LIBRARY OF WELLESLEY COLLEGE BEaUEST OF Margaret Hastings Jackson Digitized by the Internet Arciiive in 2009 witii funding from Boston Library Consortium IVIember Libraries littp://www.arcliive.org/details/liistoryof popestiiOl 01 rank THE CONFESSION. Photogravure from the original painting by G. H. Kunt{. oaoooo<xxxxxBOuoüooaxKtxxxuxTfrtYnnxxxx3üOouuoauouiJi*. i i HISTORY OF THE POPES LEOPOLD VON RANKE Translated by E. Fowler WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY <i' WILLIAM CLARK, M.A., LL.D., D.C.L. PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN TRINITY UNIVERSITY, TORONTO; FELLOW AND EX-PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA Q 3-1-lTp »COPYRIGHT, 19OI, Bv THE COLONIAL PRESS. ^0 '' 1.' r"' 1 SPECIAL INTRODUCTION LEOPOLD VON RANKE won for himself a position among the historians of the world which he is never likely to lose. Whether we consider the width and depth of his erudition, the impartial spirit in which he conducted his investigations, or the comprehensiveness of his historical views^ we must pronounce him to be the type of the scientific historian and the model who may be safely imitated by all his successors. The long list of his compositions bears sufficient testimony to his unwearying industry. It would hardly be possible to set forth the qualities of this great historian better than was done on the occasion of his death, in May, 1896, by one of the first of our English historians. Dr. S. R. Gardiner. He truly remarks that to speak of Ranke " as the greatest historian of his time is to fail to appreciate his work at its due value. He was more than this. He was a path-maker, and that, too, not in one direction only. He developed instinctively in himself all the tendencies which were to appear in the collective work of a younger generation. It would have been much for any man to lead the way in the conscientious use of manuscript authorities, or in the divorce of history from modern politics, or in the search into the roots of character and action in the mental and moral attainments of each special period. It was Ranke's glory, not only to have pointed the way in all these matters, but in one respect to have reached an achievement which was all his own. No one else has been able to speak with equal authority on the history of so many nations. Grote wrote nothing on the history of Rome, Mommsen has written nothing on the history of Greece. Ranke was equally at home in the Germany of the Reforma- tion, in the France of Louis XIV, and in the England of Charles I and Cromwell." It can hardly be said to derogate from the peculiar character ; iv SPECIAL INTRODUCTION and excellency of Von Ranke's work that he lived through the most eventful period in the history of the world, and that the state of Germany during his youth almost constrained him to give his attention to the history of the other nations of Europe and it may have arisen as much from his circumstances as from his temperament that he showed more interest in the doings of statesmen than in the lives and characters of the actors in the dramas whose progress he narrates. One advantage at least results from his lack of enthusiasm, that he does not, like Macaulay, write under the perpetual bias of political sentiment. We can always follow him without the slightest fear of being misled by the prejudices of the writer. If Ranke had begun his historical investigations at a some- what later period, his tone might have been different. The fall of the great Napoleon took place when he was barely twenty years of age, and he was nearly seventy-five when the second Napoleon proclaimed war upon Prussia and gave occasion for the foundation of the new German Empire. The greater part of his historical work was accomplished in the interval between these two events. Ranke was born December 21, 1795, at Wiehe, a small town of Thiiringia, about twenty-seven miles from Merseburg, cap- ital of the government of the same name in Prussian Saxony. He studied at the Gymnasium of Schulpforta, and subsequently at the University of Leipzig under the eminent Greek scholar Hermann, by whom he was guided to the study of the his- torians of antiquity. On leaving the university in 1818, he was made professor of history at the Gymnasium of Frankfort- on-the-Oder, a position in which he was enabled to give the greater part of his thoughts to the study of history, especially to the latter part of the fifteenth century and to the sixteenth. As a result of these studies, he published, in 1824, his first con- tributions to history, namely, a " History of the Latin and Germanic Nations " (" Geschichte der romanischea und ger- manischen Völker ") and " Contributions to the Critical Study of some Modern Historians" {^'Kritik newer Geschicht- schreiber"). In the latter work he laid down the true prin- ciples of historical composition, the scientific methods which he was henceforth to inculcate by precept and example. It has been remarked that these treatises are characterized by a certain SPECIAL INTRODUCTION V crudeness of style. Germans, as a people, have never greatly excelled in this respect, and German literature had had only a short life when Ranke began to write. It is, however, more worthy of note that, even in these earlier compositions, the historian already displayed the clearness of insight, the scien- tific instinct, the comprehensiveness of view which he never lost. The first publications of Ranke were so remarkable, espe- cially as being the work of a man living at a distance from great public libraries, that we cannot wonder that they soon came under the notice of the Minister of Public Education, who lost no time in appointing the author Professor extraordinarius in the University of Berlin (1825). In this new post he had much greater facilities for carrying on his historical studies and investigations. At Berlin, in the collection of the Royal Library, he discovered in manuscript the " Secret Relations of the Venetian Ambassadors," giving an account of their diplo- matic missions to the various countries of Europe. Ranke immediately perceived the importance of these documents, and embodied much of their contents in a volume on the " Princes and Peoples of Southern Europe in the Sixteenth and Seven- teenth Centuries"' {"Fürsten u. Völker von Südeuropa"), published in 1827, and republished fifty years afterward under the title " The Ottomans and the Spanish Monarchy in the Six- teenth and Seventeenth Centuries." We can hardly over- estimate the importance of the work of Ranke in bringing to the light documents hitherto concealed from the public eye. At the present day such collections are for the most part acces- sible to all students of history; and it is to Ranke more than anyone else that we are indebted for the change. In 1827 he obtained the means of visiting some of the great libraries and depositories of documents in Southern Europe ; so that he was able to spend four years in Venice, Vienna, Rome, and Florence, where he discovered much material available for future use. Returning to Berlin, he gave himself with great devotion to the duties of his chair, while he afforded proofs of the value of his researches in the South by several publications, among others a history of the Servian Revolution {"Die serbische Revolution, 182g"). One of his most important undertakings about this time was the " Historical and Political vi SPECIAL INTRODUCTION Journal" {" Historische-poUHsche Zeitschrift"), 1832-1836. In this review several valuable studies, on the different forms of government and other subjects, appeared, and were after- ward republished in his collected works. But the work which first gave Ranke his assured place among the great historians— of the world was that which is pre- sented in these volumes " The Popes of Rome, their Church " and State, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (" Die Romanischen P'dhste, ihre Kirche und ihr Staat im XVI und XVII lahrhundert"), of which the first volume appeared in 1834 and the third and last in 1837. To this great work we shall presently return, so that here it may suffice to remark that the work was universally recognized as both adequate and impar- tial, so that it has been translated into the principal languages of Europe, and by three different translators into English. It is truly remarked by a French writer that never before had there proceeded from a Protestant pen an estimate so impartial of the political and religious situation of the epoch of the great crisis of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a picture so striking of the part of the Catholic Church in those times of strife and trouble, or a description so intelligent and saga- cious of all those pontiffs who occupied the Holy See dur- ing that period, from Leo X to Paul IV and Sixtus V. " It was," the writer remarks, " great history, written by a man who loved truth for itself, one who knew well the heart of man, and who was no less able to set forth, in artistic fash- ion, the discoveries of the scholar and the judgments of the moralist." Soon afterward Ranke put forth the first volume of a work which in some measure was complementary to his " History of the Popes," the " History of Germany in the Time of the Reformation" {"Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Refor- mation"). The work extended to six volumes, published from 1839 to 1847. From this time, although individuals might prefer one or another of the historians of Germany, the gen- eral verdict gave to Ranke a place of supremacy among them.