Late Medieval Italy was one of the most wealthy and politically sophisticated areas of Europe.  A number of city-states (Florence, Genoa, Venice), Duchies (Milan, Padua, Ferrara), the Papal State and the Kingdom of Naples, were all powerful and had grown rich from commerce between the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe, and in the case of the Papal State, from the revenues of the Church.  The Italians became interested in a luxurious style of living, also in the wisdom and literature of Byzantium and the Near East.  They set about creating stylish towns and lifestyles by learning of Eastern and ancient Greek traditions.

The cultural movement of the Renaissance came from this interest in learning about philosophy, mathematics, literature, architecture and art.  Wealthy patrons such as the Medici (Florence), and the Sforza and Visconti (Milan), hired scholars, artists and architects to study manuscripts and to create works of beauty.  Inventions such as the movable-type printing press helped to disseminate the new knowledge.  The revival of the spirit of humanism, and the desire to become a universal (or Renaissance) man fueled the process.  In its early decades, pioneers such as Petrarch, Boccaccio and Donatello pioneered new styles in literature and art.  Cosimo de Medici founded the Platonic Academy at Florence to inspire the study of Plato as well as the Hermetic (mystical) literature of Egypt.

The masters of the High Renaissance are well known to the modern world.  Leonardo da Vinci was an artist and a devotee of science.  The accuracy of his anatomical drawings are one of the age’s greatest achievements, and his fanciful drawings of flying machines still evince the spirit of the age.  Michelangelo remains unequalled in his depiction of the human form; Raphael was renowned for his many Madonna; and  Titian for his portraits of the Venetian wealthy and Spanish royalty.

Another aspect of Renaissance intellectual curiosity (as well as political power) was the series of maritime voyages of discovery and conquest.  Portugal led the way by developing a new ship type, the caravel, and using its agility to explore the African coast and find the sea route to Asia.  In Africa, Asia and Brazil, the Portuguese founded a globe-girdling commercial empire.  The Spanish monarchs sent Christopher in the other direction to find Asia.  In the event, he was blocked by the American land mass, until then generally unknown to the Europeans.  In America the Spaniards founded a large empire, fueled by the mineral wealth of existing Aztec and Inca empires.  French, Italian and English voyages followed suit, but it was not until the seventeenth century that the other European nations began empire-building.

The Christian Church underwent a crisis in the late Middle Ages that made it possible for dissatisfied Christians to break away from it.  Administratively, corruption abounded.  Abuses such as simony (sale of office), plurality (administrators holding more than one paying job) and nepotism (hiring one’s relatives) abounded.  Institutionally, the Papacy had lost respect by being resident in Avignon (1305-1378), and undergoing a schism (1379-1415), during which time there were two, and for a time three popes concurrently.  The sale of indulgences (forgiveness for sins) was also perceived as scandalous.  During the 15^th century (Renaissance Papacy), the schism was healed but corruption remained, and the Church became participated heavily in the lavish secularism of the Renaissance.

The German, Dutch and Flemish principalities were devoted to the Christian faith, and this devotion strengthened during the Renaissance.  The new methods of scholarship that produced so much secular knowledge in Italy were turned to theological matters in the north of Europe.  The study of Latin and Greek, and the printing press, were employed to examine and strengthen the Christian faith, in particular, to examine the life of Jesus and see how the Church had strayed from his path.  The harsh visitations of the Black Death also gave a stern and religious edge to northern thinking.  The Devotio Moderna and the Brethren of the Common Life became devoted to mirroring the Early Church as closely as possible.  Renowned thinkers such as Erasmus and Thomas More criticized the Church, and contemporary society as well.

In Germany, the theological concerns took on political meaning as well.  Germans resented making large payments to Rome to subsidize the Church they felt was sinful.  Further, individual German princes saw the possibility of getting out from under the influence of the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperors—staunch defenders of the Church.  And even peasants took to complaining about their lot, politically and financially, under the last vestiges of feudalism.  The German-speaking world was ripe for rebellion.

Martin Luther (1483-1546) ended up leading the revolt.  He was an Augustinian priest and monk, and he found the Church’s sale of Indulgences repugnant, as well as unauthorized by Scriptures, in his view.   In October, 1517, Luther posted his 95 Theses on the cathedral door at Wittenberg, where he taught at the new university.  He called for debate on a number of matters of Church doctrine and authority.  He eventually got his debate, but for expressing his views publicly, was condemned a heretic and outlaw.  Under the protection of the Elector of Saxony, he remained a free man and his followers gradually built a new Christian Church.

Luther’s theology focused on the power of the individual to maintain direct contact with God, and ridiculed the idea of buying one’s way into heaven via either Indulgences or good works.  His ideas became popular throughout the north of Germany and Scandinavia.  Peasants adopted the idea of man’s equality before God and began a rebellion in 1524.  Wars were fought from 1529 to 1555 between the Lutheran princes and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, until Charles’ abdication and the Peace of Augsburg made Lutheranism legal in those states of the empire that chose to embrace it.

Meanwhile, in Zurich, Switzerland, a popular Catholic priest, Ulrich Zwingli, was preaching that Church doctrine should be more logical  (for instance, that the Last Supper was commemorated during the Mass, not repeated).  Over the course of a few years, his ideas gained great popularity, and the Zurich municipal council voted to accept the ideas of Zwingli and his followers.  Thus was begun the Swiss Reformation.  Zwingli and Luther met in 1529 at Marburg, in a fruitless attempt to unite their Reformed Churches; thus the Protestant movement was to remain splintered.  Zwingli was killed on the battlefield in 1531, as numerous of the Catholic cantons made war on Zurich and the Protestants.

Another group was formed in Zurich, the Anabaptists.  These were people who insisted that, like Christ, they be baptized (or re-baptized) as adults.  Zwingli opposed this view and the Anabaptists became renegades.  Refusing military or government service, they were hounded out of Zurich and many other towns.  The most sizable group ended up in the Netherlands and after the 1530s became the Mennonites.

The Church of England had a more purely political origin.  King Henry VIII (r. 1509-1547), given the title Defender of the Faith for his opposition to Luther, came to question the sanctity of his marriage to his brother’s widow.  The marriage had produced one daughter, but Henry considered this as good as childless, as it might bring his country to civil war to leave the throne to a female.  Henry was denied a divorce from the Pope in 1527, so, in order to divorce and marry again, he urged Parliament to create a church independent of Rome.  Henry’s theology was very conservative, similar to that of the Roman Catholic Church, but he became his Church’s supreme head.

Henry’s son Edward VI (r. 1547-1553), educated in the new Renaissance fashion, brought the Anglican Church more nearly in line with the Reformed Churches on the continent.  After his death, his half-sister Queen Mary (r. 1553-1558) returned England to the Church of Rome.  Mary’s successor and half-sister Elizabeth (r. 1558-1603) created a rather mild Protestant Church, in which doctrine was not as important as was loyalty to the Queen.  She tried to please as many people as she could, in order to preserve political peace.  Her popularity made the Church succeed during her lifetime, but after her death, disappointed factions gained strength, particularly the Puritans.

French theologian and reformer John Calvin (1509-1563) created the theology that, eventually, provided the most popular form of early modern Protestantism.  Calvin was exiled from France in the early 1530s for his criticism of the Church.  Subsequently he went to Strasbourg and Geneva.  His book, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) outlined a new form of Christianity, in which the community was responsible for the sins of the few, morality was to be inspired and insisted upon by the pre-destined elect, whose salvation was assured.  The Church-controlled government would thus be run by the saints and ensure conformity and morality.  In the 1540s he was permitted to create such a Church in Geneva.

Calvinism took hold in the Netherlands, Scotland, and among a large community in France.  The Dutch Reformed Church became the official religion of the newly-independent Netherlands, a land known for its tolerance.  The Presbyterian Church of Scotland was created by the Scottish Parliament upon the inspiration of reformer John Knox, and against the wishes of the reigning Queen, Mary Stuart.  In France, the Calivinists were known as Huguenots.  They became engaged in a series of civil wars against the crown (Queen Mother Catherine de Medici) from 1562-1589.  The most notorious episode of the wars was the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day (1582).  In 1598, the Huguenots were granted toleration by the Edict of Nantes.

The Roman Catholic Church reacted slowly to the Protestant menace.  Renaissance Popes continued to focus on beautifying Rome through the 1520s.  This was the time the Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and fashioned the statue of Moses for the tomb of Pope Julius II.  Finally, in the 1530s, a number of initiatives was pursued.  War against Lutherans was undertaken across Germany.  A Council was summoned to Trent to consider the doctrinal challenges presented by Protestantism (1545-1563).  A new order of priests was founded, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), in order to mitigate against the spread of Protestantism.  The Holy Office, or Inquisition, was kept busy trying heretics.  And across the world, the Catholic missionaries enlisted millions of new Catholics.  All these expedients failed to eliminate Protestantism.

The Early Modern period saw the appearance and success of the modern nation-state.  Spain, France, England, Venice, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and Poland-Lithuania all succeeded in creating flourishing nation-states during this era.  The secret was in devising borders that roughly represented cultural, linguistic and ethnic boundaries, and then centralizing the governance of such a state.  Most of these states were monarchies, but Venice was an oligarchic republic and the Netherlands a bourgeois one.  The achievements of these republics, and of the Tudor, Habsburg and Valois dynasties, attested to the value of the centralized nation-state.