Two Centers of Musical Ferment in the Eighteenth Century: Bohemia and Minas Gerais

Keynote address for the conference “The Baroque Legacy: Past and Present in Hispanic America and Central and Eastern Europe,” Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan, 24–26 October, 2013

 In 1817 occurred a crucial moment of interaction between Central Europe and Latin America. Archduchess Maria Leopoldina of Austria, daughter of Emperor Franz, set sail from Trieste for Rio de Janeiro, where she married Don Pedro, son of the king of Portugal. Don Pedro was heir apparent to the kingdom of Portugal; but in 1822 he declared himself emperor of newly independent Brazil. In five years Maria Leopoldina, Erzherzogin von Österreich, became Dona Leopoldina, Emperatriz do Brasil.

            Leopoldina’s voyage to Brasil inspired several central-European intellectuals to make the same trip. The most distinguished of those who traveled to Brazil in 1817 were the Bavarian naturalists Carl von Martius and Johann Baptist von Spix, who began in Rio a scientific expedition that would last almost four years and cover more than 10,000 kilometers over land and on the Amazon and other rivers, which they described on their return to Germany in the three-volume Reise in Brasilien.

Travelling by mule through the vast, sparsely populated country of northern Minas Gerais, they learned that their arrival in the small settlement of Salgado had been anticipated: 

A farmer who lived twenty leagues (almost 100 kilometers) west of Salgado, sent a messanger to ask us for the pleasure of playing quartets with us.  A few days later, this suntanned Orpheus of the outback appeared at the head of a most unusual procession. On his mules he led a bass fiddle, violins, trumpets, music stands, and—as witnesses to his artistic dedication—his wife and children. Two of his cowboys took the subordinate parts, and with joyful confidence we performed Pleyel’s earliest quartets. What greater triumph could the composer enjoy than for the power of his music to be expressed in America’s wilderness! And in truth the spirit of music watched over our efforts: both performers and listeners were enchanted, and you, excellent music lover, João Raposo, your features transfigured in the intoxication of triumph, will always live in my memory!

That story expresses for me the richness—and at the same time the strangeness—of the musical culture of colonial Brazil, and in particular of the capitania—province—of Minas Gerais, home of the quartet-loving rancher João Raposo. (Henceforth, following a Brazilian practice, I will refer to it as "Minas.")  I’d like to shed some light on that musical culture by comparing it to that of another center of musical creativity in the eighteenth century—and a land bordering on the homeland of the intrepid explorers Martius and Spix, namely Bohemia. 

In several obvious ways Bohemia and Minas differed drastically.  In terms of area, Minas was much larger. Bohemia was about 52,000 square kilometers; Minas, about 587,000 square kilometers (about the size of France) was about ten times bigger than Bohemia.

Bohemia, on the other hand, was much more densely populated than Minas. Here is a map of Bohemia in the late sixteenth showing it crowded with small towns. During the Thirty Years War Bohemia suffered great destruction and bloodshed, but its population bounced back during the second half of the seventeenth century, and a map made in the early eighteenth century gives us a sense of how many towns dotted the Bohemian countryside. In 1791 the population of Bohemia was just under 3 million. Around the same time the population of Minas was about 300,000—so a land that was 10 times as large as Bohemia had about one tenth of Bohemia’s population. 

The big difference in population can also be seen in the capitals cities. Prague in 1750 had a population of about 58,000. Ccompared to the biggest European cities such as London, Paris, and Naples, Prague was quite small; yet it was more than twice as big as the capital of Minas, Vila Rica do Ouro Preto, with a population of about 20,000 in the 1740s.

            The sparseness of the population of eighteenth-century Minas had a lot to do with its having been settled only recently. The Portuguese had colonized the coast of Brazil for almost two centuries before they discovered gold in 1695 in the mountainous inland region that came to be known as Minas Gerais (“General Mines”). In the gold rush that followed, the population of whites in the gold fields increased quickly (to 30,000 in 1709), though African slaves did most mining. (The Indian population of what became Minas had been decimated in the seventeenth century by white adventurers, the so-called Bandeirantes, who had killed or enslaved most of them long before the discovery of gold.)

            This brings up another difference between Minas and Bohemia: while the capitania was a new society, even by Brazilian standards, Bohemia was an ancient one, with traditions going back to the Middle Ages.

The importation of thousands of slaves into Minas, partly from the sugarcane fields along the coast of Brazil, and partly from Africa, led quickly to blacks becoming the majority. In 1782 blacks made up 52% of the population of Minas, mulattos 26%, and whites 22%. Black and mulatto domination of the population meant that African and Afro-Brazilian culture, including music and dance, became an important part of the culture of Minas.

Travel in Minas took much longer and was much more difficult than travel in Bohemia. Minas was more mountainous, roads were primitive, and travellers had to cross wide rivers by boat. The distance between Rio de Janeiro and Vila Rica, about 400 kilometers, is only about 100 kilometers more than the distance between Vienna and Prague, but the journey to Vila Rica took three times as long. Mozart, travelling by coach from Vienna and Prague in 1787, took four days. The English geologist John Mawe, traveling on the back of a mule from Rio de Janeiro to Vila Rica in 1809, took twelve days.

John Mawe was one of the first foreigners to visit Minas. During the eighteenth century, in order to maximize their share of the gold and diamonds, the kings of Portugal strictly limited travel to and from the capitania and put it off limits to foreigners. Travelers to and from Bohemia, in contrast, seem to have crossed its borders with no particular difficulty.

            To summarize the differences between Minas Gerais and Bohemia, we might describe eighteenth-century Minas as vast, isolated, empty, new, with a hybrid society that was Afro-European both racially and culturally, while Bohemia was small, crowded, old, and white: racially and culturally homogeneous, and within a few days travel of major cities such as Berlin, Dresden, Munich, and Vienna.                       

            All these important differences make the similarities between Minas and Bohemia more remarkable than they might otherwise seem.            

            Both Bohemia and Minas were landlocked territories ruled from outside. Bohemia was a kingdom, but since the sixteenth century its crown had been the property of the Habsburg family; or to put it another way, the Habsburg emperor, usually resident in Vienna, ruled a composite monarchy that included not only Bohemia but also Austria, the Austrian Netherlands, Hungary, and several other territories. The capitania of Minas was one of many territories, widely scattered around the world, ruled by the king of Portugal.

             Those who ruled both Bohemia and Minas valued them and exploited them as sources of great mineral wealth. The hills of Bohemia were full of silver, intensively mined during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. By the eighteenth century most of the silver was gone, but some major mines were still operating. This set of paintings shows mining in Bohemia during the early Renaissance; 

and here is a picture of mining operation during the early eighteenth century—not in Bohemia, but in the nearby part of Hungary now known as Slovakia.

            By juxtaposing pictures of diamond mining in late eighteenth century Minas and silver mining in Bohemia in the late middle ages, you get a vivid sense of the different kind of societies involved in mining and the differences in the technologies they used. In Minas the mining was done entirely by slaves, whose tools consisted of little more than pick axes and baskets. In Bohemia, several centuries earlier, the miners were already using wheelbarrows, horses, carts; mills powered by oxen; and the mining was at the center of a varied economy that included other industries and crafts.

            You might object that this picture of mining in Minas might not reflect what was actually happening. Yet the first foreign visitor to the mines, John Mawe, in 1809, described them in terms very close to what you see in this picture:

Respecting the working of the mines throughout this capitania, ....  much loss of time and labour is occasioned by the want of machinery, and proper implements for the workmen. Not a cart or wheel-barrow is in use; every thing necessary to be removed is carried on the heads of the poor negroes, in gamellas, who have in many instances to climb up steep ascents, where inclinded planes might be employed to great advantage, and would be formed with little trouble (p. 275) 

            Slavery dominated the economy of Minas; serfdom was equally important in Bohemia. Indeed Bohemian serfdom of the eighteenth century has contributed an important word to the English vocabulary. Robot is the Czech word for the unpaid work that Bohemian serfs were forced by law to do for their masters. Serfdom was not that much different from slavery. The main differences between serfdom in Bohemia and slavery in Minas is that the serfs were white and slaves were black or mulatto; and serfs were engaged primarily in agricultural labor, while the slaves were involved primarily in mining.

            The practice (common in most slave-owing societies of the New World) of white men having sex with their female slaves produced a large population of mulattos (often called pardos in eighteenth-century Brazil). White men, many of whom remained unmarried, and therefore had no obvious heirs, often recognized their illegitimate mulato children, leaving them part of their estate and sometimes granting them their freedom. The large population in Minas Gerais of free men of mixed race is important for the history of music, because most of the professional musicians in eighteenth-century Minas were free mulattos.

            The Portuguese crown claimed twenty percent of all the gold found in Brazil (the so-called “royal fifth”) and established a monopoly in the diamond fields. Although smuggling and fraud kept King João V from receiving anywhere near as much as he claimed, he did receive vast riches nevertheless, spending much of it on (among many other luxuries) ambitious architectural programs (such as the vast monastary-palace at Mafra, near Lisbon) and programs of church music and Italian opera. It was thanks in part to the gold of Minas that Domenico Scarlatti came to Lisbon in 1719, forming relations with the king's keyboard-playing daughter Maria Barbara that resulted in the composition of his sonatas.

            Revenues from the mines also paid for the construction of cities nearby, some of which survive today as remarkable monuments of eighteenth-century architecture. Rising against a background of green tropical hillsides, Ouro Preto (the former Vila Rica) is the most famous of the colonial cities of Minas. A description of Vila Rica published in 1734 explained (with some exaggeration) the reasons for its sudden rise to prominence:

            In this town live the chief merchants, whose trade and importance incomparably exceed the most thriving of the leading merchants of Portugal. Here, as to a port, are directed and collected in the Royal Mint the grandiose amounts of gold from all the mines. Here dwell the best-educated men, both lay and ecclesiastic. Here is the seat of all the nobility and the strength of the military. It is, by virtue of its natural position, the head of the whole of America; and by the wealth of its riches it is the precious pearl of Brazil. (He por situaçao da natureza cabeça de toda a America, pela opulencia das riquezas a perola preciosa do Brasil)

            Here are some of the architectural riches of Ouro Preto. The central square with the Museu da Inconfidencia, possibly inspired by the Palazzo Senatorio in Rome; 

Nossa Senhora do Pilar, with its ornate interior; 

the church dedicated to the black Santa Efigenia de Etiópia; 

and of course Sao Francisco de Assis, with its ceiling painting of music-making angels by Manoel da Costa Adaíde.

The Casa da Opera, though heavily remodelled over the years, is apparently still more or less the size and shape it was in the eighteenth century.

            Beautiful cities also rose near the mines of Bohemia; this is Kutná Hora, at the center of the Medieval silver mining district. But if the architectural glories of Minas were the product of newly discovered gold, those of eighteenth-century Bohemia were the product of the triumph of Catholicism over Protestantism.

            I’ve talked about aspects of Bohemian culture going back to the middle ages, such as mining; but many eighteenth-century Bohemians would have traced their current circumstances back to a single event in the early seventeenth century: the Battle of White Mountain (Bílá Hora) in 1620.

             Like much of northern and central Europe, Bohemia was caught up in war during the first half of the seventeenth century, as Emperor Ferdinand II, bearing the flag of the Counter-Reformation, imposed Catholicism on his largely Protestant Bohemian subjects. Ferdinand defeated the Bohemian rebels at White Mountain, near Prague, and gained absolute control over the kingdom. He handed religious matters over to the Jesuits, who imposed a rigorous program of Catholic indoctrination on the populace.

            Prague, as capital of Bohemia, exerted little political power after 1620. A satellite of Vienna, Prague offered an opportunity for the victors at White Mountain to display their power. To the beautiful medieval city the Habsburg emperors and the new Bohemian nobility added lavish palaces. The Jesuits built churches and schools. The splendid church of St. Nicholas in the Malá Strana rose between 1711 and 1753 as a celebration of the triumph of the Counter-Reformation.

               Music too owed much of its character to White Mountain. Musical education in eighteenth-century Bohemia was largely the work of the Jesuits, who had noted the importance of music in the Lutheran liturgy and the role that music played in Lutheran efforts to win Catholic converts. Fighting fire with fire, the Jesuits made music a central element in their campaign to wipe out Protestantism in Bohemia. This is at least in part responsible for the really astonishing number of fine musicians produced in Bohemia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some of whom are listed here next to the name of the cities where they were born.

            “I had frequently been told,” wrote Charles Burney, “that the Bohemians were the most musical people of Germany, or, perhaps, of all Europe.” Before he visited Bohemia in 1772, such reports might have led Burney to assume that Bohemians were innately musical. But his travels led him to realize that Bohemia’s elementary schools were the foundation of its musical achievements: “I found out at length, that, not only in every large town, but in all villages, where there is a reading and writing school, children of both sexes are taught music.” Of Čáslav, a small town in central Bohemia, Burney wrote: “I went into the school, which was full of little children of both sexes, from six to ten or eleven years old, 

who were reading, writing, playing on violins, hautbois, bassoons, and other instruments. The organist had in a small room of his house four clavichords, with little boys practicing on them all: his son of nine years old, was a very good performer.”[i] Little did Burney know that this boy, Jan Ladislav Dussek, would become one of Europe’s greatest pianists, and a composer of a great deal of fine music, including this finale to the Piano Concerto in B flat major, Op. 22 (MUSIC).  

            The prominent place of music in the Bohemian schools went hand in hand with the practice, common in the kingdom, of choosing domestic servants partly on the basis of their musical abilities, which allowed noble households to use their valets, footmen, and secretaries in private wind ensembles and orchestras. A society that employed large numbers of competent musicians as part-time players required and rewarded the mass production of instrumentalists that existed in Bohemia. But that same society produced conditions unacceptable to some of the most serious and talented musicians, who wanted to devote all their time and energy to music. Many of these went elsewhere to seek their fortune, as documented in this map. It shows that Bohemian musical talent benefitted almost every part of Europe, even as far away as Lisbon, where the royal chapel under the direction of Domenico Scarlatti included two Bohemians—an oboist and a bassoonist.

            Serfdom played both a positive and a negative role in this system of musical education, employment, and emigration. On the one hand, landowners in Bohemia sometimes invested in the musical talents of their serfs, with the expectation that the serfs would return to the estate and join the master’s musical establishment. On the other hand, a serf who benefitted from such an education to the extent that he could earn a living on his own naturally chafed under the conditions that kept him subservient to his master.

            Here are two examples how Bohemians benefitted from serfdom, but then broke away from it.

            Johann Wenzel Stich was born in Žehušice (very close to Dussek’s hometown of Čáslav) in 1755—a serf of Count Thun. When he showed talent for the horn, his master sent him to study in Prague, Munich, and Dresden. On his return to Bohemia, he entered the count’s music ensemble in Prague. In an early biographical of Stich, we read as follows: 

This service was however made doubly difficult for the young, fun-loving Stich by his master’s refusing to allow him to wear a sword, and threatening him with the prospect of joining the livery whenever he let himself be carried away by his playful moods. This was too much for a man of his genius and talent to endure. So he took an opportunity and, together with four other musicians—a hornist, two clarinetists, and a bassoonist, crossed the Bohemian border into the Holy Roman Empire, to find freedom and, if possible, fortune.

            As soon as Count Thun learned of their escape he ordered that they be pursued and found, and that, if Stich could not be captured, at least his front teeth were to be knocked out.

Fortunately Stich managed to elude his pursuers; but to be on the safe side henceforth he used the Italian version of his name. It was as Signor Punto that he quickly became the most famous horn player in Europe; and it was for Signor Punto that Beethoven wrote his sonata for horn and piano.

            Although born into serfdom, Johann Baptist Vanhal likewise benefited from Bohemia's excellent system of musical education. By 1760 he found work as an organist and choir director. His master held the reins of servitude loosely, allowing him to go to Vienna, where he continued his studies, played violin, and composed. With money earned from his music making he purchased his freedom. Then, believing (in the words of an early biographer) “that in order to perfect himself in his profession he needed to master the Italian language as well as to develop further his aesthetic understanding of the Italian masters,” he embarked on a Grand Tour. During visits to Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples, “he studied composition after the best models.”

            Vanhal returned to Vienna in 1770 and lived there, a freelance musician, the rest of his life. His enormous output included about fifty settings of the Mass. He wrote his Missa Pastoralis in G no later than 1782, the date of one of the manuscripts in which it is preserved. 

            This Mass is pastoral in making use of musical elements that had been associated since the seventeenth century with shepherds, and hence with the Christmas story.  The marriage of pastoral music and the Christmas liturgy was characteristic of rural Bohemia. In composing the Missa Pastoralis Vanhal returned to the countryside of his childhood.  The drones of the shepherds’ bagpipes give this music a secular, rustic flavor.           

            The minor mode has a small role in such a festive Mass. Vanhal used the key of G minor (the parallel minor) strategically, at the beginning of the last movement, Agnus Dei, to provide a somber moment of introspection and to enhance the effect of G major on its return later in the movement. The trumpets and oboes heard frequently earlier in the Mass are silent; strings alone accompany the chorus in its tender supplication. Then, like sunshine suddenly filling the church with light and color, the chorus begins the final Allegro moderato with a folk-like melody that shepherds might have sung. 

            The map I showed earlier of the Bohemian musical diaspora doesn’t convey much of an idea of the travels of Bohemian composers, even of those, like Vanhal, who ended up relatively close to home, in Vienna. Vanhal’s italienische Reise was quite modest compared to the travel of some other composers. Adalbert Gyrowetz, born in České Budějovice (Böhmisch Budweis) in 1763, spent almost a decade traveling around Europe during the 1780s and 1790s.

            The Catholic Church was as important an institution in Minas as it was Bohemia, perhaps even more so, because of the numerous confraternities—irmandades—that served as a link between the social life of the community and the church. This is an enormous topic that I can’t get into here in any detail; but suffice it to say that many of the irmandades welcomed black and mulatto members, that they received a lot of money from those members in dues and as heirs to members’ estates, and that they spent that money on beautiful churches, such as this chapel built by the Irmandade de Nossa Senhora dos Rosario dos Pretos in Ouro Preto; but they also spent money on music.

            Some of that music came directly from Europe, in the form of scores, and an organ built between 1700 and 1720 for a church in Portugal by the great Arp Schnitger of Hamburg. King José I, shortly after coming to the throne in 1750, gave the organ to the newly created diocese of Mariana. Taken apart and shipped by sea and muleback to Minas Gerais, it was carefully described on its arrival: “a large organ with its cases and the carvings belonging to it that arrived in eighteen large numbered crates with specific instructions for assembling it, and ten large and small numbered parcels.” The organ, installed in the cathedral of Mariana in 1753, stands there still today. 

Few if any European musicians seem to have been willing to make the same trip.  As I mentioned earlier, of the Mineiro composers that we know of , almost all were mulattos, for whom music offered an attractive career. One reason this career was wide open to them was that, in a slave-owning society, whites were reluctant to engage in a career that involved any kind of physical activity. Mawe, visiting Minas in 1809, found the white population in what seems to have been a demoralized state: “every trade is occupied either by mulattoes or negroes, both of which classes seem superior in intellect to their masters, because they make better use of it”; and elsewhere: “Sons [of white men] are brought up in idleness; they are merely taught to read and write.... they learn no trade, nor are instructed in any useful employment.” 

            Music was just one of many fields in which free men of mixed race filled gaps left vacant by a white population for whom making music as a career was unthinkable. That music often spilled into the streets of the gold cities, where it played a role in 1733, in a procession through the streets of Vila Rica that anticipated the Carnival parades of modern-day Rio. According to a contemporary account, it included “a dance of Turks and Christians in military costumes, composed of thirty-two figures” and accompanied by “musicians with sweet voices and various instruments”; then “a dance of the pilgrims, richly costumed”; and “a stately dance of the musicians.” Much later “a German mounted on a charger came by, breaking the silence with the sound of a trumpet," followed by “eight blacks on foot, dressed in fashionable style; they all played chalumeux, alternating their voices with those of the clarinets.” In a part of the procession representing the planets, Mars was accompanied by three elaborately dressed musicians playing a military drum, a fife, and a trumpet.

            We know frustratingly little about the composers active in Minas Gerais during the eighteenth century,  and relatively little music that survives, almost all of it liturgical.  What I have seen and heard of it corresponds perfectly to the festive beauty of the buildings in which it was performed—choral music accompanied by an orchestra of strings, sometimes reinforced with horns, and occasionally pairs of flutes or oboes. For that distinctively European ensemble, musicians who had never been to Europe wrote music whose predominantly homophonic textures, balanced phrases, and limited harmonic vocabulary conform to the ideals of the galant style.

One of the best of these composers was Emerico Lobo de Mesquita, who spent most of his life in the diamond mining district of Minas Gerais, the most isolated, carefully guarded corner of the Capitania. But he was unusual among Mineiro composers in the amount a travel that he did, and in managing actually to leave Minas for the big city on coast. He achieved the kind of mobility (in terms of travel but also upward mobility in his career) that Bohemian composers of the eighteenth century took for granted, but that very few of his contemporaries in Minas achieved.

Born in 1746 in the town of Vila do Principe (now called Serro), Lobo de Mesquita became organist and music director at the Cathedral of Tijuco, the capital of the Diamond district (now called Diamantina), soon after 1776. In 1798 he moved to Vila Rica, serving as music director at Nossa Senhora do Pilar. He ended his career in Rio de Janeiro.   

        One of the instruments that Lobo de Mesquita undoubtedly played during his long tenure in Tejuco is this organ in Nossa Senhora do Carmo. Here is his responsory “Congratulamini mihi” (from a two-CD set of Brazilian colonial music made by the Orquestra barroca do XXI Festival Internacional de Música Colonial Brasileira e Música Antiga de Juiz de Fora; MUSIC).

        To conclude this presentation, I’d like to give you an idea of what the organ at Mariana sounds like, in a performance of the Gloria from the Mass in F by Lobo de Mesquita, sung by a local children’s choir, accompanied by the organist of the cathedral of Mariana, Josineia Godinho. The performance is hardly polished, but the location, the sound of the instrument, and the racial makeup of the performers, suggests that the tradition of sacred music established in Minas during the eighteenth century is still alive today (MUSIC).

For further reading

Aureo throno episcopal (dated 28 November 1748; published in Lisbon in 1749), modern edition in Rivista do Arquivo Público Mineiro, vol. 6 (1901), 379

Bergad, Laird W. Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720–1888, Cambridge, 1999

Brescia, Marco Aurélio. “Difusão e aclimatação do órgão ibérico na América portuguesa entre os séculos XVI e XVIII,” Revista eletrônica de musicologia, vol 14 (2010)

Rogério Budasz. "Opera and Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Brazil: A Survey of Early Studies and New Sources," Studi musicali 2006, 213–53; available on Academia.edu

Budasz, Rogério. “Music, Authority and Civilization in Rio de Janeiro, 1763–1790,” in Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America, ed. Geoffrey Baker and Tess Knighton, Cambridge, 2011, 151–70; available on Academia.edu

Burney, Charles. The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces, London, 1775

Castagna, Paulo and Jaelson Trindade, “Chapelmasters and Musical Practice in Brazilian Cities in the Eighteenth Century,” in Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America, ed. Geoffrey Baker and Tess Knighton, Cambridge, 2011, 132–50; available on academia.edu

Church and Society in Catholic Europe of the Eighteenth Century, ed. William J. Callahan and David Higgs, Cambridge, 1979

Conrad, Robert E. Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil, University Park, PA, 2010

Ferreira Machado, Simão. Triunfo eucharistico, exemplar da christandade lusitana, Lisbon, 1734; facsimile in Residuos seiscentistas em Minas, ed. Affonso Ávila

Higgins, Kathleen J. “Licentious Liberty” in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabará, Minas Gerais, University Park, PA, 1999

Kerner, Robert. Bohemia in the Eighteenth Century, New York, 1932

Kiddy, Elizabeth W. Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil, University Park, PA, 2005

Krueger, Rita. Czech, German, and Noble: Status and National Identity in Habsburg Bohemia, New York, 2009

Loreto Couto, Domingos do. Desagravos do Brazil e glorias de Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, 1904

Mawe, John. Travels in the Interior of Brazil, particularly in the Gold and Diamond Districts of that Country, London, 1812

Miller, Jaroslav. Urban Societies in East-Central Europe, 1500–1700, Aldershot, 2008

Spix, Johann Baptist, and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius: Reise in Brasilien auf Befehl Sr. Majestät Maximilian Joseph I. Königs von Baiern in der Jahren 1817 bis 1820 Munich, 1823–1828

Wright, William E. Serf, Seigneur, and Sovereign: Agrarian Reform in Eighteenth-Century Bohemia, Minneapolis, 1966