Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 55
Context: Of all tyrannies of unreason in the modern world, one holds a supremely evil preeminence. It covered the period from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, and throughout those hundred years was waged a war of hatreds,—racial, religious, national, and personal;—of ambitions, ecclesiastical and civil;—of aspirations, patriotic and selfish;—of efforts, noble and vile. During all those weary generations Europe became one broad battlefield,—drenched in human blood and lighted from innumerable scaffolds. In this confused struggle great men appeared—heroes and martyrs, ruffians and scoundrels: all was anarchic. The dominant international gospel was that of Machiavelli.
“In the middle of the sixteenth century, Spain was the incubus of Europe. Gloomy and portentous, she chilled the world with her baneful shadow.”
Pt. I, Ch. 2 Villegagnon
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Francis Parkman 28
American historian 1823–1893Related quotes
Pt. I, Ch. 7
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)
Pt. I, Ch. 9 Charles IX and Philip II
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)
W. W. Rouse Ball, A Short Account of the History of Mathematics (1888), Courier Dover, 1960, p. 164
A Spanish politician in a political meeting said it for the first time and attributed to Bismarck https://es.wikiquote.org/wiki/Discusi%C3%B3n:Otto_von_Bismarck
Misattributed
"If God is Dead..." https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/if-god-is-dead/ (April 26, 2016), Chronicles
2010s
Wallerstein (1974) The Modern World-System, vol. I, p. 233.