Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 A turning-point in the history of the factional system in the Sacred College: the power of pope and cardinals in the age of Alexander VI
- 2 Court and city in the ceremony of the possesso in the sixteenth century
- 3 ‘Rome, workshop of all the practices of the world’: from the letters of Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici to Cosimo I and Francesco I
- 4 The ‘world's theatre’: the court of Rome and politics in the first half of the seventeenth century
- 5 Factions in the Sacred College in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
- 6 The Secretariat of State as the pope's special ministry
- 7 The cardinal-protectors of the crowns in the Roman curia during the first half of the seventeenth century: the case of France
- 8 The squadrone volante: ‘independent’ cardinals and European politics in the second half of the seventeenth century
- 9 Roman avvisi: information and politics in the seventeenth century
- 10 Hegemony over the social scene and zealous popes (1676–1700)
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ITALIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
4 - The ‘world's theatre’: the court of Rome and politics in the first half of the seventeenth century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 A turning-point in the history of the factional system in the Sacred College: the power of pope and cardinals in the age of Alexander VI
- 2 Court and city in the ceremony of the possesso in the sixteenth century
- 3 ‘Rome, workshop of all the practices of the world’: from the letters of Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici to Cosimo I and Francesco I
- 4 The ‘world's theatre’: the court of Rome and politics in the first half of the seventeenth century
- 5 Factions in the Sacred College in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
- 6 The Secretariat of State as the pope's special ministry
- 7 The cardinal-protectors of the crowns in the Roman curia during the first half of the seventeenth century: the case of France
- 8 The squadrone volante: ‘independent’ cardinals and European politics in the second half of the seventeenth century
- 9 Roman avvisi: information and politics in the seventeenth century
- 10 Hegemony over the social scene and zealous popes (1676–1700)
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ITALIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
Summary
the ‘world's theatre’
No less than the honour and advantage accruing to this Holy See and Catholic Church and to good letters will be the glory afforded Your Highness and the house of Bavaria by the perpetual preservation of such precious spoils and so noble a trophy in this, the world's theatre.
With these words Ludovico Ludovisi, cardinal-nephew of Gregory XV, thanked Duke Maximilian of Bavaria for donating the valuable Palatine Library of Heidelberg to the Vatican (a gesture which in this early phase of the Thirty Years’ War was certainly not made without an eye to political advantage). And Rome in this period certainly deserved the title of the ‘world's theatre’, especially in the years between the tenures of Gregory VIII and Sixtus V, a period culminating in the variously magnificent papacy of Clement VIII, following as it did the abjuration of Henry IV and the end of the Religious Wars in France and coinciding with the renewed importance of the militant Counter-Reformation church, alongside France and Spain, on the international scene. Rome was a ‘theatre’ above all in the ‘political’ sense, a place in which tensions and conflicts rife in Europe came to head, but where it was also possible to mediate and form alliances. It was a theatre in which individual bravura in dealing with the succession of events and ‘turns’ of fortune was indispensable and where the actors’ ability to hold the stage was of vital importance.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492–1700 , pp. 78 - 98Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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