Read America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback for Free Online

years. Challenging such indulgences, and ultimately the authority of the Pope, Luther wrote, “It is certain that when the penny jingles into the money-box, gain and avarice can be increased, but the result of the intercession of the Church is in the power of God alone.”
    Dismissed by Pope Leo X as the work of a “drunken German,”
    Luther’s ideas quickly spread through Europe with the help of Gutenberg’s printing press. Excommunicated in January 1521, Luther was called to a civil hearing before Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (King Charles I of Spain) at the Diet of Worms on April 17, 1521. Urged to retract his teachings, Luther refused, famously declaring: “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves) . . . I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.”
    Unmoved, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V declared Luther a “notorious heretic” and an outlaw, banning his literature. Luther’s words and actions—he altered the communion sacrament and later married—did not set off a polite debate over how to say one’s prayers.
    He had put the match to a powder keg of religious politics that exploded in sectarian wars across Europe. The Reformation and the holy wars it inspired transformed Western history and dominated European, and later American, statecraft for centuries, at enormous cost in lives and treasure.
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    America’s Hidden Hi Ç ory z
    i t wa s t o protect his nation’s treasure, as well as stamp out the heretical French luteranos, that Philip II had dispatched Menéndez, commander of the Caribbean fleet, to Florida. Arriving at the site of a marshy coastal Timucuan Indian village on September 8, 1565, Mené-
    ndez established St. Augustine, the settlement he named in honor of the early church father whose name day is celebrated on August 28, the day that Menéndez had sighted Florida.
    In present-day St. Augustine, the Mission of Nombre de Dios, with its 208-foot-tall stainless-steel cross and a small shrine to the Virgin Mary (Nuestra Señora de la Leche y Buen Parto, “Our Lady of the Milk and Happy Delivery”), marks the approximate spot where Admiral Menéndez landed and ordered the celebration of what is ac-claimed by local boosters as “the first parish mass in the future United States.” Another fact generally left out of the glowing arrival narrative in tourist brochures is that Menéndez also brought along Africans as “laborers,” which should properly give Spain—not the English in Jamestown in 1619—the distinction of introducing African slaves to what would become the United States.
    Within days of the Spanish landing, the French captain Jean Ribault fatefully and foolishly sailed from Fort Caroline with his five hundred men, intent on destroying the Spanish before they could erect proper defenses. He left behind a mere twenty soldiers to guard the French settlement and its settlers.
    This was not Ribault’s first disastrous decision in America. He had led the first French attempt to settle North America. Landing on Florida’s east coast on May 1, 1562, Ribault sailed up a river he named the River of May. Constructing a stone column there, he claimed the territory for France. He sailed further north and left thirty men at a | 30 \
    Isabella’s Pigs
    settlement called Charlesfort, on what is now Parris Island, South Carolina. Then Ribault sailed back for France, expecting to return with supplies and more colonists. With France engulfed in another religious war, Ribault was forced to England instead, where a suspicious Elizabeth had the Frenchman thrown in the Tower of London.
    The men Ribault left behind at Charlesfort fared miserably. When the expected relief ships failed to arrive, their situation became desperate. Building an improvised boat, they set