Spain had, however, embarked on a policy that would come to epitomize the fanatical violence inherent in religion. In 1480, with the Ottoman threat at its height, Ferdinand and Isabella had established the Spanish Inquisition. It is significant that, even though the Catholic monarchs remained the pope’s obedient servants, they insisted that it remain separate from the papal inquisition. Ferdinand may have hoped thereby to mitigate the cruelty of his own inquisition and almost certainly never intended it to be a permanent institution.20 The Spanish Inquisition did not target Christian heretics but focused on Jews who had converted to Christianity and were believed to have lapsed. In Muslim Spain, Jews had never been subjected to the persecution that was now habitual in the rest of Europe,21 but as the Crusading armies of the Reconquista advanced down the peninsula in the late fourteenth century, Jews in Aragon and Castile had been dragged to the baptismal font; others had tried to save themselves by voluntary conversion, and some of these conversos (“converts”) became extremely successful in Christian society and inspired considerable resentment. There were riots, and converso property was seized, the violence caused by financial and social jealousy as much as by religious allegiance.22 The monarchs were not personally anti-Semitic but simply wanted to pacify their kingdom, which had been shaken by civil war and now faced the Ottoman threat. Yet the Inquisition was a deeply flawed attempt to achieve stability. As often happens when a nation is menaced by an external power, there were paranoid fears of enemies within, in this case of a “fifth column” of lapsed conversos working secretly to undermine the kingdom’s security. The Spanish Inquisition has become a byword for excessive “religious” intolerance, but its violence was caused less by theological than by political considerations.
Such interference with the religious practice of their subjects was entirely new in Spain, where confessional uniformity had never been a possibility. After centuries of Christians, Jews, and Muslims “living together” (convivencia), the monarchs’ initiative met with strong opposition. Yet while there was no public appetite for targeting observant Jews, there was considerable anxiety about the so-called lapsed “secret Jews,” known as New Christians. When the Inquisitors arrived in a district, “apostates” were promised a pardon if they confessed voluntarily, and “Old Christians” were ordered to report neighbors who refused to eat pork or work on Saturday, the emphasis always on practice and social custom rather than “belief.” Many conversos who were loyal Catholics felt it wise to seize the opportunity of amnesty while the going was good, and this flood of “confessions” convinced both the Inquisitors and the public that the society of clandestine “Judaizers” really existed.23 Seeking out dissidents in this way would not infrequently become a feature of modern states, secular as well as religious, in times of national crisis.
After the conquest of 1492, the monarchs inherited Granada’s large Jewish community. The fervid patriotism unleashed by the Christian triumph led to more hysterical conspiracy fears.24 Some remembered old tales of Jews helping the Muslim armies when they had arrived in Spain eight hundred years earlier and pressured the monarchs to deport all practicing Jews from Spain. After initial hesitation, on March 31, 1492, the monarchs signed the edict of expulsion, which gave Jews the choice of baptism or deportation. Most chose baptism and, as conversos, were now harassed by the Inquisition, but about eighty thousand crossed the border into Portugal, and fifty thousand took refuge in the Ottoman Empire.25 Under papal pressure. Ferdinand and Isabella now turned their attention to Spain’s Muslims. In 1499 Granada was split into Christian and Muslim zones, Muslims were required to convert, and by 1501 Granada was officially a kingdom of “New Christians.” But the Muslim converts (Moriscos) were given no instruction in their new faith, and everybody knew that they continued to live, pray, and fast according to the laws of Islam. Indeed, a mufti in Oran in North Africa issued a fatwa permitting Spanish Muslims to conform outwardly to Christianity, and most Spaniards turned a blind eye to Muslim observance. A practical convivencia had been restored.
The first twenty years of the Spanish Inquisition were undoubtedly the most violent in its long history. There is no reliable documentation of the actual numbers of people killed. Historians once believed that about thirteen thousand conversos were burned during this early period.26 More recent estimates suggest, however, that most of those who came forward were never brought to trial; that in most cases the death penalty was pronounced in absentia over conversos who had fled and were symbolically burned in effigy; and that from 1480 to 1530 only between 1,500 and 2,000 people were actually executed.27 Nevertheless, this was a tragic and shocking development that broke with centuries of peaceful coexistence. The experience was devastating for the conversos and proved lamentably counterproductive. Many conversos who had been faithful Catholics when they were detained were so disgusted by their treatment that they reverted to Judaism and became the “secret Jews” that the Inquisition had set out to eliminate.28
Spain was not a modern centralized state, but in the late fifteenth century it was the most powerful kingdom in the world. Besides its colonial possessions in the Americas, Spain had holdings in the Netherlands, and the monarchs had married their children to the heirs of Portugal, England, and the Austrian Habsburg dynasty. To counter the ambitions of its archrival France, Ferdinand had campaigned in Italy against France and Venice and seized control of Upper Navarre and Naples. Spain was, therefore, feared and resented, and exaggerated tales of the Inquisition spread through the rest of Europe, which was itself in the violent throes of a major transformation.
By the sixteenth century a different kind of civilization was slowly emerging in Europe, based on new technologies and the constant reinvestment of capital. This would ultimately free the continent from many of the restrictions of agrarian society. Instead of focusing on the preservation of past achievements, Western people were acquiring the confidence to look to the future. Where older cultures had required people to remain within carefully defined limits, pioneers like Columbus were encouraging them to venture beyond the known world, where they discovered that they not only survived but prospered. Inventions were occurring simultaneously in many different fields; none of them seemed particularly momentous at the time, but their cumulative effect was decisive.29 Specialists in one discipline found that they benefited from discoveries made in others. By 1600 innovations were occurring on such a scale and in so many areas at once that progress had become irreversible. Religion would either have to adapt to these developments or become irrelevant.
By the early seventeenth century, the Dutch had created the building blocks of Western capitalism.30 In the joint-stock company, members pooled their capital contributions and placed them on a permanent basis under common management, which gave a colonial or trading venture abroad resources and security far greater than one person could provide. The first municipal bank in Amsterdam offered efficient, inexpensive, and safe access to deposits, money transfers, and payment services both at home and in the growing international market. Finally, the stock exchange gave merchants a center where they could trade in all kinds of commodities. These institutions, over which the church had no control, would acquire a dynamic of their own and, as the market economy developed, would increasingly undermine old agrarian structures and enable the commercial classes to develop their own power base. Successful merchants, artisans, and manufacturers would become powerful enough to participate in the politics that had formerly been the preserve of the aristocracy, even to the point of playing off one noble faction against another. They tended to ally themselves with those kings who were trying to build strong centralized monarchies, since this would facilitate trade. With the emergence of the absolute monarchy and the sovereign state in England and France, the commercial classes, or bourgeoisie, became increasingly influential as market forces gradually made the state independent of the restrictions imposed upon it by a wholly agrarian economy.31 But would it be less structurally or militarily violent than the agrarian state?
In Germany there were no strong, centralizing monarchies, only a welter of forty-one small principalities that the Holy Roman emperor was unable to control. But in 1506 Charles V, the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella and of the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian, inherited the Habsburg lands in Austria and on the death of Ferdinand in 1516 he also became king of Aragon and Castile; in 1519 he was elected Holy Roman emperor. By an adroit series of marriage alliances, skillful diplomacy, and warfare, the Habsburgs had brought more territories under their rule than any previous European monarchs. Charles’s ambition was to create a pan-European empire similar to the Ottoman Empire, but he found that he could not control the German princes who wanted to make their principalities strong monarchies on the model of France and England. Moreover, the towns of central and southern Germany had become the most vital commercial centers in northern Europe.32 Economic changes there led to class conflict, and as usual, discontent focused on Jewish “usurers” and venal Catholic priests who were said to leech off the poor.
In 1517 Martin Luther (1483–1546), an Augustinian friar, nailed his famous ninety-five theses on the castle church door in Wittenberg and set in motion the process known as the Reformation. His attack on the Church’s sale of indulgences resonated with discontented townsfolk, who were sick of clerics extorting money from gullible people on dubious pretexts.33 The ecclesiastical establishment treated Luther’s protest with lofty disdain, but young clerics took his ideas to the people in the towns, who initiated local reforms that effectively liberated their congregations from the control of Rome. The more intellectually vigorous clergy spread Luther’s ideas in their own books, which thanks to the new technology of printing, circulated with unprecedented speed, launching one of the first modern mass movements. Like other heretics in the past, Luther had created an antichurch.
Luther and the other great reformers—Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) and John Calvin (1509–64)—were addressing a society undergoing fundamental and far-reaching change. Modernization would always be frightening: living in medias res, people are unable to see where their society is going and find its slow but radical alteration distressing. No longer feeling at home in a changing world, they found that their faith changed too. Luther himself was prey to agonizing depressions and wrote eloquently of his inability to respond to the old rituals, which had been designed for another way of life.34 Zwingli and Calvin both felt a sense of crippling helplessness before experiencing a profound conviction of the absolute power of God; this alone, they were convinced, could save them. In leaving the Roman Church, the reformers were making one of the earliest declarations of independence of Western modernity, and because of their aggressive stance toward the Catholic establishment, they were known as “Protestants.” They demanded the freedom to read and interpret the Bible as they chose—even though each of the three could be intolerant of views opposed to his own teaching. The reformed Christian stood alone with his Bible before his God: Protestants thus canonized the growing individualism of the modern spirit.
Luther was also the first European Christian to advocate the separation of church and state, though his “secularist” vision was hardly irenic. God, he believed, had so retreated from the material world that it no longer had any spiritual significance. Like other rigorists before him, Luther yearned for spiritual purity and concluded that church and state should operate independently, each respecting the other’s proper sphere.35 In Luther’s political writings we see the arrival of “religion” as a discrete activity, separate from the world as a whole, which it had previously permeated. True Christians, justified by a personal act of faith in God’s saving power, belonged to the Kingdom of God, and because the Holy Spirit made them incapable of injustice and hatred, they were essentially free from state coercion. But Luther knew that such Christians were few in number. Most were still in thrall to sin and, together with non-Christians, belonged to the Kingdom of the World; it was essential, therefore, that these sinners be restrained by the state “in the same way as a savage wild beast is bound with chains and ropes so that it cannot bite and tear as it would normally do.” Luther understood that without a strong state, “the world would be reduced to chaos,” and that no government could realistically rule according to the gospel principles of love, forgiveness, and tolerance. To attempt this would be like “loosing the ropes and chains of the savage wild beasts and letting them bite and mangle everywhere.”36 The only way the Kingdom of the World, a realm of selfishness and violence ruled by the devil, could impose the peace, continuity, and order that made human society feasible was by the sword.
But the state had no jurisdiction over the conscience of the individual and no right, therefore, to fight heresy or lead a holy war. While it could have nothing to do with the spiritual realm, the state must have unqualified and absolute authority in temporal affairs. Even if the state were cruel, tyrannical, and forbade the teaching of God’s word, Christians must not resist its power.37 For its part, the true church, the Kingdom of God, must hold aloof from the inherently corrupt and depraved policies of the Kingdom of the World, dealing only with spiritual affairs. Protestants believed that the Roman Church had failed in its true mission because it had dallied with the sinful Kingdom of the World.
Where premodern faith had emphasized the sacredness of community—the Sangha, the ummah, and the Body of Christ—for Luther “religion” was a wholly personal and private matter. Where previous sages, prophets, and reformers had felt impelled to take a stand against the systemic violence of the state, Luther’s Christian was supposed to retreat into his own interior world of righteousness and let society, quite literally, go to hell. And in his emphasis on the limited and inferior nature of earthly politics, Luther had given a potentially dangerous endorsement of unqualified state power.38 Luther’s response to the Peasants’ War in Germany showed that a secularized political theory would not necessarily lead to a reduction of state violence. Between March and May 1525, peasant communities in southern and central Germany had resisted the centralizing policies of the princes that deprived them of traditional rights, and by hardheaded bargaining, many villages had managed to wrest concessions from them without resorting to violence. But in Thuringia, in central Germany, lawless peasant bands roamed the countryside, looting and burning convents, churches, and monasteries.39
In his first pamphlet on the Peasants’ War, Luther had tried to be even-handed and had castigated the “cheating” and “robbing” of the aristocracy. But in his view the peasants had committed the unpardonable sin of mixing religion and politics. Suffering, he maintained, was their lot; they must obey the gospel, turn the other cheek, and accept the loss of their lives and property. They had had the temerity to argue that Christ had made all men free—an opinion that clearly chimed with New Testament teachings but cut no ice with Luther. He insisted that “a worldly kingdom cannot exist without an inequality of persons, some being free, some imprisoned, some lords, some subjects.”40 Luther encouraged the princes to use every possible means to suppress the peasant agitators:
Let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisoned, hurtful or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog: if you do not strike him, he will strike you and a whole land with you.41
The rebels, he concluded, were in thrall to the devil, and killing them was an act of mercy, because it would rescue them from this satanic bondage.
Because this rebellion threatened the entire social structure, the state suppressed it savagely: as many as a hundred thousand peasants may have died. The crisis was an ominous sign of the instability of early modern states at a time when traditional ideas were being widely questioned. The reformers had called for reliance on scripture alone but would find that the Bible could be a dangerous weapon if it got into the wrong hands. Once people began reading their Bibles for themselves, they soon saw glaring discrepancies between Jesus’s teachings and current ecclesiastical and political practice. T
he Anabaptists (“Re-baptizers”) were especially disruptive because their literal reading of the gospel led them to condemn such institutions as the Holy Roman Empire, the city council, and the trade guild.42 When some Dutch Anabaptists managed to seize control of Münster in northwestern Germany in 1534, instituting polygamy and banning private property, Catholics and Protestants—for once in firm agreement—saw this as a political threat that could easily be emulated by other towns.43 The following year, the Anabaptists of Münster were massacred by joint Catholic and Protestant forces.44
The Münster catastrophe and the Peasants’ War both affected the way other rulers dealt with religious dissidents. In western Europe, “heresy” had always been a political rather than a purely theological matter and had been suppressed violently because it threatened public order. Very few of the elite, therefore, considered it wrong to prosecute and execute “heretics,” who were killed not so much for what they believed as for what they did or failed to do. The Reformation, however, had introduced an entirely new emphasis on “belief.” Hitherto the Middle English beleven (like the Greek pistis and the Latin credo) had been a practically expressed “commitment” or “loyalty”; now it would increasingly come to mean an intellectual acceptance of a set of doctrinal opinions.45 As the Reformation progressed, it became important to explain the differences between the new and the old religion, as well as between the different Protestant sects—hence the lists of obligatory “beliefs” in the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Lambeth Articles, and the Westminster Confession.46 Catholics would do likewise in their own reformation, formulated by the Council of Trent (1545–63), which created a catechism of propositional, standardized opinions.
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