Кембриджская история - Коллектив авторов - The New Cambridge Modern History (Vol. 1 -7) / Кембриджская история Нового времени ( 1-7 тт.) [1961 - 1990, PDF]

Of all the changes that have overtaken historical scholarship in recent times, it may be suspected that a desire to jettison the old hard-and-fast division between 'medieval' and 'modern' has pride of place. This yearning is frequently satisfied by the device of using the word Renaissance to mean primarily not a cultural crisis spread over a period, but a period itself. In the U.S.A. indeed Renaissance conveniently covers the centuries between Petrarch and Vico; and in this volume the 'Renaissance' of the title covers a survey of the main developments in most aspects of European History within an era over-precisely described in the title as running from 1493 to 1520. Such a use of the word to denote an epoch, however long or short, obliterates the ideological sense of the word.
Everything that happens within the time span can be labelled 'Renaissance', just as anything that happened in Victorian Britain can be labelled 'Victorian'. This is quite a reasonable way out of the difficulty, provided one does not confuse the two interpretations of the word. As explained below (p. 2) the harbingers of what a later age would regard as the physical sciences were in no way humanist in their interests. In the new school curriculum, the major innovation of the Renaissance (along with parallel developments in the fine arts), there was naturally a small place allowed to the gentlemanly subject of mathematics. But the time-table was overwhelmingly devoted to Latin. Latin was no longer treated as necessary because one needed it to read the Scriptures and the Missal, but because it was the language of Cicero and Vergil, of truth and beauty in their own right. By means of Latin one might attain the supreme ability—the ability to communicate. Of course such communication was often not in Latin, although a surprising amount of it was. But even when people wrote or spoke in Italian, French or the other vernaculars, those of them who were literate, who were important, had all been to the same sort of grammar school; they all knew the basic Latin classics and the Bible. Even those who had no interest whatever in learning, but only an appropriate place in society, had had the ablative absolute instilled into them, often at a heavy price: what Ascham was later to call 'beating nature'.
The use of the word 'Renaissance' as a period, then, should encourage us to transcend, as contemporaries perforce had to, those frontiers of convenience adopted by historians as temporal divisions. It has been by neglecting such artificial boundaries that much new light has been thrown, for example, on Thomas More and Luther. It is clear from Professor Elton's preface to the paperback edition of the second volume of the N.C.M.H. the degree to which current Reformation research has begun to emphasize the medieval antecedents and influences in much sixteenthcentury religious thought.

This is the second, amended and enlarged edition of a familiar standard work, first published in 1958. Like its predecessor, it describes the open conflicts of the Reformation from Luther's first challenge to the uneasy peace of the 1560s. Reforming movements in all the principal countries are discussed against the background of constitutional development and the political struggles of the ruling dynasties. Europe's relations with the outside world are given due prominence. The second edition incorporates the results of some thirty years of further research and fills some of the gaps, especially in the history of central Europe, which beset the first edition. All chapters that remain from 1958 have been revised, some very substantially, while other contributions are wholly new. The only other volume of The New Cambridge History planned to appear in a second edition is Volume I: The Renaissance scheduled for 1991.

The half century between 1559 and 1610 must assuredly rank as one of the most brutal and bigoted in the history of modern Europe. The massacre in Paris on St Bartholomew's day in 1572; the calculated savagery of the duke of Alba's Council of Blood and the wild atrocities of the Calvinistic Beggars in the Netherlands; the persecution of the Moriscos in Spain—these were merely the more spectacular barbarities of an age unsurpassed for cruelty until our own day.
Yet what, in the history of the later sixteenth century, is just as striking as man's inhumanity to man is man's impotence before events, his inability to control his circumstances or to dominate his destiny. Thus in the political field the greatest monarch of his time, Philip II of Spain, was unable to conquer a weak England or a disunited France; could hold only half his rebellious Netherlands; and ended his reign, as he had begun it, in bankruptcy.1 His noblest opponent, William the Silent, died knowing that a union of his beloved fatherland upon a basis of mutual toleration between rival religions was a dream as remote as the hopes that Sir Edward Kelley and Marco Bragadino cherished of transmuting base metals into gold. With others the gap between aspiration and achievement was narrower only because they pitched their ambitions lower, and indeed for the most part the rulers of this time did pitch their ambitions much lower than those of the preceding generation. Was not one of the most successful of them, Elizabeth I of England, renowned above all for her chronic indecision and her dexterity in avoiding action?
If, however, European rulers and statesmen of the later sixteenth century seemed lesser men than their fathers, this was precisely because their fathers had aimed too high and attempted too much. At the beginning of the century a series of fortunate—or perhaps unfortunate?—marriages had made the young ruler of the Netherlands king of Spain in 1516 and then in 1519 head of the Austrian Habsburg house and, by election, Holy Roman Emperor. So, for the next forty years this man, the Emperor Charles V, became involved, almost continually and generally as a principal, in almost every conflict in every corner of Europe—in that in Hungary, the Mediterranean, and North Africa between Christians and Moslems; in that, centred mainly in Germany, between Protestants and Catholics; in that, centred mostly in Italy, between the French monarchy and the Spaniards; even, through his sister's marriage to the Danish king, in the struggle for Baltic supremacy. Every local quarrel, therefore, easily took on a European significance and princes' ambitions readily swelled to continental dimensions. While Charles V took his imperial role very seriously, the French king, too, saw visions of empire and even Henry VIII of England dreamed of marrying his daughter to the emperor with 'the whole monarchy of Christendom' as their inheritance.
Yet while the ends that princes pursued grew ever higher and wider, the means of pursuing them grew vastly more expensive every year. The expense of the new spreading network of diplomatic and intelligence agents could perhaps by itself have been borne easily enough by all except the poorest. But the cost of the new armies and navies, made necessary by the increasing use of firearms, was so great that by mid-century it had brought even the emperor and the king of France up to and over the edge of bankruptcy. The Turks, too, had almost shot their bolt by the time that Sulaiman the Magnificent died in 1566, while lesser powers had long since abandoned all attempts at keeping up with the Habsburgs and the Valois.
England, for example, exhausted by the efforts of Henry VIII and Protector Somerset to dominate Scotland, had become first little better than a French satellite under Northumberland and had then seemed doomed to absorption in the Habsburg aggregate under the half-Spanish Mary Tudor.

Undeniably the first half of the seventeenth century in Europe (or for that matter in China and to a lesser extent India) was an eventful period, full of conflicts. In China a dynasty collapsed amidst peasant revolts and for the last time nomadic invaders conquered the settled lands. In Europe there were more widespread and prolonged wars than ever before, the assassination of one king and the execution of another, while revolts of whole kingdoms and provinces against their rulers took place from Ireland to the Ukraine, from Muscovy to Naples and from Portugal to Anatolia. But has this period in Europe any distinctive character or significance for those who feel a need to find such things in history ?
Recent fashions would cause many historians to answer No for a variety of reasons. The most general one would be that to make Europe the centre of a general history is at once anachronistic and parochial, a quaint attempt to prolong nostalgic memories of the domination of the world by western European culture and power, which ended in 1942, if not before. As Europe's place in the world has changed, so has our perspective of history. Still obsessed by the view which tacitly dominated so many earlier European historians that power is the essential subject of history and that only success and never failure deserve study, some historians were so disorientated by Europe's loss of power and so beguiled by the rhetoric of the new leaders of Afro-Asian states and by counting the heads of the big battalions that they became prophets, unmaking the past in order to gratify an imaginary present and an improbable future. This first intoxication has scarcely survived the demise of those first leaders. But one curious result has been the proliferation of posts and courses for teaching African history to a much greater extent that those dealing with Asian civilizations which really do have long recorded histories. All states feel a need to supply or invent a history for themselves and this need is now partly met for African ones, as a kind of penitential exercise by their former rulers. This may be politically or morally edifying, the development of techniques for using oral tradition even advances genuine knowledge, but as far as the seventeenth century is concerned, it cannot substantially alter the perspectives of European or world history.

The first eight chapters in this volume are devoted to the more general aspects of European history in the second half of the seventeenth century. They are followed by nine chapters on the countries of western Europe—France, the United Provinces, Britain, Spain, and Portugal—with their possessions in America and Asia and the contacts which existed between Europe and other continents. The final eight chapters describe the countries of central, south-eastern, north-eastern and eastern Europe, a world very different from that of the West where trade and enterprise were developing fast during this period. The volume covers the years from 1648 to 1688; but it has not always been possible to adhere strictly to these dates, especially where they do not mark a well-defined period. In the chapters on France and on Britain, as well as in the chapter on Europe and North America, it has been found more logical to leave the description of the disturbances of the Fronde and of the Interregnum to volume rv and to start this volume with the personal rule of Louis XIV and the restoration of Charles II. Several other chapters begin with the accession of a new ruler or end with the death of a king, thus transgressing to some extent into the period before 1648 or after 1688: thus the chapter on Scandinavia extends to the death of Charles XI of Sweden, and that on Poland to the death of King John Sobieski. The chapters on Philosophy, Political Thought, Art and Architecture, Europe and Asia, the Empire after the Thirty Years War, and the Rise of Brandenburg cover the years from 1648 to 1715, the periods of volumes v and vi, because it has been found more convenient to treat both together. Some other aspects of the period, such as music, will be discussed in volume VI.
The editor wishes to express his gratitude to those of his colleagues in the University of London who have undertaken the arduous task of translation which, in many cases, has also meant adaptation and interpretation: to Dr J. F. Bosher of King's College who has translated the chapter on French Diplomacy and Foreign Policy; to Mr A. D. Deyermond of Westfield College who has translated the chapters on Spain and on Portugal; to Dr. Ragnhild Hatton of the London School of Economics and Political Science who has translated the chapter on Scandinavia; to Dr J. L. H. Keep of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies who has translated the chapters on Poland and on Russia; to Mr W. Pickles of the London School of Economics and Political Science who has translated the chapter on Political Thought; and to Mrs P. Waley of Westfield College who has translated the chapter on Italy. The editor's greatest debt of gratitude is due to his wife who has assisted him throughout in the work of editing, comparing and checking the contributions of so many historians.

In accordance with the practice of the series, all dates are given in New Style—ten days, from 1700 eleven days, later than Old Style—unless otherwise indicated by the letters O.S. In either case the year begins on 1 January. The styles peculiar to Sweden and Russia have been ignored.
The spelling of East European place-names has presented some difficulty, since frontiers were changing rapidly at the time and many territories have since developed a national status of their own. No rigorous consistency can be claimed for this volume. While we have usually chosen the forms most familiar in English-speaking countries, it has sometimes seemed courteous, as well as more realistic, to respect local spellings. To retain 'Thorn' for the Polish 'Toruri', for example, must now appear plainly unhistorical to anyone who has been there, not least if he is a student of the Teutonic Knights. In a work like this the opportunity must surely be taken to accustom western readers to absorb a modicum of East European terms in general, even if we are not yet ready to do the same for the whole wide world, of which this series was never intended to be the history. Where any ambiguity might arise in such cases, two forms are given on first mention.
Unless otherwise stated, places of publication are London and Paris respectively for book titles in English and French cited in footnotes.

This volume surveys the political, military and diplomatic history of a period of changing alliances and limited and gentlemanly but frequent wars. It gives particular weight to the emergence of Prussia and Russia as European Powers and to the rivalry of France and England in America, in India and on the high seas. The economic background to these national fortunes is of increasing international trade, technological progress and colonialisation. Socially, European society slowly evolved from the domination of the aristocracy to that of urban populations and bourgeois administrators. Intellectually, the culture of Europe took on what are recognized as specifically eighteenth-century forms and ideals. From the point of view of world history this period saw the confirmation of European pre-eminence and dominion.