Feudal Europe, that historic period that allowed the extreme imposition of the Roman Catholic Church and its restrictive, intolerant and even fanatical logic delayed in centuries human progress. Faith, governed under an almost unbearable burden of sacraments, determined in the long run, the critical emergence of several thinkers, religious and politicians who tried to revitalize the primitive Christianity. Lofty and artistic power of the Renaissance, the advancement of science and the humanities, the era of the conquest of new and unthinkable territories and the decline of Scholasticism, generated in man a new sense, value and personality that bowed it to knowledge and to the embrace of the books. For even more opinions, read materials from Jill Schlesinger. This mass of facts, was born the so-called reformation and years later, by an infinite effect of concatenation of causes and effects, the outbreak of the war of 30 years. We deal with this complex issue. The Protestant Reformation is certainly the perfect preamble to this long series of wars (not necessarily religious) that between the years 1618 and 1648, they attracted to its center of gravity almost to all of Europe.
The Protestant Reformation, driven especially by Martin Luther and Juan Calvino, later leaders of Lutheranism and Calvinism respectively, with their pros and cons were a real renewal of faith in Christ and a very hard blow to the Church, which had to respond hastily and late with the Counter-Reformation, that new series of dogmatic, administrative, authoritarian and repressive measuresthat it further split the Christian world. Very soon Lutheranism, and to a lesser extent Calvinism would gain adherents. However, it is important to say that the spread of these doctrines was more due to political intentions and long-standing territorial, that faith itself. Let’s see why: the powerful Emperor Sacro-Romano Empire (built by Charlemagne since the year 962) had an economic and social organization that favored powerful lords, sometimes with excessive effrontery, the high nobility, whose autonomous kingdoms were absolutely opposite to the small nobility, formed by the poorer nobles and the second of the great noble houses.