The Protestant Reformation and revolt against Spain led to major struggles among civic and religious leaders over how to care for the poor in the cities of Holland. For centuries parish charity had been devoted to all poor residents. Calvinists, however, intended their church deacons (who were responsible for charity) to care primarily, if not exclusively, for poor church members. Focusing on six cities, this study shows that the struggle over charity is best understood as a conflict between two distinct visions of Christian community during the Reformation.

This is the first book to attempt a comprehensive analysis of the state of Spain's naval forces in the years following the defeat of the Great Armada in 1588 and during the seventeenth century. This was a period in which all of Europe's maritime powers were attaching increasing importance to naval warfare in their bid to topple Spain and to seize the rich pickings of her vast empire. The book's findings throw new light on the conservation of Spain's timber resources, naval funding, and the recruitment and status of the Spanish seaman, in a study of the political, social, economic and...

The reading public outside Sweden knows little of that country's history, beyond the era in the seventeenth century when Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus became a major European power by her intervention in the Thirty Years' War. In the last decades of the seventeenth century another Swedish king, Charles XI, launched a less dramatic but remarkable bid to stabilize and secure Sweden's position as a major power in northern Europe and as master of the Baltic Sea. This book gives an account of what was achieved under the absolutist direction of a distinctly unglamorous, but pious and conscientious...

The reign of Philip III of Spain (1598SH1621) has been viewed traditionally as the age when Spain's world power started to wane. This book reappraises this interpretation and demonstrates that this period represented a realignment of Spanish power in world affairs. It also analyzes the career of the Duke of Lerma, Philip III's chief minister, the first of a series of European royal favorites (such as the Duke of Buckingham, Cardinal Richelieu, and the Count-Duke of Olivares) who influenced politics, court culture and the arts during the seventeenth century.

It is assumed widely that "war made the state" in seventeenth-century France. Yet this study challenges the traditional interpretations of the role of the army as an instrument of the emerging absolutist state, and shows how the expansion of the French war effort contributed to weakening Richelieu's hold on France and heightened levels of political and social tension. This is the first detailed account of the French army during this formative period of European history. It also contributes more generally to the "military revolution" debate among early modern historians.

Filippo Strozzi (1489 1538), the Florentine aristocrat and banker, is usually remembered for the dramatic exploits at the end of his life. Forced into exile, he became an outspoken defender of the last Florentine Republic against the tyranny of the city's new dukes. His place in Florentine history, however, changes drastically when we focus not on his final years but on his extensive career as a Medici favourite and loyal financier. At the courts of the Medici popes he furthered the grandiose schemes of Leo X and Clement VII and accumulated a personal fortune of legendary size. Dr Bullard's...

In Florence in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the essentially medieval values of the age of Dante were transformed into the intellectual attitudes characteristic of the early Renaissance. Mr Green examines this change as it was reflected in the works of the city's vernacular chroniclers. These merchant historians evolved out of the traditional universal chronicle of the Middle Ages an embryonic form of the modern history, exemplified at the beginning of the fifteenth century by the Istoria di Firenze of Goro Dati. In the course of this transition from chronicle to history, the...

This book is a study of the relationship between ideology and social behaviour. Professor Crew analyses the attitudes and characters of the Calvinist ministers who preached in the Netherlands in the mid-sixteenth century and their effect on the popular religious upheavals which occurred during the summer of 1566. The hedge-preaching and iconoclasm which erupted in the period before the Dutch Revolt have been the subject of considerable speculation among historians, who have have developed a variety of interpretations of these events. Professor Crew views the Troubles in the broader context of...

The monarchy of Louis XVI suffered revolution and then destruction after failing to settle its financial difficulties. What precisely were those difficulties? In this book, Professor Bosher shows that the monarchy was financed by a chaotic system of private enterprise which proved increasingly unmanageable and wasteful. Hundreds of profit-seeking accountants - 'capitalists', in the language of the time - stood in the way of reform and even of clear accounting until governments of the French Revolution eventually nationalized the financial system and changed it 'from capitalism into a...

This is a comprehensive study in English of political thought in Spain during the Renaissance. In the early sixteenth century Castile experienced two major constitutional crises caused by the accession of a Habsburg ruler (shortly to become Holy Roman Emperor) to her throne, and by the discovery and conquest of America. Politically, these circumstances created a bizarre situation in which the venerable idea of medieval empire was forced to co-exist with a novel, imperial vision made inevitable by expansion in the new world. The strain imposed on Castile's constitutional fabric stimulated the...