Entire, more than entire we have been devastated! – Andreas Gryphius, Tears of the Fatherland, Anno Domini 1636

If the Renaissance begot the Thirty Years’ War, then the Thirty Years’ War most certainly begot the sudden decline of the Renaissance. The immensity of destruction which resulted from this series of conflicts taking hold of Northern Europe over the course of thirty years, were a slow coming consequence of religious tensions arising from the 16th century Reformation led by Martin Luther and in particular his critique of the Holy Roman Empire.  The Lutheran emphasis on the need for individual interpretation of scripture over trust in the word of traditional theologians had created a schism which divided the former empire into a checkerboard of Catholic and Lutheran states holding two competing visions of the world.

A settlement reached in the 1555 Peace of Augsburg had not held, and an uneasy truce between the two sides had seen itself destabilised by an ever-expansive Protestantism. Religious tensions alone had not been enough to trigger war, there were external drivers and realpolitik aplenty, but when in 1618, the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II was replaced as king of Bohemia by the Protestant Frederick V of the Palatinate, the die was cast.

Frederick V, a Calvinist had been offered the crown by protestant nobles wary of the increasing Catholicism of the Habsburgs. This acceptance by the short-lived ‘Winter King’ had not only been an affront to the Holy Roman empire but resulted in a constitutional crisis within Europe; especially since Frederick was married to Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of King James I of England. If initially Frederick had seemed hesitant to defy the high-powered Holy Roman Emperor, his subsequent acceptance, even if it had been the fruit of genuine protestant belief rather than a simple hunger for power, had unleashed the monster that would bring an estimated 8 million to their deaths.

The resulting wars unleashed not only waves of death and displacement, but in turn illuminated the shortcomings of theological thinking of all kinds when it came to a fitting and compassionate response to the necessities and fragilities of the human condition. This newfound desire for a more secularised reading of the world in the face of the widespread fatalities caused by religious conflict, bit by bit paved the way toward the Enlightenment by illuminating the need for rational solutions to societal problems.

Enlightenment, in short, came as the response to a 100-year period of religious conflict, and the rise of Humanistic ways of thinking were a direct response to the horror of violence that had swept Europe. The post-war proliferation of coffee houses enabled new hubs of intellectual exchange, where discussion of philosophical and political matters could be held at leisure, and in these coffee houses religiosity gave way to ‘reason’ and moral certitude to a gentle scepticism.

If this all sounds as if the Renaissance ground to a halt with an immediacy, that simply wasn’t so. The transition from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment was gradual in nature. While both the religious wars and the Sack of Rome played a pivotal part in the transformation, new developments in thought, technology and commerce were the real begetters of change as they always are.