Читать книгу The Great Hollenberg Saga - Heinz Niederste-Hollenberg - Страница 47

And yet, despite those contradicting conditions, this period was nevertheless a deeply religious epoch which included both, Martin Luther with the Bible as well as Savonarola burning pictures on Italian market places.

What then followed, after 1500 A.D., can be confidently called the “bloody Renaissance”. It was not the idealistic humanity anymore that dominated, but rather the fanned fear of Hell and Devil, growing into a militant intolerance against any deflection in religion and believe and ending in multiple religious conflicts throughout Europe. And as if this wasn’t already enough, there were epidemic events like the “Black Plague”, also called the “Black Death”, which swept the world in the 14th century, reaching Europe at its peak around 1350 A.D. and reducing the population there by one third. Two other events, even more profound, caused thereafter dramatic spititual, economic and social changes:

These two carnages, the “Thirty-Year-War” (1618 -1648 A.D.) and the “Witch-Hunt” or “Witch-Cremation” period of the 16th and 17th centuries, were undoubtedly the ultimate peak where mercenaries and soldiers massacred the population as never before – under the jubilations of theologians on both sides. Both events perpetuated the egoistic politics of the Central European powers and firmly established the split between Catholoc and Protestant Europe. At the end, Spain lost its military supremacy it had enjoyed before.

Humanity suffered through-out and was in certain areas not even existing anymore. Central Europe experienced an awesome long period of two belligerent parties – the Clericals (Pope, bishops, etc.) on one hand and the Seculars (Emperor, nobility, etc.) on the other – fighting stubbornly and mercilessly, without pitty, about their predominance in power and faith. All this happened on the back of mostly uneducated people.

Thus, and with hinsight, several hundred years later, it’s more easily to clarify many particulars and courses of the time: Was the “Reformation” just a lucky btreak or a misadventure of history?

It depends on one’s particular point of view. Within this framework, Luther and the Reformation were at the time only a part of this development. Others were climate change (“Little ice-age”), resulting in crop failure, inflation, hunger, general poverty and a high mortality as additional contributing elements.

At the same time, however, while Richelieu modernized France and England lived through a golden age under Queen Elisabeth, the bulk of the people – mostly uneducated – suffered in an unknown monstrosity under the century old quarrels between the Clerical and Secular powers. The Church used this framework to denounce and eradicate the so called “leftovers of the old paganism”: Many thousands of people lost their lives in the subsequent purgatory of witch-hunt. It was the wilful intention to subjugate the people to the “Only blessed Creed” – or turn them fugitive. Church and history called it Inquisition.

This, by all means, is a situation comparable to the dictatorships of the

20th century as well as those most recent events in the Middle East.

The property and other assets of the ”cleaned” or just burned in the inferno of the purgatory turned up as an