INTRODUCTION

Three of the great figures who were the heroes of the Enlightenment histories of morality were born within five years of each other: Hugo Grotius in 1583, John Selden in 1585 and Thomas Hobbes in 1588. The social and intellectual world in which they grew up, and in which all three were star performers before they came to reject it in various ways, was thus the world of the last years of the sixteenth century. That world had itself been shaped in complex ways by the events of the Renaissance, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, by the growth of Habsburg power and by resistance to it, so that an extraordinarily rich and pluralist culture was available to any intelligent and sensitive adolescent in Western Europe.

By our standards, they were born into a sparsely inhabited continent: the total population of the lands where the Roman Catholic or Protestant Churches were dominant (which will be the area of our enquiry, corresponding to Europe west of Muscovy and the Ottoman empire) was probably some 60 million in 1600, roughly the same as that of the islands of Britain and Ireland today (Braudel 1972 pp. 396–7). (England, to continue this parallel, had about the same population as the Republic of Ireland today.) Despite this generally sparse population, there were two areas of intense urbanisation and great wealth, on either side of the continent – one in northern Italy, and the other in the Netherlands.