AP European History

Barron’s

The Reformation

Overview

This chapter fits 100 percent within the first time period for the course. Historians generally agree that the Protestant Reformation is one of the markers of the beginning of modern Europe and a crucial part in the transformation of Western civilization. What began as an attempt to reform the Roman Catholic Church was co-opted by political forces and resulted in the destruction of the religious unity of Western Europe and the outbreak of bitter wars of religion.

Protestantism was adopted by the growing nation-states of the north as they were about to replace Italy and Spain as leaders of modern Europe; the Inquisition enforced orthodoxy. The Inquisition in Spain was designed to encourage a sense of national unity based on Catholicism. The Moslem Moors and the Jews who had been the educated groups in Spanish society were either driven into exile or forcibly converted. The Inquisition was later adapted in Spain and in Spanish territories to combat Protestantism, and it was imported to Italy for the same purpose. Protestantism, though, dominated most of northern Europe, and the continent suffered devastating disruptions during the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Causes of the Reformation