CivStory

Print, Reformation and Conquest in the Americas

Printing and Renaissance workshops, the Spanish conquest in the Americas and the Indigenous peoples who fought it, allied with it and recorded it, Luther's challenge and Catholic reform, the Valladolid debate and the peace that ended the Thirty Years' War.

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Part 1

In Mainz, between about 1440 and 1455, Johannes Gutenberg developed a printing system of cast metal type, oil-based ink and a screw press, used for the Bible completed around 1455. Movable type had been used earlier in China, and in Korea a book was printed with metal type in 1377. Gutenberg's method suited alphabetic scripts, and presses spread quickly across Europe, changing how texts circulated.

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Part 2

Leonardo da Vinci, trained in Verrocchio's workshop in Florence, worked for patrons in Florence, Milan and finally France, where he died in 1519. He painted The Last Supper in Milan around 1495–98 and filled notebooks with studies of anatomy, machines, water and flight, many of them never built or published in his lifetime. The notebooks show how closely art, craft and observation were linked in Renaissance Italy.

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Part 3

In October 1492 Christopher Columbus, sailing for the Spanish monarchs, reached an island in the Bahamas inhabited by the Lucayan Taíno. His voyages began sustained contact between Europe and the Americas. On Hispaniola, Spanish settlers under his rule imposed forced labour and tribute, and war, enslavement and epidemic disease devastated the Taíno within a few decades.

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Part 4

On 13 August 1521, after a siege of about three months, Spanish forces under Hernán Cortés and a far larger army of Indigenous allies, above all from Tlaxcala, took Tenochtitlan, the island capital of the Mexica. Smallpox had already killed many of its people, and the fighting and sack that followed killed tens of thousands more. The Nahua account in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex sets the defenders' view beside the Spanish letters and chronicles.

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Part 5

In 1517 Martin Luther, a friar and professor at Wittenberg, circulated 95 theses against the sale of indulgences; whether he nailed them to a church door is debated. Printed pamphlets spread his teaching that people are justified by faith alone and that scripture is the final authority. Excommunicated in 1521, he translated the Bible into German, and his challenge, with those of other reformers, split Western Christianity.

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Part 6

Called by Pope Paul III, the Council of Trent met in three periods between 1545 and 1563. It defined Catholic teaching against Protestant positions on scripture, justification and the sacraments, and ordered reforms such as seminaries to train priests. Historians now speak of a 'Catholic Reformation' as well as a 'Counter-Reformation', because movements for church reform had begun before Luther.

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Part 7

In 1550 Charles V suspended new conquests in the Americas and called theologians and jurists to Valladolid to judge whether such wars could be just. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, citing Aristotle's idea of natural slavery, argued that Indigenous peoples could be conquered for their own good; the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas answered that they were rational peoples with legitimate rulers. The panel gave no formal verdict, and conquest and forced labour went on.

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Part 8

On 24 October 1648, after five years of negotiation at Münster and Osnabrück, envoys of the emperor, France, Sweden and the German princes signed treaties ending the Thirty Years' War, which had killed an estimated five million people. The settlement extended toleration within the Empire to Calvinists alongside Lutherans and Catholics. The idea that Westphalia founded a modern order of sovereign states is a later interpretation that many historians now question.

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