PAGE
The imperial Austrian Councillors are thrown out of the
window of the castle of Hradschin by the enraged Bohemian
Deputies, thus precipitating the Thirty Years' War (page
65), [Frontispiece]
Painting by Vacslaw Brezik.
Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth Rock, [106]
Painting by A. Gisbert.
AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE
TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS, AND CONSEQUENCES OF
THE GREAT EVENTS
(ERA OF POLITICAL-RELIGIOUS WARS)
CHARLES F. HORNE
Gazing across the broader field of universal history, one comes more and more to overlook the merely temporary, constantly shifting border lines of states, and to see Western Europe as a whole, to watch its nations as a single people guided by similar developments of the mind, impelled by similar stirrings of the heart, taking part in but a single story, the marvellous tale of man's advance.
This sense of an all-enfolding unity, an ever-advancing common destiny, sinks weakest perhaps in the period we now approach. The nations seem sharply separated in their careers. In the preceding age the power of Spain and the fanaticism of its monarch, Philip II, had made the reëstablishment of Catholicism the dominant question throughout Europe. But in 1609 Philip III of Spain abandoned his father's attempt to conquer Holland and again enforce a universal religion. In 1610 Henry IV of France, who had brought peace and amity out of the savage religious wars within his own realm, fell under an assassin's knife. These two events may be accepted as marking a turn in the current of the world, a change in the thoughts of men. The next half-century saw wars indeed, bloody and bitter wars, but they were no longer primarily religious. The strife was more than half political, and men of opposite faiths found themselves at times allied upon the battle-field. The feeling of religious brotherhood grew weaker, that of political allegiance stronger.