HIST 100: Part 6

Reformations

Dr. Mack Holt

Introduction

The last lecture focused on the new learning of Renaissance humanism, and how scholars and artists both challenged and built upon the foundations of medieval ways of thought and expression established in the Middle Ages. Hello, I am Dr. Mack Holt, and in this lecture we will investigate further efforts to challenge or reform some of the medieval ideals and institutions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Efforts were made in this period to transform and revise a variety of  different spheres of life—religion,  politics, society, and even geography. And though not all of these reformations were successful, there is no question that the Western world by 1700 was already beginning to experience a dramatic transformation, from a hierarchical and corporate society into a more egalitarian and individualistic society.

Today we shall focus on a variety of attempts to change and transform the Western world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While we traditionally associate the term “reformation” with the religious changes of this period, there were serious attempts to reform many other aspects of life as well. Although not all these reformations proved to be successful by the end of the seventeenth century, there is no doubt that the period from roughly 1500 to 1700 was a period of continued transition in the evolution of the Western civilization. Over the next hour or so I shall be discussing with you four principal changes or reformations that were attempted during this period. The most well known is in the sphere of religion.  There was not just one Protestant reformation, of course, but many, as dozens of separate groups broke away from the medieval church. There was also a significant Catholic Reformation as well. And all these religious reformations, both Protestant and Catholic alike,  sought not only to reform a number of abuses that had crept into the medieval church, but they also wanted to reform society as well. The second major reformation we shall investigate is in the sphere of politics, as medieval notions of the state came under serious challenge, accompanied by a whole range of new political ideas. Although many of these new ideas failed to displace the older medieval precepts of divinely ordained monarchy by 1700, the process of state-building with stronger central governments that was begun in the late medieval period certainly continued, with Louis XIV’s France serving as a model for rulers and princes all over Europe. Third, we shall look at some of the scattered but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to challenge the social hierarchy in this period. While social and political equality were ideals that were occasionally expressed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the older medieval ideals of privilege and hierarchy stood firm in the face of these challenges. And lastly, we shall look at how the European's understanding of the geography of the world was transformed and reshaped by the voyages of overseas exploration that began in the fifteenth century. By 1700 Western civilization had been exported to other continents, and the very process of this exportation and colonization changed Europeans as much as Europeans changed the cultures in these new worlds. Thus, the Western world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed many reformations. Now let's turn to the first of these: Religion.

Religion

You are looking at a portrait of Desiderius Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist scholar, whose life straddled the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries. His generation of humanist scholars marked a  transition away from humanism’s exclusive focus on the pagan texts of classical Greece and Rome that so animated humanists in Renaissance Italy. Instead, in northern Europe by the late 1400s scholars such as Erasmus focused their humanist education and knowledge of Latin and Greek on the Bible and writings of early Christianity. In the process, the scholarship of these northern humanists came to challenge not only the text of the Bible itself, but some of the very foundations of Christian doctrine. In his scholarly edition of the New Testament published in 1516, Erasmus  published a Greek text—the original language in which the New Testament books were recorded—based on the oldest Greek manuscripts available in Europe. He accompanied this Greek text with a new Latin translation of his own. He discovered that there were a number of verses in the early Greek manuscripts that were left out of the official Latin translation of the Scriptures made by St. Jerome a thousand years before in the early Middle Ages. Moreover, Erasmus also saw that there were several verses in St. Jerome's Vulgate text that were not in any of the early manuscripts he consulted. More problematic were a number of mis-translations Erasmus discovered. While most of these did not seem significant, one certainly did. Erasmus felt St. Jerome had simply made a grammatical error in his translation of Matthew 4:17: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. St. Jerome had given one form of the verb- to repent- in Latin, which most nearly meant "do penance." Erasmus felt strongly that the original Greek should be translated with a different form of the same verb, whose meaning was closer to "be penitent," which means that you were aware of and sorry for your sin but did not necessarily have to make a public confession and act of penance for it. Was this just grammatical nit-picking? Not really, since this very Scriptural passage was the foundation for one of the seven sacraments of the Christian church, the sacrament of penance, requiring the contrition, confession, and absolution of sin. The educational revolution of the humanists in Renaissance Italy had now produced a very different legacy, as scholars such as Erasmus provided further ammunition to the many critics of the medieval church. Ultimately both Protestant and Catholic reformers alike used the scholarship of Erasmus's generation of humanists  as both the springboard and foundation of religious reform movements.

Before we examine some of the goals and achievements of these reformers, let's take a closer look at Christianity on the eve of these reformations to see exactly what reformers were reacting against. Certainly there were a number of abuses in the medieval church that Christians everywhere hoped to see eliminated. You only need to glance through some of the more popular texts of the period, such as Erasmus's Praise of Folly or Rabelais's History of Gargantua and Pantagruel, to see that there were a number of  monks in religious orders who were making less than conscientious efforts to live up to their vows; that there were occasionally even Popes who had fathered illegitimate children and paraded publicly in Rome with their mistresses and concubines, the Borgia Pope Alexander VI being perhaps the most notorious; that there were some cardinals and bishops who neglected their duties entirely; and that abuses such as simony (the selling of church offices), nepotism (the appointment of one's own relatives to ecclesiastical positions), and political ambition were nearly systematic in the institutional church at various times and in certain places. But there is a whole lot more to medieval Christianity than this list of abuses, which all Christians agreed needed to be eliminated. Let's look more closely at what late medieval Christians believed and what particular religious practices they held most dear. And to help us do that, let's take a look at a couple of late medieval works of art.

Here is an altarpiece depicting the Last Judgment, painted by a Flemish artist named Rogier van der Weyden, who was commissioned by the chancellor of the Duke of Burgundy in the mid-fifteenth century to paint this altarpiece to go in a chapel in a hospital in Beaune, in central  Burgundy. The hospital was built in 1453 for victims of the plague, and this altarpiece must have made quite an impression on the patients, especially those who were near death. In the center panel you can see the figure of Christ at the top, with the sword of justice near his left hand, which is directed downward toward the damned, and the lily of mercy near his right hand, which is directed upward toward the saved in heaven. Immediately beneath him is the archangel Michael, who is holding the scales that weigh the souls at the Last Judgment. Above the scales on the left is the Latin label "Virtues," while a label on the right indicates "Sins." But why are all the souls depicted as naked by the artist? He wanted to make the very clear point that all souls were weighed equally in the sight of God, that nobles and princes had the same chance as the poorest pauper of getting into the Kingdom of Heaven. Their virtues had to outweigh their sins. If we examine the left-hand panel, at the top we see a series of historical figures associated with the life of Christ and the history of the Church. At the extreme left St. Peter, who is clearly beckoning those rewarded with salvation to enter, as the souls themselves display gratitude for their reward.

The right-hand panel, however, depicts the damned, those unfortunate souls whose sins outweighed their virtues. They are being pulled into the pits of Hell as their eternal punishment. The grotesque expressions on the faces of the damned make it very clear that they are aware of the fiery fate that awaits them. And we can only imagine what those Christians dying of the plague must have felt as they gazed upon this altarpiece in the chapel at Beaune, knowing that their own fate was still to be determined. But let's return to the center panel for a moment to take a closer look at a significant detail. You might just be able to see a faint ribbon with a Latin inscription just beneath both the sword and the lily of Christ. Late medieval Christians wouldn't have to be able to read this text to understand its meaning, as they were well aware why the damned were always placed on Christ's left and the saved on Christ's right in any depiction of the Last Judgment. In red letters on Christ's left (which is your right), the Latin inscription reads in translation: "The curse is upon you;  go from my sight to the eternal fire that is ready for the devil and his angels." This is part of a well-known passage from Matthew 25:31-46. And even more faint and difficult to see in gold letters on Christ's right (and your left) is the inscription: "You have my Father's blessing; come, enter and possess the kingdom that has been ready for you since the world was made." The complete text of this passage was very well known: "When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit in state upon his throne, with all the nations gathered before him. He will separate mankind into two groups, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right hand, "You have my Father's blessing; come, enter and possess the kingdom that has been ready for you since the world was made. For when I was hungry, you gave me food; when thirsty, you gave me drink; when I was a stranger, you took me into your home; when naked you clothed me; when I was ill you came to my help; when in prison you visited me. Then he will say to those on his left hand, "The curse is upon you;  go from my sight to the eternal fire that is ready for the devil and his angels. For when I was hungry you gave me nothing to eat; when thirsty nothing to drink; when I was a stranger you gave me no home; when naked you did not clothe me; when I was ill and in prison you did not come to my help." This message that virtually all Christians would have known so well, indeed the central message of the Last Judgment itself, was that works of Christian charity were required for admission into the kingdom of heaven. Salvation required works of charity. To reject your Christian duty and responsibility to your neighbor, no matter how pious or devout the rest of your life was, was to jeopardize your chance at salvation.

Christians on the eve of the Protestant and Catholic reformations needed more than just good works to be saved. As the other side of the scales of the archangel Michael made clear, they also had to overcome and ultimately make up for their sins. Every sin one had ever committed had to be atoned and compensated for in order to go to heaven according to medieval Christian theology. The church provided the means to do this, however, with the sacraments. If we look at another altarpiece painted by Van der Weyden, we can get a very good sense of how the seven sacraments functioned as a way for medieval Christians to atone for their sins. Here we see the interior of a typical late medieval Gothic style church with all seven sacraments being performed simultaneously. Aside from the novelty that all seven are being practiced at once, the only other novelty is the obvious crucifix in the foreground. I'll come back to the crucifix in a moment, but first let’s look closely at the left-hand panel. Here we see the beginning of the life cycle with the sacrament of baptism. The baby, the priest, and the godparents surround the baptismal fount as the sacrament washes away the stain of original sin, the imperfection all Christians were born with due to the original sins of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Slightly behind this scene is the sacrament of confirmation, when adolescents, now old enough to understand the meaning of their baptism, are formally admitted to the other sacraments of the church. One of the most essential was the sacrament of penance, visible at the back of this panel. Just in front of the wooden screen is a priest hearing the confession of a couple of parishioners, who are on their knees. Just behind the screen we can see an even larger group of  parishioners doing the same thing. The most striking thing about the scene is how public it was. There was no private confession booth or box; the community could audibly hear what was going on. Theologically there were three stages to the sacrament of penance: contrition, the state of  genuine humility and regret necessary for the sacrament to be effective; confession, the oral act of recounting to God and the priest which particular sins were committed; and satisfaction, the public act of penitence as an outward sign of transformation, which could be anything from a particular prayer or act of charity in the community assigned by the priest. The sacrament of penance was obviously the most common way any Christian could atone for any sins committed.

If we move to the right-hand panel, we see three more sacraments. At the back on the left-hand side we see the sacrament of ordination, separating and distinguishing the clergy from the laity, whereby a lay Christian was ordained into the priesthood. In the middle is the sacrament of marriage, uniting two lay Christians, as well as two families and kinship networks, together in holy matrimony. Finally, in the foreground we see the sacrament of extreme unction, or the last rites, where a dying Christian is administered a final confession and blessing just before death. Notice how social the sacraments are, as they all involve other people or groups of people. The church itself is a social space as people wandering around, even dogs, seem to be a common sight.

Finally, in the center panel we see the sacrament of the eucharist or mass. Christ's sacrifice on the cross in the foreground is being echoed in the background where a priest has just consecrated the host, the blessed bread in the shape of a communion wafer, and raised it above his head for all to see. As the blessed host literally changed substance from bread into Christ's flesh, Christians could consume the sacred body of Christ and literally put some of Jesus inside themselves. The communal act itself—and the word communion stresses the communal nature of the ritual—demonstrated for all present that they were one in the body of Christ, as well as members of one local parish community. Again, notice the beggars at the door of the church on the extreme right-hand side, and all the other parishioners standing around participating in this central Christian ritual of community. What do we learn from images such as the Last Judgment and the Seven Sacraments? Both acts of charity (the virtues in St. Michael's scales) as well as the sacraments themselves (the means of atoning for the sins on the other side of the scales) were social acts. Salvation was thus a collective experience for medieval Christians, which hinged on works of Christian charity toward one’s neighbors and towards one’s enemies, in an effort to bind together a parish community based on peace on earth .

Protestant reformers such as Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin came to challenge this entire system of collective salvation in the early sixteenth century. For them, no Christian could possible do enough good works of charity to deserve admission into the kingdom of heaven. To them, no one could earn his or her way into heaven. Based on a somewhat novel interpretation of St. Augustine's City of God, around 1520 in northern Germany Luther first expounded the idea of salvation through grace by faith alone. He was certain that only through God’s grace was anyone saved, and that no amount of good works would ever be sufficient to overcome the sins of even the most devout Christian. So, for Luther and most other Protestants, salvation was totally out of the hands of individual Christians; it was entirely in God's hands. Those who had faith were saved, but they had no means of their own of acquiring this faith. If they did, this would simply be another good work; thus, God had to give them their faith.

But to whom did God give the heavenly reward of faith? And how did He decide who received this reward? It certainly had nothing to do with how one lived one's life, according to Protestant reformers like Luther, since an act of charity performed solely to achieve one’s own salvation was a selfish act rather than a righteous act of Christian charity. Indeed, according to Luther and Calvin, God made the decision about whom to reward with salvation before they were ever born, even before the creation. Thus, some Christians were predestined to be saved and others predestined to be damned. This means that in Protestant theology the Last Judgment was now turned on its head. It was really a first judgment and had nothing to do with the scales of St. Michael, as the virtues or good works being weighed were totally irrelevant to God's mercy and judgment. Moreover, Luther’s and Calvin's ideas challenged the very foundation of the seven sacraments. If there was no real relation between virtues and sins in the Protestants' mathematics of salvation, then of what use were the sacraments, which were the means to atone for sins? And since some of the sacraments, above all the mass, functioned as a means of uniting the collective body of Christians together in a sacred community, the medieval boundaries separating the sacred and the profane within that community also came under attack. In short, Protestantism seemed to threaten the very existence of the institutional church, as well as the social bonds that held the community of Christ together.

Thus, an obvious goal of the reformers was to transform the entire process of salvation from a collective and social process dependent on the entire community to a more individual and internal process dependent on God alone. Luther and Calvin made explicit attempts to de-emphasize all those rituals and practices of Catholicism that stressed the social bonds of the community and the collective rituals of salvation in order to focus more clearly on the individual's relationship with God, unencumbered by priest or saintly intercessors. A typical piece of Lutheran propaganda used in trying to win over those still wavering between Protestantism and Catholicism was the broad-sheet called "Two Kinds of Preaching," which makes this point visually. On the right-hand side is Luther's depiction of Catholic preaching. The most noticeable aspects of the image are the church's grounding in wealth and the things of this world, represented by the large chest of money in the right-hand corner, amassed by the sale of indulgences. A religious procession is taking place in the background, as the community asserts its own collective efforts to reach the kingdom of heaven. Meanwhile, God rains down hail and brimstone on the entire scene. On the left-hand side, however, Luther himself is preaching. In marked contrast to the scene on the right, he is showing the direct way to heaven, with only the Lamb of God (Christ himself, not the church) as the connecting link between the earthly city and the heavenly city.  The members of his congregation are saved individually through God's grace, rather than communally through their own collective efforts. And instead of a largely social experience of religious practice, Luther focuses here on the intellectual experience of doctrines and the tenets of the faith.

I should stress at once that there was no clear unity among those Protestant groups that left the church in the sixteenth century. Luther organized a reformed church in Saxony, Zwingli did the same in Zurich, Calvin in Geneva, and Martin Bucer likewise in Strasbourg. And these were only the best known of the Protestant communities. They all tended to share similar ideas about salvation, such as the priesthood of all believers, meaning that there was no real difference between clergy and laity, and the primacy of Scripture as the final arbiter of any doctrinal dispute, rather than a pope or church council. These Protestant communities could not agree on many other important issues, however. While all Protestant groups denounced the Catholic mass as superstition, denying explicitly the doctrine of transubstantiation whereby the elements of bread and wine literally changed substance into Christ's flesh and blood, they were a long way from agreeing on what interpretation to put in its place. Indeed, mass, or the Lord's Supper as many Protestants called it, was so significant for its community-building attributes that disagreements over its interpretation kept the two German-speaking congregations of Luther and Zwingli from uniting, when they had agreed upon everything else

Another issue of disagreement was over how to replace the institution of the Catholic church that was being jettisoned. No Protestant reformer wanted to retain the papacy, but what about bishops and priests? Should there be a centralized national church, as some favored, or totally decentralized congregations that governed themselves? What role should the state play? Should local princes be allowed to retain their traditional roles of maintaining the social and political order, as Luther preferred? Or should the reformed church play a more active role in this sphere, as Calvin chose to do in Geneva? Luther, of course, was forever grateful to his own local prince, Frederick, Duke of Saxony, for saving him from arrest by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Wörms in 1521. He was happy to leave the enforcement of order to the state, because it had benefited him and his congregation at Wittenberg in Saxony so well. Calvin, on the other hand, had a much more checkered relationship with the Geneva City Council, which had initially spurned him and his ideas for reform. He believed the reformed church there ought to work hand in hand with the state to maintain the proper Christian order within the community. And his novel idea of the consistory, a court consisting partly of secular members appointed by the City Council and partly of lay elders appointed by the church, managed to work effectively. My point is that there was no single Protestant reformation with a capital R. There were dozens of reformations and they never united in a common cause or purpose. Many of the most radical of them, in fact, were so far outside the Protestant mainstream that even Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin denounced them. Some of the Anabaptist reformers in Germany and in the Low Countries, for example, were advocating things such as polygamy, the refusal to recognize the secular state, or even to pay taxes. Groups like these were often persecuted by Protestant and Catholic states alike, and their experience, just like Luther's experience with the Duke of Saxony,  demonstrates one of the many lessons of the Reformation era: no Protestant community managed to survive indefinitely anywhere without some form of recognition by the state at the local level. Whether it was in the form of open support and protection, like Luther received in Saxony, or just the promise of neutrality and an agreement not to persecute reformed congregations, as was the case in Strasbourg where Martin Bucer was a leading reformer, obviously the state had a great deal to do with which of these reformations managed to succeed and which did not.

The role of the state and the entire realm of the social and political order was so important to Protestant reformers, because their second major goal, after the transformation of the process of salvation, was the recreation of the kingdom of God on earth. They wanted to re-make society in God's image: without prostitution, without fornication, without drunkenness, in short, without sin. This was obviously an unreachable ideal, but all the reformers, even the most radical, recognized that if God alone controlled their ultimate fate in the next world, it was clearly their duty to re-make this world in His image insofar as they could. While not all of them would go so far as the Puritans in England to achieve this aim, it is nevertheless true that a reformation of this world was as important to the reformers as anything else on their agenda. And why was controlling illicit behavior and establishing a stricter social and moral discipline in this world so important if their fate in the next world was already decided by God? Why not just go sit under a tree and drink beer? The obvious answer that rang down from Luther's pulpit was that this was God's will and charge to humankind. Moreover, God could always still intervene and punish the wayward sinner in the earthly city, as He was prone to do from time to time. Thus, moral discipline became a watchword of all the Protestant reformations.

There was also a significant Catholic reformation that occurred in the sixteenth century, though in some ways it predated the Protestant efforts and was more than just a knee-jerk reaction to the defections of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and Bucer and their followers from the church. Catholic reform had two principal outlets. The first was a very traditional means of settling disputes or dealing with crises: the pope called a church council. And when Pope Paul III convoked the Council of Trent in 1545, he could hardly have known that in addition to rejecting the Protestant heresies, the council would, in fact, over a period of the next eighteen years, ultimately embrace the very same two goals of Protestantism: transforming the religious experience of its members from a largely communal and social experience to more of an individual and intellectual experience, as well as recreating the kingdom of heaven on earth through stricter moral discipline.    The council achieved the first of these goals through a reformation of the sacraments. All those social bonds in the sacramental practices were excised in favor of those that stressed individual salvation. For example, in the sacrament of baptism the family's kinship links were severely cut back, as godparents were limited to two in number, and the sacrament had to be performed within three days of birth, largely to prevent a longer period for more distant relatives to arrive for the celebration. All these changes were designed to refocus the sacrament on its doctrinal function: the washing away of the stain of original sin. In the sacrament of penance, the public and communal confession of sins was transformed by the confessional box into a much more individual experience, the bright idea of one of the bishops at Trent, Carlo Borromeo. In contrast to the open and public experience depicted in Van der Weyden’s altarpiece of the sacraments, here we see a more private and individualized sacrament. Even the community of saints was de-emphasized, transformed from a collective cohort that could intervene with God on one's behalf into a much tamer and less active collection of role models for Christian behavior. Thus, although their theology still centered on every individual’s free will to follow or reject God rather than on predestination, Catholic reformers also sought to transform the religious experience of its members into a more individualized and more intellectual set of ideals.

The other goal of instilling greater moral discipline in an effort to create the City of God on earth was done through two means. First, the Council of Trent gave bishops much greater authority and required much more supervisory responsibility in policing the regular clergy. The council made certain that bishops themselves met all the required conditions for appointment: age, education, theological training, etc. The episcopate (or body of bishops) in the early sixteenth century was composed nearly everywhere of some political appointees and bishops who were less than devout. By 1700, however, the reforms of the Council of Trent had transformed the episcopate into a much more disciplined and devout group, whose oversight of the clergy had made a significant difference. Thus, the first step in creating greater moral and social discipline among the laity was to do likewise among the clergy. The second major approach undertaken by the Catholic reformation was the creation of a number of new religious orders that focused on educating the laity. These were largely uncloistered orders, and the Society of Jesus, more commonly known as the Jesuits, was the most visible and well known of these. Establishing schools and eventually colleges, the Jesuits spread Catholic reform and moral discipline throughout Europe and beyond, reaching Japan and China by the middle of the sixteenth century.

Both Protestant and Catholic reformers discovered the importance of indoctrinating the young in teaching the major tenets of the faith. Virtually every reformed church had its own catechism, or principles of faith, in a question and answer format that young children could memorize and learn by heart. And when schooling young children in correct doctrine before Sunday services proved successful for Luther and Calvin, what we now know as Sunday school became an institutionalized establishment for Protestants and Catholics alike. Thus, catechism also played a part in the effort to create a more morally disciplined society.

So, what have we learned in this section? To summarize, a variety of Protestant and Catholic reformers sought to reform the medieval church by eliminating abuses, by transforming religious experience from a largely collective to a more individual experience, by emphasizing doctrine and belief over communal practices, and by trying to remake the world in which they lived in the image of God. I have explicitly tried to steer you away from older views of the reformation, which still suggest that Protestantism was a more modern and morally pure religion than the corrupt and superstitious Catholicism it tried to replace. My emphasis has been that Protestant and Catholic reformers shared a great deal in common in their goals. They were still divided by theology, though even that barrier would begin to break down in the seventeenth century, as many Lutherans and Calvinists began to abandon predestination in favor of free will, while a few Catholics, such as the Jansenists in France, were eventually attracted to predestination and salvation through grace by faith alone. The real divide was not so much between Protestants and Catholics, but between pre-reformation and post-reformation Christians.

The State

The political legacy of the late Middle Ages was one of feudal monarchies that were attempting to strengthen their control over fairly de-centralized dynastic states. This evolution obviously continued in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as one state after another tried to find a way to insure that the monarch’s or prince’s will would be obeyed beyond the immediate confines of the court. In Europe in 1500, however, in order to guarantee the political order most princes and monarchs were still largely forced to rely on the loyalty and dependence of their most powerful subjects- their nobles and aristocrats. This worked up to a point, as both kings and nobles believed themselves to be appointed by God to maintain law and order in their kingdoms. It worked because the bulk of their subjects also accepted that their authority came directly from God. To challenge, much less overthrow, a divinely appointed prince was more than just rebellion against the state; it was considered treason against God.

The humanists in Renaissance Italy offered an alternative to divine right monarchy in the form of republicanism. First developed into a political theory in Florence by Leonardo Bruni around 1405, this idea achieved its most developed form a century later in the early sixteenth century in the work of Bruni's fellow Florentine, Niccolò Machiavelli. Best known for his brief work Il Principe (The Prince), Machiavelli is unfortunately too often known today as an advocate of machiavellianism: a cunning, deceitful prince who will do or say anything to remain in power at any cost. Usually associated with the phrase "the end justifies the means," Machiavelli is often a  caricature for autocratic and despotic government. If any interested readers bothered to read more of his work than just The Prince, they would quickly discover that Machiavelli favored none of these things. In fact, like his fellow humanists, Machiavelli was a republican--with a small R--at heart, and he was champion of government by the people, not a supporter of despotic monarchy. This comes across very clearly in his greatest political work, The Discourses on Livy, an examination of the history of the Roman Republic (509-44 B.C.) as described by the ancient historian, Titus Livy. Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a manual for Renaissance princes, since there were far more principalities in Renaissance Italy than republics. But his political state of choice was in fact a republic.

What The Prince and The Discourses on Livy shared, however, is that they both were firmly grounded in the political ideas of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great senator and orator who lived right at the end of the Roman Republic in the first century B.C. Above all, it was one of the main themes in Cicero's De Legibus (On the Laws) that struck Machiavelli as particularly aposite: "Salus populi supremo lex esto." Or translated into English, "The welfare of the people is the highest law." This was the ultimate goal and function of any state, whether it was organized as a principality or as a republic: to maintain and preserve the welfare of the people. Machiavelli never stated or even implied that the end justifies the means. What he clearly meant was that the end justifies the means only if the end in question was the salus populi, the welfare of the people. Again, most people point to Machiavelli's declaration in The Prince that it was better for a prince to be feared than loved. They overlook the fact that he clearly stated that a prince ought to be both loved and feared, but they also miss his principal point: that a prince had to be respected by his people in order to rule. And in The Discourses Machiavelli weighed the advantages of various forms of government and concluded very explicitly that a republic was the state that best guaranteed and safeguarded the will of the people. Well, so much for a machiavellian Machiavelli.

What made Machiavelli so detested even in the sixteenth century, however, was that his political ideas challenged and threatened to undermine the traditional medieval view that all authority came from God. Now, Machiavelli could have chosen to argue that God granted this authority to govern themselves to the people instead of to kings and princes. This is what the Founding Fathers of the United States did in the late eighteenth century in their own justification for seizing the authority to govern away from Parliament and the King of England. But Machiavelli chose not to do this, virtually ignoring God in his political theory altogether. It also has to be said that there were very few republics in Europe before the late eighteenth century. The city-state of Venice had the longest legacy of republican government in Machiavelli's day, even though it was more of an oligarchy whereby a couple of hundred wealthy families controlled all political power. Machiavelli had witnessed the collapse of republicanism in his own native Florence in the 1490s, as the heirs of Lorenzo di Medici proved unable to control the forces of political opposition and moral self-righteousness that ultimately culminated in the tragic regime of Savonarola. Thus, Machiavelli's political theory found very few outlets to be put into practice during his own lifetime.

To be sure, there were a couple of attempts to revive republicanism in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the overwhelming preference of Europeans for divine right monarchy make these efforts seem obvious exceptions. In the 1580s and 90s the seven northern province of the Spanish Netherlands declared their independence from Philip II of Spain. They eventually came to adopt a republican constitution, but they are the exception that proves the rule. Their slide from monarchy to republicanism was not by choice, as they begged virtually every major European monarch--from Catholics like Henry III of France to Protestants such as Queen Elizabeth of England--to replace Philip as their sovereign once they declared their independence. They became republicans by default. One of the earliest maps of this new Dutch Republic is called the Leo Belgicus (the Belgian Lion) and it made this point very clearly. Although the Dutch perceived their new state as independent as the lion superimposed on the map of its seven provinces, all the princes and kings who had previously governed them are nevertheless depicted around the border of the map, including even Philip II. The underlying message is striking. Republicanism in the Dutch Republic was hardly anti-monarchical. In fact, the Dutch saw their republican state as just another in the long line of succession of their previous rulers.

The other republic to emerge in Europe in this period, in the British Isles, was more significant, as it clearly was based on anti-monarchical political ideas, as demonstrated by the execution of King Charles I. The Puritan Interregnum of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s, however, demonstrated that a government based on republican principles could be just as despotic as Charles had been, especially in the way that all opponents of the regime's policies were purged from the Long Parliament by force. This is not to deny the real republican sentiment of Cromwell and his supporters, which were genuine enough, nor to deny the very clear significance of their achievement. Even though the monarchy was restored in 1660 after Cromwell's death, there is no doubt that Parliament had managed to share authority with the crown during the Restoration. And after 1689 it was clear that Parliament had wrestled away the legislative function from the crown completely. But the monarchy could not be jettisoned completely, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 was in fact a victory for constitutional monarchy rather than a victory for republicanism.

In fact, by far the most prevalent trend in politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the growing strength of divine right monarchy, the very opposite of republicanism. While the theory of sacral monarchy had been fully voiced since the Middle Ages, the practice was taking a turn toward centralization and a stronger royal state since the end of the Hundred Years' War in the mid-fifteenth century. The model par excellence of this trend was undoubtedly the Bourbon monarchy of France under King Louis XIV, who ruled from 1643 until 1715, the longest single reign in European history. Louis is often depicted as the champion of absolute monarchy, a term which conjures up all kinds of images of a strong and unrestricted dictator, much along the lines of the popular misperceptions of Machiavelli's ideal prince. Nothing could be further from the truth, however, as Louis and his political advisors were quick to point out. Although there is no surviving evidence that Louis ever uttered the phrase "L'état, c'est moi!" (I am the state), if he did say such a thing, he undoubtedly did not mean, "I am the state, therefore I can do whatever I like." If these words ever came out of his royal mouth, he surely must have meant, "I am the state, therefore I have duties and responsibilities that prevent me from doing whatever I like." In one of the clearest statements of divine right absolute monarchy ever disseminated during his long reign, his personal preacher Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet wrote that "Royal authority is sacred. God establishes kings as his ministers and reigns through them over the people. Thus, the royal throne is not the throne of a man, but the throne of God himself. It appears from all this that the person of kings is sacred, and to attempt anything against them is a sacrilege. One must obey them by reason of religion and conscience. This is why St. Peter says, 'Be ye subject therefore to kings for God's sake, as they were sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of the good." Sounding almost Ciceronian, Bossuet went on to argue that all kings, no matter how powerful, had a sacred duty to safeguard the public good. "Since their power comes from on high," he wrote, "kings must not believe that they are the owners of it, to use as they please. Rather they must use it with restraint, as something which comes to them from God, and for which God will ask an accounting of them. The prince is not born for himself, but for the people. And a prince must provide for the needs of his people. And among the people, those for whom the prince must provide the most are the weak. Thus, the true character of the prince is to provide for the needs of his people, while that of the tyrant is to think only of himself." This kind of political language was the everyday rhetoric of royal absolutism. Because kings had such clear duties and responsibilities to their subjects, they needed absolute power to carry out these burdensome duties. In terms of political theory, then, absolute monarchs only had absolute power to act within the divinely imposed restraints and limits mandated by the duties of their office. They were not supposed to become tyrants.

That was the theory. In practice, however, there is no doubt that Louis XIV of France managed to extend his own authority far beyond the bounds of his predecessors. The fact that he and his ministers had expanded the royal officer corps meant that there was a much larger royal bureaucracy that could carry out and execute the royal will in the provinces. Moreover, the fact that he built from scratch the first standing army in French history, which totaled more than 130,000 troops in peacetime and topped out at a mind-boggling 380,000 troops in wartime, meant that Louis was able to keep the peace at home and wage war abroad, expanding the French state's territory in the process. Perhaps the most significant thing that Louis XIV did to further the growth of royal power during his long reign was to come to an arrangement with the aristocracy to combine their resources and interests and essentially share power in the provinces. That is to say, Louis and his nobles collaborated to the benefit of both. Overmighty and powerful nobles, many of whom had large numbers of soldiers of their own, had often plagued and plotted against kings in the past. Louis came to an accommodation with them that ultimately removed them as a threat to his own authority. He certainly did not undermine the aristocracy through impoverishment, forcing them to live at his royal palace at Versailles, as some textbooks still insist. Despite the physical impossibility of this, only a fraction of the aristocracy could have ever fit into Versailles, it worked out much better for the king and the nobles to enrich them by bringing them into royal service. Thus, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. All of these things--the growth of the royal bureaucracy and the royal army, as well as his collaboration with the nobility--certainly strengthened Louis XIV's hand as King of France. Louis XIV did not see himself as a tyrant, and probably most of his subjects agreed with him on that. But he was the most hegemonic ruler in Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century, and virtually every monarch from Prussia to Russia tried to emulate his success.

Having said all that, it has to be said that Louis XIV was never as strong as he would have liked to be, and never as powerful as the royal propagandists like Bossuet claimed him to be. Indeed, all the propaganda put out on Louis's behalf pretty clearly underscores that there was an obvious gap between what was promised in the theory of royal absolutism and its practice. The image of himself that Louis enjoyed propagating the most was that of the Sun King. Louis wanted all his subjects to have the impression that he was the source of all light and energy in his kingdom, that everything radiated out from him and gained power because of him. He even went so far as to dress up as Apollo, Greek god of the sun, at a court masquerade and ballet early in his reign to further this illusion. As you can see from the depiction of Louis at this event  pictured here, the young king was already a master of propaganda, furthering his image as the blazing sun that shed light on everything in the French universe. His reign was so long, however, that these efforts to influence public opinion would eventually prove meaningless without some results to back them up. Much later in his reign, when he was menaced by an alliance of most of the other major states of Europe in an effort to stop his imperialist designs, a very different image of Louis XIV was required. You are looking at a full length portrait of the king at the age of sixty-nine painted in 1707. Notice the aging face and sunken mouth that are still visible despite the black wig designed to make him look much younger. Dressed in his full regalia with his royal symbols of office, Louis here is obviously trying to impress. Bedecked in his full cape of blue velvet covered with gold fleur-de-lys and lined with the fur of white ermine, Louis holds his scepter with his right hand, while his left rests on the hilt of his sword, indicating his military prowess. His crown is clearly visible on the table to his right. Yet this posed grandeur never quite comes off, and it's not only because of the silk stockings and high heels that tend to demean him and make him look smaller rather than taller and richer. Even royal absolutism had limits of credibility.

O.K., what have we learned in this section on politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? First, we saw that while most observers of politics in the period continued to sustain and even strengthen the medieval idea of divine right monarchy, a singular thinker like Machiavelli attempted a reformation in political thought. He argued cogently for a state in which authority was derived from the people rather than from God, and in which the people themselves, not a king or prince, were the best guarantors of the public welfare: Salus populi suprema lex esto was the way he expressed it, an obvious echo from Cicero. But if results are any measure, Machiavelli's reformation of political ideas failed in this period. While they would eventually triumph in the republics of the late eighteenth century in France and in the United States, there is no doubt that absolutism rather than republicanism was the flavor of the month in Western Europe. The evolving constitutional monarchy in Britain and the Dutch Republic apart, most other states sought to emulate the brilliance and shining example of Louis XIV. And even if there were clouds and storms that often darkened the horizon of the Sun King, it is nevertheless true that his state had more power over his subjects than his predecessors.

Society

If Machiavelli's reformation of politics was less than a success, the attempt to challenge and even undermine the social hierarchy of Western society was an even bigger flop. That there were so few explicit efforts to confront the traditional social order only underscores how powerful and deeply entrenched the ideas of hierarchy and inequality were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Not only were kings and princes believed to be divinely appointed by God, so were nobles and aristocracies. Indeed, the entire social pyramid, with kings at the top and the landed elites only just below them, was believed to be divinely ordained and necessary in order to maintain the social order. Peasants and the poor accepted their fate with equanimity, as everyone in the social order believed that they had a specific social function and role to play. Even in the many peasant revolts of the seventeenth century, most of the time the rioters were challenging the excesses of the tax system, the billeting of troops upon them unlawfully, or just the way they were forced to bear the brunt of famine or harvest failure. That is, they were not trying to achieve social or economic parity with their social betters, only the dues and respect owed them in their own level of the social pyramid. They were hardly advocates for social equality, much less equality before the law.

There were some notable exceptions, however, such as the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, in which an army in the pay of Parliament defeated King Charles I in a civil war. Charles was eventually executed in 1649 and a republican state was set up by Oliver Cromwell. After defeating Charles I in the first civil war, however, Cromwell was determined that not all "the people" should be part of the body politic. Parliament itself was made up of members of the gentry, or lower nobility, who sat in the House of Commons, and the members of the aristocracy, or titled peers, who sat in the House of Lords. All of them were wealthy land-owning members of the elite of British society. Ordinary folks, the real commoners,  had no voice in Parliament at all. Nor were they allowed to vote for those who did. After helping Cromwell defeat the king, many of the rank-and-file soldiers in the New Model Army strongly objected to their hasty dismissal from political discussions after the war. Many of them, as well as other groups such as the Levellers and Diggers who sought a more egalitarian society, seriously argued for universal male suffrage, declaring that every man's birthright as an Englishman mattered more than whether he owned property or not. Some of these voices sound much more like Enlightenment voices of the eighteenth century than the voice of ordinary soldiers in the seventeenth. Many of the rank-and-file soldiers voiced their complaints in "The Agreement of the People," presented to the officers of the New Model Army on October 31, 1647 at Putney Bridge. The ordinary troops demanded that Parliament be convened at least once every two years, with all adult males eligible to both vote and stand for election. The agreement further proclaimed that the authority of all future Parliaments should be inferior to no one but those who had elected them. This was an obvious allusion not just to the king, who was still alive at this point, but also to the landowning elite of the gentry and aristocracy who monopolized Parliament. Above all, the Agreement sought equality before the law, "that in all laws made or to be made, every person may be bound alike, and that no tenure, estate, charter, degree, birth, or place do confer any exemption from the ordinary course of the law whereunto others are subjected." The privileges of wealth and property were explicitly being attacked by the soldiers.

The officers of the New Model Army who made up the General Council of the Army met at Putney Bridge over the next three days to discuss the Agreement of the People in a frank and open debate. What is perhaps surprising is how seriously they considered it, and how vehemently a few of the officers even supported it. Those few recognized that for the ordinary soldier, what was he fighting against the king for if not to gain some voice in the body politic? Why had they risked their own lives and property, if they were going to be subjected to another government equally as oppressive to them as the king's? Perhaps Col. Thomas Rainborough, one of the supporters of the Agreement, put it best. "For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, [as significant] as the greatest he. And therefore truly, sir, I think it's clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government. And I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under."

Rainborough and the other supporters of the Agreement of the People were in the minority, however. Cromwell himself, like most of the officers present, was a member of the gentry, and he made it very clear that the elite of society was still going to govern England, king or no king. And what Cromwell particularly objected to was the Agreement's proposal to make Parliament inferior to those who elected it, in effect, giving sovereignty to the people. Cromwell and most Englishmen, in fact, believed that Parliament had wrested away sovereignty from Charles I by defeating him in the previous civil war. They were hardly likely to hand over part of their hard-won spoils to the rabble and ordinary soldiers, who rightly had no voice in Parliament, they argued, because they had no property stake in the body politic. Thus, sovereignty was to remain with Parliament. Ultimately, the supporters of the Agreement of the People were forced to accept that they would remain shut out of politics in Britain during the republican Interregnum. Having fought alongside Cromwell and the Parliament in the civil war and having helped them defeat the king, they now saw that they would gain little from this victory. Although the monarchy might be toppled, the social hierarchy remained firmly intact.

I could also mention the Quakers, a minority religious community that emerged during the English Revolution around 1650, as another group that challenged the social hierarchy of the West. Although better known as religious dissenters, their theology led them into social dissent as well. Firmly of the belief that all men and women were equal in the sight of God--much like the way the dead souls were depicted in Van der Weyden's painting of the Last Judgment--the Quakers came to believe that this equality ought to extend to civil society on earth as well. They eschewed all titles, ranks, and special forms of address to royalty and nobility alike, calling each other by the simple epithet "Friend" as a sign of social equality. They used the more familiar thee and thou rather then the plural and more formal "you" in speaking to everyone, high or low. The Quaker leader George Fox was notorious for refusing to doff his hat or bend his knee in the presence of social superiors, as required by social etiquette. Whether the king's officers, the king's subjects, or the king himself, Fox treated everyone the same, thereby asserting that all ranks were equal in his eyes. In short, this Society of Friends refused all forms of social deference. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Quakers were treated just like the rank-and-file soldiers of the New Model Army, the Levellers, and the Diggers. They were arrested, imprisoned, fined, and ultimately forced to flee persecution as religious dissenters. Although they found an eventual haven in the colony of Pennsylvania in the New World, their attack on the social hierarchy was viewed as anti-social even there until the revolutionary idea that "all men are created equal" eventually swept through the British colonies in the late eighteenth century.

So, how can we summarize what we have learned in this section? Simply put, the attempted reformation of the social structure by a few minority voices in the seventeenth century was an unmitigated failure. All those who challenged the social hierarchy of the rule of the few governing the many found themselves branded as trouble-makers and radicals by the establishment. The landed classes remained on top of the social pyramid largely because land was still the most viable source of wealth in the pre-modern economy. Only when land began to be seriously challenged by capital as a source of wealth in the late eighteenth century would the titled and landed classes find themselves under siege.

Other Worlds

It is now almost a cliché to say that the most significant transformation that occurred to Western civilization during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the result of the exploration and colonization of areas beyond Europe. To be sure, the age of exploration changed the continents of Africa, North America, and South America forever, exporting Western values, ideals, and institutions in its wake, Protestantism and reformed Catholicism not the least among these. It is equally true, however, that this entire process of exploration and colonization changed Western civilization as much as European armies, diseases, and ideas changed the indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas. The encounter between the cultures of the old world and those of the new proved to be a symbiotic relationship, in fact, with each culture influencing the other in a variety of ways. So, the process we are talking about is not so much a dominant and triumphalist Western culture exporting its notions of civilization to distant parts of the under-developed world to replace the inferior indigenous cultures already there, as it is a process of cultural interaction. The Western civilization that migrated to the Americas and eventually took root and came to dominate the New World was different than the Western civilization that it left behind. But even Western culture in the Old World was changed, reshaped, and re-formed as a result of the experience of  the New World encounter. This was a reformation that would ultimately change the entire notion of Western civilization on four continents.

Let's begin by looking at a map. Most Americans are usually taught to begin the narrative of European overseas expansion in 1492 with the first voyage of the Genoese sailor, Cristoforo Columbo, who is better known by his anglicized name of Columbus. A perusal of the map will quickly make clear, however, that Columbus’s first voyage was not the first, but really one of the last voyages made in an effort to find a seaward route to India and the rest of southern Asia for trading and commercial purposes. The real pioneers in this effort were the Portuguese, who initiated maritime voyages nearly a  century before Columbus. In 1415 Prince Henry the Navigator, a son of the king of Portugal, participated in the capture of the north African port of Ceuta from the Arabs. He soon began talking to mapmakers,  shipbuilders, astronomers, and instrument makers to see if it was feasible to sail around the southern tip of Africa—the Cape of Good Hope—to reach India. In 1419 Prince Henry and other Portuguese explorers began systematically exploring the western coast of Africa, including sailing up the mouths of the Niger and Congo rivers. While they did not succeed in rounding the Cape of Good Hope, they laid the foundation for those who eventually would. Then, in 1488, a freak storm blew the Portuguese sea captain Bartholomew Dias out into the Atlantic. When he finally made landfall after nearly two weeks without any sight of land, he discovered that he had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and had landed on the eastern coast of Africa, the first European to do so. Dias returned to Lisbon, never having reached India, but the route to Asia by sea now seemed to be open to the crown of Portugal. Before Portugal could mount a voyage to India, however, word reached Europe that an Italian sailor named Columbus, backed by the crowns of Aragon and Castille, had already reached India by sailing west. The rumors were obviously mistaken, however, as Columbus only thought he had landed in India. While Vasco da Gama did successfully lead a Portuguese expedition round the Cape of Good Hope to reach India in 1497, Columbus had stumbled on something new.

Columbus’s voyage to the west across the Atlantic was made for the same purpose as the voyages of Prince Henry, Bartolomew Dias, and Vasco da Gama: they were all trying to establish seaward trading routes between Europe and Asia that avoided the territory of the Holy Land occupied by the Muslim Turks. Trade and the accumulation of wealth were the causes of these voyages, and Columbus calculated, grossly in error as it happens, that he could sail westward to reach India quicker and more cheaply than sailing around Africa. He based this conviction on what he calculated to be the circumference of the earth. It’s a myth, of course, that Columbus and his men feared that the Earth might be flat and that they would sail off the Earth’s edge if they sailed westward. All educated people since the ancient world had accepted that the Earth was spherical, but Columbus underestimated the globe’s circumference by about a third. When he landed on the island of Hispaniola (the island that includes Haiti today) in late 1492, Columbus fully believed he had found India, and he would go to his grave believing he had found a westward route to India even after three further voyages. Hence, he called the natives Indians. He died in 1506 after four trips across the Atlantic, though he made no additional discoveries. He never set foot on the mainland of North America, nor is it even clear that he ever became aware of its existence. So, in what sense Columbus can lay claim to having discovered America is somewhat unclear.

The significance of Columbus’s achievement, however, is beyond dispute. Even though he died not knowing what he had actually discovered, he set in motion a series of voyages by other Spanish-commissioned explorers that eventually colonized much of the two continents of the Americas that Columbus never knew. The Aztecs and the Mayas, the two leading civilizations in North America, soon fell to Hernando Cortés in the 1520s, quickly followed by the fall of the Incas in South America to Francisco Pizzaro. Before long much of the New World was being settled and colonized by Spanish and Portuguese trading ventures. Trade turned to more lucrative profits, however, when silver was discovered in the mines of what are now Mexico and Bolivia. Vast amounts of silver were mined and shipped back to European ports starting in the early sixteenth century. But to fully exploit all this silver in the New World, a steady supply of laborers was needed.

Another of the unforeseen consequences of the encounter between the old world and the new was the biological impact. Europeans brought diseases to the New World that the indigenous populations had never encountered and against which they had no immunities. Typhoid, malaria, and above all small pox almost literally decimated the native populations. And although these same Europeans brought back some new diseases of their own into Europe—syphilis being the most significant—there was little the native peoples could do to combat the invaders’ germs and viruses. Thus, the irony is that it was neither European technology, including firearms, nor European military superiority, including the introduction of the horse, that brought about the downfall of the indigenous populations. It was the totally unintended biological warfare of the Europeans that reduced the entire native population of the New World by more than 60 percent within a hundred years of Columbus’s landing in Hispaniola. But with a diminishing supply of native labor—and the natives had been quickly enslaved and forced to work in the mines almost from the beginning—the European settlers were forced to look elsewhere for a labor supply for the mining of silver. The debate among Spanish officials over how to treat the indigenous populations of the new Spanish Empire was never really seriously contested. The well-known arguments of the Domincan monk, Bartolomé de las Casas, never really found an audience, and his much-publicized confrontation with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda ended up a very one-sided argument. Sepúlveda was a classical scholar and a distinguished master of the works of Aristotle. He was an ardent supporter of Spain’s imperial designs overseas, and firmly believed that the indigenous peoples of the New World were much like the “barbarians” who invaded ancient Rome: primitive peoples who could only be civilized by acquiring European culture. His advice was to make war on these people, conquer them, and put them to work in the mines as quickly as possible. Las Casas, on the other hand, was a Dominican monk who fiercely advocated the rights of the Indians. Unlike Sepúlveda, las Casas had actually been to the New World and had first-hand experience of the encounter between the two cultures. He claimed that if Spain was claiming the New World as part of its empire, then the Indians should enjoy the same rights as free Spaniards. In the end, his arguments were moot as almost all Spanish officials sided with Sepúlveda. The decimation of the native populations, however, eventually forced the Europeans to turn to the slave traders in western Africa that the Portuguese had encountered in their early voyages of exploration there. By 1700, African slaves had virtually replaced the enslaved natives, though to be sure, the process of race-mixing was already well under way. Also by 1700, England, France, and the Dutch Republic had joined Spain and Portugal in the race for colonies and permanent trade between the old world and the new, and they too found it necessary to import African slaves to provide the labor for their colonies in North America. It wasn’t silver or gold, but largely sugar and tobacco that were their lucrative new world products exported back to Europe.

Well, it's easy to see how this process of encounter impacted the native societies and cultures of Africa and the Americas. But how was Europe transformed, or even re-formed, by this experience? For one thing, the newly discovered wealth of the New World transformed the political balance of power in Europe. The small monarchies of Portugal and Castille were hardly major players in the Middle Ages. Indeed, the Iberian peninsula had only just expelled the last of the Muslims in Granada in the Spring of 1492, six months before Columbus’s first voyage. Spain and the Habsburgs came to dominate European politics in the sixteenth century partly through marriage alliances, but also largely through the wealth offered by New World silver. First under the Emperor Charles V, who was also king of Spain, and then under his son Philip II, Spain built the largest empire both in Europe and overseas. Philip II had more income and a larger army than any other monarch in Europe, and he was clearly the leading protagonist of the Catholic reformation as a result. When the silver from Mexico and Bolivia began to dry up by the mid-seventeenth century, however, Spain’s power and dominance quickly waned, especially after their defeat in the Thirty Years War. The French and the Dutch , Spain’s conquerors who had already established themselves in the New World, would replace Spain as the leading political powers in Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century. 

A second major transformation in Europe as a result of the encounter between the old world and the new was economic. The influx of new wealth into Europe set off a chain reaction of inflation and price increases, as the supply of money suddenly increased. Agricultural prices escalated especially quickly, affecting the cost of food for almost all Europeans except the extremely wealthy. The rising standard of living that most Europeans experienced in the sixteenth century went stagnant in the seventeenth century, as economic and agricultural crises became the norm rather than the exception. Thus, while the monarchy in Spain prospered politically because of the wealth of the new world, ordinary Europeans did not. Yet another unexpected consequence of the encounter between the old world and the new.

A third way that Europe was changed by this process is evidenced by the globalization of Western civilization in this period. Europeans had established colonies and trading outposts long before Prince Henry the Navigator set sail down the coast of west Africa in 1419. Indeed, the medieval Crusades resulted in trade and commerce between Europe and the Holy Land. The difference in the colonies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was that they were made into permanent outposts overseas. Europeans—and eventually enslaved Africans—migrated to these colonies not just to trade, but to live. This resulted not only in the exportation of Western culture to new lands, but this entire process of globalization produced a new culture of manifest destiny. The mantra of religious renewal that was the legacy of the Protestant and Catholic reformations, combined with the divine right theories of absolute monarchy, left little room for doubt about God’s intended plan for the New World. Much like the arguments of Sepúlveda in his debate with Las Casas, it seemed pretty clear to most Europeans that it was God’s will that Western civilization should supplant whatever other inferior civilizations existed in these new lands. Catholicism, as well as the efficient absolute state established by the Spanish in their New World colonies seems to bear this out.

Finally, there is no question that the encounter between the old world and the new also made the dominant Western culture much more multi-cultural. Aside from the obvious race-mixing among the indigenous peoples, the African slaves, and the European settlers, their cultures intermingled to form something new. The idea of race was certainly perceived differently by the different European cultures. Spain and Portugal, on the whole, tended to recognize and even maintain legal distinctions between persons of mixed blood in their colonies. The varying degrees of race-mixing were spelled out in the legal codes, and although pure-blood Europeans always remained at the top of this cultural pyramid, everyone else was not simply lumped together in one inferior category.  In the English colonies, however, it became clear early on that you could not be accepted as European if there was even one drop of indigenous or African blood in your veins. Thus all children of mixed races were simply classified as non-Europeans, a strategy that ultimately served to deny the obvious and very prevalent race-mixing that was going on in the English colonies. Moreover, it was an attitude that survived into the modern world and would continue to dominate American attitudes of race into the twentieth century. But these creole and mestizo cultures that were the by-products of race-mixing also served to enrich and leaven all these cultures with something new that didn’t exist in either Europe, Africa, or the Americas before the encounter. Each contributed to the others in varying degrees. The end result was that the Western civilization that came to dominate the globe by 1700 and beyond was no longer the same Western civilization that had existed prior to 1492.

Conclusion

I began this lecture by looking at one individual who was influential around 1500, and I would like to finish by looking at one individual who was not yet even born in 1700: George Mason. Mason was a man of the eighteenth century, and there was clearly a world of difference between him and Erasmus. But in George Mason we can see the legacy of the four reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries examined here. First, Mason was a Protestant vestryman in his local church in Pohick parish and obviously a product of the religious reformations of the sixteenth century. Yet Mason was also a champion of religious toleration and the protection of dissenting religious groups, an enlightened view not yet prevalent in Europe in 1700. Second, Mason was a champion of republicanism and ultimately came to be an enemy of divine right absolute monarchy. Machiavelli’s reformation of politics that failed in his own day would ultimately succeed at the end of the eighteenth century.  Third, Mason also came to attack the social hierarchy and the power of privilege. Even though he himself was a wealthy landowner by American standards, neither he nor most of the other Founding fathers would have been represented in Parliament had they lived in England.  Thus, the reformation of the social hierarchy also found its champions in the late eighteenth century. And finally, Mason was also a slave owner. Contrary to popular belief, George Mason was not an opponent of the institution of slavery. He did vehemently oppose the continuation of the Atlantic slave trade with Africa, and sought to curtail it altogether, to no avail, at the Constitutional Convention in 1789. And unlike his neighbor and friend George Washington, Mason did not even free his own slaves in his will upon his death. Nevertheless, Mason is an excellent figure to think about as  the legacies of the various reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries confronted  other forces and ideas in the eighteenth century. Although the Enlightenment and the French and American Revolutions were hardly inevitable in 1700, they were obviously grounded in the various reformations we have been examining here today. For George Mason University's course in Western Civilization, I'm Dr. Mack Holt.