Originally Posted by
drdeath613
The Christian Wars
These words have, in the history of Christianity, been enacted in bloody reality many times - starting when an important political rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church took on a religious slant - leading to the split in European Christendom between Catholic and Protestant. This split sparked off a series of religious wars which were ultimately to be responsible for the death of nearly a third of the entire White race.
The Reformation is the name given to this 16th century religious uprising. Its major outpouring happened in the middle of the Renaissance, there can be little doubt that the two events were linked: added to this was a political problem which the countries in Northern Europe had with the all powerful role the pope had assumed from Rome.
Emerging European nationalism objected to the fact that the pope - usually an Italian - had to approve the appointment of any head of state everywhere else in Europe. The pope's ability to even charge tax from foreign countries to support the Church headquarters in Rome also irked those living thousands of miles from Rome. It has been estimated that the Church ended up owning as much as one third of all the land in Europe in this manner: what the various national states must have secretly thought of this does not need to be imagined.
The Anti-Pope
The Catholic Church, while pretending to serve the Christian god only, itself betrayed its political agenda when a dispute over succession to the papal throne erupted between the Italians and the French. In an event known as the Great Schism of 1378, the French set up their pope, Clement VII, in Avignon; while the Italians installed Urban VI in Rome.
Both popes then proceeded to excommunicate each other from the church. Finally the dispute was resolved in 1415, when both popes were thrown out of their jobs and one new pope set up in Rome. The authority of the Church was severely reduced by the farcical proceedings, and many Europeans saw for the first time that the popes were all too human and lusted after power more than service to their god.
Dissolution of the Pope's Authority
The first steps towards the breakdown of the power of the Roman Catholic Church were in fact taken in England: a series of laws issued in that country from 1279 to 1352, prevented the church from overriding the local authorities by taking land and allocating it to the Church. The right of the Church clergy to act as judges in criminal and civil matters was also removed by these laws.
ENGLISH REFORMER John Wycliffe ATTACKS CATHOLICS
In the 14th Century, an English clergyman, John Wycliffe, openly attacked the sale of indulgences by the Catholic Church (whereby sinners could buy forgiveness from the Church - a nice way of earning even more money for the Church's coffers), arguing forgiveness could not be bought for a few coins. Wycliffe also translated the Bible into English and delivered his sermons in English, rather than the Latin used by the Catholics.
BOHEMIAN John Huss SPARKS MASSACRES
Wycliffe's ideas attracted a great following in Central Europe. In Bohemia, a local clergyman by the name of John Huss espoused a particularly fiery anti-Catholicism. Huss was duly executed as a heretic, and his followers then became involved in a religious war with a Catholic army: ultimately resulting in the massacre of several thousand of Huss' followers during the time known as the Hussite rebellion of 1415 - a foretaste of what was to come.
France, CATHOLICISM and the Continent
A treaty signed between the French king and the pope in 1516, placed the Catholic Church in France in a subservient role to the monarchy, while similar treaties with the rulers of other countries in Europe also slowly ate at the power of the pope, creating the political conditions under which theologians could start differing with the Catholic dogma without fear of being seized by the church police.
Thus although the Reformation is formally classed as having begun with the rebellion led by the German clergyman Martin Luther in 1517, the socio-political conditions which caused the rebellion had been in existence for at least 150 years before Luther.
Above: A woodcut from Luther's time shows the Catholic Church selling indulgences, or "instant forgiveness" in a German market place.
The German Reformation
Martin Luther (1482-1546), was a German Catholic clergyman who visited Rome in 1501 and was shocked by what he saw: in his words, the worldliness of the papal court. Appointed Professor of Scripture at Wittenberg University, Luther rejected the idea that the pope was infallible and appointed by god - his own eyes had told him this could not be so.
In 1517, he publicly announced his ideas by writing them down into the famous 95 Theses and nailing them to the door at the Wittenberg Church: this act caused alarm throughout Catholic Germany and to Rome itself, given Luther's stature in the theocratic community. Luther was ordered to retract his attacks on the Catholic Church, but this caused him to become even more outspoken. The pope then sent him a written threat of expulsion from the Church (called a bull) - which Luther publicly burnt in 1520.
This sent the Catholics into a fury: the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V and numerous other Catholic clergymen held a meeting in the town of Worms (called the Diet of Worms) and ordered Luther to recant. He refused and went underground, hiding in Wartburg castle, which belonged to a sympathetic noble. There he wrote pamphlets further espousing his views and started translating the Bible into German.
Above: Martin Luther: by objecting to the corrupt practices of the Catholic Church, he managed to spark off a massive inter-White war between Catholics and those who protested, the Protestants.
Lutheranism was supported by the north German princes, many lower order clergy and large numbers of ordinary Germans, who saw it as an opportunity to gain independence from Rome.
The First Christian War 1524 -1525
The Catholics did not take the rebellion lying down: the first Christian war, called the Peasants War, broke out between Catholic and Lutheran followers in 1524. This uprising was used as an excuse by many feudal peasants to rise up against their conditions of servitude, bound as they were to many nobles and the Church for taxes.
The peasants were defeated in 1525, but this did not end the Lutheran rebellion. A truce was reached between the followers of Lutheranism and Catholicism at a meeting in the city of Speyer (known as the Diet of Speyer) in 1526, when it was agreed in principle that those who wanted to worship in the way that Luther espoused, were free to do so.
However, in 1529, the Catholics unilaterally rejected the agreement. The Lutherans protested the turnaround: and from then on the anti-Catholic movement became known as protest-ants, or Protestants.
The Second Christian War 1546 - 1555
The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, was then diverted from the domestic political scene by the march into Central Europe by the non-White Ottomans: he hurried off to fight in Southeastern Europe, only returning in 1546. Upon his return, he decided to deal militarily directly with the Protestants: in ******** with a papal army, he made formal war against the Protestant nobles and their supporters.
After a bloody civil war lasting nine years, the two sides finally made peace in 1555, with the treaty of Augsburg. In terms of the peace, the rulers of the approximately 300 Germans states were free to choose if they wanted to be Catholic or Protestant. Lutheranism was followed by about half of the population, and finally gained official recognition.
The Reformation in Scandinavia
In contrast to Germany, the Reformation in Scandinavia was peaceful. The kings of Denmark and Sweden were, probably for reasons of political independence more than anything else, early converts and openly supported the Protestants.
In 1536, a national assembly held in Copenhagen abolished the authority of the Catholic bishops throughout Denmark, Norway and Iceland. Sweden officially adopted Protestantism in 1529.
the Third Christian War 1529 -1531 - The Reformation in Switzerland
The Reformation in Switzerland was led by the Swiss pastor Huldreich Zwingli (1484 - 1531) in Zurich. After launching his campaign against Catholicism in 1518, Zwingli managed to persuade the town of Zurich to adopt his views and by 1525, many of the strictures of Roman Catholicism had been rejected - all with the legal sanction of the town council.
Other Swiss towns, such as Basel and Bern, adopted similar reforms, but the conservative peasantry of the forest cantons adhered to Roman Catholicism. Two short Christian Wars erupted in 1529 and 1531, with Zwingli himself being killed during the latter. In terms of a peace treaty, each Swiss canton was allowed to choose between Catholicism and Protestantism.
In 1536, a French Protestant, John Calvin, settled in Geneva after having been forced to flee his own Catholic country. Through his teachings and work Calvin managed to take Protestantism to new extremes: over-compensating for the worldly excesses of Catholicism, Calvin and his followers (Calvinists) forbid all forms of entertainment and regulated even the dress of ordinary people. In a fit of ecclesiastical zeal (which has only been equaled by later equally fanatic Muslim nations), dancing, card playing, gambling and other recreations were forbidden in Geneva; those caught breaking these rules were routinely put to death.
Calvin organized the diverse thought steams of Protestantism into a coherent whole: his influence helped create the churches later be known as the Reformed religions, in Scotland, France and in the Americas.
the Fourth Christian War 1562 - 1598 - The Reformation in France
As Luther's teachings spread into France, the Catholic inclined monarchy, although nominally independent from Rome already, cracked down on the Protestant movement - more out of a fear of political subversion.
Many leading Protestants fled to Switzerland - only to stage a return around 1567, to launch a full scale evangelical campaign. This campaign culminated two years later in the formal organization of the Protestant church - modeled on the Calvinist line - in Paris in 1569. The followers of this church became known as Huguenots.
Inevitably, it was not long before the Christian wars spread to France: a series of violent clashes erupted which lasted 36 years, from 1562 to 1598. One of the most infamous incidents of this Christian war was the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in which thousands of unsuspecting Huguenots were massacred in 1572.
Above: St. Bartholomew's day Massacre in Paris, 1572. Protestants are killed by Catholics.
Then the French king Henry IV, himself sympathetic to the Protestants, issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598, officially tolerating Protestantism in France. This Edict was however revoked in 1685, and Protestants were either killed or driven out of the country completely.
The Reformation in the Netherlands
The spread of Protestantism in the Netherlands was countered by the public burning of Luther's books and the imposition in 1522, of the Inquisition by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. These suppressive measures were however unsuccessful, and by 1550, the north of the Netherlands were solidly Protestant: the southern provinces (later to become Belgium) remained overwhelmingly Catholic.
The adoption of Calvinism by the Dutch had an important side effect: they rebelled against the Catholic Spanish who had occupied the Netherlands since the early 16th century. A Spanish Catholic/Dutch Protestant war broke out which was not only fought on religious grounds, but also with nationalistic fervor as part of a conflict which came to be know as the Thirty Years War.
This war started in earnest in 1568 and continued until 1648, when Spain was forced to abandon the Netherlands in terms of the Treaty of Westphalia.
the Fifth Christian War 1560-1567 - The Reformation in Scotland
In Scotland, the ideology of Protestantism fell upon receptive ears, and repression from the Catholic English monarchy only served to spur on Scottish nationalism and reinforce the belief that the Catholic Church was not acting in the interests of the Scots.
The final break with Catholicism came with the appearance of the Calvinist follower John Knox, who in 1560, persuaded the Scottish Parliament to formally adopt Protestantism. The Parliament then started the Scottish Presbyterian church. The Roman Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, declared herself opposed to the new church, and launched a seven year long war in an attempt to suppress it. She lost, and was forced to flee to England.
The Reformation in England
Although counted as a Protestant church, the origin of the Anglican Church in fact began with the very non-religious marital affairs of the English King Henry VIII. Henry wished to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon (daughter of king Ferdinand of Spain) because the marriage had not produced a male heir.
His marriage to Catherine would have been illegal under normal circumstances: she was the widow of his brother, and special papal permission was required before Henry was allowed to marry her.
After breaking the rules to marry Henry and Catherine, the pope then refused to divorce them: Henry went ahead anyway and got the Archbishop of Canterbury to pronounce his divorce from Catherine. The pope then expelled Henry from the church.
Henry responded by getting the English Parliament to declare the English sovereign and his successors as the head of the English church. In this way the Anglican church was established, in a spectacularly non-religious way.
The Catholic monasteries were then suppressed and their property turned over to the Royal purse. These acts did not mean that Henry welcomed Protestantism himself: on the contrary, he further enacted the Act of Six Articles in 1539, which specifically declared it a heresy to deny the main tenets of Catholicism.
As a result many Lutherans were burned at the stake as heretics, while at the same time those Catholics who refused to accept that the English king was now the head of the church in England, were also executed.
It was only in 1547, that the Act of Six Articles was repealed by Henry's successor, Edward VI, who also invited Protestant missionaries into England.
Queen Mary I (Bloody Mary) attempted, however, to restore Roman Catholicism as the state religion, and during her reign many Protestants were burned at the stake. Then Queen Elizabeth I restored Protestantism in 1563, and the Catholics were in turn persecuted.
A number of Britons were not happy with the close similarities between Catholicism and Anglicanism, and formed a number of breakaway sects, called Puritans, Quakers and host of others. Many of these sects were despised equally by both Catholics and Protestants, and a small number of Protestant extremists eventually left England to become the founding fathers of White America.
The Sixth Christian War - The Thirty Years War 1618 -1648
The greatest Christian War of all was the Thirty Years' War which ran from 1618 until 1648. Starting in Bohemia with a localized conflict between Catholics and Protestants, it provided an opportunity for a number of major European countries to attack each other, based mainly on religious affiliation, using Germany as a convenient battleground.
Armed Divisions EMERGE
Despite official religious toleration being established by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, the Catholics and Protestants in Germany still tried every now and then to destroy each other. Tensions were aggravated during the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1576-1612).
Protestant churches in many parts of Germany were destroyed and restrictions were placed on the rights of Protestants to worship freely. In response, the Protestant princes and states banded together in a formal military ******** known as the Evangelical Union in 1608.
The Catholics responded by forming the Catholic League in 1609, and a renewed conflict between the two sides became inevitable.
DEFENESTRATION OF PRAGUE - CATHOLICS THROWN Out the Window
The Protestants in Bohemia struck first: in May 1618, the Protestants of Prague invaded the royal palace, seized two of the Catholic German king's ministers, and threw them out of an upstairs window.
This act, known as the Defenestration of Prague, was the beginning of a national Protestant uprising. The Protestant forces achieved numerous initial successes, and the rebellion swiftly spread to other parts of the Habsburg dominions. For a brief period early in 1619, even Vienna, the Habsburg capital, was threatened by Evangelical Union armies.
However, the Protestants themselves were divided: an attempt to install the Bohemian prince, a Calvinist, as a new king of Germany, alienated the Lutheran Germans, who then withdrew from the Evangelical Union, objecting to a Calvinist king as much as a Catholic king.
Taking advantage of the Protestant dissension, the Catholics assumed the offensive and defeated the Bohemian Protestants in November 1620 at the Battle of Weisserberg near Prague. Thousands of Protestants, combatants or not, were then killed out of hand, with Protestantism being formally outlawed in Bohemia.
Despite a determined Protestant resurgence, which saw a Catholic army being defeated at the April 1622 Battle of Wiesloch, the Catholics had, by 1624, managed to kill most of the Protestants of weapon bearing age, and Bohemia was returned to the Catholic held territories.
PROTESTANT Danes INVADE - DEFEATED BY CATHOLICS
The next phase of the Thirty Years' War saw the first foreign intervention: in 1625, King Christian IV of Denmark, invaded Saxony in support of the Protestant German states, encountering little resistance until a combined German Catholic army engaged the Danes at the Battle of Dessau in 1626. The Danes were defeated: the Catholics followed up their victory with another Danish defeat in August of that year at Lutter am Barenberge, Germany.
The Danes fled back north, and the Catholic armies set about pillaging, looting and destroying every Protestant north German town they seized. Catholic victory seemed complete: in March 1629, the Catholic king issued the Edict of Restitution which effectively nullified all Protestant titles to all Roman Catholic property expropriated since the Peace of Augsburg in 1555.
The German Protestant city of Magdeburg then rose in revolt: it was besieged by a German Catholic army and crushed in May 1631, with every single Protestant inhabitant - tens of thousands of people - being massacred by the victorious Catholics. The city was also virtually burned to the ground in the looting that followed.
PROTESTANT SWEDES INVADE - DEFEAT CATHOLICS
The defeat of the Danes then provided for the next round of foreign Protestant intervention: the Swedes. Zealous Lutherans came to the aid of the suppressed north German Lutheran states, with an invasion of the German coast in 1630.
The Swedes won a number of battles against the Catholics in quick succession: the last of these, the Battle of Breitenfeld (now Leipzig), fought in September 1630, saw a large part of the Catholic army, over 6000 men, killed. The Swedes then advanced into southern Germany, moving the theater of conflict onto Catholic lands for the first time.
By 1632, the Swedes had defeated another Catholic army on the banks of the Lech River and had captured Munich itself, capital of staunchly Catholic Bavaria. The Catholics responded by launching an invasion of Protestant Saxony in 1632: the Catholic and Protestant armies then spent a considerable amount of time and effort chasing each other round different parts of Germany, all the time laying waste to any towns in their way which happened to belong to the wrong branch of whichever Christian army passed through it.
Finally the Swedes caught up with the Catholics in November 1632, and the two sides engaged each other at the Battle of Lutzen. During this battle the Swedish king, Gustav, was killed, but the Protestants still won the day, and the Catholics were forced to retreat. All of Bavaria was then overrun by the Protestant armies, harried only by Catholic attacks in Silesia.
Then the Catholic forces staged a dramatic comeback at the battle of Nordlingen in September 1634: the Swedes were routed and Protestant resistance collapsed as quickly as it had arisen. A peace treaty was concluded in 1635, which saw the Swedes withdraw the remnants of their army and which contained minor concessions to the Saxon Lutherans.
Left: The Thirty Years War: the Swedish Protestant king, Gustav Adolphus, receives the keys of Munich after taking the town. A third of all Germany was destroyed in this Christian originated war.
SECULAR FRENCH INVASION
The final phase of the Thirty Years' War was the only part of the conflict which was not primarily driven by religious conflict but by political divisions between France and Germany. The dramatic turnaround in the course of the war saw the German Catholic House of Habsburg relaunched into a position of prominence in Central Europe. France, under the House of Bourbon, was also Catholic, but simultaneously extremely alarmed at the increasing power of the House of Habsburg, particularly after the victories over the Protestant German states.
By this time, through intermarriage, the House of Habsburg surrounded France on three sides: Spain, the Netherlands and Germany itself. The French took the initiative to try and destroy this encirclement by the Habsburgs, and in May 1635 declared war against Spain.
In the resultant confusion, the Protestant powers once again intervened, and Germany itself reverted to a battlefield where Swedes, German Catholics, German Protestants, Dutch Protestants , Austrians and French all fought each other.
The most significant battle of this period was fought at Wittstock in October 1636, when a Swedish Protestant force defeated an Austrian force, badly depleting Habsburg power in the country as a whole. In the same year, the French gained the upper hand against the Spanish, while by 1638 the Catholic Germans were defeated at Rheinfelden in March of that year. Between 1642 and 1645, the Swedes overran Denmark, which had in the interim become allied with the Catholics, and ravaged large sections of western Germany and Austria.
CATHOLIC BAVARIA SURRENDERS TO CATHOLIC FRANCE
Major battles continued between the various armies through to 1647, when the French army managed to invade and hold Bavaria: the Bavarian king, Maximilian I, then dropped out of the war, concluding a separate peace with Sweden and France, known as the Truce of Ulm, in March of that year.
Despite this, the overall Catholic German king, Ferdinand II, refused to surrender. Fighting continued in fits and starts in Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy until 1648. In that year the war took a decisive turn; the Bavarians re-entered the war on the Catholic side - but a French army inflicted a crushing defeat upon a combined Austro-Bavarian force in May 1648.
The Swedes then laid siege to the German king's home city of Prague; Munich was then besieged once again by a French and Swedish force; Vienna itself came under threat. The overwhelming run of defeats finally brought the war to a conclusion: all sides signed the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, bringing to an end that Christian War.
THIRTY YEARS WAR ENDS WITH PEACE OF WESTPHALIA
The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, fundamentally influenced the history of Europe. Switzerland and the Netherlands were established as independent states; the Holy Roman Empire of the German kings was dramatically loosened, preventing German unification for another two hundred years, and France was left as the major continental power in Western Europe.
Racial Consequences of the Thirty Years' War - ONE THIRD OF GERMAN POPULATION KILLED
The racial consequences of the Christian Wars, and in particular the Thirty Years' War, were vast. The German population was reduced by at least one third, and probably more: when combined with the effects of the Great Plague of the 1300s, the German population actually shrunk by over 50 per cent in the course of 300 years: a massive decline which, if avoided, would certainly have changed the course of world history.
When the history of the Christian Wars is read in conjunction with the 20th century conflict in Ireland; the torture and lunacy of parts of the Inquisition; the suppression of learning and science caused by the Christian Dark Ages; and the division the White populations into opposing Christian camps in even supposedly secular countries such as North America; then no other conclusion is possible except to say that the introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.
