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Spanish Conquest of The Americas : https://youtu.be/mBUwIuM3dNI
The Process of Evolution of Feudalism Into Capitalism In Europe : https://youtu.be/S9SYW0MfaNw
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Charles VII and Louis XI in France, Henry VII and Henry VIII in England, and the co-rulers Isabel and Ferdinand in Spain succeeded in strengthening their power vis-à-vis the great feudal lords and in establishing a kind of state order within the present national boundaries. These changes were important because they constituted the first steps in the transition from feudal to modern organisation.
In Spain, the most powerful of the ‘new’ monarchies, separate administrative structures still existed in the regions of Catalonia, Valencia, Aragon and Castile, while the rulers fought for a hundred and fifty years to retain the territories in Italy and the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.
The kings of France had to endure a series of wars and civil wars to subjugate regional lords to absolutist rule. Even in England, where the conquest of Normandy in 1066 had created a more unified feudal state than elsewhere, the northern ‘earls’ retained considerable power and the monarchs had not yet abandoned their claim to France. However, the new monarchies and the ‘absolutism’ that grew out of them in France and Spain represented something different from the old feudal order.
These were states based on feudalism but in which, due to the market system and the growth of cities, the monarchs learnt to use new powers to balance the power of the feudal lords. The policies of these states were orientated towards classical feudal aims, partly the acquisition of territory through war or marriage alliances. But another goal was becoming increasingly important: to establish trade and locally based production.
Isabel and Ferdinand therefore conquered the Maghreb kingdom of Granada and fought to gain territory in Italy; but they also financed Columbus and his followers in the hope of developing trade. Henry VIII used marriage to establish dynastic ties with other monarchs, but he also encouraged the development of the English wool industry and navy.
The period of the ‘discovery’ of America and the ‘new monarchies’ was also the period of the Renaissance, the rebirth of intellectual life and the arts, which began in Italian cities and spread to the rest of western Europe within a century. All over Europe there was a rediscovery of the classical science of antiquity and with it a break with the narrow worldview, artistic conventions and religious superstitions of the European Middle Ages. The result was a flourishing of art, literature and scientific advances such as the European world had not seen since the time of Plato, Aristotle and Euclid.
The Renaissance represented a return to the intellectual, cultural and scientific endeavours of the 13th century, but at a much higher level and on a much broader basis. In the Italian city-states, the birthplace of the Renaissance, it did not directly attack the narrow worldview of the Middle Ages. These states were dominated by mercantile oligarchies that flaunted the wealth acquired by non-feudal means and sought a place for their wealth and power within the framework established by feudalism, pushing aside members of the old feudal nobility.
As the Renaissance spread across Europe, its content began to change. There were increasing numbers of translations from Greek or Latin into spoken languages. Thanks to the scientific breakthroughs of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, science began to develop in Europe. The 16th century began with the emergence of ideas that were 2,000 years old. Literature in local languages began to develop in the major countries of Europe.
When Martin Luther nailed a piece of paper to the door of Wittenberg Church in southern Germany, he had no idea that it would change the destiny of Europe. It contained theses that severely criticised the Catholic Church’s sale of certificates for the forgiveness of sins. These were documents that saved people from their sins and promised them a passport to heaven. Luther’s action began the greatest schism in the western church since Constantine’s embrace of Christianity 12 centuries earlier.
The cities of Basel, Zurich, Strasburg, Mainz in southern Germany and Switzerland followed Luther. Some of the most powerful German princes, such as those of Saxony, Hesse and Brandenburg, followed suit. Despite countermeasures, such as the burning alive of 14 Lutheran artisans in the town square of Meaux in 1546, there were soon converts in Holland and France. In England, Henry VIII left the Catholic Church when the Pope refused to grant him a divorce from the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon.
Luther began with theological issues such as the forgiveness of sins, the sacraments in the church, the role of the priests as mediators between the faithful and God, and the punishment of the clergy by the pope. However, the Catholic Church had become such a fundamental element of medieval society that it was impossible to prevent these issues from becoming social and political issues.
What Luther actually did was to challenge an institution that exercised ideological control on behalf of the entire feudal order. It was inevitable that those who had a vested interest in this ideological control would oppose it. The controversy over these issues threw much of Europe into a series of wars and civil wars in the following century and beyond. The Smalkaldic war in Germany, the wars of religion in France, the long war for the independence of the Netherlands from Spain, the Thirty Years’ War, which devastated the German countries, and the English Civil War.
Luther published treatise after treatise on his cause and translated the Bible, which had a decisive influence on the development of the German language. There was a long tradition of opposition to the Roman Catholic Church with ideas very similar to Luther’s. There was the Waldensian church, which had members in major European cities and had been underground for 200 years. A century earlier the Hussites had fought back with very similar ideas, and in England the 14th-century reformer Wycliffe still had many ‘Lollard’ followers. But these movements were never able to shatter the church and the society in which it existed. Feudal economy and feudal society were giving life to something new, and Protestantism was one of its birth cries.
Western European society had been undergoing slow but cumulative change for hundreds of years. First, there was a slow, intermittent but continuing progress in production techniques, as craftsmen, shipbuilders and military engineers took innovations from elsewhere in Eurasia and North Africa and added their own. By the early 16th century, therefore, in every large town there were water mills and windmills, new methods of building and equipping ships, cannon and musket for warfare, and dozens of devices unknown in the 12th or even the 14th century, such as the printing press, which enabled the mass reproduction of texts that had previously been available only as highly prized manuscripts in elite libraries.
In the early feudal period, production was for immediate use. Production in the early feudal period was for the survival of the peasant family in order to enable the lord to live in luxury. What mattered were the luxuries necessary for the peasant family to survive and to satisfy the extravagant tastes of the feudal lord.
The pressure to increase production, whether through harder labour on the part of the peasant or the use of new techniques, could only come from either the peasant’s desire to live better or the lord’s desire to consume even more extravagantly. In such a society, exchange and money played a marginal role. If one wanted to increase one’s wealth, one would rather seize land than accumulate gold.
By the early 15th century, things had already begun to change considerably. The production of commodities for sale was becoming increasingly dominant. The so-called exchange value was becoming increasingly important. The peasant family still produced most of its own food and clothing, but more money was needed for rent and to buy agricultural implements and to support itself if the harvest was bad.
Lords and monarchs needed huge sums of money. Long-distance trade made it possible to buy exotic luxuries from the other side of the world for a price. In general, money was becoming something like it is today.
In time, this would completely change the world of work. Money would cease to be something that fulfils human needs and would simply become a means for those with money to make more money.
The merchant used the system of contract manufacturing at home to pressure craft workers to lower prices, determined by supply and demand rather than the old traditional prices, and encouraged new, rural-based industries in response to the refusal of urban artisans to accept the merchant’s profiteering. In the highlands of southern Germany, in Bohemia, in Transylvania, large financiers such as the Fugger family, who had financed the wars of the Spanish and Holy Roman monarchs, established mines run by wage labour.
The crisis of the 14th century was followed by the development of market relations throughout Europe. Even where feudal serfdom was revived, it was a serfdom orientated towards growing crops that the lord could sell to large merchants for a good price. This depression did not destroy the cities. Although many villages were abandoned in the aftermath of famine and epidemics, the cities remained unscathed.
And by the middle of the 15th century, they were at the forefront of a new economic expansion that encouraged the use of new technologies, such as printing and shipping. Not all cities benefited from this new era. The expansion of the market, the production for exchange rather than for immediate use, meant that individual cities could always be hit by accidents. Some that had prospered in the previous period were now being held back by political events in distant countries through the market or by unforeseen changes in production. Others that had lagged behind were now moving forward. Barcelona, Florence and the great Hanseatic trading cities of northern Europe and the Baltic declined to a certain extent in the 16th century, whereas cities in the north of the Netherlands, southern Spain, south-eastern Germany and England began to flourish.
The market transformed the conditions in which millions of people lived. After the mid-15th century prices began to rise and the standard of living of the masses fell. Among the rich of villages and cities, the same mania for making money prevailed. The gold lust of Columbus, Cortes and Pizarro was one expression of this. Another case was the Church’s trade in certificates of absolution, which Luther criticised. So was the return to serfdom in eastern Europe and the first forms of capitalist agriculture in certain parts of western Europe. Money was becoming the measure of all things. However, the established values of society were still embodied in the hierarchy of the old feudalism.
The Church was the centre of medieval values. Church ceremonies symbolised the expected behaviour of the different classes. However, the Church itself was also influenced by the lust for gold. Members of great merchant families, such as the Medicis or the Borgias, became popes in order to increase their own fortunes and hoped to pass them on to their illegitimate children. Children in their teens were appointed to lucrative bishoprics. The clergy received income from various churches but did not want to appear in any of them. The nobles received about half their income from tithes paid to the church.
One school, influenced by Max Weber, argued that Protestant values created capitalism without explaining where the Protestant spirit came from. The impact of technical change and new market relations on people within feudalism led to a ‘mixed society’, i.e. market feudalism. Capitalist and feudal forms of behaviour and thought clashed as much as they respected each other.
The superimposition of the structures of the market on those of feudalism meant that the masses of the people suffered from the evils of both. The ups and downs of the market constantly jeopardised the livelihoods of many people; feudal agricultural methods, which still flourished in large areas of eastern and southern Europe, could not provide the produce necessary to feed the peasants and satisfy the luxuries of the lords and the needs of the ruling narrow armies.
The expansion of ruling class consumption destabilised the basis of peasant production and, as the 16th century progressed, society gradually drifted towards a new period of crisis, divided between going forward and going backwards. As a result, every class in society was confused, and every class turned to its old religious beliefs for reassurance, only to find that the Church itself was overwhelmed by confusion. People could only cope with this situation by reformulating the ideas they had inherited from the old feudalism. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, John Knox and others provided these new ways.
Martin Luther and Jean Calvin had no intention of starting revolutionary or even social reform movements. They were prepared for a radical challenge to the established religious order. Their arguments, however, were theological, showing how the Catholic Church had distorted and corrupted the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles as expressed in the Gospels. They insisted that it was the faith of the individual that mattered, not the mediation of priests or, in particular, payments to the Church.
They insisted that the grandiose order of the Saints, worshipped through statues and holy places or objects, idolatrously corrupted the purity of the Gospel message. Calvin went even further, insisting that it was sacrilegious for worshippers to consume the flesh of Christ in some way during the Eucharist, an issue that prevented him from reconciling with Luther’s followers, let alone the Roman church.
It was because of issues like these that the early Protestants took great personal risks and urged their followers to stand firm, even though the penalty for heresy was public burning alive in cities all over Europe.
Luther was part of the humanist Renaissance that had spread across Europe and could persuade individuals from that milieu. He could also win the patronage of powerful figures who had their own conflicts with the church, such as Frederick Elector of Saxony. But the main reason for the rapid spread of his teaching in southern Germany in the 1520s was that it appealed to the broad masses of disaffected people whom Luther had distrusted. The same can be said of the spread of Calvin’s teaching in France a quarter of a century later.
The urban Reformation spread rapidly to the cities of southern Germany and Switzerland after Luther became a public figure by challenging the emperor at the Diet of Worms in 1521, a famous gathering of the constituent elements of the empire. These cities were ruled by oligarchies of wealthy merchant and minor aristocratic families.
These families had dominated assemblies and senates for generations, even where some formal democratic structures existed. Many of the oligarchies had their own private dislike of the church, for example because the clergy wanted to exempt themselves from taxation by forcing others to pay taxes, and because they feared the power of local princes. But they also had various ties to the existing social and religious order.
They benefited from feudal rents on land outside the cities, sought lucrative positions in the church for their children, and found ways to avoid church taxation. They were therefore both sympathetic to and resistant to the call for the Reformation of the Church. Typically, they wanted piecemeal changes that would give them greater control over the religious life of the city and allow them to utilise the resources available to the church without major upheaval.
Beneath this social stratum, however, there was a large mass of smaller merchants and artisans, and sometimes priests, nuns and monks from artisan families, who were fed up with paying for priesthoods that often did not even offer the religious consolation promised by the Church. Their agitation led the Reformation from city to city to victory.
In late 1524 a second and much more violent movement broke out. Known as the ‘Peasants’ War’, it has been described as ‘the most important mass uprising in pre-modern Europe’. For half a century a series of localised rural uprisings took place in southern Germany.
Hastily assembled armies of tens of thousands moved the movement across the southern and central parts of the empire, sacking monasteries, attacking castles and attempting to capture towns. Feudal lords and bishops were caught unawares and often tried to pacify the rebels with local negotiations while begging the great princes for help. The urban oligarchies did not know what to do.
On the one hand, they had their own grievances against the local lords, bishops and monasteries, and were under pressure from the city’s poorer inhabitants to join the uprising. On the other hand, they were often the owners of land threatened by the uprising. In general, they stayed away from the uprising, terrified and hoping that somehow they would be able to make peace.
The lords were not in a position to make concessions which would have dynamised their class position. While pretending to make concessions, they began to raise armies of mercenaries. These armies mobilised in April 1525.
Luther was horrified by this uprising. At first, like the urban oligarchs, he was critical of the lords for fomenting discontent. Only when the peasant armies began to make serious gains did he co-operate with the lords.
In fact, there were also Protestant preachers who came out in favour of the uprising. The best known is Thomas Müntzer. A successful university-educated clergyman, Müntzer sided with Luther in his first conflicts with the pope and emperor.
Within three or four years, however, he was criticising Luther for making concessions. His own writings and sermons increasingly went beyond religious matters to oppose the oppression of the masses. For him, what Christianity had to do was a revolutionary transformation of the world.
When the uprising began, Müntzer travelled to Mülhausen in the Thuringian mining region. There he threw himself into the defence of the city as a stronghold of the revolution, together with radical urban groups led by Pfeiffer, a former monk. He was captured, tortured and beheaded at the age of 28 after the defeat of the rebel army at Frankenhausen by the Lutheran Prince of Hesse and the Catholic Duke of Saxony.
This uprising had enormous consequences for the whole of German society. The position of the great princes was greatly strengthened. The minor knights, worried about the growing power of the princes and dreaming of subordinating them to a united imperial Germany, had occasionally taken up arms over the religious question and had even sympathised with the early stages of the uprising. In the same way, the urban oligarchs realised that in the end the princes would be their safeguard against insurrection.
However, by accepting the new power of the princes, the urban upper and middle classes also recognised that they would have no say in the future structure of German society. The crisis, which developed within feudalism as elements of capitalism, led to a revolutionary uprising. But the uprising was suppressed, just as the previous great depression had been suppressed throughout Europe in the 14th century.
Even when the urban middle classes embraced the new religious ideology of Protestantism, they were not prepared to rally the most exploited classes around them to attack the old order. The peasants were therefore oppressed and the urban middle classes were helpless in the face of the growing power of the princes. German Protestantism was one of the victims of this cowardice. Lutheranism, which supported the princes, made itself their historical prisoner.
Luther’s original doctrines had weakened the church’s dominance over the faithful by advocating equality in worship. But the Lutherans’ fear of revolt led them to re-establish the old discipline. After the defeat of the uprising, Lutheranism became a double-edged sword for them.
Thus, a religion that had emerged as a reaction to the crisis of German feudalism became the official faith in northern and eastern Germany, where the peasants had been driven back into serfdom, just as Christianity itself had emerged in response to the crisis of the Roman Empire but had become its ideology. Meanwhile, the peasants of southern and central Europe saw no reason to embrace a Protestantism which in 1525 had allied itself with the oppressors.
This put the cities of southern Germany under increasing pressure from the emperor and the Catholic princes of the region to abandon the new religion. The urban oligarchs submitted to the Protestant princes for their own protection. However, this necessarily drew them into the feudal and dynastic quarrels of such princes. In the Smalkaldic war against the emperor in 1546, the Protestant princes were not even prepared to fight seriously and abandoned the Protestant cities, leaving them to face the wrath of the victorious Catholic armies. From this point on Protestantism survived only in the southern cities, and its decline reflected the loss of independence of the urban middle classes.
The story of the Reformation in France was a kind of repetition of events in Germany 30 years later. The economic depression led to the impoverishment of peasants, artisans and wage labourers, recurrent famines, the outbreak of the plague and the bankruptcy of the state in 1557. Individuals from all social classes turned against the church, the largest property owner, and the domination of a handful of aristocratic families. Protestantism appealed to all classes.