The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War by Harold J. Cook

Author:Harold J. Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

The Valtellina and Rome

Descartes again traveled to a place at the heart of current affairs: to the Alpine valleys known as the Valtellina. The French would postpone military action there for some months, but conflict in the Italian Alps was on the boil. Baillet says that Descartes’s move was prompted by the news in March of the death of Monsieur Sain, who had been a tax collector (controlleur des tailles) for Châtelleraut. Descartes was related on his mother’s side to Sain, who was also the husband of his godmother. Actually, in the Estates-General of 1614, Sain was listed as from Tours, councilor of the king and treasurer general of France.52 Baillet believed that Sain had also taken on the position of commissary general (commissaire general des vivres) for the army in the Piedmont—such positions, looking after the provisioning of an army, could be extremely lucrative.53 The reported “pretext” (prétexte) for Descartes’s journey, then, which he gave to his friends, was that he was both looking into the affairs of his relative and seeing if he himself could obtain the post of intendant of the army. Just in those years such offices were becoming the norm in the French forces, with the intendant looking after the justice and discipline, and finances, of the organization on behalf of the crown. (Intendants also oversaw the provision of military hospitals and care of the wounded, perhaps giving Descartes an additional nudge toward an interest in medicine.) Some of those who held such offices rose to high places in the royal administration.54 Descartes seems to have been seeking to make visible in France some of the skills he had acquired abroad and by doing so to gain favor, since he told his friends that he would learn how to accomplish things in the real world.55 In retrospect, his explanation does seem a pretext, since he did not gain the office, but he seems to have returned with plenty of cash in hand.

He headed straight to the center of action, the Valtellina. A few months earlier those valleys were on the minds of everyone concerned with international affairs, since the so-called Spanish Road ran through them. If Habsburg troops and supplies were to cross from Spanish-held Milan northeast into Austria and Germany, or northwest into Lorraine and the low countries, they had to pass through the Valtellina. The chief overlords of the valleys, the Protestant Grisons, had been supporters of Frederick’s election as king of Bohemia, but a large portion of the population was Catholic. Hard-line Catholic incendiaries had been able to stir up the people of the valleys, who appealed to Spain for protection, and troops from Milan moved in, beginning a series of bloody conflicts that also came to involve the Emperor Ferdinand’s brother, Archduke Leopold of Austria. The marquis de Bassompierre had been sent to Spain to insist that the valleys remain open and that the Protestants remain free to practice their religion, points that were inscribed in the Treaty of Madrid of April 1621.

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