The Transformation of Europe

THE REFORMATION

Like the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation in Europe began as a movement devoted to returning to ancient sources—in this case, to biblical scriptures. Yet returning to the sources and interpreting Christian doctrine for oneself was dangerous in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for the church feared that challenges to its authority would arise if laypersons were allowed to read the scriptures as they pleased. The church was right: when Luther and his followers seized the right to read and interpret the Bible in a new way, they paved the way for a “Protestant” Reformation that split Christendom for good.

The opening challenge to the authority of the Catholic Church originated in Germany. Here a monk and a professor of theology, Martin Luther (1483–1546), used his knowledge of the Bible to criticize the church’s ideas and practices. For Luther, God’s gift of forgiveness did not depend on taking sacraments or performing good deeds. This faith was something Christians could obtain from reading the Bible—rather than by having a priest tell them what to believe. Finally, Luther concluded that Christians did not need specially appointed mediators to speak to God for them; all believers were equally bound by God’s laws and obliged to minister to one another’s spiritual needs.

These became the three main principles that launched Luther’s reforming efforts: (1) belief that faith alone saves, (2) belief that the scriptures alone hold the key to Christian truth, and (3) belief in the priesthood of all believers. Luther also reacted against corrupt practices in the church, such as the keeping of mistresses by monks, priests, and even popes; and the selling of indulgences, certificates that would supposedly shorten the buyer’s time in purgatory. In the 1510s, clerics were hawking indulgences across Europe in an effort to raise money for the sumptuous new Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. In 1517, Luther formulated ninety-five statements, or theses, and posted them on the doors to the Wittenberg cathedral, hoping to stir up his colleagues in debate.

In response, Pope Leo X and the Habsburg emperor, Charles V, demanded that Luther take back his criticisms and theological claims. When he refused, he was declared a heretic and narrowly avoided being burned at the stake. Luther wrote many more pamphlets attacking the church and the pope, whom he now described as the anti-Christ. Luther also translated the New Testament from Latin into German so that laypersons could have direct access, without the clergy, to the word of God. This act spurred many other reformers across Europe to undertake translations of their own, and it encouraged the Protestant clergy to teach children (and adults) to read their local languages.

Spread by printed books and ardent preachers in all the common languages of Europe, Luther’s doctrines and those put forward by other reformers won widespread support in some regions, particularly among urban populations. In France and Switzerland, the reformer Jean Calvin (1509–1564) emphasized moral regeneration through church teachings and laid out a doctrine of predestination—the notion that each person is “predestined for damnation or salvation even before birth.” Those who followed the new faith of Luther and Calvin identified themselves as “Protestants.” They promised that their reformed version of Christianity provided both an answer to individual spiritual needs and a new moral foundation for community life. The renewed Christian creed appealed to commoners as well as elites, especially in communities that resented rule by Catholic “outsiders.” For example, Protestantism was popular among the Dutch, who resented being ruled by Philip II, an Austrian Catholic who lived in Spain. Although Protestants were rarely a majority before the seventeenth century, the new ideas gained a wide following in the German states, France, Switzerland, the Low Countries, England, and Scotland. (See Map 12.3.) Later, following the sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), many European historians and economists, in their efforts to explain the origins of capitalism, would look back to these ideas—especially the emphasis on discipline, industriousness, and the individual’s relation to God—as distinguishing Europeans from other peoples.

Map 12.3 Religious Divisions in Europe after the Reformation, 1590

The Protestant Reformation divided Europe religiously and politically.

• Within the formerly all-Catholic Holy Roman Empire, list the Protestant groups that took hold.
• Looking at the map, what geographic patterns can you identify in the distribution of Protestant communities?
• List the regions in which you would expect Protestant-Catholic tensions to be the most intense, and explain why.

Counter-Reformation The Catholic Church responded to Luther and Calvin by embarking on its own renovation, which became known as the Counter-Reformation. At the Council of Trent, whose twenty-five sessions stretched from 1545 to 1563, Catholic leaders reaffirmed the church’s doctrines. But the council also enacted reforms to answer the Protestants’ assaults on clerical corruption. Like the Protestants, the reformed Catholics carried their message overseas—especially through an order established by a Spaniard, Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556). Loyola founded a brotherhood of priests, the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, dedicated to the revival of the Catholic Church. From bases in Lisbon, Rome, Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, the Jesuits opened missions as far as South and North America, India, Japan, and China.

Yet the Vatican continued to use repression and persecution to combat what it regarded as heretical beliefs. Priests in Augsburg performed public exorcisms, seeking to free Protestant parishioners from possession by “demons.” The Index of Prohibited Books (a list of books and theological treatises banned by the Catholic Church) and the medieval Inquisition (which began around 1184 CE) were weapons against those deemed the church’s enemies. But the proliferation of printing presses and the spread of Protestantism made it impossible for the Catholic Counter-Reformation to turn back the tide leading toward increased autonomy from the papacy.

In Lima, Peru, the Inquisition reached a fever pitch in the 1630s. Almost 100 people were arrested for committing treason and practicing heresy in a “Great Jewish Conspiracy.” The inquisitors held trials for two men and one woman accused of practicing Judaism. Doña Mencia de Luna, Manuel Hernández, and Manuel Bautista Pérez were charged as Judaizers and infidels, which led to a wave of unrests and mass torture. The convicted faced a dramatic public judgment and acts of ritual penance. Inquisitors ordered Manuel Bautista Pérez and ten others lashed to the stake and burned alive. Fifty-two others were publicly whipped, then exiled. Doña Mencia de Luna, Manuel Hernández, and the remaining conspirators wallowed in prison for decades while the inquisitors gathered evidence.

Both Catholics and Protestants persecuted witches. Between about 1500 and 1700, up to 100,000 people, mostly women, were accused of being witches. Many were tried, tortured, burned at the stake, or hanged. Older women, widows, and nurses were vulnerable to charges of cursing or poisoning babies. Other charges included killing livestock, causing hailstorms, and tampering with marriage arrangements. People also believed that weak and susceptible women might have sex with the devil or be tempted to do his bidding. Clearly, neither the Reformation—nor the Catholic response to it—made Europe a more tolerant society. Indeed, the Reformation split European society deeply as both Catholics and Protestants promoted their faiths.

RELIGIOUS WARFARE IN EUROPE

The religious revival led Europe into another round of ferocious wars. Their ultimate effect was to weaken the Holy Roman Empire—a loose confederation of principalities that were clustered mainly in central Europe and presided over in this period by the Habsburgs (see Chapter 11)—and strengthen the English, French, and Dutch. Already in the 1520s, the circulation of books presenting Luther’s ideas sparked peasant revolts across central Europe. Some peasants, hoping that Luther’s assault on the church’s authority would help liberate them, rose up against repressive feudal landlords. In contrast to earlier wars in which one noble’s retinue fought a rival’s, the defense of the Catholic mass and the Protestant Bible brought crowds of simple folk to arms. Now wars between and within central European states raged for nearly forty years.

Religious conflicts weakened European dynasties. Spain, with its massive empire and its silver mines in the New World, spent much of its new fortune waging war in Europe. Most debilitating was its costly effort to subdue recently acquired Dutch territories. After a series of wars spanning nearly a hundred years, Catholic Spain finally conceded the Protestant Netherlands its independence. Wars took their toll on the Spanish Empire, which was soon wallowing in debts; not even the riches of its American silver mines could bail out the court. In the late 1550s, Philip II could not meet his obligations to creditors, and, within two decades, Spain was declared bankrupt three times. Its decline opened the way for the Dutch and the English to extend their trading networks into Asia and the New World, and the center of power within Europe shifted to the north.

Religious conflicts also sparked civil wars. In France, the divide between Catholics and Protestants exploded in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. Catholic crowds rampaged through the streets of Paris murdering Huguenot (Protestant) men, women, and children and dumping their bodies into the Seine River. The number of dead reached 3,000 in Paris and 10,000 in provincial towns. Slaughter on this scale did not break the Huguenots’ spirit, but it did bring more disrepute to the monarchy for failing to ensure peace. Another round of warfare exhausted the French and brought Henry of Navarre, a Protestant prince, to the throne. To become king, Henry IV converted to Catholicism. Shortly thereafter, he issued the Edict of Nantes, a proclamation that declared France a Catholic country but also tolerated some Protestant worship.

As princes sought to resolve religious questions within their domains, states increasingly became identified with one or another form of Christian faith—and, for Protestants, with a local language. (Protestants translated the Bible from Latin so that more people could read it.) In this way, religious strife propelled forward the process of state building and the forming of national identities. At the same time, religious conflict fueled rivalries for wealth and territory overseas. Thus, Europe entered its age of overseas exploration as a collection of increasingly powerful yet irreconcilably competitive rival states, whose differences stemmed not just from language but from the ways they worshipped the Christian God.

Wealth from Asian trade, the African slave trade, and American colonization and silver fueled Europe’s religious civil war and splintered its state system. This would mean that European powers paled in comparison with the cohesive dynasties of Asia, at least for the moment.