N 1539 IN TLAXCALA, NEW SPAIN (present-day Mexico), Indians newly converted to Christianity performed a pageant organized by Catholic missionaries. It featured a combined Spanish and Indian army fighting to protect the pope, defeat the Muslims, and win control of the holy city of Jerusalem. In the play, after a miracle saves the Christian soldiers, the Muslims give up and convert to Christianity. Although it is hard to imagine what the Indians made of this celebration of places and people far away, the event reveals a great deal about the Europeans: the Catholic missionaries hoped that their success in converting Indians in the New World signaled God’s favor for Catholicism the world over.
Led first by the Portuguese and then Spanish explorers, Europeans sailed into contact with peoples and cultures previously unknown to them. European voyagers subjugated native peoples, declared their control over vast new lands, and established a new system of slavery linking Africa and the New World. Millions of Indians died of diseases unknowingly imported by the Europeans. The discovery of new crops—corn, potatoes, tobacco, and cocoa—and of gold and silver mines brought new patterns of consumption, and new objects of conflict, to Europe. Historians now call this momentous spiral of changes in ecology, agriculture, and social patterns the Columbian exchange, after Christopher Columbus, who started the process.
While the Spanish were converting Indians in the New World, a different kind of challenge confronted the Catholic church in central and western Europe. Religious reformers attacked the leadership of the pope in Rome and formed competing groups of Protestants (so-called because they protested against some beliefs of the Catholic church). The movement began when the German Catholic monk Martin Luther criticized the sale of indulgences in 1517. Other reformers raised their voices, too, but did not agree with the Lutherans. Before long, religious division engulfed the German states and reached into Switzerland, France, and England. In response, Catholics undertook their own renewal, which strengthened the Catholic church. Catholic missionaries continued to dominate efforts to convert indigenous peoples for a century or more.
CHAPTER FOCUS How did the conquest of the New World and the Protestant Reformation transform European governments and societies in this era?
These two new factors—the development of overseas colonies and divisions between Catholics and Protestants within Europe—reshaped the long-standing rivalries between princes and determined the course of European history for several generations.
The Discovery of New Worlds
Portugal’s and Spain’s maritime explorations brought Europe to the attention of the rest of the world. Inspired by a crusading spirit against Islam and by riches to be won through trade in spices and gold, the Portuguese and Spanish sailed across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. The English, French, and Dutch followed later in the sixteenth century, creating a new global exchange of people, crops, and diseases. As a result of these European expeditions, the people of the Americas for the first time confronted forces that threatened to destroy not only their culture but even their existence.
Portuguese Explorations
The first phase of European overseas expansion began in 1434 with Portuguese exploration of the West African coast. The Portuguese hoped to find a sea route to the spice-producing lands of South and Southeast Asia in order to bypass the Ottoman Turks, who controlled the traditional land routes between Europe and Asia. Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal (1394–1460) personally financed many voyages with revenues from a noble crusading order. The first triumphs of the Portuguese attracted a host of Christian, Jewish, and even Arab sailors, astronomers, and cartographers to the service of Prince Henry and King John II (r. 1481–1495). They compiled better tide calendars and books of sailing directions for pilots that enabled sailors to venture farther into the oceans and reduced—though did not eliminate—the dangers of sea travel. Success in the voyages of exploration depended on the development in the late 1400s of the caravel, a 65-foot, easily maneuvered three-masted ship that used triangular lateen sails adapted from the Arabs. (The sails permitted a ship to tack against headwinds and therefore rely less on currents.)
Searching for gold and then slaves, the Portuguese gradually established forts down the West African coast. In 1487–1488, they reached the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa; ten years later, Vasco da Gama led a Portuguese fleet around the cape and reached as far as Calicut, India, the center of the spice trade. His return to Lisbon with twelve pieces of Chinese porcelain for the Portuguese king set off two centuries of porcelain mania. Until the early eighteenth century, only the Chinese knew how to produce porcelain. Over the next two hundred years, Western merchants would import no fewer than seventy million pieces of porcelain, still known today as “china.” By 1517, a chain of Portuguese forts dotted the Indian Ocean (Map 14.1). In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese sailor in Spanish service, led the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe.
MAP 14.1 Early Voyages of World Exploration
Over the course of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, European shipping dominated the Atlantic Ocean after the pioneering voyages of the Portuguese, who also first sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean and Cape Horn to the Pacific. The search for spices and the need to circumnavigate the Ottoman Empire inspired these voyages.
The Voyages of Columbus
One of many sailors inspired by the Portuguese explorations, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) opened an entirely new direction for discovery. Most likely born in Genoa of Italian parents, Columbus sailed the West African coast in Portuguese service between 1476 and 1485. Fifteenth-century Europeans already knew that the world was round. Columbus wanted to sail west to reach “the lands of the Great Khan” because he hoped to find a new route to the East’s gold and spices. After the Portuguese refused to fund his plan, Columbus turned to the Spanish monarchs Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, who agreed to finance his venture. (See “Seeing History: Expanding Geographic Knowledge: World Maps in an Age of Exploration.”)
On August 3, 1492, with ninety men on board two caravels and one larger merchant ship for carrying supplies, Columbus set sail westward. His contract stipulated that he would claim Castilian sovereignty over any new land and inhabitants, and share any profits with the crown. Reaching what is today the Bahamas on October 12, Columbus mistook the islands to be part of the East Indies, not far from Japan. As the Spaniards explored the Caribbean islands, they encountered communities of peaceful Indians, the Arawaks, who were awed by the Europeans’ military technology, not to mention their appearance. Although many positive entries in the ship’s log testified to Columbus’s personal goodwill toward the Indians, the Europeans’ objectives were clear: find gold, subjugate the Indians, and propagate Christianity. (See “Document 14.1: Columbus Describes His First Voyage.”) Excited by the prospect of easy riches, many flocked to join Columbus’s second voyage. When Columbus departed the Spanish port of Cádiz in September 1493, he commanded a fleet of seventeen ships carrying some fifteen hundred men. Failing to find the imagined gold mines and spices, Columbus and his crew began capturing Caribs, enemies of the Arawaks, with the intention of bringing them back as slaves. The Spaniards exported enslaved Indians to Spain, and slave traders sold them in Seville. When the Spanish monarchs realized the vast potential for material gain from their new dominions, they asserted direct royal authority by sending officials and priests to the Americas, which were named after the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci, who led a voyage across the Atlantic in 1499 to 1502.
To head off looming conflicts between the Spanish and the Portuguese, Pope Alexander VI helped negotiate the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494. It divided the Atlantic world between the two maritime powers, reserving for Portugal the West African coast and the route to India, and giving Spain the oceans and lands to the west (see Map 14.1). The agreement allowed Portugal to claim Brazil in 1500, when it was accidentally “discovered” by Pedro Alvares Cabral (1467–1520) on a voyage to India.
New Era in Slavery
The European voyages of discovery initiated a new era in slavery. Slavery had existed since antiquity and flourished in many parts of the world. Some slaves were captured in war or by piracy; others—Africans—were sold by other Africans and Bedouin traders to Christian buyers; in western Asia, parents sold their children out of poverty into servitude; and many in the Balkans became slaves when their land was devastated by Ottoman invasions. Slaves could be Greek, Slav, European, African, or Turkish. Many served as domestics in European cities of the Mediterranean such as Barcelona or Venice. Others sweated as galley slaves in Ottoman and Christian fleets. In the Ottoman army, slaves even formed an important elite contingent.
From the fifteenth century onward, Africans increasingly filled the ranks of slaves. Exploiting warfare between groups within West Africa, the Portuguese traded in gold and “pieces,” as African slaves were called, a practice condemned at home by some conscientious clergy. Critical voices, however, could not deny the potential for profits that the slave trade brought to Portugal. Most slaves toiled in the sugar plantations that the Portuguese established on the Atlantic islands and in Brazil. African freedmen and slaves—some thirty-five thousand in the early sixteenth century—constituted almost 3 percent of the population of Portugal, a percentage that was much higher than in other European countries.
In the Americas, slavery would expand enormously in the following centuries. Even outspoken critics of colonial brutality toward indigenous peoples defended the development of African slavery. The Spanish Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566), for example, argued that Africans were constitutionally more suitable for labor than native Americans and should therefore be imported to the plantations in the Americas to relieve the indigenous peoples, who were being worked to death.
Conquering the New World
The native peoples of the Americas lived in a great diversity of social and political arrangements. Some were nomads roaming large, sparsely inhabited territories; others practiced agriculture in complexly organized states. Among the settled peoples, the largest groupings could be found in the Mexican and Peruvian highlands. Combining an elaborate religious culture with a strict social and political hierarchy, the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in Peru ruled over subjugated Indian populations in their respective empires. From their large urban capitals, the Aztecs and Incas controlled large swaths of land and could be ruthless as conquerors.
The Spanish explorers organized their expeditions to the mainland of the Americas from a base in the Caribbean. Two prominent commanders, Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) and Francisco Pizarro (c. 1475–1541), gathered men and arms and set off in search of gold. With them came Catholic priests intending to bring Christianity to supposedly uncivilized peoples. When Cortés first landed on the Mexican coast in 1519, the natives greeted him with gifts, thinking that he might be an ancient god returning to reclaim his kingdom. Some natives who resented their subjugation by the Aztecs joined Cortés and his soldiers. With a band of fewer than three hundred Spanish soldiers and a few thousand native allies, Cortés captured the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán (present-day Mexico City), in 1519. With 200,000 inhabitants, Tenochtitlán was bigger than any European capital. Two years later, Mexico, then named New Spain, was added to the empire of the new ruler of Spain, Charles V, grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella. To the south, Pizarro conquered the Peruvian highlands in 1532 to 1533. The Spanish Empire was now the largest in the world, stretching from Mexico to Chile.
The gold and silver mines in Mexico proved a treasure trove for the Spanish crown, but the real prize was the discovery of vast silver deposits in Potosí (today in Bolivia). When the Spaniards began importing the gold and silver they found in the New World, inflation soared in a fashion never before witnessed in Europe.
Not to be outdone by the Spaniards, other European powers joined the scramble for gold in the New World. In North America, the French went in search of a “northwest passage” to China. The French wanted to establish settlements in what became Canada, but permanent European settlements in Canada and the present-day United States would succeed only in the seventeenth century. By then the English and Dutch had also entered the contest for world mastery.
The Columbian Exchange
The movement of peoples, animals, plants, manufactured goods, precious metals, and diseases between Europe, the New World, and Africa—the Columbian exchange—was one of the most dramatic transformations of ecology, agriculture, and ways of life in all of human history. Columbus started the process when he brought with him firearms, unknown in the Americas, and on his second voyage, horses, which had become extinct in the Americas, as well as pigs, chickens, goats, sheep, cattle, and various plants including wheat, melons, and sugarcane. Enslaved Africans, first brought to the Caribbean in 1503 to 1505, worked on sugarcane plantations, foreshadowing the development of a massive slave economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Chapter 17).
The Europeans also brought with them diseases. Amerindians died in catastrophic numbers because they lacked natural immunity from previous exposure. Smallpox first appeared in the New World in 1518; it and other epidemic diseases killed as many as 90 percent of natives in some places (though the precise numbers are unknown). Syphilis, or a genetic predecessor to it, came back with the explorers to Europe.
REVIEW QUESTION Which European countries led the way in maritime exploration, and what were their motives?
The Spanish also brought back tobacco, cacao (chocolate), sweet potatoes, maize, and tomato seeds, changing consumption patterns in Europe. (Their native American wives, concubines, and domestics taught them to drink chocolate in the native fashion: frothy, red in color, and flavored with peppers.) At the same time, Spanish and Portuguese slave traders brought these crops and others—such as manioc, capsicum peppers, pineapples, cashew nuts, and peanuts—from the Americas to West Africa, where their cultivation altered local agriculture and diets. The slavers bought African yams, sorghum, millet, and especially rice to feed the slaves in transit, and the slaves then grew those crops in the Americas. Thus the exchange went in every conceivable direction.
The Protestant Reformation
When Columbus’s patrons Ferdinand and Isabella expelled all Jews from Spain in 1492 and chased the last Muslims from Granada in 1502, it appeared as if the triumph of the Catholic church had been assured. Only fifteen years later, however, Martin Luther started a movement for religious reform that would fracture the unity of Western Christianity. Instead of one Catholic church, there would be many different kinds of Christians. The invention of printing with movable type helped spread the Protestant message, which grew in part out of waves of popular piety that washed over Europe in the closing decades of the 1400s. Reformers had also been influenced by Christian humanists who focused attention on clerical abuses.
he Invention of Printing
Printing Press
This illustration from a French manuscript of 1537 depicts typical printing equipment of the sixteenth century. An artisan is using the screw press to apply the inked type to the paper. Also shown are the composed type secured in a chase, the printed sheet (four pages of text printed on one sheet) held by the seated proofreader, and the bound volume. When two pages of text were printed on one standard-sized sheet, the bound book was called a folio. A bound book with four pages of text on one sheet was called a quarto (“in four”), and a book with eight pages of text on one sheet was called an octavo (“in eight”). The octavo was a pocket-size book, smaller than today’s paperback.
Printing with movable type, first developed in Europe in the 1440s by Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, marked a revolutionary departure from the old practice of copying works by hand or stamping pages with individually carved woodblocks. The Chinese invented movable type in the eleventh century, but they preferred woodblock printing because it was more suitable to the Chinese language, with its thousands of different characters. In Europe, with only twenty-six letters to the alphabet, movable type allowed entire manuscripts to be printed more quickly than ever before. Single letters, made in metal molds, could be emptied out of a frame and new ones inserted to print each new page.
In 1467, two German printers established the first press in Rome; within five years, they had produced twelve thousand volumes, a feat that in the past would have required a thousand scribes working full-time. Printing also depended on the large-scale production of paper. Papermaking came to Europe from China via Arab intermediaries. By the fourteenth century, paper mills in Italy were producing paper that was more fragile but also much cheaper than parchment or vellum, the animal skins that Europeans had previously used for writing. (See “Taking Measure: The Printing Press in Europe, ca. 1500.”) Early printed books attracted an elite audience. Their expense made them inaccessible to most literate people, who comprised a minority of the population in any case. Gutenberg’s famous two-volume Latin Bible was a luxury item, and only 185 copies were printed. Gutenberg Bibles remain today a treasure that only the greatest libraries possess.
The invention of mechanical printing dramatically increased the speed at which people could transmit knowledge, and it freed individuals from having to memorize everything they learned. Printed books and pamphlets, even one-page flyers, would create a wide community of scholars no longer dependent on personal patronage or church sponsorship for texts. Printing thus encouraged the free expression and exchange of ideas, and its disruptive potential did not go unnoticed by political and religious authorities. Rulers and bishops in the German states, the birthplace of the printing industry, moved quickly to issue censorship regulations, but their efforts could not prevent the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation.
Popular Piety and Christian Humanism
The Christianizing of Europe had taken many centuries to complete, but by 1500 most people in Europe believed devoutly. However, the vast majority of them had little knowledge of Catholic doctrine. More popular forms of piety—such as processions, festivals, and marvelous tales of saints’ miracles—captivated ordinary believers.
Urban merchants and artisans, more likely than the general population to be literate and critical of their local priests, yearned for a faith more meaningful to their daily lives and for a clergy more responsive to their needs. They generously donated money to establish new preaching positions for university-trained clerics. The merchants resented the funneling of the Catholic church’s rich endowments to the younger children of the nobility who took up religious callings to protect the wealth of their families. The young, educated clerics funded by the merchants often came from cities themselves. They formed the backbone of Christian humanism and sometimes became reformers, too.
Albrecht Dürer, The Knight, Death, and the Devil
Dürer’s 1513 engraving of the knight depicts a grim and determined warrior advancing past death (wearing a crown entwined with a serpent and holding out an hourglass) and the devil (the pig-snouted horned figure wielding a menacing pike). An illustration for Erasmus’s The Handbook of the Militant Christian, this scene is often interpreted as portraying a Christian clad in the armor of righteousness on a path through life beset by death and demonic temptations. Yet the knight in early-sixteenth-century Germany had become a mercenary, selling his martial skills to princes. Some knights waylaid merchants, robbed rich clerics, and held citizens for ransom. The most notorious of these robber-knights, Franz von Sickingen, was declared an outlaw by the emperor and murdered in 1522.
Humanism had originated during the Renaissance in Italy among highly educated individuals attached to the personal households of prominent rulers. North of the Alps, however, humanists focused more on religious revival and the inculcation of Christian piety, especially through the schools of the Brethren of the Common Life. The Brethren preached religious self-discipline, specialized in the copying of manuscripts, and were among the first to print the ancient classics. Their most influential pupil was the Dutch Christian humanist Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536). The illegitimate son of a man who became a priest, Erasmus joined the Augustinian Order of monks, but the pope allowed him to leave the monastery and pursue the life of an independent scholar. An intimate friend of kings and popes, he became known across Europe. He devoted years to preparing a critical edition of the New Testament in Greek with a translation into Latin, which was finally published in 1516.
Erasmus strove for a unified, peaceful Christendom in which charity and good works, not empty ceremonies, would mark true religion and in which learning and piety would dispel the darkness of ignorance. He elaborated many of these ideas in his Handbook of the Militant Christian (1503), an eloquent plea for a simple religion devoid of greed and the lust for power. In The Praise of Folly(1509), Erasmus used satire to show that modesty, humility, and poverty represented the true Christian virtues in a world that worshipped pomposity, power, and wealth. The wise appeared foolish, he concluded, for their wisdom and values were not of this world.
Erasmus instructed the young future emperor Charles V to rule as a just Christian prince. A man of peace and moderation, Erasmus soon found himself challenged by angry younger men and radical ideas once the Reformation took hold; he eventually chose Christian unity over reform and schism. His dream of Christian pacifism crushed, he lived to see dissenters executed—by Catholics and Protestants alike—for speaking their conscience. Erasmus spent his last years in Freiburg and Basel, isolated from the Protestant community, his writings condemned by many in the Catholic church. After the Protestant Reformation had been secured, the saying arose that “Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched.” Some blamed the humanists for the emergence of Luther and Protestantism, despite the humanists’ decision to remain in the Catholic church.
Martin Luther’s Challenge
The crisis of faith of one man, Martin Luther (1483–1546), started the international movement known as the Protestant Reformation. The son of a miner and a deeply pious mother, Luther abandoned his studies in the law and, like Erasmus, entered the Augustinian Order. There he experienced his religious crisis: despite fervent prayers, fasting, intense reading of the Bible, a personal pilgrimage to Rome (on foot), and study that led to a doctorate in theology, Luther did not feel saved.
Luther found peace inside himself when he became convinced that sinners were saved only through faith and that faith was a gift freely given by God. Shortly before his death, Luther recalled his crisis:
Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. Secretly . . . I was angry with God. . . . At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous live by a gift of God, namely by faith.
No amount of good works, Luther believed, could produce the faith on which salvation depended.
Just as Luther was working out his own personal search for salvation, a priest named Johann Tetzel arrived in Wittenberg, where Luther was a university professor, to sell indulgences. In the sacrament of penance, according to Catholic church doctrine, the sinner confessed his or her sin to a priest, who offered absolution and imposed a penance. Penance normally consisted of spiritual duties (prayers, pilgrimages), but the church also sold the monetary substitutions known as indulgences. A person could even buy indulgences for a deceased relative to reduce that person’s time in purgatory and release his or her soul for heaven.
In ninety-five theses that he proposed for academic debate in 1517, Luther denounced the sale of indulgences as a corrupt practice. Printed, the theses became public and unleashed a torrent of pent-up resentment and frustration among the laypeople. What began as a theological debate in a provincial university soon engulfed the Holy Roman Empire. Luther’s earliest supporters included younger Christian humanists and clerics who shared his critical attitude toward the church establishment. None of these Evangelicals, as they called themselves, came from the upper echelons of the church; many were from urban middle-class backgrounds, and most were university trained. But illiterate artisans and peasants also rallied to Luther, sometimes with an almost fanatical zeal. They and he believed they were living in the last days of the world, and that Luther and his cause might be a sign of the approaching Last Judgment. (See “Contrasting Views: Martin Luther: Holy Man or Heretic?”) In 1520, Luther burned his bridges with the publication of three fiery treatises. In Freedom of a Christian, Luther argued that faith, not good works, saved sinners from damnation, and he sharply distinguished between true Gospel teachings and invented church doctrines. Luther advocated “the priesthood of all believers,” insisting that the Bible provided all the teachings necessary for Christian living and that a professional caste of clerics should not hold sway over laypeople. These principles—“by faith alone,” “by Scripture alone,” and “the priesthood of all believers”—became central features of the reform movement.
In his second treatise, To the Nobility of the German Nation, Luther denounced the corrupt Italians in Rome and called on the German princes to defend their nation and reform the church. Luther’s third treatise, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, condemned the papacy as the embodiment of the Antichrist.
From Rome’s perspective, the Luther Affair, as church officials called it, concerned only one unruly monk. When the pope ordered him to obey his superiors and keep quiet, Luther tore up the decree. Spread by the printing press, Luther’s ideas circulated widely, letting loose forces that neither the church nor Luther could control. Social, nationalist, and religious protests fused with lower-class resentments, much as in the Czech movement that the priest and professor Jan Hus had inspired a century earlier. Like Hus, Luther appeared before an emperor: in 1521, he defended his faith at the Imperial Diet of Worms before Charles V (r. 1519–1556), the newly elected Holy Roman Emperor who, at the age of nineteen, ruled over the Low Countries, Spain, Spain’s Italian and New World dominions, and the Austrian Habsburg lands. Luther shocked Germans by declaring his admiration for the Czech heretic. But unlike Hus, Luther enjoyed the protection of his lord, Frederick the Wise, the elector of Saxony (called an elector because he was one of seven princes charged with electing the Holy Roman Emperor). To become Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V had bribed Frederick and therefore had to treat him with respect.
Lutheran propaganda flooded German towns and villages. Sometimes only a few pages in length, these broadsheets were often illustrated with crude satirical cartoons. Magistrates began to curtail clerical privileges and subordinate the clergy to municipal authority. From Wittenberg, the reform movement quickly swelled and threatened to swamp all before it. Lutheranism spread northward to Scandinavia when reformers who studied in Germany brought back the faith and converted the kings from Catholic to Protestant beliefs.
Protestantism Spreads and Divides
Other Protestant reformers soon challenged Luther’s doctrines even while applauding his break from the Catholic church. In 1520, just three years after Luther’s initial rupture with Rome, the chief preacher of Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), openly declared himself a reformer. Like Luther, Zwingli attacked corruption in the Catholic church hierarchy, and he also questioned fasting and clerical celibacy. Zwingli disagreed with Luther on the question of the Eucharist, the central Christian sacrament that Christians partook of in communion. The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation held that when the priest consecrated them, the bread and wine of communion actually turned into the body and blood of Christ. Luther insisted that the bread and wine did not change their nature: they were simultaneously bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ. Zwingli, however, viewed the Eucharistic bread and wine as symbols of Christ’s union with believers, not the real blood and body of Christ. This issue aroused such strong feelings because it concerned the role of the priest and the church in shaping the relationship between God and the believer.
In 1529, troubled by these differences and other disagreements, Protestant princes and magistrates assembled the major reformers in the Colloquy of Marburg, in central Germany. After several days of intense discussions, the reformers managed to resolve some differences over doctrine, but Luther and Zwingli failed to agree on the meaning of the Eucharist. The issue of the Eucharist would soon divide Lutherans and Calvinists as well.
The Progress of the Reformation
1517
Martin Luther disseminates ninety-five theses attacking sale of indulgences and other church practices
1520
Reformer Huldrych Zwingli breaks with Rome
1525
Peasants’ War in German states divides reform movement
1529
Lutheran German princes protest condemnation of religious reform by Charles V
1534
The Act of Supremacy establishes King Henry VIII as head of the Church of England, severing ties to Rome
1534–1535
Anabaptists take over German city of Münster in failed experiment to create a holy community
1541
John Calvin establishes himself permanently in Geneva, making that city a model of Christian reform and discipline
Under the leadership of John Calvin (1509–1564), another wave of reform challenged Catholic authority. Born in Picardy, in northern France, Calvin studied in Paris and Orléans, where he took a law degree. Experiencing a crisis of faith, like Luther, Calvin sought salvation through intense theological study. Gradually, he, too, came to question fundamental Catholic teachings.
On Sunday, October 18, 1534, Parisians found church doors posted with crude broadsheets denouncing the Catholic Mass. Smuggled into France from the Protestant and French-speaking parts of Switzerland, the broadsheets provoked a wave of royal repression in the capital. In response to this so-called Affair of the Placards, the government arrested hundreds of French Protestants, executed some of them, and forced many more, including Calvin, to flee abroad.
Calvin made his way to Geneva, the French-speaking Swiss city-state where he would find his life’s work. Genevans had renounced their allegiance to the Catholic bishop, and local supporters of reform begged Calvin to stay and labor there. Although it took some time for Calvin to solidify his position in the city, his supporters eventually triumphed and he remained in Geneva until his death in 1564.
Under Calvin’s leadership, Geneva became a Christian republic on the model set out in hisInstitutes of the Christian Religion, first published in 1536. No reformer prior to Calvin had expounded on the doctrines, organization, history, and practices of Christianity in such a systematic, logical, and coherent manner. Calvin followed Luther’s doctrine of salvation to its ultimate logical conclusion: if God is almighty and humans cannot earn their salvation by good works, then no Christian can be certain of salvation. Developing the doctrine of predestination, Calvin argued that God had ordained every man, woman, and child to salvation or damnation—even before the creation of the world. Thus, in Calvin’s theology, God saved only the “elect” (a small group).
Predestination could terrify, but it could also embolden. For Calvinists, a righteous life might be a sign that a person had been chosen for salvation. Thus, Calvinist doctrine demanded rigorous discipline. Fusing church and society into what followers named the Reformed church, Geneva became a theocratic city-state dominated by Calvin and the elders of the Reformed church. Its people were rigorously monitored; detractors said that they were bullied. From its base in Geneva, the Calvinist movement spread to France, the Low Countries, England, Scotland, the German states, Poland, Hungary, and eventually New England. (See “Document 14.2: Ordinances for Calvinist Churches.”)
In Geneva, Calvin tolerated no dissent. While passing through the city in 1553, the Spanish physician Michael Servetus was arrested because he had published books attacking Calvin and questioning the doctrine of the Trinity, the belief that there are three persons in one God—the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit. Upon Calvin’s advice, the authorities executed Servetus. Calvin was not alone in persecuting dissenters. Each religious group believed that its doctrine was absolutely true and grounded in the Bible and that therefore violence in its defense was not only justified but required. Catholic and Protestant polemicists alike castigated their critics in the harshest terms, but they often saved their cruelest words for the Jews. Calvin, for example, called the Jews “profane, unholy, sacrilegious dogs,” but Luther went even further and advocated burning down their houses and their synagogues. Religious toleration was still far in the future.
The Contested Church of England
England followed yet another path, with reform led by the king rather than by men trained as Catholic clergy. Despite a tradition of religious dissent that went back to the fourteenth-century theologian John Wycliffe, Protestantism gained few English adherents in the 1520s. King Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) changed that when he broke with the Roman Catholic church. The resulting Church of England retained many aspects of Catholic worship but nonetheless aligned itself in the Protestant camp.
At first, Henry opposed the Protestant Reformation, even receiving the title Defender of the Faith from Pope Leo X for a treatise he wrote against Luther. With the aid of his chancellors Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and Thomas More, Henry vigorously suppressed Protestantism and executed its leaders. More had made a reputation as a Christian humanist, publishing a controversial novel about an imaginary island called Utopia (1516), the source of the modern word for an ideal community. Unlike his friend Erasmus, More chose to serve the state directly and became personal secretary to Henry VIII, Speaker of the House of Commons, and finally Lord Chancellor.
By 1527, the king wanted to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon (d. 1536), the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and the aunt of Charles V. The eighteen-year marriage had produced a daughter, Mary (known as Mary Tudor), but Henry desperately needed a male heir to consolidate the rule of the still-new Tudor dynasty. Moreover, he had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn, a lady at court and a supporter of the Reformation. Henry claimed that his marriage to Catherine had never been valid because she was the widow of his older brother, Arthur. Arthur and Catherine’s marriage, which apparently was never consummated, had been annulled by Pope Julius II to allow the marriage between Henry and Catherine to take place. Now Henry asked the reigning pope, Clement VII, to declare his marriage to Catherine invalid.
Around “the king’s great matter” unfolded a struggle for political and religious control. When Cardinal Wolsey failed to secure papal approval of the annulment, Henry dismissed him and had him arrested. Wolsey died before he could be tried, and More took his place as Lord Chancellor. However, More resigned in 1532 because he opposed Henry’s new direction; Henry then had him executed as a traitor in 1535. Henry now turned to two Protestants, Thomas Cromwell (1485–1540) as chancellor and Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) as archbishop of Canterbury. Under their leadership, the English Parliament passed a number of acts that severed ties between the English church and Rome. The most important of these, the Act of Supremacy of 1534, made Henry the head of the Church of England. Other legislation invalidated the claims of Mary Tudor to the throne, recognized Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, and allowed the English crown to embark on the dissolution of the monasteries. In an effort to consolidate support behind his version of the Reformation, Henry sold off monastic lands to the local gentry and aristocracy. His actions prompted an uprising in 1536 in the north of the country called the Pilgrimage of Grace. Though suppressed, it revealed that many people remained deeply Catholic in their sympathies.
REVIEW QUESTION How did Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and Henry VIII each challenge the Roman Catholic church?
Henry grew tired of Anne Boleyn, who had given birth to a daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth I, but had produced no sons. He ordered Anne beheaded in 1536 on the charge of adultery. The king would go on to marry four other wives but father only one son, Edward. When Henry died in 1547, much would now depend on who held the crown. Henry himself held ambiguous views on religion: he considered himself Catholic but would not accept the supremacy of the pope; he closed the monasteries and removed shrines but kept the Mass and believed in clerical celibacy.
Reshaping Society through Religion
The religious reformers and their followers challenged political authority and the social order, yet in reaction to any extreme manifestation of disorder, they underlined the need for discipline in worship and social behavior. Some Protestants took the phrase “priesthood of all believers” quite literally and sided with the poor and the downtrodden. Like Catholics, Protestant authorities then became alarmed by the subversive potential of religious reforms. They viewed the Reformation as a way of instilling greater discipline in individual worship and church organization. At the same time, the Roman Catholic church undertook reforms of its own and launched an offensive against the Protestant Reformation that is sometimes called the Counter-Reformation.
Protestant Challenges to the Social Order
When Luther described the freedom of the Christian, he meant an entirely spiritual freedom. But others interpreted his call for freedom in social and political terms. In the spring of 1525, peasants in southern and central Germany rose in a rebellion known as the Peasants’ War and attacked nobles’ castles, convents, and monasteries (Map 14.2). Urban workers joined them, and together they looted church properties in the towns. In Thuringia (central/eastern Germany), the rebels followed an ex-priest, Thomas Müntzer (1468?–1525), who promised to chastise the wicked and thus clear the way for the Last Judgment.
MAP 14.2 The Peasants’ War of 1525
The centers of uprisings clustered in southern and central Germany, where the density of cities encouraged the spread of discontent and allowed for alliances between urban masses and rural rebels. The proximity to the Swiss Confederation, a stronghold of the Reformation movement, also inspired antiestablishment uprisings.
The Peasants’ War split the reform movement. Princes and city officials, ultimately supported by Luther, turned against the rebels. Catholic and Protestant princes joined forces to crush Müntzer and his supporters. All over the empire, princes trounced peasant armies and hunted down their leaders. By the end of the year, more than 100,000 rebels had been killed. Initially, Luther had tried to mediate the conflict, but he believed that God ordained rulers, who must therefore be obeyed even if they were tyrants. Luther considered Müntzer’s mixing of religion and politics the greatest danger to the Reformation, nothing less than “the devil’s work.” Fundamentally conservative in its political philosophy, the Lutheran church henceforth depended on established political authority for its protection.
Some followers of Zwingli also wanted to pursue their own path to reform. They believed that true faith came only to those with reason and free will. How could a baby knowingly choose Christ? Only adults could believe and accept baptism; hence, the Anabaptists (“rebaptizers”) rejected the validity of infant baptism and called for adult rebaptism. Many were pacifists who also refused to acknowledge the authority of law courts. The Anabaptist movement drew its leadership primarily from the artisan class and its members from the middle and lower classes—men and women attracted by a simple but radical message of peace and salvation.
Torture and Execution of an Anabaptist Leader
Not long after their capture in 1535, the Anabaptist leaders of Münster were tortured with hot tongs before being killed. Their bodies were placed in cages and hung from a church steeple. This print shows the cage with the body of John of Leiden. He was a tailor’s apprentice from the Dutch town of Leiden.
Zwingli immediately attacked the Anabaptists for their refusal to bear arms and swear oaths of allegiance, sensing accurately that they were repudiating his theocratic (church-directed) order. When persuasion failed to convince the Anabaptists, Zwingli urged Zurich magistrates to impose the death sentence. Thus, the Evangelical reformers themselves created the Reformation’s first martyrs of conscience.
Despite the Holy Roman Emperor’s condemnation of the movement in 1529, Anabaptism spread rapidly from Zurich to many cities in southern Germany. In 1534, one Anabaptist group, believing the end of the world was imminent, seized control of the city of Münster. Proclaiming themselves a community of saints, the Münster Anabaptists abolished private property in imitation of the early Christians and dissolved traditional marriages, allowing men, like Old Testament patriarchs, to have multiple wives, to the consternation of many women. Besieged by a combined Protestant and Catholic army, the city fell in June 1535. The Anabaptist leaders died in battle or were executed, their bodies hung in cages affixed to the church tower. Their punishment was intended as a warning to all who might want to take the Reformation away from the Protestant authorities and hand it to the people. The Anabaptist movement in northwestern Europe nonetheless survived under the determined pacifist leadership of the Dutch reformer Menno Simons (1469–1561), whose followers were eventually named Mennonites.
New Forms of Discipline
Luther’s Bible
This opening page from the Gospel of St. Matthew is taken from Luther’s 1522 translation into German of the New Testament. The woodcut illustrations by Lucas Cranach, and Luther’s decision to use a style of German that could be widely understood, made the book accessible to a wide audience. Bible reading became a central family activity for Protestants.
Faced with the social firestorms ignited by religious reform, the middle-class urbanites who supported the Protestant Reformation urged greater religious conformity and stricter moral behavior. Protestants did not have monasteries or convents or saints’ lives to set examples; they sought moral examples in their own homes, in the sermons of their preachers, and in their own reading of the Bible. Some of these attitudes had medieval roots, yet the Protestant Reformation fostered their spread and Catholics soon began to embrace them.
Although the Bible had been translated into German before, Luther’s translations (of the New Testament in 1522 and of the Old Testament in 1534) quickly became authoritative. A new Bible-centered culture began to take root, as more than 200,000 copies of Luther’s New Testament were printed over twelve years, an immense number for the time. Peppered with witty phrases and colloquial expressions, Luther’s Bible not only made the sacred writings more accessible to ordinary people but also helped standardize the German language. Bible reading became a common pastime undertaken in solitude or at family and church gatherings. To counter Protestant success, Catholic German Bibles soon appeared, thus sanctioning Bible reading by the Catholic laity, a sharp departure from medieval church practice.
The new emphasis on self-discipline led to growing impatience with the poor. Between 1500 and 1560, rapid economic and population growth created prosperity for some and stress—heightened by increased inflation—for many. Wanderers and urban beggars were by no means novel, but now moralists, both Catholic and Protestant, denounced vagabonds as lazy and potentially criminal.
The Reformation provided an opportunity to restructure relief for the poor. Instead of decentralized, private initiatives often overseen by religious orders, Protestant magistrates appointed officials to head urban agencies that would certify the genuine poor and distribute welfare funds to them. Catholic authorities did the same. In 1531, Henry VIII asked justices of the peace (unpaid local magistrates) to license the poor in England and to differentiate between those who could work and those who could not. In 1540, Charles V imposed a welfare tax in Spain to augment that country’s inadequate system of private charity.
In their effort to establish order and discipline, Protestant reformers denounced sexual immorality and glorified the family. The early Protestant reformers like Luther championed the end of clerical celibacy and embraced marriage. Luther, once a celibate priest himself, married a former nun. Protestant magistrates closed brothels and established marriage courts to handle disputes over marriage promises, child support, and divorce (allowed by Protestants in some rare situations). The magistrates also levied fines or ordered imprisonment for violent behavior, fornication, and adultery.
Prior to the Reformation, despite the legislation of church councils, marriages had largely been private affairs between families; some couples never even registered with the church. The Catholic church recognized any promise made between two consenting adults (with the legal age of twelve for females, fourteen for males) in the presence of two witnesses as a valid marriage. As the Reformation took hold, Protestants asserted government control over marriage, and Catholic governments followed suit. A marriage was legitimate only if registered by both a government official and a member of the clergy.
Catholic Renewal
The Catholic church decided in the 1540s to undertake drastic action to fend off the Protestant threat. Pope Paul III convened a general council of the church in 1545 at Trent, a town on the border between the Holy Roman Empire and Italy. Meeting sporadically over eighteen years (1545–1563), the Council of Trent effectively set the course of Catholicism until the 1960s. Catholic leaders sought renewal of religious devotion and reform of clerical morality (some priests had had sexual relationships and fathered children) as well as clarification of church doctrine. New religious orders set out to win converts overseas or to reconvert Catholics who had turned to Protestantism. At the same time, the church did not hesitate to root out dissent by giving greater powers to the Inquisition, including the power to censor books. The papal Index, or list of prohibited books, was established in 1557 and not abolished until 1966.
Italian and Spanish clergy predominated among the 255 bishops, archbishops, and cardinals attending the Council of Trent, which condemned all the central doctrines of Protestantism. According to the council, salvation depended on faith and good works, not faith alone. On the sacrament of the Eucharist, the council reaffirmed that the bread of communion “really, truly” becomes Christ’s body. It reasserted the supremacy of clerical authority over the laity; the church’s interpretation of the Bible could not be challenged, and the Latin Vulgate was the only authoritative version. The council rejected divorce and reaffirmed the legitimacy of indulgences. It also called for reform from within, however, insisting that bishops henceforth reside in their dioceses and decreeing that seminaries for the training of priests be established in every diocese. Henceforth, the schism between Protestant and Catholic remained permanent, and all hopes of reconciliation faded.
The renewed energy of Catholicism expressed itself most vigorously in the founding of new religious orders such as the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, founded by a Spanish nobleman, Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). In 1521, while recovering from an injury suffered as a soldier in the Spanish army, Ignatius read lives (biographies) of the saints; once he recovered, he abandoned his quest for military glory in favor of serving the church. In 1540, the pope recognized his small band of followers.
With Ignatius as its first general, the Jesuits became the most vigorous defenders of papal authority. The society quickly expanded; by the time of Ignatius’s death in 1556, Europe had one thousand Jesuits. They established hundreds of colleges throughout the Catholic world, educating future generations of Catholic leaders. Jesuit missionaries played a key role in the Spanish and Portuguese empires and brought Roman Catholicism to Africans, Asians, and native Americans. They saw their effort as proof of the truth of Roman Catholicism and the success of their missions as a sign of divine favor, both particularly important in the face of Protestant challenge.
Catholic missionary zeal brought conflicting messages to indigenous peoples: for some, the message of a repressive and coercive alien religion; for others, a sweet sign of reason and faith. Frustrated in his efforts to convert Brazilian Indians, a Jesuit missionary wrote to his superior in Rome in 1563, “For this kind of people it is better to be preaching with the sword and rod of iron.”
Catholic missionaries focused initially on winning over local elites. They learned the local languages and set up schools for the sons of conquered nobles. After an initial period of relatively little racial discrimination, the Catholic church in the Americas and Africa adopted strict rules based on color. For example, the first Mexican Ecclesiastical Provincial Council in 1555 declared that holy orders were not to be conferred on Indians, mestizos (people of mixed European-Indian parentage), or mulattoes (people of mixed European-African heritage); along with descendants of Muslims, Jews, and persons who had been sentenced by the Spanish Inquisition, these groups were deemed “inherently unworthy of the sacerdotal [priestly] office.”
REVIEW QUESTION How did the forces for radical change unleashed by the Protestant Reformation interact with the urge for social order and stability?
European missionaries in Asia greatly admired Chinese and Japanese civilization, and thus used the sermon rather than the sword to win converts. The Jesuit Francis Xavier preached in India and Japan, his work greatly assisted by a network of Portuguese trading stations. Overall the efforts of the Catholic missionaries seemed highly successful: vast multitudes of native Americans had become nominal Christians by the second half of the sixteenth century, and thirty years after Francis Xavier’s 1549 landing in Japan, the Jesuits could claim more than 100,000 Japanese converts.
Striving for Mastery
Although the riches of the New World and the conflicts generated by the Reformation raised the stakes of international politics, life at court did not change all at once. Princes and popes continued to sponsor the arts and literature of the Renaissance. Henry VIII, for example, hired the German artist Hans Holbein as king’s painter. While Protestantism was taking root, Catholic monarchs still fought one another and battled the powerful Ottoman Empire. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V dominated the political scene with his central position in Europe and his rising supply of gold and silver from the New World. Yet even his wealth proved insufficient to subdue all his challengers. Religious difference led to violence in every country, even Spain, where there were almost no Protestants but many Muslims who were forced to convert by Charles V in 1526. For the most part, violence failed to settle religious differences. By 1560, an exhausted Europe had achieved a provisional peace, but one sowed with the seeds of future conflict.
Courtiers and Princes
Kings, princes, and popes alike used their courts to keep an eye on their leading courtiers (cardinals in the case of popes) and impress their other subjects. Briefly defined, the court was the ruler’s household. Around the prince gathered a community of household servants, noble attendants, councilors, officials, artists, and soldiers. Renaissance culture had been promoted by this political elite, and that culture now entered its “high,” or most sophisticated, phase. Its acclaimed representative was Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), an immensely talented Italian artist who sculpted the gigantic nude David for officials in Florence and then painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for the recently elected Pope Julius II.
King Francis I and His Court
In this illustration from a 1534 manuscript, the king of France is shown with his three sons listening to the reading of a translated ancient text. The translator, Antoine Macault, was the king’s secretary and is shown wearing the black of officials. Renaissance kings took pride in sponsoring revivals of classical texts (in this case Diodorus of Sicily, a Greek historian from the first centuryB.C.E.).
Italian artists also flocked to the French court of Francis I (r. 1515–1547), which swelled to the largest in Europe. In addition to royal officials and guards, physicians, librarians, musicians, dwarfs, animal trainers, and a multitude of hangers-on bloated its size to more than sixteen hundred members. Although Francis built a magnificent Renaissance palace at Fontainebleau, where he hired Italian artists to produce paintings and sculpture, the French court often moved from palace to palace. It took no fewer than eighteen thousand horses to transport the people, furniture, documents, dogs, and falcons for the royal hunt. Hunting represented a form of mock combat, essential in the training of a military elite. Francis almost lost his own life when, storming a house during one mock battle, he was hit on the head by a burning log.
Two Italian writers helped define the new culture of courtesy, or proper court behavior: Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), in service at the Este court in Ferrara, and Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), a servant of the duke of Urbino and the pope. Ariosto composed an epic poem, Orlando Furioso, which represented court culture as the highest synthesis of Christian and classical values. The poem’s captivating tales of combat, valor, love, and magic ranged across Europe, Africa, Asia, and even the moon. In The Courtier, Castiglione’s characters debate the qualities of an ideal courtier in a series of eloquent dialogues. The true courtier, Castiglione asserts, is a gentleman who carries himself with nobility and dignity in the service of his prince and his lady.
Courtesy was recommended to courtiers, but not always to princes. The Italian politician and writer Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) helped found modern political science by treating the maintenance of power as an end in itself. In his provocative essay The Prince, he underlined the need for pragmatic, even cold calculation. Was it better, he asked, for a prince to be feared by his people or loved? “It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, [it] is much safer to be feared than loved.” Machiavelli insisted that princes could benefit their subjects only by keeping a firm grip on power, if necessary through deceit and manipulation. Machiavellian has remained ever since a term for using cunning and duplicity to achieve one’s ends.
Dynastic Wars
Even as the Renaissance developed in the princely courts and the Reformation began in the German states, the Habsburgs (the ruling family in Spain and then the Holy Roman Empire) and the Valois (the ruling family in France) fought each other for domination of Europe. French claims provoked the Italian Wars in 1494, which soon escalated into a general conflict that involved the major Christian monarchs and the Muslim Ottoman sultan as well. From 1494 to 1559, the Valois and Habsburg dynasties, both Catholic, remained implacable enemies. The fighting raged in Italy and the Low Countries. In 1525, the troops of Charles V crushed the French army at Pavia, Italy, counting among their captives the French king himself, Francis I. Forced to renounce all claims to Italian territory to gain his freedom, Francis furiously repudiated the treaty the moment he reached France, reigniting the conflict.
Charles V and Francis I Make Peace
This fresco from the Palazzo Farnese in the town of Caprarola, north of Rome, shows French king Francis I and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (shown pointing his finger) agreeing to the Truce of Nice in 1538, one of many peace agreements made and then broken during the wars between the Habsburgs and the Valois. Pope Paul III, who negotiated the truce, stands behind and between them. Charles is on the right pointing to Francis. The truce is the one celebrated in the Tlaxcala pageant described at the start of this chapter.
In 1527, Charles’s troops captured and sacked Rome because the pope had allied with the French. Many of the imperial troops were German Protestant mercenaries, who pillaged Catholic churches and brutalized the Catholic clergy. Protestants and Catholics alike interpreted the sack of Rome by imperial forces as a punishment of God; even the Catholic church read it as a sign that reform was necessary. Finally, in 1559, the French gave up their claims in Italy and signed the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, ending the conflict. To seal the peace the French king Henry II married his sister to the duke of Savoy, an ally of the Habsburgs, and his daughter to the Habsburg king of Spain, Philip II, who had succeeded his father Charles V in 1556.
The Siege of Vienna, 1529
This illustration from an Ottoman manuscript of 1588 depicts the Turkish siege of Vienna (the siege guns can be seen toward the top of the picture). Sultan Suleiman I (Suleiman the Magnificent) led an army of more than 100,000 men against Vienna, capital of the Austrian Habsburg lands. Several attacks on the city failed, and the Ottomans withdrew in October 1529. They maintained control over Hungary, but the logistics of moving so many men and horses kept them from advancing farther westward into Europe.
The dynastic struggle (Valois versus Habsburg) had drawn in many other belligerents, who fought on one side or the other for their own benefit. Some acted purely out of power considerations, such as England, first siding with the Valois and then with the Habsburgs. Others fought for their independence, such as the papacy and the Italian states, which did not want any one power to dominate Italy. Still others chose sides for religious reasons, such as the Protestant princes in Germany, who exploited the Valois-Habsburg conflict to extract religious concessions from the emperor in 1555. The Ottoman Turks saw in this fight an opportunity to expand their territory.
The Ottoman Empire reached its height of power under Sultan Suleiman I, known asSuleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520–1566). In 1526, a Turkish expedition destroyed the Hungarian army at Mohács. Three years later, the Ottomans laid siege to Vienna; though unsuccessful, the attack sent shock waves throughout Christian Europe. In 1535, Charles V led a campaign to capture Tunis, the lair of North African pirates loyal to the Ottomans. Desperate to overcome Charles’s superior Habsburg forces, the French king Francis I forged an alliance with the Turkish sultan. The Turkish fleet besieged the Habsburg troops holding Nice, on the southern coast of France. Francis even ordered all inhabitants of nearby Toulon to vacate the town so that he could turn it into a Muslim colony for eight months, complete with a mosque and a slave market.
The French alliance with the Turks reflected the spirit of the times: the age-old idea of the Christian crusade against Islam now had to compete with a new political strategy that considered religion only one factor among many in power politics. Religion could be sacrificed, if need be, on the altar of state building. Constantly distracted by the challenges of the Ottomans to the east and the German Protestants at home, Charles V could not crush the French with one swift blow.
Financing War
The sixteenth century marked the beginning of superior Western military technology. All armies grew in size and their firepower became ever more deadly, increasing the cost of war. Heavier artillery pieces meant that the rectangular walls of medieval cities had to be transformed into fortresses with jutting ramparts and gun emplacements. Royal revenues could not keep up with war expenditures. To pay their bills, governments routinely devalued their coinage (the sixteenth-century equivalent of printing more paper money), causing prices to rise rapidly.
Charles V boasted the largest army in Europe, supported by the gold and silver coming in from the New World. Immediately after conquest, the Spanish looted gold and silver objects, melted them down, and sent the precious metals to Spain. Mining began with forced Indian labor in the 1520s, and the amount of silver extracted in Mexico and sent to Spain increased twentyfold in the 1530s and 1540s. Nevertheless, Charles could never make ends meet because of his extravagant war costs: the debt of 37 million ducats accumulated during his forty years in power exceeded by 2 million ducats all the gold and silver brought from the Americas. His opponents fared even worse. On his death in 1547, Francis I owed the bankers of Lyon almost 7 million French pounds—approximately the entire royal income for that year. Foremost among the financiers of war debts was the Fugger bank, based in the southern German imperial city of Augsburg. The enterprise began with Jakob Fugger (1459–1525), who became personal banker to Charles V’s grandfather Maximilian I. By the end of his life, Maximilian was so deeply in debt to Jakob Fugger that he had to pawn the royal jewels. In 1519, Fugger assembled a consortium of German and Italian bankers to secure the election of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor. For the next three decades, the alliance between Europe’s biggest international bank and its largest empire remained very close. Charles stayed barely one step ahead of his creditors; in 1531, for example, he had to grant to the Fuggers eight years of mining rights in Spanish lands south of Peru (present-day Bolivia and Chile).
Divided Realms
European rulers viewed religious division as a dangerous challenge to the unity and stability of their rule. Subjects who considered their rulers heretics or blasphemers could only cause trouble, and religious differences encouraged the formation of competing noble factions, which easily led to violence when weak monarchs or children ruled.
In France, King Francis I tolerated Protestants until the Affair of the Placards in 1534. Even then, the government could not stop many French noble families—including some of the most powerful—from converting to Calvinism, especially in southern and western France. Francis and his successor, Henry II (r. 1547–1559), succeeded in maintaining a balance of power between Catholics and Calvinists, but after Henry’s death the weakened monarchy could no longer hold together the fragile realm. The real drama of the Reformation in France took place after 1560, when the country plunged into four decades of religious wars, whose savagery was unparalleled elsewhere in Europe (see Chapter 15).
In England and Scotland religious divisions at the very top threatened the control of the rulers. Before his death in 1547, Henry VIII had succeeded in making himself head of the Church of England, but the nature of that church remained ambiguous. The advisers of the boy king Edward VI (r. 1547–1553) furthered the Protestant cause by welcoming prominent religious refugees who had been deeply influenced by Calvinism and wanted to see England move in that austere direction. But Edward died at age fifteen, opening the way to his Catholic half sister, Mary Tudor, who had been restored to the line of succession by an act of Parliament under Henry VIII in 1544.
When Mary (r. 1553–1558) came to the throne, she restored Catholicism and persecuted Protestants. Nearly three hundred Protestants perished at the stake, and more than eight hundred fled to the Protestant German states and Switzerland. Finally, when Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth, succeeded her half sister Mary, becoming Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603), the English Protestant cause gained lasting momentum. Under Elizabeth’s leadership, Protestantism came to define the character of the English nation, though the influence of Calvinism within it was still a cause for dispute. Catholics were tolerated only if they kept their opinions on religion and politics to themselves. A tentative but nonetheless real peace returned to England.
Still another pattern of religious politics unfolded in Scotland, where Protestants formed a small minority until the 1550s. At the center of Scotland’s conflict over religion stood Mary of Guise, a French native and Catholic married to the king of Scotland, James V. After James died in 1542, Mary surrounded herself and her daughter Mary Stuart, also a Catholic and heir to the throne, with French advisers. When, in 1558, Mary Stuart married Francis, the son of Henry II and the heir to the French throne, many Scottish noblemen, alienated by this pro-French atmosphere, joined the pro-English, anti-French Protestant cause. They gained control of the Scottish Parliament in 1560 and dethroned the regent, Mary of Guise. Eventually they forced her daughter—by then known as Mary, queen of Scots—to flee to England, and installed Mary’s infant son, James, as king. Scotland would turn toward the Calvinist version of the Reformation and thus establish the potential for conflict with England.
In the German states, the Protestant princes and cities formed the Schmalkaldic League in 1531. Opposing the league were Emperor Charles V, the bishops, and the few remaining Catholic princes. Although Charles had to concentrate on fighting the French and the Turks during the 1530s, he eventually secured the western Mediterranean and then turned his attention back home to central Europe to try to resolve the growing religious differences in his lands.
After efforts to mediate between Protestants and Catholics broke down, Charles prepared to fight the Protestant Schmalkaldic League. War broke out in 1547, the year after Martin Luther’s death. Using seasoned Spanish veterans and German allies, Charles occupied the German imperial cities in the south, restoring Catholic elites and suppressing the Reformation. When Protestant commanders could not agree on a joint strategy, Charles crushed the Schmalkaldic League’s armies at Mühlberg in Saxony and captured the leading Lutheran princes. Jubilant, Charles restored Catholics’ right to worship in Protestant lands while permitting Lutherans to keep their own rites. Protestant resistance to the declaration was deep and widespread: many pastors went into exile, and riots broke out in many cities. Charles’s success did not last long. The Protestant princes regrouped, declared war in 1552, and chased a surprised, unprepared, and practically bankrupt emperor back to Italy.
Forced to compromise, Charles V agreed to the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. The settlement recognized the Lutheran church in the empire; accepted the secularization of church lands but “reserved” the remaining ecclesiastical territories for Catholics; and, most important, established the principle that all princes, whether Catholic or Lutheran, enjoyed the sole right to determine the religion of their lands and subjects. Calvinist, Anabaptist, and other dissenting groups were excluded from the settlement. Ironically, the religious revolt of the common people had culminated in a princes’ reformation. The Augsburg settlement preserved a fragile peace in central Europe until 1618, but the exclusion of Calvinists would prompt future conflict.
REVIEW QUESTION How did religious divisions complicate the efforts of rulers to maintain political stability and build stronger states?
Exhausted by decades of war and dismayed by the disunity in Christian Europe, Emperor Charles V resigned his many thrones in 1555 and 1556, leaving his Netherlandish-Burgundian and Spanish dominions to his son, Philip II, and his Austrian lands to his brother, Ferdinand (who was also elected Holy Roman Emperor to succeed Charles). Retiring to a monastery in southern Spain, the most powerful of the Christian monarchs spent his last years quietly seeking salvation.
Conclusion
Charles V’s decision to divide his empire reflected the tensions pulling Europe in different directions. Even as Charles’s kingdom of Spain joined Portugal as a global power with new conquests overseas, Luther, Calvin, and a host of others sought converts to competing branches of Protestantism within the Holy Roman Empire. The reformers disagreed on many points of doctrine and church organization, but they all broke definitively from the Roman Catholic church. The pieces were never put together again. Portugal and Spain, the leaders in global exploration and conquest, remained resolutely Catholic, but as ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, where the Reformation began, Charles could not stifle the growing religious ferment. In the decades to come, Protestantism would spread, religious conflict would turn even more deadly, and emerging Protestant powers would begin to contest the global reach of Spain and Portugal.
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