Dynastic rivalry.  While all this was going on in Rome, the feudal dynasties of the quite rural European interior did not want to be left out of this scramble for wealth and power that was clearly benefiting these rising city-states of Italy, Flanders and other coastal regions.  Thus the Portuguese kings of the House of Aviz in the mid and later 1400s (most notably Prince Henry "The Navigator") sent explorers from coastal Lisbon to look for a direct passage to the wealth of the East by going around Africa – thereby avoiding the expensive Italian and Muslim middlemen of the cross-Mediterranean route.[1]  Not to be outdone by the Portuguese, the Spanish monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella at the end of the 1400s commissioned the Genoese sailor Christopher Columbus to locate a supposedly more direct route to the wealth of Asia by heading west directly across the Atlantic – presuming that Asia was only a short distance to the West.  What a surprise Columbus had when he ran into islands just offshore of a vast landmass whose existence Europeans were completely unaware of.  

   Ferdinand II of Aragon            Isabella I of Castile        Christopher Columbus

This discovery would ultimately inspire Spanish adventurers to head to this new land (given the name "America") – when rumors of vast quantities of gold were soon verified with the discovery – and plunder – of both Mexico and Peru (early 1500s).

At this point the Spanish Habsburg dynasty (actually originally Dutch) loomed far above all other European dynasties (the Valois of France and the Tudors of England, for example) in wealth and thus also power.  Habsburg Spain would in fact continue to dominate Europe totally during the 1500s – thanks to this huge flow to Spain of plundered American wealth in gold and silver.

While the Italian scholar and diplomat Machiavelli was exploring the hard realities of this growing power and its impact on European society, the German monk Martin Luther was looking more deeply into this matter of the Christian Church itself in how all this material power had sent the Church far, far away from the original Christian spiritual roots outlined in ancient Scripture (the Bible) – which Luther had been assigned to teach to his fellow Augustinian monks in Germany.

Luther was so bold as to challenge the Church publicly to return to the original ways of Biblical Christianity – which Christians were taking a new interest in (the Bible was just coming into massive publication thanks to the recent invention of the printing press).  This was a serious challenge to the traditional authority of the Church – presided over by the Pope but defended also by the ruling dynasties of Europe, pledged to defend that Christian faith – not only against Muslims beyond the Church but against heretics within the Church itself. 

Foremost in answering this responsibility as Defender of the Faith was the very wealthy and very powerful Charles of Habsburg, King of Spain, but also Holy Roman Emperor – actually mostly just an honorific position as feudal lord of the Germanic lands of central Europe. 

But Luther found support in his challenge to the Roman (or Catholic) Church from a number of princes and dukes of Northern Germany, feudal lords who chafed at Charles of Habsburg's imperial rule over their German lands.  And thus, because of that support, Charles was not able to silence this Christian rebel.

But beyond this political break from the Catholic establishment supported by Germany's princes Luther was not willing to go.  When German peasants attempted to put their social-political as well as their theological destinies in their own hands, Luther came out in full support of the efforts by the German princes to put down this populist rebellion,[2] even when the oppression turned extremely violent (approximately 100,000 peasants killed).  Luther simply would not go further than theological reform.  And thus feudal society dominated by a variety of German princes would remain the status quo for Germany all the way up to the beginning of the 20th century!

The Battle of Frankenhausen - May 15, 1525

This spirit of rebellion against the Catholic establishment was also picked up by the naturally inquisitive leaders of Europe's rising merchant cities, a highly literate group fully capable of looking on their own into this religious question unleashed by Luther – through a careful reading of the newly printed Bibles that had recently begun to be translated from the Latin into their national languages – something outlawed by the Church, which claimed that only trained priests were qualified to understand the Bible correctly.  But the simple reading of Scripture by literate urbanites seemed to refute this priestly claim – supporting Luther's idea of "the priesthood of all believers."  The Catholic ("Universal") Church was outraged – but the urbanites were delighted – and hungry for more.

Some two decades after Luther had challenged the Catholic Church, John Calvin wrote a huge work (Institutes of the Christian Religion - in Latin in 1536 and French in 1541)[3] in the hope of convincing French King Francis to support the reform of the "Protestants" – as they were at this point being termed.  But the effort merely forced Calvin to have to flee an angry French king.  Calvin eventually ended up in Geneva, where he was asked to try to follow up on church reform in Switzerland started out in Zurich by Ulrich Zwingli (who had begun his Swiss Reform Movement at about the same time as Luther's efforts, but who had been soon killed in a religious battle with Swiss Catholics).  Geneva's urban leadership wanted Calvin to put his Reform ideals (quite similar to Zwingli's) into operation in this highly independent Swiss city. 

On a second attempt, Calvin's Christian theological and social reforms began to take hold in Geneva.  And Calvin's Genevan reforms went well beyond Luther's, focused not just on the reform of the Christian doctrine according to 1st century standards, but also on calling all members of the Genevan community to strive to live and work together even in their daily lives in accordance with the social standards of first-century Christianity, when Christians took on not only society's theological challenges, but also its political, economic and social challenges as well, as a key part of the Christian life.

In this, Calvin also stressed the idea of equally important service to society on the part of all of its members, because he understood that all people – although called to different tasks in life – were fully equal in the eyes of God – and thus must be also be treated with equal respect in their mutual service to the community.  Even their social leaders were simply servants, not masters of society, elected to office to work in accordance with the will of the community itself. 

Calvin's reforms shook the feudal world with this idea of a basic human equality which placed on everyone's shoulders (including the elected officers of the community) the mutual responsibility of seeing that society lived, in all its ways, according to God's Biblical standards.  Calvin's reforms consequently directed Christian society to be a community of self-governing individuals, living together in a mutually interdependent manner – powerfully so because their work together was guided and strengthened by the Holy Spirit. 

Calvin's Genevan Reformation thus not only put forth Church-shaking "Reformed" theology, it presented an actual demonstration of revolutionary social philosophy in action.

Soon the word spread around Europe as to what was going on in Geneva, and would-be Christian reformers began to flock to Geneva to see what a community attempting to live according to Biblical standards in all its social capacities actually looked like.  They came from England to study the Calvinist experiment in Geneva – and returned to their English homeland as "Puritans" – calling for the Church of England (and thus English society as well) to be purified in accordance with Biblical standards.  They came to Geneva from the Dutch lands of Flanders and Holland and returned to their lands to institute the Dutch Reformed Church; they came from the German lands along the Rhine River and returned to build there the German Reformed Church; they came from France and returned as Huguenots; they came from Scotland and returned as Presbyterians.

Finally, a Catholic Church Council was held at the city of Trent where, from 1545 to 1563, efforts were made to answer the Protestant challenge, in particular by tightening up church discipline, both theologically and politically.  Besides trying to reinvigorate Catholic spiritualism, the decision was made to hunt down Protestant heretics and force their reconversion, or, alternatively, their exile – or even death – with the Spanish Inquisition (which had already gone after Spanish Jews and Muslims) leading the way.

Pope Paul III - who convened the Council of Trent - painting by Titian
Naples,  Galleria Nazionale di Capodimonte

Also the Society of Jesus, a priestly order of "Jesuits" founded by Ignatius of Loyola just prior to the opening of the Council of Trent, would play a huge role in putting some intellectual discipline behind the old Catholic order, with each Jesuit sworn to a life of simplicity, study, and total loyalty (military style) to the direction of the Roman Pope and to him alone – overriding the demand of the kings and princes to be the dominant authorities in their own realms.

At this point Europe was being deeply shaken as kings and princes of the old Catholic feudal order joined the Roman Church to fight an expansive Protestantism.  Leading in this as the supreme Defender of the "True" (Catholic) Faith was Holy Roman Emperor and Spanish King Charles (ruling during the first half of the 1500s) and then his son Philip II (ruling Spain during the second half of the 1500s).  

They fought Protestantism fiercely, Philip unleashing his mighty armies on his cousins in the Habsburg's Dutch homeland – forcing the southern Dutch, the Flemish, back into the Catholic fold.  But try as he might, he could not bring the Calvinist northern Dutch of Holland to the same result.

The Spanish slaughter of the Dutch citizens of Oudewater
The town of Oudewater was conquered by the Spanish on 7 August 1575, and most of its inhabitants were killed.



Pieter Snayers – A Spanish attack on a Flemish village
Gotha, Friedenstein Castle Museum

Meanwhile, French Queen Catherine de Medicis (ruled France from the mid-1500s until her death in 1589) managed to slaughter off the Calvinist Huguenot aristocracy (about half of the aristocracy at that point) at a Paris wedding they were invited to in 1572 – and then proceeded to go after the rest of the French Huguenots (killing tens of thousands in the process), effectively bringing the Calvinist Huguenot Reform to a halt in France.

An Eyewitness Account of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, 24 August 1572
- by François Dubois

A morning before the Gate to the Louvre - by Édouard Debat-Ponsan (1880)
Catherine de Medici inspects the productivity of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre - 1572
Clermont-Ferrand, Musée d'art Roger-Quillot

By the early 1600s, Europe was caught up in full war between Catholics and Protestants, these wars becoming incredibly bloody, especially in the years 1618-1648 (thus termed the "Thirty Years' War").  Finally in 1648, a religiously exhausted Europe came to an agreement (the Treaty of Westphalia) to simply recognize that further bloodying of the continent was not going to change the religious profile any.  It was agreed that certain areas would henceforth simply be recognized as fully Catholic and others as fully Protestant.  It was time to move on.