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 Perhaps the volume should have been replaced by a totally new one, but so drastic a step was neither feasible nor yet, as it turned out, necessary.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.

Along the western seaboard of Europe, the first half of the sixteenth century witnessed the consolidation of national states. The smaller countries were not affected. Scotland had to await the arrival of the Reformation in the 1560s and may be ignored in this survey; Burgundy was undergoing a process of centralisation which did not prevent her break-up and redistribution in the next hundred years; Portugal had already achieved all the organisation she was to have until the Spanish occupation in 1580. Thus the story must concentrate on three main units – England, France and the Spanish kingdoms. In all these countries, medieval kingship began to fail early in the fifteenth century. The Hundred Years War with attendant and subsequent civil wars wrecked both the French and English monarchies, while the kings of Castile and Aragon developed sudden weaknesses in the face of local and class independence. The second half of the century therefore saw simultaneous attempts to restore strong monarchy as the only safeguard of law and order. The Catholic kings in Spain, Charles VII and Louis XI in France, the Yorkists and Henry VII in England – all pursued much the same ends by much the same methods. But if these restorers of peace and good government naturally used the means to hand and were therefore ‘medieval’, it is not surprising that the next generation, proceeding from there, should have more consistently invented and innovated. In England the break with Rome involved a constitutional revolution in which the independent national state was deliberately set up, administration reformed, the principle of legislative sovereignty worked out in practice.

The forty years between the accession of Charles V in 1519 and the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 were more decisive for the evolution of the art of war than any subsequent period before the late eighteenth century. The previous generation had been a period of real transition; different arms, different methods of fighting, old and new, had been used side by side, their respective merits still uncertain. The successful defence of Padua had seemed to show that inner defences could effectively supplement old-fashioned walls; at Novara, the traditional tactics of the Swiss were resoundingly vindicated; the handgun still found less general favour than the crossbow. But in this later period certain definite breaks with the past were made, and the modes of warfare for two centuries were anticipated. Fortification was systematised on the basis of the bastioned trace, and the temporary emphasis on internal instead of external defences was reversed; the crossbow was rejected; the massed selfsufficient column of pike disappeared; no army henceforward dared to take the field without some balance between the three arms, cavalry, infantry, artillery; every army sought and found a unit of organisation some way between the hundred-odd strong band and the huge and unwieldy ‘battle’; the arquebus and the pike came to be used habitually together, and the former began to give way to the musket; the pistol appeared on the battlefield and was responsible for the emergence of a new medium cavalryman, the pistoleer. New weapons demand fresh tactics. The fact that armament was more or less stabilised by 1559 meant that tactics by that date had reached a stage of comparable definition.

The Reformation in the cities of the Rhineland and of Switzerland has its own character. Here a whole set of circumstances, geographical, political, cultural, gives a different pace and direction to the impulses of change which worked out differently in the landed principalities of Germany or the unified kingdoms of France and England.

By the end of the middle ages, many of the European cities had achieved independence of their temporal or spiritual overlords, and had come to exercise rights of intervention in ecclesiastical affairs which the Reformation extended and accelerated. It counted for much in Switzerland that the diocesan framework bore no relation to the all-important cantonal structure. The balance of internal forces varied from city to city. In Berne there was a persistence of aristocracy, in Strassburg a cathedral chapter and collegiate churches, in Basel a resident bishop, while in Basel also the craft guilds became an instrument of reforming pressure and the presence of a university offered facilities for propaganda which in Zurich and Strassburg devolved upon the parochial clergy. In Switzerland military prowess, prosperity, independence gave stimulus to alertness and self-confidence. ‘My lords of the council’ in Zurich were accustomed to regulate important affairs and to control events after a different manner from the small town politicians of the Saxon cities. Wackernagel’s fine picture of Basel at the beginning of the Reformation, with its great houses, its famous publishers, its artists and scholars, gives due place to the merchants, rich men furnished with ability, who could throng the lectures of Oecolampadius with an intelligent and devout awareness of great issues.

The religious life, in its many various forms, is deeply woven into the texture of Catholicism. The state of the orders is usually a reliable indication of the health of the Catholic church as a whole, and from early times the great formative periods of Catholicism have been marked not only by reforms in the existing orders but also by the creation of new ones, responsive in the first instance to the needs or the mood of a new epoch, though generally concealing surprising powers of survival and adaptability. The Counter-Reformation Catholic revival of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was no exception to this rule. The period was one which witnessed far-reaching changes in European society, and these set crucial and perplexing problems before a Catholicism resurgent, indeed, but no longer in enjoyment of a religious monopoly, faced with curtailed and shrinking frontiers in Europe, and in many places fighting for very existence. The history of the religious orders in this age shows the working out of the customary formula of restoration and new creation, but in a setting far more complicated and unfavourable than monasticism had ever faced before.

A comprehensive judgment on the state of the religious orders at the outbreak of the Reformation is extremely difficult to arrive at. The currents of reform of the previous 150 years, which had divided all the orders of friars into Observant and Conventual groups and had produced the various Observant Benedictine congregations in Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria and France, had long been dying down, though they were by no means everywhere quite dead.

In the states of the Italian peninsula, as in the rest of central and western Europe, the news of the activities and doctrines of Luther, followed by those of Zwingli and later by those of the Anabaptists, the Anti-Trinitarians and Calvin, fell on ground ready to receive it. Among the numerous ecclesiastics, memories of Savonarola’s preaching were not always propitious; thus the best-known Italian translator of Holy Scripture along Lutheran lines, the Florentine Antonio Brucioli, was violently hostile to Savonarola. But there were the hopes raised by the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17) especially in certain Florentine and allied circles in contact with the Venetian patrician and Camaldolese hermit, Blessed Paolo Giustiniani (1476–1528); there was a desire for greater morality and austerity of life in the laity, the hierarchy and the curia; people were fully aware of the ‘abuses’ originally devised to meet the needs (in money and staff) of the financial administration and the centralised policy of the church, not just the needs of the Holy See as an Italian state in matters of politics and war. There was also a strong desire for a more spiritual conception of Catholic religious life: for men like Giustiniani (and his friends included Gasparo Contarini, a Venetian nobleman, later to become famous as a cardinal) the consequence of such an infusion of the spirit occupied pride of place. These leanings were not in any way meant to affect the spheres of dogma, liturgy, discipline, traditions, the fundamental structure of the church, or the papal authority, but would, it was hoped, be capable of supplying these with energy enough to purify the church ‘in capite et in membris’.

When Ivan III succeeded his father, Vasily II, in 1462 a new era in the history of the grand principality of Moscow began. By the end of Vasily’s troubled reign the hegemony of Moscow over the other Great Russian principalities and republics had been confirmed. But Tver, Ryazan, Rostov and Yaroslavl were still independent; the republics of Novgorod and Pskov and the town of Vyatka owed no allegiance to the grand prince of Moscow; and the Russian lands in the south west along the Dnieper and the upper reaches of the Oka were under Lithuanian control. Furthermore, the majority of the Great Russian people were still, in name at least, tributaries of the khan of the Golden Horde.

The early years of Ivan’s reign were years of preparation for the major tasks that lay ahead. Before Ivan could set about the conquest of the Ukrainian lands from Lithuania, the eastern and southern frontiers had to be secured; before the remaining independent Great Russian states could be securely annexed to Moscow and the lands of Muscovy extended to the Baltic and the White Sea, Novgorod and her northern empire had to be subdued; and before Russia could emerge as an international power with her pride and dignity restored, the degrading so-called ‘Tatar yoke’ had to be thrown off.

There is little information of hostile activity on the western or southern boundaries during the sixties of the fifteenth century, and Ivan was able to concentrate his attention on the powerful and aggressive Tatars of Kazan. As a result of a series of campaigns against Kazan (1467-9), which apart from the great summer expedition of 1469 were little more than full-scale reconnaissances, not only was valuable experience in invading Kazan territory gained, but also a period of calm ensued and Moscow’s eastern frontiers were not violated during the nine years following the armistice concluded in the autumn of 1469. With his eastern frontier thus temporarily secured, Ivan was able during the following decade to devote his energies to the problem of Novgorod.

The rapid developments in educational theory and practice witnessed in this period have deservedly attracted much notice. There was a significant increase in the amount of speculation on the aims and methods of teaching and a number of institutions were established which actively practised new principles. Consideration of the question is, however, far from simple. On the one hand it is necessary to define the nature of the programme of educational reform in order to estimate, if possible, the degree to which schools and universities genuinely displayed a fresh approach. On the other hand one must disentangle the movement for reform in teaching from the movement for reform in religion, for the latter had marked repercussions in this field, not only confusing the issue for contemporaries but bedevilling later interpretations of the subject with confessional prejudice. Was there an advance in education or a regression? Did, or did not, the Reformation compromise and frustrate the Renaissance? Even the value of a classical education, which was adopted so firmly at this time as an ideal of pedagogy that it lasted invincible for over three centuries, has lately been called in question. On one point fortunately there can be little doubt. The novel attitudes which obtruded in the sixteenth century were not victorious suddenly. They modified existing machinery only gradually, and for much of the time over most of Europe the educational facilities of the mid sixteenth century were what they had been for some centuries before. It is therefore necessary to begin by surveying the traditional structure of schools and universities.

For a full measure of the Protestant Reformation in France in the first half of the sixteenth century, we must look beyond the insurgence itself to the closing settlements. In their own way they marked a stage. After so much feuding and fanatic bigotry, the new men at the forefront of affairs came willingly or unwillingly to temper the righteousness of their cause with mingled feelings of chagrin, exhaustion, and uneasy compromise. The dynasty of Valois-Angoulême had faded and disappeared, leaving Henry of Navarre to claim the rich patrimony of the Crown. In a jaunty mood of elation he may well have said that Paris was worth a mass. Yet, when on 25 July 1593 before the archbishop of Bourges in the great church of Saint-Denis he abjured the tenets of his Protestant upbringing, the moment of truth and disillusionment was patently clear: France remained staunchly Catholic. He had to recognise that profound reality before validating his inheritance. For all the show of undeniable pugnacity, the Protestant cause could not reach beyond the posture of a minority. Its stance and conduct betrayed the very attitudes of a minority. All the more striking, therefore, was its success in carving out a niche of recognition in the structured life of France. Here lay one of the great dramas of early modern Europe and summed up a host of novelties, crises of conscience, deeply felt desires for reform as much by those who followed the path of revolt as by those who remained in or returned to the doctrines and traditions of Catholicism.

England, as is notorious, wore her Reformation with a difference. While elsewhere a religious upheaval carried in its wake political and constitutional reconstruction, England’s march away from Rome was led by the government for reasons which had little to do with religion or faith. There are of course circumstances, feelings and passions, as well as indifferences which explain the English Reformation. The dislike of priests and the pretensions of the church, which appeared all over western Europe, had not left England untouched. A whole folklore of the disreputable cleric testifies to a common opinion whose significance is quite independent of its accuracy. The abuses of the church – simony, nepotism, pluralism, ostentatious wealth, corruption, worldliness – gave pause to good orthodox Christians like Thomas More who only started to deny them when denunciation had become linked with heresy. Since 1515, Thomas Wolsey, the great cardinal, had governed church and state and had given a concrete and comprehensive example of all that was wrong with the former. Like his master, the pope, he had done the work of this world and paid merely formal attention to the work of the next. The extenuating circumstances which later ages may discover – his buildings, his patronage of the arts and learning, his tolerance – seemed to his own age only to aggravate his unashamed worldliness. There were truer Christians among the English clergy than Wolsey, but both in high places and in low, among the bishops and in the parishes, the not-so-spiritual greatly outnumbered the rest.

‘I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word: otherwise I did nothing. And then, while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my Philip and my Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that neither a prince or emperor inflicted such damage upon it.’ If Luther actually spoke these words recorded in his Table Talk, he betrayed either a faulty memory or a poor grasp of political realities. It is true that he often exerted little influence on the storm that swirled around him, although he stood at its epicentre, but it was certainly not true that the Word did it all. The long-term success of demands for religious reform, even in the limited form it was to take in Germany, depended in the last resort on politics, which in turn crucially influenced the institutional shape it was to take. From the very beginning, the reform of religion was so entangled with political issues of many different kinds, that it could never give rise to an unpolitical Reformation: to put it bluntly, without politics, no Reformation.

As soon as ‘Luther’s cause’ became a matter of public debate, the fate of religious reform was tied to princely politics within the Holy Roman Empire, for Luther’s very survival depended on the protection afforded him by the elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise. Frederick was certainly convinced of Luther’s sincerity and integrity by advisors such as his chaplain Georg Spalatin and his chancellor Gregor Brück, but his willingness to take this protection to its limits was also influenced by a streak of anti-Habsburg politics shared by many other princes of the empire.

The reign of Maximilian I (1459–1519) had given the empire much new strength. The emperor, a powerful and dynamic personality, proved capable of taking some decisive decisions. When he maintained his hold over the Tyrol and the Habsburg possessions in Swabia (1488–90) he made sure that the king of the Romans should not be pushed aside to the periphery of the empire. In doing so, he also managed to reactivate the traditional supporters of the crown, especially the Swabians. The Swabian League, founded in 1488, became an important instrument of Habsburg policy in the empire at the same time as it was becoming attractive to the German princes. However, not even Maximilian was able to alter the inmost reality of German constitutional history: king and territories continued to stand side by side. There was no process of centralisation initiated by the king, though the danger that the great men might destroy the Imperial federation was removed by Maximilian’s consolidation of his kingship, a process generally given the name of imperial reform. At the Diet of Worms in 1495, important new directions were taken in hand, all of them testifying to the co-existence of king and territories on terms which before this had emerged from a laboriously negotiated compromise.

In return for a tax granted by the Diet, the king proclaimed an ‘eternal territorial peace’ directed against the right, claimed by the nobility, to wage private war. This constituted an important step in the consolidation of the empire. The king’s Chamber Court was so reformed that it might be able to control conflicts hitherto settled by licensed fighting. Though it continued to sit in the king’s name, it was separated from his court and removed from its influence. It thus profited from the fact that the monarchy continued to be peripatetic. At any rate, the organisation of the law court was completed; not only did the Imperial Estates thereby acquire a significant influence, but parity was achieved between the traditional, noble, agencies of power and the newly risen jurists of bourgeois descent. This parity was also to make itself felt within the territorial administrations.