Commentarius Rinuccinianus

Thomas Carte, biographer of the Duke of Ormond

There is still another account of those affairs, which I have frequent occasion to quote by the name of Nuncio’s Memoirs. It takes up above seven thousand pages in folio, consisting of several volumes, and is wrote in Latin, the title of it being, ‘De Haeresis Anglicanae intrusion et progressu, et de bello Catholico ad annum 1641 in Hibernia caepto, exindeque per aliquot annos gesto, Commentarius.’ It was wrote, after the Nuncio’s death, by an Irish Roman Catholic priest, whom Thomas Baptista Rinuccini, Great Chamberlain to the Duke of Tuscany, employed to digest his brother’s papers, and reduce them into the form of a narration. The compiler was a very rigid man in his principles with regard to the immunities of the clergy, the Papal power, and the lawfulness of the rebellion for the sake of religion; and appears infinitely zealous for the Nuncio’s honour. But nothwithstanding his prepossession in these respects, he appears always to have a great regard to truth, and to be very fair and candid in his relation of occurrences.

Rev. Ferdinando Warner, author of The History of the Rebellion and Civil War in Ireland (1767).

More important still, perhaps, than any of these, [sources for the period] I had the perusal of the Memoirs of Rinuccini, the Pope’s Nuncio in Ireland at the time of this Rebellion…It is a Latin manuscript in four immense volumes in folio; and appears to be written with candour, and a strict regard to the materials…No other English writer appears to have these Memoirs except Mr Carte and Dr Birch; and the former hath made a very partial use of them; and the latter confines himself to a few transactions of the King and the Lord Glamorgan with the Nuncio and the Rebels. These Memoirs, however, bring to light so many secret affairs of the Catholics in that period, - to say no more, - that it is impossible for any history of the Irish Rebellion to be complete without the assistance of this manuscript.

Commissioners for selecting papers from the Carte Manuscripts, Report to Lord Romilly, Master of the Rolls, 1870.

It is much to the credit of Carte’s sense of the responsibilities of a scientific historian that he made the remarkable effort to neutralize this manifest one-sidedness of his materials which has been described in a former page, by extracting largely from the manuscript history of the war of 1641 entitled, ‘Commentarius de Bello Catholico ad annum 1641 caepto,’ then in the possession of Lord Lovel, and still preserved in the library of the Earl of Leicester at Holkham. Of the importance of this manuscript as a means enabling the historian of the Irish war of 1641 to strike the balance of truth between the conflicting narratives, it is impossible to speak too strongly.

Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin
Senior Lecturer, School of History and Archives, University College, Dublin.

The Commentarius Rinuccinianus is no doubt principally a source of major importance in terms of seventeenth-century Irish history and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Nevertheless, the European dimensions of the text are also highly significant…The Commentarius is a lengthy repository the documents of a unique and sustained diplomatic and cultural encounter between Ireland and the Continent, principally Italy, which reveals much about both terms in that relationship.

Micheál Ó Siochrú
Lecturer in History, Trinity College, Dublin

Although unashamedly polemical in nature, the detailed narrative contained in the Commentarius Rinuccinianus is without doubt one of the key historical sources for the period, acting as an important counterbalance to those accounts based on the vast collection of the Ormond papers preserved in the Bodleian in Oxford.

John Morrill, Professor of British and Irish history, University of Cambridge

Here, in extraordinary detail, we see the wars within and between the kingdoms sumptuously displayed. But we also see how these wars were part of a global struggle, as the appeals to Continental rulers for support of all kinds are made manifest…The Commentarius tells us a huge amount about Irish history, but it also tells us about the added value of an account that frames that history in the context of the awkward neighbours and difficult friends.

W.P. Kelly, Project manager Commentarius, Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages, University of Ulster

There can be no doubt about the importance of the Commentarius for the history of the 1640s in Ireland, Britain and the Continent. The nuncio’s memoirs are one of the few surviving key primary sources of information about the politics, military history and personnel of the Catholic Confederacy. The destruction of most the records of the Confederacy in a fire at Dublin Castle in 1711 and later during the shelling of the Four Courts in Dublin during the Irish Civil War make the Commentarius one of the few contemporary accounts to survive.