第15单元  布罗代尔《菲利普二世时期的地中海与地中海世界》片段

Fernand Braudel

Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His reputation stems in part from his writings, but even more from his success in making the Annales School the most important engine of historical research in France and much of the world after 1950. As the dominant leader of the Annales School of histori- ography in the 1950s and 1960s, he exerted enormous influence on historical writing in France and other countries. Braudel has been considered one of the greatest of the modern historians who have emphasized the role of large-scale socioeconomic factors in the making and writing of history.

 

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 

pp. 678-679, 763-765

Accident and political explanation. That a historian should today combine politics and economics in his arguments will not seem remarkable. So much of what we have to discuss – though not of course everything – was dictated by the population increase, by the pronounced acceleration of trade and later by economic recession. It is my contention that a correlation can be established between the reversal of the secular trend and the series of difficulties which confronted the giant political combinations built up by the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. To make this connection clearer, I have deliberately excluded explanations advanced by historians who have concentrated on the outstanding personalities and events of the time, explanations which can sometimes be a distorting prism through which to view reality. I have also neglected what is rather more interesting to us, the long-term political explanation: politics and institutions can themselves contribute to the understanding of politics and institutions.

The controversy is rather curiously taken up again in a brief paragraph in the last book by the great economist Josef A. Schumpeter whose views are in part the opposite of those expressed above. Schumpeter recognized only one unbroken line of development, one constant: the rise of capitalism. Everything else in politics or economics is merely a matter of accident, circumstance, chance or detail. It was an accident ‘that the conquest of South America produced a torrent of precious metals’, without which the triumph of the Habsburgs would have been inconceivable. It was an accident that the ‘price revolution’ occurred to make social and political tensions more explosive; and yet another accident that the expanding states (and empires too of course) found the way clear before them in the sixteenth century. How an accident? Because the great political powers of the past collapsed of their own accord, the German Holy Roman Empire with the death of Frederick II in 1250: the Papacy about the same time, for its triumph was but a Pyrrhic victory. And well before 1453, the Byzantine Empire had fallen into decline.

Such a view of history should in fairness be discussed point by pint rather than dismissed abruptly by the historians. To be brief however, I would only say this, that the natural collapse of the Papacy and the Empire in the thirteenth century was no accident, nor was it the result of a blind pursuit of self-destruction. Economic growth in the thirteenth century made possible certain political developments just as it did in the sixteenth and prepared the way for largescale political change. It was followed by a period of recession, the effects of which were universally felt. The series of collapses during the following century can be attributed to an economic depression of long duration: the ‘waning of the Middle Ages’ during which all rotten trees were marked out for destruction, from the Byzantine Empire to the Kingdom of Granada including the Holy Roman Empire itself. From start to finish this was a slow and natural process.

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Cultural diffusion and resistance. The mark of a living civilization is that it is capable of exporting itself, of spreading its culture to distant places. It is impossible to imagine a true civilization which does not export its people, its ways of thinking and living. There was once an Arab civilization: its importance and its decline are well known. There was once a Greek civilization, of which the substance at least has been saved. In the sixteenth century there was a Latin civilization (I have reservations about calling it Christian) the sturdiest of all the civilizations to struggle for command of the sea: expanding, it advanced through the Mediterranean region and beyond, into the depths of Europe, towards the Atlantic and the Iberian Ultramar. The spread of Latin culture, dating back over several centuries, was felt as much in shipbuilding – which the Italians, masters of the craft, taught the men of Portugal and even the Baltic – as it was in silk manufacture, of which the Italians were first the pupils and then the demonstrators; or in accounting techniques, which the Venetians, Genoese and Florentines, merchants from the old days, had perfected well before the northerners. And of course Latin culture was spread by the mighty reverberations of the Renaissance, the child of Italy and the Mediterranean whose path can be followed across Europe.

A living civilization must be able not only to give but to receive and to borrow. Borrowing is more difficult than it seems: it is not every man who can borrow wisely, and put an adopted implement to as good use as its original master. One of the great borrowings of Mediterranean civilization was undoubtedly the printing press, which German master-printers introduced to Italy, Spain, Portugal and as far away as Goa.

But a great civilization can also be recognized by its refusal to borrow, by its resistance to certain alignments, by its resolute selection among the foreign influences offered to it and which would no doubt be forced upon it if they were not met by vigilance or, more simply, by incompatibility of temper and appetite. Only Utopians (and there were several remarkable Utopians in the sixteenth century) could dream of uniting all religions in one; religion, precisely one of the most personal and inalienable elements in that complex of possessions, forces and systems which goes to make up every civilization. It is possible to combine parts of religions, to transfer a certain idea from one to another, even in some cases an item of dogma or ritual: unity is quite another matter. 

Refusals to borrow: of these the sixteenth century provides one of the most striking examples. After the Hundred Years’ War, Catholicism was assaulted by a tidal wave of religious passions. Under the pressure of these waters it broke apart like a tree splitting its bark. In the north the Reformation spread through Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Scandinavian countries, England and Scotland. Throughout the South spread what it traditionally called the Counter-Reformation and the civilization known as the Baroque.

There had of course always been a gulf between the North and the Mediterranean, two worlds bound together but quite distinct, each with its own horizons, its own heart and, religiously speaking, its own soul. For in the Mediterranean religious sentiment is expressed in a way which even today still shocks the northerner as it once shocked Montaigne it Italy, or the ambassador Saint-Gouard in Spain, and as at first it shocked the whole of western Europe when it was introduced by the Jesuits and the Capuchins, the poor man’s Jesuits. Even in a region as profoundly Catholic as the Franche-Comté, the processions of penitents, the new devotional practices, the sensual, dramatic and, to the French mind, excessive element in southern piety, scandalized many serous, reflective and reasonable men.

Protestantism did succeed in pushing into the Austrian Alps, the Massif Central, the French Alps and the Pyrenees of Béarn. But in the end it failed, universally, to cross the frontiers of the Mediterranean states. After a few moments of hesitation and enthusiasm which make its final refusal even more noteworthy, Latin civilization said no to the Reformation ‘from over the mountains’. If certain Lutheran and, later, Calvinist notions gained some converts in Spain and Italy, they had currency only among a few isolated individuals and small groups. Almost always these were men who had lived abroad for some time, clerics, students, booksellers, artisans and merchants who would bring back forbidden books concealed in their bales of merchandise; or else, as Marcel Bataillon had shown in Érasme et l’Espagne, men who plunged the roots of their faith into a soil personal to themselves, borrowing from no-one, the soil tilled in Spain by the Erasmians and in Italy by the Valdesians.