Auteur/autrice : Maxim Hoffman

Article by Maxim Hoffman

For a political historian, few experiences rival the thrill of discovering a ciphered letter in an archive, one that seems to offer a vital clue to a famous plot. The excitement only grows when you manage to decipher it, and it turns out to be exactly what you suspected. That is precisely what happened to me two weeks ago, during broader research I was conducting at the Archivo General de Simancas in Spain, as part of Work Package 3 of the Capturing the Present project.

The case in question is well known. On 10 September 1547, a rebellion broke out in the Italian city of Piacenza, resulting in the assassination of Duke Pier Luigi Farnese. Two days later, Ferrante Gonzaga, imperial governor of Milan, seized the city with cavalry he had secretly stationed at the border beforehand. He claimed to have taken Piacenza in the name of the emperor, arguing it was to prevent the city from falling into enemy hands. Ferrante was immediately suspected by all of orchestrating the whole rebellion, although in his correspondence and public statements he insisted that he had acted without the emperor’s knowledge. Several scholars, however, have already shown that this was not true. Indeed, the emperor’s principal concern at the time was to counter the threat posed by the newly created Farnese state in Parma and Piacenza, established in 1545 by Pope Paul III for his son, Pier Luigi Farnese. Rumours that the duke had supported a conspiracy in Genoa in January 1547 had alarmed imperial ministers. The emperor would soon agree to a plan to seize the duchy of Parma and Piacenza, albeit, it seems, without intending necessarily to kill Pier Luigi.¹

Much about the conspiracy’s planning, however, remains shrouded in mystery till this day. In my PhD thesis, I showed that the emperor’s first councillor, Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, was already fully aware of Ferrante’s plans on Piacenza as early as March 1547. The governor had sent his secretary, Giuliano Gosellini, to present the scheme personally to Granvelle at his urban palace in Besançon. The successful execution of the plan, according to Granvelle, would leave the papacy and the Farnese family ‘in a final state of confusion’².

The ciphered letter I discovered in Simancas sheds further light on the planning of the conspiracy. On 15 August 1547, Ferrante wrote to Granvelle to confirm receipt of his instructions ‘on the Piacenza case.’ While Granvelle’s instructions are most likely lost, the rest of Ferrante’s letter leaves little doubt as to their content. Ferrante had already even begun formulating how he might later plead his innocence. He proposed making ‘a lengthy excuse to His Majesty’ (‘una lunga scusa con sua maestà’), claiming that he had been compelled to seize the city ‘out of fear that the conspirators might hand it over to the French’ (‘per dubio che i congiurati non la dessero ai Francesi’)³. A conspiracy most foul, indeed.

While the assassination reinforced Habsburg power in Italy, the struggle over Piacenza was, at the time, one of many crises unfolding across the empire of Charles V, which stretched over half of Europe and into the Americas. The complexity of governing this vast empire is perhaps most clearly apprehensible in the letters of Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle with his son Antoine Perrenot. Even when discussing the plan concerning Piacenza, Granvelle addressed dozens of other pressing present matters in imperial politics simultaneously. The timing of the conspiracy itself also offers a revealing case in point. Although Ferrante Gonzaga had already devised the plan to seize Piacenza by March 1547, the emperor delayed giving final approval. He was then deeply engaged in military operations in Saxony against the Protestants during the Schmalkaldic War, and it was hardly the right moment to provoke another conflict in Italy. At the same time, however, the plot had to be carried out swiftly, before the element of surprise was lost. Once Charles V had secured victory and stabilised the situation with the Protestant forces by the summer, he finally gave the green light for the plan to proceed.

One of the central aims of my subproject within Work Package 3 is to make sense of these overlapping and simultaneous presents within the empire, and how they shaped decision-making and the organisation of Charles V’s composite monarchy. Governing such a diverse collection of kingdoms, provinces, and peoples under a single ruler inevitably created almost insoluble challenges. Imperial presence was needed everywhere at once; the emperor’s attention, or that of his trusted ministers, had to be virtually omnipresent. This relentless need for oversight is clearly reflected in the letters of Granvelle, who constantly alluded to the immense burdens of his role as first councillor in managing it all. He often described himself as working ‘day and night’, or lamented that he had ‘no extra time’ to deal with matters, frequently specifying the long hours worked and the sleepless nights endured. New letters raising new issues were constantly arriving at court. On one occasion, the councillor compared himself to a sick man desperately seeking every possible remedy (‘yo soy como el enfermo que busca todos los remedios’)⁴. Elsewhere, he wrote that he was overwhelmed by the constant flow of despatches being sent ‘throughout all of Christendom’⁵.

It is therefore no coincidence that a clock appears on the desk in Titian’s portrait of Antoine Perrenot (later Cardinal Granvelle), who increasingly assisted his father in the imperial chancellery from the 1540s onwards and ultimately succeeded him as the emperor’s first councillor. Ministers like the Granvelles began to measure their work by the minute, kept detailed agendas, and thereby sought to rationalise the overwhelming demands of governing an empire of such unprecedented scale.

Yet for someone who was in communication with ‘all of Christendom’ and orchestrating political plots, surprisingly little is known about Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle during the 1530s and 1540s, or his ideology, his networks or the functioning of the imperial chancellery and council he led. Although significant efforts were made, for example, by the Konstanz Project in the 1990s to catalogue a large portion of the emperor’s political correspondence, that same project already noted the absence of a comprehensive study of the imperial political thought under Granvelle and his son⁶.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that the personal archive of Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle has largely been lost (and not only in relation to secretive matters such as the Piacenza Plot). However, a vast body of unstudied letters and marginal notes survives in the archives of the imperial secretaries of state who worked under Granvelle’s supervision, not only in the archive of Simancas, but also in Brussels and Vienna. The personal archives of his son and successor, Antoine Perrenot, are also relatively well preserved in Madrid and Besançon. In addition, the broader correspondence that spanned ‘all of Christendom’ offers valuable clues. Often overlooked from an imperial perspective, many archives in Italy and Germany still hold hundreds (possibly thousands) of letters written by the emperor and his first councillor that often remain uncatalogued or unexamined.

The reconstructing of this correspondence of Nicolas Perrenot (and what we might describe as an imperial chancellery archive), first begun during my PhD, is now continuing as part of the Capturing the Present project. To date, it has led me to consult over sixty archives, libraries and collections across Europe, either in person or online. The current estimate suggests the total surviving corpus will comprise around 5,000 documents, in six different languages. Engaging with this fragmented and dispersed archival record is, in itself, partially a reflection of how the composite Habsburg empire under Charles V and his chancellery functioned, with regional centres maintaing a high degree of administrative autonomy. Nevertheless, tackling this archival reality is essential in order to assess an imperial present and how the complex and shifting realities were faced by the emperor and his first councillor, realities that were not always readily apprehensible to other contemporaries influenced by local expectations within their respective realms. This task is all the more important given the enduring myth on Charles V in later historiography, where his reign is often associated with an ideal of unification or a vision of Monarchia Universalis⁷.

Although the project remains in its early stages, it’s clear that the notion of a growing, unifying central administration, allegedly initiated under chancellor Gattinara and continued under Granvelle, is often overstated. In practice, governance was shaped by precedent, tradition and the pragmatic demands of a fractured empire. The present itself, stretched and compounded by the time needed to obtain information from across Europe, posed a real challenge to political planning. Far from enforcing a rigid centralism, which was often even impossible to enforce, the imperial administration sought instead to accommodate regional differences, and implementing incremental reforms. Yet at times (and this is what makes the process of reconstructing a chancellery’s archive never boring), a ‘smoking gun’ emerges, such as the Gonzaga letter, which reveals that an ideal of unification and state formation was sometimes advanced by means of betrayal and the occasional act of bloodshed, incorporating the unexpected into the political process.

TO BE PUBLISHED

Parts of this article appeared in my PhD thesis, “The Secret Face of Empire: Espionage, Governance and the Habsburg Archives under Charles V, 1525–1550”, Ghent University, 2025, which I am currently revising for publication. An edition of the 1546-1547 correspondence between Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle and his son Antoine Perrenot is under revision for publication in the Bulletin de la Commission royale d’Histoire: “Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle and the Making of a First Councillor: a Commission Letter (1551) and the Correspondence with Antoine Perrenot (1546–1547) as a Guide to Imperial Statecraft.” In addition, I am preparing an article on the essential role of time in political decision-making, as already exemplified in the Piacenza Plot. This article will incorporate several extra cases that illustrate how temporal rhythms shaped imperial governance. Working title: “The Emperor’s Clock: Chronopolitics in the Reign of Charles V and the Myth of the Monarchia Universalis.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Ferrante Gonzaga to Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, Milan, 15 August 1547, deciphered by the author (Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 1193, no. 226).

Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle to Francisco de los Cobos, Savona, 6 February 1542 (Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 1375, no. 57).

Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle to Mary of Hungary, Toledo, 21 March 1539 (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna, LA Belgien PA 30/1, f. 49r).

Secondary Sources

Bertomeu Masiá, María José, La guerra secreta de Carlos V contra el papa. La cuestión de Parma y Piacenza en la correspondencia del cardenal Granvela. Edición, estudio y notas,Valencia, 2009.

Meister, Aloys, Die Geheimschrift im Dienste der päpstlichen Kurie von ihren Anfängen bis zum Ende des XVI. Jahrhunderts, Paderborn, 1906.

Parker, Geoffrey, Emperor: A New Life of Charles V, New Haven, 2019.

Rabe, Horst & Heide Stratenwerth, “Die Politische Korrespondenz Kaiser Karls V. und ihre wissenschaftliche Erschließung,” in Horst Rabe (ed.), Karl V. Politik und politisches System. Berichte und Studien aus der Arbeit an der Politischen Korrespondenz des Kaisers,Konstanz, 1996, p. 11-39.

Rodríguez-Salgado, Maria José, “Ferrante Gonzaga: The champion of innocence,” in G. Signorotto (ed.), Ferrante Gonzaga. Il Mediterraneo, L’Impero (1507-1557),Rome, 2009, p. 139-196.

Simonetta, Marcello, Pier Luigi Farnese. Vita, morte e scandali di un figlio degenere, Piacenza, 2020.

1. Bertomeu Masiá, La guerra secreta de Carlos V contra el papa, p. 458-461; Rodríguez-Salgado, “Ferrante Gonzaga: The champion of innocence,” p. 143-145; Simonetta, Pier Luigi Farnese. ↩︎
2. Letters from Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle to Antoine Perrenot, Besançon, 31 March & 7 April 1547; see Hoffman, “The Secret Face of Empire”, p. 50-51. ↩︎
3. Ciphered letter from Ferrante Gonzaga to Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, Milan, 15 August 1547, deciphered by the author (Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 1193, no. 226). The cipher key in question is published in Bertomeu Masiá, La guerra secreta, p. 152-153 and Meister, Die Geheimschrift, p. 212-213 ↩︎
4. Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle to Francisco de los Cobos, Savona, 6 February 1542 (Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 1375, no. 57). ↩︎
5. Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle to Mary of Hungary, Toledo, 21 March 1539 (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna, LA Belgien PA 30/1, f. 49r.). ↩︎
6. Rabe & Heide Stratenwerth, “Die Politische Korrespondenz Kaiser Karls V.”, p. 11-39. ↩︎
7. This unifying myth of the reign of Charles V is discussed in Parker, Emperor, p. 490-502. ↩︎