CONTENTS Introduction ix Against War 3INTRODUCTIONThe Treatise on War, of which the earliest English translation is herereprinted, was among the most famous writings of the most illustriouswriter of his age. Few people now read Erasmus; he has become for theworld in general a somewhat vague name. Only by some effort of thehistorical imagination is it possible for those who are not professedscholars and students to realize the enormous force which he was at acritical period in the history of civilization. The free institutions andthe material progress of the modern world have alike their roots inhumanism. Humanism as a movement of the human mind culminated in the age,and even in a sense in the person, of Erasmus. Its brilliant flower was ofan earlier period; its fruits developed and matured later; but it was inhis time, and in him, that the fruit set! The earlier sixteenth century isnot so romantic as its predecessors, nor so rich in solid achievement asothers that have followed it. As in some orchard when spring is over, theblossom lies withered on the grass, and the fruit has long to wait beforeit can ripen on the boughs. Yet here, in the dull, hot midsummer days, isthe central and critical period of the year's growth.The life of Erasmus is accessible in many popular forms as well as in morelearned and formal works. To recapitulate it here would fall beyond thescope of a preface. But in order to appreciate this treatise fully it isnecessary to realize the time and circumstances in which it appeared, andto recall some of the main features of its author's life and work up tothe date of its composition.That date can be fixed with certainty, from a combination of external andinternal evidence, between the years 1513 and 1515; in all probability itwas the winter of 1514-15. It was printed in the latter year, in the"editio princeps" of the enlarged and rewritten Adagia then issued fromFroben's great printing-works at Basel. The stormy decennate of PopeJulius II had ended in February, 1513. To his successor, Giovanni de'Medici, who succeeded to the papal throne under the name of Leo X, thetreatise is particularly addressed. The years which ensued were a timesingularly momentous in the history of religion, of letters, and of thewhole life of the civilized world. The eulogy of Leo with which Erasmusends indicates the hopes then entertained of a new Augustan age of peaceand reconciliation. The Reformation was still capable of being regarded asan internal and constructive force, within the framework of the societybuilt up by the Middle Ages. The final divorce between humanism and theChurch had not yet been made. The long and disastrous epoch of the wars ofreligion was still only a dark cloud on the horizon. The Renaissance wasreally dead, but few yet realized the fact. The new head of the Church wasa lover of peace, a friend of scholars, a munificent patron of the arts.This treatise shows that Erasmus, to a certain extent, shared or strove toshare in an illusion widely spread among the educated classes of Europe.With a far keener instinct for that which the souls of men required, anAugustinian monk from Wittenberg, who had visited Rome two years earlier,had turned away from the temple where a corpse lay swathed in gold andhalf hid in the steam of incense. With a far keener insight into the realstate of things, Machiavelli was, at just this time, composing The Prince.