world history

WORLD HISTORY II -- CLASS NOTES (Revised Fall 2002) Class Introduction – Syllabus

Text: The Heritage of World Civilizations (Craig, Graham, Kagan, Ozment, Turner), N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002.

Chapter 16 The Late Middle Ages and The Renaissance in the West (1300 – 1527)
Calamity and New Beginnings

Culture:
Culture exercise:
Japanese Printer
His pregnant wife
Olympic athlete
College Coed
Rabbi
Med. Stud./Bl. Militant
Biochemist
Hollywood Starlet
Policeman/with gun
Historian

Culture: the language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and even material objects that are passed from one generation to the next. It is unique to humans.

Examples: have students look around – what are the cultural differences between men and women? - what meaning does this give to men and women?

Two elements of culture – material and nonmaterial
Material: such things as jewelry, art, buildings, weapons, machines, eating utensils, hairstyles, and clothing.
Nonmaterial: a group’s ways of thinking (its beliefs, values, and other assumptions of the world).

Our speech, our gestures, our beliefs, and our customs are usually taken for granted. We assume that they are natural and we almost always follow them without question. Except in unusual circumstances, the effects of our own culture generally remain imperceptible to us. Henslin’s handout on Morocco?

Culture’s significance is profound; it touches almost every aspect of who and what we are. We came into this life without a language, without values and morality, with no ideas about religion, war, money, love, use of space and so on. We possessed none of these fundamental orientations that we take for granted and that are so essential in determining the type of people we are. Yet at this point in our lives we all have them. Sociologists call this culture within us. These learned and shared ways of believing and of doing penetrate our beings at an early age and quickly become part of our taken-for-granted assumptions concerning normal behavior. Culture becomes the lens through which we perceive and evaluate what is going on around us.

Principles regarding culture:
1. There is nothing “natural” about material culture. Arabs wear gowns and Americans wear jeans.
2. There is nothing “natural about nonmaterial culture. It is just as arbitrary to stand in line as it is to push and shove.
3. Culture penetrates deep into the recesses of our spirits, becoming a taken-for-granted aspect of our lives.
4. Culture provides the lens through which we see the world and obtain our perception of reality.
5. Culture provides implicit instructions that tell us what we ought to do in various situations. It provides a fundamental basis for our decision making.
6. Culture also provides a “moral imperative”; that is, by internalizing a culture, people learn ideas of right and wrong.
7. Coming into contact with a radically different culture challenges our basic assumptions of life.
8. Although the particulars of culture differ from one group of people to another, culture itself is universal. That is, all people have culture. There are no exceptions. A society cannot exist without developing shared, learned ways of dealing with the demands of life. Cultural universals…
9. All people are ethnocentric, which is both good and bad.
10. Culture is the social construction of reality.

Values: are ideas of what is desirable in life. They are the standards by which people define good and bad, beautiful and ugly.
Norms: are rules of behavior that develop out of values.
Folkways:; norms that are not strictly enforced – example: washing one’s hands before eating; holding the door for someone.
Mores: norms that are strictly enforced and that often have a moral component to them.
Taboos: norms so strongly ingrained that even the thought of violating it meets with revulsion.

Subculture: a world within the larger world of the dominant culture
Counterculture: a group whose norms place it in opposition to the general culture.

Examples of US values:
Achievement and Success
Individualism
Science and Technology
Freedom
Equality
Racism and Group Superiority

Chapter Summary:

This chapter discusses the political, social and economic decline of the fourteenth century and renewal in the fifteenth century. Topics include the Hundred Years’ War, the Black Death, relations between Church and State, development of England, Spain and France into centralized nation-states, as well as the history of Germany and Italy. The treatment of Italy includes the renaissance of classical learning and the growth of Humanism.

The Black Death

By the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries, Europe entered a period that has been called a “little ice age.” A small shift in overall temperature patterns resulted in shortened growing seasons and disastrous weather conditions, including heavy storms and constant rain. Between 1315 and 1317, northern Europe experienced heavy rains that destroyed harvests and caused serious food shortages, resulting in extreme hunger and starvation. The great famine of 1315-1317 in northern Europe became an all too-familiar pattern. Southern Europe, for example, seems to have been struck by similar conditions, especially in the 1330s and 1340s. Historians point out that famine could have led to chronic malnutrition, which in turn contributed to increased infant mortality, lower birthrates, and higher susceptibility to disease because malnourished people are less able to resist infection. This, they argue, helps to explain the virulence of the great plague known as the Black Death.

The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century was the most devastating natural disaster in European history, ravaging Europe’s population and causing economic, social, political, and cultural upheaval. People were horrified by an evil force they could not understand and by the subsequent breakdown of all normal human relations. The Black Death was all the more horrible because it was the first major epidemic disease to strike Europe since the seventh century. It originated in Central Asia. It was spread, it is believed, both by the Mongols as they expanded across Asia and by ecological changes that caused Central Asian rodents to move westward.

Bubonic plague, the most common and important form of plague in the diffusion of the Black Death, was spread by black rats infested with fleas who were host to the deadly bacterium Yersinia pestis. Symptoms include high fever, aching joints, swelling of the lymph nodes, and dark blotches caused by bleeding beneath the skin. Bubonic plague was actually the least toxic form of plague, but nevertheless killed 50 to 60% of its victims. In pneumonic plague the bacterial infection spread to the lungs, resulting in severe coughing, bloody sputum, and the relatively easy spread of the bacillus from human to human by coughing. Fortunately, since it was more deadly, this form of the plague occurred less frequently than bubonic plague.

The plague reached Europe in October of 1347 when Genoese merchants brought it from the Middle East to the island of Sicily off the coast of southern Italy. It quickly spread to southern Italy and southern France by the end of 1347. Usually, the diffusion of the Black Death followed commercial trade routes. In 1348, the plague spread through Spain, France, and the Low Countries and into Germany. By the end of the year, it had moved to England ravaging it in 1349. By the end of 1349, the plague had reached northern Europe and Scandinavia. Eastern Europe and Russia were affected by 1351, although mortality rates were never as high in eastern Europe as they were in western and central Europe.

Mortality rates were incredibly high. Italy was especially hard hit. Its crowded cities suffered losses of 50-60%. In northern France, farming villages suffered mortality rates of 30%, while cities such as Rouen were more severely affected and experienced losses of 30-40%. In England and Germany, entire villages simply disappeared from history. In Germany, of approximately 170,000 inhabited locations, only 130,000 were left by the end of the fourteenth century.

It has been estimated that the European population declined by 25-50% between 1347 and 1351. If we assume the population to be 75 million in the early fourteenth century, this means a death toll in four years of 19 – 38 million people. And the plague did not end in 1351. There were major outbreaks again in 1361-1362 and 1369 and then regular recurrences during the remainder of the fourteenth century and all of the fifteenth century. The European population did not start to recover until the end of the fifteenth century; not until the mid-sixteenth century did Europe begin to regain its thirteenth – century did Europe begin to regain its thirteenth century population levels.

Explanations of the Black Death and attempts to limit its harshness led to extreme sorts of behavior. To many, the plague had either been sent by God as a punishment for humans’ sins or caused the devil. Some – the flagellants – resorted to extreme asceticism to gain God’s forgiveness and emerged as a popular movement in 1348, especially in Germany. Groups of flagellants, both men and women, wondered from town to town, flogging each other with whips to win the forgiveness of God who they felt had sent the plague to punish humans for their sinful ways. The flagellants attracted attention and created mass hysteria wherever they went. The Catholic Church, however, became alarmed when flagellant groups began to kill Jews and attack the clergy who opposed them. Pope Clement VI condemned the flagellants in October 1349 and urged the public authorities to crush them. By the end of 1350, most of the flagellant movements had been destroyed.

An outbreak of virulent anti-Semitism also accompanied the Black Death. Jews were accused of causing the plague by poisoning town wells. Although Jews were persecuted in Spain, the worst pogroms against this minority were carried out in Germany, where more than sixty major Jewish communities were exterminated by 1351. Many Jews fled eastward to Russia and especially to Poland where the king offered them protection. Eastern Europe became home to large Jewish communities.

Social and economic consequences of the plague were numerous. The labor force was brutally reduced. As the number of workers decreased, the wages increased. Many peasants abandoned the farms for the cities because they could make more money there by doing skilled work. Landowners tried to hold peasants to their land by enacting repressive legislation. This included lowering wages to levels that existed before the plague. The opposition to such legislation helped to cause the English Peasant Revolt of 1381. The cities were also influenced by the plague. Luxury goods suddenly were in great demand. People came to cities to become artisans. The power of trade guilds and artisans grew as the demand for luxury products grew. However, this caused conflict between the guilds as different trades tried to restrict competition. Master artisans and journeymen workers also fought as the journeymen attempted to rise to master status.

Ecclesiastical Breakdown and Revival: The Late Medieval Church

The papacy of the Roman Catholic church reached the height of its power in the 13th century. Theories of Papal supremacy included a doctrine of “fullness of power” as the spiritual head of Christendom and claims to universal temporal authority over all secular rulers. But the growing secular monarchies of Europe presented a challenge to papal claims of temporal supremacy that led the papacy into a conflict with these territorial states that it was unable to win. Papal defeat, in turn, led to other crises that brought into question and undermined not only the pope’s temporal authority over all Christendom, but his spiritual authority as well.

The struggle between the papacy and the secular monarchies began during the pontificate of Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303). One major issue appeared to be at stake between the pope and King Philip IV (1285-1314) of France. Looking for a source of new revenues, Philip asserted the right to tax the clergy of France. Boniface claimed that the clergy of any state could not pay taxes to their secular ruler without the pope’s consent. Underlying this issue, however, was a basic conflict between the claims of the papacy to universal authority over both church and state, which necessitated complete control over the clergy, and the claims of the monarchs that all subjects, including ecclesiastics, were under the jurisdiction of the crown and subject to the king’s authority on matters of taxation and justice. In short, the fundamental issue was the universal sovereignty of the papacy versus the royal sovereignty of the monarchs.

Boniface asserted his position in a series of papal bulls or letters, the most important of which was Unam Sanctum issued in 1302. It was the strongest statement ever made by a pope on the supremacy of the spiritual authority over the temporal authority. When the pope threatened to excommunicate Philip IV of France, the latter sent a small contingent of French soldiers to capture Boniface and bring him back to France to stand trial. The pope was captured in Anagni, although Italian nobles from the surrounding countryside soon rescued him. Boniface died shortly thereafter from the shock of this experience, however. Philip’s strong-arm tactics had produced a clear victory for the national monarchy over the papacy since no later pope dared renew the extravagant claims of Boniface VIII. To ensure his position and avoid any future papal threat, Philip IV brought enough pressure on the college of cardinals to achieve the election of a Frenchman, Clement V (1305-1314), as pope. Using the excuse of turbulence in the city of Rome, the new ope took up residence in Avignon on the east bank of the Rhone River. Although Avignon was located in the Holy Roman Empire, and was not a French possession, it lay just across the river from the territories of King Philip IV and was French in culture.

The residency of the popes in Avignon for almost three quarters of the fourteenth century led to a decline in papal prestige and a growing antipapal sentiment. It was quite unseemly that the head of the Catholic church should reside in Avignon instead of Rome. Although the Avignonese popes frequently announced their intention to return to Rome, the political turmoil in the papal states in central Italy always gave them an excuse to postpone their departure. In the decades of the 1330s, the popes began to construct a stately palace in Avignon, a clear indication that they intended to stay for some time. The French seemed to dominate the Church. During the seventy-three years of the Avignonese papacy, of the 134 new cardinals created by the popes, 113of them were French. At the same time, the popes attempted to find new sources of revenue to compensate for their loss from the Papal States. Their imposition of new taxes on the clergy, frequently enforced by the threat of excommunication if they were not paid, did not improve people’s opinion if the popes’ use of their spiritual authority. Furthermore, the splendor in which the pope and cardinals were living in Avignon led to a highly vocal criticism of both clergy and papacy. Avignon had become a powerful symbol of abuses within the church. At last, Pope Gregory XI, perceiving the disastrous decline in papal prestige, returned to Rome in 1377. His untimely death shortly afterward, however, soon gave rise to an even greater crisis for the Catholic Church.

The Great Schism When the College of Cardinals met in conclave to elect a new pope, the citizens of Rome, fearful that the French majority would choose another Frenchman who would return the papacy to Avignon, threatened that the cardinals would not leave Rome alive unless a Roman or Italian was elected pope. The terrified cardinals duly elected the Italian archbishop of Bari as Pope Urban VI (1378-1389). Five months later, a group of dissenting cardinals – the French ones – declared Urban’s election null and void and chose one of their number, a Frenchman, who took the title of Clement VII and promptly returned to Avignon. Since Urban remained in Rome, there were now two popes, initiating what has been called the Great Schism of the church. Europe became divided in its loyalties: France, Spain, Scotland, and southern Italy supported Clement, while England, Germany, Scandinavia, and most of Italy supported Urban. These divisions generally followed political lines. Since the French supported the Avignonese, so did their allies; their enemies, particularly England and its allies, supported the Roman pope. The need for political support caused both popes to subordinate their policies to the policies of these states. The great schism badly damaged the faith of Christian believers. The pope was widely believed to be the true leader of Christendom and, as Boniface VIII had pointed out, held the keys to the kingdom of Heaven. Since both lines of popes denounced the other as the antichrist, such a spectacle could not help but undermine the institution that had become the very foundation of the church. The Great Schism introduced uncertainty into the daily lives of ordinary Christians.

The great schism led large numbers of serious churchmen to take up the theory of conciliarism in the belief that only a general council of the church could end the schism and bring reform to the church in its “head and members.” In desperation, a group of cardinals from both lines of popes finally heeded these theoretical formulations and convened a general council. This council of Pisa, which met in 1409, deposed the two popes and elected a new one. The council’s action proved disastrous when the two deposed popes refused to step down. There were now three popes and the church seemed more hopelessly divided than ever.

Finally, the Holy Roman emperor Sigismund called a council which met at Constance from 1414 to 1418. It had three major objectives: to end the schism, to eradicate heresy, and to reform the church in “head and members.” The ending of the schism proved to be the council’s easiest task. After the three competing popes either resigned or were deposed, a new conclave elected a Roman cardinal, a member of a prominent Roman family, as Pope Martin V (1417-1431). The council was much less successful in dealing with the problems of heresy and reform.

Heresies: Heresy was not a new problem. In the thirteenth century, the church had developed inquisitorial machinery to deal with it. But widespread movements in the early 15th century – especially Hussitism – posed new threats to the Church. A group of Czech reformers led by the chancellor of the univ. of Prague, John Hus (1374-1415), called for an end to the worldliness and corruption of the clergy, criticized the sale of indulgences, and attacked the excessive power of the papacy within the Catholic Church. Hus’s objections fell on receptive ears because there was already widespread criticism of the Cath. Church as one of the largest landowners in Bohemia. Moreover, many clergymen were German, and the native Czechs’ strong resentment of the Germans who dominated Bohemia also contributed to Hus’s movement. The council of Constance tried to deal with the growing problem of heresy by summoning John Hes to the council. He was arrested, condemned as a heretic, and burned at the stake in 1415. This action turned the unrest in Bohemia into revolutionary upheaval, and the resulting Hussite wars wracked the Holy Roman Empire until a truce was arranged in 1436.

The Council of Constance also passed two startling reform decrees. One stated that a general council of the church received its authority from God; hence, every Christian, including the Pope, was subject to its authority. The other decree provided for the regular holding of general councils in order to maintain an ongoing reform of the church. Decrees alone, however, proved insufficient to reform the church. Councils could issue decrees, but popes had to execute them, and popes would not cooperate with councils that diminished their absolute authority. Beginning already in 1417, successive popes worked steadfastly for the next thirty years to defeat the conciliar movement.

By the mid-fifteenth century, the popes had reasserted their supremacy over the Catholic church. No longer, however, did they have any possibility of asserting supremacy over temporal governments as the medieval papacy had. The papal monarchy had been maintained, although it had lost much moral prestige. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Renaissance popes contributed to an even further decline in the moral leadership of the papacy. The Renaissance in Italy (1375-1527)

Renaissance means “rebirth.” A number of people who lived in Italy between c. 1350 and c. 1550 believed that they had witnessed a rebirth of antiquity or Greco-Roman civilization, which marked a new age. To them, the approximately thousand years between the end of the Roman Empire (476) and their own era was a middle period (hence the “Middle Ages”), characterized by darkness because of its lack of classical culture. Historians of the 19th cent. Later used similar terminology to describe this period in Italy. The Swiss historian and art critic, Jacob Burchhardt, created the modern concept of the Renaissance in his celebrated work, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1860. He portrayed Italy of the 14th and 15th cent. As the birthplace of the modern world and saw the revival of antiquity, the “perfecting of the individual” and secularism (“worldliness of the Italians”) as its distinguishing characteristic. No doubt, Burckhardt exaggerated the individuality and secularism of the Renaissance and failed to recognize the depths of its religious sentiment. Nevertheless, he established the framework for all modern interpretations of the Renaissance. Although some modern scholars disagree, the Renaissance can still be viewed as a distinct period of European history that manifested itself first in Italy and then spread to the rest of Europe.

Characteristics: Renaissance Italy was largely the product of an urban society. The city-states became the centers of Italian political, economic, and social life. Within this new urban society, a secular spirit emerged as increasing wealth created new possibilities for the enjoyment of world things. Above all, the Renaissance was an age or recovery from the “calamitous 14th century.” Italy and Europe began a slow process of recuperation from the effects of the Black Death, political disorder, and economic recession. By the end of the 14th cent. and beginning of the 15th cent. Italians were using the words recovery and revival and were actively involved in a rebuilding process. Therefore, the following are important: a rebirth of classical antiquity – specifically Greco-Roman culture; a revived emphasis on individual ability; a high regard for human dignity and worth; a realization of individual potentiality – created a new social ideal of the well-rounded personality or universal person who was capable of achievements in many areas of life. These characteristics were applicable to the highest classes who made up a small % of the population.

Social Classes:
Three estates: the clergy, whose preeminence was grounded in the belief that people should be guided to spiritual ends; the nobility, whose privileges rested on the principle that the nobles provided security and justice for society; the third estate, which consisted of the peasants and inhabitants of the towns and cities.

The Nobility: A reconstruction of the nobility was well underway by 1500. The nobility, 2-3% of the population, managed to dominate society by holding important political posts and serving as advisors to the king. Baldassare Castiglione, in his book, The Book of the Courtier, published in 1528, describes the three basic attributes of the perfect courtier.

First, nobles should possess fundamental native endowments, such as impeccable character, grace, talents, and noble birth. He must also cultivate certain achievements. Primarily, he should participate in military and bodily exercises because the principal profession of a courtier was arms. For a medieval knight, military skill was the only requirement, but this was not true of the Renaissance courtier who must seek a classical education and adorn his life with the arts by playing a musical instrument, drawing, and painting. The Renaissance ideal of a well-developed personality became a social ideal of the aristocracy. Finally, the aristocrat was expected to follow a certain standard of conduct. Nobles were expected to make good impressions; while being modest, they should not hide their accomplishments, but show them off with grace. Nobles would adhere to these principles for hundreds of years while they continued to dominate European lifestyles and politically.

The Third Estate of Peasants and Townspeople
Peasants made up the overwhelming mass of the 3rd estate and continued to constitute as much as 85-90 % of the total European population, except in the highly urbanized areas of northern Italy and Flanders. Not allowed to hunt game, they relied mostly on grains and vegetables for their food. The basic unit of medieval life was the manor. It was divided into two parts: the home farm, cultivated by the Lord, and strips of land spread around the rest of the property, cultivated by the peasants. Land was reserved by the Lord of the manor for feeding pigs and cattle. Crops grown included cereals such as wheat and rye and spring crops such as peas, beans and barley.

Life centered around the manor. People rarely traveled more than 25 miles away from their village. Everyone’s life was small, narrow and provincial. As a result, people had a strong sense of family. People knew what their life’s work would be. Religion and the family gave the individual a strong sense of purpose. Work was physical in nature and hard. Each peasant family also had a small vegetable garden. Cabbage was an extremely popular crop. Peasants ate vegetables and appreciated their importance for good health. Vegetables eventually came to be known as “poor people’s food.” Bread was also a mainstay of the peasant life. Peasants in the Beauvais region of France ate 2 lbs. of bread a day. Castles or the manor house had ovens where the peasants could bake their bread, for a fee. They washed down their meals with water, green wine beer, or a type of skim milk.

By contrast, the nobility hunted game. This consisted of deer and wild boar. They also raised domesticated animals: cows, sheep, pigs and goats. While peasants could sometimes sneak small game to their table, they only ate meat on holidays. The nobility, on the other hand, were known as “rapacious carnivores.”

The manorial system declined and serfs were reduced in number. More peasants became legally free. The remainder of the 3rd estate centered around towns and cities, originally the merchants and artisans who formed the so-called middle class. In addition, there were a multitude of inhabitants:
At the top of society were the patricians; their wealth, gotten from capitalistic enterprises in trade, industry, and banking enabled them to dominate their urban communities economically, socially, and politically. Below them were the petty burghers, the shopkeepers, artisans, guild masters and guildsmen who were largely concerned with providing goods and services for local consumption.
Below these two groups were the property less workers earning pitiful wages and the unemployed, who lived squalid and miserable lives. These people constituted as much as 30 or 40% of the urban population. Everywhere in Europe in the late 14th and 15th cent. urban poverty had increased dramatically.
But even this large group was not at the bottom of the social scale; beneath them stood a significantly large group of slaves, especially in the cities of Italy.

Family and Marriage in Renaissance Italy The family bond was a source of great security in the dangerous urban world of Renaissance Italy. To maintain the family, careful attention was given to marriages, which were arranged by parents, often to strengthen business of family ties. A legally binding marriage contract was made while the children were still young. The important aspect of the contract was the size of the dowry, a sum of money presented by the wife’s family to the husband upon marriage. He would control the money thereafter. The dowry could involve large sums of money and was expected of all families. The father-husband was the center of the Italian family. He gave it his name, was responsible for it in all legal matters, managed all finances (his wife had no share in his wealth), and made the crucial decisions that determined his children’s lives. A father’s authority over his children was absolute until he died or formally freed his children. In Renaissance Italy, children did not become adults on reaching a certain age; instead adulthood came only when the father went before a judge and formally emancipated them. The age of emancipation varied from early teens to late twenties. The mother managed the household, a position that gave women a certain degree of autonomy. Marriages ran the gamut from deep emotional attachment to purely formal ties. While sexual license for males was the norm for princes and their courts, women were supposed to follow different guidelines. The first wife of Duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan had an affair with the court musician and was executed for it.

The Intellectual Renaissance in Italy

The emergence and growth of individualism and secularism as characteristics of the Italian Renaissance were most noticeable in the intellectual and artistic realms. For the next two cent. Italy was the cultural leader of Europe. This new Italian culture was primarily the product of a relatively wealthy, urban lay society. The most important literary movement associated with the Renaissance was humanism. Renaissance humanism was a form of education and culture based upon the study of the classics. Humanism was not so much a philosophy of life as it was an educational program that revolved around a clearly defined group of intellectual disciplines or “liberal arts” – grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy or ethics, and history – all based on an examination of classical writers. Petrarch (1304-1374) has often been called the father of Italian Renaissance humanism. He did more than any other individual in the 14th cent. to foster the development of Renaissance humanism. He was the first intellectual to characterize the Middle Ages as a period of darkness, promoting the mistaken belief that medieval culture was ignorant of classical antiquity. Petrarch condemned the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages for its “barbarous” Latin and use of logic rather than rhetoric to harmonize faith and reason.

Scholasticism: Beginning in the 11th cent. the effort to apply reason or logical analysis to the church’s basic doctrines had a significant impact on the study of theology. The word scholasticism is used to refer to the philosophical and theological system of the medieval schools. A primary preoccupation of scholasticism was the attempt to reconcile faith and reason – to demonstrate that what was accepted on faith was in harmony with what could be learned by reason. Scholasticism had its beginnings in the theological world of the 11th and 12th centuries, but reached its high point in the brilliant synthesis of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th cent. The overriding task of scholasticism in the 13th cent. was to harmonize Christian revelation with the work of Aristotle. The great influx of Aristotle’s works into the west in the High Middle Ages threw many theologians into consternation. Aristotle was so highly regarded that he was called “the philosopher,” yet he had arrived at his conclusions by rational thought – not revelation- and some of his doctrines, such as the mortality of the individual soul, contradicted the teachings of the church. The most famous attempt to reconcile Aristotle and the doctrines of Christianity was made by Saint Thomas Aquinas. Aristotle did not believe in the immortality of the soul.
Aquinas’ reputation is based on his masterful attempt to reconcile faith and reason. He took it for granted that there were truths derived by reason and truths derived by faith. He was certain, however, that the two truths could not be in conflict with each other. The natural mind, unaided by faith, could arrive at truths concerning the physical universe. Without the help of God’s grace, however, unaided reason alone could not grasp spiritual truths, such as the Trinity or the Incarnation. (God was conceived in Mary as Jesus, and Jesus is true God and true man).

Petrarch argued that philosophy should be the “art of virtuous living,” not a science of logic chopping.

He emphasized a pure classical Latin, making it fashionable for humanists to use Cicero as a model for prose and Virgil for poetry.
Petrarch’s humanistic pursuits found their most enthusiastic reception in Florence. By the end of the 14th cent. a whole circle of humanistic scholars had emerged in that city. Although some were connected to monastic orders, many were simply laymen. In fact, the latter were responsible for humanism gaining a powerful momentum at the beginning of the 15th cent. when it became closely tied to Florentine civic spirit and pride, giving rise to what one modern scholar has called “civic humanism.”

14th cent. humanists such as Petrarch had glorified intellectual activity pursued in a life of solitude and had rejected a life of action in the community and family. In the busy civic world of Florence, intellectuals began to take a new view of their role as intellectuals, a trend that intensified when the city’s libety was threatened at the beginning of the 15th cent. by the Milanese tyrant, Giangaleazzo Visconti. Cicero, the classical Roman statesman and intellectual, became their model.
Cicero: He greatly aided the development of Roman prose by his emphasis on the practice of oratory. Romans had great respect for oratory because the ability to persuade people in public debate meant success in politics. Oratory was brought to perfection in a literary fashion by Cicero (106-43 BCE), the greatest prose writer of that period. For him, oratory was not simply skillful speaking. An orator was a statesman, a man who achieved his highest goal by pursuing an active life in public affairs. Later Cicero became more interested in the writing of philosophical treatises. He was not an original thinker, but performed a valuable service for Roman society by popularizing and making understandable the works of Greek philosophers. In his philosophical works, Cicero, more than anyone else, transmitted the classical intellectual heritage to the Western world. His emphasis on the need to pursue an active life to benefit and improve humankind would later greatly influence the Italian Renaissance.

Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), a humanist, Florentine patriot, and chancellor of the city, wrote a biography of Cicero entitled the New Cicero, in which he waxed enthusiastically about the fusion of political action and literary creation in Cicero’s life. Cicero’s literary and political activities were simply two sides of the same task, the work of a Roman citizen on behalf of his state. From Bruni’s time on, Cicero served as the inspiration for the Renaissance ideal that one must live an active life for one’s state, and everything, including riches, must be considered good if it increases one’s power of action. An active life does not distract from, but actually stimulates the highest intellectual energies. An individual only “grows to maturity – both intellectually and morally – through participation” in the life of the state.

Civic humanism emerged in Florence but soon spread to other Italian cities and beyond. It reflected the values of the urban society of the Italian Renaissance. Civic humanism intensified the involvement of humanist intellectuals in government and guaranteed that the rhetorical discipline they praised would be put to the service of the state. It is no accident that humanists served the state as chancellors, councillors, and advisers. Rhetoricians had become diplomats. Also evident in the humanism of the first half of the 15th cent. was a growing interest in classical Greek civilization. Humanists eagerly perused the works of Plato as well as Greek poets, dramatists, historians, and orators, such as Thucydides, Euripides, and Sophocles, all of whom had been neglected by the scholastics of the High Middle Ages.
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The Development of Vernacular Literature
In the fourteenth century, the works of Dante and Chaucer were instrumental in transforming regional dialects into national languages, and in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, vernacular languages became broad enough in scope to create national literary forms that could compete with and eventually replace Latin.
Dante (1265-1321) came from an old Florentine noble family that had fallen upon hard times. His masterpiece in the Italian vernacular was the Divine Comedy, written between 1313 and 1321. Cast in a typical medieval framework, the Divine Comedy is basically the story of the soul’s progression to salvation, a fundamental medieval preoccupation.

The lengthy poem was divided into three major sections corresponding to the realms of the afterworld: hell, purgatory, and heaven or paradise. Symbolically, hell, (the “Inferno”) reflects despair, while “Purgatory,” the second stage of his journey, reflects hope. “Paradise,” is a state of mystical contemplation. It reflects perfection or salvation.

Geoffrey Chaucer, (c. 1340-1400), brought a new level of sophistication to the English vernacular language in his famous work The Canterbury Tales. His beauty of expression and clear, forceful language were important in transforming his East Midland dialect into the chief ancestor of the modern English language. Although Chaucer’s materials were taken from a typically medieval literary tradition, he placed much emphasis on individual characters.

The Canterbury Tales are the stories told by a group of twenty-nine pilgrims journeying from Southwark to the tomb of St. Thomas at Canterbury. The stories these pilgrims told to while away the time on the journey were just as varied as the storytellers themselves: knightly romances, fairy tales, saints’ lives, sophisticated satires, and crude anecdotes.

Education in the Renaissance:
The humanist movement had a profound effect on education. Genuinely optimistic about the educability of human beings, Renaissance humanists produced treatises on educational theory and developed secondary schools based on their educational philosophy. At the core of the educational training were the “liberal studies.” These stressed the importance of the liberal arts as the key to ture freedom, enabling individuals to reach their full potential.
History, moral philosophy and eloquence were important.
Also stressed were: grammar and logic, poetry, mathematics, astronomy, and music.

Crucial to all liberal studies was the mastery of Greek and Latin because it enabled students to read the great classical authors who were the foundation stones of the liberal arts.

The Greek ideal of a sound mind in a sound body was also stressed. This meant physical education. Pupils were taught the arts of javelin throwing, archery, and dancing and encouraged to run, wrestle, hunt, and swim frequently.

Christianity was also taught. Students were taught the scriptures and the works of the church fathers, especially Saint Augustine.

Humanist schools were primarily geared for the education of an elite, the ruling classes of their communities. Largely absent from the schools were females. While there were a few females, they were discouraged from learning mathematics and rhetoric. However, religion and morals were thought to “hold the first place in the education of a Christian lady.”

A humanist education was considered to be a practical preparation for life. The aim of humanist education was not the creation of a great scholar but a complete citizen. Humanist schools, combining the classics and Christianity, provided the model for the basic education of the European ruling classes until the twentieth century.

Humanism and Philosophy: The Revival of Platonism:

The thinkers of the Renaissance were especially attracted to Platonism and those Church Fathers who had tried to synthesize Plato’s philosophy with Christian thinking. In private residences, Florentine humanists met to discuss the works of Plato and the Neoplatonists. This was the so-called “Florentine Academy,” not a formal school but productive informal gatherings of scholars.

In two major works, Marsilio Ficino undertook the synthesis of Christianity and Platonism into a single system. His Neoplatonism was based upon two primary ideas, the Neoplatonic hierarchy of substances and a theory of spiritual love. The former postulated a hierarchy of substances, or great chain of being, from the lowest form of physical matter (plants) to the purest spirit (God), in which humans occupied a central or middle position. (Myth of the Cave)

They were the link between the material world (through the body) and the spiritual world (through the soul), and their highest duty was to apprehend higher things and ascend toward that union with God that was the true end of human existence. Ficino’s theory of spiritual or Platonic love maintained that just as all people are bound together in their common humanity by love, so too are all parts of the universe held together by bonds of sympathetic love.

The Impact of Printing:
The period of the Renaissance witnessed the development of printing, one of the most important technological innovations of civilization.
Printing from hand-carved wooden blocks had been present in the West since the twelfth century and in China even before that.
What was new in the fifteenth century in Europe was multiple printing with movable metal type. The development of printing from movable type was a gradual process that culminated sometime between 1445 and 1450; Johannes Gutenberg played an important role in bringing the process to completion. Gutenberg’s Bible, completed in 1455 or 1456, was the first real book produced from movable type.
The new printing spread rapidly throughout Europe in the last half of the fifteenth century. Especially well known as a printing center was Venice, home by 1500 to almost one hundred printers who had produced almost two million volumes.

By 1500 there were almost 40,000 titles published. Half were probably religious in character. Next came Latin and Greek classics, medieval grammar books, legal handbooks, works on philosophy and an ever-growing number of popular romances.
Renaissance Art:

In Renaissance Italy, as later in Reformation Europe, the values and interests of the laity were less subordinated to those of the clergy. In education, culture, and religion, the laity assumed a greater role and even established models for the clergy to imitate. This resulted in part from the church’s loss of power during the late Middle Ages. But it was also encouraged by the rise of national sentiment, and the growth of lay education. Medieval Christian values were adjusting to a more this-worldly spirit. Humans began again to glorify the secular world, secular learning, and purely human pursuits.

Renaissance artists considered the imitation of nature to be their primary goal. Their search for naturalism became an end in itself: to persuade onlookers of the reality of the object or event they were portraying. At the same time, the new artistic standards reflected a enw attitude of mind as well, one in which human beings became the focus of attention, the “center and measure of all things,” as one artist put it. Whereas Byzantine and Gothic art had been religious and idealized in the extreme, Renaissance art, especially in the fifteenth century, realistically reproduced nature and human beings as a part of nature.

The High Renaissance was dominated by the work of three artistic giants, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Raphael (1483-1520), and Michelangelo (1475-1564).

Leonardo represents a transitional figure in the shift to High Renaissance principles. He carried on the fifteenth century experimental tradition by studying everything and even dissecting human bodies in order to better see how nature worked. (See E.H. Gomgrich, The Story of Art, Phaidon Press Ltd., London: 1999.) p. 295.

But Leonardo stressed the need to advance beyond such realism and initiated the High Renaissance’s preoccupation with the idealization of nature, or the attempt to generalize from realistic portrayal to an ideal form.

Leonardo’s Last Supper is a brilliant summary of fifteenth-century trends in its organization of space and use of perspective to depict subjects three-dimensionally in a two-dimensional medium. But it is also more. There are profound psychological dimensions to the work. The words of Christ that “one of you will betray me” are experienced directly as each of the apostles reveals his personality and his relationship to the Savior. In one of his notebooks, Leonardo wrote that the highest and most difficult aim of painting is to depict “the intention of man’s soul.” Through gestures and movements, Leonardo hoped to reveal a person’s inner life.

Raphael blossomed as a painter at an early age; at twenty-five, he was already regarded as one of Italy’s best painters. Raphael was especially acclaimed for his numerous madonnas, in which he attempted to achieve an ideal of beauty far surpassing human standards.

Michelangelo, an accomplished painter, sculptor, and architect, was another giant of the High Renaissance. Fiercely driven by his desire to create, he worked with great passion and energy on a remarkable number of projects. He was influenced by Neoplatonism, especially evident in his figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. These muscular figures reveal an ideal type of human being with perfect proportions. In good Neoplatonic fashion, their beauty is meant to be a reflection of divine beauty; the more beautiful the body, the more God-like the figure. Italy’s Political Decline:
The French Invasions (1494-1527)

In 1494, Naples, supported by Florence and the Borgia pope Alexander VI planned to attack Milan. Because of this, the Milanese leader Ludovico il Moro urged the French to attack Naples. But the French also wanted Milan.

Attracted by the riches of Italy, the French king Charles VIII (1483-1498) led an army of 30,000 men into Italy and occupied the kingdom of Naples. Other Italian states turned for help to the Spanish who gladly complied. For the next 30 years the French and Spanish competed to dominate Italy, which was only a pawn for the two great powers, a convenient arena for fighting battles. The terrible sack of Rome in 1527 by the armies of the Spanish king charles I brought a temporary end to the Italian wars. Hereafter, the Spaniards dominated Italy.

Nicholas Machiavelli:
Machiavelli watched as the foreign invasions made a shambles of his Italy. He was convinced that political unity and independence justified any means.

In Machiavelli’s view, a prince’s attitude toward power must be based on an understanding of human nature, which he perceived as basically self – centered. He said, “For of men one can, in general, say this: They are ungrateful, fickle, deceptive and deceiving avoiders of danger, eager to gain.” Political activity, therefore, could not be restricted by moral considerations. The prince acts on behalf of the state, and for the sake of the state, he must be willing to let his conscience sleep. Machiavelli was among the first to abandon morality as the basis for the analysis of political activity.

Revival of Monarchy:
Nation Building in the Fifteenth Century

France:
The Hundred Years’ War left France prostrate, but the war also developed a strong degree of French national feeling toward a common enemy that the kings could use to reestablish monarchical power.
The process of developing a French territorial state was greatly advanced by King Louis XI (1461-1483), known as the Spider because of his wily and devious ways.

Louis strengthened the use of the taille – an annual direct tax usually on land or property – as a permanent tax imposed by royal authority, giving him a sound, regular source of income.

When Charles the Bold, who had tried to create a middle kingdom between France and Germany, died, Louis added part of Charles’s possessions, the duchy of Burgundy, to his own lands.
Three years later, the provinces of Anjou, Maine, Bar, and Provence were brought under royal control. Many historians believe that Louis created a base for the later development of a strong French monarchy.

Spain:
A major step in the direction of unifying Spain came with the marriage of Isabella of Castile (r. 1474-1504) and Ferdinand of Aragon (r. 1479-1516). This marriage was a dynastic union of two rulers, not a political union.
They replaced the nobility with townspeople. Medieval town organizations known as hermandades (“brotherhoods”) which had been organized to maintain law and order, were revived. Ferdinand and Isabella transformed them into a kind of national militia whose primary goal was to stop the wealthy landed aristocrats from disturbing the peace.

They reorganized the military forces of Spain, seeking to replace the undisciplined feudal levies they had inherited with a more professional royal army. With the development of a strong military, Spain emerged as an important power in European affairs.

Recognizing the importance of controlling the Catholic church, they secured from the pope the right to select the most important church officials in Spain, virtually making the clergy an instrument for the extension of royal power.

Although strongly catholic, Spain was the home to many Muslims and Jews. Increased persecution in the fourteenth century, however led the majority of Spanish Jews to convert to Christianity. But complaints that these Jewish converts were not always faithful to Christianity prompted Ferdinand and Isabella to ask the pope to introduce the Inquisition into Spain in 1478. Under royal control, the Inquisition worked with cruel efficiency to guarantee the orthodoxy of the converts, but had no authority over practicing Jews.

Consequently, in 1492, they took the drastic step of expelling all professed Jews from Spain. It is estimated that 150,000 to 200,000 Jews fled. Muslims, too were encouraged to convert to Christianity, and in 1502, Isabella issued a decree expelling all professed Muslims from her kingdom.
To a very large extent, the “Most Catholic” monarchs had achieved their goal of absolute religious orthodoxy as a basic ingredient of the Spanish state. To be Spanish was to be Catholic, a policy of uniformity enforced by the Inquisition.

England:

The Hundred Years’ War (with France) strongly affected the English. The cost of the war in its final years and the losses in manpower strained the English economy. Moreover, with the end of the war England experienced even greater domestic turmoil as a civil war erupted and aristocratic factions fought over the monarchy until 1485, when Henry Tudor established a new dynasty. The war involved two branches of the royal family, the Houses of York and Lancaster. This conflict, known as the Wars of the Roses (York’s symbol was a white rose, and Lancaster’s a red rose), kept England in turmoil from 1455-1485.

The Lancastrian monarchy of Henry VI (r. 1422-1461) was challenged by the duke of York and his supporters in the prosperous southern towns. In 1461, Edward IV (r. 1461-1483), son of the duke of York, seized power and bent Parliament to his will. His brother and successor was Richard III (r. 1483-1485), whose reign saw the growth of support for the exiled Lancastrian Henry Tudor. Henry defeated Richard on Bosworth Field in August 1485.

Henry Tudor ruled as Henry VII (r. 1485-1509), the first of the new Tudor dynasty that would endure until 1603. Henry married Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth of York.

Henry eliminated the private wars of the nobility by abolishing their private armies. The new king was particularly successful in obtaining sufficient income from the traditional financial resources of the English monarch, such as crown lands, judicial fees and fines, and customs duties.
He confiscated so much noble land and fortunes that he governed without dependence on Parliament for funds, always the cornerstone of strong monarchy. By using diplomacy to avoid wars, which are always expensive, the king avoided having to call Parliament on any regular basis to grant him funds.
By not overburdening the landed gentry and middle class with taxes, Henry won their favor, and they provided much support for his monarchy. Henry’s policies enabled him to leave England with a stable and prosperous government and an enhanced status for the monarchy itself.

Henry thus began to shape a monarchy that became one of early modern Europe’s most exemplary governments during the reign of his granddaughter, Elizabeth I (r.1558-1603).

Conclusion:

In the high middle ages, European civilization developed many of its fundamental features.
Territorial states, parliaments, capitalist trade and industry, banks, cities, and vernacular literatures were all products of that fertile period.
The Catholic Church under the direction of the Papacy reached its apogee.

Fourteenth century European society, however, was challenged by an overwhelming number of disintegrative forces. Devastating plague, decline in trade and industry, bank failures, seemingly constant warfare the absence of the Popes from Rome, and even the spectacle of two popes condemning each other as the antichrist all seemed to overpower Europeans in this “calamitous century.”

The new European society, however, proved remarkably resilient. The Renaissance was a period of transition that witnessed a continuation of the economic, political, and social trends that had begun in the High Middle Ages. It was also a new age in which intellectuals and artists proclaimed a new vision of humankind and raised fundamental questions about the value and importance of the individual.
(Go over ch. 16)

CH. 17 The age of Reformation and Religious Wars

In the second decade of the sixteenth century, a powerful religious movement began in Germany and spread throughout northern Europe, affecting society and politics as well as the spiritual lives of men and women. Attacking what they believed to be superstitions that robbed people of their money and peace of mind, Protestant reformers led a revolt against the medieval church. In a short time, hundreds of thousands of people adopted a more simplified religious practice.

For Europe, the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were also a period of unprecedented territorial expansion. Permanent colonies were established within the Americas, and American gold and silver spurred scientific invention and a new weapons industry. The new bullion also helped create an international traffic in African slaves.

The Voyages of Columbus:
Columbus, (1451? – 1506), and his brother, Bartholomew, were mapmakers in Lisbon. In 1484 he first presented his idea of sailing to the Indies to King John of Portugal, but was turned down. It seemed that the Portuguese felt that Columbus had greatly underestimated the distance he would have to sail. They were not deterred by their thinking that the world was flat. Most educated people of the time realized that the world was round.
Queen Isabella finally decided to stake Columbus.
But his day of departure, August 2, 1492 was the same day that Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain had determined as the deadline for the expulsion of all Jews from Spain. So Columbus sailed south to the Canary Islands. After a week long “shake-down,” he headed west across the Atlantic.

Columbus’ ships sailed ahead of the wind. Mutiny threatened on more than one occasion during the 33-day voyage. In order to keep his men happy, Columbus deliberately falsified his journal of the daily sailing distance, so that if the voyage were longer than they had originally thought his men would not mutiny. He had originally told his men that the journey would cover 2,250 nautical miles. To soften the threat of mutiny, Columbus kept reminding his men of the consequences if they returned to Spain without any treasure.

On October 5 the restless crew was encouraged by flocks of birds flying their way. Then 33 days out, at two o’clock in the morning, of October 12, a lookout on the Pinta claimed the financial prize that Columbus offered the first sailor who spotted land.

We know today that the early European voyages to America destroyed the civilizations of the native peoples of America. Warfare, disease, (smallpox and flu) and exploitation devastated their populations. In both South and North America, Spanish rule set an imprint of Roman Catholicism, economic dependency, and hierarchical structure still visible today.

The Protestant Reformation

The Protestant Reformation had its beginning in a typical medieval question – what must I do to be saved? Martin Luther, a deeply religious man, found an answer that did not fit within the traditional teachings of the late medieval church. Ultimately he split with that church, destroying the religious unity of western Christendom.

Prelude to the Reformation:
The new classical learning of the Italian Renaissance did not spread to the European countries north of the Alps until the second half of the fifteenth century. Gradually, intellectuals and artists from the cities north of the Alps flocked to Italy and returned home enthusiastic about the new education and the recovery of ancient thought and literature that we associate with Italian Renaissance humanism.

The most important char. Of northern Renaissance humanism was its reform program. With their belief in the ability of human beings to reason and improve themselves, the northern humanists thought that through education in the sources of classical, and especially Christian, antiquity, they could instill a true inner piety or an inward religious feeling that would bring about a reform of the church and society. For this reason, Christian humanists supported schools, brought out new editions of the classics, and prepared new editions of the bible and writings of the church fathers.

The most influential of all the Christian humanists was Erasmus (1466-1536), who formulated and popularized the reform program of Christian humanism.

He felt that Christianity should be a guiding philosophy for the direction of daily life rather than the system of dogmatic beliefs and practices that the medieval church seemed to stress. In other words he emphasized inner piety and ethics while de-emphasizing the external forms of religion (such as the sacraments, pilgrimages, fasts, veneration of saints, and relics). His reforms would not be followed because of the violence unleashed by the passions of the reformation.

The Hapless Church:
The institutional problems of the Cath. Church in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially the failure of the Renaissance popes to provide spiritual leadership, were bound to affect the spiritual life of all Christendom. The general impression of the tenor of religious life on the eve of the Reformation is one of much deterioration, coupled with abundant evidence of a continuing desire for valid religious experience from millions of devout lay people.

The economic change of the 14th and 15th centuries and the continuing preoccupation of the papal court with finances had an especially strong impact upon the clergy. The highest positions of the clergy were increasingly held by either the nobility or wealthier members of the bourgeoisie. At the same time, to enhance their revenues, high church officials accumulated church offices in ever-large numbers. This practice of pluralism (the holding of many church offices) led, in turn, to the problem of absenteeism, as church officeholders neglected their episcopal duties and delegated the entire administration of their dioceses to underlings, who were often underpaid and lttle interested in performing their duties.

At the same time, the atmosphere of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with its uncertainty of life and immediacy of death, brought a craving for meaningful religious expression and certainty of salvation.

By 1509, Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony and Martin Luther’s prince, had amassed over 5000 relics to which were attached indulgences (a remission of the penalties due to sin) that could officially reduce one’s time in purgatory by 1,443 years.

What is striking about the revival of religious piety in the 15th century – whether expressed through such external forces as the veneration of relics and the buying of indulgences or the mystical piety – was its adherence to the orthodox beliefs and practices of the Catholic church. But disillusionment grew as the devout experienced the clergy’s inability to live up to their expectations. The deepening of religious life, especially in the second half of the fifteenth century, found little echo among the worldly-wise clergy, and it is this divergence that helps to explain the tremendous and immediate impact of Luther’s ideas.

There were also other factors in the lay criticism of the Church. The laity in the cities were becoming increasingly knowledgeable. They traveled widely. New postal systems and the printing press increased the information at their disposal. Laypeople were able to take the initiative in shaping the cultural life of their communities.

Martin Luther and the Reformation in Germany:
Martin Luther was born in Germany on November 10, 1483. After studying law as his father’s request, he turned to religion. In the summer of 1505 he was caught in a tremendous thunderstorm and vowed that if he were spared, eh would become a monk. He then entered the monastic order of the Augustinian Hermits in Erfurt. Later, he studied theology at the University of Wittenberg, where he received his doctorate in 1512 and then became a professor in the theological faculty, lecturing on the Bible.

Sometime between 1513 and 1516, through his study of the Bible, he arrived at an answer to a problem – the assurance of salvation – that had disturbed him since his entry into the monastery.

Catholic doctrine had emphasized that both faith and good works were required of a Christian to achieve personal salvation. In Luther’s eyes, human beings, weak and powerless in the sight of an almighty God, could never do enough good works to merit salvation. Through his study of the bible, Luther rediscovered another way of viewing this problem.

To Luther, humans are not saved through their good works, but through faith in the promises of God, made possible by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. The doctrine of salvation or justification by grace through faith alone became the primary doctrine of the Protestant Reformation. Because Luther had arrived at this doctrine from his study of the Bible, the Bible became for him, as it would be for all other Protestants, the chief guide to religious truth.
Justification by faith and the bible as the sole authority in religious affairs were the twin pillars of the Protestant Reformation.
Incidentally, the Christian is not free from doing good works. Rather he performs good works out of gratitude to God: “Good works do not make a good man, but a good man does good works.”

Luther was also involved in the indulgence controversy. Indulgences were an aid to a laity made anxious by the belief in suffering in purgatory for neglected penances or unrepented sins. Originally indulgences had been given only for going on a crusade to the Holy Land. By Luther’s time, however, they were dispensed for small cash payments and were presented to the laity as remitting not only their own future punishments, but also those of their dead relatives.

Luther also debated John Eck where he challenged the infallibility of the Pope, and the inerrancy of church councils, appealing to the sovereignty of Scripture alone.

In 1517, a Jubilee indulgence proclaimed under Pope Julius II (1503-1513) to raise funds for the rebuilding of Saint Peter’s in Rome, was preached near Saxony. John Tetzel was enlisted to preach the indulgence because he was a seasoned professional who knew how to stir people to action. When on October 31, 1517, Luther posted his ninety-five theses against indulgences in Wittenberg, he protested especially against the impression created by Tetzel that indulgences released the dead from punishment in purgatory - claims he believed made salvation for sale. Unable to accept Luther’s forcefully worded dissent from traditional Catholic teachings, the church excommunicated him in January 1521.

Luther was summoned to appear before the imperial diet of the Holy Roman Empire, in Worms, convened by the newly elected Emperor Charles V. Expected to recant the heretical doctrines he had espoused, Luther refused. Charles, by the Edict of Worms, declared Luther an outlaw.

Friends hid him in Wartburg Castle, where he translated the New Testament into German.

Between 1521 and 1525, Luther’s religious movement became a revolution. Luther was able to gain the support of his prince, the elector of Saxony, as well as other German rulers among the three hundred odd states that made up the Holy Roman Empire. These rulers were instrumental in instituting new state-dominated churches in their territories.

The Lutheran churches in Germany (and later in Scandinavia) quickly became territorial or state churches in which the state supervised and disciplined church members. As part of the development of these state-dominated churches, Luther also instituted new religious services to replace the mass. These featured a worship service consisting of a German liturgy that focused on Bible reading, preaching of the word of God, and song. Following his own denunciation of clerical celibacy, Luther married a former nun, Katherina von Bora, in 1525. His union provided a model of married and family life for the new Protestant minister.

During the first decade of its existence, the Protestant movement suffered more from internal division than from interference from the king. Luther experienced dissent within his own ranks in Wittenberg as well as defection from many Christian humanists who feared that Luther’s movement threatened the unity of Christendom.

The Peasant’s War constituted Luther’s greatest challenge, however.

In June 1524, peasants in Germany rose in revolt against their lords and looked to Luther for support. But Luther, who knew how much his reformation of the church depended upon the full support of the German princes and magistrates, supported the rulers. To Luther, God had ordained the state and its rulers and given them the authority to maintain the peace and order necessary for the spread of the Gospel. It was the duty of princes to suppress all revolts. By May 1525, the German princes had ruthlessly suppressed the peasant hordes. By this time, Luther found himself ever more dependent on state authorities for the growth and maintenance of his reformed church.

The Reformation was assisted in these early years by the emperor’s war with France and the advance of the Ottoman Turks into Eastern Europe. Charles V fought four major wars. Thus preoccupied, the emperor agreed at the German Diet of Speyer in 1526 to give the German princes sovereignty in religious matters and the Reformation was able to put down deep roots.

Peace of Augsburg By the time Charles V was able to bring military forces to Germany, in 1546, Lutheranism had become well established and the Lutheran princes well organized. Unable to impose his will on Germany, Charles was forced to negotiate a truce. An end to religious warfare in Germany came in 1555 with the Peace of Augsburg, which marks an important turning point in the history of the Reformation. The division of Christianity was formerly acknowledged when Lutheranism was granted the same legal rights as Catholicism. Moreover, the peace settlement accepted the right of each German ruler to determine the religion of his subjects.

Switzerland was home to two major Reformation movements, Zwinglianism and Calvinism. Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) was ordained a priest in 1506 and accepted an appointment as a cathedral priest in 1518. Zwingli’s preaching of the Gospel caused such unrest that in 1523 the city council held a public disputation or debate in the town hall. Zwingli’s party was accorded the victory.

Over the next two years, evangelical reforms were promulgated in Zurich. Relics and images were abolished; all paintings and decorations were removed from the churches and replaced by whitewashed walls. The mass was replaced by a new liturgy consisting of Scripture reading, prayer, and sermons. Monasticism, pilgrimages, the veneration of saints, clerical celibacy, and the pope’s authority were all abolished as remnants of papal Christianity.

Zwingli and Luther As his movement began to spread to other cities in Switzerland, Zwingli sought an alliance with Martin Luther and the German reformers. Although both realized the need for unity to defend against the opposition of the Catholic authorities, they were unable to agree on the interpretation of the Lord’s Supper.

Zwingli believed that the scriptural words “This is my body, This is my blood” should be taken figuratively, not literally, and refused to accept Luther insistence on the real presence of the body and blood of Christ. In October 1531, war erupted between the Swiss Protestant and Catholic states. Zurich’s army was routed, and Zwingli was found wounded on the battlefield. His enemies killed him, cut up his body and burned the pieces, scattering the ashes. The leadership of Swill Protestantism now passed to John Calvin (1509-1564).

The Anabaptists:

John Calvin Calvin was born in Noyon, a small town in northern France. He studied both law and the humanities at the University of Paris. In his early twenties he apparently had a blinding spiritual experience that he later called his “sudden conversion,” an event about which he would say almost nothing else. Yet from that moment on all his energy was devoted to religious activity. In November 1533 Calvin was indicted for heresy, and after more than a year in hiding, he took refuge in the Swiss city of Basel. There in 1536 he published a little treatise, Institutes of the Christian Religion, outlining the principles of a new system of belief. He would revise and expand the Institutes for the rest of his life, and it was to become the basis for the most vigorous branch of Protestantism in the sixteenth century.

Outwardly, Calvinism seemed to have much in common with Lutheranism. Both emphasized people’s sinfulness, lack of free will, and helplessness; both rejected good works as a means of salvation; both accepted only two sacraments, baptism and communion. Both regarded all positions in life as equally worthy in the sight of God. Both strongly upheld established political and social authority. But the emphases in Calvisism were very different.

Luther’s belief in justification by faith alone assumed that God can predestine a person to be saved but rejected the idea that damnation can also be preordained.

Calvin’s faith was much sterner. It recognized no such distinction; if people are damned, they should praise God’s justice because their sins certainly merit such a judgment. If people are saved, they should praise God’s mercy because their salvation is not a result of their own good deeds. Either way the outcome is predestined, and nothing can be done to affect their fate. It is up to God alone to justify a person; he or she then perseveres in his mercy despite the person’s sins; and finally he decides whither to receive the simmer into the small band of saints, or elect, whom he wishes to save. Calvin’s was a grim but powerful answer to the age-old Christian question: How can sinful human beings gain salvation?

In order to supervise the morals of the faithful more closely, Calvin gave his church a strict hierarchical structure. It was controlled by deacons and lay elders, who could function even in the hostile territories where many Calvinists found themselves. A body of lay elders called the consistory served as the chief ecclesiastical authority. They enforced discipline and had the power of excommunication, though they always worked together with the secular magistrates, who imposed the actual punishments for failures in religious duties.

Consequences of Calvinist Doctrine:
In Geneva all forms of frivolity and amusement save the most simple were condemned and forbidden. No gambling or dancing or unnecessary display was permitted. All forms of art were regarded as frivolous and tainted with “popery.” If one prospered, one could not spend one’s money because there was nothing worth while to spend it on; the only alternative was to accumulate it. For the first time the bourgeois class, hardworking and thrifty, had a religion which glorified its virtues and did not, like the medieval scholastics, condemn the accumulation of money as avaricious. But in other respects, many of the medieval categories of sin were retained. Idleness and sensuality were as deadly. More than this, it was claimed by the Calvinists that God showed his joy in his elect by allowing them to prosper; thus prosperity was an actual sign of godliness, that one was indeed a member of the elect. Hence the Puritan belief that God is with the rich; that the poor man is poor through his own fault, and God is not with him – poverty being a moral crime as well as a deserved misfortune. The choice of the elect – those predestined for salvation – was in the hands of God, not man. Thus no hereditary privilege would avail the ungodly man, and no obedience was due him.

Calvin identified three tests to assure his followers of their possible salvation: an open profession of faith, a “decent and godly life,” and participation in the sacraments of baptism and communion. Although Calvin stressed that there could be no absolute certainty of salvation, his followers did not always make this distinction. The practical psychological effect of predestination was to give later Calvinists an unshakable conviction that they were doing God’s work on earth. Thus, Calvinism became a dynamic and activist faith. It is no accident that Calvinism became the militant international form of Protestantism.

Expansion of the Reformation
In the 1530’s German Lutherans formed regional consistories to replace the old Catholic episcopates. Educational reform provided:
Compulsory primary education
Schools for girls
A humanist revision of the curriculum
Instruction in the new religion

In Denmark, Lutheranism became the state religion
In Sweden, Gustavus Vasa confiscated church property and subjected the clergy to royal authority.
In Poland, Lutherans, Calvinists, and others found room to practice their beliefs. The absence of a central political authority made Poland a model of religious pluralism and toleration in the second half of the sixteenth century.

The English Reformation:
While Calvin was forging his militant brand of Protestantism in Switzerland, The English Reformation had been initiated by an act of state.
King Henry VIII (r. 1509-1547) had a strong desire to divorce his first wife Catherine of Aragon, who had failed to produce a male heir. The only surviving child was Mary Tudor.
Henry was concerned about having only a female heir. People believed in unnatural for women to rule over men. A woman ruler meant turmoil and revolution.
Normally, church authorities might have been willing to grant the king an annulment of his marriage, but Pope Clement VII was dependent upon the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, who happened to be the nephew of Queen Catherine. In addition, his marriage to Catherine had only been made possible because by a papal dispensation because Catherine had previously been the wife of Henry’s brother, Arthur.

Impatient with the pope’s inaction, Henry sought to obtain an annulment of his marriage in England’s own ecclesiastical courts.
As archbishop of Canterbury and head of the highest ecclesiastical court in England, Thomas Cranmer held official hearings on the king’s case and ruled in May 1533 that the king’s marriage to Catherine was “null and absolutely void.”

In 1534. upon Henry’s request, Parliament moved to finalize the break of the Church of England with Rome. Henry promptly married Anne Boleyn, who was pregnant.

The Act of Succession made Anne’s children heirs to the throne, and the Act of Supremacy of 1534 declared that the king was “taken, accepted, and reputed the only supreme head on earth of England,” a position that gave him control of doctrine, clerical appointments, and church discipline.

Using his new powers, Henry dissolved the monasteries in England. About 400 religious houses were closed in 1536 and their land and possessions confiscated by the king. Many were sold to nobles, gentry, and some merchants. The king not only received a great boost to his treasury but also created a group of supporters who now had a stake in the new Tudor order.

Henry VIII had broken with the papacy, but little changed in England; Henry remained conservative in his religious beliefs, and Catholic doctrine remained prominent in a country seething with Protestant sentiments. Henry did put forth the Six Articles of 1539 which declared the following: they reaffirmed transubstantiation, denied the Eucharist cup to the laity, declared celibate vows inviolable, provided for private masses, and ordered the continuation of auricular confession.

When Anne failed to provide Henry with a male heir, he had her tried for adultery and beheaded. Henry then married Jane Seymour who died in childbirth, but provided Henry with his only son, Edward VI.

Henry died in 1547 and was succeeded by his son, the underage and sickly Edward VI (1547-1553).

Under Edward, new acts of Parliament instituted the right of the clergy to marry, eliminated images, and created a revised Protestant liturgy that was elaborated in a new prayer book and liturgical guide known as the Book of Common Prayer.

In 1553 Mary Tudor (Catherine of Aragon’s daughter) came to the throne. She restored Catholic doctrine; she wanted to restore England to Roman Catholicism.

This aroused opposition. The burning of over 300 Protestant heretics roused further ire against “bloody Mary.” There also was widespread antipathy to Mary’s marriage to Philip II, the son of Charles V and future king of Spain. As a result of her policies, England was more Protestant by the end of her reign than it had been at the beginning. It was not until the reign of Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603), that a lasting religious settlement was worked out in England.

The Catholic Reformation:
By the beginning of the 16th century, constructive, positive forces were at work for reform within the Catholic Church. There were three parts to this change: the development of the Jesuits, the emergence of a reformed and revived papacy, and the Council of Trent.

The Society of Jesus, known as the Jesuits, was founded by a Spanish Nobleman, Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556). The new order was grounded on the principles of absolute obedience to the papacy, a strict hierarchical order for the society, the use of education to achieve its goals, and a dedication to engage in “conflict for God.”
Jesuit organization came to resemble the structure of a military command. Executive leadership was put into the hands of a general, who nominated all-important positions in the order and was to be revered as its absolute head.
Loyola served as the first general of the order until his death in 1556. A special vow of absolute obedience to the pope made the Jesuits an important instrument for papal policy.
Jesuit missionaries proved singularly successful in restoring Catholicism to parts of Germany and Eastern Europe.

A reformed Papacy was another important factor in the dev. Of the Cath. Ref. It took the jolt of the Protestant Ref. to bring about serious reform.

Pope Paul III (1534-1549) was the turning point.
Advocates of reform were made cardinals.
The selling of church offices were forbidden.
Bishops who resided in Rome were forced to return to their seats.
They had to preach regularly and conduct parish visits.
Parish priests were required to dress neatly, be educated, celibate, and active in their parishes.
A Roman Inquisition was established to ferret out heretics, first by Pope Paul III.
This was later strengthened by Pope Paul IV.
Paul IV also created the Index of Forbidden Books, a list of books that Catholics were not allowed to read. It included all the works of Protestant theologians as well as authors considered “unwholesome.” Any hope of restoring Christian unity by compromise was fast fading.

Pope Paul III also established the Council of Trent.
Trent reaffirmed the traditional Catholic teachings in opposition to Protestant beliefs.
Scripture and tradition were affirmed as equal authorities in religious matters
Only the Church could interpret scripture.
Both faith and good works were declared necessary for salvation.
The seven sacraments, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and clerical celibacy were all upheld.
Belief in purgatory and the efficacy of indulgences was strengthened, but hawking of indulgences was forbidden.
The position of the Church would not be significantly altered until Vatican II four hundred years later.

The Social Impact of The Protestant Reformation:
The Family:
Both Catholic and Protestant clergy preached sermons emphasizing a more positive side to family relationships.
Because Protestants had eliminated celibacy, the family could be placed at the center of human life, and a new stress on “mutual love between man and wife” could be extolled.
Nevertheless, reality stressed that the husband was the ruler of the wife.
The wife, most important duty was to bear children.
To Calvin and Luther, this was part of the divine plan.
Although Protestantism sanctified this role of woman as mother and wife, viewing it as a holy vocation, it also left few alternatives for women. For most Prot. Women, family life was their only destiny. Overall, the Prot. Ref. did not change women’s subordinate place in society.

Children: When children were between the ages of eight and thirteen, parents routinely sent them out of their homes into apprenticeships, off to school, or into employment.
In addition, the emotional ties between spouses seem to have been as tenuous as those between parents and children.
Widowers and widows often married again within a few months of their spouses’ deaths, and marriages with extreme disparity in age between partners also suggest limited affection.
An apprenticed child was self-supporting and hence had a future.
Considering the primitive living conditions, contemporaries could also appreciate the utilitarian and humane side of marriage and understand when widowers and widows quickly married again.

Religious practices and popular culture:
The Prot. Ref. abolished or severely curtailed such customary practices as indulgences, the veneration of relics and saints, pilgrimages, monasticism, and clerical celibacy.
The elimination of saints put an end to the numerous celebrations of religious holy days and changed a community’s sense of time.
In addition to abolishing saints’ days and religious carnivals, some protestant reformers even tried to eliminate customary forms of entertainment.
English Puritans (as English Calvinists were called), attempted to ban drinking in taverns, dramatic performances, and dancing.
Dutch Calvinists denounced the tradition of giving small presents to children on the feast of Saint Nicholas, near Christmas. Many of these attacks were unsuccessful.
The importance of taverns in English social life made it impossible to eradicate them, while celebrating at Christmastime persisted in the Dutch Netherlands. Europe in Crisis: War, Revolution, and Social Integration, 1650-1650

The so-called wars of religion were a product of Reformation ideologies that allowed little room for compromise or toleration of differing opinions. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Calvinism and Catholicism had become highly militant religions dedicated to spreading the work of God as they interpreted it.
While their struggle for the minds and hearts of Europeans was at the heart of the religious wars of the sixteenth century, economic, social, and political forces also played an important role in these conflicts.
Of the sixteenth century religious wars, none was more momentous nor shattering than the French civil wars known as the French Wars of Religion.

The French Wars of Religion (1562-1598)
Religion was as the heart of the French civil wars of the sixteenth cent. The growth of Clavinism had led to persecution by the French kings, but the latter did little to stop the spread of Calvinism.

Huguenots (named after Besancon Hughes, the leader of Geneva’s political revolt in the late 1520s) came from all layers of society: artisans and shopkeepers hurt by rising prices and a rigid guild system, merchants and lawyers in provincial towns whose local privileges were tenuous, and members of the nobility.

Possibly 40-50% of the French nobility became Huguenots, including the house of Bourbon, which stood next to the Valois in the royal line of Navarre. The conversion of so many nobles made the Huguenots a potentially dangerous political threat to monarchical power.

Although the Calvinists constituted only about 7% of the population, they were a dedicated, determined, and well-organized minority. The Valois monarchy was staunchly Catholic, and its control of the Catholic church gave it little incentive to look favorably upon Protestantism.

At the same time, an extreme Catholic party – known as the ultra – Catholics – favored strict opposition to the Huguenots. Possessing the loyalty of Paris and large sections of northern and northwestern France, the ultra-catholics could recruit and pay for large armies and received support abroad from the papacy and Jesuits who favored their noncompromising Catholic position.

The religious issue was not the only factor that contributed to the French civil wars.
Towns and provinces, which had long resisted the growing power of monarchical centralization, were only too willing to join a revolt against the monarchy.
This was also true of the nobility, and the fact that so many of them were Calvinists created an important base of opposition to the crown.

The French wars of religion, then, constituted a major constitutional crisis for France and temporarily halted the development of the French centralized territorial state.

The claim of the ruling dynasty to a person’s loyalties was temporarily superceded by loyalty to one’s religious belief. For thirty years battles raged in France between Catholic and Calvinist parties, who obviously considered the unity of France less important than religious truth.

But there also emerged in France a group of politiques who placed politics before religion and believed that no religious truth was worth the ravages of civil war.
The politiques ultimately prevailed, but not until both sides were exhausted by bloodshed.

Finally, in 1589, Henry of Navarrre, the political leader of the Huguenots and a member of the Bourbon dynasty, succeeded to the throne as Henry IV (1589-1610).
Realizing that Catholic France would never accept him, Henry took the logical way out and converted to Catholicism. With his coronation in 1594, the wars of religion finally came to an end.
The Edict of Nantes in 1598 solved the religious problem by acknowledging Catholicism as the official religion of France while guaranteeing the Huguenots the right to worship and to enjoy all political privileges, including the holding of public offices.

Imperial Spain and the Reign of Philip II (1556-1598):
The greatest advocate of militant Catholicism in the second half of the sixteenth century was King Philip II of Spain, the son and heir of Charles V. Philip’s reign ushered in an age of Spanish greatness.

Crucial to an understanding of Philip II is the importance of Catholicism to the Spanish people and their ruler. Driven by a heritage of crusading fervor, the Spanish had little difficulty seeing themselves as a nation of people divinely chosen to save Catholic Christianity from the Protestant heretics Philip II, the “Most Catholic King”, became the champion of Catholicism throughout Europe, a role that led to spectacular victories and equally spectacular defeats for the Spanish king. Spain’s leadership of a Holy League against Turkish encroachments in the Mediterranean resulted in a stunning victory over the Turkish fleet in 1571.

But Philip’s attempt to crush the revolt in the Netherlands and his tortured policy with the English Queen Elizabeth led to his greatest misfortunes.

The Revolt in The Netherlands:
One of the richest parts of Philip’s empire, the Spanish Netherlands was of great importance to Philip. His attempt to strengthen his control in the Netherlands, which consisted of seventeen provinces (modern Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg), soon led to a revolt.

The nobles, who stood to lose the most politically if their jealously guarded privileges and freedoms were weakened, strongly opposed Philip’s efforts.
Resentment against Philip was also aroused by the collection of taxes when the residents of the Netherlands realized that these revenues were being used for Spanish interests.

Violence erupted in 1566, when Calvinists, especially nobles – began to destroy statues and stained glass windows in Catholic churches. Philip responded by sending 10,000 veteran Spanish and Italian troops to crush the rebellion.
But the revolt became organized, especially in the northern provinces where the Dutch, under th leadership of William of Nassau, the prince of Orange, offered growing resistance.

The struggle dragged on for decades, until 1609, when a twelve-year truce ended the war, virtually recognizing the independence of the northern provinces.

These seven northern provinces, which began to call themselves the United Provinces of the Netherlands in 1581, became the core of the modern Dutch state.

The new state was officially recognized by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

The seventeenth cent. has often been called the “golden age” of the Dutch republic as the United Provinces held center stage as one of Europe’s great powers. Like France and England, the United Provinces was an Atlantic power, underlining the importance of the shift of political and economic power in the seventh cent. from the Mediterranean Sea to the countries on the Atlantic seaboard.

England and Spain (1558-1603):
When Elizabeth Tudor, the younger daughter of Henry VIII, ascended the throne in 1558, the set the stage for one of England’s mightiest periods. England became the leader of the Protestant nations of Europe and laid the foundations for a world empire.

Elizabeth moved quickly to solve the difficult religious problem she had inherited from her half-sister, queen Mary.
Elizabeth’s religious policy was based on moderation and compromise.
The Catholic legislation of Mary’s reign was repealed, and a new Act of Supremacy designated Elizabeth as “the only supreme governor of this realm as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes, as temporal.”
An Act of Uniformity restored the church service of the Book of Common Prayer from the reign of Edward VI with some revisions to make it more acceptable to Catholics.

The new religious settlement worked, at least to the extent that is smothered religious differences in England in the second half of the sixteenth century.

Deterioration of Relations with Spain:
Events led to war with Spain. The action of English pirates against Spanish ships and England’s committing soldiers to the Netherlands soured relationships with Spain. When Elizabeth reluctantly executed Mary, Queen of Scots, Phillip II had had enough.

On May 30, 1588 the Spanish Armada set sail for England. The faster English and Netherland ships defeated Spain. Spain never recovered.