Chapter 4

The Enlightenment

As the Renaissance and Reformation unfolded, it loosened the power of the Church over the domain of academia. The result was a flowering of intellectual pursuits that ranged the gamut of human experience. Philosophers, scientists, historians, politicians, theologians, and others found new freedom to explore the world and universe around them. The Roman Catholic Church fought a fruitless rearguard action against this, clinging to the idea of their supremacy over all knowledge and its pursuit to no avail. An expanding ripple of ideas poured out of Europe and throughout the rest of the world via commerce and colonialism. And while the great empires of the day were the couriers of these ideas, they were not the recipients of the benefits of them. From the Enlightenment eventually came the downfall of the European hegemony of the world over the next three centuries. With this eroding of power centralized in Europe also came vacuums into which Darkness crept.

This began with the end of the Seven Years' War, known in the United States as the French and Indian War, in 1763. At war's end, the British Government decided the British Colonies in North America should help defray the cost of their security and began passing an number of direct taxes on the colonies, culminating in a tax on tea. In protest, the colonists dumped shiploads of tea into Boston Harbor, claiming the taxes illegal since they were unrepresented in Parliament and therefore not given proper representation in the deliberations of the government. The British Government, contrary to their claims of wanting to protect colonists from the savages and the French and Spaniards on the colonies' periphery, stationed more and more of their troops in the major cities on the eastern seaboard, hundreds of miles away from the enemies they were supposedly there to protect against. By 1774, the colonists were driven to their last option, all others having been ignored or brushed aside by the British Parliament. The First Continental Congress was called and it coordinated with the local colonial governments set up by the colonists to replace the British governmental apparatus. This was met with more troops and imposition of direct military rule by the British Army. In 1775, the colonists declared independence and a six year war followed, culminating in the Battle of Yorktown where the American colonists defeated the British Army with the aid of the French.

The establishment of the United States of America and the defeat of the mighty British Empire, the most powerful nation in the world at that time, shook the world. By the end of the decade, the French populace would, taking inspiration from America and the philosophers the founders of the U. S. A. were inspired by, rise up and commit regicide. The orgy of publicly sanction mass murder that followed created the first vacuum as French colonies around the world were shaken by the news of their King's death. Haiti would be the first of many new nations created in the vacuum of the French Revolution and the results of that revolution would simply create more vacuums, including the Fall of the Spanish Empire.

The period between the end of the Religious Wars and the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution in the mid-nineteenth century were ones of turmoil and change. New ideas, new technologies, and even new nations seemed to spring up like mushrooms after a rain. It became ever harder for the Order to both expand into new territories and maintain the line against the Darkness. Contrary to the expectations of the Exarchs of the period, it was actually easier to establish the Order in newer nations, keep the Order's influence high, and dampen the influence of those minions of the Dark with which they battled than it was to keep their influence in older, more established regions. Archskopal seats, long established as powers in the Order, were continually threatened in Europe and the Near East. It was during this period that the Order, once much more open and public in many of its functions, gradually became much more covert, transforming itself from a military religious order into a covert operations organization with a religious component. Secret Papal Bulls by Pius VI, Pius VII, Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Benedict XV slowly remade the Order, stream-lining its operations, governing which nations and cities the Order abandoned due to losses in the fight against the Darkness, and re-establishing the hierarchy of the Order and the power of the Exarch, the archskopi, and the Warriors sent by God to battle the Darkness. Within those Papal Bulls were also delivered the authority to intervene in the affairs of temporal powers when the Order's hierarchy deemed it prudent and necessary.

The Order in the Age of Modernity

The Second Industrial Revolution, that of Bessemer steel and electricity and the internal combustion engine, also saw the rise of Darkness and it minions in the heart of old Order territories. With the steady transformation of the Order to meet these new threats, the Church and her allies were ready on the physical front of the battle, for the Order still counted among its members some of the best warriors, soldiers, admirals, and generals the world birthed. What it was not prepared for was the fountaining of ideas that would change the world, this time for the worse.