ABSTRACT
With this work, I have hoped to shed oblique light on the life of Sleidan, who shaped his age in so many ways, be it as a historian or as a diplomat. We have established a much more secure base for understanding Sleidan and his varied career that led him across so many boundaries. The case of Sleidan has provided us with a fine study of the struggle of a historian in a confessional age. In his Four Empires, Sleidan adhered largely to the guiding principles of Protestant historiography as defined by Gilmont: ‘rejet de la papauté, lecture de l’histoire à la lumière des Écritures, en particulier de Daniel, mise en évidence du témoignage des martyrs et recherche du petit reste d’Israël.’2 This was how the Protestants attempted, in a massive process of revisionism, to rewrite history to make it their own in order to form a communal Protestant identity. Likewise, this was the aim of the Commentaries, which intended to describe and re-evaluate an event which would change the history of Christendom forever. The view of the Reformation brought forward by Sleidan was certainly Protestant, but it was Bucer’s and Sturm’s view of Protestantism that it clearly reflected. Although both had passed away before the Commentaries were published, their influence is plainly evident throughout the text. In this respect, the Commentaries can be interpreted as their theological and political testimony.
