A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (26 page)

This left the towns of southern Germany under increased pressure from the emperor and the Catholic princes of the region to abandon the new religion. The urban oligarchies looked to Protestant princes to protect them. But this only drew them into the essentially feudal and dynastic wars of such princes. When the alliance was put to the test in the ‘Smalkaldic’ war with the emperor in 1546, the Protestant princes were not even prepared to fight seriously, leaving the Protestant cities to face the wrath of the victorious Catholic armies. From this point on, Protestantism only survived in the southern cities on sufferance, its decline reflecting the urban middle classes’ loss of independence.

The French wars of religion

The story of the Reformation in France is very much a rerun, 30 years later, of events in Germany. Economic crisis led to the impoverishment of peasants, artisans and wage earners, to repeated famines, outbreaks of plague and, in 1557, state bankruptcy. Individuals from all social classes turned against the church, the largest property holder, and the grip of a handful of aristocratic families.
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Protestantism had a cross-class appeal. But, as Henry Heller has shown, ‘in so far as it was a mass movement, it was the small-scale manufacturers, lesser merchants and craftsmen who constituted its rank and file’.
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The same point was made by the great French novelist Balzac a century and a half ago, when he noted:

Jean Calvin was from a middle class French family, although forced by persecution to live in Geneva, and framed a worldview even more suited to this class than Luther’s. Luther had initially preached against the discipline of the church and then succumbed to the discipline of the princes. Calvin, by contrast, stressed the discipline of a new sort of church, run by the urban middle classes themselves. He made his followers feel they were God’s elect and they tried to prove this by being more sober, self controlled and abstemious than their fellows. Such attitudes appealed perfectly to the respectable artisan or shopkeeper family, cut off from the world of aristocratic luxury but frightened and contemptuous of the ‘dissolute’ poor below them.

As Heller has put it:

Calvin was socially conservative, seeing the existing order of society as ordained by God. But his call for religious reformation necessarily had social implications. It ‘entailed a major advance for the urban bourgeoisie, involving not simply a degree of economic liberation but also the transfer of hegemony in the realm of religion to them’.
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This was not a call for a revolutionary reconstitution of the state: the urban middle classes were still too weak for that. But it did imply fundamental reforms and would have protected their interests in the midst of a social crisis.

Calvin’s social moderation failed to achieve even these reforms when the crisis in society became most intense in the late 1550s. A section of the nobility began to attack the privileges of the church hierarchy and two of the great aristocratic families, the Bourbons and the Montmorencys, fought bitterly over the succession to the throne with the third great family, the fanatically Catholic Guises.

The middle classes had the possibility of taking advantage of the splits in the nobility to unite the peasants and urban poor behind them in the struggle for reform. The peasants were certainly bitter enough and had their own traditions of dissent and anti-clericalism. But on Calvin’s advice the radical section of the middle class tied their fate to the dissident section of the aristocracy. When peasants reacted to the intense poverty of the mid-1550s with religious processions, involving ‘chanting the liturgy of the saints’ and some self flagellation, the urban middle classes did their best to clear them from the towns. ‘Calvinists were appalled at the ignorance, superstition and sensuality of the rural folk’, while the peasants were repelled by ‘Calvinist asceticism’ and ‘remained attached to their saints, miracles and masses, to their dances, festivals and alcohol’.
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The crisis culminated in a series of bloody religious wars in the 1560s—including the famous Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestant notables in Paris.
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The Calvinist strategy of reliance on the nobles meant these were fought essentially along feudal lines ‘by armies led and composed in the large part by nobles’,
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while the social issues were forgotten. This played into the hands of the defenders of the old order, since there were twice as many Catholic as Protestant nobles.

The basic issues must soon have been obscured for many participants in the civil wars—just as they have been obscured for many historians who do not see any element of class conflict in them.
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The behaviour of the Calvinist princes—who could be just as money grabbing, dissolute and ‘immoral’ as their Catholic rivals—can only have disheartened many of the Calvinist middle class,
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while the contemptuous attitude of the Calvinists to the poor allowed the Catholics to organise riots in Paris. As so often in history, the leaders of an opposition current believed it was ‘practical politics’ to put their faith in a section of the old rulers—and suffered bitter defeat as a result.

The Calvinists’ chosen champion, Henry of Navarre, finally took the throne by turning his back on Protestantism and the Protestants were restricted to certain fortified cities before being driven from the country a century later. The defeat for the middle class was not as total or as catastrophic as in Germany. There was still some advance of industry and trade, and successful businessmen were able to prosper. Some were able to buy their way into a new aristocracy (the
noblesse de robe
) or to marry off their children to members of the old aristocracy (the
noblesse d’epée
). But for another two and a half centuries they had to live in a society which accepted the repression, the wasteful expenditure and the posturing of the aristocracy. As so often in history, the price of ‘moderation’, ‘respectability’ and ‘realism’ was defeat.

Calvinism was not defeated everywhere. Calvin himself was welcomed by the burghers of the city state of Geneva. He became the dominant intellectual and political force in the city and imposed a new religious orthodoxy which could be every bit as bigoted as the old. In 1547, a Jacques Gruet was executed for ‘blasphemy’ and ‘atheism’ in 1553, a Spanish refugee, Servetus, was burned alive for ‘heresy’. Calvin also imposed his own discipline of hard work through public denunciations, banishments and whippings. Laws banned adultery and blasphemy, and enforced compulsory school attendance. It was a regime many respectable burghers found irksome. But it did provide ideal conditions for money-making.

The example of Geneva inspired others in Europe. Even in a place like Scotland, where the economy was backward and the urban middle class relatively weak, Calvinism could have an intellectual appeal to those who wanted somehow to take society forward. The preacher John Knox was able to draw together a disparate group of aristocrats and a weak burgher class in opposition to the Catholic Queen Mary Stuart. Most significantly, in the Netherlands it provided the banner beneath which the burghers of prosperous towns rose alongside local princes in revolution against Spanish rule.

The Dutch Revolt

The area which today makes up Belgium and Holland had passed into the hands of the Spanish crown in the 15th century. This did not cause any particular antagonism among the local population at first, for this was before the era of modern nationalism. The feudal lords gained from serving a great emperor—until 1555 the Flemish-born Charles V. The urban middle classes also benefited, using Spanish wool in their textile industries and profiting from the export of manufactured goods to Spain’s American empire. Silver and gold flowed in from the colonies, passed through the coffers of the Spanish crown, and ended up in the pockets of Low Country merchants. The Castilian heart of Spain, rich and powerful in the 15th century, entered a centuries-long era of economic stagnation, while the Netherlands became the most economically dynamic part of Europe.

The Spanish crown had used its control of the country’s Catholic hierarchy, and especially the Inquisition, to stamp on opposition to its rule since the 1490s. Philip II, ruler from the mid-1550s, took this process a step further, seeing it as his mission to fight heresy and Protestantism right across Europe, to impose everywhere a Catholic ideology which fitted the increasing backwardness of Castile’s economy. In Spain this meant attacking the autonomy of Catalonia and suppressing the remaining Moorish minority. In the Low Countries it meant an onslaught on the local aristocracy and the growing Protestant minorities among the urban classes. This was accompanied by increased taxation for the mass of people at a time of economic crisis and growing hardship.

The first wave of revolt came in the late 1560s, just as the religious wars were being waged in France. Calvinism spread from the southern to the northern cities, accompanied by a wave of ‘iconoclasm’—the destruction of religious images and the sacking of churches. Spain’s Duke of Alba crushed the revolt, marching into Brussels with an army of 10,000 and executing thousands—including the Catholic Count of Egmont who, like the rest of the local aristocracy, would not countenance armed resistance. There was a second revolt a decade later, which proved successful in the north, where it received the backing of certain nobles—the most important of whom was the Prince of Orange—and established an independent state, the United Provinces (later known as the Dutch Republic). Its towns and its trade were to prosper enormously. For more than a century it was the most economically dynamic part of Europe, supplanting Portugal in the East Indies colonies and even threatening Portugal’s control of Brazil. By contrast, the southern nobles abandoned the struggle, allowing the Spanish army to reconquer the towns. Places such as Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp, which had been in the forefront of economic development for 300 years, now entered into a long period of stagnation.

The Thirty Years War

The fighting between the Netherlands and Spain came to a halt with a 12 year truce in 1609. But before the truce had expired another great religious war had broken out several hundred miles to the east. It was to rage for 30 years over much of the area between the Rhine and the Baltic, causing devastation and a massive loss of life. Germany’s population was around a third lower at the end than it had been at the beginning.

Anyone reading about this war today is bound to be confused by its kaleidoscopic character. Alliances formed and disintegrated. One day the fighting was at one end of Europe, the next several hundred miles away. No sooner did one issue seem resolved than another arose. Whole armies changed sides. Many thousands of combatants saw the war as about religious principles for which they were prepared to die, yet Protestant princes supported a Catholic emperor at one stage, while at another the pope and Catholic France supported the Protestant king of Sweden. The ablest commander of the war was assassinated by his own generals at the behest of his own ruler. The only constant features seem to be the rampaging mercenary armies, the looted villages, the hungry peasants and the burning towns—a world brilliantly portrayed in Bertolt Brecht’s epic anti-war play
Mother Courage
. No wonder the war has been the cause of as much controversy among historians as any in history.
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Yet it is possible to find a certain pattern through the fog of events.

Spain was still the greatest power in Europe in the 1610s. Its rulers, one branch of the Habsburg family, still looked to a ruthless imposition of Catholic doctrine as a way to cement their power in all the lands of the crown—not just Castile, but also the other Iberian kingdoms of Aragon (especially Catalonia) and Portugal (which they had managed to acquire), the Americas (where they had been thrown briefly on to the defensive by a powerful ‘Indian’ rebellion in Chile), major parts of Italy (including the duchy of Milan and the kingdom of Naples), and the southern Netherlands. They were also preparing for war to reconquer the northern Netherlands.

Closely allied to the Spanish crown was the other branch of the Habsburg family, the emperors of the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German nation’. They dreamed of turning their empire into a huge, centralised monarchy embracing all Europe from the Atlantic to the border with the Ottoman Turks. But, for the moment, most of the empire was run by powerful, independent princes. The emperors’ only real power lay in their own Austrian lands, and even here it was strongly circumscribed by the ‘estates’—representatives of the lords, knights and urban oligarchies. These insisted on their right to decide fundamental questions of policy, and in the biggest part of the Austrian domains—the kingdom of Bohemia—claimed the power to choose a king who might not be a Habsburg. A growing faction within the imperial court came to see a Spanish-style impostion of religious comformity as the way to crush resistance to imperial power.

There had been a hardening of Catholic doctrine and organisation with the ‘Counter-Reformation’ of the 1560s. The church’s Council of Trent had finally agreed a common doctrine which all Catholic clerics were meant to inculcate. A new religious order, the Jesuits, based itself upon a sense of discipline, a religious zeal and an intellectual rigour very different to the corruption and laxity that had characterised so much of the church in the past. It became the vanguard in fighting Protestantism, especially within the ranks of Europe’s upper class, forming networks of aristocratic adherents in every city where it was able to operate.

Counter-Reformation Catholicism suited Spain’s rulers admirably. The colonisation of Europe’s ruling class by the Jesuits was also a way of supplementing Spanish military power with ideological power. This process, once under way, had a logic of its own. The papal laxity of the early 16th century had been that of a church hierarchy that was on occasions cultivated as well as corrupt, allowing Renaissance thought and art to flourish. The first generation of Jesuits inherited some of the Renaissance tradition, gaining repute for their educational role and their concern for charity.
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Yet the Counter-Reformation, and the Jesuits especially, were soon characterised by a clampdown not just on outright ‘heresy’, but on any critical thought. The papacy banned all the writings of the great religious scholar Erasmus and all translations of the Bible into living languages. Soon even the archbishop of Toledo, who had played a leading part in the Council of Trent, was being persecuted for ‘heresy’ by the Inquisition.
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The Jesuits became notorious for being prepared to justify any policy of their aristocratic followers on the grounds that the ‘ends’ of bringing people to salvation justified any ‘means’. There was ‘the triumph within the Society of Jesus of a cult of irrational and monolithic authority, with the subordination of the personality in the service of a monstrous organism’.
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Counter-Reformation Catholicism and the two wings of the Habsburg dynasty shared one great enemy—the liberated, anti-Habsburg, Protestant northern Netherlands. As the Czech historian Polisensky has put it, ‘Europe [was] riven within itself…the liberated Netherlands on the one hand, the Spaniards on the other, had become the two focuses for a gathering of forces which affected the whole of the continent’.
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Yet the war did not break out on the frontier of the Netherlands, but 400 miles away in Bohemia. The kingdom of Bohemia, embracing the present day Czech Republic and Silesia, was of central importance to the Holy Roman Empire. It was the biggest single state in the empire and the home of the imperial courts for much of the second half of the 16th century. But it was an anomaly in an empire increasingly under the influence of the Counter-Reformation ideology sweeping in from Spain, with its glorification of kingly power and its fear of dissent of any sort. Bohemia was characterised both by the power of the non-kingly estates and by toleration for a multiplicity of different religious groupings that had persisted since the settlement of the Hussite wars 170 years before. As well as Catholics, there were ‘ultraquists’,
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Lutherans and Calvinists. This was an affront to the whole ideology of the Counter-Reformation, just as the power of the estates was an affront to the imperial dream of establishing a centralised German monarchy along the lines of that in Spain.

The immediate cause of the war was the attempt to clamp down on religious freedom in the kingdom. The imperial authorities began to pull down Protestant churches, arrest some well known Protestants, censor printed material and ban non-Catholics (90 percent of the population) from civic office. When representatives of the Protestant estates complained, the emperor rejected the protests and declared meetings of the estates illegal. The estates retaliated with fury, with the famous ‘Defenestration of Prague’ of 1618—when they threw imperial officials out of a window 60 feet up (only a muck heap saved them from serious injury)—and replaced the Habsburg Ferdinand as king of Bohemia with a Protestant prince from Germany, Frederick of the Palatinate.

The Habsburgs saw the clash with the Bohemian estates as the first round in a bigger battle with the northern Netherlands and their allies. But behind this was an even deeper struggle—between two different ways of responding to the changes all of Europe had been experiencing as the market transformed the old feudalism.

This does not mean that the Bohemian estates stood in some crude way for ‘capitalism’ or the ‘bourgeoisie’ against feudalism. The estates represented three layers of society—not only the burghers, but also (and with more influence than them) the two feudal groupings of the great lords and the knights. Even the burghers’ representatives were not wholly bourgeois, since they often owned land which they ran along feudal lines. But as Polisensky has shown, changes were taking place which undermined the feudal character of rural life in areas of Bohemia. Many landowners, nobles and burghers were replacing serf labour or rent in kind by fixed money rents, growing industrial crops, and encouraging the growth of small towns and forms of handicraft production on their lands. There was an incentive to improve methods of production in agriculture and industry, and a spread of ‘free’ wage labour. The unfree labour a peasant had to provide could be as low as one day a year. Feudalism was far from finished across Bohemia as a whole. But there was a compromise between it and new, embryonically capitalist, forms of production. As Polisensky puts it, ‘The whole great edifice of feudal obligation, both personal and occupational, was being undermined by a series of pressures which tended in their different ways to liberate production from its fetters’.
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The result was that Bohemia was economically dynamic and did not suffer, at least until the 1590s, the economic stagnation and peasant impoverishment of the adjoining German lands.

The estates system of government, with its careful balancing of different interests and religious tolerance, provided a framework within which such economic change could occur slowly and peacefully. Members of all three estates could see reasons to defend a structure which allowed them to coexist peacefully and profitably. Even some of the greatest feudal magnates found themselves resisting forces which aimed to drive all of Europe back to feudalism.

However, that was not the end of the story, as the course of the war showed. Some of the magnates moved to the side of the empire and the Counter-Reformation in the run up to the war, producing converts for the Jesuits. Even those nobles who were steadfast in their allegiance to the Bohemian cause conceived of the war along their own class lines, causing discontent among the burghers which weakened the war effort. Observers at the court of the Protestant king ‘were astounded by the indifference or cruelty shown by Frederick and his entourage towards the “wretched peasants”.’
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Only one leading figure, the Austrian Tschernembi, argued that if ‘the serfs are freed and serfdom abolished…Common people will be willing to fight for their country’.
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He was overruled.