Religious Europe In The 16th Century Essay

When we look at Religious Europe in the 16th century and the 19th century, we see a completely drastic change. In the 16th century the two main religions were Catholicism, which was a deviation from Christianity, and Protestantism, which came with a reformation started by Martin Luther while trying to turn the Catholic Church back to its foundations which were Christianity. About a century later came what was known as absolutism. It was the kind of government in which the king had absolute and unlimited power under the excuse that God had stated him and he had “divine right”. Absolutism started in 1661 with Louis XIV, or the “Sun King”, in France. In the next century, the 18th century, started the Age of Reason. The Age of Reason was movement which followed hard after the mysticism, religion, and superstition of the Middle Ages. This movement …show more content…
When a king wanted to become absolute, he sought to increase his royal authority by getting more control over the nation’s finances, religion, and nobility; enlarging the standing army and developing a strong navy; incrementing the government’s bureaucracy and making it an instrument of their royal will; and expanding their territory. They said that God had given them their authority and that they ruled by “divine right”. This meant that they had absolute authority and they were not bound to any manmade laws. Absolutism took over many European countries like France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia yet in England it was defeated. English kings had to contend with Parliament. Absolutism lasted almost two centuries and people, especially the middle class, were tired of doing whatever the king wanted so they started to rebel against the kings until July of 1789 when the French imprisoned Louis XVI, the last French absolutist, and later sentenced him to death in 1792. Since the excuse for absolutism was that their authority came from God, people ended up blaming God and rejecting