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So no priests in the way, no Pope, no nothing, to get between you and the word of God. The thing I love about it is that it’s like reading a magazine, there are big pictures with obviously cartoony jokes, and then there are captions everywhere to make sure that you don’t miss anything. My German isn’t really good enough to get a lot of the jokes, but looking at it, I just put my own in. I imagine someone here saying, ‘Abandon Pope all ye who enter here,’ or Luther with the pen is saying ‘It’s the quill of God,’ or a lot of very strict Catholics saying, ‘Yes, but your interpretation is much Luther.’ In fact I hope the jokes are better than that, but it’s pretty clear what’s going on in this picture, and I think it’s terrific.

The broadsheet was obviously aimed at a very wide public, but it has one particular viewer in mind: the elector of Saxony. If religious differences were going to come to open warfare, Protestantism would survive only if its princely champions fought to defend it. The elector of Saxony in 1617 would have to be just as resolute as his predecessor in 1517 and so would all the other Protestant rulers in Germany.

War came the very next year, 1618, and for thirty years devastated central Europe. By 1648 the two exhausted sides recognized that this was not a winnable contest. The bloodshed of the Thirty Years War forced the reluctant combatants to recognize that the only basis for lasting peace would be pragmatic tolerance and legal equality between Catholic and Protestant states.

In this part of the book, I have been looking at how very different societies across the seventeenth-century world addressed the political consequences of religious diversity – Protestant and Catholic, Sunni and Shi’a, Hindu and Muslim. Safavid Iran and Mughal India contrived more-or-less peaceful accommodations. Christian Europe foundered in war. But in the 1680s the English philosopher John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, held out the possibility of an ultimate happy outcome even in Europe:

The toleration of those who hold different opinions on matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel and to reason, that it seems monstrous for men to be blind in so clear a light.

This conviction, dearly and bloodily bought, that there are many ways to truth, changed the intellectual and political life of Europe, so that in 1717, when the bicentenary of Luther nailing his theses to the church door came round and new broadsheets were produced, the whole continent was well on the way to a revolution just as profound as the Reformation and, in many ways, a consequence of it – the Enlightenment.

PART EIGHTEEN

Exploration, Exploitation and Enlightenment

AD 1680–1820

The European Enlightenment (1680–1820) was an age in which scientific learning and philosophy flourished. Although often – rightly – associated with reason, liberty and progress, the Enlightenment was also a period of European imperial expansion, when the transatlantic slave trade was at its height. Important advances in navigation allowed European sailors to explore the Pacific more thoroughly, and for the first time the indigenous cultures of Hawaii and Australia were connected to the rest of the world. The dialogues and exchanges, the difficult transactions and misunderstandings, the straightforward clashes which resulted from encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans all over the world created an often deeply troubling history, since much of it resulted in the suppression of peoples and the fracturing of societies. Europe, however, was not the world’s only successful growing economy: China under the Qing Dynasty was regarded by many Europeans as the best-governed empire in history, and was enjoying its own version of the Enlightenment.

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Akan Drum

Drum, made in West Africa, found in Virginia, USA

AD 1700–1750

The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow – from everything that would confine