Georges de Selve

Georges de Selve , also Georges de Selves , (* 1508 ; † April 12, 1541 in Lavaur ) was a French bishop , envoy , ambassador , humanist and translator . From 1528 to 1541 he was Bishop of Lavaur . In 1533 he went to England as an envoy , was ambassador to the Republic of Venice from 1535 to 1536 and represented France at the Vatican , in Germany and Spain . He was portrayed by Hans Holbein in his painting The Ambassadors .

family

Georges de Selve comes from an old merchant family and is the son of Jean de Selve (born April 17, 1475 in Tulle; † December 10, 1529 in Paris), the lord of Crosmières, Villiers le Châtel, some other possessions, and the Cécile de Buxy († January 10, 1530). The family experienced a rapid social rise in the late 15th century, was ennobled and thus belonged to a new class at the royal court, which the hereditary nobility initially looked down with suspicion. The ancestors were merchants from the Limousin, the father Jean studied law at the University of Toulouse, initially became an advisor to the local parliament and from 1505 was one of four Presidents of the Treasury in Normandy. Two years later, he made it chairman of the board and caught the attention of King Louis XII. In 1514 Jean mediated the wedding between Louis XII on a diplomatic mission in England . and Mary Tudor , a sister of Henry VIII. After the early death of Louis, his successor Franz I made Jean de Selve a special ambassador to England, but in 1515 appointed him Premier President of Bordeaux. After the conquest of Milan by the French troops in the autumn of the same year, Jean de Selve became Vice Chancellor there. In 1520 he took over the highest "parliamentary" post in the then public administration of France as Prime President of Paris.

Jean de Selve made sure that all of his sons made good careers. The eldest, Lazare (* 1503), took over the lands. Odet, the second born, studied civil law and was a lawyer at the Parliament of Paris (1540–1542) and at the Grand Conseil (1542–1546). On behalf of Francis I and his successor Henry II, he went to England, Venice and Rome as ambassador . The son Georges, born in 1508 or 1509, was earmarked for a church career.

Georges de Selve, detail from the painting The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein

Life

education

Georges first studied ancient Greek and Latin with Pierre Danès . Danès later became one of the first professors at the Collège de France . Georges began his ecclesiastical career as a clerc tonsuré ( clergyman ) in Rouen . At the age of almost sixteen, after his appointment as Apostolic Protonotary on September 12, 1522, he became Canon of Chartres Cathedral and three months later, in November 1522, Provost in Auvers . On January 28, 1527, he moved to St. Philibert de Noirmoutier in this capacity. On March 23, 1528, about 21 years old, he took over the Diocese of Luzon and became Bishop of Lavaur / Tarn, an office that he held until his death. Possibly this post was a reward for the merits of the father Jean in the negotiations of the peace of Madrid (January 14th 1526). The Bologna Concordat (1516) gave King Francis I a free hand in assigning church offices and made extensive use of this leeway to create dependencies and to cultivate friendships. In fact, Georges was only able to exercise the episcopate when he reached the age of 27, as stipulated by canon law (today the canonical age for a bishop is 35 years). On theological issues, Georges followed the moderate reformist doctrine of Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples , who dedicated his psaltery to David (1524) Georges and was comparatively open to the concerns of Protestants.

Diplomatic career

His diplomatic career in the service of the French king and the Catholic Church allied with him began in 1529 with a participation in the 2nd Reichstag in Speyer (March 15 to April 22), where Selve called on the Protestants in a much-noticed speech to be Catholic to return. In 1533 he went on a secret mission to England, from January 20, 1535 to June 18, 1536 he was French ambassador to the Republic of Venice , moved to the Vatican in Rome in 1536, to Germany in 1539, to Vienna in April 1540 and later to Spain.

In Venice, de Selve knew how to maintain the difficult diplomatic balance between the great powers Habsburg ( Emperor Charles V ) and the Ottoman Empire, which made a pact with France. During his stay in Rome, de Selve et al. a. the armistice of Nice (1538), in which France and Charles V, mediated by the Pope, settled their hostilities for a period of ten years and the emperor concurrently with the Republic of Venice and the Vatican concluded an alliance against the Turks. As an expert in dealing with the Habsburg claims to power, de Selves was also active in Germany and Spain. When Charles V had to put down the revolt of the Ghent merchants (1539) and wanted to lead his army through France, de Selve was involved in the negotiations as ambassador to the Spanish court.

Pupil of Pierre Bunel

It speaks for de Selve's eagerness to learn that in February 1534 he hired the renowned humanist and Latin connoisseur Pierre Bunel (Petrus Brunellus), a scholar and free spirit from Toulouse, who had taught in Padua and Venice since 1529 and taught the Greek there and studied Hebrew language. In 1537, Bunel traveled to Rome in the wake of de Selve and was so disappointed by the corruption there that he temporarily refused to speak Latin, i.e. to identify himself as an educated person. In 1538 he accompanied his employer de Selve to his bishopric Lavaur, devoted himself to his studies in the seclusion there, but after the death of his benefactor was violently hostile by his family and had to move to his hometown Toulouse. Georges de Selve retired from civil service in 1540 because of a serious illness, returned to Lavaur for good and was buried there in the Saint-Alain Cathedral after his untimely death on April 12, 1541 at the age of only 33.

Plutarch translator

At the express request of the French King Francis I , de Selve began translating Plutarch's biographies of famous men in 1530 , but was only able to edit eight biographies before his death ( Themistocles , Camillus , Pericles , Coriolanus , Timoleon , Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus , Lucius Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus and Alkibiades ; published posthumously in first edition in 1547 in Paris and in second edition in Lyon in 1548 under the title Huit Vies des Hommes Illustres de Plutarque ). With the humanist, philologist and Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) connected de Selves a regular correspondence.

Humanistic studies

In Venice, de Selve studied as one of the few non-Jews with the German humanist and linguist Elijah Levita , known as Ashkenasi, (1469–1559) the Hebrew language . Ashkenasi had to justify himself for this teaching activity to his co-religionists and defended himself by pointing out that he was penniless after the sack of Rome in 1527 and had to earn the trousseau for his daughters. In gratitude for his efforts, de Selve tried to find a professorship for his teacher at the Sorbonne in Paris, even though Jews were officially forbidden to stay in France. Levita is said to have turned down the offer so as not to become even further alienated from his fellow Jewish scholars and because he considered it unlikely that he would be the only Jew in France to remain free in teaching.

The ambassadors from Holbein

De Selve stayed in England in April / May 1533 on a top secret mission, probably to prevent the Anglican Church from falling away from Rome and to have a moderating effect on Henry VIII. In the opinion of the French court, he should keep his wedding with Anne Boleyn secret for as long as possible in order to gain leeway for negotiations with the Vatican. As a liberal spirit with a certain sympathy for the Reformation, de Selve seemed particularly suitable for this delicate task, but the exact purpose of his journey remains speculative. In London he visited his friend, the French ambassador and highly educated esthete Jean de Dinteville . Both are portrayed by Holbein as melancholy; de Selve's age at that time is evident from the cut of the book on which the clergyman is based in the picture. There you can read: Aetatis suae 25 ("his age is 25 years"). Art historical research has shown that the scene is dated to the exact day on Good Friday, April 11, 1533. The clergy's discretion and secrecy are emphasized in his clothing: he wears a floor-length, marten fur-lined, splendid brown-purple coat, which he holds closed with his left hand.

Works

In addition to his previously published Plutarch translations, a volume was published posthumously in Paris in 1559 with works left behind, Œuvres de feu révérend père en Dieu George de Selve, évêque de Lavaur, contenans un sermon, quelques exhortations, oraisons, contemplations, lettres, discours, sommaires de l'Escripture Saincte, moyen de faire et entretenir paix et deux remonstrances aux Alemans with three tracts, including pastoral instructions on baptism and confirmation ( Instructions pastorales pour le baptême et la confirmation ), as well as moral and political writings ( Traité sur les moyens de se procurer son bonheur dans ce monde et dans l'autre, suivant les différents postes ou l'on peut être appelé par son souverain and Traité sur les moyens d'établir une paix solide entre l'empereur d'Allemagne et le roi de France ) .

literature

• Chloé Bourguignon: Georges de Selve, un prélat-diplomate de la Renaissance. Tours 2013 (Master thesis).
• Robert J. Kalas: The Selve Family of Limousin: Members of a New Elite in Early Modern France. In: The Sixteenth Century Journal , 18 (1987), 147-172.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth214/deselve.html
2. ↑ http://gw.geneanet.org/selvejp?lang=fr&p=georges&n=de+selve
3. ↑ http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth214/deselve.html
4. ↑ Entry on Georges de Selve on catholic-hierarchy.org ; accessed on November 1, 2019.
5. ↑ Silvana Seidel-Menchi: Erasmus als Ketzer: Reformation and Inquisition in Italy of the 16th century , Leiden 1993, p. 336
6. ^ Glenn Richardson: Contending Kingdoms: France and England 1420–1700 , New York 2016. unpag.
7. ↑ Jacques-August de Thou: Monsieur de Thou's History of his own time , London 1729, Vol. 1, p. 32
8. ↑ Josef Bohatec: Budé and Calvin - studies on the thought world of French early humanism , Graz 1950, p. 155 f.
9. ↑ Alain Billaut: Plutarch's Lives. In: Gerald N. Sandye (Ed.): The Classical Heritage in France. Leiden / Boston / Cologne 2002, p. 220 f.
10. ^ William Johnstone: The Bible and the Enlightenment: A Case Study: Alexander Geddes 1737-1802. London / New York 2004, p. 82
11. ↑ Gérard E. Weil: Élie Lévita - Humanist et Massorète (1469-1549). Leiden 1963, p. 121