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Charles V always thought the Hapsburg Empire was too big to be ruled by just one man. For this reason, Charles V relinquished his throne and divided it between his brother Ferdinand II and his 29-year old son Philip II. -
The Spanish Armada was a Habsburg Spanish fleet of 130 ships that sailed from Lisbon in late May 1588 under the command of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, with the purpose of escorting an army from Flanders to invade England -
The Edict of Nantes granted a large level of religious liberty to the Protestant subjects, the Huguenots. -
The Tudor dynasty ended with the death of Elizabeth I on 24 March 1603. After the death of Elizabeth I, James Charles Stuart was named successor. -
The Thirty Years' War began when three representatives of the Holy Roman Empire were thrown out the window of the royal castle in Prague in 1618, sparking a continent-wide religious conflict. -
Between 1642 and 1651, armies loyal to King Charles I and Parliament faced off in three civil wars over long standing disputes about religious freedom and how the “three kingdoms” of England, Scotland, and Ireland should be governed. -
As a result of the Treaty of Westphalia, the Netherlands gained independence from Spain, Sweden gained control of the Baltic and France was acknowledged as the preeminent Western power. The power of the Holy Roman Emperor was broken and the German states were again able to determine the religion of their lands.
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He used the Army to disband the Rump Parliament in 1653, irritated by its self-serving interests and slowness in developing solutions for the Commonwealth. In the process, he became Lord Protector. -
General George Monck met with Charles and arranged to restore him in exchange for a promise of amnesty and religious toleration for his former enemies. -
Building such a lavish complex was an important part of Louis XIV's style of rule and beliefs about monarchy, which we would call absolutism -
Having ruled jointly with his brother Ivan V from 1682, when Ivan died in 1696, Peter was officially declared Sovereign of all Russia. -
In 1689 Parliament declared that James had abdicated by deserting his kingdom. William and Mary were offered the throne as joint monarchs. -
The English Bill of Rights was an act signed into law in 1689 by William III and Mary II. The bill outlined specific constitutional and civil rights and ultimately gave Parliament power over the monarchy. -
After winning access to the Baltic Sea through his victories in the Great Northern War, Czar Peter I founded the city of St. Petersburg as the new Russian capital. -
Frederick II was especially interested in gaining control of Silesia to connect his two realms into one contiguous territory -
In desperation at the financial crisis, King Louis XVI summoned a so-called Estates General in 1789 to approve new taxation. This was a representative body that had not met since 1614, but once it had been called, it developed a momentum of its own. -
The main reason why the rebel Parisians stormed the Bastille was not to free any prisoners but to get ammunition and arms. At the time, over 30,000 pounds of gunpowder was stored at the Bastille. But to them, it was also a symbol of the monarchy's tyranny. -
The basic principle of the Declaration was that all men are born and remain free and equal in rights, which were specified as the rights of liberty, private property, the inviolability of the person, and resistance to oppression. -
Ultimately unwilling to cede his royal power to the Revolutionary government, Louis XVI was found guilty of treason and condemned to death. He was guillotined on January 21, 1793. -
This marks the beginning of almost two years of repressing perceived enemies of the Revolution. It will claim an estimated 18,500-40,000 lives before its end in July 1794.