Francis Drake: The Queen's Own Pirate

Francis Drake is born about the year 1540 into a world that has been shattered by the Protestant Reformation.

The Christian Church in the West, which has been more or less united for more than 1500 years, has now been shattered by the arrival of reformers who will become known as Protestants.

Now you might think that religious reform is a fairly minor issue, some differences of opinion, some changes that might need to be made, but you would be incorrect.

This fracturing of the Christian church in the West is going to have profound effects.

The ideas of a German monk called Martin Luther, which are made public in about 1517 in a place called Wittenberg in Germany, are going to spread out and radically reshape how people understand themselves and their place in the world.

And it's going to be a bloody kind of transformation.

By 1524, a mere seven years after Martin Luther has made his criticisms public, Germany experiences something called the Peasants' War, where tens of thousands of ordinary people, inspired by Martin Luther's ideas, rise up and demand radical reforms to the social order and significant improvements in the lot of everyday farmers and peasants.

but these people are going to be brutally crushed.

They die in the tens of thousands.

And that's just a warmup for what's coming as the Protestant Reformation shakes out across Europe.

Protestant communities begin forming in France England, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and even Italy.

And as this happens, divisions are forming in neighborhoods.

People who used to live side by side are now divided by their religious identity.

And what begins as internal persecution of religious minorities, such as Protestants, will soon metastasize into open warfare as some states become fully Protestant and begin to see themselves as at odds with other states that are completely Catholic.

The Wars of Religion, as they are collectively called, are going to get started by 1560, so as Francis Drake is a young man, and they're going to last for the next 80 years or so, as Europe tears itself apart over religious identity.

And these wars don't finally come to an end until 1648.

So it's going to be a period of intense upheaval, of warfare, there's going to be sacking of cities, rape, starvation, displacement, and economic ruination.

It's a pretty major list of consequences that come out of this religious fracturing in Western Europe.

So this is the world that Francis Drake is born into.

And before we can understand his piracy and what is driving it, we have to have this appreciation of the background context of what's going on.

Because you can't separate Francis Drake the man and his pirate activities from this larger religious and political landscape that they are connected to.

And by the way, if you'd like more detail on that religious political landscape, I've done a couple of series on this specifically, so you can check out The Peasants' War on Villains and Virgins podcast, or the full series on the Protestant Reformation, which continues to be very popular.

So that's available to you if you want more information.

So while all of this religious unrest is happening, there are also some other monumental shifts that are happening at this period.

So Spain and Portugal have gotten started, as of the late 1400s, with what will be known as the Age of Exploration.