World History - Religious Wars, Absolutism and the Scientific Revolution

Humors

Hippocrates 5th century BC belief in there being 4 temperaments linked to bodily fluids

• Sanguine - optimistic, energetic

• Melancholic - moody, withdrawn

• Choleric - irritable, impulsive, angry

• Phlegmatic - calm, slow

Isaac Newton

• English physicist and mathematician who attempted to unite Kepler and Galileo’s laws

• Proposed the law of gravity

  • The force of gravity between two bodies was inversely proportional to the square of distance between them

  • The force that held planets in orbit was the same that caused objects to fall to Earth

• Proposed the 3 Laws of Motion

  • A body will remain at rest until some force is applied to it; a moving object will remain in motion unless an external force is applied (inertia)

  • Amount of force applied will determine the change in direction (acceleration)

  • To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction

• Provided mathematical proof of how the universe ran (a giant clock/ work machine)

Battle of Spanish Armada

• King Philip II of Spain decided to invade England due to its part in Spain’s loss in the Dutch revolt, and because Queen Elizabeth turned down his marriage proposal

  • English pirates were also raiding Spanish ships

• In July 1588, the Spanish Armada (130 ships, 30,000 men) sailed the English channel

• English watchers spotted the fleet, and led by Sir Francis Drake, attacked the Armada in battles along the English coast

  • The English set ships on fire against the Armada, causing the Spanish ships to break their tactical formation

  • Many Spanish ships were destroyed, and in their attempted escape they were pushed North by the “English Wind” to seas around Scotland, destroying more ships

• As a result..

  • The Spanish fleet was destroyed

  • This marked the end of the dominance of the Spanish empire, and the beginning of the dominance of the English empire

Deism

• “New Religion”, the belief that there is a God, but he plays no role in everyday life

• God started the machine and then stepped back

Habitants

• New France began as a commercial operation but there were strong religious motivations

• Farmers called habitants rented land from the Church and other land owners

Spanish Exploration

• The voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492 was sponsored by the King and Queen of Spain and was the beginning of several centuries of exploration and conquest of the American continents

• Spain exploited the region, using silver and gold of the Americas to enhance its power

• The pope divided the newly discovered land between Spain and Portugal (Treaty of Tordesillas)

• Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes arrived in Mexico in 1519 with 600 men, crossbows, guns and horses

• Spanish government was established

• Aztecs were defeated by starvation and plague

• Incas were also decimated by European disease

Louis XIV

• Nicknamed “The Sun King”, the monarch around whom everyone else revolved around

  • His intention was to centralize control of the nation

• Never called the Estates General (French Parliament) in his 55 year reign

• His network of spies, letter readers and informants allowed him to know everything about everyone

• Avid participant in “The Sport of Kings” aka war

  • Pursued land wars at the expense of his navy and overseas colonies which galvanized most of Europe against him

Edict of Nantes

• A formal religious settlement that gave Protestants religious freedoms within their own towns and territories

• The violence stops, but hostilities remain (it is difficult to legislate against hatred, intolerance and ignorance)

Catherine the Great

• Married to Peter III, 1762 arranged for her lover to kill him

• Reigned for 34 years, famous for her number of lovers

  • Grigory Potemkin is the most famous. He is known for Potemkin Villages, false facades of villages on shores to display wealth and success where there was none

• Absolute monarch, imitated the French, read Voltaire and communicated with him

• Opened the door to western thought and then slammed it shut

• Everything was done for show, killed palace guards after sleeping with them

• Died of a stroke

Geocentric/ Heliocentric

• Geocentric is the old view of the cosmos, the planets revolved around the immobile Earth, to each sphere there were attached heavenly bodies that moved with them (moons)

  • The geographical center of the Earth was considered to be Jerusalem

  • This model was conceived by Greek astronomer Ptolemy

  • No beginning or end, perfect sphere, crystalline (transparent), impenetrable, whole system revolves once every 24 hours

• Heliocentric is the idea that the cosmos is sun centered, and the Earth is attached to the third sphere, as well as that the Earth has three motions

  • Day/ Night - a daily spin on the axis

  • 1 Year - annual orbit of the sun

  • Seasons - it is tilted on its axis

  • This model was conceived by Nicolas Copernicus

Gun Powder Plot

• James I persecuted Catholics, hoping to stamp out the “papists” and their “popery”

• His anti-Catholic attitude intensified after the “Gun Powder Plot” was uncovered on November 5th, 1605

  • An alleged Catholic plot to blow up Parliament with James I in it on opening day

  • Guy Fawkes and his papist friends allegedly concocted the plot

  • Fawkes was caught about to light the fuse, he was arrested, charged with treason and executed, hung and quartered

Slave Trade

• The Portuguese first began to kidnap people from the West coast of Africa and take them back to Europe

  • The Spanish took the first African captives as early as 1503, and by 1518 the first captives were shipped directly from Africa to America

• A database puts the figure of slaves taken at over 11 million people. Of those, fewer than 9.6 million survived the middle passage across the Atlantic due to inhumane conditions

  • The total number of Africans taken from the continents East coast and enslaved in the Arab world is estimated between 9.4 and 14 million

• Africans could become slaves as punishment for a crime, as payment for a family debt, or by being a prisoner of war. With the arrival of American and European ships offering goods in exchange for people, Africans had added incentive to enslave each other, often by kidnapping

• Rich and powerful Africans were able to demand a variety of consumer articles and even gold for captives who may have been acquired through warfare or other means. By the 17th century the demand for captives was so high they could only be acquired through initiating warfare & raiding

• Resistance to slavery among whites came mostly from religious minorities (ie. Quakers, Mennonites and Puritans) who found no justification in scripture for slavery

• About ½ of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was carried on British ships

  • Slavery was incidental to Canada, New France, and the North American colonies

  • To the southern colonies, slavery was the foundation of the economic and social order, fostering sharply defined racial distinctions

Thomas Hobbes

• Born in the year of the Spanish Armada, Hobbes lived in the exciting aftermath of the Renaissance and the Reformation

• A political philosopher who attempted to use the “new science” of his day to explain the nature of man and society

• In his lifetime he had experienced Stuart absolutism, the English Civil War, Cromwell, and the Restoration

  • Served as a tutor to Charles II in exile in Paris

  • Died a decade before the glorious revolution

• In his numerous political writings, Hobbes attempted to analyze human nature, focusing on the aspect of “freedom” and “authority”

• His best known work, “Leviathan” was published 2 years after the execution of Charles I

  • Hobbes began his analysis of human nature by attempting to isolate humanity in a “state of nature”

  • State of Nature: Mankind at its most basic (before society and civilization)

  • Hobbes assessment of human nature was pessimistic

    • Motivated by greed, man is ego-centric, man is the enemy of every other man

• Hobbes believed in absolute monarchy, Leviathan expanded the virtues of absolute authority

  • All people were equal, no need for feudalism or nobility, a type of covenant exists

  • People agree that there is a need for an absolute monarch

  • The absolute power (Leviathan) creates a law of the land, determines the official religion, etc

  • There are no grounds for rebellion

Galileo Galilei

• Father of experimental science, conducted experiments in many fields

  • Falling bodies - leaning tower of Pisa

  • Mass, density, optics, 32x telescope, speed of light, thermometer, vacuum chamber, mass of air, pendulum swing, time/ distance, trajectory, distance of a projectile

• Galileo built a telescope in 1609 to observe the heavens more closely

• He observed the moons of Jupiter, found that the sun had changing spots, the moon seemed to have mountains

• Galileo was certain that his observations supported a heliocentric view of the solar system

• Theologians and philosophers were angry with this view as it contradicted the Bible and dogma of the Church

• He defended himself stating that the Bible was open to interpretation and that God endowed us with senses, reason and intellect and we should use them to discover new things about the world and universe

• In 1633 Galileo was tried before the inquisition and condemned for heresy

  • Forced to acknowledge publicly that he made a mistake and was sentenced to life in prison, which was later changed to house arrest

• Smart as he was, Galileo still believed in spherical orbits, fudged some results, and did not really prove the Copernican theory

Adam Smith/ Wealth of Nations

• Scottish economist, became the most influential champion of the “new economics” as well as “The Father of Modern Economic Theory”

  • Published “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Wealth of Nations” in 1766

• Supply and demand is the base of the Free Enterprise System

  • The ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want

• Free trade and competition are crucial to a nations success

• Wealth of Nations is also a beacon of economic liberty

  • It was also a source of fuel for the revolution in Britain’s 13 colonies

Thirty Years War

Preconditions for the war included..

• A fragmented Germany, almost ungovernable land of 360 autonomous political entities. Europe’s highway for trade and travel, Protestants afraid Catholics will try to recreate Catholic Europe pre-reformation

• Religious divisions in the Holy Roman Empire (Catholics/ Protestants, Liberal/ Conservative Lutherans, Lutherans/ Calvinists)

• Calvinism rule of Palatinate, unrecognized as legal religion, Lutherans felt this threatened the Peace of Augsburg

The Peace of Augsburg seemed to settle religious division, each state would either be Lutheran or Catholic

• Catholics became increasingly concerned about their future

• Protestant states formed a union and looked for support from Spain’s enemies

War broke out in 1618 in Bohemia. The Hapsburg Archduke Ferdinand became king of Bohemia in 1617.

• Bohemia was Protestant, Ferdinand began the process of turning it back to Catholicism by revoking religious freedoms granted earlier

In May 1618, Protestant nobles in Prague protested the moves against their religious freedoms by throwing two emissaries from Hapsburg out of the window. The “defenestration of Prague” resulted in war (the act of throwing someone out the window)

The war would eventually involve most of continental Europe, from Portugal to Hungary

• Most of the war was fought on German soil and the country was devastated

• Catholic states united with other Catholic states and so did Protestants

The war quickly became more about money and power than religion. The Treaty of Westphalia ended the war, taking four years of negotiations to create

• Treaty restored the Peace of Augsburg, adding Calvinism as a legal religion

• Swiss confederacy , the Netherlands and Bavaria become independent

• More than 300 political states acknowledged as sovereign

The pope was not present and opposed the treaty, however this did not affect the outcome. It was a sign of the popes waning political power.

Marked the end of religious wars, but peace would not come to Europe as as their reasons for fighting simply changed.

Absolutism/ Divine Right of Kings

Absolutism

• The political doctrine and practice of unlimited centralized authority and absolute sovereignty, usually held by a monarch or a dictator

Divine Right of Kings

• The belief that monarchs are an extension of God

• It led to extravagance, waste and misadventure via war

• Absolute rulers pursuits of greater glory through conquest and acquisition (imperialism) often bankrupted their nations

Queen Elizabeth I

• Daughter of Anne Boleyn, became Queen at age 25, reigned from 1568-1603

• Nicknamed “The Virgin Queen” as she never married

  • Educated in Italian Humanism, knew French, German, Italian and Latin. Enjoyed music, dancing and hunting as well as the company of men

  • She did not want to give up power to a husband, and turned down countless marriage proposals

• Under Elizabeth, England was once again Protestant (it was Catholic under her sister Mary) and began its rise to power

• Religon was not the main focus of her life, she believed in moderation and compromise as avenues to peace and economic prosperity

  • Elizabeth wanted to end religious conflict in England, as she thought it would threaten her reign

• The Act of Uniformity and the Act of Supremacy were passed, establishing the foundations of the church of England, so that it had Protestant dogma but essentially Catholic structure

• The Uniformity Bill imposed the Book of Common Prayer on religious services and required attendance at public worship and imposed fines for not attending

Mercantilism

• The purpose of the colonies was to serve domestic economy and help increase wealth of the state

  • The new colonial empires set into place a system of trade based on a highly restrictive system

• Colonies were allowed to trade only with the colonialist “mother country”, selling it natural resources and purchasing manufactured products

European Exploration

Scientific Revolution