Today Catholic sovereigns must not follow the same policy as before. Formerly friends and enemies have been distinguished according to frontiers and states, and have been called Italians, Germans, French, Spaniards, English and so on. Now we must say Catholics and heretics; and the Catholic prince has to have as his allies all Catholics in all countries, just as the heretics have for their allies and subjects all heretics, whether at home or abroad.
—An Italian diplomat, 15651
IN OCTOBER 1559, A FRENCH expeditionary force of 1,500 sailed north toward Scotland to aid the embattled Mary of Guise, Scotland’s Queen Regent, against a rebellion among the Scottish nobility. The French made clear that they would send 10,000 more troops if necessary to restore Mary. For 245 years, since Scotland cemented its independence from England at Bannockburn, France had been Scotland’s “auld ally.” As was typical in old-regime Europe, Scotland and France in 1559 were linked by dynastic ties that effectively subordinated Scotland to France’s powerful House of Guise. The French expedition was shipwrecked, however, and in December, Elizabeth I of England sent a force of 4,000 north to aid the Scottish rebels. In February 1560, Elizabeth and the rebels signed the Treaty of Berwick, calling for the ejection of all French troops and proclaiming Scotland and England allies.2 The Guises in France determined to counter-intervene so as to keep Scotland in the French sphere, but a rebellion in France itself in March prevented them from doing so. Elizabeth sent 8,000 more troops north, the Scottish rebels triumphed, and the Berwick treaty went into effect. England’s intervention had brought about a diplomatic revolution in northwestern Europe and the first step to the eventual Anglo-Scots union of 1707.
Elizabeth, then, used force to promote Calvinism in Scotland in order to steal an ally from France. But why this affinity between the English monarchy and the Scottish rebels in 1559-60? A superficial answer is that they were both anti-French. But why were the Scottish nobles anti-French, in violation of a 245-year Scottish tradition? Why did they trust England, the “auld enemy,” which on geographical grounds was always more threatening to their country? For that matter, why would Elizabeth of England aid a rebellion against a fellow monarch?
The answer lies in a development earlier in the sixteenth century that had already altered political interests and sympathies across much of Europe: the transnational contest over whether society should be ordered on Catholic or Protestant principles. That grand struggle had emerged out of a sustained crisis in the authority of the Catholic Church in the early sixteenth century. The struggle was sustained for nearly two centuries by the inability of any single model or regime type, Catholic or Protestant, to fulfill its promises manifestly better than the other. It only ended in the early eighteenth century when a third model that transcended the competitors—toleration—proved superior.
Elizabeth and the Scottish rebels were Protestant, while France’s rulers—Henry II of the House of Valois, and the powerful House of Guise—were Catholic. English and Scottish Protestants had many conflicting interests and reasons to mistrust one another, and in subsequent years mistrust was to confound their relations. But in 1559, actors across northwestern Europe were highly polarized according to religious confession. Catholics were highly prone to identify their interests with co-religionists in other lands and against Protestants in their own land; Protestants were highly prone to do the same. The source of the acute religious polarization of 1559 was the unstable religious situation in England itself in the late 1550s, which had demonstration effects across the region.
Since 1534, England had been a religious shuttlecock batted back and forth between Catholics and Protestants. In that year, Henry VIII (r. 1509-47) broke with the Roman Church and became head of the Church of England. His son and successor Edward VI (r. 1547-53) and his ministers tried to entrench Protestantism; Edward’s half-sister and successor Mary I (r. 1553-58) forcibly restored Roman Catholicism and married the Catholic Philip II of Spain. Following Mary’s death in 1558, all of Europe watched as her half-sister Elizabeth I ascended the throne. Raised as a Protestant, Elizabeth wavered on the religious question for fear of provoking the arch-Catholic Guises of France into invading and placing her cousin, the Scottish Catholic Mary Stewart, on the English throne in her place. What reassured Elizabeth that she was secure from French intervention was an exogenous event: in April 1559, Henry of France and Philip of Spain signed the Treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis, ending the long Italian wars in Spain’s favor. Elizabeth concluded that Philip would restrain Henry from invading England. The Westminster Parliament made Elizabeth head of the English Church and prohibited any worship apart from that of the Book of Common Prayer.3 England had joined the Protestant camp again.
The Protestants’ recapture of their most powerful state to date encouraged Protestants and alarmed Catholics across central and western Europe. In Scotland, Calvinists (at that time the fastest-growing Protestant group) began to smash Catholic icons in churches.4 Catholics, meanwhile, were vexed at England’s apostasy. Wrote Philip of Spain, who had contemplated marrying Elizabeth:
This is certainly the most difficult decision I have ever faced in my whole life, and it grieves me to see what is happening over there [in England] and to be unable to take the steps to stop it that I want, while the steps I can take seem far milder than such a great evil deserves … But at the moment I lack the resources to do anything.5
The long Italian wars had exhausted Spain’s treasury. Exacerbating matters in Scotland was that, under the Câteau-Cambrésis treaty, Philip and Henry had agreed to redouble persecution of Protestants in their respective realms. Mary of Guise, regent in Scotland, suppressed the energized Scottish Calvinists, stoking their anti-Catholicism.6 The persecution continued following Henry’s accidental death in a jousting match in July.7
Immediately following Elizabeth’s re-establishment of Protestantism in England, a contingent of Scottish Presbyterians (Calvinists) contacted Elizabeth’s agents and broached the subject of an Anglo-Scots union.8 John Knox, a personal disciple of Calvin’s, himself wrote to William Cecil, Elizabeth’s most trusted adviser, in the spring of 1559: “My eie hath long looked to a perpetual concord betuix these two Realmes, the occasion wharof is now most present, yf God shall move your hartes unfeanedlie to speak the saim for humilitie of Christ Jesus crucified.”9 Soon a bona fide Calvinist rebellion broke out in Scotland; in June, the rebels captured Edinburgh Castle. The next month a Scottish Calvinist sent to Elizabeth’s Privy Council the names of the leaders of the rebel movement, men “in band with them who have not yet declarit them selfis,” and still others likely to “subscribe with them to keip owt the frenche men.”10 Elizabeth’s “Protestant Left” advisers—Leicester, Walsingham, and Essex—urged her to form a Protestant League comprising Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch, French, and Scots. Her moderate councilors advised caution, arguing that intense cooperation with foreign Calvinists would provoke the French Guises into invading England.11
In August, as the Guises prepared to send 1,500 troops to Scotland to quell the Calvinist insurrection, Elizabeth’s moderate advisers now joined with the Protestant Left and pressed her to intervene in Scotland on behalf of the Calvinists. Her Privy Council remained deeply divided. A successful regime promotion would make Elizabeth more secure externally and internally: it would turn Scotland from enemy into ally and weaken Catholicism in England itself. Furthermore, it appeared likely that, notwithstanding Catholic solidarity, Philip of Spain was unlikely to help the French. In contrast to the Guises, Philip seemed to have nothing to fear from transnational Protestantism; the movement barely existed in Spain and was only starting to stir in the Spanish-ruled Netherlands. Philip refused a French appeal for help and instead ordered Spanish troops to the Netherlands to help England if France invaded.12
Thus ensued the abortive French intervention, and the successful English one, in Scotland. Both were what I term ex ante promotions, done directly in response to events in Scotland. Both French and English rulers were acting out of a desire to enhance internal and external security alike. What set off the chain of events was Elizabeth’s re establishment of Protestantism in England itself in the spring of 1559. Regardless of how sincere a Protestant Elizabeth was, the intensification of the ongoing transnational religious struggle confronted her with irresistible incentives to engage in ideological foreign policy.
The events in northwestern Europe in 1559 and 1560 have many parallels in other parts of Europe over the two centuries between the inauguration of the Reformation in 1517 and the early eighteenth century. During these two centuries, Central and Western Europe were intermittently torn by an enduring clash among rival versions of Christianity. Polities—cities, principalities, and large states in formation—were wracked by strife among various combinations of Catholic, Lutheran, Zwinglian, Anabaptist, Calvinist, Arminian, or other confessions. When it appeared likely that a polity would change from one established religion to another—via conversion of the rulers, lawful succession, or revolution—strife in neighboring polities would intensify and actors would identify their interest more and more closely with co-religionists regardless of polity and against inhabitants of their own polity who adhered to a rival religion. Transnational ideological polarization altered the incentives facing rulers: now they found their interests in promoting in other states the establishment of their branch of Christianity began to override other interests. Rulers would intervene and counter-intervene to overturn or support their rival religion in foreign polities.
Yet religious strife across and among states was not uniformly intense during these two centuries.13 In some times and places, rulers were far less polarized over religion, and international politics resembled the ideology-free world envisaged by realism. When domestic regimes were relatively stable, or other exogenous changes occurred—such as a sudden change in the distribution of material power among states—societies would depolarize to an extent and rulers’ incentives would change again; they would find less reason to aid foreigners with whom they shared a religion. Even in those less ideologically charged times and places, however, the religious networks continued to interact and agitate across Europe and work to re-polarize societies and states, Catholic versus Protestant. When exogenous conditions led to a possible regime change somewhere in Europe, or great powers would fight a war and occupy smaller states, societies would re-polarize over religion, driving rulers back toward ideological foreign policy.
Religio-political foreign policies were especially common in Germany in the late 1540s and early 1550s; northwestern Europe in the 1560s and 1580s; and the entire region in the 1620s and 1630s. International relations were less ideological in northwestern Europe before 1558 and in Germany between 1555 and 1600. The early years of the catastrophic Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) saw the Protestant-Catholic clash at its most severe, but from 1635 de-polarization ensued as Catholic France joined the war on the side of the Protestants. The war ended in the Peace of Westphalia, a set of agreements among princes on how to manage religious diversity and change. In the 1680s, the Catholic-Protestant struggle flared up once again, inflaming relations among France, the Netherlands, and England.
Thus, for nearly two hundred years international politics in Central and Western Europe was structured in part by a continuous transnational struggle for predominance between Catholicism and Protestantism. This structure shaped relations among states as certain viruses can affect an organism: active, then dormant, then active again.
The transnational contest over which religion would prevail in politics emerged from a deep crisis in the predominant political regime in Central and Western Europe during the Middle Ages. The medieval political system was complex; the component whose evident failures triggered the macro-struggle that interests us was the political or temporal authority of the Catholic Church.14 The Church, a “transnational” organization, enjoyed enormous legitimacy and influence over medieval society, including the powerful nobility, owing to its consistency and ability to make good on its promises. A legitimacy crisis emerged in the 1510s in northeastern Germany, with Martin Luther’s movement to reform the Catholic Church. Many would-be religious reformers in preceding centuries had failed; Luther succeeded owing to the manifest failures of the social and political status quo, whose legitimacy was based upon the Church. These failures led a number of German princes to support Luther’s challenge to certain Church practices. Luther’s followers and status quo advocates polarized and two mutually negating ideologies emerged: political Lutheranism and political Catholicism. In the 1540s, Calvinism emerged from Lutheranism and posed an even more potent challenge to Catholicism. The structure—transnational Catholic-versus-Protestant political competition—endured as long as no regime type clearly proved superior on its own terms. Only in the late seventeenth century did it become evident to most elites that a third way—a regime that tolerated religious diversity, as practiced in the Netherlands and then England—actually made for more stability and prosperity.
Figure 4.1 Forcible regime promotions, 1510–1710
Figure 4.1, plotting the frequency of forcible regime promotion against time, illustrates both the macro-struggle and the micro-oscillation within that struggle.
In what follows I narrate the emergence, persistence, and demise of this long contest between ideologies of Catholicism and various Protestantisms. The narrative is complex, but a central set of dynamics is discernible, consistent with my arguments in chapters 2 and 3. The crisis of the old regime began in 1517 with Luther’s initial challenges to Church teaching and practice. The ideological struggle began in the mid-1520s when several princes of the Holy Roman Empire adopted Lutheranism and disestablished Catholicism. With those official establishments, Lutheranism became tied up with the coercive power of rulers and states, making it a factor in international relations. The struggle finally decayed in the late seventeenth century as the very notion that Catholicism and Protestantism were dangerous to one another began to lose credibility among political elites.
Readers today may wonder whether the religious clashes of early modern Europe are properly classified as political. What has the process by which God forgives sins, or the metaphysics of the priesthood, to do with the distribution of power or institutions of governance? The general answer is that in medieval Europe, the “religious” and “political” realms—approximated by the Christian terms “spiritual” and “temporal,” respectively—were seen by virtually everyone as intimately mingled. As Philip Gorski writes, for civil authorities at the time “religious uniformity provided the best foundation for political stability. In the phrase of the age, ’religion is the bond that holds society together’ (religio vincula societatis).”15 “The heretic,” writes M. Searle Bates, “was a rebel and a traitor, politically and socially as well as theologically and ecclesiastically.”16 Hence political authority, with its responsibility to maintain social order, was obligated to monitor and enforce religious belief and practice to some extent; a ruler who failed to fulfill this obligation cast his own legitimacy into doubt.17
By no means were temporal and spiritual authorities in perfect harmony in medieval Christendom. Indeed, the intimacy of church and state led to countless competing assertions by princes secular and ecclesiastical (bishops). Philip IV the Fair of France (r. 1285-1314) asserted spiritual superiority to the Pope in France; Pope Boniface VIII (r. 1294-1303) responded by asserting supreme temporal authority over all of Christendom.18 The poet Dante Alighieri followed in 1309 with De Monarchia, an argument that it was actually the Holy Roman Emperor who held supreme universal temporal authority.19 But during these and other disputes, secular rulers took care not to challenge the sacerdotal priesthood, that is, the exclusive power of the clergy to mediate between God and man, chiefly by administering the sacraments. There were seven sacraments and, collectively, they covered the most significant aspects of medieval life: Baptism and Confirmation, entry into the Church; Eucharist, Penance, and Extreme Unction, the individual’s standing before God at a given time; Matrimony, marriage (by definition permanent); and Holy Orders, the priesthood itself. Put concretely, then, religious questions were political because priests and bishops, and hence the Church as a vast institution, monopolized authority over what were for Christians—that is, nearly all medieval Europeans—the most important events of life. Supporting and supported by this authority was the stupendous wealth of the Church in the form of vast landholdings, human capital, and treasures.
So why did secular rulers tolerate for so long an order that so diluted their own power? Why not break with the Catholic Church and seize power from the clergy? Were princes in 1034 or 1234 not as rational as Henry VIII, who in 1534 did break with Rome and seize the Church’s wealth in England?
Doubtless many, perhaps most, medieval princes were devoted sons of the Church who could not entertain such a break. But their devotion was in part a function of the Church’s own successes through the preceding centuries. Notwithstanding its failings in the eyes of subsequent ages, the medieval Church generally delivered on its promises. Its doctrines, a synthesis of Christian theology and Aristotelian science, made sense of the world; the hierarchy of being it limned, stretching from the lowest rock through animals and humans to angels and God, provided a norm for order that seemed consistent with the facts;20 its claim that Christ entrusted St. Peter and his successors with the keys to heaven was buttressed by the majesty and power of the papacy; its sacerdotalism was ratified by pious clergy. Thus the failures of various would-be reformations in the centuries before Luther are not hard to understand. Reform movements would sometimes erupt and argue that the current Church, or at least some of its leaders, contradicted its own central text, the Bible. Many of these movements enjoyed political patronage for a time, suggesting that princes were contemplating a serious challenge to the Church. The Cathars or Albigensians of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were protected for a time by nobles and even bishops in the south of France; the Waldensians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, by the House of Savoy; John Wycliffe and the Lollards of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, by the kings of England; the Hussites of the fifteenth century, by the kings of Bohemia; Girolamo Savonarola of fifteenth-century Florence, by Charles VIII of France. But none of these movements sparked a Europe-wide sustained movement.
The case of Jan Hus (1369-1415) is illustrative. Hus challenged the Church on various doctrinal points and was supported by Wenceslaus, King of Bohemia. Wenceslaus wanted to be elected Holy Roman Emperor and protected Hus so as to punish Pope Gregory XII for not supporting him. The papacy was especially vulnerable at this time because there were two claimants, one in Rome and a second in Avignon, and the Council of Pisa declared a third pope, Alexander V (eventually considered an anti-Pope). Wenceslaus supported Alexander, who soon declared Hus a heretic. Wenceslaus at first tried to mediate between Hus and Alexander. But the Council of Constance in 1415 declared Hus a heretic and Wenceslaus abandoned him to be burned at the stake.21 This sorry story is typical: in general, a prince supported a religious reform movement to help his political ambitions, and turned on the reformers when it became evident that his power (and perhaps his soul) was in jeopardy.
Each of these failed reform movements was “transnational” in the sense that, by means of migration and travel, each inspired at least quiet dissent in other parts of Europe. The Hussites in Bohemia were heavily influenced by the teachings and example of the Lollards in England a generation earlier. But again, none of them had a direct, lasting impact. By contrast, Martin Luther’s movement quickly gained conversions across Germany among the peasantry and in the cities, which gave princes incentives to convert or at least protect Luther, which in turn encouraged more conversions.22
Historians agree that the prestige of the Catholic Church, and hence its claims to authority, were lower in the early sixteenth than in preceding centuries. By then the Church’s actions in many realms so contradicted its teachings that many had privately come to question its authority. The Western Schism mentioned above provided one glaring anomaly: it had not been clear who occupied the Holy See. Renaissance humanism provided another in the crucial arena of the universities. The scholastic learning of the High Middle Ages had been challenged by scholars insisting that medieval glosses on ancient texts be cast aside in favor of the ancient texts themselves in their original languages. This academic return ad fontes (to the source) gave Luther an appeal among the learned; indeed, it is difficult to disentangle humanism from the early Reformation.23 Steven Ozment argues as well that Catholic spirituality had become stifling and corrupt.24
The Church’s legitimacy crisis meant that clerical abuses once tolerated were now potential flashpoints. The Church had granted indulgences, or remissions of the temporal punishments for sins, for centuries, and the doctrine had even been abused by rogue priests or “pardoners.” It was only in 1517, when Pope Leo X began to expand the use of indulgences ostensibly to fight the Turks but actually to fill his own coffers and to build St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, that Church corruption finally set a spark to dry tinder. On October 31, Luther, a young Augustinian monk, posted on the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral his Ninety-Five Theses challenging the granting of indulgences. Luther did not intend to split the Church; indeed, the Theses were a disputation, an invitation to other theologians to debate the matter, following scholastic custom. The Theses included statements of loyalty to the Pope.25 But the document met with loud enthusiasm among many clergy, nobles, and peasants, suggesting that many in German society had been deeply discontented with various aspects of Church authority. Simultaneously, it met with heated repudiation from Germany’s leading theologians.26 Luther, it turned out, was offering no ordinary disputation.
That the time was ripe in German-speaking Europe for sustained rejection of Church authority is seen in the parallel Zwinglian reformation in Switzerland. In 1519, a young priest in Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli, began to question openly various beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church along lines similar to those of Luther. It is difficult to trace any direct influence of Luther on Zwingli’s early moves, but he was of course a product of the same time and place; Zwingli was a humanist and friend of Erasmus, and his readings of the Greek New Testament led him to reject the Church’s accruals of tradition. Protected by the leaders of Zurich, Zwingli eventually became more radical than Luther, asserting that the Christian gospel had solely to do with inner faith and not at all with outward acts. Zwingli’s assertion that Christ was not present in the Mass in any special way contradicted Luther’s teaching and doomed efforts by German princes to unify his and Luther’s movements.27 Zurich established Zwingli’s version of the Evangelical faith in 1524; Berne, Basle, Constance, and several other cantons soon followed.
The anomalies that afflicted the Catholic Church may account for the enthusiasm with which many greeted Luther’s Theses. But why did not Church authorities react with caution and try to co-opt Luther and de-fang his complaint, perhaps by acknowledging that indulgences were indeed being abused by rogue priests? Such an acknowledgment may have strangled the Reformation in its crib and prevented not only the great schism in Western Christendom but also much of the intermittent international warfare in the ensuing 180 years.
For many, perhaps most, clergy the Church’s elaborate system still delivered on its promises. For these, Luther’s disputation implied a challenge not just to the doctrine of indulgences but to clerical authority in se. The hierarchy reacted sharply and rapidly to Luther and the two sides began to move progressively farther apart. In early 1518, Pope Leo directed the head of the Augustinian Order to suppress him. In March, Leo asked a leading Italian theologian, Silvester Prierias, to rebut Luther’s writings; Prierias produced a dialogue marked by insults and assertions of papal authority. In August, Luther published Prierias’s dialogue with his own reply, calling the dialogue “sufficiently supercilious, and thoroughly Italian and Thomistic”; in November, Prierias published his own reply; Luther answered with yet another. During this exchange of polemics, Leo ordered Luther to appear in Rome to recant.28 These interactions with Church authorities turned Luther against the papacy itself and prodded him and his circle of friends to identify more contradictions between Church teachings and the Bible, and to hold that in the event of conflict the Bible must be the final authority. Luther drew out the full implications for the reduction of the Church’s authority: the Christian was saved from damnation not through the mediation of the Church, but by direct faith in the merits of Jesus Christ, faith infused directly into the believer by God.29
Once Luther made these moves, the Church quickly condemned him for heresy. On June 15, 1520, Leo issued the bull Exsurge Domine, demanding that Luther retract forty-one alleged doctrinal errors. Exsurge Domine concerns in large part Luther’s implicit and explicit challenges to the power of the Church to mediate between God and man.30 In August, Luther published his reply, An Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, calling upon the secular princes of the Holy Roman Empire to call a Church council and found a new Church (or restore the original, ancient one) in which the clergy had no special privileges.31 Leo excommunicated Luther on January 3, 1521. Luther responded by burning a copy of the bull of excommunication.32 Lutheranism was now taking definite shape as anti-Catholicism; Lutherans saw themselves as retrieving pure, Biblical Christianity over against the accretions of Catholicism. Catholicism, in turn, was becoming defined in part as being anti-Lutheran; Rome’s theologians increasingly emphasized clerical authority and denigrated the ability of the individual to understand scripture. Germany quickly polarized over the deepening dispute, owing in part to the use of the printing press, a technology that had not existed when previous reformers had questioned Church practices.33
The anti-clericalism of Luther’s Appeal clearly had political implications, but in the early 1520s those implications had yet to take final shape. Catholicism was not simply a set of religious doctrines, but also a fundamental plan for ordering public life, a regime supported by an ideology. The Church was a major landholder and her princes (i.e., bishops), including the Pope, held temporal power over specified territories. The Church was not under the authority of secular princes and resisted, usually successfully, attempts by the latter to tax them. Via the power of the seven sacraments (see above), the Church controlled major events of the life of the laity. In his 1520 polemic, A Prelude concerning the Babylonian Captivity of the Church,34 Luther declared that there were only three sacraments—baptism, communion, and penance—and downplayed the last, implying that the Church only had authority over purely spiritual matters.
Luther’s teachings thus would empower the laity, but a struggle ensued over just how politically radical Lutheranism was. To oversimplify: Would it simply devolve power from ecclesiastical to secular princes? After all, if the Catholic clergy were reduced or eliminated, the secular prince could distribute more patronage, increase tax revenues, own more land, and avoid having a troublesome transnational network controlled by a foreign prince—the Pope—determine the significant events and moral views of his subjects. The prince could, in other words, extend his domestic power.35 Or, would Lutheran teaching, with its validation of individual conscience, instead lead to a leveling of the entire social order? Would Germany’s peasantry and cities gain power as well from the princes?
Luther gained a hearing among a number of prominent princes. His first political patron was his own prince, the Elector Frederick “the Wise” of Saxony (r. 1486-1525). Frederick never accepted every detail of Lutheran doctrine, but nonetheless chose to protect Luther from Church authorities in August 1518 by allowing him to disobey his recall to Rome and instead arranging an interview with the papal legate at Augsburg.36 Frederick was to continue to shelter Luther in the early 1520s, hiding him at Wartburg Castle while he translated the New Testament into German. His younger brother and successor John “the Steadfast” went farther, openly embracing the Lutheran faith.37 Another prominent convert was Philip “the Magnanimous,” Landgrave of Hesse (r. 1509-67), who was impressed with Luther’s courage from the outset. In 1524, Philip began encouraging (over the objection of various relatives) the spread of Luther’s teachings in Hesse, and finally began openly to profess those teachings himself.38 Under this political sponsorship Lutheranism not only survived but spread, as Luther wrote more polemics and translated the Bible into German, thus undercutting the Catholic Church’s ability to be sole interpreter of scripture.39
The demotion of the clergy and institutional Church was also appealing to the peasantry and cities in many parts of the Empire. In 1524, the peasants of Swabia, lately squeezed between higher prices and taxes and new restrictions on hunting, formulated their Twelve Articles. These called for the abolition of serfdom, the right to choose clergy, and fair tithes (church taxes), rents, and hunting rights. The Articles explicitly state that the test of any law or practice is the Bible rather than tradition or ecclesiastical authority. The peasants believed they were simply carrying out the principles that Luther and others were espousing.40 In early 1525, the Peasants’ War spread, particularly to areas with clerical landlords; by late April, Franconia, Thuringia, Alsace, and Württemberg had joined the Upper Swabian and Upper Rhine regions in supporting the Twelve Articles. An estimated 300,000 peasants were under arms.41 Many Imperial cities, hoping to get out from under the bishops’ authority and powers of taxation, joined in the rebellion, seizing monasteries and cathedrals. At first the peasants were peaceful and called for leading reformers, including Luther, to arbitrate between themselves and their landlords.42
The question of whether Lutheranism was to be “magisterial,” led by elites, or “communal,” mass-based and egalitarian, was ultimately resolved by force in favor of the former. Indeed, the Reformation’s first wave of forcible regime promotion—or more precisely, regime preservation—was triggered by the Peasants’ War. The Swabian League of princes, with support from the ruling Habsburgs, began to suppress the movement in the spring of 1525. The peasants responded with violence, besieging monasteries and castles, and the war escalated. Luther himself, horrified at the disorder, urged the princes to put the rebellion down in violent terms, and Lutheran princes joined in the carnage. In the savagery of the summer of 1525, perhaps 100,000 peasants were killed.43 As Peter Blickle writes, “Now the princes had to take over the Reformation. Only if they could bring it under political control could revolt be eliminated root and branch. They had to shear the Reformation of its revolutionary components, which they did by denying the communal principle as a mode of Christian life both in theory and in practice.”44
Many Imperial princes responded to the Peasants’ War by concluding that Lutheranism itself must be eliminated. In July 1525, as the war was winding down in Swabia, the Catholic princes of northern Germany gathered at Dessau to pledge to exterminate the new “sect.” George of Saxony, Albert of Mainz and Magdeburg, Joachim of Brandenburg, Duke Henry of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and Duke Erich of Brunswick pledged “to stand by each other in case the Lutherans attacked any one of them, in order to remain at peace from such rebellion.”45 The Lutheran princes did not immediately respond in kind to the Dessau League, but under the leadership of Philip of Hesse they agreed to stand together for the preservation of Lutheranism at the Imperial Diet at Speyer the next year. Helped by the Emperor’s wish for unity against his rival Pope Clement VII, the Lutherans succeeded in blocking the Dessau League: the Speyer Resolution of 1526 declared that the ban on Lutheranism could not be enforced everywhere and that a general Church council must be summoned to settle the religious question.46 In effect, Speyer set up the rule cujus regio, ejus religio (“whose the realm, his the religion”), a rule that was to wax and wane throughout Europe until the late seventeenth century, when it became permanently and generally accepted.
Lutheran rulers took advantage of the Speyer Resolution to establish new regimes in their estates, and thus began the long transnational struggle over whether to order society along Catholic or Protestant lines. Philip of Hesse was the first, beginning the reordering of his realm in October 1526 by reforming liturgy and teaching, seizing Church property, and establishing the University of Marburg, the world’s first Protestant university.47 In the next few years in northern Germany, the Countship of Mansfeld, the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and Schleswig, Holstein, Brunswick-Calenberg, East Friesland, Bremen, Hamburg, and several smaller cities became officially Lutheran. In south Germany, a number of cities did likewise.48 (Already in 1523 Sweden had separated from Denmark and its king, Gustav Vasa, declared it a Lutheran realm and seized Church property.)49
The new Lutheran regimes differed from their Catholic counterparts not in the question of sovereignty—Luther was indifferent as to whether a polity was monarchical or republican—but in the power of the clergy. Luther taught that the Church consists of the believers, all equal in God’s sight. But he held a strong view of human sinfulness, and was convinced that many in society would never be true Christians; these doctrines, along with the Peasants’ War, convinced him that robust authority was needed over society. That authority, by default, must be lodged in secular rulers. Thus the Lutheran state took shape as an Obrigkeitsstaat, or authoritarian state, to safeguard the preaching of the Gospel and to enforce the people’s submission. The chief obstacle to true public piety was the Catholic Church, so Lutheran rulers ousted Catholic clergy and seized Church property. Lutheran princes and city councils appointed their own clergy and adjudicated theological disputes.50
Since breaking with Rome brought such an alluring array of princely benefits, why did not all rulers follow Frederick, John, and Philip by becoming Lutheran? Why did the cascade of conversions not end in a complete collapse of Catholicism? Why instead did Lutheranism and Catholicism reach a stalemate that thrashed Europe for so many decades? The motives of Catholics, like those of Lutherans, remain ultimately inscrutable to us. But it is clear that, for a number of powerful princes, Catholicism retained sufficient plausibility vis-à-vis the emerging Lutheran alternative. For many, the old faith, including extensive clerical authority, was still credible, and Lutheranism appeared both false and deeply subversive of all authority.
The most important Catholic stalwart was Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1519-56) and King of Spain. Luther had reason to hope that Charles would join his movement, if for no other reason than to drive papal influence from his vast domains.51 Charles dithered about the religious question for decades, frustrating Lutheran and Catholic alike. In early 1521, Pope Leo asked him to put an end to Luther’s agitations.52 Charles rebuffed Leo and insisted that the wildly popular Luther receive a fair hearing. At the imperial Diet of Worms in April, Charles asked Luther to recant his writings. Luther’s famous reply that his conscience required him to submit to scripture rather than Church authority outraged the Emperor.53 Charles told the gathered princes the next day that he was bound to be true to the Habsburg heritage of defending the Catholic faith. Although he honored his commitment to give Luther safe passage from Worms, within weeks Charles changed tactics and issued an imperial edict banning Luther.54 Charles then left Germany until 1530 and placed the Empire under the regency of his brother, the Archduke Ferdinand, hoping the Lutheran problem would somehow resolve. It does not appear that Charles ever seriously considered breaking with the Catholic Church, even when a majority of German territory was Lutheran in the 1540s; the simplest explanation is that he was a convinced Catholic who could not seriously contemplate abandoning his family’s faith.
Charles’s fellow Habsburgs, and the powerful House of Wittelsbach in Bavaria, all remained staunchly Catholic. For them, too, Catholicism continued to be credible and a more plausible fit with their own ambitions than the Lutheran alternative. Doubtless helpful were side payments offered by the Church. In the 1523 bull, De Judicibus Cleri, Adrian VI, the new Pope (r. 1522-23), granted the Bavarian dukes the right to try heretics over the heads of the Church’s own bishops. Adrian also agreed to grant the Wittelsbachs one-fifth of Church revenues in Bavaria, and in the Habsburg hereditary lands he granted one-third of Church revenues to the court of Archduke Ferdinand.55
Whatever the motives behind the princes’ decisions, by the middle of the 1520s two mutually negating plans for ordering public life had emerged in Central Europe. The two held in common the medieval insistence that societal cohesion required religious homogeneity. But Lutheranism held that the religion that bound society must be one without any mediation between the believer and God; clergy must have no special spiritual or legal privileges, and secular authorities must be supreme. Catholicism held to the older view, now sharpened by the controversy: Christ established the Church—meaning, preeminently, the hierarchical clergy—as mediator and hence its clergy do have special privileges and are unaccountable to secular rulers. The Reformation was to stimulate still more doctrinal systems and hence political regimes. Zwinglianism had developed in Switzerland, and was chiefly confined to that country; its political consequences were similar to those of Lutheranism. Anabaptism was to develop from the smoldering remains of the Peasants’ War and was to spread eastward, but after the 1530s took on a political quietism that provoked little more international political turmoil. The most politically consequential Reformation movement was to be Calvinism (discussed below), which implied a regime more egalitarian than that of Lutheranism.
Over the next two centuries in Latin Christendom, Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism each had firm adherents in a number of states at once. But the salience of each varied over time and space. As seen in the following sections, Protestant and Catholic TINs, penetrating and penetrated by governments, perpetually agitated for regime change. In many times and places these TINs were ineffectual, stymied by rulers more concerned with other matters. But at other times TINs were highly effective at polarizing elites across societies and provoking rulers into imposing one regime or another on other states. As argued in chapter 2, those other times generally followed great-power wars and domestic regime crises somewhere in the region.
With the rapid multiplication of Lutheran regimes in the 1520s, the transnational conditions were in place for forcible regime promotions, Catholic versus Lutheran. For two decades, however, only a few isolated promotions took place. Instead, Catholic and Lutheran rulers responded to transnational ideological polarization by increasing suppression of the others’ teaching within their own realms and forming defensive alliances to deter foreign intervention. The Catholic League of Dessau of 1525 was answered by the Lutheran League of Torgau in 1526.56 The Torgau League, founded by Philip of Hesse and John, Elector of Saxony (r. 1525-32), grew in classic spiral-model fashion as the Catholic princes, including the Emperor Charles, appeared more menacing to the Lutherans.57
A second condition that contributed to the absence of short waves of forcible regime promotion during these decades was the continuing hegemony in Germany of Charles V and his Habsburg dynasty. The Holy Roman Empire, as Voltaire would later say, was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire; by the sixteenth century, power had devolved significantly to the estates; seven princes elected the Emperor.58 Yet, Charles commanded the most troops and either he or his brother Ferdinand presided at the Imperial Diets. Lutherans hoped and Catholics feared that Charles would convert to Lutheranism. And, at various times during these years, Charles needed help from his Lutheran vassals in combating external threats. In May 1526, a diplomatic revolution had taken place as Francis I of France, the Pope, the Duke of Milan, and the cities of Florence and Venice formed the Holy League of Cognac against the Habsburgs. It was his need for Lutheran help that prodded Charles to support the Speyer resolution of that summer, allowing the Lutherans to set up new regimes in their lands.59 In return, the Lutherans joined the German Catholics in warring against the Cognac League.60
Still, the one instance of forcible regime promotion in the 1520s illustrates how high ideological tensions were running. In 1528, Otto von Pack, a bankrupt ex-adviser to the Catholic George of Saxony, forged papers documenting that the Habsburgs and other Catholic princes were preparing to launch an anti-Lutheran crusade. Philip of Hesse believed the forgery, had it printed and disseminated, and attacked the neighboring Catholic estates of Mainz and Würzburg. Sensing a hoax, Catholics exposed the papers as forgeries, and in 1529 Philip withdrew his troops, leaving the cities to remain Catholic.61
Philip’s impetuosity further intensified ideological polarization in the Empire, and the Catholic princes banded together more tightly at the
1529 Diet of Speyer, voting to rescind the previous cujus regio agreement of 1526. Now Lutheranism was again officially illegal throughout the Empire.62 The Lutheran rulers responded with an official Protestation (from whence the term “Protestant”) and, after another rebuffing at the 1530 Diet of Augsburg, a new, more robust alliance.63 On February 21, 1531, six Protestant princes—John of Saxony, Philip of Hesse, Ernest of Lüneburg, Wolfgang of Anhalt, Gebhard and Albert of Mansfeld, and Joachim of Brandenburg—and ten Lutheran cities entered the League of Schmalkalden.64
The 1530s saw more rulers break with the Catholic Church. In 1534, Henry VIII broke with the Pope and established himself as head of the Church of England. Closer to the empire, Denmark became officially Lutheran in 1536 with the accession of King Christian III. Still, in this decade the spread of Lutheranism and transnational polarization were to continue to provoke little forcible regime promotion. The most significant case came in 1534 when Philip of Hesse invaded the Catholic Duchy of Württemberg and restored the Lutheran Duke Ulrich. This promotion of Lutheranism stands out for being chiefly the work of a Catholic prince, Francis I of France. Desiring to pluck a strategically important land from Habsburg influence, Francis exploited transnational ideological polarization by paying Philip to promote Lutheranism in Württemberg by restoring Ulrich. It is noteworthy that although Lutheranism had won many converts in France by this time, Francis, who saw himself as a humanist, had thus far accommodated rather than persecuted the new faith. Once Ulrich was restored, Württemberg, now Lutheran, joined the Schmalkaldic League, thereby weakening Charles and the Habsburgs. (Later in 1534, Lutheran riots in Paris caused Francis to switch from accommodation to opposition; his relations with the German Lutherans suffered accordingly.)65
A second forcible regime promotion took place the following year in the city of Münster. At this point Anabaptism, which had arisen in the Peasants’ War of 1524-25, continued to simmer and pose a transnational threat to Catholic and Lutheran rulers alike. In February 1534, Anabaptists had taken over the city and set up a sort of proto-communist utopia, complete with the abolition of family and property. In June 1535, Catholic and Protestant rulers—from Cologne, Cleves, Saxony, and Hesse—invaded together, brutally suppressed the Anabaptist leaders, and restored Catholic rule.66
After this series of isolated forcible regime promotions, a wave of promotions finally broke in the 1540s as Lutheran growth and assertiveness at last pushed the Emperor into attempting a rollback. The first promotion came in northwestern Germany in 1542, when the arch-Catholic Duke Henry of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel threatened the Lutheran cities of Brunswick and Goslar. Knowing that the Emperor was angry with Henry for other reasons and needed Lutheran help against the Turks, Philip of Hesse and John Frederick, now Elector of Saxony (r. 1532—47) invaded Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and chased Henry out. The duchy became officially Lutheran.
The Emperor had allowed this imposition of Lutheranism, but did not like the consequences. Feeling surrounded by an alliance of the French and the ever-growing German Lutherans, he decided to divide his enemies and try to destroy Lutheranism. Charles had already achieved a secret agreement with Philip of Hesse. Philip had committed bigamy and sought the Emperor’s clemency; Charles granted it in return for Philip’s pledge to “stand by him” in the event of a religious war.67 Charles’s first move was in Cleves-Jülich, a powerful duchy in northwest Germany. In the spring of 1543, Duke William publicized his conversion to Lutheranism and announced his intention to build a Protestant regime in Cleves-Jülich and join the Schmalkaldic League. But Philip of Hesse would not back William, and Charles’s forces invaded in August. The next month William surrendered and agreed to restore Catholicism, and with it Habsburg hegemony, in the duchy.68
In 1544, Charles surmounted another barrier to his planned rollback of Lutheranism by signing the Treaty of Crépy with Francis of France, in which the latter agreed to no more alliances with the German Lutherans. (Francis’s relations with the Lutherans had already been sour for a decade, following his own massacre of French Lutherans in October 1534.)69
The trigger came in January 1546: Frederick, the Elector Palatine, became a Lutheran and sought membership in the Schmalkaldic League. Under Philip’s influence, the League turned him down, but Philip himself warned his fellow Lutherans to prepare for war.70 In the spring the Imperial Diet at Regensburg was a failure, and Charles decided for war. He offered side payments to several Lutheran princes if they would remain neutral. The most consequential of these was Philip’s son-in-law, the young Duke Maurice of Saxony (r. 1541-53). Evidently Lutheranism was so entrenched in his realm by this time that Maurice felt secure from any possibility of a Catholic rollback.71
In June the war began as Charles brought in Spanish, Italian, and Dutch troops. Charles justified the war to his son Philip (later to be Philip II of Spain): “[T]hough my goal and intention has been and still is, as you know, to make war for the sake of religion, it is considered politic to allege that the war is for the purpose of punishing rebellious subjects, especially the landgrave of Hesse and the elector of Saxony and others of similar standing. The imperial cities have been given this justification for the war.”72 With Philip fighting alongside his fellow Lutherans, the Schmalkaldic League’s forces appeared stronger on paper. But the Emperor’s forces won several decisive victories, with the crowning victory coming at Mühlberg in April 1547. Francis of France refused to intervene owing to his own continuing difficulties with French Protestants.73 In the fall Charles laid down the law at the Diet of Augsburg, parading the imprisoned Lutheran rulers. The Augsburg Interim of May 1548 contained the Emperor’s terms. The Lutherans must re-establish the Catholic Church in their realms, including most of the doctrines and practices of the old faith. Lutherans could petition the Pope for a few privileges such as married clergy, and the question of restoring Church properties was deferred. The Interim, however, was interpreted by most Lutherans as effectively turning back the Reformation, and it was only an “interim”: they feared that the eventual general Church council would finish them off.74 The Schmalkaldic War was the crest of the first short wave of forcible regime promotion.
The wave continued as a number of Lutheran princes, including the now sobered Maurice of Saxony, began to plan war to coerce Charles into overturning the Augsburg Interim. In January 1551 these allied with Henry II (r. 1547-59), who had succeeded Francis as King of France. By April 1552, the French-German alliance had defeated the Emperor’s forces. After a second general war over religious ideology, the rulers of the empire called a halt. Charles abdicated, and his successor Ferdinand agreed to the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555), which once again codified the cujus regio, ejus religio norm: Lutherans could do as they wished within their realms.75 The Augsburg Peace was to hold remarkably well within the empire among Lutherans and Catholics. It did not, however, end the broad clash of ideas in Europe. Indeed, the worst was yet to come. An offshoot of Lutheranism originating in France was to become its own bona fide anti-Catholic movement and to spread within and without the empire, polarizing societies and princes and triggering, over the ensuing decades, several waves of forcible regime promotion.
Already in the 1530s a new Protestant movement had begun to emerge that was to be the most politically potent and hence helped set in motion several short waves of forcible regime promotion. John Calvin (1509-64), a French humanist and lawyer impressed with Luther’s theological insights, pushed them, so he believed, to their logical conclusions. Where Luther was a rigorous and impetuous polemicist, Calvin was a comprehensive systematizer of doctrine. He stressed both that God alone elected who would be saved—in this he was like Luther—and that the elect could be distinguished from the reprobate by the righteous lives they led. Even more than Luther (but less than Zwingli), Calvin removed the physical presence of Christ from Holy Communion, hence further leveling the distinction between clergy and laity.76 There followed an emphasis on ethical action, not simply inner faith, by all Christians. Where Lutherans had been pessimistic about the potential to have a just society on earth, and hence demanded little of their secular rulers except that they enable gospel preaching to flourish, Calvinists were driven to renew and purify society.77
Beginning in 1536 Calvin set up his model polity in Geneva, a city in the Swiss Confederation. His most radical reforms were within the structure of the Church. Congregations elected their officers, and synod (local church council) delegates elected one another. Congregations held regular meetings where members could voice concerns. As John Witte writes, “Implicit in this democratic process was a willingness to entertain changes in doctrine, liturgy, and polity, to accommodate new visions and insights, to remedy clerical missteps and abuses, to spurn ideas and institutions whose utility and veracity were no longer tenable.” Calvin evidently did not intend to be a revolutionary in the secular realm, and indeed he insisted that Church and state had separate functions: the Church would teach and enforce spiritual norms, while the state would do the same with civil norms. But the separation was by no means complete. Secular officials’ ultimate purpose was to help sustain a Christian commonwealth; they worked hand-in-glove with Church authorities. Writes Witte: “Calvin hinted that a similar combination of rule of law, democratic process, and individual liberty might serve the state equally well, though he did not work a detailed political theory.” His followers Theodore Beza (1519-1605) and Johannes Althusius (1557-1638) were to formulate Calvinist political theories in subsequent generations in France and the Netherlands, respectively.78
In the 1550s, as Geneva flourished under Calvin’s leadership, and his magisterial Institutes of the Christian Religion was translated, printed, and disseminated, Calvinism—often simply called Reformed Christianity—began to spread rapidly. Part of the reason for Calvinism’s remarkable diffusion was the accommodation that Lutheran rulers had made with Catholicism—still suffering from a legitimacy crisis—in the 1555 Augsburg Peace. Augsburg did not cover Calvinism.79 Lutherans came to view Calvinists as heretics, typically declaring that they would “rather turn popish than Calvinist.”80 But its illegality in the empire lent Calvinism appeal with many across Western Europe. In the Low Countries, where Charles V had brutally suppressed Lutheranism in preceding decades, leading families began adopting Calvinism from 1559.81 In France, by the 1560s as many as half of the aristocracy were Calvinist or Huguenot.82 In England, the arrival of a number of leading Calvinist divines from the Continent—refugees from Catholic persecution—influenced the leaders of the English Church; for their efforts to “purify” the English Church of Catholic influence, the Calvinists were called Puritans.83 In Scotland, the movement had a sufficient following among the nobility that a Calvinist revolution broke out in 1558-59. Scottish Calvinism, called Presbyterianism for its model of church governance, developed an identity as the church (kirk) that most closely approached perfection.84 In Germany itself Calvinism began to enjoy success when it was adopted by the Elector Frederick III (r. 1559-76) of the Rhine Palatinate; his capital of Heidelberg became a major European center of the Reformed faith.85 Calvinism also spread eastward into Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, and Transylvania.86 Lutheran regimes remained in place in Scandinavia and much of Germany, but by the late 1550s it was Calvinism, with its transnational momentum, that represented the more dire threat to Catholicism.
Calvinism’s rapid diffusion was due also to its coherence and the deliberate strategy of the Reformers in Geneva. Calvin himself urged exiles to return to their homelands to influence developments there.87 Demonstration effects from Geneva were powerful; a large number of pastors, theologians, and nobles visited the city in the 1550s and 1560s.88 Calvinists drew encouragement from one another’s struggles in other areas. As one Scottish Presbyterian wrote after hearing from a Huguenot, “it is not small comfort brother … to brethren of one nation to understand the state of the brethren in other nations.” Calvinism, then, was a highly (although not perfectly) cohesive movement “marked,” writes Menna Prestwich, “by a sense of international solidarity.” When the faithful in one land suffered persecution, their brethren in other lands would offer generous financial support and take in refugees.89 London in particular became a haven for exiled Calvinists during the rule of Elizabeth I.90 Indeed, the success of the Huguenots in this period had palpable effects in the Spanish-ruled Netherlands. Andrew Pettegree’s account bears quoting at length:
Most of all the apparently providential success of the French churches gave evangelicals in the Netherlands courage: courage to show the same defiance to official persecution that had brought such dividends in the French kingdom. One of the most remarkable features of Calvinism in these years was its irrepressible self-confidence, often in defiance of any realistic expectations of success. And why not? In this period of almost unbelievable progress for Calvinism in northern Europe, when a tiny group of enthusiasts had converted Scotland to a Calvinist nation, and when God had obligingly carried off persecuting monarchs in both France [Henry II] and England [Mary I], why should Netherlandish Calvinists not hope for a similar providential deliverance? In the years following the outbreak of fighting in France, Dutch Calvinists therefore began to imitate the provocative and confrontational behaviour that had brought French evangelicals such success. For the first time Dutch Calvinists shrugged off the secrecy which had previously clothed their activities, and staged defiant open services; sometimes, to make the provocation more extreme, they preached in the churchyards of Catholic churches.91
All in all, as Garrett Mattingly writes, Calvinist cells were linked across political boundaries and “all of them, everywhere, vibrated to any impulse that stirred their connecting web.”92
In contrast to Lutheranism, however, Calvinism appealed to few monarchs. It was chiefly a religion of the nobility and commoners; monarchs tended to suspect that its ecclesiastical structures led to republicanism. Indeed, Calvinism’s implicit anti-monarchism helped make it so politically explosive. Frederick III of the Rhine Palatinate became an international champion, and Henry Navarre, vying for the French throne, did so for a time. Elizabeth of England (r. 1558-1603) was a Protestant wary of her own Calvinist (Puritan) subjects. Still, during times of high transnational religious polarization, Elizabeth supported foreign Calvinists, sometimes with troops and ships. But more typically, Calvinism would take over a country via revolution, as in Scotland, the Netherlands, and Bohemia. And Catholic and Lutheran monarchs could find Calvinism terrifying, both because Calvinists sometimes went on iconoclastic rampages and because they were highly disciplined. Their branches were coordinated and represented an alternative way to organize society, one less hierarchical and more efficient than that of the old regime. Philip Gorski sees in Calvinism’s discipline the origins of the modern state.93
Map 4.1 Religion in Europe, c. 1560
During these same decades, the Catholic Church itself began to regroup and go on the offensive through various means in the so-called Counter-Reformation. In the Council of Trent (1545-63) the Church clarified and reasserted certain doctrines and practices, attempted to purge itself of various corruptions, and concentrated more power in the Papacy.94 Most important, the Papacy had organized a transnational network of its own, the disciplined Society of Jesus, in 1534. Jesuit missionaries spread throughout Europe (as well as the Americas and Asia), laboring to turn back the Protestant tide propeled by Lutheran and Calvinist divines. To regain influence in England, the Roman Church established an English seminary at Douai, Flanders, that produced an English translation of the Bible to rival the Protestant versions circulating in England.95 Catholic revivals occurred in Hungary and Poland. Catholic princes regained their footing by claiming some victories against domestic Protestant rebels and suppressing Protestant practices.96
In the second half of the sixteenth century, then, the religio-political map of Western Europe was bewilderingly heterogeneous.
At the beginning of this chapter I described how the restoration of Protestantism in England in 1559 led to a Calvinist uprising in Scotland, which in turn led to a French promotion of Catholicism, and an English counter-promotion of Calvinism, in that country in 1560. The story does not end there. French and English actions in Scotland fed back into transnational society, augmenting ideological polarization; Calvinists were emboldened in other countries and began to think of Elizabeth as their international champion.97 The country of the most immediate consequence was France itself. Since 1555, France had been undergoing what Menna Prestwich calls “an explosion of Calvinist conversions.” In May 1558, a minister in the Paris Huguenot church wrote to Calvin that “the fire is lit in all parts of the kingdom and all the water in the sea will not suffice to extinguish it.” The Franco-Spanish compact to renew persecution only strengthened the movement. The Edict of Écouen of June 2, 1559, outlawed Protestantism in France; in reaction, the scattered Huguenot congregations around the country united into a single Reformed Church of France, with a single set of doctrines and polity. Historians estimate that by 1559 half of the French nobility was Huguenot; in 1560 there were 1,750 Huguenot churches and approximately 2 million believers, making up about 10 percent of France’s population. Calvinism was especially strong in the Midi, the southern coast of France, which had a history of resistance to control by Paris.98 Huguenots proved adept at organization and, under the patronage of rural lords, began to try to take over local parishes with force.99
Divisions among French Catholics helped the Huguenots. Catholics were divided between supporters of the ruling Valois and supporters of their challengers, the House of Guise. The Duke of Guise, the Cardinal of Lorraine, and other Catholic militants were bent on uniting France by ridding it of Protestantism, while the Valois were more willing to accommodate the Protestants in exchange for loyalty to their dynasty. Charles IX (r. 1560-74) was a Valois who effectively shared power with his formidable mother Catherine de Médici; their moderation toward the Huguenots earned them the label politiques. The politiques tolerated Protestantism so as to enlist the Huguenots against their rivals, the Guises.
In the 1560s, the politiques evidently did not envisage a permanent accommodation of the Huguenots. But their relative toleration of Protestants within France matched their relatively strong ties with England’s Elizabeth and other foreign Protestants. By the same token, the Guises had close ties to Philip II of Spain, the Pope, and other foreign Catholics. In January 1561, Elizabeth explicitly declared England Christendom’s Protestant champion. She sent an envoy to France to urge Catherine to make that country into a Protestant realm, inasmuch as “true Anglo-French friendship could only flourish if both realms adopted the same religion.”100 The advice was probably disingenuous and Catherine did not follow it, but she did sponsor an ecumenical conference at Poissy, kept the leading Reformed theologian Theodore Beza at court, and issued the Edict of Saint-Germain in January 1562 increasing the Huguenots’ freedom to practice their religion.101
In March, the Guises reacted to Catherine’s tolerant moves by massacring a group of unarmed worshiping Huguenots at Vassy. A Huguenot uprising followed and the decades-long French Wars of Religion began. Huguenot leaders, including Admiral Gaspard de Coligny and Louis, Prince of Condé, proved redoubtable in the armed struggle. Condé issued a manifesto in April and the Huguenot rebellion enjoyed wide demonstration effects across Europe; Protestant sympathy was high, and 7,000 German troops came to France to join Condé.102 In London, Elizabeth’s Privy Council pressed her to act as she had in Scotland two years earlier. As R. B. Wernham writes, the cautious Cecil “felt that Condé [the Huguenot leader] was fighting England’s battle as much as the [Scottish] Lords of the Congregation had been in 1560.” Robert Dudley and Nicholas Throckmorton, Elizabeth’s most militant Protestant advisers, “were strenuously urging war. Might not the Huguenots be built up into an effective counterpoise to the Guises in France just as the Scots Protestants had been built up in Scotland?”103
Philip of Spain, meanwhile, could no longer be complacent about Protestantism: Calvinism was now spreading to the Netherlands and threatening the legitimacy of his rule there. Already in January 1561 Philip had urged the French to resume persecution of the Huguenots.104 That same year he initiated in the Netherlands an Inquisition, a tool that had already worked well in Spain itself.105 Philip paid subsidies to the Guises in France and warned Elizabeth not to help the Huguenots.106
But Elizabeth defied Philip and followed the advice of her Protestant Left councilors, sending 6,000 troops to France and lending Condé 100,000 crowns to help the Huguenots defeat the Guises. The English force arrived in October 1562. Unlike that in Scotland two years earlier, this English expedition to promote Calvinism in France went sour. The balance of power within France was held by Catherine and the politiques, who suspected that Elizabeth’s real goal was to regain the port of Calais, which England had lost in the 1559 Treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis. Eventually Catherine and the Huguenots struck a bargain: she would tolerate them and they would help her drive the English from French shores. In July the English departed Le Havre, and by the Treaty of Troyes of April 1564 Elizabeth abandoned all claims to Calais.107
The Huguenot rebellion and English expedition, in turn, had demonstration effects in the Netherlands.108 As H. G. Koenigsberger writes, “By 1565 the [Spanish] court at Brussels, undoubtedly with events in France before their eyes, began to fear open rebellion or, at least, the seizure of some important towns by the Protestants.”109 In England, the Protestant Left again urged Elizabeth to intervene on behalf of the Dutch Calvinist rebels. Elizabeth, chastened by the failure of the 1562 French expedition and fearful of pushing Philip into invading England from the Netherlands, rejected the advice.110 Thus, Elizabeth was deterred from deepening the cycle of forcible regime promotion she had helped begin in 1560 in Scotland.
In September 1566, Dutch Calvinists rioted in several places, sacking 400 Catholic churches in west Flanders alone.111 Early the following year Philip sent an army of 12,000 under the Duke of Alva to quell the Dutch revolt.112 Alva’s troops had to march hundreds of miles northward on the “Spanish Road,” creating fear in the regions they skirted among Calvinists and politiques alike. The Huguenots feared a Habsburg-Valois joint action and in August entered a pact with the militantly Calvinist Frederick, Elector Palatinate. Frederick sent 9,500 troops to France to help them, under the command of his son Johann Casimir. The German troops arrived in early 1568.113 They became irrelevant in August 1570 with the Peace of Saint-Germain, which allowed the Huguenots four secure cities for two years, and freedom of worship everywhere in France except Paris.114 Catherine, Charles, and the politiques had stabilized France. Indeed, Charles drew closer to Calvinists in France, England, and the Netherlands, inviting the Huguenot Admiral Coligny to court and arranging his own sister’s marriage to Henry Navarre, another Huguenot military leader who was a potential contender for the French throne. In April 1572, Charles entered the Treaty of Blois with Elizabeth of England, under which “if either party were assailed for the cause of religion or under any other privileges and advantages for the pretext, the other was bound to render assistance.”115
Religious strife was relieved in France, but the transnational contest endured. The main theater was now the Netherlands. Some Dutch Calvinist leaders, including Louis of Nassau, had fled to French Huguenot country upon the arrival of Alva in 1567. In April 1572 the Dutch “Sea Beggars,” Calvinist-led privateers, took the port of Brill, and William of Orange followed up by declaring war on Spain. Now Louis of Nassau took a Huguenot army into the Netherlands. Under the influence of Coligny, France’s Charles allowed another Huguenot army to follow along. English and Scottish volunteers also fought with the Huguenots. The Calvinists took the cities of Valenciennes and Mons.116
The French (Huguenot) military expedition to help the Dutch Calvinists fed back into France and helped provoke the next shock, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of August 1572. Catherine, concerned that her son King Charles had fallen too deeply under Coligny’s influence, ordered the Huguenot admiral assassinated. The assassination attempt set off a chain of events that led to several weeks of slaughter in which an estimated 8,000 Huguenots were killed in many parts of France.117 St. Bartholomew’s Day evoked predictable reactions all over Europe. Catholic Europe rejoiced, thinking at first that the slaughter was done out of righteous zeal; thanksgiving masses were said in Rome and Madrid; Philip of Spain danced a jig and Pope Gregory sent a congratulatory note to Charles.118 Protestant Europe was horrified and fearful. Relations with England immediately froze, as Elizabeth and most English assumed, in Wallace MacCaffrey’s words, “that the massacre was premeditated, a new chapter in the unfolding conspiracy of the Catholic world—Pope, Guises, Spain—aimed at the extermination of the reformed religions throughout Europe.”119 Similar fears gripped Lutherans in Germany and Calvinists in Switzerland.120 At first it seemed the diplomatic consequences would be dire. In England the Protestant Left advised their Queen to break relations with France and to behead Mary Stewart, the imprisoned Catholic pretender.121 Coligny had been England’s primary conduit of influence over the French court; now many English feared that nothing restrained France from re-Catholicizing Scotland and using force to place Mary Stewart on the English throne.122
But the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre did not trigger more forcible regime promotion. European Protestants still regarded Philip of Spain as their chief threat, and the French politiques signaled them in various ways that they remained his enemy as well. They renewed a proposal that Elizabeth marry Henry, the Duke of Anjou, another of Catherine’s sons and next in line to the French throne.123 Within France, they initiated new negotiations with the Huguenots, and in July 1573 Charles granted them toleration in certain areas.124 They began to join forces against the Guises again.125 In December Charles renewed negotiations with Louis of Nassau on cooperation against Spain.126
The Netherlands stabilized domestically after 1576. Philip’s attempts to end the Dutch revolt bankrupted Spain; unpaid Spanish troops pillaged the Netherlands, driving Catholic provinces to join the Calvinists in the Pacification of Ghent, which declared a united Netherlands loyal to the Spanish Crown but free of Spanish troops. With France and the Netherlands relatively stable, the short wave of forcible regime promotion decayed.
The lull was short-lived, however. In 1574, Charles IX died and was succeeded by Henry III. Henry remained childless throughout his reign, which elevated the importance of the Dauphin or immediate heir to the throne. In 1584 the Dauphin, Francis, Duke of Alençon, died. Now the next in line to the French throne was Henry Navarre, the Huguenot champion. Navarre’s elevation significantly raised the prospects of Protestantism not only in France but also in the Netherlands and throughout Europe.127
In country after country Protestants were buoyant and Catholics alarmed at the news from France. Rulers and aspiring rulers began to polarize further along ideological lines. In Spain, one of Philip’s ministers wrote him: “Your Majesty is obliged to make sure that no heretic succeeds [to the French throne], both because you have a duty always to defend and protect the Catholics and because any heretic must necessarily be an enemy of Your Majesty.”128 Philip agreed and in January 1585 entered the Treaty of Joinville with the Guises. The Spanish King agreed to provide 50,000 escudos monthly “for the contracting French princes, for the period they need to maintain their armies for the restoration of the Catholic religion in France, or to oppose the designs of those Frenchmen in favor of the heretics and sectaries of the Low Countries.” In return, the Guises agreed to work to restore to Spain certain French-occupied cities, to cease all French aid to Dutch rebels, and to tie French Catholicism more closely to the papacy.129 For alarmed Protestants, the Joinville treaty seemed to presage an international Catholic crusade that threatened their internal and external security.
That impression became stronger with word in late June that King Henry III, once a politique with whom the Protestants could do business, had switched sides by aligning with the Holy League. Now at last Catholics in France were unified with Philip against transnational Protestantism; northwest Europe approached complete ideological polarization. In England, Elizabeth’s moderate advisers joined her Protestant Left to recommend that she lead an international Protestant alliance to intervene with force in France and the Netherlands. The Queen’s most trusted adviser, William Cecil, now Lord Burghley, had for many years been advising her not to be too aggressive; Philip, he had counseled, was probably not crusading for Catholicism, but simply trying to suppress the Dutch revolt, as any monarch in his position would do.130 But the Joinville treaty changed Burghley’s mind.131 His method of analyzing the Spanish threat is telling. His notes about Philip are divided into two columns, Voluntas (will) and Potestas (power). Under Potestas he listed Philip’s acquisition of Portugal and its empire in 1581 and his treaties with the French and Turkish monarchs. Under Voluntas, Burghley listed a number of rebellions and plots against Elizabeth that had implicated Spain. One of these was an expedition in 1578 of Papal troops from Spain to Ireland that sought to bring about a Catholic uprising there. Burghley convinced the Queen that Philip was finally preparing to launch a Catholic crusade against England, and that she should forestall this by sending an expedition to the Netherlands to tie him down.132
Thus, in August 1585 Elizabeth and the Dutch Calvinists signed the Treaty of Nonsuch, declaring their mutual efforts to end Spanish tyranny in the Netherlands.133 Elizabeth also urged Henry Navarre to go on the offensive against Spain, and sought a new alliance with Scotland.134 In January 1586 the Earl of Leicester, a leader of England’s Protestant Left, arrived in the Netherlands with 6,400 infantry and 1,000 cavalry. The Leicester Expedition met with some early successes against the Spanish but foundered against conflicting interests with the Dutch; in November 1586, the Queen recalled Leicester to England. Still, the net effect of the Leicester Expedition was to sustain ideological polarization in northwest Europe. Spanish agents began to conspire again with Mary Stewart to overthrow Elizabeth. Elizabeth had already imprisoned Mary for previous plots with English and foreign Catholics. In February 1587, Elizabeth finally had Mary beheaded.135 That summer German troops from the Palatinate, under the Calvinist Johann Casimir, invaded eastern France to fight Holy League forces.136
Burghley and Elizabeth were correct that Philip of Spain had in mind invading England to restore Catholicism there. They were wrong in thinking that they could tie Philip down in the Netherlands, however. The final provocation for Philip was a long privateering expedition by Sir Francis Drake, climaxing in a raid on Spain itself in August 1587.137 In May 1588, Spain’s Invincible Armada sailed north, determined to oust Elizabeth, place a Catholic on the English throne, and thereby “bring the Dutch to their knees.”138 All of Europe watched the Armada, understanding that the fight was not simply between England and Spain or the power of the Habsburgs: the future of the Catholic-Protestant struggle was implicated not only in England but also in the Netherlands and France. As a Huguenot leader said to Walsingham, “In saving yourselves you will save the rest of us.”139
The storied English victory over the Armada did indeed help Protestantism in these countries, and also signaled that Spanish naval might was less formidable than it appeared. In France Henry III defected from the Holy League, realigned with Henry Navarre, and ordered the assassination of the Duke of Guise and his brother, the Cardinal of Guise.140 But Catholic-Protestant polarization continued apace in northwest Europe, and hence so did the incentives for rulers of both ideologies to carry out still more forcible regime promotions. On August 1, 1589, a fanatical Dominican friar assassinated Henry III, making Henry Navarre, the Huguenots’ military leader, King Henry IV. The horrified Guises, who controlled half of France’s territory, including Paris, refused to accept Navarre’s kingship and fought on.141
The accession of Henry IV provoked an escalation of foreign intervention in France. Philip instructed the Duke of Parma, currently fighting the Calvinists in the Netherlands, to prepare to invade France: “My principal aim [there] is to secure the well-being of the Faith, and to see that in France Catholicism survives and heresy is excluded…. If, in order to ensure this exclusion and to aid the Catholics so that they prevail, you see that it is necessary for my troops to enter France openly [then you must lead them in].”142 On the Protestant side, Elizabeth sent 4,000 troops to France under Lord Willoughby in September; these helped Henry’s troops move on Paris in October and remained in northern France for three years.143 In February 1590, Protestant forces blockaded Paris, creating an immediate crisis for the Holy League. In March, Philip responded by ordering Parma to invade France with 20,000 men to aid the Duke of Mayenne, now champion of the Guises. In April another 3,000 Spanish troops invaded Brittany. Philip’s justification to a wealthy Spanish donor of this expensive promotion reveals the intimacy between Catholic ideology and Habsburg power:
Everybody knows about the great, continuous and unavoidable expenses that I have incurred for many years past to defend our holy Catholic faith and to conserve my kingdoms and lordships, and how they have grown immensely through the war with England and the developments in France; but I have not been able to avoid them, both because I have such a specific obligation to God and the world to act, and also because if the heretics were to prevail (which I hope God will not allow) it might open the door to worse damage and dangers, and to war at home.
Now unable to use Parma’s army to suppress the Dutch Calvinists, Philip offered them a degree of toleration in exchange for loyalty; but they refused and went on the offensive.144
Foreign intervention escalated still more when the most plausible Catholic pretender to the French throne, the aged Cardinal of Bourbon (who claimed to be Charles X), died in May. Now Philip considered naming himself King of France, or else his daughter Isabella Clara Eugenia as Queen, which would violate the Salic Law prohibiting a woman from ruling France. From the militantly Calvinist Palatinate Christian of Anhalt marched 6,000 cavalry and 9,000 infantry to France in August.145 Elizabeth helped fund the German expedition and was reluctant to spend still more resources to help Henry, but in December, under urging from her close adviser Burghley, she moved one-third of her own troops in the Netherlands to Brittany. In May 1591 she sent 2,400 more troops to join them. At this point Elizabeth’s chief fear was that Henry IV would re-convert to Catholicism and make peace with Spain, thereby allowing Philip to turn his attention back to invading England. In late 1592, a Spanish plot to invade England via Scotland—which still had some Catholic nobles—was exposed, and Elizabeth responded by sending another 2,000 men to Normandy.
The spiral of regime promotion and counter-promotion that had begun in 1584 was stopped only with the end of the French civil war in 1593 and de facto stability in the Netherlands. In France, Henry IV did reconvert to Catholicism in order to gain Paris without a fight. The Holy League dissolved. Elizabeth and other foreign Protestants who had spent blood and treasure aiding him were furious, and the Spanish continued to try to topple or assassinate Henry. But France stabilized as a Catholic country and in 1598 Henry issued the Edict of Nantes, ordering the toleration of Huguenots. Meanwhile, Philip of Spain had devoted so much attention to France that the Dutch Calvinists consolidated their power and achieved virtual independence in the northern Netherlands. The need for forcible regime promotion receded. But the long transnational ideological struggle continued to simmer, and the center of action was soon to shift back to Central Europe with a number of discrete promotions.
The Peace of Augsburg of 1555, described above, was remarkably effective in halting regime promotion in Germany. With each prince and city council trusting that no one would try to change its estate’s religion, forcible regime promotion and the threat of general Imperial war receded. Emperors Ferdinand I (r. 1556-64), Maximilian II (r. 1564-76), and Rudolf II (r. 1576-1612), Catholics all, were as good as their word.146 The chief flaws of the Augsburg peace were its ambiguity over rulers who converted from one religion to another, and its omission of Calvinism.147 These two problems combined owing to the gains Calvinism made in the Empire after the 1550s. Calvinist refugees from the Netherlands brought their religion with them and triggered two forcible regime promotions in northwest Germany in the early 1580s. In 1580, Calvinists in the city of Aachen demanded freedom of worship. The Catholic City Council refused, and the Calvinists took over the city the following year. From the Netherlands, Spanish troops invaded to try to restore Catholic control. The Diet of Augsburg in 1582 resolved nothing and the problems in Aachen dragged on for decades.148 In December of that year in nearby Cologne, the new Archbishop, Gebhard Truchsess, announced his conversion to Lutheranism and soon after began to change the estate’s regime. Condemned by Catholics, Truchsess sought outside Protestant support and received it from the stronghold of German Calvinism, Louis, the Elector Palatinate. But owing to Truchsess’s friendliness toward Calvinism, Germany’s Lutheran princes refused to back him. Bavarian and Spanish forces defeated him and he fled.149
Notwithstanding the setback in Cologne, Calvinism continued to spread in northwestern Germany, propelled to an extent by the still-militant leaders of the neighboring Palatinate. In 1598, Emperor Rudolf II ordered Spanish troops into the Rhineland to suppress Calvinism around Aachen. The Calvinists’ militancy began to spread back to their fellow Protestants, the Lutherans. Protestants began to boycott the Imperial Chamber, and in 1607, in the southern city of Donauwörth, Lutherans attempted to prevent a Catholic procession. With Rudolf’s blessing, Bavarian troops invaded and overturned the Lutheran government, reestablishing a Catholic regime.150
The following year, Protestants walked out of the Diet of Regensburg. At a conference in Anhausen in May 1609, leading Protestant princes and cities, led by the Calvinist Frederick IV, now the Elector Palatinate, formed a new Protestant Union. A Catholic League quickly formed in response, headed by Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. A succession crisis between Catholics and Protestants in Cleves-Jülich drew a Habsburg invasion in the summer of 1609; the Protestant Union answered with a counter-invasion in March 1610; in August, English, Dutch, and French troops joined the Protestants.151 (In May a Catholic assassinated Henry IV of France for being insufficiently zealous for the faith, further raising Protestant fears.)152 In 1612, the Protestant Union entered a defensive alliance with James I of England.153 Again in 1613 Spanish (Catholic) troops invaded Cleves-Jülich and a Dutch Calvinist force counter-invaded. The religious alliances were intended to deter each side from widening the war, and indeed general war was averted by the Treaty of Xanten (November 1614), mediated by the English and French.154
In 1616, Huguenots rebelled against Louis XIII, now King of France. Helping Louis suppress the rebellion were Dutch troops under Captain-General Jan van Oldenbarneveldt. This odd Dutch intervention to help a Catholic monarch suppress a Calvinist uprising was a product of a new division within the Netherlands: Oldenbarneveldt was an Arminian, part of a Protestant movement that rejected orthodox Calvinism’s strong doctrine of predestination. In the Netherlands and later in England, Arminians were to lean in foreign policy toward Catholics, whose doctrine of free will was closer to their own.155
The major rulers of Europe did not want transnational religious conflict to lead to general war and were able to avert it for a time. They finally failed in the aftermath of a 1618 Protestant rebellion in Bohemia, at the far eastern end of the empire, owing to the ambitions of Frederick V, the latest Elector Palatinate (r. 1610-23) who followed the militantly Calvinist traditions of his predecessors. Calvinism had spread to Bohemia in the 1540s.156 By the early seventeenth century Bohemia’s population was only 10 percent Catholic, with Calvinists, Lutherans, and Anabaptists predominant. In 1609, the same year the Protestant Union formed, Emperor Rudolf tried to reassure Bohemian Protestants by guaranteeing them religious freedom so that they would stand with him against a renewed Turkish threat.157 In 1612, Rudolf was succeeded as Emperor by Matthias (r. 1612-19), known to be more tolerant. But the Bohemian Protestants feared that Matthias would be succeeded by Archduke Ferdinand, a rigid Catholic. In 1617, Ferdinand was crowned as King-Designate of Bohemia. With Catholics and Protestants now highly polarized, their ideologies portraying one another as satanic, it took a relatively minor incident to spark conflict: Catholics destroyed some Protestant churches, and in retaliation an assembly of Protestants threw two Catholic leaders from a window in Prague Castle. The rebels intended to set up an elected Protestant monarchy in Bohemia, and quickly elected the gratified Frederick, Elector Palatinate, as King in place of Ferdinand.
Ferdinand carried out a coup d’état against Matthias and called in 12,000 Spanish troops to Bohemia to suppress the Protestant revolt. He also enlisted the aid of John George, Elector of Saxony, a Lutheran. Like many previous Lutheran princes, John George was hostile toward Calvinism and toward Frederick in particular; he helped Ferdinand suppress the Bohemian revolt in exchange for pledges not to re-impose Catholicism on them. Protestant League troops from Transylvania and Germany counter-intervened, but could get no support from outside the empire. At the Battle of White Mountain (November 1620), Catholic forces crushed the Protestant League. Ferdinand—now Emperor—broke his promise to John George and began to suppress Protestantism in Bohemia and allied Moravia.158 Frederick fled to the Netherlands and Catholic League armies occupied the Palatinate and began to re-impose Catholicism there.159 In 1625, Pope Gregory XV founded the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, which sent Italian priests to Germany to aid in re-Catholicizing conquered estates.160
Simultaneously, Catholics rebelled in Valtellina, the strategic valley between northern Italy and Germany. Valtellina was part of the Grisons, an independent state that had adopted Protestantism previously. In January 1622, Spanish troops invaded and helped the rebels triumph.161
As had sometimes happened earlier in the century-old Catholic-Protestant struggle, forcible regime promotion and transnational ideological polarization were endogenous. The Habsburgs’ forcible re-Catholicization of German lands further polarized Europeans according to ideology and made more foreign regime promotion likely. Catholic elites supported Habsburg policy, while elites in Protestant lands began to press their sovereigns to intervene on behalf of their brethren in the empire. In 1625, James I of England sent a 25,000-man expedition to join the Protestant army of Count Mansfeld. In September, the English and Dutch entered an offensive alliance, and in December Christian IV of Denmark, a Lutheran, joined. James subsidized a Danish force that attacked the Catholic League and sent an English expedition to France to support a Huguenot rebellion.162 Gabriel Bethlen, a Hungarian Protestant prince, invaded Moravia in 1626 to try to reverse the re-Catholicization.163
These Protestant interventions went poorly, and in 1627 the Catholic princes felt confident enough to hold a meeting to discuss postwar plans. The result was the biggest round of forcible regime promotion in modern history. Ferdinand told the gathering at Mühlhausen that the whole object of the war was to restore to the Catholic Church the lands that had been stolen from it. In 1628 he circulated a draft document, and in March 1629, he issued the Edict of Restitution. Under the Edict the empire’s religio-political situation of 1552 was restored. All Protestant advances since that time were to be reversed, and Calvinism was banned. The Edict was not enforced in every eligible estate, but in Lübeck, Ratzeburg, Schwerin, Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Verden, Bremen, Merseburg, Naumburg, Meissen, and Minden re-Catholicization was either begun or completed by Imperial troops. Five hundred monasteries were seized from princes and restored to the Church. By this time, in many of these lands Protestants formed large majorities of the population, and so enforcing the edict required great coercion. The Imperial armies carried out re-Catholicization even in most Lutheran estates that had been loyal to the Emperor.164
The edict’s redistribution of power to Catholic princes in the empire, and fear among exempted Lutheran rulers of Saxony that they would be next, intensified transnational polarization by provoking the Lutherans to rally to their Calvinist fellow Protestants. Outside powers, alarmed at the Habsburgs’ consolidation of power and encouraged by the outrage among German Protestants, saw fresh opportunities to intervene. By now Louis XIII of France and his minister, Cardinal Richelieu, had suppressed the Huguenot revolt and were free to focus on foreign policy. Although Catholic, Louis entered an alliance with the Lutheran Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. With the encouragement of the Elector Palatinate and a subsidy from Louis, Gustavus Adolphus invaded the empire in July 1630 to aid the Protestants.165
The Imperial army headed by the Count of Tilly took the city of Magdeburg in Northwest Germany and, perhaps inadvertently, burned it to the ground. News of the horrific deaths of 20,000 city inhabitants further polarized Europeans along religious lines. Under domestic pressure, more Lutheran princes joined the Protestant alliance, and the combined forces defeated Tilly’s Catholic armies at Breitenfeld in September 1631. Over the next three years the Catholics regained momentum, and in May 1635, the princes ratified the Peace of Prague. The Prague treaty divided the Protestants by reversing the Edict of Restitution for some Protestant estates—chiefly in the northwest—but not for others. Ferdinand hoped to recruit enough Protestant support to deter an attack by Louis of France. Notwithstanding, Louis declared war on Spain (the Habsburgs’ other center of power) in May 1635 and soon began fighting Imperial troops as well. War in Germany dragged on for another thirteen years, with France and Sweden battling Imperial, Spanish, and certain German forces. But with France fighting alongside Protestants, and some Protestants fighting alongside Imperial troops, the conflict had lost much of its ideological character.166
Still, the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 recognized the role of religion in causing the war and took steps to prevent a recurrence. As Stephen Krasner writes, “Westphalia attempted to insulate religion from politics” by creating mechanisms to keep religious change from threatening political stability. Rulers who changed religions could not force their subjects to follow them; religious dissenters, Catholic or Protestant, must be allowed to practice their religion in private and, within limits, in public.167 The attempt did not fully succeed. Pope Innocent X declared “null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, empty of meaning and effect for all time” those sections of the treaties he judged detrimental to Catholic interests.168 The Pope was mostly ignored by Catholics in the empire; but in other parts of Europe the old norm of religio vincula societatis (“religion is the bond of society”) could not be extinguished by a treaty or even by the catastrophic war that it ended.
After 1648, very few forcible promotions of religious regimes took place in Europe. Religious conflict certainly continued, but was mostly internal, and much of it intra-Protestant, as in the Netherlands in the 1610s and 1620s and England in the 1640s. International wars took place, but mainly over territory and trade.
The two cases of forcible regime promotion were by France in the Netherlands in 1672, and the Netherlands in England in 1688. France’s Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715) was the exemplary absolute monarch of his time, but was also a devout and militant Catholic. In his mind—and in the minds of most western European elites at the time—Catholicism and monarchy were linked, as were Protestantism and aristocratic republicanism.169 The Calvinist Netherlands was a republic, and England had been one while run by Puritans from 1649 through 1660. Furthermore, the Huguenots retained strong ties with the Dutch, and the latter sent aid to the former. From 1667, Louis and the Dutch Republic were in a trade war, and it is no surprise that Louis saw Calvinism within and without France as a threat to his power.170 Thus, he attacked the Netherlands in 1672 with the object of not only coercing it but of re-establishing Catholicism there. (Louis also sought to re-Catholicize England and Scotland, and in the 1670 Treaty of Dover England’s Charles II promised Louis to join in the war against the Dutch and to declare himself a Roman Catholic in exchange for financial and military aid.)171
Louis failed to conquer the Dutch, instead uniting them behind the militantly Calvinist William of Orange.172 In 1674, under pressure from the Whigs—tied to the Calvinist wing of the English Church—Charles II withdrew England from the war. Now religio-political instability rose again in England. The Whig leader, the Earl of Shaftesbury, was implicated in a plot to assassinate Charles, and fled to the Netherlands. Charles died in 1685, succeeded by his brother James II, an open Catholic. James began to disestablish the Anglican Church as a way to re-empower the Catholics. Now even the High-Church Tories turned against James, and joined the Whigs in inviting William of Orange to “invade” England and occupy the throne in 1688, thus solidifying the Protestant succession and England’s constitutional monarchy.173 James II moved to France, where Louis granted him a chateau and a subsidy.174
After England’s Glorious Revolution, wars and interventions did not cease, but rulers stopped using force in Europe to promote Catholic or Protestant regimes. The prolonged wave, which at times in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had seemed a permanent feature of international politics, eventually ended. How did this particular long twilight struggle end? Not in the triumph of one or another of the religious regimes: Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican regimes all eventually came to coexist without trying to undermine one another. Nor did Europeans simply stop believing in revealed religion. It is true that later in the eighteenth century such religious skeptics as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson were to make powerful arguments for toleration. But in the early part of the century most Europeans, including elites, continued to be observant. Indeed, Christians of various confessions still preferred that adherents of other religions convert to theirs.
The change, rather, consisted of the fading of the medieval norm of religio vincula societatis (religion is the bond of society). The religious divisions, at least among Christians, came to be viewed by elites as far less relevant to politics. States retained their established religions, but what it meant to be Catholic France or Protestant England changed. Catholic no longer implied eradication of Protestants, and Protestant no longer meant eradication of Catholics. By the early eighteenth century, if Calvinism or Catholicism was gaining converts in one’s own state or a neighbor, it no longer had political repercussions elsewhere. Religious heterogeneity was no longer a threat to the state or the monarch, and so the state need neither enforce religious uniformity nor fear religious changes in neighboring states. In that sense, church and state began to separate more than before, and believers no longer had to fear living under a ruler who belonged to a different branch of Christianity.
From the early days of the Reformation there were times and places in which religious toleration was already practiced as a modus vivendi, a tactic to achieve societal unity for the sake of some other good such as countering a foreign threat. Charles V and Francis I both allowed, at various points, the propagation of Protestant teaching within their realms. The rule of cujus regio, ejus religio (whose the realm, his the religion) operative at various times in the empire, amounted to an effort to bring international religious toleration by insulating polities from one another’s religious turmoil. France’s Henry IV and the politiques—French Catholics who tolerated Protestantism—had their way in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes. In Poland a Pax dissidentium, mandating complete toleration among Protestants (not Catholics), was agreed upon in 1573.175 These arrangements, however, were all temporary. In France and the empire, the continuing spread of Calvinism periodically reignited persecution, polarization, and forcible regime promotion. That suggests that rulers continued to worry about competing religions’ political ramifications.
All the while, as religious strife persisted, theological and philosophical arguments for religious toleration began to emerge. Sebastian Castellio published denunciations of the Calvinists’ execution of the Unitarian Michael Servetus in Geneva in 1553. The historian Perez Zagorin calls Castellio the first advocate of religious toleration; he rejected the notion that one person, even John Calvin himself, had the authority to declare another a heretic deserving of death.176 In Poland, the Socinian (Unitarian) Confession of Faith (1574) and Catechism of Rakau (1609) both mandated religious toleration based upon the headship of Christ rather than human beings.177 In England in 1667, the Puritan divine John Owen (no known relation to the author) argued that neither scripture nor the practice of the early Church sanctioned the coercion of belief. Instead, Christians must respect the individual conscience, “God’s great Vicere-gent.”178 Twenty-two years later, John Locke took up the argument from conscience and added that because coerced belief is never genuine, coercion can only lead to the sin of hypocrisy.179
These arguments had some following among elites, particularly dissenters—Protestants in Catholic societies, Baptists in England—but little purchase among elites belonging to the religious majority in a given country. That began to change when the old religiously homogeneous regimes, Catholic and Protestant, began to encounter severe anomalies. The legitimating narrative of a uniformly Calvinist or Catholic regime maintained that God would reward the monarch and country for prohibiting heresy. But in country after country, the drive to extirpate heresy had seemed not only to fail but also to exacerbate internal divisions, subversion, and war. By contrast, societies that were pluralistic, allowing minority religions to coexist, seemed to flourish.
The chief model of national flourishing under religious toleration was the Dutch Republic. The United Provinces of the Netherlands was officially Calvinist, but its charter of 1579 prohibited anyone from being persecuted because of religious belief. At the time of its promulgation, this tolerant provision was a bid to win support among Dutch Catholics for independence from Spain; as was the case with French politiques, Dutch Calvinists were tolerant for instrumental reasons. And the Dutch rulers did not always follow their tolerant constitution. Nonetheless, particularly in the province of Holland, the ruling regents came to protect religious minorities from Calvinist zealots so long as the minorities’ leaders took responsibility for their welfare and they were loyal to the state. Religious minorities, including Jews, began migrating to the Netherlands, and conversions from one religion to another were not uncommon. In 1672, the Swiss commander of Louis XIV’s troops in Utrecht wrote that, far from comprising only Calvinists, in the Republic “there are Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Brownists, Independents, Arminians, Anabaptists, Socinians, Arians, Enthusiasts, Quakers, Borelists, Muscovites, Libertines, and many more … I am not even speaking of the Jews, Turks, and Persians.”180
The Dutch Republic was famous or notorious in Europe for its toleration and also for its staggering economic success. In its “Golden Age” (1620-1700) the United Provinces excelled all other European states in wealth and at least equaled them in culture. Notwithstanding its tiny size, after the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) the Netherlands stood alongside England and France as a holder of the balance of power.181 Of course, Dutch success was not merely a function of its toleration: its prowess at international trade played an essential role and indeed helped draw the hostility of the English and French. But the model of a tolerant polity able to compete with much larger states had its effects. Writes Willem Frijhoff:
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the social arrangements and political procedures, to which religious diversity based on freedom of conscience gave rise, made the Dutch Republic a testing-ground for peaceful co-existence, then for toleration. In the more or less long term, according to which contemporaries we consult, it was established in Europe as a model to be followed.182
The Anglican writer William Temple, for example, wrote in his Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (published in 1673, during an Anglo-Dutch war) that the Dutch government does not inquire into anyone’s religious beliefs as long as he is loyal to the state. It is significant that Temple had a polemical purpose, namely to increase toleration of Catholics in his native England.183 He was literally holding up the United Provinces as a model to be emulated. His book went through several printings, and was only one of many English tracts about the Netherlands at the time.184
Thus, the pragmatic case for religious toleration, based upon the common desire for security and prosperity, gained plausibility. After two centuries it was clear to adherents of each branch of Christianity that the others were not going to disappear; meanwhile, the other concerns of government—national security and prosperity—must be met. The Constitution of Carolina (1669), drafted by John Locke himself, forbade any hindrance to people’s changing religious affiliation and justified this on the need for the colony to attract people. In Europe, state-building and external security may have been still more important: if France or Switzerland or the empire was bound to remain religiously diverse, then civil peace must be secured without religious uniformity.185
Although England itself was not to remove legal disabilities on Catholics until 1829, the state began to practice toleration in the early eighteenth century and came to be known as one of Europe’s most broad-minded countries. English laws persecuting Nonconformists “largely slipped into disuse” during this period, writes M. Searle Bates. In the meantime France, which had begun to tolerate Huguenots in 1598, rescinded that toleration in 1685 under Louis XIV, who was determined to vanquish Protestantism and the Dutch Republic. By the early eighteenth century, Louis’s failure cast the Sun-King’s way of handling religious pluralism in a distinctly inferior light. The toleration of the Dutch and English began to appear the better way to manage religious pluralism, and pluralism itself began to appear a virtue. As Voltaire wrote: “If there were one religion in England, its despotism would be terrible; if there were only two, they would destroy each other; but there are thirty, and therefore they live in peace and happiness.” In 1732, France’s Louis XV (r. 1715-74) restated that the death penalty and torture would again be used against Huguenots. “But,” writes Bates, “officials now tended to find public disapproval of such barbarity of more consequence than the violent enthusiasms of the Catholic clergy.” Even Pope Benedict XIV intervened on behalf of French Protestants. In general, writes Bates, “The eighteenth century saw inadequate principle but relatively broad practice in England, Scotland, and the American colonies, also in Holland. Sweden began to relax, and even in France the Huguenots could hold a national synod in 1744, despite their many disabilities.”186
Thus, the ideological struggle that structured so much of European politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries began to dissolve as the ideologies—not the religions themselves, but their intimacy with the state’s coercive power—so manifestly failed to deliver on their promises. Catholic and Protestant alike had long argued that religious uniformity was necessary to civil peace and hence to prosperity and security. Each group had developed an ideology that demanded the extirpation of the other within a given society and throughout Europe. During times of high ideological polarization, when these ideologies were given free rein, however, the struggle to achieve religious uniformity had been destructive, not productive. As the Netherlands and then England came to prosper under religious toleration, it appeared a more and more viable alternative elsewhere. With rulers freed from the need to enforce orthodoxy, they could become indifferent to religious movements in other countries. In the eighteenth century demonstration effects in religion continued, as when evangelical revivals broke out in Britain and the United States;187 but these presented neither threats nor opportunities to governments. Rulers came to cooperate and confront, make peace and war, intervene or leave alone, without regard to religion.
From the 1520s through the late seventeenth century, princes in Central and Western Europe often did something they did not do before and have not done since: they used force to promote Catholicism or Protestantism in other polities. In most cases the promoting ruler was seeking both internal and external security; spreading or preserving the ideology abroad helped consolidate his power at home and increase his influence abroad. Elizabeth of England helped Protestants in Scotland, France, and the Netherlands because she knew that doing so would help suppress Catholicism within England and extend English influence abroad. The vast majority of these interventions entailed a great power’s promoting its own ideology. In a few cases, however, the King of France would help German Protestants against the Habsburgs. He was free to do so when he felt domestically secure against the Huguenots.
Most forcible promotions followed one of two types of event. Ex ante promotions followed hard upon regime unrest in a state, usually a Protestant uprising in a Catholic state, but sometimes the reverse. Unrest often lured rulers of neighboring states to send troops to influence the outcome. Sometimes these interventions would be isolated events, with no spillover effects. Thus the Lutherans’ promotion of their regime in Württemberg in 1534 was a single intervention that did not beget more. Other interventions had feedback effects and led to more such promotions. The French promotion of Catholicism in Scotland not only led to an English counter-promotion of Calvinism in 1560, but had demonstration effects back in France, leading to an English promotion of Calvinism there in 1562; events in France, in turn, had demonstration effects in the Netherlands, leading to a Spanish (Catholic) suppression and English and German counter-promotion of Calvinism. Short waves also broke out in the 1580s following the death of the Catholic heir-apparent in France, and in Central Europe in 1620 following the Habsburgs’ suppression of a Calvinist revolt in Bohemia, inaugurating the miserable Thirty Years’ War. In these cases, forcible regime promotion and increases in transnational ideological polarization were endogenous.
Many episodes of regime instability did not trigger one or more forcible regime promotions. Contrary to expectations of many at the time, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 did not detonate a wave of revolution and regime promotion. Rulers often reckoned that the incentives against carrying out such interventions—fear of a prolonged war, or a spreading war, of domestic opposition—were too strong. Indeed, Protestant and Catholic rulers sometimes formed defensive alliances precisely to deter forcible regime promotion.
Ex post promotions happened during or after wars involving great powers. The Thirty Years’ War itself is the most obvious example: the armies of Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman Emperor, re-Catholicized a number of conquered estates in the 1620s, culminating in the dozen impositions initiated in 1629 with the Edict of Restitution. A more limited set of ex post promotions came with the 1548 Augsburg Interim that followed the Schmalkaldic War. Of course, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Schmalkaldic War of 1546 that foreshadowed it, were partly fought over religion in any case, or at least were begun by a great power in response to religiously based defiance by subordinate princes. One can argue that every invasion that took place during these wars was a forcible regime promotion. Even if one stops short of that extreme interpretation, it is clear that war and peace during these centuries in Central and Western Europe cannot be fully explained without reference to the crisis over church and state and the contest over the best regime that grew out of that crisis.
This long wave of roughly 180 years was not one in which rulers were themselves more devout or less rational than normal. It is clear that their fears of the spread of a rival religion, and delight in the spread of their own, were based not only on religious conviction but also concern for their own power. That was because they were acting within a social structure across the region that foreclosed some possibilities for rulers and made others more attractive. The structure was an understanding common to most elites that one’s own polity must be either Catholic or (some type of) Protestant, and that these branches of Christianity were struggling across Central and Western Europe for survival or supremacy. Two sets of agents perpetuated the structure: transnational networks of true believers—Lutheran, Catholic, Calvinist—who worked perpetually to spread their favored regime and roll back competitors; and the princes who sometimes used force to promote one of these established religions.
The structure emerged in the 1510s in the crisis of legitimacy in the Catholic Church and the availability of alternative ideas from previous attempts at reformation. Medieval princes had often chafed at clerical authority, but by the early sixteenth century the Church had fallen into open corruption that damaged its authority across society, particularly in Germany. When Luther publicly challenged certain Church practices in 1517, he found himself receiving much more princely support than past aspiring reformers had enjoyed. By 1522 social interactions, suffused with contingency, had yielded an anti-Catholic Lutheranism and an anti-Lutheran Catholicism; after 1525 Lutheran regimes began to appear in the Holy Roman Empire. In the subsequent generation Calvinism, still more anti-Catholic, emerged in France and became the most energetic form of Protestantism. The social structure finally disappeared in the late seventeenth century with the manifest superiority of a new regime type: religious toleration. Europeans remained religious, and their polities continued to have established religions; but elites ceased to link loyalty to prince with adherence to the established religion. Toleration had been used tactically at various times during the long wave, but it was the Dutch Republic that first made it a constitutional matter in 1579. The spectacular international success of the United Provinces demonstrated to European elites that toleration could and should be made permanent and that religious changes in neighboring states were no longer politically threatening.