Christianity in Europe and overseas

R. PO-CHIA HSIA

During the 1710s, the two French Jesuits Jean-Baptiste Regis (1663-1738) and Pierre Jartoux (1668-1720) traveled in a large entourage of Manchu officials and soldiers, busy surveying and mapping the areas around a stretch of the Great Wall that separated the Qing Empire and the Mongol steppes.

Christianity in 1400

Nothing about the history of Christianity at the beginning of our period would prepare us for its dynamic expansion and world domination in 1800. In 1400, Christianity was divided into three main groups. Latin Christianity, which extended to almost all of Europe and at whose head stood the pope, was mired in a crisis of authority, with rival popes at Rome and Avignon hurling excommunications at one another in the Great Schism (1378-1415). Meanwhile, religious dissent grew into a full-blown national revolt in Bohemia against the Roman Church, before the Bohemians found a com­promise with a papacy restored in authority.

A second branch of Christianity dominated the southeastern and eastern margins of Europe: Eastern Orthodoxy.

The third branch of Christianity, Oriental Orthodoxy or the group of Eastern Christian churches, was to be found in Africa and Asia. Doctrinally, Oriental Orthodoxy differed from Latin Christianity in that it rejected the dogma of the Council of Chalcedon (451) that defined Christ as having two complete natures, fully human and fully divine. Instead, these churches held that the divine and the human are united in one nature in Christ. Also called monophysite for this reason, Oriental Orthodoxy divided further along geographic and ethnic lines. One of these branches, the remnant of Egyptian Christianity known as the Coptic Church, became a minority church after the Islamic conquest of North Africa. Representing the highest authority of Coptic Christianity, the Patriarch in Alexandria also exerted considerable influence over the affiliated but ethnically and linguistically separate Ethiopian Church. Armenian Christianity represented another member of the Eastern Christian churches.

Just as political power made Christianity into a world religion with the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century, the history of Christianity in the early modern era cannot be understood without knowing the deep connections of the Christian religion to Christian polities. The minority and stable conditions of the Eastern Christian churches and the decline of Greek Orthodoxy presented a sharp contrast to the global expansion of Latin Christianity and the Russian Orthodox Church. To these developments we will now turn.

From crisis to crisis: Latin Christianity

Latin Christianity was and is today the most significant expression of global Christianity; the story of its repeated recoveries from deep crises, its global expansion, and its relationship with other religions and Christian churches will form the heart of this chapter. It is a story all the more remarkable in that Latin Christianity survived two profound crises in this era: the Great Schism (1378-1415), mentioned above, and the Protestant Reformation and religious wars (1517-1648).

The restoration of papal authority represented the crucial development in the century between 1417 and 1517. Meeting at the Council of Constance (1414-17), representatives of the Latin Church secured the abdication of the three reigning rival popes and ended the Great Schism, the first step in restoring papal authority. Between the Council of Basel, called by Pope Martin v in 1431, and the Council of Lausanne in 1449, papal supremacy was asserted against claims by other constituents, such as church councils and bishops, as the best guarantee for the strength of the Latin Church. These were the first steps in a long process of centralization, which would be characterized by a strong Romanization and Italianization of Latin Christian­ity. Having quashed the rival claim of Avignon (and the intervention of the French monarchy) in papal elections, the papacy, as the center of Latin Christianity, was henceforth firmly rooted in Rome. Despite strong Spanish and French national representations in the College of Cardinals, the election of popes became an almost exclusively Italian affair, as elite families from central and northern Italy came to dominate the upper echelons of the papal curia. The last non-Italian pope elected before 1800 (indeed before 1978) was the Dutchman Adrian of Utrecht (1459-1523), who obtained the papal throne thanks to the strong patronage of his former pupil, the Habsburg Emperor Charles v, but who wore the tiara for only one year.

While in centralizing its power the papacy became overwhelmingly Italian in character, parallel national developments in Western Europe diminished the universal claims of the popes. In the mid-fifteenth century, with Portu­guese maritime voyages, the papacy had granted to the Portuguese mon­archy padroado (patronage) over all churches in its expanding jurisdiction. Later, the same rights were granted to the Spanish monarchs, with the papacy taking a leading role in demarcating the boundary of explorations and new Christian evangelization between the Iberian monarchies in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.

In 1516 the same pope granted to King Francis ι of France in the Concordat of Bologna extensive rights over the Gallican Church. In exchange for the royal affirmation of papal supremacy over church councils and for allowing the collection of ecclesiastical incomes in France, Leo conceded to Francis the right to tithe the clergy and restrict their right of appeal to Rome. Most significantly, the French kings gained the right of nomination to all benefices in their kingdom, thus effectively controlling all appointments to the Gallican Church as a vast source of royal patronage. The many territories of the Holy Roman Empire and England were left out of these diplomatic arrangements, a fact that would have important implications for the new crisis that would follow.

A restored papacy provided patronage for artistic creation and urbanization in Rome between the 1470s and 1700, and its vast wealth and bureaucracy provided high ecclesiastical offices and income for the Italian elites, who endowed Rome with churches and palaces. Once again, Rome felt it was the caput mundi, the head of the world, a beacon to Latin Christianity. Many looked to Rome as the sacred center. With the declaration of the Papal Jubilee, special years in which sins would be remitted for those who visited certain churches in Rome, Rome became a major pilgrimage destination. There were, however, many who looked askance at the new splendor and power of Rome. Within the church, some criticized the new opulence and power of the papacy; others denounced the worldliness and ambition of popes; and a few would come to question the fundamental legitimacy of papal rule.

Opposition arose in Bohemia. A professor at the University of Prague, Jan Hus (1369-1415) preached against the secular power of the clergy and the political rule of the papacy. Deeply influenced by the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe (1320-84), Hus argued that all Christians, not just the clergy, constituted the Church; that the Bible and preaching represented the true Christian ways; and that power had corrupted the clergy.

Dissatisfaction with the status quo within Latin Christianity did not necessarily target the papacy. For the mendicant orders - the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians - the spirit of reform led to the Observant movement, a return to the rules and asceticism of the original foundation. However, for some friars, the impulse toward greater asceticism and monas­tic discipline led inexorably to millenarian fervor. Such was the case of the Florentine Dominican, Girolamo Savonarola (1452-98), whose fervent sermons calling for moral reform led to sharp criticisms of Pope Alexander vι and ultimately to his own condemnation at the stake.

The Protestant Reformation

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Latin Christianity presented a highly complex picture. At its apex, a strong papacy played an important role in the politics of the Italian states, while the papal curia assumed the character of an Italian Renaissance court. Elsewhere, high ecclesiastical offices were in the hands of the nobility. This was particularly the case in the Holy Roman Empire, where the nobility and urban elites controlled nominations to the many benefices of the imperial church. Meanwhile, the universities, many founded in the fifteenth century, were graduating a new class of clergy, heavily recruited from the urban middle classes and theologically well trained. Keenly aware of abuses within the ecclesiastical hierarchy, this well-educated middle clerical stratum stood between a church leadership encumbered by political interests and the common people devoted to traditional forms of piety - pilgrimage, saints, and the sacraments. Most leaders of the anti-Roman movement that came to be called the Protestant Reformation stemmed from this clerical stratum - Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, Philip Melanchthon, and many others. Their voices of critique within the church, inspired initially by theological considerations, found a deafening echo outside the ranks of the clergy in society at large, especially among urban merchants and artisans and among peasants.

At issue were clerical privileges. The Latin Church consisted of two classes of people: the economically privileged clergy, subject only to canon law and tried in separate courts, who looked upon themselves as the true church; and the vast majority of laity, who resented the sacerdotalism of the clergy and their privileges, and whose strong anti-clericalism would provide the force behind the Reformation.

At its origins was the critique of indulgences. Sanctioned by the church, these were certificates sold by the church to the faithful in lieu of penance; one issuing of these was authorized by Pope Leo x to help pay for building the new Basilica of St. Peter's in Rome and in Saxony by the Archbishop of Mainz to pay for the expenses involved in his election to ecclesiastical dignity. Professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg, Martin Luther wrote a paper in 1517 that criticized the sale of indulgences and other practices. His voice found an echo, initially among sympathetic like-minded clerics and quickly among broad segments of society. By the time Leo x reacted, the “Luther Affair” had gotten out of control. In three short inflam­matory treatises, written in German not for his fellow clergy but for the laity, Luther attacked the pope as Antichrist, decried Catholic teachings and doctrines as erroneous and man-made, in contrast to the godly commands found in the Bible, argued that faith in God, not good works, was the key to redemption, and appealed to the nobility of the German nation to take up the godly cause. The evangelical movement, as it was first called, spread rapidly in the towns of the Holy Roman Empire, often with the support of urban elites. Prominent German princes, in the first place Frederick, Elector of Saxony, offered Luther protection against Rome. In 1525 rural unrests broke out in large parts of southern and central Germany, with peasants targeting monasteries but also the nobility. Coming to the side of public order, Luther condemned the revolts and stated that religious reforms must respect the god-given social order. After the suppression of rural revolts, radical social and political unrest continued in the form of the Anabaptist movement. This too was crushed in 1535 when the millenarian kingdom the Anabaptists established in the city of Munster was militarily suppressed.

Impasse was reached by the 1550s. Although Luther himself had died in 1546, his party had gained a name, the Protestants, from the 1529 act of protest lodged by princes against Emperor Charles v, who declared against Luther. In most cities and many territories in the Holy Roman Empire, the mass had been abolished, replaced by German-language services; monas­teries were closed; the clergy, allowed to marry, swore allegiance to their political masters instead of to their ecclesiastical superiors; and Protestant Germany was lost to Rome. A military attempt to compel obedience by Charles v ended eventually in stalemate. In 1555, Charles reluctantly recog­nized the Protestant Reformation in the Religious Peace of Augsburg.

From its heartland, the Reformation spread to other countries. In Scandinavia, with close cultural ties to Germany, the churches became Lutheran. In Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and Transylvania, German- speakers in the cities quickly adopted the Reformation. In the Holy Roman Empire, only Austria, Bavaria, and part of the Rhineland and Westphalia remained Catholic.

Switzerland became a second center for the reform movement. The first wave was embodied by Ulrich Zwingli (1481-1531), a preacher in Zurich, who fell in battle in the warfare between Protestant and Catholic cantons. A second and more influential wave emanated from the Frenchman John Calvin (1509-64), a refugee from religious persecutions in France, whose indefatigable leadership in Geneva made it into a Protestant bulwark and the center of a second Protestant movement. A more systematic theologian, Calvin built upon Luther's teachings on redemption “by faith alone” and “by Bible alone” and worked out an intellectually cogent and powerful theological system to explain divine and human nature, and the meaning of existence and redemption. In ecclesiology and Eucharistic theology, Calvin broke more completely with the Catholic Church than Luther. For him, the true Christian community was invisible, but its earthly manifestation took the form of a community governed by presbyters or elders elected to the office, who supervised and admonished their members to godly behavior, similar to the workings of the first apostolic churches. Calvin's theology, highly abstract and less dependent on his mother tongue, in strong contrast to Luther's profoundly German character, allowed for a wider circulation of his ideas. More effective in eliciting moral conduct with the use of church discipline, Calvin's ecclesiology also appealed to those who wished to create a more godly society by means of church discipline and moral fiber. In addition to Geneva and his native France, the Calvinist reform spread to Scotland, England, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Italy, Transylvania, and parts of Germany.

The Calvinist Reformation expanded at precisely the time when the Roman Catholic Church had awakened to the grave crisis it faced and was resolved to face the challenges. In a series of general Church Councils at Trent (1545-61), the Catholic Church drew a sharp boundary with the Protestants. Under the skillful leadership of the popes, who diverted potential anti-papal feelings into doctrinal and moral reforms, the Council of Trent clarified the doctrines of the Catholic Church, rejected compromise with the Protestants, and planned for “the reform of the head and branches of the Church.” Poised for combat, the Catholic and Protestant camps became centers not only of religious dispute but also military confrontation, as the ambitions and convictions of kings and princes fueled the maelstrom of religious violence.

Patterns of religious violence

The period between 1517 and 1648 was the most bloody in the history of Christianity. Religious disagreements and a profound fear unleashed by the collapse of authority fed long years of religious violence, which took four major forms. First, there was state violence against religious dissenters. Second, there was violence between different sectors of society or between social groups and the state. Third, religious warfare engulfed most states in Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. And finally, there was social violence against marginal religious groups.

The first victims of state repression of religious dissent were the two Augustinian friars Henry Voes and Johan Esch, followers of Luther, who were burned at the stake in 1523 in Brussels. If the Catholics were the first to use state violence to repress religious dissent, the Protestants were not far behind. During the early Reformation years in Zurich, dissenters criticized Zwingli for not going far enough in breaking with the Catholic Church and in espousing wholeheartedly the Bible as the sole basis for reformed Christianity. Arguing from examples from the first apostolic church, these dissenters refused to baptize their infants and argued that only voluntary adult baptisms constituted the true Christian community. The first Anabaptist community was thus born. Refusing civic oaths and military service, the Anabaptists threatened civic cohesion. Under Zwingli, the Prot­estants executed the first Anabaptist dissenter, Felix Mantz, in 1527.

Religious violence from the state was particularly marked during the first forty years of the Reformation. While Catholic authorities in the Low Countries, France, Italy, England, and Spain persecuted religious dissenters of all stripes, in general Protestant authorities focused their repression on the Anabaptists. The one notable exception - the 1553 burning of the Spanish physician Michael Severtus, who denied the doctrine of the Trinity - damaged the otherwise impeccable reputation of Calvin, as he was criticized for intolerance by Sebastian Castellio, a fellow reformer. The far larger number of Protestant victims of state violence inspired the creation of Protestant martyrologies, of which the English work by John Foxe was the best known. In the blood of their own martyrs, the Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anabaptists (and later the Catholics) wrote new histories that forged an unbroken link between themselves and the first Christian martyrs, estab­lishing proof of true apostolic succession.

It was the state that carried out religious repression in most countries: the Parlements in France; the bailiffs and local authorities in the Spanish Netherlands; the councils in Venice; the city councils in the Holy Roman Empire. The scale and intensity of repression depended on the zeal of individual authorities and the perception of crisis. The execution of Anabaptists, for example, peaked in the years between the first execution in Zurich in 1527 and the 1540s, a decade after the violent Anabaptist revolu­tion in the city of Munster; thereafter, with the pacifist turn of the Anabaptist movement, both Catholic and Protestant authorities stopped executing Anabaptists, with the notable exception of the Swiss.

In England, where official religion vacillated, the executions of Protestants ceased in 1534, when Henry viii was declared the head of the Anglican Church, only to be renewed with greater intensity under the reign of his daughter, Queen Mary (r. 1553-8), who tried in vain to destroy Protestantism. State violence did not cease, however, in Protestant England. During the 1580s, the war with Spain and fear of Catholic rebellion created a siege mentality in Elizabethan England, which became a relentless repressor of Catholic missionaries and leading dissenters.

In sixteenth-century England state repression proved successful because the state could muster sufficient resources to contain religious dissent. This was not possible in France and the Spanish Netherlands. In France religious disagreements boiled over to ignite social resentment and political competition, and effectively turned state violence into full-scale religious civil wars. Localized conflicts in the 1560s built up to the wholesale massacre of Protestants in 1572, an act conceived initially as a limited action by the Queen Regent Catherine de Medici to remove leading Protestant political leaders, but which degenerated into indiscriminate killings of Protestants throughout France. Between 1572 and 1598, the French state lost control as the monarchy became one player in a generalized religious civil war, fought by rival noble factions and fueled by fierce religious hatred and class antagonism. In 1593, Henri de Bourbon, leader of the Protestants, converted to Catholicism in order to claim the throne. Five years later, in the Edict of Nantes, Henri ιv granted freedom of worship to his former co-religionists and extensive political rights to the Protestant party. Despite lingering ultra-Catholic opposition, royal power was restored to a bi-confessional French state. Nonetheless, religious toleration did not last. Catholics considered the exist­ence of two religious confessions a weakening of royal authority. In 1685, at the height ofhis power, Louis xιv revoked the Edict of Nantes and subjected French Protestants to a campaign of harassment and forced conversions.

Still another model of state violence was represented by the Spanish Netherlands. Having failed to retard the growth of Protestantism despite the use of state violence between the 1520s and 1540s, the elites in the Low Countries arrived at a consensus for religious toleration. De facto religious diversity was undermined in 1566 by the iconoclastic riots instigated by radical members of the expanding Calvinist movement. It resulted in the dispatch of troops from Spain by Philip ιι, who rejected the call for religious compromise from the leading noblemen in the Low Countries. Not only did Spanish violence fail to repress religious dissent, but instead it led to a full-scale uprising, the declaration of independence by the Protestant domin­ated northern provinces, a long period of futile war (1568-1648), and the final separation between a Protestant United Provinces of the Netherlands and a Catholic south under Habsburg rule.

The Spanish Netherlands showed how a social and religious conflict could turn into a religious war between confessional states. This pattern of religious violence, the third in our list, dominated the history of Central Europe. After the Peasants War of 1525 and the Munster Anabaptist King­dom of 1534-5, there was a decrease in religious conflicts at the social level. The war between the Protestant Schmalkaldic League and the Catholic emperor Charles v (1547-52) was as much about imperial politics as religion. The 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg established a stable and peaceful co-existence for more than sixty years, albeit the rise of Calvinism after the 1570s and a more aggressive Catholic Counter-Reformation in the 1580s intensified tensions. Renewed religious conflict broke out over the election to the Bohemian Crown in 1618 that touched on the balance of power between Protestants and Catholics in the multi-territorial Holy Roman Empire. The conflict that came to be called the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) began with a strong religious character, with Protestant Denmark and Sweden fighting on the side of German Protestants against the Austrian Habsburgs and the German Catholic powers. With the entry of France on the side of the Protestants, the war assumed the character of a dynastic conflict between Bourbon and Habsburg. The conclusion of the peace treaties at Westphalia in 1648 included the Calvinists as well in the general religious settlement and largely resolved religious state violence in Christian Europe.

The fourth and final pattern of religious violence was directed at religious scapegoats. It reflected deep social reflexes that viewed social minorities as motivated by anti-Christian intentions, embodying the evil that threatened the body politic. Christian Europe targeted two social groups: Jews and witches. Persecution of Jews in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was part of the long history of antagonism toward the synagogue by the Church, and culminated in a series of accusations by Christians that Jews were engaging in desecration of the host (the bread of the Communion ritual) and ritual murder. While anti-Jewish violence diminished with the escalation of intra­Christian violence after the Reformation, sporadic persecutions persisted in seventeenth-century France and Poland.

The other persecuted group, witches, represented a constructed social category. Out of diverse marginal social elements - folk-healers, vagrants, the poor, the old, particularly women - popular fantasy and learned discourse created the image of the malevolent witch, minion of the Devil and the instigator of hail, storm, disease, poison, and death. The first persecutions against witches occurred in the Swiss Jura during the 1440s; the first demono­logical discourse, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), was com­posed in 1487 by two German Dominicans; and large-scale witch hunts began to occur after the mid-sixteenth century. Many thousands died during two centuries of witch trials, with the most intense persecutions occurring between the 1580s and 1650s, overlapping with the period of the most intense religious conflicts. Interestingly, the witch hunt was especially acute in regions faced with the greatest confessional conflicts - the Catholic territories of South and Central Germany, Protestant Scotland and England - and relatively moderate to almost non-existent in regions with strong confessional identity, notably Spain. Unlike state repression of religious dissent, the origins of many witch trials began with the popular search for scapegoats. These were rural, small-town phenomena of social control; but when political authorities inter­vened, interjecting a Manichean ideology of the struggle between good and evil, witch trials turned into full-scale witch hunts that threatened to destabilize society. The resolution of religious conflict after 1648 removed the state from the mechanism of witchcraft accusation, but popular demands for the punishment of scapegoats persisted well into the eighteenth century.

Protestant Christianity

A century after the Reformation, Christian Europe was permanently divided between Catholics and Protestants. Scandinavia, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Hungary, Transylvania, and most of Germany and Switzerland, had forsworn allegiance to Rome. In addition, there were large Protestant minorities in France and Poland. Catholicism held firm in Bohemia and Austria with the triumph of Habsburg arms, and crushed pockets of religious dissent early on in Spain and Italy with the help of the Inquisition. Even after the cessation of violence, a strong cultural frontier emerged between Protestantism and Catholicism, characterized by ecclesiology, soteriology, and liturgy.

A marked distinction in Protestantism was its ecclesiology. Born out of a deep anti-clericalism, the Reformation forswore allegiance to the papacy and created a laicized Protestant Christianity that wrested control of religion from clerical to political authority. This took different forms. In England, the monarch became the head of the Anglican Church; in Germany, the prince appointed clerical officials and determined ecclesiastical affairs; in Switzerland, officials in the Protestant cantons selected pastors and paid their wages. Whether at the national, territorial, or local level, the principle of lay control in religious matters operated, as best summed up in the formula devised in the 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg: cuius regio, eius religio, “whose realm, his religion,” with “his” here meaning the effective ruler of the territory. While Calvinist ecclesiology provided a blueprint for a more “democratic” church government, membership in the presbytery (the con­trolling institution) overlapped to a large extent with local social and political elites, as studies of the Reformed churches in Northwestern Germany and the Netherlands have shown. Whether church discipline was exercised through the Clerical Council and superintendents of a territorial state or by the magistrates in a Swiss canton, a more rigorous moral regime was created with techniques of external surveillance and internal examination of con­science. In translating church discipline into social control, Calvinism proved more effective than the Lutheran Church, which relied on periodic parish visitations and long-term catechism to bring the faithful in line with the heightened expectations of a more professional clergy.

In rejecting celibacy and monasticism, the Reformation created a clergy markedly different from the Catholic priesthood. Legally and connubially indistinguishable from the citizenry, Protestant pastors, better educated than their medieval counterparts, became just another group in the middle class by virtue of their professionalism. They were paid officials in the Protestant states, defenders of the new religious and political order, and censors of theological dissent and unorthodoxy among the laity and in its own ranks.

The triumph of laicization was manifest in religious practices. Latin no longer divided the laity from the clergy, as it continued to do in Roman Catholicism. Everywhere in Protestant Europe, religion was practiced in vernacular languages - divine services, Bible-reading, psalm-singing, Sunday sermons, confessional creeds, and ecclesiastical ordinances. The idea of “the priesthood of all believers” promoted lay Bible reading; it led to a strong emphasis on education and greater literacy in Protestant Christianity than in Catholic lands.

After the fervor of the Reformation, Protestant Christianity settled into a doctrinal stability. After the turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century - the Thirty Years' War in Germany and the Civil War in England - eschatology, prophecy, and religious “enthusiasm'”went out of fashion, as Protestant Europe radiated self-confidence in asserting its differences from Catholic Christianity.

Post-Tridentine Catholicism

The Council of Trent defined early modern Catholicism. It clarified the dogmatic boundary between the Roman Church and the Protestant innov­ators, and affirmed the supremacy of papacy and validity of tradition. In so doing, Tridentine Catholicism not only returned to its medieval roots, but assumed new characteristics with an energy found in a regained self­confidence.

First and foremost was safeguarding sacerdotal authority, with defending the papacy a top priority. An obvious response to the Protestants, this was also directed at Catholic states, the Venetian Interdict (1605-7) being a good example. Disputes over how the Venetian state controlled the clergy escalated an ecclesiastical quarrel into a full diplomatic confrontation. Venice expelled all clergy who refused to submit to secular authority; Pope Paul v retaliated by placing the entire republic under the ban of excommunication. A war of pamphlets broke out, with the Servite monk Paolo Sarpi taking the pen on behalf of Venetian republicanism and the Jesuits for the pope. This diplomatic contretemps, with France drawn to Venice and Spain support­ing the papacy, even boiled over to talks of war before a final settlement, but the most vocal pro-papal religious order, the Society of Jesus, did not return to the Venetian Republic until 1655.

The affirmation of papal supremacy came with a price. Against Protestant Europe, Counter-Reformation popes depended on Spain and France; but wars and competition between the two major Catholic powers narrowed the maneuverable space for the supreme pontiff. To enhance his powers, the pope centralized power, increased revenues, and tightened control in the Papal States, but reasons of state sometimes contradicted the goals of church reforms spelled out by the Council of Trent. Reform decrees stipu­lated better clerical training, stricter adherence to canon law, and enhanced episcopal authority. In practice, few diocesan seminaries were established, nepotism and pluralism persisted, and bishops were beholden to princes for appointments and found their pastoral duties sometimes hindered by political imperatives (including in the Papal States).

Tridentine decrees were implemented at two different speeds. While Counter-Reformation measures were quickly implemented, church reforms proceeded slowly and unevenly. In the first category, the Holy Office (the Inquisition) and the Index of Prohibited Books increased frontier vigilance against Protestantism: dissidents died, books were burned, and heretics condemned, as the Catholic Church tried to control the bodies and minds of the faithful. The seven sacraments were affirmed; episcopal visitations checked for baptisms, confessions, and communion; diocesan courts investi­gated illegal marriages; and church authorities exercised greater control over clerical admission and promotion. Still, clerical celibacy remained a problem into the late seventeenth century, and insufficient funding meant that the goal of a better-educated parish clergy did not begin to be achieved until a century after Trent.

Despite these shortcomings and limitations, post-Tridentine Catholicism expressed a new religious energy, manifest in increased religious vocations, revival of popular devotions, and a new wave of sanctity. The founding of new religious orders expressed the activism manifest in a Catholic revival; two of them, the Jesuits and the Capuchins, would play important roles in the early modern period. After 1600, signs of Catholic recovery could be seen in pilgrimages, new liturgies, and new saint cults, with the early seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries representing the two waves of canonization. The defense of papal authority extended to the centralization of liturgical practices: the Roman Missal, the Vulgate Bible, and new papal institutions reinforced the central position of Rome as the capital of Catholicism. Its positions consolidated, Roman Catholicism went on the offensive, both in terms of winning over Protestants and converting non-Christian populations. The many papal institutions founded between the mid-sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries testified to this catholic/imperialist energy: the German, English, Hungarian, and Greek colleges for the training of clergy from those nations, and a new congregation for the Propagation of Faith (1622) to coordinate the expanding Catholic missions to lands beyond Europe. This last development will be discussed in greater detail and compared with Protestant overseas missions below, but not before following developments in Orthodox Christianity, which was also affected by a reinvigorated Latin Christianity.

Greek Orthodoxy: surviving conquest

After the fall of Constantinople, the Greek Orthodox Church rallied around two poles: the patriarchate and the monastery of Athos. Important institutions in the Byzantine Empire, monasteries were often constructed on holy mountains. The site of Athos, perched on top of an inaccessible mountain at the end of a peninsula, helped to enhance its significance, as many other monasteries in Asia Minor fell to the advancing Turks. Inspired by the ideal of piety and protection of religious figures, and eager to win over the local populations, the Ottomans left Athos untouched. As the leading monastery of the movement for internal prayer and quiet meditation, the religiosity of Athos did not pose a threat to the Ottomans. The privileged monastery became a refuge from war, attracting large donations and developing into a major credit institution in the Ottoman Empire. The 1568 confiscation of all monastic lands by Sultan Selim ii represented a blow, but Athos retained its buildings, flocks, and other properties. A major center for icon production, Athos developed close financial and cultural ties to the Orthodox communities in Walachia, Moldavia, and Russia in the early modern period.

Continuing Byzantine traditions, the Ottoman sultans allowed the Orthodox Church to be governed by the patriarch. The re-establishment of the patriarchate after 1453 was an attempt to attract Greeks to the empty city, and immigrants from across Greece were forcibly resettled there. Appointed by the Ottoman, the patriarchate represented an extension of the state. The patriarch was invested with authority over the Greek Christian commu­nity, or millet, and administered the Orthodox Church in this capacity, collecting taxes among the faithful for the Ottoman state, and overseeing the administration of Roman family law among the Orthodox.

Many problems faced Greek Orthodox Christianity under Ottoman rule: a declining Greek population exacerbated by conversions to Islam, prohibition of proselytizing among Muslims, fiscal exactions from the Ottoman state, and highly fractious relationships within the Greek community. Occupying an important political office, the patriarch often had to contend with influen­tial Greek officeholders, the archontes, and was sometimes enmeshed in treacherous Ottoman politics.

Accommodating to Ottoman rule, the Greek Orthodox Church main­tained its hostility to Roman Catholicism, while making overtures to Protestants and strengthening ties with the Orthodox populations of north­eastern Europe. In 1559, Patriarch Joasaph ιι established contact with the German Lutherans, and Philip Melanchthon sent him a Greek copy of the Augsburg Confession of Faith. In the 1570s, Stephen Gerlach and other German Lutherans sent theological works to Patriarch Jeremias ii, but the two sides disagreed on the role of the church fathers and councils in Christian authority. Turning from Protestants to Russia, Jeremias ιι established closer ties with the Slavs and established the Moscow patriarchate in 1589, bringing the large Russian population under the banner of Greek Orthodoxy.

A new attempt to forge ties with Protestant Europe was made by Patriarch Cyril Loukaris (r. 1620-38). Born in Venetian Crete and educated at the University of Padua, Cyril became an envoy for the Orthodox Church in Eastern Europe. An opponent of Catholicism, and especially of the Jesuits, Cyril envisioned a grand Orthodox-Protestant coalition against Rome. He developed close ties to English and Dutch Protestants, reformed Orthodox education, commissioned a modern Greek Bible, and introduced the printing press to Istanbul. His reforms fell victim to politics, however. Embroiled in a conflict with Pope Urban vιιι, Cyril became increasingly vulnerable to papal diplomatic pressure and internal dissent within the Greek Church. In 1638 he was executed by the Ottomans for treason. Cyril's enthusiasm for Protestantism led to a negative reaction among the Orthodox faithful, which led the Greek Church to open contact with Catholicism in the late seventeenth century, although the aggressive policies of Catholic missionar­ies soon soured this rapprochement.

Russian Orthodoxy: the Third Rome

Beginning in the late fourteenth century, Russian Christianity began its long drift away from the Byzantine center and towards autocephalous consolidation. While Kiev and Novgorod had served as spiritual centers in the Middle Ages, the rise of the Muscovite state would make its capital a new center of religious power. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 contributed to the mythology of Moscow as the Third Rome/NewJerusalem. Orthodoxy was also a way for the tsars to assert their sovereignty over newly conquered western regions such as Kiev and Novgorod. Just as the tsars used the Orthodox Church to centralize power, the church sought to consolidate itself, producing unified lists of holidays, saints, orthodox spiritual practices, and texts.

A fierce devotion to tradition and relative isolation from Latin Christianity characterized the history of the Russian Church. The development of an autocephalous tradition was marked by a series of cultural productions, such as the Slavonic Bible (1499) and the chronicles and hagiographies produced by Russian monks, who constituted the church's intellectual elite. The significance of monasticism was enhanced by its strong growth in the early fifteenth century, which exhibited a distinctive pattern of religious-social dynamics: seeking spiritual solitude, a hermit or holy fool (important figures in Russian Christianity) sought out the wilderness, only to be joined by expanding groups of devotees, who became the nucleus of new monastic communities and the expansion of the Muscovite northern frontier. By the sixteenth century, the growth in properties and power led to close ties between ecclesiastical and secular authorities. Despite its cultural conserva­tism, the Russian Church witnessed a distinctive flowering of ecclesiastical architecture and a new sense of its grandeur as the Third Rome.

As the Russian Church expanded with the rising Muscovite state, events in western and central Europe made a deep impact on the history of Russian Orthodoxy after the late sixteenth century in two ways. First, the doctrinal, liturgical, and ecclesiological reforms, initially emanating from Protestantism and then from Tridentine Catholicism, stimulated similar movements in the Russian Orthodox Church. The key themes were centralization and standardization: enhancing episcopal authority, improving clerical education, eradicating folk “superstitions,” standardizing liturgy, and generally strengthening church discipline and moral behavior. Second, it is clear that these ideals for reform were inspired by developments in the Western churches and, for that very reason, they also provoked strong internal resistance from a Christian community fiercely attached to tradition, averse to innovations, and violently hostile to Roman Catholicism.

The age of the Counter-Reformation was a time of bitter conflict in the Eastern Orthodox Church in Ukraine, which at this point was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In this multi-ethnic state, there was a great deal of religious diversity, stemming from the strength of the nobility and the weakness of the central government, resulting in a sort of cuius regio policy. However, the Catholic Sigismund ιιι (r. 1587-1632) began to change this de facto policy, applying the Counter-Reformation to his territories and sending missions to both Protestants and Orthodox.

The relationship between the Orthodox and Catholic reforms in Poland- Lithuania was complex. They shared the same goals of purifying and strengthening the practice of the faith. This meant increased power of the church hierarchy over the lower clergy and laity, improved clerical educa­tion, the standardization and revision of liturgical texts, and the discipline of devotional practices. However, the orthodox, imbued with anti-papal sentiment, reacted negatively to Catholic missionary incursions.

Reforms in the Orthodox Church begun in the 1580s often underlay sponsorship. Achievements included the publication of Orthodox biblical and liturgical texts and the foundation of Orthodox confraternities in Lviv. Some leaders of the Orthodox Church in the Polish-Lithuanian Common­wealth thought unification with Catholicism the best possible means for reform. However, the laity would only accept a complete reconciliation between all of Orthodoxy and the Catholic Church, something that the Russian Church would not agree to. In 1596, church leaders accepted union with the Roman Catholic Church at the Union of Brest, but the orthodox laity organized strong opposition. The partition of Ukraine in 1654 determined the fate of the Uniate and Orthodox churches, giving each exclusive control on their side of the divide, although confessional tensions would remain for a long time.

In Russia, the Orthodox Church was the state religion, and conserved the local Slavonic traditions without much influence from the outside world. The status of the Orthodox Church was elevated by the creation of the Moscow patriarchate in 1589. Invasions by Catholic Poles and Lutheran Swedes in the seventeenth century intensified the identification of Orthodoxy with Russianness. In defending Russia against foreign invaders, Orthodoxy and Tsardom became synonymous with Mother Russia.

While rejecting Western Christianity, Russian Orthodoxy borrowed from it lessons for religious and church reforms. One such reformer was Peter Mohyla, a noble and a high-ranking cleric, who used the Jesuit model to create an Orthodox seminary, meant to provide highly trained defenders of the faith educated along Western lines. This florescence of learning was followed by a systematic program of publication and editions, making Kiev the intellectual heart of the Orthodox world by the 1650s.

The example of Kiev inspired reforms in Muscovy. Under Tsar Alexis i (1645-76), reformers in the Russian Church saw many of their proposals adopted, including strict enforcement of liturgy and moral teachings, an emphasis on effective preaching, and a ban on pagan folk practices. Changes in the tax code threatened these gains, subordinating church property and clergy to secular control. These tensions erupted under the patriarchate of Nikon, who increasingly asserted his authority. His adoption of Greek liturgical practices angered many traditional believers and members of the clergy, who focused their opposition on his increasing assertions of absolute patriarchal power. Alexis was forced to remove him from office by creating an ecumenical panel from across Orthodoxy, deposing him for dereliction of duty. Although it deposed Nikon, the council came down firmly on the side of the new liturgical practices he had introduced, exiling the opposition despite calls for reconciliation between devotees of the old traditions and the new. This event marked the rise of tsarist authority in the church and of Greek and Ukrainian leadership in the Russian Church. Though dramatic and controversial, these decisions largely settled the debate in 1666-7. Millions separated from the official church. They came to be called Old Believers. Savage repression by the state drove some to rebellion and many more into voluntary exile, especially to the expanding Russian frontier to the east, across the steppes of Central Asia and to Siberia.

The subordination of the Orthodox Church to the Russian state was completed under Peter the Great, who appointed Western-educated Ukrainians to major church positions. One of these was Feofan Prokopovich, a Ukrainian cleric educated by the Jesuits, who espoused tsarist control of the church. Having observed the Anglican Church while abroad, Peter concurred in this vision of a Russian national church. In 1718, Feofan released the Spiritual Regulation, which advocated the abolition of the patriarchate in favor of a synod. This was quickly enacted, although the synod was ineffective in implementing reforms until the 1740s. These reforms focused on curtailing folk religious practices, instructing the laity in Christian doc­trines, and training a better-educated parish clergy. While the intellectual level of the parish clergy had been raised by 1800, the success in expanding Russian Orthodoxy to the newly conquered Asian peoples on the eastern frontier was more limited. Early massive, coerced conversions obtained by state-sponsored missions in the Volga brought in large numbers of converts, but the vast majority retained at most a nominal adherence to Christianity. A shift of policy was initiated under Catherine ii, whose raison d'etat and enlightened conviction resulted in a gentler approach to missions. A more tolerant religious regime allowed Old Believers to return from exile, and removed punitive laws against them.

Monasticism in the eighteenth century was in decline, with the total number of monks decreasing by half between 1724 and 1738. Prompted by this decline and by fiscal need, Catherine ιι confiscated much monastic property for the state. Currents within the church discouraged priests from becoming monks. On the other hand, internal prayer in the tradition of Mount Athos brought a new sense of purpose to monks alienated by the scholastic turn in church teachings. This newly vibrant tradition inspired many intellectuals, as well as many women, who joined female religious institutions with increasing frequency after Catherine ιι made it easier to found nunneries.

The period of Enlightenment was followed by a conservative reaction. In the early nineteenth century, conservative church leaders asserted their authority and expressed deep hostility to reforms and foreign innovations, as well as to mysticism. The Jesuits were expelled from St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1815, and the empire in 1820; freemasonry and secret societies were abolished in 1822; British missions in Siberia were expelled in the 1830s. The Orthodox Church was once again the guardian of Russian identity.

The global expansion of Christianity

Just as Russian Orthodoxy expanded in tandem with the Russian Empire eastward to Central and Northern Asia, Catholic and Protestant missions spread globally due to the rise of Western European maritime empires (Figure 14.1). There were three models of Christian expansion: conquest, as represented by Spain in the Americas; trade, as represented by Portugal in Asia; and colonial settlement, as represented by France and Britain in North America. While these models were not mutually exclusive, the patterns shaped the nature of the encounter between Christian and non-Christian peoples.

In Spanish America and Portuguese Brazil, colonial conquest and rule imposed Christianity from above through repression of indigenous cults, enforced catechism, translation programs, and subjugation of indigenous communities to missionary authority. Catholicism and colonialism were synonymous, as soldiers protected missionaries on the frontiers in Mexico and Chile, and as conversions pacified resistance to Spanish rule. Beginning in 1500, this process terminated only in the late eighteenth century with the pacification of Chile.

Without the ambition and means to create an extensive territorial empire, except around the Indian city of Goa, Portugal created a network of trading posts in Africa and Asia, stretching from West Africa to Japan.

Figure 14.1: Pasguale Cati, The Council of Trent, 1588-9. In this fresco, painted for a chapel in Rome, the artist shows the assembled churchmen in the back, with allegorical figures, including the Catholic Church wearing a papal tiara, surrounding a globe in the front, symbolizing the global reach of the Church.

In Mozambique, Goa, Malacca, Macao, and Nagasaki, the Portuguese clergy attended first to their compatriots. After the founding of the Society of Jesus and thanks to the exemplar of Francis Xavier, the first Jesuit missionary, Jesuits from all Catholic countries volunteered to work under Portuguese padroado. In India, non-Portuguese Jesuits comprised some 10 percent of the clergy between 1500 and 1750; in the China Mission, also under Portuguese patronage, the proportion was over 60 percent. Where Christianity could not be implanted by arms, conversion took the form of persuasion. Through translated texts, rituals, healing, and other cultural practices, missionaries propagated Christianity in a larger network of exchanges that was sustained by trade, not unlike the earlier spread of Islam in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. Christianity met with various levels of success and resistance, depending on politics, culture, economy, and the ability of individual mis­sionaries. In South Asia, Catholicism achieved limited success among Hindus; encounter with Syriac Christianity caused an intense conflict within that community between supporters and opponents of Roman reunion. In Southeast Asia, Catholicism scored some success in Sri Lanka, Malacca, and Vietnam, but it suffered a catastrophe in the seventeenth century, when Japanese Christianity was brutally suppressed by the newly unified Tokugawa regime. Only in the Philippines, the only Spanish Asian colony, did Catholicism become the major religion.

Following the Spaniards and Portuguese, Protestant England and the Netherlands also became global maritime powers in the seventeenth century. Focused on trade and colonial settlement, the Dutch and English private companies that sponsored the overseas enterprises invested little in propa­gating Christianity. Where colonial interests were involved, however, greater resources became available for evangelization. Such was the case in mid-seventeenth-century Taiwan, when the Dutch supported missions among the aborigines, hoping to develop the island into their East Asian base just like Batavia in Southeast Asia. Similarly, Christian missions on the frontier of English settlements in North America took on the nature of civilizing missions and pacification, similar to Jesuit missions in the Mexican and Chilean borderlands of the Spanish state. The establishment in 1769 of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire for the Christian education of native boys may well represent the apex of this missionary impulse.

Christian missions stimulated religious rivalry in the way European states competed in the mercantilist world. In the late seventeenth century Danish and German Pietists sent missionaries to India, where many European countries were developing a strong commercial interest. The Calvinist Dutch founded the Cape colony to compete with Portuguese Mozambique and attracted French Calvinist and German Protestant immigrants. At times, religious resistance lasted longer than the military: Catholicism survived in Malacca after the Dutch snatched it from Portugal in 1641, thanks to 130 years of Catholic missions.

Resistance was equally stubborn to Catholic missions in Eastern Christian­ity. In Ethiopia, Portuguese Jesuits scored little success in the late sixteenth century, but two emperors, ZaDangel and Susenyos, converted in the early seventeenth century and agreed to a reunion with Rome. This provoked widespread and fierce resistance among many adherents of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church; in 1632 Susenyos was deposed and the Jesuits expelled.

The Armenians were also largely immune to Catholic missions. Under the leadership of their catholicos, who, as the recognized leader of his religious community, played a similar role to that of the Greek Patriarch in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian diaspora was sustained by a commercial network and a strong adherence to tradition. Armenian merchants in New Julfa near Isfahan in the Safavid Empire met Catholic missionaries with hostility; whether in the Russian or in the Ottoman empires, Armenian Christianity remained a strong ethnic marker.

Subordinated to the Armenian Church by Ottoman authorities in the seventeenth century, Syrian Christianity was in a more difficult position. With the penetration of French diplomacy and trade in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century, Catholic missionaries achieved some success in persuading Syrian converts to imitate the example of the Maronites and accept full union with Rome.

The global expansion of Christianity raised (and continues to raise) many religious and cultural questions: the translation of theological terms; the use of language; and whether conversion was or should be seen as synthe­sis, accommodation, hybridization, or spiritual conquest. While peoples around the world absorbed, rejected, or remained indifferent to the message of the Christianities propagated in the early modern period, a Christian ethnography was being founded and elaborated in Catholic and Protestant Europe. The study of non-European languages, culture, politics, and religion would eventually lay the foundation for a global knowledge, of which we are both the inheritors and deconstructors.

FURTHER READING

Angold, Michael (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2006), vol. v.

Baylor, Michael G. (ed.), The Radical Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 1991). Bossy, John, Christianity in the West 1400-1700 (Oxford University Press, 1985).

Boxer, Charles R., The Christian Century in Japan 1549-1650 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974).

Cameron, Euan, The European Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

Carlebach, Elisheva, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500-1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

Castelnau-L'Estoile, Charlotte de, Marie-Lucie Copete, Aliocha Maldavsky, and Ines G. Zupanov (eds.), Missions d'evangelisation et circulation des savoirs xvιe-xvιιιe siecle (Madrid: Casa de Valazquez, 2011).

Chadwick, Owen, The Early Reformation on the Continent (Oxford University Press, 2001). Christin, Olivier, La paix de religion: L'autonomisation de la raison politique au xvιe siecle (Paris: Seuil, 1997).

Crummey, Robert O., Old Believers in a Changing World (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011).

Delumeau, Jean, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture 13th-18th Centuries (New York: St. Martin's, 1990).

Dykema, Peter A., and Heiko A. Oberman (eds.), Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 1993).

Hsia, R. Po-chia (ed.), A Companion to the Reformation World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552-1610 (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Social Discipline in the Reformation 1550-1750 (London: Routledge, 1989).

(ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2007), vol. vι.

The World of Catholic Renewal 1540-1770 (Cambridge University Press, 2005). MacCulloch, Diarmaid, The Reformation: A History (London: Penguin, 2003). Muchembled, Robert, Une Histoire du Diable xιι-xxe siecle (Paris: Seuil, 2000). Oberman, Heiko A., Luther: Man between God and the Devil (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).

Ozment, Steven, The Age of Reform 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980).

Patte, Daniel (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Randall, Catharine, Black Robes and Buckskin: A Selection from the Jesuit Relations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011).

Rublack, Ulinka, Reformation Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Scribner, Robert, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Scribner, Robert, Roy Porter, and Mikulas Teich (eds.), The Reformation in National Context (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Standaert, Nicolas (ed.), Handbook of Christianity in China (Leiden: Brill, 2001), vol. ι. Vauchez, Andre, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E., Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn. (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Zupanov, Ines G., Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India (16th-17th Centuries) (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005).