Commentarius Rinuccinianus

Commentarius Rinuccinianus website

Archbishop Rinuccini

GianBattista Rinuccini, prince archbishop of Fermo, was sent to Ireland in March 1645 during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1641–53) by Pope Innocent X as his nuncio extraordinary to the Catholic Confederates.  From his arrival until he left Ireland in February 1649 the nuncio was at the centre of events in the politics of the three kingdoms. Rinuccini’s brief was the restoration of Catholicism.  His closest allies in Ireland were the Gaelic Irish, his main protagonists Irish royalists and parliamentarians, and eventually a considerable body of the Old English whom he came to consider as Catholics in name only. The nuncio rejected the peace treaty between the Confederates and Irish royalists under the leadership of the marquis of Ormond and advocated a continuation of the war. (1646) He excommunicated the Confederate Supreme Council for concluding a truce with parliamentarian forces under Lord Inchiquin. (May 1648) His policies gradually alienated the Old English, who reopened their negotiations with Ormond and agreed to a second peace with the royalists. Rinuccini left Ireland shortly afterwards. After his return to Italy he employed two Capuchin friars, Richard O’Ferrall and Robert O’Connell, to compile an account of his mission to Ireland. 

The Rinuccini manuscript

This narrative, or the Commentarius Rinuccinianus,as it has become known, provides a unique insight into the political, social, religious and military history of the confederate association. There has been some dispute over the authorship of the Commentarius, but it seems clear from contemporary and palaeographical evidence that the narrative was compiled in Florence by the two Capuchin friars, Richard O’Ferrall (Barnabas) and Robert O’Connell (Daniel), between the years 1661 and 1666. O’Ferrall in particular had worked closely with the nuncio in Ireland and on his return to Italy in 1649. The compilers used the nuncio’s papers, particularly the Nuncii regestum, Nuncii relatio and his diary, to produce their manuscript. This was preserved in the Trivulzi Library in Milan but was destroyed by bombing during the Second World War.

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 Confederation of Kilkenny. The destruction of most of 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. 

Aims and objectives

The primary aim of this project is to produce an English translation of the Commentarius Rinuccinianus hosted by the University of Ulster on the internet. The objective is to allow full access to the text for scholars, students and the general public. To facilitate research, the English translation is supported by new indexes and is fully searchable. The Latin text of the translation—R. O’Ferrall and R. O’Connell, Commentarius Rinuccinianus, de sedis Apostolicae Legatione ad Foederatos Hiberniae Catholicos per annos 1645–1649 (ed. Stanislaus Kavanagh) (6 vols, Dublin, 1932–49)—is also available on the site. 

The site also provides a portal by which to access key texts in PDF format related to the career of Archbishop Rinuccini, including G. Aiazzi, Nunziatura in Irlanda (Florence, 1844), translated by Annie Hutton and titled Embassy in Ireland (Dublin, 1873). The following key sources for the period are also available on the site: 

J. T. Gilbert (ed.), An aphorismical discovery of treasonable faction, or A contemporary history of affairs in Ireland from AD 1641 to 1652… (3 vols, Dublin, 1879).

J. T. Gilbert (ed.), History of the Irish confederation and the war in Ireland. With correspondence and documents of the Confederation and of the administrators of the English government in Ireland. Contemporary personal statements, memoirs, etc.… (7 vols, Dublin, 1882–91).

The site can be accessed at www.ulster.ac.uk/commentarius

The project is funded by the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism.

W. P. Kelly
University of Ulster

The European dimensions of the Commentarius Rinuccinianus

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 nunciature of GianBattista Rinuccini, so lavishly documented in the Commentarius, was the major diplomatic endeavour of the early years of the controversial pontificate of Innocent X. The manner in which Rinuccini’s mission was created and implemented and the archbishop chosen for the task offer a series of insights into the nature of papal European objectives and the restrictions under which Rome operated. In particular, the Rinuccini nunciature offers an extraordinarily interesting counterpoint to the contemporary mission of Fabio Chigi, the future pope and papal representative at the European peace negotiations at Münster. Through the contemporaneous mission in Ireland, the Commentarius allows an entirely fresh comparative perspective on the ultimately fruitless efforts of the pope to influence the Treaty of Westphalia, the foundation-stone of European international relations until the outbreak of the French Revolution.

Chigi’s frustration with French diplomacy in Germany has in the past often been integrated into a rather simplistic characterisation of the Pamfili pontificate as fundamentally pro-Spanish and anti-French, and thus a direct contrast with his immediate predecessor, Urban VIII. The documents within the Commentarius, however, demonstrate Innocent X’s attempts to preserve a strict neutrality between the interests of the Bourbons and Habsburgs in Ireland and the attempts that he made to effect a reconciliation with Mazarin’s government. Indeed, the Commentarius can be regarded as perhaps the single most important source for Franco-Roman relations in 1645, at a particularly sensitive time in this relationship. Mazarin’s government had been fundamentally opposed to the election of Pamfili as pope, and relations between France and Rome were so fraught in the wake of the papal conclave that fears of a French schism from the Roman church were openly voiced. A principal reason why Rinuccini spent three months in Paris in 1645 was to attempt to repair the damage in the diplomatic relationship between the two powers, a process recorded in detail in the Commentarius.

The Commentarius is also highly useful in clarifying the manner in which French objectives in Ireland and Britain were integrated into the overriding Bourbon preoccupation with war against the Habsburgs. Indeed, the warping effect of this great conflict on all aspects of Catholic Europe is one of the principal insights which the text reveals.

Other than the rich seams that it provides concerning European diplomacy, the Commentarius  is also highly important in terms of Italian cultural perceptions. Understandably, the text has been most extensively mined from an Irish perspective, since the information that it contains on Irish affairs is often unique in terms of content and affiliation. But the Commentarius can also be examined within the context of Italian encounters with a profoundly different cultural and political environment. This is particularly visible in the correspondence of the various Italian actors, principally GianBattista Rinuccini, Dionysio Massari and PierFrancesco Scarampi, that it contains, but the material relating to Irish receptions in Rome, such as that of Nicholas Plunkett and Nicholas French, in 1648 is also extraordinarily suggestive concerning the impenetrable bureaucracy of the Roman curia.

To sum up, therefore, while its importance as an Irish historical source remains the chief virtue of the Commentarius, the European dimensions of the text should never be forgotten in assessing its importance. The Commentarius is a lengthy repository of 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.

Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin

Dr Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin is Senior Lecturer, University College, Dublin.

The 1653 Historia of Robert O’Connell

Readers of the first part of Kavanagh’s introduction to his edition of the Commentarius (Vol. VI) will have noted that he gives a list of published works used by the authors of the Commentarius. These are by no means all identified in the marginalia of the text, however. For example, in order to find out the exact source for the opening of the Commentarius we must turn to an earlier work by one of its two authors: the Historia Missionis Hiberniae Fratrum Minorum Capucinorum of Robert O’Connell (Bibliothèque de Troyes, Cabinet des MSS, no. 706). The first folio of the Historia clearly identifies Baronius ad annum 1053 as the source of the motif of Hibernia, testis fidei tenacissima, the most staunch defender of the faith, which resounds throughout the Commentarius. Although Kavanagh drew attention to the relevance of the Historia for the Commentarius (Vol. VI, Appendix I), few scholars appear ever to have thought it worthy of scrutiny, despite the fact that a microfilm of the original manuscript is held by the National Library, courtesy of Ludwig Bieler, and that a transcript of the manuscript is held by the Capuchins in Church Street. Possibly its title gave the impression that its content was confined to material of interest primarily to historians of the Capuchin Order, and this impression may have been bolstered somewhat by Kavanagh’s rather unfortunate statement in his introduction to the effect that, while O’Connell did most of the writing, most of the preparation and planning was to be attributed to Richard O’Ferrall (p. 20).

It is true that F. X. Martin made some use of the Historia, with the assistance of Kavanagh, in his work on Friar Nugent. Moreover, Martin acknowledged O’Connell as a historian of significance. Unfortunately, the excerpts of the Historia that he used may have done little to alert historians to the panoramic perspective of the work. Accordingly, the Latin manuscript of some 700 folios has remained unedited and untranslated for almost 350 years. Fortunately, the Irish government (Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism) has now provided funding to the University of Ulster to produce an edition and translation of O’Connell’s Historia. Indeed, it represents a natural extension of the Commentarius project, given that it is a key source for the later text, which was written between 1661 and 1666, also on the Continent. Accordingly, the Historia, quoted in the Commentarius, identifies and confirms sources used in the Commentarius.

Yet this earlier text, the Historia, should not be approached solely as a valuable source for the later text. It offers an opportunity to see the events delineated in the Commentarius from a different perspective. The later, larger work honours the promise O’Ferrall made to Rinuccini to vouch for the nuncio’s version of the relevant events in Ireland, primarily through recourse to hundreds of documents written mainly by significant personages. The Historia, however, situates political events in the context of the real lives of many more of the ordinary people of Ireland: royalty is there, but as a thread in the life stories of individual men, and their families, who made the Capuchin Order their material and spiritual home.  Through their less grand biographies, we will get closer to less rarefied voices which have an equal claim on our interest.

Grainne McLaughlin

Awkward neighbours and difficult friends: Rinuccini’s mission in context

The Commentarius offers a view of the war(s)—i.e. within and between—of the three kingdoms from the point of view of Rome: how to build up the Catholic Church in three kingdoms ruled by heretics but in one of which there was every prospect of Catholic self-government. And the Commentarius locates Ireland’s war of religion within a five-kingdom context, with rich material on the constrained interventions of France and Spain. It also provides some startling information about the willingness of both Charles I and Charles II to work with the papacy, not least in the discussion of whether Lord Cottingham is right to assure the pope in 1650 that Charles II is close to conversion: ‘if the Catholic princes will give him good help towards the recovery of his realms, you will soon see the glory of God enacted in him’. It is more fitful in its contributions to a holistic history of these islands. But they are there. For example, in introducing the year 1646, it says ‘it is necessary to tell of what happened in Ireland, England and Scotland’, and it begins with an account of how the king’s military strategy, and especially his decision to move his remaining army to Chester, was governed by the expectation that the 10,000 Irish Confederate troops agreed in the treaty made between his extraordinary envoy the earl of Glamorgan and the Supreme Council were on the move. In fact, following his meeting with Rinuccini, Ormond had clapped Glamorgan into prison, and Ormond—and in due course the king—as roundly condemned the ‘Glamorgan treaty’ as Rinuccini condemned the ‘Ormond peace’ and excommunicated all who upheld it. It then moves on to discuss the heroics of the earl of Antrim ‘and his tribesman, Alexander Macdonald’, in alliance with ‘the Marquis of Montrose, a Scotsman’, and how their campaigns affected the calculations of politicians in London and Oxford. 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 of all parties to Continental rulers for support of all kinds are made manifest. There is extraordinary material in the final volume, for example, about how all parties were negotiating deals with the pope, the kings of France and Spain and the duke of Lorraine, to bring them into Ireland or keep them out of Ireland. Going back to the moment of the nuncio’s arrival, what modern work can improve on this account of the state of Ireland: ‘It became evident to the Nuncio that those who started this war for the sake of the faith… were old Irishmen… The Irishmen of the more recent generations who had come from England gave their name to that alliance… [but] many of these younger Irishmen were secretly negotiating with the Marquis of Ormond—who was indeed Irish, though he was cut from the same heretical block as the Anglo-Irishmen… They met together in secret in order that they might achieve a sort of centre government, that is a government in which neither the Old Irish nor the Church would recover their rights, but in which the Puritans and the Parliamentarians would not gain control either.’ Oh, for such clarity in modern writing! 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. 

John Morrill is Professor of British and Irish History in the University of Cambridge. 

Provenance of the Commentarius Rinuccinianus

The Commentarius was written in Florence by two Capuchin friars between 1661 and 1666. Father Richard O’Ferrall, the elder of the two, died in August 1663. By this time well over a third of the work had already been completed, and Father Richard had doubtless, as the more senior cleric, been a major influence in terms of the overall design of the work and the disposition of the material. The work was completed by Father O’Ferrall’s colleague, Father Robert O’Connell, who had already written a substantial work, the Historia Missionis Hiberniae Fratrum Minorum Capuchinorum. It is arguably O’Connell’s voice and temperament which resound in the Commentarius, as can be seen by comparison with the tenor of the Historia.

Upon its completion, the manuscript of the Commentarius remained in the Rinuccini library in Florence until approximately 1850, when it entered the Trivulzi library in Milan on the marriage of Marianne Rinuccini to the (then) Marquis Trivulzi. Regrettably, the manuscript, together with many original supporting documents, was destroyed in 1943. It is fortunate that Father Stanislaus Kavanagh had recently completed his work on editing the text before the disaster happened, although the destruction of the original has made the resolution of the hundreds of textual problems in the printed edition more difficult to resolve. In seeking to resolve such textual difficulties, resources are limited to the following.

Thomas Coke (the future earl of Leicester and owner of Holkham Hall) had a transcript of the original Commentarius manuscript made in approximately 1716–17, during his grand tour of the Continent. Although this manuscript copy (known as the Holkham transcript) of the original is littered with transcription errors, it nonetheless is an important link in a chain of events that brings us back closer to the original text than people have realised. This is because John T. Gilbert arranged to have a copy made of the Holkham transcript. This manuscript copy or transcription was made in approximately 1883 and is known as the Gilbert transcript. It was acquired by the municipality of Dublin in 1900 and is still in Pearse Street, in what is now Dublin City Archives. The Capuchins in Dublin were allowed to make a typed copy of the Gilbert transcript, which was itself a copy of the first but inaccurate copy of the Commentarius manuscript, the Holkham transcript.

Given the tendency for new errors to be introduced every time a text is copied, it might have been expected that the Capuchin typescript would be of less use to modern scholars than the earlier copies. It emerged in the course of project research, however, that Father Stanislaus Kavanagh had in fact taken the Capuchin typescript with him in a large trunk to the Trivulzi library in Milan, when he went to examine the original manuscript of the Commentarius. This means that the Capuchin typescript, the latest copy of the original manuscript, is in fact, owing to Kavanagh’s annotations and corrections to the typescript, the nearest thing we will ever have to the original manuscript. It is important to emphasise how very considerable Kavanagh’s achievement was in editing this massive text of over one million words of Latin narrative, exegesis and supporting sources in situ, notwithstanding the hundreds of errors introduced by the printers, which are in addition to the hundreds of errata identified by Kavanagh himself.

The edited Capuchin typescript is now with the Gilbert transcript in Dublin City Archives, thanks to the generosity of the current Capuchin archivist, Father Pádraig Ó Cuill, and Dr Máire Kennedy of Dublin City Archives. Both the on-line version of the English translation of the Commentarius and the future edition and translation of O’Connell’s Historia are indebted to the former Capuchin archivist, the late Father Benedict Cullen, the godson of Stanislaus Kavanagh. The earl of Leicester also kindly gave permission for photographs of the Holkham transcript to be taken.

Dr Grainne McLaughlin

University of Ulster

Commentarius Rinuccinianus as a source for Confederate Ireland

The 1640s was a remarkable decade in Irish history. For the first and only time prior to the twentieth century, the native population established a recognisably national government, based in Kilkenny, which exercised authority throughout most of the country. From 1642 to 1649 the general assembly of the Catholic Confederate association functioned as a sovereign parliament, making laws, maintaining armed forces and sending diplomats to the major courts of Europe. This radical experiment in self-government collapsed dramatically in the face of overwhelming military intervention from England, spearheaded by Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army. Whereas the circumstances of the final defeat remain seared into the national consciousness, Confederate achievements are comparatively unknown. One of the principal reasons for this historical neglect lies in the destruction of the vast bulk of official Confederate records. In 1711 a fire destroyed all the political, administrative and judicial material stored in Dublin, while the surviving sources (mainly financial) perished during the artillery bombardment of the Four Courts by Free State forces in June 1922. This meant that scholars of Confederate Ireland relied for the most part on hostile English state records, or on private collections such as the voluminous papers of James Butler, earl, marquis and finally duke of Ormond, who dominated the Irish political scene from the 1640s until his death in 1688. 

Ormond, the king’s representative in Ireland throughout the war, was a deeply divisive figure, and the papal nuncio, GianBattista Rinuccini, led the clerical faction at Kilkenny in opposing a possible peace deal between the Confederates and royalists. This dispute split the association and resulted in decades of bitterness as the competing factions blamed each other for their subsequent defeat at the hands of Cromwell. Having failed to prevent the signing of the Ormond peace treaty in January 1649, Rinuccini departed for Rome, but the controversy continued to rage on the Continent. Following the nuncio’s death in 1653, two Irish clerics, Richard O’Ferrall and Robert O’Connell, wrote the story of his mission to Ireland, primarily as a means of refuting the arguments of his opponents within Confederate ranks. Although unashamedly polemical in nature, the detailed narrative contained in 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 Ormond papers preserved in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Moreover, the work contains Latin translations of original documents relating to Confederate politics (many of them long since lost), as well as a comprehensive description of Rinuccini’s attempts to reform and revitalise the Catholic Church in Ireland. 

While a published version of the original manuscript has been available in Latin for over 60 years, few historical scholars possess the necessary linguistic skills to make full use of the material. This newly translated edition, alongside the transcription of the 1641 Depositions currently under way in Trinity College Dublin, will make two of the most important sources of the 1640s available to a much wider audience. This will greatly facilitate future research, and in the process significantly enhance our understanding of Confederate Ireland.

Dr Micheál Ó Siochrú, 

Trinity College, Dublin

Italian sources in the Commentarius

The text of the Commentarius consists of over a million words in Latin. Embedded in this text are hundreds of documents marshalled as evidence in defence of the papal legate, Rinuccini. This should not surprise the reader, as the two authors of the Commentarius aspired to the highest standards of historiography, which dictated stringent examination of prime sources. Given that the text is in essence the apologia or defence of the nuncio, however, it was important that all this evidence should be available in Latin, the language common to key figures across Europe. The task facing Robert O’Connell and Richard O’Ferrall, the two authors of the Commentarius, was consequently daunting, for they were confronted with a disparate array of material and information in Irish, Italian, English, French, Spanish and, of course, Latin.

At the time of composition (1661–6) the need to translate prime source materials into Latin posed, as it would do now, not only linguistic but also ethical problems for the authors: the Commentarius is a polemical work, and one of the ways in which Rinuccini’s actions are justified is through the denunciation of his opponents, whose meaning is at the mercy of their translators. It was therefore decided at the outset of the project that, wherever possible, the on-line reader would be provided with the original document, which could then be compared in due course with the Latin translation provided by O’Connell or O’Ferrall. It must also be remembered that the version of the Commentarius which has survived is only a draft, which the authors would doubtless have revised, had O’Ferrall survived its composition and O’Connell not been assigned other duties by the Capuchin Order. Every effort has therefore been made, and continues to be made, to locate documents referred to by the text but accidentally omitted.

In this regard, special mention must be made of nineteenth-century scholar Giuseppe Aiazzi, who knew enough of Irish hands to recognise that it was incorrect to attribute, as had his predecessors in the Rinuccini (Trivulzi) library in Florence, composition of the Commentarius to Rinuccini himself or to his secretary, Dino Massari. Aiazzi, encouraged by the Italian historian Gino Capponi, also engaged in research that has proven invaluable since the destruction of the original manuscript and related material in 1943. He published his Nunziatura in Irlanda in 1844, and in it included almost all the Italian documents used in the Commentarius from an important supporting source, the Nuncii Regestum. The manuscript available to him (Trivulzi Library cod. 1966) was a later version of the original Regestum used by O’Connell and O’Ferrall (cod. 1967), but only Aiazzi’s work preserves the original language of the documents—the complete text of the nuncio’s final report to Pope Innocent X (Relazione delle cose d’Irlanda), additional papers, and over 300 letters of various length, spirit and stylistic register, addressed by Rinuccini to the Roman Curia and to eminent figures on the European political scene in the years 1644–9. The original Italian text can usefully be compared to the Latin translations in the Commentarius; it is envisaged that close comparison of Aiazzi’s Italian originals, and indeed English and French documents, will be a fruitful area of future research for historians and linguists alike. 

Professor A. Chahoud and Dr G. McLaughlin