Columbus has a lot to answer for.

Did Columbus bring syphillis from the New World? Have a look at this piece from the New York Times.

The New World

Much of my teaching material for this topic has been based on J.H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaisance: Discovery, Exploration and Settlement 1450-1650 (Cardinal, 1973) and G.V. Scammell, The First Imperial Age: European Overseas Expansion, c. 1400-1715 (Unwin Hyman, 1989). The best textbook account I have come across is in Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789 (Cambridge University Press, 2006). I haven't yet read Hugh Thomas Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan (Random House, 2005).

I have also used a range of reliable internet sites which for copyright reasons I can't reproduce. Below some of the most useful.

A chronological account of the voyages of Columbus.

Information about the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494).

An assessment of Bernal Díaz' Conquest of New Spain.

Aztec human sacrifices. Is there an anthropological explanation?

What happened to Montezuma?

The account of the death of Atahualpa.

Disease
We don't know how many indigenous peoples died from diseases brought by the Europeans. Some accounts suggest that out of a total of approximately 50 million people in 1492, there might have been a death toll of 80%. If this is true, then it has to be the greatest human catastrophe in history.

Here is some information about the impact of the New World on food.
Peppers and chillis became part of the Iberian diet fairly quickly. Tomatoes were introduced into southern Europe in the 16th century though they only spread to northern Europe in the 18th century. Maize was brought back from Columbus’s first trip to the Americas in 1493 and spread rapidly, reaching Venice and the Balkans from the 1530s. In France it was known as millet. In Italy maize porridge (polenta) became a staple of the peasant diet.

See here for the history of the chilli.

The Spaniards introduced potatoes to Europe in the 16th century. The name 'potato' came from the Spanish word ‘patata from the Quechua work which appears as ‘papa’. Popular legend has long credited Sir Walter Raleigh with first bringing the potato to England, but history suggests Sir Francis Drake as a more likely candidate. In 1586, after battling the Spaniards in the Caribbean, Drake stopped at Cartagena in Columbia to collect provisions – including tobacco and potato tubers. Before returning to England he stopped at Roanoke Island, where the first English settlers had attempted to set up a colony. The pioneers returned to England with Drake, along with the potatoes. However, the spread was slow and uneven, with much consumer resistance.

The Ottoman Empire

See here, here, and here for some very useful websites.

‘The religious and political problems of sixteenth-century Europe – so vast, so intricate in themselves, so enmeshed in social change and cultural reorientation – were consistently rendered more complicated and more intractable by the holy war which Islam had vowed against unbelievers.’ Richard MacKenney, Sixteenth-Century Europe (1993), 243.

The empire therefore cannot be seen in purely secular terms. Religious considerations often dictated policy. The attacks on Rhodes (1522), Malta (1565) and Cyprus (1570) were designed to secure Muslim pilgrims’ access to the holy places. The infidels were also the Shi‘ites of Persia.

The Ottoman Advance
The term Ottoman is derived from Osman (Arabic: 'Uthman), the nomadic chief who founded both the dynasty and the empire. In 1300 Osman ruled one of the petty Muslim emirates of Turkish Anatolia, a frontier principality between the Byzantine Empire in the West and the Seljuk Turks in the east. A series of military victories led to the creation of a world power with 9,000 miles of borders, stretching from Hungary to the Persian gulf, sharing a common currency, the dinar.

The Osman dynasty came to power in a principality dedicated to holy war or gaza. As the major Muslim rivals of Byzantium, the Ottomans attracted masses of nomads and urban unemployed and created a huge, well-organized and highly disciplined army. They were able to take advantage of the decay of the Byzantine frontier defence system and the rise of economic, religious, and social discontent in the Byzantine Empire. Beginning with Osman and continuing under his successors Orhan (Orkhan, ruled 1324-60) and Murad I (ruled 1360-89), the Ottomans took over Byzantine territories, first in western Anatolia and then in southeastern Europe.

In March 1354, when an earthquake destroyed the walls of Gallipoli, the Ottomans under Süleyman landed in Europe. In 1361 Murad I captured Adrianople, the second city of the Byzantine Empire. Renamed Edirne, the city became the new Ottoman capital, providing the Ottomans with a centre for the administrative and military control of Thrace. As the main fortress between Constantinople and the Danube, it controlled the principal invasion road through the Balkan Mountains, assured Ottoman retention of their European conquests, and facilitated further expansion to the north.

After this, Europeans no longer talked of a crusade to recover the Holy Land – instead they recognized the need to protect Constantinople.

Murad incorporated many European vassals. He retained local native rulers, who in return accepted his suzerainty, paid annual tributes, and provided contingents for his army when required. This policy enabled the Ottomans generally to avoid local resistance by assuring rulers and subjects that their lives, properties, traditions, and positions would be preserved if they peacefully accepted Ottoman rule. It also enabled the Ottomans to govern the newly conquered areas without building up a vast administrative system of their own or maintaining substantial occupation garrisons.

Murad captured Macedonia in 1371, central Bulgaria in 1382, Sofia in 1385. This culminated in the defeat of the Balkan allies at the battle of Kosovo in 1389, during which Murad was killed. South of the Danube only Wallachia, Bosnia, Albania, Greece, and the Serbian fort of Belgrade remained outside Ottoman rule, and to the north Hungary alone was in a position to resist further Muslim advances.

In the early 15th century their power was temporarily checked by the last Mongol eruption led by Timur the Lame (Marlowe’s Tamburlaine). But as the century progressed Constantinople became more vulnerable.

The Fall of Constantinople
The fall of Constantinople to the vast army and heavy cannon of the forces of Mehmed II (the Conqueror reigned 1451 -1481) was one of the most traumatic and symbolic events in European history, marking the end of the Roman Empire in the east. Mehmed changed the city’s name to Istanbul and the Church of Hagia Sophia was turned into the mosque of Aye Sofya, while the cross was later replaced by a minaret.

Istanbul was to become Europe’s greatest capital. In 1453 it was a city in decay with only 30-40,000 inhabitants. Within a century it was to contain half a million people, of whom only half were Turks. It was probably six times the size of Venice and five times bigger than Paris. In strategic terms it was the ideal base for operations in Hungary or the Mediterranean.

In 1463 Mehmed II invaded Bosnia, causing large scale conversions to Islam. His successor, Bayezid II, conquered Herzegovina in 1483, leaving only Belgrade outside Ottoman control. The Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus (ruled 1458-90) was interested mainly in establishing his rule over Bohemia and agreed to peace with the Ottomans (1484).

The wars with Venice
The Empire fought a long series of campaigns against Venice between 1463 and 1479. In 1479 Venice was forced to cede Albania to the Ottomans in 1479, but it continued to encourage revolts against the sultan in the Morea (the area of Greece south of the Gulf of Corinth), Dalmatia, and Albania. It gained control of Cyprus in 1489 and built there a major naval base, which it used as a base for pirate-raids against Ottoman shipping and shores. Between 1499 and 1503 the Ottomans and Venice were at war again. Bayezid conquered the last Venetian ports in the Morea, thus establishing bases for complete Ottoman naval control of the eastern Mediterranean. The Ottoman fleet emerged for the first time as a major Mediterranean naval power, and the Ottomans became an integral part of European diplomatic relations. But Bayezid could not follow up all his military gains because he was faced with Shi’ite revolts in eastern Anatolia.

Mamluks and Persians
Bayezid’s troubles show that Ottoman rule was not unchallenged in the Muslim world. At the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries the Ottomans had two Muslim neighbours. The older of the two was the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt, with its capital in Cairo, ruling over all Syria and Palestine and the holy places of Islam in Arabia. In 1517 Selim I (‘the Grim’, r. 1512-20) captured the Mamluk empire, and Egypt and its dependencies were incorporated into the empire. This gave the Ottomans access to the great Egyptian granaries and the gold resources of the Sudan.

The other Muslim power was Persia, united by a new and religiously militant dynasty. The founder of the dynasty, Shah Ismail Safavi (reigned 1501-24), a Turkish-speaking Shi‘ite from Azerbaijan, brought Iran under a single ruler and ended a tradition of tolerance by imposing Shi ‘ism on his Sunni subjects and advanced into Anatolia. For a brief period it seemed as if there might be an anti-Ottoman alliance between Christendom and Persia. In 1523 Shah Ismail sent a letter to Charles V expressing surprise that the European powers were fighting each other instead of joining forces against the Ottomans. (The emperor did not send a reply until 1529 by which time the shah had been dead five years!)

Süleyman the Magnificent
Süleyman whom Christians called 'The Magnificent', (reigned 1520-66) ruled over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and over the seats of the former caliphates of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo. With the capture of Mesopotamia in 1534 the Ottomans had access to the Persian Gulf and the Indian spice trade, though here they came up against the Portuguese. Under him, the Ottoman Empire became a world power and his title ‘emperor of Islam, the king of kings, the greatest emperor of Constantinople, the lord of Egypt, Asia and Europe… the master of the universal sea’ hardly seemed inappropriate.

Under Süleyman, there were also further conquests of the Christian world. Belgrade was attacked in 1521. In 1522 the Turks attacked Rhodes, which was held by the 6,000 troops of the crusading Knights of St John. As with Belgrade, Süleyman encountered more resistance than he expected and allowed for the peaceful evacuation of the garrison in 1523. (The Knights retreated to Malta.) For a vivid account of the siege see Roger Cowley's Empires of the Sea, reviewed here.

Hungary, with its weak monarchy and squabbling aristocracy, was in no position to withstand the Ottoman advance from Belgrade in 1526. At the battle of Mohács in 1526 Turkish cannon inflicted one of the worst military defeats in the history of Christian Europe. The young king Louis (right) was killed and much of Hungary became a client kingdom of the Ottoman empire.

A challenge was mounted by his brother-in-law, the Archduke Ferdinand (Charles V’s brother and the future Emperor), who was elected king of Hungary at the Diet of Pressburg (Bratislava). After suppressing revolts within Turkey Süleyman advanced on Vienna in 1529, taking Buda en route. Had Vienna fallen, it would have opened up a path to Germany. But after a two-month siege, the Turks fell back. In 1532 Ferdinand and the Sultan signed a treaty.

Characteristics of Turkish rule
Autocracy
The sultan enjoyed absolute power in the appointment of his ministers, the most important of whom was the grand vizier. The sultan and his advisers formed the chief law court or divan and sought guidance from the ulema, the body of clerics who interpreted Islamic law.

The sultan’s role was not hereditary – the office passed from one holy warrior to another. Because kinship ties were weak, sultans often came to office through fratricide.
The sultans Replaced the jurisdiction of feudal lords with a centralized administration. Turkish historians claim that Ottoman centralization benefited the peasants, relieving them of the most oppressive labour dues. This might help to explain why they met with little resistance in the Balkan lands.

The military
The janissaries: Ottoman armies had previously been composed of Turcoman tribal levies, who were loyal to their clan leaders, but as the Empire acquired the characteristics of a state, it became necessary to have paid troops loyal only to the sultan. The sultan’s power was guaranteed by his elite corps of infantry, the janissaries, (corruption of Turkish words meaning ‘yeni new and çeri, troops’) which was Europe's first standing army. They were formed initially from Christian prisoners of war after the capture of Adrianople (1361), and later from Christian children in the Balkans. Technically slaves, they were directly under his command and not allowed to marry or wear beards. With their long cloaks and feathered turbans, armed with scimitars and arquebuses, they were the most highly disciplined fighting force in the world.

Sipahis and timariots: The army was supplemented by the household cavalry, the sipahis. The bulk of the regular army was formed of the holders of timars, military fiefs who had either to serve as cavalry or provide a number of horsemen according to the size of the fief. In contrast to western feudalism, these fiefs were not hereditary and were redistributed after the holder’s death. This provided an incentive for military advance as conquest would provide more land for distribution.

The army was probably 80,000 strong and equipped with fine cannon manufactured by Europeans.

The navy: The navy was enhanced by many Greeks who served as sailors in the fleet.

Administration
The system by which Christian children became janissaries was known as devshirme. It also applied to the administration of the empire.

Commissioners were sent out to each governmental district, where they toured the villages. It was the duty of each Christian father to wait upon the commissioner with all his male children between the ages of 8 and 20. Parents with only one son were exempt. Those thought to be the fittest and most intelligent were chosen as tribute to the sultan. They were then taken to places of special training, turned into Muslims and given the best possible education, tutored by the palace eunuchs. When their education was completed, the most talented entered the-Sultan's service in the palace - a civil service based on merit. Most of the other joined the Janissaries.

Toleration
For all its religious fervour, the regime was in practice pragmatic. The conquering Turks were few in number and lacked the governmental and technical skills of the people they conquered.

The relative tolerance of their Christian and Jewish subjects was part of Islamic holy law relating to ahl al dhimma (people of the covenant). Jews and Christians were deemed to have some insight, though grossly imperfect, of true religion. In return for freedom to practise their religion, the subject population was obliged to pay a special tax and wear dress that distinguished them from Muslims.

One of Mehmed II's first acts when he captured Constantinople was to appoint Gennadius as Patriarch. Though Hagia Sophia had been turned into a mosque, he specifically spared the Church of the Holy Apostles as the patriarchal church. This led to rumours that he was ready to convert to Christianity. Pius II wrote to him warning him against the Orthodox religion!

The Jews: Bayezid’s policy of economic expansion led to his encouragement of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 to immigrate to the Ottoman Empire. They settled particularly in Istanbul, Salonika, and Edirne, where they joined their coreligionists in a golden age of Ottoman Jewry that lasted well into the 17th century. They were allowed to practise their religion. By mid-16th century Istanbul had the world's largest Jewish community. Jews traded, practised medicine, and introduced the printing press.

Western Reactions
The West reacted with panic to the Ottoman threat, but in spite of calls for a Christian alliance, failed to unite. Venice was initially reluctant to commit itself to war because of its dependence on Ottoman grain supplies. France was prepared to ally with Ottomans against Habsburgs. Both France and England were unwilling to forgo Levantine trade. Papal pronouncements that the Ottoman advance was a judgement from God often fell on deaf ears.

The image of the Turk was at first a crude caricature. But travellers to the Ottoman Empire reported a different story - most notably de Busbecq, imperial ambassador at Constantinople.

There were important cultural implications for Europe: Anatolian carpets, Turkish baths, and coffee. In 1618 English traders established a coffee factory at Mocha in the Yemen. The Empire was also the bridge by which Europeans (especially the Portuguese) explored other cultures. It was a transit for Persian products. In 1619 the first Persian silk arrived in England.
Ottoman feelings of cultural and religious superiority meant that they had very little interest in Europe - apart from an admiration of western weapons. German firearms a revelation to a cavalry armed with bow and arrow, sword and shield! After 1590 they began to manufacture their own firearms. Western science was ignored but not Western consumer goods. European cloth was imported through Istanbul.

The beginnings of decline?
The 1530s showed both the strengths and weaknesses of the Ottomans. In 1537 Corfu withstood an Ottoman siege. (If it had been captured it would have been the base for an invasion of Italy.) But in the following year the combined fleets of Venice, Genoa and the pope under the Venetian admiral, Andrea Doria, was defeated by the corsair Khair ad-Din (Barbarossa) off Prevesa in the Ionian Sea.

After this the Venetians prepared for war at sea in what they saw as a long war or attrition. In 1539 Venice doubled its reserve fleet to 50 galleys.

The Mediterranean was now the major theatre of war, with Philip II inheriting his father’s problems. In May 1565 a Turkish fleet with 40,000 troops landed at Malta. (MacKenney, 258-9) The Christians held out for four months until relieved by Don Garcia de Toledo, the viceroy of Sicily. As with Vienna and Corfu this highlighted Ottoman problems in mounting successful sieges. It was the real turning point in the naval war against the Christians’.

Süleyman died at the siege of Szigeth in Hungary in 1566 at the age of 72. His successor Selim (‘the Sot’) the son of the ambitious senior wife Roxolana, was no warrior and reflected the decline in the personal qualities of the Sultans. As they declined, the viziers became more powerful, but their practice of selling offices to the highest bidder led to a huge decline in the quality of the Empire’s administrators. The timariot was also changing as land was not distributed not for prowess in battle but at the whim of the provincial governors. The janissaries had been given permission to marry by Süleyman and they were now demanding that their sons be allowed to join the corps.

Lepanto
In 1570 the Turks attacked Cyprus and took Nicosia. The Venetian government appealed for help to Don John of Austria, Philip II’s half-brother.

In May 1571 a Holy League was formed of Spain, the papacy and Venice, but before a fleet could be got ready to sail, Famagosta had fallen. The Venetian defender Marc’ Antonio Bragadin was cruelly put to death. His skin is preserved in the church of San Giovanni e Paolo in Venice.

In October, the combined Venetian, Spanish and papal fleet defeated the Turkish fleet under Ali Pasha at Lepanto on 7 October in the Gulf of Patras in Greece. It shattered the myth of Ottoman invincibility at sea, and ended the 'Golden Age' of the Ottoman Empire.

‘The fleet of the divinely guided Empire encountered the fleet of the wretched infidels and the will of Allah turned the other way.’

In Ottoman histories this is known as the ‘rout’. The Turks never again risked a naval confrontation with Christendom on such a scale.

For G.K. Chesterton's rousing and very politically incorrect poem, Lepanto (1915), see here.

However, the importance of Lepanto should not be exaggerated. The Venetians were forced to recognize the loss of Cyprus and to pay an indemnity of 300,000 ducats. In 1573 Venice withdrew from the Holy League, and the Turks assembled an even greater fleet off Tunis and captured the city in the following year. In 1581 Philip II and Selim made a truce – a recognition that both sides faced serious problems: Philip was dealing with the Netherlands revolt and Selim with Persia.

The Ottomans were to remain a threat until the late 17th century. They laid siege to Vienna as late as 1683.

Science and Islam

Here is the Sunday Times review of two new books on Islam and science. One of the authors, Ehsan Masood is a colleague of my husband's on Radio 4's Home Planet and the book is the tie-in to Ehsan's new BBC series. The books explore the golden age of Islamic science, in which, among other things, the astrolabe (depicted above) was invented. They note, in the words of the reviewer that

'just about everything that the western world knew of the celestial sphere in the 16th century had come to it via the Arabs, who translated and refined Ptolemy's works between the 9th and the 13th centuries. And they didn't just read Ptolemy; they added to and challenged him, with data gathered at observatories such as the one established in the 820s in Baghdad by the greatest of the “scientific” rulers, al-Mamun of the Abbasid caliphate'.

The reviewer goes on to note,

'One can't read these two lucid accounts without becoming acutely aware of the contrast between the former Islamic supremacy in science and its parlous state today. This contrast brings to mind the “Needham question”, which the English biochemist Joseph Needham posed in the parallel case of ancient China's technological and scientific superiority. Why is the West, not the East, now at the heart of science?

The answer is complex, but must partly lie in the more doctrinaire Ottoman theocracy that eventually succeeded the Abbasids at the end of the 13th century. The Ottoman sultans frowned on printing and forbade clocks because the muezzins were the keepers of sacred time. As Lyons shows, the irony is that the Arabs were once leaders in both astronomical and technological time-keeping, precisely because of the importance of prayer times.

In any event, by the mid-19th century the tables had turned. Instead of westerners marvelling at eastern learning, it was Ottoman ambassadors to Europe who were reporting back on western technological wonders to a country that had few roads and no trains or telephones. Many worried, too, that an acceptance of the western approach to science would mean abandoning Islamic principles. The result is that there have been only two Nobel laureates from Islamic countries, and, as Masood says, the scientific performance today of the members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference - many of them wealthy oil states - “is not far off that of some of the poorest countries of the world”.

Witchcraft: 1940s style

Here's some information on the 'witch', Helen Duncan, who was imprisoned in 1944 under a little-known clause of the Witchcraft Act of 1735. At a seance she revealed information about the sinking of HMS Barham, an event that was at the time kept from the public. Contrary to what is often believed, she was not convicted for being a witch but for falsely claiming to be able to procure spirits.

She is considered a martyr in spiritualist circles.

Witchcraft

[Above is Henry Fuseli's representation of Macbeth's witches.]

See here for a good introduction.

Between 1400 and 1800 between forty and fifty thousand people, mainly women, died in Europe and colonial north America on charges of witchcraft. Why? As Lyndal Roper states,

‘No-one … can offer a total explanation for phenomena lying in the realms of psycho-history.’

Europeans had long believed in witches yet only in the period after 1500 did they turn this cultural assumption into a one of the major killers of western Europe.

The chronology and geography are varied. Central Europe and Scotland were most affected, Ireland and the Iberian peninsula least. There was a short-lived bout of intense witch-hunting in England in the 1640s and nineteen deaths in Massachusetts in 1692. In Poland witchcraft executions only ended with a royal decree in 1776, by which time about 1,000 people had died. Witch-hunts did not begin in Hungary until the 18th century.

What is witchcraft?
Belief in magic has always been common and exists in the world today, for example in Africa. But what is unique to western Christian civilization is the belief in a personal devil. There were two quite different but related activities denoted by the word witchcraft as it was used in early modern Europe: the practice of maleficium, and worshipping the devil. Maleficium meaning calling down a curse on another, was the effect of witchcraft. The cause was the pact with the devil. It was usually believed that those witches who made pacts with the devil also worshipped him collectively in nocturnal ceremonies, the ‘witches’ sabbath’ ,that could include naked dancing or the cannibalism of infants.

Witchcraft as inversion
It is important to recognize that almost everybody believed in witches and it was heresy to doubt their existence. In his book Thinking with Demons, Stuart Clark argues that views on witchcraft arose from notions of ‘misrule’ or inversion: wisdom/folly; male/female; Carnival/Lent. In a world of ‘looking-glass logic’ structured by opposition and inversion, demonic witchcraft made sense. Witchcraft had all the appearance of a proper religion, but in reality it was a religion perverted. And since genuine religion was, in theory, a total experience, so its demonic copy was all-embracing. There were nine orders of devils to match the nine orders of angels. The pact with the devil was a parody of baptism. The witches’ Sabbath was a parody of the mass (or of Protestant preaching). Demonic inversion was inseparable from notions of archetypical rebellion. That was why the Puritan William Perkins argued that if the death penalty was appropriate for traitors, it was even more necessary for those who joined the devil in his rebellion against God. A further inversion lay in the fact that witches could change themselves into animals. Although these transformations were accepted as illusory, the concept of metamorphosis suggested that instinct might replace reason and brutishness virtue.

The Malleus Maleficarum
One reason for the new attitude to witches was a newly confrontational attitude among the intellectual elite, arising paradoxically out of Renaissance humanism. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII authorized two German Dominican Inquisitors, Heinrich Krämer and Jakob Sprenger, to hunt witches in nearby areas of southern Germany. Krämer oversaw the trial and execution of several groups – all of them women – but local authorities objected to his use of torture and banished him. While in exile, he wrote the classic text on witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) (full text here), published in 1486. These views and activities were endorsed in a papal bull of 1484. The book proved the catalyst to give shape to existing anxieties. In 1532 Charles V’s new codification of imperial law, the Lex Carolina, prescribed the death penalty for both heretics and witches. Far from abandoning belief in witchcraft as a relic of Catholic superstition, Protestants endorsed it and quoted Exodus 22:18: 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live'.

Witchcraft and popular belief
Witchcraft was both intellectual and folk belief. People in the early modern village were subject to a huge range of hazards – plague, illnesses and sudden deaths. The distinctions between the natural and the supernatural were blurred and within the community individuals with special powers – cunning folk – were recognized. It was natural to ascribe relatively unusual or inexplicable events such as slow lingering illnesses, mental illness, hailstones to maleficium. Most of the quarrels between ‘witch’ and victim involved a denial of neighbourliness or some other perception of a wrong done. The majority of witchcraft accusations came from below and concentrated on the alleged harm done by maleficium. It was their social superiors who added the element of diabolism.

Why women?
Overwhelmingly witches were women (though not in Poland or Russia). The Malleus was extremely misogynistic. Although men and boys were indicted, a disproportionate number of those brought before the courts were post-menopausal women, notably widows.
Stuart Clark notes that what the witchcraft writers said about women amounted to ‘three groups of propositions, drawn on with almost formulaic uniformity’.

(1) Women were by nature weaker than men and therefore had a greater capacity to fall; they could not grasp spiritual matters easily and were credulous and impressionable in their beliefs; at the same time they were resentful of authority and discipline and their carnal appetites were greater than men’s.
(2) Women were the devil’s preferred target – see Eve, whom some writers called the first witch; inconsistency was a trait that women and devils had in common.
(3) Women were both curious and loquacious, more eager than men to know hidden things; their bodies were ugly and they were malicious, rancorous and vindictive.

But he goes on to argue that these statements are ‘entirely unoriginal’, mere 16th century clichés, and are found well outside the context of witchcraft. Therefore the experts on witchcraft ‘were not in any way eccentric in what they said about women as such [but] were entirely representative of their age and culture’. The writers who were sceptical about witchcraft, such as Reginald Scot, were no more enlightened about women; instead they used the femininity of the witch as a reason for doubting the truth of her statements.

Other historians have drawn attention to the changing social situation of women that marginalized them in society – for example an increase in the number of women living alone as spinsters or widows. Keith Thomas argued that economic and social changes, as well as different attitudes to charitable relief, led to a decline in neighbourliness and that women on their own were the chief victims. Olwen Hufton notes that the witch phase is coincident with attempts to change or reform traditional charitable practice. Women’s customary roles gave them more opportunities to practise harmful magic as they generally served as cooks, midwives and healers.

Diarmid MacCulloch notes that older women and widows were often vulnerable because they had been the subject of accusations over many decades and because they did not have a husband to support them. Those who confessed to collusion with the devil repeatedly used phrases like ‘he promised I should nae want’ or ‘Je ne manquerai de rien’.

Lyndal Roper explores the combined hatred and fear felt in German society for the crone, the woman past childbearing years whose body has become an object of disgust. Envious of young women, she gives vent to her spite through harmful magic.

The late Christina Larner pointed out that witches were accused not because they were women but because they were witches. A great many cases were brought by angry and frightened ‘victims’ who genuinely believed witches had caused their misfortunes.

The women who admitted to witchcraft did so often under torture but in some cases they seem to have believed their own stories.

Scotland: a case study
Witchcraft had been on the Scottish law books from 1563, but went virtually unprosecuted until 1590 when James VI became an enthusiastic prosecutor. In 1590 he was caught up in storms when on his way to meet his bride, Anne of Denmark, and on his return he led an investigation into the witchcraft that had ‘caused’ the storms. Between November 1590 and May 1591 more than a hundred suspects were examined and a large number were executed. He uncovered a story of a gathering at North Berwick parish kirk the previous Halloween over which the devil had presided with the intention of planning the king’s destruction through manipulation of the weather. The accused confessed under torture and were executed.

In 1591 he commissioned the publication of News from Scotland, which outlined the recent events, presumably for an English audience. But he also wanted to write something more scholarly and to challenge Reginald Scot’s 1584 treatise The Discoverie of Witchcraft. In 1597 he published his Demonologie.

However, by the time this was published, James belief in witchcraft seems to have been waning. When he became king of England he backed new legislation (1604) that took witchcraft prosecutions out of the church courts and into the secular courts and in practice witchcraft prosecutions declined during his reign. (But Macbeth was presumably meant as a tribute to his zeal in uncovering witches.) But though prosecutions declined in England, they intensified in Scotland and between 1590 and 1680 about a thousand people were executed. This can be seen as part of the Kirk’s power struggle against the secular authorities.

There was a similarly intense prosecution in the Catholic archbishopric of Cologne from 1594 during the episcopate of Ferdinand of Bavaria. Here the Jesuits were especially zealous in launching prosecutions.

On the other hand, the power of the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal paradoxically acted as a check on prosecutions. In 1609-10 there was a bout of executions in Navarre. But after examining thousands of cases, the Navarrese inquisitor Alonso de Salazar wrote, ‘I have not found the slightest evidence from which to infer that a single act of witchcraft has really occurred’. But the Iberian population had their own ready-made scapegoats – Jews and Muslims – and did not need another. And the Inquisition was well trained in the hearing of evidence.

The decline of witchcraft
Witchcraft prosecutions declined in most parts of Europe from the end of the seventeenth century, when the scientific revolution and the coming of the Enlightenment provided a new view of the world with naturalistic explanations for death and disasters. The Salem trials in Massachusetts were an aberration.

The ordinary people continued to believe in witches until well into the nineteenth century, but they were unable to bring prosecutions because the legal machinery no longer supported them.

Reformations and changing cultures

[Above: Bernini's 'Saint Teresa in Ecstasy' at the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome.]

This post is heavily indebted to Diarmid MacCulloch's Reformations: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700 (Allen Lane, 2003).

Some historians now speak of a ‘Long Reformation’ that took place over a period of about two hundred years in both Catholic and Protestant Europe and profoundly changed the culture.

Time
One symbol of a divided western Europe was that from 1582 Catholics and Protestants lived in different times. In that year Pope Gregory XIII revised the Julian calendar: ten days were suppressed, and the new year was to begin on 1 January rather than 25 March. France, Spain and Italy changed immediately. The Orthodox churches refused, as did Protestant Europe. (It was only in the eighteenth century that Western Europe had a single calendar; Russia did not come into line until 1918.)

Millenarianism

‘The Reformation would not have happened if ordinary people had not convinced themselves that they were actors in a cosmic drama plotted by God. … Above all, large numbers of Europeans were convinced … that the momentous events through which they were living signified that the visible world was about to end.’ (MacCulloch, 550).

The dual crisis of the Turkish advance and the division of western Christendom created a heightened sense of living in the end times, the phenomenon known as millenarianism. This belief was in evidence before the Reformation. The idea of a cataclysmic ending of time was found in various parts of the Bible, notably the Book of Revelation, and in the writings of the Italian Cistercian monk Joachim of Fiore in the 11th century. His works seem to divide history in three ages. The first age, of 42 generations, was of the Father, the age of the Old Covenant. The second age (42 generations again) was of the Son and therefore the world of Christianity. The third and final age would be that of the Holy Spirit. In this new age an ‘Eternal Gospel’ would be revealed ‘fulfilling’ and replacing the organized church and society would be realigned on an egalitarian and utopian monastic base. Joachim seemed to suggest the Christian era would end in 1260 with the coming of the Anti-Christ. After that his utopian age would arrive. His doctrines were condemned by the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 but they continued to have a powerful influence.

Millenarianism was demonstrated in Savonarola’s (1452-98) seizure of Florence. During the carnival season that year his authority received a symbolic tribute in the ‘bonfire of the vanities’, when personal ornaments, lewd pictures, cards, and gaming tables were burned.
In the 16th century many resorted again to Joachim’s writings, and turned his prediction of the third age of the Spirit into the thousand-year rule of the Saints on earth before the last judgement. In 1534 and 1535 thousands fled to Münster to set up a new Jerusalem. In Advent 1552 the Protestant Hugh Latimer told the Countess of Suffolk:

we know by scripture, and all learned men affirm the same, that the world was meant to endure six thousand years. Now of the six thousand be passed already five thousand five hundred and fifty-two, and yet this time which is left shall be shortened for the elect’s sake, as Christ himself witnesseth (quoted MacCulloch, 551).

Borrowing from Joachim (but also from Virgil and Ovid) the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe wrote of a golden age of the Church’s first thousand years, followed by a five-hundred year ‘brazen age’ when ‘began corruption to enter and increase’.

It is clear that, far from marking the birth of the modern age, the period of the Reformation saw an increase in ‘irrationalism’, marked in particular by the persecution of witches and the pursuit of necromancy and alchemy – themes which will be explored later.

Providence
In Protestant cultures in particular there was a renewed emphasis on the doctrine of God’s providence, especially as revealed in the miraculous. King Frederick II of Denmark was much perturbed by sinister hieroglyphs found on herrings. An earthquake in 1580 that shook England, northern France and the Netherlands, toppling one of the pinnacles of Westminster Abbey caused much consternation. It is possible that this earthquake turned many English people against the commercial theatre. It certainly provided an excuse for the city authorities of Coventry to suppress the traditional Corpus Christi play and to replace it with a Protestant production on the subject of the destruction of Jerusalem.

The word replaces the image
One of the major differences between Lutherans and other Protestants lay in the attitude to images. Whereas Lutherans believed some images could be helpful to devotion, to Reformed Protestants, they were idolatry and provoked God’s wrath. There were two ways in which images were destroyed. At times, in Scotland, France and the Netherlands, the destruction consisted of spontaneous mob violence. In other parts of Europe, as in Poland and Lithuania, it was a bureaucratic process. In England mob iconoclasm was a rather marginal phenomenon. Most images such as statues and rood screens were taken down and walls were whitewashed on the orders of bishops, churchwardens, and justices of the peace. In many cases, images were only partially destroyed so that a good deal of medieval art survived into the seventeenth century (where there was further iconoclasm) and beyond into the Victorian age.

In place of the image came the word. Statues were replaced by boards listing the Lord’s Prayer or the ten commandments. The funeral sermon became common and was often circulated in a printed version. However, images continued to have a place in the pages of books. The pulpit, a ‘dramatically canopied wooden preaching-turret’ furnished with hour-glasses assumed a central place. (MacCulloch, 585-6). In Shakespeare’s London sermons were popular entertainment; there were a hundred sermons each week but only thirteen play houses.

The Bible
This was a deeply contested issue. Paul V to the Venetian ambassador, 1606:

‘Do you not know that so much reading of the Scripture ruins the Catholic religion?’ (quoted MacCulloch, 406).

In 1564 anyone wishing to read the Bible in the vernacular had to seek permission from the local bishop. In the 1596 Roman Index the ban became total. In Italy Bibles were publicly and ceremonially burned and between 1567 and 1773 not a single Italian language bible was printed anywhere in Italy. This could never have been the case in Germany or England, where vernacular translations were permitted.

Protestants were naturally committed to bible translations. One scholar has estimated that between 1520 and 1649 1,342,500 whole bibles and New Testaments were printed for the English market, enough for every English household. But Protestants were increasingly aware of the problems involved. By the 1530s Luther’s optimistic belief that the Bible alone would spread the truth was seen to be full of dangers. Whose bible? Increasingly the magisterial reformation fell back on catechisms for children and the bible translations, such as the Elizabethan Geneva Bible (1575) (right), were accompanied by annotations explaining the text.

Catechisms
These were part of a massive Europe-wide educational project. Germany produced around thirty or forty different new editions of printed catechisms every decade after 1550, England more than a thousand between 1530 and 1740 (and these are the ones that have survived). By 1600 the elders and ministers of Glasgow and lesser burghs were conducting weekly catechisms on a rota basis which would cover the entire population over a few weeks. Roman Catholic countries had their own catechisms, all modelled on the Tridentine catechism of 1566.

Marriage and virginity
From the late 3rd century, with the appearance of hermits and monks, the status of virginity grew within Christianity and marriage was relegated to a secondary good (MacCulloch, 609). From the 12th century there was a long battle to impose celibacy on the clergy. In reaction to Protestantism, the last session of the Council of Trent (1563) affirmed the inviolability of vows for priests and nuns and pronounced anathema on anyone proclaiming that

‘the married state excels the state of virginity or celibacy, and that it is better and happier to be united in matrimony than to be remain in virginity or celibacy’.

In his 1598 catechism, Cardinal Bellarmine asserted:

‘Marriage is a thing human, virginity a thing angelical. Marriage is according to nature, virginity is a thing above nature’.

But a paradoxical parallel development within Catholicism was the exaltation of the family, particularly in Spain with its declining population and overseas empire. This is shown in the cult of St Joseph promulgated by Teresa of Avila, who was celebrated as the virtuous head of the Holy Family. The representation of the Virgin Mary also changed; she became less physical and emotional, more passive and spiritual, (though in the areas of Europe threatened by the Ottoman Empire she was portrayed as Our Lady of Victory).

Erasmus, who retained bitter memories of his time in a monastery, attacked monasticism and praised matrimony in his Encomium (1518): he wrote that the single state is

‘a barren way lf life hardly becoming to a man…let us leave celibacy for bishops…the holiest kind of life is wedlock, purely and chastely observed’.

Luther, Zwingli and Calvin all married in order to demonstrate their view that marriage was superior to celibacy. The creation of a married clergy marked a social revolution and one of the great dividing marks between Catholic and Protestant Europe. In the Peace of Augsburg (1555) the Habsburgs unenthusiastically granted legal recognition the Lutheran clergy unions within the Empire.

Following Erasmus, Protestants developed a new theology of marriage. It was no longer a sacrament but it was, in Cranmer’s words, an ‘honourable estate’ and a ‘holy estate’.

Sexual feelings were no longer regarded as sinful. Few were called to celibacy and for those who were not, marriage was a positive good. Luther told a monk contemplating marriage:

‘This is the Word of God, though whose power procreative seed is planted in man’s body and a natural, ardent desire for woman is kindled and kept alive. This cannot be restrained by vows or by laws. For it is God’s doing’ (quoted Richard Mackenny, Sixteenth-Century Europe, Macmillan, 1993, 145).

This celebration of sex in marriage may also be connected to the alarming spread of syphilis in this period; monogamy – ‘safe sex’ - seemed a better solution to the problem than an unrealistic prescription of celibacy.

The Strassburg reformer Martin Bucer, one of the first of the early Protestants to marry, asserted that the chief reason for marriage was companionship. In his Prayer Book, Thomas Cranmer, another married man, cited this as the third reason for matrimony (after procreation and the cure for lust) but it is remarkable that he should have given it at all. It was the first marriage liturgy in Christian history officially to say this. In Protestant sermons wives were celebrated as calm and experienced companions ready to give advice and comfort.
However this companionship was in a context of patriarchy. Protestants not only exalted marriage but male headship within it. The ideal Protestant father was the religious head of the family, leading prayers and reading the bible to his dependants. The family was to be the microcosm of the Church.

Some historians have argued that Protestantism involved a loss for women, as with the option of a religious life ruled out, marriage remained the only life choice. The diary of Lady Margaret Hoby reveals the opportunities, but also limitations, of the life of an Elizabethan woman. But it can also be argued that Catholic women lost out as there was a growing insistence on enclosure for nuns. Charismatic women were regularly disciplined by their (male) religious superiors. Angela Merici (1474-1540) had founded the Company of St Ursula, a group of lay single women and widows dedicated to the poor. This received papal authorization and later in the century became a religious order focusing increasingly on girls’ education. But once they became a religious order they came under increasing pressure to become cloistered nuns. They were allowed to continue teaching girls though mainly within the walls of the convent.

Teresa of Avila
See here and here.

The most celebrated religious woman of the period was Teresa of Ávila (1515-82). Her paternal grandfather was a conversos, a Jewish convert to Christianity. In 1535, at the age of nineteen she entered a convent of Carmelite nuns somewhat against her father’s wishes. Life in this convent was fairly relaxed and Teresa seems to have come and gone with considerable freedom. Following a period of depression and illness she achieved inner piece in 1554-5 and experienced mystical visions which she wrote down, using the imagery of a mystical marriage. She came into contact with the Jesuits, who had just established a college in Ávila, and they encouraged her in her wish to restore the primitive rule of the Carmelites. In 1562 she founded a convent for women in Ávila, St Joseph’s for her new order, the discalced (barefoot) Carmelites, in the face of considerable opposition from the town and from within the Carmelite order.

After five years, however, she obtained permission to found more convents. She extended her mission to men after meeting Juan de Yepes (John of the Cross) in 1567 when she came to Medina del Campo to found one of her convents. In 1568 he accepted her invitation to found the first male house to follow her principles. In 1571 she was appointed prioress of the convent in Avila and in the following year she appointed Juan as priest confessor to the community.

This combination of two powerful personalities a aroused the suspicion of many in the hierarchy. In 1577-8 Juan was imprisoned and tortured. He escaped but the experience intensified his mysticism and his book The Dark Night became a Christian classic. Teresa was only freed from persecution through the support of Philip II. In 1579 the process of the Inquisition was stopped and the order was officially recognized in 1580. Teresa herself attended to some eighteen foundations. Her final foundation was at Burgos in 1582.
After Teresa’s death a new (male) Provincial curtailed much of the order’s freedom of action and Juan was removed from his position within the General Chapter of the order.
However, Teresa was canonized in 1612. In 1618 Philip III persuaded the pope to designate her co-patron of Spain (along with Santiago) and she was proclaimed Spain’s national state in 1814. General Franco kept one of her hands permanently by his bedside.

The Catholic Reformation

‘Though in the 1530s and 1540s it appeared as if Europe might become Protestant, a century later the picture was reversed – Catholicism had ended its decline and was showing a vigour and dynamic that compared favourably with a now rigid Protestantism.’ H. G. Koenigsberger, George L. Mosse,. and G. Q. Bowler, Europe in the Sixteenth Century (Longman, 1989), 207.

There is a useful summary of the Catholic Reformation here. This post is also indebted to Diarmaid MacCulloch's quite excellent Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700 (Allen Lane, 2003).

List of Counter-Reformation popes
Paul III (1534-49) Alessandro Farnese
Julius III (1550-55) Giammaria Ciocchi del Monte
Paul IV (1555-59) Gian Pietro Carafa
Pius IV (1559-65) Giovanni Angelo Medici
Pius V (1566-72) Michele Ghisleri
Gregory XIII (1572-85) Ugo Buoncompagni

The Oratories
Even before the Protestant Reformation, there were movements for renewal within the Catholic Church. In the 15th century the 'devotio moderna' in the Netherlands had practised a Christianity that stressed the inner and the spiritual as opposed to ritual and dogma. In southern Europe the oratory movement began with founding of the Oratory of San Girolamo [Jerome] in Vicenza in 1494. In 1517 the Oratory of Divine Love was founded in Rome and included in its membership many important dignitaries of the Church. It practised prayer, frequent confession, communion, and charity in the visitation of hospitals. These oratories were allied with old, strict religious orders such as the Carthusians (founded 1084) and the Observant Franciscans. In 1485 Henry VII confirmed his predecessor’s grant of a convent for the Observant Franciscans in Greenwich.

In 1524 Gian Pietro Carafa, the future Pope Paul IV, a member of the Rome Oratory was instrumental in founding the Theatine order whose task was to remedy the deficiencies of the regular clergy by concentrating on preaching and pastoral work. In 1525 the Capuchins, a reforming branch of the Franciscans, who revived the old stress on preaching an poverty, were founded in the Italian Marches. The famous female teaching order, the Ursulines, were founded in 1535 by Angela of Merici.

The Jesuits
Although reform was underway before the advent of Protestantism, the most famous of the new orders was set up specifically to counter ‘heresy’. The movement originated in Spain and the context is important. The country was eager to stress its Catholic orthodoxy and the Spanish Inquisition had been set up in 1478 to crush religious dissent. The religious orders had remained powerful, and the medieval chivalric tradition was especially strong (see Don Quixote). These factors combined to produce a religious order that was like no other in the Catholic Church.

Iñigo López de Loyola - Ignatius Loyola (1491?-1556) (left) was born into the Basque nobility. In 1521 he was badly wounded by a cannon ball while helping to defend the citadel at Pamplona from capture by the French. During his long and painful convalescence he read chivalric romances as well as the lives of the saints. When he recovered he dedicated himself to the Black Madonna at Monserrat in 1522 and in subsequent years wrote down what were to become his Spiritual Exercises, ‘one of the most influential books in the history of the Western Church’ (MacCulloch, 221). In 1523 he travelled to the Holy Land, but he was turned back by the Franciscans, who were at that time discouraging pilgrims because they were continually having to find ransoms for Christian prisoners. In 1528 he went to study at the Sorbonne (he was there with Calvin and Rabelais) where he formed a circle of like-minded friends, including the Navarrese nobleman’s son, Francisco de Javier (Francis Xavier) and conceived the idea of fighting heresy in Europe as well as Islam in the east. On 15 August 1534 he and a small group of friends, met at Montmartre and swore vows of poverty and chastity and a third vow to go to the Holy Land when their studies were finished. In January 1537 they reached Venice but found their progress barred by the war with the Turks, which meant that all commercial sailings were cancelled. They then decided that they would offer their services to the pope and call themselves the Company (soon to be known as Society) of Jesus.

In Rome, however, Ignatius found that he had powerful enemies, notably the fiercely anti-Spanish Neapolitan Carafa. One problem was the anomalous status of the Society as they were not monks or friars but secular priests. Were they to have a rule? In 1539 Ignatius submitted his rule to Paul III and in September 1540 the bull ‘Regimini militantis Ecclesiae’ gave them official recognition.

The Society was based on military principles. It was to be governed by a ‘Superior-General’ elected for life, with Ignatius elected the first general in April 1541. Under him were ‘provincials’ who governed a region, and the ‘rectors’ who ruled individual houses.
The new order had a distinctive spirituality, expressed through the ‘spiritual exercises’, a training of the mind through a series of visual exercises. Loyola’s stress on the senses profoundly affected Jesuit art and architecture, which was rich and elaborate, seen, for example in the Gesù Church in Rome (1568-75). This could not have been more different from Calvinism. Another huge difference lay in theology: the Calvinists believed in predestination while the Jesuits stressed the freedom of the will. But in other respects the two movements were similar, showing a common zeal and self-discipline and at time espousing similar radical politics.

The Jesuits became the shock-troops of the Counter-Reformation, showing remarkable energy and success. They concentrated on three areas of activity: the cultivation of rulers, education, and missionary work. They became famous as confessors, very lenient ones in the eyes of their Catholic critics. In using ‘casuistry’ to help people grapple with complex moral problems they came under attack for dishonesty and ‘jesuitical’ practices. They founded schools and universities in order to train elite young men to spread the faith. Peter Canisius founded universities in the southern part of the Holy Roman Empire. Their schools were free (financed by energetic fund-raising) and taught dancing, drama and PE as well as the usual curriculum. They were secondary schools and catered for merchants, gentry and nobility.
One of the most remarkable of the Jesuits was Francis Xavier who in 1542 began his ‘prodigious decade’ of Asian mission (MacCulloch, 433).

The most innovative of all the Jesuit missions was that pioneered by the Italian Robert de Nobili in India, who adopted the dress of a high-caste Hindu. In China, Matteo Ricci began on his arrival by wearing the dress of a Buddhist monk and then (when he knew the culture better!) Confucian scholars.

The papacy and reform
Given the power structure of the Catholic Church, reform had to come from above, and this meant the papacy. In the early 16th century the popes were preoccupied with their role as political rulers. The sack of Rome in 1527 was seen by many devout people as God’s judgement on a corrupt papacy. In 1534 Alessandro Farnese became pope as Paul III. In 1537 he created a reform commission, which was dominated by members of the Oratory of Divine Love. Three of its members were especially significant: the Venetian diplomat and Christian humanist, Cardinal Gasparo Contarini (1483-1542), the English exile Reginald Pole and the pious ascetic Gian Pietro Carafa.

The Colloquy of Regensburg
Among both Catholics and Protestants, there were those who wished to heal the breach. These included Contarini and Pole who sympathized with the doctrine of salvation by faith and Luther’s disciple Philipp Melanchthon, a humanist scholar, who wanted to find common ground with Catholics.

In 1541 Melanchthon and Contarini met at Regensburg (Ratisbon) under the auspices of Charles V while the Imperial Diet was operating. The two quickly reached agreement on a formula concerning justification but could not agree on transubstantiation, the papacy and the veneration of the saints; and in the end both Luther and the pope rejected the formula on justification.

The failure of Regensburg ended hopes of compromise. Contarini died under house arrest in August 1542, a broken man, and Italian evangelicals fled north in despair. The hour of the hard-liners, led by Carafa had come. Paul III resolved to enforce orthodoxy ruthlessly. He had already recognized the Jesuit order. In July 1542 the Inquisition was re-organized in Rome along Spanish lines to counter the growing infiltration of Protestantism into Italy. Carafa:

‘Even if my own father were a heretic, I would gather the wood to burn him.’

The Council of Trent
There was now considerable pressure on the pope, especially from Charles V, to call a general council, a move that he at first resisted, remembering how councils had in the past asserted their superiority over the papacy. On 22 May 1542 a council was called to the city of Trent (Trento; now in Italy, then in the Tyrol and part of the Holy Roman Empire). The Council of Trent laid down guidelines for dogma and pointed towards a greater centralization within the Church and a greater enforcement of religious uniformity.

The first session (1545-9) proved to be one of the most fruitful for theological definitions as it tackled the key Lutheran doctrines of Scripture and justification and thus marked the moment when many evangelicals realized that their break with Rome was decisive. The Council decreed that:

• sola scriptura was false and truth was conveyed through tradition as well as Scripture;
• the Vulgate was the authentic text of the Bible sin
• was remitted in baptism
• humanity retains free will after the fall, and therefore human beings can obey God’s commands
• the seven sacraments of the medieval church were ‘instituted by Christ’, and essential to salvation.

To the dismay of Charles V, it proved harder to achieve administrative reform. The first session forbade pluralism in the holding of bishoprics but it was unable to deal with the problem of non-resident bishops. In 1548 the Council moved to Bologna (outside the emperor’s dominions) because of the plague, and this sabotaged Charles’s attempts to involve the Protestants in the proceedings.

Paul’s successor Julius III recalled the Council to Trent.
The second session (1551-2) reaffirmed transubstantiation and stressed the importance of oral confession. But the session was suspended in a stalemate when the Protestants appeared and demanded that the bishops should be freed from their allegiance to the pope. Paul IV (Carafa) was suspicious of the Council and was embroiled in a war with Philip II (which also involved war with England). His successor Pius IV recalled the Council.

The third session sat from 1562-3. Under pressure from Carlo Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan, the impetus for reform was growing. But the pope was not in control of European developments. Pius had recalled the Council partly because he was alarmed at the French monarchy’s initiatives at religious conciliation. The Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I also wished to conciliate the Lutherans, following the fragile Peace of Augsburg in 1555. The German delegation was small, but for the first time a French delegation attended led by the Cardinal of Lorraine. With the support of Philip II, the Spaniards were also well represented but the young Queen Elizabeth forbade the papal delegate to enter England.

Since most doctrinal matters had been settled in previous sessions, most of the work of this session concerned the life and structuring of the Church. The Council condemned pluralism and decreed that every diocese was to have a seminary to train the clergy. Some abuses – the proliferation of masses said for special occasions, some aspects of popular piety, and the sale of indulgences - were condemned. But the Council was nearly wrecked over the question of the relative powers of the pope and the bishops. Did the bishops derive their authority from the pope or directly from Christ? Eventually a compromise formula was found and in practice the government of the Church became increasingly centralized over the subsequent centuries. Early in 1564 the pope ratified the actions of the Council. A special commission was formed to implement the decrees while another revised and reissued the Index of Prohibited Books.

In 1566 a new Catechism was issued followed by a Breivary (1568) and Missal (1570) were issued by the pope.

William Tyndale: pioneer of the information age

The last issue of the Economist for 2008 has this article in praise of William Tyndale.

John Calvin (1509-64)

This post owes a great deal to Diarmid MacCulloch's Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700 (Allen Lane 2003) a work as witty (in parts) as it is magisterial (always).

Calvin was born in Noyen in Picardy, the son of a lawyer. He taught theology at the Sorbonne and Roman law at Orléans and Bourges. Through his studies he came into contact with French humanism and had contacts with two influential Erasmian groups: that around the king’s sister Marguerite d’Angoulême (1492-1549) and the similar group at the court of Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux and the theologian Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples.

In October 1534 posters (placards) appeared at Paris street corners attacking the Mass, leading to considerable disorder as outraged Parisians rioted against the ‘foreigners’ who were said to have perpetrated the outrage. François called a halt to reform and Calvin and Lefèvre fled France. During 1535 and 1536 Calvin was in Basel, devoting his time to writing. In August 1536 he arrived at Geneva by accident when, because of the wars between the king and the emperor, he failed to reach the Protestant stronghold of Strassburg. There he found the fiery Guillaume Farel, another French exile, attempting to reform the city. At his insistence, Calvin became ‘Reader in Holy Scripture’ in the city. This opened an important new phase in the history of Protestantism.

Geneva was situated on the crossroads of routes between northern and southern Europe and had a large immigrant population. It was in the hands of a small governing elite that never wholly supported Calvin. He was expelled in 1538 and spent three years in Strassburg (where he married the widow of an Anabaptist), but following a change in the composition of the city council he was invited back in 1541, and it was after this period that Geneva assumed its distinctive identity.

Calvin’s theology
In March 1536 during his exile in Basel Calvin published (anonymously) the first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion and dedicated it to François I. The final edition was published in 1559. The Institutes was a systematic exposition of the Reformed faith – something Luther could never have written. His exposition was based – of course – on the Bible, but also on St Augustine. Calvin’s fundamental doctrine was that of the sovereignty of God and it is from this concept that he derived his doctrine of ‘double predestination’ which he developed in his re-workings of the text.

As Scripture then clearly shows we say that God once established by his eternal and unchangeable plan those who he long before determined once for all to receive into salvation, and those whom on the other hand, he would devote to destruction. We assert that with respect to the elect, this plan was founded upon his freely given mercy, without regard to human worth; but by his just and irreprehensible but incomprehensible judgement, he has barred the door of life to those whom he has given over to damnation.

This went much further than Lutheranism as developed by the moderate Melanchthon.

Calvin’s predestination was not an invitation to religious passivity but to striving. The saved need constantly to demonstrate that they are saved, both to themselves and to the world, and this means a life of continual struggle against sin. It also means a quest to set up a better society. This leads to an ambivalence in Calvin: if God’s kingdom can be set up on earth, what is the Christian’s relationship to the secular ruler. Should he obey him, as Paul had insisted, or were there occasions when it was right to resist?

In common with other magisterial reformers, Calvin rejected Anabaptism. He saw the Church as the community of the elect, but also a visible body containing a mixture of saints and sinners just like Israel.

Calvin’s Geneva
Calvin’s Geneva was ‘the reformed answer to Mûnster’. MacCulloch, 237. Its government was laid out in the Ordinances of 1541. Following the Strassburg model, there was a fourfold structure of church government: pastors were to preach the word, doctors to teach at all levels, elders to be elected by the council and to hold general disciplinary responsibilities deacons to look after charitable giving, either practical or administrative. Together the pastors and the senior doctors (including Calvin himself) formed a Company of Pastors. Pastors and elders combined in a committee known as the Consistory, which policed the morals of the citizens. There was to be compulsory testing and examination of faith. Certain Christian names (such as Claude, the name of the former patron saint of Geneva) were banned on the grounds that they were ‘absurd’ and ‘stupid’. There were vigorous laws against swearing, and scripts of plays were submitted to Calvin for his approval.

The governmental structure of Geneva was dualistic: at the head of the civil government was a small elite of the native-born Genevan patriciate; at the head of the Church’s government was a small exiled elite of mainly Frenchmen. This was copied over Europe.

Geneva became an international centre. There were more than thirty printing houses in the city, run by Germans, French, Italians and other Swiss. Religious refugees poured into the city from England and France. The Scotsman John Knox described Geneva as

the maist perfyt schoole of Chryst that ever was in the earth since the dayis of the Apostillis.

'To the modern eye, it would appear that by the late 1550s, the Calvinist International was preparing for the Revolution of the saints.’ Richard Mackenney, Sixteenth Century Eruope: Expansion and Conflict (Macmillan, 1993) 165.

Calvin challenged
Calvin’s autocratic theology was challenged by some radical Protestants. The Savoyard Sébastien Châteillon (now more usually called Sebastian Castellio) quarrelled with him on the canonicity of the Song of Solomon, which forced Calvin into a rather inconsistent defence of Church tradition. Castellio was forced to retreat to Basel

where the city and Church authorities were rapidly developing the principle that no one who hated Calvin could be all bad. MacCulloch, 242.

Calvin’s greatest challenge came from a maverick physician from Navarre, Miguel Serveto (Michael Servetus). In 1553 he published his anti-Trinitarian Christianismi Restitutio in Lyon. When he was condemned by the Inquisition in Lyon, he fled to Geneva where he was arrested and ordered by the civic authorities to be burned. Calvin wanted a more merciful execution but he did not oppose the burning, which took place on 27 October. Most of his fellow Protestant leaders approved the sentence. It established Calvin as a serious defender of the Reformation. In 1559 the Council appointed him to head a new institution of higher education, the Academy, which soon recruited students from all over Europe.

The English evangelicals

Note: The term 'Protestant' is not appropriate for the early stage of the Reformation in England and historians prefer to use the contemporary term 'evangelicals', usually written with a lower-case 'e' to distinguish the from the Evangelicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

One of those present at Worms was the Englishman, Cuthbert, Tunstall, bishop of London. He wrote warning that the Babylonian Captivity must be kept out of England at all costs. Yet he was too late. In 1518 Luther was sent two letters telling him that his books were being exported to England. At the end of 1519 Erasmus informed him that certain people in England were admirers of his writings. Further evidence comes from the ledger of the Oxford bookseller, John Dorne, who sold a dozen books by Luther between January and December 1520.

On 12 May 1521 in a spectacular ceremony in London, the papal anathema was pronounced against Luther and the bull was posted on the door of St Paul’s. But on the same night a mocking rhyme was scribbled on the bull. In July 1521 the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum was published. Henry told Luther that it was his, though he later denied it. He commissioned Thomas More and John Fisher to write against Luther.

Luther’s works reached England through contacts between the English and German merchant communities, especially in London. Lutheran works were not translated into English until later, but they were read in Latin by the educated. Bishop Longland feared ‘the corruption of youth’ at Cardinal College.

At Cambridge, reformers met at the White Horse Tavern. The group was so Lutheran in outlook that it was nicknamed ‘Little Germany’. The usual chairman was Robert Barnes, then prior of the Augustinians. Another associate was Thomas Bilney, who was won over by reading St Paul in Erasmus’s translation. The Master of Queen’s College, Cambridge, Dr Forman, masterminded a contraband book trade between London and Oxford. Soon these early English reformers were questioning transubstantiation. Among the first enthusiasts for the new teaching were the Lollards, and the movement spread among the old Lollard communities in East Anglia and the South-East.

On 26 and 17 January 1526 Wolsey, acting as papal legate, and accompanied by Sir Thomas More, made a raid on the German community in London and seized five Germans. On 11 February he presided over a ceremony at St Paul’s, the bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, preached a sermon, and five Germans and the English ‘evangelical’, Robert Barnes, abjured their heresy, carrying their faggots which they then threw on a fire, followed by heretical books. In the following month, Tyndale’s New Testament began arriving clandestinely into England.

William Tyndale (c. 1490-1536)
Tyndale was the most noted of the university evangelicals and England’s earliest Reformation publicist. Like Wolsey he was an MA of Magdalen College, Oxford. He became a tutor in the West Country, where he came to despise the ignorance of the local clergy. In 1523 he attempted to get a place in Tunstall’s household. When he refused, he went to work in the house of a rich London cloth merchant named Humphrey Monmouth and became associated with the ‘brethren’.

In 1524 he left England for Germany. In 1525 he began printing his New Testament in Cologne, using Erasmus’s and Luther’s New Testaments. He was forced to flee by a local magistrate, and completed the translation at Worms. 90% of the New Testament in the Authorized Version is derived from it and Tyndale’s phrases have seeped into the language: ‘eat, drink and be merry’; ‘the salt of the earth’; ‘the powers that be’ ‘death, where is thy sting’. Tyndale’s translation was tendentious, and he used it to undermine church doctrines and ceremonies.

From March 1526 it was secretly sold in England. From 1527 until1534 (when Tyndale issued a revised edition) it was printed five times in Antwerp in pirate editions for sale in England.
In 1530 he translated the Pentateuch and engaged in his controversy with More, who railed against the heretics in his Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529) and Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (1532-3).

One of Tyndale’s most important books was the Obedience of a Christian Man in which he developed the theory of the godly king who could rescue the church from corruption. However in his Practice of Prelates (1530) he denounced the king’s divorce.

Tyndale was kidnapped in Antwerp in 1535 and executed in Brussels 1536.

Man bites dog: Boris isn't Tory enough

I thought you might be interested in this post from the Guardian criticising Boris Johnson's fascinating programme After Rome: Holy War and Conquest, for anti-Christian bias and (by implication) political correctness.

Crikey!

The German Reformation

The Reformation has typically been seen in two great contexts, the corruption and chronic institutional weakness of the late medieval church and the challenges presented by humanism. The dominating early figure has been Martin Luther, who, it has been claimed, sparked off the Reformation when he posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.

The Reformation has also been placed in the context of earlier reforming movements, those of the Englishman John Wyclif (d. 1384) and the Czech Jan Hus (c.1369-1415). Wyclif had formulated a theology of predestination, rejected transubstantiation and advocate clerical marriage. His followers, known as Lollards, went underground but survived into the early sixteenth century. Hus advocated ‘utraquism’, the laity receiving the sacrament in both kinds, which was a fundamental attack on the privileges of the clergy. He was burned at the Council of Constance in 1415 but the Hussite church remained secure in its national setting of Bohemia and Moravia.

This traditional view fails to tackle adequately a number of fundamental problems. If the Church was so bad, why did it endure for so long? And if humanists contributed to the break-up of Christendom, why did some of the most influential, like Erasmus and More, devote their energies to preserving its unity? Why did Luther break with Rome when Erasmus did not? And how important is Luther in the story?

Can we be sure that the Church was more corrupt in the sixteenth century than in previous centuries when there are examples of scandalous popes and lax clergy throughout the Middle Ages? Historians like Eamon Duffy have used documents like churchwardens’ accounts to argue that the English Church in the fifteenth century enjoyed mass popular support. The orders of friars, in particular the Franciscans showed a remarkable capacity for reform; Cardinal Ximenes, who promoted his own order, the Observant Franciscans in the Spanish kingdoms, is just one example. Movements such as the devotio moderna in the Low Countries and the Oratory of Divine Love in Rome were growing in popularity. In France the humanist scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples produced a commentary on the psalms in 1509 and on Romans in 1512. His Erasmian piety gained the support of the king’s sister Marguerite d’Angloulême. It was possible to criticize the Church and want it to improve without thinking of to leaving it. And even at its worst, the Church was far from moribund. In the sixteenth century, faced with the challenge of Protestantism, it showed a formidable capacity to adapt and survive.

This is not to say that all was well with the Church. There were many vested interests working against change. For example, Lefèvre d’Etaples’ patron, Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux, fell foul of the Franciscans who accused him of heresy. There was also some serious corruption. When Leo X renewed the sale of indulgences in 1517 for his great project of St Peter’s, he showed formidable marketing skills that would not have been out of place in the modern world, but also a deep cynicism. The transaction by which Albrecht of Brandenburg (left) would promote the sale in alliance with the Fuggers in order to gain the archbishopric of Mainz and a cardinal’s was extremely sleazy!

However there had been plenty of sleaze in earlier centuries and plenty of hostility to reform. The Protestant Reformation succeeded (partly) because of a variety of new circumstances. These include the printing press, implications of humanist biblical scholarship, the ambitions of rulers, the politics of the cities of Germany and Switzerland and also a search for religious safeguards in an age that was especially preoccupied with the afterlife.

Luther (1483-1546)
The popular story that the Reformation began when Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517 may not be true. The theses did exist and were published, but it is not certain that they were posted on the church door. Modern scholarship places less emphasis than previously on the role of Luther and instead tries to assess how far the Reformations were popular movements and how far the mass of the people were affected by them. It seems certain that there was a popular movement - though princes, cities and peasants wanted different things from Protestantism. However no amount of revisionism can hide Luther’s importance.

Luther was the son of a Thurningian miner, who became the lessee of a mine and thus a small capitalist. He went to school in Eisenach. In 1501 he went to the university of Erfurt. In 1505 he entered the Order of the Augustinian Eremites, and in 1507 he took priestly orders. In 1510-1511 he was sent to Rome on business for the Saxon Augustinian monasteries, but there is no evidence that he was especially appalled by what he saw there.

On his return to Germany in 1511 he was sent by the Vicar-General of his Order, Johann von Staupitz, to teach at the new university, founded by Friedrich ‘the Wise’, Elector of Saxony, who was determined to make his university one of the centres of humanist study in Germany.

In 1514-15 Luther lectured on the psalms. In 1515 he moved on to Romans where he read in the Vulgate text of Romans 1:17: ‘Justus autem ex fide vivit’. He read this at a time when, according to his later accounts, he was troubled by intense spiritual anxieties. These arouse out of his Augustinian concept of a righteous God justly angry at his sins and his consequent fear of damnation. His reading of Romans led him to believe that salvation was not something that could be attained by striving, but was a free gift of God, apprehended through faith. The Pauline term for this is ‘justification by faith’, sola fide.

The chronology of his spiritual experiences is contradictory and contested. Long afterwards, in 1545 he spoke of a ‘tower experience’, a spiritual breakthrough that brought him to peace of mind. Though he never gave the date of this experience, it is likely to have been after 1517. When he made his famous protest, he had not fully worked out his ‘evangelical’ theology or fought through his spiritual difficulties. It was while he was in the middle of his struggles that the Dominican friar Johann Tetzel came to Wittenberg selling indulgences, accompanied by an accountant from the Fugger banking house.

The fairly recent doctrine of indulgences had been promulgated in a papal bull of 1343 that allowed to faithful to make a financial contribution to draw upon the treasury of the merits of Christ and the saints. Later in the fifteenth century it had been argued that indulgences were available to help the souls in Purgatory as well as the living. In an age of acute religious anxiety the doctrine of indulgences held a powerful appeal. But it could also be seen as a cynical exploitation of people’s fears and Luther was not the only person to protest about the system.

Luther’s aim had been the fairly narrow one of opening up a debate about indulgences. The ninety-five theses were not intended as a call to revolution. But the challenge was a public one, contained in a letter to his local archbishop – Albrecht of Brandenburg. Albrecht forwarded the theses to Rome and within a fortnight they were available in German. In March 1518 Erasmus sent a copy to Thomas More.

In the ensuing pamphlet debate among German theologians, Luther moved from his protest against indulgences to a wider consideration of the doctrine of God’s grace.

At the end of 1518 he met the great Italian scholar, Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg. But there was no meeting of minds and any opportunity for compromise was lost. It is probably about this time that Luther had his ‘tower experience’. In the wake of his disillusionment with Cajetan, he began to call for a General Council to hear his case – a direct attack on papal authority.

In 1519 Luther engaged in a public disputation with Dr Johann Eck at Leipzig (the rival university to Wittenberg). Eck, a brilliant debater, forced him into the open - Luther said that the Roman supremacy was of recent date and that much that Hus had taught had been correct. This immediately defined Luther as an enemy of the Catholic Church. The controversy spurned a huge pamphlet literature between 1518 and 1523. Pro-Luther pamphlets outnumbered the anti by 20 to 1.

1520 Luther issued three pamphlets:

(a) Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. This was addressed in German and called for a programme of social and ecclesiastical reform. The pope was described as Antichrist and the German nobility had a God-given duty to overthrow him.
(b) The Babylonian Captivity of the Church was written in Latin for the clergy. Luther reduced the seven sacraments to the three he believed were explicitly mentioned in scripture (baptism, penance and the Eucharist). He attacked transubstantiation though he maintained a doctrine of real presence.
(c) The Freedom of a Christian Man was a plea for inward religion based on a right relationship with God. ‘A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all’. Good works come naturally to those who are saved.

In December 1520, following his excommunication, Luther burned the papal bull Exurge Domine which condemned his writings at the gates of Wittenberg.

The Diet of Worms: In the summer of 1519 Charles V had been elected emperor. Though Luther was under the Ban of the Empire, Charles gave him a safe-conduct by Charles V to attend the Diet in April 1521. In a long speech he defended his refusal to repudiate his writings.

‘Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason – I do not accept the authority of popes and councils for they have contradicted each other – my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.’

Not long after his death, the first editor of his collected works added to his speech: ‘Here I stand, I can do no other’. Charles honoured the safe-conduct he had given Luther, but he also issued an edict condemning him as a heretic.

Once Luther was back in Saxony, Frederick arranged for him to be kidnapped and ‘imprisoned’ in the Wartburg. During this time he completed his translation of the New Testament based on Erasmus’s text. He also wrote hymns most notably ‘Ein feste burg ist unser Gott’.

The Swiss Reformation
Luther’s protest was not isolated. In 1519 Huldrych Zwingli’s sermons in the Great Minster at Zurich initiated the Swiss Reformation, which was to affect England much more. It is disputed among historians how much Zwingli owed to Luther and how much he arrived at his theological position independently.
Zwingli showed his radicalism by marrying (in secret in 1522) and by ordering the destruction of images. He also set out a revolutionary doctrine of the Eucharist: it was purely a symbol and a declaration of faith; there was no ‘real presence’ of Christ in the Eucharist.

The development of Lutheranism
In 1521 Luther’s brilliant young disciple Philipp Melanchthon published the Loci Communes that was to become the central text of Lutheranism.

As Lutheranism developed, the early radicalism of Luther’s pamphlets vanished. Luther believed he was confronted by two serious challenges from the ‘left’. In 1522 he returned to Wittenberg to find the scholar and nobleman Andreas von Karlstadt declaring publicly that all sacred images should be destroyed. He condemned this in a pamphlet Against the Heavenly Prophets.

In 1525 he reacted viciously to the Peasants’ Revolt and urged the nobility to ‘smite, slay and stab’. His language was that of a frightened man. He believed that he was partly responsible for the revolt.

Luther’s religious conservatism is shown at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529 where he and Zwingli clashed on the Eucharist. Luther insisted on a ‘real presence’ while Zwingli argued for a purely symbolic interpretation of Christ’s works. Their failure to agree marked a permanent division between Swiss and German Protestantism.

But Luther’s conservatism should not be exaggerated. His marriage in 1524 to the ex-nun, Katherine von Bora (left), was a revolutionary step.

In 1529 the Emperor convened the Diet of Speyer with a view to withdrawing all concessions to Lutheranism. A group of German princes who supported religious reform drew up a protest - a ‘Protestatio’. This is the origin of the term Protestant. Following this, Lutheran theology was codified in Melanchthon's Augsburg Confession (1530).