The new Punjab state created new problems because of the way in which it was formed. Sant Fateh Singh expressed his dissatisfaction several months before the new state was inaugurated: genuinely Punjabi-speaking areas were being left out of the new state and given to Haryana or Himachal Pradesh; Chandigarh was unjustly being turned into a Union Territory; power and irrigation projects were being taken over by the Union Government. Opposing the Reorganization Bill in the Parliament, Kapur Singh referred to the promises made by the Congress and its leaders on various occasions; as late as July, 1946 Jawaharlal Nehru had told a press conference that the Sikhs were entitled to special consideration: ‘I see no wrong in an area and a set-up in the North wherein the Sikhs can also experience a glow of freedom.’ Kapur Singh too favoured a larger state irrespective of Sikh population, but a state standing in a special relationship to the Centre and having a special internal constitution, a Sikh homeland.

Sant Fateh Singh demanded ‘the same rights for the Suba administration as were allowed to other states, and the same status for the language as enjoyed in other areas’. On 17 December 1966 he went on a fast with the declared intention of immolating himself ten days later. On the afternoon of December 27 Hukam Singh reached Amritsar to tell a large congregation in the Golden Temple that the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had agreed to arbitrate on the issues involved and that Chandigarh belonged to the Punjab.

The phase of about three decades from the end of the First World War to the Act of Independence in 1947 was marked by intense political activity appearing first in the form of the Act of 1935 and then in the form of independence and partition. However, the struggle for freedom was not always constitutional; it was also agitational, and even militant. The Sikhs participated in the struggle for freedom in all its forms.

In a general meeting of the Sikh leaders at Lahore in March, 1919, a new political party known as the Central Sikh League was announced, and it was formally inaugurated at Amritsar in the last week of December. The immediate and long-term objectives of the new party were put forth in the first issue of its organ, the Akālī: to rebuild the demolished wall of the Rakabganj Gurdwara, to bring the Khalsa College at Amritsar under the control of the representatives of the Sikh community, to liberate gurdwāras from the control of the mahants, and to inspire the Sikhs to participate in the struggle for the country's freedom.

The Rakabganj issue was taken up by the Central Sikh League when a few of the prominent individuals who had participated in the agitation of 1914 approached Sardul Singh Caveeshar at Lahore to revive the agitation. Caveeshar issued an appeal in the Akālī of September 2, 1920: ‘Wanted 100 martyrs to save gurdwāras’. Within a fortnight, he received 700 offers. The method and the mood had changed.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century the socio-religious community of Guru Nanak's followers became ‘a state within the state’. Each of his first four successors made his own distinctive contribution, working within the ideological and institutional parameters adumbrated by him. We have to study their own compositions closely to perceive the slow but sure development of the Sikh Panth in terms of numbers, composition, material resources, social institutions and a multi-dimensional transmutation of ideas in a creative response to changing situations. To listen to those who were closely connected with them is equally rewarding. The context for this development was provided by the politico-administrative arrangements evolved by Akbar, giving peace and prosperity to a vast empire. The position of the Sikh Panth at the end of his reign may be seen as the culmination of a peaceful evolution of nearly three-quarters of a century. This evolutionary phase came dramatically to a grave end with the martyrdom of Guru Arjan in the very first year of Jahangir's reign.

Babur ruled over the territory he conquered from Bhera to Bihar for only four years till his death in 1530. His son and successor, Nasirud-din Humayun, temporarily added Malwa and Gujarat to the dominions inherited from Babur. The Afghan resurgence under the leadership of the Sur Afghan Sher Khan obliged Humayun to abandon the Mughal territory in India in 1540. Sher Shah Sur and his successors ruled over northern India for fifteen years before Humayun staged a successful return in 1555.

A rigorous analysis of the compositions of Guru Nanak reveals that there is hardly anything in contemporary politics, society or religion that he finds commendable. Yet the age of Guru Nanak was not fundamentally or even radically different from the previous or the following few centuries. Much of his denunciation, therefore, can be understood in terms of his moral fervour. For a rational conceptualization of his position it may be suggested that the entire social order had lost its legitimacy in the eyes of Guru Nanak because it had lost its support from the prevalent religious ideologies: it was neither ‘Hindu’ nor ‘Muslim’. A new religious ideology was needed to become the basis of a new social order. At one stage in his life Guru Nanak came to believe that he had discovered a new ideology and he was looking at the contemporary situation from the standpoint of this new ideology. His denunciation of contemporary practices and beliefs is only an inverted statement of his positive ideals.

Guru Nanak was thoroughly familiar with the politico-administrative arrangements made by the Afghan rulers, particularly in the Punjab. This familiarity, reflected in the use of his metaphors, is a measure of his preoccupation with this vital aspect of the social situation. Moreover, there is direct denunciation of contemporary rule. The rulers are unjust; they discriminate against their non-Muslim subjects by extorting jizya and pilgrimage tax. The ruling class is oppressing the cultivators and the common people.

During the seventeenth century five Gurus succeeded Guru Arjan. His son, Guru Hargobind was succeeded by a grandson, Guru Har Rai. The younger son of Guru Har Rai, Guru Har Krishan was succeeded by a grand uncle, Guru Tegh Bahadur, the youngest son of Guru Hargobind. Guru Gobind Singh, who succeeded his father Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1675, abolished personal Guruship before his death in 1708.

Interference by the Mughal emperors Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb in the affairs of the Sikh Panth was an important feature of this period. We have already referred to the martyrdom of Guru Arjan at the beginning of Jahangir's rule. A few years later, Jahangir ordered the detention of Guru Hargobind in the fort of Gwalior which was generally used for detaining political prisoners. In the reign of Shah Jahan the Mughal administrators of the Punjab came into armed conflict with Guru Hargobind. Aurangzeb took an active interest in the issue of succession, passed orders for the execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur, and at one time ordered total extirpation of Guru Gobind Singh and his family. State interference was, thus, a serious matter.

State interference encouraged dissent within the Sikh Panth and accentuated disunity. Prithi Chand, significantly, put forth his claim to be the successor of Guru Arjan after his martyrdom, becoming thus a rival of Guru Hargobind. Dhir Mai, a grandson of Guru Hargobind, preferred to remain in the good books of the emperors and chose to have his own centre in the province of Lahore rather than succeeding to the office of Guru Hargobind at his headquarters in a vassal principality.

Babur's invading army in the eyes of Guru Nanak was a ‘marriage-party of sin’. Not even the ladies of the nobles were spared dishonour. With heads once of luxuriant tresses and partings adorned with red, they suffered now the shears of brutality; their throats were filled with choking dust; they wandered forlorn, away from the places that had sheltered them. No longer were there the sports of the nobles themselves, and gone were their horses and stables, their trumpets and clarions, their scarlet tunics and sword belts, their mansions and palaces, and their seraglios with soft beds and ‘beautiful women whose sight banished sleep’. Rocklike buildings were razed to the ground and princes were trampled into dust. ‘It is Babur who rules in their place now’.

Guru Nanak's sharp response to Babur's invasions underlines the most important political development during his life, the transition from Afghan to Mughal rule in the Punjab and in northern India. The first fifty years of Guru Nanak's life had been marked by a period of peace in the Punjab. At the time of his birth in 1469 the Punjab was a part of the Sultanate of Delhi under Bahlol Lodhi. The major conquest of Bahlol and his successors was that of the Sharqi kingdom of Jaunpur. Their battles for minor political or territorial gains were fought in Rajasthan. There were only a few insignificant revolts in the Punjab during a period of about seventy years.

The Punjab as a province of the British empire was larger than the kingdom of Ranjit Singh and it was also placed in a context almost of global economy and polity. The colonial rulers introduced a large measure of bureaucracy and the rule of law, which established a new kind of relationship between the individual and the state. The ‘paternal’ rule of the early decades was eventually replaced by the ‘machine rule’ of laws, codes and procedures. The executive, financial and judicial functions were separated. An elaborate administration was geared to the purposes of peace and prosperity. For political and economic purposes as well as for administration, new forms of communication and transportation were developed, symbolized by the post office, the telegraph office, the metalled road, the railway and the press.

To increase agricultural production and revenue from land the British administrators of the Punjab introduced reform in the agrarian system with periodic settlements and records of rights as its major planks. Land revenue began to increase steadily. New sources of revenue were tapped. Irrigation projects completed between 1860 and 1920 brought nearly 10,000,000 acres of land under cultivation, creating a ‘prosperous, progressive and modern’ region in the province and changing not only its agrarian economy but also its demographic distribution and even its physical appearance. The increase in production was reflected in the increasing volume and value of trade.

In the early 1520s the Reformation took root in Denmark and quickly spread over a wide area. As in Germany, the ground had been prepared beforehand. There were many signs in the later middle ages of an increasing need for religion among the people, as well as numerous complaints that the church was on the decline and willing to abuse its power. With few exceptions the bishops were inadequate for their tasks – noble landowners without any real sense of the religious needs of the age. Bishoprics and greater benefices were reserved for the aristocracy, which meant that the higher clerics were closely bound to the nobility and the gap between them and the parish priests was wide. Humanism was widespread among the clergy, many of whom had studied at foreign universities.

One of the most important representatives of this biblically based humanism and of the movement for Catholic reform was the Carmelite friar Paulus Helie who in 1520 became the head of the order’s new foundation in Copenhagen, while at the same time lecturing on the Bible at the university. His ideas rested on the Bible which he interpreted according to the Fathers of the church. He violently attacked the worldliness of the clergy and the customs and superstitions fostered by the church, but although he had originally hailed Luther as a welcome ally, he completely rejected him when he realised that the Lutheran movement was leading to a break with the church, for ‘abuse does not abolish use’. Though consistent, Helie’s standpoint was untenable.

The traditional idea according to which there is an intrinsic connection between the ‘Reformed Churches’ led by the likes of Zwingli, Bucer or Oecolampadius and the Anabaptists is broadly correct. Switzerland, south Germany and the Netherlands were the home territories of both Reformed and Anabaptists, while Anabaptists and other nonconformists were less prominent in Lutheran lands. Lutheran churches tended to be organised by secular rulers, while in Zurich, Strassburg and Basel long-established structures of guild government legitimised the popular pressure that accompanied the Reformation. It was easier to establish nonconformist conventicles where the commoner’s initiative in the church could not be totally denied than in places where he was expected to be an obedient subject in this as in all other matters. The communal elements in the ‘Zwinglian’ version of the Reformation made it generate ‘sects’ in a way that authoritarian Lutheranism did not. To this extent the old debate about whether Anabaptism began in Saxony in 1521 or in Zurich in 1525 was correctly settled in favour of Zurich.

Religious radicalism, however, was endemic in all regions of the early Reformation, in the years between the Diet of Worms (1521) and the Peasants’ War (1525). During this time the princes who later organised Lutheran territorial churches still evaded responsibility for the Reformation. To fill the vacuum created by the interacting conservatism of Luther and the princes, radical figures like Andreas Carlstadt and Thomas Müntzer took the lead in implementing changes in religious practice and articulating a non-Lutheran theology. They made it a matter of principle that there should be no ‘tarrying for the magistrate’ in the reform of the church.

Many historians of the Habsburg–Valois wars have followed the broad outline of Blaise de Monluc’s retrospective assessment, fascinated by what appears at first glance to be a destructive and almost incomprehensible duel between two highly cultured Renaissance princes: the Habsburg Charles V, and the Valois Francis I. Yet the wars, which took place in an age that produced both Erasmus and Machiavelli, involved many Christian and Muslim powers. They continued after Charles and Francis were dead, and their repercussions were felt throughout the known world either directly – as participants or victims of the fighting – or indirectly, since the struggle consumed Christian resources and enabled the Ottoman state to expand. And while the conflict was extremely destructive, states and individuals – such as Monluc – participated in the wars because they also brought considerable benefits.

Until a few decades ago, historians of economic change in the sixteenth century concentrated predominantly on the towns, the centres of manufacture and nodal points for both regional and interregional trade. It was held that European expansion overseas, the opening of new markets and new sources of raw materials, above all the acquisition of the precious metals of South America, justified calling the age that of early capitalism. The fact that most people lived on the land and were engaged in exploiting it appeared immaterial in this context, inasmuch as the land and its use appeared still to be limited by ‘feudal’ conditions and thus could not be a part of the progressive developments which were to lead to the Industrial Revolution. However, a scheme that separated town from countryside demonstrated its inadequacy in explaining the emergence of the modern industrial societies of Europe when the attempt was made to transmit the results of a process lasting four centuries to the countries of the Third World. There those one-sided notions concerning industrialisation regularly led to failure. Thus we have come to realise how fundamental the transformation had to be which would enable an agrarian society to undertake industrial growth. A rural economy engaged in producing food, raw materials and in addition beasts as the only mobile source of energy, an economy which of necessity involved a large part of the population, needed to be transformed into an economically defined separate sector to be called agriculture – a sector capable of guaranteeing the provisioning of society in a planned and predictable fashion, but employing only a small part of the population.

The first edition of this volume was written between 1953 and 1956, and the more than three decades since that time have witnessed an exceptional outburst of new research and fresh interpretations. Thus it has unquestionably become desirable to offer to readers and students a revised version of the Reformation story. Perhaps the volume should have been replaced by a totally new one, but so drastic a step was neither feasible nor yet, as it turned out, necessary. The revision was undertaken in part by the original contributors: all survivors have had the opportunity to review and where necessary rewrite their chapters. Several pieces contributed by authors no longer with us have been replaced or rewritten by living scholars. For one chapter (XVII), which the intended author’s ill health had caused to be replaced by a short and sadly inadequate note from the editor’s pen, an expert hand has now been found. In the course of the operation, it became apparent that the bulk of the volume has survived the accidents of ageing remarkably well: we feel able to put this moderately revised version before the reader with a good heart.

As a matter of fact – such things will happen – the passage of time and labour has helped to justify some of the interpretations which in between appeared to be called in much doubt. Thus work on Luther himself, while placing him more carefully within his medieval inheritance, has also reemphasized his predominant concern with matters spiritual, contrary to occasional efforts to show that he was pursuing social and political ends.

LITERATURE

The literature of the period 1520–59 was disseminated almost entirely by the printed page, and the general influences of the new process discussed in the previous volume must be borne in mind. It is, however, far less easy to generalise about sixteenth-century printed books than about incunables, for the simple reason that, while books printed prior to 1500 have been more or less exhaustively listed by scientific bibliographers, our knowledge of subsequent publications is by no means as comprehensive. There is a systematic list of publications in England covering the sixteenth century in the Short Title Catalogue of Books printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, 1475–1640; this takes in also books printed in English abroad, but (apart from Latin service books) not books printed abroad in other languages designed for the English market or by English authors, of which there were a considerable number. With this invaluable work as a basis, knowledge of both the quantity and the quality of English literary works in the sixteenth century is more securely established than is the case with the output of continental writers. With the exception of the recently (1981) completed author-catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, none of the great continental libraries has a printed catalogue of books and the student who seeks an overall view of sixteenth-century literature must perforce consult the printed catalogues of the British Library. The dangers of this are evident if one recalls that it has been reckoned that the Library’s holding of French books before 1600 ‘represents not much more than a fifth of the editions known to have been printed at Paris, and less than a sixth of the output of the French provinces’.

In a life of bold decisions, none was more significant for the future than Cortés’s decision to rebuild the city of Tenochtitlán-Mexico and to make it the capital of the kingdom of New Spain. The site had many serious disadvantages. It was an island, marshy and reputedly unhealthy; it produced no food of its own, except the fish caught in the lake; its drinking water had to be brought by expensive artificial means from the hills of Chapultepec, several miles away; it communicated with the mainland by causeways, and many among Cortés’s following thought that these causeways, with their easily invested bridges, would be dominated by the Indians of the mainland rather than by the island Europeans. Moreover, a large Indian population still lived on the island, lurking among the ruins of buildings which Cortés had had pulled down in order to dump the rubble in the drainage canals, to facilitate the manœuvres of his cavalry. In short, the site might well be a trap, incapable of resisting siege, and peculiarly vulnerable in its provisioning and water supply.

Cortés, though certainly aware of the economic defects of the place, overrode the objections. He believed it to be as strong a site for Europeans as for Indians. Further, he probably wished to avoid a too rapid dispersal of his followers through the land they had only partly conquered, where they might still become the victims of their new vassals, or of their own disagreements. Finally Cortés was wise enough to appreciate the prestige of Tenochtitlán, its ‘renown and importance’, as he expressed it.

The concept of the Reformation as a significant and selfcontained period, with characteristics and central events and even perhaps a particular ethos of its own, has had a long life as such historical categories go. Even those who disagree with the traditional interpretation of the early sixteenth century have commonly concentrated their attack on the notion that it marks the beginning of modern times. Some historians of thought trace the middle ages right through the sixteenth century and see nothing novel in yet another controversy within the church; they would put their marker at a point where predominantly religious thinking is replaced by secular (scientific) attitudes of mind. Authors of such reappraisals do not deny the special character of the years 1520–60 looked at by themselves, but others – partisans of either Catholicism or Protestantism – are willing to do even that. If one is prepared to treat the Reformation as a temporary aberration (a chapter which even after 400 years might still be closed) or as a mere return to the true way – analyses which, though historically invalid, may be denominationally necessary – one will rob the period of much of its cohesion by doubting its spiritual and intellectual content. It is also possible to argue that the Counter-Reformation and the religious wars which extended into the next century are properly part of the same story. But historians, so ready as a rule to revise the periods into which for convenience sake they divide the subject-matter of their study, have on the whole allowed the ‘age of the Reformation’ to survive.

If the Reformation can be said to have begun with a single dramatic event, it was not the alleged posting of Luther’s ninety-five theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. It was rather the stage-managed burning of the papal bull Exsurge domine, which Luther committed to the flames before the Elstertor at Wittenberg on 10 December 1520, along with the books of canon law. The entire university was invited to witness this public act of defiance of the church’s highest authorities, and after the dignitaries had gone home, students took over the ceremony by holding a parodied procession with a puppet of the pope and a mock papal bull, which they burned along with the books of Luther’s opponents. Not long afterwards the first outbreak of collective violence in support of the cause of religious reform took place in Erfurt, the other university town with which Luther had close personal connections and where he found a mass of enthusiastic supporters. Events there on 11–12 June 1521 first took the form of a rowdy student protest against a ban on Luther’s supporters among the city’s two collegiate chapters. This turned into an organised anticlerical riot, as journeymen and country-folk in town for the mid-week market joined in to sack over forty clerical houses and premises of the town’s nominal overlord, the archbishop of Mainz. The Erfurt town council possibly connived at the riot and it certainly used the occasion to force the town’s clergy to surrender many of their privileges in return for protection against further popular wrath.

Not the least notable successes of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century were scored in the three kingdoms which constituted the eastern frontier-land of the Latin church: Poland, Hungary and Bohemia. The historical interest of the fortunes of the Reformation in these lands is due largely to the peculiar form given to its manifestation east of Germany by those political, social and economic characteristics which distinguished this area from western Europe. For whereas in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Britain we can observe the impact of reformative ideas on societies which were already enjoying the benefits of strong monarchy, where aristocratic separatism had already been largely defeated, where commerce and the towns were increasingly potent, and where society was no longer based on an adscript, service-rendering peasantry, in the countries east of the Elbe, the Böhmerwald and the Leitha we can watch the impact of the Reformation on a society where kings were weak and noble landlords strong, where medieval Parliaments were still dominant, where the towns were relatively few, small and impotent, and where serfdom was being ever more widely and severely established and legalised. The western Slavs and the Magyars had ever since their admission into Christendom constantly been stimulated by the importation of techniques, art forms, institutions, ideas and persons from the earlier developed societies of Germany, Italy and France, and had given to them a character that was peculiarly Polish or Czech or Magyar. That process of importation and modification was in the sixteenth century applied to the principles and practices of the religious reformers of Wittenberg and Geneva.