scholarly journals Al Tribunal de Príncipes. An Essay for the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, Which Initiated the Downward Spiral of Saavedra Fajardo's Career as a Diplomat (1640)

2021 ◽  
pp. 410-424
Author(s):  
Tibor Monostori
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Downward Spiral ◽  
Detailed List ◽  
The Government

RESUMEN: Se edita en este artículo un ensayo diplomático escrito por don Pedro de Villa al Cardenal-Infante don Fernando en 1640. Se presentan varios argumentos para demostrar que fue este discurso que inició una larga lista de decisiones tomadas por el gobierno de los Países Bajos españoles que terminaron con la carrera diplomática de Diego de Saavedra Fajardo. Además, el ensayo es una fuente ejemplar y excepcional para mostrar que la percepción sobre la Monarquía Católica en el Sacro Imperio Romano era múltiple: si bien los enemigos superaban a los aliados, había una detallada y larga lista de príncipes y líderes políticos que apoyaban firmemente o condicionalmente Madrid incluso a finales de 1640. ABSTRACT: A political-diplomatic essay written by don Pedro de Villa and sent to the cardinal-infante Ferdinand in 1640 is edited here. A number of arguments are presented to prove this discourse spurred the government of the Spanish Netherlands to take a long series of actions that lead to the ruin of Saavedra Fajardo’s diplomatic career. In addition, the essay is an exemplary and exceptional source showing that the perceptions of the Spanish Monarchy in the Holy Roman Empire were varied. The enemies outweighed the allies, but there was a long and detailed list of princes and political leaders who were strongly or conditionally supportive, even at the end of 1640.

Revaluations, III: James Bryce, “The American Commonwealth”

1958 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-7
Author(s):  
H. G. Nicholas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Half Century ◽  
First Order ◽  
The Government ◽  
Contemporary United States ◽  
Regius Professor

Had Bryce died on his fiftieth birthday, 10 May 1888, he would have been known as the author of The Holy Roman Empire, as a distinguished Regius Professor of Civil Law and as a respectable but undistinguished Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. The record would have been impressive enough but the content of achievement would have been orthodox – such as might be paralleled by many an academic liberal, British or European. Within a few months, however, Bryce broke into a new field and established a reputation of quite another order, with the appearance in December of The American Commortwealth, The book was more than a notable study of American institutions; it marked the recognition by a European mind of the first order of the importance and interest of the government, politics and manner of life of the contemporary United States. Tocqueville had paid such a tribute, a half-century earlier, but his example had not been followed up. Moreover, penetrating as his study was, as an analysis and a prophecy, one element was lacking in his tribute – observation.

Coping with Rebellion: Cities, Mortgagee Lords, and Crown Administrators in the Habsburg Vorlande, 1517–25

2006 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 75-98
Author(s):  
Ludolf Pelizaeus
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
City Council ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Government ◽  
The City

In october 1541, a letter left the city of Innsbruck, in which the government, or Regiment, sharply admonished the mayor and councilors of the city of Belfort in the Sundgau. With all seriousness, the government reminded them that they were obliged to submit to the Lord von Mörsperg, their God-given authority, and if they did not, they would lose their freedom and risk further punishment.1 It is easy enough to identify the petitioner and petitioned in this document: the seigniorial family of Mörsberg/Morimont on one side, and the mayor and city council of Belfort/Beffort on the other. But there was also a third, superior authority involved: the Habsburg regime in Innsbruck and its subordinate, regional representatives who administered the Vorlande from nearby Ensisheim, which had admonished the city to remain “obedient” to the Herrn von Mörsberg. This instruction was, in fact, part of a long series of disputes between mortgagee lord (Pfandherr) and city. This article examines this type of conflict in more detail to present a model for analyzing structural changes through the historical development of three cities on the western edges of the Holy Roman Empire: Belfort, Rheinfelden, and Laufenberg.

Making It Count

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arunabh Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Statistics ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Great Leap Forward

In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People's Republic of China was how much they did not know. The government of one of the world's largest nations was committed to fundamentally reengineering its society and economy via socialist planning while having almost no reliable statistical data about their own country. This book is the history of efforts to resolve this “crisis in counting.” The book explores the choices made by political leaders, statisticians, academics, statistical workers, and even literary figures in attempts to know the nation through numbers. It shows that early reliance on Soviet-inspired methods of exhaustive enumeration became increasingly untenable in China by the mid-1950s. Unprecedented and unexpected exchanges with Indian statisticians followed, as the Chinese sought to learn about the then-exciting new technology of random sampling. These developments were overtaken by the tumult of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), when probabilistic and exhaustive methods were rejected and statistics was refashioned into an ethnographic enterprise. By acknowledging Soviet and Indian influences, the book not only revises existing models of Cold War science but also globalizes wider developments in the history of statistics and data. Anchored in debates about statistics and its relationship to state building, the book offers fresh perspectives on China's transition to socialism.

Lordship and Administration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
Interconnected Networks ◽  
Territorial States

The Holy Roman Empire, and especially Upper Germany, was notoriously politically fragmented in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. A common way to interpret this fragmentation has been to view late medieval lordships, particularly those ruled by princes, as incipient ‘territories’, or even ‘territorial states’. However, this over-simplifies and reifies structures of lordship and administration in this period, which consisted of shifting agglomerations of assets, revenues, and jurisdictions that were dispersed among and governed by interconnected networks of political actors. Seigneurial properties and rights had become separable, commoditized, and highly mobile by the later middle ages, and these included not only fiefs (Lehen) but also loan-based pledges (Pfandschaften) and offices, all of which could be sold, transferred, or even ruled or exercised by multiple parties at once, whether these were princes, nobles, or urban elites. This fostered intensive interaction between formally autonomous political actors, generating frictions and disputes.

Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Scholz
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Free Movement ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
German Nation ◽  
New Perspective

Abstract: Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire tells the history of free movement in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, one of the most fractured landscapes in human history. The boundaries that divided its hundreds of territories make the Old Reich a uniquely valuable site for studying the ordering of movement. The focus is on safe conduct, an institution that was common throughout the early modern world but became a key framework for negotiating free movement and its restriction in the Old Reich. The book shows that attempts to escort travellers, issue letters of passage, or to criminalize the use of ‘forbidden’ roads served to transform rights of passage into excludable and fiscally exploitable goods. Mobile populations—from emperors to peasants—defied attempts to govern their mobility with actions ranging from formal protest to bloodshed. Newly designed maps show that restrictions upon moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century, but unevenly distributed along roads and rivers. In addition, the book unearths intense intellectual debates around the rulers’ right to interfere with freedom of movement. The Empire’s political order guaranteed extensive transit rights, but apologies of free movement and claims of protection could also mask aggressive attempts of territorial expansion. Drawing on sources discovered in more than twenty archives and covering the period between the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, the book offers a new perspective on the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe.

The Bounds of Empire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Lee
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Italian Nationalism ◽  
To Come

Scholars have long believed that ‘medieval’ universalism was supplanted by ‘Italian’ nationalism over the course of the fourteenth century. As this chapter demonstrates, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Although the humanists were often more concerned with the fate of Italy, or of individual cities, than of mankind as a whole, they did not waver in their belief that the Holy Roman Empire enjoyed universal dominion. Only at the very end of the Visconti Wars, when the Empire was seen to threaten the peace and liberty of the peninsula did ‘Italianness’ at last begin to come to the fore. Yet this is not to say that their universalism was unvarying. Depending on whether they chose to view it more as the successor of the ancient imperium Romanum or as an instrument of providence, they could paint it in idealistically ‘Roman’ colours, or endow it with a more ‘hegemonic’ tinge.

scholarly journals VISUALIZING GERMANNESS THROUGH COSTUMES IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
FREDERICK G. CROFTS
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Production Networks ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scholarly Discourse ◽  
Material Exchange

ABSTRACT Examining the understudied collection of costume images from Heidelberg Calvinist, lawyer, and church councillor Marcus zum Lamm's (1544–1606) ‘treasury’ of images, the Thesaurus Picturarum, this article intervenes in the historiography on sixteenth-century German national imaginaries, emphasizing the import of costume books and manuscript alba for national self-fashioning. By bringing late sixteenth-century ethnographic costume image collections into scholarly discourse on the variegated ways of conceiving and visualizing Germany and Germanness over the century, this article sheds new light on a complex narrative of continuity and change in the history of German nationhood and identity. Using zum Lamm's images as a case-study, this article stresses the importance of incorporating costume image collections into a nexus of patriotic genres, including works of topographical-historical, natural philosophical, ethnographic, cartographic, cosmographic, and genealogical interest. Furthermore, it calls for historians working on sixteenth-century costume books and alba to look deeper into the meanings of such images and collections in the specific contexts of their production; networks of knowledge and material exchange; and – in the German context – the political landscape of territorialization, confessionalization, and dynastic ambition in the Holy Roman Empire between the Peace of Augsburg and the Thirty Years War (1555–1618).

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