WI Protestantism was adopted in France & Spain

what if during the protestant emergence as the new christian denomination not only did henry VIII's wales & england adopt the new faith but also spain and france began to convert en masse.

Would the Huguenots in France assume control of the french nation?

And what of Spain?
 

Skokie

Banned
Yikes! France at this time was the most populous nation in Europe and considered the "eldest daughter of the Church." Spain controlled the seas and held a massive empire in the Americas. Rome would have been set back a tremendous blow. No idea how that would be resolved.
 
Spain is a no-no without some serious retroversion of events. It had a set-up which made Protestant conversion essentially impossible. Charles I made it illegal for Spaniards to go to universities outside of Spain to stop them coming into contact with Protestants while Europeans were banned from teaching in Spain. Anyone found with a Protestant tract was burned at the stake for heresy with barely even a mock trial. The Inquisition was also brutally effective in finding heretics. There were about three known "outbreaks" of Protestantism in Spain during the Reformation era, and in each case they had been "cleansed" within a year. Simply put, the Spanish royalty and their nobles would rather die than see a single Spaniard become Protestant, and their methods were so effective that there's just no way it could have happened without the monarchy itself being behind the Protestant cause.
 
The only way in Spain is to alter the Reconquista. If you can make the Convivencia stronger than it later became, you can see Protestantism as just another of many variations along with Jewish, Muslim (sunni and slightly different Berber versions), Roman, Mozarabic and in some rare cases Celtic rites. Lutheranism might be your best bet here as it has several similarities compared to the Calvinist/Anabaptist styles.

I'd say the best way to do that is to have a quicker, easier Reconquista (like in my own TL) that forces the Spanish kings to deal with a much larger number of muslims in general in their regions early on, and prevent the setbacks dealt by the Africans. The Spanish first started to become Radical Catholics via a combination of the psychological effects of the Crusades and the success of the North African Empires in Al-Andalus. Reduce the success of the Almoravids (especially) in some way or create a stronger Byzantine Empire for instance that might prevent the southern crusades all together. If you can keep the religious diversity in the peninsula, the king might feel unable to suppress non-catholicism effectively or see it as too harmful to the state and might have to adopt religious freedom as a matter of survival.

I don't think it's possible to have a Lutheran dominated kingdom with the political structure of Spain. There's a reason that England is the only one of the "major" states that flipped.
 
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Cardinal Cisneros performed a "reformation" of the spanish clergy. He took care that certain uses were abandoned, better formation provided and stricter discipline so that corruptions that were common in most Europe were punished harshly in Spain (there were even clerics that fled to Morocco and converted to Islam).

Make the Papacy confront this policy...
 
If it were somehow to be adopted in Spain, there'd be huge consequences in the Americas. It was Catholic monks and priests who played the largest role in ending the worst of the Spanish brutality vs Indians.

A Protestant Spain would be far more likely to have the attitude kill the heathen rather than convert the heathen. It means a possible huge further decline in the Indian population.

I'd suggest if Spain becomes Protestant after the first stages of Spanish conquest in the Americas, many Indian Catholic converts would strongly resist becoming Protestant. Look for almost certain revolts.
 
So there is NO WAY that they could convert? I just wanna see if there is some way it is possible tbh.

It would be possible if you made Charles I/V pro-Protestant. However, this is not as simple as flicking a switch, in the way that you semi-plausibly can do to Henry VIII by changing events around. This would require a fundamental character shift, and probably require a lot of reworking Spanish history to make it less interested in sucking up to the Pope. Essentially it's a case of going back an arbitrary number of decades, throwing a POD into the TL and hoping the ripples butterfly things around enough to allow this to happen - and if not, going back further. You'd probably need to alter a load of things in the Reconquista, for example, to get rid of the underlying Spanish mistrust of non-Christians which fused the Spanish Christian culture into an almost unshakeable demand for religious orthodoxy among Christians - getting rid of the Inquisition, for example, and more importantly getting rid of the reasons that the Inquisition was allowed to become so strong.

There's really no way I can be more specific than that, except to say that the way Spanish history went, by the reign of Charles I, and probably for a couple of generations before, Spanish culture and government was too intolerant of non-orthodox belief among Christians to allow Spain to become Protestant in pretty much any way whatsoever.
 
Hmmmm....interesting thoughts chaps....but what would happen to Catholicism in Europe as a whole if France and Spain turned away from Rome???
 
Reformation Crushed

I have a better idea. What if the French and Spanish actually crushed the Protestant Reformation?
 
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