Early modern Europe, also referred to as the post-medieval period, is the period of European history between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, roughly the mid 15th century to the late 18th century. Historians variously mark the beginning of the period with the invention of moveable type printing in the 1450s, the Fall of Constantinople and end of the Hundred Years' War in 1453, the end of the Wars of the Roses in 1485, the beginning of the High Renaissance in Italy in the 1490s, the end of the Reconquista and subsequent voyages of Christopher Columbus to the Americas in 1492, or the start of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. The precise dates of its end point also vary and are usually linked with either the start of the French Revolution in 1789 or with the more vaguely defined beginning of the Industrial Revolution in late 18th century England.
Some of the more notable trends and events of the early modern period included the first circumnavigation of the Earth, the establishment of regular European contact with the Americas and South and East Asia and the European colonization of the Americas. The Protestant Reformation and the religious conflicts it provoked (including the French Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years' War), greatly altered the religious balance of Christendom, creating a formidable new opposition to the dominance of the Catholic Church, especially in Northern Europe.
Modern science emerged during the 17th century and was followed by increasingly rapid technological progress, as well as the establishment of secularized civic politics, law courts and the nation state. Capitalist economies began to develop in a nascent form, first in the Low Countries, and later in France, Germany and England. The period is often associated with the rise and dominance of the economic theory of mercantilism and the decline and eventual disappearance (at least in Western Europe) of feudalism and serfdom. The ensuing rise of global systems of international economic, cultural and intellectual exchange played an important role in the development of capitalism and represents an identifiable early phase of globalization. The five great powers of Europe that emerged by the end of the 18th century—Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—formed the Concert of Europe that dominated European politics in the 19th century and up to World War I.
Periodization
Regardless of the precise dates used to define its beginning and end points, the early modern period is generally agreed to have comprised the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. As such, historians have attributed a number of fundamental changes to the period, notably the increasingly rapid progress of science and technology, the secularization of politics, and the diminution of the absolute authority of the Roman Catholic Church as well as the lessening of the influence of all faiths upon national governments. Many historians have identified the early modern period as the epoch in which individuals began to think of themselves as belonging to a national polity—a notable break from medieval modes of self-identification, which had been largely based upon religion (belonging to a universal Christendom), language, or feudal allegiance (belonging to the manor or extended household of a particular magnate or lord).
The beginning of the early modern period is not clear-cut, but is generally accepted to be in the late 15th century or early 16th century. Significant dates in this transitional phase from medieval to early modern Europe can be noted:
- 1450: The invention of the first European movable type printing process by Johannes Gutenberg, a device that fundamentally changed the circulation of information. Movable type, which allowed individual characters to be arranged to form words and which is an invention separate from the printing press, had been invented earlier in China.
The end date of the early modern period is variously associated with the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in about 1750, or the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, which drastically transformed the state of European politics and ushered in the Napoleonic era and modern Europe.
The role of nobles in the Feudal System had yielded to the notion of the Divine Right of Kings during the Middle Ages (in fact, this consolidation of power from the land-owning nobles to the titular monarchs was one of the most prominent themes of the Middle Ages). Among the most notable political changes included the abolition of serfdom and the crystallization of kingdoms into nation-states. Perhaps even more significantly, with the advent of the Reformation, the notion of Christendom as a unified political entity was destroyed. Many kings and rulers used this radical shift in the understanding of the world to further consolidate their sovereignty over their territories. For instance, many of the Germanic states (as well as English Reformation) converted to Protestantism in an attempt to slip out of the grasp of the Pope.
The intellectual developments of the period included the creation of the economic theory of mercantilism and the publication of enduringly influential works of political and social philosophy, such as Machiavelli's The Prince (1513) and Thomas More's Utopia (1515). In the 17th century, the Scientific Revolution was defined by the foundational works of Johannes Kepler's Astronomia Nova (1609), Galileo Galilei's Starry Messenger (1610) and Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687).
Printing Revolution
From a single print shop in the Free Imperial City of Mainz around 1440, printing had spread to about 270 cities across Europe and produced more than 20 million volumes by the end of the 15th century. Just 25 miles away, the Frankfurt Book Fair was established by 1462 and remained the primary marketplace for printers and publishers and the center of Europe's book trade for the next two hundred years. By the 16th century, the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages, where facts were few and far between, had begun to give way to a printing culture where living scholars could compare their own observations with those of other (living) scholars, transforming how knowledge was created, preserved and disseminated.
Age of Discovery
The Age of Discovery was a period from approximately the 15th to the 17th century, during which seafarers from European countries explored, colonized, and conquered regions across the globe. The opening of maritime routes to the East Indies and European colonization of the Americas by the Spaniards and Portuguese, later joined by the English, French, and Dutch, spurred international global trade that connected previously isolated parts of the world to each other. The interconnected global economy of the 21st century has its origins in the expansion of trade networks during this era.
Amerigo Vespucci's Mundus Novus letter, published in 1503 and repeatedly reprinted, provided the first explicit articulation in print that the lands discovered by European navigators to the West were not the edges of Asia, but rather an entirely different continent (a "New World"). Between 1519 and 1522, the Magellan–Elcano expedition achieved the first circumnavigation of Earth in history, including the first crossing of the Pacific by a European expedition, revealing the vast scale of that ocean. Every continent was visited and mostly mapped by Europeans, except the south polar continent now known as Antarctica. The continents drawn by European mapmakers developed from abstract "blobs" into the outlines more recognizable to us. The discovery of continents that were completely unknown to the ancients had a profound impact on European intellectual life in the 16th century. By revealing a "New World" unknown to the ancients, the European encounter with the Americas also specifically undermined the authority of Claudius Ptolemy, the 2nd-century scholar whose geographic and astronomical models had long been considered infallible.
European exploration also initiated the Columbian exchange between the Old World (Europe, Asia, and Africa) and New World (Americas). This exchange involved the transfer of plants, animals, human populations (including slaves), communicable diseases, and culture across the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Epidemics of smallpox and other Eurasian diseases swept the Americas subsequent to European contact, killing between 10 million and 100 million people, up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas. The diffusion of New World crops reshaped Europe. Maize arrived first and spread swiftly through the Mediterranean and Balkans in the 16th century while the potato spread far more slowly in northern Europe. The higher and more reliable caloric yield per acre of both crops altered the peasant diet and contributed to the retreat of recurrent famine and to European population growth and urbanization. The era saw widespread enslavement, exploitation and military conquest of Indigenous peoples, concurrent with the growing economic influence and spread of Western culture, science and technology leading to a faster-than-exponential population growth world-wide.
The Protestant Reformation was a reform-oriented schism from the Roman Catholic Church initiated by Martin Luther and continued by John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, and other early Protestant Reformers. It is typically dated from 1517 - when Luther posted his 95 Theses criticizing the practice of indulgences to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany - to the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). The four most important traditions to emerge directly from the Reformation were Lutheranism, the Reformed (also called Calvinist or Presbyterian) tradition, Anglicanism, and the Anabaptists. Subsequent Protestant churches generally trace their roots back to these initial four schools of the Reformation. The Radical Reformation also gave rise to the Anabaptist, Moravian and other Pietistic movements. The core motivation behind the Reformation was theological, though many other factors played a part, including the rise of nationalism, the Western Schism that eroded faith in the Papacy, the perceived corruption of the Roman Curia, the impact of humanism, and the new learning of the Renaissance that questioned much traditional thought.
The Reformation reshaped the Church of England decisively after 1547. The separation of the Church of England (or Anglican Church) from Rome under Henry VIII, beginning in 1529 and completed in 1537, brought England alongside this broad Reformation movement; however, religious changes in the English national church proceeded more conservatively than elsewhere in Europe. Reformers in the Church of England alternated, for decades, between sympathies for ancient Catholic tradition and more Reformed principles, gradually developing, within the context of robustly Protestant doctrine, a tradition considered a middle way (via media) between the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions.
The Roman Catholic Church responded with a Counter-Reformation initiated by the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which included a variety of new spiritual movements, reforms of religious communities, the founding of seminaries, the clarification of Catholic theology as well as structural changes in the institution of the Church. Much work in battling Protestantism was done by the well-organised new order of the Jesuits. In general, Northern Europe, with the exception of most of Ireland, came under the influence of Protestantism. Southern Europe remained Roman Catholic, while Central Europe was a site of a fierce conflict, culminating in the Thirty Years' War, which left it devastated.
Margaret C. Jacob argues that there has been a dramatic shift in the historiography of the Reformation. Until the 1960s, historians focused their attention largely on the great leaders and also the theologians of the 16th century, especially Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli. Their ideas were studied in depth. However, the rise of the new social history in the 1960s look at history from the bottom up, not from the top down. Historians began to concentrate on the values, beliefs and behavior of the people at large. She finds, "in contemporary scholarship, the Reformation was then seen as a vast cultural upheaval, a social and popular movement and textured and rich because of its diversity."