The Story Of Mankind - Part 21

The Story of Mankind was written and illustrated by Dutch-American journalist, professor, and author Hendrik Willem van Loon and published in 1921. In 1922, it was the first book to be awarded the Newbery Medal for its outstanding contribution to children's literature.

Transcript

This is part 21 of the story of mankind by Hendrik van Loon.

Religious Warfare The Age of the Great Religious Controversies The 16th and the 17th centuries were the age of religious controversy.

If you will notice,

You will find that almost everybody around you is forever talking economics and discussing wages and hours of labor and strikes in their relation to the life of the community.

For that is the main topic of interest of our own time.

The poor little children of the year 1600 or 1650 fared worse.

They never heard anything but religion.

Their heads were filled with predestination,

Transubstantiation,

Free will,

And a hundred other queer words expressing obscure points of the true faith,

Whether Catholic or Protestant.

According to the desire of their parents,

They were baptized Catholics or Lutherans or Calvinists or Zwinglians or Anabaptists.

They learned their theology from the Augsburg Catholicism.

Used by Luther or from the Institutes of Christianity written by Calvin.

Or they mumbled the 39 Articles of Faith which were printed in the English Book of Common Prayer and they were told that these alone represented the true faith.

They heard of the wholesale theft of church property perpetrated by King Henry VIII,

The much married monarch of England,

Who made himself the supreme head of the English Church and assumed the old papal rights of appointing bishops and priests.

They had a nightmare whenever someone mentioned the Holy Inquisition,

With its dungeons and its many torture chambers,

And they were treated to equally horrible stories of how a mob of outraged Dutch Protestants had got hold of a dozen defenseless old priests and hanged them for the sheer pleasure of killing those who professed a different faith.

It was unfortunate that the two contending parties were so equally matched.

Otherwise,

The struggle would have come to a quick solution.

Now it dragged on for eight generations,

And it grew so complicated that I can only tell you the most important details,

And must ask you to get the rest from one of the many histories of the Reformation.

The great reform movement of the Protestants had been followed by a thoroughgoing reform within the bosom of the Church.

Those popes who had been merely amateur humanists and dealers in Roman and Greek antiquities,

Disappeared from the scene,

And their place was taken by serious men who spent twenty hours a day administering these holy duties which had been placed in their hands.

The long and rather disgraceful happiness of the monasteries came to an end.

Monks and nuns were forced to be up at sunrise,

To study the Church Fathers,

To tend the sick and console the dying.

The Holy Inquisition watched day and night that no dangerous doctrines should be spread by way of the printing press.

Here it is customary to mention poor Galileo,

Who was locked up because he had not been a little too indiscreet in explaining the heavens with his fun little telescope,

And had muttered certain opinions about the behavior of the planets,

Which were entirely opposed to the official views of the Church.

But in all fairness to the Pope,

The clergy and the Inquisition,

It ought to be stated that the Protestants were quite as much the enemies of science and medicine as the Catholics,

And with equal manifestations of ignorance and intolerance regarded the men who investigated things for themselves as the most dangerous enemies of mankind.

And Calvin,

The great French reformer and the tyrant,

Both political and spiritual,

Of Geneva,

Not only assisted the French authorities when they tried to hang Michael Servetus,

The Spanish theologian and physician who had become famous as the assistant of Vesalius,

The first great anatomist.

But when Servetus had managed to escape from his French jail and had fled to Geneva,

Calvin threw this brilliant man into prison,

And after a prolonged trial allowed him to be burned at the stake on account of his heresies,

Totally indifferent to his fame as a scientist.

And so it went.

We have few reliable statistics upon this subject,

But on the whole,

The Protestants tired of this game long before the Catholics,

And the greater part of honest men and women who were burned and hanged and decapitated on account of their religious beliefs,

Fell as victims of the very energetic but also very drastic Church of Rome.

Our tolerance,

And please remember this when you grow older,

Is of very recent origin,

And even the people of our own so-called modern world are apt to be tolerant only upon such matters as do not interest them very much.

They are tolerant towards a native of Africa,

And do not care whether he becomes a Buddhist or a Mohammedan,

Because neither Buddhism nor Mohammedanism means anything to them.

But when they hear that their neighbor,

Who was a Republican and believed in a high protective tariff,

Has joined the Socialist party and now wants to repeal all tariff laws,

Their tolerance ceases,

And they use almost the same words as those employed by a kindly Catholic or Protestant of the 17th century,

Who was informed that his best friend who he had always respected and loved had fallen a victim to the terrible heresies of the Protestant or Catholic Church.

Heresy until a very short time ago was regarded as a disease.

Nowadays when we see a man neglecting the personal cleanliness of his body and his home,

And expose him himself and his children to the dangers of typhoid fever or another preventable disease,

We send for the Board of Health,

And the health officers calls upon the police to aid him in removing this person,

Who is a danger to the safety of the entire community.

In the 16th century and 17th century,

A heretic,

A man or a woman who openly doubted the fundamental principles upon which his Protestant or Catholic religion have been founded,

Was considered a more terrible menace than a typhoid carrier.

Typhoid fever might,

Very likely would,

Destroy the body.

But heresy,

According to them,

Would positively destroy the immortal soul.

It was therefore the duty of all good and logical citizens to warn the police against the enemies of the established order of things.

And those who failed to do so were as culpable as a modern man who does not telephone to the nearest doctor when he discovers that his fellow tenants are suffering from cholera or smallpox.

In the years to come,

You will hear a great deal about preventive medicine.

Preventive medicine simply means that our doctors do not wait until their patients are sick,

Then step forward and cure them.

On the contrary,

They study the patient and the conditions under which he lives,

When he,

The patient,

Is perfectly well,

And they remove every possible cause of illness by cleaning up rubbish,

By teaching him what to eat and what to avoid,

And by giving him a few simple ideas of personal hygiene.

They go even further than that.

And these good doctors enter the schools and teach the children how to use toothbrushes and how to avoid catching colds.

The 16th century which regarded,

As I have tried to show you,

Bodily illness as much less important than sickness which threatened the soul,

Organized a system of spiritual preventive medicine.

As soon as a child was old enough to spell his first words,

He was educated in the true and the only true principles of the faith.

Indirectly,

This proved to be a good thing for the general progress of the people of Europe.

The Protestant lands were soon dotted with schools.

They used a great deal of very valuable time to explain the catechism,

But they gave instructions in other things besides theology.

They encouraged reading,

And they were responsible for the great prosperity of the printing trade.

But the Catholics did not lag behind.

They too devoted much time and thought on education.

The Church,

In this matter,

Found an invaluable friend and ally in the newly founded order of the Society of Jesus.

The founder of this remarkable organization was a Spanish soldier,

Who after a life of unholy adventures,

Had been converted and thereupon felt himself bound to serve the Church,

Just as many former sinners,

Who have been shown the error of their ways by the Salvation Army,

Devote the remaining years of their lives to the task of aiding and consoling those who are less fortunate.

The name of this Spaniard was Ignatius de Loyola.

He was born in the year before the discovery of America.

He had been wounded and lame for life,

And while he was in the hospital,

He had seen a vision of the Holy Virgin and her son,

Who bade him give up the wickedness of his former life.

He decided to go to the Holy Land to finish the task of the Crusades.

But a visit to Jerusalem had shown him the impossibility of the task,

And he returned west to help in the warfare upon the heresies of the Lutherans.

In the year 1534,

He was studying in Paris at the Sorbonne.

Together with seven other students he founded a fraternity.

The eight men promised each other that they would lead holy lives,

That they would not strive after riches but after righteousness,

And would devote themselves,

Body and soul,

To the service of the Church.

A few years later,

This small fraternity had grown into a regular organization,

And was recognized by Pope Paul III as the Society of Jesus.

Loyola had been a military man.

He believed in discipline,

And absolute obedience to the orders of the superior dignitaries became one of the main causes for the enormous success of the Jesuits.

They specialized in education.

They gave their teachers a most thoroughgoing education before they allowed them to talk to a single pupil.

They lived with their students,

And they entered into their games.

They watched them with tender care.

And as a result,

They raised a new generation of faithful Catholics,

Who took their religious duties as seriously as the people of the early Middle Ages.

The shrewd Jesuits,

However,

Did not waste all their efforts upon the education of the poor.

They entered a palace of the mighty,

And became the private tutors of future emperors and kings.

And what this meant,

You will see for yourself when I tell you about the Thirty Years' War.

But before this terrible and final outbreak of religious fanaticism,

A great many other things had happened.

Charles V was dead.

Germany and Austria had been left to his brother Ferdinand.

All his other possessions,

Spade and the Netherlands,

And the Indies in America,

Had gone to his son Philip.

Philip was the son of Charles and a Portuguese princess,

Who had been first cousin to her own husband.

The children that are born of such a union are apt to be rather queer.

The son of Philip,

The unfortunate Don Carlos,

Murdered afterwards with his own father's consent,

Was crazy.

Philip was not quite crazy,

But his zeal for the Church bordered closely upon religious insanity.

He believed that Heaven had appointed him as one of the saviors of mankind.

Therefore,

Whatsoever was obstinate and refused to share his majesty's views,

Proclaimed himself an enemy of the human race,

And must be exterminated lest his example corrupt the souls of his pious neighbors.

Spain of course was a very rich country.

All the gold and silver of the New World flowed into the Castilian and Aragonian treasuries.

But Spain suffered from a curious economic disease.

Her peasants were hard-working men and even harder-working women.

But the better classes maintained a supreme contempt for any form of labor,

Outside of employment in the army or navy or the civil service.

As for the Moors,

Who had been very industrious artisans,

They had been driven out of the country long before.

As a result,

Spain,

The treasure-chest of the world,

Remained a poor country,

Because all her money had to be sent abroad in exchange for the wheat and the other necessities of life which the Spaniards neglected to raise for themselves.

Philip,

Ruler of the most powerful nation of the sixteenth century,

Depended for his revenue upon the taxes which were gathered in the busy commercial beehive of the Netherlands.

But these Flemmings and Dutchmen were devoted followers of the doctrines of Luther and Colvin,

And they had cleansed their churches of all images and holy paintings,

And they had informed the pope that they no longer regarded him as their shepherd,

But intended to follow the dictates of their consciences and the commands of their newly translated Bible.

This placed the king in a very difficult position.

He could not possibly tolerate the heresies of his Dutch subjects,

But he needed their money.

If he allowed them to be protestants and took no measures to save their souls,

He was deficient in his duty toward God.

If he sent the Inquisition to the Netherlands and burned his subjects at the stake,

He would lose the greater part of his income.

Being a man of uncertain willpower,

He hesitated a long time.

He tried kindness and sternness and promises and threats.

The Hollanders remained obstinate,

And continued to sing psalms and listen to the sermons of their Lutheran and Colvinist preachers.

But in his despair sent his man of iron,

The Duke of Alba,

To bring these hardened sinners to terms.

Alba began by decapitating those leaders who had not wisely left the country before his arrival.

In the year 1572,

The same year that the French protestant leaders were all killed during the terrible night of Saint Bartholomew,

He attacked a number of Dutch cities and massacred the inhabitants as an example for the others.

The next year he laid siege to the town of Leiden,

The manufacturing center of Holland.

Meanwhile,

The seven small provinces of the Northern Netherlands had formed a defensive union,

The so-called Union of Utrecht,

Who had recognized William of Orange,

A German prince who had been the private secretary of the Emperor Charles V as the leader of their army,

And as the commander of their free-booting sailors,

Who were known as the beggars of the sea.

William,

To save Leiden,

Cut the dikes,

Created a shallow inland sea,

And delivered the town with the help of a strangely equipped navy consisting of scows and flat-bottomed barges which were rowed and pushed and pulled through the mud until they reached the city walls.

It was the first time that an army of the invincible Spanish king had suffered such a humiliating defeat.

It surprised the world,

Just as the Japanese victory of Mukden in the Russian-Japanese war surprised on our own generation.

The protestant's power took fresh courage,

And Philip devised a new means for the purpose of conquering his rebellious subjects.

He hired a poor half-witted fanatic to go and murder William of Orange.

But the sight of their dead leader did not bring the seven provinces to their knees.

On the contrary,

It made them furiously angry.

In the year 1581,

The estate general came together at the Hague and most solemnly abjured their wicked king Philip,

And themselves assumed the burden of sovereignty which thus far had been invested in their king by the grace of God.

This is a very important event in the history of the great struggle of political liberty.

It was a step which reached much further than the uprising of the nobles,

Which ended with the signing of the Magna Carta.

These good bergers said,

Between a king and his subject there is a silent understanding that both sides shall perform certain services,

And shall recognize certain definitive duties.

If either party fails to live up to this contract,

The other has the right to consider it terminated.

The American subjects of King George III in the year 1776 came to a similar conclusion.

But they had three thousand miles of ocean between themselves and their ruler,

And the estate general took their decision,

Which meant a slow death in case of defeat,

Within hearing of the Spanish guns,

And although in constant fear of an avenging Spanish fleet.

The stories about the mysterious Spanish fleet that was to conquer both Holland and England when Protestant Queen Elizabeth had succeeded Catholic Bloody Mary was an old one.

For years the sailors of the waterfront had talked about it.

In the eighties of the sixteenth century the rumor took a definite shape.

According to pilots who had been in Lisbon,

All the Spanish and Portuguese wharves were building ships,

And in the southern Netherlands in Belgium,

The Duke of Parma was collecting a large expeditionary force to be carried from Ostend to London and Amsterdam as soon as the fleet should arrive.

In the year 1586 the great armada set sail for the north,

But the harbors of the Flemish coast were blockaded by a Dutch fleet,

And the channel was guarded by the English and the Spaniards,

Accustomed to the quieter seas of the south,

Did not know how to navigate in this squally and bleak northern climate.

What happened to the armada once it was attacked by ships and by storms I need not tell you.

A few ships,

By sailing around Ireland,

Escaped to tell the terrible story of defeat.

The others perished and lie at the bottom of the North Sea.

Turnabout is fair play.

The British nod that Dutch Protestants now carried the war into the territory of the enemy.

Before the end of the century,

Houtman,

With the help of a booklet written by Lin Schotten,

A Hollander who had been in the Portuguese service,

Had at last discovered the route to the Indies.

As a result,

The great Dutch East India Company was founded,

And a systematic war upon the Portuguese and Spanish colonies in Asia and Africa was begun in all seriousness.

It was during this early era of colonial conquest that a curious lawsuit was fought out in the Dutch courts.

Early in the 17th century,

A Dutch captain by the name of Van Heemskerk,

A man who had made himself famous as the head of an expedition which had tried to discover the northeastern passage to the Indies,

And who had spent a winter on the frozen shores of the island of Nova Zembla,

Had captured a Portuguese ship in the Straits of Malacca.

You will remember that the Pope had divided the world into two equal shares,

One of which had been given to the Spaniards,

And the other to the Portuguese.

The Portuguese quite naturally regarded the water which surrounds their Indian island as part of their own property,

And since,

For the moment,

They were not at war with the United Seven Netherlands,

They claimed that the captain of a private Dutch trading company had no right to enter their private domain and steal their ships.

And they brought suit.

The directors of the Dutch East India Company hired a bright young lawyer by the name of de Groot of Grotius to defend their case.

He made the astonishing plea that the ocean is free to all comers.

Once outside the distance which a cannonball fired from the land can reach,

The sea is,

Or according to Grotius,

Ought to be a free and open highway to all the ships of all nations.

It was the first time that this startling doctrine had been publicly pronounced in a court of law.

It was opposed by all the other seafaring people.

To counteract the effect of Grotius's famous plea for the mare liberum,

Or open sea,

John Seldon,

The Englishman,

Wrote his famous treatise upon the mare clausum,

Or closed sea,

Which tweeted of the natural right of a sovereign to regard the seas which surrounded its country as belonging to his territory.

I mention this here because the question had not yet been decided and during the last war caused all sorts of difficulties and complications.

To return to the warfare between Spaniard and Hollander and Englishmen,

Before twenty years were over,

The most valuable colonies of the Indies and the Keep of the Good Hope and Ceylon and those along the coast of China and even Japan were in protestant hands.

In 1621 a West Indian company was founded which conquered Brazil and in Northern America built a fortress called Newell Amsterdam at the mouth of the river which Henry Hudson had discovered in the year 1609.

These new colonies enriched both England and the Dutch Republic to such an extent that they could hire foreign soldiers to do their fighting on land while they devoted themselves to commerce and trade.

To them the protestant revolt meant independence and prosperity.

But in many parts of Europe it meant a succession of horrors compared to which the last war was a mild excursion of kindly Sunday schoolboys.

The Thirty Years' War which broke out in the year 1618 and which ended with the famous Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 was the perfect natural result of a century of ever increasing religious hatred.

It was,

As I have said,

A terrible war.

Everybody fought everybody else and the struggle ended only when all parties had been thoroughly exhausted and could fight no longer.

In less than a generation it turned many parts of Central Europe into a wilderness where the hungry peasants fought for the carcass of a dead horse with the even hungrier wolf.

Five sixths of all the German towns and villages were destroyed.

The Palatinate in Western Germany was plundered twenty eight times and the population of eighteen million people were reduced to four million.

The hostilities began almost as soon as Ferdinand II of the House of Habsburg had been elected emperor.

He was the product of a most careful Jesuit training and was a most obedient and devout son of the Church.

The vow which he had made as a young man that he would eradicate all sects and all heresies from his domains Ferdinand kept to the best of his abilities.

Two days before his election his chief opponent Frederick,

The Protestant elector of the Palatinate and a son-in-law of James I of England,

Had been made king of Bohemia in direct violation of Ferdinand's wishes.

At once the Habsburg armies marched into Bohemia.

The young kid looked in vain for assistance against this formidable enemy.

The Dutch Republic was willing to help but engaged in a desperate war of its own with the Spanish branch of the Habsburg.

It could do little.

The Stuarts in England were more interested in strengthening their own absolute power at home than spending money and men upon a forlorn adventure in a far away Bohemia.

After a struggle of a few months the elector of the Palatinate was driven away and his domains were given to the Catholic House of Bavaria.

This was the beginning of the Great War.

Then the Habsburg armies,

Under Tilly and Wallenstein,

Fought their way through the Protestant part of Germany until they had reached the shores of the Baltic.

A Catholic neighbour meant serious danger to the Protestant king of Denmark.

Christian IV tried to defend himself by attacking his enemies before they had become too strong for him.

The Danish armies marched into Germany but were defeated.

Wallenstein followed up his victory with such energy and violence that Denmark was forced to sue for peace.

Only one town of the Baltic then remained in the hands of the Protestants.

That was Stralsund.

There in the early summer of the 1630 landed King Gustavus Adolphus of the House of Basa,

King of Sweden,

And famous as the man who had defended his country against the Russians.

A Protestant prince of unlimited ambition,

Desirous of making Sweden the centre of a great northern empire.

Gustavus Adolphus was welcomed by the Protestant princes of Europe as the saviour of the Lutheran cause.

He defeated Tilly,

Who had just successfully butchered the Protestant inhabitants of Magdeburg.

Then his troops began their great march through the heart of Germany in an attempt to reach the Habsburg possession in Italy.

Threatened in their ear by the Catholics,

Gustavus suddenly veered around and defeated the main Habsburg army in the Battle of Lutsen.

Unfortunately the Swedish king was killed when he strayed away from his troops.

But Habsburg power had been broken.

Ferdinand,

Who was a suspicious sort of person,

At once began to distrust his own servants.

Wallenstein,

His commander-in-chief,

Was murdered at his instigation.

When the Catholic Bourbons,

Who ruled France and hated their Habsburgs' rival,

Heard of this,

They joined the Protestant Swedes.

The armies of Louis XIII invaded the eastern part of Germany,

And Tyrann and Konde added their fame to that of Banner and Weimar,

The Swedish generals,

By murdering,

Pillaging,

And burning Habsburg property.

This brought great fame and riches to the Swedes,

And caused the Danes to become envious.

The Protestant Danes thereupon declared war upon the Protestant Swedes,

Who were the allies of the Catholic French,

Whose political leader,

The Cardinal,

The Richelieu,

Had just deprived the Hognots,

Or French Protestants,

Of those rights of public worship which the Edict of Nantes of the year 1598 had guaranteed them.

The war,

After the habit of such encounters,

Did not decide anything.

And it came to an end with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

The Catholic powers remained Catholic,

And the Protestant powers stayed faithful to the doctrines of Luther and Calvin and Zwingli.

The Swiss and Dutch Protestants were recognized as independent republics.

France kept the citizens of Metz and Toul and Verden and a part of the Alsace.

The Holy Roman Empire continued to exist as a sort of scarecrow state,

Without man,

Without money,

Without hope,

And without courage.

The only good the Thirty Years' War accomplished was a negative one.

It discouraged both Catholics and Protestants from ever trying it again.

Henceforth they left each other in peace.

This however did not mean that religious feeling and theological hatred had been removed from this earth.

On the contrary,

The quarrels between Catholic and Protestant came to an end,

But the disputes between the different Protestant sects continued as bitterly as ever before.

In Holland,

A difference of opinion as to the true nature of predestination,

A very obscure point of theology but exceedingly important in the eyes of your great-grandfather,

Caused a quarrel which ended with the decapitation of John of Oldenbarneveld,

The Dutch statesman,

Who had been responsible for the success of the Republic during the first twenty years of its independence,

And who was the great organizing genius of our Indian trading company.

In England the food led to civil war.

But before I tell you of this outbreak which led to the first execution by process of law of a European king,

I ought to say something about the previous history of England.

In this book I am trying to give you only those events of the past which can throw a light upon the conditions of the present world.

If I do not mention certain countries,

The cause is not to be found in any secret dislike on my part.

I wish that I could tell you what happened to Norway and Switzerland and Serbia and China.

But these lands exercised no great influence upon the development of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

I therefore passed them by with a polite and a very respectful bow.

England however is in a different position.

What the people of that small island have done during the last five hundred years has shaped the course of history in every corner of the world.

Without a proper knowledge of the background of English history you cannot understand what you read in the newspapers.

And it is therefore necessary that you know how England happened to develop a parliamentary form of government while the rest of the European continent was still ruled by absolute monarchs.

Reviews

Great reading voice to induce sleep but also really interesting for when you need something to distract your mind

Rich voice and historical summary that rolls you into a deep sleep. Keep it coming! 🙏🏽