CHRISTENDOM DESTROYED

Greengrass (Emeritus, Early Modern History/Univ. of Sheffield; Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe, 2009, etc.) reaches deeply behind the early myth of a united Europe.

The author focuses on the period of intensive religious conflicts that tore Catholic Europe apart from the advent of Lutheranism to the execution of King Charles I in England. The late-medieval sense of “Christendom” was more a “reflexive construction” than a reality, a geographical conglomeration of parishes across the landmass that owed their affiliation to the Holy Roman Empire, headed by Charles V from 1520 to 1555, the last emperor to be invested by the papacy. For the masses of mostly rural dwellers, social cohesion was determined by a foundation of material stability via hugely diverse patterns of habitation, marriage and family, diet (the Columbian Exchange had introduced more staples into the European diet, yet infant mortality and death by disease remained very high), agricultural systems, debt, laws of inheritance and an intermittent simmering of popular protest. Silver and gold from the New World spurred growing military conflicts among the European dynasties: the enriched Spanish monarchy, France’s emergent absolutist Bourbon state, and the Netherlands’ financial revolution that guaranteed the debts of the Habsburg overlords. Yet while “Christendom’s belief-community” was held loosely together by its sense of “orthodoxy, genealogy, inheritance and knowledge,” the threat exposing its fragility was not the Ottoman incursions but rather its own internal religious fissures. Greengrass devotes most of the second half of this hefty, scholarly study to these “conflicts in the name of God,” from the German states to Poland-Lithuania to France, Spain and Britain.

A tour de force of scholarship that begins with a gradual and accessible buildup and then descends, like the century, into a convulsion of dynastic entanglements.