Randolph C. Head . Jenatsch's Axe: Social Boundaries, Identity, and Myth in the Era of the Thirty Years' War.(Changing Perspectives on Early Modern Europe, number 9.)Rochester, N.Y. : University of Rochester Press . 2008 . Pp. xvi, 177. $70.00.

Abstract

Randolph C. Head's book is a biography that also confronts wider issues such as the varieties of patriotism in early seventeenth-century Europe and the boundaries between competing confessional groups and political factions. Its hero, Jörg or Georg (sometimes also written Jürg or Giorgio) Jenatsch, was an important political figure in Graubünden during the Thirty Years' War. The small federation of the Grey Leagues, or Grisons, was at that stage a strategically important focus of political interests. Situated between the Swiss Confederation, the Habsburg Tyrol, Venice, and Spanish Milan, the self-governing rural communities of Graubünden controlled the important Valtelline valley. Whenever Spain wanted to send soldiers from northern Italy to the southern Netherlands in the early seventeenth century they had to use the road leading through the Valtellina. Thus both the Spanish and the French but also the Venetian Republic tried to gain a foothold in the Valtellina and Graubünden itself through patronage, military intervention, and downright bribery. Jenatsch, who as a young man became a Calvinist minister, emerged as one of the leaders of the largely Protestant faction allied with Venice. Despite his status as a man of the cloth he exhibited little reluctance to participate in acts of violence, including assassinations and brutal murders. Among the victims of such actions were members of the influential von Planta family, local noblemen closely allied with Spain. Keen on taking revenge, they forced Jenatsch into temporary exile. The former clergyman lived in Venice for some years and in the end became a professional soldier and military entrepreneur. This position provided an important stepping stone for social advancement, and Jenatsch tried to persuade the emperor in Vienna to grant him a noble title and a fief in the 1630s, an objective he was about to achieve when he was killed by an assassin in an inn in the city of Chur in 1639. By this stage Jenatsch had undergone a profound change of religious and political identity by converting to Catholicism. At the same time Jenatsch put an end to his cooperation with France, which had been very close for a couple of years, and sought patronage and protection in Innsbruck and Vienna. But as Head makes clear, Jenatsch's surprising change of sides cannot be explained as a mere act of political expediency; Jenatsch's attitude to the political implications of religious convictions changed considerably over time. As a Protestant he believed that the secular laws had to correspond closely to the commandments of the one true church; as a Catholic, however, he saw religion more as a matter of personal choice important for one's eternal salvation but not necessarily for one's position in the res publica. He therefore seems to have accepted the Protestantism of his wife and children and many Grison citizens without much reluctance. Religion was for him, as Head puts it, “one source of identity among many … but not a qualification for full personhood in the first place” (p. 52).