Discovery and Reformation
The Beginnings
© 1996, Richard Hooker, Washington State University

It's hard to know why Europeans suddenly expanded over the globe with such rapidity and such ferocity. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the world was a fairly small and contained place for Europeans. While they knew about far-flung areas such as China and southern Africa, their world view was still narrowly focused on Europe and the Mediterranean. Within two hundred years, Europeans would be all over the world with settlements on every continent except Australia and Antarctica. By 1600, most of the coastline of the Americas would be under the domination of Europeans as well as all the major cities in eastern Africa. How did this happen? How did Europeans suddenly end up all over the world? And how did this change the European world view?

The simplest and most obvious answer is the growth of mercantilism in the high Middle Ages. Mercantilism is a simple economic activity. All it involves is the purchase of certain goods in a region where those goods are common, moving those goods to another region where they aren't common, and then selling them at a profit. As simple as this sounds, the European economy was only minimally mercantile through the early middle ages. One reason was the relative scarcity of money. The other was the absence of credit, for mercantilism thrives when people can borrow money to finance their purchases; borrowing money was a bit of a pickle for medieval Europeans because lending money at interest was considered by the Church to be a mortal sin. No interest, no loans; no loans, no borrowing.

The Europeans learned mercantilism for the most part from the Muslims; this is still evident today in the number of economic terms in European languages that are, in fact, derived from Arabic: "traffic," "tariff," etc. Once Europeans learned mercantilism, they set about it with great enthusiasm. The European economy quickly changed from a predominantly barter economy to a predominantly money economy, and goods from all over the world began to circulate throughout Europe.

These goods, however, were coming to Europe via middlemen, in particular, Islamic traders. The most lucrative market was the spice trade. Most of the exotic spices used in Europe came from the Middle East (such as cardamom), India (such as cinnamon), or China (cloves). They were brought within striking range of Europe by Islamic traders, who themselves had spread around the world in order to facilitate trade. The eastern coast of Africa, for instance, was one long line of Muslim cities that primarily served as conduits for trading goods from the interior of Africa. Muslims had also set up settlements in India and China; they did not, however, make it to the Americas.
Ever mindful of their wallets, the European merchants and mercantile countries wanted to eliminate the middlemen and trade directly with the regions supplying these goods. In particular, Portugal and Spain, the states that carried out the bulk of trade in spices, wanted to find a route to the spice-producing countries so that they could trade directly with those countries. Portugal headed south and east along the western coast of Africa hoping to find the southern terminus of Africa so that ships could sail around Africa to India and China. Spain would take the opposite route, foolishly sailing west to find a shorter and more direct route to China and India. This western route was neither short and certainly wasn't direct since two major continents lay in the way.
The Portuguese began the centuries-long settlement of European powers in Africa, India, and Asia and laid down the basic pattern of European relations with non-European countries: the use of militant aggression and superior technology in order to enforce economic monopolies. The Spanish explorers discovered continents hitherto unknown to general European experience. On these continents they discovered entirely new cultures; some of these cultures lived in magnificent and technologically-sophisticated cities with monumental architecture that rivaled the greatest architecture of Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa.

For Europeans, the discovery of the Americas did not merely challenge their ideas of world geography, it also fundamentally changed their view of history. From the time of early Christianity all through Middle Ages, Europeans thought of history as an ordered and rational affair. History was by and large understood as salvation history; the larger meaning of history was the salvation of humanity in a Christian sense. The meaning of all historical events could be determined by correlating those historical events to events or sayings in the New Testament which served as a kind of decoder ring; this way of understanding human experience and history is called typology. The discovery of the New World, however, made the Europeans realize that there was an entirely different human history being played out on the new continent. Not only was this history different from European history, it was unknown and unknowable, for the Europeans could not decipher the writings they encountered. The salvation model of history, then, could no longer apply to human experience since an entire human history had taken place outside the context of salvation history. This crisis in historical understanding would lead Europeans to think of history in different ways and eventually led to the Enlightenment view of history, that is, history as progress.

The Portuguese

The country that undertook the most ambitious voyages of discovery was Portugal. From these voyages, Europe would discover the entire coastline of Africa and build the first European settlements south of the Sahara. From the Portuguese, Europe would also learn the efficient human commerce: the profitable buying, selling, and distributing of human beings from Africa as slaves to Europeans, a form of mercantilism that would leave a permanent stamp on European and world culture.
It is not unfair to say that Portugal's emergence as the first great exploring country was due to a single person, Prince Henry the Navigator, who lived from 1394-1460. Henry was mainly interested in expanding the mercantile opportunities available to Portugal and secondarily interested in spreading Christianity. He was called "The Navigator" because he founded the first school of navigation in Europe. The graduates of this school would lead expeditions further and further south along the coast of Africa. While Europeans were intimately acquainted with North Africa, the continent south of the Sahara was a great unknown.

In the early 1400's, the Portuguese began to export black Africans as slaves in northern Africa. These slaves were kidnapped or purchased by Islamic slave traders south of the Sahara and then transported north to be sold to the Portuguese. In 1441, the Portuguese reached the Senegal River in West Africa and found that they could acquire black Africans without having to go through the slave traders, thus eliminating the cost of at least some middle men in the commerce in human lives: instead of dealing with Islamic traders, the Portuguese would deal directly with black Africans by either purchasing or kidnapping human beings. The first Portuguese ship to arrive in West Africa south of the Sahara was also the first European ship to bring back a cargo of humans directly taken, rather than bought, from Africa. The Portuguese were delighted, and soon they set up an energetic trade route to West Africa. Within a decade, Portugal was importing around a thousand African slaves per year to be sold to wealthy Europeans.

The Portuguese, however, were looking for more than just human cargo: they were looking for gold in Africa as well. In 1471, they discovered a gold rich region along the southern coast of West Africa (the "Gold Coast"), and trade with Africa took off. The Portuguese leased land from local rulers and set up forts and primitive settlements: the first European settlements in Africa south of the Sahara.

The Portuguese didn't stop there, however. They were convinced that Africa must have a southern extremity and that trade with the east would be possible by ship alone if they could reach that extremity. All they would have to do was to travel south, go around the southern extremity of Africa, and then proceed north and east to India and China. In 1487, Bartolomeo Diaz navigated to the southern extremity of Africa, which he named the Cape of Good Hope, and started heading north along the eastern coast of Africa. His crew, however, began to grumble and he turned back. In 1497, five years after Christopher Columbus landed in America, Vasco da Gama navigated around the Cape of Good Hope and sailed all along the eastern coast of Africa, stopping at the numerous Muslim trading cities that extended from Sofala to Ethiopia. In 1498, he reached the western coast of India: he was the first person to sail a ship directly from Europe to India.

In India, da Gama loaded his ships with spices and returned to Europe. His voyage had been sponsored by merchants hoping to break the Muslim stranglehold on the spice trade; da Gama had shown that European merchants could sail to India directly and not deal with middlemen.

Portugal then embarked on voyages of aggression rather than discovery. Their goal was to squeeze the Muslims out of the spice trade by attacking Muslim ships and Muslim trading cities both in India and eastern Africa. In 1510, the Portuguese set up a permanent settlement and fort at Goa (present day Bombay) in India.

Within a few decades, the Portuguese managed to reach China and to drive the Muslims almost completely out of the spice trade. How? Basically, they muscled them out. The Portuguese had one and only one goal in mind: a complete monopoly over the spice trade. They were willing to do anything whatsoever to gain that monopoly and there was no question that their naval technology outclassed that of their Muslim and Indian counterparts.

These actions, however, radically changed the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world. Until the Portuguese pursuit of the spice monopoly, European powers approached Muslim, African, and eastern states and cultures with a high degree of respect. From the Portuguese, the Europeans learned a new, aggressive type of relationship and the non-European countries adjusted accordingly. The European discovery of the world, it seems, also meant the discovery of global conflict.

The New World

The discovery of the American continent had nothing to do with intellectual curiosity or even unfathomable human courage. It was almost entirely about one and only one thing: money. And it was a mistake.

The Portuguese all throughout the sixteenth century ruthlessly and aggressively built a monopoly in the spice trade from the east by dominating the trade routes around the continent of Africa. Spain, on the other hand, began thinking of ways to get around this monopoly by developing a western route to the eastern countries. The problem was that this route was infinitely longer than the trip around Africa and it lay across an ocean so vast that it staggered the imagination and chilled the heart.

It was Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), a Genoese navigator, who convinced the Spanish to underwrite a western expedition to the eastern countries. Contrary to what you might have heard, educated Europeans knew that the world was round and had known this for millennia. Then as now, people who thought the world was flat were regarded as crackpots. Europeans also had a good idea as to the circumference of the earth; this circumference, in fact, had been accurately calculated in the second century BC. The general view, then, was that a western voyage to India would be a disaster, for the ship would have to travel thousands of miles over open ocean. The ship's crew would starve or die of dehydration long before the journey was complete.

But Columbus believed that the world was considerably smaller than was imagined in the general view and he managed to convince Isabella, the Queen of Spain, that a western expedition would be but a short trip. He was, of course, completely mistaken and had not the Americas gotten in his way, he and his men would have starved or died of dehydration just as everyone knew they would. But fortunately for Columbus, America did get in the way.

The Europeans immediately believed that a new continent had been "discovered" and they called it the "New World." As for Columbus, he never acknowledged or believed that the Americas were anything other than Asia; he was pretty much the only European who subscribed to this view. He went to his grave absolutely convinced of this idea, and sent several of his crew to their grave for daring to suggest otherwise.

The "New World" is a problematic term for many reasons. First, it was not a "New World," for the inhabitants of America had known of its existence for at least twenty thousand years. No European had "discovered" America since Native Americans had, in essence, discovered the continent some twenty millennia earlier. Second, the Americas were not isolated continents, even from Europe. Icelanders had landed on and settled along the coastline of Canada in the thirteenth century, and accounts of this settlement spread throughout Iceland and the Scandinavian countries. However, even before the Norse settlements in Canada, there seems to have been some kind of sporadic trade with the Americas dating all the way back to ancient Egypt. There is disputed physical evidence of American products in the Mediterranean and Europe including the discovery of nicotine in Egyptian mummies (nicotine only comes from tobacco, which grows only in the Americas). The circumstances and nature of this trade has been lost to us; suffice it to say that if this trade occurred, it was extremely rare, circuitous, and certainly not an ongoing phenomenon.

A few Europeans, then, had a slight knowledge of the Americas. Columbus's discovery, however, catapulted these continents to the forefront of the European imagination. Soon after Columbus's discovery, every country in Europe jumped on the Americas bandwagon. Henry VII of England sent John Cabot to explore the coast of New England. In 1500, Pedro Cabral, a Portugese captain, discovered South America. Florence sent Amerigo Vespucci, who traveled several times to the new continent in order to catalog the geography; because of this, the continents would eventually bear his name.

It was the Spanish, however, that dominated the settlement and exploitation of the Americas. In 1494, Spain signed a treaty with Portugal, the Treaty of Tordesillas, that divided the entire world between the two countries (imagine that). All the trade routes east of the Cape of Good Hope belonged to Portugal while all the routes west across the Atlantic belonged to Spain.

Soon a new type of explorer would enter the scene: the conquistador. As the name suggests, the conquistador set out to conquer the territories of the new continents. While many were officially sanctioned, they were all essentially independent and autonomous entrepreneurs financed by themselves and by individual investors. They were, then, private expeditions rather than official expeditions representing Spain. In 1519, Hernan Cortes began his conquest of Mexico, which would result in the overthrow of the Mexicas (or Aztecs) in 1522. By 1550, the Spanish had conquered all of Mexico. In 1531 and 1536, Francisco Pizarro conquered the extensive Inca empire. By 1560, the entire western coast of South America was firmly in Spanish hands while the Portuguese had conquered Brazil.

By the 1540's, the Spanish had become the first major colonial power in the Americas. They started settling the new lands, first with garrisons and then with clergy and other people, and they modeled their colonial government after European models. The indigenous peoples suffered cruelly in the areas under direct Spanish control. In those areas, Native Americans who were not decimated by the new European diseases or killed in the conquests died quickly as slaves to their new Spanish masters.

The Spanish Empire

The Spanish Empire in the New World was a disaster for Native Americans. The Spanish for their part could never really decide what to do with the Native Americans. On the one hand, they believed that they were introducing Native Americans to Christianity and to the arts of civilization and some believed that Native Americans had a right to their lands and should not be economically or politically exploited. This benign attitude was paternalistic: the Spanish would introduce Native Americans to salvation and school them in European civilization. On the other hand, the Spanish ruthlessly massacred native populations and freely enslaved them in some of the most cruel slave practices ever seen on the face of the earth. The average Native American slave lasted barely a year under his or her Spanish masters.

When Isabella declared that Native Americans were subjects to her crown, that allowed conquistadores to collect tribute and labor from the Native Americans. It also meant, however, that the Native Americans were to be protected and cared for, physically and spiritually, by the Spanish conquistadores . In reality, the Spanish collected the labor but by and large ignored the protection part. Native Americans were put to work in gold and silver mines as well as plantations. They were not fed well and were often forced to labor for impossible stretches of time; as a result, the Native American slaves of the Spanish died off in droves. It is believed that somewhere around 40% of the Native Americans under direct Spanish control died in the sixteenth century, some through Spanish cruelty and the majority through diseases unwittingly introduced by the Spanish.

To be sure, while we universally condemn Spanish cruelty in the Americas, it was outdone by the English treatment of African slaves in the Caribbean. The English promulgated what the Spanish called "the black legend" in order to justify their conquests in the Caribbean. The English claimed that they were more benign than the Spanish, who they depicted as monstrous and rapacious; the reality was that the English colonies of Trinidad and Jamaica were little better than death camps.
In part to justify their cruelty and exploitation, the Spanish vigorously debated the nature of Native Americans. One faction held that Native Americans were only part human and so had no legal or spiritual privileges. Another faction, a much smaller faction, held that Native Americans were fully human and deserved to be treated as full spiritual and legal beings. This faction vigorously opposed the conquest and even settlement of America, claiming that the Native Americans had full rights and privileges to lands that they occupied.

The Spanish divided their American territories into two central divisions: New Spain (Mexico and Central America along with the Caribbean Islands) and Peru (the western coast of South America). Each of these territories was ruled by a viceroy, who was the king's civil and military representative. The viceroy was advised by councils called audiencias ; these councils also served as the judicial branch of the colonial government.

The primary administrative unit, however, was economic. The Spanish wanted one and only one thing from the Americas: wealth. Production and trade was overseen by a board of trade located in Spain that governed all Spanish trade. In the Americas, however, the Council of the Indies, which regulated Spanish production and trade in the Americas, was the real administrative power in the Americas. This Council appointed all colonial officials, regulated all the trade, and even regulated church affairs in America.

The Northern Renaissance

Indulgences
The Reformation is an odd chapter in European history. The history of the Catholic church throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance is a history filled with spiritual, artistic, and intellectual triumphs as well as a history of tremendous abuses and doctrinal stupidities. From the very formation of the Christian church, there has been no such thing as a unified church. All through the Middle Ages, there are strong, passionate, and often powerful reactions to Catholic doctrine and church practices. It's not unfair to say that the history of the medieval church is, by and large, one long history of heresies.

But the granddaddy of all heresies, the one that permanently changed the face of Christianity and European culture, was perpetrated by an Augustinian monk sheltered in the recesses of the Holy Roman Empire. Martin Luther's call for reformation of corrupt church practices would eventually erupt into the greatest spiritual and political challenge medieval Catholicism ever faced. The doctrines and churches of Christianity would fragment into a million separate pieces; thousands of gallons of blood would be spilled by Christians killing other Christians in European wars over religion; the European state itself would be rocked to its foundations by the political implications of Luther's newly reformed church.

We do not have world enough and time to catalog the abuses of the medieval and Renaissance church; however, Luther's initial call for reform centered around a single practice: the sale of indulgences. We will start, then, with indulgences.
The logic of indulgences is hard for moderns to understand and the practice is easy to condemn in hindsight, but in reality they make a great deal of sense. The whole concept of an indulgence is based on the medieval Catholic doctrine that sinners must not only repent of sins that they've committed, they must also confess these sins and pay some sort of retribution. You see, the problem with repentance and confession is that the only evidence you have of repentance is the sinner's claim to be repentant. Repentance is, after all, an internal state rather than an external action; foundational Christianity is, after all, heavily oriented towards the interior life of individuals rather than their exterior life. However, just because a sinner claims to be repentant doesn't mean that he or she actually is repentant.

Therefore, in a grossly oversimplified way of putting it, the history of medieval Catholic doctrine is in many ways an attempt to find ways to give exterior signs for the interior state of the individual believer. Repentance was no exception to this. So in order for an individual to demonstrate that he or she is truly repentant and not just saying it, the concept of "temporal punishment" was invented. In other words, the sinner needed to undergo some punishment or task; the sin would not be expiated until this was accomplished. Part of this temporal punishment involved doing "good works," that is, deeds that are charitable, such as feeding the poor or caring for the sick. A truly repentant person would show that repentance by behaving in the most charitable ways towards fellow human beings.

Sins that have not been properly expiated with temporal punishment land the sinner in purgatory. In fact, the entire concept of purgatory, which was invented in the late twelfth century, is as a place of temporal punishment. The concept of performing expiatory acts in this life to demonstrate one's internal state was pushed into the afterlife. At the conclusion of this punishment, the individual soul is allowed into heaven.

The Economic Context for Indulgences
Now, here we'll take a short diversion from church history to economic history. In the latter centuries of the Middle Ages, the Europeans discovered mercantilism. Mercantilism is an economic activity in which goods are purchased in one place and then moved to another place, where those goods are scarce, and sold at a much higher price. In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, Europeans learned how to do this from Muslims and they took to it like a duck to water. From the twelfth century onwards, Europeans busied themselves moving all sorts of goods; salt, wool, sheep skins, and various new inventions--all over Europe and the European economy began to boom.

This booming mercantile economy quickly changed the way people traded goods. For the most part, trade in medieval Europe involved barter: individual goods were traded for other individual goods. I will give you one toilet for three chemistry textbooks. Mercantilism, however, put money into circulation and everybody started using it. Rather than trading goods directly, people began to trade goods through the medium of money. By the late thirteenth century, most economic transactions were taking place with money, and Europe shifted from a largely barter economy to a money economy.

Now, since we live with money all the time, we really don't think about how strange it is. Medieval Europeans, however, did understand the strangeness of money and began to adjust their thinking and world view around this new phenomenon. (Money had always been around, it just hadn't been in wide circulation). You see, in order for money to really work, it can't have a use value, or then it would just be barter. If money had a use value, then its value would fluctuate wildly. Let's say that we used toilets for money. If you could buy three chemistry textbooks for one toilet, this would perhaps seem reasonable to you if you have had nothing to eat or drink in a day or two. If, on the other hand, you had just finished drinking a case of soda pop this morning, you'd probably be less willing to trade your toilet away at such a low price. So, in order for the trade value of money to be relatively fixed, not only must money be made of a material that is relatively rare, money can't have any real value, that is, it can't have use value.

This is an odd way of doing business. You can walk into a car dealership and hand someone several thousand pieces of paper with George Washington's face on them; pieces of paper that have no use whatsoever; and that fool will hand you the keys to a brand new car. And the only reason he'll do it is because he can take those thousands of pieces of useless paper and hand them to someone else who will then give him something back that is useful and valuable.

Money works, then, by substituting for real things. When you look at a sweater and see a price tag on it that says "$50," that means that you can substitute fifty dollars for that sweater. If you own a CD player that says "$50," that means that you can substitute fifty dollars for that CD player. Rather than trade your CD player for the sweater, you can sell the CD player and take fifty dollars instead as a substitute and then use that money to purchase the sweater. In a money economy, then, money can be substituted for any object whatsoever.

This has been a long digression to explain indulgences, but there is in fact a clear relationship. Indulgences were originally created by the church for one reason: to collect money, that stuff that began circulating all over Europe in the late Middle Ages. The medieval Catholic church was the source of almost all social welfare and charity, and all this charity needed to be paid for. Beginning in the twelfth century, various hospitals and other organizations affiliated with the church began to send people out begging for money. However, there wasn't that much money around, and it was hard to persuade people to give it up for nothing at all.

In the late thirteenth century, the church came up with the idea of indulgences. In the spiritual life of sinners, indulgences function exactly the same way money functions in their economic life. Here's the logic: since the expiation of sin involves temporal punishment and this temporal punishment involves the doing of good works, why not substitute someone else's good works for the good works you're required to do? Why not pay someone else to do the good works demanded of you as temporal punishment? Church officials argued that clergy were doing more good works than they needed to; they had, you might say, a budget surplus of good works in the spiritual accounts. Why not sell them? So that's what the church did. With the approval of the pope, individual bishops could sell indulgences which more or less paid off any temporal punishment or good works that the individual believer had accumulated in the previous year. It substituted the good works of the Catholic clergy for the good works required of the individual believer. Proof of this substitution was in the indulgence itself, which was a piece of paper, like a piece of money or a check, that certified that the good works of the clergy had paid off the "good works debt" of the individual believer.

Inspired by the need to raise money, indulgences reproduced the very logic of money. In place of the real thing (good works), indulgences substituted a completely valueless piece of paper. The only reason this worked is because everybody accepted this as a valid substitution, just like money.

Indulgences, like money, had their critics from the very beginning. With the invention of the printing press, however, indulgences became big business for the church and the critics grew. Nowhere was criticism of the church more revolutionary than in northern Europe.

The Northern Renaissance
The Northern Renaissance simply involved the importation of Italian humanist ideas into northern Europe. The Northern Humanists, however, applied these ideas far more rigorously to church practices and became the first major group to call for the reform of the church.

There are two major figures in the Northern Renaissance: Desiderius Erasmus and Sir Thomas More. Erasmus (1466-1536) applied the standard humanist education in the classics, but also developed a simple theology of Christian love. Erasmus saw Christianity as primarily an ethical religion; the "philosophy of Christ," as he called it, was a philosophy of selfless love and piety. The dogmas, rituals, and, in particular, the business practices of the Catholic church were for Erasmus dangerous departures from the philosophy of Christ. Although Erasmus intended to reform the Catholic church from the inside, his writings became some of the foundational texts of Protestantism.
Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) was the most prominent English humanist of the sixteenth century. He was an unwavering Catholic and would be executed by Henry VIII for not renouncing this Catholicism. Even though More did not convert to Protestantism, his writings, which criticized the papacy and the abuses of the church, especially indulgences, became the foundations of English Protestantism.

In their critiques of church practices these Northern humanists laid down the terminology and ideas that would fuel the Reformation movement. The spark that would light this movement would be a young, Augustinian German monk who was well read in the texts of the Northern humanists: Martin Luther.

Martin Luther

Martin Luther (1483-1546) stands in history as one of those unique forces, an individual who by force of will and by his ideas changed the world fundamentally. There are several ironies incumbent on Luther's pivotal role in history:

1) he doesn't really represent a break with the past, but rather a flash point where ideas and trends which had been smoldering in Europe for several centuries suddenly blazed aflame;

2) Luther initially saw himself as a great reformer of the Catholic church, a simple monk who thought the force of his ideas would single-handedly redirect the Leviathan of the church; in the end, however, he divided Christianity into two separate churches and that second division, Protestantism, would divide over the next four centuries into a near infinity of separate churches;

3) finally, Luther (and all the other reformers) saw themselves as returning Christianity to its roots, they believed that they were setting the clock back; in reality, their ideas irreparably changed the world and pushed it kicking and screaming, not into some ideal past, but into the modern era.

Luther was not a person you would want to have dinner with; he was temperamental, peevish, egomaniacal, and argumentative. But this single-mindedness, this enormous self-confidence and strident belief in the rightness of his arguments, allowed him to stand against opposition, indeed, to harden his position in the face of death by fire, the usual punishment for heretics. Luther became an Augustinian monk in 1505, disappointing his equally strong-willed father, who wished him to become a lawyer. He earned a doctorate in theology from the University of Wittenberg, but instead of settling down to a placid and scholarly monkish life or an uneventful university career teaching theology, he began to develop his own personal theology, which erupted into outright blasphemy when he protested the use of indulgences in his 95 Theses.

Indulgences, which were granted by the pope, forgave individual sinners not their sins, but the temporal punishment applied to those sins. These indulgences had become big business in much the same way pledge drives have become big business for public television in modern America. Luther's Theses, which outlined his theological argument against the use of indulgences, were based on the notion that Christianity is fundamentally a phenomenon of the inner world of human beings and had little or nothing to do with the outer world, such as temporal punishments. It is this fundamental argument, not the controversy of the indulgences themselves, that most people in the church disapproved of and that led to Luther's being hauled into court in 1518 to defend his arguments against the cardinal Cajetan. When the interview focused on the spiritual value of "good works," that is, the actions that people do in this world to benefit others and to pay off the debts they've incurred against God by sinning, Cajetan lost his temper and demanded that Luther recant. Luther ran, and his steady scission from the church was set in motion. The Northern Humanists, however, embraced Luther and his ideas.

Luther's first writing was The Sermon on Good Works, in which he argued that good works do not benefit the soul; only faith could do that. Things took a turn for the worse: Pope Leo declared 41 articles of Luther's teachings as heretical teachings, and Luther's books were publicly burned in Rome. Luther became more passionate in his effort to reform the church. His treatise, "Address to the Christian Nobility of Germany," pressed for the German nation to use military means to force the church to discuss grievances and reform; "A Prelude concerning the Babylonish Captivity of the Church" literally called for clergy in the church to openly revolt against Rome.

In 1521, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, demanded that Luther appear before the diet of the Holy Roman Empire at Worms. Luther was asked to explain his views and Charles ordered him to recant. Luther refused and he was placed under an imperial ban as an outlaw. He managed to escape, however, and he was hidden away in a castle in Wartburg where he continued to develop his new church.

In a more conciliatory effort, Luther wrote a letter to Pope Leo explaining the substance of his ideas, Von der Freiheit des Christenmenschen , "On the Freedom of the Christian," from which your readings have been selected. This conciliation didn't work (the treatise is not, in fact, very conciliatory, but somewhat arrogant), and Luther was excommunicated from the church in 1521. What had started as a furious attempt to reform the church overnight turned into a project of building a new church independent of the Catholic church. Nevertheless, this small work, "The Freedom of the Christian," is the theological and ideological core of Luther's thinking; the fundamental term of value, that center around which every other aspect of his thought rotates, is the concept of Freiheit, "freedom," or "liberty." This is not our concept of freedom, but in the eventual turn of time it will give rise to the notion of "individual freedom," and later "political freedom," and later "economic freedom." Most of the European Enlightenment revolves around freedom and the project of "liberating" people: liberating them from false beliefs, from false religion, from arbitrary authority, etc.--that is, what we will be calling "liberation discourse." Westerners still participate in this Enlightenment project today. This idea of "liberating" people, so common to the international politics of our own period, comes out of Luther's idea of "freedom."

When you read this treatise, ask yourself the following questions: What precisely does this freedom consist of? What is the nature of the individual? What are the two divisions of a human being? What value is attached to the "internal" part of the human being? How is this "internal" part free? Finally, how do you see this concept working in the world around you?

Ulrich Zwingli

Zurich
While Germany struggled under the political and religious consequences of Luther's reform movement, the movement itself quickly spilled out of the German borders into neighboring Switzerland. At the time, Switzerland was not so much a single country as a confederacy of thirteen city-states called cantons. When Luther's ideas began to pour over the border, several of the cantons broke from the Catholic church and became Protestant while other cantons remained firmly Catholic. Of the cantons that adopted Luther's new movement, the most important and powerful was the city-state of Zurich under the leadership of Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531).

Zwingli
Zwingli brought to Luther's revolution an education steeped in northern Humanism, particularly that of Erasmus. He was monumentally popular in Zurich for his opposition to Swiss mercenary service in foreign wars and his attacks on indulgences; he was, in fact, as significant a player in the critique of indulgences as Luther himself.
Zwingli rose through the ranks of the Catholic church until he was appointed "People's Priest" in 1519, the most powerful ecclesiastical position in the city. However, by 1519 he had bought fully into Luther's reform program and began to steadily shift the city over to the practices of the new Protest church. In 1523, the city officially adopted Zwingli's central ecclesiastical reforms and became the first Protestant state outside of Germany. From there the Protestant revolution would sweep across the map of Switzerland.

Zwingli's Theology
Zwingli tends to be passed over quickly in world history textbooks for several reasons; the most glaring reason is the simplicity of his theology. In comparison to Luther and Calvin, both of whom wrote a stultifying amount of stuff on every topic under the sun, Zwingli stuck to a single theme throughout his arguments and writing. Still, this simple theology would form the background for the development of the more strict and radical forms of Protestantism and can still be heard in Christian churches around the globe. In fact, Zwingli's rather uncomplex theology could be described as the single most important shift in religious culture in the sixteenth century.

Zwingli's theology and morality were based on a single principle: if the Old or New Testament did not say something explicitly and literally, then no Christian should believe or practice it. This was the basis of his critique of indulgences. In 1522, for instance, Zwingli mounted a protest against the fast at Lent, a standard Catholic practice. His argument: the New Testament says absolutely nothing about fasting at Lent so the practice is inherently unchristian.

There are two important shifts in Western religious experience that result from this position. The first is the literal reading of the Old and New Testaments. No longer would these texts be dark and mysterious, full of difficult and allegorical meanings; instead, the texts of the Old and New Testaments became something like statute law. The words meant what they said; any difficulty, contradiction, or obscure meaning was the fault of the reader and not the text. Because these texts had simple and literal meanings, they also became standardized . While theologians and religious sages could debate the allegorical and figurative meanings of scriptural texts until the end of the world, the literal reading of Christian scriptures meant that it was possible to have one and only one meaning of the text. From this profound shift in the reading of the central writings of Christianity developed one of the most strict and severe applications of these writings to social life. Not only were practices not contained in Scriptures to be shunned, but practices, beliefs, and rules that were contained in the literal meaning of the Old and New Testaments were to be adhered to absolutely and uncritically . This became the underpinning of the social theories and organization of radical Protestant and Puritan societies and later the foundational social organization of the English colonies in America. We still live in a society dominated by this theory of social organization; you cannot walk down the street of American political discourse and not run into Zwinglian ideas of social organization based on the literal meaning of Christian scriptures.

Marburg
While Zwingli ambitiously set out to build perhaps the most strict Protestant society, in religious, social, and moral terms, he soon parted company with Martin Luther over major doctrinal issues. Luther always had his heart rooted in Catholicism, particularly the Catholic intellectual tradition; he was not willing to give up many Catholic ceremonies and he certainly was not willing to accept Zwingli's doctrine of reading Christian scriptures with unwavering literalness. The most important doctrinal issue they disagreed on was the nature of the Eucharist. Luther, like the Catholics, believed that the bread and wine of the Eucharist was spiritually transformed into the body and blood of Christ, while Zwingli believed that the Eucharist only symbolized the body and blood of Christ. This was no mere quibble about a plain-tasting cracker and a few dribbles of wine. At the heart of the dispute was the nature of Jesus Christ himself. For Luther, what made the spiritual transformation of the Eucharist into the physical body and blood of Christ was the dual nature of Christ: as both God and human, Christ was both spiritual and physical, God and human being. Zwinglian Protestantism, as well as its spiritual inheritors (the majority of Protestant churches), overwhelmingly stressed the divine nature of Christ. Jesus Christ was the divine; the Catholic insistence on the human nature of Christ was an incorrect and dangerous reading of the Christ event in history. Therefore, any implicit suggestion in the practice of the Eucharist that Christ was human must be rejected.

Now, normally when theologians disagree, nothing much is done about it. The disagreement between Luther and Zwingli, however, was viewed as a political crisis of the highest order. As leaders of the Protestant movement in two separate countries, Luther and Zwingli threatened any kind of political alliance between the two countries. Philip of Hesse (1504-1567), the Landgrave of Hesse, understood the political benefits of an alliance with Switzerland, as did the Swiss. The Protestant states in their infancy were, after all, trying to survive beneath the cloud of Catholic Europe; the leaders of these states understood their precarious position since they were surrounded on all sides by hostile countries.

An alliance between the German and Swiss states, as intelligent as this was politically, foundered on the theological dispute between Luther and Zwingli. In order for the two states to ally themselves, the two Protestant churches had to agree on basic theology, particularly the theology of the nature of Christ.

In October, 1529, Philip invited both Luther and Zwingli to his castle in Marburg to hash out their differences. The two men, however, had very little in common, and their discussions ended in failure. Luther, for his part, thought Zwingli to be mad, a religious fanatic who had lost touch with common sense and spirituality. Zwingli, for his part, thought Luther to be hopelessly enmeshed in unsupportable Catholic doctrine. Their meeting in Marburg itself represents the last point in the Reformation at which the movement could have preserved some unity. After Marburg, unification of the various Protestant movements became impossible, and the new church, which Luther believed would become another, more pure universal church, fragmented into a thousand separate, quarrelling pieces within a few decades.

John Calvin

Geneva
The spirit of Zwinglianism reached its fullest development in the theology, political theories, and ecclesiastic thought of John Calvin (1509-1564). Perhaps even more so than Martin Luther, Calvin created the patterns and thought that would dominate Western culture throughout the modern period. American culture, in particular, is thoroughly Calvinist in some form or another; at the heart of the way Americans think and act, you'll find this fierce and imposing reformer.

Calvin was originally a lawyer, but like Zwingli, he was saturated with the ideas of Northern Renaissance humanism. He was dedicated to reform of the church and he got his chance to build a reformed church when the citizens of Geneva revolted against their rulers in the 1520's.

Geneva had been under the rule of the House of Savoy, but the Genevans successfully overthrew the Savoys and the local bishop-prince of Geneva in the waning years of the 1520's. The Genevans, however, unlike the citizens of Zurich, Bern, Basel, and other cities that became Protestant in the 1520's, were not German-speakers but primarily French-speakers. As such, they did not have close cultural ties with the reformed churches in Germany and Switzerland. The Protestant canton of Bern, however, was determined to see Protestantism spread throughout Switzerland. In 1533, Bern sent Protestant reformers to convert Geneva into a Protestant city; after considerable conflict, Geneva officially became Protestant in 1535.

Calvin, by now a successful lawyer, was invited to Geneva to build the new Reformed church. Calvin's efforts radically changed the face of Protestantism, for he directly addressed issues that early Reformers didn't know how or didn't want to answer.
His most important work involved the organization of church governance and the social organization of the church and the city. He was, in fact, the first major political thinker to model social organization entirely on biblical principles. At first his reforms did not go over well. He addressed the issue of church governance by creating leaders within the new church; he himself developed a catechism designed to impose doctrine on all the members of the church. He and Guillaume Farel (1489-1565) imposed a strict moral code on the citizens of Geneva; this moral code was derived from a literal reading of Christian scriptures. Naturally, the people of Geneva believed that they had thrown away one church only to see it replaced by an identical twin; in particular, they saw Calvin's reforms as imposing a new form of papacy on the people, only with different names and different people.

So the Genevans tossed him out. In early 1538, Calvin and the Protestant reformers were exiled from Geneva. Calvin, for his part, moved to Strasbourg where he began writing commentaries on the Bible and finished his massive account of Protestant doctrine, The Institutes of the Christian Church. Calvin's commentaries are almost endless, but within these commentaries he developed all the central principles of Calvinism in his strict readings of the Old and New Testaments. The purpose of commentaries in Western literary tradition was to explain both the literary technique and the difficult passages in literary and historical works. Calvin wrote commentaries to ostensibly explain scriptural writings, but in reality he, like theologians before him, used the commentaries to argue for his own theology as he believed was present in scriptural writings. They are less an explanation of the Bible than a piece by piece construction of his theological, social, and political philosophy.

In 1540 a new crop of city officials in Geneva invited Calvin back to the city. As soon as he arrived he set about revolutionizing Genevan society. His most important innovation was the incorporation of the church into city government; he immediately helped to restructure municipal government so that clergy would be involved in municipal decisions, particularly in disciplining the populace. He imposed a hierarchy on the Genevan church and began a series of statute reforms to impose a strict and uncompromising moral code on the city.

By the mid-1550's, Geneva was thoroughly Calvinist in thought and structure. It became the most important Protestant center of Europe in the sixteenth century, for Protestants driven out of their native countries of France, England, Scotland, and the Netherlands all came to Geneva to take refuge. By the middle of the sixteenth century, between one-third and one-half of the city was made up of these foreign Protestants.
In Geneva, these foreign reformers adopted the more radical Calvinist doctrines; most of them had arrived as moderate Reformers and left as thorough-going Calvinists. It is probably for this reason that Calvin's brand of reform eventually became the dominant branch of Protestantism from the seventeenth century onwards.

Calvin's Thought
Since Calvin literally transformed the philosophical, political, religious, and social landscape of Europe, what was the substance of his radical reform?
The core of Calvinism is the Zwinglian insistence on the literal reading of Christian scriptures. Anything not contained explicitly and literally in these scriptures was to be rejected; on the other hand, anything that was contained explicitly and literally in these scriptures was to be followed unwaveringly. It is the latter point that Calvin developed beyond Zwingli's model; not only should all religious belief be founded on the literal reading of Scriptures, but church organization, political organization, and society itself should be founded on this literal reading.

Following the history of the earliest church recounted in the New Testament book, The Acts of the Apostles , Calvin divided church organization into four levels:
• Pastors: These were five men who exercised authority over religious matters in Geneva;
• Teachers: This was a larger group whose job it was to teach doctrine to the population.
• Elders: The Elders were twelve men (after the twelve Apostles) who were chosen by the municipal council; their job was to oversee everything that everybody did in the city.
• Deacons: Modeled after the Seven in Acts 6-8, the deacons were appointed to care for the sick, the elderly, the widowed and the poor.

The most important theological position that Calvin took was his formulation of the doctrine of predestination. The early church had struggled with this issue. Since God knew the future, did that mean that salvation was predestined? That is, do human beings have any choice in the matter, or did God make the salvation decision for each of us at the beginning of time? The early church, and the moderate Protestant churches, had decided that God had not predestined salvation for individuals. Salvation was in part the product of human choice. Calvin, on the other hand, built his reformed church on the concept that salvation was not a choice, but was rather pre-decided by God from the beginning of time. This mean that individuals were "elected" for salvation by God; this "elect" would form the population of the Calvinist church.

This view of human salvation is called either the "doctrine of the elect" or "the doctrine of living saints" (in Catholic theology, a "saint" is a human being that the church is certain has gained salvation; in Calvinist theology, a "saint" or "living saint" is a living, breathing human being who is guaranteed to gain salvation no matter what he or she does here on earth, although the elect obviously don't engage in flagrant sin; not all good people were among the elect, but people with bad behavior were certainly not among the elect). It was incumbent on churches filled with living saints to only admit other living saints; this organizational principle was called voluntary associations. Voluntary associations are predicated on the idea that a community or association
chooses its own members and those members, of their own free will, choose to be a member of that community or association. In time, the concept of voluntary associations would become the basis of civil society and later political society in Europe.

Protestant England

Henry VIII
England was far distant and isolated from the rest of Europe. While Protestantism tore apart European society, it took a far different form in England, retaining much of the doctrine and the practices of Catholicism. England also experienced the greatest wavering between the two religions as the monarchs of England passed from one religion to the next.

England had, for several centuries, an uncomfortable relationship with Rome. Some of the most strident and successful reformers in the Middle Ages were English; the first translation of the Bible from Latin into a vernacular language was made in England. Two major movements in England—the Wycliffite rebellion against the church in the fourteenth century (Wycliff was the first to translate the Bible into a vernacular language) and the spread of Northern humanism—prepared the foundations for English Protestantism.

The adoption of Protestantism, however, was a political rather than a religious move. King Henry VIII had originally married Catherine of Aragon; since she had been previously married to his brother, though, Henry had to get special papal dispensation for the marriage. Marrying the wife of one's brother was incest; it was almost equivalent to marrying one's sister. The marriage, however, produced no male children to occupy the throne at Henry's death. Henry began to doubt both of the marriage and the spiritual validity of the marriage. In the mid-1520's, he met and fell in love with Ann Boleyn, a lady in waiting to Catherine. He wished to annul his marriage to Catherine and marry Ann; not only did he love Ann, he feared leaving the throne of England without a male heir.

In order to marry Ann, the marriage with Catherine had to be annulled by the pope. Circumstances, however, were working against him. First, in order to marry Catherine, he needed special papal dispensation. Annulling the marriage would imply that the first papal dispensation was in error, something the pope was not willing to admit. Second, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, had recently invaded Rome and captured the pope. While the pope was allowed to stay pope, he was the virtual prisoner of Charles. The answer to Henry's request, then, was no and no again.

When he met with failure, Henry did what every other king would do. He fired his closest advisor. This was an important move. His closest advisor on the matter was Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor of England. The negotiations with the papal court were largely carried out by Wolsey. When he failed, Henry dismissed and arrested him and replaced him with Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell. Both these men were sympathetic to the new ideas of Martin Luther. They gave the king some radical advice: if the pope does not grant the annulment, then split the English church off from the Roman church. Rather than the pope, the king would be the spiritual head of the English church. If the King wants an annulment, then the King can grant his own annulment.

In 1529, the English Parliament began to debate this question; this debate would occupy the English Parliament for seven years and so gave it the name, the "Reformation Parliament." It did not settle the matter all at once, but steadily granted powers over the church clergy to the king. In 1531, the clergy of England recognized Henry as the head of the church, and in 1533, Parliament passed the "Submission of the Clergy," a law which placed the clergy completely under Henry's control. In that same year Henry married Ann Boleyn, who was already pregnant with his second daughter, Elizabeth. In 1534 Parliament stopped all contributions to the Roman church by English clergy and lay people and, in the same year, gave Henry complete control over all church appointments. Finally, the Act of Succession declared the children of Ann Boleyn to be the heirs to the throne and officially declared the king the supreme head of the church.

Despite all this storm of activity, the English church didn't really change. The average person going to church would see almost no change in the practices or dogma of the church. It was still for all practical purposes a Catholic church; the only real difference that anybody would notice was the use of English Bibles in the church. In 1539, Henry reaffirmed his commitment to Catholic practice by passing into law the Six Articles. These articles affirmed the transubstantiation of the Eucharist (that is, that the Eucharist was mystically transformed into the body and blood of Christ), confession, private masses, celibate vows, and the sanctity of the Eucharistic cup. The only substantive change Henry made merely involved the head of the church. The English church, however, would radically change under Henry's successor, Edward VI.

Edward VI
Edward VI (ruled 1547-1553) was Henry's third child, born by his third wife, Jane Seymour. Edward was only a teenager when he became king, but he thoroughly sympathized with the Protestant cause. Edward and Thomas Cranmer set about turning the church of England into a thoroughly Protestant church. He repealed the Six Articles, allowed clergy to marry, and imposed Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer on all church services. He also ordered any and all images and altars to be removed from churches. Had Edward lived, England would have become a more or less Calvinist country.

Mary
Edward, however, died only six years into his reign. He was succeeded by Mary (1553-1558), who was Henry's first child by Catherine of Aragon. Mary had been raised in France and was devoutly Catholic. When she assumed the throne of England, she declared England to be a Catholic country and assertively went about converting churches back to Catholic practices. Images and altars were returned, the Book of Common Prayer was removed, clerical celibacy was reimposed, and Eucharistic practices reaffirmed. She met opposition with steely-eyed defiance; because of the sheer number of executions of Protestant leaders, the English would eventually call her "Bloody Mary." Had she lived longer, England would probably have reverted to Catholicism for another century or so.

Elizabeth I
Mary was succeeded by Elizabeth, the daughter of Ann Boleyn. Henry had executed Ann as an adulterer and Elizabeth was declared a bastard child. Nevertheless, she assumed the throne in 1558 and reigned until 1603. Elizabeth was perhaps the greatest monarch in the history of England, and possibly the greatest and most brilliant monarch in European history.

Elizabeth understood that her country was being torn apart by the warring doctrines. While she repealed Mary's Catholic legislation, she did not return to Edward's more austere Protestantism. Rather, she worked out a compromise church that retained as much as possible from the Catholic church while putting into place most of the foundational ideas of Protestantism.

The pope excommunicated her and this created intense internal difficulties in England. For it was incumbent on any Catholic to attempt to assassinate or overthrow her if possible, and a large part of the English nobility was Catholic. Despite this, she managed to avoid assassination because of her brilliant political skills and her pervasive network of spies. The Catholic plots on her life finally met their end when she executed her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587.

Mary was a cousin of Elizabeth's and the next in line for the English throne. She was a committed Catholic, but ruled over a country—Scotland—that had become and still is fiercely Calvinist. Catholic extremists in England understood that Elizabeth could spell the end of any hopes of a Catholic revival in England, so they began to plot Elizabeth's assassination. Mary, for her part, feeling justified by the Pope's excommunication of Elizabeth, foolishly took part in several of these plots. Elizabeth eventually brought her to trial and condemned her, reluctantly, to death.

Elizabeth's greatest legacy was the spirit of compromise that infused her version of the Church of England. She managed to please Catholics by retaining several important aspects of Catholicism and also managed to please moderate Calvinists who wanted all traces of the Roman church to be expunged. She effected this by allowing English Calvinists (called "Puritans" because the wanted to purify the church from all Roman influences) to participate in Parliament and to set up semiautonomous congregations that practiced Calvinist doctrine but still recognized the Queen as the head of the church.

The Counter-Reformation

The Catholic church was not caught unawares by the Reformation. It had been steadily battling opposition, resistance, and heresy for over four hundred years; much of the opposition against the church throughout the fifteenth century involved issues that closely paralleled those splitting the church in half during the early Reformation. In answer to the growth of the Protestant movement, the Catholic Church instituted its own series of reforms that balanced real reform with a strident and conservative reaction to Protestantism. This movement was called the Counter-Reformation.

Many aspects of this movement were genuine reforms. Groups such as the Modern Devotion and the Oratory of Divine Love were organizations that included both clergy and lay people and encouraged a return to simple ethical living and piety, principles that had been championed by Desiderius Erasmus.

Other aspects were conservative reactions to the criticisms leveled against the church by Protestants and Reformers. The most important of the reactionary movements was the Society of Jesus or the Jesuits, founded by Ignatius of Loyola in the 1530's and recognized officially by the Catholic church a decade later. Ignatius was a brilliant and visionary man; he was also an uncompromising and severe fanatic. The basis of the Society of Jesus was a return to the strictest and most uncompromising obedience to the authority of the church and its ecclesiastical hierarchy. The entire spirit of the Society can be summed up in Rule 13 of Ignatius's "Rules for Thinking with the Church": "I will believe that the white that I see is black if the hierarchical Church so defines it." Ignatius was a brilliant and intelligent man, so the extent of his fanaticism in regard to obedience is hard to explain, but its origins can be found in his conversion experience. In 1521 he was wounded in a battle with the French. While recovering, he read the classics of Christianity and was deeply impressed by the lives of the martyrs and the saints. This instilled in him a deep sense of the value of absolute sacrifice; he underwent a conversion and dedicated his life to the same level of self-sacrifice that he saw in the lives of the saints.

While his first and most important theme was unquestioning obedience to anything and everything that the Church hierarchy said, his second and more lasting theme was self-mastery. His book, Spiritual Exercises , was designed to teach people how to deny themselves completely. The purpose of this self-denial, of course, was obedience to the church. Unless one could perfectly deny one's self and one's feelings, one could never perfectly obey the dictates of the church hierarchy.

At the start, the Jesuit movement was a small movement. The original Society of Jesus had only ten members. By 1630, it had over fifteen thousand members all over the world. For Ignatius dedicated the mission of the Society to the extirpation of heretics who refused to obey the church—this not only included Protestants, but non-Christians as well. The Society of Jesus became over the next few centuries the most powerfully influential carrier of Western culture and Christianity to the non-Western world.

The Protestant gains in Europe and the chaotic evolution of the Counter-Reformation finally forced Pope Paul III in 1545 to convene a council in Trent in order to define church doctrine once and for all. This council, called the Council of Trent, worked on this problem in three separate sessions from 1545 to 1563. This council eventually advised some far-reaching reforms in the abuses practiced by the church, such as the selling of indulgences. The Council forced bishops to reside in the region they presided over and also forbad the selling of church offices. On the reactionary side, the Council advised that a seminary be built in every diocese so that church doctrine could be fully and accurately represented. The reforms were very bold in many respects, but they were too little and too late. The new Protestant churches were the wave of the future; and Catholicism—although it would remain a major religion—would in a few centuries cease to be the majority religion in the Western world.

The Wars of Religion

The latter half of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century brought about one of the most passionate and calamitious series of wars that Europe had ever experienced. The early Reformation had been, in hindsight, remarkably free from bloodshed; the honeymoon, however, lasted only a short while. It was inevitable that the growing division between Christian churches in Europe would lead to a series of armed conflicts for over a century. Protestants and Catholics would shed each other's blood in prodigious amounts in national wars and in civil wars. These struggles would eventually shatter the European monarchical traditions themselves. The monarchy, which had always seemed an impregnable political institution, was challenged by Protestants unhappy with the rule of Catholic kings. The final result of these struggles would be the overthrow and execution of Charles I in England in the middle of the seventeenth century, an historical earthquake that permanently changed the face of Europe.

The French Wars of Religion: 1562-1598
The first major set of wars fought over the new churches was a series of civil wars fought in France. In 1559 Francis II became king of France at the ripe old age of fifteen. Understanding that the monarch was weak, three major noble families began to struggle for control of France: the Guises (pronounced, geez) in eastern France, the Bourbons in southern France, and the Montmorency-Chatillons in central France. Of the three, the Guises were both the most powerful and the most fanatical about Catholicism; they would eventually gain control of the young monarch and, for all practical purposes, rule the state of France. The Bourbons and the Montmorency-Chatillons were mostly Catholics who—for political reasons—supported the Protestant cause.

The French Protestants were called Huguenots (pronounced, hoo-guh-no), and members of both the Bourbon and Montmorency-Chatillon families were major leaders in the Huguenot movement. The Huguenots represented only a very small part of the French population; in 1560, only seven or eight percent of the French people were Huguenots. They were, however, concentrated in politically important geographical regions; as a result, they were disproportionately powerful in the affairs of France. It is important to understand that the rivalry between the Guises and the other two families was primarily a political rivalry; this political rivalry, however, would be swept up in the spiritual conflict between the Catholic church and the new reformed churches.

Francis II died in 1560 after only one year as king. At his death, his younger brother, Charles IX (ruled 1560-1574) assumed the throne. Because he was too young to serve as king, his mother, Catherine de Medicis became regent (a regent is the ruler of a kingdom when the king is incapable of exercising that rule). Catherine was a brilliant and powerful political thinker; she understood right off that the Guises were a threat to her and to her son. In order to tilt the political balance away from the powerful Guise family, she cultivated the Bourbons and the Montmorency-Chatillons. In the process, however, she also had to cultivate the support of the Huguenots who were closely allied to those two families. Until this time, it was illegal for Huguenots to worship publicly (although there were over 2000 Huguenot churches in 1561). In 1562, Catherine took a great leap forward in religious toleration by allowing Huguenots to hold public worship outside the boundaries of towns. They were also allowed to hold church assemblies. Catherine was a Catholic and wanted France to remain Catholic; she did not, however, want the Guises to be calling all the shots. The only way to chip away at the political power of the Guises was to increase the political power of the other major families and their Protestant allies.

The Guises, for their part, understood what this religious tolerance was all about and quickly clamped down on it. In March, 1562, an army led by the Duke of Guise attacked a Protestant church service at Vassy in the province of Champagne and slaughtered everybody they could get their hands on: men, women, and children—all of whom were unarmed. Thus began the French Wars of Religion which were to last for almost forty years and destroy thousands of innocent lives.

For all her brilliance, Catherine was placed in an impossible position. She did not want any noble family to exercise control over France; she simply wanted power to be more balanced. She also did not want a Protestant France. So the only strategy open to her was to play both sides, which she did with enormous shrewdness.

This balancing game came to an end, however, when Catherine helped the Guise family plot the assassination of Gaspard de Coligny, a Montmorency-Chatillon family member who was one of the major leaders of the French Huguenots. The assassination failed; Coligny was shot but not killed. The balancing game was over: the Huguenots and Coligny were furious at both Catherine and the Guises. Fearing a Huguenot uprising, Catherine convinced Charles IX that the Huguenots were plotting his overthrow under the leadership of Coligny. On August 24, 1572, the day before St. Bartholomew's Day, royal forces hunted down and executed over three thousand Huguenots, including Coligny, in Paris. Within three days, royal and Guise armies had hunted down and executed over twenty thousand Huguenots in the single most bloody and systematic extermination of non-combatants in European history until World War II.

The St. Bartholomew Massacre was a turning point in both French history and the history of the European Christian church. Protestants no longer viewed Catholicism as a misguided church, but as the force of the devil itself. No longer were Protestants fighting for a reformed church, but they suddenly saw themselves fighting for survival against a Catholic church whose cruelty and violence seemed to know no bounds. Throughout Europe, Protestant movements slowly transformed into militant movements.

In 1576, Henry III ascended to the throne; he was the youngest brother of Francis II and Charles IX. By this point, France had become a basket case. On the one hand, the Guises had formed a Catholic League, which was violent and fanatical. On the other hand, the Huguenots were filled with a passion for vengeance. Like his mother, Henry tried to stay in the middle of the conflict. Unlike his mother, he had immense popular support for this middle course; the St. Bartholomew Massacre had deeply troubled moderate Catholics and the growing conflict upset moderate Huguenots. These moderates were called politiques ("politicians") , since their central interest was the political and social stability of France rather than their religious beliefs.

The Catholic League was aided by Philip II of Spain who dedicated his monarchy to overthrowing the Protestant churches of other countries. By the mid-1580's, the Catholic League was in control of France and, after Henry III attempted to attack the League in 1588, the League drove him from Paris and embarked on a systematic massacre of non-combatants that rivaled the earlier St. Bartholomew's Massacre.

In exile, Henry III struck up an alliance with his Huguenot cousin, Henry of Navarre. Henry of Navarre was a politique ; he believed that the peace and security of France was far more important than imposing his religious views. Before the two Henrys could attack Paris, however, Henry III was stabbed to death by a fanatical, fury-driven Dominican friar in 1589. Since Henry III had no children, Henry of Navarre, as next in line to the throne, became King of France as Henry IV (ruled 1589-1610).
Henry understood that the only way that France would find peace is if it were ruled by a tolerant Catholic king, so on July 25, 1593, he rejected his Protestant faith and officially became Catholic. On April 13, 1598, Henry IV ended the long and tiring religious wars in France by proclaiming the Edict of Nantes. This Edict granted to Huguenots the right to worship publicly, to occupy public office, to assemble, to gain admission to schools and universities, and to administer their own towns.

Spain
The year 1556 saw the accession of perhaps the most important monarch of the sixteenth century: Philip II of Spain (ruled 1556-1598). Of all the monarchs of Europe, Philip was the most zealous defender of his religious faith and his energies in pursuit of this defense greatly changed the face of Europe.

In the first half of his reign, he was instrumental in stopping the Turkish incursions into Europe. Philip's military power lay in his navy, which was the most powerful and imposing navy of the sixteenth century. Allied with Venice, his navy defeated the Turkish navy in the Gulf of Corinth near Greece and effectively halted the Turkish invasions of Europe. After this spectacular triumph, Philip then turned his efforts from routing the Muslims to routing the Protestants in Europe.

He first turned his sights to the Netherlands, a rich and prosperous merchant country that was ruled over by Spain. The Netherlands, however, had strong pockets of Calvinist resistance and the country slowly turned on its Spanish rulers. Philip responded by sending the Duke of Alba with an army to quell the revolt in 1567. Alba imposed a tribunal, the Council of Troubles, to question and sentence heretics (Protestants). The Dutch called this council the "Council of Blood," for it managed to publicly execute thousands of people before Alba was forced from the Netherlands.
Alba and his reign of terror did not quell the Protestant revolt in the Netherlands, but rather strengthened it. The central oppositional leader, William, the Prince of Orange (ruled 1533-1584), became a hero for the whole of the Netherlands and in 1576 the Catholic provinces in the south allied themselves with the Protestant provinces in the north to revolt against Spain. The purpose of this alliance, called the Pacification of Ghent, was to enforce Netherlandish autonomy. The southern provinces, however, did not remain long in this alliance. In 1579, they made a separate peace with Spain (these southern provinces eventually became the country of Belgium) and the northern provinces formed a new alliance, the Union of Utrecht. Because Spain was overextended all over Europe, the northern provinces gradually drove the Spanish out until 1593 when the last Spanish soldier left Dutch soil. Still, the northern provinces were not recognized by Spain as an autonomous country until 1648 in the articles of the Peace of Westphalia.

Philip did not, however, want to interfere with the English, for England always seemed poised for a return to Catholicism. Elizabeth I of England also wanted to avoid any confrontation with Spain, so the war between the Spanish and the English was one of those unfortunate accidents of history—unfortunate, that is, for Spain.

In spite of Philip's reluctance to engage militarily with England, Elizabeth slowly ate away at Philip's patience. She had signed a mutual defense treaty with France after Spain had defeated the Turks. Fearful of the Spanish navy, she recognized that only an alliance with another country could protect England from Spain's powerful navy. In the late 1570's, Elizabeth allowed English ships to pirate and ransack Spanish ships sailing to and from the New World. In 1585, just as the Protestant provinces of the Netherlands were beginning to drive the Spanish from their country, Elizabeth sent English soldiers to the Netherlands to aid in the revolt.

Philip finally decided to invade England after the execution of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots. He was in part encouraged in this move by the Pope's excommunication of Elizabeth several years earlier; the excommunication of a monarch made it incumbent on all practicing Catholics to use any opportunity they could to assassinate or overthrow the monarch. Philip gathered together his navy and on May 30, 1588, he sent a mighty armada of over 130 ships to invade England. The Armada contained over 25,000 soldiers and the ships gathered for the invasion in the English Channel south of England. The English, however, were ready. Because of their treaty with the French, the invasion barges which were meant to transport soldiers from the Spanish galleons to the English coastline were not allowed to leave the coast of France. When fierce channel winds scattered the Spanish fleet to the east, English and Dutch warships were able to destroy the fleet ship by ship. What few ships remained struggled around the north of England and down along the western coast, where several ships foundered.

In practical terms, the defeat of the Armada was a temporary setback for Spain. The 1590's saw impressive military victories for the Spanish. However, the defeat of the Armada was a tremendous psychological victory for European Protestants. Spain represented the only powerful military force that threatened the spread of Protestantism; when even the mighty Spanish navy could be defeated by an outnumbered English and Dutch fleet, Protestants everywhere were reinvigorated in their struggles against Spain and the Roman church. By the end of the seventeenth century, Spain was no longer a major player in the power politics of Europe.

The Thirty Years War
With the exception of the English civil war, the last major war of religion was the Thirty Years War. It is fair to say, however, that this war was as much about politics as it was about religion. Germany, which was called the Holy Roman Empire and extended from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, was not a unified state, but rather a loose collection of a huge number of autonomous city-states or province-states—three hundred and sixty autonomous states to be exact. Each was a more or less sovereign state that levied taxes and tariffs, had its own armies, made its own money, and even enforced its own borders. Religious differences fueled the fires of the political and economic rivalries between these separate states. About half the states were predominantly Protestant while the other half were predominately Catholic.
The Treaty of Augsburg recognized Lutheranism, but it did not recognize Calvinism. However, Calvinism made great strides throughout these territories in the latter half of the sixteenth century. In 1559 Frederick III became the Elector of the Palatinate (north of Bavaria) and converted to Calvinism. This new Calvinist state would become a force to reckon with when it allied with England, the Netherlands, and France against the Spanish in 1609.

To the south of the Palatinate, Bavaria was unwaveringly Catholic with a powerful Jesuit presence. Just as the Palatinate was fanatical about the spread of Calvinism and Protestantism, so Bavaria was fanatical about the spread of Catholicism and the Counter-Reformation. When Frederick IV, Elector of the Palatine, formed a defensive league with England, France, and the Netherlands in 1609, Maximillian, Duke of Bavaria, formed a Catholic League.

In 1618, the relationship between these two regions erupted into war; this war would outdo all the other previous religious wars in terms of extent and destructiveness. The Thirty Years War was, perhaps, the first World War fought in Europe, for nearly every state in Europe became involved in the war in some way or another. The sheer amount of casualties and human destruction made this war the most calamitous and disastrous war of European history before the nineteenth century.

After thirty years of untiring bloodshed, the war came to an end with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The Treaty was not really an innovation; it simply reaffirmed the Treaty of Augsburg and allowed each state within the Holy Roman Empire to decide its own religion. The only important innovation of the treaty was the recognition of Calvinism.

Your Culture, My Culture

Or, as I would argue, "your cultures, my cultures." E.D. Hirsch and his ilk want a single, universal, or at least highly preferred, definition of culture, analagous to the "high culture" concept. I maintain, however, that there are multiple cultures existing and interacting even in a limited physical domain and that, especially today, we participate in multiple cultures.

My culture, for example, draws elements from Euro-American, middle-class, liberal, urban Minnesota--an appreciation for the arts and education and the environment, a certain style of civil social and political discourse, a determined optimism about the place we live. But I also have deep roots in the lower-class, rural culture in which I grew up and influence from African American and Latino communities in which I have lived and which inform a skepticism about values, beliefs and norms of the dominant "Minnesota nice-ness."

Then there is the difference between male and female experience of the same culture. Where I hear footsteps behind me as possible danger calling for me to be alert, many males raised in this "same" culture do not even hear them.

I haven't even touched on religions, which make their own contributions to world view, values and beliefs, conditioned responses to the world and to others ... but my point is that I do not want to overlook the complexity of culture or to ascribe to myself or anyone else just one cultural label.

Thoughts on anthropology and culture

I find it interesting that this world history course begins with a unit reflecting on culture. I don't recall any history course that I have taken ever engaging in anthropological or value-laden discussion of culture and cultural relativity at any point—much less as a point of beginning. Most of the "world" history that I have seen in textbooks and courses, in contrast, has a definite point of view situated within U.S. or Euro-American culture.

Matthew Arnold would feel right at home with the history courses I have seen—like his notion of high culture, they assume there is a correct or good or valuable POV, and devalue everything else. I can imagine him arguing that there is History and then there are little, second-rate histories that don't really deserve the name.

Not that I see the beginning as entirely unproblematic. The assertion (in the baseline essay) that "a 'cultural template' can be in place prior to the birth of an individual person" seems, at the least, susceptible to misinterpretation. I hope that the author means that the cultural template is situated in the society-as-a-whole, not that it is somehow imprinted on the individual.

What I liked best was Williams' assertion that culture is "always both traditional and creative." Here's an anthropologist who can see the art in Grandma's quilts as well as in the Weisman.