The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [93]
Chapter 10
Europe from the Renaissance to 1900
Nation States, Religion, War, and The Armada
From about 1480 onward, the concept of “nation states” began to arise. The sentiment was new, in that ancient empires such as Persia and Babylonia were normally a collage of peoples, languages, and customs reaching over a vast area with the veneer of the empire’s rulers settling over the indigenous peoples. The Spanish Empire, the British Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Austria-Hungarian Empire from the 1700s on, fit the same mold; however, the nation states’ roots go much deeper. It was a large area such as France, inhabited by generally similar peoples speaking the same language and all answering to a powerful central government. The key is all the people in the nation state considered everyone in the nation as one united entity—that is, one people. Like the people of the ancient city state, everyone was in the same boat and would advance or decline together. Similar religions, customs, languages, and history all combined to convince these rather large groups to people to think of themselves as one unit. Nearly all modern Western European nations and their progeny fit this category. Here was a momentous change in human thought, and these new inclinations would lead to both good and evil consequences.
The new nations would dramatically improve the national infrastructure of roads, banks, general staffs for the army, and bureaucracies for the monarch. Parliament would dramatically improve its position in England. In 1688, as part of the Glorious Revolution restoring the English monarchy, the incoming king accepted the English Bill of Rights.[101] This bill of rights gave Parliament the edge in the political relationship, and in due time Parliament became the controlling government body.
The discovery of the “New World” excited all of Europe. Part of the excitement involved exchanges of new foods. Corn (maize) and potatoes came to Europe, and wheat, barley, horses, and other herd animals went to the Americas. These new foods, along with an agricultural revolution in the 1700s, allowed an increase in the food production in Europe, helped ease some of the starvation prevalent in previous years, and contributed to a worldwide population upsurge from 1400 to 1700 (world population increased from about 350 million in 1400 to 610 million by 1700). These new foods also had some drawbacks, as the Irish found out in the potato famine of 1845 to 1852, where 30 percent of Ireland’s population died because of an over dependency on potatoes. A fungus hit the potatoes destroying copious amounts of the crop. In spite of a tremendous death toll, England’s Parliament acted slowly and ineptly. Nevertheless, the new foods helped the agricultural economies of Europe and the New World quite a bit.
As the explorers set out to find new worlds, inside Europe new religious rivalries were coming to the surface. From outside Europe Islam was hammering at the Balkans, while inside Europe the Roman Catholic Church suffered from increasing corruption. Several movements were trying to reform the Church, such as the monastic movement,[102] and humanist influences from philosophers like Sir Thomas Moore (1478 to1535), and Erasmus (1466 to1536) talked against corruption; however, no endeavor brought real change within the Church. A Church led by wealthy popes leading depraved lives was not going to change through its leadership. Some reformers paid with their lives for challenging Church doctrines, so many who desired restructuring stayed quiet.
All this changed with the advent of Martin Luther (1483 to 1546), an Augustinian monk who, in 1517, nailed his ninety-five theses to a church door at Wittenberg, Germany, demanding the Catholic Church end corrupt practices, change its doctrines, and recognize salvation by faith alone. Luther took a big chance with his life, and