1560 to 1648: How Religious War and New Science Ended the Old Order

The idea

The exam's last band runs from fifteen sixty to sixteen forty-eight, and the anchor's two chapters describe one world breaking in two ways. The first break was war. Augsburg had let princes choose their subjects' religion, and no one anywhere believed a rival confession could be saved. France fought itself from Vassy in fifteen sixty-two through St. Bartholomew's Day to the three Henrys, until Henry IV bought Paris with a mass and Nantes in fifteen ninety-eight made tolerance a matter of state rather than belief. Philip II fought the Dutch, who declared a republic in fifteen eighty-one, and England, whose ships beat the Armada in fifteen eighty-eight, and bankrupted Spain doing it. Then the Empire: a window in Prague in sixteen eighteen, Catholic victories to sixteen twenty-nine, Sweden with French money, France itself in sixteen thirty-five, and Westphalia in sixteen forty-eight, which left the Empire a mosaic of autonomous states, the sample question's answer, and eight million dead. After it, states built standing armies and wanted order and control above religion, which is where absolutism begins. The second break was in the head. Natural philosophy had described a universe everyone already knew; humanism showed the ancients disagreed; Bacon said start from experience and try to disprove; Copernicus moved the sun in fifteen forty-three, Brahe gathered the data, Kepler drew the ellipses, and Galileo saw the moons in sixteen ten and knelt before the Inquisition in sixteen thirty-three during the same religious war. Descartes doubted his way to a mechanical universe, and God became its clockmaker. Vesalius cut, Harvey traced the blood, and science gained authority because it could be shown. Newton, the Royal Society and the Enlightenment lie past the exam's edge, and the course stops where they begin.