The Modern State arose between the 15th and 16th centuries when the kings of Europe took advantage of the feudal crisis to concentrate their power by centralizing the power over their lands. This process was achieved by agreeing with the feudal lords to receive their lands in exchange for some privilege or by conquering the territories through bloody wars. The kings received the support of the recently created bourgeoisie that wanted to get rid of the feudal lords in order to terminate their vassalage.
The European political map that had once resembled a multicolour political mosaic with unstable edges, was about to experience changes. The number of independent kingdoms began to shrink and the limits began to consolidate. This result was a consequence of the ascension of a series of monarchs with a certain national conscience, who understood their rule differently than their predecessors.
Louis XI and Francis I in France, the Catholic kings in Spain and later Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II, Henry VII and Henry VIII in England, Christian I of Denmark, Casimir IV of Poland, Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, Ivan III of Russia. They were the artifices of the appearance of the first modern states. These kings governed as best as they could in order to keep the crown, there was a kind of natural selection that affected the final result.
The weakest monarchies disappeared. Those that were able to survive inaugurated a new system of rule that would distinguish the European political landscape for the next three centuries. An authoritarian system that the historians call the Ancien Régime.
The population belonged either to the privileged class, clergy and nobility, or to the unprivileged estates, the bourgeoisie and the common people. What was the background for the appearance of the Modern State? At the end of the Middle Ages, there was an enormous crisis in Europe with great famines.
The black plague had drastically reduced the population, the economic imbalances affected all the sectors, the vassal-lord bonds destabilized. But beginning in 15th Century, the effects of the crisis began to diminish. Europe began to experience a kind of recovery.
The conquest of Constantinople by the Turks meant the end of the Eastern Roman Empire and is one of the dates that historians use to determine the beginning of the Modern Age. In Constantinople, the classics were well-known: Plato, Seneca, Herodotus, Horace, etc. While during the Middle Ages in Europe, they predominantly knew Aristotle and, in addition, that was through Arabic translation.
When the learned of Constantinople who spoke Greek took refuge in Europe, many of them in Florence, after the fall of the city, and brought with them all their Graeco-Latin knowledge. In Europe, they rediscovered the classical philosophers. This would radically change the European mentality.
In the Middle Ages, the Europeans had been overly concerned with the great beyond, convinced that earthly life was a process for gaining access to eternal life. They lived in fear of God. Man was freeing himself from these bonds throughout the Modern Age, and began to value earthly pleasures.
Boccaccio’s Decameron became a paradigm of the sexual freedom of the age. Medieval theocentrism was replaced by anthropocentrism: Man as centre of the universe. Humanism arose as a reaction to the Aristotelian Scholasticism of the Middle Ages.
Some humanists began to refer to their own age as a period of light that ended the long night of the past. Boccaccio and Petrarch were two prophets of what was to come. Under the rule of the Medici, Florence became the cradle of the Renaissance.
A new Athens. Florence saw visits from the architect Brunelleschi, the architect and treatise writer Alberti, the sculptor Donatello, the painter Rafael, and two absolute geniuses: Miguel Angel Buonarroti, who mastered sculpure, painting and architecture Leonardo da Vinci, painter, architect, scientist, inventor, musician and much more. The Renaissance arose in Italy and meant a rupture with the medieval mentality and a return to the values of the Classical Culture.
A zest for life, for the beauty of the human body. The Renaissance man freed himself and turned his view toward the Classical Age, to Greece and to Rome. From Italy, the ideas of the Renaissance quickly reached the rest of Europe, producing an aesthetic of rebirth.
This new outlook was reflected in the arts, but also in all fields of knowledge: science, philosophy, politics. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century by Johannes Gutenberg resulted in widespread dissemination of all the branches of knowledge. This invention was crucial to the propagation of knowledge.
Without a doubt, we are before a second key tool of change in human history. Advances in physics, astronomy, biology, human anatomy, chemistry and medicine transformed medieval visions about nature and laid the foundations of modern science. A scientific Revolution occurred that began with Nicholas Copernicus and his heliocentric theory.
Later, an enthusiast of the ideas of Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, defined the elliptical orbits that the planets followed around the Sun. For nearly five millennia the geocentric model of the Earth as centre of the universe was accepted by practically the entire world. The heliocentric model, which states that the Earth and the planets move around the Sun, meant an authentic revolution and shook the foundations upon which all knowledge rested.
The bold heliocentric hypothesis clashed with the Holy Scriptures. The Court of the Holy Inquisition investigated Galileo for defending the claims of Copernicus and it nearly cost him his life. The scientific Revolution culminated with Isaac Newton.
In 1687, he published his most important work: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. In this work, he presented the theory of gravity, inspired by an event that occurred years before while he was meditating under the shade of an apple tree when a fruit fell from the tree. Humanism and the invention of the printing press were the first two tools of change, activated by the Modern Age, and they brought with them the Renaissance and a scientific Revolution.
The third tool was the discovery of America in 1492. Christopher Columbus, in his desire to find a new route . to the Indies, ran into a new continent, unknown to the eyes of Europe: America.
This event entailed the encounter of two worlds that had evolved in isolation. An era of conquests began in the name of the Catholic faith. A small group of Spaniards put the Aztec Empire in check with Hernán Cortés at the front.
The Spaniards allied themselves with the local tribes that the great Moctezuma had subjugated. Cortés brought horses and vastly superior weapons, but the most powerful weapon that his men brought with them was invisible to the human eye: smallpox and other illnesses. The Europeans were already immune to these pathogenic agents; however, the indigenous people were not.
When Pizarro arrived to Peru, the illnesses had already arrived to the region and had decimated the population. Smallpox really was the biological weapon that conquered America. To begin with, the Spaniards and Portuguese portioned out the New World in the Treaty of Tordesillas.
But the remaining European nations wanted a piece of that pie and later also took to the conquest. Gold and silver fever hit. All of Europe grew enormously, thanks to the riches of America.
In addition to gold and silver, the conquest gave rise to the importation of new agricultural products unknown in Europe, such as the tomato, maize, the potato, cacao and tabacco, which had a great impact upon the economy and European habits. The commercial and financial bourgeoisie benefitted from mercantilism and the European expansion subsequent to the Age of Discovery. During the Modern Age, this would result in a transition from feudalism to capitalism.
The opening of the world to the Europeans with the Era of Discovery brought with it the first world economy. The first Stock Markets appear such as those in Amsterdam and London. The Amsterdam Stock Market was founded in 1602 by the Dutch East India Company and operated with stocks and bonds, and published a weekly bulletin that was used as a reference when executing purchase orders.
The privileged companies took monopolistic control of routes and products, and the commercial and financial classes were strengthened with the birth of the Modern State. mainly in those with a protestant mentality, as we’ll see later. The fourth tool of change that enormously affected the course of events and the advances of the age was the Protestant Reformation initiated by Luther.
During the final years of the Medieval Age, a great crisis had emerged in the Catholic Church due to numerous accusations of ecclesiastical corruption and a lack of religious piety. To finance the construction of the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome the sale of indulgences took off. Indulgences didn’t pardon sin but they reduced the years that the sinners had to spend in purgatory before entering the Kingdom of Heaven.
The Catholic Church began to traffic with the sentiments of the faithful. In 1517, a German monk, Martin Luther, hung a document on the door of Wittenberg Palace Church, in which he presented theses against the Catholic doctrine of the indulgences. Although such a heroic act is not so clear.
The result was a debate that turned Christianity on its ear. The reaction from Rome was swift; the Pope firmly condemned Luther's theses with a counterproductive effect that only resulted in . more publicity for the German.
He clashed not only with the Pope, but also with the recently crowned Emperor. Charles V also wanted to put affairs in order with Luther. The Emperor demanded that Luther retract his doctrines, but Luther only acknowledged the word of the Holy Scriptures.
He made the Bible the only criterion for determining any matter related to faith. The clerical caste thus lost its role as intermediary between God and man. Luther was a heretic, and as such, was declared an outcast.
The printing press was the secret to the success of Protestantism. In Europe, millions of copies of the reformists ideas were produced annually. Luther was the most prolific author, but there were more Protestant writers.
Europe would suffer a radical religious transformation and the power of the Church would be divided among different Protestant denominations. The evidence demonstrates that Luther did not destroy the Church, but rather created another. Luther neither stopped being a cleric, nor reduced their numbers, he simply created a new priestly body, except now that body of pastors only served the lord of the territory, who gave them food, and not to a foreign Pope or to an Emperor with similar interests.
The new modern states demanded more independence from the Roman Catholic Church. The king of England, Henry VIII, also severed his ties with Rome and founded the Anglican Church. The reason was that the king wanted to annul his marriage to Catalina of Argon, daughter of the Catholic kings and aunt to Charles V.
The Pope of Rome, Clemente VII, opposed the annulment of their marriage. The monarch’s response was to break with Catholicism and establish himself as supreme leader of a new church. The Church of England.
The Anglican Church shares many similarities with the Catholic Church, but it does not depend on Rome. After the death of Luther, the thought of John Calvin gained momentum and became predominant among reformists. Calvin was a follower of the ideas of Luther and converted the city of Geneva into a theocratic and totalitarian state.
The pastors became the morality police and the travellers were amazed to find that the city had no theft, nor prostitutes, nor murders, nor luxuries, nor alcohol, nor dances, nor vices of any kind. It’s necessary to remember at this point that the Catholic Church strongly condemned the charging of interests, censuring this practice with the name of usury. In Catholic Spain, in fact, manual labour was something dishonourable, for lesser folk, the men of honour only bloodied their hands in the war.
For that reason, many noblemen preferred poverty over having to work. However, in the countries of northern Europe, where Calvinist morality extended to, work dignified man. And merchant or lender ended up being an honourable occupation, a morality consecrated to the capital.
Thus, these countries prospered and became rich. And it’s not unreasonable to say that for this reason, the Protestant countries are more hard-working, more austere and thriftier than the Catholic countries. Calvinism extended not only throughout Europe, but migratory movements also took Calvinism to North America.
The English puritans who travelled on the Mayflower, the French Huguenots, the Dutch colonists of New Amsterdam, later called New York, and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians from the Appalachian mountains. The Calvinist colonists were also the first Europeans that colonized South Africa, later known as Boers or Afrikaners. The Protestant Reformation led by Lutherans, Calvinists and Anglicans had unleashed a European schism that translated into bloody religious wars In France, Calvinists Huguenots were persecuted.
On the night of Saint Bartholomew, in Paris, the French king had more than 3,000 Huguenots executed. The killings spread throughout the country In a few days, the Catholic Church had claimed more victims than were claimed by the Court of the Holy Inquisition in its entire history. Tensions between Catholics and Lutherans also unleashed the Thirty Years' War, which in principle had a religious trigger and ended up becoming a European war in which .
the great powers tried to find their hegemony. The European Catholic congregation had been drastically reduced. The damage caused by the Reformation was enormous.
The Catholic Church needed a Counter-Reformation that would bring order and put a stop to the coming calamities committing for some time and that would provide an answer to the Protestant Reformation. In the city of Trent, a Council was held that implied a kind of catharsis for the church. The clergy was put to rights, .
some abuses were eliminated and the administration was reformed. In addition, forms of propaganda were devised to attract the faithful and propagate the faith. Art was used as a vehicle of expression for the greater glory of God and of the church.
Baroque art was born. A twisted, dramatic, exaggerated art that abuses ornament. Baroque art triumphed throughout Europe, even in the Protestant area, and proved to be an attractive mechanism of propaganda and ideological control.
We have clearly seen that the Modern State had identity, it was organized, structured and authoritarian. The power was centralized and was politically recognized. Authoritarianism put an end to the civil wars, guaranteeing an internal peace that favoured economic progress, with the expansion of new markets and commercial routes that opened after the encounter with the new continent.
A new mentality also flourished, a more open, and definitely more modern concept, that would culminate in the 18th Century with the Illustration.
