The Xenophile Historian

A History of Europe

1485 to 1618

	How the White Man Got Ahead of Everybody Else
	The Politics of Europe at the End of the Fifteenth Century
	The Subjugation of Italy
	Artists of the High Renaissance
	Machiavelli
	The Beginning of the Spanish Century
	Sixteenth-Century Economics
	The Reformation
	The Ups and Downs of Charles V
	Revolts in France and the Netherlands
	The Spanish Armada
	Merrie Olde England
	Sweden Returns to the Stage
	How to Elect a King
	North to the Orient
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For Europe the path to world domination was usually a slow, upward climb; much of the time the average person would have gone through his whole life without seeing any change in the continent's situation. Two European civilizations--those of the Greeks and the Romans--had amazed the world with their accomplishments, but more recently the most impressive civilizations had been those of the Arabs and the Chinese. Then in the late Middle Ages, Europe's rivals sank into stagnation. The empire of the Arabs broke up in the ninth and tenth centuries, and the Turks, recent converts to Islam, took over; they were not yet completely civilized, and thus did not promote the scholarship that was a characteristic of Islam up to that point. China succeeded in civilizing Korea, Japan and Vietnam, only to suffer permanent trauma when the Mongols conquered it in the thirteenth century. Meanwhile the Europeans were quietly making progress.

The modern historian no longer looks at political events, like wars and the actions of kings, as the only factors that can affect a nation. Usually he will look for economic trends as well. Before the industrial revolution, the vast majority of people were farmers, so anything that increased production on the farm increased the nation's income. Because Europe was colder and wetter than those places where agriculture had been practiced previously, some unknown inventor in the Roman Empire developed a heavy, wheeled plow, that did a better job of aerating the soil than the plows used in more arid climates. It took much of the Dark Ages for this tool to catch on, but once it did, farmers could afford the next labor-saving devices--the waterwheel and the windmill. As a result, every century after 600 A.D. saw Europe get a little richer, allowing its economy to advance from barbarism to feudalism to capitalism. Even the Black Death was only a temporary setback, because European society grew more efficient during the period of recovery.

Because the farms were producing more food than ever, Europe saw the return of cities; urban life had disappeared when the Roman Empire fell. Now that people could work somewhere besides the farm, the literacy rate began to rise; the typical fifteenth-century European was better educated than his grandparents, as well as richer. Two inventions worked together at this time to make education available to the new urban class: paper and printing. Previously books were extremely expensive, because they had to be copied by hand, and because the most popular writing material, parchment, was costly to make; it took about 300 sheepskins, for example, to make enough parchment for one Bible.⁽¹⁾ A medieval noble might have a library of twenty volumes, and only the Church could afford more than that. The cost of bookmaking didn't come down until the introduction of a cheaper material, namely paper. China had invented paper about two thousand years ago; the Arabs learned the paper secret in the eighth century, and they kept it out of Christian hands for as long as possible. Moslem Spain began producing a poor quality paper in the eleventh century; the Italians learned the secret near the end of the thirteenth century; Germany became the first land in Christendom to make paper on a large scale, around 1400. Once it became widely available, paper replaced parchment, and the supply of books began to increase, bringing down the price.

Printing had also first appeared in the Far East. The Chinese and Koreans had experimented with block printing for centuries, but it never completely replaced hand-copying, for reasons explained in my Chinese history. What made Johann Gutenberg's printing press so special was that it used moveable type; the letters were interchangeable between pages, making his equipment far more versatile and practical.

Few inventions have altered the course of history as thoroughly as moveable type did. Within a couple of decades, Gutenberg's printing press was being used all over western Europe, to copy the works of the past (Roman literature was more popular than ever in Italy, for reasons covered in the previous chapter), and to produce new books. We estimate that between 1455 (the year Gutenberg perfected his printing press) and 1500, Europeans published about 40,000 titles. Books became more affordable, too, now that they were so much easier to make. Before long, the printing press would also turn out pamphlets and tracts, allowing the rapid spread of new ideas to anyone who could read. That is why historians talk so much about how important the printing press was to Europe's intellectual awakening. And because Gutenberg had lived in the German city of Mainz, the Germans, so long scorned as barbarians by those living on the shores of the Mediterranean, could finally catch up with the rest of civilized Europe. At the end of the century, one German writier claimed that "Once upon a time Germany was poor in wisdom, power, and wealth; now it is not only equal to others in glorious work, but surpasses loquacious Greece, [and] proud Italy." For most of the time since, Europeans, rather than Asians, have been the world's most literate people; in the nineteenth century, a European could boast that a single bookshelf in one of his country's libraries was worth as much as all the literature from a non-European culture.

In ancient and medieval times, understanding any text was often an intellectual crap-shoot, even after the introduction of the alphabet. Ancient authors did not use many of the features in modern writing that we take for granted, like punctuation and spaces between the words.⁽²⁾ Thus the typical reader had to examine the text closely, especially if the scribe used an unusual style of penmanship, and ponder the meaning of every line; he couldn't read it at the same speed as a spoken conversation. Medieval monks who copied classical texts introduced spaces and periods, but they did so cautiously, lest these innovations use up too much of their precious parchments. They also invented lower-case letters and the Carolingian Minuscule script for the same reason, to get more words on the same page.

As the demand for books increased, a call went forth to make them easier to read. The most important improvement was the writing of books in the languages people use in daily life. Before 1300, no self-respecting author in western Europe would write his compositions in any language but Latin. The main reason for this, besides the Church's use of Latin, was because the major languages (e.g., English, Spanish, French, German and Italian) had dozens of dialects, unique ones for every province and every city. Therefore a book had to be written in Latin if the author wanted more than a few people to understand it. If you had suggested to a thirteenth-century English poet, for instance, that he should write his verses in English, he probably would have replied, "Yes, but what kind of English? That of London, York, Cornwall, or some other place?"

As it did with so many other things at the end of the Middle Ages, Italy led the way when it came to writing literature in the vernacular. We saw in Chapter 8 how Italian poetry had sprung up around the court of Frederick II, encouraging Dante Alighieri to write his greatest work, The Divine Comedy, in Italian. Those who read Dante's tale of a journey through hell, purgatory and heaven came to see his dialect (Tuscan) as the correct form of Italian, so Tuscan became the standard Italian dialect in the fourteenth century. Likewise, a standard German dialect arose in the 1520s, when Martin Luther translated the Bible into German. Once again it was the author's way of speaking and writing--in this case the form of German used in the state of Saxony--that was accepted. In the case of English, two sources of literature established the standard, William Shakespeare's plays and the King James Bible. France also produced a standardized form of French in the sixteenth century, but because the works of several authors were involved, and France's literacy rate was lower than that of neighbors like Germany and England, old dialects like Provençal managed to survive until about 1800, when Napoleon Bonaparte ordered that all schools do their instruction only in the official French. Finally, at the end of the sixteenth century, Don Quixote, the brilliant satire by Miguel de Cervantes, established the official form of Spanish.

The rise of standardized languages not only made communication much easier; it also slowed down the rate at which vocabulary and grammar changed. For example, it became necessary around 1520 to produce a new English translation of the Bible, because John Wycliffe's 140-year-old translation could no longer be understood, but today we can still enjoy Shakespeare's works with just a high school education, four hundred years after the Bard wrote them.

An educated person is a more flexible person; he is aware that there is more than one way to solve a problem, and that research may discover a better answer than the ones known already. The medieval European mindset was rigid instead of flexible, because books were written in the Church's secret language and the Church owned most of the books in circulation. Now that those barriers had been lifted, more people began thinking for themselves, and the "Age of Faith" ended. Nobody at the dawn of the modern era was more curious about the world than the Europeans. Their intellectual flexibility allowed European technology to progress at an ever-increasing rate, producing exciting changes with every generation. By contrast, other cultures would not allow a challenge to their traditions; often the attitude here was that their ancestors had already learned everything worth knowing. Asians, for example, might try European-made clocks and guns, but any idea that disagreed with what they believed was rejected outright--or not noticed at all.

The Politics of Europe at the End of the Fifteenth Century

The Spanish part of the puzzle pulled itself together in the late fifteenth century. We noted in the last chapter how Castile and Aragon were united by marriage in 1469, but technically they remained separate administrative units while Ferdinand and Isabella were alive. In 1481 the final war with Granada began, and the two Christian rulers found it very slow going, with a long siege required for every town and castle. Even so, by 1490 only the city of Granada was left. On the first day of 1492, the Castilians took the Alhambra, and the rest of the city surrendered the next day. The Moslem ruler, Boabdil, waited for Their Catholic Majesties to arrive, formally abdicated in their presence, and rode off to exile in Africa. According to legend, he stopped for a last look over his lost domain at a mountain pass now called Suspiro del Moro (the Sigh of the Moor), and as he shed a tear at the sight, his bossy mother, Aisha, said, "Fitting you cry like a woman over what you could not defend like a man." The treaty that ended the war promised freedom of worship, but soon Ferdinand and Isabella, egged on by the Inquisition, were exiling every Moslem (and Jew) they could find.

Now that all of Spain had been liberated, there was talk about sending a Crusade across the Straits of Gibraltar, thereby turning the tables on the Moorish invaders. Ferdinand thought this would have been a profitless operation. The Portuguese had been active in Africa since 1415, and in 1494, the pope produced a treaty that awarded all of Africa to Portugal. However, the leader of the Spanish church, Cardinal Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros, provided the organization and the funds needed for such an expedition, and neither Isabella nor Ferdinand would say no to him. They easily took a Moroccan port, Melilla, in 1497. Ximenes personally led the force that captured the next port, Oran, in 1509, and in 1510 they seized three more ports--Bougie, Tunis and Tripoli--plus an offshore island near Algiers. Then they stopped, because they would have been overextended if they had tried to invade the hostile interior of Africa. What's more, Spain had found more attractive opportunites in the New World, so it made sense to send available men and resources there. The tide began to turn when Algiers called on the Turks for help; they responded by sending the notorious pirate Barbarossa, and Algiers eventually became the capital of the Ottoman Empire's westernmost province.

On paper, the three most important states of Christendom were France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Poland; France was the richest, and the other two were the largest. In practice, however, none of them were managed very well. France's problem was the behavior of its kings and dukes. This was largely because the French kings still gave their brothers duchies that were about as big as the king's "royal domain" around Paris, ignoring nearly a thousand years of experience which spoke against this practice. The duchies acted like independent states and held back taxes and soldiers that should have gone to the crown. Even worse, the dukes had a knee-jerk reaction against any attempt to centralize the state, and if not allowed to do what they pleased, they were likely to go over to the enemies of France. We saw in the previous chapter, for example, how the most dangerous duchy, Burgundy, supported England for most of the Hundred Years War.

After they drove out the English, the French kings cut their dukes down to size, but the Holy Roman emperors could not do the same. Despite the name, the "Empire" was really an aristocratic republic that used Christian terminology; each emperor started out as the ruler of a minor state, and had to be elected by his peers. From the start the Empire had been too large to administer properly, and in the late thirteenth century it turned into a confederation. Politics encouraged this dissolution; to win an election, the emperor had to make concessions to the dukes, margraves and archbishops who voted for him, something that could (and often did) come back to bite him later on. No revenue went directly to the imperial throne, and because having the throne meant additional responsibilities, like defending central Europe from Turkish invasions, without rewards to match, emperors found themselves weighed down by a millstone-like burden after they were crowned.⁽³⁾ For this reason the nobles got into the habit of electing someone from the strongest family among them, usually the Hapsburgs. Equally paralyzing, the emperor could not take any important action without the consent of the Diet, a Parliament whose membership was open to every noble holding land in the Empire, down to the lowliest knight. The Diet showed how inefficient government by committee could get; it met infrequently, the members took their duties lightly (many didn't even bother showing up for meetings, and sent deputies instead), and membership included some foreigners who held property in the Empire, like the king of Denmark--they had no wish to see the Empire run efficiently!

A proper description of the Empire is almost impossible. Its official boundary had changed only slightly in the two centuries since the Hohenstaufen emperors. It included all of modern Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Bohemia-Moravia (today's Czech Republic), Schleswig-Holstein (two north German duchies ruled by Denmark since 1460), Switzerland, the Low Countries, Corsica and all of north Italy but Venice. It had no central treasury, no imperial capital, and no standing army. The Empire was divided into about 2,000 separate pieces of territory--some of which were nothing more than a castle with a little land surrounding it--organized into nearly 300 self-governing states.⁽⁴⁾ All the largest states were in the east: Pomerania, Brandenburg, Lusatia, Silesia, Saxony, Bohemia, Moravia, Bavaria and Austria. Bohemia, Moravia, Lusatia and Silesia had Slavic, not German populations, and at the beginning of this period, all of them except Bohemia belonged to the king of Hungary. Also important was the bishopric of Salzburg, an independent theocracy in the middle of Austria.

The Hapsburgs entered the modern era in a weakened state. During a long, inept reign, Frederick III (1439-93) had lost most of the family's estates, leaving only Austria and Slovenia. The next emperor, Maximilian I, succeeded in building a new empire, through the use of political marriages. For himself he landed the Low Countries by marrying the heiress of Burgundy. He probably would have taken a French heiress next, Anne of Brittany, if France's Charles VIII hadn't married her first. His biggest wedding coup involved his son Philip and the daughter of Spain's Ferdinand and Isabella; more about that later.

Poland was riding high at the beginning of the modern era. Its merger with Lithuania in 1386, like that of Castile and Aragon, had been a complete success, creating a huge realm that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It also gave the Poles leadership over half of the eastern Slavs (peoples we now call Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians), and Russian cities like Smolensk, Kiev and Odessa. Despite being a two-headed state, it coordinated defense very well; the Poles managed diplomacy and armed action against enemies to the north and west, while the Lithuanians did the same for enemies to the east and south. At this stage the Polish-Lithuanian army had the best cavalry in Europe, and it could kick the butt of everybody else. However, it seems that the nobility believed things would always be this way, because they set up a government that rarely got anything done; its parliament, also known as the Sejm (Diet), required a unanimous vote for any law or decree to be passed. Like their counterparts in France and Germany, these nobles were paranoid about any attempt to modernize the country, so Poland fell behind its neighbors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Subjugation of Italy

Lorenzo the Magnificent died in the same year that Alexander VI became pope. Lorenzo's son, Piero, was dim and fickle by comparison. Innocent VIII, the immediate predecessor of Alexander, declared prophetically that "the peace of Italy is at an end." Two years later, the people of Florence suffered a major fit of revulsion, against both the debauched pontiff and their own ungodly lifestyle; they chased the Medicis away and put a monk, Girolamo Savonarola, in charge. For the next four years Savonarola worked to turn the center of the Renaissance into a city of righteousness; he called the pope "Antichrist" in his weekly sermons, and denounced luxury. Hymns replaced racy songs, religious processions replaced tournaments, and people destroyed their worldly books, paintings and hairpieces in "bonfires of vanity." Eventually this got to be too much for the Florentines, though, and when the pope threatened Florence with both excommunication and invasion, they hanged Savonarola, burned his body, and went back to their old liberal ways.⁽⁶⁾

In 1483 Charles VIII, the thirteen-year-old son of Louis XI, became king of France. He had a claim to the crown of Naples, dating back to the days when Charles of Anjou ruled southern Italy (see Chapter 8), but because of troubles at home like the Hundred Years War, no French king had tried to enforce it for nearly two hundred years. Ferdinand of Spain had a better claim, because a relative of his ruled Naples now; Charles tried to buy him off by giving back the Aragonese province that Louis XI had purchased from Ferdinand's father (Rousillon). To keep the English off the Continent, Charles signed the Treaty of Étaples with Henry VII (1492). Finally he settled Maximilian I's claim to all the Burgundian lands once owned by his wife by giving Artois, Picardy and the County of Burgundy to the Hapsburgs. Thus, Charles threw away the very sensible gains of Louis XI so that he could attack Naples (1494). Pope Alexander VI made concessions to get Charles out of the Papal State as quickly as possible, and then formed an anti-French League of Venice. Charles returned to France a year later, after barely escaping defeat at the battle of Fornovo (Taro).

From the Italian point of view, the best years of the Renaissance ended with Charles VIII's invasion. They had gotten used to being without major wars and foreign domination, and figured that their diplomats could keep the status quo indefinitely. Now that was all over; Francesco Guicciardini voiced the sentiments of many when he wrote about "those happy times before '94" in his History of Florence (1509). Nor was this an accident; the Italians knew that they had brought the calamity upon themselves. It started in a dispute over who was the rightful duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza (the current officeholder) or his nephew, Gian Galeazzo Sforza. The king of Naples was Gian's father-in-law, so naturally he supported Gian's claim. In response, Ludovico called on the French for help, promising to back Charles if he marched on Naples to assert his Angevin claim. Italian leaders had made such appeals to foreign powers in the past, but usually it was only a bluff. This time, to Italy's great misfortune, the French actually came, bringing an army greater than what any state in the peninsula could match.

There was no rational thinking behind the strategy of Charles VIII. If there was a logical direction for French expansion, it was north into the Low Countries, not across the Alps. Unfortunately his tutors had not taught him diplomacy, but stories of bravery and chivalry. Moreover, southern Italy looked like a good base for future crusades against the Turks (the Turks took the Italian port of Otranto in 1480, and only the sultan's death had caused them to withdraw), so Charles must have seen the whole business as a great adventure. It didn't do France any good, even in the short run. Ferdinand had the pope's blessing (henceforth he was known as "Ferdinand the Catholic" for his activities in Italy), so he reclaimed Naples as soon as Charles left. Before he went home, Charles announced that he had a claim to Milan, too, and tried to take over his ally. Consequently Milan joined Ferdinand and Naples in expelling the French.

Charles died suddenly in 1498, and a distant relative, Louis XII, succeeded him. Louis was less foolish than Charles, but he also let his legal rights dictate his strategy. The French invaded Italy again, occupying Milan in 1499; a year later, Ferdinand and Louis signed a treaty which dropped the claim of the illegitimate Aragonese line to Naples, and divided the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies between France and Spain. Despite these intentions, a quarrel ruined the agreement almost immediately. Fighting resumed, and after the French suffered two defeats at Cerignola and Garigliano (1502-03), Ferdinand added both the territory and the crown of Naples to his collection. Since the French remained in Milan and Genoa, most of Italy had been divided and conquered by the two greatest powers in western Europe. Ten years later, Niccolo Machiavelli would lament that his native land had become "more a slave than the Hebrews, more a servant than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians; without head, without government; defeated, plundered, torn asunder, overrun; subject to every sort of disaster."⁽⁷⁾ Over the next generation, famine would stalk the war-ravaged areas of the peninsula, while non-Italian armies killed more men in a single afternoon than the condottieri had lost in half a century.

Now the scene of the conflict moved north. The most important remaining independent state, Venice, had used the chaos of the recent war to take Rimini and Urbino from the Papal State, so Pope Julius II formed an alliance with Louis XII, Ferdinand, and Maximilian I to teach the Venetians a lesson. Against this coalition, Venice didn't stand a chance, and lost most of its mainland territory (1509). Then the pope abruptly shifted gears again, leaving the alliance to form a new one, the "Holy League to Liberate Italy." This time the League included Ferdinand, Maximilian, Henry VIII of England, the Swiss and even the recently defeated Venetians; their goal was to drive the French out of the peninsula. There was an interesting episode in this war where the pope became a military leader, putting on armor and going forth to capture Perugia and Bologna. Louis managed to get Scotland to attack the English, but the Scots went down to defeat in the battle of Flodden Field, and their king, James IV, was killed (1513). Encircled by his enemies, Louis had to abandon Italy in the same year. Meanwhile to the west, direct warfare across the Pyrenees gave Ferdinand the opportunity to annex Navarre in 1512, completing the unification of Spain.

Artists of the High Renaissance

The great architect of the High Renaissance was Donato Bramante (1444-1514), from Milan. Bramante's most important commission came in 1506 when Pope Julius II requested that he replace the old church of St. Peter, built by the emperor Constantine (see Chapter 5), with a more majestic structure. Bramante's plan called for shaping the church in the form of a Greek cross, with an immense dome on top. His design exemplifies the spirit of High Renaissance architecture--to create buildings that approach the monumentality and grandeur of Roman architecture. In Bramante's own words, he would place "the Pantheon on top of the Basilica of Maxentius." The project took most of the sixteenth century, and Bramante only lived long enough to see the first stage of it; thus Michelangelo and others had to finish it.

The three greatest High Renaissance artists were Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. An extraordinary man, Leonardo (1452-1519) was skilled in many fields: engineering, mathematics, architecture, geology, botany, physiology, anatomy, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. Like Giotto and Donatello, he got his start as an apprentice to another great artist, Andrea del Verrocchio in this case. In his early years, he would follow his subjects around the streets of Florence for hours until he could paint them perfectly, and his observation of how birds fly caught details that nobody else saw until the invention of high-speed photography. In his spare time, he drew sketches of various devices he got ideas for, including parachutes, helicopters, tanks, rotating bridges, and weather instruments like the hygrometer. Many of these designs were practical, and all show an imagination far ahead of its time. Wanting to learn everything, he constantly experimented, and thus a lot of what he started was never finished.

Besides being a superb draftsman, Leonardo was a master of soft modeling in light and shade; by using several layers of translucent paint, he could give a picture an astonishing illusion of depth. He also applied his knowledge of human nature, the best-known example being the enigmatic smile in the Mona Lisa. As he explained it, "A good painter has two chief objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul."

Leonardo was less successful with frescoes, paintings done on wet plaster. Fresco work has to be done before the plaster dries, and Leonardo wanted to work at a slower pace. The alternatives he tried didn't work, causing many of his masterpieces to peel off the walls within a few years. His famous mural The Last Supper, for example, has needed repainting several times. His last years were also a story of sad futility. In 1506 he found employment with the king of France, and the great thinker ended up arranging fireworks displays and doing tricks for children at the French court. Many of his sketches, including his anatomical drawings, lay forgotten in an attic in Rome, and thus did not play a part in the scientific revolutions of the modern era.

Raphael, whose full name was either Raffaello Santi or Raffaello Sanzio, only lived to be 37 (1483-1520), but he probably produced more great works of art, in many styles, than any other painter in history. By the time Pope Julius II summoned him to Rome to decorate the Vatican (1508), Raphael had successfully learned the styles of Leonardo and Michelangelo. His Stanza frescoes in the Vatican, which combine classical and Christian subject matter, show careful planning and immense artistic knowledge; some have called them a pictorial encyclopedia of humanism. Raphael possessed neither Leonardo's curiosity nor Michelangelo's power, but he could portray either an appealing serenity, as was the case in his lovely Madonnas, or the hectic gestures and exaggerations that characterize many mid-sixteenth century works ("Mannerism"). Most critics consider him the master of perfect design and balanced composition.

Whereas Leonardo tried to do everything, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) concentrated on painting and sculpture, excelling in both of them. Stories of his stormy and temperamental personality made him the original eccentric genius, and there is something almost superhuman about both Michelangelo and his art. His great energy allowed him to complete in four years the entire work of painting the ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel, an area of several thousand square yards, while lying on his back on a suspended platform. With his unrivaled genius for rendering the human form, he devised many expressive positions and attitudes for his figures, from his scenes of Adam & Eve to the portrayal of the Last Judgment.

Despite his painting skill, Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor first. He found sculpting an appropriate challenge for his intellect, because it took longer than painting, required physical exertion, and because it made too much noise to do while listening to music. Even so, he successfully produced classical-style sculptures, especially those that glorified the human body.⁽⁸⁾ In 1546 he got Bramante's job as chief architect of St. Peter's, and he designed the cathedral's great dome. Michelangelo's dome has influenced the design of most major domed buildings ever since. He was still actively working as a sculptor when he died at the age of 89, long after the end of the High Renaissance.

Venice contributed to Renaissance art by introducing rich colors, the result of experimentation with oil glazes by Giovanni Bellini in the late 15^th century (Italian artists had used mostly tempera paints up to this point). Bellini's students, especially Giorgione (1477-1510) and Titian (1477?-1576), produced a sensuous style that was full of decoration, rich costumes, striking nude figures, radiant light and a variety of color tones. This enthralled the Venetians, but not some Florentine purists. One of them, Michelangelo, remarked that although he admired Titian's "coloring and style, it was a pity good design was not taught in Venice."

Finally, the opening years of the sixteenth century saw humanism and Italian-style art spread beyond Italy, sparking a "Northern Renaissance." The Reformation cut this movement short in much of northern Europe, especially Germany, but in France, England and Spain it lasted for the rest of the sixteenth, and even into part of the seventeenth century. Unfortunately a discussion of the many individuals involved is beyond the scope of this work; I'll just have to list the most important names, with the confidence that any humanities student will recognize them. Germany gave us Albrecht Dürer, a master at making art from woodcuts, while the Netherlands was home to Desiderius Erasmus, one of history's greatest philosophers. From France came the satirist François Rabelais, and from England we have several writers, chief of which were Sir Thomas More and William Shakespeare. Spain took until 1600 to produce some great talent of her own, but eventually gave to the world the painter El Greco, the novelist Miguel de Cervantes, and the dramatist Lope de Vega.

Machiavelli

In his manual on how to run a government, Machiavelli showed no interest in how things should be; all that mattered was how things really were. There was no place for righteousness, no place for Utopias, and no place for God, in his vision. For him the ultimate goal was gaining power and keeping it; whether his ideal prince had the support of the people he ruled was incidental. This morally blind man has left many readers cold, but one has to remember that he lived in a place full of morally blind men. Many kings and statesmen have regarded The Prince as political wisdom, and have often used it to justify what they planned to do anyway. However, he also gave good advice on why a regular army is better than a corps of mercenaries, and as a true Italian patriot, he called for getting all foreigners out of the peninsula. He proposed an alliance of all states in Italy, with a single Italian army to defend against invaders like France and Spain, yet a complete political unification was too much even for him; when somebody suggested such a union, Machiavelli wrote back a tart reply: "Don't make me laugh."

A central topic in The Prince was the question, "Is it better to be loved or to be feared?" Idealists in any age would say the former, but Machiavelli preferred the latter. "It is much safer to be feared than loved," he wrote. "Men have less hesitation to offend one who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared; for love is held by a chain of obligation, which, because men are wicked, is broken at every opportunity for their own utility, but fear is held by a dread of punishment that never forsakes you."⁽⁹⁾ He went on to discuss Cesare Borgia, whom he traveled with for several months, and how he was a cruel ruler, but never had a problem with revolts in the area he ruled. However, he also pointed out that a wise ruler will try to avoid being hated. Along similar lines, he felt that stinginess serves a leader better than generosity. A generous leader must "burden the people extraordinarily, to be rigorous with taxes, and to do all those things that can be done to get money." The subjects of a generous leader will never be satisfied, and will become resentful easily, while a man with a reputation for stinginess will be praised for even the smallest gift he gives to his subjects. Finally, he argued that a leader's first priority should be military matters. Like it or not, these ideas have been required reading for "princes" ever since, including today's presidents.

The Beginning of the Spanish Century

Ferdinand and Isabella's heir was a daughter named Joanna. She married Philip I, Maximilian's son by his Burgundian wife. Philip died in 1506, at the age of twenty-eight, and that caused Joanna to go insane, earning her the nickname of Juana la Loca, Joanna the Mad. She spent the next three years traveling around Spain, to get her mind off the tragedy, but it didn't work, because she brought Philip's body with her. Eventually Ferdinand had to declare her incompetent; he locked her up in Tordesillas Castle, along with her dead husband and some musicians for entertainment, and there she spent the remaining forty-seven years of her life.

The combined possessions of Castile, Aragon and the Hapsburgs now passed to the eldest son of Philip and Joanna, Charles V. Born in Ghent in 1500, Charles was raised with every privilege; his tutor, for example, would one day become the Dutch pope, Adrian VI. Now he had a fabulous inheritance: the Low Countries, Austria, Slovenia, Spain, nearly half of Italy, various Mediterranean islands, most of the New World, and dibs on the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. It included a third of Christian Europe, more than any king had held in centuries, so Charles looked like a reincarnation of Charlemagne. As one of his advisors put it: "Sire, God has granted you a most wonderful grace . . . He has set you on the way toward a world monarchy, toward a gathering of all Christendom under a single shepherd."

The truth, however, was quite different. Charles was not a master soldier or politician, but a moody fellow who liked to attend funerals and eat fish; H. G. Wells called him the best example of how a mediocre person can rise to the top. And many Europeans had outgrown the Crusader mentality by now, so it was no longer possible for all Christians to unite behind one leader for a holy war; people were beginning to pay more attention to a person's nationality than to his religion. Charles found most of non-Hapsburg Europe opposing him, canceling out the assets he had. Three groups gave him trouble constantly: the French, the Turks, and the Protestants.

Among these groups, the French acted first. In 1515, the year before Charles became king of Spain, the French got a dashing new king, Francis I. More than forty years of struggles between the Hapsburg and Valois royal houses followed. As soon as his coronation was over, Francis led an army over the Alps, crushed the Swiss in a two-day battle at Marignano⁽¹⁰⁾ and re-occupied Milan. Then Maximillian died in 1519, and the German electors had second thoughts about electing a Hapsburg, in view of how much Charles had already. Francis campaigned for the imperial crown, playing on the electors' misgivings; England's Henry VIII also offered himself as a candidate, because he was related to the Hapsburgs by marriage. Charles won the election by borrowing 800,000 ducats from the House of Fugger⁽¹¹⁾, and spending it on bribes.

Sixteenth-Century Economics

The Hanseatic League (see Chapter 9) still dominated the North-Baltic Sea network at the beginning of this period, but the League's Dutch rivals were catching up fast. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when national governments were weak and long-distance commerce was limited, the League stood out as the world's best example of international cooperation. Then came the rise of centralized nation-states, with policies like mercantilism; this was something that a loose commercial alliance couldn't deal with. One by one the countries beyond Germany closed their ports to the League, starting with a former member, Novgorod, in 1494 (Novgorod had been conquered by Moscow's Ivan III in 1478). Although the League continued to exist until 1669, after 1530 it was no longer important. However, Denmark, the League's traditional enemy, did not benefit from its decline; in return for English and Dutch help against the League, the Danes had promised to let them have the League's trading privileges, so first Antwerp, and then Amsterdam, replaced Lübeck as the Venice of the north.

The commodities carried by the Italian and Dutch traders hadn't changed much from the usual cargoes of the Middle Ages. Poland and the Teutonic Knights were still the main source of grain, Russia provided furs, and Scandinavia provided fish. England, the Low Countries and northern Italy continued to make the best textiles. The best iron came from Sweden, and most of the coal came from England and Belgium; production of both rose dramatically during this period, though the industrial revolution was still a couple of centuries away. The source of sugar shifted more than once, moving from the Mediterranean to the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, and then to the New World in the sixteenth.

At the beginning of the modern era, the most lucrative products came from Asia; Venice and Genoa picked up Asian silks, porcelain and spices from Ottoman and Mameluke ports, and brought them to Europe. Those goods, especially the spices, were ridiculously expensive by the time they reached the consumer, because they had passed through so many middlemen. Spain and Portugal, who were among the countries farthest away, definitely knew they were paying too much. This motivated the Iberians to build first-rate fleets of their own, and send out explorers like Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama to find a cheaper trade route to the Orient.

Europe's older cities served the same purpose as the capitals of ancient empires--they were home to the king and his court. They consumed nearly all the wealth they generated, unless they happened to be on a key trade route, like Constantinople. The new Italian and Dutch cities, on the other hand, were like the ancient Phoenician and Greek cities, in that commerce was the main reason for their existence. Most medieval Europeans paid their bills through barter or labor; only clerks and governments handled coins on a regular basis. That however, was now rapidly changing, as money became available again and Europeans found that cash was so much easier to use than other forms of payment, like bushels of grain, bundles of cloth or live animals.

Because of their financial strength, the northern Italian towns were tremendously influential, even though none of them belonged to large political units. The Venetian and Genovese fleets controlled the Mediterranean, and Venice still had a string of island bases left over from the Crusades. Milan and Florence were rich because they were manufacturing and banking centers. All four cities ran their budgets like today's nations and corporations, and collected taxes that averaged nearly a ducat per head a year. Nobody else could match this collection rate. The Mameluke sultans of Egypt could raise about two thirds of this amount from each of their subjects, because their subjects were concentrated along a natural highway, while the best others could manage was a third of a ducat per head, and even then the taxpayer usually ended up paying less than that. England's kings were kept on a tight leash; the Tudor monarchs had to live off whatever they collected from their own estates, plus customs duties, and if they wanted more they had to ask Parliament for it.⁽¹²⁾

Economics is not an exact science today, but five hundred years ago the winds of the market place were totally unpredictable. A nation's income could change violently from year to year, and while most governments prepared budgets, they were really statements of hope, not to be taken seriously. Beyond Italy, most rulers did not seem to realize that it is easier to spend money than to earn or collect it, so just about every court spent itself into the red, and because they were credit risks, they had to pay usurious interest rates (10-30%) on the funds they borrowed. They continued to follow the age-old practice of showing off their social status by spending large sums on stuff they did not need; for example, the wedding and dowry of a minor princess might cost more than her state's income for that year. Most European states went bankrupt at least once per generation, so kings could turn on their creditors without warning. They might accuse them of crimes and balance the books by making them pay fines, or if they were Jews, exile or massacre them and confiscate their belongings. If they got really lucky, they could abduct a rival and hold him for ransom, the way an enemy of England's Richard I did in the twelfth century. As time went on, Europeans gave more respect to the rule of law, so royal bankruptcies grew less bloody, but they still happened with distressing regularity. When kings found that they couldn't solve their problems with violence, they tried debasing their coins, which increased the money supply and caused inflation at the same time. Usually this reduced the value of their debts, at the expense of making the lives of the common people miserable. If everything else failed, they might sell some of their legal rights and their landholdings, which was a quick way to lose political power. Thus, the clever king or prince would always keep an eye out for any way to increase his income.

Spain thought it had found such an opportunity when the conquistadors captured the gold and silver of the New World. Galleons full of silver from Mexico and Peru, and the boom in commerce this influx of cash produced, combined to raise Spain's annual income to nearly ten million ducats by 1600, more than five times what it had been a century earlier. Among Spain's rivals, only France could earn even half that amount. The New World colonies also had sugar plantations, as we mentioned above, and Mexico eventually became an exporter of leather. The huge income from all these sources was good for the Spanish state, but surprisingly, the lives of the Spanish people did not get better; in fact, life got tougher for them. There were three reasons for this:

1. The law of supply and demand. This concept was not well understood before Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations. If you suddenly inject a large sum of money into a market, and leave the supply of goods constant, more people are going to want to buy those goods, causing prices to rise. In the case of Spain, it caused something we now call a "price revolution." Over the course of the sixteenth century, prices went up fourfold; each price increase started in Spain when a silver shipment arrived at Cadiz, and spread across Europe in a ripple effect. Wages increased too, but not enough to keep up with inflation.

2. The bills of the crown. The wars, politics and debts of Charles V and Philip II cost a tremendous amount, so much so that often the money was spent before it even got to Spain. If there was any left over, it was spent too, instead of being invested toward increasing future returns.

3. Spain wasn't able to produce everything its colonies required. The Spaniards who settled the New World needed manufactured goods, especially when they were in newly founded outposts. However, the mother country made a living from raw materials: farming and mining. Spain would have to switch from feudalism to capitalism to meet the new needs, and Spaniards were so obsessed with chivalry and tradition (remember Don Quixote) that their society remained stuck in the Middle Ages. Because of the inflation, Spanish industry was too expensive to attract customers. The government responded with a policy of mercantilism to protect its workers, but smugglers still managed to get the cheaper products of other countries into Spain. Because of the crying need for them in the colonies, goods manufactured by rivals like the Netherlands even showed up in the cargo holds of Spanish ships.

If anyone benefitted from rising prices, it was the merchants, and because the Netherlands had so many of them, this explains how the Dutch could wage a war for independence that lasted eighty years. Another side effect was the economic split in the Low Countries. The south (modern-day Belgium) remained under Spanish rule during and after the war, so it stagnated, while the free north boomed, making Amsterdam the fastest-growing city in Europe. It was in the Netherlands that capitalism evolved into the form we recognize (the stock market was a Dutch invention). In addition to being the best money managers, the Dutch could also build and run ships at a lower cost than anybody else. For these reasons, the early seventeenth century would be the time when the little Dutch republic went on overseas ventures that amazed the rest of Europe.

During the Middle Ages, Italy always maintained a healthy financial lead over the north; that ended in the sixteenth century. The most obvious reason was Portugal's discovery that one can sail to Asia by going around Africa, eliminating the need for Venetian traders. Italy was in a poor location to take advantage of New World discoveries, compared to the nations on the Atlantic seaboard. When Italians (Columbus, Vespucci, Verrazano, the Cabots, etc.) went across the Atlantic, they did so in the service of others. On top of all that, the spice trade wasn't showing the old-time profits. The Venetians, believing that the spice must flow, continued to handle as much of it at the end of this period as they did at the beginning, so the matching amount that the Portuguese brought back caused prices to drop. There was also a disruption of trade for much of the period between 1520 and 1571, when the Ottoman Empire attacked Christendom by sea. Most important of all was the same factor that put Spain behind the Netherlands; Dutch goods and services were cheaper than everybody else's. By 1550 Venetian ships stopped sailing into the Atlantic, and English and Dutch ships started making regular trips into the Mediterranean; in fact, half of Venice's larger ships were Dutch-built by 1600.

Population figures for the sixteenth century have a considerable margin for error, but the trends are fairly definite. The total number of Europeans grew from about 72 million to 90 million, a 25% increase. The Mediterranean basin grew the least, while Poland and Russia grew the most (about 40%). This rapid increase was due to the settling of the Ukraine. Previously the Ukraine was the home of nomads, most recently the Golden Horde, but now the invention of firearms eliminated the nomads' military advantage over peasants. The Golden Horde disintegrated in the late fifteenth century; in the 1550s Ivan the Terrible eliminated the last states ruled by Genghis Khan's descendants, except for the Khanate of the Crimea.

The Reformation

The Archbishopric of Mainz, like most German states in the sixteenth century, was deeply in debt; Albert had to spend the Archbishopric's entire annual income to make the minimum payments on this debt. Then he sent a Dominican friar, Johann Tetzel, on the most aggressive indulgence sales campaign to date, to recover what he had spent. At the next imperial election, that of Charles V, Albert sold his vote for 90,000 ducats.

In medieval times the Church had encouraged Christians to show their devotion, usually by pilgrimages and Crusades. These didn't generate much income (unless you count the profits Italian merchants made when they followed the Crusaders), and went out of fashion before the Middle Ages ended. The church could also sell positions in its hierarchy to the highest bidders (the sin of Simony, the above story about the archbishop of Mainz is a fine example), but that income was limited by how many jobs could be offered and how many nobles had enough cash to make a bid. Then came two alternative ideas for making money: the sale of relics and indulgences. Relics (bones from the saints or artifacts mentioned in the Bible) were popular as long as the faithful believed they were real, but so many relics appeared that this was becoming doubtful by 1500⁽¹³⁾; as a result, the Papacy called for more indulgence sales, without realizing that this market could become saturated, too.

The sale of indulgences wasn't anything new; the pope had legalized this practice in 1215. An "indulgence" was a spiritual pardon on a piece of paper that, when bought, gave forgiveness for all sins committed by the person whose name was written on it, whether he was living or dead; supposedly he would then escape purgatory and go straight to heaven. Sales were entrusted to the most persuasive agents of the pope, who claimed that the Apostles and the saints had committed enough good deeds to get anyone past purgatory, if he will just show his faith by buying a guarantee from the Church.

Anyway, in 1517 Tetzel brought his traveling show to Saxony, the German state that was home to Martin Luther. Luther, an Augustinian monk from Wittenberg, had some serious questions concerning indulgences, since the Bible says nothing about the indulgence business. For years he had agonized over whether he had done enough to win the grace of God, and now people were coming to him for confession with certificates from Tetzel, claiming they already had forgiveness; you can imagine how he felt about this! What's more, he knew that none of the money raised would go toward the work of God; even the pope's half of it wasn't for the rebuilding of St. Peter's Cathedral, as he had claimed, but went to make payments on the Vatican's debts.

On October 31, 1517, Luther went to the door of the Wittenburg church and nailed a list of 95 theses he wanted to discuss concerning Church practices, most of them involving indulgences. This was the acceptable way to start a debate in those days--the document was written in Latin, for example--but it wasn't just theologians who paid attention. Luther acted at just the right time, and news of what he did spread like wildfire; in a matter of months copies of the theses appeared as far away as Rome and England. At this point, Luther didn't see himself as the founder of a new denomination; all he wanted to do was reform the church he had been born and raised in. Unfortunately for him, the popes of this age viewed any Christian who questioned their authority as a heretic. In 1520 Luther was excommunicated, but the princes and common folk of northern Germany turned to Luther in droves, when they saw him creating a church that was purely German and free of the practices that scandalized medieval Christianity. Protected by the Elector of Saxony, Luther was able to avoid being burned at the stake like Jan Huss. By 1534 he had completed a German translation of the Bible, and the first Protestant denomination was established on a sure footing.

Ordinary people may have been attracted to Lutheranism because it offered a simpler, less demanding theology. Heads of state, on the other hand, liked it because it gave them an excuse to confiscate much of the Church's property. In so doing, they gained the resources to pay off their debts, got rid of an uncontrollable, tax-exempt organization that sent money abroad, and replaced it with a church that was more compliant to their wishes. Thus, just as an explosion causes objects to move the fastest in the first second after it occurs, so Protestantism grew the fastest in the first generation of its existence. The king of Sweden became a Lutheran in 1527, and the king of Denmark did in 1536; in both cases, the people soon followed the royal example. Since Sweden ruled Finland in the sixteenth century, and Denmark ruled Norway and Iceland, that took care of Scandinavia. By the time of Luther's death in 1546, all of northeastern Germany was Lutheran; the new church had also converted most of Transylvania and Austria, and was making inroads into Poland. The Teutonic Knights dissolved their order when the grand master converted in 1525. In their place came a secular order, the Livonian Knights, which ruled Estonia and Livonia (Latvia) until 1561; in the end it submitted to Swedish and Polish rule to avoid being conquered by the Russians. In Bohemia and Moravia the Reformation gave new life to what remained of the Hussites.

The acceptance of Lutheranism as an alternative to the Catholic monopoly encouraged others to break with Rome. In Zurich, Switzerland, Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) set up a church that did away with many of the traditions the Lutherans and Catholics kept, and was more tolerant than the others. Around Germany's Black Forest, bands of peasants revolted against their lords in 1524, hoping to set up a classless, lawless society. They adopted the extremist doctrine of Conrad Grebel, one of Zwingli's followers, which predicted that the Second Coming would soon arrive, so no one should have a higher status or own more property than anyone else. Everyone who joined Grebel's church had to be rebaptised, because Grebel considered all other baptisms invalid, so they came to be known as Anabaptists, meaning "re-baptisers." Within a year they plundered many castles and monasteries, and a prophet named Thomas Münzer took command of a peasant army in Thuringia.

To Luther the Anabaptists were simply anarchists, and he became a defender of authority to keep them from undoing his accomplishments. Luther never wanted to get involved in politics; life is too short and eternity is too long, he felt, for any issues concerning social engineering or justice to be very important. He called for law and order in one of his angriest sermons, "Against the Murdering, Thieving Hordes of Peasants," and told the princes to massacre any rebels they got their hands on, while he continued to build a church that was both progressive and practical.

The princes of the ravaged territory needed no encouragement; in 1525 their disciplined armies killed more than 100,000 peasants, including Münzer. Individual Anabaptists ran around loose for some time to come, though, and in 1533 one of them, Jan Matthys, proclaimed himself the prophet Enoch, seized the town of Münster, and declared this would be the New Jerusalem, where Christ would return to redeem the earth. Both Catholic and Lutheran armies attacked Münster, and when they killed Matthys, his successor, John of Leyden, crowned himself king and restored the Old Testament practice of polygamy (this was done because of a severe shortage of men in the besieged city). In 1535 Münzer was taken and a horrible massacre of the last defenders concluded the war.

By this time, the Reformation had spread across the Channel to the British Isles. Henry VIII had been married for twenty-four years to a Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon, but they only had one child, the future Mary Tudor. Kings marry not for love, but to produce royal heirs or to promote peace with the queen's country, and because they did not have a son, Henry wanted out. However, the Catholic Church refused to let him get a divorce, so in 1534 he formed a new church that said he could. Because it did not start over an issue of doctrine, the Church of England (also known as the Anglican or Episcopal Church) has fewer differences with the Catholic Church than other Protestant denominations have. It also looked like a compromise between Catholicism and the more radical elements of Protestantism; a lot of Englishmen weren't satisfied by it, and this would lead to more religious strife for the next century and a half.

Not long after this, radical Protestants found their spokesman. This was John Calvin (1509-64), a French scholar who moved to Switzerland after he converted to Lutheranism. Sixteenth-century France was a dangerous place for those who did not follow the same creed as the king; Francis I frequently shifted between toleration and persecution of heretics. In Basel he wrote his most important work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Revised by him several times after that, Institutes explained more clearly than any other book what the Reformation was all about. When he was done it left no detail of doctrine or conduct without rules governing it. It was both more logical and more somber than the writings of Luther. Whereas Luther mainly wrote about God's mercy and attacked those church practices which got between man and God, Calvin paid more attention to the Jehovah of the Old Testament, the absolute master of the universe, and talked about how the individual should behave. Calvin got his chance to put these ideas into practice in 1541, when he prepared a Bible-based law code for Geneva. It was enforced by a committee called the Consistory, or Presbytery, consisting of five pastors and twelve elders.

Calvin was never a member of the Consistory, but dominated it nonetheless. It oversaw the worship and moral conduct of every citizen in Geneva. It sent an elder to inspect each house at least once a year, and could at any time summon someone to account for his actions. Criminal offenses included missing church, laughing during services, wearing bright colors, dancing, playing cards, and swearing. Offenders were excommunicated, meaning they could not partake of the Lord's Supper and were not allowed to associate with citizens, though they were expected to listen to sermons all the same. Religious dissent brought much heavier penalties. The consistory frequently exiled offenders for blasphemy, mild heresies, adultery, or suspected witchcraft. Magistrates sometimes used torture to obtain confessions and sometimes even burned heretics, averaging more than a dozen annually in the 1540s. Michael Servetus (1511-1553), a Spanish theologian-scientist and refugee from the Catholic Inquisition, was burned for heresy because he denied the doctrine of the Trinity. The Consistory showed little sexual discrimination, punishing men and women with equal severity.

Geneva became known as the Protestant Rome, the focus of an authority even less compromising than that of the Papacy it opposed. Calvin's near-theocracy only lasted while he was alive, but during that time he gained followers all over western Europe. They went by a different name in almost every country where they established themselves: Calvinists in the Netherlands, Huguenots in France, Presbyterians in Scotland, Puritans in England, etc. Whatever their name, they only made limited headway in areas that were already Lutheran, but to those who had to fight for what they believed, Calvin, rather than Luther, was the real leader of the Reformation.

Indeed, the Protestants had to fight for everything they gained after 1545. This was because (1.) the movement was now threatening the two most powerful dynasties of Christendom, the Hapsburgs and the Valois, and (2.) the Catholic Church was now beginning to defend itself effectively. Francis I would have gained nothing by converting, because the French crown already enjoyed some control over its churches, so while individual Frenchmen converted, there was little hope of making France a Protestant country. Prospects for converting Spain were close to zero, because Cardinal Ximenes had purged corruption from the Spanish churches before Luther appeared. As for Charles V, if he had put politics before religion, he would have sided with the Lutherans, and Germany wouldn't have given him so many headaches. He didn't even get along with the Papacy very well; the pope endorsed Francis I in the imperial election. Instead, Charles couldn't see how Luther could be right, and how so many medieval theologians could be wrong, so he remained loyal to the Catholic faith.

In the middle of the century, the Catholic Church regained enough confidence to launch a "Counter-Reformation." By this time even the popes could see that they needed to clean up their act, and correct the errors pointed out by the Protestants. Pope Paul III (1534-49) attacked the indifference, the corruption, and the vested interests of the clerical organization, and was stubborn and bad-tempered enough to get his way. Under him and the next two popes, Paul IV and Pius IV, a major church council met at Trent, in northern Italy, to correct the behavior of worldly bishops and cardinals, and to explain in writing, the way Calvin did with Institutes, what the Church believed and why it did so. The Council of Trent met in three sessions between 1545 and 1563. Political turbulence in Europe, a threat of plague, and the pope's personal reform campaign caused lengthy interruptions; during the eighteen years of the Council's existence, it only actively worked for four and a half of them. Nevertheless, it was the most important Church convention between the Council of Nicaea (325) and the Second Vatican (1962).

Once the clergy was finished at Trent, the Church went to war against Protestants and other heretics. In Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands, the Inquisition, more than ever before, became the dreaded scourge of Protestants. The Church also had the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), a new order of priests who were organized along military lines, and educated enough to beat the Protestants at their own game. Although the "Counter-Reformation" failed to recover any lost countries, it effectively erased any Protestant threat to those still under Catholic rule. As a result, every country that was Catholic in the 1560s is still Catholic today. Jesuit missionaries also went overseas to the newly discovered lands in Asia and the Americas, where they converted enough natives to replace the parishioners lost at home.⁽¹⁴⁾

The Ups and Downs of Charles V

Francis initiated the second war only a year after the first one ended. This time he thought the balance of power had shifted to him, because Henry VIII and the pope, fearing that the Hapsburgs were getting too strong, withdrew their support for Charles. The shifting political kaleidoscope now produced a new alliance (the League of Cognac), this one made up of France, Milan, Florence, Venice and the Papacy. It wasn't enough to stop Charles, though; in 1527 his Spanish soldiers and German mercenaries marched on Rome and sacked it. The pope was captured, and since some of the Germans were Lutheran, they had a good time making fun of him, before accepting the ransom of 400,000 ducats that he paid. However, the commanding officer, Constable Bourbon, was killed in the battle for Rome, and the leaderless mercenaries, many of them starving and unpaid, committed many atrocities in the city. As a result of this, the Renaissance came to an abrupt end in Italy.

North of Rome, the French rallied successfully, and retook Milan in 1528. Then Charles persuaded Genoa to switch sides, depriving the French of their main base in Italy. By this time both Francis and Charles were tired of fighting, so in 1529 they agreed to "the ladies' peace of Cambrai," in which Francis again gave up all claims to Italy and Burgundy. Now the pope, realizing that Charles, and not Francis, could help him in Italian affairs, signed a treaty of alliance with Charles (the treaty of Barcelona, 1529). Together the pope and emperor attacked Florence, which had opposed their authority; the Florentine republic could not resist both, and surrendered in 1530. Now the remaining Italian states, except for Milan, Venice and Savoy, submitted to Spanish rule. In 1530 the pope finally gave Charles a proper imperial coronation, which had been delayed for a decade by politics. Charles was the last Holy Roman emperor to be crowned by a pope; they held the ceremony at Bologna, and the pope also crowned him king of Lombardy, though Charles didn't do much with this title until he annexed Milan in 1535. Two more wars between Francis and Charles (1535-38 and 1542-44) did not change the situation in Italy.

In the chain of Hapsburg-ruled territories around France, Germany was the weakest link. Here all of Charles' enemies could (and did) make trouble. Gradually Francis realized that by pushing toward the Rhine, instead of over the Alps, he could make real gains for France; if he got enough German land, it might even be possible for a future French king to become emperor. The new Turkish sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, became an ally of the French, making it possible to attack the Empire from both west and east. This was a classic case of politics making strange bedfellows; Francis had a hard time justifying what many Christians saw as a deal with the devil. Early in his reign, Charles turned over Austria and Slovenia to his brother Ferdinand; he had enough work to do with Francis trying to break into Germany and Italy.

Matthias Corvinus, the Hungarian hero, died without leaving an heir in 1490. The Hungarian nobles elected Vladislav (Lasislas) II, the king of Bohemia, to succeed him, because he was more pliable than the other candidate, Austria's Emperor Maximilian. In 1516 Bohemia and Hungary were inherited by Vladislav's teenage son, Louis II. Louis kept peace with the Hapsburgs through two weddings; he married Mary, a sister of Charles and Ferdinand, while his sister Anne married Ferdinand.

He would have been better off negotiating with Suleiman the Magnificent. The Hapsburg territory next to Hungary was only capable of self-defense, while after a 40-year pause, the Turks were now ready to resume their advance into Europe. At this stage the Ottoman army was larger and better organized than that of any opposing state, and morale was high, especially among its elite troops, the famous Janissaries. In 1521 the Turks crossed the Danube and took Belgrade; in 1526 they won a total victory at the battle of Mohacs, slaughtering Louis and the Hungarian army.

The defense of the West now fell on Austria. Because Louis had died childless, the Hapsburgs had a good claim to his sizeable kingdom. Ferdinand moved to take it immediately, calling for unity to keep central Europe out of the hands of Islam, and offering enormous bribes to those who weren't moved by religious talk. Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia submitted to Hapsburg rule, and Poland and Venice became allies, but the Hungarians preferred to be ruled by a Hungarian prince, John Zapolya of Transylvania, even if he was pro-Turkish. Suleiman responded by chasing Ferdinand out of Hungary, and advanced all the way to the gates of Vienna (1529). Ferdinand managed to hold out in Vienna, but it was weather, rather than might of arms, that saved him; the Turks arrived too late in the campaign season to stay very long, and had to withdraw when it started snowing. The Turks tried again in 1532, but again it was autumn by the time they got to Vienna, so the second siege was a short one, too. One year later Ferdinand and Suleiman agreed to a treaty, which let Ferdinand have a small strip of Hungarian territory. Suleiman didn't bother him for the next few years, because he was busy fighting the Persians on the other side of the Ottoman empire.

The treaty also promised that the crown of Hungary would go to Ferdinand on John Zapolya's death. Instead, the Hungarians crowned Zapolya's infant son, Sigismund, in 1540. Ferdinand cried foul and marched on Buda, the Hungarian capital, and Zapolya's widow called on the Turks for help. The resulting war lasted until 1547, when troubles on the Persian front forced Suleiman to make peace again. This time central and southern Hungary came under direct Turkish administration, Sigismund became "prince" of Transylvania, and Ferdinand got to keep "Little Hungary" in return for an annual tribute.

Charles V was least successful as defender of the Catholic Church. He followed in his grandfather's footsteps with naval attacks on Tunis (1535) and Algiers (1541), but failed to keep the Turks from conquering most of North Africa. As for the Protestants, most of the 1520s went by before Charles could do anything about them, and by then Lutheranism had spread too far to be stamped out. Attempts to resolve differences through a conference at Augsburg failed, and the emperor ordered all Lutherans to return to the Catholic Church by April 15, 1531. Nine Lutheran states responded to this ultimatum by sending delegates to the small town of Schmalkalden, and formed the Schmalkaldic League, pledging that: "Whenever any one of us is attacked on account of the Word of God and the doctrine of the Gospel, the others will immediately come to his assistance." Other states and towns joined, until it included most of the Protestant states in the Empire. This put Catholics and Protestants on an equal footing in Germany, and gave the Protestants a force that could meet nearly anything the emperor could dish out against them. Charles ignored them at first, continuing to concentrate his attention on Francis and Suleiman; he even asked the Lutherans for assistance in his other wars. In 1544, fearing that the League was about to join forces with Francis, he gave it formal recognition. Then in 1546 he changed his mind and tried to destroy the League. Charles' forces were led by Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, the Third Duke of Alva, and when some League members went over to his side, he didn't have too much trouble defeating the rest; both the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse were captured. However, yet another war with France broke out in 1547, so Charles had to negotiate peace instead of finishing off the Protestants. Finally, in 1555 he signed the Peace of Augsburg, a treaty granting every prince the right to choose whether he and his subjects would be Catholic or Lutheran.

This was not a promise of tolerance as we would understand it. The most certain way to enjoy religious freedom was to move to a state where the local ruler shared your faith. If you were an Anabaptist or a Jew, you were still out of luck; no head of state followed those creeds. Because the agreement was so vague, more religious wars would be fought in the next century, culminating in the Thirty Years War, before a final settlement was reached.

After Augsburg Charles was tired of life, so in 1556 he abdicated and withdrew to a monastery in Yuste, Spain. Here he tried to give up his responsibilities, but not the luxuries and authority of royal life; the letters he sent to his son, Philip II, were treated as official decrees. Two months before his death in 1558, he staged his own funeral, and attended it in disguise so he could see for himself what it would look like.

Although Charles tried to bequeath everything to Philip, the German princes were more impressed by Ferdinand's performance against the best armies of Islam, so they insisted on making Ferdinand the next emperor. What this meant was that the Hapsburg realm would now be permanently divided. Spain, her overseas colonies, Italy, Burgundy and the Low Countries would pass to Philip and his descendants (now called the Spanish Hapsburgs), but the Hapsburg lands within the central and eastern parts of the Empire, along with the imperial crown, would belong to Ferdinand and his descendants, henceforth to be known as the Austrian Hapsburgs. Both halves continued to cooperate as long as a Hapsburg monarch ruled each, and each was in pretty good shape at this point, but now they would stop trying to unite Christendom. It was probably just as well, because it is unlikely that France or England would have stood for letting so much of Europe pass into the hands of a ruler with real ability.⁽¹⁵⁾

Revolts in France and the Netherlands

Most monarchs would have either defeated the Huguenot minority, or reached an agreement with it; the kings of France did neither. Catherine de Medici tried to bring peace by marrying her daughter Margaret to Henry of Navarre, the Huguenots' champion. Instead it caused one of the bloodiest disasters in an age famous for them: the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. When thousands of Huguenots gathered in Paris to celebrate the wedding, Catherine apparently had a change of heart; she dropped a hint to her son, Charles IX, that this would be a great opportunity to kill the Huguenot leaders, now that they were all in one place. Word of this got to the people of the city, and when church bells rang on the morning of August 24, 1572, the mobs of Paris rose up and slew every Protestant they could find. When the massacre ended, two thousand were dead in Paris, and at least ten thousand in all of France.

Spain's biggest problem was the seventeen provinces of the northern Netherlands. In times past, the Netherlands was a part of the Holy Roman Empire that combined Low German and Latin customs. We saw in the previous chapter how changes of dynasty had caused it to end up first in Burgundian, and then in Hapsburg hands. By the sixteenth century, a Dutch culture had emerged, and the Dutch were starting to develop a national identity of their own; this process was speeded up when they converted to Calvinism, and the kings of Spain persecuted them for it.

Though Philip's father and grandfather had come from the Low Countries, Philip was Spanish-born and never could get along with his Dutch subjects. He had little tolerance for either religious or political freedom, while the Dutch had come to cherish both; he also disliked Dutch capitalism, which gave few privileges to the traditional ruling class. Thus he felt it quite proper to send in the Inquisition, and raise Dutch taxes to pay for his wars. The Dutch had kept quiet about acts of intolerance from Charles V, because they viewed him as one of them; by contrast, all Philip seemed to offer was unenlightened rule from a distant capital. His heavy-handedness may have worked in Spain, by bringing dissident areas like Aragon back into line, but here it led to minor uprisings as early as 1562, in Flanders and Brabant.

Philip first placed the Netherlands under his half-sister, Margaret of Parma, who like her father, was a native of the region. She was an able administrator, and popular because she understood her subjects. Philip wasted this asset by ordering her to combat heresy, whereas she did not object to Protestant preaching. By 1566 there was widespread civil disobedience, from both Catholics and Calvinists. The Dutch felt strongly about their constitutional rights but Philip would not negotiate; he ignored Margaret's frantic appeals for leniency, and finally recalled her. In her place he appointed the Duke of Alva, a leader already known for his enjoyment of religious wars. The new governor marched up from Italy with 10,000 Spanish troops, a great baggage train, and 2,000 prostitutes; his orders told him to root out both heresy and the liberties of the land. Alva's reign of terror killed 18,000, but his rule of iron produced a soul of iron in the people he tried to suppress.

In 1568 the two coastal provinces of Holland and Zeeland revolted. The Dutch raised a force of guerrillas and pirates, because they did not have a conventional army to face Alva's. They won the first battle of the war at Heiligerles, but lost the second at Jemmingen. Now the rebels fled to England and Germany, and survived by attacking Spanish shipping. England's Queen Elizabeth I, under pressure from Philip, expelled the "Sea Beggars" from English ports in 1572. To everyone's surprise, they sailed home, captured the port of Brielle (1572), and succeeded in regaining control over Holland and Zeeland. A noble from Nassau named William the Silent, Prince of Orange, was elected to lead the rebellion.

Philip and Alva did not expect the Dutch to make an ally out of the enemy they had been fighting for centuries--the sea. Half of the Netherlands is below sea level, having been reclaimed from the North Sea in a very long-term project. Since about 1200, the Dutch had been building dikes around tracts of potential land called polders, using windmills to pump the water out. In 1573 they decided to flood the country, but first they had to get the consent of the people whose crops and livestock would be lost. A carpenter named Peter Van der Mey left Alkmaar, a town north of Haarlem, carrying a message that authorized the opening of the sluice gates. Meanwhile the Spanish army approached. Alva made this chilling promise in a letter to Philip: "If I take Alkmaar, I am resolved not to leave a single creature alive; the knife shall be put to every throat." He thought his regiments were unstoppable, but every living man in Alkmaar got on the walls to resist. For four hours they fought back every assault fiercely, with only the dead and wounded leaving their posts. When the Spaniards withdrew, they had lost 1,000 men, while the Dutch had lost only 37. One Spanish officer named Ensign Solis briefly stood on the battlements before the Dutch threw him off. By some miracle he survived, and reported that while he was up there, he looked down and saw "neither helmet nor harness" among the defenders of Alkmaar. A group of very ordinary-looking people, mostly dressed like fishermen, had defeated the veterans of Alva.

About this time, the land started getting wet; the carpenter-envoy had completed his mission. Among the messages he brought back was a promise from William of Orange to drown the Spanish army. In town he lost the dispatches, and they fell into Alva's hands. Whether or not he meant to do this, it had the desired effect; the Spaniards couldn't stop the sea's advance and immediately abandoned the territory.

Spain recalled Alva after this. The Spanish army continued to win easy victories on any formal battlefield, but could not take the last rebel strongholds. The tide turned suddenly in the rebels' favor in 1576, when the Spanish government went bankrupt, and unpaid soldiers started plundering Antwerp and Ghent, causing Flanders to join the rebellion. A more politically sensitive governor, Alexander Farnese, the Duke of Parma, took charge in 1578, and he used troops from the provinces still under his control to take part in the pacification of Ghent. Once finished, he enrolled the French-speaking, southern Catholic provinces (Wallonia) in the Union of Arras, promising not to trample on their liberties anymore. In response, seven rebel-held provinces in the north formed the Union of Utrecht, and proclaimed themselves the United Provinces (1579). Even at this point, the rebels would have accepted Philip as their king in return for guarantees of religious toleration and civil liberty, but very few people beyond the Netherlands were ready for a limited monarchy. Philip certainly wasn't, so the United Provinces declared independence in 1581. For their government they chose a republic, with William of Orange as its first stadtholder (general).

The Spanish Armada

Spain assembled the largest fleet ever seen in European history for this enterprise: 130 ships, carrying 28,000 men. The original plan called for the celebrated "Spanish Armada" to sail in 1587, but a pre-emptive raid by Sir Francis Drake on the fleet in Cadiz delayed departure for a year, giving England that much more time to prepare defenses at home. The Armada, now relocated to Lisbon, was finally ready to go in May of 1588; Parma and his force moved to the port of Dunkirk, expecting to be ferried across the Channel. The leader of the expedition, Alonzo Perez de Guzman, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, had no naval experience, but he was confident his fleet could overcome anything. Little effort was made to keep the expedition a secret, so the English got ready by assembling 197 smaller vessels, only thirty-six of which had been in the Royal Navy previously.

Bad weather forced the Armada into the port of La Coruna on Spain's northwest coast, where it waited until late July. On July 29, the English sighted the Armada off Cornwall. For the next week, Lord Charles Howard, the English fleet commander, battled the Spanish ships off Plymouth, Portland Bill, and the Isle of Wight. The English had an easier time in their more maneuverable ships, and their gunners had better cannon and superior training, allowing them to fire as many as ten shots for every shot the Spaniards got off. Even so, the English were unable to break the Spanish formation. What happened next was best described in some letters recently found in Scotland, written by a deputy of Medina-Sidonia, Juan Martinez de Recalde. Recalde urged Medina-Sidonia to blockade the English in Plymouth harbour, because that would leave the rest of England wide open to invasion. Instead, the duke insisted on following the king's orders, by going on to pick up Parma; thus Spain's best opportunity was lost. Recalde also criticised his leader for abandoning the flagship Rosario after it was crippled in battle, an action which caused a dramatic fall in morale.

After sailing past Plymouth, the Armada again came under attack from Drake's ships. Finally it dropped anchor near Calais, where it waited for Parma. This time England had the opportunity, and Lord Howard went for it. On the night of August 7, he loaded eight unmanned ships with explosives and guns, which would go off when the heat reached them, and sent these "fire ships" into the Spanish formation. It worked; panicked Spanish captains ordered their anchors cut loose, causing them to run aground or drift away from the fleet. The remaining ships were devastated by the English in the nine-hour battle of Gravelines, fought the next day.

Battered by a fierce storm (the "Protestant wind") and the English, the Armada was swept into the North Sea. The survivors could only get home by sailing all the way around Scotland and Ireland, and they left 25 wrecks on the Irish shore. Just 67 of the original 130 ships made it back to Spain. Upon his return, Recalde sent a damning report on the expedition to Philip II, who wrote: "I have read it all, although I would rather not have done, because it hurts so much."

The story of the Spanish Armada goes down in all history books as a key event, because it marks a dramatic end to the age when Spain was supreme on the seas, although a century of competition between England, France and the Netherlands followed before anyone could take Spain's place. King Philip lived for ten more years after the debacle, but we only hear of halfhearted interventions in the affairs of France. Moreover, an unofficial ceasefire settled upon the Netherlands, broken only by a Dutch victory at Nieuwpoort (1600), and a Spanish one at Ostend, which involved a siege lasting from 1601 to 1604. In 1609 both sides agreed to a formal truce, which lasted for twelve years.

Philip failed to strike a critical blow against those he saw as heretics, but he did better against pagans, Moslems, and (ironically) other Catholics. In 1564 a squadron from Mexico sailed across the Pacific, took Guam, and began the conquest of the Philippines (1565-71), which had already been named after you-know-who. Meanwhile in the Mediterranean, the Turks took Cyprus from the Venetians (1570), and one year later a fleet of Spanish and Italian ships struck back with a fine victory at Lepanto. This battle had the same effect on the Ottoman Empire as the battle of the Armada had on Spain--it marked the beginning of a long Turkish decline. However, Philip didn't follow this up; the Turks got to keep Cyprus, and even took Tunis from Spain in 1574. This completed the Turkish conquest of North Africa, except for Morocco.

As for Morocco, Portugal's King Sebastian tried to conquer it in 1578, finishing the job the Portuguese started in the previous century. Instead, he was killed in the battle of Alcazar el Kebir. The ruling dynasty of Portugal abruptly became extinct, and since Philip was an in-law of the dead king, he claimed the Portuguese throne. Naturally the Portuguese people resented this, so Philip sent in the cruel Duke of Alva. By 1581 the whole country was firmly under Spanish control. Thus, Philip's most important accomplishments were not ones he wanted to be remembered for: the creation of an independent, Protestant Netherlands, and the crippling of both the Spanish and Portuguese empires.

Merrie Olde England

Besides creating the Church of England, as we noted in the section on the Reformation, Henry VIII is mainly known because he had six wives, and beheaded two of them. We already saw what happened to the first and longest marriage, that to Catherine of Aragon. The next wife, Anne Boleyn, had another daughter, Elizabeth, but then Henry tired of her, and in 1536 she was executed on a charge of adultery. Wife number three, Jane Seymour, finally gave him a son, Edward, only to die of complications twelve days after Edward's birth. Next he chose a German princess, Anne of Cleves, to show his solidarity with Protestants on the Continent. It was a failure from the start; neither Henry nor Anne was fluent in each other's language, they got along badly at the first meeting, and though a treaty forced him to go ahead with the wedding, Henry began looking for a divorce immediately afterwards. He got one six months later, but the next bride, Catherine Howard, didn't last much longer; eighteen months after their wedding she was executed, also on a charge of adultery. Finally, he married Catherine Parr in 1543. This marriage was happier than the others; at least she outlived him.

Henry's will made Edward VI his heir, and stated that if Edward had no children, the crown would pass next to Mary, and then to Elizabeth. That is exactly what happened. Edward was too sickly to do much as king, and died of tuberculosis in 1553. Mary was too much like her mother; not only was she a loyal Catholic, she also dragged England back into Continental entanglements by marrying Spain's Philip II. She earned the nickname "Bloody Mary" by burning 280 Protestants as heretics; 500 more went into exile to keep their faith. The rest of England officially recanted, but afterwards showed only the slightest evidence of any conversion. To prevent an organized Protestant uprising, she briefly imprisoned her Protestant sister Elizabeth, then put her under house arrest; during this tough time, Elizabeth's courage and political instincts kept her from saying anything that might have sent her to the block, so she avoided the fate of her mother. In 1558 Mary died childless, and many Englishmen saw her replacement by Elizabeth as an answer to their prayers.

Elizabeth I (1558-1603) was the last and most successful of the Tudors. Her reign (the first in English history that involved a long-lived, competent, female ruler) saw so much prosperity and cultural achievement, that we now refer to it as the "Elizabethan Age." In the Middle Ages, English kings saw themselves as arch-rivals to the kings of France; that ended when England lost the Hundred Years War, but the early Tudors couldn't find a new role to replace the old one. It was Elizabeth who established the national policy for England, one that has been followed to this day: build an empire overseas, and don't let any nation on the Continent gain enough power to threaten the rest. Maintaining the balance of power is tougher than submission, and often the English have found themselves alone in opposing would-be world emperors, but because they didn't back down, they have saved countless lives from tyrants like Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler, and the Soviet Union. Accordingly, she reversed Mary's pro-Spanish policy (Mary had supported Spain in the last Hapsburg-Valois war against France), though it meant an alliance with France and a war with Philip. It worked because the English navy, founded by Henry VIII, grew steadily under Elizabeth, and even before the defeat of the Armada, the Spanish and Portuguese empires were tempting targets for privateers. Some exploration took place while Elizabeth was queen, but the real fruits of a seagoing empire would be harvested by future monarchs; the first English colony in North America (Roanoke), for example, failed in less than five years. In 1600 she granted the English East India Company a monopoly on trade with the countries around the Indian Ocean, the first step toward economic competition with the other new naval power, the Dutch.

Elizabeth made England's conversion to Protestantism permanent, but the Puritans were too extremist for her tastes, so like Henry VIII, she went for a middle-of-the-road church, by passing the Act of Uniformity in 1559 and the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1563. Her religious policy also solved England's problem with Scotland. We saw previously that the English and the Scots didn't get along very well; a Scottish alliance with France was often used to keep England from defeating either of those opponents. Elizabeth won the friendship of the Scots by giving her support to the Protestant movement that sprung up there, the Presbyterian Church of John Knox.⁽¹⁷⁾ Ironically, her personal life worked toward this; she never married or had any children, and on her deathbed she named the king of Scotland as her heir, stating that no one but a king should succeed her. Thus England and Scotland were united under King James I (1603-24).

James I got the Stuart dynasty off to a bad start. He believed strongly in the divine right of kings, at a time when Parliament was starting to view itself as the most important branch of government. Queen Elizabeth could make Parliament think it was ruling when in fact it was doing what she wanted, but James did not have the skills or charm to do this. An early warning of his disregard for the law came right at the beginning of his reign, on his way from Edinburgh to London; a man accused of theft was brought before the king, and James ordered him hanged immediately without trial. And while he was convinced that his policies were correct, he was too weak to carry them out; he was rigid where he should have been flexible, and vice versa.

Parliament's power came from the fact that it controlled the purse strings of England; it could levy taxes and the king couldn't. This would have made a more sensible king listen closely to its grievances, for James was on a fixed income that could no longer pay his expenses; Queen Elizabeth had sold some of the crown lands to pay her debts, and inflation had reduced the value of the rest. Every time the king asked Parliament for money, Parliament wanted concessions in return, so its power increased as long as the crown was financially insolvent.

Though James gave us the King James Bible, which was considered the last word in English translations of the Scriptures for the next three hundred years, he didn't care much for Protestants who took the Scriptures seriously, like the Puritans. Insisting on his royal prerogatives as head of both Church and state, he passed laws requiring conformity to the Church of England. "No bishop, no king" was how he explained it, viewing the Church as indispensable to enforcing his authority. In 1607 the Separatist faction of the Puritans decided they couldn't take any more of this, so they sailed to the Netherlands. Here they could practice their faith freely, since Amsterdam was the most tolerant city in Europe. However, a few years later they concluded that Amsterdam was too tolerant. They didn't want their children growing up to be Dutch, so in 1620 they pulled up roots again, chartered an English ship, the Mayflower, and sailed across the Atlantic, becoming the Pilgrim Fathers of colonial America.

Despite the derision of less committed Englishmen, and the royal measures taken against them, the Puritans were very influential. Like other Calvinists, they believed that a person can prove his fitness for salvation by being law-abiding, industrious, sober and thrifty, so they prospered in the new capitalist society of England. As they made their way into the House of Commons, their sober and responsible behavior imprinted itself on English society. These are the same qualities that would soon tame the American wilderness.

Sweden Returns to the Stage

For Gustavus, the recovery of the country had to come first, but he also managed a successful foreign policy. In 1527 he announced his conversion to Lutheranism, allowing him, like the princes of northern Germany, to become leader of his country's churches and take the lands owned by the Church. This gave the treasury a needed shot in the arm, and ended Sweden's dependence on the Hanseatic League. In 1531, Jürgen Wullenweyer, the mayor of Lübeck, declared that the latest payment of Sweden's debt to the League was insufficient, and confiscated a Swedish ship. The Swedes joined Denmark in the war that broke the power of the League (1531-36); as a result the League removed and executed Wullenweyer, and the treaty ending the war canceled the huge debt Sweden had run up in the struggle for independence.

Gustavus wrote a will that declared his eldest son, Erik XIV, the next king, but left so much land to the other three sons that they couldn't resist making trouble. Erik was mentally unstable, and his brother John, the Duke of Finland, used that as an excuse to revolt in 1562. Denmark invaded, too, figuring that the Swedes had been independent long enough. The Danes did well on the battlefield, but were unable to hold any captured territory. In the east, John was able to survive the loss of his capital, Abo, and because the king of Poland was his brother-in-law, he had Polish help. In 1568 he marched on Stockholm, captured it after a siege, and imprisoned Erik. As King John III, he signed a treaty with Denmark that confirmed Swedish independence, and joined Poland in the long but successful Livonian War (1557-82), which prevented the Russians from conquering the east shore of the Baltic and won Estonia for Sweden.

John's son, Sigismund, had been elected king of Poland in 1587, five years before becoming king of Sweden, so under him the Poles and Swedes were briefly united under one crown. However, both John and Sigismund were Catholics, and their pro-Catholic policies were unpopular among their now-Protestant subjects. A Protestant revolt broke out; Sigismund was defeated at the battle of Stangebro and deposed by the Swedish parliament. He managed to keep Poland, where his branch of the Vasa dynasty provided rulers until 1668, but Sweden itself went to Charles IX (1604-11), another son of Gustavus Vasa. Charles was in turn succeeded by his son Gustavus Adolphus, the greatest king in Swedish history.

Gustavus Adolphus began his reign with some formidable challenges; he was only seventeen years old, and Sweden was at war with all three of its neighbors. A few months before his death, Charles IX had picked a fight with Denmark's Christian IV over Lapland, while in the east, Poland and Sweden had been scuffling over Livonia and Estonia since 1600, with the Poles doing most of the winning. The third opponent, Russia, was in a state of anarchy, the so-called "Time of Troubles,"⁽¹⁸⁾ so strategy dictated that Gustavus beat up the Russians and make peace with the others. Poland quickly agreed to a truce, since Sigismund was busy trying to put his son Wladislaw on the the vacant throne in Moscow. In 1613 he ended the "Kalmar War" with Denmark; the Danes had won every battle that mattered, but instead of taking any Swedish territory, Christian accepted a treaty that recognized Danish rule over Finnmark (the northernmost province of present-day Norway), and promised to return the port of Alvsborg in exchange for 400,000 ducats. This ransom was twice as much as Sweden's annual revenue, but fortunately for Gustavus, he was bringing home loot from the Russian campaign, and the value of Sweden's iron and copper exports was increasing, so he managed to pay it off in four years. On the Russian front, Gustavus captured Novgorod, and continued to do well even after the Russians got a new tsar in 1613. In the treaty ending that war (Stolbovo, 1617), Sweden gave back Novgorod but gained Ingria, the land between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga. Russia was now shut out from the Baltic--at least until the time of Peter the Great. We will be hearing more from Gustavus Adolphus in the next chapter of this work.

How to Elect a King

The Polish royal family, the Jagiellonians, became extinct in 1572. Instead of fighting over who would rule next, the Polish nobility decided to hold an election among its members to choose a new king. Any prince in Europe was elegible to run, so several kings sent their unemployed relatives to Warsaw. Some Polish candidates also ran, but the nobility didn't trust them, so the race was dominated by five foreigners: Henri Valois, the Duke of Anjou and brother of King Charles IX of France; Archduke Ernest, the younger son of Austria's Maximilian II; Russia's Ivan the Terrible; Sweden's John III; and Prince Stephen Bathory of Transylvania.

Henry Valois, known to history books as Henry III, didn't have much in the way of character to recommend him; his main interests were entertainment and expensive fashions, and Charles may have nominated him just to get him out of France. Moreover, this was when France's religious wars were taking place, and though the Poles were devout Catholics, they didn't care for the idea of having a king from the family responsible for the St. Bartholomew Day's Massacre. However, Henry also had Jean de Montluc, the bishop of Valence, as his campaign manager. This shrewd character was just the man for the job. First he explained to the Poles that Henry wasn't really immature, and he told so many contradictory stories about the fighting in France that everyone was left confused by the whole business. To keep track of what the other princes were up to, he bribed their secretaries for inside information, all the while making sure that nobody paid his own assistants for the same knowledge about Henry. Finally, he used the printing press to his advantage, in a country that didn't have printing presses yet. While the other candidates were copying their ideas by hand, Montluc printed and gave out 1,500 copies of Henry's campaign speech, nearly fifty times as many as each opponent could produce.

In the last days of the campaign, the two leading candidates were Henry and King John of Sweden. The decisive moment came when a crowd gathered in an enormous tent to hear the Swedish ambassador give a final speech in favor of his king. Suddenly the tent collapsed in the middle of the speech. Many thought that Montluc had cut the tent ropes; whether or not he did, few Poles could take the Swedes seriously after that, and Henry won the election.

He might as well have never run. A year later Charles IX died, and Henry deserted Poland, deciding that he would rather be the king of France. Thus, the Poles needed another election already. This time they voted for Stephen Bathory the Transylvanian (1575-86), and he proved to be a better ruler; he strengthened the army by adding Cossack units, and waged three successful campaigns against Ivan the Terrible.

As for Henry III, he was the weak and wasteful ruler people expected, who dressed like a woman until he earned the nickname "the King of Sodom." The war between Catholics and Huguenots continued, and Henry could do little to stop it. Instead he tried to straddle the fence between the two sides, first by making concessions to the Protestants, then by throwing his support behind the main Catholic army, the Holy League. Eventually the Catholics became the greatest threat to him, so the childless Henry made the Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre, his successor. In response, the Holy League launched a revolt against the two Henrys. Henry III arranged for the assassination of the Holy League's leader, Henri de Lorraine, as well as his brother Louis de Lorraine, but one year later Henry himself was stabbed by a fanatical Dominican friar (1589).

Henry's death meant the extinction of the Valois dynasty. Now the Huguenots controlled one third of the country; they defeated Spain when the Duke of Parma intervened, and Henry of Navarre had the best claim to the crown. French Catholics recognized Henry's legitimacy, but they did not want a Huguenot for their king. They threatened to continue the war, with outside help if necessary, if he tried to be both king and Protestant, so in 1593 Henry settled the matter by converting. "Paris is worth a Mass," is what he supposedly said, before he rode to Paris as King Henry IV. This is not as cynical as it sounds; Henry's foremost concern was bringing peace to the country, and if that meant becoming a "Romanist," so be it. He spent the next four years evicting the Spaniards, who tried to put a pretender on the Spanish throne, but he didn't forget his Huguenot comrades. When the war ended he passed the Edict of Nantes, which promised equality and complete freedom of religion for the Huguenots (1598).

Henry IV was blessed with an excellent finance minister, Maximilien de Bethune, the Duke of Sully. Sully put the government's spending in order, promoted trade, built roads and bridges, and encouraged practices which made French agriculture more efficient. When James I became king of England, Sully served briefly as ambassador, and remarked that James was "the most learned fool in Christendom." Because of all that Sully did, the country recovered quickly, and by 1610 it had the first balanced budget and treasury surplus in years. Sully opposed colonial ventures, but here Henry overruled him and had Samuel Champlain found the first permanent French colony in the Americas (Quebec, 1608).

Because of the need for recovery, Henry wasn't very active in foreign affairs, though French policy remained the same: weaken the power of Spain and Austria, and form an alliance with any nation wanting to do the same. He did fight a brief war with Savoy in 1601, taking the upper Rhone valley because Savoy had taken Saluzzo a few years earlier. If he had lived longer, he probably would have gone after a Spanish-held territory on his frontier, either Burgundy or the Spanish Netherlands (modern Belgium). It didn't happen because he was assassinated in 1610; the killer was a Catholic fanatic, and may have been a Hapsburg agent. In life Henry was called a heretic by many Frenchmen, but since his death he has been known as "good King Henry," one of the best-loved French kings. With Henry gone, the process of centralizing France stopped for many years. Sully resigned because he couldn't get along with France's bad-tempered nobility, and Henry's son, Louis XIII, was only nine years old, so his mother, Marie de Medici, ruled as regent until 1617.

North to the Orient

At any rate, the first part of the search was done by the English, who tried sailing along the northern edge of Eurasia. They thought that after passing Cape Tabin (a mythical headland that was placed in the same location as the Taymyr peninsula in northern Siberia), the north coast of Asia would quickly slope southeast into temperate waters, allowing easy access to the spices and other riches of Asia. In 1553 the first part of this "northeast passage" was successfully navigated with three ships by Sir Hugh Willoughby. The fleet was scattered by storms off Norway, but Willoughby regathered two of the ships and discovered the southwest coast of Novaya Zemlya. By this time summer was ending, so he withdrew to winter in Lapland. Ignorant of the shelter igloos can provide, Willoughby and his men remained on board ship; when spring came the entire crew was dead from the cold or scurvy. Meanwhile, Willoughby's second-in-command, Richard Chancellor, took the third vessel into the White Sea, made landfall at Archangel, and met the Russians. They took him to Moscow, where he signed a valuable trade agreement with Ivan the Terrible. As a result, London declared the expedition a success and looked forward to even richer contacts beyond Novaya Zemlya.

The next expedition was led in 1556 by Stephen Burrough, who had a single tiny vessel, the Searchthrift, and a crew of eight. The boat faced constant perils from storm, fog, ice--and once from a whale as large as the Searchthrift herself that surfaced alongside it--before it sighted Vaigach Island, set like a stepping stone between Novaya Zemlya and the mainland, and sailed past it into the Kara Sea. There Burrough made contact with the Samoyeds, Siberian nomads related to the Finns who were, alas, very un-Cathayan. He wrote that their idols were "the worst . . .that I ever saw. The eyes and mouth of sundry of them were bloody. They had the shape of men, women and children very grossly wrought, and that which they made for other parts was also sprinkled with blood." One of the men, Richard Johnson, described a grotesque rite where a priest heated a sword in a fire and pretended to thrust it through his body; then he pulled out the sword and sat down before they could figure out how this trick was done.

Like Willoughby, Burrough was turned back by the ice. He wintered in the White Sea near Archangel, and returned home the following spring.

In 1557 the newly formed Muscovy Company sent its chief factor, Antony Jenkinson, to Moscow. Like Chancellor, he was well received by Tsar Ivan, who gave him letters of introduction to help him on later journeys. He got as far as Bukhara in Uzbekistan, which gave him hope that he would blaze a trail overland to China; at Bukhara, however, the Mongol khan, being an enemy of Russia, turned him back. On his second try, Jenkinson went south instead, reached Qazvin (the capital of sixteenth-century Persia), and returned to Moscow with a load of trade goods.

Follow-up expeditions were delayed for a generation because it looked like there was a better chance of finding a "northwest passage" around America. The next ships to try the northeastern route were commanded by Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman. They left England on May 30, 1580, but were no more successful at getting past the Kara Sea. They dodged icebergs, lost sight of each other among them, dropped an anchor on one to catch their breath, then hurriedly cast off to avoid hitting another block of ice. Finally in August they turned back in exhaustion. Pet battled storms and made it home with his crew almost dead from exposure, while Jackman's crew perished off the coast of Norway.

The English gave up after that, but the Dutch were willing to have a go at it. In the 1590s, Willem Barents, a great Dutch navigator, made three attempts at the northeast passage. The first two failed, so in 1596 he set a wildly unrealistic course due north, in an effort to reach China by sailing over the North Pole. He discovered Spitzbergen, then sailed east to Novaya Zemlya, where the ice trapped him in a bay and forced him to winter on the northeast shore of that island.

Barents' crew were lucky enough to find enough driftwood to build a house, guarded by a polar bear that they killed, allowed to freeze and then set up on its stiffened feet. There they passed the winter, with the snow rising past the door, scurvy afflicting the crew, and with the ship rising higher every day from the pressure of the ice. When spring came they could not free their vessel, so they set off in two open boats. Barents and one of the crew members died on the way, but the others lasted until they were picked up by Russian boats; eventually they all made it back to the Netherlands. Nearly three centuries later, a Norwegian seal hunter, Captain Elling Carlsen, found the house where the Dutch had wintered; among the pitiful relics inside was a note written by Barents telling how he had been held up by ice en route to Cathay.

A few more expeditions came after that, the most noteworthy being one led by Henry Hudson in 1607. These got as far as the mouth of the Ob, Siberia's longest river, before they encountered a solid wall of ice that prevented all further progress. By the 1620s it was clear to everyone that a viable northeast passage did not exist. It was not until 1878-79 that a Swedish vessel, Baron Nils Nordenskiold's Vega, made it all the way around Siberia. A Soviet icebreaker, the Artika, made it to the north pole in 1976-77.

1. A few medieval scribes cut corners by re-using old parchments, scraping off the ink so that new words could be written on them. A book made out of recycled parchment pages is called a palimpsest, meaning "twice-used" in Greek. The last surviving copy of Archimedes' math text, for example, was converted into a prayer book around 1200. Imaging technology powerful enough to read the original words on the pages did not become available until the end of the twentieth century.

2. Sometimes it wasn't even clear what direction the words ran in. For a while after they learned the alphabet, pre-classical Greeks would write one line from left to right, then the next line from right to left, and so on. They called this style Boustrophedon, meaning "as the ox plows," because it reminded them of the back-and-forth motion an ox makes while plowing a field.

3. We noted in Chapters 8 and 9 that the Holy Roman emperor had to wear many hats--emperor of western Christendom, king of Germany, elector of his home state, and so on. Charles V explained it by listing the languages he needed to do his job: "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse."

4. A popular saying asserted that the Empire had a sovereign ruler for every day of the year!

5. The Borgias tended to poison anyone who got in their way. Much of the blame for the poisonings has fallen on Cesare's sister, Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1518), but now it appears that she got a reputation she didn't deserve. More likely her father and her brother were the ones responsible for the mysterious deaths around them. In 1501 she married her third and last husband, Duke Alfonso of Ferrara, and once she got away from her awful family there were no more reports of any improper behavior. Alfonso remembered her with these words when she died: "It has pleased Our Lord God at this hour to take to Himself the soul of Her Grace the Duchess, my most beloved consort . . . I cannot write without tears, so heavy a burden is it to find myself deprived of so sweet and dear a companion, for such she was to me, both through her excellent conduct and that tender love there was between us . . . And I would rather fain have my friends lament with me than offer me consolation." That does not sound like a mass poisoner to me.
As for Alexander VI, there was a report that seven devils were seen in his chamber at the moment of his death; presumably they were there to take him away.

6. Though exiled from Florence, this was not the end of the Medicis; eventually they returned. In the meantime a son of Lorenzo the Magnificent became Pope Leo X (1513-22), and a nephew of Lorenzo became Pope Clement VII (1523-34). A great-granddaughter of Lorenzo, Catherine, became the queen of France by marrying Henry II.

7. Machiavelli, The Prince, XXVI.

8. The real genius behind David, Michelangelo's first great work, was in the type of stone he used. Around 1462 a minor Florentine sculptor, Agostino di Duccio, ordered an expensive 18-foot-long chunk of pure white marble. When the stone arrived from the quarry, Agostino complained about it being the wrong shape, and managed to make sure it was the wrong shape by carving a big gash up the middle. Then he gave up, thinking the stone ruined, and it lay in the builder's yard of the Board of Works of the Cathedral for the next thirty-nine years. In 1501 Michelangelo was short on funds, and a friend, Pier Soderini, arranged to have the stone given to him. From the stone everybody else considered useless, Michelangelo carved the young giant-slayer, using the "Agostino overgouge" as the space between the legs.

9. Machiavelli, The Prince, XVII.

10. Marignano is worth remembering because it marked the end of Swiss involvement in European politics. The Swiss had shown that the most effective defense against a cavalry charge is a force of well-disciplined pikemen; by having the pikemen work alongside men armed with the crude muskets of the day (arquebuses), it became possible for infantry to go on the offensive. Switzerland's victories against the Burgundians and the Hapsburgs convinced Europeans that Swiss pikemen were unbeatable, so everybody wanted to hire Swiss mercenaries, or if possible, train their own infantry to fight the same way. After Marignano the Spanish infantry, the Tercios, became the best pikemen in Europe, presumably because Spain's wars kept them busy all the time, giving them plenty of opportunities to practice their "iron cornfield" formation.
Because the Swiss were so active in northern Italy, they annexed a neighboring confederation, the League of Grisons, in 1497, and between 1503 and 1512 they took the area that would become the canton of Ticino; that is why 10% of Switzerland's population now speaks Italian. The major powers allowed them to keep these gains, so by 1513 Switzerland had reached its present-day borders, except around the shores of Lake Geneva.

11. The bankers of the Hapsburgs were the Fuggers, the richest family in Germany. Originally peasant weavers from Augsburg, the Fuggers made themselves wealthy through trading and moneylending in the fifteenth century. The richest of the Fugger patriarchs, Jakob Fugger, financed the election and wars of Charles V, while gaining control over the lead, gold, silver and copper mines of central Europe; he also obtained a monopoly in mercury production. His successor Anton Fugger (1525-60) had branch offices in Chile, Peru and Moscow. After Anton the Fugger fortunes declined, because of bankrupties in Spain (they paid for the Armada), and because of family conflicts and a lack of interest among the heirs. By the time of the Thirty Years War, state-run enterprises had taken over most of the mines and international ventures.

12. The Venetian gold ducat was the standard unit of foreign exchange in the first half of the modern era, playing a role not unlike that of the American dollar in today's world economy. It contained 3.56 grams of gold which was never debased, making it worth about $110 in 2009 dollars. The coins of other states had their value pegged by how much gold they had in comparison to the ducat.

13. When England declared itself Protestant, King Henry VIII ordered the destruction of all relics in the country's churches and monasteries. His men found enough pieces of the True Cross to fill three wagons!

14. For a more detailed description of the Reformation, read Chapter 5 of my history of Christianity.

15. It is worth remembering that just about all the Hapsburg victories achieved under Charles V were defensive ones. For example, he had France surrounded on the north, east and south, but never conquered even the smallest piece of it.

16. There was a notable episode in 1520, when Henry went to France to sign a short-lived treaty with Francis I. The participants camped in tents and staged two weeks of medieval-style tournaments, in a festival so grand that the event was later called the Field of Cloth of Gold.

17. However, the Irish remained Catholic, giving Englishmen and Irishmen one more reason to hate each other. During the fifteenth century, the part of Ireland under English rule ("The Pale") shrank to a small area around Dublin. Henry VIII enlarged the Pale to include all of Leinster, and by the end of Elizabeth's reign, English rule had been imposed, more or less, over the whole island.

18. "The Time of Troubles" was a generation of weak rule, civil war and foreign invasion, beginning with the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584 and ending with the crowning of Michael Romanov in 1613. For details, read Chapter 1 of my Russian history.

© Copyright 2001 Charles Kimball