You have to understand how my mind works.
A couple of weeks ago, I started pulling on a thread. That’s what Sherlock Holmes said to Watson, I pull on a string and I follow it wherever it leads. So, I pulled on a string.
I was interested in a further understanding of the Inquisition and its effect on science in the late Middle Ages (the late 1500s – mid-1600’s) or as Durant calls it, the beginning of “The Age of Reason.” We have this basic idea that the Church fought Science and crushed it by burning men at the stake and locking Galileo away. But like the Empire, the tighter their grip, the more knowledge of the universe slipped through their fingers.
It is a far more nuanced story than we have in our rather basic understanding. The Church was not always anti-Science. Their stand was reactionary and intensified only after the Reformation. It was always more about political power than any desire to limit an understanding of the heavens. What we don’t always get is that even though the Protestants were less inclined to burn men of Science, they were not necessarily “pro” science. To be a man of learning in that era was a dangerous thing.
The thread led me through stories of men and happenings with whom I was familiar and some of whom I had never heard. That there are letters between Johannes Kepler and Galileo surprised me. That some Popes were almost willing to accept natural realities seems out of character until they were willing to put power ahead of knowledge and truth.
In 1619, Kepler publishes his Third Planetary Law. Without getting too technical, it describes how to compute a given planet’s orbital period (i.e. year). It’s almost a “So What?” rule that seems trite, but in it is the realization of immutable laws of nature. Just nine days later, all hell breaks loose.
In Prague, the debate which has been tearing at the fabric of the Holy Roman Empire for nearly two decades begins to separate. In the HRE, the Emperor is – by rule – always a Roman Catholic. But each of the myriads of small kingdoms that make up the electorate of the HRE varies in faith. Some – mostly in the southern parts of the Empire – are Roman Catholic. The north is heavily Lutheran, as you might expect. Each small kingdom (or electorate) has a simple rule – your faith is whatever the leader of your particular area’s faith is. Period. You either accept that or you move to another area. Sounds harsh, but at least they didn’t kill you for your conscience.
In reality, what ended up happening was that you went to the same church all your life. One year it might be Lutheran, the next it might be Roman Catholic, depending on your leaders currently expressed faith (which by no means was automatically constant). Despite Luther’s 95 points, there isn’t that much difference between the two. Certainly not enough for an everyday person to really get all that worked up over. It seems silly, but in reality, it helps to maintain the peace.
Well, for the most part.
The political intrigue of the day becomes the maneuvering of faith. Marriages of leaders are strategically based more on faith than love, meant to cement political relationships and produce heirs that will maintain religious order. Even with that though, men are apt to change their minds about things. A particular sermon or priest might influence a leader more than a marriage or tradition. Sons rebel against their father’s faith and choose to go the other direction. The result is a constantly shifting pattern of Roman, Lutheran, Roman, Lutheran leaders who are more about using their faith to increase their power and influence than any real concerns about heavenly truths.
Into this mix, however, comes the splinter group of Protestants known as the Calvinists. While they are Protestant, it’s less that they agree with the Lutherans on anything and more that they just aren’t Roman Catholics. In fact, there is one main point of contention that they have with both of the others, that is the presence of the Lord in the Eucharist. This is utterly rejected by the Calvinists and sets them on a course of conflict with both Lutherans and Catholic. At one point, a leader notes that “there are three times as many books written by Protestants against Protestants” than there are against Catholics. “These raging theologians have so greatly aggrieved and augmented the disastrous strife among Christians who have seceded from the Papacy, that there seems no hope of all this screaming, slandering, abusing, damning, anathematizing, etc., coming to an end before the advent of the Last Day.”
In the south, the Jesuits realize that the best way forward to ultimately capture all of the people is to reach the youth. To that end, they open university after university, all to ensure that young men are completely inundated with Roman Catholic doctrine, regardless of their professions.
When a new HRE Emperor is elected, Frederick II, he decides to end this shifting theological landscape and decrees that the entire Holy Roman Empire will be Roman Catholic. Convert or die. He sends some of his officials to Prague, in Bohemia, to let the residents there know that they can no longer be Protestant, either version. What follows, just nine days after Kepler tells the world about the wonders of the laws of physics, forever changes the world.
The people in Prague are not happy with this new edict, and they react by storming the local castle and literally throwing three of the Emperors Officials out of a window fifty feet above the ground. The fact that all three men literally land in a pile of shit and walk away unharmed is either (a) a miracle or (b) a giant metaphor for the whole situation. Or both. In either case, the Emperor cannot let this affront go unpunished and he invades Bohemia for the express purpose of forcibly converting the local people from their Protestant beliefs back to Roman Catholic beliefs.
For the first time in history, he uses an army that is almost entirely mercenary. For extra measure, he does not have the money that he has promised to pay them. He is relying on their loyalty as Catholics to do G-d’s work in eradicating the Protestants who dared oppose him. The Protestants are quickly defeated – at least intially, and the army turns to pillage and rape in lieu of pay. Over the next thirty years, this will be repeated over and again, by both sides.
This war, the “Thirty-Years War,” largely forgotten by modern people, is easily the most destructive in European history. An estimated eight to twelve million people will die, most of them not in the battles that dot the countryside of what will one day be Germany. Starvation, pestilence, disease, wanton slaughter and massacres will end the lives of millions of people for whom the only real difference on Sunday was whether they accepted the Pope or not as their spiritual leader. France, which is staunchly Roman Catholic but anti-HRE, will join the fight with the Protestants against the Pope and Catholic Spain. Powerfully Protestant Sweden will stop fighting with Poland long enough to become a major world power for the next century. Spain, hemmed by France and a recalcitrant Portugal, will drift into national oblivion and never again influence world events as she once had.
Thirty times, the earth sweeps out its elliptical orbit as defined by Kepler before calmer heads will prevail and a tentative peace returns. By then, there will be a permanent philosophical change in what is a nation and what is a sovereign state.
So what?
It’s fascinating to me to learn all of this history, but without some sort of connection to today, how does it affect our world today? Besides the rather easy comparisons between the use of University’s there lies at its core a few points that have stuck with me:
(1) There were essentially two sides to the conflict, neither of which had any legitimate claim on the hearts and minds of the entire people.
(2) Even within the two sides, there were powerful splinter groups that caused neither side to be completely unified. France, staunchly Roman Catholic, would not support the HRE as it saw in the Hapsburgs a rival power for lands, people and riches. Further conflict with Catholic Spain resulted in the liberation of the Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium and Luxemburg) eliminating the Spanish grip on the North Sea Coast. On the Protestant side, Calvinists and Lutherans fought each other almost as viciously as they both fought the papists. The net result was a twisting morass of shifting alliances and goals. What started as a religious crusade, ended as a land grab.
(3) The final years before the war began were the first real example of the use of media to exploit the passions of the people. The Jesuits used their Universities to indoctrinate all manner of professions with their Religious Doctrine, believing that if they captured the young minds, those minds would use their trades and abilities in the advancement of the Pope. The Protestants wrote thousands of book sand pamphlets, many of which sold as quickly as they could be printed, denouncing each others sects (Calvinists, Anabaptists, Unitarians) at three times the rate they all wrote about the evils of Catholics, which included, as Nivander wrote, “If anybody wishes to be told, in a few words, concerning which articles of the faith we are fighting with the diabolical Calvinists brood of vipers, the answer is, all and every one of them… for they are no Christians, but only baptized Jews and Mohammedans.”
Writers on both sides told scandalous tales of each other. One Protestant sermon described the Popes “had always been, and still were, without a single exception, sodomites, necromancers, and magicians, many of them had been able to spit hellfire out of their mouths.” In turn, the Jesuits called for the executions of ‘the stubborn heretics who spread dissension everywhere” in Catholic territories.
In all of this there were, of course, voices which called for common sense and restraint, but, in the words of Will Durant, “the public preferred vituperation to moderation.”
When I contrast this to today, what do I see?
Two main ideological positions, which are composed of lesser ideological splits bound together by a common enemy, but not by their common ideas. There is much chatter today about the state of Education and its use to indoctrinate people with political ideology at the expense of real-world knowledge. And lastly, the use of the media, in extreme measures, to denigrate and attack the other side with hyperbole so radical that no thinking person should believe it as fact. But… we do…
In the end, this was not a war about Imperial aspirations or fascist racial exterminations. It was about two competing political (couched as religious) ideologies that ended in a gigantic civil war. when everything was said and done, between eight and twelve million people had died. In some parts of Central Europe, as much as 50% of the local population had been eradicated. Blood ran in rivers across the continent.
When it was finally over, there remained Protestants and Roman Catholics. And Calvinists, Anabaptists, Unitarians, Anglicans, Fundamentalists, Jesuits, and so on. In other words, religiously speaking, almost nothing had changed. The Holy Roman Empire would fade into history within a hundred and fifty years, much as its ideological descendant the Austria-Hungarian empire would. Spain was never again able to dominate or influence the world as she had. France and Sweden emerged as major players. The idea of a unification of Germany began to percolate in the minds of the Electorates.
The lessons and comparisons to today are clear in my mind. But ultimately will we prefer eternal truths or temporary ideological fights? Do we accept, as those people did, the vituperation over moderation in our words and deeds? Is there any example in history where common sense prevailed without the death of millions for literally nothing that can be proven empirically?
Three hundred and seventy-one times since the end of that conflict, Keplers 3rd Law (and his 1st and 2nd) have been proven to be truths. And we are still calling people who differ from us in belief epithets and names.
Which one is the real truth and when will we begin to accept it?
Dave Does History 
Reblogged this on DAVEBOOK.
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