Europe: A History (102 page)

The Counter-Reformation saw a plentiful harvest of Catholic saints. There were the Spanish mystics: St Teresa of Ávila (1515–82) and St John of the Cross (1542–91); there was a long line of servants of the sick and the poor: St Philip Neri (1515–95), St Camillo de Lellis (1550–1614), St Vincent de Paul (1576–1660), St Louise de Marillac (1591–1660); and there were the Jesuit saints and martyrs: St Francis Xavier (1506–52), St Stanislaw Kostka (1550–68), St Aloysius Gonzaga (1568–91), St Peter Canisius (1521–97), St John Berchmans (1599–1621), and St Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621). They won back much lost ground.

The impact of the Counter-Reformation was felt right across Europe. Traditional support for the Church was strongest in Italy and Spain, but pockets of nonconformity had to be smoked out even there. The Spanish Netherlands, trapped between France and the United Provinces, were turned into a hotbed of Catholic militancy in which the University of Louvain (Leuven) and the Jesuit College at Douai took the lead. Yet an important reaction against the prevailing zeal was provoked by Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), Bishop of Ypres and a fervent critic of the Jesuits. In his digest of the works of St Augustine, the
Augustinus
(1640), Jansen attacked what he took to be the theological casuistry and superficial morality of his day, placing special emphasis on the believer’s need for Divine Grace and for spiritual rebirth. Though he never wavered in his loyalty to Rome, and rejected the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith, several of his propositions on the issue of Divine Grace approached the Protestant standpoint, and were duly condemned as such. (See Chapter VIII.)

Switzerland was rent by the hostility of the Catholic and the Protestant cantons. The doctrines of Zurich and Geneva penetrated many of the alpine villages of the surrounding regions. They were eradicated by violent means on the Italian border by St Charles Borromeo, Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan (1538–84), and contested in Savoy by the more gentle persuasion of St Francis de Sales (1567–1622), author of the bestselling
Introduction to the Devout Life
(1609).
[MENOCCHI]

In France, many Catholics stood aloof from the new militancy, partly in line with the Gallican tradition and the Concordat of 1516, and partly from France’s hostility to the Habsburgs. But a pro-Roman ‘ultramontane’ party grew in prominence round the faction of the Guises. Their darkest deed was committed at the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve on 23 August 1572, when 2,000 Huguenots were butchered in Paris—after which the Pope celebrated a
Te Deum
and the King of Spain ‘began to laugh’. In the seventeenth century Jansenism offered a middle way, an antidote to the partisanship of contending ultras and Huguenots.

The Kingdom of England was targeted for reconversion in a campaign that spawned the Forty Catholic martyrs led by St Edmund Campion SJ (1540–81) and many other victims. Ireland was confirmed in its Catholicism, especially after the brutal Elizabethan expedition of 1598. But religious unity in Ireland was shattered by the planting of a Scottish Presbyterian colony in Ulster in 1611, and by the Anglican inclinations of the Anglo-Irish gentry.

In the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs, the Counter-Reformation became inextricably confused with the dynasty and its politics. Indeed, that special brand of Catholicism, the
pietas austríaca
, which emerged at the turn of the seventeenth century became the prime ingredient of a wide cultural community that has outlived Habsburg rule. It was once called ‘Confessional Absolutism’. The Collegium Germanicum in Rome played a strategic role. The Jesuits took an
unrivalled hold over education in Vienna and Prague through the efforts of the Dutchman, Canisius. Western Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Silesia, Bohemia, and, at a later date, western Galicia all belonged to this same sphere. Baroque culture, it has been argued, represented the ivy which not only covered the ramshackle Habsburg edifice but helped to hold it together (see p. 529).

Elsewhere in Germany, an uneasy
modus vivendi
between Catholics and Protestants had been reached in 1555 at the Peace of Augsburg: each prince was to decide on the religion of his subjects; Lutheranism was to be the only Protestant denomination allowed; Lutherans living in Catholic states were to be tolerated. Germany was turned into a religious patchwork where, however, the Catholic princes and emperors, feared a further Protestant advance. As from the 1550s, ‘Spanish priests’ set up Jesuit centres at Cologne, Mainz, Ingolstadt, and Munich, creating durable Catholic bastions in the Rhineland and Bavaria. Calvinist enclaves, in the Palatinate and Saxony and elsewhere, were not secured until the second half of the century. In December 1607 the Duke of Bavaria provocatively seized the city of Donauwörth in Swabia in order to stop Protestant interference with Catholic processions. Ten Protestant princes thereon convened an Evangelical Union to defend their interests, only to be confronted by the rival activities of a Catholic League. It is difficult to say, therefore, whether the outbreak of the Thirty Years War occurred in 1618 or beforehand.

In this world of growing religious intolerance, Poland-Lithuania occupied a place apart. A vast territory with a very varied population, it had contained a mosaic of the Catholic, Orthodox, Judaic, and Muslim faiths even before Lutheranism claimed the cities of Polish Prussia or Calvinism a sizeable section of the nobility. Such was the position of the ruling
szlachta
that every manor could run its religious affairs with the same liberty as German princedoms. From 1565 the verdicts of ecclesiastical courts could not be enforced on the private estates of noblemen. At the very time that Cardinal Hozjusz, President of the Council of Trent and Bishop of Warmia, was introducing the Jesuits, Poland was receiving all manner of heretics and religious refugees—English and Scottish Catholics, Czech Brethren, Anabaptists from Holland, or, like Faustus Sozzini (Socinius), Italian Unitarians. In 1573, with Calvinists commanding a majority in the Senate, the Polish parliament passed a statute of permanent and universal toleration, from which only the Socinians were excepted. Under Sigismund III Vasa (r. 1587–1632), a fervent pupil of the Jesuits, the ultramontane party gradually reasserted the Catholic supremacy. But progress was slow; and non-violent methods alone were available. In this period Poland could rightly boast of its role both as the bulwark of Christendom against Turk and Tartar and as Europe’s prime haven of toleration.

Elsewhere in Eastern Europe the Counter-Reformation reverberated far and wide. The Vatican, under Gregory XIII (1572–85), entertained hopes of netting not only Sweden and Poland but even Muscovy. In Sweden those hopes remained high until the victory of the Protestants in the civil war of the 1590s dashed Jesuit plans for good. In Moscow the papal nuncio Possevino was received by Ivan the
Terrible, only to find that the Tsar’s main interest in Catholicism lay in the workings of the papal litter. Clumsy pressure from the Catholic side probably pushed Ivan’s son, Fedor, into creating the Moscow Patriarchate in 1589, thereby finalizing the emergence of the separate Russian Orthodox Church.

Moscow’s
démarche
provoked a crisis among the Orthodox in neighbouring Poland-Lithuania, who till then had always looked to the Patriarch of Constantinople. With the new Muscovite Patriarch claiming jurisdiction over them from across the frontier, many of those Orthodox now sought the protection of Rome. In 1596, at the Union of Brest, the majority of their bishops chose to found a new Uniate communion—the Greek Catholic Church of Slavic Rite. They retained their ritual, and their married clergy, whilst admitting the supremacy of the Pope. Most of the Orthodox churches in Byelorussia and Ukraine, including the ancient cathedral of St Sophia in Kiev, passed into the hands of the Uniates. For a time the old ‘disuniate’ remnant was officially banned by the state.

Moscow, however, was never reconciled to these developments. The furious determination of the Russian Orthodox Church to punish and forcibly to reconvert the Uniates remained constant throughout modern history. Nowhere has the stereotype of the dastardly, scheming Jesuit remained stronger. The Russo-Polish wars, when in 1610–12 the Poles briefly occupied the Kremlin, only served to cement the religious hatreds. On the great Russian monastery at Zagorsk near Moscow, a commemorative tablet underlines the popular Russian view of the Counter-Reforrnation: ‘Typhus—Tartars—Poles: Three Plagues’.

In Hungary, a similar Uniate communion emerged from the Union of Uzhgorod (1646). In this case, the Orthodox Ruthenes of the sub-Carpathian region chose to seek union with Rome along the lines adopted in neighbouring Ukraine. (Their decision was still causing ructions between Roman Catholic and Uniate Ruthenes in the USA in the 1920s.)

All over Europe, religious fervour profoundly affected the progress of the arts. The more severe forms of Protestantism questioned the very propriety of artistic endeavour. The plastic arts were often channelled into secular subjects, since religious subjects had become suspect. In some countries, such as Holland or Scotland, music was reduced to hymn-singing and metrical psalms. In England, in contrast, Thomas Tallis (c.1505–85) and others launched the wonderful tradition of Anglican cathedral music. In the Catholic countries, all branches of the arts were exposed to demands for sumptuous and theatrical displays of the Church’s glory and power. The trend is known as ‘Baroque’. In music, it was associated with the names of Jan Peterzoon Sweelinck (1562–1621), of Heinrich Schutz (1585–1672), and above all of Giovanni Palestrina (1526–94), magister capellae at St Peter’s, whose ninety-four extant masses reveal huge variety and inventiveness. Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), pioneer of monody as opposed to polyphony, rediscoverer of dissonance, and proponent of Italy’s ‘New Music’, occupies a special place in the evolution of Europe’s secular music. He was largely employed in Venice, as always a counterpoint to the arts of Rome. Baroque painting was dominated by Michelangelo Caravaggio (1573–1610), a pardoned murderer; by the
Fleming Paul Rubens (1577–1640), and by the Spaniard Diego Velázquez (1599–1660). In architecture, the ubiquitous Baroque churches were often modelled on the Jesuit
GesÙ
Church (1575) in Rome.

Religious fervour came to the fore in the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Passions and hatreds once reserved for the campaigns against Islam now fired the conflicts between Christians. Protestant fears of Catholic domination surfaced in the Wars of the Schmalkaldic League in Germany, 1531–48, which ended with the Peace of Augsburg; in the French Wars of Religion, 1562–98; in the Swedish civil war, 1598–1604; in the Thirty Years War, 1618–48. Catholic fears of Protestant domination inspired many episodes such as the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) in England, Irish resistance to Mountjoy and Cromwell, Polish resistance to the Swedes in 1655–60. In the East, the extended campaigns between Russians and Poles—1561–5,1578–82,1610–19,1632–4,1654–67—took on all the trappings of a Holy War between Catholic and Orthodox. Religious fanaticism could be made to inspire armies. In the sixteenth century the invincible Spaniards were taught to believe that they were fighting for the only true faith. In the seventeenth century the psalm-singing troopers of Gustavus Adolphus, or of Cromwell’s marvellous New Model Army, were taught exactly the same.

The French Wars of Religion were spectacularly un-Christian. Persecution of the Huguenots had begun with the
chambre ardente
under Henri II. But the King’s sudden death in 1559, and that of the Duke of Anjou, provoked prolonged uncertainty about the succession,
[NOSTRADAMUS]
This in turn enflamed the ambitions of the Catholic faction led by the Guises, and of the Bourbon-Huguenot faction led by the Kings of Navarre. A vain attempt at religious reconciliation at the Colloquy of Passy (1561) was bracketed by two violent provocations—one by the Protestants at Amboise in 1560 and the second by the Catholics at Vassy in 1562. Thereafter the rival factions set at each other’s throats with a will, fanned by the schemes of the Queen Mother, Catherine de’ Medici. The massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve was but the largest of the series. Vicious skirmishing reminiscent of the earlier English wars produced few set battles, but plenty of opportunity for the dashing adventurers such as the Protestant Baron d’Adrets or the Catholic Blaise de Montluc. Eight wars in thirty years were peppered with broken truces and foul murders. In the 1580s, such was the power of the Guises’ Holy League, intent alike on suppressing toleration and on reining in the homosexual king, that the latter ordered the assassination of the Duke and Cardinal de Guise (1588). (Their father, François de Guise, the famous general, had been murdered at Orleans in 1563.) In response, on 1 August 1589 at St Cloud, the King himself was assassinated by a furious monk, Jacques Clément. This left Henri of Navarre as sole contender for the throne. When the Catholic clergy refused to anoint a lapsed heretic, he cynically undertook to reconvert; he was crowned at Chartres in 1594 and entered Paris in triumph.
Paris vaut bien une messe
(Paris is well worth a Mass) sums up the moral tone. The resultant Edict of Nantes (1598) was no better. Having fought all his life in the name of religious liberty, Henri IV now undertook to limit toleration of the Huguenots to aristo-cratic
houses, to two churches per district, and to 120 named strongholds. Intense fears and suspicions remained.