DAVILA, ENRICO CATERINO. — Born at Piove di Sacco (Padova) on 30 Oct. 1576, in 1583 he is in France as a page to Queen Catherine; at 18 he enters the military, in 1599 he is in the service of Venice; he is assassinated by a servant on 26 May 1631.
He owes his fame to the *Storia delle guerre civili di Francia*. In his firm and detached style he gathers the extreme thought of raison d’état: “There is nothing either laudable or salutary in wishing to stop and be satisfied halfway” (*Storia ecc.*, 2nd ed., Pistoia 1852, p. 85): one must be able to carry the crime through to the end. He deeply feels the polemic of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, as well as that of the Counter-Reformation, on the best form of government, inclining toward a strong monarchy, aware as he is of the decline of noble forces and the germination of great national States. A genuinely political spirit, he regards religion, despite apparent phrases of great reverence, as an *instrumentum regni*. In a well-known passage rich in undertones, the conversion of Henry IV is seen sub specie politica: “the king, having received sufficient instruction on the controversial articles of faith, showed that his mind was eased and that he visibly understood the hand of God, which, recalling him from his errors, was bringing him back into the bosom of the Church” (op. cit., V, p. 179): he is not so much concerned with the sincerity of a conversion nor with the vast religious consequences that such a conversion determined in the tangle of French struggles and European Christendom, as with the political forces expressing human cunning or cupidity.