The last months of 1546 comprise something like the historians’ box of pralines—so many exciting bits, all packed together. The latest volume in the series Heinrich Bullinger Briefwechsel, Briefe von Oktober bis Dezember 1546, worthily presents the scope of these momentous months. The 130 letters included here—and the editors rightly note as well the unknown number not included because Bullinger himself deleted them from the record—give remarkable testimony to the latter stages of the Schmalkaldic War. Obviously, Zurich and Zurichers figure prominently in a collection dedicated to the record of Heinrich Bullinger, but the correspondence is by no means limited to Zurich or even the Swiss Confederation. Here are new disclosures about a broad swath of actions and personalities. Editors of the present volume judiciously direct attention to a range of considerations. Bullinger’s earlier zeal for something like an ecumenical Protestant fellow feeling with German Lutherans appears now to enter a more embittered state of disappointment. This itself suggests ways in which growing confessionalizing tensions were exacerbated by the turning tide of the Schmalkaldic War. Relevant also to the growing Swiss-German divide will be ways in which these letters shed new light on the mercenary trade. Swiss Protestant mercenaries, for example, demanded double the pay of their German peers, which makes the repeated Swiss Protestant offer to send more cohorts appear much less helpful than it might otherwise seem; by this point the battered Schmalkald alliance already lacked money to pay existing troops. The whole subject becomes even more fraught since Zurich back in Zwingli’s time had severely criticized the very practice of unofficial soldiering for hire. These letters also show Swiss Protestants and Catholics alike struggling with confederational politics over against Habsburg hegemony and/or competing concerns for their respective coreligionists in Germany. The Protestant and Catholic states of the Swiss Confederation had to calculate diplomacy not knowing whether their confederation would even hold together. There appears as well the vexed subject of Swiss negotiations with King Francis I of France (with whom Catholic Swiss states were strongly linked and whom several Protestant Swiss considered a potential leverage against their imperial Catholic Habsburg enemy). Such details reveal how astonishingly close this Schmalkaldic War came to bleeding out into something more like the Thirty Years’ War in scope. In view of the pervasive apocalypticism and astrological considerations also amply attested in these letters, it is indeed astonishing that the war remained within its comparatively limited confines.
In technical matters, the editors continue their well-established pattern of excellence. Scholars familiar with the series will again appreciate the helpful contextual introduction; meticulous, unobtrusive footnotes; a copious index of persons and places; and introductory summaries at the beginning of each individual letter. The editors have added still another improvement to this latest volume: the numbering of each paragraph along the inner margins. It will be a help in scholarly discussion moving forward to be able to refer straightforwardly to “paragraph x” of any given letter. Here we have another excellent volume within a series that supplies fresh, critical insight to the history of sixteenth-century Europe.
