Revolts and Political Violence in Early Modern Imagery (Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 54) 9004461930, 9789004461932

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Revolts and Political Violence in Early Modern Imagery

Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History General Editor Walter S. Melion (Emory University)

volume 54

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bsai

Revolts and Political Violence in Early Modern Imagery Edited by

Malte Griesse Monika Barget David de Boer

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Griesse, Malte, editor. | Barget, Monika, editor. | Boer, David de,  1990- editor. Title: Revolts and political violence in early modern imagery / edited by  Malte Griesse, Monika Barget, David de Boer. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2022] | Series: Brill’s studies on  art, art history, and intellectual history, 1878-9048 ; volume 54 |  Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021026836 (print) | LCCN 2021026837 (ebook) | ISBN  9789004461932 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004461949 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Violence in art. | Political violence. | Art—Political  aspects. | Visual communication—Political aspects. Classification: LCC N8257 .R48 2022 (print) | LCC N8257 (ebook) | DDC  704.9/493036—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021026836 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021026837

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill.” See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1878-9048 ISBN 978-90-04-46193-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-46194-9 (e-book) Copyright 2022 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands, except where stated otherwise. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents List of Illustrations vii Notes on Contributors xii

Introduction: Revolts and Political Violence in Early Modern Imagery 1 Malte Griesse, Monika Barget, and David de Boer

part 1 Visual Markers of Legitimacy 1

To Visualize or Not to Visualize: Commemorating the Suppression of Revolt in Early Qing China 21 Ya-chen Ma

2

Visualizing Punishment in Byzantium: Disseminating Memories of Quelled Revolts before the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 36 Galina Tirnanić

3

Revolutionary Ceremonies and Visual Culture during the Neapolitan Revolt (1647–1648) 54 Alain Hugon

part 2 Confessional Conflict 4

From Power Brokers to Rebels: How Frans Hogenberg Depicted the Beginning of the Dutch Revolt 75 Ramon Voges

5

Strategies of Transnational Identification: Images of the 1655 Massacre of the Waldensians in the Dutch Press 94 David de Boer

6

Image and Text as Propaganda during the Upper Austrian Peasant War (1626) 115 Malte Griesse

vi

Contents

part 3 Foreign Observation 7

The International Reputation and Self-Representation of Hungarian Noblemen in the Seventeenth Century 165 Nóra G. Etényi and Monika Barget

8

Representing the King: The Images of João IV of Portugal (1640–1652) 198 Joana Fraga

9

Marking Political Legitimacy in Early Modern Images of Russia 219 Nancy S. Kollmann

10

Through Glory and Death: Stepan Razin and the 1667–1671 Cossack Rebellion in Western Early Modern Visual Culture 240 Gleb Kazakov

Part 4 Revolutionary Images 11

Concepts of Leadership in Early Portraits of American Revolutionaries 263 Monika Barget

12

Satirical Rebels? Irritating Anticipations in European Visualizations of Black American Insurgents around 1800 289 Fabian Fechner Index 315

Illustrations 1.1

Attributed to Qiu Ying, Japanese Pirates (detail), seventeenth century. Handscroll, ink and color on silk, 32 × 523 cm. Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo 22 1.2 Anonymous, Taizu Defeating the Ula Army, in The Pictorial Veritable Records of Taizu, repainted during the Qianlong reign (1735–1795). Reprint 1920. Harvard-Yenching Library, Cambridge, MA 23 1.3 J. P. Le Bas (after a drawing by Jean-Denis Attiret [1702–1768]), The Victory of Khorgos, in The East Turkestan Campaign, 1774. Copperplate engraving on paper, 55.4 × 90.8 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art 24 1.4 Anonymous, The Submission of Red Miao, eighteenth century. Rubbing on paper, 86.5 × 229.5 cm. Fu Ssu-nien Library, Institute of History, Academia Sinica, Taipei 25 1.5 Anonymous, The Black Barbarians Pledge Allegiance, eighteenth century. Rubbing on paper, 87.5 × 235.5 cm. Fu Ssu-nien Library, Institute of History, Academia Sinica, Taipei 25 1.6 Anonymous, Prince Kang Receiving Orders to Pacify the South, in Prince Kang’s Great Achievement of Pacifying Four Provinces, seventeenth century. Woodblock print on paper, 32 × 64 cm. National Archives of Japan, Tokyo 26 1.7 Anonymous, Offering Amnesty to Liu Jinzhong, in “Pacifying the Sea”, in Collected Eulogies from Fujian, seventeenth century. Woodblock print on paper. Shanghai Library, Shanghai 27 2.1 Anonymous, The head of Maniakes brought to Constantine IX, thirteenth century. Book illustration in Madrid Skylitzes, Vitr. 26–2, fol. 224v. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid 37 2.2 View of the Hippodrome ca. 1480, in Onofrio Panvinio, De ludis circensibus, Venice, 1600 39 2.3 Base of the Obelisk of Theodosius, southeast face. Hippodrome, Istanbul 40 2.4 Constantine VIII steps on the neck of Arab general, Madrid Skylitzes, Vitr. 26–2, fol. 136r, detail. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid 44 2.5 Blinding of Leo Phokas, Madrid Skylitzes, Vitr. 26–2, fol. 126r. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid 48 2.6 Punishment of Leo Phokas and his supporters, Madrid Skylitzes, Vitr. 26–2, fol. 126v. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid 49 2.7 Blinding of Nikephoros, Madrid Skylitzes, Vitr. 26–2. fol. 197v. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid 50 3.1 The coat of arms of the King and the People of Naples, in Gennaro Annese, Per osservanza della patente fatta in persona di capitan Andrea Paliotto, 1647, Bibliothèque nationale de France 61

viii 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2

5.3

5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7

6.1

6.2

6.3

Illustrations Frans Hogenberg, Handing over of the Petition, 1570, etching, 28 × 21 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 78 Frans Hogenberg, Battle near Oosterweel, 1570, etching, 21 × 28 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 84 Frans Hogenberg, The Execution of Egmond and Hoorn, 1570, etching, 21 × 28 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 86 Anonymous, Frontispiece of Wreede vervolginge en schrickelijcke moordt aende Vaudoisen in Piedmont, 1655, woodcut. University Library, Ghent 99 Theodor de Bry, Afbeeldinghe vande Spaensche tyrannye in Spieghel der Spaenscher Tyrannye geschiet in West Indien, 1596, etching, 13.5 × 11 cm, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague 100 Anonymous, Execution and assassination in Wreede vervolginge en schrickelijcke moordt aende Vaudoisen in Piedmont, 1655, woodcut. University Library, Ghent 102 Frans Hogenberg, Moord op Willem van Oranje, 1584, etching, 21 × 28 cm. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam 103 Anonymous, Growlijke wreede moord en vervolging aan de Vaudoisen in Piemont, 1655, etching, 29 × 36 cm. Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam 104 Anonymous, Waldensian man nailed to a tree in Historie der Martelaren, 1657, etching, Royal Library, The Hague 106 Anonymous, Kort verhael van den elendigen toestant van de volckeren in de valleyen van Piemont, 1663, etching, 36.3 × 36.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 109 Anonymous, Two different title pages of Warhafte Relation. Left: original version published by Gregorio Hänlin in Ingolstadt, 1626, woodcut. Staatsund Stadtbibliothek Augsburg. Right: reprint by Aperger in Augsburg, 1626, woodcut. From Strnadt, Bauernkrieg in Oberösterreich, table 18 120 Anonymous, Title pages of two song pamphlets. a) Left: a peasant on his knees, in Ein Geistreicher Gesang/ Welchen die Baurn im Ländlein ob der Ens/ alle 24. Stund viermal/ zu Morgens/ Mittags/ Abends unnd Mitternacht/ Wie auch allezeit wann man sie angreiffen will/ Kniend/ mit gen Himmel auffgehabenen Händen/ Inniglich und Einhelligkich auch mit Seuffzen und weinen/ unterm freyen Himmel/ zu singen pflegen, n.d., woodcut. From Strnadt, Bauernkrieg in Oberösterreich, table 27. b) Right: three peasants swearing an oath, in Ein schön unnd kurtzweiliges Bawren Lied Von dem gantzen Verlauff dess Bawrn Kriegs Steffel Fätinger damalen Uhrhebers, n.d., woodcut. Staatsbibliothek München 122 Anonymous, Bauern schlagen Herberstorff bei Peuerbach, 1626, copperplate. From Strnadt, Bauernkrieg in Oberösterreich, table 7 126

Illustrations

ix

6.4 Anonymous, Eigentliche Contrafactur der haupt Stad LINTZ im Erzherzogthumb Österreich ob der Ens, wie sie von der Bawrschafft belägert worden, with added close-up of letter F with the depiction of Fadinger being shot from his horse, n.d., copperplate. From Strnadt, Bauernkrieg in Oberösterreich, table 8 127 6.5 Anonymous, Abbildung der Statt Lintz, wie dieselbe von den Bawren biss an dritten Tag beschossen, n.d., copperplate. Stadtarchiv Ulm 129 6.6 Anonymous, Votive offering to the Catholic Church of Hartkirchen, n.d., panel painting, 2840 × 1650 cm (votive shrine). Photograph by Roland Forster 137 6.7 Anonymous, Burning monastery, n.d., oil painting. Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, Linz 139 6.8 Anonymous, Stephan Fadinger in the monastery of Kremsmünster, n.d., oil on wood. From Strnadt, Bauernkrieg in Oberösterreich, table 26 140 6.9 Anonymous, Two versions of Der aller Gotts ober … Stöfl Fädinger, 1628, oil painting. Museumsverein Stephan Fadinger, St. Agatha 143 6.10 Anonymous, Stephan Fädtinger Aller Baurn Obrister Regierdt, Anno 1622, Anno 1750, 1750, oil painting. Wikimedia commons, https://upload.wikimedia.org/ wikipedia/commons/2/20/Stefan_Fadinger_Bild.jpg 145 6.11 Anonymous, Twelve oil paintings on the peasant war of 1626, n.d., oil painting, 140 × 90 cm. Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, Linz 147 6.12 Close-up of fig. 6.11, no. 7, Battle of Geiersberg. Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, Linz 149 6.13 Close-up of fig. 6.11, no. 11, Battle of Lambach. Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, Linz 150 6.14 Close-up of fig. 6.11, no. 10, Battle of Eferding. Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, Linz 151 7.1 Anonymous, Warhaffte Contrafactur und Abbildung, deren ehmals Vornehm-Berühmten drey Ungarischen Grafen, 1671, engraving, 30 × 16 cm. National Széchényi Library Apponyi Collection 169 7.2 Anonymous, Neye und richtige Abbildung aus der Ungarischen Mappen …, 1683, engraving. National Széchényi Library, Apponyi Collection, Budapest 173 7.3 Anonymous, Was Doct. Luther angericht, Der tapffre Töckely versicht, 1682, engraving. Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történelmi Képcsarnok, Budapest 176 7.4 Fatum Emerici Comitis Teckely, 1685, engraving. National Széchényi Library, Apponyi Collection, Budapest 179 7.5 Cornelis Meyssens, Hinrichtung von Graf Franz Nadásdy, in Aussführliche und Warhafftige Beschreibung wie es mit denen Criminal-Prozessen, und darauff erfolgten executionen wider die drey graffen Frantzen Nadasdi, Peter von Zrin, und Frantz Christophen Frangepan eigentlich hergangen, 1671, engraving. Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történelmi Képcsarnok, Budapest 181

x

Illustrations

7.6 Philibert Bouttats, ‘T Hedendaags Rad van Avontuur, 1690, engraving, 33 × 38.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 184 8.1 Michel Lasne, Ioannes IIII Portugalliae et Algarbiorum Rex, 1643, engraving. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon 202 8.2 Balthazar Moncornet, Iean IIII par la grace de Dieu Roy de Portugal & des Algarbes, ca. 1650, engraving. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon 204 8.3 John Droeshout, Frontispiece of Lusitania liberata ab injusto Castellanorum dominio: Restituta legitimo Principi, Serenissimo Joanni IV …, 1645, engraving. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon 206 8.4 Anonymous, Johannes der vierte Konig [sic] zu Portugal und Algarbe etc., ca. 1650, engraving. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon 208 8.5 Anonymous, Arbor genealogica Regum Lusitaniae, ca. 1642, print. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris 209 9.1 Punishments, in Adam Olearius, Vermehrte newe Beschreibung der muscowitischen und persischen Reyse, 1656, engraving, 14.7 × 9.7 cm. Dartmouth College Library, Hanover NH 227 9.2 Strappado, excerpt of fig. 9.1 227 9.3 Debtors’ punishment, excerpt of fig. 9.1 228 9.4 Beating a servant, excerpt of fig. 9.1 229 9.5 Knouting, excerpt of fig. 9.1 230 9.6 Marketplace beating, excerpt of fig. 9.1 231 9.7 Phillip Galle, IVSTICIA, 1559, from Peter Bruegel the Elder, Virtues and Vices, ca. 1539. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 232 9.8 Anonymous, Onthoofding van Karel I, ca. 1649. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 233 9.9 Anonymous, Das rebellische Bauernparlament von Braunau, ca. 1705, engraving, 30 × 19.5 cm. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon 235 10.1 Workshop of Paulus Fürst, Portrait of Razin, 1671, copperplate engraving. Reprinted in Klebeband Herschaften Kriegs[=] und Staats[bedienten] auch andere (Arolsen, FWHB, II 56e 17a, S. 511, Bild 1) 247 10.2 Anonymous, Stephanus Razinus Perduellis Moscovicus, in Theatrum Europaeum, 1670, engraving. Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg 250 10.3 Anonymous, Portrait of Razin published in a supplement to a German periodical, 1671. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen 251 10.4 Anonymous, Captured Razin being delivered to Moscow, ca. 1672. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California 254 11.1 Anonymous, General Washington Esqr/General and Commander in Chief of the Continental Army in America/Done from an Original Drawn from the Life by Alex. Campbell, of Williamsburgh in Virginia [equestrian portrait], 1775, mezzotint, hand-colored, sold in London by C. Shepherd. Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, DE 271

Illustrations

xi

11.2 Johann Martin Will, George Washington, Esq’r., general and commander in chief of the Continental Army in America, mezzotint engraved in Augsburg and sold in London by C. Shepherd. Library of Congress, Washington D.C. 273 11.3 Johann Martin Will, Fridericus der Zweyte, der tapfere Preusen Held, ca. 1763–1770, engraving with mezzotint, hand-colored. Druckerei Walch, Augsburg 276 11.4 Noël Le Mire, Le Général Washington, ne quid detrimenti capiat res publica, gravé d’après le tableau original appartenant a Mr. Marquis de la Fayette / peint par L. Le Paon peintre de bataille de S.A.S. Mgr. le Prince de Condé; gravé par N. le Mire des Academies Imperiales et Royales et de celle des Sciences et Arts de Rouen, allegedly based on a French portrait, 1780–1781, engraving. Library of Congress, Washington D.C. 280 12.1 Johann Adam Stockmann, Effigies Nicolai I. Regis Paraquariae ficti. data ex portu Buenos Ayres 15. Martij A. 1758, ca. 1758, engraving. Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome 292 12.2 Anonymous, Nette Abbildung Nicolai des Ersten seyn sollenden Koenigs, und Layen-Bruders in Paraquarien, ca. 1758, letterpress. Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome 296 12.3 William Dent, Abolition of the Slave Trade, or the Man the Master, 1789, hand-colored etching, 24.5 × 34.6 cm. Library of Congress, Washington D.C. 298 12.4 Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, Die Empörung der Neger / La revolte des Nègres, 1793, engraving, 8.8 × 5.2 cm. Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen 302 12.5 Marcus Rainsford (sketch) and Inigo Barlow (engraving), Revenge taken by the Black Army for the Cruelties practised on them by the French, 1805, engraving, 26 × 19.7 cm. Library of Congress, Washington D.C. 306

Notes on Contributors Ya-chen Ma is professor at the Institute of History of the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. She obtained her PhD at Stanford University in 2007 and was a visiting scholar at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University from 2013 to 2014. Her research interests focus on late imperial Chinese art history and cultural history. She has published The Commemorative Images of War: The Cultural Construction of Qing Martial Prowess and numerous essays including “War and Empire: Images of Battle during the Qianlong Reign,” in Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West. Galina Tirnanić is associate professor of art history in the Department of Art and Art History at Oakland University. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2010. She specializes in the visual culture of punishment in the Byzantine Empire and has published essays on a variety of related subjects, including the sense of touch; images of martyrdom; relationship between text, image, and body; and expression of political authority. Her major current project is a booklength study on the spectacles of punishment in medieval Constantinople. She is the author of “A Touch of Violence: Feeling Pain, Perceiving Pain in Byzantium,” in Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium, edited by Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Margaret Mullett. Alain Hugon is professor of modern history at University of Caen, Normandy. He received his PhD for the dissertation “Au service du roi catholique: ‘honorables ambassadeurs’ et ‘divins espions’ face à la France. Représentation diplomatique et service secret dans les relations hispano-françaises de 1598 à 1635,” under the supervision of André Zysberg. He is the author of many books, including La Grande Migration: De l’Espagne à l’Amérique 1492–1700 (2019), Philippe IV: Le siècle de Vélasquez (2014), and Naples insurgée, 1647–1648: De l’événement à la mémoire (2011). Ramon Voges PhD (2017), is deputy head of the German Museum of Books and Writing of the German National Library. He pursued his PhD at the University of Paderborn under the supervision of Johannes Süßmann. In 2019, he published an academic monograph on Hogenberg‘s visual reports under the title Das Auge der

Notes on Contributors

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Geschichte: Der Aufstand der Niederlande und die Französischen Religionskriege im Spiegel der Bildberichte Franz Hogenbergs (ca. 1560–1610). In his research he focuses on early modern prints and publishing houses. David de Boer is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. He investigates refugee advocacy and humanitarianism in early modern Europe. After obtaining his BA and MA (cum laude) in history at Utrecht University, he received his PhD at the University of Konstanz and Leiden University (cotutelle) in 2019 for his dissertation “Religious Persecution and Transnational Compassion in the Dutch Vernacular Press, 1655–1745.” He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, the Leibniz Institute of European History, and the European University Institute. Before moving to Amsterdam, he lectured at Leiden University and Utrecht University. He has published on iconoclasm, civic identity, and public diplomacy. Malte Griesse is visiting professor at LMU Munich. He received his PhD from the EHESS in Paris for a study on the evolution of personal ties under Stalin and the influence of (informal) communication on the formation of opinion. Published as Communiquer, juger et agir sous Staline: La personne prise entre ses liens avec les proches et son rapport au système politico-idéologique (2011), the book is being translated into English. He defended his habilitation thesis at University of Konstanz on revolts in early modern Europe. His currently researches subaltern autobiographical practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He held research fellowships in Moscow, Paris, Vienna, Wolfenbüttel, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nóra G. Etényi (Hab. 2010) is an assistant professor at the Department of Medieval and Early Modern History of Hungary of the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest (ELTE). She obtained her PhD at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She specializes in early modern media, propaganda, and the formation of the public opinion in the German-speaking world. Among other publications, she is the author of Pamflet és Politika (Pamphlet and Politics) (Budapest, 2009), about the image of Hungary in the seventeenth-century German public opinion, and Színlelés és rejtőzködés: a kora újkori magyar politika szerepjátékai (Simulation and dissimulation: role-playing in early modern Hungarian politics) (Budapest, 2010), edited with Ildikó Horn.

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Joana Fraga is a postdoctoral researcher at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, University of Lisbon, where she is currently conducting a research project on political representations in the Portuguese Empire between 1640 and 1750. She obtained her PhD from the University of Barcelona for her dissertation “Three Revolts in Images: Catalonia, Portugal and Naples (1640–1668).” Her most recent publications on the topic of revolts are 1640: A Restauração, da história local à história global (with Thiago Krause, Tinta da China, 2020) and “Trois révoltes en images: La Catalogne, le Portugal et Naples dans les années 1640” (with Joan-Lluís Palos, in Soulèvements, révoltes, revolutions.) Nancy Shields Kollmann is William H. Bonsall Professor in History at Stanford University. She has worked on politics and society, social values, gender relations, and the criminal law in Russia. She has published By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Cornell UP, 1999), Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (CUP, 2013), and The Russian Empire, 1450–1801 (OUP, 2017), a synthetic history of Russia as a “Eurasian politics of difference empire.” She plans to follow up this theme and return to the practice of the law by studying the implementation of Catherine II’s judicial reforms (1775) in the non-Russian provinces. Gleb Kazakov is postdoctoral researcher at the Justus Liebig University Gießen. He obtained his PhD from the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg. He is currently working on his first monograph, which will be published by Franz Steiner Verlag in 2021 and is based on his dissertation “The Moscow Strel’tsy Uprising of 1682 in Trans-cultural Communication: Transfer of Information and Circulation of Political Narratives between Muscovy and Europe 1682–1750.” Together with Malte Griesse, he has edited the thematic issue “Kosakische Aufstände und ihre Anführer: Heroisierung, Dämonisierung und Tabuisierung der Erinnerung” in the journal Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (2017). Monika Barget studied history, art history, and Catholic theology at the University of Augsburg. She obtained her PhD from the University of Konstanz, where she worked on riots, revolts, and revolutions in the British Empire. From 2017 to 2018, she was academic project manager at the Centre for Digital Humanities at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Here she contributed to the “Letters 1916–1923” digital edition and the “Ignite” project in design thinking and maker culture. Since January 2019, Monika Barget has been a postdoctoral researcher

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at IEG Mainz. Her current research interests include mobility and borders in the early modern period, geo-humanities, public humanities, and the digital analysis of media networks. Fabian Fechner is a postdoctoral research fellow in global history at the University of Hagen since 2016. His research interests include Latin American colonial history, studies in cultural contact, and religious history. His doctoral thesis deals with early modern globalizing politics and Paraguayan Jesuit missions. Previously he studied history, geography, and Spanish philology in Tübingen and Buenos Aires. From 2012 to 2015 he worked in a project about Peruvian heresies in the sixteenth century at Tübingen University. His current research deals with a systematic approach to African cartography (1700–1900), concerning the rhetorics of “discovery,” travel liars, and multiple layers of epistemology.

introduction

Revolts and Political Violence in Early Modern Imagery Malte Griesse, Monika Barget, and David de Boer In recent years, the Islamic State (IS) has repeatedly shocked audiences all over the globe with imagery of dreadful violence.1 Those who have seen the execution videos of James Fowley and other prisoners, or the photos of Abu Abdel Rahman al-Iraqi posing in front of the impaled heads of his victims, will hardly ever forget them. It is not the graphic nature of the violence alone that makes a lasting impact. Other important factors were the unexpected immediacy with which these videos, virally disseminated on social media, hit us, and the seeming similarities to popular works of fiction in the West.2 Many television series present us with remarkably graphic violence, but because it is fictional and embedded in a familiar genre, we perceive and assess it differently. The similarities and differences between real and fictional violence in our current media landscape became painfully tangible when Rod Stewart had to apologize for posting a video in which he jokingly reenacted an execution. It was supposed to be a reference to Game of Thrones, but people associated it with IS.3 Whether or not we approach depictions of violence with pleasure, fear, or disgust does not depend on the iconography alone but derives from the communicational context. Apart from the relationship between image and reality, our social environment, genre conventions, and connections with those who produce or disseminate the imagery have an effect on our reactions. Receptions of violence are therefore not only intuitive and immediate, but they also transcend the event itself. Conventions of acceptable or improper performances and representations of violence have evolved over long periods of time and are shaped by cultural transfers and innovations in media production. Western commentators often argue that the execution practices of IS’ fighters were “medieval.”4 Such judgments are more rooted in stereotypes about 1 2 3 4

Bernhardt, Bildstrategien der Terrormiliz ‘Islamischer Staat’.” Allen, “Aniconism and Figural Representation in Islamic Art.” See Grierson, “Sir Rod Stewart Says Mock Execution was Game of Thrones Prank.” The Washington Post, for instance, characterized IS propaganda as a “medieval reality show”; see Miller und Mekhennet, “Inside the Surreal World of the Islamic State’s Propaganda Machine.”

© Malte Griesse, Monika Barget and David de Boer, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004461949_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

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Griesse, Barget, and de Boer

the European past than profound knowledge of modern Islamism. Within this narrative, “medieval” serves as a synonym for archaic or barbarian, making terrorists the enemies of the modern world.5 However, the larger context of IS’ communicational objectives reveals that these strategies mirror a more recent tradition. Although visual representations of executions did exist in the Middle Ages, they became widespread only with the advent of the print revolution of the early modern period. From the fifteenth century onward, woodcuts and later engravings representing – or claiming to represent – real-life executions with graphic detail became increasingly common. In early modern Europe, executions were almost routinely visualized and disseminated, often by the punishing authorities themselves, who wanted to demonstrate their power, at first glance a direct parallel to IS’ use of imagery, albeit in different media. In this light, Hannah Kozlowska perhaps made a more apt comparison in the New York Times when she likened the James Foley execution video to a “modern guillotine execution spectacle, with YouTube as the town square.”6 What this comparison unintentionally implies is that explicit visual communication of violence inflicted on human bodies stems to a considerable extent from a European tradition, even though these regions are often idealized as the cradle of modern civilization and restrained violence. And, indeed, it appears that in Orthodox Christianity and non-Christian cultures, including those dominated by Islam, such visual representations were virtually unknown, at least in print media.7 New research has offered compelling insight into the role of visualizations of pain and torture in early modern Christian devotion, especially, and the emotive responses such works could engender.8 This volume takes this burgeoning historiography into a new direction by exploring the ways in which early modern people visually communicated political violence and by gauging the effect and influence of such imagery on early modern society. By “political 5 See, for instance, Feldman, “Islamic State’s Medieval Morals.” For the idea of “othering,” even though he does not use the term yet, see Said, Orientalism. The classic work on the enormous difference of punishment practices in the premodern and in the modern ages is, of course, Foucault, Surveiller et punir. 6 Kozlowska, “Should We Be Seeing Gruesome Acts? And If So, Where?” 7 Similarly, restrictive approaches to figural representation on many levels are also known in Byzantine and Judaic visual cultures. Islam included a broader variety of figural traditions as the faith spread, but in contrast to Western print culture, explicit depictions of exposed (naked or wounded) human bodies remained rare; see Allen, “Aniconism”; Ali, “The Royal Veil.” 8 Terry-Fritsch, Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe; Graham and KilroyEwbank, eds., Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe; Decker and Kirkland-Ives, Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300–1650.

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violence” we mean violence that is carried out by or directed against a government, or between social groups, to consolidate or change the power relations in a certain polity.9 Although many studies have covered isolated aspects of the communication of political violence and punishment in the early modern period (e.g., individual works of art or specific practices), this book is the first to offer a broad contextualization from the Protestant Reformations to the Age of Revolution and transcend the confines of Western Europe. Tracing the genealogy of imagery of political violence across time and space, the contributors to this volume explore questions that remain highly relevant in our media landscape today, and they critically evaluate the implicit but prevalent bias towards Western European material. What role did representations of political violence play in premodern societies, and how did this change with the rise of the printing press? How was violent imagery used to legitimize or contest political structures, and did governments and oppositional groups follow different visual strategies? To what extent was there a cross-border and transcultural exchange of techniques, materials, genres, conventions, and specific imagery, and how was this affected by changing political, social, and infrastructural landscapes? Indeed, how entangled or isolated were distinct visual cultures in this period of increasing interregional communication, early globalization, and European colonization? To engage with these questions, we will explore different genres and modes of visual representation, from highbrow art to cheap prints produced for broad circulation. In doing so, we tie in with “visual culture studies,” which have abandoned the narrow focus of traditional art history on the aesthetic quality and market value of artworks.10 Instead, works of art from almost any period and of very different quality and recognition have become valuable sources for cultural historians, literary scholars, and even sociologists.11 Centuries before digital media made it possible for almost everyone to visually communicate with potentially infinite numbers of recipients, different strata of society could publicly express diverging opinions in rituals, artefacts, drawings, paintings, or print. Accordingly, this volume covers a wide range of imagery, from orally 9 10

11

For a conceptual analysis, see Bosi und Malthaner, “Political Violence.” Harms und Schilling, Das illustrierte Flugblatt der frühen Neuzeit. Even before the proclamation of “pictorial” or “iconic” turns under the premises of explicit interdisciplinarity, fascinating research on early modern pamphlets and the circulation of woodcuts and engravings has developed at the interface of media studies and art history. Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip. See also the interdisciplinary Journal of Visual Culture, founded in 2002. For sociology, see Pauwels “Taking the Visual Turn in Research and Scholarly Communication Key Issues.”

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or textually transmitted mental images to illustrated manuscripts, anonymous folk art, and internationally esteemed engravings by famous artists. Moreover, putting visualizations of political violence at its center, this volume sheds new light on the historiography of early modern revolts as communicative events, in which the use of textual sources remains dominant.12 1

Morality and Legitimacy

Then as now, almost all visualizations of violence carried a normative message. First of all, it is important to bear in mind that societies made a notable distinction between violence and cruelty.13 In the early modern period, violence was almost universally accepted as necessary to restore law and order.14 The monopoly on violence of central governments only gradually evolved in the process of European state formation. Prior to the eighteenth century, aristocratic courts and other representatives or holders of worldly authority often interacted with a variety of local agents in the resolution of violent conflict, which is reflected in the imagery produced.15 When the state carried out legal violence, audiences were often present. Executions were seen as a reestablishment of violated social order in their own right. Performing them publicly was therefore an important act of political communication.16 Visual accounts were also means for authorities to claim legitimacy and call for the viewers’ consent and acclamation.17 When violence was deemed cruel, abhorrence and rejection were implied; the term referred to disproportional, excessive, or unjustified violence.18 However, it is hard to say at what stage contemporaries considered violence excessive.19 To our modern eyes, early modern punishments and the enormous variety of executions seem inhumane. Early modern authorities, however, often propagated painful executions in print. Very graphic and revolting depictions of violence could convey much more rational messages than modern stereotypes about 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

A good summary of the development of revolt historiography, especially for the seventeenth century, can be found in Benigno, Mirrors of Revolution. Pawlak und Schankweiler, “Ästhetik der Gewalt – Gewalt der Ästhetik.” Lovell, Justice and Mercy Equal Supporters of the Throne. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, 2. Yetter, Public Execution in England, 1573–1868. William Jackson, The New and Complete Newgate Calendar, or, Villany Displayed in All its Branches. Aston, Satan in Samuels Mantle, or, The Cruelty of Germany Acted in Jersey. See Baraz, Medieval Cruelty.

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early modern times will allow.20 In fact, we will come to see that cruelty was often defined not by the nature of the violence itself, but by the perceived innocence or guilt of the executed. For instance, Dutch poet Joost van den Vondel lamented the political execution of Lands’ Advocate Johan van Oldenbarnevelt by stadtholder Maurits as cruel, even though he had only been beheaded, a relatively quick and painless way to die on the early modern scaffold.21 Early modern authorities could prepare and frame the actual setting of public punishment and thereby shape context to some extent. But they had less control over how prints were received. Visual conventions were not without ambivalence and not always accepted by early modern spectators. Reconstructing these visual conventions and markers of legitimacy surrounding images of violence, we explore the boundaries of what denoted illegitimate cruelty in the complex interplay between act, representation, and reception. Conditions of art reception are generally much more difficult to trace than those of art production and the media policy of political authorities. As a consequence, only a few writers have so far explored modes of reception. One of the rare examples of an investigation of esthetic guidelines for spectators is Fee-Alexandra Haase’s study of the topoi of evaluation in contemporary reviews of history painting. However, Haase’s object of study, the journals that systematically published art reviews, only began appearing in the later eighteenth century and reflected the viewpoints of an educated audience.22 For earlier periods, we know strikingly little about patterns of perception in highbrow art, let alone those in cheap prints made for rapid circulation. Pre1700 theoretical and historical reflections on art, such as Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550) or Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593), can prove insightful because these works reveal the fragility and dissension in modes of visual perception.23 Explicit contemporary reflections on visual culture are, however, not the only tools that historians can apply to understand the perceptual horizons of people in the early modern world. As Michael Baxandall reminds us, if we want to understand how contemporaries assessed images, we also need to scrutinize how their social world visually conditioned them. The cognitive style of, say, seventeenth-century Portuguese 20 21 22 23

An attempt to look beyond gory punishments and explain the complexity and intrinsic logic in early modern approaches to violence and criminal justice was, for instance, made in Rousseaux, “Crime, Justice and Society in Medieval and Early Modern Times.” van den Vondel, “Het stockse van Johan van Oldenbarnevelt.” Haase, “Topik und Kunstrezension.” See, for instance, Giovanni Battista Passeri’s (1610–1679) complaints about endless arguments on style and meaning in the seventeenth century; quoted in Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy, 19.

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merchants were different from ours, making them perceive visual material differently.24 Many art historians in Germany have adopted the “aesthetics of reception” from the School of Constance, which is dedicated to finding the implicit, that is, anticipated, reception in the work of art itself.25 They depart from the idea that artists were able to foresee different reception settings and address more than one audience at a time. In congruence with this approach, Peter J. Burgard has described the “desacralization of the sacred” in paintings by Caravaggio, Bernini, and Asam. Burgard argues that early modern Western European art saw a constant development towards ambiguity that peaked in the mid-seventeenth century.26 A single painting or drawing could suggest more than one meaning, and different layers often playfully or dramatically contradicted each other. The contributions to this volume will show that ephemeral woodcuts or engravings, though often appearing to have been less carefully designed, could convey similarly ambiguous messages. Many scholars in the 1950s and 1960s underestimated the ability of contemporary audiences to consciously decipher, judge, or even deconstruct visual messages. But images did not travel in one direction only. Early modern media were often subjected to appropriation, recontextualization, and ridicule as warring parties could attain equal access to printing sources and visually oppose each other’s opinions in physical or “mental images.”27 Of course, visual literacy could differ starkly between social groups. Peasants from remote villages and ordinary city dwellers, who were mostly illiterate, certainly did not share the visual interpretational tools of erudite hommes de lettres. Yet this did not necessarily exclude them from consuming such media. Our modern reading habits are highly individualized – even though social networks allow for instant virtual exchange – but in the early modern period texts and images were often read and interpreted in groups, or even publicly in the marketplace.28

24 25 26 27 28

Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy; Baxandall, Patterns of Intention. Hans Belting’s work on the medieval imago pietatis is an important example, since the images were definitely used for devotional purposes. See Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum im Mittelalter; Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. Burgard, “Desacralization of the Sacred: Caravaggio, Bernini, Asam”; Rosen, Der stumme Diskurs der Bilder. Other works corroborate his findings. See, for instance, Clark, Vanities of the Eye. For the concept of mental images in visual culture studies, see Belting, Anthropology of Images. In the present study, it is mainly Galina Tirnanić who builds on this concept. Rheingold, Smart Mobs.

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The literate, or in towns even professional news criers, read the texts to the assembled public and explained its pictures.29 A case in point is a Dutch pamphlet showing the execution of three conspirators who had tried to assassinate stadtholder Maurice of Orange in 1623. Below the image is a fictional conversation between a peasant and his landlord about the news. The peasant tells the nobleman that he has seen a pamphlet commenting on the execution, but he cannot read. The landlord then offers to read the pamphlet to him, which takes the form of a step-by-step explanation of the image. The peasant is so impressed by the news that he immediately wants to head to a bookseller and buy a copy of his own, which he wants to show to his neighbors who dislike the stadtholder.30 This should also remind us that recognizing the importance of images in communicating revolt and punishment in early modern times should not lead us to overcompensate and study them in isolation from text. The two modes of communication were often heavily intertwined. Broadsides and pamphlets often combined picture and text, and they included captions or more substantial and independent narratives, such as poems.31 2

Image and Reality

The extent to which images reflect reality is an age-old question. The performance of political violence could diverge wildly from its visual representations in print, which came with its own codes and grammar. For instance, well into the nineteenth century, execution broadsides were often sold shortly after the public punishment, which meant that they had to be produced in advance. Such images were therefore rather stylized and generic.32 Prints and paintings produced, not as news media, but as visual historiography or mementos to individual historic figures were, by contrast, more likely to highlight remarkable details.33 Visual representations of violence may thus be more reflective of an assumed choreography or commemorative purpose than of what “actually” happened. Often relying on traditional symbolism and language, many images reflect more of the contexts in which they were produced than of the events they depicted. 29 30 31 32 33

Croft, “Libels, Popular Literacy and Public Opinion in Early Modern England.” See “De drie hoofdrolspelers in de samenzwering tegen Maurits.” The term “visual literacy” was coined by Debes, “Some Foundations for Visual Literacy.” Chassaigne, “Popular Representations of Crime.” See depictions of the executions of Charles I or Mary, Queen of Scots, over time.

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Working in the footsteps of Aby Warburg, theorists such as Ernst Cassirer, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Erwin Panofsky therefore did not interpret pictures as secondary expressions of external objects and ideas. Instead, they highlighted art’s own semantics and placed art on the same reflective level as texts. In his concept of “iconology” Panofsky attributed several layers of meaning to images and valued their formal conventions as much as the divergent theological, philosophical, or political conceptions they could convey.34 This could include decorative elements in broadsides reflecting their content, the elaborate framing of printed portraits, or the size and position of images used as text illustrations. Of course, images can nevertheless also be used as historical evidence. In his stimulating plea for the use of imagery by “plain historians,” Peter Burke compellingly makes this point by stating that “certain historical problems are illuminated more brightly by images than by texts.”35 For instance, he points out that engravers frequently recycled the same templates to represent different actors and events, which tells us something about contemporary approaches to time, place, and personhood. If we compare this with much more elaborate painted portraits, it can furthermore give us insight into the extent to which such approaches were universal or genre-dependent.36 To name an example, engravers often created Simultanbilder, an integrated comic strip in which several subsequent events are depicted within one composition, to tackle the temporal dimensions of an event. In the Dutch Republic, Simultanbilder were popular in print but very rare in paintings, which were governed by other visual conventions. In short, the artistic search for truth could have very different outlooks; truth could be perceived as a realistic depiction of a specific moment in time (enabling secondary eyewitnessing), but also as a metaphysical truth. In this light, we should be careful not to approach images that reflect little of what “actually happened” as mere propaganda.37

34 35 36 37

Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, xvi. Burke, “Interrogating the Eyewitness.” A more elaborate and very intriguing study on the human face, the mask, and concomitant conceptions of personhood over the ages, which discusses early modern portraiture in this broader context, can be found in Belting, Faces. Gill, “All Art is Propaganda”; Orwell and Packer, All Art is Propaganda.

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9

Tracing the Iconography of Violence in the Early Modern World

The first section of this book, Visual Markers of Legitimacy, explores how rulers and rebels from different geographical and iconographical contexts tried to consolidate their authority through visual markers. Ya-Chen Ma’s chapter on representations of revolts in early Qing China and Galina Tirnanić’s chapter on medieval Byzantium show that in contrast to the general practice of staging executions publicly in presence of an audience, visualizing these punishments for a larger distant public was not a universal strategy. But although images of violence did not publicly circulate in Byzantium and China, acts of violence were nonetheless commemorated. Drawing on visual series commissioned by high-ranking officials to commemorate their careers in both the Ming and the Qing period, Ya-Chen Ma explores the visualization of counterinsurgency campaigns. Contained in the galleries of officials, they were shown in private circles. Circulation was limited, but the production of these images sometimes entailed global transfers, for instance when engravings for private use in China were printed in Paris through Jesuit mediation in the 1770s. Tirnanić shows that bodily mutilation was an important means of permanently reminding the punished and those who saw him of his crimes and of the state’s authority. Such punishments were enacted in designated ritual public places. Being familiar with the architectural space, this allowed people to form a mental image of the punishments, regardless of whether they had actually been present. In other words, imprinting images of punishment on a large population did not necessarily require the printing press or even paper. The medieval Byzantine visualization of revolts stands out because it belongs to the pre-Gutenberg era. But even after the print revolution, Qing China and the Ottoman successors of the Byzantine Empire were practically devoid of printed media. China could draw on a much longer regional history of printing than European countries, and transfers in terms of technical reproduction preceded Western imperialist interference. Yet without the privatization and commercialization of the postal system and the trigger of the deep confessional divide, China did not develop the same culture of mass printing.38 Images had the property of depicting and shaping a desired reality, and repeated physical depictions helped create mental images of power. They not only reaffirmed the status quo of those in power, but could also help those who sought it, anticipating reality. Alain Hugon’s chapter is devoted to the role of images in revolutionary ceremonies, including rites of execution. He shows 38

Briggs and Burke, A Social History of the Media, 13.

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how the insurgents in the Neapolitan revolt of 1647–1648 mobilized pictures to legitimize and gain support for their new “regime,” no matter how rudimentary this was in institutional terms. The Neapolitan use of images and the Byzantine case illustrate how both established authorities and an emerging insurgent power tried to shape lieux de mémoire, be they fixed in place or highly mobile as were the icons carried in procession in Naples. Section Two, Confessional Conflict, addresses visual representations of interconfessional violence in the wake of the European Reformations. The rise of printed media in Western Europe was the result of a technical revolution, but it also went hand in hand with the emergence of a culture of public persuasion during Europe’s age of confessional conflict.39 Ramon Voges’ chapter on the influential newsprints of Frans Hogenberg in the early phases of the Dutch Revolt explores how the artist represented recent events and tried to influence the course of the conflict. Through different visual cues, Hogenberg notably tried to deconfessionalize the revolt and encourage spectators from different religions to adopt a moderate political stance. Voges reveals that although the prints were clearly intended to persuade, imagery circulating during the wars of religion cannot be reduced to mere propaganda. Hogenberg was not commissioned by either of the warring parties. Moreover, consumers of his images had to pay close attention to understand the subtle symbolism and arrangement of historical actors. The wars of religion also gave rise to new expressions of transnational solidarity, and publishers played a key role in creating an early humanitarian culture. Focusing on images of the 1655 massacre of the Reformed Waldensians in Piedmont, David de Boer investigates how Dutch pamphleteers used different visual strategies to make consumers identify with persecuted minorities abroad. He shows that by copying images and visual templates from earlier confessional conflicts that were important in Dutch cultural memory, printmakers framed the massacre as part of a larger struggle that transcended time and space. De Boer shows that the inevitable ambiguity of imagery also provided opportunities for printmakers. It allowed them to make visual references that could not be easily made in textual accounts. Voges and de Boer show that insurgents often depended on third parties for visual representation. This point is further elaborated upon by Malte Griesse, who shifts focus to the Counter-Reformation in Habsburg territories and the resistance of the Upper Austrian Protestant population against reCatholicization. The so-called Peasants’ War of 1626 was staged by peasants, 39

See Burkhardt, Das Reformationsjahrhundert; Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion.

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who had little political agency and means to promote their cause under ordinary circumstances. In their place, exiled Protestant nobles played a leading role in promoting and shaping the image of the insurgents in the free cities of the Holy Roman Empire, presenting it as a crucial part of what would come to be known as the Thirty Years’ War. Griesse shows that the communication of confessional identity and resistance against foreign rule led to a protonationalist sentiment that shaped both the conflicts themselves and the imagery they engendered. Together, the strategies of confessionalization and deconfessionalization discussed in these chapters shed light on how images were used to target specific audiences and shape long-distance communities in an emerging mass media landscape. Section Three, Foreign Observation, explores the international dimensions of visual strategies of legitimation and delegitimation and analyzes how rulers and rebels communicated their cause across borders. In their contribution on the Thököly Uprising of 1682, Nóra Etényi and Monika Barget show how the Habsburg dynasty visually discredited insurgents who also had access to the printing press. Even though Protestant powers in the Holy Roman Empire depicted oppositional Hungarian noblemen in a positive light and criticized the emperor, imperial visual strategies were far more efficient than the rebels’ printing campaign. Once militarily victorious, insurgents still often had to win a battle for legitimacy, as becomes clear from Joana Fraga’s contribution on the Portuguese Restoration. Fraga shows how after secession from the Spanish Habsburgs, the new monarchy realized that disseminating royal imagery abroad was crucial for acquiring international legitimacy and counteracting the reputation of the Portuguese as rebels. In the course of their, initially unsuccessful, attempt to gain international recognition, Portuguese nobles distributed portraits of King John (João) IV in Europe’s main capitals. They were presented with the daunting task of creating an internationally easily recognizable visual language of royal continuity, while at the same time showing the hardships of Habsburg oppression. Eastern European rulers and rebels typically did not fight such image offensives, even though leaders of the big Cossack uprisings in Muscovy and Ukraine certainly sought foreign support from sovereigns, from Europe to Persia, in some cases with astonishing success. Still, textual and visual representations of political violence in Muscovy and Ukraine did appear in Central and Western European media, as diplomats, merchants, and Western specialists observed carefully what was going on in these lesser-known parts of Europe. Of course, such representations were hardly neutral. Nancy S. Kollmann analyzes one of the rare images of a punishment scene in seventeenth-century Muscovy, which

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was published in Adam Olearius’ Voyages and Travels in the 1630s. Comparing the picture with contemporary representations of punishments in Central and Western Europe, Kollmann argues that its unorderly setting was intended to convey the idea of a despotic regime. The printmaker consciously left out officials and spectators supervising and witnessing the executions, creating a seminal image in the West of an Eastern society dominated by arbitrary violence. As Gleb Kazakov’s contribution reveals, a similar tendency can be observed in Western European representations of Muscovite rebels. Exploring images of the Cossack Rebellion of 1670–1671, Kazakov shows how the conflict was orientalized. In the absence of Russian visualizations of the revolt, European printmakers built on visual tropes of the Islamic world. Western media thus depicted the Cossack rebel Stepan Razin as an Ottoman. Kazakov points out, however, that this implicit discrediting of the rebels as allies of Christendom’s archenemy did not necessarily entail a rehabilitation of the government against whom the insurgents were fighting. Within Western visual stereotypes of a chaotic East, there was a soft boundary between legitimate and illegitimate rule. Section Four, Revolutionary Images, moves on to the eighteenth century, when visualizations of state power and violence had to conform to Enlightenment criticism. Monika Barget’s contribution is dedicated to the iconography of leadership in the American Revolution. Explaining conventions of eighteenth-century royal portraiture in the British Empire, she shows the difficulties of representing a nascent democratic order. In both North America and Britain, political portraits eventually stressed soldierly and civic virtues over social status and inherited rights, but aristocratic ideals were revived in the face of the French Revolution. A complex and often ambiguous history of societal change and political emancipation is also told in the representations of the Haitian Revolution, which Fabian Fechner discusses in the final chapter. Enslaved African Americans and Native Americans were excluded from political agency in the United States and most Latin American countries, but people of color played the leading role in the history of Haitian independence. In fact, almost all white slaveholders were killed or forced from the country. Fechner explores the visual codes of a colonial world turned upside down. Visualizations of anticolonial rebellion turn out to be extremely scarce, which matches Sybille Fischer’s influential thesis on the Haitian taboo.40 The graphic images that were produced mainly criticized the abolition of slavery in the wake of the French Revolution. 40

Fischer, Modernity Disavowed.

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Rather than showing the cruelty of slavery, they, for instance, depicted Black Haitian soldiers hanging white French soldiers. In the course of the nineteenth century, executions in Western Europe were gradually removed from the public realm.41 Correspondingly, exceptional depictions of executions generally lamented the represented act. Francisco Goya’s famous series of prints, The Disasters of War (1810–1820) and his painting The Third of May (1818), to name two well-known examples, denounce the represented executions as barbarism and were meant to incite indignation. But Goya’s representations, too, were part of the European visual tradition. Indeed, his prints show striking similarities with Jacques Callot’s 1633 The Great Miseries of War, which also represents violence in an unglorified manner.42 Europeans increasingly let go of visually representing just punishments, but images of violence in print media from other regions only increased. The United States, for example, retained a culture of public executions and lynchings for another century, and their visual representations were disseminated through lynching postcards.43 Colonial violence in Africa and Asia also became frequent news items. Although many Western media justified white supremacy through bloody displays of indigenous warfare, Christian missionaries and European scientists traveling the colonies also began to report home white cruelty towards enslaved people.44 In a globalizing world, visualizations of violence became virtually inescapable. This visual shift took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so most people today looking at the images presented in this book will not intuitively judge the represented scenes to be acts of justice, even though in many cases this was certainly the intention of the print producer. At the same time, the events and their modes of portrayal often seem so far from our everyday reality and visual culture that they fail to have the same affective effect on the modern spectator as they made on contemporary consumers. After all, these prints were produced in visual languages very different from ours. By translating and contextualizing these works, the following chapters can therefore provide insight into more than the societies in which they were produced. They also invite readers to compare and contemplate the visual cultures that we consume and create in today’s globalized and digital media landscape.

41 42 43 44

Foucault, Surveiller et punir. See Hood Museum of Art, Fatal Consequences. Allen, Without Sanctuary. Cutter, The Illustrated Slave.

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Burkhardt, Johannes. Das Reformationsjahrhundert: Deutsche Geschichte zwischen Medienrevolution und Institutionenbildung, 1517–1617. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2002. Chassaigne, Philippe. “Popular Representations of Crime: The Crime Broadside – a Subculture of Violence in Victorian Britain?” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies 3, no. 2 (June 1999): 23–55. Clark, Stuart. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Croft, Pauline. “Libels, Popular Literacy and Public Opinion in Early Modern England.” Historical Research 68, no. 167 (1995): 266–285. Cutter, Martha J. The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narrative, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800–1852. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. “De drie hoofdrolspelers in de samenzwering tegen Maurits, 1623, anoniem, 1623.” https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-P-OB-81.018A. Debes, John. “Some Foundations for Visual Literacy.” Audiovisual Instruction 13 (1968): 961–964. Decker, John R., and Mitzi Kirkland-Ives. Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300–1650. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Feldman, Noah. “Islamic State’s Medieval Morals.” Bloomberg, August 16, 2015. http:// www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-16/islamic-state-s-medieval-morals. Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Gill, Eric. “All Art Is Propaganda.” Rea (Betty) 5 on Revolutionary Art 8 (1935). Grierson, Jamie. “Sir Rod Stewart Says Mock Execution was Game of Thrones Prank.” The Guardian, March 3, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/mar/03/ sir-rod-stewart-mock-execution-game-thrones-isis. Haase, Fee-Alexandra. “Topik und Kunstrezension: Argumentationselemente der deutschen Kunstkritik in zeitgenössischen Rezensionen zur Historienmalerei des ausgehenden 18. bis frühen 20. Jahrhunderts.” PhD Dissertation, Universität Tübingen, 1997. Harms, Wolfgang, and Michael Schilling. Das illustrierte Flugblatt der frühen Neuzeit: Traditionen – Wirkungen – Kontexte. Stuttgart: Hirzel, 2008. Hood Museum of Art, ed. Fatal Consequences: Callot, Goya, and the Horrors of War. Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1990. Jackson, William. The New and Complete Newgate Calendar, or, Villany Displayed in All Its Branches London: Alex. Hogg, 1795.

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Kozlowska, Hanna. “Should We Be Seeing Gruesome Acts? And If So, Where?” New York Times, August 25, 2014. https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/should -we-be-seeing-gruesome-acts-and-if-so-where/. Kunzle, David. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973. Lovell, Edward. Justice and Mercy Equal Supporters of the Throne. London: Tho. Corbett at the Corner of Ludgate-Hill next Fleetbridge; and sold by J. Roberts in Warwick-Lane, 1716. Miller, Greg, and Souad Mekhennet. “Inside the Surreal World of the Islamic State’s Propaganda Machine.” Washington Post. November 20, 2015. https://www.wash ingtonpost.com/world/national-security/inside-the-islamic-states-propaganda -machine/2015/11/20/051e997a–8ce6–11e5-acff-673ae92ddd2b_story.html. Orwell, George, and George Packer. All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays. 14th ed. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2009. Pawlak, Anna, and Kerstin Schankweiler. “Ästhetik der Gewalt – Gewalt der Ästhetik.” In Ästhetik der Gewalt – Gewalt der Ästhetik. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2013. Pauwels, Luc. “Taking the Visual Turn in Research and Scholarly Communication: Key Issues in Developing a More Visually Literate (Social) Science.” Visual Sociology 15, no. 1 (2008). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14725860008583812. Pettegree, Andrew. Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Rosen, Valeska von. Der stumme Diskurs der Bilder: Reflexionsformen des Ästhetischen in der Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit. Munich: Dt. Kunstverlag, 2003. Rousseaux, Xavier. “Crime, Justice and Society in Medieval and Early Modern Times: Thirty Years of Crime and Criminal Justice History. A Tribute to Herman Diederiks.” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies 1, no. 1 (January 1997): 87–118. Ruff, Julius Ralph. Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books, 1994. Scribner, Robert W. For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Sohm, Philip. Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Terry-Fritsch, Allie. Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Milton Park: Routledge, 2017.

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Graham, Heather, and Kilroy-Ewbank, Lauren G., eds. Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2018. Vondel, Joost van den. “Het stockse van Johan van Oldenbarnevelt.” In De Werken van Vondel, vol. 8, 1935. https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/vond001dewe08_01/vond001 dewe08_01_0201.php. Yetter, Leigh. Public Execution in England, 1573–1868. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009.

part 1 Visual Markers of Legitimacy

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chapter 1

To Visualize or Not to Visualize: Commemorating the Suppression of Revolt in Early Qing China Ya-chen Ma Students of Chinese art history may be unfamiliar with visualizations of the suppression of revolts, but the sheer number and significance of such pictures in late imperial China should not be overlooked. Compared to major genres of Chinese painting, such as landscape, representations of birds, flowers, or the human figure, depictions of revolts constitute a marginalized subject matter. Yet during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), imagery drawn from the careers of officials gained tremendously in popularity. Functioning as visual curricula vitae, paintings sponsored by or for officials depicted the highlights of their public lives, including their supervisory roles in suppressing revolts locally and on the frontier.1 Kept within families and often viewed within intimate circles rather than in prominent collections, most of these paintings are no longer extant. Furthermore, they are usually not registered in traditional Chinese painting catalogues. However, the frequent references in anthologies of scholars-officials testify to their prevalence in the visual culture of elites. Moreover, the representation of suppressing revolt was not confined to the circles of officials and the borders of China, nor was interest in the subject matter interrupted by the transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). For example, paintings of Japanese pirates (fig. 1.1), made by late Ming commercial workshops, used the mode of career imagery to commemorate the governor-general Hu Zongxian (1512–1565), who was in charge of a campaign against pirates. The handscroll depicts him and other officers successfully leading Ming soldiers to rescue local people from an attack by pirates. In addition to the commercialization of career imagery for the domestic market, Chinese officials who went to Korea to help resist Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion of the peninsula in 1592 transmitted this visual culture to Chosǒn (1392–1910).2 The Manchus who established the Qing dynasty also embraced this visual trend. In 1635, Hong Taiji (1592–1643) compiled the Pictorial Veritable Records 1 For the marginalized subject matter, see Ma, Kehua Zhanxun. For the following discussion of the Ming images of revolt, see Ma, “Military Achievement and Official Accomplishment.” 2 Ma, Kehua Zhanxun, 93–94.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004461949_003

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Figure 1.1 Attributed to Qiu Ying, Japanese Pirates (detail), seventeenth century. Handscroll, ink and color on silk, 32 × 523 cm. Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo

of Taizu (fig. 1.2) to depict the career of his father, Nurgaci (1559–1626), the founder of the Qing empire.3 The images emphasize Nurgaci’s military success, including the suppression of tribal revolts and defeat of the Ming armies, and they appear to be a Qing imperial invention, combining the Han Chinese long-standing tradition of textual Veritable Records, the imperial commissions of chronicles of previous emperors, and the visual Ming elite tradition of commemorating an individual’s achievements. Imperial interest in visualizing Qing military successes recurred during the Qianlong reign (1736–1796). The Qianlong emperor commissioned numerous images to depict campaigns 3 For the discussion of Pictorial Veritable Records of Taizu, see Ma, Kehua Zhanxun, 93–126.

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Figure 1.2 Anonymous, Taizu Defeating the Ula Army, in The Pictorial Veritable Records of Taizu, repainted during the Qianlong reign (1735–1795). Reprint 1920. Harvard-Yenching Library, Cambridge, MA

pacifying frontier peoples, including The East Turkestan Campaign (fig. 1.3), a set of sixteen copperplate prints drafted in Beijing by Jesuits, sent to Paris to be engraved and printed, and returned to China to be reprinted and circulated among imperial relatives, officials, book collectors, and diplomats.4 Such campaign images became the imperial model for visualizing the suppression of revolts and the military splendor of the empire until the end of the Qing dynasty. Between the time of Hong Taiji and the Qianlong emperor, no images of suppressions of revolt issued from the imperial court during the Kangxi reign (1662–1722). Interestingly, some rather grand commemorative pictures were commissioned for or by officials outside the court to communicate with the 4 See http://www.battle-of-qurman.com.cn/ for a bibliography of this printed set and other related images. For one of the most recent studies, see Ma, “War and Empire.”

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Figure 1.3 J. P. Le Bas (after a drawing by Jean-Denis Attiret [1702–1768]), The Victory of Khorgos, in The East Turkestan Campaign, 1774. Copperplate engraving on paper, 55.4 × 90.8 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art

public. For instance, two very large incised stones (figs. 1.4 and 1.5) depicting the surrender of ethnic minorities to a local official Ohai (?–1725) were placed in the famous Ci’en Temple in Xi’an.5 By contrast, why did the Kangxi emperor, who patronized many large-scale pictorial projects, not encourage the visualization of revolt suppressions under his reign? In this chapter, I explore the political and cultural contexts in which visualizing or not visualizing the suppression of revolt was part of the pictorial, textual, and ritual matrix of commemorating military achievements of officials, the emperor, and the state in early Qing China.6 1

The Self-Aggrandizing Case of Yao Qisheng

The trend for visualizing one’s career, including the supervision of suppressing revolts, continued throughout the early Qing. Officials in early Qing followed their Ming dynasty predecessors by commemorating their achievements via 5 The whereabouts of the stones is not clear, but the rubbings measure 86.5 × 229.5 cm and 87.5 × 235.5 cm, respectively. The rubbings are in the collections of the Field Museum, Chicago, and of the Academia Sinica Institute of History and Philology Fu Sinian Memorial Library, Taiwan. Chen, Da Ci-En Sizhi, 39. 6 For a more detailed discussion of the first three sections of this chapter, see Ma, “A Re-Examination of the Manchu Culture of Martial Prowess.”

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Figure 1.4 Anonymous, The Submission of Red Miao, eighteenth century. Rubbing on paper, 86.5 × 229.5 cm. Fu Ssu-nien Library, Institute of History, Academia Sinica, Taipei

Figure 1.5 Anonymous, The Black Barbarians Pledge Allegiance, eighteenth century. Rubbing on paper, 87.5 × 235.5 cm. Fu Ssu-nien Library, Institute of History, Academia Sinica, Taipei

career imagery,7 but they did not adhere to the Ming patterns. Not only did they go beyond major themes related to revolts such as military confrontations and ceremonies after pacification, to minor events such as transporting logistic material,8 but they also greatly enlarged the format of the images, as in the aforementioned case of Ohai. Among the typical handscroll and album paintings of revolts, the images sponsored by Yao Qisheng (1624–1684) were extraordinary. First, he commissioned a set of fifty large-size woodblock-printed images, Prince Kang’s Great Achievement of Pacifying Four Provinces (32 × 64 cm) (fig. 1.6), affixed with fifty

7 For reproductions of the Qing images, see National Museum of China, Zhongguo Guojia. 8 Yongzong, Heyin Siku Quanshu, 92–97.

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Figure 1.6 Anonymous, Prince Kang Receiving Orders to Pacify the South, in Prince Kang’s Great Achievement of Pacifying Four Provinces, seventeenth century. Woodblock print on paper, 32 × 64 cm. National Archives of Japan, Tokyo

pages of colophons composed by local elites.9 Yao may also have been the patron of a large screen with these fifty pictures. Both the prints and the screen commemorate Yao’s supervisor, Giyešu (1645–1697), also known as Prince Kang, the commander in chief of the Qing armies against the revolt of three Han Chinese feudatories (1673–1681).10 Yao’s career trajectory corresponded with Giyešu’s military charge. After raising an army of several hundred men to assist Giyešu in 1674, which successfully battled several uprisings, Yao was quickly promoted to the governor-generalship of the Fujian province in 1678.11 The events selected for representation in Prince Kang’s Great Achievement not only chronicle Giyešu’s military achievement but also mark Yao’s contribution. Indeed, when the later Collected Eulogies from Fujian was compiled to praise Yao’s accomplishments in this province,12 thirteen of sixteen illustrations in the introductory section, “Pacifying the Sea” (fig. 1.7), came from Prince Kang’s Great Achievement. Both the format of the screen and the fifty colophons in Prince Kang’s Great Achievement indicate Yao’s interest in pictorial and textual publicity. The Collected Eulogies from Fujian bear witness to public support. This is an astonishing collection of twenty-eight volumes of eulogies authored by local writers. All told, it comprises more than one thousand pieces of prose and 9 10 11 12

The National Palace Museum, Taipei, and the National Archives of Japan, Tokyo, both have one complete set of Prince Kang’s Great Achievement of Pacifying Four Provinces. Anonymous, Lifu Jiazhuan, 621–648. For a discussion of Yao Qisheng’s career, see Qinfang, “Yao Qisheng.” Anonymous, Min Song Huibian. Shanghai Museum also has a copy of Collected Eulogies from Fujian.

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Figure 1.7 Anonymous, Offering Amnesty to Liu Jinzhong, in “Pacifying the Sea”, in Collected Eulogies from Fujian, seventeenth century. Woodblock print on paper. Shanghai Library, Shanghai

poetry from all counties in Fujian. The sheer number of eulogies was probably meant to demonstrate local endorsement of Yao, particularly after he lost the full command powers in the field to Shi Lang (1621–1696). Shi would eventually destroy the Zheng family in Taiwan (near Fujian) and receive from the Kangxi emperor in the ninth month (lunar calendar) of 1683 the hereditary title of the “Marquis Who Pacified the Sea.”13 Interestingly, just one month after Shi received the title, a stele praising Yao’s contribution to Fujian was installed by “all scholars, farmers, artisans and merchants in Fujian,”14 a common phrase indicating all subjects. Emphasis on the zealous support of local people can also be found in the phrase “Fujian subjects’ compilation,” used in lieu of editorial recognition in Yao’s memorials and announcements in the Collected Eulogies from Fujian.15 The extant edition of Collected Eulogies from Fujian also contains a posthumous account of Yao’s life authored by “all subjects in the province.”16 Since the preface and all the eulogies were written when Yao was still alive, the Collected Eulogies from Fujian were likely compiled under Yao’s 13 14 15 16

Shi, Shilang Nianpu, 476. Anonymous, Min Song Huibian, 31. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 85.

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auspices but published immediately after his sudden death with the emphasis on the support from Fujian subjects. Appeal to public sentiment is also apparent in both sections of images in the Collected Eulogies from Fujian. The first section, “Pacifying the Sea,” downplays the glamorous display of Qing armies in Prince Kang’s Great Achievement and instead addresses Yao’s military and nonviolent (by offering amnesty) strategies to bring peace. The second section, “Reexpansion of the Borders of Two Counties,” points to the manner in which his government benefited his subjects and to their gratitude.17 Together these two pictorial sections emphasized Yao’s service to the general public in Fujian. Yao’s textual and visual stress on public endorsement might have been related to his competition with Shi. Yao was particularly resentful because Shi could not have succeeded without Yao’s help. As a former commander of the enemy Zheng’s left vanguard, Shi could not have won the Kangxi emperor’s trust without the support of Yao and other officials.18 Shi’s successful acquisition of the full powers in the field of all military decisions therefore must have been galling to Yao. In addition, even though Yao also assisted Shi during the Taiwan campaign, the emperor did not recognize the former’s effort. The emperor bestowed upon Shi the title of marquis, but later blamed Yao as empty and boastful.19 The “public” endorsement of Yao’s contribution to Fujian in the Collected Eulogies from Fujian might have offered some compensation, but he probably remained furious at Shi, and he died just two months later.20 2

The Not-to-Visualize Response: The Case of Shi Lang

Shi Lang, Yao’s competitor, also had a commemorative compilation made to record his military achievement. The only extant edition is a manuscript, but the prefaces indicate that the first of two related commemorative projects, Eulogizing the Pacification of the South,21 was published after Shi’s ennoblement and return to Fujian at the end of the eleventh month of 1683. In spring of 1684, Shi’s memorials and announcements were added, and the whole was published as Memorials of the Pacification of the South.22 Although the extant manuscript is based on a nineteenth-century edition of The Pacification of 17 18 19 20 21 22

Ibid., 67–83. Chen, “Yao Qisheng,” 36–39. Ibid., 66. Ibid. Shi, Jinghai Jishi, 101. Ibid., 101.

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the Sea,23 compiled later by Shi’s descendants with additional records, a portion of the laudatory verses and all the prefaces and the memorials are preserved. The timing of Shi’s 1684 Memorials of the Pacification of the South immediately after Yao’s 1683 Collected Eulogies, and the similarity of their major contents, namely, eulogies and memorials, suggest that Shi’s compilation responded directly to Yao’s. Yao’s Collected Eulogies was compiled by “all Fujian subjects,” but Shi’s Memorials of the Pacification of the South made a similar claim in the prefaces that the “Fujian people” initiated the project.24 If the twenty-eight volumes of local eulogies in Yao’s Collected Eulogies were meant to demonstrate public support for him, Shi too needed public sentiment on his side. However, in contrast to “all Fujian subjects” in Yao’s book, Shi’s compilation referred particularly to championing from members of the local “scholargentry.” The prefaces announced that “Fujian people” had called for their composition, but attached after each of Shi’s memorial was a similar endorsement that “the original comment [was] jointly published by scholar-gentry from all eight prefectures of Fujian.”25 The emphasis on the scholar-gentry population is demonstrated also by the authorship of the only two eulogies in the extant manuscript. One was written by Zheng Kaiji, a famous scholarofficial, the other by Zhou Pengbai, an obscure fellow who signs as “[Shi’s] scholar student.”26 If Yao relied on the sheer number of eulogies to demonstrate the support from the general public, Shi depended on the authority of scholar-gentry to endorse his accomplishment. Although we do not know how many verses were published in Memorials of the Pacification of the South, the survival of only two scholars’ eulogies in the extant manuscript indicates that the original number of eulogies was likely not great. Yet, it is also possible that Memorials of the Pacification of the South only published those verses by scholars or that later editors preserved scholars’ verses exclusively. In either case, since scholars’ authority often outweighed that of other social groups in late imperial China, to Shi their praise likely carried a weight comparable to that voiced by the general public in Yao’s compilation. The unusual “original comment jointly published by scholar-gentry from all eight prefectures of Fujian,” in particular, shows how Shi’s compilation highlighted the joint and objective endorsement from Fujian elites and responded 23 24 25 26

Ibid., 99–101. Ibid., prefaces 3, 7, 11. Ibid., 4, 8–9, 12, 17, 19–21, 24, 26, 37, 42, 45–46, 48, 50, 53, 62–63, 65–66, 69. Ibid., prefaces 17, 21.

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to Yao’s book. Unlike the numerous eulogies written by individuals in Yao’s compilation, the comments in Shi’s were “jointly published by scholar-gentry” as objectively representing public opinion. All comments after Shi’s memorials praised his virtue, talent, and contribution. Among them, some specifically supported him in his competition with Yao. The comment that follows Shi’s memorial requesting full powers in the field of all military decisions defends Shi, attesting to his ability to take full command and praising his competence at whatever military rank he might hold.27 Another comment that follows Shi’s victorious report acclaims Shi’s achievement and poses the rhetorical question, “How could Fujian people praise one out of ten thousands of Shi’s accomplishment even if they compose eulogies?”28 as if referring to the numerous laudatory verses in Yao’s Collected Eulogies. In fact, commentaries were rarely included in the anthology genre of memorials, let alone those issuing from an obscure scholar-gentry body. The special “original comment published by scholar-gentry from all eight prefectures of Fujian” was a deliberate innovation in response to Yao’s compilation. The elites’ joint comments on Shi’s memorials were meant to represent objective evaluation, in contrast to the countless, subjective eulogies flattering Yao. The absence of illustrations in Memorials of the Pacification of the South, too, was probably a strategy reacting to Yao’s visualization. Although whether the original edition of Memorials of the Pacification of the South contains pictures cannot be confirmed, none of the prefaces in the extant manuscript signals the existence of images. Given their authors’ emphasis on the Fujian scholargentry, these preface writers were aware of Shi’s strategy for his compilation. If illustrations represented an important aspect of that earlier compilation, they would probably have mentioned the existence of images. It is thus likely that the original woodblock publication did not contain any illustrations. This was in contrast to Yao’s vigorous employment of images, including Prince Kang’s Great Achievement with fifty large-size woodblock-printed images, the large screen with the same fifty pictures, and the illustrations in Collected Eulogies from Fujian; Shi’s rejection of visualization was probably a deliberate choice. If Shi responded to the numerous eulogies in Yao’s compilation by emphasizing the objectivity of the scholar-gentry, the rejection of images functioned similarly. Both Yao’s and Shi’s compilations belong to the category of collections of memorials written solely by officeholders as a vehicle for communicating local or national affairs to the emperor. Collections of memorials were often compiled by the authors, their colleagues, advisors, staff, descendants, 27 28

Ibid., 12. Ibid., 37.

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or later admirers as objective and official records of an event or an individual. Most such collections contain only memorials, which were usually composed solely of text, nevertheless, a few collections included images to commemorate the protagonists. The addition of illustrations testifies to the popularity of career imagery in late imperial China, but that addition more or less changed the objective nature of memorials as official documents. In this respect, Yao’s illustrations were somewhat anomalous among other collections, while Shi chose to conform to norms and its ostensibly objective preservation of text alone. The unusual comments in Memorials of the Pacification of the South indicate that Shi’s compiling strategy was not, however, conservative. The return to the text-only objective standard and the attachment of neutral comments by scholar-gentry (as opposed to eulogies by a broad swath of the population) affirmed the objectivity of elites’ joint support. Later editors of The Pacification of the South added only objective documents, such as the Kangxi emperor’s verses, and they did not visualize Shi’s endeavor either. 3

The Official Histories of Pacifying Campaigns

The case of Shi’s Memorials of the Pacification of the South confirmed the authority of official documents in commemorative projects and the popularity of such compilations during the Kangxi reign. On the one hand, since many of those involved in the suppression of revolts commissioned commemorative projects,29 these compilations competed with each other to justify the protagonists’ contribution and therefore pursued new strategies, such as comments by scholar-gentry in Shi’s compilation to generate alliance. On the other hand, Shi’s memorials were compiled as objective records to testify to his endeavors during the pacification and as reference for the scholar-gentry’s comments. Although the current title, The Pacification of the South, might have appeared twenty years after the original compilation,30 it was not uncommon to compile officials’ memorials of specific suppression of revolt since the Ming dynasty. Such collections often used the formula “The Pacification of X” in their titles and functioned as both an account of the X campaign and a commemorative project of an official. Compared to narrative accounts of suppressing revolt, the compilations of memorials as historical documents appeared to be objective yet appealing. There were indeed so many such compilations that at least 29 30

Other than Yao and Shi, at least Yang Jie and Wang Deyi also had their commemorative compilations made. See Yongzong, Heyin Siku Quanshu, 1199–1200. Shi, Jinghai Jishi, 101.

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by the Qianlong period, they were often classified as historical accounts (usually as unofficial history, since they were not compiled by the state),31 rather than collections of memorials. I believe this is one of the contexts in which the Kangxi court invented a new genre of fanglue (official history of pacifying campaigns), which was issued by the emperor and compiled by officials who edited and put into chronological order the imperial decrees, officials’ memorials, and other official documents of the suppression. Modern scholars consider fanglue a unique Qing invention of historical accounts and categorize it as a subcategory of jishi benmo ti (historical narratives of major events).32 The compilers of the first fanglue also quoted past narratives of pacifications as preceding examples of the Kangxi compilation.33 Nonetheless, previous narrative accounts of pacification usually do not include imperial decrees or other official documents. By contrast, fanglue bear striking similarity to officials’ commemorative projects in that both chronologize official documents. The popularity of officials’ commemorative compilations likely contributed to the invention of fanglue.34 Although the term fanglue was sometimes associated with leader’s intelligence, the Qing fanglue as a historical account composed of imperial decrees and other official documents has been regarded less as a corpus of wise imperial commands than as an official history of pacifying campaigns. It was the objectivity of the official materials that transcended the personal dimension of both fanglue and collections of officials’ memorials. Another context in which the Kangxi emperor issued the compilation of fanglue was in his promotion of military rites and martial culture. Besides commissioning fanglue, the Kangxi emperor developed a new set of state rituals after the successes of the pacifying campaigns: he would declare the successful completion of a campaign to the Imperial Academy (also the Confucian Temple) in the capital, install there a colossal stele to commemorate the victory, and then issue the compilation of fanglue as the official history of the pacifying campaign.35 By announcing the military success and installing the monument of Manchu military prowess in the Confucian Temple, one of the most important locations of Han Chinese civilization, the Kangxi emperor transgressed the long-standing boundary between the civil and military realm and reversed the traditional Han Chinese hierarchy of civil merits over martial 31 32 33 34 35

Yongzong, Heyin Siku Quanshu, 1123–1202. Yao, Qing Dai Fanglue, 194–195. Ledehong, “Pingding Sanni Fanglue,” 354. Yao, Qing Dai Fanglue, 194–195. Ma, Kehua Zhanxun, 142.

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ones. The imperial appropriation of officials’ commemorative compilations became not only the official history of pacifying campaigns but also part of the imperialization of military culture. 4

The Lack of Visualization at the Kangxi Court

Even though the Kangxi emperor personally led armies and won battles over the Dzungars, he did not commission any images related to those military events. Visualizing the suppression of revolt was not included in the state’s military rituals, even though the emperor sponsored many large scale pictorial projects, including the projection of an ideal, agricultural state in Tilling and Weaving,36 the highlights of his reign in Southern Inspection Tours and Sixtieth Birthday Celebration,37 and the representation of his imperial garden in The Mountain Estate to Escape the Summer Heat.38 Given his obvious interest in image-making and the vigorous involvement of some of his officials in commemorative visualization of pacifying campaigns, why did the Kangxi emperor not sponsor images of the suppression of revolt? The Kangxi emperor’s detachment from his own martial achievement might explain his exclusion of visualizing the suppression of revolt. For example, his account in the fanglue of the Dzungar campaign did not emphasize his martial power but rather his sage character, as when he ate the same meager food as his soldiers.39 He also changed the title of the Qing founder Nurgaci from “martial emperor” to “highest emperor.”40 It seems that he did not want to underscore an emperor’s personal martial achievement. Rather, he aimed to imperialize the military culture by establishing the Manchu state rites of the stele, the declaration at the Imperial Academy, and fanglue. In contrast to the institutional dimensions of state rituals, commemorative images of the suppression of revolt in China were in his time associated with an individual’s military accomplishment. We have seen with the case of Yao Qisheng that the early Qing witnessed the self-aggrandization of such visualization. Then, in the case of Shi Lang, images were omitted in favor of objectivity. In this context, the Kangxi emperor’s exclusion of visualizations of revolt suppression could 36 37 38 39 40

Lo, “Yongzheng Emperor.” Ma, Kehua Zhanxun, 135–140. Whiteman, Where Dragon Veins Meet; Ma, “The New Pictorial Canon of Imperial Gardens”; Strassberg and Whiteman, Kangxi Emperor. Wenda, “Shengzu Ren,” 354, 452. Crossley, Translucent Mirror, 138.

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be interpreted as a way to avoid a close personal connection to his own military accomplishments. Visualizing or not visualizing the suppression of revolt, therefore, was not an inconsequential choice in early Qing. On the one hand, early Qing officials continued and developed Han Chinese patterns to commemorate and compete with each other with regard to their military achievements under Manchu rule. On the other hand, at the time when the Manchu began to stabilize their rule over China proper, the imperial commemoration of pacifying campaigns involved ethnic dynamics in the pictorial, textual, and ritual conduits. To the Manchu emperors, Han Chinese elites’ cultural practices became significant alternatives of imperial traditions to acknowledge, reject, or appropriate. Through the transformation, the Manchu monarchs were able to assert the cultural hegemony of imperial Qing over the ruled Chinese society. Bibliography Anonymous. Lifu Jiazhuan. In Beijing Tushuguan Cang Jiapu Congkan: Minzu Juan, vol. 33, edited by Beijing Library. Beijing: Beijing Library, 2003. Anonymous. Min Song Huibian. In Taiwan Wenxian Congkan, no. 2, edited by Chen Zhiping. Beijing: Jiuzhou chubanshe, 2004. Chen, Jingfu. Da Ci-En Sizhi. Xi’an: Sanqi chubanshe, 2000. Chen, Qinfang. “Yao Qisheng Yu Min Tai Shehui.” Fujian Normal University, 2004. Crossley, Pamela Kyle. A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Ledehong. Pingding Sanni Fanglue. In Jingyin Wenyuange Sikuquanshu, vol. 354. Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu yinshuguan (reprint), 1983. Lo, Hui-chi. “Political Advancement and Religious Transcendence: The Yongzheng Emperor’s (1678–1735) Development of Portraiture.” PhD Dissertation, Stanford University, 2009. Ma, Ya-chen. “A Re-Examination of the Manchu Culture of Martial Prowess: The Invention of Fanglue (Official Campaign Histories) by the Kangxi Court.” New History Journal 30, no. 4 (2019): 55–122. Ma, Ya-chen. Kehua Zhanxun: Qing Chao Diguo Wugong de Wenhua Jiangou/ Commemorative Images of War: The Cultural Construction of Qing Martial Prowess. Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2016. Ma, Ya-chen. “Military Achievement and Official Accomplishment: Ming Images of Warfare and the Visual Culture of Officialdom.” Journal of Ming Studies 17, no. 12 (2011): 49–89.

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Ma, Ya-chen. “The New Pictorial Canon of Imperial Gardens: The Production and Meaning of Kangxi Yuzhi Bishu Shanzhuang Shi.” The National Palace Museum Research Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2014): 39–80. Ma, Ya-chen. “War and Empire: Images of Battle during the Qianlong Reign.” In Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West, edited by Petra Chu and Ding Ning, 158–172. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016. National Museum of China, ed. Zhongguo Guojia Bowuguan Cang Wenwu Yan Jiu Congshu. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2006. Shi, Lang. Jinghai Jishi. In Taiwan Wenxian Congkan 13, reprinted in Taiwan Wenxian Shiliao Congkan 6, edited by the Department of Economic Research of Taiwan Bank. Taipei: Datong shuju, 1987. Shi, Weiqing. Shilang Nianpu. Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1998. Strassberg, Richard E., and Stephen H. Whiteman. Thirty-Six Views: The Kangxi Emperor’s Mountain Estate in Poetry and Prints. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection and Harvard University Press, 2016. Wenda. Shengzu Ren Huangdi Qinzheng Pingding Shuomo Fanglue. In Jingyin Wenyuange Sikuquanshu, vol. 354. Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu yinshuguan, 1983. Whiteman, Stephen H. Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. Yao, Jirong. Qing Dai Fanglue Yanjiu. Beijing: Xiyuan chubanshe, 2006. Yongzong. Heyin Siku Quanshu Tiyao Ji Siku Weishou Shumu Jinhui Shumu. Taipei: Taiwan shangwu chubanshe, 1978.

chapter 2

Visualizing Punishment in Byzantium: Disseminating Memories of Quelled Revolts before the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Galina Tirnanić On fol. 224v of the thirteenth-century illustrated copy of the Byzantine history of John Skylitzes, a messenger on a horse lifts the decapitated head of the rebel George Maniakes attached to a lance and displays it to the seated Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos (r. 1042–1055) (fig. 2.1).1 A successful general, Maniakes had recovered territories in Sicily from the Arabs and was eventually proclaimed emperor by his troops. On his way to Constantinople to overthrow Constantine in 1043, he was somewhat unceremoniously killed in battle near Thessaloniki. His demise was emphasized when his severed head stuck on a lance was carried through the city of Constantinople and brought to the emperor as a proof of his defeat.2 The other rebels, his supporters, were paraded into the Hippodrome in Constantinople in a mock triumphal procession. These kinds of events were common, but painted representations of them were rare.3 Seeking to understand the visual effect of spectacles of punishment in Byzantium, an art historian is faced with not having any images to study. Part of the process is to reconstruct or revisualize certain events described in textual sources, such as public punishment of unsuccessful usurpers or triumphal processions that included subdued enemy leaders. On the one hand, there were actual spectacles that large numbers of citizens witnessed 1 Madrid Skylitzes, Vitr. 26–2, fol. 224v. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid. 2 According to the text, “A messenger was sent to the emperor with the news of the victory and some days later Stephen arrived bringing the head of Maniakes and the prisoners of war. He processed in triumph down the main artery [Mese], the head going first on top of a lance, then the rebels mounted on asses, then he followed after riding a white horse.” Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Byzantine History, 403. The rubricator mistakenly labeled the messenger as Stephanos, who in fact rides the white horse. McCormick, Eternal Victory, 418. 3 Madrid Skylitzes is replete with illustrations of revolts and punishments, but these images were not widely circulated. Additionally, the paintings were not produced in Constantinople, and many were painted by local Sicilian illuminators, who were not familiar with Constantinopolitan visual culture. Elena N. Boeck discusses the nature of these images in Boeck, “Engaging the Byzantine Past”, 215–235; and more recently in Boeck, Imagining the Byzantine Past. See also Tsamakda, The Illustrated Chronicle of Ioannes Skylitzes in Madrid.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004461949_004

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Figure 2.1 Anonymous, The head of Maniakes brought to Constantine IX, thirteenth century. Book illustration in Madrid Skylitzes, Vitr. 26–2, fol. 224v. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid

with their own eyes in the public spaces of the city. On the other, there was the propagation of those events in the visual memory of those who never witnessed them, including the modern scholar. Byzantium was a different place and a different time compared to the largely early modern interests of this volume’s contributors, and its mechanisms of disseminating messages of power predate the kind of “reproducibility” of physical images enabled by the proliferation of the printing techniques.4 The concept of “visualization” is explored in various ways in this volume, mostly reflecting the translation of eyewitnessed events into another visual form, such as print, drawing, or painting. In the interdisciplinary spirit of this collaboration, historians are looking at images, but I present here an art historical take on both the performative aspect of ephemeral spectacles of punishment 4 Early modern staging of punishment spectacles often had a secondary visual expression in pamphlets and other media that provided a visualization of the original events, but in medieval Byzantium there were no prints to disseminate visual messages of the events. My chapter’s title is a reference to Walter Benjamin’s 1936 article, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in which he explores the Marxist connotations of such means of reproducibility. Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Arendt.

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in Constantinople and the literary concept of mental images, or visualization, that occurs in one’s mind.5 By considering several examples from the long Byzantine history of revolts, we can distinguish between two categories of images: primary and secondary. Within the category of primary images are (1) the actual body of the punished usurper, which was used as a metaphorical printing plate for the expression of imperial justice as it was inscribed with punishments, such as lashing, blinding, and nose slitting; and (2) staged public scenes in which the body of the punished usurper was juxtaposed to the body of the triumphant emperor against the backdrop of the public spaces of Constantinople, in which case the city functioned as a metaphorical printing plate. The category of secondary images of these events include (1) rare painted illustrations, such as the miniatures in the Madrid Skylitzes, where images are inscribed on a page; and (2) mental images, formed in the minds of those who read or hear accounts of the events. 1

Creating Primary Images of Punishment

For a citizen of Constantinople, it was the actual heads and mutilated bodies of the defeated rebels and their procession and display through the city and at the Hippodrome that served as primary images of punishment of quelled revolts. These images disseminated messages of imperial power over a rebel and therefore all rebellions. The body of the punished rebel was best understood if seen or imagined vis-à-vis the body of the emperor, another important locus of visual information for the Byzantine spectator. The mutilated body of the punished usurper was always juxtaposed to the idea of the perfect body of a Byzantine emperor, who in turn represented Christ. By serving as a background for this visual composition, the city itself became a printing plate. Events were engraved (in layers) onto the urban fabric of the city, allowing a multitude of possible “prints” to become visible in the minds of the individual citizens and visitors against the background of specific architectural and sculptural elements. Sculptures, buildings, and urban spaces could trigger visualizations of publicly staged punishments stored in the minds of the citizens who remembered these events. One of the major places that triggered stored memories was the Hippodrome, a major site for public punishment in Constantinople, where the emperor 5 For the notion of public punishment as spectacle, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish. For a discussion of mental image-making as part of a particular visual culture, see Carruthers, The Craft of Thought.

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Figure 2.2 View of the Hippodrome ca. 1480, in Onofrio Panvinio, De ludis circensibus, Venice, 1600

exhibited his power. This site, today itself in need of the modern scholar’s educated visualization, was once a major arena for a variety of spectacles.6 A sixteenth-century engraving shows a visual interpretation of the Hippodrome already in a ruinous state, helping the viewer visualize a once-grand structure, where the people could see punishments of contemporary usurpers and imagine usurpers punished in the past (fig. 2.2). As its name suggests, it was originally intended primarily for horse races, but since the popularity of the games ensured a large number of spectators, emperors combined races with celebrations of their triumphs and other types of imperial propaganda. For centuries, spectators were seated at the Hippodrome according to their social status and team allegiance.7 The emperor, surrounded by his retinue, sat or stood in the Kathisma, the imperial box, which was accessible from the imperial palace. Reliefs on the marble base of the obelisk of Theodosius I (r. 347– 395) on the spina (or euripos, the central spine of the Hippodrome) show the 6 For a recent archaeological, architectural, historical, and art-historical assessment of the Hippodrome, with computer generated reconstructions, see Pitarakis, ed., Hippodrome/ Atmeydani. 7 Since the seventh century, most circus spectacles were organized visual experiences. Mango, “A History of the Hippodrome of Constantinople,” 36–43. Of the original four Roman factions, only two survived into the medieval period, the Blues and the Greens. Roueché, “The Factions and Entertainment,” 50–64.

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Figure 2.3 Base of the Obelisk of Theodosius, southeast face. Hippodrome, Istanbul

emperor in his box surrounded by court officials during various stages of the races (fig. 2.3). In one of the reliefs he is holding a wreath, either about to crown a winner of the races or having himself received the wreath, since charioteer victories were understood as triumphs of the emperor himself.8 This fourthcentury image establishes the main role of the emperor at the Hippodrome: to watch and be seen, and to present himself to the spectators in a visual manner that emphasized his position atop the social hierarchy of the empire at large. The spectators were never meant to be passive, but to participate in the performances, usually according to scripted acclamation and actions. The notion of victory and loss was ever present at the Hippodrome, but the event that most indelibly marked it for generations to come was the Nika revolt of 532, when supposedly 30,000 rebels were massacred in this space.9 After a succession of violent riots, during which significant parts of the city were burned, including the cathedral of Hagia Sophia, the unified men of the Blue and Green factions had gathered at the Hippodrome to demand that Emperor Justinian (r. 527–565) be deposed. In his stead they put forth Hypatios (a nephew of the late Emperor Anastasius), who was summoned to the Hippodrome and ushered into the Kathisma. Procopius, a contemporary historian, reports: 8 Dagron, “From One Rome to Another,” 35. 9 Procopius, History of the Wars, I, xxiv, 230–239.

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“When Hypatius reached the Hippodrome, he went up immediately to where the emperor is accustomed to take his place and seated himself on the royal throne from which the emperor was always accustomed to view the equestrian and athletic contests.”10 By doing that, Hypatios assumed the imperial position and made himself be seen as emperor. Eventually, Justinian’s trusted general Belisarius entered the Hippodrome with his troops and massacred the men who had participated in the revolt.11 The chronicler Theophanes writes that Belisarius “ran into the Kathisma with a number of spatharioi (i.e., guards of the emperor), arrested Hypatios, led him to the emperor, and had him put in prison.”12 Hypatios was executed the next day, and his body was thrown into the sea, while Justinian reassumed his position at the Kathisma, and by extension visually restored his position as the apex of the empire’s hierarchy. The tenth-century Patria reports that the bodies of the rebels were buried under the bleachers in the area referred to as Nekra.13 Historian Michael Glykas repeats this story in the twelfth century.14 Despite the absence of human remains at the site, it was believed for a long time that those who had risen against the emperor forever resided in this place, which continued to be important for staging imperial triumphs in centuries to come.15 It is tempting to imagine that people sitting in particular sections of the Hippodrome would have visualized they were sitting on the bones of thousands of rebels who once raised their arms against a Byzantine emperor. Not only would-be usurpers, but also deposed emperors, referred to as “tyrants,” would have been displayed in this place.16 A spectacular deposition of another Justinian, Justinian II (r. 685–695 and 705–711), by Leontios, took place at the Hippodrome in 695.17 A mob of Constantinopolitans, supporting Leontios, seized Justinian II and dragged him to the Hippodrome, where he was

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Ibid., 233. Mango and Scott, eds., The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor, 276–285. Ibid., 280. Dagron, Constantinople imaginaire, 168. Berger, Accounts of Medieval Constantinople, 323 (3.201). See also Bardill, “The Architecture and Archaeology of the Hippodrome in Constantinople,” 115. “Ici reliques cachées de ceux qui, par une audace impie, voulurent renverser l’empereur et dont le massacre a durablement entaché la legitimité imperiale.” Dagron, Constantinople imaginaire, 168. See also Bekker, ed., Glykas, Annales, 468. Guilland, “The Hippodrome at Byzantium,” 679–680. On the concept of tyranny in Byzantium, see Angelov, Imperial Ideology and Political Thought in Byzantium. Mango and Scott, eds., Chronicle of Theophanes, 515.

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subjected to public punishment reserved for those guilty of treason.18 Central to the public defaming of Justinian was the slitting of his nose, which earned him his infamous nickname Rhinotmetos (Slit-nosed). Because this punishment was meted out to sex offenders in the somewhat later compilation known as the Ecloga, it virtually turned the deposed emperor into a condemned sexual offender.19 There is evidence that nasal deformities were already associated with a version of leprosy that was believed to be contracted by sexual activity. For example, Paul of Aegina (seventh c.) informs us of a type of leprosy known as elephantiasis or satyriasis, which was symptomatized by the deterioration of the nose cartilage.20 John Moschos’ Spiritual Meadow, a popular collection of monastic tales from circa 600, reports the story of a monk who had contracted leprosy by having sexual relations with a prostitute.21 State-mandated facial mutilation was to be read as a marker of the underlying moral disease. Books of dream interpretation, popular at the Byzantine court and probably written for imperial use, shed further light on associations between nose, leprosy, physical appearance, and sexuality. For example, the Oneirocriticon of Achmet maintains that should one dream his face were deformed by leprosy, his future would hold wealth, but at the same time “he will be an object of disgrace and will be kept from sight.”22 The same outcome awaits the person who dreams that his nose “became so large that it made his face ugly.”23 The author explains that the nose signifies honor or kosmos, which also meant modesty, good appearance, order, ornament, decoration, and universe.24 On the other 18 19

20 21 22 23 24

Ibid., 517. Only a few years later, Apsimaros usurped the shaky throne of Leontios and had his nose cut before sending him into exile. Mutilation, imprisonment, and exile avoided the sin of murder, but were not as effective as execution. By this time nose mutilation was probably already a customary punishment for sex crimes in tribunal practice, and a slit nose would have carried sexual implications. Rather than mutilating genitals, which would not have been visible to the public, nose was a prominent and highly visible facial feature not already associated with other crimes. A conflation of sexual offense and inability to rule appears in Arethas’ account of Emperor Alexander, who is known for his sexual indecency: “Though Leo did not cut off his nose he kept him away from government”; see Karlin-Hayter, “Emperor Alexander’s Bad Name,” 585. Adams, ed., The Seven Books of Paulus Aegineta, 1:12–14. See also Pormann, The Oriental Tradition of Paul of Aegina’s “Pragmateia”; and Prioreschi, A History of Medicine, vol. 4, Byzantine and Islamic Medicine. After repenting, his leprosy is miraculously cured; see Moschus, The Spiritual Meadow. Mavroudi, A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation: The “Oneirocriticon of Achmet” and its Arabic Sources, 125 [108]; hereafter cited as Oneirocriticon of Achmet. Ibid., 107 [56]: “If someone dreams that his nose became so large that it made his face ugly, he will be well off, but be an object of shame before the people.” Ibid., 107 [56] and 110.

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hand, akosima (ugliness) carries connotations of dishonor and is sometimes explicitly associated with moral shame. Therefore, dreams of facial leprosy and nose disfiguration have the same consequences: shame before witnesses. This points to the importance not only of the outward appearance of the body in general, but specifically the face, and facial features, as signifiers of the inner order. In separate entries, Achmet directly associates dreams of leprosy with uncontrollable or perverse sexual acts, which subsequently lead to dishonor. He specifically adds: “If a king is the dreamer [of his own leprosy], he will be short lived and hated by his subjects, and his decrees will not please the people.”25 Despite his disqualifying deformity, Justinian successfully returned to power in 705, yet his second rule was marked by ruthless persecutions and popular dissatisfaction. History remembers him as one of the most hated Byzantine emperors, and those who called him Rhinotmetos implied that he was inadequate to rule the empire.26 Once his body was fashioned into an image of a punished tyrant and labeled Rhinotmetos, it was hard to forget this fact. Legends arose about a gold prosthetic he had made to cover his shame (akosmia), attesting to how inappropriate it must have seemed to the people for an emperor to rule with distorted facial features.27 In imperially sanctioned art, Justinian was never represented with a mutilated nose: on a gold solidus from his second reign, he appears symmetrical, his nose conspicuously straight and unharmed.28 Yet, in popular imagination, he is visualized differently. Upon his return to the throne, Justinian II staged the punishment of Leontios and of Leontios’ usurper, Apsimaros. The two usurpers were taken out of prison and paraded in chains through the city and into the Hippodrome, where they were thrown at his feet.29 Justinian II then trod on their necks in an ancient gesture of triumph during the entire first horse race.30 By trampling the neck of the usurpers and holding this position, Justinian provided the spectators with a prolonged vision of this gesture, giving them enough time to deposit the image in their memory. This act of image-making offered a 25 26 27 28 29 30

Ibid., 125 [109]. Achmet notes, “If the king dreams that his nostrils were so stuffy that he could not smell …,” danger will befall him, because ultimately the “intellect judges good and bad odors through the nose.” Oneirochriticon of Achmet, 107 [57]. Pizarro, Writing Ravenna: The Liber Pontificalis of Andreas Agnellus, 160 [137]. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, inv. Monete bizantine, LV, 9. See Wolf, cat. no. 1.1 and 1.2, in Il volto di Cristo, 30–31. Justinian was eventually assassinated in 711 by spatharios Elias and his head was sent to Rome; see Mango and Scott, eds., Chronicle of Theophanes, 528 [381]. Mango and Scott, eds., Chronicle of Theophanes, 523 [375]. For calcatio colli as a gesture of total victory, see McCormick, Eternal Victory, 57–58.

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Figure 2.4 Constantine VIII steps on the neck of Arab general, Madrid Skylitzes, Vitr. 26–2, fol. 136r, detail. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid

visual proof of the underlying criminality of the subdued, delegitimizing them completely. A secondary, painted image of another instance of this traditional expression of subduing is illustrated in the Madrid Skylitzes, where Emperor Constantine VIII steps on the neck of a captured Arab general (fig. 2.4). In addition to the image of the emperor’s foot on the usurpers’ necks, the crowd sang the psalm: “You have set your foot on the asp and the basilisk, and you have trodden on the lion and the serpent.”31 We can think of this as the moment of labeling the figures in the image, similar to the labeling of Justinian as Rhinotmetos, or to the Byzantine practice of writing the names of figures and events in religious icons. The reference to the lion and the asp was particularly suitable to the names of Leontios and Apsimaros, and this kind of connection between contemporary history and biblical texts was a familiar leap for Byzantine citizens. The act of calcatio colli, in which the emperor fixes his feet on the neck of a usurper and therefore stays his power, was reflected in some images at the Hippodrome, such as the no longer extant statue of a bronze eagle that held a snake in its beak. Historian Niketas Choniates, who mentions it in the thirteenth 31

Psalm 91:13. Mango and Scott, eds., Chronicle of Theophanes, 523. Talbot, ed., Byzantine Defenders of Images, 244. Nicolas K. Kiessling, “Antecedents of the Medieval Dragon in Sacred History,” 167–177. Quacquarelli, Il leone e il drago nella simbolica dell’età patristica.

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century, explains that the action of the eagle incapacitated not only the snake in its beak, but in fact all the snakes in Constantinople.32 This was a common Roman motif (one example survives in the Great Palace mosaics in Istanbul), but the group at the Hippodrome was believed to have been enchanted to function as a talisman by the legendary magus Apollonius of Tyana. By its constant grasp of the snake, the eagle conquered all the snakes, which served a practical (if magical) function, but was also metaphorically transferable to the concept of the emperor conquering a usurper, and therefore all usurpers. Ultimately, through biblical references to conquered serpents, it also referred back to the original conquest of Satan by Christ.33 An example of this is visible in the funerary chapel of the Chora Church in Constantinople, where a fourteenth-century fresco in the apse shows a triumphant Christ looming over the tied-up figure of the subdued “tyrant” Hades. These connections fluctuated between metaphorical and sympathetic, as testified by cases in which an emperor believes an image is a visualization of his power or lack of power, such as the statue of a Khaledonian boar at the Hippodrome for Emperors Alexander and Isaakios Angelos: Alexander (r. 912– 913) adds teeth and genitalia to the boar to boost his own power; Isaakios brings the boar into the palace to protect himself from the rebellious populace.34 Similarly, religious images served as proofs of the reality of the events they represented. For example, an icon of the Annunciation serves as a visual proof of Christ’s incarnation, an event in the past, while an image of the Last Judgment serves as the proof of the future, as seen in a vision by John and described in his book of Revelations. John has seen it in a vision and recorded it – by reading it we make our own mental images, which serve as proofs. A powerful image of a boar believed to be sympathetically connected to the emperor proves the strength of the emperor himself. It was not enough for Justinian to strangle Leontios and Apsimaros behind the prison walls, or send them into exile and remove them from sight; it was necessary to perform the act of deposition publicly, and engrave it in the memory of the spectators as a vivid image. This image was not only a message of 32 33

34

Choniates describes the bronze ensemble, which served as a sundial; see Choniates, O City of Byzantium, 359 [651]. Similar function was believed to be performed by the statue with heads of three twisted snakes on the spina, parts of which are still in situ. See, for example, Madden, “The Serpent Column of Delphi in Constantinople,” 111–145. One head is at the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul. Stephenson, The Serpent Column. Mango and Scott, eds., Chronicle of Theophanes [379.12–21]. Choniates, O City of Byzantium, 305. See also Berger, “The Hippodrome of Constantinople in Folklore and Legend,” 200–201.

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imperial justice, but a proof of the reality of the relationship between Justinian and those he subdued. The Hippodrome setting, with its layered history, played a crucial role in conveying to the assembled populace who had power and who was guilty of treason or tyranny. 2

Secondary Images of Punishment

Centuries later, the Hippodrome continued to function as a main backdrop for the reinforcement of imperial authority. A literal reversal of the power structure was exhibited when the body of the deposed usurper Andronikos was hung head down on the spina in 1185.35 Choniates’ vivid account aids the reader in creating mental images of this gruesome punishment. In addition to slapping and kicking Andronikos, the punishers also tore his beard, pulled out his teeth, shaved his hair, cut off his right hand with an axe, and gouged out his eyes – thus fashioning his body into a new image of defeat. They paraded this new image through the city seated upon a “mangy” camel and covered by meager rags that replaced his imperial robes.36 He was eventually led into the Hippodrome and suspended by his feet between two small columns on the spina, literally flipping the power structure upside down.37 As with the mutilated bodies of Apsimaros and Leontios centuries before, Andronikos’ punishment was inscribed onto the printing plate of the Hippodrome, and this composition was made into a lasting image in the memories of spectators, a mental image to be passed on to future generations.38 Choniates himself mentions both mental images and physical images in the category of images of the emperor that were replaced by this new image: “In the City his image had become an abomination, whether it be the features of his face as one would visualize them or his portrait found on walls and panels; large number of the populace abused these and ground them down and scattered them over the City.”39 An elaboration on the process of visualizing is found in a famous homily delivered by Patriarch Photius in 863. Photius describes two different ways for a mind to “visualize” something: (1) by hearing and then “drawing to itself what it has heard,” and (2) by seeing and then “effortlessly” 35 36 37 38 39

See Tirnanić, “Martyrs and Criminals in Byzantine Visual Culture,” 28–29. Choniates, O City of Byzantium, 192–193. Ibid., 193. This new image of the deposed tyrant served as proof of his new status, replacing previous imperial representations of Andronikos. Choniates, O City of Byzantium, 194. Magoulias translates the verb as “visualize” (literally: “have in mind”).

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transporting forms to memory.40 How Byzantines perceived publicly staged punishments should be illuminated through their conception of the human body as an image, inseparable from the theory of icons that developed during the period of iconoclasm in the eighth and ninth centuries. Notably, in his “In Defense of Icons,” John of Damascus devised the hierarchy of images with six categories. The first and most perfect category is the Son of God as an image of the primary archetype, the Father.41 Four other categories include images of the future, man as an image of God, visualizations of invisible beings, and prefigurations. The final category includes both man-made images and verbal stories. The debates about images during the period of iconoclasm not only resulted in the creation of the Byzantine theory of icons, but also redefined the concept of the human body. Images, including bodies, were proofs of the depicted reality, even if that reality was imperially imposed and staged. In order for his deposition to work, Andronikos’ body had to be refashioned into the body of a criminal and the urban spaces of the city had to receive a new visual imprint of his new position in the empire. The image of Andronikos’ punishment that Choniates and others witnessed at the Hippodrome and the subsequent series of images that they propagated through their accounts of the events would have also been associated with the conceptual image of the Hippodrome itself. Over the centuries, the Hippodrome played such a large part in Byzantine consciousness that seers predicted to people they would end their lives at the Hippodrome’s curved end, the sphendone, or be suspended at the columns of the spina.42 Not only could people see in their minds images of past punishments, but also seers envisioned future images of punishment at the Hippodrome. Photius includes visions in ways of “depicting” a saint: in addition to paintings and writing, internal visions and mental images are always an important aspect of Byzantine visuality. Coming back to a couple of examples of secondary painted images of quelled revolts from the illustrated manuscript of Skylitzes, we can trace some of these visualization techniques. For example, the punishment of Leo Phokas, a favorite of Empress Zoe and a contender for the throne, unfolds on the bottom of fol. 126r. On the left, three men overpower and blind Leo with a sharp instrument, and in the subsequent scene on the right, they bring him before the ruling emperors, Constantine VII and Romanos Lekapenos, hands 40

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See Homily 17.5, in Laourdas, ed., Photiou Homiliai. For the English translation, see Mango, ed., The Homilies of Photius, 294; “Has the mind seen?” (“ειδεν ‘ο νους”) (ibid., n. 47). Photius favors sight to hearing, as a more effective way of making images in one’s mind. See also Brubaker, Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium, 48–9. John of Damascus, On Holy Images, 91–98. Guilland, “The Hippodrome at Byzantium,” 680–682.

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Figure 2.5 Blinding of Leo Phokas, Madrid Skylitzes, Vitr. 26–2, fol. 126r. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid

tied behind his back, eyes devoid of sight. Since the eighth century, blinding replaced nose mutilation as a very common punishment for rebellion. It was a convenient way to avoid the sin of murder while permanently incapacitating opponents.43 Leo’s lack of power and vision is juxtaposed to the enthroned emperors’ power and authority (fig. 2.5). What is depicted on the left is the act of inscribing the crime upon a body; on the right, the emperors observe the mark left by the inscription by looking at Leo’s face. As viewers of this image, we take a step back and see the whole relationship between the seated emperors and the blinded rebel. On the following page (fol. 126v), some other conspirators against the coemperor Lekapenos (Constantine Ktemetinos, David Koumoulianos, and Michael the curator of Mangana) are blinded on the left and walked in chains through the city in the middle (fig. 2.6).44 At the very right, Leo Phokas is represented on a mule, in a mock triumphal procession. What we are witnessing here is the process of the engraving the punishment of the rebels onto the urban fabric of city. This illumination is a secondary image of these events, and so are the mental images the reader forms. Of course, the same events would have been reimagined profoundly differently by a medieval citizen of

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It was often administered in association with glossokopein (tongue mutilation) and rhinokopein (nose mutilation), but depriving a man of sight came closest to depriving him of life. Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Byzantine History, 204.

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Figure 2.6 Punishment of Leo Phokas and his supporters, Madrid Skylitzes, Vitr. 26–2, fol. 126v. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid

Constantinople, by the Italy-based illuminators of this manuscript, and by a modern historian of visual culture.45 In one final example, we can see how the messages can shift between text and image. The depiction of the punishment of Nikephoros Komnenos by Constantine VIII on fol. 197v. is paired with the text that reads: Nikephoros Komnenos, the commander of Media, was renowned for his wisdom, virtue, and courage. The emperor envied him and for no apparent reason relieved him of his command and had him brought to the capital. He set up a tribunal, condemned him of plotting against him and blinded him.46 In the miniature, the emperor is visualized within a palatial structure, addressing a group of men who form the tribunal outside (fig. 2.7). The scene of blinding on the far right shows a man forcefully attacking Nikephoros, straddling his chest, pinning to the ground the unfairly punished man, whose left leg uncomfortably folds under his back. Yet the iconography attests to both the power and legitimacy of the emperor. He called a tribunal, which produced a legal sentence, and the person who was tried and punished received markings of a 45 46

See note 3, above, on the production of this manuscript. Tsamakda, The Illustrated Chronicle of Ioannes Skylitzes in Madrid, 225.

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Figure 2.7 Blinding of Nikephoros, Madrid Skylitzes, Vitr. 26–2. fol. 197v. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid

crime that from then on would be associated with him. Nikephoros’ blinded face is a testament to the emperor’s legitimacy. In our “secondary” image here, the illuminator did not show “envy” or that the emperor staged this punishment “for no reason.” What is apparent from the scene is that legally and visually Constantine VIII is correct, regardless of the historian’s bias on behalf of Nikephoros. The images trump the opinion of the historian because the viewer relies on the long tradition of this kind of image and its traditional meaning. The illuminator depicted what he read, but a Byzantine viewer would have understood this image within the layered history of the city. 3

Conclusion

To conclude broadly, punishment of rebels and usurpers was a primary tool of both exercising and exhibiting power in Byzantium. Many emperors used politically and ritually charged spaces for punishment of their opponents. These spaces were alive with vivid memories of past revolts and the echoes of the restorative punishments that ensued. New punishments united the citizens of Constantinople against the dissenters in spectacles of alleged benefit to the whole community. Emperors manipulated the powerful visual language of corporal punishment and exploited its signification of the human body and the collective memory/visualization of the architectural spaces of the city. They relied on the subsequent visualizations of punishments triggered by these spaces.

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Taking another shallow dip into the essay that inspired the title of this chapter, let us consider Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “aura.” According to Benjamin, even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art lacks its presence in time and space and therefore loses its “aura.” We did not discuss works of art in the traditional sense here, but images of punished bodies within the architectural spaces of the Byzantine capital. These images needed to be “reproduced” by internal, mental visualization, and I would argue that their “aura” was not lost in the process. Just as Byzantine copies of earlier icons carried the essence of the original, so did visualizations of quelled revolts maintain the “aura” of the original message. One did not “have to be there” in order to “see” in Byzantium. Bibliography Adams, Francis, ed. The Seven Books of Paulus Aegineta. Vol. 1. London: Sydenham Society, 1846. Angelov, Dimiter. Imperial Ideology and Political Thought in Byzantium, 1204–1330 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Bardill, Jonathan. “The Architecture and Archaeology of the Hippodrome in Constantinople.” In Hippodrome/Atmeydani, edited by 91–148. Bekker, Immanuel, ed. Michael Glykas, Annales. Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae. Bonn: Weber, 1836. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217–251. New York: Schocken, 1968. Berger, Albrecht. “The Hippodrome of Constantinople in Folklore and Legend.” In Hippodrome/Atmeydani: A Stage for Istanbul’s History, edited by Brigitte Pitarakis, 194–205. Istanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2010. Berger, Albrecht. Accounts of Medieval Constantinople: The Patria. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Boeck, Elena N. “Engaging the Byzantine Past: Strategies of Visualizing History in Sicily and Bulgaria.” In History as Literature in Byzantium: Papers from the 40th Spring Symposium in Byzantine Studies, edited by Ruth Macrides, 215–235. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Boeck, Elena N. Imagining the Byzantine Past: The Perception of History in the Illustrated Manuscripts of Skylitzes and Manasses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Brubaker, Leslie. Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium: Image as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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Carruthers, Mary. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Choniates, Niketas. O City of Byzantium: Annals of Niketas Choniates. Translated by Harry Magoulias. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984. Dagron, Gilbert. “From One Rome to Another.” Hippodrome/Atmeydani, edited by Pitarakis, 29–35. Dagron, Gilbert. Constantinople imaginaire: Études sur le recueil des “Patria.” Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Guilland, Rodolphe. “The Hippodrome at Byzantium.” Speculum 23, no. 4 (1948): 676–682. John of Damascus, On Holy Images. Translated by Mary Allies. London: Thomas Baker, 1898. Karlin-Hayter, Patricia. “Emperor Alexander’s Bad Name.” Speculum 44, no. 4 (1969): 585– 596. Reprinted in Studies in Byzantine Political History: Sources and Controversies. London: Variorum Reprints, 1981. Kiessling, Nicolas K. “Antecedents of the Medieval Dragon in Sacred History.” Journal of Biblical Literature 89, no. 2 (1970): 167–177. Laourdas, Basile, ed. Photiou Homiliai. Hellenika: Paratema 12. Thessaloniki: Hetaireias Makedonikon Spoudon, 1959. Madden, Thomas. “The Serpent Column of Delphi in Constantinople: Placement, Purposes and Mutilations.” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 16 (1992): 111–145. Mango, Cyril, ed. The Homilies of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople: English Translation, Interpretation And Commentary. Dumbarton Oaks Studies 3. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1958. Mango, Cyril. “A History of the Hippodrome of Constantinople.” Hippodrome/ Atmeydani, edited by Pitarakis, 36–43. Mango, Cyril, and Roger Scott, eds. The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor, Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD 284–813. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Martinez Pizarro, Joaquin. Writing Ravenna: The Liber Pontificalis of Andreas Agnellus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995–1998. Mavroudi, Maria, ed. A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation: The “Oneirocriticon of Achmet” and its Arabic Sources. The Medieval Mediterranean. Leiden: Brill, 2002. McCormick, Michael. Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the Early Medieval West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Moschus, John. The Spiritual Meadow (Pratum Spirituale). Translation by Gerhard Wolf. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992.

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Pitarakis, Brigitte, ed. Hippodrome/Atmeydani: A Stage for Istanbul’s History. Istanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2010. Pormann, Peter E. The Oriental Tradition of Paul of Aegina’s “Pragmateia.” Leiden: Brill, 2004. Prioreschi, Plinio. A History of Medicine. Vol. 4, Byzantine and Islamic Medicine. Omaha, NB: Horatius Press, 2001; repr. 2004. Procopius, History of the Wars, I. Translated by H. B. Dewing. New York: Macmillan, 1914. Quacquarelli, Antonio. Il leone e il drago nella simbolica dell’età patristica. Bari: Istituto di Letteratura Cristiana Antica, Università di Bari, 1975. Roueché, Charlotte. “The Factions and Entertainment.” In Hippodrome/Atmeydani, edited by Pitarakis, 50–64. Skylitzes, John. A Synopsis of Byzantine History, 811–1057. Translated by John Wortley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Stephenson, Paul. The Serpent Column: A Cultural Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Talbot, Alice-Mary, ed., Byzantine Defenders of Images: Eight Saints’ Lives in English Translation. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1998. Tirnanić, Galina. “Martyrs and Criminals in Byzantine Visual Culture: St. Euphemia at the Hippodrome.” In Blut- und Augenzeugen: Extreme Repräsentationsformen des christlichen Martyriums, edited by Carolin Behrmann and Elisabeth Priedl, 23–41. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013. Tsamakda, Vassiliki. The Illustrated Chronicle of Ioannes Skylitzes in Madrid. Leiden: Alexandros Press, 2002. Wolf, Gerhard. Cat. no 1.1 and cat. no 1.2. In Il volto di Cristo. Catalogue of an exhibition held in Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, December 9, 2000–April 16, 2001, edited by Giovanni Morello and Gerhard Wolf, 30–1. Milan: Electa, 2000.

chapter 3

Revolutionary Ceremonies and Visual Culture during the Neapolitan Revolt (1647–1648) Alain Hugon On Saturday, May 5, 1646, the transfer of Naples’ patron saint San Gennaro’s relics was to take place in the utmost solemnity to be duly celebrated in the administrative district (seggio) of Capuana. The ceremony should bring together a great number of the aristocratic elite of Naples’ government. In honor of the occasion, gold and silk drapes adorned the halls of the Seggio of Capuana in preparation for the miracle of the liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood. The altar had been decorated with heavy silverware ready to receive the saint’s relics, but then an incident caused violent opposition between the noblemen of the Seggio and the cardinal- archbishop of Naples, Ascanio Filomarino: the latter refused to allow the saint’s relics to leave his cathedral, claiming that they belonged to him. The people of Naples launched a virulent attack, and their discontent forced the cardinal into inglorious retirement. In his history of the revolution of Naples written during his exile in Rome, the historian Camillo Tutini (1594–1670), who was present and actively involved in the revolt, believed this conflict to be the source of the confrontations that led to the uprising of July 6, 1647, a defining moment in what is now known as the “Masaniello revolt.”1 During the revolution, one of Tutini’s adversaries, Francesco Capecelatro, went so far as to accuse Tutini of having written a history of Neapolitan political institutions that was in itself the cause for the insurrection.2 His book, however, was actually about the history of Neapolitan aristocratic structures that oversaw their municipal government, that is to say, the five noble Seggi (or piazze).3 The mere suggestion that the procession of San Gennaro’s relics was the source of a movement that roused Naples and its kingdom (over a period of nine months) into a conflict of authority illustrates the major role saints’ 1 Tutini and Verde, Racconto della sollevatione di Napoli accaduta nell’anno MDCXLVII, 1–2. 2 For recent books about the Masaniello revolt or revolution, see D’Alessio, Masaniello; Hugon, Naples insurgée; Villari, Un sogno di libertá. 3 According to Galasso, Alla periferia dell’impero, 247. Diego Capecelatro stated that the book by Tutini, Dell’origine e fundazione de’Seggi di Napoli, was the cause of the revolution.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004461949_005

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images and relics played in southern Italy’s ceremonies among commoners, aristocrats, and the Spanish viceroy. The religious roots of the political use of images as instruments of social and political war form the very core of the revolution of 1647–1648. Tutini, a clergyman, and other historians that participated in this revolutionary Neapolitan movement, confirmed that iconography was used as a weapon by all the parties involved in the nine-month insurrection. Whether they were in favor of the Spanish viceroy or against him, whether they supported the aristocratic royalists or the city’s poor (Lazzari), all of them believed that the image was an important political instrument and weapon for subverting the pretensions of the antagonistic parties. This belief can only be understood in the context of the decisions made at the twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent (December 1563): for the next half century, religious practices perpetuated the fact that “through the medium of images … we [Catholics] adore Jesus Christ and revere the saints who are portrayed in these images’ because they represent prototypes.”4 Redefined in this way, the function of relics and images and the sacred duty that had been attributed to them appeared to be renewed and even more closely associated with sacred images. Neapolitan institutions – Seggi, confraternities, corporations, and political bodies – conveyed the veneration that was appropriate to these images, and common practices of Neapolitan society regularly revived this veneration. Under normal circumstances, images and relics actively contributed to the rites and ceremonies that were supposed to unite the community. But historian and aristocrat Francesco Capecelatro had clearly understood that there were such great differences of opinion between the institutions (including the Seggi), from the 1640s on, organizing the town of Naples and its kingdom, that this could only end in a conflict that would shatter the community. During this decade, a political crisis in Naples was thus added to an economic one (a drop in the production of textiles). In addition, there was a buildup of military crises within the Spanish Empire (following the Thirty Years’ War with the Portuguese and Catalonian separatist movements that had broken out in 1640) and fiscal tensions. In the city of Naples, Andrea Rubino bore witness to these rising tensions when he mentioned that, on the eve of the insurrection, ceremonies planned in honor of Saint John for June 23, 1647, had been canceled. This was “because of the fear that had been brought about by some placards, put up around the town, indicating that on Saint John’s Day the people intended to cause a great

4 Fabre, Décreter l’image, 9. All translations by author.

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uproar about the lavish celebrations where bread rations [oncia] were usually in short supply.”5 The cancellation of these two ceremonies that preceded the insurrection – the procession of San Gennaro and the Saint John celebrations – indicates the scale of preexisting tensions within the city. At the same time, the level of anxiety surrounding these celebrations serves to highlight the importance that both the people and the nobility of Naples attached to these central moments of social life. There, a collective show of adhesion to religious faith and community celebrations followed precise, age-old directives, established and often codified with words spoken, gestures made, and objects manipulated, all in a specified order. With the crisis that was hitting the Neapolitan realm and the Spanish Empire, the upheaval of civic rituals was to foreshadow that of the traditional institutions and their political troubles. At the heart of these ceremonies, the visual culture that is distinct to Naples during the baroque period assigns an important role to images – any figural representation, whatever the medium (engraving, sculpture, painting, drawing). On the one hand, the presence of these images indicates the loyalty shown towards the community and towards religion in its search for similarity and reproduction and, on the other hand, the existence of an autonomous world, beyond society, that represents an absent spirit. The theology of images being developed in this way makes the idea of suggestion through images all the more specific, inasmuch as they are prototypes of the existence of a celestial world and of eschatological hope. As creations, images possess an autonomous force, as emphasized by miraculous images.6 Because of the confusion caused by the revolution, rites and ceremonies were lengthened or modified and sometimes new rules and ceremonies completely replaced old ones. The content and use of images might well have been altered at the same time, but to what extent did this actually happen within the new collective rules? The case of the Neapolitan insurrection of 1647–1648 offers food for thought about the use of iconography during a revolt. The decision to raise taxes (a gabelle on the fruits of the earth) went on to cause the insurrection led by the fishmonger Masaniello from the marketplace7 on July 6, 1647. This initial moment of the people’s uprising 5 Mauro, “Un omaggio della città al viceré,” 125. 6 The archeiropoistic character of the images, which were allegedly not created by men and whose existence was therefore believed to be a miracle (icons “made without hands”), was confirmed by the Council of Trent and lengthened the tradition of Latin and Oriental Christianity concerning the worship of images. See Vauchez, “Les images saintes,” 79–91; Schmitt, Le corps des images. 7 For more information about the marketplace, see Capasso, Masaniello, 23–28.

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became one of the defining characteristics of the revolt. After the events – the exact date is unknown – the Neapolitan artist Domenico Gargiulo (alias Micco Spadaro) depicted this day of revolution on a large canvas entitled La rivolta di Masaniello. Gargiulo painted the insurrection as part of a triptych illustrating the calamities that had just struck the Neapolitan capital – three large works illustrating the volcanic eruption of 1631, the deadly plague of 1656, and, between the two, the Masaniello revolt – all tragic moments in the history of the city.8 Despite the assassination of its leader Masaniello (on July 16, 1647), the uprising of July 7, 1647, continued until April 6, 1648. During these nine months of revolution, the rites and ceremonies continued to punctuate the political and religious life of the insurgent town. Did the radicalization of the revolt and the expansion of the revolution to the entire kingdom of Naples (to all its provinces, without exception) alter relationships during ritual practices? Were figural representations used by both insurgents and partisans of the monarchal order? And, if that was the case, what was the arrangement and how were visual representations used within ceremonial practices? How were the images integrated into Naples’ rich visual culture at a time of political controversy? We know that after the revolution, figural representations continued to be widely used by the viceroyalty as political instruments in ceremonies in order to settle their differences with the rebels.9 Thus, during these months of uncertainty, followed by total rejection of monarchical authority in the person of the Spanish viceroy, a number of revolutionary rites and republican celebrations used imagery as political, religious, and military instruments in order to influence the course of the revolution. 1

Venerating the Sovereign’s Icon

Starting with a riot against taxation on July 7 in the marketplace of Naples, the uprising quickly spread to the whole town and forced the viceroy and his guards to take refuge in the royal citadels of Castel Nuovo, Castel del Uovo, and especially in Sant’Elmo. Yet, along with the watchword “no volemo gabelle,” that of “Viva Dio e lo Re e mora il malgoverno” became the most widely used rallying cries. The significance of these slogans, which had traditionally been 8 For more information about this triptych, see Matzner, “Domenico Gargiulo,” 533–538; Spadaro, Napoli ai tempi di Masaniello. 9 Mauro, “Un omaggio della città”; Galasso, Napoli spagnola dopo Masaniello; Guarino, Representing the King’s Splendour.

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used throughout all types of revolts under the ancien régime, was the determination of the rebels to break away from fiscal oppression, while still maintaining loyalty towards the sovereign. In addition to these watchwords, images also made clear the desire to preserve allegiance to the monarchy of Philip IV. Ostentatious displays of royal portraits began to appear. One of the first revolutionary rites in the city consisted of exhibiting a portrait of Emperor Charles V, who had died more than a century earlier. The purpose of this was to point to what was seen as the golden age of Naples’ monarchy, and rites of devotion were performed in front of this representation of the emperor: After nightfall [on July 8], the incendiaries met up at the borgo de’ Vergini in front of the Duke of Traietto’s palace where Antonio Miroball lived – royal advisor, nobleman of the Square [Seggio] of Portonova and commissary of the gabelle for flour…. They burned every last beautiful object that they could find inside his house and if he himself had fallen into their hands, they would have broken him up into a thousand pieces. After that the incendiaries fled. It happened that, while they were burning his furniture, they also wanted to burn his pictures, amongst which there was a portrait of Charles V which they [the incendiaries] failed to recognize; so the on-lookers at the scene said to them: “do you want to burn the portrait of the person who did so much for you, this is a portrait of Charles V”; and they quickly took it [the portrait] and shouted “Long live our benefactor”; they placed it on a wall, beneath a baldachin, and this is how all the citizens behaved from then on, looking for portraits of Charles V and placing them under the doorways of Naples.10 This fervor for pictures of Charles V incited the insurgents to display a portrait of the deceased emperor at each entrance to the city and each access point to the city center, thus entrusting him symbolically with the safekeeping of the town. On July 13, during a ceremony at the cathedral to reconcile the viceroy (the Duke of Arcos) with the insurgent subjects, further demonstrations of devotion to the imperial figure took place. Once, during a procession on horseback through the streets of the city, the portrait of Charles V was carried alongside that of Philip IV. The two effigies were placed under baldachins of silk or damask at fairly regular intervals.11 During this same procession, the insurgent leader Masaniello saw, in passing, a portrait of Charles V near Nido Square. He approached it and bestowed words of praise on the effigy; he took 10 11

Tutini and Verde, Racconto della sollevatione, 27–28. Capasso, Masaniello, La sua vita, 54.

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out a gold medal bearing the imperial mark and raised it to kiss the portrait. Last, he passed the medal to the viceroy for him to kiss it too.12 Other anecdotes also illustrate this fervor for pictures of Charles V, which perpetuated his remembrance and maintained a certain amount of obedience. However, more than the statue of the deceased emperor, the profusion of portraits of Philip IV of Spain bears witness to the insurgents’ attachment to the Spanish monarchy, despite the crises that it had experienced. Whether it was displayed on its own, beside Charles V or with Queen Isabelle of Bourbon, the royal effigy was often protected beneath a canopy in order to improve the apotropaic value of the images. The use of a baldachin to protect the representation of the sovereign evoked the sacred character of the monarch; the canopy accentuated the majesty of sovereignty and associated it with the celestial world. Through these artifices, the absent king was made present in all his majesty, and he was haloed by a supernatural and divine environment, thanks to a substitution image being placed under a symbol of the starry dome. Portraits were, therefore, among the most important and “ubiquitous [images] of sovereignty.”13 Philip IV reigned successfully, surrounded by his many subjects – there were a great number of them – and his presence was also felt in the Regno through the artistic representations of him. On July 7, when crowds invaded the royal palace there was this scene: They [the agitators] looked everywhere for the Duke of Arcos. When they did not find him, they unloaded their rage on the most precious pieces of furniture that they could find in his apartments, throwing some through the windows and smashing or tearing others, respecting nothing except the dais, under which was the portrait of the king.14 On another day, when Masaniello was leading some armed lazzari, he saw a portrait of King Philip IV around the corner of a street and ordered the men to kneel in front of the effigy. He commanded them to recite three Paters and as many Ave Marias to the glory of His Majesty.15 The deference to the king was expressed in the demonstrators’ show of respect towards the royal effigy. As long as only the viceroy’s government was attacked and the monarchy itself 12 13 14 15

Tutini and Verde, Racconto della sollevatione, 66. For possible links to the magical properties of talismans and the term imago, which is the usual Latin translation, see Weill-Parot, “Talisman,” 706–708. Labrot, Études napolitaines, 210. Raimond Comte de Modène, Histoire des révolutions de la ville et du royaume de Naples, composée par le comte de Modène, 1: 72–73. Capasso, Masaniello, La sua vita, 54.

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was not directly challenged, the portrait of the sovereign was respected, and even revered, as far away as in the rebellious areas of the Regno. Thus, in the faraway rebel town of Cosenza, in Calabria, the new municipal organization that had been set up after the revolt held its meetings in the shadow of a large portrait of Philip IV of Spain.16 More or less everywhere during this first phase of the uprising, the rebels’ predilection for the monarchy was expressed by reverence towards images of the king, hung below baldachins, at crossroads, and near sources of light. The importance of lights served to accentuate the presence of the image. From July 10, the rebel forces were facing threats from bandits paid by the aristocracy; wild rumors were circulating of unknown riders going about the town attacking the rebel inhabitants and barrels of gunpowder being placed strategically around the city of Naples ready to destroy it. The revolutionary authorities therefore reinforced their nighttime vigils by ringing the tocsin at the churches and especially by ordering everyone to put candles in the windows of their houses to keep the city well-lit.17 2

The Epitafio: A Monument for the Revolution?

The presence of visual images appears to have been obsessive during the revolt; it became almost a necessity for the insurgent Neapolitan people. Thus, Masaniello ordered the commissioning of coats of arms for the king and for the people (fig. 3.1) in order to distinguish the houses of noblemen, who were the rebels’ enemies.18 To celebrate the treaty concluded with the viceroy, the rebel leaders decided to erect a cuboid-shaped monument, which the Neapolitans called the Epitafio del Mercato, where the text of the agreements would be engraved into marble. Situated at the heart of the marketplace where the insurrection began, this monument was supposed to mark a shift in the monarchy’s policy, after the agreements that had been negotiated by the rebels. The work presumably began on July 13,19 just a few days after the start of the revolt. To glorify the 16 17 18 19

Rovito, La rivolta dei notabili Ordenamenti municipali e dialettica dei ceti in Calabria, 75. Fuidoro, Successi historici raccolti dalla sollevatione di Napoli dell’anno 1647, 48. Tutini and Verde, Racconto della sollevatione, 53. Fuidoro, Successi historici, 57, 65. The author dates the Duke of Arcos’ order to engrave the epitaph on July 11, 1647; D’Alessio, Masaniello, 139, says the date the work began was July 13.

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Figure 3.1 The coat of arms of the King and the People of Naples, in Gennaro Annese, Per osservanza della patente fatta in persona di capitan Andrea Paliotto, 1647, Bibliothèque nationale de France

treaty and to show his good intentions, the viceroy entrusted the commission to the architect Cosimo Fanzago, at Masaniello’s request.20 Fanzago, in his fifties, was already famous for numerous architectural works, but also for paintings, sculpture, and even for his output as a goldsmith. He had taken part in the decoration of the Carthusian monastery of San Martino, and he had even gone as far as Salamanca in 1633 to serve the Count of Monterrey, who was viceroy of Naples between 1631 and 1635 and whom everyone knew to have an excessive taste for art. Choosing Fanzago in July 1647, within the troubled context of the Neapolitan uprising, shows a desire to celebrate the restoration of unity around a monument and a particular place.

20

Spinosa and Del Pesco, “Fanzago, Cosimo.”

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The painting by the aforementioned Micco Spadaro (Gargiulo) of the Piazza Mercato is one of the testimonies to this memorial, but it was painted after the revolution had failed, which Spadaro depicts by surmounting the Epitafio with the severed heads of the condemned men. Fanzago’s life was threatened on several occasions. The first time was on July 22, when his house in Melito (4 km from Naples) was almost burnt down because the work in the market square was not progressing quickly enough, according to some of the people’s extremist factions;21 the second time was when Fanzago was suspected of changing the articles of the treaty that he was engraving into the marble of the Epitafio.22 These observations about the vicissitudes surrounding the monument indicate the extent to which visual art forms reflected political issues. In addition, statues representing the viceroy of Naples, the king of Spain, and Ascanio Filomarino, cardinal of Naples,23 were meant to be looking out over the monument, symbolizing that the agreements stood on solid foundations. However, it would appear that these statues were never made;24 after the ceremony on July 13, where the Duke of Arcos officially swore to honor the agreements, the only ceremonies that took place around the Epitafio were those held by the people. Because of the radicalization of the revolt at the beginning of August, followed by dissociation from the monarchy in October 1647 when Naples was proclaimed a republic, the political ceremonies held around the Epitafio changed. On August 23, the head of President Cennamo was placed on the cornice of the monument, between those of two of his henchmen.25 In September, notices were attached to the monument to denounce the duplicity of the so-called revolutionary authorities.26 With the naval bombardment of the town on October 5 by the Spanish armada, the morbid rituals increased: people started displaying the heads of the king’s soldiers, fallen in combat.27 According to Fuidoro’s account, the monarchists had a similar Epitafio built of white marble that stood against the 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

Because the aristocrats who were against the revolution refused to place the weapons of the people beside those of the king on the gable of their houses; Tutini and Verde, Racconto della sollevatione, 87. Fuidoro, Successi historici, 76. Manfredi, “Il cardinale Arcivescovo Ascanio Filomarino nella Rivoluzione di Masaniello,” 196. Capasso, “L’epitaffio del Mercato e la fontana della Sellaria,” 113–119, 133–140. Cennamo had been the president of the Regia Camera della Sommaria, which was not only in charge of financial issues, but was also responsible for ensuring a balance in appointments to key positions in the kingdom. Tutini and Verde, Racconto della sollevatione, 134. Fuidoro, Successi historici, 161. Ibid., 183.

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wall of the castle (Castel Nuovo), but no mention is made of any corresponding political ritual for this construction.28 Throughout the whole revolution, right up to April 6, 1648, the date of the insurgent town’s surrender, the ritual carnage continued to take place on this people’s altar. The Prince of Massa (Toraldo) suffered the same tragic fate as President Cennamo.29 The Duke of Guise, who had become protector of the Royal Republic of Naples, used this space for equally bloodthirsty practices.30 The Epitafio could no longer claim to signify concord, since the agreement between the people and the monarchy was now null and void: its only purpose was sinister and vindictive, just like Carlo Coppola’s painting Resa di Napoli a Don Giovanni d’Austria nel 1648 (ca. 1656) shows. There, the broken bas-reliefs and, at the top of the Epitafio, the macabre line of heads can be seen. This painting shows another ceremony: the victorious entrance of Spanish aristocratic troops into the insurgent area of the town on April 6, led by Don Juan José. The troops are depicted in groups standing around the Epitafio, and in the center of the painting Don Juan José, illegitimate son of Philip IV, can be seen with Cardinal Filomarino to his right and the Count of Oñate to his left, while the people’s leader Annese is kneeling, handing over the keys of the people’s armory in the Carmel tower. Although the inscriptions of the Neapolitan liberties had been engraved into marble – a material reputed for being imperishable – the destruction reduced them to nothing. Strangely, it was the images of the Epitafio and not the marble itself that gave visual evidence about the altar of the insurrection. It is also thanks to these images that evidence has been passed down through time – the monument was physically destroyed after 1648 to leave room for Oñate’s Fountain, also called the Fountain of Liberties, designed by none other than the architect Cosimo Fanzago.31 3

The Image of Martyrdom

Masaniello went mad (either from an excess of power or because he had been poisoned) and died at the hands of murderers on July 16, 1647, near the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine. His body was dismembered by the assassins and thrown away; his head was planted onto a pike and exhibited on top of the city’s granaries, after having been paraded around the streets. 28 29 30 31

Ibid., 445. Ibid., 215. Tutini and Verde, Racconto della sollevatione, 540. Palomares, “Linaje, poder y cultura,” 873.

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Once Masaniello’s head and body had been abandoned, some of the people collected and reassembled the body, according to ancient funeral rites. At that moment, the attachment to Masaniello’s image seems to have been so strong that it produced a miracle in the eyes of some people. This is suggested by a number of contemporary witnesses: “The impudence and idolatry of the mad populace had now gotten to the point where they dared to say that he [Masaniello] opened his eyes, that he was perspiring, and even that he moved his hand to pick up a crown that he was able to hold quite firmly, and others went even further by saying that he came back to life again and spoke with such passion that, if anyone dared to contradict him, they ran the risk of being assassinated.”32 Masaniello’s corpse behaved in a miraculous way, in the same way as saints’ images and their relics; divine power showed itself by performing a prodigy during the funerary rites of reassembling a dismembered body. The “populace,” as Francesco Capecelatro calls them, “impudently” merged the worship of relics, the reverence of acheiropoieta (images that are said to have come into existence miraculously), and political fervor in the name of the assassinated people’s leader. Facing these displays of devotion towards Masaniello, the monarchical and episcopal authorities found themselves obliged to organize a lavish funeral ceremony in the city, which only served to confirm the mystical significance of the people’s allegiance to the figure of the revolutionary leader. Being a fishmonger by profession, Masaniello became easily comparable to the fishermen so often referred to in Christianity and in the Bible. Two hours after sunset on July 17, 1647, the rebel leader’s funeral brought together tens of thousands of people – Francesco Capecelatro estimated forty thousand – including a large number of priests who participated by holding burning torches, according to the directives of Cardinal Filomarino. A procession of children carried the cross, and the clergymen walked two by two through the streets. Next came the coffin, draped in a burial cloth of white damask. At each of the four corners rested an ornate silk crown on which four palm leaves had been placed to symbolize victory. Beneath this rested the body of the deceased, wrapped in a shroud with only the head and the hands visible. The command baton and a naked sword, with one hand laid on the hilt, had also been placed with the body. The four edges of the coffin and the burial cloth were carried by the captains and warlords that Masaniello had appointed. They were followed by their companies, the drums silent, the soldiers with their banners lowered and their weapons turned upside down, as a sign of mourning. Behind them paraded the people of Naples, men and 32

Capecelatro, Diario di Francesco Capecelatro, 104.

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women, quietly singing litanies and reciting their rosaries, according to the Neapolitan custom. The procession was well-lit, thanks to the blazing torches and lights in all the windows, as local rules demanded. The bells rang out as the funeral procession went past on its way to the halls of the six Seggi of Naples through each of the town quarters (ottina), so that the street captains and their companies could pay their last respects to the deceased. In Francesco Capecelatro’s opinion, even the funeral of a viceroy or some other great prince would not have received such a demonstration of solemnity.33 Did images play any part in this funereal mise-en-scène? More than a representation using figures and imagery, this funeral shows the importance of visual culture and, more generally, of sensorial culture within a representation, where interpretation relies as much on sight as it does on hearing during community ceremonies. The memorial planned for Masaniello was to be a mausoleum, built to house the remains of the people’s leader, and a statue, which was erected the very next day after the grandiose funeral in his honor.34 Other ceremonies of this sort took place between July 17, 1647, and April 6, 1648. The burial of Ciommo Ruoppolo illustrates the importance of these funeral rites in uniting the insurgent community. He was in charge of the army, promoted to captain by Masaniello, and became one of the main military leaders of the Republic of Naples after the dissociation from the monarchy. He had died in the military confrontations of January 1648. His funeral was a grandiose affair, held in a part of town that was controlled by rebels and attended by the four mendicant orders (Dominican, Franciscan, Carmelite, and Augustinian), surrounded by the people’s captains, with a long funeral procession to his final resting place at the Church of San Domenico Maggiore. Images of sovereigns, of the leader, and of his achievements, all represent important elements in these rites and ceremonies. They explain how an awareness of the insurgents grew up around such central issues as the signing of agreements with the authorities, which took place on two separate occasions – on July 13, 1647, and September 1, 1647 – even if both attempts ended in political failure. The visual and audible character of the funeral rites offered an opportunity for the population’s emotional attachment to the rebel leaders to be expressed. Nevertheless, the main images used during revolutionary rites were those of the city’s and the kingdom’s patron saints. The presence of a saint’s image or that of the Virgin promotes divine intercession and protection to the extent 33 34

This description comes from Capecelatro, Diario di Francesco Capecelatro, 1: 104–106. D’Alessio, Masaniello, 189.

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where the image merges with its prototype, to employ the term used in the twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent. The two types of devotion, to the intercessors’ relics and to their images, have largely become confused. 4

Salvation through Icons

During the ancien régime, social, religious, and political life were closely connected. Difficult times were not the exception, as studies show, whether they analyze the Great Peasants’ War in the Holy Roman Empire at the start of the sixteenth century, the English Civil War, or the Neapolitan Revolution. But in the last, the adherence to the worship of saints and the Virgin concealed a remarkable “ethnic” strength, which, to use historian Romeo de Maio’s expression, in certain aspects bordered on “Mariolatry.”35 Contemporary witnesses claimed that the images were intrinsically healing. Even if such anecdotes are highly unlikely, like many of Domenico Dominici’s accounts in his Life of the Principal Neapolitan Artists, they allow one to measure the influence of images and their miraculous power during the course of revolutionary rites, one of the most common of which was to pick out the houses and aristocratic palaces to be destroyed by fire: Inside Nicolas Balsamo’s house, situated in Monte Oliveto Road, in the main room of the first and the second apartments, [Fabrizio Santafede] had painted numerous very beautiful stories in the form of frescos. Now, the enraged populace had come all this way to carry out a massacre, just as they had already done in the case of many other noblemen and ministers, by burning down Balsamo’s house, because one of its inhabitants [was] a town officer. When one of their leaders noticed these beautiful paintings, he took it upon himself to hold off the members of his group and also to contain the anger of those who continued to arrive, telling them that it was a great sin to burn such wonderful paintings. This is how the virtue of Fabrizio held back the rage of a furious populace and saved the house from the voracity of the flames.36 Moral edification can be achieved through the representation of something beautiful, which, in this particular example, could almost be considered sacred; to destroy the beautiful image constitutes a sin, according to the revolutionary 35 36

Labrot, Quand l’histoire murmure, 527. De Dominici, Vita dei pittori scultori ed architetti napoletani, 884.

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leader who was in charge of setting fire to Nicolas Balsamo’s house. The beauty of the paintings then acts in a miraculous way on the rebels; it pacifies them and appeases their thirst for destruction. Purely because of the virtue of beauty and by its grace alone, the images could transform the people and diminish or even eliminate their ritual anger. The presence of the images’ autonomous force, almost independent of the prototype, offered unusual assistance to the Neapolitans, especially as the main iconographic products were religious.37 Various witnesses of these revolutionary events mention the Neapolitan rebels’ profound attachment to intercessors. Numerous invocations were constantly addressed to the Virgin and to the saints, one of whom undeniably is San Gennaro. Admittedly, in their role as clergymen, Camillo Tutini, Marino Verde, and Innocenzo Fuidoro were in the best position to highlight the consequences of popular worship of images. However, most narratives promote the veneration of saints’ images and relics.38 One of the most clear-cut cases of the active presence of an image during revolutionary rites lies in its power to perform, to act, and finally to change a course of events; it intervened during battles when the Spanish armada was bombarding the insurgent town at the start of the month of October 1647. When working-class areas of the town were violently destroyed, thousands of copies of San Gennaro’s engraved image were printed and handed out to the fighting men in order to protect the people and their soldiers from the bombs of the fleet and the royalist garrisons: In the Treasure Chapel, saints’ relics were on display and in particular the head and blood of San Gennaro. It could be seen that the latter was still liquid, a sign that the Popolari could not be wounded by their enemies, hence cannon fire from the navy and from the three fortresses, which had amounted to hundreds of thousands throughout the day, had failed to damage the churches and other town monuments, and there had not been [more than] twelve people who died from the cannon balls that had been fired. Then a priest, who was very devoted to San Gennaro, had effigies printed of this saint; he had two thousand copies made and distributed throughout the town. They were displayed in all the windows of the houses and other public places. Miraculously, where they were 37

38

Labrot, Études napolitaines, 315–316. There might have been exceptions to this prevalence, as in the collections of Roomer, the merchant from Antwerp who moved to Naples and who possessed 183 sacred works as opposed to approximately 1,100 secular works: Ruotolo, Mercanti, collezionisti fiamminghi a Napoli. De Maio, Pittura e controriforma, 150–157.

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displayed, no damage occurred despite heavy [cannon fire]. Small images were also distributed to the soldiers, who put them close to their hearts, and it was noticed that all those who were not wearing San Gennaro’s image were killed or wounded. As a result, three thousand more images had to be printed and then placed on the cannons, the banners and other such places.39 Thus, during combat, in order to gain the assistance of San Gennaro – one of the city’s main protectors – the revolutionary authorities printed out approximately five thousand copies of the saint’s image. It seems difficult to evaluate to what extent people at that time associated a figural representation of a subject with that of divine protection, that is, material reality as opposed to a spiritual dimension. How is it possible to measure what is, on the one hand, attributed to imagination, contemplation, and pedagogy for the ennoblement of the soul – relying on the pedagogy of image as the poor man’s education – and, on the other hand, the belief in the true protective nature of iconographic representation? What is the image’s autonomous action during rites involving military violence during revolutionary ceremonies? Perhaps using the term “icon” rather than “image” would be preferable for the days of the Neapolitan revolution. The strength of the sacred value of the representation itself (as in the case of the Orthodox icon) ultimately lies in its intrinsic redemptive power. In Latin Christianity, the formal realization (the genre and style of these images) makes them very different from Greek Byzantine examples of the “image of images” that are laden with codes and symbols,40 but perhaps this difference may have given the Neapolitan saints’ images a more operative character during the rites and ceremonies. Indeed, possessing both realism and a pedagogical objective, images enjoyed a specific status for the people. It would be easier to understand this status by using an expression offered by Peter Burke: “organic analogy.” This expression can be used to illustrate a particular mentality that associates similarities between objects and realities that are as different in nature as are images and divine protection; this “organic analogy” allowed one to believe in the fusion of categories (salvation, atonement, absolution), in the sharing of their qualities.41 Having stated that such an analogy existed up to the middle of the seventeenth century, Burke offers an explanation for the disappearance of royal mythologies during the ancien régime, which prompts one to look at Max Weber’s notion of “disenchantment 39 40 41

Tutini and Verde, Racconto della sollevatione, 192. Dagron, Décrire et peindre, 211–212. Burke, Eyewitnessing.

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of the world”42 for a possible link to the development of secular thinking, that is, separate from anything religious and still even further from being sacred. Consequently, this also explains a decline in the link between the material reality and the spirituality of images, a lack of interpretation of material facts in supernatural terms and an increase in ideas about magic. In Naples, in 1647– 1648 during the revolution, there was no such “disenchantment of the world” to cause a separation between the sacred and the profane, which helped to maintain the major role played by images and also by rites and ceremonies. In fact, there is no evidence of any modification in this “organic link” between images and the celestial world. Quite the contrary, images continued to offer an important means of action to the rebels in the enthusiasm that these provided along with the belief in divine election through celestial protectors. Throughout the seventeenth century, the number of saints being used as intercessors multiplied. “Everything seems to suggest that the primitive system of protection no longer sufficed and that, confronted by the anxiety caused by life’s hazards, it was preferable to build more and more ramparts and make them higher and higher,” states Jean-Michel Sallmann.43 Facing a political, economic, and military crisis, the accumulation of the protection by saints satisfied the moral and spiritual crisis, and at the same time, as Sallmann notes, the Catholic Church was looking to codify intercession by using the congregation of rites (decree of 1630). Even though the town of Naples already possessed seven patrons at the end of the sixteenth century, between 1600 and 1750, twenty-eight new protective saints were chosen by the city.44 Quite logically, there was a close relationship between the profusion of protective saints and their relics and an abundance of images. In order to motivate the crowds of people, to offer social interaction, and to provide a civic liturgy for both military rites and for community ceremonies, all methods of manipulating visual culture were necessary – from images to statues, from inscriptions on coins to public edifices (such as the Masaniello’s mausoleum or the Epitafio). Figural 42 43 44

Weber, Sociologie des religions, 448; Colliot-Thélène, “Désenchantement du monde,” 264–265. Sallmann, Naples et ses saints à l’âge baroque, 85. At the end of the sixteenth century, the seven protective saints of the town were Januarius, Agrippinus, Agnello, Aspren, Severus, Athanasius, Euphebius, who were joined by Thomas Aquinas in 1605, Andrew Avellino and Patricia in 1625, James of the Marches and Francis of Paola in 1626, Dominic in 1640, Francis Xavier in 1657, Teresa of Ávila in 1664, Philip Neri in 1667, Saint Cajetan in 1671, Gregory the Illuminator and Nicholas of Myra in 1675, Michael in 1688, Clare of Assisi in 1689, Peter Martyr d’Anghieria, Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi and Blaise of Sebaste in 1690, Francis of Assisi and Cecilia in 1691, Francis Borgia and John the Baptist in 1695, Candida the Elder in 1697, John of Capistrano and Anthony the Great in 1698, Mary of Egypt in 1699, Mary Magdalene in 1705, Augustin in 1711, and Irene of Thessalonica in 1731.

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representations offered many spiritual resources with which to prevent the misfortunes that occurred. In 1648, a cartographic representation of the city divided between the rebels and the loyalists was manufactured in Rome by engraver Pietro Miotte. Identifying about sixty-nine places within the town mostly controlled by rebels or by loyalists, this map illustrated a state of balance of power between the belligerents. However, its most remarkable quality lies in the unitary representation of the town of Naples, which, despite its political and military divisions, finds itself adorned by the thirteen protective saints, surrounding the Madonna and Child as if they were looking down from the sky; with the closest to the Virgin and the town’s center being, of course, San Gennaro. Even though it was torn apart, the city illustrated here is protected by the celestial world. As was still common at this time, Miotte’s engraving forgot to depict the telluric forces that could shake the town, as can be seen in the absence of a representation of Vesuvius. In this map, the alliance between the image, the sacredness, and the urban world take precedence over considerations that could harm the community. 5

Conclusion

The presence of figural representation during the revolution, in the midst of military rites, ceremonies of concord or funeral celebrations, did not come to an end when the insurgent town was surrendered to the illegitimate son of Philip IV and the viceroy Oñate. The overdeveloped celebration and impregnation of visual culture during the revolt was adopted by the Count of Oñate, who seized upon the Neapolitan markers and then diverted or replaced them by a new monarchical order. In this way, the introduction of sovereigns’ images, as elements in a rite of obedience by the rebels between July and September 1647, was adopted by the Spanish viceroy to better assert his power: During this time, there was an infallible rule, that any paintings found bearing the effigies of saints, the emperor Charles V, her Majesty the Queen, her children or the King of Spain should not be burnt; instead they should be exhibited with much veneration and be placed in the streets, beneath baldachins with lamps alight, both night and day, as much for saints as for royal effigies, and this was observed for many years after peace had been achieved.45 45

National Library of Naples (BNN) ms X B 7 G. Pollio, Historia del Regno di Napoli, dated July 13, 1647.

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Originally representing a mark of respect on behalf of the insurgent people, who were challenging the government, but not the sovereignty of the king, the veneration of the absent sovereign was then revived and diverted with the purpose of strengthening the current authorities. Bibliography Burke, Peter. Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. Picturing History Series. London: Ebrary, Inc, 2001. Capasso, Bartolommeo. Masaniello, La sua vita la sua rivolutizione con scritti di Fernando Russo, Salvatore Di Giacomo, Michelangelo Schipa e Benedetto Croce. Naples: Luca Torre, 1993. Capasso, Bartolommeo. “L’epitaffio del Mercato e la fontana della Sellaria.” In Napoli Nobilissima: Rivista di Tipografia ed Arte Napoletana, 113–119, 133–140. Naples: Publisher not identified, 1897. Capecelatro, Francesco. Diario di Francesco Capecelatro. Vol. 1. Naples: G. Nobile, 1850. Colliot-Thélène, Catherine. “Désenchantement du monde.” In Grand Dictionnaire de la philosophie, edited by Michel Blay, 264–265. Paris: Larousse-CNRS, 2003. Comte de Modène, Raimond. Histoire des révolutions de la ville et du royaume de Naples, composée par le comte de Modène. Vol. 1, edited by Esprit de Raimond de Mormoiron. Paris: J. Boulard, 1665. Dagron, Gilbert. Décrire et peindre: Essai sur le portrait iconique. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. D’Alessio, Silvana. Masaniello. Salerno: Salerno Editrice, 2007. De Dominici, Bernardo. Vita dei pittori scultori ed architetti napoletani. Naples: Paparo Edizioni, 2003. De Maio, Romeo. Pittura e controriforma. Naples: Laterza, 1983. Fabre, Pierre-Antoine. Décreter l’image: La XXVe Session du Concile de Trente. Vol. 4. Collection l’Ymagier. Paris: Belles-lettres, 2013. Fuidoro, Innocenzo. Successi historici raccolti dalla sollevatione di Napoli dell’anno 1647, edited by A. M. Giraldi and M. Raffaeli. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1994. Galasso, Guiseppe. Alla periferia dell’impero: Il Regno di Napoli nel periodo spagnolo (secc. XVI–XVI). Turin: Utet, 1994. Galasso, Guiseppe. Napoli spagnola dopo Masaniello: Politica, cultura, società. Florence: Sansoni, 1982. Guarino, Gabriel. Representing the King’s Splendour: Communication and Reception of Symbolic Forms of Power in Viceregal Naples. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Hugon, Alain. Naples insurgée: De l’événement à la mémoire, 1647–1648: Avec unepréface de Giovanni Muto. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011.

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Labrot, Gérard. Quand l’histoire murmure: Villages et campagnes du royaume de Naples (XVIe–XVIIe siècles). Rome: EFR, 1995. Labrot, Gérard. Études napolitaines: Villages – palais – collections (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles). Paris: Champ Vallon, 1993. Manfredi, Clelia. “Il cardinale Arcivescovo Ascanio Filomarino nella Rivoluzione di Masaniello.” Samnium 22 (1950): 49–80, 180–211. Matzner, Katia Marano. “Domenico Gargiulo: The Masaniello Rising of 1647 in Naples.” In 1648: War and Peace in Europe. Art and Culture, edited by Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling, 533–538. Munich: Bruckmann, 1998. Mauro, Ida. “Un omaggio della città al viceré: La festa di san Giovanni a Napoli dopo la rivoluzione di Masaniello.” In Opinión pública y espacio urbano en la Edad Moderna, edited by Antonio Castillo Gómez, James S. Amelang, and Carmen Serrano Sánchez, 125–136. Alcala de Henares: Trea, 2010. Minguito Palomares, Ana. “Linaje, poder y cultura: El gobierno de Iñigo Velez de Guevara, VIII conde Oñate en Napoles (1648–1653).” PhD dissertation, Universidad Complutense Madrid, 2002. Rovito, Pier Luigi. La rivolta dei notabili: Ordenamenti municipali e dialettica dei ceti in Calabria Citra, 1647–1650. Naples: Jovene, 1988. Ruotolo, Renato. Mercanti, collezionisti fiamminghi a Napoli: Gaspare Roomer e i Vandeneynden. Naples: Massa Lubrense, 1982. Sallmann, Jean-Michel. Naples et ses saints à l’âge baroque (1540–1750). Paris: PUF, 1994. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. Le corps des images: Essais sur la culture visuelle au Moyen Âge. Paris: Gallimard, 2002. Spadaro, Micco. Napoli ai tempi di Masaniello. Naples: Electa, 2002. Spinosa, Aurora, and Daniela Del Pesco. “Fanzago, Cosimo.” In Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 44. Turin: Treccani, 1994. http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ cosimo-fanzago_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/. Tutini, Camillo. Dell’origine e fundazione de’Seggi di Napoli. Naples, 1643. Tutini, Camillo, and Marino Verde. Racconto della sollevatione di Napoli accaduta nell’anno MDCXLVII, edited by Pietro Messina. Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1997. Vauchez, André. “Les images saintes: Représentations iconographiques et manifestations du sacré.” In Saints, prophètes et visionnaires: Le pouvoir surnaturel au Moyen Age, edited by André Vauchez, 79–91. Paris: Albin Michel, 1999. Villari, Rosario. Un sogno di libertá. Milan: Mondadori, 2012. Weber, Max. Sociologie des religions. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Weill-Parot, Nicolas. “Talisman.” In Dictionnaire historique de la magie et des sciences occultes, edited by Jean-Michel Sallmann, 706–708. Paris: Le livre de poche, 2006.

part 2 Confessional Conflict

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chapter 4

From Power Brokers to Rebels: How Frans Hogenberg Depicted the Beginning of the Dutch Revolt Ramon Voges In late 1570, an anonymous series of nineteen broadsheets appeared on the book market.1 The title gave its reader an impression of what to expect from the following pages: A brief account of what had happened in the Netherlands concerning religious affairs and other things from 1566 up to this present year of 1570, including the war between the Duke of Alba and the Prince of Orange and what came out of it, properly and truthfully described with pictures and words for anybody to understand, relying on trustworthy writings and the testimony of those who saw it all themselves.2 The title promises its audience a truthful account of events that had taken place in the Netherlands during the past four years – a period that was later to be known as the beginning of the Dutch Revolt.3 In order to entice the audience, the front page offers, apart from an elaborate title, a summary of the prints that follow. On the one hand, the summary serves as a table of contents; on the other hand, by mentioning where and when every incident has taken place, the front page also stresses the factuality of its reports. As a consequence, both the extensive title and the text-heavy summary point out the importance of sight. The front page makes clear that the print series not only serves as a means of getting to know what has happened, but it also reveals a feature other contemporary accounts cannot provide: the impression of seeing the main occurrences with one’s own eyes.4 The nineteen broadsheets of the series are presented as visual reports. 1 Evidence for this is found in Willer, Messkataloge, vol. 1, 366. 2 This chapter references the facsimile edition by Hogenberg and Hogenberg, Geschichtsblätter, no. 106. A newer, but smaller edition is Hogenberg, Plates, B56. All translations by author. 3 As a standard reference on Dutch history, see Israel, The Dutch Republic. For a brief overview see Darby, Dutch Revolt. 4 As a starting point on early modern news reports, see Dooley, Dissemination; Dooley and Baron, Politics of Information; Williams and Layher, Consuming News. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004461949_006

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Although no author, printer, or publisher is mentioned, contemporaries could easily ascertain that the series had been printed in Cologne by the Dutch etcher and cartographer Frans Hogenberg.5 Hogenberg had left the Netherlands at some point in the 1560s – most probably for religious and also economic reasons – and, at the end of the decade, had settled in the free imperial city of Cologne.6 In the following years, Hogenberg managed to build up a successful and flourishing workshop. He contributed to most of the maps in Abraham Ortelius’ seminal atlas and made a fortune with a complementary project: the Civitates orbis terrarum, an atlas presenting views and maps of all the major cities in the world.7 Even though Hogenberg’s Protestantism had caused him some problems with Cologne authorities, he belonged to the very few Dutch immigrants who were allowed to stay in the city.8 After his death in 1590, his son Abraham took over the workshop and continued his father’s work.9 In addition to these well-known maps and city plans, Hogenberg’s workshop published about 250 visual reports during Frans’ lifetime and another 170 under the guidance of his son Abraham.10 All in all, the workshop released approximately 420 visual reports from 1570 to 1631, most of them concerning political and military events in an area reaching from the Ottoman Empire to the British Isles. The reports focused mainly, however, on the French Wars of Religion and the Dutch Revolt.11 Hogenberg devoted about three-quarters of his publications to these Western European conflicts.12 He sold them both as single broadsheets covering recent events and, later, as compiled series.13 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13

Voges, Das Auge der Geschichte. For information on Cologne, see the seminal study by Ennen, Geschichte Der Stadt Köln. Newer and more relevant accounts can be found in Bosbach, “Köln”; Chaix, Cité chrétienne; Mölich and Schwerhoff, Köln als Kommunikationszentrum. For the atlas, see Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. For the book of cities, see Braun and Hogenberg, Civitates. In academic research the denominational adherence of Hogenberg is still a controversial issue. Anglophone studies tend to view Hogenberg as a Calvinist (see, for instance, Benedict, Graphic History), but Dutch and German academics tend to view Hogenberg as a pragmatic sympathizer with the Protestant movement. See Veldman, “Keulen als toevluchtsoord voor Nederlandse kunstenaars (1567–1612),” 43; Stempel, “Franz Hogenberg (1538–1590) und die Stadt Wesel,” 37–50. Mielke, “Art. ‘Hogenberg,’” 178–183. Hogenberg and Hogenberg, Geschichtsblätter. For a standard reference on the French Wars of Religion, see Jouanna et al., Histoire et Dictionnaire. For an overview, see Hellwig, “Einführung,” 32–43. This becomes obvious when studying the catalogues in Willer, Messkataloge, vol. 1, 366, 443, 506, 531. Additionally, several different editions of the prints have survived,

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They were bought throughout Europe, not least in the Low Countries, so that they were available at a secure distance from the hot spots, but not too far away.14 The broadsheets have entered collections in contemporary archives and libraries mostly in the form of compiled series.15 Hogenberg also integrated his prints in two large-scale historiographical narratives of the Dutch Revolt, with the result that most of the prints have survived in stand-alone compilations or voluminous accounts.16 Because they were widely disseminated when produced, they have been used to account for the nature of the conflict, becoming, in our own times, a part of the collective memory of the Dutch Revolt.17 In this chapter, I focus on how Hogenberg’s first print series represented the beginning of the revolt, and I raise questions about how his visual reports explained the conflict, explore the political message the prints conveyed, and ask what was being addressed in the eyes of the contemporary audience of these compositions. In order to answer these questions, let us first examine how the insurrection of the lower nobility was shown to be the starting point for a more comprehensive upheaval in the Dutch provinces, with the very first broadsheet on the Dutch Revolt as the subject of a close reading. Next, we will touch upon two other prints in this first series: the defeat of Calvinist rebels near Oosterweel, a small town in the north of Antwerp; and the execution of Egmond and Hoorn, two leading power brokers of the Dutch nobility. The comparison between the first report and subsequent ones will permit examination of how the narrative of the beginning of the revolt unfolded. Finally, I will elaborate on the relationship between power, faith, and their representations in Europe at the end of the sixteenth century.

so that one can clearly distinguish between single broadsheets and different series. See Hogenberg, Broadsheets, vol. 2: Text. 14 The members of the Cologne city council were anxious to remain neutral in the conflicts that raged in their immediate vicinity. See Bergerhausen, Köln in einem eisernen Zeitalter 1610–1686, 10. 15 Hogenberg, Broadsheets, vol. 2, Text. 16 For the historiographical accounts, see Aitzing, De Leone Belgico and the first official German edition of Meteren, Historia. 17 Hogenberg’s prints are still used in the late twentieth century as a means of representing the history of the Dutch Revolt. See, for instance, Hogenberg, De 80-Jarige Oorlog. The memory of the Dutch Revolt was one of the main objects of inquiry for the Vici project titled “Tales of the Revolt: Oblivion, Memory and Identity in the Low Countries, 1566– 1700,” directed by Judith Pollmann. See Kuijpers et al., Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe.

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Figure 4.1 Frans Hogenberg, Handing over of the Petition, 1570, etching, 28 × 21 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

I assume that the Dutch Revolt can be described as a military and, above all, as a political struggle for the support of the uncommitted majority, both in the Low Countries and abroad. Politically, it was important to get the undecided on your side. Hogenberg’s prints offered up exactly this to the heterogeneous majority with a moderate point of view and thereby occupied a moderate political position. 1

The Compromise of the Nobility

From the outset, the front page of Hogenberg’s first series on the Dutch Revolt declares that the war between the Duke of Alba and the Prince of Orange was a result of religious affairs, “Religionssachen.”18 Hence, it is not surprising that the first visual report of the series (fig. 4.1) concentrates on the political implications of the religious conflicts.19 18 19

Hogenberg and Hogenberg, Geschichtsblätter, no. 106. Ibid., no. 109.

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The first print is an etching with some engraving. Like the vast majority of visual accounts by Hogenberg, the broadsheet is about 28 cm wide and 21 cm high. In addition to the visual image, there are two kinds of texts: a caption at the bottom of the sheet and the name of one of the main protagonists. To the right of the vertical middle line of the composition one can spot the inscription “Madame de Parme,” which indicates the presence of Margaret of Parma, half sister of Philip II and his regent in the Low Countries. The picture is divided into a foreground, a small courtyard in the middle distance, and a background. The regent can hardly be seen; she is positioned in the building at the far end. The foreground is occupied by a group of people, approaching from the right margin of the sheet. The direction of their movement is indicated by their posture. This movement draws into the scene not only the observer at the left edge of the scene but also the audience of the print. The swords and expensive clothes of the approaching group underline their social status as nobles and power brokers.20 They contrast with the wall behind them, which dominates much of the picture and emphasizes the boundaries between the foreground, the courtyard, and the building in the background. In the wall at the top of the picture, two windows are ajar. They are placed high enough so that no one can look into the building from outside. The dark hatching indicates that events inside the palace are hidden from view. From the arcane realm of power, symbolized here by the coat of arms and the personifications of eternal life and resurrection above the gate, members of the social elite could observe public occurrences in the street, but common people had no such access to the interior of the palace.21 However, Hogenberg’s visual report offers its audience an opportunity to see beyond the wall; it provides an insight into something ordinary people who were not courtiers would not be able to see.22 With these partially opened windows, the print promises its audience access to the sphere of politics normally invisible for most people. But what does Hogenberg’s print show its observers? 20 21

22

For the role of the nobility in the Revolt, see Duke, “From King and Country to King or Country?” 175–197; van Nierop, “The Nobility and the Revolt of the Netherlands,” 83–113. For a more general perspective, see Wrede, Ohne Furcht und Tadel. The literature concerning the relationship between public and private, or even secret, is abundant. See, for a short, inexhaustive selection, Bauer, “Höfische Gesellschaft und höfische Öffentlichkeit im Alten Reich,” 29–68; Doering-Manteuffel, “Informations­ strategien,” 359–65; Hölscher, Öffentlichkeit und Geheimnis; Körber, “Vormoderne Öffentlichkeiten,” 3–26; Rau and Schwerhoff, eds., Zwischen Gotteshaus und Taverne; Schlögl, “Politik beobachten,” 581–616; Schwerhoff, eds., Stadt und Öffentlichkeit in der Frühen Neuzeit. I am indebted to Valerie Mainz who called my attention to that.

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On April 5, 1566, a group of 200 Dutch nobles handed a petition to Margaret of Parma, the regent of the seventeen Dutch provinces.23 The noblemen, led by Hendrik van Brederode, remonstrated against revision of the laws regarding heresy. Being an adherent of Protestantism had become high treason against the sovereign.24 Additionally, cases of high treason were not brought before the court in the province where they were committed, but before a court that was controlled by the central government in Brussels. Hence, revision of the heresy edicts meant two things. On the one hand, it was considered an intervention in the juridical autonomy of the provinces, which led not only Protestant but also Catholic estates of the provinces to reject the new legislation. On the other hand, revision of the heresy edicts gave the central government more power over political rivals. Every opponent of royal policy could easily be accused of heresy and thus politically neutralized. For this reason a group of more than 200 Protestants and Catholics, made up of largely the lower nobility, had joined up in the “Compromise of the Nobility” in order to safeguard their interests as local power brokers in the provinces. In his print, Hogenberg presents the actual handing over of the petition well in the background. The distinct spaces in the foreground, middle distance, and background can be understood as showing three different episodes and phases of one single process. In the first stage, the supplicants approach from the right; next, they enter the courtyard showing only their backs; finally, they present their petition to Margaret of Parma in one of the rooms on the first floor. In this way, Hogenberg’s print not only synchronizes a diachronic action, but also stages the handing over of the petition as a transgression of architectural boundaries. Hogenberg composes the picture in such a way that the observer can view all three different stages of the event: the audience observes what happens not only in the courtyard but also inside the room where the supplicants have submitted their request to the regent. To put it in another way, Hogenberg’s print guides its observers into spaces that were usually inaccessible to the public and offers them the opportunity to watch an event that otherwise would have been invisible. This is not the only aspect of Hogenberg’s representation that is ahead of the de facto incident. The caption of the print clearly takes the position of the 23 24

See Geoffrey Parker, Der Aufstand der Niederlande, 69–71; Israel, Dutch Republic, 145–146; van Nierop, “A Beggars’ Banquet,” 419–435. For the petition, see Kossmann and Mellink, eds., “Petition of 5 April 1566,” 62–64. For the connection between heresy and high treason see, for instance, Trusen, “Rechtliche Grundlagen des Häresiebegriffs und des Ketzerverfahrens,” 1–20.

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supplicants. It states that the Compromise of the Nobility humbly and subserviently asked for religious freedom, “so that religion should be free, without fire, gallows, sword, and tyranny.”25 But the actual petition of the Compromise simply called upon Margaret to suspend enforcement of the latest heresy edicts until the king had sought “the advice and consent of the assembled States General for new ordinances and other more suitable and appropriate ways to put matters right without causing such apparent dangers.”26 This was the only way, the supplicants wrote, to prevent a general rebellion. By this logic, it was the duty of the petitioners – as true and loyal vassals of the king – to warn their sovereign before it was too late. Should the central government not take appropriate action to deescalate the situation, the petitioners would not be to blame if an open rebellion broke out. True, the Compromise vehemently opposed the newly instituted persecution of confessional dissidents, but it did not oppose the central government, the Catholic Church, or Philip II as ruler of the Low Countries. On the other hand, the petition made clear that revisions of the law associated with the Spanish Inquisition were subverting the rights and privileges of the provinces and, thus, the entire political order.27 At the same time, the petition itself posed an eminent threat to the government. But the petitioners did not aspire to the repeal of the new heresy edicts altogether; their aim simply was to ameliorate the political consequences of the new legislation. To assume, as Hogenberg’s print does, that they had pledged for religious freedom in general anticipates subsequent events: the strengthening of the Protestant underground churches and the escalation of violence.28 Other reinterpretations of signs and their meanings can be found in visual elements of the print. For example, two statues frame the scene. They are stand-ins for the bronze figures situated on the balustrade delimiting the Place des Bailles in front of the palace.29 In reality, the bronze figures could not be seen by the onlooker – they were too far apart from each other.30 By referring to them visually, Hogenberg’s print emphasizes not only the locality of the event but also the opposing political attitudes. The statues were modeled after figures

25 26 27 28 29 30

Hogenberg and Hogenberg, Geschichtsblätter, no. 109. Kossmann and Mellink, “Petition,” 64. For a general history of the Inquisition, see Goosens, Les inquisitions modernes dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux, 1520–1633. Israel, Dutch Republic, 146–154. On the statues, see Engelen, Zoutleeuw: Jan Mertens en de laatgotiek, 262–265. Smolar-Meynart, “L’ancien Palais XIe–XVIIIe siècle: Des origines à Charles Quint,” 53.

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carved by Jan Borman.31 They represented several animals and four dukes of Brabant, among them Emperor Maximilian I and Emperor Charles V. At the left margin of the Hogenberg print, the statue looks like a man in armor, wearing a helmet that resembles a tiara, and holding both a sword and a royal orb. Its iconography not only underlines that this ruler adheres to the Roman Catholic faith, but it also attributes to him princely authority in the worldly and the spiritual realms. Most probably this statue was supposed to resemble Charles V, the father of Philip II and a vehement opponent of the Protestant estates in the Holy Roman Empire.32 On a syntactical level, the statue is visually associated with the group of observers to the left. Opposite this figure is a statue of a pelican. Iconographically, the pelican is a symbol for the noble power brokers who share in the authority and power of the territorial prince. In the emblematic tradition of the late sixteenth century, the pelican identifies a person as someone who sacrifices his own blood in defense of the law and in the fostering of his wards.33 In the Hogenberg print this symbol is associated with the petitioners – members of the Dutch estates who were pleading for a suspension of the royal heresy edicts. The visual report from 1570, however, refers to more than these common symbols. It also points out the subversion of the pejorative name the petitioners had been given by Charles de Berlaymont, a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece and counsellor of Margaret, who whispered into Margaret’s ear during the handing over of the petition that the conspirators were only gueux, “beggars.”34 By the time Hogenberg printed the broadsheet, the petitioners and their allies had been calling themselves “Beggars” since they would, if necessary, give up everything for the common good, even their wealth and lives. The Hogenberg print alludes to this twist of Berlaymont’s insult by indicating that the petitioners would sacrifice themselves as the pelican would do. A completely different set of symbols can be found in the depiction of the steps the members of the Compromise climb to hand over their petition. Hogenberg – who made a fortune by describing the appearance of cities as realistically as possible – represents it as a grand staircase, evoking the main entrance of the aula magna.35 Instead of the staircase’s actual Gothic appearance, however, he gives it a more Renaissance one and adds symbolic 31 32 33 34 35

Römer, “Art. ‘Borman (Borreman), Jan,’” 72. For more detailed information, see HainautZveny, “La dynastie Borreman,” 48. This is a short version of her PhD dissertation: Hainaut, “Les Borreman.” For a biography of Charles V, see Alfred Kohler, Karl V., 1500–1558. Henkel and Schöne, Emblemata, col. 812. For the process of reinterpretation, see van Nierop, “A Beggars’ Banquet.” Mielke, “Art. ‘Hogenberg,’” 178–180.

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elements. On the left side, a statue represents the abduction of the Sabine women.36 A statue on the right refers to Samson’s revenge on the Philistines. Between them sits Charles V on his throne, identified below by his name. The predecessor of Philip II maintains a balance between on the one side the hardihood of the Romans who abducted the women and through them founded Rome, and on the other side, the self-destroying rage of Samson, the biblical Hercules, who killed not only his enemies but also himself. Adapting sixteenth-century representations of power, emblems, and motifs culled from classical mythology and biblical episodes, the Hogenberg print makes it obvious that the composition is not meant to be read as a realistic image of what really had happened. Instead, the print restages the public enactment of the Compromise and takes up different political, religious, and symbolical aspects of the event. It offers a set of oscillating interpretations in order to point to the underlying constitutional cause of the conflict. In other words, the visual report elucidates that in the Low Countries the conflict over how to deal with Protestantism was transformed into a constitutional struggle for the balance of power. For that reason, Hogenberg’s visual report embodies two different perspectives on the conflict: the one of the ruler and sovereign who commands obedience in worldly and in religious affairs, and the other of the estates and nobles who act as power brokers in the provinces. On the one side, the exercise of power is conceived as an imperative by the central government, on the other as a system of checks and balances.37 According to the first point of view, the petitioners could be seen as rebellious subjects who had encroached upon the worldly and spiritual authority of the sovereign. Alternatively, they could be seen as power brokers who had sacrificed themselves by challenging the foreign prince who had stolen what rightfully belonged to others. The first viewpoint is a Catholic interpretation of a dangerous protest; the second one advocates the Protestant cause. The Hogenberg print neither lacks sympathy for the petitioners nor denies the perils of these actions. That is why Hogenberg’s first visual report on the Dutch Revolt opens up the struggle between contradictory interpretations of the occurrence.

36 37

For a comparison with other depictions see, for example, Smolar-Meynart, “Des origines,” 54; Vanrie, “L’ancien palais XIe–XVIIIe siècle,” 112. For a history of these conflicting perspectives, see Koenigsberger, Monarchies.

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Figure 4.2 Frans Hogenberg, Battle near Oosterweel, 1570, etching, 21 × 28 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

2

Revolt and Punishment

With the course being set for the following account of the beginning of the revolt, one is inclined to ask, have Hogenberg’s reports favored one side of the political conflict? In order to answer this question, we shall briefly look at additional Hogenberg prints. One of these shows the defeat of radical Calvinists (fig. 4.2) that took place a year after the handing over of the petition. In an attempt to avoid open conflict with large parts of the Dutch nobility, Margaret had suspended the new heresy edicts on her own authority. Nevertheless, violence broke out.38 Suspending the new religious legislation made it possible for clandestine Protestant churches to leave the underground. They organized public homilies that thousands of sympathizers attended. Iconoclastic movements in several cities of the Low Countries emerged. The fourth print in Hogenberg’s first series on the Dutch Revolt deals not only with the strengthening of the Protestant movement but also with the 38

Israel, Dutch Republic, 146–154.

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first violent clash.39 How could this outbreak have happened when Margaret of Parma had been responsive to the Compromise’s demands? At the beginning of the following year, 1567, Hendrik of Brederode drafted another petition appealing to the regent to grant total freedom of faith.40 The Dutch high nobility, however, denied him any support, and Margaret rejected the request out of hand. As a consequence, Hendrik van Brederode began to recruit troops among the Calvinists. They took up arms and gathered under the command of Jan van Marnix in a camp near Oosterweel, a small village in the immediate vicinity of Antwerp.41 Not even one year before, Marnix, like Brederode, had been one of the leading members of the Compromise who had handed over the petition to Margaret of Parma. Hogenberg’s print depicts how Marnix and the other Calvinist “Beggars” were defeated and killed. The visual means applied by Hogenberg is very similar to his representations of other battles: The audience views the combat zone from a cavalier’s perspective. In various parts of the picture several episodes are shown. Near the upper margin of the picture, the church steeple of Oosterweel is depicted; an inscription gives the name of the village and establishes the location of the event. The caption informs the reader of the date of the defeat. Both the chronological and geographical references emphasize the factuality of the represented occurrence. A unique feature, though, is the cross at the right margin of the sheet. Its evident purpose is to illustrate symbolically that the radicals were driven away and distanced from the true faith. As the caption points out, these Calvinists tried to uphold their faith by military action, a step, the print makes clear, that led only to more social unrest and political disturbance and thus could not be considered legitimate in a Christian sense.42 It emphasizes that power brokers such as the members of the Compromise should not engage in rebellious acts; instead they should keep the peace in their local areas of influence. As a consequence of the conflict, Philip II sent one of his most loyal and militarily experienced servants: Don Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the Duke of Alba.43 His mission was to crush any opposition to the Crown and to safeguard the Catholic faith in the Low Countries.44 One of his first actions once he had arrived in Brussels was to arrest all the noble power brokers who were thought of giving way to the radicals. Among them were two leading noblemen 39 40 41 42 43 44

Hogenberg and Hogenberg, Geschichtsblätter, no. 112. Parker, Der Aufstand, 106–108. Ibid., 108. Hogenberg and Hogenberg, Geschichtsblätter, no. 112. For the latest biography, see Kamen, Alba. Israel, Dutch Republic, 155–156.

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Figure 4.3 Frans Hogenberg, The Execution of Egmond and Hoorn, 1570, etching, 21 × 28 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

of the Dutch aristocracy: Egmond and Hoorn.45 Two years after the handing over of the petition, and fourteen Hogenberg prints later, both former members of the Council of State and Order of the Golden Fleece were beheaded in the Grand-Place at Brussels.46 Alba’s action provoked a storm of indignation. Although the duke had set up a special court in accordance with the Crown to investigate the upheaval, both Egmond and Hoorn could rightly only be sentenced by their peers, that is, the other members of the Order of the Golden Fleece.47 In contrast to the social unrest in Oosterweel, this print (fig. 4.3) portrays authority as exuberant and overwhelming. The source of authority’s power in this image lies not in political agreement but in the application of overwhelming military force. The scaffold is located at the center of the sheet. The executioner swings a sword back to behead Hoorn, who is kneeling on a cushion 45 46 47

For their opposition to the Crown, see Parker, Der Aufstand, 46–48. Hogenberg and Hogenberg, Geschichtsblätter, no. 112. van Nierop, “The Nobility,” 94. The statutes of the order are edited by Dünnebeil, Protokollbücher.

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blindfolded. Egmond’s corpse is already hidden under a cloth at the left margin of the place of execution. Dignitaries are standing at the right upper corner of the scaffold. The square in front of the Brussels town hall is full not of the usual bystanders, but instead of Spanish tercios. Their pikes, arquebuses, and flags bearing, among other emblems, the Burgundian St. Andrew’s cross - frame the execution scene. Soldiers fill even the streets leading to the square. The ubiquity of the military creates an overwhelming effect. The only civilian spectators in the scene are found on the opposite side of the square above the arcades of the Brussels town hall, identified by the asymmetrical position of its tower.48 The viewer watches the scene from a cavalier’s perspective. He or she is, literally, above it all, almost at the same level as the spectators who follow the execution from the town hall. Yet the Brussels town hall faces the Maison du Roi, the royal court.49 This means the audience of the Hogenberg print is situated in a position from which the highest judges in the Low Countries might have viewed the beheading of Egmond and Hoorn. The visual report thus assigns its viewer the role of judge. This is an obvious suggestion for the viewer to assess the scene. This appeal to make a judgment is intensified by a grandee on horseback who looks straight at the viewer from the steps to the scaffold. Through this gaze the viewer is implicated in the scene and takes part in the incident. This is why Hogenberg’s report evokes a subtle threat; after all, the judge not only judges but may also be judged. He or she could be the next to ascend the scaffold. The caption at the bottom of the sheet suggests how to understand the execution of Egmond and Hoorn. It asserts that the Spaniards were full of private hate and old rancor. They dishonorably murdered the knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece, who had remained loyal to their king. The caption thus suggests that not only had Alba made an example of Egmond and Hoorn illegally to warn the other members of the high nobility, but he in fact killed them out of personal dislike. The print exemplifies an extreme form of authority: autocratic rule in which every power broker is considered not a partner, but a rival for authority. Moreover, Hogenberg’s depiction of the execution declares Egmond and Hoorn to be political martyrs. They died, the print insinuates, because they did not fight the Protestant movement vehemently enough, in other words, because they rebelled against the government by being moderate and looking for compromise. This injustice redounds on Alba and his abettors. They 48 49

See, for instance, Soenen and Vanrie, “La Grand-Place avant 1695,” 13–27. See ibid.

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have discredited themselves by their violent and tyrannical behavior. With the execution of Egmond and Hoorn they take an oath of manifestation: the political system of mutual trust and reciprocal loyalty between sovereign and his estates is abolished. Thus, Hogenberg undertook to portray another public spectacle in the same manner as he had depicted the handing over of the petition before. But this time he is not referring to the manifold aspects of the underlying conflict. The public beheading of Egmond and Hoorn was an attempt by Alba’s regiment to reestablish the political order that had been disrupted by delinquents. Hogenberg transforms this ostentatious restoration of order into its inverse: in fact, it is Alba and his Spaniards, the judge and his executioners, who disturb the political order, not their victims. In this visual report, ambivalence and a variety of interpretations give way to a harsh accusation. 3

Conclusion

Hogenberg’s first series on the Dutch Revolt was intended to be regarded as factual records but was, in fact, actually partisan. That is why it tells us a great deal about the struggle for political and religious authority in the second half of the sixteenth century. Authority, the prints make clear, should exist not as the oneway street of commanding and obeying, but as a mutual social relationship.50 Both the prince and his subjects are dependent on each other.51 This applies in particular to issues affecting everyone, such as religious matters. Subjects must give their consent to being ruled, and the ruler must seek the approval of the subjects for his or her policies. If both conditions are fulfilled the sovereign and his subjects can rely on a relationship based on mutual loyalty and trust. That means executing power is possible only by reciprocal consent and shared interpretations of political issues. The members of the nobility at court and in the provinces served as nodes for this power relation. Rulers such as Philip II and his regents depended on their power brokers in the same manner as the power brokers needed their sovereign. Both parties had to agree on how to tackle problems in the political arena. Hogenberg’s first series on the Dutch Revolt makes clear that a ruler’s authority would remain strong only if he was prepared to listen to the counsel of his power brokers and grant them access to, and indeed a share in, political power.

50 51

This is a point Max Weber will later make clear in Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 122. See Beame, “The Politiques and the Historians,” 379.

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That is why the Hogenberg prints reflect more than the conflicts of the Age of Religious Troubles. Offering an interpretation of events, Hogenberg’s visual reports seem intended to influence them. Religious issues appear in the medium of worldly events; the prints represent religious quarrels solely as political ones. Confessional differences are de-emphasized and only their political effect is addressed by the prints. At the same time, they plead for a policy of moderation. In a world of profound social change and unrest, they favor political and religious compromise. This is why Hogenberg’s reports offer the audience a point of view that can be described best with the term politique.52 This means the Hogenberg reports were part of a struggle for power and faith, but not as dull and simple propaganda. On the contrary, the prints demanded a great deal of their audience: viewers had to be ready to form their own opinions on what they saw, but Hogenberg’s prints nudged them to criticize both radical change and the unwillingness for reform. Their suggestive power derives from seemingly standing above the opposing parties. As a historical source, the Hogenberg prints point out that in the Age of Religious Wars, sovereignty was practiced not in deciding on the exception, but instead in communicating this decision convincingly.53 Bibliography Aitzing, Mv 1583, AD || HISPANIÆ ET HVNGARIÆ || REGES || TER MAXIMOS. || DE || LEONE BELGICO, || eiusque Topographica atque histo = || rica descriptione liber || Quinque partibus Gubernatorum Philippi Re = || gis Hispaniarum ordine, distinctus, Insuper || et Elegantißimi illius artificis FRANCISCI || HOGENBERGII Centum & XII. figuris orAitzing, Michael von. AD || HISPANIÆ ET HVNGARIÆ || REGES || TER MAXIMOS. || DE || LEONE BELGICO, || Eiusque Topographica Atque Histo = || Rica Descriptione Liber || Quinque Partibus Gubernatorum Philippi Re = || Gis Hispaniarum Ordine, Distinctus, Insuper || et Elegantißimi Illius Artificis FRANCISCI || HOGENBERGII Centum & XII. Figuris Orna = || Tus; Rerumque in Belgio Maxime Gestarum, || Inde Ab Anno Christi M. D. LIX. || Vsque Ad Annum M. D. LXXXIII || Perpetua Narratione Continua = || Tus. || MICHAELE AITSINGERO AVSTRIACO || AVCTORE || CVM PRIVILEGIO CÆSAREO || FRANCISCO HOGENBERG: CONCESSO. Cologne: Franz Hogenberg, 1583.

52 53

Ibid. For this heterogeneous group, see also Woltjer, “Political Moderates and Religious Moderates in the Revolt of the Netherlands,” 185–200. See, for this definition, Schmitt, Politische Theologie, 11.

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Bauer, Volker. “Höfische Gesellschaft Und Höfische Öffentlichkeit Im Alten Reich: Überlegungen Zur Mediengeschichte Des Fürstenhofes Im 17. Und 18. Jahrhundert.” Jahrbuch Für Kommunikationsgeschichte 5 (2003): 29–68. Beame, Edmond M. “The Politiques and the Historians.” Journal of the History of Ideas 54, no. 3 (1993): 355–379. https://doi.org/10.2307/2710018. Benedict, Philip. Graphic History: The Wars, Massacres and Troubles of Tortorel and Perrissin. Geneva: Droz, 2007. Bergerhausen, Hans-Wolfgang. Köln in Einem Eisernen Zeitalter, 1610–1686. Cologne: Greven, 2010. Bosbach, Franz. “Köln: Erzstift Und Freie Reichsstadt.” In Die Territorien Des Reichs im Zeitalter Der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung: Land und Konfession, 1500–1650, edited by Anton Schindling and Walter Ziegler, 3:58–84. Münster: Aschendorff, 1991. Braun, Georg, and Franz Hogenberg. Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 1572–1618. Vol. 3, edited by Raleigh A. Skelton and A. O. Vietor. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1965. Chaix, Gérald. De la cité chrétienne à la métropole catholique: Vie religieuse et conscience civique à Cologne au XVIe siècle. Strasbourg, 1994. Darby, Graham, ed. The Origins and Development of the Dutch Revolt. London: Routledge, 2001. Doering-Manteuffel, Sabine. “Informationsstrategien: Propaganda, Geheimhaltung, Nachrichtennetze.” In Kommunikation und Medien in Der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Johannes Burkhardt and Christine Werkstetter, 359–365. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2005. Dooley, Brendan M., ed. The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010. Dooley, Brendan M., and Sabrina A. Baron, eds. The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe. London: Routledge, 2001. Duke, Alastair C. “From King and Country to King or Country? Loyalty and Treason in the Revolt of the Netherlands.” In Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries, edited by Alastair C. Duke, 175–197. London: Hambledon Press, 2003. Dünnebeil, Sonja. Die Protokollbücher Des Ordens Vom Goldenen Vlies. Vol. 1: Herzog Philipp Der Gute, 1430–1467. Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2002. Engelen, Cor. Zoutleeuw: Jan Mertens En de Laatgotiek: Confrontatie Met Jan Borreman. Leuven: Van der Poorten, Kessel-Lo, 1993. Ennen, Leonard. Geschichte Der Stadt Köln. Cologne, Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1863. Goosens, Aline. Les inquisitions modernes dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux, 1520–1633. 2 vols. Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1997. Hainaut, Brigitte d’. “Les Borreman, une dynastie de sculpteurs bruxellois (XVe– XVIe s.): Étude des retables conservés en Belgique et inventaire de ceux qui se trouvent à l’étranger, 1981–1982.” PhD diss., Université libre de Bruxelles, 1982. Hellwig, Fritz. “Einführung.” In Franz Hogenberg: Abraham Hogenberg. Geschichtsblätter, edited by Fritz Hellwig, 7–31. Nördlingen: Verlag Dr. Alfons Uhl, 1983.

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Henkel, Arthur, and Albrecht Schöne. Emblemata: Handbuch Zur Sinnbildkunst Des XVI. Und XVII. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 1996. Hogenberg, Frans. Broadsheets. Vol. 1: Plates; Vol. 2: Texts, edited by Ursula Mielke and Ger Luijten. Ouderkerk aan den IJssel: Sound & Vision, 2009. Hogenberg, Frans. De 80-Jarige Oorlog in Prenten, edited by Leon Voet. The Hague: Van Goor Zonen, 1977. Hogenberg, Franz, and Abraham Hogenberg. Geschichtsblätter, edited by Fritz Hellwig. Nördlingen: Verlag Dr. Alfons Uhl, 1983. Hölscher, Lucian. Öffentlichkeit und Geheimnis: Eine Begriffsgeschichtliche Untersuchung Zur Entstehung Der Öffentlichkeit in Der Frühen Neuzeit. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979. Israel, Jonathan I. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Jouanna, Arlette, Jacqueline Boucher, Dominique Biloghi, and Guy Le Thiec. Histoire et Dictionnaire des Guerres de Religions. Turin: Laffont, 1998. Kamen, Henry. The Duke of Alba. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Koenigsberger, Helmut G. Monarchies, States Generals and Parliaments: The Netherlands in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kohler, Alfred. Karl V, 1500–1558: Eine Biographie. Munich: Beck, 2000. Körber, Esther-Beate. “Vormoderne Öffentlichkeiten: Versuch Einer Begriffs- und Strukturgeschichte.” Jahrbuch Für Kommunikationsgeschichte 10 (2008): 3–26. Kossmann, Ernst H., and A. F. Mellink, eds. “Petition of 5 April 1566.” In Texts Concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands, 62–64. London: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Kuijpers, Erika, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller, and Jasper van der Steen, eds. Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Meteren, Emanuel van. Historia || Unnd Abcontrafeytungh || Fürnemlich Der Niderlendischer Geschichten || Und Kriegßhendelen || Mit Höchsten Fleiß Beschrieben Durch Merten von Manevel. [Cologne]: [Hogenberg], 1593. Mielke, Ursula. “Art. ‘Hogenberg.’” In Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler Aller Zeiten und Völker, edited by Andreas Beyer, Bénédict Savoy, and Wolf Tegethoff, 178–183. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. Mölich, Georg, and Gerd Schwerhoff, eds. Köln als Kommunikationszentrum. Cologne: DuMont, 2000. Nierop, Henk F. K. van. “A Beggars’ Banquet: The Compromise of the Nobility and the Politics of Inversion.” European History Quarterly 21, no. 4 (1991): 419–435. Nierop, Henk F. K. van. “The Nobility and the Revolt of the Netherlands: Between Church and King, and Protestantism and Privileges.” In Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands, 1555–1585, edited by Philip Benedict, Guido Marnef, Henk F. K. van Nierop, and Marc Venard, 83–113. Amsterdam, 1999.

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Ortelius, Abraham. Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, edited by Raleigh A. Skelton. Amsterdam: N. Israel/Meridian, 1964. Parker, Geoffrey. Der Aufstand Der Niederlande: Von Der Herrschaft Der Spanier Zur Gründung Der Niederländischen Republik, 1549–1609. Translated by Suzanne A. Gangloss. Munich: Callwey, 1979. Rau, Susanne, and Gerd Schwerhoff, eds. Zwischen Gotteshaus Und Taverne: Öffentliche Räume in Spätmittelalter Und Früher Neuzeit. Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2004. Römer, Uta. “Art. ‘Borman (Borreman), Jan.’” In Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler Aller Zeiten und Völker, edited by Günter Meißner, 13. Munich, Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 1996. Schlögl, Rudolf. “Politik Beobachten: Öffentlichkeit und Medien in Der Frühen Neuzeit.” Zeitschrift Für Historische Forschung 35, no. 4 (2008): 581–616. Schmitt, Carl. Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel Zur Lehre von Der Souveränität. 2nd ed. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1990. Schwerhoff, Gerd, ed. Stadt und Öffentlichkeit in Der Frühen Neuzeit. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2011. Smolar-Meynart, Arlette. “L’ancien Palais XIe–XVIIIe siècle: Des origines à Charles Quint.” In Le Palais de Bruxelles: Huit siècles d’art et d’histoire, edited by Arlette Smolar-Meynart, André Vanrie, Micheline Soenen, Liane Ranieri, and Martine Vermeire, 13–90. Brussels: Credit Communal, 1991. Soenen, Micheline, and André Vanrie. “La Grande-Place Avant 1695.” In Les Maisons de la Grand-Place de Bruxelles, edited by Vincent Heymans, 13–27. Brussels: CFC-Éditions, n.d. Stempel, Walter. “Franz Hogenberg (1538–1590) und Die Stadt Wesel: Mit Einem Beitrag Zu Seiner Biographie.” In Karten und Gärten Am Niederrhein: Beiträge Zur Klevischen Landesgeschichte, edited by Jutta Prieur, 37–50. Wesel: Selbstverlag der Stadtarchivs Wesel, 1995. Trusen, Winfried. “Rechtliche Grundlagen Des Häresiebegriffs Und Des Ketzerverfahrens.” In Ketzerverfolgung Im 16. Und Frühen 17. Jahrhundert, edited by Silvana Seidel Menchi, 1–20.Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992. Vanrie, André. “L’ancien palais XIe–XVIIIe siècle: De Philippe II à la fin du XVIIIe siècle.” In Le Palais de Bruxelles: Huit siècles d’art et d’histoire, edited by Arlette Smolar-Meynart, André Vanrie, Micheline Soenen, Liane Ranieri, and Martine Vermeire, 91–266. Brussels: Credit Communal, 1991. Veldman, Ilja M. “Keulen Als Toevluchtsoord Voor Nederlandse Kunstenaars (1567– 1612).” Oud Holland 107, no. 1 (1993): 34–58. Voges, Ramon. Das Auge der Geschichte: Der Aufstand der Niederlande und die Französischen Religionskriege im Spiegel der Bildberichte Franz Hogenbergs (ca. 1560–1610). Leiden: Brill, 2019. https://brill.com/view/title/54315.

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Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriß Der Verstehenden Soziologie. Studienausgabe. 5th rev. ed., edited by Johannes Winkelmann. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1980. Willer, Georg. Die Messkataloge Georg Willers: Herbstmesse 1564 bis Herbstmesse 1573. Vol. 1., edited by Bernhard Fabian. Hildesheim: Olms, 1972. Williams, Gerhild Scholz, and William Layher, eds. Consuming News: Newspapers and Print Culture in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Woltjer, Juliaan. “Political Moderates and Religious Moderates in the Revolt of the Netherlands.” In Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands 1555–1585, edited by Philip Benedict, Guido Marnef, Henk F. K. van Nierop, and Marc Venard, 185–200. Amsterdam, 1999. Wrede, Martin. Ohne Furcht Und Tadel – Für König und Vaterland: Frühneuzeitlicher Hochadel Zwischen Familienehre, Ritterideal und Fürstendienst. Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2012. Zveny, Brigitte d’Hainaut. “La dynastie Borreman (XVe–XVIe s.): Crayon généalogique et analyse comparative des personnalités artistiques.” Annales d’Histoire de l’Art et d’Archeologie, no. 5 (1983): 47–66.

chapter 5

Strategies of Transnational Identification: Images of the 1655 Massacre of the Waldensians in the Dutch Press David de Boer In the early spring of 1655, around two thousand Reformed Waldensians were massacred in the Cottian Alps in Piedmont by an army under the command of their Catholic sovereign, Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy. The survivors fled across the border into the French Dauphiné, where their leaders developed a plan to strike back.1 Apart from reorganizing themselves militarily, the Waldensians also drew up two pamphlets in which they described what had befallen them to generate international attention. After unsuccessful attempts in Grenoble and Geneva, the Waldensian delegate Jean Léger managed to get the works published with the help of Willem Boreel, the Dutch ambassador to the French court, at an unknown location.2 From France, the Waldensian account of events traveled to the great Protestant republics in the north, where it caused a wave of indignation. Soon, English and Dutch pamphleteers appropriated the news and produced translations and adaptations of the initial Waldensian pamphlets for their own vernacular audiences.3 Attention was followed by action; the Commonwealth of England and the States General raised an impressive amount of money for charity to aid the survivors, and both governments sent extraordinary ambassadors to Turin to intercede with the Duke of Savoy on behalf of the Waldensians.4 In recent years, there has been a surging scholarly interest in the transnational engagement of Protestants with persecuted coreligionists abroad. Perhaps not surprisingly, most historians have approached such engagement as a form of religious commitment and have accordingly focused on the 1 See Laurenti, I confini della comunità, 175–176. 2 Léger, Histoire générale des églises evangeliques des vallées de Piémont, ou Vaudoises, vol. 2, 365–367. 3 Kist, Neêrland’s Bededagen en Biddagsbrieven, 2:334; Greenspan, Selling Cromwell’s Wars, 137. For Dutch charity initiatives, see Boersma, “‘Yrelandtsche Traenen’ Gedroogd.” 4 Boersma, “Noodhulp zonder natiestaat,” 77–95; Smith, “Diplomacy and the Religious Question”; Rogge, De Waldenzen-moord van 1655 en de zending van Rudolf van Ommeren naar Zwitserland en Savoye.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004461949_007

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confessional language used by victims and their foreign advocates to make sense of these persecutions. Ole Peter Grell, for one, has argued that Calvinist charity initiatives for the persecuted Palatines during the Thirty Years’ War were motivated by an apocalyptic worldview and a strong sense of confessional righteousness.5 Similarly, Ethan Shagan has shown that Puritan propagandists drew heavily on John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in their coverage of the 1641 Ulster massacres, presenting the Irish perpetrators as “Biblical oppressors” and the murdered “Protestants as God’s chosen people.”6 So far, most historians have focused on textual accounts of foreign violence, but exceptions point to a similar rhetoric. Studying an illustrated chronicle authored by Jean Léger several years after the event, Christine Vogel asserts that the 1655 massacre was communicated as “a carefully constructed history of salvation” to an international audience.7 Vogel pays much attention to the chronicle’s illustrations, in which, she argues, most victims were presented as martyrs, with their hands folded in prayer as they meet their violent deaths. Some historians have noted that not all contemporaries engaging with foreign persecutions used a straightforward confessional language. Aiming to connect the history of transnational confessional engagement with modern humanitarianism, David Trim has argued that Cromwell and his officials used a “language of humanity” to condemn the fate of the Waldensians. However, he argues that this language could only be found in the Commonwealth of England, and was, indeed, only applied to fellow believers, even while other religious minorities were persecuted at home.8 Trim’s observation that engagement with coreligionists was not necessarily justified with confessional language is significant and requires closer scrutiny. How was this foreign event made relevant to an international audience? Did text and image follow a different rhetoric? And was the Protectorate indeed exceptional in decrying foreign massacres in secular terms? This chapter tackles these questions by shifting attention to the Dutch Republic. As a main center of transnational appeal and Europe’s most versatile printing hub, it is not surprising that in addition to textual accounts, several visual representations of events came off the Republic’s presses in the aftermath of the massacre. Comparing textual and visual representations of the violence, I will argue that persecuted minorities and their advocates stepped into a complex communicative landscape when they sought publicity for foreign suffering. Closely

5 6 7 8

Grell, Brethren in Christ. Shagan, “Constructing Discord,” 15. Vogel, “ ‘Piemontesische Ostern’,” 89. All translations by author. Trim, “ ‘If a Prince Use Tyrannie Towards His People.’ ” 38.

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investigating this landscape will offer insight into how early modern consumers of print media were invited to care about the plight of faraway strangers. 1

Condemnation and Identification

If we want to understand how a persecution became an international cause célèbre in early modern Europe, we should start with the persecuted in question. Why did the Waldensians make their cause public? At first glance, publishing pamphlets about one’s cause appears not to have been the most effective way to draw the attention of foreign authorities; the Waldensians could also have sent direct requests to the Dutch States General. However, in the wake of the wars of religion, seventeenth-century authorities more than ever regarded rebellion as a central danger to social and international order and were usually hesitant to openly support insurgents. Presenting themselves as passive victims of persecution was therefore a safer strategy for confessional minorities to receive foreign aid. This meant not only that the Waldensians had to keep silent about their taking up arms, but also that they should not directly plead with foreign governments, which, as most early modern authorities would agree, constituted lèse-majesté.9 This was all the more necessary because the court of Savoy, while denying that a massacre had taken place, justified the military occupation of the Waldensian valleys as the just punishment of a community that had expanded beyond where they were tolerated by their sovereign.10 To avoid further accusations of lèse-majesté, the Waldensians had to seek support through print media rather than by letters to foreign governments. Two pamphlets were initially circulated in French: the Récit véritable de ce qui est arrivé depuis peu aux vallées de Piémont (True story of what has recently happened in the valleys of Piedmont), and the much more extensive Relation véritable de ce qui s’est passé dans les persécutions et massacres faits cette année aux Eglises réformées de Piémont (True narrative of what has happened during the persecution and massacre committed this year against the Reformed churches in Piedmont).11 The Récit véritable and the Relation véritable were mainly structured around two secular argumentative strategies. First, they argued that the Waldensians had not broken the law – as the court of Savoy claimed – and were hence truly persecuted rather than punished. This was 9 10 11

In one of their pamphlets, the Waldensians explicitly denied having sent letters to foreign governments to prove their innocence; see Relation véritable, 45–46. See the court-issued Pianezza, Somma delle ragioni. Récit véritable; Relation véritable.

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backed up by elaborate descriptions and transcriptions of historic rights and privileges, which they argued had been violated by their prince. Second, the pamphlets devoted many pages to describing the inhumane violence that had befallen the Waldensians, including instances of sexual violence, infanticide, and cannibalism – acts of violence that were on all sides of the confessional divide recognized as unjust and not befitting judicial punishment. The Relation véritable also offered a third, confessional, argument by presenting the Reformed religion as the true church, which the Waldensians had managed to keep alive by the grace of divine providence in the centuries in which Rome had increasingly strayed from the right path. As such, the Waldensians were a powerful answer to the Catholic rhetorical question as to where the “true” church had been before Luther.12 In the Récit véritable this confessional argument is absent. It did not hide that the Waldensians were Reformed, but it was devoid of confessional tribalism. Why was this the case? We have little information about the writing process of the pamphlets and their subsequent dissemination, but shreds of evidence allow us to make an educated guess. We must keep in mind that both the Protectorate and the States General soon pressed Louis XIV to intercede on behalf of the Waldensians.13 Moreover, the refugees would not be served by insulting the young king, under whose protection they lived in the Dauphiné.14 In this light, it was politically prudent to provide a secular condemnation of events that could convince Catholic readers, leaving out confessional language. In his chronicle, Jean Léger described that, in Paris, the Dutch ambassador had advised him to write a shorter pamphlet about the massacre, which probably became the Récit véritable.15 The confessional Relation véritable was probably Léger’s original document. It remains unclear, however, why this document was also published; perhaps those involved counted on different audiences.16 2

The Dutch Revolt Remediated

The Waldensians’ strategic emphasis on passive victimhood helps explain why the refugees did not employ in their pamphlets a seemingly obvious strategy 12 13 14 15 16

See Barnett, “Where Was Your Church before Luther?” Smith, “Diplomacy and the Religious Question.” Trim, “‘If a Prince Use Tyrannie Towards His People’,” 60. Léger, Histoire générale, vol. 2, 365–366. For the dynamics of confessional and secular strategies in print media about religious conflict see also de Boer, “For the True Religion and the Common Cause.”

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to make a Dutch audience identify with them, namely, likening their struggle to the Dutch Revolt or the persecution of Protestants in the Low Countries under Habsburg rule. Making explicit comparisons with an armed conflict that resulted in the abjuration of a king could harm the carefully constructed image of the murder of defenseless people. Yet references to the Dutch Revolt were also absent from pamphlets originating in the United Provinces. This is surprising to the extent that the Revolt was a central reference point in seventeenthcentury Dutch political communication.17 We cannot know for sure what the reason for this omission was, but it is likely that Dutch pamphleteers similarly considered straightforward comparisons inappropriate; the religious persecution that the Dutch had suffered could hardly be disconnected from the war that followed it. Moreover, the public commemoration of the Dutch Revolt was rather secular, commemorating it as a national struggle against a foreign tyrant.18 Still, the Dutch Revolt was not absent from print media about the event either. One of the first of Dutch pamphlets to appear on the massacre was the Wreede vervolginge en schrickelijcke moordt aende Vaudoisen in Piedmont (Cruel persecution and terrible murder of the Waldensians in Piedmont), which was first published in Amsterdam in the late spring or early summer of 1655.19 Like many pamphlets, the work was composed of separate texts. The first piece was a letter, written by an anonymous Reformed person to an unidentified recipient, which, congruent with the Waldensian strategy, largely reflected on the lack of a legal basis for the attack. The letter was followed by an account of the massacre in the form of an eyewitness account – copied from one of the original Waldensian publications – with graphic descriptions of torture, rape, and cannibalism.20 The third and last part constituted a short general history of the Waldensians, reflecting on their history, religion, and customs. In other words, the interpretation of events largely follows the logic set out by the Relation véritable, including several confessional truth claims, describing how God and Antichrist would look upon the rooting out of the Reformed religion in the Alps.21 In one edition of the pamphlet, printed by Jacob Cornelissz, the situation of the Reformed in Piedmont was communicated in a fourth way, namely, through 17 18 19 20 21

Van der Steen, Memory Wars in the Low Countries, 1566–1700. Pollmann, “Met grootvaders bloed bezegeld.” Anonymous, Wreede vervolginge en schrickelijcke moordt aende Vaudoisen in Piedmont geschiet in’t Jaer 1655. Anonymous, Récit véritable de ce qui est arrivé depuis peu aux vallées de Piémont. Anonymous, Wreede vervolginge en schrickelijcke moordt aende Vaudoisen in Piedmont geschiet in’t Jaer 1655.

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Figure 5.1 Anonymous, Frontispiece of Wreede vervolginge en schrickelijcke moordt aende Vaudoisen in Piedmont, 1655, woodcut. University Library, Ghent

a total of seven woodcuts that seemingly offered a visual representation of the massacre. However, if we turn to the first image, which adorns the pamphlet’s frontispiece and depicts several people being burned at the stake (fig. 5.1), we notice something strange: the burning is not recounted in the pamphlet’s text. The explanation for this discrepancy is that the woodcut had not originally been conceived as an account of what had happened in Piedmont. Instead, all

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Figure 5.2 Theodor de Bry, Afbeeldinghe vande Spaensche Tyrannye in Spieghel der Spaenscher Tyrannye geschiet in West Indien, 1596, etching, 13.5 × 11 cm, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague

seven woodcuts in the Wreede vervolginge are almost identical copies of woodcuts from Otto Barentsz Smient’s 1644 edition of the esteemed and immensely popular Dutch schoolbook Spieghel der Jeught (Mirror of the youth), in which a father tells the bloody history of the Dutch Revolt to his son so he may grow to be a good Dutchman.22 Some of the woodcuts in Spieghel der Jeught were, in turn, based on engravings by Theodor de Bry in the Spieghel der Spaenscher Tyrannye geschiet in West Indien (Mirror of the Spanish tyranny in the West Indies) (fig. 5.2). The Spieghel der Spaenscher Tyrannye was an adaptation of Bartolomé de Las Casas’ famous Brevísima relación de la destrución de las Indias (Brief relation of the destruction of the Indians), one of the first European polemical works against the 22

Pollmann, “Met grootvaders bloed bezegeld,” 168.

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treatment of the native peoples in the New World. From the late 1570s onward, publishers in the Low Countries fed the Black Legend by recurrently producing new editions of the work as anti-Habsburg propaganda; it defamed the “Spanish” enemy and provided a frightening image of what would befall the Dutch if they would not continue the war.23 The Spieghel der Jeught was not so much meant to incite pity for the indigenous Americans as it was to warn the Dutch of the innate cruelty of the Spanish enemy.24 To be sure, the reuse of old images should make us careful not to overanalyze their “meaning” in a given pamphlet. There are countless examples of early modern printers using the same images to portray different events.25 Often they were copied simply to reduce production costs and served as little more than adornment to the text. Nonetheless, given the widespread dissemination of the Spieghel der Jeught and the Spieghel der Spaenscher Tyrannye, Jacob Cornelissz must have expected that the woodcut adaptations in the Wreede vervolginge would be recognized by Dutch consumers. The translation from cruel Spaniards to cruel Catholics more generally was easily made. Indeed, Las Casas had originally identified the perpetrators with the generic term Christians. This had been changed to Spaniards only in a 1579 edition in Antwerp to appeal to a Dutch audience.26 Because they were drawn from a different yet familiar narrative, the woodcuts in the Wreede vervolginge inevitably contextualized the massacre as part of a broader struggle that went beyond the confines of Savoy’s alpine valleys in 1655. Indeed, the fact that the images did not directly correspond with the text must have enhanced the generic message of a Catholic threat. Whereas the textual narrative stayed close to the facts “on the ground,” the woodcuts provided it with a recognizable message that transcended time and space and, as such, brought the event close to home. This was especially the case with the pamphlet’s last woodcut, which was based on two engravings by Frans Hogenberg, the Cologne-based printmaker who provided the dominant visual representation of the Dutch Revolt, as discussed in Ramon Voges’ chapter in this volume (fig. 5.3). On the left is a depiction of the 1578 execution of Nicolas Gosson in Arras, a relatively minor event in the cultural memory of the Dutch Revolt. Yet, on the 23

Pollmann, “Eine natürliche Feindschaft”; Cilleßen, “Massaker in der niederländischen Erinnerungskultur,” 93–135. 24 Cilleßen, Krieg der Bilder: Druckgraphik als Medium politischer Auseinandersetzung im Europa des Absolutismus, 95–96. 25 See, for instance, Evenden and Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England, 193–94; Marsh, “A Woodcut and its Wanderings in Seventeenth-Century England.” 26 Cilleßen, “Massaker in der niederländischen Erinnerungskultur,” 98–99.

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Figure 5.3 Anonymous, Execution and assassination in Wreede vervolginge en schrickelijcke moordt aende Vaudoisen in Piedmont, 1655, woodcut. University Library, Ghent

right, we see the murder of William of Orange – the first leader of the revolt against the Habsburgs – by the Catholic fanatic Balthasar Gérard in 1584. The composition of the victim (holding one hand in the air) and the bystander (lifting both hands in shock) were used again and again in the depiction of the murder and were therefore all too recognizable (fig. 5.4). By reusing well-known images of “Spanish cruelty” and the Dutch Revolt, the Wreede vervolginge thus implicitly compared the situation of the Waldensians in 1655 to Dutch history. By remediating the script of the Black Legend, the images created subtle markers of identification that the text did not provide.27 Dutch printmakers did not only contextualize the massacre by copying existing imagery of a bygone struggle. The Wreede vervolginge was soon followed by another visual account of the massacre, the Growlijke wreede moord en vervolging aan de Vaudoisen in Piemont (Horribly cruel murder and persecution of the Waldensians in Piedmont), which consisted of original imagery (fig. 5.5). It was published by the Amsterdam printmaker Jodocus Hondius III, who, as a friend of courantier Jan van Hilten, was well networked in the news production of southern Europe.28 The large pamphlet (29.1 × 35.7 cm) consists of a series of sixteen illustrations, which recount the massacre. The illustrations appear to have been based on the account of events in the Récit véritable. 27 28

For the remediation of atrocity scripts, see Pollmann, Memory in Early Modern Europe; see also Erll, “Remembering across Time, Space, and Culture.” Veldman, “Een riskant beroep,” 4.

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Figure 5.4 Frans Hogenberg, Moord op Willem van Oranje, 1584, etching, 21 × 28 cm. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

Accordingly, we see both strands of argumentation represented. Two images depict the Waldensians pleading with their perpetrators, with captions reading that the latter were unwilling to listen and invaded the valleys under false legal pretenses. In the original Waldensian pamphlets, questions of rights and privileges were backed up by official transcriptions of official documents and took up much space. However, one can imagine that it was harder to tell this legal narrative visually. Accordingly, the other fourteen images – except for a map of the region – depict the excessive violence that the Waldensian communities suffered. Based on the Waldensian accounts, the prints in the Growlijke wreede moord were not one-to-one adaptations of Dutch Black Legend imagery. Accordingly, they do not contain straightforward references to or comparisons with the Dutch Revolt. Nevertheless, the images speak to the visual genre of asymmetrical violence with which the Dutch had become acquainted since Hogenberg. As in many of the atrocity prints by Hogenberg, the focus is on the Waldensians’ defenselessness. This was accentuated by their plain dress, which contrasted with the soldiers’ attire. As usual in atrocity narratives, women and children

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Figure 5.5 Anonymous, Growlijke wreede moord en vervolging aan de Vaudoisen in Piemont, 1655, etching, 29 × 36 cm. Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam

form the majority of the depicted victims.29 Like in contemporary depictions of the Dutch Revolt, much attention is paid to sexual violence – in many ways the ultimate unjust violence upon the defenseless and the community. This includes rather explicit portrayals of genital mutilation and allusions to rape.30 Also just as in the Hogenberg prints, little attention is paid to the confessional aspect of the massacre. To be sure, the partaking of a clergyman in the destruction of a church is prominently depicted, reminding the viewer of the religious identity of the perpetrator. But apart from a steeple in the distance, there are no references to the faith of the victims. In fact, the emphasis on women and children, and the sexual violence enacted upon them, took away from a religious or eschatological interpretation of the events. The Waldensians were not represented as martyrs, dying steadfastly for their faith with their hands folded in prayer. They were depicted as desperate victims fleeing and begging for their lives and bodies. In martyr books, violence served a religious 29 30

Pollmann, Memory in Early Modern Europe, 179. Pipkin, Rape in the Republic.

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purpose, and victims were typically portrayed as calm, suffering with dignity, or even beyond suffering. The Growlijke wreede moord offered news consumers a visual narrative of reasonless suffering, not religious redemption. It may have incited religious fervor in Dutch Protestants, but there were no visual markers that could keep Dutch Catholics, Mennonites, or Jews from compassionating with the victims. 3

Religion’s Tears

So far, we have seen that depictions of the Piedmontese massacre in Dutch newsprints were built on the visual atrocity stories of the Dutch Revolt and the Black Legend, and were therefore rather secular. These narratives partly emerged as cross-confessional appeals to resist a cruel foreign enemy. Religious differences therefore did not play a prominent role.31 This contrasts with the visual account of the massacre in Léger’s chronicle. As Vogel has noted, these depictions of events were reminiscent of the seminal illustrations in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which had shaped the English imagination of religious violence since the late sixteenth century.32 This makes sense: Léger’s work was published in Leiden, but the illustrations were copied from an earlier contemporary history on the massacre drawn up by Samuel Morland, and were thus first conceived of in an English context, for an English audience.33 They thus tapped from a lively visual tradition of Reformed martyrdom, which, as Michel van Duijnen has noticed, did, at that time, not have a real counterpart in the Dutch Republic.34 The canonical Reformed martyrology in the Dutch Republic was Adriaan van Haemstede’s 1559 Historie der Martelaren (History of the martyrs). Contrary to Foxe’s work, van Haemstede’s work did not originally contain illustrations, which, as Andrew Pettegree has argued, was probably a consequence of Reformed iconophobia that had not made its way across the Channel.35 A modestly illustrated edition with woodcuts only appeared in 1604, and a second and third one in 1609 and 1612.36 We cannot know why pamphleteers did not pirate these images to depict the Waldensians. However, 31 32 33 34 35 36

See van der Steen, “Remembering the Revolt of the Low Countries”; Pollmann, “Eine natürliche Feindschaft”; Swart, “The Black Legend during the Eighty Years War.” Pettegree, “Illustrating the Book.” Morland probably based this work on material provided by Léger. van Duijnen, “A Violent Imagination.” Pettegree, “Illustrating the Book,” 134, 141–142. Because of the book’s continuing popularity and to keep it up to date, new editions were published regularly, with a total of twenty-four editions by 1747; Pijper, Martelaarsboeken, 41.

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Figure 5.6 Anonymous, Waldensian man nailed to a tree in Historie der Martelaren, 1657, etching, Royal Library, The Hague

when in 1657 a new edition was published by Jacob Braat in Dordrecht with 165 engraving by Jacobus Savery III, the 1655 massacre was included and reimagined.37 The visual representation of the massacre in the book strongly deviates from the pamphlet illustrations described above.38 The engraving shows a barefoot Waldensian man being nailed to a forked tree by a soldier (fig. 5.6). The scene strongly resembles a crucifixion, of which different examples can be found in the book’s section on the early Christians and, of course, Christ himself. Behind the executioner, two Catholic clergymen watch as Waldensian men are thrown into the fire. On the right, we see the silhouettes of people being pushed off a cliff. Strikingly, all victims in the image appear to be men. The Growlijke wreede moord was occupied with the depiction of women, but 37 38

Michiel C. Plomp argues that Savery based his prints on compositions by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout; Plomp, “Gerbrand van den Eeckhout’s Illustrations for Adriaen van Haemstede’s Books of Martyrs of 1657 and 1659.” The textual account of the Piedmontese Easter in the History of the Martyrs was a translation of the Relation véritable, which, as we have seen, contained explicit confessional truth claims.

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they are entirely absent from the martyr book’s illustration, and although the sexual violence that they suffered is still mentioned in the text, it is not visualized. Children are also absent from the scene. Michel van Duijnen has recently pointed to the similarities between “regular” execution prints and martyr prints in the United Provinces, as the latter did not offer visual signs of divine presence or the religious steadfastness of those executed.39 Yet Savery’s zooming in on the crucifixion of a male victim rather than portraying an indiscriminate orgy of violence was in all likelihood a conscious shift to tell a confessional story. We can understand this absence if we approach the reading of the Historie der Martelaren as a religious practice. The rape of women and the slaughter of children were effective ways of rendering violence illegitimate, as both groups could represent the innocence and defenselessness of the persecuted minority.40 And certainly, there were enough biblical examples of these forms of violence to give them a religious context. Rape was not, however, a form of violence that increased the religious virtue of the person suffering it. Whereas having one’s body tortured for religious steadfastness was considered to have a cleansing effect on the soul, rape merely brought dishonor upon the individual and, as Emma Herdman suggests, even problematized martyrdom.41 This could go very far. During the Thirty Years’ War, virgins were praised for committing suicide to keep from being raped by soldiers.42 In his dissertation on van Haemstede’s original work, Auke Jelsma has argued that the book was supposed to edify the Protestant reader. He stresses, however, that this edification should not be understood as a transcendental or spiritual experience, but as a lesson to those who were themselves persecuted or would perhaps suffer persecution in the future.43 Above all, it was an antiNicodemite exhortation.44 We must keep in mind that when van Haemstede wrote his work in Antwerp, the persecution of Protestants was still a very current thing, and within his own city. One century later, when the illustrated edition came out, the situation in the Low Countries had, of course, drastically changed: the 1657 edition came off the press in a thriving republic governed by Reformed citizens. Despite all the fears of impending religious warfare echoing throughout Europe in 1655, one may wonder how many Dutch Protestant readers of the Historie der Martelaren actually feared that they might one day also 39 40 41 42 43 44

van Duijnen, “ ‘Only the strangest and most horrible cases.’ ” Pipkin, Rape in the Republic. Herdman, “Theatricality and Obscenity in Graphic Histories of the Wars of Religion.” Rublack, “Wench and Maiden,” 4. Jelsma, “Adriaan van Haemstede en zijn Martelaarsboek,” 331. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 173–174.

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end up being nailed to a tree by a Catholic soldier.45 Still, the image paid homage to the creed that the true church was a persecuted church.46 Concentration on a single, male martyr was probably considered to convey that narrative more effectively than images of mass violence. This narrative of martyrdom was revitalized in the early 1660s, when renewed tensions between the Waldensians and the court of Savoy had lapsed into a guerilla war in the Cottian Alps. News about the renewed conflict made its way to the Dutch Republic through different channels, ultimately making clear that the Waldensians were not only persecuted again but were, indeed, in arms. In July 1663, a Waldensian band won a significant battle against ducal troops, which several pamphlets of unclear origin celebrated as a heroic act of self-defense.47 One, the Kort verhael van den elendigen toestant van de volckeren in de valleyen van Piemont (Short story of the miserable condition of the people in the valleys of Piedmont), by an anonymous publisher and printmaker, again offered a visual account of events. Like the Growlijke wreede moord from 1655, the Kort verhael is a large work (36.3 × 36.8 cm). It consists of eleven illustrations and an accompanying text explaining what can be seen (fig. 5.7). Three images and one column of text depict recent developments. Yet most attention is paid to the Piedmont Easter, both visually, with a collage of eight images, and textually, with a verse and a text that describes the images. The verse recounts the terrible fate of so many Waldensians in 1655, but it concludes that they reached martyrdom and that the kingdom of heaven was certainly theirs. This emphasis on the victims as martyrs is also reflected in the illustrations. In the center of the collage, we see the representation of religion, a winged, almost nunlike figure, crying over the fate of the Waldensians. Although she has the Bible opened on her lap, she appears to be focused on the severely mutilated bodies of two infants lying at her feet. Again, like the Growlijke wreede moord, the Kort verhael mainly shows the sorts of violence enacted upon the Waldensians, but frames it within a clear religious message; these were Christians being slaughtered to the detriment of the true religion. The first image shows the forced retreat of the Waldensians into the mountains during winter, three months before the actual massacre took place. Rather than portraying the refugees in fear as they are violently chased away, 45 46 47

Some Dutch pamphlets on the Waldensians did try to instill such a fear. See, for instance, Cornelis Beuckelaer, Spiegel voor de jeucht, daer in oude en jonghe konnen sien de wreede tyrannijen … ghepleeght. Jelsma, “Adriaan van Haemstede en zijn Martelaarsboek,” 334. See, for instance, Waerachtigh verhael, van de wreede vervolgingen, die wegen den hartogh van Savoyen dagelijcks aen de euangelische gereformeerde christenen … in de valeyen van Piemont, gepleeght worden.

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Figure 5.7 Anonymous, Kort verhael van den elendigen toestant van de volckeren in de valleyen van Piemont, 1663, etching, 36.3 × 36.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

however, the anonymous illustrator depicted their solemn arrival in the mountains, composed in a manner that harked back to the nativity story or the flight into Egypt. The depictions of the massacre itself resemble the ones of the Growlijke wreede moord. However, priests are more present, providing a more pronounced anti-Catholic message. This was further accentuated by the presence of a small demon in one of the images, who hovers above two murdering soldiers, infusing them with evil thoughts with a bellow. In the same image, the devil is also present in the shape of a snake. The recent struggle, which had made the story of the Waldensians topical again, was only depicted in the last three images, with the last one showing the victory in battle. The illustration of the battle also contains religious symbolism. A figure resembling the archangel Michael casts his light on earth as the Waldensians stand their ground.

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In short, the Kort verhael offered viewers an account of the fate of the Waldensians that to a considerable extent adopted the visual language of earlier pamphlets but infused this with religious iconography. Because the origins of the work are unclear, it is difficult to give a definitive explanation for this new visual language. However, the fact that it reflected primarily on events that had happened eight years earlier rather than on more recent developments indicates that the work was first and foremost intended as a commemorative print rather than a newsprint. Commemorative prints were common in the United Provinces, especially with reference to the Dutch Revolt. Rather than being carriers of news, they provided politicized narratives of the past.48 As a news item, the massacre could be anyone’s concern. But it only made sense for Dutch Protestants to actively commemorate the event. It served as proof of the veracity of their creed, just like the representation in the 1657 edition of van Haemstede’s martyr book. Accordingly, the central image that bound the collage together was an image of mourning, not of joy over a won battle. Although it was issued after a victory of a Reformed army over a Catholic enemy, the Kort verhael appears to have been first and foremost a reminder that God’s Church was a persecuted church. 4

Conclusion

Why did the Dutch care so much about the fate of the Waldensians, who died more than a thousand kilometers away from their homes, and about whom many had probably never heard before the news of a massacre in the Alps made its way to the United Provinces? A sense of religious brotherhood, the belief that coming to their relief was an act of Christian charity, and the fear that the true faith was in danger undeniably played a crucial role. Yet reducing engagement with the plight of foreign communities to confessional partisanship fails to give us a clear grasp of how such transnational solidarity was generated and negotiated. Both Waldensian and Dutch pamphleteers employed the shared script of martyrdom to contextualize events and make them significant to a Dutch audience, but they used other scripts also. Even though the Dutch Revolt was conspicuous by its absence in textual accounts of the Waldensian plight, it clearly premediated the visual representation of the massacre. In his seminal work on popular Reformation propaganda, Robert Scribner argued 48

Van der Steen, Memory Wars in the Low Countries, 80–81.

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that pictorial representation could “never escape the danger of ambiguity.”49 This chapter has shown that this inevitable ambiguity could also be an opportunity, and in 1655 it seems to have been instrumentalized to conjure up the memory of one event to contextualize another. Images made direct but nonetheless implicit references to the Dutch past in ways that text could not. Having been premediated by the Dutch Revolt, visualizations of the Piedmont Easter massacre were initially quite secular. In the Wreede vervolginge en schrickelijcke moordt, consumers would need to read the text to link the images to religious persecution. In the Growlijke wreede moord, the confessional identity of the victims was not made explicit at all. Only at a later stage, when commemorative illustrations of the Piedmont Easter were made, did images of the violence convey a clear confessional message. Early modern people may have reserved their compassion mainly for people of the same faith, but the news media that sparked their outrage often offered a surprisingly secular message. Bibliography Barnett, S. J. “Where Was Your Church before Luther? Claims for the Antiquity of Protestantism Examined.” Church History 68, no. 1 (1999): 14–41. https://doi.org/ 10.2307/3170108. Beuckelaer, Cornelis. Spiegel voor de jeucht, daer in oude en jonghe konnen sien de wreede tyrannijen … ghepleeght … Ter Veere: Jacobus de Later, 1664. http://archive .org/details/spiegelvoordeje00beucgoog. Boer, David de. “For the True Religion and the Common Cause: Transnational Publicity for the War of the Camisards (1702–1705).” Histoire et civilisation du livre – Revue internationale 14, no. 1 (2018): 233–246. Boersma, Erica. Noodhulp zonder natiestaat: Bovenlokaal geefgedrag in de Nederlandse Republiek, 1620–circa 1800. PhD Dissertation, Leiden University, 2020. Boersma, Erica. “ ‘ Yrelandtsche Traenen’ Gedroogd: Transnationale solidariteit en lokale politiek in Zeeland, 1641–1644.” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 128, no. 2 (2015): 201–222. Christine Vogel. “‘Piemontesische Ostern’: Mediale Inszenierungen des WaldenserMassakers von 1655.” In Bilder des Schreckens: Die mediale Inszenierung von Massakern seit dem 16. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag, 2006: 74–92.

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Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, 6.

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Cilleßen, Wolfgang. Krieg der Bilder: Druckgraphik als Medium politischer Auseinandersetzung im Europa des Absolutismus. Berlin: DHM, 1997. Cilleßen, Wolfgang. “Massaker in der niederländischen Erinnerungskultur: Die Bild­ wertung der Schwarzen Legende.” In Bilder des Schreckens: Die mediale Inszenierung von Massakern seit dem 16. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag, 2006: 93–135. Duijnen, Michel van. A Violent Imagination: Printed Images of Violence in the Dutch Republic, 1650–1700. PhD Dissertation, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 2019. Duijnen, Michel van. “‘Only the strangest and most horrible cases’: The Role of Judicial Violence in the Work of Jan Luyken.” Early Modern Low Countries 2, no. 2 (2018): 169–197. Erll, Astrid. “Remembering across Time, Space, and Culture: Premediation, Remediation and the ‘Indian Mutiny.’” In Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009: 109–138. Evenden, Elizabeth, and Thomas Freeman. Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of John Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Greenspan, Nicole. Selling Cromwell’s Wars: Media, Empire and Godly Warfare, 1650– 1658. Milton Park: Routledge, 2011. Gregory, Brad S. Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Grell, Ole Peter. Brethren in Christ: A Calvinist Network in Reformation Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Herdman, Emma. “Theatricality and Obscenity in Graphic Histories of the Wars of Religion.” Early Modern France 14 (2010): 91–113. Jelsma, Auke Jan. Adriaan van Haemstede en zijn Martelaarsboek. PhD Dissertation, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 2008. Kist, Nicolaas Christiaan. Neêrland’s Bededagen en Biddagsbrieven: Een Bijdrage ter Opbouwing der Geschiedenis van Staat en Kerk in Nederland. De Nederlandsche Biddagsbrieven. Vol. 2. Leiden: S. en J. Luchtmans, 1849. Laurenti, Martino. I confini della comunità: Conflitto europeo e guerra religiosa nelle comunità valdesi del Seicento. Turin: Claudiana, 2015. Léger, Jean. Histoire générale des églises evangeliques des vallées de Piémont, ou Vaudoises: divisée en deux livres, dont le premier fait voir incontestablement quelle a esté de tous tems tant leur discipline, que sur tout leur doctrine … et le second traite generalement de toutes les plus considerables persecutions … Vol. 2. Leiden: Jean le Carpentier, 1669. Marsh, Christopher. “A Woodcut and Its Wanderings in Seventeenth-Century England.” Huntington Library Quarterly 79, no. 2 (2016): 245–262.

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Pettegree, Andrew. “Illustrating the Book: A Protestant Dilemma.” In John Foxe and his World, edited by John N. King and Christopher Highley, 133–44. Farnham: Ashgate, 2002. Pianezza, Carlo Emanuele Filiberto Simiana. Somma delle ragioni, e fondamenti, con quali S.A.R. s’è mossa prohibire alli heretici della Valle di Luserna l’habitatione fuori de’ limiti tolerati. Turin: Giovanni Sinibaldo, 1655. Pijper, Frederik. Martelaarsboeken. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1924. Pipkin, Amanda. Rape in the Republic, 1609–1725: Formulating Dutch Identity. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2013. Plomp, Michiel C. “Gerbrand van den Eeckhout’s illustrations for Adriaen van Haemstede’s books of martyrs of 1657 and 1659.” The Burlington Magazine 148 (2006): 180–186. Pollmann, Judith. “Eine natürliche Feindschaft: Ursprung und Funktion der Schwarzen Legende über Spanien in den Niederlanden, 1560–1581.” In Feindbilder: Die Darstellung des Gegners in der politischen Publizistik des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, edited by Franz Bosbach, 73–94. Cologne: Bohlau, 1992. Pollmann, Judith. Memory in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pollmann, Judith. “Met grootvaders bloed bezegeld: Over religie en herinneringscultuur in de zeventiende-eeuwse Nederlanden.” De Zeventiende Eeuw: Cultuur in de Nederlanden in interdisciplinair perspectief 29, no. 2 (2014): 154–175. https://doi .org/10.18352/dze.9369. Récit véritable de ce qui est arrivé depuis peu aux vallées de Piémont. Publisher not identified, 1655. Relation véritable de ce qui s’est passé dans les persécutions et massacres faits cette année aux Eglises réformées de Piémont. Publisher not identified, 1655. Rogge, H. C. De Waldenzen-moord van 1655 en de zending van Rudolf van Ommeren naar Zwitserland en Savoye. Verslagen en mededeelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 4–5 (1903): 293–357. Rublack, Ulinka. “Wench and Maiden: Women, War and the Pictorial Function of the Feminine in German Cities in the Early Modern Period.” History Workshop Journal 44 (1997): 1–21. Scribner, Robert W. For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Shagan, Ethan. “Constructing Discord: Ideology, Propaganda and English Responses to the Irish Rebellion of 1641.” Journal of British Studies 36, no. 1 (1997): 4–34. Smith, David. “Diplomacy and the Religious Question: Mazarin, Cromwell and the Treaties of 1655 and 1657.” E-rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone 11, no. 2 (2014). https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.3745.

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Steen, Jasper van der. “Remembering the Revolt of the Low Countries: Historical Canon Formation in the Dutch Republic and Habsburg Netherlands, 1566–1621.” Sixteenth Century Journal 49, no. 3 (2018): 713–741. Swart, Koenraad. “The Black Legend during the Eighty Years War.” In Britain and the Netherlands, vol. 5, Some Political Mythologies: Papers delivered to the Fifth AngloDutch Historical Conference, edited by J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann, 36–57. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975. Trim, David. “‘If a Prince Use Tyrannie Towards His People’: Interventions on Behalf of Foreign Populations in Early Modern Europe.” In Humanitarian Intervention: A History, edited by Brendan Simms and David Trim, 29–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Van der Steen, Jasper. Memory Wars in the Low Countries, 1566–1700. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2015. Veldman, Ilja M. “Een riskant beroep: Crispijn de Passe als producent van nieuwsprenten.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 52 (2002): 155–185. Waerachtigh verhael, van de wreede vervolgingen, die wegen den hartogh van Savoyen dagelijcks aen de euangelische gereformeerde christenen … in de valeyen van Piemont, gepleeght worden. Amsterdam: Gilles Joosten, 1663. Knuttel 8712. Wreede Vervolginge en schrickelijcke moordt aende Vaudoisen in Piedmont geschiet in’t Jaer 1655. Publisher not identified, 1655.

chapter 6

Image and Text as Propaganda during the Upper Austrian Peasant War (1626) Malte Griesse The peasant war of 1626 was one of the three peaks of popular resistance against the Habsburg Counter-Reformation in early modern Upper Austria (the Ländlein ob der Enns). The sixteenth century had seen the German Peasant War of 1525, which extended well into Austria and Tyrol, and what has been called the “second” Upper Austrian peasant uprising of 1594–1597, which affected Upper Austria in its entirety and parts of Lower Austria.1 These uprisings exceeded the 1626 events in geographical and chronological scope. But the uprising of 1626 attained by far the highest rate of casualties: about 12,000 fell in battle, were killed by repressive forces, or were subsequently executed. At the same time, neither of the revolts of the sixteenth century nor any later uprising in early modern Austria has given birth to a similar amount of publications, texts in prose and verses, songs – and pictures. The events also stand out with regard to their commemoration today: in contrast to the revolts of the sixteenth century, 1626 has become the revolt par excellence and as such a significant part of the Austrian national memory culture. Many streets and squares are named after Stephan Fadinger, one of the leaders of the revolt, who perished in an early phase of the rising and was subsequently erected as a cult figure. Similarly, the “Frankenburg dice game” is reenacted every two years as a popular spectacle. The historical template for this spectacle was a precursor to the actual peasant war, a public execution in response to a smaller rebellion in Frankenburg and four neighboring parishes that rose against the nomination of an unwanted Catholic priest in May 1625. Since the ringleaders had fled abroad, the Bavarian governor Herberstorff, in the guise of promising clemency, summoned the villagers to an open plain. He pitted the elders in pairs against each other, obliged them to play the dice, and subsequently had the seventeen losers hanged on the spot in front of the 1 Czerny, Der erste Bauernaufstand in Oberösterreich, 1525; Czerny, Der Zweite Bauernaufstand in Oberösterreich, 1595–1597. On Tyrol and the peasant leader Michael Gaismaier, who became a bogey for the authorities and an icon in popular memory, see Macek, Der Tiroler Bauernkrieg und Michael Gaismair.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004461949_008

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assembled crowd. In martial practice this was not uncommon, but it meant that the governor treated the country as occupied territory. And apparently this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Herberstorff became the incarnation of the “common evil,” on which popular hatred concentrated. However, it took one more year, apparently a year of clandestine preparation, until the actual “peasant war” broke out in May 1626. In historiography, the Frankenburg rebellion in 1625 is considered as the first manifestation of the peasant war. And in public commemoration of the peasant war of 1626 it is the iconography of the Frankenburg events (especially the dioramas with tin figures exhibited in the Peasants’ War Museum of Peuerbach) that immediately comes to mind. In contemporaneous media, though, the events of 1625 did not provoke any echo, and no image was produced before the nineteenth (or even twentieth) century. In contrast to that, the events of 1626 occasioned an immediate media hype. They were discussed and depicted in pamphlets, broadsheets, songs, verses, engravings, paintings, and so on. Therefore, the medialization of the events and the interpretative struggles fought out between the visual and the textual realm stand in the focus of this chapter. After giving some necessary information on the historical background of the events, I will explore the specifics of visual production from two main perspectives. In the first two sections, I focus on the iconography disseminated in the course of the revolt. Practically all printed accounts, both visual and textual, were published outside of Habsburg territories, that is, in the free cities of the Holy Roman Empire. These prints largely shaped the very image (mental and physical) of a “peasant war.” The peasants had to be taken into account as agents of confessional struggle (as they had 100 years earlier in the German peasant war). This placed them in the broader framework of the Thirty Years’ War. At the same time, the imperial and Bavarian authorities did not pursue a very active media strategy, and peasants did not have access to publishers in imperial cities. This makes it likely that important mediators were involved, and I show that the Protestant nobility, who ostentatiously kept uninvolved, had a vital interest to lobby for publicity. The third section will highlight commemorative iconography after the violent repression of the uprising, which countered the government’s policy of damnatio memoriae. Since the authorities were helpless in the face of popular remembrance, both in oral culture and in (popular) paintings, they tried to adopt a more sophisticated strategy and turned from suppression to manipulation of grassroots commemoration. Their attempts to depoliticize and deconfessionalize past events were to a large extent fought out in the

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visual medium and partly relied on emphasizing the peasants’ recourse to magic practices. 1

Brief Sketch of Events and Stakes

Why a Bavarian steward in a Habsburg subprincipality? In 1619, the Protestant Estates of Upper Austria had allied with the rebellious Bohemians and supported the Winter King. In the Catholic League, the elector Maximilian of Bavaria assisted Emperor Ferdinand II against the joined forces of Bohemian and Austrian Protestant Estates and defeated them in the Battle of White Mountain (1620). Since the emperor was running short of money, he killed two birds with one stone and pledged Upper Austria to the Bavarians, who were thereby invited to get themselves reimbursed from the rebellious province. Maximilian installed Herberstorff as his man in Upper Austria. Indeed, the very fact that the anti-Bavarian motif played an important part in 1626 would make the uprising suitable for national(istic) commemoration in modern Austria. But this later commemoration of the events as a struggle against foreign rule adumbrates the (other) primary motif of the 1626 revolt: struggle against the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In reality, the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, sovereign prince of Upper Austria, had initiated the reinforcement of coercive re-Catholicization policy. Reformation patents were issued mainly on his initiative and stipulated that all Protestant predicants and schoolteachers were to be expulsed from the country. Catholic priests should be installed instead, and the commoners were to choose between rapid conversion and leaving the area.2 The Bavarian steward had realized how battered the population was from constant wars and quartering troops. He was rather reluctant to squeeze out the province too mercilessly and even more so to enforce the emperor’s confessional policy that ran the risk of provoking a serious uprising, as he rightly anticipated.3 Instead, he formalized judicial procedure and became even 2 For a nuanced account that carefully weighs the parts played by the emperor, the Bavarian elector, and Adam von Herbertorff as the actual governor of the province, see Sturmberger, Adam Graf Herberstorff, 199–259. 3 However, after his conversion to Catholicism, Herberstorff had become a staunch Catholic. In a letter to Duke William of Bavaria, who was well known for his Catholic zeal, Herberstorff wrote: “I do not desire more happiness than to get the order to achieve in this country (Upper Austria) what I have accomplished in the Duchy of Neuburg” (that is, Catholic reformation). And indeed, he did take some local measures in the early years before the emperor increased

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popular during the first years of his reign. Only the nobility despised him for his anticorruption policy that curtailed the informal power of their nepotistic networks – to the profit of the commoners. However, his leniency regarding smaller acts of resistance was taken amiss by Ferdinand II, who called for a toughened stance against recalcitrant Lutherans. Herberstorff finally complied and adopted the perspective of the emperor. Since it was impossible to find enough volunteers in the German-speaking neighborhood, Catholic priests were sent from the Tyrol, governed by Ferdinand’s brother Leopold. These clerics spoke only Italian and were unable to communicate with their new Upper Austrian parishioners. This exacerbated the dissatisfaction of the Protestant population. In addition, those who refused to convert – the overwhelming majority – faced considerable obstacles regarding emigration, fees, and supplementary taxes that would often reduce them to utmost poverty. The Frankenburg dice game helped popular resentment to find its target – and the Bavarian steward turned into the odious foreign tyrant and oppressor of Protestant worship, and as such he has gone down in the annals of history. In contrast to him, Ferdinand II was presented as flawless and the only ray of hope: if people actually did believe, wanted to believe, or pretended to believe this for purely strategic reasons, is another question. After the long clandestine preparatory phase, the open revolt (or war) broke out in May 1626 and lasted roughly until the end of the year. The rebels conquered and occupied many Upper Austrian towns, threw out the Bavarian garrisons, besieged the capital Linz for about two months, and defeated some repressive forces that were sent out against them. The governor Herberstorff tried to gain time by stringing them along with truces and negotiations, until Bavarian, imperial, and Holsteinian relief forces combined efforts and brutally slaughtered the insurgent troops.4 2

Media Coverage and Iconography during the Uprising

The revolt of the parishes around Frankenburg and the subsequent executions staged by Herberstorff in 1625 had never found their way into contemporary print media, but the events of 1626 provoked immediate press coverage. his pressure with the Reformation patents. See Sturmberger, Adam Graf Herberstorff, 202– 204. All translations by author. 4 For general accounts of the revolt, see Stieve, Der oberösterreichische Bauernaufstand des Jahres 1626; Strnadt, Der Bauernkrieg in Oberösterreich im Jahre 1626; Eichmeyer et al., Weilss Gilt Die Seel Und Auch Das Guet; Heilingsetzer, Der oberösterreichische Bauernkrieg 1626; Straub et al., Der Oberösterreichische Bauernkrieg 1626.

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The vast majority of the accounts have been published in free imperial cities, notably in Augsburg, Regensburg, Nuremberg, and Frankfurt (Main). I have not found a single depiction of the uprising released in Upper Austria and only one pamphlet that was printed in Vienna: This apology of the emperor’s Catholic Reformation policy (Apologetische Interims-Relation) has apparently been written by Joachim Enzmilner, negotiator on behalf of the Bavarian elector, who subsequently changed into the emperor’s service. Published while the uprising was still in full swing, it denounced the “peasants’ and their adherents’” resistance against religious oppression as mere pretext.5 In Bavaria (Ingolstadt), a “True Relation from the Elector’s Camp” (Warhafte Relation aus dem Churfürstlichen Läger) was published, where the Bavarian general Pappenheim reported on his (decisive) role in crushing the rebellion.6 Finally, just after the suppression of the revolt, but before executions against the ringleaders were publicly staged, a renouncement (Offentliche Abbitt) ascribed to the “formerly rebellious peasants” of the Hausruck Quarter was printed, possibly in Austria or Bavaria, but without indication of place or publisher. Both the Interims-Relation and the Offentliche Abbitt do not contain images, but Pappenheim’s Warhafte Relation displays a woodcut on its title page showing the victorious general in light armor (with full beard, in contrast to other portraits) (fig. 6.1). With his left hand he is holding a lance in vertical position, just touching the ground, with a crown in the middle, supported by means of two shorter polearms in diagonal position forming a pillar in combination with the lance. A lion is raising his paw and touching the brim of the crown. In sum, the emblematic cut exposes the main elements of the Bavarian coat of arms. The bareheaded general’s rather casual posture in the picture somehow contrasts with the text, in which he describes the insurgents as a ferocious and dreadful enemy in cahoots with the devil. According to the account, sorcerers in the insurgents’ camp petrified the warriors’ bodies and made them invulnerable against firearms. In this light he “justifies” his difficulties to quell the revolt and ascribes his victory to divine assistance alone.7 But here and in the other accounts coming from the authorities, the peasant insurgents are not

5 [Enzmilner], Apologetische Interims-Relation wegen der nägst fürgangenen kays. Probably this account was written by Joachim Enzmilner; see Stieve, Der oberösterreichische Bauernaufstand des Jahres 1626, 2: 272. The only related document published in Upper Austria (Linz) was the renewed confirmation of the Reformation patent in early 1626. But this was before the uprising and contributed to provoke its outbreak. 6 Pappenheim, Warhafte Relation. 7 Ibid., n.p.

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Figure 6.1 Anonymous, Two different title pages of Warhafte Relation. Left: original version published by Gregorio Hänlin in Ingolstadt, 1626, woodcut. Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg. Right: reprint by Aperger in Augsburg, 1626, woodcut. From Strnadt, Bauernkrieg in Oberösterreich, table 18

visualized – not even as rebels trampled down by the triumphant authorities, as we have seen it in Byzantine imagery.8 The problem might be in the first place one of genre: commoners were considered unworthy of tragedy. And was comedy an appropriate genre for all the blood that had been spilled?9 All three “government prints,” the InterimsRelation, Pappenheim’s Warhafte Relation, and the Offentliche Abbitt were reprinted by Andreas Aperger in Augsburg. And all three reprints display on their title pages the same woodcut, a representation of a peasant wearing broad knee-length boots (that seem to be rather unfit for battle), a vest covering his rump until his naked thighs, and a peaked cap with feathers. Armed with a sword thrust into its sheath and attached on his waist, he is raising his bare hands in a gesture of fright and helpless defense that can also be read 8 The same image is used in Guérin’s statue representing Louis XIV’s victory over the Fronde in France. See Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV. 9 Building on Erich Auerbach, Peter Burke has proposed that such constraints of genre often prevented both historians and painters from representing revolts of the lower sorts. See Burke, “The Virgin of the Carmine and the Revolt of Masaniello,” 5–6.

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from the expression of his face. If the representation of peasants was a problem of genre for Vienna or Munich (Ingolstadt), Aperger was less reluctant. Be it comedy or rather tragicomedy, this is clearly a mocking caricature. It puts into question the peasants’ ability to fight, even more so in combat against professional troops. The anti-peasant twist of the image matches with the hostile attitude of the texts and the concerned authorities as their initiators. But this should not be mistaken for the publisher’s political or confessional agenda. To be sure, Andreas Aperger was a Catholic, and in 1632, when Swedish troops occupied Augsburg, he had to flee. But as a professional printer he was primarily interested in fresh news to satisfy the demands of a broad readership, Catholics and Protestants alike. He was one of the most prolific publishers of extensive text-based pamphlets on the Upper Austrian uprising and, like many other (commercial) publishers in the imperial cities, he tried to avoid too much bias and often reproduced news and accounts he could get hold of from involved parties. Indeed, in many pamphlets the only comment provided by the printers was the woodcut on the title page. However, the visual dimension of text-centered pamphlets is limited, especially since pictures were often recycled for several publications, which was cheaper and faster than producing a new one each time. Most pictures, though, seem to be more neutral in their message than the “scared peasant” for the accounts coming from the concerned authorities. Some were even decidedly positive. Cuts on title pages show (1) battle scenes, in which peasants are fighting against lansquenets with swords, pitchforks, and other agricultural weapons, and, where it is impossible to tell who is considered to be the good side and who on the evil one;10 (2) displays of peasant weapons, such us flails, pitchforks, maces, often with technical annotations; (3) peasants standing in different constellations, generally with earnest and resolute expressions on their faces, armed with heavy sticks, and apparently about to decide a fateful question of conscience, of whose momentous consequences they are fully aware;11 but also (4) individual figures, apart from the “scared peasant,” a peasant holding a flower in one hand and raising the other to swear an oath, or a peasant on his knees, his hat in front of him on the ground, praying to heaven, with a cloud above him that envelops God the father.12

10 11 12

Gründliche und Warhafftige Beschreibung des Auffstands von den Bawren. See also Aussfuehrliche Avisa auß Ennss, Wie abermaln die Baurschafft den 29. Julii Lintz mit Stuermen angeloffen, reproduced in Strnadt, Bauernkrieg in Oberösterreich, fig. 21. Rechtsgründlicher Bericht des Anfangs und Verlauffs. Relation. Auß Oesterreich ob der Ennß.

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Figure 6.2 Anonymous, Title pages of two song pamphlets. a) Left: a peasant on his knees, in Ein Geistreicher Gesang/ Welchen die Baurn im Ländlein ob der Ens/ alle 24. Stund viermal/ zu Morgens/ Mittags/ Abends unnd Mitternacht/ Wie auch allezeit wann man sie angreiffen will/ Kniend/ mit gen Himmel auffgehabenen Händen/ Inniglich und Einhelligkich auch mit Seuffzen und weinen/ unterm freyen Himmel/ zu singen pflegen, n.d., woodcut. From Strnadt, Bauernkrieg in Oberösterreich, table 27. b) Right: three peasants swearing an oath, in Ein schön unnd kurtzweiliges Bawren Lied Von dem gantzen Verlauff dess Bawrn Kriegs Steffel Fätinger damalen Uhrhebers, n.d., woodcut. Staatsbibliothek München

This last image is directly related to the text, “A spiritual chant that the peasants in Upper Austria sung four times a day, in the morning, at noon, in the evening and at midnight, and in addition whenever they were about to be attacked. They sang it kneeling, their hands raised to heaven, pleadingly, and unanimously, often with sighs and weeping” (fig. 6.2a). The chant itself is adapted from Luther’s “Since the Hour Has Come” and is supposed to convey the purity of the peasants’ struggle for faith alone and their complete recognition of worldly authorities: “3. We do not seek freedom; / Instead, God’s word teaches us / To subject ourselves / To our suzerain, / His Imperial Majesty, / To whose favor and grace / We always give ourselves. // 4. With our body we willingly give / Charges, tributes and taxes, / As soon as God’s word / that is so

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dear to us / won’t be taken away from us. / We do not merit what harms the soul / That should not be offended.”13 As in many other cases, the publisher is not indicated. But in June 1627, Caspar Fuld, a publisher from Nuremberg, was severely reproved for having printed the chant, and the censor was admonished to work more diligently.14 This peasant chant is contrasted by a later one, the “Fadinger Song,” published after the end of the peasant war. It narrates the entire course of the peasant war in the manner of a news song, but from the perspective of the insurgents. Whereas the Luther adaptation is based on the principle of “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s,” the “Fadinger Song” contains far-reaching claims that conjure up a social and political overthrow. The peasants want to convert everybody by force, subjugate their lords, and become lords themselves.15 The woodcut on the title page shows three peasants with flails, swearing an oath (fig. 6.2b). Above them one can see the sun, stars, moon, and in the middle the double-headed eagle standing for the Holy Roman emperor. The unequivocal message is that the peasants are only feigning loyalty to their sovereign, and are committing perjury. The pamphlet was published after the revolt and will be examined more closely below. The numerous engravings circulated in the form of illustrated broadsheets are more sophisticated in visual terms than the pamphlets with their rather primitive woodcuts. Few of them are stand-alone pictures; many have captions and/or an accompanying text. Some broadsheets relate the peasants’ actions to the German peasant war of 1525, for instance, an engraving called “lucky dip” (Glucks Hafen), a reference to the popular figure of the “wheel of fortune” the peasants would have counted on.16 The broadsheet is dated 1627, but judging from the text it must have been produced in 1626, when the outcome of the revolt was still unclear. Below an exposition of peasant weapons are represented five alleged military leaders of the insurgent peasants of 1525 in rich garments. Their commoners’ names do not correspond to actual peasant leaders of 1525, but the name of the figure in the center, the “main commander of the peasantry, called Bernde” (Oberhaupt der Bauernschaft, Bernde genannt), reminds us of a peasant “Berndl” from Pram, who commanded the insurgents of the Hausruckviertel in 1626.17 On September 19 at Neukirchen am Walde, 13 14 15 16 17

Woodcut reproduction taken from Strnadt, Bauernkrieg in Oberösterreich, fig. 27. Diefenbacher and Fischer-Pache, eds., Das Nürnberger Buchgewerbe, 333. Ein Schön Lustig. Glucks Hafen Des vor ein Hundert Jahrn vorgangenen Baurenkriegs. Reproductions of slightly differing versions of the copperplate can be found in Paas, The German Political Broadsheet, 1600–1700, vol. 4, fig. P-1117-P-1119. See also Stieve, Der oberösterreichische Bauernaufstand des Jahres 1626, 2: 277.

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the units under Berndl’s, Vischer’s, and Fuchs’ command inflicted a devastating defeat on the troops of Duke Adolf of Holstein, who had been called by the Bavarian elector for help. Later, on November 9 in the Emling wood, the peasants under Berndl’s (and Kietoppler’s) command were defeated by General Pappenheim’s units.18 Barbara Huber has interpreted the engraving as outright hostile to the peasants because of the travesty, a visual denunciation of the lower sorts as cobblers who do not want to stick to their last.19 And indeed, the text of Glucks Hafen denounces the form of the peasants’ actions, namely, insurgency against the authorities. They would have “imprudently ignored Paul’s Date Caesari quae sunt Caesaris, & quae Die, Deo &c., i.e. the admonition to be subject to the authorities.” But the peasants’ goals, notably struggle for free worship, are not denounced. Furthermore, two of the represented leaders, the second and fourth, are carrying banners with inscriptions that read: “My God, please deliver us / From the Bavarian yoke, its tyranny / And great oppression. / Our soul and also our good are concerned, / Our body and our blood. / God, please give us heroic courage,” and “It must be done, too. Anno 1626.” Such banners are also reported in many eyewitness accounts of the 1626 uprising. But the inscription of the second one was “It must be done.” The added “too” (auch) here in the engraving relates 1626 back to the precedent of 1525. Another engraving called Memory of the Peasant War in 1626 uses the same template of the leaders, but their number is reduced to three, those on the margin are missing; the banners are the same.20 Instead of the accompanying text, the insurgents’ claims are displayed in the same typical handwritinglike font as the banners, and they are brought down to twelve articles. This godly number of Jacob’s sons in the Old Testament and the apostles in the New Testament had already inspired the composition of the peasants’ demands in 1525.21 But in 1626 there were no “12 articles.” Some accounts refer to a list of fifteen articles – and the grievances the peasant deputies addressed to the emperor in a lengthy petition in July 1626 were not numbered, but a historian tried to count them and came to a total number of 138. They were astonishingly elaborate, with references to natural law and a careful argumentation for a right to resist.22 Therefore, the fictitious number “12” definitely alludes to 18 19 20 21 22

Heilingsetzer, Der oberösterreichische Bauernkrieg 1626, 20–21, 23–24. Barbara Huber, “Im Zeichen der Unruhe,” 204–7. A reproduction of the copperplate can be found in Strnadt, Bauernkrieg in Oberösterreich, fig. 12. Blickle, “Nochmals zur Entstehung der Zwölf Artikel,” in Abel and Blickle, eds., Bauer, Reich und Reformation, 286–308. They are published in Stieve, Der oberösterreichische Bauernaufstand des Jahres 1626, 2: 244–60.

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the famous Twelve Articles of 1525 – and this is how Huber interprets them.23 But she has overseen that the odious (second) Reformation Patent from October 1625, the principal bone of contention during the uprising, consisted of twelve points too.24 Therefore the typographical allusion suggested by the twelve articles is ambivalent, which makes the engraving much less derogatory to the peasant actors. Concerning their content, the listed claims do not reproduce the far-reaching claims of 1525, but rather summarize what the insurgents claimed in 1626: they rely on God’s word, want the emperor as their sovereign, and a governor from the region instead of the Bavarian steward, Lutheran judges and mayors in the towns, no Jesuits (the most active agents of Catholic reformation); they want to have the prelates’ Estate substituted for a peasant Estate in the provincial diet “as it was custom in Tyrol”;25 instead of soldiers pillaging the regions, where they are quartered, the peasants want to protect the country themselves; they ask for a general pardon and the recognition of Emperor Matthias’ electoral capitulation that allowed the lords to have a (Protestant) preacher on their estates. The last point (12) is particularly noteworthy: “Concerning all the exiles their goods shall be completely restituted and they shall be restored to their former offices.” This is at odds with social-revolutionary scenarios of a world turned upside down, with peasants aiming to become masters, as asserted in overtly hostile publications. But it perfectly mirrors the interests of the noble Protestant exiles who, after their defeat in the Battle of White Mountain, had mostly fled to the imperial cities of the Reich and kept ostentatiously distant from the events in Upper Austria. The exiled nobles’ influence and lobbying must also be kept in mind when we have a look at a particularly important group of engravings: topographical representations, mainly of battles and sieges. In the course of the uprising they were among the most frequent images circulating in print. Independently of their bias, they show that the insurgents represented a serious military threat and even won battles against regular troops. The topographical style drew 23 24 25

Huber, “Im Zeichen der Unruhe,” 208–211. Sturmberger, Adam Graf Herberstorff, 248–252. Huber sorts out this point in particular as going beyond the peasants’ actual claims; see Huber, “Im Zeichen der Unruhe,” 210. She is right that the insurgents’ detailed petition to the emperor is extremely defensive in tone and content. But the movement as such was heterogeneous, and at different points different claims were voiced. Even though we know about most manifestations of the movement through the lens of the authorities, it does not make sense to dismiss such sources as completely unreliable. And it is noteworthy that a sound justification is delivered here. The insurgents “only” want to obtain what is status quo in other Habsburg provinces, even more so in Tyrol, from where the unwanted priests have been imported to Upper Austria.

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Figure 6.3 Anonymous, Bauern schlagen Herberstorff bei Peuerbach, 1626, copperplate. From Strnadt, Bauernkrieg in Oberösterreich, table 7

on a tradition that had evolved in the sixteenth century, mainly during the French Wars of Religion and the Eighty Years’ War in the Low Countries, when Frans Hogenberg was thriving as an engraver. In the ongoing Thirty Years’ War, important battles fought by generals such as Tilly and Wallenstein were represented in a very similar mode.26 This “elevated” the Upper Austrian events to the level of big international warfare and enhanced the political importance of the actors, who thus did not appear as humble peasants anymore. Already the very first battles around Aschach and Peuerbach were represented in such topographical images (fig. 6.3). Most prominently, though, figures the siege of the capital Linz by the insurgents, which started on June 24 and lasted for about two months. Many topographical views have been published, and they illustrate different stages of the siege. Stephan Fadinger was killed after only about ten days of siege. The incident is depicted (or rather referred to) in what was one of the first topographical representations of Linz besieged – the only contemporaneous visualization of the episode that caused Fadinger’s death (fig. 6.4). It is a (comparatively uncomplex) Simultanbild that shows subsequent events in a single

26

See the engravings of a variety of battles of the Thirty Years’ War, in Paas, German Political Broadsheet, vol. 4. See also the other volumes of this useful collection.

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Figure 6.4 Anonymous, Eigentliche Contrafactur der haupt Stad LINTZ im Erzherzogthumb Österreich ob der Ens, wie sie von der Bawrschafft belägert worden, with added close-up of letter F with the depiction of Fadinger being shot from his horse, n.d., copperplate. From Strnadt, Bauernkrieg in Oberösterreich, table 8

map-picture and the caption indicates both places and events. The outline of the city corresponds roughly to other maps of the period.27 On the right-hand side, very close to the city wall (letter F) one can see the silhouette of a horse separated from its rider (see the close-up). The caption reads: “The main captain’s horse that has been shot dead under his body.” The “main captain” (Oberhauptmann) is Fadinger. The annotation shows that his name was still unknown to the public, but also that the engraver had not yet learned about his subsequent death. This helps to date the broadsheet rather precisely. It was in the afternoon of June 28 that Fadinger had ridden out with some of his people from the insurgent camp in Ebersberg (letter L, today Ebelsberg, a quarter of Linz) for a survey. They wanted to sound an opportune place at the city wall for the next attack. Herberstorff had placed musketeers on top of the buildings close to the wall in order to counter the insurgents’ frequent approaches and their constant appeals to the population of Linz to hand over the city. Two of the musketeers had spotted Fadinger’s squad and fired at him.28 As the caption correctly says, the horse was killed immediately. In real27 28

Bernleithner, Linz an der Donau im Kartenbild der Zeiten. Stieve, Der oberösterreichische Bauernaufstand des Jahres 1626, 2: 146–147.

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ity Fadinger was also wounded in the thigh. His companions helped him back to the insurgents’ camp, and a week later, July 5, he died from gangrene in the wound. Since the engraver knows neither about Fadinger’s injury nor about his subsequent death (prints of later July already mention Fadinger’s successor), he must have produced the picture in early July, depending on where he was (no place of publication is indicated) and how long it took for fresh news to arrive. But the image still captures events of the following days, notably the fire in the suburb of Linz close to the city wall (letter C) that burned down more than seventy houses, most likely on June 30. The caption attributes the fire to the governor, who would have burned down both the suburb and the bridge across the Danube (in the foreground, letter D). Indeed, Herberstorff destroyed the bridge in order to fend off attacks across the Danube, but besiegers and besieged reproached each other with the destruction of the suburb.29 Here the engraver clearly adopts the insurgents’ version but without necessarily taking sides with them. He might simply not have known about Herberstorff’s version of the events, as he was at the same time misinformed about the sequence of the events, since in contrast to the Simultanbild, Fadinger’s horse (F) was killed before the suburb burned down (C). Several topographical engravings of Linz report on one of Herberstoff’s most important military victories during the siege. It is depicted in many publications also as a moral victory. This Illustration of the city of Linz, as it has been fired at and stormed by the peasants until the third day, when they pierced a hole into the wall, but were victoriously repulsed by the governor’s orderly soldiers, with great losses for the peasants, of whom many hundreds have been slain, a part of them captured and the rest routed 30 has only sparse annotations (fig. 6.5). Interestingly, they are mirror-inverted (apparently an error by the engraver). They are rather blurred and it is hard to decipher them. On the left-hand side in the foreground, not far from the church, one can see how the peasants have broken through the wall and swarm into the city. The mirror-inverted inscription reads “Die Bauren,” that is, the peasants, and, for the first one among them, again: “Bauer” (peasant). They are faced by men on horseback. The first one who comes to their encounter is exactly in the center of the whole picture. According to the inscription, he is the “Stathalter” (i.e., governor Herberstorff). The accompanying verses below the engraving clarify what is going on. The peasants are confident to have made the breakthrough and to finally conquer the city, but Herberstorff is well prepared, and his most experienced soldiers 29 30

Ibid., 2: 123. Abbildung der Statt Lintz.

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Figure 6.5 Anonymous, Abbildung der Statt Lintz, wie dieselbe von den Bawren biss an dritten Tag beschossen, n.d., copperplate. Stadtarchiv Ulm

descend on the crowd of the invaders, who have no space to dodge. Many of them are slaughtered on the spot or captured. Herberstorff could have killed them all, but he “is not keen on peasant blood.” Therefore he shows mercy and exhorts them to return to obedience. They are released after having promised to go back home. The peasants are grateful and tell their comrades in arms outside what happened and try to persuade them to stop the siege of the capital and go home, “which might happen soon, when they realize the whole distress.” This is how the poem ends. No reference to the leader of the insurgent peasants can be found, textual or visual. Another topographical engraving (which is not reproduced here), the True and actual counterfeit of the city of Linz, how it has been besieged and stormed by the Ensian [Upper Austrian] peasants on July 19, and how they [the peasants] have finally been repulsed with great losses by the Augsburg engraver Johann

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Georg Mannasser depicts the same event, but it shows “H. Achaz Weillinger’s Zelt” (“Sir Achaz Wiellinger’s tent”) in the background.31 Wiellinger had taken the lead of the insurgents besieging the capital after Stephan Fadinger’s and his brother-in-law Christoph Zeller’s deaths. Since Wiellinger is not mentioned in the accompanying text, the engraver must have assumed that readers/spectators knew about the rebel leader. And indeed, Wiellinger figures in many pamphlets, especially since he survived until the very end of the revolt. However, in most publications he is presented as a commoner, but he was definitely a nobleman. In the True and actual counterfeit the break through the wall takes place on the far side from the Danube and from the spectator, which corresponds to reality rather than the depiction of the Illustration. The subsequent massacres can be seen on the main street that leads to the city gate on the bank of the Danube. The prose text relates the events in more detail and gives more context information. It specifies that about 600 peasants entered the city walls and Herberstorff’s soldiers slaughtered all except for 40 who were released (same story). In the very foreground on the right, one can see two armed peasants cowering, pitchforks lying beside them, with expressions of horror, desperation, and resignation on their faces. To judge from their oversize, they are very close to the viewer. One of them is drawn in profile and seems to gaze (with the viewer) across the Danube onto the brutal spectacle inside the city wall. He is folding his hands and seems to beg for God’s mercy. The other one looks away from Linz and thereby faces the viewer and tears his hair in despair – certainly the visualization of the peasants’ moral defeat. The later phases of the uprising after the end of the siege of Linz are less visualized. Even in a plate produced by the famous Augsburg engraver Wolfgang Kilian, a richly illustrated map of the regions affected by the “peasant war” that is supposed to represent all important settings, the main focus lies on the initial phase and suggests that with the insurgents’ defeat in Linz the uprising has come to an end. Conclusive combats and the final suppression of the revolt much later in 1626 do not figure. Therefore, the plate must have been created while the war was still in full swing, and at the bottom of the plate is indicated “Wolfgang Kilian fecit A° 1626,” and not 1630, as it is often alleged in secondary literature. The map wants to draw a comprehensive picture of what actually happened without judging the actors and their deeds. The captions mostly use the neutral term “peasants” (Pauwrn), and only occasionally the qualification “rebellious” pops up that conveyed the idea of illegitimacy.32

31 32

Mannasser, Wahre vnnd eigendtliche Contrafectur. Paas, German Political Broadsheet, vol. 4, P-1105.

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To sum up the findings about representations during the revolt, one must understand (1) that almost all prints were published outside the region, mainly in the cities of the Reich; (2) that although the actors are sometimes referred to as rebels or insurgents, they are not demonized and in many cases they even elicit sympathy; (3) that they are presented as a serious military force to be reckoned with, notwithstanding their primitive weapons; and (4) that they are depicted as stern fighters for their faith, which makes them, also in ideological terms, an integral part of the ongoing great (Thirty Years’) war. This leads to the question: Why did “the peasants” have such a strong lobby? In fact, among the insurgents there was a considerable amount of city dwellers, intellectuals, and even noblemen: Achaz Wiellinger as Fadinger’s successor, Hans Christoph Haiden von Dorf, and Hans Erhard Stangl von Waldenfels figured among the leaders. Many Protestant nobles supplied the insurgents with weapons, ammunitions, and food, but refused to provide horses (Gültpferde), which would have made them a warring party. Major representatives of the Protestant Estates served as mediators in the insurgents’ negotiations with Bavarian and imperial authorities. And the petitions that the “peasants” addressed to the emperor were extremely elaborate and well argued in terms of political theory. According to the Bavarian agent Leuker, the Protestant nobles “watched the uprising laughingly,” hoping to obtain freedom of worship. In 1635, the Theatrum Europaeum (1635) stated that many observers “assumed there were scores of noblemen and soldiers among the peasants.”33 The press was another important site of support. After their defeat in 1620, many Protestant nobles had immigrated to the cities of the Holy Roman Empire but maintained close ties with their compatriots in Upper Austria. Most likely they supported the production and publication of prints in Augsburg, Nuremberg, Regensburg, Frankfurt, and other cities, and thereby accompanied the uprising in terms of propaganda. But why did they do so starting only in May 1626? Why were the Frankenburg events of May 1625 not covered in print at all, even though the actors fought for freedom of worship? Why did the Protestant nobles refrain from exploiting Herberstorff’s cruel and arbitrary repressions propagandistically to denounce counter-reformation? Apparently until 1625 they had many reasons to presume that they would not be personally affected by Catholic reformation. They had always been exempted from measures of re-Catholicization and their freedom of conscience seemed to be unalienable part of noble privileges. The 33

Eichmeyer, Feigl, and Litschel, Weilss gilt die Seel und auch das Guet, 64; Abelinus, Theatrum Europaeum. For the petition, see Stieve, Der oberösterreichische Bauernaufstand des Jahres 1626, 2: 244–260.

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situation definitely changed only after the Frankenburg dice game – notably with the second reformation patent that was issued in October 1625. To be sure, in this radical patent, which summoned the Upper Austrian Protestants from all Estates either to convert or to emigrate by Easter, “the really ancient lords and masters, whose ancestors had already been veritable lords of this country” and who could “give sufficient proof of that” (for what “they had 6 weeks of time”) were still to some extent personally exempted. But this exemption was very provisional, and it was clearly stated that the emperor could revise it at any time. Furthermore, all other regulations also applied to these “ancient lords.” They were not allowed to hold Protestant services in their castles, public or secret, or Protestant confessions, sacrament, baptism, marriages, within or outside the country. They were obliged to dismiss their Protestant bailiffs (Pfleger), administrators, scribes, preceptors, and masters of ceremonies and to replace them with Catholics – and this within a period of half a year. They were also prohibited from sending their children abroad to un-Catholic places. They were not allowed anymore to arouse anger among the Catholics through singing, disputing, and eating meat on Catholic fast days. Those who felt that this offended their peace of conscience had the right to emigrate on the basis of the Peace of Augsburg. Those who would not comply with the sovereign’s prohibitions and orders would be punished as violators or as disruptors of the public order and concomitantly be expulsed from the country.34 Formerly the Counter-Reformation had concerned the commoners; now the freedom of faith of the nobility was severely affected. Therefore it was only in 1626 that Upper Austrian Protestant nobles started to support the commoners’ struggle for freedom of conscience. At the same time they were eager not to dirty their hands, since their defeat of 1620 had taught them how risky overt participation in a “rebellion” was. For this reason it is no coincidence that the pamphlets and broadsheets published in the Reich cities by noble exiles’ initiative stressed the peasant character of the rebellion and played down all nonpeasant elements, and this was done by textual and especially by visual means, which were known to be particularly effective. 3

After the Uprising

What happened after the insurgents’ defeat in terms of media coverage? How did visual representations change after the final suppression of the revolt in late 1626? 34

Sturmberger, Adam Graf Herberstorff, 250–251.

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Normally, early modern governments reasserted their rule and authority by public rituals of punishment and execution of the “ringleaders,” which the masses (of former followers) had to attend in order to be dissuaded from their aberration and rallied to obedience. In Central and Western Europe these spectacles of suffering were often visualized and disseminated via broadsheets and pamphlets. Three decades earlier in the aftermath of the long-lasting Austrian peasant uprising of 1594–1597, the whole program had been played out. Punishments were brutal, but also sophisticated and nuanced. And they were represented in print, even in a colored drawing that showed in detail the whole palette of punishments inflicted upon the alleged “ringleaders,” including chopping off hands, noses, and ears, along with impalement, disembowelment, and ripping out hearts. Body parts remained exposed at public places for years and decades.35 In 1626/27 the situation was different. Already in the course of the revolt the looting repressive troops, especially those led by the Duke of Holstein, had been notorious for their brutality. They cut off body parts (noses and ears) not only of living rebels but also of civilians. Popular grievances and complaints show that these measures were hardly meant and certainly not read or even accepted as (legitimate) rituals of punishment. They only provoked anger and resentment against the occupation armies and largely contributed to delegitimize them. It was often emphasized that they targeted also women and children, symbols of innocence.36 After the suppression of the revolt in November/ December 1626, things were complicated by the multiplication of authorities. Both Bavarian and imperial occupation armies were roaming in the country and plundering, not to mention the infamous Holsteinian succor regiments. As representative of the Bavarian elector, Herberstorff exercised government, but the emperor as suzerain had his say. At the same time, parts of the search and persecution of ringleaders were handed over to local authorities, especially monasteries, some of which had been severely affected by the uprising; they had to coordinate actions with the provincial government. Herberstorff did not attribute the rebellion to the peasants alone. He tried hard to find the men that were pulling the strings, those who had authored the detailed and well-argued complaints addressed to the emperor and other manifestoes; those who would have inspired the insurgents and given them their resolution and firmness. He did not want to content himself with the military leaders in the foreground, most of them burghers, artisans, innkeepers, 35 36

For a detailed discussion of the picture and an identification of the represented rebel leaders from court records, see Otto Kainz, Das Kriegsgerichtsprotokoll. See Warhafftiger Bericht.

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and such, sometimes a regular peasant, and predicants, among them a mysterious “student” from the Reich, who was killed in one of the last battles. The governor searched for hidden agency in the background and suspected the Protestant Estates of having masterminded the uprising. But on his requests to their representatives, who had served as mediators in negotiations during the uprising, he was politely brushed off. Even though he accused them of having treated the insurgents in a much too gentle way instead of using a language appropriate to the “evilness” of their deeds, he could not find proof of their actual complicity and guilt. It was as if he hit upon an impenetrable wall.37 The country’s graveyard peace must have reminded Herberstorff of the quiet before the storm in the year after the Frankenburg dice game, when considerable parts of the population had secretly prepared for insurgency without him being in the least informed about their activities. Indeed, in his reports to the elector and in his negotiations with the representatives of the Holy Roman emperor, he emphasized that the 12,000 soldiers present in Upper Austria could only suck out the population of a country that lay already barren. He dreaded that the heavy charge of the soldiers quartered in people’s houses at their expense would reignite the uprising and was extremely anxious to have occupation forces reduced. However, public executions as a government’s response to a huge and violent rebellion were much too self-evident to be suspended. They were considered indispensable as manifestation of the government’s authority and a return to order and obedience. None of the involved parties, neither the emperor and his commissaries nor the Bavarian elector and governor Herberstorff, questioned the necessity of some “exemplary executions.”38 There was discreet dissent to the confiscation of convicts’ goods. The imperial side was much more reluctant, arguing that eventually the insurgents had not raised arms against their suzerain (the emperor) and their uprising was therefore not a proper case of lèse-majesté. This was no trivial controversy. It was the emperor as suzerain of the country who decided about the confiscation of goods in the last instance, but it was the elector who benefited from confiscated property according to the pledge agreement. Moreover, if the uprising had been exclusively directed against Bavarian rule and not against his imperial policy (of which the Reformation patent was the most constituent part), it would be much easier for the emperor to reject Bavarian claims for compensation for military aid.39

37 38 39

Stieve, Der oberösterreichische Bauernaufstand des Jahres 1626, 1: 309–311. Ibid., 1: 311; 2: 225. Ibid., 311–312.

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Roughly one hundred ringleaders were singled out. But many of them had already died in battle or prison, and another part was amnestied and released to forced labor in Viennese moats of fortification. Twenty people were publicly executed, ten in March (one of them posthumously) and ten in April 1627. Only Achaz Wiellinger was properly buried after being beheaded with the sword, a prerogative of nobility. Most of the others were beheaded or hanged and quartered, before their body parts were displayed in public places, either in Linz and its surroundings or in their former spheres of activity. Stefan Fadinger and his brother-in-law Christof Zeller were dug out from their graves, reburied in unconsecrated ground, and gallows erected above their new graves; their houses were destroyed and their families banned from the country.40 Apparently, this was considered the government’s duty. Herberstorff complied with what was expected from him, but he was extremely uneasy about these rituals, and he did not even think of restaging a dice game à la Frankenburg, even though he was convinced – as in 1625 – of not having got hold of the real wirepullers. In a letter to the elector, he asked for vacation in Bohemia for the time of the executions. If he was in Linz during the executions, he argued, this would only provoke popular anger and hatred against him.41 No printed record, broadsheet or pamphlet, and no picture of the executions have survived, and most likely nothing of the sort has ever been published, abroad or in Upper Austria or Vienna. Obviously, Herberstorff felt that his government had its back to the wall and that a campaign to publicize the executions even further in print would backfire on him. The printers of the Reich cities, who had previously published so eagerly about Upper Austrian events, waited in vain for template-reports or pictures from the victorious authorities. Eventually they kept silent.42 Diverging Bavarian and imperial interests might have played a role for this silence, too. But apparently the authorities’ uneasiness with regard to this ferocious people’s war of religion against re-Catholicization efforts went much deeper. So it is remarkable that when in the 1630s, after the restitution of the Ländlein ob der Enns to the emperor (in 1628), the uprising resumed on a smaller scale in the Mühlviertel, where it smoldered for several years until the leader Martin Aichinger was captured and publicly executed in 1636 in Linz together with six of his followers, the emperor seemed to pursue a very similar 40 41 42

Ibid., 313–314. Ibid., 2: 226n6. In the end he was not granted vacation by Maximilian. Probably he retired to his estate in order not to show up, when the rituals were staged. Only in 1635 did the Theatrum Europaeum publish a rather detailed historical account of the Upper Austrian peasant war (written by Abelinus), but the reader learned hardly anything about executions. Abelinus, Theatrum Europaeum, 1054.

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no-picture strategy. To be sure, there is a copperplate depicting the executions made by the famous engraver Wenzel Hollar. Hollar was accompanying the Earl of Arundell to the emperor, who was residing in Linz at that time. As English ambassador, the earl and his suite were invited to attend the executions, a rather common practice, since execution days were considered days of feast. Arundell’s scribe depicted the events in his travel diary. Upon his return to London in the following year (1637), he published the diary in London, with the written account of the execution, but without Hollar’s drawing.43 It is hard to imagine that Arundell would have refused including Hollar’s work, if Ferdinand II had not imposed this constraint on the engraver, who was a subject of the Holy Roman Empire. If there are no pictures in print depicting the suppression of the 1626 peasant war and subsequent punishments, this does not mean that no pictures of the revolt were produced after its suppression. Interestingly, even though the government’s main concern was apparently to obliterate the memory of the revolt, a whole series of pictures has been preserved, most of them oil paintings. We do not know the artists, and in most cases we can only speculate about the commissioners, their intentions, and their motives. We can distinguish three types of images: (1) pictures denouncing the peasants’ misdeeds, (2) portraits of Stefan Fadinger, and (3) a series of twelve oil paintings representing consecutive battle scenes of the “peasant war” in the manner of a comic strip. The first type is the easiest to be assessed. These images came from Catholics, often ecclesiastic authorities, who have fallen prey to the insurgents. One picture is a votive offering to the Church of Hartkirchen (near Eferding in the Hausruckviertel), dated 1628, that has recently been studied by Roland Forster (fig. 6.6). The commemorative inscription (in German) elucidates the perspective: “Wishing his dear brother, Horatio de Thomasis and Catharine his wife, who have been pitiably slain by the rebels on May 19, 1626, in this place, to find their eternal rest. Aliprandus Nicolaus de Thomasis, Dean in Linz.” This is further commented on with Matthew 5:10 (in Latin): “Blessed are they who suffer for the sake of righteousness [For theirs is the kingdom of heaven].” The picture shows three peasants, one of them clearly recognizable as a woman, on a square in front of a village church (the church of Hartkirchen), armed with lances and mace, murdering the Jesuit administrator Horatio de Thomasis, his wife, Catharina, and a Franciscan traveling through. The peasants are armed with swords, lances, and maces. Other villagers are joining the scene from the 43

Crowne et al., A True Relation of All the Remarkable Places and Passages Observed in the Travels of the Right Honourable Thomas Lord Howard, June 8, 1638.

Image and Text as Propaganda

Figure 6.6 Anonymous, Votive offering to the Catholic Church of Hartkirchen, n.d., panel painting, 2840 × 1650 cm (votive shrine). Photograph by Roland Forster

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nearby house. People are watching from the windows and seem to encourage the murderers. The Franciscan is already lying dead behind a garden fence; Horatius de Thomasis is about to fall, pierced by a sword and hit with the knob of a mace. He apparently wanted to help his wife, who is already lying on the ground. On the left-hand side, the maid is fleeing, and one peasant tries to reach her, too, with a stroke of his sword. While being killed, the spouses are imploring Jesus and Mary for help. From Catharina’s mouth and Horatius’ head thin strips of breath are rising up: they exhale their souls, which are rising to a crowned Madonna with a scepter in her right and the infant Jesus in her left hand, the Holy Spirit hovering above her. The Virgin is flanked by two of the most popular early Christian martyrs of Catholic tradition, Saint Catherine of Alexandria on her right, and Saint Stephen on her left. Angels hover above these martyrs. This endows the murderous scene with meaning: the pious couple and the monk are presented as martyrs, who suffer “for the sake of righteousness,” that is, for their true (Catholic) faith, against all violence by the heretic insurgent peasant mob that even counts bestialized women in its ranks. In the case of the votive offering, the donator and his motives are explicit, but an oil painting of a burning convent that is today preserved in the Regional Museum of Upper Austria in Linz raises more problems (fig. 6.7). There is no accompanying text that would provide any information about the context, and we do not even know which convent is represented. In the center of the picture we see the burning church. Belfry and roof are almost destroyed, and flames burst out of the windows. People on the roof raise their hands in despair, trying to flee from the flames, and the only way to escape is to leap to their death. The sky is gloomily lit by the huge fire and dense smoke. The cloistral residential buildings surrounding the church are already aflame on the left (to judge from the sky), whereas those on the right are severely menaced by the flames, which the wind blows from the church in their direction. Looters are rushing out of the doors of these buildings on the right and out of the church doors, carrying heavy objects. Armed looters are also dominating the scene in the convent yard. They are loading their loot onto horseback, and in some cases their loot is a nun, even though this is not more than an allusion to ensuing scenes of rape. Other nuns (all in white) are gathered in an agitated state and seem to implore the looters to release their fellow nuns. On the left-hand side in the background, the gate is open, and more armed invaders stream into the yard, while a flock of sheep is either fleeing from the fire or is driven away. In the foreground on the left, an escort of invaders holds a bearded man in black, most likely the abbot or a provost, and leads him forcibly to a man on horseback, apparently the invaders’ leader, who is surrounded by a small guard. While some men of the escort are also carrying loot on their shoulders, one of them is holding a

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Figure 6.7 Anonymous, Burning monastery, n.d., oil painting. Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, Linz

buckler with a white cross on red background. In the central foreground, we can see a heap of precious objects, such as carpets and blankets, apparently also booty. The plundering invaders do not shy away from murdering civilians, as the stretched body to the right of the heap of booty demonstrates. Most likely this picture is meant to represent the sack of the convent of Schlägl in the Mühlviertel (very close to the border to Bohemia). In March 1627, the provost Martin Greysing, who led the convent after the former abbot’s death, addressed a supplication to the imperial and Bavarian commissaries in Linz. He described in detail how the convent and appendant parishes were occupied by the “insurgent burghers and peasants” at the end of May 1626. With his council he managed to flee to Bohemia (Krumau). His deputy was pressured by the insurgents, who wanted the convent to support their insurgent warfare. The deputy declined in a more or less diplomatic way, while having to concede the occupation, which lasted several months until General Breuner’s troops arrived in the vicinity and chased the rebels away. According to his supplication, Greysing and his council returned to Schlägl on September 12, when he found the convent considerably impoverished. As he affirms, he considered the revolt to be definitely suppressed and immediately started to repair damages and purchase replacements for the losses. But already in October the uprising regained vigor in the Mühlviertel, and the convent and its parishes were again attacked by the rebels, this time under the leader David Spatt, a baker from

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Figure 6.8 Anonymous, Stephan Fadinger in the monastery of Kremsmünster, n.d., oil on wood. From Strnadt, Bauernkrieg in Oberösterreich, table 26

Haienbach. Whereas in May the insurgents had only threatened to set fire to the convent, this time they did it unhesitatingly, so that convent and church burned down to the walls. Greysing particularly deplores the destruction of the high altar that had only been erected at great cost in the previous year. The main aim of the supplication is to accuse fourteen surrounding parishes of complicity with the rebels and to ask the imperial and electoral authorities for permission to pledge these parishes to restitution via extraordinary taxes. The picture apparently has the function of emphasizing and reinforcing this claim by highlighting the brutality and violence of the insurgents.44 The third painting of this type comes from the convent of Kremsmünster (in the Traunviertel) (fig. 6.8). The convent was occupied by the insurgents still under Stefan Fadinger’s command on May 28. The abbot and many inhabitants fled to the convent Admont (in Obersteiermark), and the remaining staff, led by the prior, was anxious to satisfy the peasants’ wishes, especially for food and 44

The supplication has been reproduced in its entirety in Kurz, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Landes Österreich ob der Enns (1805–1809), 269–280.

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drink, which created a rather friendly atmosphere between convent people and insurgents, so that the convent was spared from looting and destruction.45 The painting is a rather moderate caricature of Fadinger46 and was probably created in the years after the uprising, when Fadinger had been made something like an icon of the “peasant war.” It shows the refectory of the convent: Fadinger is seated at the table on the left, while all the other figures are standing, their hats lifted. The three persons in black behind the table, apparently his peasants, are raising their glasses in a toast to him. Three waiters from the convent in the middle of the picture (in the original color picture they are in red) seem to be serving more food on tin plates, directed by another peasant in black. In the picture, Fadinger seems to be the only person eating from the many dishes exposed on the table, among them an almost untouched plate with artichokes. But to judge from the verses, the other peasants are participating in the orgy. On the right we can see a small separate room, called Waidtasche, where a person is pushed into an oven-like hole. According to a legend transmitted in the monastery, Fadinger did not know artichokes and cut his mouth and tongue when trying to eat them. The master of ceremonies could not repress a pitying smile. Annoyed by the pain and what he interpreted as mischievousness, Fadinger had him thrown into the Waidtasche as a detention room. But the peasant leader was rapidly conciliated with some pieces of gold and released the master of ceremonies from his prison.47 The accompanying verses are presented as a monologue by the peasant leader, who praises the good food and wine he and his peasants have “guzzled.” With respect to the stewards he says: “Indeed, they honored me as a good man, but thought: couldn’t we be far away from here!” The artichoke story is not told, but Fadinger says that one of the men “wanted to be master of ceremonies,” but “had forcibly to be thrust into the Waidtasche.” Only the last two verses address the viewer on authorial voice: “What you have seen with your eyes, has taken place in 1626 in Kremsmünster.” Fadinger is thus presented as a slightly capricious, but rather innocuous leader, realistic enough to know (and clever enough to accept) that the reverence displayed by those subjected to his power should 45 46

47

The prior acted in accordance with his abbot, who, as president of the court chamber (Hofkammerpräsident), led a party that initially opposed to dispatching troops against the insurgents. The combination of text and image reminds Elisabeth Gruber of a votive offering. She finds the caricature more offensive, especially because it is the “Schwenglman” (the Reaper), who pours the best wine; see Gruber, “Die Aneignung aufrührerischer Elemente als Erinnerungsgeschichte.” Hartmann, Historische Volkslieder und Zeitgedichte vom sechzehnten bis neunzehnten Jahrhundert, 1: 200–202. See also Keller, “Wie der Hausruckviertler zum Rebell wurde,” 25.

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not be taken for true respect, voluntary submission, or even love. At the same time the commissioners of the picture needed to stress the convent people’s own continuous loyalty to the authorities during the revolt. The image of Fadinger in Kremsmünster has to be seen against the backdrop of an iconization of the rebel leader, positive or negative, as it found expression in numerous portraits that constitute the second category of postrevolt images. More than twenty portraits of Fadinger can be found in different Austrian museums.48 Some of the portraits have definitely been created after Josef II’s patents of toleration (in the 1780s) that (re)legalized Protestant worship. But for most of them it is extremely difficult to assess an approximate date of origin. Many of the images, generally oil paintings, are presented as travesties, when in accompanying texts the rebel leader is called “colonel of the God of all” (aller Gotts Oberist). But this is hardly surprising: in principle, the revolt was taboo. Portraying a rebel leader was an infringement, but depicting him as a positive hero was considered as a direct incitement to revolt. Nevertheless, if we ignore the mockery in the texts, Fadinger is not represented unfavorably in visual terms. In many cases he is even dressed in red and white, the colors of Upper Austria as they were (already) used in coats of arms.49 Among the portraits produced rather shortly after the revolt, which served in one way or the other as templates for later pictures, we can roughly distinguish two different types (figs. 2.3.9 a and b).50 In one type of portrait, Fadinger is shown bareheaded with relatively long hair, a mace in his right hand and a flail in the crook of his left arm, wearing a brown coat with toby collar. The only text reads “The colonel of the Gods of all Stöfl Fädinger” and “1628” (most likely this is no error about the actual year of the peasant war, as it has been suggested in the catalogue of the Regional Museum of Upper Austria, but rather indicates the date of origin of the picture), the year in which Upper Austria was solemnly restituted to the emperor. The portrait exists in two versions, which appear as exactly the same at first sight, but they diverge in a significant detail. In one version, Fadinger is holding a chalice in his left hand (fig. 6.9b);51 in the other version, he holds the flail 48 49 50 51

Gruber lists the city museum of Wels, the archive of the convent of Lambach, the Fadinger Museum in St. Agatha, and the Military Museum in Vienna. See Gruber, “Aneignung,” 423. Hoffmann, Das Wappen Des Landes Oberösterreich. Heilingsetzer, Der oberösterreichische Bauernkrieg 1626, 42–45. Gruber distinguishes eight different representations in Gruber, “Aneignung,” 423. Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum (Regional Museaum of Upper Austria), Invnr. G96. Another painting shows Fadinger with chalice, too. Here Fadinger is unarmed, bareheaded, stouter than in other portraits, with a receding hairline that makes him look older, standing on a bare hill (like in many other portraits), holding in the left hand his hat, and in the right the chalice. See Straub et al., Der Oberösterreichische Bauernkrieg 1626, fig. 2. I am indebted to both Lothar Schultes, from the Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum,

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Figure 6.9 Anonymous, Two versions of Der aller Gotts ober … Stöfl Fädinger, 1628, oil painting. Museumsverein Stephan Fadinger, St. Agatha

exactly the same way in the crook of his left arm (fig. 6.9a), but the hand is empty.52 Of course, this detail is far from being innocent. The chalice in the hands of a lay person stands for Communion under both kinds, that is, for the freedom of Protestant worship the insurgents fought for with such fervor. Normally, the chalice would not be held in the left hand, and in other portraits that highlight the rebel leader’s confession (and the entire revolt’s Protestant outlook) he is represented without weapons, holding the chalice in his right and his hat in the left. Therefore, it is most likely that the purely martial picture without chalice was produced at first. Then it was copied and it might have even been another painter who added the chalice, in order to mark the revolt as a war of religion.53

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and Alois Ferihumer, from the Fadinger-Museum in St. Agata, for sending me photos of those parts of their collections relevant to my enquiry. The version is reproduced (but not commented on) in Werfring, “Symbolfigur für Stadt und Land.” Some peasants used seals with a chalice to expose their confession. They even mentioned or exposed these seals during the interrogations when facing execution after the repression of the uprising; see Keller, “Wie der Hausruckviertler,” 31. This is why it is unlikely that all Fadinger portraits with the chalice were mock representations produced by the rebels’ enemies. Therefore, I interpret the portrait with the chalice in his left hand as a pejorative vilifying answer to his other portraits that conflates the template with the other portraits.

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In the other type of portraits, Fadinger is represented with rapier, musket, and powder horn, in pourpoint with sash, knee breeches and jackboots with spurs, a yodel hat with panache on his head, standing on a hill in front of a broad panorama. Here the difference between existing versions is more obvious: for instance, the background changes from a mountainous landscape to a big city. More significant changes concern the colors of garment. Whereas one version shows his panache in red and blue,54 another one has it in red and white,55 the colors of Upper Austria, which can be meant both in the affirmative to stress that Fadinger’s protest movement was fighting for Upper Austria (against the Bavarians), or as a denunciation of his hubris that made him pretend to represent Upper Austria. The most revealing detail, though, is the presence or absence of a small sheet of paper hanging out of his belt, a “Passau chit” (Passauer Zettel), the trace of “Passau art” (Passauer Kunst) that was allegedly practiced in the insurgent camp.56 In his Swedish Intelligencer of 1632, the journalist William Watts explained Passau art to his English readers, since it was considered a German specificity: “The charme which they weare makes their bodies Gefrorn, that is, frozen, and hard…. No bullet nor iron weapon can pierce them.”57 Many such magic practices had existed since the Middle Ages. In 1611, in the fratricidal war between Emperor Rudolf II and his brother Matthias, a hangman from Passau, Kaspar Neithart, started to sell magic chits on a large scale to Matthias’ soldiers, who defeated Rudolf’s demoralized troops almost without any losses. The hangman became a wealthy man, and the reputation of “Passau art” was born. It gained momentum during the Thirty Years’ War, when innumerable mercenaries recurred to this ars mortem evitandi that pledged to make them invulnerable, in general for twenty-four hours after swallowing down such a magic scrap of paper.58 In a version of the Fadinger portrait with rapier, musket, and such from the mid-eighteenth century, the Passau chits are not only hanging out of Fadinger’s belt, but one of them is legible and reads “Rebeller!” (Rebel) (fig. 6.10). The 54 55 56 57 58

See the reproduction of the image in Eichmeyer, Feigl, and Litschel, Weilss gilt die Seel und auch das Guet, fig. III. A rather low resolution is provided at https://commons.wikimedia .org/wiki/File:Stefan_Fadinger.jpg. Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum Invnr. G95. A reproduction can be found on the website of the Fadinger Museum in St. Agata, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/a/ab/Stefan_Fadinger_Museum_St_Agatha.jpg. According to Gruber, the Passau chit is missing in none of these portraits. But there are several versions, in which I cannot discern it; see Gruber, “Aneignung,” 424. Quoted in Funke, “Naturali legitimâque Magica,” 21–22. Hartmann, Neue Teuffels-Stücklein.

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Figure 6.10

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Anonymous, Stephan Fädtinger Aller Baurn Obrister Regierdt, Anno 1622, Anno 1750, 1750, oil painting. Wikimedia commons, https://upload.wikimedia.org/ wikipedia/commons/2/20/Stefan_Fadinger_Bild.jpg

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accompanying verses specify the employed magic practice and how it failed: “I am the awesome Stöpflman, I can roast and guzzle the lords, I was founded adamantine like ore; however, the lords have shot me dead; therefore I warn you faithfully again, never start a war with the lords. From this perjury there will be no good; it is evil and a pity for the peasant blood.”59 The allegation that insurgents recurred to Passau art to make themselves insensitive against both cut-and-thrust weapons and bullets can be found in a few prints of the later phase of the “peasant war.” The earliest version I found is in a broadsheet depicting the insurgents’ victory against the Holsteinian troops (those who were reputed for their barbarianism). The battle is represented in the background, on the far side of the Danube, with the Holsteinian soldiers fleeing from the attacking peasant units back to Passau. (A detailed textual account of this battle near Neunkirchen is given in the accompanying text below the picture.)60 In the foreground, on this side of the Danube, an oversized heroic figure with a flail in his right and sword in its sheath dominates the whole picture. The two verses on both sides of the figure read: “This instrument is called a flail, And Passau art quickly dilutes/disperses it.” (Dis Instrument ein Flegl genent, Paßauer kunst lösts auff behent). The inscription is ambiguous. The problem is the “lösts auf,” that is, “löst es auf” (dissolves/ dissipates/cancels it). Grammatically “it” (es) could be “the instrument,” the flail in the preceding verse. In this case Passau art could invalidate the flail’s force, a force either from the mere will power of its owner, or, but not necessarily, from magic preparation. This would amount to the advice (ironical or serious) addressed to the fleeing Holsteinian troops to take the chance of their stay in Passau and to rearm themselves with Passau art in order to be prepared against the peasants’ flails for the next time. The other possible reading would be that “it” refers to the Holsteinian troops visualized in the background. In this reading the insurgents would have used Passau art to transform their shabby flails into silver bullets in order to dissipate the Holsteinian units. But here it is not entirely clear which side is supposed to recur to magic practices.

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Rather strange is the year 1622 as the time indication of Fadinger’s “regency” in the inscription on both sides of the “peasant colonel’s” head: “Stephan Fädtinger Aller Baurn Obrister regierdt, Anno 1622 [sic!] Anno 1750.” The picture is available at https://upload .wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Stefan_Fadinger_Bild.jpg. Warhafftiger Bericht / Welcher Massen Die OberOsterreichschen Bauren Des Hertzogs von Hollstein Regiment / Welches Ihnen Grossen Schaden Gethan / Bey Neunkirchen Unvorsehens Uberfallen Und Geschlagen. On the Holsteinian intervention and their defeat near Neunkirchen, see Heilingsetzer, Der oberösterreichische Bauernkrieg 1626, 20.

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Figure 6.11

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Anonymous, Twelve oil paintings on the peasant war of 1626, n.d., oil painting, 140 × 90 cm. Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, Linz

Then, as mentioned before, the allegation that the insurgents had magicians in their ranks pops up in Pappenheim’s report about his ferocious battles in late October and November.61 However, only in the aftermath of the revolt more significant importance is attributed to Passau art. “Peasants’ talk” about recourse to magic practice is quoted frequently. But most noteworthy is a series of twelve oil paintings. They represent consecutive battle scenes of the “peasant war” in the manner of a “comic strip,”62 accompanied by verses for each picture (fig. 6.11). The pictures are painted in a popular style, and the whole series exists in three versions that differ only

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Pappenheim, Warhafte Relation. However, apparently the allegations of the insurgents’ recourse to magic practices do not figure in his original report, which has consecutively been reworked and sensationalized for the Bavarian press, where it had been initially published (Ingolstadt) before being reproduced by Aperger in Augsburg. On the original report, see Stieve, Der oberösterreichische Bauernaufstand des Jahres 1626. To be sure, “comic strip” is no contemporaneous term. For early modern print culture, it has been introduced by Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip.

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insignificantly from each other.63 The undated pictures must have been produced in the years after the brutal repressions. Each picture represents a battle. The peasant troops can be identified by their maces. Bavarian, imperial, and Holsteinian troops often carry firearms, and parts of them are cavalry. In visual terms the scenery is rather stereotypical. The background is always dominated by an indistinguishable fortified town, in front of which ferocious battles take place. Every picture is accompanied by a stanza of four verses as “subtitles.” The verses are written from the perspective of a collective “we,” the peasants. However, the focus is exclusively on the military side of the movement. Nothing is said about the insurgents’ grievances and claims. Religion and confessional struggle are not mentioned. The number of scenes (12) evokes numerous associations, such as with the Via Crucis and with the Twelve Articles of 1525 (see above).64 At the same time, Passau art figures prominently. We find it explicitly in the pictures depicting the battles near Geiersberg (7), Eferding (10), and Lambach (11). The seventh picture of the cycle on Geiersberg actually refers to the battle of Kornrödt, about 3.5 kilometers to the east of Geiersberg (fig. 6.12). In September 1626, the Bavarian troops under Lindlo’s command passed the frontier to Upper Austria near Geiersberg. They marched towards Pram. After successfully dispersing about 2,000 peasants near Kornrödt, Lindlo learned about the defeat of the Holsteinian troops about 30 kilometers farther to the north(east) in Neukirchen am Walde. He reassembled his troops in order to attack the victorious insurgents, who were already heading into his direction. Again it came to an encounter near Kornrödt. He had his infantry on the wings attack the peasants. But the musketeers behaved awkwardly, fired all at once, which did not give them enough time for reloading their muskets, since the insurgents were attacking furiously in spite of the fusillade. This caused confusion and disarray in the Bavarian units. Instead of helping the wings with the musketeers, his cavalry acted undecidedly and soon began to flee, which resulted in general dissolution and flight. In the picture, the insurgent peasants with their maces are storming from the left to the right against their enemy, and the Bavarian musketeers, cavalrymen, and horses are either slain or fleeing to the right. The verses of the text specify to what the peasants owe their victory: “Now we have again succeeded in this quarrel / That’s why we don’t eat cow dung. We were all frozen to stone / otherwise we wouldn’t have won the battle.” 63 64

Vocelka, Leeb, and Scheichl, Renaissance und Reformation, Cat.- 24.9, 624. See also Gruber, “Aneignung,” 422. The Via Crucis association is highlighted by Gruber, “Aneignung,” 422.

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Figure 6.12

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Close-up of fig. 6.11, no. 7, Battle of Geiersberg. Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, Linz

The chronology of the cycle is somewhat blurred. The eleventh picture (fig. 6.13) depicts the battle of Lambach that took place on October 16, long before the battle of Eferding (i.e., the Emling wood on November 9), which is depicted in the previous picture. It was after the peasant victory near Wels against Löbl’s troops (October 12) that the insurgents headed toward Lambach. Protestants detested the prelates of the local convent in Lambach as much as they did the authorities of Schlägl, since they had also incarcerated those who refused to convert to Catholicism. Lambach was held by two imperial units and a squadron of cavaliers under the command of Leßle, who defended the city walls against the insurgents’ attack, until reinforcements of about 1,000 soldiers under the command of Öxl arrived (October 16). According to Öxl’s report, his cavalry was initially pushed back: “If I had not had so many musketeers unremittingly taking turns shooting, this could have caused big confusion [in my lines]. In the end it went well, thanks to God. For I now

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Figure 6.13

Close-up of fig. 6.11, no. 11, Battle of Lambach. Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, Linz

know for certain that more than 600 [peasants] remained dead [on the battlefield]. […] The peasant leader, the hatter [Alexander Treiber, a hatter from Waizenkirchen], has also been killed, and we have secured two big cannons that shoot balls of up to 12 pounds.”65 The picture shows the peasants fleeing to the left, chased by the (revived) horsemen wielding their scimitars, with many peasants lying slain on the ground in the foreground. In the accompanying verses, the peasants complain about their leader, the hatter: “Captain Hatter, he is a man / He can do a lot of wound blessing, but still he runs away / He cries that we shall all retreat in order / We follow him and in fact we also run away.” It is not clear who is the “hatter” among the fleeing peasants in the picture. In any case, he is qualified 65

Quoted from Eichmeyer, Feigl, and Litschel, Weilss gilt die Seel und auch das Guet, 143. On the hatter’s identity, see Stieve, Der oberösterreichische Bauernaufstand des Jahres 1626, 2: 62–63.

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Figure 6.14

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Close-up of fig. 6.11, no. 10, Battle of Eferding. Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, Linz

as a magician proficient in “wound blessing,” that is, the art of making people invulnerable. At the same time he is reproached for not making use of his art and sounding instead the retreat for all the insurgents under his command. The tenth picture in the circle refers to the battle in the Emling wood (near Eferding), where the insurgent troops were defeated by the united imperial, Bavarian and Holsteinian troops under the supreme command of general Pappenheim on November 9 (fig. 6.14). The image brings counter-magic into play. The united troops were coming from Linz to relieve Eferding. The insurgents used the Emling wood, a few kilometers before the town, as a natural redoubt, from where they attacked the united armies. As usual they had prepared for battle with spiritual chants. And “the student,” one of their leaders and main predicants, had preached a sermon, in which he is said to have summoned them: “The Lord has died for us, now let’s die for the Lord.” Accordingly, as in preceding battles, the insurgents completely defied death and fought “like infernal furies,” as Pappenheim described the situation. But in contrast to

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other commanders of repressive troops, Pappenheim had thoroughly prepared his soldiers. They did not retreat or even flee under the enormous impact of the insurgents’ onslaught. Herberstorff’s Crobates, Polish cavalrymen with long lances, formed the vanguard of Pappenheim’s forces, whereas the infantry acted in a well-coordinated way, with the pikemen thrusting into the holes shot by the musketeers’ concerted fusillades. The insurgents were lacking powder, and those with muskets could in most cases fire only once. But instead of retreating, they used their improvised cut-and-thrust weapons, and, ultimately, their bodies: Pappenheim described them as a “stone wall” or as a chain of “rocks.” “All but four of [the Crobates’] lances were broken in the peasants’ bodies.” To judge from his report, it was only with the help of the Almighty that the allied forces finally won the battle. But the combat claimed very high casualties and ended in a horrible slaughtering of the peasants. Pappenheim estimated the number of killed enemies at 3,000.66 In the painting, the peasants, who seem to hold their maces almost in the manner of crucifixes, are attacking from the left, while Pappenheim’s troops are advancing from the right, with the Crobates in the forefront. It is again the verses that specify the magic dimension: “Neighbors [Nachtbaurn], I would have sworn that we were all frozen like steel and iron. But the Crobates are dissolving our wound-blessing. Look, look, how they pierce with their Cobis into the blessed parts.” Pappenheim’s report had only vaguely suggested the insurgents’ recourse to Passau art and attributed his victory to God’s interference, which was substantiated and blown up in the Bavarian pamphlet, but the picture with its subtext clearly evokes magic and counter-magic. We do not know who created or commissioned the series of twelve oil paintings. As in the case of the Fadinger portraits, popular style, language, and motives are densely interwoven with what seems like introjects coming from a power that aims at discrediting the insurgents. But the twelve paintings have even more elements in common with the above-cited “Fadinger Song.” For instance, the term Nach(t)baur (“near peasant,” for Nachbar/neighbor) is used as a form of address and appeal to action among the peasants, both in the subtitles of the oil paintings and in the song.67 Both relate the entire course of the revolt from the perspective of the “Nachbaurn,” including defeat 66 67

On the battle from a viewpoint of military history, see Heilingsetzer, Der oberösterreichische Bauernkrieg 1626, 23–24; Stieve, Der oberösterreichische Bauernaufstand des Jahres 1626, 1: 293–294. In the later nineteenth century, Julius Strnadt received a poem from a peasant near Grieskirchen that must have been attached as a placard to the peasants’ banners and starts in the same way: “You neighbors, come together rapidly.” But Stieve assumes that the poem has been produced later, apparently in a rather awkward attempt to imitate

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and repentance. The “Fadinger song,” though, is much more detailed and shifts between the dominant collective “we” and an occasional individual “I” of a leader. At the beginning, the first-person narrator is Fadinger. He teaches the peasants Passau art, which he has learned as a soldier: “I show you the art of protecting yourself against shooting. So that no spear can pierce your body and you won’t get wounded.”68 In the following, the peasants count on their invincibility. This gives them great courage and daring. At the same time, they don’t even blink at slaughtering women and children, not to mention rape. During the siege of Linz, the Fadinger of the song bluntly states: “Inside [the city walls] they will all singe and fry, including children in their mothers’ wombs, except for the most beautiful women, whom we won’t dispense with.”69 Fadinger’s death is not mentioned: the narrating “I” simply shifts back to the collective “we” and later to another rebel leader (Captain Berndl in stanza 27). Whereas the subtitles of the oil paintings say nothing about the insurgents’ aims and ideology (apart from conquering fortified cities), in the “Fadinger-song” the peasants want to turn the world upside down. Instead of fighting for the right to individual worship, they aim at forcibly converting all Catholics, and to kill or chase them if they refuse Lutheranism. They do not only want to “fry and guzzle” the lords (as the Fadinger of the mid-eighteenth-century portrait proclaims), but even to become lords themselves: We want to send / Strict patents / To our former lords / Who are now subjects / Nobody will be spared / If they like it or not / They shall provide us due horses / With Corbiners[?] and many pistols / For we are now their lords … If we chase them away / Or beat them all dead / Then we can ride their horses / And become / All Barons … They will have to treat us as milords.70 The defeat in Linz is narrated, but as in the story told in the oil paintings, the real turn of their fortunes of war comes about with the arrival of General Pappenheim and his Crobates, who seem to “dissolve” the peasants’ wound-blessing with their lances, that is with counter-magic: “Look, how many [lances] got stuck [in the bodies of our men, … To hell with their long lances / And with these Crobates / And with all the soldiers! … Where is our

68 69 70

the style of the peasant war. See Stieve, Der oberösterreichische Bauernaufstand des Jahres 1626, 2: 77. See Ein Schön Lustig Unnd Kurtzweiliges Bawren Lied, sec. 3. Ibid., sec. 18. Ibid., secs. 28, 32.

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wound-blessing?”71 Initially the peasants continue to fight desperately, even if they consider Pappenheim as the master of hell commanding the Crobates like an army of devils. After a series of defeats, they come to question their own insurgent beginnings and start to blame Fadinger for having lured them into this unlawful and disastrous enterprise: How many have to expiate now / Fadinger’s sins with their own skin / Because we fatuous and ignorant people / Have been persuaded / That we wanted to become / All barons / And would govern the country ourselves / Like the Swiss / – It does not cost a penny – / but the core of the brain / hands, feet, and arms, / God, have mercy with us! / Do we have to be defeated?”72 They realize that they are fit for the plough, but not for war, and they draw analogies to preceding revolts: “There is nothing to read about peasant wars in old times, where [the peasants] remained victorious for an extended period; after longer struggle their power always waned. And it is as if, like old fools, we are riding hobby horse with our children.”73 After their definite defeat, the peasants suffer the hardships of occupation and quartering. The soldiers’ brutalities are nothing short of what the insurgents have committed earlier. Under the effect of this experience, the peasants start to repent their religious blindness and to recognize the superior truth of Catholic faith: “We wanted to know more / than all the papists / and all priests / We wanted to interpret the (Holy) Scripture ourselves / while we are capable of nothing but ploughing and harrowing / and God is punishing us accordingly.”74 Whereas religion is not even mentioned in the twelve oil paintings, the “Fadinger Song” does bring up the peasants’ confessional struggle, but interwoven with social-revolutionary aims and recognized by the actors at the end as a fatal error and peasant hubris. It seems as if the published song draws on a preexisting popular version that has been supplemented and contaminated with discrediting features. Judging from the sources emanating directly from the insurgents, for instance, the petitions or the adapted “Luther-song” that emphasize the purity of the religious cause, the published “Fadinger Song” seems like 71 72 73 74

Ibid., sec. 34. Ibid., sec. 41. Ibid., sec. 51. Ibid., sec. 47. In fact, many insurgents were forced to convert to Catholicism (and most ringleaders did so before execution), but this renunciation and recognition of the superiority of Catholicism is not even to be found in a public apology the insurgents had to make. See the republication by Aperger in Augsburg: Offentliche Abbitt.

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a distorting mirror. The (former) insurgents could recognize their own image in important parts of the song and identify with it, but they must have shrunk away from other parts, in which their alleged aims and deeds reared their ugly face, in particular the attempts to overthrow the existing social order and perjury against the emperor (as represented in the woodcut).75 4

Conclusion: Magic Practices between Denunciation and Appropriation

But was Passau art part of this contamination? Was the ascription of magic practices to the insurgents a means of discrediting their struggle, similar to the alleged social-revolutionary goals? Or was Passau art a genuine feature of the insurgents’ fight, in which they saw an appropriate instrument for promoting the superior cause of true religion? To what extent was the struggle for Protestant worship compatible with magic practices, even with “benign” white magic? These questions arise against the backdrop of the conspicuous presence of magic in post-revolt representations, both visual and textual. If we knew how Passau art was assessed by the involved groups, it would be easier to determine from which camp (rulers, insurgents, Protestant nobles, etc.) these representations must have emerged. But it is extremely difficult to come to a clear answer. The Constitutio Criminalis Carolina of 1532 stipulated capital punishment only for black magic. Other magic practices without maleficium were handled flexibly and with much more indulgence. The Passau hangman, for instance, could have been called to account for charlatanism only if his remedies did not work. But even those who outright rejected all recourse to magic practice hardly ever challenged its efficacy. Martin Luther had decidedly opposed the practice of wound-blessing: soldiers should rely on God alone and pray before battle; reliance on magic practices would be a sign of unbelief and nonacceptance of divine destination. Consequently, Protestants tended to condemn Passau art more severely than Catholics. Even though, or precisely because so many religious symbols were used for the fabrication of Passau chits and other remedies, recourse to Passau art was often considered as blasphemous and an infringement of the first two commandments. But at the same time a social dimension was involved: recourse to magic was considered quite 75

Their actual claims were at odds with the social-revolutionary dimension in the song. In their detailed petition to the emperor, for instance, they had complained about the replacement of Protestants “by impecunious and unfit people” in the city councils. Stieve, Der oberösterreichische Bauernaufstand des Jahres 1626, 2: 259, no 31.

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usual among simple soldiers, but for the higher ranks it tended to be assessed more critically. The abovequoted William Watts even attributes the practice to the “rebrobate raskalitie”; even the rank and file would keep aloof from it. And he vehemently defends General Tilly, supreme commander of the Catholic League and later the Imperial Army (i.e., one of the most prominent enemies of Watt’s own Protestant camp), against the assumption that he was “hardened”: “Very loath I am to leaue so base an imputation vpon so honourable a Commander, as to owe his life, all this while, vnto a devilish inchantment.”76 Consequently, the allegation weighed heavier for the representatives of the upper classes than for the populace. And it also weighed heavier for the identified rebel leaders, even if they did not belong to the nobility. After the end of the revolt, Fadinger and his brother-in-law, who had both fallen in battle, were dug out from their graves and punishment was inflicted on their corpses. Similar to “the hatter,” the “student,” and others, they were said to have seduced the masses and stifled revolt against lawful authorities. The imputation of sorcery made it more intelligible why the masses, the actual agents of revolt, had followed them. The “rank and file” could be treated as ignorant followers, who had acted under the leaders’ spell, as mere victims seduced by magic practices. Such an explanation justified clemency, and it was an “offer” to the great majority of insurgents to get out of it by claiming ignorance, a common practice in the aftermath of revolts. Considering Luther’s profound objections to magic practices, the allegation of having recurred to Passau art would appear as an opportune means of discrediting the insurgents’ struggle for Lutheranism, and probably this was intended by the disseminators of such allegations. At the same time, the social bias in the perception of Passau art made the peasant character of the revolt more credible. This comforted the interests of the noble Protestant Estates to deny their complicity in the uprising, which we can see from the extensive and elaborate media coverage of the Upper Austrian “peasant war” from their places of exile, that is, the southern imperial cities. Since commoners were generally not deemed capable of initiating and organizing coherent resistance movements, the authorities suspected the Protestant nobles of the leadership. Referring to the prevalence of magic practices was therefore also a means of exculpating the nobility. But things are more complex or, as Goethe put it in his “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”: “Spirits I’ve cited / My commands ignore.” On the one hand, post-revolt representations do not only impute “freezing” and “wound-blessing” to the insurgents; they say that the repressive troops recurred to magic practices, 76

Quoted from Funke, “Naturali legitimâque Magica,” 21–22.

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too, for “dissolving” their enemies’ wound-blessing, for instance. Probably it is therefore no mere coincidence that on the government side counter-magic is in the first place attributed to the Crobates, foreign mercenaries. But on the other hand, we can see how in the following insurgents started to appropriate magic practices for their struggle more proactively. In this manner a new rebel leader, Martin Aichinger, resumed the active fight for Protestantism in the 1630s. The main region of his movement’s activity was the Machland/Mühlviertel.77 He massively recurred to magical practices and fused them with medieval and Protestant theology in a syncretistic way. He used flags with magic numbers and signs and sprinkled holy water on his followers and onto the ground, thus drawing circles around their meeting places, claiming that it made his followers invulnerable in combat. To be sure, the movement was far from attaining the scale of 1626, but the population was exhausted, and after the restitution of Upper Austria to the Habsburgs in 1628 it was harder to build on a right to resist against tyrannical rule. Aichinger’s appearances were sporadic, since he was constantly fleeing the authorities. But his objective, reconversion of the new Catholics back to Protestantism, continued to enjoy enormous sympathy among the population that managed to shield Aichinger from the authorities’ grasp for about four years (1632–1636). He was able to mobilize masses of people quite instantly. And even though his military tactics were poor, the movement was able to win battles against government units that were greatly superior in numbers and in technique and equipment. Even more markedly than in 1626, his followers completely defied death and were reported to sing: “Sincerely I am yearning for a blessed end, since I am surrounded by adversity and misery.”78 It ended in 1636 in a bloody massacre in Frankenberg and with Aichinger’s and his surviving followers’ executions in Linz (the scenario engraved by Wenzel Hollar, but not included in the publication of Arundell’s travel diary, see above). The whole movement adopted what initially might have been a mere imputation by others to discredit the insurgents’ objectives. Magic practices were turned into a positive feature and integral part of the leader’s charisma. In this light the Fadinger portraits with Passau chits, the massive references to magic practices in “comic strip” style and elsewhere can also be read as manifestations of reappropriation. Since magic practices could not be repudiated unequivocally, a struggle for their assessment was apparently fought out on 77 78

On this movement, see Burgstaller, “Martin Laimbauer und seine machländische Bauernbewegung 1632–1636, 3–30; Wieflingseder, “Martin Laimbauer und die Unruhen im Machlandviertel 1632 bis 1636,” 136–208. Burgstaller, “Martin Laimbauer,” 5.

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many levels, ranging from renewed overt revolt for a syncretic Protestantism to a commemoration war of the 1626 events in textual, visual, and symbolic representations and allusions. Most of it was certainly fought out in oral or even nonverbal culture, of which the material traces allow us to catch but a tiny glimpse. It is in this context that we have to pay attention to another curious monument, namely, a series of twenty-five remarkable popular oil paintings produced in the late 1650s. At first glance the series does not have to do anything with the “peasant war,” but magical practice is in the very center. The paintings depict a gang of criminals (the Kaperger-Bande) accused, tried, and punished as sorcerers, desecrators of the Host, contractors with the devil. The series was commissioned by the bailiff (Pfleger) of Vorchdorf Philipp Hölscher, who had prosecuted and led the investigations against the group.79 Regarding composition and style, the images recall the twelve pictures on the peasant war. However, the content lacks all political dimensions, and the devils’ allies seem to have no proper religious agenda. Hölscher doubtlessly wanted to celebrate his merits. But apart from that, and independently of what the incriminated Kaperger-Bande had done in reality, if they had a Protestant agenda or not, my assumption is that the picture cycle was also an implicit comment on the series of twelve paintings that hardly ever worked as a distorting mirror, since references to Passau art were positively appropriated by the Protestants, interpreted as legitimate white magic, and even integrated into their antiCounter-Reformation agenda. On this background the Kaperger cycle appears as an attempt to outstrip the peasant war cycle of 1626 (25 instead of 12 pictures) and thereby contribute to depoliticize and deconfessionalize Protestant struggle of the first half of the seventeenth century. Bibliography Abbildung der Statt Lintz / wie dieselbe von den Bawren biß an dritten Tag beschossen und gestürmbt / biß sie auch ein Loch in die Mawr geschossen / Doch aber durch Herrn Statthalters wolverordnete Soldaten/ mit grossem verlust der Bawren / sieghafft abgetrieben / deren etlich hundert darnider gehawen/ theils gefangen / und die ubrige in die Flucht gejagt. Augsburg: Wilhelm Peter Zimmermann, 1626. Abelinus, Johann Philipp. Theatrum Europaeum, Oder Außführliche / und Wahrhaftige Beschreibung aller und jeder denckwürdiger Geschichten: so sich hin und wider in der Welt / fürnämlich aber in Europa / und Teutschen Landen / so wohl im Religionals Prophan-Wesen / vom Jahr Christi 1617. biß auff das Jahr Jahr 1629. Bey Regierung 79

Drechsel et al., Räuber, Mörder, Teufelsbrüder.

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deren … Keysern Matthiae … und Ferdinandi deß Andern … sich begeben und zugetragen haben, edited by Matthaeus der Ältere Merian. Frankfurt: Merian, 1635. Bernleithner, Ernst. Linz an der Donau im Kartenbild der Zeiten. Linz: Kulturverwaltung, 1963. Blickle, Peter. “Nochmals zur Entstehung der Zwölf Artikel.” In Bauer, Reich und Reformation: Festschrift für Günther Franz zum 80. Geburtstag am 23. Mai 1982, edited by Wilhelm Abel and Peter Blickle, 286–308. Stuttgart: Ulmer, 1982. Burgstaller, Ernst. “Martin Laimbauer und seine machländische Bauernbewegung, 1632–1636: Versuch einer volkskundlichen Durchleuchtung.” Kunstjahrbuch der Stadt Linz 1973 (1974): 3–30. Burke, Peter. The Fabrication of Louis XIV. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Burke, Peter. “The Virgin of the Carmine and the Revolt of Masaniello.” Past & Present 99, no. 1 (1983): 3–21. Crowne, William. A True Relation of All the Remarkable Places and Passages Observed in the Travels of the Right Honourable Thomas Lord Howard, Earle of Arundell and Surrey, Primer Earle, and Earle Marshall of England: Ambassadour Extraordinary to His Sacred Majesty Ferdinando the Second, Emperour of Germanie, Anno Domini 1636. London: Henry Seile, 1637. Czerny, Albin. Der erste Bauernaufstand in Oberösterreich, 1525. Linz: F. I. Ebenhöch, 1882. Czerny, Albin. Der Zweite Bauernaufstand in Oberösterreich, 1595–1597. Linz: Ebenhöch, 1890. Diefenbacher, Michael, and Wiltrud Fischer-Pache, eds. Das Nürnberger Buchgewerbe: Buch- und Zeitungsdrucker, Verleger und Druckhändler vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert. Nürnberg: Selbstverlag des Stadtarchivs Nürnberg, 2003. Drechsel, Simone, Martin Scheutz, Johann Sturm, Josef Weichenberger, and Franz X. Wimmer. Räuber, Mörder, Teufelsbrüder: Die Kapergerbande 1649–1660 im oberösterreichischen Alpenvorland. 2nd ed. Linz: Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv, 2008. Eichmeyer, Karl, Helmuth Feigl, Rudolf Walter Litschel. Weilss Gilt Die Seel Und Auch Das Guet: Oberösterr. Linz: Oberösterr. Landesverl., 1976. Ein Geistreicher Gesang, Welchen die Baurn im Ländlein Ob Der Enns alle 24 Stund viermal, zu Morgens, Mittags, Abends Und Mitternacht, wie auch allezeit aann man sie angreifen will, knieend, mit gen Himmel aufgehobenen Händen, inniglich und einhelligkich, auch mit Seufzen und Weinen unterm freien Himmel zu singen pflegen. N.p., 1626. Ein Schön Lustig Unnd Kurtzweiliges Bawren Lied, Von Dem Gantzen Verlauff, Dess Bawrn Kriegs Steffel Fättinger Damalen Uhrhebers. Hascha Ihr Nachbawrn Unnd Bawrn, Seydt Lustig, Etc. N.p., n.d. [Enzmilner, Joachim]. Apologetische Interims-Relation wegen der nägst fürgangenen kays. Religions-Reformation im Ertzhertzogthumb Oesterreich ob der Ennß. Darinnen zwar kürzlich / jedoch ganz gründlich außgeführt wird / daß der Bawerschafft/ und

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dero Adhaerenten daselbst zu jhrem unheilsamben Auffstandt hierdurch kein ainige erhebliche Ursach geben worden sey. Der Wahrheit zu steüer / den Bösen zur rew / und Mennigklich zum Bericht / in offentlichen Druck verfertiget. Vienna: Mattheo Formica im Cöllner Hoff, 1626. Funke, Nikolas. “Naturali legitimâque Magica: Das ‘Festmachen’ im Militär des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts.” Militär und Gesellschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit 13, no. 1 (2009): 16–32. Glucks Hafen Des vor ein Hundert Jahrn vorgangenen Baurenkriegs. Sambt Eigentlicher Contrafactur unnd Abriss der vornembsten officirn und Befelchshabern, So wol der gewehr und Waffen deren sich itzo die Rebellischen Bauren im Ländlein ob der Enss, in diesen Hinlauffenden 1626 Jahr, bey ihrer vermeynten Kriegs Expedition gebrauchen. N.p., 1627. Gruber, Elisabeth. “Die Aneignung aufrührerischer Elemente als Erinnerungsgeschichte: Das Beispiel Stefan Fadinger.” In Die Stimme der ewigen Verlierer? Aufstände, Revolten und Revolutionen in den österreichischen Ländern (ca. 1450–1815), edited by Peter Rauscher and Martin Scheutz, 415–430. Munich, Oldenburg: Böhlau, 2013. Gründliche und Warhafftige Beschreibung des Auffstands von den Bawren ob der Enss / wie ihr nemlich Siebentzig tausend beieinander seynd und 30. Stück Geschütz bei sich haben, auch Städte, Klöster und Flecken einnemen. Alles aus glaubwirdigen uberschickten Franckfurter Avisen und Zeitungen. Augsburg, 1626. Hartmann, August. Historische Volkslieder und Zeitgedichte vom sechzehnten bis neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Vol. 1. Hildesheim: Olms, 1972. Hartmann, Johann Ludwig. Neue Teuffels-Stücklein: Passauer-Kunst, Vest-machen, Schieß- und Büchsen-Kunst, Feuer-löschung, Granaten- und Kugel-dämpffen, Unsichtbar machen, Noth-Hembd, Waffen-Salb, Auß-seegnen [et]c. Nach Ihrer Mannigfaltigkeit/ Abscheuligkeit / und Abstellungs-Nothwendigkeit betrachtet / und zu Praeservirung der Jugend bey jetzigen Krieges-Läufften. Frankfurt: Zunner, 1678. Heilingsetzer, Georg. Der oberösterreichische Bauernkrieg 1626. Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1976. Hoffmann, Alfred. Das Wappen des Landes Oberösterreich als Sinnbild seiner staatsrechtlichen Entwicklungsgeschichte. Linz: Muck, 1947. Huber, Barbara. “Im Zeichen der Unruhe: Symbolik bäuerlicher Protestbewegungen im oberdeutschen und eidgenössischen Raum 1400–1700.” PhD Dissertation, University of Bern, 2005. Kainz, Otto. Das Kriegsgerichtsprotokoll im Niederösterreichischen Bauernaufstand aus dem Jahre 1597. St. Pölten: Selbstverlag des NÖ Instituts für Landeskunde, 2010. Keller, Irene. “Wie der Hausruckviertler zum Rebell wurde. 390 Jahre Bauernkrieg: Ursachen, Schicksale, Beweggründe.” Der Bundschuh: Schriftenreihe des Museums Innviertler Volkskundehaus 16 (2016): 21–33.

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Kunzle, David. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Kurz, Franz. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Landes Österreich ob der Enns (1805–1809). Zweyter Teil. Mit zwey Portraits. Zwey historische Abhandlungen Nebst einem Anhange von Urkunden. I. Geschichte des Aufsruhrs im Hausruckviertels, welchen der König Gustav Adolph begünstigte. II. Geschichte der Unruhen, welche Martin Laimbauer im Jahre 1636 im Machlandviertel erregt hat. III. Anhang. Sammlung der vorzüglicheren Urkunden der Klöster Lambach und Garsten. Linz: Verlag der akademischen Kunst-, Musik und Buchhandlung, 1808. Macek, Josef. Der Tiroler Bauernkrieg und Michael Gaismair, edited by Roland Franz Schmiedt. Translated by Eduard Ullmann. Berlin: DVW, 1965. Mannasser, Johann Georg. Wahre vnnd eigendtliche Contrafectur / der Statt Linz / Wie dieselbe von den Enßischen Bawren 1626. belägert / vnd den 19. Julij bestürmet / Aber endtlich mit grossem verlust wider abgetrieben worden. Augsburg / bey Johann Georg Mannasser / Kupfferstecher. Augsburg, 1626. Offentliche Abbitt, Gegen der Röm. Kays. May: vnd Churfürstl. Durchl: in Bayern, [et] c. Hochansechlich: vollmechtigen Herrn Com[m]issarien, [et]c. von den gewesten Rebellischen Bawrn, im Haußruck Viertl, deß Ertzhertzogthumbs Oesterreich ob der Enß, so sie durch einen vollmächtigen Außschuß von und vber die hundert Personen, im Schloß zu Lintz beschehen, wie hernach folgt. Nachgedruckt zu Augspurg, Durch Andream Aperger, Auff vnser L. Frawen Thor. Augsburg: Andreas Aperger, 1627. http://digital.slub-dresden.de/id379683946. Paas, John Roger. The German Political Broadsheet, 1600–1700. Vol. 4, 1622–1629. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994. Pappenheim, Gottfried Heinrich, Graf zu. Warhafte Relation, Auss dem Churfürstl. Läger, dess im Ländlein Ob der Enss, mit den Rebellen gantzen Verlauffs, den 30. Octobris, Anno 1626 biss auf den 22. Nouembris bemelten Jahrs, von Herrn General Pappenheim vberschriben. Ingolstadt: Gregorio Hänlin, 1626. Rechtsgründlicher Bericht des Anfangs und Verlauffs der Bawren grossen Tumult und Auffstand in Osterreich ob der Enß Etc. Wie nemblich nunmehr fast in die Hundert Tausent Mann sich zusammen gethan / Ein Dorff / Fleck / Schloß und Stadt nach dem andern mit Gewalt und zu ihrem Willen einzunehmen / Und also uffs höchste und eusserste umb ihre christliche Religion zu streiten und zu kempffen angefangen. Geschehen im Jahr 1626. n.p., 1626. Relation. Auß Oesterreich ob der Ennß, Wie die Baurschafft die Statt Lintz zu beyden Seitten der Tonaw belägert, biß in den dritten Tag gestürmet, doch vom Herrn Statthalter endtlich mit Verlust viel hundert Mann abgetriben worden: Auch wie Herr Obrister Löbel vor Ennß in der Bawrn Läger gefallen, jhnen vil Vieche sambt allem Geschütz abgejagt, bey 900. erlegt, auch das gantze Läger so vber 12000. Starck zerstreit, vnnd in die Flucht geschlagen. Augsburg: Aperger, 1626.

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Stieve, Felix. Der oberösterreichische Bauernaufstand des Jahres 1626. Rieger, 1891. Straub, Dietmar. Der Oberösterreichische Bauernkrieg 1626 [I.e. Sechzehnhundert­ sechsundzwanzig]: Linzer Schloss, Schloss Zu Scharnstein Im Almtal, 14. Mai Bis 31. Okt. 1976. Linz: Amt d. OÖ. Landesregierung, Abt. Kultur, 1976. Strnadt, Julius. Der Bauernkrieg in Oberösterreich im Jahre 1626: Nach 275 Jahren seinen lieben Landsleuten erzählt von einem Oberösterreicher. Wels: Hermann Haas, 1902. Sturmberger, Hans. Adam Graf Herberstorff: Herrschaft und Freiheit im konfessionellen Zeitalter. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1976. Vocelka, Karl, Rudolf Leeb, and Andrea Scheichl. Renaissance und Reformation: OÖ. Linz: Trauner, 2010. Warhafftiger Bericht / Welcher massen die OberOsterreichschen Bauren des Hertzogs von Hollstein Regiment / welches ihnen grossen Schaden gethan / bey Neunkirchen unvorsehens uberfallen und geschlagen. N.p., 1626. Werfring, Johann. “Symbolfigur für Stadt und Land.” Wiener Zeitung Online. April 12, 2012, sec. Museum. Accessed November 8, 2016. http://www.wienerzeitung.at/ nachrichten/kultur/museum/449016_Symbolfigur-fuer-Stadt-und-Land.html. Wieflingseder, Franz. “Martin Laimbauer und die Unruhen im Machlandviertel 1632 bis 1636.” Mitteilungen des Oberösterreichischen Landesarchivs 6 (1959): 136–208.

part 3 Foreign Observation

∵

chapter 7

The International Reputation and Self-Representation of Hungarian Noblemen in the Seventeenth Century Nóra G. Etényi and Monika Barget When Péter Révay first described the achievements of the Hungarian nobility to European audiences in his Latin monograph De Sacrae Coronae Regni Hungariae Ortu … (Of the Origin … of the Holy Crown of the Hungarian King­ dom), which was published in Augsburg in 1613, foreign observers generally held Hungarian aristocrats in high esteem.1 The religious agreement reached with their Catholic king and emperor in 1608 and the military campaigns led by the princes of Transylvania, Gábor Bethlen and György Rákóczi I, had proven their political influence and fighting skills to the European powers. During the decades to come, European interest in Hungarian news increased. German newspapers were particularly eager to report on proceedings in the Hungarian Diet, which was dominated by Palatine Ferenc Wesselényi as well as by Ferenc  III Nádasdy and Miklós Zrinyi, who served as ban (viceroy) of Croatia. A newspaper published in Hamburg twice a week covered Hungarian news from 1655 onward and related both the impressive coronation of fifteen-year-old King Leopold I and the election of the Hungarian palatine to German-speaking readers.2 Several German accounts of Hungarian history and geography introduced the cities, towns, and landscapes to readers and described the most important elements of Hungarian feudal politics, members of the political elite, and even the laws of 1608, which had granted Hungary religious freedom. At the same time, Hungary “has always been on the periphery of the world systems of great powers from the Middle Ages to our day (be it Charlemagne’s empire, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Soviet Union, or the European Union),” which made it necessary to constantly reassert or renegotiate power.3 1 de Rewa, De Sacrae Coronae. The book was reprinted several times into the eighteenth century. For example: Révay and Bel, Petri de Rewa, comitis comitatvs de Tvrocz, De sacrae coronae regni. 2 Anonymous, “Ordinari Dienstags Zeitung,” January 7, 1655; Anon., “Ordinari Dienstags Zeitung,” June 30, 1655; Bogel and Blühm, Die deutschen Zeitungen; Prange, “Die Zeitungen.” 3 Hadas, “The Culture of Distrust,” 135.

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In order to claim equal status among European leaders, Hungarian aristocrats also modernized their residences, responsibly participated in the regional Diet, and continued to occupy important political positions at the court of Vienna.4 Since the middle of the seventeenth century, the emperor’s Secret Council (Geheimer Rath) had also accepted Hungarian members who took keen interest in Habsburg foreign policy.5 Weekly newspapers or broadsheets were not published in Hungary itself, but noblemen and educated citizens regularly purchased printed and handwritten newspapers from abroad. Besides, some noblemen such as future rebel Ferenc III Nádasdy actively contributed to the production of books and newsletters in foreign cities. Even though Nádasdy owned a printing press, he ordered politically important publications predominantly from printers, typographers, and engravers in Vienna (e.g., Cosmerovius), Nuremberg (e.g., Endter), Antwerp (e.g., Cornelis Meyssens), Frankfurt am Main, and Amsterdam. In 1652, Nádasdy financed the republishing of two books, the abovementioned De Sacra Coronae and De Monarchia, written by his late grand­ father Péter Révay in 1613. In these works, Péter Révay had emphasized that the feudal rights of the Hungarian nobility ought to be protected by the Hungarian Crown. Furthermore, Nádasdy financed the publication of the so-called Portrait Gallery of Famous Hungarians, which demonstrated the close cooperation between the Hungarian political and ecclesiastical elites.6 His most influential publication was the Portrait Gallery of the Hungarian Kings in 1664, which described and emphasized the historical role of the Hungarian Kingdom. This book was published by Endter, and its panegyrics were written by the popular poet Sigmund von Birken. The engravings were made by famous artist Joachim von Sandrart.7 The engravings of the book served as models for portraying the Hungarian king in Europe and the Holy Roman Empire all throughout the second half of the seventeenth century. The Fürst printing house in Nuremberg would publish this portrait gallery several times as a broadsheet series between 1664 and 1711. Due to his extensive media patronage, Nádasdy was called “Hungarian Croesus” or “Hungarian Chameleon” by contemporary commentators. These names showed that he was considered a generous and able sponsor who reacted rapidly to changing political situations.8 4 Cf. articles assembled in the three volumes of the series A Divided Hungary in Europe edited by Gábor Almási and others; e.g., developments in media and music covered in Almási et al., A Divided Hungary in Europe, vol. 1, 229–70. 5 Political and leading ecclesiastical roles occupied by Hungarians are covered in Almási et al., A Divided Hungary in Europe, vol. 2. 6 Buzási, “Nádasdy Ferenc pottendorfi”; Rózsa, “Elias Wideman.” 7 Kőszeghy and Rózsa, Nádasdy Mausoleum. 8 Viskolcz, “The Information System.”

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In addition, Hungarian students who went to universities in Europe served as a source of information and could at the same time spread Hungarian news. However, the production of visual media financed by Hungarians was limited in comparison to the expenses made for more affordable prints abroad. The political elite commissioned private portraits and battle paintings as well as expensive large-scale engravings, but these sophisticated works of art did not circulate.9 Ferenc III Nádasdy was one of the most versatile patrons of the arts and had extensive international connections. But since self-representation by the seventeenth-century Hungarian nobility was not aimed at less educated audiences and deliberately centered on timeless portraiture of high quality, their media production failed to meet the requirements of confrontational propaganda. Topical events were mainly addressed in spoken and written words and as political ritual.10 Especially when Ferenc III Nádasdy turned from being one of the most respected royalist and Catholic politicians of the Hungarian Kingdom to a traitor and rebel against his king, the lack of instantaneous, stirring propaganda among the Hungarian nobility backfired and public opinion in the West largely took sides with the imperial interpretation of events. This was not wholly foreseeable if we consider the positive interest Hungarian affairs had aroused prior to Nádasdy’s revolt in the early 1670s. At first, the number of Western broadsheets in support of the brave and wise Hungarian nobility had increased during the Turkish war of 1663–1664. In 1663, three times more publications on Hungarian affairs had been published in German-speaking regions than one year before. The vast majority of pamphlets and newssheets recounted the anti-Ottoman winter campaign led by Miklós Zrínyi and the subsequent Vasvár Treaty.11 In spite of this most successful alliance against the Ottoman Empire, however, this treaty proved to be the tragic turning point in Hungarian relations with Vienna. The peace treaty signed by Leopold I contained regulations that offended the interest of the Hungarian Kingdom because extensive Hungarian territory remained under Turkish occupation. Furthermore, Leopold was accused of having broken with the established political tradition when he negotiated the treaty with the Turks in secret. He had not asked the Hungarian parliament for ratification.12 The Hungarian political elite were enraged and feared further imperial highhandedness. But it was difficult to organize a strong opposition. For years, the Hungarian aristocrats who took part in the movement 9 10 11 12

Rózsa, “Thesenblätter,” 257–289; Galavics, “Thesenblätter,” 113–130. Rózsa, “Nádasdy Ferenc,” 188; Toma, “Gróf Nádasdy III”; Viskolcz, “Nádasdy III Ferenc.” Etényi, “The Genesis and Metamorphosis.” Várkonyi, “A Wesselényi,” 424–425.

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against Habsburg policy did not find an appropriate leader. Miklós Zrínyi was the best known and most respected Hungarian official of the time. But although he entertained valuable European connections, his career came to a sudden end: he died on November 18, 1664. Nádasdy, for his part, was initially not accepted by the lesser nobility, whereas Wesselényi wanted to form a risky alliance with the principality of Transylvania (German: Siebenbürgen), then tributary to the Ottoman Empire.13 Almost two years later, in July 1666, Ferenc III Nádasdy eventually aspired to the prestigious position as “palatinus regni” (in Hungarian: “nádor”), and in 1667, he led an aristocratic conspiracy to achieve his goal.14 An open armed rebellion, however, did not take place before 1670, and the rising was speedily subdued because the king was well informed of all oppositional moves. Nádasdy and his co-conspirators Péter Zrínyi and Ferenc Frangepán were executed in public. Numerous broadsheets, pamphlets, and news from 1671 proved the attention and interest taken in the European press in their trial (fig. 7.1). Above all, this curiosity was fueled because the conspiracy had not been dominated by French-oriented aristocrats of the Western provinces, but by the Protestant nobility of Upper Hungary, who inconsistently looked to their Ottoman enemy for help. Among those who had been suspected of support for Nádasdy and consequently suffered confiscation was Count Stephan Thököly, father to Imre Thököly, who became the leader of another anti-imperial rebellion in 1678. This rebellion, too, was widely covered by Western media. Regardless of internal divides among the Hungarian nobility and despite different outcomes, Nádasdy and Thököly were seen in striking continuity and shaped the foreign reputation of an entire people.15 1

Genres, Patrons, and Propaganda Issues: The Range of Western Reporting on Conflict in Hungary

As soon as open conflict broke out in 1670, a great variety of media explained Hungarian events to Western readers. To the great disadvantage of the Hungarian opposition, most news originated in Vienna and was then copied by German newspapers almost unquestioned. Consequently, most weekly 13 14 15

Péter, “Köznemesi publicisztika, köznemesi politika a 17. század derekán,” 200–224. Palatine Ferenc Wesselényi died in 1667. Hungarian historiography began to use the term “Conspiracy Wesselényi,” but contemporary propaganda had described the events of 1670 and 1671 as “Nádasdy’s Conspiracy.” See Pauler, Wesselényi Ferenc nádor. Anonymous, Curiose Staats-Gedancken / Uber den verwirrten Zustand des Königreichs Ungarn.

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Figure 7.1 Anonymous, Warhaffte Contrafactur und Abbildung, deren ehmals Vornehm-Berühmten drey Ungarischen Grafen, 1671, engraving, 30 × 16 cm. National Széchényi Library Apponyi Collection

publications in the Holy Roman Empire denigrated resistance to the emperor as unlawful rebellion. The German newssheet Kriegs- und Frieden Currier from Nuremberg, for example, supported the idea that the rebellion should be put down by force.16 Other weekly journals presented the oppositional movement 16

Zimmermann, Entwicklungsgeschichte der Nürnberger “Friedens- Und Kriegskuriers.”

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as a vile conspiracy by the Protestant gentry and did not address the true grievances of Hungary’s local aristocrats.17 With the assistance of translators and international newsagents, reports on the rebellion and rather negative descriptions of the rebels’ characters could also be disseminated in other European countries. The weekly journal Nordischer Mercurius,18 for example, was translated into Latin and French by poet and historian Georg Greflinger in Hamburg.19 Issues of Nordischer Mercurius were especially influenced by Viennese versions of events. In April 1671, they alleged that Ferenc III Nádasdy had already begun his antiroyalist conspiracy seventeen years before and that his indecent plotting alone had incited the Hungarian counties to support the revolt.20 All in all, Habsburg propaganda published after 1671 proved to be extremely effective because it was produced in high quality applying the latest artistic techniques. Based on official court reports from Vienna, the Europaeische Freytags Zeitung, a German-language weekly newspaper, announced in May 1671 that they were going to publish the official investigations and firsthand coverage of the rebels’ executions in their next issue.21 This was the same weekly newspaper that had reported in February 1671 that the Habsburg emperor had transported the treasury of Nádasdy from the castle of Sárvár to the Hofburg (imperial residence) in Vienna.22 Written reports and visual depictions of the executions were widely perceived, and the emperor took surprising care to have media all throughout the Holy Roman Empire cover a revolt of small military significance at extraordinary length. A publication of no less than 180 pages commissioned by the Viennese court stated the names of all 138 officials involved in the court trials and praised Johan Paul Hocher as the Crown’s chief investigator.23 News of the executions of the four convicted rebels – Nádasdy, Zrínyi, Frangepán, and Bónis – who were put to death between eight and nine o’clock in the morning on April 30, 1671, was also disseminated in great detail. On June 19, 1671, Matthäus Cosmerovius and the workshop owned by Michael and Johann Friedrich Endter received the privilege to publish the official execution

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Anonymous, “Einkommende Ordinari Post Zeitungen [week III: News from Vienna].” Anonymous, “Nordischer Mercurius.” Weber, Götter-Both Mercurius, 33; Schultheiß-Heinz, Politik in der Europäischen Publizistik. Pauler, Wesselényi Ferenc nádor; Bene, “Hóhérok Teátruma,” 32–85. HStAM: 4g Zeitungen 74: “Europäische Freytags-Zeitung No. XVII”; HStAM: 4g Zeitungen 74: “Europäische Freytags-Zeitung No. XXVII.” HStAM: 4g Zeitungen 74: “Europäische Freytags-Zeitung No. VIII.” Várkonyi, “A Wesselényi,” 424–425.

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reports.24 This imperial privilege was published in German, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and French. The German versions were published during the summer of 1671 in Vienna,25 Prague, and Nuremberg;26 the Italian versions were published in Vienna, Venice, Rome, and Perugia;27 the French version and even a Dutch translation were published in Amsterdam in 1672.28 Ten years later, the revolt led by Thököly incited even more far-reaching propaganda in the emperor’s favor. The greater part of anti-Thököly broadsheets were then financed by the papal court and published in Rome, among them satirical prints by Adrian Westerhout that showed the chained Thököly on his “triumphal coach” pulled by oxen.29 Such imagery was popular in the context of early modern revolts and derived from well-known emblematic traditions.30 During Stenka Razin’s Cossack rebellion of 1670–1671, similar mock-processions had been spread in print, but there was no imminent comparison between Thököly and Razin.31 Attempts to describe the revolts of Nádasdy and Thököly as integral parts of European history in general and to compare them to similar events abroad only dated from the last decade of the 17th century and did not prevail before Ferenc II Rákóczi’s much more successful uprising. Despite all efforts to present Habsburg policy as lawful and successful, some media of the 1670s and early 1680s nevertheless supported the rebels or at least judged them mildly. A broadsheet that must have been published in Prague showed portraits of Nádasdy and a fellow conspirator on the scaffold, and pitifully reported that the executioner had only been able to kill them with the third stroke. An unknown Hungarian aristocrat ordered a painting after

24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv: RHR Impressoria. Fz 112–115. “Aussführliche und Warhafftige Beschreibung, Wie es mit denen, Criminal-Processen, Und darauff erfolgten, Executionen, Wider die drey Graffen, Frantzen Nadassdi, Peter von Zrin, Und Frantz Christophen Frangepan eigentlich hergangen,” in Apponyi, Hungarica, vol. 5, pt. III, ill. 959. “Ausführliche, und, Warhafftige, Beschreibung …, den Wienerischen Exemplar nachgedruckt. In Nuremberg bey Michael und Johann Friedrich Endter 1671,” in Apponyi, Hungarica, vol. 5, pt. III, ill. 960. “Perfetta, e veridica, relatione, delli processi criminali … Stampato in Vienna d’ Austria da Matteo Cosmerouio, … Anno 1671,” in Apponyi, Hungarica, vol. 5, pt. III, ill. 962. Köpeczi, Staatsräson, 117. “Riflessioni fatte da Emerico Teckely sopra il suo stato, tanto passatom quanto persente,” in Paas: The German Political Broadsheet, 344, PA–756; 342, PA–754. Henkel and Schöne, Emblemata, 530–531. Prints referring to Razin and the Cossack rebellion will be analyzed in Gleb Kazakov’s contribution to this volume in chapter 10.

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this engraving.32 A weekly newspaper printed in Berlin reported that even the pope had urged the emperor to grant Nádasdy his royal pardon.33 But derogatory news was published in the same newspaper, which reported that Nádasdy had tried to poison Margaret Theresa, Leopold I’s wife. Nádasdy was furthermore accused of having thrown dead cats into the wells of Vienna in order to cause an epidemic. Such accusations of poisoning wells were otherwise raised against Jews and doubted Nádasdy’s commitment to Christianity. Plus, the same Berlin newspaper also blamed Nádasdy for the fire in the Burg (castle) of Vienna. The overall impression of Nádasdy communicated in this paper was therefore ambiguous, and it mingled traditional topoi of treason and heresy with current rumors. By contrast, more prosaic and thoughtful criticism of Habsburg policy was uttered by the influential electors of the Holy Roman Empire, who saw their trans-confessional project of efficient warfare against the Ottoman Empire and the defense of all Holy Roman borders endangered by the emperor’s petty conflict with the Hungarian nobility.34 Having obtained one of the emperor’s propaganda publications, the Viennese resident to the archbishop of Mainz, Christoph Gudemus, criticized the report,35 saying that it was not convincing and informative; the only part of the publication he truly appreciated was the quality of the engravings.36 Most German and Dutch pamphlets were indeed illustrated, and portraits of Nádasdy, Thököly, and other Hungarian rebels were sold as separate engravings or included in topographical maps of battle fields on the Danube (fig. 7.2.). Rebel portraits used in these publications were generally recognizable and were not meant to be derogatory or humorous. The depiction of Hungarian leaders in traditional costume with peculiar hairstyles or feathered hats did not necessarily hint to an ethnic bias. Rather, this imagery directly drew on official representations and printed portrait galleries commissioned by noblemen such as Nádasdy himself. Seventeenth-century Hungary was fully accepted as a part of Europe, and many blood ties linked Hungarian families to Austria. One broadsheet, for example, showed the portrait of Johann Erasmus 32

33 34 35 36

“Warhaffte Contrafactur und Abbildung, deren ehmals Vornehm-Berühmten drey Ungarischen Grafen nachmals aber an Ihrer Römischen Kays. Mayest höchst-vergriffen Rebellen, Nadasti, Serini, Frangipani,” in Bibliotheca Nationalis Hungariae, “App. M.,” figs. 666 and 1021; Paas, The German Political Broadsheet, vol. 10, 42–43; Rózsa, Magyar Történetábrázolás, 136. Anonymous, “Einkommende Ordinari Post Zeitungen [week XIX: News from Vienna].” Várkonyi, “Zrínyi”; Várkonyi, “The Mediators.” BstA Würzburg: “Korrespondenzarchiv des Familienarchivs der Grafen von SchönbornWiesentheid,” no. 1584. BStA Würzburg: “Korrespondenzarchiv des Familienarchivs der Grafen von SchönbornWiesentheid,” no. 1642.

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Figure 7.2 Anonymous, Neye und richtige Abbildung aus der Ungarischen Mappen …, 1683, engraving. National Széchényi Library, Apponyi Collection, Budapest

Tattenbach-Reinstein from Styria (German: Steyermark), who was married to a Hungarian noblewoman and was a loyal supporter of the Hungarian opposition. Furthermore, the Hungarian nobility had always seen their national attire as a sign of self-confidence and militancy, which is why Habsburg kings used to wear Hungarian costumes on the occasion of their coronation.37 The illegitimacy of the Hungarian rebellions as perceived by the court at Vienna was therefore expressed in abstract symbolism and textual inscriptions rather than physical features. The longer the rebellions dated back, the more frequently Western European illustrations replaced portraiture by popular emblems and antique mythology. The political iconography developed in the course of the 1670 revolt persisted and was revived during Thököly’s rising and also in the course of the eighteenth-century Hungarian risings led by Ferenc II Rákóczi from 1703 to

37

Polleross, “Austriacus Hungariae Rex,” 67.

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1711.38 But although engravers and painters all throughout Europe employed a similar repertoire of classical symbolism, the messages varied widely. 2

Constitutional Struggle, Personal Ambition, or Religious Conflict? Conflicting Conceptualizations of Hungarian Noble Resistance in the West

All in all, Western media embarked on three explanatory approaches to contextualize the Hungarian revolts. The first strategy was to present the conflicts as religious uprisings. This was mainly the case in reports on Thököly, but confessional propaganda was also spread in some broadsheets on Nádasdy, who was frequently mistaken for a Protestant gentleman. This framework was mainly applied by Protestant artists, printers, and their patrons in Saxony, Brandenburg, the Dutch Republic, and Low Church circles in England. In such prints, the Hungarian rebels were equated with Martin Luther, while imperial and French politics were denounced as Jesuit conspiracy. In contrast to Catholic and pro-imperial media producers in southern Europe, France, and the Holy Roman Empire, Dutch engravers and printers in Wittenberg, Leipzig, and Jena saw the revolts in Hungary as a necessary fight against the Counter-Reformation, universal monarchy, and the pope’s political influence.39 Within ten years – from 1671 to 1681 – about 150 prints that criticized the emperor’s reactions to revolt in Hungary were published in Saxon cities. Dutch engravers in particular criticized the general treatment of Protestant communities and above all Protestant preachers in the Habsburg dominions, forty of whom had been sentenced to serve as galley slaves in Pozsony (Pressburg) in 1674.40 A Dutch broadsheet published in 1682 justified violent Hungarian resistance as a response to state violence against a religious minority and accused the imperial army of having occupied Protestant churches and schools in free royal cities such as Pozsony, Sopron, and Kassa. Since the engraver claimed that his print was based on firsthand information from a Hungarian eyewitness, supposedly a Hungarian preacher, this engraving belongs to a rare group of broadsheets marketed as a true-to-life depiction.41 But Protestant elites in Hungary who had formerly studied at universities in Western Europe likewise 38 39 40 41

Kessemeier and Schulze, Ereignis Karikaturen, 96–122; Schilling, Höfe und Allianzen, 333. Schorn-Schütte, Obrigkeitskritik; Bosbach, “Der französische Erbfeind.” Etényi, “Das Flugblatt.” Makkai, Fabinyi, and Ladányi, Galeria Omnium Sanctorum; Bujtás, “A Pozsonyi,” 115–157.

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used their personal networks to spread information on their persecution and emigration.42 John George II, elector of Saxony, likewise defended the Hungarian galley slaves and even ransomed them in 1676.43 Andreas Neuman, the ambassador of Brandenburg in Vienna, also paid much attention to the situation of the Protestants in the Hungarian Kingdom.44 After all, a religious interpretation of both revolts was in some way coherent with Hungarian perceptions of the true causes. In the Hungarian political debates, freedom of religion was regarded as a fundamental right of the Hungarian nobility and reflected the more general aims of both Nádasdy’s and Thököly’s rebellions.45 Therefore, the most popular novel of that time, the Hungarian version of Simplicissimus,46 also asserted the image of Thököly as the guardian of Protestant towns and of the interests of the lower nobility.47 An engraving with German inscriptions made by a Protestant master from Upper Hungary pictured Imre Thököly as the protector of the Protestant religion. In this print, Thököly is depicted between Luther and a Jesuit (fig. 7.3). An angel hovers above Luther’s head, but the Jesuit is accompanied by the devil. Thököly, who is described as “brave” (tapffer), holds an open Bible with the popular Protestant motto verbum Domini manet in aeternum (“the word of God endures forever”), from 1 Peter 1:25. In Britain, however, the religious reception of news from Hungary was far more ambiguous and reflected domestic struggles over religious dissent in Britain, Charles II’s pro-French attitudes, and his brother James’ conversion to Catholicism. Although there was great sympathy for Protestant demands for liberty, English observers were nevertheless concerned for constitutional stability and condemned civil war. As a consequence, English media often criticized Nádasdy’s revolt as an unlawful attempt to “subvert the Government.”48 But especially the religiously charged revolt of Imre Thököly in 1682 provoked much debate in the crisis-ridden British Isles. On the one hand, Protestant prints of Dutch and English origin enthusiastically compared Imre Thököly’s 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Kowalska, “Exil als Zufluchtsort”; Kowalska, “Confessional Exile.” Kowalska, “Exil als Zufluchtsort,” 257–276. GStPK Berlin: Geheimer Rat I. HA Rep 1. “Beziehungen zu Kaiser und Reich: Neumann Bericht No. 36”; GStPK Berlin: Geheimer Rat I. HA Rep 1. “Beziehungen zu Kaiser und Reich: Neumann Bericht No. 46.” Makkai and Barton, Religion oder Rebellion?, 47–150. An adventure novel published by Daniel Speer in 1683 and 1684 was set in Hungary and presented political and economic conditions in the Protestant towns of Upper Hungary. See Breuer and Tüskés, Das Ungarnbild. Benczédi, Rendiség. Ayres, The Hungarian Rebellion.

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Figure 7.3 Anonymous, Was Doct. Luther angericht, Der tapffre Töckely versicht, 1682, engraving. Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történelmi Képcsarnok, Budapest

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rise to the mysterious appearance of Halley’s comet49 or mirrored Lutheran prints from Germany that glorified Thököly as a champion of the Protestant cause. On the other hand, broadsheets in support of the Stuarts mocked Whigs in Parliament as “Thökölyans.”50 This was meant to accuse Thököly of disloyalty and religious fanaticism. And when Thököly openly allied with the Turks in autumn 1683, such negative perceptions of his character and religious orientation finally gained momentum all across Europe.51 After the Battle of Vienna on September 12, 1683, that ended the siege by the Ottomans, papal and imperial propaganda took the lead and decried Thököly as an intermediary of Europe’s archenemy. This propaganda, which rested on an impressive output of illustrated and susceptible prints, proved extremely efficient and destroyed support for Thököly. Charles V, Duke of Lorraine, the supreme commander of the imperial troops; Pope Innocent XI; and the Polish king, Jan Sobieski, fostered an offensive strategy against the Ottoman Empire and made use of Thököly’s treason to unite Catholic and Protestant princes in a joint effort to protect Christianity. In an engraving by Jacob Jeczl, celebrating the imperial victory against the Ottoman army and the reconquest of the town of Buda, Europe’s fight against the Turks and the emperor’s struggle with Hungarian rebels were intertwined. Guarded from heaven by the Blessed Virgin Mary, the imperial eagle attacks Thököly with a sword engraved with the Latin motto “Iustitia.”52 Thököly is portrayed as an obedient Turkish bloodhound. In this way, Catholic and pro-imperial propaganda of the later 1680s made Thököly an epitome of treason.53 In vain Thököly had tried to desert his Turkish alliance at last. His conciliatory proclamation to the Christian nations of Europe received no response, not even from the Protestant rulers. After the unsuccessful siege of Buda in 1684, the emperor’s army began to eliminate Thököly’s support in Upper Hungary.54 In 1684 and 1685, a large number of printed publications analyzed how Thököly had gradually lost his power while his soldiers received imperial pardon.55 General Schultz wrote a detailed account on his victory over Thököly 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Németh, “Angol jóslat Thököly”; Varga, Válaszúton, 15–19. Friedeburg, Widerstandsrecht. Wrede, Das Reich und seine Feinde, 135–145. Jacob Jeczl, Neye Und richtige Abbildung so aus der Ungarischen Mappen gezochen Umb was Reuier Bargam und Gran., Innsbruck 1683, in Cennerné-Wilhelmb, “Feind oder zukünftiger Verbündeter?,” 54–62. Cf. Duchhardt, “Krönungszüge,” 291–301. “Eigentliche Relation Der in Ober-Ungarn ligenden Statt Eperies, So von Ihro Eccell. Herrn General Valentin Graffen von Schulz den 20. Julii 1685. Belaegert,” in Apponyi, Hungarica, fig. 2218. SBR 2 Jur. 1133; SBR 4. Hist. 541/14/26.

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in September 1684, which was even published in London.56 The French Almanach Royale pictured the success of the Habsburg troops over Thököly in 1684.57 The imperial court, however, did not succeed in capturing and arresting Thököly. This is why it was important to ruin his personal credibility and fame by publishing caricatures ridiculing him.58 These pictures visualized the fall of Thököly and his rapid loss of power in an easily understandable way. German, Italian, and Latin broadsheets likewise mocked Thököly’s fatal Ottoman alliance and alleged that Thököly had eventually been taken prisoner by the Turks.59 These pamphlets predominantly used the victorious imperial eagle, which was already a prominent feature of Jeczl’s engraving in 1683 and was now commonly used a symbol of failed rebellion. The broadsheet Fatum Emerici Comitis Tekely (fig. 7.4), for example, described how the imperial eagle, armed with a sword and sending flashes of lightning down on Thököly, thrust the unfortunate rebel from his throne.60 The throne is placed right in the middle and flanked by two armies. Soldiers loyal to the emperor, one of them in traditional Hungarian attire, approach from the left to take Thököly captive, and frightened Turks take flight on the right and drop their sabers in haste. Following an agreement in Regensburg, the French did not support the Turks during the war in Hungary. The emperor had effectively won over the majority of European princes to his side, and this success was owed to his unrelenting visual propaganda. The second strategy to make sense of conflict in Hungary was to present the aristocratic rebellions as fable-like examples of personal ambition and subsequent downfall. Such prints predominantly originated in Vienna or other pro-imperial cities and preferred to compare Nádasdy and Thököly to Icarus and other tragic heroes. In such prints, imagery relating to fortune or bad luck – such as comets, wheels of fortune, card tables, or Greek mythological figures – was also very popular. After the siege of Buda 56 57

58 59 60

Anonymous, A True and Exact Relation of the Great Victory. Obtained by General Schults over Count Teckely in the Upper Hungaria, on the 20th of Septemb. 1684. Combats et victoires remportées par les impériaux sur les Turcs dans la haute basse Hongrie et Esclavonie [etc.], 1684, described as a “rare engraving” in: Institut Royal Grand-Ducal de Luxembourg (Section Historique): Publications de la Section historique de l’Institut royal grand-ducal de Luxembourg, Luxemburg: no. 29, 299. The satire expressed a critical approach to power. See Mulsow, Die unanständige Gelehrtenrepublik, 87–120. See Stollberg-Rilinger and Weissbrich, Die Bildlichkeit, 9–21; Rózsa, “Eine Darstellung.” “Fatum Emerici Comitis Teckely Programma Emericus Tekelius, Bericht nach deme der Teckely bey dem Bassa zu Wardein wegen Endsezung Caschau und Succurs angehalten ist, er von ainen Aga avisirt, Warhaffte Abbildung der Gefangen nehmung des Töckely, in Wardein,” inter alia discussed in Paas, The German Political Broadsheet, vol. 11, 232–38.

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Figure 7.4 Fatum Emerici Comitis Tekely, 1685, engraving. National Széchényi Library, Apponyi Collection, Budapest

in 1686, the engravers had once again begun to use a comet as a symbol for Thököly. And this time, the comet symbolized his political fall.61 The kings’ card game, however, highlighted the fickleness of politics in more general terms.62 One broadsheet showing a card table was a German print translated from Dutch in 1672.63 The text contained a dialogue of thirtysix game participants from all over Europe, including Sweden, Portugal, England, and Venice.64 Some conversations referred to the disgraceful fate of 61

62 63 64

“Der von dem im Ottomanischen Reich jetzt (herrschenden Gross-Sultan … aufgestellte Glücks-Hafen. Nuremberg, gedruckt und zu finden Jonathan Felsecker,” in Bibliotheca Nationalis Hungariae, App. M., fig. 355. Cf. also Schumann, “Das politisch-militärische Flugblatt.” Hilgers, “Vom Einbruch des Spiels.” “Ausländisch-Europäischer Potentaten wie auch Französisch- und Holländischer Kriegspraeparatorien Staats-Discurs,” in Paas, The German Political Broadsheet, vol. 10, 309–310. Maurer, “Europa als Kommunikationsraum”; Arndt, “Die europäische Medienlandschaft.”

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the Hungarian aristocrats and to the situation of Transylvania. The symbols were easily understandable; they suggested the importance of international, European, and Continental orientation even to the less educated readers.65 Translations from Dutch to German in the 1670s urged the alliance against France. They introduced new concepts of constitutional theory and of law enforcement to the German-speaking public.66 The third and by far most frequent explanation given for noble revolt in Hungary was a vertical power struggle between a king aiming at absolutism and traditional local leaders. In many Dutch prints, French and Austrian attempts to institute universal monarchies were criticized, but constitutional backgrounds to the two rebellions were also a central theme of Habsburgian prints and pro-imperial propaganda. As it seems, a secularized and abstract interpretation of politics appealed to both parties. The emperor himself hoped to prevent religious interpretations of the conflicts as best he could because Christian unity was necessary in the face of the Ottoman threat. A confessional war within his dominions would have severely demolished his international reputation. This is why the Habsburg propaganda tried to present the struggle with Hungarian noblemen predominantly as disobedience towards their legitimate supremacy as long as they needed to secure Protestant rulers’ support against the Turks. In this period, the Habsburg monarchy encouraged engravings of the rebels’ trials and punishments. Displays of the executions, which stressed the strict orderliness and lawfulness of the proceedings, were intended to antagonize popular support for the rebels. Clerical assistance and the presence of state officials or even large crowds were at least as important visual features as the hangmen’s raised swords. This restraint and clear-cut iconography were meant to communicate the unhurried authority and justice of the royal government.67 The ruler’s right to exclude those noblemen who would turn against him from the governing bodies was strengthened. Imperial media did not introduce the downfall of Nádasdy in a satirical or sarcastic manner but stressed the conflict as an exemplary case of necessary law enforcement (fig. 7.5.). In this vein, Christoph Boetius’ book on the rise and fall of famous European politicians and generals analyzed the deeds and executions of Nádasdy, Zrínyi, and Frangepán as a warning to posterity. In his historiographical description, Boetius underlined that Péter Zrínyi, ban of Croatia and a successful military 65 66 67

Schilling, Early Modern European Civilization; Malettke, “Hegemonie”; Kampmann et al., Bourbon. See Arndt, Das Heilige Römische Reich, 239–274. Burke, Eyewitnessing, 157–179; Harms, “Historische Kontextualisierungen.”

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Figure 7.5 Cornelis Meyssens, Hinrichtung von Graf Franz Nadasdy, in Aussführliche und Warhafftige Beschreibung wie es mit denen Criminal-Prozessen, und darauff erfolgten executionen wider die drey graffen Frantzen Nadasdi, Peter von Zrin, und Frantz Christophen Frangepan eigentlich hergangen, 1671, engraving. Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történelmi Képcsarnok, Budapest

leader, had tried to ally with Hungary’s former enemy, the Ottoman Empire, and thereby infringed upon fundamental political obligations. Boetius generally knew and understood the political situation in the Hungarian Kingdom68 and justly emphasized that Ferenc III Nádasdy’s execution had been the turning point in the powerful symbiosis between a self-confident Hungarian aristocracy and their king. Most prints that focused on the constitutional effects of the two Hungarian rebellions generally tried to consider their international long-term consequences and became especially popular after 1688, the turbulent year of the Glorious Revolution in England and Louis XIV’s attack upon the Rhine Palatinate. To a certain degree, such prints of the late 1680s and 1690s reconciled Protestant and Catholic interests within the Holy Roman Empire and northwestern Europe. Thököly’s Ottoman alliance was now seen in contrast to the realignment of Europe’s Christian nations. Well known Catholic writers, such as Abraham a Sancta Clara, and Protestant philosophers, such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, discredited Thököly’s rebellion, and a similar line

68

Boethius, Rhum-Belorberter.

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of argumentation was adopted in Curieuser Staats Mercurius, which saw eight consecutive editions in 1684 and 1685.69 Fearing French domination as much as Turkish invasion, Western European engravers, printers, and patrons also chose to propagate their own view of a healthy European balance of powers beyond confessional division. A striking Dutch pamphlet with strong international references was, for example, the engraving Labouratoire dece [sic] Temps / Het Groote Stookhuis Der Princen dezes Tijds, in Europe [The laboratory of (the Princes) of this time, in Europe] by the famous Amsterdam-born artist Romeyn de Hooghe, who was himself a Protestant but also a friend to religious toleration.70 His highly symbolic engraving of an alchemist’s laboratory, published in 1689, was in fact based on a broadside first printed in 1674.71 Whereas the print of 1674 had been a critical response to the war between France and the United Provinces in 1672–1678, the 1689 adaption covered the consequences of princely lust for power on an even wider scale.72 The version of 1674 had condemned French expansionism as a major threat to the peace of Europe, but the version of 1689 also took the consequences of the Turkish War and the Glorious Revolution in England into consideration. Looking back on the Hungarian uprising of 1682, de Hooghe clearly condemned Thököly’s actions and insinuated that Thököly’s siding with the Turks was identical to having been allured by the odor of the French lilies.73 Both symbols of Ottoman rule and the French monarchy stood for destructive, dishonest principles of foreign policy and the subsequent threat to the peace of the Holy Roman Empire at the heart of Europe. In his call for stability and unity among the princes of sense and honor, de Hooghe carefully judged the Glorious Revolution in England both as treachery towards the rightful Stuart dynasty and as a necessary response to Louis XIV’s despotism and aggression.74 Although political networks of the later seventeenth

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Sincerus, Curieuser Staats-Mercurius. Trustees of the British Museum, Labouratoire Dece [sic] Temps. Trustees of the British Museum, Den Franschen Algemist. Trustees of the British Museum, Labouratoire Dece [sic] Temps. In verse 4 of the poem below the engraving, Thököly is said to have foolishly relied on France: “Unblessed is he who believes in the lily.” Translation by David de Boer. As Thököly gets a blow from Germany, he cries for help in vain, but his relation with the Ottoman Empire is not explicitly mentioned. The relevant verse reads: “Orange, with his power, lands on England’s coast, starts to blow so dangerously in the melting house, which amazes both Jems [James] and Louis. They see one another, deadly afraid and hardly know which way best to go now.” Translation by David de Boer. See Raymond, Pamphlets; Kampmann, “Die Englische Krone.”

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century continued to overlap with confessional solidarity, lasting peace in Europe became an even more important aim.75 This is also expressed in the favorable representations of the Lutheran elector of Saxony, John George III, and the Calvinist elector of Brandenburg, Frederick William. The print reads that “all who love the Reich gather under their command,” which does not only encourage a cooperation of all Protestant denominations, but also alludes to the support John George had offered to his Catholic emperor. How strongly peace and stability in late seventeenth-century Europe depended on carefully chosen coalitions was likewise reflected in a wheel of fortune (fig. 7.6.) engraved by Philibert Bouttats, a well-known Flemish printmaker and publisher from Antwerp.76 Although this broadsheet was based on a common seventeenth-century symbol, it required explanations even for the educated readers.77 The wheel of fortune in the center of the print is adorned with hooks that force a changing fate upon mankind. The course of history is being moved by Cronos and Mars as personifications of time and war. The spikes of the wheel consist of symbols of power and justice, among them the punishing “Sword of God,” a broken pillar, and the “Rod of Destiny.”78 Members of different European dynasties hold on to the spinning wheel in order to gain superiority. Similar to de Hooghe’s depiction of the alchemist’s laboratory, Bouttats’ print made clear that politics was by no means a solitary affair: most kings, heirs apparent, and noblemen depicted in the print either assist or hinder each other’s rise.79 Denmark and Sweden are shown in a friendly embrace, but the dauphin of France and his father quarrel. Wars with neighboring countries and power struggles within individual principalities are hence presented as the major reason for a nation’s weakness or poverty. The Hungarian rebel Thököly, who clings to the Ottoman sultan’s arm, inadvertently weakens Turkish power and is even accused of having incited the Ottoman rulers to continue their fight against the West. In 1690, after the death of Mihály Apafi I, Thököly succeeded to become ruling prince of Transylvania with the aid of Ottoman troops. After the reoccupation of Belgrade by the Turks, Thököly was again considered to be an influential European politician, but by the end of October 1690, Louis of Baden expelled him from Transylvania forever. Therefore, Thököly’s image of a violent, revengeful rebel sharply contrasted with the depiction of Switzerland on the left-hand 75 76 77 78 79

Burkhardt, Vollendung und Neuorientierung, 100–101. Cillessen, Krieg der Bilder, 286–287. Henkel and Schöne, Emblemata, 1796–1811. Cillessen, Krieg der Bilder, 286–287. Raymond, Pamphlets; Kampmann, “Die Englische Krone”; Kampmann et al., Bourbon.

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Figure 7.6 Philibert Bouttats, ‘T Hedendaags Rad van Avontuur, 1690, engraving, 33 × 38.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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side of the print. A Swiss soldier is calmly seated on bulging bags and cherishes political neutrality, which brings wealth and happiness to its people. Whereas Switzerland is thus praised as a land without war, the right-hand corner of the print is occupied by a desperate citizen of the Rhine Palatinate and his starving child. The oppressed Palatine population that suffered many military attacks and losses stands for the helpless victims of the princes’ power struggle and incite compassion. Like de Hooghe, Bouttats values human sympathy more than national or religious ties, and rebels like Thököly are therefore seen as despisers of common European interests. Bouttats’ broadsheet was published in Antwerp, which then belonged to Habsburg territory, and it clearly defended Leopold I’s strong position and deliberately contrasted farsighted imperial rule with Ottoman and French selfseeking. Both de Hooghe’s and Bouttats’ engravings clearly aimed to show that both official and secret allies to Louis XIV and the Ottoman sultan would be in decline as soon as the remaining powers united in peace.80 Differentiations of rebellion, plot, conspiracy, and revolt remained unclear in the majority of popular publications of the time, but the visual reflection on different forms of resistance was very intensive.81 Apart from low-brow illustrations in pamphlets and broadsides, the visual production in the West also included sophisticated engravings used as frontispieces for expensive historiographies. Hungarian noblemen themselves mainly used oral communication to defend their cause, but Western media heavily relied on visual representations. 3

Long-Term Consequences of Nádasdy’s Conspiracy and Thököly’s Revolts and the Future of Hungary in Europe

The political position of the Hungarian Kingdom and the principality of Transylvania changed fundamentally after the expulsion of the Turks.82 This is the reason why the region was so important for European audiences. The political influence of the Habsburgs grew by the weakening of their competitor, the Ottoman Empire.83 After 1671, the Holy Roman emperor found himself in an unprecedented position of strength and disregarded the former compromise with the diet and nobility of Hungary. On the contrary, Leopold I’s imperial 80 81 82 83

Wrede, Das Reich und seine Feinde; Burkhardt and Schumann, “Reichskriege.” Warnke, “Rebellion,” 280–287. Várkonyi, “Hungarian Independence”; Bahlcke, “Hungaria eliberata? Zum Zusammenstoss von altständischer Libertät und monarchischer Autorität in Ungarn an der Wende vom 17. zum 18. Jahrhundert.” Szakály, Hungaria Eliberata; Kontler, “Hungaria Eliberata,” 181–190.

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court aimed to express the new political strategy and power by means of spectacular celebrations and sophisticated prints.84 Their communicational expertise gave them a political advantage in the course of the Hungarian rebellions. A welcome occasion to demonstrate their newly acquired strength was the coronation of Joseph I. This coronation implied the declaration of hereditary monarchy, which put an end to elective kingship in Hungary and abolished the Hungarian Diet’s ius resistendi (right to resist).85 A broadsheet published by Romeyn de Hooghe on this very occasion expressed the growing power of the Habsburg dynasty, which was legitimized by victories against the Turks and the successful suppression of the Hungarian revolts. And although political elites within the Holy Roman Empire had generally shared Hungarian opposition to imperial centralization, German pamphlets now described the constitutional revolution in Hungary with careful restraint and impartiality. Media of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century furthermore stressed that the tragic outcome of the seventeenth-century conflicts followed the compelling logic of universal history.86 Hungary’s regional interest, however, was widely disregarded for several decades to come. Back at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the princes of Transylvania (István Bocskai, Gábor Bethlen, and György Rákóczi I) had guaranteed that the political voice of the Hungarian nobility was heard in Vienna. But in the second half of the century, the expanding power of the king restricted the influence of the Hungarian nobility. Many broadsheets of the late seventeenth century shared this view. Some described that there had been several opportunities for a new compromise between the Habsburg ruler and the Hungarian nobility, but these opportunities were missed at the Hungarian Diet of 1681. After 1681, the emperor’s victories freed him from all obligations. The weakened Transylvanian principality could no longer protect the rights of the Hungarian elite. This is why newspapers and pamphlets produced in the Holy 84 85 86

Baumanns, Das publizistische Werk. The emperor’s diplomats, such as Franz Paul Lisola, experts of economics, such as Joachim Becher, and leading state officials contributed to the production of political pamphlets; see Etényi, “Die Öffentlichkeitspolitik.” Perceiving the entire seventeenth century as an unprecedented age of closely intertwined revolts, author Werner Eberhard Happel (1647–1690) and publisher Thomas Wiering (1640–1703) summarized the uprisings of their period in a series of books entitled Historischer Kern. This series aimed to show correlations of violent political change all across the world and subsequently analyzed Nádasdy’s conspiracy and Thököly’s oppositional movement as a constant revolution, while the emerging absolutism of the Habsburg dynasty was explained as the constructive result of the successful expulsion of the Turks; see Happel, Des Historischen Kerns, 3.2: 104–121; 2: 88–89, 108; and Appendix zu dieser Kern Chronika.

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Roman electorates and Protestant principalities of Europe had to adjust to this situation. Their revised media strategy remained conscious of the political alternatives, but it truthfully related the imperial successes in Hungary. In the long run, the Hungarian nobility was predominantly equated with beaten rebels such as Nádasdy and Thököly and lost its former reputation.87 The fame of many iconic Hungarian politicians who had loyally fought the Ottoman Empire in earlier decades was replaced by the ill repute of nobles who had cooperated with the archenemy of Christendom. The Hungarian political elites were no longer able to communicate their stance in a rapidly changing political system. As we said in the first paragraph of this article, Hungarian noblemen had used expensive books, exclusive paintings, and traditional ritual in their political representation, but they lost to the multilingual and highly appealing print campaign staged by the emperor and his supporters. As international media began to embrace pro-imperial propaganda in reaction to the overwhelming military achievements against the Ottoman Empire, the effect of well-priced illustrated broadsides and periodical newspapers was felt painfully among Hungarian noblemen in opposition. It is important to note that imperial propaganda had by no means been based on press control and censorship. On the contrary, it was the frankness with which the imperial governments passed information on to independent media entrepreneurs that proved highly successful. Taking the interests of his nonCatholic and foreign allies into consideration, the argumentative strategies of imperial propaganda drew on many iconographical traditions and sought broad consensus. Hungary, for its part, was not able to regain political autonomy before the war of independence lead by Ferenc II Rákóczi from 1703 to 1711.88 Rákóczi made up for the previous lack of up-to-date Hungarian representation and engaged famous artists such as Ádám Mányoki, who also worked for the Saxon and Brandenburg courts.89 Furthermore, he had his own propaganda printed in Latin, French, and English and gained considerable diplomatic support in England and the Dutch Republic.90 And Rákóczi could claim a vast inheritance in Transylvania as his power base. European media honored his

87 88 89 90

In his sociological and political analysis of Hungarian mentality, Miklós Hadas has linked the history of Hungary’s failed rebellions with a long absence of urban middle classes; see Hadas, “The Culture of Distrust,” 145–149. Kontler, “Hungaria Eliberata,” 181–190; Szijártó, “The Rákóczi Revolt.” Galavics et al., “Rákóczi-tanulmányok”; Buzási, “Rákóczi Ferenc”; Buzási, Mányoki Ádám. Várkonyi, “Der König und der Fürst,” 55–66.

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serious legitimation in more benevolent newspaper reports. Das Wienerische Diarium and The Boston News-Letter in North America gave Rákóczi’s point of view a sufficient platform and helped to change the image of Hungary in the West once more. 91 Bibliography Almási, G., e.a., eds. A Divided Hungary in Europe: Exchanges, Networks and Representations, 1541–1699. Vol. 1: Study Tours and Intellectual-Religious Relationships; Vol. 2: Diplomacy, Information Flow and Cultural Exchange; Vol. 3: The Making and Uses of the Image of Hungary and Transylvania. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. Anonymous. A True and Exact Relation of the Great Victory. Obtained by General Schults over Count Teckely in the Upper Hungaria, on the 20th of Septemb. 1684…. London: Thomas Snowden, 1684. Anonymous. Curiose Staats-Gedancken / Uber den verwirrten Zustand des Königreichs Ungarn us.lnd dahero bey der Christenheit entstehenden Gefahr/ Bekümmernus und Zeit-gewöhnlichen Fragen sonderlich aber was doch die Unserige nach erhaltener Victorie in Ungarn weiter vornehmen / und was sie Glückliches verrichten möchten? Ob der Türcke auch wieder vor Wien rucken / und was er sonst bey diesem Kriege gewinnen dürffte? Ob auch die Christliche Potentaten einig bleiben / oder sich trennen solten? Worum doch dieselben mit dem Türcken so balden Friede machen? Wie es mit dem Töckely / und denen Evangelischen in Ungarn / ja dem gantzen Königreiche endlich ablauffen; und ob solches der Türcke mit der Zeit auch vollends in seine Gewalt bringen werde? Publisher not identified, 1684. Anonymous. “Einkommende Ordinari Post Zeitungen [week III: News from Vienna]” Berlin, January 15, 1671. Z2; “[week XIX: News from Vienna].” Berlin, May 7, 1671. Z2 (II); “Nordischer Mercurius. Welcher wochentlich, zweymahl Teutsch, auch einmal Lateinische und Französisch, körzlich vorstellet, was mit den Europaeischen Posten vom Krieg und Frieden, auch andern denckwürdigen Sachen eingekommen ist [News from Vienna].” Berlin, April 21, 1671. Z20. Institut “Deutsche Presseforschung” Bremen.

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Wienerisches Diarium published the official imperial edicts, proclamations, and military intelligence. This newspaper had been founded in 1703 and was renamed Wiener Zeitung in 1780; also see cf. Lang, “Die deutschsprachigen Wiener Zeitungen.” The Boston News-Letter (1704–1776, edited by John Campbell and printed by Bartolomew Green) was the first colonial periodical in North America and was subsidized by the royal government. It covered news from the British Isles and international events. See Brigham, History and Bibliography; Bakó, “Rákóczi and America,” 324–327; Köpeczi, “Az angol hírsajtó.”

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Anonymous. “Ordinari Dienstags Zeitung.” [Mayer & Schumacher], June 30, 1655. Z9, No. 28; “Ordinari Dienstags Zeitung/Wöchentliche Donnerstags Zeitung/Appendix der Wöchentlichen Zeitung.” [Mayer & Schumacher], January 7, 1655. Z9, No. 1–29. Institut “Deutsche Presseforschung” Bremen. Apponyi, Sándor. Hungarica: Ungarn betreffende im Auslande gedruckte Bücher und Flugschriften, edited by József Vekerdy. Budapest: Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, 2004. Arndt, Johannes. Das Heilige Römische Reich und die Niederlande 1566 bis 1648: Politischkonfessionelle Verflechtung und Publizistik im Achtzigjährigen Krieg. Cologne/ Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau, 1998. Arndt, Johannes. “Die europäische Medienlandschaft im Barockzeitalter.” In Auf dem Weg nach Europa: Deutungen, Visionen, Wirklichkeiten, edited by Irene Dingel and Matthias Schnettger, 25–39. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck + Ruprecht, 2010. Ayres, Philip, trans. The Hungarian Rebellion, or, An Historical Relation of the Late Wicked Practices of the Three Counts, Nadasdi, Serini, and Frangepani: Tending to Subvert the Government of His Present Imperial Majesty in Hungary, and Introduce the Mahumetan. With Their Arraignment, Condemnation, and Manner of Being Executed for the Same. Translated into English by P. A. [Philip Ayres] Gent. London: Printed for William Gilbert at the Half Moon in Pauls Church-yard, and Tho. Sawbridge at the three Flower de Luces in Little-Brittain, 1672. Bahlcke, Joachim. “Hungaria eliberata? Zum Zusammenstoss von altständischer Libertät und monarchischer Autorität in Ungarn an der Wende vom 17. zum 18. Jahrhundert.” In Die Habsburgermonarchie 1620 bis 1740: Leistungen und Grenzen des Absolutismusparadigmas, edited by Petr Mat’a and Thomas Winkelbauer, 301–316. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2006. Bakó, Elemér. “Rákóczi and America.” Lecture prepared for the Rákóczi Commemorative Program of the American Hungarian Federation in Washington, the Canadian Association of Hungarian Studies in Montreal, and the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe for broadcast to Hungary in 1985. Washington, DC: Amerikai Magyar Szövetség, 1988. Baumanns, Markus. Das publizistische Werk des kaiserlichen Diplomaten Franz Paul Freiherr von Lisola (1613–1674): Ein Beitrag zum Verhältnis von Absolutistischem Staat, Öffentlichkeit und Mächtepolitik in der frühen Neuzeit. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994. Benczédi, László. Rendiség, abszolutizmus és centralizáció a 17. század végi Magyarországon 1664–1685. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1980. Bene, Sándor. “Hóhérok Teátruma: A Wesselényi mozgalom perei és a hazai recepció kezdetei.” In Siralmas jajt érdemlo játék magyar nyelvu tudósitás a Wesselényi mozgalomról, edited by Emil Hargittay, 32–85. Piliscsaba: Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kar, 1997. Bibliotheca Nationalis Hungariae. “Apponyi Metszet (hereafter: App. M.) – Apponyi Engraving [electronic catalogue].” n.d. http://nektar1.oszk.hu/librivision_hun.html.

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chapter 8

Representing the King: The Images of João IV of Portugal (1640–1652) Joana Fraga In any polity, the exercise of authority is inseparable from the forms and media in which that authority is represented.1 Visualizing power was, as a result, a fundamental concern of early modern rulers, and the first king of the newly enthroned dynasty of the Braganza proved to be aware of that. This chapter will explore the complexities of the construction of the royal image of João [John] of Braganza after the separatist revolt of 1640 against the Spanish monarchy and its political repercussions in Europe. The working hypothesis of the chapter is that the first representative of the new dynasty understood the need and importance of creating an official image and its use as a legitimacy tool, especially outside the kingdom. Through a variety of examples, I will argue that images played a role as important as weapons in a time of conflict, such as the Portuguese Restauração. On December 1, 1640, at 9 a.m., a group of noblemen entered the royal palace in Lisbon. They fought the guards and all the opposition they met until they found Miguel de Vasconcelos, the secretary, hiding inside a closet. After being wounded by firearms, he fell on the floor. The conjurers ended his life with swords, and afterward they threw him out of the window. Then they headed to the rooms of Vicereine Margaret of Savoy, Duchess of Mantua. As she was a woman of royal blood, her life was spared and she was imprisoned. At the same time, as the crowd was gathering around the palace square, the insurgents shouted from the windows: “Brave Portuguese people, long live the King João IV, until this moment Duke of Braganza; death to the traitors who took away our liberty” and “Long live King João IV and freedom.”2 The same noblemen then went to the streets to proclaim the new king. The archbishop, also aware of the conspiracy, left the cathedral in procession. The coup d’état

1 This work is an output of the Resistance Project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 778076. 2 All translations by author. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004461949_010

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quickly succeeded in breaking with the Habsburg monarchs, putting an end to sixty years of dynastical union.3 1

An Image for the King

João of Braganza was not personally involved in the coup d’état, and he was not in Lisbon on that day. Should the conspiracy have been discovered or the uprising prevented, he would have been able to dissociate himself from the group of insurgents, thus avoiding the charge of treason. He entered Lisbon on December 6 and was declared king of Portugal on the 15th. The king had no time to lose – there were urgent matters to attend to. He had two immediate main concerns: first, the upcoming war against Philip IV, and second, he needed to legitimate his position as king of Portugal and fight the notion of rebellion. Both were hard tasks. Militarily, the king had to face an imminent attack from the Spanish. This was not easy given the troubling state of the kingdom’s defenses. And the new king had to secure his status as rightful king, for he had been enthroned after a revolt: he had to fight the accusation of rebellion at home and abroad. Despite being a member of the most important Portuguese aristocratic household and the largest landowner in the kingdom, he was to have a hard time creating a royal image for himself. He had been raised in Vila Viçosa, away from the court. He had never profited from its social ambiance, having lived in isolation in his domains in Alentejo. Both his personality and behavior reflected this condition, giving way to remarks among those close to him. A month after being proclaimed king, João Pinto Ribeiro, a man close to João of Braganza who also played an important role in the uprising, wrote to a friend stating that the king often wore the same clothes to different ceremonies, and, on top of that, the fabrics were of modest quality.4 This reflects the political and social marginality of the new king. However, he was recognized in Portugal as king unusually fast.5 The harder task was 3 The bibliography on the revolt is immense. Among others, see Costa and Cunha, D. João IV; Valladares, A independência de Portugal. Despite the general discontentment often pointed out by these authors, the plot was idealized by a small number of noblemen, who feared for the continuity of their privileges. On this topic, see Schaub, Portugal na Monarquia Hispânica. On the symbolical and political meaning of the revolt, see Torgal, “Acerca do significado sociopolítico da ‘revolução’ de 1640,” 301–319; Valladares, “Sobre reyes de invierno,” 103–136. 4 Costa and Cunha, D. João IV. 5 Although there was some local resistance, an effort was made to transmit the image of a united kingdom supporting a strong anti-Castilian feeling. See Bouza, “Primero de diciembre de 1640,” 205–225.

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seeking the same acknowledgment in Europe, especially from the papacy. The relationship between the local power and Rome had been tense over the previous years, and in 1640 most of the churches in Lisbon were interdicted, preventing the population from participating in public rites. It was important for the new king to fall in the good graces of the Holy See again, and once the pope recognized the new dynasty, it was expected that most of other countries would follow. This process involved various initiatives on behalf of the new king, such as the publication of treaties, pamphlets, and images, written and oral accounts of miracles, ceremonies and plays, among others that played a crucial role in the fight for the Portuguese throne. Also, while preparing for war, the king made sure to make the necessary arrangements for the launch of a diplomatic offensive. He sent men in his trust to the main cities in Europe in order to seek settlements, marriages with members of royal families, and financial support for the war. At the same time, the monarch proved to be aware of the possibilities and the necessity of disseminating a certain image of himself, using engravings and prints to win minds and hearts.6 It is estimated that there are more than eighty known images related to the Portuguese revolt, most of them portraits of the king, produced mainly between 1641 and 1652, the year João IV died.7 A closer look at this imagery allows us to perceive a certain homogeneity in the visual production. Many of the visual representations of the king convey the impression of having been derived from two main models. The first one seems to have its origins in the royal portrait painted by José Avelar Rebelo, the artist in charge of creating a royal image of João of Braganza. There is little information about Avelar Rebelo’s private life, but it is possible to place his main activity between 1634 and 1657. He grew up in Vila Viçosa, in the palace of the Duke of Braganza, and thus they were most probably personal friends. With regard to his artistic education, it is believed that he completed it at the Madrid court or, more likely, in Andalusian schools.8 This portrait brings back a certain nostalgia of the glories of the Aviz dynasty, extinct after the early

6 The field of visual culture in the early modern age has been much discussed. The bibliography is immense and therefore impossible to cite in such a brief article. As general references concerning the role portraits played and regarding the general theoretical framework for this article, see Bouza, Imagen y propaganda; Burke, Eyewitnessing; Freedberg, The Power of Images; Furió, Sociología del arte; Haskell, History and Its Images; Palos and Carrió-Invernizzi, eds., La historia imaginada; Peñarroya, “El testimonio de las imágenes,” 127–142. 7 In this text and for the present argument, we will consider only the images produced during the life of João IV. See Fraga, “Three Revolts in Images.” 8 Serrão, A pintura protobarroca em Portugal, 1612–1657.

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death of King Sebastian, the last Portuguese king of the Aviz line, in North Africa in 1578. The painting, despite being a work of crisis, follows faithfully the instructions given in the manuals on how to construct “royal dignity.” It depicts the monarch standing next to a table with a helmet on it. In his right hand he holds a scepter. At his feet lies a shield. In the back a curtain frames the canvas. The king is dressed in light colors, and around his neck hangs a gold chain showing the habit of Christ. Both elements stress the difference from the usual black clothing and the Order of the Golden Fleece of the Habsburgs, emblem of the excellence of the Spanish monarchs, always visible in their royal portraits. Often described as a work of crisis for its obvious lack of quality,9 it witnesses both the military and the government engagement of the king. It brings together the symbols of majesty (the curtain), good government (table and scepter), and military leadership (shield and helmet). Nevertheless, the portrait also shows a strong resemblance to the Habsburg portraits. There is, at no point, a cultural rupture.10 It follows the main guidelines of the Spanish portraits, sober and focused on a few symbolic objects (crown, scepter, and royal mantle),11 which raises some issues. It is also worth mentioning that João IV was the last king to wear the Portuguese crown; in 1646 he consecrated it to the Virgin Mary, proclaiming her the queen and patroness of Portugal.12 However, to fully understand the creation of a royal image in all its complexities, it is important to look at other engravings and prints commissioned and disseminated in Europe. This portrait of the king made by Avelar Rebelo seems to be the source of inspiration for foreign artists at the service of Portuguese agents. There were many artists available, but not all of them presenting the same advantages as Michel Lasne and Michel Moncornet, two of the artists favored by the king’s agents. Indeed, Portuguese delegates were able to choose artists who worked also as editors and reached a wide audience. Michel Lasne, known for his talent and for the simplicity of his work, arrived in Paris in 1621 and soon became a popular artist, receiving even some privileges from King Louis XIII. His engraving of João IV is a perfect example of his talent (fig. 8.1).

9 10 11 12

Ibid. Cardim, “Una ‘restauraçao’ visual?,” 185–206. Checa, “Comment se représente un Habsbourg d’Espagne?” The ceremony of the coronation was replaced by a ceremony called “Aclamação” (acclamation), where the new king was presented with the crown and invested with the regalia. In 1640, during the acclamation ceremony of João IV, the crown was placed next to an image of the Virgin, who was considered to be the true queen of Portugal.

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Figure 8.1 Michel Lasne, Ioannes IIII Portugalliae et Algarbiorum Rex, 1643, engraving. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon

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Lasne depicts the king wearing the military armor and a cross on his chest, following the model of Avelar Rebelo. According to tradition, no crown is represented. This absence is instead compensated for with the explanatory legend “Ioannes IIII Portugalliae et Algarbiorum Rex.” The image was probably sold as a loose print, but it accompanied also the written work of the Portuguese Manuel Fernandes Vila Real, Anticaramuel, a piece on the legal rights of the Braganza to the throne, published in 1643.13 It was also used in the sixth volume of the Theatrum Europaeum (1652), a German journal containing the main events relating to European history.14 Balthazar Moncornet introduces slight differences when representing João IV (fig. 8.2). Moncornet was a well-known engraver and editor in Paris, located first in rue des Gobelins and later in rue Saint-Jacques.15 He produced a number of landscapes, religious images, and almanacs, but portraits were his specialty. The prints and engravings produced by Moncornet were aimed at buyers who usually did not know the figure represented or who had barely seen the model in real life.16 His talent made him a suitable choice for the Portuguese commissioners. His portrait of the king shows João IV dressed in a suit of armor, with the cross of Christ and the curtain as a symbol of sovereignty (fig. 8.2). The legend reads Iean [ Jean] IIII par la grace de Dieu Roy de Portugal & des Algarbes (…). However, Moncornet introduces several novelties relative to the model of Avelar Rebelo. First, there are some changes in the facial features of the monarch. João IV looks older and is depicted with a hat, mustache, and a beard. In addition, he wears an antiquated unstarched ruff-like collar. These alterations might have been introduced to show the aging of the king and present an adaptation to the French public by adopting its fashion. Both changes were very common in Moncornet’s portraits. The second novelty is the background, custom-made for each client. In this image the artist depicts the coronation of the king. There is a second portrait of the king by the same artist that shows a deer hunting scene. Hunting deer was reserved for high nobility and royalty. Both pictures underline the king’s legitimacy. Independently from the quality of the paintings concerning their resemblance to the actual appearance of the king (true to nature), the portraits

13 14 15 16

Vila Real, Caramuel Lobkowitz, and Blageart, Anticaramuel. Merian, Theatrum Europaeum. Rohfritsch, Balthazar Moncornet, 536. Ibid., 79.

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Figure 8.2 Balthazar Moncornet, Iean IIII par la grace de Dieu Roy de Portugal & des Algarbes, ca. 1650, engraving. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon

Fraga

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show the essential regalia to underline his legitimacy.17 Their conception, realization, and purpose all convey one goal: the depiction of the legitimate king of Portugal. 2

The Circulation of Images

The Portuguese king was well aware of the importance of establishing alliances with the main European territories. Therefore, he soon built a network of agents located in important cities, such as Paris, London, Stockholm, Venice, and Rome. In each of these cities his agents were extremely active in the fight for the legitimacy of their monarch. We will have a look at some examples of different kinds of images and how they were perceived by their audiences. Frontispieces could be understood as a summary of the book. Text often prolongs images, providing a more thorough explanation and offering further details. In the fight for legitimacy, printed texts were important propaganda tools. One of the most important books published during the years of the Portuguese war of independence was Lusitania liberata ab injusto Castellanorum dominio restituta legitimo principi serenissimo Joanni IV (…),18 by António Sousa Macedo. It was published in London in 1645.19 Sousa Macedo (1606–1682) was raised in an aristocratic environment, close to the Braganza. He studied law at the University of Coimbra and was known as one of the most active writers in favor of independence during the dynastical union.20 He participated in the revolt and then as secretary joined the embassy that was headed to London and led by D. Antão de Almada. While in London, he kept an active correspondence with King Charles II justifying the Portuguese independence. He also wrote several pieces on the subject, but his masterpiece was the aforementioned book titled Lusitania liberata, a 794-page work detailing the juridical rights that the dynasty of Braganza had to the crown. The text was accompanied by thirteen engravings, including a frontispiece (fig. 8.3), all 17 18 19 20

The discussion on the facial features in the early modern age is abundant. As a reference see, Belting, Likeness and Presence; Bouza, “Por no usarse,” 41–64; Freedberg, The Power of Images; Kurt Johannesson, “The Portrait of the Prince as a Rhetorical Genre,” 11–36. Translated title: “Lusitania freed from the unfair possession of Castile: Restituted to the legitimate prince João IV.” Sousa de Macedo and Lima, Lusitania liberata. On this book, see Rodríguez Moya, “Lusitania liberata,” 1377–1392. Cidade, A literatura autonomista sob os Filipes; Torgal, Ideologia política e teoria do estado na Restauração, 300–304.

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Figure 8.3 John Droeshout, Frontispiece of Lusitania liberata ab injusto Castellanorum dominio: Restituta legitimo Principi, Serenissimo Joanni IV …, 1645, engraving. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon

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of them were made by the artist John Droeshout, the author of the best engravings for books in the kingdom. The book itself should be understood as a political weapon, in the context of the texts produced during those years. In 1639, Juan Caramuel had published Philippus prudens Caroli V. Imp. Filius Lusitaniae Algarbiae, Indiae, Brasiliae legitimus rex demonstratus,21 which is about the invincibility of Philip IV and the dynasty of the Habsburgs. As an answer, the Portuguese António Pais de Viegas wrote the Manifesto de Portugal22 in 1641, which was about the right Portugal had to separate from the Spanish monarchy. As a direct answer, Caramuel wrote in the following year Respuesta al Manifiesto del Reyno de Portugal.23 And in the same year, reaching the highest level of the polemics, António de Sousa Macedo wrote Juan Caramuel Lobkovvitz (…) convencido en su libro intitulado Philippus prudens (…). Also, Manuel Villa Real wrote Anticaramuel ó defença del manifesto del reyno de Portugal in the same line.24 This was an active political debate, full of complex arguments that found a visual expression in Lusitania liberata in 1645. The frontispiece sets the tone for the book, and it is a direct answer to the provocation expressed by the frontispiece of Philippus Prudens. The image by Erasmus Quellin allegorically represents the supremacy of Philip II over Portugal: in the upper part a lion (symbol of Spain) with a crown and a sword stands on top of the defeated Portuguese dragon. The frontispiece of Lusitania liberata plays with that image, depicting in the upper part the inverse representation of the Spanish publication: the dragon wears the crown on top of the defeated lion. The title is sided by two female allegories: Justice and Peace. The bottom of the image represents four important symbols of the new dynasty: the coat of arms with the crown; the pelican – symbol of João II (1481–1495) and symbol of the Passion of Christ; the Holy Cross (or the Ordo Regius Lusit); and the Armillary Sphere, which was the insignia of King Manuel I (1495–1521) and a reference to the maritime conquests. Beneath the emblems, the sentence “Reges Lusitani quia pelicani, in hoc signo vicerunt orbem” (the Portuguese kings, like pelicans, conquered the world under this symbol), suggests that the glories of the Portuguese, and their virtues, were now restored by the new king. There were also narrative images. They combined several scenes on a single page in order to tell a story, like a comic strip.25 The pamphlet, Kort en grondigh verhael van alle’t gene sich heft toeghedragen in Portugal (…), published 21 22 23 24 25

Translated title: “Philip the Prudent son of the Emperor Charles V, the demonstrated right King of Lusitania, Algarve, India, Brazil.” Translated title: “Manifest of Portugal.” Translated title: “Answer to the Manifest of Portugal.” Translated titles: “Juan Caramuel Lobkovvitz persuaded in his book titled Philip the Prudent …, and Anticaramuel or the defense of the manifest of the kingdom of Portugal.” On the early modern comic strip, see Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip.

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Figure 8.4 Anonymous, Johannes der vierte Konig [sic] zu Portugal und Algarbe etc., ca. 1650, engraving. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon

in Amsterdam in 1641,26 contained an image showing the main events of the Portuguese revolt. Another version of the same image, this time with German captions, was printed ca. 1650 (fig. 8.4). The first scene (A) shows the death of the secretary Miguel de Vasconcelos in the royal palace on December 1. The second scene (B) depicts the entry of the Duke of Braganza into Lisbon on December 6. It is followed by the ceremony of the oath (C), which took place on the 15th, at 11:00 a.m. Finally, the last scene shows the coronation of the king (D). In the middle, there is a portrait of João IV, with the inscription Johannes der Vierte Konig zu Portugal und Algarbe etc. Following the image, in the leaflet, several pages give a thorough explanation of the events. This twenty-four-page pamphlet includes two more prints: one is a map of Portugal showing the bastions at the Portuguese border. The other is a genealogical tree growing from the abdomen of Afonso Henriques, the first Portuguese king (1139–1185), depicting all the Portuguese monarchs except the three Habsburg kings (1580–1640) (fig. 8.5). 26

Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Kort en grondigh.

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Figure 8.5 Anonymous, Arbor genealogica Regum Lusitaniae, ca. 1642, print. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

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The Portuguese history was obviously changed in order to justify the rights of the Braganza to the crown. Shortly after this pamphlet had been released, another one was published in the Netherlands. This new pamphlet preserved the visual structure resembling a modern comic strip and contained a French translation of the captions: “Récit véritable de ce qu’il est passé dans le Royaume de Portugal en l’éléction du roy Jean Quatrième, Roy de Portugal & d’Algarve.” Although images had been part of books for centuries, they gained autonomy during the seventeenth century.27 Prints were now more than decorative elements; they conveyed political messages and had an explicit informative purpose. This explains why this image (fig. 8.4), and many others, could be found as a loose print. The number of copies that still exist today28 allows us to assume that it must have been a popular edition in the second half of the seventeenth century. Other images could relate more directly to the rights of the Braganza to the throne, such as genealogical trees, documented, for example, in Rome. Rome was a very important destination for the Portuguese diplomats because the pope’s recognition of the legitimacy of João IV was crucial. The Portuguese king put D. Miguel of Portugal, bishop of Lamego, in charge of this mission. He arrived in Rome in 1641, but faced immediate difficulties when he tried to enter the city.29 The Spanish ambassador, the Marquis of Los Vélez, insisted that he should not be received as an ambassador: he was representing a rebel, after all. The Portuguese envoy was finally able to enter Rome during the night without any pomp or ceremony. At first, he stayed at the house of the French ambassador Monsieur de la Fontaine and later moved to a house in Piazza Navona, where he was to lead a discrete life. However, it was not discrete enough for his neighbor, Theodore Ameydan (known as Dirk Ameyden), a Flemish poet, lawyer, and a fervent admirer of the Spanish monarchy. According to him, the presence of the Portuguese was a huge issue. He complained about the constant presence of armed guards in the square: “I am surrounded by the soldiers so that I can barely leave home, having for my unfortune the traitor Lamego in a house next to mine.”30 He also complained to the pope about the commotion and the large number of people congregated in the square to see an image of João of Braganza and his wife wearing – to his great shock – the title of king and the crown. He was referring .

27 28 29 30

Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication; Maravall, La cultura del barroco. I was able to trace fifteen copies of this engraving. Castro, Portugal em Roma. Biblioteca Casatenense, ms. 1831, fol. 212v; cited by Bastiaanse, Teodoro Ameyden (1586– 1656), 113.

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to Dutch and French prints that could also be seen in other public places in Rome.31 He was so upset by these images that he bought an entire stock to prevent any kind of public exhibition. The blunt attitude of Ameyden demonstrates the power that images exercised in seventeenth-century Europe. It also expressed what the Flemish poet thought about the Braganza: he was nothing but a usurper and a traitor. The hostilities did not end there. Ameyden complained again after seeing Portuguese genealogical trees circulating in Rome. He even insisted that the pope should not allow the printing of such visual materials. However, the Maestro del Palazzo Sacro claimed that the images arrived from Lisbon and there was nothing he could do.32 These genealogical trees (such as fig. 8.5.) show the line of the kings of Portugal, disregarding the Habsburg dynasty. Titled Arbor Genealogica Regum Lusitaniae, they present the Portuguese coat of arms headed by a dragon. In the lower left corner, an emblem depicting a phoenix with the inscription Morte redemptora sua reminds the audience that, like the phoenix, the new dynasty was also (re)born from the ashes after those sixty years under Spanish rule. In the lower right corner, another dragon is placed on top of a globe. It has a laurel wreath on its head. In the globe, the lines of the Dragon and Phoenix, both Portuguese allegories, are represented. These lines cross the constellations of the Leo, Lyra, and Cetus. Portugal is represented here by the Dragon who rules the stars. These genealogical trees were designed to prevent the accusation of usurpation. After the early death of King Sebastian I in the battle of Alcácer Quibir in 1578, the Portuguese throne was left vacant. The monarch left no immediate heirs, and his uncle, Cardinal Henrique, became king. The cardinal attempted to renounce his clerical vows, but Pope Gregory XIII did not agree to the necessary dispensation. Two years later, in 1580, he died, without heirs and without having appointed a committee to elect a new king. At the time, three main candidates fought for the Portuguese throne: D. António, the illegitimate son of the prince Luis and grandson of King D. Manuel; D. Catarina of Braganza, the only living descendent of D. Duarte, son of the king D. Manuel; and Philip II of Spain, the grandson of D. Manuel and the son of Princess Isabel and Charles V. Fearing the favoritism expressed towards the house of Braganza, Philip II ordered an invasion of Portugal. The Duke of Alba crossed into Portugal in the same year, and the Cortes of Évora proclaimed the Spanish king as Philip I

31 32

Bodart, Verbreitung und Zensierung der Königlichen Porträts, 27. Ibid., 27–28.

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of Portugal in 1581, giving way to the sixty years of dynastical union.33 These genealogical trees consequently tried to highlight the legitimacy of João of Braganza to the crown. His grandmother had been the legitimate heir sixty years ago, and he was now taking the throne that rightfully belonged to his family. The existence of such visual documents suggested a dynastical continuity by ignoring the three Habsburg kings. In doing so, they insisted on the prevalence of the line over kinship, manliness, and primogeniture, the same arguments evoked by Philip II in 1580. These images, along with many others, were certainly powerful tools, shown by the frequent threats to their commissioners and authors. In Venice, for instance, the Spanish ambassador actively tried to prevent the printing of the book Historia di Portugallo by Giovanni Battista Birago, a historian at the service of the Portuguese agents. This 874-page book, explaining the reasons why Portugal separated from the Spanish monarchy, opens with a frontispiece showing the portraits of all the Portuguese monarchs, including the Habsburgs, and it depicts once more the dragon fighting the Spanish lion. This time, they are side by side, both posing aggressively. However, the Portuguese dragon dominates: it holds the crown and tries to prevent the lion from stepping to the center of the image. The ambassador threatened both the writer and the commissioner, Francisco Taquet, a Portuguese agent in charge of printing, translating, and spreading pamphlets, books, and images, with death, claiming that it was necessary to “put out with blood what had been written in ink.”34 Nevertheless, the book was published in several editions and was widely diffused: immediately after being printed, Taquet sent three copies through Jerónimo Nunes da Costa, a Portuguese merchant stationed in the Netherlands, to the Count of Vidigueira in Paris, and one copy to Alvise Contarini, a Venetian diplomat present at the Conference of Münster. This episode demonstrates once again the importance given to the written word and image, and how they could be a source of conflict and aggression, reminiscent of the battles fought at the Portuguese borders. In fact, Spaniards often expressed their desperation for the constant and general availability of printed material: “oy un manifiesto, mañana una historia, otro día un libro, otro un volume y en movimiento continuo esta ocupación girando sin sosiego,”35 33 34 35

On the dynastical union, see Bouza, “Portugal en la monarquía hispánica (1580–1640)”; Bouza, D. Filipe I; Schaub, Portugal na Monarquia Hispânica. Coelho, Historia do infante D. Duarte, irmão de el-rei D. João IV, Vol. 2. On Taquet, see Costa and Cunha, D. João IV, 200–201; Santos, Relações diplomáticas entre Portugal e Veneza. Bouza, “Primero de diciembre de 1640,” 207.

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which translates as “today a manifesto, tomorrow a history, another day a book, another a volume, and a constant commotion without rest.” 3

Conclusion

How should we interpret these images of João IV? A first immediate and prompt reading will tell us we are dealing with propaganda, similar to so many other images produced in early modern Europe. However, the proper perception of images is not always easy. It is crucial to have in mind that they were produced in a particular context and often their meaning was so obvious to the audience that they were barely accompanied by any text. Their messages were quite explicit for the people of the time, but we have a different visual culture.36 It is commonly accepted that images have as many meanings as observers,37 and it is important to interpret these images according to the codes of the period in which they were produced, with the danger of reducing them to mere illustrations or to the conclusions drawn from the written documents.38 The new concept of national monarchies that started arising in the seventeenth century came with a new concept of the image of power, more real and more concrete. In 1640, after breaking with the Spanish monarchy, the new dynasty – the Braganza – clearly perceived the dependence of their legitimacy on forms of representation. João IV was forced to create a new image of power and convert the forms of ducal representation into a royal language. The new king sought to make words and visual materials a principal medium of legitimacy through a variety of means. Images became historical agents, recording events and influencing the way these events were perceived at the time. Several kinds of imagery were combined to provide an integrated image of the king. Paintings, prints, and engravings aimed at providing the new king with a royal and legitimate aura and fulfilling the king’s aspirations of legitimacy and coherence. Through the commission of portraits, representation of episodes of the revolt, and genealogical trees, royal agents were able to diffuse the image of the new Portuguese dynasty and, at the same time, to fight the notion of rebellion and justify the uprising against Philip IV. They argued that this new Portuguese monarch should be the one responsible for the fate of the kingdom, without any interference from the Spanish monarchy. 36 37 38

Bouza, “Por no usarse.” Gubern, Patologías de la imagen; Haskell, History and Its Images. This idea is further explored in Burke, “Cómo interrogar a los testimonios visuales,” 29–40; Haskell, History and Its Images; Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages.

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The representation of the new king found its expression in books and leaflets commissioned by these men. These prints formed a vehicle, with its symbols and texts, that circulated across European borders. The image of the king represented the new dynasty, and despite the eventual arguable quality of the products, it was a piece of art: the art of persuasion, legitimatization, and governance. In fact, less valuable images can be more interesting in terms of a social point of view. They condense the victories, but a closer look also reveals the difficulties João IV had to face. One can argue that many of the written arguments included in treaties and in the political pamphlets did not find a direct match in the visual representations. However, the royal iconography left no place for misinterpretations, and often what was not depicted was as important as what was. The genealogical trees, for example, by omitting the period of dynastic union, displayed the notion of the Habsburgs as dynastical usurpers of a throne. Beyond the simple depiction of a line of kings and queens without the Habsburgs, there was the idea of how these three monarchs had had the opportunity to destroy Portugal, reducing it to a mere province with no identity of its own. These claims – explained in more detail in the literature – complemented this line of argumentation by adding examples of the tyrannical initiatives, and, by doing so, it contributed to the destruction of the legitimacy of the Habsburgs and highlighted the revolt of 1640 as a restitution of the throne to the Braganza.39 The visual representations of the king engage the interlocutor as a witness or as a participant in a dialogue in which the king wants to communicate by means of his portrait that he is the legitimate ruler and that Portugal is an independent kingdom. The king, his envoys, and artists worked together in order to build a precise rhetoric of the Braganza’s legitimacy to the Portuguese throne. An attentive observation of these images will reveal the use of a classic vocabulary – common and easily recognizable by a large community, not only in Portugal but also abroad. Other elements are more or less self-explanatory: the trunk of the genealogical tree as an allegory of the solidity and potential of the new dynasty is an attempt to use the prestige of the previous dynasties for the Braganza political project.40 However, these common points can also raise other questions. The language of these visual materials has little originality. Most of the vocabulary – mainly in the frontispiece of Lusitania liberata – bears strong similarities with the political imagery shared by other European contexts in the seventeenth century. These same ambiguities can also be observed in relation to the genealogical 39 40

Cidade, A literatura autonomista sob os Filipes. Cardim, “Una ‘restauraçao’ visual?”

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tree: the same tree that had once served to reinforce the proximity between Portugal and their new sovereign, Philip II of Spain – and Philip I of Portugal – was now used to highlight the differences. Are we then dealing with a used and recycled vocabulary? And did the king actually succeed in forging the idea of Portuguese separation from the Spanish monarchy? Regarding the first question, there seems to be a difficulty in creating a new visual vocabulary during periods of secession, and the Portuguese revolt of 1640 was no exception. The legitimating discourses engaged the same vocabulary that had been used during the dynastical union to emphasize the idea of identity and community.41 But even though these images distinguish themselves by the will to justify the legitimate claim of the Braganza to the throne, they also underline the Portuguese independence from the Spanish monarchy. It is possible to observe similar images created during revolts in places such as Catalonia, Naples, and the Netherlands, all of them in open conflict with the monarchy of Philip IV in the 1640s. However, only Portugal had a royal candidate. This established an important difference from other territories and other contexts.42 Only the figure of a king could render the secession legitimate. Symbols as powerful as the crown and the representation of the Portuguese noblemen being the protagonists of the coup d’état were then of extreme relevance. One of the main aspects depicted in the Dutch print previously analyzed was this joint effort to represent the Portuguese nobility as responsible for the secession: they were the ones killing the secretary Miguel de Vasconcelos, they were the ones proclaiming João of Braganza the new king. It is possible therefore to perceive a fiction of unanimity, the creation of a nobility that worked together to act in the name of someone whom they recognized as the legitimate heir to the throne led to the notion of a restauration of the natural monarchy and of the rights that they had been prevented from exercising since 1580. Finally, one can argue about the efficacy of João IV’s visual program. It is extremely difficult for us in our time to judge whether these images reached their goal or not. The reactions to the images we have analyzed suggest that they were powerful tools. Emissaries of the king often asked for portraits and expressed their concern if they lacked quality. The agents, being constantly threatened, complained to the king about the vicissitudes of their tasks as royal emissaries. These incidents demonstrate the value of social and cultural representation given to the images of the Braganza, and they highlight the importance of visual culture in the seventeenth century. It was certainly a 41 42

Ibid. On a comparative perspective of the three revolts, see Fraga, “Three Revolts in Images.”

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kind of language through which ideas circulated. The idea of a legitimate king pervades João IV’s imagery via pose, inscriptions, and symbols. These images served as a crucial type of propaganda with regard to the depiction of the new ruler in Portugal and abroad. Bibliography Bastiaanse, Alexandro. Teodoro Ameyden (1586–1656): Un Neerlandese alla corte di Roma. The Hague: Staatsdrukkerij, 1968. Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Bodart, Diane H. Verbreitung und Zensierung der Königlichen Porträts im Rom des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004. Bouza, Fernando. “Por no usarse: Sobre uso, circulación y mercado de imágenes políticas en la lata edad moderna.” In La historia imaginada, edited by Joan Lluís Palos and Diana Carrió-Invernizzi, 41–64. Barcelona: University of Barcelona, 2008. Bouza, Fernando. “Portugal en la monarquía hispánica (1580–1640): Felipe II, las Cortes de Tomar y la génesis del Portugal católico.” PhD dissertation, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1987. Bouza, Fernando. “Primero de diciembre de 1640: ¿una revolución desprevenida?” Manuscrits: Revista d’història moderna 9 (1991): 205–225. Bouza, Fernando. D. Filipe I. Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores: Centro de Estudos dos Povos e Culturas de Expressão Portuguesa, 2005. Bouza, Fernando. Imagen y propaganda: Capítulos de historia cultural del reinado de Felipe II. Madrid: Akal Ediciones, 1998. Burke, Peter. “Cómo interrogar a los testimonios visuales.” In La historia imaginada, edited by Palos and Carrió-Invernizzi, 29–40. Burke, Peter. Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Cardim, Pedro. “Una ‘restauraçao’ visual?: Cambio dinástico y uso político de las imágenes en el Portugal del siglo XVII.” In La historia imaginada, edited by Palos and Carrió-Invernizzi, 185–206. Castro, José de. Portugal em Roma. Lisboa: União Gráfica, 1939. Checa, Fernando. “Comment se représente un Habsbourg d’Espagne?” In ¿Louis XIV Espagnol? Madrid et Versailles, images et modèles, edited by Gérard Sabatier and Margarita Torrione, 17–37. Aulica. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2020. http://books.openedition.org/editionsmsh/17324. Cidade, Hernani. A literatura autonomista sob os Filipes. Lisboa: Livr. Sá da Costa, 1940.

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Coelho, José Ramos. Historia do infante D. Duarte, irmão de el-rei D. João IV. Lisboa: Por ordem e na typographia da Academia real das sciencias, 1889. Costa, Leonor Freire, and Mafalda Soares da Cunha. D. João IV. Lisboa: Temas e Debates, 2008. Fraga, Joana. “Three Revolts in Images: Catalonia, Portugal and Naples, 1640–1647.” PhD dissertation, Universidad de Barcelona, 2013. Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Furió, Vicenç. Sociología del arte. Madrid: Cátedra, 2000. Gubern, Román. Patologías de la imagen. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004. Haskell, Francis. History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Ivins, William Mills. Prints and Visual Communication. New York: Da Capo Press, 1969. Johannesson, Kurt. “The Portrait of the Prince as a Rhetorical Genre.” Iconography, Propaganda, and Legitimation (1998): 11–36. Kort en grondigh verhael van ’t gheen gepasseert is in de verkiesingh des … koninck, Iean de vierde, zijnde de rechte en eenighe erfgenaem der kroon Portugael: mitsgaders de reden en oorsaecken die hem bewoghen hebben den koninck van Spangien te verwerpen … hier is by ghevoeght een … genealogie, ofte successi-boom … Amsterdam: Joost Broersz. voor Crispijn van de Pas, 1641. Kunzle, David. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Maravall, José Antonio. La cultura del barroco: Análisis de una estructura histórica. Esplugues de Llobregat: Ariel, 1975. Merian, Matthaeus. Theatrum Europaeum, oder Aussführliche und warhafftige beschreibung aller und jeder denckwürdiger geschichten, etc. Frankfurt am Main: W. Hoffmann, etc., 1643. Palos, Joan Lluís, and Diana Carrió-Invernizzi, eds. La historia imaginada: Construcciones visuales del pasado en la Edad Moderna. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2008. Palos Peñarroya, Joan Lluís. “El testimonio de las imágenes.” Pedralbes: Revista d’història moderna 20 (2000): 127–142. Rodríguez Moya, María Inmaculada. “Lusitania liberata: La guerra libresca y simbólica entre España y Portugal, 1639–1668.” In Imagen y cultura: La interpretación de las imágenes como Historia cultural, edited by Rafael García Mahiques and Vincent Francesc Zuriaga Senent, 1377–1392. Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 2008.

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Rohfritsch, Edmond. Balthazar Moncornet: Graveur, éditeur et marchand d’estampes à Paris au XVIIe siècle ou L’invention du portrait de notoriété de grande diffusion. 4 vols. Paris: E. Rohfritsch, 1995. Santos, Maria Emilia Madeira. Relações diplomáticas entre Portugal e Veneza: 1641–1649. Lisbon: Centro de estudos históricos, 1965. Schaub, Jean-Frédéric. Portugal na Monarquia Hispânica (1580–1640). Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2001. Serrão, Vitor. A pintura protobarroca em Portugal, 1612–1657: O triunfo do naturalismo e do tenebrismo. Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 1998. Sousa de Macedo, António de, and Oliveira Lima. Lusitania liberata ab injusto Castellanorum dominio. Restituta legitimo principi, Serenissimo Joanni IV. Lusitaniae, Algarbiorum, Africae, Arabiae, Persiae, Indiae, Brasiliae, &c. regi potentissimo. Summo pontifici, imperio, regibus, rebus-publicis, caeterisque orbis Christiani principibus. London: In Officina Richardi Heron, 1645. Torgal, Luís Reis. “Acerca do significado sociopolítico da ‘revolução’ de 1640.” Revista de história das ideias 6 (1984): 301–319. Torgal, Luís Reis. Ideologia política e teoria do estado na Restauração. Coimbra: Biblioteca Geral da Universidade, 1981. Valladares, Rafael. A independência de Portugal: Guerra e restauração, 1640–1680. Lisbon: A Esfera do Livro, 2006. Valladares, Rafael. “Sobre reyes de invierno: El diciembre portugués y los cuarenta fidalgos (o algunos menos, con otros más).” Pedralbes: Revista d’història moderna 15 (1995): 103–136. Vila Real, Manuel Fernandes de, Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz, and Michel Blageart. Anticaramuel o Defença del manifiesto del reyno de Portugal a la respuesta que escrivio don Iuan Caramuel Lobkovvitz religioso de Dunas, doctor de s. theologia, abbad de Melrosa, y vicario general de la orden de Cister por los reynos de Ingalaterra [sic], Irlanda, Escocia, &c. Paris: En la officina de Miguel Blageart, en la calle de la Calandra, a la Flor de Lys, junto al Palacio, 1643.

chapter 9

Marking Political Legitimacy in Early Modern Images of Russia Nancy S. Kollmann The reader interested in how imagery communicated about revolt and revolution in early modern Russia will be sorely disappointed that no such images were produced there. Religious art dominated in a rigid iconographic style; icons and frescoes were expected to adhere to established formulae, and the artists of illuminated chronicles were similarly constrained. Chronicle illuminators could try to insert political messages in these rare depictions of secular events, but the style was inflexible and the genre was intended to celebrate grand-princely power. Thus, the artist had little range. There was no market for religious art beyond these iconographic formats, nor for depictions of nonreligious topics.1 Early modern Europe’s lively culture of broadsheets on all manner of political events was completely lacking, so one cannot speak of a civic sphere of communication about politics and resistance in Russia. The visual communication that did take place was contained in the illustrations of foreign travelers’ accounts from the sixteenth century onward. Here we briefly explore the absence in Russia of indigenously created images of political violence, particularly in broadsheets, and then turn to the few images of political violence that foreigners produced from eyewitness experience. Our focus narrows to a remarkable depiction of judicial punishment that communicated a quite specific message to the European audience about Russia. This was an engraving produced for Adam Olearius’ Travels to Russia and Persia. 1

Broadsheets Come to Russia

A culture of broadsheets – in Europe often accompanied by extended texts explicating the engraving – only began to be possible in Russia as printing 1 A facsimile publication of a sixteenth-century illustrated chronicle exemplifies the style: Kazakov, ed., Litsevoi. On political messaging in the illuminated chronicle, see Kollmann, “Representing Legitimacy in Early Modern Russia”; Kollmann, “The Litsevoi Svod as Graphic Novel.”

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004461949_011

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and literacy expanded in the seventeenth century.2 At the beginning of the century, Kremlin presses controlled by church and state began publishing religious, military, and legal books and primers, but overall literacy was extremely limited and scattered among different social groups. Educated clerics knew literary Slavonic and the Church sponsored the production of religious genres (sermons, hagiography, histories). Merchants and artisans were functionally literate in the vernacular needed for business, but the greatest locus of literacy was the bureaucracy, where several thousand clerks in Moscow chanceries and provincial offices wielded vernacular Russian to create voluminous document trails between center and periphery.3 Interestingly, however, the erudite bureaucrats of the Foreign Affairs Chancery who translated dozens of European newspapers for the court did not include their illustrations.4 Cultural influence from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, primarily through Ukraine, brought secular literary genres and ideas to seventeenthcentury Russia. Erudite scribes in the Printing Office penned syllabic verse and letters to patrons; from mid-century, émigré Ukrainian clerics and their Russian students at the Kremlin court introduced baroque genres (panegyrics, poetry) and didactic sermons preaching the virtues of civic engagement, moral improvement, and self-development.5 By the end of the century, written versions of folktales began to appear, some from the Russian oral tradition, others adapted to the Russian setting from European tales and motifs.6 At the same time, broadsheets, called lubki (apparently in reference to the wood of the original woodcuts), began to circulate, some illustrating secular tales, many on religious themes. Lubki came to Moscow from Ukraine, which, as part of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, was a hub of printing, literacy, and illustration.7 By the 1620s, broadsheets adapted from the German model circulated in Kiev; as the Russian empire developed closer political and cultural ties with Kiev in the second half of the seventeenth century, visual illustrations traveled north. In the 1680s and 1690s among the Moscow elite, baroque-style frontispieces, 2 Marker, “Literacy and Literacy Texts in Muscovy,” 74–89. 3 Plavsic, “Seventeenth-Century Chanceries and Their Staffs,” 19–45; Brown, “Muscovite Government Bureaus,” 269–330. 4 Maier and Pilger, “Second-Hand Translation for Tsar Aleksej Mixajlovich”; Maier and Pilger, “How Well was Muscovy Connected with the World?”; Waugh and Maier, “Muscovy and the European Information Revolution.” 5 Bushkovitch, Religion and Society, chaps. 6 and 7. 6 Morris, Literature of Roguery. 7 Sytova, The Lubok; Ovsyannikov, The Lubok; Snegirev, Lubochnye; Buvina and Curletto, Il lubok.

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panegyrics, and secular portraits were produced as copper engravings; woodcut broadsheets also began to appear. Moscow’s growing community of Dutch- and German-speaking merchants, engineers, and military officers also contributed models. Broadsheets proliferated in Russia in the eighteenth century and became a mass product in the nineteenth. Religious themes always predominated (imagery of saints, Church holy days), but moralizing domestic and satirical tales (unfaithful wives, foolish youth) were always popular. Significantly, political themes were generally absent. In the eighteenth century, images of victorious battles and generals appeared, but the state did not, as in Europe, produce broadsheets of executions or corporal punishment to legitimate the prosecution of rebels, nor did broadsheets sympathetic to rebels percolate up from society. The absence of revolt and punishment in Russian broadsides might be explained by censorship, direct and self-imposed. Religious lubki were explicitly subject to Church censorship from 1744, and other broadsheets were implicitly controlled by the control of printing presses. Church and state exclusively controlled printing until a few private presses were permitted in the late 1770s; private ownership of presses was legalized in 1783 in an era when Empress Catherine II encouraged enlightened public discourse. Established practices of censorship continued nevertheless, which took the form of in-house panels that tried to enforce vaguely written strictures on political and moral discourse. The Russian Orthodox Church exerted steady pressure on the state over secular publishing, particularly in the second half of the century as a growing reading public devoured translations of European belles lettres, history, and geography. In the 1780s, Church pressure dovetailed with Catherine II’s own concerns in the wake of the French Revolution: in the 1790s two prominent authors, Nikolai Novikov and Alexander Radishchev, were exiled or imprisoned for their writings and publications, presses were shut down, police surveillance of printed books increased, and in 1796 private press ownership was abolished and censorship committees for imported books were instituted at European port cities. Alexander I issued a more systematic censorship law in 1804; his brother and successor, the repressive Nicholas I (1825–1855), intensified censorship over all publications. Lubki specifically were subject to censorship laws in 1822, 1828, 1839, and 1851.8 Because of these regimes of direct and self-censorship, and perhaps also because of popular taste, broadsheets in Russia throughout the imperial period (to 1917) remained focused on religious, moral, or folkloric topics. Some of the folkloric images could be read as political allegory: a widely reproduced image 8 On printing and censorship, see Marker, Intellectual Life in Russia.

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of “Mice Burying the Cat” has been read as critique of Peter I, while another of Alexander the Great defeating Persian Shah Porus is taken as praise for Peter I’s military victories. But, in any case, these images were not explicit depictions of revolt or revolution.9 Opportunities for depicting punishment and revolt were not lacking. Russia experienced at least four serious rebellions that might have generated imagery from the state or rebels: those of Cossack Stepan Razin in 1670–1671, the Moscow musketeers in 1682 and 1698, and the Cossack Emelian Pugachev in 1773–1774. Razin and Pugachev were executed in Moscow and their supporters brutally punished; in 1698, at least 600 musketeers were hanged, beheaded, and broken on the wheel in Moscow. However, for none of these events did the government or sympathetic observers issue broadsheets. Similarly, although Peter I (ruled 1682–1725) introduced European-style “spectacles of suffering” to Russia to execute traitors, heretics, and corrupt officials, he did not publish broadsheets of them. In staging these events he strove for maximum publicity – assembling large crowds, leaving bodies or severed heads of the executed on display for months, and commissioning the publication of manifestos justifying some of these executions. But no images survive nor are any known.10 D. A. Rovinskii, an early specialist in Russian broadsheets, stated categorically that the government avoided producing such images out of its “deep suspicion” of the people; he identified only eleven images issued by the government, most produced in the early nineteenth century regarding smallpox prevention. Malte Griesse’s argument that Peter I was particularly sensitive to the power of visual images critical of him complements Rovinskii’s point.11 At least two portrait pictures of Russian rebels did circulate in Europe. One shows Stepan Razin being led to execution in Red Square in a cart, with a sympathetic portrait of him inset in an upper corner. The image conforms to details in the news reports by foreign observers and was included in an anonymous account of the rebellion published in English in 1672.12 A century later, images of Emelian Pugachev also circulated in German and English publications. 9 10 11 12

Brooks, Literacy and Popular Literature; Brooks, “The Moral Self.” Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia, chap. 18. Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki, col. 489; Griesse, “Der diplomatische Skandal,” 88–124. Mankov, Zapiski, 84, 94. The same account was published in 1671 in German and Dutch, and in French also in 1672, but I have not been able to determine whether the image was included. For full details, see chapter 10 by Gleb Kazakov in this volume. Ingrid Maier has uncovered a contemporary image of Razin produced in the Foreign Affairs Chancery, but it was not published in Russia (personal communication, August 20, 2015).

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One shows him shackled and confined in a cage, the other, chained to a dungeon wall.13 2

European Travelers Picture Russia

For political images of Russia, we must turn to Western European travel accounts, and here most were added after the fact and do not represent eyewitness experience. Four compendia by seventeenth-century travelers with direct knowledge of Russia (Meyerberg, Palmquist, Korb, and Olearius) do, however, include illustrations, thus potentially adding visual communication to textual. But for various reasons, most of these compendia did not contribute to discussions on revolt or punishment. Baron Augustin von Meyerberg, for example, did not depict such themes. He traveled to Moscow in 1661 on embassy from the Holy Roman Empire; artists in his entourage produced more than 200 images of their route through Prussia, Livonia, and Russia, but none includes scenes of punishment. The majority of Meyerberg’s images depict towns and municipal coats of arms; several focus on the Kremlin court, including the entry of the embassy into Moscow, two images of diplomatic audiences, one of Palm Sunday services. Reflecting early modern European taste, Meyerberg includes images of “costumes” of various social groups.14 Conversely, another foreign traveler was very interested in judicial punishment, but his account did not circulate. The young military engineer Erich Palmquist journeyed to Moscow in 1673–1674 with a Swedish embassy; his assignment was to prepare a report with maps, plans, and sketches of Russia’s military capabilities. He appended fifty-three drawings and sixteen maps and plans of towns, accompanied by twenty pages of commentary; his illustrations depicted towns, fortifications, artillery, troop insignia, weaponry, roads, and maps, and four images of punishment.15 Palmquist’s 1674 report languished in the state archive until an 1898 Swedish facsimile publication, produced in only seventy-five copies, two of which were given to Tsar Nicholas II. Only in 2012 did Palmquist’s “Album” appear in full facsimile (with Russian, English, 13 14 15

Pugachev in cage: Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki, cols. 489, 508. Meyerberg, Al’bom Meierberga. Palmquist might have been influenced by existing images of Russia; his images reflect Olearius’ descriptions, and the German 1647 or 1656 editions may have been known to him. Historian Iu. V. Got’e reported that Palmquist studied all available literature about Russia before leaving for Moscow (Osetskaia, “Zametki,” 53).

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and modern Swedish translations of Palmquist’s commentary).16 Palmquist’s images of judicial punishment had no resonance in their time. As Griesse has explored, the account and imagery of the 1698 musketeer rebellion in Russia, done by the secretary to an imperial embassy, Johann-Georg Korb, circulated in very different circumstances.17 Korb was member of an embassy to Moscow during the executions of hundreds of rebellious musketeers and witnessed or talked to eyewitnesses of the events. In his account of Russia, published around 1700 in Vienna, Korb described pain and punishment in lurid detail. His eyewitness information was faithfully reproduced in graphic pictures of battle, torture, and executions. Under pressure from the Russian government, most copies of the book were confiscated, and it was not reprinted. A few copies circulated widely, but to this day Korb’s account is a bibliographical rarity. Like Palmquist’s album, Korb’s text and images did not resurface to scholarly attention until the nineteenth century.18 3

Adam Olearius Depicts Punishments

One collection of images of Russia, however, did have European-wide resonance. In a profusely illustrated account of his travels in Russia and Persia, the learned Holstein scholar Adam Olearius provides a panoramic scene of Russian judicial punishments. Interestingly, he does not depict an execution, undoubtedly because he did not witness one (as noted below, he adamantly claimed that he wrote and depicted only what he himself witnessed or had good sources for). This is not surprising: there was little opportunity for foreign visitors to see executions in Muscovy. Through the seventeenth century, Russia did not participate in the “spectacle of suffering” approach to public executions. Capital punishments were carried out efficiently, with minimal preparation and ritual. A few travelers do mention seeing executions, but they did not include images, and most describe corporal punishment by flogging.19 Olearius was secretary to a trade mission from Duke Frederick of SchleswigHolstein to Russia in 1633–1635 and to Russia and Persia in 1635–1639; he returned once more to Russia in 1643. A trained linguist, theologian, and 16 17 18 19

Ms.: Palmquist, “Någre Widh Sidste,” 1674. Swedish publication 1898: Palmquist, Någre Widh Sidste, 1898. Modern facsimile: Palmquist, Zametki. On Korb’s imagery, see Griesse, “Der diplomatischer Skandal”; Korb, Tagebuch; Kollmann, “Pictures at an Execution.” Original publication: Korb, Diarium itineris. Modern publication: Korb, Tagebuch. On foreigners on Russian punishments, see Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia, chap. 13.

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scientist, after his Russian and Persian travels Olearius served the duke as counsellor, court mathematician, and antiquarian, and curator of the duke’s library and Kunstkammer. Olearius translated a major collection of Persian verse and stories (Sa’di’s Gulistan, or Rose Garden), prepared Persian – Latin and Latin – Persian – Turkish – Arabic – Hebrew dictionaries, expanded the duke’s cabinet of curiosities (including flora and fauna he collected in Russia and Persia), corresponded with scholars throughout Europe, and amassed a library of over 2400 volumes, including rare Persian manuscripts. He also built scientific instruments, including an astrolabe, a microscope, a telescope, and the Great Gottorp celestial globe that a later Duke of Holstein gave to Peter I around 1717.20 When he set himself to the task of writing about his travels, he treated it as a scientific enterprise. Olearius published a first edition of his Russian and Persian travels in 1647 at the duke’s Schleswig press; it was accompanied by about seventy engravings from his route through Livonia and Russia to Persia. In 1656, Olearius published an expanded text with twice as many engravings. Olearius’ work enjoyed great popularity: several German editions and numerous translations followed in the next decades.21 Olearius presents his travelogue as a work of science and truth. In his 1656 edition, he justifies foreign travel as a way for those at home to learn lessons from other societies and to virtually enjoy a society through the eyes of a faithful and accurate observer: To my beloved fellow countrymen, Germans, for their benefit, I present here a true and exact description of that state and also of other countries, regions and peoples, which we visited, in the very circumstances that we observed and in the condition in which we found them in the present time, with explanation of everything that happened to us during our long and difficult six-year journey that would be worthy of the reader’s attention.22 Declaring his intent to present a true version of foreign reality, Olearius is even more explicit about his illustrations. In the introduction to the 1647 edition, he assures the reader: 20 21 22

Biography: Brancaforte, Visions of Persia. Modern facsimile of 1656 edition: Olearius, Vermehrte newe Beschreibung. On the editions, see John Emerson, “Adam Olearius and the Literature of the Schleswig-Holstein Missions to Russia and Iran,” 31–55. Kollmann, “Tracking the Travels.” Olearius, Vermehrte newe Beschreibung, 5. Translated by the author. If not indicated otherwise, the following translations are also the author’s.

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Figure 9.1 Punishments, in Adam Olearius, Vermehrte newe Beschreibung der muscowitischen und persischen Reyse, 1656, engraving, 14.7 × 9.7 cm. Dartmouth College Library, Hanover NH

As for the copper engraved pictures of this edition, one should not think that they are, as is sometimes done, taken from other books or other engravings. Rather, I myself drew the majority of them from life (as some of them [were] also [drawn] by our former physician H. Graman, my close friend). Then they were turned into final form with the help of a good artist, Augustus John, who many years ago taught me drawing in Leipzig, using models of the costumes of the nations that I had brought back with me. In order to make sure, however, that no degree of accuracy would be lost during the work of engraving, I entertained three engravers, not without great expense, at my home for a long time. They were to complete the work according to my wishes.23 Olearius’ version of accurate depiction was not, however, innocent of interpretation. 23

Olearius, Offt begehrte Beschreibung, scan 16, translated by Nancy Kollmann and Monika Barget.

Marking Political Legitimacy in Early Modern Images of Russia

Figure 9.2 Strappado, excerpt of fig. 9.1

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Figure 9.3 Debtors’ punishment, excerpt of fig. 9.1

Olearius’ account of Russia includes a panoramic image illustrating his chapter on judicial punishment (fig. 9.1). At first glance, it is another of many bustling street scenes in Olearius’ ethnographic account. But if we place it in a broader context of visual imagery of judicial violence, there is more to be seen here. Indisputably text and image agree: the panorama depicts five forms of judicial torture and punishment as Olearius details them in his text; his descriptions in turn correspond to how other sources describe such punishments. He describes torture by strappado, for example, in this way: it “involves tying the hands behind the back, drawing them up high, and hanging a heavy beam on the feet. The executioner jumps on the beam, thus severely stretching the limbs of the offender from one another, as can be seen in the next image (fig. 9.2). Besides, beneath the victim they set a fire, the heat of which torments the feet, and the smoke the face.”24 In the image, the strappado and a man jumping on the beam are clear, and on the ground before it, a man lies on a rack above a fire. Olearius goes on to describe the beating of a convicted debtor with rods or bastinadoes: “Every day he is brought to an open place before the chancellery 24

English translation: Baron, ed., The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia, 229– 231, from the German original: Olearius, Vermehrte newe Beschreibung.

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Figure 9.4 Beating a servant, excerpt of fig. 9.1

and is beaten on the shinbones for a whole hour with a supple stick of about a small finger’s thickness … they call this form of punishment stavit’ na pravezh, depicted in the front under the letter A.” (fig. 9.3.) Indeed, under A, we see a man being assailed by three beaters. Commenting on the ubiquity of violence in Russia, Olearius remarks that anyone in a position of authority may flog his servant, in the following manner: the servant “must take off his cloak and other clothes, down to his nightshirt, and then lie down with his stomach to the ground. Two people then sit astride him, one on his head, the other on his legs, and he is beaten on the back with a supple rod … shown under the letter B.” (fig. 9.4.) Indeed, in front right corner, a grimacing man is being beaten in this manner. Olearius goes on to describe the “barbaric punishment” of knouting (a type of heavy beating), “shown under the letter E,” based on an incident he witnessed on September 24, 1634, when eight men and a woman were knouted for

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Figure 9.5 Knouting, excerpt of fig. 9.1

selling tobacco and vodka. “Before the chancellery called the Novaia Chetvert,’ they had to bare their bodies down to the waist. Then each in turn was obliged to place his stomach to the back of one of the executioner’s servants, while holding him around the neck. The legs of the offender were bound together, a special person held them down with a rope, so that the one being punished could move neither up nor down. The executioner retired a good three paces behind the offender and flailed as hard as he could with a long thick knout, making the blood gush forth freely…. A servant of the court stood by and read from a paper the number of strokes each was to receive. When the prescribed number had been fulfilled, he cried ‘Polno,’ that is, ‘Enough!’ ” (fig. 9.5.) This most characteristic form of judicial punishment is depicted in front left (at E): the suffering man clings to another man’s back, his legs held taut, while the executioner flogs him from a few paces back. A small group of officials observes, one wearing a high hat of office and possibly holding a piece of paper, another seemingly gesturing to the executioner. Finally, in addition to this stationary form of knouting, Olearius describes another common form, the “marketplace knouting,” in which the knouted individual is driven across urban space by the executioner. Olearius’ description of the tobacconists’ and distillers’ punishment continues: “After this, each of the tobacco sellers had a paper of tobacco hung around his neck, and the traders in vodka a bottle. They were joined by twos, the arms of a pair bound together, and were led off to the side (letter F) and were driven with lashes into the town and then back towards the Kremlin.” (fig. 9.6.) This form of flogging was familiar in Europe and in Russia. The guilty party (not necessarily in pairs) was pursued through the town while being beaten, for

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Figure 9.6 Marketplace beating, excerpt of fig. 9.1

maximum public exposure and humiliation. Here, the humiliation and public identification is heightened by the convicted parties wearing emblems of their crimes.25 On the one hand, Olearius’ image literally presents the judicial punishments that he describes. But this image probably communicated more to its European readership than merely documenting different forms of beatings. The genre of execution broadsheets was well developed in Europe at the time. States issued such images to legitimize their use of judicial violence, appending extensive written commentary about the nefarious deeds of the criminal and using specific conventions to mark sovereign legitimacy. As Griesse has argued, those visual conventions included marking out judicial space, presided over by judicial and public officials, and depicting the crowd as a representative body public.26 Though images of executions attended by hundreds can seem disorderly, engravers give their overall compositions order and control by focusing the crowd’s attention on the scaffold and by placing important insignia in prominent places. Their compositions created a sacred space for sovereign judicial power. We can see these attributes in typical European examples.

25 26

On these forms of punishment, see Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia, chap. 9. Griesse, “Der diplomatischer Skandal.”

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Figure 9.7 Phillip Galle, IVSTICIA, 1559, from Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Virtues and Vices, ca. 1539. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s depiction of “justice”, for example, presents a crowded but orderly scene (fig. 9.7). It displays a variety of punishments (hanging, flogging), torture (the rack), and executions (beheading, wheel), and legitimizes such suffering by placing a courtroom with judges and legal codes at the front lower right, blending interior and exterior. A statue of blindfolded Justice stands in front center, accompanied by a Latin inscription about the correctional and deterrent effect of corporal and capital punishment. Teeming crowds attentively focus on the sites of punishment, acting as the body politic witnessing a legitimate use of state power. Soldiers stand guard to keep order. Scholars consider this image a satire of the judicial system for its depictions of excessive brutality in torture and punishments, but even so, Bruegel’s composition conforms to tropes of legitimate state violence.27 Moving from art to broadsheet, images of individual executions, more focused and less chaotic than Bruegel’s, include many of these conventions. 27

Resnik and Curtis, Representing Justice, 71–72; Davis, “Fantasy and Irony in Peter Bruegel’s Prints,” 291–295.

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Figure 9.8 Anonymous, Onthoofding van Karel I, ca. 1649. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Take, for example, Charles I’s execution in London in January 1649 (fig. 9.8). Parliamentary authorities forbade broadsheets depicting the event, but they circulated in Europe.28 A common German image invokes the tropes seen in Bruegel: a raised scaffold stands in the square before the Banquet Hall of the royal palace at Whitehall; on it two officials preside (labeled as the Parliamentary leaders, Colonels Matthew Tomlinson and Francis Hacker), accompanied by two executioners and a “Doctor Zuxon.” The stage is surrounded by halberd-wielding soldiers and attentive witnesses, who also crowd through the windows and peer from the roof of Whitehall. Three portraits in cartouches – King Charles and his Parliamentary opponents Oliver Cromwell and General Thomas Fairfax – identify the political authority behind the execution. With these visual tropes of legitimacy in mind, Olearius’ representation of judicial punishment in seventeenth-century Russia takes on new meaning. It is typical of European broadsheets with their juxtaposition of crowded activity against an iconic background, which in this case is Russia’s seat of government, the Moscow Kremlin. Olearius depicts Cathedral Square’s cluster of domed churches and towering bell tower, surrounded by the distinctive swallow-tail 28

The image is reproduced in Paas, German Political Broadsheet, 8:2228. See other execution images in Paas, 1:12, 144; 2:239, 245, 254, 392; 3:804, 807; 7:1896; 8:2565; 9:2860.

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merlons and gate towers of the Kremlin’s fortress wall. St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square is squeezed into the right margin. All these markers might attest to the tsar’s legitimate judicial power, but the European reader could otherwise read the image as conveying a different message from that of typical European execution broadsides. The picture fails to depict the tsar’s justice in an orderly and legitimate way. Here no sacred space of judicial power is demarcated, nor other representations of judicial authority. There is no courtroom, no statue of blind-folded Justice, no cartouche portrait of the tsar, no scaffold, no lines of attentive soldiers, no center of attention. In a busy square south of the Kremlin, we are in the realm of private, not public, power. Only one of the five scenes seems to have officials present – otherwise, the figures doing the punishments and those milling about are almost indistinguishable. One vignette explicitly depicts a landlord’s punishment of a domestic servant. The images are not only chaotic, but also frightening. Two men being flogged visibly cry out in pain; floggers raise their whips menacingly. This picture repels and does not reassure the viewer that the judicial system is in charge and is just. Furthermore, the image has elements of disrespect: people mill around in small groups chatting, they are not attentive witnesses to the drama of judicial penalty. Children laugh and play; dogs play, run, and bark. And one defecates, directly in the center of the horrific scene of knouting (E). Dogs have had myriad symbolism in art and moral thought since ancient times across the world. In Hindu tradition, in Egypt, in the Old Testament, in ancient Greece and Rome, and in medieval Christian morality, dogs could be symbols of fidelity and fertility, or of passion, impurity, and sin (anger, envy, greed, lust, vanity).29 Even if not imbued with such heavy allegory in seventeenth-century genre scenes, the presence of dogs (running, barking, urinating, defecating) in engravings like these adds elements of irony, wit, or critique, and lowers the tone of the image to the quotidian. Rembrandt, for example, placed a defecating dog in a scene of The Good Samaritan in 1633 to add, in the words of one commentator, a touch of “everyday reality.” More pointedly, a satirical image of The Rebellious Peasant Parliament in Bavaria includes a dog defecating directly in front of the rebels themselves with the engraver’s caption: “A Black Dog Sh … s on the Draft of a Peasant Parliament.”30 29 30

Rowland, Animals with Human Faces, 58–66. Rembrandt, The Good Samaritan (1633), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; numerous similar examples in the collections of The British Museum at: http://www.british museum.org. Palmquist’s images of flogging include barking dogs, similar to those in Olearius: Palmquist, Zametki, fols. 31, 32.

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Figure 9.9 Anonymous, Das rebellische Bauernparlament von Braunau, ca. 1705, engraving, 30 × 19.5 cm. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon

It is unlikely that Russians viewed this and others of Olearius’ images with dogs, but had they done so, they could have reacted as their European counterparts, inasmuch as dogs in Muscovy enjoyed the same varied reputation as in Europe. They were treasured for loyalty and valued for their protective and hunting skills, and they were also condemned with all the stereotypes of the Judeo-Christian tradition.31 Olearius, however, might have purposefully used dogs to accent the negative, since in his account he himself underscored that Russians considered dogs (and foreigners) impure. “If a dog or some other unclean thing enters a church, … they immediately wash the defiled place and sanctify it anew.”32 The presence of dogs in this chaotic scene undermines the projection of “justice.” Olearius’ image includes some conventional aspects of European broadsheets of executions, but European viewers might have seen them as undermined by other aspects of the composition. The image presents an overall impression of disorder, violence, and brutality, rather than of the sacred space of the tsar’s sovereign right to punish. Did Olearius or his engraver consciously 31 32

Kleimola, “Hunting for Dogs in 17th-Century Muscovy,” 467–488. Other images with dogs: Olearius, Vermehrte newe Beschreibung, 25, 26–27, 40, 46–47, 112, 117, 128, 132–33, etc. Baron, Travels of Olearius, 263; Olearius, Vermehrte newe Beschreibung, 303.

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omit markers of legitimacy from this image? This seems likely. They would have known how to depict judicial punishment – in a more orderly picture, with judges, soldiers, tsarist portraits, and a controlled energy. Rather, here we have acts of violence, administered by many hands in many places, interspersed with indifferent crowds, with no overarching supervision or demarcated judicial space. This picture accords with Olearius’ overall argument that Russia is “a dominating and despotic monarchy” and “the Russians are by nature cruel and fit only for slavery.”33 By depicting judicial punishments without the legitimizing presence of rulers, officials, priests, or attentive witnesses, Olearius is showing his readers that the tsar’s sovereign authority did not control all violence and that power was used arbitrarily. Olearius’ textual and visual depiction of Russia as a despotism reached a wide audience through the seventeenth century, reproduced in at least four German editions with the original text and illustrations and also in many translations. Accounts in Dutch, Italian, French, and English reproduced only a few of Olearius’ illustrations, generally not the ethnographic ones. But lavish editions of the French translation published in Leiden in 1719 and Amsterdam in 1727 restored many of Olearius’ maps and engravings, including his image of punishments.34 Olearius’ erudite text communicated to the European audience the established European trope of Russia as uncivilized and despotic; when his illustrations were included, this subtly designed composition reinforced that view. Bibliography Baron, Samuel H., ed. The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967. Brancaforte, Elio Christoph. Visions of Persia: Mapping the Travels of Adam Olearius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature, 2003. Brooks, Jeffrey. “The Moral Self in Russia’s Literary and Visual Cultures: The Late Imperial Era and Beyond.” In The Space of the Book: Print Culture in the Russian Social Imagination, edited by Miranda B. Remnek, 201–230. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 33 34

Baron, Travels of Olearius, 147, 173. On tropes of despotism and barbarism, see Poe, A People Born to Slavery; Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. On editions and translations of Olearius’ Travels, see Emerson, “Adam Olearius”; Kollmann, “Tracking the Travels.”

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Brooks, Jeffrey. When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Brown, Peter B. “Muscovite Government Bureaus.” Russian History 10, no. 1 (1983): 269–330. Bushkovitch, Paul. Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992. Buvina, Elena, and M. Alessandro Curletto. Il lubok: Un’enciclopedia illustrata della vita popolare russa. Bologna: I Libri di Emil, 2015. Davis, Howard McParlin. “Fantasy and Irony in Peter Bruegel’s Prints.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 1, no. 10 (1943): 291–295. Emerson, John. “Adam Olearius and the Literature of the Schleswig-Holstein Missions to Russia and Iran, 1633–1639.” Études Safavides (1993): 31–55. Griesse, Malte. “Der diplomatische Skandal um Johann Georg Korbs Tagebuch der kaiserlichen Gesandtschaftsreise nach Moskau (1698–1699): Ursachen und Folgen.” In Politische Kommunikation zwischen Imperien: Der diplomatische Aktionsraum Südost und Osteuropas, edited by Gunda Barth-Scalmani, Harriet Rudolph, and Christian Steppan, 88–124. Innsbruck, Wien, Bozen: Studien Verlag, 2013. Kazakov, E. N., ed. Litsevoi letopisnyi svod XVI veka: Russkaia letopisnaia istoriia. 24 vols. Moscow: Firma AKTEON, 2009. Kleimola, Ann M. “Hunting for Dogs in 17th-Century Muscovy.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 11, no. 3 (2010): 467–488. Kollmann, Nancy S. Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Kollmann, Nancy S. “Pictures at an Execution: Johann Georg Korb’s ‘Execution of the Strel’tsy’.” In Dubitando: Studies in History and Culture in Honor of Donald Ostrowski, edited by Brian J. Boeck, Russell E. Martin, and Daniel Rowland, 399–407. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2012. Kollmann, Nancy S. “Representing Legitimacy in Early Modern Russia.” The Russian Review 76 (January 1, 2017). https://fsi.stanford.edu/publication/representing-legi timacy-early-modern-russia. Kollmann, Nancy S. “The Litsevoi Svod as Graphic Novel. Narrativity in Iconographic Style.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 19 (January 31, 2018). https://fsi.stanford.edu/publication/litsevoi-svod-graphic-novel-narrativity -iconographic-style. Kollmann, Nancy S. “Tracking the Travels of Adam Olearius.” In Word and Image in Russian History: Essays in Honor of Gary Marker, edited by Maria di Salvo, Daniel Kaiser, and Valerie Kivelson, 133–146. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2015. Korb, Johann Georg. Diarium itineris in Moscoviam … Ignatii Christophori nobilis Domini de Guarient & Rall … ab … Imperatore Leopoldoi I. Vienna: Leopoldi Voigt, 1700.

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Korb, Johann Georg. Tagebuch der Reise nach Russland, edited by Gerhard Korb. Graz: Akademische Druck u. Verlagsanstalt, 1968. Maier, Ingrid, and Wouter Pilger. “How Well Was Muscovy Connected with the World?” In Imperienvergleich: Beispiele und Ansätze aus Osteuropäischer Perspektive: Festschrift für Andreas Kappeler, edited by Guido Hausmann and Angela Rustemeyer, 17–38. Wiesbaden, 2009. Maier, Ingrid, and Wouter Pilger. “Second-Hand Translation for Tsar Aleksej Mixajlovich: A Glimpse into the ‘Newspaper Workshop’ at Posol’skij Prikaz.” Russian Linguistics 25, no. 2 (2001): 209–242. Mankov, A. G. Zapiski inostrantsev o vosstanii Stepana Razina. Leningrad: Nauka, Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1968. Marker, Gary J. “Literacy and Literacy Texts in Muscovy: A Reconsideration.” Slavic Review 49, no. 1 (1990): 74–89. Marker, Gary J. Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700– 1800. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Meyerberg, Augustin. Al’bom Meierberga: Vidy i bytovye kartiny Rossii XVII veka, edited by Friedrich von Adelung and A. M. Loviagin. St. Petersburg: Izd. A. S. Suvorina, 1903. Morris, Marcia A. The Literature of Roguery in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Russia. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Olearius, Adam. Offt begehrte Beschreibung der newen orientalischen Reise…. Schleßwig: Zur Glocken, 1647. VD17 23:233209P, http://diglib.hab.de/drucke/263–1-hist-2f/ start.htm. Olearius, Adam. Opisanie puteshestviia v Moskoviiu. Translated by A. M. Loviagin. Smolensk: Rusich, 2003. Olearius, Adam. Vermehrte newe Beschreibung der muscowitischen und persischen Reyse, edited by Dieter Lohmeier. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1971. Osetskaia, N. S. “ ‘Zametki o Rossii,’ Ili Al’bom Pal’mkvista …” Bibliotekovedenie 2 (2013): 51–57. Ovsyannikov, Yuri. The Lubok: 17th–18th Century Russian Broadsides. Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1968. Paas, John Roger. The German Political Broadsheet, 1600–1700. 14 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1985–. Palmquist, Erich. “Någre Widh Sidste Kongl. Ambassaden till Tsaren Muskou Giorde Observationer Öfwer Ryslandh, …” Stockholm, 1674. Palmquist, Erich. Någre Widh Sidste Kongl. Ambassaden till Tzaren i Muskou Giorde Observationer Öfwer Ryszland, Dess Wägar, Pasz Med Fästningar Och Gräntzer. Stockholm: Generalstabs litogr. Anst, 1898. Palmquist, Erich. Zametki o Rossii, Sdelannye Erikom Pal’mkvistom v 1674 Godu, edited by E. Löfstrand, U. Birgegård, and L. Nordquist. Moscow: Lomonosov, 2012.

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Plavsic, Borivoj. “Seventeenth-Century Chanceries and Their Staffs.” In Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, edited by Walter M. Pintner and Don Karl Rowney, 19–45. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Poe, Marshall. A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Resnik, Judith, and Dennis Curtis. Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Rovinskii, D. A. Russkie narodnye kartinki, edited by N. P. Sobko. St. Peterburg: lzd. R. Golike, 1900. Rowland, Beryl. Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973. Snegirev, Ivan. Lubochnye kartinki russkago naroda v Moskovskom mirie. Moscow: V Universitetskoĭ tip, 1861. Sytova, Alla, ed. The Lubok: Russian Folk Pictures, 17th to 19th Century. Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers, 1984. Waugh, Daniel, and Ingrid Maier. “Muscovy and the European Information Revolution: Creating the Mechanisms for Obtaining Foreign News.” In Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600–1850, edited by Simon Franklin and Katherine Bowers 77–112. Cambridge, 2017. Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.

chapter 10

Through Glory and Death: Stepan Razin and the 1667–1671 Cossack Rebellion in Western Early Modern Visual Culture Gleb Kazakov The Razin rebellion of 1667–1671 was one of a number of major popular insurrections that took place in Muscovy during the seventeenth century, starting with the notorious Time of Troubles up to the musketeers’ revolts in the early age of Peter the Great. It was Stepan, or Stenka, Razin, though, whose deeds and military achievements against Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich attracted the most attention far beyond the borders of the Russian Tsardom. In Western Europe, the rebellion of Stenka Razin was a subject of many discussions, rumors, and fears and undoubtedly became the first internal Russian conflict to be so widely talked about by Western observers.1 The contacts established between Muscovy and Western Europe before 1670 – mostly diplomatic and trade connections – helped to spread news rather rapidly.2 The English, Dutch, Germans, Swedes, and other diplomats or traders who happened to be in Moscow or other major cities of the Russian realm for any reason diligently delivered back home any secondhand information concerning the insurgents they could gather, providing European newspapers with the latest news.3 The postal routes, which were established between Moscow, Riga and Vilnius in the 1660s, made the spread of news much faster than before: a German newspaper, Nordischer Mercurius, 1 For the effect of Razin’s rebellion on Western Europe and an overview of Western sources about it, see two collections of historical sources edited and commented by Arkadii Man’kov: Man′kov, ed., Zapiski inostrantsev o vosstanii Stepana Timofeevicha Razina; Man′kov, ed., Inostrannye izvestiia o vosstanii Stepana Razina. For the information on the Razin rebellion in German newspapers, see Welke, “Rußland in der Deutschen Publizistik des 17. Jahrhunderts”, 203–204. 2 For an overview of Western diplomats in early modern Russia, see Poe, A People Born to Slavery, 239–250; and an old but nevertheless profound work by Adelung, Kritisch-Literärische Übersicht der Reisenden. For information on the trade routes of Muscovy, see Kotilaine, Russia’s Foreign Trade and Economic Expansion in the Seventeenth Century. 3 See, for example, the report of an anonymous English trade agent in Man′kov, Inostrannye izvestiia, 5.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004461949_012

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estimated the average delivery time from Moscow to Hamburg in 1668 at about twenty days.4 Some Western Europeans, such as the Dutch mercenary soldiers Jan Struys and Ludwig Fabritius, even witnessed the course of the rebellion as active, though involuntary, participants and published their observations and memoires afterward.5 Finally, many foreigners in Moscow saw the rebel Razin at his execution on June 6, 1671, witnessing the Muscovite punitive ritual. The reasons for the fascination and interest in the Don Cossack Stenka Razin in Western Europe were manifold. The scale of the rebellion itself was unusual and frightening. It started in the spring of 1667 with minor Cossack banditry on the lower Volga and Yaik Rivers. At that time Razin had no more than 5,000 men under his command. The Cossacks then spent the next two years on the Caspian Sea pillaging Persian territory and trying to establish a permanent base on the eastern or southern coast. In August 1669, Razin reappeared with the rest of his forces at the city of Astrakhan and accepted the pardon sent to him from the tsar. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1670 an open rebellion broke out. The insurgents captured the cities of Tsaritsyn and Astrakhan, cutting Moscow off from the rich Volga trade routes. They then started their advance up the Volga River, proclaiming that their real goal was Moscow and the eradication of the “evil boyars” who were solely responsible for all of the troubles of the poor.6 By the autumn of 1670, Razin’s army had grown to 20,000 men and rebellion spread over a huge region, from Astrakhan in the south to Simbirsk in the north. The Muscovite authorities recognized the threat and send a large force of troops under the command of Iurii Bariatinskii to deal with the rebels. In October 1670, Razin was defeated near Simbirsk and was forced to flee back to Don. There he was later captured in April 1671 by those Cossacks who had remained loyal to the tsar,7 delivered to Moscow, and then publicly executed.

4 Man′kov, Inostrannye izvestiia, 80–81, note 2. However, the time period between the actual event and the newspaper report could be even longer. 5 Jan Struys, in Struys, Tri puteshestviia; Ludwig Fabritius, in Man′kov, Zapiski inostrantsev, 5–83. 6 This attitude of insurgents claiming to raise their weapons against the wicked advisers of the ruler and not the ruler himself has long been called “naïve monarchism” by historians. For more on its effect on the Razin rebellion, see Buganov, Razin i razintsy; Avrich, Russian Rebels, 93–97. 7 These were the Cossacks led by Ataman Kornilo Iakovlev, who remained mostly neutral during the conflict. More on the matter in Boeck, Imperial Boundaries, 78–79; Avrich, Russian Rebels, 111–113.

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Media Reports and Visual Cultures of East and West

This huge popular insurrection, which brought together different social groups – Cossacks, peasants, the urban poor, some non-Russian tribes of the Volga region – and at a certain point even threatened the very existence of the Russian state and the ruling dynasty, alarmed foreign observers. Those who stayed in Moscow (mostly diplomats and trade agents) feared for their possessions and safety and tended to exaggerate the strength of the rebels.8 In reports, Razin’s army was said to be 100,000-strong, and its success against the tsarist forces on the battlefield was also often overstated. The exotic nature of the main core of Razin’s troops – the Cossacks – was also confusing to foreign observers. Their seminomadic way of life, their existence in the borderland on the very edge of “the Turks,” and their animosity against the official Russian Church in the course of the rebellion, all added together to build Cossacks up as fearsome warriors in the imagination of Europeans. It also provoked rumors of a possible alliance between Razin and the Persian shah.9 The rebellion thus threatened not only remote Muscovy but also the European Christian world. Nevertheless, the European interest in Razin was not solely based on fear and anxiety. The current weakening of Muscovy was beneficial for its neighbors: the memories of the first Northern War were still fresh for Sweden, its Livonian territories, and Poland-Lithuania, and despite the peace treaties of Cardis (1661) and Andrusovo (1667), relations between the countries remained rather tense. Hence Nordischer Mercurius cited news from Riga in September 1670 that the locals seemed to welcome disorder in Muscovy, hoping that it would decrease the Russian pressure and threat for at least some time.10 Some Polish informants reported that the Polish king expected to get the city of Kyiv back from the tsar in exchange for military help.11 The Cossack revolt represented a perfect opportunity for diplomatic pressure on Muscovy or at least gave Russia’s neighbors (and potential opponents) some time to catch their breath. It is doubtful, though, that Razin had any kind of communication with the Swedish or Polish king or even offered them an alliance. Such rumors were nevertheless mentioned in kuranty – compilations of 8

9 10 11

Thus, the anonymous English report from February 1671 states: “The daily Fears we have long here entertain’d, rendered our lives the next event (in Reasons expectation) to have been inhumanely torn from us, and, with us, your and the rest of the worthy Employers Estates to have been ransacked, and swallowed up.” Man′kov, Inostrannye izvestiia, 8. These rumors were mentioned in the French La Gazette in no. 25 and no. 42 of 1671. See Man′kov, Inostrannye izvestiia, 112, 137. Man′kov, Inostrannye izvestiia, 94, 119. Man′kov, Inostrannye izvestiia, 130, 149.

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European newspapers translated into Russian exclusively for the high Russian authorities in the seventeenth century.12 In November 1670, a foreigner in the Russian service, Colonel von Staden, was instructed by the tsar to demand that the Swedes punish newspaper publishers who deliberately spread news about the rebellion, thus insulting the tsar’s dignity.13 These accusations were then repeated during Russian-Swedish negotiations in 1672 and even 1676.14 Apart from general anxiety and malicious joy, without a doubt Western Europeans also developed a great deal of curiosity for Razin. His reputation as a frightening but peculiar rebel, whose short military success against the mighty Russian tsar was accompanied by mystical details,15 was striking. Razin’s initial success and political behavior reminded contemporaries of similar cases, such as Hetman Doroshenko’s revolt against the Polish king and the Hungarian mutiny against the Habsburgs during the 1670s. Both Doroshenko and the Hungarian mutineers, such as Ferenc Nádasdy, became vassals of the Ottomans and were threatening to claim vast territories for the sultan. For Western European observers, the Russian rebel was thus another political separatist ready to seek the aid of Muslim foes against the Christian suzerains. All these three components – the fear, the expectations of alleged Ottoman or Persian support, and the curiosity for another exotic separatist – intermingled in the media reception of Razin’s person and influenced his representation. Just as important, Razin’s popularity was reflected not only in the number of newspaper reports and other written sources, but also in visual representations. Although the tradition of “picturing Russia” had begun a lot earlier in the first half of the sixteenth century, Razin was the first Russian rebel whose visual image appeared in Western media. This tradition of visualization was initiated by Baron Sigismund von Herberstein, the ambassador of the German emperor, who first came to Muscovy in 1517 to visit the court of Grand Duke Vasilii III. In 1549, his book Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii was published in Vienna. The illustrations of Vasilii III and other members of the Russian court in the book, made by the German engraver Augustin Hirschvogel, set a 12

13 14 15

These compilations, often called “the first Russian newspapers,” were handwritten and first produced in the first half of the seventeenth century in the Moscow ambassadorial chancellery (Posolskii Prikaz) on a more or less regular basis. Since the 1980s, a lot of research concerning kuranty has been done. See the overview in Shamin, Kuranty XVII stoletiia. Maier and Shamin, “ ‘Revolts’ in the Kuranty of March–July 1671,” 199. Maier and Shamin, “ ‘Revolts’ in the Kuranty of March–July 1671,” 200. The tales of Razin’s supernatural abilities (above all his invulnerability to bullets) are well-known in Russian folklore. European observers and witnesses were also familiar with them. The invulnerability legend is mentioned by Engelbert Kämpfer; see Man′kov, Inostrannye izvestiia, 164, 173.

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pattern for the visual image of Muscovy for the time to come. These pictures of Russian rulers – be it Vasilii, his son Ivan the Terrible, or his grandson Fedor – were copied, altered, and reproduced in various publications, mostly in world histories and cosmographies, which were popular at that time, such as Effigie naturali dei maggiori principi et più valorosi capitani di questa età con l’arme loro by Giacomo Franco and La cosmographie universelle by André de Thevet. Thus, the image of the Russian tsar or a Muscovite noble found its niche in European visual culture and was easily recognized by the mid-sixteenth century. Images of Russian rulers grew even more popular during the Livonian War (1558–1583), for Tsar Ivan the Terrible was a frequent figure on German leaflets describing the atrocities of Muscovites in Livonia.16 The ambassadorships of Adam Olearius and Augustin von Meyerberg to Muscovy in the seventeenth century brought new visual material, which this time pictured not only members of the Russian ruling class, but also scenes from the everyday life of peasants and townsfolk.17 However, pictures of rebellions and their leaders were not among these popular images. It was not easy for the European envoys to gather intelligence about Muscovite internal affairs, for their movements and even their spheres of communication within Russian territory were very limited. Olearius mentions that a foreign envoy was usually not allowed to leave his place of residence without permission, and, even when allowed, he was followed by Russian escorts (pristavy).18 The Russian authorities were eager to control every movement and conversation of foreign guests, thus obtaining any piece of nonofficial information was a hard task. Even though Olearius and Meyerberg reported in their books about current urban unrests in Muscovy (the Salt Revolt in 1648, and the Copper Revolt in 1662), they did not witness them or provide any pictures with their short descriptions. The media coverage of these urban revolts in Moscow was rather scarce in Western Europe, and therefore did not produce such a rich informational background as was the case for the Razin rebellion twenty years later. Razin was thereby the first insurgent of Muscovy to be pictured.19 16 17 18 19

Kappeler, Ivan Groznyj im Spiegel. See, for example, Meyerberg, Al’bom Meierberga. “Customarily neither ambassadors nor their attendants were allowed to go out alone while they resided in Moscow.” Poe, A People Born to Slavery, 45. The same was mentioned by almost every foreign envoy to Muscovy. See ibid., 41–50. It is worth mentioning that there were portraits of the False Dimitri, a claimant to the Russian throne who finally usurped it in 1604–1605, which were known in Europe in the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, Dimitri, whatever origin he might have had, was a tsar for a short time, and he was pictured by European engravers in this official status.

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It is interesting that no original Russian printed images were made of him during his lifetime or shortly after his execution. The Muscovite visual culture was dominated by religious images – icons, Bible illustrations, and church murals – and even though some secular motives and genres began to enter the scene, these were generally portraits of high officials and rulers, together with a long-established tradition of historical illustrations of Russian chronicles.20 The image of a rebel had no place in this hierarchy of visual representations. The Great Book of State (Tsarskii tituliarnik) – a grandiose undertaking of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich’s government from 1672 that contained a portrait book of Russian rulers since Rurik – did not mention the usurper False Dmitrii I, even though the latter reigned in Moscow for about a year in 1604–1605. Having an image of oneself was a privilege, a claim to status. In this regard one can make reference to a report from a German news booklet made for the autumn fair of 1671 in Frankfurt am Main,21 which repeated rumors spread by newsmakers from Riga of Razin’s negotiations with Aleksei Mikhailovich. The rebel, in offering the tsar peace, supposedly made six demands, including one for official recognition and an exhibition of his own portrait.22 Although the credibility of this story is questionable, it demonstrates the high status enjoyed by visual images and especially by official portraits in premodern Russian culture. Western Europe was much more familiar with depictions of popular unrest and its leaders by the 1670s. An enormous number of printing workshops made it almost impossible for authorities to completely prohibit the circulation of any particular image.23 The German lands, that is, the territory of the Holy Roman Empire with its multiple local princes and self-governed cities, together with the Low Countries presented a perfect opportunity for the flourishing of newspapers, informational leaflets, and book trading. Rumors and news about revolts were often carried and circulated beyond political borders – both as a means of propaganda and as a result of mutual interest and 20

21 22

23

Kivelson and Neuberger, Picturing Russia, 7, call it “the unmistakable dominance of the ruling authorities in the production of the images.” For more on the portraits of the Russian elite in the seventeenth century, see Hughes, “Images of the Elite.” On pictures in Russian chronicles, see Podobedova, Miniatiury russkikh istoricheskikh rukopisei. Very similar information about the six demands of Razin is also found in kuranty, where it is said to be taken from a newspaper report from Wismar in March 1671. The sources for this report were again probably rumors spread from Riga. For more on the alleged ultimatum of Razin in the Western media, see Shamin, Kuranty XVII stoletiia, 156–160. It is interesting, though, that von Staden in negotiations with the Swedish representatives in 1670 also complained about the circulation of Razin’s ultimatum in Swedish territory but he did not mention the issue with the portrait. For cross-border perception of revolts in early modern Europe, see From Mutual Observation to Propaganda War, ed. Griesse, 15–18.

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curiosity. For instance, pictures of Masaniello, a leader of the Napoli revolt of 1647, were made and copied by Dutch engravers shortly after his death. Thus, the images of rebels often served either as representations (and justifications) of insurgents’ claims or as simple, “truthful” depictions of what had happened. Nevertheless, Western authorities were entrusted with the task of countering the influence of this visual propaganda, which could also be achieved by the spread of images – in this case of images of defeated revolts and punishments imposed by the government.24 The pictures of Razin made by Western engravers in the 1670s were thus produced in the clash of two visual cultures and reflected the communication of symbols, approaches, and prejudices between different parts of early modern Europe. There are two major lines to note in regard to this communication. On the one hand, Western Europe was eager to portray the famous rebel at the height of his fame, for reasons we have seen above – fear, joy, or mere curiosity. It is doubtful, though, that the Muscovite authorities were familiar with these images. On the other hand, Muscovy was pursuing a damnatio memoriae policy, that is, to suppress the spread of information on the revolt, or, at least, as it will be shown further, to spread the news they deemed appropriate, for example, about Razin’s capture and execution. This thesis is to be illustrated by the following details. 2

The Portraits

The first portrait25 (fig. 10.1) of the Cossack chieftain was made in Germany, probably in early 1671, and exists as a broadsheet. It is a copperplate signed at the bottom Paulus Fürst Ex, which connects the image with Paul Fürst, a German publisher and bookseller from Nuremberg. Although Paul Fürst is often referred to as the creator of the portrait, he actually died in 1666,26 leaving the workshop to his son Wolfgang Gottlieb Fürst and son-in-law Rudolf Johann Helmers, who continued to run the publishing business under the signature Paulus Fürst Excudit until at least 1703–1704.27 Razin is represented in this image as a middle-aged man with a full beard, dressed in a fur coat and wearing a turban on his head. His whole appearance gives the impression 24 25 26 27

Härter, “Early Modern Revolts,” 349. On punishment rituals publicly sanctioned by the government in early modern Europe, see also Dülmen, Theater des Schreckens, 145. Rovinskii, Podrobnyi slovar′ russkikh gravirovannykh portretov, 3: 1852–1853; see also Rovinskii, Materialy dlia russkoi ikonografii, vol. 12, fig. 445. Lobin, “Graviury XVII veka iz sobraniia Konstantinovskogo dvortsa,” 153. Hampe, “Beiträge zur Geschichte des Buch- und Kunsthandels in Nürnberg,” 9–10.

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Figure 10.1

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Workshop of Paulus Fürst, Portrait of Razin, 1671, copperplate engraving. Reprinted in Klebeband Herschaften Kriegs[=] und Staats[bedienten] auch andere (Arolsen, FWHB, II 56e 17a, S. 511, Bild 1)

more of a Turk than a Russian Cossack. However, for European observers the difference between Cossacks and their Muslim opponents was not a major one: the Nordischer Mercurius, in one of its first reports about Razin from September 1670, called the rebels “Tatars.”28 The combination “Cossacks and Tatars” was a frequent one in the German media throughout the whole 28

Man′kov, Inostrannye izvestiia, 92.

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rebellion. Even after the rebellion, in 1674, Johann Justus Martius wrote in his famous dissertation about “Stenko Razin” that the latter was “either of the Muslim faith or of none at all.”29 Engelbert Kämpfer, a German naturalist and a traveler, who visited Russia and Persia from 1683 to 1684, emphasized in his writings, that “the people called Khazak are quite different from the true Khosaaks, that they are of Turkish original and of the Mahometan Belief, and inhabit a Country near or under Turkestan; though it is true that both of them at the beginning participated of the same origin as well as of a name in common between them. The Cossackes, who caused the disorders in the Silk Countries upon the Caspian Sea, were Subjects of Russia about the Don, Christians by religion, speaking and writing the Russian language.”30 Besides, the Oriental visual style in depictions of Russia had already become established since the sixteenth century. A perfect example can be found in the illustrations of the 1576 edition of Herberstein’s Commentarii, where the tsar and the Russian nobles were depicted wearing turbans and other typically Turkish garments. The Turkish appearance of Razin on the copperplate thus fitted the general European perception of the “others” perfectly: Muscovy, and especially the Cossack border communities, was set on a par with Turks and Tatars on the periphery of the Christian world. On the copperplate printed in Nuremberg, Razin is holding a marshal’s baton, a symbol of military power often seen in early modern military portraits. It is not so much the image that indicates the general proposition of the portrait as the text below the picture. The inscription reads: A true picture of Stephan Razin, the chief-rebel in Muscovy, who, willing to avenge his executed brother, gathered under his command several bands and firstly acted as a brigand, but then, having raised a whole army, became a field-general and captured the rich trading city of Astrakhan together with many other places; he defeated the armies of the great Tsar many times on the battlefield and attracted so many disaffected people to his banner, that the Tsar himself was put in such a danger, that his crown wiggled on his head. And thus the monarch, who had before striven with so much gore after others’ crowns, was now unsure of his own.31 Razin thereby appears as a successful avenger, who brings the Russian tsar to justice: the one who oppressed other rulers is now in danger of losing his own 29 30 31

Man′kov, Inostrannye izvestiia, 42. Man′kov, Inostrannye izvestiia, 157. Translation by author.

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crown. The tone of the inscription, which mentions neither Razin’s defeat nor his death, suggests that it was made at the pinnacle of Razin’s glory, which, given the three- or four-week delay in news delivery, probably meant the end of 1670 or the start of 1671. It is very doubtful that Russian authorities were familiar with the work of the Fürst family. The text, however, obviously contains passages that representatives of Alexei Mikhailovich’s court would have certainly regarded as “insulting the tsar’s dignity”: the tsar’s army is said to “be beaten,” and his own crown “wiggles” on his head. The portrait was most likely influenced by the news from Riga, which showed a distinct sympathy towards the rebels. The engraver visualized a fantastic image of the Cossack leader (whom he certainly never saw), adding all the typical details – an Oriental turban, a Muscovite fur coat, and a victorious marshal’s baton. Interestingly enough, there is another competing image of Razin from the 1670s. It is to be found in the tenth volume of Theatrum Europaeum – a monumental historical chronicle edited by the Swiss engraver and publisher Matthäus Merian in Frankfurt am Main. This tenth volume, published in 1677, dealt with events from 1665 to the end of 1670 and included a report of Razin’s rebellion accompanied by a portrait of the rebel (fig. 10.2).32 Here Stenka looks much more European – his tiny lip-beard “à la royale” and a buttoned jacket make him more of a Central European nobleman than a Cossack. The picture is captioned in Latin: Stephanus Razinus Perduellis Moscovicus.33 In fact, it appears to be a part of a whole series of rebel portraits, for the same volume of Theatrum Europaeum also includes the images of the Hungarian magnates and insurgents Peter Graf von Zrinyi, Ferenc Kristóf Frangepán, and Ferenc III Graf Nádasdy, who are all named in the section Perduellis Hungaricus. Moreover, the narration about Razin in Theatrum Europaeum starts right after the storyline of the mutiny of Ukrainian Cossacks under Petro Doroshenko’s lead. Stenka is thus put together with other contemporary insurgents, and his appearance is accordingly brought to conformity. The pictures of rebels, including the one of Razin, were probably made especially for Theatrum Europaeum. However, there is no indication that Razin’s portrait was based on credible testimonies. It was almost certainly made after Stenka’s execution purely according to the creator’s fantasy.34 The 32 33 34

Geiger, Theatrum Europaeum, 304–305, 517–524. Perduellis means “a public enemy, a foe,” in Latin. It was often used in early modern Europe to designate an insurgent. One of the copies of the portrait from Theatrum Europaeum even mentions the year of Razin’s death: “Stephanus Razinus Perduellis Moscovicus †1671”; see Postnikov, “Sten′ka Razin v graviurakh ego sovremennikov,” 211; see also portrait no. 447 in Rovinskii, Materialy dlia russkoi ikonografii.

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Figure 10.2

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Anonymous, Stephanus Razinus Perduellis Moscovicus, in Theatrum Europaeum, Bd. 10, 1677, engraving. Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg

Fürst copperplate, though, had a wider influence on the imagery of Razin, for it has left a larger number of copies and was even used as a template for another, much simpler woodcut version of the same portrait, which was circulated probably in the form of single leaflets (fig. 10.3). The woodcut version was made probably after Razin’s death, for it omitted the long text of the initial

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Figure 10.3

251

Anonymous, Portrait of Razin published in a supplement to a German periodical, 1671. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen

Fürst copperplate completely and, in another variation, substituted it with a short inscription: “Stenko Radzin, leader of the rebels, cruelly executed in Moscow on the 27th of May 1671.”35 35

“Stenko Radzin Haupt Rebellen in der Moskau ist grausam hingerichtet am 27 May 1671.” See Postnikov, “Sten′ka Razin v graviurakh ego sovremennikov,” 211; and Rovinskii, Materialy dlia russkoi ikonografii, vol. 12, fig. 446. The date is wrong, for the execution of Razin took place a week later, on June 6, 1671.

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The Execution

This small change in the inscription text, however, indicates the direction in which the Russian government put a lot of effort. Translations of European newspapers, which were made for the kuranty in 1671, show the great interest with which foreign reports about Razin were thoroughly searched for and analyzed in Moscow.36 Russian diplomats abroad not only demanded punishment for the newsmakers for their “insulting” and “evil” reports, but probably also tried to spread the “correct” news, emphasizing the weakness of the rebels or even their defeat. Hence, Dutch newspapers from January 1671, which are available in Russian translation from the kuranty, explained in great detail Razin’s failure at Simbirsk and even mentioned details such as the rebel being wounded and the general of the tsar’s forces being promoted to a higher rank.37 This kind of information could only come from the Russian authorities or from circles closely connected to them. Another important issue for the Muscovite government would have been spreading the word about Razin’s capture and execution.38 After the defeat at Simbirsk, the rebel fled back to Don where he was first captured by Cossacks in April 1671 and then handed over to the tsar’s officials together with his brother Frol. On June 2, Razin was brought to Moscow, interrogated, tortured, and finally quartered on June 6. The five severed body parts were put on pikes, and, according to eyewitnesses, were displayed across the Moscow River on “the Swamp,”39 where they stayed for at least two years;40 Razin’s torso was tossed to the dogs. This spectacle of violence was not completely new for Muscovy in the 1670s. Two decades earlier in 1653, a runaway servant, Timoshka Ankudinov, who had traveled among the European courts claiming to be the son of Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii, was publicly quartered in Moscow.41 His severed body parts were also put on public display. Another traitor, Vasilii Neelov, was quartered 36 37 38

39

40 41

Maier and Shamin, “ ‘Revolts’ in the Kuranty,” 196. Maier and Shamin, “ ‘Revolts’ in the Kuranty,” 202. Some of the newspapers continued to report Razin still alive and gathering new forces even after his actual death in June 1671. Thus, considering Razin’s popularity and his role as the leader of the rebellion, it should have been important for the Russian authorities to convince the observers of his death. Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia, 385. “The Swamp,” that is, the Bolotnaia Square in contemporary Moscow, was simply the place where the rebel’s remains were exhibited, not the spot of the actual execution. Most likely, Razin’s execution took place in the Red Square, in front of the Kremlin. Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia, 385; Buganov, Razin i razintsy, 319. Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia, 381.

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in June 1654. Quartering and hanging “along the roads” were said to have taken place after the Copper Riot in 1662.42 Nevertheless, such severe public punishments were rather rare in Muscovy and were apparently used only in extraordinary cases of high treason and rebellion. Moreover, sometimes harsh open repressions were avoided on purpose to prevent new outbreaks of unrest and to calm the crowds. This was the case in the Moscow urban revolt of 1648, participants of which, as the Swedish resident Karl Pommerening reported to Queen Christina in October 1648, were not publicly punished but exiled from Moscow on different pretexts in the aftermath of the events.43 Thus, Razin’s execution did not simply follow the tradition of punishment, but was a well-designed spectacle with the aim of impressing spectators, among whom foreigners appeared to be a specific target group.44 Indeed, the scene of Razin’s execution takes an important place in European descriptions of the rebellion. It can be found in periodicals,45 and it is also mentioned by all major authors and informants writing about Razin: Jacob Reutenfels, Johann Justus Martius, Balthasar Coyet, Thomas Hebdon, and the anonymous author of A Relation Concerning the Particulars of the Rebellion Lately Raised in Muscovy by Stenko Razin. All these descriptions are very similar, which can be partially explained through borrowings and straightforward copying of text. Balthasar Coyet, secretary of the Dutch ambassador to Muscovy, who did not see the execution itself but only Razin’s body parts on display, retells the whole procedure,46 as does Martius, who even acknowledges using “reliable sources” in his dissertation.47 The source for these descriptions was probably the anonymous A Relation Concerning the Particulars of the Rebellion, for it was the earliest printed text (except for periodicals) dealing with the insurrection in general and with Razin’s death on the scaffold in particular. The author of this document is unknown, but he does indicate that the text was written (or at least finished) in Arkhangelsk on September 13, 1671. Supposedly he was an Englishman or a Dutch merchant, because the French translation of A Relation Concerning the Particulars of the Rebellion mentions that the document was sent from 42 43 44

45 46 47

Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia, 363. Iakubov, ed., “Rossiia i Shvetsiia v pervoi polovine XVII veka,” 427. For more details about the recently discovered Muscovite image of Razin’s execution and the propaganda efforts of the government of Alexei Mikhailovich, see Kazakov and Maier, “Foreign Reports about Stepan Razin’s Execution.” This article was published after the present chapter was submitted to the volume’s editors. For example, see Man′kov, Inostrannye izvestiia, 97, 100, 105. Coyett, Posol′stvo Kunraada fan-Klenka = Voyagie van den Heere Koenraad van Klenk, 456. Man′kov, Inostrannye izvestiia, 49.

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Figure 10.4

Anonymous, Captured Razin being delivered to Moscow, ca. 1672. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Arkhangelsk “to England and hither.”48 The first printed versions appeared nevertheless in Germany and the Netherlands in 1671, and then in England and France a year later. Most importantly, the English version contains a copperplate, reproducing the scene of Razin being delivered to Moscow after his capture (fig. 10.4). The text description reads as follows: Stenko coming within a mile of Mosco, the Waggon met him that had been made to bring him into the City according to his deserts. In the hind-part of it was erected the Gallows; himself was stripped of his Silken-habit, which he had worn hitherto, and an old ragged Sute put upon him; and so he was placed in the Waggon under the Gallows, with an Iron-Chain about his Neck, fastned to the top of the same. Both his hands were locked fast to the Side-beams of the Gallows, and his Legs divaricated. His Brother Frolko was with an Iron-Chain fastned to the Waggon, and went a foot on the side of it. Thus entred Stenko with his Brother into the City of Mosco, Thousands of People, of great and mean condition, beholding them, and so fulfilling his Prophesie of the honor he should have in entring this Town. And though he comforted his Brother with this honor, yet himself standing in the Waggon looked on no body, but held his Face continually down-ward […]. Four days after that he was 48

Man′kov, Zapiski inostrantsev, 85.

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brought in, he was with his Brother carried to the place of Execution in the Cittadel. The Sentence of Death was read before him, wherein were expressed the Principal Villanies he had committed. He seemed not at all concerned, and spoke not a word but stooped. And when the Executioner was going to do his office, he crossed himself several times, directing his face towards a certain Church, called Pretsietse Bogorodietse Casaneche; that is, The most Holly Mother of God of Casan. And thereupon he bowed his head thrice towards three several places of the people assembled, saying, Prostie, that is, Forgive me. And presently he was laid down between two Beams, and his Right Arm cut off to the Elbow, and his Left Leg to the Knee. After this, his Head was, cut off with an [sic] Hatchet: All which was done with great speed in a very short time; and Stenko gave not the least sigh, nor shewed any sign of sense.49 The anonymous author was not the only foreigner who witnessed the execution.50 Another Englishman, the merchant Thomas Hebdon, described the circumstances of Razin’s death in a very similar way in a letter from Moscow written on the day of the execution. He even added details not mentioned in A Relation Concerning the Particulars of the Rebellion but which can be seen on the copperplate.51 Jacob Reutenfels also saw the execution and described it in his De rebus Muschoviticis, underlining that only foreigners were allowed to stand near the scaffold.52 Similar information can be found in the reports in the Nordischer Mercurius, whose informant also mentioned the “great favor” of being allowed to stand close to the execution site alongside the foreigners, including the Persian ambassador.53 He even observed that all was done so that “we could see the execution better and report about it afterwards.” This last remark seems crucial. Whereas Russian diplomatic missions abroad were rather rare and not extremely efficient in spreading propaganda, those foreigners who resided in Moscow represented an appropriate target group for the Russian government in order for the desired news to be spread.54 49 50

51 52 53 54

Citation in English from Man′kov, Zapiski inostrantsev, 100–101. About recently discovered letters written by the Swedish agent in Moscow Christof Koch, who also witnessed the execution, see Kazakov and Maier, “Foreign Reports about Stepan Razin’s Execution.” Koch’s letters also contain a hand-drawn picture of the captured Razin, which bears a very strong resemblance to the above-mentioned copperplate (fig. 10.4) and was most likely produced by Muscovite authorities. Thus, Hebdon describes three horses pulling the cart carrying Razin. Reutenfels, “Skazaniia svetleishemu gertsogu,” 328. Man′kov, Inostrannye izvestiia, 97. This was already noticed by Smentsovskii, “K istorii kazni Stepana Razina,” 133.

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The spectacular procedure of humiliation and punishment of the famous rebel organized by the Moscow authorities could not occur without notice; moreover, the foreign spectators were granted the best observing positions. The spectacle of violence on June 6, 1671 provided European observers with a remarkable but at the same time recognizable image of a punished insurgent and was even visualized according to the standards of the Western visual culture of violence and punishment. The image, in textual and visual form, appears to have been so memorable that it was even reproduced thirty years after the event: a French engraving by Jan Luyken from 1698 and a German illustration from Historischer Bildersaal printed by Andreas Imhof in 1701 both deal with the same scene of the captured rebel being brought to his execution site on a simple cart.55 4

Conclusion

The intensification of connections between Muscovy and Western Europe in the second half of the 17th century led to the influx of information about Russia into Western media. Reports from Muscovy began to appear on a regular basis in Western periodicals and in printed books. One of the points of interest for foreign observers were the inner insurrections, of which the rebellion led by Stenka Razin from 1667 to 1671 was the biggest. The unprecedented scale of the rebellion and its initial success together with semi-fantastic rumors made the figure of Stepan Razin quite popular in Western media, especially in German, French, and Dutch newspapers. This popularity made the visualization of the rebel’s image possible, and his earliest portrait was produced during his lifetime in late 1670 or early 1671. The creation of this portrait was, however, strongly influenced by the reports, which most likely originated from Livonian lands and the city of Riga, where sympathies with the rebellious cause were widely felt. Muscovy was seen there as an aggressor and a potential threat. This attitude is reflected in the portrait and its inscription made in the Fürst workshop in Nuremberg. Another reason for European media interest for Stenka was his unexpected initial military success against the tsar, which placed him among the ranks of other famous insurgents of the time: Petro Doroshenko or Ferenc Nádasdy. All these rebels were notorious for their separatist attempts against Christian rulers and alliances with the Ottoman sultan. The rumors about Razin’s alleged contacts with Crimean Tatars or the Persian shah were also circulating in the 55

Kazakov and Maier, “Foreign Reports about Stepan Razin’s Execution.”

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newspapers. This is probably the reason for Razin’s Oriental appearance in the Fürst portrait. No Russian printed images of Razin have been preserved, for the Muscovite visual culture was focused on the elite, including the Church, and was controlled by it. The spread of any information concerning the rebels abroad was unwelcome and had to be prevented or countered with the spread of officially approved news (although the European portraits of Razin were probably never seen in Muscovy). The person of Stenka Razin was again crucial in this undertaking, for it was the official spectacle of his punishment that could prove the end of the rebellion and strengthen the power of the tsar in the eyes of foreign observers. The elaborate ritual of the execution, witnessed by Western spectators, thus gave birth to another visual motive: the image of a defeated rebel brought to the execution site by victorious authorities. The visualization of this image corresponded with the Western tradition of pictured punishment and was readily accepted by the Western media. The portrait of the successful rebel was thus substituted for an image of a defeated revolt. It was this scene of execution that became rooted in European imagery and inspired later artists. Bibliography A Relation Concerning the Particulars of the Rebellion Lately Raised in Muscovy by Stenko Razin; Its Rise, Progress, and Stop; Together with the Manner of Taking That Rebel, the Sentence of Death Passed upon Him, and the Execution of the Same. London: Tho. Newcomb, 1672. Adelung, Friedrich von. Kritisch-literärische Übersicht der Reisenden in Russland bis 1700, deren Berichte bekannt sind. St. Petersburg and Leipzig: Eggers & Comp. and T. O. Weigel, 1846. Avrich, Paul. Russian Rebels, 1660–1800. New York: Schocken Books, 1972. Boeck, Brian J. Imperial Boundaries: Cossack Communities and Empire-Building in the Age of Peter the Great. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Buganov, Viktor I. Razin i razintsy. Dokumenty, opisaniia sovremennikov. Moscow: Nauka, 1995. Coyett, B. Posol′stvo Kunraada fan-Klenka k tsariam Alekseiu Mikhailovichu i Fedoru Alekseevichu = Voyagie van den Heere Koenraad van Klenk, Extraordinaris Ambassadeur van haer Ho: Mo: aen Zyne Zaarsche Majesteyt van Moscovien, edited by А. М. Loviagin. Saint Petersburg: Izdanie arkheograficheskoi komissii, 1900. Dülmen, Richard van. Theater des Schreckens: Gerichtspraxis und Strafrituale in der frühen Neuzeit. Munich: Beck, 1985.

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Geiger, Wolffgang Jacob. Theatrum Europaeum, oder außführliche und warhafftige Beschreibung aller und jeder denckwürdiger Geschichten, so sich hin und wieder in der Welt, fürnemblich aber in Europa und Teutschlanden, sowol im Religion- als Prophan-Wesen, vom Jahr Christi … biß auff das Jahr … exclus…. sich zugetragen / 10. Irenico-Polemographiae Continuatio III, Das ist: Der Historisch-fortgeführten Friedens- und Kriegs-Beschreibung Vierdter, Oder deß Theatri Europaei Zehender Theil … von dem 1665sten Jahr biß in Anno 1671 … Vol. 10. Frankfurt am Main: Merian, 1677. Griesse, Malte, ed. From Mutual Observation to Propaganda War: Premodern Revolts in Their Transnational Representations. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014. Hampe, Theodor. “Beiträge zur Geschichte des Buch- und Kunsthandels in Nürnberg. II. Paulus Fürst und sein Kunstverlag.” Mitteilungen aus dem Germanischen Nationalmuseum (1914–1915): 3–127. Härter, Karl. “Early Modern Revolts as Political Crimes in the Popular Media of Illustrated Broadsheets.” In From Mutual Observation to Propaganda War: Premodern Revolts in Their Transnational Representations, edited by Malte Griesse, 309–351. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014. Hughes, Lindsey. “Images of the Elite: A Reconsideration of the Portrait in Seventeenth-Century Russia.” In Von Moskau nach St. Petersburg: Das Russische Reich im 17. Jahrhundert, edited by Hans-Joachim Torke, 167–187. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2000. Iakubov, K. I., ed. “Rossiia i Shvetsiia v pervoi polovine XVII veka. Sbornik materialov, izvlechennykh iz moskovskago glavnago arkhiva Ministerstva Inostrannykh del i shvedskago gosudarstvennago arkhiva i kasaiushchikhsia istorii vzaimnykh otnoshenii Rossii i Shvetsii v 1616–1651 godakh.” Chteniia v Imperatorskom Obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom universitete 3 (182) (1897). Kappeler, Andreas. Ivan Groznyj im Spiegel der ausländischen Druckschriften seiner Zeit: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des westlichen Russlandbildes. Bern: H. Lang, 1972. Kazakov, Gleb, and Ingrid Maier. “Foreign Reports about Stepan Razin’s Execution: New Documents from the Stockholm Archive.” Slovene 6 (2017): 210–243. Kivelson, Valerie A., and Joan Neuberger, eds. Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Kollmann, Nancy S. Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Kotilaine, Jarmo T. Russia’s Foreign Trade and Economic Expansion in the Seventeenth Century: Windows on the World. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Lobin, Aleksei N. “Graviury XVII veka iz sobraniia Konstantinovskogo dvortsa.” In Konstantinovskii dvortsovo-parkovyi ansambl′ i ego khudozhestvennye kollektsii. SPb., 2009: 144–159.

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Maier, Ingrid, and Stepan M. Shamin. “ ‘Revolts’ in the Kuranty of March–July 1671.” In From Mutual Observation to Propaganda War: Premodern Revolts in Their Transnational Representations, edited by Malte Griesse, 181–204: Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014. Man′kov, Arkadii G., ed. Zapiski inostrantsev o vosstanii Stepana Timofeevicha Razina. Leningrad: Nauka, 1968. Man′kov, Arkadii G., ed. Inostrannye izvestiia o vosstanii Stepana Razina. Leningrad: Nauka, 1975. Meyerberg, Augustin. Al′bom Meierberga: Vidy i bytovye kartiny Rossii XVII veka, edited by Friedrich von Adelung and A. M. Loviagin. Saint Petersburg: Izdatel′stvo A. S. Suvorina, 1903. Podobedova, Ol′ga I. Miniatiury russkikh istoricheskikh rukopisei: k istorii russkogo litsevogo letopisaniia. Moscow: Наука, 1965. Poe, Marshall. A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Postnikov, N. “Sten′ka Razin v graviurakh ego sovremennikov. Ikonograficheskaia zametka.” Zhivopisnaia Rossiia 4, no. 173 (1904): 209–211. Reutenfels, Jacob. “Skazaniia svetleishemu gertsogu toskanskomu Koz′me Tret′emu o Moskovii – De rebus Moschoviticis ad serenissimum magnum ducem Cosmum Tertium.” In Utverzhdenie dinastii. Moscow: Fond Sergeia Dubova, 1997. Rovinskii, Dmitrii A. Materialy dlia russkoi ikonografii [v 12-ti vyp.]. Vol. 12. Saint Petersburg: Ėkspeditsiia zagotovleniia gos. bumag, 1891. Rovinskii, Dmitrii A. Podrobnyi slovar′ russkikh gravirovannykh portretov. Vol. 3. Saint Petersburg, 1888. Shamin, Stepan M. Kuranty XVII stoletiia. Evropeiskaia pressa v Rossii i vozniknovenie russkoi periodicheskoĭ pechati. Moscow: Al′ians-Arkheo, 2011. Smentsovskii, Mikhail I. “K istorii kazni Stepana Razina.” Katorga i ssylka 3 (1932): 128–136. Struys, Jan Janszoon. Tri puteshestviia, edited by A. Morozova. Translated by E. Borodina. Moscow: OGIZ-Sotsekgiz, 1935. Welke, Martin. “Rußland in der Deutschen Publizistik des 17. Jahrhunderts, 1613–1689.” Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte 23 (1976): 105–276.

Part 4 Revolutionary Images

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chapter 11

Concepts of Leadership in Early Portraits of American Revolutionaries Monika Barget As all contributions assembled in this volume suggest, the credibility of politics heavily depends on convincing representation that draws on a wide range of media, from performance to print. Most importantly, none of the many communicational channels available to early modern patrons and producers seemed to become obsolete despite technical progress and infrastructural improvement. Rather than a competitive cutback of media, the early modern period saw a sophisticated differentiation and specialization of media. Although unwritten constitutions gradually yielded to bureaucratically organized nation-states and an emphasis on regularity and procedure, the formation of solid political entities could never rest on long-distance communication alone, but they carefully adapted face-to-face communication and physical manifestations of power to changing conditions. Visual media, which often directly related to public ceremony or real-life demonstrations of national unity and leadership, remained especially vital in times of crisis and transition.1 When the era of the Reformation had sparked a printing revolu­ tion, it had last but not least fueled a pictorial revolution. Images remained an important vehicle of rulers’ self-representation and oppositional agitation in the eighteenth century and subtly mirrored contemporary controversies over hereditary rights, state violence, government control, and public virtue.2 Against the background of continued controversies over the Glorious Revolution until around 1760, and the rise of republican movements in the second half of the eighteenth century, I will discuss continuities and transformations of eighteenth-century elite portraiture. After a brief analysis of the complexity and flexibility of princely self-representation in Western Europe, a comparison of the first publicly circulated broadside portraits of American commander in chief and later president George Washington to engraved portraits of 1 Larkin, ed., Politics and Portraits. 2 In the context of portraiture, one also needs to consider their presentation and arrangement in spaces such as the country house; see Perry et al., Placing Faces.

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noblemen and monarchs will show that Enlightenment discourse on the suitable representation of political influence and responsibility was thoroughly international and frequently crossed ideological boundaries.3 The same artists, printers, and booksellers who created and disseminated early Washington portraits were likewise involved in a long-standing process of reshaping public images of aristocratic leadership. Republican iconography produced in the American colonies and France was accordingly not a complete break with the past, but smoothly evolved from a more complex and gradual embedding of governance into a self-conscious, mature body of the nation.4 A precedent was, inter alia, a popular, embedded culture of collecting, displaying, and circulating royal portraits or other objects relating to the monarchy that had thrived since the later Stuart period.5 In this context, British-American tensions and interdependencies are of special interest. Owing to a strong tradition of baronial and parliamentary opposition to English monarchs, adherents to the Crown and their republican antagonists feared absolutist law enforcement, standing armies, and compromising foreign alliances, which fostered a careful reduction of visualized violence and an emphasis on regularity and moderation in governmental media.6 But at the same time, Britain’s disputatious political culture and the rapid decline in press censorship allowed for an extraordinary spectrum of aggression in popular ritual and oppositional iconography. The Glorious Revolution had limited the Crown’s ability to defeat Parliament by force and temporarily depoliticized the army,7 but radical reformers of the later eighteenth century advocated violence as a legitimate means to exert extra-parliamentary government control and established local militia and volunteer forces as political agents in their own right.8

3 Depkat, “The Grammar of Postrevolutionary Visual Politics,” 183. 4 This has also been highlighted by the essays in Larkin, ed., Politics and Portraits. Rather than inventing entirely new genres, traditional elements of portraiture were often reinterpreted; see McPherson, “Man + Horse,” 55–74. 5 “The rapidly growing marketplace of books, periodicals, pictures, and material objects brought the spectacle of monarchy to a wide audience, saturating spaces of daily life in later Stuart and early Hanoverian England. Images of the royal family, including portrait engravings, graphic satires, illustrations, medals and miniatures, urban signs, playing cards, and coronation ceramics were fundamental components of the political landscape and the emergent public sphere.” Koscak, Monarchy, Print Culture, and Reverence in Early Modern England, publisher’s abstract. 6 Schwartz, “George Washington and the Whig Conception of Heroic Leadership,” 23. 7 Cox, “Was the Glorious Revolution a Constitutional Watershed?,” 594–595. 8 Simes, “Ireland, 1760–1820,” 132.

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However, this conflict did anything but sound the death knell for noble claims to power and aristocratic art production. On the one hand, aristocrats were well able to constantly question and reappraise their status, and, especially in German-speaking principalities and in Britain, nobility demonstrated great ability to foreclose revolution through well-controlled reforms of their own. On the other hand, early republican portraiture in North America reveals that refined considerations on violence, power, and good governance not only challenged traditional royal representation but also predetermined and restricted presidential self-determination. In this very light, the “monopoly on violence”9 that has often been attributed to the modern state appears first and foremost as a monopoly on the legitimization of force through political codes of conduct that had to be continuously negotiated. Violence and power no longer formed a self-evident union, and the use of internal violence was more often invoked as a discursive potential than put into action.10 When political identity in Western Europe began to focus on territorially defined nationhood rather than dynastic allegiance,11 aristocratic warfare and mythological glorifications of noble heroism were replaced by more egalitarian concepts of national warfare, which eventually made foreign conflicts the people’s own wars.12 And both republican and monarchical constitutions could profit from calculated appeals thereto. Sooner and more profoundly than in many other countries, soldierly virtues evolved as a class-independent role model of purposefully domesticated violence in Britain and the newly independent United States.13 Within the realms 9

10 11 12

13

“Wesentliches Merkmal einer souveränen Herrschaft war (und ist), dass sie allein über legitime physische Zwangsgewalt verfügt. Die weitgehende Durchsetzung dieses Gewaltmonopols war einer der Grundpfeiler des europäischen Staatensystems, wie es sich seit dem Westfälischen Frieden darstellte: Krieg galt als prinzipiell legitimes Mittel der Interessendurchsetzung, aber nur zwischen unabhängigen Staaten.” Stollberg-Rilinger, Europa im Jahrhundert der Aufklärung, 31–32. See the usage of military symbolism in Bolingbroke, Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism, 59–60. Jallut, “Les peintres de batailles des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” 119. “Anders als im Zeitalter der Revolutionskriege identifizierte sich aber die Gesellschaft der Bürger noch nicht mit dem Krieg, so wie er war, eben weil er als primär dynastische und nicht als nationale Veranstaltung erschien. So wurde kritisiert, dass die Soldaten der stehenden Heere nicht aus edlen patriotischen Motiven kämpften, sondern bloße Instrumente fürstlicher Vergrößerungsbegierde seien, ja sogar wie Sklaven vermietet und verkauft würden. Das Militärwesen sollte vielmehr so beschaffen sein, dass auch Soldaten als tugendhafte Bürger ihren Beitrag zum Gemeinwohl leisten könnten.” Stollberg-Rilinger, Europa im Jahrhundert der Aufklärung, 42. Jansen, “Einleitung,” 9–26.

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of elite portraiture, this consensus shaped the representational archetype of humble heroism, which was famously expressed in Benjamin West’s painting The Death of General Wolfe.14 This 1770 painting was widely copied and sold abroad, and portraits of George Washington came to enjoy similar international popularity. We shall trace some of the cultural and political conditions that made this success possible. 1

Constitutions Made Flesh: The Role of Elite Portraiture in Britain and the Colonies

Visual cultures of the eighteenth century pose specific problems for historians because philosophical periodization of “the Enlightenment”15 or the “age of revolution(s)”16 do not necessarily correspond with the striking plurality of artistic styles from baroque to romanticism that coincided between the Glorious Revolution and the abolishment of monarchical rule in America and France. Artists of the time were aware of the diversification and competition of artistic expressions, which fostered the rise of professional criticism in eighteenth-century Europe but also confronts present-day researchers with the difficulty that many media simply offered “more of the same,”17 and paradigm shifts are hard to trace. Nevertheless, several dominant features of elite portraiture are worth noting and mirror constitutional and moral debates of the time. All throughout early modern Europe, the mediated presence of rulers in art served as a firstrate embodiment of the nation, and one should not underestimate the creativity and flexibility of royal and aristocratic visual culture.18 Faced with Jacobite resistance and intensifying publicity for self-confident members of Parliament 14

15

16 17 18

The Death of General Wolfe shows the officer dying the arms of three grenadiers. It became an internationally acclaimed icon of bravery and humility, as this depiction sharply contrasted with the glorifying hubris of Baroque art; see Trustees of the British Museum, “Der General Wolf (The Death of General Wolfe).” “During the period when the Enlightenment is generally agreed to have occurred, from the late seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, there were many styles, including classicism, baroque, rococo, neo-classicism and romanticism, which hints at some of the difficulties of linking historical periods to visual and material culture in this case. Nonetheless, innumerable artefacts speak to the major themes of the Enlightenment, and there is huge potential, little realised so far, for further historical scholarship.” Jordanova, The Look of the Past, 114. Ibid., 111. Black, The English Press, 163. Romaniello and Lipp, “The Spaces of Nobility,” 1.

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and political radicals, Britain’s market for serious portraits and personal satire was particularly multifaceted and even reached the overseas colonies.19 Queen Elizabeth I had strictly forbidden unauthorized portraits of herself and the English nobility, but the eighteenth century was a heyday of publicly circulated likenesses, and all political factions attempted to exploit the prospects of great popular attention. Military campaigns abroad and successful repressions of domestic revolts were, of course, a frequent topic of elite representation, but in the course of the century, baroque splendor with its references to Greek mythology or Old Testament heroism gave way to an enlightened enhancement of civic virtues and “moral authority.”20 In the 1670s and 1680s, both James Stuart (James II from 1685) and his opponent William of Orange had themselves portrayed in Roman armor, and after James’ flight, William III was allegorically represented as the valiant liberator of Britain.21 After the climax of the Glorious Revolution, however, such mythological exaltation gradually abated, but many military campaigns offered further occasion for prestigious court painting and the visual commemoration of important battles. In the course of the Jacobite rebellions, victorious generals such as King George II’s son William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, were still represented in commemorative medals with strong antique connotations, but physical strength and militancy were now interpreted in a more comprehensive context of sovereignty, representation, and duty.22 As Volker Depkat pointed out in his analysis of early republican imagery in America and the Weimar Republic, dynastic legitimation could easily draw on a wide range of “regalia and other visible signs of authority,”23 among which signs of military supremacy were not necessarily the most important. All stages of royal life from birth to death were part of the complex narrative of royal power.24 Both in Hanoverian art and counter-portraiture produced 19 20 21 22

23 24

Morris, Sex, Money & Personal Character, 24–33. Ibid., 25. Cf. Beckett, King William III. The wide range of royal portraiture and the multifunctionality of monarchical rule were artfully described in a poem by Gottsched, written in honor of Maria Theresia of Austria in 1751: “Ein jeder wird zwar Sie, doch niemand alles schildern. So gehts der Malerey in ihren schönsten Bildern, Der Schwester unsrer Kunst. Was ein Gesichtspunkt weist, Das ist es, worauf sich des Pinsels Witz befleißt. Setz hundert Zeichner hin, die dort, in Römerschulen, Um Aehnlichkeit und Art des Musterbildes buhlen, Das sich im Mittel zeigt: nicht einer trifft es ganz.” Gottsched and Schwabe, Herrn Johann Christoph Gottscheds Gedichte, 522. See also Miller and Schwartz, “The Icon of the American Republic,” 516. Depkat, “Grammar,” 193. Ibid., 183.

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at the Stuart court in exile, family life and religious devotion were at least as important as displays of the monarch’s ability to fight and appeals to royal might did not only serve the monarch’s own glory but were subordinated to the welfare of the nation.25 Many art historians have linked the richness and subtlety of eighteenthcentury royal representation to a general emancipation of British visual culture from the heroic mode of French baroque art and its glorification of an absolute monarchy.26 But we must also heed the long-term influence of contested imperial expansion and oppositional movements, which highlighted government by law and rejected cruel tyranny.27 Even though George I and George II “relished the role of soldier-monarch,”28 British monarchs increasingly defined themselves as royal comrades in arms rather than invincible warriors favored by fortune.29 Especially the violent punishments and acts of revenge that followed the failure of Charles Edward Stuart’s campaign in 1746 triggered a profound debate on the Hanoverian troops’ “butchery.”30 Not only in Britain but also on the Continent, enlightened rulers ought to be guided by wisdom, moderation, and impartial patriotism.31 German aristocratic art, too, staged military zeal in a more contained and naturalistic manner.32 The reign of Frederick II (the Great) in Prussia was marked both by the king’s deliberately promoted public image of a soldier king and his parallel self-staging as a merciful, pensive “father of all.”33 In fact, pictures of the king on campaign frequently showed scenes before and after battle rather than events of violent rage, which depicted Frederick sharing the everyday destitution of camp life, consoling the wounded, or carefully planning the next 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33

Corp, The King over the Water, fig. 44. Kirchner, Le héros épique. The debate on “The Englishness of English Art” and the development of a “truly English, or British, aesthetic” in accordance with eighteenth-century political ideals is summarized by Fordham, “State, Nation, and Empire in the History of Georgian Art,” 115–119. Thompson, “George I and George II,” 59. Ibid. See Jacobite prints denouncing the Duke of Cumberland’s military procedure, e.g., Anonymous, A Jacobite Satire on the Duke of Cumberland. “A patriot king is the most powerful of all reformers; for he is himself a sort of standing miracle, so rarely seen and so little understood, that the sure effects of his appearance will be admiration and love in every honest breast, confusion and terror to every guilty conscience, but submission and resignation in all. A new people will seem to arise with a new king.” Bolingbroke, Letters, 135. Even French modes of representation underwent a considerable transformation as battle painting became ever more closely intertwined with army engineering and geographical research of the time; see Jallut, “Peintres de batailles,” 117. Anon., Frederick the Great with the Farmers.

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strategic move. Militarizing the king accordingly meant popularizing him and his care for the country, and even the most valiant war songs in Frederick’s honor did not only stress the king’s own deeds but also highlighted the mutual bonds of trust and fellowship he had formed with his most simple soldiers. All in all, the interrelations of violence and virtue in European royal portraiture were certainly ambiguous, but this difficulty was intensified in the independent Unites States because patriot and republican art could not simply imitate traditional symbols of inherited rights or divinely instituted leadership. The major challenge for Britain’s mixed constitution was not that parliamentarian oppositions of the 1760s and 1770s were deeply skeptical of violently secured power, but that a politicization of armed citizens might lead society to the verge of disintegration. At the same time, however, radical reformers faced the challenge of emancipating themselves from accustomed imagery. 2

Images of Legitimate Authority and Violent Resistance in the American War of Independence

American political philosophy of the revolutionary years was strongly influenced by “Real Whig”34 writings on the dangers of monarchical absolutism, which popularized the constitutional solutions proposed by John Locke. Therefore, colonial suspicion of power was combined with a strong “belief in virtue as an antidote for man’s innate corruptibility”35 and a self-confident claim to resistance by force. In his 2004 article “The Face of the Public,” Christopher J. Lukasik described these two poles of America’s revolutionary society as an agitated defiance of the physicality of power, which was counteracted by a reevaluation of the human body as a permanent icon of civic republicanism.36 Therefore, America’s relationship to state violence and physical resistance proved to be highly antithetic.37 On the one hand, the experience of the Boston Massacre in 1770 had left patriots deeply distorted, and Paul Revere’s famous engraving helped to spread the myth that peaceful colonists had been cruelly overrun by British military might. On the other hand, patriot acts such as the tarring and feathering of a British tax collector betrayed that there were influential legitimations for asymmetrical aggression even before the incidents of 34 35 36 37

Schwartz, “George Washington,” 25. Ibid., 18. Lukasik, “The Face of the Public,” 413. Schwartz, “George Washington,” 26.

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Lexington and Concord in the spring of 1775 gave the revolutionary war its crucial impetus. Violence connected to political power, profound organization, and military efficiency was henceforth identified with the “bloody butchery by the British troops,”38 but violence committed by badly trained and poorly disciplined militiamen was deemed self-abandonment for a just cause. All throughout the American Revolution, loyalists were hanged in effigy, and British laws and proclamations were mocked and burnt.39 Yet there was no fundamental contradiction between American wartime encouragement of military initiative and the nation’s later veneration for civilian engagement.40 In the case of General George Washington, who became the first president of the United States and “the nation’s great moral symbol,”41 virtues attributed to ordinary soldiers and military leaders chosen from among the people corresponded well with the late eighteenth-century American peacetime “cult of virtue.”42 The glorification of agricultural life and privateness, which stressed the relevance of local communities for the common good, at first sight prohibited a nationalist mechanization and communitarization of war, but it was in fact their coherent continuation. And it is even more striking to see that battlesome engravings and mezzotints of George Washington not only appealed to American patriots but simultaneously found flourishing markets among divergent social strata and factions in Europe.43 The first recorded European portraits of George Washington were two different engraved motives sold by C. Shepherd in London in the autumn of 1775 (figs. 11.1. and 11.2.). These prints were part of a larger series of American 38 39 40

41 42 43

Russell, ed., A Bloody Butchery by the British Troops. Donald, The Age of Caricature, 55. “As will be shown, the initial expression of praise for Washington took place in the context of great political resentment and military fervor. Washington symbolized these sentiments in his role as military commander. By the end of the war, however, the public’s attention shifted from military to political concerns, and it was against this new background that Washington was transformed from a military hero into the nation’s great moral symbol.” Schwartz, “George Washington,” 18–19. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 26. “General Washington’s fame reached Europe before any accurate portraits of him did. Lacking any examples of his actual appearance, foreign publishers commissioned fictitious portraits. As early as 1775, publishers in London were already issuing prints of American Revolutionaries that bore no resemblance to the men themselves. These prints then served as models for printmakers elsewhere in Europe. In a similar vein, some American printmakers who had access to reproductions of life portraits chose not to copy them faithfully, but to use them simply as a starting point for decorative or allegorical creations”; see The New York Public Library’s Online Exhibition Archive, “Selections from the C. W. McAlpin Collection.”

Concepts of Leadership

Figure 11.1

Anonymous, General Washington Esqr/General and Commander in Chief of the Continental Army in America/Done from an Original Drawn from the Life by Alex. Campbell, of Williamsburgh in Virginia [equestrian portrait], 1775, mezzotint, hand-colored, sold in London by C. Shepherd. Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, DE

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revolutionary portraits launched by Shepherd between 1775 and 1778.44 One set of prints depicted the commander in chief on horseback with his sword drawn (fig. 11.1.); another set of images produced in the same year showed Washington three-quarter length, standing in the foreground and pointing to a distant battlefield (fig. 11.2.). Art historians have identified at least two different versions of the threequarter portrait, but it remains uncertain whether the plates were created by the same artist. Some of the surviving copies are not signed, others display the engraver’s name, “Joh. Martin Will excud. Aug. Vind.,”45 and in his Catalogue of the Engraved Portraits of Washington, Charles Henry Hart suspected that the signed version was in fact the second state of three revisions.46 Since there are slight differences in the shapes of clouds and trees in the background, it might well be possible that more than one engraver was involved, and that Johann Martin Will from Augsburg only created the original signed plate. Subsequent engravers may have copied his motif from a drawing or a sample plate provided by the London publisher, who claimed all prints sold by him had been modeled on an authentic sketch from Virginia.47 As no such true-to-life representation of Washington existed, model drawings he provided could have been purely invented. The obvious freedom of imagination, though, makes the London prints an interesting mirror of European approaches to America’s emerging revolution. In the horseback portrait (fig. 11.1.), Washington is shown as a man of action and impressive physical features, but the three-quarter length portrait (fig. 11.2) creates a sense of thoughtfulness and conscientiousness that balances his martial image. In the three-quarter portrait (fig. 11.2), Washington’s face is slightly turned into profile and his eyes do not meet the viewer’s gaze. Furthermore, his body is confined to the right side of the picture frame, whereas the left side is reserved to his pointing arm and a battle scene. This composition makes the picture not only a representation of the commander in chief of the American Continental Army, but also a locum tenens for the American cause at large. Until 1777, all painted and printed portraits of Washington were privately commissioned and depicted him as a military leader while also hinting to the political aims of the American Revolution.48 Armor and weaponry in these straightforward and artless images were no abstract emblems of power or redundant decorative elements. The display 44 45 46 47 48

The series is kept at the British Museum (BMSat 5290) and also includes a print of Charles Lee after Wilkinson: Trustees of the British Museum, “Charles Lee Esqr.” Will, George Washington. Hart, ed., Catalogue of the Engraved Portraits of Washington, 305 and 309. The New York Public Library’s Online Exhibition Archive, “Selections.” Depkat, “Grammar,” 179.

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Figure 11.2

Johann Martin Will, George Washington, Esq’r., general and commander in chief of the Continental Army in America, mezzotint engraved in Augsburg and sold in London by C. Shepherd. Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

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of cannon, battle flags, swords, or fighting cavalry denoted the topical necessity of action and personal determination.49 In contrast to monarchical representations of military power, some of the portraits of America’s revolutionary leaders highlighted the collectivity and limitations of republican leadership although they still emphasized personal ability and bravery. Therefore, it is difficult to tell if recipients in Europe interpreted these prints as a defamation or glorification of American revolutionary zeal. What we know for sure is that the fictitious engravings of the Shepherd series were widely perceived to be authentic true-to-life representations, and that this was why they were frequently copied in Germany and France.50 Apart from a French imitation published between 1778 and 1780, book illustrations in Christoph Heinrich Korn’s Geschichte der Kriege in und ausser Europa were likewise modeled on the “English originals of the engraved likenesses of President Hancock and Commander in Chief Washington.”51 52 One of the rare sources that disclose British receptions of Washington’s printed portraits is a letter from Anne Robinson to her brother Frederick, written at Saltram near Plymouth, home to the prominent Parker family, on December 30, 1781.53 This letter tells us that Mr. Parker had shown Anne a print of General Washington, “which he says is very like.”54 The portrait was discussed on the occasion of Lord Cornwallis’ capitulation in the course of a dinner reception with Captain Simonds and his son, but Anne Robinson did not share deeper political reflections with her brother. We may assume, however, that even before 1781, the English public was not unanimously averse to Washington, and as many oppositional newspapers openly expressed sympathy for the American cause, Shepherd’s prints were not necessarily seen as antiAmerican. Johann Martin Will, for his part, seems to have been eager to appeal to several political factions. Will, who had established his Augsburg workshop in 1755, was well known for the high topicality, visual clarity, and low cost of his prints, which made them popular all across Western Europe.55 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

After the Battle of Bunker Hill, C. Shepherd sold portraits of Israel Putnam that featured cannon, and Peale painted a portrait of George Washington in front of cannon and a war horse in 1779; see Sellers, “Charles Willson Peale’s Portraits of Washington,” 151. McSherry Fowble, Two Centuries of Prints in America. Ibid. Korn, Geschichte der Kriege in und ausser Europa. BLARS, L 30/15/50/27: “Anne [Robinson], Saltram, to Frederick [Robinson].” Ibid. The workshop founded by Will in 1755 still exists today and is run by the offspring of Will’s son-in-law. In order to celebrate the 250th company anniversary, current owner Heinz Walch released a concise history of his company in 2005. In this leaflet, Johann Martin Will’s portraits of American Revolutionary War leaders are briefly mentioned alongside

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Apart from the mezzotint engraving produced for C. Shepherd, Will created additional portraits of George Washington for the French and German markets. But his work was to no degree limited to American rebels. Will also engraved many broadside portraits of leading European noblemen, which were not only comparable in technique and size but also in regard to their unpretentious iconography that was open to interpretation.56 In the 1760s and 1770s, Will produced several equestrian portraits of Duke Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand of Brunswick-Luneburg, Frederick II of Prussia, and Prussian general Friedrich Ehrenreich von Ramin. Two of these prints likewise showed horses rising in the foreground and their riders with swords drawn.57 The outright pugnacious representation of Frederick II in Will’s print Fridericus der Zweyte, der tapfere Preusen Held (fig. 11.3) is a particularly telling counterpart to his later depictions of Washington.58 Between 1756 and 1758, in the first two years of the Seven Years’ War, when Will’s print is likely to have been made, Frederick II’s military exploits were widely discussed in the Holy Roman Empire, and many etchings and engravings covered his campaigns. Yet in contrast to the famous contemporary etchings of Frederick II produced by Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki and his workshop in Berlin, Will’s hand-colored equestrian portrait depicts Frederick II not only as a strategist of war, but also stresses his active engagement in battle. Prussian soldiers are placed in the far background of the print, but wounded adversaries take up the foreground underneath the king’s rising horse. One man who has already let go of his weapons is placed beneath the front hooves of the horse, and the feet of another prostrate man reach into the right front corner of the print, where a lost tricorn hat immediately catches the eye. Frederick’s face with an all-too-prominent nose and large eyes resembles contemporary caricatures and almost appears to give the print a critical or sarcastic notion. Nevertheless, the inscription underneath the portrait praises Frederick II as an enlightened king who did not only perform great deeds as a soldier, but also patronized art and science.59 It is likely that the inscription in Will’s print

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his religious publications, caricatures, and maps; see Walch, 250 Jahre Druckerei Joh. Walch, 7–9. Ibid., 8. Will, Wilhelm Ferdinand Erb Prinz; Will, Bildnis Friedrich II. der Große; Will, Bildnis des Ramin de Berlin. Walch, 250 Jahre Druckerei Joh. Walch, 8. “Der tapfre Preußen Held, der große Friderich, Das Wunder unsrer Zeit, ein König groß von Thaten schützt und beschirmt sein Reich, regieret väterlich zur Wonne seines Volcks, zum Wachsthum seiner Staaten: Er übt Gerechtigkeit und lohnt der Tugend Werth: Den Musen ist er hold, der kluge Preußen König: Der die gelehrte Welt zu schätzen weiß und ehrt. Wie glücklich ist das Land, das ihme unterthänig? – Cognomine Magnus Borussiae,

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Figure 11.3

Johann Martin Will, Fridericus der Zweyte, der tapfere Preusen Held, ca. 1763–1770, engraving with mezzotint, hand-colored. Druckerei Walch, Augsburg

reflected general topoi of worthy leadership as expressed in Prussian war songs during and after the Seven Years’ War. The war songs published by Gleim and Rex maximis gestis, Fortissimus regni sui Defensor, justitiam acque ac Clementiam exercens: Musis favens, remunerans virtutem, Felices se aestimant qui sceptro ejus parent.” Will, Fridericus der Zweyte, der tapfere Preusen Held.

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Krause in 1758, for instance, not only commemorated the king’s own deeds, but also described the common soldiers’ indispensable part in Prussian military campaigns. The edition was introduced by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who described the songs as the common grenadier’s poetry and pointed out that aristocratic heroes could only be remembered if they were remarked and immortalized by one of the common people’s artists: “The hero who was lucky enough to be remarked by them [the ancient Germanic bards, who are presented as precursors of poetically gifted soldiers] henceforth bore an undying name; as undying as the shame of the enemies whom they saw take flight.”60 In the same iconographic tradition, Will copied the equestrian Washington portrait of 1775 (see fig. 11.1) with French and German inscriptions that openly expressed support for the violent American fight against Britain.61 As no personal political reflections by Will have come down to us, and as his artistic approach to violence and military valor was by no means coherent, the assumption suggests itself that Will was aware of conflicting buyers’ expectations and tried to satisfy various demands. C. Shepherd’s widely distributed prints of George Washington and other American revolutionaries may have had a similar intention. When Washington first obtained a copy of Shepherd’s equestrian portrait, he bemusedly wrote to Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Reed that the fictitious portraitist had given him “a sufficient portion of terror in his countenance.”62 Depkat claims that “charismatic heroism”63 made Washington a “consensusfigure”64 in a vacuum of legitimation, but since contemporaries were suspicious of Washington’s military ambitions, the stately dignity of Washington’s official presidential representation should rather be seen as a foresighted and necessary correction of his soldierly reputation.

60 61

62 63 64

Gleim and Krause, Preussische Kriegslieder in den Feldzügen 1756 und 1757 von einem Grenadier, 10–11. Due to copyright regulations, the image cannot be reproduced in this chapter. “Will clearly based this representation of Washington on the fictitious equestrian portrait by ‘Campbell.’ For his version, published in Germany, Will included an inscription in French and German that appears to taunt Great Britain and question that country’s prospect of victory over the colonies.” Will, George Washington, described in The New York Public Library’s Online Exhibition Archive, “Selections.” Letter to Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Reed, January 31, 1776, in Lengel, ed., This Glorious Struggle, 36. Depkat, “Grammar,” 179. Ibid., 193.

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The Metapolitical Function of Soldierly Virtues for Eighteenth-Century State Formation

Barry Schwartz has pointed out that Washington had not been elected commander in chief because of “personal magnetism”65 or intriguing technical skills as an engineer of war; quite on the contrary, he had convincingly displayed a dislike for power and did not threaten to exploit soldierly aptitude for the suppression of his fellow citizens. Washington’s frequent quarrels with the Continental Congress concerning supplies and the need for foreign alliances made him the spokesman of the “common interests of America”66 and adorned him with the honors of impartiality and proximity to the people. Although Washington had not been chosen for his position as commander in chief in a nationwide general election, applauded by the people and surrounded by admirers, or maybe even because of it, he embodied an important hinge between everyday sorrows and the ambitions of politics. Since the public image of Washington kept violence and power neatly separated, his military failures, his emphasis on discipline and his uncompromising law enforcement were reconciled. Washington himself seemed to have been aware of his ambivalent reputation, and he made sure to employ it as circumstance commanded. In his message to the Delaware Nation on May 12, 1779, he stressed his position as a hard-working soldier who had not learned the art of diplomacy but spoke truthfully and without deceit: I am a Warrior. My words are few and plain; but I will make good what I say. ’Tis my business to destroy all the Enemies of these States and to protect their friends. You have seen how we have withstood the English for four years; and how their great Armies have dwindled away and come to very little; and how what remains of them in this part of our great Country, are glad to stay upon two or three little Islands – where the Waters and their Ships hinder us from going to destroy them. The English, Brothers, are a boasting people – They talk of doing a great deal; but they do very little.67 In a later passage of the same address, Washington applied the narrative of the laborious general to underscore his neutrality in regard to the Delaware 65 66 67

Schwartz, “George Washington,” 19. Letter to Benjamin Harrison, December 18–30, 1778, at the Headquarters of Middle Brook, in Lengel, This Glorious Struggle, 170–171. Ibid., 178.

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negotiations with Congress.68 In a letter to Joseph Reed, written on July 29, 1779, however, Washington responded to Charles Lee’s criticism of his military skills in a different manner. In this self-defense, he described his military leadership as contrary to his private wishes and said that political necessity alone had made him exchange “the peaceful retirement, and domestick [sic] ease and happiness from whence I came”69 for a command in the army. Both narratives confirmed the American patriot consensus that soldiers should not be made the tools of tyranny and that lust for power endangered the common good. When Washington became the young nation’s political leader, American representations began to highlight his civic character. At the same time, most European artists paid little attention to American concepts of republican government. The majority of French prints produced during the 1770s and 1780s depicted Washington as a self-confident gentleman leader whose manners and attire were not at all distinguishable from those of aristocratic European elites. A French mezzotint by Noël Le Mire, however, which was allegedly based on a painting by Jean-Baptiste Le Paon (1736–1785), showed greater awareness of contemporary American political discourse and the specifically republican side of Washington’s public image (fig. 11.4).70 Creating an exotic setting (e.g., a black slave in stereotypically oriental dress saddling Washington’s horse), Le Mire’s print places Washington in the position of a Roman consul who was been granted the extensive authority which the Roman Republic reserved for cases of emergency (“Senatus consultum ultimum”).71 The Latin quotation refers to the traditional formula “Videant consules, ne quid res publica detrimenti capiat” (“may the consuls see to it that the republic does not suffer damage”, transl. by Monika Barget) used to confer this extraordinary power. The formula has come down to us in several variants and sources including writings by Lucius Cassius Dio, Cicero, Sallust, and

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Ibid., 179. “If this gentleman is envious of my station, and conceives that I stand in his way to preferment; I can assure him, in most solemn terms, that the first wish of my Soul is to return to that peaceful retirement, and domestick [sic] ease and happiness from whence I came – To this end all my labours have been directed; and for this purpose have I been more than four years a perfect Slave; endeavouring under as many embarrassing circumstances as ever fell to one Mans lott [sic] to encounter and as pure motives as ever man was influenced by, to promote the cause, & service I had embarked in….” Lengel, This Glorious Struggle, 186–187. 70 Le Mire, Le Général Washington ne quid detrimenti capiat res publica. 71 Plaumann, “Das sogenannte Senatus consultum ultimum,” 342–345. Also see: Kaplan, The Senatus Consultum Ultimum; Rödl, Das Senatus consultum ultimum und der Tod der Gracchen; Barbagallo and Guarino, Una misura eccezionale dei Romani.

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Figure 11.4

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Noël Le Mire, Le Général Washington, ne quid detrimenti capiat res publica, gravé d’après le tableau original appartenant a Mr. Marquis de la Fayette / peint par L. Le Paon peintre de bataille de S.A.S. Mgr. le Prince de Condé; gravé par N. le Mire des Academies Imperiales et Royales et de celle des Sciences et Arts de Rouen, allegedly based on a French portrait, 1780–1781, engraving. Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

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Caesar.72 The Senatus consultum ultimum was solely intended for the protection of the Roman Republic and included rights to hold martial law courts and enact corporal punishment. This position, however, was limited in time and did not exempt officeholders from later legal persecution (cf. Gaius Gracchus and Marcus Tullius Cicero).73 In the engraving of George Washington, this reference stresses that he temporarily accepted the role of a powerful military leader only to safeguard American freedoms and that the conduct of the British government forced him to act (cf. torn negotiations with Britain scattered on the ground). Besides, Washington holds both the Declaration of Independence and the treaty with France in his hands. The hill on which Washington’s tent stands overlooks a battlefield in the background, but the depiction nonetheless conveys the notion of a statesman made general of necessity. As the North American colonies became the United States of America and embraced a republican constitution and elected Washington their first chief executive, early presidential portraits followed this narrative.74 Simultaneously, “the common, unrewarded soldier”75 became an important model for every accomplished citizen. In the independent United States, the major paradox appeared to be that republican ideology called for a communication of civic virtue beyond the deeds of individuals, whereas at least in the field of visual arts, such images “end[ed] up identifying civic virtue with the faces of particular persons rather than communicating it through them.”76 As foreign visitors and concerned Americans observed, the public dedication of works of art, music, and performance to outstanding individuals always bore the mark of unconstitutional idolatry.77 When the first public portraits of Washington were commissioned in the late 1770s, somebody defaced his image in the Pennsylvania State House and caused great uproar in patriotic newspapers.78 Nevertheless, portraiture – including physiognomic profile portraits of American leaders – quickly spread in individual prints and in traveling collections exhibited around the country.79 The timelessness of their

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

The different versions and use cases are discussed by Plaumann, “Das sogenannte Senatus consultum ultimum,” 322–326. Ibid. Sellers, “Charles Willson Peale,” 154. Lukasik, “The Face of the Public,” 417. Ibid., 414, emphases in the original publication. Miller and Schwartz, “Icon,” 531. Depkat, “Grammar,” 180; Miller and Schwartz, “Icon,” 533. Lukasik, “The Face of the Public,” 434.

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content and their material mobility made them excellent examples of the new body politic and the expansion of political space.80 Likewise, celebrations in honor of Washington preserved the nation’s unity and fighting spirit when the United States was again faced with war and gradually dragged into an international struggle of established monarchies against French revolutionary expansionism. In this heated period from 1793 to the turn of the century, yearly balls in honor of Washington became symbols of moderation and continuation, even more so as women actively participated in the preparations and commemorated Mrs. Washington as a devout and peaceful mother of the nation.81 This more glaring, more conservative, and also more authoritarian image of Washington was well received in Britain and hints at a new consensus of moderation across party boundaries.82 As the international crisis of the 1790s and the broad alliance against revolutionary France brought conservative republicans and enlightened monarchists in North America and Europe closer together, power and violence were channeled into a more structured militarization of leadership, society, and citizenship.83 This militarization promoted discipline and duty in contrast to anarchy and terror, which paved the way for strong national identities and a sense of cultural superiority in Britain and America, respectively. In 1799, the London magazine True Briton stated in an article on recent artistic production in England: Heath proceeds vigorously with his large Print of Washington, from the excellent Portrait by American Stewart. Now that all political animosities between this Country and the American State have happily subsided into alliance and attachment, every man who reveres the merit of consistent patriotism, and admires great talents, will be glad to have a Portrait of Washington, a zealous friend to the Liberties of his Country, but a decided enemy to the innovating doctrines of France, which, under a vain pretence of impracticable Freedom, tend to the subversion of all civilized Society.84 80 81 82 83 84

“Washington’s public appearance in a lower cultural form such as the silhouette suggests that portraiture’s signification of social distinction was changing in America.” Lukasik, “The Face of the Public,” 437. Stevens, The Revolutionary Heritage, 8. See Donald, Age of Caricature, 119. Kater, “Bürger-Krieger,” 27–46; Kruse, “Bürger und Soldaten,” 47–67; Leonhard, “Die Nationalisierung des Krieges und der Bellizismus der Nation,” 83–108; Beaupré, “Comptes rendus,” 661–664. Anon., “The Arts.”

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Such international agreement on a soldierly ars politica made up for the lack of constitutional reconciliation and permitted divergent systems of government to enter into friendly relations. On inner-state level, the ideological approximation of military and civic honors also complemented popular mistrust of professional politicians and self-seeking tradesmen. When Washington died in 1799, church services with demure military symbolism not only served as an important link between his political and private persona,85 but also provided America’s post-monarchical constitution with strong and positive iconography.86 Although Washington had “fashioned himself as the first President of the United States in an ostentatiously civilian manner,”87 his military legacy was reappraised both in the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the United Stated faced transcontinental conflict.88 One prominent example was a “great demonstration in New York in 1809, [organized] by the Washington Benevolent Society.”89 Harmony Hall did not suffice to host all participants and “in the evening the New Theatre opened with a transparent display on the building, of Washington dismounted from his horse at old Fort George at the foot of the Bowling Green on Evacuation Day, 1783. The play selected was Brooke’s Tragedy of Gustavus Wasa, the Deliverer of his Country.”90 From the Declaration of Independence to the “era of blood and iron,”91 America gradually abandoned her once cautiously guarded distinction between civic and military leadership.92 However, this was not simply a return to monarchical models of the past. The ultimate efficacy of America’s active and tradition-conscious picture policy can be traced in the twofold popularization of portraiture after the Revolution. On the one hand, more people were able to afford and collect portraits of their rulers as they were deliberately marketed to the lower classes. But on the other hand, people were likewise able to have the likenesses of their own families taken, which put an end to portrait painting as an exclusive expression of social hierarchy. The art of portraiture rather became a token of the people’s intrinsic identity: commissioning portraits for schools, universities, and city halls meant sharing the leaders’ glory and signified the citizens’

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

Stevens, Revolutionary Heritage, 4–5. Depkat, “Grammar,” 183. Ibid., 180. Stevens, Revolutionary Heritage, 20. Harris, Public Lives, Private Virtues, 9. Ibid., 9. Stevens, Revolutionary Heritage, 20. Ibid., 22.

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participation.93 This conjunction of admiration for persons of rank with the recipients’ self-empowerment seems to have guaranteed the survival of classical military imagery in American political art and set an important example for Western political iconography in general.94 Modern heroism born in the age of revolutions transcended the leaders’ selfrepresentation and highlighted the character and achievements of the entire nation. As a consequence, public invocations of soldiery virtues served both democratic and monarchical governments of the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries as a successful means of political communication: German antiFrench propaganda of the Napoleonic era praised monarchs who fought side by side with common soldiers, and British colonial ideology promoted a mili­ tary empire.95 Nobles along with economic and intellectual elites were hence most respected in their capacity as patriots and servants of the common good, which encouraged citizens to make their own commitments.96 Bibliography Anonymous. A Jacobite Satire on the Duke of Cumberland: Britannia Sitting between Prince Charles and Cumberland Weighing Mercy and Butchery. 1746. Etching, 157 mm x 256 mm. Walter Biggar Blaikie Collection/Satires British Stephens series. National Galleries of Scotland / British Museum London. Anonymous. Frederick the Great with the Farmers: Ihr Seid Alle Meine Kinder. 1740. Engraving. http://www.bridgemanimages.com. Anonymous. “The Arts.” Edited by John Heriot. True Briton, Wednesday, January 30 (1799): n.p. Arndt, Ernst Moritz. “Der tapfere König von Preußen. 1813.” In Die deutsche Gedichte­ bibliothek. Gesamtverzeichnis deutschsprachiger Gedichte. Digital edition by RalfDietrich und Christian Ritter, Berlin, not dated, https://gedichte.xbib.de/Arndt _gedicht_Der+tapfere+K%F6nig+von+Preu%DFen.htm. Barbagallo, Corrado, and Antonio Guarino. Una misura eccezionale dei Romani: Il senatus-consultum ultimum. Napoli: Jovene, 2010.

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Wick, Review of George Washington – an American icon, 89. Depkat, “Grammar,” 180. See Arndt, “Der tapfere König von Preußen. 1813”; Barringer, Quilley, and Fordham, Art and the British Empire; Fordham, “State.” Godsey, Nobles and Nation in Central Europe, 49.

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Barringer, T. J., Geoff Quilley, and Douglas Fordham. Art and the British Empire. Pbk ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Beaupré, Nicolas. “Comptes rendus: Benjamin Ziemann (Dir.) Perspektiven der Historischen Friedensforschung … / Christian Jansen (Dir.) Der Bürger als Soldat: Die Militarisierung Europäischer Gesellschaften im Langen 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Internationaler Vergleich….” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 3 (2004): 661–664. Beckett, G. King William III, in Roman Costume; beneath His Feet, a Manacled Monk and Two Bound Catholic Priests; Print Celebrating the Glorious Revolution. 1689. Mezzotint, 33.8 cm (trimmed) x 24.9 cm (trimmed). Prints and Drawings. British Museum, London. Black, Jeremy. The English Press, 1621–1861. Stroud: Sutton, 2001. BLARS. “L 30/15/50/27: Anne [Robinson], Saltram, to Frederick [Robinson].” Letter. Saltram, December 30, 1781. Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Records Service. Bolingbroke, Henry St. John. Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism: On the Idea of a Patriot King: And on the State of Parties, at the Accession of King George the First. London: A. Millar, 1749. Coleman Sellers, Charles. “Charles Willson Peale’s Portraits of Washington.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, new series 9, no. 6 (1951): 147–155. Corp, Edward. The King over the Water: Portraits of the Stuarts in Exile after 1689. Edinburgh: The Trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland, 2001. Cox, Gary W. “Was the Glorious Revolution a Constitutional Watershed?” The Journal of Economic History, no. 3 (September 2012): 567–600. Depkat, Volker. “The Grammar of Postrevolutionary Visual Politics.” In Pictorial Cultures and Political Iconographies, edited by Udo J. Hebel and Christoph Wagner, 176–197. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. Donald, Diana. The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III. New Haven, CT. Published by Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1996. Fordham, Douglas. “State, Nation, and Empire in the History of Georgian Art.” Perspective: La Revue de l’INHA, no. 1 (2012): 115–135 and 201–205. Gleim, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig, and Christian Gottfried Krause. Preussische Kriegs­ lieder in den Feldzügen 1756 und 1757 von einem Grenadier: Mit Melodien, edited by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voß, 1758. Godsey, William D., Jr. Nobles and Nation in Central Europe: Free Imperial Knights in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Gottsched, Johann Christoph, and Johann Joachim Schwabe. Herrn Johann Christoph Gottscheds: der Weltw. und Dichtk. öffentl. Lehrers in Leipzig, der Kön. Preuß. und Bonon. Akad. der Wiss. Mitgliedes, Gedichte, Darinn sowohl seine neuesten, als viele bisher ungedruckte Stücke enthalten sind: bey der itzigen zweyten Auflage übersehen,

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Leonhard, Jörn. “Die Nationalisierung des Krieges und der Bellizismus der Nation: Die Diskussion um Volks- und Nationalkriege in Deutschland, Großbritannien und den Vereinigten Staaten seit den 1860er Jahren.” In Der Bürger als Soldat: Die Militarisierung europäischer Gesellschaften im langen 19. Jahrhundert: ein internatio­ naler Vergleich, edited by Christian Jansen, 83–108. Essen: Ruhr Klartext-Verlag, 2004. Lukasik, Christopher J. “The Face of the Public.” Edited by the University of North Carolina Press. Early American Literature 39, no. 3 (2004): 413–464. McPherson, Heather. “Man + Horse: Repurposing the Equestrian Portrait in the Post-Revolutionary Era.” In Politics and Portraits in the United States and France during the Age of Revolution, edited by T. Lawrence Larkin, 55–74. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2019. McSherry Fowble, E. Two Centuries of Prints in America, 1680–1880: A Selective Catalogue of the Winterthur Museum Collection. 1st ed. Winterthur: Winterthur Museum, 1987. Miller, Eugene F., and Barry Schwartz. “The Icon of the American Republic: A Study in Political Symbolism.” Review of Politics 47, no. 4 (1985): 516–543. Morris, Marilyn. Sex, Money & Personal Character in Eighteenth-Century British Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. The New York Public Library’s Online Exhibition Archive. Selections from the C. W. McAlpin Collection. Section IV. Fictitious Portraits of Washington. Exhibition review/selection. From “Revolution to Republic in Prints and Drawings, 2007.” http://web-static.nypl.org/exhibitions/revolution/selection4.html. Perry, Gillian, Hannah Lyons, Jordan Vibert, and Kate Retford. Placing Faces: The Portrait and the English Country House in the Long Eighteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Plaumann, Gerhard. “Das sogenannte Senatus consultum ultimum: Die Quasidiktatur der späteren römischen Republik.” Klio 13.13 (1913): 321–386. https://doi.org/10.1515/ klio-1913–1325. Rödl, Bernd. Das Senatus consultum ultimum und der Tod der Gracchen. Bonn: Habelt, 1969. Romaniello, Matthew P., and Charles Lipp. “The Spaces of Nobility.” In Contested Spaces of Nobility in Early Modern Europe, edited by Matthew P. Romaniello and Charles Lipp 1–10. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Russell, Ezekiel, ed. A Bloody Butchery by the British Troops, or, The Runaway Fight of the Regulars. Salem: From E. Russell’s Salem Gazette, or Newbury and Marblehead Advertiser, published on Friday, April 21, 1775. Schwartz, Barry. “George Washington and the Whig Conception of Heroic Leadership.” American Sociological Review 48, no. 1 (1983): 18–33. Simes, Douglas. “Ireland, 1760–1820.” In Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–1820, edited by Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows 113–139. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

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Stevens, John Austin. The Revolutionary Heritage: Address by John Austin Stevens to the New York Society Sons of the Revolution Together with An Open Letter On the Past, Present and Future of the Society, February 22, 1900. New York: New York Society Sons of the Revolution, 1910. Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara. Europa im Jahrhundert der Aufklärung. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000. Thompson, Andrew C. “George I and George II: The New Monarchs.” In Als die Royals aus Hannover kamen: The Hanoverians on Britain’s Throne, 1714–1837, edited by Katja Lembke 46–67. Hanover: Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover, 2014. Trustees of the British Museum. “Charles Lee Esqr.” Print after Wilkinson. Museum no. 1902,1011.7075. The British Museum, Prints and Drawings, BM Sat 5290: A Series of Revolutionary Generals, Published by C. Shepherd in London. https://www .britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1902–1011–7075. Trustees of the British Museum. “Der General Wolf (The Death of General Wolfe).” Print by Augustin Legrand after Benjamin West. Museum no. 1838,0425.55. The British Museum, Prints and Drawings. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/ object/P_1838–0425–55. Walch, Heinz. 250 Jahre Druckerei Joh. Walch im über 2000 Jahre alten Augsburg. Augsburg: Johann Walch, 2005. Wick, Wendy. “Review of George Washington – an American Icon: The Eighteenthcentury Graphic Portraits, Washington 1982, edited by the Kennedy Galleries.” The American Art Journal 14, no. 4 (1982): 89–90. Will, Johann Martin. Bildnis des Ramin de Berlin. 1778. Engraving and etching, 20.5 × 15.7 cm. Inventar-Nr. 240971a D. München, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung. http:// www.portraitindex.de. Will, Johann Martin. Bildnis Friedrich II. der Große, König von Preußen (reg. 1740–86), Kopie nach Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki. 1777. Engraving and etching, 20.5 × 29.4 cm. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek. http://www.portraitindex.de. Will, Johann Martin. Fridericus der Zweyte, der tapfere Preusen Held. Ca. 1756–1770. Engraving with hand-coloring, 35 × 23 cm. Private collection, Druckerei Heinz Walch. Will, Johann Martin. George Washington, Esqr. General and Commander of the Continental Army in America. Ca. 1775–1781. Engraving and etching with handcoloring, size not indicated. C. W. McAlpin Collection Section IV. The New York Public Library. Will, Johann Martin. Wilhelm Ferdinand Erb Prinz v. Braun- / schweig. / Ritter des Schwarzen Adlers Orden, General Leutenamt. Geb. 9. Oct. 1735. Vermehlt 16. Jan. 1764. // No. 9. 1764. Engraving and etching. Inventar-Nr. PA3_12–24, alte Inventar-Nr. Ba 0836. Halberstadt, Gleimhaus. http://www.portraitindex.de.

chapter 12

Satirical Rebels? Irritating Anticipations in European Visualizations of Black American Insurgents around 1800 Fabian Fechner When analyzing the representation of black people in early modern Western art, there are two prevalent observations in research literature: first, the emphasis on iconographic traditions until the end of the eighteenth century, and second, the increasing importance of contemporary events from then onward.1 The iconographic traditions are focused on black saints and kings, references to malicious heathens, the motif of the black page, personifications of the African continent, and ethnographic illustrations.2 The contemporary influx started after the first successful slave revolution in Saint Domingue (1791–1803). Broad swaths of the European public gained interest in the newly born Haitian nation. Countless plays, travel reports, journal articles, novels, short stories, and poems dealt with the question of the slave revolution.3 That interest found a pictorial parallel in prints showing the Caribbean insurgents.4 During the abolitionist debates in the nineteenth century, more types of blacks entered the visual stage: the runaway, the prey in a slave hunt, 1 I wish to thank Maria Coors (London/Gießen), Nicolai Kölmel (Basel), and Philip Hahn (Tübingen) for their helpful comments. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are the author’s. 2 Kuhlmann-Smirnov, Schwarze Europäer im Alten Reich; Massing, ed., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 3, pt. 2; Bindman, Gates, and Dalton, eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 3, pt. 1; McGrath, “Sklaverei,” 350–357; Pieterse, White on Black; Kaplan and Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution; Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony; Kolfin, Van de slavenzweep en de muze; Mohammed, “The Emergence of a Caribbean Iconography in the Evolution of Identity,” 232–265; Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks; Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery; Martin, Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren; Lowe, “Introduction: The Black African Presence in Renaissance Europe”; Kaplan, “Ruler, Saint and Servant.” 3 Knabe, “Das Bild des haitianischen Königs”; Benn, “Die haitianische Revolution im Spiegel”; Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History; Schüller, Die deutsche Rezeption haitianischer Geschichte; Hoffmann, “Representations of the Haitian Revolution in French Literature,” 339–351; D’Aprile, Die Erfindung der Zeitgeschichte, 155–159; Zeuske, Schwarze Karibik, 163– 180; Wood, “Visual Representations of Slavery”; Onana, Der Sklavenaufstand von Haiti. 4 Zeuske, “Sklavenbilder,” para. 5.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004461949_014

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the suffering and exploited black plantation slave, followed by the stereotypical freed and thankful slave.5 In short, in European imagery around 1800, the black person turned from an exclusively exotic secondary figure to a decisive actor on the historical and political stage. People from the “continent without history” (Hegel) acquired a new quality in the eyes of Europeans as historical subjects (geschichtsfähig) and as pictorial subjects (bildfähig). There is nothing surprising in these observations. The motifs illustrate an already known historical perspective about biblical themes or the “exotic” black in a courtly surrounding. Many of them work as pictorial parallels to fundamental movements in world history, such as the European expansion, slave rebellions, and the final increase and abolition of slavery. However, between these pictorial traditions exist many intermediate stages that do not belong to any established motif. Especially, the representation of rebellions is promising for analyzing these intermediate stages, since they offer an intense dialogue between a more mimetic and historiographic attitude and a rich archive of political and pictorial arguments that deal with very delicate questions of legitimacy and loyalty.6 In the mainly text-based historiography, these representations serve as mere “illustrations” of decisive moments.7 When we are dealing with written sources, there are countless documents about black people in the Americas who fought against white settlers or soldiers from the sixteenth century onward. The suppression of the slave settlement Quilombo dos Palmares in Brazil (1694) may serve as an early example.8 Yet like many others,9 these rebellions are seen as a mere prelude to the liberation and emancipation movements of the nineteenth century. The motif of the triumphant black in America and his fight against white Europeans existed in an early form during colonial times. My aim here it to show categorical shifts in early modern recipients’ mind-sets and to explain that within certain parameters, a visual code of a colonial world turned upside down did exist. There are only a few early modern examples of pictures representing blacks fighting against or even dominating white settlers or soldiers.10 These images 5 6 7 8 9 10

Wood, Blind Memory; Wood, “Representations of Slavery”; Smalls, “Art and Illustration,” 65–76; Boime, The Art of Exclusion. Griesse, ed., From Mutual Observation to Propaganda War. See, e.g., Kossok, In tyrannos. Cheney, Quilombo dos Palmares. Price, Maroon Societies; Lienhard, Disidentes, rebeldes, insurgentes; Barros dos Santos, “Sklavenaufstände im Brasilien des 17. Jahrhunderts,” 161–173. I searched the following collections: Drugulin, Historischer Bilderatlas; Hohenemser, Flugschriftensammlung Gustav Freytag; Hofmann-Randall, ed., Die Einblattdrucke der Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg.

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were obviously printed for a white European audience. Three cases will be studied in depth: a pro-Jesuit broadsheet from Augsburg with a Precise Picture of Nicolai I (1758, fig. 12.1); a pro-slavery cartoon Abolition of the Slave Trade, or the Man [and] the Master (1789, fig. 12.3); and the personification The Insurrection of the Negroes from a German almanac (1793, fig. 12.4). I will show the clear satirical elements in the motif of the triumphant (black) autochthonous in America to reinterpret supposedly realistic and historically precise representations of the Haitian Revolution, as in Marcus Rainsford’s An [sic] historical account of the black empire of Hayti (1805, fig. 12.5). My reinterpretation might clarify that such reputedly “mere illustrations” of contemporary events may include intense ironical and satirical overtones.11 1

A Baroque Black King in America: Pictorial Propaganda in Eighteenth-century Augsburg

A very special early modern representation of a black “rebel,” both in his triumph and defeat, is presented in an Augsburg copperplate print from circa 1758 entitled “Precise Picture of Nicolai I.” He is represented as “Nicolai I,” a black king in Paraguay. This pro-Jesuit leaflet was printed as a protest against the rumor that a Jesuit was the leader of an anti-Spanish indigenous rebellion in 1756 (fig. 12.1).12 The indigenous rebellion in Paraguay was intensely debated, especially in Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and the Italian and German states during the 1750s and 1760s. It formed part of the general debates on the suppression of the Jesuit Order. Indeed, the uprising in Paraguay was one central piece of proof of the disloyalty of the Jesuits and one fundamental motif for the suppression of the Order in 1767. One of the most influential writings about the war in Paraguay was the anonymous anti-Jesuit Short Report, 11 12

On the special value of satire, see the classic study by Gombrich, “Magic, Myth and Metaphor”; Brauner, “Ironische Stiche, sarkastische Schnitte,” 437–459; Hodgart, Satire. In 1750, the Jesuit Province of Paraguay was affected by the Treaty of Madrid, which led to Spain’s concession of seven Jesuit mission towns east of the River Uruguay to Portugal. The inhabitants had to choose: they could leave the towns and migrate to the western Spanish regions, or they could become vassals of the Portuguese king. Many Indians did not want to leave their regions, but they refused Portuguese rule because the Portuguese laws accepted Indian slavery and the Spanish did not. In 1753, an indigenous rebellion against this forced migration began. In a first military campaign, the united troops of Spain and Portugal were poorly prepared, and they lost several skirmishes. In a second campaign, they won. In the final battle of Caaíbaté, on February 10, 1756, they defeated the indigenous militias. The decisive moments of these campaigns are described in Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule.

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Figure 12.1

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Johann Adam Stockmann, Effigies Nicolai I. Regis Paraquariae ficti. data ex portu Buenos Ayres 15. Martij A. 1758, ca. 1758, engraving. Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome

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supposedly written by the Portuguese minister Pombal.13 The most detailed source is a complete biography of Nicolas I., King of Paraguay and Emperor of the Mamelucs, published in French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Spanish between 1756 and 1761. According to this literary work, an Andalusian rake, Nicolaus Roubiouni, went to Brazil as a Jesuit lay brother. There, he became the “emperor” of a Mestizo mob in São Paulo. With the help of this crowd, he conquered the Jesuit mission towns, which formed part of the Spanish Empire, and declared himself king of Paraguay. It was a well-known satire, and in the same mood, Voltaire described a Jesuit ruler and commander in Paraguay in his Candide, first published in 1759.14 Interestingly, these texts could be read as both satires and historical proofs. The broadsheet from Augsburg is one of the rare images of this “rebel” and “king.”15 It probably survived only in a very few copies. So far, only one sample of the broadsheet can be located in the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome. A photograph of the broadsheet was found in the National Library in Buenos Aires.16 Until now, this print has not been mentioned in textbooks or listed in catalogues.17 That justifies a detailed description of it.

13 14 15

16

17

Vogel, Bilder des Schreckens, 101–104. Becker, Die politische Machtstellung der Jesuiten, 57–59; Obermeier, “Antijesuitische Drucke,” 23–34; Vogel, “Das Thema der südamerikanischen Jesuitenmission,” 139–160. The importance of Jesuit publications in Augsburg during the eighteenth century is thoroughly described and analyzed in Schmidt, Augsburg als Zentrum der Gegenaufklärung, 2011. For contextual information about the printing market in Augsburg, see Gier and Janota, eds., Augsburger Buchdruck und Verlagswesen. The exemplar in Rome consists of twelve pages. The red stamp “H. C. C.” (the initials of “Hieronymus Cardinalis Casanate”) on the title page refers to the actual owner, the Biblioteca Casanatense (vol. misc. 1358 18). The photograph in Buenos Aires (Biblioteca Nacional: S2 A L 495 533, 00567 230) was bonded in a typewritten German translation of a part of the pamphlet “Historia de Nicolas 1°” (as published in the “Revista de Derecho, Historia y Letras, Buenos Aires, Mayo-Sept. 1911”). It includes only the first two pages. That means that either the photograph is incomplete or the print was also sold as a twosided single-sheet copperplate print in addition to the standard twelve-page pamphlet format. The latter option is confirmed by the fact that only at the bottom of the second page was the first word of the following page not repeated. Surprisingly, the Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg does not own the Nette Abbildung (according to information from Brigitte Schürmann, Augsburg). It was primarily Georg Christoph Kilian who acquired the rich inventory of graphic prints that was collected before ca. 1780. Compared to German graphic prints before 1700, the graphic prints of the eighteenth century are not well catalogued. Neither the work of Drugulin or Hohenemser’s catalogue, nor the most complete descriptions of the works of its engraver Johann Adam Stockmann (Lieb, 1938) include the Nette Abbildung. I wish to thank Sibylle Appuhn-Radtke (Munich) for pointing this out.

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The broadsheet is printed on both sides. The verso shows a short poem in German; the recto is structured like classical Renaissance or baroque emblems. Below the title are a lemma, an icon, and an epigram. The German title reads: “Precise picture of Nicolai I, who is said to be king and lay brother in Paraguay.” The lemma, here as a Latin motto, is taken from Virgil’s Aeneid: “Such was he in eyes, in hands and face.” (“Sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat.”) This refers to Andromache’s description of the similarity between Ascanius and her dead son, Astyanax.18 The most striking element is, of course, the picture, with a Latin description: “Picture of the fictitious King Nicolai I, given in the port of Buenos Aires 10th of March 1758.” (“Effigies Nicolai I. Regis Paraquariae ficti. data ex portu Buenos Ayres 15. Martij A[nno] 1758”) In the center, the king himself is sitting on the ground on a kind of natural throne, with a round-bodied vessel in his right hand (perhaps containing the famous Paraguayan tea), and a long pipe in the left. His attire caricatures the “ideal” image of a legitimate king of his times: feathers instead of a crown, unkempt, long black hair instead of a white full-bottomed wig, and a simple shirt and shorts instead of a pair of culottes.19 He is barefoot, sits under a palm tree instead of a baldachin, and on the grass instead of a throne. In the foreground, the “riches” of Nicolai’s kingdom are displayed: a peacefully snoozing cow and a small cannon. In the middle ground on the left, what appears to be the royal family, a black woman and her three little children, cook around the fireplace in a cabin. In the background on the right, troops are fighting and shooting, with flags and cannons, and on the left, blacks are fleeing into the woods. Near the horizon, a few simple houses carry the only inscription in the picture itself: “S[aint] Niclas,” the name of the hamlet. All in all, this “royal” representation is a sharp parody of the official image of a baroque king, compared, for example, to Henri Testelin’s “Louis XIV as Protector of the Arts” (ca. 1667).20 The Latin epigram below clarifies the historical context and gives a certain academic overtone: 18 19 20

Virgil, Aeneid 3:490. About feather garments in Central European representations as an attribute of indigenous tribes in early modern art, see Fitz, Visual Representations of Native Americans; Burghartz, ed., Inszenierte Welten/Staging New Worlds. An alternative point of comparison might rather be an eighteenth-century aristocratic portrait than a baroque royal portrait. Hints for this parallel are predominantly the foot position and the separated little finger of the right hand. I wish to thank Dörte Wetzler (Berlin/Rudolstadt) for drawing my attention to this. Furthermore, the representation of the smoking black recalls shop advertisements for tobacco from the eighteenth century. Some examples can be found in Molineux, Faces, 147–149.

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Look, for the first time I portray the king in this picture, a king, about whom is said that the Paraguayans swore an oath to him. A Jesuit king, about whom many lies were told, who is covered with a double cloth, not with a purple robe, his court and his kitchen are without windows, he has no boots, the royal purse was always empty. In order that the enemy could invade the mountain passes, he told his [vassals] to keep away from there. The second verse continues on the right: And when he saw the unexpected fire of the arriving enemy he fled back to the wood, as if he passed through an indicated door, and he preferred to die rather than to abandon the Spanish king who is honored by the Paraguayans like a father. The soldier who was sent from the Portuguese coast did not want to fight against the crowd against whom he was sent. The Spaniard wanted Madrid to know that the Paraguayans were exemplary citizens.21 Below, we have some abbreviated hints suggesting that an artist from Augsburg, Johann Adam Stockmann, produced this picture: “I[ohann] A[dam] Stockmann Pict[or] Cath[olicus] exc[udit] A[ugustae] V[indelicorum].” He lived in the upper German imperial town at least between 1720 and 1783. Supposedly, Stockmann was not familiar with the representation of indigenous Americans. His favorite subjects were hunting scenes and landscapes.22 The verso page contains an eighteen-line poem in German (fig. 12.2). The title is the same as on the recto page. There are four footnotes explaining several details of the poem and a recommendation for further reading: Lodovico Antonio Muratori’s A Relation of the Missions of Paraguay. The German poem on the verso page is not a translation of the Latin poem on the recto page, but it offers similar information in greater detail. All in all, the source intervenes in the discussions about the suppression of the Society of Jesus in the second half of the eighteenth century. When one considers the illustration, the clear parody of a baroque king is apparent in the physiognomy of a poorly dressed, but contently relaxing black figure. The 21 22

Stockmann, Nette Abbildung, fol. 1r. I want to thank Reinhard Meisterfeld (Tübingen) for some helpful hints incorporated into this translation. Lieb, “Stockmann, Johann Adam,” 78.

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Figure 12.2

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Anonymous, Nette Abbildung Nicolai des Ersten seyn sollenden Koenigs, und Layen-Bruders in Paraquarien, ca. 1758, letterpress. Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome

tranquility, as depicted in the imagery of the pipe, the tea, and the snoozing cow, contrasts with the fleeing and falling fighters in the background. As we consult the explanatory poems, it becomes obvious that the picture is meant to show that the troops that rebelled against the kings of Spain and Portugal were not led by a Jesuit lay brother, but by an indigenous chief (“Cazig,” from Spanish “cazique”).

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Regarding the topic of “rebellion,” the German poem contains additional information: “The lie was invented by rebels, who proclaimed a lay brother to be king. It would be a sin to hate those who prefer to die rather than to abandon their king [i.e., the king of Spain].”23 This information is further explained in a footnote. The Paraguayans merely aimed to obey the king of Spain. Therefore, they refused to subject themselves to the king of Portugal.24 Regarding the military qualities of the “dream king” (Traum-König) of Paraguay, the German poem explains that “he opened all the mountain passes for the enemies, and he fled with all [his soldiers] right after the first bullet.” On the margin, the date “10. Febr. 1756” is added, referring to the Battle of Caaíbaté during the actual Guaraní War and the defeat of the indigenous troops by the united Spanish and Portuguese army.25 The text remains silent on the first campaign of November 1754, when indigenous troops succeeded in defeating the Spanish and Portuguese army and attempts to explain the domination of the European troops with an ethnic argumentation: “If a European had commanded them [i.e., the indigenous troops], this surely would not have happened.” Therefore, the “Jesuit king, about whom many lies were told” was not a white European, but a black rebel who wanted to be king. The portrait in the foreground shows the short interval of his vain reign, which ended with the defeat depicted in the background. The picture and the explanations do not mention another incoherence in the argumentation. The loyalty to the king of Spain is emphasized, but the indigenous troops did not fight exclusively against Portuguese soldiers. Rather, they rose up against an allied army of both Portuguese and Spaniards. Without this narrative gap, the argument of indigenous loyalty would not work. Surprisingly, the topics of “battle” and “loyalty” are only explained in the text, but not in the picture. In the pictorial representation, the indigenous “troops” are only seen fleeing, not fighting, just to show that their smoking leader is not successful at all, for being indigenous and not a European (Jesuit). 2

Pro-slavery Dystopia: An Inverted World before the Abolition of the Slave Trade

In the debates on the abolition of slavery, abolitionists used pictorial media far more frequently than did supporters of slavery.26 One of the very few pictorial 23 24 25 26

Stockmann, Nette Abbildung, fol. 1v. Ibid. Wilde, Religión y poder en las misiones de guaraníes, 159–165; Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule, 108. Wood, “Representations of Slavery.”

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Figure 12.3

William Dent, Abolition of the Slave Trade, or the Man the Master, 1789, hand-colored etching, 24.5 × 34.6 cm. Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

satires on abolitionism is a broadsheet entitled Abolition of the Slave Trade, or the Man [and] the Master (fig. 12.3).27 William Dent completed the etching in 1789. This nonconformist artist, whose works appeared in the decade between 1783 and 1793, was presumably an autodidact and preferred aesthetic solutions and political statements over the mainstream opinions of his time.28 The broadsheet was published in London in 1789 at the peak of the abolitionist debates. These debates grew increasingly heated after the creation of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787 and culminated in 1807, when the Slave Trade Act abolished slave trade (not slavery) in the British Empire.29 The date mentioned twice (“Pub[lished] by W[illiam] Dent May 26 1789” and “Sold by W. Moore. Oxford Street May 26 1789”) might be fictitious and a reference to the debates on slave trade in the House of Commons.30 The single-sheet etching shows a richly dressed black 27 28 29 30

Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade; Oldfield, Popular Politics, 155–160; Black, The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History, 111. Heneage, “William Dent.” Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery. The Times, May 27, 1789, 3.

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“master” beating a kneeling, half-naked white “man” with a cane. The “master” pulls brutally at the hair of the crying “man,” who begs for mercy with wringing hands. Thus, it imagines the worst-case scenario from a pro-slavery point of view, if the roles of slave and master had been reversed. There are several inscriptions within the picture; for example, the words of the black man, in a strange Pidgin English: “Now, Massa, me lick a you and make you worky while me be gentleman – curse a heart.” In the middle ground at the left, there are white men harvesting, and at the right, black men dancing and banqueting. In the background, on top of two hills, there are two more scenes. On the left, an English nobleman does not care if slavery is abolished as long as the prices of the relevant goods stay the same (“Why, if I have my Rum & Sugar and my Tobacco at the old price – I don’t care if the Slave Trade is abolished.”).31 On the right, what looks like a French merchant takes his benefits from the disappearance of the British slave market – an African chief makes him the offer “You shall have the slaves at your own price.” The heads of personifications of “Folly” and “Wisdom” are rising in the foreground. The words “abolition” and “regulation” are added to stress the political point of view that the illustration supports and to explain the satire and the “folly” of abolition. Directly behind, some barrels symbolize the products “waiting for a purchaser owing to the advanced Price,” and a halberd on the ground finally breaks with the ironic overtone of the representation because it is labeled as the “retaliation [of the slaves] for having been held in captivity.” The satirical meaning of the representation is emphasized by the body language of the kneeling white man. It is an obvious quotation of the famous Wedgwood “antislavery” medallion. This jasperware medallion, designed in 1787 by Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795), shows a black slave in chains with the surrounding inscription “Am I not a man and a brother?”32 The word “man” on the emblematic antislavery medallion explains the strange subtitle, “or the Man [and] the Master,” of Dent’s etching. He chose “man” – instead of “slave” or “servant” – to emphasize the satirical quotation of the Wedgwood medallion. The title Abolition of the Slave Trade can be compared with countless pro- and antislavery book titles that used this expression as a catchphrase, especially between 1788 and 1790. Other cartoons published during these years used very similar expressions, including even subtitles beginning with the word “or.” Among them, two should be mentioned: The gradual abolition off the Slave Trade, or leaving of Sugar by Degrees (1792), and The abolition of the slave trade 31 32

For further support for the interpretation that the pair on the top left are George III and William Pitt, see Molineux, Faces, 239. McGrath, “Sklaverei,” 351; Oldfield, Popular Politics, 155–160. McGrath, “Sklaverei,” 351.

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Or the inhumanity of dealers in human flesh exemplified in Capt[ai]n Kimber’s treatment of a young Negro girl of 15 for her virjen [sic] modesty (1792).33 In Dent’s broadsheet, the location of the depicted scenes is unclear, as it is rather a spatial collage. The contract scene on the hill at the right could take place on the West African coast, but the dialogue on the left-hand hill with the noble English consumer is probably located in London. The three scenes in the middle and in the foreground can probably be linked to the plantations in the British colonies. Thus, the broadsheet might be interpreted as including a pictorial interpretation of the classic Atlantic triangular trade, with decisive modifications: white British citizens instead of black slaves are harvesting in the plantations;34 they are dominated by the former slaves; and French, instead of British, merchants purchase African slaves. The very clear theme of the representation is the slaves’ revenge, shown in a blunt and rather unsophisticated manner. The depiction does not explain why the abolition of the slave trade might overthrow the social (and racial) order, and this obvious gap suggests that the picture might have been understood as a pro-abolitionist broadsheet. 3

Visual Sources of the Haitian Revolution between Personification, Satire, and Historical Representation

The first successful slave rebellion in the New World that led to the first independent Latin American nation took place in Haiti, then called Saint Domingue. During several riots between 1791 and 1803, the French colony Saint Domingue was transformed into the independent black nation of Haiti. The fact that the ruling class was entirely eliminated during these years meant hope for slaves and rose as a warning for slaveholders on the American continents. The Haitian Revolution was not the first slave rebellion in the New World. However, it was the first to be attentively observed and reported in Europe. After the independence of the United States, the European public was more sensitive to uprisings overseas. Furthermore, the violence of the “black Jacobins” in the Caribbean was perceived as a parallel to the revolution and the terror regime in France.35 Several French, British, and Spanish interventions after 1792–1793 in the rapidly changing coalitions on the island secured public interest.36 33 34 35 36

See, e.g., Zeuske, “Sklavenbilder.” On other compositions depicting the triangular trade, see Boime, Art of Exclusion, 15–46. The quote is taken from the title of the influential work by James, The Black Jacobins. Moya Pons, “Haiti and Santo Domingo,” 237–275; Sepinwall, ed., Haitian History; Gliech, Saint-Domingue und die Französische Revolution; Joseph, “The Haitian Turn,” 37–55.

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A new world of images emerged from the Haitian Revolution.37 It culminated in “the blacks’ representation as violent and uncontrollable.”38 Among the first published pictures referencing the slave rebellion in Haiti, “illustrations” of rebelling individuals or groups are not prevalent. Surprisingly, among the earliest representations of the contemporary events are views from afar showing the City of the Cape burning down after nightfall.39 As early as 1793, Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki (1726–1801) produced a small-scale engraving, The Insurrection of the Negroes, that was included in a popular German almanac (Göttinger Taschen Calender) (fig. 12.4).40 The illustration is part of a series of six prints about “Contemporary Events” (Begebenheiten der neueren Zeitgeschichte), which included among others the marriage of Frederick, Duke of York, and Friederike, princess of Prussia, and the peace of Sistowa between the Ottoman Empire and Austria. Both events took place in 1791, at the beginning of the slave revolt in Saint Domingue. Chodowiecki’s vast production of prints contains only three overseas scenes and three further representations of black people, mainly in folkloric, ethnographic, and literary contexts.41 To depict the Haitian Revolution for the German public, the artist employed personification, a fairly common expressive technique in his repertoire. The picture is only commented with a few words that were probably written by the publisher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg himself: “The insurrection of the negroes. Cruelty and despair are igniting the torch of revolt at the Cape in Saint Domingue, and its fire is consuming the plantations. – Actually, this is a Parisian scene in Saint Domingue.”42 Three figures dominate the foreground. In the middle, a naked black person as a personification of the “insurrection of the negroes,” on the left, with unruly hair, probably the personification of despair, which leads the black’s hand with 37 38

39 40 41 42

Lienhard, “Der Diskurs aufständischer Sklaven,” 44–67; Oriol, Images de la révolution à St-Domingue; Gómez, Le spectre de la révolution noire. Gómez, “Images de l’apocalypse des planteurs,” abstract: “Nous concluons que cette iconographie est le reflet non seulement de l’impact atlantique de la Révolution haïtienne, mais également de la transformation de la représentation des Noirs comme violents et incontrôlables.” Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement; Bégot, “À l’origine de l’imaginaire de violence à Saint-Domingue,” 95–133. Vue des 40 jours d’incendie des habitations de la plaine du Cap Français, arrivé le 23 août 1791 vieux style, Vue de l’incendie de la ville du Cap Français, arrivé le 21 juin 1793 vieux style, Gravure de Jean-Baptiste Chapuy d’après Pierre Jean L. Boquet, 1794/95. Lichtenberg, ed., Göttinger Taschen Calender für das Jahr 1793, plate, fol. 40r. Bauer, Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki. Lichtenberg, Göttinger Taschen Calender für das Jahr 1793, 200: “Die Empörung der Neger. Grausamkeit und Verzweiflung zünden die Fackel der Empörung den Negern am Kap auf St. Domingo an, und ihr Feuer verzehrt die Plantagen. – Eigentlich eine Pariser Scene auf St. Domingo.” For more information on the almanac named Göttinger Taschen Calender, see Peperkorn, Dieses ephemerische Werckchen.

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Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, Die Empörung der Neger / La revolte des Nègres, 1793, engraving, 8.8 × 5.2 cm. Niedersächsische Staatsund Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen

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the dagger. On the right, the personification of cruelty, setting the rebel’s torch alight. Apart from the color of his skin, the black figure does not have any specifying attributes. In the background, huge flames are consuming plantations, dead white figures are lying on the ground, and other white figures are seen fleeing from black aggressors – one of them on the left seems to represent the devil himself, with a tool in his hands reminiscent of a fork. The group in the foreground is even stomping on a white corpse. The artist regularly depicted contemporary scenes, including rebellions, wars, and uprisings. With respect to the Terreur in France, artist and publisher of the almanac shared a critical position.43 The reference to the “Parisian scene” therefore suggests a similar critical attitude regarding the rebellion in Saint Domingue. The image is a composition of a mimetic scene in the background and the iconographically more sophisticated group of personifications in the foreground. The explanation refers to the “revolt at the Cape,” that is, the murder of white planters and the destruction of the plantations near Cap Français in northern Saint Domingue, led by the slave Boukmann on the night of August 22/23, 1791.44 The cruelties of rebellion are represented, but the precise historical actions – presumably neither completely known nor understandable at that time – are “explained” and depicted in a simplified way: cruelty and despair lead to insurrection and death. Thus, one of the first European representations of the beginning of the Haitian Revolution claims to show a historical scene. In fact, it is a set of personifications “revealing” that the slave rebel is actually controlled externally even during the insurrection and is far from being an autonomous historical subject. He is depicted naked, like a child, with a childish head, surprised by the unexpectedly attained power; he is apparently lurching towards an unclear future rather than following a strict and decisive revolutionary plan.45 Without the inscription, it is easy to misinterpret the allegorical scene. Gaps in the interpretation are likely to be filled with references to a – presumably pro-emancipation – iconography circulating at the time. Most striking is Peter Thurmann’s opinion: “Chodowiecki’s protagonist of the negro rebellion holds the torch of liberty, but the accompanying furies are inflaming with it further torches.”46 Without the text, the protagonist can be misinterpreted as the leader of a liberation movement. Elmer Kolfin goes even further, pointing out 43 44 45 46

Oettingen, Daniel Chodowiecki, 286, n. 18. Schüller, Die deutsche Rezeption, 25. For Chodowiecki’s conventions in representing black individuals and European revolutions, see Bauer, Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki. Furthermore, see Greilich, “Les figures de l’exotisme,” 271–280. Thurmann, “367a Die Empörung der Neger,” 285.

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the “urge for freedom” (vrijheidsdrang) in the scene and interpreting the central person as “an allegory of liberty in the figure of a Black in a classical heroic pose, with the sword of battle in one hand and the torch of enlightenment [verlichting] [sic] in the other.”47 Although Kolfin quotes the standard reference work of Elisabeth Wormsbächer and identifies the personifications of Despair and Cruelty,48 he assumes – like Thurmann – that “liberation” is the main theme of the image. He can claim the untamed and active “urge for freedom” only at the price of ignoring how the personifications behind the black figure extend leading hands to him. Interestingly, by ignoring the written explications, both authors understand the image in the light of later liberation iconography. This is revealing of a research tendency that easily – and erroneously – subsume representations of the rebel slave under later pictorial traditions. There are several reasons for such isolated interpretations of a picture in the absence of a text. Some exemplars of the “insurrection of the negroes” were sold as singlesheet prints without the Göttinger Taschen Calender; they circulated without the inscription. Moreover, for technical reasons, the images in the Calender are distributed throughout the whole volume without any direct reference to the explanations. The legends of the pictures normally refer to the page, where the reader may find the picture – but not the other way around. The legends for the images are therefore not easy to find, especially because they are generally not listed in the general index. One decade later, many more printed representations of the Haitian uprisings were published on the European print market. Many of them depicted contemporary events without any nonpolitical content – at least, it seems to be that way for today’s viewers. Yet, compared to the earlier prints we have analyzed above, one can see that the “historical” mimesis is wrought with ironic and satirical elements. Marcus Rainsford’s An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, published in London in 1805, is one of the noteworthy works in this context, especially as the author was an eyewitness. Rainsford (1758– 1817) was a British military officer who served for several years in the West Indies Regiment. In 1799, he met Toussaint Louverture in person in Haiti.49 47 48

49

Kolfin, Van de slavenzweep, 117. Wormsbächer, Daniel Nikolas Chodowiecki. Wormsbächer quotes almost literally the explication and mentions the “torch of revolt”: “[Ba. 1585] Zur Zeit der Französischen Revolution gelang es den Negern in Westindien, dem alten Hauptumschlagplatz des Sklavenhandels, sich durch Aufstände von den weißen Herren zu befreien und eigene Staatswesen zu begründen. – Es wird die Empörung der Neger gezeigt. Grausamkeit und Verzweiflung haben die Fackel der Empörung am Kap auf St. Domingo angezündet. ihr Feuer verzehrt die Plantagen.” McMullen Rigg, “Rainsford, Marcus.”

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A remarkable result of this meeting is an outstanding full-length portrait of Toussaint Louverture.50 There is no portrait of him drawn from life, so the engraving included in Rainsford’s book is one of the closest.51 It is generally not clear to what extent the commissioned British engraver, Inigo Barlow, contributed to the pictures. He was active in London around 1790 and produced other line-engravings for popular publications, such as the Ree’s Encyclopedia and John Ireland’s biography of William Hogarth.52 In most cases, Barlow probably had to draw on sketches delivered by Rainsford.53 One of the most shocking pictures in Rainsford’s “historical account” shows black Haitian soldiers hanging white French soldiers during the Haitian Revolution (fig. 12.5). It is inscribed Revenge taken by the Black Army for the Cruelties practised on them by the French. After skirmishes between the Haitian and the French troops in northern Haiti near the city of Acul, French troops tortured and killed Haitian prisoners. Therefore, the black commander of the Haitian troops “instantly caused a number of gibbets to be formed, selected the officers whom he had taken, and supplying the deficiency with privates, had them tied up in every direction by break of day, in sight of the French camp, who dared not to interfere.”54 At first glance, this image seems to be a historically correct depiction of events. For that reason, in numerous articles and monographs about the Haitian Revolution, it is used as a reliable document about black resistance.55 Only at a second glance do several details confuse this first impression. First, the high number of gibbets, at least seventeen, gives an exaggerated overtone to the picture. Then, the three black soldiers in the left foreground seem to have distorted masks rather than human faces. The most astonishing element, however, is the gibbet in the foreground, on which the aforementioned group of three is executing a French officer. Unlike usual execution practices in the eighteenth century, the person to be hanged is not pulled down from an elevated place, but raised with a rope on a pulley.56 Why is this obviously 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, plate after p. 240. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War, 22–24. Bury, ed., “Barlow, Inigo,” 82. Most of the plates are signed with “M[arcus] Rainsford del[ineavit]” and “J[nigo] Barlow sculp[sit]”; see Rainsford, Introduction to An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, xli–xlix. Ibid., 337–338. For example, in Bryan, The Haitian Revolution and Its Effects, viii; Oriol, Images de la Révolution à St-Domingue, 126. Examples of standard hanging techniques in the seventeenth and eighteenth century do not include this technique. For context, consult the leading contemporary encyclopedias compiled by Johann Georg Krünitz, Johann Heinrich Zedler, and Diderot/D’Alembert.

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Figure 12.5

Marcus Rainsford (sketch) and Inigo Barlow (engraving), Revenge taken by the Black Army for the Cruelties practised on them by the French, 1805, engraving, 26 × 19.7 cm. Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

fictitious technique chosen? It allows for a depiction of the black soldier in the center in an exaggerated, dramatic pose. The way he raises the Frenchman on the gibbet strongly recalls the Christian motif of the Elevation of the Cross, thus evoking compassion for the dying Frenchman. This indicates an ironic distance between illustrations and text. The distance becomes even more evident in the author’s strong anti-French attitude that contemporary recipients often remarked upon.57 The interpretation of the picture as a graphic satire is 57

Rainsford, Geschichte der Insel Hayti oder St. Domingo, IX.

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further supported by comparison with other images in the same book, especially with the engraving View of a Temple erected by the Blacks to commemorate their Emancipation. The written description of the presumably fictitious temple remarkably differs from the engraving. It is represented as a failed attempt to copy European monuments rather than as a memorial for the liberty achieved.58 The uncertain status of the pictures is even more evident when taking into account a general remark about the Haitian people in the preface of the volume. According to Rainsford, “The same period [of riots in Haiti] has witnessed a great and polished nation, nor merely returning to the barbarism of the earliest periods, but descending to the characters of assassins and executioners; and, removing the boundaries which civilization had prescribed even to war, rendering it a wild conflict of brutes and a midnight massacre.”59 Rainsford’s Francophobia raises certain doubts concerning the Haitian Revolution. Despite the sympathy that he feels for Toussaint Louverture, the author wants to emphasize the “horrors” of the revolution. For this purpose, he explicitly includes the plates.60 4

Little Steps toward a New World of Images: The Unclear Beginnings of Liberation Iconography

The examples we have analyzed display fundamentally different perceptual patterns. Examining representations of early slave rebellions reveals the deep effect of European expectations. To a certain degree, the chosen examples represent a visual code of a colonial world turned upside down. We might say that the satire Precise Picture of Nicolai I (fig. 12.1) from Augsburg is a kind of unexpected anticipation of representations of the triumphant black in America, along with Dent’s caricature as dystopia. In light of these examples, it becomes obvious that Chodowiecki’s and Barlow’s representations of the early Haitian Revolution have nothing in common with an alleged positive “resistance” or an independent liberation iconography.61 In fact, it is a parallel to the more 58 59 60 61

Rainsford, An Historical Account, plate after p. 218. Ibid., XI. Ibid., XIX: “Mere description conveys not with so much force as when accompanied by graphic illustration, those horrors which are wished to be impressed upon the public mind.” Among the examples of a later liberation iconography are representations of the rebellions of Gaspar Yanga (Veracruz, 1570), Alonso de Illescas (Quito, ca. 1590), Bussa (Barbados, 1816), and Benkos Biohó (Cartagena de Indias, San Basilio de Palenque, ca. 1599,). Cf. Price, Maroon Societies; Lienhard, Disidentes.

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thoroughly researched motif of the “obstinate Jew.” In both cases, the rebellion of an underprivileged or marginalized social or racial group is depicted as inappropriate and scandalous in the eyes of a white Christian majority society.62 The analyzed images in their respective contexts are neither rebellious nor subversive, but mere vehicles for pro-Jesuitism, anti-abolitionism, or Francophobia. They are not representations of a group that is looking for social change, but a highly distorted vision from outside. It becomes clear that through the use of satire, personifications, and dystopian visual strategies, the images express subversive fantasies, wherein the subject of subversion is not the black population but the fear of black domination in the white mind.63 These manifold issues surging in European consciousness around 1800 fed into a visual language of violence used by artists when they tackled the themes of black ascendency and anxieties over a dominant rebel slave. Making use of gross exaggerations and satirical elements, these pictures are a polemical contribution to the cynical question of those days: “Can blacks rule themselves?” Bibliography Barros dos Santos, Ana Maria. “Sklavenaufstände im Brasilien des 17. Jahrhunderts.” Lateinamerika Studien 32 (1994): 161–173. Bauer, Jens-Heiner. Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki: Danzig 1726–1801 Berlin: Das druck­ graphische Werk, die Sammlung Wilhelm Burggraf zu Dohna-Schlobitten. Ein Bildband mit 2340 Abbildungen in Ergänzung zum Werkverzeichnis von Wilhelm Engelmann. Hannover: Bauer, 1982. Becker, Felix. Die politische Machtstellung der Jesuiten in Südamerika im 18. Jahrhundert: Zur Kontroverse um den “Jesuitenkönig” Nikolaus I. von Paraguay. Cologne: Böhlau, 1980. Bégot, Danielle. “À l’origine de l’imaginaire de violence à Saint-Domingue: Insurrection servile et iconographie.” In Mourir pour les Antilles: Indépendance nègre ou esclavage, 1802–1804, edited by Michel L. Martin, Alain Yacou, and Lucien-René Abénon, 95–133. Paris: Centre d’études et de recherches caraïbéennes, 1991. Benn, Christine. “Die haitianische Revolution im Spiegel der englischsprachigen Literatur.” PhD dissertation, Universität zu Köln, 1991. 62 63

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Index abolitionism 12, 289–290, 297–300 absolutism 101, 112, 180, 186, 269 Africa 12–13, 201, 289, 299–300 Aichinger, Martin 135, 157 Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of 78, 85, 211 Alexander I (Tsar of Russia) 221 Alexei Mikhailovich (Tsar of Russia) 240, 245, 249, 253 allegory 207, 211, 214, 221, 234, 267, 304 Alps 94, 98, 101, 108, 110 Americas 12, 101, 263–274, 277–283, 289–291, 294–295, 300, 305, 307 Ameydan, Theodore 210 Andronikos 46–47 angels 138 Annese, Gennaro 61, 63 Antiquity 173, 267, 301 Antwerp 67, 77, 85, 101, 107, 166, 183, 185 Aperger, Andreas 120–121, 147, 154 Apollonius of Tyana 45 Apsimaros 42–46 Arabian Peninsula 36, 42, 44, 225 architecture 38–39, 41, 50, 61, 63, 66 Arcos, Rodrigo Ponce, Duke of 58–60, 62 aristocracy 12, 54–55, 62–63, 66, 86, 165, 167–171, 178, 180, 199, 205, 264–266, 268, 277, 279, 294 Arkhangelsk 253–254 armies 22–23, 26, 28, 33, 133, 151, 156, 178, 248, 264, 271–273, 305–306 armor 63, 82, 119, 203, 267 Arundell, Thomas Howard, Earl of 136 Asia 13 assassinations 43, 57, 63, 64, 102, 307 Astrakhan 241, 248 atrocity 102–103, 105 Augsburg 119–121, 129–132, 147, 154, 165, 250, 272–274, 276, 291, 293, 295, 307 Austria 10, 63, 115–122, 125–135, 138, 140, 142, 144, 146, 148, 156–157, 171–173, 180, 267, 301 Avelar Rebelo, José 200 Aviz, House of 200

Barcelona 217 Barlow, Inigo 305–306 baroque 266, 291 battles 33, 67, 84–85, 117, 125–126, 134, 147–151, 157, 177, 212, 221, 242, 248, 267, 270, 272–273, 281, 297 Battle of White Mountain 125 Bavaria 115–119, 124–125, 131–135, 139, 144, 147–148, 151–152, 234 Beijing 23, 34 Belisarius 41 Berndl (peasant) 123–124, 153 Bethlen 165, 186 Bible 64, 95, 108, 175, 245 People of African Descent 279, 289–291, 294, 297, 299–308 Bocskai, István 186 Boetius, Christoph 180–181 Bohemia 117, 135, 139 Borman, Jan 82 Boston 113, 269 Bourbon, Isabelle of 59, 180, 183 Bouttats, Philibert 183–185 Brabant 82 Braganza Dynasty 198–200, 203, 205, 208, 210–215 Brandenburg 174–175, 183, 187 Brazil 207, 290, 293 Brederode, Hendrik van 80, 85 Britain / British Empire 12, 76, 113, 175, 182, 234, 264–274, 277, 281–282, 289, 298–300, 304–305 broadsheet 77, 123, 126, 130, 171–172, 178–179, 217, 219, 221, 233 broadside 7–8, 182, 185, 187, 221, 234, 263, 275 Bruegel (the Elder), Pieter 232 Brussels 80, 85–87 Bry, Theodor de 100 Budapest 173, 176, 179, 181 Buenos Aires 293–294 Burgundy 87 Byzantine Empire 2, 9–10, 36–50, 68, 120

316 Calabria 60 cannibalism 97–98 Cap Français 301, 303 Capecelatro, Francesco 54–55, 64–65 Caramuel, Juan 207 Caravaggio 6 Caribbean 289, 300 caricature 121, 141, 178, 274–275, 294, 307 Casas, Bartolomé de las 100 Caspian Sea 241, 248 Cassirer, Ernst 8 Catalonia 55, 215, 217 Catherine II (Tsarina of Russia) 221 Catholic League 117 Cennamo, Fabrizio 62–63 censorship 123, 187, 221, 264 ceremonies 54–69, 201, 210, 263 Charlemagne 165 Charles I (King of England) 7, 175, 205, 233 Charles II (King of England) 175, 205 Charles Emmanuel II (Duke of Savoy)  94 China 9, 21–26, 29, 31–34 Chodowiecki, Daniel Nikolaus  275, 301–304, 307 Choniates, Niketas 44–47 Christianity 2, 12–13, 56, 64, 68, 85, 101, 106, 108, 110, 112, 138, 172, 177, 180–181, 187, 234–235, 242–243, 248, 256, 306 churches 45, 60, 63, 65, 67, 69, 81, 84, 96–97, 110, 136–137, 174, 200, 220–221, 233, 242, 255 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 281 clergy 55, 64, 67, 104, 106, 118, 220 Cologne 76–77, 101, 113 colonialism 13, 264, 267, 277, 281, 298, 300 confession 10–11, 132, 175 conquest 45, 128, 153, 177, 207, 293 Constantine IX Monomachos (Byzantine Emperor) 36–37 Constantine VII (Byzantine Emperor) 47 Constantine VIII (Byzantine Emperor) 44, 49–50 Constantinople 36, 38–41, 45, 49–50 constitutions 83, 174–175, 180–181, 186, 263–266, 269, 281, 283 Continental Army 271–273 conversion 117–118, 123, 132, 149, 153–154, 157, 175, 213 Coppola, Carlo 63, 113

Index Cornelissz, Jacob 98, 101 corpses 64, 87, 156, 303 Cosmerovius, Matthäus 166, 170 Cossacks 11–12, 171, 222, 240–242, 246–249, 252 Council of Trent 55–56, 66 Counter-Reformation 131 crime 9, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 155, 171, 181, 231 Croatia 165, 180 Crobates 152–154, 157 Cromwell, Oliver  94–95, 112–113, 233 crowds 44, 59, 69, 116, 129, 180, 198, 222, 231, 232–233, 253, 293, 295 cruelty 4, 98, 251, 269, 301, 304–306 Cumberland, William Augustus, Duke of 267–268 Danube 127–128, 130, 146, 172 Dartmouth 226 de Hooghe, Romeyn 182, 183, 185–186 decapitation 5, 86–88, 135, 222, 232 deformity 42–43 Delaware 278–279 Delphi 45 Dent, William 298 Devil  4, 45, 98, 109, 119, 154, 156, 175, 303 diplomacy 11, 23, 94, 97, 136, 175, 186, 205, 210, 212, 222–224, 231, 240, 242–244, 252–253, 255, 278 disembowelment 133 dismemberment 63–64 dogs 234–235, 252 Dordrecht 106 dragons 33, 44, 211 drawing 3, 6, 24, 37, 46, 133, 136, 157, 223, 226, 228, 272, 294 Droeshout, John 206–207 Dutch Republic 8, 63, 65, 75, 80–81, 84–85, 95, 104–105, 107–108, 112–113, 174, 187, 264, 267, 279, 281 dynasty 11, 21, 23–24, 31, 182–183, 186, 198– 200, 205, 207, 211–215, 242, 265, 267 Dzungars / Dzungar Khanate 33 Eferding  136, 148–149, 151 Egypt 69, 109, 234 Elizabeth I (Queen of England) 267 emblems 82–83, 87, 119, 171, 173, 183, 201, 207, 211, 231, 272, 294, 299 Endter family 166, 170

Index England 4, 7, 47, 66, 94–95, 101, 105, 112–113, 136, 144, 174–175, 179, 181–182, 187, 222–223, 228, 240, 242, 253–255, 264, 266, 267–268, 274, 278, 282, 299–300 English Restoration 11 engraving 2–4, 6, 8–9, 23, 38, 45, 60, 63, 67, 70, 101, 116, 123–130, 136, 157, 166–167, 172, 174, 177, 179–180, 182–183, 185, 200–201, 203, 205, 213, 221, 225–226, 231, 234–235, 243–244, 246–251, 255, 263–264, 270, 272–275, 291, 293, 305 Enlightenment 12, 221, 264, 266–268, 275, 282 Epitafio del Mercato 60, 62–63, 69 equestrian (portrait) 271, 275, 277 etching 76, 275 ethnicity 228, 289 Europe 2–4, 6, 9–13, 76–77, 95–96, 100–102, 104, 107, 112–113, 131, 133, 135, 165–168, 170–174, 177–183, 185, 187, 198, 200–201, 203, 205, 211, 213–214, 217, 219–225, 230–231, 233–235, 240–250, 252–253, 256, 263, 265–266, 269–270, 272, 274–275, 279, 282, 289–291, 294, 297, 300, 303–304, 307 executions 1, 4, 5, 41, 86, 88, 102, 106–107, 134–135, 168, 171, 222, 224, 228, 230, 233, 241, 248, 251–253, 255–256, 305, 307 exile 11, 125, 132, 175, 221, 253 eyewitnessing 8, 37, 68, 180, 200, 224, 252 Fadinger, Stephan 115, 123, 126–128, 130–131, 135–136, 140- 142, 143, 144–146, 152–154, 156–157 Fanzago, Cosimo 61–63 Ferdinand II (Holy Roman Emperor) 117– 118, 136 Filomarino, Ascanio 54, 62–64 Flanders 183, 210–211 flogging 224, 230, 232, 234 foreigners 219, 224, 235, 241, 243, 253, 255 fortune 70, 76, 82, 123, 153, 178, 183, 210, 268 Foxe, John 95, 105, 112–113 France 12–13, 54–55, 61, 64–65, 76, 94, 96, 112, 120, 126, 168, 170–171, 174–175, 178, 180, 182–183, 185, 187, 203, 209–211, 217, 221–222, 242, 253–254, 256, 264, 266, 268, 274, 277, 279–282, 289, 293, 299–300, 303, 305–306

317 Frangepán, Ferenc 168, 170, 180, 249 Frankenburg 115–116, 118, 131–132, 134–135 Frankenburg Dice Game 115, 118, 132, 134 Frankenburg Rebellion 116 Frankfurt am Main 112, 119, 131, 166, 169, 217, 245, 249 Frederick II (King of Prussia) 170–171, 275–276 Frederick William (Elector of Brandenburg) 183 fresco 45, 66, 219 frontispiece 99, 185, 205–206, 220 Fujian  26–30, 34 Fuld, Caspar 123 Fürst, Paul 246 Fürst, Wolfgang Gottlieb 246 Galle, Phillip 232 gallows 81, 135 Gargiulo, Domenico 57, 62 Geneva 94 George I (King of Britain) 175, 183, 267, 268, 299 George II (King of Britain) 175, 183, 267, 268, 299 Georgia 268 Gérard, Balthasar 102 Geuzen (Gueux) 80, 82, 85 Ghent 99, 102 gibbets 305–306 Glorious Revolution 181–182, 264, 266–267 God 57, 124, 203–204, 281 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 156 Gosson, Nicolas 101 Göttingen 301–302, 304 Goya, Francisco 13 Greece 68, 178, 267 Gregory XIII 211 Grenoble 94 Greysing, Martin 139 Gustav I (King of Sweden) 283 György I Rákóczi (Prince of Transylvania) 165, 171, 173, 186–187 Habsburg, House of 10–11, 98, 101–102, 115–117, 125, 157, 165–166, 168, 170–174, 178, 180, 185–186, 199, 201, 207–208, 211–212, 214, 243 Hacker, Francis 233

318 Haemstede, Adriaan van 105, 107–108, 112 Hagia Sophia 40 Haiti / Saint-Domingue 12–13, 289, 291, 300–301, 303–305, 307 Han Chinese 2, 6, 22, 26, 32, 34 hanging 3, 13, 31, 33, 62, 101, 107, 115, 119, 132, 135, 144, 155, 166, 183, 185, 187, 210, 222, 228, 253, 263, 270, 282, 300, 305 Hänlin, Gregorio 120 Hanover 226, 264, 267–268 Hartkirchen 136–137 Hausruckviertel 119, 123, 136, 141, 143 Heberstorff, Adam von 115, 125–135, 152 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 289–290 Helmers, Rudolf Johann 246 Herberstein, Sigismund von 243, 248 Herberstorff, Adam von 115–118, 125–135, 152 Hercules 83 heresy 80–82, 84, 113, 222 heroism 108, 124, 146, 178, 265–268, 277, 304 Hideyoshi, Toyotomi  21 Hippodrome 36, 38–41, 43–47 Hogenberg, Frans  10, 75–88, 101, 103–105, 126 Hollar, Wenceslaus, 136, 157 Holstein, Adolf, Duke of 118, 124, 133, 146, 148, 151, 224–225 Holy Roman Empire  4, 6, 11, 66, 76–77, 82, 113, 115–116, 118, 123, 126, 130–131, 136, 144, 165–182, 186, 203, 208, 220–223, 225, 228, 233, 240, 243–248, 251, 254, 256, 265, 268, 274, 277, 291, 293–295, 297, 301 Hondius III, Jodocus 102 Hong Taiji 21, 23 horses 36, 39, 43, 58, 87, 127–128, 131, 138, 148, 150, 153–154, 255, 272–273, 275, 279, 283 Hu Zongxian 21 Hungary 11, 165–168, 170–183, 185–187, 243, 249 Hypatios 40–41 iconoclasm 47, 84 iconography 3, 5, 9, 47, 57, 66–68, 82, 84, 118, 142, 187, 217, 219, 233, 267, 277, 281, 289, 303, 307 iconology 8

Index independence 185, 269, 281, 283 Ingolstadt 119–121, 147 innocence 96, 107, 133, 143, 226 Inquisition 81 Ireland 95, 113, 264, 305 Isaakios Angelos (Byzantine Emperor) 45 Islam 1, 2, 12, 42, 243, 247–248 Israel 75, 80–81, 84–85, 273 Italy 5, 6, 49, 55, 118, 171, 178, 291, 293 Ivan IV (Tsar of Russia) 244 Jacobites 266–268 Japan 21–22 Jesuits 9, 23, 125, 136, 174–175, 291, 293, 295–297 Jesus Christ 2, 12–13, 38, 45, 55–56, 64, 68, 85, 95, 101, 106, 108, 110, 112–113, 130–131, 135, 138, 171–172, 177, 180–181, 187, 201, 203, 207, 234–235, 242–243, 248, 253, 255–256, 267, 269, 274, 293, 295, 301, 306 Jews 105, 172 John George III (Elector of Saxony) 183 John IV (King of Portugal) 11, 198–203, 205, 207–208, 210, 212–215, 217 justice 5, 13, 38, 46, 87, 180, 183, 232, 234–235, 248 Justinian II (Byzantine Emperor) 41, 43 Kangxi Dynasty 23–24, 27–28, 31–34 Kaperger Gang 158 Kiev 220 Kilian, Wolfgang 130 knouting 229–230, 234 Kolfin, Elmer 303 Komnenos, Nikephoros 49, 50 Korb, Johann-Georg  223–224 Korea 21 Korn, Christoph Heinrich 148, 241, 274 Koumoulianos, David 48 Kremlin 220, 223, 230, 233–234, 252 Kremsmünster 140–142 Krumau 139 Ktemetinos, Constantine 48 Lambach 142, 148–150 Lasne, Michel 201–203 Latin America 12, 300

Index law 4, 80–82, 96, 118, 124, 130, 135, 154, 156, 165, 169, 171, 175, 180, 205, 210, 221, 246, 264, 268, 270, 274, 278–279, 281, 291 le Paon, Jean-Baptiste 279–280 Lee, Charles 272, 279 Léger, Jean 94–95, 97 legitimacy 3–5, 9–13, 19, 31, 44, 63, 70, 85, 95–96, 107, 119, 130, 133, 156, 174, 180, 186, 199, 205–206, 210–215, 219, 221–223, 225, 227, 229, 231–235, 264, 267, 269, 277, 293–294 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 181 Lekapenos (Byzantine Emperor) 47–48 Leontios (Byzantine Emperor) 41–46 Leopold I (Holy Roman Emperor) 165, 167, 172, 185 Leopold V (Archduke of Austria) 118 leprosy 42–43 lèse-majesté 96, 134 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 277 liberty 54, 63, 175, 185, 187, 198, 205–207, 214, 217, 303–304, 307 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 301 Linz 118–119, 126–130, 135–136, 138–139, 147, 149–151, 153, 157 lions 12, 38, 44, 48, 81, 96, 113, 115–116, 119, 132–134, 168–171, 173, 175, 178, 180–181, 185–187, 199, 207, 212–213, 222, 224, 240- 244, 248–249, 252–253, 255–256, 267, 290–291, 297, 299–301, 303, 307 Lisbon 198–200, 202, 204, 206, 208, 211, 217, 235 Liu Jingzhong 27 Livonia 223, 225, 242, 244, 256 lobbying 116, 125, 131 London 136, 178, 205, 233, 270–273, 282, 289, 298, 300, 304–305 looting 133, 138, 141 Louis XIV (King of France) 97, 120, 181–182, 185, 294 Low Countries 5, 7, 8, 10, 75–88, 94–108, 110, 112–113, 126, 171–172, 174–175, 179–180, 182, 187, 210–212, 215, 217, 221–222, 240–241, 245–246, 252–254, 256, 291, 293 Lower Austria 115 loyalism 56, 58, 70, 81, 85, 87–88, 123, 142, 173, 178, 187, 235, 241, 270, 290–291, 297

319 lubki 220–221 Luther, Martin 97, 118, 122–123, 125, 153–154, 155–156, 174–177, 183 Luxembourg 178 Luyken, Jan 112, 256 lynching 13 Machland 157 Madrid 36–38, 44, 48–50, 200, 217, 291, 295 Madrid Skylitzes 36–38, 44, 47–50 magic 45, 59, 119, 144, 147, 151–153, 155–157, 291 Maio, Romeo de  66–67 Manchus, 21, 24, 32–34 Maniakes, George 36–37 Manuel I (King of Portugal) 207 Mányoki, Ádám 187 maps 70, 76, 103, 127, 130, 172, 208, 223, 274 marble 39, 62–63 marketplaces 6, 56–57, 60, 230, 264 Marnix, Jan van 85 martyrdom 46, 63, 87, 95, 104–108, 110, 112–113, 138 Masaniello (Tommaso Aniello d’Amalfi) 54, 56–65, 69, 120, 246 massacres 40–41, 94, 101, 112, 269 Matthias (Holy Roman Emperor) 125, 144 Maximilian I (Elector of Bavaria) 117 Maximilian I (Holy Roman Emperor) 82 medicine 42 memory 9–10, 21, 26- 32, 34, 36, 50, 62, 65, 77, 98, 102, 104, 110, 112–113, 115–117, 124, 246, 277, 290, 307 mercy 4 Merian, Matthäus 249 metaphor 38, 45 Meyerberg, Augustin von 244 Meyssens, Cornelis 98, 101, 108, 166, 181 mezzotint 270–271, 273–274, 276, 279 Middle Ages 1, 2, 6, 9, 37, 39, 48, 157, 234 migration 118, 132, 175 Miguel of Portugal (Bishop of Lamego) 210 Ming Dynasty 21, 24, 31 miniatures 38, 49, 264 minorities 24, 95–96 Miotte, Pietro 70 miracles 42, 54, 56, 64, 66–67, 200, 268 Mire, Noël le 280

320 Miroball, Antonio 58 monarchy 11, 34, 57, 58–60, 62, 64–65, 70, 83, 165, 174, 180, 182, 185–186, 199, 200–201, 205, 208, 210–215, 241, 248, 264–269, 273, 282–283 monasticism 42, 45, 61, 108, 124, 133, 138–142, 144, 148, 154–155, 177 Moncornet, Balthazar 203–204 Moncornet, Michel 201 Moscow 220–224, 233, 240–245, 249–256 Munich 121–122, 293 murder 42, 48, 63, 87, 95, 98, 102, 109, 136, 138–139, 303 mutilation 9, 38, 42–43, 48, 104, 108 mutiny 112 mythology 68, 83, 173, 178, 265, 267 Nádasdy, Ferenc 165–168, 170–172, 174–175, 178, 180–181, 185–187, 243, 249, 256 Naples 10, 54–70, 215, 217, 246 Neelov, Vasilii 252 Neukirchen am Walde 123, 148 news 10, 75, 105, 108, 110, 165–166, 168, 170, 172, 186–187, 220, 240–241, 243, 245, 252, 256, 274, 281 nobility 7, 11, 28, 54, 58, 60, 66, 68, 78–83, 85–86, 94, 125, 130–132, 155–156, 165–166, 172–173, 180, 183, 185, 187, 198–199, 215, 244, 248–249, 264–266, 275, 299–300 Novikov, Nikolai 221 Nunes da Costa, Jéronimo 212 Nuremberg 119, 123, 131, 166, 169, 171, 179, 246, 248, 256, 290 Nurgaci 22, 33 occupation 78–79, 96, 106, 116, 118, 121, 133–134, 139–140, 154, 166–67, 174, 185 Olearius, Adam, 12, 219, 223–226, 228–235, 244 Oñate, Íñigo Vélez de Guevara, Count of, 63, 70 opposition 11, 54, 85–86, 168–169, 173, 186–187, 198, 263–264, 268–269, 274 oppression 11, 58, 95, 118–119, 185, 248 Orange, William of 102–103, 267 orientalism 2, 12, 279 Ortelius, Abraham 76 Orthodox Christianity 2, 68, 221

Index Ottoman Empire 9, 12, 76, 165, 167–168, 172, 177–183, 185–187, 225, 242–243, 248, 256, 301 pacification 25–28, 31–32, 67 painting 6, 8, 23, 36, 38, 44, 47, 57, 62, 66, 120, 143, 147, 174, 200, 213, 272–273 palaces 26, 45, 66, 83, 211 palatine (official) 95, 165, 168, 185 Palmquist, Erich 223–224, 234 pamphlets 3, 7, 10, 37, 94, 96–99, 101–103, 105–106, 108, 110, 116, 119, 121–123, 130, 132–133, 135, 152, 167–168, 172, 178, 182, 185–186, 200, 207–208, 210, 212, 214, 293 Panofsky, Erwin 8 Papacy 154, 171, 177, 211 Pappenheim, Gottfried Heinrich, Count of  119, 120, 124, 147, 151–154 Paraguay 291, 293–295, 296–297 Paris 9, 23, 97, 201, 203, 205, 209, 212, 301, 303 parishes 115, 118, 139–140 Parliament 177, 233–234, 264, 266 Parma, Margaret of 79–80, 85 Passau 144, 146–148, 152–153, 155, 156–157 patriots 131, 265, 268–270, 279, 281–282 patronage 24, 26, 54, 65, 69, 166–167, 174, 182, 201, 220, 263, 275 peace 132, 207 peasants 6, 7, 10, 66, 79, 115–136, 138–150, 152–157, 235, 242, 244, 301, 303 Pennsylvania 281 people of African descent 107, 113, 138, 141, 155, 201, 279, 289–291, 294–295, 297–307 performance 1, 37, 263, 281 periodicals 251, 253, 256, 264 persecution 10, 43, 94–96, 107–108, 110, 112–113 Persia 11, 219, 222, 224–225, 241–243, 248, 255–256 personifications 183, 289, 291, 299, 301, 303–304 Peter I (Tsar of Russia) 222, 225, 240 petitions 78, 80–83, 131, 154 Peuerbach 116, 126 Philip I (King of Portugal) 215 Philip II (King of Spain) 79, 81–83, 85, 88, 207, 211–212, 215

321

Index Philip IV (King of Spain) 58–60, 63, 70, 199, 207, 213, 215 Philistines 83 Phokas, Leo 48–49 Photius I (Patriarch of Constantinople) 46–47 Piedmont 10, 94–96, 98–99, 102, 104–106, 108–109, 112–113 pillaging 125, 241 pirates 21–22, 105 plotting 49, 170 plunder 133, 139 poetry 5, 7, 27, 129, 152, 166, 170, 182, 210–211, 220, 267, 277, 289, 294–297 poison 63 Poland-Lithuania 152, 177, 220, 242–243 Portonova 58 portrait 8, 12, 34, 59, 166–167, 173, 205, 217, 246–247, 251, 263–267, 272–273, 281–283 portrayal 13, 55, 86, 88, 101, 104–105, 107–108, 142, 177, 246, 267, 295 Portugal / Portuguese Empire 5, 11, 55, 179, 198–217, 235, 291, 293, 295, 296–297 Portuguese Restoration 198, 205 power 11, 27, 28–30, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 165, 182, 185, 200, 205, 217 Pozsony 174 Prague 171 prayer 95, 104, 121, 155 preaching 125, 151, 174 prelates 125, 149 presidents 62, 141, 263, 265, 270, 277, 281 priests 64, 67, 109, 115, 117–118, 125, 154 princes 65, 75, 82–83, 88, 97, 117, 165, 177–178, 182–183, 185–186, 205, 211, 219, 245, 263, 301 prison 149, 198, 221 processions 10, 36, 38, 48, 54, 56, 58, 65, 171, 198 propaganda 1, 8, 95, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157, 168, 217, 245, 290–291 Protectorate (Commonwealth of England) 95, 97 Protestantism 3, 10–11, 76, 80–84, 87, 94–95, 98, 105, 107, 110, 113, 116–118, 121, 125, 131,

132, 134, 142–143, 149, 153–157, 168, 170, 174–175, 177, 180–183, 187 Prussia 223, 268, 275–277, 301 Pugachev, Emelian 222–223 punishment 2, 9, 13, 36–39, 41, 43, 45–47, 49, 84, 96, 132–134, 154, 183, 222, 224, 226, 230–231, 252–253, 256 Puritanism 95 Qianlong Dynasty 22–23, 32 Qing Dynasty 9, 21–26, 28, 32–34 Qiu Ying 22 quartering 117, 125, 134–135, 154, 252 Quellin, Erasmus 207 Quilombo dos Palmares 290 race 5, 21, 39–40, 42–43, 47, 67, 97, 122, 144, 179, 183, 187, 200, 203–204, 210, 266, 281, 283, 300 Radishchev, Alexander 221 Rainsford, Marcus 291, 304, 306 Ramin, Friedrich Ehrenreich von 275 rape 64, 104, 107, 113 Ravenna 43 Razin, Stepan 12, 171, 222, 240–256 rebellion 12, 38, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 113, 141, 144, 172–173, 175, 178, 180–181, 185–187, 200–201, 203, 222, 234, 240– 241, 244, 251, 253, 255, 267, 289–293, 295–297, 299, 301, 303, 305, 307 Reformation 3, 10, 94, 96–98, 105, 107, 110, 112–113, 115, 117–119, 124–125, 132, 134, 148, 174, 263–264, 268–269 Reformed Protestantism (Calvinism)  76–77, 84–85, 95, 112, 183 Regensburg 119, 131, 178 religion 2, 34, 56, 76, 77–78, 82, 85, 94, 97, 101, 104–105, 107, 110–113, 122, 126, 131–132, 138, 146, 148, 154, 174–175, 201, 219–221, 224–225, 248, 270 Renaissance 82, 148, 289, 294 republicanism 57, 263–265, 267, 269, 274, 279, 281–282 resistance 10–11, 21, 105, 115, 118–119, 124, 156, 157, 169, 174, 185–186, 198–199, 219, 266, 269, 305, 307 restoration 61, 88 Reutenfels, Jacob 253, 255

322 revolts 1, 3, 5, 7, 9–11, 13, 21, 36, 54, 75–79, 83–84, 88, 97–98, 100–105, 110, 120, 185, 187, 200, 215, 217, 243–244, 246, 252 revolutions 3, 4, 12, 54–55, 57, 59–63, 65–67, 69, 181–182, 220–221, 261, 263–267, 270, 272, 274, 282–283, 289, 291, 300–301, 303–305, 307 Rhineland-Palatinate 181, 185 Riga 240, 242, 245, 249, 256 Rijn, Rembrandt van 234 Ripa, Cesare 5 rites 5, 9, 12, 26, 30, 32–33, 41, 47, 55–58, 64– 70, 97, 200, 205, 212, 269, 295 rituals 3, 9, 24, 32–34, 42, 50, 56–57, 62–63, 67–70, 82–83, 107, 122, 133, 135, 151, 167, 187, 224, 241, 246, 264 Robinson, Anne 61, 63, 274 Roman Catholicism 10, 55, 69, 80–85, 94, 97, 101–102, 105–106, 108–110, 115, 117–119, 121, 125, 131–132, 135–138, 149, 153–157, 165, 167, 174–175, 177, 181, 183, 187 Rome 40, 43, 54, 66, 70, 83, 97, 171, 182, 186, 200, 205, 210–211, 234, 292–293, 296 Roubiouni, Nicolaus 291–294, 307 Rouen 280 royalism 55, 67, 167, 170 Rubino, Andrea 55 Rudolf II (Holy Roman Emperor) 144 rumor 60, 172, 240, 242, 245, 256 Ruoppolo, Ciommo 65 Russia / Muscovy 11–12, 165, 219–225, 227–231, 233, 235, 240–249, 252–253, 255–256 sacredness 6, 44, 70 Salamanca 61 salvation 66, 107, 112 Samson 83 Santafede, Fabrizio 66 satire 264, 268, 289, 291, 293, 295, 297–301, 303, 305, 307 Savery III, Jacobus 106 Savoy 94, 96, 101, 108, 113 Savoy, Margaret of 198 Saxony 174–175, 183

Index scaffolds 5, 86–87, 171, 231, 233–234, 253, 255 Schlägl 139, 149 sculpture 38, 56, 61, 66 Sebastian I (King of Portugal) 201, 211 Senatus Consultum Ultimum 279, 281 separatism 55, 198, 243, 256 sexual activity 42–43, 97, 104, 107 Shanghai 26–27 Shepherd, C. 270–274, 277 Shi Lang 27–28, 33 Sicily 36 sieges 118, 126, 128–130 Simbirsk 241, 252 Simultanbild (comic strip) 8, 126, 128 slavery 12–13, 174–175, 240, 244, 265, 279, 289–291, 297–301, 304 soldiers 12–13, 21, 33, 62, 64, 67–68, 87, 103, 106–109, 125, 127–128, 130–131, 134, 144, 146, 148–149, 152–157, 177–178, 185, 210, 222, 232–234, 240–241, 265, 268–270, 275, 277–279, 281–283, 290, 295, 297, 305–306 songs 26–27, 34, 115–116, 123, 152, 154, 269, 275, 277 Sousa Macedo, António 205 sovereignty 59, 203, 267 Spadaro, Micco 57, 62 Spain / Spanish Empire 11, 36–37, 44, 48, 49–50, 55–57, 59–60, 6–63, 67, 70, 81, 87, 88, 100–102, 113, 171, 198–199, 201, 207, 210–213, 215, 217, 291, 293, 295–297, 300 Spatt, David 139 spectatorship 5, 10, 12–13, 38–40, 43, 45–46, 87, 102, 130, 253, 256 spirituality 42, 69 stadtholder 5, 7, 128 Stangl von Waldenfels, Hans Erhard, 131 States General (Dutch Republic) 96 statues 44, 45, 59, 62, 65, 69, 81- 83, 120, 232, 234 Stockholm 205 Stockmann, Johann Adam 292–293, 295 Struys, Jan 241 Stuart, Charles Edward 268 Stuart, House of 177, 182, 264, 268

Index sultan 183, 185, 243, 256 Sweden 121, 144, 179, 183, 223–224, 240, 242–243, 245, 253, 255 Switzerland 94, 113, 154, 183, 185, 249 swords 64, 79, 81–82, 86, 120–121, 135–136, 138, 146, 177–178, 180, 198, 207, 272–273, 275, 304 symbolism 7, 10, 58–59, 62, 64, 68, 79, 82–83, 85, 109, 133, 155, 173–174, 178– 179, 180, 182–183, 199, 201, 203, 207, 234, 246, 248, 265, 269–270, 282, 299 Taiwan 24, 27–28, 34 Taizu 22–23 Taquet, Francisco 212 Tatars 247–248, 256 Tattenbach-Reinstein, Johann Erasmus, 173 terrorism 1, 2 Testelin, Henri 294 Theodosius I (Byzantine Emperor) 39–40 theology 56, 157 Theophanes 41, 43–45 Thessaloniki 36 Thevet, André de 244 Thirty Years’ War 11, 55, 95, 107, 116, 126, 131, 144 Thököly, Imre 11, 168, 171- 179, 181–183, 185–187, 243 Thomasis, Aliprandus Nicolaus de 136, 138 Thomasis, Horatius de 138 Tilly, Johann Tserclaes, Count of, 126, 156 Tomlinson, Matthew 233 torture 2, 98, 107, 224, 228, 232, 252, 305 Toussaint Louverture, FrançoisDominique 304–305, 307 trade 6, 11, 27, 67, 81, 212, 221, 224, 230, 240–242, 245, 248, 253, 255, 283, 298–300 Transylvania 165, 168, 180, 183, 185–187 treason 198, 210–211, 222, 252 treaties 60, 62, 113, 167, 281 Treiber, Alexander 150 tsar 220, 223, 240–242, 244–245, 248, 252 Turin 94, 112–113 Turkestan 23–24 Tutini, Camillo 54, 67

323 tyranny 41, 43, 45–46, 81, 95, 97–98, 100, 108, 118, 124, 268, 279 Tyrol 115, 118, 125 Ukraine 11, 220, 249 Ulm 129 Ulster 95 United States of America 12–13, 265, 270, 281–283, 300 Upper Austria 10, 12, 115, 117–127, 129, 131–132, 134–135, 138–140, 142, 144, 146–151, 156–157 Upper Austrian Peasant War 115, 124 usurpers 38–39, 41, 43–46, 50, 211, 214, 245 Vasari, Giorgio 5 Vasconcelos, Miguel de 198, 208, 215 Vasilii III (Grand Duke of Russia) 243 Vasilii Shuiskii (Tsar of Russia) 252 Venice 39, 171, 179, 205, 212 Verde, Marino 67 viceroyalty 55, 57–62, 65, 70, 165 Vienna 119, 121, 135, 142, 166–168, 170–173, 175, 177–178, 186, 224, 243 Virgin Mary 65–67, 70, 120, 138, 177, 201, 271–272 Virginia 271–272 Vondel, Joost van den 5 Walch, Martin 274–276 Waldensians 10, 94–98, 102–106, 108–110, 112 Wallenstein, Albrecht von 126 Warburg, Aby 8 wars of religion 10, 96, 135, 143 Washington, George 263–264, 266, 269–270, 272–274, 277–278, 281 Watts, William 144, 156 weaponry 2, 36, 55, 62–64, 67–68, 70, 83, 87, 96, 119, 121, 123, 127, 130–131, 136, 143– 144, 146, 148, 150, 152–153, 182–183, 198, 201, 203, 207, 221–224, 228, 240–241, 252, 255, 270, 272–273, 275, 294, 305 Weber, Max 68, 88 Wedgwood, Josiah 299 Weillinger, Achaz  130–131, 135 Weimar Republic 267

324 Wesselényi, Ferenc 165, 167–168, 170 West Indies 100, 112, 207, 291, 304, 307 Wolfe, James 266 Wölfflin, Heinrich 8 women 107, 113, 136, 138, 173, 198, 229, 294 woodcut 2, 3, 6, 25, 30, 99–101, 105, 112, 123, 220 Yao Qisheng 24–26, 28, 33–34

Index Zeller, Christof 135 Zheng Kaiji, 29 Zhou Pengbai 29 Zoe Porphyrogenita (Byzantine Empress)  47 Zrinyi, Miklós 165 Zrínyi, Péter 180, 249