At the beginning of the second volume of his massive Histoire générale du Protestantisme Émile Léonard describes the disappearance of Luther as a coup d'arrêt for Lutheranism, contrasting it in this way with the effects of Calvin's death upon Calvinism. There is a real aptness in this comparison. For Lutheranism was, and to a great extent remains, the religion of a personality, of an often stormy and erratic genius, but one capable of influencing and inspiring his followers to an almost unique degree. That Luther's influence has survived his death is apparent from the endless stream of books upon his thought produced by Lutherans in Europe and America and could never be doubted by anyone who has heard a committed Lutheran decide a problem with the reverential words, Luther sagt… Nevertheless, Léonard is not mistaken in seeing Luther's death as a calamity for the confession he had founded, in contrast to the comparatively calm way in which Calvinism reacted to the death of the Genevan reformer in 1564, less than a year after the ending of the Council of Trent. For Calvin created a system; he lived in his works and in the clearly defined church polity he had established in Geneva, which formed a pattern for all Calvinist churches. Luther was not a man of system; one might almost say that he abhorred systems and organisation as much as did St Francis of Assisi.

When the peace treaties came into effect, serious problems faced the countries that had been at war. Great Britain had not been invaded, but she had suffered heavy losses of human life and materials, and she too had her ‘devastated areas’: industry which needed to be reconverted and re-equipped, the fleet to be rebuilt, former markets to be won back, American and Japanese (and before long German) competition to be faced; the national debt was very heavy, and the balance of payments was threatened. Exports had to be redeveloped and the pound restored to its old supremacy, for this had formerly been the condition of her prosperity.

In France the terrible bloodshed of the war had cost 1,750,000 lives, and the birth-rate fell below that of 1913; the ruins remained to be built upon, but the country's debts were made worse by having to pay for war damage and for pensions to war victims of all categories. The international situation was sombre. France and, to a lesser extent, Britain assumed an attitude of resolute hostility towards Russia, whose revolutionary propaganda they feared. Germany was also the subject of their distrust, all the more so since she seemed to be trying by all possible means to evade the restrictions of the Versailles ‘Diktat’. France, particularly sensitive on this question, insisted on strict compliance with the terms of the treaty, with a narrow-minded adherence to the letter of the law symbolised by Poincaré.

The educational achievements of the post-Reformation period must be set against a background of widespread ignorance. It is probable that half the men and more than half the women were illiterate even in the more advanced European states. East of Vienna, north of the Baltic, conditions were a good deal worse. Illiteracy was found more in the country than in the towns, more among women than men, more among the poor than the well-to-do, but it existed everywhere and at nearly all social levels. To have received any degree of systematic teaching was a prerogative of the fortunate or the unusually persistent.

All the same, it is possible to maintain that the opportunities for instruction open to the young were more extensive than they had ever been before, and that they were eagerly utilised. We shall find it convenient to consider them under three heads: popular education, apprenticeship, and the training offered by universities and schools. We know only a little about the first and a good deal about the last; but they were of equal importance for the future of Europe.

Popular education may be defined for our purposes as education acquired independently of Latin. Its range varied greatly. While the majority of those who were ignorant of Latin remained ignorant in most other respects, some could claim to be well informed and an exceptional individual could attain to the many-sided learning of a Palissy. But in nearly all cases non-Latinists who made some progress in their studies did so through private reading.

Outside Italy political thinking in the sixteenth century was focused on problems raised by the Reformation. In the first place the ordinary individual was forced into an altogether novel situation, and one fraught with the most serious consequences to his peace and security. For the first time humble individuals had to make a decision for themselves as to which of the various claimants was indeed the true church. There had, of course, been heretical movements in the middle ages. But even the most serious of these, such as the Lollard movement in England or the Hussite in Bohemia, had been localised. They precipitated no general crisis of conscience. To the great mass of the faithful, Rome was the citadel of the Catholic faith and those beliefs condemned by her were rejected without hesitation as indubitably heretical. Where there were no doubts, there were no decisions to be made. But in the sixteenth century Rome's authority itself was challenged, and great congregations, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican and Unitarian were organised, besides lesser sects such as the Anabaptists. Distinctive theologies were developed, noticeably by Calvinists and Unitarians, and rival theologians thundered mutual denunciations of their adversaries as heretics and children of Antichrist. Moreover, most of these churches took the traditional view that it is the duty of the secular arm to destroy the heretic, a duty which most princes in the earlier part of the century, for various mixed motives of their own, were ready enough to discharge.

To the south and south-east of Germany there lay the dominions of the Habsburgs ruled in 1900 by an old man of 70. Since 1867 the administration of Austria had been sharply divided from that of Hungary. Within Austria the authorities had haltingly admitted the non-German, mainly Slav, populations to certain rights, first and foremost that of being educated and tried in court in their own languages. In 1907 the Minister-President of the day, Freiherr von Beck, put an end to a system for electing the House of Representatives of the central Reichsrat by electoral bodies called curiae which gave German voters great advantages. He enfranchised virtually all men of 24 and over, and he grouped the constituencies so as to make them homogeneous nationally, not racially mixed. For some time the Germans of Austria had failed to recognise that they were a diminishing minority, but the new system made evident that Austria was predominantly Slav. The most flourishing Slav group was that of the Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia, with its own university in Prague—it demanded a second one in Brno (Brünn) in Moravia. The Moravian Compromise of 1905 had arranged for the roughly proportional representation of Germans and Czechs in the Moravian Diet. The inability of the Czechs and Germans to come to similar terms with one another in Bohemia was, however, already in 1900 ominous, since for many reasons Bohemia was of great importance to the Monarchy.

The fundamental differences between the democracies and the dictatorships, National Socialist, Fascist or Communist, in the second world war can be seen in their diplomacy as in their military strategy. The conciliation of neutrals, the maintenance of smooth relations between allies, a realisation that in the long run national claims must take account of the interests of other powers, all these features of a prudent diplomacy were far more evident on the side of the democracies. German policy since Bismarck, whether under William II or under the Weimar Republic, had never been remarkable for a sense of limits. Hitler exaggerated the faults of earlier régimes; the crude maxims set out in Mein Kampf really represented the sum of his political ideas just as the Blitzkrieg, a sudden and overwhelming deployment of superior force, was his favourite method. He carried out important diplomatic moves mainly by personal interviews in which he could use his tactics of bluster and cunning. He paid little attention to his professional advisers—indeed he regarded the German Foreign Office as politically unreliable—and rarely tried to get the free, wholehearted assent even of his allies. At his meetings with Mussolini Hitler did nearly all the talking; his Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, who reflected his master's qualities as far as his limited ability allowed, was no less domineering at his interviews with Ciano, and the German military chiefs hardly troubled to hide their contempt for the Italians. There was no German-Italian liaison at a high level corresponding to the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff at Washington.

The half century between 1559 and 1610 must assuredly rank as one of the most brutal and bigoted in the history of modern Europe. The massacre in Paris on St Bartholomew's day in 1572; the calculated savagery of the duke of Alba's Council of Blood and the wild atrocities of the Calvinistic Beggars in the Netherlands; the persecution of the Moriscos in Spain—these were merely the more spectacular barbarities of an age unsurpassed for cruelty until our own day.

Yet what, in the history of the later sixteenth century, is just as striking as man's inhumanity to man is man's impotence before events, his inability to control his circumstances or to dominate his destiny. Thus in the political field the greatest monarch of his time, Philip II of Spain, was unable to conquer a weak England or a disunited France; could hold only half his rebellious Netherlands; and ended his reign, as he had begun it, in bankruptcy. His noblest opponent, William the Silent, died knowing that a union of his beloved fatherland upon a basis of mutual toleration between rival religions was a dream as remote as the hopes that Sir Edward Kelley and Marco Bragadino cherished of transmuting base metals into gold. With others the gap between aspiration and achievement was narrower only because they pitched their ambitions lower, and indeed for the most part the rulers of this time did pitch their ambitions much lower than those of the preceding generation. Was not one of the most successful of them, Elizabeth I of England, renowned above all for her chronic indecision and her dexterity in avoiding action?

Two new means of action, or instruments of warfare, that became prominent in the first world war were the principal causes of military discussion and controversy during the interval that followed —the aircraft and the tank. In those twenty years they met more doubt and criticism than recognition of their potentialities. Yet when the second world war came they largely dominated its course—especially in the opening stages.

Another new instrument, a naval one, was of earlier origin, but was allowed no adequate chance to prove its powers until the first world war. This was the submarine. Only after the surface duel between the battle-fleets had clearly become barren, by the middle of the war, was the submarine given such a chance—in the hands of the inferior naval power, Germany. But then, in 1917, it became dominant in struggle at sea, and by its potency in blockade brought the superior naval power, Britain, to the verge of defeat by starvation. Yet after that war it soon fell into neglect, and the possibility of a revival of its threat was discounted by the bulk of naval opinion, which clung to the illusion, and faith, that the battleship was again the mistress of the seas—so that when the next great war came in 1939 even Germany had only a handful of submarines. But these soon became an important factor, and, as their numbers increased, a vital one— even though their effect was never quite so great as in the previous war.

The distinction between ‘religious’ and secular thought is probably unreal and certainly difficult. The first half of the twentieth century seems, in retrospect, to fall, in this respect, into two contrasting periods—before 1914 and after 1918—the first characterised by a close relation between philosophy and religion, the second by a tendency to fall apart, influential philosophers holding that metaphysical statements are meaningless and theologians that Revelation needs no support from human reason. At the opening of the century Herbert Spencer was still alive and his agnostic theology of the ‘Unknowable’, which he derived from the Anglican Dean Mansel, was under fire from the rising school of Idealists. Positivism, of the Comtist type, was widely held as a philosophy which harmonised with the scientific outlook, and the proposition that the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge was widely accepted. About this time the word ‘Naturalism’ came into use as a general term for a scientific metaphysic which, with more or less emphasis, rejected the idea of God. Since this controversy on Naturalism was about the nature of truth and the limits of knowledge, it concerned many thinkers who would not have claimed to be theologians. The institution of the ‘Gifford Lectures’, which were explicitly devoted to the consideration of belief in God in the light of reason without resort to authority or alleged revelation, secured that the great themes of God, Freedom and Immortality were continually being examined from many points of view.

The independence achieved by the states of Latin America in the nineteenth century was political only. These twenty-odd new nations, varying greatly in size, in peoples and in resources, suspicious of their former rulers and of each other, had one characteristic in common: a heavy dependence upon events and movements outside their own borders. As specialised primary producers, they had to rely on foreign markets to dispose of their goods and on foreign investment to develop their resources. As heirs of revolution and often victims of political and financial instability, many of them experienced active foreign intervention. In the nineteenth century the intervening powers were usually European; except for the episode of the Texan war, and the period of impotence during the American civil war, the United States government upheld Latin-American independence. It not only disapproved of European interference and influence; on the whole it refrained from interference itself. In the twentieth century, however, there was to be a dramatic exchange of political roles. European influence declined; North American influence increased; and some of the major Latin-American states began to move haltingly towards a real independence. The process was punctuated and accelerated by two world wars and a world depression of unexampled severity.

In 1898 Spain, after a brief war with the United States, lost the last fragments of a great American empire—Cuba and Puerto Rico. No longer feared and hated as an ‘imperialist’ power, Spain was to become the object of sentimental respect and affection and the centre of Pan-Hispanic feeling. Great Britain, though a colonial power, still by far the largest investor in Latin America, the principal source of manufactured goods and the biggest single market for food and raw materials, showed less and less inclination to political interference, especially since the growing naval power of Germany made it necessary for British governments to court North American friendship.

In every year of the two generations that followed the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 European soldiers were somewhere engaged in battle, skirmish or siege. Few of these actions were on a large scale and none of them was decisive. Christian fought Turk and Catholic power fought Protestant by land and sea; France was distracted by civil wars for thirty years, the Netherlands for forty. Yet when the fighting petered out, the frontiers ran as geography, economic vitality, religion and patriotism dictated, not in patterns cut out by the sword. The costs of war continued to grow, and the sums raised were never enough to release into effectiveness the tactical lessons or the technical advances of the previous period, let alone the flood of advice offered by a new race of military experts. The need for regular pay, increased professionalism and something like a permanent establishment was recognised, but little was done about it. Ambitious plans laid at home were passed to the front in sieves of peculation and inefficiency. It was not a period of achievement, it was not in any real sense a period of transition, yet in no previous age had war loomed so large in men's lives and, through the pulpit, the stage, the fine arts and the press, in their imaginations.

The recurrence of wars was taken for granted. ‘To speak of peace perpetual in this world of contention’, wrote Thomas Digges, ‘is but as Aristotles foelix, Xenophons Cyrus, Quintilians Orator, or Sir Thomas Moores Utopia, a matter of mere contemplation, the warre being in this iron age si bien enracinée qu'il est impossible de l'en oster, si non avec la ruine de l'universe’. But if there was less pacifism than in the first half of the century, there was a greater self-consciousness about the legitimacy of war as such, and a more widespread urge to explain the difference between a just and an unjust war.

At the beginning of the twentieth century control over the vast area of mainland and islands now known as South-East Asia was almost monopolised by the Netherlands, Britain, France and the United States of America. Of the four the Dutch had been established the longest and possessed by far the richest empire. With its centre at Batavia, founded by Jan Pieterszoon Coen in 1619, Netherlands India, the ‘girdle of emerald flung round the equator’, comprised the whole Malay archipelago except the Philippines, newly acquired from Spain by the United States (Treaty of Paris, December 1898), north-western Borneo, the Portuguese half of Timor, and eastern New Guinea, the northern part of which was in German possession, the southern a British colony. The Netherlands Indies stretched for nearly three thousand miles from the north-west point of Sumatra to the eastern limit of Dutch territory in New Guinea, its breadth from north to south was roughly thirteen hundred miles, and it had a total land area of nearly 735,000 square miles. In 1900 the reduction of the whole area to Dutch rule was still incomplete. Much of it had been acquired only in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Achinese of north-west Sumatra, who had been fighting for independence since 1873, were not to be finally brought under control until 1908.

Middle Eastern history in the first half of the twentieth century may be looked upon as the working out of a crisis in society and politics—a crisis which began towards the end of the eighteenth century and from which in the end no geographical area and no section of society could remain immune. This crisis resulted from the contact between the traditional Muslim society, which seemed devoid of vigour, inventiveness and enterprise, and Europe, which was clearly in the ascendant, militarily superior, and full of complacent self-confidence, energy and reforming zeal. The initial European impact was military. From the first decades of the nineteenth century, Middle Eastern governments were becoming increasingly aware that European arms and military techniques were superior to anything they could command, and they proceeded to remedy their inferiority by the seemingly simple expedient of acquiring European arms and copying European military organisation. In this way they hoped both to parry the threat from Europe and themselves to threaten those of their neighbours who were tardier or more inefficient in adopting the new techniques.

But this exposure to European methods and ideas had many unexpected and disconcerting effects. We may first consider the case of the Ottoman Empire. Selim III (1787–1807) and Mahmud II (1808–39) between them destroyed the traditional Ottoman Army and laid down the basis for a European-model conscript army. Such an army required in turn a European-model centralised bureaucracy to administer it and, to lead it, a new type of officer, trained in European techniques and exposed to European ideas.

The age of the conquistadores was already over when Philip II ascended the throne of Spain and the Indies. The leaders of the great entradas were nearly all dead. Some died prematurely of their wounds and their exertions, some by the knives of jealous rivals. A few—Cortés was one of them—spent their middle age in bored and litigious retirement. Not one was long allowed to administer for the crown the provinces he had conquered. Already by 1558 an administrative service, civil and ecclesiastical, had been created and was rapidly growing in numbers, efficiency and cost. The conquistadores had no successors in their own violent mould. Miguel López de Legazpi, who in 1561 undertook the conquest of the Philippines, had been an official in Mexico; his highly successful entrada was notable for diplomacy and organising ability rather than for skill in war and was, indeed, almost bloodless. Francisco de Ibarra, conqueror of Durango, and Francisco de Urdiñola, who founded Saltillo and settled Coahuila, were typical of the later generation of conquistadores, no strangers to violence on occasion, but entrepreneurs in silver-mining and cattle-ranching, organisers of settlements, rather than conquerors of semi-barbarous empires. There were, in fact, no empires left to conquer. In North America, Coronado's expedition of 1540 had revealed nothing but arid hills and apparently boundless prairies, occupied by great herds of ‘wild cattle’ and a scattering of equally wild Indians; no place for men who lived by their swords or by their wits.

On 25 June 1572 Sigismund Augustus, the last male descendant of the house of Jagiellon which had ruled in central and eastern Europe for nearly two hundred years, died at his favourite country residence at Knyszyn. This monarch of great dignity and exceptional humanity, gifted in languages, a good stylist and orator, a connoisseur of art and a passionate collector of tapestries, left his vast kingdom, largely his life-work, without an heir. This kingdom was a sort of union of various states which had previously been independent or semi-independent but which had been united under the Jagiellon dynasty. It included the kingdom of Poland, the grand duchy of Lithuania with its Ruthenian territories, the duchy of Mazovia, royal Prussia (Danzig Pomerania), ducal Prussia, the duchy of Curland, and Livonia. This vast federation, as well as being called a kingdom, was known as the Rzeczpospolita, a commonwealth of various nations or states, as Sigismund Augustus used sometimes to describe it. This emphasised the fact that the union consisted of several nations differing in creed, race and language, but together making a political unity, under one king, with a central parliament and a common foreign policy. It was obvious that the immediate future would show whether the idea of union which Sigismund Augustus had fostered during his reign, and had bequeathed to his dominions in his will, would survive his death and become a source of political strength in this part of Europe.

In May 1939 the treaty which Mussolini called the Steel Pact was signed in Berlin between Germany and Italy. It was a frankly aggressive treaty which intensified the intimidation of Europe by Hitler and Mussolini. It misled world opinion in a way which suited Hitler in that it concealed the weakness of Italy behind Germany's strength. Almost immediately after the conquest of Abyssinia Mussolini had sent large contingents of Italian ‘volunteers’ to fight for Franco. In its timing the Steel Pact seemed to crown the success of Franco and the Axis powers in Spain after nearly three years' fighting. The Germans had not engaged more than small groups of airmen, but Mussolini had exhausted both his armies and his economic resources. As soon as he had signed the pact he began to be afraid of its consequences. Hitler, however, felt more assured. By now Mussolini had followed his example and introduced anti-Semitic measures into Italy. Beyond the frontiers directly controlled by the Germans, the governments of Hungary, Poland and Rumania were glad to buy favour in Berlin by anti-Jewish gestures. The time of annihilation was not to come for two years yet. But the existence of the scapegoat through which one could curry favour was one of Hitler's weapons in the war of nerves which he manipulated in such masterly fashion. Everyone's life in eastern Europe was affected, what they heard or read or said or saw stimulated anti-Semitism and discouraged tolerance.

In the last year of the nineteenth century the American people re-elected William McKinley as President. By doing so, they ratified the liberation of Cuba and the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands. Probably not knowing what they were doing, and certainly unwilling to accept the full implications of their new situation, the American people had moved out on to the world stage, little better prepared for their new role than the Japanese had been when Commodore Perry's ‘black ships’ broke the centuries-old, self-imposed blockade of the island empire.

William Jennings Bryan, who had fought for the economically unfortunate, above all for the angered and impoverished farmer, in 1896, had fought in 1900 against ‘imperialism’. But the sharp edge of discontent had been blunted by the flow of gold from South Africa and the Yukon, by a natural turn in the trade cycle, and the vague issue of ‘imperialism’ was not an adequate fighting theme. Flushed with an easy victory over an impotent Spain, and moving into a new boom period, the American people was convinced that it was living in the best of all possible republics, that it had nothing and no one to fear.

The politicians who felt this mood had no need to worry about re-electing the President and some of them took the chance to get out of the way an obstreperous hero of the brief Spanish-American war, Theodore Roosevelt, who had won the governorship of New York on the strength of his achievements with a regiment of irregular cavalry in Cuba.

The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (2–3 April 1559) was a belated recognition of the end of the imperial plans of the late Emperor Charles V. The last phase of the war between Habsburg and Valois had been precipitated by the octogenarian Pope Paul IV in his hatred of Spanish dominion in Italy. The principal combatants had fought it almost unwillingly, but the struggle had been as bitter as it was inconclusive and even more costly than previous wars. Now a new era was to dawn with the marriage of Philip II to Henry II's daughter, Elizabeth.

sang the poet Ronsard.

The change was even greater than men realised at the time. In less than ten years from the abdication of Charles V (1555/6) all political problems moved on to a completely different plane. Until the middle of the sixteenth century, the Reformation had been successful only where it had been allied with the state. When it became revolutionary, as it did in the German Peasants' War and in the Anabaptist movements of the Netherlands and northern Germany, it had been easily put down, because it had been supported only by the lower classes in town and country. Now, for the first time and quite suddenly, revolutionary movements became nationwide and included classes, or elements of classes, ranging from artisans to princes of the blood. Determined minorities tried to impose their views on whole countries. They had to build organised parties to match the power of the state.

Post-reformation Europe displayed on the surface a large measure of political diversity. The fragmentation of the universal church, it would appear, completed a process of political fragmentation which had been going on for centuries. With medieval natural law in decline, and the emergence of the modern sovereign state still in the future, the nations of western Europe became locked in conflict within—and with their neighbours—in search of a system of government which would lead them away from confusion and anarchy. Yet the historian who looks at western Europe at the end of the sixteenth century is, in general, impressed not by the diversity of the political systems in the process of formation but by their striking similarity. In the constitutional issues which confronted them, and in the manner of their solution, all the governments of the day had much in common, because the pressures upon them were more or less the same. The general pressure of economic and social forces burst through and flowed beyond the frontiers of the new nation states.

The whole of Europe was at this time, to a greater or less degree, subject to a double upward pressure: of prices and of population. The rise in population far outdistanced the rise in productivity and inevitably commodity prices were driven sharply upwards. In Spain, for example, the 1540s saw a savage rise in prices and the succeeding decades would see a tragic worsening of the whole situation as the Spanish economic system sagged under heavy overseas commitments, a debilitating war in the Netherlands, and a war of attrition at sea.