An introduction to modern history

Preface

The great aim and service of modern history is to create an interest in present-day politics. One of the great weaknesses in the students of our secondary schools is their indifference to what is going on in the world about them. We can often trace the sequence of events through the long and winding paths of history until our efforts finally illuminate an otherwise mysterious contemporary act. He who has had this experience will have an interest in books, magazines, and newspapers, and in the political life of his community.

This elementary modern history is intended to serve as the first view of the field. Many details have been omitted in the effort to present a simple, comprehensible outline of the whole. Since much has been omitted, what remains should be absolutely mastered.

A history text-book will no more teach itself than does one in mathematics; this mere torso of a text-book calls for special consideration from the teacher. The great condensation of the text makes necessary a maximum of explanation. It is hoped that the topics for extra study inserted at the close of the various chapters will furnish suggestions for lectures, and for outside readings by the class.

Contents

Chapter Page

I. Exploration and Discovery 7

II. The Reformation in Germany 15

Chapter I. Exploration And Discovery

Modern history is an account of the doings of nations, of their quarrels and jealousies, of their development and power. Before modern times there were no distinct European nations, each feeling its own individuality and integrity; but an interesting development took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for unified states in the modem sense began then to appear. Modern history may be called the Age of Nations.

Europe in 1500. — In England in 1485 the Duke of Richmond put an end to the Wars of the Roses at the battle of Bosworth Field. This civil war had lasted for thirty years and had terribly devastated England. The Duke settled the long dispute over the crown between the houses of Lancaster and York by taking it for himself, for he was related to the Lancastrians. He then quieted opposition by marrying Elizabeth of York, and founded a new line of kings, the Tudors. Ruling as Henry VII, he united England very firmly under his control and made the sovereign the most powerful part of the government. He easily put down various rebellions against his authority ; he collected heavy taxes from his people and thus kept his treasury full. He also forbade his great nobles to maintain bands of armed servants, a custom which made civil war easy in a time when the King had no standing army and a lord’s castle was strong enough to defend him against a considerable force. He used his great arbitrary central courts to destroy any trace of independent thought in Church and State. During his rule Parliament was simply a device for registering his will in the form of laws. As a result of this unification of England under the single will of the King, the government was strong enough to take part in foreign affairs. United at home, England for the first time became a power in European doings. Under Henry VIII, the son of Henry Tudor, England held the balance of power between the two great rivals, Francis I, King of France, and Charles V, Emperor of Germany, who also controlled® large districts outside of Germany.

During mediaeval times France had been broken up even more completely than England. French feudalism had been so completely decentralizing that the French nobles had taken practically all powers of government to themselves and the King had become a figurehead. He had the highest rank in the country, but little authority. Even after strong mediaeval sovereigns like Philip Augustus and Philip the Fair had gained a measure of authority in France the disastrous defeats during the Hundred Years War had robbed the King of both power and prestige. With the help of Joan of Arc, Charles VII had regained much of his territory from England with a consequent

Modem

History

Defined.

The

Unification of England.

The

Unification of France

1He was King of Spain and Portugal and controlled large districts in Italy; he was Duke of the rich Netherlands and head of the Hapsburg house in Germany.

MODERN HISTORY.

European Rivalry for the Possession of Italy.

The

Unification of Spain.

Evil Effects of Spanish Absolute Rule.

increase of influence in France. When his eccentric® son, Louis XI, inherited the throne in 1461, he set about by fair means and foul to make himself supreme master of all the French territories. The great French nobles formed a league against the King, but the shrewdness and unscrupulousness of Louis carried him past every obstacle. He went so far as to encourage the Swiss to go to war with his most powerful vassal, the Duke of Burgundy. This prince, Charles the Bold, was decisively defeated by the Swiss and killed in the battle of Nancy in 1477. Louis XI then appropriated much of his territory for France. In 1480 he took under his direct control the possessions of the House of Anjou, another great noble family in France. Thereafter he had undisputed control in his realm, and really began modern history for France.

In France as in England, unity at home gave the ruler an opportunity to take part in foreign affairs. A subject for such negotiations lay close at hand for the French kings, because, as members of the House of Anjou, the}7 claimed the kingdom of Naples. The Pope and the Italian cities opposed this claim, and the result was that Charles VIII, the son of Louis XI, led a French army into Italy to take this disputed territory by force. The expedition was a failure, and the question of the possession of Italy became one of the leading foreign problems for France during the following three centuries.

Spain also became unified at the close of the fifteenth century. The country had been almost completely overrun by the Saracens in the eighth century, and the mediaeval period of Spanish history had been occupied with crusades® against the infidel. Step by step the Christians had advanced southward from the mountain strongholds in the Northwest of the peninsula, where they had never submitted to the Saracens. As the crusaders had moved forward small Eoman Catholic principalities had appeared behind them, — independent, mutually jealous, united only by a fierce hatred of the common enemy. Castile, Leon, Navarre, Portugal and Aragon had all appeared during mediaeval times, while the Mohammedans, called Moors, were still in possession of the southern portion of the country. By and by the larger states began to assume authority over their smaller neighbors, until at the middle of the fifteenth century almost the entire Christian section of the country was under the control of Aragon and Castile, while the Mohammedan territory was limited to a single province in the South, Granada. This centralizing movement received a great impetus in 1469 by the marriage of Prince Ferdinand of Aragon and Princess Isabella of Castile. Through the Cortes, or National Assembly, they took away the special privileges of the separate principalities and Spain became an absolute monarchy. They conquered Granada and with the consent of the Pope they worked for further religious and political unity by introducing

2 Romance tells of the wonderful deeds of The Cid, a half mythical leader of these Crusades.

EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY.

the Holy Inquisition, a terrible system of trial which gave the accused little chance of self-defense and secured its greatest result from the terror which it created. Terror did create uniformity, but at the expense of individual initiative and a healthy progress. Like England and Prance, unified Spain also looked abroad to foreign affairs; her rulers were vitally interested in the Italian question, her people became great navigators and merchants attracted by the profitable trade with the Orient.

Not all the European states became unified and independent at the beginning of modern times. Russia was still in the profound sleep which lasted until yesterday. Both Italy and Germany did not unite around any one king or under the leadership of any one principality, but remained in a state of decentralized weakness until less than fifty years ago. Italy was rich in 1500, her students and teachers taught Europe, her artists rivaled those of the Ancient World; but there was no racial or political unity in the peninsula. Italy became the prey of foreign powers, such as Prance, Spain, and the Hapsburg princes; and these rivals in fighting each other to secure possession of Italy often worked great injury upon that unhappy country.

Like Italy, Germany was in 1500 only a name. The territory was broken up into over two hundred states, some small, some great, and all were independent and jealous of each other. There was a much betitled Emperor, a German prince whose power scarcely reached beyond his own dominions; and of a common government there was no development worthy of the name. The indifference and weakness of Emperor Frederick III during his long reign from 1440 to 1493 plunged the Empire into anarchy.® In addition to the state divisions in Germany there were also many® free cities, which were as independent as the principalities, and owed allegiance to no one but the Emperor. The minute subdivision of German society was made still more apparent by the existence of a class of nobles known as the Knights of the Empire, who were responsible to the Emperor alone; they lived within the territories of the German princes but were beyond their authority. This excessive decentralization in German lands destroyed the influence of Germany as a European state until the time of Napoleon.

The above European states, unified and disunified, were to discover, explore, and colonize a new continent on the other side of the earth. The idea that the earth was round was as old as the teaching of Aristotle. Others of the ancients had claimed that India could be reached by sailing west from Europe, and they had accurately computed the distance around the earth. Strabo and Seneca had actually foretold the discovery of a continent in the midst of the Great Ocean. Unfortunately, the means of navigation of the

1 Nevertheless his favorite device was “A. E. I. O. U.” the initial letters of the German sentence “All the world is subject to Austria.”

2 Of these Bremen, Hamburg-, and Liibeck still retain their rights under the present Empire.

Undeveloped

European

Nations.

Geograph-

ical

Knowledge of the Ancients.

MODERN HISTORY.

Of

Mediaeval

Scholars.

The Value of the Route to India.

The

Portuguese.

ancients were limited, and the question remained for centuries but a philosopher’s fancy. Indeed, the mediaeval world practically forgot all about the startling teaching, and only the Saracens kept the theory alive.

Mediaeval scholars thought that the earth was square, and that the sky was supported above it by four pillars placed at the corners. This square earth was bounded by impassable barriers, by ice on the North, by burning deserts on the South, by reedy, impenetrable swamps on the East, and by trackless ocean wastes on the West. This ocean was inhabited by great monsters capable of destroying ships ; on the uttermost western boundary there was a great furnace, the fiery glow of which could be seen in the evenings when the sun plunged into its depths.

This childish mediaeval idea of the universe gradually gave way as geographical knowledge was added to bit by bit. In the first place, some Venetian merchants by the name of Polo made a remarkable overland trip to China at the close of the thirteenth century. On the way back to Europe they sailed around the southern coast of Asia as far as the Persian Gulf, and hence proved the existence of a great ocean on the eastern boundary of the world as then known. Marco Polo’s account of the richness of Cathay, or China, and of the magic island of Zipangu (Japan) fired the imagination of the fanciful, and prepared the way for Columbus.

Men of the fifteenth century were interested in the lands east of Europe for very material reasons. For many years caravans had been coming to Constantinople and other ports on the East Mediterranean with rich supplies of spices, precious stones, and oriental fabrics which found eager buyers in European markets. The Italian cities had grown very wealthy as forwarding points of these much coveted products. In 1453 the Turks captured the city of Constantinople, and in the vigor of conquest they pushed on westward until the entire eastern Mediterranean region was under Mohammedan control. At this same time European commerce with the East fell off and the Italian cities began to decline.

The Explorations. — When the land route to India thus failed, the cities of western Europe had an opportunity to break the long established Italian monopoly of oriental trade, if a sea route to the Far East could be found. The Portuguese took the lead in this quest, under the direction of a sailor king called Henry the Navigator. Bold seamen pushed farther and farther south along the west coast of Africa, hoping that they could find an opening eastward and strike the route of the Polos as they had returned from China. In 1486 an adventurous sailor by the name of Diaz actually did reach the extremity of the continent, and King Henry named the point the Cape of Good Hope. Shortly after this, Vasco da Gama rounded the cape, made his way to India and back again with a cargo, thus establishing the possibility of an easy sea route to the East. Other Portuguese sailors went westward and had a share in the exploration of the

EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY.

New World, after Columbus had once shown the way. Cabral went across the Atlantic to Brazil in 1500, thus giving Portugal a claim to the eastern coast of South America. Magellan, a Portuguese in the Spanish service, sailed around Cape Horn and across the Pacific in 1521, being the first to circumnavigate the globe.

There was no strong government in Italy to test the striking geographical ideas of her sons Toscanelli® and Columbus, and so the latter turned to Spain. There was enough youthful enthusiasm in this new state to furnish support for even so strange a statement as that by sailing west one might ultimately reach the East. There were enough adventurous spirits on hand to man three ships to sail down hill, when there was little evidence that they would ever sail up again. This enthusiasm was not merely temporary, for scarcely had Columbus made his four voyages to the West Indies and the vicinity, when a great flood of energetic men followed after him, and carried the Spanish flag over immense stretches of territory.®

By vigorous and often unscrupulous measures Cortez took possession of Mexico, and Pizarro of Peru; De Soto traversed the Gulf States and discovered the Mississippi; Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean; and Ponce de Leon went to Florida in search of youth and health. Other restless wanderers visited the dry plains east of the Rockies, or made their way northward along the Pacific coast. Some of these men were eager to find new lands and new adventures, others were interested in the conversion of the Indians, others were in search of gold, — but whether the motives were worthy or unworthy, the result was the same, — the New World was opened up to the admiration and the cupidity of the Old.

Under Francis I, grandson of Louis XI, France entered upon a period of vigorous national life. The ambitious young monarch not only fought with Charles V, the German Emperor, for a share of Italy, and intrigued with Henry VIII of England for the control of European policies, but he also took an interest in the world beyond the Atlantic. In 1524 he sent a Florentine sailor by the name of Verrazano to investigate the new lands. Yerrazano explored the Atlantic coast between Nova Scotia and the Carolinas, and prepared a map of the region. French traders and missionaries soon followed him and penetrated to the heart of the continent. Cartier discovered the St. Lawrence waterway; Champlain founded Quebec in 1608, and discovered Lake Champlain ; Marquette and Joliet traveled over the Great Lakes and the upper waters of the Mississippi ; and finally, in 1682, La Salle followed the great river to its mouth. A host of

1 Toscanelli was a great geographer and astronomer of Florence. Columbus wrote to him for advice on his plan to seek a westward route to India, Toscanelli approved the plan and gave Columbus a map which was the chart for his first voyage. Fortunately Toscanelli made the error of computing the distance from the Canaries to Japan as 2,500 instead of 12,000 miles.

2 To avoid disputes between Spain and Portugal, Pope Alexander VI in 1493 divided the New World between those two powers. Portugal was to have all the territory east of the meridian three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands.

The

Spanish,

The French,

MODERN HISTORY.

minor explorers and traders finished the work and laid the basis for the French claims in the great colonial wars with England of the eighteenth century.

The English. The English did the least of any of the leading European states in the exploration of America. Henry VII, the first Tudor, did indeed send out English navigators as early as 1497, but the Cabots landed in Labrador, the most inhospitable part of the Atlantic coast, and their discovery gave England only a technical claim to territory later fully explored by the French. Farther south on the Atlantic coast Raleigh and Gilbert actually attempted to establish colonies, but these were not well supported and soon perished. The most capable English sailors of the time, such as Drake and Hawkins, were more interested in making raids in Spain and in searching for Spanish treasure ships than they were in hunting for new lands. The result was that the sixteenth century closed with England® in the rear in the race for possession of the New World. It was only the excellent method of colonization which the English later developed which made them the leading colonial power in the eighteenth century.

Although behind other nations in the matter of actual lands explored England produced in Sir Francis Drake and Queen Elizabeth two striking personages, very characteristic of the period of exploration and discovery. Drake’s fearlessness, his love of adventure, and his abounding energy were typical of the explorers in the New World. Elizabeth in her Macchiavellianism was a true child of her time.

Drakeancis As a mere boy the great sea captain saw the persecution of his family by the Roman Catholic queen, Bloody Mary Tudor. As a youth he went on an expedition to Holland and learned to fear the cruelty of the Catholic Spaniards. Later he saw an example of Spanish treachery in the destruction of a number of English vessels lying off Vera Cruz. For revenge, and because he recognized in Spain the great enemy of England, he kept up a crusade against Spain for the remainder of his life. The account of his exploits against Philip II reads like the stupendous deeds of Homer’s Greeks.® No odds of the enemy were too great, no dangers of unknown seas were too terrible for this lion-hearted man. He devastated the Spanish colonies in America, made his way around Cape Horn, captured rich treasure ships on the Pacific, and then sailed home to England by way of Asia. Later, when the great Spanish Armada was preparing to descend upon England, he raided the coast of Spain itself. With the utmost audacity he entered the harbor of Cadiz and under the very guns of the forts destroyed shipping and great quantities of supplies gathered there to fit out the great Armada. He then cruised along the Spanish coast until he had driven all commerce to cover. This celebrated “ singeing of the Spanish king’s

1 Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the Dutch service, discovered the Hudson River in 1609, and Hudson Bay the next year.

2 See Alfred Noyes’ great epic, Drake.

EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY.

beard ” delayed the sailing of the Armada a full year and filled every Spanish navigator with a great fear of Drake, the “Dragon.” It was a fear of his crushing, unexpected blows, and not of his cruelty or treachery, for he spared his prisoners and the defenseless. When, at last, in 1588, the great Spanish fleet bore down upon England, Drake was the man of the hour, the rescuer in the time of crisis. He led the English captains in fierce, hornet-like attacks and pressed the Spaniards northward day after day until they faced storms and shipwreck on the coast of Scotland. Though Drake ’s earlier expeditions have sometimes been called piratical, this last and greatest of his successes has placed him among the great builders of modern naval England.

Drake’s sovereign mistress, Queen Elizabeth, also built largely and permanently on the foundations of modern England. This daughter of Anne Boleyn was surrounded by distrust and suspicion from childhood; more than once she narrowly escaped execution or assassination because of her nearness to the throne. She had many enemies in Scotland, Spain and France ; the Pope and many Roman Catholics wished to see her replaced by her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. Hence, her chief object, especially in the early years of her reign, was to keep her throne. In doing this she was often unscrupulous in her measures, and she did not hesitate to shift responsibility for acts peculiarly her own. Vain, coarse, obstinate, easily enraged, of consummate tact and shrewdness, she was a true Tudor, determined to make her will prevail. Her need of a strong central government, of the Protestant religion, of an efficient navy, of opposition to Spain, was exactly the need of England, and in selfishly maintaining her position on the throne she wrought mightily for England. Her success was the success of England and she became one of the most beloved of English sovereigns, commanding the loyalty of all classes of Englishmen. The Queen’s many despotic and capricious acts did not destroy this loyalty ; on the contrary, her people had much of the spirit of the Puritan Stubbs, who, when he had lost his right hand because of his belief, immediately took off his cap with his left, saying, “God save the Queen.”

The quickened imagination of the new age became evident in a number of very important inventions. Gunpowder, although probably known to the Orient in ancient times, was first employed in Europe in the fourteenth century. Its use soon became general and had far-reaching results. It completely changed the method of warfare, for it generally kept the armies at some distance from each other. Gunpowder helped to destroy feudalism, for no castle was proof against a continued bombardment, and feudal independence was secured largely by strong castle walls. Gunpowder also extended the use of war vessels; hence from its invention have come the great modern navies and many of the problems connected with modern sea power. The invention of printing® widely spread the

1 Simple printing by means of wooden blocks was known much earlier. Some German printers of Mayence used the first printing press with movable type about 1450.

Queen

Elizabeth.

Inventions

Aided

Progress.

MODERN HISTORY.

new geographical and other scientific information which men had obtained ; books were reduced four-fifths in price, and popular reading matter became possible. The knowledge thus gained stimulated men to go further and do some of the things which we look upon as the accomplishments of the Modern Age. The invention of the compass allowed the sailor to go far out of sight of land; the telescope opened up the heavens; the discovery of a better method of producing iron opened the way for the world wide modem use of iron and steel.

The period of exploration and discovery lasted approximately a century and a half. During that time Mediterranean trade decayed and the Italian cities suffered a decline; Spain and Portugal were at the height of their influence, their cities became the centers of trade and wealth. Missionaries carried Christianity to distant parts of the world ; scientific knowledge grew in volume ; sea power began to develop. On the other hand, the evil results of the period were unpleasantly numerous. The fables from the New World started a craze for wealth without labor. This desire not only led to the shameless exploitation of new lands, but stirred up a bitter rivalry among nations, which resulted in many butcheries and in the wholesale destruction of property, even in time of peace. The European states, while gaining empires abroad maintained at home the most crushing despotism. The stores of gold and silver drawn from the the*^ period New World increased the amount of money, especially in Spain.

This condition gave an unhealthy speculative stimulus to prices, which later seriously injured Spanish industry. However, these evils were not apparent in the sixteenth century, and in the intoxication of the new wealth Spain seemed extremely prosperous, because the new possessions promised only advantages. For Europe as a whole it is certainly true that, in spite of the resulting evils, the greatest event of centuries was the discovery and exploration of the New World.

TOPICS FOR EXTRA STUDY.

1. The Italian Cities in 1500.

2. Toscanelli.

3. Early Map Making.

4. The Moors in Granada.

5. Louis XI of France.

6. The Aztecs.

7. The First Printing.

8. The Fall of Constantinople.

Chapter II. The Reformation In Germany

GERMANY IN 1500.

As we have already seen, the government of Germany was in a pitiable state in 1500. Disintegration and weakness were the characteristics of other German institutions also. A widespread spirit of jealousy and distrust made common action impossible. The Emperor and the German princes were mutually jealous, for the powers of each were increased only at the expense of the other. The knights were jealous of the princes, the peasants disliked the nobles, the cities were wealthier than the country districts and tried to regulate trade, and were consequently hated by the country. Finally, great numbers of people, in all classes, distrusted the Roman Catholic Church. People were jealous of the Pope and of the church dignitaries, — jealous of their wealth and powers. The Church interfered in the most of men’s activities from birth to death, and it drew a golden stream of revenue year after year from Germany in the form of fees and church taxes of various kinds. To make matters worse, the German people knew that the church dignitaries often looked down upon them, as being worthy of nothing better than to furnish money to support the Roman Church.

Although the German people were in 1500 unsympathetic toward the Church, they were not irreligious. They were by nature religious ; they had a sense of responsibility and a tendency to inquire into the reality of things. Reform movements during mediaeval history had found lasting support in Germany. The great Hussite agitation at the beginning of the fifteenth century had profoundly shaken Bohemia and neighboring lands, and although the Church of Rome had successfully reasserted its authority, there remained a great measure of discontent. People began to feel that the old Church did not supply the real wants of the human soul ; there was a popular yearning for a source of more real religion.

Evils in the Church. — One of the reasons for the dissatisfaction with the Roman Church, in other countries as well as in Germany, was its excessive and growing formalism. People felt that too much emphasis was placed upon outward acts and too little upon a righteous life. The custom of making pilgrimages and of heaping up relics;® the use of jubilee gatherings in Rome, at first every century and later every twenty-five years, as the Popes came to be in greater need of money ; the doctrine of purgatory — that departed souls were held for a time, on probation as it were, until the evil in them should be cleared

1 Frederick the Wise of Saxony had a collection of over 5,000 objects, enough to secure absolution for him during a period of half a million years. Among these were some straw from The Manger, some skin from the face of St. Bartholomew, and fragments of Aaron’s rod.

Discontent in German Society.

MODERN HISTORY.

away, — all of these practices and teachings tended to make the mediaeval man give regard to the form of his daily acts, rather than to the motive for them. The doctrine of a Treasury of Grace,® — that a kind of divine bookkeeping held an account with each individual on earth, — encouraged men to increase the deposits of formal goodness. Furthermore, when the ignorant or the careless taught that deposits of grace might be made by one person for others, even for those long dead, they reached a point which was revolting to seekers after real religion.

Not only did the theory of the Roman Church produce dissatisfaction in 1500, but the Clergy themselves were often deficient in practice. True, there were numbers of worthy men who were sincerely devoted to their religious work and had the confidence of the people; the indifference and personal corruption of church officers have probably been exaggerated ; but a discouraging amount of real wrong and inefficiency there undoubtedly was, and no account of the period would be fair which leaves it out of consideration. Furthermore, the people accepted the stories© of the corruption of the clergy at their face value, and this belief of the common people is an important thing to consider in making out the causes of the Reformation. The evil habit of simony, or the sale of church offices, opened up the most sacred functions to most incapable men. Pluralism, or the custom of allowing one person to hold several appointments, excited the greed of the covetous, and made it a necessity that great offices be served by minor officers. The law of celibacy was the cause of a great amount, — just how much we can never know, — of personal impurity among the servants of the Church. The election of Pope was often a shameless affair, in which votes were bought in the most scandalous manner. Sometimes the Pope himself was personally vicious and unfaithful to his vows. Alexander VI was guilty of many of the crimes in the criminal calendar. He bought his election as Pope ; he was the father of a terrible brood of criminal children, one of whom, Caesar Borgia, he made cardinal by open perjury. Leo X was a luxury loving pagan who patronized art® and was more than suspected of a part in a Florentine assassination; Julius II® was a soldier whose aim was to keep the barbarian French out of Italy and to increase the temporal power of the Pope.