SILVER MINING Saxouy is celebrated in a Idth Century altar paintifig by Hans Hesse. Commissioned by miners for St. Anne's Church in Annaberg, it reflects not only the growing importance of precious metals in Europe’s new money economy, but also an increasing respect for the dignity of work.
The Reformation was the threshold of the modern age. In 1500, the Europe of Luther's youth was still essentially medieval—accustomed to the supranational and paternalistic roles of the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire, inhibited in its attitude toward the natural world, unsophisticated in its primarily agrarian economy and unaware of the lands lying to the west. One hundred and fifty years later the world had a new look. The Americas had been settled, Protestantism had taken over a good, share of Rome's domain, Europe's political geography had taken on much the shape it has today, a scientific revolution was underway, and capitalism had become a dynamic economic principle.
Of course these changes did not occur all at once. The first stage of the religious revolution ended with the Council of Trent in 1563; the Reformation's effect on the political map of Europe was not really clear until the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648. In the interim, the various currents of the Reformation swirled along in a heady, often explosive, mixture that overturned the old ways and produced some startling effects in the process. One of the most unfortunate of these was a violent obsession with witchcraft, which stands out as one of the most grisly signposts of the age.
Witches had long been a familiar part of the European landscape. It was accepted as a matter beyond question that Satan was everywhere, and that some humans, succumbing to his blandishments, sold their souls to him. Satan's end of this fateful bargain (which of course denied salvation to the humans) was to give the newly recruited witches certain powers that enabled them to influence the weather and do mischief to their fellow men. Such misfortunes as a brewer's beer spoiling, a farmer's crops failing, babies crying continually or wives falling in love with the wrong husbands were clear evidence that witches were doing the devil's work. It was understood that witches met occasionally at an obscene Witches' Sabbath, where they worshiped Satan (disguised as a goat or other animal) and celebrated orgiastic rites with his henchmen, the lesser devils.
Even otherwise skeptical 15th Century humanists
Accepted the existence of witches, but it took the religious zeal of the 16th Century to turn witchhunting into the frenzied hysteria that it became during the 16th and 17th Centuries. Pope Innocent Vlll set a precedent in 1484 with a papal bull inspired by the Scriptural injunction, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Other Churchmen followed this a few years later with an infamous text called Malleus Maleficarum ("The Witches' Hammer"), which described how to recognize witches and how to punish them. As the increased spiritual awareness of the Reformation brought a corresponding sensitivity to the ever-present powers of Satan, the mania increased and any misfortune—a tree struck by lightning, a calf born dead—set off a search for a witch. Neighbor distrusted neighbor, and no one was safe from suspicion.
At the height of the mania, to be charged with witchcraft was tantamount to conviction, for the magistrates generally considered any defense or denial by the accused to be the work of the devil and proof of complicity. Confession was required for conviction, however, and torture, as prescribed in the Malleus Maleficarum, was the key to confession. Tortures were varied and cruelly imaginative. In England weights were piled on the victim's chest until the witch confessed or died. Other effective means of persuasion included sticking pins under the fingernails, thrusting the feet into a fire and stretching the body on the rack.
A confessed witch would sometimes escape with a whipping, but the usual sentence was death by burning. On the day of execution the witch was led or dragged to a great stake raised in a public place and piled about with wood. While the luckless victim burned, great crowds gathered to watch with vociferous approval. Fortunate indeed were the accused who were strangled to death before the fire was lit.
The craze raged over most of Europe for nearly 200 years. In Spain and Italy, where the Inquisition functioned, witchcraft was treated as a form of heresy, and Inquisitors sometimes spared penitent witches from the death sentence. Elsewhere, however, witch-hunting was the job of the secular authorities, and leniency was discouraged as a dangerous weakness. The prevailing attitude was expressed by Jean Bodin, an eminent French jurist who wrote: "Whatever punishment one can order against witches by roasting and cooking them over a slow fire is not really very much and not as bad as the torment which Satan has. . . prepared for them in hell, for the fire here cannot last more than an hour or so until the witches have died."
The total number of men, women and children put to death as witches during the period from 1500 to 1700 can only be estimated, but certain figures are available. It was recorded that in Calvin's Geneva, for instance, 34 witches were executed in 1545. But that was trivial compared with the record in Germany, where the flame of witch-hunting burned most cruelly. In five years the Bishop of
COPERNICUS' UNIVERSE, neatly diagramed by the English mathematician Leonard Digges, revolutionized traditional astronomy by enthroning the sun, not the earth, at the center of the cosmos.
Bamberg is said to have burned 600 witches. A cautious estimate puts the number of witches killed in all of Germany during the witch-hunting craze at 10,000, but some historians have figured the total as high as 100,000.
The zealous war against witches was part of the cloud of superstition that hung over a society in which the average citizen still believed firmly in ghosts, omens and spells. But a tiny minority of thinkers in the 16th Century, affected by Renaissance curiosity, quietly examined the world they could actually see and touch. Although the 16th Century scientists were themselves still heavily burdened with superstition and handicapped by their devotion to ancient authorities, they nevertheless contributed to the observation and classification of natural phenomena that provided the starting place for the brilliant scientific innovators of the following century.
In the study of anatomy, for example, the work of Andreas Vesalius was instrumental in righting errors that had persisted for 14 centuries—ever since the Greek physician Galen set forth his medical theories in the Second Century A. D. So great was the influence of Galen's teaching that anatomists prior to the time of Vesalius had ignored experimental evidence that disagreed with the ancient sage. Vesalius, on the other hand, performed hundreds of anatomical experiments and rejected Galen wherever he found a conflict. At 23 Vesalius was a professor in Padua (he later became physician to Charles V and to his son. King Philip II of Spain), and in 1543 he published the first known complete textbook of anatomy, De Humanis Corporis Fabrica ("On the Fabric of the Human Body"), a beautifully illustrated treatise which still ranks as an outstanding work in its field.
A more colorful if not more productive contemporary of Vesalius' was a Swiss healer with the resounding name of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who called himself Paracelsus, a made-up name that suggested he was superior to the great Roman physician Celsus. Paracelsus recognized no peer in medicine, ancient or modern, and he is said to have demonstrated his conviction in 1527 by publicly burning the works of Galen in Basel.
Despite his flamboyance, Paracelsus made many valuable contributions in the field of chemical medicine, using mercury and antimony in the treatment of disease. He also made the first careful clinical study of the diseases that plagued miners.
Almost every science showed similar progress. Gerhardus Mercator devised a way of drawing a flat chart of the earth's curved surface that was more accurate than any previous method. Mercator's projection is still a standard cartographic technique. The nature of magnetism was explored; Leonardo da Vinci made important discoveries about the physics of acceleration and momentum; the Swiss zoologist Conrad Gesner wrote the History of Animals, a comprehensive text that served until the 19th Century.
Even the calendar was revised, under the prodding of Pope Gregory XIII, to correct the errors of the Julian calendar, which had been in use since the reign of Julius Caesar. The old calendar gave a few too many minutes to the year, and by the 16th Century the cumulative error had put the calendar at odds with the natural yearly cycle by a full 10 days. On the basis of astronomers' calculations the modern Gregorian calendar was devised; in 1582 Gregory ordered that in all Catholic countries October 4 would be followed by October 15; ten days were "lost" and man was back on schedule with the seasons again. (Protestant countries, in their antagonism to the Pope, strenuously resisted the Gregorian calendar; England did not accept it until 1752.)
The era of the Reformation recorded one brilliant achievement in science that matched any of the next ages to come. Just before his death, in 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus published On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, in which he denied that the earth is the stationary center of the universe; instead, he asserted, the earth revolves on its axis and moves, with the other planets, around the sun. At last the concept of an earth-centered universe, proposed by Ptolemy in the Second Century and accepted by all thinking men ever since, was challenged by a man who, though short on empirical proof, had the mathematical genius and clarity of thought to make a great intellectual leap. Copernicus' theory had many faults and it had little impact on his immediate contemporaries. But it struck a spark in the murky mists of medieval astronomy and furnished a light that guided the great astronomers of the next age, like Galileo and Kepler, along the path toward scientific truth.
The scientific promise of the loth Century had to wait for another age to be fully realized, but other changes swept Reformation Europe so rapidly as to make their effects quickly apparent. Some of the most important of these were in the field of economics. The 16th Century witnessed a spectacular rise of capitalism, which was to become a dominant economic principle of later centuries.
Many factors combined to bring this about. One of the most basic was an increase in population. Figures are far from exact, but from 1450 to 1600 Europe's population probably increased by about 17 million, or almost one third. This surge may have been due partly to improved living conditions and partly to changed social conditions that made it easier for men to establish themselves and marry younger. Whatever the cause, more people meant a bigger market and a larger labor force, two prerequisites for economic expansion.
The second development basic to the economic revolution of the time was the sudden expansion of
Europe's horizons. As the intrepid explorers of Portugal and Spain opened new routes to the East and discovered new lands in the West, new imports and wealth began flooding European markets. The valuable Asian spices that had previously arrived by caravan via the Near East now traveled around the Cape of Good Hope by sea, and the centers of trade shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic ports. In the year 1503 alone, four years after Da Gama's first voyage around Africa to India, Portugal imported 1,300 tons of black pepper. A year later the price of spices in Lisbon had dropped to a fifth of that in Venice, and the Venetian monopoly on the spice trade was broken forever.
Perhaps the most important cargo carried by the ships of the 16th Century was the silver and gold that flowed in prodigious amounts from the mines of the Spanish New World to the ports of Cadiz and Seville. Spain poured the bullion into the rest of Europe in exchange for the guns, food and supplies it needed to execute its grandiose imperial schemes. Suddenly there was more money in Europe than there had ever been before. One effect of the influx was a gradual, century-long inflation that set off a price revolution throughout Europe. By 1650 the amount of precious metal in Europe had tripled, and so had prices. Wages did not keep up with the cost of living, so inflation hurt the wage earner as well as landowning aristocrats whose rents were fixed by custom. The winners in this economic transformation were the merchants and entrepreneurs, who dealt in goods and money. And as they prospered, so did capitalism.
Capitalism was by no means new to Europe. In late-medieval times, cities such as Venice, Genoa and Bruges had been centers of capitalistic enterprise. But that capitalism had been limited by the provincial nature of trade, by the Church's condemnation of usury and by the generally cumbersome business methods of the Middle Ages. Now, with the flood of liquid capital in the loth Century came more sophisticated banking practices that made possible the use of credit on a large scale. Furthermore, growing trade led to increased production in such industries as shipbuilding, textiles, arms and armor. All of these required large amounts of money, which shrewd capitalists were ready to supply, for a profit. In the Middle Ages, money had been regarded as sterile, valuable only as a medium of exchange; now the capitalistic practice of using money to make money became more and more widespread.
Not all the factors contributing to the success of capitalism were secular. In the vigorous, new spiritual force of John Calvin's Protestantism there was much that was congenial to the thriving new economic attitude. The Calvinists believed that a citizen demonstrated his fitness for salvation by being law-abiding, industrious, sober and thrifty. These same virtues served so well to help the rising bourgeois capitalist on his path that many historians have suggested that Calvinism was one of the main sources of the capitalistic spirit. Other scholars disagree, pointing out that capitalism thrived also in Catholic countries. (The most powerful financiers of the day, the Fuggers of Augsburg, were devoutly Catholic.)
There is no doubt, however, that capitalism and Calvinism were admirably suited to each other. The development of Puritanism, a variation on the Calvinist habit of thought and way of life, furnishes a clear example of the propitious compatibility of the new enterprising spirit with the Protestant religion.
The Puritans—whose name was originally a term of derision, given them for their excessive scrupulousness—arose in England in the 15o0s. They were a group of radical nonconformists who believed that the Elizabethan Reformation had retained too many Catholic ways and wished to purify the Church of England of "popishness," by which they meant episcopal hierarchy and elaborate ceremony.
The Puritans were repressed by Queen Elizabeth, who believed that Calvin and his followers were "overbold with God Almighty, making too many subtle scannings of His blessed will, as lawyers do with human testaments." More important, she deplored the Calvinist practice of lay participation in Church affairs, for she foresaw that a voice in the Church would lead to a voice in the state, and thus threaten the monarchy. James I harassed the Puritans with laws requiring conformity to the Church of England, for like his predecessor, he was determined to retain royal prerogatives as head of the Church and state. It was during his reign that the most radical Puritans, unwilling to compromise with the Church of England and thwarted in efforts to change it, fled to the New World.
But despite the derision of their fellow citizens and in the face of royal measures taken against them, the Puritans were widely influential. More than any other group of reformers they stressed the importance of individual responsibility and duty. In England as on the Continent the commercial class was rising; in both places the Calvinistic emphasis on industry and dedication appealed to the earnest men of the new class. As they made their way into the House of Commons their sober and diligent habit of thought imprinted itself on Englishmen of all classes. The hallmarks of the Puritans—their sturdy characters, the determination with which they toiled and the individual responsibility they encouraged—were to become the backbone of capitalistic enterprise and the inspiration of republican government. These were the same qualities that tamed the American wilderness.
This was still in the future, however. Before the Reformation was settled, one last destructive convulsion lay ahead that was to put a bloody end to the old order and to mark the close of the era. This was the Thirty Years' War. And Germany, which had been the stage for the opening scenes of the
Reformation, was also the stage for Its final act.
In 1555 the Peace of Augsburg, by which the Emperor Charles V had granted the princes the right to determine the religion of their subjects, had given recognition to both Lutherans and Catholics, but not to Calvinists. Neither did this settlement silence the vilification that Lutherans and Catholics engaged in. Then the Calvinists began to make significant gains in the 1560s, but in many instances the Protestants were as bitterly contemptuous of one another as were the Catholics and Lutherans. Divided against itself, Germany lay open to the designs of the other nations of Europe.
The Thirty Years' War—begun nominally in the cause of religion, but actually in a struggle for political power—was in one respect a civil war in which German Protestants warred against German Catholics. In another it was a civil war in which German princes of both faiths pitted themselves against their Emperor. In still a third respect it was an international war, in which France challenged the Habsburgs, the Spaniards tried doggedly to recapture their hold on the Dutch, the recently awakened Scandinavians endeavored to cut themselves portions of the Continental pie, and nations standing on the sidelines aided now one combatant, now another, with money, troops and treaties.
In this multifaceted struggle the armies of six peoples fought actively: Germany, Spain, France, Bohemia, Denmark and Sweden. Others—England, Poland, Scotland and Transylvania—provided mercenary troops, and their ranks were filled out with Greeks, Turks, Italians and Dutch. The generals who commanded the troops were frequently avaricious and adventurous opportunists—men who had no convictions of faith, no loyalties of nationality, but who coveted prizes of territory and power.
Underlying this imbroglio was international hatred of the Habsburg Dynasty, whose far-flung family (divided into two branches since 1556, when the Emperor Charles V bequeathed Spain to his son and the Empire to his brother) controlled lands that bordered on all the nations of Europe.
In 1619 the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II was also King of Bohemia. The Bohemian nobles, who were predominantly Lutheran, deposed him as King and in his place elected a young German Protestant Prince. The Emperor, aided by money from the Pope and troops from Spain, sent an army into Bohemia to oust the Prince, reclaim the crown and restore Catholicism; in Germany, Ferdinand stripped the Prince of his rights and property. The King of Denmark, seizing on the resulting disorder in hopes of acquiring new land for his son, came to the aid of the German Prince.
In an effort to re-establish Catholicism in Germany, the Emperor issued the Edict of Restitution, by which the many properties that had been confiscated from the Catholic Church in the years of conflict following 1552 were to be restored to it. The edict met with some resistance, but Imperial troops saw to its enforcement. Now the King of Sweden, offering himself to the Protestants as savior of the faith, marched into Germany and the international conflagration was on.
It might have been expected that Catholic France would go to the aid of the Catholic bloc, but the French had an animosity for the Habsburgs that went back many generations. So the French entered the war—at first secretly, later openly—by providing money to finance the Swedish troops and forming alliances with the Protestant Netherlands and England, and with Catholic Savoy and Venice. And by now the Spanish, who had come to the aid of their Imperial cousins against the Germans, were using German soil as a base from which to attack the Dutch.
Thus the struggle went on for years, with one nation after another entering the fray in Germany. As the religious issue began to diminish and the
A PROTESTANT CRUSADER. 23-year-old Duke Christian of Brunswick was one of many German nobles whose armies spread terror during the Thirty Years' War. He appears here amid 46 Catholic towns and castles he ravaged during campaigns in Hesse and Westphalia.
Struggle for power became more overt, the Germans had a change of heart: the terms Protestant and Catholic lost their dread significance and those of Frenchman, Swede and Spaniard grew more forbidding. The arrival of the Swedish King had at first given the Germans hope and courage, but in time they came to resent the presence of a foreign king and alien troops on their soil. The Emperor, seizing on this development, won the support of Germans of both faiths by offering to withdraw the Edict of Restitution in return for assistance against the Swedes.
This was a momentous development, for it was an assertion of German unity against foreign intervention. Now Catholic and Protestant Germans were allied with a Catholic Emperor against an alliance of Protestant Swedes and Catholic French. And the Habsburgs had in the meantime even turned against their Catholic Spanish cousins, with whose struggle against the rebelling Dutch they no longer sympathized.
Thus one army after another dragged itself across the soil of Germany for 30 years, killing, raping, burning, sacking, leaving famine and disease in their wake, quartering the troops in the homes of the people, seizing women and children for servants. The population of Germany in that period fell, according to a modest estimate, by as much as a third. By 1640 her cities lay in ruins, her villages were deserted, her fields untilled and her roads torn up. The people had taken to eating dogs and horses, even human corpses. In 1637, when the Emperor died, his son inherited a prostrate and friendless Empire.
By now the Germans were crying for surcease, and the new Emperor began negotiations for an end to the war. A conference finally opened at Westphalia in December 1644, and to it diplomats
Came from Spain, France, Sweden, Holland, Switzerland, various Italian states and the Vatican. They wrangled for nearly four years. On October 24, 1648, they finally signed the Peace of Westphalia, which settled the religious question. More significant, it redrew the map of Europe and redrafted the concept of international relations.
The treaty renewed the principle of the Peace of Augsburg, by which religion was territorially determined, but added recognition for Calvinism. From that time onward Protestantism and Catholicism were stabilized.
In his immediate domains the Emperor was confirmed in the same right that the princes had in Germany—to determine the religion of his subjects—but the Imperial authority was now limited to Austria, Bohemia and Hungary.
In Germany the princes were granted rights of sovereignty. The Emperor was forbidden to make laws, raise taxes, declare war or negotiate treaties without the consent of the states. The figurehead ruler of the now-decrepit Empire resisted this arrangement, but in vain. With local jealousies thus perpetuated, Germany was to remain in political disorder for two centuries to come.
The Imperial borders split off; the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation were formally recognized. Part of the Rhine's valley went to France, its mouth to the Netherlands; parts of the Baltic regions went to Sweden. Germany, deprived of control of her great waterways, could not regain her former commercial eminence. And with the Habsburgs' domains fragmented, the international pre-eminence of that family was broken.
The delegates who signed this treaty comprised the most massive congregation of European dignitaries since the Council of Constance in 1415. But that gathering had treated affairs of the Church; this one treated affairs of state. Unlike their Constance forebears, who had seen themselves as members of a united Christendom, the diplomats at Westphalia had no bonds in common—religious, political or other; they saw themselves as belonging to sovereign units. That fact and the terms of the treaty they signed are measures of the changes that had come over Europe. When the guns were silenced after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the last echoes of Luther's hammer on the Castle Church in Wittenberg died away as well. The Reformation as an era had come to an end.
What had the Reformation wrought, besides bloodshed and vilification? Its founders began with expressions of individualism, but demanded the most rigid conformity of their followers. They challenged the authority of the Roman Church, to replace it with the authority of the Bible. Their followers preached the gospel of love and practiced fratricide.
Notwithstanding, the Reformation had changed the face of Europe. In severing kings and their subjects from Rome, it had contributed to the growth of the modern nation-state. In rebuking the licentiousness of the Renaissance, it had brought virtue and morality back to religion. And despite its demands for conformity, the Reformation could not obscure the fact that its origins lay in individualism; the individualism of its founders would shine as a beacon for future generations.
Neither popes nor kings had been sterner bigots or fiercer tyrants than Luther and Calvin, but rebels must be ruthless to survive. Even so, Luther and Calvin had brought the people into disputes that in earlier ages had been left to scholars and priests; thus they opened the way for democracy, for once men began to voice opinions about religious faith, they moved on to make themselves heard in government as well. Luther with his priesthood of all believers and Calvin with his doctrine of the elect unwittingly contributed to a greater emancipation of man than either of them envisioned.
THE SIMPLE VOCATION of the shepherd, like other humble fobs, achieved a greater dignity when Luther stressed the equality of all men before God.
World History
