Currents of European expansion had lapped the shores of Africa since the fifteenth century. But at the end of the eighteenth century the continent and its peoples were still little known. If anything, European knowledge of and interest in Africa had declined since the heyday of Portuguese discovery and expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The coastline was tolerably well known, even if its scientific survey was to be mainly the work of the early nineteenth century, and if the east coast was now little frequented by European mariners. But what knowledge of the interior the Portuguese had once gained had been but indifferently passed on to, or remembered by, the other Europeans who had now surpassed them as builders of empires overseas. Following courses set by forgotten Portuguese embassies, French merchant-explorers had sought to make the Senegal river a highway to the empires and gold-mines of the western Sudan that were known partially through some (though not always the most accurate) of the medieval Arab writers. But their ambitions had been frustrated, in part by lack of consistent commercial backing in France, in part by the hostility both of the Sudanese peoples and of British sea power. In Guinea, Europeans had been content with their trade in Negro slaves for the Americas. Slaves were readily purchasable from African merchants and rulers at the coast. Thus Europeans lacked any incentive to penetrate inland, while at the same time established African interests existed to block any such penetration. Further south, the African kingdoms of the lower Congo and Angola, and the protectorates which Portugal had once sought to establish over them, had both been largely destroyed by the concentration of Portuguese merchants on this same trade.

The dates 1793 and 1830 are not very helpful limits. Much that was of great importance happened in Italy between them, yet they are themselves hardly significant. 1793 began with the murder of the French agent in Rome (13 January) but this is not enough to mark an epoch. Although Italy was by then already involved in the diplomatic and military struggles of Europe, the course of her history was decisively changed only in 1796. In that year, it may be said, the Settecento ended and the Revolution came to the peninsula; the modern history of Italy begins with the physical presence of the French army. The next great change came at the collapse of the Napoleonic system—the restorations of 1799–1800 were only an interlude—and this chapter can be roughly divided at 1814. Before that collapse the whole peninsula had gradually been subjected to common governmental and political influences for the first time in centuries; after 1814, although all the restored regimes had to take account of Austrian predominance, the peninsula was again fragmented. 1830 did not change this state of affairs.

The starting-point of this assessment must be the structure of Italy in 1793. In no sense was it then a unity and its components were to absorb the shock of the revolution in very different ways. Its fundamental divisions were topographical: within regions divided by mountains and climate there existed widely differing societies, separated from one another even by language. Political boundaries stabilised their provincialism. Italy consisted of a jumble of states of which the kingdoms of Sardinia and Naples, the grand-duchy of Tuscany, the lesser duchies of Massa and Carrara, Parma and Modena and the principality of Piombino were monarchical.

An attempt has been made in Chapter I (pp. 7–11) to see how the general pattern of the European state system in 1830 differed from that of 1790. The shifting scenes of the war period are described in Chapter IX, and the negotiations leading to the settlement of 1815 in Chapter XXIV. Here it is intended to present in outline the main issues that were implicit in the situation created by that settlement or that came to a head in the years of relative tranquillity that followed it. Most of these issues are touched upon in other chapters concerning particular regions, but they need to be reviewed as elements in a developing total situation as it presented itself to sovereigns, chanceries and foreign ministers. Alexander I could not fix his gaze on Constantinople without remembering Spain and Germany; neither Metternich nor Canning could make a move about Latin America without keeping an eye on the Aegean. Moreover, certain general problems arise concerning the nature and conduct of international relations after 1815. At first, these are closely connected with the experiences, even with the personalities, of the statesmen who made the settlement; all of them, except for Talleyrand, survived in power for some years— Castlereagh and Alexander I until their deaths in 1822 and 1825, and Metternich for almost as many years after 1830 as before it.

The old régime in France—a monarchical bureaucracy working amid the survivals of a medieval society and a welter of prescriptive powers—had often displayed signs of weakness and instability. But these shortcomings in no way signified to contemporaries that the old régime was on the verge of disruption. The monarchy was taken for granted both by conservative and by revolutionary thinkers, and both, in their different ways, endowed the monarchy with an idyllic past. Conservatives, opposing the innovations of the growing bureaucracy, claimed to have discovered evidence of an old constitution under which the monarchy had worked in harmony with other powers of the realm. The revolutionary thinkers—that is to say those who wished to bring about radical changes in administration—thought in terms of absolute monarchy. They had in mind the royal power served by an enlightened bureaucracy, which would govern for the common good, unimpeded by medieval institutions and vested interests. The despotic state was merely to collect taxes (in moderation), maintain an army and a navy, and provide for police and justice. It was to be truly despotic in restricted functions and it was to maintain conditions under which natural laws would prevail, unhindered by medieval prejudice and unnecessary regulation. This idea of a powerful government which would reduce and simplify the tasks of government runs through all French eighteenth-century liberal thought; and it is here that even Rousseau finds some common ground with the Encyclopaedists and the Physiocrats.

When the last of her Habsburg rulers died in 1700, Spain, in the words of José de Gálvez, was ‘hardly less defunct than its dead master’. ‘With dominions more extensive and more opulent than any European state’, the country lacked roads, industry and commerce. The population had declined by a million and a half in the last hundred years. Agriculture was in decay. The administrative system was chaotic, the currency in confusion, and the treasury bankrupt. And if, in the New World, it might almost be said that there was ‘no peaceful desart yet unclaimed by Spain’, the Spanish American empire seemed to survive more by the forces of habit and inertia, and by the mutual jealousies of the European powers, than by any internal strength of its own. If it was not, as was sometimes thought, ripe for plucking or on the brink of collapse, nevertheless there is abundant testimony to its political, social and economic ills. The devastating report written for the information of the crown in 1749 by the two young naval officers Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, though dealing, it is true, with but a part of the colonial world, is a classical example.

Yet in the years between the War of the Spanish Succession and the Napoleonic invasions of the Iberian peninsula Spain herself rose with remarkable resilience from the decrepitude into which she had fallen in the seventeenth century. Her economic decline was first arrested and then reversed. Her administrative system was overhauled, centralised and modernised, on French and absolutist lines.

These were years when the boundaries of British rule were extended while its impact was intensified. New territory was acquired, both in India and outside it, while the activities of government advanced beyond the maintenance of order and the collection of revenue to economic and social policies that accorded with European ideas of utility and morality. Exaggerated fears of a revival of French power in Asia were at first associated with this territorial expansion, and the desire for a strong ally against a resurgent France was the main reason why the British allowed the Dutch to return to South-East Asia after the Napoleonic Wars. But the major concern of the English East India Company was now the establishment of its authority as the paramount power in India. Mughal supremacy had been little more than nominal after the death of Aurangzib, the last of the great emperors, in 1707, and the Maratha confederacy lacked the unity of direction and the centralised administrative system necessary for dominance over the sub-continent. Widespread disorder and devastation in central India, spreading to the borders of British territory, indicated the need for some paramount authority. Indian considerations thus brought the English Company to grips with the Marathas. Apart from arousing occasional suspicions of Russian designs, European politics were henceforth of diminishing importance in the shaping of its external policies.

European ideas, on the other hand, were of increasing importance in the development of internal policy. True, the defects that had arisen in the administrative institutions established by Lord Cornwallis in Bengal suggested that he had paid too little attention to Indian ideas and circumstances, and the reforms that were in train elsewhere made more use of local experience by modifying the rigidity of his separation of powers, by giving more responsibility to native officials, and by settling the land revenue with villages and with individual cultivators instead of with great landholders.

For nearly two thousand years the missionary work of the Church has been essentially Bible-centred, and that in three senses: the Bible has been the source of inspiration and of spiritual nourishment for the missionary himself; it has also been the basis of the worship of the Church into which he sought to bring pagan or non-Christian tribes or individuals; and (to a larger extent than is commonly recognized) it has been a means of evangelism in itself.

From the end of the period of oral transmission the Church was dependent for authentic knowledge of Christ on the apostolic witness enshrined in the Epistles and Gospels. The final definition of the canon, followed by the provision of an authoritative version of the Latin Scriptures by St Jerome, was, therefore, an important step both for the inner life of the Christian community and for its expansion into the pagan world. The facts to which successive generations of Christian missionaries have borne witness are not merely matters of subjective experience: they are rooted in history, and in a history which is recorded uniquely in the documents which comprise the New Testament, read in the context of the Old Testament. Moreover, it has been the consistent witness of the Church in every age that these records contain not only an account of the coming of Jesus Christ and of his work for man's salvation, but also an authentic Word of God to the human soul. The missionary, therefore, has been bound to the Bible by a threefold cord: his own spiritual life and his authority as a messenger of the Gospel depended on his own knowledge of the Scriptures; the message he sought to proclaim and the Church into which he brought his converts was centred on the Bible; and the written Scriptures were a means by which the Gospel could lay hold of the minds and hearts of men and women, sometimes more effectively than by any word of his own.

Tyndale

The survival of some two hundred manuscripts of the Wycliffite versions, most of them written after the synods of Oxford and London, A.D. 1407–9, is sufficient evidence of a demand for the Scriptures in English which legislation could not stifle. With the invention of printing (even if that did not immediately bring cheap and plentiful copies of the Bible) the galling knowledge that vernacular versions were circulating, sometimes with the consent of the Church, in most European countries must have stiffened determination to get an English translation into print. Further stimulus came from the teaching of Colet at home and from the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland. Simultaneously the quickening of scholarship manifest in the Complutensian Polyglot and Erasmus's Greek Testament meant that no mere rendering of the Vulgate would suffice, although one made from the original languages must provoke greater opposition from ecclesiastical authority. England was fortunate to have in William Tyndale the man who could do what was wanted, a man of sufficient scholarship to work from Hebrew and Greek, with genius to fashion a fitting English idiom and faith and courage to persist whatever it cost him.

Publication

With an Oxford education behind him (B.A. 1512, M.A. 1515), followed by a period of study at Cambridge, Tyndale went as tutor to the family of Sir John Walsh of Little Sodbury, Gloucestershire, where he not only found himself countering the arguments of Walsh's guests (abbots, deans, archdeacons and divers doctors, says Foxe) by open and manifest Scripture, but also translated Erasmus's Enchiridion Militis Christiani.

The Authority of the Bible

“As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a den, and laid me down in that place to sleep; and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein.”

The well-known introductory paragraph to John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is itself an epitome of the place enjoyed by the vernacular Bible in the religious life of the seventeenth century. J. R. Green's statement that the English people became the people of a book, and that book the Bible, is justified by the evidence. But the vogue of the Bible was no peculiarly insular phenomenon, nor was its use confined to devotional reading. It became the source of doctrine and of worship, no less than of piety and hymnody, the object of close and continuous study on the part of scholars as well as the vade-mecum of ordinary Christian laymen. Nor was its influence restricted to religious issues. It became a proof-text for systems of government and ‘an outline of knowledge for boys and girls and their parents’ (to adopt a modern phrase) in various fields of human interest, historical, geographical and cosmographical.

Acceptance of the King James Version

The King James version of the Bible was a revision of prior English translations. In their preface, the scholars who were charged to make this revision show that they were fully aware that their work would encounter strong opposition:

“Zeale to promote the common good…findeth but cold intertainment in the world.…Many mens mouths have bene open a good while (and yet are not stopped) with speeches about the Translation so long in hand, or rather perusals of Translations made before: and aske what may be the reason, what the necessitie of the employment: Hath the Church bene deceived, say they, all this while?… Was their Translation good before? Why doe they now mend it? Was it not good? Why then was it obtruded to the people?”

For eighty years after its publication in 1611, the King James version endured bitter attacks. It was denounced as theologically unsound and ecclesiastically biased, as truckling to the king and unduly deferring to his belief in witchcraft, as untrue to the Hebrew text and relying too much on the Septuagint. The personal integrity of the translators was impugned. Among other things, they were accused of ‘blasphemy’, ‘most damnable corruptions’, ‘intolerable deceit’, and ‘vile imposture’, the critic who used these epithets being careful to say that they were not ‘the dictates of passion, but the just resentment of a zealous mind’.

German Versions

Luther

A German Bible printed by Sylvan Otmar at Augsburg did indeed appear during the year 1518—only a few months after Luther had published his theses. But it belonged to the series of editions of the German translation made in about 1350 and first printed in 1466 by Johann Mentelin at Strassburg. In the next fifty years or so there were thirteen further editions. This translation was not made from the original languages but only from the Vulgate, and was moreover—despite several revisions, especially in 1475 and 1483—clumsy in its linguistic form, and partly incomprehensible. Hence it answered neither of Luther's two requirements for such a translation, that it should be based on the original texts and should use a German comprehensible to all; and it is not surprising that this medieval version did not have Luther's approval. He had already used the Greek original in his lectures on Romans in 1515–16, and the Hebrew in his commentary on Hebrews in 1517–18. And since it was one of his cardinal principles that the Scriptures were the only true key to the faith, it is not surprising either that he decided to translate the Bible into German himself. It seems as if the idea of such a translation was already current in Wittenberg in 1520. Andreas Carlstadt's treatise on the canon (Welche bucher Biblisch seint), which was published at Wittenberg in November, said ‘Shortly, as I hear, new German Bibles are to be printed’. But it was a whole year before the plan was put into effect.

Grammar

Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac

Interest in Hebrew grammar was anticipated by the Massoretes, whose unremitting care for the preservation of the Hebrew text and of the most delicate shades of Hebrew pronunciation issued in serious grammatical work among Jewish scholars of the tenth century (mainly concerned with Arabic). The influence of Arabic grammar is to be seen in the work of Ben Asher, the Massorete of Tiberias. His contemporary, the Gaon of Saadia (892–942) may be credited with transforming Hebrew grammar into something like a scientific discipline, and Judah ben David Hayyug, in eleventh-century Spain, put Hebrew grammar on a permanent basis, particularly by the recognition of the tri-literal root. Abraham Ibn Ezra (1092–1167) carried this grammatical knowledge from Spain to other European countries. Joseph Kimhi's grammar, Sefer Zihkaron (c. 1150), was the first exposition of Hebrew grammar in Hebrew. His son, David Kimhi (d. 1235), produced the Hebrew grammar which was to be the main source of the classical Jewish philology of the Middle Ages. Until the sixteenth century, grammatical aids to enable the Christian student to study the Hebrew text of the Old Testament hardly existed.

There is no extant Syriac grammar before the eleventh century, then that of Elias, Bishop of Tirhan (d. 049), ed. F. W. A. Baethgen (1880), and The Net of Points of Joseph bar Malkon, Bishop of Nisibis, and, most important of all, the K'taba Semhe of Barhebraeus (the Jacobite Syrian bishop bu-l-Farag, 1226–86).

German Versions

Protestant Versions

It is plain from the history of the Bible that every age has attempted to come to fresh terms with it, to form its own image of it. This is also true of Luther's version of the Bible, which has been the one most commonly printed and by far the most widely accepted in Germany during the period under review.

The linguistic superiority of Luther's Bible had moved Calvinists such as Tossanus and Pareus—especially in the Palatinate and Frankfurt am Main—to print the text and to add, instead of Luther's, prefaces and glosses of their own which had an entirely different spirit. Lutherans protested against this, particularly in Württemberg. But Johannes Piscator went even further, for he also dispensed with Luther's translation, and produced a most uneven one of his own in 1602–3. It was still being printed in Berne in the nineteenth century.

The Thirty Years War both hampered and helped the dissemination of the Bible. The losses were enormous, and the subsequent general poverty made it hard to replace them. The more handy and cheaper formats came into common use as well as the folios. Bible printing ceased entirely in Wittenberg, and the most important printing towns were now Lüneburg, Nürnberg and Frankfurt am Main. In the very middle of the war Sigismund Evenius promoted the production of one of the most important German bibles. The first printing of this ‘Weimar Bible’, with its many notes, accessories and pictures, was commissioned by Duke Ernst the Pious of Gotha in 1640 at Nürnberg. Though not cheap, it went through more than a dozen editions in 150 years.

The invention of printing was as important for the Bible as it was for all literature; but its significance has often been misinterpreted, largely because modern conceptions and preoccupations have been imported into the context of early printing. The earliest observers went to the heart of the matter, as they saw it. ‘He prints as much in a day as was formerly written in a year’ said Campano, bishop of Teramo, of the fifteenth-century printer Ulrich Han. Printing was a means of speedy, and soon of cheap production. Speaking of the Bible, a French translator added that there was now no excuse for the literate believer if he was not familiar with the Word of God.

Writers nearer our own time, but before modern bibliographers had made their systematic investigations, found a deeper significance, which is still advanced. The concept of the edition, a scholar's concept which has taken five hundred years to elaborate, is projected backwards into the first years of printing as if it were the perfect outcome of a sudden transformation. Where once the scribe had produced his single copy— perhaps inaccurately transcribed, interpolated or tendentiously altered, and taken from another single copy subject to the same vicissitudes, and so on back through innumerable stages—there was now supposed to be the modern succession of accurately printed editions, each an improvement on the last if not faithful to it. Within each edition all copies were supposed to be identical.

The Council of Trent

The first task of the Council of Trent was to delimit the spheres of Scripture and Tradition in the transmission of Catholic doctrine. For centuries the Church had been content with a rough-and-ready arrangement whereby Tradition (in the shape of the baptismal catechesis) introduced a believer to the doctrines of the faith, while Scripture was used at a later stage to test, to amplify and to collate those doctrines. Thus it was that St Thomas had said, in a much-abused phrase, sola canonica scriptura est regula fidei: only canonical Scripture—as distinct from apocryphal writings—is the (or a) rule of faith (lectio VI in John XXI). But doctrines which were accepted alone or mainly on the authority of Tradition were not unfamiliar. It was these doctrines which were the main objects of reforming attacks: purgatory, the invocation of saints, the conversion of the bread into the Body of Christ, infant baptism and the sacramental character of marriage. Hence the Council had to start by making its position clear on the value of Tradition as contrasted with Scripture.

After sharp discussion the Council came to the decision that it received and held in honour pari pietatis affectu ac reverentia, with equal devotion and veneration, the books of Scripture and the divine and apostolic traditions (that is, those coming from Christ or the apostles) which concerned faith or morals. It did not mean that each book of Scripture was inspired in exactly the same way, as some modern theologians have claimed, for the Council was not comparing book with book but the body of Scripture with the body of apostolic tradition.