religious wars in europe

In Europe, the Christian church had been a near universal church for about 1000 years, but this was changed by the reformation of the early 1500s. In particular, the enduring emotional appeal of the crusade was to be extremely influential. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox.

…a long succession of civil wars. Nothing is more immediately destructive for concepts of religious freedom and mutual respect than war waged in the name of faith.

Chapter 4 brings us to the 30 Years' War.

Much as Philip II hated and feared a possible Huguenot (French Protestant) victory in France, he was content to see the civil wars continue, anxious most often to intervene on the side of the Catholics yet sometimes covertly offering help to the Huguenots.

The eight wars of religion (1562-1598) Musée protestant > The 16th century > The eight wars of religion (1562-1598). Three years later there was a very limited response to Pope Callistus III’s efforts to raise troops to relieve Mehmed II’s siege of Belgrade, despite a papal pronouncement that the city’s fall would endanger the whole Christian world. In fact, another war had already begun.

Although Burgundians were again to see service outside the walls of Nicopolis, aiding the Wallachians in 1445, the Polish and Hungarian armies in the so-called Crusade of Varna in 1444 were joined by only a few Czech, German, and Italian troops, despite the appeals of Pope Eugenius IV; the crusade ended in a defeat at Varna (on the Black Sea coast in modern-day Bulgaria) more disastrous than that at Nicopolis.

The Seljuk Turks, who had taken the distant holy places of Christianity in the eleventh century, were supplanted by the Ottoman Turks, who drove from Central Asia into the Near East and then into Europe, albeit only (at this stage) Europe’s eastern borderlands.Furthermore, in this period, as long as wars were against pagans, infidels, or heretics, then contemporaries typically regarded them as “crusades,” whether or not they met the original criteria for a formal crusade and regardless of whether they were undertaken in the Baltic, Iberia, northwest Africa, Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean, or southeastern Europe—and this meant that they were not just conducted by Spaniards, Portuguese, Teutonic Knights, Hungarians, Serbs, or Cypriots. Chelcicky railed against those who scrupled to eat pork on Friday but lightly shed Christian blood. Then around the year 1400 the Lithuanians converted en masse to Christianity, and the crowns of Lithuania and Poland were united in marriage. Thanks to the leadership of János Hunyadi and the religious zeal of the defenders, the siege ended in a remarkable Christian victory, celebrated by the ringing of church bells all over Christendom.

Germany, France, and the Netherlands each achieved a settlement of the religious problem by means of war, and in each case the solution contained original aspects. Germans were still able to crusade close to home in the fifteenth century, however, against the Hussites in Bohemia and Silesia in the 1420s. The bulk of the crusaders’ army was composed of the forces of the Hungarian king, including troops from across Central and Eastern Europe: Bohemia, Bosnia, Carinthia, Styria, Transylvania, and Wallachia. In a sense, then, the order could be said to have achieved part of its goals, in that it helped to obtain the conversion of many pagans to Christianity! As the historian Philippe Contamine points out, this was advocated by one Hussite group, the Union of Bohemian Brothers.

military service.”Furthermore, once the Hussites had enjoyed sustained success against Sigismund’s armies, they had the opportunity to impose their views on others by force, and this was one of the chief reasons for the splintering of the movement into factions. Yet there was an alternative to taking up arms, which was to undergo martyrdom. The greatest "international" conflict of the period was the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), a war that had its origins in the complicated religious and political environment of the period. Their leading theologian, Peter Chelcicky, “preached nonviolence. After their victory over the Serbians at the epic Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the Ottomans expanded through southeastern Europe, gradually conquering the region’s Greek Orthodox princes but being steadfastly defied by the important (and Roman Catholic) Hungarian kingdom.

However, while there were to be no more general crusades to the Holy Land—no more expeditions, that is, which drew volunteers from across Christendom, and which conducted campaigns in Palestine and the surrounding region—this was not the end of crusading.First, although we now know the Holy Land was lost for good, this was by no means obvious to Western Christians in the fourteenth century or for two centuries thereafter.

However, Western Europe was not seriously threatened by the Turks before the 1520s, and while calls for help in campaigns against the Ottomans stimulated a significant response in the West in the late fourteenth century, they drew only a limited response in the 125 years after the disastrous denouement of the so-called Crusade of Nicopolis in September 1396.The crusade was reminiscent of the original Crusades, in its pan-European appeal, which transcended even the Great Schism (discussed below), and in the transnational composition of the Christian forces.