Term | Definition |
St. Bartholemew’s Day Massacre | Catherine de Medici ordered the killing of the Huguenot’s leaders and this lead to a massacre where over three thousand Huguenots were murdered in Paris. |
Huguenots | French Protestants or Calvinists. |
Henry of Navarre, Henry IV | Protestant Bourbon who came into power in France after the death of Henry III. He said “Paris is worth a mass” and tried to blend the two religious ideals. |
Elizabeth I | Came into power after the death of Mary Tudor and became queen of England. Often referred to as the "Virgin Queen" |
Mary, Queen of Scots | Next in line after Elizabeth, she waited under house arrest creating plots against Elizabeth. Elizabeth finally ordered her beheading after discovering she was working with Philip II. |
Phillip II | Sent in the Spanish Armada with the praise of Pope Sixtus V to eradicate the heretical Queen Elizabeth. |
Spanish Armada | Great fleet of 130 ships that was defeated and forced to return home after losing half of its ships. This was a great victory for Protestants around Europe. |
James I | Came into power as the King of England and Scotland after Elizabeth I. |
Ivan the Terrible | Ruthlessly fought to make Muscovy the centre of the Russian Orthodox Church. |
King Gustavus Adolphus | King of Sweden who fought for the Protestant cause during the Thirty Years War and had the strongest military presence in Northern Europe. |
Thirty Years' War | A war which began as civil wars over religion and spread to the rest of Europe. It started as a war over religion and became political, end by the Treaty of Westphalia 1648. |
Peace of Westphalia, 1648 | Brought peace to the Thirty Years' War and served as a model for resolving conflict among the warring European countries. |
Puritans | Any person seeking "purity" of worship and doctrine, especially if they rejected the Church of England. Many of these people settled in the American colonies. |
William Shakespeare(1564 – 1616) | Famous English playwright, writer, actor whose plays reflected on the contemporary concerns on the nature of power by setting them in faraway times and places. |
Baroque | the qualities most frequently associated with this type of art are grandeur, sensuous richness, drama, vitality, movement, tension, and emotional exuberance. Curves, exaggerated lighting, release from restraint, and even a kind of artistic sensationalism |
Peter Paul Rubens | Was the most popular and prolific Flemish and European painter of the 17th century. He was the proponent of an exuberant Baroque style which emphasized movement, colour and sensuality. |
Opera | A form of theatre in which the drama is conveyed wholly or predominantly through music and singing. Claudio Monteverdi was the first person to apply this art form, which spread from Italy. |
Scientific Revolution | Can be dated roughly as having begun in 1543, the year in which Nicolaus Copernicus published his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) |
Nicolaus Copernicus | Astronomer who formulated the theory of heliocentrism. |
Heliocentrism | the belief that the Sun is at the center of the Universe and/or the Solar System. |
Tycho Brahe | Astrologer and alchemist. Along with his assistant Kjohannes Kepler, he designed the laws for planetary motion. |
Johannes Kepler | A key figure in the 17th century astronomical revolution, was a German Lutheran mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. He is best known for his laws of planetary motion. |
Galileo Galilei | He was an Italian physicist, astronomer, and philosopher. He improved the telescope, made many astrological observations. He discovered that the Earth revolves around the Sun. |
Sir Francis Bacon | He was an English philosopher, statesman and essayist but is best known for leading the scientific revolution with his new 'observation and experimentation' theory which is the way science has been conducted ever since. |
Rene Descartes | A highly influential French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and writer. Dubbed the "Founder of Modern Philosophy" |
Witchcraft | Basically became obsolete after the Scientific Revolution. |
Cardinal Richelieu | Consecrated as a bishop in 1607, he later entered politics, becoming a Secretary of State in 1616. He soon rose in both the Church and the state, becoming a cardinal in 1622, and King Louis XIII's chief minister or regent in 1624. |
Edict of Nantes | Granted Huguenots the same rights as Catholics in a mainly Catholic nation and made them an officially protected minority. It was issued by Henry IV of France on April 13, 1598. This paced the way for tolerance and secularism in France. |
Albrecht von Wallenstein | He was a Bohemian soldier and politician who gave his services (a mercenary army of 30,000 to 100,000 men) during the Danish Period of the Thirty Years' War to Ferdinand II for no charge except the right to plunder the territories that he conquered. |
White Mountain (1620) | A decisive battle in the Thirty Years War. |
The Defenestration of Prague, 1618 | The throwing of Catholic officials from a castle window in Bohemia. Started the Thirty Years' War. |
Politiques | public figures who placed politics before religion and believed that no religious truth was worth civil war |
Moriscos | Muslems in Spain who had converted to Christianity - 1501. Their conversion was often questioned. They were persecuted and often came before the Inquisition. Finally, they were expelled from Spain in 1609. |
Raison d'état | Political theory articulated by French statesmen Richelieu (1585-1642) that holds that the interests and needs of the state may take precedence over traditional moral and international law. |
Tithe | a tax offering of a tenth part of some personal income |