ABSTRACT
The sixteenth century was notable for two great changes which have shaped the subsequent history of the Christian West. First, Spain and Portugal acquired vast new empires in the Americas and the Far East which made Christianity a global religion. A king of Spain gave his name to what still remains the only Christian country in Asia, the Philippines, while a Roman Catholic population was formed in Latin America which is now the largest in the world. Second, Protestantism ended forever the religious unity of western Christendom under the Pope, as in the years after Luther’s revolt in 1517 most of northern Europe declared its independence of Rome and has preserved it to the present day. Yet that Protestant rejection of the Papacy provoked a massive Catholic reaction, the Counter-Reformation, which left Europe more religious in 1600 than it had been in 1500, as two in some ways rather similar movements of spiritual renewal strove for mastery, in more than a hundred years of religious war.
