European Review of History: Revue europ√©enne d'histoire最新文献

ABSTRACT

Information provided a crucial means for the aggregation of composite polities, a notion first developed in the context of late medieval European multiple kingdoms, but one that can be extended chronologically and geographically to include a wider range of political arrangements that extended to large parts of the early modern world. To what extent did communications networks hold composite polities together, and what challenges did those networks face? These concluding remarks on this special issue of European Review of History, entitled Information and the government of the composite polities of the Renaissance world (c. 1350-1650), assess the viability of the notion of composite polities, the role of information and the nature of their archives.

ABSTRACT

Recent research has widely emphasized the role of public written records and data-managing strategies in late-medieval governmental growth. The necessity to control information and to assure that a timely stream of news and communications circulated among the various components of a composite domain became central for princes and governments. Such a need was translated into new documentary techniques and archival organization by the endless work of many professionals at various territorial levels. However, the increasing recourse to recorded information was a multifaceted phenomenon. To better understand its complexity, the essay will investigate the intersection of spoken and written strategies of information-gathering and negotiation. Secondly, the paper will also take into account the ambivalent dynamics underlying the recording of the various means required not only to rule a composite territorial domain, but also to control its administrative, judicial and fiscal geography. Whereas the use of written records became the norm for the establishment of a new political order, that practice sometimes, and for different reasons, also contributed to preserving the memory of a different past. In order to adequately capitalize on late-medieval Italy’s complexity, the essay will examine different records and different contexts. The examples will be taken from a set of composite polities in post-communal northern and central Italy (ranging from Milan to Florence or Mantua) which shared some common features, but which were also different in size, strength, ideological models and material constitution. The considered timespan will be a long Quattrocento going from the mid-fourteenth to the early sixteenth century.

ABSTRACT

The first ‘globalization’, which from the sixteenth century united the four parts (or continents) of the world, was first of all accomplished in terms of distance and time. There was extreme tension between the Philippines, the last circle of the Hispanic Empire, and its centre, Madrid. Here, information and instructions took three to five years, round trip. Contemporaries were aware of such tension and the complexities it entailed. For this, the Philippine authorities relied on the so-called procuradores (procurators), a group of deputies entrusted with power of attorney, who travelled across the globe, facing constant dangers, unforeseen difficulties and often long delays. Procuradores travelled a variety of routes, including going directly to Spain (‘La carrera de España’), travelling through the viceroyalty of New Spain and its capital Mexico City or crossing the Indian Ocean. In a global empire like the Spanish Catholic monarchy, authorities had to rely on individuals entrusted with producing and transmitting information, which they had to physically submit in the form of pleas and reports at court. In essence, the monarchs’ decision-making process in the Iberian Peninsula relied on information from the Empire’s local communities. Imperial policy is not therefore developed in one centre or in several centres, but in multilateral exchanges on different scales. This essay highlights three interconnected issues: first, the role of information as resource and crucial asset in the relationship between the King, his agents and his distant subjects; second, the importance of travel and physical presence at the Spanish Court for submitting pleas that, theoretically, could have been sent via letter; finally, the interconnection of religious, political and economic interests in the management of the monarchy’s affairs. The authors conclude with two case studies describing the religious experience of displacement and supplication: the journeys of Diego de Guevara to Fernando Moraga.

ABSTRACT

The evolution of the Swiss Confederation from a local alliance among Imperial estates to a national entity on the European stage can be mapped by tracking the way that federal business was archived from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. The original Diet (Tagsatzung) established after the allied cantons gained shared territories in the Aargau in the 1420s lacked the personnel or institutional identity necessary to undertake any archival activity. As the Confederation gained institutional definition and became a regional player in the politics of the Holy Roman Empire and of Central Europe, however, documentary practices became increasingly routinized, and stable federal collections began forming in parallel in the archives of the leading cantons. Consisting of durable representations of ongoing debates and negotiations and preserved in documents (Abschiede) that were circulated differentially depending on the matters and parties involved, the emerging confederal archive was distributed in that no single location possessed a complete version, and imaginary in that contemporaries regarded it as a comprehensive unity despite its very real physical and material fragmentation. In the later sixteenth century, a separate archival collection reflecting the Confederation’s shared business emerged in the administrative centre of Baden (Aargau), reflecting the consolidating identity of Confederation as it moved out of the Empire’s orbit. Repeated efforts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to complete and protect this collection referred to it as an archive despite its unusual characteristics. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, projects to create a Swiss national archive, either virtually or in print, culminated in the printed Eidgenössische Abschiede that created a documentary record of a Swiss state since the thirteenth century that had never existed historically.

ABSTRACT

Starting in the 1340s, the Crown of Aragon strengthened its position in the Western Mediterranean by absorbing the Kingdom of Majorca (1343), reincorporating the realm of Sicily (1392) and securing its control over constantly rebellious Sardinia (1420). To govern those territories, which were distant from the royal court and separated by sea, the kings of Aragon developed a pervasive information strategy that facilitated the retrieval of data from their archives and the transformation of that data into useful knowledge that kept them informed about the three islands’ administration. The monarchs developed regional series of registers specifically dedicated to Majorca, Sardinia and Sicily in which orders and ordinances pertaining to the islands were recorded and they created or strengthened territorial archives for preserving records and accounts produced in the localities. They also relied on a network of accountable officers and informants who updated them via official and unofficial letters and, finally, they gathered intelligence using envoys who travelled continuously across the Mediterranean to inform the Crown on a vast range of affairs pertaining to the islands. This essay explores these topics during the long fourteenth century, using the records and correspondence preserved in various archives of the Catalan-Aragonese world and emphasizing the role of both the written word and oral communication for ruling a late-medieval composite polity like the Crown of Aragon.

ABSTRACT

This special issue uses information as a lens through which to examine the operation of the Renaissance world’s composite polities and political unions, such as the Venetian thalassocracy or the Spanish Empire. To date, late-medieval and early modern scholarship has mostly neglected the role of information in ruling those polities. Yet information was crucial, for it allowed authorities to know what was happening in their dominions and colonies and thus shaped their policies and interactions with local political societies. The authors of this special issue suggest that a focus on information can help us fully understand how composite polities operated, whether on a regional, Mediterranean or global scale. This introductory essay examines the historiographical debate about late-medieval and early modern composite polities and unions and discusses how and to what extent communication strategies, record-keeping practices and data accumulation can be used to understand how authorities relied on information to exercise their rule over their various dominions. It also discusses this approach in relation to this special issue’s six case studies and other examples of pre-modern composite polities.

ABSTRACT

Like other early modern European states, Venice ruled by correspondence. The letters to and from officials preserved in Venetian and regional archives reflect the structure of the composite state. Just as Venetian rule layered centralized control onto areas of local autonomy, local archives contain series of documents created by governors and captains over centuries of Venetian rule and archived locally, as well as documentation produced by local elites. In Venice itself, letters about daily governance and sensitive intelligence passed through an interlocking system that was designed to manage correspondence about spies and supply chain problems through the same central institutions. This article uses the Council of Ten’s involvement in the dramatic circumstances of the Ottoman Jem Sultan’s rebellion, escape and time as a hostage in the West to examine the particularities of how the Ten gained power through their control of correspondence. Juxtaposing the Ten’s use of sensitive and timely information in a single case with the daily machinery for sending, receiving and archiving correspondence in Venice and in regional archives allows us to understand the internal dynamics of a particular ‘letterocracy’ and how one government council uses information to place itself at the centre of a republican polity.

ABSTRACT

This essay seeks to understand the workings of Portugal’s overseas domains between 1580 and 1640, the time when kingdom and empire found themselves under the umbrella of the Hispanic Monarchy and were ultimately ruled from Madrid in lieu of Lisbon. The authors aim to identify what was new or different during this period with regard to the nature of political information on the Portuguese Empire, and the means of its collection, assessment and transmission. The article begins by perusing the institutional arrangements that made possible this model of imperial management, while simultaneously examining the types of written and visual materials that helped the three Spanish kings of Portugal to learn about and handle their ‘other’ empire. Next, it delves into one of the most important modalities of information during this period: the arbitrio and its rich interplay of evidence and advice. Lastly, the article investigates the deliberate dissemination of imperial news for propaganda purposes and the role played by war stories recounted through the so-called relaciones de sucesos. They argue that the informational fabric of the Portuguese Empire changed significantly during these 60 years and discuss the main transformations introduced.