‘Recording and Anthologizing Personal, Communal, and Interstate Conflict in Late Imperial Chinese History.

For the final blog of our early modern history in conflict series, we turn to the presentation of self-described ‘interloper’ Hilde De Weerdt, bringing a medieval Chinese perspective to our early modern European proceedings. De Weerdt’s presentation explored three cases of conflict, each at different scale: the personal, the communal, and the inter-state.[....]

In the penultimate paper of the webinar, Gerard Wiegers of the UvA presented us with an extraordinary source: the Lead Books of Sacromonte. Discovered between 1595 and 1600 near Granada, these books professed to be early Christian lore, yet were mainly written in Arabic. Besides eschatological revelations which merge Christian and Islamic scripture, the text contains a historical narrative according to which the Blessed Virgin Mary had tasked St James (or Santiago) to convert Spain. Debates around the authenticity of the Lead Books lasted well into the 17th century until the Vatican in 1682 condemned them as Islamic heresy.

Wiegers places this source in the context of religious conflict in 16th century Spain. Following the Christian conquest of Granada in 1492, Muslim minorities had suffered increasingly repressive treatment and forced conversions. Many continued to practice their believes in secret and authorities prohibited converted Muslims (Moriscos) from using their language and customs, leading to the Morisco Revolt in 1568-71. The Lead Books’ history of early Spain should convince Christian authority of greater tolerance towards the Moriscos and their practices. Not only did it frame Arabic as the language of early Spanish Christianity but it reversed the image of St James who in Christian crusade-ideology had served as a warrior against the Muslims. Furthermore, elements of the eschatological revelations contained phrases from Islamic scripture and implicitly advised Moriscos to retain their believes in an increasingly intolerant environment.[....]

Shannon McSheffrey chose a slightly different approach to the theme of history in conflict. That is: she looked at the ways in which the recording of an event can be about forgetting as well as remembering. Her case study was the Evil May Day in London of 1517, a riot that was a protest against the number of immigrants residing and working in the city. The archival documentation of the Evil May Day is the most striking. Though the riot itself and the aftermath must have consumed the City – through the month of May public the City witnessed show-trials of the rioters and spectacular executions of perhaps forty of the rioters in the City’s most central places – there is very little evidence in the civic archives about Evil May Day. The riot against immigrants in London was a deeply embarrassing event for the city as a corporate government body, and a form of corporate amnesia was the response.

Although we cannot always know what was omitted, sometimes other surviving evidence offers a glimpse at a deliberate refraining from recording certain things in official records. Guild and legal documents indicate that the mayor and aldermen were busy issuing decrees and trying to establish order on the night of the riot itself and in the days and weeks that followed, but none of those were copied into the usual registers for such orders. Instead, the civic records for the day before the riot and the weeks that followed had some oblique references to the handling of the king’s reaction to the violence, but otherwise were filled with the City’s ordinary business of property transactions and petty trade disputes sensibly settled by the wisdom of the court of Aldermen. If all we read were the official archival records of the City of London, we would think that business continued as usual in May 1517. We know from other evidence, however, that these were extraordinary rather than ordinary times: the crown ordered that the bodies of the executed – some dismembered as traitors – remain on scaffolds in marketplaces and at the City gates. The crown meant for the consequences of the riot to be imprinted on Londoners’ memories: the City’s record-keepers, by contrast, responded by pretending it wasn’t happening.[....]

‘Who belongs to the parish? Parish conflicts on household settlement status and access to poor relief in eighteenth-century Flanders and France.’

Next up in the history in conflict webinar was Marjolein Schepers, who turned our attention to the coastal areas of 18th century Flanders and France. Central to her talk were letters written between parish officials regarding poor relief, responsibility and belonging.[....]

In the following presentation, Carlo Taviani took us on a tour through the centuries and from the USA to the Black Sea, demonstrating how the history used in conflict can itself be conflicted. In 1716, Scottish Economist John Law convinced the French government of a financial scheme, which – in short – intended to have the French public debt absorbed by the Mississippi Company in the French oversea-colonies of Louisiana.

Yet, even before the Mississippi bubble burst in 1720 and collapsed the French economy, it had become the goal of criticism. In a pamphlet, Daniel Defoe had depicted it as a chimera – only a dream – and it is the ensuing conflict between him and John Law which Taviani presented to us. For Law defended himself by pointing towards a historical example. It was, he claimed, Machiavelli’s description of the Casa di San Giorgio (or Bank of St George), in his Florentine Histories VIII, 29, which had served him as a very real template since the bank also transformed public debt’s shares into shares of a sort of corporation. Indeed, in the archives of Genoa, Taviani found that John Law invested in and studied the Casa di San Giorgio which still existed in the 18th century. [....]

Stephen Cummins’ presentation takes us into the realm of legal conflict, in court in seventeenth-century Naples. The Vicaria was the high court of Spanish controlled Naples, and Cummins’ presentation examines how historical argument was used there by officials and by ordinary people. His work on the Vicaria opens up one of Italy’s understudied public institutions. Compared to similar judicial material in Venice, Bologna, or Rome, these Neapolitan judicial sources had received less attention from historians, in part because of damage to the collection during World War Two.
At the centre of Cummins history of the Vicaria was the figure of Don Diego de Soria y Morales, Marchese di Crispano (c.1620-1697). De Soria was an official who worked at the court in Naples, along with several other posts in Spanish service. He was proregente of the Vicaria in the 1660s, and after a brief period in Messina, took up an office specifically created for him, combating banditry in and around Naples.

Letters and requests addressed to de Soria reveal how history figured in the arguments of ordinary Neapolitans. One of their striking features is the presences of the rebellion of 1647/8, which had been a major event in the region but was officially unspeakable thanks to acts of oblivion. In one letter, an officer from the Spanish army sought de Soria’s help, citing his service against the rebellion and in other Spanish conflicts as a reason he deserved the official’s sympathy. De Soria also heard the case of a disgraced monk who had been living in exile in Venice since the rebellion, in the documents produced by this case Cummins finds evidence of a large community of such exiles, maintaining varying degrees of connection with Naples and perpetuating the memory of the rebellion.
Personal histories, however, were often as important as regional ones in the letters de Soria received. Young aristocrats in trouble with their families were one common source of letters seeking his assistance. One young man wrote that he risked losing his inheritance to an uncle who wanted to send him to a monastery. In another letter, a young woman complained of the mismanagement of her estates by family members who were charged with administering them on her behalf. [....]

‘Peace as an argument in conflict II: The peace treaties of Oliva and Alt-Ranstädt in the Swedish-Saxon dispute at the German Perpetual Diet.’

The second presentation of this double session on the use of earlier peace treaties in conflicts took us further in time, to the German imperial diet, or the so-called Perpetual German Diet, of 1663. Goetze approached the subject of peace as an argument in conflict from a different angle than Lena Oetzel, by using the example of a Swedish-Saxon dispute at the German Perpetual Diet during the Great Northern War in the beginning of the 18th century.[....]

‘Peace as an argument in conflict I: The peace of Prague in the Westphalian peace negotiations.’

The history in conflict webinar continued with a double session featuring presentations by Lena Oetzel and Dorothée Goetze, who both focused foreign relations and the use of earlier treaties as arguments in conflicts. Lena Oetzel directed our attention to the Westphalian Peace Congress and, in particular, how the earlier Peace of Prague was referred to in the negotiations between the different parties. [....]

In the second presentation of the day, Jan Hennings, associate professor at Central European University in Vienna, introduced us to the intricacies of diplomatic ceremonial in the relations between early modern imperial powers. How and when to hand over an ambassador’s credentials presented a crucial moment in early modern diplomatic ritual as well as a constant source of conflict. Timing and performance signaled the recognition of status and rank of the parties involved.

In Hennings’ case study, an Ottoman delegate sent to the Russian court in 1704 attempted to deliver his credentials to the Czar directly. The Russian chancellor, however intervened. The tsar’s ambassadors at the sultan’s court did not enjoy this privilege, neither should he. Ambassadors and state officials negotiated such conflicts by asking for equal treatment based on reciprocity or by demanding precedence over other members of the diplomatic corps based on different forms of prestige. Apart from these two strategies,  Hennings identified the past as a central argument in dispute. Of course, the past as historical narratives played an important role in arguing for reciprocity or creating symbolical capital as well, but Hennings also pointed to the use of "the past as precedent”.[....]

Stuart Carroll introduced himself to our audience as a living contradiction: a historian of violence, but not much interested in war. It’s a puzzle appropriate to Carroll’s research on early modern France.  Louis XIV, for example, was no stranger to violent conflict, he led France into many wars and financing them was a defining issue of his reign. But violence amongst his subjects was another issue. Like many early modern monarchs, Louis was drawn to the idea of Solomonic kingship. He was keen to be shown arbitrating his subjects’ disputes, as in the picture above, and this peacemaking was more than propaganda in many cases, says Carroll.[....]