Catholics x Protestants: The Thirty Years War (1618-1648)

By Waldon Volpiceli

It was the second decade of the 17th century. Europe was divided. On the one hand, the Catholic Church, which for almost 1,300 years ruled the minds of the Europeans alone and now faced splits. On the other, several different churches, generically called evangelical, or Protestant, if we want to use a more historical name.

Since the 16th century, when Luther wrote his 95 theses, where he questioned Catholic dogmas, Protestants had expanded: Lutherans (this is the church that emerged from Luther’s teachings and it is the first of all) in Northern Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark. Calvinists, church founded by Calvin in the Netherlands, south-eastern France, half of Switzerland, and much of England. The Anglicans, a church founded by the King of England Henry VIII, primarily in his own country, had been smaller but equally active churches. This religious division, early on, caused turmoil, swept and changed concepts, completely reshaped European politics and the European economy, created conflicts and further divided the already divided Europe.

In a society where religion and politics mingled, where Christianity was an intrinsic part of the mindset of Europeans and where each church spoke the true and pure doctrine of Jesus Christ, accepting little of the others, war would be possible and unfortunately inevitable, but not even the most pessimistic could imagine that the religious divisions of European Christendom could cause the greatest of all religion wars in the history of the continent and one of the largest in the world: the Thirty Years War, which took place from 1618 to 1648.

In this war, where virtually every European power has clashed, we find it all: betrayal, political Machiavellianism, contradiction, cruelty, patriotism, rebellion for freedom, ambition and religiosity. All of these ingredients are an integral part of this gigantic military conflict that would forever change the course not only of Europe but of the planet.

This book will cover not only the war itself, but also the war before it. The emergence of Protestant Churches; its expansion and its conflicts with the prevailing religion; how the Catholic Church behaved in the face of this challenge to its authority as the Church of Christ, and how the new evangelical churches changed the fate of Europe and the planet with their new ideas, not only religious, but social and economic. Everything is in this little book. Good knowledge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Jul 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781071533062

Book preview

Catholics x Protestants:

The Thirty Years War (1618-1648)

Waldon Volpiceli

The Protestant Reformation

The Catholic Reformation

The Separation Between Catholics and Protestants

The Thirty Years War

The Consequences of the Thirty Years War

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Notes to the reader

All sources of the information contained in this book are in the bibliography.

The number of people killed and wounded, as well as the number of soldiers in any army or city dwellers in this book are rounded off, approximate numbers based on historical research or data from the time.

All images and schematics in this book are public domain and may be reproduced by other publications at will, provided the source is acknowledged, but the text remains protected.

Introduction

It was the second decade of the 17th century. Europe was divided. On the one hand, the Catholic Church, which for almost 1,300 years ruled the minds of the Europeans alone and now faced splits. On the other, several different churches, generically called evangelical, or Protestant, if we want to use a more historical name.

Since the 16th century, when Luther wrote his 95 theses, where he questioned Catholic dogmas, Protestants had expanded: Lutherans (this is the church that emerged from Luther’s teachings and it is the first of all) in Northern Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark. Calvinists, church founded by Calvin in the Netherlands, south-eastern France, half of Switzerland, and much of England. The Anglicans, a church founded by the King of England Henry VIII, primarily in his own country, had been smaller but equally active churches. This religious division, early on, caused turmoil, swept and changed concepts, completely reshaped European politics and the European economy, created conflicts and further divided the already divided Europe.

In a society where religion and politics mingled, where Christianity was an intrinsic part of the mindset of Europeans and where each church spoke the true and pure doctrine of Jesus Christ, accepting little of the others, war would be possible and unfortunately inevitable, but not even the most pessimistic could imagine that the religious divisions of European Christendom could cause the greatest of all religion wars in the history of the continent and one of the largest in the world: the Thirty Years War, which took place from 1618 to 1648.

In this war, where virtually every European power has clashed, we find it all: betrayal, political Machiavellianism, contradiction, cruelty, patriotism, rebellion for freedom, ambition and religiosity. All of these ingredients are an integral part of this gigantic military conflict that would forever change the course not only of Europe but of the planet.

This book will cover not only the war itself, but also the war before it. The emergence of Protestant Churches; its expansion and its conflicts with the prevailing religion; how the Catholic Church behaved in the face of this challenge to its authority as the Church of Christ, and how the new evangelical churches changed the fate of Europe and the planet with their new ideas, not only religious, but social and economic. Everything is in this little book. Good knowledge.

The Protestant Reformation

The dawn of the 16th century saw the expansion of Catholic hegemony. Spain had defeated the last Muslim bastion in Western Europe. A new continent had been discovered, and its inhabitants, called Indians by Columbus, because he believed he had reached the Indies in the East; they were being converted to the old religion, to the Indians, a new one, though the illnesses that the Europeans unintentionally brought to the world continent, such as flu and smallpox, were wiping out these new Catholics.

If you wanted to consider yourself a Christian, you were born in the Catholic Church, there were no others, at least not in Western Europe. The Church alone dominated the mindset of the European. To ensure Christian unity, the Church used the Inquisition, a court created in the 12th century, which punished dissent. But the human spirit was restless. The Renaissance, a movement that emerged in Italy in the mid-15th century and gained strength in the early 16th century, funded by the Church itself, hit Philosophy, the arts and science with questions and inquiries.

These ideas were revolutionary compared to the medieval mentality. The Renaissance praised anthropocentrism, both in Philosophy and in the arts. Anthropocentrism is a conception that considers the human being as the center of understanding, and the universe must be analyzed according to its relationship with this human being. This conception clashed with the mentality of theocentrism that existed in the Middle Ages, which considered, unlike anthropocentrism, God as the center of everything.

Based on anthropocentrism, art flourished, as in Michelangelo’s statues or in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, where the human body was portrayed for its better understanding. This kind of belief was responsible for the revival of Medicine, basically Anatomy, of which Leonardo da Vinci was its great cultivator. From this anthropocentrism also came hedonism, which is the incessant search for pleasure and happiness. In the theocentric culture of the Middle Ages, human beings should seek pleasure with God alone and disregard earthly amusements.

Already in hedonism, the human being seeks pleasure also on Earth, that is, on Earth we must also seek happiness. The Renaissance was opposed to self-flagellation, fasting, common in the Middle Ages, because they claimed that Christ had been crucified so that we would no longer suffer, and that if he self-tortured was to regard Christ’s sacrifice on the cross as useless. From hedonism also comes the exaltation of individualism. In the theological conception of the Middle Ages, which extolled collectivism, the human being was plural, his beliefs should not be different from the whole, should reflect the society in which he lived, in this case, the Catholic. Already in individualism, preached by the Renaissance, the human being was accountable to God (the Renaissance were fervent Catholics, but had their own interpretation of Christianity) and religious freedom should prevail.

Individualism, born with the Renaissance, represents a certain freedom since a person need not be equal to a particular social group and must have their personal opinions respected, which is one of the principles of modern democracy and tolerance. With the Renaissance also arises rationalism, where the search for truth, including the divine, should be made by reasoning, reason and not only by faith, as the prevailing conception preached, since with faith one does not question, does not questions only accepting a certain conception as truth. The Renaissance advocated the reason is a way to reach the truth revealed by God, for the reason we could know not only the divine truth, but its creation, why the world, better understanding its natural as well as social phenomena.

The Renaissance spirit, starting in Italy, primarily in the cities of Milan, Genoa, Venice, Florence and Rome, will expand, especially in Germany, France, England and the Netherlands, let alone Portugal and Spain. This spirit will unintentionally influence the emergence of a new current within Christianity, a current that will break Catholic hegemony, which even the most optimistic Renaissance could not imagine would emerge: The Protestantism.

The Protestantism, the first church, Lutheranism, from which all others will emerge, arises in Germany through the initiative of one individual: Martin Luther, German, Augustinian monk and professor at the University of Wittenberg. Luther was born in 1483, in the city of Eisleben. Raised in the field, young Luther receives a good education. At that time education was for the few. In Europe, illiteracy prevailed, especially among the poor. The continent was rural. Most of the population lived in the countryside as servants, being subjected to the feudal regime of production.

The feudal regime, or feudalism, arises at the dawn of the decay of the Roman Empire and consequently of the slave system of production. What defines an economic system is the labor relations applied in it. The Roman Empire in the last decades of the 3rd century was in crisis: it lacked manpower, lacked slaves to the crops. There was a rising inflation, because without slaves, production especially agriculture, fell. The Emperor of the time, Diocletian (who had nearly 1,500 Christians murdered for refusing to worship the Roman gods), who took power in 284 following a major civil war that ravaged the Empire, instituted an interesting and unprecedented economic reform to guarantee labor for the crops of the great farmers living in the Roman Empire.

With the lack of slaves, Diocletian instituted the settlement regime. In the settlement each peasant received a plot of land that was not his own but that of the great farmer. The peasant could use the land for production and would have to pay a tax for the use of the land or the tools he used to cultivate either the farmers or the State if he were on state land.

By the end of the 4th century, however, the settler, the peasant who cultivated the land of the farmer or the state became a servant, because he was forbidden to leave the land where he lived, that is, he became imprisoned to land and cannot leave without the permission of either the farmer or the State.

With the decay of the Roman Empire, destroyed by the Germans in the 5th century, the lands of the Empire were divided among the various conquerors of the different Germanic tribes. Each tribe, which therefore had several nobles, had large tracts of land and adopted the Roman model of labor, where the peasant was attached to the land. Thus, arose feudalism (feud = farm, ism = doctrine), which prevailed throughout Western and Eastern Europe. The Catholic Church adopted the new economic model by reforming it socially by dividing the feudal system into clergy: the members of the Church; nobility: including kings, landowners (the king was the one who guided the State and could donate land to his allies, but within the fiefdom the nobleman could impose his own laws on the peasants as long as they did not conflict very much with the State), also called Feudal Lords and the people: generic designation of those who were neither of the nobility nor of the clergy.

It was in this economic and social system that prevailed in Europe for 1100 years that Luther was educated. At 18, in 1501, he entered the University of Erfurt, studying Philosophy and Greek. Graduating in 1505, he entered Law School at the same university. Everything indicated that Luther would lead a normal life. His fun was to play the lute, a stringed guitar-like musical instrument, and of course to study, especially Greek, which he loved very much.

But a single night changes his life. He was coming home from college and into a forest, taking a trail that was then used as a shortcut. In the middle of the road a great storm, with many lightning and great wind, caught him. Homeless, he feared for his life. Terrified, he appealed to Santa Ana, asking for her intercession and promising that if he left, he would become a monk. The storm was lessening and Luther, believing this to be a sign, fulfilled his promise. Much to his father’s disgust, he dropped out of Law School in the late 1505s, sold all his books for a good price (at that time books were luxury items, and only the rich owned them), having retained some of the poetry he liked like Virgil’s, a 1st century Roman poet of Christ, and went on to study theology in order to become a monk of the Augustinian order.

The Augustinians emerged from the union, instigated by Pope Innocent IV in 1243, from various hermit communities in the Tuscany region of Italy. The Incubit Nobis bull from Innocent IV officially instituted the Augustinian Order, named after their patron Saint Augustine and living in celibacy and poverty, much like the Franciscans, but unlike them because they are less active, being more education oriented, providing theologians to the church. Saint Rita of Cassia was a member of this order. From the beginning the Augustinians accepted women.

It was as a monk that Luther completed his studies of Theology and of Latin. In Luther’s time, the Bible could