I. INTRODUCTION#

Fear, dread, and despair occasionally engulfed portions of the European populace in the seventeenth century. These feelings of anguish did not appear groundless. Warfare, famine, and poverty frequently prowled as unwelcome visitors in corners of Europe.

The true causes of communicable diseases were often unknown.

• In 1495 syphilis began infecting occupying French troops in Naples, Italy.

• In 1518 the first reported outbreak of smallpox occurred in the Americas.

Conquistadors and others brought syphilis and smallpox with them as deadly exports to the New World.

In the main the characterization of the seventeenth century as generally an age of fear and crisis remains quite apt.

A. The Scourge of Massive Deaths#

Death on occasion relentlessly stalked Europeans, cutting them down at very early ages as judged by modern mortality rates for developed nations.

• In the province of Anjou, France, infant mortality rates ranged from 300 to 350 per 1,000 for the first year of life.

• In early seventeenth-century England, the average person lived to age thirty to thirty-five.

Worse yet, the average age for life expectancy at birth, with all European populations considered, settled at a dismal twenty-three to twenty-six years of age.

During the Thirty Years War (1618–48), brutal warfare created killing fields within central Europe and left cities like Magdeburg in ruins and desolation.

• The population of Germany fell from about 21 million to 13 million, with regions such as Swabia, Pomerania, the Palatinate, and Bohemia especially hard hit by fighting.

Between the years 1598 and 1602, a bubonic plague killed 600,000 in Castile. In 1603 a virulent plague broke out in England.

On the Italian peninsula, the horrific plague of 1630 decimated populations, in cities such as Mantua, and killed up to 40 percent of the inhabitants in Lombardy and Tuscany, the Venetian Republic, and the Este states.

In France, two million people died of the plague between 1600 and 1670. Fires on occasion charred homes in villages and burned sections of cities to the ground.

In 1665 an overcrowded and dirty London was struck by a horrendous plague, with nearly 70,000 people losing their lives; then London was set ablaze in 1666 with 100,000 people deprived of their places of shelter.

Nor were famines uncommon in Europe. A fear of hunger is referenced in the popular literature of the day. Bad weather, especially bitter cold, ruined growing seasons and thereby reduced harvests in the 1590s, 1620s, 1640s, 1650s, and 1690s.

The year 1601–2 was apparently the coldest to grip portions of Europe in six hundred years. Due to crop failures, two million Russians died of starvation during the year 1602–3.

B. Revolts and Revolutions#

Antagonism between various Christian churches and factions stoked fierce theological disputes, intemperate rhetoric, rude personal attacks, and even violence.

Economic, political, and religious competition precipitated a series of wars in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

• During the 1640s England was wracked by a painful civil war, which culminated in the execution of Charles I (1649), a “divine right monarch.”

• Spain faced revolts in Catalonia and Portugal, whereas Poland – Lithuania was ravaged by Cossacks.

• The Fronde (civil wars, 1648–53), inspired in part by nobles caught up in revolt, violently shook political life in France.

• In 1649–50 the troops of Oliver Cromwell meted out very harsh reprisals on rebels in Ireland.

In 1643 Spanish authors of a political tract lamented worldwide political disruptions:

All the north in commotion … England, Ireland and Scotland aflame with Civil War … The Ottomans tearing each other to pieces … China invaded by the Tartars, Ethiopia by the Turks, and the Indian kings who live scattered through the region between the Ganges and the Indus all at each other’s throats.

In the 1680s Louis XIV’s dragonnades — known as “booted missionaries”—resorted to any means of intimidation short of murder while billeting in the homes of the king’s Huguenot subjects in France. They forced thousands to abjure the Reformed faith and convert to Roman Catholicism, at least formally.

II. NEW WAYS OF THINKING, THE “SHOCK OF DISCOVERY,” AND THE “NEW WORLD”#

In eastern Europe things were not much more politically stable.

The much-feared Ottoman Turks — despite a sultan’s earlier peace agreement with the Hapsburg family (the Peace of Zsitvatorok, 1606) bringing a respite in warfare, and despite occasional military defeats — continued to advance westward. Already controlling vast swathes of eastern Europe including Greece and much of the Balkans, the Turks:

• invaded Hungary in 1664

• captured Crete from Venice in 1669 after a twenty-year siege

• were menacingly poised at Vienna’s gates in 1683

The success of the Turks provoked enormous anxiety and dread. Since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, various popes had called for new crusades. Christian thinkers attempted to explain the reasons the Turks were continuing to advance successfully again in Christian states. A number of western Europeans speculated that God was punishing the Eastern Orthodox for their sins.

Printing presses turned out a wave of anti-Turkish books, thereby pursuing one of the first ideological campaigns carried on in print.

Other kinds of worries could traumatize Europeans.

• Alarming reports circulated that witches and warlocks were preying on souls and bodies.

• Interest in apocalyptic biblical passages concerning the Antichrist surged.

Contemporary events seemed to confirm that this malevolent being was roaming abroad in the land.

A number of writings on biblical prophecy focused on such themes as the expected conversion of Jews to Christianity in 1655 or 1656 and the soon return of the Messiah.

• In 1655 Menassah ben Israel proposed that Jews should be permitted to return to England because they needed to be “dispersed into all places and countries of the world” before “the Messiah would come and restore our nation.”

• The Quaker Margaret Fell (later married to George Fox) likewise favored the resettlement of Jews in England.

She was persuaded that Jews would convert to Christianity in 1655.

• Jean de Labadie, a founder of a Dutch Quietist sect, taught that the millennial rule of Christ would begin in 1666.

His prediction coincided with the announcement in that year by Sabbatai Zevi of Smyrna that the messianic age had begun.

More than 90 percent of Jewish communities worldwide believed that Sabbatai Zevi (1626–76) was the “promised” Messiah. Many were rudely disappointed when he later converted to Islam.

A. Commerce, Culture, and Christianity#

By no means were all Europeans beset by despair of one kind or another on a regular basis in the seventeenth century.

The Dutch, despite decades of fighting, enjoyed remarkable economic prosperity, especially after 1648 during their “Golden Age.”

According to historian Simon Schama, the Dutch experienced an “embarrassment of riches”. Calvinist burghers or wealthy citizens in Amsterdam sometimes felt guilty about having too much wealth. They were torn between the lure of material abundance and the demands of their Calvinist ethics to care for the poor and indigent widows and children in their midst.

The dining tables of the rich in Amsterdam were piled high with food, the wharfs of their ports stacked with goods and crowded with ships from around the world.

As great maritime traders, the Dutch profited from investments in joint-stock companies such as the Dutch East India Company (1602–1798) and the Dutch West India Company (1621–1791).

• They controlled Europe’s Baltic trade.

• Dutch citizens needed the permission of the Dutch West India Company to trade along the African and American coasts.

• In North America the company founded Fort Orange (1624), Fort Nassau (1624), and Fort Good Hope and Fort Amsterdam (in New York City, 1625).

The French minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert once complained that three Dutch ships plied the high seas for every single French vessel.

Other Europeans received large sums of money or landholdings from the patronage of a noble or a king or a tsar, or through other forms of feudal obligations, or through more capitalistic ways of earning noticeable wealth.

Some Europeans experienced the satisfaction of making and learning about scientific discoveries and inventions. Natural philosophers (“scientists” of a sort) worked less in singular isolation.

• They shared their findings with others and joined newly formed societies of scholars such as the Académie française in Paris (1635), the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge in London (1660), or the Academy of Sciences in Moscow (1681).

• They did not view natural philosophy (the study of “science”) and philosophy as necessarily distinct disciplines.

Talented musicians and composers — whether in Germany, Italy, France, Poland, or elsewhere in Europe — produced a remarkable array of musical offerings for royal festivals, worship services, and concerts. Among the foremost were the Italian Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), the English Henry Purcell (1659–95), the French Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87), and the German Paul Gerhardt (1607–76). They sometimes complained, however, about the paltry pay they received for their efforts.

Court painters, sculptors, and architects demonstrated remarkable talents in creating and adorning splendid churches, palaces, government buildings, and stately residences.

In 1662 Louis XIV’s Chateau de Versailles began to rise majestically over a French countryside outside of Paris. Enhanced by stunning statuary, its beautifully coiffed gardens stretched into the far distance.

The Austrian Schönbrun Palace outside Vienna, the English Boughton House in Northamptonshire, and the royal palace in Stockholm represent samples of the extensive phenomenon of imitation. In Paris, the Louvre was built between the years 1667 and 1678.

Outside of France, painters and men and women of letters also made significant artistic contributions to their national artistic heritages. The Council of Trent had proposed that paintings, statues, and frescoes should extol the lives and deaths of the martyrs and thereby teach Christian virtues.

Turning from “Mannerism,” this didactic approach to the arts prepared the way for the “Age of Baroque,” associated with the arrival of Lodovico Carracci (1555–1619) and Michelangelo Caravaggio (c.1571–1610) in Counter-Reformation Rome.

The Age of Baroque was an especially auspicious period for the arts, architecture, and music. Its painters and sculptors sometimes emphasized the emotional, the turbulent, and the grandiose. Baroque painters often used flowing lines, much pigment, and the techniques of illusion and chiaroscuro (contrast between light and dark).

In literature

• Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599/1604) and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605–15), some of the earliest European novels, appeared.

• William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, apparently written in 1606, was staged in 1611.

• Later in the century Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière entertained audiences with clever verse and mordant satire in plays such as Le Misanthrope (1666).

• From John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and Richard Baxter’s The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650) to Pascal’s Pensées and Madame Guyon’s Short and Easy Method of Prayer, Protestants and Catholics penned classics of Christian spirituality.

The century provided reasons to hope, if not at least wonder, about the possibilities of beneficent changes due to increased understanding of the natural sciences, medicine, and commerce.

• In an epochal moment of 1609, Galileo became the first person to study the skies with an improved telescope.

• In 1628 William Harvey published An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and the Blood in Animals, in which he described the key role of the heart in the circulation of the blood.

• On May 30, 1631, Théophraste Renaudot published La Gazette, which became France’s first newspaper.

• In the 1650s the English began to sip tea, a drink that began to compete with ale as the national beverage.

The century also witnessed the daring exploration of “old” territories with innovative new approaches.

• The territory of the way the mind functions was explored most notably by Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Antoine Arnaud, Nicholas Malebranche (all from France), John Locke (England), and Gottfried Leibnitz (Germany).

• The territory of land masses beyond Europe was explored by Christian missionaries, conquistadors, and merchants.

• The territory of vast expanses in the heavens was penetrated with greater power, owing to the newly created telescope.

• A few religious leaders such as Leibnitz, Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, and Christopher Royas de Spinola, the bishop of Thina, even dared to investigate controversial religious territory by proposing ecumenical plans to unite Christians across confessional borders.

Due to the “shock of discovery,” Europeans sometimes questioned time-honored ideas taught by ancient authorities such as Aristotle and Ptolemy. Geographical exploration and scientific experiments on earth and renewed observation of the heavens proved these authorities less than trustworthy guides.

B. The Americas#

The exploration of the non-European world seemed to indicate that greatly enhanced political and economic power in Europe might reside with the nation that laid claim to or acquired vast lands in the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

A number of explorers sincerely professed a desire to see the peoples of these areas “converted” to the Christian faith. Their missionary efforts sometimes cost them their lives.

In 1496 the Spanish founded Santo Domingo in Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). In 1518 Cuba became the launching site for the conquest of other lands.

The Conquistador Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) defeated the Aztecs and set up a colony of “New Spain”, the capital of which was Mexico. In the 1530s large amounts of silver were discovered in Mexico; enslaved natives worked the silver mines.

Whereas there were 25 million native peoples in Mexico when Cortés arrived, a century later there was apparently only a small fraction of that number there.

Spanish Franciscans arrived in Mexico in 1524. They published the first book in the Americas, a catechism for Indians, in Mexico City in 1539.

In 1510 the explorers Vasco de Balboa and Francisco Pizarro discovered the Pacific Ocean. Pizarro later conquered the Incas in Ecuador and Peru.

Toward 1544, Indians on the plains of Kansas put to death Spanish Friar Minor Juan de Padilla, who had previously ministered in Mexico. Between the years 1581 and 1598, Spanish Franciscan friars entered what is now New Mexico and then settled at San Juan de los Caballeros. By the 1620s, between 20,000 and 25,000 Indians had been converted to the Catholic faith in New Mexico. Mexico City and Lima became governmental centers. The Spanish built large cathedrals, hospitals, orphanages, and shelters for women in these cities.

In 1500 the explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral claimed Brazil for the Portuguese. The Portuguese discovered much gold and silver in Brazil. African slaves became essential workers in mining gold and silver as well as in harvesting sugar cane. Brazil became a dominant producer of sugar.

In 1649 Jean de Brébeuf, a Jesuit missionary, was killed by Iroquois Indians near the Georgian Bay in Canada. French missionaries Jacques Marquette, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, and Louis Joliet explored regions around the Great Lakes, paddled on waterways such as the newly discovered Mississippi River and the Illinois River, built settlements, and taught the Catholic faith to natives.

Nonetheless, the exploration of newly acquired lands sometimes tragically included the enslaving of their peoples. Exploitation of slaves, warfare, and diseases like smallpox took a deadly toll. Europeans on occasion justified their exploitation by saying they were Christianizing the natives. But their motivation for exploration was often fueled by an unquenchable desire to find gold and silver to stash in the coffers of European governments.

The discovery of gold and silver in the New World and gold in Africa provided an even more acquisitive thrust for European conquest.

• Colonies should be planted whose inhabitants could help search out raw materials to send to the mother nation.

• In turn, the colonies could become potential markets for her finished goods carried on her ships.

To facilitate exploration and land acquisition, a greater knowledge of the world was needed. As explorers, missionaries, adventuresome merchants, and other travelers who had crossed the high seas brought back more credible reports of non-European lands, it became clear that older maps of the world were simply not accurate. By the 1680s “travel” accounts regarding Africa, Asia, India, and the “New World” possessed less of the fabulous and exotic and more of the factual in their contents.

After the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) ended the Thirty Years War, Europeans needed maps that could take account of the new political boundaries in Europe, some of which paradoxically enough reiterated several older borders and religious strictures of 1624.

In 1654 Nicholas Sanson, a distinguished mapmaker, became the first Frenchman to publish a world atlas.

As natural philosophers peered into the starry heavens with the telescope, they began to realize that new charts would be useful to track more accurately the path of planets through the skies.

In 1627 Johannes Kepler published the Rudolphine Tables that calculate the location of planets in the future and in the past.

In a word, knowledge of this world and the heavens surrounding it expanded in a significant fashion during the seventeenth century.

III. THE POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS SITUATION IN 1598#

A. The Politics of the Time#

In 1598 Europe remained a loosely defined geographical entity.

• A number of contemporaries believed its shifting boundaries stretched from Edinburgh to Moscow and even to Constantinople.

• Others considered England, Russia, and Turkey not to be part of Europe.

The most densely populated area was the Italian peninsula with its various principalities and republics (13 million in 1600 and 19.3 million in 1700) and boasting Naples, the largest city in Europe other than Constantinople.

Also in 1598, European wars continued to ebb and flow in intensity, depending on the region. Several great European powers, spent by the religious and dynastic wars of the sixteenth century, felt obliged to regroup their political and economic forces. This regrouping effort was difficult, given oppressive features of seventeenth-century life. By the 1620s a general economic depression gripped much of Europe. Nonetheless, despite very real demographic reversals and setbacks, the overall population of Europe managed at least some growth during the century (85 million in 1600 and 100–110 million in 1700).

From a religious point of view, in 1598 the dominant issue troubling European Christians remained what it had been since the Reformation: the painful divisions of Christendom. These divisions now extended beyond those separating the Roman Catholic Church from the Greek Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church to new sets of divisions within Protestant churches.

Now the Christian world could no longer identify the word religion solely with Roman Catholicism, as Roman Catholics were prone to do. Some thought there were now “religions” that claimed to be Christian but in fact were not.

Although amiable relations existed between Protestants and Roman Catholics in various local settings of Europe, sometimes both parties evinced bitter hostility toward the others. Protestant leaders feared that Spain, a citadel for Roman Catholic orthodoxy, was determined with the emperor’s help to establish a universal Roman Catholic monarchy.

Likewise, animosities festered within the Roman Catholic Church itself, especially between the Jansenists and Jesuits. Then again, Protestants sometimes battled with each other over doctrinal issues. Doctrinal distinctions between Protestant churches were refined and spelled out in binding confessions.

The Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577–78) made cooperation between Calvinists and Lutherans within the empire more difficult, given the anti-Calvinist thrust of the confession. The Council of Trent (1545–63) provided authoritative doctrinal and moral teaching for Roman Catholics.

Divisions and tensions between Protestants and Roman Catholics and between Protestants and Protestants raised yet another fear. Would a politically and religiously divided Christian Europe possess enough resolve and military strength to mount a successful defense against the feared intruders, the Ottoman Turks advancing westward from eastern Europe?

At the Sublime Porte, the Sultan’s Court in Turkey, ambassadors from Western Christian nations commonly believed that Eastern Christians in general had not fared especially well under the millet (a kind of judicial) system of Turkish rule, despite the fact that the Turks allowed the various Christian millets a certain amount of autonomy.

Paradoxically, while both fearing and condemning the Turks’ advances, a number of Western powers vied with each other to acquire favorable trade agreements with the Turks.

In many regards, it was not surprising that powers such as the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, due to their considerable strength and proximity to Turkish controlled lands, contributed the most militarily to stop the advance of the Turks.

B. The Papacy: Stability Regained#

By the papal reign of Clement VIII (1592–1605), the city of Rome was adorned with a new array of grandiose architecture and sculpture of a baroque flavor. The papacy’s emphasis on liturgical and ethical reform had helped restore Rome’s reputation for piety and virtue, a worthy host city for the huge crowds of pilgrims bustling through its streets in the Jubilee Year, 1600.

The Roman Catholic Church in aggregate was once again on the political, educational, and evangelistic offensive.

• Roman Catholic missionaries and explorers, educators (some of whom belonged to religious orders such as the Society of Jesus), parish clergy, the papacy and hierarchy, kings and queens, governmental officials, men and women of commerce, soldiers, and others on occasion energetically sought to spread the message of the Counter-Reformation.

Even if certain areas of Europe such as the United Provinces (the Dutch Republic) were lost to Protestantism, the influence of the Roman Catholic Church continued to grow in portions of Europe intermittently, from the middle of the sixteenth century through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth.

• Catholic missionaries were also engaged in attempts to win Orthodox Christians to the Roman Catholic Church.

Bolstering the confidence of the Roman Catholic clergy in their struggle against Protestant “heretics,” Caesar Baronius, Clement VIII’s confessor, published the Annales Ecclesiastici (1588–1607), a series of twelve apologetic historical volumes.

These books were intended to demonstrate the antiquity of the sacred traditions and the power of the Roman Catholic Church and prove that a genuine continuity existed between the doctrines and practices of the Tridentine Roman Catholic Church of the day and those of the early Christian churches.

Baronius was attempting to answer charges of doctrinal innovation as articulated in the massive study the Magdeburg Centuries, written by Lutheran theologians under the guidance of Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520–75). Many Roman Catholics were relieved to read Barionius’s Annales. Baronius received numerous letters of thanks and commendation for his painstaking historical efforts.

In addition, Clement VIII called on the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) — destined to become one of Rome’s most admired disputants — to correct the errors in the recent edition of the Vulgate sponsored by Pope Sixtus V. The resulting text of the Vulgate became the official edition for the Roman Catholic Church for centuries to come.

In a controversial move that irritated the Spanish, Clement VIII removed the excommunication from the newly converted Henry IV (who renounced the Reformed faith on July 25, 1593) in an attempt to assure the role of the Kingdom of France as a great Roman Catholic power.

The pope also tried to calm passions among Roman Catholic theologians who were caught up in acrid debates regarding the nature of grace.

Upon his death in 1605, Clement VIII left a much more self-confident Roman Catholic Church. The faithful believed that the good reputation of Rome had been largely restored.

Poland — thought lost to the Protestant cause in 1555 — as well as other lands had been won back to the church.

The popes believed that reforms stipulated by the Council of Trent were in the process of being carried out. By the 1570s preachers had begun to claim that Rome’s moral life was exemplary, by the 1580s that the city had few vices.

IV. EUROPEAN PROTESTANTISM IN JEOPARDY?#

As the seventeenth century dawned, the political and religious gains of an expansive Roman Catholicism greatly troubled many Protestants. To some, it appeared that the very future of Protestantism on the Continent was in question.

• In several countries such as Poland, France, and Bohemia the spread of Protestantism was all but halted.

• In certain regions, Protestants converted to Roman Catholicism in large numbers or emigrated to other lands.

Given this overall pattern of widespread Roman Catholic expansion, it may appear paradoxical that in 1689 Bossuet, a leading French Catholic cleric, complained that never had the challenge of Protestantism been “more menacing.” Bossuet was apparently worried about the accession of the Protestants William and Mary to the throne of England in the wake of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.

As the century wore on, religious issues seemed to fade somewhat into the background as the principal causes of warfare. Instead, “reasons of state” — that is, what benefits the state — became more determinative of the foreign policy of a nation. Consequently, pragmatic alliances were made between powers. These alliances crossed confessional divides. On occasion during the century, Protestant powers fought Protestant powers and Roman Catholic powers fought Roman Catholic powers.

During the century France, England (4 million in 1600 and 5.8 million in 1700), and the United Provinces emerged as major players on the European economic and political stage.

• They fought Spain in Europe or overseas — as in the lengthy revolt of the Dutch against Spain (1555–1648); France versus Spain (1648–59); and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14).

• France and England battled against each other, as in the War of the League of Augsburg (1689–97).

The overseas trade of the Dutch, so worrisome to the French, the English, the Spanish, and the Portuguese, did diminish later in the century, owing in large measure to enervating warfare that overtook the Dutch (Anglo-Dutch Wars, 1652–54, 1664–67, 1672–79), including Louis XIV’s invasion of the United Provinces (1672), during which he entered more than forty cities).

In addition, Muscovy (Russia, with 11 million in 1600 and 16 million in 1700) became a political entity with which Western diplomats began to reckon more seriously. Between 1614 and 1617, Sweden fought against Muscovy. Even though Michael (1596–1645) became tsar in 1613, the first of the Romanov family that would rule the nation until 1917, Muscovy remained in a weakened state for decades. By the end of the century, however, Muscovy was making serious territorial encroachments into Poland.

A. France#

In 1598 France was just extricating herself from decades of bloody fighting between Protestants and Catholics. In that year Henry IV (1553–1610) granted the Edict of Nantes to his former Reformed coreligionists, the Huguenots, permitting them certain liberties to worship God more freely. Nonetheless, the fact remained that in 1593 Henry IV, the great Huguenot leader, had converted to the Roman Catholic faith.

The Huguenots’ hopes of the early 1560s that France would become a land in which the majority of the French embraced the Reformed faith had been largely dashed.

The intervening nine politico-religious wars between 1552 and 1598, compounded tragically by the horrendous bloodletting of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, had diminished the Huguenots’ military power, reduced the number of their nobles, largely sapped their missionary zeal, and transformed their overall spirit into one of a suffering minority, “under the Cross.” Then again, Henry IV, their notable benefactor, was assassinated in 1610, a knife driven deep into his chest by François Ravaillac.

Toward 1598 a French Roman Catholic “mystic” tradition that had emanated from the Middle Ages and passed through the “Golden Age” of French mysticism (Jean Gerson, 1363–1429, to Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, 1450–1537) continued to flourish. It highlighted in various ways the adoration of Christ, Mary, the Eucharist, the Cross, and the pursuit of a rigorous life of self-renunciation and self-abnegation.

B. The Hapsburgs#

From 1516 to 1659, beginning with Charles V, the Hapsburg family was the dominant force in European politics. The German and Spanish branches of the Hapsburg family maintained four different courts. All told, about a thousand territories belonged to the empire. In Germany, the large electorates of Saxony and Brandenberg were Protestant, and the duchy of Bavaria was Roman Catholic.

Charles V, King of Spain (1516–56) and Holy Roman Emperor (1519–58), in 1556 abdicated in favor of his son, Philip II, King of Spain (1556–98). Both father and son diligently attempted to advance the cause of Roman Catholicism, although Philip received the Council of Trent in July 1565 on condition that his “royal rights” be protected. Philip’s Roman Catholic convictions reinforced

1. his desire to marry Queen Elizabeth and thereafter bring England back to the “mother church,”

2. his fateful decision to invade England with an armada (1588)

3. his attempt, only partially successful, to put down the Protestants’ revolt in the Spanish Netherlands

The fact that Philip II had to contend with the challenge of Islam in the east diminished his effectiveness in fighting the Dutch. The various Hapsburg families competed with the Bourbon family of France for political and economic preeminence among the Roman Catholic powers. This competition was also carried on outside of Europe.

By 1598, troubling signs were surfacing that the fragile peace within the Holy Roman Empire that had existed since the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) might be shattered. The peace agreement had served as a fundamental law of the empire. It stipulated that two religions were legal in Germany: Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism as represented in the Augsburg Confession (1530). But triangular tensions mounted between Roman Catholic and Protestant princes and between Reformed and Lutheran princes in the various judicial courts of the empire. Often local conflicts erupted when a prince confiscated the buildings and other possessions of a displaced religious community. Moreover, Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), the King of Bohemia and Archduke of Austria, defended Roman Catholicism in a heavy-handed fashion.

Many Protestants feared that the Hapsburgs were determined to force them out of the empire in an attempt to fulfill an old dream of Charles V (Charles I of Spain) — the creation of an exclusively Roman Catholic Holy Roman Empire.

C. Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine#

On July 4, 1569, “The Commonwealth of Two Nations, the Polish and the Lithuanian” was born. Four years later (May 16, 1573), Henri, the French Duke of Anjou, became the King of Poland. Upon the death of his brother (1574), Charles IX, the King of France, Henri abruptly returned to France and assumed the kingship as Henri III. In Poland and Lithuania, magnate families owned vast territories and attempted to protect their “liberties.”

In 1596 four bishops and the Metropolitan of Kiev, Ukraine, created what became known as the Uniate Church. They submitted to the authority of the pope and embraced Catholic doctrine. At the same time, they continued to observe the Eastern liturgical rite and allowed their priests to marry. For three centuries, Uniate Christians became the subjects of fierce persecution. Cossacks in Ukraine and in Poland proved to be determined enemies. During the Cossack-Polish Wars (1648–57), many Uniates were killed. The Orthodox often disdained the Uniates. Nor were Uniate bishops especially well received by the papacy.

In 1598 hostilities broke out between Poland and Sweden. Fighting lasted until 1611, but resumed from 1617 to 1629 and once again from 1655 to 1660, thereby overlapping in part and constituting for a time one theater of the Thirty Years War outside of Germany. The secession of Ukraine from Poland in 1648, coupled with the devastation caused during the war with Sweden (1655–60), signaled the apparent end of the Polish-Lithuanian state as a first-class European power.

V. THE THIRTY YEARS WAR: A RELIGIOUS-SECULAR CONFLICT?#

On May 23, 1618, an acrimonious verbal exchange inflamed the emotions of some two hundred Protestant members of the estates of the Kingdom of Bohemia who were crowded into the lower quarters of Hradcany Castle in Prague.

The Protestants had come to complain to four members of the kingdom’s council of regency about:

• Archduke Ferdinand’s persecution of Protestants

• His disputed assumption of the Bohemian throne

• Other alleged infractions of their rights.

As tensions continued to mount, a number of Protestant Czech nobles made their way to upper rooms of the castle and then proceeded unceremoniously to throw two councillors, Jaroslav von Martinitz and Wilhelm von Savata, along with a secretary through open windows.

Why the Roman Catholic councilors survived the fall of sixty feet into a moat far below became a subject of hot debate.

• Catholics proposed that angels had caught the councilors in midair and saved their lives.

• Protestants retorted that the legates had been preserved from almost certain death by the cushioning effect of falling into a dung heap in the moat.

This curious episode, known as the “defenestration of Prague,” constituted one of the most well-known events of the seventeenth century. However intriguing the incident is in retrospect, it did help to precipitate armed hostilities of what became known as the Thirty Years War (1618–48). The war was a disaster for parts of Germany, with a loss in population from 21 million in 1618 to 13 million by the war’s end in 1648.

The religious stakes in the early years of the warfare seemed only too obvious to contemporaries.

• Protestants throughout Europe believed their forces were fighting for the defense of Protestant liberties.

• Roman Catholics often thought that if the Bohemians were able to overthrow their Hapsburg governmental officials, their example could inspire other Protestants to revolt.

Whatever sincerity was wrapped around their religious concerns, the participants in the Thirty Years War soon manifested other concerns having nothing to do with religion but having much to do with raw contests for economic and dynastic power.

The Bohemian phase of the war (1618–21) ended with advantages accrued to the Roman Catholic cause.

In 1620 the Catholic League forces defeated decisively the rebel Bohemians, their Hungarian allies, and the troops of the elector prince of the Palatinate at the Battle of White Mountain. Archduke Ferdinand, the contested king of Bohemia, essentially eliminated the Protestant nobility from Bohemia and forced many other Protestants, including pastors, into exile.

In 1629 the Holy Roman Emperor stipulated in the Edict of Restitution that Roman Catholics throughout the empire could reclaim the ecclesiastical goods that had been taken from them by Protestants.

Given the disasters that befell Protestants after the defeat at White Mountain, this battle has sometimes been described as a turning point, marking the end of Protestant advances in central Europe. Without the intervention of the Protestant Swedes and the Roman Catholic French in the next decade, the Protestant forces in central Europe might have been completely routed by Roman Catholic armies.

But thereafter, Roman Catholic forces did not encounter easy and uninterrupted victories in their struggle with Protestant “heretics.”

In 1629, after victories against Poland and Russia, the Lutheran King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, landed with twelve thousand troops at the Odor River. He portrayed himself as the savior of German Protestantism and won a number of impressive victories over the Spanish troops and the empire’s Imperialist troops. In 1631 Gustavus Adolphus received a promise of aid from France. However, the great Protestant military leader was killed at the battle of Lutzen in 1632. Two year later, the Imperialist-Spanish forces won a decisive victory at Nordlingen.

As early as 1620, France’s Louis XIII, a sincere Roman Catholic, indicated that when matters of his own monarchy’s welfare were at issue, he would do what was best for his kingdom and not what confessional loyalties would otherwise dictate. Fearful that the Spanish Hapsburgs might garner too much power, Louis XIII, working in tandem with Cardinal Richelieu, entered into alliances with the Dutch Protestants (1635) and the Swedish Protestants against the Roman Catholic Spanish and the Imperialists.

These alliances were designed to provide relief for beleaguered Protestants with the goal of thwarting Hapsburg political designs. The alliances provided striking evidence that religious loyalties no longer necessarily represented a decisive factor for some European diplomats in determining foreign policy.

In a word, the Roman Catholic Church’s ability to advance its cause was blunted by those Roman Catholic monarchs, leaders, and soldiers for whom loyalty to the faith was sometimes supplanted by more secular ambitions.

The fact that Pope Innocent X, in his brief Zelo domus dei, harshly criticized the Treaty of Westphalia that had brought an end to the Thirty Years War, is yet another indication that the papacy was not always having its way in international politics.

Not only were the pope’s wishes basically ignored by Ferdinand III of Bohemia and Elector Maximilian I of Bavaria, who influenced the treaty’s contents, but Innocent X was convinced, whether rightfully or wrongfully, that Protestants had emerged as the principal beneficiaries of its stipulations.

The political independence of the Protestant United Provinces was acknowledged; France, the Roman Catholic supporter of the Protestant cause, received the bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun; and Protestant Sweden acquired western Pomerania and the bishopric of Bremen.

Owing to Innocent X’s restricted ability to influence the international politics of his day, a number of historians have proposed that the Thirty Years War and the Treaty of Westphalia contributed to the “secularization” of diplomacy in Europe. Several governments appeared less concerned to weigh religious factors in determining foreign policy, although certainly religion’s influence on governments’ policies did not completely recede. Deep into the eighteenth century and beyond, matters of religion often affected the internal and external policies of many European nations.

VI. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: A CULTURALLY “CHRISTIAN AGE”?#

Was the seventeenth century a culturally “Christian age” in Europe? If the standard for making an affirmative judgment is that all Europeans had to embrace Christianity in a serious fashion, then it was no such age.

Members of Jewish communities in Amsterdam, Venice, and other cities and in regions such as Poland were generally unresponsive toward Christian efforts to convert them. A number of Jewish authors such as Elijah de Montalto wrote apologetic pieces for “Marranos” — that is, Jews forced to convert to Christianity. He tried to encourage them to remain Jews in their hearts.

Muslims living in Europe on occasion also had to pretend they were Christians. They were called “Moriscos.” By 1614 Castile had forced 275,000 Moriscos out of their homes; many went to France or North Africa. Then again, Turks controlled sections of Europe in which Christians lived.

Sizeable numbers of witches and warlocks also plied their fearsome wares in Europe. During the so-called European “witch craze,” up to 100,000 persons were accused of witchcraft, some of whom were suspected followers of Satanism. Between the years 1675 and 1690, a series of witchcraft trials took place in Catholic Salzburg, with some two hundred boys and men, mostly beggars, executed in consequence.

In France, libertines érudits (“erudite libertines”) such as Pierre Charron, Guy Patin, Gabriel Naudé, and Samuel Sorbière wrote in such ambiguous ways that Christian critics suspected these authors were covert skeptics, possibly even atheists. In 1625 Marin Mersenne, a prominent Roman Catholic cleric and scientist, made the shocking claim that 50,000 atheists resided in Paris.

Cities such as Amsterdam, Naples, Paris, and London had well-organized underworlds of criminals and quarters where prostitution, thievery, drunkenness, and other unsavory practices thrived.

• Prostitutes especially haunted fairs, theaters, parks, church entrances, and other public places.

• Robbers and thieves sometimes rendered travel between villages and cities dangerous.

Executions of criminals were often public and as festive as they were gruesome. They could attract huge, raucous crowds. The corpses of the executed were sometimes left exposed to public view for a lengthy period of time — graphic object lessons of what awaited captured criminals.

The fact remains, however, that whatever the exact number of witches and warlocks, skeptics and atheists, members of other religions, and the unchurched, seventeenth-century Europe was in general “culturally” Christian.

This is not to say that all English and other Europeans necessarily had well-formed views of the Christian faith or considered themselves disciples of Christ or displayed virtuous lifestyles.

• Many contemporaries were often mortified by the dubious activities they witnessed or heard about that occurred at carnivals, festivals, and other celebrations in which “Christian” peasants and townspeople joined in raucous revelry.

• Nobles and even members of the clergy were not above engaging in unseemly behavior. Mistresses for kings and nobles were commonplace.

• In certain regions of Europe barely any Christian presence was evident or none at all.

In Catholic countries more than one hundred holy days dotted a calendar year. In regions in which Reformed churches were dominant, the Sabbath was often observed with meticulous care. Although living under the millet system of the Ottoman Turks, the clergy of the Orthodox Church were on occasion able to superintend the customs and practices of their faithful in a rigorous fashion.

Whether noble, city dweller, or peasant, most Europeans other than Jews and Muslims were generally baptized in a church (as infant or adult, depending on the church connection), attended its services at least minimally — that is, once a year — and in dying sought a Christian burial. Quite simply, the church with its graveyard was frequently at the center of community relations in a village.

The Bible was deemed an infallible authority, and its teachings gave comfort regarding how a person might have a right standing with God.

• A number of European kings believed that the Bible confirmed that they were divinely appointed by God to their royal office and that they were accountable to God alone.

• In England, before the advent of the novel, the Bible’s stories about Jesus Christ’s life, miracles, death, and resurrection and about Adam and Eve, Moses, David, Ruth, Mary, Peter, John, and Paul were etched in the minds of the young and the old.

In France, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Poland, and southern Germany, the impact of the Catholic Church on daily life was widespread and deep.

In countries where Lutheran and Reformed churches predominated, church and state relations were often very close. The clergy of the Reformed churches greatly affected the cultural life of Scotland and the United Provinces, whereas Lutheran clergy did the same in northern Germany and Scandinavia.

Despite the rule of the Turks, in Greece and portions of the Balkans the worship practices and authority of Orthodox churches held sway over the minds and hearts of millions.

In Muscovy, the same was also true despite periodic controversies such as the battle between the Orthodox Russian Patriarch Nikon (1652–67) and Tsar Alexis (1645–76) and disputes between “Old Believers” and the Russian Orthodox.

A. “Popular Religion” (The Religion of the People)#

What did these Europeans believe about Christianity?

• For some, their beliefs were conventionally summarized in the Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox catechisms, creeds, confessions, and traditions.

• For the theologically sophisticated, the books of contemporary theologians and Christian writers from earlier centuries added elements to their beliefs.

• For about one-half of the population of Europe who could not read, what the local parish priest or pastor or member of a religious order taught them orally or what they had learned about religion through word of mouth from their families, local townspeople, and community storytellers was the true faith.

The use of Latin in the celebration of the mass disallowed many of the laity from gaining a full understanding of its significance for their lives. At the same time, they could acquire certain impressions of the Christian faith from what they saw in the architecture, paintings, stained-glass windows, and statuary of the churches or what they witnessed and experienced in the ceremonies and religious services of the various churches.

In these circumstances, the forms and deformations of the Christian faith that European and non-European people practiced could vary in significant ways. Distinctions were sometimes only too obvious between

• What clerical guardians of right doctrine and practice for the various churches viewed or stipulated as orthodox and spiritually uplifting.

• What the people actually believed and did.

These distinctions resulted from many factors

1. the level and quality of the Christian instruction the people received

2. the social and economic estates and groups to which people belonged that determined what level of access they had to Christian teachers

3. the capacity of the clergy to exercise church discipline and of rulers and other officers of the state to enforce religious conformity within churches or a region

4. the willingness of individuals to follow the teachings of Christ and the Bible and the doctrines of their churches, if exposed to them

Belief in the reality of vampires, witches and warlocks, sorcerers, practitioners of black and white magic, fortune-telling, the predictive capacity of wheels of fortune, the benefits of judicial astrology (divination), and alchemy was not restricted to the “people.” Scientists, theologians, philosophers, and members of the nobility and kings’ households sometimes upheld these same beliefs with as much fervor as any peasant or worker.

From James VI, the future king of England, to peasants in Germany, to the townspeople of Salem, Massachusetts, the existence of witches was a widely held belief. Passages of the Bible could lend significant credence to this view. The upper classes often celebrated the same religious customs and festivals as members of the Third Estate.

In consequence, the expression “popular religion” should not be restricted too sharply to the beliefs and practices of a certain social group of non-European and European Christians, the ill-defined “people.”

Less-educated Europeans often incorporated into their festivities and celebrations such as Carnival and May Day elements that horrified better-instructed Christians, who condemned these practices as pagan and sometimes as licentious. The list of offensive practices of the “people” was quite long: charivaris (mock raucous serenading for just-married couples), bullfights, bearbaiting, dicing, certain forms of dancing, drunkenness, the haunting of taverns, and the playing of cards.

B. Reforming Popular Culture#

So concerned were “reforming” Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic, about the deficient practices and beliefs of less-educated Christians that they attempted to reform these practices.

Their reforming program, sometimes a part of post-Tridentine initiatives, was no small undertaking, given the embedded character and pervasive presence of many of these festivals, celebrations, and practices in the culture of peasants and townspeople. Moreover, the beliefs of many of these people were frequently embroidered with folktales, legends, and superstition.

• Until the 1650s, belief in sorcerers who could cast spells and change a person into a toad or another being or object, if they so chose, was widespread.

• After 1648 some Roman Catholics, feeling oppressed by their minority status in the United Provinces, espoused prophecies that foretold the return of Catholicism as the dominant religion and gave reports of miracles, apparitions, and exorcisms that confirmed God actually favored them and not the Protestants.

In the cities, Christian governmental officials sometimes attempted to reform the lives of vagrants, prostitutes, petty thieves, and hardened criminals.

One of the most notorious “reforming” techniques was associated with the “water house” in Amsterdam. Rumor had it that a person who refused to work was placed in a room that would fill with water unless the person pumped the water out. The lesson was as simple as it was ominous: work or drown.

The reform programs of the seventeenth century could be torturous indeed. Many criminals received arbitrary punishments, including hanging, being broken on a wheel, physical mutilations, or imprisonment in dank cells.

Lutheran and Reformed theologians attempted to tamp down movements of religious “enthusiasm” whose members claimed special extrabiblical revelations. These theologians feared that the “enthusiasts” might overthrow the social order and even foster atheism.

The “reformers” of religious practice found that the list of problems to be rectified not only in the popular religion of the “people” but among the “social elites” was lengthy.

VII. CONCLUSION#

Life in seventeenth-century Europe was often precarious.

• Recurring crises including food riots characterized the age.

• Wrenching political upheaval was in abundance.

• War, famine, and disease were not unfamiliar strangers; they wandered through both the countryside and the towns.

• Death struck people down in ways that seemed arbitrary and incomprehensible.

Europeans were often beset by fears.

It is little wonder that many Europeans, including some Christians, were tempted to seek relief, understanding, and protection from these fearsome foes by repairing to divination, astrology, black magic, and the wheel of fortune.

• Roman Catholics more generally prayed for protection, help, and care from Mary and the saints.

• Both Roman Catholics and Protestants sought succor in various forms of Christian mysticism.

Still others sought consolation in the teachings of the Christian churches about God’s providential love and care for his children. As in previous centuries, the belief that God knows when the smallest sparrow falls and that things do not simply happen without God knowing about them provided genuine comfort. People also sought solace in turning to Christ, the only Savior, the only hope for their salvation.

In an age of fear and crisis that witnessed much personal distress and agony, many Christians believed counsel of this type was wise indeed.