THREE KINGS AND A MONK
Apart from the discovery of the West and of the new sea-route to the
East, the most important events in the early years of the sixteenth
century happened in Italy--Northern Italy. We have seen that Italy
was almost the only country which showed no sign, as yet, of settling
down within something like the boundaries which delimited the
European nations up to the time of the Great War. It must be
understood that this is a statement which takes no account of the
differences made by Napoleon's victories at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. We may disregard them, for the moment, because
they were not lasting.
But the most important of all the events happening in Italy had
nothing to do with changes of territories or national boundaries.
Far more interesting and more helpful to the world was the growth of
that Renaissance, or new birth, of love of letters and of all
artistic beauty which we saw beginning with Dante and Petrarch and
Boccaccio, and some of the early Italian painters, sculptors, and
jewellers. Moreover, we must not forget the glorious architecture
which goes by the name of Gothic, nor the noble buildings in that
Byzantine style which the influence of the Moors carried into Spain.
We should notice that a very great impetus was {36} given to that
study of Greek literature, which Petrarch and Boccaccio in particular
had revived, by the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in the
middle of the fifteenth century; for it had the effect of scattering
the Greeks far and wide, seeking new homes and bringing their books
and their traditions with them.
And further, we ought to observe how this learning had been carried
into every country and corner of Europe by the establishment of
colleges and universities where it now became possible for every
student to read "the classics." Their establishment was the work of
the Church or of wealthy men acting under the advice of the Church.
Moreover, for what we may call elementary education the teaching of
the children of the poorer classes, so far as they received any
teaching at all, was also the Church's work, for it was done by the
members of the monasteries and convents all over Christendom. It is
well that we should bear this in mind, to the Church's credit, at
this moment, for the time is close at hand when we shall have to see
that same Church accused, and in large measure convicted, of acts
very greatly to her discredit.
All the while that the love of letters and of art was growing within
the walls of the fortified cities of Italy, the cities were
constantly at variance with one another, and even within their walls
civic strife seems to have been the rule rather than the exception;
but apart from these small local fights there were two principal
causes of unrest. The first was the fact that the kings of France
were not at all disposed to regard the Alps as forming a natural
boundary of their possessions--they were constantly coveting the
fertile land of Northern Italy--and a second cause of unrest was the
desire, which was strong enough to unite for a time most of the other
states, to cripple the excessive power of Venice.
{37}
[Sidenote: The decline of Venice]
Several circumstances combined to make possible the curbing of that
power. The Turks were strong enough at sea to demand the full
attention of the naval force of Venice, and her resources were vastly
diminished by the diversion of that Eastern trade, for which she had
held the gate into Europe, to the newly found sea-way round Africa.
The Pope took the lead against her. He formed a league which was
joined by the Emperor and by the kings of France and Spain. The
alliance was too strong for the single state, and after the first
battle Venice resigned nearly all her possessions on the mainland.
She ceased to be a danger to the neighbouring states.
There was, however, no such combination of circumstances to diminish
the power of France. Within a few years after the beginning of the
century the French, by the capture of Genoa, had established
themselves in a strong position to menace the whole of Italy. The
French king Louis XII. had some pretext for the menace, for he could
produce a kind of hereditary claim on the sovereignty both of Naples
and of Milan. He had served the Pope against Venice, and after
rendering this assistance he was not disposed to withdraw his claims.
The Pope therefore arranged a new league against his late ally.
Spain, the Emperor, and England were parties to this, which was
called the Holy League--England under Henry VIII., who was not always
to prove himself so close a friend of the Pope! The result was the
speedy expulsion from Italy of the French, chiefly by the Spanish
armies. Very shortly afterwards the French king died and was
succeeded on the throne by his cousin Francis I. in 1515.
It has been my aim, through all the course of this Greatest Story, to
encumber it with as few names as possible, in order that the names of
the most {38} important actors may stand out the more clearly and be
remembered the more easily. But just at the moment which the story
has now reached the names of four men, three being powerful kings and
one a humble cleric, stand out pre-eminently. We might almost say
that the story of those four is the story of all Europe, so large is
their part in it.
Luther is the name of the cleric. He was the leader in that great
schism, or cleaving off, of the Protestant Church--the Church which
"protested"--from the ancient Church of Rome. It is that cleaving
off from the old and founding of the new, the reformed, Church, which
is called the Reformation.
The three great kings were Francis I. of France, above mentioned, our
own King Henry VIII., and--by far the greatest of the three--Charles
V.
It was the greatness of Charles V., the accident, as we may perhaps
call it, that he held, in his own person and by rightful succession,
the sovereignty of so many and extensive countries so far apart from
each other, which was one of the chief factors of the story at this
time. For he was of the ancient house of the Habsburgs. He was the
ruler of Austria. He became Emperor. He became King of Spain. He
was Duke of Brabant and Count of Flanders and Holland. He had a
claim of sovereignty over Burgundy. The Pope purchased his help
against the Reformation movement of Luther by giving up to him such
sovereignty as he was able to enforce over the greater part of Italy.
We can see at once what was the position of France thus surrounded.
And we must always remember that it was the day of despotic monarchy,
when the king could make war or peace at his own pleasure and
regarded the lands over which he was king as his own private
property. Especially of this despotic kind was the monarchy of
Francis. He appears in {39} history as a brilliant figure,
ambitious, eager for deeds of arms, without depth of character or
fixed principles. He came to the throne as a young man and at once
was attracted by the lure of Italy.
At first his arms had a rapid success, and he defeated the combined
forces of Spain, the Papal states, and Venice--Venice being then in
alliance with the Pope. He was thus victorious over Italy in arms,
but the culture of Italy and of the Renaissance made a complete
conquest of him. A new combination of Swiss, German, and Spanish
arms drove the French out of Italy, and Francis returned, strongly
influenced by that new light of art and letters which he had there
found. From that invasion of Italy by the French we may date the
beginning of the Renaissance in France, whence it spread to other
nations of Europe.
[Sidenote: The "Cloth of Gold"]
It was in the year 1516 that Charles succeeded to the throne of Spain
and to the possession of all the wealth that the Spanish ships had
begun to bring in from the New World. Three years later he was
elected Emperor, giving offence thereby to Henry VIII. of England, as
well as to Francis, since both had sought to be Emperor. Their
common cause of offence led to their famous meeting known as the
"Field of the Cloth of Gold" by reason of the magnificence of the
decorations, the gay and splendid tents, and so on. But it all ended
in nothing, or indeed less than nothing, except an exchange of
compliments, for almost immediately afterwards we find Henry, under
the influence of the great Cardinal Wolsey, pledged to support
Charles. In the shifting alliances of the time it was nearly always
against France that England was engaged, notwithstanding that Henry's
sister had married Francis' predecessor on the throne of France.
Charles, on the other hand, was Henry's nephew. But France was
constantly giving aid to Scotland, whether {40} secretly or openly,
in her continual fight with England. Scotland, however, had just
been beaten to her very knees in the battle of Flodden, and had
little fighting left in her for the moment. With such forces as
these opposed to France the wonder really is that she maintained her
power undiminished. It is yet more wonderful that, under Francis,
she should have been ready for still further adventures in Italy.
Yet she did so adventure, and though she and her king met with
grievous disaster there--especially at the battle of Pavia where
Francis was made prisoner and whence he was taken to Madrid--we have
to notice that at the death of Francis, shortly before the middle of
the century, France was in possession of the provinces of Savoy and
Piedmont, both on the Italian side of the Alps--and this, although
Charles had been crowned "King of Italy" by the Pope nearly twenty
years earlier. Probably the explanation lies chiefly in the fact
that the territories over which Charles ruled were so extensive, and
also so scattered, that it was impossible for him to bring any great
force together at any one place. Moreover, on his south-eastern
border, in and around Austria, he was constantly menaced by the Turks
ever pressing up from Constantinople. He seems to have tried to rid
himself of the Turkish trouble by handing over to his brother some of
the provinces on the side which lay most dangerously exposed; but
even so their defence must have remained practically on his hands.
He never made good his claim to Burgundy--in which matter again it is
rather wonderful that Francis should have been able to resist him.
And, not having Burgundy in his possession, he was obliged to
maintain a fleet able to command the seas on the west of France in
order to go to and fro between Spain and the Netherlands. He must
also have a second fleet of ships for bringing treasure from the {41}
East; and, since Spain had a long sea-coast on the Mediterranean
where the Turks and pirates swarmed, he must have yet a third fleet
there for the protection of his trade. Besides, he had a claim of
sovereignty over Naples and Sicily.
Therefore, with these, and other less important, calls upon his power
it is really not surprising, great although that power was, that it
did not prove equal to all he would have liked to demand of it. And
further, in those states over which he had been elected Emperor, with
the rather vague authority and duties belonging to that title,
another cause arose of great and increasing trouble, the Reformation.
[Sidenote: Luther]
For the last few pages we have been occupied with kings and emperors:
it is time that our story concerned itself with the cleric of low
degree. I put this phrase in place of that which was on my pen's tip
to write, namely, "humble cleric," because, however we may think of
Luther, "humble" he certainly does not appear. Humble before God he
may indeed, as a good Christian, have been. It was perhaps the most
striking feature in his character that he would not humble himself
before men--not even before that great man whom he had been taught to
look on as endowed with a quite special grace and blessing, the Pope
of Rome. His origin was humble enough. He was the son of a miner in
the German state of Saxony. He had the education of a monk, was made
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wittenberg, in Saxony,
and took the degree of Doctor of Divinity. He went on a pilgrimage
to Rome and came back grieving sorely over what he saw there.
The way in which the Pope and his council, called the Curia, had been
governing, or misgoverning, the Church, had given great offence for
many years. The monasteries and the convents, that is to say, the
{42} establishments of the monks and the nuns, had done much useful
work in acquiring learning and in educating the people throughout
Christendom in religious and other knowledge. Many of them were
doing good work still. But the condition of most of them appears to
have become very bad, both monks and nuns being lazy, gluttonous, and
worse--setting the worst possible example to the common people. They
were careful perhaps about the performance of the religious
ceremonies in the churches, but their religion had little or no
influence on the conduct of their lives.
Against Rome itself the complaint of Christendom was not only that it
did not exercise its authority to amend these ill practices, and that
the very same practices were followed in Rome itself, but also that
the Pope and his council exacted money, from the people generally and
even from the clergy themselves, and did not apply the money to the
purposes for which it had been demanded. For the demand was made on
the plea that the money was needed to equip armies to fight the Turk,
and those armies were never summoned or put in movement. The money
was diverted to increase the private wealth and pomp of Pope and
Cardinals and high church dignitaries at Rome.
So there was sufficient cause of offence, both at the centre and in
every part of the world over which the Pope claimed authority. We
saw in the last volume how our own Wycliffe, and how Huss, in
Bohemia, had raised furious protests against these evils in the
Church. The fire of those fierce protests was still smouldering.
The people understood the protests better. The knowledge of the
Bible was not so entirely the possession of the clerics as it had
been. The printing press had made many copies. Moreover, the Greeks
and the knowledge of the Greek language, {43} in which the New
Testament was written, had been widely dispersed when the Turks took
Constantinople--the headquarters of the Greek Church.
Luther's first act of protest against the action of Rome was directed
against the sale of "Indulgences," as they were called. These
"indulgences" were written pardons for sin. They were even credited
with power to bring out of Purgatory a soul that was there already.
And they--that is to say, the parchments or papers with the pardon
written on them--could be bought. They could be bought from people
called "pardoners" who sold them on behalf of Rome, and the Pope's
explanation was that the money was needed for the building at Rome of
the Cathedral of St. Peter.
[Sidenote: The burning of the "Bull"]
Luther boldly declared that the "indulgences" were valueless, because
no man, not even the Pope, had the power to forgive sins, and he
nailed a declaration to this effect on the door of the great church
at Wittenberg and sent another copy to his Archbishop. At first the
Pope seems to have made light of the matter; but at length, as
Luther's supporters increased in number, he issued a Bull of
excommunication against Luther as a heretic, summoning him to Rome to
give an account of his actions, and commanding the burning of books
which he had written against Rome. We have seen before what such a
Bull meant. It had meant so much in the way of setting a man outside
the protection of the laws in this world, and in condemning him in
the world to come, that even the great Emperor Frederic had to yield
before it, cowed and vanquished. The act of the monk of Wittenberg,
when he received it, was to throw it publicly on the fire kindled for
the very purpose in an open space of the city!
The fire created by the burning of the Papal document set all the
smouldering embers into a more {44} furious flame than ever before.
That burning of the Bull happened in 1520.
Luther did not go to Rome; but he did go, when summoned by Charles,
the Emperor, and appeared before him at the Diet, or meeting, of the
German States, held at Worms. Charles, after listening to his
passionate pleadings, pronounced that he should receive the treatment
of a heretic, but he was allowed to leave Worms and start for his
home. On the journey he was taken prisoner by the Elector of Saxony,
who had always been a friend to him. It is supposed that this
capture was effected for his better protection. In his imprisonment
he made the translation into German of the New Testament. Later, he
translated the whole Bible.
It is not impossible that this capture was made with the cognisance
of Charles himself. The course of events forced him to side with the
Pope and oppose the reformers, but there are several incidents which
show him much more anxious to make peace, if that were possible,
between the two parties, than to take a leading part in the strife.
He had much to attend to elsewhere. In 1526 the Protestant states of
Germany had leagued themselves together for mutual support; and in
the very same year the Turks had made themselves masters of the whole
of Hungary, and reduced it to a Turkish province.
It was now only a year since Charles had released Francis, whom he
had taken prisoner at Pavia, after making a solemn compact with him;
yet Francis was already intriguing against him. Francis had induced
the Pope of all people--the Pope whom Charles had so helped against
Francis--to be his ally against Charles. Charles's reply was to send
a strong force into Italy which sacked Rome and took the Pope
prisoner. Thus he disposed of that trouble. He then again made
peace with Francis on liberal {45} terms. The Pope was soon set at
liberty and returned to his see, but he seems to have learnt his
lesson--namely, that Charles held a power far too great to be
opposed, if he cared to put that power forth. In 1530 Charles was
crowned King of Italy by the Pope and at the same time he received
the Pope's consecration as Emperor.
[Sidenote: Spread of Reformation]
Meanwhile the Turks had been extending their aggressions and besieged
Venice. And the Reformation, that schism, or cleaving off, which
denied the authority of the Pope, spread more widely and took deeper
root. Its direction of growth was chiefly northward, from Saxony
which is one of the Southern German states. It worked up through
Germany and so to Scandinavia and Denmark, to the Netherlands and to
France. The help of those German princes who had formed themselves
into a Protestant league was essential to Charles if he was to be
successful in repelling the Turks, and he consented to withdraw the
edicts condemning the so-called "heretics" which had been passed by
his own authority.
Finally he did march against the Turks, and though he did not gain
any striking victory, a peace on favourable terms was made with them
in 1538, after their fleet had suffered a heavy defeat from the
Venetians. For the Turks were constantly at war at various points of
their wide empire. On the eastern, the Persian side, there was
continual fighting, with the result that they maintained their hold
on Bagdad, the capital; but it was a possession which they always had
to keep strongly defended. Their pirate fleets had established
themselves in Tunis and Algiers on the North African coast. Charles
made two naval expeditions against them, in the first of which he
succeeded tolerably, but in the second had no success at all. The
Moslem corsairs remained dominant in {46} the Mediterranean until
they suffered a notable defeat in the famous battle of Lepanto in
1571.
Luther died in 1546, boldly uttering, both by speech and writing, his
doctrines until the last. He lived to see them firmly grounded in
Germany, and spreading north and west. On the Continent of Europe
the kings were in opposition to them. In England, exceptional
circumstances arose which disposed Henry VIII. to receive them with
favour.
Rather as Francis was attracted by the idea of adding to his French
possessions the northern and western provinces of Italy, so Henry
VIII. was tempted by the desire to regain for England some of the
continental territory that had once been hers. It was largely to
this end that he had sought alliance with Spain and had helped Spain
and the Pope in driving the French out of Italy in 1512. Later he
had the assistance of the King of Spain in an invasion of a part of
France which had belonged to England in a former reign. He gained a
quick success, but before he could establish himself in the conquered
province the Spanish help was withdrawn. The adventure gained
nothing for England, but cost her a large sum and created much
dissatisfaction among the people.
The idea of the Spanish alliance had been in the mind of Henry
VIII.'s father, before him, and to confirm it he had married his
eldest son to a Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon. That eldest
son died, and left Catherine a widow. Henry VIII. pursuing the same
policy, sought, and obtained, from the Pope a "dispensation," as it
was called--that is to say, a permission--to marry Catherine,
although she was his brother's widow.
[Sidenote: Henry VIII. and his Queens]
The alliance with Spain did not bring Henry nearly all that he had
hoped of it. He was disgusted by the withdrawal from France of the
Spanish force that {47} we have just noted. Catherine's children
died, with the exception of a daughter, Mary. Perhaps his great
minister, Cardinal Wolsey, put it into Henry's head that there was a
curse on his marriage with his brother's widow, or perhaps it was a
thought that came to him without Wolsey's suggestion. However it
came, it seems that it took possession of him. He expressed doubts
about the legality of the marriage. Also he had fallen in love with
a lady of the Court, Anne Boleyn. He began to desire the annulment
of his marriage with Catherine in order that he might marry Anne
Boleyn, and approached the Pope with a request that he should
pronounce that marriage invalid and illegal. It was, in effect,
asking the head of the Church, who, in theory, could do no wrong, and
was infallible, to confess that such infallible authority had erred.
The Pope was not at all anxious to make an enemy of Henry. In the
troubles created by Luther's preaching and writing, Henry, so late as
1521, had appeared as a true friend to the Pope by ordering the
burning of all Luther's books. So the Pope sent great Churchmen to
England to look into the matter of the marriage. There was much talk
and many conferences, but in the end Henry must have realised, what
he probably had deemed probable from the beginning, that the Pope
would not reverse a former decision. He could not get his marriage
declared to be illegal by the Church at Rome. He determined to act
without that Church, to have the illegality pronounced by English
bishops, whom he could trust to express such opinions as he should
command them to utter, and to proceed in accordance with their views
thus expressed. Catherine was divorced. He married Anne Boleyn.
Once he had taken this step, he followed on the path to which it led,
never looking back. The proud {48} Cardinal Wolsey fell from the
king's favour, largely by reason of his pride and arrogant
ostentation which had raised him up a number of enemies among the
English nobles, but he was succeeded by another adviser, Thomas
Cromwell, whose influence was even greater in determining the king to
be the absolute master of England. Under Wolsey he had gone far in
this direction. Parliament had power in its hands, because it had
the power of granting subsidies for the king's wars and expenses.
Wolsey had advised the king not to summon Parliament, but to extort
contributions from his subjects instead. They did not give
cheerfully, nor to the full extent of the sums demanded, but they
gave grudgingly, in fear of punishment for some charge that would be
brought against them if they did not.
Under Cromwell's influence, the king did call his Parliament
together; but by that time, with his growing power, he had succeeded
in getting his own friends in a majority in that Parliament. And in
order to put down any possible opposition in the Upper House, he did
not hesitate to bring to the executioner's block some of the noblest
and most venerable of the Peers. It was a reign of terror, with
Henry as absolute despot.
And he made himself despotic in the Church no less; for that was the
final end of that path on which he made the first step when he
divorced Catherine and married Anne in defiance of Rome. For first
came thunders, ever louder and louder, from Rome, answered by ever
louder defiance. It was defiance that was not displeasing to a large
number in England. Already, before any of the ideas of the
Reformation were introduced, we have noticed England growing restive
under the attempts of the Popes of Rome to dictate to her. We may be
sure that this restiveness had been increased of later years. Some
of the clergy {49} themselves, as we have seen, were none too pleased
at the demands which Rome made upon them for money for Turkish wars,
or for the building of St. Peter's Cathedral. They were the less
pleased, because of a strong suspicion that it never was intended to
use the money for the purposes stated.
Henry, therefore, and his powerful and ruthless counsellor were able
to turn this dissatisfaction to their own use. The clergy were very
ready to support Henry in asserting that the English Church was not
to be subservient to Rome. Even the bishops in the Upper House
probably thought that they were doing a good work for the freedom of
the Church when they passed the Act called the Act of Supremacy which
made the King of England head of the English Church. That Church was
indeed freed, by the Act, from the authority of Rome, but it was only
to put it under another authority, the authority of the English king.
And it gave equally little offence to the majority of the clergy when
the king drove the monks from their monasteries, and took their land
and its revenues for the service of the Crown or gave them to his
friends. The good work of the monasteries had been done, and they
had passed the time of their usefulness, for their inmates no longer
studied to acquire knowledge, nor imparted it to the laity and their
children. Only in the north of England did their suppression rouse
opposition and lead to a dangerous rising which the Crown's forces
put down with great severity.
But education had been spreading in England, as elsewhere in
Christendom, in spite of the religious troubles. The new opening of
the ancient stores of classical literature, and their diffusion by
the printing press, could scarcely fail to arouse the interest of men
of intelligence.
The spirit of protest against Rome which Luther {50} preached had
this, at least, in common with the spirit in which Henry of England
acted, that both were bitterly and even violently opposed to the
Pope's claim of authority. So this spirit of the Reformation made
its way in England without encountering the difficulties which it had
met in other parts of Europe. The clergy, who, in an earlier reign,
would have opposed it, had now become subject, in part by their own
act, to the King of England rather than to the Pope of Rome.
Protestantism was accepted as the State religion.
In Ireland also Henry declared himself head of the Church as well as
king. All Acts of the Irish Parliament, from his reign for several
centuries, had to receive the assent of England before they became
law.
Of the four great men who had so large a share in the making of our
story in the first half of the sixteenth century, the monk, the most
important figure of the four, was the first to die, in 1546. The
next year saw the deaths of Francis and of Henry. Charles, greatest
of the three kings, lived on until 1558, though he laid down his
honours two years or so earlier and retired to a monastery to end his
days.
By the death of Francis, Charles was relieved of his life-long enemy,
and took advantage of that relief to turn all his attention to the
Protestant princes of Germany who were leagued together to support
their faith by arms. He defeated them at that time, and, using his
victory, as was his custom, with moderation, he drew up a document
called the "Interim," a statement of doctrines to which he hoped that
both Catholics and Protestants would agree. It failed, however, to
satisfy either. Five years later the Protestant princes again took
arms, and this time their Emperor, whom they found unprepared, had to
fly for his life. The ultimate result was a treaty called {51} the
Peace of Religion, of which the most important provision was that the
Emperor permitted the Protestants, so far as the permission lay with
him to give, to hold their doctrines and perform their religious
services as they thought right.
[Sidenote: The Peace of Religion]
It was a beautiful name--the Peace of Religion--but unfortunately the
name of peace was not sufficient to ensure that peace would follow.
Even within the Protestant Church itself there soon arose acute
differences of opinion.
The doctrines of the monk won their way over most of North-Western
Europe. Into Scandinavia and Denmark they were introduced with the
support and favour of the king himself. They made little penetration
on the eastern side, for the simple reason that those particular
abuses against which they protested did not exist there. Their
protest was mainly against evil practices in the Church of Rome. But
over Russia, rising into greatness in the east of Europe, the Greek
Church prevailed. Constantinople, until its capture by the Turks,
had been the capital city, the Holy Place, of that Church; but now
the Tsar of Russia claimed to be its head, speaking from his capital
city of Moscow.
We saw something of the break-up of the Mongol power, which had
extended over nearly the whole of Asia and threatened Europe also,
when we were recounting the story of China. The blow that was dealt
it at the end of the fourteenth century by the Buddhist monk who
became the first Emperor of the Ming Dynasty doubtless helped in its
break-up even so far away as its western border. The centre of its
power was shattered. It no longer had the strength that comes from
unity. The Mongols fell apart into a number of independent tribes.
Early in the sixteenth century Russia began to throw off the
domination with which those Mongols, or Tartars, always threatened
{52} her, and from time to time exercised. She had partly
amalgamated with the Tartars, and partly ruled over them, by the
middle of that century.
The knowledge of Russia began about the same time to be brought to
England, by traders who had found their way to Moscow by adventurous
voyages round the top of Scandinavia and so on to the White Sea,
whereon is the city of Archangel, and so down into the centre and
capital of the great country, travelling partly by river and partly
overland. A treaty, for the exchange of the products of the two
countries, was made, and the English were allowed to build warehouses
for storing those goods which they brought in to trade with and those
Russian goods which they obtained in return.
It is of interest to note that this discovery of Muscovy, as Russia
for a long while was called in England, was made by sailors in search
of a very different land, namely, China. For there was an idea in
the minds of the men of the fifteenth century that a way to China,
and all its riches, might be found by sea round the top of
Scandinavia and so eastward until China was reached.
And so, in fact, some sort of a way was ultimately found through
Behring's Straits--the narrow sea-way between the extreme north-east
of Asia and the extreme north-west of America. But it is a way so
blocked by the ice for so large a part of the year as to be of no
practical use, and the discovery of the south-west passage round the
Cape took all the interest and zest out of the search for what was
called the North-West Passage. Portuguese trading vessels had
reached China and Japan before the middle of the century and
missionaries of the Order of Jesus, or Jesuits, had introduced
Christianity into Japan as they had already brought it to India.
Spanish missionaries of the same great monastic order had {53}
carried Christianity westward into the New World. Thousands of
Indians in Mexico and Peru and other countries conquered by the
Spaniards were baptised as Christians. Churches and cathedrals built
by the labour of the natives, which cost the Spaniards nothing, began
to rise on the sites of the pagan temples.
[Sidenote: Cross and Crescent]
Thus both eastward and westward the Cross, the Christian emblem,
travelled with the conquering sword of those who went by sea; but on
land, and in the Mediterranean itself, the Mahommedan Crescent was
carried far by the scimitar, or curved blade, of the Moslem.
The Moslem Turks fought their way, as we have seen, so far, in
Europe, as Vienna, which they nearly, but not quite, captured. On
the other side they had subdued Persia, and established themselves at
Bagdad. Up to the year 1571 and the heavy defeat of their fleet at
Lepanto, they continued to be the strongest naval force in the
Mediterranean. It was in the first half of the century that they
touched the highest point of their power and extended their sway most
widely. In further course of the story we shall find them for the
most part on the defensive, striving, especially against the growing
might of Russia, to retain what they had won.
Towards the latter part of his reign that great king and emperor,
Charles V., had trouble in the most northern section of his wide
domain--in the Netherlands. He put down, with severity, a rising of
the great city of Ghent, formidable, within its walls, because of the
privileges that had been granted to its burghers, because of the
wealth and of the numbers of its inhabitants and their independent
spirit. This little trouble in the Netherlands might have sounded in
his ears, if they had been able to appreciate its meaning, as the
first note of an immense trouble that was to follow, for in the years
to come we shall find {54} unrest and fighting over almost the whole
stage, which has become world-wide, of our story; and we may trace
the origin of it all back to what now happened in that comparatively
small corner which was called the Netherlands.
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