Chapter 16: Transformations in Europe, 1500-1750

Question 1

What was the papacy suffering from in 1500?

Answer 1

Corruption and dissent.

Question 2

Who was Pope Leo X and what did he do?

Answer 2

He was a member of the Medici family. He used indulgences to raise funds for new churches and buildings, including St. Peter’s Basilica.

Question 3

What did Martin Luther do?

Answer 3

He objected the emphasis of indulgence over faith; wrote the 95 Theses.

Question 4

What was Pope Leo’s response to Martin Luther’s objections? What did Martin Luther do in response to this?

Answer 4

He ignored them and condemned Luther. Luther then burned the papal document of condemnation, rejecting the pope’s authority and starting the Protestant Reformation.

Question 5

What was the Protestant Reformation?

Answer 5

A religious reform movement, protestors formed new Christian denominations.

Question 6

What did Luther believe about salvation?

Answer 6

He insisted that the only way to salvation was through faith in Jesus Christ, and that it should be based on the word of God in the Bible and Christian tradition, not the authority of the pope like Catholics.

Question 7

What was used to promote Luther’s ideas?

Answer 7

The printing press

Question 8

Who was John Calvin and what did he do?

Answer 8

He was an influential Protestant leader. He agreed on faith over works, but denied that faith could merit salvation and believed that salvation is predestined.

Question 9

What did the Catholic Church do in response to the Protestant Reformation?

Answer 9

They undertook their own reforms (Catholic Reformation). The supremacy of the pope was reaffirmed, but they required each bishop to reside in a diocese with priest training. The Society of Jesus/ Jesuits became a new religious order.

Question 10

Why did witch-hunts occur? What were accusations against independent women and widows based on?

Answer 10

Their power was feared. Accusations against independent women and widows drew on the belief that women who were not under the control of fathers/ husbands were likely to turn evil.

Question 11

What did witch-hunts lead to?

Answer 11

Rising social tensions, rural poverty, and environmental strains.

Question 12

What did Aristotle say regarding the Earth and elements?

Answer 12

He said that everything on Earth is made up of 4 elements. He was influenced by Pythagoras.

Question 13

During this time period, what did considerations of the conceptions of Aristotle and others start?

Answer 13

The Scientific Revolution, an intellectual movement associated with physics that showed that the workings of the universe could be explained by natural causes.

Question 14

What did Nicholas Copernicus do? Brahe and Kepler?

Answer 14

He theorized that the center of orbit was not the Earth but the Sun, calledheliocentrism. Brahe and Johannes Kepler strengthened and improved this model by finding that planets moved elliptically.

Question 15

What did Galileo Galilei do? What did this cause?

Answer 15

He built a telescope and found that heavenly bodies were not perfectly smooth. Intellectual and religious leaders encouraged political authorities to suppress the new ideas. Most Protestant leaders condemned the heliocentric universe as contrary to the Bible. Jesuits got his ideas banned, but printed books still spread them.

Question 16

Most religious leaders were suspicious of new scientific ideas, but pioneers of the Scientific Revolution thought what?

Answer 16

They thought that science and religion didn’t have to conflict.

Question 17

What was the movement of Enlightenment?

Answer 17

The belief that human reason could discover laws that governed social behavior and were just as scientific as laws that governed physics. It was often opposed, like the Scientific Revolution.

Question 18

What was economic life like in Europe?

Answer 18

• A small number of noble families had privileged access to high offices
• Merchants and professionals had wealth, but no legal privileges
• The masses were rural peasants or landless laborers.
• “A study of English society in 1688 […] distinguished twenty-five different social categories and
  pointed up the shocking inequality among them. It argued that less than half the population contributed to increasing the wealth of the kingdom, while the rest—the
  majority—were too poor and unskilled to make any substantial contribution.” https://www.dentonisd.org/cms/lib/TX21000245/Centricity/Domain/907/Earth%20and%20Its%20Peoples%20Ch%2016.pdf

Question 19

What was the bourgeoisie?

Answer 19

An urban class that dominated manufacturing, finance, trade, etc.

Question 20

What did the expansion of maritime trade lead to?

Answer 20

New merchant ship designs.

Dutch built the:

• fluit/ flyboat, a large capacity cargo ship developed in the 1590s.
• East Indiaman, a heavily armed ship that helped the Dutch establish supremacy in the Indian Ocean

Question 21

What did the Dutch government charter in order to facilitate trade during this time period?

Answer 21

Joint-stock companies- businesses that sold shares to people to raise money for trading enterprises and to spread risks (and profits) among many investors. Investors could buy and sell shares in stock exchanges.

Question 22

What projects did governments undertake to improve water transport?

Answer 22

The Dutch built canals for transport and to drain lowlands for agriculture. Other governments financed canals and systems of locks to raise barges over hills.

Question 23

After 1650, the Dutch received growing competition from who?

Answer 23

The English- their merchant fleet doubled, and foreign trade increased by 50%.

Question 24

Some successful members of the bourgeoisie in England and France retired from business and bought country estates to become members of what?

Answer 24

The gentry, a class of landowning families below the aristocracy. They loaned money to impoverished peasants.

Some sought aristocratic husbands for their daughters

In France, families could gain tax exemption by living in gentility for 3 generations or buying a title from the king.

Question 25

What happened as a result of the Little Ice Age?

Answer 25

The condition of the average person decreased, also due to warfare, environmental problems, and economic conditions.

Question 26

What helped the European poor avoid starvation?

Answer 26

High-yielding new crops from the Americas.

Question 27

What was the status of women like?

Answer 27

It was closely tied to the husband’s and family’s. They could inherit the throne in absence of a male heir.

They ranked below men everywhere, but class and wealth defined their position more.

Good marriage was important.

Question 28

How did city-states and principalities relate to each other in Germany?

Answer 28

They were bound in loose federations.

Question 29

Who was Charles V and what noteable contribution to international relations did he make?

Answer 29

“In 1519
electors of the Holy Roman Empire chose Charles V
(r. 1519–1556) to be the new emperor. Like his predecessors for three generations, Charles belonged to the powerful Habsburg˚ family of Austria, but he had recently
inherited the Spanish thrones of Castile and Aragon.
With the vast resources of all these offices behind him
(see [map below]), Charles hoped to centralize his imperial
power and lead a Christian coalition to halt the advance
into southeastern Europe of the Ottoman Empire, whose
Muslim rulers already controlled most of the Middle East
and North Africa.

Charles and his Christian allies eventually halted
the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1529, although
Ottoman attacks continued on and off until 1697. But
Charles’s efforts to forge his several possessions into Europe’s strongest state failed. King Francis I of France,
who had lost to Charles in the election for Holy Roman
Emperor, openly supported the Muslim Turks to weaken
his rival. In addition, the princes of the Holy Roman Empire’s many member states were able to use Luther’s religious Reformation to frustrate Charles’s efforts to reduce
their autonomy. Swayed partly by Luther’s appeals to
German nationalism, many German princes opposed
Charles’s defense of Catholic doctrine in the imperial
Diet (assembly).” https://www.dentonisd.org/cms/lib/TX21000245/Centricity/Domain/907/Earth%20and%20Its%20Peoples%20Ch%2016.pdf

The Global Empire of Charles V

Question 30

How did many Germans’ view of their government add to the appeal to them of Martin Luther’s reforms?

Answer 30

Many opposed the Catholic doctrine of imperial Diet.

Thie Diet is the “legislature of the German empire, or Holy Roman Empire, from the 12th century to 1806.” https://www.britannica.com/topic/Diet-German-history

Question 31

What was the Holy Roman Empire?

Answer 31

a loose federation of mostly German states and principalities, headed by an emperor elected by princes.

Question 32

What happened in the German Wars of Religion (1546-1555)?

Answer 32

“After decades of bitter squabbles turned to open
warfare in 1546 (the German Wars of Religion), Charles V
finally gave up his efforts at unification, abdicated control of his various possessions to different heirs, and retired to a monastery. By the Peace of Augsburg (1555), he
recognized the princes’ right to choose whether Catholicism or Lutheranism would prevail in their particular
states, and he allowed them to keep the church lands
they had seized before 1552. The triumph of religious diversity had derailed Charles’s plan for centralizing authority in central Europe and put off German political
unification for three centuries.” https://www.dentonisd.org/cms/lib/TX21000245/Centricity/Domain/907/Earth%20and%20Its%20Peoples%20Ch%2016.pdf

Question 33

Rulers of Spain and France successfully defended what? How?

Answer 33

They successfully defended Catholic tradition vs. Protestant challenges.

King Phillip II of Spain (r. 1556-1598) used an ecclesiastical court (Spanish Inquisition) to bring in line those who resisted authority. Suspected Protestants and critics of the king were accused of heresy, punishable by death.

“In France the Calvinist opponents of the Valois rulers
gained the military advantage in the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598), but in the interest of forging lasting
unity, their leader Prince Henry of Navarre then embraced the Catholic faith of the majority of his subjects.
In their embrace of a union of church and state, the new
Bourbon king, Henry IV, his son King Louis XIII, and his
grandson King Louis XIV were as supportive of the
Catholic Church as their counterparts in Spain. In 1685
Louis XIV even revoked the Edict of Nantes˚, by which
his grandfather had granted religious freedom to his
Protestant supporters in 1598.” https://www.dentonisd.org/cms/lib/TX21000245/Centricity/Domain/907/Earth%20and%20Its%20Peoples%20Ch%2016.pdf

Question 34

What did King Charles I of England do to evade any check on power? What did this cause?

Answer 34

He ruled for 11 years without summoning Parliament. In 1640, there was a rebellion in Scotland that forced him to summon it to approve new taxes, but he refused their requests. He arrested leading critics, which started the English Civil War (1642-1651), a conflict over royal vs. Parliamentary rights and part of the wider War of the Three Kingdoms (1639-1653) in England, Scotland and Ireland, then united in a personal kingdom under Charles I. He and his supporters lost the war and he was tried and executed in 1649.

Question 35

After the Stuart line was restored, what did King James II refuse? What happened as a result of this?

Answer 35

He refused to respect the Parliament’s rights and had his son baptized as a Roman Catholic.

He was forced into exile in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

The Bill of Rights was created in 1689, which stated that the Parliament had to be called frequently and consent to changing laws and the raising of the army. Religious toleration was extended to the Puritans.

Question 36

What did the Estates General in France represent?

Answer 36

The traditional rights of the clergy, nobility, and towns/bourgeoisie.

Question 37

Bourbon monarchs (France) ruled without doing what?

Answer 37

Calling the Estates General into session. They claimed the monarch had absolute authority to rule in God’s name on Earth.

Question 38

What did Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles do?

Answer 38

“Louis XIV’s gigantic new palace at Versailles˚ symbolized the French monarch’s triumph over the traditional rights of the nobility, clergy, and towns. Capable of housing ten thousand people and surrounded by elaborately landscaped grounds and parks, the palace can be seen as a sort of theme park of royal absolutism. Elaborate ceremonies and banquets centered on the king kept the nobles who lived at Versailles away from plotting rebellion. According to one of them, the duke of Saint-Simon˚, ‘no one was so clever in devising petty distractions’ as the king.”

Question 39

What was the result of almost constant warfare in early modern Europe?

Answer 39

Monarchs spent a lot of money, there was widespread devastation and death. There was long-lasting depopulation and economic decline after the 30 years war.

They also lead to an improvement of European military and weaponry, the # of men in arms increased.

Question 40

England had no standing army in peacetime, but they had what?

Answer 40

A rise as a sea power that started under King Henry VIII.

Question 41

France’s expansionist efforts were blocked by what?

Answer 41

Britain’s navy and land armies.

Question 42

What undermined the Spanish economy?

Answer 42

Concern for religious uniformity and aristocratic privilege.

Question 43

What caused inflation in Spain?

Answer 43

Imports of silver and gold from American colonies.

Question 44

The French developed a national economy under Colbert, but did what, unlike England?

Answer 44

They didn’t tax wealthy landowners. Aristocrats kept them from taxing wealthy landowners, collecting taxes directly, securing low-cost loans, or managing debt as efficiently.