Somewhat similar was the case of Austria. Terrifying fear of the advancing Turk, joined with the political exigencies of the Habsburg rulers, threw that duchy with most of its dependencies into the hands of the pope. If the bishop of Rome, by favoring the Habsburgs, had lost England, he had at least saved Austria.
[Sidenote: Poland and Ireland]
Ireland and Poland—those two extreme outposts of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe—found their religion to be the most effectual safeguard of their nationality, the most valuable weapon against aggression or assimilation by powerful neighbors.
SUMMARY OF THE RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
By the year 1570 the profound religious and ecclesiastical changes which we have been sketching had been made. For seventy-five years more a series of wars was to be waged in which the religious element was distinctly to enter. In fact these wars have often been called the Religious Wars—the ones connected with the career of Philip II of Spain as well as the subsequent dismal civil war in the Germanies—but in each one the political and economic factors predominated. Nor did the series of wars materially affect the strength or extent of the religions implicated. It was prior to 1570 that the Protestant Revolt had been effected and the Catholic Reformation achieved.
[Sidenote: Geographical Extent of the Revolt]
In the year 1500, the Roman Catholic Church embraced central and western Europe; in the year 1600 nearly half of its former subjects— those throughout northern Europe—no longer recognized its authority or practiced its beliefs. There were left to the Roman Catholic Church at the close of the sixteenth century the Italian states, Spain, Portugal, most of France, the southern Netherlands, the forest cantons of Switzerland, the southern Germanies, Austria, Poland, Ireland, large followings in Bohemia and Hungary, and a straggling unimportant following in other countries.
Those who rejected the Roman Catholic Church in central and western Europe were collectively called Protestants, but they were divided into three major groups. Lutheranism was now the religion of the northern Germanies and the Scandinavian states of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Calvinism, under a bewildering variety of names, was the recognized faith of the majority of the cantons of Switzerland, of the northern Netherlands, and Scotland, and of important followings in Germany, Hungary, France, and England. Anglicanism was the established religion of England.
[Sidenote: Doctrines Held in Common by Catholics and Protestants]
The Protestants retained a large part of Catholic theology, so that all portions of western Christianity continued to have much in common. They still believed in the Trinity, in the divinity of Jesus Christ, in the sacredness of the Jewish scriptures and of the New Testament, the fall of man and his redemption through the sacrifice of the Cross, and in a future life of rewards and punishments. The Christian moralities and virtues continued to be inculcated by Protestants as well as by Catholics.