CHAPTER XXVIII
The Migrations of Reform
1517–60

I. THE SCANDINAVIAN SCENE: 1470–1523

THE piety of the people had by 1500 made the Church the economic master of Scandinavia. In Denmark half the soil was owned by the Church, and was tilled by tenants verging on serfdom.¹ Copenhagen itself was an ecclesiastical fief. Clergy and nobility were exempt from land taxes: the nobles because they served at their own expense in war, the clergy because they organized worship, morals, education, and charity. The universities at Copenhagen and Uppsala were of course in ecclesiastical hands. The Church required a tenth, annually, of all nonecclesiastical produce or income; it exacted a small fee for every building raised, every child born, every couple married, every corpse interred; it claimed a day of gratis labor from every peasant yearly; and no one could inherit property without making a contribution to the Church as the probate court of wills.² These imposts were defended as financing the ministrations of the Church, but complaints rose that too much of the proceeds went to maintain bishops in regal splendor. The merchants of Denmark, harassed by Hanseatic dominance in the North and Baltic seas, chafed at the additional competition of nobles and clergy who directly exported, often in their own ships, the surplus product of their estates. In Scandinavia, as elsewhere, nobles hankered after ecclesiastical lands. And there, as elsewhere, nationalism conflicted with the supernational Church.

In all three countries the Church supported the Scandinavian Union of Calmar, which Christian I of Denmark had renewed (1457). But in Sweden a National party of burghers and peasants rejected the Union as in effect a Danish supremacy, and proclaimed Sten Sture the Younger regent of an independent nation (1512). Archbishop Gustav Trolle of Uppsala—then the capital of Sweden—defended the Union; Sten Sture the Younger deposed him; Pope Leo X ordered him reinstated; Sture refused; Leo interdicted religious services in Sweden, and commissioned Christian II of Denmark to invade Sweden and punish the Regent. Christian’s first attempt failed; he had to sign a truce; but he carried back with him to Copenhagen (January 18, 1520) several hostages as pledges for Swedish adherence to the truce; one of these hostages was Gustavus Vasa. In a second expedition Christian won a decisive victory, and Sture died of wounds received in battle. His widow improvised an army, which held Stockholm for five months against Danish siege; finally she surrendered on the promise, by Christian’s general, of a general amnesty. On November 4 Christian was crowned King of Sweden by the restored and triumphant Trolle.

On November 7 the leading Swedes who had supported Sture were summoned to the presence of the King in the citadel of Stockholm. A representative of Trolle accused them of major crimes in having deposed the Archbishop and having destroyed his castle, and he called upon the King to revenge these wrongs. Despite the amnesty seventy leading Swedes were condemned to death. On November 8 they were beheaded in the Grand Square; on November 9 several others were arrested and executed; some spectators who expressed sympathy were added to the slaughter; and the property of the dead was confiscated to the King. All Sweden cried out with horror. The Union of Calmar, men said, was drowned in this “Stockholm Bath of Blood,” and the Church suffered severely in public esteem for having initiated the massacre. Christian had thought to make his rule secure by destroying the brains of the National party. In reality he had cleared a way to the throne for the young hostage who was to make Sweden free.

His name was Gustavus Eriksson, but posterity called him also Vasa, from the bundle (Swedish vasa, Latin fascis) of sticks that appeared in his family’s coat of arms. At thirteen he was sent to study at Uppsala; at twenty he was called to the court of Sture the Younger, who had married a half-sister of Gustavus’s mother; and there he received further instruction from the prime minister, Bishop Hemming Gad. In 1519 he escaped from surveillance in Denmark, made his way to Lübeck, persuaded its senate (always hostile to Denmark) to lend him money and a ship, and regained his native shores (May 31, 1520). For months he wandered in disguise, or hid in obscure villages. In November news reached him that nearly a hundred Swedish patriots, including his father, had been slaughtered in Stockholm. He mounted the swiftest horse he could find, and rode north to his own province of Dalecarlia, resolved to organize there, from the hardy yeomanry, the beginnings of an army that might free Sweden from the Danes.

His life was now an epic worthy of Homeric song. Traveling icy roads, he sought rest at the home of a former schoolmate. This friend gave him every hospitality, and then went off to notify the pro-Danish police that the escaped hostage could now be caught; but the wife warned Gustavus to flee. Riding onward twenty miles, he found asylum with a priest, who hid him for a week. Moving thirty miles farther, he tried to rouse the town of Rättvik to revolt; but its people had not yet heard, and would not believe, the story of the Bath of Blood. Vasa rode over frozen meadows twenty-five miles north to Mora, and again pleaded for a revolutionary uprising, but the peasants listened in skeptical apathy. Friendless and for a moment hopeless, Gustavus turned his horse to the west, resigned to seeking asylum in Norway. Before he reached the frontier a messenger from Mora overtook him, and begged him to come back, pledging that now he would be heard with a spirit as hot as his own. The peasants had at last heard of the horror in Stockholm; moreover, it was rumored that the King was planning to journey through Sweden, and had ordered gallows to be set up in every major town. New taxes were to be imposed upon a people already struggling for life against the greed of masters and the tyranny of the elements. When Gustavus spoke again to the citizens of Mora they gave him a bodyguard of sixteen highlanders, and vowed to arm themselves, discipline themselves, and follow wherever he led them against the Danes.

They knew no weapons yet but bows and arrows and axes. Vasa taught them to make javelins and pikes with iron heads. He trained them with all the ardor of a youth inspired by love of country and power. So inspired, they captured Vesteres, then Uppsala; once more Archbishop Trolle fled. Patiently, resolutely, the growing army won province after province from the Danish garrisons. Christian II could not come to lead his forces in person, for in his own country he was confronted by civil strife, but his navy repeatedly raided Swedish shores. Gustavus dispatched emissaries to Lübeck to ask for ships of war. For a large promised sum the merchant city equipped ten vessels, which diverted the energies of the Danish fleet. On June 7, 1523, the victorious revolutionaries, in a new Riksraad, named their leader King Gustavus I; on June 20 Stockholm surrendered to him, and thereafter Vasa made it his capital. Meanwhile Christian II had been deposed in Denmark, and Frederick I, his successor, renounced all Danish claims to sovereignty over Sweden. The Union of Calmar (1397–1523) came to an end; the Vasa dynasty began.

II. THE SWEDISH REFORMATION

Gustavus was still a youth of twenty-seven. He was not as tall as we expect men of the north to be, but he had a Viking’s vigor of body, his round face was ruddy with health, and his long yellow beard gave him a dignity befitting his royalty rather than his age. His morals were excellent for a king, and even the Church that he was soon to reject could not impugn his piety. He devoted himself to the tasks of government with an impatient energy that sometimes slipped into violence or tyranny, but the condition of Sweden at his accession almost justified his temper and autocracy. In the chaos of war thousands of peasants had left their farms unsown, miners had abandoned their pits, the cities were devastated with conflict, the currency was debased, the national treasury was bankrupt, the executive brains of the country had been spilled out in the “Bath.” The surviving feudal barons considered Gustavus an upstart, and looked down their noses at his assumption of power. Conspiracies were formed to depose him; he put them down with a strong arm. Finland, which had been part of Sweden, was still in Danish hands, and Sören Norby, the Danish admiral, held the strategic island of Gotland. Lübeck clamored for the repayment of its loans.

The first need of a government is money paid, or promised, to the armed forces that protect it, then to the officials that administer it. But in Vasa’s Sweden taxes cost almost as much to collect as they brought in, for those who alone could pay them were strong enough to resist. Gustavus stooped to the desperate expediency of again debasing the coinage, but the bad coins soon fell to their actual value, and the state’s finances were worse than before. Only one group in Sweden was still rich—the clergy. Gustavus turned to them for aid, thinking it just that the wealth of the Church should alleviate the poverty of the people and the government. In 1523 he wrote to Bishop Hans Brask of Linköping for a donation of 5,000 guilders to the state. The Bishop protested and yielded. To the churches and monasteries of Sweden Vasa sent an urgent request that all money and precious metal not indispensable to the continuance of their services should be remitted to the government as a loan; and he published a list of the amounts he expected from each source. The response was not what he had hoped for, and he began to wonder whether it would not be wise to do as the Lutheran princes of Germany were doing—confiscate the wealth of the Church to the needs of the state. He had not forgotten that most of the higher clergy had opposed the revolution, and had buttressed the rule of Christian II in Sweden.

In 1519 Olaus Petri, son of a Swedish ironmaster, returned from several years of study in Wittenberg. As deacon of the cathedral school at Strängnärs he permitted himself some heresies—that purgatory was a myth, that prayers should be addressed, and confession should be made, only to God, and that the preaching of the Gospel was better than the ritual of the Mass. The writings of Luther began to circulate in Sweden. Brask importuned Vasa to forbid their sale; the King replied that “Luther’s teachings have not been found by impartial judges to be false.” ³ Perhaps he thought it politic to keep a heretic in reserve as a bargaining point with the Church.

Matters grew livelier when Pope Adrian VI refused to confirm his own legate, Johannes Magnus, as Archbishop of Uppsala, and proposed to restore Gustav Trolle, enemy of the revolution. Vasa sent to the Curia a letter that would then (1523) have shocked, and would later have delighted, Henry VIII:

Adrian’s death, and the absorption of Clement VII with Luther, Charles V, and Francis I left Vasa free to advance the Swedish Reformation. He appointed Olaus Petri to the church of St. Nicholas at Stockholm; he made Olaus’s brother Laurentius professor of theology at Uppsala, and raised a third reformer, Laurentius Andreae, to be archdeacon of the cathedral. In the chapter house of the cathedral, under the presidency of the King, Olaus Petri defended Lutheranism in debate with Peter Galle (December 27, 1524). Vasa judged Olaus victor, and was not disturbed when Olaus, four months before Luther’s marriage, took a wife (1525). Bishop Brask, however, was shocked by this violation of clerical celibacy, and demanded that the King should place Petri under the ban. Gustavus replied that Olaus should be punished if he had done wrong, but “it would seem surprising if that should be the effect of marriage (a ceremony not forbidden by God), and yet for debauchery, and other sins that are forbidden, one should not fall under the ban.”⁴ Instead of outlawing Petri he commissioned him and his brother to translate the Bible into Swedish. As in many other countries the vernacular version helped to form the national language, and to transform the national religion.

Gustavus, like most rulers, considered any measure moral that strengthened his country or his throne. He saw to it that bishops pliable to his plans should be promoted to Swedish sees. He found irresistible reasons for appropriating, gradatim, monastic lands; and as he shared the spoils with the nobles, he explained that he was merely returning to laymen what their ancestors had been wheedled into giving to the Church. Pope Clement VII complained that Swedish priests married, gave communion in bread and wine, neglected the sacrament of extreme unction, and altered the ritual of the Mass; and he appealed to the King to remain faithful to the Church. But Gustavus had gone too far to come back; orthodoxy would have ruined his treasury. At the Diet of Vesteres (1527) he openly declared for the Reformation.

It was an historic meeting in both its constitution and its results. Four bishops, four canons, fifteen members of the Riksraad, 129 nobles, thirty-two burgesses, fourteen deputies of the miners, 104 representatives of the peasantry—this was one of the broadest-based national assemblies of the sixteenth century. The King’s chancellor laid a revolutionary proposal before the Diet: the state, he said, was so impoverished that it could not function for the good of the people; the Swedish Church was so rich that it could transfer much of its wealth to the government and yet have enough left to fulfill all its tasks. Bishop Brask, fighting to the last for his own ideals and realty, declared that the Pope had commanded the clergy to defend their property. The Diet voted in favor of obeying the Pope. Gustavus, staking everything on one throw, announced that if this was the sentiment of the Diet and the nation he would resign and leave Sweden. For three days the assembly debated. The burghers and the deputies of the peasants came over to the side of the King; the nobles had good cause for moving in the same direction; finally the Diet, convinced that Vasa was more valuable to Sweden than any pope, agreed to the royal wishes. In the Recess or conclusions of Vesteres the monasteries were made fiefs of the King, though the monks were allowed to use them; all property granted by nobles to the Church since 1454 was to be returned to the donors’ heirs; the bishops were to surrender their castles to the Crown; no bishop was to seek papal confirmation; the clergy were to yield to the state all income not needed for their services; auricular confession was ended, and all sermons were to be based exclusively on the Bible. In Sweden, even more decisively than elsewhere, the Reformation was the nationalization of religion, the triumph of the state over the Church.

Vasa survived this crisis for thirty-three years, and remained to the end a forceful but beneficent autocrat. He was convinced that only a centralized authority could reorganize Sweden into order and prosperity, that in so complex a task he could not stop at every step to consult a deliberative assembly. Under his encouragement and regulation the mines of the north poured their iron into the sinews of Sweden; industry expanded; commercial treaties with England, France, Denmark, and Russia found markets for Swedish goods, brought into Sweden the products of a dozen lands, and gave new refinement and confidence to a civilization that before him had been arrested in rural and illiterate simplicity. Sweden flourished now as never before.

Gustavus engaged in several wars, suppressed four rebellions, and took in succession three wives. The first bore him the future Eric XIV; the second gave him five sons and five daughters; the third, who was sixteen when he, fifty-six, married her, outlived him by sixty years. He induced the Rigsraad to accept his sons as heirs to the throne, and to establish hereditary succession in the male line as a rule for Swedish royalty. Sweden forgave his dictatorship, because it understood that order is the parent, not the child, of liberty. When he died (September 29, 1560), after a reign of thirty-seven years, he was buried in Uppsala Cathedral with fond and lavish ceremony. He had not given his people the personal freedom for which they seem so peculiarly fitted, but he had given them collective freedom from foreign domination in religion or government; and he had created the conditions under which his nation could mature in economy, literature, and art. He was the father of modern Sweden.

III. THE DANISH REFORMATION

Christian II of Denmark (r. 1513–23) was as colorful a character as the Gustavus Vasa who defeated him in Sweden. Forced by the barons to sign humiliating “capitulations” as the price of his election, he surrounded himself with middle-class advisers, ignored the Rigsraad of highborn magnates, and took as his chief counselor the mother of his beautiful Dutch mistress. This privy council must have had some ability and spirit, for Christian’s domestic policy was as constructive as his foreign adventures were futile. He labored assiduously in administration, reformed the government of the cities, revised the laws, put down piracy, improved the roads, began a public postal system, abolished the worst evils of serfdom, ended the death penalty for witchcraft, organized poor relief, opened schools for the poor, made education compulsory, and developed the University of Copenhagen into a light and haven of learning. He incurred the enmity of Lübeck by restricting the power of the Hanse; he encouraged and protected Danish trade; and he put an end to the barbarous custom by which maritime villagers had been privileged to plunder all ships wrecked on their shores.

In 1517 Leo X sent Giovanni Arcimboldo to Denmark to offer indulgences. Paul Helgesen, a Carmelite monk, denounced what seemed to him the sale of these indulgences; and in this he anticipated Luther’s Theses.⁵ Legate and King quarreled over the division of the proceeds; Arcimboldo decamped to Lübeck with a part, Christian confiscated the rest. Finding excellent reasons for Protestantism in the real abuses and available wealth of the Church, Christian brought Helgesen to a post in the University of Copenhagen, where, for a time, this eloquent Danish Erasmus led the movement for reform. When Helgesen turned cautious, Christian asked Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony to send him Luther himself, or-at least some theologian of Luther’s school. Carlstadt came, but did not stay long. Christian issued some reform legislation: no one was to be ordained without having studied sufficiently to expound the Gospel in Danish; the clergy could not legally own property or receive bequests unless they married; bishops were bidden to moderate their luxury; ecclesiastical courts lost jurisdiction where property was involved; and a supreme court appointed by the King was to have final authority over ecclesiastical as well as civil affairs. However, when the Diet of Worms placed Luther under the Imperial ban Christian suspended his reforms, and Helgesen advised reconciliation with the Church.

While these domestic policies were exciting his people, Christian lost the reins by his failures in foreign affairs. His cruelty in Sweden turned many Danes against him. Lübeck declared war on him for his attacks upon Hanseatic shipping. Nobles and clergy, alienated by high taxation and hostile legislation, ignored his summons to a national assembly, and proclaimed his uncle, Duke Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein, as the new king of Denmark. Christian fled to Flanders with his queen, the Protestant sister of Charles V; he made his peace with the Church, hoping to get a kingdom for a Mass; he was captured in a futile attempt to regain his throne, and for twenty-seven years he lived in the dungeons of Sönderborg with no companion but a half-wit Norwegian dwarf. The paths of glory led him with leisurely ignominy to the grave (1559).

Frederick I found no happiness under his challenged crown. Nobles and clergy had accepted him on many conditions, one of which was that he would never allow a heretic to preach in Denmark. Helgesen, while continuing to criticize the shortcomings of the Church, now turned most of his passionate polemics against the Protestants, urging that gradual reform was better than turbulent revolution. But he could not stem the tide. Frederick’s son, Duke Christian, was already a Lutheran, and the King’s daughter, with his consent, had married Albrecht of Brandenburg, the Lutheran ex-head of the Teutonic Knights. In 1526 Frederick veered with the wind, and appointed as his chaplain Hans Tausen, who had studied under Luther. Tausen left his monastery, married, and openly advocated Lutheran ideas. Frederick found it convenient to order that episcopal confirmation fees should be paid to him, not to the pope. Lutheran preachers took courage and multiplied; the bishops asked for their expulsion; Frederick answered that he had no lordship over men’s souls, and was resolved to leave faith free—a most unusual proceeding. In 1524 a Darihï; translation of the New Testament appeared; in 1529 a much better version was published by Christian Pedersen, which immensely advanced the Protestant development. The people, eager to end tithe payments to the clergy, readily accepted the new theology; by 1530 the Lutherans dominated Copenhagen and Viborg. In that year, at the Diet of Copenhagen, a public debate was held between Catholic and Protestant leaders; both King and people gave the victory to the Protestants; and the Confession of Faith presented there by Hans Tausen remained for a decade the official creed of the Danish Lutherans.

Frederick’s death (1533) ushered in the final act of the Danish Reformation. The merchant princes of Denmark joined with their old enemies in Lübeck in an attempt to restore Christian II; Count Christopher of Oldenburg led the Lübeck forces and gave his name to the “Count’s War”; Copenhagen fell to him, and Lübeck dreamed of ruling all Denmark. But the burghers and peasants rallied to the standard of Frederick’s son Christian; their army defeated Oldenburg, and captured Copenhagen after a year’s siege (July 1536). All bishops were arrested, and were released only on promising to abide by the Protestant regime. The national assembly, in October 1536, formally established the Lutheran State Church, with Christian III as its supreme head. All episcopal and monastic properties were confiscated to the King, and the bishops lost all voice in the government. Norway and Iceland accepted Christian III and his legislation, and the triumph of Lutheranism in Scandinavia was complete (1554).

IV. PROTESTANTISM IN EASTERN EUROPE

Poland had her Golden Age under Sigismund I (1506–48) and his son Sigismund II (1548–72). Both were men of culture and spirit, discerning patrons of literature and art, and both gave to religious thought and worship a freedom which, though imperfect, made most other nations of Europe seem medieval by comparison. Sigismund I married the gay and talented Bona Sforza (1518), daughter of Duke Giangaleazzo of Milan; she brought to Cracow a retinue of Italian courtiers and scholars, and the King, instead of resenting them, welcomed them as a bridge to the Renaissance. A taste for luxury in ornate dress and rich furnishings took hold of the aristocracy, language and manners became more refined, letters and arts flourished, and Erasmus wrote (1523): “I congratulate this nation .... which now, in sciences, jurisprudence, morals, and religion, and in all that separates us from barbarism, is so flourishing that it can rival the first and most glorious of nations.” ⁶ Dominating her husband by her beauty, grace, and craft, Bona became queen in fact as well as in fashion. Her son Sigismund II was a humanist, linguist, orator, and transvestite.⁷ Wars marred these brilliant reigns, for Poland was involved with Sweden, Denmark, and Russia in a contest for control of the Baltic Sea and its ports. Poland lost Prussia, but she absorbed Mazovia, including Warsaw (1529), and Livonia, including Riga (1561). Poland was in this age a major European state.

Meanwhile the Reformation filtered in from Germany and Switzerland. The freedom of worship guaranteed by the Polish Crown to its Greek Catholic subjects had habituated the nation to religious tolerance, and the century-long rebellion of Hussites and Utraquists in neighboring Bohemia had made Poland somewhat careless of distant papal authority. The bishops, nominated by the Kings, were cultured patriots, favoring Church reform with Erasmian caution, and generously supporting the humanist movement. This, however, did not allay the envy with which nobles and townsmen looked upon their property and revenues. Complaints grew of national wealth being drained off to Rome, of indulgences expensively absurd, of ecclesiastical simony, of costly litigation in episcopal courts. The szlachta, or lesser nobility, took particular offense at the exemption of the clergy from taxation, and the clerical collection of tithes from the nobles themselves. Probably for economic reasons some influential barons listened with sympathy to Lutheran criticism of the Church; and the semi-sovereignty of the individual feudal lords provided protection to local Protestant movements, much as the independence of the German princes made possible the revolt and shielding of Luther. In Danzig a monk championed Luther’s Theses, called for ecclesiastical reforms, and married an heiress (1518); another preacher followed the Lutheran vein so effectively that several congregations removed all religious images from their churches (1522); the city council released monks and nuns from their vows, and closed the monasteries (1525); by 1540 all Danzig pulpits were in Protestant hands. When some clergymen in Polish-Prussian Braunsberg introduced the Lutheran ritual, and the cathedral canons complained to their bishop, he replied that Luther based his views on the Bible, and that whoever felt able to refute them might undertake the task (1520).⁸ Sigismund I was prevailed upon to censor the press and forbid the importation of Lutheran literature; but his own secretary and Bona’s Franciscan confessor were secretly won to the forbidden creed; and in 1539 Calvin dedicated his Commentary on the Mass to the Crown Prince.

When the Prince became Sigismund II both Lutheranism and Calvinism advanced rapidly. The Bible was translated into Polish, and the vernacular began to replace Latin in religious services. Prominent priests like Jan Laski announced their conversion to Protestantism. In 1548 the Bohemian Brethren, exiled from their own country, moved into Poland, and soon there were thirty conventicles of their sect in the land. The attempt of the Catholic clergy to indict some members of the szlachta for heresy, and to confiscate their property, led many minor nobles to rebel against the Church (1552). The national Diet of 1555 voted religious freedom for all faiths based on “the pure Word of God,” and legalized clerical marriage and communion in bread and wine. The Reform in Poland was now at its crest.

The situation was complicated by the development, in Poland, of the strongest Unitarian movement in sixteenth-century Europe. As early as 1546 the antitrinitarian tentatives of Servetus were discussed in this Far East of Latin Christianity. Laelius Socinus visited Poland in 1551, and left a ferment of radical ideas; Giorgio Blandrata continued the campaign; and in 1561 the new group issued its confession of faith. Continuing the confusion of Servetus’s theology, they restricted full divinity to God the Father, but professed belief in the supernatural birth of Christ, His divine inspiration, miracles, resurrection, and ascension. They rejected the ideas of original sin and Christ’s atonement; they admitted baptism and communion as symbols only; and they taught that salvation depended above all upon a conscientious practice of Christ’s teachings. When the Calvinist synod of Cracow (1563) condemned these doctrines, the Unitarians formed their own separate church. The full flourishing of the sect came only with Laelius’s nephew Faustus Socinus, who reached Poland in 1579.

The Catholic Church fought these developments with persecution, literature, and diplomacy. In 1539 the bishop of Cracow sent to the stake an eighty-year-old woman on the charge that she refused to worship the consecrated Host.⁹ Stanislaus Hosius, Bishop of Kulm in Prussia, later Cardinal, carried on the counteroffensive with ability and zeal. He labored for ecclesiastical reform, but had no sympathy with Protestant theology or ritual. At his suggestion Lodovico Lippomano, Bishop of Verona, was sent to Poland as papal legate, and Giovanni Commendone, Bishop of Zante, was made papal nuncio at Cracow. They won Sigismund II to active support of the Church by stressing the divisions among the Protestants, and magnifying the difficulty of organizing the moral life of the nation on such inimical and fluctuating creeds. In 1564 Hosius and Commendone brought the Jesuits into Poland. These trained and devoted men secured strategic places in the educational system, caught the ear of pivotal personalities, and turned the Polish people back to the traditional faith.

The Bohemians had been Protestants before Luther, and found little to terrify them in his ideas. A large German element on the border readily accepted the Reform; the Bohemian Brethren, numbering some 10 per cent of the 400,000 population, were more Protestant than Luther; 60 per cent were Utraquists—Catholics who took the Eucharist in wine as well as bread, and ignored the protests of the popes.¹⁰ By 1560 Bohemia was two thirds Protestant; but in 1561 Ferdinand introduced the Jesuits, and the tide turned back to the orthodox Catholic creed.

The Reformation came to Hungary through German immigrants bearing the news of Luther—that one could defy the Church and the Empire and yet live. Hungarian peasants oppressed by a Church-supported feudalism viewed with some favor a Protestantism that might end ecclesiastical tithes and dues; feudal barons looked with grasping eyes upon vast Church properties whose products competed with their own; town laborers, infected with Utopia, saw in the Church the chief obstacle to their dream, and indulged in image-breaking ecstasies. The Church co-operated by persuading the government to make Protestantism a capital crime. In western Hungary King Ferdinand labored for a compromise, and wished to allow clerical marriage and communion in both forms. In eastern Hungary Protestantism spread freely under a Turkish rule scornfully indifferent to varieties of Christian belief. By 1550 it seemed that all Hungary would become Protestant. But Calvinism began then to compete with Lutheranism in Hungary; the Magyars, constitutionally anti-German, supported the Swiss style of Reform; and by 1558 the Calvinists were numerous enough to hold an impressive synod at Czenger. The rival focuses of reform tore the movement in two. Many officials or converts, seeking social stability or mental peace, returned to Catholicism; and in the seventeenth century the Jesuits, led by the son of a Calvinist, restored Hungary to the Catholic fold.

V. CHARLES V AND THE NETHERLANDS

In the Flanders of Charles’s maturity a thriving commerce was more than making up for sporadic industrial decline. Bruges and Ghent were depressed, but Brussels survived by being the Flemish capital, Louvain was brewing theology and beer, and Antwerp was becoming—would be by 1550—the richest, busiest city in Europe. To that hectic port on the broad and navigable Scheldt international trade and finance were drawn by low import and export dues, by the political connection with Spain, and by a bourse dedicated, its inscription said, ad usum mercatorum cuiusque gentis ac linguae—“to the use of merchants of every land and tongue.” ¹¹ Business enterprise was here free from the guild restrictions and municipal protectionism that had kept medieval industry happily unprogressive. Here Italian bankers opened agencies, English “merchant adventurers” established a depot, the Fuggers centered their commercial activities, the Hanse built its lordly House of the Easterlings (1564). The harbor saw 500 ships enter or leave on any day, and 5,000 traders trafficked on the exchange. A bill on Antwerp was now the commonest form of international currency. In this period Antwerp gradually replaced Lisbon as the chief European port for the spice trade; cargoes sailing into Lisbon were bought afloat by Flemish agents there, and were sailed directly to Antwerp for distribution through northern Europe. “I was sad at the sight of Antwerp,” wrote a Venetian ambassador, “for I saw Venice surpassed”;¹² he was witnessing the historic transfer of commercial hegemony from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic. Spurred on by this commerce, Flemish industry revived, even in Ghent; and the Lowlands provided Charles V with 1,500,000 livres ($ 37,500,000?) a year, half his total revenue.¹³

He responded by giving Flanders and Holland reasonably good government except in religious liberty—a boon hardly conceived by his friends or his foes. His authority was constitutionally limited by his sworn pledge to observe the charters and local laws of the cities and provinces; by personal and domiciliary rights stoutly maintained by the burghers; by councils of state and finance, and a court of appeal, established as part of the central administration. Generally Charles ruled the Netherlands by indirection, through regents acceptable to the citizens: first his aunt, nurse, and tutor, Margaret of Austria, then his sister Mary, ex-queen of Hungary, both women of competence, humanity, and tact. But Charles became more imperious with more Empire. He stationed Spanish garrisons in the proud cities, and suppressed with severity any serious contravention of his international policies. When Ghent refused to vote the military funds demanded by him and granted by the other cities, Charles put down the revolt by a show of indisputable force, exacted the subsidy and an indemnity, abolished the traditional liberties of the municipality, and substituted Imperial appointees for the locally chosen government (1540).¹⁴ But this was hardly typical. Despite such occasional harshness Charles remained popular with his Lowland subjects; he received credit for the political stability and social order that supported the economic prosperity; and when he announced his abdication nearly all citizens mourned.¹⁵

Accepting the current theory that national peace and strength required unity of religious belief, and fearing that Protestantism in the Netherlands would endanger his flank in his strife with France and Lutheran Germany, Charles fully supported the Church in prosecuting heresy in Flanders and Holland. The reform movement there was mild before Luther; after 1517 it entered as Lutheranism and Anabaptism from Germany, as Zwinglianism and Calvinism from Switzerland, Alsace, and France. Luther’s writings were soon translated into Dutch, and were expounded by ardent preachers in Antwerp, Ghent, Dordrecht, Utrecht, Zwolle, and The Hague. Dominican friars led a vivacious rebuttal; one said he wished he could fasten his teeth on Luther’s throat, and would not hesitate to go to the Lord’s Supper with that blood on his mouth.¹⁶ The Emperor, still young, thought to stop the agitation by publishing (1521), at the Pope’s request, a “placard” forbidding the printing or reading of Luther’s works. In the same year he ordered the secular courts to enforce throughout the Netherlands the Edict of Worms against all proponents of Lutheran ideas. On July 1, 1523, Henry Voes and Johann Eck, two Augustinian friars, were sent to the stake at Brussels as the first Protestant martyrs in the Lowlands. Henry of Zutphen, friend and pupil of Luther’s, and prior of the Augustinian monastery at Antwerp, was imprisoned, escaped, was caught in Holstein, and was there burned (1524). These executions advertised the Reformers’ ideas.

Despite censorship Luther’s translation of the New Testament was widely circulated, more fervently in Holland than in rich Flanders. A longing for the restoration of Christianity to its pristine simplicity generated a millenarian hope for the early return of Christ and the establishment of a New Jerusalem in which there would be no government, no marriage, and no property; and with these notions were mingled communistic theories of equality, mutual aid, and even “free love.” ¹⁷ Anabaptist groups formed at Antwerp, Maastricht, and Amsterdam. Melchior Hofmann came from Emden to Amsterdam in 1531, and in 1534 John of Leyden returned the visit by carrying the Anabaptist creed from Haarlem to Münster. In some Dutch towns it was estimated that two thirds of the population were Anabaptists; in Deventer even the burgomaster was converted to the cause. Fanned by famine, the movement became a social revolt. “In these provinces,” wrote a friend to Erasmus in 1534, “we are made extremely anxious by the Anabaptist conflagration, for it is mounting up like flames. There is hardly a spot or town where the torch of insurrection does not secretly glow.” ¹⁸ Mary of Hungary, then Regent, warned the Emperor that the rebels planned to plunder all forms of property among the nobility, clergy, and mercantile aristocracy, and to distribute the spoils to every man according to his need.¹⁹ In 1535 John of Leyden sent emissaries to arrange a simultaneous uprising of Anabaptists at several Dutch centers. The rebels made heroic efforts; one group captured and fortified a monastery in West Friesland; the governor besieged them with heavy artillery; 800 died in a hopeless defense (1535). On May 11 some armed Anabaptists stormed and captured the city hall of Amsterdam; the burghers dislodged them, and wreaked uoon the leaders the frightful vengeance of frightened men: tongues and hearts were torn from living bodies and flung into the faces of the dying or dead.²⁰

Thinking the whole social structure challenged by a communistic revolution, Charles imported the Inquisition into the Netherlands, and gave its officials power to stamp out the movement, and all other heresies, at whatever cost to local liberties. Between 1521 and 1555 he issued placard after placard against social or religious dissent. The most violent of these (September 25, 1550) revealed the deterioration of the Emperor, and laid the foundations for the revolt of the Netherlands against his son.

In addition, any person entering the Low Countries was required to sign a pledge of loyalty to the full orthodox creed.²²

Through these desperate edicts the Netherlands were made a major battleground between the old and the new forms of Christianity. The Venetian ambassador at Charles’s court estimated in 1546 that 30,000 persons, nearly all Anabaptists, perished in this prolonged Imperial pogrom;²³ a less excited estimate reduced the victims to 1,000.²⁴ So far as the Dutch Anabaptists were concerned, the Caroline Inquisition succeeded; a remnant survived in Holland by adopting non-resistance; some fled to England, where they became active supporters of Protestantism under Edward VI and Elizabeth. The communistic movement in the Netherlands collapsed, frightened by prosecution and stifled by prosperity.

But as the Anabaptists wave subsided, a stream of hunted Huguenots poured into the Lowlands from France, bringing the gospel of Calvin. The stern and theocratic fervor of the new heresy appealed to those who inherited the traditions of the mystics and the Brethren of the Common Life; and the Calvinist acceptance of work as a dignity instead of a curse, of wealth as a blessing instead of a crime, of republican institutions as more responsive than monarchy to the political ambitions of the business class, contained ingredients diversely welcome to many elements in the population. By 1555 there were Calvinist congregations in Ypres, Tournai, Valenciennes, Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp, and the movement was spreading into Holland. It was with Calvinism, not Lutheranism or Anabaptism, that Charles’s son would be locked, through a bitter generation, in the conflict that would break the Netherlands in two, liberate Holland from the Spanish domination, and make her one of the major homes and havens of the modern mind.

In 1555 Charles V put aside all dreams except that of dying in sanctity. He relinquished his hope of either suppressing Protestantism in Germany and the Netherlands, or reconciling it with Catholicism at the Council of Trent. He abandoned his aspiration to lead Protestants and Catholics, Germans and French, in a magnificent march against Suleiman, Constantinople, and the Turkish threat to Christendom. His excesses in eating, drinking, and sex, his exhausting campaigns, the burdens of an office that bore the brunt of revolutionary change, had ruined his body, dulled his statesmanship, and broken his will. Suffering from ulcers at thirty-three, old at thirty-five, afflicted at forty-five with gout, asthma, indigestion, and stammering, he was now half his waking time in pain, and found it hard to sleep; often his difficulty in breathing kept him sitting upright all the night through. His fingers were so distorted with arthritis that he could hardly grasp the pen with which he signed the Peace of Crépy. When Coligny presented a letter from Henry II, Charles could hardly open it. “What think you of me, Sir Admiral?” he asked. “Am I not a fine knight to charge and break a lance, I who can only open a letter after so much trouble?” ²⁵ Perhaps his occasional cruelty, and something of the savagery with which he attacked Protestantism in the Netherlands, came from the exhaustion of his patience by his pains. He ordered the amputation of the feet of captured German mercenaries who had fought for France, though his son, the future inexorable Philip II, begged mercy for them.²⁶ He had mourned long and bitterly the death of his beloved wife Isabella (1539); but in time he allowed helpless maidens to be brought to his bed.²⁷

In the fall of 1555 he called a meeting of the States-General of the Netherlands for October 25, and summoned Philip to it from England. In the great tapestried hall of the dukes of Brabant at Brussels, where the Knights of the Golden Fleece were wont to hold their assemblies, the deputies, nobles, and magistrates of the seventeen provinces gathered within a guard of armed soldiery. Charles entered leaning on the shoulder of his son’s future enemy, William of Orange. Philip followed with the Regent Mary of Hungary; then Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy, and the Emperor’s councilors, and the Knights of the Fleece, and many other notables around whom the world once turned before forgetting them. When all had been seated Philibert rose and explained, too lengthily and vividly for Charles’s enjoyment, the medical, mental, and political reasons why the Emperor wished to abdicate his rule in the Netherlands to his son. Then Charles himself stood up, leaning again on the tall and handsome Prince of Orange, and spoke simply and to the point. He summarized his rise to successively wider powers, and the absorption of his life in government. He recalled that he had visited Germany nine times, Spain six, Italy seven, France four, England and Africa twice, and had made eleven voyages by sea. He continued:

When Charles sank painfully into his chair the audience forgot his sins, his persecutions, and his defeats in pity for a man who for forty years had labored according to his lights under the heaviest obligations of the time. Many auditors wept. Philip was formally installed as ruler of the Netherlands, and took a solemn oath (as he would be later reminded) to observe all the laws and traditional rights of the provinces. Early in 1556 Charles surrendered to him the crown of Spain, with all its possessions in the Old World and the New. Charles reserved the Imperial title, hoping to transmit that too to his son; but Ferdinand protested, and in 1558 the Emperor resigned it to his brother. On September 17,1556, Charles sailed from Flushing to Spain.

VI. SPAIN: 1516–58

1. The Revolt of the Comuneros: 1520–22

It was a questionable boon for Spain that her King Charles I (1516–56) became the Emperor Charles V (1519–58). Born and reared in Flanders, he acquired Flemish ways and tastes, until in his final years the spirit of Spain conquered him. The King could be only a small part of the Emperor who had his hands full with the Reformation, the papacy, Suleiman, Barbarossa, and Francis I; the Spaniards complained that he gave them so little of his time and spent so much of their human and material resources on campaigns apparently foreign to Spanish interests. And how could an emperor sympathize with the communal institutions that had made Spain half a democracy before the coming of Ferdinand the Catholic, and that she so longed to restore?

Charles’s first visit to his kingdom (1517) earned him no love. Though king for twenty months past, he still knew no Spanish. His curt dismissal of the devoted Ximenes shocked Spanish courtesy. He came surrounded by Flemings who thought Spain a barbarous country waiting to be milked; and the seventeen-year-old monarch appointed these leeches to the highest posts. The various provincial Cortes, dominated by the hidalgos or lower nobility, did not conceal their reluctance to accept so alien a king. The Cortes of Castile refused him the title, then grudgingly recognized him as co-ruler with his demented mother Juana; and it let him understand that he must learn Spanish, live in Spain, and name no more foreigners to office. Other Cortes laid down similar demands. Amid these humiliations Charles received the news that he had been elected emperor, and that Germany was summoning him to show himself and be crowned. When he asked the Cortes at Valladolid (then the capital) to finance the trip, he was rebuffed, and a public tumult threatened his life. Finally he secured the money from the Cortes of Corunna, and hurried off to Flanders. To make matters trebly perilous he sent corregidores to protect his interests in the cities, and left his former tutor, Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, as regent of Spain.

Now one after another of the Spanish municipalities rose in the “Revolt of the Comuneros” or commune members. They expelled the corregidores, murdered a few of the delegates who had voted funds to Charles, and leagued themselves in a Santa Comunidad pledged to control the King. Nobles, ecclesiastics, and burghers alike joined the movement, and organized at Ávila (August 1520) the Santa Junta, or Holy Union, as a central government. They demanded that the Cortes should share with the royal council in choosing the regent, that no war should be made without the consent of the Cortes, and that the town should be ruled not by corregidores but by alcaldes or mayors chosen by the citizens.²⁹ Antonio de Acuña, Bishop of Zamora, openly advocated a republic, turned his clergy into revolutionary warriors, and gave the resources of his diocese to the revolt. Juan de Padilla, a Toledo noble, was made commander of the rebel forces. He led them to the capture of Tordesillas, took Juana la Loca as a hostage, and urged her to sign a document deposing Charles and naming herself queen. Wise in her madness, she refused.

Adrian, having no soldiery strong enough to suppress the uprising, appealed to Charles to return, and frankly blamed the revolt on the King’s arbitrary and absentee government. Charles did not come, but either he or his councilors found a way to divide and conquer. The nobles were warned that the rebellion was a threat to the propertied classes as well as to the Crown. And indeed the working classes, long oppressed with fixed wages, forced labor, and prohibition of unions, had already seized power in several towns. In Valencia and its neighborhood a Germania or Brotherhood of guildsmen took the reins, and ruled the committees of workingmen. This proletarian dictatorship was unusually pious; it imposed upon the thousands of Moors who still remained in the province the choice of baptism or death; hundreds of the obstinate were killed.³⁰ In Majorca the commons, whose masters had treated them as slaves, rose in arms, deposed the royal governor, and slew every noble who could not elude them. Many towns renounced their feudal ties and dues. In Madrid, Sigüenza, and Guadalajara the new municipal administration excluded all nobles and gentry from office; here and there aristocrats were slain; and the Junta assessed for taxation noble properties formerly exempt. Pillage became general; commoners burned the palaces of nobles, nobles massacred commoners. Class war spread through Spain

The revolt destroyed itself by extending its aims beyond its powers. The nobles turned against it, raised their own forces, co-operated with those of the King, captured Valencia, and overthrew the proletarian government after days of mutual slaughter (1521). At the height of the crisis the rebel army divided into rival groups under Padilla and Don Pedro Girón; the Junta also split into hostile factions; and each province carried on its revolution without co-ordination with the rest. Girón went over to the royalists, who recaptured Tordesillas and Juana. Padilla’s dwindling army was routed at Villalar, and he was put to death. When Charles returned to Spain (July 1522) with 4,000 German troops, victory had already been won by the nobles, and nobles and commoners had so weakened each other that he was able to subdue the municipalities and the guilds, tame the Cortes, and establish an almost absolute monarchy. The democratic movement was so completely suppressed that the Spanish commons remained cowed and obedient till the nineteenth century. Charles tempered his power with courtesy, surrounded himself with grandees, and learned to talk good Spanish; Spain was pleased when he remarked that Italian was the proper language to use to women, German to enemies, French to friends, Spanish to God.³¹

2. The Spanish Protestants

Only one power could now challenge Charles in Spain—the Church. He was pro-Catholic but anti-papal. Like Ferdinand the Catholic he sought to make the Spanish Church independent of the popes, and he so far succeeded that during his rule ecclesiastical appointments and revenues were in his control, and were used to promote governmental policies. In Spain, as in France, no Reformation was needed to subordinate the Church to the state. Nonetheless, during the half of his reign that Charles spent in his kingdom, the fervor of Spanish orthodoxy so worked upon him that in his later years nothing (except the power of the Hapsburgs) seemed more important to him than the suppression of heresy. While the popes tried to moderate the Inquisition, Charles supported it till his death. He was convinced that heresy in the Netherlands was leading to chaos and civil war, and was resolved to circumvent such a development in Spain.

The Spanish Inquisition abated its fury, but extended its jurisdiction, under Charles. It undertook the censorship of literature, had every bookstore ‘arched, and ordered bonfires of books charged with heresy.³² It investiated and punished sexual perversions. It instituted rules of limpieza (purity of blood), which closed all avenues of distinction to descendants of Conversos and to all who had ever been penanced by the tribunal. It looked upon mystics with a stern eye, for some of these claimed that their direct intercourse with God exempted them from attending church, and others gave their mystical ecstasies a suspiciously sexual flavor. The lay preacher Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz announced that coitus was really union with God; and Friar Francisco Ortiz explained that when he lay with a pretty fellow mystic —even when he embraced her naked body—it was not a carnal sin but a spiritual delight.³³ The Inquisition dealt leniently with these Alumbrados (Enlightened Ones), and kept its severest measures for the Protestants of Spain.

As in northern Europe, an Erasmian skirmish preceded the Protestant battle. A few liberal churchmen applauded the humanist’s strictures on the faults of the clergy; but Ximenes and others had already reformed the more palpable abuses before the coming of Charles. Perhaps Lutheranism had seeped into Spain with Germans and Flemings in the royal entourage. A German was condemned by the Inquisition at Valencia in 1524 for avowing Lutheran sympathies; a Flemish painter was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1528 for questioning purgatory and indulgences. Francisco de San Roman, the first-known Spanish Lutheran, was burned at the stake in 1542, while fervent onlookers pierced him with their swords. Juan Díaz of Cuenca imbibed Calvinism at Geneva; his brother Alfonso rushed up from Italy to reconvert him to orthodoxy; failing, Alfonso had him killed (1546).³⁴ At Seville a learned canon of the cathedral, Juan Gil or Egidio, was imprisoned for a year for preaching against image worship, prayer to the saints, and the efficacy of good works in earning salvation; after his death his bones were exhumed and burned. His fellow canon, Constantino Ponce de la Fuente, continued his propaganda, and died in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Fourteen of Constantino’s followers were burned, including four friars and three women; a large number were sentenced to diverse penalties; and the house in which they had met was razed to the ground.

Another semi-Protestant group developed in Valladolid; and here influential nobles and high ecclesiastics were involved. They were betrayed to the Inquisition; nearly all were arrested and condemned; some, trying to leave Spain, were caught and brought back. Charles V, then in retirement at Yuste, recommended that no mercy be shown them, that the repentant should be beheaded, and the unrepentant burned. On Trinity Sunday, May 21, 1559, fourteen of the condemned were executed before a cheering crowd.³⁵ All but one recanted, and were let off with beheading; Antonio de Herrezuelo, impenitent, was burned alive. His twenty-three-year-old wife, Leonor de Cisneros, repentant, was allowed life imprisonment. After ten years of confinement she retracted her recantation, proclaimed her heresy, and asked to be burned alive like her husband; her request was granted.³⁶ Twenty-six more of the accused were displayed in an auto-da-fé on October 8, 1559, before a crowd of 200,000, presided over by Philip II. Two victims were burned alive, ten were strangled.

The most famous prey of the Inquisition in this period was Bartolomé de Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain. As a Dominican friar he was active for many years in hounding heretics. Charles appointed him envoy to the Council of Trent, and sent him to England to attend the marriage of Philip and Queen Mary. When he was elected archbishop (1557) only his own vote kept the choice from being unanimous. But some of the “Protestants” arrested at Valladolid testified that Carranza had secretly sympathized with their views; he was found to have corresponded with the Spanish Italian reformer Juan de Valdés; and the influential theologian Melchior Cano accused him of upholding the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith. He was arrested only two years after his elevation to the highest ecclesiastical dignity in Spain; we may judge from this the power of the Spanish Inquisition. For seventeen years he was kept in one prison or another while his life and writings were subjected to scrutiny at Toledo and Rome. Gregory XIII proclaimed him “vehemently suspected” of heresy, ordered him to abjure sixteen propositions, and suspended him for five years from the exercise of his office. Carranza accepted the sentence humbly, and tried to perform the penances assigned to him; but within five weeks, exhausted by imprisonment and humiliation, he died (1576).

With him ended all danger of Protestantism in Spain. Between 1551 and 1600 there were some 200 executions there for Protestant heresies—i.e., four per year. The temper of the people, formed by centuries of hatred for Moors and Jews, had congealed into an unshakable orthodoxy; Catholicism and patriotism had merged; and the Inquisition found it a simple matter to stamp out in a generation or two the passing Spanish adventure with independent thought.

3. The Emperor Passes: 1556–58

On September 28, .1556, Charles V made his final entry into Spain. At Burgos he dismissed with rewards most of those who had attended him, and took leave of his sisters, Mary of Hungary and Eleonora, widow of Francis I. They wished to share his monastic retreat, but the rules forbade it, and they took up their residence not too far from this brother whom they alone now seemed to love. After suffering many ceremonies en route, he reached the village of Juandilla in the valley of Plasencia, some 120 miles west of Madrid. There he tarried several months while workmen completed and furnished the accommodations that he had ordered in the monastery of Yuste (St. Justus), six miles away. When he made the last stage of his journey (February 3, 1557) it was not to a monastic cell but to a mansion spacious enough to house the more intimate of his fifty servitors. The monks rejoiced to have so distinguished a guest, but were chagrined to find that he had no intention of sharing their regimen. He ate and drank as abundantly as before—i.e., excessively. Sardine omelets, Estremadura sausages, eel pies, pickled partridges, fat capons, and rivers of wine and beer disappeared into the Imperial paunch; and his physicians were obliged to prescribe large quantities of senna and rhubarb to carry off the surplusage.

Instead of reciting rosaries, litanies, and psalms, Charles read or dictated dispatches from or to his son, and offered him advice on every aspect of war, theology, and government. In his final year he became a merciless bigot; he recommended ferocious penalties to “cut out the root” of heresy, and he regretted that he had allowed Luther to escape him at Worms. He ordered that a hundred lashes should be laid upon any woman who should approach within two bowshots of the monastery walls.³⁷ He revised his will to provide that 30,000 Masses should be said for the repose of his soul. We should not judge him from those senile days; some taint of insanity may have come down to him with his mother’s blood.

In August 1558, his gout developed into a burning fever. This returned intermittently, and with rising intensity. For a month he was racked with all the pains of death before he was allowed to die (September 21, 1558). In 1574 Philip had the remains removed to the Escorial, where they lie under a stately monument.

Charles V was the most impressive failure of his age, and even his virtues were sometimes unfortunate for mankind. He gave peace to Italy, but only after a decade of devastation, and by subjecting it and the papacy to Spain; and the Italian Renaissance withered under that somber mastery. He defeated and captured Francis, but he lost at Madrid a royal opportunity to make with him a treaty that could have saved all faces and a hundred thousand lives. He helped to turn back Suleiman at Vienna, and checked Barbarossa in the Mediterranean. He strengthened the Hapsburgs but weakened the Empire; he lost Lorraine and surrendered Burgundy. The princes of Germany frustrated his attempt to centralize authority there, and from his time the Holy Roman Empire was a decaying tissue waiting for Napoleon to pronounce it dead. He failed in his efforts to crush Protestantism in Germany, and his method of repressing it in the Netherlands left a tragic legacy to his son. He had found the German cities flourishing and free; he left them ailing under a reactionary feudalism. When he came to Germany it was alive with ideas and energy beyond any other nation in Europe; when he abdicated it was spiritually and intellectually exhausted, and would lie fallow for two centuries. In Germany and Italy his policies were a minor cause of decline, but in Spain it was chiefly his action that crushed municipal liberty and vigor. He might have saved England for the Church by persuading Catherine to yield to Henry’s need for an heir; instead he forced Clement into a ruinous vacillation.

And yet it is our hindsight that sees his mistakes and their enormity; our historical sense can condone them as rooted in the limitations of his mental environment and in the harsh delusions of the age. He was the ablest statesman among his contemporaries, but only in the sense that he dealt courageously with the profoundest issues in their widest range. He was a great man dwarfed and shattered by the problems of his time.

Two fundamental movements pervaded his long reign. The most fundamental was the growth of nationalism under centralized monarchies; in this he did not share. The most dramatic was a religious revolution rising out of national and territorial divisions and interests. Northern Germany and Scandinavia accepted Lutheranism; southern Germany, Switzerland, and the Lowlands divided into Protestant and Catholic sections; Scotland became Calvinist Presbyterian, England became Anglican Catholic or Calvinist Puritan. Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal remained loyal to a distant or chastened papacy. Yet amid that double fragmentation a subtle integration grew: the proudly independent states found themselves interdependent as never before, increasingly bound in one economic web, and forming a vast theater of interrelated politics, wars, law, literature, and art. The Europe that our youth knew was taking form.