Caspar Schoppe (27 May 1576 – 19 November 1649) was a German Catholic polemicist, philosopher and scholar.
Life
He was born at Neumarkt in the upper Palatinate and studied at several German universities. He converted to Roman Catholicism in about 1599, after reading the Annales Ecclesiastici of Baronius.
Schoppe obtained the favour of Pope Clement VIII, and distinguished himself by the virulence of his writings against the Protestants. He became involved in a controversy with Joseph Justus Scaliger, formerly his intimate friend, and others; wrote Ecclesiasticus auctoritati Jacobi regis oppositus (1611), an attack upon James I of England; and in Classicum belli sacri (1619) urged the Catholic princes to wage war upon the Protestants. In about 1607, Schoppe entered the service of Ferdinand, archduke of Styria, afterwards Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, who found him very useful in rebutting the arguments of the Protestants, and who sent him on several diplomatic errands. According to Pierre Bayle, he was almost killed by some Englishmen at Madrid in 1614, and again fearing for his life he left Germany for Italy in 1617, afterwards taking part in an attack upon the Jesuits.
Schoppe died at Padua on 19 November 1649.