1. The World in an Age of Colonialism Instructor Pacas

3. Spanish wars against the Protestants had plunged the Spanish Crown into huge debts. Most of this money was owed to the Spanish Crown creditors and bankers in the Netherlands. At the time the Netherlands were part of the Spanish Empire. Most of the Dutch bankers were Protestants though.

4. Thus the wealth of the Americas were shipped off to Spain and from there siphoned off to meet the debt owed to the Dutch creditors. This is how the Spanish Colonies financed the growing wealth of Northern Europe and Protestantism.

5. Alarmed by the growing wealth of the Dutch territory, the Spanish Monarch Phillip II 1527-1598 CE began to try to reassert Spanish/Catholic power over their Protestant population. These acts further plunged Spain into more debt and the ruthless oppression of Protestants further inspired rebellions against the Crown.

6. In 1570 CE the Prince of Orange successfully threw off the shackles of the Spanish Crown and declared the independence of the Dutch Republic (Northern Netherlands). Wars between the Dutch Republic and Spanish Crown continued until 1609. A truce was reached and a cease fire that should have lasted 12 years proclaimed.

7. However, in the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire’s kingdom of Bohemia, Catholic forces began to persecute the Protestants. Catholics destroyed Protestant churches, arrested Protestants, censored their material, banned Protestants from holding government offices, etc. The population was 90% Protestant and retaliated.

8. The Defenestration of Prague 1618- Protestants broke into government offices and through Catholic officials out of the windows some of them as high as 60 feet tall…only the piles of refuse below spared them severe injuries. This prompted the beginning of the Thirty Years War from 1618-1648.

9. The Kingdom of Bohemia had become a hotbed of social turmoil because of changes to society brought about by pressures of the market. Shifts from agrarian based economy to a rudimentary modernized economy- improvements in production in the agrarian sphere and simple industry

10. Shifts to a monetary based economy and ‘wage’ labor instead of the more traditional serfdom and collection of taxes in kind. Northern Europeans were transforming the economy to a more modernized version and this was causing huge social and socio-economic convulsions throughout the continent.