The League of Augsburg and the Siege of Buda
[CORNAND DE LACROZE, Jean, et al.]
Tract volume of ten pamphlets in French and two in Dutch on the League of Augsburg (July 1686), and the Siege of Buda (June to September 1686), all published under fictitious imprints. The Netherlands, various publishers, 1686 [and one 1694].
Twelve works, 4to, all uncut and preserving original blanks; slightly dusty in places, else very good copies; bound together in nineteenth-century maroon quarter morocco with marbled paper sides; spine a little stained; from the library of the Walpole family at Wolterton Hall.
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Tract volume of ten pamphlets in French and two in Dutch on the League of Augsburg (July 1686), and the Siege of Buda (June to September 1686), all published under fictitious imprints.
A fine exchange of rare political propaganda published in the late months of 1686 after the signing of the League of Augsburg and the defeat of the Ottomans at Buda.
The League of Augsburg was a treaty of mutual defence signed on 9 July 1686 between various existing alliances within the Holy Roman Empire, Swedish Pomerania, and Bavaria, with the broad intent of opposing the French. The victories against the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683 and then Buda in September 1686 allowed Emperor Leopold I to turn his attention westward against French ambitions, which came to the fore in the Nine Years’ War in 1688, goals that in the event proved difficult until the formation in 1689 of the larger Grand Alliance including Great Britain under its new king, William III.
In this fascinating collection, the text of the Treaty of Augsburg is followed by an exchange of pamphlets between ‘un bourgeois de Cologne’ and several respondents on current affairs. The ‘bourgeois de Cologne’ was in fact a pro-French propagandist, and his three letters, dated 14 September, 30 September and 10 November 1686 and signed ‘L. B. C. G. F.’, proved an effective tool in swaying public opinion against the League, implying that it threatened Europe’s security against the Turks, embroiled small states in a conflict with France they could not sustain; it also suggested that British involvement would be contrary to their national interest. The letters were all published under the fictitious imprint ‘A Cologne, chez Pierre Marteau’ (Peter Hammer), and elicited a number of anti-French responses supposedly written from Liège (imprint ‘Paul l’Enclume’, i.e. Paul Anvil), Trier, and Frankfurt. The last of these, Lettre ecrite a Francfort, par un homme destitué de passion, is signed ‘J. C. de la C.’, i.e. the journalist and Protestant propagandist Jean Cornand de Lacroze (1660–1705?), one of the editors of the Bibliothèque universelle et historique (Amsterdam, 1686–94), who had come to London after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The first two Dutch pamphlets are a similar for-and-against on the League; the final work is on the installation of the pro-French Prince Joseph of Bavaria as Prince-Bishop of Liège in 1694.
A full list of contents is available on request.