Chapter 15: Wars of Religion and the Clash of Worldviews

politiques

moderate Catholic and Calvinist political advisers during the sixteenth-century French Wars of Religion who argued that compromise in matters of religion would strengthen the monarchy

Elizabeth I

English queen (r. 1558-1603) who oversaw the return of the Protestant Anglican church and, in 1588, the successful defense of the realm agains the Spanish Armada

Puritans

strict Calvinists who opposed all vestiges of Catholic ritual in the Church of England

Defenestration of Prague

two Catholic deputies tried to dissolve the meetings of Protestants in May 1618 in Prague; angered, the Protestants trapped the Catholics and threw them out the windows to the pavements; this touched off the Thirty Years' War, eventually involving every major power of Europe

French Wars of Religion

(1562-1598) series of wars between the Huguenot and Catholic armies

Bourbon family

the Huguenots followed the lead of this family, who were close relatives of the French king and stood first in line to inherit the throne if the Valois kings failed to produce a male heir

Guise family

Catholic nobles followed the lead of this family, who aimed to block Bourbon ambitions

"nobility of the robe"

Henry IV used court festivities and royal processions to rally subjects around him, and allowed rich merchants and lawyers to buy offices and, in exchange for an annual payment, pass their positions on to their heirs to sell them to someone else

Escorial

Spanish palace of King Philip II; represented prestige, power, and the wealth of the king

William of Orange

under this leader, the Netherlands' seven Protestant northern provinces formally allied with the ten Catholic southern provinces and drove out the Spaniards

Dutch Republic

gained independence from Spain in 1648; sometimes called Holland, was a self-governing state sheltering a variety or religious groups; made it one of Europe's chief intellectual and scientific centers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion

(1563) issued by the Church of England under the authority of Elizabeth I, it incorporated elements of Catholic ritual along with Calvinist doctrines

Spanish Armada

Spanish word for "fleet;" Philip II sent his "fleet" towards the English Channel in 1588, but the ships got lost in the Scottish winds, and the Protestants rejoiced

Sweden, Poland-Lithuania

blocked Ivan IV's plan for expansion

Ferdinand II

(r.1619-1637) elected emperor of the Holy Roman Emperor, and was therefore deposed of by the rebellious Bohemians

Christian IV of Denmark

(r. 1596-1648) Lutheran King of Denmark who responded to Wallenstein's invasion by invading northern Germany to protect the Protestants; did not have an adequate army and was defeated by Wallenstein

Cardinal Richelieu

(1585-1642) French monarchy's chief minister; offered to help Gustavus defeat the Catholic Habsburgs; advised Louis XIII to take advantage of the growing tensions

Cardinal Mazarin

an Italian cardinal who provided advice to the foreign queen

intendants

delegates from the king's [Louis XIII] council dispatched to the provinces to oversee police, army, and financial affairs

Divinie Right theory of kings

James I of England argued that he ruled by divine right and was accountable only to God

"Crisis of the 17th century"

the economic crisis that was deepened by the devastation of the Thirty Years' War; led to drops in prices and a slower population growth

joint stock companies

countries chartered these private companies in the colonies of the New World to enrich investors by importing fish, furs, tobacco, and precious metals

Michel de Montaigne

(1533-1592) a French magistrate who resigned his office in the midst of the wars of religion to write about the need for tolerance and open-mindedness; revived the ancient doctrine of skepticism, which held that total certainty is never attainable

Jean Bodin/The Six Books of the Republic

(1530-1596) French Catholic lawyer who sought systematic secular answers to the problem of disorder in his 1576 book; concluded there were three types of sovereignty: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy

Nicolaus Copernicus/On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres

(1473-1543) this Polish clergyman began the revolution in astronomy by publishing this treatise; believed in heliocentrism

Galen

medical knowledge in Europe was, until the mid-sixteenth century, based on the writings of this second-century Greek physician

mathematics, mechanical principle

Descartes argued that these provided the key to understanding all of nature, including the actions of people and states in his Discourse on Method (1637)

witchcraft

the exercise of magical powers gained by a pact with the devil

Cathereine de Medicis

Italian-born mother of French king Charles X; she served as regent and tried but failed to prevent religious warfare between Calvinists and Catholics

Edict of Nantes

the decree issued by French King Henry IV in 1598 that granted the Huguenots a large measure of religious toleration

Philip II

King of Spain (r. 1556-1598) and the most powerful ruler in Europe; he reigned over the western Habsburg lands and all the Spanish colonies recently settled in the New World

Lepanto

a site off the Greek coast where, in 1571, the allied Catholic forces of Spain's King Philip II, Venice, and the papacy defeated the Ottoman Turks in a great sea battle; the victory gave the Christian powers control of the Meiditteranean

Peace of Westphalia

(1648) the settlement of the Thirty Years' War; it established enduring religious divisions in the Holy Roman empire by which Lutheranism would dominate in the north, Calvinism in the area of the Rhine River, and Catholicism in the south

raison d'etat

French for "reason of state," the political doctrine, first proposed by Cardinal Richelieu of France, which held that the state's interests should prevail over those of religion

St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre

(1572) bloodbath that had been fueled by years of growing animosity between Catholics and Protestants; occurred after the wedding of Marguerite de Valois to Henry of Navarre (Bourbon)

Henry IV

Protestant Bourbon leader of France (r. 1589-1610); concluded that to establish control over war-weary France he had to place the interests of the French state ahead of his Protestant faith

Moriscos

Muslim converts to Christianity who remained secretly faithful to Islam; revolted in the south of Spain

Dutch Revolt

(1566-1648) started after Calvinists in the Netherlands vandalized churches; Philip sent an army to put a stop to the rebel forces;

Ivan IV

(r. 1533-1584) Muscovite tsar who ruled over the Russian Empire and protected the Russian Orthodox church; tried to make Muscovy the center of a mighty Russian empire; "the Terrible"

Boyars

nobles that Ivan IV murders

Thirty Years' War

(1618-1648) initiated after King Ferdinand of Bohemia, Catholic Habsburg heir, curtails religious freedom which had been previously granted to Protestants

Frederick V of the Platinate

(r. 1616-1623) Calvinist ruler who took over after Ferdinand was deposed of from Bohemia nd become Holy Roman Emperor

Albrecht von Wallenstein

(1583-1634) commander of a mercenary army who fought for the emperor and plundered much of Protestant Germany

Gustavus Adolphus

(r. 1611-1632) marched into Germany in 1630 to support the Protestant cause and gain control over trade in northern Europe; made Sweden the supreme power of northern Europe

Louis XIII

(r. 1610-1643) hoped to profit from the troubles of Spain and the Netherlands and from the conflicts between the Austrian emperor and his Protestant subjects

The Adventures of Simpleton

(1699) written by Hans Grimmelshausen who experience the Thirty Years' War; was originally Lutheran and then converted to Catholicism; his story is told from the point of view of a "simpleton" -- a naive peasant who does not understand what is happening around him

secularization

the trend toward making religious faith a private domain rather than one directly connected to state power and science; it prompted a search for nonreligious explanations for political authority and natural phenomena

baroque

an artistic style of the seventeenth century that featured curves, exaggerated lighting, intense emotions, release from restraint, and even a kind of artistic sensationalism

scientific method

the combination of experimental observation and mathematical deduction that was used to determine the laws of nature and became the secular standard of truth

heliocentrism

the view articulated by Polish clergyman Nicolaus Copernicus that the earth and planets revolve around the sun

Little Ice Age

some historians refered to the entire period 1600-1850 as this because glaciers advanced during this time and retreated only after 1850

mannerism

emerged in the Italian states during the late sixteenth century; almost theatrical style that allowed painters to distort perspective to convey a message or emphasize a theme

Hugo Grotius/The Laws of War and Peace

(1583-1645) attempted to systemize the notion of "natural law" -- laws of nature that give legitimacy to government and stand above the actions of any particular ruler or religious group; his work in 1625 was condemned by the Catholic church and he was arrested for taking part in religious controversies

Aristotelian-Ptolemiac model of the universe

revolution in astronomy contested the Ptolemaic view, endorsed by the Catholic church

Tycho Brahe

(1546-1601) Danish astronomer who undermined the Ptolemaic view and designed his own instruments and observed a new star in 1572 and 1577

Johannes Kepler

(1571-1630) assistant to Brahe who converted to the Copernican view; used Brahe's evidence to develop his three laws of planteary motion, published between 1609 and 1619; provided mathematical backing for heliocentrism and directly challenged the claim long held, even by Copernicus, that planetary motion was circular (the planents traveled in ellipses)

Galileo Galilei

(1564-1642) provided more evidence to support the heliocentric view and also challenged the doctrine that the heavens were perfect and unchanging

Andreas Vesalius/On the Construction of the Human Bod

(1514-1564) Flemish scientist who challenged the traditional account in anatomy; refuted Galen's work in this illustrated anatomical text

Paracelsus

(1493-1541) went even further than Vesalius and in 1527, burned Galen's text at the University of Basel, where he was a professor of medicine; performed operations and pursued his interests in magic, alchemy, and astrology; helped to establish the modern science of pharmacology

William Harvey

(1578-1657) Englishman who used dissection to examine the circulation of blood within the body, demonstrating how the heart worked as a pump ("piece of machinery")

Francis Bacon/The Advancement of Learning

(1561-1626) English Protestant politician; (1605) attacked reliance on ancient writers and optimistically predicted that the scientific method would lead to social progress; empiricism

Rene Descartes/Discourse on Method

(1596-1650) French Catholic mathematician and philosopher; nothing at all was certain; aimed to establish more secure philopsophical foundations, those of mathematics and logic; (1637) argued that mathematical and mechanical principles provided the key to understanding all of nature, including the actions of people and states; "I think, therefore I am"; "clearly and distinctly"

empiricism

knowledge that is gained by observation and experiment

Isaac Newton/Principia Mathematica

laws of movement developed by the English natural philosopher; established the basis for the new mathematics of moving bodies, the infinitesimal calculus; (1687) developed his law of universal gravitation, which explained both movement on earth and the motion of planets; formulated three fundamental physical laws; he saw no conflict between faith and science

law of universal gravitation, laws of motion

every body in the universe exerts over every other body an attractive force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them

Newtonian model of the universe

Newton saw no conflict between faith and science; by demonstrating that the physical universe followed rational principles, natural phiosophers could prove the existence of God and so liberate humans from doubt and the fear of chaos