30 Chapter 1 Alien Encounters: Europe in the Americas
The Protestant Reformation
Many factors contributed to the Protestant
Reformation. The spiritual lethargy and bureau-
cratic corruption besetting the Roman Catholic
Church in the early sixteenth century made it a fit
target for reform. The thriving business in the sale
of indulgences, payments to the church to help
release dead relatives from purgatory, was a public
scandal; while the luxurious lifestyle of the popes
and the papal court in Rome was another. Yet
countless earlier religious reform movements had
generated little or no change. The fact that the
movement launched by Martin Luther in 1517 and
carried forward by men like John Calvin addressed
genuine shortcomings in the Roman Catholic
Church does not entirely explain why it led so
directly to the rupture of Christendom.
The charismatic leadership of Luther and the com-
pelling brilliance of Calvin made their protests more
effective than earlier efforts at reform. Probably more
important, so did the political possibilities let loose by
their challenge to Rome’s spiritual authority. German
princes seized on Luther’s campaign against the sale of
indulgences to stop all payments to Rome and to con-
fiscate church property within their domains. Swiss
cities like Geneva, where Calvin took up residence in
1536, and Zurich joined the Protestant revolt for spiri-
tual reasons, but also to establish their political inde-
pendence from Catholic kings.
The decision of Henry VIII of England in 1534
to break with Rome was at bottom a political one.
The refusal of Pope Clement VII to agree to an
annulment of Henry’s marriage of twenty years to
Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinand and
Isabella, provided the occasion. Catherine had given
birth to six children, but only a daughter, Mary, sur-
vived childhood; Henry was without a male heir. By
repudiating the pope’s spiritual authority and declar-
ing himself head of the English (Anglican) church,
Henry freed himself to divorce Catherine and to
marry whomever—and however often—he saw fit. By
the time of his death, five wives and thirteen years
later, England had become a Protestant nation. More
important for our story, the English colonies in
America were mostly Protestant.
As the commercial classes rose to positions of
influence, England, France, and the United
Provinces of the Netherlands experienced a flower-
ing of trade and industry. The Dutch built the
largest merchant fleet in the world. Dutch traders
captured most of the Far Eastern business once
monopolized by the Portuguese, and they infiltrated
Spain’s Caribbean stronghold. A number of English
merchant companies, soon to play a vital role as col-
onizers, sprang up in the last half of the sixteenth
century. Thesejoint-stock companies, ancestors of
the modern corporation, enabled groups of investors
to pool their capital and limit their individual
responsibilities to the sums actually invested—a very
important protection in such risky enterprises. The
Muscovy Company, the Levant Company, and the
East India Company were the most important of
these ventures.English Beginnings in America
English merchants took part in many kinds of interna-
tional activity. The Muscovy Company spent large
sums searching for a passage to China around
Scandinavia and dispatched six overland expeditions inSt. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican was built between 1506 and- Catholic popes defended the magnificent church as a
suitable expression of love for a God who had redeemed
humankind. Protestant critics denounced St. Peter’s as a form of
idolatry that celebrated human attainments rather than those of
God. Puritans insisted that their houses of worship be simple and
their altars plain.