CHAPTER III

THREE KINGS AND A MONK

Apart from the discovery of the West and of the new sea-route to the East, the most important events in the early years of the sixteenth century happened in Italy--Northern Italy. We have seen that Italy was almost the only country which showed no sign, as yet, of settling down within something like the boundaries which delimited the European nations up to the time of the Great War. It must be understood that this is a statement which takes no account of the differences made by Napoleon's victories at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We may disregard them, for the moment, because they were not lasting.

But the most important of all the events happening in Italy had nothing to do with changes of territories or national boundaries. Far more interesting and more helpful to the world was the growth of that Renaissance, or new birth, of love of letters and of all artistic beauty which we saw beginning with Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio, and some of the early Italian painters, sculptors, and jewellers. Moreover, we must not forget the glorious architecture which goes by the name of Gothic, nor the noble buildings in that Byzantine style which the influence of the Moors carried into Spain.

We should notice that a very great impetus was {36} given to that study of Greek literature, which Petrarch and Boccaccio in particular had revived, by the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in the middle of the fifteenth century; for it had the effect of scattering the Greeks far and wide, seeking new homes and bringing their books and their traditions with them.

And further, we ought to observe how this learning had been carried into every country and corner of Europe by the establishment of colleges and universities where it now became possible for every student to read "the classics." Their establishment was the work of the Church or of wealthy men acting under the advice of the Church. Moreover, for what we may call elementary education the teaching of the children of the poorer classes, so far as they received any teaching at all, was also the Church's work, for it was done by the members of the monasteries and convents all over Christendom. It is well that we should bear this in mind, to the Church's credit, at this moment, for the time is close at hand when we shall have to see that same Church accused, and in large measure convicted, of acts very greatly to her discredit.

All the while that the love of letters and of art was growing within the walls of the fortified cities of Italy, the cities were constantly at variance with one another, and even within their walls civic strife seems to have been the rule rather than the exception; but apart from these small local fights there were two principal causes of unrest. The first was the fact that the kings of France were not at all disposed to regard the Alps as forming a natural boundary of their possessions--they were constantly coveting the fertile land of Northern Italy--and a second cause of unrest was the desire, which was strong enough to unite for a time most of the other states, to cripple the excessive power of Venice.

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[Sidenote: The decline of Venice]

Several circumstances combined to make possible the curbing of that power. The Turks were strong enough at sea to demand the full attention of the naval force of Venice, and her resources were vastly diminished by the diversion of that Eastern trade, for which she had held the gate into Europe, to the newly found sea-way round Africa. The Pope took the lead against her. He formed a league which was joined by the Emperor and by the kings of France and Spain. The alliance was too strong for the single state, and after the first battle Venice resigned nearly all her possessions on the mainland. She ceased to be a danger to the neighbouring states.

There was, however, no such combination of circumstances to diminish the power of France. Within a few years after the beginning of the century the French, by the capture of Genoa, had established themselves in a strong position to menace the whole of Italy. The French king Louis XII. had some pretext for the menace, for he could produce a kind of hereditary claim on the sovereignty both of Naples and of Milan. He had served the Pope against Venice, and after rendering this assistance he was not disposed to withdraw his claims. The Pope therefore arranged a new league against his late ally. Spain, the Emperor, and England were parties to this, which was called the Holy League--England under Henry VIII., who was not always to prove himself so close a friend of the Pope! The result was the speedy expulsion from Italy of the French, chiefly by the Spanish armies. Very shortly afterwards the French king died and was succeeded on the throne by his cousin Francis I. in 1515.

It has been my aim, through all the course of this Greatest Story, to encumber it with as few names as possible, in order that the names of the most {38} important actors may stand out the more clearly and be remembered the more easily. But just at the moment which the story has now reached the names of four men, three being powerful kings and one a humble cleric, stand out pre-eminently. We might almost say that the story of those four is the story of all Europe, so large is their part in it.

Luther is the name of the cleric. He was the leader in that great schism, or cleaving off, of the Protestant Church--the Church which "protested"--from the ancient Church of Rome. It is that cleaving off from the old and founding of the new, the reformed, Church, which is called the Reformation.

The three great kings were Francis I. of France, above mentioned, our own King Henry VIII., and--by far the greatest of the three--Charles V.

It was the greatness of Charles V., the accident, as we may perhaps call it, that he held, in his own person and by rightful succession, the sovereignty of so many and extensive countries so far apart from each other, which was one of the chief factors of the story at this time. For he was of the ancient house of the Habsburgs. He was the ruler of Austria. He became Emperor. He became King of Spain. He was Duke of Brabant and Count of Flanders and Holland. He had a claim of sovereignty over Burgundy. The Pope purchased his help against the Reformation movement of Luther by giving up to him such sovereignty as he was able to enforce over the greater part of Italy.

We can see at once what was the position of France thus surrounded. And we must always remember that it was the day of despotic monarchy, when the king could make war or peace at his own pleasure and regarded the lands over which he was king as his own private property. Especially of this despotic kind was the monarchy of Francis. He appears in {39} history as a brilliant figure, ambitious, eager for deeds of arms, without depth of character or fixed principles. He came to the throne as a young man and at once was attracted by the lure of Italy.

At first his arms had a rapid success, and he defeated the combined forces of Spain, the Papal states, and Venice--Venice being then in alliance with the Pope. He was thus victorious over Italy in arms, but the culture of Italy and of the Renaissance made a complete conquest of him. A new combination of Swiss, German, and Spanish arms drove the French out of Italy, and Francis returned, strongly influenced by that new light of art and letters which he had there found. From that invasion of Italy by the French we may date the beginning of the Renaissance in France, whence it spread to other nations of Europe.

[Sidenote: The "Cloth of Gold"]

It was in the year 1516 that Charles succeeded to the throne of Spain and to the possession of all the wealth that the Spanish ships had begun to bring in from the New World. Three years later he was elected Emperor, giving offence thereby to Henry VIII. of England, as well as to Francis, since both had sought to be Emperor. Their common cause of offence led to their famous meeting known as the "Field of the Cloth of Gold" by reason of the magnificence of the decorations, the gay and splendid tents, and so on. But it all ended in nothing, or indeed less than nothing, except an exchange of compliments, for almost immediately afterwards we find Henry, under the influence of the great Cardinal Wolsey, pledged to support Charles. In the shifting alliances of the time it was nearly always against France that England was engaged, notwithstanding that Henry's sister had married Francis' predecessor on the throne of France. Charles, on the other hand, was Henry's nephew. But France was constantly giving aid to Scotland, whether {40} secretly or openly, in her continual fight with England. Scotland, however, had just been beaten to her very knees in the battle of Flodden, and had little fighting left in her for the moment. With such forces as these opposed to France the wonder really is that she maintained her power undiminished. It is yet more wonderful that, under Francis, she should have been ready for still further adventures in Italy. Yet she did so adventure, and though she and her king met with grievous disaster there--especially at the battle of Pavia where Francis was made prisoner and whence he was taken to Madrid--we have to notice that at the death of Francis, shortly before the middle of the century, France was in possession of the provinces of Savoy and Piedmont, both on the Italian side of the Alps--and this, although Charles had been crowned "King of Italy" by the Pope nearly twenty years earlier. Probably the explanation lies chiefly in the fact that the territories over which Charles ruled were so extensive, and also so scattered, that it was impossible for him to bring any great force together at any one place. Moreover, on his south-eastern border, in and around Austria, he was constantly menaced by the Turks ever pressing up from Constantinople. He seems to have tried to rid himself of the Turkish trouble by handing over to his brother some of the provinces on the side which lay most dangerously exposed; but even so their defence must have remained practically on his hands.

He never made good his claim to Burgundy--in which matter again it is rather wonderful that Francis should have been able to resist him. And, not having Burgundy in his possession, he was obliged to maintain a fleet able to command the seas on the west of France in order to go to and fro between Spain and the Netherlands. He must also have a second fleet of ships for bringing treasure from the {41} East; and, since Spain had a long sea-coast on the Mediterranean where the Turks and pirates swarmed, he must have yet a third fleet there for the protection of his trade. Besides, he had a claim of sovereignty over Naples and Sicily.

Therefore, with these, and other less important, calls upon his power it is really not surprising, great although that power was, that it did not prove equal to all he would have liked to demand of it. And further, in those states over which he had been elected Emperor, with the rather vague authority and duties belonging to that title, another cause arose of great and increasing trouble, the Reformation.

[Sidenote: Luther]

For the last few pages we have been occupied with kings and emperors: it is time that our story concerned itself with the cleric of low degree. I put this phrase in place of that which was on my pen's tip to write, namely, "humble cleric," because, however we may think of Luther, "humble" he certainly does not appear. Humble before God he may indeed, as a good Christian, have been. It was perhaps the most striking feature in his character that he would not humble himself before men--not even before that great man whom he had been taught to look on as endowed with a quite special grace and blessing, the Pope of Rome. His origin was humble enough. He was the son of a miner in the German state of Saxony. He had the education of a monk, was made Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wittenberg, in Saxony, and took the degree of Doctor of Divinity. He went on a pilgrimage to Rome and came back grieving sorely over what he saw there.

The way in which the Pope and his council, called the Curia, had been governing, or misgoverning, the Church, had given great offence for many years. The monasteries and the convents, that is to say, the {42} establishments of the monks and the nuns, had done much useful work in acquiring learning and in educating the people throughout Christendom in religious and other knowledge. Many of them were doing good work still. But the condition of most of them appears to have become very bad, both monks and nuns being lazy, gluttonous, and worse--setting the worst possible example to the common people. They were careful perhaps about the performance of the religious ceremonies in the churches, but their religion had little or no influence on the conduct of their lives.

Against Rome itself the complaint of Christendom was not only that it did not exercise its authority to amend these ill practices, and that the very same practices were followed in Rome itself, but also that the Pope and his council exacted money, from the people generally and even from the clergy themselves, and did not apply the money to the purposes for which it had been demanded. For the demand was made on the plea that the money was needed to equip armies to fight the Turk, and those armies were never summoned or put in movement. The money was diverted to increase the private wealth and pomp of Pope and Cardinals and high church dignitaries at Rome.

So there was sufficient cause of offence, both at the centre and in every part of the world over which the Pope claimed authority. We saw in the last volume how our own Wycliffe, and how Huss, in Bohemia, had raised furious protests against these evils in the Church. The fire of those fierce protests was still smouldering. The people understood the protests better. The knowledge of the Bible was not so entirely the possession of the clerics as it had been. The printing press had made many copies. Moreover, the Greeks and the knowledge of the Greek language, {43} in which the New Testament was written, had been widely dispersed when the Turks took Constantinople--the headquarters of the Greek Church.

Luther's first act of protest against the action of Rome was directed against the sale of "Indulgences," as they were called. These "indulgences" were written pardons for sin. They were even credited with power to bring out of Purgatory a soul that was there already. And they--that is to say, the parchments or papers with the pardon written on them--could be bought. They could be bought from people called "pardoners" who sold them on behalf of Rome, and the Pope's explanation was that the money was needed for the building at Rome of the Cathedral of St. Peter.

[Sidenote: The burning of the "Bull"]

Luther boldly declared that the "indulgences" were valueless, because no man, not even the Pope, had the power to forgive sins, and he nailed a declaration to this effect on the door of the great church at Wittenberg and sent another copy to his Archbishop. At first the Pope seems to have made light of the matter; but at length, as Luther's supporters increased in number, he issued a Bull of excommunication against Luther as a heretic, summoning him to Rome to give an account of his actions, and commanding the burning of books which he had written against Rome. We have seen before what such a Bull meant. It had meant so much in the way of setting a man outside the protection of the laws in this world, and in condemning him in the world to come, that even the great Emperor Frederic had to yield before it, cowed and vanquished. The act of the monk of Wittenberg, when he received it, was to throw it publicly on the fire kindled for the very purpose in an open space of the city!

The fire created by the burning of the Papal document set all the smouldering embers into a more {44} furious flame than ever before. That burning of the Bull happened in 1520.

Luther did not go to Rome; but he did go, when summoned by Charles, the Emperor, and appeared before him at the Diet, or meeting, of the German States, held at Worms. Charles, after listening to his passionate pleadings, pronounced that he should receive the treatment of a heretic, but he was allowed to leave Worms and start for his home. On the journey he was taken prisoner by the Elector of Saxony, who had always been a friend to him. It is supposed that this capture was effected for his better protection. In his imprisonment he made the translation into German of the New Testament. Later, he translated the whole Bible.

It is not impossible that this capture was made with the cognisance of Charles himself. The course of events forced him to side with the Pope and oppose the reformers, but there are several incidents which show him much more anxious to make peace, if that were possible, between the two parties, than to take a leading part in the strife. He had much to attend to elsewhere. In 1526 the Protestant states of Germany had leagued themselves together for mutual support; and in the very same year the Turks had made themselves masters of the whole of Hungary, and reduced it to a Turkish province.

It was now only a year since Charles had released Francis, whom he had taken prisoner at Pavia, after making a solemn compact with him; yet Francis was already intriguing against him. Francis had induced the Pope of all people--the Pope whom Charles had so helped against Francis--to be his ally against Charles. Charles's reply was to send a strong force into Italy which sacked Rome and took the Pope prisoner. Thus he disposed of that trouble. He then again made peace with Francis on liberal {45} terms. The Pope was soon set at liberty and returned to his see, but he seems to have learnt his lesson--namely, that Charles held a power far too great to be opposed, if he cared to put that power forth. In 1530 Charles was crowned King of Italy by the Pope and at the same time he received the Pope's consecration as Emperor.

[Sidenote: Spread of Reformation]

Meanwhile the Turks had been extending their aggressions and besieged Venice. And the Reformation, that schism, or cleaving off, which denied the authority of the Pope, spread more widely and took deeper root. Its direction of growth was chiefly northward, from Saxony which is one of the Southern German states. It worked up through Germany and so to Scandinavia and Denmark, to the Netherlands and to France. The help of those German princes who had formed themselves into a Protestant league was essential to Charles if he was to be successful in repelling the Turks, and he consented to withdraw the edicts condemning the so-called "heretics" which had been passed by his own authority.

Finally he did march against the Turks, and though he did not gain any striking victory, a peace on favourable terms was made with them in 1538, after their fleet had suffered a heavy defeat from the Venetians. For the Turks were constantly at war at various points of their wide empire. On the eastern, the Persian side, there was continual fighting, with the result that they maintained their hold on Bagdad, the capital; but it was a possession which they always had to keep strongly defended. Their pirate fleets had established themselves in Tunis and Algiers on the North African coast. Charles made two naval expeditions against them, in the first of which he succeeded tolerably, but in the second had no success at all. The Moslem corsairs remained dominant in {46} the Mediterranean until they suffered a notable defeat in the famous battle of Lepanto in 1571.

Luther died in 1546, boldly uttering, both by speech and writing, his doctrines until the last. He lived to see them firmly grounded in Germany, and spreading north and west. On the Continent of Europe the kings were in opposition to them. In England, exceptional circumstances arose which disposed Henry VIII. to receive them with favour.

Rather as Francis was attracted by the idea of adding to his French possessions the northern and western provinces of Italy, so Henry VIII. was tempted by the desire to regain for England some of the continental territory that had once been hers. It was largely to this end that he had sought alliance with Spain and had helped Spain and the Pope in driving the French out of Italy in 1512. Later he had the assistance of the King of Spain in an invasion of a part of France which had belonged to England in a former reign. He gained a quick success, but before he could establish himself in the conquered province the Spanish help was withdrawn. The adventure gained nothing for England, but cost her a large sum and created much dissatisfaction among the people.

The idea of the Spanish alliance had been in the mind of Henry VIII.'s father, before him, and to confirm it he had married his eldest son to a Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon. That eldest son died, and left Catherine a widow. Henry VIII. pursuing the same policy, sought, and obtained, from the Pope a "dispensation," as it was called--that is to say, a permission--to marry Catherine, although she was his brother's widow.

[Sidenote: Henry VIII. and his Queens]

The alliance with Spain did not bring Henry nearly all that he had hoped of it. He was disgusted by the withdrawal from France of the Spanish force that {47} we have just noted. Catherine's children died, with the exception of a daughter, Mary. Perhaps his great minister, Cardinal Wolsey, put it into Henry's head that there was a curse on his marriage with his brother's widow, or perhaps it was a thought that came to him without Wolsey's suggestion. However it came, it seems that it took possession of him. He expressed doubts about the legality of the marriage. Also he had fallen in love with a lady of the Court, Anne Boleyn. He began to desire the annulment of his marriage with Catherine in order that he might marry Anne Boleyn, and approached the Pope with a request that he should pronounce that marriage invalid and illegal. It was, in effect, asking the head of the Church, who, in theory, could do no wrong, and was infallible, to confess that such infallible authority had erred.

The Pope was not at all anxious to make an enemy of Henry. In the troubles created by Luther's preaching and writing, Henry, so late as 1521, had appeared as a true friend to the Pope by ordering the burning of all Luther's books. So the Pope sent great Churchmen to England to look into the matter of the marriage. There was much talk and many conferences, but in the end Henry must have realised, what he probably had deemed probable from the beginning, that the Pope would not reverse a former decision. He could not get his marriage declared to be illegal by the Church at Rome. He determined to act without that Church, to have the illegality pronounced by English bishops, whom he could trust to express such opinions as he should command them to utter, and to proceed in accordance with their views thus expressed. Catherine was divorced. He married Anne Boleyn.

Once he had taken this step, he followed on the path to which it led, never looking back. The proud {48} Cardinal Wolsey fell from the king's favour, largely by reason of his pride and arrogant ostentation which had raised him up a number of enemies among the English nobles, but he was succeeded by another adviser, Thomas Cromwell, whose influence was even greater in determining the king to be the absolute master of England. Under Wolsey he had gone far in this direction. Parliament had power in its hands, because it had the power of granting subsidies for the king's wars and expenses. Wolsey had advised the king not to summon Parliament, but to extort contributions from his subjects instead. They did not give cheerfully, nor to the full extent of the sums demanded, but they gave grudgingly, in fear of punishment for some charge that would be brought against them if they did not.

Under Cromwell's influence, the king did call his Parliament together; but by that time, with his growing power, he had succeeded in getting his own friends in a majority in that Parliament. And in order to put down any possible opposition in the Upper House, he did not hesitate to bring to the executioner's block some of the noblest and most venerable of the Peers. It was a reign of terror, with Henry as absolute despot.

And he made himself despotic in the Church no less; for that was the final end of that path on which he made the first step when he divorced Catherine and married Anne in defiance of Rome. For first came thunders, ever louder and louder, from Rome, answered by ever louder defiance. It was defiance that was not displeasing to a large number in England. Already, before any of the ideas of the Reformation were introduced, we have noticed England growing restive under the attempts of the Popes of Rome to dictate to her. We may be sure that this restiveness had been increased of later years. Some of the clergy {49} themselves, as we have seen, were none too pleased at the demands which Rome made upon them for money for Turkish wars, or for the building of St. Peter's Cathedral. They were the less pleased, because of a strong suspicion that it never was intended to use the money for the purposes stated.

Henry, therefore, and his powerful and ruthless counsellor were able to turn this dissatisfaction to their own use. The clergy were very ready to support Henry in asserting that the English Church was not to be subservient to Rome. Even the bishops in the Upper House probably thought that they were doing a good work for the freedom of the Church when they passed the Act called the Act of Supremacy which made the King of England head of the English Church. That Church was indeed freed, by the Act, from the authority of Rome, but it was only to put it under another authority, the authority of the English king.

And it gave equally little offence to the majority of the clergy when the king drove the monks from their monasteries, and took their land and its revenues for the service of the Crown or gave them to his friends. The good work of the monasteries had been done, and they had passed the time of their usefulness, for their inmates no longer studied to acquire knowledge, nor imparted it to the laity and their children. Only in the north of England did their suppression rouse opposition and lead to a dangerous rising which the Crown's forces put down with great severity.

But education had been spreading in England, as elsewhere in Christendom, in spite of the religious troubles. The new opening of the ancient stores of classical literature, and their diffusion by the printing press, could scarcely fail to arouse the interest of men of intelligence.

The spirit of protest against Rome which Luther {50} preached had this, at least, in common with the spirit in which Henry of England acted, that both were bitterly and even violently opposed to the Pope's claim of authority. So this spirit of the Reformation made its way in England without encountering the difficulties which it had met in other parts of Europe. The clergy, who, in an earlier reign, would have opposed it, had now become subject, in part by their own act, to the King of England rather than to the Pope of Rome. Protestantism was accepted as the State religion.

In Ireland also Henry declared himself head of the Church as well as king. All Acts of the Irish Parliament, from his reign for several centuries, had to receive the assent of England before they became law.

Of the four great men who had so large a share in the making of our story in the first half of the sixteenth century, the monk, the most important figure of the four, was the first to die, in 1546. The next year saw the deaths of Francis and of Henry. Charles, greatest of the three kings, lived on until 1558, though he laid down his honours two years or so earlier and retired to a monastery to end his days.

By the death of Francis, Charles was relieved of his life-long enemy, and took advantage of that relief to turn all his attention to the Protestant princes of Germany who were leagued together to support their faith by arms. He defeated them at that time, and, using his victory, as was his custom, with moderation, he drew up a document called the "Interim," a statement of doctrines to which he hoped that both Catholics and Protestants would agree. It failed, however, to satisfy either. Five years later the Protestant princes again took arms, and this time their Emperor, whom they found unprepared, had to fly for his life. The ultimate result was a treaty called {51} the Peace of Religion, of which the most important provision was that the Emperor permitted the Protestants, so far as the permission lay with him to give, to hold their doctrines and perform their religious services as they thought right.

[Sidenote: The Peace of Religion]

It was a beautiful name--the Peace of Religion--but unfortunately the name of peace was not sufficient to ensure that peace would follow. Even within the Protestant Church itself there soon arose acute differences of opinion.

The doctrines of the monk won their way over most of North-Western Europe. Into Scandinavia and Denmark they were introduced with the support and favour of the king himself. They made little penetration on the eastern side, for the simple reason that those particular abuses against which they protested did not exist there. Their protest was mainly against evil practices in the Church of Rome. But over Russia, rising into greatness in the east of Europe, the Greek Church prevailed. Constantinople, until its capture by the Turks, had been the capital city, the Holy Place, of that Church; but now the Tsar of Russia claimed to be its head, speaking from his capital city of Moscow.

We saw something of the break-up of the Mongol power, which had extended over nearly the whole of Asia and threatened Europe also, when we were recounting the story of China. The blow that was dealt it at the end of the fourteenth century by the Buddhist monk who became the first Emperor of the Ming Dynasty doubtless helped in its break-up even so far away as its western border. The centre of its power was shattered. It no longer had the strength that comes from unity. The Mongols fell apart into a number of independent tribes. Early in the sixteenth century Russia began to throw off the domination with which those Mongols, or Tartars, always threatened {52} her, and from time to time exercised. She had partly amalgamated with the Tartars, and partly ruled over them, by the middle of that century.

The knowledge of Russia began about the same time to be brought to England, by traders who had found their way to Moscow by adventurous voyages round the top of Scandinavia and so on to the White Sea, whereon is the city of Archangel, and so down into the centre and capital of the great country, travelling partly by river and partly overland. A treaty, for the exchange of the products of the two countries, was made, and the English were allowed to build warehouses for storing those goods which they brought in to trade with and those Russian goods which they obtained in return.

It is of interest to note that this discovery of Muscovy, as Russia for a long while was called in England, was made by sailors in search of a very different land, namely, China. For there was an idea in the minds of the men of the fifteenth century that a way to China, and all its riches, might be found by sea round the top of Scandinavia and so eastward until China was reached.

And so, in fact, some sort of a way was ultimately found through Behring's Straits--the narrow sea-way between the extreme north-east of Asia and the extreme north-west of America. But it is a way so blocked by the ice for so large a part of the year as to be of no practical use, and the discovery of the south-west passage round the Cape took all the interest and zest out of the search for what was called the North-West Passage. Portuguese trading vessels had reached China and Japan before the middle of the century and missionaries of the Order of Jesus, or Jesuits, had introduced Christianity into Japan as they had already brought it to India. Spanish missionaries of the same great monastic order had {53} carried Christianity westward into the New World. Thousands of Indians in Mexico and Peru and other countries conquered by the Spaniards were baptised as Christians. Churches and cathedrals built by the labour of the natives, which cost the Spaniards nothing, began to rise on the sites of the pagan temples.

[Sidenote: Cross and Crescent]

Thus both eastward and westward the Cross, the Christian emblem, travelled with the conquering sword of those who went by sea; but on land, and in the Mediterranean itself, the Mahommedan Crescent was carried far by the scimitar, or curved blade, of the Moslem.

The Moslem Turks fought their way, as we have seen, so far, in Europe, as Vienna, which they nearly, but not quite, captured. On the other side they had subdued Persia, and established themselves at Bagdad. Up to the year 1571 and the heavy defeat of their fleet at Lepanto, they continued to be the strongest naval force in the Mediterranean. It was in the first half of the century that they touched the highest point of their power and extended their sway most widely. In further course of the story we shall find them for the most part on the defensive, striving, especially against the growing might of Russia, to retain what they had won.

Towards the latter part of his reign that great king and emperor, Charles V., had trouble in the most northern section of his wide domain--in the Netherlands. He put down, with severity, a rising of the great city of Ghent, formidable, within its walls, because of the privileges that had been granted to its burghers, because of the wealth and of the numbers of its inhabitants and their independent spirit. This little trouble in the Netherlands might have sounded in his ears, if they had been able to appreciate its meaning, as the first note of an immense trouble that was to follow, for in the years to come we shall find {54} unrest and fighting over almost the whole stage, which has become world-wide, of our story; and we may trace the origin of it all back to what now happened in that comparatively small corner which was called the Netherlands.

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