Europe in Crisis: The Wars of Religion

The French Wars of Religion

• By 1560, Calvinism and Catholicism had become highly militant (combative) religions.

  • Of the sixteenth-century religious wars, none was more shattering than the French civil wars known as the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598).

• Huguenots were French Protestants influenced by John Calvin.

  • Still, the Catholic majority greatly outnumbered the Huguenot minority, and the Valois monarchy was strongly Catholic.

• Although the religious issue was the most important issue, other factors played a role in the French civil wars.

  • For 30 years, battles raged in France between the Catholic and Huguenot sides.

• Finally, in 1589, Henry of Navarre, the political leader of the Huguenots and a member of the Bourbon dynasty, succeeded to the throne as Henry IV.

• To solve the religious problem, the king issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598.

Philip II and Militant Catholicism

• The greatest supporter of militant Catholicism in the second half of the sixteenth century was King Philip II of Spain, the son and heir of Charles V.

  • The first major goal of Philip II was to consolidate the lands he had inherited from his father.

  • These included Spain, the Netherlands, and possessions in Italy and the Americas.

• The Catholic faith was important to both Philip II and the Spanish people.

• Philip II, the “Most Catholic King,” became a champion of Catholic causes, a role that led to spectacular victories and equally spectacular defeats.

• The Spanish Netherlands, which consisted of 17 provinces (modern Netherlands and Belgium), was one of the richest parts of Philip’s empire.

• In the northern provinces, the Dutch, under the leadership of William the Silent, the prince of Orange, offered growing resistance.

• Philip’s reign ended in 1598.

• In reality, however, Spain was not the great power that it appeared to be.

  • Spain’s treasury was empty.

• Philip II had gone bankrupt from spending too much on war, and his successor did the same by spending a fortune on his court.

The England of Elizabeth

• When Elizabeth Tudor ascended the throne in 1558, England had fewer than four million people.

  • Intelligent, careful, and self-confident, Elizabeth moved quickly to solve the difficult religious problem she inherited from her Catholic half-sister, Queen Mary Tudor.

  • Elizabeth was also moderate in her foreign policy.

  • She tried to keep Spain and France from becoming too powerful by balancing power.

• Phillip II of Spain had toyed for years with the idea of invading England.

• In 1588, Philip ordered preparations for an armada—a fleet of warships—to invade England.

  • The hoped-for miracle never came.

• The Spanish fleet, battered by a number of encounters with the English, sailed back to Spain by a northward route around Scotland and Ireland, where it was pounded by storms. Many of the Spanish ships sank.

Social Crises, War, and Revolution

Economic and Social Crises

• From 1560 to 1650, Europe witnessed severe economic and social crises.

  • One major economic problem was inflation, or rising prices.

• By 1600, an economic slowdown had begun in parts of Europe.

• Population figures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveal Europe’s worsening conditions.

  • Population grew in the sixteenth century.

  • Warfare, plague, and famine all contributed to the population decline and to the creation of social tensions.

The Witchcraft Trials

• A belief in witchcraft, or magic, had been part of traditional village culture for centuries.

  • Common people—usually the poor and those without property—were the ones most often accused of witchcraft.

  • Under intense torture, accused witches usually confessed to a number of practices.

• By 1650, the witchcraft hysteria had begun to lessen.

• As governments grew stronger, fewer officials were willing to disrupt their societies with trials of witches.

• In addition, attitudes were changing. People found it unreasonable to believe in the old view of a world haunted by evil spirits.

The Thirty Years’ War

• Religious disputes continued in Germany after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555.

• One reason for the dis- putes was that Calvinism had not been recognized by the peace settlement.

• The war began in 1618 in the lands of the Holy Roman Empire.

  • At first, it was a struggle between Catholic forces, led by the Hapsburg Holy Roman emperors, and Protestant (primarily Calvinist) nobles in Bohemia who rebelled against Hapsburg authority.

  • Soon, however, the conflict became a political one as Denmark, Sweden, France, and Spain entered the war.

• Especially important was the struggle between France and the rulers of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire for European leadership.

• The Thirty Years’ War was the most destructive conflict that Europeans had yet experienced.

• The Peace of Westphalia stated that all German states, including the Calvinist ones, could determine their own religion.

Revolutions in England

• In addition to the Thirty Years’ War, a series of rebellions and civil wars rocked Europe in the seventeenth century.

• With the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, the Tudor dynasty came to an end.

• The Stuart line of rulers began with the accession to the throne of Elizabeth’s cousin, the king of Scotland, who became James I of England.

• James believed in the divine right of kings—that is, that kings receive their power from God and are responsible only to God.

• Religion was an issue as well.

  • The conflict that began during the reign of James came to a head during the reign of his son, Charles I.

  • The Puritans (Protestants in England inspired by Calvinist ideas) did not like the king’s strong defense of the Church of England.

  • Charles also tried to impose more ritual on the Church of England.

• Complaints grew until England slipped into a civil war in 1642 between the supporters of the king (the Cavaliers or Royalists) and the parliamentary forces (called the Roundheads because of their short hair).

• Parliament proved victorious, due largely to the New Model Army of Oliver Cromwell, a military genius.

• The victorious New Model Army lost no time in taking control.

• Parliament next abolished the monarchy and the House of Lords and declared England a republic, or commonwealth.

• Cromwell found it difficult to work with the Rump Parliament and finally dispersed it by force.

• After the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, Parliament kept much of the power it had gained earlier and continued to play an important role in government.

• Charles II was sympathetic to Catholicism, and his brother James, heir to the throne, did not hide the fact that he was a Catholic.

  • Parliament was suspicious about their Catholic leanings, especially when Charles suspended the laws that Parliament had passed against Catholics and Puritans.

  • Parliament forced the king to back down on his action.

• In 1685, James II became king.

  • James was an open and devout Catholic, making religion once more a cause of conflict between king and Parliament.

• Parliament objected to James’s policies but stopped short of rebellion.

• A group of English noble- men invited the Dutch leader, William of Orange, husband of James’s daughter Mary, to invade England.

• In January 1689, Parliament offered the throne to William and Mary.

• The Bill of Rights helped create a system of government based on the rule of law and a freely elected Parliament. This bill laid the foundation for a limited, or constitutional, monarchy.

  • Another important action of Parliament was the Toleration Act of 1689.

• By deposing one king and establishing another, Parliament had destroyed the divine-right theory of kingship.

• William was, after all, king by the grace of Parliament, not the grace of God.

• Parliament had asserted its right to be part of the government.

Response to Crisis: Absolutism

France under Louis XIV

• One response to the crises of the seventeenth century was to seek more stability by increasing the power of the monarch.

• The result was what historians have called absolutism.

  • Absolutism is a system in which a ruler holds total power.

• The reign of Louis XIV has long been regarded as the best example of the practice of absolutism in the seventeenth century.

• French history for the 50 years before Louis was a period of struggle as governments fought to avoid the breakdown of the state.

• Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s chief minister, strengthened the power of the monarchy.

• Louis XIV came to the throne in 1643 at the age of four.

• Due to the king’s young age, Cardinal Mazarin, the chief minister, took control of the government.

  • When Mazarin died in 1661, Louis XIV took over supreme power.

• One of the keys to Louis’s power was his control of the central policy-making machinery of government.

• The greatest danger to Louis’s rule came from very high nobles and royal princes.

• Louis’s government ministers were expected to obey his every wish.

• Although Louis had absolute power over France’s nationwide policy making, his power was limited at the local level.

• Maintaining religious harmony had long been a part of monarchical power in France.

• The cost of building palaces, maintaining his court, and pursuing his wars made finances a crucial issue for Louis XIV.

• He was most fortunate in having the services of Jean- Baptiste Colbert as controller-general of finances.

  • Colbert sought to increase the wealth and power of France by following the ideas of mercantilism

  • The increase in royal power that Louis pursued led the king to develop a standing army numbering four hundred thousand in time of war.

• To achieve his goals, Louis waged four wars between 1667 and 1713

• In 1715, the Sun King died.

• He left France with great debts and surrounded by enemies.

Absolutism in Central and Eastern Europe

• After the Thirty Years’ War, there was no German state, but over three hundred “Germanies.”

• Of these states, two—Prussia and Austria—emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as great European powers.

• Frederick William the Great Elector laid the foundation for the Prussian state.

• To maintain the army and his own power, Frederick William set up the General War Commissariat to levy taxes for the army and oversee its growth.

  • In 1701, Frederick William’s son Frederick offi- cially gained the title of king.

  • Elector Frederick III became King Frederick I.

• The Austrian Hapsburgs had long played a significant role in European politics as Holy Roman emperors

• The core of the new Austrian Empire was the traditional Austrian lands in present-day Austria, the Czech Republic, and Hungary.

• The Austrian monarchy, however, never became a highly centralized, absolutist state, chiefly because it was made up of so many different national groups.

Russia under Peter The Great

• A new Russian state had emerged in the fifteenth century under the leadership of the principality of Muscovy and its grand dukes.

• In the sixteenth century, Ivan IV became the first ruler to take the title of czar, the Russian word for caesar.

  • Ivan expanded the territories of Russia eastward.

  • He also crushed the power of the Russian nobility, known as the boyars

  • When Ivan’s dynasty came to an end in 1598, a period of anarchy known as the Time of Troubles followed.

• This period did not end until the Zemsky Sobor, or national assembly, chose Michael Romanov as the new czar in 1613.

• The Romanov dynasty lasted until 1917. One of its most prominent members was Peter the Great.

  • A few years after becoming czar, Peter made a trip to the West.

  • One of Peter’s first goals was to reorganize the army.

    • To impose the rule of the central government more effectively throughout the land, Peter divided Russia into provinces.

  • After his first trip to the West, Peter began to introduce Western customs, practices, and manners into Russia.

  • Because Westerners did not wear beards or the traditional long-skirted coat, Russian beards had to be shaved and coats shortened.

• One group of Russians—upper-class women— gained much from Peter’s cultural reforms.

• The object of Peter’s domestic reforms was to make Russia into a great state and military power.

• A long and hard-fought war with Sweden enabled Peter to acquire the lands he sought.

• On a marshland on the Baltic in 1703, Peter began the construction of a new city, St. Petersburg, his window on the West.

The World of European Culture

Mannerism

• The artistic Renaissance came to an end when a new movement, called Mannerism, emerged in Italy in the 1520s and 1530s.

• The Reformation’s revival of religious values brought much political turmoil.

• Mannerism in art reflected this new environment by deliberately breaking down the High Renaissance principles of balance, harmony, and moderation.

  • Mannerism spread from Italy to other parts of Europe and perhaps reached its high point in the work of El Greco (“the Greek”).

    • El Greco was from the island of Crete.

• After studying in Venice and Rome, he moved to Spain.

• In his paintings, El Greco used elongated and contorted figures, portraying them in unusual shades of yellow and green against an eerie background of stormy grays.

The Baroque Period

• Mannerism was eventually replaced by a new movement—the baroque.

• The Catholic reform movement most wholeheartedly adopted the baroque style.

• This can be seen in the buildings at Catholic courts, especially those of the Hapsburgs in Madrid, Prague, Vienna, and Brussels.

  • Baroque artists tried to bring together the classical ideals of Renaissance art with the spiritual feelings of the sixteenth-century religious revival.

• Perhaps the greatest figure of the baroque period was the Italian architect and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who completed Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

  • Bernini’s Throne of Saint Peter is a highly decorated cover for the pope’s medieval wooden throne.

• Artemisia Gentileschi is less well-known than the male artists who dominated the seventeenth-century art world in Italy but prominent in her own right.

A Golden Age of Literature

• In both England and Spain, writing for the theater reached new heights between 1580 and 1640.

• Other forms of literature flourished as well.

• A cultural flowering took place in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

• The period is often called the Elizabethan Era, because so much of it fell within the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

• Of all the dramatists, none is more famous than William Shakespeare.

  • When Shakespeare appeared in London in 1592, Elizabethans already enjoyed the stage.

  • The Globe’s admission charge of one or two pen- nies enabled even the lower classes to attend.

  • William Shakespeare was a “complete man of the theater.”

  • Shakespeare has long been viewed as a universal genius.

  • The theater was one of the most creative forms of expression during Spain’s golden century as well.

• Beginning in the 1580s, the standard for play- wrights was set by Lope de Vega.

  • Lope de Vega made no apologies for the fact that he wrote his plays to please his audiences and satisfy public demand.

• One of the crowning achievements of the golden age of Spanish literature was the work of Miguel de Cervantes.

  • His novel Don Quixote has been hailed as one of the greatest literary works of all time.

  • In the two main characters of this famous work, Cervantes presented the dual nature of the Spanish character.

Political Thought

• The seventeenth-century concerns with order and power were reflected in the political thought of the time.

• Thomas Hobbes was alarmed by the revolutionary upheavals in England.

  • He wrote Leviathan, a work on political thought, to try to deal with the problem of disorder

• To save themselves from destroying one another, people made a social contract and agreed to form a state.

• John Locke, who wrote a political work called Two Treatises of Government, 1690, viewed the exercise of political power quite differently.

  • He argued against the absolute rule of one person.

  • Unlike Hobbes, Locke believed that before society was organized, humans lived in a state of equality and freedom rather than a state of war.

• In this state of nature, humans had certain natural rights—rights with which they were born.

  • These included rights to life, liberty, and property.

• Like Hobbes, however, Locke believed that problems existed in the state of nature.

• The contract between people and government involved mutual obligations.

• Government would protect the rights of the people, and the people would act reasonably toward the government.

• To Locke, people meant the landholding aristocracy, not landless masses.

  • Locke was not an advocate of democracy, but his ideas proved important to both Americans and French in the eighteenth century.