Europe

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The Dawn of a New Age

This ambivalence was manifest in those who in the late 15th century began to explore the lands that lay beyond Europe’s shores. Insofar as they were inspired by religious zeal, captains such as Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, and Ferdinand Magellan made possible a vast missionary effort. Motivated by acquisitiveness as well, they contributed to a commercial revolution and the development of capitalism. As the principal sponsors of the earliest voyages, Portugal and Spain were the first to reap an economic harvest. Although the vast quantity of silver that poured into Spain from the Americas contributed to a “price revolution” (rapid devaluation of money and long-term inflation), it served initially to place extraordinary power in the hands of King Philip II. Heir to the Habsburg domains in western Europe and the Americas, Philip was also the self-appointed defender of the Roman Catholic faith. He opposed the ambitions of the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean not only because the Turks were imperial competitors but also because they were Muslim infidels. Similarly, his campaigns against the Netherlands and England were at once imperial and religious, his enemies in both cases being Protestants.

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The Reformation

The Protestant Reformation that Philip detested was begun in 1517, when Martin Luther proposed his Ninety-Five Theses for public debate. In search of personal salvation and offended by what he considered the sale of papal indulgences, the Wittenberg professor had arrived at a position that differed little from that for which Jan Hus (John Huss) had been martyred a century before. Having proclaimed salvation by faith alone, Luther refused to recant even when presented with a bull of excommunication. Despite its religious character, however, Luther’s challenge to the church was entangled with politics. Recognizing the danger of political repercussions, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V placed Luther under imperial ban.

Luther’s break with the church might have remained an isolated event had it not been for the invention of the printing press. Reproduced in large numbers and widely circulated, his writings served as the catalyst for even more radical reform—that of the Anabaptists. In their determination to re-create the atmosphere of primitive Christianity, the Anabaptists were opposed by Roman Catholics and Lutherans alike. Nor could the Reformation be contained geographically; it entered Switzerland when Huldreich Zwingli championed its cause in Zürich. In Geneva, French-born John Calvin published the first great work of Protestant theology, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536). Just as important, Calvinism proved to be the most politically militant of the Protestant confessions.

Unable to preserve western Christian unity, the Roman Catholic Church did not abandon the field to the Protestants. Although not merely a response to the Protestant challenge, the Counter Reformation represented an effort by the church to reinvigorate the instruments of authority. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) reaffirmed traditional Roman Catholic dogma, denounced ecclesiastical abuses, and established the Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden Books. In the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius Loyola, the Counter Reformation could boast of an organization as militant and dedicated as that of any Protestant confession.

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Religious Wars

The struggle between Roman Catholics and Protestants could not be confined to the spiritual arena. During the period from 1550 to 1650, protracted religious wars occasioned widespread death and destruction. These religious struggles were, however, inextricably intertwined with political contests that eventually assumed primary importance. In France, bloody civil strife between Roman Catholics and Huguenots (Protestants) dragged on for 30 years until Henry IV was recognized as king in 1593. Placing secular power above religious loyalty, the Protestant Henry converted to Roman Catholicism, the faith recognized by the majority of his subjects. In the Netherlands, Roman Catholic Spain and the Calvinist Dutch provinces fought a long and brutal war (1567-1609) that ended in victory for the latter. Here, religion was closely identified with national aspiration; Dutch leader William of Orange, a Roman Catholic and a Lutheran before becoming a Calvinist, summoned his people above all else to national resistance.

In England, too, the religious struggle was part of a more encompassing effort to ensure national independence from Rome. Under Queen Elizabeth I, reasons of state dictated religious policy; as a result, Protestant administrative autonomy and Roman Catholic ritual were skillfully woven into a fabric of compromise that produced the Church of England. With the aid of treacherous storms (the “Protestant Wind”), Elizabethan England turned back the “Invincible Armada” sent against it by Philip II of Spain in 1588, a victory as much national as it was religious.

The Thirty Years’ War was the last religious and the first modern war. Ignited in Bohemia, where Roman Catholic Habsburgs and Protestant Czechs stood in fierce opposition, the fires of war were fed by Lutheran Denmark and Sweden. Almost from the first, however, the war’s character was ambiguous; although religious passions certainly contributed, the war had by 1635 become a political contest between the Habsburg and Bourbon families, both Roman Catholic. Consistent with the transitional and tension-ridden character of the age, it was Cardinal Richelieu, a prince of the church whose interests were secular, who led the French into the fray. At the end of the war France emerged as the greatest power on the European continent and the prototype of the secular, centralized state.

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The Age of Absolutism

In the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, absolutism began to take recognizable form; the secular, centralized state replaced feudal political conceptions and institutions as the instrument of worldly power and influence. Through the efforts of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, France had emerged as the first great modern power. In 1661, when Louis XIV assumed control of the country’s affairs, he understood that new territories could be won only by mobilizing the economic and military resources of the entire nation. The series of wars that he visited upon Europe failed to transform his boldest dreams into realities, but the effort itself would have been impossible without the mercantilist economic policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and the creation of a large standing army. The vast military and civil bureaucracy that was the inevitable concomitant of Louis’s unbridled territorial ambition soon began to take on a life of its own, and although the king may have believed that he was the state, he had in fact become its first servant. A similar fate overtook the French aristocracy. As feudal diversity fell victim to bureaucratic rationality, aristocrats were obliged to surrender political power to bureaucratic officers called intendants.

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The Centralized State

Perceiving that power was trump, other European monarchs were quick to emulate French absolutism. Tsar Peter the Great devoted his energies to transforming Russia into a major military power. As part of his program of Westernization he created a standing army and a navy, encouraged the study of Western technology, and insisted that nobility be defined by service to the state. Moreover, he took steps to rationalize government administration. These efforts were crowned with success when Russia defeated Sweden in the Great Northern War (1700-1721). Ensconced in their new capital at Saint Petersburg, Peter and his successors could no longer be left out of Europe’s political equation. Nor could Prussia, where the historical pattern was similar to that of most centralizing states: War and the expansionist impulse dictated the concentration of power, the standardization of administrative procedures, and the creation of a modern standing army.

The price to be paid for failing to centralize power was political decline, as manifested by the histories of Poland and the Ottoman Empire. The persistence of aristocratic independence so weakened Poland that it was finally devoured at three separate feasts (1772, 1793, 1795) by its neighbors Austria, Prussia, and Russia. The Turks, once the feared conquerors of southeastern Europe, were unable to prevent their Janissaries and provincial officials from usurping power that had once belonged to the sultan. As a result, the Ottoman Empire was on its way to becoming the “sick man of Europe” before the end of the 18th century.

Out of the wars that ravaged Europe between 1667 and 1721, a state system emerged that by and large survived until 1914. At the beginning of the period, France stood unchallenged as the greatest military power in Europe; by the second decade of the 18th century, however, England, Austria, Russia, and Prussia were all powers to be reckoned with. Instead of a French imperium, Europe was organized as an equilibrial group of great powers. Balance of power became the fundamental principle of European diplomacy and an effective counter to any aggression that had for its aim continental hegemony.