, seem not to have benefitted as much from the post-1555 pacification.80 The problem here was less religion than politics. In Upper Lusatia nobles oppressed their peasants, were in perpetual conflict with the towns and engaged in regular blood feuds with each other.81 The local towns were not exempt from the trouble. Augustin von Kohlo, the son of the Mayor of Zittau, was killed at a baptismal feast in 1579 and the mayor’s grandson was beheaded in 1612 for murder. The emperor had to issue an ordinance in 1598 against noblemen and their lackeys from shooting at each other in town. The fact that the emperor reiterated this and similar prohibitions in 1600, 1602, 1625 and 1645 is indicative of the depth of the problem. Emperor Matthias ordered that all murders committed by noblemen should be reported to the local captain, but the routine murder of peasants whose kin were then satisfied by blood money payments continued. It was relatively easy for a killer to slip over the border into Bohemia, where they often owned property or had a network of friends. The appearance of the von Nostitz clan, the most important in the region, in much of the violence demonstrates the extent to which it constituted a fundamental feature of social ascendancy. It should not, however, be assumed that these men were uneducated, part of a backwoods traditional culture that was soon to be surpassed. Far from it: Hieronymous von Nostitz, son of the captain of Görlitz, who was killed in a duel in 1619, had studied at the universities of Marburg and Heidelberg.82 In other regions too, customary law continued to legitimise blood vengeance. In Electoral Saxony, the traditional Fehde and the principle of Wergeld were formally abolished in 1572. This was, however, a reiteration of a 1555 ordinance which had had little impact. On 15 September 1558 Hans von Carlowitz posted a Fehdebrief on the door of the residence of his enemy the bishop of Meissen, accusing him of denying him his rights in law and defamation.83 He launched an attack on the bishop’s property and in 79 80 81 82 83

Roeck, Eine Stadt, II, pp. 656–7. Wieland, Nach der Fehde, conclusion. For this and following: Knothe, ‘Fortsetzung der Geschichte’. Ibid., 113. R. von Kyaw, ‘Die Carlowitzsche Fehde in Jahre 1558’, Archiv für sächische Geschichte, 4 (1978), 193–216.

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August 1559 a skirmish that left six dead. The bishop finally caved in and agreed to pay 4,000 Gulden in damages. Carlowitz was encouraged by the elector in contravention of his own decrees. This was because the noble feud was always linked to politics and the elector wanted to cut the bishop down to size. The noble feud reappeared across the Empire at the end of the sixteenth century. The following chapter will present the evidence that this was a phenomenon across the Empire and outline the reasons behind the transformation. The intention here is simply to draw attention to this new phase and to point to its social and political implications. The duchy of Holstein provides some of the best evidence for the revival of the feud. The duchy was partitioned for most of the early modern period between the kings of Denmark and their relatives the dukes of Holstein-Gottorp. In Denmark the traditional Fehde was already in decline in the early fifteenth century; its practice there was characterised, as elsewhere, by control and the absence of violence. During the early sixteenth century it died out altogether. However, Danish law still upheld a nobleman’s right to take revenge until 1682.84 The explosion of interpersonal violence in the duchy can be traced with some degree of precision thanks to Asmus Bremer, the Burgermeister of Kiel, who in 1711 wrote the Chronicon Kiliense tragicum-curiosum.85 The Chronicon is different from the other chronicles of the period in that it makes use of the Kiel’s extensive archives to report homicides committed in and around the town. Although the details before the mid-sixteenth century are sketchy, the Chronicon develops thereafter into a day-to-day tally of every recorded homicide. Why he should have undertaken such a project is unknown. However, it is clear that the local nobility had long had a reputation for violence, inspiring him to demonstrate biblical truths by chronicling the sins of men.86 If we exclude the murders committed by Holsteiners in far-off places and tales of poisoning and bewitchment, we are left with 280 homicides committed between 1560 and 1717 (Table 5.1). Although an average of one murder every seven months might seem statistically insignificant, Kiel was only a small town with perhaps 1700 inhabitants in the sixteenth century rising to 3,000 at the end of the period. The figures should be used with caution. The numbers for the 1560s seem low and may reflect record survival. There are some high-profile cases missing from Bremer’s compilation and the decline in the mid-seventeenth century is more apparent than real as the population of the city was affected, as elsewhere, by the devastation wrought by the Thirty Years’ War. What the figures clearly 84

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J. Netterstrøm, ‘Feud in Late Medieval and Early Modern Denmark’, in Netterstrøm and Poulsen (eds.), Feud in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, p. 175. M. Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon Kiliense tragicum-curiosum. Die Chronik des Asmus Bremer, Bürgermeisters von Kiel’, Mitteilingen der Gesellschaft für kieler Stadtgeschichte, 18 (1916). Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, ci.

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Table 5.1 Homicides in early modern Kiel 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 1560s 1570s 1580s 1590s 1600s 1610s 1620s 1630s 1640s 1650s 1660s 1670s 1680s 1690s 1700s 1710s

demonstrate is the explosion of interpersonal violence at the end of the sixteenth century – more than half the murders recorded in Kiel took place between 1570 and 1630 – with a sharp fall only in the 1690s. This rise in violence was not due to the failure of the law: it was precisely during this same period that appeals to the Reichskammergericht from Holstein reached their peak.87 What is most significant about the Kiel evidence is that the overall rise in violence is directly attributable to the local nobility. In this period there are numerous reports of fights and encounters between young nobles and their gangs, which left a score of noblemen dead. One example will suffice. Brothers Benedikt and Wolf von Ahlefeld first fell out in the 1560s over the property they were expected to share in common. At first this followed the familiar pattern of attacks on tenants and distraint of chattels and goods. There were numerous failed attempts at arbitration and the case was appealed to the Reichskammergericht. The dispute was inherited by their respective eldest sons, Detlef and Marquand von Ahlefeld. In the summer of 1598, the cousins fought an encounter in which Marquand was shot in the stomach and another nobleman killed. Marquand ‘swore by highway or byway, in church or cloister that he was his enemy’. He kept his oath the following March, attacking his cousin as he was on his way to the Landtag, the ensuing battle left five dead.88 The effects of the violence were widely felt. Noble gangs preyed on the citizens of Kiel, who were subject to routine intimidation – a common tactic 87

88

H.-K. Stein-Stegemann (ed.), Findbuch der Reichskammergerichtsakten, 2 vols. (Schleswig: Veröffentlichungen des Schleswig-Holsteinischen Landesarchiv, 1986). D. Detlefsen, Geschichte der holsteinischen Elbmarschen, 2 vols. (Glückstadt, 1891–2), pp. 149–51; Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 79; Stein-Stegemann (ed.), Reichskammergerichtsakten, I, p. 49.

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involved smashing windows – and even assassination. Tensions with citizenry resulted in several incidents in the St Nicholas church in Kiel and in 1578 Breide von Rantzau fatally stabbed the son of a burgher near the pulpit. The citizenry took steps to defend themselves, and in 1590 they killed Hans von Pentz, a scion of one of the leading families in the region.89 It was in this febrile atmosphere of revenge that the first witch hunts in Kiel took place.90 How do we explain the upsurge of violence in Kiel? The contempt of the nobility for townsfolk in the sources is palpable; they expected hospitality in the town on credit and resented having to mortgage their property to the burghers in order to fuel the conspicuous consumption that a noble lifestyle demanded. Their treatment of the peasantry was worse. Peasant independence in the region had been crushed by the mid-sixteenth century and the harsher lordship that ensued was enforced with brutality. In some instances the peasants fought back. Otto von Buchwald was ‘so hard’ on his peasants that they murdered him in his coach in 1595.91 However, the ‘robber baron’ explanation does not explain how feuds between nobles turned so bloody. In fact, these protagonists differed from the ‘robber barons’ of the Middle Ages by virtue of their education. Benedikt von Ahlefeld and Hans von Pentz, for example, had studied at the universities of Wittenberg and Rostock respectively. Under the governorship of Heinrich Rantzau from 1556 to 1598 the duchy of Holstein became a centre for Renaissance learning, and with this came new codes of behaviour. The change in patterns of behaviour can be measured by the arrival of the duel – the local nobility was among the earliest adopters of the practice in Germany. And the Rantzau family were at the forefront of promoting it. Heinrich Rantzau’s, nephew Gerhard, who had learnt his Greek and Latin while studying in Italy and France, was killed in one in Odense in 1580.92 And the specialist muscle that projected a swaggering image can be discerned in the employment of lackeys – the French word ‘lacquey’ first appears in the sources in 1590.93 The noble violence in late sixteenth-century Holstein thus had a political aspect in that it was the consequence of a struggle for pre-eminence, and it is no surprise that the duchy provides us with some of the best evidence in Germany for pew disputes and violence in churches. A similar upswing in aristocratic violence can be detected in other regions too at this time, although for different reasons. In the fragmented regions of the centre and south-west rising litigation was a consequence of the Imperial 89 90

91

92 93

Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 60, 150. Ibid., 62, 79, 81. The relationship between feuding and witch-hunting is explored in the following chapter. Ibid., 70. The precise date is unclear. His cousin Claus was also killed by peasants around this time. C. von Rantzau, Das Haus Rantzau: Eine Familien-Chronik (Celle, 1866), p. 144. Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 153.

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Counts (comprising about 143 families) and the Imperial Knights (150 or so families) fighting to protect the privileges that had been confirmed by the 1555 settlement, and in particular their claim to be direct vassals (Reichsunmittelbar) of the emperor. The emperor had a strong interest in upholding these claims. In Franconia nobles had traditionally competed with each other and against the pretensions of the princes. The problem of aristocratic violence seemed to have been solved by the mid-sixteenth century as claims to sovereignty were clarified by the recognition that the counts and knights constituted a distinct estate within the Empire. However, this settlement was challenged within a generation as the princes once again attempted to assert claims to overlordship. The Franconian knights were troubled by the secular Protestant princes, whose officials used force and even murder in enforcing their masters’ rights. But it was the prince-bishops who posed a greater threat to the peace. The drive to expel Lutheran pastors and return the faithful to Catholicism by a new cohort of Counter-Reform bishops was dangerous because it also posed a renewed challenge to the hard-won independence of many Imperial Knights and Counts. As William Bradford Smith explains, in Franconia: The resistance of local elites to the reform programs emanating from the centre reflected a fundamental disagreement over . . . the character of local governance . . . The reformation of the sixteenth century did not . . . provide any sort of resolution to the paradox of local governance in the territorial state. Rather, in the identification of a single orthodoxy intended to be binding on all subjects regardless of privilege or rank, the reforms added a new dimension to the age-old contest between the prince and the Land.94

Intervention in and mediation of local disputes was the traditional manner in which lords demonstrated and enhanced their authority. But after the Reformation interference by Catholic prince-bishops in feuds involving Protestants ran the risk of becoming politicised. An early example of this was the arrest and execution of the Protestant military contractor Bertold von Wintzingerode in 1575. He had been involved in a bloody feud with his neighbours since the 1540s. At first the archbishop of Mainz acted as mediator and composed a peace deal in 1565. But when violence broke out again in 1573 he took sides, stormed Wintzingerode’s castle at Bodenstein and put him on trial. Despite pleas from across the Empire for clemency, Wintzingerode was executed, even though his opponents also had much blood on their hands. His removal paved the way for the re-catholicisation of Eichsfeld.95 There was little 94

95

W. Bradford Smith, Reformation and the German Territorial State: Upper Franconia, 1300–1630 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008), p. 112. A. Jendorff, Der Tod des Tyrannen – Geschichte und Rezeption der Causa Barthold von Wintzingerode (Münich: Oldenbourg, 2012).

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stomach for any action that would threaten the public peace and protests were muted. 1573 marked the beginning of a new threat to the peace, for it was the year in which Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn was consecrated as prince-bishop of Würzburg, and the date therefore marks the beginning of the CounterReformation in Germany. On the positive side his reforms involved a major revival of learning and piety and a massive church-building programme. On the negative side it entailed large-scale witch hunts and an aggressive reassertion of manifold rights.96 This pursuit of rights was not just targeted at Protestants who were deemed to have encroached upon the 1555 Religious Peace. Echter’s attempt to incorporate the abbey of Fulda into his jurisdiction resulted in a dispute that lasted twenty-six years. The abbot of Fulda was also trying to introduce reforms in his territories. Rather than help his neighbour, Echter exploited Protestant resistance to expel the abbot and take control of Fulda. Echter’s defeat in the courts, the imposition of a heavy fine and the demand for the reinstatement of the abbot should have brought the matter to a close. But the lack of trust between them was evident on the frontier they shared. In 1613 there was an encounter between two heavily armed units. The leading officials then fought a duel to settle accounts.97 This is one of many examples in which the policies of the prince encouraged low-level but frequent skirmishing between his officials and those of his neighbours. Inheritance disputes within families could also lead to wider public violence. When the senior line of von Bibra, one of the great Franconian noble houses, died out in 1602 the prince-bishop pressed his claim, occupying the castles of Euerheim, Burgwallpach and Kleinbardorf with a force of 300 men.98 His opponent, Bernard von Bibra, a cadet of the house, managed to cling on to Schwebheim. Attempts at mediation failed because of the personal enmity between the two, which was sharpened by confessional differences: the senior line had been Catholic and the bishop had no intention of letting the inheritance fall to its Protestant cadets. Hunting became the proxy for carrying on the dispute by other means. Bernard viewed his arrest and fine for hunting infringements as vexatious and appealed in 1612 to the Reichskammergericht against the threats, wounding and murder committed by the bishop’s men.99 The arrival of civil war in the region permitted the family to briefly seize back control of the properties in the 1630s. Peace was finally made in 1681 and the von Bibra were reinstated in their possessions in return for renouncing their claim for compensation. 96

97

98 99

J. Nepomuk Buchinger, Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn: Bischof von Würzburg und Herzog von Franken (Würzburd, 1843). F. Stein, ‘Der Duellstein bei Hilders’, Buchenblätter, 23 (1975), 83; www.suehnekreuz.de/ (hilders). W. von Bibra, Geschichte der Familie der Freiherrn von Bibra (Munich, 1870), pp. 95–102. Gebhardt and Hörner (eds.), Reichskammergericht, III, p. 314.

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The rival claims to the county of Wertheim evolved into an even more serious dispute; it is a useful case study of the way in which force now required the backing of the law.100 When the Stolberg counts of Wertheim failed in the male line, contestation arose over two competing wills. The first, dated 1556, permitted the count to pass the county to his eldest two daughters in return for recognising the suzerainty of the prince-bishop of Würzburg over Wertheim. However, in 1566 the count annulled this deal and left the county to be held in common by all his daughters and their husbands as co-heirs. The significance of the second will was that it added the youngest daughter, Anna, as an heir. Unlike her elder sisters who were childless, Anna had children, and they stood to inherit the whole county. The conflict was sharpened by the fact that Anna’s husband, Ludwig count of Löwenstein, was both a Protestant and claimed that the county was Reichsunmittelbar, making him answerable only to the emperor. The Löwenstein were well connected at the imperial court and confident of success. The court case dragged on for many years. When the imperial commissioners found in favour of Würzburg in 1589 Löwenstein appealed immediately to the Reichskammergericht. As long as he could keep the court case going, Löwenstein would remain in their possession. Löwenstein underestimated the political acumen of Bishop Echter. In 1594, the second daughter of the last Stolberg count of Wertheim, Elizabeth, remarried to Wilhelm von Kriechingen. This was a rather odd marriage since she was already sixty years old. Löwenstein smelled a conspiracy. He complained that Elizabeth was not of sound mind and that Kriechingen was a straw-man acting for the bishop. His suspicions were soon proved to be correct: within a year Elizabeth had renounced the 1566 agreement and pressed her sole claim to the county. But whereas her first husband had been a Protestant, Kriechingen was a Catholic. In 1598 Kriechingen pressed his claim by force, using troops provided by the bishop; he occupied the villages and forced them to swear fealty. Things got worse for Löwenstein when the Reichskammergericht rejected his appeal against dispossession. What happened next demonstrates the difference between the medieval Fehde and its seventeenth-century iteration. Both sides appealed to the wider public in print. Löwenstein claimed that this was an illegal feud. His propaganda relied heavily on publicising the ‘atrocities’ of his enemies.101 The bishop, who hid behind his man Kriechingen, denied that this was an ‘illegal and punishable Fehde’.102 The wider significance of the dispute was that Echter, driven by his commitment to the authority of the Church, placed little 100 101

102

H. Ehmer, Geschichte der Grafschaft Wertheim (Wertheim: Buchheim, 1989), pp. 109–79. J. Reinhard, Wohlgegründer Gegen-Bericht mit ahngeheffter Warhaffter Information auff den vor der Zeit durch die Bischöffliche Würtzburgische Rähte wieder die Herren Graven zu Löwenstein und Wertheimb außgeßprengten Vermeinten Bericht (1618). Deß Hochwürdigen Fürsten und Herrn/ Herrn Iulii Bischoffs zu Wirtzburg . . . kurtzer gründlicher Bericht (Wurzburg, 1607).

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value on accommodation and compromise. As early as 1589 he had shown he was prepared to use force, sending 1200 men to wrest back control of the monastery of Bronnbach, whose secular incumbent had placed himself under the protection of the counts of Wertheim. In many villages Protestant pastors were expelled and a process of reconversion began. After Echter’s death in 1617, the feud was represented as a part of a conscious attempt at recatholicisation. In practice, too, the feud had evolved from its earlier medieval incarnation. The common tactics of distraining goods and crops, extorting dues with threats of arson and ransoming tenants were still employed – every incident from 1599 to 1617 was recorded in miserable detail by Wertheim city council.103 Bloodletting was at first limited and only in 1606 were two officials murdered when they failed to collaborate with the bishop’s men. However, the Wertheim feud was distinguished by the scale of the operation, which involved the mobilisation of thousands of militiamen, resembling full-scale war. The dispute came to a head on 8 July 1607 when the bishop’s army of 3,000 men and 4 cannon was repulsed from the village of Derdinghen, leaving 18 dead. Until the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War (and in all likelihood beyond) the county remained divided and subject to sporadic hostilities and border skirmishing. In 1617 attempts to collect the tithe in a contested parish left five dead and eleven wounded. The Löwenstein family estimated their losses over the previous decade at 66,000 Gulden. The disruptive effect that the feud had on everyday life can be gleaned from the fact that the disputed region became the epicentre of bouts of witch-hunting over the next two decades. It should come as no surprise that the first major hunt in the bishopric of Würzburg took place in the contested former Lutheran jurisdiction of Freudenberg, where fifty people were executed in 1616–17.104 Echter’s centralising policies were continued by his successors down to 1631. This seems to have contributed to the general rise in elite violence during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, whose trajectory can be traced through prosecutions launched by the bishop’s court. At least forty-two nobles were punished for acts of violence in the seventeenth century, but nearly half of these prosecutions occurred in the 1620s.105 The efforts to bring the Franconian nobility to heel show that even the elite was not exempt from 103

104

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A. Kaufmann, ‘Hans Schumachers Bericht über die Kriegsvorfälle zwischen Würzburg und Löwenstein (1599–1617)’, Archiv der historischer Vereins von Unterfranken un Aschaffenburg, 19 (1867), 122–59. E. Midelfort discerns no clear reason for the outbreak: Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972), pp. 138–9. Copia Instrumenti Specificationis Actuum Exercitorum PUncto Jusridictionis Criminalis contra immediatoes Imperii Nobiles ex parte WURZBURGENSIS, 2 vols. (Regensburg, 1750), II, pp. 442–8; N. Gönner, Staatsrechtiche verhältnisse der adeligen Gutsbesitzer in

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Counter-Reformation attempts at social disciplining. However, there are grounds for thinking that there were other motives in operation. In none of the cases was corporal punishment ordered and in most the payment of blood money, sometimes a token amount, sufficed. Two were outlawed and the first execution of a nobleman (who shot a woman) did not occur until 1706. Of the fourteen Franconian noblemen who were indicted for murder between 1620 and 1630 several seem to have been involved in feuds with their kinsmen. The arrival of civil war turned them bloody. The bishop was not directly to blame for this, but his policies and character did not predispose him to play the traditional princely role of peacemaker, meaning that old quarrels now escalated out of control. The consequences of this can be seen most clearly in the case of the von Steinau. Hans von Steinau, a Protestant Imperial Knight, had been a senior official and counsellor of the bishop of Würzburg until Echter’s arrival in 1573. The two men quickly fell out when the bishop claimed sovereignty over a jurisdiction they had formerly shared – the dispute was still ongoing in 1624 at the Reichskammergericht. At the same time, Hans also fell out with his brother Bernard over the right to present to the benefice of Euersbach. The dispute soon turned bloody and was conducted like a ‘true war . . . with fire and sword’.106 It embroiled the whole family: Hans’s son Johann Hartmann was killed in a duel in 1604 by one of his cousins. A key player was Bernard’s son Wolf Adam, whose fearsome reputation – he was outlawed from Würzburg in 1599 for killing the local head of the Teutonic Order – earned him the nickname the ‘red devil’. The poisonous nature of social relations in these decades can also be seen from the gunning down of Johann-Georg von Lichtenstein, a former captain of the Protestant Union, in front of his castle at Wiesen in 1623 by his cousin Veit Ernst von Steinau, probably in retaliation for Lichtenstein’s killing of Sigmund von Dobeneck a few months previously. These murders reveal factions within the Imperial Knights in Franconia: victims and killers were closely linked by kinship ties. The outbreak of aristocratic violence was not unconnected to the bishop’s policies. The attempt to reassert episcopal authority generated significant local opposition. But the bishop’s threat to their rights and honour also seems to have increased conflict among them. The bishop’s opponents did not resort to open rebellion, which would have been foolhardy, but they spared no effort to demonstrate their power and their intention not to be pushed around. The result was a complication of friend–enemy relationships, which resulted both in bloody

106

den Churpfalzbaierschen entschädigungslanden besonders den frankischen Fustenthumern Bamberg and Wirzburg (Landshut, 1803), document 88. R. von Steinau-Steinrück, ‘Abriß aus der Geschichte des fränkischen Geschlechtes von Steinau gen. Steinrück’, Archiv des historischen Vereins von Unterfranken und Aschaffenburg, 49 (1907), 114.

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conflicts between the Imperial Knights and in collusion between them against the bishop – for example, Wolf Adam von Steinau’s escape from Würzburg in 1599 was abetted by another of the bishop’s bitterest enemies, Bernhard von Bibra.107 The ways in which social peace was threatened by the Counter-Reformation can also be seen in neighbouring Bamberg. Here reform was less systematic in form and more sporadic in intensity than in neighbouring Würzburg. One reason for this was the hatred aroused by Echter von Mespelbrunn and his policies among his fellow Catholics. The prince-bishop of neighbouring Bamberg from 1599 to 1609, Johann Philipp von Gebstattel, was an enemy. Echter’s aggressive assertion of his rights ignited a border dispute between the two principalities which was matched by personal insults. For this reason Gebstattel openly sided with the Protestant Löwenstein during the Wertheim feud.108 During Gebstattel’s tenure of the bishopric, Protestants continued to hold office: his engagement of Echter’s enemy Bernhard von Bibra as a counsellor and official was a public repudiation of the policies in neighbouring Würzburg. Hatred of Echter and his policies did not make Gebstattel a bad Catholic. He, too, was intent upon restoring the faith in his diocese and restoring worship where it had been usurped. The result was an intensification of litigation. The historian of one of the Imperial Knightly families affected, the von Aufseß, noted that the litigation ‘developed into almost ceaseless disputes, which would probably have degenerated into bloody feuds had [they] lived a hundred years before’.109 The reason it did not do so was that Gebstattel was trusted by the Protestants and both sides were prepared to compromise. Disputes were open to arbitration. On 29 January 1604 Gebstattel signed a deal with Achaz von Aufseß recognising his right to present to the benefice of Mengersdorf (and therefore his sovereign authority), so long as he chose a Catholic candidate.110 Mediation became more difficult on the death of Gebstattel and the election in 1609 of the less politic Johann Gottfried von Aschhausen, a founding member of the Catholic League. The new bishop was an admirer of the Würzburg model of reform and signed a peace deal to end the border dispute between the two principalities in 1612. Arbitration was no longer a priority. With their rights and sovereignty under threat, the Aufseß fought back. Daniel von Aufseß (1576–1633) appealed five cases involving honorific and hunting rights, presentation to benefices and insults to the 107

108

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W. von Bibra, Beiträge zur Familien Geschichte der Reichsfreiherrn von Bibra, 3 vols. (Munich, 1880), II, p. 175. For this and following: J. Looshorn, Geschichte des Bistums Bamberg, 7 vols. (Münich, 1886–1910), V, pp. 324–97. O. von and zu Aufseß, Geschichte des uradelichen Aufseß’schen Geschlechtes in Franken (Berlin: 1888), p. 245. Looshorn, Geschichte des Bistums Bamberg, V, p. 324.

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Reichskammergericht.111 In 1610 the bishop pressed a claim to the Aufseß castle at Freienfels. The violence that ensued was not yet murderous and involved skirmishes between the Aufseß family and the bishop’s officials in the region of Hollfeld halfway between Bamberg and Bayreuth. Violence erupted elsewhere in 1612, however, when another Imperial Knight, Wolf Andreas Stiebar, forbade a Catholic wedding at Ermreuth. The bishop sent 300 men to ensure it went ahead, but they were repulsed by cannon with the loss of one dead and eight wounded.112 Civil war offered an irresistible opportunity for the bishop to press his advantage. In 1620 the arms of the House of Wildenstein were replaced by those of the bishop on the church at Grafenhaig. In 1624–6 troops began to occupy churches over which the bishop claimed rights of patronage. Many of these disputes were long-standing and preceded the Reformation. Taking advantage of the Catholic victories, the bishop compulsorily purchased the Protestant town of Kitzingen in 1626. This was not a restoration of property usurped since the 1555 religious settlement. The bishop had only ever owned a portion of the territory, which was shared with the margrave of Brandenburg. According to a local diarist, his opportunism meant that ‘the unending and nearly 200-year-old dispute between the bishop of Würzburg and the margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach over possession of the town of Kitzingen and its appurtenances was revived’.113 The complexity of the 1555 settlement in the region can be seen through the lens of one village. The residents of Modschiedel owed a variety of allegiances. Of some 650 parishioners only forty or so were under the direct lordship of the bishops of Bamberg. A few were subjects of the margrave of Brandenburg, but the majority were divided among several Protestant noble families, including the von Aufseß.114 Though the bishop had the right to appoint to the benefice, the community was overwhelmingly Protestant and the Lutheran pastor had been in place for a generation. In 1574, when the bishop expelled the pastor, there were only twenty-three Catholic communicants. The ensuing dispute centred around the right of the congregation to worship as they had done for the past twenty years in accordance with the religious peace, which clashed with the right of the bishop to appoint to the benefice. A succession of Catholic priests was subject to threats and intimidation from the congregation. One was forced to defend himself with a sword and another was shot at.115 111 112 113

114 115

Gebhardt and Hörner (eds.), Reichskammergericht, I, pp. 141–65. Looshorn, Geschichte des Bistums Bamberg, V, p. 404. V. Wirth (ed.), Bartholomäus Dietwar. Leben eines evangelischen Pfarrers im früheren markgräflichen Amte Kitzingen von 1592–1670, von ihm selbst erzählt (Kitzingen, 1887), p. 39. Bradford Smith, Upper Franconia, pp. 101–2. Erhard Meissner: Modschiedel – 1382 – 1982; aus der Geschichte einer 600jährigen Pfarrei (Modschiedel, 1982), pp. 41–5.

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The perpetrators acted with impunity since they enjoyed the protection of the local nobility. Religion was not the only thing that divided the village. As the 1618 Bohemian revolt destroyed the spirit of compromise across the Empire, the breakdown of order exposed enmities within the Protestant elite in Modschiedel. Until the outbreak of war Daniel von Aufseß had employed limited force to back up his rights. He was a civilised man: he was university-educated, had completed the obligatory tour of Italy and was versed in using the law to defend his interests.116 But in 1621 the first troops crossed the region and the bishop of Bamberg began to recruit his own regiments. On 17 May Aufseß arrived in Modschiedel with fourteen men and killed his Protestant neighbour Jobst von Modschiedler. The dispute was over a garden worth 18 Thalers in rent. Aufseß claimed to have acted out of self-defence. In particular, he accused his victim of using the arrival of civil war in the region as a pretext for threatening to kill him and burn his manor in the village. There were rumours that Jobst was a backslider and about to convert to Catholicism.117 In this atmosphere of mutual suspicion, a lethal response was more likely in otherwise banal disputes. This murder was part of a wider pattern of aristocratic violence in Franconia in the 1620s in which religion was a complicating factor. The killing of his neighbour was a signal that Aufseß’s attitudes had hardened, as was soon evident in his relations with the bishop of Bamberg. In 1624 the family not only tore up the 1604 peace deal made over the benefice of Mengersdorf but installed a pastor and cleansed the church of popery.118 The feud that now developed between the bishop and the von Aufseß has left a rich trail of evidence. The bishop, taking advantage of the favourable military situation for the Catholic League, made good his claim to Freienfels in 1628. He expelled the Lutheran pastor and installed a garrison, which was sustained by raiding the rest of the Aufseß properties. Following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Daniel von Aufseß’s son Hans Wilhelm tried to recover the castle legally. But the bishop granted it instead to a creditor, Adam von Wirsberg. Religion no longer complicated the matter. Wirsberg was a Protestant and the bishop, desperate for cash, was happy to sell his rights to appoint to the benefice.119 Frustrated by the legal route, the family succeeded in retaking the castle by force after a two-week siege in 1652. But this did not bring an end to the affair as their repossession reignited the old boundary disputes with the bishop’s sheriff of Hollfeld. In 1655, Hans Wilhelm, in response to an insult to his wife, tried to provoke the sheriff to a duel and threatened to shoot the bishop. The bishop 116 117 118 119

Von Aufseß, Geschichte des uradelichen Aufseß’schen, pp. 261–3. Gebhardt and Hörner (eds.), Reichskammergericht, I, p. 141. Looshorn, Geschichte des Bistums Bamberg, VI, p. 97. H. von und zu Aufseß, ‘Merkwürdige Schicksale des Felsenschlosses Freyenfels an der Wiesent’, Archiv für Geschichte und Altertumskunde von Oberfranken, 10 (1866), 40–69.

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responded by ordering Hans Wilhelm’s arrest and the seizure of Freienfels. The bishop returned the property to Wirsberg. Hans Wilhelm made one last vain attempt to retake the castle by force. But by now the political situation in the Empire was once again unfavourable to self-help. Henceforth there were threats and libels, but the conflict was confined to the Imperial Chancery Court in Vienna. The matter was only finally settled in 1681. ***

The return of confessional tensions elsewhere in the Empire after 1580 is well documented. In Catholic Cologne, for example, which had heretofore been tolerant of the Lutheran minority, the conversion of the archbishop and his attempt to secularise the see in violation of the 1555 peace led to a bitter struggle (1583–8). Hermann Weinsberg, who experienced the civil war at first hand, chronicled the evaporation of goodwill: ‘Mistrust and factionalism is a nasty business.’120 The advance of Calvinism during this period was not only disruptive of the 1555 settlement, since they had not been included, but they posed a threat to social relations more widely because they rejected altogether the festive culture that Catholics and Lutherans continued in large measure to share and which contributed to communal solidarity. We should be wary, however, of concluding that confessional differences by themselves generated violence, and there is plenty of evidence that confessional coexistence across the Empire continued to flourish in communities with mixed confessions until 1618.121 The high levels of aristocratic violence we encountered in Upper Lusatia and Holstein had little to do with religion. The Counter-Reformation generated much less conflict in Bamberg than in Würzburg, though even here Protestants were quite capable of distinguishing between their enmity for the ‘tyrant’ Echter von Mespelbrunn and Catholics as a group, many of whom were friends and kinsmen.122 After 1618 such distinctions became more difficult to make. All the evidence suggests that it was the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War which upset the fragile equilibrium and made the resort to self-help in private disputes more likely and more lethal. Understandably, the historiography on the conflict has concentrated largely on the violence committed by the soldiery, while the current state of research does not permit a detailed investigation of the impact of war on social relations within communities123 The destructive nature of the conflict means that the 120 121

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www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de/Edition/Liber_Senectutis/Liber_Senectutis.htm, 29 July 1583. For a recent re-statement of this: D. Luebke, Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2016). F. Faktenheuer, Lebenswelt und Religion: Mikro-Historische Untersuchungen an Beispielen aus Franken um 1600 (Göttingen: Vandehoeck & Rupprecht, 2004), pp. 125–35. For some preliminary observations: O. Ulbricht, ‘The Experience of Violence during the Thirty Years War: A Look at the Victims’, in J. Canning, H. Lehmann and J. Winter

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sources are often lacking. So for example, the peasant feuds, generated by land hunger and feudal exactions, which were clearly on the increase in some regions, forcing Saxony (1602) and Brandenburg (1603) to reissue ordinances against the practice, suddenly disappear with the arrival of war. At Prignitz in Brandenburg the rich documentation uncovered by Jan Peters halts in the 1630s, as the area became a centre of military operations.124 He speculates that the traditional practices of the peasant feud, in particular arson, were neither efficacious nor acceptable at a time when soldiers were using the same practices in a more systematic and widespread fashion. An older hypothesis claims that, although communities were riven by internal faction and conflict, threats from outside inevitably increased social cohesion. There is some evidence to suggest this might be the case. The pastor of the small Franconian town of Marktbreit recorded its petty disputes and occasional punch-ups. Initially, things turned nastier after the first appearance of troops in the region: on 31 March 1620 a cobbler was killed by a man who later became the mayor; on 3 April a magistrate was run through by the sheriff; on 14 July two men killed each other over ‘an old hatred’. These internal feuds immediately ceased to be recorded, as if drowned in the tsunami of violence perpetrated by soldiers: in one week alone in 1627 four peasants were killed ‘by our own soldiers’.125 However, recent research suggests that civil war privatises violence; that is to say the breakdown of public order changes the nature of private quarrels, legitimising revenge, encouraging predation and discouraging mediation. It is tempting to think that this was offset by the greater availability of land as the population was decimated by disease. The evidence from the devastation wrought by the 1629–31 plague in Italy suggests that this was not the case. Here vendetta was fuelled by the fact that survivors fought over abandoned plots and orphans and widows were left with insecure property rights and were prey to the strong.126 Some evidence that similar circumstances might have prevailed in Germany comes from the detailed study of the county of Hohenlohe by Thomas Robisheaux. The desperate measures taken by property owners to control the family patrimony in sixteenth-century Hohenlohe, in particular the ending of partible inheritance, was already causing significant conflict within villages before the outbreak of war. After 1620 ‘the tone set by participants in the conflicts was more bitter and desperate than ever before’.127 The pressures of the wartime economy in the county split whole families into

124

125 126 127

(eds.), Power, Violence and Mass Death in Pre-Modern Times (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 97–128. Märkische Lebenswelten: Gesellschaftsgeschichte der Herrschaft Plattenburg-Wilsnack, Prignitz 1550–1800 (Berlin: Brandenburgischen Landeshauptarchivs, 2007), pp. 314–15. Hüttner (ed.), ‘Wolfgang Ammon’, 296. Rose, ‘Homicide in North Italy’, chapter 4. T. Robisheaux, Rural Society and the Search for Order in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 141.

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‘warring factions’ and the state effectively collapsed by 1630 to be replaced with the iron fist of military rule. The terrible economic and demographic impact of this transformation is much easier to chart than its impact on social relations. But as order collapsed, ‘ancient feuds often became life and death struggles over who would shoulder the largest burden of taxes’.128 The ways in which mundane disputes were sharpened by shortages, exactions and the fear spread by marauding armies can be gleaned from the small village of Presseck in Franconia. Three murderers fled the village between 1647 and 1652 to join the Swedish army, before returning to pay their victims’ families compensation.129 As the state collapsed, so soldiers were able to act with impunity in their private quarrels. Claus Rosengarten killed Daniel Mahlstede’s brother when they were serving in Bohemia in 1620. Mahlstede mobilised fourteen armed men and tracked the killer down to a village near Hamburg. Rosengarten offered to pay for the crime, but Mahlstede first took the money and then had his revenge.130 The war divided previously mixed communities into hostile confessions. Before the war the different confessions of the village of Hoheim near Kitzingen rubbed along. Until he was forced out of the village of Hoheim in 1629 by the bishop of Würzburg, the Protestant pastor, Bartholomäus Dietwar, made no comment about his Catholic neighbours. It was as if they did not exist. By the time he was reinstated in 1632 the mood had changed radically: ‘The [Catholics] threatened to cut off the arms and legs of the Protestants and tear out their hearts. They threatened me that, when Tilly’s army returned, they would tie me up and make me answer to them.’131 The same thing occurred in great cities like Augsburg, where the two religions had largely coexisted before the war. In 1648 it became necessary to create distinct and legally divided communities because of the level of suspicion that had been generated. Everyday coexistence became more difficult to negotiate: at Mitwitz (Franconia) insults between the Catholic schoolmaster Züberlein and the Protestant steward got out of hand in 1631 as the former accused the latter of sending letters threatening to shoot him and his father. The arrival of Protestant troops rapidly turned the dispute in the steward’s favour and Züberlein, father and son, were arrested and summarily shot.132 In this region, villages were pitted against each other along confessional lines and protected by their own militias (Ausschuß), who preyed on neighbouring villages.133 128 129

130 131 132

133

Ibid., p. 226. M. von Lerchenfeld, ‘Die von Wildenstein und ihr Gericht zu Preseck’, Archiv für Geschichte und Altertumskunde von Oberfranken, 16 (1886), 70–1. Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 251. Wirth (ed.), Bartholomäus Dietwar, p. 75. R. Hambrecht (ed.), ‘“Das Papier ist mein Acker . . . ”. Ein Notizbuch des 17, Jahrhunderts von Handwerker-Bauern aus dem nordwestlichen Oberfranken’, Jahrbuch der Coburger Landestiftung, 29 (1984), 352. Ibid., 355.

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The partition of the contributions that were levied to pay the soldiery was another cause of dissension within communities.134 The end of hostilities did not immediately put a stop to suspicion of one’s neighbours. Lutheran pastor Gerhard Ramsler described the ill-feeling that the war left in its wake in the village of Tennenbronn (Württemberg). On his arrival in 1660 he noted the musket balls fired from the other side of the village that pocked the church and rectory, which had forced his predecessor to quit. The Catholics made noise in order to disrupt Protestant services and Ramsler had to be accompanied to outlying farms by an armed escort. ‘Here one saw the great bitterness of these people. They plotted tumults every night and with their guns fired many shots with the intention of keeping me awake and forcing me out of the vicarage.’135 The evidence for the way in which war exacerbated aristocratic violence is richer. As an ordinance of the duke of Saxony of 1646 explained, ‘in this time of war Christian blood flows like water, especially among the nobility . . . who when one of them is insulted should avenge themselves civilly (ordentlich) by legal means. It is a great disgrace when he has no regard for honesty (redlich), but rather because his rank obliges he settles everything with arms, thereby putting his body and soul in terrible danger.’136 The resolution of aristocratic disputes by these means was not new. What changed, however, was the spread of these practices into the city. Civil war shattered trust. In bi-confessional Augsburg this was caused by the military occupation of the city, first by the Swedes and then by the Bavarians. At first glance, the records for Augsburg suggest a significant decrease in violence from a peak in the 1610s of 40 murders and 189 woundings, which fell to only 4 woundings and 5 murders in the period 1641 to 1648. But these figures only recorded those arrested and imprisoned. What they suggest therefore is less a decline of violence than the collapse of the legal system.137 Qualitative evidence gives a better indication of what was really happening throughout the Empire. A tourist visiting Vienna in 1651 reported that murders were still so common that one would be talking about one at midday only to hear that another had been committed that evening.138 Duelling to the death, which had already conquered the nobility, now spread to the towns and it was during the 1630s that the foreign word ‘duel’ first became commonplace.139 In Kiel the church cemetery became the 134

135

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137 138 139

For example: V. Happe, ‘Chronicon Thuringiae’, www.mdsz.thulb.uni-jena.de/happe/ quelle.php, 11 May 1634. U.-J. Wandel (ed.), Lebens- und Leidensweg des M. Johann Gerhard Ramsler, Specials zu Freudenstadt. Die Lebenserinnerungen eines wüttemburgischen Landpfarrers (1635– 1703) (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1993), p. 47. Fürstl. Sächsisches Gothisches Ausschreiben/ Wie dem leidigen Ausfordern und Balgen zu stewren/ Auch die Vberfahrer zu bestraffen (Gotha, 1646). Roeck, Eine Stadt, II, p. 740 R. Möhner, Ein Tourist in Oesterreich während der Schwedenzeit (Linz, 1874), p. 124. Ludwig, Das Duell, pp. 72–4.

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favoured place to fight publicly. In 1631 an ordinance ordered nobles’ servants and other non-nobles to refrain from ‘shooting, fighting, rampages and other tumults’ in the streets. Such was its effect that it had to be reiterated in 1638, 1650, 1655, 1665, 1666 (twice), 1670, 1672, 1673 (twice) and 1675.140 Lübeck issued its first ordinance against duelling in 1645 following a precedence dispute at a banquet held by the city which resulted in two deaths, including the town commandant.141 The half a dozen funeral sermons for murdered students composed during these years show that the fashion for open fights in the streets had spread in the urban environment: in 1652 the son of the Professor of Law at Rostock was shot in the town’s market by a fellow student.142 ***

This chapter has demonstrated how the feud changed in the sixteenth century. The idea that feuding ended in 1495, or at the latest in 1555, is still commonplace in the literature. The increase in litigation after 1550 is held up as an example of why this was the case. It is claimed that the juridification of disputes reduced violence. This chapter has attempted to establish a different narrative. The medieval legal institution of the Fehde was brought to an end, at least among the social elite. But enmity, though it can be controlled, redirected and pacified, cannot be completely suppressed because it has a political aspect related to a sense of justice. It is often assumed that litigious societies are less violent societies. But an increase in litigation may be indicative of the fact that mechanisms of mediation are failing and that conflict is becoming intensified. This is precisely what we would expect at the end of the sixteenth century as economic and environmental pressures generated social differentiation and created social tension. The feud changed after 1555. The use of force now required legitimation by the courts. Even so, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that peasants in many regions continued to believe that feuding without recourse to the courts was a legitimate practice. The social elite scorned the term Fehde and viewed its practices as dishonourable. At the same time, however, they were beginning to adopt a code of individual honour in which no affront could be ignored. In Westphalia, for example, the number of slander cases appealed to the Reichskammergericht peaked around 1600.143

140 141

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Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 269. M. Sircks, Warnungs Predigt/ Darinnen/ wie durch eine Göttliche Kette und Donnerstrael/ alle Todtschläger/ Duellanten, unnd Balger von ihren unmenschlichen Mordthaten abgezogen und abgeschrecket werden (Lübeck, 1645). M. Schütz, Auf den zwar Kläglichen/ doch Sehligen Hintrit Herrn Joachim Steffens/ I.U. Licentiati, Als er zu Rostock erschossen ward / überreichet von Matthias Schützen von Kolberg aus Pommern (Greifswald, 1652). Fuchs, Um die Ehre, p. 73.

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The evidence from this region suggests that litigiousness over honour made the elite more prone to violence not less.144 If litigation is a guide to the level of conflict in a society more generally then violence was reduced after the Thirty Years’ War. The pattern of declining litigation at the Reichskammergericht was repeated in lesser courts: in the jurisdiction of Amerang in Bavaria, which consisted of 150 farms, there was an average of ninety-six cases per year in the 1670s before the local court, falling to an average of twenty-three for the 1690s.145 However, the fact that the population was also much reduced, in some regions by as much as 30 per cent, suggests that we should be wary of drawing too many conclusions from this evidence. In fact, noble violence, in particular, remained a significant problem after 1648. Control of the fortress and town of Rothenburg in Franconia is an example of how protracted disputes over rights fuelled duelling. The town and its fortress came under the suzerainty of the elector of Bavaria following the Peace of Westphalia. However, the territory was controlled by a community of 133 nobles (Ganerbschaft), which defended its rights with force, resulting in a feud with the Bavarians. In 1673 Hans Albrecht Schott von Hallingen, the leader (Burggraf) of the community, was killed in a duel with a Bavarian officer. The resistance was a success and the Bavarians were forced to indemnify the Ganerben to the tune of 165,000 florins.146 The diary kept by Michael Walburger, an apothecary from Hof, a small town belonging to the margrave of Brandenburg in Franconia, provides a more intimate insight into the endurance of enmity post war.147 University-educated, sociable, with a keen sense of humour and sceptical of popular customs like diabolic magic, he was also quarrelsome, litigious and prone to anger when his rights were threatened or pride wounded. He owned two pistols, but in contrast to the nobility in the locality, he did not spill blood. Between 1652 and 1661 he recorded a dozen murders committed by nobles, largely in duels and encounters. On 3 December 1661 he recorded how, at a betrothal party, two nobles ‘with swords came at each other, so that they were both run through and both were horribly killed, but this is nothing new’.148 The level of violence he recorded declined in the later 1660s, but the activities of one local lineage, the Reitzenstein, show that the violence had not altogether gone away. In March 1649 Adam Asmus shot and killed Georg Wilhelm von Dobeneck in 144

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F. Dierkes, Streitbar und ehrenfest: Zur Konfliktführung münsterländischer Adeliger im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Aschendorff: Münster, 2007). R. van Dülmen, Kultur und Alltag in der Frühen Neuzeit, 3 vols. (Münich: Beck, 1999), pp. 48–9. ‘Geschichten, Sagen und Bilder aus der Oberpfalz und einem Theil des angränzenden Böhmens’, Jugendblätter, 24 (1848), 201. F. Händel and A. Herrmann (eds.), Das Hausbuch des Apothekers Walburger, 1652–1667, 5 vols. (Hof: Nordoberfränkischer Verein, 1988–92). Ibid., III, p. 923.

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a mounted encounter near Marlesreuth, 20 kilometres east of Hof. He had to pay 500 Thalers in compensation, swear an Urfehde and leave the margravate of Brandenburg-Ansbach for three years. The feud between the cousins can be traced back to 1601 when Christoph von Reitzenstein killed Georg von Dobeneck at a church feast. It was reignited during the Thirty Years’ War.149 Duelling did not supersede the feud but was, in many instances, a continuation of it by other means. The Reitzenstein were particularly dedicated to the practice and their involvement in it is recorded in 1613, 1639, 1652, 1670, 1676, 1689 and 1692. Even more common were symbolic insults, such as when the family assembled outside Mitwitz castle in March 1674 demanding repayment of a debt. When it was not forthcoming, they fired on the castle and peppered their enemy’s name and arms, which were affixed to the village linden tree as a symbol of lordship, with shot – an attempt either to shame the occupants to venture out or to intimidate them.150 The following chapter explores in more detail this everyday culture of enmity.

149 150

A. von Dobeneck, Geschichte der Famille von Dobeneck (Berlin, 1906). Hambrecht (ed.), ‘Das Papier’, 392.

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6 The Culture of Enmity in Early Modern Germany

I argued in the previous chapter that enmity was transformed in sixteenthcentury Germany. In the late Middle Ages the traditional Fehde was practised by all social groups, a legally recognised form of conflict resolution. The rules that governed the Fehde limited violence. Its rituals communicated grievances which invited mediation before matters escalated out of control. This changed after 1550 as the institution was criminalised. Its practices were increasingly shunned by the elite. Accordingly, the word fell out of favour among them and they increasingly chose other synonyms to express their hostility. When Bishop Echter von Mespelbrunn attacked the county of Wertheim in 1599, he sent a declaration of hostility (Feindlichen Absagebrief). Echter was proceeding according to the law; it was his opponent who complained that this was an illegal Fehdebrief.1 The practices of the Fehde survived in popular culture. Indeed, traces of its customs survived in rural areas into the modern era. The dominant motive for arson in nineteenth-century Bavaria was revenge, but by now it was a practice confined to the landless and the marginal.2 This chapter argues that the growth of litigation after 1550 is not an indicator of a decline of enmity among the social elite. In fact, the opposite is the case: social change generated new enmities which were fought using legal writs. The late sixteenth-century explosion of violence was, as in the rest of Europe, not an indicator of ‘backwardness’ but a consequence of status anxiety as social mobility and Renaissance ideas about merit and worth challenged traditional ideas about hierarchy and virtue. In the sixteenth century a great deal of conflict was generated by anxiety over reputation and the requirement to prove one’s status and place in the social order. The Renaissance ideals of virtue and glory taught that no honour accrued to ransoming peasants and burning farms, and so such practices became outmoded. This is not to suggest that, while there are similarities with developments elsewhere in Europe, the German-speaking lands did not possess their own distinct practices of 1 2

Reinhard, Wohlgegründer Gegen-Bericht, p. 228. R. Schulte, The Village in the Court: Arson, Infanticide and Poaching in the Court Records of Upper Bavaria, 1848–1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 27.

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vindicatory violence, nor that elites did not continue to share many folk beliefs and customs. The literature on the culture of enmity in Germany is arguably the richest in any European language. This is largely because south-west Germany and the Rhineland were the epicentres of the European witch craze. The ubiquitous recourse to magic was not just to snare a lover or restore health but also to take revenge. The records generated by witch hunts shed light on village disputes and the politics of enmity more widely. This chapter sets out to establish the parameters of the culture of enmity, to discuss some of its rituals and practices, and to show the ways in which the social elite attempted to distinguish itself from ordinary folk by adopting new forms of dispute resolution. ***

Germans developed a distinct set of customary practices that displayed enmity and invited mediation. The belief that a grievance had to be announced in order to make it legitimate was integral to the conduct of the Fehde. This usually took the form of the posting of a libel (Absage- or Fehdebrief), which warned an enemy that they ran the risk of robbery and arson unless they addressed the listed grievances. Arson had traditionally been used by the social elite in its disputes, and they could afford to employ people to do their dirty work. In the spring of 1533 fire-starters were paid 3 crowns a week or 1 crown per house in the canton of St Gallen in Switzerland.3 The duke of BrunswickLüneburg demanded 32,000 Gulden in unpaid debts from the city of Münster and employed his own secret ‘fire-master’ in the city in 1563 to force its hand.4 Arson was used by the princes systematically during the civil conflicts of the 1540s and 1550s as a tactic to extort and terrorise. This set an example to those of lower social status. Jost Strycke paid a carpenter to lay fires in his feud with the city of Cologne in 1550.5 In the region of Ulm, which suffered heavily from depredations of the princes in 1552, a schoolmaster took up fire-starting after his wife got into a dispute with another woman in the village.6 The village of Crempzow (Pomerania) was burned down twice in the 1550s in the feud between the Replin and the Wedel families.7 Thereafter the practice was increasingly shunned by the social elite in its disputes and arson viewed as a dishonourable crime. As a weapon of the weak, however, it remained in widespread use. In 1746, for example, the ‘forest men’ of Reusa near Plauen posted two warnings to the door of the castle of their lord, 3

4

5 6 7

E. Rüsch (ed.), Johannes Rütiner diarium 1529–1539, 5 vols. (St Gallen: E. G. Rüsch, 1996), I, p. 259. J. Janssen (ed.), Die Münsterischen Chroniken von Röchell, Stevermann und Corfey (Münster, 1856), p. 21. Spormecker (ed.), Cronica, pp. 223, 279. Veesenmeyer (ed.), ‘Sebastian Fischers Chronik’, 240. J. von Bohlen (ed.), Das Hausbuch des Joachim von Wedel (Tübingen, 1883), p. 9.

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threatening to burn his property unless he paid them the 600 Thalers they were owed.8 Fire-starters were aware of the high stakes they were playing for and the potential for being pursued by the courts as murderous arsonists (Mordbrenner). For this reason arsonists represented themselves as victims of injustice seeking reparation from tyrannical lords. In a barb at his lord’s incivility, Jesper Wetzel sent his 1557 threat in Latin, demanding damages when his wife lost her hand in a dispute about work. He added that he was happy to send one in German should his lord not understand it.9 As well as written or verbal threats, symbols announcing enmity could be posted in visible places, such as the church, well or communal oven. These required little skill and were made up of some form of combustible material, which symbolised burning (Brandzeichen), such as the ‘thing cobbled together from an old beehive, wound round with flax with coal stuffed inside’, or a ‘cross made out of a bunch of burnt branches’.10 Occasionally, a picture might be added for effect, such as an upturned broom.11 Or the letter itself might be partially burned and nailed to a door.12 The threats were conditional and enmity would cease upon satisfactory compensation being paid. Nevertheless the damage inflicted and the terror it induced could be significant: in 1591 in the region of Prignitz an anonymous arsonist burned twenty-four buildings and forty cows.13 The fact that all fires were viewed with suspicion focussed attention on one’s neighbours. When a house was burned down in Mitwitz in 1675 the inhabitants ‘held that it had been set alight. But one really doesn’t know what happened’. But when another went up in flames two days later Hans Lintner was certain that ‘it had been set alight by his enemies’.14 Enmity was also signalled by a range of provocative gestures. Many of the more common insulting gestures, such as sticking out a tongue, knocking off someone’s hat, nose-thumbing, making the sign of a cuckold and drawing an index finger across a throat, were universal. Others, such as the knippschlag, clicking one’s fingers under someone’s nose, seem to have been more specific to Germans.15 ‘By continuously braving and provoking him by clicking his fingers in front of his face’, Dietrich von Klencke sought to wind his opponent up in 1637. Onlookers noticed that his hatred was shown not only by his 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

A. Neupert, ‘Schloß Reusa, seine Vorbesitzer und der durch eingeworfene Fehdebriefe daselbst im Jahre 1746 erregte Aufstand’, Mitteilungen des Altertumsvereins zu Plauen, 21 (1911), 102–16. Peters, ‘Leute-Fehde’, 71. Mommertz, ‘Von Besen und Bündelchen’, pp. 221–2. Peters, ‘Leute-Fehde’, 79. Harrington, Faithful Executioner, p. 11. Peters, ‘Leute-Fehde’, 63. Hambrecht (ed.), ‘Das Papier’, 396. A. Beuke, ‘“In gutter zier und kurtzweil bey der naßen angetastet”. Aspekte der Konflikaustrags in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in B. Krug-Richter and Ruth E. Mohrmann (eds.), Praktiken des Konfliktaustrags in der Frühen Neuzeit (Münster: Rhema, 2004), p. 131.

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‘hectoring and provocation’ but by the fact that his ‘face lost all its colour’.16 The rolling of the eyes was apparently a common form of discourtesy that denoted that someone had got what they deserved.17 To touch the pommel of someone else’s sword was a grave offence that demanded a response.18 Dietrich von Galen, a member of the Münster social elite, demonstrated his contempt for a neighbour ‘by laughing and feigning to kiss his hand in a show of knavish buffoonery’.19 Among those with a previous history of hostility any form of inappropriate gesticulation could be construed as an insult. Hans Sigismund von Aufseß complained not only about gestures and a libellous letter brought in a slander suit against his cousin but also of inappropriate ‘glances’ by one of his enemy’s servants.20 Another peculiarly German practice was the public summons out of a house. The purpose of this was to force an enemy to come out of his property in order to have a showdown in the street. The most common way of doing this was to provoke them by shouting insults, accusing them of being a coward and breaking their windows. The publicity that the scene generated explains its function. Onlookers were being invited to judge the honour of the ‘coward’ who remained cowering being closed doors. The spate of window smashing in the explosion of violence between the burghers of Kiel and the local nobility in the 1570s can be partly explained by the fact that the windows of the burghers’ houses contained coats of arms and breaking them was a direct attack on their claim to honour.21 Window breaking did not require entering the property, which would leave the challenger open to accusations of trespass and breaking the public peace. Johann Philipp Engerini, a wealthy landowner from the county of Lippe, did everything he could do to provoke his enemy, a lawyer, in May 1618, kicking down his fence and smashing the door. Bystanders prevented him from entering the property, so he satisfied himself by throwing earth and stones at it.22 There were also insults by omission: that is the failure to give someone their due or to act in the expected fashion. Christian von Anhalt interpreted the failure of the Pfalzgraf von Neuburg to speak with him as a sign of ‘hatred and malice’.23 Pew disputes, discussed in Chapter 13, were frequently caused by the failure to recognise another’s social precedence. But enmity was most commonly announced by public damage to a reputation. The calumny that one’s 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Dierkes, Streitbar, p. 188. Fuchs, Um die Ehre, p. 120. Dierkes, Streitbar, p. 138. Ibid. p. 88. Gebhardt and Hörner (eds.), Reichskammergericht, I, p. 135. Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 103, 106–7, 166, 177. Fuchs, Um die Ehre, pp. 147–8. ‘Digitale Edition und Kommentierung der Tagebücher des Fürsten Christian II. von AnhaltBernburg (1599–1656)’: http://diglib.hab.de/edoc/ed000228/start.htm, 23 August 1635.

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enemy was a ‘thief’, if male, or a ‘whore’, if female, was particularly common. It suggested that the accused merited punishment. Verbal insults of a confessional stripe do not seem to have made it to the higher courts, which is remarkable given the virulence of German religious printed polemic.24 One factor that prevented individual insults from escalating was the absence of politicised factions. The very high levels of violence in Holstein can be attributed to the existence of noble and urban patrician factions – ‘Kielischer dogs’ and ‘Danish knaves’ – but on the whole the Empire avoided the excesses that became associated with partisan loyalties in France and Italy, at least before 1618. Religious parties with a popular following did not oppose each other in city streets. A high value was placed on civic order and one of the effects of the mixed sovereignty that characterised the Empire was to generate multiple and overlapping loyalties, which made it less simple to single out an ‘other’. The German fondness for calumny had its most pernicious effect in accusations of witchcraft. The Holy Roman Empire was the heartland of the European witch craze and witnessed the greatest number of executions for the crime, around 23,000, in early modern Europe. The process of accusation and trial is now well understood. Witchcraft beliefs were ubiquitous and the challenge facing the historian is not to explain why they existed but to understand why they were invoked in particular cases.25 The role played by village feuds in the dynamic has long been recognised. Spells, charms and curses coexisted with prayers, invoking divine vengeance as part of an armoury of protection against an enemy. Accusations were often the culmination of a long history of dispute, and it was the trial process that exposed the envy, hatred and bitterness that were a mark of village life in a world of limited good. Local participation was crucial in shaping the outcome of any witch hunt. One major difference, for example, between the eastern German-speaking regions of the Rhine-Moselle region and the Francophone ones to the west was the participation of local committees in preliminary investigations in the former, informing the activities of the investigating magistrate. These reveal the existence of village feuds. According to Robin Briggs, these local committees ‘became the agencies for murderous extension of local feuds; in the affected areas unusual numbers of elite figures were accused . . . being more in the nature of little coups in which a determined group used terror to impose a false sense of external unity’.26 In jurisdictions where elites were sceptical about the efficacy of maleficent witchcraft, such as the imperial free city of Rothenburg, 24 25

26

Fuchs, Um die Ehre, p. 230. R. Briggs, ‘“Many Reasons Why”: Witchcraft and the Problem of Multiple Explanation’, in J. Barry, M. Hester, G. Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 49–63. R. Briggs, ‘Witchcraft and the Local Communities: The Rhine-Moselle Region’, in Brian P. Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 205.

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the low number of convictions was shaped by the knowledge that accusations tended to be malicious and that death sentences threatened the social order by encouraging them.27 However, the very high rates of execution for witchcraft in relation to the number of accusations need to be seen in the context of the relatively lax way in which other manifestations of enmity, particularly crimes of violence, were treated. Accusations of witchcraft were not simply an attack on one’s honour but could be lethal and this explains the readiness of those with the resources to press for restitution of their good name in the courts.28 The role played by witchcraft accusations in everyday social skirmishing has been studied by Walter Rummel in the region of Trier, an epicentre of witch-hunting.29 In 1649 a dispute between two families escalated when a boy was caught stealing apples from the Bonsch family orchard. He was beaten and had his genitals grabbed by the owners. When the boy’s father intervened he was met with a hail of stones. But the most serious aspect of the affair was not the physical injuries but the verbal insults, which escalated considerably when Frau Bonsch accused the thief’s mother of being a ‘public witch and sorceress’. This was an insult freighted with menace: for the previous six years there had been a tide of witch trials resulting in a number of local residents being sent to the scaffold. The Bonsch recognised the seriousness and so they dropped their claims and settled the defamation suit out of court. The 1643 witch hunt in Winningen exposed divisions in the community. The head of the witch-hunting committee was in a dispute with one of the village aldermen, Dietrich Siegbert, whose opposition to its abuse of power led him to assault a hunt committee member in the house of the Burgermeister, who was forced to take sides against the witch-hunters. It was then the turn of the pastor to receive a beating when he fell foul of the factions, having prophesied that at least one of the protagonists would burn as a witch.30 In most instances in these Trier villages slanderous accusations of witchcraft were settled out of court, the accuser recognising the potential seriousness of escalating matters further. However, in some cases, simmering feuds boiled over into a deadly game in which vanquishing an enemy was the goal. The behaviour of Hofmann, a rich farmer in the village of Eveshausen, attracted the hostility of his neighbours because of his refusal to share his good fortune. 27

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A. Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561–1652 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). On revenge as a motive in accusations: L. Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), chapter 8. W. Rummel, ‘Verletzung von Körper, Ehre und Eigentum: Varianten im Umgang mit Gewalt in Dörfern des 17. Jahrhunderts’, in A. Blauert and G. Schwerhoff (eds.), Mit den Waffen der Justiz: Zur Kriminalitätsgeschichte des Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Fischer, 1993), pp. 86–114. Rummel, ‘Verletzung von Körper’, p. 93.

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Economic success created envy. His reputation for lacking charity developed into accusations of theft which later translated into accusations of witchcraft and eventually led him to the scaffold. It was for this reason that the socially successful might strike first before they were challenged for harming the common good. In the parish of Füchtdorf in Westphalia most crimes of violence were committed by a small number of families. The relatively welloff Bramert family was one of these. They lent money to poorer villagers and regularly used violence to enforce their authority, which resulted in dozens of confrontations and occasionally murder. By 1589 they had added witchcraft accusations to their repertoire, which led to several neighbours being tortured and at least two being executed.31 Recourse to accusations of diabolic magic was not confined to peasants. In 1594, countess Goda von Sain was accused of contracting professional killers to assassinate her husband. She told her brothers that only an outside job would do. Should the family be involved, she argued, and ‘put their hands on the bullet-ridden corpse and it bled they would be revealed as the murderers’.32 This refers to the custom of the Bahrprobe, in which murderers were revealed by the touching of the victim’s corpse, which continued to form part of the legal process in many parts of Germany into the seventeenth century. Witnesses also deposed that the countess conjured magic to make her husband ill and ‘summoned the devil into his body’. We should take these accusations with a pinch of salt. They were the result of a family feud which began when she refused to separate and escaped to the castle at Friedewald and the protection of the landgrave of Hesse. She successfully defended her name and property through the courts against her husband and his bastard son, whom she contemptuously referred to as ‘the Jew’. The violence was limited to insults and the killing of unfortunate servants. In Kiel witchcraft accusations had more serious implications. The first witch hunt in the region in 1578 got underway precisely at the same moment when factional violence was beginning to affect the town. Benedikt von Ahlefeld, from a family heavily implicated in the disorder, apparently lost eleven of his children to witches’ magic. The surviving daughter, whose husband was murdered during the faction fighting, was also later poisoned by witches. A further five witches were burned in 1580 for enchanting the wife of Diedrich von Blome, who was involved in smashing the windows and shooting into the house of the archdeacon of Kiel.33 Educated sceptics were well aware of the potential for witchcraft accusations to be generated by malice. The Cologne burgher Hermann von Weinsberg was one of them. He thought that accusers were prompted by ‘hatred, enmity or 31 32 33

Wittke, Mord oder Totschlag? p. 53. Mallinckrodt, Urkendenbuch, I, pp. 80–92. Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 82, 103.

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wantonness’ and ‘they would have to pay heavily for it in front of God’.34 When he confronted people who made claims about witches, they would reply that ‘it was the rumour’. To which he replied, ‘If that was said about you, what would you feel about it, would you take pleasure in it?’ Weinsberg’s empathy, however, had its limits: ‘I know well the manifold evils of women: foolishness, jealousy, partiality, wilfulness, lewdness, and mischievousness. But it does not follow that they are witches.’ Weinsberg shared the universal belief in the natural malice of women and their susceptibility to feelings of vengeance. ***

Sermons habitually denounced feelings of ill-will as a route to damnation. Legal sources too were shaped by strict conventions: plaintiffs’ intentions and actions were always reasonable, while defendants routinely complained that the complaint was based on nothing more than hatred and envy. Getting beyond these tropes presents problems. In order to understand the emotional field better, we need to turn to other sources. The theologian and humanist Cyriacus Spangenberg wrote a conduct book in 1591, the Adels Spiegel, which portrayed the life of a nobleman as one of struggle: ‘On the earth the nobleman looks after and fights for himself, his children, and his nest, against all his enemies, of which they are many.’35 Spangenberg was aware that this could lead one into sin. The absence of good neighbourliness was a cause of many problems. What he meant by neighbourliness was not love and friendship but the absence of malice. Enmity should not be dissimulated but rather declared openly. ‘It is fair that a neighbour be warned before any wrong-doing.’36 This was the reason for issuing letters of hostility (Feindbriefe) so that an enemy was prepared for an attack and not taken unawares. He printed a medieval example to demonstrate how enmity was to be displayed in a ‘well-meaning’ and ‘friendly’ fashion. The apparent paradox of the idea of ‘friendly enmity’ is solved if we remember that enmity was not a feeling but a public state. By avoiding anger one did not run the risk of falling into sin. Since public acts and statements of disunity were designed to attract attention and mediation, force had to be reasonable. However, Spangenberg admitted that this was not always the case and that ‘it is unfortunately a wicked custom everywhere that one has disaffection, enmity and hatred, or when one seeks disunity, or to begrudge another’s fortune, wealth and honour’.37 Not everyone felt bound to obey these rules. The Pomeranian Joachim von Wedel described how he was attacked 34

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www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de/Edition/Liber_Decrepitudinis/Liber_Decrepitudinis.htm, 30 March 1589 C. Spangenberg,Adels Spiegel. Historischer ausfürlicher Bericht; Was Adel sey und heisse, woher er komme, wie mancherley er sey, und was denselben ziere und erhalte, 2 vols. (Schmalkalden, 1591), II, p. 5. Ibid., II, p. 132. Ibid., II, p. 343.

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several times unawares. On Easter Saturday 1566, as part of a long-running feud, his neighbours ‘violently attacked our servants without warning’, shooting two of them, including his tutor. In 1579, in a court case over river access with the local town of Stargard, his property was invaded ‘without warning or a declaration (Absage)’ by 800 men.38 Letters declaring public enmity still seem to have been common across the social spectrum at the end of the sixteenth century. In his diary the bailiff (Droste), Kaspar von Fürstenberg, mentions in March 1581 a judge issuing one against a local nobleman and Kaspar himself received one several weeks later from someone with whom he was at law.39 The concept of legal enmity, which justified the use of self-help, still formed the basis of several customary law codes. In 1595 three members of the Mordhorst family attacked Marx Wriedt near St Jurgen’s church in Kiel, ‘since he had lived with them in enmity for a while before’.40 Wriedt defended himself and killed the father, Paul Mordhorst. In February 1599 Paul’s sons took revenge and killed Wriedt in Kiel. One of the Mordhorst sons was arrested and tried, but in 1605, on the recommendation of the jurists at the University of Rostock, the court judged that it was an honourable murder and not premeditated. Crucial to their decision was the legal concept of enmity. Wriedt had been forbidden from returning to Kiel for killing Paul Mordhorst until he had compensated and reconciled with the sons (gebürlichen Aussöhnung). Because Wriedt had ignored this and broken the law, he had become a public enemy. The Mordhorst brothers had acted within reason (Feindschaft) and not out of mere hatred (Haß). Navigating feelings of animosity posed problems for the pious.41 As Benigna von Krusenstjern points out, diarists often had a devotional motive for setting down their thoughts and were aware of the sinful effects of wrath and envy. Since anger was a moral failing and love of one’s neighbour an imperative, feelings about conflict were usually only obliquely referred to. And when they were referred to they rarely discussed their own bad behaviour but alluded to the wrongs done to them in terms of injustice, mortification, threats and calumnies.42 However, it is possible to read through these tropes, if we recognise that part of the motivation to write was to negotiate these feelings. Bartholomäus Sastrow, the Stralsund city councillor, wrote his memoirs in 1595 to explain the calumny surrounding the family and ‘stop the shameless lies of my mortal enemies’.43 The rise of Calvinism posed a new problem for 38 39 40 41 42

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Bohlen (ed.), Hausbuch des Joachim von Wedel, pp. 211, 275. Bruns (ed.), Tagebücher, I, pp. 123, 128. Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 195, 199. For a fuller exploration of this theme see Chapter 12. B. von Krusenstjern, ‘Die tränen des Jungen über ein vertrunkenes Pferd: Ausdrucksformen von Emotionalität in Selbstszeugnissen des späten 16. und des 17. Jahrhunderts’, in Greyerz, Medick and Veit (eds.), Von der dargestellten Person, pp. 157–68. Mohnike (ed.), Sastrowen, III, p. 152.

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traditional practices of neighbourliness. Augustin Güntzer began his life story with a prayer: ‘Man has many public and private enemies, because unfortunately there are many evil men on the earth.’44 Güntzer was an artisan and part of the Calvinist minority in the Lutheran cities of Strasbourg and later Colmar until his expulsion in 1653. His rejection of the social bonding – the obligatory drinking rituals and visits to the brothel – that artisan life demanded meant that he was stigmatised as a ‘monk’ and a ‘hermit’. He was comforted in his isolation that suffering was the lot of the Christian and that the animosity he attracted was a sign of his election and others’ unfitness for resurrection. Güntzer placed his faith in God’s vengeance and prayed for a reckoning with his enemies. He later wrote with pleasure when one of them was deprived of his council seat. Calvinists were few in number, but such sentiments were not uncommon among the pious. The Lutheran pastor Gerhard Ramsler was in dispute with a number of his colleagues and this made him enemies, so that he began to see conspiracies and calumnies everywhere. His diary exercises restraint in its feelings of revenge and expresses the convention that one should love one’s neighbour. When one of his enemies is punished he accepts this as ‘God’s revenge’ on the wicked. However, there are grounds for thinking we are reading a self-serving account. Ramsler also describes the period he spent in the religiously divided village of Tennenbronn in the 1660s as ‘blood-soaked’. His main opponent in the village was the Catholic sexton, a former soldier, whom he called the ‘wolf’. Only in passing is it revealed that the ‘wolf’ and his wife were later executed as witches. Ramsler’s role in this is unknown.45 The misfortune of others also provided comfort to the laity. When his servants were attacked in 1566, Joachim von Wedel got no satisfaction from the law. His enemy, so he claimed, embroiled the matter in chicanery. He comforted himself with the thought that God took revenge for him when his enemy’s son was murdered in Leipzig.46 The belief that one was commonly opposed in everyday matters by secret enemies was conventional. One of the few to interrogate these feelings at length was the Cologne patrician and lawyer Hermann von Weinsberg. Making a list of his good and bad points in 1578, he admitted to the following flaws: I am really stubborn, hard-headed and obstinate, who keeps on with lawsuits, even if my rights are weak. I shout and scream during fights and confrontations and also insult people easily . . . I am full of disaffection for my enemies, even though I do not know them well. I am quick to slander, neglecting some people’s faults and peccadilloes and speaking up about others. Some people’s honour, fortune and prosperity pains me . . . 44 45 46

Güntzer, Kleines Biechlin, p. 86. Wandel (ed.), Ramsler, pp. 46–7. Bohlen (ed.), Hausbuch des Joachim von Wedel, p. 211.

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germany At times, I am overcome by anger, and swear to myself, but do not permit people to see my wrath and disaffection, in order to prevent murmuring.47

Despite these failings, Weinsberg concluded confidently that ‘with disputes and feuds (kreichs) I am not too afflicted’. This is a testimony to the thick skein of institutions that prevented neighbourly disputes from escalating, and which made Cologne a largely peaceable city. What these institutions were less capable of dealing with was the powerful emotions generated within the family. Within months of compiling this list Hermann fell out with his siblings. He lived in the same house and shared everything with his two sisters, his brother and his brother’s wife. Such communal living was common in many parts of Germany and was designed to avoid the squabbles associated with partible inheritance. In practice, Hermann, as the oldest male, kept tight control of the patrimony. He was the paterfamilias, or Hausvater. Perpetuation of the rule of a single Hausvater and the reinforcement of patriarchal authority were seen by the authorities as a means to uphold the social order. Consequently, many states altered their law codes in the sixteenth century in favour of impartible inheritance. Unsurprisingly, this led to discontent from the losers and resistance to domination by the whims of a single male. Hermann, too, was determined to pass the inheritance undivided after his death to another paterfamilias. Since he himself had no children, this meant his brother Gottschalk and his nephew Hermann junior. Part of the purpose of writing his diary was to demonstrate to those who followed him how to deal with family squabbles. As Hermann senior aged and his iron grip on the patrimony showed no signs of lessening, so the resentment grew. Hermann junior, in particular, proved a great disappointment. When junior gave one of the other kinsfolk the lie in 1581, Hermann senior flew into a rage and ‘hit him once or twice in the face . . . and this was the first time in my life that I had hit him’.48 After Hermann senior’s death in 1597, aged 79, the squabbles and disputes that he had dedicated so much time and effort to dampening ignited. Within months, Gottschalk, who seems to have been unable to withstand the pressure of being Hausvater, committed suicide. Within a year Hermann junior murdered his aunt when she attempted to resist his claim to her portion of the inheritance.49 The tragedy that befell the Weinsberg family was an extreme example of a universal problem. The fragmentation of properties caused by partible inheritance caused a particular problem for those who were expected to keep up appearances. There is a wealth of evidence from all regions of the Empire that these pressures generated violence among the nobility, in particular, dividing cousins, brothers and brothers-in-law. For example, the reciprocal 47 48 49

www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de/Edition/Liber_Senectutis/Liber_Senectutis.htm, fo. 34, 1578. www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de/Edition/Liber_Senectutis/Liber_Senectutis.htm, 267v–268. He died in prison in 1604.

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killings between the von Dobeneck and von Reitzenstein families in the region of Hof, which are recorded in 1487, 1545, 1602, 1640 and 1649, were not the result of a long-running vendetta between two distinct clans, since each family was itself divided into competing lineages.50 Both families were inextricably tied together by bonds of marriage and neighbourliness. Rather, the violence was the result of intergenerational competition and disputes over marriage contracts and inheritance. The potential for trouble within the nuclear family can be seen in more detail in the case of the Schönburg.51 When Wolfgang II von Schönburg died in 1612 he left seven sons. The eldest, Wolf Ernst, was charged with administering the patrimony until the youngest reached a majority. By 1617 several brothers were unhappy with this arrangement: while the youngest of them had only been born in 1605 the eldest would still have to wait years before they could establish separate households, and three of them were already aged thirty. Tensions boiled over when a meeting was arranged at Glauchau to discuss the matter. There was an initial argument between Wolf Ernst and the third brother Otto in which swords were drawn and the latter wounded. Later that day another argument broke out between several brothers in the presence of the family and its servants. In the mêlée Wolf Ernst stabbed Otto, who died several hours later. Settlement of the dispute was complicated by shared sovereignty. Though vassals of the kingdom of Bohemia, Wolf Ernst looked to the elector of Saxony for protection. Competing criminal investigations were begun, one in Zwickau and one in Prague. Wolf Ernst claimed to have acted in self-defence and took refuge with his wife’s family, the counts of Pappenheim. He had no intention of ceding his claim to the patrimony but substituted his wife and brother-in-law in his place. The property was still held in common and the other Schönburg siblings now had to suffer unexpected and unwanted visits from their Pappenheim in-laws. In turn, the in-laws complained about the mistreatment they received on their ‘family visits’. The elector of Saxony ordered the siblings to treat their visitors with respect. These ‘family visits’ were, of course, merely a tactic designed to test the siblings’ resolve. The criminal investigation stalled in the face of legal and political obstacles and by 1621 a comprehensive settlement, which included the division of the property and satisfaction for the murder, had been largely hammered out, though the bitterness between the siblings and the in-laws continued over responsibility for the family’s debts. A feature of this dispute is that the seven brothers were well educated and well travelled. August Siegfried, who imbibed Italian manners on his tour there, killed his cousin 50

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R. Fritz, ‘Die Steinkreuze der Stadt Hof und seiner weiteren Umgebung’, Der Siebenstern, 5 (1949), n.p.; Dobeneck, Geschichte, pp. 388, 295; www.30jaehrigerkrieg.de/dobeneckfriedrich-ernst-von/m; Händel and Herrmann (eds.), Hausbuch, V, p. 97. A. Beil, ‘Im Streite um das Erbe Wolfs des Jüngeren von Schönburg’, Neues Archiv für sächische Geschichte, 36 (1915), 39–63.

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Friedrich von Schönburg-Lichtenstein in 1628, probably in a duel. Although he was pursued by the victim’s family for the killing, he enjoyed the protection of the elector and was not brought to justice.52 ***

The fragmented nature of the Holy Roman Empire ensured that boundary disputes were ceaseless. Most of these disputes were low level, conducted by local officials and did not disturb the public peace. Escutcheons, posts and stones that delineated authority were ubiquitous and the easiest way of demonstrating a grievance was to strike at the offending symbol. The illegality of Ulrich von Rechberg’s feud against the city of Schwäbisch Gmünd was underlined by the fact that he tore up an imperial field sign and threw it into a midden.53 In 1603 the city of Friedburg in Hesse tore up the border stones outside its gates belonging to the local nobility. The Herr von Frankenstein retaliated by smashing up those belonging to the city, which had the desired effect and his were soon re-laid.54 One night in 1605 the men of the chapter of the bishopric of Halberstadt destroyed the tollbooth between the villages of Schneidlingen and Athensleben, complaining that this had been illegally built, and they erected new posts displaying the episcopal arms.55 When the lord of Mitwitz refused to listen to a summons from his enemy and leave the safety of his castle to confront them in 1674, they satisfied themselves with taking potshots at his name, which was posted on the linden tree where village dances were held.56 Gallows were another symbol of lordship. Georg von Freundsberg demonstrated his ascendancy in 1566 by invading the village of Erkheim with 500 men and torching the gallows.57 In its 1531 border dispute with Basel, the Swiss canton of Solothurn tore down the stone markers, trees and hedges and replaced them with a gallows crowned with its arms. The so-called galgenstreit reverberated across Switzerland. The Baselers complained that their opponents had been buying up local properties in order to move the boundary. Civil war threatened until the cities of Bern and Zürich arranged a compromise in which the offending gallows were removed.58 These mundane border skirmishes had the potential to seriously disrupt local life. The eighty-year boundary dispute between the counts of Stolberg and princes of Sachsen-Anhalt, which was finally brought to an end in 1613, resulted 52 53

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E. Eckardt, Chronik von Glauchau (Glauchau, 1882), p. 106. A. Brunotte and R. Weber (eds.), Akten des Reichskammergerichts im Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, 7 vols. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1993–2008), II, p. 352. C. Waas (ed.), ‘Die Chronik des Dr. Jeremias Molther’, in Die Chroniken von Friedburg in der Wetterau (Friedburg, 1937), p. 116. Lücke (ed.), Reichkammergerichts, III, p. 45. Hambrecht (ed.), ‘Das Papier’, 392. Gebhardt and Hörner (eds.), Reichskammergericht, III, p. 261. Karl Buxtorf-Falkeisen (ed.), Johannes Gast’s Tagebuch (Basel, 1856), pp. 16–26.

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in attacks from sides and a great deal of damage.59 Officials in rural areas, in particular, had to be prepared to use force and Germany’s extensive forests made patrolling borders and enforcing rights hazardous. In 1587 the Nuremberg taxcollector Esias von Verß was caught by surprise by his rival from the margravate of Brandenburg-Ansbach, in which he and two of his men were killed.60 Perhaps more typical was the long-running dispute on the Bohemian–Lusatian border between the Zechtritz and Gersdorf families, which can be traced over sixty years punctuated by long truces, the first of which was signed in 1661.61 But the dispute flared up again in 1701 over a benefice. In April 1723 a complaint by the Zechtritz was lodged with the elector of Saxony: von Gersdorf had ventured onto their lands to hunt illegally despite warnings; they had drawn their weapons and issued threats when confronted; their incursions had damaged the crops in the field; they cut down trees and uprooted marker-stones; they permitted herds of animals to cross the border; they travelled in their carriages along roads without permission; they dammed water courses illegally; they impounded the property of and beat Zechtritz’s peasants; they hassled women on the way to church and hit the schoolmaster of Wiese in a dispute about religion. As this case reveals it was usually the peasants who suffered most. This was the case in the last feud that took place in Franconia. It occurred in 1786–7 when a border dispute between the villages of Muggendorf (Catholic Bamberg) and Streitberg (Protestant Bayreuth) turned violent. Trouble seems to have been expected at the church fair in Muggendorf, since the local militia was mustered to escort the local procession across lands which were contested. This show of strength led to months of border skirmishing and ended in a full-scale attack on Streitberg in which one man was killed and forty to fifty were wounded.62 This was a fairly restrained episode during a time of peace. Border areas were more sensitive to the tensions that came with civil conflict. In Westphalia, for example, the lawlessness of the 1540s and 1550s encouraged predation in banal disputes: in 1548 the citizens of Lippstadt destroyed eighteen houses in a boundary dispute; a battle over tree clearing between two villages ended up going all the way to the Reichskammergericht; in 1558 the villagers of Rahden in the bishopric of Minden crossed a border into the neighbouring village of Wagenfeld to make arrests and distrain goods, committing nine murders in the process.63

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Lücke (ed.), Reichkammergerichts, I, p. 20. N. Gundling, Historische Nachricht von Dem Ursprunge und Wachsthum Des Heil. Röm. Reichs freyer Stadt Nürnberg: Aus uralten glaubwürdigen documentis und Urkunden vorgestellet (Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1707), pp. 504–5. J. Helbig, ‘Eine Fehde im 18. Jahrhundert zwischen dem Besitzer von Ostrichen und der Herrschaft in Friedland’, Neues Lausitzisches Magazin, 81 (1905), 217–22. ‘Die Fehde zwischen den Streitbergern und Ebermannstädtern im Jahre 1787’, Archiv für Geschichte und Altertumskunde von Oberfranken, 6 (1856), 59–71. Spormecker (ed.), Cronica, pp. 221, 271; Ebeling (ed.), Reichskammergericht, I, p. 146.

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Jan Peters has argued that the increase in peasant feuds in Brandenburg at the end of the sixteenth century was linked to land hunger. This not only increased competition between families but pitted villages against each other. In 1585 a petty war erupted between the villages of Wilsnack and Plattenburg over a field, which involved armed confrontations and the exchanges of shots.64 The consequence of this strain on resources is seen elsewhere too during the sixteenth century. The feud between local nobility and the monastery at Böddeken in Westphalia, which lasted between 1511 and 1541, was related to access to common land as once deserted plots were reclaimed and rebuilt. Monks were threatened and some even killed. But more routine were attacks on animals and their handlers as they gleaned in forests and grazed on common land. In the 1550s a bloody battle was fought between two families for control of a deserted village in Thuringia which had only recently been resettled.65 But boundary disputes were about more than physical space. Rights were not simply economic resources to be exploited but closely linked to privilege and honour. In this respect, Germany was no different to the rest of Europe: there were numerous disputes about water rights, access and the hunt.66 However, there are some local differences that are worth highlighting. Beer and brewing played a much larger part in German culture than elsewhere. But the right to brew and sell beer was also related to lordship. This explains why in 1607 the count of Stolberg entered a village belonging to the bishopric of Halberstadt, seizing barrels of ‘foreign’ beer from innkeepers whom he claimed were his vassals.67 After Georg von Braun purchased Wartenberg in Silesia in 1570, he claimed the monopoly to brew and sell beer in the region. This occasioned a veritable ‘beer war’ in the region against other lords and towns, which involved the destruction of maltings and breweries and even murders. In 1582 there was a ‘beer-battle’ at Boguslawitz when the seigneur there put beer on sale from outside the region.68 This last case also highlights the problems of border disputes on the frontiers of the Empire itself. The proximity of the border with the kingdom of PolandLithuania ensured that this was a marcher region where the law was especially difficult to enforce. Georg von Braun complained of Polish raids across the 64 65 66

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Märkische Lebenswelten, p. 258. Lücke (ed.), Reichkammergerichts, II, pp. 304–6. Bohlen (ed.), Hausbuch, p. 275; Detlefsen, Geschichte, pp. 149–51; Gebhardt and Hörner (eds.), Reichskammergericht, I, p. 165; Lücke (ed.), Reichkammergerichts, II, p. 155; Ebeling (ed.), Reichskammergericht, I, p. 239. Lücke (ed.), Reichkammergerichts, II, p. 187; Dierkes, Streitbar, p. 125; M. Kordes and E. Kleinertz (eds.), Reichskammergericht Köln, 4 vols. (Cologne: Mitteilungen aus dem Stadtarchiv Köln, 1998–2000), II, p. 488. J. Frankowski, ‘Die Herren von Braun als Besitzer der freien Herrschaft Wartenberg und Zustände unter deren Regierung’, Zeitschrift des Vereins für Geschichte und Alterthum Schlesiens, 24 (1890), 130.

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border onto his property.69 In 1578 he was on his way to a baptism at Medzibor when he was involved in an encounter with a Polish count, Andreas Gorka. He was taken prisoner and a young woman, Ursula von Kottwitz, was shot four times in the head. Braun was a small player in a bigger feud. Gorka kidnapped Braun as a bargaining chip in a dispute with another Silesian nobleman. The Braun family appealed to the local Estates and to the Kaiser but got little help. In the absence of central authority self-help was necessary and the von Braun committed several murders themselves in this period, including the shooting of Wolf von Seydlitz in 1585, for which a pardon was issued by the emperor on payment of 3,000 Thalers. The Polish War of Succession (1587–8) also impacted on the local political community across the border. But the manner in which foreign conflict provided opportunities for revenge along the border can best be seen in the north-west. Although Otto von Grothaus was confirmed in possession of a mill near Osnabrück in 1553, he had to launch a feud against the city and its bishop in 1557 to secure possession. After a campaign of burning and plundering he was defeated the following year in a battle with the citizenry and forced to renounce violence and his claim for damages. However, the revolt of the Netherlands provided his son Cord with an opportunity to take revenge and in 1587 he demanded 100,000 Thalers in reparation. When the city refused to pay up he contracted Spanish soldiers to raid villages around the city, murdering inhabitants and stealing their chattels and goods. In 1591 the city agreed to pay damages and, in return, Cord swore an oath of peace.70 Animals were common bounty in boundary disputes: the impounding of ‘stray’ cattle and sheep (viehschutten) being easily defensible in court. The owner could only get them back on the payment of a fine (Schuttegeld). Lords often got embroiled in these everyday disputes because they were expected to protect their tenants.71 Zeisolf von Rosenberg complained that the officers of the count of Hohenlohe had burned barns on his lands in the 1570s, killing 200 sheep.72 In June 1586 rival lines of the von Westernhagen family confronted each other in a battle over sheep in which one of them was killed.73 In September 1623 a feud erupted between neighbouring lords following the murder of a peasant. The counts of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen made a claim for compensation because the man was their tenant. When this request was refused, they sent a force of 200 men who brought back over 300 sheep, 69 70

71

72 73

Ibid., 141–54. J. Friderici, Geschichte der Stadt Osnabrück: aus Urkunden, 3 vols. (Osnabrück, 1816–17), III, pp. 57–80. Fuchs, Um die Ehre, pp. 220–2; Gebhardt and Hörner (eds.), Reichskammergericht, IX: www.gda.bayern.de/fileadmin/user_upload/PDFs_fuer_Publikationen/Archivinventare/ 50-09-F-RKG-Inventar_Online-Druckfassung.pdf, Fuchs von Bimbach vs. bishop of Bamberg, 1569, 1598–9, 1615. Brunotte and Weber (eds.), Reichskammergerichts, V, p. 419. Lücke (ed.), Reichkammergerichts, V, pp. 226–7.

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which were sold in recompense for the killing.74 Germany’s extensive forests were ideal for pigs, but they were liable to do extensive damage to the environment unless carefully managed. In urban areas the nuisance was strictly controlled by regulations.75 The suspicion in rural areas was that pigs, let loose to forage, were being used as offensive weapons in disputes.76 The 25-year lawsuit over pig foraging rights fought between the Mallinckrodt brothers and their neighbours was discussed in the previous chapter. The shoot-out between the von Schierstedt and the von Byern at Karow near Magdeburg in the early years of the seventeenth century, which left one man dead and another crippled, was sparked by a herd of pigs being let loose.77 Boundary disputes required that expense and time be dedicated to fencebuilding and ditch-digging. The memoir left by Augustin Faust was particularly keen to remind his readers about the problems these caused ‘as a warning to my ancestors as to how extraordinary these were here’.78 The beating of the bounds took place twice a year in his village in Württemberg. But the arbiters were open to bribes, which cost Frank’s father a lot in fines because of a ‘nasty, quarrelsome neighbour’ in 1699. For these reasons, Faust counselled marking boundaries with small stones in case they were ordered to be removed. A more serious case was caused by the ditch that separated the property of the pastor and a village tavern-keeper and his wife on the island of Rügen. The affair escalated into physical and verbal threats until the pastor delivered a sermon in which he attacked the sinful conduct of his opponents and implicitly accused them of witchcraft.79 Even more serious was the falling out between the lords of Steuden near Halle and the village commune. In 1591 a ditch demarcating their property was declared illegal. But it was still there in 1611 when the villagers dumped a pestiferous cow in it, apparently as a provocation. By 1615 the matter had escalated to the extent that a villager was shot in a stand-off.80 What did those charged with policing these rights think and how did they represent them? The family memoir written by Philipp Eisenberger (1548– 1607) is instructive. The memoir is significant because the family belonged to the socially mobile; from the late fifteenth century they invested in education and made their fortune in office-holding in Hesse and were linked to the urban 74 75

76 77 78

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Happe, ‘Chronicon’: www.mdsz.thulb.uni-jena.de/happe/quelle.php, fos. 292v, 301r. C. Schedensack, Nachbarn im Konflikt: Zur Entstehung und Beilegung von Rechtsstreitigkeiten um Haus und Hof im frühneuzeitlichen Münster (Münster: Aschendorff, 2007), pp. 1, 139. For example: Lücke (ed.), Reichkammergerichts, I, pp. 98–9. Ibid., III, p. 292. W. Durr (ed.), Künzelsauer Chronik, 1678–1741 (Historische Verein für Württembergisch Franken, 1960), pp. 123–4. M. Eriksson, ‘Gemäßigte Gewalt und andere Wege zur Interessendurchsetzung auf der Insel Ummanz bei Rügen im ausgehenden 17. und im 18. Jahrhundert’, in Eriksson and Krug-Richter (eds.), Streitkulturen, pp. 125–56. Lücke (ed.), Reichkammergerichts, III, p. 224.

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patriciates of Frankfurt and Mainz and ennobled in 1563.81 Part of Philipp’s purpose was to demonstrate the family’s struggle to attain respectability. A Renaissance education taught that ‘he who dedicated himself to public life, must suffer envy and back-biting’.82 He recorded the ‘many examples where plans to marry into noble families were hindered by the envy and strife’ because of their humble origins.83 The tag of parvenu was difficult to shrug off. A neighbour and rival sneered on hearing of Philipp’s death that he ‘would have wanted to have been a nobleman’.84 The memoir describes struggles both against external enemies and within the family. In relation to the former, Philipp described the many armed encounters in which his grandfather and father participated while carrying out their duties. As was often the case, problems arose from the fact that Ortenberg, where his father was first treasurer (Keller) from 1527 and then Amtmann from 1557, was shared between the counts of Hanau, Königstein and Isenburg, which created ‘great enmity’ between the opposing officials. Philipp records with pride how his father encountered his opposing number on horseback: They let fly with their crossbows at each other . . . in front of the castle and behind the church at Ortenberg . . . and afterwards reached for their swords and shields . . . and set about each other, such that both had to expose life and limb . . . and [the combat] between the two was so furious and so grave that they went at each other for a long time, seeking to get the upper hand. Finally [my father] got the better of his opponent, knocking him from his horse in disgrace, and wrenching by force his sword out his grip. This dishonoured the man and his kin so much, that after his death his children offered money several times for its return. But [my father] and his children kept it and to this day we keep it for memory’s sake.85

Philipp included pictures of another feud between the imperial counts of Königstein and Isenburg in which his father took part in. He records these adventures as if they were glorious deeds in some great war. And the word he used to describe these petty disputes was Krieg. Participation in them was important because it placed the family on a par with men of high status. His opponent, count Otto von Isenburg, was ‘a hero of repute (as is witnessed by the writings of historians)’.86 Despite the hostility, these foes were to be looked up to and admired. Opponents of lesser status were not worthy of such consideration. The tax-collector (Rentmeister) of Nidda, Reinhart Abel, was 81

82 83 84 85 86

H. Bock (ed)., ‘Die Chronik Eisenberger: Edition und Kommentar Bebilderte Geschlechterbücher als Gattung Schriften des Historischen Museums Frankfurt am Main’, ‘Kommentar’: www.hartmut-bock.de/CE-Uebersicht/Bock.CE-Komm-0704.pdf. Ibid., p. 297. Bock (ed)., ‘Chronik’: www.hartmut-bock.de/CE-Uebersicht/Bock.CE-Edition-0704.pdf, 7. Ibid., fo. 42. Ibid., fo. 45. Ibid., fo. 47.

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nothing more than ‘crafty, jealous, troublesome, who cared little for justice, but did everything to sow dishonourable strife in the neighbourhood’.87 As for the Eisenberger family, Philipp described the falling out between his five uncles over their sister’s inheritance, which resulted in his father and one of his uncles ‘in great bitterness with encountering each other with naked blades, in which one of them or both could have been killed, were it not for his [aunt] immediately coming between them’. Despite his aunt’s bravery Philipp drew the following lesson from this: ‘that at all times most of the problems, misfortune, quarrels experienced by the Eisenbergers had been caused by women’.88 As for the menfolk, Philippe’s purpose was to demonstrate that his ancestors were men of honour and his pride in their preparedness to defend it at all times. ***

On 9 March 1648 Otto Heinrich, younger brother of the count of Lippe, was escorting the countess von Waldeck to the castle at Hardenburg near Bad Dürkheim in the Palatinate when they ran into his cousin Count Johann Casimir von Leiningen. It was not a happy meeting. Four years previously there had been a falling out between Lippe and von Leiningen when both were officers in the imperial army. Ostensibly the origin of their hatred was an act of horseplay that had got out of hand. Behind this trivial incident, however, lurked the fact that von Leiningen was governor of Lutheran Lemgo, a city which the Calvinist counts of Lippe had always coveted. The count of Lippe quit the imperial army in protest at the insult. Whether the encounter four years later between von Leiningen and the count’s brother was entirely fortuitous would later be the subject of long legal proceedings. After an exchange of words, both reached for their pistols and Johann Casimir shot his opponent through the head and he tumbled dead from his saddle. Although the judicial pursuit was a long one, it came to nothing. In fact, the killing seems only to have enhanced von Leiningen’s reputation and career prospects, since from 1672 to 1688 he served as President of the Reichskammergericht at Speyer.89 It has become commonplace to argue that the Holy Roman Empire escaped the worst of the elite violence that scarred Italy and France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.90 Duelling, it has recently been argued, arrived late in Germany, was confined largely to the aristocracy and was characterised by the absence of bloodletting.91 Others have even suggested that German nobles 87 88 89

90 91

Ibid., fo. 69. Ibid., fo. 53. E. Brinckmeier, Genealogische Geschichte des uradeligen, reichsgräflichen und reichsfürstlichen, standesherrlichen, erlauchten Hauses Leiningen und Leiningen-Westerburg (Braunschweig, 1899), p. 22; www.30jaehrigerkrieg.de/lippe-detmold-otto-heinrich-graf-zur/. Dülmen, Kultur und Alltag, II, p. 201. Ludwig, Das Duell.

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Table 6.1 Homicides of German gentlemen, 1550–1750 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10

s

s

40 17

s 17

30

s

20 17

s 17

10

s 17

00

s 16

90

s 16

80

s

70 16

s 16

60

s 16

50

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40 16

s

30 16

s 16

20

s 16

10

s 16

00

s 15

90

s 15

80

s

70 15

60

15

15

50

s

0

were more civilised and peaceable than elsewhere.92 The idealisation of the German nobility as a caste of disciplined warriors immune to effete foreign influences is rooted in patriotic legend. For Georg von Below, writing in 1894, ‘German nobles, to their exceptional credit, have at no time adopted such unworthy behaviour as the French.’93 The evidence presented in Table 6.1, based on a survey of 660 homicides of German gentlemen, shows that claims about the singularity of the ‘Germanic spirit’ are entirely incorrect.94 The vast majority of the deaths tabulated here were the result of duels and encounters fought between men of equal status.95 Though far from exhaustive, the sample does claim to be representative of the broad pattern of elite violence. It confirms the local pattern that we have already encountered in Holstein. The statistics show that violence among the elite grew rapidly at the end of the sixteenth century, peaking in the decade before the outbreak of the 92 93 94

95

Zmora, The Feud, citing Lazarus von Schwendi, pp. 201–2. G. von Below, Das Duell in Deutschland: Geschichte und Gegenwart (Kassel, 1896), p. 11. The list is overwhelmingly made up of noblemen but also includes military officers, students, members of the urban patriciate and senior office-holders. It excludes those whose status could not be identified. The research involved a systematic survey of contemporary diaries, journals and memoirs; systematic research of online genealogical tables in https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Adel and Zedler’s Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon, 68 vols. (Leipzig, 1731–54); soundings in the antiquarian and local history periodicals online at https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/ Zeitschriften_(Landesgeschichte). This was supplemented by a score or so of printed funeral sermons: www.vd17.de/.

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Thirty Years’ War. The second peak in the 1630s includes several random attacks by marauding brigands, but the death toll was still dominated by encounters between equals. The figures from the second half of the seventeenth century suggest a return to the levels of the 1570s and 1580s. However, the apparent slow decline in homicides after the Thirty Years’ War needs to be placed in the context of the collapse of population: it took many regions half a century before they recovered pre-war population levels. A rapid decline in violence is much more clearly discerned after 1700 and lethal violence among the elite had petered out by the 1740s. This parabola should come as no surprise, as it mirrors the rise and decline in the homicide rate that we see elsewhere in Europe. It is also consistent with the recent finding of Ulrike Ludwig’s study of the prosecution of 559 duels in eastern territories of the Reich between 1637 and 1806. The vast proportion of these duels involved noblemen and soldiers. Prosecution began seriously in the 1650s, but it was only at the end of the century that the problem was brought under control. The fact only 13 per cent of the combats ended in a death suggests that by 1700 the German elite had accepted that fighting to first blood was sufficient to repair honour.96 The decline of fatalities around 1700 was due to factors other than legislation. For, despite the punitive nature of these laws, punishment was lax. In her sample of 559 cases, Ludwig found only one example of a duellist who was not pardoned, and he was a common soldier.97 Factors other than repression must explain this transformation at the very end of the seventeenth century. The social change caused by the establishment of standing armies staffed by a professional officer corps would seem to be significant. Officers who crossed the line and ignored the prohibition of duelling put their careers at risk. Not only was first lieutenant von Jeetze dismissed from the AnhaltDessau Regiment for killing his captain in 1722 but he could not find a commission elsewhere and he ended up on a Dutch ship.98 This is not to suggest that duelling among the soldiers ceased altogether but rather that they were much less likely to be fatal in the eighteenth century. It seems that the removal of officers from the local enmities that made duels and encounters so frequent and so lethal was a major factor in the reduction of fatalities. The duel over the point of honour was a foreign import. It arrived from Italy and France at the end of the sixteenth century and was rapidly adopted in Germany as a signifier of civilised behaviour. Educated at the University of Tübingen, Otto von Münchhausen ‘had a reputation as a God-fearing and learned man’ when he fell on the field of honour aged 40 in 1601.99 The duel 96 97 98 99

Ludwig, Das Duell, p. 133. Ibid. A. Walter, Genealogische Geschichte des Geschlechts von Jeetze (Magdeburg, 1860), p. 106. G. Treuer, Gründliche Geschlechts-Historie des Hochadlichen Hauses der Herren von Münchhausen (Cologne, 1741), p. 59.

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quickly became a status symbol for commoners too: when the Hamburg trader Franz Bergendorff challenged an apothecary in 1616, he suggested rapiers because ‘youngsters fight with fists and daggers, which for men like them was not seemly’.100 To ignore an affront was to court the disapproval of one’s peers. Until the adoption of the duel, Germans possessed their own distinct fighting style.101 The German way of fighting developed in the middle ages was designed for hewing and slashing with the heavy broadsword and also prized grappling and wrestling with an opponent in order to disarm him. The adoption of the rapier required a new style of fighting. The new techniques were more lethal, as Figure 6.1 indicates. The image was produced for a German manual written by Jean-Daniel de l’Ange in 1664, which advertised the art of killing quickly, by puncturing vital organs and arteries.

Figure 6.1 ‘How to run a man through chest or neck as you throw him to the ground.’ From Jean-Daniel L’Ange, Deutliche und gründliche Erklärung der adelichen und ritterlichen freyen Fecht-Kunst (Heidelberg, 1664).

100 101

Fuchs, Um die Ehre, p. 148. A. Tlusty, The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany: Civic Duty and the Right of Arms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

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As the author, fencing-master at the University of Heidelberg, explained, rapiers were quicker to deploy and easier to use than heavy broad swords. Since defeat was often fatal, the rules were always open to interpretation. For this reason, he advertised the secret tricks that one could learn at his academy: ‘how to use a sword in one hand a pistol in the other, and how to defend oneself with bare hands against a stiletto, and the many ways you can employ to disarm an adversary and even wound or kill him. In addition, to injure your enemy with a sword that was still in a scabbard before he can fire his pistol.’ Germany differed, however, from the rest of Europe in the esteem in which the martial arts were held throughout all echelons of society. Service in civic militias was a badge of citizenship and, in contrast to many European states, where military training for the peasantry was frowned upon, many German states organised territorial militias. In areas where there had long been a free peasantry soldiering was a respectable profession, and in Switzerland and parts of south-west Germany this amounted to a significant economic activity. Weapon ownership was not only widespread but often a requirement for citizens. Even the Jew Ascher Levy owned a double-handed sword in the 1620s, and presumably knew how to use it.102 The high status in which the profession of arms was held throughout society explains the popularity of training in villages, which was conducted by itinerant swordsmen belonging to one of two sword-master guilds. They would put on a Sunday sword dance for the locals followed by a few fencing classes. Fencing schools were established in many towns during the Middle Ages and competitions were held on public holidays, attracting punters who liked to bet and the patronage of the wealthy who put up prizes for the winners. This traditional culture changed at the end of the sixteenth century. At the Breslau school it was the introduction of the rapier in the 1580s which changed the nature of combat and made fighting more deadly.103 The schools began to attract a reputation for spreading the duel and the city attempted stricter regulation before closing down its school in 1616 for a decade. Schools were increasingly seen as a problem elsewhere too and Nuremberg also attempted regulation in 1631 before closing its school altogether in 1698. In the towns fencing students were usually artisans or pupils of the gymnasium. Many others learned the new techniques in situ. During the French Wars of Religion thousands of Germans saw service in France. Georg von Schönburg (1542–78) rose at the French court to become a mignon, one of the fashionable dandies who protected King Henry III. In 1578 he was killed in a duel, which was widely condemned for inventing the custom that seconds were not there to see fair play but instead to fight. Germans’ martial prowess was widely admired 102 103

Ginsburger (ed.), Ascher Levy, p. 42. P. Feit, ‘Schwerttänze und Fechtschulen in Schlesien, insbesondere in Breslau’, Zeitschrift des Vereins für Geschichte und Alterthum Schlesiens, 38 (1904), 176–233.

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in France and their specialist muscle much in demand during the French civil conflicts between 1560 and 1660.104 Many gentlemen travelled to study at French universities less to matriculate than to learn a foreign language and fashionable codes of behaviour.105 The influence of French manners can be seen in the import and spread of the French language of honour: Germans began to talk of braviern, or playing the gallant, of employing lackeys, or lacqueyen, to project the correct swaggering image, and fighting encounters, renkontres, to defend their rights and display their courage.106 The cavalier’s obligatory tour of Italy was not simply a matter of seeing the sights. In 1575 Veit Ulrich von Erthal was killed in a duel in Naples by Konrad Bräunig von Schettstadt.107 German students were a problem in several Italian cities. Even by Italian standards Siena was notorious for violence. German students adapted very well to the local culture. In 1603 the students of the German nation at the university were required to apologise in person to the authorities following fights between themselves and the locals.108 But the Sienese economy relied on them – between 1583 and 1704 as many as 10,000 may have studied there – and for this reason complaints about their rowdy behaviour fell on deaf ears. The traffic was not all one way: Zacharias von Quetz fought an encounter with the French tutor of the margrave of Brandenburg at Plassenburg castle in the 1620s.109 Foreign travel was not confined to the aristocracy and was especially important for the socially aspirant. The complaint about the minor Saxon Juncker Hans Georg von Maltitz, who was executed in 1604 for a variety of crimes including duelling and murder, was that, on return from his travels to Spain, Portugal, Scotland, France and Italy, he liked nothing more than ‘slashing, shooting and stabbing’ and his penchant for foreign ‘practices’ meant that he ‘would not spare any estate nor even his own blood kin’.110 104

105 106

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The most famous was the Württemberger noble and assassin of Admiral Coligny, Jan Janowitz. For reports of Germans killed in duels in France in the seventeenth century: Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 269 and 278. On the import of the word ‘duel’ from France: Dierkes, Streitbar, p. 142. On encounters: B. Krug-Richter, ‘Ein stund ernennen und im ein schlacht lieffern. Anmerkungen zum Duell in der studentischen Kultur’, in U. Ludwig, B. Krug-Richter and G. Schwerhoff (eds.), Das Duell: Ehrenkämpfe vom Mittelalter bis zur Moderne (Constance: UVK, 2012), pp. 280–2. M. Kittel, ‘Geschichte der freiherrlichen Familie von und zu Erthal’, Archiv der Historischen Vereins von Unterfranken, 17 (1865), 97–255. J. Davies, ‘Violence and Italian Universities during the Renaissance’, Renaissance Studies, 27 (2013), 504–16. E. Zöllner (ed.), ‘Der Lebensbericht des Bayreuther Prinzenerziehers Zacharias von Quetz’, Jahrbuch fränkische Landesforschung, 15 (1955), fos. 3–4. Joabi Supplicium. Joabs Rechtfertigung 1. Reg. 2.: Erkläret/ und in einer besondern Leichpredigt außgelegt/ Als . . . Hans Georg von Maltitz/ den 2. Junij dieses 1604 (Leipzig, 1604).

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Maltitz had adopted a code of honour that was inviolable and did not pay deference to traditional hierarchies. It was partly in order to compete with the exodus of well-to-do clients that German universities began to employ fencing-masters with Jena (1550) and Rostock (1560) leading the way.111 The universities quickly became incubators of the new comportment. The great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe lost part of his nose in a duel as a student in Wittenberg in 1566. A certain ‘Gallomania’ can be discerned among fashionable Germans at the end of the sixteenth century. The attraction of French style in the student milieu can be explained by the short career of the would-be gentleman Johann Caspar Bosch. Bosch adopted French manners and speech and carried a rapier as a sign of social distinction, gaining a reputation as someone ready to defend any slight at the point of a sword. When he passed fellow student and nobleman Stürtzel zu Buchheim on 27 August 1599, he greeted him in French. Buchheim refused to acknowledge Bosch as an equal, saying he was ‘the son of a whore’ and ‘even if his father was a knight, he would never be one in his life’. Bosch gave him the lie and the ensuing combat proved that he was indeed an equal. However, Bosch’s career as gentleman was short-lived – he was killed in a fight the following December.112 Rapier ownership is indicative of the spread of the new culture across the social spectrum. The Nuremberg jurist Hieronymus Koeler purchased one in Italy in 1526. By the 1540s Nuremberg’s armourers were manufacturing them.113 By the end of the century they were ubiquitous and, as an accessible and cheap marker of social status, were even being wielded by peasants and journeymen.114 By 1607 it was claimed ‘that among honest German noblemen it is an established custom, that he who is freely and openly challenged, without cunning and or deceit, can avail himself of a rapier’.115 On a local level, nowhere is the craze for duelling more in evidence than in the duchy of Holstein. The word first appears in use there in 1599 when Joachim von Brockdorff travelled to Bremen to take on Salvatore Fabris, one of the most famous Italian fencing-masters in Europe. Brockdorff was killed with a thrust through his throat.116 Fabris went on to establish a fencing school at the court of Johann-Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp before moving on to Copenhagen, where he published arguably the most significant fencing book of the early modern era, De lo Schermo, in 1606. His influence in changing practice in Germany cannot be overstated and his manual went through three editions in 111

112 113 114 115 116

T. Braun, Feinde, Freunde, Zechkumpane. Freiburger Studentenkultur in der Frühen Neuzeit (Münster: Waxmann, 2007), pp. 99–101. Krug-Richter, ‘Ein stund ernennen’. Mohnike (ed.), Sastrowen, II, p. 82. Fuchs, Um die Ehre, p. 144; Güntzer, Kleines Biechlin, p. 124. Dierkes, Streitbart, p. 140. Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 202.

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German in the 1610s alone. The treatise advertised the theory and benefits of aggressive attack: ‘proceeding to strike the enemy quickly with the sword without taking guard, nor wasting time, reasoning never before treated by any professor or writer’.117 The elaborate formalities and rules of fair play that were supposed to govern and regulate the duel in France and Italy were largely absent in Germany. The sophisticated debate that developed between its supporters and opponents elsewhere was also lacking and printed discourse largely confined to condemnation by theologians. The first imperial edict against duelling issued by Emperor Matthias in 1617 simply viewed it as another form of fighting, or balgen. The intense legislation against duelling that developed in the second half of the seventeenth century was a response to a real problem. There was widespread acceptance by this date that honour must be satisfied by blood. In 1619 Konrad von Liebenstein was referred to the corporation of Franconian Imperial Knights by his enemies for ‘unnecessarily vexing them with lawsuits and for not defending himself in a knightly fashion with sword in hand’.118 Official tolerance for duelling was still evident in the early eighteenth century when, in contravention of his own laws, the elector of Saxony continued to license combats in which men were killed.119 In any case, Germans did not talk about ‘duels’ much. The word was known but combatants tended to talk of ‘encounters’, which were fortuitous and thus defensible in law, or they used the verbs erstochen (run through) or erschossen (shot) to distinguish their acts from simple murder. This is not to suggest that formal duels did not exist. Cartels, the formal challenge, were exchanged by the dukes of SachsenAltenburg and Sachsen-Lauenburg in 1624. This was a formal affair in which seconds were employed and the fight was to first blood. It demonstrates how the practice spread: fifty spectators watched the contest; it was the subject of much gossip and the handwritten cartels were eagerly sought after.120 But for Germans the word cartel was simply another word for the traditional declaration of enmity in the feud, or Absagebrief, and a Saxon law of 1655 outlawing both made the link between the two clear.121 Even where formal duels were fought, it did not exclude these from developing into an encounter. The Prussian courtiers von Buch and von Schlieben were aware of the elector of Brandenburg’s 1652 prohibition on duelling and so chose their fighting 117 118 119

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S. Fabris, Lo Schermo, overo Scienza d’Arme (Copenhagen, 1606), p. 151. Brunotte and Weber (eds.), Reichskammergerichts, IV, p. 330. J.-F. Gauhe, Des Heiligen Römischen Reichs Genealogisch-Historisches Adels-Lexikon, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1740–7), ii, 982. J. Meusel, ‘Nachricht von einem bey Tauperlitz vorgefallenen Duell zwischen Herzog Friedrich zu . . . Albrecht zu Sachsen Lauenburg im Jahr 1624’, Historischen Untersuchungen (Nuremberg, 1779), 69–90. Zacharias von Quetz fought a duel in front of ‘a hostile crowd of onlookers’. Peters, ‘Leute-Fehde’, 68.

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ground in 1678 just over the border in Saxony. They took two seconds with them to ensure fair play. Once they had taken three passes at each other, ‘which left them breathless’, the seconds proposed the matter settled. Buch refused and called for pistols. Once these had been harmlessly discharged, the group headed back to Berlin in apparent harmony. On the return journey, however, there was another falling out and Schlieben rode at his companions discharging his pistol, whereupon Buch returned fire and killed the assailant. He had to pay a fine of 200 Thalers for contravening the 1652 edict but got a pardon for shooting his man in self-defence.122 As an antidote to any residual tendency to romanticise duelling, two examples will suffice to illustrate the brutality of fighting. The first illustrates many of the wider themes that provoked violence. On 30 January 1587 Andreas von Schönburg was run through (erstochen) by Heinrich von Lüttichau at a wedding party at Linz, 35 kilometres north of Dresden.123 Schönburg was a twenty-one-year-old former student at Wittenberg who had recently completed the obligatory cavalier’s tour of Italy. His killer was considerably older, possibly aged around forty and, it seems, a soldier, as he died fighting in France five years later. That evening Schönburg: joined his hands with others in the dance in the hall of the Paternoster. When he became separated Lüttichau offered him his hand, but the line, in which (the dance) the Corallen was formed up, had become too short and Schönburg was unable to re-join it with the consequence that some of the Corallers fell over. Whereupon Lüttichau reacted very angrily and although Schönberg protested in God’s name that he had not done this on purpose and urged him to re-join the Corallen once more, the other did not cease to swear at and slander him.

The guests intervened and bundled them outside, but they could not prevent them drawing their swords. Schönburg was killed. The surgeon’s report on his corpse noted several stab wounds ‘including one which had entered the right side and gone in a quarter of a yard, making a hole that was two fists wide on its way out’. Feasts and family gatherings are frequently mentioned as a major flashpoint among all the social classes. Michael Walburger, who kept a diary of events in Hof in the years following the Thirty Years’ War, shrugged off reports of yet another killing: ‘since around here among the nobility this doesn’t amount to news, for scarcely a gathering, whether a wedding, baptism or other banquet, ends without a murder’.124 This was usually ascribed to too much strong drink. 122

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F. Hirsch (ed.), Das Tagebuch Dietrich Sigismund von Buchs (1674–1683), 2 vols., (Leipzig, 1904–5), II, pp. 31–6. A. Fraustadt, Die urkundliche Geschichte von Schönberg Meissnischen Stammes bis zur Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1878), pp. 589–91. Hausbuch des Apothekers Walburger, III, p. 923.

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But this does not account for the brutality of the fight between Schönburg and Lüttichau, which was no drunken brawl. In order to understand the dynamic of violence we need to recall that festivities were public dramas in which honour and reputation were on display. The causes of quarrels that erupted were apparently trivial, but weddings, dances and even church services brought together people who might otherwise have preferred to avoid each other. Dancing in particular was a performance fraught with tension, in which fun clashed with claims to precedence, masculine bravado and competitiveness. The toxic consequence of this was that stepping on someone’s toe was not as innocent as it might seem. The deliberate transgression of boundaries and rules to provoke was well known to contemporaries. The Leipzig jurist Matthias Berlich complained on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War about those who deliberately went to weddings in order to cause trouble: ‘throwing a bone of contention in the middle to provoke fights and duels’.125 Ernst von Wartensleben was the only dancer to sport a hat at a wedding in Wrisbergholzen (Hildesheim) in 1641. Whether this was deliberate provocation or not, it attracted attention. With one flick Hilmar von Münchhausen sent the hat flying, whereupon Wartensleben drew his sword and took his revenge.126 The link between alcohol consumption and violence is not as straightforward as we might imagine. Germans were stereotypically portrayed as quarrelsome drunkards and drunkenness was an excuse which condoned all sorts of bad behaviour. But this does not explain the dramatic rise and fall in the elite homicide rate. The problem was not so much the alcohol as the manner in which it was consumed and the mentality that accompanied it. Drinking formed the core of the routines that bonded males in the worlds of work for the artisan and study for the student. Ritualised drinking, with its strict rules regulating conduct, provided ample opportunity for transgression and contestation. Like dancing, it was easy to provoke a foe without appearing to be the aggressor; backing down meant losing face among his peers. This problem was well known to contemporaries. It was referred to in the gentle satire on the rules of drinking, the Disputatio inauguralis theoretico-practica ius potandi (1616), which was a product of the German student milieu. There were at least nine German editions of its sixty rules, or Zechrecht, before 1700. The success of the book points to a kernel of truth within the stereotype of German drinking culture. For the rules do not exist to suppress debauchery – far from it. Rather, they establish the rules of the game for masculine bravado. As the English edition explained, this was a conduct book which regulated drinking rituals and ‘that which resulteth or ariseth from thence, 125 126

Below, Das Duell, p. 11. J. von Wartensleben, Nachrichten von dem Geschlechte der Grafen von Wartensleben (Berlin, 1858), p. 114.

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comprehending the rites and solemnities thereof, and subinferring whatsoever may seeme convenient for one to performe unto another, according to the prescript of that law’. If and when could one honourably refuse a toast? The analogy with the duel was explicit: ‘Drinking’, the author tells us, ‘is a valiant combat or encounter with the pot.’ Drinking requires learning to control your tongue and those who will not hold their peace ought to be ‘cudgeled and sent back to the place from whence they came’.127 An even more detailed account of a duel comes from the judicial investigation into the killing of Christian Ratlow by Franz von Rantzau on 28 April 1631 in a tavern not far from Kiel. Witnesses claimed that what started as a bit of horseplay simply got out of hand. As Christian got up to leave, he was suddenly ‘without warning, or without being able to defend himself’ run through.128 As he collapsed, he called to one of his friends: ‘Do for me what I would do for you and avenge my death.’129 Rantzau freely confessed to the killing. But as so often in these cases, what was a fair fight and what was murder was a matter of interpretation. On the balance of the evidence presented by both sides, it seems that this was not horseplay but rather a prearranged fight to first blood. Matters got out of hand. The fact that there were nineteen witnesses, including a roll call of the local elite, suggests that they had been invited to the event. The crime did no discernible harm to Rantzau’s career; he fled in the immediate aftermath but had powerful connections and appears in 1651 as provost (propst) of Preest. The Rantzau family had a reputation as duellists of distinction. Elsewhere the propensity for violence seems to have passed down through the generations in other families too.130 Among the von Watzdorf, Heinrich Konrad was killed in a duel at Kronach (Franconia) in 1602; Caspar was killed in a duel when a student at Jena in 1628; Wolf Christoph died in one in 1648 and Christoph Daniel was murdered following a family conference in 1663.131 Among the von Stange, Johann Abraham was killed in a duel in 1638; Heinrich befell the same ‘misfortune’ in 1640; Rudolph was killed at the wedding of his daughter in 1652 and Georg August was shot dead in 1668.132 Although young noblemen were overwhelmingly the participants, not all of the victims conform to the stereotype of the hot-blooded young gallant. Otto von Blome was in his sixties when he was killed after he objected to a younger man preceding him at a banquet in Lübeck in 1644; Ernst Dietrich von Feilitzsch was 73 years old when he was run through in 127 128 129 130 131

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Blasius Multibibus, Jus Potandi, Oder Zech Recht (1669). Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 670. Ibid., 671. On this phenomenon: Wittke, Mord oder Totschlag? p. 48. C. von Watzdorf, Rath, Hof- u. Forstmeister zu Untern-Greiz historisch-genealogische Beschreibung des uralten adligen und gräfl. Geschlechtes Derer von Watzdorf 1740 (Dresden, 1872). Gauhe, Adels Lexicon, II, p. 1658.

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1692!133 In Holstein the passion for duelling among the local nobility seems to have spread to the citizens of Kiel. The university was founded in 1665 and the first duel mentioning students took place three years later; fights among themselves and with the local garrison became commonplace, resulting in deaths in 1699 and 1706. In 1689 the sons of a pastor and a city burgher were killed in the same year. More astonishing was the death of Nicolas Martin, Professor of Law, who received blows to his heart and lungs in 1681.134 One distinctive category among the social elite of the Holy Roman Empire was the secular canons (Domherren) who helped administer bishoprics. The canonries continued to be sought after by Protestants after the Reformation and some sees, such as Minden, were divided after 1648 into Protestant and Catholic canonries. The involvement of the Domherren in vindicatory violence was a notable feature of politics in the bishopric of Münster. An early indication of this was the quarrel that occurred at a wedding party in the city in March 1588 following which Domherr Bernd von Oer killed Melchior von Droste in a duel. Oer was perhaps inspired by his recent visit to Italy. He resisted prosecution by the city authorities; as a canon he claimed the benefit of clergy and was released in 1592.135 This sort of behaviour was not confined to Catholics. The non-fatal duel between Domherren in Naumberg (Saxony) led one witness to complain that such ‘spiritual lords should also fight and be allowed to carry swords next to their psalters’.136 Samuel Strimesius, rector of Frankfurt an der Oder, explained in 1689 that ‘strictly formal duels are arranged and practised in the guise of a simulated encounter’.137 But even he recognised that distinguishing between the two was difficult and that self-defence was natural, such that all encounters would have to be investigated carefully in order to judge the degree of premeditation. In another sermon, printed in 1644, Johannes Schmidt, professor and city preacher of Strasbourg, attacked those: Persons of high status, counts and lords . . . who not only delight in fighting with swords and rapiers, but also use arquebuses and muskets charged with lead and powder, who charge at each other on horse, shooting at one another, and when their shot misses . . . they reach for other weapons.138 133

134 135 136

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W. von Feiltizsch, Geschichte und Genealogie der Familie von Feilitzsch (Neustadt, 1875), p. 223. Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 337. Dierkes, Streitbar, p. 181. S. Wagner und K.-H. Wünsch (eds.), Notabilia: Naumburger Denkwurdigkeiten aus dem 17. Jahrhundert (Naumberg: Uder, 2005), p. 82. S. Strimesius, Die Unchristligkeit und Unvernunfft des Duellirens: Nebst entgegen gesetzeten Vernunfft und Christligkeit der Liebe der Feinde (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1689), p. 21. J. Schmidt, Mordspiegel/ Oder Bericht von unschüldig Blutvergiessen/ Morden und Beleidigungen (Rostock, 1644), pp. 9–20.

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And he went on to condemn the way they encouraged servants and lackeys to do the same. The evidence for encounters with firearms is rich. Georg Bernhard von Massenbach was plagued by a long dispute with his cousin over the shared use of a wood store. On 22 February 1666 he confronted his cousin on horseback near the disputed building and after an argument both men pulled pistols on each other. Massenbach explained to his pastor that ‘he was sorry for what he did, even more so since his cousin, in order to greet him in the forest had even taken off his hat in front of him’. However, he explained what he had done as a form of cultural transfer: for in Lorraine (where he had served as an officer of the duke), ‘it is the simple custom that when two men draw their pistol, one will be left remaining on the ground’.139 When choosing a place to encounter an enemy, fencing master Jean-Daniel de l’Ange told his readers to follow four rules: approach him with the sun to your back so that his eyes might be blinded; eschew the higher ground, which is difficult to defend with a sword, and force your opponent on to it in order to put him off balance; use walls, water and hedges in order to corner him; avoid surfaces like gravel roads and wet grass, where you are in danger of slipping.140 There are instances where cemeteries served the purpose of an arena. There were three killings in Kiel cemeteries between 1618 and 1633. One of these followed an argument between kinsmen at a burial, which suggests that fights in and around churches were sometimes spontaneous encounters between those who would have preferred to keep a distance.141 One reason why cemeteries were chosen as places for fights was that they were often viewed as places of refuge free from the law. Unlike most of the rest of Europe, where asylum as both a concept and a space beyond the law was in retreat in the Middle Ages, many towns and jurisdictions in the Holy Roman Empire continued to claim the rights of refuge for those accused of crimes into the seventeenth century. The right to issue pardons was a mark of sovereignty but also performed a useful role in protecting the accused from revenge and facilitating negotiations with the victim’s kin.142 At Kotzau in Franconia the right of asylum was guaranteed by the local lord, but during the seventeenth century the ancient right changed into a place where duels could take place without fear of prosecution. The fighting area, the Ritterrain, is still marked out today by nine stone markers, which stand over a metre tall, and several duels are recorded to have taken place there. In December 1661, for example, the parties to a betrothal fell out and two men repaired to the Ritterrain with their

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140 141 142

Freiherr von Massenbach, Geschichte der reichsunmittelbaren Herren und des kurpfälzischen Lehens von Massenbach 1140–1806 (Stuttgart, 1891), p. 173. Deutliche und gründliche Erklärung, chapter 36. Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 242, 266–7. This is discussed more fully in the next chapter.

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seconds, where they ‘went at each other with such fury that both of them were left dead’.143 What were the reasons behind the explosion of elite violence in the decades around 1600? The most obvious change was the Renaissance reification of individual honour. In a great city like Augsburg most violent differences between males revolved around social rank and the anxieties that social mobility aroused.144 In a world that is full of ‘trouble’ and ‘disquiet’, explained Hieronymus Koeler, there is nothing better than our good name, and as the Bible made clear a bad name echoed down the generations ‘visiting the iniquity of the father’s children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me (Exodus 20:5)’.145 Hermann Weinsberg admitted in his diary: ‘Winning honour pleases me greatly, but not especially less nor more than others. The good praise of other people carries a lot, especially if it continues after my death.’146 He desired ‘glory’, although as a lawyer and city patrician, this was confined to shuffling through paper in order to claim noble ancestry. The possibility of winning glory by challenging men of equal and, even better, higher status, was open to all those who pursued the profession of arms. Wolf von Hirschberg’s reputation was always local but still endures today as a part of folklore. The parish register of Ebnath recorded his death in 1694 and added in Latin in the margins that he was a ‘victor in many duels’.147 The desire to memorialise a beautiful death is also evident in the practice of setting up memorials to duellists. We should be wary of focusing on the apparently trivial causes of so many disputes; they were not trivial episodes to those who took part in them, but essential to their sense of self. Zacharias von Quetz refused to give way to the count of Mansfeld’s sledge in 1620. Despite the disparity in status, Quetz was making a claim to the equality of all men of honour and was prepared to spill blood to defend the principle.148 Cyriacus Spangenberg had already noticed the change in manners in the 1590s. He criticised those who acted ‘like dogs, exchanging bullets and sword 143

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146 147

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A. von Dobeneck, ‘Die Geschichte des ausgestorbenen Geschlecht von Kotzau’, Archiv für Geschichte und Altertumskunde von Oberfranken, 24 (1909), 68–70; ‘Gesamttext der Ausarbeitung über das Duellwesen und der Tat am Ritterrain’: www.fgv-oberkotzau.de/ Duellwesen.pdf. M. Haberlein, ‘Tod auf der Herrenstube: Ehre und Gewalt in der Augsburger Führungsschicht (1500–1620)’, in Ehrkonzepte in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Sibylle Backmann (Berlin: Akademie, 1998), pp. 148–69, p. 162. H. Amburger (ed.), ‘Die Familiengeschichte der Koeler. Ein Beitrag zur Autobiographie des 16. Jahrhunderts’, Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg, 30 (1931), 206. www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de/Edition/Liber_Iuventutis/Liber_Iuventutis.htm, fo. 660v. M. Neubauer, ‘Wolf Adam von Hirschberg, Herr auf Ebnath und Schwarzenreuth: Reichsritter, Duellant und Zauberer’: www.bayern-fichtelgebirge.de/heimatkunde/035 .htm. Zöllner (ed.), ‘Lebensbericht’, fo. 3.

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cuts for words’. Today, he complained, you were likely to hear phrases such as ‘Shut up! Or I’ll stab you in the neck’; ‘Stop! Or you’ll taste my pig-stick’; ‘Look! Or your hide will feel my lance.’149 The statistics suggest that this represents more than perennial moaning about declining moral standards and the research of Frank Dierkes on Münster has confirmed that honour disputes were much more likely to turn violent at the end of the sixteenth century. For example, the dispute at Rinkerode, Westphalia, between Hermann von Kerckerinck and Dietrich von Galen over land, debts, animal trespass and forest rights turned nasty in 1604. The Kerckerinck had arrived in the village in the fifteenth century, but it was only now that the von Galen reacted violently to the loss of a lawsuit over a church pew. Their determination to resist was most likely provoked by the 1596 articulation that the urban patriciate of Münster was on a par with the hereditary nobility. The Kerckerinck were descended from the patriciate and though they claimed nobility were not yet legally so, while the von Galen were part of the established military noble caste.150 By stopping his neighbour having access to his pew in the nave, von Galen sought to relegate his enemy to the chancel with the rest of the commoners. The complaint made by Hermann Kerckerinck to the High Court at Münster cited that ‘in open noble company he had been many times grossly insulted, involving provocation with arms’. Behind the pew dispute was a struggle for social ascendancy over land rights between men who lived only a couple of hundred metres apart. Among many insults, he recounted how Galen had stood outside his house and tried to summon him by calling him a thief and a knave. This was no ritual conflict: von Galen had a reputation for violence. The battle for social supremacy can be traced quantitatively in the growth of lawsuits for slander which reached their peak around 1600. It was these insults that the legislation against duelling successfully targeted at the end of the seventeenth century, the purpose being to police insults provocative to a duel. But the de-escalation of conflict was also dependent on the avoidance of such language in the first place and explains why duelling took so long to bring under control in many regions. Words might still be carefully crafted in order to provoke an immediate response, such as those uttered by Hans von Blome, who told a relative of his new bride, Hans von Rantzau, in 1696 that he would ‘kiss her for as long as he liked and also her arse without prejudicing his honour’, to which his opponent had no alternative but to draw his sword. After a vicious fight Rantzau succumbed to wounds in his back and face.151 The peak in elite interpersonal violence during the Thirty Years’ War should come as no surprise since during times of civil conflict all forms of homicide 149 150 151

Spangenberg, Adels-Spiegel, II, p. 439v. Dierkes, Streitbar, pp. 70–102. Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 355.

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will increase. The increase in violence was not simply a consequence of military operations and a rapacious soldiery. Trivial slights now took on more significance. Franconia in the 1620s was not yet a scene of significant military activity, but the heightened state of fear and anxiety was shown by the increased propensity of local lords to attack each other and murder insubordinate peasants. In a world where armed gangs roamed the countryside with impunity, it was often better to shoot first and ask questions later. Hans Joachim von Müffling was shot by Haino von Pfuel on the open road in 1631 even though ‘they had no preceding quarrel’.152 As the duke of Saxony proclaimed in his 1646 ordinance against provocations and insults, at a time of war when ‘Christian blood flows like water’, satisfaction was being sought through the use of ‘private force or violence’.153 The statistics should be used with caution. The apparent decline in elite violence in the 1640s and 1650s is more likely to reflect the collapse of the state and the failure of the judicial system accurately to record homicide. The 1646 Saxon ordinance lamented that enemies were no longer bringing slander suits to court. The figures for the 1660s therefore represent less an increase in violence than the recovery of the state and its ability to record and mediate it. What is clear, however, is that elite violence outlived the Thirty Years’ War. There are many examples of the survival of private enmities and the culture of revenge it fostered after the Peace of Westphalia. The destruction did not spare parts of Switzerland, such as Schaffhausen, which was heavily damaged by both the Swedes and Bavarians. The post-war factionalism between the patrician Imthurn and Ziegler families in the town turned serious in 1654 when Hans Friederich Imthurn was beaten up by the sons of Burgermeister Ziegler. In 1658 Christoph Ziegler shot Heinrich Imthurn and his servant in a duel. A peace was made and Ziegler was eventually permitted to return to the town from exile on payment of 10,000 Thalers, which funded the erection of a stone cross in the spot where he had killed his victim. But on 7 September 1661 he was himself gunned down in front of his own door by two teenage members of the Imthurn kindred.154 The politics of the CounterReformation that had contributed to the rise of tension before 1618 was stilled by the 1648 settlement, but its consequences continued to disrupt life in some localities. The efforts of Johan Arnold von Sickingen to enforce Catholic worship in his lands continued to provoke resistance. In 1656 he and three of his servants were murdered. His brother complained to the emperor that 152

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K. Kiefer, Zur Geschichte der Freiherren von Müffling sonst Weiss genannt (Frankfurt-am -Main, 1913), p. 8. Fürstl. Sächsisches Gothisches Ausschreiben. F. Haffner, Der klein Solothurner allgemeine Schaw-Platz historischer Geist- auch weltlicher vornembsten Geschichten und Händlen (Solothurn, 1666), p. 311: www .solothurnerzeitung.ch/solothurn/kanton-solothurn/ein-kreuz-erinnert-an-das-toedlicheduell-von-1659-in-riedholz-126072630.

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this had been secretly abetted by the Elector Palatine and that forty to fifty men wearing the Elector’s livery had been seen disappearing across the nearby border.155 The dispute between Georg von Massenbach and his cousin over the wood store demonstrates how the destruction of the seigneurial economy created a world of limited good in which even the most trivial rights took on huge symbolic and economic importance. ***

Hunting disputes, as elsewhere in Europe, generated a significant amount of conflict. Most of this was low level and the destruction of traps, impounding of dogs, tearing up of border posts and trampling of crops were a routine consequence of border disputes. The distinction between a poacher and a licensed hunter was often dependent on the state of relations between neighbouring communities.156 Today the intense emotions that hunting aroused are difficult for us to grasp. An insight can be gleaned from a funeral sermon printed in 1653.157 It recounted the story of 54-year-old Rudolph von Hacke who, in preparation for the duel he was about to fight, summoned his seconds to a dinner in a tavern near Schönburn in Silesia. Unfortunately, during the meal the two seconds, Rudolph’s brother Otto and Caspar Sigismund von Bornstädt, exchanged insults about hunting. Rudolph intervened on his brother’s behalf whereupon von Bornstädt pulled out his pistols – ‘The dog must die’ – and shot him through the head, throwing the discharged weapon at the mortally wounded victim for good measure and hitting him in the face. The right to hunt was a claim to status and its denial an existential threat. This explains the response to the shooting of Detlev von Sehestedt, who was caught hunting in a forest claimed by the bishop of Lübeck’s cousin in 1577. Two years later Detlev’s brother travelled from his home in Braunschweig to take revenge in the same spot.158 The hunt was also a proxy for low-level guerrilla warfare against an enemy in which the blame for any excesses could be placed on overzealous local officials. The politics of this can be seen in the ways in which 155

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C. von Stramberg, ‘Das rechte Rheinufer von Braubach bis zur Wisper’, Denkwürdiger und nützlicher rheinischer antiquarius, 5 (1856), 234–5. For some examples: Schertlin von Burtenbach, pp. 115–6; Brunotte and Weber (eds.), Reichskammergerichts, III, p. 330; Gauhe, Adels Lexicon, Philipp von Hohenlohe, 1541; Gebhardt and Hörner (eds.), Reichskammergericht, IX: www.gda.bayern.de/fileadmin/ user_upload/PDFs_fuer_Publikationen/Archivinventare/50-09-F-RKGInventar_Online-Druckfassung.pdf, Fuchs von Bimbach vs. bishop of Bamberg, 1615 and Fuchs von Dornheim vs. Kilian von Wenkheim, 1540–3; V. Weikert, ‘Eine gestörte Jagdpartie 1669 und Rechtsstreit deswegen bis zum Jahre 1674 zwischen dem Hochstifte Würzburg und dem Kloster Schwarzach. Kulturbild aus dem 17. Jahrhundert’, Archiv des historischen Vereins von Unterfranken und Aschaffenburg, 34 (1891), 163–79; Ebeling (ed.), Reichskammergericht, I, p. 239. J. Adami, Misanders Theatrum Tragicum, 2 vols. (Dresden, 1699), I, p. 85. Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 67.

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hunting disputes became a proxy for resistance to the princely claims by the imperial free knights in Franconia. The Crailsheim family were involved in many lawsuits about hunting whose overall purpose was to defend their sovereignty against the rights of the bishops of Würzburg and Bamberg, and the margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. The family used the privilege of asylum (Freiung) for murderers, which had been confirmed by the emperor in 1582, to give protection to poachers and killers of rivals’ hunting officials.159 In 1607 a clash between two hunting parties at Davert was the cause of an encounter in front of Münster cathedral in which Dietrich von Galen ran through his neighbour, Gerhard von Morrien. The Morrien family had inherited the forest of Davert in the 1590s and their attempts to keep their neighbours out of it through the courts and through the posting of soldiers had led them ‘to exist with almost all their neighbours in a state of enmity, division, trouble and dispute’.160 The control of the forest was part of a wider battle for social ascendancy and the animosity this generated lasted down the generations. The Morrien were Protestants and the von Galen Catholics, but confession seems to have played no role in the feud until the 1620s when Protestant noblemen came under pressure to convert. A judicial contest developed over whether the killing was a fair fight or premeditated. Galen, who was effectively exiled from the city, used the courts to continue the battle, accusing his victim of being a superstitious wife-beater, and objecting to mention of the word ‘murder’ on his victim’s tomb. The widow complained to the prince-bishop about this lack of respect. On 13 November 1621 Johann von Morrien took out his anger by smashing the von Galen arms in the windows of a house at Aschberg. In the end it was the von Galen who emerged victorious. Following the election of Christoph Bernhard von Galen to be prince-bishop of Münster in 1650, he was able to exploit division within the Morrien family. In 1677, the two brothers, Friedrich and Johann Bernhard, grandsons of Gerhard, fought a non-fatal encounter. Though this was hardly an uncommon occurrence, the bishop was to exploit their indiscretion for his own purposes, breaking the power of a traditional enemy by stripping them of their lands and titles. The effect of forest disputes for those who relied on them for their livelihood is not difficult to imagine. Local officials had to project the right image for the enforcement of rights, which explains why the huntsmen of the abbot of Fulda and bishop of Würzburg deployed muskets, broadswords and halberds in their battle in 1613.161 Consequently, behind the elite body count is the incalculable toll of the many more victims who were commoners. In 1548 Christoph von Dobeneck sent a Fehdebrief to Balthazar von Reitzenstein for trampling on his 159 160 161

F. von Crailsheim, Die Reichsfreiherrn von Crailsheim (Munich, 1905), p. 79. Dierkes, Streibar, p. 126. Stein, ‘Der Duellstein’.

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crops while tracking deer, to which Reitzenstein replied by shooting two of his servants.162 The traditional obligation to protect subjects (Schutz und Schirm) was open to widespread abuse. The ways in which feuding intersected and complicated the struggle between lords and peasants is a vast topic that requires separate treatment. It is worth noting here that the killing of peasants by lords seems to have been fairly routine in some regions. In seventeenthcentury Franconia the punishment for killing a peasant was limited to compensating the victim’s family, a sum that ranged between 100 and 450 Thalers.163 The high level of intra-elite violence in Holstein seems to have been matched by a similar relationship between lords and their tenants. In 1557 the Holstein nobility had participated in the bloody suppression of the neighbouring free peasant republic of Dittmarschen following decades of conflict. But the tightening of seigneurial control in the region continued to be resisted. Otto and Claus von Buchwald were murdered by their own peasants in the 1580s. Hans von Rantzau, who was forced to flee Kiel after murdering a pregnant woman in 1606, was paid in the same coin by peasants near Lüneberg in 1618. The fatal duel between two brothers at a mill at Sierhagen in 1592 was finished off by their subjects, ‘who seeing their Junker dead, finished off the fratricide in the same fashion’.164 Resistance is discernible in other regions too: in 1571 Paul Bartholomäus von Haim was murdered by his peasants at Reichenstein when he put up taxes, probably to pay for the new Renaissance palace which was completed in 1576; Tobias von Ponikau met the same fate in Upper Lusatia because of his oppression; abbot Bertram Goswin von Gevertzhagen was shot by peasants near Aachen in 1699 for being too ‘hard’ on them.165 Ostensibly, these incidents did not have anything to do with the noble feud. However, the lord threatened by his neighbours ran greater risks if he had already alienated his own subjects. What is striking about many of the conflicts discussed here is the manner in which large numbers of armed men could be mobilised quickly. There was an overlap between lackeys, soldiers and subjects and it is likely that many adherents of a lord belonged to more than one category. In the 1590s Cyriacus Spangenberg thought that even lesser nobles (those below the level of Freiherr) should employ three or four mounted retainers and that a poor noble should ‘be able to call on one mounted retainer in case of necessity’.166 The sorts of roles played and personas adopted by these retainers (reisiger Knechten) can be gleaned from the 1609 tavern argument between a retainer of the Reitzenstein zu Blankenburg and a rival employed by 162 163 164 165

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Dobeneck, Geschichte, p. 203. Gönner, Staatsrechtiche verhältnisse, document 88. Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 70, 77, 246. F. Wißgrill, Schauplatz des landsässigen nieder-oesterreichischen Adels, 4 vols. (Vienna, 1794–1804), IV, p. 71; Gauhe, Adels Lexicon; Knothe, ‘Fortstzung der Geschichte’, 126. Spangenberg, Adels Spiegel, p. 218.

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the Dobeneck zu Gottmannsgrün, whose names frequently appear as rivals in the region of Hof, then part of the margravate of Brandenburg-Ansbach. The parish register of Sparnberg records their duel thus: ‘after a short while they became quarrelsome, so that they challenged each other to a fight, in which Heinrich Bischoff received a mortal thrust in his right side’. He lingered for a week in the village, was not refused the consolation of holy communion and died leaving five children to be cared for.167 Before the creation of standing armies at the end of the seventeenth century roaming bands of unemployed or disbanded soldiers, known in the north-west as Gartenknecht or Garde, a word apparently also taken from the French, were a menace to public order. They were, however, useful in feuds and hired to carry out dirty work or paid to move on and live off an enemy’s land. One of the nicknames for the House of Welf in the sixteenth century, ‘Garde bruder’, mocked their penchant for such tactics.168 When not on campaign, mercenary captains, like Schertlin von Bertenbach, retained men for their own protection and in all likelihood rewarded others with jobs and farms. The 1559–62 feud between him and his neighbours, the counts of Oettingen, involved the mobilisation of hundreds of men. In an attempt to make peace the duke of Württemberg expressly forbade either side to hunt but skirmishing between both men’s subjects could not be stopped. On 23 September 1559 500 peasants accompanied by 50 horse were sent by Oettingen to gather acorns in the woods at Gellingen in what was interpreted as a deliberate provocation. Attempts to arrest the trespassers led to exchanges of fire between the two sets of officials. The contest centred upon control of the village of Bissingen and in 1561 both lords were determined to fight to enforce their right to preside over the patron’s day festival. Schertlin garrisoned Bissingen with 100 musketeers, while the Oettingen deployed 40 horse, 300 foot and 4 cannon but were unable to dislodge their opponents from the fortified church.169 The attraction of mercenaries lay in the fact that they were ideal for this sort of short-term job in which a show of force and distraining property was more important than defeating an enemy in combat. In the 1530s, the horse-dealer Hans Kohlhase maintained a band of thirty men on the proceeds of his feud with the elector of Saxony. There were plenty of willing recruits and he employed his own piper and drummer. After 1550 employment of muscle in disputes did not cease, but it did henceforth require the sanction of the courts. The counts of Oettingen, for example, continued to use the same tactics they 167

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‘Ausgewählte Kirchenbucheintragungen (Berg, Geroldsgrün, Steben, Töpen)’: www .ahnenforschung-klatt.de/kirchenbuch.htm. For similar instances: Gebhardt and Hörner (eds.), Reichskammergericht, II, p. 30; Brunotte and Weber (eds.), Reichskammergerichts, V, pp. 294–5. P. Burschel, Söldner im Nordwestdeutschland des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. Sozialgeschichtliche Studien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), chapter 5. Schertlin von Burtenbach, pp. 116–25.

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had employed in Bissingen. From 1590 to 1635 there were several lawsuits between them and the abbots of Ellwangen, who complained that the hunt was being used as cover for military forays and that the counts maintained a force of 4 cannon and 1100 men. The county of Oettingen adjoined the city of Nördlingen and disputes were so frequent that 103 separate complaints were sent to the Reichskammergericht between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century.170 These were linked to claims of sovereignty, but it was the setting of quail traps that brought matters to a head. In 1614 Count Marx Wilhelm von Oettingen and his men were shot dead by the citizenry.171 This incident shows that city militias existed not merely for defence but to enforce rights. The small town of Stargard in Pomerania launched a suit at the local high court and at the Reichskammergericht in a dispute with their neighbours, the von Wedel, over fishing rights and water access. But at the same time (1579) they also gathered 800 men to seize back boats, nets and eels which had been taken and subjected the enemy territory to three days of retaliatory plunder. Joachim von Wedel, powerless in the face of such numbers, referred to the town mayor as ‘Herod’.172 But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that, on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, many lords were able to raise substantial forces from their ordinary retinues, supplemented by their tenantry, should they need to enforce their legal rights. Part of the attraction of office-holding was that it conferred authority to raise troops or maintain a retinue.173 Even in the peaceful 1720s Otto-Heinrich von Gersdorf complained that his enemy invaded his lands with 200 men and smashed a dam.174 Office-holding also might entail protection in another sense. The assassination of Niklas von Pucheim, Erbtruchsess, imperial councillor, commissioner of the Lower Austrian Estates by the Hofkirchen, in 1591, was a major event. The killing was the culmination of a local feud between leading Protestant families. But the assassination would not have been successful without support from within the archducal court. The imperial Stallmeister, Cavriani, had a hand in getting into the victim’s fortress at Raabs and the dirty work was carried out by men under the count of

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171 172 173

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M. Spindler and A. Kraus, Geschichte Schwabens bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts. Band 3: Franken, Schwaben, Oberpfalz bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts. (Munich: Beck, 2001), pp. 368ff. G. Schäblen, Oettingischer Geschichts-Almanach (1783), p. 182. Bohlen (ed.), Hausbuch des Joachim von Wedel, p. 275. Gebhardt and Hörner (eds.), Reichskammergericht, I, p. 165; Lücke (ed.), Reichkammergerichts, II, p. 319; Bayerisches Hauptstaatarchiv Reichskammergericht, IX: www.gda.bayern.de/fileadmin/user_upload/PDFs_fuer_Publikationen/Archivinventare/ 50-09-F-RKG-Inventar_Online-Druckfassung.pdf, Hans Georg von Fronhofen vs. Graf Wolfgang zu Castell, 1605–7. Helbig, ‘Eine Fehde’.

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Montecuccoli, an outlaw from Italy whose services were in demand at the imperial court.175 ***

It is tempting to ascribe the rise in violence outlined in this chapter to a seventeenth-century ‘crisis’ caused by worsening economic and climatic conditions, the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’ that occurred after 1590. I suggest that we resist this simplistic correlation. The deployment of force and the tactics used in disputes were always shaped by social expectations. Peasant feuds, in particular, continued to be overwhelmingly characterised by threats and did not entail mutilation and murder. Elites were less affected by the economic downturn until the collapse caused by the Thirty Years’ War. Landowners benefitted from rising food prices. Likewise, there were many bad years at the end of the seventeenth century when violence seems to have been falling. For these reasons, I have stressed the social and political structures that shaped enmity. The magnificent building programmes, lavish expenditure and investment in education during the sixteenth century point to the way in which competition for power and status was increasing. Slander cases among the social elite, a good indication of the everyday competition over honour, peaked at the Reichskammergericht in the early seventeenth century. The cult of individual honour and the status anxiety it bred contributed significantly to the explosion in the elite homicide rate. The Thirty Years’ War led to the collapse of authority and the fostering of a culture of vengeance that continued to be in evidence for a generation after the Peace of 1648. Encounters, often involving firearms, were more common than formal duels. Since we know that duelling was still prevalent throughout the Empire in the early eighteenth century, it would seem that it was the decline of the encounter and the formalisation of combat, in which taking part and not killing was the object of the exercise, that explains the decline of lethal elite violence in the decades after 1700 and its almost complete eradication by 1750. So far as present research permits, the qualitative evidence for Germany in this period suggests that the rise of interpersonal violence was not matched by the brutality that characterised the practice of vendetta in France and Italy.176 There is more evidence for acts of humiliation. The ritual shaving off of hair and beard was a shaming act that mimicked an act of public atonement for sin. But the two instances of this for which we have records were reserved for servants of an enemy.177 Rituals of humiliation seem only to have been 175

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‘Ermorderung des Niklas Freiherr von Puchheim auf Raab, 1591’, Oesterreichische Blätter für Literatur und Kunst, 2 (1845), 287. The medical reports on the corpses of Georg Fieke (30 wounds), Peter Graumann (48 wounds) and Detlev von Theinen (24 wounds) suggest the fury of their assailant and the possibility that their corpses were subject to mutilation: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Wellaune#cite_note-3; Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 73. Lücke (ed.), Reichskammergerichts, I, p. 179; Hambrecht (ed.), ‘Das Papier’, 392.

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employed against those of lower social status, publicising the gulf that existed between true nobles and the citizens of Kiel. Otto von Rantzau, one of the leaders of the noble faction which subjected the city to a campaign of intimidation at the end of the 1580s, smashed windows and stormed the town court in order to ensure the torture of a woman he had accused of witchcraft was applied with sufficient stringency. Following the murder of one of his associates in June 1590, he pulled out the beard of one respected elder citizen with his own hands. In contravention of the reconciliation made by the duke of Holstein, he subjected the Burgermeister’s nephew to a set of humiliating ritual punishments, including parading him in a ‘spanish cloak’, a barreltype contraption or portable pillory used for the public denigration, and forcefeeding him salted herring. Otto was nicknamed ‘Der Tolle’ and it would be easy to dismiss him as such, except that he was the nephew of the Statthalder of the duchy and, as an accomplished duellist, an exponent of the latest fashion.178 His acts symbolised his social ascendancy and advertised that his opponents were not men of worth. In cases where there was greater symmetry between the opposing parties, humiliation had to be more subtle. The purpose was not the denial of an opponent’s honour but an attempt to steal it and to provoke. What made Dietrich von Galen such a dangerous neighbour was his willingness to test the conventions and boundaries of social etiquette. The fatal duel in which he killed Gerhard von Morrien in 1607 was preceded by several attempts by Dietrich to provoke his enemy. Their hunting dispute had led Morrien to impound some of Galen’s dogs. Morrien ordered him to return the dogs or fight him. When he refused he called him a coward and summoned him outside by ‘continuously slapping his fist on his sword’ with the words ‘this is for thee, this is for thee’.179 Once again, his enemy did not respond. It was only on 16 July in Münster that Galen succeeded in provoking his man using insulting gestures. Even then there were attempts to restrain the two men until Galen shouted: ‘the fop’s a fool’. This pattern of escalation and provocation shows that the reaction to insults was not automatic or hardwired. Others were capable of seeing gross insults for what they were. In his dispute with the von Galen family, Hermann Kerckerinck was not only referred to as a ‘ploughman’ but kneed in the testicles. Even so, he refused to retaliate and pursued the matter through the courts.180 In his and his family’s opinion this was the most effective way to obtain satisfaction. It shows that not every affront required an immediate counter-response and that the appropriate response was often a matter for careful reflection, permitting mediation to take place, the avenues for which are the subject of the next chapter. 178 179 180

Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 60, 76, 107, 127, 154–63. Dierkes, Streitbar, p. 138. See below p. 260.

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7 Sühne: The Theory and Practice of Peacemaking

‘Greet one another with the kiss of love’. This one clearly reads in the Gospels, but this custom is no longer in vogue today. (1523)1

The contradiction that was Martin Luther is nowhere more clearly in evidence than in his views on the Christian message of peace and forgiveness. Charity and neighbourliness are prominent in his teachings. But his new services removed the unifying elements of the medieval liturgy and emphasised abasement before God and not reconciliation with one’s neighbour.2 Luther was no prude. He did not share the clerical disapproval of the kiss of peace on the grounds that it was lascivious, but he nevertheless removed it from his version of the Mass. On the one hand, he took his pastoral duties seriously and involved himself in negotiations to end feuds – the last act of his life in February 1546 involved a journey home to Eisleben to ‘break the pride’ of the count of Mansfeld ‘like a poltergeist’.3 On the other hand, he was a great hater whose long-running feuds with former friends and allies were punctuated by vicious personal attacks. Luther reserved a particular contempt for the law and lawyers and, following Augustine, taught that true peace was to be found in God. His teaching initially gave succour to the millenarians and radicals who dreamed of erecting the City of God. But the threat posed by the fanatics forced him into a hasty defence of civil society. However, Luther was no humanist; he had little faith in the capacity of man to seek good. Both he and Calvin distinguished between the political regime and the heavenly realm. But whereas for Luther the former was essentially a guarantor of social order, for Calvin, the former lawyer, it had a more positive valence, which helps to explain why the Calvinists developed a more systematic approach to the problem of dispute settlement.4

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3 4

M. Luther, Luther’s Works, J. Pelikan and H. Lehmann (eds.), 55 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press; and Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955–86), XXX, p. 144. S. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 136. M. Luther, Martin Luthers Werke, 120 vols. (Weimar, 1883–2009), Briefe, XI, p. 300. See Chapter 14.

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Despite the huge literature on the German Reformation, the subject of peacemaking has generated surprisingly little interest.5 On the eve of the Reformation there were two German words for peace. Friede meant peace in the sense of tranquillity or the opposite of war. The other commonly used word, Sühne, was closer to the Latin compositio or concord, and referred to reconciliation or the making of peace. It was integral to the peace in the feud. Rooted in the customary legal practice of compensation for an injury it was also a synonym for the Latin term ‘satisfaction’, on which the medieval sacrament of penance was grounded. Sühne was thus the key to the popular understanding and appropriation of the theological principles that underpinned penance and promoted neighbourly reconciliation. Sühne survived into the seventeenth century, but by 1700 the word had disappeared from popular use and survived only as a technical theological term, meaning expiation or atonement.6 The reasons for this and its ramifications are discussed below. The law is much better served in the historiography and German historians have been at the forefront of the recent revolution in our understanding that demonstrates the overwhelming importance of courts as forums for arbitration as opposed to punishment. The traditional concentration on the rise of the Roman Law inquisitorial process was misleading because the vast majority of lawsuits were derived from accusations from plaintiffs who supported the costs of the case – public prosecution remained very rare. The law therefore needs to be seen from the point of view of its customers, the expectations they had of the legal system and how they used it. Unfortunately, very little of this stimulating literature has appeared in English.7 Many German legal codes of the late Middle Ages continued to uphold the idea that blood revenge (Blutrache) was legal.8 The concept was particularly widespread on the north German coast and in some places, like Bremen, the local law stated that ‘the whole kindred should suffer a feud’ in the event of murder. However, there were from the twelfth century widespread attempts to regulate revenge. For example, the idea that those who offered to pay Wergeld should be immune to retaliation became widely accepted. The concept of compensation for a wrong was deeply embedded in the fabric of medieval society. Wergeld or ‘man payment’, according to ancient Germanic law, was the compensation paid by an offender to the injured party in order to prevent blood revenge. The blood price was 5

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For some general considerations: I. Schmidt-Voges, S. Westphal, V. Arnke, T. Bartke (eds.), Pax perpetua: Neuere Forschungen zum Frieden in der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2010). Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm: http://woerterbuchnetz.de /DWB/. Dinges, ‘Justice als soziale Kontrolle’; Schwerhoff, Aktenkundig und gerichtsnotorisch; Eriksson and Krug-Richter (eds.), Streitkulturen. Frauenstädt, Blutrache.

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fixed according to the type of injury and the social status of the parties. The rise of Roman Law in the late Middle Ages did nothing to undermine this principle. What changed was the growing involvement of the courts and the Catholic Church in the arbitration process. The pronouncement of rulers, such as Emperor Charles IV in 1375, against blood revenge reflects the growing feeling that customary law codes were morally faulty and required oversight. The Church developed a panoply of expiatory rituals and penances which required the offender to properly atone for their crime. Typically, this involved a combination of pious works, pilgrimage, masses for the deceased’s soul and the erection of a cross. These were frequently written into reconciliation agreements, either as part of court settlements or appended to the bloody money compensation imposed by the court. It has also been argued that the decentralised nature of the Holy Roman Empire contributed to conflict resolution. Representative and corporate institutions were supplemented by numerous ad hoc commissions, or Tagfahrten, dedicated to making peace and bringing feuds under control.9 It used to be thought this ended in the sixteenth century when violence came under the purview of the public peace and was no longer a matter for private settlement. The 1532 Carolina, which required a formal investigative procedure, or inquisition, and prescribed the death penalty for homicide and restricted mitigating circumstances, is still commonly thought to have replaced the traditional system with outright state repression. In fact, this did not happen for the reason that the new system was not incompatible with traditional practices. The Carolina was not a binding text and, in any case, Roman Law was not a closed system; it sat alongside customary law. The new jurisprudence continued to be shaped by social expectations. There were all sorts of possible mitigating circumstances for acts of violence in particular. Anything that smacked of a provocation or threat to honour justified a remission of sentence or a pardon. The social standing and reputation of the parties continued to be crucial to the outcome of a case. Even an Enlightenment jurist like Christian Thomasius argued in 1719 that blood money compensation was the best way of dealing with the murder of a social inferior.10 German practice in the sixteenth century was catching up with the more centralised systems that had existed in France and Italy since the fourteenth century – punishment was in theory severe but in practice the system was governed by the ubiquity of pardons and out-of-court settlements. The significance of the reforms was to give the state greater purview over private settlements. Sovereign authority was enhanced by the exercise of grace through 9

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F. Dirks, Konfliktaustragung im norddeutschen Raum des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Rupprecht, 2015). H. Lück, ‘Zur Entstehung des peinlichen Strafrechts in Kursachsen’, in Rudolph and Schnabel-Schüle (eds.), Justiz = Justice = Justicia? p. 281.

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pardons and remissions. In Württemberg, where the Carolina was incorporated into the territorial law code of 1552, the centralisation of control allowed the duke to perform the task of ‘fatherly arbitrator’.11 The advantages and disadvantages of using traditional blood money compensation alongside the Carolina can be seen from the duchy of Mecklenburg, where the new code was gradually introduced in the sixteenth century. It created a flexible system whose outcome depended greatly on the arbitrary will of the prince. In 1747, for example, the courts were ordered to desist from an inquisitorial procedure when Restorff auf Pritz was by killed Rittmeister von Zülow and use ‘the ordinary accusatory fiscal procedure’, that is civil compensation. The system was a cheap way for the state to regulate aristocratic violence, being predicated on the ability of the plaintiff to fund a criminal prosecution. It bolstered ducal authority, which profited financially from transactional justice and politically from the exercise of favour. The downside, as the Schwerin chancellery complained in 1710, was that it did little to control ‘the many excesses of noblemen’ for which they blamed a lack of ‘personnel, prisons and means to conduct criminal investigations’.12 Although the Carolina influenced norms throughout the Empire, it was never introduced in many regions. Electoral Saxony, Brandenburg, Magdeburg and other ‘Saxon’ territories, for example, continued to rely heavily on the thirteenth-century customary law, the Sachsenspiegel, which upheld the principle that even the most heinous crimes could be paid for.13 The realm of private negotiation was restricted in 1572 in the Electorate and henceforth all legal judgments had to be sent to Leipzig for review. But the essence of a system which promoted arbitration and reconciliation at every stage of the process did not change: the most common form of punishment, as it had been in the Middle Ages, was banishment, a penalty which opened up the possibility of reintegration and reconciliation with the community. Saxony was one of the most important regions for the development of jurisprudence because of the influence throughout the Empire of the Saxon jurist Benedict Carpzov (1595– 1666). Carpzov was a promotor of arbitrary sentencing against a mechanical interpretation of the Carolina, especially in relation to homicide. Carpzov summarised the variants of homicide: premeditated (dolus); negligent (culpos); accidental (casuale); necessarium (unavoidable). The last three were not capital offences. Carpzov admitted that when honour was at stake blood money was the best form of atonement.14 11

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S. Pohl, ‘Schuldmindernde Umstände im römischen Recht’, in Rudolph and SchnabelSchüle (eds.), Justiz = Justice = Justicia? p. 244. A. Glöckler, ‘Das Compositionen-System und das Strafrechtsverfahren in Mecklenburg im 16. und im Anfange des 17. Jahrhunderts’, Jahrbücher des Vereins für Mecklenburgische Geschichte und Altertumskunde, 15 (1850), 149. Lück, ‘Kursachsen’. Ludwig, Herz der Justitia, pp. 77–85.

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In many respects dispute settlement differed little from practice elsewhere in Europe. However, there were some peculiar features of the peace in the feud in Germany that are worth exploring in more detail. This chapter sets out the traditional practices of Sühne, its interaction with the law and the Church, and some reasons for its decline in the seventeenth century. This pattern needs to be placed in the context of wider social and cultural change. Like other northern Europeans, Germans did not develop the sophisticated ethicopolitical treatises that the problem of violence encouraged in Italy, and the domain was largely left to moralising sermons. But during this period, educated Germans were exposed to new stoic ideas about peace. German egodocuments are especially rich in their ruminations on quarrels and the ups and downs of peacemaking. So rich is the material that it requires separate treatment. This chapter confines itself to some observations about the experience of the law. ***

Peacemaking in late medieval Europe was underpinned by the Roman Law concept of satisfaction. In Roman Law it meant ‘to do enough to prevent an angry party from taking vengeance’. This formed the basis of the medieval sacrament of penance instituted at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. It required the sinner to offer a combination of prayers, alms and deeds to compensate for the pain they had caused. The institution complemented traditional practices of Wergeld and court judgments regularly stipulated both penances and financial compensation for murder. In Germany there was wide latitude in deals, and the stipulations and process varied according to time and place. A comprehensive example was registered at the court at Weißenstadt in Franconia in 1504. The killers of Andreas Schuster promised: 1. To go on pilgrimage to Rome, but otherwise they can pay another to do it in their place. They must however go on pilgrimage to Aachen in person and provide evidence for it. 2. To put up a stone cross seven feet high and five feet wide on the pond dam near Saint Wolfgang’s church. 3. To pay for masses for the soul of the victim in the church of Our Lady. 4. To pay for an honourable burial with thirty priests and fifty-five candles for carrying to the grave. 5. To beg pardon in front of the priests and the whole kindred and request that, God willing, they be forgiven. 6. To pay the widow and her children 100 Gulden. 7. To pay all costs.15 15

W. Stadelmann, ‘Ueber den äußern Stand des Kirchenwesens in der Dechanten Wunsiedel vor der Reformation’, Archiv für Geschichte und Altertumskunde von Oberfranken, 5 (1853), 121.

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In some regions traditional practices might be incorporated, such as the ritual of the ‘todt Hand’, in which the killer asked ritually three times for forgiveness and the plaintiff then reached across the grave and passed him the severed hand of the victim. The killer dropped the hand in the grave and handed over the compensation payment. Once the dead hand was buried hatred was banished. Even before the sixteenth century the courts were claiming a role in the settlement process, calibrating the satisfaction according to the victim’s status and the gravity of the crime. There is some evidence that the system was moving towards a more straightforward system of monetary compensation and that pilgrimages, vigils, offices and masses were of secondary importance to the cash. Christian ideals were being compromised by haggling. For this reason, the Tyrolean Landesordnung of 1526 removed negotiations over cash from the bargaining.16 The widespread resort to indulgences in the Renaissance also subverted the original meaning and purpose of satisfaction. The coup de grâce was delivered by the Reformation – the sacrament of penance was one of the main targets of the Reformers, who would have no truck with satisfaction since Christ had already done full satisfaction for all men’s sins. Luther fulminated against Aquinas and other ‘sophists’ and attacked the idea of satisfaction.17 The Counter-Reformation Church was hostile too. But satisfaction for murder survived nonetheless. In Eichstätt, for example, the stipulation that reconciliations had to be registered with the episcopal chancery was enforced from 1465.18 The fiscal incentive for this should not be underestimated: charters had to be purchased and petitions from outside the diocese were accepted. Between 1465 and 1587, when the records cease, the number of charters issued per decade did not usually reach double figures. The exception was the peak in the 1540s and 1550s when the court registered sixteen charters per decade. The fact that this was double the rate for any other decade is further evidence of the impact that civil war had within communities. The judicial oversight of the process can be gleaned from the fact that many killers spent time in prison before the agreement was sealed and were forced to swear an Urfehde, an oath which bound them over to keep the peace. The evidence suggests that the level of fines and compensation increased in the sixteenth century at the expense of the penances. In Swabia, for example, the requirement for pilgrimage had largely been replaced by the end of the sixteenth century in favour of atonement in the local church (Kirchenbuße), the setting of a stone cross and compensation.19 Despite its more transactional nature and the worries of 16 17 18

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Frauenstädt, Blutrache, p. 138. Luther’s Works, XXVII, p. 52. O. Rieder, ‘Totschlagsühnen im Hochstift Eichstätt nach beispielen aus dem 15. Und 16. Jahrhundert’, Sammelblatt des Historischen Vereins Eichstätt, 6 (1891), 1–58. F. Baumann and G. Tumbült (eds.), Mitteilungen aus dem F. Fürstenbergischen Archive Herausgegeben von der Fürstlichen Archivverwaltung in Donaueschingen, 2 vols.

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Reformers, Sühne was seen to bring both temporal and earthly rewards. The Lutheran Hans von Schweinichen bragged about how he brought two warring brothers together: and composed them to peace (in der Sühne) and at the same time to lay off each other and unite in brotherly fashion, and drew up a written agreement between them. Thereby I did for God an agreeable work in reconciling the two brothers, for which I gained great fame because previously his princely grace and his counsellors had not been able to accommodate them.20

Evidence for both continuity and change can be gleaned from the fate of expiatory crosses, or Sühnekreuze, which commonly formed part of the deals. Present-day Germany is still dotted with them: 7,500 stone crosses have been documented so far, 1,300 remain undocumented and at least 1,500 are known to have disappeared altogether.21 Crosses built from wood survive only in the few documents that mention them.22 Not all of the crosses were put to the memory of murder victims, but thousands were, largely before the seventeenth century. As one late medieval document makes clear, they were intended to ‘put an end to such homicides happening again’.23 Dating a Sühnekreuz is difficult because of the general absence of documentary evidence. It is wrong to assume that it was a medieval practice that fell into disuse after the Reformation. The weathered stonework often makes them appear more ancient than is the case. Some are dateable (Figure 7.1). While the broadsword carved on the cross at Zillerthal-Erdmannsdorf might suggest a medieval provenance, the date shows that it was put up in 1586.24 Firearms, such as the pair of early pistols carved on the cross at Simmershausen in Thuringia, clearly demonstrate a post-1550 provenance.25 The records show that crosses for the purpose of atonement were still part of Catholic reconciliations in Moravia and Bohemia into the seventeenth century. The data from Swabia from 1549 to 1631 is particularly rich. In 1550, for example, Hans Bentzing was ordered by the count of Fürstenberg to put up a cross for killing Thomas Meyer, but the local church forbade this on the grounds that Bentzing was a Protestant. The latest documented case in 1631 involved the intervention

20 21 22

23 24

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(Tübingen, 1894 and 1902), II, pp. 111, 388, 803. For a pilgrimage to Einsiedeln in 1582: B. Losch, Steinkreuze in Baden-Württemberg (Stuttgart: Theiss, 1981), p. 260. Oesterley (ed.), Denkwürdigkeiten, p. 406. ‘Statistische Auswertung der Standort-Datenbank’: www.suehnekreuz.de/. D. Wojtucki, ‘“. . . ein steynen Crewtze an die stelle setzen, do der Todslag gescheen ist . . .”: Schlesische Sühneverträge vom 14. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert’, Forschungen zur Rechtsarchäologie und Rechtlichen Volkskunde, 24 (2006), 187–210. Rieder, ‘Totschlagsühnen’, 5. www.suehnekreuz.de/; M. Hellmich, Steinerne Zeugen mittelalterlichen Rechtes in Schlesien (Liegnitz, 1923). H. Köber, Die alten Steinkreuze und Sühnesteine Thüringens (Gutenberg, 1960), p. 67.

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Figure 7.1 Stone cross at Lagenau (Czernica) in Silesia, inscribed with a pistol and dated 1661

of both the bishop of Augsburg and the abbot of Kempten, who stipulated two crosses, one at the murder scene and the other at the grave.26 Change was already apparent as pilgrimages were not stipulated in any of these contracts. In Swabia murder crosses and pilgrimages do not seem to have survived the Thirty Years’ War. Pilgrimages, at least, continued for a time in other regions, such as Pfalz-Neuburg, where the duke ordered one to Padua in 1679.27 The attraction to the people who put them up points to the many functions of Sühnekreuze. Crosses in fields and waysides warded off evil spirits. It was believed that those dying suddenly and without the last rites were doomed to walk the earth as maleficent spirits. Murderers, as Hamlet makes clear, had much to fear from the ghosts of their victims. The intervention of the authorities indicates perhaps some uneasiness at the superstitious uses to which stones might be put. Crosses no longer served to appease an angry God, nor 26

27

F. Baumann and G. Tumbült (eds.), Quellen zur Geschichte des F. Hauses Fürstenberg und seines ehedem reichsunmittelbaren Gebietes, 2 vols (Tübingen, 1894–1902); M. Dömling, ‘Sühnekreuze im Landkreis Marktoberdorf’, Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Schwaben, 59/60 (1969), 326–9; Brunotte and Weber (eds.), Reichskammergerichts, VII, p. 424. Rieder, ‘Totschlagsühnen’, pt II, 6.

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formed part of the penance that atoned for a sin, but were rather a sign that peace had been made and served as a memorial to the victim. For example, the court at Zwittau (Svitavny) in Moravia made it clear that the rituals it imposed on Jacob Weydner in 1585 were exemplary and not good works. Having paid compensation, he was ordered: to perform atonement (Buß) as an example to others: for nine Sundays during services walk on his knees while holding a burning candle to the cemetery, stopping at the grave of the deceased. He must ask the widow, children, kin and the other villagers three times in God’s name to forgive him . . . and where he had committed the act to put up a stone cross as a memorial and landmark for eternity.28

The change from penance to memorialisation was influenced by the Renaissance reification of glory. Memorialising duels and encounters announced that the victim had died a beautiful death and that his deeds would live on. We can tell this from surviving inscriptions. In 1543, for example, after twelve years of enmity a peace deal was finally brokered by the bishop of Worms to satisfy the killing of Christoph von Lerch. Although both victim and killer were Catholics, the penances were converted into a cash payment which supported the hospital at Dirmstein.29 The cross put up by the victim’s father was a memorial in honour of his son, not an expiatory cross. In Protestant areas this transformation from atonement to memorialisation was more systematic. The killing of Busso von Alvensleben by the Asseburg brothers, Asche and Hans Ernst, on 6 November 1576 was a serious matter.30 Busso’s father had amassed a fortune as counsellor to the archbishop of Magdeburg, and Busso’s sister Elisabeth was betrothed to marry August von Asseburg, Domherr of Magdeburg. The elector of Saxony and the archbishop of Magdeburg intervened to prevent further bloodshed and set up an arbitration meeting at Aschersleben on 13–15 August 1577. The demonstration of force that this involved – the Alvensleben arrived with 218 horse and the Asseburg 250 – was tempered by their deference to the princely arbitrators and their Christian obligations. Both sides were backed by powerful patrons and supported by teams of lawyers. Asseburg was supported by thirty-two noblemen, including the duke of Braunschweig and the counts of Mansfeld. Alvensleben came with three of his own lawyers and thirty-five noblemen, and his patrons, the elector of Brandenburg and the bishop of Halberstadt, sent 28

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A. Czerny, ‘Beschreibung der Steinkreuze und Kreuzsteine der ehemaligen deutschen Sprachinsel Schönhengstgau’, Mitteilungen zur Volkskunde des Schönhengster Landes, 3 (1907), 74–5. www.suehnekreuz.de/; B. Schnabel, ‘Die Steinkreuze in Rheinhessen’, Alzeyer Geschichtsblätter, 15 (1980), 155–9. S. Wohlbrück, Geschichtliche Nachrichten von dem Geschlechte Alvensleben, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1819), III, pp. 31–3.

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their own lawyers, including the Professor of Law at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder. The Asseburg brothers offered an expression of ‘heartfelt sorrow’, begging them ‘out of Christian love and kinship to forgive and excuse the injury and misfortune that they had happened to cause’, offering in return ‘demonstrations of honour, love and service’. In addition, they agreed to pay the dead man’s father 2000 Thalers and avoid any gatherings, meetings and festivities at which the Alvensleben were present, and to give way to them on the open road. In 1581 they performed some sort of ritual of reconciliation presided over by the Dompropst of Halberstadt. The duke of Braunschweig was assured in a letter that Asseburg honour had not been compromised and the matter had been made ‘right, although several people appeared to be sour (sawer) about it’.31 The real sign that the families were no longer in enmity was the fact that the marriage between Elisabeth von Alvensleben and August von Asseburg went ahead in spite of the killing. More detail on rituals can be gleaned from the contemporaneous deal between the von Brockdorff and the von Rantzau. The reconciliation between them took place in St Nicholas church, Kiel in front of thirty-six people – twelve men, twelve women and twelve maidens – who pledged guarantees for the murderer’s future good behaviour. The main point of the oaths which were sworn was to restore the wounded honour of the victim’s family. In turn, the injured party promised to forgive the killer and the peace was complete.32 The traditional role of women as intercessors for clemency is worth noting here. The fact that it took place in church suggests that we should be wary of seeing the process of peacemaking as becoming wholly secularised or disenchanted. As part of his atonement, the killer of Wendel von Lichtenstein, in the presence of sixty-four Franconian Lutheran princes, lords and officials, blamed his actions on the devil: ‘before this time . . . [they] had been in good friendship and trust, but unfortunately due to the work of the enemy of mankind a pitiful death had occurred’.33 The Reformation hastened changes that were already apparent in the Middle Ages. Although murder stones no longer served to sanctify the spot where blood had been spilled, they continued to be erected as a memorial to the victim. A 1574 document from the Lutheran town of Blomberg in the county of Lippe records that ‘as is customary in such cases, one will put a stone cross four feet high and five feet wide, where the authorities indicate’.34 31

32 33

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Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv WO 27 Alt Nr. 822, Curdt von Schwichelde to Julius zu Brunschweig-Luneberg, 21 August 1581. Jespersen, ‘Fehdekultur’, 95. J. Mötsch, ‘“Zur Rettung meiner Ehr”: Der Totschlag an Wendel von Lichtenstein (1563) und die Vermittlerrolle des Grafen George Ernst von Henneberg’, HennebergischFränkischen Geschichtsvereins, 13 (1998), 186. P. Rupke, ‘Was bedeutet der kreuzstein auf dem kirchhofe in Deutsch-Sagar?’, Crossener Kreiskalender (1938), 149.

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Alvensleben erected a cross at Hundisburg in honour of his murdered son’s memory.35 And the compensation he received was not a straightforward cash payment: Alvensleben donated the money to found a hospital on his domain at Hundisburg, demonstrating Protestant links with medieval piety. In Protestant Silesia expiatory crosses were still part of deals in 1600, though these might now be replaced by an epitaph in a church.36 At Protestant Großheppach in the duchy of Württemberg an expiatory cross is engraved with an axe and carries the date of 1575. A 1621 ducal ordinance confirmed the legality of compensating for a killing (Totschlagsühne).37 The 2.3 metres-high memorial at Sontheim in Franconia dated 1650 and inscribed with the name Maria von Stein was put up to atone for the brutal murder of Hans Otto von Jarsdorf by her stepson, the Freiherr von Stein. More is known about the deal behind it because the case reached the imperial court in Vienna. Jarsdorf’s widow was put under pressure by the community of Swabian Imperial Knights to settle out of court. Stein’s father offered 7000 Gulden, but it was not paid in full on his death in 1655. The widow launched a criminal investigation. Stein’s lawyers claimed that he had been provoked, being called a ‘Jungen Rossmaul’ and ‘Maulaffe’, but he was fined 3000 Gulden and ordered to do two years’ military service.38 There was no mention of any cross in the judgment and presumably the edifice was part of the original 1650 settlement. Since there is no mention of the victim, this was less a memorial than a traditional symbol of atonement. The von Steins were Protestant but shared Niederstotzingen church with the Catholic cadet line. During the sixteenth century, therefore, monuments became more varied and their social function more differentiated: some of them were put up by condemned criminals; others were Renaissance monuments that signalled a glorious death in an encounter or combat, or remembered a murder victim, such as Dietrich von Mallinckrodt at Herdecke on the Ruhr (Figure 5.1).39 The Thirty Years’ War completed the process of turning murder stones from symbols of peace among the living into memorials for the dead. Reconciliation was inappropriate or impossible in the tsunami of violence. This was not simply a reflection of official attitudes. The cross put up in 1678 at Seifersdorf in Saxony to Herr George Hille was strictly commemorative, since his family refused a peace deal and the killer, despite pleas to the elector of Saxony, remained exiled in Lusatia.40 It was a practice that infuriated preachers like Johannes Schmidt who complained about a duellist who ‘put up 35 36 37 38 39

40

‘Hundisburg’: www.suehnekreuz.de/. Wojtucki, ‘. . . ein steynen Crewtze an die stelle setzen’. Losch, Steinkreuze, pp. xii, 43. Die Akten des Kaiserlichen Reichshofrats, Antiqua K111 Nr 12: http://rhrdigital.de. For example, T. Möller, ‘Sühne- und Erinnerungsmale’, in Schleswig-Holstein, Nordelbingen, 17/18 (1942), 119–21, Nr.12. W. Buchholz, ‘Die beiden Steinkreuze bei Seifersdorf’, Neues Archiv für Sächsische Geschichte, 49 (1928), 323–7.

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a monument, on which he could be remembered in that place his whole life long, without considering that shortly he would soon quit this life like the other’.41 The cross at Wandersleben near Gotha which commemorates the spot where Herr Christian Friedrich Carl von Bose was shot in a duel in 1717 was inscribed with the rather ambiguous motif: ‘My blood has freed me from hellish revenge; My blood here cries for God’s revenge.’42 This is a clear indication of the ways in which Christian sentiments and the honour code coexisted at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Switzerland provides a completely different point of departure, as several cantons maintained the traditional system of law that balanced the right to revenge and Christian reconciliation intact into the eighteenth century. In 1603, for example, the court at Schwyz declared Leonard Silder a murderer and: That the kin of the deceased have the right to take revenge, on land or water, in wood or field, on highway or byway, mountain or valley, with or without legal means, on Leonard Sidler’s body or on his kin up to the fourth degree.43

The law also stipulated that in order to avoid this fate the killer should recognise their guilt, go into exile and treat with the victim’s family over the appropriate compensation. The system was mediated by the courts – exile was typically for five years and the blood money payment set at 50 Gulden. A particularly scandalous case occurred in Schwyz in 1698 because it involved a duel between representatives of the town’s two leading families. Wolf Dietrich Reding von Biberegg, son of a leading official (Bannerherr), was killed and the perpetrator, Captain Franz Anton Schorno, fled.44 The killer’s family admitted his guilt in court, which ordered him to remain in exile for five years. Should he return during that time a revenge attack was legal. At the end of the period Schorno paid 1000 Gulden in fines to the court and 500 crowns in compensation. As elsewhere in the German-speaking lands, the atonement (Buße) was normally converted into a cash payment that replaced penances. However, this was not always the case and in another judgment from 1727 the court at Schwyz imposed penances for murder, which included pilgrimage to Einsiedeln and the erection of an expiatory cross. Although the court did not stipulate it, Schorno also seems to have agreed with the family to put up a cross in the deal that permitted him to return home in 1707 (Figure 7.2). The 41 42

43 44

Schmidt, Mordspiegel, p. 19. J.-F. Adloff, Historische Beschreibung der drei thüringischen Bergschlösser Gleichen, Mühlberg und Wachsenburg (Gotha, 1824), pp. 6–8. For an earlier duelling memorial: Losch, Steinkreuze, p. 281. Dettling, ‘Die Scharfrichter’, 4 February 1603. F.-X. von Weber, ‘Ein Sühnekreuz in Schwyz’, Forschungen zur Rechtsarchäologie und Rechtlichen Volkskunde, 4 (1982), 69–78.

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Figure 7.2 Sühnekreuz at Schwyz, Switzerland (1698)

inscription on the cross, which still stands today, recalls that Reding was ‘inadvertently and horribly run through’ and commends his soul to God. The fact that the Jesuits were involved in this reconciliation may have contributed to the survival or revival of traditional practices. But, in any case, the differences between Schwyz and other German-speaking parts of Europe were a matter of emphasis rather than form. In most of Europe, even before the Reformation, there was a disenchantment or secularisation of satisfaction, as penances were turned into compensation paid in cash and kind. The secularisation of penances also led to stipulations of exile (which usually meant paying a fine in order to return) or military service rather than pilgrimage. The sheer number of expiatory crosses that survive from Germany suggests that it was originally a Germanic custom, which spread to France and the Low Countries. The practice survived into the seventeenth century, and in some regions beyond, because such tokens were valued by the victim’s family as a form of consolation, even if they had lost their original penitential function. ***

The hostility of the Reformers to the practice of satisfaction has already been noted. God was not an angry God and did not require placating by offerings and penances. Satisfaction was not Christian peace because it was not done

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with the heart. Before the Reformation there was a growing belief that reconciliation with God was best dealt with by the examination of the conscience before confession. The theological justification for this was the revival of the Augustinian doctrine of justification. The Reformation hastened this process: in effect the regulation of the seven deadly sins was replaced by obedience to God’s commandments. In the new order neighbourly quarrels were no longer an inevitable consequence of the failings of human society but a sign of wickedness and turning away from God. Luther maintained elements of the Catholic liturgy, such as the mass and confession, but removed elements, such as the Pax, which were deemed unscriptural. He extended and expanded the late medieval assault on the gestures and rituals of peace. Following Augustine, true peace was defined as inner peace; that is peace with God. Whereas traditional piety saw gestures as public and essential, Luther made them private and optional. They were empty gestures: the kiss of peace was potentially a Judas kiss. The fact that the Anabaptists retained the fraternal kiss was another reason for rejection.45 The other Reformers went further. They abolished the mass altogether, but in accordance with humanist thinking they transferred its peacemaking function to secular institutions, notably the Calvinist consistory. The role of the consistory in settling disputes was much more popular than its role in policing morals. In many respects the consistory was borrowed from the communal courts of the late medieval city, which were highly successful in upholding neighbourliness. The continuity can be seen in the ordinance of the city of Berne (1528) which aimed at reducing hatred and envy by mediation. The control of duelling and challenges by stopping quarrels before they escalated was explicitly mentioned. The city transferred peacemaking from the liturgy to a secular court, the Chorgericht, whose main task was the reconciliation of quarrelling neighbours. Neighbourliness was not an empty word but had a strong ethical meaning that was related to civic order.46 In Reformed Berne, the Eucharist was transformed from a rite of peace into a sign of neighbourly love. One of the attractions of the Reformed Heidelberg Catechism (1563) over the Lutheran liturgy was the clarity with which this was set out. Lutheran territories later recognised this and the establishment of the Kirchenkonvent in Württemberg in 1642 was directly inspired by the success of Calvinist practice. The court was, in many respects, a return to medieval practice. It placed greater emphasis on the pastoral role of the pastor

45 46

Koslofsky, ‘The Kiss of Peace’. H.-R. Schmidt, ‘Pazifizierung des Dorfes – Struckture und Wandel von Nachbarschaftskonflikten vor Berner Sittengerichten 1570-1800’, in H. Schilling (ed.), Kirchenzucht und Sozialdisziplinierung im frühneuzeitlichen Europa (Berlin: Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung – Beiheft 16, 1994), pp. 91–128.

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as mediator of enmity and reinforced the Christian message of peace and unity.47 Luther had less knowledge of and respect for the role of civic institutions than the humanist Reformers. In this respect, Luther was closer to the religious radicals who rejected civil society altogether and whom he denounced as ‘fanatics’. Following St Paul, Luther taught that true Christians had no need of human law: ‘The law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless.’48 Although Luther took his pastoral duties as a peacemaker very seriously, this reasoning meant that he paid little attention to the secular institutions that might help Christians be more charitable to one another. For Luther, the Gospels contained everything that was required for peace. The Lectures on Galatians (1535) reveal this continuing strain of utopian thinking in Luther’s theology. He attacked the scholastics and other ‘sophists’ who taught that loving your neighbour only means ‘wishing him well’. Lawyers were associated with the sophists, who sold counterfeit love. This was not good enough for God: ‘the whole of the law is contained in “You shall love your neighbour as you love yourself.” If you observe this law you fulfil all.’ This was something that we feel in our hearts and did not require the law or mediators. It was the devil who keeps us from knowledge of the Commandment: ‘Such is the amazing craft of the devil that he is not only able to remove this noble object from my mind with great skill but even to persuade my heart of the exactly opposite opinion, so that it regards a neighbour as worthy, not of love but of the bitterest hatred.’49 This privileging of the search for inner peace over civil peace explains the initial failure of the Lutheran Church to establish an institution that complemented the secular courts. This did not mean that secular courts throughout Lutheran territories did not continue to spend most of their time arbitrating and reconciling disputes but rather that Lutheran teaching was suspicious and even hostile to their role, for within the legal settlement of disputes lurked enmity. The practical effects of this can be seen in Luther’s simplistic approach to the problem of honour. He railed against ‘quarrelsome young noblemen who immediately draw and unsheathe their swords on account of one word’. The cause of this was not a civil disagreement, but a sign that they were ‘children of the devil’.50 Only the sacrament of holy communion guaranteed reconciliation. Since the problem of enmity was essentially one of the heart, the solution to the problem lay within and this explains why the Lutheran liturgy 47

48 49 50

H. Schnabel-Schüle, Überwachen und Strafen im Territorialstaat: Bedingungen und Auswirkungen des Systems strafrechtlicher Sanktionen im frühneuzeitlichen Württemberg (Cologne, Böhlau, 1999), pp. 163–4. See also: Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual, p. 127. Luther’s Works, XLV, p. 89. Luther’s Works, XVII, pp. 54–8. Luther’s Works, XXI, p. 39.

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retained such an emphasis on individual preparation for holy communion through confession.51 The pastor was to withhold the sacrament should neighbours not demonstrate true contrition. Calvinists also used excommunication to discipline the faithful, but they saw the Eucharist differently; it was a rite of collective repentance and where they took over in Germany they abolished confession and absolution. The Lutheran Church was slower to develop practices that promoted social unity. The superintendents, who oversaw the administration of the church, played a very different role from the consistory, being primarily concerned with conformity. The new Lutheran liturgy was demanding. The faithful were required to attend services at an absolute minimum on every Sunday morning, but often at least once more per month. Attendance was dependent on prior scrutiny by the pastor. Strictness in these matters led people to stay away from church. Lawsuits were no different in this regard. Nicolaus Sastrow excused himself from holy communion for many years on the grounds of his lawsuits. His son was so concerned that, while a student at Wittenberg in 1540, he urged Luther to write to his father and remind him that ‘we are at no hour secure in life’ and that such behaviour put his salvation in danger. Luther urged the father to reconsider: ‘let the law fall to those who judge the law, while forgiving them who have done me wrong and go to holy communion. By doing this you will not be unworthy.’52 However, feuds with neighbours continued to be one of the main reasons for non-attendance at church.53 In his 1625 sermon against fighting, murderous provocations and challenges, the superintendent of Chemnitz, Zacheus Faber, made it clear that the pastor should bar anyone from attending Eucharist who did not have a clear conscience.54 Some tried to avoid confession by feigning illness. Others, such as the sacristan of Reichenbach in Hesse, were more cunning. He demonstrated his contempt for the pastor by keeping his hat on during church services. When challenged about this ‘incivility’, the sacristan complained that the hat was essential because he had a headache.55 Pastor Albert Cuppius, who served among the miners of the Harz Mountains, met great resistance in his attempts to enforce discipline by withholding the sacraments. This came to a head in the 1620s. Instead of offering solace, he portrayed the chaos of war as a sign of God’s wrath at his parishioner’s sins. Anyone suspected of counterfeit contrition was excluded from communion. The threat posed by his rigorism to social harmony caught the attention of his superiors and he was summoned to 51 52 53 54

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For this and following: Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual, pp. 92–122. Mohnike (ed.), Sastrowen, I, pp. 185–6. Goodale, ‘Intimidation, Intolerance, and Injury’; Sabean, Power in the Blood, chapter 1. Z. Faber, Antimonomachia. Das ist: Was von dem Morderischen provociren, Ausfordern, Balgen, Stechen und Kugelwechelsen der heutigen verblendeten und verstocken Welt – Besials – und Mordkinder zu halten? (Leipzig, 1625). Kunz and Lizalek (eds.), Südhessische Chroniken, pp. 50–1.

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Wolfenbüttel to account for his overzealousness.56 At Beendkirchen in Hesse nobody in the village appeared for Christmas holy communion in 1615 because the pastor was in a dispute with three families, and eventually he was removed from his position.57 These incidents are suggestive of the pressures that pastors faced in a system where the principal mechanism for arbitration was confession and communion. Social harmony was much more likely to be achieved when confession was formulaic. The exercise of discipline was also negated by retaining the Catholic practice of Beichtpfennig, the fee that was paid to the pastor following absolution.58 This amounted to a conflict of interest: pastors who refused absolution would be out of pocket. If the penitent were rich this was a considerable inconvenience: the apothecary Michael Wahlberg paid 8 Gulden each for himself and his wife and 2 Gulden for each child to be absolved – and they took communion four times a year.59 Ensuring that his church was full and harmony among his flock was maintained therefore required the pastor’s careful judgement. The survival of traditional festive culture across large parts of Protestant Germany is suggestive of the ways in which many Lutheran pastors were apt to turn a blind eye to what the more rigorous saw as immoral behaviour. The German custom of Bierbußen (literally, atonement by beer) a beer fine, akin to the English church ale, was popular because offenders paid their fine into a communal pot, which provided a drink for everyone at the next feast day. The fear that such events bred immorality and disorder led authorities to order Bierbußen to be converted into cash fines payable into the communal coffers.60 But the practice survived, especially where officials and pastors recognised its value. In 1730 the peace commissioners in a border dispute between two villages near Hanover ordered that as a part of the deal the two sides should share a tun of beer and dance with each other. Having downed his drink, one commissioner toasted: ‘Once everyone has drunk a peace pint they should say: “that makes peace and unity, the devil has the quarrel”’. To which one of the disputants quipped: ‘To the devil’s health; it’s worth it for peace and unity!’61 These practices were part of the masculine drinking culture that was an essential feature of artisan and student life and which served to foster male 56

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59 60

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O. von Heinemann (ed.), ‘Der Zellerfelder Chronik des Magisters Albert Cuppius’, Zeitschrift des Harz-Vereins fur Gescichte un Altertumskunde, 28 (1895), 253–360. Kunz and Lizalek (eds.), Südhessische Chroniken, p. 121. J. Strom, Orthodoxy and Reform: The Clergy in Seventeenth Century Rostock (Tübingen: Mohr and Siebeck, 1999), pp. 114–15; Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual, pp. 104–6. Hausbuch des Apothekers Walburger, II, p. 411. H. Wunder, Die bäuerliche Gemeinde in Deutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), p. 66; K.-S. Kramer, Die Nachbarschaft als bäuerliche Gemeinschaft (Munich: Bayerische Heimatsforschung, 1954), p. 41. J. Peters, Mit Pflug und Gänsekiel. Selbstzeugnisse schreibender Bauern: Eine Anthologie (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), p. 106.

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bonding and fraternity. On the other hand, the German who became quarrelsome after too much drink was a stereotype throughout Europe. A seventeenth-century French pamphlet advised its readers to avoid making peace deals in taverns ‘in the German fashion’.62 Another potential flashpoint in the religious calendar was the parish fair, or Kirchweih, the annual celebration of communal harmony, which is addressed in Chapter 13. Luther had wanted to abolish these as ungodly, but their survival demonstrates the Lutheran capacity to adapt to popular culture. The other weapon that pastors had in their armoury against enmity was the sermon. To all intents and purposes this replaced the Pax as the central focus for the laity during Protestant services. Since all that was required for salvation was contained in scripture, human gestures of peacemaking were no longer preparation for communion. Following Luther’s death, the counts of Mansfeld fell out once again and there was an arbitration meeting at Mansfeld castle on 10 November 1555, at which the superintendent of the county, Erasmus Sarcerius, expounded on the Sermon on the Mount.63 His sermon tells us a lot about the role of the pastor in dispute settlement, Lutheran teaching on reconciliation and popular misconceptions about peacemaking. Sarcerius did not take part in the negotiations and differentiated between the legal amicable settlement (gütliche Verhandlung) and neighbourly reconciliation (Versöhnung). The former was a means to the latter and he urged his audience to undertake the negotiations in a friendly spirit. But the problem with legal haggling was that it awakes ‘envy, hatred and contention’. Judgements were often unjust and gave birth to worse misery – feuds, arson and murder. In contrast, neighbourly reconciliation and forgiveness were in preparation for eternal life; they are what get us into heaven. The earthly reward is a clear conscience: forgiving one’s neighbour is a sign that God will also forgive us; it permits us to take holy communion. Sarcerius answered various common objections to the Gospel insistence on reconciliation: that it applied to the poor but not to lords and princes; that the Gospels allowed freedom to pick and choose who it applied to; that it was not necessary for salvation; that it was of no practical use. Perhaps the most serious opposition was to the widespread belief that an injured party should be compensated before forgiveness was forthcoming. Sarcerius recognised that the idea of restitution was contained in scripture. But he insisted it was not always appropriate. In any case, no party was free of sin. He admitted that these laws were ‘tough and onerous’, but only for the worldly. The Christian abides by God’s law and always knows when they have done wrong. The most difficult aspect of forgiveness was the requirement that it be heartfelt. This demand lay at the heart of the tension between the ideal of 62

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S. Carroll, ‘The Peace in the Feud in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France’, Past and Present, 178 (2003), 87. Eine Predigte gethan auff dem Schloss Mansfelt im anfang der guetlichen vnterhandlung dis jars 1555 den 10. Novemb. (Eisleben, 1556).

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brotherly love and the reality of everyday life. The problem for the true Christian, as one sermon explained, was that it was difficult to avoid evil people and hard to reconcile when ‘love among men is almost lost, such that there is so little peace among people, but only enmity in every street and alleyway’.64 The danger for the good Christian was that with so many evil people about, it was ‘difficult to avoid getting wet in the downpour’. This was not simply an everyday inconvenience, for as St Paul prophesied, those who were not reconciled before the Second Coming would be damned. Luther’s loathing of the law and lawyers was later tempered by the challenge of the Radical Reformation and the utopian attempt to establish separate communities of the Godly. Orthodox Lutheran sermons were at pains to distinguish their misgivings about the failings of human law from the outright rejection of it by religious radicals. But the tension in Lutheran theology between earthly and eternal peace remained a constant preoccupation of sermons. A 1667 Hamburg sermon denounced any form of dissimulation in reconciliation: ‘everyone utters lies to his neighbour; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak. May the Lord cut off all flattering lips’. Those who did not make peace with love would be reckoned with at the Final Judgement.65 One of the most revealing contributions to the debate was the 1588 sermon by Moses Pflacher, the widely published pastor of Kempten.66 Pflacher distinguished three forms of reconciliation: the judicial, the out-of-court settlement and the Christian. The first was the least advisable. Of course, no Christian was forbidden from going to the law, as the Anabaptists claimed; it was not a sign of ‘blood enmity’, so long as the parties hated the matter in hand and not each other. But the problem remained that the law was not true reconciliation but in actual fact another form of feud, since people are apt to ‘start a war over a bushel of straw or a word said in jest’.67 As in any war even the winners can be damaged and lawyers are akin to profiteers. For this reason, ‘amicable or civil reconciliation, where pious, honourable, wise and peace-loving people compound their neighbourly tensions and disputes’ was preferable. Pflacher saw something of Christ in this. But since, in their minds, both parties still think they are in the right, this was not a Christian peace, which entailed recognition that one was at fault. He proposed something that was rooted in the medieval sacrament of penance, namely satisfaction (Abtrag) following confession. On the principle that there should be no remission of sin without restitution, the offender must not only apologise but also ‘recompense the injury and pay for the damage caused’.68 Scripture was full of examples of expiatory offerings: 64 65 66 67 68

M. Pflacher, Christliche Predigt von brüderlicher Versonung (Tübingen, 1588), p. 1. J. Cruseaus, Des bußfertigen Sünders Versöhnungskuß (Hamburg, 1667). Pflacher, Christliche Predigt. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 19.

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words could heal insults, damaged honour could be restored and acts of harm could be repaired by works. Even a heinous injury to life and honour could be satisfied by an equivalent compensation. This was not dissimilar to Jesuit teaching. But unlike the Jesuits, who elaborated a significant case law and inspired manuals on the matter, Pflacher offered no practical advice to confessors on how reconciliation was to be achieved. He expected the true Christian to step forward of their own accord and offer forgiveness. In contrast to the Jesuits, whose humanist training taught them that the difficulties encountered by peacemakers were due to the shortcomings of civil society and that private peace between individuals contributed to the public good, Pflacher identified a different problem and offered an appropriately different antidote. The failure to make peace was caused by the threefold devil who holds people back: Claudens Cor, he who closes the heart to the confession of wrongdoing; Claudens Os, he who closes the mouth and the tongue to a public confession or apology; Claudens Manus, he who closes the hand and prevents one from giving over what is owed to God and the law. To approach the sacrament without reconciling with your brother put you in jeopardy of eternal damnation. It was tantamount to defiling the life and blood of Christ. And in spite of his defence of satisfaction and reconciliation as a good work, peace was defined essentially as an inward state. It did not matter a jot how many times you took communion, went to church or did your devotions if you remained unreconciled in your heart. A ton of honey cannot make a handful of wormwood tasty: ‘Envy, hatred, enmity spoil all your churchgoing, praying, sermon-listening and sacrament-taking.’69 Pflacher represents one strain in Lutheran thought. Luther’s scorn about man’s capacity for good in general and lawyers in particular was offset by the more optimistic attitude of his chief lieutenant, Philipp Melanchthon. Melanchthon’s commentary on Aristotle’s Politics (1529) was a defence of civil society against the prophets of the Radical Reformation. Melanchthon’s ideas had a major impact on Calvin’s own thinking on the utility of social and political organisation: civil society enabled humanity to protect itself from barbarity and protect true religion. This humanist train of thinking, firmly rooted in the urbanised south-west, spread east. Thomas Günther, the preacher appointed by the Schönburg family to serve at its domain at Glauchau (Saxony), wrote a pamphlet in 1562 on the ‘great division which afflicts everyone everywhere’.70 What marks out Günther’s from the other sermons on peacemaking is that it is peppered with references to classical texts. As well as the promise of eternal life and a clear conscience, Günther thought that neighbourly reconciliation had earthly utility: forgiving an injury also did honour to civil authority; it led to social peace; it gained one honour and 69 70

Ibid., p. 25. Ein Büchlien von der Christlichen und Brüderlichen Versöhnung zusammen gezogen (Leipzig, 1562).

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reputation; and it set an example to one’s social inferiors. For Günther peace was not built on love but rather on civility. We should talk well of our enemies and think the best of them and remember the proverb: ‘Friendly words make peace and unity.’ Reconciliation did not require atonement or abasement. This was close to the positive Jesuit view of the human capacity for peace and it is no surprise that a copy of his book ended up in a Jesuit library.71 The tension between peace with God and peace between neighbours was something which every pastor faced. For some it was easier to resolve than others. The completion of the new Rathaus at Reichenbach in Hesse in August 1601 was the setting for a sermon. The pastor assured his audience that the courtroom was a place where ‘justice and peace kissed each other’.72 While gestures and rituals lost efficacy in attaining God’s grace, they did not altogether lose their social value, which helps to explain the survival of the practices of Sühne across Germany into the seventeenth century. Ideally Christian and civil reconciliation complemented each other. The duke of Saxe-Gotha recorded in his diary the amicable settlement to a property dispute that took place after the parties had attended church on Sunday 22 January 1667: ‘the litigious matter was taken in hand and, God be praised, was settled through a peaceable agreement’.73 In Catholic Germany the evidence for the pastoral role of the clergy in peacemaking is much less rich.74 We have already noted the role played by the Jesuits in Switzerland, but their rural missions in France and Italy, where reconciliation of disputes played a prominent role, was not, it seems, replicated in Germany. It is clear, however, that the Catholic revival in the seventeenth century was most successful where it sought to revive worship and win back converts by adapting itself to the needs of the village commune. Austere forms of Counter-Reformation piety which emphasised frequent confession and communion found little resonance in the German countryside. Across Europe the installation of the confession box in the parish church marked the arrival of the Counter-Reformation and the use of the sacrament of penance to discipline the faithful. But in Germany the shift of confession from a collective to a private individual one was patchy at best. The confession box was prescribed in the diocese of Regensburg in 1591, but by 1656 many parishes still did not have them and even some that did preferred to continue with the old custom of using the sacristy.75 In the diocese of Speyer 71

72 73

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https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qho8AAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover& source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Kunz and Lizalek (eds.), Südhessische Chroniken, p. 20. R. Jacobsen (ed.), Friedrich I. von Sachsen-Gotha und Altenburg. Die Tagebücher 1667– 1686, 3 vols. (Weimar: Staatsarchivs Gotha), I, p. 50. For some general observations: J. Bossy, Peace in the Post-Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Chapter 3. T. Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter-Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 213–15.

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Catholicism revived precisely because it retained traditional practices, such as collective confession.76 And the re-catholicisation of the Upper Palatinate, following its annexation by Bavaria in 1621, was achieved by downplaying the importance of confession in order to encourage the faithful to take communion. The population found Catholic discipline softer and less restrictive than the Protestant version in which they had been schooled. From the little information we do have about reconciliation, it appears that there were similarities with the Protestant experience. Catholics put up memorial stones to honour murder victims in the seventeenth century. Feuds festered because enemies stayed away from church. In March 1603 a deal was sealed between Johann Möller and Jürgen zur Mühlen in front of the local judge, the priest and other witnesses in Westphalia with a ‘heartfelt handshake’. They had a punch-up in 1596 followed several months later by a knife fight in which a bystander was killed. For five years ‘due to their lasting hatred, envy and mutual disdain’ they did not partake of holy communion.77 Hermann Weinsberg’s confessor had until 1588 played the traditional role of peacemaker in family quarrels. Hermann was therefore horrified when a new young priest pulled out a schedule of questions for a thorough examination, including the question of whether he had ever considered murder.78 When challenged, the priest said he was poor and admitted that, in return for absolution, he was after a fee. Weinsberg expressed the widely held lay feeling: ‘I permit examination for the sake of peace and the common good, as long as other things are not questioned and poked into.’79 For the humanist-educated Weinsberg, confession was valuable insofar as it upheld social peace. But he was indignant when it was deployed as an instrument of subjugation to clerical authority. ***

In spite of the fact that or perhaps because he was a lawyer, Weinsberg was deeply sceptical of the role of the law in achieving true peace. Of course, ‘judicial war was better than a bloody war when no peace could be had’.80 The purpose of keeping his diary was to impart wisdom to his descendants and he was at pains to stress the financial and psychological toll that lawsuits took: They lead people astray in the head and don’t let you sleep . . . One must pursue the judges, lawyers, procurators, clerks, solicitors and their deputies, offering them nice words, honouring them and giving them gifts, 76

77 78

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M. Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). Wittke, Mord oder Todschlag? p. 228. www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de/Edition/Liber_Decrepitudinis/Liber_Decrepitudinis.htm, 4 June 1588. Ibid. Ibid., 20 April 1590.

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paying salaries and supporting costs, while also appearing modest towards the opposing party: not hating, not swearing and not slandering them, lest one gets into deeper trouble and the matter blows up.81

Experience taught him that there was no such thing in the law as right – there were only opinions. For judges were not impartial, a matter ‘not easily excused when it is caused by a mistake or ignorance, but great hurt when it is done intentionally out of hatred and spite’.82 For these reasons it was important not to stand too hard on one’s right. Everyone was free to settle whether the matter was in the right or not. It was a paternal duty of the head of household to stop people going to court ‘to spare them the great expense, the uncertainty of the duration and the judgment, to save them from trouble and danger’.83 There is qualitative as well as quantitative evidence that lawsuits and violence were part of the same problem; that people used the law to pursue enemies out of malice and that litigation might make feuds worse. Hans Kohlhase started his campaign of violence in the 1540s not because there was no law but because he did not believe the compensation offered to him was sufficient. He interpreted the failure of negotiations to adequately compensate him as an attack on his honour.84 In 1557 a laborious lawsuit required letters of safeguard to be issued against three Senfft brothers for public threats and a challenge to a duel.85 Hans von Schweinichen was more tormented by his enemy ‘than the Lord Christ by the Jews, for I was led from one judge to another’.86 The serving of writs was often interpreted as an insult, especially if the plaintiff was deemed to be of lesser social status.87 In a sense the Fehdebrief was replaced by the Schmähbrief, or libel, as a sign of enmity. Settlements might stipulate the burning of documents that contained insults and other defamatory material.88 One of the great achievements of the late medieval city was the development of a thick skein of institutions that kept the peace. Everyday life was regulated according to an expanding set of detailed police ordinances. The purpose of ‘good police’ was to promote order and foster informal mechanisms of social control. In principle this involved the expectation that amicable settlements, the so-called Taidigung, Tagung or gütlichen Tag, should be registered by a court. By the sixteenth century town councils had generally attained oversight over the settlement of conflicts. In civil matters police ordinances set out clear instructions which promoted arbitration and prevented quarrels from 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

Ibid., 30 May 1589. Ibid., 3 November 1593. Ibid., 25 March 1590. Dießelhorst and Duncker (eds.), Kohlhase, p. 29. Brunotte and Weber (eds.), Reichskammergerichts, II, p. 268. Denkwürdigkeiten von Hans von Schweinichen, p. 496. Fuchs, Um die Ehre, p. 218. Kordes and Kleinertz (eds.), Reichskammergericht, III, p. 307. Hausbuch des Apothekers Walburger, IV, p. 1103.

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turning ugly. Certain officials or councillors were often entrusted as designated arbitrators.89 No such formal procedures existed in the ordinances in the arbitration of crimes of violence. But it clear that the same principles applied, so long as the crime was paid for: in 1490 a severed hand was valued at 27 Gulden, deaths at between 35 and 49 Gulden – these were considerable sums when one considers that a female domestic servant earned between 4 and 5 Gulden a year. Only those who could not pay were subject to corporal punishment. By 1500 the rules of the game were well known and had become proverbial: ‘Flee, if you can flee, because good deals (theidigen) are made out of town.’90 Killers were encouraged to seek refuge in neighbouring jurisdictions in order to avoid vengeance, let passions cool and allow the mediators to do their work. Among villagers in Westphalia the process was often referred to as Beschickung, literally a summons, in which the victim sent two representatives to their enemy, in order to deliver their demands and begin negotiations. The number of out-of-court settlements is impossible to determine since these only appear in the records when the parties failed to come to an agreement and opened legal proceedings. In 1591, for example, the kin of Hermann Wewer, a peasant from Münster, engaged two minor officials to summon his killers to do Sühne with them within fourteen days. The only reason that this ended up in the record is that the killers feared a revenge attack and required official assurances that no hand would be laid on them.91 Beschickung also formed part of the aristocratic culture of satisfaction. In eighteenth-century Silesia, for example, it involved ‘an insulted nobleman sending the perpetrator three noblemen to civilly summon (ordentlich beschicket) him, whether he acknowledged the insult, and then to fix the matter according to the laws of chivalry (Ritter-Recht)’.92 During the sixteenth century territorial princes sought to centralise control over the complex patchwork of manorial, town and seigneurial courts. This involved bringing amicable settlements under court purview and ensuring that the prince took his cut in the form of fines and letters issued by chanceries and the pardons, safe conducts and Urfehde issued as part of the peace in the feud. This intervention was welcomed since it ensured that deals, which were often compensation payments made in instalments, could be legally enforced. The 1608 police ordinance 89

90 91 92

V. Groebner, ‘Der verletzte Körper und die Stadt: Gewalttätigkeit und Gewalt in Nürnberg am Ende des 15. Jahrhunderts’, in A. Lüdtke and T. Lindenberger (eds.), Physische Gewalt: eine Kontinuität in der Moderne (Frankurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), pp. 162–89; Schedensack, Nachbarn im Konflikt; P. Sutter, Von guten und bösen Nachbarn: Nachbarschaft als Beziehungsform im spätmittelalterlichen Zürich (Zürich: Chronos, 2002); M. Scheutz, ‘Compromise and Shake Hands: The Town Council, Authority and Urban Stability in Austrian Small Towns in the Eighteenth Century’, Urban History, 24 (2007), pp. 51–63. Frauenstädt, Blutrache, p. 138. Wittke, Mord oder Totschlag? p. 197. Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch: ‘Beschickung’: http://drw-www.adw.uni-heidelberg.de /drw-cgi/zeige?term=beschickung&index=lemmata.

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for the duchy of Cleves-Jülich, for example, forbade secret compositions, recognising the fact that they were liable to break down.93 The bishopric of Würzburg during the sixteenth century developed an efficient bureaucratic practice in which the chancery issued safe passports in their hundreds to exiled killers once they had settled with their victim.94 Attempts at reform in the bishopric of Münster – where nearly 80 per cent of murders still went unpunished at the end of the sixteenth century – were less successful.95 The Electoral Saxon reforms of 1572 saw an increase in sentences and a consequent increase in pardons. The new system was predicated on the dispensing and management of princely grace. Between 1547 and 1636 almost half of the 484 cases warranting corporal punishment in the town of Freiburg ended with a pardon. Banishment remained the most common punishment for crimes of violence, a practice that was unchanged from the Middle Ages. Conscious that lawsuits were inimical to social harmony, the Elector frequently ordered parties to make peace or drop criminal proceedings, sometimes against the wishes of the plaintiff.96 It is quite clear that arbitration was a mundane feature of the different legal systems across the Holy Roman Empire and that in crimes of verbal and physical injury fines and compensation were the commonest forms of punishment. Arbitration did not preclude reopening the legal proceedings later if the negotiations broke down. What changed during the sixteenth century was the expectation that compensation should be fixed according to legal principles. The public and official nature of Sühne both enhanced princely authority and ensured that the contract would be honoured. It also meant that the rich and powerful could no longer literally get away with murder and would have to pay for their crime. Compensation was calibrated according to the offence and the social status of the victim.97 The drawing of blood significantly raised the price (Blutgeld). Some examples of the settlements recorded by the bishops of Bamberg and Würzburg give a flavour of the different rates of payment applied to seventeenth-century noblemen:98 1618, 1 September: petition of Adam von Vestenberg for pardon, having paid out 1100 Gulden in satisfaction for a murder. 1624, 7 August: Hans Dietrich von Bernheim ordered to pay 100 Gulden to settle the killing of the Vogt of Steindorf. 93 94

95 96 97

98

Wittke, Mord oder Totschlag? p. 188. Staatsarchiv Würzburg, Amtsbücher, 6255 ‘Registerbuch über die Wiederaufnahmen in die Landeshuldigung derjenigen Personen, die wegen Verbrechen, insbesondere Totschlag und Fehde “ausgetreten” waren und Gnade und Landeshuldigung verloren hatten, 1540–1592.’ Wittke, Mord oder Totschlag? pp. 101–7. Ludwig, Herz der Justitia, pp. 152–280. For tabulations in local law codes: Kramer, Die Nachbarschaft, p. 38; Wittke, Mord oder Totschlag? p. 221. Gönner, Staatsrechtiche verhältnisse, no. 88; Reichs-Ständische Archival-Urkunden, I, pp. 432–8.

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1660, 13 July: pardon for Friedrich Wilhelm von Gaysmar for shooting a farmer, having paid 100 Reichsthalers in compensation. 1665, 21 March: pardon on the intercession of the abbot Fulda for Franz Caspar von Buchholz for shooting a farmer, having paid 300 Reichsthalers compensation. 1701: Otto Veit von Rieneck fined 1000 Thalers for wounding an officer in an encounter. These were substantial sums of money: the annual wages of a tailor in the seventeenth century was around 24 Thalers. By way of comparison, the killings in Upper Lusatia on the eve of Thirty Years’ War cost 300 to 600 Thalers in fines to the court and 1,000 to 4,000 Thalers in costs.99 Across the Reich matters were complicated by the Thirty Years’ War, which opened the debate about whether a killing had occurred according to the laws of war and did not therefore require compensating.100 An uncompensated killing left room for revenge. Otherwise, peasants might pay off soldiers seeking retaliation for a murdered comrade.101 The strains that the war put on settlements can be gleaned from an incident in the small Bohemian town of Graupen. In 1629 the deal for the killing of a burgher, Martin Forman, was sealed in the Rathaus in front of the whole municipal council. Six years later this led to a serious falling out among the councillors when Forman’s son accused another burgher of pocketing the money instead of handing it over to the widow.102 This incident shows that town councils continued to broker settlements in the traditional fashion largely without interference. Though these were secular settlements, they were not always shorn of their spiritual function. In 1540 in Bolkenhain in Silesia the arbitrators were chosen in front of various dignitaries ‘following the will of Christ and the intercession of the authorities, so that the said [murder], can be forgiven and forsaken by God’s will’.103 Nicolaus Gentzkow, Bürgermeister of Stralsund, recorded several of the negotiations he was involved in. In August 1558 he reconciled a murder for 100 Marks costs and 650 Marks Blutgeld, payable within three years; the handing over a sow, oats and two tuns of beer; and the provision of stones for the tomb and a wooden cross. In addition, the killer swore an Urfehde to keep the peace.104 In Friedberg in Wetterau the city council held a day of public atonement 99 100

101 102

103 104

Knothe, ‘Fortstzung der Geschichte’. ‘Anmerkungen einiger in den gräfl. Schwarzburg-Rudolstädtischen und umliegenden Landen von 1620 an sich ereigneten Begebenheiten’, fo. 59, 1628: www.mdsz.thulb.unijena.de/sz/search_sz.php?szid=20&personid=alle&placeid=alle&commid=alle. Happe, ‘Chronicon Thuringiae’, II, 398v, 1641. J. Kilián (ed.), Michel Stüelers Gedenkbuch (1629–1649): Alltagsleben in Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Rupprecht, 2014), pp. 61, 172, 177, 184. Frauentädt, Blutrache, p. 68. Böcker (ed.), Nicolaus Gentzkow, p. 91.

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(Bußplatz) on 14 and 15 May 1658. These were traditional peace pacts and referred to as such (Theidigen). This public reconciliation seems to have been more popular and less onerous than the sort of reconciliation on offer from many pastors, since it involved seventy people who paid 116 florins in fines for their misdemeanours.105 Even in Protestant territories accords sometimes stipulated that money be set aside for pious works. In 1639 Joachim von Rantzau was ordered to pay 6,000 Thalers ‘ad pias causas’, having provoked his victim into a duel in 1639 with the words that he was a ‘Danish dog’.106 The haggling that was involved can be gleaned from the murder of the shepherd, Bartel Wetter, in Silesia in 1604. Silesia retained customary laws, which, much like parts of Switzerland, outlawed killers and permitted revenge unless they came to an agreement with the kin.107 The problem in this case was that the killer, Adam von Unruh, was a local landowner and well versed in the law, having studied at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder. He denied the killing. The family resorted to the customary practice of the Bahrprobe in which the corpse of a murder was left unburied since it was thought to bleed when the suspect came near. The widow complained to the court that, after six months of display, the coffin was just about to be buried when Unruh came to the village causing ‘blood to flow out the coffin, as if an ox had been slaughtered’. The marvel was very timely because the haggling over the Blutgeld had stalled. She wanted 2000 Thalers; he had offered first 200 then 300 and finally 400. In 1614 Unruh abandoned negotiations and tried to leave the vicinity by swapping his lands with a neighbour. The substitution was, however, prohibited until he had settled with the widow. He seems to have done this the following year because a stone cross was set up in the village. Blood money often went hand in hand with some form of exile. Banishment was the classic form of conflict resolution because it removed the actors from the possibility of retaliation and forced them to seek a settlement with their neighbours and to petition the prince for letters of safe conduct. Traditionally, exile had been voluntary and the safest way to avoid revenge while the mediators negotiated. In customary law codes it was formally recognised as part of the process. In the late Middle Ages states adopted and extended the practice, using banishment as a tool to force parties into reconciliation and ensure that the state’s interests were upheld. In sixteenth-century Cologne it was the most commonly used sanction, requiring offenders to deal with their victims, petition the authorities and mobilise their contacts in order to regain their citizenship.108 The 1529 Augsburg police ordinance stated that even when killers had made 105 106

107 108

Waas (ed.), Chroniken, p. 300. Stein-Stegemann (ed.), Reichskammergerichtsakten, I, p. 325. See also Nostitz, Beiträge zur Geschichte, p. 165. Rupke, ‘Kreuzstein’, p. 149. Schwerhoff, Köln in Kreuzverhör, p. 148.

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their peace they should stay away from the city for five years before paying 10 Gulden to be readmitted.109 A 1593 ordinance from the canton of Zürich stipulated a 20 silver Mark fine for ‘common honourable homicides’ and a year’s banishment with no return until the kin had been satisfied.110 In terms of its political structure the Holy Roman Empire shared more in common with Italy than centralised France. The fragmented nature of the polity made it easy to cross the border into a neighbouring jurisdiction or town, in order to escape justice and wait for one’s enemies to exhaust their means. The venality that characterised the Italian system and fed the plague of banditry never developed in Germany. But, as in Italy, there are cases of killers dragging their victim’s body across a border in order to confuse the judicial process.111 A further difference in the Empire was the existence of recognised refuges, where killers could claim asylum. Among the most notable Freistätte, where one could claim immunity, were: Asperg, Berneck, Biberach, Barmen, Lausanne, Tübingen, Gaildorf, Neuenbürg and Friedberg. In other towns and villages particular spaces and places were set aside – the houses belonging to the Teutonic Order, for example, claimed rights of refuge.112 The purpose of refuges was to prevent revenge and encourage mediation. The claims made by refugees and the counterclaims of the victim’s family revolved around the question of premeditation, which would ultimately determine the level of blood money due. But their existence nevertheless caused problems for neighbouring jurisdictions and from the fourteenth century there were attempts to restrict the privilege: killers had to demonstrate they had committed an ‘honourable homicide’, that is without malice aforethought. The imperial city of Reutlingen guarded its privilege of asylum until its incorporation into the duchy of Württemberg in 1806 because it was a precious sign of sovereignty and independence.113 Between 1533 and 1590 1157 people accused of homicide were admitted into the city. The busiest decades were the civil war years of the 1540s and 1550s when over twenty killers were taking refuge annually. This number halved to ten per year during the second half of the century, reaching a low point in the 1570s with a slow rise again between 1580 and 1617 to thirteen per year (473 cases). In comparison, the asylum town of 109

110

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112 113

C. Hofmann, ‘Außergerichtliche Einigungen bei Strafakten als vertikale und horizontale soziale Kontrolle im 16. Jahrhundert’, in Blauert and Schwerhoff (eds.), Kriminalitätsgeschichte. J. Pestalutz (ed.), Vollständige Sammlung der Statute des, Eidsgenößischen Cantons Zürich, 2 vols. (Zürich 1834–9), II, p. 152. ‘Schreiben des Bischofs Johann Philipp an den Markgrafen Christian, 20 June 1605’: www.marlesreuth.de/halsgeri.htm, 20 June 1605; Happe, ‘Chronicon Thuringiae’, 7 September 1623. Frauenstädt, Blutrache, p. 57. T. Drück, ‘Das Reutlinger Asylrecht’, Württembergische Vierteljahrshefte für Landesgeschichte, 4 (1895), 1–58.

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Coesfeld in Westphalia received 193 requests from killers between 1574 and 1657 and the village of Pfullingen next to Reutlingen 35 between 1532 and 1648.114 After the Thirty Years’ War Reutlingen became a refuge for duellists and the duke of Württemberg entered into bilateral talks to prevent entry for those who had contravened the duke’s 1663 and 1670 edicts against duelling. The agreement, however, remained a dead letter and in 1673 the duke complained to the emperor about the problem. By the eighteenth century the numbers of asylum seekers declined significantly in line with the pacification of society as a whole and during the eighteenth century there were only two or three refugees per annum.115 In towns the use of churches and monasteries as asylums had long been a bone of contention between the civic and ecclesiastical authorities. Attempts to claim refuge in them remained common, although during the sixteenth century the city authorities gained the upper hand.116 When a murderer took refuge in the Überwasserkirche in Münster in 1574 and refused to come out, he was removed by force. When two duellists tried the same thing twelve years later, they were refused entry altogether by the religious.117 The practice continued, however, in the many rural manors, castles and fortresses that claimed to be refuges and the right was vigorously defended as a signifier of sovereignty. The lord of Neuhaus in Franconia appealed to the Reichskammergericht in 1608 when the bishop of Bamberg’s men pursued a killer across his border, contravening the refuge.118 A similar case was heard at the court in 1604 when the city of Bremen complained of a fugitive murderer who had taken refuge in Mengen near Sigmaringen, where he had been absolved by the bishop of Constance.119 Places of asylum were even more widespread in Switzerland until they were abolished by the French in 1798. Banishment was difficult to police and enforcement in large part depended on the community. In 1610 Hans Jacob Hoch agreed with the victim’s family to quit their village in the Swabian Alps and do twenty years’ military service on the eastern frontier of the Empire. He was back within four years, having failed to find a suitable post. A new agreement was required in which he promised to avoid his enemies and live outside the village.120 A killer was allowed to return to Oberfahlheim near Ulm in 1569, so long as he avoided the tavern, smithy, bathhouse and mill when his enemies were there.121 Asmus Adam von 114 115 116 117 118 119

120 121

Wittke, Mord oder Totschlag? p. 20; Drück, ‘Asylrecht’, 53. Drück, ‘Asylrecht’, 40. For example: Mair, Chronik, p. 267. Janssen (ed.), Münsterischen Chroniken, pp. 46, 100. Gebhardt and Hörner (eds.), Reichskammergericht, VI, p. 153. R. Weber (ed.), Akten des Reichskammergerichts im Staatsarchiv Sigmaringen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2004), pp. 219–20. Losch, Steinkreuze, p. 287. Ibid.: ‘Oberfahlheim (Ulm)’.

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Reitzenstein’s career of murder and hell-raising should have been stalled by his sentence to five years of service in Hungary in 1649, but with the connivance of his family he did not serve his time. He was unable, however, to keep a low profile and was eventually executed after committing another murder.122 Hans Wolf von Thümmel had too high a profile to avoid oversight from the officials of the elector of Saxony following his banishment in 1678. He repeatedly petitioned the elector to be allowed to return home, but this was refused, probably because his enemy was a member of the elector’s household.123 This case points to the ways in which, by the end of the seventeenth century, states were more secure and did not have to demonstrate their power through dramatic executions and displays of grace. The attempt to impose some form of secular punishment on nobles, such as military service against the Turks, seems to have been a product of Renaissance state-building. From the late fifteenth century overseas service, on Rhodes for example, was already being used to control noble feuds in Württemberg. In 1562 Fritz Walters von Anweil, having already settled with the victim’s family, was released from prison, swore an Urfehde, and agreed to do three months’ military service at his own expense.124 During the sixteenth century service in Hungary was the most common form of secular atonement. It removed troublesome young men to the frontier far away from local politics. Some of this service could be very long indeed: in 1621 Hans Wolf von Rotenhan, a Bamberg official, had his capital sentence commuted to ten years’ war service.125 But, on the whole, the punishment of noblemen was difficult given the myriad ties of protection that existed. The family of the killer of Wendel von Lichtenstein appealed in 1563 to their patrons, the margrave of Brandenburg and the count of Henneberg, who stepped in immediately to arbitrate and prevent the matter going to court. The Lichtenstein could do little against this array of forces. The fact that they refused to accept any monetary compensation and handed over the cash to the dead man’s fiancée gives an indication of how they felt about the deal they were offered.126 On 16 April 1598, Wolf Adam von Steinau stabbed Georg Melchior von Schwalbach, administrator of the Teutonic Order in the city of Würzburg, in the neck. This was a particularly heinous crime. The case was politically charged and mobilised the opponents of the centralising policies of bishop Echter von Mespelbrunn in support of Steinau. His escape from the city was abetted by the bishop’s enemies.127 In April 1599 he was outlawed. Wolf Adam sought the protection of the margrave of Brandenburg and was given the office of bailiff. Steinau also had powerful connections in Vienna and 122 123 124 125 126 127

Hausbuch des Apothekers Walburger, I, pp. 97, 214. Buchholz, ‘Steinkreuze’. Reichs-Ständische Archival-Urkunden, I, p. 248. Gönner, Staatsrechtliche Verhältnisse, no. 88. Mötsch, ‘Zur Rettung meiner Ehr’. Bibra, Geschichte, I, p. 175.

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the Emperor himself joined in demands for a pardon. In 1617 the ban on him was lifted, leaving the way open for a settlement the following year. In 1622 his rehabilitation was complete when he received a commission as colonel of horse in the army raised by the bishop of Würzburg. For a man like Steinau, whose fearsome reputation earned him the nickname ‘the red devil’, the war was a career opportunity. He was captain of the Imperial Knights of Rhön und Werra until 1630 before switching to the Swedish service and another colonelcy in 1632.128 These complex personal relationships were tempered by complementary institutions which strove to underpin mediation. The notary seems to have been a much less significant figure than in France and Italy. This was perhaps because medieval German towns developed a sophisticated system of neighbourhood policing, which stopped minor quarrels about access, nuisance, noise, the water supply, rights of way, boundaries, building and the removal of excrement, from getting out of hand. Civic courts were complemented by the guilds, which remained a powerful force for the regulation of artisan behaviour. The principle of arbitration was integral to the functioning of neighbourhood law (Nachbarrecht) and underpinned by the elaboration of detailed stipulations on good order (gute Policey). In many towns councillors were explicitly charged with mediating these mundane issues. The Reichskammergericht was also expected to arbitrate, as well as to judge. In 1564 the court was called upon to act as Schiedsgericht, a court of arbitration, in a hunting dispute when the commissioner appointed by the emperor, the abbot of Kempten, died.129 The relative absence of final judgments among its voluminous records is an indicator of its success in promoting out-of-court settlements. One of the most important features of the 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg was the subdivision of the Empire into Kreise with quasigovernmental peacekeeping powers. This supplemented existing representative institutions and the ad hoc commissions routinely established by the emperor to make peace. The feud over a mill between Cord von Grothaus and the bishop of Osnabrück was referred from the Reichskammergericht in 1559 for arbitration by the colonel of the regional Kreis. Grothaus got to keep the mill but had to renounce his claim for damages and swore to refrain from further violence.130 Mediation continued to be an essential part of lordship. The princes, both secular and ecclesiastical, continued to play a routine role in arbitrating disputes during the sixteenth century, either on their own initiative, or acting on supplications from neighbours and vassals, or by appointments as commissioners by the emperor. Some of these negotiations were laborious and, as for example in the case of the Sühne for the murder of Busso 128 129 130

Steinau-Steinrück, ‘Geschichte’, 118. Gebhardt and Hörner (eds.), Reichskammergericht, I, p. 258. Ebeling (ed.), Reichskammergericht, I, p. 515; Friderici, Geschichte, III, pp. 57–80.

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Alvensleben, generated a significant amount of paperwork. These courts, commissions and representative assemblies worked to manage enmity, but they did not overcome it. In order to function effectively representative institutions required that negotiations be conducted in the spirit of compromise. The system functioned fairly well in the second half of the sixteenth century when memories of the destruction and chaos of the civil conflicts of the 1540s and 1550s were still fresh in the memory. But few delegates to the Kreise were capable of representing the interests of the institution rather than just their own territory and the meetings were riven by precedence disputes and subservient to privilege and vested interest. Faction became more difficult to manage as religious parties began to emerge and the 1555 settlement came under threat. For example, the Franconian Kreis was unable or unwilling to step in and stop the feud between the count of Löwenstein and the bishop of Würzburg, despite calls to do so as early as 1601. The development of a formal association representing the Imperial Counts (comprising 143 families in 1521) and the Imperial Knights (hundred and fifty or so families) after 1555 did give them a political voice within the Empire and a more effective defence of their privileges.131 What these associations were much less successful at was containing aristocratic violence.132 The peace process was routinely managed by the issue of letters of safe conduct, Geleitsbriefe, and the ubiquitous Urfehde. The fact that the chancery of the bishop of Würzburg issued hundreds of safe conducts for those attending his courts suggests how perilous this might be and reinforces the view that legal writs were often taken as a sign of contempt. The Geleitsbriefe offered a measure of protection but not immunity. The revenge killing of Harbort von Holle in 1577 took place in spite of the fact that he was in possession of a Freies Geleit issued by the king of Denmark.133 Safe conducts were more secure when both parties had to post surety for their good behaviour, such as that imposed following the encounter fought by the Wolfskeel cousins in 1655.134 The purpose of these measures was to implement a truce between parties so that mediation could get underway. This process was institutionalised in the customary law code of Zürich as Stallung, the promise that enemies made to each other not to escalate matters. This was neither war nor peace, but a state of suspended hostility. Infractions were treated as breaking the public peace and could be expensive. A 1593 statute made breaking the Stallung a capital offence.135 131

132

133 134 135

J. Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire: Volume I: Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia, 1493–1648 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 353–5. For an example involving the former captain of the Ritterkanton Gebirg: Gebhardt and Hörner (eds.), Reichskammergericht, I, p. 165. Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 67. Reichs-Ständische Archival-Urkunden, I, p. 435. S. Pohl, ‘Uneasy Peace: The Practice of the Stallung Ritual in Zürich, 1400-1525’, Journal of Early Modern History, 7 (2003), 28–54.

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Tens of thousands of Urfehden were issued during the Middle Ages and early modern period – more than 7,000 survive from Württemberg; in the small imperial city of Schwäbisch-Hall over 200 were sworn in one year alone, 1574.136 The Urfehde had different forms and functions. Some were reconciliations between feuding parties: an example from late sixteenth-century Schwäbisch-Hall recorded how: ‘The town council had finally reconciled and brought to peace after many years sworn enemies and their supporters, counts, lords, knights, nobles and commoners, who many times brought war into the town.’137 Other oaths were akin to French letters of remission or the Italian rinuncie, in which the oath-taker accepted they had done wrong and agreed to cease further enmity in return for having their penalty reduced or suspended. These peace pacts were sealed by a handshake, and the practice continued into the eighteenth century – there are numerous examples from Schwäbisch-Hall. But oaths might take the form of an English recognizance, in which the offender was let off with a caution and bound over to keep the peace. In general, there was a tendency from the fifteenth century to move from pure reconciliation to incorporate some form of punishment, involving a fine and banishment. As we have seen, the imposition of temporary exile was designed to ensure the injured party were compensated and the reconciliation more effective. The damage to reputation could be considerable for those with a reputation to protect and there were appeals to the Reichskammergericht against the malicious and vexatious use of cautions and binding over. Hans von Feilitzsch was still fighting to have his name cleared in the 1550s, having had to post 15,000 florins caution and swear an Urfehde for a murder committed in 1521.138 The elaboration of a more bureaucratic system mediated enmity, but we would do well not to idealise a system that worked in favour of those with resources and contacts. Every letter had to be paid for: the tax for being accepted as a refugee in Reutlingen was 1 Gulden in 1578, the same as the cost of a Geleitsbrief issued by the city of Stralsund.139 Pardons and remissions had to be paid for too, although the evidence is thin. Kaspar Preis records in his journal the murder of his nephew in 1666. Even though the killer had plunged an axe in his back, he was not subject to the full force of the law, but ‘through grace and favour’ merely flogged and banished from the principality of HesseDarmstadt.140 Nor should we underestimate the venal character of the law. After all, public prosecution remained rare. The purview of the courts was in 136 137 138

139 140

Blauert, Das Urfehdewesen, pp. 29–40. Ibid., p. 16. www.gda.bayern.de/fileadmin/user_upload/PDFs_fuer_Publikationen/Archivinventare/ 50-09-F-RKG-Inventar_Online-Druckfassung.pdf. Hans von Feilitzsch vs. Markgrafen von Brandenburg – Ansbach. Drück, ‘Asylrecht’, 27; Böcker (ed.), Nicolaus Gentzkow, p. 242. Peters, Mit Pflug und Gänsekiel, p. 81.

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most cases confined to ensuring that no crime went without some form of punishment and that the state took its cut in fines from the financial settlement between the victim and the accused. The inquisitorial procedure was a costly one and in many regions plaintiffs had to post surety before their case was taken on. Lawyers and writs had to be paid for. Since the level of fines and compensation was fixed according to legal principles there was much space for quibbling over intent – premeditation would have to be proved on the basis of proofs elucidated from witness statements and medical reports. It is no wonder that most criminal cases did not produce a final judgment. The Aufseß family were successful in obtaining the emperor’s support in their various disputes with their neighbours, but this support did not come cheap and visits to Vienna in 1666 and 1677–9 proved financially crippling, as access to the imperial court required ‘lubrication’ (schmieralien).141 For this reason Hermann Weinsberg urged caution. If the defendant was really at fault, he would pay up quickly. But once they chose to fight, it was a question of working out ‘how rich or poor they were, how weak or powerful’.142 This was a process of weighing up the costs and benefits and whether peace might be a better option than fighting on. Once peace was made there was no guarantee that it would last. Weinsberg frequently mentions the fraughtness of the negotiations and the difficulties of keeping the peace in his own family. Peacemaking ceremonies, like any other, were liable to be spoiled by those whose grievances had not been fully satisfied. At a reconciliation dinner at the end of the sixteenth century between rival lines of the house of Ahlefeld in Haseldorf in Holstein one of the protagonists was shot through the stomach.143 The depth of enmity between the von Galen and the Kerckerinck can be gauged from the fact that two peace parleys were spoiled by violence. Following a court hearing on 23 September 1604, when the von Galen brothers, Dietrich and Ludwig, lost their suit over a pew in the local church, the archdeacon invited the two families to a Friedensmahl, a peace banquet at which both parties were asked to shake hands ‘and thereafter not to think about the dispute, but to be merry and jolly’. But during the meal Ludwig von Galen picked what seems to have been a carefully choreographed quarrel with the teenage son of Hermann Kerckerinck. There was a scuffle and they were separated. Ludwig then provoked the father by calling him a ‘ploughman’, who responded by leaning across and punching his opponent. Daggers were drawn and the von Galen was quickly bundled out of doors by the other guests. A second meeting ended with Dietrich von Galen seizing Hermann von Kerckerinck and ‘kneeing him between the legs as if he were unmanning him’. Once again, bystanders 141 142

143

Aufseß, Geschichte, p. 282. www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de/Edition/Liber_Senectutis/Liber_Senectutis.htm, 7 December 1585. Detlefsen, Geschichte, pp. 149–51.

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intervened, but on departing von Galen blew his enemy a kiss and later bragged of his antics that his enemy ‘would no longer be fit to service a lady’. It was an attempt to provoke his enemy to fight; he explained that he himself would never behave like a woman.144 ***

Security and tranquillity could only be achieved when violence ceased to be a tool of social and political advancement. The evidence suggests that, in regard to the social elite, this did not definitively happen until after 1700. In the decades prior to this there was a growing recognition that aristocratic violence was a problem that required addressing, as the flurry of edicts against duelling attests. When, in 1699, the count of Sayn-Wittgenstein broke his riding cane over the head of a notary, he was fined for an outrage that a century before would, in all likelihood, never have got a final judgment.145 But how far changes in behaviour were due to more punitive laws is debatable, especially as courts were extremely reticent to apply harsh punishments for crimes that were deemed to be honourable. The cultural change that contributed to the decline of violence is a large topic that requires separate treatment. Suffice it to say here that it was a slow process. The fashion for neo-stoicism, which taught self-control and forbearance, began early in Germany, but it does not seem to have had much effect on elite patterns of behaviour until the end of the seventeenth century. The Reformation was unable to fulfil its promise to inscribe Christ’s message of love on the hearts of quarrelling neighbours. This explains why the pious Lutheran Bartholomäus Sastrow was so very forthright about his enemies. His memoirs, composed in the 1590s, were dedicated to recording the calumny of enemies and the ways in which he and his parents ‘had been troubled and vexed for thirty years, which hostility upset their conscience, their rights and their equanimity’.146 Sastrow’s world was one plagued by enmity, in which friends were angels and enemies devils. He was an educated man, a well-travelled lawyer and urban dweller, but the environment of Stralsund (population 15,000) he described was not a civil society in which one could feel neutral or ambivalent towards one’s neighbours but rather a community governed by the polarities of love and hate. Recent work on civil conflict has shown how profoundly it transforms the social environment. People’s experience of conflict refers not simply to the transient everyday experience (Erlebnis) of violence that was a consequence of marauding and pillaging troops, but the lessons that one drew from these experiences (Erfahrung) and how and what significance and meanings were 144 145 146

Dierkes, Streitbar, p. 88. Fuchs, Um die Ehre, p. 225. Möhnike (ed.), Sastrowen, pp. 98, 273.

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applied to them.147 During the Thirty Years’ War the experience of violence led to an atmosphere of acceptance of change in which the security and order provided by a strong state were elevated to the status of a supreme public good. Once a prominent partisan of the Protestant cause, by the 1630s Christian von Anhalt had become disillusioned. His experiences gave him bad dreams: ‘Oh God deliver me from so many torments!!! And send me a sweeter, more tranquil life.’148 This search for earthly tranquillity was very different from the peace promised by the religious Reformations. Sermons promoted the idea that true peace was founded in union with one’s neighbour and in Christ. Tranquillity was a lesser ‘carnal’ or civil peace, which offered mere security from one’s neighbour. It was the terrible experience of civil war that demonstrated the more modest virtues of tranquillity. For Anhalt the path to security lay in eschewing anything that upset the social order. The purpose of setting down his thoughts in a diary was to expose the ambitious and ‘their vast pride, which has permitted them to get carried away, even to the extent of forgetting who their real master is’.149 These were widely held sentiments by midcentury. A pastor condemned the futility of the Hessian civil war in the 1640s as emanating from ‘vainglory (eiteler Ehre), enmity, hatred and envy’.150 This relativising of honour and right, placing it within the context of social order, conduct and good police, seems to have had wider traction following the Thirty Years’ War. After 1650 noble litigation over honour declined as did accusations of calumny.151 This suggests that there was a greater willingness to accept arbitration before matters escalated. And there is some evidence to suggest that the mid-century crisis may have focussed the minds of pastors on their traditional role as peacemakers. It explains the ceremony that took place in the knave of St Nicholas’s church in Kiel on 12 March 1671 when the Rantzau and Brockdorff families came together to witness a peace deal following the shooting of Leopold von Rantzau.152 One factor that contributed significantly to change among the elite, in particular, was the creation of standing armies at the end of the seventeenth century. Soldiers were portrayed in eyewitness accounts of the Thirty Years’ War as wolves and devils. But this did not necessarily render them worse than one’s neighbour. The unscrupulous profited from the breakdown of order and the spread of insecurity encouraged predation, pitting neighbour against neighbour. The multi-confessional communities that characterised much of Germany before 1618 became plagued by mutual suspicion and fear. It was 147 148 149 150

151 152

Ulbricht, ‘The Experience of Violence’, p. 98. http://diglib.hab.de/edoc/ed000228/start.htm, 23 March 1636. Ibid., 23 June 1635. J. Hirsch (ed.), Wetterfelder Chronik: Aufzeichnungen eines lutherischen Pfarrers der Wetterau (Giessen, 1882), p. 123. Fuchs, Um die Ehre, pp. 89, 225–8. Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 325.

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a time when people ‘suddenly realized that their neighbourhood was not what for years they had thought it to be’.153 In the region between Waldeck and Kemnath (Upper Palatinate) ‘during this time [1641] enmity between the country folk had grown so great . . . that they pursued each other with fire and sword. In this enmity brothers and blood kinsmen opposed each other with mortal hatred.’154 As military historians have shown, standing armies did not replace mercenary armies because they were more combat-effective. Rather, the advantage of standing armies derived from the fact that they increased the patronage available to the prince through the creation of a professional officer corps and improved order by the abolition of a class of underemployed soldiers who had previously been available for private hire. The career officer was more easily disciplined since stepping out of line might entail forgoing promotion and a pension. The creation of a clear hierarchy of ranks removed some of the uncertainties caused by status anxiety. Postings to garrison towns and the frontier removed young nobles from the local environment. Squabbles and fights continued but they no longer constituted part of the politics of the feud. Honour and prowess now led to advancement in a structured career in which service to the dynasty and the regiment was a sine qua non. The formation of civil society was predicated on the creation of a separate but complementary military estate. The pacification of society was also visible in towns. The right to bear arms had been a traditional symbol of civic liberty and of manhood. Attempts by town authorities to control the carrying of weapons were routinely ignored. In Frankfurt am Main it is only in the eighteenth century that sharp-edged weapons disappear from the criminal archives.155 The reason for this was that policing functions were now performed by soldiers who replaced the traditional civic militias. The utility of and justification for the citizens’ right to bear arms had been permanently undermined. These changes also help to explain the dramatic decline in the elite homicide rate at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a phenomenon in which the Holy Roman Empire was part of a Europe-wide trend. 153 154

155

Ulbricht, ‘The Experience of Violence’, p. 120. H. Braun (ed.), Marktredwitz im 30jährigen Krieg 1628–1648; Der Leopoldschen Hauschronik (Marktredwitz, 1961), p. 138. J. Eibach, ‘Burghers or Town Council: Who Was Responsible for Urban Stability in Early Modern German Towns?’, Urban History, 34 (2007), 14–26.

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France

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8 Village Politics and Vendetta

On 25 August 1674 Pierre de Bonnauld, the bailli and judge of Millau, arrived in the village of La Bastide to investigate ten murders.1 The village lies at the confluence of the Tarn and the Rance on the edge of the region known as the Grand Causses, the southern section of the Massif Central, a region characterised by rugged mountains, high calciferous plateaus, river valleys and steep gorges. The village of La Bastide has always lain on a border, between the mountains of the Causses and the gentler plain of the Albigeois, where the provinces of the Rouergue and Languedoc, the dioceses of Vabres, Rodez and Albi, and the modern départements of the Tarn and the Aveyron meet. The region is today probably best known for its distinctive cheese, Roquefort. Witnesses who had attended Mass in La Bastide on Sunday 15 July told the judge that prayers for the dead had only just finished when a group of forty men and women men burst into the church. At the head of this group was the sieur de Saint-Pierre de Sénégas carrying a pistol and shouting ‘A moy! A moy!’ They seized three of the communicants, including the local seigneur, François vicomte de Trélans, whose wig was pulled off before he was bundled out of the church. Forced at gunpoint to cross the Rance into Languedoc, the captives were taken by horse to a barn in the surrounding hills, where they were summarily shot. Revenge was swift. Trélans’s son, Jean-Luc, and 100 men, including a posse of local villagers, pursued Sénégas and his gang, cornering them in a local manor house on 9 August. On day three of the siege Sénégas managed to smuggle out a letter to his sister: ‘begging you in God’s name to take particular care of the women, children and dependants of the poor men who will have their throats cut if God does not take pity on us’.2 Short of water, he and his men attempted a break-out. In the ensuing gunfight several were killed and their leader taken prisoner. During his investigation bailli Bonnauld could find no trace of Sénégas. Rumour had it that he had been murdered and his body burned. So the bailli went to La Bastide in search of evidence. In an 1

2

B[ibliothèque] N[ationale] MS Clairambault 795, fos. 553–61, ‘Inquisition fait par nous pierre de bonalde escuyer conseiller du roy bailiff, juge de la ville de Millau’. Y. du Guerny (ed.), Archives des châteaux de Saint-Urcisse et de Tauriac (Tarn) (2007), p. 20: www.geneanet.org/archives/ouvrages/?action=detail&book_type=livre&livre_id= 540242&page=1&tk=99771058035e728c.

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oven they found human hair, but no sign of a corpse. It was only by chance that one of his archers, who had wandered off in search of a stray horse, bumped into some peasants who showed him the remains of a fire in a nearby field. Bonnauld reported that the archers, ‘after brushing away the ashes and scratching around found several burnt bones there, which they wrapped in paper before remounting and re-joining us’.3 There are three significant features to the story. The first concerns the vendetta between the two leading noble families in the region, the Nogaret de Trélans and the Durand de Sénégas. Aristocratic feuding was a significant feature of rural life in mid-seventeenth-century France and, in Languedoc at least, the practice survived well into the reign of Louis XIV.4 The second significant feature of the dispute is that the Trélans were Catholic and the Sénégas Protestant. The religious dimension of their dispute is underlined by the sacrilege committed in the church, which had to be shut for rites of purification, and by acts which recall the purifying rites of religious violence described by Natalie Zemon Davis.5 Sénégas’s body was burned like that of a heretic and the body of one of his men was stripped naked and, in order to prevent a Christian burial, dumped in the Rance. The enmity between the Sénégas and the Trélans families can be traced to the origins of the Wars of Religion. The modest barons of Sénégas profited from service to the Protestant cause and to Henri de Navarre, emerging during the seventeenth century as among the most significant Protestant families in the region. It is tempting to see their conflict as part of the wider religious struggle. Their lands in the HautAlbigeois were part of a border zone between Albi, seat of a bishopric and bastion of orthodoxy, and Protestant Castres to the south (Map 8.1). In 1698 only 1.2 per cent of the Albiegois was identified as Protestant, while the Castrais were, even after their official expulsion in 1685, estimated to be 18.6 per cent Protestant.6 However, the role of religion in the violence is less significant than it might at first appear. Although Trélans was snatched in a church, blood spilled and an act of sacrilege committed, such incidents were not uncommon and almost exclusively caused by trouble between Catholics.7 In any case, the Wars of Religion that devastated the region were largely over by 1629 and confessional tensions much reduced. Not only was Curvalle much more heterodox in the mid-seventeenth century than the later statistics suggest but there is no 3 4

5

6

7

BN MS Clairambault 795, fo. 560. For the outlines of the feud: S. Carroll, ‘Vendetta in the Seventeenth-Century Midi’, Krypton, 5/6 (2016), 25–40. N. Davis, ‘The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France’, Past and Present, 59 (1973), 51–91. P. Rascol, Les paysans de l’Albigeois à la fin de l’Ancien Régime (Aurillac: Imprimerie Moderne, 1961), p. 198. See Chapter 13 below.

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Map 8.1 The Albigeois and the Castrais

evidence of religious tension between ordinary believers. Although there was no Protestant temple – the nearest one at Paulinet was a good day’s walk away – there were in fact many Protestants living in Curvalle, interacting and coexisting with their Catholic neighbours.8 Moreover, confessional identities were fluid: many apparent Catholics were recent converts, sporting Old Testament names, such as Moïse, Samuel and Judith, and had Protestant friends and relations; several apparently Catholic wills dispensed with the customary invocations of the saints and prayers for the dead.9 Most of Sénégas’s supporters were Catholic and this included priests, such as rector Antoine Gazilhou.10 Intercommunal relations seem to have been characterised by the everyday ecumenism that we find elsewhere in small communities in the 8

9

10

For example, the accord over debts between the heirs of Raymond Bermond and Blanche de Calvière in 1654 and the 1629 property sale by Protestant David de Gautran to the Nozier brothers, a family that featured prominently as opponents of Sénégas: A[rchives] D[épartementales] Tarn 3E1 8424*, fo. 235; AD Aveyron, 3E1 779, 111v. My analysis is based on a systematic reading of wills registered by Curvalle’s notary: Aveyron 3E1 778, 779 and 781. The occasional invocations of the Virgin Mary and the Saints stand out: AD Aveyron, 3E1 781, fo. 672 (1639). Order for his arrest as a supporter of Sénégas: AD Tarn E 198.

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seventeenth-century Midi.11 This is not to deny that religion was without significance in the trajectory of the feud, but we should distinguish between everyday social relations and the rhetoric employed by the principal protagonists to attract the attention of the authorities. It is the third element of the feud, communal politics, which was the most significant factor in generating the extraordinary levels of violence. Communal politics is an important and still largely unexplored aspect of social and political relations under the Ancien Régime and it is this aspect of the feud with which the remainder of this chapter is concerned.12 In many respects, the nobles were responding or reacting to events that took place in the villages and decisions reached by the commune. The story of the peasant uprisings of the seventeenth century has been a staple of the historiography since the debates between Porchnev and Mousnier in the 1960s.13 However, both Marxist and non-Marxist accounts rely heavily on documents generated by royal officials – historians’ disagreements are rooted in different interpretations of substantially the same sources. This chapter attempts to get at the village view, using a variety of different sources – tax records, the judicial documents generated by a variety of competing courts, private archives and letters and notarial records – permitting us to see the feud at the communal and individual level. In doing so, we get an invaluable and rare insight into non-elite politics before 1789 that goes beyond the standard historical conventions of peasant resistance and rebellion, shedding light on villagers’ motives, deliberations and divisions, as well as their capacity to organise, use the law and exploit the protection offered by local lords and officials. The story that emerges is not simply one of resistance to the royal fisc, the centre against the periphery or the people versus the nobility. Rather, the demands of the state after 1635 divided local society among itself and led to faction and violence within the corps politique. While in the short term these internal divisions posed a challenge to traditional local order, they paradoxically offered an opportunity for the state and its agents to intervene as arbiters, an opportunity that was realised by Louis XIV’s redeployment of the intendants after 1661. ***

In the Midi the village commune was run by Consuls elected by taxpayers; they had responsibility for collecting taxes and maintaining the land register, or Compoix, which listed how much tax was owed on each property. The register 11

12

13

G. Hanlon, Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 1993). For recent reassessments of peasant politics: R. Souriac, ‘Le “sens politique” des paysans aux temps modernes en France. Cultures et comportements paysans, vers 1550 – vers 1650’, Dix-Septième Siècle (2007), 11–29; A. Follain, Le Village sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Fayard, 2008). The best analysis remains Y.-M., Bercé, Histoire des Croquants: étude des soulèvements populaires au XVIIe dans le Sud-Ouest de la France (Geneva: Droz, 1974).

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was of great significance in the Midi, which was subject to the taille réelle, where taxes were rated according to the type of land one possessed (non-noble fiefs, even if owned by a nobleman, were liable). The taille did not fall equally on property and control of the Compoix was very significant. In 1643 the Estates of Languedoc complained that seigneurs not only influenced the elections to the Consulat but had their own servants elected ‘whose venal protection was purchased by intrigue, making the smallest village a theatre of division and endless conflict’.14 This is precisely what happened in the barony of Curvalle, where the drama of the Sénégas–Trélans feud took place. Charles I Durand de Bonne founded the fortunes of the House of Sénégas as a Protestant captain during the Wars of Religion. He was close to Henri IV and invested the profits of office in land. In 1608 he purchased the seigneuries and châteaux of Plaisance and Curvalle, a barony spread over five parishes and with a seat of royal justice, which lay opposite La Bastide on the other side of the Tarn (Map 8.2).15 Although the Wars of Religion came to an end in 1629 with the Peace of Alès and the dismantling of the Protestant military establishment in Languedoc, other challenges to social stability remained.

Map 8.2 Curvalle and its neighbours

14

15

C. Devic and J. Vaissette, Histoire générale de Languedoc avec des notes et les pièces justificatives, 16 vols. (Toulouse: Privat, 1872–1904), XIII, p. 158. P. Foulquier-Lavergne, ‘Étude historique et statistique sur le Canton de Saint-Sernin’, Mémoires de la Société des lettres, sciences et arts de l’Aveyron, 11 (1874–8), 81–192.

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One was the long-term trend of social differentiation that divided rich and poor in every village: the number of poor and landless peasants had been growing since the sixteenth century, while a tiny peasant elite at the top increased its control of the lion’s share of property.16 More immediately, following two decades of relative prosperity at the beginning of the seventeenth century, there was an economic downturn from the 1620s. Environmental change can have a significant destabilising effect on social relations since it often extenuates social differentiation, creating winners and losers. The impact of the great 1628–31 plague and colder climates was not uniform. Producers benefitted from high food prices. But the outbreak of war with Spain in 1635 significantly increased the burden on all taxpayers. The tax assessment of the diocese of Albi as a whole rose from 70,861 livres in 1621 to a high point of 531,995 livres in 1643 and was still averaging 350,000 livres per annum in the mid-1650s.17 Regions, like the Haut-Albigeois, which were not particularly wealthy were completely unprepared for and unable to meet such burdens. At the end of Ancien Régime, the diocese of Albi was dominated by small plots (less than 10 hectares) and medium landowners (10–40 hectares). But the Haut-Albigeois was wetter, more wooded and more mountainous than its lowland counterpart. Beyond the river valleys in which Curvalle nestled the terrain was more mountainous, rising to as much as 600–700 metres, and the villages significantly smaller.18 The barony of Curvalle and its villages comprised one of the largest communities in the region. The capitation tax roll of 1695 shows a population of 1,149 people.19 It was also diverse, much more so than the surrounding region. As well as the métayers (sharecroppers) who dominated the region working their modest plots, there was a sizeable rural artisanate, which included cloth-workers (five tailors and thirteen weavers) and metal-workers (seven smiths and two armourers). In total, there were 227 taxpayers. Here we should distinguish between the illiterate majority in the lowest tax band and the elite, which included two noblemen (assessed in class 15, they were the highest ranked individuals in the capitation roll, paying 40 livres), two bourgeois, three merchants, one sieur (or gentleman), and two greffiers (clerks). There was a big social gap between ranks 21 (artisans taxed at 2 livres) and 22 (labourers and workers paying less than 2 livres) and rank 19 (ordinary gentlemen or gens de bien who possessed neither fief nor chateau, paying 6 livres).20 Curvalle had thirteen of these gens de bien in 1695. 16

17

18 19 20

The classic work is P. Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730, contribution à l’histoire sociale de la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1960). L. Malet, ‘Le Ségala tarnais devant l’impôt au XVIIe siècle’, Bulletin de la Société des arts et belles lettres du Tarn, 41 (1987), 495–516. See also: J. Collins, Fiscal Limits of Absolutism: Direct Taxation in Early Seventeenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Rascol, Les paysans, p. 29. http://corbiera.free.fr/roles/curvalle.htm. F. Bluche et J.-F. Solnon, La véritable hiérarchie sociale de l’ancienne France. Le tarif de la première capitation (1695) (Geneva: Droz, 1995), pp. 110–13.

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But even master artisans had the wherewithal to employ others – there were thirty maids (servantes) and twenty-eight valets listed in the community. In fact, the notability was even more extensive than these figures suggest: many of the richest inhabitants, who used the courtesy title sieur, had property elsewhere and do not appear among Curvalle’s taxpayers. Many of Sénégas’s opponents figured among the socially aspirant elite: Barthélemy Bonté, who signed himself with his toponymic ‘de Salvatages’, had pretensions to nobility; Jean Nozier, Consul in 1653, was married to a noblewoman.21 This notability fortified its manor houses – the word châteaurette appears several times in the sources – and played a preponderant role in the micro-politics of the parish during the Ancien Régime. Like most fiefs, the constitution of Curvalle and neighbouring Plaisance was complex. There were several axes of secular authority. The first of these was the seigneur and his officials. Although Sénégas had purchased them from the crown in 1608, the latter still possessed residual rights. There was, for instance, a royal courthouse. Any control exercised by Sénégas over appointments to royal offices was limited by the fact that they were venal and therefore the property of the purchaser. In any case, the crown retained some domain and the resident substitut du procureur général du roy was responsible for upholding royal rights. The third axis of power was the Consulat, the institution that was present in every community in the Midi, representing it in the outside world and regulating its internal affairs. Elections were usually held annually, and the office of Consul generally lasted one year, although sometimes this period could be extended. The outgoing Consuls would draw up a list of those eligible for election. The list of candidates had to be submitted to the lord, or more likely his officers, for ratification. The election then took place and the newly elected Consuls (consuls modernes) took an oath in front of the seigneur or his representative, most commonly a judge.22 Significantly, the assemblée générale of the electors of Curvalle took place, not at the seat of the royal court or the seigneurial chateau, but in the village square of Villeneuve-sur-Tarn.23 In the seventeenth century Curvalle was run by four Consuls who drew a salary. The Consuls were equals only in name: the significant social distinction between them ensured that some had more weight than others. In the eighteenth century this was recognised by the fact the First Consul at Curvalle was paid a salary of 18 livres a year and his colleagues only 10 livres.24 The Consulat was completed by the syndic, who was responsible for the communal coffers and accounts. In addition, the notary also played a role in the Consulat as secretary of the community.25 21 22 23 24 25

AD Tarn 2E/077/001/1, 25 February 1669. Rascol, Les paysans, pp. 208–9. AD Tarn C 618, 1661. Rascol, Les paysans, p. 316. AD Aveyron 3E1 786 fo. 119v.

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The Consuls had responsibility for the communal finances, receiving royal tax demands and apportioning them in accordance with the land register. Syndics were charged with representing the Consulat to Languedoc’s accounting and financial institutions, for which they claimed expenses.26 As well as collecting royal taxes, the Consuls were permitted to raise sums for the running of the commune and the payment of its officers, including the bell-ringers and the schoolmaster. A 1663 regulation stipulated that all accounts were to be rendered in public and that ‘all important matters should be treated in a general council’.27 The commune had the power to offer tax relief. In 1658, for example, rebates were offered to some taxpayers whose ability to pay had been disrupted by an outbreak of plague.28 How the system worked can be seen in the neighbouring village of Miolles, where taxpayers assembled in the square after Mass in October 1667. The village Consul addressed fifty fellow parishioners ‘constituting the greatest and soundest of the inhabitants’ on the need for a new rectory for the priest.29 One of the parishioners offered a property on condition that he received a rebate on his taille assessment. The notary who recorded the meetings tells us that the assembly agreed to this unanimously. The fact that the beneficiary was one the richest gens de bien in Curvalle, a sieur, should alert us to the fact that, like any democratic system, the process was open to abuse and manipulation by those with means. Richer inhabitants could exploit those struggling in the face of economic hardship and rising taxes. Let’s take the case of the Brandouin family. Jacques Brandouin was a notary and began investing the profits of office by buying land in Curvalle and the surrounding area from the 1610s, culminating in the purchase of the seigneury of Balaguier in 1634.30 This enabled his son, Jacques, to assume nobility. Jacques added to the family fortune by lending money to his neighbours. For example, between 1629 and 1658 he advanced 57 livres to Antoine and Jean Cappelet, father and son, so that they could pay their taille assessment on a meadow in the parish of Saint Pierre d’Illergues. Unable to pay back the capital and the interest accrued, an agreement was reached in 1663 by which they handed over a sieurie, manor (chasteaurette) and meadow to Brandouin.31 Others with less property – the Cappelet were not without means – were harder hit by the big tax increases demanded by the state, which was exacerbated by the demographic impact of the plague, decimating the ranks of 26 27 28

29 30

31

Ibid., 3E1 781 fo. 502v. AD Hérault 1B 39 fo. 793, ‘Règlement de la communauté de Caux, 1663’. AD Tarn, Archives Communales de Curvalle, 77 EDT CC3, ‘Quarc et Descarq servent de repertoire de Compoix et cadastre de curvalle’, fo. 127. AD Aveyron 3E1 787 fo. 378. For the genealogy: https://gw.geneanet.org/mthfrancois?lang=fr&iz=921&p=jac ques&n=de+brandouin. AD Aveyron 3E1 786 fo. 119v.

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taxpayers.32 In 1636 and 1637 complaints were made about the force used by the collector of the taille in Curvalle, Michel Blanc, later a leader of the antiSénégas faction.33 In 1638, a parish neighbouring Curvalle sent a delegation to Montpellier to lobby for a reduction in its taille assessment.34 In 1661 it was reported that some villages in the region were forty years in arrears.35 It was the disappointing returns from ordinary taxation which forced the crown in 1639 to resort to the wholesale creation of new venal offices and the technically illegal practice of selling the royal domain. This was an opportunity for the notability of Curvalle. Louis Manelphe, another leader of the anti-Sénégas faction whose career of violence and corruption would later see him outlawed, purchased the newly created office of prévôt of Albi, a post that put him in charge of policing functions in the district. His uncle, a cathedral canon, snapped up the royal domain that was put up for sale in Curvalle.36 The inability of the commune to meet its tax obligations meant that it had to borrow the money – they turned to Jacques Brandouin, who now became a creditor to the whole community. The interest he earned on deals like this permitted him to enter the banking world and marry into Languedoc’s financial elite. He became trésorier de France in the généralité of Toulouse, an office he probably inherited from his father-in-law.37 In 1647 the communauté of Curvalle decided to purchase the royal domain from Manelphe.38 The extent to which this decision was taken by the community as a whole, or a narrow clique that stood to profit from the purchase, is moot. The latter seems likely since the Consuls who took this decision did not have the necessary funds; they would have had to borrow the money to complete the purchase. In essence, a group of ambitious men were speculating in land. They approached their lord, Charles II Durand de Sénégas, grandson of the purchaser of Curvalle, for a loan. The deal stipulated that he lend them 11,600 livres and in return he would enjoy the land and its revenue for six years, after which they would buy him out. Two years later they had found sufficient cash and offered to buy him out early. But contention now arose between lord and community over how much he was owed, once interest and expenses were added. The community claimed that Sénégas ‘doubled the interest that he 32

33 34 35 36

37

38

The deal with Brandouin allowed Jean Cappelet to quit his debts before getting married, for which he received a dowry of 750 livres: AD Aveyron 3E1 786 fo. 147v. AD Hérault B 2147, p. 151. AD Aveyron 3E1 781 fo. 502v. AD Tarn C 478 and 479. AD Tarn C 482; http://vatepe.over-blog.com/article-a-propos-du-castel-de-cadagor114415157.html. http://gw.geneanet.org/mthfrancois?lang=fr&p=francois&n=de+brandouin+de +balaguier. Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat portant renvoi à la Chambre de justice des charges & informations faites contre le sieur de Senegas (1664), 1–2.

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claimed was owed’.39 They complained to the prince de Conti, governor of Languedoc: Of the extreme oppression exercised on them by the aggression, violence and extortion of the baron of Sénégas, who by artifice and deceit had found a means to extort from their poor community . . . an obligation for 11,600 livres and the mortgaging (engagement) of all their revenues. And having since bought up lawsuits of divers creditors of the petitioners, he has nearly reduced them to a state of extreme misery even forcing several of them to quit their own homes.40

This petition, sent in January 1661, was part of a systematic attempt by Sénégas’s enemies to use both the law and their political connections against him. It would lead to the sequestration of his property, banishment from the kingdom and eventual pardon. By making common cause with Sénégas’s ancient enemies, the vicomtes de Trélans, the community started a bloody feud which reached its apogee in the 1674 murders. A definitive peace was only finally concluded in 1678 under the auspices of Louis XIV himself.41 ****

Politics in Curvalle was characterised by levels of faction and intrigue that bear comparison with Versailles. Although Sénégas’s opponents claimed to speak for the community, it is clear that, initially at least, they represented a small faction, consisting of those who feared losing financially from the 1647 deal. Sénégas launched a lawsuit against the incumbent Consuls in the court of the Chambre de l’Edit at Castres, whose bench comprised judges of both confessions, ‘where he had many kinsmen and is considered among the most significant of the Reformed Religion’.42 On 12 August 1654 he received a judgment ordering the community to assemble ‘in front of two commissioners from the court of the chamber at Castres to deliberate on the utility or incommodity of recovering the domain’.43 We do not know what happened during that assembly. Sénégas’s enemies accused him of intimidating the electors. They accused him of moving the assembly from its customary meeting place: ‘he had the assembly of the community take place at Curvalle under the windows of his house, which was full of armed men, and had deliberated what he wished by threatening individuals with prison and death’.44 They were determined to resist his claims, by force if necessary. Already in 1652, in a letter 39 40 41

42 43 44

Ibid. AD Tarn C 476. AD Tarn B 100, ‘Transaction entre les familles de Sénégas et de Trelans’, 5 April 1678, printed in Carroll, ‘Vendetta in the Midi’, 35–50. Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat, 2. Ibid. AD Tarn C 476.

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which notary Pierre Bonnet, one of the ‘directeurs’ (the term used to designate Sénégas’s agents) placed for safe keeping in his notarial register, the difficulties that they were causing is evident. The letter makes it clear that the baron was involved only at a distance. It was his wife, Marthe de Montcalm, and sister, ‘Mademoiselle’, who dealt with debt collection in liaison with the directeurs. There were disagreements among them on how to proceed. The litigation was costly and when Bonnet requested more funds from the women, ‘Mademoiselle cried bitterly which made it necessary for me to enter a plea without either a lawyer or a procurator.’45 As a taxpayer on his non-noble property, Sénégas was both lord and a member of the community. His name appears at the head of the land register, the Compoix. Likewise, the directeurs of the barony were far from being mere baronial officials. They, too, were local property owners and taxpayers with voting rights.46 In this respect, they were little different to their opponents in the anti-Sénégas faction, who were the brothers Michel and François Blanc, sieurs de Lasfargues, and Barthélemy Bonté, sieur de Salvatages.47 Among the biggest taxpayers in Curvalle were the Manelphe family, Louis, sieur de Villeneuve, and his uncle the canon of Albi, who was assessed at more than 8 livres.48 As prévôt of Albi Manelphe wore the royal insignia and his troops provided the muscle for the resistance. In 1654 there were already complaints to the Parlement of Toulouse that he and his men, which included his brotherin-law François Blanc, were little more than brigands, guilty of extortion, intimidation and kidnapping.49 The precise details of what occurred in Curvalle in 1654 are hazy. Unlike in 1674, when the high status of the victims necessitated the intervention of the state and its judicial machinery, the lower social status of the victims attracted much less attention. Victims of low social status and their families only appear in records when mentioned in judgments obtained or petitions filed by the faction leaders. Their demands for justice were invariably sponsored or paid for by their richer neighbours. Violence first broke out in July 1654 when one of Sénégas’s supporters, Jean de Bermond, sieur de Roquecave (a Catholic), obtained a judgement from the court at Castres ordering the arrest of Michel Blanc, Louis Manelphe and Barthélemy Bonté.50 Following an investigation into the incumbent Consuls, the court ordered the community to assemble and 45 46

47 48 49

50

AD Aveyron 3E1 783 fo. 15v. Notary Bonnet, who was himself sieur de la Pagezié, mentions merchant Barthélemy Lecoules, sieur de Seignoret and Pierre Lavit, docteur ès droits and royal lieutenant of Curvalle as his colleagues. AD Tarn 77 EDT CC3, fo. 38. Ibid., 53v. AD Haute Garonne 1B 22819, ‘Supplication de jean douat habitant de valence en albiegois’, 4 March 1658. AD Haute Garonne 3B 492, 12 August 1654.

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hold fresh elections, at which Sénégas’s candidates triumphed. This transfer of power was not without trouble. Within days of the election Sénégas’s opponents complained of a fracas and sent a surgeon’s report to Castres, demanding his arrest and sixteen of his supporters. The court divided along confessional lines: the six Protestant judges were against the request and the six Catholics for, meaning that Sénégas could not be summoned to appear.51 The losers refused to accept what they considered to be a coup. They responded by refusing to comply with the tax demands following the 1654 harvest, comprising not only the king’s due but also the money entitled to Sénégas under the terms of the 1647 contract. In defiance of the court of Castres, they acted under cover of judgments issued by the excise court, the Cour des Aides, at Montpellier, where they represented the imposts as illegal and obtained writs for the arrest of Sénégas and his adherents.52 They encouraged others to disobey the new Consuls, whose tax-collectors responded by impounding cattle.53 The tax avoiders retorted with suits for trespass and threatened one of the new Consuls, Pierre Nicoules, who was placed under the safeguard of the Castres court.54 In late 1654 or early 1655 there was a shoot-out when the next round of elections for the Consulat was contested. According to Sénégas’s enemies, the lawfully elected Consuls, Jean Nozier, Jean Alary, Jean Alvergne and Jacques Sablayrolles, were stripped of their office and replaced by Sénégas’s choices, including notary Pierre Bonnet, who was made syndic. They claimed that François Blanc was wounded by a pistol shot to the head and had his hand shot off; that Barthélemy Bonté’s daughter and her maid were mortally wounded; and that another supporter was killed outright. On the other side, one of the directeurs of the barony, a Protestant called Antoine de Corbière, sieur de Peyrolles, was killed during the mêlée.55 ***

The directeurs appeared to have triumphed. Attempts to have their Consuls struck down came to nought and until 1659 they maintained control of the commune, ensuring that the money owed to Sénégas was paid. Proceedings in the name of Corbière’s widow, Sénégas and the Consuls of Curvalle were begun at Castres and orders for the arrest of Manelphe, François Blanc, Bonté and his son, and the deposed Consul, Jean Alvergne, a lawyer, were issued on 9 August 1655. They, in turn, refused to accept the election results 51 52

53 54 55

Ibid., 26 August 1654. Cited in AD Tarn E 198: ‘Information faict by M philippes de serignol juge de villefranche, 9 oct 1654 commissaire depute by cour des aides a la requete des consuls moderns de la baronnie de curvalle.’ AD Haute Garonne 3B 492, 24 September 1654. Ibid, AD Tarn 2E1 77/1, St Pierre d’Illiergues BMS, 17 February 1678. Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat, 2.

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and recognised an alternative regime, or shadow Consulat, consisting of the four men who had been illegally and violently removed by the directeurs.56 Their claims were, once again, supported by writs issued by the Cour des Aides at Montpellier.57 More significantly, in October 1656, the shadow Consuls obtained an order from the Parlement of Toulouse permitting them to fulfil ‘the obligations of their office and to proceed forthwith to the collection of royal moneys whose collection should not be delayed under any pretext’.58 This judgment resulted in more violence. One of Sénégas’s supporters, Barthélemy Herail, was killed.59 By early 1657 the dispute had reached the Conseil du Roi and the parties awaited its decision as to which of the competing courts would hear the case definitively. The anti-Sénégas faction in Curvalle did not wait for a judgement. They changed tactics completely, perhaps indicating that they expected little from the king’s council. Instead, they decided to form what was described by their enemies as ‘divers sindicatz’. A syndicate was an association for the defence of common interests, typically financial.60 One witness deposed that these were formed: against [Sénégas], in order to assail his honour, his life and his goods and they had held divers deliberations at Villeneuve-sur-Tarn, where they harmed the honour of the said sieur Sénégas and made divers invectives against him and defamed and slandered him . . . and had them signed . . . in the name of Maître Antoine Balard, procureur général du roy, in which they put all the slanders imaginable against Sénégas. And since Balard did not want to give [assent] or sign it, they took him prisoner and conducted him to the Château de La Bastide and detained him until he had signed in order to be released from prison. And afterwards he had legally disavowed it at the royal court at Curvalle.61

The Château de La Bastide, which stood on the opposite bank of the Tarn from Curvalle, belonged to François vicomte de Trélans. Trélans had an interest in affairs in Curvalle. He owned taxable property there and had voting rights. But there is little doubt that his main motive for involving himself in the dispute was the possibility of damaging a political enemy – he had form in this regard and had recently been engaged in several violent feuds with other neighbours

56 57

58

59 60 61

AD Haute Garonne 1 B 393, 9 and 17 Aug 1655. AD Hérault 1 B 39 f° 346, 28 March 1656, ‘Renvoi du procès de Jean de Nozier, sieur de Fonfrège; Jean Alvergne, sieur de Pratnou et autres habitants de la baronnie de Curvalle, contre Marguerite de Gautran, femme d’Antoine de Corbière.’ AD Haute Garonne 1 B 22819, 3 Aug 1657, ‘deliberation faite [par le] sr manelphe et autres’. Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat, 6. A.-M. Hetzel, ‘Quand les dictionnaires parlent du syndicat’, Mots, 36 (1993), 102–16. AD Haute Garonne 1 B 22819, Jean de Bermond tesmoin, 11 August 1661.

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in the Rouergue.62 Trélans hoped to profit from Sénégas’s financial embarrassment and made common cause with his enemy’s enemies. The syndicate set out to seize back control of the Consulat, summoning a meeting of the assembly general of the commune on 3 August 1657 at Villeneuve-sur-Tarn. Remarkably, the report of the deliberations survives.63 The electors of Curvalle were presented with a proposal by the syndicate. Its spokesmen argued that the shadow Consuls were the legitimate representatives of the community and had been prevented from carrying out their duties. They requested that the assembly entrust them with the collection of municipal and royal taxes and they kindly offered the help of Prévôt Manelphe’s troopers to give assistance. They portrayed Sénégas as a petty tyrant, ‘who by private authority wishes to levy immense sums on the poor inhabitants of the community and has them levied by force in order to utterly ruin it’. The present Consulat was not the legitimate authority, ‘having never been valid, nor recognised as such by law or reason’. They claimed to be acting in the name of ‘public order’ and accused others of being traitors, disturbers of the public peace, or selling out to Sénégas.64 The syndicate went further in its attempts to represent itself as acting in the name of the public good. It accused the previous Consuls of corruption and of using the quartering of troops on the villagers as a pretext for siphoning off funds, ‘under the guise [of paying] the soldiers it gave itself 3,500 livres’. And it sought the consent of the inhabitants for ‘un ammendement general’, that is a reformation or correction, of the communal finances in order to recover these stolen monies and to quit its debts to Jacques Brandouin, who, with the failure of the community to pay its royal taxes, had stepped in to fulfil its obligations from his own pocket, amounting to the sum of 6,400 livres. In reality, the ‘general amendment’ consisted of the syndicate purchasing the community’s debts and any litigation pertaining to it: It has been deliberated by the corps of this community and conseil general that a very humble request be made to Messire François de Nogaret, vicomte de Trélans, to Messieurs Philippe de Dumas, sieur de Graves and Louis Manelphe, sieur de Villeneuve, if it please them to lend the community and to its syndic . . . all the sums that the community owes to the sieur de Sénégas and other creditors [and] to procure the revenues beneficial for undertaking the pursuit of all the affairs made by its syndic.

The sale of debts and lawsuits (subrogation) was common in the Ancien Régime but given the previous history of enmity between members of the 62

63

64

For this story: Carroll, Blood and Violence, pp. 78, 142, 212; AD Haute Garonne 2B 962, 9 November 1666; Carroll, ‘Vendetta in the Midi’. AD Haute Garonne 1 B 22819, 3 August 1657: ‘deliberation faite [par le] sr manelphe et autres’. In particular, Louis Bonté, son of Barthélemy, and Jean Alvergne, who had made their peace with the directeurs.

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syndicate and Sénégas there is little doubt their motives were as much political as financial. The deal was signed by 106 members of the community headed by the syndicate. Since they constituted only about 50 per cent of the electorate and many leading members of the community were absent the vote undoubtedly represented the will of one faction. However, it is unlikely that the meeting was a complete sham and merely packed with clients, tenants and servants of the syndicate, for the syndicate claimed to represent the ‘public good and utility’ of the commune, an appeal that reached beyond a narrow set of grievances against a lord. First, the syndicate admitted that they had previously made mistakes and they criticised the failings of all Consuls, including former friends, who had since reconciled with Sénégas. Second, they claimed that the deal would lead to justice, ‘for the oppression of the quartering of troops suffered by the inhabitants of Curvalle’ and that they would ‘pursue incessantly’ those responsible for maladministration. One can imagine that this appeal struck a chord with many ordinary villagers who otherwise cared little for the enmities that divided their social superiors. The syndicate was echoing the demand made throughout France in the 1640s and 1650s for punitive justice against corrupt officials. ***

The five parishes were now effectively divided into two armed camps, each claiming the right to levy taxes. On 18 September 1657, Sénégas, acting on behalf of the widow of Barthélemy Herail, obtained a judgment condemning members of the syndicate for his murder. But when his men tried to serve the arrest warrants they met with armed resistance from the garrison at La Bastide and at Cadagors, Manelphe’s chateau a little upstream on the Tarn.65 In 1660, one of the men charged with serving the writs was himself clapped in irons and put in the dungeons of La Bastide.66 The syndicate’s soldiers prevented Sénégas from collecting his rents.67 Sénégas obtained a fresh judgement, permitting him to seize the chateau of La Bastide and its revenues in recompense, which he did in July 1663: But since, in order to prevent [Sénégas] from taking the dues of his charge, François de [Trélans], sieur de La Bastide and his accomplices have committed an infinite number of aggressions and atrocious crimes, taking and removing its emoluments and making efforts to despoil [him] of the château of La Bastide.68 65

66

67

68

AD Haute Garonne 1 B 22819, ‘Information secrettement fait par jean bec magistrate royal de la vile [sic] et la canne commissaire de la chambre deledit a castres’, 1661. AD Haute Garonne 3B 567, ‘Supplication de Messire Charles de Durand de Bonne baron de Senegas, anne meliere et Catherine flamanque femme de jean connac sergent’, 1661. AD Haute Garonne 1B 22819, ‘Témoinage de Jean de Bermond, sieur de Roquecave’, 11 August 1661. AD Haute Garonne 3B 504, 12 December 1663.

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The list of his accomplices, which included more than a dozen noblemen, demonstrates the level of support enjoyed by Trélans and how far the dispute had escalated. It included both locals, members of the syndicate and other disgruntled landowners, as well as his kinsmen from faraway Gévaudan. However, this was not a Catholic faction; it also included members of the local Protestant elite, whose reasons for opposing Sénégas are a matter of speculation.69 The unholy alliance complained to the governor and the royal council, portraying themselves as defenders of the royal fisc. This was a fabrication. It was the syndicate which was preventing the collection of royal taxes. Keen to pose as defenders of the community, they offered locals protection against the officers of the fisc. In 1661, for example, the receiver of Albi, who had overall responsibility for collecting the taille, sent his archers to Curvalle to impound cattle in lieu of arrears. Trélans had the archers arrested and imprisoned at La Bastide.70 The fact that the syndicate was able to attract the king’s sympathetic attention demonstrates the sophisticated way in which they managed public relations and how they were able to play on the prejudices of policy-makers. Their complaint that Sénégas has seized control of the community and royal domain was sent to the Chambre de Justice, an extraordinary commission established by Colbert to pursue financial malfeasance in the wake of the fall and imprisonment of Finance Minister Fouquet. Sénégas was arrested and sent to Paris to answer the charges. In its 1664 petition to the Conseil d’Etat, the syndicate, in the name of the inhabitants and taxpayers of Curvalle, appealed to another prejudice of Louis XIV: the baron of Sénégas ‘being of the profession of the Pretended Reformed Religion . . . has no difficulty in violating all human and divine laws’. They accused him of sacrilege, having garrisoned La Bastide with ‘religionnaires’ and razing a church bell-tower.71 Sénégas retorted that the Chambre de Justice was not competent to judge him. But the charges were now so serious that he was sent to be judged by the Great Assizes, or grands jours, of the Parlement of Paris, whose sentence on 7 January 1666 razed the chateaux of Plaisance and Curvalle, banished him from the kingdom in perpetuity and fined him 16,000 livres. His enemies profited from the judgment – Louis Manelphe obtained 6,000 livres in damages.72 Neither Sénégas’s conviction, nor his eventual pardon, nor his death in 1671 brought an end to the fighting, legal or otherwise, largely because the problem was not caused by one man’s usurpation of royal rights but was rather rooted in a political contest between two factions. The dispute engulfed scores of individuals who were convicted in absentia and subject to sentences of 69 70 71 72

For example, several members of the Perrin de la Bessière. AD Tarn C 476. Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat, 2, p. 11. AD Tarn E 198, 7 January 1666.

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outlawry, meaning that they faced the risk of being killed with impunity and having their property seized. One judgment obtained by the syndicate in 1665 named fifty accomplices of Sénégas and made them liable for the 20,000 livres which it, in the name of the taxpayers of Curvalle, claimed had been falsely levied on the community.73 In 1667, one of those condemned was killed ‘by an injury to his head’.74 Although we do not know if the injury was accidental or not, it points to the potential for the court judgments to legitimise private justice. Fortunately for Sénégas and his directeurs the syndicate was not in a position to enforce the writs it obtained. Its armed wing was significantly weakened by the arrest of Prévôt Louis Manelphe, who was himself imprisoned by the Great Assizes of the Parlement of Paris for various infractions committed in a public office. Although he was released, the Parlement of Toulouse kept up its investigation and he was killed in 1670 while resisting rearrest.75 It was Sénégas, or rather his wife, Marthe de Montcalm, who now reassumed direction of family affairs in her husband’s absence, who was better able to employ force in recovery of her dues.76 Resistance to her coalesced in Plaisance. On 1 September 1670 her agents, accompanied by the prévôt of Castres, arrived to oversee the collection of debts. When they tried to cross the Rance from Curvalle to Plaisance the inhabitants rang the tocsin and greeted them with a volley of shots and cries of ‘écorcheur’, threatening to cut the ears off anyone who entered their village. Among the crowd were syndicate members Michel and François Blanc.77 The immediate cause of the vicomte de Trélans’s murder in 1674 is unclear, especially since peace negotiations led by the intendants of Guyenne and Languedoc were underway. But in the summer of 1674 the Sénégas family was still intent on using force and obtained a judgment against the inhabitants of Plaisance and its Consuls, threatening them with fines and placing their own agents under the court’s protection.78 It is clear that some family members were not content with this; they saw the controlling hand of Trélans and the syndicate behind the resistance. It was the sixth and youngest son of Charles II de Sénégas and Marthe de Montcalm who chose or was chosen to act. The sieur de Saint-Pierre was a 24-year-old man of action, who had already been involved in a deadly duel and was, as a lieutenant in a royal cavalry company, to some extent protected from acts of violence that could be construed as a vindication of honour.79 73 74 75

76

77 78 79

Ibid., ‘Information fait par griffoul juge royale de la guyolle’, 1665. AD Aveyron 3E1 787 fo. 373v. AD Tarn C 482; C. Barrière-Flavy, La Chronique criminelle d’une grande province sous Louis XIV (Paris: Occitania, 1926), pp. 68–9. Under the direction of Marquis de Cabaussel, sieur de Puguet: AD Aveyron 3E1 787 fo. 568v. AD Tarn B 225, 3 September 1670. AD Haute Garonne 3 B 561, 20 July 1674. AD Tarn B 224, 9 March 1668.

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But it was not simply a matter of the settling of accounts by aristocrats. When Saint-Pierre disrupted Mass in La Bastide on 25 August he did so at the head of a group of men, women and children. Folklore recounted in the nineteenth century suggests that they made common cause with the ‘enemies of their lord to finish him off, in order to avenge the everyday personal outrages that this lord allowed him against their daughters’.80 This is entirely possible, since the rioters consisted of whole families, husbands, wives and children. A closer investigation of those involved suggests other grievances were also at work.81 Charles Assier was the son of a town merchant and his wife, who pulled off Trélans’s wig, was the daughter of an écuyer and considerable property owner in La Bastide.82 Once Trélans had been detained they and their families burst into his chateau and seized its movables. The witnesses in the judicial investigation did not reveal a motive for this. But it is clear that it was not a riot. Rather, these were gens de bien intent on taking Trélans’s property in lieu of debts or damages. The assailants clearly thought their actions legitimate. It was only when news of his murder reached La Bastide that they fled. It is moot whether Saint-Pierre set out with the intention to kill. Trélans’s men were in hot pursuit and it seems he was unable to escape with his prisoner. It seems safe to conclude that Sénégas fils was playing Trélans at his own game, making common cause with his enemy’s enemies, providing the muscle for them to recover their debts and possibly to take compensation for the hurt done to their daughters. Although the comprehensive peace settlement of 1678 brokered by the intendants brought the vendetta to an end, enmity did not altogether disappear. During the harvest of 1680 there were armed confrontations at both Plaisance and Curvalle between Charles de Sénégas’s fifth son, Augustin, and armed supporters of the syndicate. When Augustin held aloft a court judgment which empowered him to collect his family’s dues they called him ‘a knave who should remember what happened to the sieur de Saint-Pierre his brother, the example of which he should have in his mind, and that if he didn’t retire they would box his ears’.83 In March 1688 Augustin’s sister Marthe de Sénégas complained to the sénéchaussée court at Castres about two brothers called Calmelet, farmers (petits laboureurs), who: often displayed the signs of malice and enmity that they had for the House of Sénégas . . . and in the presence of several persons . . . uttered base and malicious words against the seigneur and marquis de Sénégas her brother, saying that his lands in the neighbourhood . . . is a nest of thieves and by 80 81

82 83

Foulquier-Lavergne, ‘Étude historique et statistique sur le Canton de Saint-Sernin’. BN Ms Clairambault 795 fo. 565, ‘Témoinage de Louis de mareschal docteur en droit et juge pour le roy au lieu de pleasance en rouergue’. He was from Valence d’Albigeois: AD Aveyron 3E 4306, 23 October 1662. AD Tarn 234, July and 19 August 1680.

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an excess of malice also said that if there was wood to burn him they would willingly go to get it and several other infamous and maliciously thought up words . . . and with 17 or 18 others they went to his plot called La Martinie and committed great disorders in contempt of her brother, killing the chickens, beating his sharecropper and family, and threatening to ransack their house.84

The reference to the burning of the corpse of the sieur de Saint-Pierre de Sénégas in 1674 shows that the feud that had divided the community for a generation was not yet forgotten. The judicial documents are a snapshot of the wider oral culture that is lost. They suggest the ways in which villages are, like any other political community, shaped by friend–enemy relationships. Events were memorialised and recalled in order to provoke, demonstrating the strong emotions that the violence continued to generate long after the initial causes of the dispute had been forgotten. ***

The story of Curvalle in the seventeenth century is both dramatic and significant. It has important implications for our understanding of the pattern of violence in early modern history of France more generally. It is commonly assumed that the high levels of violence that characterised France in the period from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, particularly in the Midi, was largely the product of religious division and upheaval, which was progressively brought under control by the growing power of the state, which disarmed the Protestants in the 1620s and expelled them altogether in 1685. The violence at Curvalle, however, occurred during a time when confessional tensions were considerably reduced. There is no evidence that the community divided along confessional lines. All the evidence is to the contrary. Sénégas’s religion was invoked only once by his enemies; it was employed instrumentally in a petition in order to attract the attention of Louis XIV. In fact, in Curvalle the state was part of the problem. This chapter has argued that the Trélans– Sénégas feud tells us something about the emergence of modernity in France, about how the arrival of the state into a previously marginal region upset a delicate equilibrium. William Beik has demonstrated that conflict in seventeenth-century Languedoc was not simply a matter of centre against periphery, or the people against the tax-collectors. Rather, the demands of the state led to divisions within the local corps politique.85 On the one hand, there was widespread resistance to the sale of royal rights to local landlords; on the other hand, the gamble made by speculators in royal domain and office often left them mired in debt and litigation. After 1639 rival parties in many 84 85

AD Tarn B 242, 5 and 17 March 1688. W. Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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communities fought for control of the Consulat. At Rabastens-en-Albiegois, for example, the sale of royal domain ‘occasioned a sort of civil war’ lasting twenty years.86 It led to the creation of two armed factions called ‘la Matte’ and ‘la Séquelle’, who fought each for control of the community in the same way as the ‘syndicate’ and the directeurs contested Curvalle. This was a common problem across Languedoc and there is evidence of electoral violence at Béziers (1651), Lautrec (1653) and Albi (1654). Some of the violence was confessionally motivated, but there was more to it than anti-Protestant or antiCatholic sentiment. The sacking of the episcopal palace at Le Puy in 1657 demonstrates a strong strain of anti-clerical feeling among Catholics, who wished to protect civic authority against the claims of the CounterReformation Church.87 Antoine Jacmon, a bourgeois of Le Puy, recorded in his diary the violence between the urban factions, which caused seventy-six murders between 1632 and 1654, including the deaths of seven nobles, twelve notables (lawyers, notaries and physicians) and two priests – this in a town of about 6,000 inhabitants.88 The ties that bound pre-modern communities together are well covered in the research. It is more difficult to get at the feuds and factions that are a feature of all pre-industrial societies. The village commune was a hierarchical institution that was far from being dominated by a homogeneous peasantry. Excessive reliance on official records tends to reduce village politics to the story of resistance to the royal fisc and landlordism. I argue for a more multivalent approach to village politics, which was in its own fashion every bit as complex as the political relations between lords, or within urban communities, which are the staples of the historiography. This was especially true of southern France during the seventeenth century when elections to and control of the Consulat were the scene of highly politicised struggles for control of office among the propertied. Another claim is that the high level of violence we see in seventeenthcentury France is evidence of the survival of traditional kinship obligations, namely that it was customary to take revenge for a family member who had been wronged. Seventeenth-century France remained a traditional, community-oriented, kinship-based society in which the values of family ties, loyalty and above all honour were primary in importance, which led to incidents of verbal and physical violence as parties sought to redress insults to their honour or to the honour of a member of their household.89 While there is some truth in this, this was not the primary cause of the trouble in Curvalle, 86

87 88 89

A. du Mège (ed.), Histoire générale de Languedoc de Dom Claude de Vic & Dom Vaissette, 10 vols. (Toulouse, 1840–6), x, pp. 128–31. Barrière-Flavy, Chronique criminelle, pp. 21–3. A. Chassaing (ed.), Mémoires d’Antoine Jacmon, bourgeois du Puy (Le Puy, 1885). M. Nassiet, La violence, une histoire sociale. France, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2011).

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where violence was, in large measure, the product of political relationships. In Curvalle these were determined by material interests, which were not always compatible with kinship obligations. Violence was closely related to justice, the defence of rights and the enforcement of legal writs. In any case, kinship ties were extremely complex, and factions did not coalesce around neatly defined kinship groups. The village elite, in particular, were tied together by marriage and financial obligations. Family feelings, as anyone is aware, can generate both antipathy and envy, as well as love and affection, as a document registered by the notary of Curvalle in 1636 demonstrates. Suzanne Calvière, a member of the village squirearchy, whose will was witnessed by some of the protagonists in the violence, had a codicil appended in which she prevented her sister from being a beneficiary ‘because of the ingratitude she has received from her even during present illness’.90 The events also have significance beyond France. The relatively high levels of violence that we see in both southern France and Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have less to do with a shared ‘Mediterranean’ culture than a common political culture shaped by representative institutions, communal office-holding and ideas of citizenship. The demands of the state in both mid-seventeenth-century Italy and France increased the stakes and therefore the level of conflict in communal politics. In France the hatred directed at the Cardinal Ministers, first Richelieu and then Mazarin, was a product not just of tax hikes and their failure to respect corporate liberties, but the manner in which the kleptocratic system they created poisoned everyday social relations. The state built by Louis XIV was different to that created by his immediate predecessors: it paid close attention to the material interests of local elites and to the mediation of disputes, something the king took a close personal interest in. The success and failure of Louis XIV’s system form the subject of the next chapter.

90

AD Aveyron 3E1 780 fo. 201.

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9 Peace and Justice under the Absolute Monarchy

TUES. MAR 31. Many murders committed here. He that endeavoured to kil his sister in our house, had before kild a man, & it cost his father 500 escus to get him off, by their secret distribution gaining the favour of the Counsellors.1

It would be easy to dismiss John Locke’s observations, recorded while staying in Montpellier during his 1675–6 travels in France, as the prejudices of a hostile observer. After all, historians have traditionally been impressed by the order that Louis XIV rapidly imposed upon the realm after 1660. We are still frequently reminded that Louis outlawed duelling, brought a rebellious aristocracy to heel and repressed criminality. In fact, it would be worth paying more attention to Locke the eyewitness. He was no simple Francophobe; a student of the new French civility, he promoted it on his return to England. And all the evidence suggests that Languedoc was, in spite of Louis’s attempts at repression, a troubled place in the 1670s and, with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, things were about to get a whole lot worse. In common with most of Europe, murder in France continued to be largely dealt with by a combination of royal pardons, pious bequests, fines and compensation to the victim’s family. The French state had, since the Middle Ages, imposed the principle that private settlements had to be publicly registered in its courts and sealed by royal pardons. This had to be paid for. The rich, as Locke observed, had to pay through the nose at every stage of the process. Over the past twenty years legal historians have overturned the idea of a punitive and inflexible Ancien Régime legal system. The law, at least, was not the hammer of royal absolutism. The reason for this was twofold. First, the Counter-Reformation, in reaction to the humanist idealisation of justice, reasserted the role of peacemaking as a moral imperative. Louis XIV, in particular, took the Christian ideal of the king as peacemaker seriously.2 He personally ordered the intendants of Languedoc and Guyenne to intervene and 1

2

J. Lough (ed.), Locke’s Travels in France, 1675–1679: As Related in His Journals, Correspondence and Other Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), p. 67. See Chapter 14.

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terminate the Curvalle vendetta in 1674.3 This is one of the many examples in which the despised intendants were redeployed during his reign: ‘Louis XIV restored a healthy political climate by arbitrating provincial quarrels more effectively, using the intendant as an expert investigator and the royal council as an authoritative judge.’4 Effective arbitration was built on the expansion of the information state – knowledge of impending trouble permitted the state to intervene before it escalated. Lettres de cachet, permitting arrest without trial, which later came to symbolise tyranny, were initially a form of preventative detention, permitting passions to cool and negotiations to take place before matters got out of hand. In 1714, for example, the intendant of Guyenne reconciled Duhamel, son of a judge in the Parlement of Bordeaux, and the sieur de Drouillart, a city merchant. Duhamel had ordered his enemy to be thrashed, but before this could be carried out he was summoned to Paris by lettres de cachet. The king’s minister, La Vrillière, sent him back to the president of the Parlement of Bordeaux, ‘pour y faire satisfaction’, that is to effect a settlement. It was the prompt action of the king’s ministers therefore which prevented the affair from escalating.5 Louis XIV also demanded information from his agents in order to inform distributive justice: known disturbers of the peace were to be refused royal grace and favour.6 The weakness of this system was that it depended on the Herculean efforts of the king to master the minutiae of business. In the early years of the personal rule Louis was able to do this, laboriously poring over, for example, the pardon rolls in order to check the claims made by supplicants for the royal grace. This became increasingly difficult from the 1680s as foreign affairs began to take priority over the domestic agenda. The second reason why criminal law continued to privilege reconciliation and arbitration over punishment was the recognition that the mania for litigation – there was very little in the way of public prosecution – was part of the problem of violence in the first place. The explosion of litigation in the sixteenth century was a consequence of social change: the richer one was, the more one used the law. Even at the village level litigants were overwhelmingly drawn from the notability and the propertied, the top 20 per cent, who had rights to enforce and debts to collect.7 The link between enmity and litigation continued in the eighteenth century. Hervé Piant’s analysis of 10,000 petty civil and criminal lawsuits for the period 1670–1790 led him to conclude that 3

4 5

6 7

‘Le Roy veu led consentement auroit renvoyé le tout pardevant led sieur d’aguesseau pour juger diffinitivement et en dernier resort’: AD Tarn B 100, ‘Transaction entre les familles de Sénégas et de Trelans’, 5 April 1678. Beik, Absolutism and Society, p. 323. C. Le Mao (ed.), Chronique du Bordelais au crépuscule du Grand Siècle: Le Mémorial de Savignac (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2004), p. 323. Carroll, Blood and Violence, pp. 326–7. Piant, Une justice ordinaire, pp. 116–23.

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‘Vengeance is in fact everywhere in the judicial archives even if its presence is rarely explicit.’8 Sworn enemies were unlikely to accept the finality of a court judgment. But the monarchical state was also partly responsible for the problem. The expansion of the number of courts in the sixteenth century was driven by fiscal imperatives and the possibility of creating more legal offices, which could be sold. There was a plethora of competing courts and a cumbersome appeals process, which meant that, for those with means, court judgments were never final. The high rates of violence that characterised France between 1560 and 1660 do not mean that France was a lawless society. Quite the opposite: it was a legalistic society in which the use of violence was routinely legitimised with legal writs. Contemporaries were aware of their reputation for litigiousness and made unfavourable comparisons with the summary justice available elsewhere: And in all the countries of Zuizerland, & in the imperial cities, there is neither proctors nor lawyers, & suits are ordinarily dispatched at the first assignation, & without cost or trouble. And truly the natural sense assisted with an upright conscience, joyned with experience, setteth a rule downe for judgements: For France, it hath of long time had this Epitheton given vnto it, that she is the mother nurse of practisers: & a stranger which made a commentary vpon Ptolome saith, that in France is more petifoggers, and wasters of paper to be found, than in al Germany, Italy, or Spaine.9

Under Louis XIV there were significant attempts to rationalise the system, but litigation remained both costly and tortuous. Louis himself, hardly known for his modesty, admitted in his memoir to the dauphin that justice was the hardest area of royal government to reform, the reason being that justice meant confronting vested interests and privilege, the foundations on which absolute monarchy rested. For these reasons, reform of the legal system did not undermine either in practice or in principle the dominant role played by arbitration and mediation that characterised the Ancien Régime legal system.10 A 1695 edict, for example, behoved priests and notaries to intervene and reconcile lawsuits. The system of negotiated justice prevailed until 1789. In eighteenth-century Brittany between a third and a half of all lawsuits never reached a judgment, a figure that reached 60 per cent in the justice of Vaucouleurs in Lorraine. Judgments issued in lesser courts were subject to appeal, or were often the product of a plea bargain or forced arbitration (arbitrage penalisé), in which the accused confessed in order to receive 8 9 10

Ibid., p. 202. M. Coignet, Politique discourses (London, 1586). E. Wenzel, ‘La paix par la justice. Les modes alternatifs de règlement des conflits’, in Broggio and Paoli (eds.), Stringere la pace, pp. 509–19.

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a light sentence. This was especially true of crimes that involved a defence of honour, meaning that prosecutions for violence were much more likely to be dropped than those for theft. Definitive judgments were very difficult to enforce against those with political contacts and good lawyers.11 For example, the seigneur de Pellevert obtained a pardon in 1624 for killing his neighbour and cousin over contested rights, including pre-eminence in the local parish church. In 1629 the dead man’s widow had it quashed and obtained the killer’s property in compensation for her loss. However, she did not manage to get her hands on the cash because the killer’s wife ‘was the secret and real purchaser [of Pellevert], which she did at auction under borrowed names’. The widow got a judgment in her favour in 1631. But the dame de Pellevert was not finished yet. She appealed to the Parlement of Paris in 1633 on the grounds that the lands in question formed part of her dower and that she could not be held responsible for the felonies of her husband.12 The Ancien Régime state was much more concerned with maintaining social harmony than punitive justice and judges had wide leeway in interpreting the law. One of the great attractions of the king’s absolute authority to his subjects was its potential to cut through the blizzard of contradictory legal judgments emanating from competing courts. The royal will had the power to terminate the equivocation of the courts and the endless appeals, negotiations and evocations that were a feature of France’s pluralistic legal system. The continuity with medieval practice was not without success. All the evidence suggests that interpersonal violence was much reduced by the mideighteenth century. Since pacification was not the result of repression, it suggests that it was due more to the transformation of the political environment and the manner in which the state succeeded in strengthening mechanisms of social control. The present chapter outlines this process. It sets out the problem of disorder faced by Louis XIV and assesses the success and failure of his attempts to deal with it. It argues that some of the problems that had beset France in the mid-seventeenth century reappeared around 1700. This was followed after 1725 by the remarkable efflorescence of French civil society. It concludes by suggesting that this social equilibrium was not overthrown by Revolution in 1789, but that the Ancien Régime system of social control was already under strain by the 1780s and that rocketing levels of interpersonal violence were indicative of the ways in which the political and constitutional crisis were impacting everyday social relations. 11

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AD Haute Garonne 1B 3744. In October 1674 the sieur de Haupont was shot and killed in his house. The procureur général of the Parlement of Toulouse lamented that ‘the guilty had innocented themselves from the murder by fabricating a lawsuit under with the authority of the ordinary justice of the locality’. J. du Fresne, Journal des principales audiences du Parlement, 7 vols. (Paris, 1757), I, pp. 239–48.

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The problem of disorder facing Louis XIV in 1661 when he assumed the personal rule was deep seated. Disorder was not the product of bad manners or criminality, but the widespread belief among the social elite that the use of violence in defence of honour, rights and the commonwealth was both legitimate and necessary. The argument that the violence was the product of religious war, which was progressively overcome in the seventeenth century, is reductive. If the Wars of Religion (1562–98) had been just about religion they would have been over very quickly, since the Huguenots never constituted more than 10 per cent of the population. In fact, the civil wars were also a great political and social crisis than unleashed violence at every level of society, dividing families, towns and villages. It gave birth to a venomous print culture obsessed with denouncing enemies, real and imagined, contributing to the climate of hatred which continued to poison public life for the first half of the seventeenth century.13 Religion shaped factional allegiance but did not determine it. Catholics were never a united bloc and, during times of religious peace, neither were the Protestants. Nor were the Protestant nobility more Godly or disciplined than their Catholic neighbours. The experience of persecution accustomed them to violence. Protestants fought duels with each other and were divided by bloody feuds over property rights, as well as their Catholic neighbours.14 Let us return to the Midi, where Protestantism was strongest. We have already seen in the previous chapter that the barons of Sénégas had enmities with their Protestant neighbours, as well as with the Catholics.15 The differences among the Protestant factions in Castres came to a head in 1607 when there was a three versus three duel in the streets. One petitioner for a pardon expressed his regret at the behaviour of his companion, Jacques de Toulouse-Lautrec, sénéchal of Castres. Having killed his opponent, Toulouse-Lautrec ‘threw stones at his 13

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Y. Rodier, Les raisons de la haine. Histoire d’une passion dans la France du premier XVIIe siècle (1610–1659) (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2019). The are many examples: http://montmaurvillage.free.fr/montmaur_duelhtm;. www .romanshistorique.fr/romans-sur-isere-famille-gillier; www.christies.com/en/lot/lot4907830; https://gw.geneanet.org/pierfit?lang=en&p=daniel&n=clausel; http://jm .ouvrard.pagesperso-orange.fr/armor/fami/l/lecoq.htm; www.ghcaraibe.org/articles/ 2013-art20-2.pdf; M. Nassiet (ed.), Guerre civile et pardon royale en Anjou (1580–1600) (Paris: Société de l’Histoire de France, 2013), p. 199; L. Meschinet de Richemond, ‘Diaire de Joseph Guillaudeau, sieur de Beaupréau (1584–1643)’, Archives historiques de la Saintonge et de l’Aunis, 38 (1908), 157; AD Lot et Garonne B 233 and 234; M. Lesueur de Pérès, Chronique d’Isaac de Pérès, 1554–1611 (Agen, 1882), pp. 96–8; AD Haute Garonne 3B 494, 25 November 1656, 495, 30 January 1657; A. de Ruble (ed.), Lettres et commentaires de Blaise de Monluc, 5 vols. (Paris, 1864–72), V, pp. 77–83. In 1607, the youngest son of the baron de Sénégas was murdered on the open road: F. Dumont (ed.), Inventaire des arrêts du conseil privé (Règnes de Henri III et Henri IV), 2 vols. (Paris: CNRS, 1969–71), II, no. 13338.

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head, besides the other wounds’ he had given him. When the combat was over they argued (in Occitan) about what to do with the wounded man who was left: ‘What advantage was there in [finishing him off]? He was dying.’ ToulouseLautrec replied (in Occitan), ‘I want to make sure he’s dead, since he did not ask for quarter.’16 Better to shoot first and ask questions later – those who followed the rules ended up dead.17 This is one of many examples demonstrating how deep was the rancour caused by the civil wars. It was because enmities were complex and not simply marked by confessional boundaries that they continued to fester in the decades after the 1598 Edict of Nantes had largely solved the problem of religious division.18 In 1615 another bloody duel was fought between representatives of competing Protestant factions.19 The following year Toulouse-Lautrec was shot in the head and killed in an encounter on a bridge between Albi and Castres by David de Castelpers, vicomte de Panat, who had seconded him in 1607.20 Within months Panat was himself dead. The cause was ostensibly the adultery of his sister, Marguerite, with another Protestant captain, the vicomte de Paulin. On 9 July 1616 the two lovers were murdered. The killing of adulterers is a common feature in all honour societies and the husband, the baron de Reyniès, obtained his pardon. The case became a cause célèbre and the subject of Parisian gossip. However, the brutality of the killings and the fact that David de Castelpers, who was suspected of encouraging the liaison, was also killed suggest that there were other motives in play, in addition to male sexual jealousy. The judicial investigation shows that this was no ordinary killing – the surgeon’s reports show that Marguerite died from twenty-five wounds.21 Reyniès did not survive for long; he was embroiled in other feuds and murdered in 1623. These incidents of Protestant-on-Protestant violence demonstrate the complexity of local enmities, which were not demarcated along neat confessional identities. It explains why religious peace did not bring social peace in many localities. Disputes were often rooted in material interests. The feud between 16

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BN MS Français 5809. fo.119v, ‘Abolition accordée au Sr de Chasteau Verdun, Sr de La Razerie.’ Jean-Antoine de Bouffard was run through in 1651, having given his opponent quarter not once but twice: C. Pradel (ed.), ‘Le livre de raison de Jean de Bouffard Madiane (1619– 1673)’, Bulletin de la société d’histoire du protestantisme français, 56 (1907), 41. For example, ‘Un Duel aux Lèches près Bergerac’, Bulletin de la Société Historique et Archéologique de Périgord, 20 (1903), 224–6. Like good Protestants they prayed once they had removed their doublets. Then the insults began, the sieur de Piles taunting his opponent that he ‘was an apprentice and novice and had never seen blood and would be in danger of a heart attack when he saw his own’. Four were left dead. A. Halphen (ed.), Journal inédit d’Arnauld d’Andilly, 1614–1620 (Paris, 1857), p. 73. G. Marceau, ‘Petite histoire de La Fenasse’: https://en.calameo.com/read/ 0009873293bbad1cf293d. Published from a private archive: http://corbiera.free.fr/etudes/etudes/paulin.htm.

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the Courtils family and its neighbours near Beauvais began in the 1550s following a lawsuit about contested rights. It turned bloody during the Wars of Religion and revived after 1607 in a series of duels; it was only finally settled by the Marshals of France in 1648. Litigation became dangerously entangled with notions of honour: one of the Courtils’s enemies ‘repeated that since his father . . . did not fear to spend 500 écus in a suit launched over common grazing for the sheep of Merlemont, he would spend 2,000 écus to revive it’.22 Encounters fought over the possession of game or access to pasture were more often than not the product of a more profound contest over rights and social pre-eminence.23 The practice was not confined to sword nobles but adopted by the social elite broadly defined: a judge of the Parlement of Rennes was assassinated in 1623 after attending Mass, ‘the cause of which was either private revenge or for political reasons’; the First Consul of Montpellier was killed in a duel in 1651; the village notability of Nailloux (Languedoc) fought seven vs seven in 1660.24 In his explanation of the causes of the Wars of Religion in Languedoc, Jacques Gaches agreed that religious division was the first cause. But there was a second cause: the manner in which questions of belief became intertwined with personal enmities. This was true both at court and in every town throughout France: The second factor was the feud [querelle] between two powerful houses in [Castres] who were jealous of their power and advancement . . . they clashed, not only over public affairs but over private ones, always contradicting one another . . . the feud of two individual houses was the reason for the advancement of Protestantism in the town . . . and thereby, we can make a comparison between the smallest and the greatest houses of the state . . . it was the Houses of Bourbon and Lorraine, who contested with ambition the government and management of affairs.25

Gaches was describing the manner in which private and public identities become confused during civil war. The bloody feuds that distinguished high politics and contributed directly to major turning points, such as the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, were replicated in thousands of other instances across 22

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Cte d’Elbée, ‘Notice historique et archéologique sur Merlemont’, Mémoires de la société académique d’archéologie, sciences et arts du département de l’Oise, 17 (1898), 687. Chanoine Bornet, ‘La famille de Caravaggio ou Carvoisin d’Achy, 1525–1874’, Mémoires de la société académique archéologique, sciences, arts du département de l’Oise, 21 (1910), 310; ‘Les circonstances de l’assassinat d’Etienne de Mage à Paziols en 1644’, http:// membres.multimania.fr/funny/Histloc/assassin.htm; Barrière-Flavy, Chronique criminelle, p. 51. F. Saulnier, Le Parlement de Bretagne, 1554–1790, 2 vols. (Rennes, 1909), I, 235 n. 2; C. d’Aigrefeuille, Histoire de la ville de Montpellier (1737) – Pierre Sengla; AD Haute Garonne, 22941. C. Pradel (ed.), Mémoires sur les guerres de religion à Castres et dans le Languedoc, 1555– 1610 (Paris, 1879), p. 9.

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France. The contribution of personal enmities to the level of disorder can be demonstrated by the fact that the violence did not decrease, even as its confessional character waned. Religious riots and massacres were a feature of the period before 1572. But violence overall did not reach its peak until the anarchy that characterised the Wars of Succession (1585–94), which pitted Catholic against Catholic for and against the accession of Henri IV. Gaches recorded in detail the private feuds (querelles particuliers) and duels (combats singuliers) that were the quotidian experience beyond the military campaigns. In a carefully chosen analogy he referred to the frequent murders and treasons as ‘an Iliad of evil’.26 Local enmities often had only a superficial relation to national events and it is therefore no surprise that they did not cease with the triumph of Henri IV. In Normandy, a province deeply divided during the War of Succession, the Parlement claimed that despite the pacification: Gentlemen armed with all sorts of weapons, band together one against the other and take part in murderous combats; maintaining from afar whole regions in fear, including the judges, who dare not proceed against them . . . ; coming sometimes into the streets of Rouen in full daylight in order to settle their quarrels, sword in hand, one against one, two against two, three against three; and posting their challenges even in the court and in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice.27

By posting challenges in the law courts, gentlemen were advertising the justice of their cause. The duelling craze got worse following Henri IV’s victory. Contemporaries were well aware of this, reckoning that the king issued 8– 10,000 pardons for homicide during his reign. And pardons were just as easy to come by under the regency that followed Henri’s assassination in 1610. Writing in 1614 Simon Goulart remarked on the ‘crisis of quarrels in our time’ that had resulted in 10–12,000 deaths since Henri IV’s accession in 1589. ‘They earn glory in killing, without knowing why they do it.’28 In fact, much of the violence was rooted in the recovery of rights usurped during the Wars of Religion. Nor was it lawless by nature; it was carefully calibrated and accompanied by legal writs. Summonses and hostile judgments were interpreted as a sign of hostility, as the Parlement of Rouen reported in 1611: In Rouen and in other places in the province, at fairs or in markets, a great number of gentlemen fight each other with swords and pistols . . . and a great number of gentlemen gather in troops one against the other, in order to solicit for their lawsuits and those of their friends, and when they encounter each other, they quarrel, and lay their hands on their weapons.29 26 27 28

29

Ibid., pp. 296, 287, 477. A. Floquet, Histoire du Parlement de Normandie, 7 vols. (1840–2), IV, pp. 53–4. Thrésor d’histoires admirables et mémorables de nostre temps, vols. 3 and 4 (Geneva, 1614), pp. 619–21. Floquet, Histoire, IV, p, 278.

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One lawsuit, between the Balsac d’Entragues family and Maréchal de Bassompierre, led to years of chicanery accompanied by armed demonstrations. Bassompierre took to arriving at court proceedings at the head of a ‘small army’ to intimidate the judges. Far from being censured, Bassompierre won his case thanks to the intervention of the regent, Marie de Médicis, who recognised that Bassompierre was not to be trifled with.30 In this atmosphere, the protection offered by a patron or an armed retinue was essential. The persistence of elite violence can be quantified. My 2006 study Blood and Violence was based on an analysis of a database of 772 homicides of French gentlemen. Since then I have continued to gather data and the database has grown to 976 homicides (Table 9.1). While the present graph does not permit a scientific evaluation of the homicide rate, it is representative of the scale and longevity of violence among the wealthiest and most civilised section of society. Political and dynastic instability after 1610 encouraged factionalism. Richelieu’s crackdown on duelling and dissent brought a measure of relief in the 1630s, but this did not last. A reliable contemporary authority calculated that 940 gentlemen were killed in duels alone in the decade 1643–53, or 85 per year.31 The local ramifications can be gleaned from the example of Abbeville (population 40,000), where twenty-four gentlemen were killed in Table 9.1 Homicides of French gentlemen, 1550–1660 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0

30 31

1550s

1560s

1570s

1580s

1590s

1600s

1610s

Ibid., IV, pp. 278–83. Nassiet, Violence, p. 292.

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1630s

1640s

1650s

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duels in the town and its environs in the first half of the seventeenth century – only one of the killers was executed as the strict laws against the practice dictated.32 The fiscal policies of the Cardinal Ministers contributed to the climate of crisis and discontent. The state was outsourced to vested interest groups and the financial expedients required by the war economy entrenched corruption at all levels of administration. Royal judges and law enforcement officials had to make a return on the money they invested in purchasing offices, the cost of which rocketed in the first half of the seventeenth century. Prévôt Manelphe at Curvalle was not the only corrupt law enforcement officer in the region. Marguerite Vabres, daughter of the sénéchal of Toulouse, paid an archer of the vice-sénéchausée, the jurisdiction responsible for law enforcement, 1,200 livres to assassinate Gabriel d’Escayrac, half before and half on completion of the job.33 For his French translators, Thomas Hobbes, ‘the greatest man living who understands Northern Europe’, most clearly identified the problem and offered practical solutions, following his arrival in Paris in 1641.34 The reason why Hobbes become something of a guru in France was that, in contrast to Renaissance thinkers and their classical idols, Hobbes identified the problem of disorder not with the unruly plebs but with the recklessness of the educated elite. Hobbes’s claim that we are all equally egotistical chimed with French public opinion, where such Augustinian pessimism was commonplace. Not only did the educated misunderstand the classics, he argued, but they also failed to learn from experience. In France, in particular, the right to violence was closely associated with Renaissance ideals of heroic autonomy and the essential equality of men of honour. The tone was set at the top. In Brittany, for example, ‘brutality exploded most characteristically at the heart of the most privileged caste’ and during the seventeenth century elite violence became a major theme of Breton popular songs, the gwerz.35 The arch-conspirator the cardinal de Retz was frank about his motivations. In his memoirs he admitted that the defence of the commonwealth was largely a fiction and his motives were rooted in personal enmities. He became involved in a plot to assassinate Richelieu in 1637 largely because his cousin ‘cordially hated’ the Chief Minister. While Retz observed civility to inferiors, when wounded by the actions of his peers nothing could moderate his ressentiment. The public consequences of his actions were of little significance: ‘I count as nothing the 32

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Marquis de Belleval, Nos pères, moeurs et coutumes du temps passé (Paris, 1879), pp. 69–74. Barrière-Flavy, Chronique criminelle, p. 172. Le corps politique, ou Les éléments de la loy morale et civile (Leiden, 1653), Preface. A. Corré and P. Aubry (eds.), Documents de criminologie retrospective (Bretagne XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles) (Lyon and Paris, 1895), p. 192; D. Giraudon, ‘Drame sanglant au pardon de Saint-Gildas à Tonquédec en 1707’, Annales de Bretagne et de Pays de l’Ouest, 114 (2007), 57–88.

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poison and steel my enemies direct against me. Nothing can touch me save what is in me. Everywhere death is waiting.’36 Retz renounced duelling when he took holy orders, but otherwise the roll call of those who fell on the field of honour is a list of the best and brightest: Richelieu’s own brother was killed in a duel and the cardinal pardoned his favourite nephew for killing a man in one; Antoine de Montchrestien, one of the founders of political economy, killed a man in a duel in 1604; Vital Audiguier, translator of Cervantes, was assassinated in Paris in 1624. ***

Louis XIV’s reign is traditionally associated with the completion of a process of royal absolutism, a shift to an authoritarian system of government, achieved in part by the domestication of the nobility. The reforming zeal of the early years of the reign is impressive: a renewed edict (1651) to combat duelling; the war against elite violence taken into the provinces with the Great Assizes of the Auvergne (1665–6) and Upper Languedoc (1666–7); the judicial system rationalised through the unification of law codes and practices (1667–70); and a new jurisdiction for Paris created (1667) with its own police force for a city that had long since outgrown its medieval walls. A different form of repression operated at Versailles, where, we are told, the aristocracy internalised strict rules of etiquette into self-constraint. Despite recent reassessments of Louis XIV’s reign this image remains powerful. It is an image that Louis himself wished to foster through propaganda, proclaiming in medals and in a magnificent frieze at Versailles that he abolished the duel. But social change is not a top-down process. Louis’s reforms were built upon the widespread revulsion at the violence of the 1650s. As one 1652 pamphlet put it, France had descended into ‘hell’, where ‘everybody . . . was pursuing everyone else with irreconcilable and mortal hatred’.37 It was this everyday experience that changed attitudes to the state. There was a backlash against over-mighty subjects who pursued private ends under the guise of the public good and a desire to see the king assert his absolute authority and bring order to the myriad competing claims of rival jurisdictions. There was a growing recognition of individual responsibility and acceptance of the constraints of society. It was the widespread nature of the violence that made Hobbes’s evocation of the state of nature resonate with Frenchmen in particular. Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) is traditionally viewed as a straightforward apology for state power, since the war of man against man necessitates the submission of all citizens to the will of the sovereign and his thinking had an immediate impact on policy-making – Louis’s Chief Minister from 1661 to 1683, Colbert, 36 37

A. Feillet (ed.), Oeuvres de Cardinal de Retz, 10 vols. (Paris, 1870–96), IV, p. 488. Le labyrinthe de l’estat (Paris, 1652), p. 36.

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was a disciple.38 But Hobbes’s purpose was also to liberate men from the fear that bred violence. The belief that men naturally hate each other, and that society protects us from anarchy formed the basis of the scores of French conduct books, which appeared in over one hundred editions in the period 1670–1730. Since, as one of these books put it, ‘Men naturally love themselves better than their Neighbours’, new codes of conduct were required that supplemented Christian morality. The new civility had utility but no moral value; it guaranteed that social relations were protected from violence by the hygiene of tact. In 1675, Antoine de Courtin contrasted his code with the false laws of honour, which were based on hatred and pride and only led to ‘feuds, murders and division’.39 The ‘science of living with other men in civil society’ did not promote slavish attention to etiquette and protocol – petty transgressions of social rules and squabbles over precedence were frequent flashpoints – but rather knowledge of what to avoid.40 In order to be agreeable to society the individual had to recognise that the ‘most just personal quarrels are still troubling and annoying to others. Avoid lawsuits for they always end as matters of honour.’41 The invention of an abstract society was complemented by the creation of a real standing army. Europe’s largest since the Romans, it was staffed by a professional officer corps numbering 20,000 men. Whereas previously regiments had been raised for a single campaign and a career largely reserved for those who could meet the exorbitant costs of campaigning, the new royal army gave officers a long-term stake in their units and created the possibility for a more structured and secure career path – a process aided by the introduction of a cadet system to train young officers. By 1715 about 50 per cent of the nobility were serving in the army. A structured profession satisfied the quest for promotion and as transfers between regiments became more common, so a more diverse geographic mix among officers was created. Esprit de corps was built around a regiment and loyalty owed to it rather than to one’s kinsmen or patron. Young noblemen were removed from their local community for long periods, to frontier garrisons or barracks far from their homes and their kin; their disputes were likewise far removed from local enmities. Outside the web of local social relations into which he was born, honour for the young cadet became a more individual affair. Although duelling continued to flourish in the army, combats were now subject to military discipline and much more 38

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He possessed several of his works, including the 1651 edition of Leviathan in English and the 1668 Latin edition: Bibliotheca Colbertina: seu Catalogus librorum bibliothecæ, quæ fuit primum ill. v. D. J. B. Colbert (Paris, 1728). Suite de la civilité françoise: ou traité du point-d’honneur (Paris, 1675), p. 5. J.-B. Morvan de Bellegarde, The letters of Monsieur L’Abbe de Bellegarde, to a lady of the Court of France, On some Curious and Usefull Subjects (London, 1705). J. Trotti de la Chétardière, Instructions pour un jeune seigneur ou l’idée d’un galant homme, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1683), II, pp. 78–9.

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likely to be fought to first blood. The establishment in 1679 of a special tribunal under the aegis of the Marshals of France to deal with matters of honour was a success – during the eighteenth century it arbitrated more than 800 honour disputes per annum.42 The third significant change at the end of the seventeenth century was the creation of the information state. As Hobbes pointed out ‘it is no less, in fact much more, conducive to peace to prevent quarrels arising than to settle them afterwards; and all disputes arise from the fact that men’s opinions differ’.43 The intendants were redeployed and redirected: they began to spend longer in their jurisdiction, acting as the main source of intelligence for the crown and leaving mundane matters of administration in the hands of the local office-holders. Intendants were not the only royal spies operating in provinces: the antiduelling edict of 1679 ordered judges to send regular reports of feuds in their jurisdictions, and bishops were to notify the king of duels in their dioceses. The king pored over this information. In his memoirs for the dauphin, Louis confronted the problem of maintaining control over the dispensation of his grace, a pressing issue since ‘justice . . . seemed to me the most difficult thing to reform’. At first he had left letters of remission to the discretion of the chancellor, but soon changed his mind because of the terrible state of affairs he had inherited: ‘Pardons demanded and snatched rather than waited for . . . with obligations on no one, except to thereby offend those to whom one wished to refuse.’44 Reform involved an enormous amount of hard work. Louis personally scrutinised the pardon rolls and ensured that the unworthy were made to pay compensation. He made it known that he was happy to receive personal or written requests concerning disputes and lawsuits, which he deliberated on with the chancellor in attendance. Information about troublemakers permitted the king to make better judgements about distributive justice. Guy de Chaumont, marquis d’Orbec, thought he was protected as a royal musketeer after he had killed a neighbour in a feud in Normandy in 1660. Initially the matter went unpunished. But Louis did not forget the incident. In 1672, when the marquis petitioned the king for command of a regiment left vacant on the death of his cousin, he was refused and forced to return to his estates in disgrace.45 Royal spies were most numerous in Paris. The establishment of the city’s police force in 1667 also did a great deal to bring greater order to Europe’s largest metropolis. It had responsibility for weights and measures, food quality, guilds and business regulation, fire prevention and water regulation, the streets and cleanliness, prostitution, and also monitoring public opinion. Consequently, the 42

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H. Drévillon, ‘Civiliser par les armes ? La violence comme contrat social dans la France moderne’, in Broggio and Paoli (eds.), Stringere la pace, pp. 293–308. On the Citizen, eds. R. Tuck and M. Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 79. Carroll, Blood and Violence, p. 321. For the full story, see below p. 388.

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Paris police had much more on its mind than policing crime. The police had a great impact on controlling honour disputes and therefore a positive impact on social control. Everyday insults about honour were usually rooted in material or social grievances, such as labour relations, inheritances or debts. The Paris police spent a great deal of time arbitrating neighbourly feuds.46 ***

The system created by Louis XIV worked best in the 1660s and 1670s when France was at peace. The king was able to dedicate himself to the minutiae of dispute settlement in the provinces. There are good reasons for thinking that the system came under strain from the 1680s and some of the problems that caused the mid-century peak of violence reappeared. Unfair taxes, as we saw in the previous chapter, had a pernicious impact on social relations. Table 9.2, showing cases of violence and murder recorded in Languedoc between 1660 and 1790, gives a quantitative representation of the return of violence in the later years of the reign. Table 9.2 Incidents of violence (black) and murder (grey) in Languedoc, 1660– 1790 250

200

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100

50

0 1660s 1670s 1680s 1690s 1700s 1710s 1720s 1730s 1740s 1750s 1760s 1770s 1780s

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M. Dinges, Der Maurermeister und der Finanzrichter: Ehre, Geld un soziale Kontrolle im Paris des 18. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandehoeck and Ruprecht, 1994).

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The graph represents 1,168 incidents of violence and 779 references to murder recorded in the sac à procès, or judicial dossiers, that survive for the Parlement of Toulouse.47 These represent only a fraction of the total cases. However, the sample is large enough to be representative. It shows the scale of the problem that remained in the 1660s and the effectiveness of measures taken to control the problem of violence. However, violence exploded again in the 1680s and remained a problem until the 1710s. The crown and its agents continued to be indulgent towards aristocratic violence. In 1683, for example, a pardon issued to the marquis de Castelbajac, whose routine terrorisation of his subjects makes for depressing reading, listed no less than seven murders, all of which were satisfied by monetary compensation.48 The disastrous Revocation of the Edict of Nantes stopped the pacification process in its tracks. The Revocation had a disproportionate impact on the province, where the majority of French Protestants lived. The high levels of violence at the turn of the seventeenth century undoubtedly reflect resistance to Louis XIV’s religious policy, culminating in the War of the Camisards (1702–5). Languedoc was not a typical province. It was far from Paris and notoriously difficult to control. But there are grounds for believing that the pattern in Languedoc is more widely applicable and that stubbornly high rates of interpersonal violence in the provinces under Louis XIV were not simply the product of Protestant resistance. The intendant of Poitou, for example, reported in 1665 that the nobility ‘was only notable for the violence it committed’.49 Many were involved in helping their tenants avoid taxes, which inevitably made them extremely popular. The governor of Lower Poitou, Pardaillan, did nothing to stop armed factions from gathering and the encounters they fought. On the contrary, he protected a client who had killed two men for refusing his marriage proposal. When the comte de Mauleon was killed in Holy Week 1663 the affair was covered up with the connivance of the local magnate, the duc de La Trémoille, uncle of the victim, who received 20,000 livres from the proceeds of the dead man’s estates, ‘and thus the most heinous crimes which are committed in this province are redeemed, either with money or through fear’.50 It was not simply a matter of the old nobility: one local law court was divided ‘in two factions because of mortal enmities . . . as a result of family and individual quarrels’.51

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https://archives.haute-garonne.fr/archive/recherche/sacsproces/n:109. Barrière-Flavy, Chronique criminelle, pp. 173–6. See also the career of the capitoul Raymond Aussaguel, baron de Lasbordes on p. 32. C. Dugast-Matifeux (ed.), Etat du Poitou sous Louis XIV rapport au roi et mémoire sur le clergé, la noblesse, la justice et les finances par Charles Colbert de Croissy (Fontenay-leComte, 1865), p. 25. Ibid., p. 111 Ibid., p. 147.

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The intendant’s assessment is confirmed by local diaries, such as that of Charles Demaillasson (1614–98), the royal attorney in the small town of Montmorillon.52 In 1652 he records two killings of local nobles involved in feuds which were settled out of court. In 1663, the marquis de Fors, sénéchal of Poitou, was assassinated by five masked men, while he was on the way to Poitiers for a peace settlement. Litigation made feuds worse and consequently local officials and lawyers became embroiled. Demaillasson was caught up in an encounter with other lawyers, in which his hunting dog was killed and he received sword blows to arm and nose. In 1664 his nephew shot a tax-collector and another son of a lawyer was shot by his brother-in-law, a surgeon, in 1664. In 1672 a royal attorney was killed in a three-against-three duel in front of the local courthouse. It was only as the 1670s progressed that such incidents became less common in Montmorillon. The evidence we have for feuding after 1661 is extensive but comes predominantly from the south and the west.53 Nevertheless, even in regions closer to Paris the problem was not completely extinguished in the 1660s when, for instance, troops had to be sent in to quell factional violence and brigandage in the Thimérais 100 kilometres west of the capital.54 Encounters among the local elite had become routine during the Frondes. In 1666 sieur de Saint Bonnet was executed for his part in the violence, though a contemporary local memoir did not consider this as justified: This gentleman was regretted everywhere because of his valour and comportment; his renown spread to every province of France as being the best blade in France, having always won every combat he had had. He was a fine esquire, skilled in the handling of weapons and had always fought with magnanimity. Finally, he had the good fortune to die as a good Christian.55

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M. V. Bardet (ed.), ‘Charles Demaillasson: Journal, 1643–1694’, Archives Historiques du Poitou, 26–7 (1907–8). M. Bricaud de Verneuil (ed.), ‘Journal d’Antoine Denesde Marchand Ferron à Poitiers et de sa femme Marie Barré (1628–1687)’, Archives Historiques du Poitou, 15 (1885), pp. 135, 202; www.animation-lannilis.org/index.php?page=bris-de-vitres-a-l-eglise, http://abgenealogie .pagesperso-orange.fr/abgenealogie/Histoires_familiales_files/ViolencePrads.pdf, www.laca pelle-marival.fr/fr/decouvrir/histoire.html#c56166, http://mondomicile.centerblog.net/10assassinat-du-marquis-de-saint-astier-sous-louis-xiv; http://polymathe .over-blog.com/article-17491085.html; B. Atger, ‘Quand les manants se rebiffent!’, Le lien des chercheurs cévenols, 161 (2010), 6–9; AD Aude B 392 registration of a 1664 pardon for an assassination, ‘en sortant de l’esglize Notre-Dame de La Garde où il venait d’entendre la messe’; Barrière-Flavy, Chronique criminelle; Corré and Aubry (eds.), Documents. V. Chevard, Histoire de Chartres et de l’ancien pays chartrain, 2 vols. (Chartres, 1801), II, pp. 513–19. ‘Petite Chronique de Blévy’, Mémoires de la Société archéologique d’Eure-et-Loir, 2 (1860), 372.

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Admiration explains why his execution did little to stop the trouble. The struggle for precedence in the church at Blévy, which had resulted in skirmishes and attacks on the priest, came to a head on Sunday 20 October 1669.56 Like many Protestants, the sieur de la Noue was compelled by royal policies to convert to Catholicism. The trouble began when he reclaimed the family pew in Blévy church. Not without some cause, his neighbour, the sieur de Baronval, resented the convert’s claim to precedence. This was not the only pew dispute generated by recent converts, whose sincerity was open to question.57 On Sunday 20 October a pitched battle erupted when both men and their friends and followers fought for the right to take communion first – four were left dead from sword and gunshot wounds. Sixteen nobles and two valets were condemned in 1670 by a special commission headed by the intendant of Orléans. There was, however, a reluctance to enforce sentences for crimes of honour, as a local historian noted: these examples of severity did not bring calm to the province, whose inhabitants were constantly tormented and harassed. Meanwhile the licence of the rural nobility reached such a point that the government was obliged to keep them under surveillance for a long time after. Several of them could not be made to see reason, either by the laws of the state or force of arms.58

Contested rights continued to provoke violence in churches into the eighteenth century, and not just in the periphery.59 Hunting disputes led to the killing of Claude de Proisy in Artois in 1668 and Philippe de Rune in Picardy in 1700.60 Once again, this was not simply a matter of an uncouth and uncivilised rural gentry. In 1699, for example, the President à Mortier of the Parlement of Brittany was killed in a duel, whose opponent was also then promptly murdered by the judge’s outraged servants.61 It is no surprise, therefore, that not everyone was convinced by royal propaganda. In 1715 the abbé de Saint-Pierre wrote that the ‘cursèd custom’ of duelling had in recent years ‘regained all its vigour; hidden away it was doing as much damage as ever’.62 It was, he argued, a particularly French problem. Even if his estimate of 400 deaths per annum is an exaggeration, it is clear that duelling to the death had not been eradicated. Indulgence towards the nobility came from the very top. Louis had very little room for manoeuvre when it 56 57

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Ibid., 372–4. M. and H. Gras, ‘L’affaire du banc à Sénergues (1687–1728)’, Revue du Rouergue, 53 (1998), 71–84. Chevard, Histoire de Chartres, II, pp. 519. See Chapter 13. Dictionnaire historique et archéologique du Pas de Calais, 3 vols. (Arras, 1875–84), I, p. 61; www.bletteryjp.fr/Craonne/Villages-Aisne/Neuville.htm. Saulnier, Parlement de Bretagne, I, pp. 111–12. C.-I. Castel de Saint-Pierre, Mémoire pour perfectionner la police contre le duel (1715).

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came to les grands, as the assassination of the marquis de Saint-Nectaire demonstrates.63 The marquis was a man of violence, having already been disabled following a duel in which he killed the comte de Roure. In 1671, the marquis was shot seven times during an attempt to take control of property in Privas, the consequence of an inheritance dispute with his mother and siblings. Several minor players were executed and the victim’s stepfather, a former president of the Parlement of Metz, was exiled from France, but the SaintNectaire were otherwise too important to have their death sentences carried out. The victim’s brother, Jean-Gabriel, was given a pardon but refused to accept it, and the family lobbied for his conviction to be quashed and for their sequestered property to be returned. There was much sympathy for them in high society and the case was brought before the king’s council.64 This pitted them against the widow, a woman ‘of spirit and intrigue’ according to madame de Sévigné, and the affair soon became embroiled in Versailles’ vicious politics. Finally, after nineteen years of machinations an accord was reached between the widow and the killers. The role of women in the informal lobbying process is worth underlining. Jean-Gabriel’s sister ‘contributed a great deal to the liberty of the chevalier, her brother’.65 But the king was also indulgent to lowly servants. He intervened directly to force the registration of the letters of remission issued to a captain of the royal guards, following a duel fought in Paris.66 The family of the victim had successfully contested their registration, claiming it was a case of premeditated murder. The king however overrode the judgement and the pardon was issued on payment of 3,000 livres compensation and 3,000 livres in pious bequests. These were trifling sums for those who enjoyed royal protection – the killer’s son ended up a marquis. In the first three decades of the eighteenth century elite violence continued to remain a banal feature of local life in many rural regions.67 These were not simply trivial affairs of honour: a series of encounters in the Limousin in 1717 were in ‘mortal enmity that divided two neighbouring families’.68 63

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Avertissement et inventaire de production, que met & donne par devers le roi, & nosseigneurs de son conseil dame Anne de Longueval, veuve de messire Henry, marquis de Senecterre, comte de Lestrange (1687). M. Monmerqué (ed.), Lettres de Madame de Sévigné, 14 vols. (Paris, 1862–6), II, p. 400. Père Ansèlme, Histoire généalogique et chronologique de la maison royale de France, 9 vols. Paris (1726–33), IV, p. 893. Factum pour messire François de Goddes . . . seigneur de Varennes (1683). Corré and Aubry (eds.), Documents, p. 337; L. Desaivre (ed.), ‘Journal d’Emmanuel Augier de La Terraudière (1707–1712)’, Procès-verbaux, mémoires et documents de la société historique et scientifique des Deux-Sèvres, 2 (1906), 193–4; ‘L’assassinat du Seigneur de Margerides’: www.ventadour.org/pages/etudes-et-archives.html; I. Cameron, Crime and Repression in the Auvergne and Guyenne, 1720–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 198–9. L. de Nussac, ‘Une Affaire criminelle et ses précédents en 1717’, Bulletin de la Société Scientifique, Historique et Archéologique de la Corrèze, 12 (1890), 615.

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The socially mobile still faced outright hostility in some rural areas. In 1727 the local judge at Pranzac in the Angoumois refused to fight François Viaud, despite intense provocation: ‘A qui parles-tu, fichu gueux ?’, ‘Toi, Jeanfoutre, tu es gentilhomme et coquin !’ Viaud, whose family had long resisted claims to equality by officials in the locality, ran his man through.69 There is no doubt that by this time the larger towns had long since become safer and less prone to factional division. But rural disputes still sometimes disturbed urban life. The inheritance dispute between the Joyeuse-Grandpré and the marquis de Vervins was initially fought in the courts and then in clashes in the Vermandois in the 1690s.70 In 1704 the marquis was attacked in his coach in Paris and severely wounded. The abbé de Grandpré was convicted and fled. From exile, the abbé maintained that it had been a fair fight. His brother, the comte de Joyeuse, successfully sued Vervins for calumny and false imprisonment and was awarded damages of 10,000 livres.71 Beyond Paris, local courts continued routinely to treat murder with fines, pardons and compensation for the victims.72 Louis XIV’s army, it appears, was less effective at disciplining the nobility than is usually claimed. An incident from Aunis helps to explain why. In 1672 Jacques de Courbon made himself a reputation when he killed the count of Miossens, whose fame rested on the killing of madame de Sévigné’s son-in-law the previous year. The origin of the quarrel was over rights on the river Seure. But that was soon complicated by other factors, including Courbon’s army commission. Courbon’s petition for registration of his pardon recalls that he was recruiting for his regiment when he met the count on 29 January 1672, who ‘after several reproaches made to the supplicant about their ancient animosity and the new signs of ressentiment in his beating of the [recruitment] drum, which he said without civility or respect and which were not true, obliged [Courbon] to put sword in hand’.73 It appears that Courbon had been provocatively recruiting for his regiment on his neighbour’s territory, reminding us that Louis XIV’s army was far from being a modern professional force. Glory and valour were much more highly prized than discipline and obedience. Though the army was a very effective weapon of terror, especially when deployed on foreign soil, as for example in the wasting of the Palatinate in 1688, the behemoth created problems in the territories conquered by Louis. In Lille, anti-French resentment, which continued for 69 70

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http://lamotte.ecole.pagespro-orange.fr/ecuras/no11due.htm. A. Combier, Les justices seigneuriales du bailliage de Vermandois sous l’ancien régime (Paris, 1897), pp. 23–4. F. Gayot de Pitaval, Causes célèbres et intéressantes avec les jugemens qui les ont decides, 13 vols. (The Hague, 1735–9), XIII, pp. 99–107. AD Dordogne, Répertoire provisoire de la série B: sénéchaussée et présidial de Périgueux (B 1-1147): https://archives.dordogne.fr/r/86/inventaires-classes-par-series/; AD Aude, Inventaire de la série B: https://archivesdepartementales.aude.fr/utiliser-les-outils-derecherche. www.histoirepassion.eu/spip.php?article525.

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a generation, was fuelled by the ill-discipline of the garrison. But what happened in the region amounted to more than simply the depredations of a soldiery used to living off the land. The tearing of the local social and political fabric had a profound impact on interpersonal relations, turning neighbour against neighbour. The result of this was a surge in the local murder rate. In 1668 the intendant of Flanders, Le Pelletier, reported that 1,800 pardons for homicide were issued for the châtellenie of Lille alone, a city whose population was only 40,000.74 The tensions between the locals and the newcomers are evident from the fight between the prince de Morbecq, who was mortally wounded by the son of marshal Humières, governor of Lille, in 1682.75 The precise reason for their enmity is unknown, but Morbecq, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, had been a loyal servant of the king of Spain prior to the conquest of Artois, whose tenants had suffered egregiously at French hands: in 1676 they had burned 560 houses at Morbecq for no other purpose than to spread terror. Louis XIV’s policies had a disproportionately negative impact on the periphery. While court and capital were effectively pacified, the situation deteriorated in several regions at the end of the reign. The violence that accompanied the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in the Midi, culminating in a brutal guerrilla war fought by the Camisards in the Cévennes, is well covered in the historiography. What is largely unacknowledged is the way in which Louis XIV’s policies revived mid-century factionalism in many localities, encouraging the everyday violence witnessed by tourists like Locke and confirmed by the statistics in Table 9.2. Electoral violence, for example, returned to Béziers in the 1680s. Royal policies encouraged all sorts of enmities, not simply confessional ones. They pitted unrepentant Protestants against the new converts. The master surgeon at Conches in Normandy, who had recently abjured, was assassinated in 1671 ‘due to the persecutions his former co-religionaries had been exposed to’.76 Catholics were divided between enthusiasts for and sceptics of the king’s crusade. The Nîmois diarist Etienne Borrelly hated Protestants, but he also loathed their ‘wicked’ friends, the ‘Catholics of their faction’. Consequently, the Revocation brought him little joy and he turned his ire on the new converts, holding them to be ‘mortal enemies of the king . . . as obstinate as devils’.77 Traditional civic resistance to 74

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A. Lottin, Chavatte, ouvrier lillois. Un contemporain de Louis XIV (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), pp. 357–8. A. Lottin (ed.), Chronique memorial des choses memorables par moy Pierre-Ignace Chavatte: 1657–1693: le memorial d’un humble tisserand lillois au Grand Siècle (Brussels: Commission Royale d’Histoire, 2010), pp. 70, 247. H. de Fontenay (ed.), ‘Mémoires de Claude, Jacques et N. Dusson, pour servir à l’histoire de Conches au 17e siècle’, Mémoires de la Société Eduenne, 4 (1875), 218. A. Puech (ed.), ‘Le livre de raison du notaire Borrelly (1654–1717)’, Mémoires de l’Académie de Nîmes, 8 (1885), 225–6, 228, 388.

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clerical power contributed to the climate of opposition.78 At Cavaillon in Provence in 1670, the diarist Jean-Gaspard de Grasse, a cathedral canon, considered the most noteworthy thing about the fight between the retinues of the baron of Vence and the bishop of Cavaillon was that the people lined up against the bishop, whose men had mistreated the town’s First Consul.79 The fact that bishops still employed armed retinues in the region is indicative of both their priorities and their need for protection. ***

The year 1715 is an important milestone in the history of the Ancien Régime. This was the first time in two hundred years that the accession of a minor passed off peacefully. Unlike the 1560s, 1610s and 1650s, there were no court putsches or provincial revolts. The royal army had a monopoly of legitimate force. Court conspiracy had been replaced by recognition of the benefits of peace and the consequences of disturbing it. Society as a contract between men for mutual preservation had found widespread acceptance. Such ideas were widely publicised; Buffier’s 1726 Traité de la société civile advertised the ‘science of living with other men in civil society in order to procure, as much as we can, our own happiness in concert with the happiness of others’.80 By the time of the publication of the Encyclopédie in 1756 ‘civil society [had become], so to speak, a divinity on earth’.81 By this date its benefits were recognised in the provinces. The diary of the Limousin country gentlemen Gilbert de Raymond praised men of virtue, the honnêtes hommes, not men of honour. He taught his children the importance of ‘being agreeable in society. Never permit banter that could offend anyone in the least manner. That’s usually how we make the most enemies.’82 Looking back in 1781, Louis Sébastien Mercier thought that sixty years previously even the most wise and circumspect could not ‘avoid a bloody quarrel . . . and the most innocuous gestures and futile reasons would lead to a challenge’. Society had since become more forgiving of petty transgression and duels were considered barbaric and ridiculous. In Paris, it was not even necessary to wear a sword.83 78

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Barrière-Flavy, Chronique criminelle, chapter 5; www.feretsavoirfaire.org/IMG/pdf/ BONNECAZE_Capbis_txt.pdf, ‘Vendetta in the Midi’, 29; M. Barilly-Leguy (ed.), Livre de mes Anciens grands pères: Le livre de raison d’une famille mancelle du Grand Siècle (1567–1675) (Rennes: Press Universitaires de Rennes, 2006), fos. 195–7. F. Meyer (ed.), Un Chanoine de Cavaillon au Grand Siècle: Le Livre de Raison de JeanGaspard de Grasse, 1664–1684 (Paris: Collection de Documents Inédits sur l’Histoire de France, 2002), pp. 36–8. D. Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 79. Entry for ‘philosophe’. G. Tholin (ed.), ‘De quelques livres de raison des anciennes familles agenaises’, Revue de l’Agenais, 7 (1880), 312. L. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 12 vols. (Amsterdam, 1782–8), VIII, pp. 214–7.

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The decline of violence was due to political stability, the waning of social antagonism among the elite and the increased use of preventative measures to preserve the social order, a range of measures covered by the term ‘police’, which refers to much more than surveillance and repression. The law remained a flexible instrument in which arbitration and out-of-court settlements remained common. Contemporaries were well aware that the softening of manners was not due to repression, an assessment supported by archival research.84 Law enforcement continued to be lax. Chancellor d’Aguesseau, who conducted a detailed investigation in 1733, complained that ‘the pursuit of crimes is more neglected than ever in most of the provinces of this kingdom’.85 The manner in which the use of violence was consciously tempered by the social elite and the honour code relativised can be tracked using a variety of sources. The abbé of Saint-Pierre argued that the rigour of the law was not alone sufficient to curtail the practice of duelling. Social attitudes would have to change too. This did not mean that encounters and duels disappeared in the eighteenth century, but the difference with the previous century was that these combats were now largely fought to first blood – combatants showed restraint. The diary kept by the Bordeaux magistrate Joseph-François Labat de Savignac from 1708 to 1719 is indicative of changing manners. Savignac frequently recorded fights but, with one exception, they did not result in death.86 Antagonism between the traditional noblesse and the socially aspirant officeholders waned. Savignac was involved in a feud with his neighbour, the Sieur Croustillas, who fired three shots at him in October 1715, but there was no serious injury – Croustillas had made his point. Civil society was predicated upon an emerging aristocratic class identity in which a gentleman’s right to rule was demonstrated by restraint and discretion. Savignac was very jealous of his rights but also attentive to avoiding acts that would create a public scandal. He contrasted his behaviour to that of the uncivilised masses: the ‘brutishness’ of his servants and tenants merited corrective beatings.87 Savignac’s social superiority required that his quarrels be worthy and reasonable. In contrast, the quarrels of his subjects were characterised as querelles d’allemands, trifling and trivial. The effects of the transformation of the social and political environment are supported by Table 9.2, which shows that incidents of murder and acts of 84

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Nassiet, Violence, p. 317; Cameron, Crime and Repression; J. Ruff, Crime, Justice and Public Order in Old Regime France: The Sénéchaussées of Libourne and Bazas (London: Croom Helm, 1984); R. Mowery Andrews, Law, Magistracy, and Crime in Old Regime: Paris, 1735–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). E. Leromain, ‘Les états des crimes dignes de mort ou de peines afflictives: une source sur la criminalité et l’activité des juridictions dans tout le royaume au xviiie siècle’, in A. Follain (ed.), Brutes ou braves gens ? La violence et sa mesure XVIe XVIIIe siècle (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2015), p. 189. Le Mao (ed.), Chronique du Bordelais, p. 299. Ibid., pp. 59, 486, 490, 508.

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violence recorded by the Parlement of Toulouse were very low from 1710–80 in comparison with the preceding period and this is confirmed by evidence from elsewhere. In other regions homicide rates varied greatly in the eighteenth century but were never higher than 3 per 100,000, and in many places lower than in modern France.88 Even Roussillon, where the power of church and state remained highly circumscribed, was pacified.89 The decline of litigation in the first half of the eighteenth century is a further indication of how everyday social relations were shaped by the wider improvement of the political and social environment.90 ***

Historians who believe that history is a process and that the decline of violence is an inevitable consequence of the rise of the state or the emergence of the individual or the repression of biological drives are left puzzled by the French Revolution. Roger Chartier, for example, in a highly influential book, is left perplexed: ‘The paradox is that the Revolution reintroduced large-scale violence to a land in which, for more than a century, the “process of civilization” had made notable advances, radically reducing and circumscribing violence.’ This leaves them struggling for an explanation: ‘At the end of the eighteenth century, the civilizing process had not yet transformed all the inhabitants of the kingdom. The personality structure that instilled in individuals stable and rigorous mechanisms of self-restraint, substituting self-imposed prohibition and repression for exterior constraints was not yet universal.’91 This argument rests on two false assumptions: that violence is a primeval force that requires taming and that revolutionary violence does not have its own logic. These assumptions underpin liberal interpretations of the French Revolution, which since the 1970s have come to dominate the historiography. For all its failings, we are frequently reminded, the Ancien Régime developed a vigorous civil society, tolerant of dissent, accommodating of protest. The Revolution, on the other hand, opened the floodgates to violence and terror on an unprecedented scale. Opponents of this interpretation point to the rising tide of popular collective violence after 1760 as evidence to the contrary.92 But this is far from being the whole story. The fiscal and constitutional crisis that engulfed the Ancien 88 89

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Nassiet, Violence, p. 298. G. Larguier, ‘Violence meurtrière et turbulence juvénile dans le Midi de la France: faut-il réexaminer le processus de civilisation des mœurs?’, in Follain (ed.) Brutes ou braves gens, pp. 356–8. C. Kaiser, ‘The Deflation in the Volume of Litigation at Paris in the Eighteenth Century and the Waning of the Old Judicial Order’, European History Quarterly, 10 (1980), 309–36. R. Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), pp. 193–4. J. Nicolas, La rébellion française: mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, 1661–1789 (Paris: Seuil, 2002).

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Régime divided communities and generated cleavages that saw a rise in interpersonal violence too. This amounted to more than a crime wave. During the 1780s the failure of the state to effectively mediate social and political antagonism became apparent; mired in a morass of contestation, the legitimacy of the system was sapping away. As Lynn Hunt has argued, what distinguished the French from the English and American Revolutions was the intensity of competition within the Old Regime elite.93 Recent research has shown how the crisis of the Ancien Régime generated enmities between neighbours and sowed the seeds of revolutionary violence.94 The French Revolution of 1789 did not suddenly create cleavages in local society. Rather, it provided a new and more toxic context for local enmities to mutate towards overt, implacable violence. In Provence, for example, the cycle of revolutionary violence was the result of a collision between the rhetoric of universal liberation and bitter pre-existing personal antagonisms.95 Table 9.2 suggests a similar pattern in Languedoc. Here both interpersonal and collective violence exploded in the 1780s, reaching levels not experienced since the Camisard Wars. As the pioneering work of Nicole Castan has demonstrated, the increase of crime and violence at the end of the Ancien Régime became ‘an obsession of the time’, contributing to a profound sense of crisis.96 Intimidation was on the rise as traditional mechanisms of social control began to deteriorate.97 The violence corresponded to rising political tensions as ‘petty quarrels over precedence, private interests, or feuds between clans’ became embroiled with anxieties about public order and arguments about the fairness of the quasidemocratic institutions that administered every town and village in Languedoc.98 The murder of Bernard de Fondeville, vicomte de Labatut, was an extraordinary event, but it demonstrates how the death rattle of the Ancien Régime in the localities reprised traditional struggles and shaped the 93

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L. Hunt, Politics, Class and Culture in the French Revolution (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 222–3. G. Bossenga, The Politics of Privilege: Old Regime and Revolution in Lille (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 201; P. McPhee, Revolution and Environment in Southern France, 1780–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 36; J. Horn, Qui parle pour la Nation ? Les élections et les élus de la Champagne méridionale, 1765–1830 (Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes, 2004). D. Sutherland, Murder in Aubagne: Lynching, Law, and Justice during the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). N. Castan, Les Criminels de Languedoc: Les Exigences d’ordre et les voies du ressentiment dans une société pre-révolutionnaire (1750–1790) (Toulouse: Association des publications de l’Université de Toulouse Le Mirail, 1980), p. 23. N. Castan, Justice et répression en Languedoc à l’époque des Lumières (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), p. 91. G. Fournier, Démocratie et vie municipale en Languedoc du milieu du XVIIIe au début du XIXe siècle, 2 vols. (Toulouse: Les Amis des Archives de la Haute-Garonne, 1994), I, pp. 383–4.

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Revolution.99 In January 1781 the vicomte was assassinated and his son Pierre wounded by the son of a business rival, Gérard Martin, at Saint-Béat in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The murder was the product of a classic Ancien Régime feud in the Midi, pitting the recently ennobled Fondeville against aspiring merchants (négociants) over control of the lumber trade in the 1760s and 1770s. The murder followed a decade of tortuous litigation. It appears that the fiscal crisis of the state raised the stakes, rendering attempts at mediation more difficult. The printed legal briefs of the parties employed traditional republican language familiar to historians of the sixteenth century. Gérard Martin accused his enemy of being a tyrant and of forming a syndicate in order to ruin him. But the famous Parisian lawyer Elie de Beaumont whom he engaged to defend him against charges of conspiracy to murder also drew on new ideas, appealing to ‘simple citizens’ concerned for ‘the general interest of society as a whole’ and worried about ‘a world in flux’.100 This language struck a chord in local society, where the Martin family enjoyed considerable public sympathy. In spite of the weight of evidence, the Parlement of Toulouse struck down the original conviction against members of the Martin family, awarding them substantial civil damages in the process. No one was convicted for the crime – a further example of how the well connected and wealthy used the law to escape justice. After 1789 the principal antagonists became political opponents. Pierre de Fondeville, wounded in the 1781 attack, subsequently moved to Tarbes, where he became the first elected mayor in 1790 and then president of the new département of the Hautes-Pyrénées. In 1793 he was targeted by the Jacobins as a Feuillant, or supporter of constitutional monarchy, and dismissed. In contrast, the Martin family were enthusiastic Jacobins and active in supporting the Terror in the region. A rise in elite violence is also discernible in the south-west, where mundane disputes were now more likely to escalate, meaning that the number of physical assaults recorded by the eighteenth-century courts at Libourne and Bazas reached its peak in 1785–9. In the small town of Pujols (Gironde), for example, the feud between two bourgeois over property boundaries festered in the 1770s. Both parties recruited their friends and participated in a long series of assaults, threats and property damage. The rancour reached a climax in January 1786 when one of the faction leaders was murdered.101 In Périgord, crimes of physical violence before the courts grew during the 1780s, largely as a result of private prosecution: litigants rejected traditional modes of settlement and were increasingly prepared to meet the costs of pursuing their 99

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P. Compans, ‘L’“accident” de Monsieur de Fondeville’, Revue de Comminges, 107 (1992), 225–35. Accueil Requête pour M. de Fondeville-Labatut. Contre les assassins de son père (Toulouse, 1786), pp. 11–12. Ruff, Crime, Justice and Public Order, table 1.01, pp. 73, 75.

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enemies in court. Notable here were the protracted disputes between wealthy bourgeois and the nobility, who resorted to violence and intimidation to protect their rights and reputation.102 The violence was partly a consequence of rising social antagonism – as the economy grew after 1760, the gap between the winners and losers made the highly unequal burden of taxation more egregious – and partly a consequence of politics. Urban factions, not seen since the seventeenth century, reappeared and clashed in the streets for and against judicial reform in 1788.103 In spite of Mercier’s claims to the contrary, duelling, always a good indicator of the political barometer and a weathervane of factionalism, was rising in the 1780s.104 Litigation, another barometer of social conflict, was also rising from the 1770s.105 Debt recovery and civil litigation generated violent enmities because of the inequalities and injustices of the system. In the Gévaudan, for example, it was remarked in 1785 that prosecutions for ‘debt were multiplying, as well as murders’.106 Social and political conflict multiplied demands for a system based on justice and not mere social peace. Eighteenth-century civil society had been predicated on compromise and the avoidance of open conflict. We tend to think of peace as a necessarily good thing. But peace and justice are in tension: the former can mask injustice. A legal system predicated on reconciliation and arbitration disproportionately benefitted those who could pay for their crimes. Locke was not the only commentator to condemn the corruption that this encouraged. In 1651, for example, Antoine Jacmon, a diarist from Le Puy, denounced this ‘strange practice’. When the son of the sieur de Pourrat, a town consul and physician, was shot and killed by two students, Jacmon criticised the father for settling with the killers, ‘selling the blood of his child four months later’ for 2,000 livres. For Jacmon blood money payments were unnatural (dénaturé).107 The system legitimised the buying off of crimes at all levels of the social scale, a practice that was proverbial: ‘péché payé était moitié pardonné’, says (relatively high-status) artisan glazier Jacques-Louis Ménétra to his rape victim (a low-status shepherdess), as he tosses her a few sous in compensation.108 Negotiated justice for those who could pay continued to operate at the end of the Ancien Régime. In 1784, for example, 192 livres was 102

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S. Reinhardt, Justice in the Sarladais, 1770–1790 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), chapter 3, pp. 249–66. T. Margadant, ‘Summary Justice and the Crisis of the Old Regime in 1789’, Historical Reflections/Reflections historiques, 29 (2003), 509. Brioist, Drevillon and Serna (eds.), Croiser le fer, p. 366. Kaiser, ‘Deflation’. Castan, Les Criminels de Languedoc, p. 142. Chassaing (ed.), Mémoires d’Antoine Jacmon, p. 271. D. Roche (ed.), Journal de ma vie: Jacques-Louis Ménétra, compagnon vitrier au 18e siècle (Paris: Montalba, 1982), p. 53.

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paid to the family of a dead labourer at Ugny in Lorraine – the killer a lawyer whose father was the local judge. In return for the money, the family were forced to state that the victim had been the cause of his own death!109 This sort of injustice was much more starkly exposed as conflict increased at the end of the Ancien Régime. The relative merits of peace and justice were at the very heart of Enlightenment debates between conservatives and radicals. Voltaire, conscious of the lessons of history, extolled the virtues of absolute monarchy. But for a younger generation of radicals the arbitrariness of justice was a symbol of tyranny: If a man of eminence robs his creditors, or is guilty of other knaveries, is he not always assured of impunity? Are not the assaults, acts of violence, assassinations, and even murders committed by the great, matters that are hushed up in a few months, and of which nothing more is thought? But if a great man himself is robbed or insulted, the whole police force is immediately in motion, and woe even to innocent persons who chance to be suspected.110

In light of the evidence presented here, Rousseau’s claim was not an exaggeration. The Ancien Régime legal system became a symbol of barbarism, not because it was punitive and repressive – as a generation of historians has shown, that was far from being the case – but because its transactional nature, its peacemaking, negotiating and arbitrating, did not make it just. ‘Justice under Ancien Régime always operated on two levels: for the superior classes, with which it was rarely concerned, there was privileged treatment; terrifying methods and brutal examples were reserved only for the masses.’111 Its overarching purpose was to uphold social order and protect privilege, promoting negotiations which invariably favoured the party with money and influence. Atrocious crimes went unpunished. In 1775, for example, a priest – who had the temerity to begin Mass without the permission of his lord – was shot dead at the altar by the marquis de Bellegarde. Bellegarde was no uncivilised backwoods country gentleman. As a former President à Mortier of the Parlement of Paris, he had powerful friends and neither the courts nor the Church wished to create a scandal over the death of a mere parish priest. Bellegarde made some pious bequests and the affair was hushed up.112 Revolution is inconceivable without a desire to see justice done. Michelet defined ‘Revolution as the advent of Law, the Resurrection of Right, and the reaction of Justice’.113 The exposure during the Enlightenment that there was 109 110 111 112

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Piant, Une justice ordinaire, p. 210. Discours sur l’oeconomie politique (Geneva, 1758), p. 61. Castan, Les Criminels de Languedoc, p. 17. J.-H. Bauchy, ‘Du Nouveau sur le crime de Quiers-sur-Bezonne, 16 juillet 1775’, Bulletin de la Société Archéologique de l’Orléanais, 20 (1959), 23–30. F. Furet (ed.), Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), p. 982.

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one law for the rich and one for the poor legitimised class enmity and the desire to get even. Keith Baker has traced the growing ideological attack in the final decades of the Ancien Régime on a system predicated on security and social peace. ‘Repose’ was increasingly associated with ‘a state sought only by despots and their slaves’. The belief that contestation was at the heart of all healthy political life led Mably to conclude that ‘civil war is a good, when society, without the help of this sad operation, would be in danger of perishing from gangrene, and not to speak metaphorically, would run the risk of dying from despotism’.114 For Marat, ‘If [the tyrant] commits any violence to indulge his passions, it is under the forms of justice; if he sacrifices any subject to his resentment, it is by means of the magistrates; and thus gratifies his desires without being loaded with public hatred.’115 The first reform of the Revolutionaries was to introduce the English jury system for criminal trials. The involvement of the community in dispensing justice gave the law and official justice a legitimacy in England that was unrivalled elsewhere in Europe. A system that was both much more punitive and more prone to the whims of public opinion, it proved to be the perfect tool for exercising Revolutionary vengeance. The story of the role of the common law in shaping England’s peculiar history of enmity is one to which we shall now turn.

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K. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 94. Chains of slavery (London, 1774), p. 245.

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England

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10 Justice and Violence

The diary of Thomas Roberts, constable and well-to-do yeoman of Stockleigh Pomery in Devon, records various feuds with his neighbours. He was at odds, for instance, with the Gibbs family over rights of way and access. On 20 November 1625, it being Saynt Andrewes day John Gib the younger came to me in John Vesie’s meddow and came and gut [struck] me two or three times then he strake me and his father ran to me and caught me about the neck and did draw me at the ground. So the oulde Gib and Gib son and his man were at me at one time and did beat me.

The following 1 January 1626: ‘John Gibe out of malice sent for a writ and tried to arrest [me]’.1 On 4 February Gibbs crossed his field and slandered the Roberts family as the ‘cosoningest [cheaters] peepel that were in all the parish and that they did live altogether by cosoning and dozening’. On 2 March Robert Roberts was arrested for striking John Gibbs, a suit that cost the family 20s 2d, and induced them to offer ‘satisfaction’, that is some form of arbitrated settlement.2 This did not end the dispute. Roberts recorded every trespass committed by the Gibbs between 1626 and 1628 and their routine resort to violence. In July 1626, for example, John Gibbs junior threw a man out of church at Cheriton. Roberts was himself no innocent. He frequently quarrelled with other neighbours. In April 1628 he was hit and thrown down the stairs by Anthony Poole at Thorverton.3 He was at odds with the Pines until peace was made with his marriage to Grace Pine in April 1631.4 This ill will was replaced by that with the Matthews. A month before his marriage our author recorded that ‘George Matthew the elder came in to Thomas Roberts meddow . . . and did spit up his ground and spoyle his gras and did turn away his water.’5 In 1634, the infractions escalated and Roberts was punched by Robert Matthew

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North Devon Athenaeum, ‘Diary and account book of Robert Roberts’, pp. 14–15. Ibid., p. 22. ‘john bartlet the ygr say that rob Roberts did not strike john gibbe the elder.’ Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., pp. 34, 40, 48, 55. Ibid., p. 56.

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and grabbed around the throat by Henry Matthew.6 Three years later Roberts and Henry Matthew were involved in a pew dispute.7 Roberts’s diary is more accurately described as a reckoning book. In order that his enemies could be called to account at law, he needed to catalogue every injury received, record the witnesses whom he could summon and tally any costs incurred. Roberts’s practice of disputing is instructive. He never used the word feud – a word that had long been obsolete – but described a series of feud-like practices. His frequent recourse to the law was a corollary to, not a replacement for, verbal threats and physical violence. But the physical clashes show restraint. There is, for example, no mention of bloodletting or serious wounding. Weapons ownership among the lower orders was much less common than in other parts of Europe and the right to carry offensive weapons strictly regulated.8 Roberts does not mention neighbourliness either, though he makes frequent reference to mediation and settlements, whose termination came with the payment of debts and reparations at the porch of the local church, a venue of some significance. Communion was a sign of friendship and fellowship and Roberts disapproved of the fact John Pleace took communion on Sunday morning 5 November 1626 and in the afternoon ‘did prate and fight with John Heard’.9 Neighbourliness was a ‘critical social ideal’ that underpinned social relations in early modern England; it encompassed the belief that neighbours should live quietly and in charity with one another and when they fell out directed them to mediation, arbitration and reconciliation.10 At the same time, the parish was a political forum and benevolent feelings were dependent on a shared social position and outlook and shaped by occupational solidarity, kinship and client–patron relations. Consequently, village life was characterised by an ‘atmosphere of contention and sometimes bitter enmity’.11 But, while social historians have recognised the significance of enmity to village life, there is still no history of it. For Wrightson and Levine, it was social and economic difficulties that explain the growing number of feuds in the village of Terling around 1600, their decline after 1610 and return in the 1650s.12 6 7 8

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Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 71. R. Redhead, ‘Weapons Ownership in Early Modern England’, unpublished MA dissertation, University of York (2019). ‘Diary and account book of Robert Roberts’, p. 23. K. Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), pp. 10–46; N. Tadmor, ‘Friends and Neighbours in Early Modern England: Biblical Translations and Social Norms’, in L. Gowing, M. Hunter and M. Rubin (eds.), Love, Friendship, and Faith in Europe, 1300–1800 (London: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 150–76. L. Stone, ‘Interpersonal Violence in English Society, 1300–1980’, Past and Present, 101 (1983), 27. K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 123–5.

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Neighbourliness was put under strain by a population rise during the sixteenth century, as growing numbers of poor began to burden the community. But as Bernard Capp has pointed out, parish politics ‘reflect not only ties of kinship and economic interest, but the chemistry of personal friendships and antipathies’.13 The extent to which riots were neighbourly feuds that had become entangled with disputes over enclosures and common rights is only now becoming evident.14 And the unscrupulous were prepared to take advantage of a charitable nature. Richard Gittins, the largest landowner in Myddle, was remembered seventy-five years after his death in 1624 ‘as a mild and peacable man, very charitable and soe willing to forgive injuryes that he passed by many without seeming to take notice of them’. But his failure to enforce his rights and obligations left his estate in peril and harmed his children.15 One reason for the neglect is the persistent claim that English social relations were progressively pacified by the law and that private disputes had little capacity to upset the public peace. The sixteenth-century boom in litigation, it is claimed, is evidence of the transformation of manners as disputants turned increasingly to the courts to settle disputes. For Lawrence Stone, ‘a consequence of the decline of violence was an astonishing growth in litigation’.16 More recently it has been claimed that the state ‘established a successful monopoly of violence by the end of the sixteenth century, if not earlier’.17 The Tudors, we are frequently reminded, cut over-mighty subjects down to size and abolished their armed retinues. ‘Across the early modern period the tentacles of Leviathan began to reach into every realm of violence. From the private armies of the nobility to homicide, assault, and even accident, the English state sought to define legitimate and illegitimate violence and to reserve the use of force.’18 The cultural change which attended this decline has generated a huge literature. The ‘first modern nation’ we are told was characterised by the emergence of a polite and commercial people. Essential to this process was the spread of Renaissance values, especially civility. Violence was increasingly seen as a form of bad manners and men of honour were kept peaceable by a public discourse of masculinity that prized restraint and the mastery of passion.19 Sir Keith Thomas has summarised the literature: 13 14 15

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B. Capp, ‘Life, Love and Litigation: Sileby in the 1630s’, Past and Present, 182 (2004), 67. Capp, When Gossips Meet, p. 312. D. Hey, An English Rural Community, Myddle under the Tudors and Stuarts (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1974), p. 92. L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 240. M. Lockwood, The Conquest of Death: Violence and the Birth of the Modern British State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 21. Lockwood, Conquest, p. 343. M. James, ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642’, Past and Present Special Supplements, 3 (1978); E. Foyster, ‘Male Honour, Social Control and Wife Beating in Late Stuart England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6 (1996), 215–24.

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england The reason that the homicide rates dwindled was not that the aristocracy had become capable of greater self-mastery, but that their values were changing in response to the growing power and legitimacy of the Tudor monarchy. Increasingly exposed to humanist notions of civil virtue, they were readier to seek honour serving the crown than by manipulating their retinues in pursuit of private feuds and vendettas.20

There is no doubt that litigation boomed in the sixteenth century. As Christopher Brooks has shown, business increased significantly after 1550 and only began to decline from the 1680s, and rapidly so from the 1730s.21 But rising rates of litigation are not evidence of improvements in manners or the success of Tudor pacification. As we have seen in other chapters, they are an indication of greater conflict in society. The vast majority of cases at the English courts related to the enforcement of debts and obligations but, as Thomas Roberts’s reactions to the ‘malice’ of his enemies show, civil suits did not necessarily entail civil behaviour. There were three main reasons for this. Craig Muldrew has shown the close relationship between credit and honour. A good reputation for honesty and reliability in obligations was of great social importance and the claim that one was not good for one’s debts was a threat to standing within the community.22 In a world where it was commonly believed that there was limited good, public credit was a scarce commodity of social capital that required defending. In 1637, for example, Edward Heylin, the brother of Peter Heylin, the Laudian cleric, wrote a letter to Ursula, wife of Henry Chaloner, the son of Sir Thomas Chaloner, the courtier and naturalist, in which he exposed her husband as a scoundrel, able neither to meet his debts nor fulfil his obligation as a gentleman to meet him in combat.23 Secondly, there was a strong belief that going to law was a social evil. A 1576 parliamentary bill lamented ‘the multitude of contentions which for lack of charity rise upon the smallest occasions between neighbours’.24 Informing, denunciation and litigation were unneighbourly and unchristian.25 Thirdly, economic and social change weakened the traditional bonds of neighbourliness and intensified enmities between the winners and the losers. At Market Rasen in Lincolnshire, for instance, where the population had more than doubled since the 1560s, conflict between ‘lords’ of the town and the freeholders over the enclosure of the commons led in 1602 to heated exchanges in the church. An attempt by the minister, William Storre, to mediate did not please Francis 20 21

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Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility, pp. 24–5. C. Brooks, Lawyers, Litigation and English Society since 1450 (London: Hambledon, 1998); Brooks, Law, Politics and Society. Muldrew, ‘Culture of Reconciliation’; Muldrew, Economy of Obligation. www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/102-chaloner-heylin. Brooks, Lawyers, Litigation and English Society, p. 23. P. Withington, ‘The Semantics of “Peace” in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 23 (2013), 127–53.

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Cartwright of the ‘lords’. The following day he declared in the marketplace that Storre was ‘a scurvy, lowsie, paltrie priest: that whosoever said he was his friend, or spake in his cause, was a rogue, & a rascall: that he would (but for the law) cut his throat, tear out his hart, & hang his quarters on the maypole’.26 On the next Sunday Storre responded with a thunderous sermon likening his flock to the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. Cartwright took the message personally. The following week he assaulted and killed the minister. The brutality of the attack – the victim received twenty-four sword wounds – was clearly designed as a warning to anyone who opposed the ‘lords’. Cartwright’s ‘friendes laboured by corrupt dealing’ to forestall the trial and he was able to purchase a pardon from James I.27 Litigation did not supplant violence. Taking homicide as an indicator of overall levels of interpersonal violence, there is agreement among historians that the murder rate, moderate in the 1560s and 1570s, rose sharply in the 1580s and 1590s. Indictments reached a peak in the 1620s and did not fall to the levels that had prevailed in the mid-sixteenth century until the early eighteenth century.28 Nevertheless, the figures also suggest that, in comparison to the rest of Europe, England had relatively low rates of violence. Eisner’s analysis of 137 English datasets shows a homicide rate of 7 per 100,000 in the sixteenth century, falling to 6 in the first half of the seventeenth and 4 in the second half; with a further fall by the end of the eighteenth century to 1.29 England, it appears, was the least homicidal nation in early modern Europe. According to those who use the statistics as a measure of civilised behaviour, seventeenth-century Yorkshire (homicide rate of 2 per 100,000) must have been much more ‘advanced’ than northern Italy, where rates over 100 have been recorded.30 The apparent lack of interpersonal violence relative to its neighbours means that no claim for the powers of the English state is deemed too exaggerated – it could even ‘conquer death’.31 If one factors in the advances made by modern trauma medicine, the low early modern homicide rate suggests that our early modern ancestors were not much more homicidal than today, supporting the claims for a Merrie England, where ‘feuds and factions . . . are nowhere to be seen’.32 26

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Three bloodie murders the first, committed by Francis Cartwright vpon William Storre, Mr. of Art, minister and preacher at Market Raisin in the countie of Lincolne (London, 1613). In 1611 he committed another killing, of Mr Rigg, in Grantham: www.raseheritage.org.uk /william-storre-murder/. For a summary of recent research: J. Sharpe, A Fiery and Furious People: A History of Violence in England (London: Random House Books, 2016), chapter 3. Eisner, ‘Long-Term Historical Trends’, 99. The figures for Yorkshire are given in S. Barbour-Mercer, ‘Prosecution and Process: Crime and Criminal Law in Late Seventeenth-Century Yorkshire’, unpublished DPhil thesis, University of York (1988). Lockwood, Conquest of Death, p. 7. A. Macfarlane, The Justice and the Mare’s Ale: Law and Disorder in Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 20–3, 194.

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This chapter challenges these interpretations. It shows that until the eighteenth century violence and litigation were coordinate ways of redressing grievances. First, it will outline the limitations of the statistical evidence in regard to levels of violence and the weakness of basing claims on sources generated by a relatively unbureaucratic legal system. In fact, the evidence suggests that the overall homicide rate in England was much higher than is usually claimed, and not dissimilar to the rates recorded by its neighbours. It requires us to reexamine the effectiveness of the machinery of repression. Second, having demonstrated that judicial records alone are insufficient for studying violence, I will suggest some alternative sources for capturing the history of violence and assess how that helps us to rethink the traditional narrative. ***

There are good reasons for being sceptical of early modern England’s apparently low homicide rate since the statistics, compiled from assize indictments and coroners’ inquests, do not capture all homicides. One obvious example of the gaps in the evidence relates to periods of civil conflict. No one would seriously claim that the apparently low and declining homicide rates of the 1640s are evidence of anything other than the collapse of local county administration. We can be fairly certain that the homicide rate during the civil war was significantly higher than the judicial and coroners’ records suggest.33 In the county of Cheshire, for example, where quarter sessions ceased altogether between 1642 and 1645, the 366 homicide indictments recorded for the seventeenth century do not include the twelve inhabitants of Bartholmey parish murdered by royalist soldiers in December 1643.34 English historians have yet to employ the sophisticated methods of data collection and regression analysis used in the United States.35 Erik Monkonnen’s pioneering work and methodology was a response to the haphazard records created by a legal system that relied heavily on voluntary and often untrained participants.36 In England, following the 1487 Murder Act, magistrates were obliged to conduct investigations into felonies but although many were undoubtedly conscientious and 33

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See the excellent discussion in R. Bennett, ‘Enforcing the Law in Revolutionary England: Yorkshire, c.1640–c.1660’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London (1987), chapters 4 and 5. J. Sharpe and R. Dickinson, ‘Revisiting the “Violence We Have Lost”: Homicide in Seventeenth-Century Cheshire’, English Historical Review, 131 (2016), 293–323; G. Ormerod, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, 3 vols. (London, 1875–82), III, p. 164. For a different interpretation of the massacre: G. Hudson, ‘The Northern Civil War Atrocity at Barthomley Church, 1643, Revisited’, Northern History, 46 (2009), 329–32. R. Roth, ‘Homicide in Early Modern England, 1549–1800: The Need for a Quantitative Synthesis’, Crime, History, and Societies, 5, (2001), 33–67. E. Monkkonen, Murder in New York City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

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indefatigable, this was not always the case.37 Robert Howes killed a man in a duel around 1600, but ‘little pursuit was made after him’ and for the next thirty years he held an office at Woodstock Park.38 The amateurishness of the record-keeping at the assizes is indicative of a lack of professionalism.39 For this reason, historians tend to place greater faith in coroners’ inquests. The coroner was an ancient office. In order to encourage these unsalaried amateurs, who were largely drawn from the lesser gentry, they were paid 13s 4d for every murder or manslaughter conviction. But, in practice, the expense of traversing their jurisdiction, empanelling juries and conducting investigations rendered these fees insufficient.40 Consequently, there is plenty of evidence for laxity and even corruption. Star Chamber received 57 complaints of coroners’ malfeasance between 1603 and 1634.41 Complaints were also regularly sent to the Privy Council. In 1591, the Bedfordshire coroner, who had already been summoned to London once before, had to be reminded not to proceed any further with his verdict since ‘some doubt is made of indirect dealings to be practized against the supposed offenders’.42 Coroners did not operate outside local networks of power and in the same year the Privy Council recused the coroner of Caernarvonshire from proceeding against: Robert ap John ap Griffith and many others for riotous assaulting of the suppliantes with unlawful weapons being at praier in the Church, and against the Coroner of that Court who (as it is feared) by reason of his nere alliance in blood to the defendantes and for many other great respectes is purposed to proceed to a verdict of murder or fellony to be given up by a parcial jurie against the suppliantes for the death of Thomas ap John ap Merideth who was slaine, as it is enformed, by one of his owne company.43

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M. Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 243–4. T[he] N[ational] A[rchives] SP 16/165, fo. 3. J. Cockburn, ‘Early Modern Assize Records as Historical Evidence’, Journal of the Institute of Archivists, 5 (1974–7), 215–31. K. Kesselring, Making Murder Public: Homicide in Early Modern England, 1480–1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 85–7. For example: TNA STAC 8/311/28: falsification of a coroner’s inquest whereby a verdict of murder was found against Richard Banckes of West Ness, his goods having been granted to plaintiff Henry Zinzan, esquire; 8/43/18: arrest of plaintiff John Austen and Thomas Austen, his son, for the murder of Ananias Foxhall, mariner of Bristol, found by a coroner’s jury to have died of the plague, bribery of witnesses, and other misconduct in office; 8/185/17: packing and corrupting a jury to find the plaintiff’s sons guilty of the murder of Thomas Lewis; 8/202/28: information as to bribery of Harry Vaughan (Lord Lieutenant of Breconshire) and Epyphane Haworth to cease the prosecution of Roger Griffiths, and others for the murder of James Daunce, gent. TNA PC 2/19 fo. 206. See also TNA PC 2/24 fo. 307. TNA PC 2/18 fo. 120.

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In Merionethshire in 1602: More than three years since, Ellisey ap William Lloyd, of Rhuoedoge in the said county, and his followers to the number of five or six more, murdered Thomas ap John ap Humphrey in the town of Bala, and to this day nothing has been done by course of law, not so much as a coroner’s inquest; neither dare the friends stir in it, fearing the friends on the other side, who every year find means to have such returned for sheriffs as are nigh in blood or by marriage to the murderer.44

In 1609 the Attorney General was informed of a conspiracy to acquit Sir Pexall Brocas of the murder and mutilation of a servant, the jury having returned a verdict of suicide.45 Jury-packing was a particular problem. In 1598, the coroner of Monmouthshire was ordered ‘to return a sufficient and indifferent jury, without cousins and familiar friends’.46 Following a duel in Plymouth, in 1668, ‘upon the impanelling of the jury by the coroner, Mr. Edgecombe’s father sent several of his servants and tenants to serve upon the inquest, and procured such a verdict as he pleased’.47 Influence over due process might also be exerted from the centre. In 1622, the coroner charged with investigating the death of the earl of Berkshire was told not to ‘urge’ the evidence; that is not to press the case too purposefully.48 The subsequent verdict of suicide from a self-inflicted crossbow shot was deemed highly suspicious. The other problem with relying on county coroners’ records is that the archive contains many gaps and omissions. Most of those that survive are copies returned to King’s Bench, but it is uncertain what proportion of the whole went there. Moreover, coroners tended to be reactive – a coroner was called in by the community when they considered there was a death he ought to know about.49 The decision to report a death cannot be dissociated from local power relations. So, for instance, the death of Sir John Reresby’s ‘moorish’ servant would have gone unnoticed since his master failed to inform the authorities. It was only when Reresby was denounced by an enemy that the corpse was exhumed and an inquest performed. Reresby’s father had killed another gentleman in a brawl in York in 1639 but ‘luckily’ the surgeon deposed

44

45 46 47 48 49

Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, ed. R. Roberts et al., 24 vols., (London: HMSO, 1883–1976), XII, p. 481. TNA STAC 8/10/20. Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, VIII, p. 259. TNA SP 29/254 fo. 90. See also PC 2/21 fo. 120, 3 February 1595. TNA SP 14/127 fo. 139. See the important introductions by R. F. Hunnisett in Sussex Coroners’ Inquests 1485– 1558 (Lewes: Sussex Record Society, 1985); Sussex Coroners’ Inquests 1558–1603 (London: Public Record Office, 1996); Sussex Coroners’ Inquests 1603–1688 (London: Public Record Office, 1998).

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on oath that he died of the pox.50 The county coroners’ jurisdiction was also limited. What of murder on and over the seas? This is of particular significance in a maritime nation. Deaths aboard ship were under the jurisdiction of the Admiralty. One reason for their failure to locate duelling is because English historians have been looking in the wrong places. Travel to the continent to fight duels was often safer and more convenient, but the bodies do not appear in the judicial archives.51 There were exclusive jurisdictions, whose records do not survive.52 In particular, the records of the Court of the Verge, which comprised the residence of the royal court and a circuit of twelve miles round it, were of major significance, especially once the court became fixed in London. The royal coroner attached to the Verge was supposed to collaborate with county coroners but the latter were forbidden by statute from operating in his jurisdiction without permission. Henry VIII asserted the exclusive purview of the Verge within 200 feet of any royal ‘edifice, courts, places, gardens, orchards, privy walk, tilt-yards, wood-yards, tennis-plays, cockfights, bowling alleys’.53 As a consequence large parts of London fell under royal jurisdiction. Charles I had to close the bowling green created in the Mall in 1630 because it became the scene of three quarrels every week, where gentlemen could strike one another with no fear of interference from the ordinary justice.54 A newsletter of April 1694 gives a flavour of the documentation this court once generated, noting three indictments at the Verge in one day, ‘the one against the Earl of Bath’s page for killing Lord Lansdowne’s page last summer, the second against Sir Henry Dutton Colt, and the third against Mr. Lake for fighting and drawing blood’.55 With these documentary gaps it is no wonder that it is so hard to find evidence for duelling in early modern England. ***

We can be fairly certain then that the homicide rate in early modern England was much higher than is generally claimed: ‘The actual homicide rate in England in the early 1600s was probably 15 per 100,000’, concludes Randolph Roth on the basis of the modelling developed by him and other US historians.56 The surge in

50 51

52 53 54

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The Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, ed. A. Browning (Glasgow, 1936), pp. xlii, 108. Among many examples: TNA SP 14/95 fo. 38; SP 14/115 fo. 9; Kesselring, Making Murder Public, p. 94; www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/172-duck-doubleday. R. Wellington, The King’s Coroner, 2 vols. (London: W. Clowes, 1905), II, pp. 24–6. Ibid., I, p. 26. E. Walford, ‘The Mall and Spring Gardens’, in Old and New London: Volume 4 (London, 1878), pp. 74–85. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the reign of William and Mary, 1689–1702, ed. W. Hardy et al. (London, 1895–1937), VI, p. 245. Roth, ‘Homicide’, 28 and 36.

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homicides in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries led to rates that were little different to the thirteenth century. This is precisely what we would expect from the data elsewhere: the sixteenth-century explosion of violence and its rapid fall in the eighteenth century is part of a European parabola. As Krista Kesselring has recently shown, the rising rates of homicide from the 1570s were not due to the weakness of the law. The law had been considerably tightened following the civil wars of the fifteenth century when murder was redefined by the 1487 statute as a breach of the public peace: ‘The creation of manslaughter shifted decision-making from whether a killing would be punished to how it would be punished.’57 What distinguished the English common law was its hostility to blood money payments and compensation. There was a high tolerance of assault, which, until the end of the eighteenth century, was treated more as a private than a public concern and dealt with by magistrates using nominal fines.58 Out-of-court settlements were common for misdemeanours, but in regard to felonies negotiated justice occurred only at the margins.59 In the common law there was no concept of a civil party that could be satisfied financially and an expectation that, if convicted, ‘public satisfaction’ would be done for a crime. The common law was both punitive in principle and in practice, which was compounded by the lack of rigour in due process. The outcome of the trial rested heavily on the attitude of the jury to the accused: ‘It will seeme straunge’, admitted Thomas Smith in De Republica Anglorum, ‘to all nations that doe use the civill Lawe of the Romane Emperours, that for life and death there is nothing put in writing but the enditement onely. All the rest is doone openlie in the presence of the Judges, the Justices, the enquest, the prisoner, and so manie as will or can come so neare as to heare it, and all depositions and witnesses given aloude, that all men may heare from the mouth of the depositors and witnesses what is saide.’60 The leading historian of the assizes concluded from an analysis of 4,000 indictments that ‘a moderately alert attorney could have made mincemeat of perhaps half of the indictments considered at assizes’.61 But with no counsel or sworn defence, trials were swift. In Sussex ‘jurors judged defendants in an atmosphere at times both chaotic and intimidating’.62 The privileging of punishment and the low priority given to judicial oversight and standards of proof – there were no courts of appeal, for instance, before the reforms of the eighteenth century – created a system that was unrivalled in its brutality. Between 600 and 1200 felons were executed 57 58

59 60 61 62

Kesselring, Making Murder Public, p. 31. P. King, Crime and Law in England, 1750–1840: Remaking Justice from the Margins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 232, 240–1. Kesselring, Making Murder Public, chapter 3. T. Smith, De Republica Anglorum (1583), II, chapter 23. Cockburn, ‘Assize Records’, 228. C. Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 141.

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per year in early modern England with rates peaking, along with the homicide rate, in the early 1600s.63 This level of judicial murder requires some reflection. After all, it was much higher than rates of execution elsewhere in Europe, where a brief experiment with harsh punishments in the sixteenth century was abandoned and rates of execution tumbled from the end of the century. The English, less inhibited by the oversight of sceptical legal experts and university law faculties, had greater faith in the value of capital punishment as a form of social control. But the law was not simply a tool of state repression. In England, in particular, where ‘one stood a better chance of dying a violent death at the hands of the authorities than those of common killers’, it was an effective means of pursuing everyday enemies.64 Where depositions survive, they demonstrate the potential for suborning witnesses, ‘embracery’, the attempt to corrupt jurors, and intimidation.65 Star Chamber imprisoned a plaintiff in 1590 for sending a letter to a defendant in which he made the sign of the gallows.66 Magistrates had to be wary of the information they received from plaintiffs. As one jurist put it, ‘malice is a good informer, but an ill judge’.67 A 1670 royal proclamation complained of ‘the multitudes of causeless presentments and indictments which are usually presented at assizes and sessions rather out of malice or revenge than for the furtherance of justice’.68 Perjury was a major challenge to a system heavily reliant on voluntary officers with often minimal expertise. Juries might be deceived by a well-coached witness. A 1663 confession by a witness, bullied and bribed into giving false testimony, recounts how ‘witnesses [were] framed and ordered . . . and trained’ by counsel for the plaintiff who ‘ask[ed] them cross Questions, on purpose to make them perfect’.69 But in spite of the move to more punitive justice, it did not stop homicide rates from rising at the end of the sixteenth century. One reason for this was that there was little equality before the law – 87 per cent of those executed were thieves – and those with social capital, who were responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent crime, were more likely to escape punishment. The literate escaped hanging by pleading benefit of clergy and, in practice, courts were flexible in their attitudes to homicide and juries, subject 63 64 65

66

67

68 69

Kesselring, Making Murder Public, p. 126. Ibid., p. 128. For example, S. Hindle, ‘“Bleeding Afreshe”? The Affray and Murder at Natwich, 19 December 1572’, in A. McShane and G. Walker (eds.), The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). K. Kesselring (ed.), Star Chamber Reports: Harley MS 2143 (London: List and Index Society, 2018), p. 98. J. Baildon (ed.), Les reportes del cases in Camera Stellata, 1593 to 1609 (London, 1894), p. 242. TNA SP 63/328 fo. 56. A true narrative of the proceedings in the severall suits in law that have been between . . . Charles Lord Gerard of Brandon and Alexander Fitton, Esq. (The Hague, 1663).

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to manipulation by those with the means, were usually unwilling to pass murder convictions for actions that could be deemed justifiable. The gap between a theoretically punitive and indiscriminate legal system and actual practice can be demonstrated in the failed attempt to arrest the spread of duelling, a social practice closely associated with claims to status and reputation. The duellists who were executed for murder in 1602, 1609 and 1610 were of low social status and consequently the impact was limited.70 The 1613 Proclamation, which forbade words provocative to a duel, was hampered by James I’s indulgence and preference for pardons.71 Charles II lamented that the practice was a crime committed by ‘persons of Quality’, which explains why his 1679 proclamation remained a dead letter. There were a handful of high-profile aristocratic felons executed for homicide but the numbers are statistically insignificant.72 The distinction in common law in regard to murder (defined as ‘prepensed malice’) and manslaughter differed little from the Roman Law tradition, where punishments were also calibrated according to intent. Crompton’s 1583 manual for JPs, Loffice et Authoritie des Justices, observed: Two men who fall out in a town, and by agreement take the field, nearby, and this one kills the other, this is murder, for there was precedent malice . . . But if they fought a combat suddenly without malice precedent, and paused a little in the combat, and then they took to the field, and one killed the other, that would be manslaughter, because everything was done in the continuing heat of passion.73

This quibbling was significant. It shaped the standard defence in criminal trials for duels, encounters and brawls involving the elite, which were represented as spontaneous combats fought between men who were, at heart, good friends. In May 1698, for example, Mr Elisius Burges of the parish of St Paul’s, CoventGarden, was indicted for the murder of Halibrand Hording, giving him one mortal wound with a rapier. Burges was not only able to convince the jury that there was ‘no Malice appearing in the Case . . . the Accident having happen’d in a sudden Quarrel’; he was able to call several witnesses to attest to his good reputation. The jury found him not guilty.74 Similar cases from the Old Bailey reveal two essential facets of elite violence. First, most fights involving gentlemen were not formal duels with their elaborate protocols but encounters or brawls, which could always be construed as fortuitous and justifiable in law. The English adopted continental practice and referred to ‘rencounters’ from 70 71 72 73

74

‘List of precedents for condemnations for murder after duels’, TNA SP 46/174 fo. 120. Kesselring, Making Murder Public, p. 95. Ibid., p. 31. Quoted in S. Banks, A Polite Exchange of Bullets: The Duel and the English Gentleman, 1750–1850 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2010), p. 13. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 12 May 2020), February 1698, trial of Elisius Burges (t16980223-17).

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the French rencontre.75 Second, credit was not confined to the field of honour but was social capital that could be spent in the court-room. The importance of patrons and testimonies from peers and commanding officers was crucial to the defence, certainly also how one spoke and dressed. Robert Cook, who killed a fellow esquire in a duel in 1725, called the duke of Richmond, the duke of Montague, the earl of Essex, the Lord Mansfield, the Lord Albemarle, and the Lord Walgrave to depose ‘that they had known Mr. Cook for several Years, and always found him to be of a peaceable Disposition, and not subject to quarrel’. The jury returned a verdict of self-defence.76 Juries usually accepted that the profession of a gentleman required him to defend his reputation and returned manslaughter verdicts accordingly. For example, the sixty-eight cases before the Old Bailey against killers of gentlemen between 1678 and 1800 resulted in forty-two manslaughter convictions and nine death sentences for murder. In all but two of the trials the accused were also gentlemen. The death sentences tended to be reserved for dishonourable actions (fratricide; a defenceless victim) or for the few cases of lower-status people who had broken a taboo and killed a superior (four out of nine executions). Manslaughter carried the penalty of branding and some gentlemen were indeed ‘burnt on the hand’.77 But there is little evidence it was an effective deterrent. Branding, like the duelling scar, was painful but not necessarily ignominious, and not always carried out. Peers escaped branding altogether by virtue of their rank. Technically prohibited from receiving immunity for a second murder in 1681, the seventh earl of Pembroke was nonetheless granted a full pardon.78 Baron Chandos and Lord Arundel of Wardour were the only two peers ever burned in the hand, following a murderous duel on Putney Heath in 1653. And the fact that one of the few high-status duellists to be executed was a Cromwellian lieutenant colonel, following a court martial in Ireland in 1652, is indicative of the English Republic’s desire to enforce the ideal of equality before the law more rigorously.79 75

76 77

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For example: Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 12 May 2020), September 1677, trial of Gentleman (t16770906-4). Ibid., February 1725, trial of Robert Cook (t17250224-22). For example: W. Jackson, ‘The Curwens of Workington Hall and Kindred Families’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 5 (1881), 47. D. Smith, ‘Herbert, Philip, First Earl of Montgomery and Fourth Earl of Pembroke (1584– 1650)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/ 13042. A. Warmington, ‘Brydges, George, Sixth Baron Chandos (1620–1655)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/3802; C. McGrath, ‘Rochfort, Robert (1652–1727)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, DOI: https://doi.org/10 .1093/ref:odnb/23921. The Council of State took up the 1651 recommendation of the House committee to punish the crime more severely: J. Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’: Duelling in Ireland, 1570–1860 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), pp. 21–2.

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Those with means could interfere at any stage of the process. It was proverbial that ‘the law, like a cobweb, traps the little and allows the great to escape’.80 Sir Thomas Throckmorton, a Gloucestershire JP and member of the Council in the Marches from 1590, was notorious for expecting presents from suitors, or what the locals referred to as ‘going to offer my candle to the devil’.81 In 1602, he admitted accepting £800 to have a murderer acquitted and was fined and disbarred from office. His accuser, Sir Henry Winston, was little better and found guilty of taking bribes for reducing sentences.82 When Edward Morgan killed John Egerton in a duel in Middlesex in 1610, he was initially protected by friends and escaped arrest.83 Following his arrest, there was an attempt to move the inquest from the Middlesex coroner to the Court of the Verge, where he expected more favourable treatment. The failure of this gambit led his friends to fix the jury selection. There were also attempts to nobble witnesses.84 Jurymen were offered ‘wyne and beere and other things’ at the Nags Head in St John’s Street, Islington. Morgan, however, was up against the powerful Egertons, who countered his every move and, with royal justice delayed, brought a private prosecution against him.85 The jury returned a murder verdict. Nevertheless, Morgan was assured of the protection of ‘great persons’ and received a pardon.86 The empanelling of juries was also shaped by local politics. When Sir Henry Hobart was killed in a duel in the wake of the 1698 election his killer, Oliver le Neve, became a hero for local Tories. He fled abroad and waited while his supporters manipulated the jury rolls in his favour. In 1700 he returned to Thetford, where he was triumphantly found not guilty.87 In spite of moves towards more punitive justice, favour and grace still shaped the judicial process since the arbitrary will of the monarch remained an essential component of the aura of majesty. While James I publicly denounced duelling, he also did his utmost to protect individual duellists from his own harsh laws.88 Given the bloody nature of the system and the absence of courts of appeal, the clamour for mercy was shrill: in the sixteenth century 1800 killers received special pardons and half of these involved 80 81

82 83 84 85 86

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The Duchess of Malfi, Act 1. www.histparl.ac.uk/volume/1558-1603/member/throckmorton-sir-thomas-153891607#footnote3_eaoun9q. Baildon (ed.), Les reportes, p. 134. See also pp. 232, 334. TNA SP 46/174 fo. 115. Ibid., fo. 99. Ibid., fo. 81. TNA SP 46/75 fo. 65; www.histparl.ac.uk/volume/1604-1629/member/egerton-sir-john -1551-1614. F. Rye (ed.), Calendar of Correspondence and Documents Relating to the Family of Oliver Le Neve, of Witchingham, Norfolk, 1675–1743 (Norwich, 1895), pp. 59, 62; R. KettonCremer, Oliver Le Neve and His Duel with Sir Henry Hobart (Felbrigg Hall, 1941). Kesselring, Making Murder Public, p. 95.

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murders for which there was no legal justification or excuse.89 Their contents betray the existence in the sixteenth century of bloody local feuds.90 With no concept of a civil party, the English system worked for the benefit of the Exchequer. The sixteenth-century price inflation eroded the state’s already meagre resources – revenue in 1601 was 40 per cent less than in 1509 – and pardons were one way to fund the gap. The fiscal importance of mercy to cashstrapped Tudor monarchs can be gleaned by the fact that Elizabeth I’s first general pardon in 1559 was issued to 2,725 persons, paying 26s 8d per charter.91 Petitions for pardon, which appear haphazardly in the State Papers, also point to the ways in which the law was used to pursue private enemies, such as the supplications on behalf of Mr Wraten in 1628, ‘who in defence of his friend drew his sword, and yet was not himself so unfortunate as to kille the man that dyed in that fray, for as the coroner’s [in]quest found it but manslaughter, yet the malice of a violent Recorder of Salisbury, where this act was done, will endanger this young gentleman unless your Grace out of your goodness prevent it’.92 The potential for political interference and corruption is also clear. Henry St John, for example, was tricked into confessing to murder following a duel in 1684, on promise of a pardon, even though the ‘proof did not vary it beyond manslaughter’. Following his sentence ‘it appeared on what design he had been practised on. It was a rich family, and not well affected to the court: so he was told that he must pay well for his pardon: and it cost him £16,000 of which the king had one half, the other being divided between two ladies that were in great favour.’93 ***

The same patchy archives that generate misleading homicide data also give a false impression of the extent, nature and chronology of elite violence. Most historians agree that it ceased to be a problem from the 1620s. Lawrence Stone’s classic study of the English aristocracy uncovered several feuds, whose frequency seemed to be increasing around 1600. In doing so he brought 89

90

91 92 93

Special pardons made up 13 per cent of the 14,000 issued under the Tudors: K. Kesselring, Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 75–6, 102, Kesselring, Mercy, pp. 98, 106–7. The pardon granted to Thomas Scrope, yeoman, in 1534, seems to have been related to his role in the struggle between the Knollys and Englefield families for control of Rotherfield in Oxfordshire: J. Gairdner (ed.), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. 7, 1534 (London: Longman, 1883), p. 291. Kesselring, Mercy, p. 67. TNA SP 16/525 fo. 77. See also TNA SP 12/254 fo. 119. M. Routh (ed.), Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time, 6 vols. (London, 1823), II, p. 445. On the importance of political connections: R. Bald, ‘A Manuscript Work by Sir George Buc’, Modern Language Review, 30 (1935), 12, recounting the tale of Walter Raleigh’s nephew.

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nuance to the idea of a Tudor revolution in government. Far from bridling over-mighty subjects and abolishing retaining, he found that English magnates were routinely capable of mobilising hundreds of men in private disputes at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I. ‘Given that the keeping of retainers, stocking arms and even fortification of castles continued in the late sixteenth century it is hardly surprising that the true story of the Tudor struggle to monopolise violence is far more long-drawn, far more complicated and far less triumphant than is usually supposed.’94 According to Stone’s albeit impressionistic evidence, real success came only in the 1620s: there were thirty-eight instances of violence among the peerage between 1580 and 1599; thirty-two between 1600 and 1619; and twenty-six between 1620 and 1639, two decades during which the peerage had significantly expanded.95 While the English wrote a great deal about the idea of duelling and frequently issued challenges, there is very little evidence that they acted upon these threats. It seems they were overwhelmingly bloodless affairs and operated as a civilised form of dispute settlement. Stone found only twenty mentions of duels in newsletters and correspondence in the 1590s, peaking in the 1610s with thirty-three and falling thereafter in the wake of the 1613 edict. His conclusions have been substantiated by recent research.96 Krista Kesselring’s database of 3,600 English homicide indictments between 1480 and 1680 has turned up only seventy deaths from duelling. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography lists ninety-seven fights in the period 1500–1700 and forty deaths.97 The English, it seems, showed restraint and sobriety in the face of this continental import; it was easy to decline a challenge as dishonourable and uncivilised. Englishmen ‘did not just use the law in lieu of violence, but also endorsed the notion that retribution belonged only to the king’s justice’.98 There is general agreement that duelling was suppressed by the English Republic and that its reappearance following the Restoration was part of wider cultural change, a symbol of aristocratic reaction and libertinage. One virtue of the disproportionate propensity of the social elite to engage in lethal violence is that, unlike their social inferiors, they leave traces of their behaviour in sources other than judicial archives, such as the State Papers, diaries, local antiquarian publications and genealogical compendiums. A systematic review of all such materials is beyond the scope of the lone researcher but a search of some of the most significant genealogies and databases yields a total of 250 victims, the overwhelming majority of whom were killed by their peers in duels, brawls or encounters, between 1550 and 94 95 96

97 98

Stone, Crisis, p. 223. Ibid., p. 770. Peltonnen, Duel; R. Cust and A. Hopper, ‘Duelling and the Court of Chivalry in Early Stuart England’, in S. Carroll (ed.), Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 156–74. Kesselring, Making Murder Public, p. 115. Ibid., p. 113.

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1800.99 By elite I refer not only to the armigerous but to those identified in the sources as gentlemen, as well as officers, professionals, such as lawyers and ministers, and the university-educated more broadly. One murder per year may not appear a very significant figure. But we can be fairly certain that our 250 (Table 10.1) victims represent only a fraction of the total number. There is, for example, little overlap between the victims identified by our data-mining method and gentlemen victims recorded by the Old Bailey, whose records become voluminous from the 1680s. The Old Bailey recorded some of the causes célèbres of English duelling, such as the deaths of the dandy ‘Beaux’ Wilson killed by the Scottish political economist John Law in 1694 and that of Charles Baron Mohun in 1712, but it also records the killing of sixty-eight other gentlemen between 1678 and 1800 that our data-mining method misses.100 Our sample of 250 is therefore far from comprehensive; it tends to over-represent the titled and senior army officers at the expense of the more typical victims among minor officials, junior army officers and petty gentry. Table 10.1 Elite homicides in England, 1550–1800. Evidence from data mining 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5

15 50 15 s 60 15 s 70 15 s 80 15 s 90 16 s 00 16 s 10 16 s 20 16 s 30 16 s 40 16 s 50 16 s 60 16 s 70 16 s 80 16 s 90 17 s 00 17 s 10 17 s 20 17 s 30 17 s 40 17 s 50 17 s 60 17 s 70 17 s 80 17 s 90 s

0

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100

The various editions of Burke’s Peerage online were supplemented by searching by the History of Parliament online, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Dictionary of Welsh Biography and Dictionary of Irish Biography, State Papers Online, Early English Books online, Eighteenth Century English Collections Online and soundings in the local antiquarian literature; a more systematic search of such publications would reveal many more cases. www.oldbaileyonline.org/ records only one non-elite case from the 1670s which does not otherwise appear in our data-mining sample.

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There are other reasons why our sample is of wider significance. I only include gentlemen who were victims and only those that contemporaries – who took these matters seriously – recorded as gentlemen. Fighting with an equal was a claim to status and many fights were the result of the need to determine the social pecking order. Gentlemen were a minority of the victims in the 334 indictments for murder with a rapier or sword heard by the Old Bailey between 1674 and 1800, demonstrating the widespread nature of duelling in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (70 per cent of these cases occurred in the period before 1725). Our method also allows us to collect data on Scotland and Ireland. This is a valuable exercise for several reasons. First, it gives an indication of the personal conflicts that attended the birth-pangs of the British state – a number of high-profile duels in England were fought between Englishmen and Scots who came south with James I.101 Second, it would be wrong to distinguish too clearly between the different nationalities after 1603. Most of the gentlemen murdered in seventeenth-century Ireland were English settlers and the propensity of English officers to duel in Ireland and of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy to bring its quarrels to London is well established. In 1713, for example, Lucius O’Brien, MP for county Clare, killed his former friend Colonel William Hickman on Hampstead Heath, while two Irish law students fought at the Temple in 1721, leaving one dead.102 In addition to the English and Welsh figures from 1550, Table 10.2 includes separate figures for Scotland (96) and Ireland (91), which are certainly an underestimate of the actual numbers. I have not included data for the sixteenth century because of the very different contexts that pertained before 1603. The atrocities committed in Elizabethan Ireland involved a great deal of state-sponsored violence under cover of martial law.103 In Scotland, the practice of blood money compensation, or assythment, gave the blood feud a legality that it had ceased to enjoy south of the border in the twelfth century. The abolition of the practice by James I brought Scotland into line with England and with ‘remarkable suddenness’ the Scots moved from expecting reparation to expecting the death penalty for murder.104 The Irish and Scots figures are punctuated by two very bloody events, the massacres that occurred during the 1641 Irish Rebellion and at Glencoe in 1692.105

101

102 103

104 105

For example, the killings of the Master Blantyre and the son of Baron Wharton in 1609 and of the lord of Kinloss by the earl of Dorset in 1613. Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, pp. 24–35, 48. D. Edwards, P. Lenihan and C. Tait (eds.), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010). Kesselring, Making Murder Public, pp. 75–7. The 1641 depositions database records the murder of thirty gentlemen: http://1641.tcd.ie/. It is certainly an underestimate of the true numbers. The boundary between murder and

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Table 10.2 Elite homicides in England, Scotland and Ireland, 1603–1800. Evidence from data mining 45 40 England

Scotland

Ireland

35 30 25 20 15 10 5

15

50 15 s 60 15 s 70 15 s 80 15 s 90 16 s 00 16 s 10 16 s 20 16 s 30 16 s 40 16 s 50 16 s 60 16 s 70 16 s 80 16 s 90 17 s 00 17 s 10 17 s 20 17 s 30 17 s 40 17 s 50 17 s 60 17 s 70 17 s 80 17 s 90 s

0

But the long-term pattern that emerges is clear. In England, elite violence began to rise sharply at the end of the sixteenth century, peaking around 1600, and slowly declined until 1640. Our figures conform to the pattern for the overall murder rate for this period and confirm the rise and fall of elite violence already sketched in the historiography. In order to avoid the gaze of central government and the imposition of swingeing fines it had largely been confined to trespass under cover of hunting and the encouragement of poachers on enemy territory by the time of the civil war.106 This pre-war decline is also evident in Scotland and Ireland, a consequence of the pacification policy pursued by the early Stuarts. The most remarkable feature of Table 10.1 is the spike of violence in England between 1660 and 1720 and its decline thereafter. This rapid rise and decline in the decades around 1700 should caution against notions of an ineluctable linear process of cultural change and state repression. More significant, I would argue, is the relationship between the political environment and elite violence, a correlation that can be further demonstrated by combining our data-mining figures with the Old Bailey trial cases, giving a more representative sample of elite homicides (total 185) for the eighteenth century. This permits comparison with Ireland. James Kelly’s systematic research of duelling fatalities (overwhelmingly composed of petty gentlemen, army officers, professionals and officials) for the period after 1720 is combined with the figures from our data-mining sample, giving a total of 173 homicides in Ireland.107 The figures are set out in Table 10.3.

106 107

judicial killing in early modern Ireland is fraught with interpretative difficulty. It is a vast subject and cannot be done justice here. Stone, Crisis, p. 239. Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, pp. 82, 120, 214.

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Table 10.3 Elite homicide in eighteenth-century England and Ireland 60

50

40

30

20

10

0 1680s 1690s 1700s 1710s 1720s 1730s 1740s 1750s 1760s 1770s 1780s 1790s England

Ireland

While these figures do not claim to be comprehensive, they are representative of patterns of change already well established in the historiography. The figures confirm the spike in violence around 1700 and its rapid fall after 1720. In England the mid-eighteenth century was a period of security and stability for the social elite and the political context essential to changing manners and trust in the state. Partly this was a consequence of changing masculine attitudes and expectations.108 Fashionable gentlemen began to sport a cane instead of a sword in the 1730s. The adoption of pistols, often fired at prudent distances, led to combats that were largely symbolic. This was not simply an urban phenomenon. In Cheshire, the gentry virtually disappeared in homicide cases during the second half of the eighteenth century; they no longer required retainers to enforce their will.109 Initially, Ireland was part of the overall pattern of pacification of society that occurred everywhere in the 1720s, but unlike in England and Scotland the change was not permanent and lasted only a generation. As politics in Ireland became more divisive from the 1750s, so instances of elite homicide rose accordingly. Even in England, however, there was a small rise in the number of deaths at the end of the century. This was, as in Ireland, a consequence of the revival of duelling, a fact confirmed by recent research in contemporary newspapers: between 1785 and 1844 there were at 108

109

R. Shoemaker, ‘The Taming of the Duel: Masculinity, Honour and Ritual Violence in London, 1660–1800’, The Historical Journal, 45 (2002), 525–45. J. Sharpe and R. Dickinson, ‘Homicide in Eighteenth-Century Cheshire’, Social History, 41 (2016), 192–209.

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least 1680 combats and 277 deaths, or 4.69 per year in England.110 The context for this was entirely different from the previous spike a century before. The bourgeoisification of the duel at the end of the eighteenth century was a global phenomenon.111 But the resort to violence in order to settle disputes by journalists, students and radical politicians is also an indicator of the enduring importance of the public sphere in shaping the masculine code of honour. ***

In one sense the figures confirm the claims of the traditional historiography. In comparison to the rest of Europe, early modern England was a peaceful polity. The figures for Germany, France and Italy indicate higher rates of interpersonal violence. Nevertheless, there were more violent deaths than previously recognised and the pattern in England was part of a European one. Civil war had a long-term impact on social relations among the social elite, in particular, and among this group violence reached a peak in the period 1660–1720. Although our sample is small, it is significant because of the disproportionate role played by the gentry and their servants in determining the overall pattern of violence. It was more socially acceptable to use violence against a social inferior than against an equal. Sharpe and Dickinson’s study of seventeenthcentury Cheshire, for example, has found that roughly half of those accused of murder and manslaughter in the seventeenth century were gentlemen or yeomen.112 Seventeenth-century Cheshire was characterised by gentry feuds, lethal duels and the employment of retainers. More peaceful counties, like Essex, had a lower homicide rate, one reason being the smaller number of elite men (19 per cent) among those indicted for killing.113 Our sample is therefore a signifier of the wider violence legitimised by the elites. For every gentleman that we count, there were social aspirants who do not appear in our figures, such as the dancing-master who killed the linen draper in a quarrel about the Westminster election in 1679.114 The idea that the Tudor crackdown on retaining abolished the practice altogether is unsustainable: John Evelyn’s father maintained 116 liveried servants; in the 1630s Sir Hugh Cholmley maintained 8 liveried men in addition to a household of 50–60; John Aubrey reported in 1680 that the earl of Pembroke had at Wilton ‘52 mastives and 30 110 111

112 113

114

Banks, Polite Exchange, p. 35. B. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); U. Frevert, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel (London: Polity Press, 1995); W. Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Sharpe and Dickinson, ‘Revisiting’. J. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: A County Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 124 table 12. TNA SP 29/412 fo. 57.

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grey-hounds, some beares, and a lyon, and a matter of 60 fellowes more bestial then they’.115 Retainers did not disappear; rather their role and appearance changed with circumstances. The flunkeys, lackeys and soldiers who hung around fashionable addresses in Williamite London were a different form of muscle than their Tudor antecedents but they still functioned to project power. In 1691 rival groups of lackeys clashed in the pit of a London playhouse, ‘where the earl of Oxford’s footman was run through the body’.116 Both the rise of interpersonal violence and the boom in litigation at the end of the sixteenth century and their corresponding fall in the eighteenth century were no coincidence: violence and the courts were coordinate means for pursuing grievances. The elite figure disproportionately in both civil and criminal suits. They were less subject to restraint and more litigious. The state’s monopoly of violence was tentative. The punishment of those who claimed that their actions were a justifiable defence of honour and property was haphazard. In any case, patterns of violence are only partially determined by repression. We need to explore other determinants of behaviour. 115

116

The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. de Beer, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), I, p. 9; J. Binns (ed.), ‘The Memoirs and Memorials of Sir Hugh Cholmley of Whitby, 1600– 1657’, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 153 (2000), 33; D. Smith, ‘Herbert, Philip, First Earl of Montgomery and Fourth Earl of Pembroke (1584–1650)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13042. Calendar of State Papers Domestic, William and Mary, II, p. 311.

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11 Enmity in Early Modern England

The Kingdomes beauty, the Nobilitie, who were wont to bee strangers in their native country, leading the ranks of blood and death against their enemies, have now no enemy, but keepe their practise amongst themselves, to pastime with . . . And now (more sweet and holy) are Pillars at home, that were enforced to be prodigies abroad.

Thomas Middleton’s widely read Peace-maker, published in 1618, identifies enmity’s cohesive property, as factional and personal enmities (inimicus) are replaced by a public and national abstract sense of shared enmity (hostis) towards foreigners. The process he describes is well known to historians of early modern Britain. Hatred of popery and arbitrary government gradually formed the core of a new British national identity. Although nationalism only fully emerged after the 1707 Act of Union, when a sense of Britishness, based largely on perceived differences from other Europeans and in particular its inveterate enemy in Catholic France, finally coalesced, a putative sense of superiority is already apparent in the Peace-maker. Middleton’s subtitle, Great Brittaines blessing Fram’d for the continuance of that mightie happinesse wherein this kingdome excells many empires, juxtaposed the long peace enjoyed under the Tudors and the smooth transition to the Stuart dynasty with the instability that prevailed elsewhere on the continent. Today the othering of Europe remains a cornerstone of British national identity. Historians have challenged the myths upon which this identity was founded. Religious historians have refuted the Whiggish account of the rise of toleration. The overcoming of religious hatred in the seventeenth century continues to underpin the notion of a historically liberal and tolerant society. On the contrary, few Britons believed in religious freedom: tolerance was a largely negative concept that entailed putting up with potential subversives and enemies of the Truth. Alexandra Walsham has demonstrated that persecution was pursued as a laudable endeavour; saving sinners, it was a form of Christian love, or ‘charitable hatred’. After 1559 persecution was not imposed by the state but was endemic in everyday life, the product of village ‘vendettas’ and factions.1 Since there could be ‘no fellowship between light and darkness’, the pursuit of godliness required a high degree of social ostracism. 1

A. Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 129–30.

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Political historians have challenged long-held assumptions about the stability of the early modern English state. The failure of the Stuarts to reform an essentially medieval system made them vulnerable to their European neighbours, who had developed sophisticated tax systems and standing armies. The collapse of royal authority in 1639–41 was rooted in deep-seated ideological and constitutional problems.2 John Adamson has demonstrated how competing conceptions of the constitution were propelled towards crisis by the personal animosities that pitted Charles and his counsellors against their aristocratic opponents on the ‘Junto’.3 The viciousness of the attacks on Charles’s chief minister, the earl of Strafford, in 1639–41, who was portrayed as a marauding animal let loose by an authoritarian monarch, echoed the demagogic rhetoric that characterised the French Wars of Religion. But the spirit of unity created by identifying and pursuing public enemies was fragile. Anti-popery was a powerful prejudice, but when there was no clear and present danger the sectarianism that plagued the Puritan movement reappeared.4 Cromwell was well aware of the fragility of the coalition from which his power derived. He hoped that the taking of Bristol in 1645 would be a lesson: ‘Presbyterians, Independents, all had the same spirit of faith and prayer . . . they agree here, know no names of difference; pity it should be otherwise anywhere.’5 The fighting that characterised the British Civil Wars was anything but civilised. Successful foreign invasions in 1640 and 1688 and frequent foreign interference make the civil wars in the British Isles no different from those that afflicted the rest of Europe. The English Civil War resulted in the death of 160,000 people between 1640 and 1660, or 3.7 per cent of the population, a greater proportion than the losses in either World War I or II. Scotland lost 6 per cent of its population and Ireland a staggering 41 per cent, rendering the conflict there comparable to the mortality rates caused by the Thirty Years’ War. Nor did the killing stop when the military campaigns came to end. Between 1660 and 1688 1,000 people died for their religious beliefs at the hands of the state. Informers, law-abiding Catholics and Protestant rebels all fell victim to the climate of paranoia that gripped the nation after 1679.6 Political divisions were only partially solved by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the emergence of party politics was characterised less by its civility than by vicious and poisonous partisanship.7 2

3

4

5 6 7

J. Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). J. Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007). On pre-war Puritan factionalism: P. Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 240. Ibid., p. 47. F. O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History 1688–1832 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), chapter 6.

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What is less well explored is the effect the wider political environment had on social relations.8 Stone, who first uncovered the problem of violence in the period 1570–1620, dismissed his finding as the ‘Dying spasms of a primitive society as it was slowly swallowed up by the voracious authority of the central government.’9 But violence is not the product of ‘primitive’ behaviour. The rise in the homicide rate between the 1570s and the 1620s came at precisely the same time that new ideas and codes of behaviour were imported from Europe. Ciceronian ideals ennobled the pursuit of private enemies in the name of the public good. In the first decades of the seventeenth century the distinction between public and private became highly charged with a moral force and potency, which drew upon classical republicanism, traditional ideas of the commonwealth and radical Calvinism.10 This discourse changed the tone and language of enmity. Of course, no one ever admitted to provoking a quarrel for selfish ends – this was always a charge made against an enemy – but the emotions that inspired the pursuit of public enemies were not always noble. The assassination of the duke of Buckingham in 1628 was widely applauded as public-minded. The assassin, Felton, though he could have escaped, wished to sacrifice his life in defence of the commonwealth. But his motives were not wholly patriotic: vengeance for him was personally satisfying.11 Plans to assassinate Cromwell and the other regicides largely failed, but the few successes provided emotional satisfaction for Charles II and his followers.12 The memoirs of Sir Hugh Cholmley compiled in the 1650s give a deeper insight into how public and private enmities became entangled during this period of great political upheaval. The thousands who came to witness the earl of Strafford’s execution in 1640 were no doubt, in large measure, motivated by the desire to see public satisfaction done. After all, Strafford personified the evils of arbitrary government. Cholmley’s feelings were more ambiguous. He would have been a natural royalist had he not had a personal antipathy to the earl. Strafford, who had emerged out of the bitter divisions that characterised Yorkshire politics, had many enemies in the county besides Cholmley. Their support for Parliament was tepid and, Cholmley among them, they changed 8

9 10

11 12

The ways in which the development of the public sphere shaped social identities and contributed to emergent notions of class is better established. See, for example, J. Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Crisis, p. 239. R. Cust, ‘The Public Man in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in P. Lake and S. Pincus (eds.), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 116–43. M. Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 42. J. Peacey, ‘Order and Disorder in Europe: Parliamentary Agents and Royalist Thugs’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), 953–76.

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sides during the course of the civil war.13 Cholmley’s memoirs, written in the 1650s, are a tissue of self -justification. He presented himself as a good neighbour, when, in fact, he did not easily forget his enmities. He inherited his antipathy for his ‘perverse and troublesome neighbour’, Sir Thomas Hoby, from his father; recounting their 1636 altercation at the local assizes, Cholmley accused Hoby of saying publicly that ‘his grandfather once crossed me thus on the bench, but I made him repent it; and so I will this man’.14 Personal feelings were complicated by religion. Hoby was a Puritan; he in turn accused the Cholmleys of making the bailiwick of Whitby Strand into ‘a very bishopric of papists’.15 Strafford had been instrumental in composing the quarrel between the two men in 1637, but he interpreted Cholmley’s refusal to support Ship Money as a display of ingratitude. Cholmley recalled that when he was elected as MP for the Short Parliament in 1640 the earl ‘passed by me as if he knew me not, and with some scorn, which my ill nature could not digest’. The affront was matched by public disgrace: ‘he did not only give me his personal discountenance . . . but put me out of all commissions’.16 Cholmley’s sense of being undervalued was not a trivial matter for him and the sense of injustice he felt is indicative of one factor that shaped the fractious and shifting coalitions that fought the civil wars.17 The nomenclature that contemporaries used to categorise their enmities is significant. Before the sixteenth century the word ‘feud’ was rarely used. But this archaic word began to appear more frequently at end of the sixteenth century very often with pejorative reference to Ireland or Scotland.18 Its reappearance was also a consequence of the Renaissance and the learning that celebrated the superiority of civilised values over barbarity. A 1598 description of the Borders presented them as a world turned upside down: ‘They turn their deadly feuds into infinite horrible murders, and this is held impossible to be reformed among them, living as they do worse than infidels, so as the clown makes the gentleman knave.’19 The positive side of civilising savages was the border commissions established by James VI of Scotland when he became king of England in 1603. In practical terms James’s accession brought border raiding – the state-sponsored feuding that was a feature of 13

14 15

16 17

18 19

A. Hopper, Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides during the English Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 167–71. Binns (ed.), ‘Memorials’, 33. R. Robertson Reid, The King’s Council in the North (London: Longmans, Green, 1921), p. 231. Binns (ed.), ‘Memorials’, 36. Braddick argues that understanding civil war allegiance requires understanding ‘people’s response to particular mobilizations rather than fixed allegiance to one of two sides’: God’s Fire, p. 233. Kesselring, Making Murder Public, pp. 74–7. Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, VIII, p. 562.

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a militarised frontier – to an end. James went even further in Scotland and abolished the system of blood money compensation. He advised his son in the Basilikon Doron (1599) not to ‘rest until you root out these barbarois feides’.20 In Ireland, civilisation took on a more sinister aspect and the repression of traditional forms of dispute settlement, based on cattle raiding and kidnapping, involved a great deal of state-sponsored violence under cover of martial law.21 Although ‘feud’ retained its colloquial meaning of hatred, enmity and strife, it was increasingly considered something characteristic of uncivilised and backward peoples. In a letter to Secretary Cecil in 1602, Sir George Carew, an English captain in Ireland, underlined the essential differences with England, ‘all men knowing that every particular lord (according to the manner of Scotland) is in food [feud] with some or other’.22 The English characterised their disputes differently. In common with the French, they referred to them as ‘quarrels’ (querelles). To assume that these were the same as the modern English ‘quarrel’ (‘a heated argument or disagreement, typically about a trivial issue and between people who are usually on good terms’) is not only misleading but contributes to the underestimation of the significance of private enmities in early modern English society.23 Shakespeare’s ‘quarrel’ (119 usages) was not trivial and his protagonists not on good terms. This was because ‘quarrel’ originally meant a legal complaint or suit and its colloquial meaning retained for Shakespeare and his contemporaries this sense of justice. Quarrels were rarely simply private matters. When the godly spoke of the ‘Lord’s quarrel’, they were referring to a Manichean struggle. For Francis Bacon, one of the architects of the 1613 edict against duelling, ‘It may grow from quarrels, to banding, and from banding to trooping, and so to tumult and commotion, from perticuler persons to dissention of families and aliances, yea to national quarrels.’24 Hobbes argued that quarrels are rooted in competition, mistrust and the search for glory, each of which might cause violence: the former in the quest for material gain; the second in defence of property. In the third case, Hobbes targeted the Renaissance honour code and the manner in which violence was generated ‘for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and in any other signe of undervalue, either direct in their Persons, or by reflexion in their Kindred, their Nation, their Profession, or their Name’.25 It was precisely because they might be transgressed or misinterpreted that Hobbes sneered at rituals of civility: ‘As how one should salute another, or 20 21 22 23 24 25

Kesselring, Making Murder Public, p. 76. Edwards, Lenihan and Tait (eds.), Age of Atrocity. TNA SP 63/211/3 fo. 17. On the significance of quarrels: Muldrew, ‘Culture of Reconciliation’. Peltonnen, Duel, p. 111. Leviathan, p. 88.

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how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company, and such other points of the Small Moralls.’26 The remainder of this chapter traces the fortunes of the English quarrel. It looks at the nature of the spike in violence in the period, 1570–1620; assesses the role played by civil society in mediating quarrels before the civil war; reflects on what contemporary ego-documents have to say about enmity; and concludes with some speculation about the reasons for the second spike in elite violence, 1660–1720. ***

The escalation of personal quarrels was more likely at the end sixteenth century because they became entangled in local faction politics, a consequence of centralisation, as the Tudors progressively undermined the power of local magnates who had formerly guaranteed the peace. Those counties most divided at the end of the sixteenth century – Wiltshire, Herefordshire, Kent, Norfolk, Suffolk, Northumberland, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and Worcestershire – were characterised by groups of gentry fighting bloody battles for control of office.27 In Norfolk, Suffolk and Northumberland the troubles among the gentry followed immediately upon the collapse of a powerful noble family. In this respect Elizabethan England resembled other European states, where a policy of divide and rule in the localities permitted the centre to intervene as arbiter. Local disputants were forced to cultivate friends at court and manage lawsuits in London. In Northumberland, for example, Sir John Selby escaped punishment for murdering an enemy in 1586 and his career flourished, in spite of the disorders that continued in the region, for he enjoyed the protection of Secretary Walsingham.28 Kinship shaped but did not determine local factional allegiances. In Wiltshire, for example, the opposing parties were closely related to each other.29 By the end of the sixteenth century disputes which had once been only dimly related to court politics were being transformed by national events. In Wiltshire the faction led by John Thynne, Walter Long and Sir Henry

26 27

28

29

Carroll, ‘Revenge and Reconciliation’, 137, for a discussion of this point. A. Wall, ‘Patterns of Politics in England, 1558–1625’, The Historical Journal, 31 (1988), 947–63. The ways in which bloody feuds were caught up in the scramble for national office is well understood in Wales: H. Owen, ‘Family Politics in Elizabethan Merionethshire’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 18 (1958–60), 185–91; A. Dodd, ‘North Wales in the Essex Revolt of 1601’, English Historical Review, 59 (1944), 348–70; J. Neale, ‘Three Elizabethan Elections’, English Historical Review, 46 (1931), 209–38. TNA SP 15/29 fo. 247; www.histparl.ac.uk/volume/1558-1603/member/selby-william-iii -1556-1638#footnote4_jqmbt3q. A. Wall, ‘For Love, Money, or Politics? A Clandestine Marriage and the Elizabethan Court of Arches’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 511–33.

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Knyvett had shared Puritan sympathies.30 In Staffordshire, the feud between the Baron Dudley and his neighbours the Lyttletons over Prestwood, a small estate near Kinver, degenerated into raiding and street skirmishes, culminating in the contested 1597 local parliamentary election, which led to Dudley’s prosecution for electoral fraud. The Lyttletons relied on the protection of the earl of Essex and his fall from power and execution probably explains why the violence ceased in 1601.31 Northumberland demonstrates how elite feuding poisoned social relations more broadly. An informant lamented there that ‘many murders and manslaughters have taken place these last three years, and so increased that, since July last, 1601, 12 murders, &c. have been committed, besides other crimes’. This was not for want of the law: more murderers and felons had been executed within the previous four years than in the ten years before. The problem stemmed from the malfunctioning local administration and an absence of trust: 1. The principal reason is that the sheriffs do not account, so that recognizances are forfeited, and fines imposed are not certified nor levied. 2. Impunity increases the number and boldness of cruel men, that they dare attempt anything, and despise justices of peace, who cannot give warrants for their apprehension, nor the high sheriff execute Her Majesty’s writs, without peril of their lives. 3. The power of these malefactors is such that malefactors indicted by the grand jury escape for want of evidence, none daring to inform against them for fear of their lives, so that the judges of assize caused the grand jury to repeat the private evidence given by them to the petty jury. 4. Murderers frequently compound for money, and the coroners dare take no verdict till the parties be agreed, so that odious murders are found manslaughters. 5. Whatever time of the year the murder is committed, the coroner’s verdict is deferred till the yearly assizes are past, that the parties aggrieved may have leisure to cool, and the murderer obtain the easier composition.32 The extent of elite feuding around 1600 and comparability with the phenomenon elsewhere in Europe invites a re-examination of the problem in more detail. Let us take, as an example, the Talbot–Stanhope feud first analysed by Wallace MacCaffrey in 1960.33 The principals in the affair were Gilbert, earl of Shrewsbury (1552–1616) and Sir Thomas Stanhope (1540–96) of Shelford, Notts. The Talbots were one of the richest and oldest noble families in England, 30

31 32 33

A. Wall, ‘Faction in Local Politics 1580–1620’, Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine, 72–3 (1980), 119–33. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Littleton_(died_1610). TNA SP 12/284 fo. 97. ‘Talbot and Stanhope: An Episode in Elizabethan Politics’, The Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 33 (1960), 73–85.

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but their dominance in Nottinghamshire was challenged under the Tudors by the Stanhopes, who benefitted from connections at court. Until 1590 they had been on good terms, but struggle for control of public office, in the shape of the lieutenancy of Nottinghamshire, was sharpened by personal grudges, in particular, the breaking of a marriage promise by John Holles, a wealthy Nottinghamshire squire, to the earl of Shrewsbury’s cousin in favour of Anne Stanhope, Sir Thomas Stanhope’s only daughter. In a letter of 1591 Sir Thomas blamed the quarrel on the earl’s bad faith and deliberate malice.34 Shrewsbury retaliated to the loss of credit, not by an open assault on his enemy but rather by abetting Stanhope’s other enemies. Stanhope had built a weir across the Trent at Shelford in 1570 to power his grist mills there, an action that aroused considerable opposition among local fishermen and farmers. In 1592 Shrewsbury sponsored a petition against Stanhope signed by 500 townsmen of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. Stanhope’s connections at court meant that the petition went nowhere. Shrewsbury’s machinations were hampered by the Tudor anxiety about over-mighty magnates. His own councillors warned him to reconcile since royal policy ‘think it both, justice, equity, and wisdom take care that the weaker part be not put down by the mightier’. Shrewsbury ignored their advice: ‘I prefer an open foil to a smothered dishonour.’35 In spring 1593, therefore, the earl gave his assent for the locals to divert the Trent away from Shelford weir. When Stanhope attempted to bring an indictment, the earl used his influence with the sheriff to subvert the process and, instead of indicting the weir wreckers, the grand jury charged Stanhope with being a public nuisance. Shrewsbury encouraged other tenants of his enemy to resist their unjust landlord, and there were attacks on Stanhope’s deer-park at Horsley Park, Derbyshire, and enclosures made by him at Tawton, Notts.36 These attacks were the subject of protracted Star Chamber proceedings, but Stanhope was unable to get enough evidence to convict the earl of collusion. Matters were going well for Shrewsbury until one of the agents running the operation was outed as a papist. Though there was no evidence of a wider conspiracy, the earl was arrested and publicly humiliated, before being released and sent to France as ambassador to Henry IV. The feud between the chief protagonists finally ended with the death of Sir Thomas Stanhope in 1596. It is tempting to see the Talbot–Stanhope feud as a backwards-looking phenomenon, the product of the antipathy of an ‘old-style’ magnate for social upstarts, but this underestimates the extent to which local society was divided into factions, whose membership reached down the social hierarchy. The 34 35 36

Ibid., 75. Ibid., 79. Attacks on deer parks were a common method of score-settling at this time among English gentry: D. Beaver, Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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January 1593 parliamentary election for the shire of Nottingham was contested between them. There were disturbances at Newark; Stanhope’s coach was defaced and uncomplimentary pictures of the earl circulated. Insults were exchanged and in March 1593 Gervase Markham and John Holles were committed to the Marshalsea prison for issuing challenges. The violence reached London. The duel arranged between John Stanhope, son of Sir Michael, and Sir Charles Cavendish on Lambeth Bridge was stopped when Stanhope refused to remove his doublet. Cavendish accused him of wearing concealed armour and declined to fight an ‘unfit and unequal’ combat. Subsequent accusations of cowardice led Cavendish and sixteen men to beat his enemy up in Cheapside. The first death occurred in 1594 when one of Shrewsbury’s gentlemen of the horse was killed in a duel, for which the killer was granted a pardon. In November 1598 Holles and Markham and their bravoes fought an encounter, in which the latter was seriously wounded. The factions mobilised: Shrewsbury offered to protect Markham with 120 men; Edmund, Lord Sheffield, offered 60. The bloodletting escalated the following year when John Stanhope the younger and Cavendish fought an encounter at Kirkby (Notts.) in which three men were killed and several wounded.37 Animosities faded with the accession of James I and his careful management of patronage: Shrewsbury was finally selected as Lord Lieutenant (of Derbyshire) in 1605 and became constable and steward of Newark and forester of Sherwood in 1607; the Stanhopes, Cavendishes and Holleses all shared generously from James’s beneficence. The role of women in the dispute requires highlighting. Shrewsbury’s room for manoeuvre was constrained by the need to defer to his stepmother and mother-in-law, the formidable Bess of Hardwick. In the murky world of Nottinghamshire politics women ensured that their men upheld family honour. Bess worked on him through her daughter, Mary Cavendish, telling her, for instance, to make sure her husband had nothing to do with the sheriff of Nottingham (Sir John Byron) and ‘his followers’ because they had murdered her cousin.38 John Holles considered that husband and wife were equally his enemies: ‘Shrewsbury and his Ladies hatred is great, so have their wrongfull beelefe every where, and they means enough of revenge.’39 Religion sharpened the hostility – Mary Cavendish converted to Catholicism as an adult, while the Holles family had Puritan leanings – and made reconciliation more difficult. The dispute is significant for several reasons. First, it demonstrates how disputes about marriage, property and inheritance, which were inextricably tied to honour and credit, were fought out first in the courts and then in the streets 37

38

39

TNA SP 12/271 fo. 72; www.histparl.ac.uk/volume/1558-1603/member/cavendish-sircharles-1553-1617. ‘Arundel Castle, Autograph Letters 1585–1617’, no. 124: www.bessofhardwick.org/letter .jsp?letter=233. ‘Letters of John Holles, 1587–1637’, vol. 1., ed. P. Seddon, Thoroton Society Record Series, 32 (1980), 3.

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and fields. Litigation deepened the enmity and did not render violence less likely. Second, duelling did not supersede the feud; rather it made it more deadly. Contemporary critics of the duel, like Raleigh, considered it to be the ‘like mischiefe’ of ‘that hereditarie prosecution of malice, called the deadly feud’.40 Third, factions mobilised supporters, in some cases hundreds, across the social spectrum whose violence was mediated, but not stopped by the crown. In spite of the ostensibly harsh laws against it, licences could be purchased to put men on a retainer. The establishment of county militias after 1558 may have even encouraged retaining since retainers were exempt from the musters and indentures of service became a form of patronage. The citizens of Chichester lamented ‘that the retaining and giving liveries against the law makes sometime the Queen’s Majesty cannot be served as she should be, as I have sometime noted upon musters, when the best sort of labourer has been set forth’.41 The earl of Leicester complained to secretary Walsingham how the Armada crisis swelled retinues: ‘you will hardly believe how many lyveryes be gotten within this six weeks and no man fears the penalty’.42 Sir Thomas Throckmorton used his captaincy of the trained bands in Gloucestershire to press his enemies and their servants for campaigns in Ireland.43 In Cardiff the muster of the trained bands in 1596 brought together two factions who would have otherwise remained apart. The Lewises and their followers marched through Llandaff in warlike array, provoking the Mathews into a response and routing their enemies. On the evening of 31 January 1596, Edmund Mathew, sheriff of Glamorgan, returned from London to his house at Cardiff, and a throng of his opponents celebrated his homecoming by throwing stones at his windows. The gentlemen inside replied with pistols and a fight ensued, in which the combatants, armed with various weapons, wounded several people.44 The feud continued in court as Mathew’s opponents accused him of corruption. In Monmouthshire around the same time ‘great quarrels and jars began to grow’ when William Morgan returned home from university and the Inns of Court determined to assert his ascendancy against his kinsman, Henry Morgan of Penllwyn Sarth. Quarter sessions became flashpoints as William and his father assembled 300 supporters in an effort to overawe potential opponents. These men were paid expenses: ‘stand by me and I will stand by you; I have money sufficient to defray your charges’.45 40 41 42 43

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45

The History of the World in Five Bookes (London, 1617), p. 549. Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, V, p. 323. TNA SP 12/213 fo. 40v. J. Broadway, ‘Throckmorton Family’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/72341. ‘Star Chamber Proceedings: Introduction’, in Cardiff Records: Volume 1, ed. John Hobson Matthews (Cardiff, 1898), pp. 307–10: www.british-history.ac.uk/cardiffrecords/vol1/pp307-310. www.histparl.ac.uk/volume/1604-1629/member/morgan-sir-william-1567-1652# footnote32_tibm5z3.

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Nottinghamshire politics required frequent mobilisations at the end of the sixteenth century. The Stanhopes were also opposed by the industrialist and coal owner Francis Willoughby and they had a ‘quarell’ with their neighbours, the Molyneuxs, which involved skirmishes between servants, seizure of livestock and breaking down of fences.46 John Holles complained ‘how at all the market crosses in Nottinghamshire [Gervase Markham] sett up the most infamous libels and proclomations against me, stuffed with the most disgracefull vennime that ever was powred forth’. For Holles, Markham was not simply a private enemy: ‘yet may he be thought more abject than the worme, and a dead member in any commonwealth who indures his reputation, his comfort among men, with Prince and country to be trodden under every mans foote’.47 A petition calling for justice for Jerome Markham, who was killed in a duel in 1597 fighting alongside his brother Robert and cousin Gervase, gives an insight into the viciousness of the dispute.48 The Markhams were no backwoodsmen – Jerome and his brother had both been to university – but they became embroiled in a quarrel with Thomas Cooper of Thurgarton, who had been a ward of the Stanhopes, first at the archbishop’s palace at Southwell and later at the assizes.49 Attempts at mediation were unsuccessful. Cooper was seconded in the duel by men described as Stanhope’s ‘champions’, including one George Nowell, who made ‘an occupation of fraying and quarrelinge . . . and he is at any manes motion reddy to be drawn to maintain any quarrel’. The petition concluded with a long list of quarrels that Nowell maintained and his boast that ‘he would have ye first bloode in the matter’ in the dispute with Sir Francis Willoughby. His companion, Cooper, was later ‘slain’ and died without issue.50 The pattern of escalation, involving lawsuits, trespass, damage to property, failed attempts at arbitration and challenges to fight, is representative of other feuds in this period. The duel that resulted in the death of Sir John Egerton’s son in a field in Highgate, Middlesex, in 1610 needs to be seen in the context of the father’s embroilment in Flintshire politics.51 The Egertons were a prominent Cheshire family but clashed with the Morgans when they acquired Tallacre in Flint. According to Egerton’s story, Edward Morgan the 46 47 48

49 50

51

www.histparl.ac.uk/volume/1558-1603/member/molyneux-john-i-1588. ‘Letters of John Holles’, 12. TNA SP 12/288 fo. 48, ‘Note of the whole order and manner of the quarrel between Robert Markham the younger, and Thomas Cowper, with the circumstances and accidents happened by the means thereof’. TNA SP 12/67 fo. 57. R. Thoroton, ‘Thurgarton and Horspole’, in Thoroton’s History of Nottinghamshire: Volume 3, Republished With Large Additions By John Throsby (Nottingham, 1796), pp. 54–61: www.british-history.ac.uk/thoroton-notts/vol3/pp54-61. L. Bowen, Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England: Gentry Honour, Violence and the Law (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2021).

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father, with ‘the aide of servantz and frendes did picke sundry quarrels against sir John Egerton and his people and riotously and at sundry tymes did . . . violently and furiously breake and enter into sir john egertons house at Tallacre and beate his servants and cattle . . . and gave out speeches that Tallacre house shold be fired and pulled downe’.52 In the summer of 1607 the parties clashed over the lord’s pew in the parish church, Morgan threatening ‘to stab such as should sitt here’. In the next year, when Morgan’s son refused to return his enemy’s hawking bird, things escalated and Morgan’s son sent Egerton’s close relation a challenge: thou art a base sneaking villen and that for thine own parte neither thou nor they filthie black knight dares once treade on ears of my fathers corne in my dirision when I am in place myself. If thou hadest had a right regarde of Prince and Country considering upon what terms we now stande thou though shouldest not provoake me to further quarrel; but though carest not whoe thou wroungest, nor who be murdered abroade, whilst like a rascal thou art either incrochings of commons or cramming of capons at home. If thou or st john they cosen desire my bloude I will answere you in any place of Christendom . . . I wold thinke it an exceeding happiness I might once venter my life to ridd the common wealth of such vipers.53

The challenge was couched in the language of the Commonwealth, the defence of virtue and justice. Duelling was not simply a product of faction and feuding. Its glamour lay in the fact that it was a vector for social mobility. Taking part was a marker of status and consequently duels were fought by a broad spectrum of the brightest and the best, like the commoner Ben Jonson, who was burned in the hand for manslaughter after killing a man in Shoreditch fields in 1598, the two lawyers who in 1606 who were found ‘both on the ground having each spitted the other with theyr rapiers and made themselves goode frends as they lay though without strength one to help another’, and the moral philosopher Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582–1648), whose autobiography recounts both his intensive martial training and numerous youthful combats.54 The brutal reality of combat can be gleaned from Sir Robert Mansell’s 1600 account: [I] cam upp to him, and in the verie first thrust, he hurte me in the breste, which I followed and hurte him in twoo places, whereof one was in the thigh, whereupon he turned his back towards me, and following of him he stumbled, and after I did judge he would falle I stoke him a blowe on the 52 53 54

TNA SP 46/75 fo. 40. TNA SP 46/75 fo. 40. ‘Editor’s Preface’, in Middlesex County Records: Volume 1, 1550–1603, ed. J. Cordy Jeaffreson (London, 1886), pp. xvii–lx: www.british-history.ac.uk/middx-countyrecords/vol1/xvii-lx; TNA SP 14/24 f.53; The Autobiography of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. W. H. Dircks (London, 1886).

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face, wherewith he fell upon his hands and knees, and he cried, ‘That I would not kyll him baselie on the grounde, for he would make me any satisfaction I would demand’, which I confesse held me from doinge him any further hurte until he did rise; and when he was upp, without speaking any worde he ran me into the brest againe, and my thruste myst him, as I thought, by his coming home to me. Then we fell to stabbes with our daggers, and at his goinge out I strooke him upon the hend with my sworde, and another blowe at his face, which made him loose his dagger, which instantlie he recovered; afterwards I charged to halfe sword, and then he cryed to me to hould my hands, for he would make me any satisfaction; wherewith I stepped back, and soddenlie, before there passed any wordes, he thrust and hitt withall, came to stabbs with his dagger, and hurte me in the right arms two stabbs, whereupon I never left him, untill, he cryed the third tyme to hould my hand, saiing againe he would make me any satisfaction, whereunto I answered, I would never trust a treacherous villaine the third tyme, unless he would laye downe his rapier and dagger, which att the first in valiant terms he denied, untill he sawe me presse him so hotlie, he said, ‘if I would not kyll him he would laie down his rapier and dagger and make me what ever satisfaction I would,’ which I promised by oaths to performe, though he in the interim thrust his rapier in the grounde to breake it, but perceiving it would not breake, he laid his rapier and dagger crosse waies close by his fete, and stepped back as I willed him. Then I tooke upp his rapier and dagger, and carried them to the place where I left my purse and inkhorne, and drewe out my articles from my breste, where I carried them, and brought them with ink and penn to him to signe.55

Heydon was stripped of his arms and left for dead; ‘he could neither stand nor speak’. He survived the amputation of a hand; its shrivelled remains were kept as a memento. In Norfolk the struggle for office was intensified by charges of corruption. The cash-strapped Elizabethan regime resorted to selling, trading and manufacturing patents. From the 1580s there were clashes in the county between patentees and their opponents who lamented the selling of the commonwealth to private interests.56 The struggle for office was played out in insults and legal challenges. In January 1601 the Lord Chief Justice instructed magistrates to ensure than ‘no weapons be worne’ at quarter sessions in view of the ‘hart-burning . . . betwixt divers of the chief men of this cuntry’.57 Here and elsewhere national politics played their role in 55

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https://sites.google.com/site/haydonhaydenkeysgenealogy/OLIVER-HAYDEN-WITH -2ND-WIFE-ELIZA-FUNK-AND-THEIR-OHIO-DESCENDANTS/rev-coleman-green -keys –branch/HEYDON-HAYD ON-HAY DEN -KEY S-F AMI LY-HIS TO RY /HEYDONS-OF-NORFOLK-GENEALOGY. A. Hassell Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), chapter xi. Ibid., p. 302.

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exacerbating personal enmities. Religion played a part – the defenders of traditional county government had Puritan leanings – but court politics seems to have been a more significant contributor to the violence. The Heydon–Mansell feud was reflected in their support for rival patrons at court (Essex and Cecil respectively). Both men had their pardons, Heydon having fled to Ireland to serve his master. ***

By the 1620s the problem of elite violence had been brought under control. This was due less to repression than to the state’s ‘traditional function of coordinating civil society through the settling of disputes’.58 What distinguished the English state was the degree of control it exercised over the settlement process. A system that privileged crown indictments and public satisfaction over civil damages limited the transactional justice that characterised Roman Law systems, which permitted the wealthy to pay off their crimes. It was possible to bring private suits (known as Appeal) against killers in the hope of forcing them to settle financially but, as Krista Kesselring has demonstrated, this formal procedure was in decline from the sixteenth century as public punishment took precedence.59 Although the evidence is fragmentary, it seems that compensation and private settlements continued to exist, albeit clandestinely. One document, which survives in a private archive, demonstrates what peace pacts looked like in Tudor England.60 On 17 August 1591 there was a gathering between the kinsmen, allies and ‘tolongers’ of the house of Seaton Delaval, headed by Robert (who served as sheriff of Northumberland three times), and the Halls of Otterburn and Ribblesdale, in order to settle ‘dyverse, controversies variances and debates’, which had been smouldering ‘36 yeres since’ and had recently escalated with the murders of Thomas Widdrington and Gawen Mylburne, gentlemen, the previous year. The parties submitted themselves to ‘arbitrators indifferently elected’: Whereupon we, the said arbytrators, haveng before us the said parties and thoroulie hard and considered there severall greves, allegations and aunsweres on both sides, and considering how God’s hevie wrathe and punishment is threatned to be laid upon malytious and blode-thirstie men, and how good and godlie a deed yt ys to stablyshe that goodlie unytie and amytie which ought to be amonst God’s children being countrymen, kynsmen and nere neighbors, and also nedfull and requisite it is for the better service of our prince and countrey to have the said parties agreed, have agreed, have awarded etc. 58

59 60

S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 34. Making Murder Public, pp. 77–93. E. Bateson et al. (eds.), A History of Northumberland, 15 vols. (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: A. Reid, 1893–1940), IX, pp. 155–7.

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The parties agreed to behave ‘honestlie, frendlie and charitablie’ towards each other and to desist from litigation. In addition, the Halls agreed to come to widow Hedly’s house at Morpeth before Michaelmas next and confess to the injuries that they had done to Henry Delaval, and that William Hall: shall upon his knees, according to the custome of this country, submytt hymselfe unto the said Percyvall Hall, alias Beyl’s [Belle?] Percye, at or before the aforesaid daie and in the aforesaid howse for the shedding of his blode.

This private indenture, underpinned by financial guarantees, brought an end to one of the many blood feuds that troubled Northumberland at the end of the sixteenth century.61 Such settlements were probably commoner in the Borders and likely disappeared following the union of the crowns in 1603. But they were not unknown elsewhere: Francis Cartwright’s return from exile was predicated on his settlement with William Storre’s widow.62 In any event, there is one stipulation in the Hall–Delaval settlement which sheds light on a potentially more widespread form of negotiated justice. The ‘seasing and paicifing’ of the feud was necessitated by the trial of Clement Delaval, ‘who referreth himself to th’almightie God and to his countrye to trye his innocencie’ for the murder of Widdrington and Mylburne. His fate rested on the testimony of the Hall family. The indenture tells us that their silence was bought by the Delavals as part of the peace deal. Official justice, it appears, did not completely replace private deals; rather it forced them underground. In Cardiganshire in 1639 several witnesses deposed that the father of Jevan Gwynn JP had been questioned for murder and had sought their help with blood money. Cymhortha, the customary Welsh means of generating ‘assistance’ in return for protection, was illegal and only came to light when it was exposed by his opponent in a pew dispute.63 Out-of-court settlements for less heinous crimes were much more common: ‘arbitration was crucial in almost every jurisdiction in early modern England’.64 Going to law was both expensive and deemed to be lacking in charity; consequently very few suits reached a conclusion and most settled out of court.65 Some form of satisfaction might be part of the process. The quarrel between Henry Chaloner and Edward Heylin around 1631 resulted in the latter issuing a challenge. Chaloner went into hiding, offering his servant Thomas Wright £60 to fight in his place and, on another occasion, tried to get a friend to shoot his enemy. This matter was settled by arbitration, arranged by Sir Matthew Carew, Sir Thomas Hord and Mr Trotman, in which Chaloner 61 62 63 64 65

For example: TNA SP 15/29 fo. 247. See above pp. 322–3. www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/268-gwynn-lloyd. Hindle, State and Social Change, pp. 229, 238. Brooks, Lawyers, Litigation and English Society, pp. 80–1.

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begged Heylin’s forgiveness on his knees, drank his health and promised him a ‘Yorkshire nag’, worth £10 by way of compensation.66 Lawyers were also approached to arbitrate outside court and magistrates were expected to be peacemakers as well as judges.67 Sir Richard Grosvenor, high sheriff of Cheshire, enjoined his fellow magistrates to: Be a Chancellor rather than a Justice among your neighbours, who are tow apt to fale into contentions, and count it an honour if you can compose their differences and keep them from that pick-purse lawinge . . . If your neighbours demand from you the peace one against another . . . before you grant it persuade and move then to reconciliation; such an end with be lasting and beget heavenly peace.68

The practice of binding over potential troublemakers was important for stopping violence and defusing tension. As Krista Kesselring has recently suggested, England’s comparatively low rates of homicide might be evidence, less of the success of the Tudor state, than the robustness of its medieval laws and institutions.69 Medieval institutions, like the church courts, survived the Reformation and continued in their traditional function of reconciling neighbours, as did church ales.70 Communion remained integral to the reconciliation of neighbourly disputes in post-Reformation England.71 Alice Thornton’s diary records the ‘very great breech in the friendship’ between her brothers, leading to ‘such animosity, as that neither could be satisfied to receave the Holy Sacrament’ until she effected a reconciliation and they took communion together at Easter 1651.72 Settlements customarily involved a handshake, the universal sign of ‘love, duty, reverence, supplication, peace, and of forgivenesse of all injuries’ and drinking healths and eating together.73 At Christmas 1618, the Yorkshire gentleman Richard Cholmondley told his guests not to dwell on their quarrels and drink up: ‘it was no fit tyme to recken up wronges of greiffs but to be merye’. But one of his tenants refused to toast his bailiff, Harry Watson, ‘and then in an excedinge scornefull and filthy fashon after a rymyng mannor wityh 66 67 68 69 70

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www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/102-chaloner-heylin. www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/166-done-babington. Hindle, State and Social Change, p. 115. Kesselring, Making Murder Public. J. Sharpe, ‘“Such Disagreement betwyx Neighbours”: Litigation and Human Relations in Early Modern England’, in Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements, pp. 167–88; J. Bennett, ‘Conviviality and Charity in Medieval and Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 134 (1992), 19–41. A. Hunt, ‘The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 161 (1998), 39–84. C. Jackson (ed.), ‘The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton’, The Surtees Society, 62 (1875), 71. J. Bulwer, Chirologia (London, 1644), p. 116.

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the bowle of beare in his hand called Watson a knave, and kisse my arse shitten Harrye’.74 Thomas Billiard and Matthew Robinson’s fight in the three Tuns in Peterborough was reconciled by the drinking of healths. But the matter rankled, and Mrs Robinson prevailed on the minister of Peterborough to make them friends. The minister suggested Wright’s alehouse, where both reaffirmed their friendship over a flagon of sack provided by Robinson. This was what the Germans called ‘beer atonement’: Robinson paid for the drink as reparation but admitted no fault. Both men should have departed merrily, although in this instance litigation ensued.75 The absence of notaries meant that their role in dispute settlement was performed by amateurs. The apprentice mercer Roger Lowe was much sought after in his Lancashire village by the illiterate as both scrivener and peacemaker, and his efforts usually ended up with a trip to the pub.76 The Privy Council intervened frequently in order to settle quarrels in the counties amicably.77 In February 1596, for example, Sir William Mallory was summoned from Yorkshire to compose ‘the unkindness and difference’ with Sir Edward Yorke, one of whose servants had killed Mallory’s son Christopher. The negotiations were still ongoing in November 1598 when the queen asked the archbishop of York to look into the matter.78 James I’s indulgence towards duellists is indicative of a wider reticence towards applying the punitive common law against men defending their honour and after 1613 the matter tended to be dealt with by Star Chamber, which heard 200 cases during his reign involving complaints of scandalous words provocative to a duel. Star Chamber was superseded by the High Court of Chivalry, which had a long history but was only fully re-established in 1634. As Andrew Hopper and Richard Cust explain, the parties could at any stage plead for arbitration, and the court was very keen to encourage this. The large amount of business it dealt with – 783 suits survive – suggests that the court was filling a very real need. Most cases appear not to have ended in a final judgment and there were numerous instances of cases being referred to senior gentry and noblemen in the hopes of achieving a settlement; in 19 out of the 126 cases where the outcome is known (15 per cent), this was successfully achieved. The 94 convictions involved a fine and humiliating submission in front of the local community, often performed in church. But even these judgments were not 74

75 76

77 78

The Memorandum Books of Richard Cholmondley of Brandsby, 1602–1623 (Northallerton: North Yorkshire County Record Office, 1988), 22 December 1618. www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry. The Diary of Roger Lowe, ed. W. Sachse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1938), introduction, pp. 14–15. More than thirty instances are recorded in TNA PC 2/7-26. www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/mallory-sir-william-1603; ‘Shrewsbury Papers MSS/704 Volume 11, 1328–1613’: www.earlymodernengland.amdigital .co.uk/Documents/Images/LPL_MS_704_h/180.

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definitive. Abraham Comyns was sentenced by the court to perform a submission in Great Bentley church on 16 July 1637, but he made a mockery of the proceedings; keeping his hat on, he denied his enemy the honorific Mr, altering the words and uttering them in a ‘jeering and fleeting manner’. At evening prayer, he made a mocking bow which made the congregation laugh. Ordered by the court to perform a second submission, he refused, preferring to accept prison and a fine.79 In contravention of the spirit of their 1631 reconciliation, Edward Heylin made accusations about the creditworthiness and character of Henry Chaloner. Heylin was ordered to pay £200 damages and £20 expenses, and also to perform a submission by 28 January 1639 before Sir Francis Norris, Sir Thomas Coghill and three other persons appointed by Chaloner. The fact that Heylin had still not paid the damages and expenses in February 1639 suggests that the same cogs of arbitration which had prevailed in 1631 were still in motion.80 Despite their success in controlling duelling, both Star Chamber and the High Court of Chivalry were among the notorious symbols of Charles’s arbitrary and authoritarian rule and were abolished in 1641. There were charges of high-handedness and peculation. There is some justification for this. Much of the caseload was caused by status anxiety, as plaintiffs sought to punish upstarts claiming equality. Francis Grove JP was provoked when his enemy William Lock, registrar of the bishop of Winchester, proclaimed in Southwark church that ‘while he was a gentleman born, and so should continue and die’, Grove had ‘come up by degrees, first an apprentice, then a journeyman, then master’.81 There were frequent charges against those who failed to show the due marks of respect and pay the correct civilities to their social superiors. The defendants replied that the charges were the product of malice. In 1634 Henry Throgmorton protested that differences had already been settled by the informal drinking of healths.82 Many cases were rooted in material interests and the subject of tortuous litigation in other courts. The yeoman Hugh Hellin was ordered to perform a humiliating submission at Haverfordwest on 8 July 1635, at Pembroke on 18 July and at Tiverton on 17 August for saying that he ‘did not care a fart for Sir John Carew’ and ‘scorned that Sir John Carew should be his landlord’. Hellin explained that he had already offered his submission to Sir John and that there were two more suits in train in other courts, which explained the context of his outburst.83 Women appear in the background as protagonists. In March 1636 at the Pelican Inn in Sandwich, Kent, at ‘an ordinary where gentlemen meete’ on 79 80 81 82 83

www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/20-badcock-comyns. See above p. 355. www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/265-grove-lock. www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/61-bowne-throgmorton. www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/93-carew-hellin.

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a market-day Saturday, William Crayford insulted William Argent by taking the place above him at the table and then declaring that ‘I was a base fellow and no gentleman, and that none of my ancestors were gentlemen, and that he would prove me so whensoever he met me, that he would kill me or I him, and badd some or one present tell me so to my face.’ The two men, who were related by marriage, had come to blows a month previously. Crayford complained that he had been provoked by constant vilification from Argent’s wife. The local minister reconciled them and they took communion together, but the peace did not hold.84 In 1640 Thomas Heber of Marton in Yorkshire told the court he was driven to seek satisfaction by his wife; he would not dare to ‘look her nor her friends in the face’ until he had done so.85 The physical violence recorded by the court shows restraint. It often occurred in public and was calibrated to demonstrate a grievance and invite mediation. When matters threatened to escalate the crown was well informed and swiftly intervened. The cause of Sir William St Ravie’s complaint against Carew Raleigh of Surrey remains unknown. But Raleigh had a reputation as a troublemaker, having been confined to his quarters to prevent him travelling to France to fight in 1636. The seriousness with which the crown viewed such matters was reflected in the unusually large bond of £1,000 imposed on him to be of good behaviour.86 Such vigilance was prudent given the potential for differences over religion and the constitution to inflame quarrels. Ralph Pudsey, a Catholic of Stapleton in Yorkshire, brought a suit against a neighbour who accused him of cheating at bowls and calling him ‘a base cheating . . . papisticall rascall’.87 But the fact that Pudsey brought suits against several others suggests that more was at stake than a game of bowls. In particular, he quarrelled with Michael Wharton, a prominent refuser of Ship Money. Wharton offered ‘to end the suites and controversies [and] fight with Mr Pudsey if Mr Pudsey would or durst’.88 But while private quarrels were refracted through national events they did not determine allegiance in the civil wars. Wharton was elected MP for Beverley in the Short and Long Parliaments. He proved to be a lukewarm parliamentarian and by 1643 was attending the king at Oxford. In doing so, he joined his former enemy, Pudsey, who was a lieutenant colonel in the royalist army, and both men died fighting in the cause. The complexity of private and public identities during this period of great upheaval can be seen at a more elevated level. In 1633 Henry, earl of Holland, was ordered by the Privy Council to beg forgiveness ‘for sending a challenge . . . [and] . . . questioning a nobleman in combat 84 85 86 87 88

www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/6-argent-crayford. Ibid., www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/291-heber-michell. www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/574-st-ravie-raleigh. www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/546-pudsey-johnson. www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/549-pudsey-wharton.

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for life and honour without alleging any particular cause of wrong done, which is beyond the falsely pretended rules of Duel, and subverts the freedom of the society of mankind’.89 Holland had challenged the son of the earl of Portland, Lord Treasurer, and one of the main architects of the Personal Rule. The challenge was a public demonstration of his opposition and of his willingness to shed his blood in defence of the constitution. His hostility to Charles’s ministers did not abate following his submission and he joined the aristocratic cabal which worked to bring down the regime in 1639–41. Once the removal of the hated ministers and policies was completed, like many aristocrats, he considered there to be no further reason for rebellion. In 1643 he defected to the royalists, was appointed general of the royalist army when civil war resumed in 1648 and was executed as a traitor by Parliament in 1649. ***

Traditional mechanisms of dispute settlement came under strain during the civil war. The tension between obedience (civil peace) and conscience (peace with God) was at the root of the troubles, a tension which was recorded in the journal of Puritan minister Ralph Josselin. A dedicated peacemaker, Josselin’s diary records more than fifteen settlements between 1645 and 1680, often accompanied by a short reference on the importance of the peacemaker’s vocation. Josselin provided an important service for his parish, preventing quarrels from escalating and satisfying wrongs with monetary compensation.90 But his attempts to enforce Puritan discipline on the parish led to antipathy from most of his flock. He found himself ‘caught between his desire, in accordance between his strict Calvinist beliefs, to exclude from the sacrament of communion those who were not in the company of the saints, and his pressing concern to promote throughout his parish a moral reformation that required regular and universal church attendance’.91 Josselin’s decision to restrict communion only to those who showed evidence of grace and salvation alienated the majority: although several hundred were eligible, usually fewer than twenty parishioners were thought to be worthy, and by 1647 he worried that the ‘congrecaion growes very thine’. Josselin’s agony over this may explain his assiduous attention to peacemaking among all sorts of people beyond the small godly circle that sustained him. Josselin’s peacemaking activities seem to have waxed and waned with the fortunes of the Church of England: his most intensive period of peacemaking coincided with the victory of the Puritan sects

89 90

91

Calendar of the manuscripts of the most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, XXII, p. 274. S. Carroll, ‘Peace-Making in Early Modern Europe: Towards a Comparative History’, in Broggio and Paoli (eds.), Stringere la pace, pp. 75–92. J. Walter, ‘Josselin, Ralph (1617–1683)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https:// doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/37618.

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in 1640s and 1650s; he was less active when the Anglican liturgy was reintroduced after the restoration of Charles II in 1661. It is important not to caricature English Puritanism, a broad movement that was fractured and unstable even before the civil war. On the one side, there were those like Nehemiah Wallington, whose autobiographical writings have very little to say about neighbourliness.92 He and his godly circle were in a battle with their worldly neighbours and Wallington considered that all social relations should be regulated by the strict application of God’s laws. A Presbyterian elder from 1646, there is no indication that he viewed the classis as anything other than an enforcer of conformity. He opposed the Independents and the sects precisely because such bodies of saints had abandoned the task of disciplining their sinful neighbours. On the other side, the Lancashire Presbyterian Roger Lowe demonstrated a much stronger commitment to neighbourliness. His diary records regular interaction with the ungodly, leading to frequent quarrels and reconciliations. Unlike Wallington he did not hate papists or supporters of episcopacy, but argued with them, often over a pint, in a ‘loving’ fashion. Even when ‘the contention had like to have beene hot’ and they fell out, he was always able to reconcile.93 Other Puritans used their diaries as a means of dealing with uncharitable feelings towards ‘enemies to everything that was good’, using the process of writing to interrogate their consciences, justifying and memorialising their struggle.94 Ad hominem resentment towards the ungodly was fuelled by the contaminating malignancy of sin. For Samuel Rogers, one ungodly individual was capable of spoiling an otherwise saintly society: ‘such an one in a company is like a dead flye in a box of ointment, makes the companye unsavoury’.95 Feelings of enmity were sublimated by shunning the ungodly and social distancing, which was reinforced by the certain knowledge that God would punish the wicked. Diaries also explored the fracturing of the Puritan movement. The nonconformist minister Oliver Heywood, for example, juxtaposed the solidarities among the godly in the 1630s with the divisions that occurred following victory in the civil war. Before the war there were divisions in Bolton, but common opposition to ‘the Bishops government’ enabled his mother to work effectively as a mediator: 92

93

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95

P. Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 12–13. Diary of Roger Lowe, p. 53. William Gouge, London’s most celebrated Puritan preacher before the civil war, was ‘a great peace-maker, having an excellent dexterity in composing differences’: S. Clarke, A Collection of the Lives of Ten Eminent Divines (London, 1662). The Autobiography of Joseph Lister of Bradford: 1627–1709, ed. A. Holroyd (Bradford, 1860), p. 33. The Diary of Samuel Rogers, 1634–1638, ed. T. Webster and K. Shipps (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), p. 78.

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england she was very useful in reconciling differences and making up breaches, taking much paines, yet great delight in that worke, often repeating that sweet word, Blessed are the peace-makers, she had so much interest in the affections of good people, and did so palpably evidence that she minded not selfe that there was but few who would have been prevailed upon by her, besides, she used to fal so home upon them with plain, down-right homely Rhetorick and scripture-grounds that few (I believe) had power to deny her request, she was so much for peace that she rolled every stone to compasse it . . . yea, in a matter of apparent injury to the whole family in things ecclesiastical she was so intense upon accommodation as that she inclined rather to acknowledgement of some fault for peace-sake.96

But after 1647 the victors in Bolton fell out over the terms of the religious settlement. The squabbles became ‘hot, begot much bad blood, many animosity amongst good people and opened the mouths of haters of Religion . . . it divided the whole society into partys, some taking one side some the other it broke the heart of his [father’s] good wife who was for love and submission’.97 Pepys’s diary is important for what it does not say on the subject. The suspicion and mistrust that continued in the wake of the civil war led him to record ‘that a man should treat every friend in his discourse and opening of his mind to him as of one that may hereafter be his foe’.98 The capacity to hide rancour was a facet of the new civility. Pepys used the diary in this way: recording his feelings as a means of dissembling them. On his next-door neighbour Sir William Penn in 1662: ‘who I hate with all my heart for his base and treacherous tricks, but yet I think it not policy to declare it yet . . . He dissembles with me, so must I with him.’99 He promised to his diary that he would ‘get even’ with Sir William Batten, who had denounced him as a traitor. When he came across Batten’s son-in-law he put on the countenance of ‘seeming very friendly to him, though I know him to be a rogue and one that hates me with his heart’.100 But Pepys also recognised Batten to be no threat. Like Pepys, he was a civil man who preferred to dissimulate. I spoke with Lady Batten ‘and she told me very civilly that she did not desire, nor hoped I did, that anything should pass between us but what was civill, though there was not the neighbourliness between her and my wife that was fit to be’.101 They promised to avoid any such words and passages that would create contention. Pepys found it harder to hide his anti-clerical antipathies (‘religion, be it what it will, is but a humour, and so the esteem of it passeth as other things do’) and he 96

97 98 99 100 101

Rev. Oliver Heywood’s Diary, 1630–1702, ed. J. Horsfall Turner, 4 vols. (Brighouse, 1882), I, p. 49. Ibid., I, p. 80. Diary of Samuel Pepys, IV, p. 423. Ibid., III, p. 132. Ibid., V, p. 312. Ibid., III, p. 249.

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frequently fell asleep during sermons, saying of Mr Mills, the minister: ‘I used him civilly, though I love him as I do the rest of his coat.’102 Pepys recognised the value of civil religion, which promoted unity and order. In private he demonstrated kindness and tolerance towards his nonconformist neighbours and colleagues, so long as they did not disturb the public peace. ***

Pepys had good reason to be circumspect. Charles II’s reign saw duelling reach a new peak with 196 combats and 75 victims recorded.103 This phenomenon is invariably ascribed to the libertine nature of the Caroline court. But as the tables in the previous chapter demonstrated, the problem of elite violence peaked only in the 1690s; it was a widespread phenomenon not confined to the court aristocracy. Our sample of 250 elite homicide victims for the period 1550–1800 shows that 54 per cent were killed in the period 1660–1720. This pattern is confirmed by the 68 gentle victims identified in the Old Bailey records (1678–1784), which are not included in our sample – 55 of these, or four-fifths, were killed before 1720. We should be wary of ascribing the duelling craze of this period to moral decline – the rake is a stock figure of the era – for duellists were just as likely to be lawyers, professional soldiers or MPs. Of course, there were plenty of drunken brawls in brothels, but there were also strong legal reasons for representing disputes as essentially trivial disagreements among friends, or the unfortunate result of too much strong drink. Any indication of malice or deep-seated enmity was a hanging matter. We will have to look elsewhere for the causes in the post-Restoration spike in elite violence. The viciousness of partisan politics, the ‘rage of party’, in this period is well known, but it is traditionally associated with the encouragement or legitimisation of ‘mob’ violence. The manner in which political conflict leached into everyday social relations requires investigation, a transformation that can be traced from the tropes told in pardon tales, such as Ralph Salkeld’s claim that he killed Richard Ogle, a Northumberland gentleman, in 1669 in an attempt to enforce the legal prohibition on former Parliamentarians from carrying arms, or the petition on behalf of John Bower, clerk of the Court of King’s Bench, found guilty of murder at Nottingham in 1680, whose conviction was due to ‘disaffected persons there [who] very much envy the petitioner and his son, who have vindicated his Majesty’s government and prerogative’.104 What united army officers, MPs and officials who fought encounters was the intense competition for public office and preferment, as the state burgeoned and the 102 103

104

Ibid., p. 135. B. Truman, The Field of Honor (New York, 1884), p. 35. Unfortunately, he does not give a source. TNA SP 29/255 fo. 6; 44/54 fo. 47.

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gaps between winners and losers widened. Encounters were an opportunity to test friendships, win fame and intimidate opponents. The parties had their champions and bravoes who were prepared to fight it out in the streets. Sir Thomas Armstrong, who was executed in 1684 for conspiring against the future James II, was known as the ‘Hector of the Whigs’.105 The killing of Sir Henry Hobart, leader of the Norfolk Whigs in 1698, caused little surprise: ‘the heats about the elections have been so great, that it will not be wondered at, if encounters of that sort are frequent.’106 Ferdinando Forster MP was provoked into a lethal duel at dinner in Newcastle in 1701 by Mr Fenwick singing his favourite party song and commenting that there were too many Tories in the House. The politics was sharpened by intense personal feelings: ‘Fenwick had long had an inveterate enmity against Forster relative to some family matters.’107 This was a reference to the long-standing feud between the two families. In the 1630s the Earl Marshal had then presided over a reconciliation where Forster and Fenwick joined hands and promised that ‘there never should be further question moved betwixt them touching the words’.108 The political environment seventy years later was less conducive to arbitration. Political identities were fractious and complex in this period and cannot be reduced to simple bi-party politics. The reason for this is that ‘civil wars are not binary conflicts but complex and ambiguous processes that foster an apparently massive, though variable, mix of identities and actions’.109 The elite violence that characterised post–civil war Britain was a consequence of the new complexity of friend–enemy relations. Private and public enmities became entangled with lethal consequences. The pressure to maintain face in this atmosphere of mistrust can be gleaned from the report on the election of the new Oxford town clerk in 1681, which was significant for the forthcoming parliamentary election: Lords Norreys and Lovelace, Sir George Pudsey and Brome Whorwood, with several others of the neighbouring gentlemen, were at the election, but the Whiggish party carried it by a great majority, near 4 to 1, which shows the temper of our townsmen. Lord Norreys, being somewhat nettled at this, began to fall foul on Whorwood, and asked how he had the impudence to appear there, when he owed so many just debts, which he refused to pay. Whorwood answered he owed no man anything, whereat my lord instanced himself, and told him he owed him money, and bade him pay it, at which Whorwood gave him the lie, and my lord called him ‘Old knave’, and he in return called him ‘Young rogue’, whereat 105

106 107 108 109

R. L. Greaves, ‘Armstrong, Sir Thomas’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/665. TNA SP 32/15 fo. 203. Bateson et al. (eds.), History of Northumberland, II, p. 144. www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/216-forster-fenwick. Kalyvas, ‘Ontology of “Political Violence”’, 475.

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his lordship fell on him with his cane, and with several blows [broke] his pate very severely in the face of the whole town, whereat Whorwood told him, were he not disabled by his age, he durst not deal so with him, at which my lord answered he had seconds enough to revenge his quarrel that were young enough, if they thought fit to undertake it, meaning Lovelace, but he sat very quiet without interposing in the least. The person elected is Prince, an attorney, but he being not confirmed in his place without the King’s approbation, it’s supposed Lord Norreys will interpose that way to obstruct what has thus been carried against him here.110

The drinking of healths was a test of loyalty and the failure to do so indicated a potential traitor, unfit for office, preferment or respect.111 Charles Aldworth MP, who ‘had such a weakness in both his arms that he could not stretch them’, could not refuse the duel with the army officer that killed him. A youthful indiscretion had led him to drink the Pretender’s health and this made his visits to the court in 1714 the object of malicious gossip.112 William Bowen, who was killed in 1718, sometimes drank healths and sometimes not, which opened up the question of his trustworthiness: Mr. Quinn Charg’d Mr. Bowen with sometimes drinking Healths to the Duke of Ormond, and at other times refusing it. Asking Mr. Martin, to whom the Decision of the Wager was left, How could he be as honest a Man as any was in the World who Acted upon two different Principles? That thereupon Mr. Martin told Mr. Bowen, that if he insisted upon it, as to his being as Honest a Man as any was in the World, he must needs give it against him. That this Discourse was all the while carry’d on with a jocular Air, but upon this Mr. Bowen rose up, flung down some Money for the Reckoning, saying, he could not bear it, but must be gone; that he did go away but he did not perceive in him any Signs of a Resentment that should procure so fatal a Consequence.113

A regional example of the long-term impact of civil conflict on social relations is Yorkshire. Before the civil war political life in the county was dominated by the feuds from which Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford emerged.114 But these were bloodless. Nor is there any evidence for duelling in the county 110 111

112

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TNA SP 29/417 fo. 510. www.oldbaileyonline.org (version 8.0, 13 May 2020), September 1720, trial of Giles Hill (t17200907-47). On this point see A. MacShane, ‘Political and Material Cultures of Drinking in Seventeenth-Century England’, in P. Withington and A. McShane (eds.), Cultures of Intoxication: Past and Present Special Supplements, 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1690-1715/member/aldworth-charles -1677-1714. www.oldbaileyonline.org (version 8.0, 11 May 2020), July 1718, trial of James Quinn (t17180709-1). J. Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War (London: Athlone Press, 1969).

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before the civil war. The following list of incidents demonstrates the change: July 1659, Laurence and John Meynell gents. of Thornaby indicted for assaulting and beating Hugh and Robert Savile and Richard Grimston; September 1660, Nicolas Fenny gent. indicted for murder; 1661, Captain Smith killed in a duel by Major Constable at Malton; 1663, Marmaduke, second Baron Langdale indicted for assault; March 1667, William Hammond esquire indicted for assault; August 1668, Mr John Swann killed in a duel in York.115 On 22 March 1678, Christopher Hawden, attorney, and Edmond Bunny of University College, Oxford had a vicious fight at the Smith house in Wakefield: ‘how they quarrelled is not knowne, but Hawdon was runne almost thorrow and came [sic] fell down betwixt doors, and lived but about two or three hours, and Bunny had two or three wounds in him in the breast and lived till Monday at night’.116 The most high-profile combat in the county was that between George Aislabie, the archbishop of York’s registrar, and Jonathan Jennings, former alderman and mayor of Ripon, who referred to his opponent ‘as the scum of the county’, in 1675. Their dispute was rooted in the former’s social climbing and acquisition of Studley Royal, threatening Jennings’s pre-eminence in the region. Jennings’s killing of Aislabie did little to halt his career: he was knighted in 1678 and elected as a local MP.117 In Hull it was the garrison that incubated duelling, leading to the deaths of two captains and an ensign in the 1690s. But the problem was not confined to barracks: the town sheriff was ‘unfortunately slain’ in 1691.118 We are fortunate to have an eyewitness account of the transformation of Yorkshire society in the shape of Sir John Reresby’s memoirs. Reresby’s frequent resorts to violence were always carefully calibrated according to the social status of his target, since ‘It is not wise to have a poor man one’s enemy, if it can be helped, much more a rich.’119 He was born into a feud with his neighbours, the Wentworths, which he knew all about because he researched its origins, including the brawl at the Rotherham assizes in 1599 and the pardon issued by James I to his great-grandfather. In his own dealings with Sir William Wentworth he was circumspect. It was the failure of the Restoration to deliver the deference and respect he demanded that led him to lose his cool. Reresby learned his codes of comportment as a royalist exile in France and Italy. For Reresby, civility was not an inner condition but a sign of status, consisting of the civilities that were paid or performed to recognise 115

116 117

118 119

J. Raine (ed.), ‘Depositions from the Castle of York, Relating to Offences Committed in the Northern Counties in the Seventeenth Century’, The Surtees Society, 40 (1861), 89–92. J. Crawford Hodgson, ‘Six North Country Diaries’, The Surtees Society, 118 (1910), 39. www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1660-1690/member/jennings-sir-jonathan -1632-1707. T. Gent, Annales Regioduni Hullini (1735), p. 198. Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, p. 108.

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rank. On his return to Yorkshire, Reresby was alert to any absence of civility, especially from social inferiors. He was soon involved in a precedence dispute in Selby which led to a brawl and ‘which provoked me to wound one or two with my sword’.120 In London he cudgelled a man who refused his challenge and compounded with another man for £50, having wounded him in the belly.121 The political climate shaped the manner in which Reresby conducted himself in everyday life. By the 1670s security made him less querulous and the requirement to lash out declined. Reresby was happier to compose quarrels and lawsuits: ‘I had paid no kind of civility to Sir William (Wentworth) for a considerable time . . . and yet durst not quarrel too far with him.’122 His behaviour changed again with the political climate, as he felt himself besieged by the ‘fanatics’, dissenters on one side, Catholics on the other. In 1682 he threw a lead dish at a fellow JP: ‘I was sorry for this accident, it happening at a sessions of the peace, but the provocation could not be passed over.’123 He then got involved in a pew dispute with Sir John Brooke, whose loyalty to the regime was suspect: ‘I could very well content that noe such disputes have offered themselves but when they doe I have found that the best way to prevent them for the future is not to seem too backward in seeking restoration.’124 The sentiments of Reresby’s local opponents can be gleaned from the diary of Oliver Heywood. A victim of persecution at the Restoration, he was ejected from his ministry in 1662 and became an errant preacher in the West Riding and was subject to frequent harassment. The West Riding was a hotbed of popular radicalism and Heywood’s diary displays elements of class hostility. In 1681, he expressed his belief that divine vengeance was imminent when ‘god will take away multitudes of wicked like drosse and scumme, he will send a purge that shall cleanse the earth’. But this would affect some more than others: ‘yea as rulers sins are greater than other[s], and above punishment by men, god himself will pour contempt upon the honourable of the earth, for all alike with him’.125 The relegation of private enemies in favour of public fears is also evident in the diary of Lady Anne Clifford. Before the civil war only social equals were worthy of hatred: she prayed for deliverance from the ‘sinister practices of mine enemies’; considered the ‘breeding of faction’ in Westmorland as advantageous to her interests; and lamented the ‘malicious hatred’ of her brother-inlaw.126 During the 1640s the tone and the object of her fears were directed 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., pp. 39 and 45. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., p. 272. Ibid., p. 273. Oliver Heywood’s Diary, II, p. 221. J. Malay (ed.), Anne Clifford’s Autobiographical Writing, 1590–1676 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 50–1, 75, 107.

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downwards. She drew solace from Psalm 18: ‘it is God that avengeth me, and subdueth the people under me; He delivereth me from mine enemies’.127 Enmity was not just a matter of faith; she could be personally friendly towards the heterodox, even Quakers, and she broke bread with tenants when the lawsuits were resolved in her favour.128 But the context of civil war undoubtedly politicised and personalised her feelings towards tenants who attempted to resist her claims. She took satisfaction in 1664 when one of these, former parliamentarian captain Robert Atkinson, ‘my great enemy’, was executed for treason. Restoration Appleby was subject to much closer control by the landed class and residual civil war animosities blunted by the skilful use of favour and patronage.129 ***

At the same time that Reresby was cudgelling his inferiors and stabbing his equals, the superiority of English manners was already being proclaimed in print. In 1673 Obadiah Walker described a ‘Country of great freedom and little jealousy, where persons of quality are neither so apt to give, or take, offence.’130 Born in 1616, Walker was describing the England of his youth, not contemporary reality. Reresby’s extreme sensitivity to the civilities that required paying was a product of the political context. In the same year that Walker was making his fanciful claims about English manners Robert, Lord Cholmondley, Viscount Kells, was able to use his connections and wealth to avoid punishment for the death of a carter, James Woodall, whom he killed for the latter’s ‘great affronts’ and ‘insolence’ in not allowing Cholmondley’s coach precedence on the highway.131 Cholmondley’s father-in-law, Sir Orlando Bridgeman, was the judge who presided at the trial of the regicides. Despite the fact that the coroner’s jury and the grand jury of the assizes in Cheshire returned a verdict of murder, the case never proceeded to trial and Cholmondley was spared, in his words, ‘the mercy of malicious and merciless rustics’. Plebeians were, however, not always willing to give way, sometimes with fatal consequences for the gentleman in question.132 127 128 129

130 131

132

Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 235. M. Mullett, ‘Patronage, Power and the Politics of Appleby in the Era of Lady Anne Clifford, 1649–1689’, Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 25 (2015). Of education, p. 221. G. Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 125–6. Richard Washborne, gent., was killed in retaliation for striking two sedan men with his cane saying, ‘since they undertook the work of Horses, they ought to keep the Horse-way’: The True narrative of the proceedings at the sessions-house in the Old-Bayly which began on Monday the 17th of this instant January and ended on Tuesday the 18th following giving an account of most of the remarkable trials there (London, 1681).

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The assertions frequently made about early modern England – the state’s progressive monopoly of violence, the universal acceptance of the rule of law and the distinctiveness of its inhabitants’ manners – remain cornerstones of the historiography. These claims are significant today because they are building blocks of a national identity that is rooted in a mythic exceptionalism distinct from the rest of Europe. England was not exceptional. Its high and rising rates of homicide in the late sixteenth century are masked by the gaps in conventional judicial sources. In practice, the law permitted elites wide latitude and punitive justice seems to have been little deterrent where matters of honour and reputation were at stake. Equality before the law was a rhetorical claim, not a fact of life. Better control and regulation permitted civil society to perform its traditional function of mediation in the 1620s and 1630s. But the return of the persistent problem of religious and political instability led to the collapse of this system after 1640. The period 1660–1720 was the golden age of the encounter; lacking the protocols and etiquette associated with modern duelling, they were bloody and not infrequently vicious fights redolent of deepseated animosities. The emergence of the civilised gentlemen at the end of the seventeenth century and the English invention of politeness is also a staple of the historiography. But for Sir John Reresby, being civil meant the respect due from his peers and the deference expected from his inferiors. The absence of civility was interpreted as a sign of hostility or a transgression that merited punishment. The figures indicate that English gentlemen were no more pacific in 1700 than in 1600. The level of elite violence was not subject to a linear and progressive decline but fluctuated according to the social and political environment. The pacification that occurred so rapidly in England in the 1720s is not evidence for the singularity of English manners but part of a European pattern.

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Comparisons

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12 The Experience of Enmity

Ego-documents offer a different perspective on the bilious rhetoric that fills the pamphlets and sermons which constitute the normative sources for enmity in this period. The genre of self-writing defies easy categorisation. Adam Smyth has recently demonstrated the assortment and variety of texts available in English.1 But the English sources alone would make for a limited study. There are hundreds of French reckoning books, or livres de raisons, many of which were published in the nineteenth century, and there continue to be fresh discoveries.2 Italian sources are as plentiful. When the Neapolitan diarist Fabio Capece Galeota died in 1674 he left thirty manuscript volumes to the Theatine library of Saint Paul in the city.3 Such large collections were not unusual in the peninsula, though many remain unpublished.4 The Germans have led the way in digital publishing. The already large corpus of printed editions has now been supplemented by more complete online editions and new archival discoveries. In the study of ego-documents German scholars distinguish between Erfahrung, the cumulative knowledge connected with that which one has experienced, which is not identical to the transient event experienced (Erlebnis).5 This distinction allows us to go beyond the events that writers described and permit us to explore how they characterised these enmities, what meaning they ascribed to them and the lessons they wished to impart to their readers in order to influence future actions and attitudes. A journal, a 1690 French dictionary explained, is ‘the memorialisation of what one did and what happened each day. An orderly man keeps a paper journal of what he receives and what he spends.’6 This had been a medieval practice. But 1 2

3 4

5

6

Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For those in print: http://ecritsduforprive.huma-num.fr/accueilbase.htm; for manuscripts, see www.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/chan/chan/AP-pdf/Livres-de-raison.pdf. Bulifon, Giornali, I, p. 54. A. Cicchetti and R. Mordenti (eds.), I libri di famiglia in Italia, vol. 1, Filologia e storiografia letteraria (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1985). For a local example of unpublished materials: Frati, ‘Ricordanze’. M. Meumann, ‘The Experience of Violence and the Expectation of the End of the World in Seventeenth-Century Germany’, in Canning, Lehmann and Winter (eds.), Power, Violence and Mass-Death, p. 153. www.furetière.eu/index.php/component/search/?searchword=journal&searchphrase=all&Ite id=116.

373

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the desire to record human folly was indicative of a humanist education. On the whole, journals were chronicles or registers for the edification of family, friends and descendants, rather than self-reflexive accounts. In Italy these chroniclers formed clubs of like-minded antiquarians who passed their record down through the generations. The French bookseller Antoine Bulifon joined one when he settled in Naples in 1670. He loved history and consulted local diaries in preparation for keeping his own. In order to make sure of the facts, Neapolitan diarists shared their news and when one of them died his diary was passed on to others for continuing.7 One can see similar if more modest one-man multivolume projects in France and England, such as Pierre de l’Estoile’s scrapbook and Roger Morrice’s Entring Book, which is subtitled A Historical Register.8 But journals and memoirs do not fit into easily classified genres and they were often a blend of public record and private comment. They might evolve. The mutation of Pepys’s accounting book into a diary was a common development. Within the different genres there are to be found different forms of self-expression. Interior self-examination is rare, but writers betrayed their sentiments when they commented on an event or recorded matters for a moral or satirical purpose. An example of the extraordinary value of these sources is the document written by Aurelio Farolfa, a lawyer, which was entirely recopied and added to by his brother Marino, a physician, from the small town of Asolo on the Venetian mainland. The diary was begun in 1599 and continues to 1641, but it starts with a family history that goes back to the 1460s. Their motivation in keeping a diary was typical for those with a humanist education; they wished to teach their descendants how ‘to imitate the good and avoid the bad . . . because we are accustomed to be moved by the examples of our neighbours and kin rather than strangers and foreigners’.9 Asolo was described as an arcadia without rancour or division until the 1570s when two rival factions, the Beltramini and the Razzolini, began to fight for control of the municipal council. The intensification of the struggle for public office in the late sixteenth century, a European phenomenon, was particularly acute in the Venetian Republic. Although the brothers were nominally in the Razzolini faction, it being impossible to remain neutral, the diary displays little partisan passion. On the contrary, the experience of civil conflict generated distrust and cynicism: In matters pertaining to party (fazioni) conscience is banished, and hatreds are immortal. I would encourage the Farolfa family not to procure many friends in Asolo, because you will be easily deceived and at the 7 8

9

Bulifon, Giornali, I, pp. 44–55. Registre-journal du règne de Henri III, ed. M. Lazard and G. Schrenck, 6 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1992–2003); M. Goldie et al. (eds.), The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691, 6 vols. (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007). Gasparetto (ed.), Farolfa, p. 42.

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mercy of their envy, or their ingratitude, which dominates this miserable region; nor to believe in those pious hypocrites (colli torti), who assiduously go to church and pretend to remain neutral, while living off the negotiations, because these people are cunning folk who corrode [the patria] and scorpions who bite without a care.10

Although the Farolfa despised party and believed that it corrupted the body politic, membership was obligatory, especially for a family of professionals, whose livelihood rested on working as notaries, physicians and in the town bureaucracy. The diary evokes a Hobbesian state of nature, ‘where those who have no one to oppose, devour each other’.11 What glued the factions together was shared enmity. There was no virtue on either side: ‘these two powerful factions, so full of evil men’.12 Membership was not defined strictly by kinship and both sides were closely connected to each other by ties of marriage. ‘Friends’ were frequently people who one secretly despised: ‘the nature of men from this locality is to forget by evening services rendered in the morning, to measure everything by his own use for it, not caring for debts of blood, or credit, or similar things . . . they would revenge every slight injury from anyone else, taking for an enemy anyone who was not a supporter of their party’.13 The venality of local politics, in which enemies had to be bought off and votes for the council purchased, was encouraged by Venice, whose padroni arbitrated and offered protection. The diary conveys a sense of terror at the ‘diabolic’ violence that was the result. It deals in existential dilemmas worthy of Hamlet: Indeed, it is good to make peace when some difference occurs by accident. But when the offence is born from old hatreds, to forgive is to give occasion to the same enemy to do it again, and others, from his example will learn to do the same. But if one waits for a while, either out of a [desire] to revenge or not to forgive, everyone is alert and during that time another misfortune may happen . . . from small things enmity perpetuates, which, as far as I am able to observe, ensure that old passions between the opposing factions will pour out when the occasion arises, as if they were new born.14

By 1619 the feelings were dominating the rhythms of everyday life. Threats made by the Beltramini meant that every movement had to be carefully calibrated. Was it safe for Aurelio Farolfa to leave home alone? Yes, not being seen outside was provocative, giving the impression that he had something to hide. Should he greet an enemy if he encountered one? Yes, it was agreed, he should do so, but negligibly (magramente) with a jolly countenance 10 11 12 13 14

Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 73.

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in order not to suggest that he had been insulted. The family plotted retaliation, agreeing that Antonio Beltramini should be beaten up and Carlo Beltramini killed. But ‘nothing could be done without the assistance and protection’ of their padrone, Giacomo Ca’ da Pesaro, who had arrived from Venice to settle the dispute. Antonio Beltramini was finally murdered the following year. The peace deal that followed, sponsored by padroni from as far away as Rome, involved fines for those responsible sealed by a marriage pact.15 The Farolfa brothers distilled these experiences into some general principles: unjustly acquired wealth by the father will ruin his sons; the friendships of fathers are not passed to sons; the Beltramini ‘have tyranny in their eyes’; stoic sufferance is a virtue; the Venetian legal system, which permitted the rich to pay off their crimes, was contemptible.16 The fear and suspicion generated on the Venetian mainland were replicated in other regions that experienced civil conflict. In sixteenth-century Italy and France the mutation of reckoning books into fully-fledged diaries was spurred by the need to memorialise extraordinary and terrifying events. Sixteenthcentury diaries are generally dry and matter of fact, it being necessary to carefully list misdemeanours to be avenged or otherwise called to account for at some time in the future.17 For example, the family remembrancer of Fabio Monza changed following the murder of his father’s cousin in 1548 and turned into an account of the pursuit of the killers. The quest for justice, which required him to keep notes of legal judgments and expenses and manage the spies and assassins he hired, consumed his time, money and health.18 Recording injuries was a matter of public record. As a notary, Tommasino de’ Bianchi was responsible for drawing up peace deals in Modena. It was only a short step from this to keeping a chronicle that recorded infractions of them. His chronicle of the killings in the 1540s became a public record and a reference for disputants during negotiations.19 As the Florentine chronicler Giuliani Ricci noted in 1569, ‘one must hold an enemy to account, since he who does an injury forgets much more easily than he who it is done to’.20 Giovanni Spaccini, who took over the semi-official chronicle of Modena, maintained the tradition. His tally permitted him to know when peace deals had been violated. He knew, for example, that the 1608 murder of a bookseller’s son was a serious matter because it was a violation of a peace deal made six years earlier.21 The Italian obsession with reckoning 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

Ibid., pp. 118–19. Ibid., pp. 193, 205, 224, 228–9. Valseriati, Tra Venezia e l’Impero, ‘La percezione del contrasto in diari e memorie familiari’, pp. 49–54; M. P. Paoli, ‘I Medici’, in Broggio and Paoli (eds.), Stringere la pace, p. 93. Lomastro (ed.), I ‘zornali’ di Fabio Monza. Borghi, Lodi and Ferrari Moreni, Cronaca, VII. Ricci, Cronaca, p. 31. Spaccini, Cronaca, II, p. 320.

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insults reached its peak in the autobiography published by marchese Annibale Porrone in 1683, a riposte to libels which impugned his honour. The marchese kept a score of his combats – he fought twenty-six duels and encounters all over Italy – a list that, when published, was designed to protect his rank in the league table of honour.22 Porrone’s narcissism shows how far journals and memoirs had evolved from the medieval reckoning book. By the end of the seventeenth century French memoirs, heretofore limited to justifications of public conduct, begin to include more personal reflections. The new possibilities for expressing private feelings in different ways are nowhere more evident than in the invention of the novel. Courtilz de Sandras wrote a number of semi-autobiographical novels, the first of which, Les aventures du Comte de Rochefort, appeared in 1687. The novel, narrated in the first person, is based on real events that took place in the civil wars of the 1650s, though its evocation of neighbourly feuds, which involved poaching and illegal logging, is more than likely based on his father’s and grandfather’s experience of a real feud, which originated in the 1570s and terminated only in 1648.23 There were many other reasons for writing. The godly recorded their mercies. The Florentine Francesco Bonazini kept a diary ‘to escape boredom’.24 Giovanni Battista Bianchi from Brescia kept his journal because it ‘gave him particular pleasure, receiving from it a pastime and honest recreation’.25 The autobiography of the jurist Francesco d’Andrea was not only an advocacy for the science of Descartes and Galileo but a more conventional advice book on how to get ahead. The best means was the law: ‘the unique road in Naples particularly for noble persons to make a fortune and to acquire great riches and to be able to ascend to the highest dignities’.26 Vincenzo d’Onofrio’s chronicling of Neapolitan society had a strong moral purpose. The truth served ‘as an example and for the benefit of those who come after that they might better govern themselves’.27 Unlike medieval chronicles, his register had no place for divine intervention; it was men who made history, who had to be called to account and satirised accordingly. The opinions and prejudices which chroniclers frequently betray are vital for understanding enmity. On taking up the reins of the Neapolitan journal, Antoine Bulifon felt obligated to meet the same standards set by his predecessor but was aware that the journal could go beyond the recording of the truth; ‘on the contrary it 22 23 24

25 26

27

Porrone, La verita svelata. Carroll, Blood and Violence, p. 127. Bonazini, ‘Diario’, title page: http://grandtour.bncf.firenze.sbn.it/indici/altre-fonti /Magl_XXV_42. Guerrini (ed.), Le cronache bresciane, IV, p. 47. N. Cortese, I ricordi di un avvocato napoletano del seicento: Francesco d’Andrea (Naples: Luigi Lubrano, 1923), p. 9. Fuidoro, Successi, p. x.

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spoke with too much anger and rancour towards the governing classes and ministers’.28 The different purposes in writing, the distance between self-reflection and social reality, the style of a text and how it changes over time are themselves as significant as the content in exploring enmity through the lens of egodocuments. The subject is a vast one and the present chapter can only serve as an introduction. It limits itself to considering personal reflections about public enemies; the varieties of emotions that writers negotiated when describing their enmities; the experience of civil conflict and fashion for stoicism in the seventeenth century; family breakdown; and, finally, through the lens of a particular manuscript diary, it shows how the emergence of new social identities around 1700 changed the perception of enmity. ***

Ego-documents offer a fresh perspective on the discourses and construction of the public enemy, the ‘othering’ which has played such a significant role in history. They permit us to nuance the historiography, exploring the interplay between public discourse and private feelings and revealing doubts about commonly held beliefs. Strong social prejudices and sectarian hatreds are to be found in private writings. Pepys thought the ‘Jewes more like Brutes then [sic] people’.29 Jean Maillefer, expressing distinctly unchristian sentiments, thought that vagabonds were ‘excrement’.30 The Reformation generated a vicious polemical debate that encouraged feelings of ‘charitable hatred’ at best and intercommunal violence at worst. The struggle between the godly and their worldly neighbours amounts to an entire genre.31 Calvinists, in particular, used writing as a tool for displaying God’s providence, recording tests of faith and scrutinising their lives for signs of election. The Alsatian pewterer Augustin Güntzer, for example, was brought up in a strict Calvinist household in the imperial free city of Oberreinheim (Obernai), before he was forced to flee persecution in the 1620s. As an artisan he was socialised into the macho world of the journeyman, which meant frequenting brothels and drinking rituals. This proximity to sin led him to contemplate suicide. The recording of his memories was a way of coming to terms with the torments of everyday life, a coping strategy for an outsider. Güntzer portrays himself as Job, a Christian alone, fighting evil. He recorded personal enmities with frankness, because the wrath they engendered was reasonable and did not imperil his salvation. His three chief enemies were the devil, the pleasures of the flesh and the ungodly, ‘a 28 29 30

31

Bulifon, Giornali, I, p. 54. Diary of Samuel Pepys, IV, p. 335. H. Jadart (ed.), Mémoires de Jean Maillefer, marchand bourgeois de Reims, 1611–1684 (Paris and Reims, 1890), p. 120. Seaver, Wallington’s World, pp. 12–13, 20, 103, 131, 134, 146.

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portion of men hate me because of my faith and hate me out of malice’.32 He left a pictorial record of one incident. When he was aged eight, ‘one of his father’s religious enemies’ pushed Augustin into a river. The action, captured in a drawing inserted in the memoir, shows him crying for help; his mother and father fish him out and drain the water out of him. We cannot be certain that it was a deliberate attempt to drown the child, but this was how Güntzer interpreted it. The interpretation of misfortunes and accidents as signs of malice was the product of religious propaganda. Its impact on neighbourliness in France is particularly well understood.33 Official vitriol had the capacity to sanctify private disputes and quarrels. The diary of Catholic weavers Pierre and Claude Dusson reported the drowning of their brother in 1675. They blamed the Huguenot bathers for abandoning him because ‘he had refused to lend a piece of cloth to them on credit’.34 The diary records the brothers’ fears that the Huguenots would poison them, which is redolent of witchcraft accusations. In their small town in Burgundy trust between the communities had broken down following a visit by Jesuit missionaries, whose preachers had caused the locals ‘to shake’ ecstatically in 1665. On the whole heresy was no longer interpreted, as it had been in the sixteenth century, as a sign of the end of the world. Instead, Huguenots were identified as a political threat. The diary of the Nîmois clerk Etienne Borrelly is a good example of how memories of the Protestant insurgency shaped attitudes long after the end of the civil wars.35 His vicious anti-Protestantism was not typical of Catholic sentiment in Nîmes. When he was writing in the mid-seventeenth century the town was still dominated by the Reformed Church and coexistence between Protestants and Catholics was the general rule. Borrelly’s sectarian hatred was shaped by family memories. He was an outsider from the rural hinterland. The village he was born in was nicknamed ‘cross of blood’ after being brutally sacked by Protestants in 1577 and it was devastated once again by Protestant rebels in 1621–2. His background made him an unquestioning recipient of CounterReformation propaganda, which characterised Protestants as a ‘cursed race’. The fighting in which Borrelly participated and which tore much of the Midi apart in the 1650s was not, however, a straightforward religious war. Borrelly was a member of the Ultra-Catholic faction; he considered his moderate coreligionaries ‘evil’ and represented himself as belonging to an oppressed minority, describing the Protestant hegemony as ‘slavery’ and denouncing their ‘murders, violence and oppressions’. His capacity for suspicion meant 32 33

34 35

Güntzer, Kleines Biechlin, p. 282. For example: K. Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early Modern France (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 2005). Fontenay (ed.), ‘Mémoires’, p. 236. R. Sauzet, Le Notaire et son roi. Étienne Borrelly (1633–1718), un Nîmois sous Louis XIV (Paris: Plon, 1998).

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that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the expulsion of the Protestants in 1685 brought him little joy – there was no New Jerusalem. He now turned his ire on the Nouveau Convertis, whose conversion to Catholicism he considered superficial, making them ‘mortal enemies of the king’.36 The complexity of friend–enemy relations in Languedoc, which cut across confessional lines, pitting zealous Catholics against politiques intent on protecting Protestant friends, was also a theme of Léonard Delsol’s scrapbook. He condemned the ‘politick spirit that sought the approbation of the Nouveau Convertis’. In 1686 his ‘sworn enemy’ the diocesan vicar general ordered former Protestants to be transferred to the care of less hostile priests, leading to a punch-up between them and the men they were sent to replace.37 His frequent denunciations forged an unlikely alliance of Benedictines, former Protestants and Jansenists to resist him in the town of Montagnac. While pamphlets and sermons of the period were replete with eschatological premonitions that fortified faith through fear, ego-documents demonstrate that hearers and readers were not always passive consumers. Before it was imagined or represented, religious difference was a lived experience. Religious animosity was mediated by social relationships. Vicious polemics against heretics or papists were ubiquitous, but on the whole the intercommunal violence which characterised the French Wars of Religion was not replicated elsewhere in Europe. The Basler diarist Johannes Gast talked of Catholics in the 1530s as the ‘enemy’ but expressed no desire to attack harm them, ‘because civil war is the most terrible and most serious of all things’.38 The fragmented nature of the Swiss Confederation and ceaseless border conflict were ripe for generating intercommunal violence. As a 1657 document explained, religious tensions rose on ‘Holidays, baptisms, burials of unbaptised children, the setting up of crosses over graves, weddings held on holy days, the failure to remove one’s hat during bell-ringing, and other such matters.’39 Confessional hostility was an everyday matter. But in Switzerland, at least, mundane incidents did not escalate into full-scale violence. The Swiss religious settlement – the right to vote to belong either to the Catholic or to the Reformed Church was established in the Confederation in the 1520s – meant that members of opposing faiths were not identified as public enemies. The capacity for respecting enemies is visible in the English sources too. The royalist Sir John Reresby admitted that Cromwell was ‘the greatest and bravest of men’.40 The English Puritan artisan Nehemiah Wallington hated Catholics, believed in their conspiracies and was ready to take up arms to resist them. This was a product of 36 37 38 39 40

Puech (ed.), ‘Le livre de raison’, 388. Delsol, Livre ou registre, pp. 222, 226. K. Buxtorf-Falkeisen (ed.), Johannes Gast’s Tagebuch (Basel, 1856), p. 16ff. Ibid., pp. 54–5. Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, p. 139.

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fantasy; he never seems to have met one. His attitude to his royalist enemies was more nuanced, feelings that demonstrate his attachment to the ideal of neighbourliness. He regretted the fact that co-religionists were ‘so ready to devour one another’ over ‘difference in judgements’.41 The desire to shun all but the company of the saints and to welcome ostracism as a form of martyrdom was a feature of English Puritan writings, but in reality insulation from one’s neighbours was difficult to achieve. This was especially the case in regions of great diversity, such as the Rhineland. Augustin Güntzer’s complex feelings towards his neighbours were shaped by his inability to separate completely from the ungodly. On an individual level Güntzer evinces gratitude to and friendship for Catholics, and he took part in Catholic processions and heard Mass. His scorn for popish ceremony did not result in him distinguishing between friend and foe along strictly confessional lines. The ungodly and personal enemies were closer at hand among his Lutheran neighbours. The diary of the Lutheran Hieronymous Rueffer (1573–1614), who was forced to leave his hometown of Würzburg because of the Counter-Reformation policies of Bishop Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn, shows that his feelings were not informed by confessional prejudice. Julius was a political enemy, ‘a tyrant’.42 Otherwise the family relied on its Catholic friends for support, trust which he reciprocated by choosing Catholic godparents for his children. Everyday ecumenicism was common across Europe before it was consumed by civil war. Even in France, where the religious character of civil war was most in evidence, ego-documents express equivocal attitudes to faith that act as a counterweight to the caricatures and stereotypes of the other conjured in print. The diary of Gilles de Gouberville reveals an open-minded Catholic, wary of the militants on either side. Above all, he was an advocate for good neighbourliness, a practical vocation which involved mediation and dispute settlement. The following conversation caught his ear on 3 August 1562: On my return I found Contrôleur [Thomas] Noel and Jehan France walking in the fields. We talked until we came to the rue d’Argouges. While we were talking about religion and the great divisions and controversies of opinions there are these days between men, France said: ‘If I had my way, a new God would be made who was neither a Papist nor Huguenot so that it could be no longer be said that so-and-so is a heretic or Huguenot.’ To which I said ‘Unus est Deus ab eterno et eternus. We cannot make Gods since we are just men.’ It seemed to me that Noel was very offended at France’s words.43

Gouberville disagreed with Jehan France’s idea that men should make new gods, but neither did he, unlike Noel, find such a heretical idea offensive. 41 42 43

Seaver, Wallington’s World, p. 274. Faktenheuer, Lebenswelt und Religion, p. 125. M. Foisil (ed.), Le Journal du Sire de Gouberville, 4 vols. (Pont Neuville, 1993–4), iii, 806.

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Denunciation by its nature appears frequently in the historical record; mediation, temporisation and moderation, characteristics of Gouberville’s diary, much less so. In the wake of civil war, expressing relativist ideas like these was, as we encountered in Pepys’s diary, dangerous. It was a staple of humanist rhetoric that internal divisions could be healed by patriotism. True virtue lay in the identification of and struggle against public enemies. The concept of a fixed and immutable other was more difficult to sustain in the Holy Roman Empire where loyalties were multiple and overlapping. The rhetorical force of the public enemy was diluted in the Empire’s religious and constitutional complexity. The Cologne civil war of 1583–8, in which the Electorate was contested by rival candidates, forced the city councillor Herman Weinsberg (1518–97) to reflect on the nature of patriotism.44 Humanist books taught him that one should fight for one’s homeland or fatherland. But he wondered what this meant. He deconstructed the notion of home, which might mean the imperial free city of Cologne, Germany or Christendom, but also referred to his local neighbourhood, his house and his kin, as these had to be defended and fought for too. The implication of Weinsberg’s rumination was that these overlapping loyalties were not necessarily in harmony; they were often in conflict. For these reasons it was always better to avoid taking up arms for a public cause. Patriotism was also a complex sentiment in Italy. Shared feelings of cultural superiority over foreigners were undermined by the experience of invasion, conquest and political violence that characterised the early sixteenth century. Enmity in Italy was nourished by the sense of injustice at foreign occupation and the absence of trust in the new regimes that took power, feelings that were exacerbated by the ways in which factionalism was encouraged as a matter of policy. The ‘climate of terror’ that this induced in Brescia, for example, is well captured in diaries. Pandolfo Nassino joined the pro-Venetians not out of love but for self-preservation: ‘Whichever lord you wish for, they will only take and give nothing in return . . . All lords are great tyrants, the Venetians only a little less so.’45 He looked back to a medieval past, where party was less pernicious. The seventeenth century witnessed a revival of patriotism. Republican hopes prospered once again as Spanish power waned and the 1559 settlement began to crumble. The monumental memoirs of Antonio Francesco Ghiselli (1634–1730), which consisted of 92 volumes each of 1,000 pages, were composed as a testimony to Bolognese liberty and an indictment of papal tyranny. Ghiselli did not hide the fact that the local nobility was an unpleasant bunch and the memoirs describe a city full of armed bands, fortified palaces and factional violence.46 But the root of 44

45 46

www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de/Edition/Liber_Senectutis/Liber_Senectutis.htm, 1582 ultima novembris. Valseriati, Tra Venezia e l’Impero, p. 54. Angelozzi and Casanova, La nobilità disciplinata, pp. 12–17.

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the problem was perceived as domination by Rome and its legates, ‘who did the greatest harm and infinite detriment to this city and to this public . . . In truth, one would have expected it from any other quarter than the Pope, whose authority is built on holiness, but in this matter anyhow he has demonstrated and demonstrates little love for his subjects.’47 The 1647 Revolution in Naples left the diarist Vincenzo d’Onofrio with an abiding hatred of the French, who had let down the revolutionaries and who continued to interfere in internal politics to the detriment of public order. They were, he said, about as trustworthy as the Greeks or the Turks.48 But Onofrio also disliked Romans and people from the Papal States in general were described as the ‘natural enemies’ of the Neapolitans. His anti-clericalism was shared by other Neapolitan diarists: ‘one can say with certainty that only in these kingdoms and not in others does the Pope, supported by the crown of Spain, rule with despotic power’.49 Onofrio was a pious Catholic, displaying a particular attachment to the local cult of San Gennaro, but he was angered by the frequent abuses of clerical authority, recording in detail how church courts and clerical privilege undermined civic government.50 He disliked the power wielded by Rome in the form of the Jesuits and the Inquisition; the latter’s agents were ‘hateful’ and opposed to the public good while the Inquisition’s crackdown on freethinking in seventeenth-century Naples was driven by political ‘ambition and temporal ends’. The chronicle kept by the Lillois weaver Pierre-Ignace Chavatte, son of illiterate parents, from 1657 to 1693 offers a different perspective on the rancour that foreign domination generated. Chavatte was exposed to propaganda and read international news gazettes. But his loathing of the French and Louis XIV and his sentimental attachment to Spanish rule were not in the main shaped by a sense of imagined community. The French conquest of 1667–8 was a disaster for the inhabitants of Lille and the surrounding countryside. Chavatte’s diary was a record of the banality of violence under occupation and the everyday forms of resistance, such as toasting the king of Spain, it engendered. Chavatte’s patriotism was reactive. What he and so many other so many diarists craved was peace and order.51 French rule came to be accepted once this was achieved. ***

The construction of the other and the public enemy are the staples of political and religious history. But we are much less well informed about how people 47 48 49 50 51

Angelozzi and Casanova, La giustizia criminale a Bologna, p. 26. Onofrio, Giornali, IV, p. 175. Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 347, Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 287; II, pp. xv, iv, 111, 116, 158. Lottin (ed.), Chronique, p. 110.

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negotiated, reflected upon and understood the enmities that perturbed good neighbourliness on a daily basis. The recording of feelings of enmity towards others was routine across the range of self-writing genres. The sentiments expressed varied, of course, conditioned by age, gender and social expectation, and also by the particular genre of recording. So, for example, the overwhelming sentiment recorded in the diary of the timid seventeenth-century savant Agostino Nelli was one of fear and trepidation lest his brother-in-law demonstrate any sign of enmity, such as failing to recognise or greet him.52 His diary was thus a form of catharsis, in which he could confide fears about his brotherin-law and their lawsuit. Following their reconciliation, the diary entries become much more cursory, less reflexive, reverting to a more traditional reckoning book. Nelli was the opposite of his contemporary the marchese Annibale Porrone, whose swaggering and self-justificatory account of his life targeted the lies spread about him in print. He confessed to the murders he committed because he had either been pardoned for them or because they demonstrated virtue. Yes, he had killed Dottore Parasacco, but the man had accused him of being a traitor to the king of Spain, an insolence that merited punishment.53 The diaries of priests and ministers often read like a catalogue of complaints about parishioners. The English Puritan, Thomas Larkham, tells us in his account book of the disputes created by his determination to exclude the unworthy from communion. He was in turn accused of being a ‘sower of discord and hatred’.54 Parochial resistance to the discipline of the sacraments was not uncommon in Germany too. Lutheran pastor Martin Walther approved of the Calvinist attempts to impose more rigid moral discipline that had been introduced in other parts of Hesse and the Palatinate. Unfortunately, his attempts at reform were complicated by personal hostilities, the significance of which is underscored by their record in Latin, rather than the German he normally used in his memoir. First, he fell out with his sacristan, who he referred to as an ‘idiot’, and next with the three leading families of the parish over the costs of the school and poor relief. When he recorded the death of one of his opponents in the parish register in 1615, he included a long entry in his chronicle listing the dead man’s faults and noting that ‘he was a bitter enemy of the present pastor’.55 The alienation of the community reached a peak that Christmas when not a single parishioner came forward to take communion. Walther’s capacity to upset the locals came to the attention of his superiors and he was removed from the benefice in March 1620. Communities were not always so united and the astute pastor 52 53 54 55

See above p. 111. Porrone, La verita svelata, p. 9 Smyth, Autobiography, pp. 105–8. Walther, ‘Reichenbachisch Memorial’, p. 93.

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or priest knew how to work with a coalition of like-minded notables. But at Mönchsondheim in Franconia village tensions were exacerbated when the pastor between 1614 and 1627, Thomas Junius, married the thirteen-yearold daughter of a village bigwig. Junius gained friends but also many enemies, who began to make trouble for him, complaining to his superiors about his over-rigorous attention to discipline, implying that village factionalism was a result of his readiness to withhold the sacraments.56 The Catholic priest Pierre Vacherie recorded similar resistance to his attempts to enforce morality on the parishioners of Condat in the Limousin, where he was appointed in 1643. Vacherie fell out so badly with one of the leading families in the village, who he described as ‘ingrates, liars, vindictives, slanderers’, that ‘I wrote this in order to serve as an eternal memory to never again lend them anything and never to speak to them again, but simply to greet them and escape their presence like the plague.’57 Writing this down comforted him, for expressing his feelings publicly would be both dangerous and unchristian. He saw no hypocrisy in preaching that one should love one’s neighbour and withholding communion from those whose hearts were uncontrite, while privately eschewing this regime and pouring out his heart against his enemies. For most writers navigating such feelings posed greater problems. Those with a devotional motive for putting pen to paper were conscious of the risk they ran for not fully accounting for wrath and envy. Part of the motivation to write was to rationalise sins as a product of injustice or calumny. It enabled the devout to express pleasure when God’s vengeance was visited on enemies. Augustin Güntzer viewed life as a threefold struggle against the devil, temptation and other men – ‘man has many public and secret enemies’.58 Prayer was a weapon of the Christian soldier in the struggle against them: ‘Lord, make me into a Christian soldier, so that through your power I can beat off all my enemies.’59 The memoir records their downfall in such a way that avoided imperilling the author’s salvation. The satisfaction of witnessing divine vengeance in action was not, however, confined to Calvinists.60 Martin Walther recorded that one of his flock, who he had disciplined for blasphemy, had died soon after from taking a surfeit of laxatives. In his opinion this was particularly apt because the man ‘had shat on the holy sacrament’.61 The joy of the Sacchi family from Viterbo at the news of the death of their enemy from illness in 56 57

58 59 60

61

Facktenheuer, Lebenswelt und Religion, p. 317. P. Bruel (ed.), ‘Livre de raison de Pierre Vacherie, 1595–1652’, Bulletin de la Société scientifique historique et archéologique de la Corrèze, 9 (1887), 25–74. Güntzer, Kleines Biechlin, p. 86. Ibid. In a Lutheran context: Wandel (ed.), Ramsler, pp. 72–4. On divine vengeance in the French context: Carroll, Blood and Violence, pp. 13, 96, 269. Walther, ‘Reichenbachisch Memorial’, p. 65.

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1550 was tempered only by the tardiness of providence: ‘if only God had taken him twenty years earlier’.62 Giovanni Spaccini thought that the shooting of Giulio Rangoni, who had his teeth shot out in Venice in 1633, was particularly apposite. ‘This gentleman was very courageous and one could not deny that he did not recognize fear, was magnificent and generous; he had only one imperfection, that of being a blasphemer, and God punished him by striking him in the mouth.’63 Bartholomäus Sastrow, a Lutheran city councillor in Stralsund, wrote his memoirs in 1595 to teach his children about the calumnies suffered by their family against ‘unseemly slander and . . . in order to vindicate our honour and good name’, and expose ‘the jealousy and hostility of my opponents’.64 There was a lot to record. He started with feuds from 100 years previously that were clearly still significant to him, and he wished to pass the memory of them on to his children. Sastrow justified his father’s killing of a Greifswald Burger in 1523, which forced him to flee the town and set up shop in Stralsund, a place his son referred to as ‘the devil’s stew’. It was a tale that recounted triumphs over multiple enemies.65 In life’s ceaseless struggle only God can help us against the wicked. Psalm 75 was especially dear to him: ‘It is God who judges: He brings one down, he exalts another. In the hand of the Lord is a cup full of foaming wine mixed with spices; he pours it out, and all the wicked of the earth drink it down to its very dregs.’66 For Sastrow, like other orthodox Lutherans, the devil played an active part in human affairs, not representing chaos but acting as regent for the political realm. The devil’s work was done through others and consequently political opponents were characterised as his servants and abettors (Hofteufel, Glitmassen).67 Sastrow was pessimistic about the possibilities for civic peace, for the sins of the wicked were passed down the generations. Fortunately, divine justice meant that the children of his father’s enemies came to no good. Reporting on the shooting of one of his fellow city councillors in a tavern brawl, Sastrow commented that the man was, in the end, getting his ‘just desserts’. For those, like Sastrow, with a humanist education one of the main purposes of writing was to address an audience on how to negotiate the vicissitudes of life. Montaigne’s Essays turned this into an art form. In contrast, most egodocuments were restricted to the edification of friends and family. Cologne city councillor Herman Weinsberg’s diary is one of the longest and most important ego-documents of the early modern period. His purpose was to create 62 63 64 65 66 67

Ciampi (ed.), ‘Ricordi’, p. 432. Spaccini, Cronaca, VI, p. 438. Mohnike (ed.), Sastrowen, I, pp. 10–11. Ibid., I, p. 273. Ibid., I, pp. 96–106. K.-R. Trauner, Identität in der Frühen Neuzeit. Die Autobiographie des Bartholomäus Sastrow (Aschendorff: Münster, 2004), pp. 258–60.

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a monument to the past: ‘the living voice and word disappears like the wind, but words are imperishable’.68 He chose to write not a chronicle or a universal history ‘of great lords, wars and religious matters’, but rather about his family and neighbourhood for the benefit of kin and his descendants. There were already, he claimed, enough universal histories: ‘the things related to me and my kin are so slight that if they were scattered among great matters they would be thereby destroyed’.69 Weinsberg was writing a history from below. He wanted to show that ‘such mediocre histories and matters’ had utility and that the low-born were ‘more real (leiblicher), more merry and more agreeable’ than the glorious deeds of lords and the high-born celebrated in chronicles and histories.70 Recounting what happened in the immediate neighbourhood had a didactic function: to demonstrate what was wise and what foolish behaviour and to show how to avoid ‘ridicule, shame and ignominy’.71 Weinsberg’s extensive writings were a manual that would teach his descendants how to do things better. He often directly addressed the readers who would come after him. Unfortunately, the merriness of the Weinsberg household was overshadowed by petty enmities, which after his death culminated in murder and suicide. The social expectations and concerns of the nobleman were very different from those of the bourgeois paterfamilias or priest. As Ed Muir explains, ‘just as a merchant might keep a ricordanza – a “memory book” designed to inform his sons about the family business, marriage connections and political alliances – or a patrician might write a chronicle of his city to instruct his fellows and progeny about the republic’s mythic truths, so aristocrats write down accounts of their relations with their blood enemies’.72 Sir John Reresby’s dislike of his neighbours, the Wentworths, was confirmed by his own researches into the origins of the feud. French noblemen also conducted archival research in order to warn their children about their neighbours.73 The Memoires historiques des Quiqueran Beaujeu, compiled in 1657, records a vendetta in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Provence. It was compiled ‘to content the curiosity of our descendants and to oblige them to do the same, since our forefathers have neglected to shed little light on the details of their actions’. Several of these ancestors were illiterate and so the memoir relied on a rich oral tradition. The document is unmediated by Christian or humanist reflections or justifications for the violence and is all the more valuable for it. It is sanguine about the killings, including one 68

69 70

71 72 73

K. Höhlbaum and F. Lau (eds.), Das Buch Weinsberg: Kölner Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem 16. Jahrhundert, 5 vols. (Leipzig and Bonn, 1886–1926), I, p. 13. Ibid., I, p. 9. www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de/Edition/LiberDecrepitudinis/LiberDecrepitudinis.htm, 23 May 1590. Das Buch Weinsberg, I, p. 9. Muir, Mad Blood Stirring, p. 10. For this and following Carroll, Blood and Violence, pp. 138, 232, 271.

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committed in Arles cathedral. Written during the chaos of the 1650s, the memoir had practical significance: it taught that it was better to strike first against one’s enemies. The portraits which hung in the family residence were full of bullet holes, having been used by their ancestors for target practice. A family memoir from 1743 sheds light on the process of pacification in France, how lessons were learned and experience imparted.74 The memoir tells the story of the feud between Guy de Chaumont, marquis d’Orbec (1641– 1712) and his neighbour, the seigneur de Gauville. It was written by the marquis’s descendant Marguerite Angélique du Fay de Saint-Léger, who based her story on oral tradition. We do not know the origins of the feud. There are a number of possibilities: the neighbour was of much lower social status than the marquis, but he had carved himself a reputation in the 1650s, fighting a number of encounters and earning himself the epithet of ‘brave Gauville’. Marguerite, who wrote using the pseudonym ‘Anonyme’, claimed that Gauville started the quarrel in 1660, by casting aspersions on the marquis’s manliness: ‘if you turn his nose his mother’s milk comes out’. Marguerite listed the lessons of the feud for her sons. ‘Lesson 1: one should only speak with a great deal of circumspection.’ The marquis ignored this advice. As soon as he got wind of the insult, he surprised his enemy and beat him up. Swords were drawn and the two men were separated. ‘Lesson 2: it would have been better to let them fight’ since an impromptu encounter was easily defensible in law and easily reconciled. Instead, the dispute escalated. When Gauville provoked them by riding in full view of their chateau, the whole family was mobilised. The marquis, his father and half-brother trespassed on Gauville’s property. The marquis had his front teeth shot out; Gauville was killed. ‘Lesson 3 A troublesome, but necessary step. At all costs one must regard the duel with horror and when a quarrel is born, one must resolve it immediately or at the first encounter.’ Once again, Marguerite underlines the preference for fighting encounters and avoiding formalities. She blamed the marquis’s predilection for revenge for his subsequent disgrace and the social oblivion suffered by his ancestors. Her interpretation of the feud is open to question. She fails to mention that, following Gauville’s murder, the marquis was pardoned and initially went on to have a distinguished military career under Louis XIV. The termination of his career was not a result of the murder but because he was a Protestant; refusing to renounce his faith, he was forced to resign his commission and retire to his estates. However, Marguerite’s emphasis on the hydra of revenge is significant, for she was a reader of fashionable English books on politeness. Her interpretation of the feud is rooted in the principle of individual moral responsibility. 74

J. Depoin, ‘Une affaire d’honneur au XVIIe siècle’, Mémoires de la Société historique et archéologique de l’arrondissement de Pontoise, 30 (1910), 105–11.

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According to her, rancour and vainglory were the factors that brought the family low, not religion or the vicissitudes of court politics. Her version of events was shaped by the conventions of civility. Getting ahead, she told her sons, required ‘being polished, affable and benevolent to everybody’, which was useful since ‘It brings us friends and patrons and access to people of great credit.’75 These were the tools with which the family fortune would be restored. Ego-documents are also significant for the silences they record. The lack of reflexivity or sentiment in relation to violence is especially evident in the Italian sources. Eyebrows were rarely raised even when people were shot at during Mass, as if this sort of behaviour was perfectly natural. In 1690 the blacksmith Giovan Francesca Fogni from Piedmont recorded a stabbing in the cathedral of Alessandria and later mentioned the fact that someone shot at him without even a comment on the causes of these crimes.76 Bonaventura Casalini refused to name his family’s enemies in 1561 because these were ‘scoundrels unworthy of any memory in a book, and so as not to offend God by leaving a memory to my ancestors so that they will not have occasion to take revenge against their posterity’.77 The recording of such sentiments might be a dangerous matter, as the following section demonstrates. ***

It was often the experience of civil war that stimulated individuals to keep a register of events. In his study of seventeenth-century German egodocuments, Otto Ulbricht has found little evidence that people saw their suffering as a sign of God’s wrath. Such theological explanations were too general to be of help in explaining concrete experience. When pastor Albert Cuppius explained to his congregation in 1625 that the descent of the imperialist army on his parishioners was God’s chastisement of the wicked, they would have none of this nonsense and temporarily forced him to quit his position.78 But the impact of the Thirty Years’ War was not only felt in the movement of troops and the spread of disease; it left a legacy of distrust and enmity within communities: Belief in the solidarity among neighbours had received a serious blow during the war. Much damage had been done to social trust in the villages and towns, and consequently, normal neighbourly relationships had suffered a blow. This had not only occurred through a ‘betrayal’ by those who ‘collaborated’ in order to avoid being pillaged by offering up their neighbours’ property, but also as a result of the uneven distribution 75 76

77 78

Ibid., 109. B. Mortara Garavelli, ‘Un quaderno di memorie del XVII secolo’, Rivista Italiana di Dialettologia, 4 (1980), 171, 176. A. Lazzari (ed.), La cronaca domestica di Bonaventura Casalini (Faenza, 1941), p. 114. Heinemann (ed.), ‘Zellerfelder Chronik’, 332.

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comparisons of injuries, killings, theft of cattle, and the destruction of houses. Complaints that those who stayed behind had to shoulder the burden of the entire community reinforced tensions between them and the returning refugees. Not to speak of the ill-feelings that the threats of religious ‘cleansing’ had left behind in the areas in which Protestants and Catholics were neighbours.79

The German experience is applicable elsewhere. When civil wars came to an end this did not mean everyday enmities suddenly ceased. In many regions fighting on the battlefield was transferred to the private sphere. In France, one diarist lamented in 1624, how ‘the poor town [of St Yrieix] was ruined by the vengeance and enmities of the principal inhabitants who should have preserved and protected it’.80 The legacy of mistrust caused by the Italian Wars was recorded in the chronicle of Jacopo Sacchi, whose brother fell victim to a political trial in Viterbo in 1532. The memoir was addressed to the dead man’s sons. They were told that the author of their downfall was driven by uttermost enmity (inimicissimo) and uttermost cupidity (invidiossisimo). As if this was insufficient to keep the injustice alive, the victim left his own testimony ‘which you still have in the house and which you sometimes read, unless the tears do not stop you’.81 Many ego-documents in Italy from this period amount to a tally of injuries that later could be used to settle scores and calculate compensation. They were a form, as it were, of political accountancy. Since chronicles were weapons in a struggle, they might be destroyed or tampered with.82 Bonaventura Casalini’s Cronaca Domestica details the factional violence that scarred Rovigo for two decades, following its sack by the Spanish in 1514. Casalini was party to the 1533 peace settlement which had allowed him to return home from exile. He started his Cronaca in 1561 because following his return to the city mistrust did not abate, requiring him to set down the ‘unbending and mortal enmity of many citizens’.83 For some, maintaining a tally of the violence was a public duty. The Republican tailor Bastiano Arditi was determined to record the decadence of the Medicean regime in Florence. His routine recording of the violence – between April 1574 and July 1575 alone he recorded 189 assaults which resulted in 72 murders – had a didactic function. According to him Florence had become ‘infamous for its lawlessness and a haven for assassins, who have been exiled from Rome, Naples, Genoa, Milan, but above all Venice, Lucca and Urbino’.84 In 79 80

81 82 83 84

Ulbricht, ‘The Experience of Violence’, p. 125. ‘Journal d’un sieur Gondinet, de Saint-Yrieix (1613–1630)’, in L. Guibert (ed.), Livres de raison, registres de famille et journaux individuels limousins et marchois, (Limoges, 1888), pp. 273–82. Ciampi (ed.), ‘Ricordi’, p. 432. See also: Comaschi, ‘Strategie familiari’, pp. 229–30. Ricci (ed.), Cronache, p. xx, on the loss of a chronicle hostile to the Rasponi family. Lazzari (ed.), Cronaca, p. 129. Diario, p. 86.

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his continuation of the Modenese chronicle, Giovanni Spaccini dedicated a great deal of space between to systematically recording the skirmishes, duels and encounters that plagued the city between 1588 and 1636. He seems to have undergone some form of spiritual conversion and what began as a simple chronicle was turned by his disgust into a more personal record of moral decline and political impotence. The murder and mutilation of a canon in 1621, whose corpse was dumped in the city canal, shocked the usually phlegmatic Spaccini: ‘this disorder is such that it could start a civil war given the number of kinsmen on each side’.85 The following May it was unsafe to walk the streets at night because of the rival gangs. Spaccini struggled to explain the symptoms and causes. ‘It is true that these gentlemen have no wish to bridle themselves . . . their houses are full of bravi and seditious, homicidal and blasphemous men . . . they feel no shame in such things . . . With everything they make it clear that is not their fault, but those who have done them a bad turn, but if they examined their own actions in the same way I don’t believe they would speak so boldly about others.’86 Not a day passed in July 1633 without a shooting. Spaccini described his revulsion at one murder scene. By 11 a.m. there was a gaggle of people discussing the matter in the piazza when he went to look at the body. The killers had cut off a tuft of the victim’s hair, possibly as a trophy. Spaccini was soon joined by corpse robbers: ‘Surely someone should have taken care of it. Leaving it in a public street since 10 o’clock. And no one bothering to carry it into the churchyard. The whole thing was bestial.’87 This sort of behaviour was also a matter of record in Naples in the decades after the crushing of the 1647 Revolution. Vincenzo d’Onofrio was no friend to the revolutionaries and was inspired to keep a diary by the prospects for social order. But he abhorred excesses on both sides and brought a critical eye to practices of the postRevolutionary regime, and particularly the use of assassination squads: ‘several squads of Spanish hoodlums (guappi), which in our in our language equates to smargiassi (wise guys) went around harassing people and killing them’.88 The law courts were invaded by angry relatives of those who had been summarily executed. This officially sanctioned score settling, he claimed, led to a collapse in respect for law and order. A more intimate view of vendetta comes from the diary of the nun Lucia Pioppi. The Pioppi family were sympathetic to the Bellencini faction in Modena and horrified by the murder of Annibale Bellencini in May 1547.89 Lucia, then a young girl, recorded that her mother and father wept as they watched the funeral procession.90 Lucia reports the speech of Giambattista 85 86 87 88 89 90

Spaccini, Cronaca, V, p. 81. Ibid., V, pp. 224–5. Ibid., VI, p. 270. Fuidoro, Successi, p. 96. Madden, ‘Vendetta Politics’, chapter 4. Suor Lucia Pioppi, Diario (1541–1612), ed. R. Bussi (Panini: Modena, 1982), p. 4.

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Bellencini, who announced at a family gathering in 1559 his resolve to ride out against the Fontana: ‘those who love me will follow me’, implying that those who did not follow would be treated as enemies.91 The vendetta culminated in 1562 when Lanfranco Fontana dispatched a series of letter bombs targeting the Bellencini in Modena, Reggio, Parma and Florence. Nine people were killed. Fontana, who took refuge in Milan, was never apprehended. Lucia Pioppi appended a dramatic verse dialogue to her narrative of the events. The verse imagines the dialogue between each of the murdered Bellencini as they wait for the ferryman to take them across the Styx. When Giambattista Bellencini asks, ‘Lanfranco our harshest enemy! Oh how outside of nature! Where in the earthly body rules such artifice?’, the reply comes that ‘Other forces rule him.’92 The poem paints Lanfranco Fontana as diabolical, a beast fit only for slaughter. Giambattista Bellencini consoles himself and his fellow ghosts that ‘there are so many friends and kinsmen who lived to punish this senseless wrong, and who will take deadly revenge (farn vendetta si funesta) that their race will be doomed to an infinite and gloomy abyss. The next generation . . . will never be divided because they will be stitched together by the thread of bitterness woven by the Fontana.’93 Pioppi’s diary is of particular significance. That a nun, ostensibly insulated from society, recorded the poem in her diary provides further evidence of how far political division in Italian cities penetrated everyday life and the imagination. It was Pioppi’s partisanship that encouraged her to write. The idiom of the poem is significant. The model she wished her readers to emulate was classical. The quiescence of the dead souls and the restoration of their honour required the extirpation of their enemies. ***

By the 1650s war-weariness and fear of disorder was a common refrain across Europe from southern Italy to northern England. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in Germany. Bartholomäus Dietwar, who was robbed twice by his own side, described the conflict in Germany as like watching ‘two peasants who had fallen on each other and who had torn at each other for so long until they were exhausted . . . But there was someone in heaven who looked down and laughed and said “I know a better way”.’94 ‘God deliver us from the persecutions [of the soldiery], friend and foe alike’, prayed one nobleman in 1636.95 Johannes Cervinus, pastor of Wetterfeld in Hesse, also felt that Catholic and Protestant soldiers were indistinguishable; they were all 91 92 93 94 95

Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., pp. 38–43. Ibid. Wirth (ed.), Bartholomäus Dietwar, p. 92. www.tagebuch-christian-ii-anhalt.de/index.php?article_id=6.

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‘wolves and devils’. When civil war broke out in Hesse in 1645 between Calvinists and Lutherans, Cervinus did not take sides but fulminated about a conflict rooted in ‘vainglory, enmity, hatred and envy’.96 The class hostility that was a feature of post–civil war life writing in England is also evident in France. The aristocratic violence that was a feature of France in the century after 1560 led to complaints about genspillshommes or ‘robber barons’.97 The memoirs of Valentin Jameray-Duval offer a striking impression of what aristocratic feuding meant for peasants. Jameray-Duval, an Enlightenment savant, was born to a wheelwright in 1695. He recounted his picaresque teenage years as a vagabond, including the 1708 encounter in Brie, not far from Paris, with an old man who still vividly remembered the civil wars of the 1650s. ‘At that time’, the local lord, he said, ‘had cut loose from his sovereign and on his own authority mounted excursions onto the lands of his neighbours, ransoming passers-by and committing all the excesses that one might expect of the violent and barbarous.’ The lesson of this story for the old man was the need for a strong state. ‘But since’, he went on, ‘the heavens have made our kings absolute they have abolished these odious tyrannies and abolished the refuges that these actors used.’ Jameray-Duval concurred. Although the memoirist was a lover of liberty: ‘On this occasion I agreed that arbitrary power, against nature, had produced a great benefit.’98 The aristocratic violence that made life so hazardous in Modena in the 1630s was, in the understated words of Giovanni Spaccini, ‘not lauded by the public’.99 Vincenzo d’Onofrio complained that ‘every nobleman plays the cockerel, doing whatever he wants . . . not a day passes without murders and brawls’.100 Counter-Revolutionary violence became proverbial – ‘nobility means taking other people’s honour and property’.101 ‘Today’s nobles are ignorant, vainglorious and will not contend with their inferiors except by assassination. One holds the ideal that nobles cannot do things contrary to their birth, but the nobility of Naples . . . did great harm to the public good.’102 Onofrio had a strong moral and didactic purpose in recording their behaviour: ‘This breed have no comparison in history . . . See whether in Turkish lands such contempt exists as there is in Christian lands.’103 In particular, they corrupted civil society: ‘everyone does what he wants; those [malefactors] 96 97

98

99 100 101 102 103

Hirsch (ed.), Wetterfelder Chronik, p. 123. S. Simiz and J. Buridant (eds.), Journalier de Jean Pussot maître-charpentier à Reims, 1568–1626 (Villeneuve d’Asq: Presses Universitaires de Septentrion, 2008), p. 54. V. Jamerey-Duval, Mémoires. Enfance et éducation d’un paysan au XVIIIe siècle, ed., J.M. Goulemot (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1981), p. 74. Spaccini, Cronaca, VI, p. 782. Giornali, I, pp. 154, 200. Ibid., I, p. 200. Ibid., I, p. 170. Ibid.

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who know how to work the system, flee and do private deals; those who are arrested have protectors’.104 Hermann Weinsberg drew different lessons from his experience of conflict in Cologne in the 1580s. The fighting between rival Catholic and Lutheran claimants to the Electorate was less alarming than the ‘partisan and defamatory’ words in the city that might stir the plebs. The diary was his attempt to search for the truth amid rumours and fake news: The people are factious, one leans to this side, one to another, one chooses what one likes to hear, have and say. It reminds me of those historians and writers who also tend to err and make errors when the events are obscure or take place far from their study, or when they refer to them in a biased way, or when an author takes one side. I have the custom, as soon as I hear something, that I immediately make a note of it in my almanac for the purpose of memorialisation and let it rest there for a while at the least for a month at times even for a whole year. In the meantime, I am not idle, I ruminate and enquire better after the truth, although I am not on every occasion able to learn . . . what is right. When the required time has passed and I am happy with it, I extract it and extend it in my memorial book.105

Weinsberg was an advocate for history, a discipline which taught the reader prudence and circumspection. Writing was also associated with the need to act upon oneself. The delay in committing his thoughts and experiences to paper permitted reflection and prevented him succumbing to first impressions, a stoic technique that distinguished Hermann from the hoi-polloi. For Weinsberg writing was therefore a means of self-policing, or what Foucault calls a technology of the self.106 This technique was most widely associated with the stoic revival, one of the most significant by-products of the upheavals of the sixteenth century, in which the disciple mastered passion and suffered the slings and arrows of fortune. For many diarists writing had a cathartic effect. For the merchant Jean Maillefer, a disciple of Montaigne, writing a journal was a ‘healing for the pain in mind and body’.107 But moral philosophy was not simply about wellness; it had public utility, an antidote to the destructive capacities of the ego. By 1600 stoic ideas and the language of the passions were deeply entrenched in contemporary discourse across northern Europe.108 In Germany, for example, the idea that clemency was the most virtuous way of triumphing over an enemy, demonstrating a control and 104 105

106

107 108

Ibid., I, p. 146. www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de/Edition/Liber_Senectutis/Liber_Senectutis.htm, 24 July 1583. L. Martin, H. Gutman and P. H. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (London: Tavistock, 1988). Mémoires de Jean Maillefer, p. 3. G. Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

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superiority, entered the lexicon of virtuous conduct. The sentiment that the nobility was more prone to sin, avarice and idleness than the common man was a traditional refrain. The conduct-book the Adels Spiegel was written in the 1590s precisely to refute this notion by promoting a reformation of the self, using neo-stoic techniques. But even before this, ego-documents show the impact of stoicism. Joachim von Wedel was a Pomeranian noble, whose family was involved in a number of feuds in the 1560s. His tutor was shot in an encounter and one family enemy was killed (in an act of divine vengeance) in a duel in Leipzig. Wedel’s motivation for writing was to ensure that his patria would not make the same mistakes again. ‘Life is short, power shorter still, but memories are long and everlasting.’ Wedel knew his Lucretius and his Luther, but his favourite author was Seneca and it seems likely that this author provided the best means of explaining his youthful experiences. The violence, refracted through stoic wisdom, was given meaning.109 More significant perhaps was the diffusion of these ideas in Italy after 1600. The Farolfa brothers, who had little faith in Venetian justice to solve the violence that plagued their hometown, looked to the Dutch neo-stoic guru Justus Lipsius for solace.110 Stoic advice was acted upon. For Jean Maillefer dealing with the vicissitudes of life was ‘a continual combat’. His secret book shows him practising indifference and patience. After twenty years he was able to report that efforts to moderate his temper were paying off. As a young man, he had hit one of his workers: ‘Poor man, I was wrong. He had given me no offence.’111 Hans Jakob vom Staal became an admirer of Lipsius when a student in Paris. The lesson he learned stood him in good stead when he became mayor of the canton of Solothurn. His Secreta Domestica details the divisions between pro- and anti-French factions in the canton from the 1640s. Although Staal was a protagonist in the struggle, in his mind there was always the desire to avoid the private enmities that would make the violence worse: ‘in the management of affairs of state there should be no other passion than public utility’.112 The teenage meditations of Elizabeth Delaval in the 1660s demonstrate that stoicism was not just for men. She learnt that ‘vengeance belongs to God, and tis the glory of man to pass over a transgression’.113 ‘There is so mich fier in my natural temper that were I ether love or hate, tis with the greatest violence imaginable.’ The stifling of these passions was important because ‘a hasty contention . . . kindleth a fier’.114 109 110 111 112

113

114

Bohlen (ed.), Hausbuch des Joachim von Wedel, p. 330. Gasparetto (ed.), Farolfa, pp. 196, 205, 238. Mémoires de Jean Maillefer, pp. 76, 86, 93, 97. E. Meyer, ‘Hans Jakob vom Staal der Jüngere (1589–1657), Schultheiss von Solothurn, einsamer Mahner in schwerer Zeit’, Jahrbuch für Solothurnische Geschichte, 54 (1981), 503–20. D. Greene (ed.), ‘The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval: Written Between 1662 and 1671’, The Surtees Society, 190 (1978), 102. Ibid., 104.

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Others learned the techniques the hard way. The Lutheran pastor Albert Cuppius was a querulous chap frequently at odds with his tough congregation of miners in the Harz mountains. He admitted to being no angel: ‘When I was in company and drinking I did not have the good discretion to know how to use patience. I was easily put to do foolish things, fighting, arguing and vindicating, such that I had to make a run for it into the night.’115 Prayer and study enabled him to overcome his precipitousness. He abstained from drinking and bad company. For Cuppius this was less a journey of selfimprovement than a means to triumph over enemies. His moral superiority meant that ‘those who afflicted me did not prevail over me. They threatened me for many years, but they did not overcome me.’116 Some readers, he said, might find his attitude tiresome and consider that a true pastor, friend and devout Christian should be more affectionate. But his task was to administer the Truth. The 17,400-page diary of Christian II von Anhalt-Bernburg is one of the most remarkable of the seventeenth century. Christian, who was a leading figure in the 1618 Bohemian revolt and captured at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1621, began his diary as a conventional register of high political events, but in the light of his experiences it became a reflection on the vicissitudes of life. Following his release from captivity in 1623 his father warned him of the dangers of ambition and as the decade progressed Christian became a disciple of Lipsius.117 By the 1630s he was recording how to negotiate malice. And he worked upon himself in order to moderate his feelings. When he drew his sword and insulted the duke of Saxony in 1636, he admitted that his motives were not honourable but driven by ‘invidious jealousy’.118 One of his favourite words became ‘patience’. He linked his personal trysts to the dire state of the Holy Roman Empire. Christian was well aware of his own responsibility for the chaos and feared that it would harm his reputation for posterity. The humiliation led to bad dreams: ‘Oh Lord, deliver me from so many torments and send me a life more tranquil and sweet.’119 The lesson he learned was the danger of the will to power: ‘an infinity of such examples ancient and modern could be produced, but my scope is not to write a book on this matter. A short collection of my afternoon thoughts on the matter should suffice to serve to instruct the over ambitious . . . to limit their vast ambition into taking on enterprises without discrimination . . . and those whose vast pride allows them to get carried away.’120 115 116 117 118 119 120

Heinemann (ed.), ‘Zellerfelder Chronik’, 291. Ibid. http://diglib.hab.de/edoc/ed000228/start.htm, 14 February, 6 June, 13 November 1623. http://diglib.hab.de/mss/ed000143/start.htm?image=00230, 5 May 1636. http://diglib.hab.de/mss/ed000143/start.htm?image=00203, 11 and 23 March 1636. http://diglib.hab.de/mss/ed000209/start.htm?image=00622, 23 June 1635.

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Hermann Weinsberg also admitted to being obsessed with honour and reputation. He explains the emotions he felt in some detail: By nature I am disposed to gentleness . . . but when someone opposes me and I don’t get my way (whether it be people or business) I get very angry inside. Yet anger soon passes. Also I can readily conceal my anger and with the first flush I am able to tame it and tolerate it. I can ruminate on a thing for a long time, yet when one offers a reconciliation, I happily make peace and readily forgive my opponents and enemies . . . Peace pleases me without measure. Since I cannot reconcile without some repugnance, I avoid criticizing anyone lightly. I get angry and quite affected by the affair and therefore hate, avoid and counsel against quarrels, disputes, lawsuits and punch ups . . . If someone insulted or dishonoured me I swear secretly alone when first angered, but rarely in public.121

It is important to recall that, at thirty-three, this was age-appropriate behaviour. As a student Hermann had been involved in bouts of masculine bravado. As an adult he never hit a man, except Brussler, the local barber, which he justified because Brussler was a wife-beater: ‘Because I was not at fault my blood boiled.’122 Nonetheless, Hermann’s behaviour was deemed inappropriate for a patrician and he was censured by his fellow city councillors. ***

The nuclear family unit was idealised as the best defence against the uncertainties of fortune. One of the earliest works of humanism, Leon Battista Alberti’s Quattro libri della famiglia, written in the 1430s, provided a model for the organisation and conduct of the nuclear family. It was much copied in later centuries throughout Europe. Danger was everywhere. ‘The arms of the enemy are not just steel and arrows, but protectors, contacts, opportunism, craftiness, dissimulation, by which they can harm us.’123 Counter-operations needed to be conducted with discipline, avoiding irrational hatred, a ‘poison’ that would bring ruin. Bartholomäus Sastrow counselled that members ‘should not lightly insult anyone and should not be compelled to do harm or violence to another’.124 The memoirs left by Charles Castel described the legacy of the Wars of Religion in France, which left his family assailed by unreconciled enemies: ‘father was greatly troubled after the civil wars by lawsuits which were provoked by his neighbours jealous of his glory, who wished to take advantage of his ignorance . . . Nevertheless, God permitted us to ruin them.’125 Castel 121 122

123 124 125

Das Buch Weinsberg, I, p. 354. www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de/Edition/Liber_Iuventutis/Liber_Iuventutis.htm, 20 July 1563. Watkins, Family in Renaissance Florence, p. 305. Mohnike (ed.), Sastrowen, p. 71. Drouet, ‘Une famille de gentilshommes’, 18.

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gloated on the victory over a dozen other families and the acquisition of their property. The threats to family from within were as significant as those from without. In the pre-industrial West family relations were shaped by emotion and material interest. Marriage should ideally be for love but it above all fulfilled the purpose of economic and social reproduction. Property was transmitted and social mobility sanctified by marriage. Material and affective relations were linked for, as David Sabean has pointed out, ‘The way that property is held gives shape to feelings between family members, territorializes emotions, establishes goals and ambitions, and gives a sense of dependence and independence.’126 Montaigne dedicated an essay to the problem, warning that those parents ‘who exploit their wills as sticks and carrots to punish or reward every action of those who may claim an interest in the inheritance’ were creating future grievances.127 Since family unity necessitated the sacrifice of individuals’ desires, tension was inevitable.128 The gap between the ideal and reality of family life is probably best captured in the diary of Hermann Weinsberg, whose purpose in writing was to establish a set of best practices for the paterfamilias, the Hausvater, in running the household. During his lifetime Hermann wrote a lot about the pettiness of family life and the fraught task of making up. Hermann first had problems with one of his brothers-in-law, who was eventually bought off and separated from Hermann’s sister. But Hermann’s nephew and favoured heir proved to be an even more difficult character. The root of the dissension in the household was caused by Hermann’s desire to keep control of the family patrimony and his siblings’ desire for independence. Like many elite German families, the Weinsberg household lived in a common household, or Kondominium, in order to prevent the division of the patrimony. But by 1578 communal living was causing tensions: ‘the women especially complain and whine, are grasping and stingy, acting at the table either angrily or remaining completely silent’.129 ‘My sister, Catherine, when she gets angry gets red in the face . . . but although intolerant she is kind hearted. But her husband is a choleric, angry, impetuous and violent man. They say he has Saint Vitus’ dance . . . My brother also wants to fight when we get angry.’130 He consoled 126

127 128

129

130

‘Young Bees in an Empty Hive: Relations between Brothers-in-Law in a South German Village around 1800’, in H. Medick and D. Sabean (eds.), Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 171–2. Essays, p. 446. J. Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France 1570–1715 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 73. www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de/Edition/Liber_Senectutis/Liber_Senectutis.htm, 23 October 1578. Ibid., 21 November 1578.

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himself with the thought that ‘one finds in the holy scriptures, how parents and children, brothers and sisters, young and old, servants and maids clash’.131 By 1581 the situation had become intolerable and they agreed to divide the inheritance. Hermann drew up a new will. He recorded the peace at some length in his diary thus: all kindred, members of the house and friends of the Weinsberg will be diligently requested and summoned to peace, unity and friendship between them . . . you shall have love and bear goodwill to each other. Everyone shall cherish and behave towards the other as they would be cherished and have done to them. What is more sweet, loving and satisfying than unity among friends, kin and commensals . . . .What honour, joy or utility does envy bring? . . . How evil is it when the bonds that build the bulwark are shattered.

But peace proved easier to keep than to make: The smallest slight . . . the smallest injury are not treated accordingly and tolerated . . . So towards each other give up all threats, ill-will, hatred, anger, dishonesty, divisions, faction, gossip and insult . . . Everyone agrees not to make another angry, speak not a hateful thing nor open an old wound in the street, in company, or during gatherings, nor utter any provocative word . . . We will henceforth be happy and joyful. I will be your friend and will remain so and do what I must, and be loving towards you. If there is anger which cannot be stilled retire until matters improve.132

A year later, however, Hermann write a long passage to the diary which set out his concerns about the leadership of the family after his death.133 These were well founded. Following his death in 1596 the family fell out definitively over the inheritance: Hermann’s brother committed suicide and the nephew murdered his aunt. Feuds were often the result of inheritance disputes that pitted cousins, brothers-in-law and stepchildren in a struggle over the rightful portion. The Cronaca written by Soldoniero Strassoldo is a detailed account of a family falling out during the Italian Wars. However, the Cronaca has wider significance because it has much to say about enmity on several different levels. It is a good means with which to explore the relationship between the family and the political, since it demonstrates how different layers of enmity are interrelated and feed each other. There was enmity within a family, there were enmities between families, and these were crowned by political divisions, in this case between the pro-Venetians and pro-imperialists who dominated Friuli. 131 132 133

Ibid., fo. 103. Ibid., 24 February 1581. Ibid., 3 February 1582.

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The major event in the chronicle was the murder on 4 October 1561 of the writer’s dear brother Frederigo by their cousin Zuan Iosefo. Soldoniero and Frederigo had been wards of their uncle since 1533. They claimed to have been defrauded by him and took him to court. The murder was the culmination of a series of violent clashes over property. The chronicle recounts Soldoniero’s attempts to get justice for his brother and, once their cousin had been outlawed, his attempts to take revenge. The killing forced Soldoniero to marry. When his brother was alive, he had agreed to remain unmarried in order to protect the integrity of the inheritance: seeing that my only nephew Gian Francesco, son of my dead brother, was born a gentleman he could never have not taken honourable revenge for the murder of his father, that being the case it would be more than certain that he would be outlawed from this place and imperial jurisdiction and while he was in exile I would be entrusted and empowered, but if I was not able to marry or have children . . . the inheritance would go to my enemies.134

It was the marriage and the birth of Soldoniero’s sons and heirs that permitted his nephew, Gian Francesco, to take revenge in Venice in July 1575. The chronicle operated as a synopsis of the case, whose full details were to be found in the lawsuits, judgments and peace deals in the family archive. So we read that Gian Francesco attacked Zuan Iosefo, lopping off his right hand and giving him twelve wounds in the head, ‘as you can see from the investigation against him’.135 A peace deal was brokered by the Venetians with the surviving cousin, Bernardino, and ‘all of his dependents and all of ours’. ‘God permit that charity and peace continued between us’, wrote Soldoniero. What did the experience teach him? Firstly, that the peace was nothing but a truce. Divisions were ‘today more than ever apparent’. In 1603 Bernardino ‘litigated with me over the mill at Chiarmazia and because of the wheat there, in a guise of venomous serpent, he shed his skin, haughtily not wishing to confess nor do little to conform to the commands of the holy church, just like one who when alive showed little faith and a lack of charity’. When Bernardino died, it gave Soldoniero great satisfaction that there was no one to give him the customary send-off, being ‘buried in our communal and ancient tomb with few honours behind the traitor Zuan Iosefo his brother’.136 Secondly, the chronicle also tells us how the Venetian state exploited family division. The Strassoldo had traditionally been anti-Venetian and participated in patriotic attacks against those who sought to turn the homeland into a ‘new colony’ of the Venetian Empire. But revenge could not be carried out without legal sanction. Soldoniero learned to trust the Venetian state and its organs of 134 135 136

Degani (ed.), Cronaca, p. 50. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 68–9.

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justice because, so long as he followed the rules and paid his money, it permitted him to pursue vendetta. He was much more scathing about the capi of the local factions. He made it clear to his descendants that they should avoid them: ‘I order my heirs . . . not to have dealings with or get involved with the great Savorgnan [family], in order for our house to get on.’137 Thirdly, the vendetta taught him that family consisted only of the nuclear unit. When Soldoniero talked to his descendants of ‘casa nostra’, he meant the nuclear household and not the noble house of Strassoldo. Sons and nephews were exhorted ‘to remain and live in unity’ and those who upset it were to be disinherited. ***

The ways in which affective relations were reshaped by the state are even more pronounced in the four-volume diary kept by the Bolognese aristocrat Giovan Paolo Pepoli from 1691 until his death in 1738. It began as a traditional register of public events relating to the lineage but evolved into a more confessional diary that recounted his private feelings. The diary is therefore an important record of the ways in which the social environment can change relatively rapidly. The first two volumes covering the decades either side of 1700 describe a world in which the Pepoli clan, which consisted of three distinct lines of cousins, operated together as a political unit in competition with the papal regime and against other hostile families.138 The frequent fallings out between the cousins over communal property were, by necessity, patched up. When Giovan Paolo talked about ‘the Pepoli’ he meant the whole clan and not the nuclear family. Solidarity was a manifested in pro-imperial sentiments and feuding, which was still a feature of Bolognese life in the decades either side of 1700. One episode will suffice to illustrate the character of local politics. At Carnival in 1713 our diarist was involved in a coach crash. When Giovan Paolo failed to get a response from Gioseffo Malvezzi, the occupant in the other carriage, he cancelled all his public engagements and visits, ‘so that I was obliged to do him no discourtesy nor to show that I had any grievance with him’.139 Giovan Paolo was a pupil of the scienza cavalleresca; he would have nothing to do with illegal duelling and planned a ‘chance’ encounter. On 10 February he ventured out ‘with the intention not of searching for Signore Gioseffo Malvezzi . . . but to have my satisfaction if I accidentally came across him’. Having scoured the town, Giovan Paolo picked up the trail of his enemy in a bookshop and followed him. But Malvezzi was accompanied: ‘I was not 137 138 139

Ibid., p. 12. For this and following: Angelozzi and Casanova, La nobilità disciplinata, pp. 341–58. For this and following: ASB, Archivio Pepoli, 892, 112v–119v.

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happy with attacking him with all these companions.’ Finally, he managed to get between his target and the others and induced Malvezzi to fight. The fighting was carefully choreographed to avoid bloodshed. No one else joined in and the fight was soon broken up. And the choreography continued when both men retired to a convent – laws of refuge still prevailed in Bologna – in order to allow the arbitrators to work on an accommodation. This was not arduous: ‘there having been always good relations between the house of Malvezzi and mine’. What is most significant about this otherwise banal dispute was the manner in which Giovan Paolo turned a private affair into a matter of public record. He politicised this trivial matter by using it to differentiate friend and foe. He drew up a list of all those who came to visit him in the convent. The list was divided into three sections: the names of those who had come to pledge their support in person (108 names); those who had not come but who had a legitimate excuse (31); and finally those who had stayed away and provided no excuse (111). The diary served the purpose of creating a record of friends and enemies. ‘Here follows the others who had no excuse at all not come, and to make a memorial of it.’140 Although the violence that had plagued Bologna had been brought under control by 1700, the underlying causes of that violence remained. Trust was at a premium. Private disputes were matters of public interest and the line between the public and the private remained blurred. This changed over the next decade. Volume three of the diary is missing, but volume four, which begins in 1722, is very different in tone to its predecessors. It is less a register of public events than a long confession about divisions within the family. Firstly, there were tensions in the nuclear family. These were longstanding but go unmentioned in the earlier volumes. In volume four Giovan Paolo finally admitted to having long been preoccupied by the ‘infinite disputes’ between his two younger brothers. He now used the diary as a means to express his anxiety at some length. He could not fathom their conduct towards each other: why did they act like ‘enemies towards their own, but outside the house were friends with everybody’?141 The language which he used to describe the fallout was political. His brother, Francesco, displayed an attitude that was ‘despotic’ and ‘unjust’. Matters came to a head when Francesco announced his intention to marry against Giovan Paolo’s wishes. When Francesco brought his bride home ‘she acted contrary to the wishes of everyone’. Things went from bad to worse: ‘I really believed that my heart was being torn apart, and I imagined that this was the cross that God had given me.’ ‘I showed my disapproval and was reserved and showed that I do not care for her behaviour, though I could do nothing to stop it.’142 The wife’s desire for privacy was interpreted as a sign of contempt. 140 141 142

Ibid., 119v. ASB, Archivio Pepoli, 893, fo. 2. Ibid., fo. 10.

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Due to the unflattering portrait he painted of his brother, Giovan Paolo felt it necessary to write about himself, ‘so as not to be deceived by self-love’.143 He admitted that as a youth he was ‘full of fire and violence’. He regretted his involvement in factional violence. He had changed as a person and the writing style changed accordingly. Unfortunately, his other brother, Carlo Filippo, did not. He continued to behave like the Pepoli of old. He ‘became familiar with the barons of the region, who lived on violence with their assassins’.144 In 1717 he abducted a notary’s wife and had the unfortunate husband assassinated. Giovan Paolo had to pay the case off. But Carlo, ‘accompanied by a hundred villains’, was then outlawed for a ‘thousand violent acts in the Romagna, in the Ferrarese and in Bologna’. Giovan Paolo did not hide his contempt: ‘Such brutish behaviour produces bad effects . . . No correction, no prayers, no offers, had ever served to enlighten him, to persuade him, to turn him away from such a life.’145 But it was not only the siblings who fell out. The collateral lines of the Pepoli were at loggerheads, causing their public front to fissure. By 1731, ‘There was no intelligence, on the contrary there was a positive quarrel between the marquis Antonio Pepoli and between us brothers for the great mistreatment [done] by him to us.’146 Trivial disagreements unleashed deep antipathies. The marquis had a ‘screw loose, and even if he did not have a malignant heart he believed that everything revolved around him . . . and wanted to be considered by everyone in the lineage’.147 Giovan Paolo refused Jesuit attempts to make peace: ‘I will remain obstinately indifferent to the marquis, not wishing to have anything to do with him, other than that to which any community is obliged.’148 Every petty disagreement was interpreted as a sign of hostility. Giovan Paolo stopped going to family weddings and when Antonio died in 1735 he remembered ‘all the wrongs [the deceased] had done to him’.149 The change in the diary from 1713 to 1722 was not a consequence of changes within the internal family dynamic – these internal tensions had existed all along – nor due to the fact that Giovan Paolo was becoming older and wiser, although this may have been a contributory factor. The fact that Giovan Paolo first felt it necessary or was able to confess his feelings in the 1720s was closely related to the changing political environment. The first two volumes of the diary were a register of events. Affective relations in the decades around 1700 were subject to political considerations. The diary in these years operates a form of self-censorship, reflecting the demands of family discipline in its struggle against 143 144 145 146 147 148 149

Ibid., 12v. Ibid., fos. 13v–15v. Ibid., fo, 49. ASB, Archivio Pepoli, 894, 8v. Ibid., fo. 10. Ibid. Ibid., 33v.

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other families and against the state, which was neither trustworthy nor legitimate. The Spanish War of Succession proved to be the last hope of patriots for emancipation from papal rule. Carlo Filippo’s resort to self-help and violence was not due to an absence of control but politically motivated – he was heavily involved in pro-imperial intrigue. Smuggling, the employment of bravi and frequent recourse to violence were not signs of a criminal personality but manifestations of resistance to the papal state and its agents. But Carlo Filippo was isolated and exposed to justice because during the 1720s most Bolognese made their peace with the regime. Giovan Paolo, too, recognised the legitimacy of the state and his subjection. Acts which had once been signifiers of ‘aristocratic liberty’ were now interpreted as criminal behaviour. In doing so he liberated himself in other ways. He was no longer constrained by traditional considerations and the burdens they placed on self-expression. From 1722 he began to place himself and his family in relation to the new order. Henceforth, he was able to write with honesty. The actions of his brothers and cousin were no longer justified but condemned as an embarrassment. ***

There are good reasons for seeing Giovan Paolo Pepoli as representative of elite social change more generally. His diary demonstrates how and why state and society came to be respected and valued, sentiments that could not be imposed but rather were the product of experience and reflection. Social change in the seventeenth century was not an unconscious or top-down process but related to the individual coming to terms with the problems created by civil conflict and division. One of the keywords of modernity is indifference. This emotion is impossible in communities where affective relations are politicised – for Giovan Paolo in the early 1700s there were only lists of friends and enemies. Indifference, which involves emotional distancing, is a quality intrinsic to the functioning of society. Giovan Paolo learned how to put his enmities in the context of society; he learned how to relativise them. One technique that permitted many of our writers to do so was stoicism. But Giovan Paolo and others did not need to belong to a philosophical school in order to understand the dangers of the cult of individual honour, the benefits of social order, the role of the state in guaranteeing it and the contribution that they might make to its maintenance. The dramatic decline of violence in Bologna in the second quarter of the eighteenth century was a consequence of this conscious realisation, a change that was already well advanced in other parts of Europe. In demonstrating this, this chapter has demonstrated the benefits of comparative history. The civil conflict experienced by our diarists was broadly similar and the lessons learned refracted through a shared humanist education. The following chapter demonstrates one significant area of contrast.

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13 Enmity and Sacred Space

In 1537 the Serenissima established a special court and officials to police Venetian churches, where disorder had become a serious problem. Serious violence was brought under control during the early decades of the seventeenth century. But, as the diary of Pietro Gradenigo records, the trouble returned at the dawn of the Enlightenment: April 1748: August 1751: February 1752: July 1752: January 1754: March 1754: August 1755:

San Barnaba closed because of the spilling of blood San Girolamo closed following a punch-up between rival plebeian factions a young woman murdered in Santa Ternita a master of the Arsenal mortally wounded in San Zaccaria and two officers fought a duel in San Simon a Greek killed while leaving San Francesco at the Feast of the Annunciation a priest was stabbed at the entrance to Santa Maria as the Host was being raised a soldier is assassinated by a shot fired from the belltower of Santa Maria Formosa.1

We should caution against dismissing these events as peculiar to a Republic fallen into decadence and decline. Murder committed in churches continued to be tolerated in eighteenth-century France. On 6 January 1767, for example, during Mass in the Capucins on the Ile-de-Ré, Prosper de la Motte Gerard, major in the regiment Royal-Comtois, murdered a certain Massé servant.2 The church was closed for purification for four days, but otherwise the sacrilege did little to harm the major’s career. Although known for his haughtiness, he nevertheless ‘acquired the esteem of the officers of the regiment’ and was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1769.3 Churches were still embroiled in feuds. Following his retirement from royal service in 1730, André-Alexandre 1 2

3

‘Notatorii di Pietro Gradenigo’, Biblioteca Museo Correr, Gradenigo-Dolfin, 67.I–III. Dr Atgier, ‘Notice historique sur l’ancien Hôtel-Dieu de St-Martin de Ré’, Recueil des actes de la commission ds arts et monuments de la Charente-Maritime, 18 (1908), 339. A. de Saint-Mauris de Montbarey, Mémoires autographes de M. le prince de Montbarey, 3 vols. (Paris, 1826–7), II, p. 72.

405

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Laurens, sieur de la Barde du Villars, kept a journal, ‘which must remain a secret among my children’, in which he detailed the ‘open war’ waged against him by the sieur de Laroche, curé of Moussac in Poitou.4 La Barde du Villars, a former cavalry officer and diplomat, invested the profits of office into buying the fief of Moussac, provoking a lawsuit from 1738 to 1753 over possession of the lord’s pew. The curé complained that la Barde du Villars was a mere commoner and questioned why he did not pay the taille like the other peasants. La Barde left a list of twenty ‘small affronts given by the sieur Laroche, curé of Moussac, besides stirring up (émotion) the whole parish against me’.5 In 1745, for example, the curé removed his church pew, hunted on his lands without permission, conspired to poison him and ‘by malice had buried under the pedestal of the altar of the virgin a carpenter called Plantaude, because my pew faced it’.6 Certainly, the rise of political stability in the eighteenth century had reduced the capacity of imbroglios over sacred space to escalate, but the potential for politicised violence to get out of hand can be seen in the context of colonial Ireland. In 1775 the ‘Whiteboy’ agrarian protest movement, which was characterised by a vendetta against landlords, became embroiled in a private dispute over church space at Newtownbarry (Wexford) contested between the Ralphs and the Dempseys. Dempsey took advantage of his connections to the ‘Whiteboys’ to take revenge on his enemy and one night two of them entered the Ralph house and cut off Mrs Ralph’s ears. Although the ‘Whiteboys’ were apprehended and later hanged, Dempsey seems to have remained untouched.7 Churches are not normally associated with violence. They were, after all, designed for worship. But because in most communities they were the preeminent site for the display of social capital, they were theatres of conflict. For this reason, sacrilege was not necessarily a heinous crime. As an eighteenthcentury French jurist explained: ‘In our customs (moeurs) punishment is discretionary. When a crime is committed in a church or in a cemetery it pertains to sacrilege, but punishment depends on the circumstances and the quality of the persons.’8 Whereas its rival, the tavern, was an open space and regulated by codes designed to foster sociability and good company, churches were the environment in which ‘the hierarchy of honour and respect was most visibly represented and insisted upon’.9 The introduction of pews and fixed 4

5

6 7 8 9

Deliquet, Commandant, ‘Un gentilhomme poitevin au XVIIIe siècle, Laurens du Villars, seigneur des Roches de Moussac-sur-Vienne’, Bulletin de la Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 3rd series, 1 (1909), 565–611. Ibid., 587. Ibid., 588. The Gentleman’s Magazine, 64, part 2 (1794), 1059. Dareau, Traité, p. 89. S. Hindle, ‘Custom Festival and Protest in Early Modern England: The Little Budworth Wakes, St. Peter’s Day, 1596’, Rural History, 6 (1995), 169.

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seating in the fifteenth century reduced fluidity and established proprietorial rights over space. Ideally, the ordering of pews should have fixed social hierarchy with the most eminent members of the congregation sitting in the most prominent seats, but the social and demographic changes of the sixteenth century led to an explosion of contests over seating arrangements. Catherine Wright’s study of 691 English pew disputes demonstrates that litigation rose steeply from the 1590s and peaked in the 1630s, as tensions caused by social and economic dislocation were played out on the church paving.10 The problems created by segregation were universal. A 1580 Saxon church ordinance noted ‘the common complaints received, that here and there where pews are built, the people are thereby hindered either from seeing the preacher in the chancel, or the altar when the holy sacrament is distributed’.11 In Germany a significant corpus of jurisprudence, the Ius Subselliorum Templorum, was the consequence of the flood of litigation that ensued over these signifiers of status.12 Regulations had to be introduced to prevent the construction of elaborate pews that blocked the view and to police the lively trade in pews, the purchase of which by undesirables threatened traditional hierarchy. Pew disputes were the most conspicuous cause of enmity in sacred space, but they were not the only one, since churches were not simply devotional spaces, but public buildings with multifarious uses that made them the main theatre for social interactions of all sorts. In Italy churches were routinely used for business deals and settling lawsuits. The forecourt of the chiesa della Pace in Naples, a regular meeting place for lawyers and their clients, was symbolic, inclining the parties to peace.13 In France, village assemblies took place after Sunday Mass.14 Notaries might set up shop in a church or cemetery when they arrived in a village to finalise a contract. They remained the principal defensive structure in most villages.15 In Germany Wehrkirche surrounded by curtain walls enclosing the cemetery were not uncommon, permitting villagers and their animals to take shelter, though they were useless against modern artillery as the massacre of 160 peasants at Kalterherberg in the Eifel mountains by marauding mercenaries in 1648 shows.16 10

11

12

13 14 15

16

C. Wright, ‘The Spatial Ordering of Community in English Church Seating, c.1550-1700’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick (2002). R. Wex, Ordnung und Unfriede: Raumprobleme des protestantischen Kirchenbaus im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert in Deutschland (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1984), p. 12. T. Weller, ‘Ius Subselliorum Templorum: Kirchenstuhlstreitigkeiten in der frühneitzlichen Stadt zwischen symbolischer Praxis und Recht’, in C. Dartmann, M. Füssel and S. Rüther (eds.), Raum und Konflikt: Zur symbolischen Konstituierung gesellschaftlicher Ordnung in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Münster: Rhema, 2004). Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 221. Follain, Le village, p. 233. For their involvement in feuds: Schertlin von Burtenbach, p. 119; H. Ruckgaber, Geschichte der Frei- und Reichstadt Rottweil, 2 vols. (Rottweil am Neckar, 1835–8), II, p. 196. http://strauch-eifel.de/portal/fileadmin/generalversammlung_2012.pdf.

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They remained the principal source of news for most people. The crying of debts, announcements of foreclosure and auctions were, however, potentially disruptive. Tilman Iserenheuft, for example, was confronted by a bookseller in Antwerp Cathedral in 1566, demanding payment for a copy of Erasmus’ Colloquies; it provoked a bloody combat. The bookseller was obviously expecting trouble because he was accompanied by armed friends and tried to surprise Tilman during Mass.17 Canon Michel Bernard of Le Puy-en-Velay was so irritated by the demand for 10 livres at the end of Mass in the cathedral in 1661 that he punched his creditor, a fellow canon.18 An attempt to collect a debt at the altar of San Geminiano in Modena during Mass in June 1633 ended up with the creditor being shot dead.19 In England, too, churches were places for settling debts. At Stockleigh Pomeroy in Devon creditors were paid at the door of the parish church, where the community could stand witness.20 The abolition of asylum rendered them the ideal place for making an arrest. The constables of Nuova in the Ferrarese decided to lay their hands on the dangerous faction leader and bandit Lodovico Rasponi in 1569 because of the ‘concourse of people’ expected at the feast of San Apollinare.21 The frequent territorial disputes that characterised the Holy Roman Empire required armed incursions into hostile territories in order to make arrests, a tactic that often amounted to little more than legalised hostage-taking. The small town of Zeil mobilised 150 officers to cross into the neighbouring territory of Eltmann in 1569 and arrest two men in the local church, including the priest.22 Charles Stourton tricked his enemy William Hartgill in 1557 into coming to the church at Kilmington on the promise of the payment of money he owed, whereupon he seized Hartgill and took him to his house at Bonham, where two justices of the peace signed a warrant for his removal to gaol the next day.23 The murder of Thomas ap John ap Merideth in Abderaron church, county of Carmarthen, in one of the feuds that characterised late Tudor Wales, exposed the partiality of local justice: one side complained of riotous assembly; the other of resistance to law enforcement.24 The violent clashes that attended the 1601 parliamentary 17 18 19 20 21 22

23

24

www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de/Edition/Liber_Iuventutis/Liber_Iuventutis.htm, 518v. AD Haute Garonne 2 B 22395. Spaccini, Cronaca, VI, p. 480. ‘Diary and Account Book of Robert Roberts’, p. 44. Ricci (ed.), Cronache, p. 124. Gebhardt and Hörner (eds.), Reichskammergericht, IX, no. 3560 and 3283; https://de .wikipedia.org/wiki/Herren_von_Wallbrunn#Brudermord. During the night both prisoners were beaten unconscious, and when taken to Stourton’s chief residence and found to be still alive they had their throats cut in Stourton’s presence by one of his servants. Stourton was hanged for his treachery: www .historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1509-1558/member/hartgill-%28hargyll%29william-1493–1557. Acts of the Privy Council of England: vol. 20, 1590–1591, ed. J. Roche Dasent (London, 1900), p. 131.

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elections in Wrexham did not spare the local church, for this was where the writ of summons was proclaimed. Sir John Salusbury complained that the opposing faction and their complices, by a most wilful and malicious assault and affray committed against me by the said Sir Richard Trevor and his crew, to bereave me of my life even in the churchyard at the instant when the writ of summons was ready to be proclaimed and executed by the sheriff sitting in Court. For they assembled a warlike and riotous company of disordered persons out of several foreign counties, with pikes, halberds, privy coats and shot.25

The disorders that arose from the serving of writs and summons on the Lord’s Day in England led to its discontinuance in the seventeenth century.26 We have already traced the complications caused in Italy by the Council of Trent’s reassertion of asylum. Its entanglement with the banditry problem had gruesome consequences: in 1660 it was reported that a rural militiaman (corporale di campagna) severed the heads of three refugees in the church at Marano.27 In the same year in Naples a friar who attempted to prevent the pursuit of a man into the Carmines – ‘this is a place of immunity warning them to sheathe their swords’ – was run through and killed as the pursuers hurtled into the interior of the church.28 This was not a problem confined to ‘backward’ southern Italy. In 1642 Notre-Dame de Paris had to be shut when a man was murdered, having been initially assaulted by three enemies on the Pont Saint Michel; he vainly took refuge in the cathedral ‘hoping to find safety for his life in such a holy place’.29 But the problem was more widespread in Italy. Despite the efforts of the Counter-Reformation to more strictly separate monasteries and convents from the world, they continued to provide accommodation for lay patrons, which meant that they were not immune from the factional politics that plagued cities such as Bologna and Naples. Don Francesco d’Aragona was murdered in July 1660 as he entered the monastery where he lived in Naples and three years later the enemies of a lawyer smashed down the dormitory of San Leonardo at Chiaia in order to murder him.30 In Bologna monasteries were still being used as safe houses by rival factions as late as 1725.31 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, XI, p. 445. R. Gough, The History of Myddle, ed. David Hey (Penguin: London, 1981), p. 177. Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 6. Ibid., I, p. 12. Recit veritable de ce qui s’est fait & passé à la Benediction & Ceremonie de l’Eglise de Nostre Dame de Paris, à cause d’un meurtre qui s’y est commis le vingt-un iesme iour de Decembre 1642 (Paris, 1642). Onofrio, Giornali, I, pp. 42–3, 162. ASB Archivio Pepoli 893, fo. 43, 8 June 1725.

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It was difficult to prevent people entering church with weapons they were lawfully entitled to carry. Sir Thomas Lunsford fired his pistol at his enemy’s coach outside East Hoathly church after Sunday morning service. The incident was regarded as attempted murder, but Lunsford enjoyed protection: he escaped from Newgate prison in 1634 and fled abroad; his fine and sentence of outlawry were remitted five years later.32 German town ordinances regularly tried to ban the carrying of weapons, but the frequency with which these were issued shows that they were largely ignored and until the end of the Thirty Years’ War the carrying of weapons into church was routine in Germany.33 In January 1618 Adam Grule, the son of a Saxon magistrate, killed his brother-inlaw during the sermon and fled. The kin were compensated and Adam returned to succeed to his father’s office.34 Although disorder inside sacred space was frequent in England and Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, serious incidents such as these were relatively rare. One reason for this was the absence of urban factions. Kiel church was not safe during the troubles of the 1580s, but this was not a typical German experience.35 In the European league table of church murders, Italy takes the title, or scudetto, with France in a distant second place. Precise figures are hard to compute, but victims certainly ran into the hundreds in Italy and the dozens in France.36 In Italy churches were the sites of some major battles: in the Carmines of Modena in 1601 following vespers a fight was followed ‘by the women screaming and the unsheathing or more than 200 swords’; in 1616 ‘several’ men, including an abbot, were killed in a battle that raged in and around the church at Valmareno north of Treviso; the following year a battle raged between nineteen men at the entrance to the episcopal palace in Brescia; a newsletter reported that in one incident in 1695 eight died in a church in Brescia following a bride’s refusal to take her vows in a forced marriage.37 This was in spite of the attempts to tighten security. At Breganze a warden had been appointed in 1499 to stop trouble, but he did little good and the church was closed in 1547 with orders from the Doge to the Captain of Vicenza to punish malefactors. The problem persisted, however, 32

33 34

35 36

37

B. Morgan, ‘Lunsford, Sir Thomas’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/17197. Rieder, ‘Totschlagsühnen’, 23. W. Eckarths, CHRONICA Oder Historische Beschreibung Des Dorffes Herwigsdorff (1737), Anno 1618. den 28. Jan. Stern (ed.), ‘Chronicon’, 639. In addition to Carroll, Blood and Violence, pp. 67–81, see G. de la Thaumassière, Histoire de Berry (Paris, 1689), p. 333; R. Couffon, ‘La Confrérie de Saint-Yves à Paris et sa chapelle’, Société d’émulation des Côtes du Nord, 64 (1932), 43; B. de Montégut (ed.), Journal historique de Pierre de Jarrige (Angoulême, 1868), p. 20; www.chateau-de-latouche.com/index.php?nav=historie&lang=fr. Spaccini, Cronaca, I, p. 448; Molimenti, Banditi, pp. 113–14; Guerrini (ed.), Le cronache bresciane, IV, p. 105; Confuorto, Giornali, II, p. 182.

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and in September 1666 the bishop of Padua ordered the suspension of Mass at Molvena and Breganze because guns were let off in church.38 It was not simply a matter of unruly nobles. In Vicenza guild meetings in churches posed a problem because the artisans were armed. In Padua students were in the habit of taking arms into church with unhappy consequences.39 Italian exceptionalism was commented upon. In 1612 Giorgio Pagliari dal Bosco lamented the custom of striking at an enemy during the elevation of the Host: ‘in the kingdom [of Naples], in Abruzzo, the Marche and Romagna the most cruel vendetta and murders take place in churches every day’.40 Giovanni Spaccini complained that the firing of an arquebus in a church in Parma ‘bothered no one, it was as if it were nothing’.41 When Andrea Oriole was seriously wounded in Naples in 1672, causing the singing of Mass to be suspended, it was a signifier of Italian decadence: ‘consider whether in the lands of the Turk such shamefulness could happen as in the lands of the Christians’.42 The reasons why Italian, and to a lesser extent French, churches were so frequently scenes of violence requires further investigation. The comparisons and contrasts between different regions and states help to illuminate and explain the different forms and trajectories taken by enmity. In both France and Italy churches were sites for politicised violence. The remainder of this chapter considers the role of assassination, patrimonialism and anticlericalism mainly in the French and Italian context, and then broadens to explore sacred space as a theatre for staging social conflict across Europe. ***

The Italian practice of killing in churches has been remarked upon since Burckhardt: ‘So well was the tyrant guarded that it was almost impossible to lay hands upon him elsewhere than at solemn services; and on no other occasion was the whole family to be found assembled together.’43 In the fifteenth century there were attacks on the Sforza, Visconti and Medici. But the spread of the practice in the sixteenth century, which targeted enemies across the social spectrum, has been largely ignored. It was a consequence of the political violence generated by the Italian Wars. The following list of second-tier victims is not exhaustive: 1493: 1510: 38 39

40 41 42 43

Antonio Malvezzi (San Francesco, Cesena) Giberto Rangoni (Santo Agostino, Modena)

Zanazzo, ‘Bravi e signorotti’, 5 (1964), 101. Guerrini (ed.), Le cronache bresciane, IV, p. 326; ASV Consiglio dei Dieci, Criminale, 105, 26 March 1688. Osservationi sopra i primi cinque libri degli annali di Cornelio Tacito (Milan, 1612), p. 71. Spaccini, Cronaca, V, p. 339. Onofrio, Giornali, III, p. 71. J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 54.

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412 1517: 1518: 1520: 1536: 1540: 1547: 1559:

comparisons Giovanni Gozzadini (Reggio Cathedral) Antonio Savorgnan (Villach Cathedral) Francesco Fontanella and Battista Malguzzi (San Prospero, Reggio) Agostino Ruboli (Basilica Orsiana, Ravenna – unsuccessful) Lorenzo Zannoni (Carmelitani, Modena) Giambattista Codebò (San Pietro, Modena) Niccolò Gallarati (Milan)

Assassination continued to be a feature of the violence that characterised the peace that followed the military campaigning after 1559. Attempts to pacify the factions in Venetian Lombardy, for example, were led by the podestà of Brescia and the faction leaders agreed to hear Mass together at the cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore on Thursday 1 April 1563. Assured of the protection of the Venetian authorities, Achille Brembati refused the offer of an armed guard. When the priest raised the consecrated Host he was shot dead.44 The violence in Brescia was reprised at the end of the century. A petition to the Ten in 1599 complained about the murder of nobleman Locullo Soardo in San Francesco on 3 January. Locullo had just entered the church when ‘a person disguised as a beggar secretly hidden behind the door fired an arquebus and hit his victim in the back’. The assassin was himself shot and killed during his escape.45 In May 1610 the Venetian podestà, Bernardini Ganassoni, who had promised to clean up the town of Salò, was assassinated by contract killers in the town cathedral.46 In December 1617 street fighting in Brescia spilled into the episcopal palace and Sant’Agata; three years later the cathedral archdeacon was shot; in 1625 count Sforza Avogadro was shot by the Martinengo while he heard Mass in the cathedral; in 1628 there was a murder in Santa Giulia in Brescia and another in the convent of Santa Maria dei Padri in Ghedi.47 The modus operandi spread down the social ladder and across northern Italy. The citizens of Castel Goffredo (Mantua) shot their repressive lord as he arrived for Mass in 1569. In May 1585 a Florentine was hanged for killing a priest at the altar.48 During the first half of the seventeenth century churches were also sites of assassination and factional violence in Emilia-Romagna and Modena.49 And the tensions created by the War of Spanish Succession in Piedmont can be seen by the attack of a soldier on a fellow worshipper in the cathedral at Alessandria in 1690 and the revenge killing of a Frenchman as he 44 45 46 47 48 49

Belotti, ‘Sacrilega faida’, 31. ASV, Consiglio dei Dieci, Suppliche, Filze 2, 13 January 1599. See above p. 48. Guerrini (ed.), Le cronache bresciane, IV, pp. 105, 131, 204, 303. Ricci, Cronaca, p. 424. Santi, Secchia Rapita, I, p. 244; Spaccini, Cronaca, II, p. 362; III, p. 111; VI, pp. 103, 109, 438; Rose‚ ‘Homicide in North Italy’, pp. 216, 231.

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left the Franciscans in Turin six years later.50 Naples was largely spared until political violence began to take off from the late 1620s when the Sanfelice and Rocco families launched attacks on each other in the Girolamini and San Lorenzo respectively.51 The cult of assassination spread uncontrollably following the 1647 Revolution, sparing neither women nor children. In March 1664 the thirteen-year-old nephew of the president of the Sacro Regio Consiglio was murdered as he left Santa Maria Angioli, but because of the code of omertà the dying boy remained silent as to the identity of the assassins.52 Church officials were no better: one of the archbishop’s familiari shot dead a fellow archepiscopal official over a gambling debt in Santa Catarina at Formello in 1672.53 The Vargas family, Spanish immigrants whose assimilation into the kingdom was unsettled in the 1650s by mutual accusations of crypto-Judaism with other new Christians, resulting in their investigation by the Inquisition in 1661, fell out with one another in the following decade. In 1672 Don Giovanni Vargas was killed at the door of Santa Chiara by his nephew and two years later there was a firefight in front of the church in which Don Diego was killed.54 The symbolism of killing a tyrant in church has been explored by Carlo Guarienti in his study of the killing of Gozzadini, papal governor of Reggio in 1517.55 The decision of the killers to strike during the elevation of the Host was a claim to legitimacy; they were purifying the body social, which was symbolised by the body of Christ. The fact that Gozzadini was stripped of his clerical habits and his body left on the steps of the altar was also a symbol of resistance to papal tyranny. But the phenomenon was also a function of the ways in which sacred space was on the front line of hostilities. In Brescia the street fighting did not even spare the nunneries.56 On 1 January 1531 the podestà of Vicenza informed the Council of Ten of the enmity between the Trissino and the Capra, ‘a matter which had induced almost the whole city to take up arms, since these are among the principal families’.57 On 3 July he reported that ‘both parties with others from their families and with many armed servants arrived in the cathedral, where the resort to arms was only narrowly avoided’. The podestà summoned the parties to negotiations, where ‘both parties exchanged insults, in such a manner that if I had not separated them and constrained them to silence, a conflict between them would have begun which would have set off 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Mortara Garavelli, ‘Un quaderno di memorie’, 170; Misanders Theatrum Tragicum, II, p. 3. Volpicella (ed.), ‘Aggiunta alli Diurnali’, 157. Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 214. Ibid., III, p. 61. Ibid., III, pp. 65, 149. Confuorto, Giornali, II, p. 243. Il bandito e il governatore (Rome: Viella, 2014), chapter 3. Valseriati, Tra Venezia e l’Impero, p. 53. ASV Consiglio dei Dieci, Dispacci dei rettori, 223, fo. 157.

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the whole city’.58 There were utilitarian reasons why Italy’s growing class of professional hitmen favoured churches for their operations. It took three years of planning to avenge Gozzadini. A priest was employed to spy on their targets, Francesco Fontanella and Battista Malguzzi, who ignored warnings because, in spite of their own experience, they considered themselves safe in church. They were killed as the Host was raised in San Prospero on 19 February 1520.59 Although Italian practices were not replicated to the same extent in the rest of Europe, there are points of comparison. In Germany, Fürwarten, catching one’s enemies on the way to church, was a common ploy, and there are several cases of victims being ‘taken out’ at the church porch or in the cemetery.60 In 1542, for example, Philipp von der Heydt shot and killed Asmus von Zedwitz outside Mißlareuth church in revenge for killing his brother-in-law. Both the king of Bohemia and the Elector of Saxony interceded for him and he was bound over to keep the peace.61 In Cologne in 1632 Johann von Viermund was shot by a fellow officer as he left the Jesuit church and another deadly combat took place outside the city’s cathedral in 1695.62 But it was France that most resembled Italy. Fights and assassinations in and around churches were frequent occurrences during its civil wars. In 1589, the nephew of Chancellor Cheverny, ‘having gone to hear mass in the town was unhappily assassinated in the church [of Lassé], by means of information given by the priest who said the mass’.63 In all likelihood, the perpetrators, partisans of the Catholic League, resented the fact that he had married a Protestant; she pursued the killers for thirteen years, spending 20,000 écus, but they were never brought to justice. The execution in Paris of Charles de Chabannes in 1659 for shooting his cousin outside the Grands Augustines seems to have ended the problem in the capital, but in the south and west of France churches continued to be sites for conducting feuds. At Blévy in the Thimerais a battle between sixteen men, followers of: Charles de Paris, écuyer, sieur de la Noue et Guillaume de Colas, sieur de Baronval . . ., being in dispute over the honorific rights of the church, had 58 59 60 61

62

63

Ibid., 160. G. Panciroli, Storia della città di Reggio, 2 vols. (Reggio, 1846–8), II, pp. 161–2. Reinle, Studien zur Fehdeführung Nichtadliger, p. 268. J. Biedermann, Geschlechts Register der löblichen Ritterschafft im Voigtlande (Kulmbach 1752), CCV. Other examples: Böcker (ed.), Nicolaus Gentzkow, p. 441; ‘Chronik des Hans Krafft’: www.mdsz.thulb.uni-jena.de/sz/search_sz.php?szid=30&personid=alle&placei d=alle&commid=alle, fo. 170r; Misanders Theatrum Tragicum, I, p. 152; Waas (ed.), Chroniken, p. 124; Janssen (ed.), Münsterischen Chroniken, p. 21. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_von_Viermund; Misanders Theatrum Tragicum, II, pp. 26–7. ‘Mémoire de messire Philippe Hurault, comte de Cheverny’, in Collection complète des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de France: vol. 36, ed. M. Petitot and L. Monmerqué (Paris, 1819–29), p. 147.

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several times hit the curé as he performed his office. On Sunday 20 October 1669 each of the disputants gathered several friends armed with swords, pistols and muskets. They began by threatening one another and then came to blows. They fought with ferocity in the church, forcing the congregation to flee . . . the sieur de Baronval was killed on the spot . . . the sieur de Marigny was mortally wounded near the balustrade of the choir. La Houssaye was likewise mortally wounded as well as la Noue, the principal aggressor died eight days later from his wounds.64

The French judicial system was pusillanimous in relation to the social elite and attempts to punish the killers were hampered by the fact that the defence of honour trumped charges of sacrilege. This explains the pardon issued to Bernard de Calmes in 1664 for a murder committed ‘as he left the Church of Notre-Dame de La Garde where he had just heard mass’.65 In the Midi violence was intimately connected, as in Italy, with the struggle for control of local office between factions in the many small towns that characterised the region. At Foix in 1649 an assault on the way to Mass was related to contested consular elections.66 In Bagnères de Bigorre, also in the Pyrenees, a consul was shot by electoral opponents in church in 1653.67 In contrast, political assassination came later to England and never became a widespread practice. It is, however, notable that the 1664 shooting of the regicide Lord John Lisle took place in a Lausanne churchyard. Carried out by Irish soldiers, the operation was planned and executed with a professionalism that demonstrates that the British Isles differed from Europe only in the scale of its political violence. ***

One major factor in accounting for the different levels of violence in sacred space was the role played by the Catholic Church in civic and political life. In Italy and France the clergy were not above embroilment in local feuds and in some respects the Counter-Reformation made matters worse as the laity were determined to resist the expansion of clerical power. The failed assassination of Cardinal Borromeo in Milan Cathedral in 1569 marked a turning point. Borromeo went on to be one of the most significant champions of Catholic reform; the plotters against him in the Order of the Humiliati, an institution closely associated with the civic order in Lombard towns, were vanquished and the order suppressed altogether in 1571. Figure 13.1, commissioned by Milan Cathedral to celebrate Borromeo’s beatification, represents the failed assassination as a miracle. But by the time of its completion in 1610 the zeal displayed by Borromeo was on the wane. 64 65

66 67

‘Chronique de Blévy’, 372. AD Aude, Série B Cours et Juridictions: http://audealaculture.fr/sites/default/files/ Archives/Inventaire%20de%20la%20s%C3%A9rie%20B%20(1–2158).pdf. AD Haute Garonne 2 B 23516; 23169. Ibid., B 743; 2 B 22578.

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Figure 13.1 St Charles miraculously saved from attack, Giovanni Battista della Rovere, c.1602

Genuine reform was being replaced by the requirements of conformity. The Counter-Reformation was a multi-faceted phenomenon. The very high levels of violence experienced by clerics in seventeenth-century Italy were partly a consequence of individual priests standing up to vested interests, aristocratic padroni in particular, and partly fuelled by resentment at the corruption and venality of the church, which reached its peak under the pontificate of Urban VIII. The following is an indicative list of prelates targeted in this political environment: 1613: 1619: 1621: 1649: 1663: 1665: 1669: 1669:

Marcantonio Brandolini, abbot of Nervesa, bandit and padrone, killed by his brother in a shoot-out in a churchyard Archdeacon Chizzola of Brescia Cathedral shot and killed Assassination of Canon Scandiano of Modena Bishop of Castro, murdered on the orders of Ranuccio Farnese, duke of Parma Murder at the altar of a vicar and archpriest in Naples Cathedral Murder of the abbot of Sant’Arpino in Naples Murder of the vicar general of Lecce at the behest of the principe di Cursi Murder of Abbot Cepperelli in Florence

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417

Attempted murder of the bishop of Nicastro Murder of the bishop of Alife, following his embroilment in local politics Murder and decapitation of an abbot in Naples Murder of Canon Tournaquinci in Florence by a paid assassin Attempted shooting of bishop of Nola in the wake of his reform of convents and monasteries

The position of the rural regular clergy was especially precarious, as churches were frequent targets for soldiers, bandits and political factions, forcing priests to carry arms and employ armed guards. Let us take, for example, the diocese of Milan, studied in detail by Natale Perego.68 The policy of the archbishop was inconsistent. In 1596 he forbade clergy to carry weapons and shelter bandits, but this was largely ignored. By 1655, when archbishop Litta licensed firearms so that clerics might protect sacred sites, the problem of parishioners coming to church with weapons had worsened and shoot-outs were a not infrequent occurrence. In 1644, for example, Giovanni Tavola turned up for Easter communion at Biglio, near Lake Como, and was ordered out ‘lest he provoke the Lord’. Tavola was indignant and claimed that the gun was harmless: ‘he had brought it in peace and was using it as a staff’. Witnesses could not see what the fuss was about.69 Across Italy parish priests were embroiled in vendettas. In the Ligurian mountains the parish church and its property were a source of conflict.70 Around Lake Garda priests figured among the faction heads, ordering hits on opponents and harbouring bandits.71 At Vallinfreda in Latium a priest took revenge for the murder of his father, killing the perpetrator in 1659 and then his sons the following year.72 But it was not only in rural backwaters where priests walked in fear. In the 1660s a preacher was murdered in San Francesco di Paola in Florence by leading members of the city’s elite, including the poet and savant Lodovico Adimari, who went on to be an instructor of the scienza cavalleresca in Tuscany’s Accademia dei Nobili.73 In Modena prelates made careers as padroni with the hazards this entailed. The murder of Canon Scandiano in Modena was ‘a business of great consequence . . . they treated him very badly; in addition to the other wounds they almost severed his forehead and then threw him into the canal . . . this disorder is such that it could unleash a civil war given the number of kin belonging to each party’.74 Giovanni Spaccini was unconvinced that the new reformed orders were any better. The palazzo of 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Perego, Homini de mala vità, chapter 6. Ibid., p. 156. Raggio, Faide e parentele, pp. 236–7. Povolo, Zanzanù, pp. 69–96. Forclaz, Borghese, p. 158. www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ludovico-adimari_(Dizionario-Biografico). Spaccini, Cronaca, V, pp. 80–1.

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Aloiso Boschetti, who was involved in a long-running feud with his cousins, was guarded among others by a Carmelite friar, ‘a factious and bloody individual’.75 In the wake of the mid-century agricultural depression, priests were involved in resistance to unscrupulous landlords. They made themselves popular by resisting tax-collectors and using the right of asylum to hide contraband and bandits in their churches. In 1652 the Spanish regime in Milan claimed property belonging to the abbey of Civate and sent troops there under the bargello to take possession. The abbot responded by sending one of his bravi to Milan to assassinate the bargello.76 Clerical violence declined in the north just as it began to take off in the south, where many clerics were involved in the fight against Spanish rule. Francesco Maria Brancaccio, for example, became embroiled in several disputes when he assumed the see of Capaccio in 1627, and in 1632 his guards killed the Spanish governor of Sala forcing him to flee to Rome. His antiSpanish credentials attracted the attention of the Barberini and he was made cardinal the following year, giving him licence to continue his conspiratorial activities.77 Those who stayed behind were subject to reprisals during the violence that swept the kingdom after 1647.78 The protection offered by clerical immunity ensured that the taking of holy orders was a political opportunity as much as a religious vocation. It was the cover used by the patriot Andrea Carratello, the last of whose twenty-three assassinations took place during Good Friday Mass in 1663 of a prominent counter-revolutionary nobleman from Sorrento. Carratello’s subsequent execution was denounced by Louis XIV as an act of judicial murder.79 One of the most infamous of all Italian brigands, Abbot Cesare Riccardi, conducted a guerrilla war against the state and the local aristocracy with the support of the civic elite of Nola. Riccardi and Carratello were not the only clerics to target aristocrats.80 The intensity of the conflict between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities and the rivalry between different religious orders was a recipe for escalation. In June 1684, for example, a dispute over the right to carry the cross at a funeral procession pitted the cathedral canons and regular clergy against the city’s monks and friars. Punches were thrown and servants of the regulars drew their swords and wounded several friars.81 In 1695 rival groups of nuns from the convents of Donna Regina and the Gesù threw stones at each other in a dispute over the building of a new wall.82 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Ibid., VI, pp. 438, 355. Perego, Homini de mala vità, p. 161. www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/francesco-maria-brancaccio/. Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 255; III, pp. 73–4, 239. Onofrio, Giornali, I, pp. 164, 173. Blasiis (ed.), ‘Frammento’, Archivio storico per le province napoletane, 13 (1888), 800. Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 117; Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 124. Confuorto, Giornali, II, p. 178.

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This sort of scandal – stone-throwing was more commonly associated in Italy with plebeian gangs – fired anti-clerical opinion. In May 1677 Vincenzo d’Onofrio reported the stabbing of a notary by a priest over a lawsuit. Onofrio, a disciple of the new science, contrasted the priest, a man esteemed for his skill as an exorcist, with the victim’s son, who led ‘a religious life and begged his father to take this mortification from the hands of God for the salvation of his soul and forgive his attacker’.83 Onofrio underlined the corruption of the Church by adding that the cardinal archbishop granted the priest a pardon after ‘extorting continuous gifts from him and showing signs of his appreciation’. Similar scorn was expressed in private diaries elsewhere in Catholic Europe. Jesuit arrogance was a common complaint.84 In Germany the extent to which priest-killing was the product of anti-clerical feeling is difficult to gauge without further archival research.85 We can be certain, however, that the Reformation did not bring clerical feuds to an end.86 We are better informed about the situation in France, where resistance to the Counter-Reformation even resulted in attacks on bishops.87 At Mans the monks of the abbey of Saint-Pierre de la Couture, who enjoyed considerable local support, opposed its takeover by the Maurists, leaving two dead when the monastery was finally stormed in 1659.88 Resistance was fiercest in the south, where clerical power posed a challenge to ancient civic liberties. On one side, there were brave priests who fought to uphold civil society and oppose overmighty nobles, such as curé Sarramean of Montastruc, whose opposition to the crimes of the marquis de Castelbajac turned him into ‘the sworn enemy of the family because the sieur de Castelbajac had once had him deprived of his position and because [the curé] had a lawsuit against him’. When, in 1668, curé Sarramean forbade the marquis’s seven-year-old son from holding a baby at the baptismal font there ensued a confrontation, in which the priest ‘had the bells rung . . . the inhabitants took up their arms and chased off the son and servants of the sieur de Castelbajac and in the tumult Jeantet Couget was killed’.89 83 84

85

86 87 88 89

Onofrio, Giornali, IV, p. 116. In Reims Jean Pussot quit his pew in 1623 in protest at them: Simiz and Buridant (eds.), Journalier de Jean Pussot, pp. 240–5. www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de/Edition/ Liber_Senectutis/Liber_Senectutis.htm, fo. 152, for one of many comments by the Jesuitsceptic Herman Weinsberg. Some examples: Rieder, ‘Totschlagsühnen’, 14; Rüsch (ed.), Rütiner Diarium, I, p. 103; Kilián (ed.), Gedenkbuch, p. 121; www.archivportal-d.de/item/3LW4ORLASHU5ZONCAM 3632JS4RUYOCQ4?offset=60&rows=20&sort=time_asc&viewType=list&hitNumber=64. See above pp. 195, 242. Carroll, ‘Vendetta in the Midi’, 29. Barilly-Leguy (ed.), Livre, p. 231. M. Pagel, ‘Episode de guerre locale entre la féodalité et les communes dans l’Astarac’, Bulletin de la société archéologique, historique, litteraire et scientifique du Gers, 1 (1900–1), 8–11. See also AD Haute Garonne 2B 2239, 22907.

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On the other side, there were priests who exploited their position for private ends. At Montagnac, the zealot Léonard Delsol, who we encountered in the Introduction, frequently denounced his enemies in print and fought them in the courts. In 1682 he was charged with fabricating evidence and withholding the sacraments from witnesses unless they altered their testimony.90 Some French clerics went further than witness tampering. On 10 March 1689 there was an encounter at Mur des Barrez in the Rouergue pitting the prior of Ginoulhac and his brothers against the abbot of Castelnoël and others. Castelnoël and his accomplices were pardoned for killing the prior.91 Priestly embroilment in local feuds was not confined to the Midi. In 1640 a dispute over space in the parish church at Rauville in Lower Normandy pitted the curé, Robert Hervieu, who was socially aspirant, against Jean VI de Crosville, one of the most powerful men in the region. Hervieu restored the presbytery, a feat which he recorded by placing his arms inside. But when he buried his sister-inlaw in the church choir in 1640 his opponent objected. Hervieu won the lawsuit, but extracting the civil damages and costs from the Crosville proved difficult. When he and his men attempted to serve the warrant at the gates of the Château de Crosville two men died in the ensuing firefight.92 Two years later a canon of Poitiers Cathedral stabbed his cousin, also a canon, in a dispute about a benefice; Pierre Luzarey, a lawyer, and Bernard Benguet, a theology student, provoked a priest in Nogaro (Armagnac) into fighting in 1660.93 At Buellas in the Bresse on 11 May 1729 the local lord, la Teyssonnière, got into a heated argument with the curé, who: made replies unworthy of a churchman and uttered expletives that he should not have. He leapt on the lord, punching him on the chin, grabbing him by the throat and dragging him across the cemetery, in the ensuing battle the curé was joined by his younger sister who threw herself on the lord and grabbed his hair . . . the curé, kneeling on monsieur de la Teyssonnière put his hands around his neck [as if] to strangle him, he then stood on his stomach and gave him several kicks in the chest.94

Teyssonnière made a complaint, but his assailant launched a counter-suit. On 25 July, as he arrived to celebrate Mass at the Capucins in Bourg-en-Bresse, the curé was assassinated in broad daylight. *** 90 91 92

93

94

Ibid., 2 B 21917. Ibid., 2 B 7830. AD Manche J 1030, ‘Memoire et instruction du procès criminal de Jacques de Crosville’: http://le50enlignebis.free.fr/spip.php?article1#. Bricaud de Verneuil (ed.), ‘Journal d’Antoine Denesde’, 106; AD Haute Garonne 2 B 23001. http://f6dqm.free.fr/index_fichiers/guillot.pdf.

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Priests were unable to extricate themselves from the feuds of others because their churches were theatres for the display of power and prestige. Hierarchy and the social order were enacted there and represented in the symbols that demarcated space. In France, the complexity of the law in relation to rights and privileges in church generated a significant corpus of jurisprudence. Matthias Mareschal’s Traité des droits honorifiques des seigneurs dans les églises went through twenty editions between 1613 until 1772 and inspired various imitators. There were major honours (the right to display coats of arms; to build a pew, chapel, tomb and hang funerary decorations) and minor honours (these included being the first to receive communion, incense and blessings; being the subject of public prayers; having the right to be welcomed by the priest before services and preceding others in processions). Contests over these rights frequently led to violence. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Paul de Montbourcher identified ‘the principal cause which moves the French nobility to quarrels, disputes and division’ as ‘pre-eminence in churches and the honours in them . . . who will be the loftiest in life and death . . . who shall lead processions, . . . and who shall have the blessed bread first’. He calculated that there were currently 500 disputes over churches in Brittany alone and that ‘not a Sunday, nor a feast day during the year passes without an assembly of a noble lineage on this subject’.95 There is plenty of evidence to support this claim with scuffles during Mass, the smashing of coats of arms and stained glass, and the burning of pews. In 1588, for example, Salomon de Lanjamet had his right to a pew and coats of arms in the chapel of SaintGermain contested by the procurator fiscal of the county of Lamballe. This case was settled by arbitration, but in 1613 his pew and arms were destroyed and in 1625 his son was murdered.96 Far from being a relic of the Middle Ages, the violence was a product of the social and economic transformations wrought by the Renaissance as the upwardly and downwardly mobile passed each other in church. During the sixteenth century there was a growing gap between traditional markers of authority and the new social reality, as traditional nobles were challenged by officeholders and other parvenus. Although the sale of honorific rights was forbidden, in practice pews and tombs were available for sale or lease. The jurist Charles de Loyseau complained in 1608 that ‘In villages gentlemen and those who wish to become gentlemen have the audacity to claim for themselves pews and places in the choir for themselves, their wives and families, as being a dependency of their land . . . and in towns women of mediocre quality place pews in the nave or in chapels; which afterwards someone else claims, which results in a great quarrel or aggravating lawsuit.’97 In April 1646 four members 95 96 97

Carroll, Blood and Violence, p. 65. http://penguillyweb.pagesperso-orange.fr/La_Maison_Lanjamet.htm. H. Halgouet, ‘Droits honorifiques et prééeminces dans les églises en Bretagne’, Mémoires de la société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne, 4 (1923), 56.

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of the same family were killed for daring to erect a pew and a tomb in a church in Guyenne. As recently ennobled lawyers, they represented a threat to the local establishment.98 Loyseau railed against substitution, the practice of sitting one’s valets and chambermaids in one’s pew as a means to demonstrate superiority over others. We might also underline here the role played by women in contesting sacred space. The sister of the marquis de Flamarens was particularly punctilious about enforcing her rights in churches. On Easter Monday 1668 the rector of Saint Georges de Montastruc in Gascony had the temerity to begin vespers without her; when she finally arrived he was ‘violently shouted at in the church and called a conceited knave and an idiot by the noble lady with many menacing gestures’.99 Since the control of sacred space was part of an existential struggle in many localities, the problem was not completely resolved by Louis XIV. At Crémarest in the Boulonnais in 1684, for example, the contest to receive the blessed bread first led to the drawing of swords and a combat which left several gentlemen dead – the church was not reopened until 1725.100 Jean-François Labat de Savignac’s diary explains such behaviour. He was proceeded into ‘his’ church by a sergeant, whose job it was to ensure that everyone stood up as their lord entered. But in 1713 Savignac was a ‘little scandalised’ by the curé: ‘I had the right to be received at the door and have holy water and incense before the people; his predecessors had always done this for my mother and father.’ Next Sunday the curé dallied and attended to other communicants in order to ‘keep me waiting and show a kind of independence’; Savignac responded by refusing to dine with the curé and addressing him in a ‘dry manner’.101 Finally, the curé agreed to a detailed list of protocols, including the use of the church bells, which were never to be rung without the lord’s permission, even when sounding a fire alarm. Peace was harder to achieve when symbolic rights became enmeshed with material interests. Madame de Sarrasin’s opening of the du Boucheron family tomb in 1717, in order to bury her son, was the touchpaper to a dispute about control of property in Saint-Hippolyte in the Limousin. Two weeks later there was an armed confrontation when she caught the du Boucheron using earth from her land to repair a dyke. On Sunday 21 September Jean-Louis Sarrasin was shot and killed in an encounter with Gilbert and François du Boucheron, an acolyte nicknamed the abbé de Fieux.102 In Italy, too, aristocratic and patrician families identified with particular foundations. In Asolo politics could not be kept out of the parish church 98 99

100 101 102

www.vallee-du-ciron.com/Allons/AllonsVillage/Histoire.htm. Barrière-Flavy, Chronique criminelle, pp. 47–50; Recueil des actes, titres et mémoires concernant les affaires du clergé de France (Paris, 1752), pp. 536–40. www.cc-desvressamer.fr/Communes/cremarest. Le Mao (ed.), Chronique du Bordelais, pp. 309–14. ‘Une Affaire Criminelle’, pp. 615–21.

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because chapels were for sale: ‘In this commonwealth (publico) everyone does everything for his own interest, in such a fashion as to insult now one now the other, giving up right for wrong, and by this means introducing it into the church of Christ.’103 One of the best-documented disputes relates to the ‘long and complicated war scattered with battles and skirmishes’ for control of the benefice of San Lorenzo in Verona between the Maffei and the Emilei.104 A 1667 accord between the families had held until 1694 when a septennial indulgence obtained by the old countess of Emilei was interpreted by the Maffei as a breach of the agreement and they complained to the authorities in Rome, Venice and Verona. The son of the countess, Ferrante Emilei, responded by affixing his mother’s bull of indulgence to the door of the church, resulting in a duel between the leading protagonists and their seconds. The problem was renewed in 1701 with the end of the initial seven-year indulgence and the purchase of new indulgences by both parties. In August 1702, Ferrante entered the church ‘with a great following of armed men, and the congregation being uncertain as to what holy object the count had a quarrel with [until] he crossed menacingly to the chair where the Maffei indulgence hung and provocatively tore it down and carried it away with him’.105 It was an attempt to provoke another duel. Instead, Maffei responded by publicising the feud, targeting in print not only his enemy but also the entire code of honour which rendered it so intractable. It would be wrong to see these proprietorial claims over sacred space as necessarily Catholic in nature. After all, the struggle for the control of ecclesiastical property during the Reformation and its significance for understanding high politics in the empire until 1648 is beyond question. Control of a church or monastery was also a key part of local territorial and inheritance disputes. In Franconia, for example, the Lutheran von Steinau brothers fought a ‘real war’ over the control of benefices between 1574 and 1616.106 In Protestant England, too, there is evidence of the ways in which churches became embroiled in disputes. In December 1578, for example, John Molyneux complained to the Privy Council that the Stanhopes had defaced the parish church, enclosed the common and committed other offences in the parish of Saxondale, where Molyneux was lord of the manor and owner of the advowson.107 The likely source of the dispute was the Stanhope purchase of monastic property following the dissolution. Ownership of the lord’s pew at Tallacre in Flintshire was 103

104 105 106

107

Gasparetto (ed.), Farolfa, pp. 302–3. See also Mazzoni-Tosselli, Racconti storici, I, pp. 32– 3; Spaccini, Cronaca, II, p. 107, III, p.sa 78. Donati, ‘Scipione Maffei’. Ibid., 38. Steinau-Steinrück, ‘Abriß aus der Geschichte’, 114. See also Wieland, Nach der Fehde, p. 452; Vereinigte Westfälische Adelsarchive e.V. Vel.Ak / Haus Velmede, Akten, Nr. Vel.Ak - 64; Helbig, ‘Eine Fehde im 18. Jahrhundert’, 218. www.histparl.ac.uk/volume/1558-1603/member/molyneux-john-i-1588.

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one aspect of the Morgan–Egerton feud. It was claimed that the Morgans never bothered to sit in it ‘until Morgan fils conceiving malice towards Sir John Egerton and his sonne came upon a Sunday about midsummer [1607] with 16 in company furnished with swords daggers and pikes . . . he threatened to stab such as should sitt here’.108 ***

Speaking of his experiences when bishop of Winchester, Archbishop Neile of York observed in 1633 that ‘noe causes . . . were more frequent than broyles about seates [in church]’.109 This was a universal problem. Pews were among the commonest form of public contention because of their symbolic value in the wider struggle for social superiority and recognition. The church interior was the arena in which the local community was symbolically constructed. Seating plans were introduced in order to reproduce and fix the social hierarchy. But the rituals that created and maintained order were open to challenge and reinvention. The attempt to regulate space rigidly according to rank and to exclude the unworthy from prominent positions clashed with the entitlement that money bought. In England the violence rarely escalated beyond a punch-up or damaged pew. In France, in contrast, pew disputes between Catholics had the potential to get out of hand. This was a consequence of the political violence that gripped the kingdom after 1562. The non-confessional character of pew disputes is demonstrated by the fact that French Protestants were not immune from fighting each other. Although Huguenot services dispensed with Catholic ceremonial, they were still the occasions for petty conflicts among the congregation. At Dun the Protestant congregation had to be forbidden from carrying arms to services in 1673.110 Raymond Mentzer has pointed to the preponderant role played by women in Huguenot pew disputes. The reasons for this are unclear and may relate to the stricter demands placed on the segregation of the sexes in Protestant church space, which may have contributed to conflicts about precedence: some Protestant churches, such as Castres, even had separate communion tables for men and women. Male social space was clearly demarcated by hierarchy and in many churches there were distinct benches for each corporate group, whether nobles, bourgeois, the various professions or individual guilds. The space given over to women seems to have been less structured and therefore more prone to contention and competing claims to precedence.111 Some of the best evidence for the ways in which pew disputes exacerbated enmities comes from Germany. Although pews were introduced before the 108 109 110 111

TNA SP 46/75 fo. 40. Wright, ‘Spatial Ordering’, p. 88. AD Haute Garonne 1B 960. R. Mentzer, ‘Les débats sur les bancs dans les Églises réformées de France’, Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, 152 (2006), 393–406.

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Reformation, Lutheran churches were models for the replication of the social order.112 This was signalled by the construction by lords of magnificent galleries and elaborate raised seating boxes (Patronatsloge) that overlooked the congregation. Below them men sat on the right and women on left. Families of status were permitted to have their own pews, which had separate seating for each sex. More valuable pews needed locking to deter intruders, such as Johann Ludwig Pfannkuch, who in 1667 was fined for nailing a huge pointed block of wood to a pew in Dortmund. He appealed the sentence; denying that this was done out of malice, he had simply wished to stop the wife of Anton Krupe using seating that had been in his family’s possession for forty years.113 Officials sat at the head of the congregation – Mrs Krupe was related to the town Burgermeister – but peasants and workers were also ranked according to office, or the guild they belonged to. Low-status people like servants and maids were relegated to the back on Klappstühlen. As in France and England, pews were often linked to plots and contention arose when a property changed hands. It was not unusual for the word Krieg to be used in this context, denoting the serious threat to disorder that pew disputes posed. The seating register of the Augustiner Church in Gotha reported in 1637 the settling of such a Krieg. In 1730 an investigation of the Nikoliaskirche in Greifswald found that there was ‘almost no position left in the church, which had not caused a dispute or feud (Kreig) between the possessors’.114 At Wismar Rittmeiser von Göben posted a soldier at the church door in 1738 to intimidate his enemy. By the end of the seventeenth century consistorial courts did an effective job of ensuring that these disputes did not turn bloody, but this had not always been the case. At the beginning of the century Heinrich von Buchwald took offence when Gosche Rantzau, who possessed the advowson, permitted his steward to use his pew at Westensee in Holstein. The two nobles came to blows and Buchwald shot the steward’s servant.115 The killings exchanged by the Dobeneck and Reitzenstein in Thuringia during the 1640s also encompassed a pew dispute at Gefell between their women.116 But the best evidence for their role in noble feuds comes from the Catholic church at Rinkerode in Westphalia. This pitted the von Galen family, whose authority rested on military service, against the Kerckerinck, who belonged to the Erbmänner, the hereditary patriciate of Münster and technically separate from the nobility, 112

113 114

115 116

G. Signori, ‘Umstrittene Stühle: Spätmittelalterliches Kirchengestühl als soziales, politisches und religiöses Kommunikationsmedium’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 29 (2002), 189–213. Fuchs, Um die Ehre, p. 133. J. Peters, ‘Der Platz in der Kirche. Über soziales Rangdenken im Spätfeudalismus’, Jahrbuch für Volkskunde und Kulturgeschichte, 28 (1985), 77–106. Stein-Stegemann (ed.), Reichskammergerichtsakten, I, p. 287. http://recherche.lha.sachsen-anhalt.de/Query/detail.aspx?ID=1029157.

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which was discussed above.117 The interior of the church at Rinkerode explains why two attempts at peace failed. The dispute was about a plethora of rights, but the pew dispute acted as a lightning rod. Inside, the church space was allocated according to rank. This meant that, while the village’s tiny notability was allocated one half of the church, the two enemies still had to sit facing each other every Sunday next to the altar while the rest of the congregation watched them from the packed nave. Holidays were a time for sport and recreation. Problems arose when preexisting enmities were brought to the festivities. Squabbles over their organisation not only pitted individuals against each other but revealed cleavages within the community.118 The procession of Corpus Christi, for instance, was prone to clashes over status. In Brescia gangs associated with the Provaglio and the Papafava refused to give way to each other in 1703, leaving two dead.119 Vincenzo d’Onofrio, who displayed a patriotic devotion to the cult of San Gennaro, patron saint of Naples, lamented the manner in which it was demeaned by nobles intent on displaying their liberty to do as they pleased, making fun of priests and fighting duels.120 It might be thought that the Reformation brought greater discipline to holidays and feasts, but this was certainly not the case in Lutheran rural Germany. Weddings, baptisms and public holidays were microcosms of the social order, where precedence, honour and worth were both on display and open to challenge, and much of the evidence for the disorder that arose pertains to the social elite. In Upper Lusatia, noble ‘family festivities very frequently ended early because of a murder’.121 Peace settlements stipulated that killers should avoid festivities and weddings in particular. Wedding parties were ideal forums for provocation and airing grievances because transgressions could be justified as spontaneous and the result of too much strong drink. In the (Catholic) Aegidiikirche in Münster it was reported that during ‘weddings discord, squabbling and great disunion has arisen many times in the women’s pews’.122 Augustin Güntzer was confronted at his cousin’s wedding by a (Lutheran) Colmar city councillor in 1646: ‘I spy a Calvinist; which means I spy an irresponsible man.’ The insult was carefully choreographed because it was uttered in the presence of other city councillors.123 Güntzer’s 117 118 119

120 121

122 123

See above p. 218. Carroll, Blood and Violence, pp. 65–7; Raggio, Faide e Parentele, pp. 233–43. Guerrini (ed.), Le cronache bresciane, V, p. 62; Bonazini, ‘Diario’: http://grandtour .bncf.firenze.sbn.it/indici/altre-fonti/Magl_XXV_42, 21 September 1685; Spaccini, Cronaca, III, p. 339. Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 15; Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 124; II, p. 164. Knothe, ‘Fortsetzung der Geschichte’, 40; Hausbuch des Apothekers Walburger, III, p. 923. H. Offenburg, Bilder und Skizzen aus Münsters Vergangenheit (Münster, 1902), p. 69. Kleines Biechlin, p. 244.

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faith taught him to see the scorn of the ungodly as a test. But not everyone was prepared or able to tolerate this sort of behaviour. In a well-documented case from Münster, Bernd von Oer, a lay cathedral canon (Domherr), smarted at being reprimanded for his boorish behaviour at a wedding by Melchior von Droste, commander of the Teutonic knights. Feeling humiliated, von Oer confronted and killed his opponent once the festivities had finished.124 Murderous encounters at noble weddings are recorded across the empire – Saxony (1544, 1587), Ansbach (1588), Franconia (1571, 1598 and 1608), Thuringia (two examples from 1652) – partly because guest lists were fixed by convention rather than desirability, making it impossible to prevent enemies from meeting.125 Johan von Wüllen was a quarrelsome chap embroiled in many lawsuits in Westphalia, but as he was a landlord peasants were disinclined to leave him off their wedding list. The glamour he added to the festivities at Seppenrade in October 1603 evaporated when he confronted the musician about a pre-existing dispute. When the musician’s pregnant wife tried to break up the fight von Wüllen ran her through.126 The etiquette surrounding dancing created plenty of opportunities for provocation. Hilmar von Münchhausen, for example, was run through at his cousin’s wedding in 1641 by Ernst von Wartensleben. His funeral oration reassured its hearers that ‘he had no enmity in his heart towards his killer and no evil word was exchanged’. Münchhausen had simply objected to the fact that Wartensleben ‘was the only one dancing with a hat and had knocked it off’.127 In Germany the parish fair (Kirchweih) mixed recreation and military training. Hans Beham’s 1539 woodcut (Figure 13.2) displays dancing in the foreground, while various forms of military training are being conducted, including fighting on horseback and instruction from professionals. Though the potential for such heavily armed gatherings to be a flashpoint certainly existed, matters do not seem to have routinely got out of hand. The frequent complaints of the educated about the excesses of fairs need to be used with caution. Peasants showed restraint. Reports of a ‘great battle’ at a fair in Franconia in 1670 turned out to be, in fact, one stabbing.128 It was altogether different when Kirchweihen became a vehicle for politics. Lordship was publicised and displayed at Kirchweihen and where the sovereignty was 124 125

126 127 128

Dierkes, Streitbar, p. 181. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirsberg_(Adelsgeschlecht); www.starks-historischespurensuche.de/Sechsaemterland/Grabdenkmaeler/Schoenbrunn/Schoenbrunn_ Grabdenkmaeler.htm; Fraustadt, Schönberg, p. 589; Hüttner (ed.), ‘Wolfgang Ammon’, 7 November, 1598; ‘Chronik des Hans Krafft’, fo. 220v: www.mdsz.thulb.uni-jena.de/sz/ search_sz.php?szid=30&personid=alle&placeid=alle&commid=alle; Ludwig, Das Duell, p. 13; Gauhe, Adels Lexicon, II, p. 1658. Beuke, ‘In gutter zier’, p. 120. Christliche Leichpredigt / Von der ertödteten . . . Hilmarn von Münchausen (1641). Hambrecht (ed.), ‘Das Papier’, p. 388.

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Figure 13.2 Jan Theodor de Bry, Die Dorfkirchweih after Hans Beham, 1539

contested this might have explosive consequences, such as at Weihern in the Upper Palatinate in 1534, where rival retinues clashed at the opening ceremony of the fair, leaving five men dead.129 At Unter-Sontheim these rights (Kirchweihschutz) led to frequent armed clashes between the counts of Limpburg and the imperial free city of Schwäbisch-Hall, which proclaimed its intention to use force against any attempt on the count’s part to hold dances or engage players.130 In a fragmented region such as Franconia, fairs were frequently the sites of the struggles and matters got worse following the Thirty Years’ War, which swept away the memory of customary norms. Attempts to reassert rights in their aftermath resulted in ‘small wars’.131 At Pretzfeld, for instance, the local lord was shot while presiding at the fair in 1660.132 *** 129

130

131

132

Gebhardt and Hörner (eds.), Reichskammergericht, IV, p. 7; Wieland, Nach der Fehde, p. 452. R. Moser, Beschreibung des Oberamts Hall (Stuttgart, 1847), p. 289; T. Neumeyer, Dinkelsbühl: Der ehemalige Landkreis (Munich: Kommission für bayerische Landesgeschichte, 2018), pp. 207–8, 241, 308. K.-S. Kramer, ‘Geschichtliuche Nachrichten aur mittelfränkischen Kirchweih’, Bayersiches Jahrbuch fur Volksunde, 5 (1959), 98–119. J. Deuber, Geschichte der Pfarreien Seußling, Pautzfeld, Hallerndorf, Hirschaid & Buttenheim (Forchheim, 1872), p. 77.

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Church interiors were not only spaces for the performance of status. Churchgoing was an occasion for seeing and being seen. Freer codes of sexual conduct at the end of the seventeenth century meant that flirting in church was no longer immediately taken as a serious breach of honour. Samuel Pepys enlivened dismal sermons in the 1660s by leching at girls.133 The installation of family pews and their grouping according to social rank aided a process which permitted proximity albeit under close supervision. In regions where stricter separation prevailed, such as Naples, the differences between the sexes were highlighted and rendered attempts at interaction both more difficult and potentially transgressive, where a careless word or gesture might be interpreted as offensive. Two noblemen who stood guard at the entrance to a chapel during Mass in Santa Maria di Piedigrotta in September 1680 in order to ‘play the gallant’ with the ladies upset Francesco Caracciolo, ‘the ugly’, who tried to pass through them with his wife and ‘pretty’ daughter, resulting in a brawl.134 Ten years later at Santa Maria della Concezione at Montecalvario the banter between a woman and a secretary of the Inquisition was interrupted by her brother who thought she was being taken for a courtesan. Their fight continued outside with the secretary being run through with a sword.135 It is difficult to ascertain the extent to which conflicts inside sacred space were spontaneous or staged by enemies for the benefit of an audience. Challenges issued in sacred space were difficult to brush off. In Bologna the last great aristocratic feud, that between the Pepoli and the Zambeccari (1695–8), was sparked by what appears to be a trivial incident. When the entourage of Count Ercole Pepoli arrived at the Ospedale della Morte to venerate the Madonna di San Luca, a man ‘not wearing any livery’ belonging to Count Emilio Zambeccari tried to prevent Pepoli’s ‘familiar’ from entering the sanctuary, provoking a scuffle between the two retinues. The longstanding enmity between the two and their subsequent behaviour leaves the impression that the affair was staged or aggravated by one of the parties, who found it extremely difficult to share the same space.136 Sacred space offered a demarcated field of combat and a measure of publicity and, as the fashion spread, arenas for duelling.137 In 1616 the vicar general of Münster issued an order against the ‘nightly shooting out of the windows of the cathedral close and fights that ended up in killings’.138 An English statute of 1552 targeted fighting in churches.139 It seems to have 133 134 135 136

137 138

139

Diary of Samuel Pepys, IV, pp. 153, 161. Confuorto, Giornali, I, p. 50. Ibid., p. 311. Angelozzi and Casanova, Nobiltà disciplinata, pp. 327–40. Other examples of formal challenges in church: Onofrio, Giornali, I, p. 124; Consigli cavallerschi, II, pp. 43, 94. For a German example from the 1540s: Spormecker (ed.), Cronica, p. 201. ‘Die Bistümer der Kirchenprovinz Köln. Das Bistum Münster 4,1. Das Domstift St. Paulus zu Münster’, 280: http://germania-sacra-datenbank.uni-goettingen.de. Baildon (ed.), Les reportes, pp. 336–7.

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had some effect and by the seventeenth century Englishmen more commonly stepped into the churchyards before confronting their enemies: the churchyard of Myddle in Shropshire hosted two bloody encounters in the seventeenth century.140 Churchgoing provided the perfect cover story for enemies to meet. In the autumn of 1613 Francis, Lord Norris had a duel with Peregrine Bertie ‘upon an old reckoning, and hurt him dangerously in the shoulder’. Two years later Norris fought with Peregrine’s brother Lord Willoughby in a churchyard at Bath, in which a retainer was killed. The encounter was set up precisely so that it could circumvent the strict prohibition on duelling. As Norris’s successful application for a pardon made clear, ‘His discoursing with Lord Willoughby in a church or churchyard proves that he was not intending to quarrel, but Lord Willoughby assaulted him treacherously and unexpectedly. His slaying Lord Willoughby’s man was purely in self-defence, as the man drew upon him.’141 In Italy, vendetta lent the theatricality a grislier aspect. In 1636 the bastard of Colaltino was shot after he left church in Asolo and had his face disfigured.142 The purpose of such gruesomeness can be discerned from the events that took place a century earlier at Poiana Maggiore in the Veneto on 18 April 1545. Sebastiano Riccoboni and his sons, Niccolò and Gerardo, citizens of Vicenza, had gone to hear Mass. His enemy, Pagan da Poiana, another vicentino, who was also at Mass, had laid a trap. At the end of the service ‘four strangers armed with bucklers, polearms and pistols’ entered the church from different entrances and, following a signal from Pagan, attacked Niccolò, who fought them off with his dagger and made a run for it. They pursued him into a nearby house and finished him off with his father, Sebastiano. The gang then returned to the church porch with their blooded weapons in order to threaten the witness: ‘They had done what they had wanted, and anyone else who wanted some should step forward.’ Having received no reply, they set off for the Riccoboni house to murder Gerardo, after which they returned once more to the church. The church played a symbolic role in the vendetta: it was the stage for the Poiana family to enact its own justice and display its power in front of the community assembled for Mass. The three victims were butchered while they were at their most vulnerable, as if they were sacrificial animals, in full view of the public. Following the initial strike, the murderers returned twice to the church, in order to demonstrate what they had done and to intimidate the rest of the congregation, ‘bragging and threatening . . . with their weapons covered in blood’.143 140 141

142 143

Gough, Myddle, pp. 94, 176–7. For a later Irish case: TNA SP 36/16/279. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the reign of James I, 1603–1625, ed. M. Green (London, 1856–9), II, p. 306. Gasparetto (ed.), Farolfa, p. 283. Carroll and Cecchinato, ‘Violence and Sacred Space’, 575.

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The political context in Italy explains why so much as a dirty look during Mass might have lethal consequences. Across the rest of Europe symbols and gestures were the weapons of the weak, brandished in a less bloody fashion. In early modern England there are records of parishioners sticking pins into each other, disturbing the graves of dead neighbours and encouraging horses to defecate in the pews of opponents.144 In sixteenth-century Germany symbols, often denoting a threat to burn property (Brandzeichen or Brandmahl), which announced an enmity or grievance requiring mediation, might just as well be stuck by peasants on the village church, instead of a well or communal oven. In France, breaking sculptures, digging up corpses, smashing arms and stained glass was largely an elite pursuit. Social inferiors relied on subtler forms of insubordination and carefully calibrated insults. Pierre Asges turned up at the wedding of Antoine le Blanc in 1701 in order to humiliate him ‘as a killer who owed him money’.145 Priests also saw their own churches as a stage for secular performances. Exasperated by his failure to get the courts and his superiors to take his complaints seriously, Léonard Delsol resorted to using his church in Montagnac for staging his revenge. Inside, one of his opponents had placed a portrait of himself on a table dedicated to various saints. Delsol, it was alleged, drew a moustache on the picture and defaced the nose, a joke which was left to amuse his parishioners for several weeks.146 *** Immortal feuds, and more than Civil Warrs, And Fights thô fierce, disfigur’d with no Scarrs. I sing!

Boileau’s mock-heroic poem, Le Lutrin, was wildly popular across Europe, as this 1682 English translation shows. Readers laughed at the ridiculous dispute about the positioning of a lectern in a church choir. Le Lutrin struck a chord with readers across Europe precisely because it mimicked real events with which they were familiar. Le Lutrin reflects changing attitudes at the end of the seventeenth century as educated people began to place their behaviour in the context of society and laugh at the absurdity of those who refused to conform. Quarrels over sacred space were ridiculous. Boileau gently mocked the hypocrisy of the church and its pretensions. However, the deadly conflicts over and in sacred space in the eighteenth century demonstrate the limits to polite thinking. In Venice the problem was resurgent in the 1750s. In rural France, 144

145

146

C. Marsh, ‘“Common Prayer” in England 1560–1640: The View from the Pew’, Past and Present, 171 (2001), 66–94. AD Haute Garonne 2 B 6978. See also AD Haute Garonne 22798, 22266, 22740; AD Lot et Garonne B 287. AD Haute Garonne 2 B 21917, deposition of Augustin Bonnet and Pierre Durand.

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it was really only after 1760 that disputes about church honours ceased to be a problem.147 This chapter has argued that we need to see disputes in and over churches through the lens of worldly beliefs about honour, rank and the law rather than the sacred or spiritual. The following chapter explores more fully the spiritual ramifications of living with the enemy.

147

Nicolas, Rebellion française, pp. 197–9.

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14 Living with the Enemy

Early modern people wrote a lot about peace. Shakespeare used the word 547 times compared with 261 instances of ‘war’.1 Medieval theologians identified three types: peace with God, peace with yourself and peace with your neighbour; making peace with the latter was both a balsam for the mind and essential for salvation. Forgiveness brought comfort through the knowledge that malice would be punished by Him: Lord Herbert of Cherbury boasted that ‘No man hath exceeded me in forgiveness . . . I never used revenge, as leaving it always to God, who, the less I punish mine enemies will inflict so much the more punishment on them.’2 Renaissance Italy developed a sophisticated corpus of ethico-political writings on the mechanics of peace and practical guides to private pacts, the pace privata.3 The most important of these texts, Del Modo di Ridurre à Pace l’inimicitie private, written by Fabio Albergati in 1583, identified four types of peace. There was tranquillitas, or what Cicero termed ‘the free tranquillity to be able to live together securely’. This absence of hostility, signified by outward signs, such as greetings and handshakes, was only a truce, placing the Christian in mortal peril. True peace came from the union of hearts. Following Aristotle, Albergati thought that peace was a state of nature. It was the duty of the peacemaker to restore the natural equilibrium and hierarchy. Unions between individuals were essential for creating the third type of peace, ‘civil peace: the securing of the public good through the concord of citizens, according to the laws of the Commonwealth’. In turn this would contribute to universal peace uniting cities and states across the world. The Italian private peace pact was one of the few Renaissance ideas that remained confined to the peninsula.4 The claim that peace was the natural condition of men seemed ludicrous in sixteenth-century northern Europe, where the fashion for Augustine was evidence of a more pessimistic view of human nature. English commentators, for example, discerned only two forms 1 2 3

4

Withington, ‘Semantics of “Peace”’, 134. Autobiography of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, p. 37. P. Broggio, ‘Linguaggo religioso e disciplinamento nobiliare. Il “modo di ridurre a pace l’inimicitie private” nella trattatistica di età barocca’, in F. Cantu (ed.), I Linguaggi del potere. Politica e religione nell’età barocca (Rome: Viella, 2009), pp. 275–317. Carroll, ‘Revenge and Reconciliation’.

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of peace: inward peace, that is, our reconciliation made with God, from which follows the peace of conscience; and outward peace (tranquillitas), which was defined as refraining from ‘all manner of striving and contention, whether it be in countenance, gesture, worde, or worke’, or abstinence from actual force and violence.5 Enmity for Protestants was essentially a matter of individual hearts. The solution was to inculcate the obligations of Christian love and to discipline the recalcitrant by refusing them holy communion. But resistance to Italian peacemaking methods was not a confessional matter. Across Catholic Europe there was hostility to rituals that were widely perceived as heterodox and to private deals that undermined the rule of law. The Christian logic of reconciliation was facilitated by a combination of the judicial system, community pressure and ubiquitous letters of pardon. Civil society mediated conflict through its institutions: the efflorescence of law courts, civic institutions and associational groups, such as guilds and confraternities, was the greatest legacy of the late Middle Ages. The desire for a wellregulated and ordered society was enshrined in the term ‘police’, which began to be used from the fourteenth century. It signified the regulations and the means that would advance the common good through the securing of peace and order, protecting private property and improving the conditions of life. In urban communities, in particular, the law articulated and ordered social, economic and political relationships that underpinned the ideal of good neighbourliness. Compensation for a wrong was enshrined in the canon law principle of satisfaction, which offered the possibility of redress to the injured party and to God. This book has shown how the system came under attack during the Reformation. But satisfaction did not disappear. The Renaissance had already hastened its secularisation and monetisation. It survived as part of the code of honour that replaced chivalry. It was a means to peace by replacing vengeance with secular penances, such as a grovelling apology and rituals of submission. It remained integral to most early modern legal systems, with the notable exception of the English common law. As a result, the elaboration of more punitive legal codes in the sixteenth century incorporated rather than replaced penances and rituals of atonement. Corporal punishment was not always appropriate, either because of the social status of the parties or because the offence was justifiable. Wrongdoers could be rehabilitated through the paying of a fine or a period of military service. Banishment, which replaced pilgrimages, was the most widely used tool by states because it was a flexible instrument, allowing heads to cool and forcing the wrongdoer to negotiate with the injured party. It favoured those with means and profited the state, which issued the safe conducts, court orders and pardons integral to the process of reintegration. Contemporaries were aware of the injustices that paying for a crime 5

Withington, ‘Semantics of “Peace”’, 141–2.

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entailed. In his 1727 dictionary of jurisprudence Pierre-Jacques Brillon declared that transactions for homicide are made ‘due either to the powerlessness of the bereaved family, or due to the [killers] credit . . . such transactions for cruel murder are rarely a sure expiation’.6 Peace was not imposed from above. Possessors of an office or social capital – priests, notaries, lords, village elders or guild-masters – were routinely approached to settle neighbourly disputes out of court. Otherwise peasants turned willingly to their local courts because judges offered a fair resolution of disputes, with verdicts with which people agreed and which were unlikely to escalate them.7 But living with the enemy became more difficult during the sixteenth century. Across Europe, the division of communities along confessional lines, or between the devout and their enemies, rendered reconciliation not impossible, but certainly more tortuous. The economic and demographic changes of the sixteenth century placed traditional mechanisms of social control under strain. Social mobility and the resentment caused by growing inequality made peacemaking more necessary, but since it was full of contradictions, inequalities and uncertainties, its soothing balm could be fleeting; it offered solace and recompense but it also had the capacity to entrench injustice. This chapter seeks to go beyond the existing literature on peacemaking and ask what happened after the settlement, exploring the ways in which people lived alongside their former enemies, assessing the ways in which the official justice was modified by people to suit their emotional and spiritual needs. ***

Peace was an obligation for all Christians. But what sort of peace? Even before the Reformation there were complaints that practices of satisfaction – penances, compensation and rituals of atonement and forgiveness – might be simply tokens and gestures that masked people’s true feelings and left them in mortal sin. There were growing concerns at the end of the Middle Ages about the carnality of the kiss of peace, the traditional means of sealing a deal, making up, demonstrating loyalty and obedience, and preparing for communion. By 1500 the pax board, which was passed from the celebrant to the deacons and then among the laity during the canon of the traditional Mass, had replaced the kiss of peace in order to ensure that the ritual was transcendental and not lascivious.8 Supporters of ceremonies, following Aquinas, argued that gestures are expressive of an interior state, a way of expressing the inexpressible. Moralists worried that for the laity the Pax was not only insufficient 6

7

8

Dictionnaire des arrêts, ou Jurisprudence universelle des Parlemens de France, 6 vols. (Paris, 1727), III, p. 611. J. Hayhoe, ‘Neighbours before the Court: Crime, Village Communities and Seigneurial Justice in Northern Burgundy, 1750–1790’, French History, 17 (2003), 127–48. See above pp. 227, 240.

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preparation for communion but widely perceived as a substitution for it. They feared that kisses were empty gestures, an artifice to avoid the uncomfortable and dishonourable penances that communion required. The consequences of the Reformation removal of the Pax were not confined to the liturgy. It meant an overturning of the medieval concept of the political, in which the church and its rituals had functioned to uphold civil society and guarantee the civil peace. Reformers argued that civil peace, tranquillitas, was no substitute for the union of souls. The fashion for Neoplatonism encouraged a return to the teachings of Saints Augustine and Paul, whose influence spread with the discovery and dissemination of original Greek texts. They taught that true peace, the inward peace with God and conscience, was a sign of grace and essential for salvation. ‘Loving your neighbour’, argued Luther in Letters on the Galatians, does not mean ‘wishing him well’ as Aquinas and other ‘sophists’ interpret it, this is a ‘meagre mathematical love’.9 The true Christian needed no rituals and rules, for all was contained in the words ‘You shall love your neighbour as you love yourself.’ There was no surer pattern for life: ‘And so you do not need any book to instruct you how you should love your neighbour, for you have the loveliest and the best of books about all laws right in your own heart.’ Enmity did not come from injustice but from within: ‘such is the amazing craft of the devil that he is not only able to remove this noble object of love from my mind with great skill but even to persuade my heart of the exactly opposite opinion, so that it regards the neighbour as worthy, not of love but of the bitterest hatred’.10 Although Luther quickly fell out with the Radicals, he shared their mistrust for civil society, and in particular lawyers and their quibbling. Consequently, his defence of the earthly city against sectaries and ‘fanatics’ also made it clear that true Christians did not need the law. As Saint Paul said, ‘The law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless.’ ‘Christians should not go to law’ and the existence of the law was evidence that ‘there are few true believers, and still fewer who live a Christian life’.11 In contrast, Luther’s chief lieutenant, Melanchthon, retained the humanist respect for civil society, seeing it as an antidote to the Anabaptists and millenarians, who wished to substitute it for the City of God. Calvin, the trained lawyer, went even further, defending litigation against charges that it was sinful: ‘I confess that in these times it is rare to meet with an example of an honest litigant; but the thing itself, untainted by the accession of evil, ceases not to be good and pure.’12 For Calvin, civil society was not irretrievably tainted by pollution but had utility, 9 10 11 12

Luther’s Works, XXVII, pp. 52–8. Ibid., p. 58. Luther’s Works, XLV, p. 89. J. Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1846), p. 666.

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‘enabling us to adapt our conduct to human society, to form our manners to civil justice, to conciliate us to each other, to cherish common peace and tranquillity’.13 In order to achieve this objective Calvin created the consistory court, which played an infra-judicial role, one that was facilitated by the unfailing presence of lawyers serving as elders.14 In Nîmes, for example, quarrels accounted for one-third of the infractions that courts were called upon to correct and were the leading reason for excommunication. The Calvinist hierarchy was active in nipping disputes in the bud, summoning potential troublemakers for a stern word before matters escalated. Reconciliation usually involved a mutual renunciation of hostility, together with a handshake or kiss, and a reciprocal declaration to respect one another as honourable and trustworthy. Excommunication was reserved for the most serious cases, for instance where blood had been shed, and reintegration into the community came after a ceremony of repentance. ‘Eliminating bitterness and anger in social relations became a well appreciated objective.’15 The spirit of patience, forbearance and compromise displayed by the consistory in its approach to quarrels was much more appreciated than its policing of sexual conduct, which was largely unsuccessful and provoked widespread hostility.16 In the Midi, Switzerland and the Dutch Republic the consistory built on civic traditions of infra-justice and the belief that neighbourliness was enhanced by good police. The evidence from Scotland demonstrates the consistory’s capacity to operate effectively in a largely rural setting too.17 In Protestant states without the consistory, peacemaking was more reliant on the secular courts and the initiative of individual ministers and pastors. Protestants were not alone in their fear of artifice and judas kisses. The Council of Trent removed the Pax from the revised Roman liturgy. Catholics too worried about the worldliness and monetisation of penance. In Italy, moralists fretted that communicants found it much easier to forgive their own sins. They complained about those who omitted from the Pater Noster the line forgiving others altogether, those who mumbled it and those who considered that they were covered if other members of the congregation said it.18 The Counter-Reformation’s drive to change hearts and minds was guided by contradictory theological positions. Those who continued to revere scholastic thinking 13 14 15

16

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18

Ibid., p. 652. For this and following Carroll, ‘Peace in the Feud’, pp. 94–5. R. Mentzer, ‘Marking the Taboo: Excommunication in French Reformed Churches’, in R. Mentzer (ed.), Sin and the Calvinists. Morals Control and the Consistory in the French Reformed Churches (Kirksville: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1994), p. 85. J. Meyer, ‘Women and Consistorial Discipline: The Case of Courthézon in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Church History, 88 (2019), 316–44. M. Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), chapter 5. Niccoli, Perdonare, pp. 135–6.

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believed that grace was possible for all believers and that ceremonies and rituals were the best means to encourage and maintain sincere feelings. In contrast, followers of Augustine were sceptical of the efficacy of peacemaking rituals for salvation and emphasised rigorous self-examination for signs of grace aided by the discipline of the sacraments. The former approach is associated with the new religious orders, principally the Jesuits, and the latter by their rigorist opponents, who accused them of traducing the Commandments and encouraging moral laxity. However, the simple binary opposition between the Jesuits and their opponents betrays a more complex picture and in the Catholic tradition there arose different regional cultures of peacemaking. Italians were largely resistant to fashionable northern European ideas about human nature. On the whole, they continued to support the Aristotelian idea that humans are by nature pacific and disagreements unfortunate misunderstandings. Consequently, Italy produced Europe’s only significant corpus of writing about the art of peacemaking, which taught Christians to avoid justice in favour of mediators who would, by satisfaction, return the parties to their status quo ante. Fabio Albergati was critical of secular settlements that produced only tranquillitas. The handshakes and kisses that sealed these were not signs of peace, simply suspensions of discord, ‘in reality truces’.19 Albergati’s reassertion of the Church’s role in settling disputes should come as no surprise. His hometown of Bologna, where the widely despised organs of papal justice struggled to control vendetta, led the way in promoting out-of-court settlements. The city’s archbishop, Gabriele Paleotti, set up the Congregazione della Concordia to encourage the practice; it received papal recognition in 1574. Even murderers who presented themselves to the victim’s family with humility could not be refused: ‘for the same law which binds them also binds you to open your heart to any sign of peace . . . and to accept the reconciliation and satisfaction’.20 The only instrument of justice necessary was a notarised document, detailing the pecuniary settlement. To reject this peace and insist on prosecution was to demonstrate an absence of charity and grounds for the refusal of the sacraments. Cardinal Borromeo established a similar confraternity in Milan, but it was the Jesuits, whose missions criss-crossed the peninsula, instructing the faithful but also exhorting them to heal their enmities and renounce justice, who took the message to the people. As early as the 1540s, they were staging public demonstrations of amity, which were sealed with a public embrace, followed by confession and communion. Their measure of success was the number of people reconciled to the sacraments and they boasted that it paved the way for enemies, who had for years avoided Easter Communion, to return to church. The theatrical nature of these spectacles was not appreciated by all and by the end of the seventeenth century questions were 19 20

Albergati, Del Modo di Ridurre à Pace l’inimicitie private (1583), p. 2. Niccoli, Perdonare, p. 165.

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being raised in Rome about their orthodoxy and utility. The formalisation of the peace process in the seventeenth century also raised the question as to whether these were empty ceremonies. The waning of spontaneity can be seen by the printing and distribution of pro-formas covering all manner of disputes, which were filled in by the parties and then presented to the notary for registration.21 Jesuit methods provoked the most resistance in France. Pascal’s Provincial Letters (1656–7), which ridiculed them for both excusing violence and endangering salvation, was part of a wider rigorist backlash; sceptical of the efficacy of superstitious and empty ceremonies, rigorist influence went beyond the narrow Jansenist controversy. French supporters of Italian peacemaking methods faced opposition from the legal profession suspicious of clerical interference in its business, a Roman Trojan horse that threatened Gallican liberties. At Saint-Sulpice in Paris, Jean-Jacques Olier established a charitable council which met twice a month to settle the disputes of the poor and in 1651 he founded a confraternity dedicated to the eradication of duelling. But the following year he was forced to resign his benefice by those questioning its orthodoxy. Elsewhere, individual initiatives by clergy foundered on the aristocratic honour code. The deal brokered by the bishop of Lisieux in 1663 between two warring families lasted only three years until an encounter which left two dead.22 The rising tide of violence in France in the 1650s and the fragmented response to it inspired the only significant treatise on private peacemaking published north of the Alps. L’Arbitre charitable pour éviter les procez et les querelles (1666) had to be published under a pseudonym because the author supported the charitable tribunals run by the Compagnie du Saint Sacrement, a secret society of the godly, which had been recently dissolved by Louis XIV. Practical and comprehensive – the booklet included a variety of pro-forma settlements – it was a runaway success, going through at least six editions. It was probably the work of Breton agronomist and lawyer Gabriel de Calloët de Kerbrat.23 He argued that the law made quarrels worse – ‘chicanery in France is the worst of all evils’ – and that litigation endangered salvation: ‘lawsuits are a form of war accompanied by hatred, animosity and vengeance’.24 Eighty per cent of failed accords, he claimed, were the result of bad arbitration and advised how to remedy this, including examples of pro-forma satisfactions for his readers to use. What distinguishes L’Arbitre charitable from its Italian 21 22 23

24

Ibid., chapter 5. Carroll, ‘Peace in the Feud’. J.-L. Bruzulier, ‘Saint-Yves, modèle pour les dévots bretons du XVIIIe siècle? L’exemple de Gabriel de Calloët de Kerbrat, avocat general des pauvres’, in J.-C. Cassard and G. Provost (eds.), Saint Yves les Bretons. Culte, images, mémoire, 1303–2003 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004), pp. 241–53. L’Arbitre charitable, p. 43.

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competitors are its illustrations. They offer an eclectic mix of exemplary lay and clerical peacemakers to guide and inspire the reader. The book begins with a picture of the young King Louis XIV (Figure 14.1) making peace among his subjects. Louis was presented with a copy in 1668. The Solomonic image – which represents both rich and poor litigants filing past the king clutching their legal briefs and petitions – was not without veracity, since in the early decades of his reign, Louis paid a great deal of attention to the business of dispute settlement. L’Arbitre charitable owed a debt to Jesuit practice. But it carefully sought to disarm potential criticism from rigorists by including the figure of Saint Augustine, the authority on which the Jansenist theology of grace was grounded, in the pantheon of peacemakers. In L’Arbitre charitable it is Augustine’s pastoral work which is held up as a model to be imitated. He is portrayed performing his duties as bishop of Hippo, reconciling the disputes of his flock. Augustine was a unifier in another sense. The author claimed that his booklet had been translated into English, German and Danish, and that the Huguenots had approved its use in their synods. Objections from patriotic Frenchmen about importing Italian practices that threatened to undermine the rule of law were countered by the figure of Saint Yves, the Breton patron saint

Figure 14.1 ‘Here the Great King Louis XIV gives audience to his poorest subjects in order to quickly settle their disputes’

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Figure 14.2 ‘The good curé St Yves reconciled almost all lawsuits and quarrels in his parish amicably by charitable mediation’

of legal professionals (Figure 14.2). Saint Yves, who is traditionally depicted reconciling a rich man and poor man, embodies the Christian ideal of the harmony between justice and peace. The peregrination of the Yves cult has much to tell us about different regional cultures of settlement and is a window onto attitudes beyond printed discourse. The cult spread rapidly across Europe following his canonisation; it can be traced to the building of a chapel in Paris in 1352 and the wave of university law faculties that were established in the late Middle Ages. Many courts forbade lawyers to plead unless they had enrolled in his fraternity. By the end of the sixteenth century the cult was well established in the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, as well as France. In 1607 it reached Naples.25 While Protestant universities dispensed with the religious ceremonies associated with Yves, some, like Tübingen, retained the traditional feast and lecture extolling the virtues of arbitration.26 25

26

F. Mastroberti, Sodalito advocatorum: la congregazione di Sant’Ivone e la difesi dei poveri. Le origini francesci e la sua attività a Napoli (Bologna: Mulino, 2017). K.-H. Burmeister, ‘Der hl. Ivo und seine Verehrung an den deutschen Rechtsfakultäten’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Germanistische Abteilung, 92 (1975), 72, 82.

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Yves did not make it to England, probably due to the common law’s hostility to the principle of satisfaction. During the seventeenth century there was a revival of interest in the saint in southern Germany and Italy.27 This was a consequence of the Counter-Reformation’s charitable imperative and members of the brotherhood were encouraged to offer free legal support for paupers. Some confraternities established an office of advocate or procurator for the poor. The Jesuits were heavily involved in promoting the cult, a facet of the control they exercised over civil society in Catholic Europe more generally. Their message of Christian mediation before litigation targeted both the professoriate of university law faculties in major cities and the notaries and solicitors who ranked among the elite in small towns. The evidence suggests that the confraternity operated, like a medieval guild, as a social club, regulating professional practice and the job market. The records of the confraternity at Châlon-sur-Saone demonstrate that its fifty or so members dedicated more time to defending their interests than serving the poor. The charitable impulse waned in the later eighteenth century and it was wound up altogether in 1777.28 In Rome clerical control of the confraternity of Sant Ivo, which was given papal recognition in 1620, was stricter and the charitable mission more explicit. Four pacificatori were elected annually to ‘procure peace and concord among the poor’ and were expected to visit the city’s hospitals.29 The upshot of Jesuit influence here was a very different figure from the medieval ideal sustained in northern Europe. The French Yves portrayed in L’Arbitre charitable wears a judge’s hat and upholds the principles of equity, symbolised by his capacity to reconcile between a rich man and a poor man, who are traditionally shown standing on either side of the saint. Frenchmen were comfortable with the belief that in the state of nature men were equally base; the rich were as, if not more, capable of wrongdoing and the poor equally deserving of justice. Sant Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome (1642–60), one of the masterpieces of High Baroque, projects an entirely different vision (Figure 14.3). Italian peacemaking manuals were highly status-conscious: people with no or little honour were not equal to the best. All the poor could expect was charity, not justice.

27

28

29

L. Kretzenbacher, ‘St. Ivo, der bretonische Armenanwalt und Juristenpatron, in der Grazer Herrengasse’, Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereines für Steiermark, 86 (1995), 187–209; P. Chevet, Vita e miracoli di S. Ivo, sacerdote e confessore (Rome, 1640). H. Batault, ‘Etude sur la corporation de l’ancien baillage de Chalon-sur-Saône’, Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Chalon-sur-Saône, 5 (1869), 177–216; H. de Ridde Symoens, ‘The Growth of Civil Society: The Emergence of Guilds of Lawyers in the Low Countries in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century’, in A. van Dixhoorn (ed.), The Reach of the Republic of Letters: Literacy and Learned Societies in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 337–52. G. Alessi, Compendio istorico del pio instituto, congregazione . . . di S. Ivo avvocato (Rome, 1829).

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Figure 14.3 Giovanni Ventura Borghesi, St Yves receives petitions from the poor, copy of the altar of S. Ivo alla Sapienza, c.1680. Pinacoteca Comunale, Città di Castello.

Consequently, the altarpiece of la Sapienza not only replaced Yves’s judge’s hat with a priest’s biretta and a halo but the rich man was left out altogether and the poor man was replaced by a poor woman and orphaned children – lying prostrate and stripped of any agency, they place themselves entirely at the priest’s mercy. The Italians transformed Yves from a celebration of the virtues

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of secular peacemaking and the judge as impartial mediator into a veneration of clerical holiness and authority. The Roman idea of Yves as intercessor rather than peacemaker was brought back to France by the artist Pierre Mosnier, who had studied in Rome. His depiction of Yves, which was presented to Notre-Dame de Paris in 1696, has something to tell us about lay attitudes. The painting had originally belonged to the prince de Conti, who donated it to the cathedral.30 A libertine at odds with Counter-Reformation piety, Conti’s attachment to the saint was sentimental rather than spiritual. His father, who died in 1666, had been well known as a settler of disputes in Languedoc, where he had been provincial governor. Indeed, L’Arbitre charitable dedicated an engraving to his activities, which were held up as an example of good practice for holders of public office. The desire to honour his father explains Conti’s commission of the painting. But its bequest to the cathedral was prompted by more atavistic feelings. In January 1696 Conti won a major victory in court against his half-sister, the duchess of Longueville, in a battle for control of the principality of Neuchâtel. They were great enemies and Conti’s benefaction to the cathedral was likely a gift of thanks, an ex-voto, celebrating his victory. There is good reason to believe that this compound of ressentiment and piety remained widely felt in eighteenth-century France. On the eve of the Revolution, litigants were still suspending their case documents (sac à procès) from the ceiling of the chapel of Saint-Yves in Paris, in hope of divine intercession.31 ***

Forgiveness was embroidered into the fabric of justice across Europe. Pardons, remissions and renunciations of suits were public recognitions of an accord between enemies. The French monarchy led the way in requiring wrongdoers to seek the royal grace and pay for charters and their registration at its courts. At least 58,000 charters survive from the late fourteenth century to 1568, when it seems the royal chancery became overwhelmed and ceased to archive parchment duplicates. Pardons were rarely refused for all but the most heinous of crimes: a survey of 349 gentlemen who presented their pardons for registration between 1564 and 1660 shows that only two were rejected and decapitated.32 By the fifteenth century the mechanism for brokering settlements was formalised and refined. The remittance of a criminal sentence was invalid unless the civil party was satisfied. The sorts of negotiations that the process entailed can be gleaned from a lawsuit at the Parlement of Paris, following the murder of Hector 30

31

32

Explication du tableau presenté à la Sainte Vierge & à saint Yves, dans l’eglise de NostreDame de Paris (1696). A.-L., Millin, Antiquités nationales, ou Recueil de monumens pour servir à l’histoire générale et particulière de l’Empire françois, 5 vols. (Paris, 1790), IV, p. 18. Carroll, Blood and Violence, p. 262.

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Rousseau in 1458.33 His killers obtained remissions from the death penalty, claiming that they were carrying out an arrest warrant. The victim’s family challenged the registration on the pretext that the killing was premeditated; the result of a local territorial dispute, Rousseau’s house had been besieged by an armed gang and burned down. Both sides mobilised their patrons, hired Parisian lawyers and based their claims on detailed investigative work. The lawyer for the victim’s family revealed the defendants’ letters to be a tissue of lies; he outlined their motive, the previous history of enmity and their criminal record. He demanded their banishment; the posting of inscriptions of the criminal judgement at their residence and the scene of the murder; the erection of a stone cross with an inscription; the performance of atonement in church with an image of the victim present during the mass; the foundation of an expiatory chapel; and the payment of a 12,000 crowns (écus) lump sum and 400 livres annuity for the widow. These demands were the opening gambit in negotiations that took place out of court, whose progress depended greatly on the status and political clout of the parties. In this case, the matter dragged on for another two and a half years. Finally, in September 1463 the court ordered that the defendants should rebuild the property, pay 100 livres for Masses for the soul of their victim and pay 3,220 livres in damages. Even so, the family complained ten years later that they had still not been paid in full. The two settlements demonstrate that there was already, at the end of the Middle Ages, a variety of options open to the courts: one end of the spectrum included a panoply of spiritual and memorial stipulations; the other was almost exclusively monetary with token religious conditions. It would be wrong, however, to consider monetisation as part of an inevitable process of disenchantment. Just as significant was the Renaissance return to classical models, which placed great emphasis on the importance of memorialising a beautiful death. Let us explore changes to settlements and regional variations through the non-financial aspects of the court judgments. The erection of a monument in France was dependent on the ability to pay and the status of the victim. In 1617 the Toulousain jurist Bernard de la Roche Flavin explained that ‘the sovereign courts of the kingdom often order killers to build a chapel and make pious foundations at the place where the homicide was committed when their wealth is sufficient’.34 For the lower social orders Masses and financial compensation sufficed. At the bottom of the social ladder life was cheap, whereas the cost of paying for someone of high status was prohibitive for all but the propertied.35 Expiatory chapels and crosses were 33

34 35

P. Guerin (ed.), ‘Recueil des documents concernant le Poitou contenus dans les registres de la chancellerie de France’, Archives historiques du Poitou, 35 (1906), xviii–xli, 125–65 and 311–17. Arrests notables du Parlement de Toulouse (1682), p. 369. Carroll, Blood and Violence, pp. 228–32, provides some figures.

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reserved for the very rich.36 Jacques de Toustain, who killed a man in a duel in 1625, founded the chapel of the New World (Nouveau Monde) in the parish of Hautot-le-Vatois in Normandy. As the name suggests, expiatory chapels like this were not medieval hangovers but products of the Counter-Reformation; serving a confraternity dedicated to the Rosary it housed a hermitage under the care of the Capuchins, which soon developed into a pilgrimage site until its destruction by fire in 1775.37 The son of a judge, Toustain was a member of the wealthy provincial elite and could afford such a commission. He also seems to have undergone some form of spiritual conversion, being buried by the Capuchins in Caudebec in 1653. Such foundations were beyond the means of the petty gentry. In 1640 Pierre Faulcon, an esquire, was ordered to build a chapel at Chasseneuil in the Limousin and pay the salary of its vicar. But in 1687 it had still not been completed when his heirs were discharged from further work on condition that they still contributed to a vicar’s salary.38 Not all benefactions were motivated by piety, as the history of Boisstissandeau chapel in Poitou suggests.39 From at least 1430 two local lords had disputed control of the church there. The Ollivereau were originally vassals of the Coué, but when they constructed their own chateau in 1607 it was resented by the latter who forced the upstarts to quit the local church and use a nearby chapel. The dispute reached a peak in 1641 when Claude Ollivereau was killed by René de Coué. The judicial investigation was a cue for peace negotiations conducted by the wives of the combatants. The peace stipulated that the Ollivereau would build a chapel adjoining the parish church in which the dead man would be buried. This was consecrated on 12 January 1646. However, in order to uphold the rights of the Coué, it was also stipulated that the chapel had to be separated from the main body of the church by a grille. Furthermore, the Ollivereau family arms were not to be mounted on the church side of the new construction. In return, they did not challenge the killers’ pardon and recognised that the Coué retained their authority over the central space. They would enter the church from a different door and continue to sit in their seigneurial pew, facing the new chapel from its position in the nave. These meticulous precautions enabled peace to be established while upholding the honour of both families. More happily, at Troménec in Brittany the chapel of Saint-Laurent is home both to its founder, Guillaume Simon, who was buried with an inscription asking for God’s pardon, and his former enemy, the seigneur de Kermavan, 36

37

38

39

For example: E. Olry, ‘Notice sur la chapelle de Notre-Dame-des-Gouttes à Housselmont’, Journal de la société d’archéologie Lorraine et du comité du Musée Lorrain, 16 (1867), 103–40; Marquis de Brisay, La Maison de la Jaille (Paris, 1910), p. 281. C.-G. de Toustain-Richebourg, Famille de Toustain-Frontebosc (n. p., 1799), pp. 244–5; http://cdn1_2.reseaudespetitescommunes.fr/cities/816/documents/5haugdz90vhmp.pdf. A. Lecler, Dictionnaire historique et géographique de la Haute-Vienne, 2 vols. (Limoges, 1920–6), 631. Chevalier de la Broise, Notice sur le château de Boistissandeau (Angers, 1927), pp. 21–8.

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who he killed in a duel in 1602. Simon had built the chapel following his excommunication by the bishop of Léon.40 Expiatory chapels seem to have been peculiar to the French CounterReformation. I have not seen evidence for their use in peace deals in Italy, though memorialisation certainly existed. In 1625 the Martinengo family were ordered by the Venetian authorities to build a monument in the courtyard of the municipal palace in Brescia for their part in the killing of a priest and at Fusignano in the Romagna the feud between the Calcagnini and the Corelli was brought to an end in 1753 with the building of the Chiesa del Pio Suffragio on the site where the Palazzo Corelli had been razed in 1632.41 Penalties of banishment and execution were routinely recorded on inscriptions, colonne d’infamie (pillars of shame), which were sited at the scene of a crime or on the ruins of felons’ houses, whose destruction had been ordered by the courts. House-razing was part of a repertory of visually dramatic measures which were used to sharpen the impact of public executions. Across Europe it was used sparingly to publicise exceptional crimes committed against the natural order, especially rebellion.42 In Italy, the practice was much more common and related to the large number of outlaws and the need to symbolically punish criminals who had fled. A German visitor to Vicenza at the end of the sixteenth century found ‘many demolished houses, in which place an inscription is placed, and on it engraved, what murderous acts the owners of the said houses had done’.43 These inscriptions commemorated the misdeeds of outlaws, who might subsequently be reinstated and rebuild their property once they had paid for their crime. One of these inscriptions (Figure 14.4) survives in Vicenza, commemorating the ‘most atrocious homicides’ committed by Galeazzo da Roma and Giuseppe Almerico and accomplices in 1548. Colonne d’infamie were classical in inspiration. Although they were not explicitly instruments of peace, they might play a role in the settlement process since they functioned as a form of symbolic revenge for the bereaved, providing a modicum of emotional satisfaction and ensuring that the infamy of their enemies was preserved for posterity. In this instance vengeance proved to be hollow. Neither da Roma nor Almerico was brought to justice: not only did their relatives successfully claim compensation for the demolition of their property, claiming that they had purchased it from them before they

40

41 42

43

MM. Peyron and Abgrall, ‘Notices sur les paroisses du diocèse de Quimper et de Léon’, Bulletin Diocésain d’Histoire et d’Archéologie, 16 (1916), 230–1. For an earlier example: www.michellemarc.fr/gennes/index.php?option=com_hpd&view=hpd&Itemid=251. Guerrini (ed.), Le cronache bresciane, IV, p. 256; Spaccini, Cronaca, VI, pp. 342-3. C. Friedrichs, ‘House-Destruction as a Ritual of Punishment in Early Modern Europe’, European History Quarterly, 50 (2020), 599–624. http://selbstzeugnisse.hab.de/edition/diarium/1598, 11 December 1598.

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Figure 14.4 Colonna d’infamia, Vicenza

committed their crime, but they also endeavoured to obscure the stone epigraph from public view. What we see today is the result of a restoration.44 In France executions were commonly carried out on effigies and the judgment inscribed on a copper or bronze plaque at the scene of the crime. This was no guarantee that the punishment would be carried out in practice, nor did it prevent the outlaw from settling with the victims. The assassins of the comte de Charlus, who was killed in 1612, had to wait twenty-two years for their pardons. In the meantime, they paid for a chapel and an inscription detailing their crime to be erected at Mézamblin in the Bourbonnais. Research into expiatory crosses and 44

Almerico was later executed for a different crime: Niccolini, 3 luglio 1548.

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chapels in France is hampered by their disappearance. The vestiges of the chapel at Mézamblin were pulled down in 1875 and the cross that replaced it also seems to have gone.45 At Avremesnil in Normandy there was a wooden cross still standing at the beginning of the twentieth century. The wood had disappeared by 1960, but the remaining stone base inscription told us that it had been put up by the sieur de Lespine in 1613. This had also gone by 1968.46 During the Revolution, in particular, crosses and wayside chapels were the subject of systematic destruction. Some of them were medieval in origin, but the great period of stone cross-building in France came after the Reformation. In the small village of Larajasse in the Lyonnais alone, seven were put up in the sixteenth century and three in the seventeenth. The neighbouring village of Chevrières has nine crosses dating from the sixteenth century.47 The few that survive are difficult to decipher, because of either decay or the absence of records. For example, the cross at Bourgon (Figure 14.5) in the Maine apparently erected by Louis de Monteclerc, who killed his wife in flagrante delicto in 1583, poses as many questions as it answers. A royal favourite, Monteclerc obtained his pardon with ease.48 But the coat of arms on its pedestal belongs to a local priory and it does not seem to have been erected at the scene of the crime, raising questions as to its provenance and purpose. Murder crosses are still commonly found in east and central Europe and the Low Countries. The thousands that survive today in Germany, discussed in Chapter 7, give an indication of what the French countryside might have looked like before the Revolution. They survived the Lutheran Reformation. In 1598, for example, Count Wolf von Wolfsthal erected one near Nuremberg, in addition to paying his victim’s family 2000 Gulden.49 In contrast, Calvinists were hostile to any object or structure that smacked of superstition and the influence of the Reformed tradition may explain the declining use of stone memorials in settlements in Germany in the seventeenth century. In England the erection of what were known as weeping crosses died out before the break with Rome. It used to be thought that the English common law had always been hostile to satisfaction and monetary settlements, but this is no longer the case. Blood money compensation was part of the fabric of English medieval justice.50 The 1487 Murder Statute, which required punishment for a killing and 45 46

47

48

49 50

Carroll, Blood and Violence, p. 21. ‘Calvaire dit: “Croix Lorgerie”’, Bulletin de la Commission des antiquités de la Seine-Maritime, 17 (1915–19), 176–7; ‘La Croix Lorgerie’: http://avremesnil.com/histoire4.html. G. de Jerphanion, Vieilles croix des Monts du Lyonnais; Les croix de Larajasse et autres lieux voisins (Lyon, 1942). Archives Nationales, X2b 129, 17 December 1583; Archives de la Préfecture de Police, AB 8 fo. 91; www.chateaudebourgon.com/le-calvaire. ‘Burgfarrnbach’: www.suehnekreuz.de. A. Musson, ‘Wergeld: Crime and the Compensation Culture in Medieval England’: www .gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/wergeld-crime-and-the-compensation-culture-inmedieval-england.

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Figure 14.5 Le Calvaire de Bourgon

created the lesser crime of manslaughter to ensure that juries reached a conviction, sought to put a stop to abuses caused by a generation of civil war. The 1487 Act was part of a wider European move towards more punitive justice, but untypically it took little heed of the rights of widows and orphans. Henceforth public prosecution took precedence in England: there was no recognised civil party and although private suits for compensation continued they remained at the margins of the English common law.51 Pardons, which were ubiquitous, were consequently for the exclusive profit of the state, there being no requirement, as elsewhere, to settle the civil damages. In England, therefore, the monetised and 51

Kesselring, Making Murder Public, chapter 3.

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disenchanted process of settling a killing had less to do with the Reformation but was rooted in procedures developed by medieval Europe’s most centralised state. Before the 1487 Act there are scattered references to so-called weeping crosses for those compelled to do penances for a crime. For example, Sir John Holland received a pardon for the killing of the only son of the earl of Stafford in 1386. As part of the process of reconciliation, he was required to endow a chantry for his victim and erect a large stone cross on the main road into York. In the eighteenth century the cross still marked the boundary of the city wards. Nevertheless, the number of crosses in England on the eve of the Reformation, estimated at 5,000, seems rather low in comparison to the figures from elsewhere. It appears that, while preaching crosses, market and boundary crosses, sanctuaries for travellers and memorials existed, their use in settlements was already negligible when the 1487 statute rendered them redundant.52 ***

What did people think they were doing when they put up crosses, columns and chapels? What function did they perform for the dead and their kin? One official view can be gleaned from the 1534 satisfaction performed by Georg Ungemut near Biberach. The court stipulated that once the cross, monetary satisfaction and atonement were complete, ‘the murder was to be consigned to eternal forgetfulness (Amnestiam)’.53 Some decades later the Lutheran pastor Johannes Wigandi wrote an entire Latin treatise, Amnestia, on the power of forgetfulness, which he considered to be the best way to end worldly disputes.54 Forgetting was an antidote to feelings of revenge. But, as the building of memorials suggests, forgiving does not mean forgetting. And there is good reason to believe that ordinary people did not forget. During the French Wars of Religion, for example, the building of unofficial Catholic victory memorials, marking the death of a heretic or the destruction of their house, had the purpose of sanctifying polluted ground and nurturing feelings of revenge against Protestants. Popular memorials were an affront to royal peace efforts, which were predicated on reconciliation through forgetting (oubliance). The removal of one monument, the Croix de Gastines, by the authorities in Paris contributed significantly to the intensification of popular anger, which was channelled into the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew. Writing in the wake of the civil wars, la Roche Flavin worried that satisfaction was arousing the wrong sorts of sentiments. ‘In all judgements . . . for murders and homicide one is inviolably accustomed to apportion a part of the goods of a murderer to pray 52

53 54

A. Rimmer, Ancient Stone Crosses of England (London, 1875); A. Vallance, Old Crosses and Lychgates (London: Batsford, 1920). A. Sulger, Annales imperialis monasterii Zwiefaltensis, 2 vols. (1698), II, p. 125. Abhandlung / Von der Amnestia Oder Beylegung derer Streitigkeiten und Vergessung alles Vnrechts, den Frieden zu gewinnen (Quedlingburg, 1693), pp. 11, 35.

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Figure 14.6 La Croix Ricard, Jobourg, France

for the soul of the deceased, principally in order to appease the anger of God on the people for the spilling of blood.’55 To the educated, appeasing an angry God was superstitious, a further reason why court orders requiring them waned in the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, the practice survived in the face of educated scepticism. La Croix Ricard, which stands in the village of Jobourg on the Cap de la Hague, the wild and isolated tip of the Cotentin, is indicative of the multiple functions of memorials and the emotional needs they served (Figure 14.6).

55

Arrests notables du Parlement de Toulouse, p. 369.

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As with most crosses there is very little documentation to explain its provenance, giving rise to competing accounts of what happened.56 Around the year 1670, it is said, the seigneur d’Auderville made derogatory remarks about the wife of his neighbour, the seigneur de Jobourg. A duel was arranged for 15 August, the feast of the Assumption. When he arrived at church for Vespers, Jobourg saw Auderville waiting for him in the cemetery. Warned of the impending event, madame de Jobourg rushed out from the church and ran towards her husband, letting out a cry of anguish; he, surprised by the commotion, turned around and momentarily dropped his guard, whereupon his rival plunged a sword straight through his heart. Such violence was unremarkable in seventeenth-century France. Two gentlemen fight over the reputation of a lady. They fight in a cemetery, sacrilegiously on a Holy Day. Publicity attests to the legitimacy of their actions, advertising that honour was repaired. Like most duels, it leaves no traces in the archives. What distinguishes it is the cross. And it is the tales that the cross engendered, passed through the generations and written down in the midnineteenth century, which preserve its memory. The seigneur de Jobourg’s spirit is said to haunt the moors around the village when it is driven there by the frequent storms which batter the coast.57 In the absence of contemporary documentary evidence, it is unwise to dismiss the ghost stories out of hand. They were part of a rich oral tradition that was passed through the generations and written down by folklorists in the nineteenth century. In traditional Europe crosses invited the believer to ponder the reality of divine presence and the mystery of redemption. They called for divine protection. Passers-by were invited to stop and pray, to make signs of the cross, or simply look on and recall Christ’s sufferings. But there was often a magical element to crosses in hills and waysides. The fact that the phantom duellist comes back to haunt his former village is significant. In popular culture revenants were typically querulous persons who had made a bad end. Those who died badly, that is unshriven, or through violence or guile, were depicted as unquiet souls who wandered the earth either as maleficent spirits or as corporeal revenants. The untimely dead were to be feared and placated. The Catholic Church had a full armoury of sacramentals to ward them off. The sign of the cross was, according to many Catholic demonologists, sufficient protection against demons. The Croix Ricard thus had a purifying element, sanctifying the ground on which blood was shed. This was even more important if the body, as was the case with other duellists, had been buried outside consecrated ground at Jobourg. If this was the case, the cross was a site where the family could do its devotions and 56

57

L. Couppey, Notes historiques sur le prieuré conventuel d’Héauville à La Hague (1898), pp. 98–9. J.-B. Digard de Lousta, ‘Coup d’œil sur la Hague’, Mémoires de la Société royale académique de Cherbourg, 5 (1847), 20. www.mairie-jobourg.fr/patrimoine/bati/croix-ricard.

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assist the passage of the dead man’s soul to heaven. It has become a truism that the Reformation fractured the community of the living and the dead; that it cast out the dead from earthly society when it abolished the dead’s status in attaining salvation. Nevertheless, into the twentieth century there was still a strong belief, even among Protestants, in spirits, ghosts and restless souls and the recognition of the reciprocal bonds between living and dead was deeply rooted in folklore.58 A closer look at the cross suggests other possible functions. It displays two swords of unequal length; one of them is possibly a dagger, and a badly weathered crude figure lying prostrate is depicted on the base. These images were not stipulated by any court. Private commissions were not unknown. In 1590, for example, Marie Barjot commissioned a chapel at Ons-en-Bray, which still stands today, in the hope that it would bring to an end a feud that had claimed the lives of twenty-eight men during the recent civil wars.59 La Croix Ricard may have also been part of an out-of-court settlement. Although the royal courts increasingly restricted their judgments to pecuniary settlements, the Catholic Church continued to encourage rituals of atonement. In 1685, for example, the church court at Rouen ordered two duellists to take part in a ceremony of reconciliation, each holding a candle, in the cemetery of Allouville, where they had fought after Sunday Mass.60 But the weapons depicted on La Croix Ricard evoke less pity than the commemoration of a beautiful death. Following the Renaissance there was a growing naturalisation, if not secularisation of death, in which the reputation and fame of the dying became more significant. Survivors were encouraged to contemplate the deceased as exemplifications of virtue and human accomplishment. Virtuous lives deserve perpetual memory and this neopagan cult of fame is captured on an earlier tomb to a duellist, who was refused burial in sacred ground in Arles in 1521. In defiance of this order a chapel dedicated to Saint-Accurse was erected by the baron of Beaujeu in memory of his victim near the cemetery entrance, in addition to the obligatory cross where the combat took place. The combat was ‘portrayed by a bas relief sculpted on a frieze about the door. Two men are depicted advancing towards one another. One depicted over a death’s head symbolising the outcome of the combat and shown sounding a hunting horn.’61 La Croix Ricard seems to have been a cruder version of this idiom. The representation of death both served as a memento mori and announced that glory had triumphed over death. Peace between the parties was sealed by the mutual recognition that honour had been satisfied. 58

59

60 61

P. Marshall and B. Gordon (eds.), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). https://oise.catholique.fr/archives/rubriques/droite/art-culture-et-foi/notre-histoire /temoins-dhier/marie-fernel-grande-figure-chretienne-de-loise; Carroll, Blood and Violence, pp. 142, 259, 294. www.allouvillebellefosse.com/index.php/tourisme/le-village. Carroll, Blood and Violence, p. 232.

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This sort of deal was appropriate for a duel but not for a premeditated murder, whose infamy required a different form of memorialisation. Those who received pardons or remissions had often paid for their offence through the ignominy of banishment or being executed in effigy.62 These largely symbolic punishments undoubtedly provided a modicum of emotional satisfaction. The descendants of the count of Charlus went further and had frescoes painted in the guard-room of their chateau at Poligny depicting details of his murder.63 The infamy that crosses and inscriptions incurred can be gleaned from a court case at Mondidier in 1499. Jean de Hangard was prepared to pay cash to satisfy the murder he had committed but refused to finance a cross in town that would have memorialised his crime for posterity. Instead, a pile of stones was placed in front of Mondidier’s hôtel de ville and a second one at the scene of the crime. These memorials were out of sight. A local historian explained the reason for their survival in 1857: ‘their obscurity is their safeguard’.64 The different meanings that memorials had for opposing parties can be seen elsewhere in Europe. The family of Wendel von Lichtenstein refused the blood money from his killers during negotiations in 1563–5. Instead they demanded a headstone for him, costing 40 to 50 Gulden, in which the manner of his death would be recorded. The killer objected to the use of the word ‘murder’ on the inscription. Understandably, the family wished to memorialise the killer’s guilt, while he strongly objected to being dishonoured for posterity.65 This deal was less a case of Christian forgiveness and joining of hearts than a truce. Similar sentiments are recorded on a 1608 German tomb: ‘here lies buried Hans Fabian von Wildenstein run through by Hanse von and zu Wildenstein at a wedding party’.66 German stones survive in greater numbers and consequently the iconography is richer. Here murder stones were much less of an elite phenomenon and we find flails, axes, crossbows and firearms as well as swords carved into them. At Lauingen an der Donau the stonemason’s receipt for a murder cross in 1591 shows that at 4 florins – about twenty days’ wages for an unskilled labourer – they were within the means of all but the poorest.67 Consequently, it was not just noblemen’s quarrels that were remembered. Most are crude works, but Peter Swyn, leader of the peasant republic of Dittmarschen, is portrayed being thrown from his horse during his assassination in 1537, and such elaborate carvings were not unusual in this region in the sixteenth century.68 At Clausnitz in Saxony the 1563 settlement for the killing of the 62 63 64 65 66

67 68

Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 21. V. Beauvillé, Histoire de la ville de Montdidier, 3 vols. (Paris, 1857), II, pp. 399–400. J. Mötsch, ‘Zur Rettung meiner Ehr’. www.starks-historische-spurensuche.de/Sechsaemterland/Grabdenkmaeler/ Schoenbrunn/Schoenbrunn_Grabdenkmaeler.htm. ‘Lauingen an der Donau’: www.suehnekreuz.de. ‘Lunden’: www.suehnekreuz.de.

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local judge by the pastor included the planting of a cross with the murder weapon on it – a hammer – and a skull (Totenkopf), the motif that reminded Christians of earthly vanity.69 The inscriptions on German stones are invaluable for dating and giving substance to often competing legends. An inscription at Leuba in Saxony records the murder of the town clerk of Ostritz by the local junker, Kaspar von Gersdorf, over a game of skittles in 1591 – one of two crosses that the settlement required.70 The significance of such edifices to the kin can be gleaned by the inscription on the Croix de Grez in the Artois, which was spared complete destruction in 1793. The cross surmounted by an image of Christ was put up in 1628 to commemorate the deaths of five men, who in all likelihood lost their lives in an encounter on what was then the border between France and the Spanish Netherlands. The work is artisanal and lacks the finesse of a master, the wording jumbled and difficult to decipher. The inscription tells that the men died in 1578, so someone had taken a great deal of trouble to record the event precisely fifty years later, to inscribe each of their names and to exhort ‘all my friends who pass this way to remember [their] trespass [and] pray God’ for them.71 Though the formal stipulation that stone crosses be built as part of a court settlement declined in the seventeenth century, they continued to be put up by private individuals because they fulfilled an important emotional need. Henceforth, the people who put up murder crosses were doing so to commemorate a friend or comrade, or they were local villagers attempting to ward off ghosts. They represented less forgiveness and reconciliation than pity for the individual who died unshriven. Bravery was also worth recalling. The death of Louis de Proisy in a duel in 1668, for example, was recorded by a stone put up in the Laonnais on the site of the combat.72 Louis XIV contributed to changing fashions in several ways. In 1660 a cross, since lost, was erected in the forests of the royal chateau of Saint Germain-enLaye to commemorate its governor (whose nickname, le Dragon, gives an indication of his reputation while alive) after he was gunned down by two masked assassins.73 Not long after, Louis’s vocation as a Solomonic peacemaker was severely tested when Bernard and his son François de la Broüe, leading members of the Poitevan nobility, were tortured and executed for their part in the assassination of the marquis du Vigean in 1663. Within months it became clear that a terrible miscarriage of justice had occurred. The prosecution had been politically motivated and the witnesses ‘encouraged and 69 70

71

72 73

www.suehnekreuz.de. R. Doehler, Geschichte des Dorfes Leuba in der königlich sächsischen Oberlausitz (Zittau, 1907), pp. 14–15. M. Danvin, ‘Croix de Grès de Vacquerie-le-Boucq’, Bulletin de la Commission des antiquités départementales (Pas-de-Calais), 2 (1862), 93–7. www.bletteryjp.fr/Craonne/Villages-Aisne/Neuville.htm. A. Rolot and L. de Sivry, Précis historique de Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1848), p. 13.

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protected by the grands, marshals, dukes and peers and the governors of the Marche, Angoumois and Poitou, who were kin and allies of the widow’.74 Suspicion fell on the duc de Richelieu in particular. Louis intervened to stop demands for vengeance. Since a reckoning had the potential for scandal, publicity had to be avoided. Instead the king treated with the la Broüe privately, giving the widow a precious image of Christ as a symbol of reconciliation and personally arranging and signing the marriage contract of her son and heir. Louis’s diplomatic victory over Pope Alexander VII the following year was commemorated with the erection of a memorial in Rome. In August 1662 soldiers of the pope’s Corsican Guard came to blows with the guard of the French embassy. Shots were fired at the coach of the French ambassador, leaving several of his retainers dead and wounded. Louis seized Avignon, forcing the Pope to submit in 1664. The papal legate, Cardinal Chigi, was compelled to give an apology and the governor of Rome to come to Paris and explain his conduct. The Corsican Guard was dissolved and a pyramid built in Rome to mark the site of the incident (Figure 14.7). Though the pyramid served to expiate a crime, the motif was secular and Christian peace absent. It proclaimed Louis’s diplomatic triumph. The scale was different from the private crosses commemorating duellists, but its evocation of honour satisfied and proclaimed was not dissimilar. In the absence of any sign of reconciliation, the Romans considered it as nothing more than a colonna d’infamia. Clement IX had it pulled down in 1668. ***

Whereas violence leaves traces everywhere in the archives, peacemaking is more intangible. This chapter has attempted to explore its shifting emotional landscape through images and monuments. These are extraordinary physical survivals that are representative of the much more mundane practice of everyday reconciliation. Peacemaking in the early modern period owed a great deal to the continuation of established medieval practices even if these were adapted and sometimes distorted. Social control in urban areas was an extension of the medieval notion of civil society, where the church and its institutions worked to support the arbitration and mediation offered by the secular courts. The thick skein of institutions which promoted good peace, civil unity and neighbourliness was a development of late medieval ideas of good police, an all-encompassing term for a well-regulated society, dealing with all manner of neighbourly disputes. Outside of England the notary continued to be a cheap and popular alternative to going to court into the eighteenth century. In the Low Countries the neighbourhood official 74

BN Morel de Thoisy, 381 fo. 246, ‘Discours a Messieurs du Presidial d’Alencon par dame Gabrielle-Aymerie-Heslie de La Rochesnart vefve de Deffunt Francois de La Broue ecuyer sieur de Vareilles’.

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Figure 14.7 Pyramid commemorating the Corsican Guards Affair, 1664

buurtmeester or faiseur de paix was a familiar sight. Their job was to maintain peace, friendship and concord. Reconciliations required that the wrongdoer recant an insult before the parties shook hands and made friends. In Calvinist Holland the kiss of peace, the vredekus, though it was expunged from the

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liturgy, continued in use, not as a greeting or parting ritual but as a sign of friendship, brotherhood, reconciliation, accord and mutual agreement.75 The practice of binding people over to keep the peace was ubiquitous. Even the Paris police force (established in 1667), which became the model for absolutist state control, spent a great deal of time reconciling neighbourly disputes, which meant that they had multiple roles, not only as spies and policemen but also as social workers, youth custody officers and family counsellors.76

75

76

H. Roodenburg, ‘The “Hand of Friendship”: Shaking Hands and Other Gestures in the Dutch Republic’, in J. Bremmer and H. Roodenburg (eds.), A Cultural History of Gesture (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), pp. 152–89. A. Farge, Vies oubliées. Au coeur du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: La Découverte, 2019).

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u Conclusion

This book has explored ordinary Europeans’ interaction with everyday enemies at the birth of modernity. My method has been, as far as possible, to ground my story in a wide variety of contemporary sources where we have followed people motivated by a sense of injustice, using the law, enforcing their rights, mobilising friends, defending reputations, making peace and often resorting to violence. The sources privilege the social elite because they leave more records, had more property to defend, were more status-conscious, used force more legitimately and suffered more from status anxiety than their social inferiors. But one factor that distinguishes early modern Europe from the medieval period is the larger and more amorphous nature of the social elite, and over the course of our story we have encountered not simply nobles but also lawyers, students, aspirant rural notables and priests. And we have encountered the peasants who became embroiled in and suffered from the enmities of their better-off neighbours. This book builds on 2006’s Blood and Violence in Early Modern France, which demonstrated that feuding was a dominant feature of life in Europe’s most populous state. In that book I demonstrated that vindicatory violence was not a relic left over from the Middle Ages – there was very little evidence for the feud in the early sixteenth century – but rather a direct consequence of the French Wars of Religion (1562–98), which undermined a well-functioning civil society and legal system that had, until then, mediated violence effectively. I also proved that elite violence did not cease with the end of the military campaigns and that the new phenomenon of duelling was not, as is frequently claimed, a civilising force which canalised violence. In fact, I speculated that feuding remained a feature of much of rural France into the reign of Louis XIV. This book has demonstrated that, in some parts of rural France, we can extend that chronology to the 1720s. Despite these findings, which were based on extensive archival research, historians continued to make outdated assertions about state power and the progressive taming of violence. Rates of violence can rise and fall, but these histories ignored evidence that contradicted their linear thinking and teleological assumptions. In 2011 Robert Muchembled wrote, in the face of the evidence, that, ‘Homicide . . . has declined spectacularly all over Europe, most 460

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notably at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This trend is linked to the marked reduction in the number of fights between men using bladed weapons, which was first visible among the aristocracy.’1 In fact, elite violence was on the rise in the period and only fell in the eighteenth century. In the same year Steven Pinker published The Better Angels of Our Nature, whose mix of Whig history and pop science garnered celebrity endorsements and glowing reviews and which became a global publishing sensation. Pinker offers a congratulatory view of the West in which ‘modernity’ conquered our innate predisposition to violence: the rule of law, the development of state institutions and social discipline interjected rationality into social relations and tamed us. According to Pinker, ‘from the 14th century on the European homicide rate sank steadily’.2 In fact, the current evidence suggests that the instauration of modernity had the opposite effect: homicide rates increased during the sixteenth century and peaked in the mid-seventeenth. And historians have not been kind to Pinker. They complain about his conjuring of a fabulous Middle Ages, a conceit necessary to demonstrate the distance we have since travelled; his ‘shockingly shoddy’ use of evidence; the fact that he selects only evidence that fits his theory; his misuse of the statistics and inability to interpret data.3 They have exposed the politics behind Better Angels, which amounts to a defence of technocratic neoliberalism, comforting us that however bad things are at present the past was always a lot worse.4 Pinker’s irreverent style and ahistorical relativism might be deemed to be harmless, and we might be prepared to forgive the wasting of twenty-firstcentury science in the service of nineteenth-century historical thinking if there were not bigger issues at stake. To misrepresent the past is to misunderstand the present. The first problem with ‘comfort history’ relates to the use and abuse of history in contemporary culture. In the United States, in particular, with university humanities enrolments down, the liberal arts ideal under threat and premodern history provision being cut back to the bone, we are witnessing a telescoping of history, in which only the contemporary is valorised. But students need to know why medieval York was much more peaceable than many modern American cities. The second danger of ‘comfort history’ is to nurture the belief that we are nearing an end to violence, for if violence is the stuff of history, then we are close to the end of history itself, as many commentators have claimed. History suggests that we should always resist such utopian thinking. It is comforting to think that peace is an indubitably good thing and that today every sensible person has grown to abhor violence. 1 2 3

4

A History of Violence(Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p. 301. Better Angels, p. 63. P. Dwyer and M. Micale (eds.), The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History and Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). D. Bell, ‘Pinker’s Technocratic Neoliberalism, and Why It Matters’, in Dwyer and Micale (eds.), Darker Angels.

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But peace and justice are in tension. An absence of violence is not an indicator of a just society. High rates of violence in the past were often a result of feelings of injustice. The significant increase of collective violence in France after 1760 was not a sign of a decivilising process but a growing revolt against a system that put social peace before social justice. The tension between the two remains crucial to understanding the present. The decline of violence in the 1990s and early 2000s led to a remarkable renaissance of American cities. But, as Patrick Sharkey explains, the underlying causes of the violence were not tackled and from 2014 the homicide rate began to creep up again.5 Then, in 2020, it jumped 30 per cent, the largest such annual increase ever recorded, demonstrating the enduring significance of civil conflict, factionalism and a sense of injustice in shaping social relations, and the potential for the wider political environment to escalate otherwise trivial altercations.6 But historians would do well not to dismiss Pinker completely. History is, after all, stronger when it engages with the sciences and social sciences. Pinker concedes that the brain is remarkably plastic and that we are no more hardwired to lash out than to seek peace. It is the environment that shapes our response to a situation. Homicide rates do seem to have fallen significantly across western Europe in the eighteenth century and Pinker is correct that the high rates of homicide that we see in the preceding two centuries are an example of what he terms Verkko’s law. This states that the higher the overall rate of homicide, the lower the percentage of female victims. High rates of homicide are associated with a much higher rate of non-domestic male-onmale violence.7 He is also right to suggest that killings are overwhelmingly a product of the prevailing moral order and not for gain; they are contests largely between men for dominance and rank in the pecking order.8 This explains why the spread of Renaissance ideals about manliness and virtue had the potential to escalate trivial disputes. Pinker is correct when he nuances his idea of the Leviathan. A policy of divide and rule is predicated on encouraging factionalism and conflict as part of the process of state-building. In contrast, states that fostered commerce and offered structured careers in their bureaucracies and armies were building legitimacy and trust among subjects. The British Empire was built on both policies. But trust can go down as well as up, as the history of eighteenth-century France attests. One of the major claims of the present book is that violence was on the increase before the Revolution, contributing to the profound sense of crisis in 1787–9. Recent research also suggests that there was nothing particularly special about 5

6 7 8

Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence (New York: Norton, 2018). www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/27/us-murder-rate-increase-2020. Pinker, Better Angels, pp. 64, 84, 622. Ibid., p. 63.

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European states’ capacity to exercise social control. In fact, they may have been less effective than their East Asian counterparts in policing and controlling interpersonal violence.9 The homicide rate in China, for example, was much lower than in early modern Europe, ranging from 0.35 to 1.47 per 100,000 in the period 1661–1898.10 It may be that the answer to the rapid fall in the homicide rate across eighteenth-century Europe lies beyond the state. It was precisely to get beyond common assumptions about the European state, the law, violence and innate emotions that I adopted the framework of enmity. My approach, in contrast to Pinker, has been bottom up; I am concerned with real people and their experience. Statistics have a role to play in my analysis, but I used them cautiously. We need more statistical evidence. Most of the data for the premodern period comes from England, whose judicial records are much thinner than elsewhere, and until we have better statistics from across Europe we should be wary of extrapolating too much from the English data. Enmity remains, for us as it was for our ancestors, crucial to a sense of identity. The reason why I discarded the concept of feud for enmity for this study is that the former is an anthropological construct that had little meaning for people in the past. Enmity, in contrast, is a colloquial term. It is also a dynamic category. Its origins lie in the ubiquitous nature of competition and rivalry between individuals and groups. Enmity is distinguished by the intensification of antagonism in which another group or person is perceived as threatening and must be countered by force. It is a relationship legitimised by a narrative which seeks to demonise the other, who is characterised as evil or subversive or a threat to one’s existence.11 The movement is not all one way. We can make allies out of enemies or return to a healthy sense of rivalry. ‘Narratives of enmity’, writes Rodney Barker, ‘or descriptions of enemies, or more broadly narratives of contention are a recurring theme in which political leaders, parties and nations give account of who they are themselves.’12 Enmity represents a particular threat to democracy whose flourishing relies on a healthy civil society and sense of social trust. Social media has publicised feelings of resentment and given voice to antipathies and prejudices once hidden from view. This is well understood by democracy’s enemies who weaponise social media platforms in order to sow division among citizens and undermine trust in institutions. At the beginning of modernity enmity was most likely to be experienced as a personal feeling (inimictia). But the early modern period was crucial to the emergence both of nationalism and national enemies and the identification of public enemies within the state (hostis). The 9

10

11 12

R. Antony, S. Carroll and C. Dodds Pennock, ‘Introduction’, in Antony, Carroll, and Dodds Pennock (eds.), The Cambridge World History of Violence: vol. 3. Z. Chen et al. ‘Social-Economic Change and Its Impact on Violence: Homicide History of Qing China’, Explorations in Economic History, 63 (2017), 8–25. Barker, Making Enemies, p. 38. Ibid., p. ix.

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revival of classical learning during the Renaissance identified new threats, the schism of the Church created new categories of subversives and print culture demonised enemies on a scale not seen before in human history. The legacy remains today. The demonisation of public enemies remains common even in democracies. But we should not draw too clear a distinction between inimicus and hostis: ‘the untangling of personal calculation and political calculation is both impossible and unprofitable’.13 In the period 1500–1700 the distinction between public and private enemies was more blurred than it is today because of the frequency of civil conflict. The transformation of social relations in the West was not the culmination of an ineluctable process, either of state formation or of the repression of instinct. The erosion of medieval hierarchies and systems of mediation made competition for material resources and status rivalries more intense. The Renaissance state was part of the problem of violence. Enmity is rooted in a sense of injustice and there was a growth in distrust between those who gained from and those who lost out to the burgeoning of state power after 1500. Punitive justice proved largely ineffective, even counter-productive, in curbing rising rates of violence in the sixteenth century, and during the following century courts used corporal punishment with more circumspection. In any case corporal punishment was not appropriate for the educated even if they were responsible for a disproportionate amount of the violence: corporal punishment was reserved for crimes against the moral and natural order; it was inflicted largely on the marginal and the propertyless. The law is part of a social continuum. It shaped enmity and mediated violence, but it did not repress them. We have seen in this book, and we know from current experience, how the law can be used and abused. Enmity was a major threat to public order because its scale and intensity were related to the struggle for social and political capital. Obligatory kin vengeance, as a social duty to avenge one’s kin, certainly existed, but it was not responsible for the surge in elite violence that occurred across Europe in the sixteenth century, nor was the decline of kinship obligations responsible for the decline of violence in the eighteenth century. More significant in generating the rise in elite violence was social change and the development of a caste code in which retaliation was seen as socially acceptable and politically necessary. The social elite were the most avid consumers of the law, and they used the courts alongside violence to uphold their honour and enforce their rights: rising rates of litigation in the sixteenth century were part of the same process of contention as rising rates of homicide. And just as violence declined in the eighteenth century, so did rates of litigation. The law promoted arbitration and reconciliation at every stage of the process and there were strong moral pressures for peace. But the desire of the

13

Ibid., p. 45.

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parties to fulfil their obligations and make use of the myriad institutions of mediation was dependent on social and political circumstance. Tracing changes in social relations is extremely difficult. We can be fairly certain that the changes that occurred around 1700 were not imposed from above as Pinker claims. The abbé de Saint-Pierre, an Enlightenment social commentator and acute observer of contemporary society, argued that the cure for the cult of duelling in France lay in transforming social attitudes: In general, one can say that men are rarely cured of their prejudices or their errors by force or by violence: this means is but a fraction of persuasion. They will cure each other, some by the examples of their fellows, others by the gap they notice between their prejudices and certain truths; the former by the esteem they have for wise men who have contrary opinions; the latter by their own reflections; some others by the evidence of the reasoning that we make to them; but everyone by the signs of scorn of ignominy that one attaches to anyone who judges with and conducts themselves according to their prejudices.14

The transformation of enmity around 1700 is the subject of a subsequent book. It is common to attribute this to the Enlightenment, but Saint-Pierre was writing in 1715 before the Enlightenment really took off in France. In fact, a better clue to the origins of his reflections comes from the fact that he was born in 1658 during a period of intense civil disorder. We know that he was brought up on tales of aristocratic violence that had scarred the lives of his father and grandfather since the late sixteenth century, because his father composed a memoir around 1667 in order that his son could imbibe the lessons of family history.15 Saint-Pierre’s uncle had been murdered in 1640 and the judicial pursuit of the killer, who claimed it had been a fair fight, cost the family 4,600 livres in expenses and bribes. Saint-Pierre was dismissive of Louis XIV’s claim to have abolished the duel. Unlike many historians he did not accept Louis’s boasts of success in eradication as a social fact. Saint-Pierre’s experience rendered him sceptical of the efficacy of change imposed from above. Instead, like many men born in the mid-seventeenth century he placed his faith not in the state or religion but in society. The experience of violence taught educated people that regulation was by itself insufficient and that we needed to police ourselves and others. Salvation not only required that we suffer our enemies, but the experience of civil conflict, which often continued long after the military campaigns had ceased, taught that it was the best means of self-preservation. Thinkers turned it into a rule for living when they invented and popularised the abstract notion of society. Society and the social contract were born out of the violence that came in the wake of the Reformation and the Renaissance cult of individual honour. 14 15

Mémoire pour perfectionner la police contre le duel, p. 157. See above p. 397.

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Widely despised and feared it might have been, but the state turned out to be no worse than one’s neighbours. Experience showed that the law alone was insufficient to arbitrate quarrels and that an over-arching source of sovereignty and authority was essential. And the state began to change at the end of the seventeenth century as the expansion of fiscal-military government offered avenues for enrichment and a structured career. For Hobbes, the state was a means to self-discipline. Like other stoics, he claimed that wisdom lay in the renunciation of feeling. We find peace by subordinating our desires and will to the sovereign, not because know they know better but because self-disciplining is better for our well-being.16 Hobbes was representative of a strong strain of Augustinian thinking that pervaded northern Europe, Catholic and Protestant. In contrast to the Ciceronian ideals of the Renaissance, which argued that the citizens required liberty, civil peace began with the recognition that we are all equally capable of doing harm. For his contemporary Pascal, all men naturally hate one another. In order to defend ourselves and protect our neighbours it is necessary to subordinate our wills to an external force. The proponents of society taught that in order to survive and prosper we must learn to trivialise our feuds and quarrels. There were selfish reasons for doing so. The great populariser of the benefits of society, Morvan de Bellegarde, taught that social peace required concessions and abatements. The failure to do so led to eternal lawsuits which fattened only judges. But Bellegarde went further and emphasised the psychological costs: ‘Dealing in Law-Suits, is in my Opinion that which of all things most warps the Mind.’ Right masked pride and enmity: suits may have begun as a matter of principle, ‘But once action is commenc’d, it is made a Point of Honour to maintain it.’17 Tranquillitas was turned from a stoic guide to the good life into a law which governed society. Pierre Nicole, whose popular Essays on Manners owed much of their influence in England to the patronage of Locke, complained that ‘those exterior troubles which divide Kingdoms, often rise from the little care [taken by] particular persons whereof they are compose’d’. He defined civility as the ‘commerce of self-love, by which one tries to attract the affection of others by showing them affection in turn’.18 This reciprocity underpinned society. Since loving your neighbour was impossible, something else would have to suffice: ‘It being impossible Men should live without being hated, they ought with extreme care to avoid incurring hatred by their imprudence and indiscretion . . . to the end we may maintain humane Society . . . every one should lend his helping hand, since then every one reaps considerable advantages.’19 If civility is the traffic of self-love, it followed that 16

17

18 19

R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). J.-B., Morvan de Bellegarde, Reflexions upon ridicule; or, what it is that makes a man ridiculous; and the means to avoid it (London, 1706), p. 270. Moral Essays (London, 1677), p. 285. Ibid., p. 238.

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incivilities do us no harm: in the commerce of the world we receive profit from some and loss from others. Christian teaching quickly made its reconciliation with politeness. Loving one’s neighbour was utopian; its impossibility left many ordinary believers fearing for their salvation. By 1734, however, it was possible for the author of the popular Traité du vrai mérite de l’homme (twenty editions) to claim that the ‘science of manners is the great Christian science’. Revenge, he told his readers, was unseemly, a vice peculiar to religious fanatics.20 The changes wrought by these ideas can be tracked through semantic shifts. The English word ‘quarrel’ today typically refers to a trivial issue between people who are usually on good terms. But this was different from early modern quarrels, which were rarely simply private matters and indicative of deep-seated enmities. In the interim we have learned to relativise our private enmities and place them in context. As early as 1618, the subtitle to Middleton’s Peace-maker took aim at prevailing notions of masculine bravado: ‘shewing the idlenesse of a quarrelling reputation wherein consists neyther manhood nor wisdom’. Nonetheless, enmity did not disappear. The invention of an abstract society that required defending created new categories of enemy: the subversive, the anti-social, the enemy of progress. The consciousness of belonging to an aristocracy in which the right to rule was predicated on civilised conduct points to the formation of class identities and the enmities that these spawned. Eighteenth-century civil society was predicated on the disciplinary capacities of professional armies. The fiscal-military state ensured that inimicus was replaced in public discourse and in social relations by the spectre of the hostis. Henceforth, politics was dominated by the concept of the public enemy.

20

C.-F., Le Maître de Claville, Traité du vrai mérite de l’homme, 2 vols. (Paris, 1740), pp. 208, 234.

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

The footnotes indicate the huge range of sources in four languages on which the research is based. Publishing a comprehensive bibliography would render the present book far too long. What follows is an indicative guide to further reading mainly in English. A full bibliography with more information on my research methods can be found at: https://enmityandcivilsociety.hosted.york.ac.uk/.

Enmity Alwine, A., Enmity and Feuding in Classical Athens (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015). Barker, R., Making Enemies (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). Bartlett, R., ‘“Mortal Enmities”: The Legal Aspect of Hostility in the Middle Ages’, The T. Jones Pierce Lecture (Aberystwyth, 1998). Bossy, J., ‘Practices of Satisfaction 1215–1700’, Studies in Church History, 40 (2004), 106–18. Netterstrøm, J. and Poulsen, B. (eds.), Feud in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2007). Schmitt, C., The Concept of the Political (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Shklar, J., The Faces of Injustice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). Zur, O., ‘The Love of Hating: The Psychology of Enmity’, History of European Ideas, 13 (1991), 345–69.

The Law Bossy, J. (ed.), Disputes and Settlements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Brooks, C., Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Lawyers, Litigation and English Society since 1450 (London: Hambledon, 1998). Dinges, M., ‘Justiznutzungen als soziale Kontrolle’, in A. Blauert and G. Schwerhoff (eds.), Kriminalitätsgeschichte: Beiträge zur sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der Vormoderne (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2000), pp. 503–44.

468

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Piant, H., Une justice ordinaire: Justice civile et criminelle dans la prévôté royale de Vaucouleurs sous l’Ancien Régime (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010). Rouland, N., Legal Anthropology (London: Athlone Press, 1993).

Violence Antony, R., Carroll, S. and Dodds Pennock, C. (eds.), The Cambridge World History of Violence: Vol. 3, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Carroll, S., ‘Thinking with Violence’, History and Theory, 56 (2017), 23–43. (ed.), Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective (London: Palgrave, 2007). Daly, M. and Wilson, M., Homicide: Foundations of Human Behavior (London: Routledge, 1988). Davies, J. (ed.), Aspects of Violence in Renaissance Europe (London: Routledge, 2013). Dwyer, P. and Micale, M. (eds.), The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History and Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). Eisner, M., ‘Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime’, Crime and Justice, 30 (2003), 83–142. Gould, R., Collision of Wills: How Ambiguity about Social Rank Breeds Conflict (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Pinker, S., The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity (New York: Penguin, 2011). Roth, R., American Homicide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

Italy Bellabarba, M., La giustizia nell’Italia moderna (Rome: Laterza, 2008). Bowd, S., Renaissance Mass Murder: Civilians and Soldiers during the Italian Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Broggio, P., Governare l’odio: Pace e giustizia criminale nell’Italia moderna (Rome: Viella, 2021). Carroll, S., ‘Revenge and Reconciliation in Early Modern Italy’, Past and Present, 230 (2016), 101–42. Carroll, S. and Cecchinato, U., ‘Violence and Sacred Space in Early Modern Venice’, Acta Histriae, 27 (2019), 561–80. Dean, T. and Lowe, K. (eds.), Crime and the Law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Fosi, I., Papal Justice: Subjects and Courts in the Papal State, 1500–1750 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2011). Muir, E., Mad Blood Stirring: Factions and Vendetta in the Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Povolo, C., L’intrigo dell’onore: Poteri e istituzioni nella Repubblica di Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento (Verona: Cierre, 1997). Raggio, O., Faide e parentele: Lo stato genovese visto dalla Fontanbuona (Turin: Einaudi, 1990).

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Rose, C., A Renaissance of Violence: Homicide in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

The German-Speaking Lands Brunner, O., Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). Dierkes, F., Streitbar und ehrenfest: Zur Konfliktführung münsterländischer Adeliger im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Münster: Aschendorff, 2007). Fuchs, R.-P., Um die Ehre: Westfälische Beleidigungsprozesse vor dem Reichskammergericht (1525–1805) (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999). Ludwig, U., Das Duell im Alten Reich: Transformation und Variationen frühneuzeitlicher Ehrkonflikte (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2016). Mommertz, M., ‘Von Besen und Bündelchen, Brandmahlen and Befehdungschreiben’, in M. Eriksson and B. Krug-Richter (eds.), Streitkulturen: Gewalt, Konflikt und Kommunikation in der ländlichen Gesellschaft (16.–19. Jahrhundert) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), pp. 197–234 . Oman, Ž. , ‘Will auß der Vnordnung nit Schreitten: A Case of Fehde from 17th Century Styria’, Acta Histriae, 24 (2016), 63–100. Peters, J., ‘Leute-Fehde: Ein ritualisiertes Konfliktmuster des 16. Jahrhunderts’, Historische Anthropologie, 8 (2002), 62–97. Reinle, C., Studien zur Fehdeführung Nichtadliger im spätmittelalterlichen römischdeutschen Reich, besonders in den bayerischen Herzogtümern (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2003). Schwerhoff, G., Aktenkundig und gerichtsnotorisch: Einführung in die Historische Kriminalitätsforschung (Tübingen: Diskord, 1999). Köln in Kreuzverhör: Kriminalität, Herrschaft und Gesellschaft in einer frühneuzeitlichen Stadt (Bonn: Bouvier, 1991). Wieland, C., Nach der Fehde: Studien zur Interaktion von Adel und Rechtssystem am Beginn der Neuzeit: Bayern 1500 bis 1600 (Epfendorf: Bibliotheca Academica, 2014). Wittke, M., Mord und Totschlag? Gewaltdelikte im Fürstbistum Münster, 1580– 1620: Täter, Opfer und Justiz (Münster: Aschendorff, 2002). Zmora, H., The Feud in Early Modern Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

France Beik, W., Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Billacois, F., La duel dans la société des XVIe–XVIIe siècles: Essai de psychosociologie historique (Paris: EHESS, 1986). Brioist, P., Drévillon, H. and Serna, P., Croiser le fer: Violence et culture de l’épée dans la France moderne, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2002). Carroll, S., Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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Castan, N., Les criminels de Languedoc: Les exigences d’ordre et les voies du ressentiment dans une société pre-révolutionnaire (1750–1790) (Toulouse: Association des publications de l’Université de Toulouse Le Mirail, 1980). Nassiet, M., La violence, une histoire sociale: France, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2011). Nicolas, J., La rébellion française: Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, 1661–1789 (Paris: Seuil, 2002). Rodier, Y., Les raisons de la haine: Histoire d’une passion dans la France du premier XVIIe siècle (1610–1659) (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2019).

England Bowen, L., Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England: Gentry Honour, Violence and the Law (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2021). Cust, R. and Hopper, A., ‘Duelling and the Court of Chivalry in Early Stuart England’, in Carroll (ed.), Cultures of Violence, pp. 156–74. Hindle, S., The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (London: Macmillan, 2000). Kesselring, K., Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Making Murder Public: Homicide in Early Modern England, 1480–1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Peltonnen, M., The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Roth, R., ‘Homicide in Early Modern England, 1549–1800: The Need for a Quantitative Synthesis’, Crime, History, and Societies, 5 (2001), 33–67. Scott, J., England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Sharpe, J., A Fiery and Furious People: A History of Violence in England (London: Random House Books, 2016). ‘“Such Disagreement betwyx Neighbours”: Litigation and Human Relations in Early Modern England’, in Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements, pp. 167–88. Sharpe, J. and Dickinson R., ‘Revisiting the “Violence We Have Lost”: Homicide in Seventeenth-Century Cheshire’, English Historical Review, 131 (2016), 293–323. Stone, L., The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). ‘Interpersonal Violence in English Society, 1300–1980’, Past and Present, 101 (1983), 22–33. Wrightson, K., ‘The Politics of the Parish’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), pp. 10–46.

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Ego-Documents ‘Les écrits du for privé’: http://ecritsduforprive.huma-num.fr/accueilbase.htm; www.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/chan/chan/AP-pdf/Livres-de-raison.pdf. Greyerz, K., von Medick, H. and Veit, P. (eds.), Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich. Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historiche Quellen (1500– 1850) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001). Krusenstjern, B., Selbstzeugnisse der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges. Beschreibendes Verzeichnis (Berlin: Akademie, 1997). ‘Selbstzeugnisse im deutschsprachigen Raum, Autobiographien, Tagebücher und andere autobiographische Schriften, 1400–1620’: www.geschkult.fuberlin.de/e/jancke-quellenkunde/index.html. Smyth, A., Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Ulbricht, O., ‘The Experience of Violence during the Thirty Years War: A Look at the Victims’, in J. Canning, H. Lehmann and J. Winter (eds.), Power, Violence and Mass Death in Pre-Modern Times (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 97–128.

Peacemaking Bossy, J., ‘The Mass as a Social Institution 1200–1700’, Past and Present, 100 (1983), 29–61. Peace in the Post-Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Broggio, P. and Paoli, M. (eds.), Stringere la pace: Teorie e pratiche della conciliazione nell’Europa moderna (secoli XV–XVIII) (Rome: Viella, 2011). Carroll, S., ‘The Peace in the Feud in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France’, Past and Present, 178 (2003), 74–115. ‘Revenge and Reconciliation in Early Modern Italy’, Past and Present, 230 (2016), 101–42. Cummins, S. and Kounine, L. (eds.), Cultures of Conflict Resolution in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2015). Koslofsky, C., ‘The Kiss of Peace in the German Reformation’, in K. Harvey (ed.), The Kiss in History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 12–32. Muldrew, C., ‘The Culture of Reconciliation: Community and the Settlement of Economic Disputes in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 915–42. Niccoli, O., Perdonare: Idee, pratiche, rituali in Italia tra cinque e seicento (Rome: Laterza, 2007). Withington, P., ‘The Semantics of “Peace” in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 23 (2013), 127–53.

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INDEX

Abruzzo, 89, 118, 135, 411 Acquaviva, family, 88–89, 133–134 Acquaviva, Giangirolamo d’, count of Conversano, 88, 133 Agde, 1 Ahlefeld, von, family, 169–170, 192 Albani, family, 76, 80 Albergati, Fabio, 433, 438 Alberti, Leon Battista, 69, 97, 397 Albi, 267, 272, 275, 277, 282, 286, 293 Alife, 53, 133, 417 Alsace, 166 Alvensleben, von, family, 235–237, 258 Andrea, Francesco d’, 57, 69, 117, 132–133, 377, 411, 418 Ange, Jean-Daniel de l’, 207, 216 Anhalt, Christian II von, 189, 262, 396 anti-clericalism, 56, 95, 383, 411 arbitration, 16, 26, 28, 30, 35, 38, 40, 81, 114, 136, 153, 155, 157, 166, 169, 176, 228, 230, 235, 243–244, 249, 251, 256–257, 262, 289–290, 309, 313, 319–320, 351, 355–357, 364, 421, 439, 441, 457, 464, 466 Ariosto, 17, 97–98 Aristotle, 10, 18, 42, 97, 140–141, 246, 433, 438 armies, 47, 62, 83, 93, 95, 101, 118, 125–126, 128, 163, 174, 178, 181, 204, 206, 223, 257, 262–263, 299, 306, 308, 321, 335, 337, 342, 359–360, 363, 365, 462, 467 arson, 186–188 Asolo, 374, 422, 430 assassination, 10, 46, 52, 57, 71–72, 74–75, 77, 79, 82–83, 95, 100, 104, 106, 117, 120, 127–128, 131, 170,

224, 295, 305, 343, 391, 393, 415, 455–456 in churches, 405–432 Asseburg, von, family, 235–236 asylum, 49, 56–58, 128, 136, 216, 221, 254–255, 408–409, 418 atonement, 157, 225, 228, 230, 232–233, 235–238, 243, 247, 252, 256, 434–435, 445, 451, 454 Aufseß, von, family, 176–178, 189, 260 Augsburg, 128, 149, 159, 163–164, 166–167, 181–182, 217, 234, 253 Augustine, 227, 240, 297, 433, 436, 438, 440, 466 Austria, 82, 137, 224 Avalos, Buenaventura d’, bishop of Nocera, 62, 64, 118 Avogadro, family, 84 Avogadro, Pietro, count, 64 Avogadro, Sforza, count, 84 avvocato dei poveri, 37, 42 Bamberg, 176–179, 199, 221, 251, 255–256 bandits, 32–33, 36, 40, 46–51, 64, 71, 74, 79–82, 85, 89, 92, 95, 110, 118, 127–128, 130–131, 135, 137, 140, 408–409, 416–418 banishment, 37, 46, 48–50, 61, 71, 77–79, 94–95, 123, 137, 157, 230, 251, 253, 255, 259, 276, 434, 445, 447, 455 Barberini, family, 64, 94–95, 118, 418 Bari, 88 Baronio, Francesco, 6 Basel, 198 Bautzen, 153, 158

473

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474

index

Bavaria, 156, 161, 184, 186, 248 Bellegarde, Morvan de, 314, 466 Bellencini, Annibale, 75, 391 Bellencini, family, 67, 75, 82, 92, 392 Bellencini, house of, 391–392 benefit of clergy, 59, 89, 215, 329 Bentivoglio, family, 29, 85 Bergamo, 59, 76, 80, 85, 126–127, 130 Berlichingen, Götz von, 150 Béziers, 286, 307 Biberach, 254, 451 Bibra, von, family, 172, 176 Biglia, Count, 112 Birago, Francesco, 99, 112, 114 Blanc, family, 275, 277–278, 283, 431 Blévy, 303–304, 414 blood money. See compensation Bohemia, 167, 181, 197, 233, 252, 414 Bologna, 19, 23, 29–31, 35–36, 38–39, 41, 46, 52–54, 57, 59–61, 63, 66, 68, 79–83, 85, 92–93, 95, 97, 100–101, 104, 108–110, 113–115, 119–120, 124, 128–129, 137, 140, 382, 401–404, 409, 429, 438 Bonté, Barthélemy, 273, 277–278 Bordeaux, 289, 309 Borghese, family, 27, 417 Borrelly, Etienne, 307, 379 Borromeo, Cardinal, 43, 415, 438 Boschetti, family, 70, 109, 418 Boselli, Galeazzo, count, 126–128, 130, 137 Boucheron, family, 422 bounty-hunters, 82, 105, 120, 127 Brancaccio, Francesco Maria, bishop, 55, 418 Brandenburg, 148, 152, 163, 177, 180, 184, 199–200, 209, 211, 221, 223, 230, 235, 256 Brandenburg-Ansbach, margrave of, 177, 185, 199, 221, 223 Brandolini, Marcantonio, 51, 416 Brandouin, family, 274–275, 280 Braunschweig, duke of, 236 bravi, 64, 89, 116–118, See retainers Brembati, family, 76–77, 80, 412 Bremen, 210, 228, 255

Brescia, 35, 45, 47–48, 57, 60, 76, 81, 84–85, 90, 117, 124, 130–131, 377, 382, 410, 412–413, 416, 426, 447 Breslau, 158, 208 Brittany, 290, 297, 304, 421, 446 Brockdorff, von, family, 210, 236, 262 Brunner, Otto, 145, 148–149, 155 Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, dukes of, 162–163 Buchwald, von, family, 170, 222, 425 Bulifon, Antoine, 49, 374, 377 Calabria, 87, 118, 123, 135 Calvin, 15, 227, 246, 436 Calvinists, 11, 166, 179, 194–195, 204, 227, 240, 242, 343, 360, 378, 384–385, 393, 426, 437, 449, 458 Cammarota, marchese di, 113, 133 Campania, 69, 133 Capra, faction, 77, 84, 413 Capua, 57, 136 Capucins, 45, 405, 420 Caracciolo, Don Ferrante, 89 Caracciolo, family, 40, 88–89, 429 Carafa, family, 94, 133–135 Cariati, prince of, 51, 70 Casalini, Bonaventura, 73, 389–390 Castaldi, family, 98, 104 Castel, Charles, 18, 397 Castelbajac, marquis de, 302, 419 Castelbesozzo, Pietro Antonio, 112 Castres, 268, 276–278, 283–284, 292–294, 424 Catholic Church, 4, 36, 41, 44, 51, 53, 55–59, 61, 65, 76, 92–93, 95, 103, 106–107, 129, 133, 136, 140, 173, 229, 314, 325, 415, 419, 438, 453–454, 464 Catholics, 162, 165–167, 171, 173, 177, 179–182, 195, 221, 282, 286, 292, 307, 349, 359, 361, 367, 379, 381, 423–424 Cellini, Benevenuto, 98 Chaloner, family, 322, 355, 358 chapels, expiatory, 445–447 Charles I, King, 271, 327, 358 Charles II, King, 275, 283, 330, 343, 361, 363 Charles V, Emperor, 73, 149

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index Charlus, count of, 448, 455 Chaumont, Guy de, 300, 388 Cherbury, Lord Herbert of, 352, 433 Cheshire, 324, 338–339, 351, 356, 368 Chinelli, family, 85, 131 Cholmley, Sir Hugh, 339, 343–344 Cicero, 11, 18, 63, 343, 433, 466 Cicinello, family, 40 civil society, 9, 44, 46, 51, 53, 56, 90, 122, 132, 138, 140, 227, 241, 246, 261, 263, 291, 299, 308–310, 313, 346, 354–360, 369, 393, 419, 434, 436, 442, 457, 460, 463, 467 civil war nature, 2, 29–30, 71–79, 160, 163, 180, 292, 343, 364, 393 civil wars nature, 6 civility, 8, 97, 110–114, 206, 292, 321, 366, 368, 388 civilising process, 3, 310, 323, 462 class. See social status Clement IX, Pope, 457 Clement VII, Pope, 78 Clement XIII, Pope, 141 Cleves-Jülich, duchy, 152, 251 Cockburn, John, 12 Codebò, Giambattista, 75, 412 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 282, 298 Cologne, 156–157, 159, 161, 179, 187, 192, 195–196, 253, 382, 386, 394, 414, 470 Colonna, family, 93–94 Colonna, house of, 448 Colonna, Marcantonio, 54 compensation, 16, 27–28, 32, 60, 69, 73, 119, 131, 137, 155, 157, 167, 172, 175, 181, 185, 188, 201, 222, 228–232, 235, 237–239, 246, 249–252, 254, 256, 260, 284, 288, 291, 300, 302, 305–306, 313, 328, 336, 345, 354–356, 360, 390, 435, 445, 447, 449, 455 Conclubet, Andrea, marchese di Arena, 57 Conclubet, family, 87, 132 Confuorto, Domenico, 55, 122, 132 Conti, prince de, 276, 444

475

Conversano, Giangirolamo, count of, 91 Corneille, 17 coroners, 324–327, 332–333, 347, 368 corruption, 31, 46–48, 60–64, 85–87, 89, 109, 129, 135, 138, 141, 254, 275, 280, 297, 302, 313, 325–326, 332–333, 347, 350, 353, 375, 416, 419 Council of Trent, 37, 44, 46, 56, 102, 409, 437 Counter-Reformation, 36, 41, 43, 52, 135, 171–172, 175–176, 219, 232, 247, 286, 288, 379, 381, 409, 415–416, 419, 437, 442, 444, 446–447 credit notion, 15, 88, 90–91, 170, 205, 322, 331, 348–349, 375, 379, 435 Cremona, 36, 47, 80, 83, 106 Cromwell, Oliver, 342–343, 380 crosses, expiatory, 153, 233–239, 447–457 Cuppius, Albert, 242, 389, 396 Curvalle, 267–287 customary law. See law, codes Da Roma, family, 78, 100 Da Roma, Galeazzo, 78, 447 defamation. See insult Delsol, Léonard, 1, 420 Denmark, 149–150, 162, 168, 258 Desideri, family, 97, 113 Devon, 319, 408 Dietwar, Bartholomäus, 392 Dobeneck, von, family, 175, 184–185, 197, 221, 223, 425 Doria, marchese, 89 Doria, Paolo Mattia, 138 duelling, 13–14, 37, 39, 44, 46, 57, 71, 75, 79, 81, 86–88, 97–99, 101–103, 105–107, 109, 113, 125, 133–134, 139, 160, 167, 170, 172, 175, 178, 182, 184–185, 198, 204, 206–212, 214–215, 218–220, 222–223, 225–226, 238, 240, 249, 253, 255, 261, 283, 288, 292–296, 298–300, 303–305, 307, 309, 313, 325–327, 330–337, 339, 345, 349–352,

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476

index

357–358, 363–366, 369, 388, 395, 401, 405, 423, 430, 439, 446–447, 453, 455–456, 460, 465 Dutch Republic, 437, 458 ecclesiastical jurisdiction, 51–59 Egerton, family, 332, 351–352, 424 ego-documents, 1, 17–18, 32, 40, 63, 65, 73, 111, 116, 119, 122, 129, 140, 184, 194–196, 212, 248, 262, 286, 308–309, 319–320, 343–344, 356, 360–362, 367, 373–404, 422 Eichstätt, 232 Eisenberger, Philipp, 202 Emilia-Romagna, 52–54, 73–74, 80, 99, 120, 403, 411–412, 447 emotions, 1, 3, 6–7, 9–10, 12, 16–18, 36, 44–45, 49, 89, 97, 102, 113, 124, 131, 136, 153, 160, 182, 193–196, 220, 229, 249, 285–287, 297, 320, 343–344, 361–362, 364, 367–368, 375, 377–378, 381–404, 419, 433–459, 462–463, 466 encounters, 28, 34, 38, 43, 77–79, 81–85, 88–89, 94–95, 98, 103–107, 114, 131–132, 134, 136, 138–139, 152, 164, 169, 172, 185, 201, 203–205, 209, 211, 214–216, 221, 225, 235, 237, 252, 258, 293–295, 302–303, 305, 309, 330, 334, 349, 363–364, 369, 377, 388, 391, 393, 395, 401, 420, 422, 427, 430, 439, 456 England, 3–4, 13, 16, 19, 141, 319–369, 392–393, 408–410, 415, 423–425, 431, 442, 457, 463, 466 legal system, 324–333, 450 Enlightenment, 26–27, 36, 44, 46, 56, 64, 122, 132, 137–138, 140–141, 229, 314, 393, 465 enmity and incivility, 9, 111, 188, 242 and print, 79, 102–105, 292, 423, 464 and sacred space, 405–432 concept, 1–9, 17, 34, 69, 94, 246, 293–294, 299, 341, 359, 364, 402, 434, 436, 463–466 experience of, 373–404

private, 5, 55, 71, 79, 91, 163, 195, 297, 322, 333, 343, 367, 383–404, 464 public, 2, 5–6, 11, 46, 65, 71, 91, 94, 151, 163, 194, 246, 262, 280–281, 298, 315, 343, 367, 378–383, 393, 467 Ercolani, family, 95, 97, 113 Erfurt, 167 Erri, family, 83, 104 Este dukes of Ferrara, 29, 37–38, 52, 73–74, 82, 92, 95, 101–102, 106, 109–110 Este, Alfonso d’, 37, 47, 75 Este, Alfonso III d’, duke, 82 etiquette. See civility executions, 32–34, 36, 49, 61, 71–72, 74, 81, 102, 126, 131, 156–157, 175, 190, 229, 256, 328, 331, 336, 342, 445, 447–448 exile. See banishment faction, 71, 77, 80–81, 84–86, 88–90 concept, 75, 93 French, 92–95 familiars, 53–54 Farolfa, family, 374–376, 395 Fehde, 7, 19, 148–151, 155, 160–161, 163–165, 167–168, 173, 183, 186–187, 470 Feilitzsch, von, family, 214, 259 Ferraglio, faction, 85 Ferrara, 29, 37, 45, 48, 54, 60, 64, 82, 101, 110, 125 feud, 2, 5, 7–8, 10–11, 14, 16–17, 29–31, 37–38, 40, 48, 50–52, 66–67, 69–70, 72, 74, 76, 80, 82, 86, 88–89, 92, 97, 100, 107, 109–110, 113, 117–120, 123–124, 126, 128–130, 132–133, 136, 139, 145, 148–152, 155, 157, 159, 161–165, 167–168, 170–171, 173, 175–176, 178, 180–181, 183–184, 187, 190–192, 194, 196, 198–201, 203, 211, 221–225, 227–229, 231, 242, 244–245, 249–250, 256–257, 263, 270–271, 276, 279, 285–286, 292–295, 299–301, 303, 309,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009287319.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

index 311–312, 319–323, 333, 336, 339, 344, 347–348, 350–351, 354–355, 364–366, 377, 386–388, 395, 405, 408, 414–415, 418–421, 423–425, 429, 431, 447, 454, 460, 463, 466 concept, 7–8, 145–152, 164, 174, 186, 203, 320, 344–347, 425 firearms, 53, 62–63, 82, 104–105, 137, 139, 184, 204, 212, 216, 220, 225, 233, 295, 320, 338, 350, 415, 417, 430, 455 Florence, 23, 29, 36, 39–40, 48–49, 60, 62–64, 66, 72, 75, 79–80, 101, 103, 106–107, 111, 116, 119–120, 122–123, 140, 376–377, 390, 392, 412, 416–417 Foggia, 51 Fondeville, family, 311–312 Fontana, family, 67, 75, 82, 392 Fontana, house of, 392 Forli, 39, 73 France, 1, 10–11, 13, 19, 41, 93, 117, 128, 141, 152, 170, 190, 204, 206, 208–209, 211–212, 229, 239, 247, 254, 257, 267–315, 341, 348, 376, 379, 381, 388, 390, 393, 398, 405, 407, 410–411, 414–415, 419, 421, 424–425, 431, 439, 441, 444–445, 448, 452–453, 456, 462, 465, 470–472 Franconia, 150, 161, 165, 171–172, 174–175, 178, 180–181, 184, 199, 211, 214, 216, 219, 221–222, 231, 236–237, 255, 258, 385, 423, 427 Frankfurt an der Oder, 215, 236, 253 French Wars of Religion, 208, 268, 271, 292, 294–295, 342, 380, 397, 451, 460 Friuli, 40, 52, 70, 73, 117, 121, 130, 399 Fulda, abbey, 172, 221, 252 Gaetani, family, 93–94 Galen, von, family, 189, 218, 221, 226, 260–261, 425 Genoa, 23, 38, 40, 81, 93, 102, 138, 140, 390 Gentzkow, Nicolas, 149, 252 Germany, 5, 7, 19, 75, 119, 141, 145–263, 339, 382, 384, 392, 394,

477

407, 410, 414, 419, 424, 426–427, 431, 442, 449 Gersdorf, von, family, 199, 224, 456 Gessi, Berlingiero, 103–104 gesture, 8–9, 12, 43, 99, 111–113, 134, 185, 188–189, 226, 240, 244, 247, 308, 422, 431, 435–436 Gévaudan, 282, 313 Ghellini, Giovanni Battista, 84 Ghibellines, 71, 74, 77–78, 80 Ghisilieri, family, 85–86 Gibbs, family, 319 Göbels, brother, 149 Görlitz, 158, 167 Gotha, 165, 247, 425 Grassi, family, 95, 129 Guelfs, 53, 71, 74, 77–78, 80 Güntzer, Augustin, 166, 195, 378, 381, 385, 426 Guyenne, 283, 288, 312, 422 Halberstadt, 198, 200, 235 Halle, 202 Hamburg, 154, 181, 207, 245 Hamlet, 10, 234, 375 Heidelberg, University, 167, 207–208 Henri IV, king of France, 271, 295 Hesse, 242–243, 247, 392 Hesse, landgrave of, 164, 192 Heylin, family, 322, 355–356, 358 High Court of Chivalry, 357–358 Hildesheim, 149, 162, 213 Hobbes, Thomas, 6, 297–300, 345, 466 Holles, family, 348–349, 351 Holy Roman Empire, 13, 52, 148, 146, 158, 190, 198, 204, 215–216, 229, 251, 254, 263, 382, 396, 408, 441 homicide, 3–4, 11, 13, 32, 34–35, 48, 61, 67–68, 71, 77, 79–83, 108, 128, 130, 141, 156, 158–159, 168, 206, 213, 218–219, 229–230, 254, 263, 295–296, 307, 321, 323–324, 327, 329, 333, 338–339, 343, 356, 363, 369, 435, 445, 451, 461–462, 464 homicide rate, 3–4, 13, 35, 67–68, 79–83, 108, 128, 130, 159, 206, 213, 263, 296, 323–324, 327, 339, 343, 461–463

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478

index

honour concept, 5–6, 8, 12–17, 26, 34, 37, 42–43, 69–70, 97–104, 106–107, 110–112, 115–116, 121–122, 125, 127, 130, 138–140, 152, 157, 162, 175, 183–184, 186, 189, 191, 193, 195, 200, 204, 206, 209–211, 213, 217–218, 225–226, 229–230, 235–238, 241, 246, 248–249, 262, 279, 283, 286, 291–294, 297–301, 304–305, 308–309, 321–322, 331, 339–340, 345, 349, 356–357, 360, 369, 377, 386, 392–393, 397, 399, 404, 406, 415, 423, 426, 429, 432, 434, 439, 442, 444, 446, 453–454, 457, 464–465 hostis. See enmity, public hunting, 109, 172, 174, 220–221, 304, 337 immunity. See ecclesiastical jurisdiction Imperial Knights, 165, 171, 175, 211, 237, 257–258 inimicitia. See enmity, private Inquisition, 53–55, 58, 62, 76, 132, 383, 413, 429 insult, 8, 104, 106, 112–113, 115, 153, 159, 167, 176, 181, 185, 189–192, 218–220, 226, 246, 249, 261, 286, 301, 306, 349, 377, 413, 431 intendants, 289, 302–304, 307 Ireland, 331, 336–338, 342, 344–345, 350, 354, 406 Italian Wars, 29–30, 46, 71–72, 79, 101, 120, 124, 390, 399, 411 Italy, 3, 7, 13, 19, 23–141, 152, 166, 170, 180, 190, 204, 206, 209–212, 215, 225, 229, 231, 247, 254, 257, 287, 290, 323, 339, 374, 376, 382, 390, 392, 395, 407, 409–412, 414–417, 419, 422, 430–431, 433, 437–438, 442, 447, 470 Jacmon, Antoine, 286, 313 James I, King, 323, 330, 332, 336, 349, 357, 366 Jena, University, 210

Jesuits, 6, 26, 42–45, 57, 61, 98, 135–136, 141, 239, 246–247, 379, 383, 403, 414, 419, 438–440, 442 Jews, 61, 151, 161, 192, 208, 378 Jobourg, 452–453 Josselin, Ralph, 360 juries, 16, 315, 325, 329, 332, 450 jurists. See lawyers justice, 462 concept, 10, 287 distributive, 30–31, 289, 300 feeling, 7 negotiated, 29, 37, 39–41, 65, 290, 313, 328, 355 Kempten, 234, 245, 257 Kerckerinck, von, family, 218, 226, 260, 425 kidnapping, 50, 75, 151, 277, 345 Kiel, 168–170, 182, 189, 192, 194, 214–216, 222, 226, 236, 262, 410 kinship, 70, 89, 109, 152–154, 162, 167, 196–197, 286, 375, 384, 387–404 Kitzingen, 177, 181 Kohlhase, Hans, 162, 223, 249 Languedoc, 267–268, 270–271, 273–276, 283, 285, 288, 292, 294, 298, 301–302, 307, 311–312, 379–380, 415, 419–420, 437, 444 Latium, 27, 91, 417 law, 34, 145, 229–230, 241, 248, 407, 421, 435 codes, 2, 7, 23, 32–33, 148–149, 151, 156–157, 194, 196, 228–230, 232, 253, 257, 298, 324, 429, 434, 449 courts, 19, 23–26, 137, 161, 184, 250, 289–290, 306, 435 revenue from, 28, 30–31, 37, 39, 42, 51, 54, 62, 102, 131, 157, 202, 232, 238, 243, 250–253, 259–260, 271, 273, 275, 283, 288, 290, 306, 347 Roman, 14, 16, 28, 63, 157–158, 228–229, 231, 330, 354 use of, 4, 8, 15–16, 23–65, 155, 158, 161, 164, 248–261, 289, 295, 348, 353, 444 law enforcement. See police

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009287319.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

index lawyers, 6, 23, 31, 37, 41, 53, 59–61, 75, 78, 96, 100, 105, 120, 122–123, 126, 130, 133, 157, 183, 189, 195, 210, 213, 215, 217, 227, 229–230, 235–237, 245–246, 248, 261, 277, 286, 290–291, 302–303, 312, 314, 329, 335, 352, 363, 374, 377, 384, 407, 409, 420–422, 436, 439, 441, 445, 460 Le Puy, 286, 313, 408 Leiningen, Johann Casimir von, 204 Leipzig, 195, 205, 213, 230, 395 Levy, Ascher, 151, 208 Lichtenstein, von, family, 175, 198, 236, 256, 455 Lille, 306, 383 Limousin, 305, 308, 385, 422, 446 Lippe, county, 189, 204, 236 Lipsius, Justus, 395–396 litigation, 4, 15, 23, 26, 31, 36–37, 43–44, 55, 59, 61–62, 79, 91, 114, 129, 135, 138, 151–152, 157, 160, 165, 170, 176, 183–184, 186, 242, 247, 249, 262, 277, 280, 285, 289–290, 294, 303, 310, 312–313, 321–324, 340, 350, 355, 357–358, 384, 407, 436, 439–440, 442, 444, 464, 466 Locke, John, 288, 307, 313, 466 Lombardy, 47, 76–77, 80, 83–84, 91, 117, 126–130, 412 London, 349–350, 352 Lorraine, 216, 290, 294, 314, 446 Louis XIV, 18, 128, 268, 270, 276, 282, 285, 287–288, 290–292, 298, 301–302, 306–307, 383, 388, 418, 422, 439–440, 456, 460, 465 Löwenstein, Ludwig, count of, 173–174, 176, 258 Lübeck, 162, 183, 214, 220 Lucca, 38, 41, 92–93, 111, 390 Lusatia, 158, 199 Luther, 151, 227, 232, 240–242, 244–246, 395, 436 Lüttichau, von, family, 212–213 Machiavelli, 10, 49, 97 Maffei, Scipione, 44, 122, 125, 138–140, 423

479

Magdeburg, 148, 161, 202, 230, 235 Malaspina, family, 60, 106, 121 Mallinckrodt, von, family, 237 Mallinckrodt, von, feud, 152–154 Malvasia, family, 52, 105–106 Malvezzi, family, 63, 86, 115–116, 401–402, 411 Manelphe, family, 275, 277–278, 280–283, 297 manners. See civility Mansfeld, count of, 217, 227, 235, 244 Mantua, 48, 64, 75, 91, 93, 101, 128, 412 Marche, the, 69, 411, 457 Markham, family, 349, 351 Marktbreit, 180 Martin, Gérard, 312 Martinengo, family, 76, 84, 130, 412, 447 Martinoni, Niccolino, 126, 130 masculinity, 10, 17, 47, 92, 98, 101, 110, 138, 170, 209, 243, 384, 388, 429, 462 Massenbach, Georg von, 220 Matthias, Holy Roman Emperor, 167, 211 Mazarin, Cardinal, 287 Mecklenburg, 162, 230 Medici, Alessandro de’, 72 Medici, Cosimo I de’, 79 Medici, family, 29, 38, 64, 72, 78–79, 119, 129, 411 Medici, Francesco de’, duke, 62 Medici, Lorenzino de’, 119 Melanchthon, 15, 246, 436 memory, 217, 235, 285, 373, 387, 394, 447, 451–457 mercenaries, 47, 150, 223, 407 Mespelbrunn, Julius Echter von, bishop of Würzburg, 172–176, 179, 186, 256, 381 Middleton, Thomas, 341, 467 Milan, 23, 37–39, 43, 48, 56, 64, 77, 94, 126–128, 140, 390, 392, 412, 415, 417–418, 438 military. See armies Mitwitz, 181, 185, 188, 198 Modena, 7, 27, 29, 32–33, 38, 46, 49, 52, 60, 62, 70, 74–75, 80, 82–83, 92–94, 98, 102, 104–108, 110, 116,

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480

index

120, 124, 376, 391, 393, 408, 410–412, 416–417 Montagnac, 1, 380, 420, 431 Montaigne, 7, 13, 18, 139, 386, 394, 398 Montebello, baron of, 123, 125 Montecuccoli, family, 72, 104, 225 Montecuccoli, Guido, count, 82 Monza, Fabio, 66, 119, 376 Monza, Giovanbattista, 78, 100 Moravia, 233, 235 Morgan, family, 332, 350–352, 424 Morrien, von, family, 221, 226 Münchhausen, family, 206, 213, 427 Münster, 156, 163–164, 184, 187–189, 202, 215, 218, 221, 226, 250–251, 255, 425–427, 429, 470 Muratori, Antonio, 7, 26 Myddle, 321, 430

100, 109, 115–116, 118, 129, 164, 171, 174, 176–177, 198, 202–203, 220–221, 223–224, 232, 236, 243, 250, 256, 271, 273–275, 277–281, 283, 285–287, 290, 297, 303, 309, 325, 332, 335, 337, 346, 348, 353, 363, 365, 374, 405–406, 410, 415, 425, 435, 442, 444, 457 Old Bailey, 330–331, 335–337, 363 Olevano, Giovanni Battista, 114, 122 omertà, 63, 127, 130, 413 Onofrio, Vincenzo d’, 57, 61, 377, 383, 391, 393, 419, 426 Orsini, family, 79 Osnabrück, 158, 201, 257 Ostuni, 88, 120 outlawry, 46, 48, 82, 447 Oxford, 364

Naples, 30–31, 37–41, 47, 49–51, 55–58, 61–64, 67, 86–88, 91–94, 96, 102, 105, 107, 109, 113, 115, 117–118, 120–122, 124–125, 132–133, 135–136, 138, 141, 209, 374, 377, 383, 390, 393, 407, 409, 411, 413, 416–417, 426, 429, 441 legal system, 39, 42, 47, 56, 87, 90 Nardò, 91 neighbourliness, 28, 157, 166, 193, 195–197, 227–228, 240, 244–246, 301, 320–322, 356, 361–362, 379, 381, 389, 434–435, 437, 457, 459 Nelli, Agostino, 111–112, 384 Nemours, duchess of, 18 Nîmes, 307 Nördlingen, 157, 224 Norfolk, 346, 353, 364 Normandy, 295, 300, 307, 420, 446, 449 Northumberland, 346, 354–355, 363–364 Nostitz, von, family, 153, 167 Nottinghamshire, 348–349, 351 Nuremberg, 134, 156–157, 199, 208, 210, 449

padroni, 40, 46, 61, 63–64, 88–89, 100, 113, 116, 120, 124, 129–132, 135, 137, 140, 375–376, 416–417 Padua, 66–67, 100, 123, 234, 411 Papal States, 29–31, 37–39, 41, 46–48, 52, 54, 56, 59–61, 64, 71, 73–74, 78–82, 91, 95, 97, 103, 108–110, 118, 121, 129, 132, 137, 139–140, 383, 438, 457 Pappacoda, family, 113–114 pardons, 6, 18, 26–27, 29, 31, 36–40, 42, 45–50, 57, 61–62, 64, 77, 85, 87, 89, 94–95, 135, 137, 141, 157, 201, 212, 216, 229, 231, 251–252, 257, 259, 276, 282, 289, 291–293, 295, 300, 302, 305–306, 319, 323, 330–333, 349, 354, 363, 366, 415, 419, 430, 434, 444, 446, 449–451, 455 Paris, 301, 305–306, 409, 444 Parlements, 277, 279, 282–283, 289, 291, 294–295, 302, 304–305, 310, 312, 314, 444 Parma, 75, 94, 102, 392, 411, 416 Parmigiana, 49, 52 Pascal, 439, 466 Pasqualin, Bartolomeo, 59, 63 Paul III, Pope, 29, 74, 98 Paul IV, Pope, 74 peace kiss of, 3–4, 9, 227, 240, 435

Oettingen, von, family, 164, 223–224 office, 12, 18, 28, 30–31, 35, 39, 42, 50–51, 53–56, 58–64, 68, 72–74, 76–77, 84, 87–88, 90–91, 96, 98,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009287319.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

index peacemaking, 2, 4, 7–10, 14, 23, 26–31, 34–38, 40–48, 52, 58–59, 65, 67, 69, 72–77, 79–83, 86, 94, 97–98, 105–106, 114, 123, 129–130, 134–136, 139, 148, 152–153, 155–156, 159–161, 163–165, 171–172, 176–179, 189, 198–199, 201, 214, 219, 223, 227–263, 276, 280, 283–284, 288, 292–293, 300–301, 303, 308, 313–315, 319, 341, 346–347, 354–356, 359–360, 362–364, 367, 375–376, 383, 390, 397, 399–400, 403, 407–408, 414, 417, 426, 433–462, 464, 466 peasants, 27, 47, 50, 73, 80, 82, 86, 107, 109, 118, 120–121, 132–133, 135, 148, 151, 154–155, 161, 164, 167, 169–170, 174, 180, 183, 186, 192, 199, 201, 208, 210, 219, 222–223, 252, 268, 270, 272, 281, 286, 302, 307, 309, 326, 348, 356, 368, 392–393, 406–407, 425, 427, 431, 435, 460 penance, 2, 43, 228, 231–232, 235, 245, 247, 434, 437 Pepoli, Ercole, count, 82, 92, 114, 429 Pepoli, Fabio, 57 Pepoli, family, 57, 80–82, 101, 108–109, 113–116, 129, 140, 401–404, 429 Pepoli, Giacomo, 57, 113 Pepoli, Giovan Paolo, count, 97, 108, 113, 140, 401, 404 Pepoli, Lodovico, count, 80 Pepys, Samuel, 374, 378, 429 pew disputes, 170, 218, 304, 320, 355, 367, 424–426 Pflacher, Moses, 245–246 Philip II, 47, 54, 64 Piacenza, 53 Picardy, 304 Piccolomini, Alfonso, 47 Piedmont, 91, 389, 412 Pignatelli, family, 39, 89 Pius V, Pope, 74 Plaisance, 271, 273, 282–284 Poitou, 302–303, 406, 446, 457 Poland, 200 Policastro, count of, 133

481

police, 23, 30, 32, 51, 53–54, 56, 74, 136, 202, 218, 249–250, 253, 257, 262–263, 275, 298, 300–301, 309, 314, 394, 405, 434, 437, 457, 463, 465 political violence. See violence, factional Pomerania, 161, 187, 224, 395 Porrone, Annibale, marchese, 95, 377, 384 Porta, faction, 63, 77–78, 84, 106 precedence. See social status priests and violence, 52–55, 322, 415–420 Prignitz, 180, 188 Priori, Lorenzo, 34–35 Protestants, 1, 3–4, 43, 162, 165–166, 171–179, 181–182, 199, 215, 221, 224, 233, 235, 237, 243–244, 248, 253, 262, 268–269, 271, 278, 282, 286, 292–293, 302, 304, 307, 342, 379–380, 388, 390, 392, 414, 423–424, 434, 437, 441, 451, 454, 466 Provence, 308, 311, 387 Puglia, 32, 88, 98, 133 punishment, 4, 16–17, 26–28, 30–34, 37, 41–42, 54, 66, 69, 78, 85, 106, 127, 129, 131, 135, 151, 156–157, 161, 175, 190, 206, 222, 228–230, 250–251, 256, 259–261, 281, 289, 291, 314–315, 328–332, 340, 346, 354, 357, 367–369, 384, 406, 433–434, 448, 450, 464 Puritans, 342, 344, 347, 349, 354, 360–361, 367, 380–381, 384 quarrel, concept, 8, 294, 309, 344–346, 467 querelles. See quarrel Quetz, von, Zacharias, 209, 217 quistione. See encounters Rampanelli, faction, 85 Rangoni, family, 27, 71, 83, 98, 101, 105–106, 116, 386, 411 Rantzau, von, family, 170, 214, 218, 222, 226, 236, 253, 262, 425 rape, 33, 41, 49, 74, 84, 313

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482

index

Rasponi, family, 60, 74, 408 Ravaschiero, Don Ramiro, 58, 122 Ravenna, 39, 60, 73, 412 recognizances, 259, 459 Reformation, 2, 4, 11, 19, 36, 41, 43, 52, 159–161, 164, 171, 177, 179, 215, 228, 232–233, 236, 239–240, 245–247, 261, 356, 378, 419, 423, 425–426, 434–435, 449, 451, 454, 465 Reggio, 60, 70, 75, 83, 95, 123–124, 392, 412–413 Reichskammergericht, 152, 155, 158, 160–161, 163–165, 169, 172–173, 175, 177, 183–184, 198–200, 204, 224–225, 255, 257, 259 Reitzenstein, von, family, 184–185, 197, 221–222, 256, 425 Renaissance, 4, 9–10, 12, 14, 72–73, 96–98, 100, 115, 170, 186, 203, 217, 232, 235, 237, 256, 297, 321, 344–345, 421, 433–434, 445, 454, 462, 464–465, 469 Reresby, Sir John, 66–67, 81, 326–327, 366–369, 380, 387 retainers, 33, 47, 60, 64, 67, 83–84, 89, 94–95, 108, 113–119, 124, 130, 134, 167, 169–170, 209, 216, 222, 224–225, 296, 308, 321–322, 334, 338–340, 350–351, 391, 404, 418, 428–429, 457 Reutlingen, 254, 259 revenge. See vengeance vengeance, 10, 267, 467 Revolution English, 331, 334 French, 310–315, 449 Neapolitan, 40, 63, 88, 91, 117–118, 124, 383, 391, 413 Riccardi, Cesare, 50, 418 Richelieu, Cardinal, 287, 296–298, 457 rights, 12, 27, 50, 52, 55, 67–68, 72, 86, 88, 90, 97, 108–110, 120, 129, 137, 148, 183, 186–187, 189, 215, 220, 225, 261, 292, 294–295, 309, 334, 338–339, 348, 426, 464 feudal, 31, 51, 87, 172, 180 inheritance, 152, 172, 197, 349, 399

of way, 8, 28, 52, 93, 109, 114–116, 201, 257, 319 seigneurial, 27, 138, 152, 161, 220, 222, 250, 270–285, 304, 421–424, 446 water, 52, 107, 109, 134, 182, 199–200, 216, 219, 224, 238, 257, 267, 319 Rimini, 54 Roberts, Thomas, 319, 322 Rome, 23, 27, 41, 46–48, 51–54, 57–58, 61–62, 64, 68, 92–95, 115, 117, 141, 231, 376, 383, 390, 418, 423, 439, 442, 444, 449, 457 Rostock, University, 210 Rothenburg, 184, 190 Rouergue, 267, 280, 420 Roussillon, 310 Rovigo, 73, 79, 390 Sachsen-Anhalt, 198 Saint-Pierre, abbé de, 304 Saint-Simon, 18 Saint-Yves, 440–444 San Giorgio, family, 132 San Giorgio, marchese di, 57, 132 Sardinia, 131 Sastrow, Bartholomäus, 161, 194, 261, 386, 397 satisfaction, 13–14, 28, 42–43, 86, 99, 116, 195, 197, 219, 226, 228, 231–232, 239, 245, 250–251, 289, 328, 343, 354–355, 359, 368, 385, 434–435, 438, 442, 449, 451, 455 Savelli, Marcantonio, 36 Savignac, Jean-François Labat de, 309, 422 Savorgnan, Antonio, 73, 412 Savorgnan, family, 70, 121, 401 Savoy, 93–94 Saxe-Gotha, duke of, 247 Saxony, 167, 180, 212, 230, 246, 251, 427, 455 Saxony, duke of, 182, 219 Saxony, Elector of, 162, 165, 168, 197, 199, 211, 223, 235, 237, 256, 414 Saxony, Lower, 162–164 sbirri, 23, 60–61 Schertlin von Burtenbach, Sebastian, 164–166, 223, 407

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index Schleswig-Holstein, 150, 154–155, 161, 168–170, 179, 190, 205, 210, 215, 222, 226, 260, 425 Schmitt, Carl, 5 Schönburg, von, family, 197–198, 208, 212, 246 Schweinichen, Hans von, 151, 233, 249 scienza cavalleresca, 26, 42–44, 69, 97, 99, 101, 105–106, 112, 115, 130, 138–141, 401, 417 Scotland, 209, 336–338, 342, 344–345, 437 Segneri, Paolo, 6, 8, 44, 136 Sehestedt, von, family, 220 Sénégas, family, 267–269, 271, 273, 275–285, 292 Serra, marchese di, 51, 70, 109, 135 Shakespeare, 122, 345, 433 Sicily, 30, 54 Siena, 67–68, 78, 129, 209 Silesia, 200, 220, 234, 237, 250, 252 Sixtus V, Pope, 80–81 social mobility, 13–14, 38, 60, 62, 84, 90, 96–97, 111, 120, 122, 124, 127, 161, 164, 175–176, 186, 209, 217, 237–238, 250–251, 268, 273, 286, 309, 315, 321, 352, 366, 376, 398, 420–421 social status, 8, 12–14, 26–27, 34, 68, 72, 74, 85–86, 90–91, 93, 96–97, 99–101, 108, 110, 114–115, 128, 145, 157, 167, 170, 183, 186–187, 189, 203, 210, 213, 218, 221, 226, 229, 249, 251, 258, 263, 272, 277, 297, 299, 304, 306, 309, 311, 315, 322, 329–331, 366–368, 387–388, 393, 406, 424, 426, 434–435, 467 soldiers, 32, 50–51, 79, 85, 116, 133, 166, 180–181, 201, 206, 221–222, 252, 263, 280–281, 324, 340, 363, 392, 405, 417, 457 Soldoniero, family, 32, 40, 52, 63, 66, 399–401 Spaccini, Giovanni, 36, 45, 65, 82–83, 98, 110, 376, 386, 391, 393, 411, 417 Spain, 19, 30, 38–40, 47, 50, 54–55, 61, 73, 77, 80, 83, 86–88, 90–91, 93–95, 101–102, 115, 117, 123,

483

128–129, 131–133, 138, 201, 209, 272, 307, 382–384, 390–391, 412, 418, 441 Spangenberg, Cyriacus, 193, 222 Speyer, 204, 247 Spinelli, family, 87 Stanhope, family, 347–349, 351, 423 Star Chamber, 325, 329, 348, 357–358 Steinau, von, family, 175–176, 256–257, 423 Stockleigh Pomery, 319 stoicism, 18, 136, 231, 261, 376, 378, 394–395, 404, 466 Stolberg, count of, 173, 198, 200 Stralsund, 194, 252, 259, 261, 386 Strasbourg, 195, 215 Strassoldo, family, 32, 40, 63, 66, 104, 399–401 Strevi, marchese di, 28 Strozzi, family, 129 students, 100, 115, 139, 183, 208–210, 212–215, 242–243, 313, 336, 339, 395, 397, 411, 420, 460–461 Suardo, family, 126–127 Sühnekreuze. See crosses, expiatory Swabia, 164, 232–233, 237, 255 Switzerland, 80, 158–159, 187, 198, 208, 219, 238–239, 247, 253, 255, 380, 437 Talbots, family, 347–349, 357 taxation, 11, 31, 36, 51, 53–54, 85–88, 91, 181, 222, 232, 270–271, 274, 277, 280–282, 285, 297, 301–302, 310, 312, 333, 466–467 Thiene, Annibale, 84 Thiene, Francesco, 67, 84, 124 Thirty Years’ War, 83, 151, 159–160, 168, 174, 179, 184, 206, 212, 218–219, 224–225, 234, 237, 252, 255, 262, 342, 389, 410, 428 Thümmel, Hans Wolf von, 256 Thuringia, 200, 233, 425, 427 Trélans, family, 267–268, 271, 276, 279–285 Trier, 150, 191 Tübingen, University, 206, 441 Tudors, 321–322, 333–334, 339–341, 346, 348, 354, 356

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484

index

Turin, 413, 469 Tuscany, grand duchy, 37–38, 47, 57, 81, 93, 95 Udine, 73 Ulm, 150, 187, 255 Upper Lusatia, 153, 167, 179, 222, 252, 426 Upper Palatinate, 167, 248, 263, 428 Urban VIII, Pope, 54, 94–95, 416 Urbino, 38, 390 Urfehde, 152, 157, 185, 232, 250, 252, 256, 258–259 Valmarana, family, 78, 100, 114 Vasto, family, 89, 118 vendetta, 6, 26, 31–32, 34, 124, 126, 411 and mutilation, 123–124, 134 and priests, 136 and sex, 121–123 decline, 126–141 economics of, 118–120 France, 267–287 Italy, 66–125 priests and, 52–54 vengeance, 7, 14, 16–17, 69, 78, 103, 132, 134, 139, 148, 155, 163, 166–167, 190, 193, 195, 225, 231, 250, 315, 343, 367, 395, 434, 439, 447, 457, 464 Venice, 23, 32, 34–35, 37, 41, 47–49, 51–52, 59, 63–64, 72–73, 75–78, 80–82, 84–85, 91, 98, 102, 104–105, 108, 116–117, 119–120, 123–124, 126–127, 130–131, 137, 374–376, 386, 390, 395, 400, 405, 412, 423, 431, 447, 469 legal system, 32, 35, 48, 64, 72–73, 81, 127, 130, 376 Verge, court of, 327, 332 Verona, 83, 122, 139, 423, 469 Versailles, 18, 276, 298, 305 Vicenza, 35, 59, 63, 77–78, 81, 84, 100, 108, 114, 119, 122, 124, 410, 413, 430, 447–448 Vienna, 32, 125, 130, 140, 179, 182, 237, 256, 260 violence, 10

and borders, 47, 51–53, 70, 76, 80, 82, 85, 87, 92, 109–110, 130, 163, 167, 172, 176, 198–201, 243, 255–256, 263, 299, 345 and festivities, 85, 107–108, 115, 127–128, 195, 212–214, 236, 243, 358, 380, 396, 401, 426–428 and kinship, 70 and plague, 68, 83, 85–86, 91, 120, 180, 272, 274 and sacred space, 56, 76, 84, 153, 182, 304, 405–432 and urban space, 104–108 concept, 11–13, 343, 460–465 control, 3, 26–27, 35, 46–52, 54, 90, 129, 134, 164, 171, 211, 329, 354–360 decline of, 3, 126–141, 182, 206, 261, 292–315, 321, 369, 404, 431, 460–467 factional, 11, 30, 35, 48, 54, 59, 69–70, 76, 78, 84–86, 88–90, 93–95, 122, 124, 166, 179, 181, 190, 192, 219, 276–287, 296, 303, 307, 313, 346–354, 363–368, 374–377, 382, 385, 390, 395, 403, 406, 411–413, 415, 424, 462 rates of, 3, 12, 59, 65, 71, 79–82, 84, 90, 103, 107–108, 125, 141, 159–160, 168, 174, 179, 182–185, 205, 285, 287, 290, 292–315, 324–340, 342, 363–368, 390, 410 religious, 75, 165–166, 268–270, 292, 341, 379, 414 virtù. See masculinity Viterbo, 29, 55, 385, 390 von Stain, family, 164, 166 Wales, 326, 346, 350, 355, 408 Walker, Obadiah, 110, 368 Walther, Martin, 384–385 Wartensleben, family, 213, 427 Wedel, von, family, 187, 193–195, 224, 395 Weinsberg, family, 399 Weinsberg, Hermann, 149, 192–193, 195, 217, 248, 260, 382, 386, 394, 397 Wentworth, family, 366–367, 387

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index Wentworth, Thomas, earl of Strafford, 342, 365 Wergeld, 158, 167, 228, 231 Wertheim, 173–174, 176, 186 Wertheim, feud, 173–174 Westphalia, 159, 163, 178, 183, 192, 199–200, 218–219, 248, 250, 255, 425, 427 Wildenstein, von, family, 177, 455 Wiltshire, 346 witchcraft, 187, 190–193 Wittenberg, 170, 210, 212, 242 women, 14–15, 61, 76, 84, 121–123, 125, 277, 305, 349, 358, 388, 391, 429

485

Württemberg, 182, 202, 230, 237, 254, 256 Württemberg, duke of, 164, 223, 255 Würzburg, 221, 251, 256, 258, 381 York, 326, 451, 461 Yorkshire, 323, 340, 343, 346, 356–357, 359, 365–366 Zambeccari, family, 129, 429 Zambeccari, Girolamo, 53 Zechtritz, von, family, 199 Zettritz, von, family, 151 Zürich, 159, 198, 254, 258

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009287319.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009287319.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press