Charles V (Charles I of Spain)

Charles V (Charles I of Spain)

Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire was the first monarch who was in the position to aspire to universal dominion. From his paternal grandfather, he stood to inherit the paternal domain of today’s Austria and South Tyrol, as well as claims to parts of Switzerland and southwest Germany.

In addition, the Habsburgs had held the elected position of the Holy Roman Emperor (a collection of lands that included today’s Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, northern Italy, Switzerland, the central eastern part of France, and the Low Countries).

Although the constituent lands of the Holy Roman Empire (mostly Germany and adjacent lands) were basically independent, the title held great prestige as it implied a primacy in Western Christendom. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 placed the Western Empire in a position of primacy in Europe.

Charles’s inheritance from his paternal grandmother was also impressive. The House of Burgundy, although an offshoot of France, had amassed a whole series of lands that included the Netherlands and adjacent areas, such as the County of Burgundy (Franche-Comte) and Luxembourg.


At that time, the Netherlands not only included the present-day countries of Holland and Belgium, but also much of northern France and parts of northern Germany. In many ways, it was the wealthiest country in Europe with textile products, crafts, commerce, and precapital financial processing, thereby making it a center of the European economy.

After the death of an older sister, Charles’s mother, Juana of Spain, became the heiress of the fabled Indies. From his grandmother, Isabella, Charles inherited the Crown of Castile, which comprised 60 percent of the Iberian Peninsula.

More importantly, it included the title to the Indies, which turned out to be western South America, most of the present West Indies, Central America, and present-day Mexico, including parts of the present-day Southwest United States.

From his maternal grandfather, he inherited the Crown of Aragon, about one-quarter of Iberia. Significantly, this included claim to Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, together about 40 percent of modern-day Italy. Charles inherited these territories at an early age.

His father died in 1506, and soon thereafter, his mother was declared insane. His maternal grandfather and grandmother, Ferdinand V and Isabella I, passed away in 1515 and 1504, respectively, while his paternal grandfather, Maximilian, passed away in January 1519.

Far-Flung Government

With these vast inheritances came vast responsibilities. All of Charles’s land possessions had separate governments that warranted consideration. Castile had separate governments not only in Granada, which had recently been conquered, but also overseas.

Charles V on horse back

The American possession was so vast that separate viceroyalties had to be set in Peru, New Spain (Mexico), and lesser jurisdictions in Colombia and Santo Domingo. In addition, Castilian claims to territories in North Africa included Ceuta and Melilla. Aragon also had its own separate parliaments, as did Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia.

The Netherlands had 18 separate jurisdictions in addition to Franche-Comte, as did the landgravate of Alsace and the Austrian possessions. While all of these could at least contribute to the exchequer, the Holy Roman Emperor was a title without much power.

Germany also at this time was composed of 300 separate states. To complicate matters further, Charles faced the menace of the Turks under their greatest ruler, Suleiman I the Magnificent, who were advancing into the Balkans.

He forced the Turks back after they invaded Austria in 1531, but much of the Balkans remained under Turkish control. Charles captured Tunis in 1535 and helped drive the Turks out of northern Africa temporarily.

Among Charles’s greatest challenges was France and its monarchs, the Valois. The French, especially under Francis I (1515–47), resented his position in Europe and feared encirclement by Charles and his family, the Habsburgs. The French sought to regain French-speaking sections of the Netherlands and wanted to gain power in Italy with claims to both Milan and Naples.

The result was a series of wars between 1521 and 1559 between the French and Charles and his son, Philip II of Spain. In the end, the Spaniards remained supreme in Italy with Lombardy under their control, in addition to Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia.

The Protestant Reformation, which broke out in the German territory between 1517 and 1521, was another of Charles’s major challenges. The Reformation split Germany and prevented unity against the Turks and the French.

After earlier successes, opposition that appeared in 1552 forced Charles to retreat as some of his allies—both Catholic and Protestant—felt he was too powerful. The resulting Peace of Augsburg froze existing section lines in place between Catholics and Protestants.

In broad terms, Charles’s job was to preserve his inheritance. He tried to maintain his inheritance via marriage alliances and aiding his royal family, although he was not always successful. He tried to gain peace with France through the marriage of his widowed sister Eleanor to Francis I.

On the other hand, he could not help his brother-in-law, Christian II of Denmark, who was deposed. And although he supported his aunt, Catherine, whose husband, Henry VIII, divorced her, he could not stop the divorce.

More successfully, after his sister’s husband, Louis of Hungary, perished at Mohácz in 1526, he arranged a marriage of his brother Ferdinand to Anne of Hungary, which led to the annexation of Czech territories and that part of Hungary not conquered by the Turks. His own marriage to Isabella of Portugal led to the annexation of that country in 1580 when the last male heir of the royal house of Portugal died.

Ultimately Charles realized that his empire, lacking real cultural or administrative unity, could not be sustained. Realizing that his health was failing (he had gout and dropsy), he handed over his Spanish, Italian, and Netherlands possessions to his son, Philip II, in October 1556, and his Austrian lands and Holy Roman Emperor title to his brother Ferdinand I. He died two years later. Although not a brilliant ruler, Charles accomplished his goal of maintaining his empire so as to pass it on to his heirs.

Thirty Years’ War

Thirty Years’ War

The Thirty Years’ War was a series of wars, escalating from armed clashes of German princes to military confrontations involving all major European monarchs from 1618 to 1648. It was a crucial stage in the ongoing European wars of religion between Catholicism and Protestantism.

It was also the first civil war in continental Europe that mixed religious conflict with traditional princely territorial ambitions and emerging sentiments of national unity and transnational geopolitical balance of power.

In 1617, Ferdinand of Styria (1578–1637), the Habsburg heir apparent to the imperial throne of the Holy Roman Empire, was elected to be king of Bohemia. The Calvinists, the majority in Bohemia, revolted against their new Catholic king.


In May 1618, a group of Calvinist noblemen threw the two most hated Habsburg councilors from the Hradschin Castle’s window into a ditch, severely injuring both. This incident, termed the “defenestration of Prague,” put the Calvinists in temporary control over Bohemia and spread the religious conflict into surrounding principalities.

In 1619, Ferdinand succeeded to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire as Emperor Ferdinand II. In Bohemia, the Calvinists openly rejected Ferdinand as their king and offered the Crown to Frederick V of the Palatinate. In response, Ferdinand II secured support from the papacy and the Catholic kings of Spain and Poland and formed an alliance with Maximilian I, duke of Bavaria (1573–1651) and leader of the German Catholic League.

In November 1620, Catholic forces invaded Bohemia and defeated Frederick’s Union at the Battle of White Mountain. The Bohemian phase of the Thirty Years’ War ended with Catholic victory in 1623. Emperor Ferdinand recovered his Bohemian throne, and Maximilian acquired Palatinate after Frederick was deposed and his Union dissolved.

In 1625, as the triumphs of the Catholic forces enabled Ferdinand to restore centralized monarchical power over Austria and Bohemia, Christian IV (r. 1588–1648), Lutheran king of Denmark and duke of Holstein, intervened to rescue the German Protestants.

Spanish Cavalry officer

However, his army was no match for the Catholic League. Ferdinand secured assistance not only from Tilly, but also from Albrecht von Wallenstein, a Bohemian nobleman, who was a Lutheran by birth, then a converted Catholic, and now an ambitious mercenary with an eye on the Bohemian Crown lands.

After a series of military victories, Tilly and Wallenstein scattered the renegade German princes and compelled Christian IV to make peace in 1628. The Danish phase of the war ended again with Catholic victory. In 1629, Emperor Ferdinand issued the Edict of Restitution. The edict outlawed Calvinism, restored the former ecclesiastic territories to the Catholic Church, and restricted the right of legal appeal to the imperial diet by the Protestant princes.

The edict alienated the German Protestant princes. Meanwhile, the alliance between Spain and the Empire alarmed Lutheran king Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (r. 1611–32) and King Louis XIII of France (r. 1610–43) and his chief minister, Armand-Jean du Plessis, duc and cardinal de Richelieu.

Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden

In the summer of 1630, the Swedish king, encouraged by the French Cardinal Richelieu and supported by the German Protestant princes, invaded Germany. After winning a few noteworthy battles in the early stage, he crushed Tilly’s Catholic League army in the battlefield at Breitenfeld in September of 1631.

Facing this defeat, Ferdinand was forced to turn to Wallenstein, who had been disgraced by the German Catholic powerhouses for his greedy and fast expansion of personal power. In November 1632, Wallenstein led his newly formed army, engaged the Swedish force at the Battle of Lutzen, and killed King Gustavus Adolphus on the battlefield. He then entered into a secret negotiation with the Swedes.

Because of his treachery, Ferdinand deprived him of his command and ordered his assassination in February 1634. The Swedish phase of the war ended with the Treaty of Prague of 1635, under which the Edict of Restitution was suspended and the Empire’s constitutional order was restored to pre-1618 conditions.

6 November 1632 - the Leu von Mitternacht, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden,
fell in the Battle of Lützen, 20 miles southwest of Leipzig

Louis XIII and his cardinal became increasingly disturbed by any possible settlement that would give the Habsburgs in Europe opportunities to mount attacks against France—from Spain in the south, the Netherlands in the north, and from a number of Habsburg territories in the east. A few days before the Treaty of Prague was finalized, France declared war on Spain. In retaliation, Spain invaded France and defeated Sweden, the French ally, at the Battle of Wittstock in 1636.

Meanwhile, the German Imperial armies, now combining the Catholics and the Protestants allied with a new sense of national unity, marched into France, forcing the French back in Alsace and Lorraine, ravaging Burgundy and Champagne, and threatening Paris. The French, supported by Dutch Protestants, carried out a few successful counterattacks but could not gain a clear advantage over the enemy.

However, the deaths of Emperor Ferdinand (1637), Cardinal Richelieu (1642), and Louis XIII (1643) gradually slowed down the momentum of the war, and both the new emperor Ferdinand III and the new cardinal Mazarin under the child king Louis XIV began to work toward a peace settlement in 1643.

The German people, after suffering from three decades of havoc of war, political treacheries, religious bloodshed, and economic devastation, had to live miserably for another fives years to see peace.

The Peace of Westphalia was finally reached in October 1648, composed of a set of treaties among the enemies in the Thirty Years’ War. It reorganized Germany into a very loose confederation with a unified diet and unified army.

Battle of Rocroi (1643)

The emperor remained in place symbolically as feudal overlord for the purpose of recognizing and protecting “German Liberties.” The peace legalized Calvinism, gave it equal status as Catholicism and Lutheranism, and recognized the rights of religious minorities in the electorates and principalities.

In short, the peace treaties announced little new but redrew a constitutional framework, which would guarantee a decentralized Germany for another two centuries. However, the territorial changes defined in the treaties did help the rise of Prussia to challenge the traditional authority of Habsburg Austria in the Holy Roman Empire.

In Europe, the peace marked the rapid decline of support for prolonging the ongoing wars of religion, and fresh sentiments of national unity, national interest, and national defense would gradually reshape European peoples and states. It also helped promote transnational cooperation and alliance.

The immediate consequences of the Thirty Years’ War in European geopolitics were the isolation and decline of Spain and the rise of France as the dominant power till the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century.

Portugal

Portugal flag

Portugal has been a land of paradoxes. For much of the 20th century, it was simultaneously a weak, agrarian, poverty-stricken, isolated state on the periphery of Europe and the seat of a vast colonial empire. It had used an alliance with Britain to sustain this paradox for a long time.

Portugal relied on Britain to keep Spain at bay and to secure its claim to its colonial holdings. In return, the Royal Navy enjoyed access to a far-flung network of colonial ports to be used as coaling stations.

Modern nationalism in Portugal dates from the popular reaction to the British ultimatum of 1890, which foiled a Portuguese scheme to connect Angola and Mozambique by seizing the intervening territory.


For half of the 20th century, the country was governed by Western Europe’s most enduring authoritarian regime. Then, in 1974–76, it became the only North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) country to experience a full-fledged social revolution. After approaching the precipice of civil war, Portuguese society backed down and built a working democracy.

Portugal overthrew its monarchy in 1910. The country established a new constitution the following year and became Europe’s third republic, after Switzerland and France. There were several coups over a 16-year period. In reaction to labor unrest in the early 1920s, extra-parliamentary right-wing organizations arose. These groups lent their support to a bloodless military coup in 1926.

Two years later, in the wake of financial crisis, the military regime brought an economics professor out of the obscurity of the University of Coimbra and named him minister of finance.

António de Oliveira Salazar

António de Oliveira Salazar had a limited set of priorities in that office: to generate a budget surplus and to stockpile gold. He proved to be quite effective at what he set out to do. He quickly overshadowed a succession of military prime ministers and won supporters among officers, clergy, businessmen, bankers, and landowners.

The New State

The military regime was a little more stable than its predecessor. Salazar, whose star was already rising within the regime, founded a new party in 1930, the National Union (União Nacional), to unify the regime’s supporters. In 1932, as the Great Depression advanced, he was appointed prime minister, a position he would hold for the next 36 years.

Salazar promulgated a new constitution in 1933, establishing the New State (Estado Novo). The National Assembly, consisting of the Chamber of Deputies and the Corporatist Chamber, had severely limited powers. Salazar selected nearly all candidates personally.

Rights and liberties proclaimed by the constitution were nullified by government regulation. Various sectors of society were organized from above in corporatist fashion. The political police maintained surveillance over potential opponents, many of whom fled into exile. Censors erased any hint of dissent.

From 1936 to 1944 Salazar was also minister of war. In that position he found he could shrink the size of the army and control officers’ salaries, transfers, retirements, and even marriages.

Officers were encouraged to marry wealthy women so that their salaries could be kept low. A politicized government-run militia, the Portuguese Legion (Legião Portuguesa), partially offset the army’s influence.

Thus it was Salazar, not the military, who consolidated the authoritarian regime. His was a conservative, corporatist police state, but it was not a true fascist state. It did not seek to overthrow traditional elites or mobilize society around its goals.

Rather, Salazar sought to demobilize—or even freeze—society and to reject modernity. Rather than exalting war, Salazar strove for a kind of neutrality. In any event, his austere policies left the armed forces with a very low level of effectiveness.

Spain and World War II

Salazar viewed Spain’s leftist Popular Front government as a threat. When General Francisco Franco rebelled against it in 1936, launching the Spanish civil war, Portugal officially followed the lead of Britain and France by promising nonintervention, but surreptitiously funneled aid to Franco.

Franco’s agents were allowed to operate on Portuguese territory. Thousands of volunteers went to Spain to fight against the Republican cause. At the end of the war, in March 1939, Salazar and Franco signed a treaty of friendship and nonaggression, known informally as the Iberian Pact.

Salazar declared Portugal’s neutrality in World War II on September 1, 1939, the very day Poland was invaded. He also sought to keep the war as far away as possible by bolstering Spain’s neutrality. In the wake of its civil war, Spain was in no condition to take an active role in World War II, but Portugal’s position highlighted the potential costs of even a passive role, as in allowing the Germans to pass through to take the British stronghold of Gibraltar.

The strategic situation changed for the Iberian Peninsula as the Germans became tied down in the Soviet Union and the Allies moved into North Africa and Italy. It was now highly unlikely that Spain would intervene on Germany’s side. Salazar allowed himself to be persuaded to join the Allied cause, albeit passively. From the Allied perspective, the Azores were the key objective.

Situated in the mid-Atlantic, these Portuguese islands would be useful bases both for antisubmarine warfare and for refueling transatlantic flights in the buildup prior to the great invasion of France. First Britain, and then the United States, acquired access to facilities there, and Portugal ceased selling tungsten to Germany while still claiming to be neutral.

Postwar Portugal

Portugal’s shift put it on the winning side, improving its bargaining position in postwar Europe and increasing its chances of getting back East Timor and Macao, which had been occupied by the Japanese.

Still, the semifascist state was in an ambiguous position after the war. It began to describe itself as an "organic democracy" rather than a "civilian police dictatorship", an expression that had been used in the 1930s.

Portugal was not invited to the San Francisco conference, which established the United Nations, and was denied UN membership until 1955. Portugal was, however, a founding member of NATO chiefly because the United States still wanted access to bases in the Azores.

Portugal’s relations with the United States and NATO replaced its traditional alliance with Britain. Unlike Britain’s earlier guarantee of Portugal’s overseas territories, however, NATO’s area of responsibility was expressly restricted to Europe to avoid its being drawn into colonial wars.

A certain "softening" marked the Salazar regime in the postwar era. There was no real institutional change, but some of the more fascistlike institutions were allowed to erode. On the other hand, after a dissident general managed to win 25 percent of the vote in presidential elections in 1958, the direct election of the president was discontinued.

A degree of economic liberalization led to the growth of the service sector and a larger middle class in the 1960s. Industry, previously limited to textile production, added electrical, metallurgical, chemical, and petroleum sectors.

A stroke immobilized the dictator in 1968, although he lingered for two more years. His successor was Marcello José das Neves Caetano, who, not coincidentally, had also succeeded him in his chair at the University of Coimbra.

Caetano brought technocrats into the regime, retired some of Salazar’s old-school hangers-on, and favored economic development over cultivated stagnation, but again the basic system remained.

Africa

War was spreading in the African colonies of Portuguese Guinea (Guinea-Bissau), Angola, and Mozambique. The policy of the New State had been to instill pride among the Portuguese in their empire, a legacy of Portugal’s glory in the age of discovery. The state also reasserted national control over the colonies, where foreign corporations had conducted much of the economic activity.

African farmers were compelled to shift from subsistence crops to cotton for the Portuguese market in the 1930s, and more so as World War II disrupted other trade sources. Portuguese investment in Africa began to take off in the years after the war. Portuguese emigration tripled the white population of Mozambique and quadrupled that of Angola between 1940 and 1960.

Initially, even the outbreak of the wars of national liberation spurred economic growth, as the state responded by boosting civil and military investments. All of these changes disrupted the lives of the Africans, and many of them also undermined the few existing bases of support for Portuguese rule.

In 1961 a revolt against forced cotton cultivation broke out in Angola. Fighting escalated with retributions and counter-retributions; it spread to Guinea in 1963 and Mozambique in 1964. The government quickly repealed forced cultivation and forced labor. It also mobilized troops and dispatched them to Africa.

Large numbers of Africans were concentrated in strategic villages (aldeamentos) where their actions could be controlled. In 1961 the United States called on Portugal to decolonize. The insurgents sought and received military aid from the Soviet bloc and China.

In order to fight the leftist insurgency most effectively, the military high command assigned anabawang officers to read the political tracts of African revolutionary leaders, such as Amílcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau.

To their ultimate surprise, a sizable number of anabawang officers were convinced that the insurgents were right. Some of them also concluded that Portugal itself was an underdeveloped Third World country in need of "national liberation".

Revolution of The Carnation

A diverse group of disgruntled anabawang officers in 1973 formed a clandestine political organization, the Armed Forces Movement (Movimento das Forças Armadas, MFA). On April 25, 1974, the MFA deposed Caetano. The New State collapsed without resistance. Holding red carnations, demonstrators had persuaded other military units not to resist.

The MFA then stepped back, but this proved only temporary. The young officers would soon be in the midst of a political free-for-all to determine the direction of the revolution. They too coalesced into a number of factions built around competing political orientations and personalities.

Captain Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho became the focal point of one radical faction, once styling himself as the Fidel Castro of Europe. Colonel Vasco Gonçalves began as a moderate, but moved to a position close to the Portuguese Communist Party. A moderate faction, later dubbed the Group of Nine, formed around Lieutenant Colonel Melo Antunes.

Finally, further behind the scenes until the last stages of the revolution were the "operationals", a group of officers largely concerned with professional military matters and associated with Lieutenant Colonel António Ramalho Eanes.

The Junta of National Salvation (Junta de Salvação Nacional) was formed from moderate senior officers. General António de Spínola, a former military governor of Guinea-Bissau, was invited to lead the junta as provisional president of the republic.

Palma Carlos, a liberal law professor, was named provisional prime minister. Political parties of all stripes were legalized, and political prisoners were released. Political exiles streamed back into the country.

Cease-fires were arranged in Africa. In one of the most fateful decisions of the new regime, the leaders promised elections for a constituent assembly within a year, the first real elections in over half a century, and with universal suffrage and proportional representation.

The revolution had released popular tensions that had been building up for decades. Turmoil spread quickly in the newfound freedom, and rival power centers competed to control the situation. Spurred on by the newly legalized Portuguese Communist Party, Maoists and other leftist groups and workers staged strikes and seized factories, shops, and offices.

Students took over schools and denounced teachers for "fascist sympathies". Services broke down, and shortages became common. Right-wing groups, especially in the conservative rural north, began to mobilize and arm themselves.

In July the Palma Carlos government collapsed amid the turmoil, and prominent members of the MFA moved into key positions. Carvalho was promoted to brigadier general and put in charge of the army’s new Continental Operational Command (Comando Operacional do Continente, COPCON), which became the principal arbiter of order as the police disintegrated.

Colonel Vasco Gonçalves was appointed to the position of prime minister. The MFA radicals regularly overruled Spínola’s decisions and also forced him to accept the independence of the colonies.

In September a major demonstration planned by Spínola to bolster his position forced a confrontation with COPCON, which resulted in Spínola’s resignation. General Francisco da Costa Gomes, who was more sympathetic to the left, assumed the presidency.

The most radical phase of the revolution began in March 1975. Spínola launched an unsuccessful coup attempt on March 11. In response, the radical wing of the MFA abolished the Junta of National Salvation and formed the Revolutionary Council (Conselho da Revolução), some 20 officers responsible only to the MFA Delegates’ Assembly.

The council nationalized the banking system, press, utilities, and insurance companies. With elections for the Constituent Assembly scheduled for April 25, the anniversary of the revolution, the MFA pressed a "constitutional pact" on the six largest parties, which recognized the permanent supervisory role of the MFA in a "guided" democracy.

Turnout was high for the elections, in which 12 parties competed, but the outcome shocked the radicals. The moderate Socialist Party came in first with 37.9 percent, followed by the right-of-center Social Democrats (originally called the Popular Democrats) with 26.4 percent. The Communists, the electoral ally of the MFA radicals, garnered only 12.5 percent.

Talk of Civil War

The MFA responded during the "hot summer" (verão quente) of 1975 by styling itself as a national-liberation movement. In the south, landless agricultural laborers seized large estates and declared them collective farms. Moderate Socialists and Social Democrats resigned from the government. Small freehold farmers formed armed groups, held counterrevolutionary demonstrations, and bombed the offices of leftist parties.

Plans were drawn up for a possible alternative government in the north. COPCON was beginning to disintegrate, and individual army units were under pressure to declare their political orientation. Both society and the MFA itself were becoming increasingly polarized, and there was talk of civil war.

As a consequence of the growing tension, Gonçalves and his government were pressed to resign at the end of August, and they did so. A new, more moderate provisional government was installed.

Dissatisfied with this outcome and determined not to "lose" the revolution, radical paratroopers attempted to organize a coup in November 1975. Like Spínola’s coup attempt, however, this backfired. Lieutenant Colonel António Ramalho Eanes, of the MFA’s professional military faction, led a purge of the MFA radicals. COPCON was disbanded and Otelo, its commander, placed under house arrest.

Eanes was named army chief of staff and made a member of the Revolutionary Council. The "constitutional pact" was renegotiated in February 1976. Elections were held for the new Assembly of the Republic in April, and Eanes was elected president in June with 61.5 percent of the vote in the first round.

The Constituent Assembly sought to avoid both the weak, unstable governments of the 1911 constitution and also the authoritarianism of the 1933 constitution. Based on the French model, the new system called for both an elected president with real powers and an executive prime minister chosen by a majority party or coalition in a freely elected parliament.

The renegotiated constitutional pact still called for socialism as the goal of government and society and institutionalized the legacy of the revolution. Moreover, it retained the Revolutionary Council, still a self-appointed and purely military institution, and gave it the power to safeguard the legacy of the revolution and judge the constitutionality of legislation passed by the civilian government.

The first elected government was led by Mário Soares of the moderately leftist Socialist Party. In 1979 however, a center-right government of Social Democrats and Christian Democrats was elected. The inherent tension between the elected government and the essentially undemocratic council became evident as the cabinet sought to privatize portions of the economy.

After a standoff that lasted roughly from 1979 to 1982, a process of normalization set in and the undemocratic vestiges of the revolution were gradually excised. In particular, a constitutional reform in 1982 abolished the Revolutionary Council and sent the army back to the barracks.

In the elections of 1986 Soares became Portugal’s first civilian president in 60 years, replacing Eanes. Another constitutional reform, in 1989, eliminated the requirement to keep the nationalized sector of the economy.

The moderate Socialist and Social Democratic parties had increasingly come to dominate the political system, reducing the need for multiparty coalitions and increasing the stability of government. Portugal had become a far less hierarchical and far more pluralistic, democratic, and dynamic society than it had been before 1974.

In 1986 the European Economic Community (now the European Union) accepted Portugal and Spain simultaneously as members. The opening to trade, the inflow of European investments for infrastructure and other purposes, and the constitutional changes of 1989 spurred growth and helped transform the economy.

Economic growth surpassed the European average in the 1990s and until 2002. While, like any country, Portugal was not without its scandals, controversies, and disagreements, by the end of the century it had become integrated as a solidly democratic, stable, and respected member of the European community.

Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda (Arabic for "the base") is a worldwide Sunni Islamist militant insurgent group. Founded by Osama bin Laden in 1988 in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is now dedicated to driving the United States out of the Middle East specifically and out of Muslim countries generally, to destroying Israel, and to toppling pro-Western governments in Islamic countries and replacing them with Islamic fundamentalist governments.

These three goals lead to the organization’s ultimate goal, which is the reestablishment of the caliphate, a nation uniting Muslims and spanning the Islamic world.

The organization is believed to be highly redundant, both financially and operationally. While the various cells that make up the organization are accountable to higher-level leadership, operations appear to be left to the individual cells, while higher levels provide material and logistical support.


Ideas and targets coming from the upper echelons filter down to the individual cells responsible for coordinating and executing the attacks. This redundancy increases the organization’s resiliency; when cells are destroyed or captured, the losses can be contained more effectively than if al-Qaeda were a more linear organization.

Al-Qaeda’s training camps are likewise well organized. The extent of the training and organization is best seen in the group’s multivolume Encyclopedia of Jihad. Several thousand pages in length, the encyclopedia details the bureaucratic workings of the group.

Covered topics include guerrilla warfare, assembling booby traps, tactics for fighting against armored or aerial combat units, urban warfare, intelligence security, data gathering, and chemical weapons tactics.

The group has been linked to or accused of taking part in terrorist acts across the globe beginning in the early 1990s. A list of the attacks against U.S. interests attributed to al-Qaeda includes the 1992 hotel bombings in Aden, Yemen; the February 6, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City; attacks carried out on U.S. military forces in Somalia in 1993 and 1994; the June 25, 1996, truck bombing of the Khobar Towers residential compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; the near-simultaneous bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on August 7, 1998; the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen on October 12, 2000; and the September 11, 2001, airline hijackings and attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

The United States is not the group’s only target, however. Al-Qaeda also is linked to the April 2002 bombing of the El Ghriba synagogue in Tunisia; the October 2002 nightclub bombing in Bali, Indonesia; the November 2003 bombings of synagogues and a British bank in Istanbul, Turkey; the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid, Spain; and the July 7, 2005, London transit bombings.

Al-Qaeda is most often represented and understood in regard to its founder, Osama bin Laden (aka Abu Abdallah). Bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on March 10, 1957. When he was six months old, his father, Muhammad bin Laden, the Yemeni immigrant who established the Saudi Binladin Group, relocated to Jeddah, where Osama grew up.

The Soviet Union’s December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan galvanized the Muslim world in defense of Afghanistan and provided the West with a proxy war through which to combat the Soviet Union. Bin Laden, who had studied economics at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, was one of many spurred to action in defense of Afghanistan.

He made his first trip to neighboring Pakistan in 1980, where he sought ways to contribute to the jihad. Bin Laden made several monetary contributions to the mujahideen, but quickly began looking for other ways to contribute.

Bin Laden joined with Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam to found the Services Bureau (Makhtab al-Khidimat, or MAK) in Pakistan in 1984. Azzam, who had taught at King Abdul Aziz University while bin Laden studied there, was indispensable in recruiting.

In addition to providing relief to war victims in Afghanistan, the MAK organized and coordinated the volunteers, donations, and weapons coming into Pakistan and Afghanistan in support of the jihad.

Azzam believed that the young Arab men streaming to Pakistan to participate in the jihad should be scattered among the Afghan functions. Azzam felt that such a mixing of Arabs among the local forces would reap benefits both in Afghanistan and abroad.

Bin Laden saw the situation differently and sought to create his own separate Arab fighting force. He believed that such a force would be a superior fighting unit compared to local Afghan forces. Bin Laden broke with Azzam and established training camps for his Arab force near Jaji, in eastern Afghanistan.

From this base, which they dubbed al-Masadah (the Lion’s Den), bin Laden’s "Arab Afghans" engaged the Soviets in the battle of Jaji in the spring of 1987. It was at this time that bin Laden grew closer to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) and one of its most prominent members, Ayman al Zawahiri, who would become bin Laden’s deputy in al-Qaeda.

When the Soviets announced their planned withdrawal in April 1988, bin Laden began preparations to perpetuate and expand his forces. He began by moving his unit to the area around Jalalabad, Afghanistan, which became known as al-Qaeda; bin Laden would later say that the name remained with the group by accident. Following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, bin Laden, who had consistently expressed his contempt for the "atheist" Hussein and his Ba’athist government, approached the Saudi king with a plan to use his Arab Afghans to drive Hussein’s forces from Kuwait.

The Saudi government sought to restrict his movements within the kingdom. Bin Laden obtained permission in early 1991 to travel to Pakistan on the pretext of checking in on some business interests and never returned to Saudi Arabia.

In early 1992 bin Laden and al-Qaeda moved to Sudan, where they remained until 1996. Al-Qaeda and the National Islamic Front (NIF), the ruling party in Sudan, enjoyed a symbiotic relationship.

The NIF granted al-Qaeda a safe haven and freedom of movement, while bin Laden made substantial investments in Sudanese industry and agriculture and undertook several large-scale construction projects to develop the infrastructure and agricultural and industrial production capacity of Sudan.

While in the Sudan, bin Laden directed his forces in actions against the communist government of South Yemen. The Arab Afghans also were sent to Bosnia, where they had a substantial impact on that conflict. Bin Laden dispatched al-Qaeda forces into Somalia in response to the buildup of U.S. forces.

In December 1992 President George H. W. Bush sent 28,000 U.S. troops into Somalia on a humanitarian mission in support of United Nations (UN) relief efforts. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda dismissed all humanitarian claims and interpreted the U.S. presence as a way of putting pressure on Islamic regimes and as an effort to establish another base from which to attack Muslim nations.

Al-Qaeda regarded Yemen as a major victory. First, even though the hotels bombed in Yemen did not house U.S. personnel, the transfer of U.S. troops out of Yemen shortly after the hotel bombings indicated to al-Qaeda that they had been successful in driving the Americans from Yemen.

Bin Laden also claimed that the militarily superior U.S. forces were driven from Somalia by a poor, ill-armed people whose only strength was their faith. In his 1996 aliran declaring war against the United States, bin Laden claimed that the most important lesson to be learned from Somalia was that the United States would flee at the first sign of resistance.

The year 1994 was a watershed for bin Laden. He survived two assassination attempts and in April was stripped of his Saudi citizenship in response to the growing threat he represented to the regime.

A jawaban step in his radicalization came in August, when the Saudi government imprisoned clerics Salman al Awdah and Safar al Hawali, who were among the first and most prominent of the clerics circulating cassettes of their sermons against the continued U.S. presence in the Arabian Peninsula, and whose imprisonment bin Laden would later mention in his 1996 fatwa.

Bin Laden and al-Qaeda left Sudan in 1996 and returned to Afghanistan, a move prompted by several factors. In addition to the assassination attempts, bin Laden faced international pressure on the NIF and its de facto leader, Hassan al-Turabi.

The United States and Saudi Arabia sought to have bin Laden silenced and his activities curtailed, and al-Turabi found it increasingly difficult to maneuver and protect bin Laden.

When Sudan started pressuring bin Laden, he returned to Jalalabad. There bin Laden and al-Qaeda entered into a symbiotic relationship with the Taliban ("the students"), who were in the process of consolidating their control over much of the country.

This relationship was similar to that with the NIF in Sudan; bin Laden and his organization gained considerable freedom of movement and protection, while his benefactors benefited from agricultural, infrastructural, and industrial investment and development.

It was during the period between bin Laden’s return to Afghanistan and the 1998 aliran that civilians became targets. Both the 1996 aliran and bin Laden’s 1997 CNN interview spoke of civilians as collateral damage, not as legitimate targets in and of themselves.

By 1998 this had changed, and the aliran issued February 22, 1998, explicitly stated that Americans and their allies, civilians and military alike, were now al-Qaeda targets anywhere they could be found.

Communications from al-Qaeda repeatedly stress their belief that Western governments oppress Muslims and Muslim nations and are engaged in a war against Islam. Bin Laden describes the presence of U.S. forces in "the Land of the Two Holy Places" (Saudi Arabia) as the greatest insult and threat faced by the Islamic world since Muhammad’s lifetime.

In addition to decrying U.S. support for Israel, the group condemns U.S. support for what it considers "apostate regimes", particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden also points to the sanctions imposed on Iraq following the Gulf War as one reason to reject any human rights arguments coming from the West.

Al-Qaeda’s idea of the ummah (community of believers; the Islamic world) in opposition to the world derives from the teachings of two prominent Islamic scholars.

Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328) was a 14th-century Islamic scholar who taught that jihad is the duty of each individual Muslim when Islam is attacked, that the Qu’ran should be interpreted literally, and that all Muslims should read the Qu’ran and Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet) for themselves and not rely on a learned clergy. A second influence on al-Qaeda was Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), an Islamist associated with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Describing the world as existing between states of belief (Islam) and unbelief (jahiliyya), Qutb condemned Western and Christian civilization. Urging jihad against all enemies of Islam, Qutb believed that there is no middle ground and that all Muslims must take to jihad when Islam is threatened.

These influences are apparent in al-Qaeda’s activities and rhetoric. Bin Laden believes that since the Christians, Jews, and Hindus have nuclear weapons, it is only fitting that Muslims obtain them as well.

Bin Laden also echoes Ibn Taymiyyah in his assertions that the Saudi government is aiding the "crusaders" in plundering the wealth of the ummah, the vast Middle Eastern oil reserves, and by acting to keep oil prices below fair-market value.

Al-Qaeda’s leadership cadre is well educated. Bin Laden has a university degree in economics, and his inner circle contains doctors; agricultural, civil, and electrical engineers; and computer scientists, but no religious scholars.

Rahman’s aliran echoed the call to attack the United States and its allies—civilian and military, anywhere in the world—and contained exhortations to sink ships, shoot down airplanes, and burn corporations and businesses.

Two separate attacks on U.S. warships were made in subsequent years, with the USS Cole attack following an unsuccessful attack on the USS The Sullivans one year earlier. On September 11, 2001, the plot masterminded by Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who were arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and 2003, respectively, proceeded along the lines of Rahman’s fatwa.

Italian Renaissance

Italian Renaissance - Leonardo da Vinci | Anatomy

As the opening two phases of the grand cultural and intellectual rebirth (literal meaning of the French term Renaissance) of the late medieval period, the Italian Renaissance, or Quattrocentro (Italian for 1400s), and early northern renaissance sparked tremendous achievements in literature, art, architecture, and music that were inspired by creative interaction with rediscovered sources of classical antiquity. Launched from Florence, the Italian Renaissance concentrated its energies in the northern regions of Italy before moving south to Rome, where its spirit was embraced by the Renaissance popes.

It reached its zenith in the late 15th century prior to its dissolution, aggravated both by an ecclesiastical backlash against its perceived secularism and sensuality and by the series of Italian Wars, or foreign invasions against Italy, starting in 1494. The Renaissance fervor was not to be extinguished, however, as its ideals migrated northward to France, then to the Low Countries and Germany, and finally to England and Scandinavia by the close of the 16th century.

Most common people of the time were unaffected by these innovations and did not view their age as distinctive. Producers of its main aesthetic streams, such as authors, artists, and their patrons, willfully rejected the culture of the preceding abad (the Middle Ages) and set out to create a new one.


Sensing only a limited attraction to the courtly motifs of the medieval secular literary tradition and disillusioned by the elaborate argumentation of Scholasticism, the sophisticated urban ruling classes searched for a new culture that would enable them to cope with the quandaries of human existence and empower them to deal with and even manipulate other people.

Perfectly suited for this aim was the literature of ancient Rome, with its strongly political and ethical outlook and the prominence it placed upon oratorical and rhetorical training. To gain a deeper understanding of Latin literature, the urban elites were quickly drawn to the Greek literature that Roman authors frequently cited and presupposed of their readers as background knowledge. Hence the classical Latin and Greek texts of antiquity served as a common springboard for the era’s multifaceted and interdisciplinary cultural shift.

Social Origins

While formally beginning in the 15th century, the social origins of the Italian Renaissance can be traced back to the economic, social, and political developments in Italian society during the 12th through 14th centuries. The 12th and 13th centuries comprised an age of expansion and prosperity directed by the capitalistic noble classes, or grandi, who often resided in the cities and invested in business but whose cultural traditions were military and feudal, giving preference to the chivalric and courtly literature of France.

This changed in the late 13th century when the nonnoble classes, led by rich businessmen, seized control of many town governments and drove the grandi from power. However the 14th century experienced a series of disasters that, paradoxically, modified the structural foundations of Italian society so as to promote the flourishing of artistic and literary endeavors.

Amidst the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, King Edward III of England disclaimed his debts in 1345, leading to the collapse of the two largest Florentine banks, owned by the Bardi and Peruzzi families. From 1347 to 1350 the Black Death, or bubonic plague, exterminated one-third of Europe’s population, which triggered an economic depression followed by a lengthy period of stagnation. While these events prevented the founding of new fortunes, they left the wealth of established rich families largely intact, creating a new social condition.

Since the relatively high degree of social mobility that kept business enterprise open to new talent and preoccupied with acquiring new wealth had evaporated, the dominant business class was converted from a group of self-made men to a group of men who had inherited their wealth and who had been raised in luxury that they intended to preserve but they could largely take for granted.

Rich businessmen, who retained their active participation in politics to defend their material interests from radical movements spawned by working-class agitation, now devoted an equal amount of time to public affairs, especially the patronage of art and literature.

Looking to Greco-Roman antiquity as a model of administrative effectiveness and intellectual genius, the thinkers, writers, and authors of the age, collectively known as humanists, founded a new approach to scholarship, the mission of which was to restore “true” civilization in place of the prevalent “barbarous” civilization.

This view of history was spearheaded largely by Petrarch (1304–1374), who proceeded to synthesize it with his new anthropology, or doctrine of humanity, that humans were rational and sentient beings, intrinsically good by nature, with the power to think and choose for themselves. With this blatant denial of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, the humanists provoked fresh insights about reality that questioned the church’s philosophical perception of the universe and the role of humanity within it.

Before the 13th century, Italian was not the language of literature in Italy, as most works were composed in Latin, French, or Provençal. However, in the late 13th and early 14th centuries before the rise of Renaissance humanism, a number of masterpieces in the vernacular catalyzed the transition of Italy from a cultural backwater to the leader of European culture.

The nation’s first great literary figure, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), wrote his magnum opus, La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy), in Italian, which reflected the social and political life of the Florentine people and amassed great popularity.

Petrarch became the second great figure of Italian vernacular literature through poems capturing the attention of both refined courtly society and the common people. The master of the Italian sonnet, Petrarch is best remembered for his highly personal and subjective love poetry, most notably the Canzoniere, a collection of sonnets addressed to his unrequited love, Laura.

The third great figure of 14th century Florentine literature was Petrarch’s disciple, Giovanni Boccacio (1313–75), whose principal work, the Decameron, featured 100 stories recounted by 10 storytellers who fled to the outskirts of Florence to evade the Black Death. His work was heightened by motifs reflecting everyday life, including satire against corrupt clergymen, amusing treatment of human idiosyncrasies, and tales of marital infidelity.

Unfortunately the animo toward classical humanism in the first half of the 15th century temporarily stifled the germination of the vernacular tradition, which deterrence was removed by the major revival of the vernacular in the second half of that century.

Under the influence of Florence’s leading family, the Medicis, Italian resurfaced as a medium for important literary work and came to the fore when Lorenzo de’ Medici, the first of the family educated from an early age in the humanist tradition, formalized Medici rule over the city with his creation of the new Council of Seventy, over which he appointed himself head, in 1469. Lorenzo was a lyric poet of great ability who set the stylistic parameters for both secular and religious poetry in the vernacular.

The Florentine Petrarchan tradition experienced great development under the Venetian cleric Pietro Bembo, a leader in the movement attempting to restore the purity of the Latin language embodied in Cicero, when he embraced its highly refined sentiment and technical mastery of intricate verse forms for his Italian poetry.

Popular literature of a less aristocratic flavor often applied French chivalric and courtly themes to Italian characters. Recasting the French heroic knight into the Italian Orlando, Italian courtiers such as Luigi Pulci (1432–84) adapted this material for consciously humorous verse.

Medieval French chivalric themes were discussed more seriously in the poem Orlando innamorato (Orlando in Love) by Matteo Boiardo (1441–94), a noble at the refined court of the dukes of Ferrara who invented a new style integrating humanistic classical topics with medieval chivalric interests.

This style received further advancement under Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) in his Orlando furioso (Orlando’s Insanity) and reached its pinnacle in the 16th century with Torquato Tasso (1544–95), whose Jerusalem Delivered, an epic of the Crusades, revamped this popular medieval theme into a major literary production that influenced practically all other 16th-century literature.

The most brilliant example of Italian prose in the High Renaissance (the early 16th century) is the work of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) on politics and history. His two principal books, The Prince and Discourses on the First Ten Books on Titus Livius, drew heavily on the author’s firsthand experience as a leading Florentine diplomat and civil servant in the Florentine republic (1494–1512).

Although The Prince is notorious for its advocacy of political self-seeking through deceitful tactics, Machiavelli regarded a balanced republican government, typified by Rome, as the best and most durable form of government and trusted the public spirit and wisdom of the common citizens more than that of princes and aristocrats.

In the artistic sphere, Giotto di Bondone (1266–1336) took the first steps toward the Renaissance, completely forsaking the flat and nonrepresentational appearance of the prevailing Byzantine art in favor of the illusion of three-dimensional form on the twodimensional painted surface.

He was the originator of “tactile value,” portraying his space as an extension of the real space out of which the spectator looked and giving his figures a three-dimensional depth that appeared as if the spectator could reach in and grasp them. Moreover, each of Giotto’s works features the visual representation of one unifying idea instead of a spectrum of meticulous details.

The Renaissance style in sculpture was created by Donatello (1386–1466), who assimilated the basic principles of ancient sculpture, such as contrapposto (with weight shifted to one leg) and the unsupported nude, into a framework creating the appearance of movement and furnishing accurate anatomical structure of his figures.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) brought this style to maturity with sculptures independent of any surrounding architectural support, including the David and the marble figures he carved for the tomb of Pope Julius II at Rome and for the tombs of the Medici family at Florence.

The striking aspect of his approach is its portrayal of robustness and monumentality in the human body, often styled “Dionysian” after the Greek god known for his unbridled power. His spectacular frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel stand as perhaps the single greatest work of High Renaissance painting, and his redesigning of St. Peter’s crowned his prominence as an architect.

Two other Florentine-trained artists, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520), further defined the High Renaissance style. A universal genius with interests in nature, physics, and engineering, Leonardo is most renowned as a painter, revolutionizing his field with the invention of both atmospheric background and sfumato, the “smoky” effect achieved by blurring the outlines of figures to make them softer with an environment of shadow tones. He experimented greatly with new paints even at the expense of the traditional fresco style, seen most prominently in The Last Supper.

Intensely interested in studying the human personality and portraying it on canvas, Leonardo attempted to capture the fragile, fleeting, and illusive qualities of human facial expressions in his Mona Lisa and Virgin and Child with St. Anne. His plans and sketches proved greatly significant for architecture, as they constitute the blueprints for buildings later erected by his friend Bramante (1444–1514).

Raphael’s images, including his many Madonnas, the School of Athens, and Disputa, rank among the world’s most beloved artistic treasures and are noteworthy for their sense of peace and serenity. Furnishing inspiration in architecture as well as in literature, the ideals of classical antiquity experienced restoration in the work of Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72). Brunelleschi’s designs for two Florentine churches, San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito, reflect his intense study of ancient Roman buildings, as both employ the early basilica form and classical columns.

Further he is renowned for his discovery of the mathematical rules of perspective and his innovations in shape, seen most clearly in the octagonally designed dome base for the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. Alberti revitalized the ancient brick architecture of Roman times, as portrayed by his San Andrea church in Mantua, and established the Renaissance standard use of flat roofs, overhanging cornices, and prominent horizontal lines.

Ironically 15th century music saw little advancement and primarily continued in the genres conceived by Francesco Landini (1325–97), who despite his blindness from childhood became a leading composer and music theorist. Celebrated as a composer of secular works for voice and accompaniment, Landini developed the ballata, or rhythmic dance song; the caccia, a “chasing” song of enjoyment; and, most importantly, the madrigal, a high art form in which poetry was sensitively set to music and so guaranteed that the music would serve as an appropriate vehicle for conveying the spirit and emotional content of the text.

Italian Renaissance church music reached its zenith during the 16th century in the works of Giovanni da Palestrina (1525–94), choirmaster of St. Peter’s in Rome, who composed more than 600 religious pieces, including 102 masses. Typified by the Agnus Dei from his Pope Marcellus Mass, Palestrina achieved a stunning sense of serenity in his works through balance, purity, and arrangement of texts that made the words clearly understandable during performance.

Early Northern Renaissance

With the free exchange of scholars and students between European universities and political exploits, such as the French invasion of Italy in 1494, which brought new contact between cultural elements, Italian concepts and discoveries were reaching into the rest of the Continent by the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

The reorganized and powerful monarchies of the north quickly found that Renaissance thought suited their needs, as its endorsement of social class and military prowess enhanced their status, and its emphasis on public service, personal merit, and learning furnished an attractive substitute for the traditional manners of the uneducated and disorderly feudal classes.

Moreover, the invention of the printing press at Mainz by Johann Gutenberg in 1456 changed the course of history by making possible the rapid dissemination of ideas to a populace moved by the spirit of the age to become increasingly more literate.

Disillusioned by corruption in the late medieval church, including simony (buying and selling of church offices), sinecures (receiving the salary from a benefice, or region to be served by a clergyperson, without overseeing it), pluralism (holding more than one office), clerical concubinage, and the selling of indulgences, the bourgeoisie or rising upper-middle class of merchants found the Renaissance rejection of the recent past and the desire to return to the original sources of antiquity tremendously appealing.

This interest sparked a northern movement of biblical humanism, which exalted ethical and religious factors over the aesthetic and secular ideals typical of Italian humanism and was primarily interested in the Christian past, or Judeo-Christian heritage, rather than the classical Hellenic heritage of Western Europe.

More interested in the human being as a spiritual than a rational creature, these biblical humanists applied the techniques and methods of humanism to the study of the Scriptures. This exegetical approach was spearheaded by John Colet (1466–1519), a pious English cleric who, after visiting Renaissance Italy, soon afterward began in lectures at St. Paul’s Church to expound the literal meaning of the Pauline Epistles, a novelty because former theologians interpreted Scripture allegorically with an almost total unconcern with the meaning originally intended by its authors.

Borrowing his notion of biblical humanism from Colet, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469–1536) became the greatest of all the northern humanists and an internationally renowned scholar. Unlike the later reformers who vehemently denounced the evils in the church, Erasmus’s scholarly spirit inclined him to oppose its abuses through clever satire in his The Praise of Folly (1511) and Familiar Colloquies (1518).

His most outstanding contribution both to scholarship and to the future course of church history was his publication of the Greek New Testament (1516), in which he applied humanist rules of textual criticism to the extant Greek biblical manuscripts of his day, accompanied by a new Latin translation directly from the original language and by notes. As a result, scholars were now in a position to make accurate comparison between the New Testament church and the church of their day, with the assessment decidedly unfavorable to the latter.

A necessary complement to the work of Erasmus, Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) expanded the humanistic brand of scholarship to the Jewish Bible; in 1499 this prince of German humanists traveled to the Jewish community in Bologna to study Hebrew language, literature, and theology under the Jewish rabbinic scholar Obadiah Sforno.

The fruit of Reuchlin’s scientific study of the Christian Old Testament was his 1506 Of the Rudiments of Hebrew, a combined Hebrew dictionary and grammar, which enabled others to study the text in its original tongue. The humanist enterprise also spread to Spain through Jiménes de Cisneros (1436–1517), a former resident of the papal curia in Rome.

He established the University of Alcala both to train clergy in the Bible, establishing a trilingual college to provide the classical Latin, Greek, and Hebrew instruction that humanists like Erasmus regarded as essential for any sound theology, and to form virtuous character grounded in earnest Christian piety.

The ideals of Italian Renaissance architecture took root in France under King Francis I, when Italian architects and artisans were invited to France for renovations and new building projects for the king. Deciding to make his Fontainebleau Palace into a center for the arts in the 1530s, Francis invited two Italian interior designers, Giovanni Rosso and Francesco Primaticcio, to create a new style of decoration using a mixture of painting and high-relief stucco molding known as strapwork.

This new technique created a dramatic effect in a long gallery room in Fontainebleau known as the Gallery of Francis I. Francis also embarked on major building projects at châteaux Blois and Chambord, both designed in an Italian Renaissance style adapted to French taste with steep roofs, clusters of tall chimney pots, and the placing of vast elongated windows above one another.

Clement Janequin (1485–1560), who developed the Parisian chanson as a vocal ensemble form, made significant developments in music during Francis’s reign. His approximately 300 chansons are programmatic works, where the musical setting narrates the text using sound effects, such as battle noises, and imitations of natural tones, such as bird calls, to augment the effect of the story.

When social dancing became a prevalent form of entertainment, composers were commissioned to write instrumental music to accompany the dances. In the 1589 treatise Orchesographie, a French priest writing under the pseudonym of Thoinot Arbeau (1519–95) designed two broad dance categories arranged for fife and drum, haut (fast and lively) and bas (slow and stately). Most famous was the gagliard dance from the haut category, featuring a quick duple rhythm with each beat divided into three subunits.

Artistic cultivation found its most fertile soil north of the Alps in the Low Countries and Germany. For example, Geertgen tot sint Jans (1465–93), a monastic painter from St. John in Haarlem, fashioned his famous Virgin and Child, where the figures are completely encircled by a wreath of smaller figures and objects, including several popular musical instruments.

One of the leading Flemish mannerist painters was Pieter Bruegel (1525–69), who developed the ideal of “realism toward the peasants,” in which nonaristocratic figures and objects were rendered in flat areas of color without extensive attention to detail or modeling of human figures.

Bruegel remains remembered for his scenes of peasant life illustrating many aspects of their dress, customs, and forms of entertainment. His paintings were often concerned with disclosing how biblical themes are revealed in the everyday world, as portrayed by his The Parable of the Blind Leading the Blind, which shows the helplessness of afflicted peasants.

renaissance painting

The German painter Hieronymus Bosch (1453– 1516), who reflected the widespread pessimism of his age provoked by the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War, devised the style of mannerist fantasy. This cynicism transferred over into Bosch’s theological deliberation, fueling his fiery preaching against the evils of the world.

Observing animal instincts, appetites, and the evil of overindulgence in humanity, Bosch attempted to warn his contemporaries through his art, renowned for its overwhelming detail and morbid quality, that, save for repentance, salvation lay beyond their reach.

To this end, his Seven Deadly Sins depicts its human subjects, engaged in folly and gluttony, as pitiable and foolish, and his Concert within the Egg, in a paradoxical depreciation of a related art form, casts music in a diabolic light by depicting several persons standing inside a broken eggshell singing a profane song.

This low view of music is shared by his best-known altarpiece, Garden of Delights, a triptych exhibiting scenes of a highly moralistic nature where musical instruments, such as the lute, harp, hurdy-gurdy, bombard, fife, cornet, and drum, serve as instruments of torture for lost souls in hell who had used music for immoral purposes during their earthly lives.

At the same time, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) grew distinguished for his masterful woodcuts that perfected the technique of crosshatching, where a fine gridwork of lines would be employed in creating light and shadow effects.

Two additional German artists of note were Mathias Grunewald (1460–1528), whose Isenheim Altarpiece depicts the birth, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Jesus using medieval symbolism and a harsh realistic style, and Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543), known for his ability to capture the character and personal attributes of his human subjects.

In both northern and southern Europe, the Renaissance generated lasting effects in the social and religious realms. Looking back to the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome as furnishing the paradigms for humanity’s greatest achievements, much of the literature and fine art produced in this period depicted humanity as beautiful and godlike and exhibited tremendous concern with the emotional life.

While the ideal of the person as an independent entity with the right to develop according to individual preferences undermined the medieval ideal of one who was to be saved by assuming a humble role in the corporate hierarchy of the church, the return to and scientific study of the primary sources of antiquity made possible a far more accurate knowledge of the Bible. Both of these somewhat divergent factors contributed to the Reformation, with its critique of medieval religion and exaltation of Scripture over tradition.

In the political realm, the rhetorical models of Cicero displaced the perceived scholastic logical wrangling of Aristotle, facilitating improved communication, centralization of power, and administrative effectiveness among the aristocrats of Italian city-states and the rising nation-states of northern Europe. For all its achievements, Renaissance culture stands as one of the primary creative foundations of the modern Western tradition.

Early Holy Roman Empire

Ottonian Dynasty

Following the death of Emperor Louis the Pious (814– 840) and the Frankish civil war (840–843), the Carolingian Empire was divided among three sons of Louis. On the eastern ruins of the empire a new kingdom, that of Germany, had emerged, stretching from Holstein in the north down to the Alps in the south, from Lorraine in the west up to the Elbe in the east.

The first Carolingian kings of Germany struggled for the survival of their fragile kingdom. Their power was challenged not only by foreign invaders, the Slavs, Magyars, and Vikings, but also by rival rulers of France, as well as by some domestic opponents.

In 911 the last Carolingian offspring, Louis the Child (900–911), died and the German nobility elected Conrad, duke of Franconia, as their new king (911–918). Conrad’s son, Henry I (918–936), and later his grandson, Otto I the Great (936–973), succeeded to restore law and order in their kingdom, by bringing different tribes under their control and beating off the invasions.


Ottonian Dynasty

After the victory over the Magyars in the Battle of Lechfeld (955) and successful intervention in Italy (951–961), Otto had established himself as undisputed ruler over vast territories in western and central Europe. On February 2, 962, Pope John XII crowned him emperor in Rome. The new Roman Empire, ruled by the German emperor, had been founded.

Its very title Holy Roman Empire derives from the fact that the act of the imperial coronation, performed by the supreme head of the Christian believers, the pope, was sacral in its character and hence also a sacral character of the imperial dignity and power. The coronation of Otto was by no means an outstanding achievement: The papacy lacked both infl uence and power in those days and was largely subjugated to the goodwill of the German rulers.

Otto II (973–983) succeeded Otto and was married to the Byzantine princess Theophano. The latter introduced a series of Byzantine imperial ceremonies, which were adopted in the Ottonian court. Just as his father before him, Otto II attempted to increase the imperial control over Italy. His invasion of Calabria ended with the defeat of his army by the Arabs in 982. Otto III (983–1002) spent much energy on consolidating the imperial influence in the east.

He created the archbishopric of Gniezno and made Boleslas the Brave, duke of Poland, patrician. During Henry II’s reign (1002–24) , he had undertaken three military campaigns into Italy, the fi rst of which (1004) intended to punish his unfaithful subject Arduin of Ivrea, who proclaimed himself king of Italy. The second campaign (1013–14) resulted in his imperial coronation by the pope.

Following the third invasion (1020), the imperial power over Italy was firmly established and new German officials were installed for ensuring the imperial control in the region. The warfare with Boleslas I, in which Henry was allied with the pagan Ljutizi, ended in the peace of 1018, by which Henry gave up Bohemia.

Salian Dynasty

Salian Dynasty

The death of Henry II marked the end of the Ottonian dynasty, which gave way to a new dynasty, the Salians. Its first ruler was Conrad II (1024–39), elected by the German magnates after the death of Henry, despite some opposition that wished to have William III, duke of Aquitaine, crowned as a new king. After his imperial coronation on Easter 1027 his power was reasserted.

He now turned his attention to legal matters, codifying ancient Saxon customs. In 1028 he was victorious in his war against the rebellious Mieszko II, duke of Poland. With peace achieved, Mieszko surrendered all territories conquered by him and his predecessor from the empire. In 1032 Rudolf III, the last king of Burgundy, died, commanding his kingdom to Conrad. Burgundy was annexed to the empire, assuming the name kingdom of Arles.

Conrad and his heirs, Henry III (r. 1039–56) and Henry IV (r. 1056–1106), attempted to centralize the imperial power, as well as to diminish the influence of regional nobility, lay and religious alike. This led to frequent conflicts and an occasional revolt. The imperial interference with spiritual matters was clearly demonstrated in Henry III’s attempt to reform the papacy.

Between 1046 and 1049 he appointed, one after another, four German bishops as popes, to make German control ubiquitous and to have the emperor as a dominant figure in church matters. Although praised by some churchmen for his efforts to reform the papacy, Henry attracted fierce criticism from among more radical circles in Rome.

During the minority of Henry IV, the Roman movement was led by an energetic cardinal, Hildebrand, the future Pope Gregory VII (1073–85). In 1059 Hildebrand had decreed that no temporal ruler is authorized to install or depose the pope, who is to be chosen by a college of cardinals.

This may have marked the beginning of the Gregorian Reform, which indulged in a bitter struggle with the Crown known as the Investiture Controversy. The first blow delivered upon the emperor was his humiliation at Canossa (January 1077), with him excommunicated and his empire placed under the interdict.

The first stage of the controversy ended with the Concordat of Worms (1122) between Henry’s son Henry V (1106–25) and Pope Calixtus II. By the concordat, Henry gave up his authority to invest bishops but kept his right to oversee and take part in the Episcopal elections.

The weakness of the emperor was utilized by the German nobility, which elected Lothar of Supplinburg as their new king Lothar II (1125–37), putting an end to the Salian dynasty. Lothar’s and subsequently Conrad III’s reign (1138–52) is marked by social and dynastic struggle.

Frederick I Barbarossa and Frederick II

Frederick I Barbarossa

With the election of Frederick I Barbarossa (1152–90), a new chapter in the history of the German Empire began. Frederick’s primary objective was to restore the imperial control in Italy, over both the rebellious Italian communes and the pope, who had allied himself with King William I of Sicily. The first Italian expedition of 1155 did not produce any significant fruits, while the second campaign (1158) resulted in the reduction of Lombardy into a royal province and rebellion of the Milanese commune.

The fervent Pope Alexander III (1159–81) and the king of Sicily backed the Italian city-states, while Frederick was supported by most of the German magnates and the antipopes. During his fourth Italian march (1166–67) he seized Rome and only an outbreak of malaria, perceived as a divine punishment, forced him to retreat.

In 1174 Frederick led his fifth expedition and despite some agreement reached with the Lombard League, the war resumed, resulting in the imperial defeat in the Battle of Legnano (May 29, 1176). After this, Frederick turned to diplomacy and the confl ict ended with the Peace of Constance (1183). Along with Italian policy, Frederick paid attention to domestic matters.

He expanded the imperial domains by annexing lands of extinct German dynasties and seizing the properties of Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, in 1180. It was during his reign that the imperial chancery started using the adjective holy to denote the Roman Empire.

Frederick died on his way to the Holy Land leading the Third Crusade. His son Henry VI (1190–97) was married to Constance, the aunt of childless William II, king of Sicily, and upon his ascension he invaded Italy to be crowned in Rome and to claim his Sicilian kingdom. The Sicilian campaign ended in a failure because of the high summer heat and Henry retreated, leaving Sicily ruled by antiking Tancred, William II’s cousin.

After Tancred’s death in 1194 Henry launched another campaign into Sicily, which resulted in the conquest of the Norman kingdom and Henry’s coronation as king of Sicily on Christmas 1194. Once home, Henry attempted to transform the empire into a hereditary monarchy ruled by the House of the Hohenstaufen.

Upon his death (September 28, 1197), Henry VI left a two-year-old son, the future Frederick II (1212–50). He was raised in Sicily with Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) serving as his guardian. The latter brilliantly exploited the social and political chaos following Henry VI’s death and annexed vast territories in Italy to the papal demesnes.

Philip of Swabia, Henry VI’s brother, was elected as a new king (1198–1208) and his reign is characterized by a continual struggle with his archenemy, Otto of Brunswick. The German and Sicilian nobility, as well as the church with its leader Innocent III, changed sides frequently during the war between the two rivals.

After Philip’s murder, Otto was styled as Otto IV (1208–18). He won Innocent’s support, thanks to his promise to recognize the papal territories in Italy and to allow free episcopal elections, but his failure to carry out these promises led to his excommunication by the pope (November 18, 1210), which ironically coincided with the excommunication of King John of England in 1209.

In the meantime, Frederick II was elected as a new king (September 1211). Frederick had easily won Innocent’s support by confirming Otto’s concessions of 1209. Otto’s declining power was finally crushed after the Battle of Bouvines (July 27, 1214), where the armies of two excommunicated rulers, John of England and Otto of Brunswick, were defeated. Otto died excommunicated in 1218.

The good relationships between pope and emperor were doomed after Innocent’s III death. Frederick failed to keep his promise regarding the separation of Sicily from the German Empire. He instead had his young son Henry crowned King Henry VII of Germany in 1220 and retreated to his native Sicily. In 1227 Gregory IX excommunicated Frederick for his failure to take the cross.

This resulted in the expedition to the Holy Land known as the Sixth Crusade, where Frederick brilliantly restored Jerusalem to Christian control through his masterful diplomacy. Frederick’s success and the support of many German princes contributed to the Peace of San Germano, achieved between pope and emperor in 1230.

By this peace Frederick recognized papal territories in Italy and Sicily; however the peace did not last long. In 1237 Frederick renewed imperial hostilities toward the Lombard League, crushing the communal armies in November that year. Gregory excommunicated Frederick in 1239 and called for a church council to depose the emperor, who was seen as the Antichrist.

Frederick invaded Rome in 1241 only to find Gregory dead. Gregory’s successor Innocent IV followed the policy of his predecessor and in 1245 the First Council of Lyon, deposed the emperor. However Frederick’s rule was strong enough to survive this symbolic deposition.

While Frederick was perceived as the Antichrist by the papal circles, his Sicilian companions saw him as a keen promoter of arts and sciences, the founder of the University of Naples (1224); as an open-minded personality, who was equally tolerant to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, Germans, Normans, and Greeks; and as a man of an extraordinary learning, speaking as many as seven languages and possessing progressive views on economics and government. His extraordinary personality earned him the nickname Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World.

Frederick died on December 13, 1250, and his mighty empire collapsed. After the brief reign of his son Conrad IV (1250–54), the German Empire submerged into two decades of political and social chaos, with no recognized king or emperor. During the interregnum period of 1254–73, the Swiss cantons attempted to break free from the imperial control, Charles of Anjou conquered the imperial possessions in Sicily and southern Italy, while France threatened the German territories.

Habsburg Dynasty

In autumn of 1273, an assembly of German princes, the Kurfürsten, elected a new king, Rudolf of Habsburg, son of Albrecht IV, count of Habsburg, and Hedwig, daughter of Ulrich of Kyburg. Rudolf is thought to have been a prominent figure well before his crowning, possessing lands and estates in Switzerland and Alsace. Pope Gregory X recognized his election, provided that Rudolf renounce his claims to the imperial title and rule in Rome, Sicily, and the papal lands. Alfonso X of Castile also acknowledged Rudolf’s election.

Challenge to his authority came from within, in the face of Otokar II, king of Bohemia, who refused to surrender his territories in Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola to Rudolf. After a war that lasted five months, Rudolf seized the aforementioned provinces in November 1276. Otokar retained Bohemia and the peace was consolidated by the betrothal of Otokar’s son Wenceslaus to Rudolf’s daughter. The peace, however, did not remain long, with Otokar allying himself with some German and Polish princes against Rudolf.

The latter, having made an alliance with Ladislas IV of Hungary, met his enemy on the river March on August 26, 1278. The outcome of the battle was the defeat and death of Otokar and subjugation of Moravia. Having overcome the Bohemian challenge, Rudolf turned his attention to consolidating his authority in the Austrian provinces, where he invested his two sons, Albrecht and Rudolf, as dukes of Austria and Styria.

In doing so, Rudolf expected to establish dynastic rule in his kingdom. At the same time, he attempted to restore peace and order in Germany and Switzerland. In 1289 he marched into Thuringia, where he subdued some rebels. His wish of having his son Albert crowned as German king did not come true, with the electing princes refusing to do so. Rudolf died on July 15, 1291.

The assembly elected Adolf, count of Nassau, as the new king. Unlike his predecessor, Adolf lacked power and influence, being from minor nobility. This choice may have been made because the princes, having tasted power in the House of Habsburg, preferred to install a weak ruler.

Crowned as king of the Romans in Aachen on June 2, 1292, and never anointed Holy Roman Emperor by the pope, Adolf did not achieve any significant accomplishment throughout his brief reign (1292–98). His attempts to subdue Thuringia to his rule failed, and his former supporters deposed him, electing Albrecht of Habsburg, Rudolf I’s son, as their king. Adolf refused to recognize Albert’s election and led his army against him, only to be defeated and killed in the Battle of Göllnheim (July 2, 1298).

Albert I’s reign (1298–1308) is characterized by the growing international importance of the House of Habsburg. His attempt to annex territories over the Burgundian frontier led to a conflict with Philip IV the Fair of France (1285–1314).

However, a lack of papal support urged him to abandon his claims in this region. A treaty between the two kings was signed in 1299, by which Albrecht’s son Rudolf was to marry Philip’s daughter Blanche. In 1303, Pope Boniface VIII had finally acknowledged Albert as the German king and Holy Roman Emperor, regarding him as his ally in the conflict with the French Crown.

In 1306 he made his son Rudolf king of Bohemia. He failed to subdue Thuringia, and his army suffered a heavy loss in 1307. Albert was killed on May 1, 1308, on his way to Swabia, where a revolt had broken out. Most contemporary sources depict Albert as a harsh though just ruler as well as a protector of Jewish communities, persecuted in those days.

Luxembourg Dynasty

Henry VII of Luxembourg succeeded Albert, was acknowledged by the pope, and was crowned by him as emperor on June 29, 1312. At this time the princes’ assembly was torn between the Habsburg and Luxembourg parties. While in Italy, Henry imposed imperial power on rebellious Florence and interfered in the ongoing war of the Guelphs and Ghebellines, supporters of the pope and emperor, respectively, in Tuscany. He also attempted to subdue his vassal Robert, king of Naples, only to die on August 24, 1313, near Siena.

Upon his death, the Luxembourg party of electors’ assembly elected Louis, or Ludwig, IV Wittelsbach of Bavaria, against the wishes of the Habsburg party, which attempted to install Frederick the Fair Habsburg. Louis’s coronation in 1314 led to a violent confl ict between the latter and the Habsburg heir. Frederick’s army was defeated in 1322 in the Battle of Mühldorf. Having eliminated his rival, Louis set out to consolidate his authority.

He went to Rome in January 1328, and was crowned by an old senator, because of the absence of the pope in the Eternal City. While there he deposed Pope John XXII on the grounds of heresy and appointed a Spiritual Franciscan as antipope Nicholas V, who was deposed as soon as the emperor left Rome in early 1329.

While at home Louis acted as the patron of antipapal intellectuals, such as Marsilius of Padua and William Ockham. In 1338 the princes’ assembly had decreed that the king, chosen by the assembly, did not need papal authorization or coronation. This antipapal policy provoked a harsh reaction of the pope, who was then allied with the French king. In order to withstand the papal-French coalition, Louis made an alliance with Edward III of England. In his domestic policies, he relied much on his power and lands in Bavaria.

In 1340 he united Lower and Upper Bavaria, while two years later he annexed neighboring Tyrol. His increasing authority over smaller territorial rulers led to an inevitable conflict with the latter. In 1346, a year before his death, the electors’ assembly, with the support of Pope Clement VI, chose Charles IV of Luxembourg and Bohemia as an antiking.

Louis IV died on October 11, 1346, and the Crown passed to Charles IV. Although crowned emperor in 1355, Charles, unlike his predecessors, did not strive to revive the idea of the universal Christian Roman Empire, ruled by the German emperor. Instead, he invested his powers and resources in the cultural development of Bohemia, his native land, and Prague, where he resided, in particular.

In 1348 he founded and patronized the Charles University of Prague, which attracted scholars and students with its humanist studies. The emperor corresponded with Petrarch and even invited him to settle in Prague, while the Italian humanist called on Charles to return the imperial throne to Rome. Under Charles’s patronage, some of the finest monuments of Old Prague were built.

While most of the emperor’s attention was concentrated on Bohemia, other parts of the empire, especially Germany, suffered from a social crisis following the epidemics of the Black Death (1348–51). Charles issued his famous Golden Bull of 1356, which attempted to define the procedure of imperial election and the annual diet held by the electoral princes. Raised and educated at the French royal court, Charles was related to John II (1350–64) and Charles V (1364–80) of France and supported them in the French struggle against England.

Charles IV died on November 29, 1378, and the titles of the king of Bohemia and king of the Romans passed to his son, Wenceslaus (known as Wenceslaus, or Vaclav IV the Drunkard). Just as his father, Wenceslaus devoted much of his attention to his native Bohemia. His Bohemo-central policy provoked a rebellion of the German princes, who deposed him as king in August 1400, electing the German Rupert, count of Palatine.

Wenceslaus did not give up the title of the king of the Germans and continued reigning in Bohemia until his death in 1419, without acknowledging his deposition and the crowning of Rupert. This also marks the beginning of animosity between Bohemia and Germany, on political, national, and cultural levels. It was under Wenceslaus that the Hussite movement started by John Huss started gaining ground in Bohemia.

After Rupert’s death in 1410 the princes’ assembly elected Sigismund of Luxembourg, margrave of Brandenburg and king of Hungary. Soon after his election, Wenceslaus of Bohemia, his half brother, renounced his claim to the title of king of the Romans and Sigismund was universally recognized as such. During his reign, the history of Hungary became interwoven with that of the Holy Roman Empire.

The two main objectives of his early reign were to put an end to the Papal Schism (1378–1417) and to crush the Hussite movement in Bohemia. Both problems were solved at the Council of Constance (1414–17), where Sigismund was a key figure. The two leaders of the Hussite movement, John Huss and Jerome of Prague, were burned at the stake on July 6, 1415, and May 30, 1416, respectively.

The Papal Schism was ended by the deposition of three rival popes and election of a new one, Martin V. The martyrdom of Huss and Jerome resulted in street riots in Prague, which swiftly transformed into a civil war. In the meantime Wenceslaus died and Sigismund inherited the title of king of Bohemia.

In 1420 he attempted to restore peace and order, only to be rejected by the Bohemian nobility and repulsed by the Hussite army, led by some remaning commanders. The Hussite wars continued until 1436, devastating various eastern regions of the empire. Only a later schism within the movement itself allowed Sigismund to take over. In 1437 a short time before his death, the local nobility accepted him as the king of Bohemia.

Albrecht II Habsburg of Austria succeeded Sigismund, ruling briefly for two years (1437–1439). He also inherited the reigns of Hungary and Bohemia. The Bohemian nobility rejected Albrecht as their king, allied itself with the Poles, and rebelled against him. As king of Hungary, he spent his energy defending the realm against the Ottoman Empire.

Frederick III and Maximilian

After Albert’s death, Frederick III was elected as king of the Germans in 1440. To consolidate his power, he signed the Vienna Concordat with the papacy in 1446, which codified the relationships between the emperor and the pope. Frederick was crowned emperor in 1452, the last imperial crowning in Rome. While unsuccessful in battle, Frederick achieved brilliant results through diplomacy.

In 1452 Frederick married Eleanor of Portugal, receiving a considerable dowry. In 1475 he forced Charles the Bald, duke of Burgundy, to marry his daughter to Frederick’s son, Maximilian. Despite this, his rivals frequently challenged Frederick’s power.

The first challenge came from Albrecht VI, his brother. Between 1458 and 1463 the two fought each other over the control of Austria. The struggle with his nephew, Ladislaus Posthumus, over Hungary and Bohemia, resulted in the capture and imprisonment of the latter. His main rival, however, was a powerful Hungarian king, Matthias Corvinus (1458–90), who seized some of Frederick’s possessions in Austria, Moravia, and Silesia and then took Vienna in 1485.

The collapse of Frederick’s power was prevented only by Corvinus’s death in 1490. The last 10 years of his life, Frederick ruled jointly with his son, Maximilian, who had been crowned the king of the Romans in 1486 and inherited his father’s imperial title after the latter’s death in 1493.

Maximilian held vast territorial possessions well before his ascension to the throne. In 1477 after the death of Charles the Bald of Burgundy, he had inherited the Free County of Burgundy, along with the Netherlands. In 1490 he acquired Tyrol and some parts of Austria from his half-uncle Sigismund.

In 1494 the emperor entered into a conflict with France over the intervention in Italy, which led to the Italian Wars of 1494–1559. He did not live to see his armies beat the French enemy. In 1499 the empire suffered heavy losses in the Battle of Dornach at the hands of the Swiss Confederation, which forced the emperor to acknowledge the independence of the Swiss cantons.

While at home Maximilian tried to reform the imperial constitution. In 1495 the Reichstag of Worms had issued four documents, known as the Reichsreform, which created and legalized two legal establishments: the Reichskreise (Imperial Circle), whose main function was to collect taxes and organize a common defense, and the Reichskammergericht (Imperial Chamber Court), the highest judicial institution of the empire.

Under Maximilian, and perhaps even under his father, Frederick III, the Holy Roman Empire began to rise to be the premier power in Europe. With the election of Maximilian’s grandson, Charles V of Spain, the empire became the largest territorial unit in Europe, encompassing central Europe, Germany, the Low Countries, parts of Burgundy, and Spain with its vast American colonies.