ABSTRACT
In many ways, the accomplishments of the first decades of the seventeenth century represent the fulfilment or the further elaboration of the accomplishments of the last decades of the sixteenth century. At least two historians, Enrico Caterino Davila of Padua (1576-1631) and Guido Bentivoglio of Ferrara (1577-1644), succeeded in overcoming the ‘crisis of content’ that had afflicted the ‘definitive historians’ of the Italian states. They did so by following the example of the earlier Italian humanist historians of non-Italian countries — that is, by looking beyond the frontiers of peace-plagued Italy to such war-torn, and therefore event-filled, regions as France and the Netherlands. They learned about these regions by going there themselves — Davila as a page at the court of Queen Caterina de’ Medici and a soldier in the army of King Henry iv, Bentivoglio as a papal nuncio. They learned to shape their narratives in accordance with humanist historiographical principles in the literary circles of Carlo Salice in Padova, of Bishop Alvise Lollini at Cadore and of Traiano Boccalini in Rome. Having thus become aware of ‘the splendour and amenity of history’ and ‘the many and varied scenes from human life that it presents’ (Bentivoglio), they were able fully to appreciate the value as a source of ‘lessons about human behaviour’ of what their subject offered them: more ‘bloody battles, unheard-of sieges, horrible sackings, burnings, destruction and atrocities on land and sea’ than those recorded of any previous wars (Davila). They were able to explain all these horrors as the consequences of ‘their most intimate causes’, which invariably turned out, in deference to the strictly observed separation of political and sacred history, to be political or personal rather than religious.1 Better yet, they were able to make the foreign events they described relevant to their Italian readers by weaving them around the career of an Italian hero, Alessandro Farnese, the commander of the Spanish forces in the Low Countries.
