Meanwhile, there was turmoil just about everywhere else in Europe. Monies were needed to support and defend centralized state powers. Additional resources came from few sources: taxes and piracy and conquest and expansion. Unifying people under one religion strengthened national identity and was a useful mechanism of rule while Church and State were aligned. Many monarchs sought to expand royal power into the religious. These rulers are sometimes called the New Monarchs. The best way to align Church and State for a monarch is to make yourself the head of your own Church.

While monarchs wrestled with papal Rome, the Reformation continued and many splintered sects formed under various religious figures and ideas. More and more, centralized religious authority was being rejected for a more personal relationship with the Divine. The rejection of authority was not just a threat to the Church, but to the State as well. The borders of authority were fraying.

The frenchman, Jean Calvin, was a religious reformer. Like Luther, he began his career studying the law, only to take on the brown robes of a monk.

In 1534, the Affair of the Placards had posters denouncing the Catholic Church appear throughout Paris. French authorities executed many reformers and Calvin fled. The generations to come would see families and different levels of society, often violently, divided over religion.

While in exile in Geneva, Calvin developed a religious doctrine based on theology, rule according to religion. With his concept of predestination, Calvin also argued that God had already decided before even birth which humans would ascend to Heaven and which would descend to Hell. God had predetermined the path of all and people were fated. Ironically, he also felt that citizens needed to be strictly controlled, else they fall into sin. There were fines for drunkenness, blasphemy, dancing, and gambling. His theocracy in Geneva was coined Protestant Rome. Calvin was seen as its father. Calvinism would spread even further than Lutherism.

***

Words and Images are my own. Click on any title below to further explore and support my writing.