AD 1500-1650 Renaissance

In the early 16th century AD the Protestant Reformation, begun by Martin Luther (AD 1483-1546), divided imperial states into Catholics or Lutheran Protestants. The overstretched Habsburg Emperor Charles V (reigned 1519-56), defending Hungary against the Ottoman Turks and fighting France in Italy, agreed to the existing religious differences among states at the Peace of Augsburg (1555). The Catholic Church undertook reform at the Council of Trent (1545-63), promoting a ‘Counter-Reformation’. In Geneva, John Calvin (1509-64) preached an extreme Protestantism.

The Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) began with a Protestant Bohemian Revolt against the Emperor Ferdinand II (reigned 1619-37) and at various times involved Denmark, Sweden – under its greatest king, Gustavus Adolphus (died 1632 in battle) – and France, as well as Spain and the Netherlands. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia established the constitution of the Empire for the next hundred years, but left Germany devastated, dominated to the west and north by France, Holland and Scandinavia.

In the east, Poland-Lithuania escaped the religious wars and invasions of the Ottoman Turks, but not the bloody 1648-52 revolt of the Dnieper Cossacks who ravaged the Ukraine. Ivan the Terrible (reigned 1533-84) created an absolutist Russian state centred on Moscow. It disintegrated into civil war after his death and was invaded by Poland in 1610 before the Romanov Michael (reigned 1613-45) reunited it.