A Short History of the World

by Christopher Lascelles

  Luther had been horrified by what he had seen in a journey to Rome in 1510, namely the Church selling indulgences – documents issued by the Church to reduce time in purgatory and grant the buyer remission from the need to do penance for sins. His reading of the Bible had led him to the conclusion that one did not need to labour to win God’s favour, as one could not in that way influence how God behaves towards us. Christians were saved by faith and faith alone, and no amount of good works, or indeed even the purchase of indulgences, made any difference at all. The consequence of this was that he rejected the authority of the Pope, denied that priests had any special power over laymen, and asserted the Bible as the sole source of Christian truth:

  One did not need to do penance, to make costly pilgrimages, to venerate the wasted carcasses of supposed saints; one did not need to make sacrifices. Above all one did not need to buy the tawdry goods the Church peddled to its deluded flock in order to raise the cash it needed for its wars, for its vast buildings, for the paintings, the sculptures, the carved woodwork, the golden goblets and the bejewelled inlaid cases in which the relics of the sanctified laid, and that it relentlessly commissioned from all the finest and most expensive artists and craftsmen in Europe.62

  In 1517, as the Ottomans were capturing Egypt from the Mamluks, whose economy had also suffered from the discovery of the maritime spice route, Luther wrote his famous 95 arguments against the sale of indulgences and sent them to his local bishop. With the help of his friends and of the printing presses, Luther’s arguments spread like wildfire, leading Pope Leo X to condemn Luther's teachings in a papal decree.

  Not one to be told what to do, Luther burned the decree, as a result of which, in 1521, he was invited by Emperor Charles V to recant his views. With the Ottomans at the back door, the last thing Charles needed was a divided Germany. Luther refused and would only recant, he said, if the scriptures told him to do so, an act for which we was outlawed as a heretic. Fortunately for Luther, many of the German princes were keen to remain independent from the encroaching Spanish power and he gained the protection of one of them.

  Luther’s challenge to traditions and to ecclesiastical authority made him the focus for pent-up religious and economic discontent, and many peasants used the opportunity to air their resentment of the church authorities. It seemed obvious to many of them that the church favoured their oppressors. When the complaints gained traction they turned into a rebellion and then, in 1525, into a full-scale peasant revolt. Unfortunately for the peasants, Luther had ‘released a conflagration upon Europe far greater and far more radical than any he had himself intended’,63 and instead of supporting them, he gave his support to German nobles intent on putting out the flames of insurrection.

  It was not long before the Reformation swept through Western Europe, as ‘national and dynastic rivalries had now fused with religious zeal to make men fight on where earlier they might have been inclined to compromise’.64 While Luther had the most influence in Germany, the Swiss and the Dutch were heavily influenced by the Protestant teachings of an exile from France, John Calvin, who preached predestination, namely that God had already decided who would be damned and who would be saved.65 Protestants in France, known as Huguenots, were brutally suppressed and war raged between Protestants and Catholics there until the Protestants were granted freedom of worship in 1598 by Henry IV under the Edict of Nantes.66 In England, the new teaching would give King Henry VIII just the reason he needed to renounce the authority of the Pope completely and divorce his Catholic wife and daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Catherine of Aragon.

  The Reformation had a huge impact, both positive and negative, on the development of the West. It allowed great parts of Europe to throw off the shackles of Catholic dogma and develop the freedom of thought that was necessary for innovation; but it also separated the Christians of northern and southern Europe, a division that ultimately led to religious wars that did not abate until 1648.

  The Habsburgs take over Europe

  By the time Charles became Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, his Habsburg family, through a number of successful marriages, owned the largest western empire since Roman times including Spain, the Netherlands, Austria and a number of smaller countries, not to mention Spain’s rich, though unexplored, colonies in the Americas. His empire encompassed so many cultures and languages that he was said to have spoken Spanish to God, French to his mistress, and German to his horse. King of Spain already since 1516, he began to regard the country as the most important part of his empire, leaving the German-speaking provinces to be governed by his brother, Ferdinand.

  Emperor for 39 years in a hugely important period for Europe, Charles V spent his reign fighting against the French over lands in Italy and the Netherlands,67 against a defensive league of Protestant princes in Germany, against the Ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean, and even against the Pope, sacking Rome in 1527 and driving the Pope into exile because the Vatican had allied itself with the French. Overseas, Charles oversaw the Spanish colonisation of the Americas, including the conquest of both the Aztec and Inca empires.

  The Aztecs and the Incas meet the Iron Age (1200–1520/1531)

  Not long after the first Europeans landed in the Americas, word spread of kingdoms rich with gold. As it turned out, gold was indeed found, and beyond people’s wildest dreams. Two major empires in the Americas at this time were the Aztec Empire of present-day Mexico and the Inca Empire, possibly the largest empire in the world at the time, covering an area incorporating lands in present-day Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Argentina and Bolivia. Prior civilisations in the area, such as the Olmecs and the Mayans, had expired for reasons unknown. By the time the conquistadors arrived in the early 16th century, the 300-year old Aztec and the Inca empires were at the height of their civilisations.

  The lust for gold experienced by the conquistadors led to the brutal conquest of these empires. Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztecs between 1519 and 1520 and Francisco Pizarro conquered the Incas a decade later. Both conquests are noteworthy due to the few Europeans it required to conquer vastly superior numbers of natives.

  In the case of Cortes, the Aztec emperor Montezuma, reigning from the large city of Tenochtitlan, may have taken Cortes for a returning god and lowered his guard. The Aztecs were also terrified by guns and horses, neither of which they had seen before; indeed, there is no record of horses being present in the Americas before the Europeans arrived there in 1492. Cortes also found allies among the local population who had been subjugated by Aztec emperors. The Aztecs believed that without human sacrifice, the sun would not rise and the world would end. Finally, Cortes famously burned the ships in which his troops had travelled, forcing them to either fight or die.

  Pizarro captured the Incan king, Atahualpa, and held him for ransom until the Incas filled a room 22 feet long by 17 feet wide and 8 feet high with gold. Pizarro then reneged on his promises and murdered the king (although not before christening him into the Catholic faith!). According to various sources, the Spanish managed to defeat an Incan army of up to 80,000 soldiers with only 168 people. European diseases killed huge numbers of the local population before the forces even joined in battle, and when natives were able to come together to defend themselves, the result was what you would expect from the clash of a Stone Age and an Iron Age culture: the native Americans had no chance of defeating iron and steel weapons with weapons of stone and wood.

  Back in Spain, Charles V encouraged the union of his son, Philip, to the Catholic Mary Tudor of England in order to link Spain, England and the Netherlands in a union of Catholic states. He was determined that Protestantism would not be permitted to gain a stronger foothold in Europe, afraid of the dissent it would encourage; to all intents and purposes there was little difference to him between Protestants and Turks. The defence of Luther by a group of German princes, however, together with the wars against the French and the Ottomans, distracted Charles and prevented him from putting down the religious revolt in Germany while h
e had the opportunity to do so.

  By the time he was ready to make a move, Protestantism was too deeply entrenched – at least in northern Germany – and, in 1555, at the Peace of Augsburg, Charles was forced to grant Lutheranism official status within the Holy Roman Empire. Worse still, in his opinion, it allowed the 225 German princes to choose the official religion68 within the domains they controlled.

  As regards the Ottomans, they remained a thorn in Charles’ side, unsuccessfully attempting to take Vienna in 1529,69 and remaining a strong naval force in the Mediterranean until well after his death. Under Suleiman I the Magnificent, the Ottomans would continue to make war against both the Habsburg Empire in the west and the Shiite Safavid Persians, with whom they shared a huge common frontier, in the east. Yet through a series of incompetent Sultans, an over-extended empire and an increasingly repressive attitude to free thought, the Ottoman Empire would see slow but inevitable decline from the 17th century onwards.

  Safavid Persia (1502–1732)

  In the confusion left by the retreating Mongols of Tamerlane, the Shiite Safavid dynasty had taken power in Persia and established a strong independent state, although it was eventually forced to cede Baghdad and all of Iraq to the Ottoman Turks whose interests it interfered with. Shah Abbas (1571–1629) was the most renowned of the Safavid Shahs but he was followed by weaker rulers, which made Persia less of a threat to the Ottomans. A weak Persia became the focus of a struggle between the Russians and the British in the 19th century.

  The Catholic Counter-Reformation (1545)

  In response to the growth of the Protestant movement, the Catholic Church instituted its own reforms. In 1545 the Council of Trent was called under Pope Paul III to reform the Church and to refute Lutheranism. However, in a defensive measure, the full fury of the Church was also unleashed on anybody who continued to challenge its authority. The Council endorsed the establishment of the Roman Inquisition that hunted down and executed heretics in the most gruesome of ways. An index of books deemed heretical was published in the first attempt at mass censorship, and to read them was to run the risk of excommunication, which was to many a fate worse than death.

  In 1543 the Polish astronomer, Nicolai Copernicus, had been condemned for daring to suggest that the Earth, far from being the centre of the universe, actually rotated around the sun. 72 years later, Galileo Galilei was called to Rome by the Inquisition for daring to agree with Copernicus. While agreeing that the Bible was infallible, he had suggested that the people who interpreted it might not be. As a result, he was forced to state publicly that the Earth did not revolve around the sun and was sentenced to imprisonment in his own home. As David Landes states, ‘The Protestant reformation gave a big boost to literacy, spawned dissent and heresies, and promoted scepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of the scientific endeavour. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure.’70

  Exhausted by wars on all fronts, Charles abdicated in 1555, only to die in a monastery two years later. The German-speaking Habsburg lands passed to Charles' younger brother, Ferdinand, who became Holy Roman Emperor – now a virtually hereditary Habsburg title. The Spanish Empire, including the Netherlands, the Habsburg Italian possessions and, for a time, Portugal, passed to his fanatical son, Philip II. In this way, the minor branch of the Austrian Habsburgs and the major branch of the Spanish Habsburgs were founded.

  The Dutch Revolt (1579–1648)

  Philip II attempted to impose a more centralised system of government, partly to indulge his autocratic tendencies and partly to increase tax revenues to fund the spiralling costs of his wars. As a champion of Catholicism, Philip was also intent on repressing Protestants, hitherto tolerated in the Netherlands in the interests of trade, wherever he found them.

  The beginning of Philip’s reign saw simmering discontent among the Dutch, whose country had only formally been joined to the possessions of Spain by Charles in 1549. Fiercely autonomous, they resented the new taxes levied by Philip. A series of bad harvests spread unrest among the masses and led to mobs sacking a number of churches and monasteries. Keen to impose his authority against the impertinent Protestants, Philip sent an army to quell the revolt; however, the brutal way in which his men handled the situation even alienated some of the Dutch Catholics and gradually turned the revolt into a fight for complete independence.

  In 1579 seven northern provinces formed the ‘United Provinces of the Netherlands’, and two years later they stated that Philip was no longer their rightful king, effectively declaring independence from Spain. Little did they imagine that their independence would only be fully recognised in 1648 after a devastating Europe–wide war. The southern provinces, including present-day Belgium and Luxembourg, remained loyal to Spain. Losing the battle against the Spanish and in desperate straits, the United Provinces offered the Dutch crown to Queen Elizabeth of England and to the younger brother of the king of France. They both turned it down, but Elizabeth eventually sent a small army to help the rebels after William I of Orange was assassinated in 1584.

  The English Reformation (1517–1558)

  Meanwhile, in England, the Tudor king, Henry VIII, had come to the English throne in 1509. Henry became king only because his elder brother, Arthur, who had married Catherine of Aragon, had died. Henry VIII married his brother’s widow, but his roving eye soon fell upon another, and he tried to have his first marriage annulled, not realising for a minute the problems that this would cause. The ideas of Luther had already begun to percolate through to England and were welcomed by Henry’s new lover, Anne Boleyn. Catherine’s nephew, however, was Emperor Charles V, and his influence was brought to bear on the Pope who refused to annul the marriage. In turn, an embittered Henry refused to recognise papal authority, an ironic act from a man who had initially rejected the teachings of Luther to such an extent that he had earned himself the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ in 1521.71

  As the Catholic faith did not recognise divorce, Henry ordered the Archbishop of Canterbury to grant him one, which he duly did. This break with Rome was confirmed in 1534 when Henry was made Supreme Head of the English Church by an Act of Parliament. The head of the Church of England was henceforth to be the king and those who challenged Henry were executed. Those who supported him, on the other hand, were richly rewarded with the lands and riches of the Church, which the king redistributed after having dissolved the rich monasteries. Royal revenues doubled in the process.

  Henry’s eventual six marriages produced three heirs: Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth. Each had differing religious beliefs. His son, Edward, was staunchly Protestant, but his reign was short. Mary, like her mother, Catherine of Aragon, was a devout Catholic. When Mary became the first queen of England, she tried to turn the clock back, but squandered any goodwill she had managed to gather by marrying Philip II of Spain, the Catholic son of Charles V. England, after all, had no desire either to be ruled by a Spanish king or to have its religious life run by the Pope, and those who had benefited from the distribution of Church lands by Henry VIII certainly had no intention of giving them back.

  Mary’s revival of heresy laws, and the public burnings that followed, were the final nail in her coffin and earned her the epithet of ‘Bloody Mary’. To make matters worse, England, now a friend of Spain, was dragged into a war with France in which England lost Calais – the last bit of land it held in France – in 1558. When Mary died that same year, she was not particularly mourned and, as her marriage to Philip II had not produced an heir, the throne passed to her sister, Elizabeth. Elizabeth who would gain a place as one of England’s greatest monarchs in a reign that lasted 45 years.

  Elizabeth I: The Virgin Queen (1533–1603)

  The new queen had Protestant sympathies for which she was eventually ex-communicated by the Pope, but she was not an extremist like her sister. She was generally tolerant except when religious questions of the day gave her no other option, such as when numerous plots were discovered to p
ut her first cousin Mary, Queen of the Scots, on the throne of England. Much to her distaste, Elizabeth was forced to have Mary executed.

  Elizabeth’s reign was a great one for England and she raised the country’s status in the world. During her reign the first English attempts were made to set up a colony in northern America. Walter Raleigh named the land Virginia, after the virgin queen, at the suggestion of the queen herself so she could curry favour with her Catholic subjects.

  This claim on America, however, was the final straw for the Spanish; after all they had claimed the entire American continent as their own and with papal approval no less! By sending aid to the United Provinces, by repeatedly attacking Spanish shipping and settlements, and by executing her Catholic cousin, Mary, Elizabeth could surely not have expected a reasoned response.

  The Spanish immediately started preparations for sending an ‘Armada’ of ships to invade England and restore the country to the Catholic faith. Word of this endeavour soon spread as Philip of Spain encouraged all Catholic countries to contribute funds and men. When it set sail, the Armada comprised 7,000 sailors, 17,000 soldiers and 130 ships. While the Pope blessed the venture, the whole of Europe looked on. Yet despite the funds at its disposal, the Armada failed.

  First, there were delays when Francis Drake sailed brazenly into the port of Cadiz in southern Spain and sank 30 Spanish ships, infuriating Philip even further in the process.72 Second, the person put in charge of leading the Armada, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia had, rather unbelievably, never commanded a navy and sought desperately to get out of taking command. A combination of factors, including errors by the Spanish, bad luck with the weather and superb tactics by the English, together with their use of smaller and faster ships, ensured Spanish defeat. The Armada was forced to sail around the British Isles, and limped back into port in Spain with half its ships and approximately half its men – a financial disaster and a humiliating defeat.