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controlling the produce from its own fields or from the fields of its masters could have produced.
    In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries this dead hand of the Church became so oppressive that rumors of rebellion began to circulate, and in the opening years of the sixteenth century dramatic events unfolded in various parts of Europe that would modify the history of the world. In England, King Henry VIII began his stormy involvement with a succession of six wives by divorcing his first, Catherine of Aragon, and beheading two of her successors. To win his divorce Henry had to defy both the religious strictures against divorce and the dictates that the pope thundered at him from Rome. In surprisingly quick order Henry showed himself strong enough to ignore the pope and to lead theCatholic Church in England into open rebellion against papal authority. While remaining outwardly Catholic, the English Church sowed the seed that would end in its becoming a Church of its own, the established Church of England.
    Having accomplished what at the time must have seemed a miracle, for the Catholic Church of Rome was all-powerful, Henry broadened his campaign against the pope by ordering that all the monasteries and convents in England be dissolved, the monks and nuns thrown out into the countryside, and the ownership of Church lands transferred to local knights and barons to ensure their loyalty to the Crown. The dead hand of the Church was thus transformed into the bold hand of the barons. The lot of the peasants attached to the land was not conspicuously improved; nor were the agricultural practices. But a vast revolutionary change had swept England: a new Church, a new landownership, a new spirit of defiance. A cynic has accurately summarized the peaceful revolution: ‘So Protestantism in England was born of concupiscence and cupidity.’
    There is no evidence that Henry engineered his break from Rome with any avowed intention of transferring Church property to the barons, but that is what happened. Nor did he intend to convert the serfs of the Church into semifreemen responsible to local English landlords, but that also happened. It was a revolution of enormous significance, which started with a divorce proceeding and ended in a fundamental change in landownership.
    Meanwhile, in Germany, a stubborn monk, Martin Luther, was launching his own rebellion against papal authority. Initially, his was a clean-cut philosophical rebellion, which, from the start, presaged an eventual break with Rome and the establishment of a new denomination, Lutheranism, although he never called it that. (Toward the close of his rebellion, sex played a role much as it had with Henry VIII; Luther enticed the nun Katharina von Bora to leave her convent by renouncing her vows and to marry him.)
    Luther’s plans initially contained nothing parallel to the dissolution of the English monasteries; indeed, when revolutionary German peasants tried to wrest lands from the Church, Luther sided with the Church and against the peasants. He wanted no physical uprisings in Germany, merely the ecclesiastical reordering of Church procedures and freedom from the domination of the monks, who had been so oppressive and in many instances totally inept.
    Eventually, following the revolutions in theology begun by Luther, movements did occur to divest the monasteries of their vast landholdings, and the results were similar to those in England: the newly freed lands fell into the hands of the nobility while the serfs profited little.
    Within a relatively few decades, these two rebellious denominations reshaped the history of modern Europe: an independent Church of England only slightly removed, in ritual, from Rome; and lusty Lutheranism, whose principles would become manifest in various nations, each under its own charismatic leadership: Ulrich Zwingli in Switzerland, John Knox in Scotland, and especially John Calvin in scattered localities throughout Europe.
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