Monarchy, Exploration, Colonization, Revolution
In 1517, Martin Luther denounced the practices of the Church by nailing his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in Saxony. He was finally excommunicated by the pope in 1520. Shortly thereafter, Henry VIII of England split from the Catholic Church and proclaimed himself the head of the Church of England. Now there were officially two branches of Christianity, Catholicism and Protestantism.
Henry was one of the great monarchs of the age. In fact Europe experienced this age as one of great monarchs, from Henry VIII and Elizabeth I of England, to Henry IV and Louis XIV of France, to Peter the Great and Catherine the Great of Russia.
This was a time of upheaval on much of the European continent. In eastern Europe, Romanian principalities fell to the Ottoman Turks in the 1500s; this streak was continued in 1526 with the Ottoman defeat of the Hungarian army. By 1541, the Turks ruled central Hungary, but their streak began to end when the Habsburgs, a royal German family, gained Ottoman-ruled Hungarian territory in a 12-year conflict that ended in 1699. In Czechoslovakia, the Habsburgs came to power in 1526 (and ruled there till the end of World War I in 1918). A series of uprisings against Ottoman rule resulted in an autonomous Serbian principality in 1817; in 1867, the Ottoman garrison was expelled from Belgrade. During the revolutionary year of 1848-49, Hungary defeated the Habsburg on their throne, but Habsburg rule was re-established with Russian help. In 1859, the principalities of Moldavia and Walachia merged to become modern Romania; this new country was recognized internationally in 1861. The Treaty of San Stefano in 1878 at the conclusion of the Russo-Turkish War saw the creation of an autonomous Bulgaria and Serbian independence (Timeline: Ottomans and Balkans, 2010).
It was also the age of European exploration of the Americas. This era, which began in 1492 with Christopher Columbus, was continued in the early 1500s by explorers such as Ferdinand Magellan and Hernando Cortez. The age became one of colonization and displacement of native populations. In the first decade of the 1500s, the Portuguese claimed Brazil, Mauritius, and Sumatra; and in 1511, Malacca and Indonesia (then known as the Spice Islands), backing these claims by establishing a series of forts. Spain settled Cuba in 1511 and used it as a base to conquer Mexico and parts of Central and South America. For a brief time, Spain became the richest country in the world by virtue of the captured gold flowing into its treasury, until it all flowed out again to finance war.
A little later, in 1536, Jacques Cartier founded Montreal, in Canada. In 1565, Pedro Menendez founded St. Augustine, in Florida, having earlier destroyed a Huguenot colony in the area later known as South Carolina. In 1607, the English founded Jamestown in what is now Virginia. Jamestown became the first permanent English settlement in the New World. In 1620, the Mayflower, carrying 120 Puritans, landed at Plymouth Rock. Eventually 13 colonies lined the eastern seaboard of what would become the United States.
During this time period in Africa, even as colonization made inroads and the slave trade became a global industry, new African empires arose: the Buganda Kingdom (later Uganda) near Lake Victoria; the Ashanti empire in Ghana; the Changamire empire, the Zulu nation, and the Kingdom of Sotho, all in various parts of southern Africa; the Kanem-Boru empire in Sudan; the Lunda Kingdom in what is now Angola; and the Mandinka empire in the upper Niger Basin. An earlier empire, the Ethiopian, expanded, doubling in size; later, Ethiopia successfully fought against European domination, the only African nation to have such success. By the mid-16th century, the European slave trade was firmly established, taking root along with colonization. Some African-controlled centers of the slave trade were Kenya, Zanzibar, and eastern Congo (Global African history timeline, n.d.). The Portuguese, the Dutch, Spaniards, Germans, French, Italians, and the British all participated in a colonial land rush (this land rush, which became known in the late 1800s as the Scramble for Africa, resulted in territorial divisions formalized at the 1884 Berlin Conference, which largely ignored tribal boundaries and set the scene for conflict in the 20th century).
In the 1700s, the age of the great monarchs drew to a close. The kings who followed were ill-equipped to deal with the great problem of the 18th century: revolution. (Even the strong-willed Napoleon Bonaparte ultimately could do nothing to stop the slave revolution that began in 1791 in the French possession of Haiti.)
