Why Serve in Wars in Seventeenth-Century Europe?

Abstract

In 1588, Alessandro Valignano, a Jesuit father appointed “Visitor” to the province of India, prepared a list of gifts that the pope should send to the Ming emperor to pave the road to China for Catholic missionaries. Among the most desirable objects Valignano listed were beautifully illustrated books; yet, curiously, he stressed that the pictures they contained should not depict war or martyrdom. Academic textbooks covering the early modern history of Europe are dominated by grand narratives that stress the role of interstate competition and interreligious (or interconfessional) conflict. A thesis about the predominance of confessional factors in military confrontations in which Poland-Lithuania took part in the seventeenth century finds apparent support if one draws the list of its major adversaries and calculates the years of combat. Curiously, Pasek's anthropological observations found an analogy in distant Scandinavia, when he comments that the king of Denmark had an inherent hatred of the Swedes.

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• people Alessandro Valignano

Provenance

• openalex (W4389142196)
  2026-04-30T19:57:06.264381+00:00

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