AP European History

Barron’s

The Reformation

Overview

This chapter fits 100 percent within the first time period for the course. Historians generally agree that the Protestant Reformation is one of the markers of the beginning of modern Europe and a crucial part in the transformation of Western civilization. What began as an attempt to reform the Roman Catholic Church was co-opted by political forces and resulted in the destruction of the religious unity of Western Europe and the outbreak of bitter wars of religion.

Protestantism was adopted by the growing nation-states of the north as they were about to replace Italy and Spain as leaders of modern Europe; the Inquisition enforced orthodoxy. The Inquisition in Spain was designed to encourage a sense of national unity based on Catholicism. The Moslem Moors and the Jews who had been the educated groups in Spanish society were either driven into exile or forcibly converted. The Inquisition was later adapted in Spain and in Spanish territories to combat Protestantism, and it was imported to Italy for the same purpose. Protestantism, though, dominated most of northern Europe, and the continent suffered devastating disruptions during the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Causes of the Reformation

• 1. Corruption of the Roman Catholic Church during the Renaissance; sale of church offices (simony); sale of indulgences; nepotism, absenteeism, decline of morality among the clergy
• 2. Impact of Renaissance humanism, which questioned Church traditions; Humanist “glorification of humanity”
  1. Contradicted the Church’s emphasis on salvation
• 3. Prosperity brought the “virtue of poverty” into disrepute and the Church lost the “spirit” of Christ’s message and was out of touch with the mass of believers
• 4. Declining prestige of the papacy:
  1. Babylonian Captivity of the Church in the fourteenth century when popes, subservient to the French king, took up residence in Avignon and lost prestige in the rest of Christendom.
  2. The Great Schism beginning in 1378, when French and anti-French cardinals elected two popes, one of whom lived in Rome, the other in Avignon, and lasting over forty years.
  3. Moral decline of the Renaissance popes bred cynicism. Papal involvement in secular · politics fostered contempt.
• 5. Influence of religious reformers, such as Wycliffe (c. 1330-1384) and John Huss (c. 1372-1415) stressed personal communion with God, which had two effects:
  1. Diminished the importance of the sacraments
  2. Weakened the influence of the clergy
• 6. Resentment of secular rulers over the power of the popes and clergy:
  1. Monarchs of growing nation-states resisted papal supremacy over national churches.
  2. Secular rulers also resented vast landholdings of the Church within national boundaries.
• 7. Resistance to the power of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V:
  1. The princes of the Germanic lands resented the new Holy Roman Emperor
  2. Charles V (r. 1519-1558), who at age nineteen took the throne along with his vast Habsburg holdings and proclaimed at his coronation, “the empire from of old has had not many masters, but one, and it is our intention to be that master.”
  3. The Holy Roman Emperor had been a symbolic title, and his desire to make it more actual caused resistance to the power of Charles V.
  4. Protestantism helped the princes do just that.
• 8. Invention of the printing press allowed dissenters to spread their ideas throughout Europe and made the Bible available to the common people.