Ch 15

• The Ottoman Siege of of Vienna in 1529 marked a muslim advance into the heart of central Europe. 
• The Reformation began in 1517 when a German priest, Martin Luther, nailed a document called the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. 
• This document opened up a debate about the various abuses within the Roman Catholic church. 
• What made Luther's protest potentially revolutionary was its theological basis.
• Luther believed that salvation came through faith alone. 
• Although a large number of women were attracted to Protestantism, Reformation teachings and practices didn't offer them a substantially greater role in the church or society.
• In Protestant-dominated areas, the male Christ figure was the sole object of worship.
• The culmination of European religious conflict took shape in the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), a Catholic-Protestant struggle that began the Holy Roman Empire but eventually engulfed most of Europe.
• New religious orders such as the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), provided a dedicated brotherhood of priests committed to the renewal of the Catholic Church and its extension abroad.
• Christianity motivated European political and economic expansion and also benefited from it.
• In 1535 the bishop of Mexico proudly claimed that he had destroyed 500 pagan shrines and 20,000 idols.
• Throughout the colonial period and beyond, many Mexican Christians also took part in rituals derived from the past, with little sense of incompatibility with Christian practice. 
• Many Jesuits learned Chinese, became thoroughly acquainted with confucian texts and dressed like Chinese scholars.
• They aimed to show people the commonalities between Confucianism and Christianity rather than introducing something new and foreign to them. 
• Missionary efforts over the course of some 250 years (1550-1800) resulted in 200,000 to 300,000 converts, a minuscule number in a Chinese population approaching 300 million by 1800.The early modern era likewise witnessed the continuation of the "long march of Islam" across the Afro-Asian world. 
• Continued Islamization was usually dependent on the wandering of holy Islamic men or Sufis, Islamic scholars, and itinerant traders, none of whom posed a threat to local rulers. 
• What they offered in short was a connection to the wider prestigious, and prosperous world of Islam. 
• Islamization extended modestly even to the Americas, where enslaved African Muslims practiced their faith in North America, particularly in Brazil, where Muslims led a number of slave revolts in the early nineteenth century. 
• Al Wahhab emphasized the rights of women within a patriarchal Islamic framework. 
• These included the right to consent to and stipulate conditions for marriage, to control her dowry, to divorce, and to engage in commerce. 
• He did not insist on head-to-toe covering of women in public and allowed for the mixing of unrelated men and women for business or medical purposes.
• Although an Egyptian army broke the power of the Wahhabi control in 1818, the movement's influence continued to spread across the Islamic world.
• At the level of elite culture, the Mughal ruler Akbar formulated a state cult that combined elements of Islam, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism.