Would there have been a Counter-Reformation, which finally did in Galileo in 1633, without a Reformation starting in 1517? Italy had had a good run for a long time before its science tapered off in the 17th Century. The Italian Renaissance Catholic Church had been highly sophisticated and elitist, but in response to the Reformation, it became more populist, honest, and dogmatic.
The usual attribution to the Ottomans is that their pressure on and conquest of Constantinople led to Orthodox scholars fleeing, with their texts of Ancient Greek learning, to Italy in the 1400s. The sudden arrival of multiple ancient texts led not just to the recovery of Greek learning, but to Renaissance Italians developing a critical spirit as they tried to figure out which texts were most authentic.
Conversely, the Enlightenment really got into gear after Vienna was rescued from the Ottomans for the last time in 1681.
Yes, I do note in the article that I suspect that there would have been a Counter-Reformation and it would have leveraged institutions like the Inquisition. Material progress promotes unbelief, and so science was something the Catholic Church would have eventually wanted to suppress in its own right had there not been a Protestant movement attached to it.
Regarding those fleeing scholars, they don't seem to have a persistent impact that's differentially felt across the Catholic and Protestant worlds.
I think your main thesis (Protestantism equals Modernity) is hobbled by the fact that Catholic France was the country that birthed Enlightenment, Modernity's software, instead of one of those wonderful free-thinking Protestant countries that were busy murdering witches non-stop well into the 18th century. Industrialization was kicked off in England because of very specific circumstances there (mostly a lack of manpower that made automatization very appealing) but was very quickly embraced by, again, Catholic powers and Catholic regions of Germany like Bavaria that one would really, really struggle to describe as hotbeds of obscurantist anti-modernism. (Also, let me state that there are great, thought-provoking ideas in the post; I wrote "hobbled" and not "destroyed")
My thesis is not Protestantism equals Modernity and regarding France, please see the article's discussion of France and note that I mention agglomeration and France was historically very large relative to much of the rest of Europe.
I'm sorry, it must have been somebody else who wrote this paragraph: "In my view, the advent of Protestantism in Europe was a watershed moment for the continent and the Ottomans made that moment possible. The claim that the Ottomans are responsible for modernity is tongue-in-cheek. No one seriously contends that the Ottomans were directly responsible for the innovations that made economic growth possible, nor for the institutional developments that made it it possible to innovate. But many people believe that Protestantism was, if not responsible, extremely important for those developments."
What I mean to say is that I get (I share) the idea that the breakup of Europe's political and religious landscape made possible by the Protestant reformation was fundamental for the development of ideas, institutions and technologies that later coalesced into industrialization. I just object to the presentation, and the badmouthing (and ignorance) of the role of Catholics so typical of those who make such arguments. You have 8 references to France in the entire post, none of which credits France for the Enlightenment.
The French Enlightenment was largely the discovery by the French of how Britain worked after the Glorious Revolution, hence Voltaire's discussion of the religious tolerance of the London stock exchange. The Glorious Revolution was the overthrow of the Catholic Stuart dynasty by the Protestant Orange dynasty, from the Protestant Netherlands, which had spent 80 years fighting for independence from Catholic Spain.
And, of course, the Scottish Enlightenment arguably did more for Modernity's "software" than the French Enlightenment, and it also consisted largely in the Scottish discovery of how England worked after the Glorious Revolution.
This is far too strong a claim. I don't know of any instances of the "Catholic Church" fighting against material progress and economic growth on principle. And I'm pretty familiar with the documentary history. And when it comes to regression studies of the effects of prosperity on religiosity in Europe, wealth does not determine whether or not a family is likely to be religious, but education level does. I can dig up the source (it was an economics lit review) if it would help you refine your own views. :)
Sorry my mistake for being unclear. The specific claim I am responding to is "Material progress promotes unbelief, and so science was something the Catholic Church would have eventually wanted to suppress in its own right had there not been a Protestant movement attached to it."
@cremieux can chime in if I am misreading him, but I don't even know how to steelman this claim - it seems so strong and outside of the evidence I know.
It was the Puritan Cotton Mather who preached, "Religion begot prosperity, and the daughters devoured the mother." Nonetheless, I would not call Puritans anti-material progress.
I agree that claim is a bit of a stretch, but I think it's supportable. Without pluralism, science generally gets squelched in the end. E.g., China after 1100AD.
The problem is that the actual effects of the scientific discoveries of the early modern period on the living conditions of the general population wouldn't really kick in until the mid 19th century, a point where it is (in my judgement) far too late for the Church to start going after technological progress.
Life was actually maybe much worse for people during the 17th century than it was during the 16th, encouraging more belief in God.
This is one of the most interesting and eye-opening posts I've read this year.
Some comments in no particular order:
(1) Perhaps this is more comprehensively addressed in the article (which I haven't read yet), but I am still skeptical that innovation rates were unaffected by Protestantism's accelerative influence on broad literacy rates. Even elite scientists are drawn from the pool of literate people, and their own capabilities and potential are capped by the quality of the lesser human capital they can interact with and bounce ideas off.
Also note that northern Europe was much less urbanized than southern Europe. In the pre-industrial world, absent very strong efforts (almost invariably of a religious nature), literacy was a near exclusively urban phenomenon so far as classes other than the clergy and nobility were concerned. So the Protestant areas would have had to run faster just to stand still. That their literacy rates caught up and then flipped the southern Catholic areas was a huge achievement consider the latter's advantages in much greater urbanization.
> The Dutch, which had by far the highest levels of literacy during the 18th century, did not exhibit higher densities of researchers than low-literacy countries such as France.
I was surprised to read this - the Dutch had 1.5M vs. 20M French people, I don't think the ratio of prominent Dutch vs. French scientists in that era was 1:13, more like 1:3 or 1:4 if I had to make an off the cuff guess (perhaps someone can look into the Human Accomplishment database?). But even accepting that claim, I'd like to see other explanations addressed. For instance, France had Europe's most luxurious court (=many patronage opportunities), and an expansive bureaucracy that could de facto provide welfare for scientists (e.g. de Fermat), which at least matched the opportunities provided by the Dutch Republic's moneyed bourgeois patrons. However, as Europe's most commercially advanced state, it was also brimming with money-making opportunities that must have siphoned away human capital from fundamental science.
(2) The Protestant repressions were much more brutal than the Catholics. The Spanish Inquisition killed 3,000-5,000 people over its three centuries of existence, IIRC the Protestants burned 10x as many "witches" just in that single category of prosecution. Witch burnings were negligible in the solidly Catholic realms since the Inquisition suppressed those kinds of superstitions. Just want to put that in here as an additional data point for Caballo's argument that religious Protestant ideologues may have been dumb fanatics but inadvertently their fractiousness allowed progress to accelerate.
(3) Not sold on the idea that science would have been suppressed in the event that Catholicism remained hegemonic in Western Europe. First, the very absence of the Protestant threat may have made them feel more secure about allowing liberalism (as indeed was the case before its appearance). Second, the power of the centralized monarchical state relative to both local and ecclesiastical authority was in any case increasing, and this was a programmed outcome (printing x literacy x gunpowder x administrative capacity). As was the increasing military competition between them. As was the outcome of this competition increasingly hinging on technological modernity. That is, the backwards and anti-science states would have found themselves getting increasingly beaten and selected against on the battlefield.
There were also Catholic states that ensconced religious freedom, the most prominent example being the PLC. It obviously had its own critical problems (totally dysfunctional governance system x exploitative "second serfdom") but it does demonstrate the large degree of heterogeneity even within the Catholic realm, so even if Western Europe as a whole had gone really repressive under Catholic hegemony then science might have found succor in places like Krakow and Lwow, or more speculatively, the Russian Empire after Peter the Great.
In any case the critical mass of literate human capital unleashed by the printing press was so large I find it hard to imagine the Industrial Revolution being postponed by more than perhaps half a century, let alone canceled.
(4) Speaking of Russia and since you have an interest in heresies, the "Judaizing heresy" from late 15C Novgorod might be right up your alley. ;)
(5) First thought I had when you asked what the Ottoman contribution to modernity was: Coffee. Obviously wasn't central, but not entirely insignificant either, considering it's one of the few legitimate nootropics and the role of coffee salons in knowledge propagation.
Fascinating. It does make me wonder: did a similar process play out analogously in the Muslim world? That is, did major Christian-Muslim clashes like with the Habsburgs, or earlier during the Crusades, distract the attention of leading Islamic powers and create more space for Muslim schisms to persist?
While possible, I'm going to guess the answer is 'no', because Europeans didn't have a large, expansionist empire trying to break into the Muslim world like Europe had with the Ottomans.
Short answer: No, because Islam has no separation of religion and state. That's the crucial ideological element which allowed for Western European pluralism. Although I will point out that the Islamic regime most often-cited as being tolerant is Spain, which was the furthest away from the Caliphate as possible to the west. Indonesia would be a similar example to the east of the Caliphate, also often cited as being a relatively-tolerant version of Islam. Their tolerance is usually greatly-exaggerated, though.
indonesian islam before the modern era was basically the native religion with arabic words, highly syncretic (a good book on this is “ islamisation and its opponents in java” havent read it but read a review on it lol).
As for the andalusians that was probably only the case during the emirate kinda because when the later caliphate broke up into different taifas and the northern christian kingdoms started pushing down south it further led to the creation of the distinct arabic speaking muslim andalusian identity. But the almohad expulsion of the christians certainly helped also.
Long but solid analysis. So the Ottoman expansion spawned the scientific, economic and political strengths that enabled the West to dominate the world from the siege of Vienna to the present.
<<Up until the Counter-Reformation, Europe’s Protestant and Catholic cities were on a similar enough trajectory when it came to the production of scientists, but suddenly growth overall was curbed across the continent, leading to a slowdown for both, with total stagnation in the Catholic cities. If we perform this comparison at the country level, the importance of the Counter-Reformation becomes even more dramatic:5>>
Regarding the map: It is interesting to note that Spain changed ruling dynasty in the beginning of the 1700's from the Habsburg's to the French Bourbon's, who implemented some modernizing reforms.
Well... the truly remarkable thing is that on the Continent (not UK and Ireland) the Catholic-Protestant dividing line follows so remarkably the border of the Roman Empire. This has rarely been adequately explained, but suggests some very ancient dynamics.
As the paper notes, the borders follow from military-logistical concerns and random luck, like influential people randomly dying, or those people being forced to act a certain way by a nearby military force.
Protestantism is a germanic phenomenon. It never achieved lasting success in either Romance or Slavic speaking regions so it's no surprise that the Catholic-Protestant dividing line follows the border of the Western Roman Empire.
Hegel draws attention to this in The Philosophy of History. Other than southern Germany--Austria and Bavaria--the speakers of Germanic languages embraced Protestantism. Other than a small population in France that was eventually expelled, the speakers of Romance languages remained Catholic. The Protestant Reformation can be seen as a movement of German nationalism.
Estonia & Finland don't speak Germanic languages. They don't even speak Indo-European languages! Latvia does, however (it speaks a Baltic language), and there Lutherans also outnumber Catholics (its fellow Baltic-speaking country Lithuania is mostly Catholic).
I am sorry, but I think it is completely bogus. Most heretical movements were, how to put it, "leftist", in the sense that they wanted the redistribution of the property of the rich, often denied obedience to kings. So the wordly powers and the church joined in crushing them.
Protestantism was a "rightist" movement that explicitly courted support by
1) saying the church and monasteries should not own land, therefore, the king and the nobility can take that land for themselves
2) saying that kings have a right to rule over the church, and were full of praise of "the godly prince"
3) when some German peasants revolted anyway, Luther came down 100% against them, disobedience to the Pope is justifiable, to the king - not
Thus, it offered strong incentives to kings and nobility to support them, they could get everything, more land, more power, more praise and thus some have chosen to support them.
Why was it geographically so centered on NW Europe is a good question. Southern France was full of Huguenot, including the king of Navarra. I think it dependent on Spain. Spain was strong and intent on keeping their neighborhood Catholic. Austrian Habsburgs wanted to impress their Spanish relatives and with these powers together, plus the Pope, Protestantism in the Mediterrean or Hungary has no chance. Poland hat a strongly Catholic identity because their arch-rival Russia had a strongly Orthodox one, you don't change your religion in such circumstances.
The lands that went Protestant were very far from the Ottoman Empire. The big exception is the Kingdom of Hungary and the Principality of Transsylvania, where Ottoman support helped Protestantism survive. Transsylvania had the first law of religious tolerance in Europe, the Edict of Torda, largely because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sigismund_Z%C3%A1polya kept changing his religion, ending up Unitarian. Thus it was the only place where Unitarianism was tolerated.
Lol, protestants only become something in the XVIII century, you article don't prove anything except that you know nothing about the catholic church, middle ages, etc... this is pure protestant babble and fanfic, nothing more, especially the renaissance who some people believe it destroyed the intolerant catholic church and free the world of the science, easily refuted by the way, when in reality both protestants and catholics are intolerant and with former being considerable more to heresies and science who they believe are superstitions.
I would make the case that the Renaissance was in a sense a special age. It was the age when people started to publish books in their national language instead of Latin. I can't say whether it meant less church control (though likely), more free thought (likely enough), but not necessarily better thought (churchmen were educated in logical reasoning, if any rando, can write a book, the quality will IMHO go down, not up, I know for a fact that early Protestant Bible translations were terrible, they just flat out left out anything they did not agree with), but the key thing is later nationalists could point to the Renaissance as the beginnings of a national culture. For example, the official Italian language was explicitly based on Dante's dialect.
I agree. The author forgets how Protestants recruited the support of kings and nobles by sayign they should own the land, churches and monasteries should not own land, by saying the churches should be led by kings and the whole cult of the godly prince.
This article is over all very, very good and a lot of fun! However it comes across as polemic, since the author make some strong sweeping claims that are negative and not supported by the evidence provided - go perhaps he has arrived at that conclusion from undiscussed evidence.
For example it is strongly implied, and then asserted, that Catholic institutions cause a decline in science by persecuting science, but if this were true you could find evidence in the well articulated inquisitional tribunal literature. I know of no such evidence.
Similarly it is implied that Protestants' weak state power and weak institutions preserve science, but Mokyr provides good evidence that scientists fled in both directions - Catholic lands to Protestant and Protestants towards Catholic lands. Once again though in all of the instances I know of, besides Galileo, it is due to political and theological fighting, not scientific claims, creating this back and forth.
I don't mean this as an apology for Catholic ecclesiastical behavior in the 17th century, which is more or less abominable. But to the extent that the article is polemical, it is painting is selective picture which mistakes the negative effects of heresy hunting for anti-science, anti-economic growth institutions per se - institutions whose inner workings the article fails to describe.
My own view is the one which dominates Mokyr's book: the fractured religious states of Europe inadvertently helped foster a competitive intellectual environment. Neither Protestantism nor Catholicism nor the Ottomans are our scientific saviors - though I do enjoy the status game!
This bears on a long-standing quest of mine, to refute the asinine claim that "War is the Health of the State," as Randolph Bourne said of WWI, and all too many libertarians since then have mindlessly parroted. War may reduce freedom, but it can also increase it, too. I knew the Wars of Religion were examples of this, but never thought to include the Ottoman Empire's invasions, too. Thanks for the rundown, very interesting!
Sure, but then Italy, Spain and Portugal withered on the vine 1500-1850 while avoiding the religious wars in Netherlands, Germany or England. Economically and demographically, the effects of Inquisition were not good.
Beautiful exposition on the tension between faith & reason, of cooperation through competition, & of how quickly science devolves to scientism.
That hegemony, even non-religiously based tyranny where the state is the church, brings on Lysenkoism seems obvious. The obverse, that incompetence in governance is critical to freedom is much less appreciated.
There's so much to absorb in this article that I will conclude with the Muslim "closure of ijtihad" (mental struggle vs jihad, physical struggle) circa 1,000 AD. The Mohammedan empire was not immune from religious schisms & solved the issue in a catholic fashion: suppression of thought with the concomitant decline in science.
Today we stand at the same juncture, where sacred narratives are being promoted as universal and unassailable "truths," —what counterforce will clash with the borders of our modern scientism to allow our emergence from our current «technological dark age»(Professor Gian-Carlo Rota during a 1970's dinner conversation)?
Fascinating stuff! Are you familiar with Deirdre McCloskey's related work? She echoes your suggestion that the Lutheran and Church of England inability to stamp out new Protestant sects was the key spark leading to the industrial revolution. See her books and the link below:
How are the data sources you're drawing on operationalizing "scientist"? I had the impression the term wasn't really in use until the 19th century, and most of the academic departments that we would identify as sciences also date from that period.
It's an asymmetric card-driven strategy game, with some similarities to GMT's counterinsurgency games. Factions are the English, the French, the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, the Protestants, and the Papacy. Starts with Protestantism spreading like wildfire, then it turns into a grind. The Papacy and the Hapsburgs are in a de facto alliance from the beginning, as are the Protestants and the Ottomans, and any time the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs have a truce the Protestants are likely in for a walloping.
The idea that the Ottomans helped Protestantism spread by challenging the Catholic powers at the key moment is clearly borne out by the gameplay.
Would there have been a Counter-Reformation, which finally did in Galileo in 1633, without a Reformation starting in 1517? Italy had had a good run for a long time before its science tapered off in the 17th Century. The Italian Renaissance Catholic Church had been highly sophisticated and elitist, but in response to the Reformation, it became more populist, honest, and dogmatic.
The usual attribution to the Ottomans is that their pressure on and conquest of Constantinople led to Orthodox scholars fleeing, with their texts of Ancient Greek learning, to Italy in the 1400s. The sudden arrival of multiple ancient texts led not just to the recovery of Greek learning, but to Renaissance Italians developing a critical spirit as they tried to figure out which texts were most authentic.
Conversely, the Enlightenment really got into gear after Vienna was rescued from the Ottomans for the last time in 1681.
Yes, I do note in the article that I suspect that there would have been a Counter-Reformation and it would have leveraged institutions like the Inquisition. Material progress promotes unbelief, and so science was something the Catholic Church would have eventually wanted to suppress in its own right had there not been a Protestant movement attached to it.
Regarding those fleeing scholars, they don't seem to have a persistent impact that's differentially felt across the Catholic and Protestant worlds.
I think your main thesis (Protestantism equals Modernity) is hobbled by the fact that Catholic France was the country that birthed Enlightenment, Modernity's software, instead of one of those wonderful free-thinking Protestant countries that were busy murdering witches non-stop well into the 18th century. Industrialization was kicked off in England because of very specific circumstances there (mostly a lack of manpower that made automatization very appealing) but was very quickly embraced by, again, Catholic powers and Catholic regions of Germany like Bavaria that one would really, really struggle to describe as hotbeds of obscurantist anti-modernism. (Also, let me state that there are great, thought-provoking ideas in the post; I wrote "hobbled" and not "destroyed")
My thesis is not Protestantism equals Modernity and regarding France, please see the article's discussion of France and note that I mention agglomeration and France was historically very large relative to much of the rest of Europe.
I'm sorry, it must have been somebody else who wrote this paragraph: "In my view, the advent of Protestantism in Europe was a watershed moment for the continent and the Ottomans made that moment possible. The claim that the Ottomans are responsible for modernity is tongue-in-cheek. No one seriously contends that the Ottomans were directly responsible for the innovations that made economic growth possible, nor for the institutional developments that made it it possible to innovate. But many people believe that Protestantism was, if not responsible, extremely important for those developments."
No, you just misread it. That paragraph clearly does not equate Protestantism with Modernity.
What I mean to say is that I get (I share) the idea that the breakup of Europe's political and religious landscape made possible by the Protestant reformation was fundamental for the development of ideas, institutions and technologies that later coalesced into industrialization. I just object to the presentation, and the badmouthing (and ignorance) of the role of Catholics so typical of those who make such arguments. You have 8 references to France in the entire post, none of which credits France for the Enlightenment.
The French Enlightenment was largely the discovery by the French of how Britain worked after the Glorious Revolution, hence Voltaire's discussion of the religious tolerance of the London stock exchange. The Glorious Revolution was the overthrow of the Catholic Stuart dynasty by the Protestant Orange dynasty, from the Protestant Netherlands, which had spent 80 years fighting for independence from Catholic Spain.
And, of course, the Scottish Enlightenment arguably did more for Modernity's "software" than the French Enlightenment, and it also consisted largely in the Scottish discovery of how England worked after the Glorious Revolution.
This is far too strong a claim. I don't know of any instances of the "Catholic Church" fighting against material progress and economic growth on principle. And I'm pretty familiar with the documentary history. And when it comes to regression studies of the effects of prosperity on religiosity in Europe, wealth does not determine whether or not a family is likely to be religious, but education level does. I can dig up the source (it was an economics lit review) if it would help you refine your own views. :)
He said the Counter-Reformation had the unintended consequence of suppressing material progress, not that its intended result was to do that.
Sorry my mistake for being unclear. The specific claim I am responding to is "Material progress promotes unbelief, and so science was something the Catholic Church would have eventually wanted to suppress in its own right had there not been a Protestant movement attached to it."
@cremieux can chime in if I am misreading him, but I don't even know how to steelman this claim - it seems so strong and outside of the evidence I know.
This letter by Cardinal Bellarmine concerning Galileo, I think shows the strongest version of the catholic view of the time, which even then takes seriously the claims of scientists as potentially overturning old, revered readings of Scripture. Though it does raise a very high epistemological bar: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Galileo_Affair/k7D1CXFBl2gC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA67&printsec=frontcover
It was the Puritan Cotton Mather who preached, "Religion begot prosperity, and the daughters devoured the mother." Nonetheless, I would not call Puritans anti-material progress.
I agree that claim is a bit of a stretch, but I think it's supportable. Without pluralism, science generally gets squelched in the end. E.g., China after 1100AD.
The problem is that the actual effects of the scientific discoveries of the early modern period on the living conditions of the general population wouldn't really kick in until the mid 19th century, a point where it is (in my judgement) far too late for the Church to start going after technological progress.
Life was actually maybe much worse for people during the 17th century than it was during the 16th, encouraging more belief in God.
You have to re-read the post!
The Counter-Reformation also spared Iberia and Italy the wars of religion that killed so many people in NW Europe.
And it also spared them the economic progress that resulted from them, deferring those civil wars until the 20th century. Spanish Civil War, anyone?
Northern Italy was industrialized during the 1800s.
You wrote this in two hours?
Yes.
Do you make notes or some sort of a zettelkasten? Can you share some thoughts/methods that you find helpful in productive writing?
I'm preparing a post on writing quickly, but I am writing it ironically slowly.
This is one of the most interesting and eye-opening posts I've read this year.
Some comments in no particular order:
(1) Perhaps this is more comprehensively addressed in the article (which I haven't read yet), but I am still skeptical that innovation rates were unaffected by Protestantism's accelerative influence on broad literacy rates. Even elite scientists are drawn from the pool of literate people, and their own capabilities and potential are capped by the quality of the lesser human capital they can interact with and bounce ideas off.
Also note that northern Europe was much less urbanized than southern Europe. In the pre-industrial world, absent very strong efforts (almost invariably of a religious nature), literacy was a near exclusively urban phenomenon so far as classes other than the clergy and nobility were concerned. So the Protestant areas would have had to run faster just to stand still. That their literacy rates caught up and then flipped the southern Catholic areas was a huge achievement consider the latter's advantages in much greater urbanization.
> The Dutch, which had by far the highest levels of literacy during the 18th century, did not exhibit higher densities of researchers than low-literacy countries such as France.
I was surprised to read this - the Dutch had 1.5M vs. 20M French people, I don't think the ratio of prominent Dutch vs. French scientists in that era was 1:13, more like 1:3 or 1:4 if I had to make an off the cuff guess (perhaps someone can look into the Human Accomplishment database?). But even accepting that claim, I'd like to see other explanations addressed. For instance, France had Europe's most luxurious court (=many patronage opportunities), and an expansive bureaucracy that could de facto provide welfare for scientists (e.g. de Fermat), which at least matched the opportunities provided by the Dutch Republic's moneyed bourgeois patrons. However, as Europe's most commercially advanced state, it was also brimming with money-making opportunities that must have siphoned away human capital from fundamental science.
(2) The Protestant repressions were much more brutal than the Catholics. The Spanish Inquisition killed 3,000-5,000 people over its three centuries of existence, IIRC the Protestants burned 10x as many "witches" just in that single category of prosecution. Witch burnings were negligible in the solidly Catholic realms since the Inquisition suppressed those kinds of superstitions. Just want to put that in here as an additional data point for Caballo's argument that religious Protestant ideologues may have been dumb fanatics but inadvertently their fractiousness allowed progress to accelerate.
(3) Not sold on the idea that science would have been suppressed in the event that Catholicism remained hegemonic in Western Europe. First, the very absence of the Protestant threat may have made them feel more secure about allowing liberalism (as indeed was the case before its appearance). Second, the power of the centralized monarchical state relative to both local and ecclesiastical authority was in any case increasing, and this was a programmed outcome (printing x literacy x gunpowder x administrative capacity). As was the increasing military competition between them. As was the outcome of this competition increasingly hinging on technological modernity. That is, the backwards and anti-science states would have found themselves getting increasingly beaten and selected against on the battlefield.
There were also Catholic states that ensconced religious freedom, the most prominent example being the PLC. It obviously had its own critical problems (totally dysfunctional governance system x exploitative "second serfdom") but it does demonstrate the large degree of heterogeneity even within the Catholic realm, so even if Western Europe as a whole had gone really repressive under Catholic hegemony then science might have found succor in places like Krakow and Lwow, or more speculatively, the Russian Empire after Peter the Great.
In any case the critical mass of literate human capital unleashed by the printing press was so large I find it hard to imagine the Industrial Revolution being postponed by more than perhaps half a century, let alone canceled.
(4) Speaking of Russia and since you have an interest in heresies, the "Judaizing heresy" from late 15C Novgorod might be right up your alley. ;)
(5) First thought I had when you asked what the Ottoman contribution to modernity was: Coffee. Obviously wasn't central, but not entirely insignificant either, considering it's one of the few legitimate nootropics and the role of coffee salons in knowledge propagation.
Fascinating. It does make me wonder: did a similar process play out analogously in the Muslim world? That is, did major Christian-Muslim clashes like with the Habsburgs, or earlier during the Crusades, distract the attention of leading Islamic powers and create more space for Muslim schisms to persist?
While possible, I'm going to guess the answer is 'no', because Europeans didn't have a large, expansionist empire trying to break into the Muslim world like Europe had with the Ottomans.
The Mongols did.
Short answer: No, because Islam has no separation of religion and state. That's the crucial ideological element which allowed for Western European pluralism. Although I will point out that the Islamic regime most often-cited as being tolerant is Spain, which was the furthest away from the Caliphate as possible to the west. Indonesia would be a similar example to the east of the Caliphate, also often cited as being a relatively-tolerant version of Islam. Their tolerance is usually greatly-exaggerated, though.
indonesian islam before the modern era was basically the native religion with arabic words, highly syncretic (a good book on this is “ islamisation and its opponents in java” havent read it but read a review on it lol).
As for the andalusians that was probably only the case during the emirate kinda because when the later caliphate broke up into different taifas and the northern christian kingdoms started pushing down south it further led to the creation of the distinct arabic speaking muslim andalusian identity. But the almohad expulsion of the christians certainly helped also.
Long but solid analysis. So the Ottoman expansion spawned the scientific, economic and political strengths that enabled the West to dominate the world from the siege of Vienna to the present.
<<Up until the Counter-Reformation, Europe’s Protestant and Catholic cities were on a similar enough trajectory when it came to the production of scientists, but suddenly growth overall was curbed across the continent, leading to a slowdown for both, with total stagnation in the Catholic cities. If we perform this comparison at the country level, the importance of the Counter-Reformation becomes even more dramatic:5>>
Regarding the map: It is interesting to note that Spain changed ruling dynasty in the beginning of the 1700's from the Habsburg's to the French Bourbon's, who implemented some modernizing reforms.
Well... the truly remarkable thing is that on the Continent (not UK and Ireland) the Catholic-Protestant dividing line follows so remarkably the border of the Roman Empire. This has rarely been adequately explained, but suggests some very ancient dynamics.
As the paper notes, the borders follow from military-logistical concerns and random luck, like influential people randomly dying, or those people being forced to act a certain way by a nearby military force.
Protestantism is a germanic phenomenon. It never achieved lasting success in either Romance or Slavic speaking regions so it's no surprise that the Catholic-Protestant dividing line follows the border of the Western Roman Empire.
Hegel draws attention to this in The Philosophy of History. Other than southern Germany--Austria and Bavaria--the speakers of Germanic languages embraced Protestantism. Other than a small population in France that was eventually expelled, the speakers of Romance languages remained Catholic. The Protestant Reformation can be seen as a movement of German nationalism.
Estonia & Finland don't speak Germanic languages. They don't even speak Indo-European languages! Latvia does, however (it speaks a Baltic language), and there Lutherans also outnumber Catholics (its fellow Baltic-speaking country Lithuania is mostly Catholic).
I am sorry, but I think it is completely bogus. Most heretical movements were, how to put it, "leftist", in the sense that they wanted the redistribution of the property of the rich, often denied obedience to kings. So the wordly powers and the church joined in crushing them.
Protestantism was a "rightist" movement that explicitly courted support by
1) saying the church and monasteries should not own land, therefore, the king and the nobility can take that land for themselves
2) saying that kings have a right to rule over the church, and were full of praise of "the godly prince"
3) when some German peasants revolted anyway, Luther came down 100% against them, disobedience to the Pope is justifiable, to the king - not
Thus, it offered strong incentives to kings and nobility to support them, they could get everything, more land, more power, more praise and thus some have chosen to support them.
Why was it geographically so centered on NW Europe is a good question. Southern France was full of Huguenot, including the king of Navarra. I think it dependent on Spain. Spain was strong and intent on keeping their neighborhood Catholic. Austrian Habsburgs wanted to impress their Spanish relatives and with these powers together, plus the Pope, Protestantism in the Mediterrean or Hungary has no chance. Poland hat a strongly Catholic identity because their arch-rival Russia had a strongly Orthodox one, you don't change your religion in such circumstances.
The lands that went Protestant were very far from the Ottoman Empire. The big exception is the Kingdom of Hungary and the Principality of Transsylvania, where Ottoman support helped Protestantism survive. Transsylvania had the first law of religious tolerance in Europe, the Edict of Torda, largely because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sigismund_Z%C3%A1polya kept changing his religion, ending up Unitarian. Thus it was the only place where Unitarianism was tolerated.
Lol, protestants only become something in the XVIII century, you article don't prove anything except that you know nothing about the catholic church, middle ages, etc... this is pure protestant babble and fanfic, nothing more, especially the renaissance who some people believe it destroyed the intolerant catholic church and free the world of the science, easily refuted by the way, when in reality both protestants and catholics are intolerant and with former being considerable more to heresies and science who they believe are superstitions.
https://historyforatheists.com/2021/08/the-great-myths-13-the-renaissance-myth/
https://historyforatheists.com/2021/05/the-great-myths-12-religious-wars-and-violence/
https://historyforatheists.com/2020/03/the-great-myths-8-the-loss-of-ancient-learning/
I would make the case that the Renaissance was in a sense a special age. It was the age when people started to publish books in their national language instead of Latin. I can't say whether it meant less church control (though likely), more free thought (likely enough), but not necessarily better thought (churchmen were educated in logical reasoning, if any rando, can write a book, the quality will IMHO go down, not up, I know for a fact that early Protestant Bible translations were terrible, they just flat out left out anything they did not agree with), but the key thing is later nationalists could point to the Renaissance as the beginnings of a national culture. For example, the official Italian language was explicitly based on Dante's dialect.
I agree. The author forgets how Protestants recruited the support of kings and nobles by sayign they should own the land, churches and monasteries should not own land, by saying the churches should be led by kings and the whole cult of the godly prince.
This article is over all very, very good and a lot of fun! However it comes across as polemic, since the author make some strong sweeping claims that are negative and not supported by the evidence provided - go perhaps he has arrived at that conclusion from undiscussed evidence.
For example it is strongly implied, and then asserted, that Catholic institutions cause a decline in science by persecuting science, but if this were true you could find evidence in the well articulated inquisitional tribunal literature. I know of no such evidence.
Similarly it is implied that Protestants' weak state power and weak institutions preserve science, but Mokyr provides good evidence that scientists fled in both directions - Catholic lands to Protestant and Protestants towards Catholic lands. Once again though in all of the instances I know of, besides Galileo, it is due to political and theological fighting, not scientific claims, creating this back and forth.
I don't mean this as an apology for Catholic ecclesiastical behavior in the 17th century, which is more or less abominable. But to the extent that the article is polemical, it is painting is selective picture which mistakes the negative effects of heresy hunting for anti-science, anti-economic growth institutions per se - institutions whose inner workings the article fails to describe.
My own view is the one which dominates Mokyr's book: the fractured religious states of Europe inadvertently helped foster a competitive intellectual environment. Neither Protestantism nor Catholicism nor the Ottomans are our scientific saviors - though I do enjoy the status game!
This bears on a long-standing quest of mine, to refute the asinine claim that "War is the Health of the State," as Randolph Bourne said of WWI, and all too many libertarians since then have mindlessly parroted. War may reduce freedom, but it can also increase it, too. I knew the Wars of Religion were examples of this, but never thought to include the Ottoman Empire's invasions, too. Thanks for the rundown, very interesting!
Sure, but then Italy, Spain and Portugal withered on the vine 1500-1850 while avoiding the religious wars in Netherlands, Germany or England. Economically and demographically, the effects of Inquisition were not good.
Beautiful exposition on the tension between faith & reason, of cooperation through competition, & of how quickly science devolves to scientism.
That hegemony, even non-religiously based tyranny where the state is the church, brings on Lysenkoism seems obvious. The obverse, that incompetence in governance is critical to freedom is much less appreciated.
There's so much to absorb in this article that I will conclude with the Muslim "closure of ijtihad" (mental struggle vs jihad, physical struggle) circa 1,000 AD. The Mohammedan empire was not immune from religious schisms & solved the issue in a catholic fashion: suppression of thought with the concomitant decline in science.
Today we stand at the same juncture, where sacred narratives are being promoted as universal and unassailable "truths," —what counterforce will clash with the borders of our modern scientism to allow our emergence from our current «technological dark age»(Professor Gian-Carlo Rota during a 1970's dinner conversation)?
Fascinating stuff! Are you familiar with Deirdre McCloskey's related work? She echoes your suggestion that the Lutheran and Church of England inability to stamp out new Protestant sects was the key spark leading to the industrial revolution. See her books and the link below:
https://oll.libertyfund.org/publications/liberty-matters/donald-boudreaux-deirdre-mccloskey-economists-ideas-bourgeois-era
How are the data sources you're drawing on operationalizing "scientist"? I had the impression the term wasn't really in use until the 19th century, and most of the academic departments that we would identify as sciences also date from that period.
Here I Stand is basically this essay in board game form.
Say more? I've never played it.
It's an asymmetric card-driven strategy game, with some similarities to GMT's counterinsurgency games. Factions are the English, the French, the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, the Protestants, and the Papacy. Starts with Protestantism spreading like wildfire, then it turns into a grind. The Papacy and the Hapsburgs are in a de facto alliance from the beginning, as are the Protestants and the Ottomans, and any time the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs have a truce the Protestants are likely in for a walloping.
The idea that the Ottomans helped Protestantism spread by challenging the Catholic powers at the key moment is clearly borne out by the gameplay.
Wow, that sounds exactly like my post. I'm buying the game immediately.