Lords of France: Roads to the Enlightenment

The most important event of the early 1500s, besides the domination of Europe by the Hapsburg's hereditary empire, was the Protestant Reformation. And though it seems that the Reformation only effected those countries on the periphery of European politics (England, Sweden, Germany), the truth is more complicated than that. But the question that my previous statement brings up is an important one--why the Reformation? And why did the Reformation only occur in certain areas? Why Germany but not Italy, England but not Poland, Sweden but not Norway?


The Reformation, occurring in different regions for different reasons, was one of the first ideological counter-movements in European history, alongside the creation of Christianity itself. Like the swift spread of Christianity, we can attribute the uneven spread of Protestantism to both political and religious factors. The religious factors are the ones which the Protestant harped on over and over: Priests being the only people allowed to take the Communion Host, the Church's distaste for preaching in the Vernacular, and the relatively recent redefinition of the concept of 'good works' to mean donations given to pastors.

While these factors were true across Europe, they afflicted Northern Europe far more. Although Germany, Sweden, and England were effected by the Literacy Revolution which the Rennaissance had brought just as much as France, Italy, or Spain, Latin wasn't as popular a language in Germany or England as it was in the Southern countries. Furthermore, Germany and England had the highest rates of absentee bishops, which happened when a Bishop would take nominal charge over a bishopric while staying in Rome to participate in Papal politics. This was, yet again, a new dynamic, caused by the centralization of Papal authority which occurred through the 15th century. This dynamic again barely affected the Southern states, which were all relatively near Rome and thus rarely suffered from absentee Bishops. This meant that, in Germany at least, the Church was seen as a foreign institution by 1510, dominated as it was by agents of the Hapsburgs. This perception of regionalism was only worsened when the Pope moved back to Avignon.


Avignon was the center of the Papacy through much of the later Middle Ages, but after the loss of the province of Roma and Romagne during the later 15th century, the Papal bureaucracy moved the Catholic-state apperatus back to the capitol of the French Renaissance, Avignon. This was highly problematic for those who felt marginalized, for even though nominal control of the Papacy moved through French, Polish, Austrian, and Spanish hands during the period, the majority of the Catholic bureaucracy had become overwhelmingly French even in 1520. The new Vatican City, completed in 1520, was built with Imperial money and staffed by Imperial priests, who spoke in either Latin or in Frenchified 'low Latin'. Things were going to come to a head soon.

Philipp Melanchthon, student of the Carmelite monk Martin Luther, was a part of a project by German Carmelite monks to translate the Bible, not to Low Latin, but directly into German for consumption by the people. Completed in 1523, the Bible was soon put on the Papacy's censor list, and the corrupt Bishop of the Palatine (acting from Avignon) had copies of the book burnt. Furthermore, the cadre of monks and priests who had completed the Bible were cast out from Worms, and in the journey to Saxony Martin Luther (a man who's constitution was already worn thin by a monk's diet) died in the snow. This was the last straw for Phillip. In Dresden's inn he scribbled away into the night, and the next morning, Phillip's 95 Theses were pinned to the Cathedral of Dresden.


Melanchthon's theses outlined every sin of the contemporary Catholic church, including the villainization of the Vernacular and Bishop absenteeism. They were quickly spread through Europe, and through the medium of print, a great conversation was born, written in journals, newspapers, and letters.

This was the religious origin of the Phillipist sect, a moderate Protestant sect which became popular in Germany and England. But the sect's popularity amongst the peasants was of little importance in the era. Why did it become popular among the nobility and the courtly factions of Northern Europe, while remaining the rankest heresy in Italy? The answer, to me, comes out of the comparative centralizations of Italy, France, and Germany. In France, noble families which had been entrenched for hundreds if not thousands of years opposed their rulers with great gusto, and in Italy various factions had prevented any sort of centralization, leading Italy on an alternative path out of feudalism. But in Germany, Sweden and England the Church was one of the last impediments to royal rule. This explains the strange reasons for conversion in England (over, if I'm not mistaken, divorce proceedings), but it also explains the swift conversion to Phillipism in Germany.

By 1530 the Hapsburg Empire was in crisis. The next entry will deal with the Imperial and Catholic response to the Reformation, and the Reformation in France.

dragonizer said:

The Catholic church in that time was also corrupt.

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As hell, but I figured that I'd dealt with that with the 'you can bribe your way to heaven' bit.

France, on the face of it, seemed like an unlikely target for the Reformation. It was a member of the Imperial faction of European politics, it was the centerpiece of intellectual Catholicism, and religious corruption was less of an issue in France than in Germany. And yet, the Huguenots (French Protestants) formed one of the largest Protestant groups outside of England even in 1560, and the most popular Radical sect, Neo-Catharism (also known as Moullinisme, after the first man to translate the New Testament into French, or [exclusively in the Anglo-Sphere] Calvinism, after the prominent French missionary who converted a great many Scots and Englishmen to the Neocatharist cause), was born in the University of Paris. Why?


The reason why the rise of the Huguenots seems odd to the modern reader is that their rise came out of primarily religious rather than political factors. The Catholic Faith in France was a very different beast than the Catholic faith in the rest of Europe. The Monks which had acted as gate-keepers to the Faith (and the Word, as well, as one of the largest literate institutions in the world at the time) were now the source of religious radicalism. Both monks and academic theological laymen saw the separation of the practitioners of the faith from the general population as wrong and unnatural: shouldn't all peoples be able to accept the Faith into their lives?

This conflict, over monasticism, occurred in the broader context of a battle over the use of the Vernacular. The Vernacular languages were, essentially, any language but Latin: the question was whether the Bible should be kept in Latin (IE, only readable by a select few even after the mass literacy movements of the 1480s), or if it should be printed in the local languages, to be read by the masses. There was a massive movement in the Church against the use of the Vernacular, which came on two fronts: the Spaniards, who wished to preserve the original intent of the original writers of the Bible, and the Italians, who argued that through educational programs the Vernacular could be made closer to Latin (as it was in Italy, where Latin had totally overtaken Italian as the language of the elites).

This is where Henri II came in. A reformist Catholic himself (like most Flemishmen and Frenchmen), Henri had argued most stringently that the Protestants were only a threat if treated as such. If, instead, the Catholics treated Phillipism as a movement to reform the Church, then the Protestant threat would be gone!


Henri's moderate stance on Catholicism was a major wedge between him and both his Hapsburg brethren and the ultra-orthodox Catholics in France. It was, however, most amenable to the League of the Commonwealth. Gallicanism (the belief that the French King is as high an authority over his priests as the Pope) was a uniting issue between Henri and his hated enemies, but Henri's views didn't converge with the League until the Council of Avignon. Instead, Henri pursued a moderate line against the Protestants and within the Church, with the belief that a Reformed Church could still combine Phillipist and Catholic views. Whether or not such a treaty could really be made even at this point is unclear, but what we do know is that the French papists were able to call a general Church council in 1528, over the Protestant crisis.


The Council of Avignon was one of the few times in the early Reformation that the French, moderate faction was able to coherently announce its views. Henri, well aware of the importance of the council (and the rareness of Church Councils), prepared for the entire year for the occasion, amassing thousands of clergymen and bureaucrats in Avignon. But he also made sure that the French clergymen present at the Council were of one mind on the issues, and would vote together. Furthermore, Henri brought Mittelbach out of retirement and brought several highly intelligent reformist intellectuals forward to speak at the council (including Erasmus and John Calvin, both later Reformed Christians).

They all argued that, in light of recent discoveries (the most important being that the original New Testament wasn't even written in Latin, and that many Catholic traditions weren't based on the Bible but were based, simply, on tradition), that a profound change in the way the Church did things was necessary. A more open Church, which went back to a universally readable Bible in its organization, could cure heresy and Godlessness within Europe, and even act as an integrating factor, lowering war and reinstating the universal Societad of Christendom.


The Council of Avignon ended up acting as little more than a show of strength. Pope Leo XIV didn't acquiesce to any major changes of Church besides a reform of incest laws (an issue close to Henri's heart, having had to go through years of deliberation to marry the love of his life who happened to be his cousin in law 5 times removed). The Council of Avignon is often remembered as a 'what if' moment, but it was immensely important in two seperate ways--firstly it radicalized both the French Catholics, who turned away from the institutional church and towards Gallicanism or Protestantism. Secondly it marked the end of French dominance over the Papacy. Henri would attempt, with gusto, to retake the Curia away from her religious rivals (the Poles, mostly), but the battle for the Spirit of the Catholic church had already been won. The reaction to the Moderatiste Council was uproarious and hateful--Henri was depicted as a closeted Phillipist, Jew, or sodomite, and the unmoral and oh-so intellectual arguments of the French faction were disregarded as borderline heresy. The French faction returned to Paris with an ashen taste in their mouths and a fire in their stomachs. Christianity would be reformed, they thought, one way or another.

loki100 said:

oh whoops, so not only the Reformation but a potential split between French and Papal Catholicism?

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It happened historically!

But yeah things are going to get rough.

dragonizer said:

Oh yes now that is a real casket of worms.:laugh:

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Most certainly

The failures of the Council of Avignon convinced the greatest minds of France that reform within the Church was a failed endeavor. And so within the year, both Henri and the academiques of the University of Paris had found their own solutions to the problem of reform. The solution in both cases was similar, but was implemented differently in the Universities and in the Courts--the Courts started down a path of locally-controlled Catholicism, while the Academiques went for a complete break with the Church.



The factors which made France so resistant to Phillipism were precisely the factors which made France such a threat to the Church. French Catholicism had developed along such different lines during the Renaissance that the possibility of a total break with Avignon was strikingly possible, especially in the early years of the Radical Reformation.

The intricacies of Henri's move towards religious independence shows that, while Henri was overcautious he was no diplomatic slouch. Other, prouder kings would have recoiled at the rumors of heresy which dogged Henri after the Council of Avignon. But Henri knew two things: firstly, that the rumors were widely disbelieved in France (mostly because Henri's 'heretical' beliefs were fully in line with common French religious beliefs), and that the rumors were widely (if secretly) believed in the New Vatican. Knowing these two things, and knowing his goal (a Church of France which he would be able to control to some degree), he moved forwards at a neckbreaking pace.

Through 1530 Henri courted the League of the Commonwealth with promises of giving away massive amounts of Church property. This enraged the 'Spanish' faction (a group of fundamentalist Catholics) of French politics, with the Bishop d'Orleans coming forward as the spokesperson for the faction. The Bishop d'Orleans was a highly political animal; one of the youngest bishops in France at the age of 28, d'Orleans' skill in demagogic oratory came from his extensive readings of Cicero, Pericles, and Cato. But though his teaching was filled with the pagan greats, he preached that fully embracing the Church was the only way to heaven, and that derivating in any minor way sends one to hell.


Henri's courtship with the League was facetious--he habitually preferred keeping a balance to any kinds of change. But the emergence of the Bishop d'Orleans was precisely what Henri was looking for. In 1531 he announced an entente with the Spanish faction, coming up to and including a private confession with the Bishop D'Orleans. In his confession Henri admitted to Protestant tendencies, which we know because the Bishop immediately incorporated this confession into his own sermons. The exacerbated rumors turned Henri's requests for independence from a simple want to a possible threat to the Church--letters between First Minister de Bosquet and Henri II show that Henri was having his policies taken seriously by the Church. In 1532, with the support of the Pope, Henri announced colossal reforms over Franco-Papal relations. French bishops and Cardinals would be appointed by the King, and Church peasants would similarly be under the legal authority of the Kings of France. Furthermore, the French king had some degree of direct control over the dogma of the Catholic Church of France.

This controversial decision bound France to the Church at the same time as it worsened the relationships that existing German Catholic states had with Catholicism. Immediately following the announcement, Brandenburg, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Wurttemburg and Sweden all announced that they were breaking their ties with the Church, who clearly cared more for her Latin subjects than her nordic ones. But the decision wasn't only controversial in France--it enraged the Clergy Peasants (IE peasants who lived on Church/Monastic land) saw it as a threat to their livelyhood, while the Spanish faction took up in arms, with the Bishop of Orleans declaring the Church itself void. The minor revolt (the Bishop of Orleans leading a combination of ultramonstics, ultraorthodox Catholics, and clerical peasants) destroyed much of the opposition to Henri's rule, and allowed him far more slack in terms of policy.

More importantly, it allowed Henri to put his proposed reforms into place in the French Church. Bibles were printed



The next section will be on the Radical Hugenots, and the French reaction to them. Then a short section on de Bosquet, the first First Minister of France, which will end my section on Henri II.

Rifal said:

revolts in Barrois and Cambray. Things are about to get (very?) bloody i believe.

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Sadly, not really. The battles just weren't important enough for me to screencap

blsteen said:

Not lazy, task focused. On one task at a time.

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Also I've lost too many entries to computer overheats, shutdowns, or simply accidentally closing the window to risk it with hyper-long posts, especially when time is so essency.

Rifal said:

Well i didn't think so but might it be a sign of whats to come? As I said before, do I hear the rumblings of an early 30 years war?

Either way keep writing, this is a terrific AAR

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Oh! Right you are!

Henri II wasn't the only Frenchman who sought to chart a new course in religious matters in the wake of the Reformation. A group of Parisian scholars were just as insulted by the lack of results of the Council of Avignon as Henri was, but unlike the King they had far less power to influence the Pope: the events immediately after the COuncil of Avignon (and the Council of Munchen, the Second Council dealing with the Reformation, which occurred in 1532 and was completely dominated by Counter Reformationist elements) closed the door to the Church for the Reformists.


Among the future Reformists, the greatest theological mind among them was the young Jean Cauvin (or John Calvin). Only 15 when he joined the order of the Carmelites, he already had a reputation as a great theologian and missionary by the age of 18, when was summoned to the Council of Avignon. Immediately after the Council, Cauvin moved to the Cathar country, where he acted as a missionary for three years, converting the fortress-village of Montsegur. But his faith was troubled, even then. His letters to his companion, Francois de Chacrise, show how much Cauvin's missionary work worried him even before his conversion.

To my dearest Francois said:

Are we doing the right thing? We've been taught, we've been raised, to believe that we were doing God's work by converting the heathens to the Universal Church. But my time in the Cathar country has sowed doubt in my mind. They live together, unbound to a hierarchy. They may not kill, they may not covet one another's property or engage in corrupt activities. When I was a student in Parma, I saw murder, I saw avarice, I saw sin. I saw sin everywhere. And yet we don't send missionaries to Italy. We only see these paragons of virtue as heretics, and we must convert them to our 'superior' ways. Is this my true purpose?

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It is apparent that shortly after this, Jean Cauvin started one of his first great theological works: a history, called The Practices of the Cathar. Cauvin's history, which includes the organization of a Catharist congregation, the beliefs and history of the Cathars, Catharism's origins in Bulgarian and Armenian heretical sects (as well as Gnosticism), and the history of the Cathars since the Albigensian Crusade of the 1200s.

The Practices of the Cathar was a wonderful historical text, still used as a source today. It was also on the very edge of what was considered acceptable by Cauvin's contemporaries. The text not only treated the Cathars with a respect they hadn't been given in over 300 years, it lionized them. The book, despite its borderline heretical nature, was widely read in the theological universities of France and Germany, and became the template for a series of later Jesuit works on other heretic sects.

Cauvin's move towards heresy was completed in 1535. On a travel from Cathar country to Paris, Cauvin was struck with a revelation. He yelled to his carriage driver to stop, he got out and prayed by the side of the road, near Dijon (the point is now a point of pilgrimage for Neocatharists). When he got back into the carriage and was asked by his fellow passengers what the fuss was about, he immediately started 'The Carriage Sermon', the first neoCatharist gospel. In it, Christ was a man who was moved by God to convert the godless Romans, but also to preach to the wrongheaded though right-hearted Jews. Cauvin argued that knowledge of Christ carried with it the moral obligation to reenact his missionary work, both for the Godless and for those who had merely lost their way. During the sermon Cauvin converted 3 of his four fellow passengers, and he moved to convert, en masse, the members of the University of Paris.

He was largely successful. His view of Christian dogma spoke to the past 40 years of scholarly thinking in Paris--that Christ was a man, that Christians had a moral obligation to enact the beliefs of Christ etc. But Cauvin went a step farther, incorporating both the criticism and popularity of monastic orders in France. He saw the Cathar's most major problem being their early lack of priests, springing of course from their laudable want for equality between members of the congregation. However this made converting unbelievers more difficult. But Cauvin believed that the moral obligation to reenact the life of Christ would supersede the need for priests. Instead, all young men would become missionaries for some part in their life. Upon finishing their missionary work they could continue the road of their faith and become monks, although Cauvin meant a different kind of monk than the Catholic sort. Neocatharist monks would remain in society, preaching both to unbelievers but also to those who lost their way.

Neocatharism exploded in the Paris after 1535. Within a decade, Cauvin's sect had converted more than 30,000 Frenchmen and Cauvin himself had traveled from France to Scotland and Germany, spreading his version of the gospel, although both Henri II and Louis XII let him stay in France (Henri because it allowed him to pressure the Church more, Louis because he saw Neocatharism as a weapon to inflict on his enemies).


Although Henri II welcomed, to some degree, the Neocatharist heresy, he also saw it (and its huge popularity in the Universities of Paris and Toulouse) that the old, Scholastic method of teaching priests was defunct. For one, the institutions of the Universities clearly led to an academic class prone to heresy. But secondly, both Paris and Toulouse were too far away from Avignon to provide a concentrated group of Priests. In order to give the Avignon Pope the number of priests needed in these hard times, Henri felt that there needed to be a school closer to Avignon. Thus was born the largest prestige project of Henri's career--the University de la Pon.

Auvergne, as I said, was a highly fractured province before it was integrated into the Kingdom proper by Francois I. But in many ways, it remained just as fractured after its integration. Different baronies in Auvergne supported different monastic sects, and this ended with Auvergne becoming the province in the Commonwealth with the highest monastic diversity. This was a blessing and a curse. It allowed the people of the county of Auvergne a huge amount of choice, but after 1535 the fractured province became highly susceptible to Calvinism. Henri aimed to kill four birds with one stone--by creating a new kind of school in Auvergne (The Universite de la Pon was the first modern seminary), he was continuing his reformist path, giving the Papacy more trained priests (who were trained in a French tradition), unifying a fractured province within his rule, and fighting heresy within his kingdom.


And the Universite de la Pon (meaning Bridge University, both because it was placed by a bridge which crossed the Rhone and because it was a symbolic 'bridge' between the monastic orders of Auvergne) did all of that and more. The liberal education given by the University (students had to pick a focus in History, Doctrine [ie pure theology] or Oratory) made it one of the most modern Universities in Europe outside of Paris until the Kunsthochschule Kassel [University of the Fine Arts at Kassel] was opened in the 18th century.

But the mixing of monastic branches did far more than merely bring them together--it created something new. The Spanish, Counter-Reformationary faction of French monks were, for the first time, forced to collaborate with Reformist monks (and vice versa). Together, each side saw the necessity for the other--the Church didn't need Reform alone, it also needed zealous followers who were willing to travel to the farthest reaches of the Earth.



The Order of Jesus (or the Jesuits) was formed a generation after the creation of the Universite de la Pon. An evangelist monastic order, the Jesuits committed to converting not only the heathens of far away lands (Jesuits quickly became the largest religious order in the New World after their formation), but the intellectuals of the home front. Jesuits would go to the Far East, the New World, Africa and India, but would also remain a huge presence in France itself, replacing the Inquisition as the main enforcers of the Word. France remained the center of Jesuit activity for decades to come, and it was a Jesuit who later crowned Louis XII 'most Christian King'.

Jesuit missionaries in China

Jesuit missionaries in New France​