A Little History of the World

Gombrich remarks that he could write a great deal more about the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, but he won’t, because the era was “terrible” and became more about politics than religion (193). Nevertheless, he dedicates this chapter to discussion of the Thirty Years’ War. The Habsburg emperors, though Catholic, did allow the high population of Protestants in the lowlands to hold religious services for a time. When a revolt broke out in Bohemia, however, that changed, and 30 years of international conflict began.

France joined the war, but despite being a Catholic country, France joined on the side of the Protestants. This was because the two Habsburg rulers, the emperor of Germany and the king of Spain, were the two dominant rulers of Europe, and France wanted the opportunity to diminish their power while enhancing its own. The brutal, destructive war continued for 14 years, and when it finally ended in 1648, very little changed from how it was 30 years before. The Protestant lands remained Protestant, and the Catholic lands remained Catholic. Half the population of Germany had been decimated, and the rest lived in poverty.

The religious conflict and corruption had given way to an era of superstition and fear of witchcraft. While belief in evil and sorcery had existed for a long time, it reached a new fever pitch of fear and persecution. Thousands upon thousands of people were killed under suspicion of sorcery. In contrast, Gombrich reminds us that some were still pursuing the kind of magic investigated by Renaissance thinkers—the magic of science and math: “magic that lets us look into the past and into the future and enables us to work out what a star billions of miles away is made of, and to predict precisely when an eclipse of the sun is due and from what part of the earth it will be visible” (197). People like Galileo Galilei, who determined that the Earth moves around the sun, continued to study nature’s laws, despite attempts at suppression from the Church.

Gombrich now discusses the domestic conflicts taking place in England during this time period. Since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, the English monarch was bound to consult the nobility and Parliament in ruling. Now, 400 years later, King Charles I did not want to rule in accordance with this agreement and used money and power as he liked. The English population at this time had a great deal of conservative Protestants called Puritans, who disliked displays of wealth and luxury. One such Puritan, a member of Parliament named Oliver Cromwell, led the faction that split from the king. Charles was taken to trial at Westminster and charged with high treason. In 1649, he was sentenced to death and beheaded. Oliver Cromwell took his place, not as king, but as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. He increased England’s power through colonies and sea trade, and though a king replaced him soon after his death, the parliament played a stronger role in government, and no king defied the Magna Carta again.

In France, there was no such document that drew power away from the regent. France also had remained stable and wealthy through the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War and was now the dominant power in Europe. In 1643, Louis XIV began his 72-year reign. He demanded to be involved in all matters of governance. He turned the kingship into a unique blend of performance and display of absolute power. Daily life in his court was full of ceremony and luxury. His palaces were enormous and numerous. One such palace, called Versailles, was the size of a town. Beyond his own abilities as a ruler, Louis had numerous financial advisors who extracted as much money as possible for the king’s use. While French industry flourished, the peasant class suffered greatly. Louis spent a great deal of this money on expensive wars waged in the interest of expanding his own power to all of Europe. His influence spread, and the princes of Europe all started to dress like him and live in palaces like his.

Here, Gombrich turns his attention to Louis’s contemporaries in Germany. In 1453, the Turks had built the Ottoman Empire by conquering the entirety of the old Eastern Roman Empire, including Hungary. Many Hungarians were Protestant, and after the death of their king, they were fighting the rule of the Catholic emperor. The Hungarian nobility asked the Turkish sultan to step in and help them, and in 1683, his army marched toward Austria. The emperor’s army in Hungary retreated, leaving the path to Vienna open. For a month, Vienna was besieged by the Turks, until imperial reinforcements arrived to push them back. The Austrian army pushed back the Turks further and further until the sultan relinquished all of Hungary, which became a part of Austria. Turkish power declined as new power rose in Russia.

Gombrich states that he has not yet mentioned Russia in his history but gives a brief and grim description: “It was a vast wilderness of forests, with great steppes in the north. The landowners ruled the poor peasants with terrible cruelty and the sovereign ruled the landowners with, if anything, greater cruelty” (209). They were Christian but were not heavily involved with the affairs of Western Europe. In 1689, a man named Peter, or Peter the Great, ascended to the Russian throne. He wanted to model his state after the great Western powers, so he traveled west to learn how. He worked as a carpenter in Dutch and English shipyards, and when he returned to Russia, he ordered the construction of a seaport city called St. Petersburg. Now, Peter attacked Sweden, which had become considerably powerful after the Thirty Years’ War. Sweden’s King, Charles XII, was a brave and ambitious man, and his army defeated the much larger Russian army. Without waiting for reinforcements, Charles conquered Poland, and his army marched into Russia. They marched deep into the country without meeting any resistance for months, but when the Russian winter came, the Russians attacked the freezing, starving Swedish army in 1709. Defeated, Charles fled to Turkey. Peter the Great, meanwhile, had destroyed his enemy and expanded his empire in all directions.