22 The Counter–Reformation

The Reformation delivered a profound shock to the Roman Catholic Church, one that induced it to reform and reinvigorate itself. Now the Church Militant went on the offensive, purging itself of abuses, laxity and ill-educated clergy, and sending forth its soldiers, both spiritual and temporal, to strike down the heretical schismatics who had raised their banner against the authority of the pope in Rome.

It was to be a bloody business, marked by merciless zealotry on all sides, while increasingly complicated by secular politics and international realpolitik. The conflict between Protestants and Catholics culminated in the horrendous blood-letting that was the Thirty Years’ War, which devastated much of central Europe. By the end of that war, the struggle was not so much between Protestants and Catholics, but between the rising (Catholic) power of France, and the fading (Catholic) power of the Habsburgs, rulers of Spain, Austria and the Holy Roman empire, which then comprised most of Germany.

Catholic renewal The rapid spread of the reformist teachings of Luther and Calvin across Europe threatened the very existence of the Roman Catholic Church. While on the pope’s behalf the Holy Roman emperor Charles V fought the German Protestant princes, the church, realizing how far it had fallen from its own high standards, sought to renew itself. The main agent of reform within the Catholic Church was the Council of Trent, a body that met in three sessions between 1541 and 1563 in the northern Italian town of Trento, conveniently close to the linguistic border between Italian- and German-speaking Europe. The Council issued numerous decrees regarding both doctrine and practice, and put in place measures to ensure that all priests were properly educated—not to mention celibate. A tighter rein was applied to the existing religious orders, whose moral slackness had given the reformers considerable ammunition. A number of new orders, both lay and monastic, were also established.

“In the invocation of the saints, the veneration of relics and the sacred use of images, all superstition shall be removed, all filthy quest for gain eliminated, and all lasciviousness avoided … ”

Decree of the twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent, 3–December 4, 1563

Most notable of the new orders was the Society of Jesus, whose members, the Jesuits, swore vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. This highly disciplined and effective body was founded in 1534 by a former Spanish soldier, Ignatius Loyola. Their task, in Loyola’s words, was to “fight for God under the banner of the cross” and to “advance souls in Christian life and doctrine and to propagate the faith by the ministry of the word, by spiritual exercises, by works of charity and expressly by the instruction of children and unlettered persons in Christian principles.” The Society became one of the most powerful institutions in Catholic Europe, and was the leading Catholic missionary body elsewhere in the world.

In 1542 the Holy See established the Holy Office—the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. This had responsibility for enforcing Catholic doctrine, and was possessed of inquisitorial powers over all Catholics. In a number of countries Inquisitions already existed, and in others one was introduced. The Spanish Inquisition had been active against Jewish converts suspected of backsliding since 1478, and with the Reformation worked to snuff out Protestantism throughout the Spanish empire (which then included the Netherlands). These bodies tried suspected heretics in ecclesiastical courts, then handed them over to the secular authorities for punishment, “not … for the correction and good of the person punished,” according to a 1578 manual for inquisitors, “but for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit.” Those found guilty of heresy were burned alive, usually in a great public spectacle called an auto-da-fé—meaning “act of faith.” Between 1575 and 1610, in just one Spanish city, Toledo, 366 people suffered this fate. Thousands more shared their fate elsewhere.

The Index

In 1559, aware of the effect that print had had in spreading the teachings of the Protestant reformers, the pope introduced an “Index” of books that Catholics were forbidden to read, prompting many to scour their shelves anxiously for anything not authorized. One scholar in Rome described it as “a holocaust of literature.” It was also damaging to scientific advance: for example, Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, in which he concluded that the Earth orbits the Sun and not vice versa, remained on the Index until 1835.

Europe polarized As at other times, when opposing religious certainties clash, violence ensues. The son of Emperor Charles V, Philip II of Spain, although anxious to limit the power of the church in his own realms, emerged as the most zealous champion of Catholic Europe. His attempt to extirpate Protestant heresy in the Spanish Netherlands contributed to the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt in 1567. English support for the Dutch rebels prompted Philip to send the Spanish Armada against England in 1588, but this ended in ignominious failure. Philip also intervened in the French Wars of Religion (1562–98), in which the French Huguenots (Calvinists) fought for freedom of worship while Catholic and Protestant nobles vied for control of the crown. The worst excess occurred in 1572, when some 13,000 Protestants were killed in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The war ended in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes, by which the Huguenots were granted religious freedom.

“It was for me the best and most cheerful news which could come to me.”

Philip II of Spain, August 1572, on hearing of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of French Protestants

The Thirty Years’ War Although France had for the time being resolved its internal religious differences, Europe soon became embroiled in a wider religious conflict, the Thirty Years’ War. This was in fact a complex mix of conflicts, starting with a revolt within the Holy Roman empire by Protestant Bohemians against the imperial rule of the Austrian Habsburgs. Although the revolt was crushed, in 1620 the Spanish Habsburgs intervened against the Protestant princes in Germany, and were joined in this anti-Protestant crusade by the Emperor Ferdinand II. Alarmed at this development, Gustavus Adolphus, the powerful king of Protestant Sweden, intervened in 1630 and scored a number of victories until he was killed at the Battle of Lützen in 1632. Three years later, France joined in on the side of the German Protestants. The war from now on was more political than religious: France itself was a Catholic power, but it had been an enemy of the Habsburgs since the early 16th century, and now saw that its own place in Europe depended on containing the power of Spain and the empire. The war dragged on until 1648, when the Peace of Westphalia gave recognition to Dutch independence, and fixed the religious map of Europe in more or less its present form.

It was at a terrible cost: in Germany alone, through war and its constant companions, pestilence and famine, some 7 million men, women and children—some two-thirds of the population—had lost their lives. It was a reverse from which Germany took many generations to recover.

the condensed idea

The religious map of Europe was only fixed after a century of violent conflict