How did Europe live during the times of Ivan the Terrible?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the middle of the 16th century, England, France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and Poland managed to survive the plague, crisis, dynastic wars, and the death of rulers.

England

Ivan IV (the Terrible), who formally ruled from the age of three, became a full-fledged ruler in 1545, at the age of 15. And on January 16, 1547, he was solemnly crowned king. At this time, the reign of Henry VIII Tudor ended in England, he died on January 28, 1547. Henry was succeeded by his 9-year-old son from Jane Seymour, Edward VI, for whom his uncle Lord Somerset ruled.

During the reign of Edward, "42 Articles of Faith" were developed, which form the basis of the Anglican Church. In 1553, the parliament, after listening to the opinion of the clergy, elevated these articles into state law. Eduard was in very poor health and contracted tuberculosis.

At the insistence of John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, he appointed Lady Jane Gray, the great-granddaughter of Henry VII, as his heiress, excluding his older sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, from the circle of applicants. The young king died on 6 July 1553. Jane Gray became Queen, but the people did not accept her. Jane's reign lasted only nine days, after which she and her family were arrested on charges of high treason.

On July 19, 1553, Mary became Queen of England. She began the restoration of the Catholic faith in the state, the reconstruction of monasteries. During her reign, there were a large number of executions of Protestants. In total, about three hundred people were burned.

Subsequently, during the reign of Elizabeth I, a nickname was coined for her sister - Mary the Bloody. In the summer of 1554, Mary married Philip of Spain, the son of Charles V. On June 7, 1557, England, in alliance with Spain, entered the war against France. The central event of this war was the French conquest of Calais in January 1558. The British lost their last possessions on French soil.

In 1557, a "fever" of a viral nature came to Europe, which became the worst epidemic of the 16th century. In England, it peaked in the fall of 1558: on the southern coast of the country, more than half of the population fell ill with the "fever".

And if the plague struck people quickly and mercilessly, then the new disease was long-lasting, sluggish, and its outcome was unpredictable. The queen also fell ill. On November 17, 1558, Mary died. Elizabeth ascended the throne. One of its first plans was to restore, in a somewhat softened form, the ecclesiastical order that existed under Edward VI.

Elizabeth I. Source: wikipedia.org

Under Elizabeth, England was on the rise. Agriculture has reached a high degree of prosperity. Industry began to develop rapidly, new branches of production emerged, and British metal and silk products began to appear on the market. Foreign trade has found unexpected markets for itself thanks to the extraordinary success of navigation.

France

On March 31, 1547, Henry II ascended the French throne. His reign was marked by endless wars. In 1552, Henry entered into an alliance with the German Protestants. While Moritz of Saxony had betrayed Charles V, Henry suddenly attacked Lorraine, conquered Toul and Verdun, and occupied Nancy; the French succeeded in capturing Metz, but the attack on Strasbourg was repulsed.

In 1554, Heinrich fielded 3 armies, which devastated Artois, Gennegau and Liege and repeatedly defeated the imperial troops. In Italy, Henry also waged war from 1552. His marshal Brissac acted with success in Piedmont. In 1556, a 5-year truce was concluded. But Pope Paul IV decided that the French court had the right to violate this truce, and the very next year the Duke of Guise moved to Italy to conquer Naples.

This enterprise ended in complete failure.

Heinrich fought even more unsuccessfully at the Dutch border. The constable of Montmorency, rushing to the aid of the besieged Saint-Quentin, was defeated and, together with the best part of the French aristocracy, was captured by the Spaniards.

True, in 1558 Giza managed to take Calais from the British and capture the fortress of Thionville, but the defeat at Gravelingen stopped the successes of the French. According to the peace concluded in Cato Cambresi, Henry was forced to return Piedmont and left behind only Calais. To strengthen friendly ties, Henry married his eldest daughter to Philip II. To celebrate his daughter's wedding and the conclusion of the Cato-Cambresian Peace, Henry organized a 3-day knightly tournament.

On the second day, Henry fought the Earl of Montgomery. The count's spear broke on the enemy's shell, the spear fragments pierced the king's forehead and hit the eye. A few days later, on July 10, 1559, Henry died.

The eldest son of Henry II and Catherine de Medici, fifteen-year-old Francis II, became the King of France. Francis died in Orleans shortly before his 17th birthday from a brain abscess caused by an infection in the ear. He had no children, and his 10-year-old brother Charles IX ascended the throne. On August 17, 1563, Charles IX was declared an adult.

He was never able to run the state on his own and showed minimal interest in state affairs. In the early years of Charles' reign, Queen Mother Catherine tried to pursue a policy of religious reconciliation, but the effect of her actions turned out to be the opposite. On March 1, 1562, the Vassi massacre took place - a massacre of French Protestants in the town of Vassi in Champagne.

More than 50 Huguenots were killed and at least a hundred were wounded. After that, a series of protracted civil wars began in France between Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots). At the head of the Huguenots were the Bourbons (Prince of Condé, Henry of Navarre) and Admiral de Coligny, at the head of the Catholics were Queen Mother Catherine de Medici and the powerful Giza.

On the night of August 24, 1572, St. Bartholomew's Night took place in France - the mass murder of the Huguenots, organized by Catholics on the eve of St. Bartholomew's Day. The massacre culminated in a series of events: the Treaty of Germain of August 8, 1570, which ended the third religious war in France, the wedding of Henry of Navarre to Marguerite of Valois on August 18, 1572, and the failed assassination attempt of Admiral Coligny on August 22, 1572.

St. Bartholomew's night. Source: mcba. ch

On May 30, 1574, not having lived a month before his twenty-fourth birthday, Charles IX died. The cause of death is secondary pleurisy, which developed against the background of tuberculosis infection. Karl's younger brother, Heinrich, who was sitting at that time in the Polish tone, preferred to return to France. On February 11, 1575, Henry III was crowned in Reims Cathedral. Lacking the means to continue the war, Henry made concessions to the Huguenots.

The latter received freedom of religion and participation in local parliaments. Thus, some cities, inhabited entirely by Huguenots, became completely independent of the royal power. The king's actions provoked strong protests from the Catholic League, led by Heinrich Guise and his brother Louis, Cardinal of Lorraine.

In 1577, a new, sixth in a row, religious civil war broke out, which lasted three years. At the head of the Protestants was Henry of Navarre, who survived during the night of St. Bartholomew, renouncing his faith and hastily adopting Catholicism. The war ended with a peace treaty signed in Flais.

Spain

Charles V was de facto the first ruler of a unified Spain in 1516-1556, although only his son Philip II was the first to bear the title “King of Spain”. Charles himself was officially king of Aragon, and in Castile he was the regent of his incapacitated mother, Juana the Mad.

On January 16, 1556, Charles renounced the Spanish crown in favor of Philip's son, including giving him possession of Spain in Italy and the New World. In 1561, Philip chose Madrid as his residence, near which, by his order, the El Escorial was erected in the period from 1563 to 1586 - the symbolic center of his dominion, combining a royal residence, a monastery and a dynastic tomb.

Philip's reign was a golden age for the Inquisition. The auto-da-fé was sometimes attended by the king, who made every effort to eradicate the Protestant heresy. He forbade the Spaniards to enter foreign educational institutions, established vigilant supervision over theological literature, which sneaked into Spain. With the Protestants, the Inquisition had its most trouble in northern Spain; in the south, Philip turned his attention to the Moriscos.

Auto-da-fe, F. Goya. Source: wikimedia.org

Since the fall of Granada (1492), the Moors, in order to get rid of violence and the eternal threat of exile, whole crowds adopted Catholicism, but, outwardly performing all church rites, many of them in fact remained faithful to Mohammedanism. Philip decided to put an end to this.

Philip achieved the fact that the Moors began a desperate armed struggle. In 1568, the Alpukharian uprising broke out, which lasted more than two years.

After pacification, accompanied by mass executions, many Moriscos were sold into slavery, others were resettled in the northern provinces of Spain.

In 1578, King Sebastian I of Portugal was killed during a North African expedition. Philip, based on the right of succession by kinship and on the rich gifts with which he endowed the Portuguese aristocracy, decided to seize the Portuguese throne.

Among the Portuguese, a national party arose that tried to provide armed resistance to Philip. But in 1580, the Spanish army occupied the whole country almost without a fight, and a few months later the Portuguese Cortes proclaimed Philip king of Portugal.

Holy roman empire

As a result of the Reformation, which began in 1517, the Holy Roman Empire was split into the Lutheran north and the Catholic south.

Protestantism in the first half of the 16th century was adopted by many large principalities (Saxony, Brandenburg, Kurpfalz, Braunschweig-Luneburg, Hesse, Württemberg), as well as the most important imperial cities - Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Hamburg, Lubeck. The ecclesiastical electors of the Rhine, Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, Bavaria, Austria, Lorraine, Augsburg, Salzburg and some other states remained Catholic. The unresolved church issue led to the formation of two political alliances in Germany - the Protestant Schmalkalden and Catholic Nuremberg.

Their confrontation resulted in the Schmalkalden War of 1546-1547. Although Charles V won the war, all the main political forces of the empire soon rallied against him, dissatisfied with the universalism of Charles's policy. In 1555, the Augsburg Religious Peace was concluded at the Reichstag in Augsburg, which recognized Lutheranism as a legitimate religion and guaranteed freedom of religion for the imperial estates.

Charles V refused to sign this agreement and soon resigned as emperor. The Augsburg religious world made it possible to overcome the crisis caused by the Reformation and restore the efficiency of imperial institutions. Over the next half century, the Catholic and Protestant subjects of the empire cooperated quite effectively in the governing bodies, which made it possible to maintain peace and social tranquility in Germany.

Coat of arms of the Holy Roman Empire. Source: i. pinimg.com

In 1556, the post of emperor was taken by Ferdinand I, Charles' brother. The successor of Ferdinand I, Emperor Maximilian II, himself sympathized with Protestantism, and during his reign (1564-1576) he managed, relying on the imperial princes of both denominations, to maintain territorial and religious order in the empire, resolving conflicts that arise with the help of exclusively legal mechanisms of the empire.

In 1568, after another war with the Ottoman Empire, Maximilian concluded a peace treaty with Sultan Selim II with the payment of tribute to the Turks for 8 years.

In 1575, a group of Polish and Lithuanian magnates proposed Maximilian as a candidate for the throne of Poland, but he did not have sufficient popularity and Stefan Batory was elected king. On October 12, 1576, Maximilian died in Regensburg. The throne passed to his son Rudolph.

Poland

In 1548, the Polish king Sigismund I the Old died in Krakow. His son, Sigismund II Augustus, ascended the throne. In external affairs, Sigismund Augustus tried to maintain peace, remained on good terms with Austria and Turkey, but could not avoid war with Ivan the Terrible due to the latter's claims to some parts of Livonia, with which Sigismund Augustus entered into a defensive and offensive alliance.

The Livonian War began in January 1558. It was mainly in the nature of the confrontation between the Russian kingdom and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and was conducted mainly on the territory of the latter.

Map of the Commonwealth in the 16th century. Source: wikipedia.org

On June 28, 1569, the Union of Lublin was signed, uniting the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania into one federal state - Rzeczpospolita. After the signing of the Union of Lublin, the Russian state had to fight the forces of not only the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but also Poland.

However, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by that time was too exhausted by the protracted war, so at the end of 1569 a "great embassy" from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth left for Moscow. According to the terms of the 3-year truce (1570), Polotsk, Sitno, Ezerishche, Usvyaty and several other castles retreated to Moscow.

With the death of Sigismund II Augustus in the summer of 1572, the Jagiellonian dynasty ended, and at the Diet of 1573, the brother of the French king, Henry of Valois, was elected monarch. Before Henry was handed the decree on his election as king, the Seim took a number of obligations from him, including the payment of the state debt of the Commonwealth and the contribution to the state treasury for 40 thousand florins a year.

Another prerequisite was the adoption of "Articles", which limited the powers of the monarch. After staying in Poland for five months, Heinrich fled to France. The new king in 1576 was the Transylvanian prince Stefan Batory. In January 1582, the Yam-Zapolsky Peace Treaty was concluded with the Russian state, according to which the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth received Livonia and the Polotsk land.