Editing Renaissance (section)

==Protestantism==
Protestantism also emerged during this time. Depending who you ask, Martin Luther was either an [[this guy|enlightened reformer]] or whiny [[rules lawyer]]. [[Nazi|(He definitely was a massive antisemite even by the standards of his time, though)]]. He started out as a Catholic monk, but got fed up with the brazen corruption the Pope was endorsing and the clergy's deviation from the tenets of Christianity. Luther wasn't the first Catholic to call out the church's corruption, but he was the most noticeable and proactive. After nailing a list of 95 criticisms to his local cathedral door, Luther decided to start his own practice of Christianity... [[Meme|without blackjack or hookers]]. This went about as well as you'd expect (he was declared a heretic and hunted as a renegade), but what the Pope and the Hapsburgs (the dynasty that effectively controlled the title of Holy Roman Emperor) hadn't counted on was how incredibly unpopular they'd made themselves over the years. 

You may have heard of the Borgia family and how they got away with some pretty crazy shit while they controlled the papacy, including bribery, incest, and murder. The truth is that the papacy had been in severe trouble for many centuries, including a period where the office of pope was so tightly controlled by the French that they relocated his seat from the apostolic Rome to the backwater town of Avignon just to prove a point. When the stranglehold of the French kings started to loosen a little, it devolved to the point where three people claimed to be pope at the same time. Lutheranism and its more radical strains like Calvinism hit the Dutch, German, and Austrian parts of the Holy Roman Empire like a tidal wave, making it essentially ungovernable as a single whole - not that the Holy Roman Empire was ever whole to begin with, even before Spain came into the picture. Protestantism also started making inroads into other countries. Radical Zwinglians and Calvinists set up shop in Geneva and Zurich, establishing theocratic regimes where all forms of fun (dancing, excessive eating, drinking) were strictly verboten. It even swept into France, where it intersected with power struggles among the nobility for the throne to nastily split the majority Catholic kingdom.

Even then, the Reformation might have been crushed had it not been for one nation. England was ruled by Henry VIII, who was a devout Catholic but [[That guy|wanted his marriage annulled]] because his only living children were daughters and his wife was too old to produce more children. However, there was a major roadblock to getting it: he'd gotten the Pope's personal dispensation to marry his sister-in-law after his brother had died and asking for a reversal meant sending a message to the Pope, who was at the time a prisoner of the Holy Roman Emperor, his wife's nephew. The Pope declined for obvious reasons (read: he didn't want to upset the guy who was holding him prisoner), so Henry got the Archbishop of Canterbury to step in and give him the annulment, which meant breaking with the Roman Catholic Church and forming his own branch of Christianity. This was further reinforced by his daughter Elizabeth I, who essentially made the monarch the head of the new religion and forced all English clergy to pledge loyalty to the Queen above all else. The average English noble and peasant alike were remarkably on-board with this, as the whole "England vs the Continent" mentality was already firmly entrenched from about four centuries of previous wars. However, many Protestants felt that the Church of England was still too much like Catholicism, with its head of state essentially taking the role of the Pope. These Puritans would cause problems for the British Crown later on. But either way, in England the continental Protestants had received a potent ally in opposition to Catholicism as the English sided with the Dutch against the Holy Romans, except when they sided with the Holy Romans against the French. Like we said, this was a weird time. 

Things came to a head with the Thirty Years War, the first major conflict between the nations of Europe following the widespread adoption of gunpowder. It began with German princes holding more power than the Holy Roman Emperor and Bohemian (Bohemia now being called the Czech Republic) Protestants not wanting to be ruled by an anti-Protestant Emperor and throwing a group of imperial ambassadors out of a window (yes, really) in protest. Incumbent Emperor Ferdinand II reacted by destroying a Protestant church and his officials started killing Protestant protestors. While nominally the war was over Protestantism vs. Catholicism, politics played an important role in the ever-shifting alliances of the nations involved. For example, despite being devoutly Catholic themselves and having Cardinal Richelieu acting as the power behind the throne, France was more concerned with keeping the Hapsburgs at bay and supplied aid to the Protestants in the North (while harshly suppressing their own Protestants as a threat to the French Crown). 

Eventually Louis XIV came to the throne in France (and ruled for '''72 years''', still the longest verifiable reign of any sovereign in recorded history) and quickly proved to be even more brutally cunning than Richelieu. With that the Habsburg ambitions died and everyone agreed to the Peace of Westphalia, which is regarded today as the foundation of national sovereignty as we know it. This also tends to mark the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the "Early Modern" period, or the "Age of Enlightenment."