Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
with the sword, and the women to be buried alive, if they do not
persist in their errors; if they persist in them they are to be
executed with fire; all their property in both cases to be confiscated
to the Crown....
We forbid all persons to lodge, entertain, furnish with food,
fire, or clothing, or otherwise to favor, anyone holden or notoriously
suspected of being a heretic; and anyone failing to denounce any
such we ordain shall be liable to the above-mentioned
punishments.... All who know of any person tainted with heresy are
required to denounce and give them up.... The informer, in case of
conviction, shall be entitled to one half the property of the
accused.... To the end that the judges and officers may have no
reason- under pretext that the penalties are too great and heavy and
only devised to terrify delinquents- to punish them less severely than
they deserve, [we ordain] that the culprits really be punished by
the penalties above declared; we forbid all judges to alter or
moderate the penalties in any manner; we forbid anyone, of whatever
condition, to ask of us, or of anyone having authority, to grant
pardon to, or to present any petition in favor of, such heretics,
exiles, or fugitives, on penalty of being declared forever incapable
of civil or military office, and of being arbitrarily
punished. `062821
-
In addition, any person entering the Low Countries was required to
sign a pledge of loyalty to the full orthodox creed. `062822
Through these desperate edicts the Netherlands were made a major
battleground between the old and the new forms of Christianity. The
Venetian ambassador at Charles's court estimated in 1546 that 30,000
persons, nearly all Anabaptists, perished in this prolonged Imperial
pogrom; `062823 a less excited estimate reduced the victims to
1,000. `062824 So far as the Dutch Anabaptists were concerned, the
Caroline Inquisition succeeded; a remnant survived in Holland by
adopting non-resistance; some fled to England, where they became
active supporters of Protestantism under Edward VI and Elizabeth.
The communistic movement in the Netherlands collapsed, frightened by
prosecution and stifled by prosperity.
But as the Anabaptists wave subsided, a stream of hunted Huguenots
poured into the Lowlands from France, bringing the gospel of Calvin.
The stem and theocratic fervor of the new heresy appealed to those who
inherited the traditions of the mystics and the Brethren of the Common
Life; and the Calvinist acceptance of work as a dignity instead of a
curse, of wealth as a blessing instead of a crime, of republican
institutions as more responsive than monarchy to the political
ambitions of the business class, contained ingredients diversely
welcome to many elements in the population. By 1555 there were
Calvinist congregations in Ypres, Tournai, Valenciennes, Bruges,
Ghent, and Antwerp, and the movement was spreading into Holland. It
was with Calvinism, not Lutheranism or Anabaptism, that Charles's
son would be locked, through a bitter generation, in the conflict that
would break the Netherlands in two, liberate Holland from the
Spanish domination, and make her one of the major homes and havens
of the modern mind.
-
In 1555 Charles V put aside all dreams except that of dying in
sanctity. He relinquished his hope of either suppressing Protestantism
in Germany and the Netherlands, or reconciling it with Catholicism
at the Council of Trent. He abandoned his aspiration to lead
Protestants and Catholics, Germans and French, in a magnificent
march against Suleiman, Constantinople, and the Turkish threat to
Christendom. His excesses in eating, drinking, and sex, his exhausting
campaigns, the burdens of an office that bore the brunt of
revolutionary change, had ruined his body, dulled his statesmanship,
and broken his will. Suffering from ulcers at thirty-three, old at
thirty-five, afflicted at forty-five with gout, asthma, indigestion,
and stammering, he was now half his waking time in pain, and found
it hard to sleep; often his difficulty in breathing kept him sitting
upright all the night through. His fingers were so distorted with
arthritis that he could hardly grasp the pen with which he signed
the Peace of Crepy. When Coligny presented a letter from Henry II,
Charles could hardly open it. "What think you of me, Sir Admiral?"
he asked. "Am I not a fine knight to charge and break a lance, I who
can only open a letter after so much trouble?" `062825 Perhaps his
occasional cruelty, and something of the savagery with which he
attacked Protestantism in the Netherlands, came from the exhaustion of
his patience by his pains. He ordered the amputation of the feet of
captured German mercenaries who had fought for France, though his son,
the future inexorable Philip II, begged mercy for them. `062826 He had
mourned long and bitterly the death of his beloved wife Isabella
(1539); but in time he allowed helpless maidens to be brought to his
bed. `062827
In the fall of 1555 he called a meeting of the States-General of the
Netherlands for October 25, and summoned Philip to it from England. In
the great tapestried hall of the dukes of Brabant at Brussels, where
the Knights of the Golden Fleece were wont to hold their assemblies,
the deputies, nobles, and magistrates of the seventeen provinces
gathered within a guard of armed soldiery. Charles entered leaning
on the shoulder of his son's future enemy, William of Orange. Philip
followed with the Regent Mary of Hungary; then Emmanuel Philibert of
Savoy, and the Emperor's councilors, and the Knights of the Fleece,
and many other notables around whom the world once turned before
forgetting them. When all had been seated Philibert rose and
explained, too lengthily and vividly for Charles's enjoyment, the
medical, mental, and political reasons why the Emperor wished to
abdicate his rule in the Netherlands to his son. Then Charles
himself stood up, leaning again on the tall and handsome Prince of
Orange, and spoke simply and to the point. He summarized his rise to
successively wider powers, and the absorption of his life in
government. He recalled that he had visited Germany nine times,
Spain six, Italy seven, France four, England and Africa twice, and had
made eleven voyages by sea. He continued:
-
This is the fourth time that I am setting out hence for Spain....
Nothing that I have ever experienced has given me so much pain... as
that which I feel in parting from you today without leaving behind
me that peace and quiet which I so much desired.... But I am no longer
able to attend to my affairs without great bodily fatigue and
consequent detriment to the state.... The cares which so great a
responsibility involves, the extreme dejection which it causes, My
health already ruined- all these leave me no longer the vigor
necessary for governing.... In my present state I should have to
render a serious account to God and man if I did not lay aside
authority.... My son, King Philip, is of an age sufficiently
advanced to be able to govern you, and he will be, I hope, a good
prince to all my beloved subjects.... `062828
-
When Charles sank painfully into his chair the audience forgot his
sins, his persecutions, and his defeats in pity for a man who for
forty years had labored according to his lights under the heaviest
obligations of the time. Many auditors wept. Philip was formally
installed as ruler of the Netherlands, and took a solemn oath (as he
would be later reminded) to observe all the laws and traditional
rights of the provinces. Early in 1556 Charles surrendered to him
the crown of Spain, with all its possessions in the Old World and
the New. Charles reserved the Imperial title, hoping to transmit
that too to his son; but Ferdinand protested, and in 1558 the
Emperor resigned it to his brother. On September 17, 1556, Charles
sailed from Flushing to Spain.
VI. SPAIN: 1516-58
1. The Revolt of the Comuneros: 1520-22
-
It was a questionable boon for Spain that her King Charles I
(1516-56) became the Emperor Charles V (1519-58). Born and reared in
Flanders, he acquired Flemish ways and tastes, until in his final
years the spirit of Spain conquered him. The King could be only a
small part of the Emperor who had his hands full with the Reformation,
the papacy, Suleiman, Barbarossa, and Francis I; the Spaniards
complained that he gave them so little of his time and spent so much
of their human and material resources on campaigns apparently
foreign to Spanish interests. And how could an emperor sympathize with
the communal institutions that had made Spain half a democracy
before the coming of Ferdinand the Catholic, and that she so longed to
restore?
Charles's first visit to his kingdom (1517) earned him no love.
Though king for twenty months past, he still knew no Spanish. His curt
dismissal of the devoted Ximenes shocked Spanish courtesy. He came
surrounded by Flemings who thought Spain a barbarous country waiting
to be milked; and the seventeen-year-old monarch appointed these
leeches to the highest posts. The various provincial Cortes, dominated
by the hidalgos or lower nobility, did not conceal their reluctance to
accept so alien a king. The Cortes of Castile refused him the title,
then grudgingly recognized him as co-ruler with his demented mother
Juana; and it let him understand that he must learn Spanish, live in
Spain, and name no more foreigners to office. Other Cortes laid down
similar demands. Amid these humiliations Charles received the news
that he had been elected emperor, and that Germany was summoning him
to show himself and be crowned. When he asked the Cortes at Valladolid
(then the capital) to finance the trip, he was rebuffed, and a
public tumult threatened his life. Finally he secured the money from
the Cortes of Corunna, and hurried off to Flanders. To make matters
trebly perilous he sent corregidores to protect his interests in the
cities, and left his former tutor, Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, as
regent of Spain.
Now one after another of the Spanish municipalities rose in the
"Revolt of the Comuneros " or commune members. They expelled the
corregidores, murdered a few of the delegates who had voted funds to
Charles, and leagued themselves in a Santa Comunidad pledged to
control the King. Nobles, ecclesiastics, and burghers alike joined the
movement, and organized at Avila (August 1520) the Santa Junta, or
Holy Union, as a central government. They demanded that the Cortes
should share with the royal council in choosing the regent, that no
war should be made without the consent of the Cortes, and that the
town should be ruled not by corregidores but by alcaldes or mayors
chosen by the citizens. `062829 Antonio de Acuna, Bishop of Zamora,
openly advocated a republic, turned his clergy into revolutionary
warriors, and gave the resources of his diocese to the revolt. Juan de
Padilla, a Toledo noble, was made commander of the rebel forces. He
led them to the capture of Tordesillas, took Juana la Loca as a
hostage, and urged her to sign a document deposing Charles and
naming herself queen. Wise in her madness, she refused.
Adrian, having no soldiery strong enough to suppress the uprising,
appealed to Charles to return, and frankly blamed the revolt on the
King's arbitrary and absentee government. Charles did not come, but
either he or his councilors found a way to divide and conquer. The
nobles were warned that the rebellion was a threat to the propertied
classes as well as to the Crown. And indeed the working classes,
long oppressed with fixed wages, forced labor, and prohibition of
unions, had already seized power in several towns. In Valencia and its
neighborhood a Germania or Brotherhood of guildsmen took the
reins, and ruled the committees of workingmen. This proletarian
dictatorship was unusually pious; it imposed upon the thousands of
Moors who still remained in the province the choice of baptism or
death; hundreds of the obstinate were killed. `062830 In Majorca the
commons, whose masters had treated them as slaves, rose in arms,
deposed the royal governor, and slew every noble who could not elude
them. Many towns renounced their feudal ties and dues. In Madrid,
Siguenza, and Guadalajara the new municipal administration excluded
all nobles and gentry from office; here and there aristocrats were
slain; and the Junta assessed for taxation noble properties formerly
exempt. Pillage became general; commoners burned the palaces of
nobles, nobles massacred commoners. Class war spread through Spain.
The revolt destroyed itself by extending its aims beyond its powers.
The nobles turned against it, raised their own forces, co-operated
with those of the King, captured Valencia, and overthrew the
proletarian government after days of mutual slaughter (1521). At the
height of the crisis the rebel army divided into rival groups under
Padilla and Don Pedro Giron; the Junta also split into hostile
factions; and each province carried on its revolution without
co-ordination with the rest. Giron went over to the royalists, who
recaptured Tordesillas and Juana. Padilla's dwindling army was
routed at Villalar, and he was put to death. When Charles returned
to Spain (July 1522) with 4,000 German troops, victory had already
been won by the nobles, and nobles and commoners had so weakened
each other that he was able to subdue the municipalities and the
guilds, tame the Cortes, and establish an almost absolute monarchy.
The democratic movement was so completely suppressed that the
Spanish commons remained cowed and obedient till the nineteenth
century. Charles tempered his power with courtesy, surrounded
himself with grandees, and learned to talk good Spanish; Spain was
pleased when he remarked that Italian was the proper language to use
to women, German to enemies, French to friends, Spanish to
God. `062831
2. The Spanish Protestants
-
Only one power could now challenge Charles in Spain- the Church.
He was pro-Catholic but anti-papal. Like Ferdinand the Catholic he
sought to make the Spanish Church independent of the popes, and he
so far succeeded that during his rule ecclesiastical appointments
and revenues were in his control, and were used to promote
governmental policies. In Spain, as in France, no Reformation was
needed to subordinate the Church to the state. Nonetheless, during the
half of his reign that Charles spent in his kingdom, the fervor of
Spanish orthodoxy so worked upon him that in his later years nothing
(except the power of the Hapsburgs) seemed more important to him
than the suppression of heresy. While the popes tried to moderate
the Inquisition, Charles supported it till his death. He was convinced
that heresy in the Netherlands was leading to chaos and civil war, and
was resolved to circumvent such a development in Spain.
The Spanish Inquisition abated its fury, but extended its
jurisdiction, under Charles. It undertook the censorship of
literature, had every bookstore searched, and ordered bonfires of
books charged with heresy. `062832 It investigated and punished sexual
perversions. It instituted rules of limpieza (purity of blood),
which closed all avenues of distinction to descendants of
Conversos and to all who had ever been penanced by the tribunal.
It looked upon mystics with a stern eye, for some of these claimed
that their direct intercourse with God exempted them from attending
church, and others gave their mystical ecstasies a suspiciously sexual
flavor. The lay preacher Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz announced that coitus
was really union with God; and Friar Francisco Ortiz explained that
when he lay with a pretty fellow mystic- even when he embraced her
naked body- it was not a carnal sin but a spiritual delight. `062833
The Inquisition dealt leniently with these Alumbrados (Enlightened
Ones), and kept its severest measures for the Protestants of Spain.
As in northern Europe, an Erasmian skirmish preceded the
Protestant battle. A few liberal churchmen applauded the humanist's
strictures on the faults of the clergy; but Ximenes and others had
already reformed the more palpable abuses before the coming of
Charles. Perhaps Lutheranism had seeped into Spain with Germans and
Flemings in the royal entourage. A German was condemned by the
Inquisition at Valencia in 1524 for avowing Lutheran sympathies; a
Flemish painter was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1528 for
questioning purgatory and indulgences. Francisco de San Roman, the
first-known Spanish Lutheran, was burned at the stake in 1542, while
fervent onlookers pierced him with their swords. Juan Diaz of Cuenca
imbibed Calvinism at Geneva; his brother Alfonso rushed up from
Italy to reconvert him to orthodoxy; failing, Alfonso had him killed
(1546). `062834 At Seville a learned canon of the cathedral, Juan
Gil or Egidio, was imprisoned for a year for preaching against image
worship, prayer to the saints, and the efficacy of good works in
earning salvation; after his death his bones were exhumed and
burned. His fellow canon, Constantino Ponce de la Fuente, continued
his propaganda, and died in the dungeons of the Inquisition.
Fourteen of Constantino's followers were burned, including four friars
and three women; a large number were sentenced to diverse penalties;
and the house in which they had met was razed to the ground.
Another semi-Protestant group developed in Valladolid; and here
influential nobles and high ecclesiastics were involved. They were
betrayed to the Inquisition; nearly all were arrested and condemned;
some, trying to leave Spain, were caught and brought back. Charles
V, then in retirement at Yuste, recommended that no mercy be shown
them, that the repentant should be beheaded, and the unrepentant
burned. On Trinity Sunday, May 21, 1559, fourteen of the condemned
were executed before a cheering crowd. `062835 All but one recanted,
and were let off with beheading; Antonio de Herrezuelo, impenitent,
was burned alive. His twenty-three-year-old wife, Leonor de
Cisneros, repentant, was allowed life imprisonment. After ten years of
confinement she retracted her recantation, proclaimed her heresy,
and asked to be burned alive like her husband; her request was
granted. `062836 Twenty-six more of the accused were displayed in an
auto-da-fe on October 8, 1559, before a crowd of 200,000, presided
over by Philip II. Two victims were burned alive, ten were strangled.
The most famous prey of the Inquisition in this period was Bartolome
de Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain. As a Dominican
friar he was active for many years in hounding heretics. Charles
appointed him envoy to the Council of Trent, and sent him to England
to attend the marriage of Philip and Queen Mary. When he was elected
archbishop (1557) only his own vote kept the choice from being
unanimous. But some of the "Protestants" arrested at Valladolid
testified that Carranza had secretly sympathized with their views;
he was found to have corresponded with the Spanish Italian reformer
Juan de Valdes; and the influential theologian Melchior Cano accused
him of upholding the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith. He
was arrested only two years after his elevation to the highest
ecclesiastical dignity in Spain; we may judge from this the power of
the Spanish Inquisition. For seventeen years he was kept in one prison
or another while his life and writings were subjected to scrutiny at
Toledo and Rome. Gregory XIII proclaimed him "vehemently suspected" of
heresy, ordered him to abjure sixteen propositions, and suspended
him for five years from the exercise of his office. Carranza
accepted the sentence humbly, and tried to perform the penances
assigned to him; but within five weeks, exhausted by imprisonment
and humiliation, he died (1576).
With him ended all danger of Protestantism in Spain. Between 1551
and 1600 there were some 200 executions there for Protestant heresies-
i.e., four per year. The temper of the people, formed by centuries
of hatred for Moors and Jews, had congealed into an unshakable
orthodoxy; Catholicism and patriotism had merged; and the
Inquisition found it a simple matter to stamp out in a generation or
two the passing Spanish adventure with independent thought.
3. The Emperor Passes: 1556-58
-
On September 28, 1556, Charles V made his final entry into Spain. At
Burgos he dismissed with rewards most of those who had attended him,
and took leave of his sisters, Mary of Hungary and Eleonora, widow
of Francis I. They wished to share his monastic retreat, but the rules
forbade it, and they took up their residence not too far from this
brother whom they alone now seemed to love. After suffering many
ceremonies en route, he reached the village of Juandilla in the valley
of Plasencia, some 120 miles west of Madrid. There he tarried
several months while workmen completed and furnished the
accommodations that he had ordered in the monastery of Yuste (St.
Justus), six miles away. When he made the last stage of his journey
(February 3, 1557) it was not to a monastic cell but to a mansion
spacious enough to house the more intimate of his fifty servitors. The
monks rejoiced to have so distinguished a guest, but were chagrined to
find that he had no intention of sharing their regimen. He ate and
drank as abundantly as before- i.e., excessively. Sardine omelets,
Estremadura sausages, eel pies, pickled partridges, fat capons, and
rivers of wine and beer disappeared into the Imperial paunch; and
his physicians were obliged to prescribe large quantities of senna and
rhubarb to carry off the surplusage.
Instead of reciting rosaries, litanies, and psalms, Charles read
or dictated dispatches from or to his son, and offered him advice on
every aspect of war, theology, and government. In his final year he
became a merciless bigot; he recommended ferocious penalties to "cut
out the root" of heresy, and he regretted that he had allowed Luther
to escape him at Worms. He ordered that a hundred lashes should be
laid upon any woman who should approach within two bowshots of the
monastery walls. `062837 He revised his will to provide that 30,000
Masses should be said for the repose of his soul. We should not
judge him from those senile days; some taint of insanity may have come
down to him with his mother's blood.
In August 1558, his gout developed into a burning fever. This
returned intermittently, and with rising intensity. For a month he was
racked with all the pains of death before he was allowed to die
(September 21, 1558). In 1574 Philip had the remains removed to the
Escorial, where they lie under a stately monument.
-
Charles V was the most impressive failure of his age, and even his
virtues were sometimes unfortunate for mankind. He gave peace to
Italy, but only after a decade of devastation, and by subjecting it
and the papacy to Spain; and the Italian Renaissance withered under
that somber mastery. He defeated and captured Francis, but he lost
at Madrid a royal opportunity to make with him a treaty that could
have saved all faces and a hundred thousand lives. He helped to turn
back Suleiman at Vienna, and checked Barbarossa in the