The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century

By James Muldoon

Juan de Solorzano Pereira (1575-1654) was a lawyer who spent eighteen years as a judge in Peru before returning to Spain to serve on the Councils of Castile and of the Indies. Considered one of the finest lawyers in Spain, his work, De Indiarum Jure, was the most sophisticated defense of the Spanish conquest of the Americas ever written, and he was widely cited in Europe and the Americas until the early nineteenth century.

His work, and that of the Spanish School of international law theorists generally, is often seen as leading to Hugo Grotius and modern international law. However, as James Muldoon shows, the De Indiarum Jure represents the fullest development of a medieval Catholic theory of international order that provided an alternative to the Grotian theory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781512809572

James Muldoon

James Muldoon is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Exeter, Head of Digital Research at Autonomy, and YouTube philosopher at Political Philosophy. He also works directly with digital businesses transitioning to fair work practices. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Time magazine and the Huffington Post.

Book preview

The Americas in the

Spanish World Order

The Americas in the

Spanish World Order

The Justification for Conquest

in the Seventeenth Century

James Muldoon

Publication of this volume was assisted by a subvention from the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities.

Copyright © 1994 by the University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Muldoon, James, 1935–

The Americas in the Spanish world order : the justification for conquest in the seventeenth century / James Muldoon.

p.       cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–8122–3245–3

1. Solórzano Pereira, Juan de, 1575–1655. De Indiarum jure.   2. Latin America—Politics and government—To 1830.   3. Spain—Colonies—America—Administration.   4. Law—Spain—Colonies—History.   5. Christianity and politics.   I. Title.

F1411.S6973M85     1994

Cover: Columbus Welcomed to Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella. From Arthur Gilman, A History of the American People (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1883), p. 19. Used by permission.

For Judith

Who Held My Hand Along the Way

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1.  The Law of Christian-Infidel Relations: The Spanish Title to the New World

2.  To Civilize the Barbarian—The Anthropology and the History

3.  The Mechanics of Political Evolution

4.  The Mechanics of Political Evolution—The Natural Law

5.  A Legitimate Claim to the Indies—The Theory of Papal Power

6.  A Legitimate Claim to the Indies—Papal Jurisdiction over the Infidels

7.  A Legitimate Claim to the Indies—The History of Papal-Royal Relations

8.  Order and Harmony Among Nations

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

As I finish this book dealing with the way in which one important seventeenth-century Spanish lawyer and imperial official justified the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the United States and the nations of western Europe find themselves asking questions about their role in the world that echo the questions that dominated Spanish intellectual life several centuries ago. Should American troops remain in Somalia in an attempt to establish stable government? Should the major powers of Europe stop Serbian expansion? What justifies military intervention in other countries? Is it legitimate to seek change in another state’s policies by employing economic sanctions? In the United States, the federal government has engaged in a variety of actions, military, diplomatic, and economic, to force changes in other societies. Even state and local governments have passed laws forbidding the investment of public pension funds in the securities of countries that pursue policies, such as apartheid, that are repugnant to U.S. standards.

But what is the legal or moral basis for such intervention? Pronouncements of the United Nations are sometimes used to justify intervention in countries that fail to live up to what are seen as world standards of political behavior. In other cases, proponents of intervention simply assert that the need to intervene in another state is obvious to any right-minded observer. When state and local governments in the United States condemn South Africa’s racial policies, they generally do so from the perspective of domestic politics.

What is lacking is a coherent body of thought underlying late twentieth-century judgments about correct or legitimate state behavior. Critics often point out the inconsistencies in these judgments, where behavior condemned in one society is tolerated or ignored in another, again for reasons of U.S. domestic policy. There is a general sense, however, that it is the responsibility of the developed nations of the world, especially the United States, to encourage all nations to adhere to a high standard of human rights for all their citizens and that, when governments fail to act according to such standards, the developed nations have the right to intervene on behalf of those being oppressed.

Juan de Solórzano Pereira (1575–1654), the subject of this book, and his contemporaries would not necessarily assert the same bases for intervention that twentieth-century government officials would, but they would agree that what we now call developed nations have a responsibility to assist less-developed nations in the process of developing modern state institutions. Twentieth-century governments no longer declare that they have a responsibility to Christianize non-Christian societies, but they would argue that the international community should impose sanctions on governments that oppress their own citizens. Unlike Solórzano, we do not look to natural law to provide guidance when seeking to determine whether a government is oppressive, but we do speak of universal human rights as a basis for judgment. In other words, although the language has changed, five hundred years after Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean and began the European encounter with the previously unknown peoples of the Americas, Europeans and their American heirs are again wrestling with fundamental questions of international relations and world order.

Furthermore, in the late twentieth century, as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the debate about intervention in other societies pits moralists against realists. Those who defended the conquest of the Americas centuries ago generally did so on the ground that Christians had a moral responsibility to eliminate the evils that they claimed characterized American societies. These evils included cannibalism, human sacrifice, and idolatry. When Solórzano and other Spanish writers defended the conquest in moral terms, they were consciously reacting against the contemporary Machiavellian thinking that denied any role for traditional morality in politics. At the end of the twentieth century the political realism that has characterized much of U.S. foreign policy for the past forty years appears to be giving way slowly, as moral arguments are again heard. Ever since the war in Viet Nam generated opposition on the ground that it was not simply the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place but was rather an immoral war, moral language has been heard more and more in foreign policy debates. To be precise, several moral languages are being heard as Americans debate public issues from a variety of moral bases, with the result that there is little agreement on what constitutes behavior that would justify U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of other states. At the heart of the problem is the question of the relation of morality to politics. We find ourselves now asking the questions that concerned Solórzano and his contemporaries and looking for an intellectually coherent moral basis that will enable us to act effectively and legitimately in the international arena.

The present book continues a line of research that I have been pursuing for almost three decades. It started with the study of the way in which a few medieval canon lawyers began to consider the relationship between Christians and non-Christians. The next stage dealt with the way in which the Spanish scholastic philosophers of the sixteenth century developed these rudimentary concepts to create a kind of Christian theory of international relations. Solórzano represents the fullest development of these ideas. The next phase of this work will be a general book on the Christian theory of world order from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century.

A major theme of this work is that medieval ideas and institutions continued to shape the way in which Europeans operated long after the supposed end of the Middle Ages somewhere in the fifteenth century. To a medieval historian, much of what was happening in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has a very familiar ring. This is especially true in the realm of political and legal thought, as Brian Tierney has forcefully argued in his Wiles Lectures.¹

A medieval historian crossing the line from the medieval to the modern world in pursuit of medieval ideas and institutions requires the guidance and assistance of those who work in the early modern period. The result is that this book owes a great deal to a number of individuals in a variety of disciplines. In the first place, I owe a great debt to all my colleagues in the History Department at Rutgers-Camden for their patience in answering questions and listening to parts of this work as it progressed. Rodney Carlisle has been especially helpful over the years as I moved cautiously, and sometimes incautiously, into the early modern world and then to the Americas. He has suggested books and articles to consider, read the entire manuscript, and proposed a number of very helpful revisions. Loretta Carlisle, our department secretary, has also been very helpful in dealing with the multitude of details involved in completing this project as well as providing encouragement when things were not going well.

I am also obliged to the sponsors of conferences who have allowed me to develop this work in stages and who have brought me into contact with others who have related interests. Two individuals are of particular importance in this regard. The first is Professor Otto Gründler, Director of the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University and host of the annual Congress on Medieval Studies where I have given several papers on Solórzano. The second is Professor William R. Garrett of St. Michael’s College, Winooski, Vermont, who invited me to attend two conferences on Religion and World Order, where I was able to discuss a variety of issues with a very knowledgeable group of sociologists of religion.

In the course of developing this book, I also benefited enormously from two fellowships that provided time to read and to write without interruption. The first was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where I had the great advantage of working with Professor John H. Elliott, then at the Institute but now Regius Professor of History at Oxford University, and with Professor Giles Constable of the Institute, as well as with a wonderful group of visiting scholars who provided guidance and advice that has proved very helpful. The second was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship that took me to the John Carter Brown Library on the campus of Brown University, where the Director, Norman Fiering, has brought together one of the world’s finest collections of materials dealing with European expansion into the Americas and specialists in history, anthropology, literature, and related fields in an extraordinarily hospitable atmosphere. I especially benefited from conversations with Professor Karen Kuppermann of the University of Connecticut and Professor Fermin del Pino of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas Centro de Estudios Históricos in Madrid.

As usual, the University of Pennsylvania Press has been very helpful. The readers of the manuscript for the Press examined the text with great care, eliminated repetitions and tightened up the writing, and suggested points to develop further. I also wish to express my appreciation to the Research Council of Rutgers University, which provided a grant that has underwritten some of the costs of publication.

Finally, there are two people without whom this and my other work would not have seen the light of day. The first is Professor Edward M. Peters, Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History at the University of Pennsylvania, who for almost thirty years has been a source of great encouragement and support, believing in this project when my own faith wavered. The second is my wife, Judith Fitzpatrick Muldoon, whose love and support has made everything possible.

Introduction

The Spanish discovery and conquest of the Americas had a number of historic consequences.¹ To critics of the conquest of the Americas, the line of adventurers, beginning with Christopher Columbus, who sailed to the West brought with them only death and destruction for the indigenous peoples of the New World. From sixteenth-century missionaries such as Bartolomé de Las Casas to twentieth-century critics such as Kirkpatrick Sale and the National Council of Churches, a continuous series of critics have condemned to varying degrees the consequences that followed Columbus’s successful first voyage.² Above all, the critics have pointed to the undoubted reality of the demographic catastrophe that struck the peoples of the Americas. Some small populations were completely wiped out and, among the larger populations, some scholars have estimated that up to 90 percent of the indigenous people died in the first century of Spanish occupation of the Americas.³ As a direct result of the demographic catastrophe that struck the Americas, the Spanish introduced African slaves into the New World. This action in turn increased the market for such slaves, thus affecting the relations among the peoples of Africa and creating racial problems that still haunt the Americas.⁴

In recent years critics have added ecological disasters, ecocide, to the list of charges against the Europeans who entered the New World.⁵ According to this line of argument, the coming of Europeans to the Americas affected not only the human population of the New World, but also the entire biological system as well. For example, flocks of grazing animals that the Spanish brought to the New World began to flourish in lands where previously there had been none, thus changing the ecological balance. Furthermore, European agricultural methods as well as crops to which the Europeans were accustomed transformed the face of American agriculture.⁶

The efforts of missionaries to convert the inhabitants of the Americas to Christianity have also drawn criticism. From the very beginning of the Spanish occupation of the Americas, there were missionaries who decried the violent methods employed by other missionaries. Some charged that the Spanish were forcing the Indians to accept baptism and then punishing those who continued to practice their traditional religious rituals. Other observers criticized the role of Spanish troops who pacified the countryside in order for the missionaries to preach safely.⁷

Where Catholics vehemently criticized the methods employed in converting the Indians but not the ultimate goal, Protestants condemned the entire missionary effort. To the Protestant Reformers, Roman Catholicism was a corrupt form of Christianity, one that they had first to eliminate in Europe before proceeding to attack it overseas. As a result, they were fiercely opposed to Catholic missionary efforts in the New World, because this work would simply expand the corrupt Roman Church into new areas, making it even harder to eliminate.⁸ Furthermore, not only did Protestants condemn the doctrines that Catholic missionaries brought to the peoples of the New World, they also opposed the way in which many Catholic missionaries Christianized the Indians. Specifically, Protestants condemned the rapidity with which missionaries baptized large numbers of converts in mass ceremonies once these individuals indicated a willingness to receive baptism. In the Protestant view, the inhabitants of the New World required a great deal of instruction in Christianity and in the ways of civilized living, as the Protestants saw civilized behavior, before receiving baptism. In seventeenth-century Massachusetts, for example, Indians who wished to become converts had to live in special settlements, the Praying Towns, where they would learn the ways of townspeople and farmers as well as receive instruction in Christianity. This process was expected to take a long time and the Indians’ spiritual state would be examined before being admitted to the congregation. Baptism would come only at the end of this education process.⁹

Twentieth-century critics have heaped condemnation on the missionaries for yet another reason, the fact that the missionaries destroyed many elements of the indigenous culture of the Americas. Some scholars have, for example, condemned Catholic missionaries for destroying the written materials of the Aztecs as part of their program of eliminating pagan religion in Mexico.¹⁰ Furthermore, the missionaries sought to wipe out all traces of pre-Columbian American religion by destroying temples, statues, and other physical elements of those religions as well as forbidding the Indians to practice their traditional forms of worship. On the basis of this behavior, modern critics find the Spanish missionaries guilty of cultural genocide.¹¹

The air of condemnation that attends much of the current literature about Columbus’s voyages and their consequences is, however, only one side of the story. From the end of the fifteenth century to the present there has also been a tradition that has defended the work of discovery and the subsequent conquest of the New World. W. H. Prescott’s The History of the Conquest of Mexico offered a positive judgment on the effects of the conquest of the New World, a view that reflected Enlightenment optimism about the progress that had occurred in the social and political order since Columbus first sailed. While recognizing that the coming of Europeans meant the collapse of an old order and the death of large numbers of people, Prescott argued that, nevertheless,

The cause of humanity, indeed, has gained. They live under a better system of laws, a more assured tranquillity, a purer faith.¹²

In this view, European civilization provided a more advanced stage of human existence than the Aztecs and other inhabitants of the New World had reached or would have reached on their own. As Prescott and other supporters of the nineteenth century’s conception of progress saw matters, the deaths of so many individuals were unfortunate but necessary if the peoples of the New World were to advance to a higher level of existence. Historians like Prescott and his contemporary Francis Parkman could praise the virtues of the Aztecs and the North American Indians, and even mourn the passing of the unique qualities that marked these societies. For Prescott, the Aztec civilization was of the hardy character which belongs to the wilderness. The fierce virtues of the Aztec were all his own. They refused to submit to European culture—to be engrafted on a foreign stock.¹³ The result was that the decline of the Indian population and the passing of their way of life was, like the subsequent passing of the bison, a necessary, if unfortunate, consequence of the advance of civilization. Such being the case, the Spanish adventurers who followed Columbus to the New World deserved neither praise nor blame, because they were simply the agents of the forces that shape humanity’s movement onward and upward.

The major flaw in both the negative and the positive judgments about Columbus and the effects of his voyages on the New World is that they reduce the study of history to the passing of judgment on the peoples of the past. In making such judgments, however, twentieth-century historians are doing what one of the high priests of self-confident Victorianism, Lord Acton, said they should do. In his inaugural lecture at the University of Cambridge (1895), Acton exhorted his listeners never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.¹⁴ Any historian who accepts the reality of continual, inevitable progress therefore becomes a hanging judge, since presumably the present generation is more advanced morally and otherwise than its predecessors. The historian who chooses to follow Acton’s maxim has, of course, the advantage of knowing the long-term effects of actions that previous generations took, effects unknown to those who caused them. As a result, historians can easily pass judgment on the defendants who stand before them in the dock.¹⁵

In fact, however, the historian should not play the part of hanging judge. Rather than rushing to judgment, the historian’s first question should be not How well did the peoples of the past perform according to the standards of my own day? but rather What did these people do and how did they perform according to what they knew and believed? Having done this, the historian can then legitimately go on to determine whether the people of the past lived up to their own standards and only then compare the beliefs and actions of the past with the values of his own generation.

When we turn to Columbus and his successors, men who created the Spanish domination of the Americas, we must ask first what they did and why they did it, what it was that they intended to achieve. How did the Spanish envision what they accomplished? One way to consider this question is to examine the writings of Spaniards who reflected upon the Spanish experience in the New World, an intellectual process that began within a generation of Columbus’s first voyage and continued on throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Spanish, and only the Spanish, reflected at length on the morality or legality of what they were doing as they encountered the New World and its inhabitants. From the very beginning of contact with the New World, Spanish officials, guided by a long intellectual tradition, acted to prevent the exploitation of the peoples of the New World. Columbus’s attempt to create a trade in slaves drawn from the ranks of the Indians of the Caribbean caused Queen Isabella to forbid such trade as early as 1500.¹⁶ The official Spanish desire to possess the Americas legitimately did contribute to the Portuguese and Castilian request that Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503) issue a bull (eventually three bulls) distinguishing between Portuguese and Castilian spheres of jurisdiction in the newly discovered lands.¹⁷

The great official concern about the legitimacy of the conquest of the Americas and about the rights of the Indians who lived there provided a dominant theme for Spanish intellectual life in the sixteenth century. That century, the Golden Century in Spanish history, saw an unusually close link between explosive overseas expansion, with its attendant growth of wealth and power, and impressive intellectual development centered on a revival of medieval scholastic learning.¹⁸ As explorers were discovering new lands and new peoples, learned officials, university professors, missionaries, and others were attempting to fit these new lands and peoples within a legal and political framework that would legitimize Spanish domination of the Americas.¹⁹

One result of this sixteenth-century Spanish interest in the legitimacy of the conquest of the Americas was an extraordinary outpouring of books on political and legal thought that dealt with various aspects of the conquest.²⁰ In the twentieth century, this material has been studied by a number of authors who have correctly recognized that previous generations of scholars have neglected sixteenth-century Spanish thought.²¹ While this work has examined a broad range of topics in Spanish political thought, especially the conception of constitutionalism, much of it has focused on the debate about the New World that attracted the attention of the most important Spanish thinkers.

Within the overall discussion of the implications of the New World conquest for Spain, scholars have for many years focused on the debate about the rights of the Indians and the efforts to protect them from exploitation. This issue, associated above all with the name of the Dominican friar, Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566), reached a climax in the famous debate in 1550 between Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573) at Valladolid before representatives of the Emperor Charles V. This represented the high point of what Lewis Hanke felicitously described as The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America, the point at which legal and theological theory came closest to shaping Spanish royal policy in the New World.²² Hanke’s work defended the Spanish from many of the charges against them that stemmed from the Black Legend, leading to the charge that he was in turn countering the Black Legend with a White Legend that provided too favorable an evaluation of the Spanish efforts to limit, if not to end, the exploitation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.²³

A second line of interest in sixteenth-century Spanish thought concerns the role of Spanish thinkers in the development of modern international law. This work, associated with the efforts of James Brown Scott (1866–1943), onetime Secretary of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, led to revived interest in the works of Francis Vitoria (ca. 1480–1546) and Francis Suárez (1548–1617). Scott argued that in order to understand modern international law, the origins of which were usually attributed to Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), it was necessary to examine Grotius’s predecessors, of whom, he argued, Vitoria and Suárez were among the most important. His views were epitomized in the title of one of his last works, The Spanish Origin of International Law: Francisco de Vitoria and His Law of Nations.²⁴

The work of the numerous scholars who have examined the Spanish debate about the legitimacy of the conquest of the New World has obviously followed several paths, yet they share an important characteristic—they all focused on the sixteenth-century developments and rarely gave any attention to the seventeenth century. It is as if the debate about the conquest and about the treatment of the Indians had ended with the death of Las Casas. For Scott, the lack of interest in seventeenth-century Spanish thought arose from his approach to the sixteenth-century thinkers. He saw them as the forerunners of Grotius and the other figures who created international law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his opinion, the development of international law was a linear process, moving directly from Catholic Spain in the sixteenth century to Protestant Holland in the seventeenth.

It is easy to understand why scholarly attention to the conquest has centered on the sixteenth century and not the seventeenth. After all, the sixteenth century was the period of stirring deeds, great adventures, empire-building, and all the ancillary activities, including intellectual developments, that accompanied these actions. With the death of Philip II (1556–1598), however, the great days of Spanish expansion were over and Spain had begun its inevitable decline. If Philip’s death is taken as a sign of the inevitable collapse of Spain, then it is easy to understand why historians have neglected seventeenth-century Spanish history.

In recent years, traditional opinions about Spain’s decline and about the consequences of that alleged decline have been challenged. In particular, questions have been asked about the severity of Spain’s decline and when exactly it began. This line of questioning naturally leads to wondering about the inevitability of Spain’s decline. Was this decline inevitable? If not, then its history can be traced, and the major turning points in the history of seventeenth-century Spain, the points at which the decline could have been halted or reversed, can be charted. Recognition that the decline of Spain was not inevitable has led to a series of important books and articles that demonstrate that the study of seventeenth-century Spain deserves more detailed attention than has previously been paid.

The most important figure in this reassessment of seventeenth-century Spanish history has been John H. Elliott. His magisterial study of the Count-Duke Olivares (1587–1645), the principal minister of King Philip IV (1621–1665), is crucial to the question of the decline of Spain.

Decline, then, was not simply the context into which later generations chose to set him. It was also the context in which he and his ministerial colleagues were consciously operating as they framed their policies. Indeed, the Count-Duke’s ministerial career can be interpreted as a long and ultimately unsuccessful struggle to find the right responses to a perceived challenge of decline. . . .

Inevitably the Count-Duke was to a large extent a prisoner of these trends, which he and others interpreted as manifestations of sickness and decline. One possible response was to bow to them. . . . An alternative response was to move boldly and decisively in the direction of change, taking risks where necessary. The Count-Duke by instinct was canny and cautious, but he was also by temperament one of nature’s activists. . . . His own assessment of the gravity of Castile’s condition, his activist temperament, and his burning desire to restore his monarch to his rightful position in the world, all led him to place himself squarely in the ranks of the reformers.²⁵

In Elliott’s opinion, the decline of Spain was not inevitable or necessary. The problems facing the world monarchy that Philip II left to his heirs were not unsolvable. Olivares understood many of the problems and recognized their solutions. Try as he might, however, he failed to implement these solutions successfully. If nothing else, the size and scope of the problems facing his king and the particular circumstances in which he faced them required, as a frustrated Olivares wrote to a friend not long before his death, a miracle, and miracles were not commonly found in the political order.²⁶

In the years since Professor Elliott re-opened the question of seventeenth-century Spanish history, a number of other works have taken up the challenge to reconsider the significance of that century in the history of Spain and in the history of Spain’s place in the world.²⁷ The very existence of a major scholarly debate about the significance of the seventeenth century in the history of Spain indicates that the earlier judgments about its importance, or lack of importance, for historians were too facile. It is true that by the middle of the seventeenth century, Spain was in full retreat within Europe, giving way to France as the dominant power. As Professor Paul Kennedy put it in his 1987 book on imperial collapse, the conditions of the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) were not particularly harsh, but in forcing Spain to come to terms with its great archenemy, they revealed that the age of Habsburg predominance in Europe was over.²⁸ This statement is correct as far as it goes, but it does not go quite far enough. Above all, it overlooks the survival and even the revival of Spanish power overseas. The Spanish empire in the Americas largely survived into the early nineteenth century. The history of Spain and its overseas possessions from the death of Philip II thus cannot be graphed as a straight line that slopes gradually downward. The line falls and rises, occasionally levels out, and does not end until 1898, reflecting a more complex reality than that which a straight line can describe.

If the story of the Spanish overseas empire is more complex than scholars have often realized, it also means that Spanish political history in the first half of the seventeenth century is worth much more study than it has received. It was an age in which a talented, if flawed, chief minister sought to create the means that would insure the long-term survival of the family and the kingdom that he served. It was also an age in which scores of proposals for reform emerged from the pens of those known as arbitristas. While some of these proposals were exercises in fantasy, others were sensible and realistic. All of this was part of an orgy of national introspection that marked Spanish intellectual life in the early seventeenth century.²⁹ Even if one