The Super Summary of World History

by Alan Dale Daniel

  As the explorers set out to find new worlds, inside Europe new religious rivalries were coming to the surface. From outside Europe Islam was hammering at the Balkans, while inside Europe the Roman Catholic Church suffered from increasing corruption. Several movements were trying to reform the Church, such as the monastic movement,[102] and humanist influences from philosophers like Sir Thomas Moore (1478 to1535), and Erasmus (1466 to1536) talked against corruption; however, no endeavor brought real change within the Church. A Church led by wealthy popes leading depraved lives was not going to change through its leadership. Some reformers paid with their lives for challenging Church doctrines, so many who desired restructuring stayed quiet.

  All this changed with the advent of Martin Luther (1483 to 1546), an Augustinian monk who, in 1517, nailed his ninety-five theses to a church door at Wittenberg, Germany, demanding the Catholic Church end corrupt practices, change its doctrines, and recognize salvation by faith alone. Luther took a big chance with his life, and he might have lost both his life and his spiritual battle if not for the protection of German princes who wanted to break from the pope and his long tradition of extracting money from them. With this protection, he survived several attempts on his life by the supporters of the pope, wrote a Bible that a common person could read,[103] and printed several tracts defending his position on the Bible. Marrying a defrocked nun only confirmed to all Catholics Luther was in league with Satan. Eventually, the Protestant Reformation spread across northern Germany, Scandinavia, and England (kinda sorta). From the city of Geneva, Switzerland, which became a religious state, John Calvin (1509 to 1564) spread his form of the Protestant faith (a belief in predestination, hard work, and thrift) to France and Holland. Calvin’s Protestant sect had an outsized worldwide influence that lingers until this day. The Protestant Reformation generated many sects of Christianity, and many wars, causing millions of deaths across Europe. Like all religious wars, they were brutal.

  The Catholic leaders of Europe had numerous problems. Under escalating attacks from the Muslim east they needed the German princes to help repel the threat; accordingly, they could not destroy them to get to Martin Luther. The problem of defending Catholic empires (like Spain) from upstart nations (like England) took men and money, adding to their woes and wreaking their ability to crush the Protestants. As the Protestant religion spread, the Catholic response became more violent as France and other nations began killing their own. In Spain, Phillip wanted to end the Protestant rebellion in the Netherlands that England was supporting. This small fact would lead to a famous sea battle and then the demise of a great Catholic worldwide empire, followed by the foundation of a new and even greater Protestant worldwide empire.

  Henry VIII of England really threw a wrench into the religious works when he decided to replace his queen with a much younger woman. In times past the monarch could just buy the pope off, but this time the pope refused, thereby turning King Henry VIII into a fat vat of smoldering anger.[104] He decided the King of England could darn well head his own church, so he decided to go Protestant and reject the Catholic Church in 1533.[105] Soon he had put his old queen away and married a much younger one—and then decided to marry another, and another, and, well, the whole thing just went nuts. King Henry ended up with six (6) wives, most going to their deaths to make way for the next woman in the king’s bed. After King Henry’s death, Elizabeth I of England, the daughter of Ann Boleyn (the second wife), eventually became queen; and she was a Protestant.

  Henry VIII did more than just argue with Catholics over women and power. He set the foundations for the future might of England when he decided to build the most advanced navy in the world. His ships had the best cannons and the best designs. This decision, continued by his successors, was foundational and eventually made England the most powerful nation on earth for over 350 years.

  Phillip, King of Spain and ruler of the Netherlands (at least he thought so), sent his army to fight the Dutch Protestants over their claim of independence (Holland, et al). It would be a war lasting eighty years. This was a tough war, fought over what amounted to salt marshes by troops wearing heavy armor pounding away with crude and inaccurate guns, long pikes, and heavy swords. The fighting gained little for Spain, and Phillip thought the so-called virgin queen of England (Elizabeth) was helping the rebels. So, following the custom of the day, Phillip sent diplomats to diplomatically tell the virgin queen to back off assisting the rebels. Elizabeth, following the custom of the day, gently replied she could do nothing of the sort, while lying and denying England was sending aid.—also part of the customs of the day. Naturally, this upset the Spanish king, but he still wanted a better reason to go to war, and Elizabeth gave it to him. There was another heir to the English throne, Mary Queen of Scots, a Catholic enjoying wide support in England. She was, however, Elizabeth’s prisoner making it hard to push a claim. Mary made a few poor decisions and ended up charged with conspiring to kill Elizabeth (all true) which got her condemned to death. Soon her head was bouncing away from her otherwise gorgeous body, and the King of Spain had what he needed, a righteous reason to war with England.

  King Phillip constructed the Spanish Armada, a fleet consisting of numerous exceptionally outsized ships, to invade England. King Phillip planned to sail his fleet to Holland, load his waiting infantry aboard the massive ships, and thence sail to England and debark for conquest. Realizing he needed a lot of men to invade England, the Spanish king thought many large ships were necessary to haul the men and equipment. Phillip may have been right about the need for large ships, but did all of them have to be so large? Believing the Catholic God was on his side, King Phillip put the Armada to sea in 1588 with orders to sail for Holland.

  Figure 31 Route of the Spanish Armada

  Things immediately began to go wrong for the Armada. Many of the ships were not seaworthy, and the men had little training in sailing, firing cannons, or otherwise surviving at sea. When the Armada appeared on the British horizon the English sea dogs set out in their small, but very maneuverable, ships to meet the challenge. Elizabeth was ashore with her army, all decked out in gleaming armor and ready to fight, but armies were unnecessary in this battle. The highly experienced English seamen vigorously attacked the Armada, but the grand ships sailed on with little noticeable damage. The Armanda successfully sailed to Holland, but unfortunately for the Spanish the troops were not ready to board. Somehow, no one informed them when the Armada would arrive. Seeing this was a mess, the Spanish dropped anchor, waiting for the morrow while trying to figure out what to do.

  The English had other plans. Seeing the Spanish at anchor, the English unleashed several fire ships, burning from stem to stern, at the stationary Spanish Galleons when the wind was right. The fire ships caused a general Spanish panic, and a few of their ships were lost, but mainly the Spanish were unnerved. With things deteriorating and no troops appearing for the invasion, the Spanish admiral made a bad decision. He decided to return to Spain, but not down the channel—the way they came—but around Scotland and Ireland, and then back to Spain. The Spanish sailed north to their doom. On the way home tremendous storms struck the Armada tearing the vessels apart. The ships were not all that seaworthy anyway, and the massive storms simply gave them no chance. Nearly the entire Armada was lost at sea or driven onto the rocky Irish coast where plundering and murder awaited the warships and men courtesy of the area’s unruly inhabitants.

  The loss of the Armada, by whatever means, was a huge blow to the Spanish war effort. Building the Armada drained the treasury, always bad news in a war, and the loss of men hurt as well. This began the loss of the worldwide Catholic empire. Meanwhile, England celebrated a miraculous victory. Elizabeth I became a legendary leader by way of the defeat of the Armada, and England would go on to secure its place as the world’s predominant sea power for 350 plus years (until the end of World War II in 1945). This was the start of the worldwide Protestant empire.

  Europe Undergoes Vast Change

  T
he Catholic Church was undergoing a new beginning because of groups like the Jesuit order founded in 1540 by Ignatius Loyola. This spawned the Counter-reformation against the Protestants. Eventually, the Council of Trent (1545 to 1563) managed to stop the worst church offenses. None of this prevented the two warring Christian sides from murdering one another in the name of God. The Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648) devastated huge tracts of Europe, and the English civil wars (1642 to 1649) managed to do the same in England. The Puritans won in England, thereby allowing Oliver Cromwell to establish a virtual military dictatorship as “lord protector” (after beheading Charles I in 1649). These wars and beheadings failed to endear Catholics and Protestants to one another, so the fighting just went endlessly on. Cromwell died in 1658, followed in 1660 by the Restoration of the monarchy when Charles II became King of England. His son, James II, after losing a war with the Parliamentarians, lost his kingship which was assumed by the Protestant William of Orange, who became King in 1688. It was after this so-called Glorious Revolution that he took the crown as William III of England. Unknown to James II, he was the last Catholic monarch of England.

  Another subtle, but extremely powerful, change was spreading in Europe. Land, the measure of wealth for probably 5,000 years, was becoming something less. Money—cash that is—created by trade and commerce was becoming the something more. Quickly, it seems from the record, the people at the pinnacle now longer held land. They had cash in the bank, ships for commerce, storehouses of goods, and other trappings of capitalist wealth. Landholders typically hold little cash. In feudal times land equaled power because people with land controlled commerce. Commerce was now flowing from fast growing cities where landholders had no say. As the merchants accumulated money and expanded their power, land was less valuable. Hard money was the language of the new era. This decreased the power of the landholding nobility somewhat, and it caused the monarchs pause, because their power was land based; after all, taxes came from land. Monarchs and parliaments learned to tax commerce to increase their wealth, but the nobility lacked that taxing power, so the landholders watched their power melt away into the cities of a new epoch.

  While religious wars snuffed people out at a fantastic rate, something else was having a profound influence on religion and human endeavors of all types. Science was coming of age, and with the invention of the printing press the spread of experimentally confirmed knowledge was assured.

  Science and the Printing Press (The Road to Tomorrow)

  1430

  One of the greatest inventions since the advent of language and agriculture, the PRINTING PRESS is a key reason the modern world exists as it does today.

  Our modern world exists because of the printing press. In about 1430, Johann Gutenberg, a goldsmith in Germany, invented a method of printing using movable type, the precursor of the modern printing press. His press was so good it spread all over Europe and the world very quickly. At the same time the printing press was producing books and pamphlets in large numbers, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of science, and new political ideas were emerging and changing the world. Without the printing press such ideas may not have spread as quickly or might fail to spread at all. The printing press was so powerful that Muslim countries banned it in 1515 because it might spread Western learning.

  Large numbers of people began reading as books and tracts became widely available. They included: the Bible as translated by Luther, the King James Bible (1611), the tracts on science by Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, the political thoughts of Moore (Utopia 1516), Machiavelli (The Prince 1513), philosophers like John Locke, and literature by Shakespeare (1553 to1616). Once these ideas moved off the press their power was limitless. Efforts by churches and traditionalist to thwart the growth of new ideas about the earth, the universe, and mankind were condemned to failure once the concepts hit the printing presses and a literate public.[106]

  The first book off the new printing press was the Gutenberg Bible in 1455. This book held the words of a man scourged and crucified in about AD 33 in the backwater Roman province of Palestine (modern day Israel). This poor fellow died crucified between two criminals, was not of noble birth or any kind of government official. His burial place was a cave with a rock rolled over the front. No one chiseled his words into stone like emperors or Pharaohs. He lived before the printing press, newspapers, tape recorders, radio, TV, or any modern method of keeping records of the spoken word. When he died, his friends said they did not know him, and his death went unrecorded in any official record we know about. It seems the only thing owned when he died was the clothes on his back which were filthy, blood-soaked rags after his scourging and crucifixion. He died alone, childless, no wife, without money, without worldly power or position on the dusty outskirts of Roman civilization. Before his crucifixion, he made a strange statement: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matt: 24:35). His statement was confirmed, at least in the short run, when Gutenberg published the Gutenberg Bible, because the man who spoke those words was Jesus Christ. The most printed book on planet earth is the Bible carrying the words of Jesus Christ who suffered scourging and crucifixion outside the gates of the city of Jerusalem so long ago.[107]

  Yet, the printing press did not seem to be a friend of religion so long as it printed the words of men scouring the earth and the heavens for answers to the mysteries of life. The acceptance of the scientific method was the key to advancing empirical knowledge, and the advance of mankind’s empirical knowledge grew spectacularly in Europe. This was the scientific revolution that was throwing out old ideas of an earth-centered universe through the work of Copernicus, Brahe, and Kepler. By explaining the movement of the planets in the sky they were able to prove that the sun was the center of the solar system. It was the start of a new way of thinking. Before, people looked to the past or the books of Aristotle or Ptolemy to explain the world, but now people would not read the classics to see what was fact or fiction. Now people tested it for themselves, and if the classic view failed the test, rejection was the result. New ideas based on tested facts became the accepted view, and any new empirically proven “facts” survived only so long as they withstood testing. This brave new empirical world started during the Renaissance and zoomed ahead during the 1600s and 1700s in Europe. And its growth never stopped accelerating.

  The new scientific and practical advances were astounding: Peter Heinlein invented the first pocket watch in 1500; in 1515 the first rifles were developed; Isaac Newton described the laws of gravity in 1665 and in his publication of Principia Mathematica (1687) united gravity, inertia, and centrifugal force; William Harvey discovered how blood circulated in the human body by 1628; Fermat put forth the statistical theory of probability in 1659; John Kay invented the flying shuttle loom in 1733; and so on. After laying the foundations of science, more discovery and invention followed until a tidal wave of progress swept the Western World.

  The Arts—Painting

  During this period, painting began to advance as never before. Michelangelo (1475 to 1654), Titian, Durer, Raphael, Jan van Eyck, El Greco, Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt (1606 to 1669), Holbein, and many others brought painting away from the stiff and unrealistic styles of the Middle Ages to the vibrant, realistic, and almost-animated paintings of 1400 to 1600. The artists were using new colors based on oil paints invented in 1400, and painting on new material (canvas) with new techniques founded on perspective drawing (perspective discovered about 1434) that brought the paintings alive. There was still an enormous amount of symbolism, but the depiction of the world became very real. Oils allowed new techniques of paint application including the layering of color where very thin coats of multiple colors were laid on over a long period. This allowed light to enter through the layers of thin paint and then bounce back to the viewer’s eye, imparting a glow to the paintings that made the colors iridescent. Nothing like this had ever been seen before.

  Speed of Change

  Due to the printing pr
ess new ideas now spread with astonishing speed and clarity. Ideas spread by word of mouth can warp quickly, but once written down the idea remains the same no matter how many people read the book or pamphlet. This foretells the pace of change in the modern world. Today, 2010, the pace of change is so fast that most of it goes unreported and almost unnoticed. A publication called Science News comes out once per week filled with summaries of new discoveries which most people will never hear of directly. The flow of information has been increasing since 1455, and it is now so great (with the Internet, TV, radio, computers, newspapers, etc.) it is impossible to sort through it all. In ancient Persia, the fastest way to get information around was by pony express (not their name for it). Until the telegraph in 1837, pony express was the quickest way possible to transmit detailed information. Now, the push of a button electronically transports a hundred pages of text to Japan from America in seconds. Hence, from 1837 to 2010, the speed of information transfer has increased from a running horse to the speed of light. From before 5000 BC to 1837, it had not increased at all.

  The French Revolution 1789 to 1799

  The French Revolution is so significant it is difficult to exaggerate its importance. Yet, it is a very complex revolt changing France and Europe a lot, but then changing them very little. The Revolution started in 1789 when starving people in Paris, France, decided to do something about it. Riots and confrontations shook the government, escalating until the king and queen were captured and then beheaded by the unleashed forces of change. Shortly thereafter, suspicious radicals commenced beheading anyone they could lay their hands on calling them enemies of the Revolution, and those beheaded included several prominent early leaders of the rebellion. During the crisis, a strong man arose and captured the Revolution, eventually naming himself emperor of France in 1804. Now everyone is back where they started minus thousands of dead and a swarm of wars stemming from the Revolution. It did not really end until 1815, after the strong man was defeated at Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna convened to stop the wars and achieve a political balance in Europe. The strong man was Napoleon, and his ideas on war and government came to dominate the age. The French Revolution set off numerous new political, social, and cultural ideas, but in the final event the “old order” prevailed, suppressing many of the innovative ideas. Still, such ideas did not die, and a permanent structural change took place in the culture and the societies of Europe touched by this inferno.