"In order to incite the people, the heretics made all their preachers preach that the emperor wanted to take away all the privileges of their religion."
The writer is an anonymous informer in the Imperial court in Vienna, and his weekly account, obviously partial to his Catholic audience, reached the Grand Ducal court and who knows where else, before eventually ending up among the papers in the Medici collection in Florence. I’m looking for the origins of news reporting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and I’m immersing myself in handwritten newsletters about what was going to be called the Thirty Years War, fought between 1618 and 1648 with satellite conflicts involving three continents. The account goes on: "Wednesday [23May] they went into the chancery well-armed, and there they read a writing to the [imperial] lieutenants.” What the angry Protestants did next had elements of comedy and tragedy at the same time. “Ulrich Chiazichi grabbed Baron Slavata and threw him out of the windows facing the castle moat . . . and Smergischi seized Baron Sminciaschi and threw this one out too, and then they did the same thing with secretary Philip, a Catholic, and although the first drop is more than 28 1/2 Florentine braccia, and another 14 braccia because they rolled down the bank and were shot at with harquebuses," the three nonetheless survived.
Brendan Dooley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at UCC. A recipient of the Advanced Laureate Award from the IRC (2019), he has recently authored The Continued Exercise of Reason: Public Addresses by George Boole (M.I.T. Press, 2018) as well as Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy (Bloomsbury: 2017) and A Mattress Maker’s Daughter: the Renaissance Romance of Don Giovanni de’ Medici and Livia Vernazza (Harvard: 2014).
Published: 21 Jul 2017 Categories: History, The Busy Season