Wars of Religion

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 446.

To provide a sense of continuity with last week's lecture on the Reformation, we will deal with these topics in the following order: wars of religion, economic changes; and state-building.

The 100 or so years from the mid-1500s to the mid-1600s was a period of almost constant warfare, much of which revolved around conflict between proponents of Catholicism and Protestantism. A century of warfare ended in the 1640s with a stalemate—neither the Catholics nor the Protestants had vanquished their enemies. This would have great consequences in the later 1600s and 1700s, and many of the major intellectual and political trends of that period--the Scientific Revolution, Mercantilism, and Absolutism—can be seen as reactions to the turmoil of the wars of religion. Still, despite almost continuous warfare, the period from 1540-1660 also witnessed very important economic developments as well as significant growth of the centralized monarchical state.

Lecture 15 Wars, Religion, and State-Building 1540-1660

It was pointed out that the religious divisions of the Reformation had political dimensions (remember Henry VIII? The Protestant German Princes?). The combination of religious fervor (there could be only ONE true religion, most people believed—all others were heretical) and political ambitions fueled a century of warfare. The first center of religious warfare was Germany.

Germany (1540-1555). Remember that Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had called Luther to Worms hoping there to bring an end to the Protestant heresy—Charles was a very devout Catholic. In the 1540s and 1550s, Charles waged war against the Lutheran princes, hoping to reestablish Catholicism by force. He failed, in part because his own supporters, Germany's Catholic princes, feared that victory for the Emperor would end their own autonomy. Bloody battles between Lutheran and Catholic armies continued until 1555, when both sides agreed to the Peace of Augsburg. This treaty recognized that any principality would follow the religion of its ruler (so if the prince was a Lutheran, all the people must be Lutherans). In other words, there would be no tolerance of religious diversity within any state, and there would be no strict separation of Church and State. This compromise would lead to considerable tensions in the 1600s, but it did at least bring an end to the war.

France (1562-1598). In France the most significant religious tensions were between Catholics and Calvinists. Remember that Calvin was a Frenchman living in Switzerland; one of his goals was to convert his mother country to his "true" religion. He did succeed in converting hundreds of thousands of French men and women to Calvinism, in the form of the Huguenot movement (by the 1560s, about 2 in every 10 people in France had become Calvinists). The most important of the converts were Queen Jeanne of French Navarre (in the South), her husband Antoine de Bourbon, and her brother in law the Prince de Conde. Conde became the political leader of the Huguenots; like many other Huguenot aristocrats, he formed a large army and was feverishly devoted to the cause of spreading his faith. (Jeanne and Antoine de Bourbon's son Henry will play an important role in this story, as we will see shortly.)