Early modern Europe

Early modern Europe, also called the post-medieval period, is the time in European history between the end of the Middle Ages and the start of the Industrial Revolution. It lasted from about the mid 1400s to the late 1700s. Historians mark its beginning in different ways. Some point to the invention of moveable type printing in the 1450s. Others point to the Fall of Constantinople and the end of the Hundred Years' War in 1453, the end of the Wars of the Roses in 1485, the start of the High Renaissance in Italy in the 1490s, the end of the Reconquista and the voyages of Christopher Columbus to the Americas in 1492, or the start of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. The end of the period is also marked in different ways. It is usually linked to either the start of the French Revolution in 1789 or the less clearly defined beginning of the Industrial Revolution in late 18th century England.

Many important events happened during this period. The first circumnavigation of the Earth was completed, and Europeans began regular contact with the Americas, South and East Asia. The European colonization of the Americas also took place. The Protestant Reformation and the religious conflicts it caused, including the French Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years' War, greatly changed the religious balance of Christendom. It created a strong new opposition to the power of the Catholic Church, especially in Northern Europe.

Modern science began to develop in the 1600s, and technological progress soon grew faster. At the same time, governments became more secular, and law courts and the nation state took shape. Capitalist economies started to form first in the Low Countries, and later in France, Germany and England. This era is often linked with the economic idea of mercantilism. It also saw the decline and eventual disappearance of feudalism and serfdom, at least in Western Europe.

The growing trade and exchange of ideas across the world helped build capitalism and is an early stage of globalization. By the end of the 18th century, five great powers had emerged in Europe: Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom. They formed the Concert of Europe, which dominated European politics in the 19th century and up to World War I.

Periodization

The early modern period is generally agreed to include the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. Historians say this time saw science and technology grow quickly, politics become more separate from religion, and the power of the Roman Catholic Church become smaller. Many historians also say people began to think of themselves as part of a nation. In the Middle Ages, people's identity was based more on religion (belonging to Christendom), language, or loyalty to a lord or magnate.

The start of the early modern period is not clear-cut, but it is usually placed in the late 15th or early 16th century. Important events from this time include 1450, when Johannes Gutenberg developed a printing process using movable type in Europe. In 1453, the Ottomans conquered Constantinople. In 1492, Christopher Columbus made the first recorded European voyage to the Americas. In 1517, the Reformation began when Martin Luther shared his ideas for change in the church. The end of the period is linked to either the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain around 1750, or the French Revolution in 1789.

Further information: Printing press § Mass production and spread in Europe

Around 1440, printing started in a single print shop in the Free Imperial City of Mainz. Within a short time, printing had spread to about 270 cities across Europe, and more than 20 million volumes had been printed by the end of the 15th century. Just 25 miles away, the Frankfurt Book Fair was established by 1462. It remained the main marketplace for printers and publishers and the center of Europe's book trade for the next two hundred years.

By the 16th century, the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages, where facts were hard to find, had begun to give way to a printing culture. In this new culture, scholars could compare their own observations with those of other living scholars. This changed how knowledge was created, preserved and shared.

Age of Discovery

Main article: Age of Discovery

Further information: New World § Mundus Novus, Waldseemüller map, Columbian Exchange, and Atlantic Slave Trade

The Age of Discovery was a period from about the 15th to the 17th century, when seafarers from European countries explored, colonized, and conquered regions across the globe. The opening of sea routes to the East Indies and European colonization of the Americas by the Spaniards and Portuguese, later joined by the English, French, and Dutch, led to international global trade that connected parts of the world that had been isolated from each other. The interconnected global economy of the 21st century has its roots in this era.

Amerigo Vespucci's Mundus Novus letter, published in 1503, argued that the lands found to the west were not the edges of Asia but a different continent, a "New World." Between 1519 and 1522, the Magellan–Elcano expedition made the first voyage around the Earth, including the first European crossing of the Pacific. Every continent was visited and mostly mapped except the south polar continent now known as Antarctica. European mapmakers drew continents that changed from abstract "blobs" into more recognizable shapes. Discovering lands unknown to the ancients also weakened trust in Claudius Ptolemy, the 2nd-century scholar whose geographic and astronomical models had long been seen as perfect. European exploration also started the Columbian exchange between the Old World and the Americas, moving plants, animals, people (including slaves), communicable diseases, and culture between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Epidemics of smallpox and other diseases from Eurasia swept the Americas after European contact, killing between 10 million and 100 million people, up to 95% of the Indigenous population. New crops from the Americas changed Europe. Maize spread quickly through the Mediterranean and Balkans in the 16th century, while the potato spread more slowly in northern Europe. Both crops gave more food per acre, which changed the peasant diet, helped reduce famine, and supported population growth and cities. The era also saw widespread enslavement, exploitation, and military conquest of Indigenous peoples, at the same time as the spread of Western culture, science, and technology, which led to faster-than-exponential population growth worldwide.

Reformation

Main article: Reformation

The Protestant Reformation was a reform-minded schism from the Roman Catholic Church. It was started by Martin Luther and continued by John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, and other early Protestant Reformers. It is usually dated from 1517, when Luther posted his 95 Theses on a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, to 1648, when the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War. Four main traditions grew directly from it: Lutheranism, the Reformed tradition (also called Calvinist or Presbyterian), Anglicanism, and the Anabaptists. The Radical Reformation also led to the Anabaptist, Moravian, and other Pietistic movements. The main motivation was theological, but other factors also played a part, including the rise of nationalism, the Western Schism that weakened faith in the Papacy, complaints about the Roman Curia, the influence of humanism, and the new learning of the Renaissance.

The Reformation changed the Church of England greatly after 1547. The church separated from Rome under Henry VIII, beginning in 1529 and completed in 1537, but England's religious changes were more gradual than elsewhere in Europe. Church leaders there moved back and forth between older Catholic traditions and Reformed ideas, creating a middle path (via media) between the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions. The Roman Catholic Church responded with the Counter-Reformation, begun at the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which brought new spiritual movements, reforms, and the well-organised Jesuits. Northern Europe mostly became Protestant, Southern Europe stayed Roman Catholic, and Central Europe suffered greatly in the Thirty Years' War. Historians' focus also shifted: until the 1960s they mostly studied leaders like Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, but the new social history began looking at the beliefs and behaviour of ordinary people.

Scientific Revolution

Main article: Scientific Revolution

Further information: Law of universal gravitation

Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) made telescope observations in the early 1600s. These began to change a small technical update of classical astronomy into a strong challenge to traditional cosmology and its long-standing link with Christian theology. English mathematical physicist Isaac Newton (1643–1727) published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687. It showed that one mathematical law, the law of universal gravitation, explained both the heavens and Earth. This removed the ancient boundary between the celestial and the terrestrial and was the first great unification of physics.

The Scientific Revolution ended the medieval idea of natural philosophy as the servant of theology. During the 1600s, natural philosophy grew in power and independence, and educated people's thinking moved from fides quaerens intellectum toward understanding that was more separate from religion. By the end of the century, the "New Science" had broken sharply with earlier natural philosophy. It moved away from older Greek ideas, saw the world in a more machine-like way, worked more closely with mathematics, and focused strongly on collecting and interpreting new evidence.

Enlightenment

Main article: Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment (also "Age of Reason" or simply "the Enlightenment") was a period of intellectual and cultural flourishing that emerged in the late 17th century in Western Europe and reached its peak in the 18th century as its ideas spread more widely across Europe. It placed great value on reason, empirical evidence, and the scientific method. Its ideals included individual liberty, religious tolerance, progress, and natural rights. Its thinkers supported constitutional government, the separation of church and state, and using reason to reform society and politics.

Ideas spread through scientific academies, literary salons, coffeehouses, Masonic lodges, and a growing print culture of books, journals, and pamphlets. These ideas weakened the power of the monarchy and religious leaders and helped pave the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Many 19th-century movements, including liberalism, socialism, and neoclassicism, trace their intellectual roots to the Enlightenment.

Difference between 'early modern' and the Renaissance

"Early modern" is sometimes used in place of the word Renaissance, and the reverse is also true. However, "Renaissance" is the right word for a wide range of cultural changes. These happened over several hundred years in many parts of Europe, especially central and northern Italy, and they marked the change from late Medieval times to the start of the early modern period.

The term "early modern" is mostly used for Europe and its overseas empire. It has also been used in the history of the Ottoman Empire. In Japanese history, the Edo period, from 1590 to 1868, is also sometimes called the "early modern" period.

Diplomacy and warfare

Main article: International relations 1648–1814

The 1600s saw very little peace in Europe, with major wars fought in 95 years. The worst was the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which had a terrible effect on the people of Germany and nearby areas. It grew out of a series of religious wars that followed the Reformation. The Roman Catholic House of Habsburg and its allies fought the Protestant princes of Germany. The Habsburgs ruled many lands, including the Crown of Bohemia, Hungary, the Slovene Lands, and the Spanish Netherlands.

The Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War. Under it, all sides agreed to recognise the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which let each prince choose his state's religion, following the idea of cuius regio, eius religio. Pope Innocent X declared the treaty invalid, but European rulers ignored him. Some scholars with a realist perspective see Westphalia as a turning point, when states began to focus on power and land rather than religion. Hamish Scott explains that this view says foreign policies were guided by a struggle for resources and a 'balance of power.'

Major states

The Holy Roman Empire was also known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation from 1512. The Habsburg House of Austria held the title of Holy Roman Emperors from the mid-1400s through the whole early modern period. Through marriages, the Habsburgs gained many lands, including the Burgundian Netherlands. Their son Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor inherited the Habsburg Netherlands, Habsburg Spain, and Habsburg Austria. The Habsburgs' main opponents were the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of France. The Ottomans' siege of Vienna in 1529 began a long series of wars, and their 2nd, and last, attempt to take Vienna in 1683 was repelled by the largest cavalry charge in history, led by the king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In Spain, the Catholic Monarchs funded Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1492, and the Treaty of Tordesillas divided newly discovered lands between Portugal and Castile. Under Philip II of Spain, Spain became one of the most powerful nations in the world. In France, the Ancien Régime was the political and social system of the Kingdom of France from about 1450 until the French Revolution that started in 1789. Over time, the kings worked to bring more power to the central state, using officials called intendants to reduce the control of local nobles.

In England, the Elizabethan Era was a golden age in English cultural history, when William Shakespeare wrote his plays. The first permanent English settlements in North America were founded at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. The Glorious Revolution (1688) placed the English crown under Parliament. In Poland, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth faced near-extinction during the 1640s and 1650s, but the Ottoman attack on Vienna in 1683 was broken by the largest cavalry charge in history. At the end of the 18th century, the country was carved up between Austria, Russia and Prussia.

The papacy continued to have significant diplomatic influence. Pope Pius V assembled the Catholic coalition that won the Battle of Lepanto, and Pope Gregory XIII established the Gregorian calendar. Following the Peace of Westphalia and the birth of nation-states, papal claims to universal authority came effectively to an end.