Order of Battle of the Jesuits

This Dutch political broadside organizes the Catholic Church hierarchy as a military formation, a satirical attack on Jesuit power during the order's suppression across Europe. The print charts three regional commands—Burger State, Regent State, and Kerkelyke State—each with ranked officers, artillery, and a reserve corps, rendering ecclesiastical structure as strategic warfare. The composition descends from the Northern European tradition of political woodcuts and engravings that visualized complex institutional critique through visual analogy. By mapping religious authority onto military nomenclature and tactics, the anonymous artist joined Enlightenment campaigns against clerical influence. The broadside format—dense text and parallel columns—recalls the Bilderbogen sheets that would later seed modern comics' sequential and modular design. Anti-Catholic polemic suffuses the work; such prints fueled religious prejudice while pioneering visual satire's power to make abstract power structures legible and ridiculous.