Paolo Sarpi, His Networks, Venice and the Coming of the Thirty Years' War

Among the causes of the Thirty Years' War, scholars have recognized the role of the Spanish network around Olivares, Bedmar, Gondomar, Onate, and Spinola. This study seeks to establish the role of a network grouped around the Venetian Fra Paolo Sarpi, canon law adviser to the Venetian government starting during the papal Interdict of 1606--7, and including figures like Antonio Foscarini, Nicolo Contarini, Sir Henry Wotton, Sir Dudley Carleton, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, Christoph von Dohna, Marcantonio de Dominis, Giovanni Francesco Biondi, Daniel Heinsius, Thomas Hobbes, and Sir Francis Bacon. This study views Sarpi and the giovani party primarily as practitioners of geopolitics, but with a greater stress on adventurism and confrontation, owing to the weaker and more exposed position of Venice after 1600, when a wave of peace settlements occurred. Like the Olivares networks, the Sarpi network regarded the outbreak of a general religious war as inevitable and desirable, and sought to control its outcome. Henry IV and Oldenbarneveld opposed this. The struggle of Venice with Pope Paul V thus appears as an attempt to favor the outbreak of a religious war between France and Spain. The main result of Sarpi's policy during the Interdict was probably to drive the papacy back towards dependence on the Habsburgs. Sarpi was especially hostile to Henry IV of France, the only possible counterweight to Madrid. In his correspondence, Sarpi developed a campaign against Henry IV which was supplemented by hostile activities of Antonio Foscarini, the Venetian ambassador to the French court. Henry IV intercepted correspondence alleging a Calvinist community in Venice, and informed the Pope and the Venetian government in an attempt to undermine Sarpi's position. Carleton, as English ambassador to the Dutch Republic, sought the ouster of the Advocate of Holland Johann van Oldenbarneveld and took the lead in the convocation of the Synod of Dort, which condemned the Arminian party, who favored peace with Spain. Oldenbarneveld, labeled by Sarpi as pro-Spanish, was judicially murdered, and Grotius imprisoned. The Gomarist party, supportive of war with Spain, backed Maurice of Nassau, but the Dutch were weakened by sectarian strife. Sarpi composed an opinion for Carleton deprecating royal marriages between England and Spain, while warmly recommending the marriage of Princess Elizabeth Stuart to the Elector Palatine. The English-Palatine connection was a decisive reason why the Bohemian rebels offered the crown of Bohemia to the Elector, and Princess Elizabeth was a strong supporter of accepting it. The Cardinal-Duke of Lerma accused Venice of having fomented the Bohemian rebellion of 1618. Sarpi guided the Venetian propaganda offensive against Spain around the alleged Bedmar Plot of 1618, and published his History of the Council of Trent in 1619. Venice collapsed militarily in 1630, but nevertheless managed to survive until the time of Napoleon, partly because the other powers had been exhausted by war between 1618 and 1648.