Descartes in Rome

The death of Pope Gregory 15 on July 8, and the election of Urban 8th after a month of conclave, reawakened Descartes’ desire to make a trip to Italy.

The curiosity that had formerly led him to procure the spectacle of all that is accompanied by forms and ceremonies among the great, was not yet entirely extinguished. But he could not satisfy it on the election and the coronation of the new pope, because of the diligence with which everything was advanced in Rome. Thus no longer caring about going straight to Rome, he arranged his affairs according to the disposition he was in to spend two winters on this trip: so that his stay in Rome was no longer to coincide except with the beginning of the jubilee of the year 1625.

He thought of an Italy trip in March after learning of the death of Sain, his relative, who from controller of taxes in Châtellerault, had become commissioner general of provisions for the army on the side of the Alps.

The pretext was to go and put order in the affairs of this relative, and to take this opportunity to have himself given, if it was possible, the position of intendant of the army.

He had provided himself with all the necessary powers of attorney to succeed in this matter; and he was to leave by post on the 22nd of the same month, after having sent word to his relatives that a trip beyond the Alps would be of great utility to him to instruct himself in business, acquire some experience of the world, and form habits that he did not yet have; adding that “if he did not return from it richer, at least he would return from it more capable.” But the eagerness he had to sell the property he owned in Poitou had made him postpone the trip.

He left in September, and took his route towards the city of Basel and the Swiss, with the resolution to visit what he had not been able to see of high Germany in his first trips.

It would have been easy for him to find in Basel, in Zurich, and in other cities, philosophers and mathematicians capable of conversing with him: but he was more curious to see animals, waters, mountains, the air of each country with its meteors, and generally what was the most distant from the frequentation of men, to better know the nature of things that seem the least known to the vulgar of scholars. When he passed through the cities, he saw the scholars there only as other men, and he observed their actions no less than their speeches.

From the Swiss he passed to the Grisons, among whom the movements of the Valtellina retained him for some time. From the year 1619 the King of Spain in concert with the archdukes and other princes of the house of Austria in the county of Tyrol, had sent troops from Milan to invade the Valtellina on the Grisons, to whom it belonged.

The pretext for the invasion according to the ordinary method of the Kings of Spain, was the protection of the Catholics against the Protestants: “but the true motive was the design to make a free passage from Milan to the county of Tyrol, and to join by this means the states of the King of Spain to those of the house of Austria in Germany.” The neighboring states, and particularly the lordship of Venice, the Duke of Savoy, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and all those who feared the Spanish power in Italy, besides the Swiss and the Grisons, were interested in this affair.

This is what had led the King Louis 13 to powerfully solicit the restitution of the Valtellina as much with the pope, as with the King of Spain Philip III, who died on the point of giving this satisfaction to the pope who had written him a brief about it, and to the king who had dispatched Mr. de Bassompierre to him.

Philip 4th on his accession to the crown had seemed very disposed to have the last wishes of his father executed on this point. But time passed insensibly in various treaties, passed in Milan between the deputies of the King of Spain and of the house of Austria, and those of the Grisons: until by an agreement made in Rome on the fourth of February 1623 between the pope and the ministers of France and Spain, they agreed to put the Valtellina in deposit, in the hands of his holiness, who sent the Marquis de Bagni there as commissioner of the holy see. This marquis was since nuncio in France, and cardinal. He made a profession of loving people of letters, and seemed curious about physical observations. It is not improbable that Mr. Descartes rendered him his civilities in Chiavenna or in Tirano, which was the main place of the Valtellina where he commanded.

But this encounter must not make him be confused with another celebrated cardinal of the same name, older than him by a few years, who was no less a lover of letters and sciences than this marquis, and who particularly honored Mr. Descartes with his friendship. This one was named Jean François Guidi.

He was nuncio in France after Spada at the time of the siege of La Rochelle, and was vested with the purple a year after. But the marquis of whom it is a question here only exercised the nunciature after Bolognetti Bichi, and Grimaldi, who succeeded one after the other to the first Cardinal de Bagni, who died in Rome on July 24, 1641 at the age of 76. The marquis was a native of Rome, “was named Nicolas, was nuncio in France during the entire pontificate of Innocent X, and the first two years of Alexander VII, who made him cardinal in 1657: and he died in Rome on August 23, 1663 at the age of 80.”

The negotiations that were treated in Rome under the new pope for the restitution of the Valtellina, failed by the obstinacy that the Spanish showed in wanting to preserve the freedom of passage from Italy to Germany by this province.

It was recognized at the same time that there had been only pretense in the protestations that Philip IV made of wanting to execute the treaty of Madrid, signed by the king his father at the article of death. This is what obliged the King Louis XIII to take forceful measures to do justice to his allies. He sent troops to the Valtellina under the command of the Marquis de Cœuvres, who chased the Spanish and the Austrians; took all the places; and reduced the whole province in less than two months.

Descartes could not be present at this beautiful expedition, having left the Valtellina from the beginning of the negotiations of Rome. He continued his travels by the county of Tyrol, from where he went to Venice after having seen the court of the Archduke Leopold, brother of the Emperor Ferdinand II at Innsbruck. He had taken his measures on the disposition of his affairs to arrive in Venice at the time of the rogations, and he saw on Ascension day the famous ceremony of the espousal of the doge with the Adriatic Sea.

This doge was Francesco Contarini who was in place only since eight months, having succeeded to Antonio Priuli who died in the month of August 1623. Mr. Descartes being in Venice, thought of unburdening himself before God of the obligation he had imposed on himself in Germany in the month of November of the year 1619, by a vow he had made to go to Loreto, and which he had not been able to fulfill at that time. We do not know what were the circumstances of this pilgrimage; but we will not doubt that they were very edifying, if we remember that at the time of the conception of his vow, he was well resolved to omit nothing of what could depend on him, to attract the graces of God, and to procure for himself the particular protection of the holy virgin.

Having accomplished his vow in Loreto, he had the leisure to attend “to the affairs which had served as a pretext for his trip concerning the intendancy of the army,” before going to Rome, where he only wanted to arrive after All Saints’ Day. There was then no news more universally spread in Italy than that of the jubilee of the twenty-five years, of which the opening was to be made in Rome at the beginning of the following year. Pope Urban VIII had already had the celebration published by a bull of April 29, posted and proclaimed on May 17 following. The ceremony of the opening was indicated there for Christmas Eve 1624, and that of the closing for the end of the year 1625. It carried the order to visit the three main churches, namely, of Saint John Lateran, of the blessed apostles Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and of Saint Mary Major during the space of thirty consecutive days, or otherwise for the Romans or inhabitants of the city; and of only fifteen for foreigners. The pope had published a few days later another bull to absolutely suspend and suspend all indulgences of whatever nature they were, in order to make the necessity of this jubilee more universal, and to attract more people to Rome. This occasion gave rise to some movements of devotion in the mind of Mr. Descartes who had at first had only the curiosity to see the city of Rome and the court of the pope as a motive for this trip. He arrived in the city a few days before the beginning of Advent: and the prodigious concourse of peoples who flocked there from all parts of Catholic Europe, was not long in filling it.

The affluence was however less great than it had been at the secular jubilee of the year 1600: and this decrease was attributed to the noise of the epidemic diseases that afflicted the city and the neighborhood; to the war of the Valtellina; and to the alarms spread on all the borders of Italy on the side of France.

The most apparent of the pilgrims of the jubilee was Ladislaus Prince of Poland, who from the siege of Breda, and the Catholic Netherlands had passed into France, and from there had gone to Rome, in order to be able to attend the procession, that the pope accompanied by all the cardinals who were in the city, made in the church of Saint Peter on Christmas Eve, to make the opening. There also came various other princes among whom was “even the Archduke Leopold Count of Tyrol” despite the affairs that the Marshal d’Estrées and Mr. de Haraucourt, camp marshal, gave him in the Valtellina, and in the County of Chiavenna.

By this means Descartes found in Rome an abbreviated version of all of Europe, and this concourse seemed to him so favorable to the passion he had always had of knowing the human race by himself, that instead of spending his time examining buildings, antiques, manuscripts, paintings, statues, and the other monuments of ancient and new Rome, he applied himself particularly to studying the inclinations, the morals, the dispositions, and the characters of mind in the crowd and the mixture of so many different nations. This convenience dispensed him from making other trips, and took away his desire to go to the bottom of Sicily and Spain to look for the peoples that remained for him to see.